Rochoppers Chapter 7
In the silence of vacuum, a steady stream of the Rockhopper’s robotic helpers haul ore to the ship’s hopper. Every few hours, another thirty meter section of the rail is extruded from a one-way cargo dump on the bottom of the engineering bay. The rapidly-cooling metal girders fall to the ground with the exaggerated sloth dictated by Sleepy’s tiny gravity. Well-anchored spiderbots reach up and wait with infinite patience to receive each new section.
Once their manipulators have a solid grip on the tiny handles built into the rail for just that purpose, the little robots heave in unison. The section flies out from under the Rockhopper like a massive, shining javelin. Its path floats parallel to the already-constructed portion of the rail, coasting toward the horizon. The spiderbots launch themselves after it, hurtling with much higher speed than their erstwhile missile. Occasionally one or another might bump the rail, diverting its path by millimeters, or adjusting the speed with which it slowly glides over the surface of the planetoid. The tiny but constant pull of Sleepy’s microgravity allows them to keep the rail in what amounts to extremely low orbit, skimming less than a meter over the path they’ve cleared for this purpose.
An observer might think they look a little like a pod of dolphins, playfully gamboling around a much larger creature as they leap and shepherd the shining metal. The only available observer, however, emerging in its tiny thousands from the mouth of a fresh tunnel just below the ship, has never seen a dolphin.
The spiderlings flow into each other to form a large, single alien. It crouches next to one of the smelter’s conductive columns, a shaft that sinks into the stone of the planetoid, shedding the enormous heat-debt of the metalworks housed in the ship above. The creature patiently observes the activities of the mechanicals as they maneuver one of the metal rails away from the ship. Hours pass, and it watches another. And another.
Eventually, it moves forward, placing itself in easy reach of the army of diminutive robots, who ignore it. Even when it moves to block their most efficient path, they simply weave around it without reaction. It never leaves the covering shelter of the visitor’s craft, so Faith’s carefully calibrated surveillance cameras monitoring the external perimeter never get a peek at this latest visitor. It observes the activities of the robots for a few more hours before finally turns its attention to the ship.
It has watched the process long enough to establish that there are only two accesses the spiderbots are using to interact with the ship. The first is the large metal cube into which they deposit rock, which leads directly into a device with temperatures too hot for the creature to tolerate without shedding too much mass to maintain cognition. The second is the hatch from which large metal girders emerge, which does not share the hellish temperatures of the first, but operates in such a way that even if it split into the tiniest possible bits of itself that could still follow instruction reliably, it could not squeeze through the available gaps quickly enough to avoid being smashed by the cargo mechanism.
It turns its attention to the conductive column it shelters beside. There is still a pile of debris and oddly liquid-looking slag where the drill has torn/melted its way down into the rock. The aboveground portion of the column is sheathed in the same type of high grade steel the rest of the hull is comprised of.
The spawnling extends a pseudopod to the metal, causing tip of the appendage to become a fine point. Pausing for a moment just above the surface of the steel, a small, clear droplet forms at the tip, which the creature presses into contact with the metal. Though there’s no hissing noise in the vacuum around the ship, the liquid clearly reacts with the alloy, boiling away in a few seconds and leaving a faint scar behind.
The creature examines the scar for a few moments, then applies another droplet slightly to one side of the shiny scar created by the first. This time, the reaction takes longer, and upon inspection, the second blemish is markedly more visible than the first, and has clearly eaten at more of the metal. A third improves on this result slightly.
The creature settles in, creating a grid of tiny pockmarks on the column’s sheathe as it searches for the most efficient compound for its purposes. If neither of the two accesses available are useful for its purposes, it intends to create a third.
“Anything?” Faith glides in to Josh’s cabin. Its occupant is sitting in front of his portable console. He’s wearing a shipsuit on his legs, but hasn’t bothered to pull the attached upper half around his shoulders yet.
“Nope, no movement for a hundred meters in any direction of the ship that can’t be attributed to a tagged, verified spiderbot. At least, not for the last two days.” He flicks his console closed, and stands, stretching.
