by Chris Turner
Miko, disarmed of his weapon, gave an anguished cry. Perhaps it was Audra’s slimy fluids, or the inhibiting influence of the locusts’ witch water that prevented him from blinking out. Just when he needed his ghost-like invisibility, it refused to indulge him.
Star struggled to her feet, her mouth working in horror at the obscene embrace she was witnessing. She lunged forward, weapon raised.
Audra chittered a rapid jabber of confused sounds and slapped Star away as she came stumbling in. Star fell stunned in a dazed heap.
Where was Usk? Miko thought savagely.
Audra curled another lascivious tentacle around Miko’s throat and reeled him in closer, their faces inches apart. So great was her lust for him and obsessive need to reunite, that she seemed oblivious to the mayhem and laser fire all around her. Miko’s heart beat with the absolute horror and memory of a hundred grisly couplings. Struggle was futile against this muscled monster. Her chitter was as wild and wanton as any he had heard in the cockpit of Sitty II so long ago as she now popped open his helmet and sent a probing tentacle down his front toward his groin. She latched on to his clammy flesh and straining limbs. Cold, biting vapours bit his skin. Was she about to kill him? As he gasped for air, he could see the old scars seaming the crosshatched scissor wounds he had cut in her, to free himself from those flabby wattles and rippling midsection—pulsing wounds grown hard with new polyps.
Audra’s tentacles tightened. Miko’s quivering body slackened in a last desperate plan. He wheezed out a deep breath, letting his muscles go slack, shuddering and writhing to the feel of the flabs of her ropy flesh and generative organ about to roll onto his own and tear through his suit. The probing tentacle stimulated his member with a lustful squeeze and pull beyond his control. He squirmed, thrust his arm down to his belt and seized the hilt of the knife strapped there. In one savage ripping motion, he tore upward at flesh and sinew.
Audra gave a wild, tortured squeal. Her slimy tentacles squeezed tighter with bone-breaking force. Miko’s frame constricted. He sagged, his eyes bulging from their sockets with the pain of constriction and the lack of air. He felt his ribs about to snap. Pain surged through every cell of his body.
Just then a plate-armoured Zikri glided in, one smaller than Audra. Chittering wildly, the thing tore at Audra with its own flexible tentacles, trying to pull the two apart. Lashing tentacles snaked in, and for a moment there was an instant of slackness. Miko broke free with a choked howl, away from the slimy suckers and noxious secretions, his body shaking and lungs gasping for air.
In a haze of semi-consciousness, Miko lay panting, clawing at the glass globe of his helmet, trying to relatch it after the crushing embrace with Audra.
The aggressive Zikri loosed a torrent of chitters and Audra in her rage tore two of the thing’s tentacles off. But another Zikri rose from the shadows, grappling her, hauling her back into its enveloping body. Both Zikri seemed fixated on taking Audra alive.
For a moment, Miko lay moaning, inching painfully on his belly. His helmet was firmly sealed and in place. Slowly air began to flow back into his suit, driving out the toxic vapours of Kraetoria’s atmosphere.
In a slimy heap he crawled toward Star, who roused herself from her own stupor. At first she pushed him away in a wave of disgust, revulsed at the ooze coating him, then she grabbed hold of her reason, and dragged him away from that violent mass of slippery, grasping tentacles and alien flesh.
Miko caught a glint of an eye in that mass. Audra’s fierce, lusty eye—in that instant, he saw her in a rare, unguarded moment. A sudden thought pushed into his own brain. Run! ... I wasn’t going to kill you, only teach you a lesson.
Miko grunted and surged to his feet. He needed no further urging. Audra flung the pesky assailant over her back and melted the thing’s pock-marked head with her lethal body acids. More Zikri formed a ring around her. With savage brutality she fought, and with a feral elegance she began ripping heads off her own kind, killing them instantly, stirred to a frenzy at how close she had come to being reunited with her former mate. The Zikri, unlike other races, did not shun cross-coupling with other races. Nor were they revulsed by it. So had the program been bred into them in the vats of the Masters, ages ago.
But even Audra’s impressive strength could not withstand the numbers of enemies that now swarmed over her. They lifted her high in a wormy mass of fleshy tentacles. They hauled her back to where their ships were berthed, as new Zikri foes burst through the screen of locusts and advanced upon the rebels.
