Got through a couple of chapters today! Which is good. I need this sucker done.
I got excitement anyway, in the form of Nur tossing a small, tangled lump of wires and circuits onto my desk. “Behold!” he intoned. “The thing that tried to kill you.”
I looked at it — and then I looked away. There was something wrong about the twisted, matted thing, like the wires were spelling out words I didn’t want to read. The whole effect was spoiled by the long iron nail that Nur had presumably hammered through the item, although ‘spoiled’ isn’t really the right word there. “Okay, what is it? Where did you find it? And when did it try to kill me?”
“Well, easiest question first. I found it inside the basket you brought along for your picnic, hidden inside a cold-pack.” I realized right then that Nur had the kind of calm you get when you’ve slammed a couple of mood-dampeners in a row. “It was also smeared with a pretty nasty neurotoxin. Good thing I was wearing gloves.”
“Jesus.” That was closer to a prayer than I’d come for a long, long time. We’d been carrying that thing around all day, after all. “Wait, though: this isn’t a bomb, is it?”
“Oh, no, Pam. It’s a sonic transmitter. One that broadcasts at a frequency we can’t hear, but the local lifeforms can. I checked with the some people in Biology, and they think the not-cows could have been able to hear the signal. The only thing is, we’d have to actually check to confirm it. Which is not a good idea…”
“Gotcha. I don’t feel like trying to be cruel to alien animals, either. What if we succeed?”