The gap ever widened. Miko crowed in frustration. The serrated edge bit deeper into the door and severed metal. If it were to continue, the cargo door would be unsealable, the locusts would storm through and this crate would be their coffin.
A motor whirred and metal ground, mangling the edges.
Miko roared an oath.
The locust saw retracted and slid down coated in a smear of blood. In its place a corkscrew weapon jammed through, some kind of fishhook and gun which sent a blast of heat careening into the bay. The various gear hanging upon the walls erupted in flames. Miko ducked back, his back throbbing from the heat. The stun weapons of the Jakru were turned up to lethal.
Barking angry words at Fenli, Miko flung a fist down at the feeding station and its regal, blue-robed occupant. “Those are Jakru weapons! They would not be destroying this ship, if you hadn’t insisted upon bringing her aboard.”
Fenli seemed beyond pain or caring. He shrugged, staring wildly. Peering out from a liquid matrix for so long had likely resigned him to a life of slavery, a prisoner of parasite aliens. “These ships are L-Doraxu design,” he grunted. “There is a buffer wall that shields these cargo vessels, if the outer hatch fails.”
“Well, you’d better hope—”
The clink of metal alerted them to something flying through the gap. An apple-sized object, a spiked ball of some sort, rolled out of sight.
“That’s a class C gren—” But Fenli never finished.
An explosion ripped through the back hatch just as he dove for cover, sending him and Miko flying, while hot gases singed the hair on their heads.
III
Patches of Miko’s hair came away in charred clumps. His shoulder was bashed and his left side was raw and singed from the heat. The smell of charred locust flesh lingered in his nostrils. He wiped futilely at the blood and ash coating his forearm.
He pulled Fenli away from the chaos. Fire trailed from the walls; wreckage burned everywhere. Figures were moving in the dim, smoke-torn ruin. Red glossy eyes, cold, alien, glinted with inhuman intelligence, and in them, Miko saw a hatred running deep that defied understanding.
A fresh burst of the pincered devils swept through the gap in the outer hatch. Muscles straining, Miko heaved a smoking locust whose arm was half torn off back into the others. He cast a wild eye toward the cockpit. He caught the watery glint of three feeding stations aside racks of equipment. Each was populated with some gruesome, goggle-eyed creature. He also saw space suits, foul weather gear fitted for the locusts, for excursions off world. What more but further proof that the ship was an exploratory vessel with purpose to acquire new hosts. Miko’s loathing for the locusts only spiked to new levels.
He particularly did not like the look of the two amalgamators housed at the far end of the cargo hold. One set of parallel plates flashed amber, now the other pulsed green.
Miko strained in the blood and heat. All these images registered in his mind for a split second. He lifted the butt end of his scalpel to smash it into the eye of an attacking locust. Two more materialized in a kaleidoscopic rain of sparkles from the left rear amalgamator. He was about to club them to oblivion when more jumped out behind him from the gaping outer hatch and a blast of cold air sent him broadside as a partial vacuum swept in from the cargo bay.
He reeled back, the thin air clawing at his lungs. Caught off guard, he ws knocked stumbling by the foremost attacker that charged him with lumo javelin raised. The other bore straight for the Jakru tank. A metal tong was raised in its claw to break the glass and terminate the woman.
Miko spat out a cry. He sidestepped the charge, sliced the weapon out of the clacking pincer-grip with a wild yell. He ducked under the other snapping pincer then caught the second weapon on his scalpel. Fenli managed to twist on his heels and swing the pipe two-handed into Miko’s attacker’s side. The creature’s ribs caved.
“Haul her past the zero-g safety barrier!” Fenli wheezed.
“Let them have her!” Miko growled.
“Do it. Don’t argue.”
“Are you obsessed?”
“She’s too valuable,” croaked Fenli.
Miko grabbed up the dead locust’s weapon in one hand then seized an end to help drag the sloshing tank away from the outer hatch. More of the fiends sprouted in pairs from the amalgamator. Gibbering curses, Miko dropped the cold tank and trained his lumo weapon on the new menace. Several fell in charred and bloody heaps. He took up the tank once again; together they dragged it past the safety barrier into the midship’s bay.
Fenli hit a hexagon-shaped button on the wall. The half-glass, half-metal-plated doors slowly started to slide shut from both ends, struggling to meet in the middle.
Miko thought furiously: the locusts were trying to kill the woman in the tank. She must have significance.
He rasped, “How can anything human surive in water?”
Fenli growled, “The fluid nourishes! Look out!”
Jakru soldiers were bursting through the outer hatch, wielding stun hooks. The special forces, sizing up the situation, engaged the locusts trying to win past the ever closing, protective wall.
Miko ducked a green, pulsing ray that would have fried his skull.
“Keep them back!” yelled Fenli. “Our only chance is to fly this heap out of here!”
Miko slashed wildly with his scalpel while the door was closing slowly. Blood spurted from locust torsos. In his other hand he wielded the lumo javelin, pressing buttons on the glowing handle trying to figure out how to aim and set it properly. A ray careened from the end and smote the smoking ceiling
