The craft hurtled on and Audra and Miko examined each other under the deep violet of VR for perhaps the last time with a strange understanding. They merged their essences for a last time, basking in the secret, forbidden deep union between alien and human that only could be achieved through the sinister technology of the NAVO.
Miko’s last glimpses before impact was of a dim amber world, tinged with green and gold. The lights of a colony shone below, odd coruscations glinting off shiny constructions: of palisades, low tree towers, crude dwellings...
The wings sheared off Sitty, biting against scores of peculiar tree-like forms. The air chutes were pulled away with fury and tore against jagged branches, then shredded to nothing.
A groan, a tearing shriek, then shearing metal came to the passengers’ ears. The ship was caught by massive trunks. A dark body of water appeared below and the ship plunged through the strange treetops and sank into oblivion.
Sitty lay on its side, half submerged in inky water. The ship, teetering precariously, was supported on a massive log or something solid.
Every bone in Miko’s body ached. Blood streamed from his forehead; his ears rang with a continuous, insect-like whine.
By some miracle, the spongy trees had absorbed the shock; the descent had not killed them. Likewise, Sitty’s protective VR socket had cushioned them. The concussion, however, had knocked them both senseless and for several instants they lay dazed.
Miko’s vision cleared. Under the flickering lights of the console, he could hear sharp electrical tinges. The crackle of short-circuiting. He glimpsed Audra moving, trying to get the console back in operation. Her elastic, springy body was resilient to shock, almost indestructible, and wont to mould to whatever was around her. Miko knew it well. He heard the dripping of water, and became aware of a faint reek, similar to the sulphurous hot springs on his home planet—no doubt of some breach in the hull. He shook his head in shock and tried to chase the daze from his skull. Greenish brown water was now seeping through the starboard glass. There was some stir beyond the glass.
He flexed his tentacle-like arms and felt not for the first time pangs of alarm. No broken bones. Only some scratches and abrasions. They left his alien skin blood-streaked. How his head throbbed! The console was smashed beyond repair. Little to his surprise the pieces of metal and puretholene littering the cramped compartment kept him from easily lifting himself out of his socket.
He blinked. What creatures were these that he saw swimming beyond the glass port? Faces with three eyes. Fishes? Amphibians? He could not guess. They were enough to freeze the blood. A long eel-like shape snapped its powerful tail against the glass. Then, lightning fast, it followed with its beak, cracking the glass like a hammer.
The flush of sour vapours poured forth. Caustic liquids intruded on the fragile sanctity of the VR compartment.
Miko recoiled, trying to crab his way backwards. He could not help but gag and suck in a lungful of the loathsome air, hardly daring to imagine what it would do to him.
What’s this? The air was just barely breathable.
The eel thing drove through the glass. Scythe-like teeth ripped flesh from Audra’s middle. Razor fins raked across the metal. The thing was huge, many times the size of both of them and looked ready to ingest her whole, or at least tentacle by tentacle.
Audra thrashed about, whining and chittering while the thing with its beak-like snout dragged her back toward the glass. Miko cried out. The putrid obscenity would drag them both away. He was still joined to Audra’s gruesome body! Flabs of white skin at shin and waist still bound them. He scrabbled for some weapon to strike out with while she was being hauled through the dark water.
Bleeding at the hip, he tore at a piece of twisted wreckage from the console as his fingers raked along the panel and he used the serrated edge to saw fiendishly at the flaps where they were attached.
Audra let out another pained squeal; in a torrent of chittering howls, she wrapped her slimy body around the thing’s neck where its teeth still clutched her. Separation from Miko was her greatest fear, he perceived, not the bite of the eel thing.
The eel creature or whatever it was, used powerful thrusts of its snake-like tail to propel it through the roiling water. Yet it was the single black eye that cast the greatest terror in Miko, as if it were right out of a demon’s aquarium. The eye pulsed; it looked right through him and with the coldest of gazes. He cut the last of the flesh binding him to Audra and the fish jerked its tail and hauled her out and through the port glass and she disappeared in a frothing whirl of bubbles and brackish foam.
Miko sagged, clutching his gore-splattered pipe. He felt as if the blood had been drained from his soul. Purple ichor streaked the water from where Audra has last been. His chest rose and fell in pained gasps, his brain stunned into some kind of reverie. He crawled his way through the sludgy water over to the starboard bay. Nausea had his blood pulsing; shock sapped his resolve. Now as water poured in through the broken pane, he was thinking how glad he was to have escaped such a grisly end.
Audra—she was gone forever!
But there was something else—an inexplicable loss and desolation stirred in his chest. What was this? Pure madness?
He squelched the feeling. The water was rising fast. He dogpaddled the rest of the way over to the broken glass and clawed his way up out of the cockpit onto clumps of bracken that fanned the sides of the craft’s smoking fuselage. The water
