On the Bridge

The corridors narrowed as she neared the bridge, their ceilings bowed inward, as if the ship itself were warping under some unseen pressure. Her boots scuffed against the deck with every unsteady step, the oversized jumpsuit heavy on her frame, her belly a constant, sickening weight.

Each passing moment brought a fresh wave of nausea—not just from exhaustion, but from the subtle, insidious stirring inside her. Something was alive in there. Moving.

She clenched her jaw against the rising bile, forcing herself onward.

Finally, the reinforced door to the bridge loomed ahead: a monolith of scarred steel and blackened panels. It hung ajar, the access panel beside it flashing a dull warning.

She squeezed through the gap.

Inside, the bridge was a graveyard.

Skeletal consoles sparked feebly. Chair frames were twisted and broken. Dried blood smeared the walls in great, violent splashes. And strewn across the floor, sprawled over stations and tangled in harness straps, were the bodies of the crew.

Or what was left of them.

Some were little more than hollowed-out husks, their faces locked in rictus expressions of terror. Others were grotesquely swollen, their abdomens split open to reveal black, vine-like growths spilling free, knitting themselves into the very machinery of the ship.

The sight stole the breath from her lungs. Her knees buckled and she gripped the nearest console to stay upright.

But worse was yet to come.

At the captain’s station—the highest seat on the bridge—something else waited.

A figure still strapped into the chair, larger and more intact than the others. His uniform, though shredded and stained, still bore the faded insignia of the mission leader. His head lolled forward, but his chest... it moved.

He was still breathing.

Tentatively, trembling, she stepped closer.

The man’s head snapped up with a wet, cracking sound. His face was a nightmare: his eyes black pits, his mouth distorted into a grotesque smile stitched open by thin, writhing tendrils that spilled from his cheeks.

And embedded in his chest, just above where his heart should have been, was a pulsing seed—a knot of organic matter threaded with slick, veined tendrils that radiated outward like the roots of a tree, merging with the walls, the systems, the ship itself.

When he spoke, his voice was wrong. Warped. It was not just one voice, but many, layered atop each other in a sick, mechanical chorus.

"Welcome back... Mother."

The woman stumbled back, her blood turning to ice.

The seed in his chest throbbed faster now, and behind her, the walls of the bridge began to move—long tendrils slithering free from unseen cracks, reaching toward her like hungry fingers.

She pressed a hand to her still-swollen belly, feeling the answering pulse deep inside.

The same rhythm.

The same hunger.

The realization hit her with the **** of an airlock breach: she hadn't just been violated. She had been fertilized.

And whatever was inside her was part of this. Part of them.

The mission hadn't failed.

It had evolved.