by Chris Turner
He ducked out of the low oval of the side door. On he staggered like a drunk down the wide corridor. Was this what it was like to be dead?
Or a spirit.
Or neither?
His most recent memory of Audra burned in his mind’s eye—enslaved though he had been in pale green fluid. She had saved him, perhaps inadvertently, attacking the locusts to give him a diversion. As had the red-banded outcast. If not for her and the mysterious ally, he would have been dead, or looking out from a glass prison.
No time to ponder. The invisibility could wear off any second, leaving him prey to these fiends.
Groups of them shuffled by in the outside corridor. Long, gangly insectoid things walking on grasshopper-like legs, hunched slightly forward. He shuddered at their physical grotesqueness: their pincers on the end of short, tyrannosaurus-like forepaws clicking like the insects on earth. Incisors knifed down from both corners of their bullet-like mouths.
The creatures passed right through him, as if he were nothing more than ether. Examining them now, for the hundredth time, he grew even more repulsed.
He moved without effort on unmoving legs. It was not his legs that moved, but his exercise of will. He had no legs.
Bzt.
Back in his body. All the aches and pain of a wracked man came for an instant, then subsided as if they’d never been. Electrical spatter buzzed around his frame, and burnt feather odour lingered in the space where his body would have been. He was strobing in and out, flickering like a candle.
The walls were plated of hard hexagons, about a foot square. The ceiling was gridded with the same plates, thrusting low, no more than a foot overhead. Strange yellowish algae grew from the walls at places, dangling like hanging moss.
Miko drifted by more of the tube prisons set against the wall and watched as locusts would curiously wire themselves up to a ghoulish canister, attaching a cord to their bellies that hung from the stopper of the tube. He waited until he went astral and glided forward to investigate. One stood now not four feet away, aside a liquid-filled glass tube containing a repugnant, squid-like crustacean. The pair stood there rapt, intent, the locust as if recharging; Miko stared, transfixed with curiosity. The water would sometimes glow, then it would flare an unwholesome deep green. The creature confined within would twitch or shudder, and then the locust would chitter or chirp in a satisfied way.
Rapture?
While Miko watched, the locust’s eyes fluttered shut as the abominable waters in the tube churned, or a bubble exuded from the lips of the imprisoned creature, its face a mask of wretched anguish.
It was more than he could stomach and he sagged back, numbed but wary. What diabolic bio-plasmic essence passed from tube to host?
He passed more of the grotesque victims suspended in their vessels: proto apes, human-like, but scaled or furred, some similar to the simian race he had glimpsed briefly on Rogos.
Miko glided ahead. Visibility was fast returning.
Bzt.
When he became fully visible, he drew back, his breath coming in dry rasps. The grime and blood had all washed away. The ankle where the wark had bitten him had ceased to throb, likewise the ache in his ribs where a locust claw had dragged across his middle. The locust water had healed him—or was it the transformation to a ghost? He thought not, remembering his anguished crawl from amalgamator to amalgamator upon entering this locust world.
A checkpoint ranged ahead. Locusts teemed about the enclosure, with the guards bearing lumo-javelins. Day-to-day locusts streamed in and out past a glass partition with wire edges. Each showed a luminous badge or circuitry pad of some obvious significance before a lit monitor. Miko ducked back into an interconnecting hall. Had he been seen? He heard a droning cry and the clatter of insect feet. He had barely escaped the laser fire of a security team before his body blipped out of existence again. He muttered a mental prayer and made good speed away from continuing pursuit, the last of their excited babble fading from earshot as they searched for a nonexistent quarry. These locusts clutched weapons in pincer-like claws similar to those that had zapped Audra back in the laboratory.
Miko backpedalled, ducking into a side corridor. The passage was clear. Crackles, buzzes echoed in the locust corridor. Before his invisibility failed, he passed through the wall like a knife through soft butter, only to enter into another hallway. Seconds ago he had passed through an insulated wall riddled with wires and circuitry. What was this secured place? It didn’t seem like any bunker, or shelter or locust colony. He felt as if he traversed through some giant machine.
