How many souls had these murdering fiends ripped from their lives and stolen from uncountable worlds? On raids to all corners of the galaxy to create this monstrous tapestry? For what sinister purpose?
Some sick art form? Miko’s being quailed at the possibilities. Certainly not for feeding—there were no signs of containers here.
He felt the familiar tug tickle at his chest. Audra was calling. That bond with her had never diminished, even though he had cut himself loose from her gelatinous flesh some weeks ago.
He stared at the abominable lattice and thought of the sheer improbability of its existence, how he had escaped thus far from similar hellish fate. This destiny would have been his had he not escaped from the laboratory. It was Audra’s fate too. That bittersweet feeling clutched at his soul, like a craving for a drug that would never go away. The Zikri had saved him just recently. So long had he been joined to her that he could feel the attachment like a parasitic tendril. Could he just leave her to die, become part of this sinister web? He crawled through these thoughts and the hostility and aversion flared up in him with squeamish urgency.
Not far out of his reach, Miko heard a silent whisper: akin to a gibbering plea. One of the human heads entwined in the web called to him. It was only the head and shoulders that wallowed in that greasy, plasmic filth; the rest of the body was missing. Where could it have gone? Perhaps hidden underneath those slimy layers?
But how could the head survive, knitted together with the other appendages—ape heads, crustaceans, animals, insectoid skulls, many other unclassifiable things? Part of the otherworldly science of these ghouls?
In rage and desperation, Miko reached up and hacked the member free from its sticky gum. The head fell with a sick thud and seemed to babble words in an unknown tongue before its life blinked out. The tongue lolled and the being died like so many others before it. But the look on its face was one of gratitude.
Miko turned his head. Whatever the words had been, they were not decipherable to his ears.
This creature had been female. He felt a further black despair grip him and send the blood hammering in his temples.
The lights dimmed; a low throbbing thickened the air, and now a disquieting rumble cascaded throughout the bay.
What had he done?
Alerted the locust keepers? He scrambled back through the shadows, cursing himself for his defiance. His skin lay bathed in the eerie, prune-grey glow. While his body flickered in and out, the clacking of insect claws on metal came from above, ever closer. They would hunt him down forever!
Impossible to get the image of the ghastly lattice out his head. Did it serve a higher function? Like reproduction of the race, producing higher strains, more intelligent breeds of the organism without the reproductive parts? It was almost too fantastic to contemplate.
A faint glow from the leftmost wall caught his eye. A glass patch—an oval portal—revealed a view outside that staggered him. He continued on, transfixed. A dusky brown planet glowered dimly below with orange-hues around the centre. He caught sight of the hard, shiny surface of the edge of a ship of fantastic design. Massive hexagonal pods tiered many times on top of the other, forming a vast complex, radiating outwards from a central hub like the reaching arms of tentacles.
He was on a ship.
Miko shook his head. Impossible. Beacons of light poured from windows farther down the sides. The vessel was huge, like a planet itself.
So, it was not a bunker he was in, or some land base, but a huge ship. An incomprehensible ark that had transported this parasitic race through the galaxy, from world to world. An ark of horrors.
Miko looked out from somewhere on the edge of this gargantuan spacecraft while the brown planet swung below, a hundred thousand miles away.
From a triangular portal far down its side, alien vessels buzzed back and forth like silent ghosts toward the dim planet and from round cargo ports scalloped on the edges of the ark.
Miko pulled himself away from the glass, forcing speculation from his mind. To his left stood a feeding station, the first he had seen since the lattice. The victim, blinking within the canister, was not some primitive beast or some horrid hybrid of one—it was human!
Miko stared with fascination. The scalpel fell loose in his hand. Revulsion seized him. The man was in his prime, well-built, of medium stature with thick brown hair and blue eyes, dressed in pilot’s garb similar to his own. A military man?
Miko tapped on the glass with his scalpel. No reaction.
In a fit of passion, he smashed the glass with the pipe which he kept tucked at his waist. The fluid gushed out from the tank in a steaming putrid stream, taking the occupant with it. The liquid splashed on the floor.
The man fell to his knees, choking out lungfuls of foul liquid. His limbs shook in convulsions. Sobs of despair gurgled from his throat.
Miko tried to help him, but the prisoner brushed him away with a quivering hand.
Miko took a step back. “Who are you?”
“I—I’m Fenli,” the man gasped. His voice was hoarse, affected with a singsong trill, difficult to understand. The glands in his throat were likely swollen, doubtless from exposure to the air after such a long
