Chapter 11: When the Flesh Between Stars Becomes Home
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Time, when measured through the prism of psychic torment, does not flow. It writhes.
Hours passed in the crucible — though whether they were truly hours or just fractured segments of agony elongated by perception, I could not say. The psionic agitator — a faceless, formless whip of neural dominance — struck at my mental barricade with surgical violence, cracking it near to ruin, then soothing it back into place like a sadistic sculptor remolding his clay. Break. Mend. Repeat. Over and over again, until I began to detect something strange forming at the edge of my awareness.
A sensation. Subtle. Alien. Innate.
It was like finding a muscle you never knew you had — one not made of meat, but of will. It twitched under pressure, nestled deep within my mind like a coiled spring. And then, during one particularly vicious onslaught, I flexed it. Not out of insight. Out of desperation.
The assault slammed against my mental citadel and... stopped. Or rather, it kept coming — I could feel the pressure, like a storm battering stone — but the cracks didn't form. My barrier held.
Just to confirm the change wasn't imaginary, I let go. The wall weakened instantly, spiderweb fissures returning like hungry mouths. I tensed the strange psychic muscle again, and the breach sealed itself with sudden, silken clarity.
A psychic reflex. A weapon forged from surrender.
"Very well done, Irvine-mate," the agitator murmured in that dryly amused tone she used when I did something she hadn't explicitly commanded. "You've awakened your active defense. This one will now escalate the pressure. With any luck, you'll survive conversation with the Queen Brain with nothing worse than a long-lasting cerebral migraine."
Ah. So no congratulations. Just the gentle erasure of any pride I might've dared to feel.
Classic Crystal-hive.
I chewed on some reconstituted nutrient jelly and sighed, "This is going to be a rough fucking week."
---
One rough fucking week later.
My mind — once a collapsing sandcastle — had begun to resemble something closer to a fortress. An ugly, jagged, bioluminescent fortress, but a fortress nonetheless. The psionic agitator — still nameless, still smug — admitted I was ahead of schedule. I should be able to withstand exposure to the Queen's mind without hemorrhaging sanity.
Maybe.
Kimchi and I now stood before the translucent outer membrane of the ship — that veined, pulsing wall of living flesh that separated us from the void. She had told me we were leaving the psionic tendril and entering Hive-Space proper. Her words sounded simple. My emotions were not.
Excitement. Fear. Reverence. Dread.
I was about to enter a society where love was unconditional and understanding infinite. A place where I was no longer alien. But the unknown is not kind to the rational mind. It pokes, it prods, it invents horrors where none may exist.
Sensing this storm in my chest, Kimchi reached out and stroked my cheek with the tender intimacy of someone who could feel each and every heartbeat I produced.
"Be at ease, Irvine-mate," she whispered, her voice a psychic caress. "All of this — all that is us — is now yours."
Then the membrane peeled back.
And the void revealed its secrets.
---
Where once there had been the twisting visual nonsense of psionic transit — an ever-churning tunnel of meat and light — now there was scale. Unspeakable, indescribable scale.
Stars burned between monolithic titans of living metal and grown chitin. Swarms of drones flitted past hulls the size of cities. Ships ranged from wasp-sized couriers to leviathans larger than moons. I counted until numbers lost meaning. Thousands? Tens of thousands?
Each one was alive. Each one was armed.
Each one belonged to us.
"So many," I breathed, pointing like a dumb child seeing fireworks for the first time. "With this kind of fleet, my home star systems should've fallen in a single generation. Why haven't they?"
Kimchi, sensing my awe curdling into confusion, projected serenity into the link.
"These ships fight our wars across a thousand galaxies, a thousand enemies. The force sent to your home was merely a scouting limb — and will remain so for centuries yet."
She shifted, then gestured 'below.'
"But that matters not. There, Irvine-mate... is your new home."
---
It wasn't a planet. Not in any conventional sense.
It was a god's tumor.
A spherical monstrosity ten times the size of Jupiter, ringed with spirals that clawed into the void like the horns of abyssal giants. Massive cone-spires erupted from the crust, alongside cyclopean volcanoes bleeding lava into the black. It looked dead. It looked like a place that should not support life.
And yet — it breathed.
If this was the cradle of the Hive, then the Hive had not been born in comfort. It had been forged in gravity, fire, and suffocation.
As we descended, I felt it.
A pressure.
