Some thoughts I have had recently:
Kesha's new songs are who i want to be as a person
i have crippling depression
Me: screeches like a chimpanzee and throws this chapter at you like it's monkey shit
Thank you to Colorful Crayola for beta'ing this for me even when it's been so long.
Thanks to my new and old reviewers, I love you more than I love myself. I'm gonna keep trying to get this story out, because it is almost over.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Queens
There were bruises on the nape of his neck in the shape of those grotesque, skeleton appendages. That's all she could see. Nasira walked a half pace behind him, which he only allowed after she assured him twice that he would be safer if she did not have to turn to see him.
She regretted it only after he'd taken up the position. From here she could see the reddened backs of his ears and, on the back of his neck from the top of his spine into his hairline, two thin, curving lines as ghastly reminders of what fate awaited him.
His head turned and she could see that his lips were moving but she heard nothing.
"Huh?" she said.
"I said how are we supposed to do this? There's — there's like a billion of them down here. Nasira, I don't know that I can -"
"I'll handle it. I've already disabled the cooling systems' secondary cores. I can deal with them while you initiate the reactor purge from the main control panel."
The central reactor lay far above them now — the reactor itself was, of course, enormous, spanning the entire height of the cavernous chamber that held it. Multiple tiers of platforms rose intermittently up its side with the Queen encamped right at its heart.
Nasira swallowed hard. She knew now that at least some of the drones had ventured out of the hive since Tresses had slain the Queen's bodyguard, the Palatine. The one that had ambushed her and Runite in the airlock chamber, and the one that had stalked her down to Reactor Maintenance. It was possible that what drones remained— the entirety of the horde that had come to the Queen's aid — had resumed whatever duties they had been tending to before the Palatine had been slain. It was possible. But Nasira knew better than to hope she would find the way to the central reactor clear and the Queen defenseless.
Even as she thought this, Edmund was still lamenting his doubt.
"I really don't know how to do any of this, Nasira."
Nasira pulled him to a stop but immediately released him again, as if the simple act of touching him could set off the nymph nestled within his chest.
"The control panel is right at the base of the reactor on the central platform. Just access emergency protocols. I've already done all the overrides."
"The central platform?" he said, his pupils black pits. "That's right in the middle of them."
"I told you I'd handle them."
"But it's impossible!" he cried, throwing his arms out toward her as if he meant to grab her shoulders and shake her. Her own forearm went up automatically, deflecting his motion and knocking him off balance. He stumbled and slammed into the wall, crying out in pain. He dropped to his knees and coughed, deep coughs that sounded as though his lungs had broken off.
"Ah — Fuck! Nasira, I'm sorr —"
But his apology was lost to her, second to her vision of the way the parasite fetus writhed inside him, irate at having been disturbed.
"We don't have time," she said, forcing her revulsion away.
Tresses could already be in the hive, unless she had opted to stay with Siwili after Runite had pursued Nasira. If she had returned to the hive, that meant Siwili was vulnerable and Tresses was tempting doom. The infestation was simply too great. Setting the ship to self-destruct was the only way to purge the hive. Beyond that, Nasira needed to give Tresses a reason to retreat — to cut her losses and drag Siwili to safety.
She ducked her head. "I didn't mean for you to have to be a part of this. But I can't leave you here now that I've found you."
"We can just run to the lifeboats," he moaned. "Just leave."
"No, we can't. We can't just run away and leave the ship as it is. I can't risk letting them survive," she said. "Eventually the ship's engines will either give out or overload. If it's the former, it'll stop accelerating and become some poor salvager's dream haul. They'll catch up to it. Become exposed. Return to populated space for help. We can't risk that, Edmund."
He looked like he might faint, swaying back and forth on bent knees, his mouth screwed as if he was going to cry. She continued, cutting off his imminent protest.
"Remember Uataislurn," she said. "Marcus's weapon test. The whole planet infected in a matter of days, he said." Despite herself, she seized one of his hands between her own, knowing the contact would bring his attention back to her. "We can't let that happen to anyone else."
He ceased his desperate swaying, biting his lip. He had looked down to her hands when she had touched him and had yet to take his eyes off them.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Okay. I'll help. But then the lifeboats?"
