26 days until Mars Arrival

Arachna awoke with a pounding headache. She was tucked away inside an overhead air duct. Her entire body ached. It felt like her blood was pulsating with the weight of a thousand Krath tumblers.

What was in that drink? It was so delicious, and yet it caused all sorts of problems with her body. Hopefully, the pain would go away on its own.

Horde, she had been looking forward to using her newly discovered invisibility to explore more public areas of the ship, but today she didn't feel very adventurous.

She set a mental reminder never to drink champagne again. Perhaps she'd stay away from too much Yumen food altogether. There was no telling what kind of side effects it would have on a Krath.

But it was so delicious.

Horde, she'd have that conversation with herself on another day. Not now. Maybe when she wasn't feeling so out of sorts.

Her two defective forelimbs felt particularly pained. They normally hurt, but today, the aching was combined with the side effects of the Yumen drink. Maybe she should just gnaw her two front limbs off? If she removed them then they would hurt even more but only for a few hours before the wound healed over. Maybe they would even regrow properly?

Not a bad idea.

She placed her beak around her right forelimb. It was large and swollen but only in the front half of the appendage. The back half was normal, like her other legs. She bit down.

Click, cliiiiiiick, click.

It hurt like crazy. The pain shot through her nervous system like electricity through an electric circuit. Acidic blood dripped from the wound.

Her limb could still move. Her bite hadn't been hard enough to amputate. She merely managed to bruise and cut herself.

Horde, would a Hive Mother be this much of a wimp? Looking at her bruised forelimb, she decided that perhaps she would be a bit of a wimp. At least for now. That hurt.

She licked her wound, trying to soothe away the pain. Krath were not meant to self-inflict pain but they were meant to put up with pain. Lots of it. Somehow she knew that she'd need to toughen up if she was going to survive. It was part of being Krath.

Best not to focus too much on it.

Standing up, she decided to test out her invisibility. Closing her eyes, she mentally envisioned herself turning transparent. Then she opened them.

Nothing.

She could see her limbs plain as day. Why wasn't she able to turn it on like she did yesterday? How had she done it before? Her entire body was black and not invisible.

Arachna mentally retraced her steps. If she could recreate the circumstances, maybe she could find out how to become invisible once again. She'd just eaten lots of pie. Maybe it was the pie? The Yumens could have had something in their food that made Krath turn invisible. That didn't seem too likely, but no theory was too stupid at this point.

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Closing her mind, she tried to recreate the scene, imagining herself about to be discovered by Yumens. She imagined the room filled with dazzling lights and wondrous aromatic scents. Then she imagined the taste of pie, adding one twist—this pie contained apples mixed with Xitherium and Yumen flesh. Yum.

Now turn invisible.

Nothing happened. Arachna remained her plain self. Horde, that was annoying. She'd made one of the greatest discoveries probably of any Krath, and now she couldn't repeat it. Maybe she had to eat the pie. Imagining a scene of her eating it simply wouldn't do.

Horde.

Another theory to consider was that she was panicked and put on the spot. The situation had been life or death. The amount of adrenaline coursing through her veins had been unusually high at that moment. That could have something to do with it. It was possible that she had to be truly desperate to access her powers.

Horde, that wouldn't be easy to recreate unless she was actually, truly panicked. Not a situation she was too keen to repeat.

For now, she'd have to explore the Eschaton the old fashion way—through stealth.

She peered down—the drops of her blood that had come out of her wound were already eating through the duct. She really needed to be more careful when she bled. This was getting to be a bad habit. These Yumens used weak materials to make everything. Horde, couldn't they simply use sturdier materials that didn't crumble so easily? It wasn't as if Krath blood was that acidic. Was it?

Opening her beak, she nipped at the blood droplets with her beak to lap them up. No use in burning a hole in her hiding spot.

Curling up into a ball, Arachna decided that today would be for resting and recovering. Her body needed time to heal and wait out the aftereffects of the Yumen champagne.

Her stomachs grumbled inside her. Was she hungry already? Horde, feeding herself was an awful lot of work. Maybe that was her body's way of telling her to get off her spinneret and find some food.

But horde, she knew in her gut that what she really needed wasn't food. It was a plan.

The Starship Eschaton was barreling through space at a tremendously fast speed toward the Yumens' homeworld. Even if she managed to survive in hiding, wouldn't she eventually be found if she landed on Mars?

Maybe not...if she figured out how to stay invisible, then she could simply stay out of everyone's way and disembark on her own. That might just work.

If she could evade detection for the remainder of the passage while developing her stealth cloak then she might just survive.

But then what?

She scratched her hind legs together while wriggling her spinneret. What kind of life would that be living on the run on a Yumen planet that was probably filled with more marines and soldiers than she could imagine? That was no life. If she was outnumbered now, then when she arrived on Mars, she'd be nothing. She'd stand no chance at making a proper life for herself.

Arachna instinctively wanted to spawn hatchlings. To do that, she'd need to metamorphize into a proper full-grown Hive Mother. Mars was no place to raise a family of Krath. Maybe after a proper invasion, it could be transformed into a nice Krath world. The Yumens could be farmed and eaten. But all that would take time and lots of Krath forces. On her own as a queenling, she couldn't do anything. And in that state, she would have to live out her life as a queenling, never finding a place safe enough to transform, to truly call her own.

No, Arachna decided. There had to be a better way.

This ship was her home. Her birthplace. And if she was going to survive, she needed to figure out how to survive here. It was, after all, all she'd ever known.

Stealth and hiding were not the ways of the Krath. The Krath attacked with overwhelming numbers. They struck fear into the hearts of their enemies. They ruled planets and star systems. They didn't hide and cower in fear.

And neither would she.

There was only one way that Arachna would be able to pull off such a feat.

If Arachna was going to survive, she needed to find a way to take over the Eschaton.