They groped their way through dusty corridors, more lost than ever. Whether they had emerged out into the main corridor they knew well and on to the same level as their ship, was not known. What seemed certain, they would never find their ship again.
Bleak futures loomed for Miko’s band. Miko slowed to a halt, Star and Usk hunching at his side. Laren trailed, crouching with hands on his knees. Miko’s eyes widened as they adjusted to the thick gloom.
“How long does the air last in these suits?” demanded Star.
“About a day,” answered Laren grimly, struggling to catch his breath.
“A day?” cried Star. “Nice knowing you guys.”
“Focus on the positive,” growled Miko. “We’ll find some air. Even the locusts who lived here must have stored a supply somewhere. Perhaps there’s a container—”
“You saw them in their skin suits,” retorted Laren. “The air is all dried up. We’re on a dead world, Lieutenant. That’s why the Zikri and locusts were terraforming it with their ships and cargo vessels, remember?”
“Maybe, but if there’s an air generation system—”
“What and live out our days in these sunless caves?” taunted Star. “Hunted by insects? What about food?”
Miko had no answer. He clamped his mouth shut. Star was right. Either way, barring a miracle, they were dead—walking corpses in these endless passageways. His mind flashed on Zaul. Any chance the Colonel had survived and could initiate a rescue effort? He knew the Colonel had attached homing devices to all their ships. But then again, maybe his fleet could not fend off the innumerable enemies that must be ravaging the fleet’s hulls now, keeping their guns occupied?
“These Cuyrne,” murmured Laren, his eyes still gleaming with a feverish light. “If they really were an ancient race who created Zikri, possibly humans, why didn’t they tell their offspring who their creators were? It makes no sense.”
“It spoils the fun,” grumbled Miko. “How do I know? Stop dwelling on it.” He stepped ahead to peek at an alcove that contained another cluster of the grotesque cocoons. “This nightmare’s hardly over.”
They crept past the cocoons and around a tight bend to enter a high-ceilinged, cavernous hall. It was impossible to take it in at a glance. The first sight Miko caught was a row of amalgamators past carvings of locusts and squid like creatures. It chilled his soul. Five of the parallel plates in a row with their sinister panels glowing a dim amber. The ancient transporter devices stood unusually high, twice as tall as him, buzzing with an unwholesome hum. If they were still operational, as it appeared, locusts could stream out at will and butcher them like pigs. Miko was about to back out of the chamber and try another passage when Laren strode through like a mesmerized child.
With reluctance, Miko clopped after. Towering walls rose to either side, drenched in shadow. The ceiling was indistinguishable from the blackness. Enormous tanks, squat as ogres, flanked both walls, and pushed up flush to the sides like aquaria in a degenerate research lab. A crypt-like stillness hung over this place, quivering with a sinister, knowing intelligence. Miko’s flesh crawled.
“These can’t be locust tanks?” Laren blurted. “Why are they so big?”
Miko pursed his lips, admittedly not knowing the answer.
“They’re incredibly ancient,” murmured Laren. “Look at the grimed, scored glass.” The vessels were filled with a familiar green liquid, some yellow, many containing horrifying creatures, as if products of ancient experiments gone wrong, judging from their deformed nature. Peak-headed proto-locusts with glaring eyes floated in the eerie fluid, among similarly malformed Zikri, their pale tentacles floating swollen and muscled and much larger than any Miko had seen, thus far.
Laren tugged on Miko’s arm and Miko jerked back in annoyance. Laren spoke: “He didn’t altogether come out and say it, but I gathered this G hinted we were all the experiments of the Genetrix.”
Miko scowled, twisted out of the pilot’s grip, wishing he would just let it rest.
“I can’t believe that hunk of circuitry!” Star exclaimed as she looked around in frightened wonder. “This place is like an ancient museum, or some battle arena.” She pointed to the hulking statues of both Zikri and locust rising in between the looming tanks. Some statues were in terrifying poses of battle—Zikri ripping heads off locusts, locusts clipping tentacles off Zikri. Elsewhere stood stone poles strung with hideous skeletons with extended skulls and plated ribs, of what manner of unclassified creature Miko shuddered to guess.
Littering the ground, as their weak headlamps revealed, lay dry, shrivelled husks of locusts. Nothing more than dusky, black, dessicated mounds, showing rotted bones and dry ribcages broken open.
From what? Teeth, blasters, virulent disease, torture?
“An antediluvian slaughterhouse,” murmured Miko.
Usk’s fervent chirrup acknowledged as much.
A low whistle came from Laren as he crept forward in his hopping gait toward what looked like an especially large tank lurking in the shadows by the rightmost wall. “Here, what’s this?”
It was not so much the tank, but the occupant that sent a shudder through Miko’s frame. A large double crescent creature floated in the middle of the pale greenish liquid. Two massive sickle moons joined at the centre to form a four pointed star, where above, a blue transparent sac bulged. A mysterious organ? The thing floated with authority, tips of its sickle moons drawn down, keeping itself upright like some mushroom out of a madman’s nightmare, or a primitive jellyfish. Some vaguely proto-locust creatures lurked in the peripheries, but those looked dead. The star-shaped monster, whether dead or alive, hung suspended, as if it had been there for a thousand years. But four, small, cilia-like streamers on its sleek limbs seemed to waver ever
