I’d caught the whiff of brewing coffee in the hallway outside and smiled knowing how much Sun was enjoying that small part of our dual worlds. The plastic sheets rustled as I pushed through into the lab.

Jessop was busy, checking and testing all manner of slides and vials on machines that made my head spin. My smile grew as I watched him move between the Disciples, explaining what they were seeing and asking questions to get them thinking on a deeper level. He was a teacher through and through. It struck me while watching the tattooed gangsters how, given the right environment, anyone could flourish. How many Einsteins, Da Vincis, Mozarts, had been born and died in squalor, never having the opportunity to uncover their gifts?

The professor caught sight of me. “Mark! You made it back in one piece.”

“Barely,” I replied. “Any good news to share?”

“I believe so, yes. Come and look at this,” he said, waving me over.

The screen he was interested in meant nothing to me. I recognised the image of DNA helixes from school. The numbers and symbols that joined them were beyond my comprehension. “You’re going to have to dumb it down for me.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit. Anyway, what you’re looking at is the double helix arrangement I sampled from the locust wings you provided.”

“You’re going to tell me a way to kill them?” I asked.

He grew animated and clapped his hands. “That’s just it. You don’t need to. I made sure to test a wide enough sample to be sure of my initial findings. There are two key aspects to the sequence that are fascinating. The first, and most important is that every wing I tested came from a male.”

“So… a real sausage fest. Does that mean no babies?” I asked hesitantly.

“No eggs. No babies. If left alone, the species would have died out within six months anyway. But the second aspect relates to the genetic sequencing I carried out. I was astonished at my findings.”

His excitement was infectious. It was obvious he’d found something spectacular. “Let me have it.”

“I was a little confused at first, because comparisons to our database revealed some abnormalities. In basic terms, what I was looking at wasn’t entirely locust DNA. It was something new! The people working for Lake have spliced in genes from the common mayfly. You can see them here, here, and here.”

I was still oblivious to the colours and names that he pointed out. “What does that mean?”

“It means we could’ve hidden in the cathedral and you wouldn’t have needed to bludgeon yourself to within an inch of your life. They would’ve dropped dead within a day or two at most.”

“What? How?”

“The lifespan of the common mayfly is measured in hours, or a single day. It’s as if they put a failsafe into the DNA of their abomination.”

“Thank god for that.” I groaned with relief. My plan was now marginally less suicidal. “So all the attacks taking place, the locusts will all die today or tomorrow?”

“According to the samples you gave me, yes. Every single one of them will just fall from the sky. Kaput. Goners. It’s astonishing what Lake’s people have achieved. Simply astonishing.”

“It’s not just us they’ve attacked.”

Jessop’s smile faded. “I know. Mythic showed me the footage.”

“Can you give me a guess as to how they’ve managed to weaponize those things against all the military installations? They’re trying to wipe out everything that can fight. Every country is under attack, and the only constant is that the locusts seem to only be going after specific targets. We could be stood side by side and they’ll flense you to the bone while I watch.”

Jessop leaned against the immaculate steel counter and rubbed his chin. “Different countries, different cultures, different environments, different military structures, all beset by these creatures.”

“I don’t think it was the pheromone sprays either. They wiped out the army base near Marnmouth. Millions of the things. I didn’t see any massive canisters or any sign of a spray. If there had been, the CID base would’ve been hit by the liquid too.”

“Knowing what I do of the various countries, there’s only one constant they all share.”

I was on tenterhooks. “And that is?”

“Food and drink.”

“Food and drink?”

“Minute quantities would be undetectable to us, but like a beacon to the insects. If Lake could use his connections to get involved with their suppliers, it’s a simple case of a few drops per meal. A few drops in their water supply. They would be a lodestone to the insects. There would be nowhere they could hide.”

It was so simple, yet so dastardly as to be incomprehensible. “If that were the case, would they attack anything else after they’d finished feeding?”

“If Lake could change their protein receptors, and with what I’ve seen I expect they could, the locusts wouldn’t even know there was anything else to eat. They would just wait, and die.”

Jessop’s words rang true. The locusts that had attacked The Pit had passed over occupied homes to reach us. They never wavered. They never flew off in search of other prey. “Ok, as horrible as their attacks are, the fact that they’re going to die soon is good. What about the scorpions? Are they the same?”

“Their genetics weren’t spliced with the mayfly. Theirs were combined with the Isoptera, or common termite.”

I scowled at him. “What on earth for?”

“Purely conjecture?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“To see if it would work. What Liza told you was true. Scorpions are solitary creatures, fiercely defensive of their territory. What you fought was a colony. A colony that shouldn’t have existed.”

“So I ask again, why? Those things were breeding, and spreading.”

“Conjecture again? If I were to guess, I’d say from the samples you provided, they were at their second generation. How long had that taken, and how far had they spread?”

“I don’t know. A few days. A week or two. And they’d wiped out that poor village.”

“Yes, but how far had they gotten?”

I clicked with his reasoning and I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it sooner. “Only a few miles. Do you think they were dropped there on purpose? Hundreds of miles from civilisation, but close enough to a population of humans to make it a challenge?”

“I’m not sure about that last part, but I am almost certain that they wouldn’t have been a threat, even if they did breed and spread. Once Lake had achieved his goal, taking care of the scorpions would’ve been relatively simple. The speed of this invasion seems more like a… how do the military put it? A surgical strike? Lightning fast, designed to overwhelm. The analysis I’ve carried out on the velociraptor remains confirms the possibility.”

I raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“They were all males too. No chance to breed. One life cycle, and then they would follow the locusts back into extinction.”

