by Chris Turner
Miko rubbed his aching wounds. The disturbing images had a heavy lump growing in his throat, yet he stared on with sick resignation. All the horror and disgusts he had endured during his time with Audra had not left him that squeamish. These creatures must be some type of scientists. But all the blood and body parts? The nature of their work smacked of butchery, nothing less. The place was a stinking slaughterhouse.
Like the laboratory on Rogos, this chamber was undoubtedly the product of the same advanced species. But while that lab had been abandoned long ago, this was in full swing with ghastly activity.
But the devices that linked these grisly worlds—the amalgamators. Why the—?
His foot suddenly slipped on a squashy tendril of some fleshy creature. An aphid-like head swivelled, glowing eyes peering his way.
Miko ducked into the shadows.
Too late!
A pincer lifted; a chitter of anger rang out. The locusts bounded forward on hind legs.
The amalgamator hummed to life, and between its amber plates glowed something he would rather have not seen. Peculiar lights and bands of colours flashed before his eyes; once more Miko goggled as he saw a squat, grey shape ripple into existence, coalescing in an eerie flurry of electricity. Unlike his own silent arrival moments ago, this shape did not enter the scene with graceful ease. It burst into the chamber, gliding past the pool in a tentacle-whipping, pulsing fury.
Audra.
Her rush sent him reeling to the floor.
He could see the gelatinous bulk of the Zikri was scored with numerous wounds. She had somehow escaped the warks and their pointed horns and claws, and the broken tusk of the narwhal. From one amalgamator to another she must have crawled like a shipwrecked sailor, following the trail of his own blood. She had chosen the right combination to reach this bizarre, violent world. Very clever of her, and unfortunate for him.
The first locust butcher came clacking over on bandy legs, somewhere tripping an alarm.
That was a mistake.
The encased owl crashed from its grip as Audra smashed into it with tentacles twitching. The mutilated owl pecked its way from the glass, and hopped painfully away, upsetting one of the locusts which had intended to impale Miko with its lancing pincer.
Miko jerked back in dismay. He grabbed up one of the mechnobots and hurled it. The keen upper edge bit deep, carving a gash across the thing’s carapace. The alien squealed. Its claw-like pincers lashed out mostly at air, the tip grazing Miko’s ribs. He fell back, clutching at his bleeding side.
Audra surged in like a grey cloud, tentacles entwining the foremost locust. The slimy blanket of her body absorbed its essence and squashy, horrible sounds ensued, appalling to the ears of the other locusts, as they lurched back, tipping their antennae and spitting foam from their gleaming mandibles and irate screeches of alien sound.
Miko fought with blind ferocity. Two at once he battled, laying in with pipe and scalpel. He shielded himself from their pincers, slashing and parrying. His prior training at boot camp flooded back in rigorous waves. To become one of the elite force of NAVO pilots, he had to endure the most excruciating of conditions: high altitude hardship, lack of water, food. He dodged pincers, shrieked in defiance as more insectoids came bounding from the direction of the side door.
For a second, his body and Audra’s brushed together and Miko felt a quiver of revulsion crawl over his skin in the violet gloom. The brush of the creature evoked too many memories, of hideous coupling in hours of darkness aboard his ship. It had been a miracle that he had cut himself free from the fiend Audra.
The fleshy contact was broken and Miko jolted out of his reverie, slashing out with his scalpel on crusted thoraxes and insect heads and pincer-like limbs that came arching in his face.
One of the mechnobots pulsed to life, towing mindlessly a canister large enough to fit him. In a savage burst, he drove at it, loosing a barrage of slashes as he pushed back the whistling, fanged locust that menaced him. He lopped off a pincer and in a last frenzied swing, used the scalpel to nearly decapitate the thing, as it lurched backward, its aphid-like shell smashing into the nearest vessel, the third one, bringing it down in a splash of sizzling liquid.
