Miko backpedalled, ducking into a side corridor. The passage was clear. Crackles, buzzes echoed in the locust corridor. Before his invisibility failed, he passed through the wall like a knife through soft butter, only to enter into another hallway. Seconds ago he had passed through an insulated wall riddled with wires and circuitry. What was this secured place? It didn’t seem like any bunker, or shelter or locust colony. He felt as if he traversed through some giant machine.
The corridor supported a conveyor system like the ancient airports on earth.
He gave this conveyor treadmill wide berth. The last thing he wanted was to flicker back to bodily form in the midst of these hostile insectoids.
Mechnobots roamed everywhere, carrying out multifarious tasks.
The floor opened before his feet—a translucent portal or some viewing window that stretched for fifty feet before merging back into plated material. Below him locusts and mechnobots worked side by side, their pincers and mechanical cranes lifted to bolt machine parts while others wired and welded them.
A production line.
Miko shook his head with wonder. Safe for the moment, he stared long at the industrious locust society before he turned back to the mystery of his invisibility. What laws of physics enabled him to blink in and out? What precipitated the flux? He suspected his journey by amalgamator had contributed to his abnormal ability. Had that first amalgamator device, unused and antiquated for so long, malfunctioned? But why did Audra then not experience the same invisibility? He hadn’t observed her for long, but if it were true, maybe something in her genetic structure inhibited the side effect.
He forced his mind back to more practical concerns. He looked through the floor and realized he must be in some base, but a bunker? He shook his head. An underground research facility? It seemed too large, and tied in with some type of barbaric production. Some purpose that filled him with horror, and he was trapped here billions of miles from his home world.
He could easily evade their security nets while being invisible, but when he zapped back into his body... Miko guessed the butchers in the labs were focussed on the immediate area around the facility, so he was safe for the moment in other parts of the complex.
Hurrying down the endless corridors, he made progress, or glided with purpose while the astral power remained, sometimes snaking around hairpin corners. He passed through walls like electron particles.
* * *
Back in the laboratory, Audra looked out from her tank with an expression bordering on venomous. She was alive, but barely. More birthlings were growing in her. She could feel them stirring under her skin like maggots. Loathsome creatures. Spawn fathered by the fecund swordfish creature. At least something for her to eat.
These locusts’ intelligence was inferior to hers. True, they had captured her, but theirs was only a temporary victory. One of the creatures would slip up—and when it did...she would not be lenient, or so naive and unprepared as before. It was only because of the cursed narwhal spawn that she had been taken anyway.
As for the human, Miko—a flutter of mixed emotions rose in her breast. The creature had shown no gratitude for the service she had granted. He would have been killed, or permanently bottled had she not intervened. True, to save her own skin, she had acted.
Likely her human mate would be captured by the fiends before long, and this possibility irked her. The thought of him, like her, also encased in a tube, the life essence continually siphoned out of him, was repugnant. She was robust, able to handle the rigour, but he was weak. How easily they had caught him and trapped him like a fly in a bottle.
Audra came as close to a sigh as she ever would.
Foolish human! Angst pulsed from her consciousness, rippling out through the water. Her tentacles swept out and battered against the glass.
Locust heads turned, then refocused on their work.
The wounds from the wolf-terrors back on Rogos had been almost enough to keep her from fighting, and now these insectoids had scratched her with their crude instruments and burned her with their lasers. No matter. The liquid in which she was immersed was helping her heal. She could feel revitalizing pulsations. There would be blood to pay in the time to come—by all.
Audra ceased her pounding, letting her tentacles droop to her sides. One of the more primitive creatures paused before the glass and stared at her with its glassy globular eyes, as if divining what she was thinking. It was smaller, weaker, even more repulsive-looking than the others, with a pale, sickly aqua-hued carapace and drooping antennae. A bubble rippled from Audra’s polyp of a mouth. She was not in a stupor like the two other slaves on either side of her that floated in their tubes, goggle-eyed.
What was this miniature creature’s next move? She narrowed her smudges of eyes in crafty inspection. The locust reached a claw-pincer for the tube that dangled down the side of her tank.
Audra watched enthralled. She waited as the creature affixed the end to its navel and began feeding on her essence. She felt a tingling in her nerve ends as life force was drained out of her. In vindictive wrath, she set to work on the possibility of escape.
Her gaze caught the glowing amber plates arrayed at the far end of the room. It was through these devices that she had come into this hateful world. The portal mechanism...interesting, ingenious. Even scientists on her world would flutter their tentacles; they had not such science.