A grim laugh forced itself from Miko’s throat. Fools to think that they could contain such an obsessive, monstrous powerhorse as Audra.
The thought was interrupted by a crimson flash in the upper reaches of the arena. For an instant, the gladiatorial chamber lay exposed in all its gory majesty. The blast, detonated by locusts, engulfed tanks, broken and whole, hurling Miko and Star to their knees. Fiery afterbursts licked at toppled totems, shorn of their macabre burdens and at the menacing statues with their twisted faces and tusks, tossing writhing locusts and tentacled Zikri about like wireworms.
Alien spawn crawled from the broken tanks and began killing each other and devouring anything living in sight. Zikri and locusts quailed, pulled down to their doom in the slimes and bloody pools—howls of rage, rending claws, ripping tentacles—all was a blur before the monsters were blasted to atoms with a barrage of lasers. Small revenge for the countless years the creatures had spent in isolated misery in the locust aquaria.
But this aftermath Miko did not heed. On he staggered with Star on sagging legs, wishing no more than to flee this abysmal place. His headlight beam caught familiar glints off a bleeding carapace—a sudden proof that Usk was alive and staggering away from two locusts he had killed, one blasted to ruin, another with a dagger thrust through its throat. Usk was in bad shape, wheezing in laboured gasps, limping on an injured hind leg.
With a cry, Miko struggled toward him. But in a blur of confused motion, the locust twisted and loosed a harsh chirrup. A twining tentacle came bearing down on Star and Usk stepped in to deflect it. The long sinuous shape hooked his shell and lifted him before he could blast it, and pulled Usk into the air. Miko watched as his faithful friend crashed into a slimed body, the monster pulsing with rage and vengeful anticipation of disposing of yet another locust. Usk fought in terror, a swarm of tentacles enveloping his carapace. His pincers clipped black flesh and Miko blasted the thing while Usk, smothered in smoking, reeking octopi-like coils, crawled away. His shell was cracked and blood oozed from ears and nose. His helmet was smashed and leaking air.
Miko cursed. Surely this was a death sentence for the locust. A tide of anguish swept over him. He knelt, expecting the worst. But there was still life in that resilient body: a twitch of antenna, a shudder of breath.
He looked around in helpless agony. A laser beam whizzed by his skull and he ducked instinctively, dragging the body away from the fray. Star, snapping out of her shock, helped drag the locust until they were out of sight in the shadows of a broken tank before the dusky curve of a cross chamber. The devilish hosts had not seen this passageway and now seemed more concerned with battling each other in the arena of war than searching for the rebels who had brought them here.
Miko wasted no time. Dragging Usk by a bloody pincer, he ordered Star to take up the other one and they tripped down the darkening tunnel. All the while Usk’s tortured breathing worsened. Dim walls of bluish stone narrowed in on them, walls naturally phosphorescent. Shrill cries echoed behind them. They came to what appeared to be a ceremonial training hall. Iron weapons of gruesome configuration hung from the walls: spiked hatchets and tridents with corkscrew forks, unlike any Miko had seen before.
He caught glimpses of more weapons and a lesser array of smaller locust statues caught in heroic poses. The weight of dust and decay, rust and ruin permeated this chilling place.
Usk’s noisy breathing had stopped but for a sporadic, choking gasp.
Desperately, Mi
ko searched for a place to hide him, and to keep the locust safe from molestation, even if he were doomed. The locust’s only chance was to get to a feeding tank. But where? Whether one existed in these remote chambers—
There, ahead, a faint greenish glow! He motioned to Star. A corridor ran low into the shadows. Quickly they hauled the comatose Usk through, panting with their exertions.
Miko discerned four squat glass vats huddled in the gloom. Two were drained of liquid and only withered husks lay at the bottom. Another was stained pink and its horned occupants lay long dead. One tank remained with a healthy greenish hue. A single locust occupant stared out from within. Who had been using these tanks? Had they been here to provide fuel for those locust fighters of the ancient rituals? Miko thrust the thought from his mind and snatched up the trailing hose. To his dismay, he found the octagonal nozzle too large to fit in Usk’s navel. He flung it aside. Star watched in despair. These hookups seemed too incompatibly ancient!
