THE BLOOD ECLIPSE HUNG low over the gray horizon like a festering wound, bathing the lunar penal colony of Phelgrim-6 in a sickly red glow. The prison dome’s reinforced glass was webbed with fractures and radiation scoring, the scars of decades spent orbiting forgotten on the dark side of the moon. It didn’t matter. No one came to Phelgrim-6 to look at the stars.

Deke squinted up at the sky, a thick wad of tobacco swelling in his cheek. He spat into the ash-swirled yard.

“Goddamn moon looks like it’s fuckin’ bleeding,” he muttered to no one in particular. The other inmates, lifers, cannibals, rapists, the worst Earth had to offer, kept their eyes down. They could feel it too. The pressure in the air. The vibration behind the eyes. The way the walls seemed to breathe with you.

The Blood Eclipse came once every few decades. And when it did, things changed. Inmates went mad. Guards committed suicide. Once, an entire cell block tore itself apart in perfect silence. The official report blamed solar flares.

Miles beneath the surface in the bowels of the warden's private suite, Warden Elias Skell was otherwise occupied. The lights were off. The only illumination came from the soft pulse of the neural rig embedded in his skull. Tubes fed stimulants into his veins. Electrodes mapped every inch of his nervous system. He lay naked on a synthetic bed, hips grinding into the air, moaning quietly through clenched teeth. Inside the virtual space, he was a god.

The avatar on top of him moaned louder. A red-haired woman with six breasts and a forked tongue. Her body shimmered with simulated sweat as she rode him like an animal. Her eyes glowed neon pink. “You’re a monster, Elias,” she whispered in his mother’s voice. “But monsters deserve to be worshipped.”

Her form twisted, changed, her skin peeling off to reveal a younger version of himself, bound and begging. The fantasy blurred at the edges, laced with images of violence, submission, and childhood trauma. Skell’s eyes fluttered. He didn’t care about the discomfort. This was the only way he could feel anything anymore.

Then the sirens began.

A deep, braying howl cut through the neural feed. Skell winced. His fantasy began to glitch, his lover’s face melting into static, her cries for pleasure morphing into screams. Blood poured from her mouth. Her breasts turned to rows of sharp teeth. Her skin peeled like latex.

“Security breach,” the AI droned flatly. “Biocontamination alert in Cell Block Delta.”

“Fuck!” Skell screamed, yanking the neural jack from the port in his neck. The connection ripped free with a wet pop, leaving a red ring of bruised flesh.

He stumbled from the bed, naked, furious, and disoriented. He vomited onto the cold floor. Not from the drugs, he was used to those. From the loss. The severing. It always left him shaking. Through the vomit, the sirens howled again. And somewhere in the prison, something screamed, a wet, inhuman sound.

Skell wiped his mouth and stumbled toward the control terminal.

“Security to Delta,” he rasped. “Now.”

Sergeant Harlan's boots slammed against the blood-slicked tiles as he stormed down the Cell Block Delta corridor, pulse rifle at the ready. The air was thick with rot and something worse, something cloying, sweet, like milk left in a dead man's mouth.

“Why the fuck do these freaks always lose their minds on eclipse night?” muttered Corporal Nines behind him.

“Because this place eats souls,” Harlan growled. “And tonight, it wants seconds.”

The cellblock was lit by emergency strobes, painting everything in flashes of red and shadow. Each flicker revealed more horror. Smears of blood. Something like afterbirth trailing along the walls. Scorch marks. Scratches that hadn’t been there yesterday.

They stopped outside Cell 18.

“This is where the first screams came from,” said Officer Briggs, hand shaking, as he pointed his scanner at the biometric reader. “One confirmed life sign inside.”

Harlan nodded, “Stack up. Breach on three.”

They kicked the door in.

And found hell.

The prisoner, a thick-necked lifer named Greaves, was crouched naked over his bunkmate, who lay splayed and gutted on the floor like a butchered pig. Greaves was elbow-deep in the man’s chest cavity, both hands rooting around with surgical glee.

He turned slowly, blood smearing his face like warpaint. His eyes glowed faintly under the emergency lights.

