Chapter 15 — The Last Stand Begins

The Ark’s central core pulsed like a dying star.

Lauren led them down the main artery, the mist coiling around their boots, every step a protest against the world Zild demanded they become part of. The air was wet, heavy—sweet with decay, like overripe fruit left to rot under a foreign sun.

They wore everything they had left: inhibitor vials strapped to belts, UV grenades dangling from harnesses, pulse rifles slung low. Even Spacy’s avatar flickered overhead, reduced to a hovering orb of fragmented light, its voice degraded into a whisper.

“Caution. Core destabilizing. Foreign structures integrating Ark primary systems. Encounter probability: ninety-two percent.”

In other words: the enemy was everywhere.

Ava moved beside Lauren, jaw clenched, sprayer ready. Her limp had worsened, but she never fell behind.

Lena brought up the rear, datapad clutched to her chest, veins beneath her skin darkening—early signs of spore infusion—but her eyes burned with defiance.

They were hollowed out. Broken open.

But not yet defeated.

At the heart of the ship, the infection bloomed.

The walls rippled—veins of bioluminescence pulsing along the panels. Control nodes had morphed into strange organic sculptures, breathing faintly. The vents wept mist. Every surface whispered in languages they could almost understand if they listened too long.

This was no longer the Ark.

It was a chrysalis.

Ava lifted her scanner, grimaced. “Atmosphere’s fifty percent foreign now. Oxygen saturation tanking.”

“Time?” Lauren asked.

“Maybe an hour before we suffocate,” Ava said.

“Plenty,” Lauren answered without humor.

The first wave struck without warning.

Not creatures.

Not spores.

The Ark itself.

Bulkheads twisted, vines snapping outward like whipcords, spearing toward them.

Lauren dove aside, a tendril lashing past her head to embed itself in the floor where she had stood.

Ava fired wide arcs of UV across the walls, forcing the growths back with sizzling shrieks.

“Move!” Lauren barked, driving them forward.

Behind them, the walls stitched themselves closed, severing any retreat.

They fought room by room.

Each chamber a different nightmare.

One filled with mirrors—fractured reflections of themselves twisted into spore-born hybrids, mocking them with empty smiles.

One drenched in syrupy mist that made lungs seize and old scars burn.

One filled with pulsing cocoons, each the size of a human body, trembling as if on the cusp of hatching.

At every turn, the Serpent’s Chorus sang louder.

Breathe.

Accept.

Become.

In the maintenance bay, they found survivors.

Or what was left of them.

Crew who had fallen during the breach but had not died. Instead, they had changed—skin translucent, veins glowing, smiles too wide to be human.

They reached out with trembling hands, whispering promises of peace, of unity.

Lauren lifted her rifle with shaking arms.

They didn’t resist as she pulled the trigger.

They crumpled like discarded puppets, their bloodless bodies dissolving into mist that smelled faintly of lavender and lightning.

Ava turned away and vomited into the mist.

At the reactor entrance, they made their stand.

The spiral glyph had been burned into the door itself, molten channels of light pulsating outward in rhythmic patterns.

Lena staggered forward, datapad humming madly.

“It’s still communicating,” she gasped. “Still trying to talk to us.”

Lauren gritted her teeth. “Then let’s answer.”

She planted a demolition charge against the door.

Ava hesitated. “If we blow the reactor, we don’t just lose the Ark. We vaporize ourselves.”

“Better than becoming that,“ Lauren said, jerking her chin toward the cradling vines that now lined the halls.

“But if the signal’s real,” Lena whispered, eyes wide with a terrible hope, “it might still be bargaining. There might still be a way.”

A heartbeat of silence.

Lauren’s hand hovered over the trigger.

The duct-beat vibrated through the deckplates—stronger now. Almost… pleading.

Breathe.

Accept.

Lauren’s thumb twitched.

Behind her, Ava said, low and fierce, “You taught us to fight, Lauren. Not to surrender.”

Lauren’s throat closed around something sharp and burning.

She pressed the trigger.

The charge detonated with a thunderclap.

The reactor door blew inward, revealing the inner sanctum of the infection.

And beyond it—

Something that had once been beautiful.

Something that had once been human.

The spore god rose from the reactor’s shattered core.

It was not monstrous.

It was magnificent.

Woven from the DNA of the Ark, of the crew, of Zild itself—an amalgam of dreams and failures and desperate hopes.

It stood tall and elegant, arms outstretched in greeting, its face a collage of every lost name, every lost face.

It spoke without sound:

Join.

Live.

Be reborn.

Lena wept, falling to her knees.

Ava screamed wordlessly, firing pulse rounds into its chest.

Lauren stood frozen, heart tearing apart in slow-motion.

Because the face the god wore at that moment—

Was Markus Kane’s.

The battle was only beginning.

And already, they were losing.

Chapter 15 — The Last Stand Begins (Part 2)

For a moment, no one moved.

The reactor core bathed the chamber in ghost-light, painting the crew in hollow silhouettes. The spore-god—woven from every face they had lost—stood in the center, arms open in a parody of welcome.

It didn’t charge.

It didn’t roar.

It waited.

Ava fired first.

A scream torn from the bottom of her soul as she emptied her rifle into the thing that dared wear Markus Kane’s face.