She pads over and leans her forehead between his shoulderblades, feeling the soft fabric of his undershirt, enjoying his smell. “Okay, I’ll let the Captain know when I go up for watch.”
He nods, turning around to give her a hug. “I’ll tell Grubs. We’ll probably go under before the shift is over, I think the Captain is eager to get us back on a regular stasis cycle. If I’m honest, I kind of am too. It’s nice to wake up once a week and see a big jump in production from the bots instead of watching them plod along every day.”
Faith nuzzles his neck. “Hnn. As long as we don’t get any more uninvited guests, I don’t mind the extra uptime.”
Josh chuckles bringing his arms up around her. “Don’t you, now.”
“Nope.” she dots little butterfly kisses along his collarbone. One of her hands drifts down to give him a playful squeeze. “Don’t mind the half hour till shift change either.”
Grinning, he starts helping her out of her shipsuit.
“Hey, Skipper.” Grubs arrests his motion down the hall when he encounters Nomi in one of the service corridors. “The boy says nothing is moving out there, and hasn’t since we fired up the feed.”
Nomi nods. “Faith told me. I’m headed down to engineering, I want to see the numbers on the rail construction. How’s the boat?”
“Everything is in the green, I’ve been going over the temperature log since we shifted the equipment around, and the smelter’s still dumping heat just fine. As long as the boy thinks the bots have the job well in hand, I think we’re good to start getting some coffin time again.
“Thank god. I don’t want the to have to spend a day eating vat paste this trip if we can avoid it.”
They glide in silence a few moments, before Grubs puts his hand on his Captain’s arm and stops her short of the engineering hatch. “How are you, Skipper? No bullshit, lass, I’m not one of the kids.”
Nomi sighs. “I’m... okay. I haven’t felt sick again. Some nightmares, more because I can’t remember anything than because anything actually happened, I think. It was scary, Chief. But I’m sleeping better, and every camera on the ship, inside and out, hasn’t caught a whiff of that thing in days. It wouldn’t surprise me if the eggheads who come back here to find it have to hunt pretty hard. If anyone even believes us, with just 30 seconds of ’lock footage to show them.”
Grubs grunts. “Aye. Well, I feel better with all the work Faith did on the surveillance package. I threw a couple dozen pebbles out from under the ship in different directions when we were outside, and it caught and tracked every one of them to the limits of the cameras. Every movement log inside the boat is us or the bots in engineering, so whatever the beastie was, it didn’t leave any friends behind.”
He claps her on the shoulder and winks. “You were right to keep us here, Skipper. It’ll look better that we didn’t scarper when they make all the historical dramatization about our amazing discovery.”
She grins. “You have some ideas about who should play you?”
A shrug. “I’ve a name or two in mind, lass. Takes a lot of gravitas to pull off a proper Chief.”
Laughing, she tugs open the engineering access.
“There they go.”
The crew is gathered around the large mess display, watching the view of a temporarily retasked spiderbot as it records a team of its brethren hurtle a new section of rail across the surface of the planetoid.
Watching the bots in their strange dance of leaps and nudges around the massive rail, Faith says “They still creep me out sometimes, but that’s weirdly pretty to watch.”
Grubs nods. “Aye. Like a ballet.” He thumps a fist on Josh’s shoulder. “You’ve done well with your little toys, lad.”
“Thanks, Chief. So, yeah, Captain, they’ve got this. Every week we get roughly another kilometer of rail built, with variance because of terrain or when we get a lower concentration of iron in the smelter. As far as my little guys are concerned, we can start using the mausoleum again. I’d feel comfortable with thirty days instead of seven if unless the Chief thinks the smelter needs more frequent checks.”
Grubs says, “I’ve no problem with a month.”
She nods. “I’ll think about it tonight. All right then, really well done over the last few days, everyone. Grubs, fire up the grill. Everyone eat and catch a full eight hours of sleep. We’ll start a stasis cycle at the beginning of first shift.”
