The human element was distinctly Monique DeFriend. Like Transhuman Andria, she was hairless, with white transparent lenses for eyes. Her exposed breasts offered a more brazen look, aided and abetted by her flesh tone, which was a blazing violet hue. What was as impressive as it was sinister was the way her waist melded so easily into the black widow spider’s narrow pedicel—the delicate marriage of the human spine into the arachnoid nerve center, the prominent roundness of the insect’s abdomen and its inspired anatomical placement—creating the sensual if not disturbing illusion of being Monique’s buttocks, albeit a massive one … all culminating in her centaurlike carriage riding aloft and in full command of those eight deadly seven-segment legs, their pointed claws clacking along the hard surface of the transports like approaching steeds.

The two bald, bare-breasted, strikingly violet human arachnids loomed over me, each as wide and as tall as a tank, their dexterous front legs twitching like nervous thoroughbreds. As for me? My mind was gone, my bio-chip fighting the paralysis of fear.

THEY ARE NOT HERE TO KILL YOU.

It was Transhuman Andria, her thought energy probing my psyche just in time to soothe my scattering consciousness—her hand reaching out for mine, warm and moist from the bloody object concealed in her palm.

KEEP THIS WITH YOU. THINK OF ME.

It was her finger. She had snapped the bone, wrenching and twisting the digit until the flesh had torn free … her ring finger!

I suppose there was a message in the gesture, but the circumstances weren’t exactly conducive to deep thought, and so I shoved the bleeding appendage into my sweat suit pocket, just as the spider-woman on my right hoisted me high off the ground into the human arms of Transhuman Monique 1. The female’s incredibly strong upper torso quickly grasped my wrist in her clawed fingers and positioned me atop her insect abdomen as if to ride her like a horse—which is what I did, if you call holding on for dear life “riding.” But where to hold on to? As we raced toward the Holy City my first instinct was to reach around her and cup her naked breasts, but that was too repulsive. I thought about grabbing her in a headlock, and she must have read my thoughts because her clawed hands expertly reached behind her back and grabbed my wrists, pulling my arms around her waist as a wet sheet of webbing shot out from the spinneret behind me, adhering me in place.

Pinned by the reeking soured goo, pressed against her lavender-pigmented back, I turned my face away and saw the second transhuman spider-woman trailing us, the pod holding Oscar webbed to the top of its abdomen.

My mount scurried across the photovoltaic backs of the Hunter-Transports, the scarlet eyes of these miserable transhuman sentries sparkling in the rising sun, the advancing daylight burning away the remaining fog to recharge their anatomical solar cells.