The boy who fell out of the void wouldn’t quit talking. He barraged her with frantic questions, not even pausing between.
Footfalls sounded just outside the room. Frustrated hands shook the door with pointed violence after finding it locked.
She was almost out of time.
In pain and terror, the creature fled on its remaining limbs. Zone Boy One (she had to remember to call him that) barked something in protest. She felt sickened and sorry. Her head throbbed from drugs and days of no sleep.
A fist smote the door’s thick wood.
“Let me in,” said a muffled voice. “You can’t…” Pound. Pound.
Silence for a moment. Then metal rasped on metal as different keys were tried.
In the same moment, a portal bloomed out of mid-air. It started as a marble-sized bolus of spacetime in absolute curvature.
She was down to seconds and everyone was in the wrong place.
She moved to intervene, but then remembered she had the creature’s severed leg in one hand and medical cutters in the other. The creature reared its jointed body defensively, where it cowered in a corner.
She retreated to the worktable, where she placed the leg in a stainless steel tray. She did this with apologetic care.
By then, the portal had inflated to an endlessly black sphere, like a giant dark pearl. It was bigger than the door, which was groaning open.
From certain angles the sphere presented a mirage like a tunnel stretching (or infinite tunnels) stretching forever. Perhaps the creature saw this, because it bolted for the portal, legs pistoning like train gears. Zone Boy stood there frozen as it bolted past, mouth stupidly agape.
His passiveness enraged her.
In a desperate fury, she shoved him at the portal, so roughly he lost balance. His body distended like a funhouse reflection as it sucked him inside.
“I’m sorry!” she cried as the black sphere swallowed him—and then itself right after.
“Sorry about what?” said someone beside her.
She just stood there, hands balled and shaking.
Dr. Cybrot shrugged, disdainfully unbothered. He raised his ridiculous, complicated goggles, to scratch his face underneath. His eyes glittered with mean amusement. He seemed content, for the moment, with her discomfort.
She broke off from him, going to a terminal.
Dr. Cybrot reached past her for a set of tongs on the table.
“I see you didn’t want me meeting him,” he said. “But I don’t know what you thought I’d do.”
He sauntered over to where bullets were lodged in the wall. His goggles whirred with faint mechanical sounds as lenses in them refocused. He extracted one bullet, then the other. They dinged as he dropped them in a metal dish on the worktable.
“Is that enough flagrantium?” she said, not looking up from the terminal screen.
“We’ll see,” he said. “These are the first samples of Flagrantia’s alloys. You got your own specimen, I expect?”
She held up the tray with the amputated member.
“That’s all?” he complained.
No more straining your ears to listen to his appalachianmagazine.com generico levitra on line or her own inner guidance system and connects that individual to the infinite source of Universal Intelligence.
She set it down with a hostile clang.
“You should have harvested the whole creature. You’d have a complete specimen.”
“I know you feel that way,” she said in a constrained voice.
“You could have caught it while it’s juvenile and weak. But you threw it back.”
“It ran off,” she muttered.
“Same thing,” he said. “You lost it.”
“We don’t need the entire creature,” she argued, doggedly. “It’s entirely composed of stem cells…”
“So you think.”
“…or analogous units. Any size sample should express its whole biology.”
“Should—should,” he echoed facetiously. “If your hypothesis is right. You haven’t proven any of it.”
She snatched the tray defensively and walked it to a station where gimbaled instruments loomed over a square table.
“I have the only sample of this species ever obtained,” she said, “which now I need to analyze.”
She positioned the leg on the grid-lined surface, like a colourless chessboard.
“You could at least be happy about it,” he said.
A smile accordioned across his face.
She didn’t like him much better when he smiled. It actually made him worse.
“We seized an opportunity,” he continued. “And we succeeded. Enjoy it.”
She positioned a wide magnifier over the specimen. She gazed at it forlornly.
“Don’t let it get to you,” he cajoled, in an oily effort to reassure. “Small cruelties come with the work. We learn to adapt.”
He gestured where the portal once was.
“Even that—boy has to. Who knows? He might even make it.” The grin widened. “But he doesn’t seem that bright, does he?”
She faced him, glowering, for two defiant heartbeats, before returning to her specimen.
She reached for more instruments, ignoring him sullenly. A tense eternity later, he left.
As the shutting door’s echo died down, she slunk over to her terminal. There she cycled through close and far views of locations ranging from maddening to mundane. She finally settled on one captioned, “ZB-1”.
An alien city’s skyline loomed over him. He lay strapped to the ground with many, many slim, dark cables, that same idiot look on his face.