The corridor supported a conveyor system like the ancient airports on earth.
He gave this conveyor treadmill wide berth. The last thing he wanted was to flicker back to bodily form in the midst of these hostile insectoids.
Mechnobots roamed everywhere, carrying out multifarious tasks.
The floor opened before his feet—a translucent portal or some viewing window that stretched for fifty feet before merging back into plated material. Below him locusts and mechnobots worked side by side, their pincers and mechanical cranes lifted to bolt machine parts while others wired and welded them.
A production line.
Miko shook his head with wonder. Safe for the moment, he stared long at the industrious locust society before he turned back to the mystery of his invisibility. What laws of physics enabled him to blink in and out? What precipitated the flux? He suspected his journey by amalgamator had contributed to his abnormal ability. Had that first amalgamator device, unused and antiquated for so long, malfunctioned? But why did Audra then not experience the same invisibility? He hadn’t observed her for long, but if it were true, maybe something in her genetic structure inhibited the side effect.
He forced his mind back to more practical concerns. He looked through the floor and realized he must be in some base, but a bunker? He shook his head. An underground research facility? It seemed too large, and tied in with some type of barbaric production. Some purpose that filled him with horror, and he was trapped here billions of miles from his home world.
He could easily evade their security nets while being invisible, but when he zapped back into his body... Miko guessed the butchers in the labs were focussed on the immediate area around the facility, so he was safe for the moment in other parts of the complex.
Hurrying down the endless corridors, he made progress, or glided with purpose while the astral power remained, sometimes snaking around hairpin corners. He passed through walls like electron particles.
* * *
Back in the laboratory, Audra looked out from her tank with an expression bordering on venomous. She was alive, but barely. More birthlings were growing in her. She could feel them stirring under her skin like maggots. Loathsome creatures. Spawn fathered by the fecund swordfish creature. At least something for her to eat.
These locusts’ intelligence was inferior to hers. True, they had captured her, but theirs was only a temporary victory. One of the creatures would slip up—and when it did...she would not be lenient, or so naive and unprepared as before. It was only because of the cursed narwhal spawn that she had been taken anyway.
As for the human, Miko—a flutter of mixed emotions rose in her breast. The creature had shown no gratitude for the service she had granted. He would have been killed, or permanently bottled had she not intervened. True, to save her own skin, she had acted.
Likely her human mate would be captured by the fiends before long, and this possibility irked her. The thought of him, like her, also encased in a tube, the life essence continually siphoned out of him, was repugnant. She was robust, able to handle the rigour, but he was weak. How easily they had caught him and trapped him like a fly in a bottle.
Audra came as close to a sigh as she ever would.
Foolish human! Angst pulsed from her consciousness, rippling out through the water. Her tentacles swept out and battered against the glass.
Locust heads turned, then refocused on their work.
The wounds from the wolf-terrors back on Rogos had been almost enough to keep her from fighting, and now these insectoids had scratched her with their crude instruments and burned her with their lasers. No matter. The liquid in which she was immersed was helping her heal. She could feel revitalizing pulsations. There would be blood to pay in the time to come—by all.
Audra ceased her pounding, letting her tentacles droop to her sides. One of the more primitive creatures paused before the glass and stared at her with its glassy globular eyes, as if divining what she was thinking. It was smaller, weaker, even more repulsive-looking than the others, with a pale, sickly aqua-hued carapace and drooping antennae. A bubble rippled from Audra’s polyp of a mouth. She was not in a stupor like the two other slaves on either side of her that floated in their tubes, goggle-eyed.
What was this miniature creature’s next move? She narrowed her smudges of eyes in crafty inspection. The locust reached a claw-pincer for the tube that dangled down the side of her tank.
