by Chris Turner
Hresh, in pure terror, the farthest from the melee, backed away, his eyes bulging and his teeth chattering.
“For crap’s sake, they’re everywhere!” cried Yul. “Quick, in here!” He motioned to a side chamber with steel door marked with red, no-access bars.
Hresh grimaced, clutching at Yul’s muscled arm with curled fingers. “No, this way. Try another bay!”
“Why, you miserable shit? You hiding something? Do you want us to get cut down? Inside!” Using his massive strength, he ripped the bar free and shoved the protesting scientist through. Nonas followed with a grunt, pushed the door shut, shouldering Cloye aside. Blood streamed from a wound on his brow. The man was limping from a crippling shot that had penetrated his leg armour.
Yul’s mouth sagged at what he saw.
“I told you not to come in here,” said Hresh.
Yul’s blinking eyes adjusted to the murk and he caught a glimpse of many bathtub-shaped vessels containing deformed heads, twisted limbs, dismembered appendages and naked body parts, all floating in cloudy water—monsters, dwarfs, human, subhuman. It made no difference. The blur was indistinguishable. Bits of metal—racks or plates—were sewn into some of the skulls, and upon their reptilian-spined backs: circuit control boards or implants, from what Yul could deduce. His mind gave up trying to understand. His fists clenched, then he seized Hresh by the shoulders and pulled him close with his iron fingers.
“You miserable hunk of filth. What the hell have you done here?”
Hresh, wincing in pain, spewed spittle from his lips. “You think it’s easy, Vrean? All these ideas? The dead ends I hit, the swamps of hell I wade through everyday?”
“Spare us the violins,” Cloye spat. “You’re a deranged psychopath.”
“Call it what you will,” panted Hresh. “There’s darkness to the places I go. Any visionary must make the plunge, take the risks.”
“No shit,” cried Cloye, slapping his face hard and boxing his ears. She hip-checked him to the ground.
Yul pulled her off him, sucking in a deep breath and casting many uneasy looks around at the cages off to the sides. They contained live specimens from what he could see. “Easy, Cloye, the damage is already done.”
“I don’t care! This reptile should be put down. He obviously used live humans to test drive his horror show.”
The figures in the cages rattled their bars in sudden movement. Yul caught ripples of movements: of human eyes, bare patches of skin, furred fingers, bodies crawling on all fours.
“They were willing subjects and signed waivers,” defended Hresh. He wiped his bloody lip, as he regained his feet.
Cloye tossed her hair. “No fool is gonna sign a waiver for this.”
“We only used their DNA,” stammered Hresh. “To build clones for studies. They’re not real—These weren’t real humans.”
“Says who?” snorted Cloye. “I’m sure they had feelings too, breathed, laughed, thought and shat like anyone else.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. Bold experiments—all failed. Preliminary research to the Biogron, prototyping the neural net to flesh route. I had to be sure. It didn’t work.”
“I should kick your smug ass for what you’ve done, Hresh.”
Nonas looked on in amusement, enjoying the spectacle. “Listen up, children. We’ve got precious minutes to find a way out of here before hostiles swarm in here through that mangled door.”
Hresh glowered in silence. Yul shouted, “Where’s the exit?”
Hresh lifted a finger. “There.” He indicated a darkened alcove at the back of the lab.
Metallic thuds bombarded the door. Cloye and Nonas pushed through the murk.
Yul, in a fit of fury, blasted the locks off the cages of beasts to either side as he passed by. The monsters, raw-fleshed, furred and nightmarishly hued, flowed out of their cages, cringing at the flashes of movement that came bursting through the door. Now they peered in venom, alerted to their new circumstance.
Some cut into their locust attackers with teeth, nails and claws, others went wild and scattered in every direction. Yul was last to reach the exit, leaving the locusts behind to contend with the panicked brood.
Yul caught a glimpse of Nonas’s bewildered expression. The man, blinking and muttering, seemed ignorant of the whole sordid operation. Lucky for him or he would have wasted him along with Hresh right there.
