When Lilina and I left that planet named after the gods, yet ruled by coldness and death, tens of thousands of butterflies had already spread throughout the Arctic Circle. Finding the remaining bases was easier than expected—at least some of them had been found. They lay adjacent to the base we had first reached, forming a broken ring within the Arctic Circle. The butterflies, endowed with special powers, cut through the biting wind at supersonic speeds and settled in every inhabited area of the infection zone within half an hour. Fifteen minutes later, most of them would begin transforming into deadly viral mist, while the rest would quietly divide and advance toward other parts of the planet. If Lilina's design worked as usual, the first death would occur in roughly three hours.
During the process, we also saw just how tightly guarded those maximum-security bases were—Tula Zo's repeated infiltration failures had their reasons. Though I felt that a swarm of perfectly normal, "natural" butterflies should not have attracted attention, nearly a third of the swarm was intercepted while invading the other locations. Those bases had clearly noticed the creatures and used high-temperature fields to block their advance. Had the butterflies not immediately changed course and evolved camouflage abilities, Lilina's swarm might have suffered severe losses. I had no idea how the Merova People had become suspicious of them. Lilina had specifically scanned the surrounding environment when creating the swarm, imitating a species of polar butterfly native to the area to make these plague carriers. In theory, they should have had no abnormalities worth noticing, yet the Merova People had still activated their defenses. It could only be their extreme caution at work: no unregistered life-form was allowed into a base, abnormal or not—not even insects or rats.
We were both