Krin’s breath rasped out of his chest in slobbery gasps. He coughed out a gob of black blood onto his mask, which dangled askew, not quite covering his nasal orifices, almost retching as he dragged himself with torment down the corridors.
The human had fought well, like the dervish he was to the end, and had won. A salute to him. As a warrior, Krin could not feel bitter toward him, only applaud him, and honour the creature in his own death in accordance with the warrior code that he served. He was prepared to die peacefully and alone on this alien world. A death he could have met earlier. Many times he had escaped doom, but not this time.
Krin’s polyp of a mouth curled into an ironic grimace. He had saved the human Mathias by plunging him into a tank. What irony that the human with that pup’s grin was still somewhere on his ship, had been granted near immortality, one who would stare glaze-eyed out of his glass prison forever. The human would bear the ravages of time until the elements corroded his container and spilled his innards out in death. No one would venture to this world now. Most of the Zikri here were dead, as were the crafty locusts, and their ships destroyed or flown away.
How Krin dragged himself those hundreds of yards through the human corridors was beyond him. His emergency mask dangled even further from his cheek, only half covering his bruised mouth, as he chittered in anguish in various stages of delirium. Finally he was at the hangar and through the damaged air lock. The erstwhile Krake’s Orb had gone, taken away by the Mentera with their trove of humans from the research facility. His smaller Orb lay on its side with a gaping hole, defunct, shot down by the research team’s counter-defences.
Where the human machine that had crippled him was, he did not know, nor did he care at this moment. He crawled with grief amongst the wreckage of bodies closer to his ship, his mausoleum. No time to get to the Mentera tanks that could rejuvenate his ravaged and broken body, he was bleeding out too fast.
The last thing Krin saw was the mechanical juggernaut looming over him, gazing with certain ‘curiosity’. Twitching bodies of Mentera lay crushed under its mechanical feet as it staggered closer. Just as suddenly came a sound of fluttering over his shoulder. The pod-birthed-dragonfly flew through a jagged gap in the avatar’s metallic breast and Krin glimpsed through the smoking hole in his ship’s side, Mathias’s tank, and he understood...
That three beings from far-off worlds were inextricably linked by fate, all brought to a tragic end.
* * *
The dragonfly observed all this as it flew out of its breach in the Biogron’s glass. The atmosphere of this strange world did not seem to affect its peculiar bodily functions. Its physiology was made for adapting to constantly changing situations and conditions of its existence: atmospheric, climatic, physical. That and chemical shock or physical imprisonment were its banes and strength-givers. Such was the nature of the creature’s survival mechanisms. As its mechanical exoshell smoked and sizzled in the blood and flesh of Zikri at its feet, the dragonfly adapted again. An insight dawned in its agile brain. Flying with fervour back into its armadillo shell, it reached out to state-of-the-art circuits made available by the Biogron. The avatar twitched its ears, lowered its horn in response, while the dragonfly continued to send more pulses to heal its mechno-circuits and its outer wounds and urge its battered, plated form forward across the ruin of bodies closer to the Zikri ship that held Mathias.
The dragonfly realized it could fly free of its glass case at will, or it could fly back into the Biogron casing and use its protective armadillo armour when it needed to—like a virtual mechanical god.
As the creature of Hresh’s creation lay there smoking in the sallow murk now lightening before the alien dawn, its robot eyes sighted on the multiple forms of Mentera and Zikri corpses, the sizzling clumps of jagged metal and twisted wreckage, and it sensed a perfect utopian stasis: a harvest of corpses in a peaceful graveyard of eternity, its for the taking, and it, the sole lord of its domain.
Chapter 11
Life had taken an unfortunate turn for Regers—if such euphemism could be applied. Left to his own resources, he was to die in the most lonely, hellish manner possible, abandoned by his own crew to the tentacles of the Zikri.
As he lay choking in the cold, oxygen-deprived air pouring in from the desolate moon through the Orb’s breached hull, it was the dead bodies of the marines that saved him. Several of their suits were nearly intact and the adhesive that Yul had ‘kindly’ left behind had served to repair one he had exchanged for his own. Regers had used Hurd’s oxygen mask during that grim melee, knowing the sod wouldn’t mind, suffering while he sucked air and jerked about, freezing in the cold as the room slowly warmed up. By the time he had loped back to the hold, Lander was gone and Mathias’s mop-up crew had left without him. The fuckers.
Regers had slumped on his knees, praying for death, with the big eerie dragonfly following him everywhere about like a mariner’s albatross. Now the thing was more a dragonfly than a
