by Chris Turner
Miko ducked stray laser blasts, jammed the door shut just as Usk squeezed his shell through the gap and the concussion of the last blast sent them writhing backward, knocking them flat on their faces and backs.
Fire smote the tortured metal. A wave of heat enveloped them.
Miko crawled painfully in the heat and dust. He half expected the corridor to erupt in flames. But it didn’t.
Ears ringing, he tottered to a crouch and hauled Star to her feet. “Let’s get out—of this hell!” He pushed Laren ahead who mouthed curses at the locusts, long dead aliens and Genetrix. Like phantom figures, they stumbled on, blinking and gasping in the dusty dark. Miko was hardly conscious of the long sterile laboratory hall down which they staggered.
“The blast—would have alerted more of the fiends,” Laren rasped.
Miko nodded. “We have little time.”
* * *
The corridor ran on a long way. While they stumbled on, Miko caught glimpses of crescent-shaped rooms behind glass windows. Through the glass, he saw surgical instruments and strange command pods and robotic arms of medical equipment that reached into low steel vats. Everything was frozen in time. Racks of consoles, displays, monitoring stations were likely those that seeded and nursed the first Mentera.
The chilling familiarity had Miko thinking of Zikri and Mentera battling over the equipment, willing to sell their souls for dominance. Chills ran up his spine. From what the alien presence, G, had said, this command bunker hadn’t been penetrated by friend or foe.
Not for long. The locusts would be coming soon, drawn like flies to the flame.
The fugitives’ breaths came in gasps and their headlamps cast eerie, slanting rays about the dark sterility.
At last they came up out of the birthing laboratories into what Miko recognized as crudely-formed tunnels with a distinctly more locust cast. The walls, carved with images of pupae and hatched insects, wings outspread, sent shivers prickling their skin.
They groped their way through dusty corridors, more lost than ever. Whether they had emerged out into the main corridor they knew well and on to the same level as their ship, was not known. What seemed certain, they would never find their ship again.
Bleak futures loomed for Miko’s band. Miko slowed to a halt, Star and Usk hunching at his side. Laren trailed, crouching with hands on his knees. Miko’s eyes widened as they adjusted to the thick gloom.
“How long does the air last in these suits?” demanded Star.
“About a day,” answered Laren grimly, struggling to catch his breath.
“A day?” cried Star. “Nice knowing you guys.”
“Focus on the positive,” growled Miko. “We’ll find some air. Even the locusts who lived here must have stored a supply somewhere. Perhaps there’s a container—”
“You saw them in their skin suits,” retorted Laren. “The air is all dried up. We’re on a dead world, Lieutenant. That’s why the Zikri and locusts were terraforming it with their ships and cargo vessels, remember?”
“Maybe, but if there’s an air generation system—”
“What and live out our days in these sunless caves?” taunted Star. “Hunted by insects? What about food?”
Miko had no answer. He clamped his mouth shut. Star was right. Either way, barring a miracle, they were dead—walking corpses in these endless passageways. His mind flashed on Zaul. Any chance the Colonel had survived and could initiate a rescue effort? He knew the Colonel had attached homing devices to all their ships. But then again, maybe his fleet could not fend off the innumerable enemies that must be ravaging the fleet’s hulls now, keeping their guns occupied?
“These Cuyrne,” murmured Laren, his eyes still gleaming with a feverish light. “If they really were an ancient race who created Zikri, possibly humans, why didn’t they tell their offspring who their creators were? It makes no sense.”
“It spoils the fun,” grumbled Miko. “How do I know? Stop dwelling on it.” He stepped ahead to peek at an alcove that contained another cluster of the grotesque cocoons. “This nightmare’s hardly over.”
They crept past the cocoons and around a tight bend to enter a high-ceilinged, cavernous hall. It was impossible to take it in at a glance. The first sight Miko caught was a row of amalgamators past carvings of locusts and squid like creatures. It chilled his soul. Five of the parallel plates in a row with their sinister panels glowing a dim amber. The ancient transporter devices stood unusually high, twice as tall as him, buzzing with an unwholesome hum. If they were still operational, as it appeared, locusts could stream out at will and butcher them like pigs. Miko was about to back out of the chamber and try another passage when Laren strode through like a mesmerized child.
