I fell an incalculable distance then landed with a thud on a hard surface. I felt disassociated from my body as if I had been atomized. But somehow I was whole and very bewildered, staring out from googly eyes, not knowing where I was. Everything was dark here, with only the sound of the raspy air whistling through my mask. The air felt warmer than before, though edged with an acrid, dry tinge of decay. The mask only assimilated the alien air, processing the surrounding atmosphere as best as it could. My lungs pumped air, but my brain struggled to catch up with the impossible reality.
A tickle of electrical energy played at my back. Balt materialized behind me, like some amber ghost. His electrical signature jolted me forward, spiking me with a stronger current. I lurched to the laws of physics, sprawling on my hands and knees on some type of concrete floor. Balt’s form shimmered back to visibility, his atoms reassembled, and I saw that he wore a mask like mine. He kicked me aside, his weapon raised, trained to kill.
We crouched there like white-eyed zombies, breathing in the sepulchral darkness, waiting for some horror to come out at us. But it did not.
We’d left Mong’s temple far behind. We were in some new dimension. Behind us, the sister amalgo, companion to the one on Othwan, buzzed with a bee’s hum and shone a grim amber. We were in some medium-sized room with a low ceiling, carved out of pure rock—no, it was metal of some sort. I reached out to touch it and it gave back a hollow, tinny, reverberating sound when I knocked. Only the ethereal glow of parallel plates of the transporter gave us any illumination.
We edged our way to the room’s end, which was empty save for the amalgamator, perhaps fifty feet away. We passed through some U-shaped doorway with no visible door. I sensed we had moved into a vast space, like a cavern of giants, or some immeasurably large hangar. I looked down upon a frightening scene:
A vast pantheon of rectangular tanks standing upright, like old telephone booths out of Old Earth all assembled in a V-shape, or some deformed star shape. How many? The numbers were uncountable. Hundreds. Thousands? Some tanks were larger than others, and sported a dim green glow, perhaps large enough to hold some large lion or elephant or alien creature.
Balt prodded me along down the walkway that spanned the rim of the depot or hangar, whatever it was in the gloom. I discerned several aphid-shaped ships scattered amongst the masses of those tanks, much different from the Skug vessels, larger, bulkier, like praying mantises, with cruel prows and grotesque, chitinous flukes in their sides.
Christ, what was this place? Another Cyber Corp, some enormous crypt of the past?
Balt nudged me on. We wandered down a low ramp that gave access to the hangar below. I use that word loosely, for I approached the first row of tanks as a man would shamble in a sleepwalk. Ages of dust and grime coated the panes of thick glass. I wiped off a section and peered within. I saw only death. A human skeleton, stoppered, entombed, honeycombed like some primordial honeybee. The saliva in my mouth suddenly tasted dry and sour. Another victim was in no better state. A grinning skull, slumped at the bottom of a glass cage, some relic caught in time. The glass had cracked in several places, as with all of them, as if a foul liquid had drained from the glass sarcophagi ages ago.
A glow of green water radiated up ahead. Balt pushed me along with surly impatience, a hoarse rasp deep in his throat. Two neck-high tanks, stood side by side. Intact. We wiped the glass. I sprang back in horror, recoiling with a snarl on my lips. That tank contained the most repulsive creature I’d ever seen. Some jet black insect, as high as my shoulder, floating on its hind legs, suspended in some god-awful brine, light green like that back at Mong’s temple. The red eyes blinked back at me with feral intensity and a claw pincer lifted to touch the glass a few inches from where I stood. As in a trance, I raised a hand and my right finger mechanically touched the same spot that the insect had touched, suspended in that horrible brine beyond the glass. The insect’s lips parted and a bubble rose, as if to say something. Peekaboo. I see you.
No, this couldn’t be happening. Like some lunatic on a funny farm, I laughed at the mad absurdity of it. Balt licked his lips. “Pipe down. So, they do exist. They didn’t all die out.”
“Does what exist? What didn’t all die out? What the fuck are you talking about? What are these things?”
“They are the Mentera. The mutant locusts. Overlords of the galaxy.”
I stared again. The hint of wings, the faintest silver on the chitinous back, glinted back at me, as if long ago over the course of its evolution those dwarfed appendages had dwindled to stubs, depriving the thing of its power of flight. “Doesn’t look like that to me.”
“You wouldn’t understand, Rusco. Mong can tell you all about it.”
“Fuck Mong,” I sneered. “I’m sick of that crazy bastard and his airy hints. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Shut up.”
“We’ve done his scouting, god damn it. Dead humans, a bunch of tanks, and a couple of weird bugs—”
“I said, shut the fuck up!” He gripped his R6 with a white-clenched
