Self Destruct

The bridge shook violently, the walls flexing and groaning around her like a wounded animal. Lights flickered erratically, throwing shadows across the grotesque tableau of the dying captain and the writhing tendrils clawing at the scorched floor.

But it was inside her where the true battle raged.

Her abdomen seized, muscles spasming wildly as the thing growing within her fought to survive. She staggered, clutching her belly as it pulsed—a furious, thrashing mass **** to be born.

No.

She gritted her teeth and lurched toward the center console, where the manual override—one final failsafe—still blinked weakly amid the ruin. Each step sent bolts of white-hot pain lancing through her pelvis, her hips grinding against joints that felt ready to split open.

A wet tearing noise came from beneath her jumpsuit. She dared a glance down—only to see thin, fibrous tendrils worming their way through the fabric, coiling around her thighs and burrowing into her skin. Her flesh bubbled and swelled around them, absorbing them, feeding them.

Her fingers, slick with sweat and blood, fumbled over the console keys. The ship’s interface stuttered, barely responsive. Systems failed one after another in a cascade of groans and shrieks.

Inside her, the thing was crowning.

She fell to her knees, one hand still hammering at the console, the other clutching at her splitting abdomen. Something sharp—bone? claw?—pressed against her from within, shredding the soft inner walls of her body.

A shriek tore from her throat—not entirely human anymore—as a grotesque bloom erupted from her pelvis. Wet, chitinous limbs, twitching and glistening, punched free of her flesh. The alien spawn **** itself from her ruined body in spasms of blood and mucous, writhing like a newborn god, its eyeless head turning toward her with blind, instinctive malice.

The woman sagged against the console, blood pouring in thick rivulets down her thighs, pooling around her knees. Her vision swam, but the override was nearly ready—one hand poised over the final confirmation switch.

The spawn gurgled wetly, twitching its spindly limbs. Its body was a mass of shifting plates and pulsating veins, already hardening against the dying world it had been thrust into.

And still more pain. More movement. Her belly, now deflated and slick with gore, rippled once more. Another was coming.

They're endless, she thought dimly, heart hammering, mind fraying at the edges. A brood. A fucking army.

The ship howled around her, the very air vibrating with the alien shriek of their dying hive.

She had seconds. Maybe less.

Ignoring the molten agony lancing up her spine, she wrenched herself upright, slamming her blood-slicked hand down on the final command.

A warning siren blared.

SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED.

The console flickered—then died.

The newborn creature shrieked, a piercing, mindless wail that split the smoke-choked air. It lurched toward her, tendrils whipping wildly from its deformed shoulders, reaching—yearning—for her.

She didn’t run.

There was nowhere left to run.

Instead, she knelt there, broken and leaking, staring it down.

As the ship’s core began to melt down, as the very walls split and screamed, she bared her bloodied teeth in a grim smile.

I may have carried you, she thought savagely, but I'll die before I let you live.

The world around her exploded in white-hot light.

And for a moment—just a moment—she was free.