Yul slammed the door shut and pulled down the bar, securing the exit, chest heaving at the thought of abandoning those who were inside as human fodder for the locusts. “How did the locusts track us so quickly?” he demanded.
“Who knows?” Nonas panted. “The bloodsuckers must be swarming all over this warren. The place is infested with their reek. Does it matter?”
“This is bullshit,” cried Cloye, smacking her blaster against the wall. Tinny echoes rebounded up the hall.
“Quiet, or you’ll alert the squids!” said Nonas.
“Let them come. I’ll fucking kill them!”
Nonas shook his head. “Control your wild bird, Vrean, or I’ll clip her wings.”
“Try it,” grunted Cloye.
They scrambled up the corridor, Hresh wheezing and trailing behind. They went skidding left at a T junction.
But they didn’t get far.
Three hulking Zikri stormed out of a side hallway. Hresh groaned in dismay. Like a babbling lunatic, he clambered to stay away from them, knocking over a water dispenser. Nonas, E1 lifted, jerked the man to his feet. Hresh scrabbled up the corridor. Nonas got a shot in, blasted one of their heads off and ran after Hresh.
Yul and Cloye stumbled after, but the two remaining Zikri cut them off. Yul squeezed off a blast, which ricocheted off the first’s armour, stunning it momentarily. But their backs were to the wall and they were forced into an abandoned lab room, desperately backpedalling to avoid those deadly tentacles, spilling beakers and lab equipment as they blundered in.
The second Zikri ducked Cloye’s fire. It charged her and she fell crashing into a table full of electrical equipment, circuits and glass carboys.
A tentacle whipped out, smacked her in the head. She sagged, then fell limp.
Yul roared in fury. He grunted and kicked out a leg at the questing tentacles. With a chitter of triumph, the larger Zikri, a hulking brute with grey, wavering tentacles, charged Yul and bore him back.
Yul swore he could sense a glint of recognition in those pig-like eyes. But that was crazy! This Zikri seemed to target him almost instinctually, as if its chitters were profane announcements of a score to settle.
Yul’s second blast shimmied off the Zikri’s chest armour as the scuttling creature jerked crab-like and set Yul spinning back.
Stupid! He should have aimed for the legs!
His mechanical fingers caught a whipping tentacle before it surrounded his throat. Another slimy appendage looped around his torso, threatening to crush his midsection. The air whooshed out of his lungs. Yul groaned in dismay. Damn, the thing was far stronger than anything he had ever felt before. It was going to rip his body apart.
He twisted left, caught a second motilator that quested to wrap around his head and he tore, wrenched the flapping limb with an unrepressed fury, mashed it to pulp. A grunt from the ugly mouth came burbling and the member hung limp. Yul’s ribcage was near bursting. The Zikri, in pain and rage, whipped a lower motilator around Yul’s throat, choking him.
Yul pulled it off with his strong left hand, gasping for air.
The second Zikri skittered closer and was almost on him, reaching slimy motilators to ravage him from behind.
Cloye, coming out of her daze, jumped in to savage the Zikri’s back with a powerful kick, snapping the thing’s neck. It gave Yul time to fall backward, pulling the first hulking Zikri with him, and flipping the monster over his shoulders to crack on a piece of shattered metal with pointy edges. The Zikri cried out in anguish, its hide punctured by several metal prongs.
Yul grabbed the flailing tentacle and looped
it with triumph over the overhanging bars of the lab table. He pulled the thrashing member down and tied it around the Zikri’s neck in a crooked knot, choking the creature with its own flesh. Yul loosed a savage roar of vindication. The squid twitched, gurgling out noxious fluid from its butt hole of a mouth. Yul grabbed up Cloye and his slimed weapon and staggered for the exit, eager to leave the dead and dying Zikri to their last moments. But a glint of metal beside the choking Zikri caused him to pause.
A queer expression crawled over Yul’s face. One of doubt and astonishment. The gun at the dying Zikri’s side. It was the same as the pain dispenser that Goss had held on him back on Phallanor. How the fuck—? He shook his head in bafflement. There was no way that it could have gotten in the hands of a Zikri. Or was there? The implication was staggering. It could explain how the Zikri had tracked them here. These squid-lowlifes got hold of Mathias’s pain distributor. But what about the Mentera?