Nomi turns away from the console on Josh’s coffin. Both of the younger crew are in stasis, leaving the captain and the chief engineer the only two conscious souls on board.
“Grubs.”
“Aye, Skipper. Get in. I’ll wait and make sure you go under clean.”
Relief floods her, as well as gratitude that she didn’t have to explain herself. She nods pulls herself into her own crypt, attaching her hookups with the ease of long practice.
Once she’s settled, she looks up at the grizzled engineer floating beside her. She reaches up to give him a fond pat on the cheek. “Thanks, Chief. See you in a month.”
“As you say, Captain. Sleep well.”
The coffin slides home with a familiar crash, and Grubs watches the readouts until his captain is safely under. Satisfied, he gives the surveillance logs one last perusal before pulling himself into his own coffin.
The spawnling draws a thin line along the alloy below its test grid, and the residue it leaves behind reacts and boils away almost immediately. A perfect centimeter-deep groove is left behind in the metal.
Satisfied, it dispatches a tiny bit of itself to scurry back down to the core. The remaining mass examines the memories of the original visit inside the ark and repositions itself under a portion of the bay it remembers to be clear of activity and concealed from casual observation. Shoving itself away from the rock of the planetoid, it adheres the hull on the underside of the ship. If a few moments, it has bonded itself with the strength of a weld to a circular section of the hull about ten centimeters across. The metal inside the circle begins to bubble as it applies the compound it has developed.
Over the next hours, the creature clings to the hole it is making in the ship’s half-meter-thick hull, occasionally belching out the gaseous residue of the chemical reaction chewing through the metal. It is spending its own mass to fuel the reaction, and by the time a small section of the floor in the engineering bay boils away to nothing, all that is left of the spawnling is a thin, tight membrane stretched across the hull breach. It is strong enough to trap the pressurized atmosphere of the ship, but not enough mass remains to fuel independent thought. It simply holds station, following simple directives it had given itself before it boiled away to imbecility.
Minutes later and meters away, dozens of tiny spiders flood out of the passage to the core, immediately hurling themselves up towards the black patch on the Rockhopper. As they strike the surface, they merge with it. Seamlessly, each new addition of mass to the patch causes another spider of equal mass (but not necessarily the same molecules) to pop into the atmosphere of the ship. The first few to reach the lip of the hole in the engineering bay cling there, snatching their brethren as they come floating up, until the hole is plugged full of black alien. A few spiders remain outside the ship, touching the patch, available to convey information to the core should the need arise.
The spawnling extends a tiny pseudopod above the lip of the hole and spends a few minutes observing the environment. Mechanicals bustle around the bay on various arcane tasks, none of which bring them into the vicinity of the spawnling, tucked away below a bank of large, silent machines. There is no sign of their arboreal masters, although the atmosphere contains trace examples of their biology. The vast majority of the bay is floodlit, though the spawnling’s vantage does not allow it to observe the light sources, somewhere near the top of the bay. The light itself falls into a very low, narrow spectrum, deep into the infrared.
The spawnling does not understand why the creatures would rely on light so far outside their visible spectrum, as the bay would be mostly shadows to their visual sense. It watches the mechanicals go about their business for a few hours, but still sees no sign of their masters. After a few more minutes, it dispatches one of the spiderlings outside the breach to report to the core.
The main mass of the alien has no trouble judging the nature of the light its child has discovered inside the ark. The visitors might not be able to see in the infrared, but there is no reason their machines cannot, and the likeliest explanation for the new state of affairs aboard the vessel is that its masters have some inkling that they are not alone on the planetoid.
Possibly the mass it had left in the female has been discovered, possibly mechanical eyes have noted the movements of one of its spawnlings. Regardless, they are exercising caution in the face of an unknown. Their equipment uses infrared light precisely because they cannot see into that spectrum. It has been designed to observe the furtive actions of their own species, who would blunder into the floodlights all unknowing.
The creature sends a courier back to the ark, carrying instructions.
