WHEN they first discovered the missing alien, Leandra reacted like a soldier. A hostile, extraterrestrial creature or weapon was at large on United States territory. It was a threat. It had to be found and destroyed. She was relieved when she first met General Young. Young was Special Forces, the kind of specialist who got results and got them fast. His reputation preceded him; the man was a legend. There was a keen intelligence behind that deep voice and the aging-jock good looks, different from Leandra’s own brand of smarts but no less valuable. It was reassuring to see. Thanks to military command structure, Leandra could put the whole mess into the general’s apparently quite capable hands and wait for another set of blackened remains to study.
As the hour grew later, though, a different voice started to make itself heard from the back of Leandra’s mind as she stood bent over the dissected body of one of the aliens. It was the scientist speaking: the part of her that never stopped seeking knowledge, never gave up on finding a way to see Kitty run again. Look at this, the scientist said as she poked at a muscle jam-packed with fine metal fibers. I bet you dollars for donuts these little bastards double as a secondary nervous system, or at least they could if the host’s system failed. And God help her, but that made her stop and reconsider her position. There might be answers in there, solutions to a lot of the problems that constantly brought her up short in her research.
The beings in front of her were dead, burned and compressed by the force of the explosions that had stopped them. There was just enough left to give an impression of what had been there, but probably not enough to reconstruct it. It was like staring at the pages of a badly damaged
encyclopedia, getting glimpses of all that lost knowledge, wanting more.
The secrets held within these corpses might open doors way beyond her desire to find a method to repair a damaged spinal cord.
It was an epiphany, but not of the pleasant kind. She needed the remaining alien creature alive in the name of science, for the sake of her sister and countless other people who had no hope of recovery now, but might just get another chance if Leandra and others could learn how these presumably artificial systems worked. Of course, she’d only recently given a certain general a long list of all the reasons why negotiating with the entity was going to be extremely dangerous and a seriously dumb idea. She might as well have told him to just nuke the critter and be done with it. The bitch of it was that this rather martial piece of advice was still sound, and the general was not the type to risk the lives of his men for possible scientific advancement. At least, not without sufficient motivation. An order from higher up might do the trick.