Miko recognized the voice of the stocky man who boomed orders—Zaul.
The Jakru—Zaul’s men!
One of their blasts hit the main pipe. The metal ruptured under a force of ionizing implosion. Murky water sprayed everywhere, turning it into a slippery mess. Fishy creatures spewed across the concrete and islands of fallen bodies were suddenly afloat. Creatures swam, others slid; an octopus groped its way with splayed tentacles. Turtles waddled, large and small, and mid-sized encephalapods with star-shaped bodies showing fangs and spiky bristles, wormed their way through the gushing water.
A Jakru soldier shouted triumphantly, recognizing the lone figure of the Empress who swayed near the surface car. He and others rushed toward Lexia, slipping and sliding in the slime and foul liquid, dodging tentacles and fire. One removed his coat to cover her near-nudity. A hawkbot swooped from on high, raining searing rays from its eyes, killing three in one blast. The Jakru shot it out of the air as if it were a pigeon target and as it fell, it crushed two soldiers and one of Dragar’s men.
Lexia screamed; her hoarse voice yelled imperious orders despite her fragile state.
Dragar motioned to his men. They fled back down the chamber, leaving behind this crypt of death, braving the jumble of debris and fallen machinery strewn throughout the confines beyond. The perilous catwalks were prey to laser fire. Dragar halted, perhaps realizing that he was a dead man. Outnumbered and outgunned, he and a few survivors of his elite guard piled into the waiting surface car.
Miko winced wryly. Now that Murlag had been slain, doubtless Dragar would pick up the pieces and become the next outcast gangster-chief. The car hummed over the tangle of bodies, wreckage and twisted metal, banking along the ceiling pipes back toward the hall of the dead.
The guards of the late Drek and Beardly continued to battle the Jakru, driven to insane frenzy now that their master was dead. Audra stood, blinking on the sidelines, shielded under a twisted catwalk, loath to enter the line of fire. Her body leaked fluid from a hundred places. She jerked forward, twitching with the urge to reach Miko, but halted as a spray of fire sizzled a spongy anemone sprawled at her feet. The thing twisted and shrivelled in its death throes. Her polyp of a mouth quivered in vexation. Already she had accrued significant wounds; her pulse beat weakly.
A contingent of Zaul’s men rounded up Miko and the others and shoved them along toward the Empress.
The big man waved his cruel blaster. “I’ll kill all these worms, Empress—especially this insect—” he aimed his lethal firearm at Usk, who had suddenly popped up from under a fallen circuit panel. Miko thrust himself between the locust and the line of fire.
“No, let them live!” Lexia cried. “Even the locust. I’ll question them later. Take them with us, Zaul—all of them!”
Zaul shook his head in fury. The colonel, an overbearing man with an elaborate, scrolled helm, red and gold medals, arms thick with muscles and badges, eyed the rebels with little trust. “I disagree, Empress, but as you wish. Come on, you rogues!” He shoved Miko and the others along, slapping the defunct pistol out of Miko’s hand.
Guards fell in behind to herd the rebels toward the far tunnel where the intake pipe lay. Miko counted five of them left: Star, Sket, Usk, Berlast and Fenli. Another hawkbot fell in a blazing ruin, its eyes leaking fire and spitting weak laser beams. The mixed company dodged the sporadic rays, hopped over the bodies, slogging through the inches of foul water streaming from the pipe and pooling at their feet.
They were not fifty yards along when a massive shelled reptile, some sea crustacean, reared and seized a Jakru soldier by the helm, armour and all and dragged him down.
“Move along!” Zaul fired on the gobbling thing, blasting it to a smoking ruin, leaving the unlucky soldier a grisly heap, somewhere underneath.
Through the crude-cut stone tunnel, they shambled on, following the three pipes running along the ground. They wended their way through the mass of blasted stone while echoes of mayhem faded behind them. Miko gaped at the jagged ruin of what was once a tall stone wall, effectively sealing the filtration plant from the rest of the complex. A smouldering ruin of shattered blocks lay strewn like a war zone’s. The pipes which had gone through the wall, were blackened and scored from the Jakru blast, but still remained intact.
Out of the cavern they stumbled, into the daylight of Demen II, onto a ledge that overlooked the desert. The open air and endless vista was an overwhelming sight. The bright light pained Miko’s eyes. He tensed a moment, not knowing that he crouched on the very ledge where Audra had contemplated the same closed steel door before blasting it to pieces and entering the filtration cavern. Miko sucked in the warm air, hardly believing he was free from the horrors within.
Zaul’s eyes locked with Miko’s and moved on to bore holes through Fenli. The soldiers frowned in disaste at the Mentera, itchy fingers on triggers. Lexia, shivering in her makeshift garb, stared at the desolate terrain. Then her eyes lit up at the looming X22 Vilidome waiting on its six landing supports. “What a sight for sore eyes!” she hissed fiercely.
Zaul barked commands into a mic at his lapel and a ramp descended from the gleaming mass of grey steel. Two armed Jakru trooped out to stand guard as they clambered aboard herded by Zaul, oblivious of the black locust craft hidden away behind the towering boulders where Audra had left it.
“We have company,” grunted Zaul. Small specks of metal were growing in the sky over the towers of
