Odette quickly suited up in the IDS tent while being partially reminded of her first time seeing the specimen after landing.

  Odette hadn’t come into contact with the specimen since the tarp had been placed over it, which had been shortly after SCR had arrived a few days ago. So it was said, IDS had retrieved all the samples they were going to need for their purposes, so there was no reason to make redundant trips.

  Odette had felt fairly accepting of that reason at the time, it not even occurring to her that the reasoning could have been given falsely. Later her feelings turned to suspicion after her station was reassigned to managing the new SCR hires, which now turned again to confirmation. Looking around the near empty tent as she suited up allowed Odette to confirm what she had been ninety-nine percent sure of for the last few days, that IDS never really had a role in this site.

  ‘I should have come back here sooner. No wonder the tour didn’t mention IDS’s station.’

  Now, all suited up again, Odette’s eyes laid fresh upon the visage of the mutant beast.

  Walking the dozen feet to the center of the encampment with her machine in both hands, she pushed the tarp’s flap up and stepped into the decontamination closet attached to the tarp. For the only way in or out of the specimen’s site, it weirdly was unstaffed at this hour.

  Waiting for a moment to be sanitized over her suit, she then stepped through to the tarp’s interior and exhaled in awe upon seeing its sole resident up close once again.

  ‘There’s just nothing to compare it to. I really feel they’re making a mistake by allowing it to be auctioned off. If the brass really came here, saw it with their own eyes, felt its presence, I don’t think they’d be so sure.’

  Odette shook her head. She was here to prove her own importance, not the specimen’s. Tapping a series of control prompts into the panel on the back of her machine, that she had made from an old phone in her tent and some wiring from the observation poles, she sent the machine into activation. The claws at the front end began to whirr in response, rotating rapidly with great force.

  Stepping closer, Odette searched for a piece of flesh on the beast that looked untouched so far.

  That wasn’t hard, given its boulder-like frame, but she wanted something better than just ‘untouched’.

  ‘If I picture it as the fetus it resembles, the head would be about there?’

  Odette looked toward the far end of the pale green saccule. They had already extracted many samples from that area.

  Tomorrow, the SCR team would be working on developing a nerve agent based on the spinal fluid found near its brain, in fact.

  Odette looked elsewhere.

  ‘It’s torso? No, that would be more like its abdomen, I guess? Why haven’t we taken any from there yet?’

  Odette thought they had been thorough, but the beast’s corpse had started to slump in the past few days, despite its apparent lack of decomposition. Perhaps when they had started the samples, that area hadn’t been exposed yet?

  Regardless, it looked like the best place for Odette to extract from now.

  With her machine, she would execute an effective leap of ten years of scientific progress, extracting, analyzing, and safely storing all in one motion.

  She hoped that after considering her work without bias, the community would recognize it as something that could save biologists dozens of hours a week.

  Odette stepped forward, pressing the spinning claw further into the flesh. She met resistance at first, like stone scraping against steel, but expected as much.

  ‘You don’t think I prepared for this after working with you before?’

  Odette smirked and flipped a switch on the machine. At once the blur of spinning claws was superheated, water dispensed by tubes running along the machine making sure it didn’t damage the rest of the components.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  With another press, she was through. Digging into the flesh of the creature’s lower torso, she cut through the coagulated sac enveloping its mutated form before hitting more solid muscle. That was when she knew to insert the last command prompt into her devices panel, and let the claws grab around the flesh they had found and pull it out.

  Sweating now, Odette pulled the spinning machine out precisely before setting it down on some crates within the tarp. Numbers on its electromechanical display quickly began flipping until they reached a determination on the sample.

  ‘What? This can’t be right. Cell viability at sixty-two percent?’

  Odette tapped against the display, but the result still stayed the same. Yet it was obviously incorrect, as that number was almost three times their readings from other parts of the specimen.

  Of course, any cell viability reading above five percent in a dead organism constituted an anomaly, yet they had accepted the higher readings in this specimen as a unique attribute. Or rather, the brass had.

  But to get a reading thrice the amount from anywhere else in its body either meant they had missed something, which was unlikely given the staff at work here, or Odette’s machine was faulty.

  Her heart sank.

  ‘No, before I give up, I need to take another measurement!’

  She couldn’t allow emotions to dictate her actions, or the possibility of failure to overwhelm her. Odette cleaned off the business end of her machine before looking for another spot in the beast.

  ‘The neck, this time. It's been ravaged to hell by SCR, but it's where I first took samples from. If I know any reading by heart, it's this one.’

  Odette plunged the spinning claws past the specimen’s saccule layer and into the softer tissue of its nape. There, she let it dig for a moment before pulling it out again to confirm the reading.

  ‘Come on…come on…yes! Cell viability at twenty-four percent!’

  While that usually meant a creature was freshly dead, or on the cusp of it, that reading marked the exact one Odette had recorded in the first days of the study. Weird that it hadn’t dipped even a little bit, but that wasn’t her focus for now.

  ‘I should reconfirm the reading from the abdomen then, that first sample must have been a fluke.’

  Perhaps she had even dug into its intestine and fished out an earlier meal. Whatever the reason, she wasn’t a scientist if she didn’t check her own work.

  For the third time, Odette set the machine up against the congealed outer layer of the beast, pressing it in as the claws started to heat up. As the whirring of the blades started, she looked around past the semi-transparent tarp to see if anyone was getting up yet.

  Half an hour had already passed during this process. Though there was no one on stand-by near the tarp and the drilling machine was fairly quiet, Odette wanted to avoid being seen until she could make her findings certain. The bottled sample from the neck already counted as a primary case, but she needed something to back up her tool’s reliability.

  Perhaps selling the design could even net her enough to have Lukas cared for in the Republic.

  VVVVEEEEEEEE!

  In the next moment a violent vibration rocked through her hands and practically shook her out of the suit.

  ‘What the–?’

  Odette grasped the handles of the analyzer to keep it from getting away from her, but something was rocking it back and forth. She rapidly punched into the panel, switching the machine head off that was sounding like it was chewing steel.

  Odette heaved, trying to pull the machine out as it came to a stop still buried within, but it barely budged. Once she was able to get it out part of the way however, she was able to see what it had gotten caught on.

  A fibrous ball of blood-red tissue. Curling in a mass around the head of the machine, forming a stop-gap between the thick saccule and the dense flesh it had been pulled from.

  Membranous strings bent off from it like cobwebs, slowing the motor of the front claw and even clogging the nearly air-tight spaces deeper along. It had stopped the machine from being pulled out past the saccule the creature was draped in, and appeared to largely still be connected to its internals. It was steaming, even now.

  Odette’s eyes expanded. Shock emerged even through the hindrance of a fogged hazmat mask.

  The coloring of it. The heat coming from it in thick curls of steam. Its raw, beating form as Odette stared at it from less than three feet away.

  ‘It’s heart? No.’

  They had already extracted samples of that, and they looked nothing like the cluster Odette had struck.

  This was something else. Not a sample, but the object itself. It was something complete, and small enough to fit within the grasp of her machine.

  Odette started to slowly wind up the claws and bore the object out of the body. Its stringy appendages still attached to the internals of the specimen began to slide as well, coming out along with it.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. But whatever it is, it's not dead!’