Viridian Nova

Dragon Cobolt

A Smoky Mountain Publication

Dragon Cobolt

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Cover by CJ Douglas

Website  | Twitter

Also from Dragon Cobolt

Purgatory Wars

The Murder Stroke

Riposte

The Cross Guard

The Blood Groove

Powder And Shot

Blood And Iron

Grapeshot Pantheon

The Star Fort

"Statues And Suitors" in Sex & Sorcery 4

Worldshard

Cadet

Cadre

Champion

Other works

A Fetch Job

"The Last Mage" in Sex & Sorcery 3

Furicana

Devil May Care

Prismatic High

Scales Like Stars

Brash the Dragon and the Schrodinger Snare

A Dirty T.A.S.K Needs Doing

Dreams of a Silver Age

The Squire and the Succubus

The War to End All Worlds

To Walk the Constellations

The Templar and the Temptress

Chapter One: Sarah Has A Bad Day

        Sarah slotted her keycard into the company maker and scowled as a glowing red rectangle popped up onto her HUD.

         Script error. Please report to your supervisor.

         Sarah kicked the maker. The rectangular machine had been kicked a great many times in its long and storied history aboard the NovaDyne Survey Ship A1-201. It had been kicked when, two weeks ago, a bug had crept into its coffee programs and it had started making cups that had the ratio of coffee to sugar reversed, meaning people had sludgy masses of granulated sugar to drink. It had been kicked again, yesterday, when the Chief of Security had set it to making a new load of hyper-dense hollow point expander bullets for his favorite rifle and it had instead spat out several dozen copies of a romance novel from the 21 st  century with the smutty parts behind paywalls.

        And it was being kicked now, because Dr. Sarah Kappel was not about to put on a biohazard suit to start hacking her way through an alien jungle without her morning shot of coffee. The machine, being a heavy brick of fullerenes and ominous black glass, responded to her kick by almost breaking her toe. Sarah scowled, swore under her breath, then slotted her keycard back into the side of the Maker. This time, her HUD flared bright red and an alarm trill loud enough to make her jaw ache buzzed through her skull.

         Repeated attempts to insert fraudulent script will be registered as a C-crime and result in a 5% fine of any affiliate pay stubs.

         “Oh come the fuck on!” Sarah snarled.

        “Dr. Kappel.”

        Sarah spun around. The company maker was set in the central room of A1-201, which meant that the whole place was under observation at all times from someone. Most of the time, it was members of the survey science team, or the security staff. Working drones, like her. People who didn’t give a flying fuck what you were doing so long as whatever you were doing didn’t get in their way. But maybe twenty percent of the time, there was someone from management. And if there was anything more terrifying than a middle managers with a tiny bit of bureaucratic power, Sarah didn’t know if they existed.

        MinTech Craid was one of the worst middle  managers that she had ever worked under. He was about six feet tall, with the spindly build and Caucasian features of someone from the Belt. His parents had been Enclavers who had fled the Troubles with their money and their connections, and they had raised whole broods of kids away from the child taxes and the ecoprogrammes that Sarah’s parents had needed to deal with. This, combined with the most expensive education program in the solar system, produced people who were utterly convinced of two things.

        The first: Any kind of regulation of a capitalist system was essentially slavery.

        The second: Doing anything that your boss didn’t like was worthy of being spaced.

        Sarah gritted her teeth as Craid clasped his hands before his black clad belly – he was dressed in one of those skintight suits that only someone who was genefixed could get away with. “Damaging company property, especially when we’re thirty nine light years from Earth, is against regs.”

        “Sorry, uh, sir,” Sarah said, nodding. “I just need my coffee and, um, my card...” She tugged the card free.

        Craid stepped forward. He took the card from Sarah’s fingers before her brain even registered the mistake she had made. “This card is out of date,” he said, frowning as he waggled the card at her.

        “W-Well, I, I wasn’t...informed...that...we need a new one, uh, so...” Sarah trailed off.

        “An out of date card is also against regulations,” Craid said, pursing his lips slightly. “Dr. Kappel...” He smiled a sickly little smile. “How long have you needed to update your card?”

        “Uh,” she said. “Um, like, I think a week. I was saving up to buy the newest card from the company store.”

        “Ah,” Craid said. “So you knew  that you were using an out of date card?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at her.

        Sarah’s gut knotted. “W-What? I...ye, er, n-no, uh-” She stammered.

        “I think you’re trying to get one past me, Dr. Kappel,” Craid said, quietly, twirling the card between his fingers in an effortless display of manual dexterity. “I think you knew that you needed to update your card and were hoping that you could ignore the requirements – security requirements. Requirements put in place for your safety.”

        “No, sir!” Sarah said, shaking her head. “I...I’m just...I’ll get a new card. Right now.”

        “See that you do,” Craid said.

        He turned and he left.

        Sarah imagined throwing him into one of the biopits they had found last week. The ones full of digestive acid. Instead, she breathed in, closed her eyes, and tried to just focus on what she needed to do next to keep her job and get that raise. The way her budgets were jiggered right now, if she didn’t get the raise, she’d need to sell the next year of her contract at a cut-rate to get the funds she’d need to survive to that next year. But if she got the raise, she’d be able to retain her contract and then maybe find a job with an Earth based company, not NovaDyne. And if she got that, she might actually see her frigging parents more than once every year. But to get that raise, she needed to get good marks. To get good marks, she had to...get that card.

        Sarah was using her HUD to do the math on her budget as she walked through the corridors of the scout ship to the corporate store. The Maker was used far more than the store – since the store only sold HD objects. Stuff like new programs, HUD updates...and keycards. Since she was trying to both use the internal map and the internal calculator, Sarah nearly walked into a wall twice and did run into Dr. Bowers from biotech. He was currently in his civilian clothes and was reading from a tablet – and when the two of them bashed together, Sarah snapped her head to the side, her HUD winking off.

        Belatedly, the proximity alert chimed in her head.

        “Little late!” she groaned.

        Dr. Bowers laughed, picking his tablet up hurriedly. “Those things never work, huh?”

        Sarah blushed. She was glad Dr. Bowers didn’t look ticked off. He was, like her, from the slines. But he showed it a bit more overtly than she did. She was just brown skinned and short from a malnourished childhood. He had a huge hairlip that split his mouth jaggedly. It had been crudely repaired by a slinedoc so it wouldn’t get infected, but that didn’t make him any prettier, or make his speech any less carefully modulated. “I mean, I hear the upgraded proximity programs are a lot better, but, heh, I’m not made of...script...” She trailed off.

         Don’t look at his hairlip. Don’t look at his hairlip. Don’t look at his hairlip.

         She looked at his hairlip as Dr. Bowers said: “You got any more readings on the biopits?”

        “No, no, no, I was going to take two of the drones to check them,” she said, shaking her head. “Er. Uh. First. I was going to get a new card. Since, um, the maker isn’t accepting my old card anymore.”

        “Yeah, they finally updated it,” Bowers said, shaking his head. “And broke half the maker routines.” His tablet chimed. “Oh, the DNA on the xenos just came through. Gotta get to the germ lab. See you later, Sarah.”

        “Later!” Sarah waved after him.

        When she came to the company store, she had jiggered her budget. She would still be on track, assuming she got her raise, if she just cut out her weekly ice cream. That was okay. She needed to lose weight anyway. She could survive on rice for a few months without treats. Yeah. She could do this. She rubbed her hands together as the metal door hissed open and she stepped up to the counter on the company store. The woman who stood behind the counter looked bored out of her skull. Beyond ensuring that the HD items in the store were printed from the store’s maker, then checking to make sure they worked, she had nearly nothing to do on the ship. Sarah stepped up to the desk and smiled at her. “Hey,” she said.

        The woman glanced at her, then said – in a bored drone: “Welcome to the NovaDyne company store, your one stop shopping spot for all hard digital items. We accept universal credits and company scrip, though any purchases with UC will have a 10% surcharge.”

        “I need one of the new keycards,” Sarah said.

        “That’ll be five hundred Novabucks,” the woman said, her voice still bored.