The cameras in the engineering bay observe what looks like a bloom of thousands of tiny black hairs begin to flow from underneath the console for the ship’s radiator fins. They stretch in every direction until they reach every wall of the engineering bay. The spiderbots working in the bay notice them as well, in as much as they notice anything: obstacles to be maneuvered around.
The entire process is recorded in extreme fidelity from multiple angles, to the point that each of the tendrils could be individually examined by anyone accessing the recording. The software behind the surveillance apparatus, however, observes nothing that passes the size filter dictated to make an entry in the log, much less perform an emergency wakeup of the crew, and so the recordings anonymously join thousands of hours of footage already collected by the system, with nothing to distinguish them in the log.
The spawnling waits, the bulk of its mass spread across the space of the bay in the form of thousands of tendrils, each thinner than a human hair. It retains one visual organ, which watches from under cover as spiderbots continue their work in the bay. For each click of a robotic claw against the deck plating, the network of hairs tracks not only the sound, but all of the resulting faint echos.
It takes a few hours, because some of the arboreal machinery produces a great deal of white noise when it activates, but eventually the spawnling has an intricately detailed sonic map of the entire engineering bay, including the lumps of polycarbonate near the ceiling that must be the ark’s surveillance apparatus. As slowly as it extended them, it reels its tendrils back into itself, until it is once more a formless blob plugging the hull breach.
A courier spider dives away from the patch outside the ship, bound for the core, but this time the spawnling does not wait for a response. Instead, it begins to extrude itself into pulsing black worm, a couple of centimeters thick. Soon it is adroitly winding around equipment, always flowing just out of the point of view of the cameras above. Eventually the snake comprises all of the spawnling’s mass, and nothing remains in the hull breach except the thin black membrane holding in the atmosphere.
The creature is almost twenty meters long, now, and moves more swiftly as it becomes confident in its survey of the bay. Soon it reaches the bank of thick pipes that house the cabling that feeds the rest of the ship power from the engineering bay’s reactor. The snake coils itself around one of the pipes and reels in the rest of its length. Then the spawnling applies a tiny amount of solvent to one of the pipes, creating a small hole that immediately uses to enter the ship’s wiring infrastructure. It spends another tiny bit of mass to plug the hole with a small patch.
A few moments later, the spiderbots are once again the sole occupants of the engineering bay.
“Hey Captain, there’s coffee. Grubs says he’ll be up here in a few minutes to make breakfast.”
Nomi glides into the mess, having left Faith on the bridge to verify that none of Sleepy’s orbital mechanics have changed since they went under. Josh is nursing a bulb of coffee with one hand while he flips between spiderbot views on the main display with the other.
“Thanks.” She fills a bulb from the vac-dispenser. “So how did your little minions do with our extended nap?”
“Like gangbusters. The rail construction has reached a relatively flat plain on the surface. They’re on track to finish it up about the time we wake up again. Are we still going under in three hours?”
“No. Grubs said everything in engineering held up fine as well, so now that we can go down a month at a time I’m giving us a solid twenty-four hours at each cycle.”
“Aye, Captain. I won’t mind that a bit. I feel loopy when we do a few cycles without any actual sleep.”
“I know what you mean. A thousand studies will tell you its psychosomatic, but I like natural sleep between crypt sessions too.” She settles down at the table with him. “So, you think we can start pushing iron on the next cycle?”
“I think so. At that point the spiders will just be hauling ore, so you’d be better off checking with Faith, the rail systems are her baby. I can just tell you that the construction side should be complete.”
Nomi nods. “She’s rechecking the orbital math again right now. I don’t think there’s going to be much for any of us to do the rest of the shift. If you’re satisfied that the bots are in order, go put your head together with hers about when we should set the next wake cycle for. I want us to be watching when the rails fires the first slug.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Later that evening, Nomi has left the other three in the mess, where Grubs is educating the two younger crew members in the fine art of properly appreciating scotch in microgravity.
Uninterested in going into stasis hung over, Nomi has bid the others goodnight and is gliding along the corridor to her cabin. Palming the release, she waits for the hatch to slide open. She doesn’t even have time to scream before an oily black tentacle splashes over her face and around her head, dragging her inside while she flails helplessly.
