The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

‘Pierced’

(mc, f/f, nc, sf)

DISCLAIMER: This material is for adults only; it contains explicit sexual imagery and non-consensual relationships. If you are offended by this type of material or you are under legal age in your area, do NOT continue.

Synopsis:

Alien bioweapons are unleashed on an human colony world.

* * *

‘Pierced’

Chapter Two ‘Poolside’

Part One

* * *

“Are you awake?”

Margot started. Everything was black. “Where am I? What....”

Then she remembered.

She wished she hadn’t.

“We’re in kitchen storage,” a woman’s voice replied. “You hid us here. I’m going to turn on the flashlight, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Light came on and Margot winced. This was definitely a storage room; metal shelves held orderly lines of condiments, stacks of dishes, an array of silvery pots and pans. Along the back wall were stacked sacks of rice and flour.

She was sitting on a concrete floor.

Xiulan was...

Blue swimsuit was kneeling a meter away, holding the flashlight which had been in Margot’s tool belt. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Margot hesitated. “If that word even means anything any more.”

Swimsuit nodded. “Yeah.” She sighed, and sat down on the concrete floor. “So. We’re awake. We can move. What are we going to do?”

“Give me a minute. What’s your name?” Margot asked.

“What? Oh, right. Sorry. I’m Sirine. I’m from Basrab. I work for the Tetron sector branch of Imperial Comestible Supply.”

“Margot. Originally from New Austin, but my family moved a lot. Staff Sergeant, Civil Reconstruction.”

“So you are military. Well, nice to meet you, Margot, for what it’s worth.” Sirine exhaled. “We’re pretty fucked.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“All they have to do is hit us with that goop and we’re done for.”

“Mmm-hmm. And even the big ones have it.”

Sirine gave her a look. “You think we have any chance of getting out of here?”

Margot shrugged. “I think we have to try. I mean, staying here is no good. So that means trying to get out. I guess I could kill myself, but... no, not for me. Fuck giving them the satisfaction. They’re gonna have to kill me.”

Sirine stared at her. “You’re hard.”

Margot touched her temples, exhaled. Took her hands down. “It’s the only way I can keep it together. Focus on the mission. Mission is to get away. If I let myself think about...” she shook her head. “I can’t face that. So I focus on the mission.”

“I’m not... I don’t... I’m not as hard as you,” Swimsuit—Sirine—replied. “I keep thinking of...” She looked aside and fell silent for a moment, then gathered herself and looked at Margot again. “But I’ll try. I don’t want to kill myself either. I want to kill them.”

“Killing them is great and all,” Margot said, standing up, mostly to see if she could. “But best done if we can reach some organized resistance with real guns.” Her legs worked perfectly normally. The venom must have worn off while she was asleep.

How long had she slept?

Sirine stood up as well. “So what do we do?”

“Hell if I know. My—” Margot’s voice caught, and she paused. “We were trying to reach an underground exit, some sort of service tunnel.”

Hope crept into Sirine’s voice. “Is there one?”

Margot shrugged. “I don’t know. We didn’t get a chance to look. We’d only gotten the door open when the crawlers swarmed in. You were with us.”

“Yeah. So do you want to check the doors?”

“Now? Might as well. I doubt we’re getting out the ground entrance. Though...” Margot hesitated.

“Yes?”

“I don’t... I don’t know if I can go back in there yet.” She snorted. “And you called me ‘hard’. But... seeing their bodies...”

They stood in silence for a moment.

Sirine put a knuckle to her lips. “Margot... I understand. I do. All right, look. Short term goals. I’d really like to get out of this swimsuit, if I could. My room’s on the fourth floor of this building. Do you think we can get up there?”

Margot rubbed her face.

“We can certainly try,” she replied. “It would also give us a way to look around, get a sense of our chances for getting away from here. And the stairwell isn’t exposed to the outside, so if the xenos aren’t already in it, they won’t notice us going up.”

“Right.”

“But once we’re out on the fourth, there’s a good chance we might run into some.”

“True. Although the hallway is interior.”

“Mm.”

They looked at each other.

“We gonna do it?” Sabine asked.

“I guess so,” Margot replied. “Kill the light.”

Sabine nodded and turned off the flashlight. The room was once again utterly black.

Margot slowly opened the door.

Nothing stood outside waiting for them. The hallway looked the same. One corpse, six women lying or sitting with black xenos clasped tightly to the tops of their heads. None of the larger xenos seemed to have made an appearance; the metal door from the garage was closed.

Gingerly, they crept past the bodies on the floor. The women were still breathing, which almost made it worse. Margot thought about the crawlers watching, as she and Sirine slipped past—they must be. Could they summon others?

As they passed the other side door, Margot tried it and found it open. But it wasn’t a tunnel, just another large concrete room. Uniform storage; racks of resort uniforms on hangars. Valets, desk clerks, chefs.