        Sarah winced inwardly. She slotted her keycard into the desk, which chirruped. For a horrifying second, she thought the desk was going to reject her card. But after grumbling quietly, her HUD flashed up a green rectangle as the desk registered the money exchange. The large bar that represented her scrip whirred down to a painfully small number. Sarah’s eyebrow jumped as she nearly winced physically. The bored woman walked over to the maker, which started to whirr and grumble. It chimed a moment later, then opened to reveal a card that looked a bit like Sarah’s old card – save that it had a black edge, rather than a gray one.

        The woman held out the card. “Thank you for shopping at the company store,” she said. “You’ve earned two silver prize boxes, which can be redeemed at your quarters at any time for a five Novabuck fee.”

        Her HUD chimed and the silver boxes seemed to float in the air around Sarah. She smiled thinly.

        When she came back to the maker, she realized she didn’t have enough scrip left to buy coffee.

***

        Trappist-1a was the closest planet to Trappist-1 proper. The many planets of the Trappist solar system had been detected centuries ago, but it wasn’t until the invention of the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive before humanity – or, more accurately, the corporations – could reach out and begin to survey the planets of the solar system for exploitation. There had been a fierce bidding war – then a fierce literal war in orbit around Trappist-1c – before the planet rights had been shaken out.

        NovaDyne had lost both wars and ended up with the least appealing of the earth-like worlds: Trappist-1a. Dominated by a vast jungle and shrouded by an atmosphere that was nearly 90% pollen by weight (this was only a mild exaggeration on Sarah’s part), Trappist-1a would need massive terraforming before it would ever be inhabitable by humans without space suits. Then they landed on it and discovered that the native fauna included a race of horse sized creatures with claws sharp enough to put a serious dent in tank armor, a horizontal leap of five meters and a voracious taste for anything made of carbon. They had taken to human beings like human beings had taken to chocolate, and had required three platoons of corpsec troopers to secure the landing site.

        But under the jungle, the planet had enough heavy metals, radioactives and refinable organics (mostly in the happy petrochemical family of products) that the company board had decided to shift from survey to exploitation mode immediately. For Sarah, that meant that her project of trying to understand how the acidic biopits she had discovered interacted with the less hostile fauna and flora of the planet had been basically shelved. Most of the team was instead working on creating an omnieffective pathogen to eradicate anything more complex than a monocular life form. Once the ecosystem was so much mulch, the heavy extraction could begin.

        In previous decades, NovaDyne had preferred to use asteroids for this kind of thing. But a side effect of losing the shooting war with StarCon meant that they had ceded all heavy lifting and suborbital rights to the larger, more muscular company. Any attempt to move an asteroid would lead to StarCon taking the war to Earth and, well…

        NovaDyne didn’t want that.

        Sarah grumbled under her breath as she wriggled into her biohazard suit. The egg shaped, stubby legged, tentacle limbed suit was somewhere between a suit and a vehicle. There was no helmet, no real leg or arm holes. Instead, she would hook her HUD to it while her body remained cocooned in the center of the suit. This had been a hasty modification when they realized that the silvery trees produced enough radio interference to jam up communications past a certain distance – so no long distance teleoperation. Yet another annoyance for her. She closed her eyes in the slightly comfortable caress of the heavy suit’s internal restraints, then focused. Her HUD connected her to the computer and suddenly, she was looking through the belly cameras. She hefted the writhing tentacle arms, wriggling them around. Once she was sure that she could remember how to use them, she sent a ping to C&C.

        [Kappel]: This is Sarah, reporting in. Hey C&C.

         [C&C]: Hey Sarah. You’re...hey, I thought the biopit survey was canned.

         [Kappel]: (sigh) yeah, they are. But I’m taking genetic samples for the omniphage. Can I get two defense drones. None of the chompies try and stop us from getting close, but…

         [C&C]: One sec. Okay, uh, we have one drone earmarked for you.

         [Kappel]: One?!

         [C&C]: Sorry, Sarah. You want to scrub the mish?

         [Kappel]: And get undertime demerits? No thanks. It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine!

         [C&C]: Okay Sarah, watch your ass out there.

        Sarah made sure that she wasn’t transmitting as she started to swear under her breath again. While her body wasn’t doing any of the actual work, she started to feel achy after only a few minutes of making her biohazard suit stomp forward and out of the hanger. Once she was out of the pristine metal of the hanger and down the gangplank, she got a camera full of the area immediately outside of the scout ship. Here, jungle had stomped flat under the stomping of dozens of heavy feet and then crushed again by the heavy tractor treads from the heavy as haulers when the first mineral results had come in. Flamers had bitten chunks out of the nearby forest, and a turret fence had been put up on hard, steel poles. Several security drones were ambling around the perimeter. They looked like dogs. Greyhounds, to be specific, save that they had machine guns on their shoulders. Those guns swiveled around and...well, the combination of the shape and the color always made Sarah think of that mascot from EduTech. Uh, Scooter the Solver?

        Scooter but packing heat.

        One of them peeled off from the edge of the perimeter and moved to lope behind her. She resisted the urge to pet the things head and instead focused on setting her suit to stomping forward along the course she had followed before. Passing between two turrets, she felt a prickling, tingling sensation riding along her back. From here on out, she was in the jungle. She stomped past the flamer tracks, then was between the trees proper. The trees didn’t look like Earth trees. They were bulbous and tall, narrow at the top, and their leaves and branches were clustered near the very tippy top. This made them top heavy and produced an odd swaying motion as the wind blew through them. The foliage along the ground was thick and veined and were covered in thorns that would have been deadly dangerous, if she hadn’t been in a heavily armored egg.

        Sarah took the walk to review what she had learned on previous expeditions. She was here to get genetic samples, that didn’t mean she couldn’t also do some surveying. Right? She might even get merits for it! Right? The biopits were...well, they were odd. Something had dug them – but she hadn’t found any animal or plant that might have done it. They were uniformly deep, about three meters each, and the bottom was filled with a circular lifeform that had, according to her initial studies, a physical structure similar to a Venus fly trap. Once you got past the very basic morphological similarities, though, everrrrrrrything went completely batshit.

        For one thing?

        Rather than digestive fluids, it had a fluid that seemed to be a general purpose anesthetic. She had done tests and saw it would work on a worrying effectiveness on human beings. Now, this wasn’t that odd, since, well, making something not move was a great first step on the road to eating it. She hadn’t identified how it would do that yet, since she had also done some ultrasounds of the terrain and saw that thick, fibrous clumps of root like structures spread through the ground around the pits. They led to other plants which she had originally thought were independent flowers.

        Were they providing photosynthesis?

        Camouflage?

        Symbiotes?

        Parasites?

        She had no idea.

        And now she never would. Once the omniphage – she supposed they most have settled on the exact vector for the mulcher – was released into the planet’s equivalent to the Gulf Stream, the biopits would be so much undifferentiated carbon slurry. She sighed in physical space and felt the warm heat of it against her face, even as her HUD showed her the trees parting and the first biopit clearing. She stomped up to stand near the pit and focused to extend the tentacle to the left of her hazard suit. The tip of the tentacle had a very tiny, extremely locked down maker. It could just about make any kind of scientific tool that NovaDyne had access too, though using it frivolously could rack up demerits.

        That was the last thing she needed right now.

        So, she formatted it into a sample taker with a thought and waited for the nanoscopic machines to do their work, constructing the sample taker from the brick of carbon in the belly of her hazard suit. As she waited and tried to ignore the worrying smell of ozone and the crackling heat that always came when the tentacle’s maker got to work, Sarah took a moment to look at the jungle. And for just a moment, she felt her heart beginning to break. Her grandparents had been from Brazil, before they had become changefugees and rushed northward in the Troubles. Somewhere along the way, they’d settled into the sline quarters of the northern megacities and acquired a Germanic surname, a penchant for swearing in Farsi, and new corporate citizenship from EduTech.

        But they’d never lost the stories of those last days before the Dieback. They told them to a young Sarah.

