Four forcefield-swathed wyrms slammed themselves into either side of the infected ship's hull. The ship's shields snapped and flared as they intermingled with the wyrms' energy fields.

Slick and Lt. Dueright shot out from either side of me and zeroed in on the segment of the ship's shields undergoing the biggest oscillations.

Then they fired.

Slick's heat ray and Dueright's bullets ate away at the ship's shields. The rest of us joined in, striking that one spot with alternating attacks of psychokinetically-boosted claw swipes and lurid spore streams hammered into needles and hammers.

Push! Push!

The shield couldn't take it anymore. The energies coursing through it buckled, snapped, and cracked.

"Push!" I screamed.

Sparks sprayed across my eyes-sight as the fraying waves finally spilled open.

"Whatever you're gonna do Dr. Howle," Slick said, "you better do it now!"

I followed the wyrm's gaze to the Fort. The Vyxit and the other ship were pelting Fort Marteneiss with laser fire and corrosive magics.

No!

I sped my thoughts like the wind. Everything around me slowed to a crawl.

Though infected, the ship wasn't a transformee. I desperately hoped that I'd still be able to use it to link up with the Vyx network. Eating the ship—or at least part of it—entailed interlinking my body with it. Best case scenario, I could enter the Network, or at least hijack the one module's weapons. Worst case scenario, I'd get the strangest case of indigestion in human history, but, either way, the Vyxit wouldn't be able to use the ship against us, and at least that would be an unabashed win.

If I was going to do this, I needed to get inside and access the control panel.

I let time resume in order to yell. "Use spore breath on the ship! Make a hole! Make! A! H—"

—Multiple wyrms bent their necks over the rapidly expanding hole in the forcefield and breathed out spores in concentrated streams. The ship's hull blackened and fizzled, sizzled and bubbled, cracking and flaking, sloughing and breaking.

I breathed a spore cone of my own. The metallocrystalline hull crumbled like dirt where the others' spores had already eroded a pit into its side. I shaped my spore cone into a drill and flushed it with power, making it whirl, digging into the silver substance, channeling my inner pangolin.

I helped the process along with my claws, and a couple psychokinetic headbutts.

I revved the drill wild.

Seconds later, I broke through, and then used my psychokinesis to thrust myself through the tunnel and into the interior of the ship. My sense of balance went haywire as I passed through the midpoint of the tunnel. I slithered into what looked like some sort of cargo hold, and the feeling only spread, quickly engulfing the rest of me.

Then, abruptly, I dropped in.

From above.

I caught myself with a levitation just in time to land in a messy coil on the silvery floor.

But it could have been a lot messier.

Thankfully, the embarrassing pose didn't last for very long; I quickly reoriented myself—one of the many benefits of having a mental capacity that put even supercomputers to shame.

Still, those precious few seconds I spent indisposed were more than enough time for the ship's crew to react to my presence.

They started their attack before I'd even slithered into the ship's central chamber.

I know, I know, I should have expected this.

Force fields shimmered into place along the short sequence of bulkheads that separated the cargo hold from the ship's core. The forcefields compressed me like a vise, only one covered in razors. Sparks flew where they pressed onto my flanks. And while I was busy trying to un-jam myself, the ship's crew decided to unload on me with continuous fusillades of laser fire from attachments to their power suits. Through my third eyes, I could see one of the aliens—a twEfE—had conjured up more of those cotton swab plexuses both in front of and behind me. When I tried to raise a forcefield to block the incoming laser fire, my plexus fizzled. The twEfE's fibrous, tangled energies seemed to cancel it out.

I brought my claws as close to my face as I could manage. The laser fire stung pretty badly.

Following my professional instincts as a licensed neuropsychiatrist, I asked my attackers to stop as nicely as my pained bellowing allowed. They did not listen. I didn't blame them for this; they'd been fed a lifetime of jingoistic propaganda; also, they had no idea what I was saying. Heck, by the look of the fungal aura spreading through their bodies, there was a good chance my attackers were beginning to suffer losses to their mental acuity.

While I was fretting over these things, a burly, four-armed humanoid charged at me with a quartet of energy blades as blue as a raging sky.

