These people were the enemy. They'd always been the enemy.

And they had him by the balls.

He spun around and slammed his fist into the examination table. It didn't even hurt. He continued until it did. Panting, knuckles raw and stinging, he looked around for something else to smash.

The teleop woke up enough to hiss and spark when the chair bounced off its central trunk. One of the arms wiggled spastically for a moment. A faint smell of burnt insulation. Then nothing. Only slightly dented, the teleop slept on above a litter of broken paradigms.

"Tip for the day," Scanlon snarled at it. "Never trust a dryback."

Head Cheese

Head Cheese

Theme and Variation

A tremor shivers through bedrock. The emerald grid fractures into a jagged spiderweb. Strands of laser light bounce haphazardly into the abyss.

From somewhere within the carousel, a subtle discontent. Intensified cogitation. The displaced beams waver, begin realigning themselves.

Lenie Clarke has seen and felt all of this before. This time she watches the prisms on the seabed, rotating and adjusting themselves like tiny radio-telescopes. One by one the disturbed beams lie back down, parallel, perpendicular, planar. Within seconds the grid is completely restored.

Emotionless satisfaction. Cold alien thoughts nearby, reverting.

And further away, something else coming closer. Thin and hungry, like a faint reedy howl in Clarke's mind...

"Ah, shit," Brander buzzes, diving for the bottom.

It streaks down from the darkness overhead, mindlessly singleminded, big as Clarke and Brander put together. Its eyes reflect the glow from the seabed. It slams into the top of the carousel, mouth open, bounces away with half its teeth broken.

It has no thoughts, but Lenie Clarke can feel its emotions. They don't change. Injury never seems to faze these monsters. Its next attack targets one of the lasers. It skids around the roof of the carousel and comes up from underneath, swallowing one of the beams. It rams the emitter, and thrashes.

A sudden vicarious tingle shoots along Clarke's spine. The creature sinks, twitching. Clarke feels it die before it touches bottom.

"Jesus," she says. "You sure the laser didn't do that?"

"No. Way too weak," Brander tells her. "Didn't you feel it? An electric shock?"

She nods.

"Hey," Brander realizes. "You haven't seen this before, have you?"

"No. Alice told me about it, though."

"The lasers lure them in sometimes, when they wobble."

Clarke eyes the carcass. Neurons hiss faintly inside it. The body's dead, but it can take hours for the cells to run down.

She glances back at the machinery that killed them. "Lucky none of us touched that thing," she buzzes.

"I was keeping my distance anyway. Lubin said it wasn't hot enough to be dangerous, but, well..."

"I was tuned in to the gel, when it happened," she says. "I don't think it—"