Chapter 3
“You live here?” Mel asked as they entered the large, converted warehouse. Converted was somewhat generous of a term. There was furniture placed in haphazard grouping that approximated rooms in the otherwise empty building.
“We sleep upstairs.” Kira said, pointing towards the far side of the room where what looked like offices on a partial upper floor were located.
“We’re going to need to do something about you two,” Kelly said “you both stand out like a sore thumb…”
“What?” Mel said.
“You’re both dressed like you’re on safari, and it’s April. You are going to be cold.”
“We were in the jungle…” Joshua said “In peru…”
“Even more of a reason…” Kira said “Joshua, you look about my size, let’s see if we can get you something to blend in from my wadrobe.”
She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him along towards the stairs.
Thom and Greggory sat down on a sofa and Kelly wandered back outside.
Mel followed Alex and Marvin into the corner.
“You think we got the whole nest?” Alex asked.
“I hope so… but we’ll have to watch for the next couple weeks to see…”
“Worst part of this job… we’re glorifed pest control…”
“I know… I’m gonna get dinner started…” Alex nodded as Marvin walked away.
“So what is all this?” Mel asked
“Well, Welcome to my lab, or what passes for it…” Alex said “I may be a botanist, but this job has made me the world’s foremost expert on the Ferrox. And I have still barely scracted the surface after all this time.”
“So, what exactly are they?”
“That’s the thing… I don’t know.”
“I thought you said you were the formost expert?”
“Yeah, like if I sent you to the moon, you’d be your world’s foremost expert on it and not have a clue what was going on around you…”
Mel thought for a second
“Okay, that actually makes sense.”
“The problem is trying to isolate a pure Ferrox tissue sample that hasn’t been affected by absourption of other matter and materials. Best theory I can tell you right now, they’re an engineered lifeform. Someone made them…”
“Is that even possible?”
“In theory, yes. In practice, not without a LOT of help from forces I don’t even want to try to explain. And not like this, to my knowledge. It’s like someone took the best traits from multiple different forms of life and cobbled them together like a casserole. There’s even plant like DNA that does not track back to anything I can remotely locate. Unless in your travels you’ve found a plant that metabolizes methane.…”
“What’s DNA?” Mel asked.
“Oh, right… you’re what, a century behind us? This is going to take a lot of explain…”
Some time later, after having explained basically all of the modern equipment in his lab to her…
“So, from what samples I have been able to put together, a pure Ferrox would have a hard, insect like exoskeleton, with a plant like fibrous internal structure in place of normal muscles and tendons. Their limb movements are through, effectively, a hydraulic process, powered by a second heart on the other side of the body of the normal one if they were humans. They are, in function anerobic, using, like I said, Methane instead of oxygen. Their circulatory system is designed around that hydraulic pump. Like normal earth insects, they have a open circulatory system for hemolymph, though unlike earth insects, they have mammalian style lungs, so the hemolymph also carries methane to their organs.
“Iornicly, their methane breathing makes their nets easy to destroy. Introduce oxygen, toss in a match, and BOOM… whole place goes up.”
“Convenient…”
“Problem becomes for them, when they begin to absorb tissue samples from oxygen breathing life. They become dependent on both gasses to survive and can no longer travel too deep into the nests.”
“Why?”
“Deep inside the nests is something that is generating so much methane it pushed out almost every other gas. Their oxygen breathing tissues would suffocate and they’d die.”
Alex stood up and walked over to the table nearby.
“This projects what’s known as a hologram, it’s a 3d projection, so to speak. This is what a nest looks like, at least, what we’ve be able to figure out.
The hologram switched on, showing a generic hill.
“there is usually two or three entrances, protected by twenty to thirty workers with a drone supervisor.” Alex said, poiting to three red dots irregularly placed outside the hill. He then pressed a button on the device and half the hill vanished, leaving a cut away view. It looked to Mel like an ant farm.
“The tunnels under the hill have a general mix of gases, but as you can see, they rise up into a central chamber inside the hill, to keep the lighter methane in place. Whatever generates the methane is inside that chamber.”
“Don’t cattle make methane?” Mel asked “could they have stollen some?”
“Archons in their digestive tract do, yes… but that’s the thing, cattle are mammals, aerobes. They’d die in that chamber. As would any of us if we got that far… Heat is incredible, hundreds of degrees. In theory, enough that introducing any oxygen would set the methane off. I believe they absorb earth biological tissues to supplant as much of their methane dependent tissue as possible.”
“Okay gang!” Kira yelled out “Prepare to meet the new Joshua Carter!”
Alex and Mel walked over to the door to the stairs where the others were already gathering
Joshua stepped out from behind the wall and they could not believe their eyes.
Kira had given him a full makeover in the time Mel and Alex had been talking. His hair was perfectly framing his face with bouncy curls. He was wearing a pink sweater with a hood over a red t-shirt. He was wearing a knee-length skirt, white, full-length stockings, and a pair of sneakers. His skin was smooth and clean. Kira had even put on a little makeup for him.
“Wow…” Alex, Thom and Kelly said together. If they didn’t know better, they’d think Joshua was a girl from their world. He looked like what certain corners of the internet might call a “femboy”.
“What did you do to him?” Mel asked.
“Hey, fashion is my passion…” Kira said…
“This is what I get for dating a Lipstick lesbian…” Kelly said
“I mean… this just… doesn’t seem right…” Mel said “I should not see THAT much of a man’s legs… it’s… it’s not how things are done…”
“Where you’re from, maybe… but for now, this is what I had that fit him.”
“Fine…” Mel said “Is dinner ready?”
“Yeah, almost…” Marvin said “just give me a second and we can eat…”
As the group walked over to the table, Mel noticed something else about Joshua…
He was smiling. He seemed happy. Something she’d hardly seen out of him in the months they’d been married.
Then again, his job to was to help her and support her, not to be happy.
“Why should he be happy?” She thought to herself.
As they ate, they heard a ringing sound. Alex reached into his labcoat pocked and pulled out his phone.
“Morgan… Yes… yes sir. Yes we believe so. Yes, I’ll stop by tomorrow. I know… I know… right… see you then…”
“Mr. Hartford?” Kelly asked.
“Yeah… he’s not coming tomorrow. He wants me to stop by before the ceremony. He and Mr. Collins want to go over a few things.”
“What ceremony?” Mel asked.
“R Day…” Greggory said.
“Anniversary of every ranger in the universe disappearing.” Kelly said “As the last team left, we’re expected to make an appearance…”
“Ever wonder what our lives would be like if we had to keep our identies a secret?” Thom asked.
“I don’t want to even think about that…” Marvin said “I like the attention…”
“You would…” Kelly snipped at her brother.