by Chris Turner
Ramra gulped. “The Mentera must have had this place staked out. Either that or this acting CEO friend of yours led us into a trap.”
“That’ll earn you demerits, Dez,” Regers snarled. “A blast to the face.” He smashed him in the nose with his rifle. Dez’s nose erupted in blood.
“OW! You bloody bastard,” choked Dez. “Wasn’t me planned this Remus shit.”
“Well, those ships are bug ships, not squid ships. Creib,” Regers yelled, “get us away from this rock. Max impulse. Now! Wait—take us on a high arc, as far from the planet as possible. We can activate warp as soon as we clear atmosphere. No low looping shit!” Regers reached for the Varwol.
“They’re too close,” cried Creib. “It’ll foul up our grav signature!” The ship rocked to Mentera fire.
“Shit, those bugs are fast,” cried Deakes. The ship rocked again, shields holding. The hovering mechnobot turned and swiveled its turret toward the approaching Mentera craft.
Regers thundered, “Blast them!”
Vincent rained heat beams at the offending craft. But the enemy’s superior fire lashed back at them, sending them in a tumbling roll. The Mentera mantis-fighter ship, superior in every aspect, was going to crush them. Superior shields, armor, speed, dexterity. Another creepy aphid craft fighter with mantis-like prow sprang up from the same shadow-laced place as its peer. Regers loosed a string of curses. These ships must have been waiting for someone to show up.
At the prospect of being thrown back in a locust tank, Regers clawed at the nav controls. Jennings gave a despaired croak. “Your insanity got us into this mess, Regers—Get us the hell out!”
“They’ve snagged us in a tractor grip,” Ramra breathed. “Ship’s impulse diminished to less than 3%.”
Regers thought fast. “Creib, reduce the thrust. Let them think we’ve capitulated. At the point of surrender, Vincent, train our guns on their recon tower. Deakes, aim a second set on her two rear boosters. The moment they try to breach, we blast them full on.”
“Damn! We’ll never break free,” groaned Deakes.
“Throw it off! Blast them for crap sakes!”
“Shields are too strong!”
They’re not trying to kill us—they would have blown us out of the air by now,” said Jennings.
“Of course, so they can stick us in their tanks and feed off us till the end of time.”
“Or they were waiting here for somebody to show up,” snarled Regers. “Maybe they want information.”
Dez cowered in a ball, all googly-eyed and holding his blood-seeping nose. He clutched his hair, frightened out of his skull.
Deakes growled. “They’re not drawing us into the mother ship, Regers. They’ve put a can opener on us.”
“Can opener?” His mind reeled. How the fuck had this happened? He saw the screwnail-shaped bot loosed from the mothership come speeding their way in the rear holo cam. It clamped onto Xaromar’s port middle, digging into her armored hull. Long, metallic grey spider appendages vibrated with giant magno suckers latched to the hull and its massive titanium stinger rose like an oil-well’s pumpjack. It poised to penetrate the hull, maintaining the ship’s pressure while locust troopers disgorged into the main hall to capture them.
“Ramra, get the defensive armor down off the wall. Everyone, suit up!” He snatched up a Kevlar vest and others donned armor plates on torsos and vitals. Only six suits to go around so Dez got the short stick. Choking and gibbering, the CEO was already beyond realizing his fate.
“We’ve got ourselves a fight,” Regers rasped. He tossed E1s to the others. “Barricade the bridge. They’ll come in and try to blast us. But we’ll take down as many as we can.”
