Alysa Nang was not having a good day. But to be sure, she was surprised she was still having any type of day at all. After leaving the message—hopefully, it will do someone some good—she had fled from the airlock and positioned herself against a rock face. Then she opened up on the bastards with her armor-piercing rounds. But... Let’s face it. It’s dark, and I’m firing an overpowered weapon from a standing position. She would have been amazed if she’d hit anything. Maybe I got one. The first few of them were pretty bunched up... But the gun was just a feint to slow them down and to pack them into as much of a tight group as possible and then draw them in for a grand finale... I will not be an incubator for one of these nightmares!

Dropping the gun, she pulled free the divider on her mechanized liquid-mix grenade. When she saw the red and clear elements diffuse into each other. She expected that to be the last thing she would ever see. Crouching there, hoping to take two or three more of the aberrations with her...

It was then that things went pear-shaped.

The largest drone she had seen so far dropped from the rock above and landed directly at her twelve o’clock. Alysa had reflexively turned away from it, trying to protect the grenade from its reaching arms. The giant monster had stripped the activated grenade from her hands with no effort. It had then opened its giant mouth and shoved the grenade inside. Two other drones had dropped down and piled onto the first just as the grenade had gone off. The muffled, meaty thud had instantly killed all three in a hail of sharp bone fragments spraying in all directions. She caught many pieces of the white organic shrapnel as they struck her arms and face, embedding themselves there.

Eyes wide with shock, Alysa absently brushed the gore from her face and scraped a gnarled tooth from a shallow wound in her cheek. A thousand thoughts bobbled around inside her pressure concussed head like the balls in the hopper at her Zuma's bingo hall.

The rotting thing just ate my grenade…

Why did it eat my grenade?

Did it look like a tasty snack? Maybe the lights lure it like deep sea fish to glowing bait?

It couldn’t have known that the yield on that mixer was too large for even its massive strength to throw far enough, fast enough to save the rest of them?

Could it?

Alysa had never been one to try and figure out stupid people... or insane internally gestating parasitical beasts in this case... But she had no idea why they would sacrifice so many of their number to add only herself to their colony. She was only one host, after all. By definition, one host was only worth one organism to such parasitical hives. The numbers didn’t add up for the price they had paid… But whatever was going on, it was clear that these things did want her alive.

After losing the grenade, the remaining drones had overwhelmed and captured her, showing more intelligence than she had anticipated. They stripped her of weapons, including her regulation side-arm and sapper’s satchel. The monsters had even deftly yanked and discarded her utility knife from its calf sheath. Then, as expected, they carried her back to their nest in the area near the conduit exposure.

Passing through the beasts’ warren, Alysa had seen what was left of the other seven members of her team. The first captured were already dead. Emerging pupates had devoured their energy-rich internal organs to fuel the hyper-accelerated growth during their natal period and emergence. Alysa had also seen at least two juvenile drones lurking behind the swarming adults as they dragged her in. The other five team members were unconscious or not otherwise lucid, with their limbs restrained in a brown slurry of fibrous organic resin while their bodies served as gestational fodder for the hive’s growth.

Disturbingly, as Alysa passed, she could tell the fleshy, multi-nodular ‘root system’ that functioned as the invasive parasitical element for this species hadn’t used the mouth as the entry orifice to their alimentary canals.

This isn’t going to be fun... She hadn’t been able to keep the reflexive thought out of her mind when she realized that it gained its entry from the other end.

Alysa thought they would plug her in next to the rest of the team while she continued her useless struggles... But the monsters hadn’t stopped there. They continued to the back of the maintenance facility housing the conduit junction and then continued down several levels to the junction room. Reaching the bottom of the facility, Alysa confirmed what she had already guessed. The Stargen Conduit had been excavated in a terraced fashion and partially stripped of the lead-nickel alloy that shielded its massive power flow. The Stargen’s exposed EM waves blew her tangled hair back in a windless static surge as her captors carried her around the corner, bringing the conduit into view. Her teeth were practically wiggling in her gums, being this close to it.

Alysa could see a large dingy white rock sitting several meters from the exposure. Occasionally, arcs of raw white silver energy leapt to its surface, leaving glowing circles of rippling illumination as the power was absorbed.

The drones tied her hands and legs with a simple but sturdy twine and set her down in a sitting position on a smaller gray rock next to the white one she had noticed one of them had carried in. Then, in an act of conscious supplication, they bowed their heads to the ground and backed out of the lower level, only turning around and regaining their feet once they were on the steps leading up.

It was only then that she realized that things had gone completely FUBAR.

“Yes, yes... let’s see what you are made of, my dear...” The hissed words came from the large, off-white boulder they had sat Alysa beside. It had opened its four eyes positioned in pairs on the rounded top point of its head and started speaking in a coarse, rasping voice, thick with age. And it was speaking nothing less than flawless Intergalactic Common. The one language every member of every crew of the Hegemon fleet spoke through the entire iteration.

