by Chris Turner
Chapter 3
Yul’s new route took him well away from the tanks and Regers’ desperate predicament. A shaky voice in his helm informed him that Frue had no new enemy to report. Frue couldn’t track where he was without a homer but could detect Zikri enemies on the line of his path. Not ideal, but better than no early warning at all. He only hoped Frue could keep the enemy ship at bay.
Yul snuck back along his circuitous route with increased caution. One corridor left, three right, two straight ahead. He took care to notch a mark in the wall at each junction with the butt of his blaster. A risk, should wandering Zikri stumble upon such marks, but better to have an escape route marked than not.
He passed under a spider-veined, diamond-shaped archway and into a spacious area. The Zikri hold. The dull cavernous thud of his booted feet echoed back in his ears, causing his heart to quicken. The Albatross’s blue pilot light came to his view, a familiar beacon, still functional after all the damage to her. He passed through the gaping hole in her side and crept up the companionway breasting the bridge, with the ship’s faint blue glow permeating the dim murk. The unknown lurked here. So far, he had yet to encounter a Zikri.
Slinking to the bridge, he saw the interior was in bad shape. Whole walls were blackened from blaster fire and multiple explosions. A faint smell of decomposition prevailed, like humus in a forest. His suit’s compressor attempted to draw oxygen out of the surrounding air to preserve the stored resources, thus Yul picked up the faint odour, or was it fresh? His blood chilled at the prospect of new developments. The weird, pear-like pods had popped open, dozens of them, showing brown, skeletal, rib-like formations. What had hatched? A scuttling motion came from overhead.
Yul ducked, heart hammering, but he saw nothing. He was about to dip back into the hall when the muted roar of the ship’s engines jarred him, followed by the sudden thud of metal bracing against rock.
The Orb had landed. Good, Frue had come through; they were on Phebis.
Yul worked with speed. He had heard no clunk of tractor pad door retracting so he assumed the task was beyond Frue. He hastened to the Albatross’s armoury to rummage for explosives.
Frue’s panicked voice hissed over the com. “Get back here! The squids, they’ve blown the—”
“What the hell?” Just when he thought nothing else could go wrong! He groped deeper into the pile of hardware. Frue would have to cope with the Zikri himself. No way he could get back in time to protect him. Snatching up two decent sized explosives with detonators, he turned to look up, eyes bulging at what he saw.
A colourful shape, a blurred winged thing, crashed into his forearm. He whipped it off him with a swipe. It chirped like a bug and flew off as fast as it had come.
Frue’s voice was drowned in a peal of blaster fire and chittering shrieks, gasps of terror. At the same time, a shadowy movement brushed by the doorway, then a familiar slithering. Damn, Frue was in trouble, but why hadn’t the sod warned him earlier?
The pilot’s wails of panic rose to a crescendo. Yul heard the slap of tentacles and Frue’s last agonized howl before the com went dead. Yul shuddered.
No time for remorse. He turned and a Zikri hit him like an avalanche. He rolled on the ground, clawing at rubbery, strangling flesh. His blaster fire rained askew. His mechanized fingers tore at slimy tentacles, creepers that wrapped tighter about his waist, arms. A hideous, mottled face jerked closer to his faceplate and he caught a strange, crablike movement hovering over his head.
A dragonfly thing, some winged crustacean, flung itself down from the ceiling and latched onto the Zikri’s neck. It pricked pale barbs onto the lower part of its head and lifted and jammed a white, pulsing, bulb-like proboscis into the thing’s brain.
The Zikri howled, slumped, its short head stalk dangling, while the butterfly pulsed, as if extracting fluids from the Zikri’s brain.
Yul gasped for breath, struggling wildly to extricate himself from the dying Zikri’s embrace. He staggered off, sickened by the sudden assault and the horror of it, wiping off the sticky goo from his suit.
Mercifully no butterfly-dragonfly flew shrieking and seeking his flesh. Only a writhing mass of tentacles, confusion and horror. The Zikri tried to tear off the winged invader, but the thing only clung on tighter. Before long, the Zikri’s head cracked like an egg and it stiffened forever. Yul ploughed on down the companionway with an instinct for preservation. Why had the creature crashed into him initially? To warn him? Unlike the Zikri, he had made no overt motions of aggression against its parent pods during the bridge attack. Regers, that was another matter... Under no circumstance must he allow a proboscis to enter his brain.
