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“Gitsh,” Margaret said, “check this monitor. Is it frozen or something?”

Gitsh looked at the screen, then moved to the computer that fed the images. As he checked it, Margaret’s eyes slid over the twenty-five test pairs. Each had a word across the top. Words in red indicated no effect on the crawlers. Words in green showed successful kills.

Chlorine killed them, and in far lower concentrations than the Margo-Mobile’s decontamination mist. In fact, basic bleach killed them instantly.

That was great for sterilization but didn’t do much for a living victim. Antibiotics, unfortunately, had no effect, and Sanchez’s immune system completely ignored the things.

Reducing the temperature did nothing—freezing them might work, but that would also kill the host. Heat at two hundred degrees Fahrenheit or higher killed them, but that wasn’t a solution either, as those temperatures would also kill the host. Heat did, however, provide another way to decontaminate any area exposed to the dandelion-seed spores.

“The picture is live,” Gitsh said. To punctuate the point, he changed the screen from twenty-five small squares to one big square containing a nerve crawler. He slid a needle into the sample. Up on the screen, she saw the needle magnified thousands of times. It looked like a giant sword poking into a hydra.

“Huh,” Margaret said. “It’s like they just shut off.”

“They quit,” Dan said. “They have seen the new Mightily p.i.s.sed-Off Margaret, and they threw in the towel.”

Suddenly, Clarence’s voice crackled in her earpiece, anxious and rushed. “Margo! Murray found the satellite! They just launched an attack, and they think they got it.”

“Oh my,” Margaret said. So that’s why Murray had been in such a hurry.

“When? Like two minutes ago?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“The samples, they shut down,” Margaret said. “Even at the smallest level, they must have been controlled by the thing. Is there any effect on Sanchez?”

“He’s out cold,” Clarence said. “He was babbling incoherently, then started getting groggy and just dropped off. He’s snoring.”

Margaret didn’t know what to think. The crawlers’ sudden shutdown, Sanchez falling asleep, both things coinciding with the satellite’s destruction. Could it all be over?

No. It wasn’t all over. She knew that.

“Dan, how much latrunculin do we have?”

“Plenty, if it’s just Sanchez,” Dan said. “If we need more, the supplier could medevac it right to us.”

“Let’s see if it works first. Start an IV drip of latrunculin on Officer Sanchez. I’m not going to get caught with my pants down. These things might reactivate at any second.”

“But latrunculin is toxic as h.e.l.l,” Dan said. “We give Sanchez too much, he could lose the ability to breath, his heart could stop. Shouldn’t we wait to see if these things are really dead?”

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