by Chris Turner
The Zikri gave a wild screech.
“Don’t kill her!” shrieked Miko, hurtling forward. He shook his head with dismay, not quite knowing why he had blurted that out or had been moved to such intense emotion. He pulled the Empress down as air blasts from B & D’s guards whooshed by her head. The rich purple flare ricocheted off control pipes and grids and zapped off catwalks as B & D’s guard readied for another round.
Audra launched herself at B & D, tentacles latching onto Beardly’s neck.
Miko heard a sickening snap. Drek whipped an air gun up, firing wildly, perhaps symbiotically feeling Beardly’s pain. But the bright blast only scored Audra’s dark, polyped flesh. Another deadly, stinging tentacle snaked out, knocking Drek’s weapon free. He savaged the Zikri monster with his free hand, his inhumanly strong fingers and nails ripping into spongy flesh. But that too was restrained as auxiliary tentacles wrapped and slimed around him. Dragar’s men stood speechless, paralyzed with fear.
Audra encompassed the helpless two-headed mutant. Her fibrous, muscle tissue worked over the two torsos, pulsing and pumping, glowing with a hideous greyish and black strength. It rolled over human flesh, kneading it like pie dough.
As the folds enveloped Beardly’s frontal lobe, the skin sagged and sizzled. Her facial features dissolved like a sandcastle washed by beach surf. It was hard to distinguish whose face belonged to whom in that chaotic jumble of moving, writhing flesh. Crunching sounds echoed in the chamber, and for a moment all present in the dimness stood still.
Sket gave a heart-wrenching cry. Miko heard and stood puzzled, then remembered the truth about the man’s family and all Drek’s dark secrets died within that skull and shrivelled husk of a body.
“Ugh, enough,” moaned Star. “Can we not get out of here?”
Sket, bleeding from a dozen wounds, grunted in agreement, as did Fenli.
Men fell shrieking and smoking as Audra finished her dirty work. She tossed aside the remains of B & D’s corpse. The outcasts cut at her tentacles but she slapped them away and pulled man after man into her foul body. The enemy fled in vain, those who had dared harm Miko throwing hands up in defeat while she shrieked through her horrid gullet, a chittering whine that cast terror in men’s souls.
Miko snatched up a blaster from the hand of a dead guard. He cursed, realizing the mechanism had jammed. One of Murlag’s sword-wielding brutes lunged at him, but Miko twisted aside and rapped the blunt end of the pistol against the man’s skull. “Quick!” he yelled at Star, kicking the stunned enemy to the ground.
Star gaped. “I saw you go down, how—?”
“It was somebody else. Quickly!”
More of the enemy, including Dragar’s contingent, rushed in. Screams of the hurt and dying were all around Miko. Sket swore. “Down this way. The unexplored tunnel. They’ll swarm us and we’ll all be killed! Stay, and regret your choice.”
Fenli paused, confused by the mayhem, the rays of death and screams.
“Fenli, move! Do you want your eyes clawed out?” Sket shoved him, even as a metallic shape loomed overhead. The man was in shock.
Now more of B & D’s militia, arriving on the heels of Dragar’s forces, brought a rain of blaster fire upon anything they perceived as a threat. Audra retreated behind fallen boxes of circuitry and pumping equipment.
Usk was nowhere in sight. In a moment of grief, Miko assumed the valiant locust had been cut down.
The dark and cramped tunnel proved a dead end. Rough walls, hewn by old mining equipment, ended in a sheer wall. They were trapped. Sket slammed down his sword. Miko groaned, a grimace of frustration curdling his features. They retraced their steps back into the cavern, hobbling and staggering, resolved to fight the renegades rather than be caught here and slaughtered like helpless sheep.
Another explosion wracked the cavern, this one far louder, coming from the tunnel behind them. Skullroxers? From the direction of the blast came the patter of booted feet. Helmed and fully-armed troops unleashed electro fire in a fury upon B & D’s guard and the outcasts who fought with them.
Miko recognized the voice of the stocky man who boomed orders—Zaul.
The Jakru—Zaul’s men!