A few moments later, the hatch slides closed on a silent corridor.
Several hours later, the spawnling believes it understands what happened to the mass of itself that had once occupied the female’s mind. They are unable to communicate with language, and the female lacks the capacity for nuanced pheromone production the creature prefers to use for rapid communication, but after insinuating itself into the arboreal’s sensorium, it had been able to use pleasure and pain stimulus to force the visitor to revisit its memories of the events over and over until it believes it understands them.
The creatures seem to rely on a form of mechanical hibernation while their automatons go about their manual tasks. Something about the process of entering that hibernation was fatal to the remnant left controlling the female. The hibernation also explains the long absence of activity aboard the ark before the female finally returned to her quarters.
The spawnling dispatches a spiderling to wend its way through the ships internals, and to eventually reach the core to report. It then returns its attention to the mammal it holds floating in the middle of the room. Her entire head is wrapped in the spawnling’s black mass. It breaths for her. Her limbs occasionally jerk as it induces another climax to reward her retrieval of an appropriate memory. It has not had to use pain for hours.
Now it turns its attention more current issues. If it understands her, the arboreals intend to begin hibernating once more in a few hours, and it will not be able to exert direct control over her actions, or it will expose itself and sacrifice whatever part of itself it leaves inside her.
It is, therefore, required to use less elegant methods. It does not know how to perform the actions it requires from the female, but the knowledge is inside her. It is time to begin the slow work of embedding the appropriate impulses. Unfortunately for her, this process will require the use of pain.
It is well into the process, watching her claw helplessly at the air when the spiderling courier from the core arrives and conveys approval of its chosen course of action.
“Och, Skipper, no offense, but you look like shit.”
Grubs is carefully sipping coffee from a bulb in the mess, and pretending he isn’t massively hungover. Both of the young crew members have their heads pillowed on their arms on the table, and are not trying to hide their sad state at all.
“I slept like shit, and you’re one to talk. Come on kids, best cure for a hangover is a stasis wakeup cocktail.”
“God, anything that will help.” says Josh as the crew slowly drags itself out of the mess and towards the mausoleum.
Nomi says, “That will teach you to listen to Grubs when he’s not on shift.”
“Lesson learned, Captain.” groans Faith.
The chief grunts, “Slander.”
Grubs and Nomi get the kids tucked in and frozen, and Nomi turns to her chief, “You mind doing the honors again?”
“Aye, Skipper, get on in.”
Grubs helps Nomi with her hookups, and soon she joins the kids in their preprogrammed sleep schedule. A couple of minutes later, the engineer joins them.
Twenty minutes later, acting on programming she input a couple of hours earlier, the Captain’s coffin overrides the schedule and rouses her. She pulls herself out into the chill air of the mausoleum. She pauses at the consoles for each of the other crewmembers and makes some adjustments before leaving the crypt and heading to the bridge.
She accesses the main security console and makes a number of alterations to Faith’s surveillance program, chief among them disabling autolog and the emergency crew wakeup routines. Once she hits the final command key she feels a wash of pleasure roll over her. She gasps and clutches at the console as she rides it out. By the time she’s back under control, her panties are soaking.
She glides out of the bridge, and navigates the ships corridors until she reaches her cabin. This time when she opens the hatch she doesn’t feel anything but excited relief as the creature drags her inside.
A few minutes later, Nomi pulls herself out of her cabin. She is clad only by the spawnling, who coats her entire body in a skin-tight layer. It stops in an uneven edge at her neck, leaving her head free except for two small black strips that flow up her face and into her eyes, like a stream of black tears.
She makes her way deep into the ship, all the way to the massive hatches that border the engineering bay, and lets herself inside. The air is warmer here, and the bay is filled with the sounds of the smelter and manufactory going about their business. Spiderbots scuttle to and fro. Nomi ignores all of this and maneuvers over to the console bank that handles the radiation fins. She crouches and places a hand on the deck beside the console, and a small spider drips from her fingers and scuttles underneath, on its way to her master at the core.
