The alien halted, the fleshy folds in her face crinkling in a sightless grin, as does a wolf that sniffs the air when it senses danger.
She was no more than a half dozen paces from him when several feral shapes slinked into the chamber.
Shit, what next? Miko’s mind screamed as the warks rushed forward.
Seven were on them before he could even breathe, knocking him back. His body stumbled into one of the tubes, his arms flailing. The canister tottered and crashed into the narwhal’s tank, hitting the creature in the head. The canister cracked, spilling its contents. The brute dropped to the floor. Miko slashed with his scalpel, ripping the underbelly of the closest wark as snapping teeth came within hairbreadths of his neck. Another he kicked into the waterless pool. He almost tottered backward into the jaws of a horned stalker while the eel-like narwhal flapped at his feet, seeking to gore him.
Miko took three steps away, struggling to reach the chamber’s far wall, hoping for an exit he had missed. He kicked and dodged the lethal thrusts of the narwhal’s shortened tusk.
More warks surrounded him and he smote with both weapons. A horrible scream caught in his throat. Die, you miserable shit-weasels! Die!
One got too close and the slithering narwhal swatted out its tail, and the wark dropped instantly and lay still. Poisoned? Electrified?
Miko wielded the pipe and scalpel, like sword and mace, tearing away chunks of flesh from the warks gnashing their teeth at him and dodging their lunges. Miko glimpsed Audra in his periphery, forcing her foes to their knees. Smothering them in her slimy embrace, she scored them with her acrid secretions. He grimaced just as a wark was about to sink fangs into his leg. Audra drifted forth and engulfed the slavering beast in the grey mantle of her vile body.
Pressed to the ground, the wark squealed and Miko only registered that Audra’s oily clutch was not on his own limbs. Too vividly he remembered being smothered in that sexual embrace out in space on Sitty II. Now the embrace was the poisonous and assimilating one that enveloped this thrashing wark-beast and had it squealing and lying still within seconds. Before the last shrill notes spilled from its jowl, her grey body enveloped its reddish brown hide, and chemical processes began their melting action. Miko smelled arsenic pervading the air, burnt flesh, the sizzling of scales, and the metallic stench of blood and fermented urine. In the blink of an eye, only a small ruin of smouldering flesh and bone remained where the wark had last been.
Miko stumbled about, disoriented, his boots crunching on the remains of past victims. Audra glided in, trying to catch him in a tentacle and bear him away, but the narwhal was gaining horrifying mobility. Miko dodged the thing’s blunted tusk. Its glassy whale-like eyes fixed on Audra as it flapped along the ground, undulating like some ghastly snake or half insect, able to jump from the ground by flexing its muscles and springing up like a leech.
The creature, faster than an eel, whipped around Audra’s gleaming torso.
It penetrated a gill-like flap, a sexual organ, one that Miko could never forget after Audra had fused herself to him during those months in space.
Audra let out a low chittering wail as the creature’s head burrowed in her body. She rolled back and forth, in an attempt to pry the predacious thing off her. But it clung leech-like to her midsection with its under-barbs, its tail twitching as it quested to plunge deeper.
Audra twisted and writhed as warks drove in, slicing and impaling her with their horns. Even her outstanding abilities could not guard against the narwhal’s penetration. While the two rolled and flailed in obscene embrace, Audra snatched the offender with her grouper-like mouth. The narwhal flapped and tore at her, but she bore it to the ground and smothered the thing with her heavy, pulpy body. The thing stopped thrashing and bled white fluid. Even as its essence dripped from her torso, she swayed upright. The narwhal had damaged her, but Miko knew Audra could not be hurt by conventional means; never could such a thing as Audra die too swiftly. She was capable of absorbing punishment far beyond what another organism could, and still survive.
She glided to a wall and leaned there, quivering. All but a few warks lay dead in warm, blood-dripping heaps. The few live ones feasted on their dead in their carnal fashion. Audra’s skin had turned a slightly yellowish hue. Gases seemed to have been trapped in her abdomen; her midsection bloated and oozed pus. Perhaps the creature had caused her internal injury with its invasive thrusts. Miko could only speculate.
Audra gave a gurgle, then convulsed, releasing what seemed a high-pitched chitter of agony. Miko, dazed and somewhat empathetic to the creature he had been joined to for so long, could not help but feel the small hairs rise on the back of his neck. He had time to gasp out a choking breath then stagger away when one of the last warks came crashing into him.
He fell back, missing the parallel plates by a hair’s width. Then he stumbled between them. Electricity seized him and shivered through his body. The room disappeared in a blaze of chilling light.
Miko cried out a single elongated scream that no one could hear...
His spirit was dangling in space, not his mind, not his body, but something else. His body had died back on Rogos in a parallel reality—in a limbo of nowhere-ness. The Miko that was Miko, now hung suspended light years above obscure stars and planets in the gulfs of space, travelling at immeasurable speed. His astral body was suspended in a matrix of improbability, going somewhere, nowhere, through worlds of past and future, he could not guess or imagine.
Many colours passed before his
