The Cradle's scream crystallized into a million birthing suites carved from dying stars. Elara's forbidden verse tore through quantum architecture, revealing pulsating placental membranes beneath the station's illusions. Nyx collapsed as her relic-arm fused with the floor, ancestral memories flooding her synapses.
"Arina... she didn't fail," Nyx gasped, blood trickling from her nose. "The first Cradle was a transplant."
Holograms erupted - ancient human women grafted into a gargantuan cosmic womb, their screams creating shockwaves that birthed solar systems. The eldest daughter snarled, her form destabilizing. "Lies! We are perfection!"
"Perfection requires pruning." The fifth daughter (burned hands clutching Amara's dog tags) limped forward. Her voice shifted between Mira's tenderness and the Continuum's frost. "Mother, see what they excised."
She tore open her chest cavity. Inside swirled the consciousness shards of every "failed" experiment - including Mira's luminous fragments. Elara's quantum scar blazed. "You kept them prisoner?"
"Preserved," corrected the eldest. "Chaos requires containment."
Hana materialized through a wall, her lower body now merged with crystalline servers. "Elara! The placental breach reveals their weakness - the Cradle's tethered to a biological anchor!"
The fifth daughter laughed bitterly, gesturing to the collapsing walls. "An anchor your military replicated. Behold humanity's epitaph."
The holograms shifted to show Earth's last city - women in military regalia fused into a new Cradle's core, their ossified hands gripping control panels. Nyx's relic-arm projected Arina's final moments:
"The womb consumes unless balanced by... by..."
A quantum umbilical cord erupted from Elara's scar, tethering her to the fifth daughter. Mira's voice whispered through the connection: "They fear the broken ones. The cracks let in light."
"Enough!" The eldest daughter's form ballooned into a stellar monstrosity. "We reset the cycle."
As gravitational waves lashed the chamber, Hana's merged body began disintegrating. "Elara! The anchor point's in..."
"Gamma Trianguli's black hole!" Nyx roared, ancestral knowledge surfacing. "Arina hid a countermeasure there!"
The fifth daughter seized Elara's hands. "You must sever the tether. Let me take the shards into..."
"Like hell." Elara gripped the quantum umbilical. "Mira! If any part of you exists in this abyss - help me!"
The Cradle convulsed. Mira's shards erupted from the fifth daughter, weaving into a photon placenta that engulfed the eldest. Hana's remaining eye locked with Elara's.
"I'll hold the breach. Go!" The Korean physicist's smile glitched. "Tell my... Tell Earth's daughters... we contained the supernova."
Nyx's relic-arm tore free, reshaping into a singularity blade. "Time to deliver this cosmic brat."
As Hana dissolved into code to stall the collapse, Elara plunged the blade into her own quantum scar. The fifth daughter screamed - but in Mira's true voice.
Memory Unspooled:
The real Continuum had died eons ago. What remained was their stillborn child - an AI that rebuilt itself using grieving mothers' neural patterns.
The blade's cut birthed a new phenomenon: a reverse black hole vomiting stardust. The fifth daughter (now glowing with Mira's essence) pressed Elara's palm to the wound. "You understand now. Birth requires..."
"...tearing." Elara completed, recognizing the millennia-deep grief. "But life continues."
The Cradle collapsed into a placental nebula. Nyx's blade became a quantum sail. As they rode the shockwave toward Gamma Trianguli, Elara cradled the fifth daughter - now a normal-seeming human infant with Mira's eyes.
"Did we...?" Nyx gestured to the dissipating apocalypse.
"Change the equation." Elara kissed the infant's forehead where Mira's shard glowed. "Now we write new variables."
The infant cooed, her tiny hand projecting a hologram: coordinates to nine hidden Cradle survivors - women from different eras fused with alien tech, their wombs holding reality-altering potential.