The second Zikri ducked Cloye’s fire. It charged her and she fell crashing into a table full of electrical equipment, circuits and glass carboys.
A tentacle whipped out, smacked her in the head. She sagged, then fell limp.
Yul roared in fury. He grunted and kicked out a leg at the questing tentacles. With a chitter of triumph, the larger Zikri, a hulking brute with grey, wavering tentacles, charged Yul and bore him back.
Yul swore he could sense a glint of recognition in those pig-like eyes. But that was crazy! This Zikri seemed to target him almost instinctually, as if its chitters were profane announcements of a score to settle.
Yul’s second blast shimmied off the Zikri’s chest armour as the scuttling creature jerked crab-like and set Yul spinning back.
Stupid! He should have aimed for the legs!
His mechanical fingers caught a whipping tentacle before it surrounded his throat. Another slimy appendage looped around his torso, threatening to crush his midsection. The air whooshed out of his lungs. Yul groaned in dismay. Damn, the thing was far stronger than anything he had ever felt before. It was going to rip his body apart.
He twisted left, caught a second motilator that quested to wrap around his head and he tore, wrenched the flapping limb with an unrepressed fury, mashed it to pulp. A grunt from the ugly mouth came burbling and the member hung limp. Yul’s ribcage was near bursting. The Zikri, in pain and rage, whipped a lower motilator around Yul’s throat, choking him.
Yul pulled it off with his strong left hand, gasping for air.
The second Zikri skittered closer and was almost on him, reaching slimy motilators to ravage him from behind.
Cloye, coming out of her daze, jumped in to savage the Zikri’s back with a powerful kick, snapping the thing’s neck. It gave Yul time to fall backward, pulling the first hulking Zikri with him, and flipping the monster over his shoulders to crack on a piece of shattered metal with pointy edges. The Zikri cried out in anguish, its hide punctured by several metal prongs.
Yul grabbed the flailing tentacle and looped it with triumph over the overhanging bars of the lab table. He pulled the thrashing member down and tied it around the Zikri’s neck in a crooked knot, choking the creature with its own flesh. Yul loosed a savage roar of vindication. The squid twitched, gurgling out noxious fluid from its butt hole of a mouth. Yul grabbed up Cloye and his slimed weapon and staggered for the exit, eager to leave the dead and dying Zikri to their last moments. But a glint of metal beside the choking Zikri caused him to pause.
A queer expression crawled over Yul’s face. One of doubt and astonishment. The gun at the dying Zikri’s side. It was the same as the pain dispenser that Goss had held on him back on Phallanor. How the fuck—? He shook his head in bafflement. There was no way that it could have gotten in the hands of a Zikri. Or was there? The implication was staggering. It could explain how the Zikri had tracked them here. These squid-lowlifes got hold of Mathias’s pain distributor. But what about the Mentera?
Yul’s head swam with the possibilities. They only made his head reel with more throbbing pain. He took his boot heel to the weapon, smashing it to bits.
The voice came over the loudspeaker: “Danger. Air breach. Lockdown in progress. Contamination warning.” The female emergency recording droned on. Red lights flashed in the corridor, bathing the white-washed halls in a blood-pulsing glow.
“Are you okay?” Yul rasped.
“I’ll live.” Cloye gripped her elbow with trembling fingers. A welter of bruises covered the space from throat to mid collarbone where the plant ring had gripped her. “Let’s catch up to those cowards, Hresh and Nonas, teach them a lesson.”
“Forget them. We’re on our own now.”
“Your head’s all banged up,” she said, reaching up a hand to his forehead where it was all red and raw.
Yul winced. A goose egg was forming nicely on his left temple. His right leg was gashed and swollen and his hip throbbed. “A rib or two feels cracked. Otherwise I’ll live.”
“How do we get out of here?” murmured Cloye. “I’ve lost track of direction. Hresh and his bodyguard are the only ones who know this place.”
Cloye’s eyes travelled to the tiled floor. Yul admired what he saw, the round curve of her full breasts, her slender waist, firm bulge of hips. “Well, there’s one of their blood trails. If we really want to find our weasels then we follow, catch up with them and get out of this rat’s maze.” She whipped back her tawny hair like a defiant cat. Clenching blaster in blood-caked fingers, she whirled to face him, studying the keen interest in his dark eyes, a fierce light shining in her own.
Yul grunted and slapped a fist in his palm. “I’m up for some more ball-busting, if you are.”
Chapter 9
Yul and Cloye slunk like wolves down the hall, blasters gripped in both hands. They passed broken bodies of Zikri and Mentera, tentacles burnt, or with claws and heads singed, smoking or sheared off. A fine job of trailblazing, Nonas, thought Yul. The man had skill.
They caught up with Hresh and Nonas at the air lock to the hangar. Hresh, rubbing his temples, pacing in tight circles, looked out from a face blackened, his bare arms scored with burns. Nonas peered miserably through the glass that provided a view of the parked ships and an open hole blasted in the domed roof. Yul bored eyes into him.
Nonas turned to glare. “I had to look after Hresh.”
“Sure, it makes perfect sense.”
“Look, he was scrambling up the