Audra watched enthralled. She waited as the creature affixed the end to its navel and began feeding on her essence. She felt a tingling in her nerve ends as life force was drained out of her. In vindictive wrath, she set to work on the possibility of escape.
Her gaze caught the glowing amber plates arrayed at the far end of the room. It was through these devices that she had come into this hateful world. The portal mechanism...interesting, ingenious. Even scientists on her world would flutter their tentacles; they had not such science. Doubtless a stolen technology. She knew all about piracy, being a grushruk. How would the human’s primitive mind term it? A plunderer. She recalled with satisfaction the delight of capturing the NAVO stealth VR ship that Miko piloted, the one which she had commandeered for her own purposes, despite the displeasure of her superiors. So many races, like Miko’s, had developed clever innovations, despite their undeveloped brains and backward technology.
The insect creatures’ research science, though, was laughingly primitive. Carving off limbs, then slapping living entities in noisome fluids... It smacked of butchers’ work on her home world.
A team worked at the table in the centre of the room, piled high with guts and gore. Creature after creature were borne in on the backs of the mechnobots, writhing and squealing, unstrapped and lifted onto the table, while the locusts worked with efficiency. Never had she witnessed such a variety of organisms. The insects had evidently invaded and inhabited many worlds and had some means of transporting themselves to and from their respective environments on their habitable worlds. A veritable parasite network. How their hub had once connected to Rogos was beyond her. Apart from the fact that it was still operable after so many ages and she and the human had passed through it. A pity. Rogos would have been a perfect haven to settle down with the human who could give her endless pleasures.
A new locust arrived and reached pincer to unhook the hose from the feeder’s navel and the aqua-coloured creature hunched before Audra, sated. The second locust swiftly inserted the tube into its own abdomen and began to feed.
A stir grew in Audra’s belly—premature birthlings rose and fell inside her. She convulsed.
The vestiges of a smile crawled over Audra’s face. Her tentacles fluttered in response to the birth pangs, like the streamers of a jellyfish. The birthlings would not tolerate the confinement for long. The enclosure was too small. The young would rebel and fight tooth and nail to escape their cage. Or, the insects would have to open the tank to relieve the pressure. Her abdomen swelled and she quivered in anguish as a seal-like thing surged under her skin like a predacious worm.
The locust creature that was feeding, jerked and tore the wire from its belly, clearly in pain. The others working at the table wheeled about.
She grinned. Easy to absorb the seal-like things and ingest them back into her, but these little horrors could perhaps work to her advantage. The locusts had not thought the situation through. Two of the insects clacked over, forceps and calibres clutched in flesh-dripping pincers, and they fiddled with the wire-to-stopper mechanism.
A stir of glee fluttered in Audra’s breast, but she rejoiced all the more when the stopper unlatched and the water began to roil and foam with an ominous possibility at escape.
* * *
Miko cut his way through a band of fiends that had caught sight of his flickering figure and had taken pursuit. His half-invisibility had hindered and helped at the same time: on one hand it allowed him to sneak up on their hunching forms at a point before his body blinked back to visibility, on another, it hindered him when the annoying crackle and stench of electrical discharge had given his location away. The scalpel had done its grisly work. He hid the bodies in a garbage chute, kicked away what dark blood he could from the floor, then wiped his boots on the corpses before his visibility finally slipped away. He pushed through the opposite wall, using his bodiless will, then descended to a lower level of the compound, or whatever that was. He could not keep up this hide-and-seek game forever. Sooner or later the insects would catch him, either his being one second too slow, or a searing ray ripping into his vitals.
The walls in this section were richly woven with odd symbols: what looked like insectoid skulls surrounded by wavy lines and stars and crosses. The patterns shimmered in his eyes, and made his head swim. A huge locust head peered down upon all, in full carved relief—like some god. This section seemed excessively secured, with electric trip wires and security posts stationed everywhere. The place reeked of hostility. Every symbol, every cross feature hinted of locust supremacy.
