What funny creatures these humans were! thought Audra. They were trying to take her alive? Let them try. They would have a tough go of it. Yet loss of blood was sapping her strength. She could not get too overconfident in her present condition.
Garbled audio messages continued to stream from the ship’s com, unintelligible to her. A stark, bald-headed face appeared on the bridge’s viewscreen, speaking human words. She blinked without feeling. Flicking the control that governed the universal translator, she heard Zikri words slowly following the human speech. “Surrender the vessel, return Commander Mewas and Sergeant Jaan.”
Audra’s chitter shrilled. She would never surrender to these weaklings!
A warning shot grazed the hull, but the locust electro-shields held.
The humans would not risk blasting the ship, unsure whether their men inside were dead or alive. She knew these sentimental beings for what they were.
It seemed foolhardy, nevertheless, to risk an open confrontation with the humans’ blasters when they inevitably did storm the hatch. To take the ship up meant a certain battle, which she would lose, given her mediocre weapons’ skills. Already two more battleships were screaming closer from the city. Evasive manoeuvres were fraught with disaster. What to do?
The underhatch! She remembered having snuck aboard the vessel on the doomed Mentera station, creeping from ship to ship until this lightfighter had caught her attention with its utility hatch underneath. Probably a feature to facilitate special operations on their kidnapping missions.
Audra took a risk and lowered the shields. She turned, clicked off the translator, squeezed through the hatch and small depression just aft of the midship’s zero-g glass barrier, leaving behind the bewildered locust pilot and his Skullrox guest in their watery prison.
Quickly she glided along the cliff face, using the scrub and fallen rocks for cover. She concealed herself behind some large boulders just as she saw out of the corner of her eye, helmed figures forcing open the cargo hatch.
The minutes crept by while Audra wrestled with conflicting thoughts. Should she stay hidden? Openly engage?
Six of the soldiers emerged from the cargo hatch. If the ship were hauled away, she would be exposed to view and would have no means of transportation off this planet to follow Miko.
Back under the ship she scuttled, cranked open the circular hatch and cautiously poked up her head and peered across into the cockpit.
One man was still left, as she had guessed, muttering words into his handheld device. His eyes darted about uneasily as he prowled about with halting stealth. She closed the hatch quietly behind her, letting her body settle in the U-shaped window well. She caught the tail end of his clipped conversation, incomprehensible words to her.
“Sweep done, Delta Force. Only Mewas is dead, head crushed, neck snapped, and Jaan is in a tank with a locust.” The soldier touched the glass and the trapped man’s hand reached out, his mouth opening in a wordless rush.
“They appear to be alive. Shall I kill the alien and pull him out?”
“Negative, Lander 6! Keep everything intact. I want to see this mess for myself back in the lab.”
“Roger, Delta Force. Whatever it is that killed Mewas, is gone.”
“What do you mean ‘gone’? For Deltair’s sake, there has to be a source!”
“It must have been the locust that killed him.”
“How? It’s in the tank—with Jaan. And there’s another I see floating in the tank beside it.”
“Don’t know, sir. One or both of them must have put themselves back in there. Kind of like a back to the womb scenario. How the fuck do I know?”
A startled pause.
Audra slunk out of the window well. Tucking in by the amalgamator-transporter device, she was a killing leap from him.
She debated taking the man in a flurry of tentacles. No. Wrong move. Why alert these humans to her presence? An even more desperate plan unfolded in her mind. Let them winch her and her hijacked Doraxu vessel inside their cargo hauler.
The air hauler set down and the soldier departed with visible relief. The Doraxu shuddered to more clamps and cables as the hauler pulled it across the stone and rubble and into the landing bay. The heavy-duty twin panel hatches lowered shut. Darkness came over the ports and Audra’s world too. A thud indicated the sealing of the door, and then there was silence.
The roar of engines shuddered without; a sudden shifting of weights, knocking her sideways. The ship was rocketing airborne and a vindictive smirk curled Audra’s smug, blooded visage. She acted fast, unstoppered the tank, latching tentacles onto the single locust occupant to thrust it toward the pilot’s chair. The ends of her sinister cilia sent electric shocks through the quivering insect’s nerve centres, an indication of the necessity of a hasty departure. The locust understood and started up the thrusters in earnest and activated the viewport, while she herself manned the blaster station.
The view on the screen revealed that they were headed back toward the human city, at a point east on the outskirts—likely a military installation. They would not mop up the mess here, thought Audra, but in a controlled environment on ground.
They would not make it there, if she could help it.
She aimed the rear cannon, blasting twin lasers at the Skullrox ship’s cargo doors. The metal buckled and gave way to a jagged hole showing a patch of yellow sky. Audra emptied the lasers into the scorched, smoking metal, searing an even larger hole. She chirped a note of triumph as her ship’s engines roared to life and shuddered ahead on impulse power.
The locust needed no urging. Breaking free from the airbus, the ship snapped the cables as if they were string. The Skullrox vessel, smoking and burning, tailfinned, plummetted toward the city while the L-Doraxu rocketed out into the atmosphere, its exhaust burning the holding bay and anything in it. The
