She looked at the knife with a horrified expression and took a decisive step back.

The large man chuckled. “I’ll poke around a little bit, then.”

Lana’s face paled as he bent down and started hacking into the partially torn head. “I think I’ll go run a sensor sweep, make sure there are no more Warped in the area.”

“Good idea,” Nori said. She looked around at the milling people. “Keep me posted. I’m going to lend a hand here.”

***

It took several hours to clean-up after the battle. All the people who didn’t die outright recovered from their wounds, setting the final death toll at 212.

The bodies were carried up to the fort to be buried inside the Broodmother’s pit, marking the place they had given the ultimate sacrifice. As the last rays of the dwindling sun disappeared over the horizon, everyone gathered together to lay the dead into their final resting place and pay their respects.

One by one, people stepped forward and said a few words about the friends they had lost. Each of the fallen names was etched into the steel walls, forever commemorating their sacrifice.

“You know,” Martin spoke quietly over the comms as the eulogies continued. “You never explained what happened to your ship at the final moment - when it turned into a giant insect and took out the queen.”

“It was Nathan,” Lana said softly as she looked at the grieving people. “He saved us all.”

“He has a very special Path,” Nori explained. “It somehow upgraded the ship and fused it with an alien mining robot. The weapon that melted its head off is actually an excavation tool.”

Diamond shook his head. “You kids and your crazy adventures. So you mean to tell me that’s a mining ship now? With that big-ass cannon of yours? Looks more like an attack vessel to me.”

Bulco chuckled. “It’s just an asteroid cannon. It was designed to break apart space rocks to a minable size. I think.”

“But you have a point,” Nori said. “Unity is more than just a simple freighter now. It’s classified as a miner-freighter. Seeing her transformed shape finally explains that ‘mining’ section in the upgrade options. You know, our biggest problem before was getting enough resources to make the bullets, but now, we can probably just mine it ourselves …”

“We can have an unlimited supply of ammo,” Bulco finished.

Nori shook her head. “It’s much more than that.”

“She’s right,” Lana said. “If we can find valuable, hi-Tec minerals, we can sell or exchange them for new upgrades and tools for survival. We could help speed up a new Tech-based industrial age that would benefit everyone on Earth.”