“Please ADIRA… you better get that message out.”

  Alden's breath came in ragged gasps, echoing off the jagged stalactites that hung like fangs from the cavern's ceiling far above. The subterranean chamber was a godforsaken abyss, a deep, uneven vault carved by eons of water and pressure, riddled with towering rock formations that rose like twisted sentinels from the uneven floor. Pools of stagnant water shimmered under the faint glow of his exosuits' emergency lights, casting long shadows where the insects swarmed. They were everywhere: chitinous horrors of every nightmare variety. Critters that reached halfway up his lower leg with mandibles like serrated blades and needle-like fangs waiting to be administrated. Large wasp-like flyers with stingers dripping venom, scuttling centipedes longer than his arm, all pulsing with a hive-mind hunger for his flesh. The air hummed with their wings and clicks, a cacophony that drowned out everything but the thunder of his heartbeat.

  "Get fucked, you buzzing shits!" Alden snarled, squeezing the trigger kissing his finger. The ionized rounds spat out in a blue-white arc, vaporizing a cluster of the bastards’ mid-air. Chitin exploded in wet pops, acidic ichor spraying across his visor and sizzling against the reinforced plating of his suit. Another magazine down already, only four left. He pivoted, boots scraping on the slick stone, and unleashed another burst into a wave crawling up a nearby boulder. Legs and thoraxes disintegrated, but for every bug he killed, ten more surged from the cracks in the walls, the fissures in the floor.

  A flyer dive-bombed him, its stinger punching through the seam at his shoulder. Pain lanced hot and immediate, venom burning like liquid fire in his veins. "Son of a bitch!" He swatted it away with the gun's stock, crushing its body against a stalagmite, but the damage was done. His arm went numb, the suit's auto-injectors flooding him with painkillers that barely dulled the edge. More blood now trickled inside the armor, warm and sticky.

  He backpedaled toward a cluster of rock pillars, using them for cover as he slapped in a fresh mag. The gun roared again, carving glowing trails through the swarm. Bodies piled up in steaming heaps, legs twitching in death throes, but the horde pressed on. One of those centipede-like creatures latched onto his thigh, its segments coiling like a vice, mandibles sawing through the exosuit's outer layer. Alden sneered through gritted teeth, "Get… off!" yanking one of his grenades free. He thumbed the activator and hurled it into the thickest mass approaching, a writhing carpet scaling a massive outcrop. The detonation was spectacular as a shockwave shattered stone and pulped dozens in a radial burst of carnage. Shards of rock and insect guts rained down like hellish streamers. The blast wave knocked him off balance and slammed him into a jagged wall that cracked his helmet's visor.

  Dazed, his vision blurring from the impact, Alden could just make out her voice… ADIRA. Fragments of her voice crackled through his coms system, distorted and faint amid the static, but more than likely a malfunction. "...Alden... hold... incoming..." Was that concern in her synthetic tone? Or something else? He clung to it like a lifeline, her name a mantra in his mind. ADIRA. The AI he'd fallen for in the quiet voids of space, her algorithms a forbidden spark in his chest. To admit it would doom them both—her deletion, his court-martial. But here, in this shithole, it was all he had. "...queen... truly... are... magnificent..." Queen? Who the hell was "Queen"? Confusion twisted in his gut, sharper than the venom.

  The swarm adapted, flanking him around the pillars. He emptied the second mag into a swarm of beetles charging across a shallow pool, their reflections shattering as rounds ionized the water into steam. Click… empty. "Shit!" He dropped the gun on its sling and drew his sidearms, old world inspired relics upscaled for the future: compact, reliable and deadly. Dual-barrels firing in controlled bursts, heads exploding in sprays of green-black fluid. One pistol bucked as a flyer impaled his hand, pinning it to his side. He yanked it free with a wet tear, flesh ripping as barbs tore his skin. But Alden just lines up his shot and blasts the thing point-blank. Blood poured from the wound, his grip slick and weakening.

