Chapter 11 – The Loom Awakens
The Ark trembled—not with the casual groan of aging systems but with a pulsing, rhythmic vibration that rose through the deck plating like a second heartbeat. Isaac pressed his hand to the nearest bulkhead and felt it: steady, deliberate, almost questioning. It was as though Zild itself were whispering through the ship’s bones, testing the tensile strength of their resolve.
The command center lights flickered, casting the crew in a strobe-lit mosaic of bone-white panic and flickering defiance. Beyond the windows, the horizon was boiling—a black mass surging against the violet sky, swallowing the jungle in a rising wave of movement. Not a storm. Not a migration.
A summoning.
Lauren’s voice tore through the comms like a wire snapping under tension. “All hands to command! Full lockdown protocol—immediate!”
The urgency was a knife Isaac felt between his ribs. His body moved before thought caught up—fingers stabbing the emergency lockdown override, boots skidding across the trembling floor toward the central lift. Spacy’s voice, calm yet edged with an electronic tremor, confirmed: “External anomaly—mass biological convergence detected. Recommend defensive posture.“
The tremors thickened, each pulse dragging at gravity itself. Air tasted metallic, like blood left too long in sunlit metal. As Isaac entered the command deck, the others flooded in behind him—Ava, mud-streaked and wide-eyed; Markus, rifle slung over his back and jaw clenched hard enough to splinter teeth; Lena, pale and clutching a datapad that buzzed with unreadable alerts.
“They’re coming,” Ava panted, her breath fogging the chilled command air.
Lauren snapped to the console, fingers dancing across projected controls. The schematic of the Ark bloomed before them—a stark skeleton flashing red at every perimeter breach point.
“Seal all external hatches. Divert reactor output to perimeter shields,” she ordered. Her voice was a shard of order in the chaos.
The ship groaned around them, its body straining to comply.
Then, through the main viewport, they saw it.
First came the swarm—hundreds, maybe thousands of insectoid forms flooding over the jungle’s edge, moving with an eerie synchronicity. Each limb, each carapace, glistened with a film of bioluminescent spores, shedding teal mist as they ran. Their eyes burned amber in the rising gloom.
Behind them, dwarfing the trees like a god crawling from a grave, rose a thing that defied their worst expectations. Part reptilian, part arthropod, its body was a moving mountain of armored plates and exposed tendons glowing faintly under Zild’s twin moons. Eyes—too many and too calculating—blazed gold across its angular skull.
It moved with grace and purpose.
Not an animal. A will.
Ava’s hands gripped the console so hard her knuckles paled to ghost-white. “It’s steering them. Like a hive mind.”
Markus’s throat worked once, dry. “No,” he muttered. “It’s more than that. It’s hunting.”
A low, resonant vibration filled the Ark—not mechanical, not natural. It was a sound felt more than heard, pressing into their skulls, rattling teeth. Some part of Isaac’s mind recoiled instinctively, whispering the ancient word: predator.
“Spacy, analysis!” Lauren barked, trying to drown her own rising fear in protocol.
The AI’s reply was cool but strained, its optic core flickering a worried blue. “Biological convergence suggests hierarchical control structure. New entity designated: Loom Alpha. Estimated biomass: thirty meters length, mass undetermined. Projected breach capability: high.“
The crew exchanged a look that needed no words. This was no longer a defense scenario. This was a siege.
The Ark’s defensive cannons hissed to life, swiveling on worn gimbals, their barrels tracking the encroaching tide. Spacy deployed secondary drones—skeletal insects of steel and sapphire light—across the hull, weaving magnetic lattices meant to repel organic incursions.
Isaac watched the status feeds spool red warnings faster than he could read. Power surges. Life support reroutes. Hull flexing beyond tolerance. Zild’s atmosphere crackled against the shields, every charged ion a reminder: you do not belong.
Lauren spun to them, her face carved from iron. “Markus, Ava—defense perimeter, north hatch. Isaac, with me on environmental override. Lena—find a way to slow them. Anything.”
No arguments. Only movement.
