“Yeah,” Young growled, leaning forward in his chair the better to glare at them all, “that’s why there’s an alien creature out there right now, whereabouts unknown. So how does anything you told me so far help catch the fucker?”
Convince me, he thought. Show me what you’re made of.
He needed to know their mettle, Butler’s in particular, because he was going to need them and he wanted to get an idea about who’d be reliable and who was apt to fold. This entire clusterfuck was as classified as it got and part of Young’s job was to weed out people who were better kept at the periphery of it. As it turned out, only Butler and Weston held his angry gaze, and it was Butler who answered his challenge.
“Well, for one thing, you’re not looking for the actual alien, General.
You’re looking for an armor system.”
Now they were getting somewhere.
“How do you figure that’ll help?” Young asked, letting up a little, because he was genuinely curious about her reasoning. “The thing was smart enough to play dead then fuck off when nobody was looking. Doesn’t sound like your average machine to me. For all we know it might be a different species of alien.”
“Maybe,” Butler acknowledged with a faint shrug. “We don’t know enough to disregard the possibility.”
Young’s eyes narrowed. There was something about her… she wasn’t merely reacting to his questions, she was headed somewhere specific.
“Get to the point, Lieutenant.”
“We believe the entity—whether it’s an alien species or a weapon—is not an independent life-form. There are indications that it is symbiotic in nature, in a kind of service-resource mutualism: the entity provides a top-notch internal and external defense system and the host in turn provides the biochemical environment the entity needs to survive. The metal mimics organic matter—specifically, its host’s individual markers—to avoid triggering the immune system, and it is evidently perfectly able to operate independently for a limited amount of time. But, and this is a big but, it cannot retain its cell wall integrity indefinitely outside of its host body. This is why the exposed metal elements we examined became porous. It needs a host. We don’t know for sure why it was the only one of the three that didn’t protect its original host to the end, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’ll need a new one.”
She must’ve noticed his skepticism, because she held up a hand to ward off interruptions. “Please, bear with me for a second, sir. See, we went with this assumption and took the liberty of following that line of thinking
to its logical conclusion.” It was as close as she’d come to babbling so far, quick-talking to justify her decision to go with a hunch instead of verified data.