“Hey, I don’t see buildings, spaceships, electronics, roads, farms, mines, or anything that I’d consider a sign of intelligence. So, if even the TriNA learns, what does it learn? Or does it just hang around thinking planet-shaking great thoughts? Some kind of solipsistic navel gazing dedicated to asking the eternal question of why? So the planet has figured out the purpose of existence, what good is it if you don’t do something with it?”

“Good question,” Kalico answered. “We’ve been asking ourselves the same thing over the last few years. We know the most about the quetzals. Used to think they were the apex predators. Now we’re dealing with mobbers, and finally, something big, furtive, and deadly that lurks in the treetops out west. Something smart enough to know it was going to be bombed from the air.”

“Wait,” Yoshimura said. “It knew it was going to be bombed? You’d tried to bomb it before?”

Kalico shook her head. “First time. Somehow the treetop terror figured out that we were baiting it from below while Dek circled above in an airplane. It was able to analyze our actions tactically, identify the airplane as a threat, and make the decision to tear off a tentacle in order to escape our trap. That, gentlemen, is a sobering cognitive ability.”

“And the quetzals? They do this too?” Shinwua asked.

“Not like that treetop terror. Here’s what we know: The quetzal lineage around Port Authority considers itself at war with humanity. We call this the Whitey lineage after the current leader. For the last thirty years, his lineage has been studying humanity, trying to figure out how to exterminate us. It has taken them that long to figure out how to coordinate a massed attack on PA. But quetzals pass information down through transfers of TriNA. Some learning may even be generational, although individuals are highly adaptive. One of the reasons it may have taken them this long is that we’ve killed a lot of quetzals. We were taking them out of the brain pool before they could share knowledge.”

“That doesn’t argue for intelligence,” Yoshimura noted.

“Rifles, drones, remote sensing, and explosives haven’t been in their cultural history until recently,” Kalico countered. “It took Rocket--a quetzal from another lineage who bonded with a little girl--for us to begin to understand quetzal intelligence. And through a couple of infected humans, we’re learning that quetzal lineages, like groups of people, have different agendas.”

“Go back to this infection,” Yoshimura said. “I’ve heard rumors, but nothing concrete. That somehow quetzal molecules are changing people. Like that Perez woman. That her infection was what made her so . . . what do I say? Alien?”