A last look back confirmed his suspicion; he must be victim of some mad hallucination. The Zikri’s head oozed vile fluids while the dragonfly, some magnificent absurdity, sucked up the issuing ichor, its wings trembling. A hissing, gurgling chitter burbled impossibly from the Zikri’s exposed throat. Yul winced. A metamorphosis. A butterfly thing, a quarter of the size of the original attacker, morphed out of the Zikri’s shattered skull.
Yul staggered back in shock and disbelief. He tried to erase the image from his brain, but it was impossible.
He scrambled back through the Albatross’s companionway, empty and eerie as was the darkened hold of the Zikri ship.
Tottering on drunken legs through the hold, he reached a dark wall of metal, the gate pad through which the Zikri dragged their victim ships. The spiked barrier rose impossibly high, an impenetrable rampart. As he guessed, there were no controls on the gate to draw it up or down or unlock it.
He armed his detonating device, set the time sequence, and clamped the magnetic casing at eye level then stepped back. His mind could not help but postulate theories as he stumbled away... He had seen that flying insect in all its vivid, grotesque detail.
It had formed crab-like legs as a springboard... why? To jump like a spider? Perhaps a speedy adaptation to a dire situation? In the heavier gravity, wings could not support its mass, so it seemed legs had been a necessity.
The explosion rent the Orb’s hold with tongues of red flame and a terrible concussion batted Yul forward with jarring force.
He shook his head, crumpled in a dazed heap by the far wall, in a tangle of overturned benches. The blast fortunately had not damaged or punctured his suit. Why the devil had he set it for only seven seconds? Stupid. He was not thinking. Shock? Fatigue? Shrieks raged in his ear as the thin Zikri air was sucked through the hold into the outside atmosphere which was even thinner there. It meant the Zikri on board, caught exposed, would die. Perfect! He ground his teeth in a satisfied grimace.
But his body shook and his ears rang.
Over he staggered to the brink of the shredded tractor pad, feeling the tug of air, nudging at him and his suit. The ship depressurized. He looked upon a desolate landscape. Frue had landed them on a slight angle in the dusty soil that looked like snow. Boulders flanked the pliant Orb’s side, and small dusty ridges rose distantly behind it. To his right, ran an endless plain of frosted soil disappearing into a dark horizon. The time of day, if day it were, was late, perhaps approaching dusk. Mra, the distant sun, was setting, and long shadows spread across the lunar soil. The enemy Orb stalking them was nowhere in sight. A fortunate circumstance. Perhaps the erstwhile Frue had taken care of it.
Somehow he thought not.
He looked at the digital readout on his helm’s suit: -25 degrees Celsius, humidity 3%, Gravity 0.84. Air: 60% carbon dioxide, 9% oxygen, traces of 1% sulphur and 0.7% Argon, the rest indeterminable. A weird mix, unsuitable for human life. Lucky that his suit had not been compromised. His only chance would be to board and arm Lander now.
He turned back to the Zikri hold, but his eyes caught a brisk movement on the moon’s horizon.
A ship? Yul gaped, squinted, saw a familiar, cylindrical Wren X, a Mark V design skim the landscape. It emerged to face the Orb. Twin photon torpedoes were mounted on its sleek underbelly and ion-blasters to the sides
. It was a state-of-the art light-drive propulsion X3 model. Heavy artillery its trademark, a fast and deadly machine. Mathias did not scrimp. Yul imagined the Wren X contained only the most modern cloaking devices.
So Mathias had come—sooner than he expected. Those plant samples must have meant more to the industrialist than all the gold in the universe. Sad news that the plant pods were either hatched or burned. Mathias would definitely not be pleased. The ferns? Who knew where the hell they were?
* * *
Crouching on his haunches, Yul let the daze wash out of his head. Nervous exhaustion crept into his limbs. He cast a furtive glance back, expecting one of the iridescent dragonfly horrors to come vaulting out at his head. He doubted there was only one. But if any one of them had wanted to hatch something inside him, it would have done so earlier. It hadn’t, which meant something significant. For whatever reason, Yul did not feel the fear he should in his heart. That was a good thing.
