How to explain a miles-long cable of Webber silk in an open rift inhospitable to higher lifeforms? There had been no mention of it in the recovered logs. Then again, the prospectors hadn't been looking for bio-signs, and it would have been easy to miss. Was it a recent construction or a leftover relic?

The airborne pelicans could shed no more light on the subject. The CU needed a ground-based bot to first locate and then infiltrate the Webbers' caverns to observe them in their natural habitat. But what kind of bot could get up close and personal with the spider-like aliens without being noticed?

Ordinarily, distance reconnaissance would be performed to create bio-mimics resembling indigenous bugs, but that wasn't possible when the target species was miles underground. The reaprs had been attacked before they had a chance to do much sightseeing, and twenty-three seconds of footage constituted the sum total of human knowledge about the Webbers and their habitat. In the head-mounted wide-beam, the creatures looked like fuzzy boulders dangling from crooked sticks. Aside from the webs, there was only moisture-slick rockface streaked with gray slime.

"How about this little critter here?" Trevor displayed a brown, inch-long insect with a nubby head and long antennae.

"A cockroach?" Renata said. "You're kidding, right?"

"The beetle form factor is one of the most ubiquitous across all terrestrial biomes. If you want to appear incognito, it's really your best bet."

"Are you taking into account subterranean ecosystems?"

"We know of only one other strictly subterranean apex species. They do have something like cockroaches and rats galore too. Visiting them should be on everyone's bucket list."

"We're not sending in fucking roaches," Renata said. "What else have you got?"

Trevor scrolled through an array of pedes, worms, and flies before pausing on spiders. "The AI suggests the spider form is the best match."

"Of course it does," Renata scoffed. "It's just extrapolating backwards from the Webbers. If human evolution followed that logic, we would expect to see lots of smaller creatures running around on two legs, but there are virtually none."

Trevor leaned back from the holo. "Fine, what would you suggest?"

Renata floundered. Trevor had a point. Surely the Barqiis must have their own variety of little critters, and there were only so many forms that nature could choose from. From Earth to the other side of the Orion Arm, a beetle was a beetle.

But something pricked at the back of her mind. Were they focusing too much on the physical form? Living in eternal darkness, the Webbers were presumed to be sightless. She flipped through more bot forms. There were segmentoids that could lock together in various configurations along with larger animal analogs like rats, snakes, and salamanders.

"That one," Renata decided even before she had finished reading the paragraph beneath it. The first line read, A silent surface clinger...