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[b][u][center]Queen by Accident

For thebodyswapeur

By Draconicon[/center][/u][/b]

When the xenomorphs reared their heads, there was only one force that was willing to go in and take them out. The Colonial Marines were the only group in the human military that had any experience in dealing with them – albeit mostly bad – and the minutes that a colony went dark with no messages, there was usually only one reason. When the colony on TH-101 stopped sending messages, there was no slow build-up to their response. The Marines were dispatched immediately.

Now, they were on a dropship, falling towards the planet at ship-shaking speeds. John grunted as he was rattled back and forth in his seat, clutching his rifle with fingers that were shivering from the cold. He looked around the rest of his squad, saw that they were all looking back with various degrees of hopelessness.

He didn’t blame them. At least a third of them were probably going to die on this mission. There had never been a bug-hunting mission that had gone without casualties.

“Why can’t we just blow this fucker from orbit, sir?” Wright called out from the back of the dropship. “Company saying we can’t make their expensive toys go boom?”

“That’s the shape of it, Private,” the Sergeant in charge said. “Don’t want to start all over building their colony. Not like there’s gonna be much left after what the bugs did, but hey, that’s why we get paid the big bucks.”

“That’s why you get paid the big bucks, you mean,” another marine, Toller, called out, laughing. “We get shit for this.”

“Well, shoulda gone to officer school, Toller.”

The squad numbered ten men, though he only knew the Sergeant, Toller, and Wright. The others were recruits that were going on their first mission. Not the sort of people that John wanted to be on a bug-hunt with. He would have preferred lifers in the Corp, people that knew what they were doing, not people that were getting their boots bloody for the first time.

“Strap yourselves in, everyone. We’re about to break lower atmosphere,” the Sergeant shouted back.

John grabbed the straps around his chest, and gripped his weapon that much tighter. The ‘fun’ was going to be starting soon.

#

The squad split up into five teams, two men each. They were all accompanied by a floating drone that would keep the team views beamed back to the dropship, and the dropship would communicate anything suspicious back to the other teams. John had Toller with him, and he hoped that would be enough to keep him alive once they found the main bundle of bugs.

With a colony that spread out from a central plaza, and more buildings than one could easily shake a stick at, he and Toller took the cafeteria. John pushed the door open while Toller covered the opening crack, and then they stepped inside.

The large building was dark. No surprise, considering the rough weather outside. The climate controllers were holding for now, but only because the power was shut down to the rest of the complex. Oxygen outside flooded into the sealed room, and the two soldiers met each other’s gaze. The place had been hermetically sealed for who knew how long. Survivors were going to be near to nonexistent without oxygen.

Toller propped the door open with a wedge of plastique, allowing the room to fill with air before the two of them stepped inside. The long, modular tables that the colonists would have eaten from were covered with dust and, here and there, slime. Bug slime, for that matter.

They pointed their weapons up, dragging the flashlights at the tips over the ceiling. No sign of anything moving, but that didn’t mean anything. There were still slime stalagmites all over the place, markers of the xenomorphs coming through and building up a new colony of their own in here.

“Where do you want to check first?” John muttered.

“Let’s check the replicators.”

“Good idea.”

They walked with Toller in the lead and John keeping his weapon pointed behind them. The drone floated between them, a rotating camera spinning all around. So far, there hadn’t been any updates from the other team, so John could only assume it was quiet in the rest of the colony, as well. He hoped that was the case; if they were lucky, maybe the xenomorphs had already failed to produce a queen and they only had a few drones left around.

The cafeteria was quiet beyond the common lot of things, and John didn’t like it. Even in a dead place, there should have been something. Rattling machinery, some bit of sparking life in the wires, some sort of rattle in the vents that meant that the rats were moving around or some other pest that had moved in after the humans had moved out. The total quiet save for their breathing was not comforting. If anything, it made him all the more paranoid.

“This is John; we’re sweeping the cafeteria,” he said, pressing his hand to the side of his helmet. “Anyone see anything yet?”

“[i]This is the Sergeant. We’re in Life Support. Not much living here anymore…[/i]”

“Anything?”

“[i]Just a lot of bodies, and a lot of open eggs.[/i]”

“Fuck.”

John shook his head, looking over his shoulder. He and Toller probably had the same expression. So much for a lack of a queen.

