The overseer’s bullet head jerked around as he pushed in closer. “What’s that? Speak up!”
Audra increased the intensity of her plaintive gurgling. As the overseer’s head moved in to decipher the gibberish, she struck with incredible force. She tore her upper motilator free from its cincture, shredding flesh and sinew. The electrode flew from its vise. She snapped goblin teeth and sank yellow fangs into Hrang’s rheumy eye. While a blood-sopped tentacle whirled around his head, pulling him in closer to her teeth, her muscles rippled and smashed his skull against the empty socket where the motilator had last been fastened.
The device short-circuited. White sparks flew, singeing the tyrant’s black, rubbery face. He let out a horrid wail. The cinctures loosened for an instant. In a chain reaction, Audra’s lower motilators broke free. She was mobile! The overseer curled in a defensive C. He pushed motilators outward to counteract the monstrous force, but Audra, pitched to a fountain of rage, flung strangling tentacles around Hrang’s body.
The assistant Jngken stood frozen. His mouth gobbled, beady eyes gaped, then he was instinctively on the move to save the overseer.
Too late. Audra constricted with a vengeance and sounds of ripping cartilage soon filled the room. The overseer cried out and lay helplessly gasping on the cold floor. Audra straddled him in her triumph, her motilators still gripping and tearing away flesh from his hide while bits of his tentacles lay twitching in gory heaps at his side.
Jngken surged forward. He held aloft the sedative hypodermic in a trembling grip.
Audra caught the movement. She leaped up from her captor’s gored body to bat away the syringe. But the needle made contact with her whipping tentacle before she could send the attendant sailing across the room. He smashed into the torture rack. The still-sparking circuits smoked and burned, allowed the captive locust a brief chance to free himself. Tearing at the failing ring mechanism, he ripped his left pincer off. The right pincer slipped free. Tugging and thrashing, he worked to snip the restraining wire from his right leg. He ducked, snapping with sharp teeth at the rings holding his left insect leg. Bedlam, smoke, anguish…all ensued with blood splattering everywhere.
Audra felt a wooziness in her head. That underling Jngken must have pumped her with some somno-drug. She advanced, seeing slightly double. She bore down on him as the locust scuttled out of her way, gibbering in pain.
The Mentera grabbed a suit from the wall and despite its half torn claw, struggled to plunge himself into it. The creature obviously had a plan of action. Soon he was scuttling out the back door. The insect’s exit plan was a good one. Audra dimly registered the need to follow such a lead…
In a fit of rage she sprang at the attendant. He was nimbler. Scrambling to the reinforced front door, he heaved it open with a jerk of tentacle, stumbled through, closing it with a clang.
Audra snatched at the iron wheel, still slowed by the injection, but the door was already tightly locked and her tentacles slapped uselessly against the cold metal. She stared at him through the glass window, their eyes shafting daggers at one another. Each was of the same breed but of different eras spanning centuries.
Enough games. Audra turned at the gurgling moan of the overseer, still not quite dead. Her intent, to follow the locust out the back exit, was momentarily forestalled…
* * *
In a painful crouch, Jngken ducked, breathing heavily. He waited several seconds before he frogged his way across the hall; then he halted, having other thoughts. He waddled back to the glass, gaping at the carnage and impossible ruin of the interrogation lab. Three of Hrang’s motilators lay twisted and lifeless on the floor. Hrang himself lay on his back, sucking in wheezing breaths. He was straddled by the rebel, mutant Zikri, his beady eyes bulging from their sockets. The Zikri’s two foremost tentacles wrapped around the pliable, wattled neck of his superior’s, giving the final twist.
Black blood oozed as Hrang let out his last chittering gasp.
Black blood spilled to smoke and sizzle.
Jngken caught a last glimpse of the female Zikri as she gave a chortle of vindication. She turned and withdrew through the back exit where the locust had fled in jerky motions down the dim stone corridor. Perhaps the mutant had reacted to the threat of being injected. The sedative would not last long. Hrang’s orders had been to keep the prisoners alive and mentally alert so they could be interrogated to the maximum.
Whatever the cause of her escape, Jngken could not believe the strength of the Zikri. He shuddered when he thought about how easily those motilators had made a ruin of Hrang’s tentacles and ripped off his head. Hrang was no weakling.
He struggled with the concept of her improbable presence but was firm in his resolve to avoid a similar fate, both awed and appalled at the prospect of being roughhoused by those meaty motilators and surviving. A dangerous spider-and-fly game. Such distracting thoughts Jngken set aside. What he needed right now was a clear head to handle the current affair. What with his superior Hrang mauled beyond repair, splayed on the detention room floor, Jngken, lab technician, was now leader of the operation.
He turned and glided in silence down the laboratory hall. The research and torture area facility was wide and complex with many side corridors and alcoves, containing machines, decoders, hypno-boxes, pain-inducer units and other interesting gadgets. Half distracted, Jngken wandered on a circuitous path via a back way to the control center, hoping to avoid the creature should it still be lurking. He was still dazed by his near miss of death. Even now, his lustful mind wandered over the lurid
