Deathcap
Author: Lara Elena Donnelly
Date: 2026-02-24 23:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction & Fantasy; Fiction & Literature; Horror; Science Fiction; Published: 25 Feb 2026; Tor Publishing Group
Description: Two space marines trapped in a doomed spaceship confront the desires that will destroy them both.
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

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It’s been seventy-two hours since you and Baker barricaded yourselves in med bay six. You’re supposed to be sleeping in shifts but the rota is starting to break down and right now you’re both propped up against the operating table, shoulders touching, heads nodding, red-eyed and grimy and laughing all the way to the gallows.

“Spinach pakora,” says Baker. “The cheap stuff, from the divey place around the corner from my flat.”

You can feel the crunch of the batter, the tickle of spices in the back of your nose. You close your eyes for just a second. They’re dry from the stale, recycled air and your eyelids stick. It’s painful. You don’t want to open them again.

“Deep fried morel mushrooms.” You blink up into the fake blue daylight of the full-spectrum lamps, which are supposed to make you feel awake. The tubes hum on the edge of your hearing.

“Expensive, innit?” Baker asks. “Like, they use those in—” he pauses, tucks his chin and lowers his eyelashes, raises one limp-wristed hand—“haute cuisine.”You shrug. “I guess. My grandma used to go out in the woods and pick ’em. Fried ’em in Crisco.”

Baker lets his head fall back against the gurney. His Adam’s apple bobs beneath his stubble as he swallows. Once, twice. “You know there’s this mushroom, it’s poisonous. Only a couple of people who’ve eaten it have survived. And they all said it was fucking delicious. Best thing they ever ate.”

“Used to have a friend who’d say everything’s edible, at least once.”

Baker snorts. You giggle. You’re both about to have hysterics but then somewhere, not too far off, there’s a metallic crash that echoes through the ship. No gunfire, no voices: Maybe there’s nobody left to shoot or scream. Which means you two are the only people left to do either. Which means that thing is probably looking for you.

Baker swallows again, snickers low and kind of crazy.

“Hey Nowak,” he says. “Would you eat an alien?”

“Maybe. Depends, I guess.”

He jerks his chin at the med bay door. “Would you eat that thing?”

You consider it. You’re so tired nothing seems strange anymore. “I dunno. Bugs are supposed to taste like lobster.”

“Yeah, but. Ain’t a bug though. Is it? It’s like that fucked up crab Bautista showed us.”

Bautista said the thing was like this kind of parasite that gets in a certain kind of crab, wraps all around its brain so it can control its limbs and make it move, and then…She called it a parasitic castrator. She showed pictures.

Could you eat a crab like that? Could you eat the thing inside of it? Bautista could have told you, if she wasn’t dead. You hope she’s dead, anyway. Last time you saw her she was pale and sweating, belly swollen up, coveralls busted at the side seams and patches of lymph and blood where her skin had broken open. She was past talking—just making this low, animal groan. Bautista with her fancy fucking degrees, she would have known for sure if you could eat that thing. Not that that’s what you want to do.

You wish you’d shot her. There had probably been time to shoot her. You know there was time to shoot her because you just stood there for a second like an idiot and stared, thought about what was going to happen to her. She explained it to all of you, clinical and terrified, after the thing took out its first fire team and only one guy made it back, wild-eyed, sweaty, half nuts. After he raped the tech who was trying to draw his blood—crying all the time, apologizing, not stopping. Bautista showed you all the surveillance footage. After the split and weeping skin stretched over the tech’s belly started to move like something in a nature documentary. After Bautista held the tech’s hand while he died, or as close as she could hold it through the containment chamber’s gloves.

The other guy died too—the rapist. Different way, also bad. But nobody held his hand.

“You think Bautista’s dead yet?” you ask Baker, wondering if you sound normal.

“Jesus,” says Baker, who definitely doesn’t. “I fucking hope so.” He pauses, pinches the bridge of his nose. “You know she had two kids?”

Yeah, you know. She had one of those annoying fucking 3D frames in her lab that cycled through clips of her family. Two boys, and the older one looked like her. They were living in base housing with her wife and dog. The wife would get her pension.

Sometimes you wondered who was the real mom, the one who’d held the kids inside her body. What that conversation had been like. How they’d done it. You thought, sometimes, about the cold lab table, the jelly, the catheter. It got you wet. You knew this was weird. It wasn’t as weird as some of the other shit that got you wet.

