Lacey's brass gears clicked with nervous anticipation as she stepped closer to Xylogram's crystalline avatar. The AI's form pulsed with restored chromatic brilliance, but something in its prismatic depths suggested depths of knowledge that might be better left unexplored.
"Xylogram," she began, her voice carrying the weight of desperate hope, "perform a full ship-wide Bioscan. Life signatures for the missing crew—all 11,500 of them. Are they..." She paused, unable to finish the question that had been gnawing at all of them since the entity's defeat.
The AI's avatar shimmered, processing arrays cycling through spectrums of light as it reached into every corner of the Meridian's Edge with invisible fingers of scanning energy. For a moment that stretched like eternity, the Central Core hummed with the sound of possibility.
Then Xylogram's voice carried a note of something that might have been relief—or horror poorly disguised.
"Life signatures detected. Eleven thousand, five hundred biological entities confirmed aboard the Meridian's Edge."
The Six exhaled collectively, a sound like pressure releasing from a damaged airlock. Around them, the 500 restored crew members who had gathered in the Core chamber began to weep with joy, embracing each other, calling out names of loved ones they thought they'd lost forever.
"Thank God," Pip whispered, her Stitch Dragon helm's empathic sensors picking up waves of pure relief washing through the assembled crowd. "They're alive. They're actually—"
"However," Xylogram's voice cut through the celebration like a scalpel through silk, "I must clarify the nature of these life signatures."
The hologram that materialized above them was a masterpiece of horror.
The thing that had once been human stood seven feet tall, its spine erupting through what remained of a maintenance technician's uniform in gleaming chitinous ridges that curved like the carapace of some deep-sea nightmare. Where arms should have been, segmented appendages ended in mandibles that clicked and scissored through the air with mechanical precision. The creature's head had elongated grotesquely, compound eyes replacing what had once been warm brown human eyes, each facet reflecting the ship's emergency lighting in thousands of fractured images.
But it was the face that broke them.
Beneath the insectoid features, traces of humanity remained—the curve of a cheek, the shape of a jaw, enough to suggest this thing had once smiled, had once loved, had once dreamed of home between the stars. A name tag still clung to the chitinous chest plate: "Rodriguez, M. - Environmental Systems."
"My God," Hexi breathed, her Tesseract Weaver plates recoiling instinctively from the holographic display. "The entity... it didn't just drain their color. It used them as raw material."
More holograms flickered into existence—a carnival of biological impossibility. A former communications officer whose throat had distended into a bulbous sac that pulsed with bioluminescent patterns. A security guard whose fingers had fused into razor-sharp talons that dripped with acidic secretions. A child—a child—whose small body had been hollowed out and filled with writhing, wire-like tendrils that sparked with electrical discharge.
Each one bore the remnants of their former identity like a cruel joke. Wedding rings fused to chitin. Family photos clutched in mandibles. Children's drawings still tucked into uniform pockets that had grown around them like living tumors.
"The result of the entity's feeding process, I can only presume. Unless some other outside force is at work here." Xylogram explained with clinical detachment that couldn't quite mask the horror in its voice, "A metamorphic cascade appears to have been triggered at the genomic level. The crew's biological matrices were... repurposed. Transformed into what I can only classify as Bleak box bugs—hybrid organisms designed to maintain the entity's influence throughout the ship."
Dagger's scream shattered the silence.
"No!" She lunged forward, her hands clawing at the holograms as if she could somehow reach through and touch the faces of her friends. "Davey! Where's Davey? And Calliope! Show me Davey and Calliope!"
Xylogram's avatar flickered with something that might have been compassion. "I... cannot locate specific individuals within the transformed population. The biological corruption has altered their bio-signatures beyond recognition."
Dagger collapsed to her knees, her restored orange hair falling like a curtain around her face. "They could still be in there," she whispered, voice breaking. "Somewhere inside those... things. My friends could still be in there, trapped, screaming..."
The 500 survivors stood in stunned silence, watching the holograms rotate slowly in the air above them. These weren't strangers—these were their colleagues, their friends, their family members. The woman from Engineering who made the best coffee on the ship. The botanist who had filled the hydroponics bay with Earth flowers. The little girl who had drawn pictures for everyone in the crew.
All of them transformed into living nightmares.
"We have to save them," someone called out from the crowd—a man whose own wife might be among the twisted forms displayed above them. "Whatever they've become, they're still our people."
"We can't just leave them like that," another voice agreed. "If there's even a chance..."
"If there's even a chance they can be saved…" one survivor called.
Another voice rose: "Then it's our duty."
A chorus followed—raw, desperate, unanimous: "We save them."
The murmur of agreement that rippled through the survivors carried the weight of survivor's guilt and desperate love. They had been spared the transformation, but that only meant they bore the responsibility of those who hadn't been so fortunate.
Lacey's gears clicked once, twice, settling into a configuration that her tactical systems recognized as absolute resolve.
"Then we save them," she said simply. "All of them."
The holograms continued to rotate above them, each twisted form a testament to what they had lost—and what they still might hope to reclaim. But in the depths of those compound eyes, in the spaces between the chitinous plates, something that might have been human consciousness still flickered.
Somewhere in the darkness of the transformed ship, eleven thousand five hundred souls waited for salvation—or for someone to grant them the mercy of a final rest.
Either way, the Six would not abandon them to their metamorphosis.
Not while color still flowed in their veins and chaos still burned in their hearts.