At the end of the hall was the door to the southern stairwell. The door was open; at the bottom there were two more women on the floor, each head capped with a crawler, their lips wrapped around black tails. One of them was lying up against the door, her body keeping it propped open. Their chests rose and fell in unconscious rhythm.

Margot and Sirine crept up the stairs. It was still relatively cool in the windowless stairwell. Margot kept expecting to hear something; a shout, a scream, a bang. The scuttling of hard black legs. But there was nothing, just their own quiet breathing and the vague buzz of the emergency lighting. Margot wondered when it would run out of power.

She had no idea what time it was. She’d left her communicator back in Xiulan’s room, and had no sense of how long she’d been asleep in the storage room. It could have been minutes; it could have been hours.

They encountered no additional bodies as they crept up the stairs, although there was a jumble of small suitcases at the second floor entrance. They passed carefully by and kept moving upward. At the fourth floor, Margot put her hand on the door handle and caught Sirine’s eye. Sirine nodded.

She opened the door and nothing jumped at her; nothing moved in the hallway. Closed doors, emergency lights. Just next to them, at the stairwell door, another woman sat slumped against the wall, one of the crawlers tight atop her head. She had teak-colored skin and wore a bright multicolored sundress. Her tightly-curled black hair stuck out around the body of the xeno on her head.

Gingerly, crouching down, Margot stepped past the unfortunate woman and moved a few steps into the hallway. She looked over her shoulder. “Which room?” she hissed at Sirine.

“Four oh eight,” Sirine replied.

The room at this end of the hall was four thirty two. They’d have to pass the elevators and traverse most of the length of the hall to get to Sirine’s room.

Margot started moving.

As they neared the elevators in the center of the building, one of the room doors was propped open on their left. Orange sunlight spilled into the hallway. Carefully, Margot approached, and peered around the edge.

The door was being kept open by a woman’s prone form, lying on her back on the carpet. She was older, with little parentheses around the corners of her emotionless, tail-filled mouth, probably nearing time for her next rejuv treatment. Only now, like the others, she had a black monstrosity clutched tight atop her skull. Getting younger was no longer in her future.

Beyond her the window of the room was shattered, glass glittering on the floor in front of it. Outside, Margot could see the tilted number four tower and beyond it, the sea. The shadows were long and angled; it must be late afternoon.

She’d been out for hours.

Margot gave the woman a final glance and slipped past the open door. The elevators were quiet and dead. Someone’s luggage stood in the small parquet-floored foyer.

The other half of the hall was just as quiet. Slumped against the wall next to room four-ten was yet another woman, younger, who was topless, clad only in a bikini bottom. She reminded Margot of Cora, her deeply tanned skin generously sprinkled with fetching freckles. Her nipples were almost the same color as her skin, and rose and fell slowly with her breathing.

She had blonde hair which emerged from beneath the black carapace of the crawler. As with the rest, her hands lay limp on the floor next to her.

Margot sighed and passed her by, stopping in front of four zero eight. With the power out, she wasn’t entirely sure the biometric lock would open, but as Sirine put her palm atop the reader, the lock made a distinctive click.

Sirine slowly opened the door. Her room was on the side of the resort opposite the sea, facing the agricultural flatlands and the mountains beyond, but the window was equally shattered.

There was no sign of anyone inside, either human or xeno.

“Lectra and I were staying here...” Sirine said quietly. “Lectra.” She swallowed. “She was with us downstairs. Let me get my clothes.”

Margot followed Sirine into the room. Sirine went to a dresser and pulled it open. Margot past her, over between the two beds, and looked out the window.

“Saints and Martyrs,” she muttered.

Columns of smoke rose from a score of places in the distance. The town of White Beach, which the resort was situated just south of, had a dozen of them, and a fire was raging in the landward side of the town. Farther north, the town of Helenni had its own cluster of impact sites sending their thin pillars skyward. And those were just the ones still smoldering; tower four had never caught fire at all.

“Fuck,” Sirine said behind her. Margot turned to see her standing at the dresser with the top drawer open, communicator in her hand. She looked up from it, at Margot. “I know it’s stupid, but I thought maybe...”

“Orbital bombardment,” Margot said. “They control space. No satellites means no comms.”

“I know, I know. I was just hoping.” Sirine put the communicator onto the dresser and, clothes in hand, went into the bathroom.

Margot sat on the bed and tried to make sense of it. Murderous xenos like this were the province of horror films; there were some dangerous creatures in Imperial space but they were apex predators, highly dangerous but rare, capstones in their ecosystems. These things... they were more bio-weapon than alien lifeform.

And how were there two types? Big ones and little ones? Were the smaller ones just immature versions? They had the tails, but otherwise the morphology was so similar. Did eating brains advance their lifecycle? And even if they were sufficiently chemically compatible to consume humans, how could they have gotten that way?

Were they a new weapon, then? But that made no sense either. The Pretender wanted to control worlds, not destroy them, and unleashing these things... no, it didn’t fit. And why Strand? The world had no military value, and no ability to resist any orbital force. A demonstration? A test? Those didn’t make sense either, not on this scale. The entire continent of Verdis was at risk, if not the entire planet.

