it's best for you and I to keep on flying home

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Erica stared at the organic red mass writhing on the sterile linoleum of the med bay. If it was an organ, it was one her years of medical school had failed to inform her of. If it was a creature, it was one that a decade as a ships biologist had not prepared her to encounter. Whatever it was, it was alive, it was bleeding, and it was still connected to her stomach by the fleshy tube that followed it out of her throat as she hacked it up.

It was her crewmate’s scream that finally broke the spell of silence. Her hands groped for purchase on the tendril spilling from her mouth but before she could begin to pull it out her hands gave up their strength. They fell down at her sides against her will and even as she looked towards the terrified faces in the room around her she felt her connection to them start to slip. The parasite worked fast, once it hatched. Her brain faltered as it grappled with her nervous system and did away with all the parts it didn’t need.

“Penny...” Erica thought as her eyes fixed on the medical assistant with the shaking hands, one fist tightly gripped around a scalpel. “Her name was Penny.” The parasite eschewed the useless information, and Erica found herself focused on only what mattered to the thing reaching out inside her. The girl was 56 kilos of meat. 23% fat. Rich in protein and salt. She was sufficient. Suddenly, Erica was hungry, hungry as though she hadn’t eaten in days.

She bit down, hard, teeth splitting through the rubbery umbilical cord and leaving behind the fleshy mass on the floor as the tube inside her throat retreated back to the acidic comfort of her stomach. She breathed new air into her lungs, feeling them inflate for what felt like the first time in ages, and let the breath out again through her nose, feeling the subtle rush across her upper lip. It was electric, having a body again. Her lips parted and as they did she felt a dull pain spread out across her face, and vaguely registered a chorus of gasps and another scream from those around her. Her cheeks split open from the corners of her mouth up nearly to her ears, and as they did her jaw let out a sickening crack as it snapped in half at the chin, another tear in her flesh splitting down towards her neck and her mandibles stretched and clicked against each other for the first time. A tension built in her limbs, every muscle building like a rubber band even as new splits formed between her fingers and her toes, her palms disappearing in favor of long, nimble digits, until the power in her changing frame released and she sprung forward at the screaming prey.

The screams were cut short as Penny’s head was engulfed in Erica’s jaws and wrenched sideways, her spine snapping at the skull and leaving her body to hang limply and unnaturally by the flesh of her neck, scalpel dropping uselessly to the ground. Her meat was indescribable. Something in Erica’s brain stem buzzed with joy at the texture of raw meat sliding over her tongue and being ripped apart by her teeth, the buried instinct stimulated to impossible heights by the thing that both filled her stomach and left her starving. The girls cheeks peeled easily off her bones before her neck was stripped apart, the teeth at the tips of Erica’s mandibles cutting thick steaks away from the corpse even as she half chewed her meal and horked the large chunks down her throat. She had just begun to slice down across the corpse’s breasts when a sharp pain sprung from six points in her back, one after another in rapid succession.

Erica doubled over, wrapping around her meal as she let out a scream in a voice both deeply alien, and yet entirely natural to her. Her shaking jaws clicked and readied themselves as she turned around to face the ships security officer, the now familiar tension building in her legs as she hissed at the woman’s unwavering stance. With a low growl she once again released the coiled power of her body and sprung towards the woman, when an earth shattering pain split her head in two.

The bullet ripped through Erica's brain and out the other side of her skull with little notice, embedding itself in the wall of the outside corridor somewhere. Erica stared in disbelief at her friend, who took one step closer and fired again. Another blasting pain shot through her skull and the unknown human in front of her removed the clip from its weapon. Erica scrambled to her hands and feet, crouching in front of the suddenly stumbling human, and leapt again. This one would taste good too, she had… she was… she was tall. Probably a lot of meat. Not enough of Erica's frontal lobe remained to figure out the rest. The parasite would have to discard this body soon if it wanted to know who was best to eat. Erica held the human underneath her down and leaned her face in, mandibles wrapping around her and muffling her screams to the rest of the world. Her tongue reached out and probed the humans lips, splitting down the middle and prying its jaws open, before the thing inside her stomach crawled up through her throat and down into the fresh body. As it did, Erica went limp, and without it’s electricity crackling through her brain, the ruined lump of neurons instantly went dark.

Gloria shoved the mutilated corpse of her friend off herself and scrambled backwards several feet, eyes wide, drenched in sweat, and swearing loudly to herself. After a few moments breath, she dove forward and grabbed the pistol off the floor where she had dropped it, grabbed a fresh magazine off her belt, clipped it into place and shoved the barrel beneath her chin. Just above the trigger, her finger gave up it’s strength.

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