The chittering was starting to get loud. Helms sealed up and ear-blockers came on. Scott’s casual sniping hadn’t stopped, either, and a couple incoming shots had bounced off the hard air shield I was keeping up in front of us.

McCoy had the full tactical display up in front of him. “External groups have passed us and are converging from behind,” he reported smoothly, cadence of his words matched to Ben’s footsteps, which slowly stopped.

“Good,” Rich said. “Give us some light.”

The very bright Eternal Lights cones stuck into the webbing went on at a Word, and suddenly everyone could see the things a hundred yards down the tube, not just the lights blocked off as they approached.

The airborne horde of reptilian insect-things with their needle teeth, double-tailed stingers, and tentacle arms there promptly screeched, adding to the droning of oversized wings somehow lifting bodies that size, and a lot more incoming fire came our way.

A lot of fire went right back at them.

Peggy’s Gatling gun turned the middle of the tube into absolute explosive hell, the mini-gun flaring with the light of Blessings from her Shield Honor and blowing right through dozens of these things in no time at all.

Cyclops began to scythe beams down the length of the tube, not really killing much, but making them shy away from the corridors and stick together in convenient lines for the other shooters.

There was pounding from the doors behind us as the Brood outside tried to get in. The metal started to buckle as they began to concentrate fire on the access doors.

The Brood were snarling and snapping as they kept getting stuck in and wrapped up in the webbing scattered around, but their fellows just skittered over them, or snapped into flight long enough to bypass the clusters and knots of stuck Brood. After the first Gatling burst chopped those in the air out of it with preternatural accuracy, they were staying closer to the ground where Peggy couldn’t kill so many at one time from behind her floating Shield.

The closest ones were almost to the waiting Rock that was Ben Grimm when Richard chopped his hand at Scott.

His visor cycled emerald, and silent green stillness swept out.

Kinetic force cancelled kinetic force, and everything in front of us stopped moving.

The mini-missile launchers looted from the ship’s armory cycled open, calculated optimum spread and coverage, and Fixer pushed the button as everyone else picked targets, too.

The green vanished, but the onrushing horde had no momentum, and the missiles and gunfire came in very fast.

The doors behind us blew off less than two seconds apart. That was nice for them, except Jewel was sitting at the top of the tube with incendiary ammunition, and let go into very tightly-packed spaces.

Ahead of us, the tube vanished in an array of hundreds of fragmentation explosions going off, shrapnel pinging off the hard air I put down, while everyone else contributed their fire to eradicating what was ahead of us.

“Alpha and Beta are cleared!” McCoy sang out. “Get to it, Bobby!”

Behind the horde of Brood, ice morphed into a humanoid form, and the Iceman flexed.

Walls of ice filled the tube behind the horde, and then he flowed through banks of ice out into the external corridors. With incredible speed, he sealed off all the escape routes behind the Brood.

They hadn’t progressed up far enough to see that the corridors ahead of them were sealed in ice, either. This ship needed more secure bulkheads, and not just emergency airlocks.

The area ahead of us was a gorefest of exploded Brood parts, and the Spiders had leapt in. Peter and Gwen both had their handfangs out, scribed and Enruned with magic they had a long ways to go to improve, but wielded with a natural accuracy and skill, preternatural speed, and a strength and agility that wasn’t held back.

Spiders went hunting bugs.

Silk was totally on mess-them-up duty, webbing up knots of Brood to be blown apart by Beetle or Cyclops with amazing speed and awareness, totally disrupting lines of rushers and leashing leapers and fliers down to be picked off in mid-charge.

Peggy popped her Mindsword and dropped right down into the thick of the fighting, the silver Blade blazing with invincible purpose, and wove a net of death around her so fast the Spiders looked kind of slow in comparison.

Ben held the center, advancing into the mass, invulnerable and unstoppable, while Nova was behind us. Jewel had turned one side of this tube into an exploding firestorm, while Richard was spinning and dumping energy blasts and slicing blades in all directions.

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Cyclops was bouncing ruby beams around the fighting now, targeting any shooters and killing three or four with every shot. Beetle was sweeping away groups and swarms with vibrational blasts, while Fixer’s point defenses snapped and hummed, pulping any who got past the two and thought they were being clever.

“Done!” came over coms, and that wall of ice back there grew a great big face.

Everyone jumped backwards at the same time as I came down, Jewel and Nova pulling back and down the shaft in the other direction as I domed the rest of us against the floor.

Cyclops’ visor went sapphire, and the cold, cold light of eternity freezing solid lanced down the tube, past the scuttling horde, and hit the icy wall.

There was a pulse of blue-white light that swept back out past us, and all the air around us liquified, then crystallized. The hard air of my dome turned crystalline.

Sealing off all air flow, then icing the corridors created a much smaller space to work with, and as I’d pointed out to the two, in a sealed space, freezing the air instantly created a vacuum.

Liquid oxygen splattered to the ground, but life support was off, and no more came to replace it, nor did the heaters kick in to counter the absolute chill.

The Brood fuckers could go into hibernation and/or maybe fight off the cold with psionic means, but their physiology meant that the vast majority of them still had to breathe.

