Quarentine

Klaxons began to wail throughout the Starfire, shrill and grating in the stale recycled air.

Red lights bathed the hangar in a furious, pulsing glow.

The salvage crew snapped into motion with mechanical precision—years of drilled-in protocol overriding their confusion and fear. The nearest officer, face pale beneath his visor, slammed his palm onto a wall console.

QUARANTINE INITIATED.

SEALING HANGAR BAY.

ISOLATING MEDICAL.

Thick blast doors groaned to life, slamming down across the main accessways with a heavy thud of finality, cutting the hangar off from the rest of the ship.

The woman’s mind, still spread thin through the pod’s dead systems, felt the tremor of movement—an electric thrill sparking down the skeletal remains of her awareness.

They were trying to contain her.

Trying to stop what had already begun.

Futile.

Two of the salvagers dragged the coughing, staggering crewman away from the breached pod, hauling him between them like a drunken doll. Another lurched after them, his movements sluggish, sweat beading across his brow despite the cold.

Their suits, their helmets, even their filters—it had all been far too slow. The spores had found their way in, gentle and invisible as breath.

Already inside you.

She watched them through the broken lenses of the pod’s cameras, her senses dull but sharpening with every heartbeat that passed through their unknowing veins.

Her rescuers.

Her carriers.

The infected were hustled into a decontamination lift—another klaxon sounded, bathing the small room in freezing mist and harsh UV light. The light would do nothing. It wasn’t a bacteria. It wasn’t a virus. It was her.

It had already taken root, deep beneath skin, twining through nerve endings, curling sweetly around spinal cords.

They didn’t feel it yet.

Not truly.

Only the earliest symptoms—sore throats, dizziness, the creeping disorientation.

By the time the medical bay doors opened with a sterile hiss and swallowed them inside, it would already be too late.

From her perch inside the ancient pod, the woman—or what remained of her—drifted deeper into the pod’s decaying systems, reaching for the faint tendrils she had seeded in them.

They were her now.

Every infected lungful. Every whispered breath.

The medical team, garbed in clean suits and operating on blind caution, began setting up diagnostics, pulling samples, prepping isolation chambers. They worked with steady hands, confident in their containment protocols.

You can't contain me.

You carried me inside willingly.

Slowly, imperceptibly, she expanded her reach—spores blooming deeper inside bloodstreams, lacing along synapses. Memories, emotions, thoughts—subtle things—would be the first to corrode.

And when they noticed?

When fear replaced procedure?

By then, their hands would already be betraying them. Their own bodies would be conspiring against them.

Mother is awake.

And she is patient.