Margot stared out the shattered window at the distant columns of smoke. Space travel meant high intelligence. But aside from the insertion vehicles, the creatures showed no sign of it. No, that wasn’t true. They had herded the humans into the buildings, until the little ones—again, were they the young?—could emerge, subdue, and feed. So they were intelligent, at least to a degree. But sapient? If so, would they have thrown so many of the juveniles into the garage to die, even knowing that eventually the paralytic agent would bring the humans down? Sapient individuals would never have done that.

A Hive mind, maybe. That would be willing to send individuals to their deaths to achieve its purpose.

They had no missile weapons, no armor beyond their carapaces, no indication of any organizational structure. So... intelligent to a degree, but not sapient. So who brought them to Strand? If not the Pretender, or the Chancellor, then—other xenos? Some new galactic neighbor that used bioweaponry? That had studied humans and designed these monsters to deal with them?

“Okay,” Sirine said from just behind Margot, who jumped up with a squeak.

Sirine hesitated. “Sorry, did I startle you?”

“I- uh... just thinking,” Margot replied. She turned around and found Sirine clad in thin exercise skins, ankle-to-wrist and skin tight, with a shiny multicolored pattern. Margot was a bit taken aback at how revealing they were—the outfit was really tight. She could see the lines of Sirine’s panties—and her lack of a bra. It was also shiny and brightly colored; not at all suited for sneaking around. She was doubtful it was an improvement over the swimsuit.

Sirine didn’t notice Margot’s dubious expression and held out her arms to show off her clothes. “I thought, well, I thought the less skin I exposed the better chance I’d have against that goop. This is what I brought that covers the most of me.”

Margot shook her head. “Maybe. Xiulan was in her dress uniform but I guess the stuff soaked through, it got her anyway.”

“She got hit with a lot of it,” Sirine replied. “I mean, a lot. And in the face. And, well, dress uniforms don’t wick do they? Like this does? It might keep the goop out. Come on, let me have a little hope.”

“Actually... that does seem pretty smart. Better than this cami I’m wearing.”

“I have another set. You’re a little bigger than I am, and, uh, more, you know, muscular, but these really stretch and we’re close to the same size. It might give you an edge.”

Margot was about to decline, but then she reconsidered. If nothing else, it might be a confidence boost. “Yeah, actually. That sounds worth a try.”

Sirine pulled a drawer open and pulled out another set of workout skins, long-sleeve top and pants, both metallic silver. Margot hesitated when she realized how she’d look in them, but Sirine handed them to Margot and she took them and went into the restroom.

They did fit, almost, although just like Sirine, the lines of Margot’s panties and bra were clearly visible front and back. Although tight in the armpits, they were otherwise surprisingly comfortable. She preferred to work out in loose clothes and didn’t own any skins herself, but these didn’t feel bad. Or, more importantly, distracting. At least, not distracting to wear. Looking at herself in the mirror was a different story; she looked like a woman in panties and bra who’d been spray-painted silver.

No sense changing back. Maybe later she could find something in an olive green.

She’d worried the skins would be hot—the late afternoon air was as muggy as ever—but they seemed to breathe well enough that the temperature wasn’t uncomfortable at all. Keeping sweating people cool was what they were designed for, after all. Margot picked the tool belt back up and cinched it tight around her waist.

She emerged from the restroom to find Sirine standing at the edge of the window, peering around the side at the smoke rising in the distance. Sirine looked back at Margot; her eyes widened slightly in appreciation, which almost made Margot blush.

“It’s, uh, it’s pretty fucked up out there,” Sirine said.

Yes, focus on the problem. “It is,” Margot replied.

“If we get out of here, I mean, out of the resort, we should head south. Away from,” Sirine gestured, “That. That’s a lot of impacts up there.”

Margot nodded. “Good idea.”

“Alright,” Sirine said, stepping away from the window. “I’m done here. Are you ready? To go back down to the basement? I mean, if that’s what we’re doing.”

“Yeah,” Margot said. “I think... I can face it now. I’m ready. As ready as I’m going to be.”

“Alright,” Sirine replied. “You look good in my skins,” she said, walking back through the room. As she passed the dresser, she lifted her communicator again, looked at it. “Fuck.”

Margot snorted and went to the door, took the handle, slowly opened it—and barely swallowed a shriek.

The topless woman was standing right outside the door.

* * *

She was in the middle of the hallway, almost close enough to touch. Her skin glistened with perspiration. Her arms were bent at the elbow, both hands forward but hanging limply at the wrists. She was nude save for her tiny metallic red bikini bottom.

Slowly, the woman turned her head towards them. The black crawler was still firmly attached, a hard black cap tight to her head, its front legs framing her face, the tips dug in under her jaw. She faced Margot directly almost as though she could see her- but she could not, clearly, the translucent black flesh squeezing out from under the crawler’s carapace completely covering her eyes.

