by Chris Turner
Miko reached over cautiously and was about to let his fingers trace slow circles over the plates, but then he paused. The proximity to the metal, which wasn’t really metal from what he could tell, made his fingers tingle, even though they were two inches away. It was as if a small electric current ran through them.
He pulled his hand back sharply. Cryptic squiggles, stars and dashes were engraved in the plate’s bronze-black face, though some of the forms tended toward the geometric. Whatever these things were, they pulsed with a weird energy.
Something had gone horribly wrong here. He glanced down at the triangular-shaped skulls with eye sockets lower in the face than what they should have been.
Whether this place was the product of the Zikri, from whom he was fleeing, or an indigenous group that had originated on this planet, was not clear.
Nor did the technology match anything he remembered of the Zikri mothership when they had captured him and Sitty II. It seemed so long ago that he had been paired with the detestable Audra and they both had set out on that fateful test run aboard his own craft.
Could the Zikri have manufactured the freakish creatures on Rogos? Even the monstrous presence that had taken down and devoured the giant flying pterodactyl days ago seemed more some perverted evil born of the demonic planet itself, than something engineered.
His mind brushed upon another mystery: was he in the future or the past? How he wished to answer that question! Ever since the light-drive on Sitty II had failed under gunfire from the pursuing Zikri craft, the constellations had looked different. Something was oddly displaced then. Also, the debris from the explosion of the NAVO and Zikri craft had mysteriously vanished when he had come out of time-light slip. If he were in the future, this technology was perhaps ahead of its time, but barbarically primitive. His eyes pinched shut in exhaustion and he rubbed his temples. Either way, he was doomed.
He pushed his head closer. The plates gave off a suspicious hum that grew louder in a beat frequency every ten seconds. A simple heater? Alien decor? He wiped the mirthless grin off his face. Odd that there appeared no battery or wires carrying any current of any kind to grant the plates life or luminosity.
Miko pulled at the whiskers on his chin. He looked about the litter of ancient bones and dusty skulls and wondered what had happened.
He backed away from the plates. Returning to his examination of the lab, on impulse he tapped the scalpel’s blade against the glass that encased a particularly loathsome-looking creature—the narwhal.
An oval eye flicked open.
Miko jumped back in panic.
The creature was alive in its pale liquid. Another eye winked open, glowing nefariously in the sombre light. Miko stared. The thing was three feet long, but oozed elemental evil. It had a black-green scaly tail and its snout was tapered, fitted with gills and an eldritch razor-sharp horn and disfigured nostrils. Most of its tusk had been shorn off and lay at the bottom of the tube.
The cold, green, merciless eyes peered right through him, piercing like a blade—eyes which spoke of intelligence and violent acts.
Miko swallowed, hypnotized by the creature. The thing thrust its broken tusk against the glass, attempting to break free. The tube rocked back and forth and Miko stepped away, flinching. Perhaps this was why the masters of the laboratory kept skewering hooks on hand. If one of the more dangerous monsters were to break loose—
Miko sensed a chilling presence suddenly at his back. He whirled around. A ghostly shape glided into the chamber. Loathing gripped him like wildfire.
Audra.
The alien’s body was dripping and covered with yellow slime, evidently blood from the warks she had mutilated and assimilated. No doubt she was proud of her conquests.
Miko backed away, bile creeping up his throat. He raised the scalpel, squelching the hideous disgust that rose up in him. One moment of inattentiveness would surely make him prisoner of the creature again, a fate which he was determined to avoid.
He snatched at the pipe tucked at his waist. He kept it raised at shoulder height. The scalpel he held at the ready in his other hand.
Audra advanced.
Miko licked his lips. He snatched glances left and right, and he contemplated his next move. He’d have to make a run for it, but where? She would catch up with him. The yipping and excitement of the forest warks grew more intense from the open doorway. No escape there.
Audra halted, the fleshy folds in her face crinkling in a sightless trance, as does a wolf that sniffs the air when it senses danger.
She was no more than a half dozen paces from him when several feral shapes slinked into the chamber.
Shit, what next? Miko’s mind screamed as the warks rushed forward.
