The tunnel had long since narrowed into darkness. It was no longer lit by the bioluminescent fungi that had once clung to the walls like glowing veins. Now only the dim pulse of their shoulder lights illuminated their path which casted trembling shadows across jagged stone and fungal husks. The stink of rot and rust filled the air—thick, nauseating, and inescapable. Every breath came with the sour tang of decay.

  Deciding to leave the lab, through the same tunnel as Thariel, they circumvented most of the Braccari, silently dispatching one or two who crawled across their path.

  Behind them, the skittering continued. Talons dragged on stone. A low click-click-chitter came from no single direction but echoed along every surface like the walls themselves were whispering they would die down there.

  John raised his Scorcher, eyes scanned ahead through his visor. His chest heaved. Sweat ran into his collar. The others—Esh-Kaet, Samantha, and Rhea Morgan—huddled behind him. Sasha’s voice cut through the tension, calm but quick.

  “There’s a path. I remember it. I marked the air currents. We can follow it out.”

  “Then lead,” John muttered. “And don’t stop unless I tell you to.”

  They moved as one. Boot scraped over uneven ground, through a slanted tunnel and into a massive atrium. The chamber opened like a wound in the Earth, filled with rows and rows of the dead.

  Dozens of human corpses were pinned to the bone walls—webbed, impaled, or half-submerged in spore-mass. That really caught Esh-Kaet’s attention. Others sat in fetal positions, grown into the walls, limbs twisted up as if pleading for help that never came.

  The room was silent…until the breathing began. It wasn’t their own. It was something else.

  Shifting shadows pulsed in the dark recesses. Then came a hiss—and then another. A long and sinuous chittering like wet claws dragged across the bone tile.

  John raised his Scorcher. Sam and the others raised their weapons.

  From the fissures in the wall, they emerged—half a dozen Braccari. They were silent but coordinated. Their armor gleamed from wet entrails. The lead Braccari let out a guttural scream. Chaos.

  Gunfire roared in the confined space. Muzzle flashes lit up carapaces. Rhea Morgan ducked behind a jutting rib of rock, returning fire with surgical precision. Esh-Kaet fired an ion beam from his Judgement and sliced a Braccari in half. One of the creatures leapt from a higher ledge and tackled Samantha—John spun and fired a burst into its skull, then fired three more times until the creature’s mandibles twitched no more.

  Samantha shoved the beast off with a grunt, gripped her revolver, and returned to her firing position. “Thanks, John!”

  The firefight was over in less than thirty seconds. But the silence that followed was worse. It was that awful scream. It wasn’t from any Braccari. It was something older and deeper. It was something that echoed through their bones. It rattled John’s soul. It vibrated through the flesh and marrow of Eurynome.

  “What…what is that?” Esh-Kaet asked, who seemed abnormally concerned.

  “The ten thousand year old commander doesn’t know?” Rhea Morgan asked.

  “God…it gives me the creeps,” Sam said.

  Sasha appeared in her holo form, in the middle of them. She bit on her fingernail and whispered. “That’s the Queen.”

  “You sure?” John asked.

  She nodded grimly. “No other Braccari sounds like that. She’s mourning. Or calling. Maybe both.”

  John checked the ambient energy readings on his Scorcher. Readings displayed a green bar, a high energy density, enough energy for continuous fire before running out of juice and forcing a complete recharge. He felt for the explosive breaching charges in his pouches. They were still there.

  “Can we kill her?”

  Sasha hesitated, calculating. “No one’s ever killed a Braccari Queen, or lived long enough to report it. But in theory…yes. Kill the Queen and the colony may collapse. Or at least…it may stop growing.”

  John glanced around at the others. Samantha reloaded her revolver. Esh-Kaet applied a special gel to his dead skin. Rhea looked at him disgusted, before counting the grenades on her pack. No one said anything.

  John took a breath.

  “We’re not running. We end this now. For the colony. For every poor soul left behind on this planet. We have to burn her.”

  They descended deeper into Eurynome.

  The chamber they stepped into defied expectation. What had been darkness gave way to cold silver-blue light which emanated from a cage that did not look built but conjured. It was carved with eerie precision from translucent facets of conundrium. Sasha whispered before anyone could ask. “Hyperion design. Built from the hardest known material in the galaxy.” Even John, who had witnessed ships split open by Hyperion weapons, had never seen it used like this. The material buzzed at the edges of his perception. The tips of his ears tingled. Inside the cage, the Braccari Queen waited.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  She sat half-curled in on herself, a towing amalgam of insect and fungus. Her crown was a split chitin crest over a bulbous glistening skull. Her carapace was layered like armor, but pulsed slightly as she breathed through hundreds of gill-like slits. Her limbs were folded beneath her, legs like organic stilts tipped with claws. From her spine flowed tendrils that shimmered wet. But it was her stillness that unsettled John the most, not the lack of motion, but the control of it. She regarded them not as prey, nor as enemies. She simply…observed.