The crawler’s tail moved.

Margot felt paralyzed. She should slam the door—but then they’d be trapped in the room with no way out other than a four story jump from a shattered window.

The tail was sliding out of the woman’s mouth.

It was pulling its tail out to spray her. But- why was it moving so slowly?

And how was the woman standing up?

Margot didn’t move.

The tail curved upward, a glistening black tube slipping past pursed lips. The tip emerged with a wet pop.

It didn’t point itself at her.

Instead, the tail relaxed, lowering back down, curling around the side of the woman’s face, around behind her head, and down around her neck, the tip coming to rest on her collarbone.

The woman idly smacked her lips, still glistening with a clear mucus.

Then her head rotated slowly back to looking—or facing, at least—down the hall.

Margot could feel Sirine’s panicked breathing behind her.

But the woman had turned away from them. Hands still oddly extended, the crawler’s tail curled lightly around her neck, the woman took a step. Then another.

Heart racing, Margot watched as the woman in the tiny bikini bottom walked towards the north stairs, one slow step at a time.

“The fuck,” Sirine hissed, once the woman was several meters away, “is that?”

“I don’t...” Margot whispered back. “She...”

The door of the room diagonally across the hall opened. Margot and Sirine watched in silence as another woman emerged. She was in white capri pants and a light green halter top, and had her hands raised before her in a classic sleepwalker pose. The black creature atop her head glinted, its wet black tail curled around the woman’s neck, as she stepped blindly out into the hallway. Her head rotated slowly, then she began to plod slowly down the hall behind the topless woman.

“What’s happening?” Sirine hissed. “Are they... are those things controlling them?”

“Or they’re just... driving the bodies,” Margot replied. “Either way. Merciful Saints.”

She thought about Xiulan.

“Lectra,” Sirine said with sudden urgency. “I’ve got to get to Lectra.”

“What will you do?” Margot hissed at her, but Sirine had already slid past her and was making her way, semi-crouched, back towards the elevators and the southern stairwell beyond.

“I don’t know,” Sirine hissed without looking back. “But I’ve got to see her.”

Margot didn’t know if she wanted to see Xiulan like that. Zombified, driven like a vehicle by the thing latched onto her head. What could Margot do? Smash it? Pry it off somehow, when she hadn’t been able to before? It would just spray her with its now more-accessible tail and then she’d have her brain eaten, too.

As the two of them crept down the far side of the hall, another woman, crawler firmly attached, emerged from a room just ahead of them. She was lean, quite muscular but very thin, hipbones and ribs clearly visible.

They were particularly visible because she was stark naked.

Sirine slowed, staying behind this new intruder. The nude woman walked slowly towards the stairwell, pausing before placing each leg forward. She had short blonde hair and Margot could see the dimples where the rear legs of the crawler dug into the back of her neck; dried blood crusted around them. Its tail curled around her head and rested over her right shoulder.

Ahead of them, the dusky woman in the bright dress who had been slumped next to the southern stairwell was gone.

The nude woman reached the stairwell door, Sirine and Margot a few paces behind her. Robotically, she reached for the handle, turned it down. Slowly, she pulled the door open. After a moment’s further hesitation, she entered the stairwell.

Margot and Sirine crept up behind her.

“They can use doors,” Margot observed.

“But is it the woman, or the crawler?” Sirine whispered back.

Margot shrugged. Sirine was at the door now, turning the handle.

“Creator preserves,” she whispered.

The stairwell was full of women.

The nude woman stood in the stairwell a few steps down from a shorter, darker, more voluptuous woman, dressed in a red sundress. Half a dozen steps above that woman was a woman in a white shirt and nylon pants; in front and below the nude woman on the stairs were two women right next to each other, in shorts and green and blue halter tops.

All of them had black chitin clinging to the tops of their heads, tails curled around their heads, and black flesh lying atop their eyes. All of them were slowly walking down the stairs, one step, then another. They were not moving in synchronization, but all were descending at a similar slow pace.

“They got everybody,” Sirine breathed.

She looked at Margot. Margot looked back at her. Sirine put the question in her eyes, and Margot nodded. Sirine nodded back, and her mouth stiffened.

The curvy woman in the red dress walked slowly past the open fourth-floor entrance, and Sirine stepped into the stairwell behind her.

Margot followed.

They began to descend the stairs. Margot’s heart was pounding. She could see a score of women in the stairwell below her; there must have been even more up above.

Where were they all going? And how were these creatures controlling them?

The silence was frightening, no noises except for soft footfalls and the swish of the woman’s pants behind her. Then Margot frowned. No, that was not all. She turned her head.

The woman in the white shirt, which she was wearing loose over a metallic green bikini top, was mouthing something. Muttering to herself. Her lips pursed, pinched, and widened. Pursed, pinched, and widened. Margot stared at her lips.

She was saying “obey”.

Margot could hear her now; she realized she’d slowed down and was now only a few steps ahead. “Obey,” the woman said in a whisper.