The replicators were just behind a metal screen between the cafeteria and the back rooms, and both Marines paused at the sheet. They looked at each other again, and John pulled a grenade from his belt. He laid it on the counter, then gripped the edge of the metal sheet. If something was on the other side, they could shove that in and shut the sheet again, blow it up from the other side. They slowly pulled the sheet up –

“Hsssssssss.”

And immediately heard the tell-tale hiss of something that they really didn’t want to see. The two Marines’ eyes met again, and John shoved the grenade through the gap. They slammed the sheet down, and he hit the button on his belt to set the grenade off.

The shockwave rattled the walls, but the building was built sturdy enough to handle the blast. The hissing on the other side stopped, but there hadn’t been a death shriek or anything else.

Toller tapped his helmet.

“Dropship, we found something. What’d the drone see?”

“[i]Processing. It seems to have seen the crest of a xenomorph queen.[/i]”

“…Shit.”

John gritted his teeth, shaking his head. If that had been a queen, then there was no way in fuck that it was dead. A grenade might have killed off a drone, even a Praetorian, but a queen? Not with a hide that thick, and not with her being so hard to kill in the first place. The only thing that they might have done was clear out a few of her eggs, if she was keeping them back there in the first place.

“[i]This is the Sergeant. Dropship, blueprints. Is there any way out of that back room?[/i]”

“[i]Processing. Yes. Two back doors.[/i]”

“[i]Shit. Alright, everyone converge on the cafeteria. John, Toller, I want eyes on this thing. See if there’s any damage, and make fucking sure that it can’t get out.[/i]”

Death sentence, then. They were essentially the bait to keep the queen from running off. They couldn’t seal the doors, they didn’t have the equipment for that, so they had to stick around and ensure that the queen smelled something, wanted something, so that the rest of the team had time to come around with more weapons.

John should have expected that.

“Fucking hell,” Toller muttered, gripping the edge of the sheet. “Had to be today, didn’t it?”

“Well, if it wasn’t today, it’d be tomorrow.”

“Yeah, but then we’d have another twenty-four hours.”

“Yeah, twenty-four hours of shit,” he muttered, grabbing his side. “Might as well get this shit over with. On three?”

“One, two, THREE!”

They yanked the plate open and swung themselves over the counter, guns already pointed forward and up. They scanned the room, saw the broken ovipositor – [i]shit[/i] – and the goo that had come from it, slime that soaked the floor and almost sent Toller sliding to his doom. John brought his gun up –

And there was the queen, clinging to the ceiling.

“Ceiling!” he shouted, pulling the trigger.

The queen’s crest caught most of the bullets, and she turned her head down so that she was able to take it along the top of her head rather than along her spine. The ricochets bounced all over the room, one of them hitting him in the leg and taking him off his feet.

“John!”

“Get her!”

He screamed as he kept pulling the trigger, shooting at the bitch as she crawled and skittered across the ceiling several dozen feet up. She was pulling panels free and dropping them, throwing them at him and Toller, disrupting their shots. It was easy to forget that the xenomorphs had intelligence, and even easier to forget that the queens had it in spades.

Even as he did his best to keep moving with the bullet lodged in his thigh, however, he noticed something. The back room held more than the cafeteria replicators. Other machines were stashed high on the walls, including things that he had never seen before. Ones that looked like spheres of energy, and cylinders that burned and buzzed with energy.

Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

Toller got off a lucky shot, firing his grenade launcher at the ceiling. It bounced off a hole that the queen was running for, and then exploded right in her face. She screamed, shocked into letting go of the ceiling.

“Take that, bitch!” Toller shouted.

Unfortunately, as the queen fell, she recovered. Her limbs flailed about, grabbing for something, anything, and she finally managed to get a grip on something, alright. Something that John had seen stacked against the wall. Something that didn’t stop her fall, but did get pulled along with her.

“Oh, fuck, oh FUCK!”

The Marines tried to run, but it was too late. The queen brought it down with a scream, and when the great glass ball hit the floor, it exploded with white lightning. John barely had time to scream before he blacked out.

#

When he opened his eyes again, he felt…wrong. The world was spinning, but it was more than that. He could feel the sparks and currents of things, almost like there was this whistling wind in the distance, like a storm all around him. It gave him a headache, and he grunted.

