An answer came in a moment’s introspection. Centuries of inbreeding had weakened the strain of the original Zikri race. The new stock was soft and weak, their bodies no match for her superior strength and her flexible motilators—if only she could break free…
A rumbling chitter came from her throat. “I come from an age long before you—from the time of the Oldevri cycle—on a heisted state-of-the art starship, of human manufacture.”
“That can’t be. You claim birth origin eight Magellan cycles ago.”
Audra remained silent.
“You are certainly a different breed of Zikri. Stronger, faster, more insidious. You took out nine guards of mine before they could even defend themselves. That in itself is impressive, as much as it makes you an item of scientific interest. You’ll need to be studied. Tell me how you have developed such strength? Through drugs? Bio-implants?”
Audra’s body arched as the vises gripping each tentacle shot electrical surges through her body. Unbearable pain. She jerked to a spasmodic pitch, loosing a spine-chilling howl—a guttural, primeval wail of contorted rage and defiance.
“I passed through a time hole, a warp failure,” she chittered. “NAVO craft…they blasted us on warp sequence when we were in the humanoid’s experimental ship. I have no idea what century I am in. Though everything is different now. Zaigua outpost is gone. This planet is much different from what I remembered.”
The overlord spoke in a rapid series of gutturals. “Zaigua 1 was decommissioned over two hundred years ago. So you claim to be two-hundred years old? Impossible.” The overlord swept an upper tentacle out, tickling the upper lip of his grey mottled face, a gesture which implied disbelief. Audra grimaced in contempt. The Zikri overlord’s mind was slow. Easy to outwit this pretender. Just a matter of biding her time and playing into his puerile illusion of domination.
“Incredible. Far too incredible for my tastes. You could be lying to us, Griekshj. I cannot verify it, because we have no records of names and titles from that long ago. Even your ship, this giant Orb, Xmrkiw, you claim to have been science officer aboard, has passed out of record. As too the commanders, officers and crew you worked under.”
He continued with a tentacle curled around the smooth egg-dome of his skull. “You followed this humanoid creature, Miko, and became enamored with him and attached yourself to his body in a grotesquely physical way.”
Audra gurgled out a protest, but ultimately gave a jiggling gesture in the affirmative. A disturbance came at the door.
She watched while two Zikri guards hauled in a Mentera, a smaller bipedal, locust-like creature. They clamped pincers and legs in the torture board not fifteen feet away from her own miserable hide. The creature, like all of the Mentera race, sported the large greenish-black head of a locust, two arms with lobster-like pincers at the end in place of hands, and a pair of hind, locust-like legs on which it stooped much as an ape would. Its deformed wings had long atrophied. As attendant and guards fussed with the locust’s bonds, its black, spiky antennae drooped in defeat. Though in the gleam of that rebellious eye, lurked a ruddy hint of recognition. Yes, the one who had fought against his own kind in the Hall of Tanks, thought Audra. A rebel, a dangerous renegade. The Zikri’s and Mentera’s mutual feeling of deviancy was shared in a wayward glance.
“This locust, some spy or rebel, was reported firing on his own in the same battle you were caught in. We recovered him dunked in a Mentera tank. His accomplices must have dragged him in there after suffering battle wounds, no doubt to heal. We will catch up with those perpetrators soon enough. For his crimes, he will die painfully. But not until we pick his brain clean of information, question his motives for rebellion and find out who he was working with.” He motioned a tentacle. “Jngken, my young protégé, I am mentoring on the arts of torture and persuasion. So you and the rebel will provide excellent case studies in this regard.”
Audra only dimly registered the overseer’s words as the next power surge shot up her leathery hide. It coursed into her head and started to dull her mind. Likewise the drug or hypno agent they had injected into the puny creature’s bloodstream now seemed to be having a noticeable effect. The attendant hooked up a universal translator device to the locust’s antenna, one thin black disc. The overlord began grilling him with questions.
“Why did you blow up the lower level of our installation?”
The locust’s red eyes glazed over. “The Master bade us to do so—in return for granting us an escape route.”
“What Master?”
“The master race. The Masters were here on this planet before the Zikri and you never knew it. They played god, manipulating the early evolution of both Zikri and Mentera, brewing creatures like you and me in vats, not knowing that one day they would overthrow them.”
“Oh, really? Describe this ‘Master’ species.”
The locust paused, his one antenna drooping, as if unsure how to answer.
“Answer the question!” A small surge of current made the locust jerk and utter words that the translator echoed back in Zikri-speak:
“Some humanoid creature! Tall with hollow eyes and hairless hooded skull. A thing neither male nor female, somewhat androgynous, with short forelimbs and long bare feet with four hairy toes like one of the giant, humanoid, primate apes. At one time they called themselves the Cuyrne.”
The overlord gurgled out an expletive. “Preposterous!”
Audra’s mind blanked out for several instants as the attendant ministered to some innovative preparations involving a hypodermic injected into each motilator. Each had its own notable effect: dizziness, a pleasurable tingling from tentacles
