And with that thought, Jerry tilted his head just a bit further forward, and let his orange fangs crackle through the thin chitinous green "flesh" beneath the stiff white fur on the alien's wrist....
Yellow dispersion-medium spurted with a satisfactory gush from the scalloped gap in the alien's forearm.
Jerry landed nimbly on his hind feet on the metal floor as the shrieking medic dashed to a confrere for whatever first aid is given when a colloidal creature's liquid contents are spilling out.
While a minor part of his mind wondered idly if they'd employ a tourniquet or just a cork, the rest of his mind concentrated on directing those fore-paw-and-foot phalanges to carry him swiftly up the face of the stacked cages. There were twenty-four of them, all right, against the wall. He perched precariously on the top, in the cage-roof-to-ceiling space that was too small for another layer of the same.
As the fur-face medic fiddled around with the wrist of the man Jerry had bitten (it was the raccoon/pangolin medic, of course), the anesthetist dragged a small stool over to the base of the stacked cages and began climbing up after him.
"Oh, hell," thought Jerry, cowering weakly against the wall. "If I had a piece of chalk or a charcoal stick I could write something. Or draw a picture, maybe, on the ceiling. Then they'd know I was intelligent, and—They'd probably use me anyhow. The middle of a battle is no time for writing learned scientific papers about new zoological 'finds.'"
Those black fingertips were coming for him, too carefully for a repeat wrist-crunching performance. If he were taken this time the bearer would handle with care.
Jerry skittered and scrabbled for the corner near the wall, hoping to engage the anesthetist in a game of you-climb-up-at-this-point-and-I-run-back-to-that-point. But the fur-face had too long a reach to make it practical. As Jerry cowered helplessly, those black fingertips gripped him about the throat with strangling force. It apparently made no difference if he died on the top of the cages or under the scalpel. He could only fend feebly with his paws at the creature as he was lifted down to the table and set into the concavity, dizzy and sick.
"White lightning?" he begged. "Come on, white lightning! Please, test, be over. How long can forty minutes last?"