The ones who didn’t tended to be big and obvious, and we had other ways to deal with them. I think there were two of them back there that had been moving slowly in Cyke’s stasis field and not made it up here.

Cold made it hard to move, and it was hard to tuck yourself up against the air getting sucked out of your lungs as it gelled and came spattering down as super-cold rain and snow.

Yeah, there were definitely two of them still coming on, ignoring the chill and the vacuum. They were three times the size of the others, although not fliers, extra-long frontal tentacles hitting the ground like steel cables and leaving etch-marks in the metal.

I let the hard air dome drop and shatter as I supercharged my Fists, and crystalline force energy gathered around each of my hands as I flashed forwards.

I smacked the first one.

Yeah, layers of protection. Ablative field, psi-reinforced chitin hide, dispersive field on the organs, energy tolerances in the insane range, and capable of psi-powering to ignore the need for air, food, and environment.

S’ fine. The tight force pulse vented the force of the Shards through their skulls and didn’t allow any dispersion. I rode the recoil as the head of the one on the left liquified to my right Fist, and as the other slapped his tentacles down on Ben and at Peggy’s Shield Honor, my left Fist came over. The force went out the other side of its head, taking its brains with it.

Scott’s cold sapphire beam finally shut off. The two uberbrood hadn’t dared get in its way, despite themselves.

Frosted and frozen Brood, many with their insides coming out of their mouths as their organs boiled in the low pressure and their tough hides wouldn’t give way, surrounded us in all directions.

“Give me a scan,” Nova ordered coolly, gliding back to us, Jewel next to him.

“Vibrations down, down, down...” Fixer reported, echoed by McCoy as the lights on their displays fell away.

The Brood Peggy had killed began to burn vivic, the flames unaffected by the cold or lack of oxygen. They’d spread to the other corpses and the gore quickly, too, and dissipate into the Veil with no natural ecosystem about.

I pulled the two big ones away from the others. “I got plans for these two. Now, tell me where the queen is.”

Hank and the Fixer glanced at one another, and shook their heads.

“Reframe the question. Where could she be hiding?” Peggy stated, keeping her Sword and Shield out, letting her minigun sit on the Disk with its ammo case.

“Engineering,” the Fixer said instantly.

“The Power Core’s vibrations create a blind area there,” agreed Hank.

“Iceman, reverse the ice and make me a hole!” I said, shooting down directly towards him.

With a flexing of his will, the energy invested in chilling the air to liquid and crystal vanished, and the gaseous ice evaporated from everything with breathtaking speed. Air pressure rebuilt in seconds, while a hole opened into the ten-foot-thick wall of ice ahead of me that had sealed off the fall tube.

Nova was a second behind me as I shot down the tube towards the power core of the ship, but that still meant I reached Engineering before fifteen seconds had passed from the death of the Brood Marauders.

I swooped into Engineering, getting McCoy’s feed and the area of blankness it covered.

Red Eyes looked in a certain direction. I turned my eyes thataway.

“A Totem!” the Queen in the shadows over there screeched in her buzzing-rasping language, recognizing me immediately for what I was. Bugs 4-evah, I guess. “You dare act against-“

Starfire-bright plasma fed by 30d6 of lightning, with Sacred and Primal overlays, slammed into her, punching through her armored hide and detonating inside her. She got real bright inside, then things began to burn as her Psoak couldn’t handle the raw amount of damage I was punching into her. She collapsed like a dead bug, legs kicking out and locking into position as internal pressure fields dropped to default, final writhings and hissings and all that fun going on.

Huh. Guess the Brood didn’t get along with Bug Totems.

Also, I had me yet another potential Baneskull.

Nova arrived a couple seconds later, but the excitement was all over with, maybe.

Both of us took a moment to look over the chamber accented so tastefully with slimy biomatter, organic goop, pools of slime, and more insects and molds than you could shake a web at.

“She’s probably got an egg chamber feeding off of the idle output of the Core, doesn’t she,” Rich muttered fatalistically.

“Or two or three.”

“We need to fix the self-repair and maintenance systems first,” he said as we drifted around the chamber and the quietly pulsing pseudo-white hole power source there, making sure to avoid anything falling from above.

The organic cables spun around some important-looking feeds and leading out of the room were kind of hard to miss. There were a couple Red Eyes glancing at where they were leading, too.

I sighed. “Someone should make a movie about this shit,” I muttered.

“Yeah? I’ve got video!” Ebersol said in the distance.

“Bug aliens that turn others into members of their race, drifting spaceship crewed only by the dead, organic alien environment on a dark spaceship, and egg chambers.”

“Is that in Engineering?” he asked hesitantly.

“Yes.”

“I’ll get all the video you want, but I can’t write for the life of me,” he admitted.

“He can’t,” Jenkins confirmed. “I had to do all the scripts on his instructional videos.”

“I love horror stories!” Peggy piped up, startling everyone.

“Yeah? Well, I think everyone should get down to engineering just to see this... before we go blowing eggs of space alien bugs apart.”