Alien- Lion-Worm Xeno

  Its head is still a long curve of black chitin, featureless and awful, but its jaws aren’t blunt, toothy things anymore. Instead, they push out into a beak, and when it opens its mouth and hisses, the second mouth that emerges for a moment is like a terrible serrated flower, cutting surface upon cutting surface upon cutting surface. It looks like it could gnaw through the foundations of the world.

  It’s larger than the others, with a thicker body, a shorter neck. Its arms are as long as the rest, with clawed hands prepared to rip and slice, but below them waves row after row of golden cilia. It looks like one of the creatures somehow successfully melded with a lion-worm.

  That’s impossible. Even if they were genetically compatible—which they’re not; the lion-worms are virtually mammalian, and the creatures secrete an acid powerful enough to dissolve glass and steel; there’s no way their biology could blend—there hasn’t been time. There’s no way they could have mated, reproduced, and raised an offspring to this size in the time they’ve had available to them.
…

  “Back in the cave, when you called the lion-worm to fight the creature,” says Viola. “Some of the pheromones got on my skin, in my circuitry. Olive, I think that creature just now came because it has enough lion-worm in it to follow the scent. It thought it was chasing prey. It was chasing prey, because you, and Kora—don’t you see?

Echo, Chapter 21