For three days, Elara drifted in and out of a feverish sleep. Kaelen stayed by her side when he wasn't securing their immediate vicinity. He had Mother run constant diagnostics, terrified that the symbiote would suddenly activate and consume her.
But the opposite seemed true. With each passing hour, her body grew stronger, healing at an accelerated rate. The symbiote was supercharging her cellular regeneration. The deep hollows in her cheeks began to fill out, and a healthy color returned to her skin.
During her waking moments, she told him fragments of her story. The initial chaos after the anomaly, Valerius's descent into madness, the horror of seeing colleagues consumed by the very specimens they had studied. She had been captured early, kept alive as a "control subject" for Valerius's experiments.
"He wanted to see if a human mind could coexist with the Xylophage without being subsumed," she explained, her voice growing stronger. "He failed. Every subject went mad or was absorbed. But he never got to finish his work on me. The Gestalt that formed after his… assimilation… was more interested in data accumulation than his specific goals."
On the third day, she was strong enough to sit up and eat real food from the ship's synthesizers. As she ate, she suddenly froze, a spoonful of nutrient paste halfway to her mouth.
"It's moving," she whispered, her eyes losing focus.
"What's moving?" Kaelen asked, instantly alert.
"The Gestalt. It's not just angry. It's… adapting. It felt your power. The armor, the weapons. It recognizes you as a predator. It's pulling back from the upper decks. Consolidating its forces around the core."
On the holodisplay, Mother brought up the internal sensor map. Elara was right. The faint, skittering life signs that had been probing the clean zones had vanished. The red mass representing the Gestalt was contracting, growing denser around the primary bio-lab.
"It's learning tactical retreat," Kaelen muttered. "It's preparing for a siege."
"It's more than that," Elara said, closing her eyes in concentration. "It's afraid. And it's looking for a way out. It's turning its attention… downwards. Towards the planet."
The alien transmission chose that moment to re-establish contact. The friendly, flower-like symbol appeared, but this time, it was pulsing with a slow, rhythmic urgency.
"The transmission has changed," Mother announced. "It is now a repeated warning. A single concept, broadcast over and over."
"What concept?" Kaelen asked.
"Contamination."
The pieces slammed together in Kaelen's mind. The aliens' knowledge of the ship's interior. Their help in locating the core. Their advanced bio-organic technology.
"They're not just mutated Xylophage," he said, the revelation hitting him like a physical blow. "They're what the Xylophage became when it escaped."
Elara's head snapped up. "What?"
"Think about it! The comms array was destroyed by an explosion. Valerius did it to isolate us. But what if a fragment of the Xylophage, maybe on a shuttle or a piece of debris, landed on the planet thousands of years ago? It would have had an entire biosphere to consume, to evolve in, without competition."
"The theory is plausible," Mother confirmed. "The planet's lifeforms would have been defenseless against the initial assimilation. Over millennia, it could have evolved into a stable, planet-wide symbiotic ecosystem. A successful hive mind."
"And now the 'parent' hive, the Gestalt, is here," Elara finished, her face pale. "It's a violent, predatory version. And the planet-born hive sees it as a disease. A contamination. They're not offering us an alliance. They're asking us to clean up our mess before it infects their world."
The noble First Contact scenario had evaporated. They were stuck between two warring factions of the same cosmic cancer. One was a feral, trapped predator. The other was a civilized, planetary-scale entity that saw the Elysian as a plague ship.
The warning pulse of "Contamination" from the planet was not a helpfully offered diagnosis. It was an ultimatum.