        Deep in her bones, she loved the biological world. Billions of years and billions of moments of presapient decision making crafted an ecosystem. While each individual actor in such a system carried amazingly little weight, the totality of their existence created something beyond marvelous. She could have studied Trappist-1a’s ecosystem and its interrelationships for centuries and would still be finding new, and amazing interactions. As it was, seeing the very tip of the trashberg felt painful.

        But…

        She needed that raise.

        She needed that job on Earth. If she got a job on Earth, she could see her parents again. Sarah sighed, a longing feeling stirring in her gut at the memory of Dad’s cooking, or Mom’s block wide parties, where the slines could get together and see what fun they could have without buying a single thing from the corporate stores. Citizenship could be ignored in the sline sectors, if you didn’t mind relying entirely on black market and universal credit. For at least a little bit. And...maybe she could  meet  someone.

        One of the problems with crewing on a survey ship was that the crews  changed  every few months, when they returned from distant solar systems with new data and new product, or when people quit the corporation and bought new citizenship. That, combined with the fact that she was a chubby dork  kind  of made it a little tricky to actually get a frigging date. But if she was back on Earth, she’d not only have a stable population to meet, but also a significantly  larger  one. One that would maybe include someone who’d  like  a chubby dork? Eh? Eh!

        Okay, she felt like a total moron for even thinking that. So, uh, instead of that, she could get put into one of the enclave projects. That thought hit her with nearly the same nostalgic force as thinking of her parents’ house. Imagine getting to rebuild the Earth’s ecosystem in those enclosed enclaves? The idea was that once the enclaves had proved they could reconstitute an ecosystem, they’d begin to spread them outwards. This would lower the price eventually to the point where even slines could get in!

        “A rising tide lifts all boats, right?” she muttered. “All I need-”

        Her eyes stopped their slow scanning of the jungle environments as she realized that the sleek, dark shape that had been concealed by her hazard suit’s shadow was now growing closer with a slow, predatory grace. Sarah froze. Her eyes widened and her mouth went dry as she realized it was one of the very aggressive alien predators. Up close, it was even scarier than it looked in the security briefing holograms. It was, after all, the size of a fucking horse. It’s skin was purple and covered with thick, armored slabs of chitinous plates. It had huge, sharp claws that thrust from its forelegs, like the talons of the velociraptor, but...you know. They had four each. Its muzzle was narrow and triangular and had a pair of curved tusks that thrust out to either side like the protective grid of a footballer’s helmet, angling inwards and tipped with gleaming beads of acidic venom.

        Her proximity alert chimed as its nose bumped against the belly of her hazard suit.

        [Kappel]: C&C. Come in.

         Nothing.

        Sarah gulped.

        Her security bot finally realized something was going on and turned its angular body around to bring the heavy machine guns to bear. Both started to hammer . Even inside of the hazard suit, the noise was overwhelming. Sarah had never heard anything so loud – her ears rang and she wished she could clap her hands over them. Instead, she simply had to grit her teeth and step back and away from the xeno as it exploded like an overripe melon being struck with a hammer, the armor plates peeling apart and the guts bursting against her camera. She clapped her tentacles against the body of her suit, crying out as if she had been the one splattered. “Ugh, ugh, ugh, guh!” She stepped backwards and stumbled into something that suddenly shifted and moved aside. The proximity alert chimed again – then again and again – and she heard the machine guns start for a stuttering moment before a squealing, screeching sound filled her ears. She wiped the last bit of the cameras off and saw that the security bot was being torn limb from limb by three of the bitey xenos.

        They had taken advantage, by pure animal instinct, of the bot’s distraction to leap onto its back. Their claws skittered along armor plating, leaving behind weals of silvery metal as they gouged chunks free. But then their claws found the weak points and started to jab in, severing electrical wires, slicing through pneumatic cables, even tearing out tufts of fibrous synthetic muscle. One had even clamped its jaws around the barrel of a machine gun and was levering it up and away, so that its stuttering gunfire shot into the air harmlessly.

        Almost like it... knew.

         Sarah turned and sprinted away. Well. Waddled.

        It felt like one of those nightmares, where something is chasing you, and never quite manages to catch up, but you never quite manage to get away. For Sarah, those dreams had always been set inside the sewer sections right underneath her home – recalling the time she had fallen through some rusting grating plates and dropped into a river of gray water. If someone hadn’t heard her screaming and rescued her, she’d have been washed right into the reprocessing center. Ever after, her nightmares had been narrow corridors and hideous stinks.

        Well.

        Now her nightmares would be jungles. Jungles and growling beasts that flanked her to the left and to the right, that rushed forward and made her veer hastily away to avoid their claws. Assuming, of course, she ever had nightmares in the future. Sarah wanted to vomit, but instead, she clenched her jaw, kept plodding forward, and kept frantically trying to signal C&C. But the radar jamming trees kept filling her ears with a hideous static. And through the panic, a cold, analytic part of her mind was tapping its fingers on a table and asking: What’s taking them so long? Get this over with.

         “Shut up shut up shut-” She stumbled through a set of trees and gaped.

        She was standing before a mountain. That was the first insane thought that bubbled through her head. But under the dull red light of Trappist 1a’s star – which loomed overhead, dominating the sky with its cold closeness - the thing she was looking at resolved into an animal. A massive animal. It had six trunk-like legs, each one as big around as her hazard suit’s entire frame, and they reached up towards a body that was somewhere between a beetle and an elephant. It had two huge wings that fanned to either side, iridescent and glowing with brilliant red veins. They looked pathetically small compared to its bulk, and the shape of the body was all wrong for fling. Sarah, normally, would have been fascinated, wondering at the evolutionary track that had produced it, wondering at the biological needs those wings filled.

        Instead, she was slightly more focused on the massive, hinged tusks that were mounted on either side of the perpendicular, narrow head. Six eyes sat in the center point of those tusks, protected by the curved bone, which sharpened to two wicked points. The tusks fanned outwards as the three smaller xenos that had been hounding her sprang forward and smashed into her back. She fell onto her hazard suit’s knees and nearly rolled forward onto the egg shaped belly.

        “Oh no no no no!” she shouted.

        The tusks swung forward, clapping shut, so that the two points crashed into either side of the hazard suit. Metal squealed and alarms blared and her HUD dropped her connection with a spray of static. She felt a moment of utter disorientation – and then she was sprawled on purple grass. Her face prickled and her eyes widened as she sucked in a startled gasp. Immediately, she tasted alien scents. Sickly sweet decay. The thick musk of the animals around her. And the pollen. Oh. Yeah. The pollen. Her throat tightened up and her nose suddenly closed. Her face went puffy as she clutched at her throat, her brain sending up panicking signals: You cannot breathe!

         Her HUD was just as helpful, filling her vision with: Warning! Anaphylactic Shock. Warning!

         She wheezed. Then the three animals to either side of her rushed forward. Their jaws closed around her arms. Their teeth didn’t sink in, though. Instead, they gently lifted her to her feet. Their breath was warm against her wrists and she shuddered as they started to walk forward. She put foot ahead of foot, her throat still tight and closed. Her eyes were half closed, and around the gathering darkness, she saw them pushing her towards the biopits.

        In the muzzy, half awareness of the moment, a thought rushed through her head: Huh. They’re not animals. They’re not animals at all.

         They proved it by pushing her to her knees before the pit. One put a claw on the edge of her neck, the hard bone rasping against her skin. Sarah sank forward, her face mashing against the grass as her lungs screamed for air – and then she tried to make a noise of protest as the claw hooked on her undersuit and then started to rip down. What had torn metal was more than good enough against cheap maker printed cloth – and her undersuit came apart like she was a fruit, being peeled by an uncaring god. Noses bumped against her skin, pushing at the tatters of her clothes. Sarah made weak whimpering sounds as she was rolled away from the two halves of her undersuit.

        She was utterly naked under an alien sky, sprawled right next to a biopit.

        The huge beast that had ripped open her hazard suit looked down at her with six, pitiless eyes, while the three smaller xenos stood around her, watching her. She reached out, towards the dull glow. As her vision went blacker and blacker, the glow of Trappist looked more and more like the warm yellow light of her home sun, as seen through the haze of pollution that tended to cluster over the sline sector. Her lungs were still screaming fitfully for air, and she felt the horrible, muffling sensation of closure every time she tried to choke something in or out past the puffiness that filled her. "

         I...guess I...always wanted to know what the biopits did…

         The xenos were waiting. Watching. She swore she could feel them telling her she had to take the next leap.