One of their blasts hit the main pipe. The metal ruptured under a force of ionizing implosion. Murky water sprayed everywhere, turning it into a slippery mess. Fishy creatures spewed across the concrete and islands of fallen bodies were suddenly afloat. Creatures swam, others slid; an octopus groped its way with splayed tentacles. Turtles waddled, large and small, and mid-sized encephalapods with star-shaped bodies showing fangs and spiky bristles, wormed their way through the gushing water.
A Jakru soldier shouted triumphantly, recognizing the lone figure of the Empress who swayed near the surface car. He and others rushed toward Lexia, slipping and sliding in the slime and foul liquid, dodging tentacles and fire. One removed his coat to cover her near-nudity. A hawkbot swooped from on high, raining searing rays from its eyes, killing three in one blast. The Jakru shot it out of the air as if it were a pigeon target and as it fell, it crushed two soldiers and one of Dragar’s men.
Lexia screamed; her hoarse voice yelled imperious orders despite her fragile state.
Dragar motioned to his men. They fled back down the chamber, leaving behind this crypt of death, braving the jumble of debris and fallen machinery strewn throughout the confines beyond. The perilous catwalks were prey to laser fire. Dragar halted, perhaps realizing that he was a dead man. Outnumbered and outgunned, he and a few survivors of his elite guard piled into the waiting surface car.
Miko winced wryly. Now that Murlag had been slain, doubtless Dragar would pick up the pieces and become the next outcast gangster-chief. The car hummed over the tangle of bodies, wreckage and twisted metal, banking along the ceiling pipes back toward the hall of the dead.
The guards of the late Drek and Beardly continued to battle the Jakru, driven to insane frenzy now that their master was dead. Audra stood, blinking on the sidelines, shielded under a twisted catwalk, loath to enter the line of fire. Her body leaked fluid from a hundred places. She jerked forward, twitching with the urge to reach Miko, but halted as a spray of fire sizzled a spongy anemone sprawled at her feet. The thing twisted and shrivelled in its death throes. Her polyp of a mouth quivered in vexation. Already she had accrued significant wounds; her pulse beat weakly.
A contingent of Zaul’s men rounded up Miko and the others and shoved them along toward the Empress.
The big man waved his cruel blaster. “I’ll kill all these worms, Empress—especially this insect—” he aimed his lethal firearm at Usk, who had suddenly popped up from under a fallen circuit panel. Miko thrust himself between the locust and the line of fire.
“No, let them live!” Lexia cried. “Even the locust. I’ll question them later. Take them with us, Zaul—all of them!”
Zaul shook his head in fury. The colonel, an overbearing man with an elaborate, scrolled helm, red and gold medals, arms thick with muscles and badges, eyed the rebels with little trust. “I disagree, Empress, but as you wish. Come on, you rogues!” He shoved Miko and the others along, slapping the defunct pistol out of Miko’s hand.
Guards fell in behind to herd the rebels toward the far tunnel where the intake pipe lay. Miko counted five of them left: Star, Sket, Usk, Berlast and Fenli. Another hawkbot fell in a blazing ruin, its eyes leaking fire and spitting weak laser beams. The mixed company dodged the sporadic rays, hopped over the bodies, slogging through the inches of foul water streaming from the pipe and pooling at their feet.
They were not fifty yards along when a massive shelled reptile, some sea crustacean, reared and seized a Jakru soldier by the helm, armour and all and dragged him down.
“Move along!” Zaul fired on the gobbling thing, blasting it to a smoking ruin, leaving the unlucky soldier a grisly heap, somewhere underneath.
Through the crude-cut stone tunnel, they shambled on, following the three pipes running along the ground. They wended their way throu
gh the mass of blasted stone while echoes of mayhem faded behind them. Miko gaped at the jagged ruin of what was once a tall stone wall, effectively sealing the filtration plant from the rest of the complex. A smouldering ruin of shattered blocks lay strewn like a war zone’s. The pipes which had gone through the wall, were blackened and scored from the Jakru blast, but still remained intact.
Out of the cavern they stumbled, into the daylight of Demen II, onto a ledge that overlooked the desert. The open air and endless vista was an overwhelming sight. The bright light pained Miko’s eyes. He tensed a moment, not knowing that he crouched on the very ledge where Audra had contemplated the same closed steel door before blasting it to pieces and entering the filtration cavern. Miko sucked in the warm air, hardly believing he was free from the horrors within.
