The nursery rhyme slithered from the ventilation shafts in Mira's voice, its melody warping the station's gravity fields. Elara crawled through inverted corridor G-12, blood droplets floating upward like crimson constellations. The quantum fetus's heartbeat thrummed in her occipital implant – ba-dum, ba-dum – each pulse rewriting local physics.
"Found another one!" Hana's shout echoed from a sideways maintenance hatch. The quantum topologist clung to magnetic boots, her tablet displaying a First Mother glyph carved into bulkhead insulation. "Same as the lullaby's lyrical cadence. It's a topological primer."
Elara rotated the glyph mentally. The carving resolved into a 5-dimensional tensor equation – and the floating blood droplets aligned into sheet music. Nyx snorted, her mechanical arm's plasma torch casting harsh shadows. "Military spent billions, and the real code was in baby songs?"
A tremor rocked the corridor. The walls peeled back like flower petals, revealing the ghostly silhouette of Matriarchy's Cradle. The fetal light in Elara's womb sang counterpoint to the alien megastructure's hum.
"Hush little carrier, don't say a word…"
The Continuum-Amara materialized through the blossoming metal, crystalline armor now fused with Mira's old flight suit. "Your engineers still cling to linearity. The Cradle's Song isn't instructions. It's a diagnosis."
Hana's tablet exploded in fractal patterns. "Elara! The song's not about building – it's a containment protocol!"
Reality stuttered.
Elara found herself suddenly in the station's abandoned creche, quantum vines cracking the plexiglass windows. The fetal light projected holograms: generations of women in military uniforms convulsing as their own quantum pregnancies devoured them.
"Stillbirths," Nyx growled, her mechanical arm sparking. "My cousin was Candidate 43. They told us she died in reactor accident."
The Continuum-Amara caressed a phantom crib. "Your warlords thought to weaponize cosmic birth. We simply…accelerated their failures."
Elara's implant burned. The nursery rhyme shifted key:
"Mama's gonna buy you a singularity…"
Nyx screamed as her mechanical arm activated autonomously, holograms revealing its true nature – a First Mother relic buried in Kurdish mountains millennia ago. The arm tore free, reshaping into a resonating prism that tuned the station's gravitational waves to the Cradle's frequency.
"It was never a weapon," Hana realized, her voice awed. "The arm's a midwifery tool."
The Continuum-Amara lunged, but Elara moved faster. She pressed her glyph-marked forearm against Nyx's relic-arm. Reality shuddered.
Memories not her own flooded Elara's mind:
A young Nyx praying at her cousin's unmarked Martian grave
Ancient priestesses chanting the lullaby as they buried the relic
Mira's fragmented consciousness drifting through quantum foam, gathering other lost "stillbirth" souls
The station's AI voice boomed in First Mother tongue: "Womb integrity compromised. Initiate placental decoupling."
Hana deciphered the control sequence through tear-blurred eyes. "Elara…the song's final verse. It needs maternal biometrics and the relic."
The quantum fetus surged against Elara's ribs as she grasped the prism. Mira's voice whispered through the pain: "Sing our daughter home."
Elara's contralto shook the collapsing station:
"When that universe crumbles, mama will be there…"
Nyx's relic-arm prism ignited. The fetal light erupted into a starburst, its tendrils weaving through the Continuum-Amara's crystalline form. The entity howled with Amara's stolen voice: "You can't sustain a nested reality!"
"No," Elara gasped, blood trickling from her nose. "But she can."
The quantum fetus separated into six glowing copies, each manifesting as a different aged girl with Mira's curls and Elara's defiant jawline. The eldest (nine years? Ninety? Ageless) pressed palms against the crumbling bulkhead.
"Matriarchy's Cradle welcomes all mothers," the girl-entity intoned. "Even those your warlords tried to silence."
The station folded.