With reluctance, Miko clopped after. Towering walls rose to either side, drenched in shadow. The ceiling was indistinguishable from the blackness. Enormous tanks, squat as ogres, flanked both walls, and pushed up flush to the sides like aquaria in a degenerate research lab. A crypt-like stillness hung over this place, quivering with a sinister, knowing intelligence. Miko’s flesh crawled.
“These can’t be locust tanks?” Laren blurted. “Why are they so big?”
Miko pursed his lips, admittedly not knowing the answer.
“They’re incredibly ancient,” murmured Laren. “Look at the grimed, scored glass.” The vessels were filled with a familiar green liquid, some yellow, many containing horrifying creatures, as if products of ancient experiments gone wrong, judging from their deformed nature. Peak-headed proto-locusts with glaring eyes floated in the eerie fluid, among similarly malformed Zikri, their pale tentacles floating swollen and muscled and much larger than any Miko had seen, thus far.
Laren tugged on Miko’s arm and Miko jerked back in annoyance. Laren spoke: “He didn’t altogether come out and say it, but I gathered this G hinted we were all the experiments of the Genetrix.”
Miko scowled, twisted out of the pilot’s grip, wishing he would just let it rest.
“I can’t believe that hunk of circuitry!” Star exclaimed as she looked around in frightened wonder. “This place is like an ancient museum, or some battle arena.” She pointed to the hulking statues of both Zikri and locust rising in between the looming tanks. Some statues were in terrifying poses of battle—Zikri ripping heads off locusts, locusts clipping tentacles off Zikri. Elsewhere stood stone poles strung with hideous skeletons with extended skulls and plated ribs, of what manner of unclassified creature Miko shuddered to guess.
Littering the ground, as their weak headlamps revealed, lay dry, shrivelled husks of locusts. Nothing more than dusky, black, dessicated mounds, showing rotted bones and dry ribcages broken open.
From what? Teeth, blasters, virulent disease, torture?
“An antediluvian slaughterhouse,” murmured Miko.
Usk’s fervent chirrup acknowledged as much.
A low whistle came from Laren as he crept forward in his hopping gait toward what looked like an especially large tank lurking in the shadows by the rightmost wall. “Here, what’s this?”
It was not so much the tank, but the occupant that sent a shudder through Miko’s frame. A large double crescent creature floated in the middle of the pale greenish liquid. Two massive sickle moons joined at the centre to form a four pointed star, where above, a blue transparent sac bulged. A mysterious organ? The thing floated with authority, tips of its sickle moons drawn down, keeping itself upright like some mushroom out of a madman’s nightmare, or a primitive jellyfish. Some vaguely proto-locust creatures lurked in the peripheries, but those looked dead. The star-shaped monster, whether dead or alive, hung suspended, as if it had been there for a thousand years. But four, small, cilia-like streamers on its sleek limbs seemed to waver ever so slightly in the slimy water.
Miko frowned. He let his eyes drift past. A wide flight of steps rose to a raised altar on which perched a monstrous tank, filled with Zikri and locust forms. It was flanked by imposing locust statues on one side and a Zikri on the other.
“Mother of God, what is this place?” hissed Laren.
“An ancient ritual ground, I suspect. I’m betting losers get a quick ride into a tank of their choice,” quipped Miko.
“Not funny,” murmured Star.
Miko swallowed. Who knew what grisly happenings had transpired here? He scratched at his helmet whose air nozzle had taken up that high-pitched whining again. He tapped the backplate and the noise stopped.
Usk stared transfixed, his pincers hung slack at his side, weapon in a claw. His eyes burned and teeth chattered with an intensity that Miko thought would have the locust keeling over. Of his own volition, Usk abruptly donned the language translator.
“I saw an age,” came his croaking voice from the device, “where locust and Zikri battle in ritual. Cut, mutilate and feed off bodies. Zikri lose, warriors slung into tanks with big beasties and scorpions. Locust lose and husks pinned on tall totems, like trophy.”