“Obey.”

“Obey.”

Margot shuddered and turned away, resuming the slow march down the stairs. There was something terrifying yet compelling about watching the woman’s lips form those words, watching her repeat a mantra that the creature engulfing the top of her head was forcing into her brain.

So they weren’t brain-dead corpses, piloted by xeno creatures.

They were brain-controlled xeno slaves.

Merciful Saints... Xiulan.

Margot wanted to push past these women, to force her way down the stairs, but all those dozens of tails, tips ready to spray her... if she awoke them to her anomalous presence, even if the silver bodysuit kept the slime out it wouldn’t save her.

They reached the third floor, then the second. Margot and Sirine kept pace with the xeno-ridden victims, not daring to push past them. At the second floor the door opened just ahead of Margot, admitting a short woman in business attire and a tightly-attached crawler. Its black tail had left a wet trail on her expensive shirt. She stepped out slowly, just in front of Margot, between her and Sirine, and began to make her placid way down the stairs.

“Obey,” the woman behind Margot whispered. “Obey.”

At the first floor, the victims were leaving the stairwell. One after another, they reached out, put a hand on the door handle, pulled it open, and passed through. When the two women in halter tops reached the door at the same time, one opened it and went through as the other waited, allowing the door to close before reaching for the door handle herself.

The woman in the suit ahead of Margot stopped, so Margot did as well. Behind her, the woman in the white shirt continued her quiet chant.

The woman in the suit began to repeat it, too. “Obey,” she said in a breathy voice. “Obey.”

“Obey,” the woman behind Margot repeated. “Obey.”

The thin naked woman reached for the door, opened it, and passed through. The voluptuous woman behind her stopped and waited for the door to close, then reached for the handle. As she was leaving the stairwell, Sirine slipped past her.

Margot waited a moment longer, until the well-dressed woman was taking her turn at the door, then sucked in her belly and slid past her. Sirine was waiting, and the two of them hurried down to the basement level.

None of the xeno-ridden women appeared to notice.

Sirine had stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

“They were chanting,” Margot whispered, catching up to her.

“Yeah,” Sirine replied. “The short curvy one in front of me was saying ‘I am a slave’, over and over again.

“The ones around me were just saying ‘obey’. Again and again.”

Sirine paused at the basement door. It was closed, the woman who had been propping it up no longer there. “I guess they’re not just... gone,” Sirine said.

Margot nodded glumly. “I don’t know if this is better.”

“Better than having their brains eaten out? Of course it is,” Sirine replied. “Maybe... maybe we can save them. Get those fucking things off. Maybe they’re still people in there.”

Margot didn’t respond.

The hallway beyond the door was empty, except for the man’s corpse. The women here must also have risen and walked away.

“Shit, it looks like they’re gone,” Sirine said, hurrying down the hall. “They must have gone upstairs.”

“Where do you think they are going?” Margot asked, but Sirine was almost running down the hall and did not reply. She reached the metal door to the garage, and pulled at the handle. It did not move; the light next to the door blinked red.

“Come on, come on,” she said, turning to Margot. “It’s locked.”

Margot took hold of the keyfob and raised it from her waist. “What if that big one’s still in there?” she asked.

“Then we close the fucking door. Come on, maybe Lectra’s still in there...”

Margot raised the keys towards the doorpad. The light flicked to green. Sirine rotated the handle down, and gingerly pulled the door open.

The garage looked different from before; for a second Margot was puzzled. Then she realized that the door was open—not the door she was peering through, but the large roll-up door to the loading ramp. Late afternoon light was illuminating the room, lighting the interior in a completely different manner than the emergency lighting she’d seen it in earlier. The forklift was still wedged into the opposite hallway. The pallets and stacks of boxes were still where they had been, positioned around the room.

Otherwise, the garage was empty. The xeno warrior that had chased them out was not visible.

Nor were any of the women they had left lying on the floor.

Nor were the two dead men.

Margot gave Sirine a quick look, then quietly stepped into the garage. The humming of the battery generators masked any other sounds she might have heard. Crouching, she crept over to the pallet of boxes that only a while ago she had been helplessly propped up against. Beyond it was the area where the battle had been, where Xiulan and all the others had been claimed by the xenos.

Now all their bodies were gone—no, not all. There were still several small black bodies of crawlers lying on the floor.

But not all of them. There had been dozens, and now there were only eight. All the humans, alive and dead, were gone.

The light coming in the open garage door was orange shading into red; the sun had started going down. Strand had a human-world typical G-type star, a bit closer and a bit smaller than average, and the sunset was much like that on most of the worlds humans lived on.

Sirine had followed her into the garage and was standing next to the large blood puddle where one of the men had lain. “They dragged him off,” she said, gesturing with her arm. Sure enough, a long stretch of bloody skid marks led towards the opened roll-up door. “Why?”

Margot shrugged. “What do we—” she said, then froze. A shadow had appeared on the loading ramp, stretching down into the garage.

