The White Phantoms did not charge. They flowed.
They moved like mercury, closing the distance in silence. Their arms, elongated blades of white bone, slashed through the air with surgical precision.
"Elara, stay with the Zygote!" Zin shouted.
He activated his hydraulic legs, leaping over the first Phantom. He spun in mid-air, bringing his Starlight Scalpel down in a decapitating arc.
CLANG.
The Phantom blocked it. Not with a weapon, but by shifting its own shoulder bone to catch the blade. It twisted its torso 180 degrees—ignoring human anatomy—and kicked Zin in the chest.
Zin flew backward, crashing into a rack of test tubes.
"Fast," Zin gasped, checking his cracked ribs via his internal HUD. "Reflexes are 300% faster than standard humans."
Two Phantoms lunged at him.
Zin didn't try to outspeed them. He used his Admin Access.
He looked at their joints. They weren't mechanical; they were biological polymers.
Zin threw a vial of Coagulant Agent (stolen from the shelf) at their feet.
The chemical splash hit the Phantoms' legs. The polymers hardened instantly. The Phantoms stumbled, their liquid grace turning stiff and brittle.
"Shatter," Zin whispered.
He swept his leg, smashing the frozen limbs. The Phantoms crumbled like dry clay.
But Overseer Prism was still there.
The being of light floated above the chaos, watching the Baby Star pulsing erratically.
"The specimen is unstable," Prism calculated. "If I cannot harvest it... I will delete it."
Prism raised both hands. The room began to heat up. He was turning the entire Gene-Lab into a microwave oven.
"Elara!" Zin yelled. "He's going to boil the baby!"
Elara stood before the massive, house-sized Zygote. She placed her hands on its swirling golden surface.
"I can't shield it forever, Zin! It's too hot! It wants its mother!"
"Then let it call her!"
Elara closed her eyes. She didn't push energy in. She pulled the "Cry" out.
She amplified the baby's distress signal, projecting it through the walls of the station, into the vacuum of space.
MAMA.
It wasn't a sound. It was a gravitational ripple.
The station shook.
Violently.
The artificial gravity failed. Zin grabbed a bolted-down table as debris began to float.
Through the transparent ceiling of the lab, they saw it.
A shadow.
Something so large it blocked out the stars.
Gemini-Alpha. The Mother.
She had broken the clamps. The pain of her child crying had overridden the sedatives.
Her massive, golden face pressed against the station's outer glass. An eye the size of a city looked inside.
She saw the Phantoms. She saw Prism. She saw her baby trapped in the lab.
CRUUUUUNCH.
There was no grace. No physics.
The Mother simply bit the station.
The ceiling ripped open. The vacuum of space roared in like a hurricane.
Glass, metal, Phantoms, and atmosphere were sucked out instantly.
Prism, being made of light, wasn't sucked out, but the sudden decompression shattered his focus. His laser beams scattered wildly.
"Hold on!" Zin screamed, firing a grappling hook into the floor. He grabbed Elara, who was holding onto a pipe.
The Mother Star's massive tongue—a tendril of golden plasma—slithered into the wrecked lab.
It didn't touch Zin. It wrapped gently, lovingly, around the Zygote.
With a tug that groaned against the metal of the hull, she pulled her baby out of the lab, into the safety of the void.
The room was now open to space. Zin and Elara were dangling by a wire over the infinite drop.
Their suits sealed automatically, but their oxygen was leaking.
"We... saved... the baby," Elara wheezed over the comms. "Now... who saves us?"
BOOOOM.
The wall behind them exploded inward.
A battered, smoking transport beetle smashed through the wreckage, drifting sideways in zero-g.
The side hatch blew open.
Captain Gorge stood there, tethered by a chain, firing his acid-cannon at a surviving Phantom that was crawling toward Zin.
"Ride's here!" Gorge bellowed over the radio. "And I'm not charging for waiting time!"
Zin cut his grappling line. He and Elara floated across the gap. Gorge grabbed Zin's hand with his giant pincer, hauling them inside.
They slammed the airlock shut. Pressure returned.
"Go! Go! Go!" Zin yelled.
The beetle fired its thrusters, shooting out of the debris field just as the massive Incubator Ring began to collapse in on itself, crushed by the angry parents.
[Location: Vitalis Bridge - 1 Hour Later]
The view was magnificent.
The Incubator Ring was drifting scrap metal.
In the distance, the Gemini Twins—Alpha and Beta—were swimming freely. Between them, protected by their gravity wells, the tiny Golden Zygote glowed happily.
"They are reunited," Elara said softly, watching the screen. "A family."
"And the Aseptic League?" Zin asked, bandaging a deep cut on his arm.
"Prism escaped," The Queen reported. "I tracked an energy signature fleeing the system at light-speed. He will report our capabilities to the High Council."
Zin nodded. He expected that. You can't kill light easily.
Suddenly, the console beeped.
INCOMING TRANSMISSION: ORIGIN - GEMINI ALPHA.
"They are hailing us," The Queen said.
The screen shifted. It wasn't a face. It was a stream of raw biological data.
It was a gift.
"Decoding..." The Queen's eyes widened. "Zin. It's the DNA sequence of the parents. Encoded inside the junk DNA... is a set of coordinates."
Zin stood up.
"The second piece of the map."
"Yes," The Queen confirmed. "And it points to a sector deep in the Nebula of Decay. A place where stars go to die."
Zin looked at the map.
"That's where the Nursery is?"
"No," Zin analyzed the data. "That's where the Third Patient is hiding. And if the map is in the Nebula of Decay... that means the next patient is already infected."
He turned to the crew.
"Set a course. We saved a birth today. Next, we have to visit a hospice."