Arthur Vance raised his left arm, aiming the wrist-mounted launcher of his air-powered dart gauntlet toward the trailing edge of the purple spore cloud.
“Pip, hold a low-heat outer edge,” Arthur ordered softly. “Don’t burn up the plume directly. I need an unburned liquid biopsy.”
Pip chirped in assent, spreading his molten-gold wings to an exact three-meter span. He didn’t unleash a wild blast of solar fire. Instead, the raptor adjusted his body heat with razor-sharp restraint. That created an invisible heat rising heat wall two yards ahead of the squad. The radioactive purple motes drifted toward them. Then, the warm updraft diverted the cloud into a swirling eddy. That kept the toxic specks from settling onto Arthur’s seals while keeping the chemical bonds intact.
Arthur squeezed the clockwork release on his index finger.
Tsk-whuff.
A hollow, double-fluted sampling dart made of non-reactive razor-sharp silver-steel shot through the air. The dart pierced thirty yards into the violet cloud, swallowed fifty drops of the aerosolized spore fluid through its micro-porous baked-clay intake, and snapped shut with a clean internal empty pocket click.
A thin filament of man-made spider-silk, anchored to Arthur’s gauntlet winch, whined softly as it reeled the biopsy metal tube back across the quartz gap.
