Audra shivered with anticipation. She would commandeer his craft. How the Zikri would punish her after such a brash breach!
Under the blue glow of the VR, Miko’s eye caught a glimpse of the loose flaps of alien flesh that were growing from his hip, fusing him to the alien. Those moments were the most soul-disturbing of his life. A macabre understanding of carnal knowledge passed between man and alien: a feeling so repugnant and intertwined it made Miko shiver with horror.
He stabbed at the immuno-injector, hoping that the device, designed to irradiate gas, air, fluid, food, water, soil, nutrients in extreme cases of outer-world infection, would immobilize his enemy.
It was impulsive, and unwise. Not only would it irradiate her body, but his.
Miko’s muscles knotted; he felt Audra’s electric punishment, his nerves stabbed with fire, as she linked into the VR and mentally willed the immuno-injector’s frequencies to cancel.
Dire repercussions came at once. The link, having recorded Audra’s brain wave signature, started a new sequence. The computer was confusing the two, as it had with Miko and Bazon. It had sensed that Audra was Miko—and Miko was Audra, then began to synthesize a harvest of a life based on their composite.
The result was ghastly.
The two organisms coalesced into an abhorrent version of both. Brainlessly, the computer continued to feed the electromagnetic signature of both Miko and Audra to the composite-hybrid of Miko-Audra.
Miko looked with horror at his body. Six-inch yellow stubs of tentacles had split through his uniform below his armpits.
The alien-conglomerate part of him began to palpitate and glow. Audra’s fibril flanges danced to some faraway tune, like some deformed jellyfish caught in a rip tide, while Miko thrashed like a fish, sprouting new appendages and organs
...organs that did not have the right to exist. Audra’s upper torso began to form facial features—eyes, nose, ears of a man, like Miko’s.
The two were fast becoming one.
Miko felt a rigour as he had never before—limbs which were not his own, but tragic caricatures of those that once were—alien-like appendages, began to grow.
The marauder Orb sky-rocketed into view on the starboard reach. The alien vessel crept closer, pursuing Sitty like a demon eye. The Orb was not without its horsepower, or weaponry. The members on her decks jigged about, squealing with strange, whale-like chittering sounds for which the Zikri were known, sounds that coursed with a basic understanding of Audra’s rebellious ambitions. The Zikri were not pleased.
At one with her VR casing, Audra engaged the hyper-thrust. In seconds, the ship veered off at right angles to its original trajectory. With redoubled anger, the Orb raged behind, a sprawling mass of metal and machinery.
The Zikri hunted Audra through the cold wastes of space. Vengeance was the ship’s collective thought and the aliens showed it by launching Uro-gas bombs off the starboard side by the hundreds.
Audra sent Sitty dodging between the radionic-pulses, any of which could shear off her trillion-credit fuselage to nothingness. Nevertheless, the freakish Orb spun toward Sitty with a venomous wrath.
Audra reached out to Miko’s mind and forced him to assist by whatever means possible, despite the state of his anguish and deformities, but Audra’s unclassifiable makeup confused the VR-link. The nexus wavered for an instant. Audra’s consciousness seemed to strain to connect again to the eerie technology, directing the vessel closer to an asteroid cluster whose gravitational pull was becoming noticeable. It was just enough of a tug to warp the effectiveness of the Orb’s missiles.
A sudden burst of enemy fire ripped across the port bow. Sitty’s under carriage glowed incandescent for several seconds. She drew a temperature anomaly, which broached a near-fatal heat targeting by the Zikri craft. Audra discharged a photo-lumo bomb of her own, shearing a chunk off one of the large asteroids in the field. The chunk spun off from its source, smashing against the Zikri War-Orb’s weapon side.
The pirate station faltered as fires and explosions ripped across her steel-spiked hull.
Audra set out a scatter projection off port bay, cloaking Sitty from her fellow warship. This, through the use of a rogue technology she had ordered her technicians to install aboard Sitty, the hardware stolen from a warlord vessel Vascon whose secrets her race had pillaged years ago.
Sitty lurched. Miko launched a deep-perturbation scan, hoping to knock out the enemy sensors and disrupt the power cells of her thrusters. Almost as if reading their minds, the Zikri craft launched an intercept beam. At once, Sitty felt the same fatal pull that Miko had first encountered on contact with the aliens. The ship’s perspective distorted; she was tractored to a near halt.
Audra, sensing a futile fight, jammed the lumo-thrusters to the max. The ship lurched, struggling forth in fits and starts. Then at last it broke free from the tractor field and swung out of range. The Zikri’s first numbing intercept beam fell away like a shadow. Clearing the asteroid belt, Audra engaged the time drive. Sitty swept out on a broad arc, leaving the system and the Orb far behind.
* * *
A series of days passed, or what Miko thought was days. How to tell from the aching misery of assuming the form of a monster? Of feeling the amphibian deformity permeate every cell of his physical and mental being. How every hour of those days snailed by like years, plaguing his life with unimaginable rigour. A dire struggle ensued between human and alien, one that was fast becoming a lopsided fight to a unified end.
Miko tried to veer out on an escape vector toward the NAVO base, but every time he tried, Audra’s telepathic power intruded upon his nerve centres. Pain, wracking pain was his reward. Constantly she dragged him back to a place of subservience; her will was focussed, so focussed—an incorrigible single-mindedness that rivalled a machine’s programming.
Nor was Audra immune to Miko’s will to survive.
