Now a team of distinctly locust-shaped creatures crouching on four legs began enacting an obscene, if not deranged ritual. Some mounted others and cavorted around the pool like horse and rider, pincers clamped, tusks dug into a host’s back, grunting. They were reminiscent of Usk in shape and pincer, but that’s where the similarity ended. These had fins or appendages on their backs, that he wouldn’t quite call tentacles as much as membranous wings or flexible arms. Lordy lord! Gills spanned the sides of their crescent-shaped heads. And he thought Miko was bad.
Fenli’s eyelids lifted. He was in some kind of open crater, or valley, or bowl-shaped indentation, on top of a high ridge or mountain. A volcano? Wait. He remembered now. Kraetoria. The escape pod had jammed. He and Varon had suited up in the smoking midship’s bay. They had crash-landed seconds later. The impact must have knocked him out cold.
Twilight was in progress. Blasts of explosions pinpricked the skies. Ships above him tore into each other. Marvellous. What a trip! What a ride! Poetry in motion. Fenli coughed up some blood. Vaguely he recalled the crash-landing on an impossible jumble in a crater and their ship jolting across a sea of crumbled rock, before it finally halted in a smoking ruin.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have woken up. Perhaps he should have died? How he had gotten from that place to here was a mystery. Though he didn’t doubt the backwoods creatures had something to do with it. They must have carried him and Varon some distance from his battered ship, leaving behind the dead Vembrod to rot.
These things needed to feed and Fenli was not pleased with the idea. He was not taken to that U-shaped tank that Varon had been stuffed into. Powerful sets of limbs lifted him upward to the edge of another pool, more hideous and scum-ridden, covered with a transparent film of glass, populated with more appalling things: squids, celentra, oceophods, including some of the hybrid, deformed creatures of this tribe’s own kind. It was too much to absorb, and made his head hurt. In his dream-like daze, Fenli saw there was space there for more occupants.
Guttural sounds, akin to what Usk might have made, but not quite, came over his staticky audio link speaker. He reached to turn it off, but found that the mechanism was jammed. He would have to suffer through the obscene chatter much reminiscent of cicadas and other jungly sounds on his home planet. Two creatures pulled aside the glass and Fenli struggled—albeit vainly, against the resilient limbs that peeled back his helmet and dragged him closer to the pool’s vile waters.
Fenli screamed as he hit the surface. The barrier closed over him, and a sucker-scarred face of something neither Zikri or locust lampreyed onto his face.
* * *
Miko’s tongue cleaved to his palate. The creature rose from its crouched position to tower three feet over his head. The thing was thrice his mass, a hideous, mottled shape, spiked with tentacles, tusks, and hard-plated chitin. It loomed like a fiend from the trenches of an accursed sea. What the hell! The thing must have escaped the tanks, wandered with instinctive cunning through the tunnels looking for food and escape from the blasts of the locusts’ lasers. Likely it had detected the faint beam of his headlamp and doubled back to ambush whatever it thought skulked in the gloom.
The thing moved with surprising speed. He was still wet, glistening from the drops of the locust witch water, hindering his ability to slip into invisibility.
Already it was on him. No chance to move away. The tusks and sucker-pocked tentacles bore down with fury. He lifted his weapon. A lumo ray rang out, skimmed off the massive peaked skull and sheared off a groping, questing member. The pain only served to anger the mutant Zikri. Two other coils lashed around his thighs with unnatural strength, bearing him backward. He groaned, his back hitting the wall, nearly cracking his bones. His body went numb, as he thrashed uselessly in the last seconds the Zikri would spare him. A silent croak escaped his bloodless lips.
Fear. Crushing impact. Unreasoning panic.
The awareness of the prolonged agony of dying far from home smote him like a hammer. The fate of suffering like those wretches sucked-up in the starfish’s embrace, a fate far worse than a quick and clean end in an exploding spaceship or a lethal weapon strike. The clawed members tore at his suit, shredding it. The gelatinous tentacles scaled over his bared skin and he felt the air whoosh out of his suit, collapsing it, as alien gases ripped at his throat. Already his lungs were bursting for air and the cold clutched at them when he gasped.
Miko’s lungs were collapsing. In a last desperate attempt, his hands burst through the suit, clawing fingernails at alien flesh. Rubbery, muscled hide that did not yield to human touch, clutched him even tighter and whipped him back and forth with bone-crushing strength.
Bzt. Invisible. So, he eluded the allure of death. Was that how it was? The surge of violent, intense emotions triggering the transformation? Had he only to mentally induce it to control his mutant power?
What luck! He