Miko paused, stunned. It made sense. What else could those gory stems be with their husks of pincered skeletons? The cluster of crusted bodies, ancient and mouldering on the arena floor was an example of ritualized savagery, a practice incomprehensible to civilized minds.
Usk tore the translator disc from his helmet and would say no more.
Phosphorescent glows from the tanks revealed other truths. Miko saw that the locusts hanging on the totems were much different than Usk, fitted with small tusks on their chitinous faces. Likewise were the Zikri different; their larger and more menacing tentacles were armed with sharp barbs.
Laren turned back to the tank with a disgusted scowl.
“I wonder what this starfish thing is?” He made a move to reach for the glass.
“Don’t touch it!” Miko cried.
But his warning came too late.
Laren had already tapped on the glass without much thought. A sucker-shaped appendage whipped up through the stopper and slithered down the glass surface to wrap around Laren’s midsection. Usk chittered maniacally and fired off a shot. But the alien flesh that smoked and writhed was not incapacitated enough to prevent it from pulling the squirming and screaming body of Laren up and over the glass down into the tank. The smoking chunk of flesh sizzled in the water and knitted over in healing scabs. The thing squeezed down on the pilot, its mushroom mass dwarfing him, pushing him further underwater while the water roiled and the eyes of the locusts in the tank fluttered open.
Miko lifted his blaster, but hesitated. In the turmoil, he would kill him anyway. He watched in fear and horror as a probing tentacle unhitched Laren’s helmet and Laren’s mouth opened in a wild screech. The Jakru flailed, drowning and choking in the foul witch-water, finally to stare in helpless horror while suckers caressed him, probing ears, nose and mouth.
The blaster sagged in Miko’s hand.
Usk gaped on, his insect face expressionless, as if caught up in a primordial ritual mirrored in a dark memory of his past. Miko fidgeted uncomfortably in the wake of the locust’s torment.
“We must save Laren!” Star gasped. She clawed at Miko in horror.
Miko shivered. “There is nothing we can do.”
“His eyes...” Star shuddered. “I think he is still alive.”
Miko flinched, knowing the truth of it. A kind of conscious, living death. “Everlasting life...” He aimed steadily, forcing the quiver from his trigger finger, shuddering to think what would happen when the tank exploded and the thing was loosed.
A clink of claws echoed on the stone floor. “What’s that?” Star cried, wheeling.
Usk jerked around, his antenna on full alert.
“Locusts! They must have tracked us,” cried Miko.
“Not just locusts. Look!” Star wailed.
“Zikri!”
“We’re done,” she whimpered, sucking in a sobbing breath.
But Miko was gone, disappeared. Bzt. He shimmered out of existence in a crackle of energy. Suit and all. Anything that his bare skin or hair touched, even remotely, went invisible, as he knew well from his prior episodes.
Star’s eyes rounded in horrified amazement as his gun magically drifted through the night black air, the same as it had done back in the filtration plant.
In a raging frenzy, Star fired blast after blast into the advancing line of locusts. “Bloody freaks!” She rushed out to meet them. “Die! All of you!”
Four in lightweight suits came bounding in, weapons spewing warning fire. To take them alive for their tanks? Two invaders erupted in bloody ruin.
Usk, bewildered, hurried after the hysterical woman, returning fire.
Using the tanks as cover, Star knelt and rained ruin into the chittering locusts that momentarily were checked, quivering in indecision. Then she ran out, blasting limbs off locusts to give cover to Usk who lay sprawled behind a decayed mound of corpses. She exposed herself for an instant, opening fire point blank on a locust that would have cut down Usk. Miko fired off shots and watched like a silent wraith as she and Usk crawled like worms from the cover of one desiccated corpse to another, attempting to cross the arena and retreat to an escape tunnel.
Admittedly her intent was tremendously brave. Usk, he could forgive for such desperation, but was the woman insane?
Miko glided purposefully after them, snatching up one of the dead locust’s extra lumo weapons, peppering locusts two-handedly now that were targeting his friends.