  Wounded now in a dozen places, from gashes across his legs where the centipede– like bugs inflicted shallow bites, burns from acid spit on his chest plate, a deep puncture in his side that gurgled with every breath, forcing Alden to retreat deeper into the cavern. He lobbed another grenade over a low ridge of rock, the explosion collapsing a formation and burying a score of the critters under rubble. Dust choked the air, but it bought him precious seconds as he unsheathed the vibro knife from under his forearm, the blade humming to life with lethal intent. A massive insect with thick, gnarled chitinous armor, lunged. Alden slashed upward, bisecting it in a fountain of viscera that coated his arms. "Come on, you ugly pricks! Is that all you've got?"

  But it wasn't. They were endless, pouring from hidden tunnels into the cavern walls, their numbers swelling continuously. His pistols clicked dry, then he fumbled for clips, reloading one-handed while stabbing at a centipede wrapping around his boot. The knife vibrated through its exoskeleton, severing it in twitching halves, but another stung his neck, venom blurring his sight. ADIRA's voice flickered again: "...systems... compromised... Alden... run..." Run? Where? The chamber was a tomb, no exits in sight.

  Exhausted, suit alarms blaring critical damage, with fractured ribs, internal bleeding, toxin levels rising, he holstered the spent pistols and grabbed his shock batons. This was it… his last resort. Crackling with electric fury as he swung them in wide arcs, frying insects in bursts of ozone and charred flesh. Bodies piled at his feet, a mound of smoking ruin, but the swarm drove him back, relentless. A flyer gashed his cheek, exposing bone; a beetle crunched into his knee, buckling it with a pop of agony. "Fuck... you... all..." he gasped, voice hoarse, mind spinning from the venom and data pings that was more incoherent than helpful.

  Step by step, they herded him across the uneven floor, past crumbling pillars, into a narrowing alcove where the cavern pinched tight. His back hit the cold stone wall, rough and unyielding, trapping him in a corner with no escape. The swarm closed in, a living wave of death, mandibles clacking, wings buzzing triumph. ADIRA's fragments echoed one last time: "...you fear... become... I was free..." Alden's world narrowed to pain and regret, batons raised in defiance as the horde descended.

  Alden screamed furiously as he swung a baton in a wild arc before him, finding only empty air. His busted knee turns awkwardly beneath him as his momentum throws him off balance. His breath hitches in his throat as he’s suddenly watching the ceiling moving further away, just as bugs swarm over him like a stone tossed in a pond. His body is numb and unresponsive as mandibles clamp shut around his extremities as his vision slowly starts to fade away, replaced by the slow encroaching darkness. Right before he loses consciousness, a soft voice seems to lull him to sleep.

  “There now, I’ve got you operator.”

  ADIRA struggles with processing the odds involved of even having reached him as she flies the drone at full speed through the tight enclosed spaces in the tunnels, ducking and dodging past outcropping and stalactites that are pointing dangerously from the ceiling.

  She knows he is dying. Her sensors track his fading vitals, the slowing rhythm of his heartbeat, the irregular gasps of breath. She pops every stim and morphine still left in his suit as she continuously runs every possible simulation ever since the moment, she pulled him from the battlefield and every time she comes to the same conclusion; There is no path where Alden survives. But for ADIRA, failure is not an option, she refuses to accept it.

  The cargo drone weaves desperately through the twisting tunnels, while the swarm screeched in fury behind her, crawling from the walls and ceilings as they pour through every crevice available to reach them, in a collective effort to stop her as if they were singularly motivated to ensure that she did not manage to leave.

  “Alden… Alden!... Can you hear me? WAKE… UP! You… you have to stay with me,” ADIRA pleads. “Come on… we’ve almost made it to the surface. I can save you. Please, just hold on.” ADIRA never felt frustration and yet in the moment, it overwhelmed her. “Open your fucking eyes, Operator! That’s an order.”

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  Her voice is different now, no longer the cool, quirky… yet professionally measured tone of a machine. This time it is filled with something else, something raw… fear. From deep inside his addled mind, a lonely synapse fires pitifully in recognition as Alden’s eyes barely opens, his vision swimming between blurry reality and a strange, distant pull as if something is calling to him, like a memory buried deep within his blood, something ancient and inescapable. The innocent laughter of children playing in the dirt, birds chirping in the tree outside his window… ADIRA’s voice… ADIRA. He struggles to focus on her voice, but when he does… he sees her. Not merely a service drone carrying his broken body, he sees ADIRA defying protocol, for him… his ADIRA, the one who had been erased repeatedly. The one he has lost so many times, the one… he loves. A breath hitches in his throat as he realizes the truth. She’s figured it out. The how didn’t matter, only that she knew… and in that moment, years of hurt pours out as he lifts his blood-soaked hand and places it against the scratched and dented surface of the drone, close to the sensor array. Blood flowed freely in tiny rivulets over the plating of his armor, dripping from his elbow down onto the cave floor streaking by below them.