        Weakly, Sarah pushed against the ground.

        Rolled.

        Fell.

        The aliens stood around the biopit for a long moment. Crackling radio transmissions – barely heard over the distant cree cree cree of insects that filled the jungle – escaped from the ruined hulk of the hazard suit: “Dr. Kappel? Dr. Kappel, do you read us? We received a fragment...” Static. “Dr. Kappel?” Static. There was no chance for another transmission. The sleek xenos instead crawled onto the hazard suit and began to tear out the radio. Once it was silenced, they systemically began to rip chunks off the hazard suit while the biggest xeno scraped out holes in the dirt with a massive foot.

        Soon, the suit’s fragments – and the fragments of the droid, abandoned almost two miles back – were buried. Then, stolidly, the xenos walked into the pit, tumbling head first in without fear or hesitation, to be consumed. Turned into raw material for the great project.

        And the jungle was silent again.

Chapter Two: Sarah Gets A Makeover

        Sarah’s eyes snapped open into utter darkness. Her mouth opened and she sucked in liquid. Her lungs clenched and her drowning reflexes kicked on – and then soothed away. It was as if someone had taken a warm wet rag and just wiped along her brain, pushing aside all those panicky thoughts. It was nearly as alarming as literally just...drowning, to have her thoughts wiped away like that. And just as soon as she had that alarming realization, her alarm at that alarm was wiped away. Her eyes hooded slowly and she breathed in another lungful of liquid. It flowed through her body like slow, sluggish air...but her brain was no longer screaming for oxygen…

        That was an improvement?

        Mmm…

        She started to slide her hands along her body in the liquid, hoping to find her survival packs. Instead, her palms rubbed along perfectly smooth skin – her skin. She felt the faint creases and rises of her chubby belly, the fullness of her breasts, her achingly hard nipples. God. This felt nice. This warm bath of fluid, surrounding her every body. She knew she should have been alarmed about how the alarm at not being alarmed had been wiped away – but she somehow couldn’t seem to muster up any more levels of meta-alarm. Instead, she just idly played with her nipples, as if she was laying in bed and in a randy mood. They were getting more sensitive by the moment, and as she teased and tweaked them, her lips split into a warm smile.

        Then…

        Light.

        Light began to grow before her. It was dull amber, as if shining through a mass of honey. It was growing ahead of her, and as she watched, it brightened and brightened, until she could see herself and her surroundings. She was inside of a pod, roughly two meters in diameter and three meters tall, giving her plenty of space while still being relatively small. The walls were smooth and rubbery looking, and faintly transparent. The light was coming from beyond it, from a single point that did not move. A lamp? She drew her hands away from her breasts, sheepish at being caught playing with herself. She started to try and swim towards the edge of the pod – her body moving sluggishly through the thick liquid. Tiny bubbles of air moved in it as she swept her hands. They didn’t rush to the top but instead remained in the place that her motions had put them, so she felt as if she was swimming through a constellation of stars.

        After what felt like an eternity, she came to the edge of the pod. Her palms touched it and she flashed on memories of touching her uncle’s pet pig. It was the same living, smooth skin. Not metal or plastic. Her eyes widened – and then the light from beyond grew brighter as the skin turned transparent.

        It wasn’t a light.

        It was an eye.

        No.

        Not an eye.

        It was  the Eye. It was an Eye that eclipsed and transcended all others – massive and staring and perfect. It never blinked, never twitched, never showed the little wobbling that human eyes needed. The iris was black and circular and it focused in on her body. Sarah screamed. Or, well. Tried too. Bubbling air rushed from her lungs, flowing into the thick liquid as she kicked and flailed her legs, trying to get away. Instead, it was like the nightmare again. She was stuck, unable to move as that thing kept looking at her. And she felt a prickling awareness rushing along her skin. Her nerves burned with shame as she realized it could see her every imperfect. Her chubby belly, her chunky thighs, the discolorations from the cheap subdermal hair removal service she had gotten when she had thought maybe it was her armpit hair that had scared off her boyfriend in a fit of depressive illogic. She tried to cover herself – but the Eye could still see so much of her.

         Acceptable clay.

         She hadn’t thought those words.

        Was…

        Was it hacking her HUD?

        Except that she hadn’t felt the tell tale buzz in her jaw that normally came when the implant triggered a sound effect. The effects weren’t created by tapping directly into her brain, after all, she wasn't made of money . It came through a small speaker attached to her inner ear, and because it was cheap even for such an old model, it buzzed whenever it turned on. Instead, that voice had come from inside her head like the voices of a god.

         Not a God.

         Sarah wanted to scream – but she was too terrified. Then the walls of the pod puckered. Small holes opened and sleek shapes started to emerge. Four of them were large, four were small. But each, she realized, was a tentacle. The small ones looked like tiny wires with bulbous tips, while the larger ones were more muscular and sturdy looking. A large tentacle bumped against her shoulder – and the point of contact flared with a heat that made her shudder – in pleasure and disgust. She opened her mouth, then closed it hurriedly as another larger tentacle pressed to her cheek, then rubbed along her lips. Her lips tingled and…

         A memory. Mika Gordon, the guy she’d been dating in college. His cock, rubbing against her face. His voice, whiny: Come on baby, we’ve been dating three weeks-

         She turned her head aside. The tentacle had tasted far better than the bitter, sharp taste of Mika. But, like Mika, the tentacle followed her head and pressed to her again. This time, not only did the fine smearing of liquid against her lips taste good, but it also made her head spin. Her mouth opened of its own curious accord and before she could stop herself, her tongue had darted along the edge of the tentacle’s tip. Was it just her imagination, or was the tentacle more phallic than it had been? She closed her mouth so tightly and so hard that she nearly bit it. The tentacle jerked backwards, as if offended.

        One of the smaller tentacles darted forward.

        It plunged into her ear.

        Sarah’s mouth opened and she froze, her body trembling. There was no pain from the penetration. Instead...it...it felt…

         Good .

        She could feel the tentacle inside her brain. She knew it should have been horrifying, but instead, she was more amazed by the tiny twitches, the slow pushing. The pressure increased and the tentacle pushed another few inches into her head. She could track it by the warmth buzzing through her gray matter. It was behind her left eye now, and she felt a throbbing pleasure, emanating from her ear, buzzing along her jaw. She trembled, her left eye twitching shut as she made a soft ‘hnnnh’ noise. Then the tentacle drew back and she felt a faint pressure...and then a pop as it came free.

        And she came.

        She came inside the pod, her thighs pressing together, her sex clenching on nothing. Her mouth fluttered open and her eyes snapped shut as she let out a soft: “Hoofuck.”

        She hadn’t cum that hard since…

        She blinked as the small tentacle darted past her and she saw that it was holding the tiny black bead of her HUD, trailing the equally tiny silver bead of the subcutaneous speaker and microphone. Her hand lifted, to touch her head, but instead, one of the larger tentacles slithered into her palm. Her hand closed around it without a thought, and she shivered. Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it hastily as the large tentacle came in to touch her lips again. She shook her head. She was scared. She was turned on. She...she wanted another tentacle inside of her, but she was terrified of how much she wanted it.

         What are you doing to me? She thought.

         Sharpening.

         Two more small tentacles drifted forward. For a dizzying moment, Sarah thought they would approach her nose. But instead, they brushed along her lips. She tightened her grip on the large tentacle in her hand – and it spurted a thin streamer of pre-cum, which floated in the amber liquid like a small cloud, drifting slowly against her. Then the smaller tentacles brushed against her lips. It was a feathery touch. Like a kiss. One slipped left. The other slipped right. Both ended up right above her breasts. She had a moment to feel fear and excitement both before they plunged into her nipples. She felt a sharp sensation of contact. Then a dull, throbbing ache of pleasure.

        She’d never been desperate enough to take pregnation drugs and sell herself to the people who like babyplay and pregplay.