“Er, Professor? There’s one flaw in your analysis.”

“And what might that be?”

“Cody’s incubating one of their eggs. We’re going to have a raptor baby in our little home soon.” I thought of the movie and their ultimate undoing. “Was there amphibian DNA in there?”

He shook his head. “No. Obviously we have no samples to compare it to, but the genetic makeup is unique. Why do you ask.”

“I was wondering if they could change sexes?”

Jessop returned to rubbing his chin. “Like frogs have been observed to do in certain settings. Interesting hypothesis. I can’t say that the same evolution is impossible in velociraptors given the right environmental or biological triggers. These are extinct species. Their fossils aren’t abundantly helpful in telling us about their genetics. Not to mention anything that Lake’s people have wrought that I might be missing. You do know what this means, though?”

“We’re in deep shit?”

“Succinctly put, Mark.”

“And these are only the phase 1s,” I added.

“Phase 1s? There are more coming?”

“Phase 2s according to the communications I’ve seen. There may be 3s, and 4s, right up to 100s.”

“It might be that this anomaly is why they have created the next generation. Cleaning up their processes, that kind of thing. Not that it will make much difference if the first crop are able to replicate. They could very well overrun the world and replace humans as the apex predator.”

“After what I’ve seen today, Professor, I don’t think we even rank as… fapex predators.”

He looked at me as if I was a diseased sample on one of his slides. “Fapex?”

“Cut me some slack. I just added a lower letter on the alphabet to show we’d been replaced.”

“I see,” he replied. “Very good.”

“On top of that, I’m not sure they even know about their little mistake. Nothing in the communications points to a worry about them breeding. Not to mention the fact that these things were locked up and drugged. How could they even have time to do it?”

“We don’t know how they were kept before their transportation. It might simply be that they were secured together before their seizure and drugging. With enough free time on their hands, who knows what kind of parties they threw?”

He had a good point. They might well have been kept in pens, or wide open fields like in the movie for all I knew.

“Shall we move onto those boxes you were so interested in?” he asked.

“Yeah. What have you found?”

“Come and take a look. It’s almost as extraordinary as their genetic work. I’m not overly familiar with cybernetics, so I asked for a second opinion from your young computer friends. What I’m about to tell you is our dual analysis.”

We approached one of the benches and the raptor head was secured, facing downward in clamps. The back of its head and neck had been exposed with expert precision.

“Holy shit,” I muttered.

“I’m a firm believer in the sanctity of the biological form. This…” he grimaced. “Is anything but holy. It’s most unnatural, though I understand its arrival has been coming for several years.”

I picked up the cover, expecting steel, but it was extremely light and warm to the touch. Compared to steel, anyway. Jessop saw the look on my face.

“I had the same reaction when I first touched it. It’s not a metal at all, but a new material that I haven’t had the chance to study. What I can confirm is that it doesn’t trigger a body’s natural defence mechanisms. It’s how they managed to fuse it so effortlessly with the creatures you’ve been fighting. Most metals would create infections and all manner of ghastliness.” He held it up to the light. “Can you see the marks on it?”

I peered closer. There were a couple of faint abrasions. “I see them,” I confirmed.

“That is the extent of the damage from the bullets fired by my young apprentices. Both small and large calibre ammunition has been used. This material will revolutionise combat.”

“It’s bulletproof? That’s why we couldn’t get through it!”

“Indeed. A lot of the kinetic energy from the impact is also absorbed within the material’s complex structure before it can cause damage to the soft tissue and anchor points on the vertebrae. I’m in awe.”

It was becoming clearer why Lake had secured so many scientists for his little experiment. If they had managed to mass produce this material and supplied it to the CID men, we were in big trouble.

Jessop continued. “What you can see under that shell is the nerve centre of the whole thing.”

I studied the compact electronics. “It looks like the inside of a phone or something.”

“Your friends seem to think it’s a little more complicated than that. It does have the function to receive signals, but the purpose remains a mystery. It seems to use the body’s natural electricity as a power source, meaning no unnecessary chemicals.” Jessop picked up a scalpel and gently raised a tiny filament that emerged from the unit. “If you follow this, it melds with the nerves of the velociraptor. This material seamlessly connects with living tissue in a way I’ve never seen before.”

“So it can be used for control?”

“Mark, if I were to make a hypothesis based on this alone, I’d say that would be the bare minimum these connections could cause. There are dozens of these things running up and down the spine and into the cerebellum. But also the cerebrum.”

“Dumb it down, Professor.”

“That covers both movement, and thinking. If I could get a live specimen, I could give you more information.”

“I don’t think that’s happening any time soon. These things will eat your face. I need to kill them, not study them.”

He sighed. “That’s a real shame. I might be disgusted by the technology on display, but I can appreciate the genius that went into it. As for killing them, they’re just flesh and bone. Get through the thick skull and you kill the brain. Get into the chest and you stop the heart. You already know the way. But… if you should…”

“I’ll try, Professor. No promises.”

“Of course.”

“Anything else to share? Can you give me any idea where they’re being made?”

“Not at the moment, but we’ll keep digging. I’ve got Mozy and Crank working on synthesising a copy of the pheromone too. I didn’t put much stock in their past experience, but they’ve exceeded my expectations. I was wrong.”

The two drug cookers beamed at the praise before returning to their task. The white smocks looked strange against their tattoos and scars, but I let it slide.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help, Mark.”

“You have been, Professor. Honestly. This has filled in a few blanks that were driving me to distraction. I’ll be back in a few hours,” I said, considering my emerging plan. “Maybe.”

“Good luck! And Godspeed.”