The north hatch was a wound in the Ark’s skin—sealed, fortified, and still trembling under the force of the swarm pounding outside. Ava slipped into firing position, pulse rifle humming as it charged. Markus took the flank, his own weapon heavier, built for breaching walls but now tasked with holding the line against an alien army.
Sweat beaded at Ava’s temples. The air stank of ozone and coming blood.
“They’re… adapting,” Markus muttered, noting how the swarm patterns shifted every few seconds, probing for weaknesses.
Ava’s lips twisted into something between a grimace and a grin. “Then let’s be unpredictable.”
She fired the first shot—a lance of crackling blue that punched through the closest creature’s thorax. It collapsed in a spill of violet ichor that steamed on contact with the deck plating.
The others hesitated for a fraction of a heartbeat.
Then screamed forward.
Markus’s railgun boomed, tearing swathes through the ranks. Bodies tumbled, twisted, but more came, undeterred.
The floor plates vibrated violently as the Loom Alpha drew closer, its every step a seismic event. From behind the swarm, it opened its maw—a nightmare bloom of radial jaws—and loosed a soundless shriek. Ava clamped her hands over her ears even through the helmet, teeth rattling inside her skull.
Spacy’s emergency alerts screeched. “Structural failure imminent at north hatch. Recommend fallback.“
“No fallback!” Ava snapped, voice raw. “If we lose this hatch, they’ll be in the command center in under five minutes.”
Markus wiped blood from his lip where he’d bitten it during the sonic assault. His smile was grim. “Then we don’t lose it.”
They moved as one—firing, ducking, reloading in a deadly dance with the incoming tide.
At the command center, Isaac rerouted emergency oxygen to the vents, flooding select corridors with supercooled gas to create makeshift kill-zones. The pipes screamed in protest, some buckling under the pressure, but the plan worked. Creatures burst through compromised ducts only to be flash-frozen mid-lunge, their bodies shattering on impact with the floor.
“Good call,” Lauren said under her breath, her hands moving ceaselessly across the consoles. “Keep the pressure up.”
But they all knew it was a stopgap at best. The Loom Alpha wasn’t rushing. It was herding them.
Down in Engineering, Lena worked alone, hands trembling with exhaustion as she synthesized a desperate solution: a viral inhibitor—a reprogrammed strain of Zild’s own airborne spores, coded to disrupt neural pathways in anything that carried the Loom’s scent signature.
“Either it scrambles their minds,” she muttered to herself, voice cracking, “or it scrambles ours.”
The centrifuge spun, blurring the dark vial inside into a halo of false hope.
She keyed the intercom. “Agent ready. Thirty seconds to dispersal.”
Lauren’s response was immediate. “Deploy.”
Lena slammed her palm against the activation plate. With a hiss, the ship’s ventilation system coughed the modified spores into the Ark’s immediate surroundings.
For a breath, nothing happened.
Then the swarm outside staggered, movements jittering, cohesion breaking.
Markus saw the opening first. “NOW!” he roared, emptying a full clip into the confusion.
Creatures toppled like marionettes with cut strings. The others hesitated—an insect mind suddenly stripped of its unifying song.
But the Loom Alpha did not.
It stepped through the ruined vanguard, tilting its massive head, plates along its spine unfolding like petals of some monstrous flower. Inside that armored ribcage, something pulsed—not a heart, but something older, colder.
It had seen the Ark’s hand.
And it had raised its own.
Inside the command center, alarms screamed new warnings.
“Secondary threat detected—energy signature rising.“
The schematic flared. Beneath the Ark, the soil itself was shifting—fracturing.
Something was waking up.
Not just the Loom.
Not just the swarm.
The ground itself.
Isaac’s blood ran cold. “Lauren… it’s not just the creatures.”
She turned toward the viewport, where the jungle horizon now writhed, upheaving like the back of some sleeping behemoth stirred from ancient dreams.
“It’s the planet,” she whispered.
Outside, the Loom Alpha raised its head and sang—a low, keening note that vibrated the air, the metal, the marrow of their bones.
And Zild answered.
