Reactor, February 2026
Note: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault.
“Deathcap” is a tense, claustrophobic science fiction short story set aboard a doomed spaceship overrun by a parasitic alien creature. The narrative unfolds in second person, placing the reader directly in the perspective of Nowak, a space marine who, along with her fellow marine Baker, has been barricaded in med bay six for seventy-two hours as the only apparent survivors of the alien attack.
The story opens with the two exhausted soldiers keeping each other awake by talking about food — comfort foods from home, mundane and specific. Baker mentions a poisonous mushroom (the titular deathcap) that only a handful of people have survived eating, yet those survivors all described it as the most delicious thing they ever tasted. This detail becomes the story’s central metaphor: the allure of something deadly, the desire to consume what will destroy you.
The alien threat is gradually revealed through the soldiers’ grim conversation. The creature operates as a parasitic organism, taking over its host’s body and compelling them toward reproductive behavior. A scientist named Bautista had briefed the platoon on the alien’s life cycle — a reproductive stage, an egg stage, and a juvenile stage — before she herself fell victim. The horror is rendered with clinical precision: a soldier under the alien’s influence assaulted a crewmember, and both ultimately died in grotesque ways. Nowak reflects that she hopes Bautista is dead by now rather than still suffering.
Amid this terror, the story explores Nowak’s inner life with surprising intimacy. She grapples with a long-suppressed sexual fascination — a desire to be physically overtaken, to push her body past its limits — that she has spent years hiding and being ashamed of. This desire, which she frames alongside her other extreme physical challenges (carrying heavy loads under fire, drinking hot sauce, playing chicken in the airlock), is not presented as pathological but as consistent with how she understands herself: someone who values what her body can endure.
The emotional and erotic tension between Nowak and Baker escalates as the ship’s end draws nearer. When Nowak reaches for Baker, she discovers he has already been infected by the alien. The revelation recontextualizes everything. Rather than fleeing or shooting him — the rational survival response — Nowak chooses something else entirely. The med bay has opiates. They agree, in a darkly tender exchange, to face what’s coming on their own terms.
The story closes on Nowak’s reflection about the deathcap mushroom: perhaps those who sought it out knowing the risk weren’t crazy — perhaps they got the last laugh. She pulls Baker close and tells him he can eat anything once, and that he always said he wanted kids. It is a moment of black humor, genuine connection, and defiant self-acceptance. Donnelly crafts a story about desire, mortality, and the very human urge to choose how one meets the end — even when, especially when, that choice looks like madness from the outside.
Lara Elena Donnelly is the author of the Nebula, Lambda, and Locus-nominated Amberlough Dossier trilogy, the contemporary thriller Base Notes, and short fiction and poetry appearing in venues including Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Nightmare, and Uncanny. Lara has taught in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as the Catapult Workshop in New York. She is a graduate of the Clarion and Alpha writers’ workshops, and has served as on-site staff at the latter, mentoring amazing teens who will someday take over the world of SFF. You can also find her at Homeward Books, where she’s one of four co-founders working to bring genre-defying literature into the world.