A large force of the creatures followed the four humans as they ran, but Jeffcott and the others were easily able to outdistance them. Jeffcott stared ahead at the newly built housing complex on the other side of the street, expecting more of the creatures to appear and cut them off, but none did. Apparently every creature in the vicinity had gone to surround the labs.

The road they'd come in by carried on, leading out of the city. Jeffcott turned to follow it, but as soon as a large outbuilding hid them from sight of the laboratory Dustu grabbed his arm to stop him. "They'll expect us to go that way," he said.

"Who cares so long as we're ahead of them?" asked Jeffcott.

"There are still farms and homes ahead of us before we reach the open desert. We must not follow a predictable path. I suggest we go that way." He pointed to the left, to an open area of ground that had been cleared for the building of more homes. "There is a ditch that runs to the south. Once we are in it we will be able to travel without being seen for many miles."

"Isn't that also predictable?" asked Summers, catching up with the first two men. He was puffing with the unexpected activity.

"I'd listen to him if I were you," said Seabreeze. "He's always the last to be found and captured in the escape and evade exercises."

Jeffcott was doubtful. The open road ahead of him tempted him with its straightness and smoothness. It would be possible to run very fast along it. Every moment they hesitated, though, the creatures were getting closer behind him and it would only take one to see in what direction they had gone...

He nodded, therefore, and the four men ran off the road onto the lumpy, dusty ground. They used the newly built houses (hopefully now empty of the creatures) for cover and reached the ditch a couple of minutes later. They slid down its side, scratching themselves on dead thorns and brambles, and then crouched down until they were sure that it was deep enough to hide them. Then Dustu led the way through the accumulated debris and litter to the south.

"Why'd they suddenly attack?" asked Seabreeze. "Did someone provoke them?"

"Not unless one of you soldiers did," Jeffcott replied.

"We just held them back," Seabreeze replied. "They seemed happy to just stand there, as if all they wanted was to keep us hemmed in. Then, suddenly..." His voice broke off and he stared at the blood staining the sleeves of his uniform.

"Are you hurt bad?" asked Summers.

"So long as he can walk and isn't losing too much blood, the first aid can wait," said Dustu without turning his head to look back at them. "Our first priority is to put distance between ourselves and the enemy."

"We have to go back," said Jeffcott, though. "Some of the others may still be alive."

"The Sergeant gave us new orders before he fell," Dustu replied. "Return to friendly territory and tell what we've learned. VC Cannon."

"Cannon?" asked Summers.

"Victory Condition Cannon," Seabreeze explained, his face white as he realised the full significance of what the other soldier had said. "It means that only one person has to make it back alive for the mission to be considered a success."

"Named after Sergeant Cannon," Dustu added. "He was a member of a patrol in the second World War who discovered that their base was about to be attacked by the Japanese. They returned through the jungle to their base, harassed by the Japanese all the way. Cannon was the only one who made it all the way, but his warning was enough to save the base. Since then it's entered army terminology."

"And everyone else is Jetsam," Seabreeze added drily. "That means..."

"Yeah, I think know what that means," said Jeffcott unhappily. "Maybe we'll all make it and the jerrisoning of unnecessary parts, or people, won't be necessary."

"Let us hope so," said Dustu. "Be silent now. We are approaching houses that may be occupied by enemies.

☆☆☆

Bright and Bhatt fled down the slope back down to the basement, the creatures close behind them. "Run!" cried the linguist as she headed for the stairs up to the main body of the building. Costanzo was coming down them, though, blocking her way. He looked terrified and was streaked with blood. Bright stared at him in shock, then looked past him up the stairs where more of the creatures were following the soldier down.

Then the creatures stopped, though, as the remaining humans huddled together against the wall on the other side of the room. Duffy, the only one of them still holding a spear, brandished it at them and they pressed forward menacingly, uttering their shrill, screeching alarm calls. Those in front waved tentacles ending with vicious claws.

"Drop it!" Costanzo hissed at him. "They'll kill us all."

"Where are the rest of you?" demanded the physicist accusingly.

"All dead. There's too many of them."

"You were supposed to protect us!"

"They died trying to protect you. Not throw the bloody spear away or they'll kill the rest of us as well."

Duffy stared at him, his eyes wide with fear, but then he let the spear fall to the ground. The creatures immediately calmed down, their string-of-sausages tentacles merging back into the bulk of their bodies. One of them came forward, and Duffy backed away from it as it picked up his spear and carried it away. The other creatures stared at the humans, the eyes in their flower-heads blinking. The humans cowered before them.