The only expression of reassurance she was able to summon was a smile, and it was stale, as much of a lie as her next words.
"Then the lifeboats. Both of us."
How long did he have? How long until…
A crack like breaking ribs. Something wet and meaty slapped her face, spattering her with moisture. Dumbstruck, she blinked crimson beads from her eyes. There was a cavity in his chest, a bombshell gone off in his heart. Red muscle, red bone, red tubing that made him up, red everything.
She forced the remainder of the memory away. She did not need to recount the visage of the Queen in her skeletal infancy. Not while she was sharing air with one of the bitch's brood.
The entrance to the reactor chamber lay just ahead, encased in an arch of resin. They were still on a lower level than the one they had initially entered through — they would have to climb several flights of stairs to reach the central platform where the reactor's main control panel was housed.
"Come on," she said, beckoning him forth when he stopped short.
He took another step that looked as though a thousand pound weight were chained to his ankle.
What Nasira felt was not impatience — she was beyond that, especially knowing that it was his whose time was drastically growing shorter. It was desperation. It was panic setting in, fraying the edges of her nerves.
"Here," she said. She held out the handgun, the weapon she'd held to the back of his skull mere minutes ago. "Take it."
It would do nothing against the hard exoskeletons of the aliens, but it was not them he had to fear.
After a moment's hesitation he took it.
"Remember," she said. "Access emergency protocols. Initiate reactor purge. Then we're getting the hell out."
He nodded.
"Are you ready?"
His response was firm, though tinged with a slight quiver. "Yes."
Nasira swung Runite's spear off her back and held it across her front as she took her first strides into the reactor chamber. There was only the sounds of the reactor cores alighting, firing in meteoric bolts, the sound utterly cataclysmic now that it was nearing overload.
She looked up and immediately blinked away water as it cascaded down from the apparatus overhead. The cooling reservoirs that had ruptured long ago were situated above the reactor, so the entire chamber appeared to be raining fat, wet drops that made the resin even more treacherous. The central platform was four flights of stairs above them.
She jerked her chin at Edmund and he followed her through, tucking his weapon into a pocket so he could climb on all fours up the slick, resin-caked stairs. She preceded after him, planting each foot carefully so she did not slip. Between the gaps in the steps was the blackness of the reactor's bowels, so far below.
Once or twice, Edmund stumbled and cared more for clutching his chest than he did for regaining his balance — she caught the back of his shirt both times and stopped him from tumbling beneath the railing and falling. He didn't complain aloud, but his breathing was growing sharper with each flight of stairs. By the time they had reached the top, he pulled himself onto the landing and curled up on his side, holding himself as he struggled to regain his breath.
Nasira, too, reached the top and stopped, her blood freezing in her veins.
"Edmund," she said in a low voice, for she was not sure what it would take to provoke the small army of xenomorphs that had turned to greet them.
They held their weight on one clawed, black foot, their shoulders pressed back like dancers as they fixed Nasira and Edmund with their eyeless gazes. They moved in an anxious sort of swarm, like an instinctive ritual. Some were pressed low to the ground, skeletal tails lashing as their inner jaws slid out to taste the air. Others walked upright in that bizarre, arched-foot gait.
Nasira's hand was still on the spear, though she knew it mattered little. Even Tresses would not have been able to withstand such numbers, unbalanced, with her back to an abyss.
"Edmund, move up," Nasira said. She tipped the spear towards the platform.
Edmund moaned piteously but did as she said, crawling forward on his hands and knees so he was kneeling in front of her. Tremors wracked their way through his body so violently that the water soaking him fell in uniform sheets. He would not dare turn his back to the platform, so she did not think twice about shifting the point of the spear so it hovered over his back where, beneath skin and muscle and bone, the parasite fetus slumbered.
The reaction of the horde was instantaneous — a bristling hiss rent the air, its many voices overlapping and dissonant.
"What are they doing?" Edmund lamented.
"Shh," Nasira said, not moving her eyes off of them, still holding the spear over his back.
Far across the platform, the Queen's inner jaw slid out from her maw, a splintering hiss leaving her, and the horde shifted itself backwards.
