Sweat trickled down Miko’s blood-grimed face. He saw the outcast swaying backward and he stumbled forward to catch it and propel it toward the feeders. He hooked it up to a feeding station and clamped the cord into the socket at its belly. The outcast blinked gratefully. It sank down in a crouch beside the tank while the pilot confined in the liquid glared fixedly at Miko as it convulsed in short bursts. Its red eyes narrowed at Miko with the utmost venom.
Miko returned the glare.
The thing’s pincer began to tap at the glass, then it clawed at him. Miko banged back with a fist. “How do you like it now, you miserable scorpion?”
The prisoner stared with defiance, but curbed its aggression.
The outcast continued to feed on the prisoner’s essence. Miko saw its eyes were the colour of dead pools looking into a universe of nothingness.
Usk the outcast, thought Miko, a fitting name. Usk—it meant fighter, or rebel, in the legends of the mysterious mountain raiders who haunted the hills of his youth on Sileron.
The outcast began to relax and stop his quivering as its life forces returned, jump-started by the rejuvenating, intravenous feed. A once limp pincer began to move.
Amazing that these creatures could rejuvenate, mused Miko. Particularly by such cyber-eldritch means. He didn’t think they ate. Maybe they did long ago, back in their prehistory, but they had evolved into these grisly lampreys, these life suckers, or soul eaters. That or they had become so dependent on their ghoulish technology that they had lost the ability to ingest food through regular means like most other races.
A flicker of movement. Past the glass it caught Miko’s attention.
A scorpion-like shape, larger than the others, materialized out of the amalgamator and crawled over the husks of dead bodies. Was it a mechnobot sent by the locusts? Clever, ruthless bastards. The bots could work in a vacuum, smiting at the zero-g shield, where flesh and blood creatures couldn’t, or had failed. Miko remembered the torn and bloody bodies of the Jakru and the locusts.
The anomaly looked through the blood-smeared glass with its robotic eyes, assessing the situation, oblivious to the ravages of vacuum. Clacking its claws with efficiency, the bot removed a saw-toothed tool from a kit at its side. It fitted a wicked-looking blade to claw. Was it trying to kill them?
Miko staggered about with horror, looking desperately for something to thwart the bot’s intent.
The tool whirled and the point levelled at the glass.
“Slow to sublight speed!” Miko cried at Usk.
The locust understood something of what Miko had said and unhooked himself from the feeding cord and ran over to the controls. The ship dipped, then swayed back to impulse power. Miko hoped Usk’s navigational twiddling would not put them somewhere in the middle of a planet. The white-grey flood from the windows disappeared. The stars blurred back into regular form. Unknown stars now appeared on the horizon. Usk cast a look over his shell-back to see the mechanized horror drilling at the glass.
Miko ran clutching for the controls. He joggled the accelerator stick back and forth. Usk was knocked out of his seat. The ship pitched and yawed. The mechnobot was knocked backwards and slid to the side. Its ugly face smashed into the cargo door, its eyes sizzling electric sparks.
“There, you bastard!” crowed Miko vindictively.
He jammed the control, and the bot slid toward the outer hatch. Usk jerked up and clawed madly at the console, trying to get the cargo ramp down. A whine of machinery indicated success and the mechnobot slid past the range of the artificial-grav field generator. It lifted its mechanical arms, then suddenly flailed spider-like as it floated weightless in an airless void.
Miko caught his breath, pausing, for he wondered if the mechnobot could stabilize itself, or if others of its kind would come to finish the job.
None came, though Miko watched for breathless seconds, waiting for some new mechanical horror to materialize through the amalgamator plates. The fact that no new scorpio-bot had been sent to menace them, indicated that perhaps they were free from this scourge for a time. At present, the scorpion-bot could do nothing with its sensors knocked out.
Miko watched as Usk took the plunge back to light speed. For a time, he was hopeful.
But the sudden whirring and inner grindings of machinery told him that such hope was premature; the locust craft came spinning out of light drive and stuttered to a jarring halt. Miko’s head struck the command panel. Red lights blinked in synchrony across the command console.
Miko shook the daze out of his skull. The outcast crawled back to the console from where it had been thrown. Usk shook his hard carapace, which, Miko saw, was cracked along the left side. He let his quivering pincers clack over the console. Chattering on in his incomprehensible language, he gave Miko the impression that the light drive was definitively dead.
The ship floated through space—a derelict, struggling on impulse power.
Miko stared dumbly. The dry blood on his cheek itched.
A faint thud sounded on the upper hull.
“What now?” he groaned.
Fenli moaned painfully at his side, pulling himself along the floor through the blood-soaked debris. Miko staggered over to help him. He could feel his skin quiver and his breath coming in shallow gasps.
“Visual!” barked Miko over Fenli’s shoulder.
Usk showed a scattersplay widescreen. Curiously, a U-shaped craft descended like an inverted horseshoe, latching on to the upper davits on the hull. Robot limbs grappled to the
