Zildiz immediately went after the Leaper with swords in hand and began to climb the smoldering heap which the progenitor had blasted. But Rene grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her back.

“Going somewhere?” he asked.

“Is the question rhetorical, or are you just being your usual dimwitted self?” she nipped, batting his hand away, “You heard what that madman said. Either we catch the vermin, or he exterminates us along with it.”

“Oh, so I’m the stupid one, am I? We came within an arsehair’s breadth of getting killed thanks to that stunt you pulled back there! Do you have some kind of death wish, girl? Is that it?”

The Gallivant levelled another one of her trademark looks of disdain at him and refused to answer. Knowing that it would impossible to get a rise out of her now, Rene vented his ire upon the sphere.

“And as for you!” Rene took Exar and sloshed him around like a half-empty water canteen, “Thanks for all the help!”

“Sorry,” Exar said sheepishly, “But I judged discretion to be better part of valor in that situation. The information you allegedly possess is the only real bargaining chip we have. If I had revealed myself to be an engrammatic intelligence, he would have no reason to keep the two of you alive. He could just access my files and learn everything he wanted to know about the abandoned T.O.R.U. and the general state of the company’s remaining retrievable assets.”

Rene had to admit that it was a good point. That didn’t mean he wasn’t still sore about it, though. The pathfinder knelt beside the oozing sac on the underside of the shuttle’s ramp and studied it with some distaste.

“How’d the cursed thing even survive the trip? Is it true what that thing said about the kindreds?” Rene asked Zildiz, “Were you all designed by the Vitalus with interstellar travel in mind?”

“Not exactly,” she replied, and began sawing open the silky pod with a sword, “It depends on the conditions of the Great Game. Like I said, we aren’t void crawlers.”

“Void crawlers?” Rene repeated, once again feeling at sea.

“You poor, sheltered thing. Just how much does your precious Fleet keep from you?”

Zildiz pried open the sticky mess and dug around inside until the she unearthed an almost wholly intact carapace, its arms and legs curled up in a fetal position. A huge rent along the backplate split armor into even halves, the black hairs of its body rimed white with frost.

“Just as I thought,” Zildiz autopsied, “Plugged its spiracles and pores with webbing after weaving a pressurized sack around itself to prevent ebullism. Made another sack to store a supply of Arachnean atmosphere. Then it went into diapause mode to slow down its metabolic rate and oxygen consumption. What I can’t understand is how it managed to construct all that equipment in the few minutes between the shuttlecraft’s takeoff and its emergence into hard vacuum.”

“Well, the shuttlecraft did hang around in the stratosphere for over an hour,” Rene told her, “Exar insisted on it. He told me that we had to properly treat your wounds under the influence of standard Arachnean gravity before we subjected you to any extreme g-forces. But how could our stowaway have withstood the cold?”

“It must also have subdermal arterial tubules for heat retention,” Zildiz answered, “The silk would share that property as well as provide shielding from harmful radiation.”

“Sounds like that Leaper was more prepared for space travel than we were. Mighty convenient, that,” Rene said, unsure if he could still believe Zildiz’s earlier claim that the kindreds were separate from the quasi-demonic void crawlers.

“All of the implants I’ve mentioned so far are standard requirements for high-altitude variants such as migration mappers, meteorologists or—”

“—those Leapers who help make the storm catchers?” Rene cut in.

“Correct,” Zildiz said, arching an eyebrow as if she hadn’t thought him capable of deductive reasoning, “They often have to work long shifts in low pressure environments. That, or it inherited some recessive genes from grandparents who were candidates in the defunct space program.”

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“The Leapers have a space program?” Rene said faintly, shaken to his core by the mental image of a bunch of the black-furred creepy crawlies floating out into the oily stain between the stars.

“Had. Once. So did we Gallivants,” Zildiz said, “But those eight-legged bastards had to go and ruin everything, as usual.”

Zildiz quickly related a portion of the troubled history between Gallivants and the hitchhiker’s people. And the more Rene heard, the sooner he came to the conclusion that the Fleet would be hopelessly outmatched in the upcoming conflict against the Vitalus and the kindreds.

Relations between the Leapers and the Gallivants had not always been so hostile. During the time of Zildiz’s grandfather, the two races had been cordial enough that the Vitalus had thought to introduce a new addition to the Great Game, a project that was to utilize the very best traits of both kindreds.