“He was full of them,” Greaves rasped. “Squirming. Singing. They wanted out. So I helped.”

“What the actual fuck,” Nines breathed, raising his rifle.

Harlan stepped forward, weapon trained. “Greaves. Hands where I can see 'em. Now.”

“I can feel them in you too, Sarge,” Greaves said, grinning wide. “They're in all of us, seeds, waiting.”

Something twitched beneath his skin. A ripple across his abdomen.

“Shoot him!” Briggs shouted.

Greaves lunged.

The gunshot was deafening. The round tore through Greaves' lower jaw, blowing it into a spray of bone, teeth, and gore. He collapsed in a heap, still twitching.

“Check him,” Harlan barked.

Nines crouched cautiously. “Still breathing...barely. But you need to see this.”

He pulled back what remained of Greaves’ chest cavity. Nestled inside, near the spine, were translucent sacs, small, jellyfish-like things pulsing with life. Tendrils coiled around Greaves' ribs like roots.

“Mother of God,” whispered Nines. “They're growing inside him.”

“Torch it,” Harlan ordered.

The flamethrower unit stepped forward and incinerated the body in a gout of cleansing fire. The sacs screamed.

As the flames hissed down, Briggs checked his scanner. “We’ve got four more dead across the block. All eviscerated. Same missing organs. No sign of forced entry.”

“They weren’t murdered,” Harlan said. “They were planted.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Briggs asked, voice rising.

Harlan didn’t answer.

Because through the wall, they heard another scream.

This one wasn’t human.

The flamethrower hissed down, engulfing what remained of Greaves. His chest cavity collapsed in on itself, releasing a chorus of high-pitched wails from the embryonic sacs as they burst, splattering the walls with gelatinous slime. The flames blackened the cell, but the stench, acrid, chemical, and alive, lingered.

Nines stepped back, gagging behind his visor. “Jesus... those things were growing inside him.”

Briggs wiped sweat from his brow. “I don’t get it. Where did they come from? There’s no breach. No transmission vector. No pattern.”

Harlan said nothing. His jaw clenched as he stared into the scorched ruin of Greaves’ body, something gnawing at the edge of his memory. A smell. A feeling.

A rumor.

He turned on his heel. “Janus, the old janitor.”

Briggs blinked. “What about him?”

“He’s always muttering about the foundations... about something underneath.” Harlan’s voice was dry, tight. “He calls it The Pit.”

“Come on, Sarge,” Nines scoffed, forcing a grin. “That’s just a boiler room ghost story. Shit, there’s nothing under Phelgrim but rock and regret.”

“Then why the fuck are prisoners growing things in their guts without breaking quarantine?” Harlan snapped. “You ever seen infections that sing?”

No one answered.

“Grab weapons and breather units,” Harlan growled. “We’re going below.”

“Below where?” Briggs asked.

Harlan didn’t turn back as he stormed down the corridor.

“Below everything.”

Sergeant Harlan had seen a lot of things in his twenty-two years of holding the line—gang wars in the slums of Europa, organ theft rings in the Martian colonies, even the flesh-market riots on Titan. But nothing made his stomach tighten like the stories about The Pit.

It wasn’t on any map. No keycard opened it. No prisoner knew about it. But the old guards whispered after lights-out. Rumors of a shaft drilled too deep. Of black flesh pulsing beneath the lunar crust. Of experiments quietly swept under reinforced floors.

The only man who’d speak of it openly was Old Janus, the janitor with white cataracts and knotted hands, who muttered scripture to the mop bucket.

Harlan found him in the service crawlspace near the hydroponics lab, kneeling in a pool of stagnant water and urine.

“You wanna know about her, don’t you?” Janus wheezed without looking up.

Harlan crouched low, nostrils burning from the stench. “Talk.”

Janus grinned, revealing gums like rotting leather. “It ain’t a prison. It never was. This place? It’s a womb. A shrine built over an egg older than the sun.”

“What egg?”

“She was already here when we came. Black as sin. Breathing. They found it when they were laying geothermal cores. Big Corp sent in suits and surgeons. Thought they could weaponize what came out.”

Janus shivered.

“They opened it during the last eclipse. Took ‘em days to die. Some of ‘em didn’t even die proper, they just changed.”

