Bzt!
His body flashed and was gone. Only an electrical signature remained and the odour of electrical discharge.
The creatures looked around in confusion, whistling through their insect teeth. Several slashed the air with their mantis-like pincers, then emptied rays into the chaos, killing some of their own.
A group still surrounded Audra, though many died in horrible ways, gripped by her tentacles and pulled into her smothering hide.
The three narwhals were jumping from victim to victim, as if their primary purpose was to defend their mother. But the locusts were able to gather them up and jam them into tubes.
Miko staggered back, his ethereal body passing right through raging locusts unharmed. Why didn’t the locusts kill him? They were right on top of him, right there. He was a walking corpse. He looked at his arm. It was gone. No arm. His body was gone too. He clutched for reason, clasped for his head with his fingers. But found insubstantial mist, his arms and fingers passed right through skull and bones. But how was this possible? He had no arms, or fingers either!
Miko quivered in confusion. A stab of pain assaulted his nerves; an electrical energy surged as he blinked back into existence and was visible again.
Now he was surrounded by dozens of foes and they turned on him. He fled for the amalgamator; but knew he would not make it.
Bzt!
His body blanked out again. They couldn’t see him. Though they shouted and chittered and raced about looking for him, he doubled back through their ranks, passing through locust and mechnobots like a ghost. This time he raced for the exit. He slid through their masses like insubstantial stuff, as if their bodies were made of mist. But in reality, it was he who was made of air.
He ducked out of the low oval of the side door. On he staggered like a drunk down the wide corridor. Was this what it was like to be dead?
Or a spirit.
Or neither?
His most recent memory of Audra burned in his mind’s eye—enslaved though he had been in pale green fluid. She had saved him, perhaps inadvertently, attacking the locusts to give him a diversion. As had the red-banded outcast. If not for her and the mysterious ally, he would have been dead, or looking out from a glass prison.
No time to ponder. The invisibility could wear off any second, leaving him prey to these fiends.
Groups of them shuffled by in the outside corridor. Long, gangly insectoid things walking on grasshopper-like legs, hunched slightly forward. He shuddered at their physical grotesqueness: their pincers on the end of short, tyrannosaurus-like forepaws clicking like the insects on earth. Incisors knifed down from both corners of their bullet-like mouths.
The creatures passed right through him, as if he were nothing more than ether. Examining them now, for the hundredth time, he grew even more repulsed.
He moved without effort on unmoving legs. It was not his legs that moved, but his exercise of will. He had no legs.
Bzt.
Back in his body. All the aches and pain of a wracked man came for an instant, then subsided as if they’d never been. Electrical spatter buzzed around his frame, and burnt feather odour lingered in the space where his body would have been. He was strobing in and out, flickering like a candle.
The walls were plated of hard hexagons, about a foot square. The ceiling was gridded with the same plates, thrusting low, no more than a foot overhead. Strange yellowish algae grew from the walls at places, dangling like hanging moss.
Miko drifted by more of the tube prisons set against the wall and watched as locusts would curiously wire themselves up to a ghoulish canister, attaching a cord to their bellies that hung from the stopper of the tube. He waited until he went astral and glided forward to investigate. One stood now not four feet away, aside a liquid-filled glass tube containing a repugnant, squid-like crustacean. The pair stood there rapt, intent, the locust as if recharging; Miko stared, transfixed with curiosity. The water would sometimes glow, then it would flare an unwholesome deep green. The creature confined within would twitch or shudder, and then the locust would chitter or chirp in a satisfied way.
Rapture?
While Miko watched, the locust’s eyes fluttered shut as the abominable waters in the tube churned, or a bubble exuded from the lips of the imprisoned creature, its face a mask of wretched anguish.
It was more than he could stomach and he sagged back, numbed but wary. What diabolic bio-plasmic essence passed from tube to host?
He passed more of the grotesque victims suspended in their vessels: proto apes, human-like, but scaled or furred, some similar to the simian race he had glimpsed briefly on Rogos.
Miko glided ahead. Visibility was fast returning.
Bzt.
When he became fully visible, he drew back, his breath coming in dry rasps. The grime and blood had all washed away. The ankle where the wark had bitten him had ceased to throb, likewise the ache in his ribs where a locust claw had dragged across his middle. The locust water had healed him—or was it the transformation to a ghost? He thought not, remembering his anguished crawl from amalgamator to amalgamator upon entering this locust world.
A checkpoint ranged ahead. Locusts teemed about the enclosure, with the guards bearing lumo-javelins. Day-to-day locusts streamed in and out past a glass partition with wire edges. Each showed a luminous badge or circuitry pad of some obvious significance before a lit monitor. Miko ducked back into an interconnecting hall. Had he been seen? He heard a droning cry and the clatter of insect feet. He had barely escaped the laser fire of a security team before his body blipped out of existence
