by Chris Turner
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 a 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 followed Miko through the plates 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 three more of them. One was glowing with a greenish light, or he imagined it glowed, and it hummed with the same ominous beat, but he couldn’t quite be sure. As his vision greyed, approaching oblivion, he clawed his way between the alien plate 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 and crackles of energy buzzed from someplace within.
Instantly he came crashing back into his body, senses reeling, limbs shaking with pain. Shaking the daze out of his head, he found his crumpled body lying between two parallel plates similar to those back in the bunker on a world far away. Five more sets of parallel plates loomed in a row beside the one in which he sprawled. His skin prickled with fear.
The dim light bathing 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? The odour 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!
Back he was thrust into his body. Arcs of pain shot through his arms and legs. Blood-caked, his garments shredded, his skin lacerated... He must be dreaming...
But no... Pain had him crawling 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 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, Miko clutched the handle of his weapon. Fingers quivering, 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: it was sinister technology that could whisk him off to some other strange, new, violent world. He moved forward like a phantom, deeper into the chamber.
Suddenly he felt movement in the stillness. Machinery? Aliens? A strange hum permeated the air, like the droning of hornets.
Humid vapours brushed his cheek. Surprisingly fresh and breathable, they were 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 told him otherwise...the bite of the wark 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 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 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: the creature was larger and whiter than any owl he had ever seen, with sparse feathers, and pocked flesh, showing where the feathers had been plucked.
Miko clutched at the wall, dizzy with confusion, struggling for support.
The locust beings gripped instruments similar to those hanging from the pillars on Rogos. And these creatures sawed away—oblivious to his presence.
The owl gave a mournful hoot, still alive, struggling to get away from the invasive incisions as the locusts inserted electrical implants. But it could not. He backed away a step, unable to control his revulsion, feeling the bile back up his throat. The creatures still had not seen him.
The rip of flesh filled the air as an excision tool hacked off a wing. Then an anguished hooting and a satisfied chitter from the head of the lead locust.
A mechnobot in the shape of a shin-high aphid rushed along the floor with coloured lights blinking on its front faceplate. On its back it carried a tube, like one of the upright canisters 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 canister to the table. It tossed the owl’s wings 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 ceramic crystal with wires and circuitry bulging from its curved surface they inserted tightly into the top.
So, the butchers 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 these experiments. Off to the sides four more canisters stood like the one that held the mutilated owl. Each vessel contained a different specimen immersed in liquid. 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 own research? Torture, for science’s sake?
From the stopper of each container to the floor dangled a flexible cord, the purpose of which baffled Miko.
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 these locust keepers to retain such exhibits?
Miko rubbed his aching wounds. The disturbing images had a heavy lump growing in his throat. 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. The place was a stinking slaughterhouse.
Like the laboratory on Rogos, this chamber was without doubt the p
roduct of the same advanced species. But while that lab had been abandoned long ago, this was in full swing with grisly activity.
But the devices that linked these chilling 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 and a chitter rang out. The locusts bounded forward on hind legs.
The amalgamator hummed to life. In 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. It coalesced 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.
The alien’s 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. From one amalgamator to another she must have crawled like a shipwrecked sailor, following the trail of his own blood. The right combination she had chosen to reach this bizarre, violent world. Very clever of her…and unfortunate for him.
The first locust butcher came clacking over on bent legs, somewhere tripping an alarm.
That was a mistake.
The encased owl crashed from its grip as Audra smashed into it with her tentacles twitching. The mutilated owl pecked its way from the glass; painfully it hopped away, upsetting one of the locusts which had intended to impale Miko with its lancing pincer.
Miko jerked back in dismay. He grabbed one of the mechnobots and hurled it at the locust. The keen upper edge bit deep, carving a gash across the thing’s carapace. The creature 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 mandibles and irate screeches of alien sound.
Miko fought with blind ferocity. Two at once charged him and he lay in with pipe and scalpel. He shielded himself from their pincers, slashing with furor and parrying. His prior training at boot camp flooded back in rigorous bursts. To become one of the elite force of NAVO pilots, he had to endure the most excruciating of high altitude conditions, lack of water, food. He dodged pincers, shrieked in defiance as more of the 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. 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. He slashed 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 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 menacing him. He lopped off a pincer and in a last frenzied swing, used the scalpel to nearly decapitate the thing. Backward it lurched, 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. Like their own it fought, but with a crimson glob of slick gum pasted on its skull like a brand. With haste it crawled away, before jerking to its knees, clicking its mandibles. It turned to study Miko with intense scrutiny for a moment then scanned the chaotic scene with dispassionate, crimson eyes. It seemed to come to some decision then 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 its attacker. But it 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. A stream of gnashing locusts drove through the opening in the chamber, thwarting him, surely alerted by the alarm and the sounds of skirmish.
These brutes had some blue silky material draped on their fronts, some kind of shield or body armour, and they clutched luminous javelin weapons in clacking pincers. Blue rays shot out from their stick-like weapons, narrowly missing him but spraying 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 crusted pincers. He caught the movement of 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 fluid being poured into a funnel to fill the container. They upended him into the tube and he choked on the warm, chemical wash. He blinked back tears, mouthed bubbly screams as the foul, greenish-coloured liquid stung his eyes and had him fighting 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. His ankle felt only a dull ache.
His body suddenly blinked out of existence. Bzt! The electrical surge struck 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 give a peculiar convulsion, 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. 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 must have somehow impregnated her with its thrusts and jabs on her generative organ, and now its spawn swarmed over her body like witchlings. They barely had the semblance of their narwhal progenitor, with the obscene crossbreeding that had occurred. 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 locusts jerked back in surprise as the birthlings leapt from Audra onto their attackers’ faces, ravaging them with their sharp tusks, plunging tentacles through their eyes. Audra was granted an instant reprieve.
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 vicious desperation. Her tentacles wrapped about everything in sight. Locust necks snapped like twigs.
As she staggered back, she collided with Miko’s canister and the vessel toppled and green liquid spewed out. Coughing and choking, Miko kicked the broken shards away. He rolled free, inching his way along the cold, plated floor, gasping for air. 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, he caught a flash of a red-banded skull. The locust who had helped him, the ally, dove into the dark pool to the side and disappeared below the surface. Locust guards jumped in after it.
It was all a blur. Miko shook out the haze just as a blue glow from an enemy weapon sparked his way and he looked again into the maw of death.
<
br /> Scenes from his life flashed before his eyes. Of training on Altair 6. His childhood on Sileron. 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 teeth. 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 in horrible ways, 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, 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. He 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 either!
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 he was surrounded by dozens of foes and they turned on him. 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 like insubstantial stuff, as if their bodies were made of mist. But in reality, it was he who was made of air.