“Oh, shit.” Sebastien and Elena hunched over the screen.

The three helmet feeds all converged on the thing – creature? organism? – moving through the vast hangar. The thing was almost as large as the Anjou, and its physical structure was so strange that Elena was only able to focus on parts of it at a time. The synchronized undulation of its dozens of spidery legs. The waving of – cilia? pseudopods? – all over its body. The body itself, which resembled a sea cucumber the size of a killer whale, all covered in bumps and nodules. Was that thickest pseudopod a neck, or a tail, and what was that immense flower-like bud on the end? How did something so big move on legs so seemingly spindly in gravity this strong?

“Fall back!” Robin shouted.

“To where?” Hans said, but they retreated as the thing moved toward them with alarming speed. One of the helmet feeds abruptly spun, and Ibn shouted in alarm.

On Robin’s feed, they saw that one of the creature’s vinelike pseudopods had whipped out, wrapped around Ibn’s body, and lifted him into the air. For a moment Ibn hung there upside-down, looking at the bizarre creature that had towered over him, and now filled the space beneath him. The neck, with its closed-flower-bud head (Elena was aware those terms were wildly inaccurate, but approximations were all she could manage) moved directly beneath him, and the petals began to unfurl.

Ibn shrieked and fired his rifle at the bud, but to no particular effect. Either he missed, or it just didn’t do any significant damage. The pseudopod gave him a shake and the gun bounced out of his hands, though it stayed against his body, dangling from its strap. The bud opened wider, the pseudopod loosened, and Ibn dropped into the center of the flower-like opening, down into some sort of tube or chute. He screamed as he fell.

Elena covered her face, and looked away, but the screaming went on and then trailed off. “I’m alive.” Ibn’s voice was full of wonder. His feed showed rushing, organic-looking walls zipping past him. “It’s like some kind of a slide–” He grunted. “I’ve hit bottom. It’s soft… spongy, even…” His light shone around. “Am I in its stomach or–”

His feed abruptly went dark, and Sebastien groaned.

Hans screamed and ran forward, shotgun held at the ready, and when he got close to the creature, Elena realized the thing’s legs weren’t spindly at all: they were so big she wouldn’t have been able to wrap her arms around one of them.

“Stop!” Robin shouted, but it was pointless: Hans was in a frenzy, and who could blame him? That thing had eaten Ibn. Maybe. Or maybe it had put him into some kind of body cavity for storage. Maybe the creature wasn’t even alive. Perhaps it was some kind of biomechanical construct–