Frakas kept a wary eye out when wandering the halls of the Andredi. The ex-humans in his employ were still acclimating to their latest incarnation as lizard men. He felt certain once the shock had subsided, they'd thank him. Until then, he carried a laser pulse rifle adjusted to do just enough damage to get them to back off without burning a hole clear through them and the mother ship's inner walls, as well.  

The hall was suspiciously empty.  

The creaking bones of the mother ship could be explained away as nothing more than her own muscles straining to pull her joints back into alignment after Frakas's little makeover. He had taken to resetting her bones in hex patterns, pentagrams, and mandalas throughout the ship.  

The passageways between rooms now were all hex signs of his making, inspired by the classics, of course, with a few improvements. The twelve-petaled rosettes, which the Pennsylvania Dutch used for good luck, for the twelve months of the year, along with the triple star, also used for good luck, were Frakas's favorites, each enhanced with countless minor modifications to dress them up, according to the dictates of his own unconscious.  

But the Asian use of the mandala as a schematized representation of the cosmos, and the Jungian use of the mandala as a symbol representing the effort to reunify the self, were the applications that interested him most.  

And that much was clear by his choice of bone-adjustments on the pod ship Andredi. He hoped they would impart a calm and order to the lothra's minds as they did to his; help them to center more completely within their new bodies; help them, moreover, align mind, body, and spirit in a superior fashion, all owing to the greater alignment of mystical and earthly forces one was capable of in the presence of the now numberless mandala.  

How he wished he'd entertained Draxor's mystical temperament better when he had his mind to pick, not just a bunch of stale old e-books.  

But one of those e-books was worth considering. The one that stated, "The branch of Tibetan Buddhism known as Vajrayana Buddhism used the sand painting of mandalas to focus attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. Their symbolic nature can help one to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises."  

And indeed, over the prior months, his mandalas had served to do just that, ever enhancing his ability to concentrate his mind, and that in turn was the gateway to ever more powerful forms of magic.  

Soon, with sheer, unclouded belief, and the rational mind pushed out of the way, he would be able to snatch anything out of the divine ground he desired, out of the void as it was understood by the Buddhists. The spiritual matter that gave birth to the cosmos as a perpetual arising from some holographic field that could project and sustain any amount of parallel universes within its inexhaustible substrate would soon yield all its secrets to him.  

Even as they calmed his over-excited subjects, the mandalas adorning the cavernous chambers of the pod ship Andredi granted him access to deeper quadrants of his psyche and soul, and that of the cosmos's psyche and soul, as well.  

But at this current moment, they also concealed the whereabouts of a chameleon lizard-man who was stalking him, marking him for death. He had trained himself to dart out of the corners of Frakas's eyes from one hex design to another, taking up position as one more line in the overall pattern that looked like it belonged there. Some former mathematician maybe, or a field officer with a keen sense of spatial relations, a surveyor by trade perhaps, who was now applying his "gift" to testing the play in Frakas's steely nerves. The Cambrian-like explosion of life aboard ship had broadened the genetic diversity beyond anything Frakas had consciously intended. In this one case, at least, that was a good thing. 

This one could be useful if he could bring him down unharmed. Frakas needed to walk these halls a little less impeded. If he, too, could cloak himself, he wouldn't need the gun. If he could acquire just enough of the chameleon's genes, and put them under his conscious control, he could then use the added concentration his mandalas leant him to trigger the response at will. A far superior solution to what this fellow had been granted by an accident of genetics, which was a passive nervous system response to his environment over which he had no control. Granted, he didn't really need it for the camouflage to do its work, but Frakas had better things in mind for a camouflage response he could control.  

Frakas turned three hundred and sixty degrees with the gun, sweeping the field as if it were a lighthouse beacon. He made sure to keep turning about himself in irregular patterns which couldn't be mapped out, a little more to the right this time, then a little more to the left, never the same amount twice, forcing the lizard man to do his darting about in order to keep pace with Frakas more out in the open and less from the corners of Frakas's eyes.  

There, the stratagem was bearing fruit. He fired as the chameleon, realizing the jig was up, lunged for him. The creature landed on the floor, spasming, his air sacs filling instinctively so they could feed oxygen to his brain with fewer breaths in between, with less effort, as his life force bled out of him. But not too much. Frakas wanted this one alive. 

* * *

Frakas's subject was coming to on the operating table. The console itself grew out of the Andredi, but the latest assortment of bones tortured into intricate mandala growth patterns.  

The patient struggled against the restraints, unable to move his wrists, ankles, and knees, convinced his foggy vision hadn't cleared sufficiently to behold the straps holding them down. But there were no straps, not in the physical sense. He was held in place by the binding forces of smaller mandalas within the larger mandala of the table itself, made specifically for the task. Despite the creature's frantic panting, it was even now being calmed by the larger overall rosetta pattern embossed within the table.  