Bautista gave her little presentation on those 3D frames too, in the lab, because the briefing room was outside the blast door they had sealed to keep the fucking thing outside. She wanted you to know what you were going after. You didn’t really care, since you already knew what would happen if you fucked up.

“You ever want kids, Nowak?” There’s sweat at Baker’s hairline, darkening the stubble of his crew cut. His pupils are fucking huge and there’s a flush crawling up his neck. Maybe he’s getting sick. You put your hand out to feel his forehead and he flinches away first, then presses into your touch. So maybe he’s just horny. Fight, flight, freeze, or fuck.

He’s not bad-looking; had his nose broken one too many times, but it’s not like you haven’t. You like the way he talks, like the old movies you used to watch with your grandpa: Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Ian McShane.

Guys aren’t the only ones who get battle boners.

“Nah,” you say, because you don’t know what else to tell him. You never did want kids, not really, but more than once you’d put your mouth to somebody’s ear, so hard your teeth mashed the ridges of cartilage flat, and you’d growled “Put a baby in me, fuck.”

A couple of them thought you meant it: poor schmucks trying to start a family while the world burned down around everybody’s ears. Who saw the uniform and still somehow thought you’d stick around to raise some unlucky kid who’d die in a mudslide or a heatwave or a water riot. And it would be their fault for knocking you up. Your fault for asking for it. For not having the balls to tell anybody what you really wanted.

It was never about kids.

You realize you’re staring at Baker’s ear. The tip is flushed with red. A bead of sweat makes its crooked way across his temple. You reach out and swipe it from his skin. His breath hitches. You pull your hand away.

“I always—” His voice is hoarse, creaky. He clears his throat and starts again. “I always did.”

“But?”

He sniffs, rubs the back of his forearm across his sweaty forehead. “Never found the right person.”

In the silence you both look, involuntary, at the med bay doors. It’s quiet out there now: just the soft groan of the ship’s hull, compromised by the attack. Is that thing just waiting for you to make a run for it? How many more of them are out there now that you two are the only people left? You imagine dozens of them, hundreds, crouched outside the med bay doors, between you and the evac shuttles.

That would be worse than getting sucked into space when the ship goes. Because then you might make it back home with a lot of new friends.

“My guess is, at least three life cycle stages,” Bautista told your platoon—what was left of them. “One, reproductive stage.” 3D rendering of the dead guy, the rapist, naked on a table in the morgue so you could see what she meant by reproductive stage, see what the thing had done to him. One of the guys in your unit made a noise. Bautista ignored him. “Two,” she said. “The eggs.” A picture of the tech, alive but barely. “Three…” She jerked her head at the blast door. “They come out small; we don’t know how long it takes them to get big.”

You hated how thinking about it made you feel. Not the part where you got eaten alive from the inside out but…the things that came before. You wanted to apologize to the dead people for this fucked up stubborn jealousy you felt when you thought of the slick weight inside of them, the shine of their stretched out skin.

“Maybe you weren’t trying hard enough,” you say to Baker now, your voice two pitches too high, and you hope he thinks it’s panic. Funny you still care, at this juncture. “For kids, I mean. You ever think about, you know, fuckin’…hijacking a spaceship? Seems like it’s working out great for that guy.” Girl. Whatever.

“Ha ha,” says Baker, just like that. Like he’s saying the words, not laughing.

“What,” you say, because you don’t like the sound of it.

He rubs the back of his neck, opens his mouth, starts to answer but shakes his head. Now he really laughs, a sound like he got punched in the gut, and says, “Hey, Nowak, would you fuck an alien?”

“Aw, come on,” you say, because this is the tired joke all the sniggering recruits make in boot camp. But the blush comes up instantly now, just like it did then.

“Oh shit,” says Baker, breath hitching. “Nowak you perv, is that why you joined up?”

“No,” you say, and you hate how your anger makes you sound like a girl.

“Hey,” he says, “hey, it’s okay. Sorry, I didn’t mean—” and then his arm is around you and you’re crying, which you also hate. But it’s finally dawning on you that you are actually going to die out here. For real. You’re going to die hiding in the med bay with Baker, if you’re lucky, and you’re worried he’s going to think you’re weird.

That makes you laugh too—cry-laugh—because it all seems so stupid suddenly. All the protestation, the fights you got into with the other recruits. Lying to all those guys who wanted to knock you up about what got you off. Ashamed of wanting what you wanted, instead of what everybody seemed to think you should.

