The suit dimpled beneath the blade as the S-PAC scraped it sideways across her forearm, but the fibers refused to part. The robot repeated the motion with increasing force, until at last it gave up scraping and attempted a short draw cut.

As Kira watched, she saw the fibers underneath the blade fuse and harden. It looked as if the scalpel were skating across a surface of molded obsidian. The blade produced a tiny shriek.

“Any pain?” the doctor asked.

Kira shook her head, never taking her eyes off the knife.

The robot withdrew several millimeters and then brought the round tip of the scalpel down upon her forearm in a swift, plunging movement.

The blade snapped with a bell-like ping, and a piece of metal spun past her face.

Carr frowned. He turned to speak to someone (or someones) she couldn’t see, and then turned back to her. “Okay. Again, don’t move.”

She obeyed, and the S-PACs moved around her in a blur, jabbing every centimeter of skin covered by the xeno. At each spot, the organism hardened, forming a small patch of adamantine armor. Carr even had her lift her feet so the robots could stab at the soles. That made her flinch; she couldn’t help it.

So the xeno could defend itself. Great. Freeing her would be that much harder. On the plus side, she didn’t have to worry about being stabbed. Not that it had been a problem before.

The way the thing had emerged on Adra, spikes bristling, tendrils writhing … Why wasn’t it acting like that now? If anything might have been expected to provoke an aggressive response, it should have been this. Had the xeno lost the ability to move after bonding with her skin?

Kira didn’t know, and the suit wasn’t telling.

When the machines finished, the doctor stood, one cheek sucked in as he chewed on it.

“Well?” said Kira. “What did you find? Chemical composition? Cell structure? DNA? Anything.”

Carr smoothed his mustache. “That’s classified.”

“Oh come on.”

“Hands on your head.”

“Who am I going to tell, huh? I can help you. Talk to me!”

“Hands on your head.”

Biting back a curse, Kira obeyed.

5.

The next round of tests was far more strenuous, invasive even. Crush tests. Shear tests. Endurance tests. Tubes down her throat, injections, exposures to extremes of heat and cold (the parasite proved to be an excellent insulator). Carr seemed driven to the point of distraction; he yelled at her if she was slow to move, and several times, Kira saw him berating his assistant—a hapless ensign by the name of Kaminski—as well as throwing cups and papers at the rest of his staff. It was clear the experiments weren’t telling Carr what he wanted, and time was fast running out for the crew.

The first deadline came and went without incident. Twelve hours, and so far as Kira could tell, the xeno hadn’t emerged from anyone on the Extenuating Circumstances. Not that she trusted Carr to inform her if it had. But she could see a change in his demeanor: a renewed sense of focus and determination. The doctor had his second wind. They were working against the longer deadline now. Another thirty-six hours before the rest of the crew would have to enter cryo.