The surgical stage was linked to the hex pattern Frakas had dragged his subject to on the floor of the hall. It allowed him to teleport him here. The table's mandala acted as a docking or receiving station. The psychic energy the particular pattern inscribed had at its most macroscopic level the ability to receive his subjects from anywhere in the ship, providing there was a teleporting ring in each room. Frakas had seen to that, no two exactly the same in design in order to cloak the true nature of the teleporters. The smaller adorning patterns didn't interrupt the power of the larger design so much as mark the room's specific location in the geography of the Andredi - or maybe anatomy was the better word.  

"What do you intend to do to me now, Frakas? Please, by all means, enhance my reptilian abilities so I can get far better at hunting you down and killing you." 

"Glad to see your will to live is returning. Revenge is as good a reason to get through the day as any other." Frakas pulled back on the syringe as he was talking.  

"No matter how many times I will myself to die, how many times I leave my body, I keep getting sucked back in."  

Frakas made the mistake of taking too much pleasure in the skin of the chameleon. He quickly averted his eyes, but it was time enough for his patient to be clued as to what was really going on. He realized the mandala patterns he saw throughout the room, no two the same, were repeated on his skin. Had he been able to look at this skin under a microscope, he would have realized just how far Frakas's treachery extended. The grosser patterns he was able to detect in the room weren't the half of it. 

"These designs, they're how you keep us imprisoned. But how?" 

"Calm yourself. It is you I wish to learn from today, and you who will lend me some of your coping methods after I shared mine with you so generously." 

"No one asked us to cope with this, Frakas. No one but you."  

"The mandala patterns inscribed on your skin don't have to enslave you," Frakas said, affectionately running his hand along the surface of his subject, "though I grant they do help keep the genie in the bottle.  

"With time, you will learn to unlock each and every design on your person. Learn the secret of each. They will help you climb out of the confining limitations set by your genetics better than any stairway to heaven you could have divined."  

"But you're the one who set the limits on my genetics." 

"I freed you as much as I could, but you will have to do the rest on your own.  

"In the old days," he said, returning to his preparations, "I knew only how to mix and match genes to help you be all that you can be, to help your thinking be more holistic. Not that I chose to do this. That was Draxor's quest.  

"But since then, I have learned so much more about using the mind to transcend whatever locked box of genetics in which I find myself. My secrets are tattooed on your body in the form of innumerable mandala.  

"If you're only half the student I am, you can use them to unlock the heavens, in time. How much time is up to you. You want to keep hating me, then it will take you that much longer to get over yourself."  

Frakas injected his subject, pulling his blood into the chamber of the syringe. "What's your name?" 

"Carvacas."  

"You feel familiar to me." 

"You know me from another lifetime, back on Mars. You and Draxor were deciding the fate of the world even then." 

"Hm."  

"I cleaned the halls, did my best to be neither seen nor heard, trained to carry out my duties without drawing the attention of the dignitaries."  

"So your chameleon cloaking abilities are entirely in keeping with who you are."  

"Yes. What have you done to me? Did you drug me?" 

"No, the mandalas are exerting their calming effect, counteracting the adrenaline surges in your body." 

"How?" 

"They're vibrating at a frequency that stimulates the pineal gland in your brain to release endorphins associated with deep relaxation. Once they've flooded your bloodstream, the other hex patterns inscribed in the table will engage, vibrating your adrenals, and your other endocrine glands, causing them to harmonize better, and triggering ecstatic states." 

"Your prisons for the soul just keep getting better, Frakas. You must be so proud of yourself." 

"Please accept my gifts. Maybe one day I won't have to bind you to the table. You'll come here of your own accord to reach ecstatic states you can't yet reach on your own."  

"Strange. Now I want to kill you and make love to the cosmos all at once." Cravacas relaxed his neck, allowing his head to fall back to the table.  

"Can I mix a hormonal cocktail or can I mix one, huh?" 

"You want my chameleon abilities?" 

"Yes." 

"That's like choosing to become one of the hired help, isn't it?" 

"You shouldn't be so down on yourself. You are a master stroke of creation." 

"Nice to know you're taking this elevator ride to hell with us," Cravacas said, passing out.  

"I wonder how the particular reptilian mutations managed to align themselves with their human host's core attributes? Is this true for all of you? It wasn't planned or expected. It appears some other force has its hands in things." 

* * * 

On edge, Frakas walked the halls of the Andredi. This was the first time he'd attempted the trek without the gun. Would he be able to summon the magic of Crevacas's chameleon genes on command? Especially after he had deliberately rerouted their nervous system access away from his medulla oblongata, precisely so he could retain conscious control of them? He took a deep breath, his enemies amassing about him. They were supposed to be his loyal subjects.  