        But...one of her roomates at college had told her, in brisk, cheerful terms, about what it felt to have milk sucked out of heavy, pregnant breasts. Sarah now knew what the reverse felt like. The tendrils that had pierced her nipples flowed and twitched, small beads of liquid flowing down them, visible to her eyes. They reached her nipples...then there was pressure. A flare of pain. Then pleasure. Such pleasure that she nearly wet herself, her body clenching, her hands tightening as she opened her mouth in wordless joy as the fluid pushed into her breasts, which began to...swell. Swell more.

        She had been busty before. But now she was easily in the upper tiers of breasts before they moved from human to cartoonish. Then the tendrils yanked free and her breasts began to shrink as she felt something flowing through her veins, flowing through her body. She could actually  see  her veins bulging slightly as the fluid forced itself from her breasts to her skin, before smoothing out once more. Her breasts shrank to the size they had been before – but they were smoother. Perkier. Firmer. Perfectly symmetrical. Her nipples had shifted their position slightly, so that each were exactly where porn and movie stars said they should be. And what was more...maybe it was the amber light fucking with her…

        But she was fairly certain that her skin was beginning to change color.

         Oh… she thought. Muzzily. Confused. Excited. Desperate. Terrified.

        The large tentacle pressed to her lips.

        She did not turn away. The tentacle slid into her mouth, past her teeth, and down her throat with a smoothness that shocked her. Her gag reflex didn’t even so much as rumble. Instead of gagging, she simply felt... full . Her hands went to her throat and she felt the bulge and her toes curled in delight as the tentacle started to gently thrust into her. She bobbed in time with the movement, her hips rocking in the middle of the pod, responding to the movement with the animal desire that was stoked inside of her. She hadn’t been laid in years . Those two small tentacles caressed along her neck, then slipped into her skin. Veins bulged as they pumped her full of chemicals and her head swam with the pleasure of her. Her hands groped outwards, and large, thick tentacles sithered along her wrists. They looped around her biceps, teased her shoulders, then jerked taut.

        Suddenly, Sarah was held in a cruciform position, the tentacles hardening and holding her still. The tentacle in her throat began to speed up, slamming into her deep enough for a small ache to begin in her jaw as it was stretched wider and wider. Her eyes rolled back and up into her head as she felt her pleasure roaring through her body, her legs flailing and twitching. Her toe scraped along the inner edge of the pod, and she strained, desperately. She wasn’t sure if she was trying to escape, trying to get more, trying...she was just trying for something, anything.

        Then another sting came – the small tendrils slipping from her neck. One slammed into her ear again. Her entire face went slack as she felt it slipping into her brain. Tingles ran along her skin from the inside out and she felt her vision shifting  and twisting. She...for a moment...tasted colors. She felt the thrumming sound of a deep humming, buzzing through her body – but she felt it like knives dragging along her back. Her eyes sparkled as she saw sound waves humming and warbling through her vision. Then a thick tentacle plunged between her shoulder blades. She felt it penetrating her skin and she came.

        Again.

        The tendril in her ear began to thrust into her ear, in time with the tentacle that was fucking her throat. Another thick tentacle wrapped around her ankle, holding her still so that two small tendrils could brush against her clit, then worry into her sex. She felt them sliding into her. She could practically trace the movements inside of her body, and what should have been searing pain instead felt like utter bliss . Her eyes shut tightly and she made a muffled little moan through the tentacle filling her throat.

        Her jaw creaked as she felt a bulge sliding through the tentacle, then flowing down her throat. She made a gagging, gulping slurping noise in the thick pod as the huge tentacle deposited something warm and wriggling inside of her. She wanted to squirm and laugh, it tickled. Then she saw another tendril reaching down. It hovered before her eye, but then split, and plunged up her nose, joining the tendril in her ear inside of her brain. She was being fucked in the head...and it felt glorious .

        New memories formed and crystallized in her thoughts, then were shattered apart before she could quite grasp them.

        Memories of movement.

        Of grace.

         History.

         She saw the star/thing, fusion form in collapsing gravity. It was centered around system, gas giants, huge, ponderous, moon/worlds, surrounding the gas giants, warmed within, cold beyond. Under ice, flowing, swift, sentience, growing. It came/arose, and it wished to become/be/all/entity. She shuddered as the tentacles slid out of her ear, gleaming and dripping and looking sharp. Then it thrust into her neck and more black veins spread across her skin. Sarah tried to scream – it was too much. But then the two tendrils buried in her sex began to fill her and she felt the warmth within her growing to a furnace heat.

        Consume.

        Be.

        All.

        Consume.

        Be.

        All.

        Consumebeall. Consumeconsumeconsume.

        Two tendrils plunged into her wide eyes. They penetrated deep and when they began to spurt the liquid into her, she knew a bliss that rivaled even the time she had tried tasping. Electrical currents running  straight into her pleasure centers was nothing compared to the transcendent perfection of those three words. Be. All. Consume. Be. All. Consume.

         Her back arched and her claws sprang out from her fingertips as Sarah Kappel saw the worlds shrouded in a haze of ascomycete mind-spores. She saw the seedships, sprawling and fat, glutted on billion strong biomatic reclamation systems, thinking a single thought every ten centuries as their glacial metabolism kept their hive-swarms in flash frozen storage sacks. They floated between the star/things, and they wanted more . And then she saw her own life compared to these glories.

         Sarah Kappel, starving and hungry in the sline section, begging for some food from the gangers who had set up shop around the Maker. Sarah Kappel getting into the Colotto and getting to hug her parents goodbye before she was slotted into the fifty thousand student slots that were provided for slines. Sarah Kappel, eating rice so she might be able to afford new corporate citizenship on a world with ten billion mouths and never quite enough to eat.

         Be.

         No, wait-

         All.

         Sarah shook her head fitfully, feeling the tug of the tendrils.

         Consume.

         More images. More sights. But this wasn’t of distant star/things or alien ships. It was of humans. Men and women, their eyes glassy, the backs of their heads molded and rotten, fungal spires swirling out of their softened skulls. They marched forward in single file, stumbling and shambling. They fell, without even jumping, over the edge of the ragged metal parapet into the vast circular mulcher. Their biomass, broken apart, turned into simple resources. And overhead, a sky shrouded with a thick haze of mind-spores.

         Be.

         No!

         All.

         No !

         Consume.

         Sarah twisted her head hard. She felt a stabbing, sharp pain in her ear, in her nose. Her hand writhed and slipped through slippery tentacles and she ripped at the tendrils in her neck. They didn’t tug free, but they parted. Tentacles drew backwards and wriggled away, and the Eye  blinked. It blinked . Sarah kicked and shot forward, her hand plunging through the thick, rubbery mass of the pod. Fluid flowed past her wrist and she dug her hand deep into something soft and spongy. Red exploded and the amber light vanished, covered entirely by black and red. Sarah writhed and struggled, scratching. Clawing. Memories of being half drugged, a weight over her body, hands holding her wrists over her head. Memories of a snarling voice, growling: Come on, bitch, you wanted it a few seconds ago.

         No! No!

         No!

        Sarah grabbed onto something solid and felt a dizzying rush of pleasure at the feeling of dirt crumbling between her fingertips. She hauled herself forward, up, outwards, upwards. She felt the ragged edges of the pod sucking at her skin, and she felt completely soaked with the thick, viscous fluid. It dripped off her in sheets, sticking between her thighs, worked between her toes. It was sticky enough that dirt clung to her as she clambered up, hand over hand, feet working into the wall. Her hand, finally, grabbed onto the edge of the pit and she saw light – real light! The ruddy red sunlight of Trappist-1a.

        She hauled herself up and out and rolled onto her side.

        There, she vomited a thick mass of the amber liquid. It fell from her lips and her lungs clenched and squeezed as she coughed and hacked and spat, until, at last, she could breath in. She sprawled on her back then and simply lay there, too spent, too utterly drained, to do anything but gasp. Pant.

        Whimper.

        “Wh...What...the fuck?” She mumbled.

