Teyja coughed blood as she slammed herself into cover, the spatter of her own red spittle coating the interior of her combat helmet. Cursing, she forcefully detached her stiff fingers from her bullpup carbine to press a button at the side, the visor interior briefly sizzling as the liquid was cleaned off by superheated filaments.

Hand flying to her belt, she scrambled for whatever half-filled magazines she had left as she heard another desperate scream and full-auto burst from one of the few remaining comrades she had left. She was terrified. Any discipline she had left as part of her training was fully obliterated upon what they’d been forced to go up against.

She was just a Debtor-Class anyway. She wasn’t meant for this shit!

The sound of puncturing plastisteel armour prefaced the gasping scream of another of her comrades. Teyja hastened her hands. Ejecting the empty mag from her weapon, she slammed the next home and checked the ammo counter. Barely half full. She pressed her lips together, her teeth clamping them closed in a painful bite.

The aliens were getting closer. The mantilesk brood they’d encountered on this scouting mission had been tearing apart their turrets and temporary blast walls, dragging the other D-Class and S-Class soldiers off into the dark interior of the hollowed asteroid, terrible noises of tearing flesh and pained screaming soon following. They weren’t even told what it was that they were sent to recover!

Teyja steadied her breathing and pushed open the grenade launcher integrated to the high-calibre carbine, swapping the subsonic explosive for a flechette round. With all her comrades dead she’d have little reason not to use something that would clear the entire tunnel with a single blast. And with any luck a ricochet would put her out of her misery. Gripping her rifle in red-raw hands, she peeked her head and rifle around the corner of the tunnel system.

Nothing.

She gulped. Silence was worse than the screams.

Keeping a hand to her belt, the taut contact cable keeping her anchored to the floor of the free-floating asteroid and running through the belt of her ENV-Carapace, she backpedalled. Teyja had no way of knowing where the mantilesk brood had spread to, or even if they’d even made their own tunnels through the porous rock. The enemy wasn’t well understood, even after the days they’d been able to categorise them as something other than “Species Z” from first contact.

It seemed that they had some habit of not just killing organic life, but consuming it in the middle of combat. Tearing people apart, devouring organs and especially heads whole. It was unnerving, terrifying to say the least. Especially for someone like Teyja, who didn’t have a choice in the matter to be here. She wasn’t a Patriot or a Merc. She wasn’t any better than the kids who skipped one too many rental payments on their hab-pod or the poor suckers who got goaded by so-called friends into smuggling contraband documents. She was just one of many walking corpses who owed a corp bigger than solar systems more money than she could make in her entire lifetime.

She heard a skittering in the tunnels to her left. She whirled, flashing on the torch at the side of her carbine just in time to see one of the mantilesk bioforms, a four-legged beast thing with two more limbs ending in scythe-like claws from its foreshoulders that was just about to pounce.

Teyja screamed as her hand flung to the integrated launcher system, just as the eviscerator bioform lunged with its scythes swinging down. Teyja knew from seeing it happen to Varja that if she retreated the scythes would catch her and bisect her, even through the plastisteel armour of her carapace, so she gritted her teeth and did the stupidest thing her body screamed at her not to do.

She bowed her head and barrelled forward, pulling the trigger on her launcher.

Flechettes burst from the forty millimetre launch system in an explosion of shrapnel and flash, the eviscerator torn open by the hundreds of tiny lances punching through its hard bioorganic carapace. Blood and bone and pulverised organs showered across her suit as Teyja pushed forward, the claws and scythes of the bioform continuing to close in around her as she tried to leap through the body-sized hole she’d made in the creature.

But she was stuck. Shit, the cable!

The bioform’s remains crashed into her, knocking her to the ground with a speed difficult for a human to reach in Nil-G. She kept her grip on the carbine and tried desperately to wipe the gore from her visor, looking desperately around for any more contacts.

A thudding sensation knocking the wind from her chest told her she didn’t need to look far. Something was sitting on her chest.

It was humanoid, lithe with six arms and clawed feet that flexed and pierced into her plastisteel armour. A pair of prehensile tails formed the end of its long, sinuous torso, and its head was leering and noseless, with yellow compound eyes that stared into every part of her soul through her helmet.

And it grinned at her, teeth and mandibles where there should only be one or the other. They moved in a garbled approximation of human speech.

‘A valiant effort, invariant. But your inquisition ends.’

Teyja tried to bring her rifle around, to put a lump of 6.5 Acta Esprimere through the smug xeno, but its reactions were faster. The twin tails whipped around, the scorpion-points at their ends piercing through the thin plating on the neck of her armour.

She gasped, feeling a paralytic forced into her veins. It felt like she was dying. Her vision twisted and melted, somewhere between fading consciousness and a terrible hallucination. The bioform’s grin only widened, filling her vision as it leaned in closer.

‘I wonder what kind of drone our Princess will make of you…’

Invariant. That was what the mantilesk called individual humans, so called from their inability to modify their own forms beyond what they saw as “basic procedures” for their kin.

As if anything that the mantilesk did to themselves or others was basic in the slightest. That the biological signatures of every single one of their bioforms was identical to all human technology was proof enough of that.

Liquid filled Teyja’s lungs as her eyes blearily opened. No, her lungs were already full. But she wasn’t choking? It felt like she should retch, not merely because it was mantilesk biotech.

