Kala slammed a lid on the glass bowl to prevent the amettal from jumping out. She stared up at Stanos; he blinked back at her, unhelpfully silent as she grabbed her microscope.

“I’m kind of freaking out here,” she said, aware that an edge of panic was creeping into her voice. “Now would be a great time to share whatever knowledge you have.”

“Calm down, Holcroft. Just focus on your job and tell me what you can.”

Kala drew a ragged breath and brought her tweezers and scalpel down on the original sample. The black ball began flailing its tendrils again as soon as she touched it, and Kala tried to slice off one of the tips. To her shock, the severed tendril immediately stretched back towards the main body and reconnected, making the ball whole again. “Self-healing…” she muttered and tried again.

It took her four attempts before she managed to separate a portion and get it out of the bowl without it reattaching. She dropped the tiny blob onto one of the slides and put it under the microscope.

“It’s incredible.” She watched the creature’s mass shift and reform itself into different shapes. “It’s almost infinitely adaptable. From what I can tell, it can take over living creatures, absorb their mass, and convert the body into a host. It can heal itself almost instantly and repair its host animal flawlessly. Even more alarming”—she paused to poke at the black blob, making it squirm and swirl—“it can mimic the host’s behaviour. You saw the amettal back there, right? It’s been consumed by this—this—thing, but it’s still behaving normally.”

“Yes, I saw.”

“You know what that means, right? It’s absorbing and adapting to its host’s characteristics and intelligence as well as its body.”

She looked up from the microscope and rubbed the back of her glove over her sweating forehead. “This is big, Stanos. It could wheedle its way into any sort of animal colony without raising suspicion. Possibly even… even…”

“Even humans,” he finished for her. “I’ve considered that already. Can you tell me what you think its weaknesses would be?”

“Weaknesses?” Kala laughed. She’d intended it to be a light noise, but it came out panicky. “We’ve already seen it deal with scalpels pretty well, so I’m going to guess knives and bullets might not do a lot. First thing I’d try is fire, based on how it shied away from the heat pen. Neurotoxins might also stand a chance against it, but with those aggressive healing properties, you’d have to hit it fast and hard.”

“You’d consider it a fairly resilient creature, then?” Stanos pressed, his dark eyes watching her face eagerly.

“Yeah, that’s the problem! It can reproduce nearly instantly, clone its host, heal injuries, disguise itself perfectly—we need to tell someone about this,” she said, the realization hitting her. “This—it could already be spreading, taking over the native animals on moons and planets, and we’d have no way of knowing.”

“Want to know what its biggest flaw is?” Stanos asked. He had his arms folded over his chest, and a spark of something fierce and exultant shone in his eyes.