and Elois were approaching, a short, stocky man with an upturned, meticulous mustache with them. Conover, who’d been helping with the analysis, trailed along behind, as did the ever dour Envaer.
“Dash, Wei-Ping, I’d like to introduce our head of xenogenetics, Elias Grunne,” Elois said, indicating the stocky man. “He’s been compiling results about the Deepers, but I’d better let him do the talking. Repeating things wastes time, and we’re going to want to conserve it for this war.”
“You asked us to look at DNA and RNA in these Deeper corpses,” Grunne said, his voice a soft rumble. “We did, and we found it. Unfortunately, that’s about all I can say about it right now.”
Dash glanced at Lomas, who shook her head. “No, it’s not a security thing. Believe me, we’ve learned a hard lesson about the need to trust you and your people.”
“They just haven’t finished trying to puzzle out the data,” Conover said.
Dash turned back to Grunne. “Puzzle out what, exactly? Isn’t DNA just DNA?”
“Yes and no. Yes, the genetic markers have the molecular forms of DNA and RNA we know—double—and single-helixes, respectively—and they’re made of essentially the same chemicals all organized much the same way. But no, we don’t understand the way these are sequenced. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Deepers’ DNA and RNA is much older than ours. They may have had some common ancestral DNA, but each has evolved very differently.”
“How about the data from the Arkubator?” Dash asked.
“Again, there are similarities, things common to all of these species, but also significant differences that we—”
“Don’t understand,” Dash said, nodding. “Starting to see a theme here.”
“But if their DNA has commonalities, then aren’t they all related species?” Wei-Ping asked.
Grunne gave her a thin smile. “You share about sixty percent of your DNA with a banana. Do you consider yourself related to bananas?”
“Depends on the banana,” Wei-Ping replied. “I could see having a nice, respectable cousin who’s a banana.”
“That explains some of your behavior,” Dash said to Wei-Ping, who grinned. “But not a lot of actual answers, despite all the good work?” Dash turned to Grunne, careful to keep his face open and friendly. He knew the science team was relentless in their pursuit of data.
“At the moment, yes,” Grunne said.
“So how about the fact there only turned out to be eight of them aboard that missile?” Wei-Ping asked. “We must have killed at least twice that many by the time we even made it back to the hatch.”
“No, you might have shot that many,” Elois said. “But you obviously didn’t kill them. It seems that most wounds to a Deeper don’t do much to it, at least not immediately. Their carapaces heal up fast, the same way their ships do. You pretty much have to blow them to pieces to keep them dead—or else get a shot through their neural net.”
“Their what now?” Dash asked.
“Do you remember that first Deeper we examined, the one that turned to powder and sludge? Do you remember a little blocky component thing left over?”
Dash grimaced, thinking of the noisome Deeper remains. “I do. That was a neural net?”
“So it seems,” Elois said. “It’s mostly made of platinum, with a few other things alloyed in—osmium, gallium, some indium. Anyway, when we studied it closely, we realized it was a self-organizing neural net—basically a small, very sophisticated computer.”
“That’s, what? Their brain?”
Elois smiled. “I’m tempted to say yes, but I learned long ago not to bullshit people, and just say I don’t know when I don’t know. This is one such time. All I can say is that it seems to be implanted, and is tied into all of the Deeper’s life processes. Destroying it almost certainly kills the Deeper.”
Dash scowled. “That’s a damned small target. And let me guess, it’s buried inside the thing.”
“It is.”
Dash turned and looked back into the isolation chamber. Some of the Deeper corpses had already broken down into organic residue. The rest would no doubt soon follow. He remembered shooting chunks out of the Deepers, but it wasn’t until they were literally hacked and bludgeoned apart with boarding weapons they finally went down and stayed down.
They contained DNA and apparently had some sort of tech implanted in them.
“I wonder if this is more of the Unseen long game,” he said, turning back. “Where they stole us as a new species and made us into soldiers tailor-made to fight their war.” That prompted a curious look from Grunne.
“Stolen?” Grunne asked. “How?”
“I’ll share the images and