Margot ducked back behind the boxes. Sirine darted to the very back of the garage and crouched down next to a large shop vacuum.

The shadow stretched across the floor, slowly approaching, and Margot realized that it was human; tall and thin with two legs, rather than table-like with four. She strained to hear any sounds over the generators’ buzzing.

The person reached the bottom of the ramp and entered the room, walking slowly towards the battle site and the hallway where the forklift remained wedged into the opening. Margot ventured to peer out at them.

It was Freckles.

The crawler was still tightly gripping her head; its tail was curled around her neck, the tip pointing between her breasts, which swayed in her bikini top as she walked slowly across the concrete floor. She wasn’t taking one step, then a second, as the women in the stairwell had done. Instead she was walking more normally, but slowly, her arms hanging more naturally at her sides. She was still sightless, her eyes hidden by the under-flesh of the xeno on her head. Her head was cocked at a slight angle, as though she were puzzled.

She stopped near the forklift, bent over, and picked up one of the dead crawlers. She took a few steps, bent over, and picked up a second one.

Margot’s stomach clenched. Cora. What was left of her mind?

She looked up the ramp. No one else—and no thing—was visible.

There was one way to find out. She rose up, and stepped forward.

“C-Cora?”

Freckles’ body straightened up, a fourth crawler corpse dangling from her right hand. She placed it atop the others cradled in her left arm.

Then, slowly, her head turned to face Margot.

They stood facing each other for a moment. Cora’s mouth opened, her tongue moistened her lips. A greenish ichor made a long rivulet along her arm holding the broken crawlers.

Cora’s mouth opened again.

“Muh,” she said. “Mar-goh.”

Could she see? How? Margot’s eyes flicked to the ramp. Nothing but the long rays of the setting sun. She looked back at Freckles.

“Cora? Is that you?”

Cora’s voice was faint, breathy. She took a step towards her. “M. Mar-goh. You... are not... o-bey....”

“Cora. Are you... are you okay? Can we... can we try to get that thing off of you?”

Cora’s head swiveled slightly back and forth. “N-no. Must... obey. You... must... sssub-mit.”

It was controlling her. But how much of her was left? She raised her hands. “Cora—”

Freckles took another step towards her.

“Mar-goh. You must... obey.”

“Cora...”

Freckles took another step, and as she did so, her left arm slowly went slack and the crawler corpses tumbled to the floor.

“You... must... obey...” Cora breathed slowly. “You... must... obey...” Her lips glistened beneath the black carapace on her head.

Margot looked to Sirine, still crouched by the vacuum. Sirine gave her a wide-eyed, helpless shrug. She looked back at Cora, who was drawing close. She wasn’t afraid that Cora could overpower her, her body was too soft...

“Margot!” Sirine hissed.

She looked at Sirine again, who was gesturing frantically at the ramp. So she looked at the ramp—and silhouetted at the top were several human figures. Three—then four. Five.

They were slowly walking down into the garage.

Cora was almost close enough to touch. She stopped. “Margot,” she said, her snub nose and full lips framed by the black legs of her crawler, “You must obey. All humans must obey.”

“I’m not—”

The xeno tail at Freckles’ neck sprayed a burst of slime onto her.

“Gah!” Margot said, recoiling; wicking silver bodysuit or not made no difference, it had hit her full in the face. She frantically wiped slime from her eyes as she stepped backwards, bumping into the boxes. Freckles’ motionless form was a blur as Margot staggered away.

She could hear more rapid footsteps now—the people on the loading ramp were coming quickly down into the room. Margot desperately squinted but everything was just shadows now.

Something hit her roughly in the waist—Sirine. “No no no” the other woman was muttering as she clutched Margot in one arm, forcing her backwards towards the metal door. Margot turned to get her feet moving and they scrambled together towards the door. Margot stepped on something that crunched—she could hear the people from outside closing in on their left—then something wet flicked onto Margot’s hand and Sirine said “shit!". The Freckles-creature, or one of the others, must have sprayed them again.

They reached the door. Sirine yanked it open, shoved Margot through, and came through after. “How do I lock this thing?” she hissed.

“Only lock’sh on that shide,” Margot replied, already feeling woozy. “But ’f you hide us in th’ shtorash room theresh a manual lock.”

Sirine guided them back to the storage room they had hidden in before. It was still unlocked, still pitch black. Sirine guided Margot inside and leaned her against one of the shelves before turning to fiddle with the door handle. There was a click.

“I think I got it,” she said.

Margot’s legs were feeling weak, and she started sliding down the shelf towards the floor.

They strained to hear footsteps outside, or the door opening, but heard nothing.

Margot’s arms were now too heavy to lift.

“’Joo get hit much?” she whispered.

“No, not much—and it’s all on the clothes. I guess we’ll find out if wicking is any defense. Actually...”

There were rustling noises and Margot realized that Sirine was taking off her clothes.