They would not hurt him, not while he was incubating one of their own, and they would not challenge her while she held the spear poised to run the parasite fetus through. Their regard for one of their own, even one unborn, bordered on reverence.
"Keep moving," Nasira said, the spear still levered between them. "Do you see the terminal?"
"This is crazy," he said. "This is fucking crazy. Why aren't they —?"
"Move," Nasira snapped, almost jabbing the point of the spear into his back to corral him forward, and then remembered it was only the threat over her doing so that held the horde at bay — if she pushed him too much, they might spring forward all at once, determined to kill her before she could do any harm to him.
The horde parted for them as they approached, still dancing about the perimeter, then closed behind them so they were surrounded.
A chill stole its way down her spine and she reacted without hesitation, drawing her sidearm from its holster and pointing it at Edmund's back, swinging the spear around so it was braced against her side with the ambushing drone's throat at the point of it.
Yellow beads of blood pulsed from the drone's throat and smoked on the platform. Its lips rolled up and away from its fangs in a snarl, then it slunk away, the steady drips of acid following it like a leash.
Nasira turned back, only to see the immense field of white in Edmund's widened eyes. His mouth was a soft "O", opening and closing as he groped for words.
Eventually, all he croaked was: "Nasira?"
And those bulging eyes of his were not on the killing ring of the gun held on him, but on her own hard ones.
"I've got one," he said. His tone was mournful. "I do, don't I?"
Nasira couldn't speak, could only nod.
A strange placidness smoothed over his features. Despite the nightmare creatures surrounding them, he shut his eyes. His lips shaped then abandoned several words before he said, "I thought I'd dreamt it. I've dreamt it before. What about Marcus?"
Nasira remembered that crimson torrent, the deluge that flooded the water underfoot with Marcus' guts. And the sight of his two halves thrown carelessly in separate directions. The executioner, tossing his shoulders with a sharp rattle before heaving her out of the tainted water and dragging her away.
"Runite. The one with the prosthetic arm. He – he did it."
A curdled hiss, and one of the xenomorphs grew bold enough to stalk forward, entering the tentative circle of respite of which Nasira and he were the center. Nasira stepped closer to Edmund, brandishing the spear at his middle and the alien receded, tail lashing impatiently.
Edmund, seeing this, let his shoulders rise and fall.
"Do what you need to do. I'll help however I can."
Nasira nodded, collapsed the spear, and hooked it to the back of her suit alongside the helmet. Then she grabbed him in the most forgiving headlock she could manage, pulling him in front of her.
"Nice and easy," she said. "Just until we get to the terminal."
He gurgled an affirmation, the heavy plates of the suit likely pressing into his windpipe. He tapped the back of her hand and she looked down. He was holding out the handgun she'd given him earlier. She took it and pressed it against his chest, which held his heart, which was somehow beating more steadily than her own.
The Queen's crystalline teeth sawed the air in agitation as they moved across the platform towards the terminal, but she gave her children no command to stop them.
Nasira met her eyeless gaze over Edmund's shoulder, felt rage mount inside her at the sight of this conscienceless evil, knew that her own features had grown into a cold mask of fury like that which reigned on the Queen and all of her children.
When they reached the terminal, she released him and made sure all of the prowlers nearest them saw her heft the weapon so it rested between his shoulder blades.
"Emergency commands. Reactor settings. There. Initiate reactor purge. You see it?"
"I see it. It's letting me manually input a countdown. I'll give you fifteen minutes."
Nasira frowned. "Give yourself fifteen minutes. I'm not leaving without you."
"What?" He half-turned.
"One of the lifeboats has a medical stasis pod. I'll freeze you. Adrara will know what to do."
He didn't move, what she could see of his face lit by the sickly glow of the terminal's disaster settings.
"Alright then. Fifteen minutes."
He hit confirm and the terminal spat out a metal cuff.
"A crisis cuff?" Edmund said. "The ship must really think we're in trouble."
The humor was so unexpected that Nasira actually laughed. Here, in the midst of the greatest, most thoughtless evil in the universe, she laughed.
"Wow," Edmund said. "We're a long way from 'Shut up, Edmund!' now."