        Pain. Pain exploded behind her eyes. That voice boomed between her ears. Weakness. Explain.

         She clutched her head, curling up into a fetal position, her eyes closing tight. She heard the bewildered, confused emotion behind those emotions and choked out a laugh that was halfway a sob. The...the thing had chosen her. The knowledge filled her from her bones outwards, an intuition that went beyond the spoken words. It had chosen her because she…she was the weakling. She was the pushed around, bullied, little Dr. Sarah Kappel. Terrified of her snotty middle manager, too scared to ask a boy out on a date because she was a little chubby.

        “Heh...heh...hahah...” She laughed, then rolled onto her hands and knees. When she opened her eyes, she saw she was still dripping. She saw that her fingers were black. Her fingernails had become large, sharp claws. When she slid her tongue along her teeth, she had inch long fangs that, when she tightened muscles she hadn’t had a few minutes ago, retracted back to normal canines. More hysterical giggles.

         EXPLAIN.

         “Fuck off,” she snarled. “You hear that? Fuck off!”

        The pain redoubled. Sarah screamed as she felt the searing attention of the Eye, burning through her lobes. She saw her memories in grainy, black and white, third person. Mercilessly, the Eye examined every inch of her childhood. She saw the plunge into the sewers. The hungry nights. The begging. The excitement of winning the lotto. She saw it all from an alien perspective – and felt the growing perplexity of the Eye. It was growing more and more confused as it cycled past her memories, rushing up to the last few years of her life. Finally, it was done.

         EXPLAIN.

         “What can I say,” Sarah hissed. “We’re a...fucking stubborn species.”

        Then, wham. Another memory exploded before her. It was her first day on a starship, when she had been excited, before she had learned what surveying was like. The engineer had been cute and dreamy and she hadn’t learned he was gay yet, so she had asked him to explain to her how the HPS Drive worked. At the time, she hadn’t listened to a damn thing, she had been too busy drooling over his abs in his very tight yellow jumpsuit. But the Eye listened to every word.

         Alternative chosen.

         With a snap , the connection was broken. She felt hollowed out. Emptied. As if someone had just...yanked the plug from her guts. Sarah sprawled on the ground, wheezing. Her eyes fluttered shut. For a time, Sarah simply wished to cease to be. She didn’t want to dream.

        She did not get her wish.

        She dreamed.

        She dreamed of the star/fusion, burning beneath a dozen worlds. She dreamed of teeming billions of chittering, hissing, crawling things . She dreamed of them. And she dreamed their name. Their name. Their name . The Eye and the Claw. The Claw. The Claw. And she dreamed their goal. She saw it reaching outwards, turning star after star from their normal hue to a throbbing infrared black. Shrouding them in spheres of biomatter, focusing on something . Something she couldn’t even begin to imagine. A goal that she wasn’t sure the Claw even understood.

        And she dreamed again.

        Of the dead eyed humans, marching forward, fungal growths using their rotting bodies like puppets. Plunging, by the millions. By the billions . Plunging into the mulchers.

        The last she saw were her parents.

        Falling.

***

        Sarah gasped herself awake.

        She was sprawled on her back and felt dry and creaky. Her every muscle ached and her sex throbbed. She’d have said it felt a lot like the night after good sex, except she’d never had good sex, so...she closed her eyes and put her hand over her face. Despite remembering clearly what happened, she reflexively tried to tap into her HUD. Rather than the normal blip and interface projected in her vision, there was just her own rattled thoughts and, beyond her eyelids, the incredibly short night of Trappist-1a. The planet was semi-tidally locked, meaning that it had a night once every few years. Of course, each year was only a few Earth days long, so that wasn’t saying much.

        At night, the jungles lit up. Bioluminescence shimmered from every tree and every flower. The fireflies – tiny, blue lights – sparked and came to life in vast, swirling rivers of illumination that flowed between the trees overhead. That was enough to soothe her for a moment...and then Sarah sat up.

        Her hand went to her throat. “I can breathe!” She said.

        And then she noticed her voice was different. She had always sounded kind of whiny and sniffly when she had spoken before. Now? Now, her voice sounded like the husky contralto of a movie star. “Bloop,” she said. “Bleep. Bloorgh?” She blinked. Even saying nonsense words still came off like she was about to croon the final speech from The Stars are Eternal. She shook her head and stood – and that movement sent her sprawling right back down on her belly again. Her arms slapped onto the ground and she groaned as she laid there. The funny thing was that...she hadn’t lost her balance because she was wobbly or anything.

        She had lost her balance because she had stood up with a smooth, fluid motion – going from on the ground to on her two feet so rapidly that she had psyched herself out. Sarah closed her eyes, worked her fingers into the ground. She felt how sharp her fingertips were. Her claws were. Her claws. Her claws . She had fucking claws . She breathed slowly, tasting the pollen rich air and the moist scent of the grass she was mashed against, and forced herself to stand. She moved slowly and carefully and when she got her feet underneath her, she was able to open her eyes and not fall flat on her face.

        The jungle – vast and dark and glowing – surrounded her in every direction. There was no sign of her hazard suit.

        Sarah knew she should look down. See what had been done to her. Instead, she clenched her hands, feeling the sharp prick of her fingers against her palms, and tried to psyche herself up for taking a step forward. She just had to head forward and-

        An ungodly screech filled her ears.

        Sarah screamed and, quite suddenly, she was standing on one of the high branches on the narrow, spindly trees. The branch bowed under her weight and Sarah screamed again as she wrapped her arms around the trunk that connected to the branch. The whole tree began to sway and she tried to figure out what it was that had made the noise. She craned her head back over her shoulder and realized that...despite it being extremely dark and lit only by the guttering lights of bioluminescent flowers, her eyes had shifted to see things clearly. Then they zoomed in on a skittering movement, as if she had a pair of auto-tracking telescopes in her skull with an AI cleaning up the image quality and removing jitter.

        The thing that had screeched was one of the...well, the researchers called them ungodly screechers. They looked a bit like slugs with frills around their midsections that they used as a sound producing surface – they could make that hideous noise. The team was still not sure if they used them to scare off predators, attract mates, or give researchers heart attacks. Sarah put her hand to her chest and closed her eyes. Her fingers/claws pressed to her skin and she could feel the differences, no matter how much she tried to ignore it.

        Sarah trembled. The arm that was wrapped around the tree should have been aching with exertion – memories of Chief Bakara screaming at her as she scrambled over the obstacle course during one of those hideous employee health seminars filled her head. She had pipe cleaners for arms. But right now, she felt as if she could cling to this tree for hours. Which was good she also felt like she was going to break down sobbing again and needed something to cling to.

        The wind picked up and the tree swayed hideously. She felt her stomach lurch...and for just a moment, Sarah had a thought that she had had many times, a thought that she had to beat off with sticks and with gritted teeth every time it crawled up from the black pits of her brain to trouble her conscious thoughts.

        Sometimes, when she looked forward and saw the sheer amount of work she had to get home, she thought of an easier way to get out of things. Sometimes, when the rice was exceptionally bland and the day had been exceptionally shitty and her coworkers had been exceptionally distant and focused on their own work, she felt the vast, grinding gears of the universe pressing against her spine and...and she started to wonder if this was all there was. Nine to seven work, for a paycheck that never quite managed to pay all the bills, juggling conversion between scrip and universal credits, writing infrequent letters home to her parents, and watching the programs that were provided for free on the entertainment service.

        When the realization/thought of that going on forever hit her in those dark nights, she would idly imagine playing with the oxygen/carbon dioxide/nitrogen mixture of her space suit the next time she was out and about. The nice thing about taking out oxygen and carbon dioxide in a life support system was that a human’s lungs couldn’t breathe nitrogen. But it also didn’t – couldn’t, even – notice nitrogen. There was no suffocation reflex, no carbon dioxide poisoning, no panic like when she had been struggling to breathe through her puffy lips and choked throat.

        You just...went to sleep.

        Sarah looked down at the distant jungle floor. At this height, she was pretty sure that she’d just... splat .

         You sure about that? She thought. I mean, the fucking thing that transformed you was part of some kind of interstellar civilization of fucked up bug people. Who knows what it could do, what engineering or materials science it had access to. Right? Right?!