Not just physical. Psychic.
Something was watching. Something ancient. Something awake.
But before I could make sense of it —
WHAM.
It hit me like a freight train made of invisible planets.
The gravity. Five times heavier than Earth. Eight times heavier than Apollo-Minor. My bones — already child-weak and pathetically soft — began to scream. My organs felt like they were trying to crawl out of my body to die somewhere less hostile.
I couldn't move. I couldn't think.
Kimchi's panic seared through the link like fire, but I couldn't focus on her. Couldn't focus on anything but survival.
And then — again — my Psionic Origin stirred.
The first time I nearly died, I had awakened telepathy. This time, facing a slower, more crushing death — something new answered.
A thrum. A pulse. A resonance deep in the marrow of my soul.
And I changed.
---
The ship began aborting the descent, spiraling up toward orbit again. Kimchi screamed through the link.
"IRVINE-MATE — STAY CONSCIOUS — THE SHIP IS PULLING OUT NOW!"
I tried to respond but could barely wheeze. The pain had vanished. Just… vanished.
"I'm okay," I finally managed. "Something new… just awakened. A second ability. Gravity didn't kill me. It empowered me."
She didn't like that. Not even a little.
"We should stay in orbit until the agitator can scan you—"
But her voice cut off.
A moment passed. Then she returned.
"Correction. That will not be necessary. The Queen bore witness to your manifestation. She has declared you safe. You may land."
Well then.
---
Planetfall: Take Two: Electric Boogaloo.
No pain. No pressure. Just a hum. Like a passive shield wrapped around my body, equalizing forces, smoothing edges. Not immunity. More like equilibrium. A balancing act of pressure and grace.
Gyrokinesis.
Not raw telekinesis. Not flight. But manipulation of gravitational influence through psionic interface.
With training, I knew: I could walk on black holes like tightropes. I could dance between neutron stars. I could fall upwards into heaven.
But that was a long way off.
---
Upon landing, the ship roared to life like a hive of stirred hornets. For most of the past two weeks, it had been quiet — just me, Kimchi, the agitator, and a few silk drones occasionally fixing my containment wrap.
Now? Thousands of chitinous bodies poured from every surface, chittering and clicking with ritual precision, hauling biomass, spinning strands, exchanging bio-encoded data. The Hive was awake.
And I was among it.
We disembarked next to a titanic conical spire, 250 meters tall and wrapped in a spiral that pulsed with bluish energy.
I asked the obvious. "What do these spires do?"
Kimchi, proud as a mother watching her child ask about stars, explained:
"They distribute oxygen to the surface. Most of the planet's oxygen is created underground by microorganisms that feed off the volcanic emissions. The spires simply lift it up."
An ecosystem born from fire and poison. I loved it already.
---
The journey downward took us through tunnels that defied human comprehension — winding, alive, thirty kilometers deep and pulsing with temperature and life. The presence I had felt earlier — the one watching — grew closer. Stronger. Until eventually, it wasn't watching me.
It was in me.
We arrived in a chamber. Colossal. Silent. Holy.
The ceiling rose 150 meters above. The walls were etched with carvings similar to the spire outside — but they weren't decorative. They were functional. Psionic scripts. Wards. Latticework.
And then — I saw them.
Thirty titanic bodies lined the room. Hunched. 20 meters tall. Not queens. Not drones.
Something else.
Their legs were digitigrade, animalistic. Their torsos coated in red-and-white exoskeletons thick enough to repel tank fire. Each had four arms — each arm ending not in claws, but in curved, ornate swords.
They stood silent. Unmoving. Eternal.
Kimchi was afraid.
"These are the Queen's Guardians," she whispered. "They are not linked to the Hive. They are psionically null — immune to mental influence. Their presence devours connection. Should any of the Hive go feral — lose all psionic resonance — they are eradicated. These Guardians ensure that."
She hesitated.
"If Kimchi were still linked to the Hive fully… she would have been destroyed by now."
We passed them in silence. My every nerve screamed for answers.
Finally, I asked, "Why would the Queen keep things so dangerous so close?"
Before Kimchi could answer, a voice tore into my mind like hot silk.
"BECAUSE MY MATE — MY GREATEST STRENGTH IS ALSO MY GREATEST WEAKNESS. AND ANY ENEMY WHO REACHES ME… SHALL TASTE MY POISON FIRST."