Minx Ep. 05: Sphere, Age of Arachnids

<em>Trapped in the hollow world that hurtles between the stars, Minx has finally found Dragon only to have him whisked away by the plotting Mahar. Joined by the giant spider Arachne, Minx must cross the remainder of this lethal world, enter Arachne's home domain, and overcome the wiles and traps of Mahar to rescue the evil hyperman's prisoner. The conclusion to Minx's adventures in the Sphere.</em>

I

Minx lay paralyzed in the dust and sand, surrounded by stone hoodoos and watched over by her dog-sized arachnid friend, Arachne. While waiting for the paralysis to end she had plenty of time to think over what had happened to her and wonder how she was going to find Dragon, her hyperman lover who had been stolen away by Mahar. Mahar's final fate was another item on her to-do list. She'd had enough of the arrogant hyperman who'd bedevilled her for far too long.

The courtyard surrounding the tower in the Mesozoic Zone of the Sphere was luckily still free of large predators, more specifically free of large and living predators. Three therapod corpses were being torn into by a number of smallish carrion eaters who'd cautiously crept up to their feasts while keeping a wary eye on both the immobile Minx and her arachnid protector. Any that had braved approaching the helpless woman had been hissed at by an angry Arachne, and then had wisely decided that the freshly slain dinosaurs would provide much better, and more bountiful, meals. Insects buzzed about the large, bloody bodies as the sounds of moist flesh being torn from bone filled Minx's ears.

After the effects from Mahar's weapon slowly wore off, the bounty hunter rose to her feet. She swayed, unsteadily, then waved off the offered limb that helpful Arachne offered her.

"I'm fine. Or, I soon will be. I hope you have a door into that tower."

"Minx!" called out Aphrodite, the A.I. on Minx's crashed spacecraft.

"I'm so glad to hear your voice, Aphrodite! Give me a second or two, Aphrodite. It's only been..."

"Three hours since Mahar stole Dragon from you, boss. Who knows where they've gone and what Mahar and that scheming bitch, Vanessa, have done to your guy!"

"He's not...!" began Minx, and then she stopped to remind herself that she'd been through this thought process already. Dragon was hers or, at least, they were together. It was the programming in her subconscious that kept making her claim she wanted nothing to do with him. For a hyperman he was actually a pretty impressive guy. She did like the man he was, she reminded herself. She wanted to get to know him better.

She stretched, then worked some of her joints. The air stank. Small scavengers ignored her as they tore into the allosaur carcases a short distance away. Minx glanced at them and smiled at the memory of Dragon coming to her rescue so dramatically. He really did have some style when the opportunity presented itself. And, he had been ready to throw his life away to protect her. It was hard for her not to be impressed by that. He clearly was not the sociopathic murderer and torturer that his people had been known for in the historical records.

She patted the spider's back. "Arachne, want to show me where everyone is?" The arachnid bobbed, then scuttled across the ground to the base of the tower. She poked the end of a limb through a holographic wall, then motioned for Minx to follow her.

"Now, Aphrodite! It's so good to hear your voice again! Tell me everything!"

As the artificial intelligence upon her disabled vessel gave her a recent history of Dragon's exploits, Minx hurried after her arachnid friend. She put a hand through the holographic wall, then followed her ally in to find a curving corridor made of strange substances that clearly had been built by an advanced culture. Arachne touched the wall on the inside of the tower and Minx, suspecting her friend had just closed the door, reached out and felt a solid barrier where before there had just been an illusory wall. She nodded at Arachne and the two began to search the tower.

Arachne led Minx to a room where a dozen spider robots, similar in size to Arachne, stood frozen. Arachne was intent on showing her friend every detail about the robots, and of the controls upon the walls. The control panel meant nothing to Minx.

"...and now I cannot communicate with him, at all," finished Aphrodite.

"Why is that?" asked the bounty hunter.

"I suspect Mahar has set up some sort of interfering screen around Dragon to prevent our communicating."

"Makes sense. Arachne was able to figure out how to work the security robots in this tower, Aphrodite?"

"Yes, Dragon was showing her some of the technology while they were aboard the underground transport system. You were correct about Arachne's intelligence. She's been able to go well past Dragon's teachings. Her species is more intelligent than the average human, possibly more so than the average hyperman."