The locust, wallowing in the wreckage of its freedom, stirred to life. It was one like their own, but with a crimson glob of slick gum pasted on its skull like a brand. Hurriedly it crawled away, before jerking to its knees, clicking its mandibles. It turned to study Miko with intense curiosity for a moment then scanned the chaotic scene with dispassionate, crimson eyes. It seemed to come to some decision and snatched at the nearest locust. The claw pinched hard and the left pincer of its enemy snapped in two, prompting a horrible screech as it tore at the crimson brand with its remaining one. But the other caught the remaining pincer in its fangs and snipped that too, as Miko ran hobbling for the amalgamator, striving for some escape from this lunatic world.
Not to be. He was thwarted by a stream of gnashing locusts driving through the opening in the chamber, surely alerted by the alarm and the sounds of skirmish.
These were brutes with some blue silky material draped on their fronts, some kind of shield or body armour, Miko guessed, and they clutched luminous javelin weapons in clacking pincers. Blue rays shot out from these stick-like weapons, narrowly missing him but spraying a fire at his feet. Audra, however, was stunned by a full-on blast, sizzling a section of her abdomen and she rolled away. Several swarmed upon Miko, pinning him to the ground with their terrible, crusted pincers. He saw another mechnobot wheeling a canister large enough to encase him. A group gripped his arms and lifted him toward the hated vessel. Miko thrashed and screamed. He heard the sloshing of foul fluid being poured into a funnel to fill the container. They upended him into the tube and he choked on the warm, chemical wash. Miko blinked back tears, mouthed bubbly screams as the foul, greenish-coloured liquid stung his eyes and he fought for breath before the stopper sealed the tank. The horror of becoming one of these moronic, bottled marionettes became a reality.
He struggled to stand upright in his prison, but his arms felt heavy, like lead, in the smothering, heavy fluid. Liquid began to fill his lungs, choking him, and he was sure he’d die. But somehow he remained alive, without a need to breathe. Strangely, his ankle felt only a dull ache.
His body suddenly blinked out of existence. Bzt! There was the electrical surge again. What was it? Some side effect from the amalgamator? He looked from eyes not his own, but astral organs. Bzt. He was back in corporeal form again.
He saw Audra mysteriously convulse, her body welling upward. Her stomach ballooned and two frenzied, pale-blue shapes ripped out of her grey belly, swarming about her body like large lice, searing her with pain. They were seal-shaped things with hides covered in wavering tendrils and with snub noses each displaying a tiny tusk.
Even confined in his sub-aqueous prison, Miko realized the narwhal on Rogos must have somehow impregnated the Zikri with its thrusts and assaults on her generative organ, and now its spawn swarmed over her body like witchling, water-bred horrors. They barely had the semblance of their narwhal progenitor, with the obscene crossbreeding that had taken place. These pale-fleshed terrors with stubbed, deformed tentacles had a corkscrew tusk.
How did they gestate so quickly? Miko gaped and felt strangely aged, in spite of his insurmountable terror, his very bones aching with weariness. Did the transporter accelerate time?
The locust attackers jerked back in surprise as the birthlings leapt from Audra onto their faces, ravaging them with their sharp tusks, plunging tentacles through their eyes. Audra was granted an instant opportunity of escape.
But too late.
The locusts pounced on her, thrusting surgical instruments through her body, pinning her to the floor. She chittered with anguish and ripped upward in a vicious, desperate display of strength. Her tentacles wrapped about everything in sight. Locust necks snapped like twigs.
As she staggered back, she collided with Miko’s prison and the vessel top
pled and green liquid spewed out. Coughing and choking, Miko kicked the broken shards away. He rolled free, gasping for air. Inching his way along the cold, plated floor, he crawled toward the amalgamator. Away from the enemy—his only chance to escape this madness while the locusts focussed their fury on Audra.
In the dim spaces ahead, he caught a flash of a red-banded skull. The locust who had helped him, the ally, dove into the dark pool and disappeared below the surface. Locust guards jumped in after it.
It was all a blur. Miko shook out the haze from his skull just as a blue glow from an enemy weapon sparked his way and he looked again into the maw of death.