        So, Sarah worked it out. She could see the biological mechanisms that would give her a vertical leap on this scale. There were engineering considerations and energy considerations – but it wasn’t that far out of the bounds of human science. There were biological nano that could construct exotic and hyper-tough materials. Using those to make bones and muscles could make structures strong enough. The energy requirements were a little more sophisticated, but then again, maybe she’d need to eat twenty six square meals a day to keep from starving. Not that she felt hungry.

        The ground and the easy way out looked downright tempting…

        Sarah’s grip tightened and she clenched her teeth. No.

        No.

        No no no no! She shook her head. She hadn’t kicked off the Eye’s awareness, she hadn’t dragged herself out of the pit, just to give up now. The road ahead might have looked dangerous. It might have looked terrifying, actually. She had no idea what she even looked like, or what her coworkers would say. But she knew that just dropping off the side of a tree and splatting herself on the ground was not how she was going to go. And so, Sarah started to loosen her grip. She just needed to-

        The branch under her snapped.

        Sarah plunged.

        She had time to think: I am getting sick of falling down.

         Then the ground rushed up and she struck head first. Her neck snapped and her skull fractured from the impact. Her ribs crunched and one of them punctured inwards towards one of her hearts – piercing it with a shard of bone the size of her pinkie finger. Sarah’s consciousness snapped out of existence as sudden as she had hoped and feared.

Chapter Three: Sarah Has A Snack

        When Sarah opened her eyes, it was day again. She was surrounded by a small patch of blackened, charred grass. Her head hurt. Her stomach was growling. And a large carnivorous animal that her research team had never seen before was nosing at her ass like an overeager college student. Sarah reacted instinctively. But it wasn’t with her old instincts. Old Sarah would have either frozen and let things happen – in the case of the college student – or screamed and died – in the case of large carnivorous animals. New Sarah apparently had an entirely new repertoire of instinct.

        She drew back a leg, then slammed it into the creature’s throat with enough force to bury her foot through pulpy, well jowly skin.

        The carnivorous creature – which looked a bit like an oversized anteater with purple skin and sharp teeth at the end of its coiled nose/tusk – froze, its bulging eyes opening wide in shock. Blood sheeted down her leg and Sarah tried to not notice how very good it felt. Warm and hot and...she jerked her leg back, twisting herself onto her back as she saw her own body in the harsh, red light of day.

        Starting with her feet.

        They were human feet. Save that her skin was now black-green and had a faintly rubbery texture, which made her look as if she had been recently oiled. The addition of blood to her right leg only made her shimmer a bit more. Oh, also, her big toes could extend claws that looked like they were designed to hook and tear out people’s throats after she leaped on them – though they could serve as climbing tools too. That had been what had tore out the scavenger’s throat. Her legs were sleek and well muscled and lead to full, generous thighs, a completely hairless...everywhere, actually. Her chest had been sculpted to fit movie model perfection and then pushed a step beyond that. Despite being...ah...just as busty as she had always been, her breasts no longer seemed to need a bra. Her shoulders were harder to see, but her fingers probed them out, finding that the shoulders themselves were smooth...but there were some strange ridges that started along her shoulder blades.

        Touching the ridges made her squirm. They weren’t painful to touch. Just…

        They…

        It was hard to say exactly how they felt. It wasn’t uncomfortable or painful, but it felt like she shouldn’t prod them overmuch. Sarah stood and touched her own butt.

         Jesus. And here, she had thought her boobs were movie star quality.

        Sarah put her hands over her face and tried to not giggle hysterically. Good to know that aliens were also perverts. Or…

        Or had the redesigns been partially based off her memories? The first tendril that had...her brain skittered away from the first few words that came to mind. Her stomach squirmed in guilt and uncertainty as she weighed words like ‘rape’ and ‘forced’ and ‘penetrated.’ Because at the time, she had wanted it. She had wanted it bad. But she hadn’t had any choices at all. What did it say about her that this was a hard fucking call to make? She gritted her teeth and forced the words out: “You were skull raped by a tentacle that fucked with your brain, Sarah! Stop getting mushy headed!”

        The words hung in the air, and felt flat and unconvincing. Like the entire jungle was listening and shaking its head and going: Yeah. Sure, tell us another one.

         Sarah shook her head. “Okay. Tentacle...enters. Takes out the HUD. But there was a connection too. So, the Eye had to have my memories. Which means he saw every shallow desire you had to be skinny and beautiful and gave you that. Great. Wonderful.” She sighed. “He also modified your lungs to filter alien pollen, spores and other things that trigger anaphylactic shock – still an oxygen breather though.” She breathed in a deep lungful of air. She also looked down while she did so, just to check, and the effect that breathing in so deeply had on her breasts was...remarkable. Sarah let out a giddy sound that was somewhere between a giggle and a squeal: Oh my god, I’m gay for my own boobs.

        Looking down had a side effect of also putting the dead animal in her vision.

        Its blood puddled on the ground-

         Consume.

         Its eyes looked off, dead and sightless-

        Consume.

         Sarah’s tongue darted sloooowly along her lips. Her mouth was wet. Her fangs were out and her teeth felt sharper, as if they knew what it was she wanted. Claws thrust from her fingertips and she dropped to her knees, crawling towards the animal. Consumeconsumecon-

         She grabbed onto the flank and tore a great big chunk of purple flesh from the beast. Black blood dripped through her fingers and she pressed her face into the raw meat, biting down into it. The flavor that exploded in her mouth was so shocking, so intense that for a few seconds she was back at the mess hall when she had gotten a merit for identifying the gene sequence that had been confounding the whole secondary biology department on survey ship 98-01. Dr. Giovanni had bought her a sim-steak as a way to give her extra props and it had tasted sooooooo good .

        This was like that. But after she had licked her fingers clean and sucked the last bit of blood off her palms, there was still more . It was like someone had forgotten to password lock the maker and she could just print food. She grabbed and pulled and ate and ate and ate. She yanked out bones, cracking them in half to suck out the marrow, which she chewed on happily – gooey, delicious, so delicious. She plucked out an eye and chewed on it experimentally, then found that the ocular jelly had flavors like sophisticated grapes. Mmm! She knew she was getting messy as hell, but she didn’t care. She crawled almost half into the body to begin nibbling on bits of organ that were still attached to the inner ribcage.

        Finally, she pulled back, smacking her chops. Her belly was distended and she felt soooo full and so happy.

        “Mmmhm...” Sarah curled up on the patch of blackened grass. As she lay there, she thought idly about why she was on blackened grass. It wasn’t blood. It looked, rather, like it had been charred. The first thought that came to mind was that she had suffered a huge amount of damage when she had fallen – so she had to have repaired that, or else she wouldn’t be alive, right? Well, metabolic activity at that rate had to have been a hugely exothermic reaction – purely from the amount of energy being expended. Hot enough to cook grass? She had no idea.

        Her eyes closed tight.

        When she woke, she felt simultaneously better and worse than she had since this whole nightmare had started. On the one hand, she was full and utterly at peace. Her skin felt natural – like she was so comfortable and happy in it that she never needed to move. She was like some kind of primeval goddess, enjoying dirt and grass as much as thick downy beds and silken sheets. But on the other hand, she was also caked in gore, which had dried. And insects were crawling over her body, nibbling at the chunks of flesh. Sarah screamed and sprang to her feet, slapping at her body to try and get the bugs off. Then she saw the corpse of the beast she had...her eyes widened.

        For a few seconds of frantic slapping and squirming and repetitions of ‘ew ew ew ew ew’, Sarah was sure that some other animal had come in to eat more. There was no way she could have eaten that much. Right? Right! But there were no other tracks in the area, no other signs of a recent animal passage. Sarah took that horrifying detail and filed it far, far, far away from her conscious thoughts and instead, started trotting through the jungle. She barely knew where she was going at first – but then the sound of the burbling creek reached her ears and she realized what she was doing.

        She had to get a frigging bath .

        The river sounded close.

        She kept walking.

        Nice and close. It’d be here any second now.