Nasira grabbed the cuff and fastened it around her wrist, over her heat suit. It was a small, molded tablet that showed her the ship's emergency procedures, a 3-D display of the ship, lifeboat statuses, and most critically, the reactor purge countdown.
Which read: 14:43
"Okay," she said. "Let's get the fuck out of here."
The last of her words were suddenly overwrought by a tremendous bellow that managed even to drown out the elephantine noise of the overloaded reactor cores.
Tresses stood at the end of a catwalk that connected to the far side of the platform. Even at this distance, it was possible to make out the absolute rigidity of her every flexed muscle, the light shearing itself off her golden tusks of her mask, fractal eyes aflame with wrath.
Light, hyper-exposing the immense reactor chamber, turning every falling droplet to crystal - then came the plasma arc from Tresses' shoulder cannon.
Two drones were vaporized instantaneously, nothing left but an unpleasant memory. A third swayed back and forth on the spot, a third itself, with only a bit of torso and leg left behind. It toppled over sideways and lay twitching at the feet of its siblings.
The Queen screamed a challenge and every single drone rose up as if a single entity and turned about, throwing themselves at Tresses.
They stampeded towards her, and Tresses stood her ground, another pillar of plasma slaying three or four on the front line.
Nasira could only watch the rapture before her, eyes drinking in Tresses' killing light.
Edmund seized her shoulder. "Let's go!"
Nasira came to her senses, and the two of them sprinted to the nearest catwalk and then threw themselves up the stairs. Nasira climbed, but kept her chest pressed to the railing so she could watch the massacre on the platform.
Tresses held them at bay, batting away those closest as if they were no more than mild vexations. The blue killing light continued, sawing a line through the new frontline. She had installed more of those laser trap devices, and the red vectors were a vicious minefield, flashing and crisscrossing and sawing through hard carapace.
The metal groaned under Nasira's feet and she wondered whether the entire structure suspended in the middle of the reactor chamber would collapse. It was not the doing of Tresses – her strikes were so precise that there was scarcely a spare scorch mark made throughout her assault. Then Nasira checked the countdown; she'd wasted nearly a minute captivated by Tresses, and the reactor purge had begun wreaking progress on the rest of the room.
Now alone on the far side of the platform, the Queen must have sensed the same danger Nasira had. She was rising to her full height, barbed legs spindly but graceful. She stood, ripping free of her egg sac and shrieking.
The remaining drones – less than fifteen, by the looks of things – abandoned their assault and scuttled away, some leaping up the walls of the reactor chamber and others taking to the underside of the platform.
The Queen lurched as the platform shifted under her.
Tresses ignored her, striding across the platform towards the catwalk that Nasira and Edmund had taken.
The Queen, her balance restored, took a step after her. Then another.
"Nasira," Edmund said. He'd rushed back to find her bent nearly double over the railing, watching. "What are you doing?"
"The Queen," Nasira intoned. "She's coming."
Edmund let out a panicked laugh. "Oh yeah? Which one?"
Nasira looked again. A Queen, still swaying under her newfound weight, crown glistening as water showered over it.
The other, chin tipped high, wielding her wicked glaive, blade bloodied with yellow gore. Her icy eyes screamed with cold fury, and they were fixed upon Nasira, her gaze as righteously murderous as her intent.
"Both of them," Nasira said.
"And which one do you think wants to kill us the most?" He was nearly begging despite the quip.
Nasira did not resist when he started to drag her, and consented to let him tow her through the maze of the ship's corridors.
"One of them has already killed you," Nasira said, but he didn't appear to have heard.
They arrived in the upper levels of atmospheric conditioning, where, lifetimes ago, Nasira had solved the gas leak that Marcus had caused to distract her from noticing the central bunker had been breached. The machinery in Atmospheric was a giant sleeping on its side far below, snores rumbling through the metal of the ship. This was the nearest maintenance level to the habitations levels. They'd be back in the fuselage in a few minutes.
Nasira checked the countdown on her cuff. 12:37.
They stood on a balcony railing that wrapped around the top of the room and gave passage to a series of corridors that led to various parts of the ship.
Edmund stopped and looked around for the correct exit. Nasira stared back down the dark one from whence they'd come, from whence came the tremendous groans of the laboring ship and the creatures she bore in her belly, and from whence came the vengeful pursuit of the two Queens.