Scenes from his life flashed before his eyes. But in that split of a second, his body tingled, and it jumped peculiarly out of sync with reality—to the tune of an uncanny electrical snap.
Bzt!
His body flashed and was gone. Only an electrical signature remained and the odour of electrical discharge.
The creatures looked around in confusion, whistling through their insect jaws. Several slashed the air with their mantis-like pincers, then emptied rays into the chaos, killing some of their own.
A group still surrounded Audra, though many died horribly, gripped by her tentacles and pulled into her smothering hide.
The three narwhals were jumping from victim to victim, as if their primary purpose was to defend their mother. But the locusts were able to gather them up and jam them into tubes.
Miko staggered back in a daze, his ethereal body passing right through raging locusts unharmed. Why didn’t the locusts kill him? They were right on top of him, right there. He was a walking corpse. Miko looked at his arm. It was gone. No arm. His body was gone too. He clutched for reason, clasped for his head with his fingers. But found insubstantial mist, his arms and fingers passed right through skull and bones. But how was this possible? He had no arms, or fingers!
Miko quivered in confusion. A stab of pain assaulted his nerves; an electrical energy surged as he blinked back into existence and was visible again.
Now, surrounded by dozens of foes, they turned on him. Despair clutched at his vitals. He fled for the amalgamator; but knew he would not make it.
Bzt!
His body blanked out again. They couldn’t see him. Though they shouted and chittered and raced about looking for him. He doubled back through their ranks, passing through locust and mechnobots like a ghost. This time he raced for the exit. He slid through their masses, as if their bodies were made of mist. But in reality, it was he who was made of air.
He ducked out of the low oval of the side door, and staggered on like a drunk down the wide corridor. Was this what it was like to be dead?
Or a spirit.
Or neither?
His most recent memory of Audra burned in his mind’s eye—enslaved though he had been in pale green fluid. She had saved him, perhaps inadvertently, attacking the locusts to give him a diversion. As had the red-banded outcast. If not for the Zikri and mysterious ally, he would have been dead, or looking out from a glass prison.
No time to ponder that. The invisibility could wear off any second, leaving him prey to these fiends.
Groups of locusts shuffled by in the outside corridor. Long, gangly insectoid things walking on grasshopper-like legs, hunched slightly forward. He shuddered again at their physical grotesqueness: their pincers on the end of short, tyrannosaurus-like forepaws clicking abominably like the insects on earth. Incisors knifed down from both corners of their bullet-like mouths.
The creatures passed right through him, as if he were nothing more substantial than ether. Examining them now, for the hundredth time, he grew even more repulsed.
He moved effortlessly on unmoving legs. It was not his legs that moved, but his exercise of will. He had no legs.
Bzt.
He was back in his body. All the aches and pain of a wracked man came for an instant, then subsided as if they’d never been. Electrical spatter buzzed around his frame, and burnt feather odour lingered in the space where his body would have been. He was strobing in and out, flickering like a candle.
The walls were plated of hard hexagons, about a foot square. The ceiling was gridded with the same plates, thrusting low, no more than a foot overhead. Strange yellowish algae grew from the walls at places, dangling like hanging moss.
He drifted by more of the tube prisons set against the wall and saw that locusts would curiously wire themselves up to a ghoulish canister, attaching a cord to their bellies that hung from the stopper of the tube. He waited until he went astral and glided forward to investigate. One stood now not four feet away, aside a liquid-filled glass tube containing a repugnant, squid-like crustacean. The pair stood there rapt, intent, the locust as if recharging; Miko, transfixed with curiosity. The water would sometimes glow, then it would flare an unwholesome deep green. The creature confined within would twitch or shudder, and then the locust would chitter or chirp in a satisfied way.
Rapture?
As Miko watched, the locust’s eyes fluttered shut while the abominable waters in the tube churned, or a bubble exuded from the lips of the imprisoned creature, with its face a mask of wretched anguish.
It was more than he could stomach and he sagged back, numbed but wary. What diabolic bio-plasmic soup passed from tube to host?