Usk’s only chance was complete immersion in the healing water.
“Here, help me lift him,” Miko hissed. Star struggled to assist him. “Unstopper the tank first.”
She grimaced, trembling in her boots.
“Do it!” Miko shrilled.
Star reached up a quivering hand, yanked at the unyielding top. She swatted at the snakelike cord in a flurry of fear and revulsion while Miko half lifted, half dragged the unconscious Usk up against the tank. Panting, he heaved him over his shoulder and dropped him into the water. Usk sank like a stone. The primitive locust captive in the tank stared impassively back at them, flexing its hooked tusks.
“Stay here. Watch him,” ordered Miko. “I have to find an oxygen source. Help Usk out, if he recovers. Blast the glass if you have to.”
Star shook her head in fear.
“Hide in the shadows behind these tanks, if you hear any of them come. Here’s a weapon—” he tossed her his extra blaster. Hers had been lost long ago “—Use it liberally. We’re no match for their combined force.”
“You’ll get killed,” she sobbed.
“So be it.” Miko turned to hobble off. “I’ve already seen enough in this lifetime.”
Down the tunnel he loped, his teeth-clenched. He willed his being to bring on his mutant skills. It wasn’t working. He must trigger the cloaking power to conceal his battered body! That or find some way off this miserable planet. He couldn’t do it with Star cringing at his shoulder. He realized all too well their lives depended on what happened next—perhaps the lives of all humanity.
He set his headlamp on the lowest setting, relying on the ambient glow from the surrounding stone. Doggedly, he hobbled through the alien halls marking twists and turns with the sharp edge of his blaster. He would have to find his way back to the tanks sooner or later.
He rounded a bend. His knees sagged at what greeted him. Now he wished he hadn’t ventured from the sanctuary.
There was a glint of something, an enemy ship?—hidden somewhere in this crypt-like hall with three shadowy side passages. But—
His heart plummeted in his chest.
What was the other thing?
Some alien horror? A product of diseased genetic engineering? Miko gasped. How big did these creatures get?
Epilogue
Somewhere far away, blazing ships lit the zenith, and Fenli’s breath came in hoarse rasps. Spiderweb cracks lined his glass faceplate along with an ugly smear of blood and slime. He was losing air fast.
Of the half-locust, half Zikri things crouching not ten paces away amongst the peg-like stalagmites, he had little to note, other than he wished he was anywhere in the galaxy but here. The brothels or casinos at Skullrox would be fine. But not here.
As for the pilot, Vembrod, there was no sign. Fenli discerned Varon sprawled in black gravel on his side in his grimy spacesuit, writhing and gibbering in a general state of misery. Several hairless chitinous creatures scooped the figure up. They slapped the Jakru pilot in a nearby pit of bubbling, greenish yellow water.
Varon twisted and screamed in a most disconcerting way, as his head bobbed above the slimy liquid. He was plunged under by many pincered claws. Well, not the worst way to go, thought Fenli.
The pit was shaped like a medium-sized horsehoe, and Fenli observed that these creatures had adapted to the oxygen-low air. In fact, they thrived in it, judging from the vivacity of their clacking mandibles, chittering like insects in the open air. They wore no protective suits. Why would they, he thought amusedly. Delirium was settling in, coupled with shock and loss of blood. Somewhere he was aware of a waning high in his incapacitated state. Maybe it was his right leg that felt wrong, with so little feeling. He had resigned himself to the inevitable, but wasn’t there completely yet. Kind of like being juiced up on snow. Only he wasn’t. He was either dead and in some kind of dream-like hell, or this was real. Hopefully not the latter. Somehow the sinister feeling that tugged at the edge of his sanity told him it was reality.
Now a team of distinctly locust-shaped creatures crouching on four legs began enacting an obscene, if not deranged ritual. Some mounted others and cavorted around the pool like horse and rider, pincers clamped, tusks dug into a host’s back, grunting. They were reminiscent of Usk in shape and pincer, but that’s where the similarity ended. These had fins or appendages on their backs, that he wouldn’t quite call tentacles as much as membranous wings or flexible arms. Lordy lord! Gills spanned the sides of their crescent-shaped heads. And he thought Miko was bad.
