“Freedom is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the hunted, we are not guiltless.

Long ago we became accomplices of the history in the mirror .”

Bei Dao, (1990)

I’m not supposed to be here.

Laughable as sentiments go, I know. There are literally millions of unfortunate souls aboard this ship, whose last thoughts before they were assimilated into the Hive probably ran parallel to this, but seriously though – I’m really not supposed to be here at all.

I’m not actually from this Universe.

Now, before you start, I know how preposterous that sounds. I get it, I really do.

Before the unfortunate series of improbably unlucky events that transpired to land me in my current parallel – predicament commenced, like most people in the Prime Universe, the concept of alternate and opposing planes of existence were as preposterous as they were considered hypothetical.

And brother, were they all wrong!

Not that any of this does me much good now, on reflection, I guess. Like the countless voices that clamor in my head unbidden, singing their disparate songs of lament as their individuality is slowly stripped away by the irresistible mutagenic-agent that pervasively dissolved their DNA and replicates that of the Hive, I feel the same slow poison coursing painfully through my veins as the Hive mind chitters in my mind like a million locusts and the slow stirring of autumn leaves in the breeze.

But the change will not come.

Through my undeniable (and unsought for) link to the Hive, I can sense the frustration and puzzlement of the Collective. Such a thing is as improbable as to be impossible. No one species, in the thousands of years since the Hive first spawned, has ever resisted the change.

The Collective is dismayed.

I can sense the frantic bustle of their carapace bodies against the hexagonal confines of the maturation chamber in which I have been imprisoned these long months, my body half – submerged in the soothing goo of the ichor that feeds me nutrients, the invasive embrace of the various bio-organic tubes that worn beneath my skin and violate my every orifice.

The change has not come.

Despite all the nightmarish terrors that have befallen me since the Collective snatched me away from the final battle against my Mirror Universe doppelgänger, my body most remains as stubbornly in its human form as it did on the day of my birth. To realize how singular and fortuitous this state of affairs is, all I have to do is crane my head to view what is happening to the person imprisoned in the chamber adjacent to mine, to realize how fortunate and singular I am in this.

Where their humanoid head once was, a hideous metamorphosis is underway. Portions of their skull are denuded to the bone, their original flesh seeming to have melted away as if under the compunction of some infernal blowtorch. The tissue melts like wax and is slowly being reformed into a complex, compound insectoid eye. The eye that still remains recognizably human stares at me with insane terror, but they no longer have a mouth with which to scream or form their protest. Harsh mandibles stir lazily where thier lips once were.

It’s enough to make you laugh.

No. Not about the poor bastard beside me. Jesus! Keep up. I mean the improbable set of circumstances that seem to have inoculated me against being transformed into a drone are actually the results of being infected by a completely different alien lifeform. Again, against my will and without my knowledge.

What’s a girl gotta do to catch a break in this Universe, right?

I’m reasonably sure that the crystal lattice that my Mirror Universe self-discovered growing up my right leg is the culprit. That other version of me used this discovery to amplify the crippling effect of the Agonizer that she tortured me with, whilst I was her prisoner aboard the ISS Albion.

I had never experience pain like it. Until the Hive injected me with their mutagen, that is.

One is like having a monofilament diamond – wire lancing through your nervous system that can be vibrated to such a degree that every nerve in your body feels like it is on fire.

The other is like an excruciating nausea that you feel on a micro – cellular level, a pervading sickness that seems to permeate every ounce of flesh with a creeping revulsion. Every time a change washes through you, there is more of it and less of you.

Honestly, I can’t recommend either.

“But how did this first alien infestation come to be within you?” I hear you ask.

And that’s a good question. The human body does not normally come off the production line complete with a crystalline substrate that bonds itself to the nerve ganglions and autonomously be drawing power from the body’s natural bio – electric impulses and sustaining a micron-scale energetic resonance.

Believe me, I speak from experience.

To explain that particular conundrum, we have to go back. Further back than when I was the Captain of the USS Valley Forge and foolishly pierced the veil between this universe and my own, in an attempt to rescue my crew. We have to go WAY back to when I was just a callow Junior Lieutenant aboard the USS Sacramento and to my unfortunate first mission to the Primarion Gerontocracy.

The mission where my father died.

There, unbeknownst to any, beneath the archaeological ruins of the once – fabulous Reliquary of Ost , in the Great Ost Desert on the planet of Primar – Majoris #7, the real reason why the stones of the great circle were able to impart psychic visions of the past was unearthed with devastating effects.

Beneath the Reliquary has slumbered a Shard from a Crystal entity.

Seeded there millennia ago to gather information on the proteogenic ancestors of the Primarion people, the shard was awoken by the work of my father, the noted Xeno-archaeologist Jonas Hyland and his team, who all perished as the Shard awoke and destroyed the reliquary, absorbed my father and began to rise into the heavens towards space.

And guess which idiot nearly rode all of the way on the God’s back?

That was when the entity must have ‘seeded’ me with a sliver of its crystalline structure, as I lost consciousness from asphyxiation in the thinning atmosphere. As it prepared to begin the eons – long voyage back to its parent at sublight speeds (presumable to merge and tell momma of all that it had learned), the bastard crystal created a new Shard.

Inside of me. Thanks a bunch for that.

I’d complain against being so violated, but at the time I had no idea this had taken place and even my routine medical scans between the time when I captained the USS Savannah and went on to serve as XO aboard the USS Albion all failed to note the presence of a micron – thin lattice of exotic crystal growing up my bloody leg.

So much for modern medical science, right?

Despite finding this out only when a psychotic Mirror Universe twin of myself was using said lattice to torture me half to death, it did explain the strange and disturbing visitations from my dead father.

At the time, I thought I had been literally going out of my mind. The visions of my dead father, with awful glowing crystals where his eyes should have been, I thought to be hallucinations brought about by the persistent trauma my mind had undergone over a series of trying missions.

Worse still, it proved that they were actually real and the crystal lattice slowing growing throughout my body was acting as some sort of fantastically powerful subspace resonance transmitter, linking my mind to that of the distant crystal shard as it made its long, slow progress home.

On balance, I think I preferred thinking I that was insane.

Still, gift – horses & mouths and all that right? On one hand I seem to be infected with a foreign alien substance that is slowly killing me. On the other, I seem to be infected with a foreign alien substance that is slowly killing me. Just one is doing it much slowly that the other and somehow is preventing the Hive mutagen from transforming me into a Drone.

How lucky can one girl be?

I am still exorably linked to the Hive – mind. I can feel what it feels. I know what it knows.

It does not thirst. It does not hunger. I does not sleep.

But for the first time in its existence, it feels fear.

And it’s not just about me. I mean not all about me anyway. I can feel the systems of the Tet beginning to power up, to bring the quantum singularity at the heart of the great ship to life. The Hive is attempting to do something else it has never done before.

The Collective is trying to flee.

Something is coming.

Something with the power to frighten even the Hive Collective itself.

And I think it’s coming for me….