Another shape emerged between the crooked trees with their spindly yellow leaves.
Miko’s jaw dropped. He was gripped with an emotion which began as incomprehension then grew to revulsion.
Audra floated out, like a vengeful swamp demon—a grotesque Zikri, an alien race of conquerors and space pirates. A race that captured NAVO ships and put their crews to death, or worse. She contemplated the scene with the clinical dispassion of her kind. The shapeless face showed vague smudges which marked mouth, nose and ears and formed the chilling mask that Miko had come to know so well over the past months.
The creature lay wrapped in a preternatural menace, standing several heads higher than the warks on two webbed feet and a stub of a tail. She loomed at the edge of the glade, a silent, grey-slabbed mass of flesh with numerous quivering tentacles and slitted gills. But it was clear from her fearless stance that her boneless mass contained a wealth of muscle underneath that fleshy exterior, and guarded powers undreamed of.
How had she flushed him out of the bush so soon? A shiver ran through Miko’s gaunt frame. The warks suddenly became aware of their new prey and they turned twitching snouts and bared teeth to her. Audra stood her ground, impassive as a sentinel, an impressive foe.
How the creature had hijacked his ship, Miko was loath to recall. The thing had been keen to tap into New Avionics Vanguard Order’s state of the art technology; she had been ruthless in this regard. All those months on board his vessel Sitty II remained a soul-shattering blur to him, joined hideously to the creature in a freakish accident when an experimental pilot-co-pilot mechanism had spliced the two together. He had hacked away the flabs of flesh binding them but—
Miko stared spellbound. The rank, peaty smell drifting from the forest was starting to sicken him. The whine of insects crowded in on his ears. As he watched the creature glide effortlessly toward the snarling beasts below him, he felt the lumps on his ribs and underneath his armpits. The thought that tentacles used to be there, sprouted and now fallen off, made him reel with loathing. Still, he retained deformities: facial distortions, gills under the ears. He could feel them with his partially webbed fingers. The last two weeks had seen a consistent reversal of the effects of alien fusion. But only because he had cut himself free from Audra.
The creature advanced with stealth, appearing as if she glided on air over the yellowing turf. Her egg-shaped body caught the dimming copper light that filtered dully from the sky. More warks were streaming out of the crazy twists of bush. Their assaults, while in vain would be met with fury.
Miko ducked back, swallowing the hard lump in his throat. Howls of pure agony reached his ears as the warks melted like wax on contact with Audra’s flabby hide. Sucker pads on her underbelly worked to consume their flesh as chemical processes did their corrosive work. Their yipping rang long in his memory as he scrambled to the very top of the summit while Audra wreaked her havoc.
He pushed through the stunted plants down the other side of the bunker, club gripped in a sweaty fist, his skin catching on the scratchy fronds. His muddy rag of a uniform was blood-caked, mostly dry now, but some fresh blood from his ankle trickled, courtesy of the recent fight with the warks. Even if he slid down the other side with the aim to lose those fiends in a scramble to the dense trees, the creatures that survived Audra’s onslaught, and others, would figure out a way to circumnavigate the bunker. Curse all these alien predators! If he could only—
Screeeaaach! It all happened so fast, quicker than his mind could compute: he fell twenty feet to splash into a pool of cool liquid. The metal had given way underneath him, swallowed him up like a sinkhole.
He shook the water from his arms, curses spilling from his lips.
The interior of the bunker was dim, lit only by small sky holes above.
He checked himself for injuries. No broken bones. His back had been slammed hard, but a few more aches at this point could add nothing to the hurts he had already accrued. The pool’s brackish water had cleansed the caked blood and grime on his skin. He gritted his teeth and squared his resolve. He re-bandaged his wounds as best he could. As it was, his tattered uniform could barely cover the wounds hidden underneath.
The musty air stank with a faint odour of decay. Something else too he could not define, a chemical odour.
Miko felt the dull pounding of his heart; he listened to the muted thuds of the many wark snouts battering against the bunker, also the screams of others. He had no sense of the size of this place; his eyes were still adjusting to the gloom.
Examining the pool from which he had crawled, he saw the pit was shallow, and had an unwholesome look to it. A rusty, metallic odour exuded from the water.
He looked up; pale yellow light streamed from the gaping hole above. Several wark heads popped up around the opening, glaring down at him in frustration. Many sniffed with suspicion while others whined in their miserable way.
He accepted that, for the moment, he was trapped.
Around him the bunker’s walls rose sheer. No chance of scaling them. Would the warks jump down and attack him? They looked hungry enough. But the scent of the place made them skittish. He crouched, pipe gripped in hand. He watched the creatures with disgust. They pawed and whined at the loose soil and set leaves and humus spilling down into the pool.
Miko vaguely wondered what Audra was up to.
He staggered down a wide walkway, leading from the pool to the far wall. Shaking the