Star jerked to her feet to make another suicidal run for it. Something had snapped in her. Miko saw it. The violence of past events, the blood-sucking locusts and the tanks, the firsthand exposure to gruesome death in space, the gory fate of Laren, and now the chilling revelations of “G”—all had contributed to the world as she knew it slipping sideways, tumbling end over end.
Miko surged ahead in frenzied haste and sent an intercept projection which tripped her, just as enemy laser fire would have ripped off her head. Usk stared, chittering in bewilderment as the magic gun drifted through the air, and its invisible wielder ducked back toward the amalgamators, the place where Usk now skulked, grateful for the diversion.
With his astral will, Miko dragged Star back to cover, while a host of locusts swarmed in, with Zikri hounding their heels.
Miko threw her behind a mound of withered locust bodies out of sight. Then he focussed on killing anything that moved.
He glided by a statue of a Zikri strangling an upended locust. His hope was to lead the locusts and Zikri away from her, so he slid by the tank containing Laren and the monstrous starfish. Locusts with tiny teeth clacked closer, long hind legs bounding over corpses with lumo-sticks clutched in pincered claws.
Crash! A flash of crimson flared in his astral sight. A locust laser blast shattered the wall of glass near him, sending a spray of putrid-smelling liquid over his astral body.
Bzt. His body crackled back to existence. He gasped with the shock of tumbling back into his body. He wiped his faceplate of the foul liquid. His still-glowing eyes peered intensely through the glass.
Star was coming out her daze and she saw Miko stagger, slipping in the wash of slimy liquid at his feet. “You!” she croaked insanely. “What the hell are you?”
He tossed away the stunner, fouled by the locust slime.
She swayed back in horror just as the nightmarish shape of the starfish thing rose to life, freed from its prison. It loomed like a giant mushroom on crab’s legs fresh from the depths of a dark ocean trench. The starfish towered over all, dripping reeking fluid. Up it vaulted on four extensible legs, collapsing its body upon three of the closest locusts. The creature, fresh out of its amniotic fluid, was driven by its first real need to feed. Down it squashed itself on other hapless victims, working its rubbery, flexible appendages with grisly efficiency.
Screams and chirrups rang out as it squeezed shell and flesh up into a widening, funnel-like sucker tentacle right through to its central node or brain—the transparent sac that bobbed so hideously. The globule was quite possibly a brain where the squirming locusts, now enveloped by slime
, clawed their way uselessly in their death throes. Laser fire raked the thing’s hide, but it emitted a low-pitched drone and scuttled after the offending locusts.
A dozen chittering Zikri and a score of locusts swarmed the hall. The timeless enemies fired and hewed at each other without restraint.
The Zikri wore no suits. No trouble did they have contending with the foreign air. Quite possibly they were the deadlier threat since they were not compelled to keep survivors for their tanks.
Laren lay sprawled grotesquely on his side, dripping slime. He gasped for air, reaching for the helmet that the starfish had unlatched. A tentacle whipped suddenly around him and dragged him away, into the midst of the Zikri invaders.
Miko heaved. It was impossible to fight all these foes and save his companions. Doom hovered like a black cloud over him, and a helpless rage enveloped his heart.
Backed into a corner between tank and statue, Star crouched, wild-eyed. A locust zipped in faster than a scorpion, its pincer wrenching the blaster out of her grasp. She kicked it but another locust sent her flying.
Miko rushed in and opened a fusillade of fire into the back of its neck, shearing crown from torso. The headless body flopped to its knees while the other he struck hard with the butt of his weapon and gunned it down when it sank in a heap.
Star lay immobile, limp as a fish.
A new horror emerged into this arena of death: a familiar, flesh-polyped form gliding out of the murk and standing dripping before Miko like a thing from an unremembered dream. Miko spun about, nearly scorching the figure’s hide. But the polyped creature moved faster than a snake, and slapped the quivering weapon out of his grasp.
A dozen fatalistic thoughts flashed through Miko’s brain. It must have been she who had blasted the attacking locust craft out of the sky and followed them here. Audra! Of course. Why should he be surprised?
The Zikri wrapped tentacles around his forearms, drawing him in like a fisherman’s catch of the day. A third she looped around his back, almost in a loving embrace.
