“Our sensors aren’t giving us much of anything,” Janice said. “They aren’t even willing to confirm there are structures down there. It’s the same kind of results we got when we scanned the bridge generator, actually. Whatever that stuff is made of, it’s weird alien matter.”

“Maybe this is the Liar homeworld?” Callie said. “Maybe in times of emergency, the bridge generator activates and transports them to their home system–”

Something on the viewscreen moved, just a flash seen in a gap between two of the immense branches. Elena pointed. “Did you see that?”

“It was just a flicker,” Drake said. “It could have been an artifact in the transmission–”

“It moved like something alive, Callie,” Elena said. “Believe me. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the motion of living things.”

“At this magnification, for us to see something moving on the surface, it would have to be immense. Mountain-sized, like in those old movies Ashok likes–”

“Kaiju,” he crackled. “You’re telling me we’re orbiting a planet of giant monsters? The universe is amazing.”

“Scanning for motion,” the ship said. The screen flashed, showing various segments of the city, if it was a city, and not a power plant, or art piece, or cemetery, or something less comprehensible. Callie caught another flicker of movement, and the image froze for several seconds as something passed from underneath a twisted cloverleaf of tunnels onto a patch of clearer ground. The image incremented forward in slow-motion, showing the thing’s movement as a series of progressive frames. At this magnification the image was a little blurry, but the basic shape of the thing was recognizable.

Elena turned her back on the viewscreen, wrapped her arms around herself, and trembled.

“It’s just like the creature Elena described,” Stephen said, presumably watching on his own tablet in his quarters. “The thing that ate her friends. The long body, the neck, the flower-bud head.”

“Except the one she saw was the size of a bus.” Callie went to Elena and put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but Elena flinched away. “How big is this one?”

“It must be at least a mile long,” the ship said. “Which is absurd, because the gravity on this planet should be very close to that of Earth, and a creature that size would collapse under its own weight. Unless it’s not a creature at all, but a biological machine – or, more likely, a sort of cyborg with mechanical reinforcement.”