"What do they want?" asked Bhatt.

"Good question," said Bright angrily. "What do they want, Bergman?"

"How should I know?" the physicist replied indignantly.

"You've been here more than a week."

"Those creatures only just appeared. I thought the whole city was dead. I don't know anything more than the rest of you."

"What about that?" the linguist demanded, pointing at the window into another world in the centre of the Furnace. "You've had a week to study that place."

"And I've learned virtually nothing," Bergman replied. "You can push through the barrier around it, but the air on the other side contains no oxygen. I almost died the first time."

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"The first time," said Bright. "So you've been through several times?"

"Just for a few seconds each time. I held my breath and came back when I couldn't hold it any longer. Just long enough to bring back a few rocks and samples."

"What rocks and samples?"

"Over there, on that workbench."

Bright looked and saw them, about twenty feet away. The creatures were between her and them. There was also an array of equipment on the bench. A microscope, cutting and grinding equipment and bottles containing various chemicals. There was also a computer, she saw, and it was working, its screen showing a page of text. Bright swore to herself. How hadn't she noticed that before?

"So what did you learn?" asked Duffy.

"Who cares?" demanded Costanzo hysterically. Bhatt was helping him take off his jacket and frowning as he examined his injuries. "We've got bigger problems right now than what a bunch of rocks are made of."

"Those creatures were designed by a controlling intelligence," Duffy replied calmly. "That intelligence almost certainly came from that world, so anything we know about the world will tell us about the intelligence."

"There is no intelligence," said Bergman, though. "No life of any kind, so far as I can tell. Not even the tiniest microbe."

"What about those plants?" asked Bright. "The grass and shrubs. "

"They're not plants," Bergman replied. "They're crystalline growths. Very complex, mind. Much more complex than any terrestrial crystal I'm aware of, but still nothing more than repeating non-organic units. Mainly silicon with aluminium, oxygen and various metals."

"Metal and glass are crystallising inside the anomaly," said Duffy thoughtfully. "The natural laws of that universe seen to favour the growth of crystals and those natural laws are leaking through into our universe."

"Is this an incursion?" asked Costanzo. "Is something from that world invading our world, using our own dead to breed soldiers?"

"We don't know what their motives are," Duffy replied.

"Bullshit!" spat the soldier. "They killed fifteen men, most of them Americans on American soil, and took prisoners. The first step of an invasion is to secure a bridgehead and guard it while they bring more troops from their homeland."

"Not seeing anyone coming through yet," said Duffy, looking at the window into the other world.

"You said those creatures were forced to emerge early," said the soldier. "They thought the anomaly would protect them. They weren't expecting anyone to be able to get here so soon. Their reinforcements may not be ready to come through yet."

"Surely you'd have your forces ready to march at the earliest possible opportunity," said Duffy, though. "Any delay gives the enemy time to get defences in place."

"If this was a planned invasion," Bhatt replied. He'd helped the soldier out of his shirt and was now tearing it into strips to make bandages. "What if the opening of that.." The mathematician gestured towards the window into the other world. "That, whatever it is. What if it took them by surprise? What if this is an opportunistic invasion? A doorway to another world suddenly appears and they attack, hoping to take us by surprise?"

"It would take more than a few days to design an entirely new form of life, surely," said Duffy, gesturing to the creatures still surrounded them. "There's years of work there. Decades."

"Who cares?" exclaimed Costanzo. "What matters is that that doorway must be closed before their army can come through." He pointed to the Furnace. "That machine must be destroyed."

"That machine might be our only hope of separating the two universes," said Duffy. "We don't dare damage it."

"Destroy the machine and the doorway might close all by itself."

"We don't know that."

"Look," said Bright, though. "Some of them are leaving."

She was right, they saw. Some of the creatures were drifting away up the slope to the car park. Others were climbing the stairs back to the main body of the building. Soon only a dozen or so were left, forming a line that separated the humans from the rest of the room. They were the larger ones, they saw, with two or three flower-heads emerging from pile-of-fish-eggs bodies the size of armchairs. Creatures formed from the merging of several smaller ones.

"They may have no concept of individual identity," said Duffy thoughtfully. "And if they're a single intelligence, they may think that we are as well. They may think they've reduced and weakened a single entity instead of killing several."

"Then they'll soon learn their mistake," said Costanzo fiercely. "When the President sends a whole army in to deal with them."