Zaul’s eyes locked with Miko’s and moved on to bore holes through Fenli. The soldiers frowned in disaste at the Mentera, itchy fingers on triggers. Lexia, shivering in her makeshift garb, stared at the desolate terrain. Then her eyes lit up at the looming X22 Vilidome waiting on its six landing supports. “What a sight for sore eyes!” she hissed fiercely.
Zaul barked commands into a mic at his lapel and a ramp descended from the gleaming mass of grey steel. Two armed Jakru trooped out to stand guard as they clambered aboard herded by Zaul, oblivious of the black locust craft hidden away behind the towering boulders where Audra had left it.
“We have company,” grunted Zaul. Small specks of metal were growing in the sky over the towers of Skullrox. Doubtless the loss of water pressure and the failed hawkbot defense had finally registered a full red alert.
The Jakru craft, sleek and fast, wasted no time in blasting off, its blue fire churning the dust to clouds of frenzy. Immediately a barrage of Skullrox gunfire raked the outer hull as they strove to escape the perimeter. Coordinated shots shook the Vilodome, knocking men off their feet. But the shields held.
Zaul was about to retaliate but Lexia stayed his hand. “No, Zaul, you’ve already battered them enough. They were largely innocent. Just get us out of here!”
Five large Gaxion battlenoughts rose up on the viewscreen. Miko blinked in dismay, awaiting instant doom.
“Engage early light jump,” Zaul roared. The pilots on the bridge entered the coordinates.
The sequence, dangerous as it was in such close proximity to a planet of significant gravity, was the only option.
In a searing blaze, the craft shuddered. The crew, vidscreens and blinking command panels shifted and stretched in four directions. Miko thought they would be ripped to oblivion by the conflicting forces at play. The planet shimmered below, and the stars sheared every which way. Then they were in space, at one with the atoms of creation, moving with the speed of the gods.
A chorus of laughter and applause burst from the crew gathered at the bridge.
In the belvedere of the craft the Empress shook her head. “Zaul, you always were a hothead.”
“But if I hadn’t gone out of my way to storm the—”
“I know, she waved him off, “if you had not interfered, I would still be playmate to that monster—and these rebels, for all their daring and mettle, would be dead, sizzled to cinders by now.”
She stared critically at the motley crew of burnt, cut and broken figures who stood before her. “Now, for those answers... Who starts?”
X
Audra peered up at the fleeing craft carrying the Jakru avengers, as its blue flare jetted it into the atmosphere. She turned from her hidden place at the portal overlooking the desert with some misgiving. She had failed again to reunite with Miko. Blood dripped from her stump of a tentacle, leaving a sizzling trail. Without one of her long grasping tentacles, she would be vulnerable.
With an angry chitter she moved awkwardly across the ledge, hugging the cliff face, twitching in wrath. Let them flee, she chirped to herself. There was nowhere for them to hide...
A new sight made her polyped mouth sag: a glint of metal amidst the boulders around the corner. Squinting in the glare, she halted, quivering at a streamlined ship that hovered there with authority. Its landing gear was lowered. The whine of subtronic engines racked the stillness. Had they detected her hidden craft?
A human male, skulking about with his stunner raised, stood guard outside her craft. A flicker of movement. Had another figure just forced the seal and slipped inside?
Audra glided forth, whipped out a stinging tentacle and broke the man’s neck in an instant. She dragged the dead man inside the darkened vessel, sealing the door behind. She crossed the landing bay in great leaps and caught the other soldier in midword speaking into a com set. He turned, gazed in stark horror, but Audra rushed in and seized him in a slimy embrace, wrapping a nest of tentacles about his neck, waist and thigh, squeezing the breath out of him. The stunner fell from his fingers. The man began to scream as her body essences gave off an acidic fluid.
Like a wild animal, he kicked, clawed at her, ripping patches off her ropy flesh. Audra was sluggish from loss of blood. They fell to the ground in a rolling mass of tentacles and slime, and black blood that slicked the floor. She let her slimy appendages coil tighter, his bones near cracking. His body bent, went limp and a gurgle of raw anguish escaped his throat.