Or at least, he thought he grunted. It sounded more like a dull growl, or a soft roar, something that shouldn’t be coming from him.

The Marine reached for his leg, only to realize that felt wrong, too. His arm…his arm felt like it was bruised up and down the limb, like there were little pockmarks in it. More than that, he didn’t feel the pressure of his body-armor against his skin, nor did he feel the way that he normally did when he moved his arm. No muscle pressure, no tightness, no rewarding thickness for all that PT that he had done.

[i]The fuck…the fuck is…going on…[/i]

He strained to open his eyes, but only managed one. When he did, he wanted to scream, but his voice didn’t work right.

There was a great, black arm extending out in front of him. It had to be the queen from the size of the hand, the sharpness of those fingers. Yet, even as he tried to move his hand to push him back, he watched it move.

He froze, and the arm froze.

[i]…No fucking way…[/i]

No, no, that wasn’t possible. There were a shit ton of things that could happen in the wide reaches of space, and there were fucking weird things out there, too, that could happen to people, but this was one of the freakiest.

[i]No way…no way…[/i]

Tentatively, he flexed a finger. The thick middle finger of the alien hand, black, chitinous, and [i]wrong[/i], did the same motion. He curled his hand into a fist, and he watched the black, not-quite-flesh do the same thing. A little whimper rose in his throat, and it came out as a hiss through a mouth that did not want to move right.

The more that he stared at his outstretched arm, the more that he was aware of other things that were wrong, other things that were different. He could feel that there was another set of arms against his chest, smaller and curled up against him almost as if they were hiding. He could use them, control them, but they were tired and damaged, probably from –

No, no, there was no way that this was real. He was covered up, the queen fallen on him, and…and…

He tried to reach his other hand up to his head, trying to find his helmet, but all he found was a crest. A long, bruised crest that ran down over the back of his head and then along his spine as he twisted his head back.

[i]No…no![/i]

John pushed himself up, and shards of metal and glass and who knew what else went flying. He saw them coming off his hardened skin, realized that it could have, should have broken through, but the alien flesh –

[i]I’m not one of them. I’m not one of them![/i]

He screamed, and it came out as the roaring shriek of an alien queen. The disgusting, spitting action of a xenomorph’s second jaw came flying out of his mouth, and he felt it and saw it at the same time, like a horrible feeling of a tongue being spat out of one’s mouth, if one’s tongue had more solidity to it and could click along a sliding bar.

He couldn’t even talk. He didn’t have lips, didn’t have anything that would let him make the right shape for words. All he could do was roar and hiss and –

Oh, [i]FUCK[/i] everything hurt. His body ached, bruised and battered, and he could feel the impact of falling from so high on the body. Both secondary arms were almost useless, and one of his legs barely wanted to move. His tail was alright, but it was stiff and sore, probably from having fallen on it.

Tail. God. He looked over his shoulder at the deadly thing, at the tip that was so pointed and sharp that it was almost bladed, at the way that it moved in a frenzied, frantic way that made him feel like everything was [i]wrong.[/i]

Even trying to stand and move felt wrong. Double-jointed legs meant that movement forward was like trying to walk on springs, and movement backward just felt off, tricky, difficult. He tried to step back, and ended up falling sideways, the great bulk of the xenomorph queen’s body slamming into the wall and nearly knocking it down.

[i]Fuck…fuck…fuck…[/i]

He took a step forward –

Crunch. Squish.

And looked down. A human body was down there, a human body that had been completely crushed beneath the claws and toes of his new leg. He slowly pulled them back, dragging organs out with the claws, and he saw…

He saw his name on the chest of the uniform.

That was his body.

There was no going back.

Something rattled further off, and he forced himself to walk forward. It felt like every step was going to send him flying into a charge, and he had to force the new body – the new alien, ugly, horrible body – to move the way that he wanted it to. There were instincts that told him how to keep his balance, how to use his tail to keep himself from falling over, everything, but they were slow, and it was hard to tell what the right ones to listen to were, and which ones were the ones telling him to kill and rip and tear and break things.

The sounds were coming from Toller’s helmet, which lay about five feet away from Toller himself. The other Marine was dead, impaled with a glass shard as big as his arm and gone straight through his chest. The helmet, however, was still going. John, the alien, whatever, reached down and picked it up, listening to the sounds coming from it.