Seven were on them before he could even breathe, knocking him back violently. His body stumbled into one of the tubes, arms flailing. The canister tottered and crashed into the narwhal’s tank, hitting the creature in the head. The canister cracked, spilling its contents. The brute dropped to the floor. Miko slashed with his scalpel, ripping the underbelly of the closest wark as snapping teeth came within hairbreadths of his neck. Another he kicked into the waterless pool. He almost tottered backward into the jaws of another horned stalker while the eel-like narwhal flapped at his feet, seeking to gore him.
Miko took three steps away, struggling to reach the chamber’s darkest wall, hoping for an exit he had missed. Desperately, he kicked and dodged the lethal thrusts of the narwhal’s shortened tusk.
More warks surrounded him and he smote with both weapons. A horrible aborted scream frogged in his throat. Die, you miserable shit-weasels! Die!
One got too close and the slithering narwhal swatted out its tail, and the wark dropped instantly and lay still. Poisoned? Electrified?
Miko wielded the pipe and scalpel, like sword and mace, tearing away chunks of flesh from the warks that gnashed their teeth at him and dodging their lunges. Miko glimpsed Audra in his periphery, forcing her foes to their knees. Smothering them in her slimy embrace, she scored them with her acrid secretions. He grimaced in dread just as a wark was about to sink fangs into his leg. Audra drifted in and engulfed the slavering, grunting beast in the grey mantle of her vile body.
Pressed to the ground, the wark squealed and Miko only registered that Audra’s oleaginous clutch was not on his own limbs. Too vividly he remembered being smothered in that sexual embrace out in space on Sitty II. Now the embrace was the poisonous and assimilating one that enveloped this thrashing wark-beast and had it squealing and squirming and lying still within seconds. Before the last shrill notes spilled from its jowl, her grey body completely enveloped its reddish brown hide, and chemical processes started their melting action. Miko smelled arsenic pervading the air, burnt flesh, the sizzling of scales, and the metallic stench of blood and fermented urine. In the blink of an eye, only a small ruin of smouldering flesh and bone remained where the wark had last been.
Miko stumbled about, disoriented, his boots crunching on the remains of past victims. Audra glided in, trying to catch him in a tentacle and bear him away, but the narwhal was gaining horrifying mobility. Miko dodged being touched or skewered by the thing’s blunted tusk. Its glassy whale-like eyes fixed on Audra as it flapped painfully along the ground, undulating like some ghastly snake or half insect, able to jump from the ground by flexing its muscles and springing up like a leech.
The creature, faster than an eel, whipped around Audra’s gleaming torso.
It penetrated a gill-like flap, a sexual organ he saw, one that Miko could never forget after Audra fused herself to him for months.
Audra let out a low chittering wail as the creature’s head burrowed in her body. She rolled furiously back and forth, in an attempt to pry the predacious thing off her. But it clung leech-like to her midsection with its under-barbs, its tail twitching incessantly as it quested to plunge deeper.
Audra twisted and writhed as warks drove in, slicing and impaling her with their horns. Even her outstanding abilities c
ould not guard against the narwhal’s insidious penetration. While the two rolled and flailed in obscene embrace, Audra snatched the offender with her grouper-like mouth. The narwhal flapped and tore at her, but she quickly bore it to the ground and smothered the thing with her heavy, pulpy body. The thing stopped thrashing and bled white fluid. Even as its essence dripped from her torso, she swayed upright. The thing had damaged her, but Miko knew Audra could not be hurt easily; never could such a thing as Audra die easily. She was capable of absorbing punishment far beyond what a similar-sized organism could, and still survive.
She glided haltingly to a wall and leaned there, quivering. All but a few warks lay dead in warm, blood-dripping heaps. The few live ones feasted on their dead in their carnal fashion. Audra’s skin had turned a slightly yellowish hue. Gases seemed to have been trapped in her abdomen; her midsection bloated and oozed pus. Perhaps the creature had caused her internal injury with its poisonous thrusts. Miko could only speculate.