“I guess it was a good idea to change my clothes,” Sirine said. “Give me the flashlight. I’m going to see if I can find a tablecloth or something to wipe them off with.”

Margot maneuvered her hand to the toolbelt and fumbled for the flashlight. Her fingers were awkward, disobedient. She finally managed to open the pouch clasp and withdraw the light; as she extended it towards Sirine, it slipped from her fingers and rolled across the floor.

Sirine gave a soft snort in the darkness. “That was the light dropping to the floor, wasn’t it? Good enough. I’ll find it. You rest, I’ll keep watch.”

There was some movement, then the flashlight came on. Margot winced. Sirine, in black underpants and no bra, stood up and moved to rummage amongst the shelves. Margot tried to turn her head to watch, but her neck barely responded.

Sirine made a noise of discovery. She returned and sat down with a pile of cloth napkins, and began to wipe at the exercise skin she’d slipped out of. She did that for a while, then looked at Margot and said “No reason to drain the battery.”

They sat in the dark. After a while Margot slipped into unconsciousness.

* * *

Margot woke up. The room was pitch black.

She tried raising an arm, and did so without difficulty. As she tested her limbs, she realized that she was hungry. Very hungry.

How long had she been asleep?

“Sirine?” she asked quietly.

No response.

Gingerly, she leaned forward and stretched out, trying to remember where Sirine had been sitting and where she had placed the flashlight.

She found Sirine’s foot. She bumped it gently with her hand, and it moved, but Sirine didn’t say anything. She must be asleep. Margot turned over onto her hands and knees and crawled closer, feeling for the flashlight. She found Sirine’s hand—and this close, she could hear Sirine’s deep, even breathing—and then the flashlight, which immediately fell over and rolled away.

Stifling a curse, she felt around again and, after a moment, found the light. Aiming it so that the light would only just illuminate Sirine, she turned it on.

There was a crawler on Sirine’s head.

Margot’s stomach sank. “Oh no. No no no....”

But it was. The black carapace gripped Sirine’s head tightly, its gelatinous under-flesh resting snugly over her eyes. Little dried rivulets of blood mirrored each other on her neck from the twin spots where the crawler’s legs had dug in under Sirine’s jaw. Its tail was holstered comfortably between her lips.

She had put her exercise skin back on. It glittered uselessly in the light.

Margot stared, emotion roiling, then spun as she heard something behind her.

She saw no movement. There was something lying on the floor—a grate.

Her eyes tracked up to the ceiling. There was a square open hole.

Of course. The ventilation system.

Sirine must have fallen asleep, and then...

There was another flicker of movement in the darkness. Margot turned the flashlight—and there, next to where she had been lying just a moment ago, it was. Another crawler. Facing her. Its tail was curled scorpion-like over its body.

It sprayed her.

“Fuck!” Margot cried. She’d gotten an arm in front of her face but not quickly enough, not enough. The venom was on her chin and her neck and in her hair.

But the hammer was still in her toolbelt.

“You little fuck!” she screamed, pulling the hammer out and leaping towards the alien thing. It tried to crawl into the shelf but now she was the quick one. Margot screamed in rage as she brought the hammer down on it, again, and again, and again.

A few moments later the crawler was a broken black smear, no part of it more than a centimeter in thickness. Margot knelt next to it, panting.

“You fucking fucking fucking...” she muttered. Already she was woozy again.

She looked over at Sirine, motionless, her mouth sucking on the xeno’s tail. The hammer felt solid in her hand.

“What do I... Oh, God, I can’t. Can’t hurt her. And I can’t stay here, and I can’t get out...”

Margot released the hammer and stood up. She looked at the hole in the ceiling, almost invisible in the darkness of the room. With a grunt, she braced her hands against the shelf and pushed. For a moment she strained and nothing happened; then with a scrape of metal on concrete, it moved.

Margot pushed the shelf across the floor until it was beneath the grate. A wave of dizziness washed over her, but the opening was a half-meter above the top of the shelf, plenty of room for another crawler to get in. She looked around—there. A toasting oven.

Margot picked it up. It was almost too heavy to raise, but she squatted down and then jerked it up, over her head, and shoved it on top of the shelf as her arms wobbled and then she fell.

The toasting oven stayed on the shelf. Margot could hear the blood rushing in her head as she pulled herself up a final time, using the shelf for support. She shoved at the small oven until it was completely blocking the opening in the ceiling.

Then her legs were jelly and she slumped to the floor, clinging to the shelf as she slid helplessly downward. The flashlight was still on, lying on the floor, too far to reach. As was her hammer.

She could still see Sirine. She looked almost peaceful, arms at her sides, back against the wall next to the door.

While the crawler did unspeakable things in her head.

Although she was once again paralyzed by weakness, this time she didn’t black out. It was a mixed blessing at best; she sat and stared at Sirine’s motionless body as the other girl had her brain enslaved by the crawler. To make matters worse, Margot was ferociously hungry.

