“Trapped in their own conduits.” Dante rumbles out a laugh, which turns into a deep purr.
It’s a purr which soothes my soul…until I see his arm.
It’s blackened like charcoal.
“Dante!”
“I will heal, my mate,” he croons. “It’s a small price to pay in order to deal with our enemies.”
“It isn’t to me. You didn’t need to do this.”
Dante gazes at me, his slit pupils glittering with the white light surrounding us.
“Of course I did. Everything needs to be perfect for you, my mate. I want to dance for you, as I should have done from the beginning. I want to rut for you, fill your belly with my seed, and make a life for ourselves free from the mutations which have made our lives incalculably hard.”
“And what if I like your mutation?” I stumble out through hot tears I cannot hold back. “What if you being you is all I want?”
Dante wipes his good thumb over my cheek, lifting it away to lick the tears.
“I will never change, just ask Dalox. Being who I am is the reason Deus gave me access to his sector. It’s the reason Darax trades with me, the reason Dexx lets me process the gygament into star fuel, the reason Driok hates the fact I’ve made a better job of protecting Vorostor than he has. I will never change, little flame. I will always be Dante. I have always been Dante, and I will always be yours.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“I think I have had enough of the Gonoz.” Dante sighs. “I want to get back to Vorostor, cure my crew, and mate with my heartsfire until neither of us can move,” he says.
And he reaches up with his other hand, crushing the bundle of wires together in a slow, measured action. The silence is gone, filled with groans which are almost ethereal, and at the same time made entirely from metal being wrenched apart.
The white light reduces and reduces until we are standing in the passageway, the walls blackened, the hole Dante crawled into wide open and the remains of the robot at our feet once again.
I’d say it was exactly the same, but it isn’t. It feels…free.
In his charcoaled hand, Dante holds a glowing, pulsing ball of light about the size of a tennis ball.
“The Gonoz are in there,” I gasp, staring at it, almost unable to lift my eyes away.
“If you have no form, you can exist anywhere, even somewhere small,” Dante says, peering at the ball. “And if you can inhabit the uninhabitable, then you can be contained in a loop going nowhere.”
“That is an infinity loop?” I gaze at it once again.
“It is a cage for the Gonoz,” Dante says with a satisfied smile.
“Not all of us.”
I tear my eyes away to see a huge robot, one which is bigger even than Dante. Its single eye, in the center of a tiny head, is a speck of laser red. The body is solid, black, and intimidating. On each of its six arms is an individual weapon.
“I think, perhaps, enough of you to make one more not necessary,” Dante says, dropping the ball of light down into the hole and launching himself at the robot, his form partially shifting with wings and a tail, flame licking around his huge jaws as I stumble back.
Right to the edge of the hole, where I windmill my arms for a beat before recovering my balance.
I do not want to leave Dante, but also, if I try to use my ray gun, given the way he’s grappling with the big robot and how much of the passage is taken up with his shifted form, I risk hitting him instead.
What I do know is I need to secure the cage because even if that is the last Gonoz, none of them are getting out, not again.
Dante has his jaws clamped onto the robot. I can hear the screeching sound of metal bending as I lower myself down into the hole in the floor. The glowing ball is where Dante dropped it, and I pick it up, shoving it in my pocket. It is hot down here, and as I look up, the robot and Dante roll over the opening until I can’t see them anymore.
In the distance, I can see another light up ahead. I have to get the remaining Gonoz’s compatriots as far away from it as possible, and if it means I can get to the scout ship, then I know Dante would want me to do it.
I run as fast as I can towards the light, the irony not being lost on me, as there is a wrenching sound behind me.