He sucked in a grateful gust of oxygen and struggled to his feet. A hailing frequency came over his headset with a staticky rasp.
“Yul Vrean? This is commander Goss of the Mercedes Arknot, Cybernetics Corp. Do you read?”
“Clear,” croaked Yul.
“Any hostile report?”
“I’m clear.”
“How many hostiles are left?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We see you’ve cracked open the tractor pod. Good. We’re coming in.”
“Over.” Nice timing, you morons, he thought. Just when his whole team had been wiped out.
The Wren hovered and landed in a safe area on the plain before the downed Orb. Twenty figures emerged in grey-camo spacesuits. Their ship flew to some safe corridor in the hills and the figures moved ant-like toward the Orb under the direction of a single leader. They reached the edge of the craft and grabbed the spiked surface. Yul paused to watch. It was only an eighteen-foot climb up the ship’s hull to the tractor pad from spike to spike, which the team managed with apparent ease.
The crew had hid the ship despite it being cloaked. They were taking no chances. But the Orb in the sky, where was it? Was it no longer a threat?
A suited man with unblinking eyes and waxen face struggled over the lip of shattered metal and faced Yul who stepped back to examine him with curiosity.
A man of medium height wearing a commander’s badge, with a high forehead and shock of sandy hair, followed next and vaulted to his feet like a kangaroo. A rare dexterity for a man in a suit. Sixteen other men followed, of various builds, complexions, and races. All carried weapons, Master E1 assault rifles, sleek, black, ten-inch instruments of death. The commander sized up Yul without much effort, something he was apparently used to. “Where are the samples?”
“In the Albatross. There.” Yul jerked a thumb back deeper in the hold.
“You lead. I’m Goss, this is lieutenant Xix. A synthetic, cybernot SC 34-6. You’re going in there to get them. Mathias paid you to do a job, so this time, do it.”
Yul stared whimsically at Goss’s flattened boxer’s nose and his equally glamorous synthetic minion. “Aren’t you the man of charm?” he remarked dryly.
“I get paid for my competence, Vrean, unlike you. Not for my good looks.”
Yul shrugged. “Greer is dead. Hurd may still be alive, near the ship’s bridge. Frue and Regers, I think are toast.” A guilty feeling played at Yul’s guts. He hadn’t left Hurd in any position to escape. Bluntly, a toy for the Zikri.
Goss plied him for details then waved an impatient hand. “Dumb sod was stupid enough to get caught without a suit, so I say let him die in a stew of his own making.”
Yul gritted his teeth. “I’ll take that as a no then, regarding rescue.”
“Move on.” Goss waved his weapon.
Yul didn’t like Goss. The man was abrupt, devoid of feeling for the value of human life. This was going to be a difficult operation. Somebody was going to get killed and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be him. “What about the Orb up there?”
“What Orb?” Goss’s toothy smile gleamed through his faceplate like a zombie’s rictus.
Yul’s lips parted. “You blasted them? Are you up for a war with the Zikri?”
“Whatever the cost,” grumbled Goss. “Move on, Vrean. Your foolish questions are eating up time. Better we get out of here before more squids show up.”
Yul clenched his fists. He led them to the Albatross, holding his tongue.
Goss grunted at what he saw, not liking the look of the charred holes in its outer hull, where the Zikri had forced their way in.
Entering the companionway, the commander frowned at the headless carcass of the Zikri splayed in death. Yul gave it a wide berth. A spray of flesh where the head had exploded had coagulated faster than what Yul thought normal. He looked about, but saw no sign of the dragonfly. Some men stayed to tear off samples of Zikri flesh, fragments of skull, and its slime-drenched tentacles.
“What killed it?” asked Goss’s lieutenant, Xix. “Doesn’t look like blaster fire.”
Goss waved him on. “Who cares? It’s dead.” The commander liked even less the state of the bridge when Yul showed it to him. He considered warning the precious commander and the last eight stragglers of his team about the menace of plants and strange winged crab-like bugs, but thought it wouldn’t matter much to these wordless robots. He knew men like these—soulless automatons, encountered many times, men who followed orders blindly, with fixed impressions in their tiny, programmed brains. No heart there or soul.
They pushed by him one by one, shouldered him out of the way.
