Without them, humanity cannot survive. —HIS HOLINESS TENZIN GYATSO, the fourteenth Dalai Lama In retrospect, the genetic engineering involved in creating the monstrous beings nimbly advancing toward me from across the recharging docks must have been far less challenging than designing a humanoid hovercraft, and yet the interfacing of the two species into this particular brute seemed a far greater accomplishment. The human element was distinctly Monique DeFriend. Like Transhuman Andria, she was hairless, with white transparent lenses for eyes. Her exposed breasts offered a more brazen look, aided and abetted by her flesh tone, which was a blazing violet hue. What was as impressive as it was sinister was the way her waist melded so easily into the black widow spider’s narrow pedicel—the delicate marriage of the human spine into the arachnoid nerve center, the prominent roundness of the insect’s abdomen and its inspired anatomical placement—creating the sensual if not disturbing illusion of being Monique’s buttocks, albeit a massive one … all culminating in her centaurlike carriage riding aloft and in full command of those eight deadly seven-segment legs, their pointed claws clacking along the hard surface of the transports like approaching steeds.
