The planning should have been straightforward. Xylogram's tactical displays painted the ship in zones of red and green—hostile territories and safe passages mapped with clinical precision. But as the Six huddled around the holographic schematics, something else demanded attention.
Bunk shifted uncomfortably, his Blockbuster frame's servos whining as he reached behind his right shoulder blade with his left gauntlet. At first, it was just an itch—the kind of phantom sensation that sometimes-plagued pilots after long missions in their frames. His angular fingers scratched at the spot on his armor plating, but the irritation only grew worse.
"Bunk?" Lacey noticed his distraction, her Knight systems automatically cataloging his biometrics. "Status report?"
"It's nothing, just—" His words died as his gauntleted hand found something that shouldn't have been there. A raised bump, roughly the size of a chicken egg, nestled between his shoulder blades where his Toy Frame's primary neural interface connected to his spine. "What the hell?"
The others turned as Bunk's fingers explored the growth with growing alarm. There on his Lego block plating, they could see it—a translucent cyst that pulsed with its own internal light, it had veins of deep purple and black threading through its membrane like corrupted circuitry.
"Get it off," he said, voice tight with revulsion. "Rip it off me now!"
"Wait." Hexi's Tesseract Weaver plates shifted into analytical configuration, sensors probing the growth from a safe distance. "Don't touch it directly. The bio-readings are... unusual."
Pip's empathic sensors suddenly flared with alarm. "Guys," she said quietly, her Dragon helm tilting as she reached behind her neck. "I think we all need to check ourselves."
What followed was a nightmare of discovery.
Tumbler found his cysts along his inner right thigh, pulsing with swirling carnival colors that shifted between reality phases. The membrane was semi-transparent, revealing writhing patterns that seemed to move independently of his breathing. "Guess I've got a passenger now."
Zozo's cyst was on her Toy Frames Lower back, it gleamed with the same iridescent quality as her bubble projectiles. As she moved, it seemed to track her motion, bulging slightly as if something inside was trying to push its way out. "I don't want it; I don't want it on me!"
Lacey's cyst had grown on the inside of her left bicep of her Clockwork Knight. It pulsed in perfect rhythm with her heartbeat, its brass-colored membrane shot through with veins that moved like tiny gears beneath the surface.
Pip's was perhaps the most beautiful and therefore the most horrifying—a story-book illustration of a cyst, its surface covered in microscopic text that seemed to write and rewrite itself continuously. When she tried to read the words, they slipped away from comprehension like a half-remembered dream. "No, no, no… this isn't real."
And Hexi... Hexi's cyst was geometric perfection, a crystalline structure that seemed to exist in more dimensions than the eye could process. It hurt to look at directly, creating optical illusions that made reality seem to fold around its edges. "Look at the symmetry…"
"They're all different," she whispered, her analytical mind struggling to process what her sensors were telling her. "Each one corresponds to our frame types, our chromatic signatures. But the biological integration is complete—they're not parasites. They're... part of us now."
"Since when?" Lacey demanded, though her tactical systems were already running probability matrices. "How long have we been carrying these things?"
"Unknown," Xylogram interjected, its voice carrying a new note of concern. "However, I am detecting synchronized biorhythms across all six growths. They appear to be... communicating."
As if responding to the AI's words, all six cysts began to pulse in perfect unison. Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum. Like a heartbeat shared across six bodies, a rhythm that was definitely not human.
"They're alive," Tumbler said, his phase-shifting abilities making his cysts flicker in and out of visibility. "Whatever these things are, they're growing. Changing. And they're connected to each other."
Zozo reached toward her cysts, then stopped herself. "Connected to what else, though? Are we... are we turning into something like those poor bastards down there?"
The question hung in the air like a toxic cloud. Around them, the 500 survivors watched with growing alarm as their saviors discovered they might be compromised, might be changing, might be becoming the very thing they sought to fight.
Dagger stepped forward, her restored humanity lending weight to her words. "I was converted once," she said quietly. "I remember... fragments. The entity doesn't just take—it gives something back. Something that changes you from the inside out."
"But we destroyed it," Pip protested. "We saw it shatter across dimensions."
"Did we?" Hexi's analytical mind was already racing through possibilities. "Or did we simply... redistribute it? Fragment it into smaller pieces that could integrate more subtly?"
The cysts pulsed again, stronger this time, and for just a moment, each of the Six felt something that wasn't quite their own thoughts—a whisper of alien logic, a hint of purpose that felt both foreign and disturbingly familiar.
Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum.
"We need to move," Lacey decided, her tactical systems overriding her personal horror. "Whatever's happening to us, we can't help anyone if we're stuck here analyzing it. The rescue mission proceeds."
"But what if we're compromised?" Bunk asked, his massive frame trembling slightly as his cyst pulsed in response to his elevated stress. "What if we're carrying the infection to them?"
"Then we deal with that when it happens," Lacey replied grimly. "Right now, eleven thousand people are counting on us. We don't abandon them because we might be compromised."
The cysts pulsed once more, as if approving of her decision.