She peered about. Oddly, there was no one around.
Seizing an end of the door with her powerful tentacles, she gave it a savage tug. The slightly corroded metal flew off and she drifted inside, like an emboldened thief, and no stranger to the sepulchral darkness and stale air that flooded out.
An alarm trilled. Such did not concern Audra—she had a gut feeling that the place was only trip-wired. More of a concern was that an intruder recognition system might see her and record her image. This would give the enemy an advantage knowing her physical size and capabilities, something she wished to avoid.
She shot off quickly into the thick, stale-aired passage. She sensed movement behind her. Not organic activity, but robotic devices, chirping and clicking with moving parts. No matter. The algorithms of these devices were inferior to her intellect; she could elude them.
Making good speed, she navigated the tunnel through sombre, dim-lit, pipe-snaking ways, full of cobwebs and dust. Her limbs, unique to Zikri evolution, gave her a steady, gliding gait. She came to a cavernous, high-ceilinged chamber hewed out of the rock. The place was reminiscent of some primitive mine of undeveloped organisms on other planets. Tunnels led in different directions. Down the main shaft, she saw three large pipes trail into gloom.
Audra studied these pipes with detached interest. She detected the slosh of liquids cascading through their massive lengths. Of greater significance was the vast array of engines that towered above her, set in the wall with flywheels, tubes and whirring parts. She guessed that these machines pumped air through some vast circulatory system to augment the oxygen content in the atmosphere. Some of the treated air was likely siphoned back to the city Skullrox via the complex tubings. The rest was pumped into the atmosphere, hence the ungainly funnels that she had seen erected over the city.
Audra paused, her tentacles twitching.
What an incredibly inefficient way to manage oxygen! Did the humans not know the difference between oxygenation and omni-ocidation? Obviously not. Their science was yet in its infancy, she recalled. Still, the VR ship that Miko piloted was quite impressive. Ahead of its time, for its size and shape, and human technological advancement. A giant leap for ignorant savages. Pity the craft had sunk into the mire on a planet now lost in a distant time.
Time... What did it mean? A circle that went out to infinity and came back to the same point where it started. Audra’s mind flitted upon the concept in that breezy way of hers.
She was light years from the place she had started. She was the oldest Zikri in existence! To get back to her time meant applying an equal and opposite force to the thrust that had plunged her and Miko forward in the space-time continuum. A difficult undertaking. The question remained, was there any need to go back to her time?
She chortled and pulled herself out of such reveries, concentrating on the task at hand.
* * *
The massive pipes that ran side by side into the shadows evoked a mix of curiosity and uneasiness. She sensed that her bond-partner Miko wandered somewhere in this direction. The three pipes met a tall, sheer wall and disappeared in close-cut holes, with no gap to squeeze through. Only massive force would allow entry past this barrier.
Audra considered. She could blast her way through with the ship’s weapons’ system. But that crude means would also alert the authorities. A glass hatch showed in the middle pipe. At a place where the conduit met the rock, murky water flowed, pumped likely by engines on the other side. Judging from the number of aquatic creatures that swept by, fishes, snails and larger, uglier things, she guessed it was the raw liquid pumped from the lake below for filtration purposes. At the very least, a source of food for her, these creatures. Locusts had been dull fare on the ship. Better to save the last few insects on board in case of unexpected contingencies.
The beginnings of a simple but daring idea took form. She could always do with some exercise.
Working the device hatch cap off, she slipped her slimy tentacled body inside, closing the hatch snugly behind her. Not a perfect job, but it would have to do. She would not be gone long—or so she hoped.
The humans like Miko had learned that drowning could not affect her, as he had witnessed when he tried to feed her to the feral eel back in the Rogos swamps. That was unmerited. That he had stooped to cutting her flabs of flesh loose from their common bond was an act of defiance that could only be reconciled with punitive measures on their next meeting. It was an act of fate, or cosmic will that they were joined in the first place. My, how she had grown sentimental in her advancing years!
She reached out a tentacle to play at the smirk on her cratered face.
VIII
The unlikely companions trudged the gloomy ways, bathed in the odd flickering light, eyes glued to the shadows. All remained on the alert for Murlag’s skulkers. The lights were powered by some unknown source. The minutes grew to hours.
For the most part they navigated a square-cut tunnel with steel girders reinforcements at roughly ten to thirty feet intervals. These formed an eerie, unnatural U-shape when they walked under it. The passage narrowed at times to a crawlspace wide enough only for one person to hunch through, prompting Sket and Iasan to suggest alternate routes. But these all looked dusty and crumbling. Miko doubted they even connected to this mythical ‘Farfan’ mesh that was their destination.
Miko racked his brains trying to recall details of old Earth prehistory when mine shafts were reinforced with square-cut wooden baulks. There was no
