“Would an optimal environment be a pile of dead Dreen?” Bill asked. “We’ve got that.”
“I’m not sure,” Miriam said. “I’ve never been able to experiment with Class Four biologies. The best I can suggest is we can try.”
“It looks dead,” Eric said, examining the space spider through the glass of the box.
“I evacuated the air,” Miriam said. “They go into hibernation in vacuum.”
She twisted the valve on the inlet, letting air into the box, and the spider immediately began to move.
“Okay,” she said, opening it up and dropping the spider onto one of the dead dog-demons. “Here goes nothing.”
The arachnoid appeared to be surprised to be awake, spinning in place in confusion, then began wandering across the dead Dreen, its antenna waving. When it found the exit wound from the .50 caliber that had killed the Dreen it paused for a moment then dove into the hole.
“I wonder what it’s — ” Eric started to say, then there were crunching sounds from inside the Dreen. “Yuck.”
“Interesting,” Miriam said. “No reaction to the increased oxygen that I can determine.” She sat down with her back to the bulkhead and pulled out a lab book. “Time is… fourteen twenty-three. Now to see what happens…”
“That didn’t take long,” Eric said, trying not to retch as small arachnoids streamed out of the collapsing carcass of the Dreen. It had been less than two hours and starting with one of the space spiders the dog-demon was now almost totally consumed.
“Their rate of propagation in the presence of food resources from a Class Four biology is amazing,” Miriam said. “Can you grab a couple of them so I can observe rate of growth? I’d love to get a count on them but I think that’s going to be hard. Two thousand, you think?”
“I cannot listen to that anymore!” Sergeant Bae screamed, his Wyvern’s claws up against his sensor pod. “Okay, external audio is off!”
“That shouldn’t happen to… a Dreen,” Eakins said, turning his sensors away from the pile of Dreen bodies.
When the wave of arachnoids from the first dead dog-demon hit the pile of Dreen by the entrance, they exploded, reproducing in enormous numbers. It had taken two hours to reduce the first Dreen to bones. It took about the same to do it to a hundred.
“They’re moving,” Staff Sergeant Carr said.
The, by then, hundreds of thousands of spiders had moved into the compartment, spreading out in a quest for more sustenance. They found it first in the scattered bodies of thorn-throwers, but that satiated them for barely five minutes. Then they hit the fungus.
“Now that’s…”
“…A hell of a thing,” Berg said. He had used the cover of the pillars to move forward where he could observe the effect of the spiders on the Dreen fungus. Miriam had wanted to do it, but he’d forced her to wait in the corridor and monitor his video.
The spiders weren’t having it all their own way. He saw dozens, hundreds, of them being captured by pseudopods thrown out by the fungus. The same thing had happened to humans during the Dreen war and even after. It had especially happened to the armies and mujahideen militias in the Middle East who had thrown themselves into the Dreen “crusaders” much as the arachnoids were doing.
But this was a small patch of fungus and a lot of spiders. While one might get captured by the fungus, a dozen other of the creatures swarmed over the pseudopod, eating it as fast as it could digest its captured prey. Sometimes captured spiders even survived, breaking out to attack the fungus in their own turn. Some were partially absorbed, leaving shredded corpses behind. Perhaps the fungus gained some sustenance from them, but it was being eaten too fast to do anything with it.
As Eric watched, one of the most dreaded things in the galaxy shriveled and fell to the cute little spiders, who munched their way across, unheeding of losses, chewing it up, reproducing even as they moved, leaving little spiders behind which caught at the shreds, moved onward…
“Thirty-two minutes to ingest one hundred and sixty-four square meters of spread-fungus,” Miriam said. “Not bad. Full time to clear the compartment, from one spider, was approximately four hours forty-nine minutes. Lieutenant Bergstresser, your compartment is now clear of fungus as far as I can see.”
“Right,” Berg said. “Gunny Juda, move teams forward by fire and maneuver to clear the compartment of remaining threats…”
“Sir, this is Bae! You need to see this, sir!”
“This” was a Nitch, a much larger arachnoid than the ones that had cleared the compartment, standing nearly eight feet at the shoulders. The Nitch were one of two Dreen slave races the humans had encountered in the Dreen War, the other being the felinoid Mreee. While the Mreee were a relatively recent addition to the Dreen empire, having been conquered within the lifetime of one of the survivors of the war, the Nitch had been slaves since time immemorial.
The spiderlike Nitch had silvery bodies that reflected oddly in any sort of complex background and actually acted as natural camouflage. But this one was easy enough to see, rolled onto its back, its blaster lying more then ten feet away as if tossed and its legs pulled up in contortions. It was also, quite clearly, dead.
“What’s this?” Bae asked, squatting down next to the giant spider. “It’s leaking fluid from holes on its sides.”
“It was the sentient controller,” Berg said, staying well back. He did not particularly like spiders and Nitch gave him the willies. The space spiders were just different enough from true spider forms he found them okay, but Nitch… “They’re generally hooked into the fungus through tubes that feed them and I guess that they use to control the rest of the Dreen. If there was Dreen stuff in them…”
A juvenile space spider fell out through one of the holes, walked a few feet and then stopped, its legs pulling in and its carapace wrapping around it in hibernation mode.
This end of the compartment was littered with the hibernating space spiders, so many that it was impossible not to step on them. With the food supply exhausted, they’d apparently shut down in hopes that something would turn up. Space spiders appeared to be nothing if not patient.
“Well, let’s get him back to base,” Eric said, turning to leave and treading on another of the spider bodies. “And we’ll need to get the compartment swept up. I figure Captain Weaver will be up here with his guitar in about…”
“We got a way to get these things cleaned up, Lieutenant?” Weaver asked, walking up, guitar in hand. “I’m afraid the crunching will interfere with the acoustics…”
“We must watch the Tree closely for any change,” Colonel Che-chee said over the comm. Nine of the dragonflies were parked outside the field of the Tree, hiding in its shade, while the tenth was waiting by the space dock. “In the event we observe any change, Cha-shah will immediately enter the space dock and report. My chronometer says that Captain Weaver will be starting at any time. Observe closely, males! Any change in the light patterns, even the slightest! Any change in the particle emiss… Oh My GOD!”
“CAPTAIN WEAVER!” the communicator screamed. “Colonel Che-chee requests that you cease playing immediately!”
“Why?” Weaver bellowed. “Anna Gadda Da Vida… !”
“Sir… sir…” the communications tech stuttered. “JUST STOP!”
“That’s a hell of a thing,” Weaver said, watching the video from Colonel Che-chee’s helmet camera.
On the dot of the time-stamp of his starting to play, the entire Tree jumped about five times in luminosity. But that wasn’t the really strange part. It began collapsing upwards, the base expanding in size at the same time, the higher points sliding in line with lower and stretching out. He’d stopped before the full transformation could take effect.