A bulbous, featureless head slithered free. Bone white, dripping with blood. It had limbs, a body, and it climbed onto its legs. Perching. It clicked, rattling with a sharp sound as it slid free from the embryonic sack and stood on two little pale legs. Limbs twitching and awkward. Its back legs raised, a long bony tail flicking behind it. Four-legged and skeletal. Pulsing.

It lunged with unreasonable speed.

It exploded in a spray of thick yellow slime as Captain Alcantar fired. My ears rang, the blasts reverberating in this small, sealed space. For a moment, no one moved.

“What the fuck just happened?” Someone warbled nervously.

“A fucking alien is what,” Commander Alcantar huffed, shaking his head.

“Another endoparasitic alien,” Nicole muttered, glancing at me. I didn’t know why she was staring at me. I wasn’t exploding out of anyone. I felt faint. The air was too thin. I ran for the airlock.

“Wait!” Nicole yelled.

I needed out. Unfortunately, everyone else decided the very same thing.

I practically rode the stampede out of the bridge. Someone threw up. Others just collapsed to their knees. The airlock whooshed open again, and more stumbled out. I scurried down the stairs and leaned against the hull, sucking in breathable air. What the fuck? What the fuck!

A scream echoed through the camp. Everyone perked up at that. Oh no.

“Help! Help!” someone yelled. “There's something wrong with my daughter!”

No.

White beasts. What had Matthew done?

Nicole stepped out of the bridge and descended the stairs to meet me. Panic was spreading through the camp. One man stumbled out of a tent, blood gushing from under his shirt as his friends tried in vain to help him. Gunshots began.

“What do we do?” I asked, looking up at Nicole shakily.

“I don’t know,” she shook her head. “I don’t know what any of this is. Commander Alcantar is the next in the chain of command. Which may be needed as… I suspect what Vander & Frakes is researching is a bioweapon.”

“We run?” I suggested bleakly. “I slip into Tobias, and we run.”

Nicole grimaced.

“Don’t just stand there, get your EVA suits on. You have an infestation to exterminate."

Speak of the fucking devil. Tobias appeared and was doing his best to shout as the stunned and emotionally shattered officers. His voice was weak and hoarse, but he made up for it in pure fury.

“You heard him!” Commander Alcantar barked far louder. “Suit up, let's go!”

Tobias grinned.

Fuck. The baron was back. If there was anything beneficial to a man like him, it was fear.

Just like that, within minutes, a tiny army had been rallied. Tobias leading the slow charge, they all rushed off with weapons live. Once again, the settlement was thrust into violence, but this time Nicole and I were at least on the outskirts of it.

“That puts a wrench in our plans,” Nicole hummed, sitting on the step beside me.

“Itsss okay, I will stay like this,” I reluctantly decided. “Air is not a problem this way anyway.”

“If you’re certain,” Nicole replied. “I should… I should do an autopsy.”

“What, no? We can just go,” I protested. “Find our way to the Ioueeke. Build a cabin.”

Nicole shook her head. “We need to know what happened. If it’s a virus, we may just carry it to the Ioueeke. It’s a bioweapon, we need to know how it spreads, if it spreads, before we do anything.”

“Fuck,” I groaned.

“What?” Nicole blinked.

I shook my head. “Back just hurts.”

“In. What. Way?” Nicole said very slowly.

“The I got blown up way,” I chuckled weakly.

“Okay,” she relaxed a little. “But if you feel anything, we need to get you out of the host.”

I nodded. The idea of having a parasite growing to burst out of me was a horrifying one. Or well… another growing parasite. There was only room enough in this host for one.

Nicole walked over and grabbed a stick. Then I followed her back onto the bridge. “Wait,” she stopped me. “At the very least, put this on,” she said, handing me a cloth face mask.

“Will protect me?” I asked, taking it from her.

“It is… better than nothing,” she winced. “Here,” she added, handing me a plastic shield thing that apparently also attached to one’s head. Neither of the items fit me, nor were they designed for my weirdly round skull. I didn’t even have the right kind of ears to wear the facemask.

“It’s fine,” I chuckled, feeling ridiculous as she tightened the bands around my head. “Surely it cannot infect my weird alien self.”

“Are you willing to take that risk?” Nicole asked.

“Well, no,” I admitted.

“Hold on, I’ll see if there are any EVA helmets left,” she grimaced.

“I’ve already been in. If it's airborne, we are all dead,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but I am not going to exacerbate things,” Nicole sighed before disappearing inside.

I waited on the step for a minute, peering over the railings as gunshots continued to ring out, interspersed with yelling and, the worst part, silences. It felt… vulnerable to be standing out here. I froze, staring numbly as a small white thing skittered under one of the tent flaps and disappeared into the brush.