“[i]- the Sergeant. Everyone to the cafeteria, now, now, now![/i]”

They were coming, and they were going to be bringing everything that they had to rip him apart. No, to rip the queen apart. They wanted the queen dead.

But the queen was dead. He was the queen now.

Which meant that they wanted to kill him.

John lowered the helmet from the side of his head, slowly staring to the side. The drone was still there. The drone was watching him, showing him to the rest of the group. Dropship would be paying attention, seeing him noticing it.

[i]What can I do? What can I do?[/i]

There was only one choice. He could let himself die, or he could try and survive.

[i]Do I want to die?[/i]

He’d been willing to die in the line of duty, been willing to take someone out or fight to keep them contained. That was part of being a Marine. But now…

Now, he was an alien. And he was the one that had to die. And suddenly, he wasn’t so sure that he was willing to just lay down and die. A shiver, but not a human shiver, went down his spine. There was something…something different there. Something like anger, like indignation, like fury.

It was like the body of the queen was infuriated at the idea that someone would try and kill it, and it wanted to fight back, to push them away, to make sure that it would never, ever happen.

For all that he had been human, for all that he knew Wright and the Sergeant…

He didn’t want to die. And that meant fighting.

He stared at the drone for another second or two, then followed his instinct. The tail lashed out, slashing through the air. The drone tried to move, but the queen’s body was faster, and the tail too sharp to do anything but destroy.

The drone was spitted on the end of the tail, and he tossed it to the ground. They would be here soon.

#

The door to the cafeteria came flying open with an explosive thud, as he’d known would happen. The Sergeant liked the shock value that they created, and he saw the next step. Acid grenades, blowing up on the floor and in the air, creating a rain and a dead zone in the middle of the room. If he’d been there, he would have been subject to great pain, possibly death.

It was a good thing that he wasn’t.

The next round were the smart guns, aimed at the ceiling and spitting tracer rounds and explosive bullets. They ripped through the stalagmites up there, cutting through the roof, even, in an effort to deny him any cover there.

It was a good thing that he wasn’t up there, either.

John waited, hidden behind and under the cluster of tables that he had pulled together after the drone had been destroyed. The Marines would have an idea of what was in here, and that something had changed, but unless the dropship had been paying attention earlier, it wouldn’t know quite what had happened. All they would know was that something was different.

And who was to say that the tables hadn’t been clustered before, pulled together or knocked aside by the bugs during the initial infestation?

The remaining eight members of the team walked through the door, their weapons aimed and primed at the different corners of the room. The Sergeant, a taller, Asian man, stepped through at the head of them, carrying one of the waist-mounted smart guns, and he turned it this way and that, slowly scanning the room.

John stayed as still as he could, and he found that surprisingly easy in the queen’s body. She was built for this, for holding still, for staying silent. She was meant for stationary activity, despite all the deadly things that were built into her body. She was meant to give the eggs protection, and nothing more.

“Slow advance, eyes peeled,” the Sergeant ordered. “The queen already got Toller and John, let’s not lose anyone else.”

He didn’t move, didn’t even think of anything, but he felt something. The pain in his crest, that whistling, uncomfortable sensation that he’d been feeling ever since he woke up, was starting to change. Something was moving in the distance, almost turning that whistling feeling in his head into a different tone, a different sound.

And there were other things moving around, other things that were changing the tones in his head. They were…

John remembered something that had been theorized, that the queen’s crest was her way of communicating with the drones and other members of her nest. Was he…was he feeling other drones in the facility? Were there others out there, still alive, coming to their queen even now?

[i]No, please…please, this is bad enough…I don’t want to be…I just want to live through this…[/i]

The Marines marched through the room, pushing the different tables and obstacles out of the way. They moved in twos and threes, at least one person always covering the Marine moving something out of the way. They were cautious, now, making sure that they did everything by the book.

[i]I don’t want to kill you…[/i]

But he didn’t want to die, either. And if he didn’t want to die, then there was only one way to do this.

He waited until they were on opposite sides of the acid pool that they’d created in the middle of the room, waiting for them to be focused more on the broken tables and busted furniture than themselves.

Then, he struck.

One table went flying, striking Wright on the left side of the pool, and as he went down, another long table followed, taking his partner with him. John leaped from the wreckage of the tables, pulling one up and running forward with it in front of him, catching the smart bullets of the Sergeant as he did.