"There." Edmund pointed to the opposite corner of the room, the entry marked with Habitation and Control. Just beyond Habitation, the lifeboats were housed.
They ran towards its dark maw, drunken with the security it would bring, and did not notice the drone clinging to the ceiling of the passage just beyond.
It collapsed atop Nasira, would have delivered its death blow to her throat, but the heavy metal neck of her heat suit caused the jaw to glance off of her. Her arms and legs, however, were still pinned as it lined up its next attempt, hot saliva slagging from its fangs and dripping over the Blooded mark on her forehead.
Before it could strike, before it could pierce her skin and the skull beneath it, Edmund threw himself at it, just enough of a distraction to unbalance it.
The drone reared up before Edmund, its spindly hands seizing him and forcing him away, his back suddenly to the rail and the three story drop it guarded.
The drone's face dipped low, listening to his infected heart, and Nasira took advantage of its inattention and stabbed it in the foot, which proved just as effective as when Siwili had done it.
It howled and jerked and Edmund spilled backwards over the rail. Nasira launched herself forward and just managed to grab his elbow, which slipped her grasp and became his wrist, then his fingertips.
Groaning with exertion, she managed to heave him up just enough that he could grab the platform himself. Then she let go, took up the spear upon which the drone was still pinioned, and planted it in the drone's head. It drove through the front of the skull, just above the jaw, where an eye socket would have been. Shallow, not enough to penetrate the brain, but enough to send it reeling backwards, clawing at the spear.
Nasira grabbed Edmund again and pulled, teeth clenching as his weight tugged at old injuries in her back, her sides, her bruised arms. He, too, was yelling and straining and not quite managing to pull himself up when a bellow announced Tresses' entrance on the now-far side of the room.
The drone, still scrabbling at the spear, suddenly whipped around at the intrusion, and Nasira had a glimpse of the ornamented haft of the spear swinging towards her before fuzzy heat erupted behind her eyes and she dropped like a stone, forgetting everything in the universe but the new system of stars that danced on the backsides of her eyelids.
When she blinked them away, she was lying at the drone's feet, and three ghostly spears were still lodged in its skull, swaying and overlapping. She reached up to her temple and felt warm ribbons of blood there. Then she turned her head and saw that Edmund was clinging to the underside of the grated platform by only his curled fingertips, inches from her.
Vision still swimming, she rolled towards him and started to reach over the edge of the platform. Through the holes in its underside, she was able to see his face, awash with desperation, as his grip started to loosen. And then she heard the sickening crack and saw the beads of red blossom on his shirtfront. His eyes were wet with terror.
Nasira couldn't tear her gaze from him, even as she bent her arm over the edge of the platform and made another attempt to catch him, so she saw the cough that sent blood spurting from his mouth and coating his lips. She saw how very much alive he was when the blood fountained from his chest and he lost all strength to hold on, and how alive he still was when he fell away from her with the infant parasite tearing through his shirt. He bounced off the metal machinery with a hollow bang and landed in a misshapen crumple.
Nasira blinked and blinked and blinked again and felt her throat work and realized that she should have been screaming, so she listened to hear whether she was — what she heard was just a low wail, a sound of unequivocal defeat, so weak it was nothing more than a mewl. And yet it became all she heard as the shrieks of the drone above her faded to damp pulses — and then to silence. She scarcely felt the heat of Tresses' next bolt from her plasma cannon that turned it to melted black tallow.
And she did not bother to stand as she quit making that sound and spoke instead: "Do they live?"
She asked, "Do they live?"
Was Siwili, whom she had been charged to protect and instead left defenseless, alive? Was Runite?
Tresses did not answer, scions of crackling energy shedding themselves about her as if her equipment was burdened to its limits. A cascade erupted at her shoulders as she charged the next bolt from her plasma cannon — its light seemed to feast on the air near it like a sort of glutton, and the light grew as dense as it had been when it reduced three drones to ash.
And it fixed itself upon Nasira.
It was not conscious thought but instinct that drove her arms up over her head and rolled her onto her other side, becoming a tight ball in the fetal position when the Queen's killing light struck and slaughtered the world around her.