"There are definitly Grendels." Gold bowed over the corpse. "And then again they are not. Well, they are Grendels but significatly different from _our_ Grendels. Do you see this?" She pointed at something between the liver and a kidney. "That's a new feature. There are more of those minor differences. Seems to be a result of evolution. After all those Grendels developed seperated from 'ours' for quite a few generations." She turned to the head and poked into the brain. "But this lookes quite odd to me. I haven't analysed it yet, but I'll do that now. You can wait, it won't take too long." She took a scalpel from a tablet nearby and cut a piece out of the brain. Putting it in a petri dish she went to a strange apparatus. "No, the neurones look pretty normal." she said looking on a screen attached to it. "Let's do a genetic analysis." Gold took a few drops of blood from the corpse and put it into another apparatus. "Now we've just got to wait a few moments." she said and leaned against a wall.
"How did they die?" Rain asked her. She was with Gold alone in the room. There were a number of tables and dead Grendels were lying on 14 of them. The air was cold, cold enough for their breath to form clouds. "I can confirm that the ones we teleported in from the surface all suffocated. They only had an oxygen supply for about half an hour with them although I can't really say how fast they actually used it up. I used the Grendel data from the database. The other two died of inner injuries. You know how the cockpit looked like. They..." A PING! interrupted her.
"Ah, it's ready. Now let's have a look." Gold turned to a monitor and pressed some buttons. It showed a diagram of the brain now. "Now that's odd."
"You said that before..."
"Yes, but look yourself. It's a new lobe! And it seems to introduce some concept of hierarchy. I don't think it's a concidence. It could even be... No, not that."
"What?"
"Just a silly idea of mine. Nothing important..."
"Tell me."
"Well, missing hierarchical thinking is what made the Grendels a danger for the Shee. With it should be able to control them to a certain degree. But they'd never... No, I don't think they would do that."
"What?"
"You see, the Grendels were originally designed as soldiers..."
"I know. But I don't really think they would be that stupid."
"Each time you think things can't get worse, the universe proves the opposite. Ever heard that one? Shee and weapons..."
"...wouldn't be the first time."
"Exactly. We can only hope you are right and they did nothing that stupid."