Was I imagining it, or had it already grown substantially?

Oh fuckkk.

The door hissed open, making me jump. “Here, try this on,” she said, handing me a simple old flimsy compression suit. “It will be airtight without all of the weight and bulk of the EVA suits.”

“Okay,” I replied and did my best to wiggle into it.

Unsurprisingly, it was far too big. A manageable problem in a way that it wouldn't be too small. Nicole sealed the helmet and began adjusting the oxygen levels inside. “You’ll burn through it faster than a human would, but you’ll still have a few hours of air.”

I took a breath, the sound bouncing around the weird glass bubble helmet. It was horribly claustrophobic. I took another calming breath, tugging up the sleeves to try to wiggle my hands into the gloves. I felt ridiculous. Maybe safe. But ridiculous. I immediately nearly tripped over my own feet.

Nicole pursed her lips, biting back a smile before she picked me up and carried me inside. “You’re adorable.”

“I know,” I replied cheekily.

The creature was definitely dead. When Nicole poked it with a stick, however, it twitched, making both of us jerk back. Its head was weirdly squishy, its limbs spindly. I hated it. Nicole used the stick to pick it up, allowing us to see it better. It dangled, dripping with gore and weird yellow blood.

“Look,” I interrupted, pointing at the floor.

There was a crevice in the metal hull, a scar of some kind. Shiny and bubbled away. Whatever reaction had happened was over. Now the goop was just in a little puddle of its own making.

“The blood must be acidic even for this planet,” Nicole mused. “Strong enough to eat into reinforced steel.”

Dangling from the stick, the creature was almost transparent in spots. It was mostly bony, but the soft issues were partially see-through. It was so creepy.

Nicole set the creature down and approached the Captain’s body. The chest cavity was… empty, no organs, no muscle, all soft tissue was just a goo. “It doesn’t make sense. If the… thing was eating all of his soft tissue, he should have been dead long ago. I don’t understand how he could have stayed alive so long when essentially internally liquifying,” Nicole grimaced, carefully turning the body over.

I generally hid behind her, just peering enough to see what she was up to.

“There was an immune response which seemed… ineffective,” Nicole sighed. “I think it’s probably for the best that I don't try to analyze a sample myself. Symptoms started this morning, which means either a rapid onset or a long period of dormancy. Considering recent sabotage, I’m leaning towards the former.”

She stood back up, glancing back towards the creature. “Its hostility from birth was strange,” she mused. “It seems to lack even a mouth. Perhaps it feeds entirely on the host to sustain its whole existence. Its life would have to be quite short, and it would need a reliable way to reproduce.”

“Eggs?” I suggested trying to adjust the helmet that was slipping down.

“Could be, the tail is quite nasty,” Nicole nodded, lifting the weird segmented tail up with the stick. “Though it seems more of a piercing weapon rather than any kind of ovipositor.”

“How else can things reproduce?” I asked.

“Well… there are essentially two different options. Sexual reproduction with two or very rarely more parents, and asexual reproduction with only one,” Nicole sighed. “But we are in an alien environment. Making such assumptions may do more harm than good.”

“If you had to guess?” I replied. Why not just guess at this point?

“Judging by its aggressiveness, I can’t see it being particularly social. Asexual reproduction might make more sense. But that still leaves us with the question of how… We know nothing about its life cycle.”

“Captain was sick,” I pointed out. “Some kind of disease that turns into monsters?”

“There are essentially seven different kinds of pathogens, microscopic things that can infect the human body. I am inclined to cross viruses and prions off as neither is living and wouldn’t be able to gestate something. That leaves us with parasites, protozoa, fungi, or bacteria,” Nicole explained.

“Parasite,” I snorted.

“Not a parasite in that sense. The creature is parasitic but not a parasite. Honestly, you aren't really a parasite in the traditional sense, you’re too big,” Nicole shook her head. “Tiny little organisms could lay eggs which… No. It just doesn’t make sense to be a pathogen; it’s so big. Protozoa and bacteria are both unicellular.”

“Fungus can get big, no? I watched a documentary about one of the core planets that supposedly got entirely eaten by one giant fungus before it eventually died out because it ate eeeverything,” I explained. “I can’t remember the name.”

“Fungus can be microscopic, but not all fungi are. Again, it's… wibbly wobbly,” Nicole sighed. “But yes, fungus can get quite big and very quickly. Except this…” she trailed off, nudging the creature, "isn't a fungus.”

“Boo,” I muttered.

“It’s certainly a puzzle,” Nicole hummed. “I’ll collect some samples. Hopefully, I can do some testing later.”