I tried twisting around, and when that didn't work, I lubricated the burning gap between myself and the bulkhead's forcefield with a forcefield of my own, which I used to push back at my entrapment. It was like having an armwrestling contest, only with my mind instead of my limbs.

Speaking of limbs, the four-arm slashed at me with all of his. I sprang forward right as he did so, flinging myself to the side.

My tail hit him like a tree-trunk sized whip. My strike flung the twEfE against the wall and knocked my attacker over a railing and down to the ship's lower floor. A wet crunch cracked through the air a moment after that.

The twEfE smeared black ooze on the wall behind it as it slid to the ground. The hummingbird did not get up after hitting the floor.

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I wrapped myself in a cylindrical forcefield. Laser bullets crashed into my plexus' scintillating blue and gold threads, splattering off in bursts of light and heat.

One of the Vyxit—a four-legged insect-centaur type, by the look of their silvery figure—shouted something, and then dropped their gun and extruded a short, slender energy blade from their wrist and slit their own throat.

I roared. "No!"

Pale yellow fluid poured from his corpse. The fluid was intermixed with clumps of &alon's mycelium threads and her ooze.

For a split second, the others stopped firing and stared at their comrade. Then the Vyxit pointed their guns at one another. I reached out to them with my plexuses. I tried to pry the weapons out of their hands. Instead, their limbs separated from their bodies with sickening snaps.

They made hideous screams. Angel's mercy, the pain…

I hated what I was about to do, but what other choice did I have?

Shaking my head, I dispelled my forcefield and slithered over to the dying Vyxit, pulling up alongside them. A simple jostle to the side brushed my flanks up against their spasming bodies, triggering the now-familiar sensation of haustoria emerging from my scales to pierce into their flesh and drag it into mine. For a split second, the Vyxit soldiers looked like they'd gotten caught in the flypaper. A moment later, they started coming apart at the seams.

I paused the flow of time, to assess my next move, freezing my meals-in-progress while my body was in the middle of the awful process of distributing the fresh, new biomass across itself.

Evidence of the ship's infection was all around me, and amply so. Fungus-eaten ulcers were opening up on the walls, floor, and ceiling. The bulkheads, ramps, and railings were turning gangrenous and necrotic. Fungal hyphae grew along the walls like shadows of ivy. &alon's had seeded her garden along the control panels, up at the front of the ship.

Just as I was about to slither into that garden and try my hand at hooking up with the Vyx Network, I felt a ping from Lt. Kaplan's soul.

I immediately summoned the spirit into my presence. He was just as I remembered him when I'd… well, when I'd eaten him; he was decked out in the sleek, black armor worn by Trenton's armed forces. His swept-back raindrop-helmet's visor was perfectly transparent. Not even a single image, order, or line of code to be seen on its surface.

"This ship is going down," he said. "The other wyrms want to know if you want them to land it."

Vernon's spirit came into being right beside him. "You have to let them go, Genneth," the General said, staring me right in the eyes." We need their help to take down the other starfighter."

I wasn't going to argue with that.

"I agree with General Marteneiss," I said.

Vernon nodded. "Thank you. I'll tell the others." He disappeared as suddenly as he'd appeared.

Lt. Kaplan looked up at me. It was only then that I noticed how much I towered over him. It was like I was looking down at a dog at my feet, only this wasn't a dog, but a complete human being.

"What are you going to do with this ship?" he asked. Turning, he looked over the control panels among the fungus behind him. "It's not like I know how to fly this crazy thing."

"You're right, you don't."

But I knew someone who did.

If any of the senior members of the Trenton Psychiatric Board had been turned into wyrms and—additionally—ever caught wind of what I was about to do, I was pretty sure they'd retroactively revoke the psychiatric half of my neuropsychiatric medical license.

A quick port to my Main Menu showed the soul crystals of my Vyxit victims were only just beginning to fill up. Unfortunately, I didn't have the luxury to wait. I willed the crystals out of their orbit and floated them over to me, and then closed my eyes and injected my mind into them, subjecting myself to a battering by a rush of chaotic images, sensations, memories, and feelings. I grabbed bits and pieces of anything and everything pertaining to the operation of the Vyx starfighter. I had to pry the knowledge out of the Vyxit's spiteful hands. The put up fierce resistance, and I feared I was damaging them, but…—

—Well, I could beat myself up over it when this was over.

