The Core: The Hive Daughter

5. Adopting a star eater

The hole that I had created to craft the Alpha cube was quite a bit larger for some reason. The reason came to me when I realized that I had used up more resident cr to hold the egg in place.

"I need to fix all this," I said offhand as I walked over to the wall of raw cr that took up half of the bay. Everything was getting very crowded with the addition of the egg, my Alpha cube, Silvers module, and the book, plus all of the gel piles of nest matter that my cr had managed to harvest while I was off tunneling.

"Invicta... did Tutor instruct my cr to lay off from collecting more Leva nest?" I asked as I realized just how dumb that command had been.

"Yes?" She answered with a worried tone of voice.

"Well, I will definitely have to thank her for the oversight in that manner then," I said when I remembered just how vast the nest had been. Had my cr kept at it, it could have stuffed my habitat to the brim thousands of times over and still had more nest material to collect at the end.

I found the cr hovering off to the side and mentally commanded it to remerge with me.

"Swarm, eat only what is required to completely absorb and assimilate the rest of the raw gold cr contained here," I said as I let it gorge itself on the gold pulp cubes I held inside me. I was about to step over towards the lone travel disk when I instead attempted to simply leave the cr body that I was existing in and to transfer myself into my habitat.

This was how I became the habitat. It took me a second to realize what I had done wrong above the noise of Invicta's laughing. To me it was as though I had simply jumped into the mining harvester body that I had been held captive inside, except in this case it was the habitat and I was able to see both inside the cargo bay and the quickly shrinking blue dwarf behind us.

"What did I do wrong?"

"Ahh. Thank you. That was hilarious. You did the right thing, you just need to enter the travel disk. All of the programming to transfer your mind into your habitat is in there." She replied.

"So... this can be my body as well?" I marveled as I watched my alien cr rapidly working through the raw gold. It was like watching a water balloon being filled up. There was no wasted effort, no human error, it simply flowed over the sides of the mass and went to work making it mine.

"Yes... and while it may seem to be an increase in size, trust me when I tell you that you will need it dearly." She said with foreboding in her windy voice.

"Why do you say it that way?" I asked as I noticed something that she seemed to be pointing out to me.

The Leva egg's pulsing had changed. It was no longer as steady and timed as it had been while inside the sun.

"What does that mean?"

"Mmmm... it means that you have about 3 days to hatch it or it will fuse and forever become inert."

"Well, I am off to take Leva hatching lessons then," I said as I mentally targeted the travel disk and tried to enter VR again. This time I was successful and found myself standing back in the area next to the navigation deck.

"Whew, it is good to be back!" I said as I clenched my hands, feeling the skin of my palms against my fingers. It was the strangest feeling to come back to, being inside a flesh and bone body. I knew it was in VR, but the realism was perfect from what I remembered it being like before.

So I had three days to induce the Leva offspring to hatch? We were currently traveling in real-time so that we could get back to the task of rescuing Silver's sister. I hoped that my delay in needing to harvest more cr wouldn't create a bad outcome in finding her module. I still had the coordinates as to her estimated path of travel while leaving under the guise of garbage from her Core but I also knew that real life happened and could lead to unforeseen events taking place.