Yul grinned, his suspicions confirmed, and a raging heat gathered in his chest.
“You did a number on the bridge,” Goss remarked. He inclined his head, hissing. “I see the casing fragments of our own titanium bombs over there. You blow up our bridge?”
“Well, you know how it goes, Goss—better to go out with a bang when improvising.”
“Clown,” grunted Goss. “We’ll see what Mathias thinks of all this, and how much grinning you’re doing when he cuts your balls off.”
Yul was somewhat surprised, even disappointed, that the dragonfly-crabs hadn’t put in an appearance. But now he was nervous. Where was the bloody thing? There couldn’t be just one. There was never just one. He’d rather know where they were, than discover them cached somewhere, leaping out of some dark shadow and driving a white proboscis through his skull.
His fingers curled about his blaster, his dark eyes darting to the ceiling.
Goss caught the movement and his steel-blue eyes beetled up to follow Yul’s gaze. “Something up there, Vrean? Something you want to tell us about?”
Yul shook his head, looked away.
The men scooped up a few charred ribbed husks in their sample bags, looking about the ruined bridge with unease. All aboard the bridge felt some deadly menace lurking about the blasted spaces.
Goss spoke huskily into his communicator. “The Orb is carrying two V-Z lightfighters. Saw them on the way into the hold. Also some charred, but charming exhibits here on the bridge which might spark your interest.” If it was who Yul thought it was, Goss must be using the Cybernetics Corp ship’s hyperdrive coils as a means to relay the message back through the light years. Goss continued, “A mutilated Zikri in the hall, dozens more in the bridge. Ship’s taken a beating, not skyworthy. Some of the dead seem killed by blaster fire and explosions, others not. Yul here, appears not to have taken much physical damage, or care of your plants.”
Angry words sprayed through the receiver to which Yul was not privy, but seemed to cause Goss mild amusement.
The commander grinned, shook his head with sad emphasis. “Not looking good for you, Vrean.”
Yul looked around sullenly. “Are you happy now? You got what you came for.”
Goss sighed with little patience. “The samples are useless to us, Vrean. Charred, dead. Mathias wanted live ones. As explicitly stated in the contract.”
“
I don’t give a damn about Mathias.” Yul’s fists knotted in fury which was getting the better of him. “Tell him to come down here himself and get his samples.”
“Tell him yourself, Vrean. Don’t jerk me around, I’m warning you. You really don’t want to go that route. What the fuck has gone on here?”
Yul glared at him. The two eyed each other with menace, nose to nose, neither willing to back down.
“You’re coming back with us. The others I could give a flying fuck about. Somebody has to answer for this mess. Looks like you’re the lucky candidate.”
“Not until we get Hurd.”
“The fuck we are!” exploded Goss. “There’s no time. This ship’s a time bomb waiting to go off. Zikri will be all over us like flies on shit.”
A cry issued from behind and Yul caught the sudden movement of a blurred shape, some crablike thing winging its way through the air. One of Goss’s men tagged it with his E1 and it fell crumpling in a charred heap, clicking and rolling. Manta-ray like wings curled up like dried banana peels, with blue smoke coiling up.
Goss tramped over to investigate and peered at the blackened husk with little interest. He trained his weapon. “Bag it, Xix. Don’t kill any more of the things, for shit sakes. Mathias wants live specimens.” His thin lips twisted in a frown. “Doesn’t look like our plant, does it Vrean? What’s going on here? What the hell is this?”
Yul flashed him a sour grin.
The man who had shot it, eagerly tripped forward but accidentally stepped on a pod and cracked it open like an egg. In less than a second, another dragonfly thing flew down from the ceiling, camouflaged, and buried its proboscis in the man’s skull, piercing both helmet and bone.
The man dropped to his knees, clutching his helmet and ear through which the thing had bored. His anguished howl rang throughout the bridge. The sudden assault had spurred a chain reaction in the team which started blasting anything in sight.
Yul sucked in a stunned breath. How had he missed it? The dragonfly had splayed flat against the ceiling; its wings blended in masterfully. No wonder his eyes had glossed over it. He had heard of butterflies and moths changing colour, able to mimic a tree’s mottled bark over a period of years of their evolution, but never in such a short period. How long had it been? Only a few hours? It was incredible.