“Back off, people.”

Massy and Knots moved out to the perimeter with the others.

“I need to do this,” Linda said. She was getting ready to pare its nails.

“Back off now!”

“Sir—”

“This is way off the reservation. We need a whole lot of support here.”

“Can those function?” she muttered, staring down at the eyes. They were pale blue, the irises solid. They looked painted.

There was more movement nearby, a flicker in the soft-lit dawn forest. Somebody’s motion sensor chimed softly.

“Got one,” Louis said into their helmets.

Another sensor tripped. Charles said, “Incoming this end.”

They were being surrounded.

“Deploy Metal Storm, prepare to fire.”

“No! Do not fire!”

“What in hell, Linda?”

“This is contact. It is not necessarily hostile.”

“Linda, this is some kind of work in progress that we’ve interrupted. We push these suckers much harder, they’re gonna be on us.”

“We need to move the material to Plum Island, Colonel,” Linda said, “all of it.”

“They’re in the woods. They’re all around us. Do you understand that?”

Linda returned to the creature in the box.

“Get away from there! Now!”

“Look, I need at least skin, hair, and nail parings.” She bent down and went back to work. “Anyway, this isn’t a coma. This is deeper. Eyes open or closed, this thing isn’t gonna be moving anytime soon.”

There were soft whines as the guys started their Metal Storms charging.

“Sir, why do they have our names on them?” young Knots asked.

Mark heard fear. He said, “Do not fire that weapon unless you get a specific order. And the answer to your question is, I have no idea.” He touched his mike again. “Anybody seeing anything?”

In quick response, three clicks in his earpiece. Okay, three noes. So what the hell was Massengill doing?

“Massy?”

The response was a sound that Mark heard only during training on Metal Storm, a noise that he always thought must be like the rending of the veil in the temple, a gigantic, ripping thunder. Linda stifled a shout of surprise, but nobody broke position.

Fragments of leaves turned to glittering green snow in front of Massengill, and a foot-long section of a redwood’s thick trunk became a spreading haze of sawdust. The tree crashed down on itself, then swung back into the woods, its limbs hissing as it slumped away. It came to a stop against other trees, leaning at a crazy angle. Its huge bulk was now fifty feet back in the woods, the stump, smoking and alone, isolated in the new clearing made by the high intensity gun’s ten-thousand-round-a-second spread. You could hold a thousand of its beads in your cupped hands. But drive them to extreme velocity, and they turned into a wall of death. The gun itself was silent. The ripping noise came when the beads broke the sound barrier.

There was another sound then, bell-like laughter.