Chapter 7
Audra stirred from her stupor, spread-eagled in the dimly-lit chamber, smelling of must, alien vermin and ancient death. She started to regain her senses. Each of her six powerful motilators was stretched across a torture board in painful precision, taut and wired to a gridded vise of strange design. The unpleasant memories of being tortured drifted into her consciousness. Yes…she was on Kraetoria, legendary home world of her Zikri race. The air and pressure in the room was controlled—a feature on the plus side—easier to breathe than the inhospitable cold air in the tunnels. On the negative side…well, her immobility was only one of the many negatives…
“We want to get to the bottom of this mystery,” an accented voice said in her own chittering language. “We will ferret out this human and his meddling friends, never fear, Griekshj.” The word, a derogative reference to ghost in her native tongue, held a hollow ring—indicating a rebel hovering on the fringes of society. The massive Zikri standing hunched over her splayed body, mouthed the name in a jeering, almost insolent way. Here was some minor captain, eager to make a name for himself, with a manner gloating and carefree. He pulled up some data on a green-pulsing screen, a 3D monitor of some unknown technology. His assistant, a lowly attendant, clearly intimidated by his overseer, shrank back in his ropy pose, cowering under the murky shadow of his superior.
Audra’s eyes adjusted to the dimness. She squinted through their narrowed slits at her tormentors. She could handle far worse pain than this, but it was expedient to give the semblance of weakness at this moment. All her training had taught her to employ tricks, however small but significant. She cowered in as painful a feigned posture as possible, but made careful note of every nook and cranny around her in the hopes of making an escape. This small claustrophobic burrow with walls and ceiling of the same dull grey stone as without, was not to her liking. Several machines sat to either side: monitors and control panels, tower boxes and surgical equipment with crane-like arms, holding hypodermics and incisory tools…adjusted by a technician, a much more wiry and thin Zikri than the leader, with six long, pale tentacles. Two steel doors at either end of the chamber served as exits, with the squidlike logos and motilator motifs characteristic of her race. Black and silver emergency suits, of both squid and locust design, hung on the far wall. Sprinklers and air vents, set in the smooth rock ceiling, oddly complemented a half dozen air tanks sitting under the long, utility counter. Their presence caused more distress than ease. She couldn’t quite peg the purpose of this place, as much an experimental hazlab as a torture chamber in her opinion. Maybe both.
Noticing her return to consciousness, the overlord made a gesture of tentacle. “No doubt you are wondering why you are here? You are of the older breed,” he said conversationally. “Fascinating, as impossible as that can be.”
Audra stiffened. The overlord twitched his polyp of a mouth and prompted his attendant to flick a switch.
Electro-stimulus coursed through her tentacles. She bore the pain, though it sent ripples of agony through her elastic, muscular upper body. Her own polyp of a mouth tightened in a small quivering O.
“Answer the question, Griekshj, or you will dance in pain. We’ve much time to explore your dark little secrets and you will tell us all you know. Why were you there with the human, Miko, attacking Mentera and Zikri soldiers?”
Audra gave a chitter of disgust. This peacock interrogating her was insufferable! No less, torturing her. He and all his kind had already lost the ability to transmit electro-charged energy through their motilators. A critical natural defense and survival mechanism lost in the mists of time. Had all this happened while she and Miko had been cavorting about in spacetime? Evidently they had been propelled into the future after the time drive accident. These Zikri needed machines to help them effect their aggressions! What had become of this modern race of Zikri over the centuries?
An answer came in a moment’s introspection. Centuries of inbreeding had weakened the strain of the original Zikri race. The new stock was soft and weak, their bodies no match for her superior strength and her flexible motilators—if only she could break free…
A rumbling chitter came from her throat. “I come from an age long before you—from the time of the Oldevri cycle—on a heisted state-of-the art starship, of human manufactu
re.”
“That can’t be. You claim birth origin eight Magellan cycles ago.”
Audra remained silent.
“You are certainly a different breed of Zikri. Stronger, faster, more insidious. You took out nine guards of mine before they could even defend themselves. That in itself is impressive, as much as it makes you an item of scientific interest. You’ll need to be studied. Tell me how you have developed such strength? Through drugs? Bio-implants?”
Audra’s body arched as the vises gripping each tentacle shot electrical surges through her body. Unbearable pain. She jerked to a spasmodic pitch, loosing a spine-chilling howl—a guttural, primeval wail of contorted rage and defiance.
“I passed through a time hole, a warp failure,” she chittered. “NAVO craft…they blasted us on warp sequence when we were in the humanoid’s experimental ship. I have no idea what century I am in. Though everything is different now. Zaigua outpost is gone. This planet is much different from what I remembered.”
