For a second, his body and Audra’s brushed together and Miko felt a quiver of revulsion crawl over his skin. The brush of the creature evoked too many memories, of hideous coupling in hours of darkness aboard his ship. It had been a miracle that he had cut himself free from the fiend Audra.
The fleshy contact was broken and Miko jolted out of his reverie. He slashed out with his scalpel on crusted thoraxes and insect heads and pincer-like limbs that came arching in his face.
One of the mechnobots pulsed to life, towing a canister large enough to fit him. In a savage burst, he drove at it, loosing a barrage of slashes as he pushed back the whistling, fanged locust menacing him. He lopped off a pincer and in a last frenzied swing, used the scalpel to nearly decapitate the thing. Backward it lurched, its aphid-like shell smashing into the nearest vessel, the third one, bringing it down in a splash of sizzling liquid.
The locust, wallowing in the wreckage of its freedom, stirred to life. Like their own it fought, but with a crimson glob of slick gum pasted on its skull like a brand. With haste it crawled away, before jerking to its knees, clicking its mandibles. It turned to study Miko with intense scrutiny for a moment then scanned the chaotic scene with dispassionate, crimson eyes. It seemed to come to some decision then snatched at the nearest locust. The claw pinched hard and the left pincer of its enemy snapped in two, prompting a horrible screech as it tore at its attacker. But it caught the remaining pincer in its fangs and snipped that too, as Miko ran hobbling for the amalgamator, striving for some escape from this lunatic world.
Not to be. A stream of gnashing locusts drove through the opening in the chamber, thwarting him, surely alerted by the alarm and the sounds of skirmish.
These brutes had some blue silky material draped on their fronts, some kind of shield or body armour, and they clutched luminous javelin weapons in clacking pincers. Blue rays shot out from their stick-like weapons, narrowly missing him but spraying fire at his feet. Audra, however, was stunned by a full-on blast, sizzling a section of her abdomen and she rolled away. Several swarmed upon Miko, pinning him to the ground with their crusted pincers. He caught the movement of another mechnobot wheeling a canister large enough to encase him. A group gripped his arms and lifted him toward the hated vessel. Miko thrashed and screamed. He heard the sloshing of fluid being poured into a funnel to fill the container. They upended him into the tube and he choked on the warm, chemical wash. He blinked back tears, mouthed bubbly screams as the foul, greenish-coloured liquid stung his eyes and had him fighting for breath before the stopper sealed the tank. The horror of becoming one of these moronic, bottled marionettes became a reality.
He struggled to stand upright in his prison, but his arms felt heavy, like lead, in the smothering, heavy fluid. Liquid began to fill his lungs, choking him, and he was sure he’d die. But somehow he remained alive, without a need to breathe. His ankle felt only a dull ache.
His body suddenly blinked out of existence. Bzt! The electrical surge struck again. What was it? Some side effect from the amalgamator? He looked from eyes not his own, but astral organs.
Bzt. He was back in corporeal form again.
He saw Audra give a peculiar convulsion, her body welling upward. Her stomach ballooned and two frenzied, pale-blue shapes ripped out of her grey belly, swarming about her body like large lice. They were seal-shaped things with hides covered in wavering tendrils and with snub noses each displaying a tiny tusk.
Even confined in his sub-aqueous prison, Miko realized the narwhal must have somehow impregnated her with its thrusts and jabs on her generative organ, and now its spawn swarmed over her body like witchlings. They barely had the semblance of their narwhal progenitor, with the obscene crossbreeding that had occurred. These pale-fleshed terrors with stubbed, deformed tentacles had a corkscrew tusk.
How did they gestate so quickly? Miko gaped and felt strangely aged, in spite of his insurmountable terror, his very bones aching with weariness. Did the transporter accelerate time?
The locusts jerked back in surprise as the birthlings leapt from Audra onto their attackers’ faces, ravaging them with their sharp tusks, plunging tentacles through their eyes. Audra was granted an instant reprieve.
Too late.
The locusts pounced on her, thrusting surgical instruments through her body, pinning her to the floor. She chittered with anguish and ripped upward in vicious desperation. Her tentacles wrapped about everything in sight. Locust necks snapped like twigs.
As she staggered back, she collided with Miko’s canister and the vessel toppled and green liquid spewed out. Coughing and choking, Miko kicked the broken shards away. He rolled free, inching his way along the cold, plated floor, gasping for air. He crawled toward the amalgamator, away from the enemy—his only chance to escape this madness while the locusts focussed their fury on Audra.
In the dim spaces, he caught a flash of a red-banded skull. The locust who had helped him, the ally, dove into the dark pool to the side and disappeared below the surface. Locust guards jumped in after it.
It was all a blur. Miko shook out the haze just as a blue glow from an enemy weapon sparked his way and he looked again into the maw of death.
Scenes from his life flashed before his eyes. Of training on Altair 6. His childhood on Sileron. But in that split of a second, his body tingled,
