Chapter 34: "In the Mouth of Her God: Tales from the Green War"
"Well, you see—" Crystal began, her voice laced with that peculiar tone of scientific pride mixed with sultry obsession, "—the loss we suffered was actually our very first brush with the species now known as the Raghul. That particular fleet—the one that was devoured like the contents of a poorly sealed can of starfruit—had been specifically engineered for aquatic planetary consumption. Its design parameters revolved around eroding planetary oceans and stripping their biomass. They were not, to put it bluntly, built for a fistfight."
"Ahhh, gotcha," I nodded, the click of sudden understanding reverberating through our link. "So it was a disposable armada anyway. A little evolutionary dead-end."
"Yes," she purred, flicking her psionic tendrils outward in pleased agreement. "But here is where it gets interesting. The new mutation in the drone we seeded onto that Raghul vessel... while not quite as sophisticated as a freethinker, it developed a rather comical yet devastating advantage: the Raghul couldn't see the color green."
I blinked. "Wait. You're telling me they're blind to green? Like, just... can't see it?"
Crystal let out a psychic giggle that brushed against my mind like silk soaked in moonlight. "To this very day, I remain baffled that such an evolutionary oversight was allowed to persist in a spacefaring civilization. But yes. Our variant realized this and began bioforming itself and its spawn in vivid, viridian tones. It painted the walls of the ship in hues the Raghul simply could not perceive. It became their invisible reaper. After the first kill, it took a mere thirteen hours to clear the entire vessel."
"Wait, hold up." I leaned in and rested my hand on her head, lacing it with stabilizing psionic energy to avoid phasing through her semi-corporeal form. "That doesn't sound like a failure to me. That drone variant sounds like a textbook definition of 'successful.'"
She hummed, pleased by my praise but eager to elaborate. "I was getting to that, my love—I just needed to set the scene, to give you the proper emotional and strategic context. When the drone variant returned to hive-controlled space, it was... erratic. Its mutations had begun to destabilize—too many changes layered too quickly. But from its journey, I gleaned inspiration: what if we repurposed the strategy? What if we incubated these same aggressive traits... inside host species?"
She drew a long breath, psychic aura glowing dimly around her hips. "I ordered the hive to collect derelict Raghul ships after our invasions—which had become laughably easy at that point—and seeded them with my specially-designed ambush eggs. Then I activated their FTL drives and scattered them like cosmic pollen across the stars."
"The plan worked beautifully—at first," she said, brushing imaginary dust from her thigh as though removing failure itself. "Scavenger crews, pirates, and misguided good samaritans would stumble across these battered vessels, find only a few strange, damp, glistening eggs within, and either try to sell them as curiosities... or attempt to nurture them."
She paused, her cheeks flushed with the faintest magenta blush. "Of course, those who tried to help were consumed first."
I snorted. "You're telling me alien species were dumb enough to pick up random wet eggs on ghost ships?"
"I believed in their altruism," she replied defensively, eyes downcast.
"Hey, hey," I chuckled, lifting her chin with two fingers, "don't go kicking yourself. From a scientific perspective? That wasn't failure. It was field testing. You had a hypothesis: trap-style deployment using emotional manipulation. You accounted for greed, compassion, curiosity... all valid vectors of engagement. What you learned was invaluable."
I smirked. "Just maybe don't make the eggs so obviously... moist. That probably set off a few flags."
That earned me a reluctant smile and a sparkle in her psionic core.
"So you don't think... less of me?" she asked through our bond, shy in a way that made the stars outside flicker with jealousy.
"Think less of you?" I laughed. "Crystal, you just shared with me a deeply personal failure. That kind of transparency isn't weakness—it's intimacy. If anything, I love you even more, you beautiful, horrifying science goddess."
That did it. The energy in the chamber changed.
Not physically. Not audibly. But psychically. A soft pressure of emotion wrapped around us like a blanket freshly pulled from a solar dryer. Time didn't slow, but it felt like it had. We were in the eye of the storm—just the two of us, spinning within the stillness of eternity.
And suddenly, I knew what I had to do.
I cupped her faceplate, her flesh just barely tangible beneath my fingers. I kissed her.
Her mouth tasted like starlight spiked with honey and fermented electricity. Our tongues collided with practiced desperation, tasting one another like dying archivists trying to memorize the shape of the other's language. My other hand rose from her waist to her breast, and her armor—aware of my touch—melted like butter beneath a psionic sun.
She moaned into my mouth, and that moan carried across the hive like a ripple in subspace.
The glow from her eye sockets, once a regal purple, had bled into a vibrant, throbbing pink. And the air smelled faintly, inexplicably, of buttered popcorn and ozone.
Breaking the kiss, I asked the obvious. "You've gone into heat, haven't you?"
She couldn't answer. Not with words. The pressure of her mind against mine was frantic, straining. She was holding the hive together with the same effort it took me not to flip a table during group therapy in my last life.
"Shh," I whispered. "Let me take care of you."
I kissed her again, deeper, slower, as I laid her down. My hand glided along the curve of her abdomen and found its destination. She was already soaked—slick and ready—her flesh pulsing with need.
Hnnnngh!
She bit my lip as her climax approached, her fingers digging furrows into the very architecture of the hive-ship beneath her. When she finally came, she did so with a full-bodied psychic scream that nearly crashed three nearby scout vessels.
I licked my fingers. "Tastes like berries."
She stared at me, panting—until the hivemind screamed as one: "MORE."
I grinned darkly. "You're damn right."
Clothes vanished. Tongues tangled. My body pressed between her thighs like the keel of a divine ship breaching forbidden waters.
But before I entered her, I leaned in and whispered, "You don't tell me when. I decide when."
I choked her—not cruelly, but dominantly—and her entire body trembled with such violent ecstasy that dozens of her children felt it like an orgasmic earthquake.
Foreheads pressed, I entered her.
She was heat incarnate. Tight, coiled, designed for me. I groaned, overwhelmed. She screamed, overwhelmed. Her walls gripped me like a lover and a trap, and every pump threatened to shatter the simulation of flesh around my spirit.
We fucked like the end of the universe. We fucked like creation had been a lie and this was the truth beneath it. I touched her everywhere, her breasts, her thighs, her neck—each place a holy site.
When the end came, we screamed together. She begged for my seed. I gave it with a roar.
And then... silence.
Her light faded.
"Crystal?" I asked, chest rising and falling with divine exhaustion.
No answer.
"...Crystal?!"
To be continued...