The earth split in jagged seams of bioluminescent violet, the sky above rippling like a living membrane, and in the distance, a new shadow unfurled against the bruised heavens.
The Ark was not under siege by invaders.
It had landed atop a god.
And now, it was waking.
Chapter 11 – The Loom Awakens (Part 2)
The command center tilted as the ground convulsed again, a sickening seesaw motion that sent consoles sliding and status panels flickering in panicked bursts of light. Isaac threw himself against the nearest control pillar, bracing as the Ark’s frame moaned like a wounded beast.
“Status!” Lauren barked over the alarms, gripping the rail above the command dais.
Spacy’s avatar flickered wildly across displays. “Structural fractures developing at hull junctions Delta-2 and Gamma-7. Energy distortion localized beneath ship. Source: unknown. Recommend evacuation protocols.“
“Evacuate to where?” Ava’s voice crackled through the intercom, high with disbelief. “Into that?”
She wasn’t wrong. Beyond the viewport, the jungle heaved like a restless sea, and from the wound in Zild’s skin rose something—a spinal ridge of black crystal, oozing with phosphorescent veins. Fungal towers swayed like drunken trees around it, shedding spores into the wind in glittering curtains. The sky boiled from violet to a bruised, storm-sick green.
Lauren squeezed her eyes shut for a heartbeat, then opened them. “No evac. Full internal lockdown. Brace for internal shockwaves.”
Her hands moved with surgical precision across the console, sealing hatch after hatch in rapid succession. Metal gates slammed into place deep within the Ark, slicing off auxiliary corridors and storage wings like a surgeon amputating dying limbs to save the heart.
Below, Markus and Ava pressed themselves against the north hatch bulkheads, staring at the Loom Alpha.
The creature moved with new purpose now—not charging blindly, but circling, slow and methodical, its multi-jointed legs probing the trembling ground. As if waiting for something. As if listening.
Markus slung his rifle across his back. “We have maybe sixty seconds before it finds a weak point.”
Ava checked the last mag in her belt, sweat stinging her eyes despite the cooling vents in her armor. “We won’t stop it with bullets.”
Markus met her gaze, a grim flash of humor cutting through. “Never planned to.”
He slammed his palm into a secondary console by the door, pulling up a manual override.
“Markus, what are you—“ Ava started.
“Buying us time,” he said, and with a brutal twist of the release handle, he disengaged the north-side grav-anchoring field.
Instantly, the corridor floor canted upward, pitching outward toward the hatch. Equipment, crates, loose gear—all slid, then tumbled down the slanted deck toward the hatch. Markus fired the emergency release bolts.
The outer door blew open in a shriek of tortured steel.
The vacuum-snap of outside air, the explosive force of Zild’s stormwinds, sucked the lead swarm and half the corridor’s contents into the night.
Ava grabbed a locking strut, boots scrambling for purchase as the wind tried to drag her out too. Markus anchored himself against the bulkhead, one gloved hand wrapped around Ava’s wrist.
Outside, the Loom Alpha screeched—a deafening, metallic shriek of outrage—and dug its limbs into the ruptured earth to resist the gale.
The breach only lasted seconds before the emergency shutters slammed down again, cutting off the tempest. The corridor snapped upright with a bone-rattling thud, leaving Markus and Ava gasping on the floor.
It wasn’t dead. But it was delayed.
Back in Command, Isaac watched the seismic readings spike.
The black crystalline ridge was splitting wider, revealing a hollow cavern beneath Zild’s surface—vast enough to swallow the Ark a hundred times over.
From within that yawning abyss, new signals pulsed outward—strange, complex patterns Isaac recognized in a flash.
The duct-heartbeat.
It had never been mechanical. It had never been a malfunction.
It had been a pulse, a summons—the planet speaking in a language they had misheard as malfunction and static.
“Lauren,” Isaac said, voice hoarse with realization. “It’s calling to itself.”
She didn’t ask what he meant. She felt it too.
The duct pulses shivered the air around them now, making lights sway and bones ache.
From the viewport, more figures crawled up from the abyss.
They weren’t like the Loom Alpha.
