Max?' he asked.'Yeah?''...What are you doing?''Shooting people.

Simon stopped listening. He realised he'd had enough. Enough of the theories, enough of the mystery, enough of the bullshit. Enough of the soldiers and guns and MI5. Enough of bugs in phones and in people he cared about. Enough of not being cared about back. Enough of uncertainty and lies and civilisation, collapsing or not. Enough of is part in it, his place, his role; the character of Simon Parfitt and all the baggage it entailed.

I'm psychologically equipped for this.

For a moment, Simon's sympathetic nervous system forgot he was arachnophobic. The sight of those spindly legs rising, like an ink drawing popping out of paper into three-dimensional space, should have caused a surge of adrenaline, a yelp of panic, and at least three feet of involuntary back-peddling.

Something was wrong with the devices themselves. Digging deep into the internal structure of the circuit boards with powerful microscopes, Simon's team had discovered broken and incorrect connections, electronic dead-ends, short circuits, and nonsensical pathways.

The unfortunate 8075 hadn't survived his assault, splintering apart, fragments of its casing skittering across the bench. The battery within had split along its plane, revealing something as out-of-place as a missile in a bathtub.

He had no problem with flies or bugs or beetles, even creepy ones like earwigs and cockroaches...Six legs were fine, but eight were alien and unnatural.'The same number of legs as four fully-grown serial killers!

Odessa sighed. 'When I said you were one of the smartest people in the company, I was referring solely to your technical abilities. Now get to work.

But the things in the batteries couldn't be spiders. It just wasn't possible. There had to be another explanation. But of what kind?