“Lieutenant, Lieutenant!” I heard, a half an hour later. “We found one!”

I sighed and got dressed. “Oh?” I said to the boy, coming out. “One what?”
“It’s one of the Juvies” the boy said, holding up a struggling Juvy for me to ‘look’ at,” but, look!”
I did look, and they were right. It was a Juvy, and it showed some of the same markings as the Pack I had brought in earlier. “Well, let’s show it to Adlephe,” I said leading the boys over to her tent.
“Hold it here, boys,” I said, enjoying their discomfitted look. They had two boys on the Juvy, one for each hind foot, but he was still getting an occasional scratch in.
“Carl,” Adelphe said, looking up from one of her instruments. I saw the Pack I had brought in in a cage in the corner, seemingly asleep. I could see it breathing. I could also see a variety of tubes and wires leading into it.
“We’ve got another one, a Juvy, same markings?”
“Really?!” she asked, turning from her instrument, “Let me see.” She went outside, examined the Juvy briefly, smiled at the poor boys trying to hold it, and then said, “Carl, if you could get a cage ready for it, I will examine this one after the other one.”
“Sure, Adelphe,” I said, and the boys eagerly followed me into the tent. I grabbed an extra cage and the boys, relieved, dropped the Juvy in, closed it, and left. I went over to Adelphe, though, and tried to see what she was doing. But all she was really doing was going over some figures on a computer screen.
“Have you figured out what is wrong with it, yet?” I asked.
“No, not yet. It’s nothing genetic, I know that already. His genetic pattern differs very little from that of the others. It is well within the norm.”
“So what gives it those funny markings?”
“I don’t know. I am beginning to think that the markings aren’t genetic at all, that they are hormonal.”
“Hormonal?” I asked, and she sighed.
“I wish you had a better education, Carl.”
I bristled, “I have all the education I need to be a soldier!”
Perhaps, but I need more than that right now. If I only had somebody…
“Do you want me to assign you a boy? Or a wife?”
“A wife would be good, actually. Even if she didn’t understand what I was doing she could still take samples and all.”
I left to get her somebody. I decided on Finella, the wife of one of the Catholic boys in my squad. I would have sent her Bethany but I knew she wasn’t up on all this medical stuff any more than I was. “Catch more of them, if you can,” Adelphe called after me. We need more. Some living Pack would be good, too, regular Pack.”
Well, that gave us something go do. I left at a run, yelling for my squad, and then we all went to get the sergeant. Oh, and I sent Bethany for Finella.
—
“So, what do we know so far?”
Adelphe stood in front of the entire crowd, looking a little nervous. The Colonel had asked Uncle Andrew, of course, but Adelphe answered: “Sir. I have discovered two thing so far, and have some suspicions about other things.”
She turned back to the computer and lit up the screen. “First of all, the physical difference.” She shifted the view to a picture of a Pack, cut in half. Not really, but the way the computer could pretend such a thing. I knew the real Pack wasn’t cut in half, I had seen it just an hour ago in her tent. “These are the, umm, these organs are what make a boy Pack a boy, she said, point to three small, round, little… things deep inside the Pack. “This is what they are supposed to look like.”
She clicked the computer again and the things, which I guess had looked like raisins, now looked like grapes, and had totally changed color, from a kind of reddish green, to a shiny black. “You see, they are basically dead.”
“So,” the Colonel said, “They aren’t ‘boys’ any more? They’ve been gelded? Like a steer?”
“Sort of,” Adelelphe said. “I traced the problem to one of the arteries, a large artery that gives blood to all three of these organs. Basically, it comes apart…” she moved the screen and we got to see what looked like a clotted up hose with some frayed pieces coming from it. “This takes the blood away from these organs, and they basically wither and die.”
“Well, that’s nice,” the Colonel said. “So they are unable to reproduce, I assume?”
“Yes, Colonel,” Adelphe said. “But that isn’t the big change.”
She flickered the screen again and suddenly some chemical formulas came up, and a bunch of charts and things. “You see there are also rather significant differences, chemically and hormonally, within the creature.”
“So, what does that do? Does it die?”
“No, sir, it seems to be stable. But I’m wondering if that isn’t what makes the Pack willing to kill its own. We took a Juvy, and put it in the Packs cage, and he ate the Juvy without any hesitation.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know the physiology of the Bentarri that well. I don’t really know why they don’t eat each other, quite frankly. I’m not even sure I could point to a physiological reason why we don’t eat each other.”
The audience kind of laughed at that. “But given what would otherwise be a rather dramatic coincidence, I am inclined to believe that they are linked.”
“How do you think this happened?” the Colonel asked, after a pause.
“I have no idea,” Adelphe said. “I recommend that we communicate our findings to the other teams, and start a search for exactly that.”