A slithering sound echoed out of the shadows, rousing him out of his reverie.
More Zikri. Shit! Gliding on skulking feet, undulating tentacles extended, they padded like phantoms through a rear entrance. Why did they always travel in threes?
Yul ducked low behind Hurd’s tank, scarcely daring to breathe, his blaster held on the ready. His stark outline was hopefully hidden behind Hurd’s opaque shimmer, though he prayed his thin vapour trail had not been seen. He could hear their squashy movement as they glided forth. He hunched lower, grinding his teeth. Like wraiths they slipped across the plated hall and Yul’s flesh crawled. Those tentacles, thick as boas, could strangle a man in seconds, squeeze his liver right through his mouth. That fate not so long ago he had barely escaped.
Yul could hear the squids’ incessant chittering, like the insect chatter in faraway jungles. How many more of these creatures must he kill, creatures that roved the ship down the many corridors meandering in gloom and eerie stillness?
No time to deal with Hurd. Yul lay in wait, weighing his options. If he startled them, they could storm him in a single swoop. Easy to spray them with a burst of fire, but what of the chance others were skulking nearby?
One of the brutes passed close, only to pause.
It lifted its polyped head as if to sniff the air like a stalking predator, its slimy, grey tentacles pausing from their writhing rhythm.
The Zikri’s features were a smear of indistinct sense organs, pig-like eyes, flattened snout, warted, pudgy cheeks. The stuff of nightmares. Its sense orifices and protuberances were nothing more than chilling, grey-black blobs set against a slightly darker hide.
The thing had sniffed him out like some mutant bloodhound.
He opened fire. Dismembered pieces sprayed black blood. Its comrades whirled, tentacles rippling on robust torsos. More of the grotesques slid out of the shadows like serpents.
Yul slipped on the gore. The fiends were upon him in seconds. He flipped over on his back—just in time to blast the first grisly head and the eel-like appendages about to riddle him with electricity. Yul rolled away—no time to get to his feet—as he swatted off the ghastly flesh from his faceplate.
Two surged after him. More were gliding their way back from the hall where he had come.
He gained his feet and scrambled to an exit. He ran full tilt down an unknown corridor, to an unknown doom. He wheeled around to spray ion fire, a defiant cry on his lips in face of the futility of it all. There were too many of the fiends! Everywhere.
Ducking down a cross corridor, he raced on, then ducked down another, panting with horror. To his left loomed a wide doorway. Beyond it, four Zikri wearing crude, spiked, metal headgear worked at the ship’s helm. Holy shit, the control room! Two others to the side had turned to gaze back at the source of the ruckus and lifted grey tentacles at the human form that aimed blaster at them. Their angry chitters confirmed their awareness of a serious security breach.
Yul heard padding sounds of webbed enemy feet at his back.
He whirled, blasted the first questing feelers that threatened to wrap around his throat. The Zikri sagged on his torso in twisting ropes of death.
The bridge door came a foot from sliding shut just as Yul heaved and jammed the shredded Zikri in it.
More patterings of webbed feet thudded from the corridor.
A stray blast came hurtling out at him from the bridge, followed by excited Zikri chitters. Yul ducked back, grimacing at the reality of being caught in the crossfire between two grotesque and hostile forces.
His back flush to the leftmost wall, he felt the alien squid motifs dig into his back. A live grisly head poked out its mottled face through the doorway and he blasted it from stem to stern. The lumpy body split open. He caught the sagging heap and using it as a shield, pushed the creature back into the control room. An angry knot of confusion raged on the bridge. With a roar, he riddled the knot of Zikri at the controls with ion fire as they leapt from their stations. The last Zikri choked on its own blood and collapsed in a charred heap.
Yul heaved the dead creature out the door. The sliding mechanism was jammed, but there existed an inner safety door, a heavy barrier with thick black iron, equipped with a metal ring of sorts.
Yul clamped the door shut, cranking the smooth iron ring around with his strong fingers, sealing it.
He crept over to examine the bodies. He licked his lips with distaste. Such obscene things. Nudging the first with his toe, he felt it give way with a sludgy, slopping sound. The dark blood pooled at its side with slick and heavy emphasis and stuck to his boot. Under its misshapen back and unnatural neck more pooled. More squids would be coming soon. To avenge their comrades’ deaths. He turned with a jerk, examining the rest of his environment.
Yul suppressed a gasp. He had a slim sliver of opportunity to figure out the bridge controls, at best sabotage them, so they couldn’t hyperdrive to their home base, or alert their own kind. No way to know whether these creatures had been aware of the cockup on the Albatross and had alerted backup yet or not.
His eyes widened at an unwelcome sight. Another glass tank? Yul reeled at the sight. Slowly he walked over to the aquarium, his mouth sagging, like a man in a trance.
* * *
The sudden blast had sent Regers’ air mix out of kilter. Now it was injecting stimulus chemicals into his air space—the equivalent of a shot of heroin and a zap of speed. The suit’s survival
