fragment – excerpt from Chapter 3, “The Propagation Weapon”
(29 March 1993)

Fabergé. The beams of Kane’s helmet light and flashlight cut through the mist and shadow like lines of scar-tissue running across a bruise. He watched the nearest egg. It seemed to be soft, leathery, and translucent like a crocodile’s, rather than hard, brittle, and opaque like a bird’s, and its carunculated upper end was cut into four lobes by deep grooves. Withen the egg, something, some creature, moved in a sudden spasm.

“Something’s moving.” Kane reported this over his suit radio. The creature continued to writhe. “We have life. Organic life.”

With tantalising lanquor the quadrifid end of the egg opened, the lobes widely splayed. Kane recoiled, then stared dumbfounded at the pulsing flesh within.

Osculation. The creature vaulted ballistically from the egg and clung to his hemispherical Perspex visor; corrosive secretions ate swiftly through the prophylactic bubble. Its many-jointed limbs – fingers? – enfolded his head in an almost crushing embrace and its prehensile tail slithered with an almost sensuous ferocity several times around his neck. Its soft underbelly, its warmth and mositure bizarrely familiar, moulded itself to his face. A muscular appendage found his mouth, open in a silent, breathless scream. It snaked its way past his teeth and tongue. He gagged, but it slid with easy fluidity along his œsophagus against the flowing tide of bile. The pain of penetration swelled in its intensity until he blacked out.