Miko frowned. He let his eyes drift past. A wide flight of steps rose to a raised altar on which perched a monstrous tank, filled with Zikri and locust forms. It was flanked by imposing locust statues on one side and a Zikri on the other.
“Mother of God, what is this place?” hissed Laren.
“An ancient ritual ground, I suspect. I’m betting losers get a quick ride into a tank of their choice,” quipped Miko.
“Not funny,” murmured Star.
Miko swallowed. Who knew what grisly happenings had transpired here? He scratched at his helmet whose air nozzle had taken up that high-pitched whining again. He tapped the backplate and the noise stopped.
Usk stared transfixed, his pincers hung slack at his side, weapon in a claw. His eyes burned and teeth chattered with an intensity that Miko thought would have the locust keeling over. Of his own volition, Usk abruptly donned the language translator.
“I saw an age,” came his croaking voice from the device, “where locust and Zikri battle in ritual. Cut, mutilate and feed off bodies. Zikri lose, warriors slung into tanks with big beasties and scorpions. Locust lose and husks pinned on tall totems, like trophy.”
Miko paused, stunned. It made sense. What else could those gory stems be with their husks of pincered skeletons? The cluster of crusted bodies, ancient and mouldering on the arena floor was an example of ritualized savagery, a practice incomprehensible to civilized minds.
Usk tore the translator disc from his helmet and would say no more.
Phosphorescent glows from the tanks revealed other truths. Miko saw that the locusts hanging on the totems were much different than Usk, fitted with small tusks on their chitinous faces. Likewise were the Zikri different; their larger and more menacing tentacles were armed with sharp barbs.
Laren turned back to the tank with a disgusted scowl.
“I wonder what this starfish thing is?” He made a move to reach for the glass.
“Don’t touch it!” Miko cried.
But his warning came too late.
Laren had already tapped on the glass without much thought. A sucker-shaped appendage whipped up through the stopper and slithered down the glass surface to wrap around Laren’s midsection. Usk chittered maniacally and fired off a shot. But the alien flesh that smoked and writhed was not incapacitated enough to prevent it from pulling the squirming and screaming body of Laren up and over the glass down into the tank. The smoking chunk of flesh sizzled in the water and knitted over in healing scabs. The thing squeezed down on the pilot, its mushroom mass dwarfing him, pushing him further underwater while the water roiled and the eyes of the locusts in the tank fluttered open.
Miko lifted his blaster, but hesitated. In the turmoil, he would kill him anyway. He watched in fear and horror as a probing tentacle unhitched Laren’s helmet and Laren’s mouth opened in a wild screech. The Jakru flailed, drowning and choking in the foul witch-water, finally to stare in helpless horror while suckers caressed him, probing ears, nose and mouth.
The blaster sagged in Miko’s hand.
Usk gaped on, his insect face expressionless, as if caught up in a primordial ritual mirrored in a dark memory of his past. Miko fidgeted uncomfortably in the wake of the locust’s torment.
“We must save Laren!” Star gasped. She clawed at Miko in horror.
Miko shivered. “There is nothing we can do.”
“His eyes...” Star shuddered. “I think he is still alive.”
Miko flinched, knowing the truth of it. A kind of conscious, living death. “Everlasting life...” He aimed steadily, forcing the quiver from his trigger finger, shuddering to think what would happen when the tank exploded and the thing was loosed.
A clink of claws echoed on the stone floor. “What’s that?” Star cried, wheeling.
Usk jerked around, his antenna on full alert.
“Locusts! They must have tracked us,” cried Miko.
“Not just locusts. Look!” Star wailed.
“Zikri!”
“We’re done,” she whimpered, sucking in a sobbing breath.
But Miko was gone, disappeared. Bzt. He shimmered out of existence in a crackle of energy. Suit and all. Anything that his bare skin or hair touched, even remotely, went invisible, as he knew well from his prior episodes.
Star’s eyes rounded in horrified amazement as his gun magically drifted through the night black air, the same as it had done back in the filtration plant.
In a raging frenzy, Star fired blast after blast into the advancing line of locusts. “Bloody freaks!” She rushed out to meet them. “Die! All of you!”
Four in lightweight suits came bounding in, weapons spewing warning fire. To take them alive for their tanks? Two invaders erupted in bloody ruin.
Usk, bewildered, hurried after the hysterical woman, returning fire.
Using the tanks as cover, Star knelt and rained ruin into the chittering locusts that momentarily were checked, quivering in indecision. Then she ran out, blasting limbs off locusts to give cover to Usk who lay sprawled behind a decayed mound of corpses. She exposed herself for an instant, opening fire point blank on a locust that would have cut down Usk. Miko fired off shots and watched like a silent wraith as she and Usk crawled like worms from the cover of one desiccated corpse to another, attempting to cross the arena and retreat to an escape tunnel.
Admittedly her intent was tremendously brave. Usk, he could forgive for such desperation, but was the woman insane?
Miko glided purposefully after them, snatching up one of the dead locust’s extra lumo weapons, peppering locusts two-handedly now that were targeting his friends.
Star jerked to her feet to make another suicidal run for it. Something had snapped in her. Miko saw it. The violence of past events, the blood-sucking locusts and the tanks, the firsthand exposure to gruesome death in space, the gory fate of Laren, and now the chilling revelations of “G”—all had contributed to the world as she