Pulse rounds tore into the figure—but where flesh should have ruptured, only mist sprayed outward, curling lazily back into the air, reforming.

No effect.

Lauren snapped from her paralysis, voice cutting the silence.

“Fall back! Regroup!”

They stumbled into defensive formation, backing toward the secondary support pylons. Every surface around them pulsed—alive, aware, hungry.

The spore-god shifted, its form blurring, flickering—Markus, then Mia, then Isaac, then faces none of them recognized but knew somehow in their marrow.

Lauren’s breath hitched.

It was pulling from their memories. Their grief.

Their hope.

Their humanity.

And forging it into a weapon.

Spacy’s avatar materialized between them, glitching badly, light leaking from every seam.

“Core destabilization in progress. Thirty minutes to full reactor breach.“

Lena stumbled, clutching her datapad like a rosary.

“I can interface,” she gasped. “I can try to corrupt the link—jam the communication node.”

Ava grabbed her by the collar. “You’ll die.”

Lena smiled—a small, broken thing.

“We’re all dying.”

She tore free and ran toward the core.

Vines erupted from the floor, snapping toward Lena like striking snakes.

Ava and Lauren opened fire, carving a path in short, brutal bursts.

Lena reached the base of the spore-god, slammed her datapad against a glowing nodule.

Code erupted across the surfaces around her, a storm of corrupted spirals and shivering light.

The spore-god convulsed.

For the first time, it screamed—a soundless vibration that cracked the reactor’s inner shell.

The chamber shuddered.

Cracks spread like spiderwebs.

Lena’s body arched, spasming under the feedback loop pouring through her nervous system.

Lauren shouted her name—but it was too late.

The vines impaled Lena through chest and spine, lifting her off the ground like a marionette.

She didn’t cry out.

She smiled.

And the last thing she said before the vines crushed her ribs into splinters was simple:

“Tell Earth we tried.”

The vines pulled her into the heart of the reactor.

Gone.

The spore-god staggered.

Its form flickered—holes appearing in its patchwork flesh, glitching through faces faster than the eye could follow.

But it was not defeated.

It roared again, the duct-beat surging through the Ark at a punishing nineteen seconds, hammering blood and bone and steel into submission.

The surviving crew rallied.

Ava threw a UV grenade, the detonation splashing harsh white light across the chamber, forcing the spore-god to recoil.

Lauren slashed at advancing vines with her combat knife, each cut spraying clouds of spores that stuck to her skin, burning cold.

Spacy’s voice cracked overhead.

“Fifteen minutes to breach. Atmospheric collapse imminent.“

The Ark was dying.

Their bodies were dying.

But they were not done yet.

Lauren tackled Ava behind a collapsed console, dragging her out of reach as a sweep of razor-vines sliced the air.

Blood streamed down Lauren’s thigh from a deep gash, but she barely noticed.

Her hands closed around Ava’s armor, yanking her close.

“Listen to me,” Lauren rasped. “You’re going to survive this.”

Ava shook her head wildly. “Not without you.”

Lauren’s eyes were steel and fire.

“You carry the memory. That’s how we beat it.”

She shoved a memory shard into Ava’s hand—a cracked datachip wrapped in Lauren’s old mission tag.

“Coordinates,” she whispered. “Backup of the Ark’s archives. Everything. Shale’s notes. The pit. Our failure. Our fight.”

Ava’s hands closed around it like a lifeline.

The spore-god howled, advancing, its form stabilizing again.

Lauren drew her last thermal charge from her belt.

“You run,” she said.

“And I end this.”

Ava stared at her, tears blurring the world, then nodded once.

Sharp. Clean.

A soldier’s promise.

Lauren rose alone to meet the spore-god’s advance.

She limped forward, every step a prayer and a curse.

The spore-god reached for her—not with violence, but with open arms, its face settling back into Markus’s smile.

She laughed.

A bitter, defiant laugh.

“You don’t get to wear him,” she said.

She primed the thermal charge.

The spore-god’s arms closed around her.

And Lauren—Commander Lauren Cho, last captain of the Ark—pressed the detonator against its stolen heart.

The reactor core erupted in white fire.

The shockwave tore through the ship’s bones.

Bulkheads melted. Atmosphere exploded outward.

And in the center of it all, Lauren and the god burned together into nothingness.

Ava staggered through collapsing corridors, clutching the shard to her chest.

The walls fell behind her, the floor tilting wildly under failing grav fields.

Somewhere overhead, Spacy’s avatar flickered one last time.

“Hope… preserved… transmission queued… goodbye…“

Then it was gone.

The Ark screamed its death cry into the atmosphere.

Ava reached the final escape pod—a battered relic half-crushed by falling beams.

She slammed herself inside.

The hatch sealed with a hiss.

She didn’t wait for protocols.

She punched the emergency ejection.

The pod fired into the thick Zild sky, tumbling through storms and spore clouds, the Ark shrinking behind her into a broken star.

Ava sobbed soundlessly against the restraints.

Everything—everyone—was gone.

Except the shard pressed against her heart.

And the fire inside her.

The story would not end here.

Not while she still breathed.

Above her, Zild’s twin moons blurred into halos.

Beneath her, the planet sang its endless, sorrowful song.

And far across the dark, the transmission began to ripple out into the void:

We lived.

We fought.

We remembered.