You know your body isn’t made for it. But your body isn’t made for the vacuum of space either, or for nine Gs of pressure in a banking fighter, or for carrying 120 pounds of shit on your back while you sprint through live fire. It isn’t made for drinking straight hot sauce, or playing chicken in the airlock. But you did all those things and more and you liked it. You liked knowing your body could take it. You liked that other people valued your body, desired your body, for what it could endure.

You’re getting a patch of snot on Baker’s coveralls. The skin of his neck is close to your mouth. And then it’s on your mouth, or your mouth is on it: open and sloppy and smearing spit through his sweat and grime.

“I would,” you say into the taste of him. It blows out of you, past the busted pressure valve of giving a shit. “Baker. I’d let an alien fuck me.”

He makes a different type of gut-punched sound this time, and tangles his hand in the top of your grown-out crew cut.

“Nowak,” says Baker, voice all soft and weirdly tender. He’s half talking, half kissing your temple. His teeth scrape your eyebrow. “Nowak I gotta tell you something, okay?”

Whatever it is, you don’t care. You take his ear in your mouth, his whole ear.

“Hang on,” he says. “Nowak, wait a minute,” and he’s pushing you away but still kissing your face with teeth and tongue and you’re grabbing at the zipper of his coveralls. He’s already got them rolled down to his hips—it’s hot in the ship, the reactor is critical, but his skin is hot too, he does have a fever—and you get the coveralls open and you reach down but he catches your wrist so hard it hurts.

“Nowak,” he says, too loud, biting off the K.

“Shit,” you say. Because now he doesn’t have to tell you. Now you know.

It doesn’t look anything like that fucked-up crab Bautista showed you. Not at all. It’s different from the dead guy in Bautista’s presentation, too, because Baker’s still alive. It is still alive. Your breath comes hard and fast through your nose and you can smell Baker, smell his sweat. But you can smell it too. A mineral, earthy tang, like the underside of a rock. Like well water. Like out back of your grandma’s house. Like mushroom hunting.

Answering a question you didn’t ask, Baker says: “Right before we linked up. It got Xie, then Salvador, then me. I killed them both but then I couldn’t…I couldn’t. Then you found me and—” He’s watching your mouth while he talks and then he’s not just watching anymore, and you’re helping.

“Nowak, no,” he’s saying, even while he’s got his tongue in your mouth, even while he’s getting his hands inside your coveralls and you’re trying to help him peel them off. “Nowak, I can’t do that to you. I can’t do that to you and…and what, shoot you after? You want me to do that? You want to do that to me?”

But you’ve been thinking about this too, and no, you don’t. You don’t want to make him do that, though you would if you had to. More like, you don’t want to find out how long you’ll stay alive and aware with a smoking tunnel through your skull. But if you are going to die, there’s some things you do want to find out first. You want to know what it feels like. You want to know if it hurts, and how much. You want to know if you can take it. You want to prove you can.

“Baker,” you say, “it doesn’t have to be like that.”

He blinks at you, glassy-eyed.

“It’s a med bay,” you say. “Opiates.” Then, choking out the joke like it’s funny: “I’ll do you if you do me.”

You see his surprise, then his relief. It makes him laugh for real, and you know you’re doing this for real, and it scares you.

You wonder if anybody ever went looking for those mushrooms, the ones Baker mentioned. If anybody ever got so curious they picked them and cooked them even though they knew what would happen. Probably everybody would think they were crazy. But maybe they got the last laugh, in the end.

“Fuck it,” you say, your palm slipping in the sweat on the back of Baker’s neck. You grip him harder, pull him close. “Baker. Listen.” You pant into his open mouth. “You can eat anything once. And you said you always wanted kids.”

About the Author

LARA ELENA DONNELLY is a graduate of the Alpha and Clarion writing workshops. Her fiction won the Dell Magazine Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy and she has been published in Icarus, Strange Horizons, Grim Corps, and Mythic Delirium. Donnelly has worked as professional fire performer, belly dancer, and is knowledgeable in aerial acrobatics and burlesque. Amberlough is her debut novel. You can sign up for email updates here.

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Contents

1. Title Page
2. Copyright Notice
3. Begin Reading
4. About the Author
5. Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Lara Elena Donnelly

Art copyright © 2025 Kei-Ella Loewe/Folio Art

Cover design © 2025 Christine Foltzer

The publisher of this book does not authorize the use or reproduction of any part of this book in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. The publisher of this book expressly reserves this book from the Text and Data Mining exception in accordance with Article 4(3) of the European Union Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790.