The oxygen-rich substance with a consistency thinner than water was perhaps the least sinister of the xenos’ creations. Teyja tried to lift her arms to touch at the transparent membrane of flesh that surrounded her within this stomach-like pustule, but her arms refused to move. They hung suspended by her sides as she floated within the paralytic fluid, tethered by fleshy shackles binding her ankles. Only as it occurred to her that she shouldn’t be able to breathe, the walls of the pustule flexed inwards, forcing her body to convulse and expel the liquid inside her before refilling it as the walls slowly bowed outwards. Of course. This whole organic chamber was some kind of fluid-based iron lung. And she was trapped inside it.

She would have screamed, would have begged, would have pleaded for a bullet to put through her own head just to get out of this pod, but not even bubbles escaped from her open mouth. The taste of this fluid was some unholy mixture of the kind of dental scum scraped from the back of one’s tongue, intense citric acid, and dehydrated hog urine. She’d vomit if her body could allow itself to.

Through the haze of the liquid and the semitransparent flesh that forced more of this vile liquid in and out of her, Teyja could see that thing – that fucking thing – that pinned her and tranqued her in the asteroid. Questions flooded her mind as more of the oxygenated fluid forced itself inside her. Where was she? Why was she alive? What the fuck did this thing want with her?

‘Temper, temper,’ the thing’s reedy, smug voice reverberated inside her head, ‘Should good invariants comply and accept their fate with dignity, then you might receive answers to those questions of yours.’

Teyja’s eyes sluggishly slid wide. It was reading her thoughts! How could it-?

‘Ooh, you do catch on quick!’ the thing made a delighted insectoid squeal, ‘Clever thing. Far more clever than your usual brood of invariants. Yes, we have made a few modifications. For starters, you may find the back of your skull feeling tender from where the Thoughtwyrm Device burrowed into the core of your brain.’

Panic immediately set in. There was a fucking worm in her brain?! Terror superseded her fury, a pained and muted moan of despair entirely muted by the oxygen rich fluid she was suspended within. The paralytic fluid around her may have numbed the site of the burrowing worm, but once it had reached her brain there would be no pain, since the brian itself had no nerve receptors to speak of. Even so, the mental image revolted her.

The mantilesk tittered a chittering laugh, delighting in her distress.

‘But yes, as you may have surmised that is how I have been able to impose mental communication upon you. In a way, you are part of our hive now. Be honoured, invariant.’

Invariant. That word that felt like an insult the more it was meant as a clinical biological descriptor of her kind.

‘Worry not, human,’ the voice seethed with delight, ‘You shall not be trapped by your monoform state for much longer. The Princess has made her decision for your biological reconfiguration!’

Once more, horror settled into the pit of Teyja’s stomach.

‘Since the last incursion of your fellow invariants – as sloppy and inefficient as it was – did manage to terminate some of our hive’s more prominent bioforms, my work as our hive’s broodsurgeon would likely become overwhelming if it weren’t for our Princess’ magnanimous decision!’

Teyja’s mind raced, even in her tranquilised state quickly understanding what the mantilesk was talking about.

‘Yes, indeed! You will become my fellow broodsurgeon! At last, at long last, a sister bioform of my very own! Oh I do so look forward to seeing the results of your gestation! A fitting bioform for yourself, wouldn’t you agree, Doctor Teyja Anders?’

Curses filled Teyja’s mind. Had it been reading her mind while she slept? The abilities of mantilesk bioforms weren’t well understood, but the specimens they’d recovered never indicated anything of this level, even well after the initial discovery of Species Z!

The broodsurgeon mantilesk scoffed derisively.

‘I still struggle to believe your scientists would refer to us with such an inauspicious name as “Species Z,” even to begin with. Disgraceful, even! Though I suppose you would know much about the emotion of disgrace, wouldn’t you?’

Anger once again flared within Teyja’s heart, but her impotent body prevented her from any action more violent than a pointed stare. There was a not insignificant chance the mantilesk had already spent more than enough time poring over her mind like a vintage hard drive to know about her entire life. The important parts anyway.

It was beyond doubt that the mantilesk were an intelligent, sapient species. The surest sign of such a thing to Teyja was the indulgence of sadism. The mantilesk beamed with pride.

‘Yes, I have taken the time to get to know you, my soon-to-be sister. Of both your primitive professions, and your,’ it chuckled darkly, ‘personal studies of the anatomies of our many bioforms.’

Death could not come swiftly enough to Teyja. She wished she could lose herself in dreams and just fall asleep, or become abandoned in the infinite void of space, anything beyond being at the mercy of this creature any longer.

‘Oh, you will not be at my mercy, invariant. For I have none to give,’ the mantilesk leered closer to the holding pustule, ‘Thank your gods for the blessings of our Princess, soon to be yours as well.’

With clicking mandibles and talons, the mantilesk began to stalk away, its twin venomous tails swaying with catlike malice as it walked.

Teyja once again felt the mental silence of her own solitary mind return. Her body convulsed, whether or not it was a sob or attempt at vomiting she couldn’t say for certain. It was all she could do to make peace with the fact that her life as she knew it was likely about to end.

It made no sense to her, but she swore that she felt something wriggling at the back of her mind, close to the base of her skull where it met the spine.