How do you do space zombies correctly?

>>54312060
Flood. Book Flood, that is. Scary stuff.

The internal communication implant firmware's got a bug, and 80% of the population uses one!

I like to play the horror aspect of it being incredibly infectious, and thus making it landing planetside effectively a planetwide death sentence.

Nuke the site from orbit and all that.

>>54312114

Been almost 10 years since I read any Halo books, how did they differ from the games?

>>54312060

Chrome nanobots than turn flesh into more of themselves, and optimize their new host bodies to "infect" others with nanobots, or kill them and "infect" their corpse.

>>54312301

>*that turn

bump, i need to know too

>>54312060

Do them as hallucination. The infected still retain much of their intelligence, they're just deluded into thinking violence and murder is a sort of gift. They're childishly happy when they're mutilating bodies.

Like that video "Meet the Pyro", where he thinks he's in a happy wonderland, but he's causing carnage.

>>54312290
level of detail, master chief actually holding a conversation, other spartan adventures, fun with grunts and AI.

>>54315051
Doesn't that mean the 'zombies' would be killing each other too?

>>54315210

Mormons don't bother knocking on the door of another Mormon. Better to spread the word until you're all part of the cult, THEN get on with enjoying it.

Given that we are in science fiction, I try to make sure they have a couple of traits which are science fiction kinds of horrifying when I run them. The sort of stuff you couldn't appreciate if you were some pleb hick with a shotgun, but because you're a character in science fiction you have like 3 engineering degrees so you understand the implications of.

Previously I've had zombies that bleed when injured but don't stop bleeding. They just keep bleeding. Whole decks flood with infectious zombie blood as the zombies break down their entire bodies and eat and drink everything nearby just to keep up with the blood they're producing just to lose.

I also had some "alien insect things chilling inside human corpses puppeteering them" kind of zombies as well which were pretty decent, features like them making bridges out of their bodies ant style and passing members of the hive forward over the top as they charge in order to accelerate the horde, basically working in perfect emergent coordination at all times etc.

>>54312060
Borrow Zygotes idea and have the 'zombivication' caused by an entity that transfers via lightwaves. No biting, no infection via physical means, merely seeing the 'light' means you are infected.

>>54312060
They're not reanimated flesh but reanimated machinery.

An ancient, decrepit and obviously non-functional battleship suddenly activates. The engines roar to life despite the fuel tanks being ruptured. Garbage floats out of the huge gashes left by some ancient battle as the ship turns and heads right at you.

Or, if you don't want to be explicitly magical, a mining drone running on automated but not truly sapient protocols targets you for breaking into scrap and turning into more of them. Perhaps there are hundreds of them, swarming around the gutted-out hulks of their previous victims who have been stripped bare of all but their (too tough to process) armor.

Or a space station with heavily damaged AI. Or a moonbase. Or almost anything which is of human origin and could conceivably be automated. Because that's what a zombie is: a human with only their low-level automated systems running.

>>54312060
I much prefer STALKER's "brain-fried humans" rather than the re-animated dead