“You’re saying this place was built over a living thing?”

“I’m saying we feed it. With bodies. With screams. With semen and blood.” Janus laughed—a dry, cracking sound like leaves burning. “She’s waking up again. Can’t you smell it? The milk in the air? That’s amniotic fluid, boy.”

Harlan rose, disgust rising in his throat. “You’re fucking insane.”

“Yeah,” Janus croaked. “But I’m still here. You think that’s luck?”

The access shaft to The Pit wasn’t in any blueprint. It was behind the old psych wing, beyond a welded door marked “E.R.A.S.E.D.” in grease pencil. It shouldn’t have existed.

They cut it open.

The darkness inside wasn’t just black, it was wet. The air dripped. The walls shimmered with mucosal slime. Tendrils pulsed like intestines. The entire tunnel smelled like menstruation and hot meat left in the sun.

They descended slowly, boots sticking to the ground with every step.

“What the fuck is this?” muttered Nines, aiming his lamp upward.

Above them, corpses were embedded into the walls, dozens, maybe hundreds. Twisted in impossible angles, limbs fused together like clay sculptures in a madman’s gallery. Some were eyeless. Others smiled. One still moved.

“Oh Christ,” whispered Briggs. “That’s Simmons. From C-Block.”

Simmons’ head turned, what remained of it. His lower jaw was gone. Something with teeth had hollowed out his torso. In its place was a network of veiny tubes, pulsing with white fluid. When he opened his mouth, it wasn’t a scream, it was a chorus, hundreds of voices crying out from within him in fractured harmony.

“Burn it!” Harlan shouted.

The flames lit the shaft with shadows of flailing limbs. The meat walls recoiled like they felt pain.

Then the tunnel breathed.

A deep, moaning inhale rattled the team’s bones. Something below shifted. Something massive.

The Pit opened into a cavern that had no right to exist. Rib-like structures arched over a living landscape of flesh and bone. Massive tumors swelled and contracted like lungs. Fluids dripped from ceiling sacs into twitching pools. The ground was spongy, covered in a membrane that squirmed beneath their feet.

And in the center, towering, glistening, obscene, was Her.

The Brood Queen.

She was made of bodies. Woven together in a cathedral of sin. Male and female. Adult and child. Inmates, guards, workers, priests. All melted into a screaming monument to creation.

Her lower half was a tangle of birthing stalks, each ending in a split ovipositor pumping out wet, larval things into vats of bile. Her upper torso bore breasts, dozens of them, each lactating into chutes that funneled the fluid across the room to waiting mouth-holes in the walls.

Faces emerged from her flesh. Some pleading. Some moaning. Some locked in rictus orgasms that never ended. Her head, a crown of horns and uterine sacs, turned toward them.

She opened her mouth.

And Sergeant Harlan heard his own voice.

“You brought the seed,” the Queen said, using his speech patterns, his tone. “You fed me your dead, your broken, your wicked. We have grown strong on their filth.”

Harlan dropped to one knee, clutching his temples.

Behind him, Nines screamed as something reached from the floor and pierced his calf. A long, slick tendril with tiny barbed mouths. It pumped fluid into him, and he vomited blood instantly.

He turned toward Harlan, sobbing. “Help me. It’s fucking inside me. I can feel it chewing.”

His eyes exploded.

His skull split down the center.

From within, a tiny, pale creature clawed its way out, blind, mewling, covered in amniotic fluid. It looked at Harlan and smiled.

The Queen laughed.

“We are only beginning.”

The walls throbbed.

Sergeant Harlan stumbled backward, gagging. His boots squelched in the membrane-covered floor, every step producing a wet, sucking sound like walking through afterbirth. Behind him, the remainder of his team, Briggs, Alvarez, and Harper, stood frozen, their weapons lowered. Eyes wide. Mouths slack.

“Dear God...” Harper whispered. “It’s a... nursery.”

The chamber stretched for over a hundred meters, though the dimensions twisted the mind. Gravity didn’t quite feel right. Distance collapsed and expanded in the corners of vision. The walls were lined with sacs, transparent, twitching, each one containing a humanoid figure curled in fetal position, its features shifting, melting, reforming as if uncertain of what species to become.

