Future Winds (6 page)

“Woah man, just asking,” Kaito said raising his hands. “I would have done the same and I am not second guessing what you did at all...just,” he paused. “What was it? Do you think it killed Valerie?”

Leon faced forward again continuing on. “The girl entered that cave, by her own accord or someone else’s I do not know, but I am sure she entered that cave. My faith that she exited alive simply does not exist. Hell, I don’t think anything gets out of there alive often for that matter and we should be grateful that walking maggot corpse died in there instead of us.” 

He isn’t wrong. Fuck everything about that cave: its enormous creepy bats, its wretched stench, and whatever the fuck that maggot bug thing was.
Kaito thought.

“Well, look at that,” Leon pointed out, “Looks like our friends have been quite busy in our absence.”

Kaito looked ahead to see not only a fully constructed warp gate off in the distance but also a citadel of a carrier ship that had been warped in while they were gone.

“Those things are way bigger in person than they appear on television,” Kaito said in amazement.

“Yea and just think, we are about two miles out from it. Let’s go,” he said as the two picked up their pace forward.

***

The gate further from where Kio-Kai sat in the great colosseum of glory, slowly raised and if the crowd cheered before for the rebels of Ikan clan, they now bellowed a thunderous roar of appreciation for the beast that lay behind the lifting gate. He was their champion and a gift from the overlords of gratitude for their loyalty and hard work.

The rock golem Brutalius emerged. A body of irregular uneven stone from head to toe radiated red as if fire burned within its very soul. He wasted no time thumping his chest hyping not only himself up to kill but the crowd to equally feel a part of what it was he was about to do. The arena was his world and his fans were his family.

The three Vai-Zik hunters that guarded the smaller weaker one, began to advance towards the Anolem. No sense in delaying the inevitable conflict, they aimed to strike first before the golem could get himself psyched up.

“It’s a smart move,” Lai-Kai chimed in, glued to the sport below.

The golem caught on to their ploy for a quick attack and began to advance towards them to cut off their momentum.

As the two parties gained speed heading straight for each other the three hunters branched out, one fluttering ahead on the right, another to the left, while the third stayed centered at ground level advancing straight for Brutalius.

Like a bull seeing red, the brute continued its charge for the ground level hunter--passing the two that fluttered by his sides.

The two in the air double-backed and dive bombed towards the hunter still advancing at ground level. It was a trap and at the very last second the hunter that played the role of bait rolled safely off and to the side.

Brutalius continued on, gaining momentum, not bothering to stop and re-engage them. The two hunters that dive bombed from above hit the ground empty handed.

“He could care less about the three of them,” Lai-Kai commentated dispassionately as if she had solved some great secret.

The three hunters took but a couple of seconds to realize what was happening. They jumped up and dashed back towards the fourth half-pint, defenseless hunter they had left behind. Clearly they went on the offense early in an attempt to defend it, but they did not expect the golem to completely disregard their assault and not engage at all.

The runt backpedaled tripping on its own awkward feet and began to squeal in fear as Brutalius showed no ambition of yielding his charge. The other three hunters tried to catch him but he was too far gone and before any of them could even come close, he ran through the runt’s small, fragile body. The shattering of its bones could be heard cracking apart throughout the great colosseum.

Brutalius doubled back and made it to the broken grunt just as the other three hunters arrived. Fragmented into multiple pieces, it lay on the ground twitching and convulsing. They could do nothing for him and one even fell to its knees out of heartache for its brethren.

Brutalius cackled maniacally and picked up the torso of the twitching child. Not hesitating for a second, he began to pick apart its legs from their sockets and toss them down into the dirt before the hunter that lay on his knees in dismay. He then popped off the still-living head that was going through spasms as it died in complete fear, horror, and pain. Cupping the face of their comrade, he smashed it into his stone chest, spewing chunks of shell, blood, and viscera in all directions.

One of the hunters on his feet zoomed forward in a fit of rage. The second joined in on the charge and, as soon as he had, the big brute of a golem countered the attack. He caught the thrusting arm of the first hunter in the air and added to his momentum--spinning him around much faster than he had taken off. Using him as a bat he swung the helpless insect around and smashed him into the other that still charged forward behind him.

The collision crushed their bones and once again the sound of cracking cartilage echoed through the arena. The final hunter perched, still on his knees, blood caked his face as he watched in speechless horror. Brutalius approached the lonely hunter, stepping on and crushing a pile of mangled body parts as he draw near. The single hunter sat watching a leg on the ground before him twitching as if attached to a body that was still alive. Much like their bodies, his spirit was broken. He no longer needed to die to be defeated.

Brutalius palmed the face of the hunter on his knees, and detached the head: making it look easy he plucked off the antennas, discarded them to the ground of blood and gore, and raised the head to his face to look within the eyes of his fallen enemy. He smiled then raised it higher above his own head to show the crowd whose silence in awe erupted into cheers of admiration.

I require the presence of you before me, my child.
A voice as clear as the dead bits of hunter down in the arena below, spoke directly inside Kio-Kai’s head.

His antennae twitched a bit, as they always did when receiving commands from his queen lady Kai-Zul and he looked over to Lai-Kai who also appeared to have gotten the same message. It was rare for a queen to summon an individual. She would spread her will amongst the clan daily but as far as personal commands went, she had workers that spent their lives catering to her direct needs who almost never left her side.

“What do you think this is about?” Lai-Kai ask him.

Kio-Kai shrugged and the two took flight from the arena, working their way into one of the many thruway transit systems that led deeper into the hive, while the crowds behind could still be heard, roaring in praise of Brutalius.

