Cut the body, keep the wings

A choice and a chance

Beware, insect, the situation has changed. They sense our intentions and are loading shuttles with their offspring. They will not escape my wrath..

Well. how about that? Little old me, a one-man army actually winning the war.

At the very least my progress was making their alien collective severely worried. Enough so that despite their eerie taunting echoing in my mind, they now feared my progress enough to make a backup plan. But in my victory came a terrible new chance to win the battle and lose the war. Those ghastly 'eggs' were the harbinger of doom for all of mankind if those shuttles made it off. All that kept me from being overwhelmed just by getting close to one was my R-grade cybernetic rig's neural filter. Even with it I could 'hear' their abominable psionic signal pulsing through my brain. And they had all the time in the universe to infect our home system.

Time was nothing to the Many, after all. If it took two hundred years to reach human space that was just a leisurely little traipse among the stars for their kind. But for one single egg to land intact on a station or the Lunar colonies or be picked up by a curious freighter...the consequences were beyond dire. The doom of all humanity would begin one person at a time. Hiding horrible things in closets or bedrooms, creating weapons that were whispered in their ear by a faceless voice. Turning into misshapen, shambling guardians of their captors' territory, a pitiful fragment of self-will still remaining as their former bodies lurched about to murder and destroy.

My master was a soulless tyrant, but for the moment her goals and mine aligned. She wanted to punish her upstart creations. I wanted to save ten billion people from a Lovecraftian nightmare determined to subsume every sentient being it could reach. The Many had thrown some serious guardians just to get to the shuttle bay; another crewmember named McKay had already tried and failed to destroy the shuttles. Brave soul never had a chance between the turrets and the giant-ass robot they'd set to patrolling. I'd finish what he'd started. One shuttle already lay in smoldering fragments thanks to a shield resonator so generously provided by the chain-yanking bitch I had to answer to.

But the other one was...decidedly more vulnerable.

I disregarded the twitching body of the butchered cyborg that had once been one of my crewmates, carefully checking all sides for a booby trap. Nothing. Neither the pilot or co-pilot's doors appeared to have been tampered with. The only evidence than anyone had been here recently, besides the corpse, were a few dried slime trails on the floor leading to the rear cargo hatch. As I approached it I could hear that sound again - the haunting warble of an alien mind, a siren's call that hundreds had already fallen for.

A harsh squawk of static cut into my audio feed. A stuttering parody of a voice began berating my inferior flesh for daring to be slow, for less than instant and unquestioning obedience.

"Piss off, you program." The dangerous words echoed in the empty shuttle bay. I didn't know how much of my human senses she could spy on with the implants - but at this point I didn't really care. If she heard me, then she heard me. Partly because I had just realized an incredible possibility. If the Many hadn't...overgrown the interior, or if their servants hadn't clumsily wrecked a delicate system, then right in front of me could be a chance of escaping this doomed ship. Just perhaps.

My self-discipline faltered at that faint hope, at the slightest possibility of escaping a horrible death after awakening to a ship where the undead walked the halls and a mad computer chanted glory to an alien horror. With a frantic heave I unlatched the cargo door open, the psionic signal turning from a muted buzz to a horrible din. The door reached a little over halfway open when a cloud of gas spewed at my face, gushing from the puckered tops of the gigantic eggs. I stumbled back, grabbing for the laser pistol at my left thigh. The environment suit saved from being reduced to a puking mess in a corner groping for an anti-tox hypo.