Yul’s head swam with the possibilities. They only made his head reel with more throbbing pain. He took his boot heel to the weapon, smashing it to bits.
The voice came over the loudspeaker: “Danger. Air breach. Lockdown in progress. Contamination warning.” The female emergency recording droned on. Red lights flashed in the corridor, bathing the white-washed halls in a blood-pulsing glow.
“Are you okay?” Yul rasped.
“I’ll live.” Cloye gripped her elbow with trembling fingers. A welter of bruises covered the space from throat to mid collarbone where the plant ring had gripped her. “Let’s catch up to those cowards, Hresh and Nonas, teach them a lesson.”
“Forget them. We’re on our own now.”
“Your head’s all banged up,” she said, reaching up a hand to his forehead where it was all red and raw.
Yul winced. A goose egg was forming nicely on his left temple. His right leg was gashed and swollen and his hip throbbed. “A rib or two feels cracked. Otherwise I’ll live.”
“How do we get out of here?” murmured Cloye. “I’ve lost track of direction. Hresh and his bodyguard are the only ones who know this place.”
Cloye’s eyes travelled to the tiled floor. Yul admired what he saw, the round curve of her full breasts, her slender waist, firm bulge of hips. “Well, there’s one of their blood trails. If we really want to find our weasels then we follow, catch up with them and get out of this rat’s maze.” She whipped back her tawny hair like a defiant cat. Clenching blaster in blood-caked fingers, she whirled to face him, studying the keen interest in his dark eyes, a fierce light shining in her own.
Yul grunted and slapped a fist in his palm. “I’m up for some more ball-busting, if you are.”
Chapter 9
Yul and Cloye slunk like wolves down the hall, blasters gripped in both hands. They passed broken bodies of Zikri and Mentera, tentacles burnt, or with claws and heads singed, smoking or sheared off. A fine job of trailblazing, Nonas, thought Yul. The man had skill.
They caught up with Hresh and Nonas at the air lock to the hangar. Hresh, rubbing his temples, pacing in tight circles, looked out from a face blackened, his bare arms scored with burns. Nonas peered miserably through the glass that provided a view of the parked ships and an open hole blasted in the domed roof. Yul bored eyes into him.
Nonas turned to glare. “I had to look after Hresh.”
“Sure, it makes perfect sense.”
“Look, he was scrambling up the tunnel. Lucky I came after him, otherwise he would have been rat bait, wouldn’t you, Hresh? Three of those squids were up there skulking like bloodhounds. They’re in squidy heaven now. Always moving in packs of three, these squid-slugs.”
“Makes perfect sense,” Yul repeated, deadpan.
“Let’s shut the small talk, you dull fucks,” growled Cloye. “We need to find a way out of this mess.”
Yul smiled facetiously and bowed. “After you, Princess Cloye. Spoken like a true lady.”
Nonas smirked. “Wish you two had have been here. Couple of roughnecks like you would have made short work of those squids.”
“Yeah, what’s your story?” muttered Yul, looking on the man’s wounds and blackened, blood-streaked face.
“The Zikri started throwing pressure caps at us. One of them, I managed to chuck back. The other, I was a little late.” He grinned, a wide gap showing where two of his front teeth were missing.
“Tough break. Some people just don’t have any luck.”
“Yeah, I thought so too.”
“How is that all the halls aren’t flooded with toxic air?” snapped Cloye.
Hresh waved a hand. “There’s an automated airlock in section E that seals the lab areas in case of accidental breach.”
“But the squids don’t seem to have blown those yet,” added Nonas.
The recorded voice droned on, “Danger. Hangar 1 is flooded with high sulphur dioxide levels. Repeat, danger! All personnel in the vicinity report to evacuation chambers. This is not a drill. Repeat. Not a drill.”
“Shut up, you stupid—” groaned Cloye.
The robotized female voice continued to drone and Yul grinned.
“Great, now what are we going to do?” Cloye hefted her E6.
