Mara awakens

Somewhere deep in the ship, the crew collapsed one by one — their laughter fading to **** groans, bodies sprawled across cold metal floors, chests rising and falling with slow, heavy breaths.

The Starfire had fallen silent.

Except for the medbay.

There, something else stirred.

Mara's eyes snapped open with a choked gasp, her body jackknifing violently against the medical bed. Pain tore through her, so raw and sudden it was almost a physical blow.

Her belly — impossibly swollen, the thin medical gown stretched taut over the grotesque curve of her abdomen — heaved and shifted.

She clutched at herself, trembling fingers splayed across the fevered, distended skin, feeling the thing inside her moving.

Her mouth opened in a silent scream as a contraction hit — a brutal, merciless spasm that **** her hips to jerk against the restraints.

"Help... help me," she croaked, tears spilling from her wide, glassy eyes, but the medbay was full of nothing but **** bodies.

Except—

Across the room, Idris stirred, a broken groan ripping from his throat. His own body was a twisted, unnatural mirror of Mara’s—his abdomen grotesquely swollen, the fabric of his uniform split wide open around it.

His face contorted with horror as he clawed at himself, trying to comprehend the impossible sight.

"This isn't happening... this isn't happening..." he muttered, voice rising in pitch as he staggered off the bed, nearly falling to his knees.

Then the pain hit him—sharp, slicing, deep in his gut.

He screamed—a high, animal sound of terror and agony.

Mara's contractions came faster now, her thighs slick with fluids that weren’t entirely human. She arched her back, sobbing, feeling her body being split apart from the inside.

Something thick and slick pressed against her from within, forcing its way downward.

It’s happening, she realized, the thought barely coherent through the agony.

I’m giving birth to it.

Her body convulsed, hips bucking wildly.

And then, with a sickening wet sound, something spilled free of her—a mass of glistening, writhing flesh, slicked with fluids, hitting the floor with a heavy slap.

Mara collapsed backward, sobbing in exhaustion, her skin clammy and pale, but she was alive—barely clinging to consciousness as the thing she had birthed slithered wetly across the floor, tendrils twitching, tasting the air.

Idris wasn’t so lucky.

He fell backward against the wall, clutching his grotesquely distended stomach as blood ran freely down his legs. His swollen abdomen writhed violently, bulging outward as something within fought to escape.

"No, no, no—" he choked, but the words were shredded by another scream as his midsection split open.

The creature inside him tore its way free — rending flesh and cracking bone as it ripped a gaping wound through his ruined body.

Idris slid to the floor, gasping weakly, his eyes wide with shock, his blood pooling around him in thick, steaming puddles.

The thing that had been inside him — larger, more violent than Mara’s — hissed as it unfurled itself, dripping, glistening, monstrous.

Around the medbay, others remained **** — their bodies similarly swollen, bellies heaving beneath sheets and torn uniforms, as if the very air they breathed was knitting them into grotesque incubators.

Mother watched it all from the pulsing network of vines that crept along the walls, through the circuits, in the air itself.

She felt every tremor. Every new birth.

Every warm, delicious spasm of pain and transformation.

Mara shuddered on her bed, weakly lifting her head to see the creature she had borne—its many black, glistening eyes turning to regard her with something almost like... recognition.

Tears streaked down her cheeks.

Deep inside, she already knew: this was only the beginning.

She wasn’t free.

She was part of it now.

Forever.