Krin’s eye arched away from the torture devices, avoiding his commander’s eye lest it find some way to detect his guilt.
“I will personally deliver the dozen specimens to Consul Jnedz aboard the Mentera station, as I have reason to curry favour with the First Commander. He’s a prominent locust lord. You will accompany me.”
Krin assented with a flick of an upper tentacle. He breathed a sigh of hidden relief, confident that he had disarmed Krake.
Krake turned his penetrating gaze toward one of the chittering, drooling prisoners suspended from manacles. “Vagul here was lax at his post and neglected to warn us of invasion early in the Jakru attack. He left Zikri ships open to assault. Many deaths resulted. Recall: five ships, can you believe it! The Jakru did that much damage to our fleet. Treguk, Ak Gruilkaa!” he cursed. “A hundred ships lost, and more from the Mentera’s armada of lightfighters and ring stations.”
It was news to Krin. He looked at Krake with new respect. Krake obviously had links higher up the chain than he imagined, perhaps even to admiral Nrog himself. He recalled snatches of the Jakru battle and knew they had flown in ships disguised as Mentera decoys, a clever plan, even if hatched by aliens. Even if it had failed to accomplish its goal. But only five ships? The paltry number appalled him. It did not, however, help his situation.
“Vagul is beyond redemption,” said Krake. “He must be put to death for his carelessness. But not too quickly. You, however, are granted a chance at redemption, as we, the Zikri, are a forgiving race.”
Krin bowed and watched the ends of Vagul’s tentacles slowly being stretched to the max by metal pulleys and cables.
Krake flicked a tentacle. A wall switch, activated by Krake’s motilator clicked, and Vagul’s closest, most abused tentacle was drawn beyond its means of capacity. Krin heard a wrenching snap, then a ripping of flesh as the member was torn free from its socket and flopped onto the floor with a sickening thud. Vagul let out a screech that chilled Krin’s innards. Horrific, beautiful torture—yet oddly, a sick fascination for all Zikri who witnessed it.
“He is nearing his hundredth round of torture,” observed Krake, “and will not last much longer. Pity. I quite enjoyed our sessions. Between the torturer and the tortured a sense of intimacy develops, if the victim lasts long enough. It’s almost as painful for the torturer to let go of his charge as it is for the tortured to succumb to his pain.”
Krin could understand something of this. He was just glad he had eluded Vagul’s fate.
* * *
As Krake and Krin approached the Mentera ring station in Krake’s personal shuttle, details became clearer. A Velasian star-cruiser, one from the free colonies, enormous, grey, octagon-shaped, but fish-like at its fore. This was a colony ship en route to Punara in the Bedjron sector. The hulk was being towed by a Zikri tug through the protective ranks of aphid ships toward the Mentera ring-torus. The locusts, Krin reflected, would take the starship’s crew, which Krin estimated at a humble 3-5 thousand, and use the colonists for their vats. Quite a haul. The humans, trapped and wired up to the mesh like lab rats, would feed the locusts’ power generators. The ship’s technology would support the Zikri initiative and be incorporated into their own vessels. That, or they would use the craft as bait to orchestrate more ruses and heists.
Hundreds of warships prowled the vicinity like a swarm of bees, the hive being the hub centred around the partly ruined Mentera ring station and the Zikri megaorb Vixlis—the two like an eye of a swirling galaxy, a floating stronghold in space, an ark of terror. It had been centuries since the Zikri had centralized their power, otherwise they had operated as regional marauders ravishing their territory and collecting their spoils like the outlaw barons of old. United under a new leader, the upstart Nrog, a ruthless tyrant, if not an ambitious visionary who saw the Mentera as the springboard to the Zikri manifest destiny, ultimate rulers of the galaxy, they were a force to be reckoned with.
Krin had yet to meet this Nrog. Veteran Zikri had reported Nrog as being ‘intimidating’, ‘indomitable’, and they felt dwarfed, sucked dry in his presence, as if the leader absorbed their very energy through the air. He must be down there somewhere amongst those masses of ships, plotting, rousing Zikri to fight for him, thought Krin who would relish an audience with the warlord.
A forked formation of protector Orbs guarding the inner ‘gate’ parted now to allow Krake’s ship to pass through to the Mentera base station. No chances were being taken after the last ambush.
“Nrog has plans for us,” said Krake. “An invasion that will set the human colonies on their heels forever. We must be ready. Many opportunities are to be had.”
* * *
On the Mentera space station, Krin and Krake walked the long metal walkways through an impossibly high-ceilinged corridor. A detail of Krake’s ranged behind them, drawing their human spoils in tanks on wheeled carts. To the side gaped an empty blue-black space, plunging below into the bowels of the ship. To where those boundless gulfs led, hundreds of feet below, Krin could barely guess, but he had heard of some larger weave of trapped organisms in the vessel’s core, and some sinister power that drove it. A soup bowl of souls. The same that drove the locusts’ life support systems.
Much activity ranged around Krin and his lord. Large, Zikri-sized locusts with wings long fused to their dark chitinous bodies walked on their hind legs or drove aphid-shaped carts filled with goods, supplies or members of their own kind to unknown destinations within the alien ship. Some clacked their way down