He passed more of the grotesque victims suspended in their vessels: proto apes, surprisingly human-like, but scaled or furred, some surprisingly similar to the simian race he had glimpsed briefly on Rogos.
Miko glided ahead. Visibility was fast returning.
Bzt.
When he became fully visible, he drew back, his breath coming in dry rasps. The grime and blood had all washed away. The ankle where the wark had bitten him had ceased to throb, likewise the ache in his ribs where a locust claw had dragged across his middle. The locust water had healed him—or was it the transformation to a ghost? He thought not, remembering his anguished crawl from amalgamator to amalgamator upon entering this locust world.
A checkpoint ranged ahead. Locusts teemed about the enclosure, the guards bearing lumo-javelins. Day-to-day locusts streamed in and out past a glass partition with wire edges; each showed a luminous badge or circuitry pad of some obvious significance before a lit monitor. Miko ducked back into an interconnecting hall. Had he been seen? He heard a droning cry and the clatter of insect feet. Barely did he escape the laser fire of a security team before his body blipped out of existence again. He muttered a mental prayer for the fact. He made good speed away from continuing pursuit, hearing the last of their excited babble as they searched for a nonexistent quarry. These locusts clutched weapons in their pincer-like claws similar to those that had zapped Audra back in the laboratory.
Miko backpedalled, ducking into a side corridor. The corridor was clear. Crackles, buzzes echoed in the locust corridor. Just before his invisibility failed, he passed through the wall like a knife through soft butter, only to enter into another hallway. Seconds ago he had passed through an insulated wall riddled with wires and circuitry. What was this secured place? It didn’t seem like any bunker, or shelter or locust habitation. He felt as if he traversed through some giant machine.
The corridor supported a conveyor system like the ancient airports on earth that moved people along faster, granting easy access to other parts of a vast complex.
He gave this conveyor treadmill wide berth. The last thing he wanted was to flicker back to bodily form in the midst of hostile insectoids.
Mechnobots roamed everywhere, carrying out multifarious tasks unfathomable.
The floor opened before his feet—a translucent portal or some viewing window that stretched for fity feet before merging back into plated material. Below him locusts and mechnobots worked side by side, their pincers and mechanical cranes respectively lifted to bolt machine parts while others wired and welded them.
A production line.
Miko shook his head with wonder. Safe for the moment, he stared long at the industrious locust society
, before he turned back to the mystery of his invisibility. What laws of physics enabled him to blink in and out of existence? What precipitated the constant flux? He suspected his strange journey by amalgamator had contributed to his abnormal physical ability. Had that first amalgamator device, unused and antiquated for so long, malfunctioned? But why then did Audra not experience the same invisibility? He hadn’t observed her for long, but if it were true, maybe something in her genetic structure inhibited the side effect…
He forced his mind back to more practical concerns. Looking through the floor, he realized he must be in some base, but a bunker? He shook his head. An underground research facility? It seemed too large, and tied in with some type of barbaric production. Some purpose that filled him with dread, and he was trapped here millions of miles from nowhere.
He could easily evade their security nets while being invisible, but when he zapped back into his body… He guessed the butchers in the labs were focussed on the immediate area around the facility, so he was safe in other parts of the complex.
Hurrying down the endless corridors, he made progress, or glided with purpose while the astral power remained, sometimes snaking around hairpin corners. He passed through walls like electron particles.
Back in the laboratory, Audra looked out from her tank with an expression bordering on venomous. She was alive, but barely. More birthlings were growing in her. She could feel them stirring under her skin like maggots. Loathsome creatures. Spawn fathered by the fecund swordfish creature. At least something for her to eat.
These locusts’ intelligence was inferior to hers. True, they had captured her, but theirs was only a temporary victory. One of the things would slip up—and when it did…she would not be lenient, or so naive and unprepared as before. It was only because of the cursed narwhal spawn that she had been taken anyway.
As for the human, Miko—a flutter of mixed emotions rose in her breast. The creature had shown no gratitude for the service she had granted. He would have been killed, or permanently bottled had she not intervened. True, to save her own skin, she had acted.
