It took NASA a day to find a politician willing to hear their concerns, and another day to requisition a military drone to blow the severant's machine to pieces. In that time, the creatures had emptied out their villages and thrown themselves into the portal.

There had been a shortlist of a hundred exoplanets most ideally suited for human habitation, coordinates that Professor Bryant had been privy to. Scans detected severant bio-radio waves on 97 of them.

Would it stop there? Could they create another machine without broken drone parts to work from? Did they know, or rather, had Professor Bryant known, how to smelt metal, how to mine ore?

It was enough to make American expansionists panic. "It's terrible. Just terrible. They're making us look bad. It's not the Russians we should be worried about. We're being outmanoeuvred by noses on legs," declared President Trump Jr. "They're growing at a fantastic rate. We've gotta start colonising now if we're ever to stay ahead of them."

Attempts to bioengineer an astronaut small enough to traverse the portal aperture continue.