Audra’s tentacles tightened. Miko’s quivering body slackened in a last desperate plan. He wheezed out a deep breath, letting his muscles go slack, shuddering and writhing to the feel of the flabs of her ropy flesh and generative organ about to roll onto his own and tear through his suit. The probing tentacle stimulated his member with a lustful squeeze and pull beyond his control. He squirmed, thrust his arm down to his belt and seized the hilt of the knife strapped there. In one savage ripping motion, he tore upward at flesh and sinew.
Audra gave a wild, tortured squeal. Her slimy tentacles squeezed tighter with bone-breaking force. Miko’s frame constricted. He sagged, his eyes bulging from their sockets with the pain of constriction and the lack of air. He felt his ribs about to snap. Pain surged through every cell of his body.
Just then a plate-armoured Zikri glided in, one smaller than Audra. Chittering wildly, the thing tore at Audra with its own flexible tentacles, trying to pull the two apart. Lashing tentacles snaked in, and for a moment there was an instant of slackness. Miko broke free with a choked howl, away from the slimy suckers and noxious secretions, his body shaking and lungs gasping for air.
In a haze of semi-consciousness, Miko lay panting, clawing at the glass globe of his helmet, trying to relatch it after the crushing embrace with Audra.
The aggressive Zikri loosed a torrent of chitters and Audra in her rage tore two of the thing’s tentacles off. But another Zikri rose from the shadows, grappling her, hauling her back into its enveloping body. Both Zikri seemed fixated on taking Audra alive.
For a moment, Miko lay moaning, inching painfully on his belly. His helmet was firmly sealed and in place. Slowly air began to flow back into his suit, driving out the toxic vapours of Kraetoria’s atmosphere.
In a slimy heap he crawled toward Star, who roused herself from her own stupor. At first she pushed him away in a wave of disgust, revulsed at the ooze coating him, then she grabbed hold of her reason, and dragged him away from that violent mass of slippery, grasping tentacles and alien flesh.
Miko caught a glint of an eye in that mass. Audra’s fierce, lusty eye—in that instant, he saw her in a rare, unguarded moment. A sudden thought pushed into his own brain. Run! ... I wasn’t going to kill you, only teach you a lesson.
Miko grunted and surged to his feet. He needed no further urging. Audra flung the pesky assailant over her back and melted the thing’s pock-marked head with her lethal body acids. More Zikri formed a ring around her. With savage brutality she fought, and with a feral elegance she began ripping heads off her own kind, killing them instantly, stirred to a frenzy at how close she had come to being reunited with her former mate. The Zikri, unlike other races, did not shun cross-coupling with other races. Nor were they revulsed by it. So had the program been bred into them in the vats of the Masters, ages ago.
But even Audra’s impressive strength could not withstand the numbers of enemies that now swarmed over her. They lifted her high in a wormy mass of fleshy tentacles. They hauled her back to where their ships were berthed, as new Zikri foes burst through the screen of locusts and advanced upon the rebels.
A grim laugh forced itself from Miko’s throat. Fools to think that they could contain such an obsessive, monstrous powerhorse as Audra.
The thought was interrupted by a crimson flash in the upper reaches of the arena. For an instant, the gladiatorial chamber lay exposed in all its gory majesty. The blast, detonated by locusts, engulfed tanks, broken and whole, hurling Miko and Star to their knees. Fiery afterbursts licked at toppled totems, shorn of their macabre burdens and at the menacing statues with their twisted faces and tusks, tossing writhing locusts and tentacled Zikri about like wireworms.
Alien spawn crawled from the broken tanks and began killing each other and devouring anything living in sight. Zikri and locusts quailed, pulled down to their doom in the slimes and bloody pools—howls of rage, rending claws, ripping tentacles—all was a blur before the monsters were blasted to atoms with a barrage of lasers. Small revenge for the countless years the creatures had spent in isolated misery in the locust aquaria.
But this aftermath Miko did not heed. On he staggered with Star on sagging legs, wishing no more than to flee this abysmal place. His headlight beam caught familiar glints off a bleeding carapace—a sudden proof that Usk was alive and staggering away from two locusts he had killed, one blasted to ruin, another with a dagger thrust through its throat. Usk was in bad shape, wheezing in laboured gasps, limping on an injured hind leg.
With a cry, Miko struggled toward him. But in a blur of confused motion, the locust twisted and loosed a harsh chirrup. A twining tentacle came bearing down on Star and Usk stepped in to deflect it. The long sinuous shape hooked his shell and lifted him before he could blast it, and pulled Usk into the air. Miko watched as his faithful friend crashed into a slimed body, the monster pulsing with rage and vengeful anticipation of disposing of yet another locust. Usk fought in terror, a swarm of tentacles enveloping his carapace. His pincers clipped black flesh and Miko blasted the thing while Usk, smothered in smoking, reeking octopi-like coils, crawled away. His shell was cracked and blood oozed from ears and nose. His helmet was smashed and leaking air.
Miko cursed. Surely this was a death sentence for the locust. A tide of anguish swept over
