The cavernous space dock teemed with squids bustling about, servicing craft and relaying orders. Vessels of many shapes and forms blasted off to fling themselves into the arena of war. On the open holoview the battle raged: red and green beams of destruction crisscrossing the black tracts of space and meeting shields, some penetrating through armor to targets within. Ships of multiple origins, NOA, Mentera, Zikri, weaved in and dodged out, delivering destruction upon one another: the submarine NOA craft, the triangular Xarean, ultra-light defense squads, Zikri Orbs and the Mentera aphids.
Audra glided toward the last sleek mantis left at the docking grounds. She thrust open the hatch and entered the bridge, claiming it as her own. Better this than one of the Orbs. She could use this ship to pass through the Mentera ranks, thus avoid pursuit by her own kind.
A memory flashed in her mind: how Miko had made efforts to save her. Though grudgingly, he had followed through. She had seen it in the human’s eyes, the struggle, the indecision. But he had acted with resolve. What to do with him? An age of subjugation and molding, bending him to her will had passed, and gone. The familiar impulse to hunt him down still surged through her veins, but now a new awareness dawned. The splicing of their cells by the shipboard computer on the NAVO craft had bound them in ways even her superior Zikri intellect could not comprehend. It had led them on an epic chase through the galaxy. For what purpose? Time to end it. The open galaxy lay ahead of her, hers for the taking…she would leave behind this unnatural war and the ghastly ruins of her misguided race. She wanted nothing to do with Nrog and his upstarts, despising what they’d become, and what she’d become in part, and their flagrant acts of terrorism against Miko’s race.
Chapter 32
Regers’ eyelids fluttered open. Glass enclosed him on either side. His heavy limbs floated in a liquid matrix. Ahead, beyond the thick glass, two Zikri worked at a command console, along with one of those dinky little locust munchkins.
A dim memory surfaced in the back of Regers’ fuzzy mind. Of struggle, capture and pain. Deakes and Jennings, struggling in the iron-thewed motilators of squids like those that had hooked his own thighs, popping bone from sockets before he had slipped into welcome unconsciousness. The pain of snapping and searing agony had now gone.
A vague memory of cold green water lapped at his lank hair. Then drinking deep. A few lungfuls. Fighting, thrashing, to no avail. Then an eternal bath. A deep dive into silence infathomable.
Days, or perhaps years later, a snatch of awareness tickled his brain. He looked over to see Deakes suspended in a green tank on his left, Jennings on the right.
Well, he’d be a damned monkey! The three dumb-dumbs, side by each.
He could see squids still vaguely moving about somewhere ahead in the dim space of what looked like a ship’s bridge. So, he’d been transferred to a locust craft. He recognized the cryptic design, the alien markings, the stigma-like toggles, artificial grav box and cluttered, low-sloping console. But why squids on a locust ship?
His mind worked with agonizing slowness.
Reckon he’d busted up an arm and a leg fighting those damn slime-bitch squids. All healed from what he could see, though he could barely lift an arm or a leg in this heavy soup. No matter how hard he willed it, no luck. No pain, just a blank, brain-dead type of numbness.
The ship impulsed above Xares. In the large holoscreen set above the control panel, he recognized the smalt blue disc of the human-colonized planet spinning below. Regers also caught a glimpse of a butterfly-moth taking a chunk out of a Zikri Orb. The pieces of the puzzle started to make sense. There’d been some fuck-up during the transfer of prisoners and all available ships had been called to fight the war in space. These nice squids had obliged, got caught up in the middle of it.
Lordy Lord. What was this world coming to? Jennings over there, gaping with a fish-white gaze, his face as long as a lank lizard’s with a grimace to match, as if his mother’d puked all over his breakfast. Deakes looking like the ghost who denied Christmas, eyes two pissholes in the snow.
And what do you look like, Regers, you dumb ass fuck? Some princess at a honeymoon ball?
No, he wasn’t going to be trading gags with himself for the next million years. He had to get out of this glass, monkey cage.
Not so easy with one’s limbs quasi paralyzed.
The two squids jerked to some disturbance in the viewport and he imagined Zikri chatter gushing through the com speakers. The war must be going sour for the squids, they’d nowhere to run. All it took was one buggered up light drive and then it