Yul pushed Nonas aside and looked through the glass. Locust ships amassed in the air, slipping through the cracked dome. Wrecked ships and mechnobots, dead bodies, human and various types of alien, lay strewn across the tarmac. A massive Orb had landed in the middle of the hangar and several Mentera craft ranged beside it. A smaller one with beams lit up the air, and a medium-sized Orb lay ruined beside it, with a gaping hole in its side. Hresh’s terraformers and three other lighter ships lay to the side, seeming as of yet undamaged. Locusts milled about in black pressure suits, pincers outstretched while the Zikri roamed, garbed in light air masks, leaving the rest of their ropy masses of skin exposed.
“Well, the ships are good news,” said Yul, eyeing the intact vessels.
Hresh hitched himself forward with excitement, lifting a finger. “That’s my V6 lightcraft over there. If we can make it—”
“We’ve got to suit up first.” Yul pushed him aside. “Make for that ship, or those ships.”
“It’s a battleground out there,” murmured Nonas. “Are you up for it?”
“Any better ideas? It’ll be a battleground here too pretty soon.”
They grabbed suits from the emergency dispenser to the side of the airlock. Yul checked Cloye’s oxygen level after she had suited up. It was at 90%. They tuned their radio frequencies to each other, as it would be a challenge to get there.
Hresh entered the security code override in the wall monitor and Yul pulled the air lock open and fingered his blaster. A flood of poisonous air whooshed into the chamber, nearly knocking Cloye and the others off their feet.
Yul wasted no time. He herded the others toward Hresh’s light craft and ran ahead with Nonas to engage the enemy.
Mentera scouts stirred at the first glint of movement and lifted their lumo sticks. Green flares arched their way. Yul ducked low, blasting Zikri stragglers that glided by as he ran. The aliens exploded in splatters of blood and guts, air masks disintegrating. He plunged on, scrambling past the landed Orb, ducking stray locust fire.
Tentacled figures clutched captured humans, the remnants of Hresh’s research team, heading to the open cargo bay of the landed Orb. Locusts with lumo sticks oversaw the operation. The gruesome scene brought chills to Yul’s spine. The victims were herded in with slimy appendages. Lost. No way to rescue them. To storm that stronghold was suicide, one or two against hundreds, with armed ships about. As much as he would have loved to blast those aliens to atoms, he had others to think about.
It would take them two minutes to reach Hresh’s V6, he calculated. Should it be a seamless entry, they could be airborne in as little as a minute. Hope flared in Yul’s chest.
A whirring sound whined overhead.
He craned his neck. What the hell was that? Hresh’s invention? No, It couldn’t be! The A13. How did it get in
the air?
Like the butterfly in the lab on Phallanor, the A13’s outerbody had formed wings, which now flapped with fury to propel it airborne. Much like the hybrids Yul remembered back on the Orb on Phebis, this one was equally disturbing.
Yul gazed on it with awe, Hresh, no less. He halted to grunt at his brainchild with pride.
The landed Orb, distracted by the mechnobot’s sudden appearance in the air, trained its guns on the A13.
Yul cursed and ran across the debris-littered tarmac. “Hurry, you idiot,” he called after Hresh through the com, “more Orbs and aphid fighters will be coming any second.”
Hresh’s sudden euphoria vaporized as he gazed on with tear-filled eyes at the ruin of his enterprise. “What a stupid waste!”
“Quit your bellyaching,” muttered Cloye, clipping him on the back of his helmet and shuttling him along. “You’ve got the entry codes to the ship, or I’d leave your miserable hide behind.”
Two of the Mentera ships, the ones shaped like bloated mantises, took to the air, treating the A13 as a visible threat. The landed Orb rocked upward, and was powering up its ion cannons. The aphid ships loosed photon fire, but the flying A13 deflected the blasts off its titanium exterior.
How it survived that battery of assaults, Yul couldn’t fathom. A massive torpedo launched from the Orb trailing a red flare, burst through the armadillo’s armour, penetrating the Biogron, cracking the glass and releasing the vacuum. The thing collapsed with a sizzle, and Hresh groaned as his magnificent machine crashed down from the sky into the litter of bodies and debris.