With the terraforming process going so well on Arachnea, the Vitalus wanted to explore the possibility of resettling its resident moon, Cloister. The moon would have been a fresh arena in which the kindreds could carve out their own ecological niches amid the challenges of a low gravity setting.

To this end, the Vitalus released new modifications into the Leaper gilt helix which allowed them to extrude a far stronger version of their silk, diamond nanothreads that were light and strong enough to be used to weave a ‘star spool’, a superstructure that used the planet’s own centrifugal force and gravity to hold a geosynchronous tether under constant tension, allowing kindreds to simply climb up and down and release their payloads into orbit. The entire Leaper kindred set to work on the second phase of the project, erecting the Spool on an island on the opposite hemisphere of the world; the first phase involved the Gallivants launching themselves at Cloister using grafted multistage biochemical afterburners, each twice the size of its wearer and designed to molt and shed during the stages of takeoff.

The Gallivants were the proud vanguard of the recolonization effort. The Vitalus had bestowed upon on them countless revolutionary helix modifications and grafts to allow the kindreds to make the cislunar trip. Subdermal heat regulator tubules, fully pressurized epicuticle layers, exterior lung-tanks, thruster bladders—the list of gifts was endless. The Leapers had slowly grown jealous of what they perceived as a clear case of favoritism, despite the fact that all the kindreds would have undoubtedly received similar upgrades in the later stages of the mission.

And so it passed that during the maiden voyage, a joint taskforce of Gallivants and Leapers was sent up to make an initial survey of Cloister’s conditions. A team of Gallivant rocketeers had provided transportation by carrying the Leapers on their backs as they broke free of Arachnea’s pull. After landing the Leapers had put up a series of silk domes where gene edited pioneer species could be introduced via specimen sacs brought up on the star spool.

“Gallivant rocketeers managed to transport one delivery of specimens up the Spool and to the lunar surface. After that, it all went sideways,” Zildiz said sadly.

Wishing to get a good head start on the brave new frontier, the Leapers had struck first. The last anyone ever heard of the rocketeers was a mayday message that spoke of treachery and heavy casualties. The murders on the lunar colony sent shockwaves down into Arachnea, with both sides trading accusations and threats. The Vitalus voiced its displeasure at the disruption of its plans, but washed its hands and stood aside when the War of the Spool was declared between the two kindreds, a war which only ended when the Spool itself was severed by persons unknown and sent crashing into the oceans below.

Left completely stranded, the lunar colonies had died out soon after the Leapers sued for peace. Yet the victory of the Gallivants remained a hollow one—following the cessation of hostilities the Vitalus had confiscated or overwritten nearly all of the space-related grafts and helix modifications.

“That explains why your kindreds hate each other so much,” Rene said, pulling thoughtfully at his lower lip.

“Indeed. In the end the war was a net loss for everyone involved. But a select few of the grafts were allowed to stay in widespread use. The pressure bladders that allow Gallivants to tolerate high-g maneuvers are one of them. This Leaper we’re after clearly has some cislunar upgrades. Either it inherited recessive genes from its parents, or its tribe is using illegal hardware that they refused to surrender to the Inkarnids. In any case, most of its exomorph did not survive the trip—only the innards remain.”

“So he’s completely naked,” Rene nodded, “That’s good news, I suppose.”

“Not exactly. The helm and one of its legs are missing. Which means it still has its venomed fangs and possibly 360-degree night vision, if it installed the necessary upgrades.”

Rene reviewed the tactical information and found that he did not like the odds. Zildiz’s own destroyed exomorph was useless to her now, which meant that their quarry was on roughly even footing with them in terms of offensive capabilities. It had gotten a head start in those vents and was likely already laying in ambush. And as if things couldn’t be worse, Rene's back was still killing him.

“27 minutes remaining,” the flayed god announced, its incorporeal voice somehow projecting throughout the hangar, “Better hurry up, crewmen.”

The pathfinder cast about the trash heap and saw one of the wheeled vehicles overturned, one of its doors hanging open by its hinges. Rene retrieved the sword of the ancients from the cabin and went back to the vehicle, slicing the door clean off and holding it in his offhand by its handle. For a shield it was quite heavy and cumbersome, but at least he could see clear through the windshield as he took cover behind it.

Like everything else on this raggedy-arsed mission of his, it would have to do.