Jeffcott was given a room in the administration building to sleep in. It was spartan and bare but the bed was comfortable enough and that was all he cared about. There was a television mounted on the wall and be watched it for a while before going to sleep. Incredibly the anomaly was no longer the number one news item. The presenter seemed deeply concerned about the breakup of a celebrity couple that Jeffcott had had no idea were even married. The anomaly was only mentioned ten minutes in, and only as a human interest story about how the inhabitants of Phoenix were dealing with having been forcibly removed from their city. Jeffcott shook his head in astonishment, turned off the set and began getting undressed.

  The next morning he went back to the canteen for breakfast, and as he was leaving a young Corporal came to summon him to what he called an orientation meeting for the troops. He would be talking to the hundred or so men going into the anomaly with him, to tell them what to expect. "They already know everything you knew before you went in for the first time," the Corporal said as they walked together. "All you have to tell them is what you've learned since."

  The meeting took place in a lecture room where tiered rows of seats led down to a movie screen which was already showing the four captive creatures slithering around in their pen. The air was filled with conversation as soldiers filed in and chose a seat. Captain Daniels was there, he saw, although he remained standing at the back with General Bromley and Malcolm Starr. A pretty young woman took Jeffcott down to the front and stood him in front of a podium on which a glass of water was standing. It gave Jeffcott a welcome sense of familiarity. He could almost imagine that he was back at the university, about to give a lecture on physics to a class of teenage students.

  These students weren't teenagers, though. They were adult men and they were all staring at him as they waited to hear what he had to say. The camp had to be full of gossip and rumour, he knew. Stories of how the anomaly was a death sentence for anyone who dared to enter. And not just death but the most horrible death anyone could imagine. They were staring at him as if he were somehow responsible, as if he were to blame. These men were used to facing death, Jeffcott knew. He could see it in their faces, but death in the anomaly might not come from an enemy they could shoot back at. It might come from inside their own bodies. Their own tissues and organs come to life and killing them from within. There wasn't much that could scare these men, Jeffcott could see, but the anomaly scared them, and well it might. Jeffcott himself was almost shitting himself with terror at the thought of going back in.

  "All right, pipe down," said Captain Daniels, his voice raised to be heard above the hubbub. Gradually the conversations quieted down. "You've all been given mission briefings. I trust you've read them. This is David Jeffcott, the man from whom we've gotten most of this information. This is your chance to hear him describe his experiences in the anomaly first hand and answer your questions, so you'll know even better what to expect in there."

  "I'm getting a definite Ripley vibe from all this," said one of the soldiers in a low voice. He was speaking to the man beside him but the acoustics of the auditorium carried his words to the whole room. A ripple of laughter rose from the soldiers.

  "I just need to know one thing," said another man, making a shooting gesture with his fingers. "Where they are."

  "Hey, Figgis," said a third man. "Have you ever been mistaken for a man?"

  "Fuck off, Bell."

  "All right, pipe down men," said Daniels again. "And pay attention. This could save your life. It could save the whole planet, including your loved ones at home. Unless we stop it, this thing will reach them all sooner or later no matter how far they run, no matter where they hide. Forget about serving your country. You're here to save the people you love the most."

  That got their attention and silence fell in the room. Jeffcott saw every eye focus on him and felt an unfamiliar sense of stage fright coming over him, something he'd never suffered from before. They're just students, he told himself again. This is just a physics lecture. You've done this a thousand times before. Make yourself believe it.

  He cleared his throat and began speaking, beginning with their entry into the anomaly and how it had felt as they'd passed through the weird, rippling barrier. As he went his mind cleared and it became easier. So long as he kept his eyes away from his audience, he was able to sink into the fantasy that he was back at the university and was even able to enjoy himself. Then he got to the part where people had started dying, though, and he started to feel a new hostility from the soldiers.

  "Brent would never kill himself," a man near the front said. "I served with him for five years and you never get to know a man so well as when the bullets are flying. He would never have taken his own life."

  "He held himself responsible for the death of Lucy Dennings," Jeffcott replied. "Even though he wasn't to blame. He blamed himself."

  "Even so, he would never kill himself," the soldier insisted. "He wasn't the type. I saw him face almost certain death once, when we were ambushed in Bolivia. Surgeys all over the place. I thought we were dead for sure but Brent fought like a madman. He saved my life that day, but what he was really fighting for was to save himself because he loved his life so much. He loved his family and wanted to go back to them. A man who loves his family that much doesn't just kill himself."

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "I didn't know the man," Jeffcott said, "so I've got no idea what his normal state of mind was. Maybe the anomaly was having an affect on him. I saw it making people angry, suspicious, paranoid. Maybe it also has the ability to accentuate an already present sense of guilt."

  "You said he had nothing to be guilty of," the man accused, glaring at him angrily.

  "That's right, but he was involved in the death of Lucy Dennings. You knew him better than I did. Would being involved in the death of a civilian, no matter how innocently, make him feel bad?"

  The soldier glared at him a moment longer, but then he nodded. "Yeah," he said, dropping his eyes. "Yeah, it would."

