AVP Prey 5

He switched to the electronic eyes that watched
the Hard Meat queen in the nest they had made for
her deep in the belly of the ship. The image blossomed on the plate in front of him. Tall she was, the queen, twice his own height, massive even in the reduced gen-pull of the ship, probably four times his weight. Black as a nestcleaner's hands, gleaming dully under the lights, the queen looked like a giant zabin bug, with the addition of a long segmented tail and smaller supplemental arms jutting from her torso. Her comb rose high like antlers, flat and flaring, and she had two sets of needle-toothed jaws, one nesting inside the other and able to extrude a span from her mouth to grab like pincers.

Freed, she would be a formidable opponent, fast, powerful, intelligent. But she was not free, the queen. She was bound in bands of dlex, wound in restraints that could resist the sharpest blades, the hottest fires, the strongest acids. Bound and made into nothing more than an egg-laying captive, subject to the will of the ship's Leader.-pg.4 chpt.1