Duffy stared at the window into the other world. The world that Bergman had called Wasp. Could the soldier be right? Could there be an army getting ready to march through? Maybe they were alarmed by the sudden appearance of a doorway to Earth. Maybe they thought the Earth people were getting ready to invade them.

"We have to figure out how to communicate with them," he said. "Bright, you think you can figure out their language?"

"Maybe," the linguist replied. "If those sounds they make are a language. This'll tell us."

She showed him the laptop she was still holding. She lifted the screen, pressed the power button and grinned with delight when it went through its startup routine. The display showed that there was only twelve percent battery left, though. She looked over at the workbench, where Bergman's computer was connected to a power outlet. There were other power sockets beside it, but her power lead was still out on the equipment wagon. Perhaps Bergman had a spare one.

In the meantime she had about an hour's worth of power. Enough to make a start. "Let's begin by getting a recording of the sounds they make," she said, turning on a voice recorder app. The creatures were paying close attention to her, she saw, perhaps wondering if the laptop was a weapon of some kind. "Let's see if we can get then to say something," she said.

She took a step closer to the nearest creature. "Careful!" said Vincent. Bright ignored him. The creature extended a tentacle ending with a long claw and held it up in front of her eyes. A warning in any language. Bright grinned with pleasure. They were communicating already.

"Say something," she said. "Come on, white caviar. Say something."

The creature brandished the claw for emphasis, but it also made its chalk-on-a-blackboard sound, and now that there was just one creature doing it she was able to make out details she hadn't been able to hear before. An intonation that rose and fell, as well as changes in the 'grittiness' of the sound, for want of a better word.

Having gotten her sample, she stepped back and the creature relaxed, withdrawing its tentacle. Bright opened one of her analysis apps and fed the sound recording into it. "Wow," she said a moment later.

"What?" asked Duffy.

"Well, it's not really possible to tell much from a single sound recording. I'm going to have to do a lot more work, but this is showing that the sound that creature just made is about twice as information-dense as human speech. That's astonishing!"

"Pleased you came now?" asked Bhatt with a nervous smile.

"God yes! This is the opportunity of a lifetime! I need more power, though. I wonder if they'd let me go over to the workbench."

"I get the impression they're waiting for more orders," said Duffy. "Could he bad news for us when they get them."

"Then we've got nothing to lose," said Bright. She went back to the voice recorder app, turned the volume to maximum and played the creature's sound back at it."

The result was dramatic. All the flower-heads turned to fix their eyes on her and several barbed tentacles appeared, waving threateningly. They also made more sounds, which Bright recorded, and then she played them back at them again. The sounds the creatures were making intensified.

"They're having a conversation," said Duffy. "I guess they do have some individuality after all."

"Possibly," said Bhatt. "Or maybe this is the verbal equivalent of a massively parallel computing system."

The nearest creature approached Bright, but it had no tentacles extended. It was making sounds, but even without any computer analysis they sounded simpler to Bright, as if it was trying to make itself understood to someone who didn't speak its language. Bright was euphoric. "They want to communicate," she said, grinning like an idiot. "They're trying to communicate."

"So what do you do next?" asked Duffy.

"Well, we start by assuming that they use a noun, verb system like us," said the linguist. "Then you point to a table and say table. The other person then says their word for table and so on. You build up a vocabulary."

Leaving her laptop to record any sounds the creature made, she pointed to herself and said "Human." She put a hand on Duffy's shoulder and said 'Human' again, then did the same thing with Costanzo, Bhatt and Bergman. "Human. Human. Human."

The creature extended a tentacle that ended with a long, narrow tendril. It touched Bright on the shoulder and made a simple sound consisting of a squeak and a pop. Bright played the sound back while touching herself on the shoulder. The creature touched her shoulder again and made the sound again.

"That'll he their word for human," she said in delight.

"Or maybe it's their word for shoulder," said Duffy. "Or enemy, or item of food."

"It's a start," said Bright, trying not to sound annoyed. "I think I can take a risk..." She edged hesitantly forward, watching the creature warily for any sign of hostility, and reached out with a finger. The creature didn't move. She reached out further and gently touched the nearest of the creature's glistening white globes. "Visitor," she said. "Visitor."

"Sounds better than Creature, I suppose," said Duffy drily. "More diplomatic."

The creature hesitated a moment. Then it touched itself with its tentacle and made another short, simple sound.