Her trousers were torn below the knee, where the thing had been holding on to her. The doctor found superficial scratches on her calves, not breaking the skin. He took pictures of them for later comparison, just in case, and then dosed her with first-aid spray, which would kill any known bacterium or virus, and maybe some unknown ones.

A search party found the thing and brought it back, draped over two shovels, nearly dead. They dumped it on a sheet of plastic under the bright light in the center of camp. Some people examined it while everybody else examined the dark overcast sky, wearing hats.

The central part looked like a crab or a spider about half a meter wide, with twelve muscular tentacles that fanned out into a frame for the transparent skirt of the gasbag. Inflated, it probably made a globe about two meters in diameter, with pods ballooning out between the tentacle ribs. It could obviously move pretty fast on the ground, deflated, hauling itself along with the tentacles, which had retractable talons.

One of Kisti’s, or somebody’s, pellets had struck the central crab part; an opalescent watery fluid puddled underneath it. The skirt had several knife punctures and a long rip that partly severed a tentacle. Two different fluids, one watery and one yellow and viscous like honey, dripped from that wound.

Twelve was the animal’s magic number. The crab part had twelve simple eyes, spaced evenly around the carapace, and twelve fingers or articulated claws in two rows underneath, surrounding a mouth with twelve teeth like blunt tusks. The claws were imbedded in a nest of hundreds of writhing cilia that slowly stopped moving as they watched. The zoologists decided to put off dissection until the morning light.

The next morning, everybody not involved with the dissection joined Sandra’s crew in the suddenly urgent business of roof raising. The ‘krete floors would be dry enough to sleep on by nightfall, a word that had a new connotation.

A review of satellite and drone data came up with four possible pictures of the “floating spiders.” At least they were infrared blobs with central blobs that were there in one frame and gone in a frame taken a few hours later. All the pictures were nighttime. The blobs hadn’t shown up on the first analysis because they were only slightly warmer than the ground.

It may have homed in on its victim’s body heat. Dissection didn’t reveal any sense organs that might be used for batlike sonar or sharklike detection of electrical activity. It didn’t seem to have ears; its eyes were little more than light detectors. Its brain was less than a centimeter wide.