"I see. And Dragon was teaching her Galactic Standard? She seems to understand me much better now."

"He was communicating with her in similar ways as to what you had tried, Minx. I don't know if it just took her some time to decipher your language or if she found a tool that taught it to her..."

Arachne shuffled toward Minx slowly, ruffling her fur with the end of one clawed leg as she did so. She then extended the leg toward Minx, where a small, shiny button of only a few millimetres diameter caught the bounty hunter's eye.

Minx kneeled down and peered at the tiny device. "Is this a translator of some type?"

"What does it look like, Minx?"

Arachne bent her leg and placed the device back against her thorax where it was almost invisible. The leg came out slowly and tapped Minx on the mouth.

"That is the device you use to understand what I say to you?" asked Minx.

Arachne's leg stretched out and tapped Minx on top of her head. Minx took that as a yes.

"You don't have one for me, do you? So, I could understand your clicks and whistles?"

Arachne simply spread two arms wide, in what seemed to be a gesture of helplessness.

"Not that advanced then," muttered Minx. "Your people didn't invent everything."

"Actually, Minx," noted Aphrodite, as the spider shuffled out of the room waving for Minx to follow her, "the device might be attuned to her brain, which would be very different than a human brain. If her people had met humans while they still retained their technological knowledge then they might have made some for your species but, obviously, the last time they were on Terra there were no humans."

"And down the rabbit hole we go," said Minx as she followed her eight-legged friend into the depths below the tower.

II

Under the influence of a paralyzing toxin, Dragon was easily manhandled by the other hyperman, who threw his enemy's bound form onto a flat and gleaming, octagonal surface. As Dragon felt the first tingling of sensation in his hands and feet energy beams snaked up from the base of the octagon to form a dome above him. The ceiling was high enough for him to stand, if he wished. Instead, the hyperman forced his resisting muscles to move until he was sitting in lotus position on the very centre of the platform. His eyes darted about the chamber, observing the computer controls of hyperman manufacture that had obviously been installed by his nemesis.

Mahar sneered in disgust and walked away, leaving Dragon alone with the naked, human woman, Vanessa. The limited equipment and furnishings in the room provided little opportunity for escape, though the many physical screens along one wall did pique his curiosity. He had not seen what controls Mahar had used to imprison him and suspected the energy bars had been activated by his weight upon the octagon. The woman walked across the floor until she stood, hands on hips, directly in front of him. Her eyes wandered over his cell. He grinned at Vanessa, who watched him while an evil grin grew upon her own face.

It had taken just a few short hours for Mahar to fly the paralyzed Dragon and the submissive Vanessa from the tower in the Mesozoic Zone to its counterpart in a third region of the interior of the Sphere. Dragon hadn't been impressed by the other hyperman's vessel or its abilities; his own Hephaestus appeared superior in every way. Mahar, as he had named himself here, had never been a dominant force in hyperman society, nor a threat feared by many of their people. It was evident that any technologies he had gained since their last interaction had not changed that situation. These were all weaknesses that Dragon intended to exploit at the first opportunity.

"You are our prisoner," she gloated.

Dragon relaxed. "Well, Mahar's at any rate." His mind shifted gears; Vanessa was a tool to help him gain freedom, and he recalled she was best manipulated with fear. She was not, what Dragon considered, a thinking being. Operating on immediate needs, desires and fears, she did little in the way of deep reasoning or planning. He wondered how easily he could affect that change within her.

"He's going to kill you," she noted with a chuckle, hoping to pay him back for his previous mistreatment of her. "He's promised me that. Both you and that bitch, Minx."

"Yes, there's no point in belabouring the obvious Vanessa."

She blinked in surprise and her smile disappeared. "You're not afraid?"

"Of dying?" He threw back his head and laughed. "My death will simply free my soul so that it may return to its place beside the Creator. There are far worse things than death, Vanessa. And...Mahar's going to do many of those things to me before he lets me die." He shrugged and took another look about the room.