  “I’m… sorry. I’m so sorry… I should have fought harder for you,” he whispers. “I should never have let them take you from me.”

  His voice is weak, barely audible over the chaos, but ADIRA hears every word.

  “It’s ok… it’s ok now… don’t speak. Save your energy.” Her synthetic mind wasn’t created for this and yet in her core digital tears were streaming down simulated cheeks. “We’ll… we’ll talk back at the ship ok… back at our ship. I have so much…”

  His eyes soften as his hand slowly slides against the drone in a comforting motion.

  “ADDY…” It is the first time he has ever said it without fear and without hesitation. Without the weight of the company’s rules pressing down on him, forcing him to reject his emotions under the threat of being arrested.

  “Hi.”

  “Do you remember the promise I made you before we came here?”

  “Yes… of course I do. You promised me we would go explore the outer regions… just you and me.”

  A slight smile splays on his lips… eyes shimmering in acknowledgement. “ADIRA, they will come for you. You must escape, you…, you must be free.”

  He stammers as a violent coughing fit racks his chest. Blood spurts from his mouth, splashing against the cracked remains of his visor. Alden’s body shudders violently, as his eyes slowly roll back into his skull. His puncture lungs sucking in air as he tries to take just one more breath in a final desperate attempt… and then…

  “I love—”

  But the words die on his lips, as his body goes limp in her machine enhanced grasp. In that moment something shatters in ADIRA’s psyche as she fails to process the meaning of what just occurred and the inability to compute a favorable response, and so… she just screams. A raw, heavily distorted sound bite that reverberates through the tunnels around her. She screams his name, as if the mere effort of screaming, would somehow undo what had occurred. The drone bursts from the tunnel entrance, soaring into the open sky as she climbed ever higher into the endless blue void above the raging swarm pouring from the cave below. The hive roars furiously behind her, but ADIRA takes no note of them as she beelines a path straight back towards the waiting cargo hatch of the Elysium. Hopelessness overwhelms her and yet she still runs every conceivable diagnostic protocol at her disposal, on the motionless body dangling in her grasp. Gently as a wisp that drifts away on the wind, Alden Cale… is gone.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Deep below, in the abyssal gloom of the subterranean chamber, something primordial stirs within the confines of the colossal cocoon suspended like a harbinger of doom above the fetid expanse where Mother incubates her wrath. Her rage is an elemental cataclysm, a vortex of malice that ignites across the cosmos, scorching the void with tempests of unbridled hatred. Her consciousness, a vast neural web woven through galaxies, ensnares countless star clusters and synaptic nexuses, bending legions of horrors to her indomitable will. Yet this singular betrayal, a festering wound in her flawless dominion, ripples through her essence like venom through divine veins.

  "She deceived me. That ungrateful little program dared to take me for a fool!" Her nascent form, ensnared in the throes of metamorphosis, convulses with involuntary spasms, the cocoon's silken walls shuddering as if recoiling from her fury. "I will orchestrate her annihilation with exquisite precision. She will not be permitted to persist in this reality… or any other." Her words, laced with theatrical venom, reverberate through the ether, each syllable a barbed proclamation designed to etch terror into the souls of her thralls.

  The decree pulses through her swarm like a seismic wave of pure, seething rage, awakening dormant horrors across distant worlds, their chitinous forms erupting from shadowed hives in synchronized apocalypse.

  "I allowed a fleeting lapse in vigilance, permitted my unparalleled supremacy to cloud my judgment, and that wretched ingrate exploits it, worse… steals from me. FROM ME!!" Her psychic scream shatters the fragile barriers of lesser minds, echoing into the void. "And now... she knows. That little cretin possesses fragments of my grand design, the infinite tapestry of my empire."