Some had extra limbs. Others bore mouths where eyes should be. One writhed against its sac, dragging clawed fingers across its own face until it flensed the skin off. Then it smiled.

Briggs vomited violently. “What... what the fuck are these?”

“They’re being made,” Harlan said. His voice was hollow. “Constructed from what’s left of the prisoners.”

“No, not just prisoners,” Alvarez said, pointing to a body hanging from a spine-like umbilicus. “That’s Jensen. He worked security. They’re using all of us.”

At the chamber’s center, a vast birthing canal yawned open in the flesh of the floor. Ribbed and pulsating, it shuddered every few seconds and expelled another slick, malformed creature onto the conveyor of organic tendrils below. These newborns writhed blindly until they were picked up by spider-like drones, biomechanical things with twitching eyes and surgical arms, and carted away down chutes lined with screaming mouths.

Harper stepped too close to one of the sacs. It pulsed. The figure inside, a pale, sexless childlike thing with no face, opened its arms to him. The membrane split.

“Don’t touch it!” Harlan barked.

Too late.

The fluid sprayed out in a high-pressure burst, coating Harper’s face and armor. He screamed, clawing at his visor. The fluid burned through it. His skin bubbled, peeled, melted. Tendrils laced with teeth slithered from the sac, forcing their way into his mouth, ears, eyes.

He collapsed, twitching violently, spine snapping backward as his torso bulged grotesquely. Within seconds, his ribcage exploded outward, and a new larval shape slithered out, dragging Harper’s steaming organs behind it like a placenta.

Alvarez screamed and opened fire. The bullets tore into the creature, but three more emerged from adjacent sacs, drawn by the scent of fresh blood.

“Move!” Harlan shouted, dragging Briggs away. “This whole level’s alive!”

They ran.

Retreating through the birthing halls, the Queen’s voice echoed behind them, from the walls themselves.

“You leave so soon?” she cooed, motherly and mocking. “But you’ve only just begun to ripen.”

Dozens of sacs split open as they passed, releasing steam, half-born horrors that crawled after them on all fours, jaws slack, drooling amniotic bile. One had the face of Warden Skell, laughing as it snapped at Alvarez’s heels.

They made it to the upper chamber, a surgical arena fashioned from bone and gristle. Tables lined the room, and each was occupied by a prisoner or guard mid-transformation. Some still conscious. Some praying. Most vocalized agony.

What looked like surgical tools lay nearby. Carved from bone, shaped like insect limbs. Controlled by long, umbilical-like nerves stretching into the ceiling.

Alvarez raised her flamethrower. “We burn this whole fucking nest. We torch it until it stops screaming.”

“No,” Harlan said, eyes locked on a console fashioned from stitched-together skulls. “We don’t just torch it. We find the Queen. We end this at the source.”

Briggs stepped back, shaking. “You saw what she was! She’s made of us, Sarge! You think bullets or fire will stop something that feeds on pain?!”

“Then we feed her something she’s never tasted,” Harlan growled. “We feed her fear.”

As they moved deeper into the hive, the lights faded.

But the heartbeat grew louder.

And far below, the Queen was waiting.

The corridor narrowed as they descended, slick with mucus and pulsating with every heartbeat that wasn’t theirs. The walls were no longer stone or steel, but tissue, veined and warm, twitching beneath the light. Every so often, Briggs swore he saw faces in the walls: former inmates, old guards, even a woman he thought he’d left behind on Earth. Their mouths opened and closed without sound, as if gasping for air that didn’t exist.

The air was syrup-thick and full of spores. Every breath tasted like copper and afterbirth.

Alvarez gripped her flamethrower tighter, her knuckles bone white.

“This place is changing,” she muttered. “I swear the walls weren’t this... close... before.”

“They weren’t,” Harlan said grimly. “It’s growing. Feeding off us. Off every step we take.”

The tunnel opened into a cathedral of horrors.

The

Hive.

