The Moon was not an inert ball of rock. It was an organism screaming in clockwork agony.
When the deep pit at the southern end of the nursery cave burst, the sound didn’t travel through the empty pocket of space. It traveled as a violent, bone-shattering ground-shaking through the solid dark rock floor beneath their boots. The bedrock heaved like the deck of a storm-tossed frigate in heavy seas, throwing Miller’s riflemen to their knees and sending hairline fractures racing across the granite support posts supporting the three-mile-high ceiling.
From the glowing depths of the mantle magma trench, the Void-Infected Lunar Brood-Mother rose into the light.
She wasn’t a mere beast. She was a living, underground siege engine of world-ending scale.
Over three hundred and twenty meters from her grinding jaw prow to her segmented ovipositor tail, the Brood-Mother occupied nearly a third of the cave’s horizon. Her dorsal back shell was a jagged mountain range of glass-fused lunar dark rock fused with thick, rainbow-bright sheets of black void-hard shell. Along her flanks, hundreds of segmented high-pressure limbs—each the thickness of an ancient redwood tree, tipped with diamond-toothed digging claws—clawed into the earth-shaking fault lines of the mantle. It anchored her titanic bulk directly to the planetoid’s core.