Audra gave a horrible gurgle, then convulsed, releasing what seemed a high-pitched chitter of agony. Miko, dazed still and somewhat empathetic to the creature he had been joined to for so long, could not help but feel the small hairs rise on the back of his neck. He had time to gasp out a choking breath then stagger away in panic when one of the last warks came crashing into him full on.
He fell back, missing the plates by a hair’s width. Then he stumbled between them. Electricity seized him, and an electrified surge shivered through his body. The room disappeared in a blaze of chilling white light.
Miko cried out a single elongated scream that no one could hear…
His spirit was dangling in space, not his mind, not his body, but something else. His body had died back on Rogos in a parallel reality—in a limbo of nowhere-ness. The Miko that was Miko, now hung suspended light years above obscure stars and planets in the gulfs of space, travelling at immeasurable speed. His astral body was suspended in a matrix of improbability, going somewhere, nowhere, through worlds of past and future, he could not guess or imagine.
Many colours passed before his astral senses—roses, greens, whites, yellow puffs of billowing gas. They were light years away and many thousand more across; many worlds and stars spun in this universe, untold numbers. He passed the slip stream of consciousness, of imagination, through death, surrender, rebirth.
Then it came to him—journeying on the astral plane spawned an epiphany! He had been thrust into a time whorl. Had he known that the parallel plates were the ancient race’s time travel device, an amalgamator, to cross the limitless bounds of space, he could have been more reassured. The realization that he was centuries in the future was certain.
Smash!
He came crashing down into physical reality, knocked back into a human body again.
He lay on a cold metal floor, groaning in pain and shock. He fought for breath. It felt like a sock had been wedged in the back of his throat. Toxic, reeking chemicals stung his lungs. His terror-filled eyes peered out through a circle of glass windows upon a panorama of windswept barrens. He must be in some lookout or belvedere, high above some strange city spread below, surrounded by desolate sand-blown wastes that ran as far as the eye could see.
A dead world. Old buildings, topped with towers and antennae, crumbled now. Behind him rose a rugged cliff, with drifted dunes running up to its foot.
Miko’s senses reeled. His lungs laboured to expel their poisons. His vision began to swim before his eyes. He wobbled to his knees, staggered toward what looked like an engineering console. Behind him, the wark which had butted him into the amalgamator, lay prone, having been caught in Miko’s wake and thus passed too through the time whorl. However, both hind legs had been shorn by the electrical stab of its late entry. The beast shuddered painfully, licking blood from its useless limbs, as it tried to save itself. Its face turned green as it choked on the noxious air in the chamber and bled out.
Miko legs failed him. He crawled on hands and knees to what looked like another set of the triangular plates. No, there were more of them: three, he thought. One was glowing with a greenish light, or he imagined it glowed, and it hummed with the same ominous beat, but he couldn’t be sure. As his vision greyed, approaching oblivion, he clawed his way into the alien technology and jerked upright, rigid as a man in the electric chair. Again he was out in space, his mind spinning and stars swirling in succession below him like tops from a child’s fantasy. He felt himself soaring like a bird in free fall toward the centre of the galaxy. Free of weight, free of Audra. The lights—they were so insanely bright!
II
Miko’s essence hurtled like a subatomic particle through the depths of space and time. Kaleidoscopic lights weaved before his astral form while crackles of energy buzzed from someplace within. He came crashing suddenly back into his body, senses reeling, limbs shaking with pain. Shaking the daze out of his skull, he found his crumpled body lying sprawled between two parallel plates like those back in the bunker on a world far away. Five more sets of parallel plates loomed in a row aside the one in which he straggled. His skin prickled with dread.
The dim light that bathed his body felt wrong; it somehow slanted too eerily from an unknown source ahead. He was in a hold or shelter—a landing bay perhaps? But with the soft lap of water not far from where his legs stretched.
A pool of brackish water stretched into plum-coloured gloom, and with it a strange scent—blood? It wafted from deeper within.
For a second Miko’s body blinked out of existence with a quiet electrical crackle. He shook the sound out of his ear, or rather, his astral ear. He was looking out from eyes with no body, as if he were of no substance. Invisible?