Audra’s rough handling had not killed him thus far, so surely a few alien skulls and parasitic gods would not unnerve him.
Miko had an ominous feeling that there were more hideous surprises waiting around the corner.
He found himself in a vast echoing chamber, interminably high. It rose into plum-grey shadows like a dark cathedral. Bzt. He was back in his body again—with no pain from previous wounds.
He looked up into the dim haze as a low hum filled the air. Mournful. Sinister. Vibrations of unknown source. He stalked forward, emboldened by his recent kills. He felt he had reached the centre of the compound, for the size of the auditorium astounded him, as if he were walking in the lair of some bio-mechanic god.
Lights showed ahead, tiny twinkles and shadows that teased his imagination as they stretched to infinity. A small movement caught his eye—a fan of pinprick light rising to the ceiling far overhead. On both sides, levels or bays rose with piping and scaffolding: and stairs gave locusts access to the bewildering structure. He swallowed hard as he saw heads embedded in the weave—animal-like, human-like, of every genus and species imaginable. Each gory member could be reached from the access ramps connecting to the scaffolding above. Miko was on the very bottom.
A chill horror rippled through his heart.
On a high landing the flit of locust pincers caught his attention, a glint against the plum-grey gloom. Or perhaps it was the sharp cutting edge of a metallic instrument? Miko quieted his approach. His feet were still driven on by a morbid curiosity. He stopped with a jerk and slumped to his knees, his muscles going slack. Before him a gigantic web of heads strung as far as the eye could see. An abominable lattice, some shimmering collective body of tortured souls, stitched together with some obscene, glistening plasma. The wall of heads rose like an impossible lake of quivering, molten quicksilver, for the beings with the heads were still alive, their features animated, their heads victim of a ghoulish rhythm.
How many souls had these murdering fiends ripped from their lives and stolen from uncountable worlds? On raids to all corners of the galaxy to create this monstrous tapestry? For what sinister purpose?
Some sick art form? Miko’s being quailed at the possibilities. Certainly not for feeding—there were no signs of containers here.
He felt the familiar tug tickle at his chest. Audra was calling. That bond with her had never diminished, even though he had cut himself loose from her gelatin
ous flesh some weeks ago.
He stared at the abominable lattice and thought of the sheer improbability of its existence, how he had escaped thus far from similar hellish fate. This destiny would have been his had he not escaped from the laboratory. It was Audra’s fate too. That bittersweet feeling clutched at his soul, like a craving for a drug that would never go away. The Zikri had saved him just recently. So long had he been joined to her that he could feel the attachment like a parasitic tendril. Could he just leave her to die, become part of this sinister web? He crawled through these thoughts and the hostility and aversion flared up in him with squeamish urgency.
Not far out of his reach, Miko heard a silent whisper: akin to a gibbering plea. One of the human heads entwined in the web called to him. It was only the head and shoulders that wallowed in that greasy, plasmic filth; the rest of the body was missing. Where could it have gone? Perhaps hidden underneath those slimy layers?
But how could the head survive, knitted together with the other appendages—ape heads, crustaceans, animals, insectoid skulls, many other unclassifiable things? Part of the otherworldly science of these ghouls?
In rage and desperation, Miko reached up and hacked the member free from its sticky gum. The head fell with a sick thud and seemed to babble words in an unknown tongue before its life blinked out. The tongue lolled and the being died like so many others before it. But the look on its face was one of gratitude.
Miko turned his head. Whatever the words had been, they were not decipherable to his ears.
This creature had been female. He felt a further black despair grip him and send the blood hammering in his temples.
The lights dimmed; a low throbbing thickened the air, and now a disquieting rumble cascaded throughout the bay.
What had he done?
Alerted the locust keepers? He scrambled back through the shadows, cursing himself for his defiance. His skin lay bathed in the eerie, prune-grey glow. While his body flickered in and out, the clacking of insect claws on metal came from above, ever closer. They would hunt him down forever!