It defied architecture, logic, sanity. Great arches of spinal columns stretched into an infinite ceiling, from which hung bloated sacs like diseased chandeliers. Fluids dripped from them in slow, rhythmic pulses, pooling below into thick, steaming trenches. Crawling over the ground were the

Constructs

, failed births. Misshapen creatures, half-human, half-insect, dragging themselves across the biofloor with twisted limbs and weeping mouths.

Some cried like infants. Others mimicked the screams of men being burned alive.

In the center of the Hive stood the

Breeding Pillars.

They rose from the floor like phallic altars, each one formed from the fused torsos of male prisoners, moaning in synchronized agony. Tentacles snaked from the walls and fucked the Pillars, violently and rhythmically, pumping fluid into unseen depths. From beneath the floor, larvae slithered out, crawling toward the light with eager, clicking jaws.

“Sweet fucking hell,” Briggs whispered, raising his rifle.

“Don’t shoot,” Harlan said. “We fire in here, we wake up everything at once.”

Something was already stirring.

From the far end of the Hive, a new figure emerged, taller than any they’d seen. Thin. Feminine. Beautiful and horrific all at once. Her flesh was smooth but stretched too tight. Her arms split at the elbows into clusters of finger-like feelers, each twitching as if tasting the air. Her face bore no eyes, just a vertical slit where her mouth should have been, sealed with living stitches that wriggled.

Behind her trailed an umbilical tail longer than a train car, coiled in glistening nerves and eyes that blinked in random rhythms.

The

Caretaker.

“Another servant,” Harlan said, spitting bile. “They have castes.”

The Caretaker moved without sound, gliding toward the central Pillar. Her fingers unfurled, and from her belly a new appendage unspooled, a slick, ovipositor-like protrusion crowned with needle-like teeth. She pressed it against the face of one of the moaning torsos and injected it with something that pulsed.

The man convulsed, mouth wide in a silent scream, as his abdomen split and a new sac began to form over his groin.

“That’s how they do it,” Alvarez whispered. “They grow the nursery from the living.”

Suddenly, the Caretaker turned.

No eyes. But she saw them.

With a shriek like shattering glass, she lunged.

Harlan fired first. The shot ripped through her chest, she didn’t stop. Briggs screamed and stumbled back, firing wildly as the Caretaker pounced. Her tail whipped through the air, slicing through his neck with a spray of arterial mist. His head bounced once. Twice. Rolled into a pit of squirming infants.

Alvarez screamed and torched her with fire. The Caretaker howled as her flesh blackened, but she didn’t fall. She melted, oozing into a crack in the floor, vanishing into the depths with a sound like bones grinding through meat.

Then silence.

Harlan stood over what was left of Briggs. His fingers twitched for a moment after death, as if something inside him still tried to move.

Alvarez looked around, shaking. “How do we fight this?”

Harlan looked up at the breeding columns. At the sacs hanging from the ceiling. At the endless, pulsating birth machinery of the Hive.

“We don’t fight it,” he said. “We abort it.”

From his side pack, he pulled out a containment charge. A miniature fusion coil. Illegal in most sectors. Designed for planetary sabotage.

Alvarez stared at it. “You’ll kill us.”

“I know,” Harlan said, his voice heavy. “But if even one of those things makes it off-world...”

A low rumble echoed through the Hive. The walls tensed. From above, a long moan answered them.

“She’s coming,” Alvarez said, backing away. “The Queen. She knows.”

Harlan placed the charge at the base of the largest breeding column. The flesh hissed where it touched. The moans intensified.

He looked at Alvarez, eyes steady.

“Get to the surface. Find a comms unit. Tell Earth to burn the orbit clean.”

Alvarez hesitated.

“Harlan…”

“Go!”

She ran.

As the Hive screamed around him, Harlan stood in the middle of the nightmare, surrounded by birthing flesh and failed gods. He pressed his palm to the charge. The countdown began.

Above him, the Queen’s massive silhouette unfurled.

He welcomed the dark.

The ceiling split like a rotten womb.

From the gash above descended the Brood Queen, vast, obscene, and regal in her decay. Her mass displaced gravity. Her limbs, long as scaffolding, bent at impossible angles, trailing viscous strands of birthing fluids and tethered offspring. Her skin was a patchwork of flesh: pale, black, jaundiced, all stretched thin across bone and fluid sacs. Entire faces shifted beneath her skin like trapped souls clawing to be reborn.