Right then and there, I made a promise to myself: however long it took, I would make these spirits right as rain. I owed them that much.

I brought Lt. Kaplan with me as I returned to my Main Menu.

"What is this place?" He looked around in shock.

I fidgeted with my bowtie.

"There's no way I can say this that doesn't make it awkward, but… I'm Adam, I'm sorry I ate you. Right now, though, I need your help."

The lieutenant stepped back. He looked at me like I was nuts.

I definitely deserved that.

He grimaced. "What?"

"Believe it or not," I said, "you're the only spirit I have on hand with a decent amount of flight experience. Yes, there are a few others, but none of them have your skills, and I'm not going to add a second violation of good psychiatric practice to my record by pulling the experience out of your mind and putting it in theirs."

Opening my hand, I revealed a spool of twitching light. It was the sum total of the information I'd taken from the Vyxit. Motes of light drifted from the soul crystals to the cluster in my hand as the souls slowly continued to upload.

"Please, take this. It's information I've copied from the aliens' minds. It should give you knowledge of how to fly the ship. I hope."

He barked and glared. "You ate me!"

"Yes," I said, putting my free hand on my chest, "and I promise I'll make up for it as soon as I can, once everyone's lives aren't at stake!"

Sighing, Lt. Kaplan crossed his arms. "Well, dammit."

"Wha?"

He looked me in the eyes. "Now I owe General Marteneiss a beer."

I certainly hadn't expected him to say that.

"I bet him you wouldn't have the balls to ask for my help," Adam explained. "Turns out I was wrong."

"As was I, Lt. Kaplan," I said, with a nod. "As was I."

I shot the memories at Lt. Kaplan. His spirit-body glowed as he incorporated them into his being. Any new motes of light that streamed off the Vyxit's slowly filling soul crystals now passed directly into the Lieutenant. Hopefully, if there was any knowledge I hadn't found, it would get to him that way.

"I don't know how long I'll be out of commission while I'm in the Vyx Network," I said. "I don't even know if it will work. But…" I clenched a fist. "I have to try. And while I do, my body is in your hands."

"Why would you trust me with something so important?" he asked.

I cleared my throat. "If I can't trust you to help me, what chance do I have of ever earning your forgiveness?" I saluted him. "Godspeed, Lt. Kaplan," I said.

I started to tear up.

Then I returned us to the real world, me in my wyrm body, and roving spirit Adam swaddled in the psychokinesis he needed to interact with the world of the living. The ship plummeted in free-fall, gravity pushing up at my underbelly.

Both of us rushed toward the control panel. Lt. Kaplan kept to my left, where the machinery still seemed to be operational. I could already feel my body itching to send out some haustoria to link up with the fungal tissue extruding from the floor. I let my body indulge itself, and not just because more food meant more power.

If this was going to work, I needed to link as much of myself up to this shape as possible.

I plunged my hands into the control panel's right side, claws out. It was like sinking my fingers into taffy. I clenched my fists, straining to start the feeding process.

The infected machinery sparked. The fungus in the mainframe shifted about as filaments erupted from my fingers and merged with the ship.

As big as my mind was, I could feel it opening even further. I focused on that feeling. I chased it, anchoring it to an empty room in my mental palace, where it took the shape of a gateway to the unknown.

I set my body on autopilot. It would keep singing my spirits into being for as long as it could. I didn't want the other wyrms or their spirits to lose contact with mine while I was in the Network, assuming I even made it there.

Nina's voice ran through my mind: "Dr. Howle, don't forget about me!"

Don't worry, I won't, I thought.

I had no problem with her accompanying me. I could use the help.

Closing my eyes, I focused on appearing in the depths of the Network where I'd been separated from Suisei, and leapt into the portal in my mind.

Wouldn't you know it, at the very last moment, Lark stood before me and asked—

—But, by then, I'd already jumped in.

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