The airship carrying the preliminary teams couldn’t land right on top of the encampment site for obvious reasons. So instead it touched down a distance outside of the camp ruins while the other five stayed in the air, waiting for further confirmation.

  That gave Odette plenty of time to air her grievances as she and Caleb walked along with the group. The tense atmosphere of their approach seemingly had no effect on her as she was too busy rationalizing her own nerves.

  Caleb smiled at this behind his mask, as whether or not she knew, her verbosity in this situation where most people were silent proved her own mettle.

  “So I’ve got some missions under my belt, yes. That gives me a little bit of leeway on my final mission, but this one is still different! When was the last time our department was tapped first for a black site, much less one that’s related to mutant beasts?”

  “Well, I.D.S has actually received access to quite a few special projects, especially in the last two decades. Though it’s not a stretch to call this one special…”

  “Exactly! I understand them not sending the big-named researchers, because they’re probably all still focused on the race with the Principality—”

  Several heads turned their way as Odette mentioned the Principality, the Silver Republic’s primary contender economically and ideologically. Both countries were in a careful balance right now with each other, having discovered fission energy at nearly the same time a few decades ago, so there was still a great deal of suspicion for anything that concerned the Principality right now, especially in their sensitive field of work.

  Odette blanched at her mistake, realizing that she may have gotten a bit overzealous.

  But Caleb shook his head, beckoning her to continue. On the hunch that it was better for this usually shy person to vent her frustrations when she was feeling this aggressive, he urged her to verbalize despite the wary glances from the rest of the group.

  Odette continued in a quieter tone.

  “---I understand not asking for their presence here, but even the others in our department weren’t called? When we left, I could have sworn I saw the Director in the lab, but you’re telling me she wasn’t the first choice?”

  ‘She’d kill to be here’ went unsaid, but they both thought it.

  Sam was a hard-ass on everyone in I.D.S but they appreciated the department more because of her. She never took anything lying down, especially when it was detrimental to her team, and she never missed an opportunity to further their field of study: merging engineering and biology.

  “Sam’s absence here did strike me as unusual, yes, but that’s simply life. With the…struggle, going on as you pointed out, orders to all departments have been multiplied consistently over the years. She not only has to coordinate funding and the allocation of resources for them, but contribute herself if she ever wants to progress in her career.”

  “Yet she still has time to breathe down my back.”

  Caleb whistled, taken aback a little by the snarky comment. This young cub could really grow into a lioness couldn’t she? Just had to give her that extra bump…

  “You know what the best piece of advice I ever received was?”

  She shook her head. Of course she didn’t know, he had only come up with it about a minute earlier.

  “It took me three months to go from the advisory program to the last mission in my apprenticeship. In my first year after making Senior Researcher while writing my thesis, I had expected to maintain that rapid growth, but quickly found I had peers and colleagues who had thought the same as I had. Surrounded by geniuses in my field, despite all of my hard work to get there I felt small. As I looked at the people sitting next to me and watched them run through problems that had taken me months to figure out in minutes, I felt like the whole world was mocking me for my efforts to get to that point. When I realized that some people’s starting line was my finishing, I finally understood it was my own pride that was getting in the way.”

  Caleb looked through Odette’s gas mask.

  “Do you understand what I’m getting at? Most people strive to achieve some measure of success or importance without ever realizing what that means. I’ll tell you what you really want to achieve: the capacity for failure.”

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Even with the gas mask on, Caleb could tell the woman had just made a face at that.

  “No, it’s true. Strive for greatness, but have faith that you’ll be fine even if you fail. Accept people liking you, but be fine even when they don’t. Learn to be humble whether you’re promoted or fired, because you have a long life ahead of you and each second is too precious to waste worrying about something you can’t control.”

  Caleb looked back to the front of their group, understanding that Odette’s lioness had evidently hidden itself back up after that talk.

  “I understand, even if it sounds a bit cliche. Thanks.”

  What? Cliche?