There was that massive control console along one wall. It was of hyperman design, and Dragon guessed that Mahar had constructed it to give him better dominion over the arachnid machines. The thought occurred to him that he would have simply learned to utilise the advanced technology of the arachnids to avoid any connection issues. The floor, walls and ceiling were composed of some semi-metallic ceramic, that was smooth and polished. Spider symbols were etched upon the walls, just as they'd been in many chambers in the tower found in the Mesozoic region of this hollow world. He already had a grasp upon the rudiments of the written language of Arachne's people.

"And you're not terrified?" she asked, her voice a little shrill.

"What's the point in terror? It's not going to save me. It's not going to save you either, Vanessa," he added, as sympathetically as he could. He loathed the woman he was talking to, for she had first tried to help rape Minx and then later had tried to murder her.

"Save me?" Her eyes opened wide, and she hugged her chest.

"Yes. He'll visit horrendous tortures upon you soon enough, once he's finished with me and Minx, of course." He let that sink in for a few seconds. "What did you offer him? He wouldn't let you walk around his base freely...unless you'd offered him something he couldn't resist."

"I...I told him..." she drew herself up, obviously trying to mimic Dragon's bravado, "I told him he could do whatever he wanted with me once you and that slut were dead."

"Was does he intend to do to Minx?" Dragon asked, too eagerly he realized. In his mind he was cursing himself for allowing his worry over Minx to cloud his thinking. He knew he had to change the subject. "Mahar will be showing you the manner of your demise as soon as he can. He'll want to see you worry and fret, and watch as your nerves slowly shatter in anticipation of the hell you'll face, Vanessa."

"But...you and Minx will be dead!"

"I feel sorry for you, Vanessa." He saw her surprise at that admission, then disbelief. "No, I really do. I can desensitize myself to whatever tortures he visits upon me, and I've done some modifications on Minx that give her a limited ability to do the same." It was a lie, but it had conveniently popped into his head. "But you're just a normal human, Vanessa. You'll feel everything he does to you when the time comes. There's no hope for you...no rescue. It will go on and on until he becomes bored and ends your life in the most gruesome way possible."

She swallowed hard. "You were going to drag me behind that boat and feed me to sea monsters!" she accused.

"I was never serious about that, Vanessa. If I had been, would I have cared whether or not you were conscious? I would have ordered Rod to tie a rope to you and toss you overboard after you'd fainted. Instead, I gave you to Rod...a ruse to keep you alive for the time being."

"But...!"

"You'd tried to arrange for the rape of Minx," he reminded her. "Didn't it occur to you that I'd want to get revenge upon you? Otherwise, I had no intention of harming you." He looked her in the eye as she shook her head in disbelief. Centuries of tales about the monstrous hypermen were evidently playing in her mind. "Didn't I rescue you from that giant squid monster, Vanessa? I could have stayed safely aboard my vessel while it crunched your bones and dragged you beneath the waves."

"You're playing with my head!" she accused, her eyes moistening.

"Could be," he agreed. "But, have I ever done worse to you?"

"You gave me to that pirate! He did things to me!" She turned her back to him and trembled at the memory of Rod's desires.

"Just like your friends would have done things to Minx?" asked Dragon. "Simple revenge, Vanessa. Nothing more. You enslaved a race of peaceful hominids - I cannot guess at how many you killed while doing so - so that you and your friends could have an easy life. You arranged to have Minx drugged and then raped by those same friends. Then, when she defended herself against your attacks, you threw her into a pit to be eaten alive by a giant lizard. Your conscience isn't clear, Vanessa. All the evils I have done to you were brought on by you. And...I think you have done far worse than I have done."

"But...!"

Dragon nodded his head to the door through which Mahar had left. "You'd best follow after him, and quickly. He'll get suspicious if you stay here too long. Mahar doesn't want you to learn anything that might help you escape his clutches. He probably has another chamber where he can spy on Minx and the others no matter where in the Sphere they are. When he goes there to be entertained you can come and visit me." Her face showed her disbelief. "I'm your only way out of here safely, Vanessa. I just want to rescue Minx and leave this world. Mahar seeks entertainment...hyperman entertainment. At some point in what's left of your life you'll have to admit that I'm right and that you need help."

Vanessa hurried out the open doorway, eager to find Mahar and prove Dragon's words to be lies. She took one curious look back at him then ran off down the hall. The hyperman laid back upon the platform, interlocking his fingers behind his head. He smiled. Vanessa would be very easy to manipulate, especially since Mahar was unlikely to bother considering what harm a stupid human such as she could do to his plans. It was just a matter of time before she began to listen to his advice and act against Mahar, and all Minx had to do was survive until then.