She stopped the chemical process. Death was not for this one.
She stared at the weapon. Cowardly to use such a prop.
She pulled the gasping man across the floor and toward the locust tanks that loomed like aquaria out of a nightmare. Dropping him there, she extended a tentacle and fumbled with the stopper on the first tank as the groaning trooper tried to crawl away across the floor plates, gagging from time to time at the toxic slime enveloping him. She lifted him effortlessly and plunged him into the gaping hole. He splashed and flailed, managing to hook a finger in one of Audra’s eyes and rip a handful of fibrous flesh out of her shoulder with the other, but she plunged him under the foul water onto the head of the squealing locust underneath trying desperately to escape.
Human and locust groped and kicked, the human butting his lacerated brow against the glass, yelling, bubbles forming from his lips. But then he choked, convulsed, as the green liquid overwhelmed him, filling his lungs. He floated, limbs flailing like the flippers of a great, sinking turtle. The man’s eyes bulged, his copper hair suspended like wet noodles. He choked again, his tongue lolling as he tried to claw at the locust.
Audra plugged the open hatch with the stopper, the connected intravenous cable that fed external locusts swinging to tap against the glass, and moved on to the adjacent tank. They would be coming for them soon.
A boom thudded against the hull. Bracers? Audra turned. Garbled voices came over the trooper’s com lying in a pool of blood. The L-Doraxu locust vessel shuddered; it jerked backward toward the Skullrox ship. Audra peered through the porthole. The whine of the dreadnought’s engines escalated. Another craft had appeared, an air cargo tanker. The ship loomed with retracted ramp like a hungry shark. A massive cable had latched on to it, eel-like. Men with stunners dropped from the first ship and advanced upon the L-Doraxu.
What funny creatures these humans were! thought Audra. They were trying to take her alive? Let them try. They would have a tough go of it. Yet loss of blood was sapping her strength. She could not get too overconfident in her present condition.
Garbled audio messages continued to stream from the ship’s com, unintelligible to her. A stark, bald-headed face appeared on the bridge’s viewscreen, speaking human words. She blinked without feeling. Flicking the control that governed the universal translator, she heard Zikri words slowly following the human speech. “Surrender the vessel, return Commander Mewas and Sergeant Jaan.”
Audra’s chitter shrilled. She would never surrender to these weaklings!
A warning shot grazed the hull, but the locust electro-shields held.
The humans would not risk blasting the ship, unsure whether their men inside were dead or alive. She knew these sentimental beings for what they were.
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It seemed foolhardy, nevertheless, to risk an open confrontation with the humans’ blasters when they inevitably did storm the hatch. To take the ship up meant a certain battle, which she would lose, given her mediocre weapons’ skills. Already two more battleships were screaming closer from the city. Evasive manoeuvres were fraught with disaster. What to do?
The underhatch! She remembered having snuck aboard the vessel on the doomed Mentera station, creeping from ship to ship until this lightfighter had caught her attention with its utility hatch underneath. Probably a feature to facilitate special operations on their kidnapping missions.
Audra took a risk and lowered the shields. She turned, clicked off the translator, squeezed through the hatch and small depression just aft of the midship’s zero-g glass barrier, leaving behind the bewildered locust pilot and his Skullrox guest in their watery prison.
Quickly she glided along the cliff face, using the scrub and fallen rocks for cover. She concealed herself behind some large boulders just as she saw out of the corner of her eye, helmed figures forcing open the cargo hatch.
The minutes crept by while Audra wrestled with conflicting thoughts. Should she stay hidden? Openly engage?
Six of the soldiers emerged from the cargo hatch. If the ship were hauled away, she would be exposed to view and would have no means of transportation off this planet to follow Miko.
Back under the ship she scuttled, cranked open the circular hatch and cautiously poked up her head and peered across into the cockpit.
One man was still left, as she had guessed, muttering words into his handheld device. His eyes darted about uneasily as he prowled about with halting stealth. She closed the hatch quietly behind her, letting her body settle in the U-shaped window well. She caught the tail end of his clipped conversation, incomprehensible words to her.