Fenli’s eyelids lifted. He was in some kind of open crater, or valley, or bowl-shaped indentation, on top of a high ridge or mountain. A volcano? Wait. He remembered now. Kraetoria. The escape pod had jammed. He and Varon had suited up in the smoking midship’s bay. They had crash-landed seconds later. The impact must have knocked him out cold.
Twilight was in progress. Blasts of explosions pinpricked the skies. Ships above him tore into each other. Marvellous. What a trip! What a ride! Poetry in motion. Fenli coughed up some blood. Vaguely he recalled the crash-landing on an impossible jumble in a crater and their ship jolting across a sea of crumbled rock, before it finally halted in a smoking ruin.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have woken up. Perhaps he should have died? How he had gotten from that place to here was a mystery. Though he didn’t doubt the backwoods creatures had something to do with it. They must have carried him and Varon some distance from his battered ship, leaving behind the dead Vembrod to rot.
These things needed to feed and Fenli was not pleased with the idea. He was not taken to that U-shaped tank that Varon had been stuffed into. Powerful sets of limbs lifted him upward to the edge of another pool, more hideous and scum-ridden, covered with a transparent film of glass, populated with more appalling things: squids, celentra, oceophods, including some of the hybrid, deformed creatures of this tribe’s own kind. It was too much to absorb, and made his head hurt. In his dream-like daze, Fenli saw there was space there for more occupants.
Guttural sounds, akin to what Usk might have made, but not quite, came over his staticky audio link speaker. He reached to turn it off, but found that the mechanism was jammed. He would have to suffer through the obscene chatter much reminiscent of cicadas and other jungly sounds on his home planet. Two creatures pulled aside the glass and Fenli struggled—albeit vainly, against the resilient limbs that peeled back his helmet and dragged him closer to the pool’s vile waters.
Fenli screamed as he hit the surface. The barrier closed over him, and a sucker-scarred face of something neither Zikri or locust lampreyed onto his face.
* * *
Miko’s tongue cleaved to his palate. The creature rose from its crouched position to tower three feet over his head. The thing was thrice his mass, a hideous, mottled shape, spiked with tentacles, tusks, and hard-plated chitin. It loomed like a fiend from the trenches of an accursed sea. What the hell! The thing must have escaped the tanks, wandered with instinctive cunning through the tunnels looking for food and escape from the bl
asts of the locusts’ lasers. Likely it had detected the faint beam of his headlamp and doubled back to ambush whatever it thought skulked in the gloom.
The thing moved with surprising speed. He was still wet, glistening from the drops of the locust witch water, hindering his ability to slip into invisibility.
Already it was on him. No chance to move away. The tusks and sucker-pocked tentacles bore down with fury. He lifted his weapon. A lumo ray rang out, skimmed off the massive peaked skull and sheared off a groping, questing member. The pain only served to anger the mutant Zikri. Two other coils lashed around his thighs with unnatural strength, bearing him backward. He groaned, his back hitting the wall, nearly cracking his bones. His body went numb, as he thrashed uselessly in the last seconds the Zikri would spare him. A silent croak escaped his bloodless lips.
Fear. Crushing impact. Unreasoning panic.
The awareness of the prolonged agony of dying far from home smote him like a hammer. The fate of suffering like those wretches sucked-up in the starfish’s embrace, a fate far worse than a quick and clean end in an exploding spaceship or a lethal weapon strike. The clawed members tore at his suit, shredding it. The gelatinous tentacles scaled over his bared skin and he felt the air whoosh out of his suit, collapsing it, as alien gases ripped at his throat. Already his lungs were bursting for air and the cold clutched at them when he gasped.
Miko’s lungs were collapsing. In a last desperate attempt, his hands burst through the suit, clawing fingernails at alien flesh. Rubbery, muscled hide that did not yield to human touch, clutched him even tighter and whipped him back and forth with bone-crushing strength.
Bzt. Invisible. So, he eluded the allure of death. Was that how it was? The surge of violent, intense emotions triggering the transformation? Had he only to mentally induce it to control his mutant power?
What luck! He was alive. But what power! Why hadn’t it triggered when Audra had snatched him?