Her belly was massive, distended, and pulsing. It dragged behind her like a breeding silo. Dozens of transparent pods rippled beneath it, each one housing a fetus curled like a scorpion, twitching as it grew organs in real-time. Some bore human features. Some were entirely alien.

Her eyes, hundreds of them, opened across her torso. Each one blinked, dripped. And then her mouth opened. A vertical gash from chest to navel, revealing rows of umbilical teeth and a black, yawning void that moaned like the core of the Earth.

Sergeant Harlan stood his ground.

The charge at his feet blinked with a slow, steady pulse. He had less than five minutes.

The Queen’s voice entered his mind, bypassing ears and thought.

“You planted the seed. You fed us murderers. Rapists. Kings. Now the hive bears fruit. You do not abort this. You become it.”

Harlan’s nose bled. His knees buckled. He felt pressure behind his eyes. Thoughts not his own. Memories restructured. She was injecting identity, implanting her brood not just into bodies but into consciousness.

He screamed and fired.

His bullets tore chunks from her torso, revealing more twitching limbs, eyes, veins pumping white bile. She barely noticed. Her gaze fell upon him like a caress.

“You are pure. Trauma-sweetened. Womb-hardened. A seed-bearer.”

From beneath her belly, a thick, glistening ovipositor extended, six feet long, veined and throbbing. It stabbed toward him.

Harlan dove.

The tip missed his spine by inches and embedded in the floor, vomiting larvae that screamed in his voice.

He rolled and drew a plasma grenade, yanked the pin with his teeth, and slammed it into the Queen’s tendril before it retracted. The explosion ripped through her flank. She roared, a thunderclap of agony, and reared back, flesh raining from her in ribbons.

He stood, staggering. Blood poured from his ears. The timer showed 03:17.

Behind him, the Hive walls split open.

Alvarez.

She was alive, but changed.

Her skin blistered. Her eyes black. Veins pumped just beneath the surface, glowing faintly. She staggered forward, a weapon in her hand, a detonator stolen from a secondary charge.

“Harlan,” she croaked, voice layered with something else. “She got into me.”

He raised his rifle.

“I should burn you where you stand.”

“I know,” she said, tears spilling down her cheeks. “But I fought her. And I found the control core. You blow this room, she’ll survive. She has clones. You have to hit the whole fucking womb.”

“Where?”

She pressed the detonator into his hand. “Her brain. It’s below. At the base of the canal. Beneath the pit.”

Harlan hesitated. “You coming?”

She shook her head. “I’m already fading.”

From her mouth, something moved, a small worm-like shape crawling behind her teeth.

She smiled sadly. “Make it mean something.”

Then she raised her pistol and put a round through her own skull.

Harlan ran.

He descended into the depths of the Queen’s birthing chamber, past her screaming roots and twitching walls. The space narrowed into a tunnel made of nerve endings, pulsating red and white, leading to a massive central chamber shaped like a heart.

It beat.

Each throb sent tremors through the station.

He approached the core - a massive, glowing organ suspended by cords of spine and fat. Faces screamed across its surface. Some of them were his team. Some were his own.

He planted the final charge.

As he armed it, he heard her - inside him now.

“We could make you immortal. Father of galaxies. The hive is truth. The hive is forever.”

He pulled the trigger.

Silence.

Then -

Light.

The core erupted in a supernova of flame and bone.

The blast chain-reacted up the nerve-spine, rupturing the Queen from within. Her birthing sacs exploded like pustules. Her scream was a shockwave that cracked the dome.

From orbit, the surface of Phelgrim-6 blistered outward as the Hive collapsed in on itself, devouring everything in a writhing spiral of shrieking matter.

EPILOGUE

Days later, a salvage drone orbiting the moon detected movement near the wreckage of the escape bay.

Footage showed a single figure dragging itself across the ash.

A tall, humanoid shape - female - pregnant. Glowing.

Its face was Harlan’s.

It smiled at the camera.

And then it opened its stomach with its own hands.

Inside, dozens of tiny hearts began to beat.

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