She stretches and drifts, waiting contentedly for a response.
The creature at the core finally receives the message it had been expecting. It begins crafting a reply by carefully forming a unique spawnling, much larger than previous incarnations, because it will have to spend mass to keep its payload warm and viable on its long, roundabout trip to the ark. While it works, more conventional pieces of itself begin the labor of widening a tunnel to the surface to allow their new sibling to emerge.
A courier skitters out from under the console and leaps to where Nomi stands, staring at nothing while the Rockhopper’s bots swirl around her on their business. The courier leaps at her and slaps into her chest, where it joins the rest of the spawnling coating her.
After a moment she blinks, and begins moving to the controls for the large bay airlock, dormant since Josh and Grubs had reconfigured the Rockhopper’s mining operations to function without it. It takes her a moment to order the airlock to begin its processes, but before long the outer doors clank open. Nomi watches on the lock camera as a huge spawnling lumbers into the airlock, and then orders the lock to do a full cycle.
The outer doors shut, and the airlock floods with atmosphere. The spawnling is massive enough that it doesn’t sway in the brief wind inside the airlock. Once the pressure is equalized with the rest of the ship, the enormous black spider, easily Nomi’s height even in its current squat configuration, pulls itself inside the Rockhopper.
Smiling, she approaches it and places a hand against its slick carapace. Her eyelids flutter as she shares communion with it through the spawnling coating her. The alien briefly explores the invasive interface spread through her mind, and begins to stimulate first her pleasure centers, and then the the set of instincts associated with procreation.
Nomi’s eyes roll up and she begins to pant, her mind beginning to blank. Her body begins to react to the direct erotic stimulus. Her nipples harden, visible through the perfect black coating of alien flesh that sheathes her. Unconsciously, her hips buck slightly, and the alien flesh covering her crotch begins to peel back, revealing her freshly hairless sex to the warm air of the engineering bay. Moisture glistens on the inner folders of her vagina, and the outer lips are swollen with her burgeoning excitement.
The larger spider reaches forward with two forelimbs to secure the woman. Her legs spasm open when she feels the pressure of its grip on her hips, and it begins to draw the woman towards itself. Low on the main bulk of its mass, a new pseudopod begins to form, shaping itself into what Nomi can only describe to herself as a large, slick penis. She groans as it carefully impales her. Her legs splay wide as the creature’s mass presses her against the metal plate floor of the engineering bay. The spider allows the woman’s breeding instincts to guide its actions, and soon the creature is actively fucking the human captain, its extruded cock pounding the pink, swollen flesh of her sex.
The spawnling coating her glides back over the join between the woman and the spider, sealing her body once more. Deep inside the giant spawnling, a carefully preserved chamber yields up a small part of its payload and carries it towards the join between the creature and the human woman.
It can sense biological triggers firing inside the mind of its partner, and it waits until it senses a now familiar rush of endorphins as the woman climaxes. At the ultimate moment, it presses itself against the entrance of the female’s womb, and proceeds to flood her with carefully modified seed, modeled on semen stolen from the male several weeks ago.
Nomi is aware of warmth gushing inside her, and aware that the alien will not let the tiniest amount be wasted, because even all with the genetic expertise it is bringing to bear, it is extremely unlikely that she will be impregnated by a this single application.
That’s all right, though. Her lover has liters more to spend, and they have all the time in the world.
In the silence of the mausoleum, time ticks by unnoticed. The readouts on the three coffins still in service indicate that the occupants are in good health, and will remain so indefinitely. Their coffins have no time limit set.
Outside the Rockhopper, a small army of spiderbots continue their ceaseless toil. A day comes when there is no more rail to build, and their brethren inside the ship automatically reconfigure the smelter and manufactory to produce large metal slugs. A little over a month and ten days after the crew went to sleep, the first one accelerates down the rail and out of Sleepy’s pull, beginning its years-long journey to the construction site of New Pangea. Almost four hours per orbit, another slug is fired once every two to three minutes. The process has been well-prepared, and there’s no need for human intervention.