Snap!
He was thrust back into his body. Arcs of pain shot through his limbs. Blood-caked, his garments shredded, his skin lacerated… He must be dreaming…
But no!… Painfully he crawled to his knees, shaking the lank hair out of his eyes. He snatched up the scalpel at his side. The pellucid water shimmered to small ripples of movement beneath; the strange, alien scent of fluids all round him made him nauseous. Water trickled down the walls, feeding the pool. But trickles so quiet as to be noiseless.
Skirting the pool, he clutched the handle of his weapon. Fingers trembling, he could barely walk, but he forced his feet on in jerky hops to explore this chamber, anxious to be away from the pulsing glow of the capacitor plates: sinister technology that could whisk him off to some other strange, new, violent world. He moved forward like a wraith, deeper into the chamber.
Suddenly he felt movement in the stillness. Machinery? Aliens? There was a strange hum in the air, like the droning of hornets.
Humid air brushed his cheek. Surprisingly fresh and breathable, it was unlike the toxic horrors of the worlds he had visited but briefly on his jumps through space.
An owl’s hooting stabbed out in the gloom. Was he dreaming? An owl? No, the pain in his ankle indicated otherwise…the bite the wark had given him back in the strange laboratory was all too real.
He crept along the floor, drawn by the sounds of madness, then he saw them.
Large insect-like monsters, poised on their hind claws, hunching as high as himself. Four of them gathered around an operating table, or some gruesome parody of one. Wingless, locust-like things with pincers and fangs, purple bodies, domed backs and flattened skulls. A team of them worked over a carved-up, wretched beast strapped to a low table. The table was equipped with miniature gantries and surgical equipment, much like the lab he had left, light years behind. The victim was some sort of owl, but not: it was larger and whiter than any owl he had ever seen, with sparse feathers, pocked flesh, showing where the feathers had been plucked.
Miko clutched at the wall, dizzy with pain, struggling for support.
The locust beings gripped instruments similar to those that hung from the pillars on Rogos. And these creatures sawed away—indiscriminately, oblivious to his presence.
The owl hooted mournfully, still alive, struggl
ing to get away from the invasive incisions as the locusts inserted electrical implants. But it could not. Miko could not control his revulsion. He backed away a step, feeling the bile back up his throat. The creatures still had not seen him.
He heard the rip of flesh as an excision tool hacked off a wing. Then an anguished hooting and a reactive chitter from the head of the lead locust thing.
A mechnobot in the shape of a shin-high aphid rushed along the floor. Coloured lights blinked on its front faceplate. On its back it carried a vessel, like one of the upright tubes that lurked back at the bunker. Another followed, towing a miniature wagon full of electronic parts—microchip-embedded crystals, tetrahedrons, luminous tubes, dials, globes.
One of the locust beings clacked its pincers and lifted the translucent tube to the table. The owl’s wings were tossed in a heap of other oozing body parts while another cauterized the wounds. With the help of the others, they stuffed the owl inside the tube. A stopper of crystal ceramic with wires and circuitry bulging from its curved surface was inserted tightly into the top.
So, they had cut off the helpless creature’s wings to make it fit inside the tube. Miko’s jaw hung loose.
He kept to the shadows, weaving his way forward, crouched on all fours behind large, empty glass tanks. Gazing around the periphery in bafflement, he struggled to grasp the purpose of such experiments. Off to the sides stood four more canisters like the one that held the mutilated owl. Each vessel contained a different specimen. One was shaped like a seal, its skin blue and sleek; another had one squid-like eye; the third was of a two-legged species, brown and furry while the last held a creature similar to the locust creatures themselves with a red mark on its skull. Did they imprison their own kind? Miko stared. Why? For their research? Torture, for science’s sake?
From the stopper of each container to the floor dangled a flexible cord, the purpose of which baffled him.
He cringed as he looked back at the containers. A strange white mould afflicted the second specimen—the brown furry one—as if the creature had decayed or rotted in its tube, or contracted some hideous infection. What ghoulish purpose prompted the locust keepers to retain such macabre exhibits?