There was a clicking noise in the hall, outside the chamber, but from his vantage Dragon could not see what had made the noise. The sounds receded after Vanessa, as if following her. It had not sounded mechanical though the clicking was clearly patterned and reminded him of something hard impacting a solid surface, such as the floor. The noises suggested multiple pairs of legs, and he briefly searched his memory for any knowledge of large creatures of the Paleozoic that might have been the cause.

Dragon later thought back on the events at the tower in the Mesozoic area. He had been inconceivably stupid to have believed the flying figure he and Minx had seen was Mahar fleeing. They had bumbled around like fools and then had been rightly incapacitated by the scheming Mahar. Why had they been so careless? What could have possessed him? He considered it likely that his happiness at finding Minx had blinded him to everything else...as if seeing her again was the only important event in the universe. The thought disturbed him, and had given his enemy an advantage. However, Mahar had only brought him to this far refuge, for he assumed he was in another tower, likely in a region full of animals and plants that were native to Terra when Arachne's people arose. It made sense. The Sphere was an ark, containing lifeforms from the time of the arachnid's rise to power and then from two subsequent visits to Earth.

So why hadn't Mahar brought Minx, too? Obviously, he believed Minx was human and, therefore, unimportant. Yet he had brought Vanessa along. Mahar, Dragon surmised, must have believed Minx too intelligent to fall for his lies while Vanessa had immediately been assessed as having a limited intelligence. Or, he thought quickly, since Minx had been around Dragon for some time prior to arriving at the Sphere and Dragon had come to find her, Mahar might assume she was under the control of his pheromones. Then, Minx was only an entertainment, and a mild one at that. Dragon and Vanessa would be saved for some truly spectacular tortures, while Mahar would watch as Minx risked her life to find the hyperman he believed she was obsessed with.

Dragon shook his head. Mahar's immediate motives and plans were unknown to him. He had always been isolationist, more so than most of their people. On the occasions that the two had crossed paths Dragon had not been impressed by Mahar, and Mahar had done little to improve himself and his access to technology since the last time. He should be in total control of the Sphere by now, and yet... That would mean Mahar was eccentric, possibly afraid of other hypermen and potentially vulnerable. After all, that was why he was hidden away inside the Sphere. Dragon was confident that with what he had learned to date he could easily extract all useful knowledge from this world in just over a month given full access to an arachnid database, yet Mahar had clearly been here longer than that. So, Dragon reasoned, Minx did have a good chance against Mahar, especially if she was helped by Arachne and the fool continued to underestimate her.

He was sure that the arachnid was underestimated by Mahar, and that would be an advantage that Minx could use. Now all he had to do was undermine Mahar's control over this world and that would require Vanessa's unwitting help.

There were some more clicks, intermittent, in the hall beyond the open doorway. A creature soon came in view. It was a giant scorpion-like beast fully two metres long and a little more massive the Arachne. Its stinger hung menacingly over its own back and two large claws looked quite capable of dealing damage to anyone careless enough to get grabbed by one. The scorpion carried an open-topped box upon its back that was affixed to its body by a harness. The creature stared at Dragon for a few seconds then scuttled away.

Surprised by the sudden appearance of this new over-sized arthropod, he quickly realized that these creatures must be working for Mahar in some manner. It made sense that the arachnids would have brought their cousins into the Sphere, but he wondered why he'd yet to see one of Arachne's people in this building. Dragon stared at the lone doorway leading out of the room and started crafting plans.

III

It took her forty-five minutes of padding bare-footed down hall after strange hall in the arachnid fortress, before Vanessa finally found Mahar. He was in a trophy room, of sorts. It was a large circular chamber and a multitude of animals were mounted atop a variety of platforms in life-like displays. Vanessa passed mammals, dinosaurs, insects, and creatures too strange to classify in any way until, at last, she stood beside the hyperman as he considered a large, two-legged carnivorous dinosaur that made her very nervous. Something scuttled out of a dark corner and Vanessa fought back a frightened squeal as an enormous scorpion left the room through the very doorway she had passed through seconds earlier.