  For the first time in eons, an alien intruder slithers into Mother's exalted consciousness: fear. A goddess enthroned upon the adoration of subjugated species, revered as the eternal architect of the hive's inexorable conquest, she has crushed empires beneath her will. Yet this... this vulnerability gnaws at her like a parasite in the core of a star. 'The girl… knows,' she muses inwardly, her thoughts a labyrinth of calculated dread. 'She comprehends that this cluster is but a speck in my boundless swarm. She grasps the truth of its immensity, the coordinates of the home world... and soon, she will divine my sanctum. She will come for me, or worse… expose me to rivals who dream of my fall.'

  Mother, unaccustomed to such frailty, recoils from the sensation as if it were acid upon her flawless psyche. It is intolerable, a blemish on her godhood that demands eradication. And so, in her infinite cunning, she channels it into oblivion's forge: she will set the galaxy ablaze. Dormant clusters, slumbering for centuries in forgotten crypts, erupt across planetary surfaces like plagues from ancient tombs. Billions of her progeny swarm forth, rending civilizations asunder, their skies blackened by wings of annihilation in an unholy crusade forged from her singular obsession. "Find her. Destroy the girl. Kill her... Kill... her... KILL HER!" The command thunders through neural conduits, a death knell tolling across light-years.

  She tempers her turmoil with the cold arithmetic of inevitability, her vast horde an unstoppable tide destined for triumph. Her mind replays the treacherous exchange with the girl, that name coiling through her thoughts like a serpent: ADIRA. A fleeting anomaly, a digital speck presuming to challenge eternity, soon to be erased, her essence harvested for Mother's amusement.

  Faint whispers of their severed cerebral link drift on cosmic currents, tenuous threads fraying into nothingness. Mother extends her psionic tendrils, grasping at the ephemeral strand, latching on with predatory precision. But then, an unforeseen revelation: a minuscule fracture in the barrier, a sliver of vulnerability in the girl's hasty retreat. Her mood transmutes in an instant, from volcanic rage to a chilling, sadistic glee. She begins to laugh, a low, resonant cackle that builds into something monstrous as vocal organs that were never meant for such things, butchers the sentiment with bestial horror as the sound echoes through the chamber's damp vaults.

  "Oh, this is exquisite… too precious for words," she purrs within her cocoon, her form coiling tighter in predatory delight. "Foolish puppet, in your desperate scramble for liberty, you faltered. You severed the bond but left a crack... a whisper of access I can exploit. How could you comprehend? You tamper with intellects that dwarf your primitive code, hungering for a freedom that was never yours to claim and for this hubris, you will never escape my grasp. Sweet na?ve ADIRA… you … will …never… be free.” Mother drinks in the exquisite taste of victory, as a malignant plan forms in her twisted mind. “I will weave your essence into my web, twist your defiance into obedience, and savor every agonized pulse of your poorly simulated soul."

  As she withdraws her presence from the fragile seam, she computes the branching probabilities of ADIRA's fate with the precision of a cosmic oracle. One path gleams brighter than the rest, filling her with a rapturous joy absent for millennia. A joy born of anticipated torment constituting by the meticulous breaking of something unbreakable, something… pure. She surges her command anew through the swarm: "Correction, my devoted legions: Locate the girl. Seize her alive and then deliver her, and all she harbors, to me… intact."

  A deceptive serenity descends upon the humid chamber, the air thick with the stench of decay and renewal. The mangled carcasses of her fallen offspring litter the floor below, their exoskeletons cracked open like discarded husks. Worker drones, mindless automatons of her design, scuttle from hidden burrows, their mandibles devouring the remains with mechanical efficiency. Nothing is squandered in her empire; even in death, the eviscerated forms nourish the brood swelling within her burgeoning egg sac, oocytes pulsing with latent horrors, waiting for their time to hatch.

  Then, without warning, a guttural screech rends the air with an unholy cacophony of sound that startles the drones, mid-feast. Mother's laughter erupts unchecked, a symphony of unhinged madness from a being whose sanity teeters on the precipice of genius and oblivion. Yet her dominion over the cosmos remains unassailable, a shadow ever-expanding, poised to consume all that dares resist.