The rock stood and stretched out its arms and legs, instantly becoming a four-meter-tall monstrosity. It shuffled toward Alysa in a stooped fashion. Its slow and stuttering pace gave the direct impression that it was suffering from severe arthritic pain as it hobbled slowly to Alysa’s seat.

Alysa’s wide eyes took in the new creature. There were prominent female organs. Six thin and depleted breasts lay flat and swayed slightly with its rocking gait against the thick armored plates that otherwise covered its chest. There was also a pair of large, sagging labial lips that dragged on the dirt-strewn floor. Weapon-wise, heavy black claws opened and closed on all four of its upper arms, with even thicker ones on its two grasping feet.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Compared to the drones Alysa had seen, this creature had a larger head with more defined humanoid features. Finally arriving, the monstrosity stopped in front of Alysa as the top of its hinged head snapped open and tasted the air. Then, it hunched over Alysa, filling the immediate space around her with the turgid smell of death from its wheezing breath and clearly failing body.

The space marine could see the alien creature’s four slitted pupils waver without conscious control or focus, all of them clearly blind beneath opaque lenses calcified with age.

Finishing its apparent inspection of Alysa, the nightmare straightened and spoke in its previous feeble hiss. “Oh good! Oh, very, very good! I’ve waited so long for a viable candidate... I had only hoped for an appropriate female of the proper age...”

Alysa’s face blanched in shock and disgust as a gigantic, clawed hand patted her head gently. “But you are so much more than I had even hoped! An excellent specimen!”

Momentarily speechless, Alysa’s slack-jawed befuddlement left her gaping like a fish out of water. Then, her mind switched back on, and the space marine chose to resist in the only way she still could.

“Whatever you want from me, I won’t give it to—”

Alysa strained and stammered as she coughed up crimson-tinged sputum, followed by a congealed glob of blood that dribbled down her chin. She caught her breath and tried again. “I won’t... I won’t give it to you!” Blood now dripped down her lips to the front of her armored chest as her bleeding increased its pace.

Slowly chuckling in her thick and rasping way, the matriarch responded to Alysa’s feeble refusals with a mild tone and spread hands. It spoke as if explaining to a loved child. “Not that I would give you a choice, young one... but you are already dying. Exposure to the Stargen Conduit I’ve fed off all these years has already caused your cell membranes to break down. You’ll be dead in minutes if we don’t join–” It opened its four massive arms as if to embrace her. “But do not be afraid! You are going to be my newest vessel. Once I’ve wrapped my mind around yours and seeded you with enough genetic elements, we will leave here and find a new home. Just like when I came here out of necessity within the body of a maintenance crew member so many millions of years ago.”

Four drones came down the stairs carrying a root system similar to what Alysa had seen invading her team’s bodies above. But this one had two large, blunted prongs connected with fleshy, mucous-covered umbilicals. Obviously augmented for some extra purpose, Alysa didn’t like the look and implications of it—not at all.

The white horror standing next to her leaned back onto the first prong and gave an initial sharp grasp of pain, then a deep sigh of relief. Mounting fear and horror filled Alysa’s face as she looked at the disgusting display. Instinctively, her mouth tried to tell the psychotic monster to ‘screw right off,’ but a large blood clot came out instead and plopped onto her lap. Her thoughts slowed and began to jumble as sensations of weakness and vertigo overcame the adrenalin which had up till then taken hold of her.

The matriarch gently placed its giant, black-clawed hand on her shoulder in an almost comforting way. Once again, it hissed to her with placating words like a mother putting a fussy baby to sleep. “... Hush, child. You don’t understand the benefit of being my vessel. You will always be with me... like they all are... We will live to the end of this iteration and move on to find a new one... and a new one after that. Once united, we will be together forever...I will show you what it means to have true power... to Transcendence...”

A barrier membrane must have ruptured when the monster matron sat on the parasite prong. A stream of vile black ichor was freely flowing out from the insertion site. The rancid stench of decay again filled the air with much more force from the new source of putrid fluids spilling from her body.

For a creature planning to live for billions of years, her time among the living must have been relatively short. She is definitely rotting on the inside.

The space marine couldn’t spare any more thoughts for the monster. The lead drone grabbed the other end of the probe and brought it forward. It was now Alysa’s turn. As the prong neared Alysa, it started wiggling in her direction, instinctually preparing to start some sort of self-inserting function.

At the sight of the heat-seeking prong, Alysa lost all sense of calm and collection. Hysterically thrashing against her bonds with uncontrolled frenzy powered by overriding instincts of her own. But her uncoordinated and thoughtless struggles were futile against the bonds the drones had tied her with. She could feel her already drained strength ebbing even deeper with every passing micro. Dying from intense radiation poisoning, her motions grew increasingly feeble, and she slipped from the restrained-seated position to a prone one lying on her back that was even harder to fight from. As if this was what the prong had been waiting for, its blunted tip jumped forward and started to worm between her clenched legs–

Then, two men jumped from the landing above and started cutting through the first rank of drones huddled in the back of the room as they were watching over their matriarch’s transference. The men were dressed in crew onesies and brandished “... glowing swords?” Alysa couldn’t help but mumble aloud at the improbability of what she thought she was seeing. I must be dizzier than I thought...