  "That seems to be all it takes," said Jeffcott, feeling relieved. "When I think back on it, the altered perceptions I suffered often reflected fears and phobias that I suffer from in real life. I often saw corpses turning their heads to look at me and saw phantoms looking at me from the windows of empty buildings. I have a slight fear of strangers. A mild, very small nervousness. Barely worth mentioning..." A ripple of laughter ran around the auditorium. "But that was enough for the anomaly. It took that fear and heightened it. Made it the basis of the hallucinations I suffered. I now suspect that it might have been the same for Mister Brent."

  "That's Private Brent," the soldier corrected him. "The man was a soldier. He deserved to die like a soldier."

  Jeffcott made himself look up at the men facing him from their rows of seats. Many of them were wearing expressions of hostility, he saw. Hostility born from fear. Suddenly he understood Captain Daniels's unhappiness at having a civilian embedded with the assault force. If the men were afraid now, what would be the effect of seeing a civilian freaking out in terror? He looked up at the Captain and saw him staring back at him, nodding slightly as he saw Jeffcott's new understanding.

  "It might help to think of the anomaly as an area effect weapon," Jeffcott told the men. "There's nothing mystical or supernatural about it. It's like a cloud of poison gas. A gas mask will protect you from poison gas, and magnetic fields protect us from the effects of the anomaly. The magnets we wore on our chests protected us from the living tumours, and although we suffered all kinds of psychological effects during the mission, the one place we didn't suffer them was in the presence of the Furnace itself. We're hoping that it was the more powerful magnetic field generated by the Furnace that protected us from the anomaly's more subtle affects, and if that's so we may get the same protection from the MCV we'll be taking with us."

  "That's a lot of ifs," another soldier said. "How much do you really know?"

  "I can only recount my own experiences," Jeffcott told him. "The magnets did indeed protect us from the living tumours. Mark Summers, one of the doctors, died because an anomaly effect made him remove his. So long as you don't remove yours, you'll be safe."

  "As an added precaution," said the General from the back of the room, "the magnets you will be wearing will be locked in place. It will be impossible for you to remove them, no matter what kind of mental aberration you're afflicted with."

  The soldiers glanced at each other as they tried to decide what they thought of this. After a while, though, calm returned and Jeffcott resumed his tale. When he go to the part where most of the soldiers had died, though, they once again leaned forward in their seats, staring at him avidly.

  "So they went down fighting," said the soldier who'd been called Figgis by his neighbour.

  "I didn't see them die," Jeffcott replied, "but Privates Dustu and Seabreeze had several cuts when they got away. They told me they saw several of their comrades, er, meet their ends."

  "Not like Dustu to run from a fight," said Figgis, staring suspiciously.

  "They were obeying orders," Jeffcott reminded him. "Their Sergeant ordered them to try to get away, to bring back what we'd learned. They saved my life. I would have died along with the others if they hadn't saved me."

  "Your life better be worth theirs," Figgis told him angrily. "Dustu was a good man. If I find out he sacrificed himself to save a useless piece of shit..."

  "That'll do, Figgis," said the Captain sternly. Figgis continued to stare at Jeffcott, though, keeping his eyes fixed on the physicist in a silent threat and a warning.

  "He didn't die to save me," Jeffcott told him. "He died to save the information I brought out with me. It's that information that needs to be worth his sacrifice. Not my life." Figgis nodded and dropped his eyes.

  Jeffcott spent the rest of the lecture telling them about the plants that seemed to have been modified to become an early warning system. "So they'll know we're coming," he finished off. "With every road and every field covered, there's no chance of us sneaking in secretly."

  "We won't be sneaking," said the Captain, coming forward to stand beside Jeffcott. "We're going in hard, and if they come out to attack us that just means they'll die sooner." A cheer of agreement rose from the assembled soldiers. "Having said that," the Captain continued. "You were making comparisons to a movie earlier. Remember that happened to the men in that movie. They died because they were overconfident. They thought they were just going on a bug hunt. Don't make the same mistake they did. We're hoping it'll be easy, and if we keep our wits about us it will be." He turned to face Jeffcott. "Do you have anything else to add?" he asked.

  "No," Jeffcott replied. "I think that about covers it."

  Daniels nodded and turned back to the soldiers. "Any questions?" he asked. There were none. Conversations were already breaking out as the army men considered what they'd heard and someone was even laughing at something his neighbour had said. The mood seemed to be good, although there was still a frown on Figgis's face and when he turned to look at Jeffcott he wasn't smiling. Jeffcott looked away, but after a moment he was forced to look back to see if the soldier was still looking at him. He felt a chill of fear when he saw that he was.

  "That'll be all then," said the Captain. "Mister Jeffcott will be around somewhere, in the camp, until we set out. If you think of anything else you'd like to ask him I'm sure he'd be happy to talk, to you."

  Thanks a lot, thought Jeffcott surly.

  "In the meantime," the Captain continued, "you are dismissed."

  Men started standing and making their way towards the exit and the air was filled with conversation as they discussed what they'd heard. Jeffcott took a sip of water from the glass of water on the podium. It gave him an excuse not to look to see if Figgis was still looking at him, but in his imagination he could feel his eyes burning into the back of his head long after the room was empty.