  Caleb complained in his mind, but soon enough they had come up on the first row of tents, most of which were scorched through or collapsed.

  The group of scientists fanned out, clearly eager now that their skylegs weren’t being tested, to gather data on the surroundings in accordance to their specific fields. Unlike the others, Caleb and Odette’s would take them to the center of the encampment.

  “It looks like there was a fight here. Some of these discharges are clearly from explosives. Look at the impact craters over there!”

  Caleb hurried her along, tapping her on the shoulder to follow him.

  “It’s not our business either way, come on.”

  But something in his stomach sank too as he glimpsed at the surroundings. Clearly, Odette was right, but whatever had happened here hadn’t been shared with them. Sam and the higher officials had been extremely vague about the results of the satellite imagery, what they had seen in the hours after gaining visuals, and the Major hadn’t been very helpful either.

  But even against the backdrop of the testament to human atrocity, nothing could have prepared them for the sight of the specimen they had come for.

  Its presence, above all, stabbed into them like a stake in the heart.

  A partially flayed conglomerated mass of colorless tentacles. Flattened like matted hair and wrapped around a nauseatingly disfigured saccule, containing something half-dry half-wet.

  Words alone couldn’t do it justice. The mere fact that it struck terror into Caleb’s heart immediately after seeing it spoke columns. Odette, however, must have had a stronger constitution to immediately speak her burning thoughts after seeing it.

  “It’s not from this world, is it?”

  Caleb snapped to the junior researcher.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It’s physiology, its presence. Just by looking at it, I can’t see any sort of commonality with another species on our planet, mutant or not. Yes, it has some features we can name, but they don’t make any sense in conjunction with each other. How does it move? How does it sustain itself?”

  Caleb shook his head, perhaps a bit in disapproval of the researcher jumping to conclusions.

  “To say its alien is still far too grand of a stretch. We haven’t even done a core sampling, much less a cellular analysis. Be patient, these things will be answered in time, and now is when you especially don’t want to be hasty, given this is a big assignment for you.”

  “But your speech about being assured—?”

  “--But aliens, for god’s sake?! Perhaps I gave that speech to you earlier than I should have! Really, just wait to run some tests before voicing your initial theories. It’s a lesson that I’ve learned after some thirty years in this field, and that doesn’t contradict my earlier statements. Alright?”

  Odette looked like she had been slapped, before nodding and working to unpack the equipment they had traveled with.

  As she transitioned to drilling into the specimen, which turned out to be a lot harder than she had expected, she thought about other things.

  Sometime in the last couple days, someone like Odette hadn’t been told exactly when of course, when the satellites of the Republic had inexplicably become inoperable, they had lost all visuals over the Jejune region. Which when paired with the sudden emergence of a high-value biological asset in the region and the subsequent loss of communication with the battalion, had sent red flags far up the totem pole of the upper brass.

  When the Silver Republic’s highest officials had finally gotten back the imagery of the site, they had been shocked by the silent progression of events. It had appeared that the situation in the desert had escalated to violence for some reason, and so the Chancellor had doubled the deployment into the Jejune, sending over a squadron of six high-payload airships.

  The power of these half dozen vessels accounted for nearly ten thousand men’s worth of firepower, yet they were equipped entirely with lethal chemical agents and incendiary weapons instead. All of which was at the ready to be rained down from far above.

  That was the kind of thing Odette was thinking of, as she looked above the clouds to the group of airships hovering directly over them. With a shake of discomfort, she loaded the last sample into the container by the machine that Caleb had set up.

  “That makes two core samples from each part of the specimen’s body we’ve identified. So far that includes two types of feeler tentacles, its outer-dermal sac, its inner-dermis, several yet-to-be-identified organs, and two different cores through parts of its head.”

  “Thanks for your work Odette, now sit down over here and help me work the machine.”

  Odette looked around the workstation the senior researcher had set up, covered by one of the mostly intact tents, and nodded.

  “Of course, Professor.”