VII

The depths of the engineering deck rumbled and groaned as the engines continued to pulse, the heat given off from the equipment giving the nursery a stifling, moist warmth that lingered in the air in the form of a pale blue mist that blanketed the ground. The walls on all sides of the chamber were dark, thick and encrusted with a resinous material that signified where human technology ended and the alien nest began. Like intestinal tracts coated in a gleaming opaque shell, the alien secretions looped around support struts and pipes, the structures coated in dew and mucus.

In the centre of the chamber, the matriarch of the hive rested, her swollen abdomen pulsing and trembling as more and more eggs slipped from the slime-coated sac and onto the ground, or into the waiting arms of a warrior creature, who would lovingly carry the eggs away from the centre of the nest, placing them closer to the walls and the men and women that had been affixed there within the hive. Some of the inhabitants were pale, lifeless husks, their chests torn open and vacant, their entrails having been consumed by the infant creatures that had either been born there or retreated there from the many birth that were happening all across the ship. Other bodies lay silent and still, their faces engulfed by eight-legged creatures that pulsated and quivered, slowly forcing their embryos down the throats of their intended hosts and deep into their chest cavity.

As another creature was born on the ship, this one distant and beyond the reaches of the nursery, the mother alien raised her immense head, her piston-like jaws slowly opening and closing as she issued a silent command to the newborn: an urge to retreat to the sanctity of the hive where it could feed and mature in the safety of its kin. The queen's link with her children was strong, she knew what they knew and saw what they saw, and vice versa: though the immense egg-layer had never left the confines of her domain since arriving, the ins and outs of the ship were well known to her through the senses of her brood. Her presence was like a beacon to her children, and a trail of pheromones detectable only to the creatures laid a trail directly to her.

But her clan was by no means as large as it could be.

All around her, in the surrounding ship, she could sense the life, the essence of the crew and its cargo: animals destined for colonies far off or yet to be set up, a multitude of hosts to expand her family. And then, beyond the confines of the ship… were there others? Even outside the walls of the ship, she could feel the closeness of a wealth of other life forms, warm and inviting.

One step at a time.

She issued another command, an order to all the mature children under her guidance, to reach out and spread their taint across the vessel. Though the drones continued to tend to the eggs and their mother, the warriors around the miniature hive awakened, revealing themselves from their hiding places amongst the webbing and cocoons. Muscles as strong as steel cables tensed and relaxed, coiled tails of ridged bone tipped with razor-sharp barbs unfurled from shapeless mounds and unwrapped from around rigid limbs as the aliens roused themselves from their slumber, their forms previously camouflaged amongst the convoluted ridges of the hive structure. Each creature was silent as it roused itself from its slumber, like wraiths rising from their graves, before eagerly filing out the chamber and into the ductwork of the craft.

One step at a time.