Even after what he’d been through though, Brennan was in decent shape and had kept his satisfyingly analytical mind. His initial report had been methodical if concise and he didn’t hesitate to elaborate and include personal observations when Young asked for them. He was in the middle of describing the armor, how the aliens had moved, how they had killed, when suddenly he trailed off and stared into space for a moment.

“It’s the psycho one, isn’t it?” he asked. He looked up at Young, a hazy terror growing in his eyes. “The one we killed last. Thought we killed last.”

Young leaned back, assessing him. “What makes you say that?”

“It was different.” Brennan rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, the memories clearly making him uneasy. “I saw it… it tore apart my sergeant. Harris. Bill Harris. After the ship blew up. It just—it went nuts.

Completely psycho. Hacked him to pieces and didn’t—didn’t stop. We shot it with the Spitfire, like the others, but it… I thought….” He took a breath, searched for words, but eventually merely slumped a little and repeated,

“The explosion looked different.”

Jackpot.

“Different how?” Young asked, careful to keep his voice level, his body language relaxed, and his limbs well out of Brennan’s personal space bubble. Just two soldiers, exchanging information. No need to get stressed.

Judging from how carefully Brennan considered this, scrunching his eyebrows in concentration, he honestly hadn’t thought about it before. “It was louder. Brighter. Seemed like it, anyway. When I thought about it later.

I mean, the crater was still burning and we were all distracted, but… there was more of an explosion, I think.”

“So you believe it’s that specific alien that survived?”

Young didn’t like it, but couldn’t honestly say he was shocked. It figured they’d get to tangle with the crazed one.

“I don’t know, sir,” Brennan hedged, though the shadow in his gaze said he was pretty fucking convinced, “but the explosion was different.”

They held, Dr. Butler had said. They died and their hosts died, but they kept it together.

The eggheads still didn’t know whether the creatures were naturally evolved organisms or manufactured defense systems, but maybe it didn’t matter. They had been destroyed while protecting their hosts, but what if, Young wondered, what if this one being had a stronger instinct of self-preservation or simply was smarter than the others? What if it had sacrificed its host in order to survive? It would explain the poor condition of the empty body in comparison to the other two. It also made the thing more likely to jump hosts when cornered instead of making a stand. A critter that knew when to run was much more dangerous than a preprogrammed killer on a rampage. It would be harder to find, harder to nail down and kill. It would try to go underground and do whatever it had been created to do, which could be anything from living out its days in peace to engineering the annihilation of mankind.