The overlord spoke in a rapid series of gutturals. “Zaigua 1 was decommissioned over two hundred years ago. So you claim to be two-hundred years old? Impossible.” The overlord swept an upper tentacle out, tickling the upper lip of his grey mottled face, a gesture which implied disbelief. Audra grimaced in contempt. The Zikri overlord’s mind was slow. Easy to outwit this pretender. Just a matter of biding her time and playing into his puerile illusion of domination.
“Incredible. Far too incredible for my tastes. You could be lying to us, Griekshj. I cannot verify it, because we have no records of names and titles from that long ago. Even your ship, this giant Orb, Xmrkiw, you claim to have been science officer aboard, has passed out of record. As too the commanders, officers and crew you worked under.”
He continued with a tentacle curled around the smooth egg-dome of his skull. “You followed this humanoid creature, Miko, and became enamored with him and attached yourself to his body in a grotesquely physical way.”
Audra gurgled out a protest, but ultimately gave a jiggling gesture in the affirmative. A disturbance came at the door.
She watched while two Zikri guards hauled in a Mentera, a smaller bipedal, locust-like creature. They clamped pincers and legs in the torture board not fifteen feet away from her own miserable hide. The creature, like all of the Mentera race, sported the large greenish-black head of a locust, two arms with lobster-like pincers at the end in place of hands, and a pair of hind, locust-like legs on which it stooped much as an ape would. Its deformed wings had long atrophied. As attendant and guards fussed with the locust’s bonds, its black, spiky antennae drooped in defeat. Though in the gleam of that rebellious eye, lurked a ruddy hint of recognition. Yes, the one who had fought against his own kind in the Hall of Tanks, thought Audra. A rebel, a dangerous renegade. The Zikri’s and Mentera’s mutual feeling of deviancy was shared in a wayward glance.
“This locust, some spy or rebel, was reported firing on his own in the same battle you were caught in. We recovered him dunked in a Mentera tank. His accomplices must have dragged him in there after suffering battle wounds, no doubt to heal. We will catch up with those perpetrators soon enough. For his crimes, he will die painfully. But not until we pick his brain clean of information, question his motives for rebellion and find out who he was working with.” He motioned a tentacle. “Jngken, my young protégé, I am mentoring on the arts of torture and persuasion. So you and the rebel will provide excellent case studies in this regard.”
Audra only dimly registered the overseer’s words as the next power surge shot up her leathery hide. It coursed into her head and started to dull her mind. Likewise the drug or hypno agent they had injected into the puny creature’s bloodstream now seemed to be having a noticeable effect. The attendant hooked up a universal translator device to the locust’s antenna, one thin black disc. The overlord began grilling him with questions.
“Why did you blow up the lower level of our installation?”
The locust’s red eyes glazed over. “The Master bade us to do so—in return for granting us an escape route.”
“What Master?”
“The master race. The Masters were here on this planet before the Zikri and you never knew it. They played god, manipulating the early evolution of both Zikri and Mentera, brewing creatures like you and me in vats, not knowing that one day they would overthrow them.”
“Oh, really? Describe this ‘Master’ species.”
The locust paused, his one antenna drooping, as if unsure how to answer.
“Answer the question!” A small surge of current made the locust jerk and utter words that the translator echoed back in Zikri-speak:
“Some humanoid creature! Tall with hollow eyes and hairless hooded skull. A thing neither male nor female, somewhat androgynous, with short forelimbs and long bare feet with four hairy toes like one of the giant, humanoid, primate apes. At one time they called themselves the Cuyrne.”
The overlord gurgled out an expletive. “Preposterous!”
Audra’s mind blanked out for several instants as the attendant ministered to some innovative preparations involving a hypodermic injected into each motilator. Each had its own notable effect: dizziness, a pleasurable tingling from tentacles up, an urge to babble the truth without dissembling. The overseer’s voice became a soporific drone like the vague surge of waves on a distant shore. She shook herself alert once again.