***

Two mechanics exited the carrier ship and Abram, as instructed, lead the two over towards the warp gate while the vice admiral and her escorts retreated back into the vessel.

“Alright Aries, see if you can get a fix on Leon,” Tyler instructed his drone.

Aisha perched against a rock, “So what the hell was that about?”

Tyler ignored her, he wasn’t expecting to be ripped apart like that and did not feel as though he had done anything wrong to deserve it. When dealing with that level of authority, he figured it best to just simply comply.

After pinging Leon’s drone, Scorpio, Aries computed her results out loud, “The distance between our current location and Scorpio is approximately four hundred and thirty-five yards due east.”

“Wait, what?” Tyler questioned, spinning around to look.

Over towards the warp gate and just below, within the shadow it cast across the ground, approached Leon and his drone. Kaito and his bot were right behind him.

Tyler began to jog over to meet the other two and Aisha jumped to her feet to follow suit.

“Well, that was easy,” she sarcastically spat out.

Tyler was stoked to see Leon: aside from considering him a friend, this also meant he wouldn’t have to directly deal with the vice admiral.

“Long time no see,” he called out as they met.

“You guys have been busy I see. What did we miss?” Leon responded.

“Well, it looks like we report to a humbling women by the name of Vice Admiral Natalia Fox,” Tyler said.

Leon’s face looked as though his brain was trying to recall the familiar sounding name, “Yea, I remember meeting her once in our training,” he said, “Eyes that can cut through steel.”

“Yea, she is a real peach, anyway she has Abram and a few tech guys going over the gate, making sure it is a hundred percent, while the two of us were supposed to head out and find you three.” He paused, noticing there were only two, Leon and Kaito. “Where is Valerie?”

“We found her ship-- got torn to pieces in that fire storm that flailed about all day.”

“Holy shit, did you find her body?”

“That’s the thing, she didn’t die in the wreckage. We followed a trail of blood to a cavern where we made contact with hostile alien life.”

“What do you mean hostile? Did it attack you? What was it?”

“I don’t know what it was. A sizeable humanoid like creature though. I wouldn’t say it’s cause for concern but definitely a matter of interest we should look into.”

“Aries get a message to Fox. Tell her we found the team and we have new intel on a potential threat.”

“Transmission sent,” Aries confirmed.

Almost instantly after, Aries alerted, “Incoming live com.”

“Patch it through,” Tyler complied. Before them, Aries spat out an array of color that created a high resolution holographic image of the vice admiral.

“That didn’t seem to take long. Were they hiding off in the bushes?” The vice admiral spat.

***

Kio-Kai, and Lai-Kai approached their queen's lair. A small opening led into a hollowed out room with stagnant ponds and streams of blood that once flowed from the upper levels of the hive. Thick gooey eggs, varying in size, attached to the streams via heavy umbilical cords. When a queen lay an egg, a twitch drone would puncture the egg and grab the umbilical cord so that he could run it over and submerge the tubing into a body of lifeblood.

Twitch drones were another type of worker unit within the Vai-Zik empire. They rarely slept and were considered the working ground force, as they constructed cities and catered directly to the queen’s needs.

Kio-Kai passed one of the eggs--pulsing with life from within. Somewhat transparent, he could make out a small fetus suspended in a clear, red gel. He had a cloudy memory, decades old, of being in the hatchery. He hadn’t been here since birth. It intrigued him to actually see the inner workings first hand and with much older, mature eyes.

From around a corridor emerged a twitcher, bipedal with three sets of arms and much smaller wings than that of a hunter, he approached. He had a smaller frame and smaller antennas. In general, twitch drones never ventured too far from their queen and never engaged in combat, just manual labor, day in and day out.

“Are you the two Lady Kai has summoned?” he hissed.

“No, we are just tourists looking for a view,” Lai-Kai joked.

The twitcher’s ugly face looked perplexed. It did not comprehend humor for, it lived its life stuck in the old ways of the swarm--forever loyal and bound to the queen’s will. Humor was an emotion that manifested with freedom of thought. Freedom of thought was still a new and cloudy idea to most. Some accepted it and some did not--staying loyal to the past.

“We are the two she called for,” Kio-Kai said in a serious manner.

The twitcher looked at Kio-Kai and nodded, then beckoned them to follow him as he led them through a swamp of blood and eggs to their queen’s domain.

Dark green and red veins pulsated along the walls. An organic plant-like substance fed on minimal amounts of the lifeblood. The Vai-Zik never cleansed their layers of the leaching plants since they acted as a free, interconnected system of pipes and tubes. If a twitcher needed to access a pool of blood from a distance, it only need puncture one of the vein plants and it would gush the liquid out like a fountain for hours before the wound would eventually coagulate and seal.

The three entered through a large opening that was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of hieroglyphics, most dating back to a time history had long since forgotten. Languages, dead and gone, left only mystery and speculation as to their curators and meanings.

In the next room, lit by the light of a thousand candles was Lady Kai, queen of her clan. She was beautiful. A queen could evolve from any species of Vai-Zik, be it grinder, twitcher, or hunter and might maintain some of the traits from being such. When a female embraced the destiny of queen, a large abdomen would rupture from her spine and grow in enormous size along with four to eight very small additional legs that could help carry the added weight.

Lady Kai’s antennas were tremendous and hung down to her belly. She had three sets of arms, which led Kio-Kai to the conclusion that she once was a twitcher herself, very long ago.

Kio-Kai and Lai-Kai dropped to one knee and bowed before their queen. Hunters rarely got to meet a queen after all.