It appeared that no amount of mandala patterns drawn throughout the ship or on their persons could quite counteract their hatred for him. Good. The magic was nonetheless clearly doing something. Since they had stopped committing suicide. They lived now for revenge, so much so that their self-organizing speciation throughout the ship probably had to do as much with evolving unique ways of killing Frakas as they did with finding their place in the food web on the Andredi, and with maintaining their own sense of individuality. Revenge was a good emotion for a reptilian brain; not overly complex, not requiring a whole lot of mental energy. 

He had hoped to bring out the herd mentality with this lower-level life form that would make them easier to corral. Maybe under the light of the yellow suns, he would use mammalian life forms. These reptiles were too primitive to think of grouping together much or organizing en masse. When they congregated at all it was only because their overlapping singular purpose leant the illusion of cooperation amongst them. No, like the typical lizard that drops its eggs then leaves her children to fend for themselves, these reptiles weren't exactly communal in the warm blooded sense of the word. No doubt some of them kept their young in their mouths to keep the mates from devouring them, like any crocodile. But that, too, was not quite the sense of mothering and "herd" mentality he had in mind.  

Curse these pale blue suns. They were definitely cramping his style. 

That seeming mass effect was making itself felt on the hairs of his person which were now standing on end.  

He stopped down the irises in his pupils, whose natural mandala geometries had been enhanced by Frakas himself. His irises could now stop themselves down in innumerable ways; layers upon layers of supplementary geometries had been inscribed in his eyes. Depending on which one he employed, he could see along different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. After some practice, he could now de-cloak those hiding themselves by any number of light-scattering interference patterns. He could see through walls of the ship, or through his adversary's anatomy. With time, he hoped to be able to fire lasers and proton torpedoes from his eyes-things he'd only read about in the scrolls scribed by ancient Zen masters, courtesy of Draxor, who coughed them up to buffet his side of the argument during a debate long ago.  

For now he merely needed to see better in the low light environs of the pod ship, lit largely by the creature's own bioluminescence, which it appeared able to adjust. Right now, the lights were set to low. He selected a mandala pattern in his iris that allowed him to polarize light hitting his eyes. There they all were, the ambushing bastards.  

He concentrated on his chameleon genes, causing them to excite, as he sent the electrons in the halos about their atoms forming the molecules in the light-shifting genes of his skin into P-orbital, a quantum level up from their lower resting energy S-orbital state. At D-orbital, or worse F-orbital vibrations, he may very well disappear from their eyes entirely. He hadn't yet experimented to see just what would happen at those vibrations. For now he wanted to pass for Drakus, not pass for invisible.  

It worked. They were momentarily confused, but then it must have occurred to them that the evil Frakas would make Drakus look like him to get them to eliminate one of their own. They started backing away. Strange how their reptilian logic, so long as it confined itself to castle-like intrigue most notable during the Middle Ages, was quite penetrating.  

Perhaps it was Merlin's genes coursing through his veins, but he had taken a liking to all things Medieval, down to viewing this pod ship as a floating castle in space. Someday it might be a space museum. If ever they failed to survive what rigors on whatever world he set them, then the cosmos would need some record of his handiwork, some testament to the divine at work inside him.  

The iris-like mandala guarding the access point to his command room opened by pulling back countless shutters within its overall design, before unfolding its complicated geometry behind him to its closed position. 

He was by now used to looking for Drakus on the ceiling or the wall, any place where he could get a better vantage point on Frakas for taking the one decisive lunge for his throat.  

"How went your morning constitutional?" Drakus said, flicking his tongue from the ceiling. 

"Better." 

Drakus was already moving his body into striking range. He had learned to manipulate the tone of his voice and the pacing of his words in order to speak in a hypnotic fashion, naturally sedating his victim, even as he maneuvered into better striking range. "Oh, Drakus, what would I do were it not for your sublime treachery?" 

"Do I amuse you, Frakas?" 

"We kill the ones we love in order to set them free. This one secret to life the lowly black widow spider figured out ahead of the rest of us." 

Drakus made his body go still the way a good magician pulls off his best tricks with a little diversion, hoping Frakas would be lured further into lowering his defenses by Drakus's clearly submissive body stance, not to mention his servile stillness. All the while he whipped his tail savagely at Frakas, a tail strong enough to shred his body on contact as if papier-mâché, the tail, all this while cloaked rather well by how he allowed its curling to blend with the mandalas adorning the room.  

Drakus was Frakas's favorite, because he was simply so much better at this treachery and backstabbing game than his relatively uninspired crew of cutthroats. Best they all practice their savagery on him in any case to get in shape for the holy war to come, the one Frakas and Draxor had set in motion what seemed like so many eons ago. Had Draxor even glimpsed where this was all heading yet?