She ran the video again. They crawled like spiders, and here came the kicker, the young man came into view. He was moving down the cliff—headfirst. No human being could do that, not even an acrobat.

She’d already upset Hammond by asking him what should be done. Now that the situation had escalated, she was going to need to contact him again, and that was going to really make him unhappy.

The reason was, the political side of the organization did not want to know about things that might blow up in their faces. Better to be able to say that the facts had been concealed from them by Company old hands.

A distant rumble drew her eyes to the window. Stormy out there. Didn’t matter to her, as long as it didn’t disturb her uplink. Still, some kind of major storm was predicted. All she needed just now.

Her mind returned to Dr. Turner. When she had asked him, “Wouldn’t they want the earth?” he had replied, “They wouldn’t. Their interest is us, not our planet, and the only thing we actually have to offer them is innovation. So they will want to study us as closely as possible, enter our societies, take the measure of our world, all without us observing them. To them, we represent the new, and for an extremely old and advanced civilization, that must be a very valuable prize.”

She worked her team as aggressively as she could without violating Turner’s orders, worked them and watched over them—which brought her back to Willoughby and the woods that surrounded it.

Finally, she picked up her phone. She called Dr. Turner.

“Colonel Bryan has a KIA. Captain Massengill.”

Silence. It extended.

So she continued, “What we are looking at is this. As soon as they took the casualty, I ordered a local withdrawal.”

“What killed the man?”

“There was some sort of … I don’t know how to describe it. Just say that the attack was highly asymmetric and that it involved a sort of lure in the form of hybrid bodies. There’s video uploading now, so you’re going to get a good look at the hybrids, which is one plus. But they were bait, and we took that bait, to our cost.”

“How many were there?”

“Six, all in boxes, more in the woods. And what was so very odd is that each box was labeled with the name of one of our team members.”

“I want to evaluate this. Let me look at that video as soon as possible.”

“It’ll be on the server in a few minutes. You’ll be notified. Dr. Turner, be aware that this very volatile situation is right on top of some large population centers.”

“You say Mark induced this?”

“He was examining the evidence—these boxes and the creatures inside. Dr. Hicks was attempting to retrieve tissue samples for you.”