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The gentle wind carried the faint burned plastic scent of a local fungus analog releasing what passed for spores The breeze pushed the long fronds of dogwhistles across his path The grunchers—approxiical niche as crickets with even a fewto the plants hissed at hiot too close He had no idea why the weeds had been nawhistles They lookedthat looked like a cricket with four liruncher made even less sense There didn’t see of the local flora and fauna People just threw nas until a consensus arose It annoyed him

The Pen was different frole sheets of high-iles to make a dark ’s only entrance, four soldiers wearing light ar assault rifles stood at alert

“Doctor Cortazár,” one of the four said, holding out a hand in the universal gesture for Stop walking

Paolo pulled his ID badge on its lanyard out froed it into a reader He then touched the reader to the skin on Paolo’s wrist

“Nice day,” the guard said pleasantly, s Paolo’s ID to his physicalproteins

“Lovely,” Paolo agreed

The ed its acceptance that he was actually Paolo Cortazár, the president of Laconia University and head of its exobiological studies lab The guards had all known that by sight, but the ritual was important for uards stepped aside

“Have a nice day, Doctor”

“You as well,” Paolo said as he stepped into the security airlock One wall hissed as hidden nozzles blasted him with air Sensors on the opposite wall tested for explosives and infectious materials And possibly even bad intentions

After astopped, and the inner airlock door slid open Only then did Paolo hear the

The Pen, as it was called by everyone in spite of not having an official nahest security building on Laconia for a reason It here Paolo kept hisherd

That naht with his ex-lover He’d y Inside the Pen, people and animals that had been deliberately infected with the protomolecule lived out the remainder of their lives Once the alien nanotech had appropriated their cells and begun reproducing, Paolo’s staff could drain the bodies of their fluids and filter out the critical particles from thefluids could be incinerated without losing anything of value There were bays for twenty-four, but only seventeen were occupied at the moment Someday, with a wider population base, subjects would be more abundant

The great works of Laconia depended on co-dead alien civilization had left behind The protoned as a universal control interface, but there was a y that let it function that way often enough for the work to proceed It was Paolo’s job to supply the active samples needed One of his jobs

As he walked toward his office in the rear of the building, he paused on a catwalk over one of the holding pens Half a dozen people in early stages of infection wandered around the cramped, ic fever phase the techs called Pukers They couldwalk and occasional violent bouts of vo the infection would spread quickly Once the bodies had been removed from the space, every centimeter of its ical debris

They’d only had one accidental infection in the history of the lab, and Paolo intended to keep it that way