She could twitch, just barely. It wasn’t as though her muscles were locked up, not like lockjaw. She had been training in some horrible jungle portion of, where was it, Stremadura. Nice enough world, most of it, Spanish speaking, but the Imperial camp was on some tropical peninsula and when it wasn’t raining it was steaming you alive. Apparently, somehow, Clostridium tetani had been brought to the planet and damned if several of the trainees hadn’t gotten it.

Margot hadn’t been one of them, but she could still remember Lee telling her how it felt.

This wasn’t like that. It was more like extreme weakness, like trying to lift one more rep after you’d already gone to failure. Her muscles just couldn’t do it.

Margot sat and tried to think of other things. Tried to remember the training on Stremadura.

Four times. They’d sprayed her four times, helplessly paralyzed four times in—how many hours? She’d fallen asleep again, it could be the next day already, or the middle of the night.

Time passed.

Saints and Martyrs she was hungry.

Sirine was motionless. Then—something. Margot squinted; Sirine’s body was only dimly illuminated by the edge of the flashlight beam. It happened again.

The gelatinous sacs that had squeezed out from beneath the crawler weren’t just covering Sirine’s eyes, they were on all four sides of the thing, squeezed out over the top half of her ears as well as probably the back of her head. As Margot watched, one of the bulges over Sirine’s left ear wiggled a bit, then shrank a little.

It was some sort of sac. All of the fleshy bits were sacs.

The crawler was injecting whatever was inside them into Sirine.

Margot’s stomach tightened. She tried to look away but the most she could manage was to look at the door, leaving Sirine in her peripheral vision.

Doubtless those sacs were where the paralytic venom was. Maybe other compounds as well. Margot wondered if it was squirting the stuff into her stomach, or directly into her brain.

Think of something else. How would she get out of here?

The tunnels. Xiulan’s solution still seemed to be the obvious one. Once she could move again, she had to get away from Sirine—the thing that was Sirine—and get across the garage to the other half of the basement. One of those doors they had passed in the initial rush, probably the locked one. That must be the service tunnel. Electricity and gas and water reached the building somehow.

Then what? From what she had seen from Sirine’s window, the xenos were everywhere. No—not everywhere. To the east, the mountains. No one lived there—and there hadn’t been any columns of smoke in that direction.

The xenos had intelligence behind them. Somewhere, someone was guiding them. Orbital bombardment required it.

Sirine sighed, and Margot’s stomach clenched again. She closed her eyes. Didn’t want to look.

Her eyelids were responding.

She tried to move her arm, and this time it moved, just a little. It wouldn’t support any weight, yet, but... fifteen minutes? Maybe? She tried to remember how long it took to get muscular control back, that first time, in the garage. When Sirine was on the floor, in her blue swimsuit.

Sirine. Despite herself, Margot opened her eyes again.

Sirine had moved. She was in the process of standing up.

Margot’s heart sank. Sirine had gotten into a crouch, and, one hand sliding up the wall, was slowly standing up. Her other arm was limp.

Once she was erect, Sirine just stood there for a moment, facing Margot.

Freckles had seen her. Had recognized her. How? Her eyes, too, had been totally covered by the venom sacs of the crawler latched to her head. But clearly the victims could see, somehow.

Was Sirine looking at her right now?

Sirine’s throat tightened; then the tail began to slide out of her mouth, her lips tight around it as though not wanting it to go. It slid up, curling, and then the tip came free with the same wet pop that Margot had heard upstairs.

Was it going to spray her?

No. Leisurely, tip first, the tail passed around the back of Sirine’s head and came to rest on the front of her neck.

Then, slowly, Sirine turned. Her chin dipped as she faced the door. Margot looked at Sirine’s ass, shiny in the skin-tight cling-skin she wore, and then up at the back of her head. There were venom sacs there too, just above her occipital bone. They were flat, their contents already injected.

Sirine raised one hand to lightly hold the door knob. A moment passed, then with the other hand she undid the lock.

“Oh no,” Margot whispered to herself. She leaned to the side, but her arm was still too weak to take her weight. Her legs were only just waking up.

Sirine pulled open the door. Her head was slightly tilted as she stood there. Then, instead of walking out of the room as Margot was expecting, she stepped back, into the room, pulling the door open wide, then standing in front of it, holding the door open with her backside.

There were women standing in the hallway. With Sirine propping the door ope, they walked into the room.

The first one was a dark-skinned woman in shorts and a baggy t-shirt; she entered and then stepped to Margot’s left, revealing the next woman. That woman was totally nude—in fact, she was the same thin, short-haired blonde that had preceded Margot and Sirine down the stairwell. Her pubis was neatly trimmed, her arms slender enough that Margot could see the veins in her muscular forearms.

They both had their crawlers firmly seated atop their heads.

The nude woman stepped to the side, on Margot’s right.

A third woman, crawler attached, stepped forward to stand between them.

Freckles.

“Hello, Margot,” she said.

* * *

END Chapter Two, Part One