Chapter 137: Humans Part 2
While he was busy getting Lucien's attention, a part of him was already on the move.
It did not break through the hull.
It found a seam.
A maintenance duct, barely wide enough for a maintenance drone, ran along the station's outer plating — a blind spot in the design, an afterthought in engineering. Francis pressed one tendril through it, no thicker than a wire. Then another. Then a dozen more, threading themselves through the gap with the patience of something that did not need to breathe.
That was the point.
He moved through the ductwork in silence, dispersing ahead of himself — not his body, but what lived inside it.
Invisible. Tasteless. Carried on circulated air the way a whisper rides a current. The station's ventilation system was a masterpiece of engineering: three redundant loops, a central exchange hub, emergency filtration for biological and chemical threats.
He released the parasites in a single, controlled push.
They scattered instantly, riding the pressurized airflow through every corridor, every sealed compartment, every pressurized chamber the ventilation touched.
Which was all of them. That was the nature of a closed ecosystem in space — you could not survive without shared air, and shared air meant shared vulnerability.
The alarms came four seconds later.
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In the control room, Lucien Ark was already moving
"Biological contaminant — shut it down. Full lockdown, all ventilation nodes, now."
His voice carried the particular flatness of a man who had already calculated the odds and did not like the answer.
Technicians lurched into action. Fingers hit panels. Emergency seals began cycling through their sequences — sector by sector, node by node, bulkheads slamming down like a fist closing around each compartment.
They were fast.
They were not fast enough.
The filtration shutdown required seventeen seconds to cascade fully through the station's network. The parasite needed three.
By the time the last ventilation node went dark, every person aboard had already breath
It did not announce itself.
That was what made it worse, Lucien would later think — in the brief window when thinking was still entirely his own. There was no no obvious signal that something had passed through the membrane of there brain and taken up residence.
He felt fine.
For forty seconds, he felt completely fine.
Then his second-in-command, Reva, turned from her terminal with an expression he had never seen on her face: not alarm, not concentration, but an absolute, untroubled stillness.
"Reva."
She didn't answer. She was looking at something that wasn't in the room.
Around her, the same stillness was spreading — table by table, terminal by terminal — like a tide coming in.
Lucien clenched his jaw. He could feel it at the edge of his own mind — a pressure, soft and patient, like a hand resting against a door. Not forcing. Just... waiting.
He pushed back.
His will had carried him through things that had broken other men. Political wars. Personal losses. The decision to deploy VIR, which had cost him more than anyone would ever know. He had built his authority on the bedrock of refusal — the refusal to yield to fear, to compromise, to sentiment.
He poured all of that into the door now.
The pressure did not increase. It simply remained.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
He was still himself. He could feel the difference — the parasite was present but contained, pressing against the boundary he had constructed through sheer accumulated stubbornness. His hands were shaking. He had not noticed when that had started.
I can hold this, he thought.
Two minutes.
The shaking reached his knees.
He stood at the center of his control room with every terminal manned by people who were no longer entirely themselves.
(Amazing to think a normal human like yourself could resist my control. Did you know that only people with special abilities could fight it off?)
Francis spoke through the mouths of everyone present.
"I don't need your praise, monster!" Lucien gritted his teeth in anger. His nose was now bleeding from the pressure.
(That isn't praise. It's a fact.)
"I don't care. You think you've won? Huh? I'll promise you that I'll—"
Blood burst out from his mouth.
(Stop resisting. If you do, you can still keep living.)
"I'd rather die!"
(So be it.)
Francis tightens his control over the parasite in Lucien's brain.
His last fully independent thought was something between rage and a kind of exhausted recognition: of course it ends like this.
No matter how hard he tried to fight back, he could not defeat a biological anomaly.
Francis withdrew the majority of his tendrils.
He left the parasites in place — they required no maintenance, no attention, no continued effort on his part.
The station's population of tens of thousands was already reorganizing itself at a level below conscious awareness, the new behavioral architecture settling in like furniture in a room that had simply always been arranged this way.
Next, he began the adjustment systematically.
Not control in the crude sense. He was not interested in puppets — puppets were fragile, predictable, useless the moment the strings were cut.
What he installed was something closer to orientation: a deep, structural loyalty, the kind that did not require commands to sustain itself.
They would follow Samantha because they would understand, at a level beneath articulation, that she was worth following. They would not betray her because the concept of betraying her would simply not cohere. It would be like trying to burn water.
When he was finished, he closed his eyes.
A thread of awareness dropped downward through the dark, through the kilometers of dead air between the station and the ground, finding the body he had left in service.
Through borrowed eyes, he looked at the hangar.
The airship was ready.
The technicians had stopped working only when there was genuinely nothing left to do, and had then simply stood near it, waiting for the next command.
He gave the signal for everyone to board.
The launch sequence initiated.
The was rising when the airship cleared the hangar mouth.
It should have been beautiful — the angle of early light across the hull, the clean shape of ascent, the long shadow the ship cast across the ground below. For a few seconds it nearly was.
Then the capital came into view, and beautiful stopped being a word that applied to anything in that direction.
The silver anomaly had reached the city outskirts.
Buildings that had stood for decades were visibly thinning at their bases, the molecular structure giving way.
And the people were being devoured almost instantly, which was probably the best outcome.
Samantha stood at the window. She watched the city she was born in gets devoured.
BOOOM!
The airship lurched upward with a violence that sent unsecured equipment sliding across the floor and knocked two technicians off their feet.
The biological nodes Francis had integrated into the hull — opened simultaneously along the undercarriage.
The compressed air they released was not room temperature.
It was not even close.
He had been storing heat in those nodes for hours, drawing thermal energy from the engine output and packing it into the biological chambers. When they vented, the release came out as focused columns of superheated pressure.
The airship did not just climb. It launched.
Inside, Samantha grabbed the nearest fixed surface and held on. Around her, Covenant members did the same — bracing against walls, against each other, against anything that wasn't moving.
Meanwhile in space.
Francis was already waiting. His body had transformed into a behemoth the size of an entire building, built to store more energy.
He compressed all the king's power as he had done before, forcing it down and holding it in place. When the airship drew close, he released the pent-up force.
BOOOOM!
The blast erupted in a shockwave that completely destroyed the invisible restriction.
"NOW!"
Francis shouted as he took control of the airship, guiding it through the temporary opening.
Thanks to his timing, the airship passed through without trouble. For the first time, Samantha saw his true form, and her heart began to beat faster.
Not just her—everyone on the airship felt it. Instinctively, they understood they were in the presence of something far beyond anything they had known, even the Kings.
Francis didn't say anything. He simply guided the airship back toward the space station.
Everyone had expected a confrontation. Instead, when they arrived, they were met with silence and order. The people were already gathered, waiting. Even Lucien Ark was there, smiling as if nothing had happened.
"Welcome to the sanctuary," he said. "My name is Lucien Ark, and from now on, everyone here will loyally serve you, Miss Samantha."
He knelt. The people behind him followed.
"Wow, so this is the perk of having a god for a dad," one of the younger members of the covenant joked.
Aris shot her a glare.
Right now, Samantha was the only reason they had survived, so making remarks like that was dangerous.
"You're the one responsible for this whole mess," Samantha lifted Lucien by his collar.
"I am sorry, Miss Samantha. My obsession with revenge led me down this path, but after Master Francis educated me, I realized my mistake and am now fully loyal to you. You can kill me if that will appease your anger."
Instead of calming down, his words only made her more furious. It made her sick to think she now owed everything to a beast that had once been inside her without her permission.
"Forget it." She let him go. There was no need to kill him. Being brainwashed was already a fate worse than death.