Adapted Beckon
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| Classification | |
|---|---|
| Type | Beckon |
| Structure | Nexus |
| Class | Nexus |
| Characteristics | |
| Body temperature | Self-regulating (warm-blooded) |
| Trunk | Hollow, pressurised with sulfur hexafluoride |
The Adapted Beckon is a warm-blooded species of Beckon. It regulates its own body temperature, and grows in cooler climates than the Primitive Beckon. Its trunk is hollow and held up by the pressure of sulfur hexafluoride, which it produces from minerals in the soil. By the mid-2020s it had replaced the Primitive Beckon in the Americas and Europe.
Description
The trunk of an Adapted Beckon is divided into many small sealed cells, each filled with sulfur hexafluoride under pressure. The pressure braces a flexible spine that runs up the middle of the trunk and gives the body its shape. A breach deflates only the cells around it, and the gel membrane seals over the wound. A badly damaged Adapted Beckon sags as it loses pressure. A 30-metre Adapted Beckon holds about half a tonne of the gas.
The bulb is not pressurised, and holds the organs. It is the most vulnerable part of the organism.
Physiology
Adapted Beckons regulate their own body temperature, and grow in temperate climates where the Primitive Beckon could not. They are kept warm by heat from luxsynthesis and from the breakdown of stored biomass, and through Overwinter by the breakdown of their own sulfur hexafluoride, which the gas cells hold as an energy store. Beckons of the Boreic genome of Siberia carry larger stores and remain fully active through the winter. They hold their bodies at 18 to 25 °C; a cell cooled from 20 °C to −10 °C loses a tenth of its pressure, and an Adapted Beckon that cools softens and leans.
Their blood carries sugars and glycerol-like alcohols that keep it liquid below freezing, and high concentrations of the sulfate and fluoride their gas glands use.
They make sulfur hexafluoride in gas glands lining the gas cells, from sulfate and fluoride drawn from the soil, at a rate set by how much fluoride the soil gives up. Filling an empty Beckon takes one to two years. The gas keeps the body pressurised, and is vented to smother fires near the Beckon. Unlike the Primitive Beckon, which releases the gas it makes into the air, the Adapted Beckon keeps it. The first systematic measurement of sulfur hexafluoride emissions from biological sources came from a survey by H&A Hyperbiology.
Control
The gel membrane stiffens under impact, and most conventional ammunition does not puncture it. RTG rounds are the least powerful munition that does so reliably. Fire works on Adapted Beckons but is slow and unreliable: a sustained burn exhausts the Beckon's store of sulfur hexafluoride faster than it can make more, and crews commonly burn a Beckon a second time before it refills. Magnesium incendiaries burn in the gas itself and cannot be put out by venting. Attacks are aimed at the bulb.
History
Adapted Beckons spread as Primitive Beckons died out, and by the mid-2020s Primitive Beckons had been declared extinct in the Americas and Europe. With the Adapted Beckon the infestation spread out of the tropics into temperate regions.