  All around her, the dead were strewn in morbid arrangements—some clearly dragged while others grew into the floor by thick stalks of fungal roots. They were human, or had been. Some still wore uniforms, others casualwear. But all bore the same gray-green infection around their mouths and eyes. Spore-bloom. Veins turned to vine which fed the Queen.

  Without a word, the Queen extended one long triple jointed arm through the cage. Her clawed fingers curled gently around a nearby corpse—a young woman, her face partially caved in but recognizable beneath the grime. Sasha hissed as the Queen pulled the body toward herself. Thick, root-like filaments unfurled from the Queen’s torso, writhing with surgical precision toward the woman’s skull. They penetrated silently—two through the base of the neck. A low current pulsed through the filaments.

  Then, slowly, the dead woman’s eyes opened.

  They did not blink. They did not shine with life. But her mouth twitched and words came out, spoken in a hollow and airy voice.

  “Do not kill me,” she said, “Please.”

  John didn’t lower his weapon. None of them did. Through the corpse, the Queen continued speaking.

  “I was…tricked,” it said. “By the one you call Thariel. He promised me an alliance. Unity. That my hive would serve a greater purpose. He said I would be his equal.” The woman’s dead hand lifted in a broken, jerky motion, palm outward. A gesture of…entreaty?

  “He lied,” the puppet continued. “He used me to build a colony of death. Turned my kin into monsters. Into tools.”

  John felt the grip of his Scorcher shift. Sweat dripped from his temple. The Queen wasn’t speaking. Not directly. But her mind was here, her intent animated through the dead girl like some grotesque ventriloquist. The image was difficult to stomach.

  “I do not control them now,” the puppet went on. “Not fully. Thariel has taken control using a device—something vile. It seeds the spores. It speaks over my will.”

  “What device?” Sasha’s voice cut in. Her tone was sharp and clinical. The Queen tilted the corpse’s head, as if listening, and then moved the puppet’s hand to its wrist. With a flicker, the wristband there activated and projected a small flickering hologram into the air.

  It was a towering obelisk, etched in angular alien script. “Sasha, can you identify this?” The device was crystalline, dark, and pulsed within like a trapped storm. Conduits spilled from its base like roots. “I cannot,” Sasha said.

  “How many allies does Thariel have?” muttered Samantha.

  “The Idol,” the Queen’s voice said. “That is what he named it. It warps my thoughts. Spreads blight. He planted it here. The day he brought us here.”

  There was silence among the group. The only sound was from the soft hum of the projection and the hiss of the moist air flowing against the cave walls.

  “How does he control it?” John said.

  The puppet blinked. A glitch, not a human gesture.

  “He wears a ring of platinum. It sings to the Idol. Thariel commands it with his will.” The puppet’s voice paused, faltering, then came again, low and raw. “Destroy the ring. End his command. Break the Idol. Free us.”

  And then, as though exhausted, the woman’s body slumped in the Queen’s grip. The tendrils, slowly, almost delicately, retracted. The Queen let the corpse rest gently against the floor.

  John gestured sharply. The squad retreated into a small alcove adjacent to the chamber. The moment they were out of her line of sight, they spoke.

  “She’s using us,” Rhea Morgan growled. “You really think she’s some helpless matron in a cage? That thing participated in killing a colony. She knew what she was doing.”

  “She might be telling the truth,” Sam said.

  “There’s logic to it,” Sasha said. The spore transmission, the behavioral shifts, the signal modulation—it tracks with forced external manipulation.”

  “She’s a Braccari Queen,” Esh-Kaet snapped. “Her kind’s used humans as fertilizer for a century. Maybe she didn’t invent the Idol, but she sure didn’t resist it.”

  John said nothing. He stared at the projected image of the Idol on his wristband. Sasha already sent the details to be scanned by SPECTRE for topographical layout, signal bleed, and any matching energy source.

  “She’s in a conundrum cage,” Esh-Kaet added. “She can’t leave. She’s as trapped as the colony was. What do you gain by freeing her? In my opinion? Nothing.”

  John exhaled. The tension sat like steel plates on his shoulders. The silence grew thick.

  “We find the Idol,” he said at last. “We find Thariel. We take the ring. We shut it all down. Then we forget this horror show ever existed.”

  He looked at each of them which held his gaze in turn.

  “If we do that—maybe we have leverage. Maybe she can help us solve the Braccari problem permanently. Or maybe she dies. But not before.”

  They nodded, one by one. No one argued.

  Together, they stepped back into the chamber.

  The faint light of the cage glowed in the gloom chamber. The Queen was still there, unmoving, tendrils folded in like prayer. She did not rise. She did not speak.

  John approached slowly. The other stayed behind him. He lowered his weapon.

  “For now, you live. We’re going after the Idol.”

  The Queen blinked. A long, slow blink, as if she understood the meaning beyond the words.

  Behind them, the tunnel loomed.

  And deep within the caverns ahead, pulsing like a second heartbeat deep within the planet, the Idol waited for them.