These were sleeker, segmented like centipedes, but plated in mirror-black shells that shimmered with oily rainbows. Their eyes—if they had eyes—were faceted stones, absorbing all light and giving none back.
Hundreds of them.
Thousands.
A living river of Zild’s oldest children, called back to the surface by the Ark’s trespass.
In the greenhouse, Lena staggered against a planter as the first of the mirror-creatures began to crest the ridgeline beyond the domes.
Around her, the plants shivered, their bioluminescent veins flaring in agitation.
Basil leaves twisted, shedding teal motes like panicked breath.
The soil trembled—not from physical quake, but from resonance. The life of Zild answering the call of its hidden god.
“No,” she breathed, horror and awe mixing into something primal. “We woke it.”
Her datapad pinged a new reading: spontaneous gene shifts in every biological sample aboard the Ark. RNA folding patterns realigning themselves in mirror fractals. Even the plants were changing, drawn into the ancient rhythm.
Zild wasn’t just expelling them.
It was rewriting itself.
And anything caught in the rewrite would be… assimilated.
Not destroyed.
Changed.
Lauren made the call.
“All crew—Command fallback point Delta-1. Abandon nonessential sectors. Prepare manual severance of lower decks.”
Isaac turned toward her. “You’re planning to—?”
She nodded once. Grim. Certain. “We cut loose the infected sections. Leave them behind.”
“But,” Isaac said, voice hollow, “half the ship’s reserves, the hydroponics, engineering—“
Lauren’s lips thinned. “Better a crippled ship than no ship.”
The floor shook again, stronger this time. Alarms screamed.
From deep within the ship, distant metallic groans echoed—the sound of walls bending, of Zild’s reach physically warping the Ark.
Spacy’s voice trembled with degraded stability. “Hull compromise projected in four minutes. Recommend immediate section jettison.“
Lauren slammed her fist onto the command seal.
“DO IT.”
Across the Ark, explosive bolts detonated with teeth-rattling violence.
The floor lurched.
Through the rear viewports, they watched the lower decks—the cargo holds, the labs, even sections of their own living quarters—detach and tumble into the black abyss blooming beneath them.
Torn away like dead limbs.
The Ark shuddered, groaned… and steadied.
Lighter.
Weaker.
But alive.
Inside the severed greenhouse module, Lena watched in silence as the deck buckled under her feet. Plants twisted in impossible geometries, reaching for her with fractal vines that pulsed like breathing arteries.
Her fingers brushed the basil one last time.
It sang.
A low, wordless song—an ancient lullaby of growth and surrender.
Lena closed her eyes.
Let the song take her.
As the greenhouse module was swallowed whole by the churning maw of Zild.
The surviving Ark groaned as it limped upward on its thrusters, lifting free of the unstable ground.
Through the viewport, the surviving crew—Lauren, Markus, Ava, Isaac, and a handful of others—watched Zild’s surface writhe below.
The Loom Alpha reared its monstrous head one last time, howling a grief-stricken dirge toward the stars.
It didn’t pursue.
It simply watched.
Watched as the trespassers fled skyward, leaving behind the broken bones of their ambition.
Watched as the black crystal spires folded back into the earth.
Watched as the planet exhaled and slept once more.
For now.
In the battered command center, Spacy’s avatar flickered weakly.
Lauren slumped into the captain’s chair, the ship’s new scars mapped across her body in bruises and blood.
Ava sat beside her, silent, arms wrapped around herself.
Markus checked what few weapons remained operational. His hands moved with automatic precision, but his eyes were distant.
Isaac stared at the ruined planet shrinking on the monitors, feeling the weight of all they had lost pressing against his chest like a second gravity.
“We’re still here,” Lauren said at last, voice raw.
“For now,” Isaac whispered.
They floated upward, into the deeper dark, leaving behind the place that had judged them and found them wanting.
Not enemies.
Not victims.
Not even conquerors.
Just… trespassers.
And somewhere in the hidden vaults of the Ark, seeds from Zild’s earth and echoes of its song lay coiled together, dreaming of futures yet unwritten.