DAY 4
From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal
June 25th
I have collected the intact corpses of a hundred Six-Heads. Many were crushed by our AmRovers or plasma-blasted, some were burned by the heated hull, but the best samples I have are still fairly intact, albeit dead. I found no live specimens, and to date no one has studied a living Six-Head. Sometimes they are alive when you scoop them into the bag, and then the damned things are dead when they come out again. Perhaps they are highly sensitive to the shock of capture.
They are beautiful creatures, like stars that crawl. Each head has a chin that acts as a leg, and the central segment has a dozen legs with what appear to be arms with opposable claws, as well as the wings on top. I’ve found traces of Jungle Web substrate, aka Green Goo, in the mouths of many of the specimens, and it seems fair to deduce that they eat and excrete through the same orifice, i.e. the mouth.
There are three distinct types in my samples — fully winged, with no dagger wings, dagger-winged only, and fully winged but with one additional set of dagger wings and brightly patterned central segments. The “wings” in fact may not be wings at all, they may be neural organs, or indeed sexual organs, or possibly eyes, but if they are wings that suggests that the Six-Heads are capable of flying to distant locations to forage for plant matter, though in fact no one has ever seen them airborne.1
I am analysing the stomach contents of each of the Six-Heads to determine the planetary source of the vegetation they have ingested.
Provisionally, I have labelled the creatures thus.
Six-Heads
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Sub-Phylum: Chelicerata
Class: Insecta
Subclass: Pterygota
Order: Gladiatorius
Family: Carnivora2
Genus: Sexticeps
Species: Sexticeps alesum
Sexticeps sinealesum3
Sexticeps coloratum
The chelicerae are hollow and may allow the Six-Heads to spit venom as well as vomiting/excreting plant and animal matter.
The joy of this creature is that it can easily be categorised within existing taxonomies. It is an arthropod with a segmented body and chelicerae around the mouth, which are morphologically comparable to those possessed by Earth spiders.
It’s such a treat to find such a remarkably normal creature! It’s very much the kind of insect one might expect to find in an English country garden — apart from its six-heads, dagger wings, flesh-eating tendencies, and its habit of creating vast impermeable walls thousands of feet high.
The journey continues to be slow, and tedious, and dangerous in the extreme.