Then it came to him—journeying on the astral plane. He had been thrust into a time pocket. Had he known that the parallel plates were the ancient race’s time travel device, an amalgamator, to cross the limitless bounds of space, he could have been more reassured. The realization that he was centuries in the future was certain.
Smash!
He came crashing down into physical reality, knocked back into a human body again.
He lay on a cold metal floor, groaning in pain and shock. He fought for breath. It felt like a sock had been wedged in the back of his throat. Toxic, reeking chemicals stung his lungs. His terror-filled eyes peered out through a circle of glass windows upon a panorama of windswept barrens. He must be in some lookout or belvedere, high above a strange city spread below, surrounded by desolate sand-blown wastes that ran as far as the eye could see.
A dead world. Old buildings, topped with towers and antennae, crumbled now. Behind him rose a rugged cliff, with drifted dunes running up to its foot.
Miko’s senses reeled. His lungs laboured to expel their poisons. His vision began to swim before his eyes. He wobbled to his knees, staggered toward what looked like an engineering console. Behind him, the wark which had butted him into the amalgamator, lay prone, having followed Miko through the plates and thus passed too through the time whorl. However, both hind legs had been shorn by the electrical stab of its late entry. The beast shuddered painfully, licking blood from its useless limbs, as it tried to save itself. Its face turned green as it choked on the noxious air in the chamber and bled out.
Miko legs failed him. He crawled on hands and knees to what looked like another set of the triangular plates. No, there were three more of them. One was glowing with a greenish light, or he imagined it glowed, and it hummed with the same ominous beat, but he couldn’t quite be sure. As his vision greyed, approaching oblivion, he clawed his way between the alien plate technology and jerked upright, rigid as a man in the electric chair. Again he was out in space, his mind spinning and stars swirling in succession below him like tops from a child’s fantasy. He felt himself soaring like a bird in free fall toward the centre of the galaxy. Free of weight, free of Audra. The lights—they were so insanely bright!
II
Miko’s essence hurtled like a subatomic particle through the depths of space and time. Kaleidoscopic lights weaved before his astral form and crackles of energy buzzed from someplace within.
Instantly he came crashing back into his body, senses reeling, limbs shaking with pain. Shaking the daze out of his head, he found his crumpled body lying between two parallel plates similar to those back in the bunker on a world far away. Five more sets of parallel plates loomed in a row beside the one in which he sprawled. His skin prickled with fear.
The dim light bathing his body felt wrong; it somehow slanted too eerily from an unknown source ahead. He was in a hold or shelter—a landing bay perhaps? But with the soft lap of water not far from where his legs stretched.
A pool of brackish water stretched into plum-coloured gloom, and with it a strange scent—blood? The odour wafted from deeper within.
For a second Miko’s body blinked out of existence with a quiet electrical crackle. He shook the sound out of his ear, or rather, his astral ear. He was looking out from eyes with no body, as if he were of no substance. Invisible?
Snap!
Back he was thrust into his body. Arcs of pain shot through his arms and legs. Blood-caked, his garments shredded, his skin lacerated... He must be dreaming...
But no... Pain had him crawling to his knees, shaking the lank hair out of his eyes. He snatched up the scalpel at his side. The pellucid water shimmered to small ripples of movement beneath; the strange, alien scent all round him made him nauseous. Water trickled down the walls, feeding the pool. But trickles so quiet as to be noiseless.
Skirting the pool, Miko clutched the handle of his weapon. Fingers quivering, he could barely walk, but he forced his feet on in jerky hops to explore this chamber, anxious to be away from the pulsing glow of the capacitor plates: it was sinister technology that could whisk him off to some other strange, new, violent world. He moved forward like a phantom, deeper into the chamber.
Suddenly he felt movement in the stillness. Machinery? Aliens? A strange hum permeated the air, like the droning of hornets.
Humid vapours brushed his cheek. Surprisingly fresh and breathable, they were unlike the toxic horrors of the worlds he had visited but briefly on his jumps through space.
An owl’s hooting stabbed out in the gloom. Was he dreaming? An owl? No, the pain in his ankle told him otherwise...the bite of the wark back in the strange laboratory was all too real.
He crept along the floor, drawn by the sounds of madness, then he saw them.
Large insect-like monsters, poised on hind claws, hunching as high as himself. Four of them gathered around an operating table, or some gruesome parody of one. Wingless, locust-like things with pincers and fangs, purple bodies, domed backs and flattened skulls. A team of them worked over a carved-up beast strapped to a low table. The table was equipped with miniature gantries and surgical equipment, much like the lab he had left, light years behind. The victim was some sort of owl, but not: the