The one with the bald-top knotted head moved through the monsters like a Tan Lao sword master, leaving limbs and decapitated bodies behind him as he wove through their attacks like a dancer in the rain who could move between the drops.

Exactly like a Tan Lao sword master, she thought.

She’d never forget the sight of their sparring, despite only having seen the monks when she was eight or nine years old. It had been beautiful then, and it was even more so now. Her eyes prickled with emotion as the man moved through the creatures, never seeming to touch them, yet limbs and heads still fell from their lifeless bodies as he passed.

The other, taller man was swinging his sword like a child’s field baton... though to good effect if her fading sight was seeing right. He was much less precise in his movements than his partner but made up for it with an intensity of focused will and fury Alysa could feel from across the room. His slower strikes chopped the drone’s bodies in half with powerful diagonal upswings as he moved with a steady tread through the drones, dismissing the dead ones and stepping back to stab the heads of those still alive.

After the last of her drones were down, the matron jumped off the probes impaling her and ran on powerful legs that clawed up the ground to fight off the two men. But she was either too far gone on her path to oblivion or no match for them. Probably both.

Waving off this partner to come to Alysa, the top-knotted one moved in to confront her one-on-one. His glowing blade formed arcs of afterimages in her site as he struck at her six times in the same micro. Golden-orange sparks splashed from places where the Matron had been able to get the armored plates of her forearms aligned with his whirling blade. Twice, she hadn’t been able, and her lower left arm and upper right now lay on the ground, ejecting weakening streams of black blood as they spasmed.

Obviously, on the losing end of the exchange, the matron backed out of his lightning reach by kicking up a cloud of dirt and stones in front of her with a whiplash move of her powerful right leg that made the sword master shield his eyes and turn away as she quickly backed up to within reach of the exposed flow of the Star Gen conduit.

Turning back through squinted lids, he nonetheless walked at her with a steady tread that would allow him to react to any further delaying tactics.

Things happened very quickly from that point.

The taller man had started to sidestep toward Alysa while maintaining his combat awareness, always facing the matriarch with his sword between him and her. Alysa cast slow-moving eyes toward his approach, trying to be ready for anything–but nothing could have prepared her for what came next.

Reaching back with her remaining right arm and forward with her left the Matriarch hissed angrily at the shorter one, “...Very well if you doom me to the end of my path… Do not think that there are no consequences to such interference.”

“No… NO!!!” The tall warrior screamed as the Matron’s clawed backhand snapped out to grasp the naked flowing energy of the Star Gen conduit.

Alysa tried to fall to the side but was moving too slowly as a sizzling white column of death exploded from the monster’s upraised left hand and shrieked through the air to incinerate her.

Ready for the death that had been hovering over her all morning, Alysa was shocked to see that somehow the approaching man had covered the ten yards between them and took the blast meant for her full in the chest. His body tensed, and he seemed to be rigidly locked in place with his hands held out to the sides in a likely attempt to better cover her. Screams of rage and pain exploded from between his clenched teeth as somehow the same power source that moved the enormity of the Hegemon-4 at greater than light speed hadn’t incinerated a hole directly through him and killed her anyway.

The shorter one had immediately closed the gap between himself and Matriarch with his sword raised over his head in a cleaving strike that severed the Matron’s left forearm at the elbow… but unfortunately didn’t stop her. If anything, the Star Gen’s divergent arc now seemed to surge in a more tightly focused electric-blue colored beam using the chopped end of her exposed humorous as a macabre focusing lens. With a roar of pain, the towering monster waved her plasma-emitting stump in a trail of blasted dirt, exploding rocks and clouds of ozone that quickly angled directly toward the swordsman. The top-knotted warrior was already spinning out of the way in a 360-degree rotation of his shoulders, torso and legs finishing the motion with a series of cartwheeling backflips while being continually chased by a sparking stream of death continuously spewing from the rapidly flailing severed limb.

Somewhere on his way back across the chamber’s excavated floor the beast had returned the insult to her limb. Alysa could see the amazing agility of the swordsman becoming suddenly impaired as his left arm was lopped off below the elbow. It went spinning off on its own trajectory in a puff of red steam and burnt flesh while the rest of him tucked into a wobbling summersault behind the heavily built plazcrete stairway leading to the upper levels.

Jeering in rage at her victory, the monster continued to focus the ravening energy on the warrior's temporary shelter. Increasingly larger chunks of its squarish construction were being blasted off to reveal the plasteel support framing which had already started melting in black runnels.

It would only be a matter of seconds before the obstruction was completely destroyed, along with the man recovering behind it.