No need, that is, until a freak micrometeorite strike demolishes a section of the rail.
“Up! Now!”
Faith’s eyes slam open and the first thing she’s cognizant of is the emergency klaxon echoing through the mausoleum. Josh is sitting up next to her, frantically yanking out connections, and Grubs is by the exit hatch of the crypt, cursing over the pad controlling it.
By the time Faith starts pulling her own connections, Josh is reading his own coffin’s console and learning the first bits of what has the chief engineer so frantic.
“We’ve been down almost eight months!”
Faith pulls her self out, and looking around, asks “Where’s the Captain?”
“That’s what I’d like to fucking know.” The chief is almost apoplectic with anger and worry. “Her console says she came out of stasis almost immediately after we went under, and she hasn’t been back. She’s not answering the com, and there’s a lock override on this hatch I don’t have the authority to shut off!”
Faith is already entering the security log through her own console. “She turned off the perimeter wake-up protocol, it’s right here in the log. Right after she woke up. Give me a minute.”
As she turns back to the console, Josh asks Grubs “So what woke us up?”
“Something about the rail, I didn’t look into it after I saw how long we’d been under.”
Josh pulls up the alert. “Damage to the rail. Meteor, maybe. There was no wakeup set, we would have stayed under until something woke us.”
“Got it!” Faith calls from across the room.
In a moment the indicator on the main hatch switches from red to yellow, and Grubs and Josh immediately begin to work the manual cranks to wheel it out of the way. Soon all three of them spill out into the corridor.
“Stay with me.” The chief bounds down the hall, headed for the bridge, and the other two follow closely. The Captain is not there, and grubs takes a minute to key open the weapons locker. He retrieves a shock pistol for each of them.
“I don’t know what’s happening, but whatever has happened, the Captain isn’t behaving like the woman I know. I’m declaring her medically incompetent, and I’m giving the two of you a direct order: if you see something moving that’s alive and not one of the three of us, you shoot it. If it’s the Captain, the worst that can happen is she gets knocked out for a couple of hours. Am I understood?”
In unison, “Yes, sir.”
They find no sign of the Captain near the bridge, or in her quarters. In the mess, they find most of the ships stores are eaten, and the yeast vats have been activated.
“At least we won’t starve. Where now?” Faith asks.
Grubs thinks for a moment before replying “Engineering.”
They pause at the main hatch and listen. Even through the thick walls, the sound of the smelter is obvious, but that’s all they can discern.
“All right, open it.”
Josh keys the console, the doors roll aside and they drift in to the familiar cacophony of the bay.
A cacophony presided over by what used to be the Rockhopper’s commanding officer.
Nomi floats in the center of the room, watching as the three new arrivals come to a gaping stop in front of her. Her hair has grown out, now falling in a tangle well past her shoulders. She’s topless, and her breasts are swollen with... something. Something blue, a dribble of which is leaking from one of her nipples. Her stomach is grotesquely swollen, gravid with new life that none of them assumes is human, because her waist vanishes into the front of the thick black mass of an enormous alien spider, which now serves as her lower body. She towers over her former crew.
An obsidian stream flows from each of her eyes and down her jaw, curving over her shoulders and disappearing down her back. Her eyes themselves are completely black, no hint or iris or sclera remain. Her gaze is alien, and hard. Bots blithely swirl around her, faithfully maintaining the operations of the bay, as they had for all the months prior. They pay no more attention to the alien spider-queen in their midst than they do the three humans who just stumbled into her lair.
Her mouth moves as though she’s trying to speak, and then stills. Her human arms reach down towards Grubs, and her head tilts quizzically to one side as she regards her former Chief. Her eyes narrow and she smiles. Grubs just has time to shove the younger crewmembers back towards the hatch with a shout before her forelegs streak forward to drag him toward her embrace.
Josh is trying to draw a bead on the Captain without hitting the Chief, but Faith drags him with her through the entry and slams her palm on the emergency seal. Their last view of Grubs as the doors roll shut is a swell of black tar enveloping his body as his captain wraps her arms around him.