He bowled them over, knocking the men to the side, and pulling their weapons away, throwing them into the pool of acid. The smart gun, the pulse rifles, even the grenade launchers went in.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

The sudden explosions rattled the cafeteria, almost bringing pieces of it down, and John took advantage of that to run for the front door. He couldn’t take them all on. Not easily. That was why he’d disarmed them in the first place, removing the most potent weapons so that he could make a run for it.

“Get her! GET HER!” the Sergeant shouted.

It was too late. John already knew what he needed to do, and he already knew how he could save himself and avoid getting killed. He knew how he could get away from here, away from all the Marines that would want him dead.

Away from this.

He ran out of the cafeteria, managed to get out the door –

BOOM!

The plastique that had propped the door open. Someone must have wired it while they were waiting at the door.

John found that the exoskeleton of the alien queen was still durable enough to take the explosion, but it still sent him flying head over heels. He went rolling down the ramp that led from the central plaza to the cafeteria, slumping down in pain and exhaustion.

The Marines were coming out, now, and they had their guns – what ones they had left – primed and aimed at him. One still had a pulse rifle, but the others were limited to pistols and grenades. They advanced slowly, and he could hear them talking.

“It’s too close to the dropship.”

“If we have to, we’ll blow it up. We can call in a new one.”

“From out here?”

“We can’t let it get away, can’t let it rest.”

The Sergeant was a dedicated one, and he’d known that right from the start. Anyone else would be holding back, wanting to make sure that they didn’t blow up their only escape, while the Sergeant was willing to go that distance if it meant wiping out the queen and her hive.

[i]Wonder if he’d be so gung-ho if he knew it was me…[/i]

Not that it mattered now. John groaned as he tried to move, finding it harder and harder. The exoskeleton did a lot to keep the worst of the damage from getting through, but he and Toller had done quite a number on the queen before he had taken her body, and now, he was bruised further from the explosion that had hit him from underneath. He struggled to move one arm, then one leg.

The Marines came closer and closer, and the Sergeant held two grenades in hand. The rest of the men were right behind him, armed with whatever they had managed to grab that hadn’t gone into the acid.

For all that they were trying to kill him, John had to admit. The rookies were doing better than they had any right to. He felt sorry for them, in a way.

Because…he had already won. They were in reach.

Once more, he stabbed with his tail. He didn’t aim for a person, he aimed for the grenades, and he got them. The Sergeant looked shocked as could be, eyes wide, but before the others could fire, John flicked the grenades back, making them land right in the middle of the group.

Their bodies shielded the dropship from the concussive blast, and the shrapnel was eaten by their armor and their bodies. They slumped down, their tight formation killing them almost instantly.

Wincing the entire time, John walked around the cluster of bodies, stepping on heads and making them pop one by one. He hated it, but if he was going to survive, he needed to make sure that there were no survivors that might report him to the rest of the Colonial Marines. If they came after him again, he needed them to assume that he was just another queen, not someone that had been this competent.

The dropship was locked, but all it took was a code to open the back door. He stumbled in, shutting the landing plank behind him. The other drone feelings through the crest were getting closer, but he wasn’t going to let them come with him. No way in hell. No. Way. In. Hell.

The claw fingers made manipulating things in the cockpit more difficult, but thankfully, he only had to push a few buttons. The ship started to rise, the legs coming back up into the ship. From here, he could make his way back to the orbital craft. There were only a few people there, people that he might be able to scare off into the dropship and send back to the planet. And if he couldn’t…

Well, the queen’s body was strong, and with some rest, it would likely be more than recovered. It was terrifying just how capable it was, and how horrifying it was at the same time. It was meant for killing, meant for destruction.

John did his best to try and feel some hope for finding a way back to his own body, or at least, into an android body, or something, but the longer that he stayed in the queen’s form, the less that hope remained.

[i]Try…[/i] he told himself. [i]Try.[/i]

That was all he could do.

[b][u][center]The End[/center][/u][/b]

Summary: John is a Colonial Marine, part of a squad sent in to try and hunt down a xenomorph hive. It doesn’t go well.

Tags: no sex, human, xenomorph, alien, body swapping, fighting, sci-fi, horror,