“I am,” Drek said over the receiver, “and I urge you to filter your language. I have ears.”
Torn with indecision between helping his friends or stopping Jingin’s abominable handiwork, Miko clambered upon the platform and prepared to face him. He couldn’t allow all the innocent Skullroxers to die because of one man’s twisted vision. Drek’s plan for vengeance and genocide went beyond insanity.
He struck like a snake at Jingin. Jingin turned to gun him down but cried out in dismay as Miko wrestled the air gun from his fingers. The weapon fell on the gridded grate, and Miko kicked it through the cracks before Jingin could grab it.
Drek’s voice lashed through the headset. “You simian fool! I see I’ll have to do this job myself. Expect me in fifteen minutes. You’re too close to completing this mission to fail now.”
The mutant’s voice screamed through the com. “One last thing. New rules! Sabotage the water supply, gain yourself a hundred thousand credits!” The gangster’s manic order squawked double volume. “Break the air filtration system and earn yourself the wealth of kings!”
Cheers and howls rumbled from the gathering outcasts, who poured down from the catwalk and raged amongst the defenders, destroying everything they could. Murlag was amongst them, rallying his men.
Miko cursed and sought to wrest the controller out of Jingin’s hands. If he should insert the key in the master filtration slot... Miko elbowed Jingin in the teeth, forced the device out of his grip. He scrambled away, avoiding the jailer’s wrath. Hopping over the railing, he fled down a catwalk to the main water pipe and Jingin raced after him, fists balled, spitting curses. “You’ll die for that, you filthy thrall!”
Escape down the back tunnel was impossible, no less the catwalks, Miko saw, controlled by the gathering horde. He yelled to Star to take refuge in the cluster of control consoles under the catwalks. She and Usk ducked blades and clubs while Miko scrambled for balance on top of the massive water-bearing pipe, gripping his blade, daring Jingin to follow. At his feet the churning water swirled through the pipe past the tempered glass. The water sloshed dangerously, incredibly close. The intake fan at the pipe’s farther end churned the water forward like a ship’s screw.
Sket roared a lusty challenge and clambered upon the pipe with Miko, while Fenli joined Star and Usk to take on the aggressors who had cut them off from the rest of their company. A hawkbot came soaring out of the gloom above, hovering over the catwalks. It swooped down to menace the humans below. The outcasts scattered like rats to take cover behind what machinery they could. If not for the diversion, Fenli and others would have been dead.
Jingin gained the pipe, smiling maliciously, coveting the key. His sharp, glittering machete quivered in a fist.
Miko ran along the pipe, but Murlag came scrambling up from the other direction, his teeth flashing in a hideous grin. Sket and Miko edged together, back-to-back.
“Well, let’s make this our best go,” growled Sket. He charged Murlag with a spitting cry while Miko plunged toward Jingin. Their blades connected in shrill clangs as Jingin sought to disembowel him. Miko saw it before it happened. He crashed to the glass, his foot slipping on the smooth surface. Jingin again sprang upon him, smashing his machete down. Miko rolled in time, but the sound attracted some hideously large wading creature paddling in the murk below.
Miko caught a flash of a grotesque shape—something akin to a turtle but having a bearded snout and six under-fins.
Miko gasped in horror. He could hardly imagine that anything so repulsive existed. Doubtless a creature of the prehistoric past, one of the same that had destroyed the protective screen that held back the lake’s spawn, loosing hordes such as these into the stream.
The turtle, sensing easy fodder, smashed its crusty beak up against the glass, spiderwebbing it with myriad cracks. The weight of the rolling, thrashing men cracked the glass finally and they spilled into the rushing water in a shower of broken glass. The tortoise sprang, snapping its flexible neck, toothy skull driving in with menace. Its six jellyfish-like extensible fins propelled it forward like a monstrous squid and an appendage darted in to grasp Miko’s ankle.
Miko reacted instinctively, pulling himself away. But a slimy appendage latched on to his thigh, and dragged him under.
He felt himself flashing out of existence. Something had triggered the mutant power. The fright and stress of it all? But somehow the warm lake water inhibited his complete transformation. He flickered on and off like a lamp, to and from his astral self. The grim tortoise beak with snapping teeth came angling in for his face. His machete caught those teeth before they made a ruin of his skull. But the fins clutched ever tighter and pulled him in. Bubbles came from his lips; soon his lungs would fill with water. The urge to breathe was overwhelming. The filthy, poisonous water would kill him!
Jingin, no less desperately, thrashed for his life, in an attempt to dogpaddle his way away from the roiling horror. But his hands missed the edge of the pipe, and he was swept downward toward the raging turbine. Crying out in fear, Jingin had only enough air space for his bobbing head, gulping lungfuls of it, as he paddled frantically against the current.
Miko saw a flash of another shape: a familiar, black-grey tentacled menace. Impossible! A tingling chill rippled up his spine.
The turtle’s triangular head whipped out