“…I refute these masters,” said the overlord with a tinge of scorn. “These Cuyrne, you say they engineered the Zikri and Mentera—in vats? that the stronger-engineered Zikri escaped, took over the lab, killing their overseers and claimed the planet but that the so-called Masters were there all the time watching in some underground bunker?”
“It implied as much.”
“What do you mean, ‘it’?”
“The AI simulacrum that spoke for the long dead Cuyrne Masters.”
The overseer gave another chitter of disbelief. “So, you discovered this bunker, fell through the crust while pursued by Mentera troopers. Where is the proof of this claim?”
“The proof, the blue memory module—we destroyed it,” said the locust. “The simulacrum compelled us to initiate the destruct sequence. Thus the information would not fall into the hands of either you or the Mentera. We barely escaped with our lives. Only to plunge into the midst of your secret, allied base.”
“Why would this AI intelligence do that? And why couldn’t it initiate the destruct sequence on its own?”
The locust alien twitched its carapace. Its eyes hardened to a dull coral sheen. Its shoulders, dark plates of green and black, hunched in helpless compliance. “The detonator sequence was designed deliberately so the simulacrum could not initiate it on its own. In case the algorithm went berserk. Or in case it was ever tweaked by outside invaders. Or so it told us. As for keeping this origin of our races secret, that is beyond my knowledge.”
“You are an ignorant, foolish creature!” the overlord rasped and smacked a tentacle down on the torture console. He signaled the attendant with a brisk flicking motion. The attendant zapped the locust with a dose of current. The locust howled, a keening, whining cry, folding its long atrophied wings in weak flutters.
“The Zikri are masters of the universe! Much older than any locusts, humanoids or apes, or the smattering of mutant intelligent species littered throughout the galaxy. Our dominance on this planet proves it. Where is this module you describe with its databank of proof of these Masters and our manufactured origin? I would kill you now for your lies, bug, had the Mentera not recently discovered a similar blue box as you described in the aftermath of the blast. They are busy trying to penetrate its secrets. For that reason you still live. Your motives regarding this fabricated story, or whatever else you’re hiding, I do not know. Possibly to delay your inevitable fate. War is upon us and we are called to duty, to crush the humans once and for all and enslave the populations of their planets. Even now, I am pushing this interrogation beyond my superior’s wishes. Bu
t I have other intentions in mind, though they’re on hold for now…” His eyes scrunched into glittering beads.
“So now, do you still tell the same story, bug?”
The locust did not respond. The overlord puckered his mouth in an ugly O. The locust howled again as current surged through its vitals, causing the hard-shelled pincers to clack and its ovoid head to bob up and down on its chest in anguish. Audra watched in detached curiosity.
The overlord loosed a belligerent chitter. “We’re getting nowhere here, Jngken. Up the voltage!”
“As you wish, overlord.” Jngken fiddled with the knobs. Audra braced herself for more punishment in parallel to the locust’s. Then a sudden idea hit her.
Chapter 8
Jngken, the lab trainee, licked his polyp of a mouth. He stood under the shadow of Hrang, his superior, yet no less caught up in scientific fascination of cracking the mystery of this time-traveling Zikri. She exhibited inexplicable attributes that could not be tossed off as mere mutant side anomalies. Classic muscular lines, toned muscle, a fearsome vitality, all radiating an impressive hyper-awareness. A femme fatale, if any there was. Jngken had never seen such a physically magnificent specimen in such fine, but deadly form…
Lust overcame his reason. Admittedly he felt himself smitten with freakish sexual attraction. The trainee was awed and intimidated at the same time that this Zikri had come from nowhere, having no past and no present. Could this time travel story of hers be true? Why Hrang was treating her so cruelly seemed to be counterproductive to what could be gleaned and enjoyed from her. Whether he wanted Jngken to play the sympathetic role to soften her up remained to be seen. He wouldn’t mind that. If the prisoner’d time-traveled, she’d be confused. It stood to reason. Such a queen amongst their race!
As overseer Hrang administered a torture spike to her left lower motilator, Jngken thought he caught her answering stare of burning intensity in response to his gaze of admiration and lust. He quickly looked away. Could she actually be attracted to him? It seemed pure fantasy.