        Sarah started to jog.

        Niiiice and close . Right?

        An ant-like-creature tried to crawl into a part of her body she preferred nothing would crawl into . She slapped it away and then started to sprint. Her legs pumped and trees whipped past – and Sarah started to count them. She knew the density of the jamming trees was one every half a mile. She passed two in about thirty seconds. She was still trying to not do the math to work out how fast she was going when she came on the creek. It was actually more of a brook – or maybe the right term was riverette? It was deep enough she could get up to her belly in it, but slow enough that she was pretty sure she’d be safe.

        Sarah waded in, still muttering under her breath: “Ew ew ew ew ew!”

        Of course, the fact she had breathe at all and wasn’t a gasping, wheezing wreck was terrifying too. Everything was terrifying! It was a terrifying kind of day. She plunged her head forward, then wriggled under the water, rubbing her hands frantically over her skin, then stood up and snapped her head backwards. Water flew off her...she just realized that she hadn’t even checked her hair. She didn’t know if she had hair. She hadn’t seen anything in her peripheral vision that looked like bangs or anything. She felt water dripping from something atop her head. Sarah gulped, then looked down at her glistening wet body. The blood was gone, rushing rapidly down the river, and she could see herself reflected in the glittering water underneath her.

        Her face was recognizably her – but better. More symmetrical. No more weirdly bigger left nostril, no more persistent barely visible mustache that she had to shave every few weeks. But her eyes were black . Not as in ‘oh, I’m no longer brown eyed.’ No, they were black black . Her irises were black and her whites were black. Everything was black and reflective, like she was looking into the pools of the abyss. She tried to smile a disarming smile at herself, to see how innocent and non-threatening she looked.

        Sarah felt immensely relieved that, even with midnight black eyes and black-green skin, she could still manage to look faintly harried and nervous all the time. Then her eyes shifted to the top of her scalp and she saw that she did have hair. Sort of. Rather than countless strands, she had several dozen spines that thrust from her scalp in a frilled pattern. The spines had several ‘knuckle’s on them, allowing them flex in various directions. She winced at seeing them – and as if responding to her thoughts, the spines clenched tight, giving her a ‘knotty’ look to her hair. Sarah bit her lower lip and tried to ‘relax’ her hair.

        It frilled outwards into a more relaxed, wavy pattern.

        “Well,” she said, her voice soft. “At least I won’t need a haircut? Or something?”

        Sarah walked out of the riverette a few seconds later, once she was sure she was clean, found a clean-ish looking boulder that had been deposited near the river by the ancient glaciers that had cleared this whole area of mountains several million years before humanity had ever swung by to stick its oar in, and sat down. There, she put her hands on her chin, her elbows on her thighs, and started to think aloud.

        “So, Sarah, let's look on the bright side. You have superhuman strength and speed...and endurance. You can run, uh, maybe thirty, forty miles an hour. Jump twenty meters from a standing position.” She licked her ups, then reached down and picked up a small rock from the riverbank. It was covered in moss. She clenched her hands around it and it exploded into a fine powder, dribbling through her fingers. “H-Holy fuck!” She laughed in delight.

        She spent an inordinate amount of time testing that out. She picked up about ten different rocks and crushed them with both hands, marveling at how the powdered rock chunks flowed through her fingers and dribbled onto the ground, at how her hands never ached nor felt tired. Instead, she felt like she could keep crushing rocks for hours and hours and hours without noticing. She tried stomping on one with a black-green heel and it exploded apart under the force with a sound like a gunshot.

        “Whew. Okay...” She grinned and looked upwards, at the pale red sky of Trappist-1a. She crouched down...and lost her nerve. Instead, she stood and bounced on her toes. Even this was remarkable – with a tiny flex of her feet, she popped up like a cork, clearing nearly half a meter before she dropped. Her knees bent slightly to absorb the shock of landing and she flung her arms out, cartwheeling them to keep herself from falling right onto her supermodel ass.

        “Whoa,” she whispered. “Okay. Okay. Okay. Sarah. You can jump super high and it won’t hurt you. You can do it. You can do it.”

        She lowered her knees.

        Lost her nerve.

        She stood up and then scowled and bent her knees. She screwed her eyes shut, clenched her hands, her claws pricking against her palm. “Annnd... jump ,” she hissed. “Jump!” Her knees remained locked – memories of the dizzying, terrifying height of the tree filling her head. “Juuuuuuump!”

        Nothing.

        Sarah opened her eyes and realized how absurd she looked – crouched, arms spread and commanding herself to jump, like a bugged out vid game character. She shook her head and slapped her hands against her sides, her cheeks darkening. She felt the flush burning through her and when she peeked over the edge of the riverette to check herself, she saw that she did blush red. For some reason, that deeply relieved her.

        Sarah put her hands to her face and rubbed her palms against her cheeks. “Okay, Sarah, make a checklist. Lets get shit done.” She clapped her hands together and nodded. “Step one. Find out where you are on the planet. Uh...the radar trees grew along the lines of magnetic force, with the width being roughly analogous to longitude. Or latitude.” She paused. “The part that indicates side to side, not up and down. Whichever one of the two that is. I’m a biologist , Jim, not a cartographer!” She chuckled to herself, her hands on her hips.

        The quiet sounds of the jungle – the faint creak of insects and reptiles, the buzz of wings, the rustle of leaves – sounded particularly judgmental at that moment.

        “Shut up,” Sarah whispered. “Not the jungle. You. Stop talking to yourself.”

        Memories of being found talking to herself on the more cramped scout ships by fellow coworkers chose that moment to burn through her as she started to pace on the riverette bank. She had always claimed to be using her HUD, and no one had believed her because she was a terrible liar and a huge dork. Sarah started to swing her hands expressively and forced herself to think silently. Once she determined her rough position, she could find her way back to the scout ship and tell them what had happened. They could check her out and…

        Her stomach knotted as she started totting up the cost. Just the checkup fees to determine her biological baseline – things like counting heart beats, measuring blood pressure, taking scraping samples – would put her into the red. A full genetic makeup and beginning a comprehensive package for retrogenetic engineering to try and bring her more in line with her old body would put her into prole status for...centuries. She shuddered.

        “Okay,” she whispered. “I can paint myself brown.” She looked down at her skin. “A-And wear a wig. That’s basically the same as being human, right?”

         Oh, and never touch anyone again, a snide, dark part of her brain muttered. Because I’m sure Dr. Bowers would love for someone who can crush rocks with her bare hands – her bare hands with frigging claws – to touch his-

         “Walking time!” Sarah announced, clapping her hands together and walking forward.

        It took her shockingly short time to find one of the jamming trees. And it wasn’t even that she had spotted the distinctive pattern of clearing and flowers that surrounded each tree – the part of the jungle she had been walking through was thick and viney. One second, she had been pushing her way through foliage. The next, she had stepped out and boom . There was a silvery radar jamming tree. Sarah felt faintly disquieted at how easily she had found it.

        Also, how not thirsty she was.

        She had been walking around, buckass naked, through the jungle for who knows how long now. She glistened constantly. Was it sweat? She actually didn’t know. So, before she walked to the tree, Sarah lifted her wrist to her face, as if she was about to check her perfume. She licked herself – and it tasted sweet, not salty. What was she excreting?

        A sudden heat flared to life between her legs.

        “Y-You...have got to be kidding...” She whispered as her knees turned to rubber and her nipples became puffy and hard. Her cheeks flushed and she looked at her glistening skin, breathing in a slow, ragged breath. Her breasts rose and fell with every movement she made, her eyes slowly hooding as she whimpered and the heat stoked hotter and hotter and hotter. Her knees turned from rubber to water and she fell to them, thumping onto the soft grass. She whimpered softly, her head ducking forward as she panted and arched her spine. No.

        No, she didn’t arch her spine.

        Her spine arched itself. A desperate animal instinct, burning through her.

        Then, the heat went from hot to unbearable.

        A noise whined between her teeth as she rolled her head back, her claws digging into the ground as she spread her thighs and thrust her ass into the air. “Fuckfuckfuck!” She hissed out, barely able to form words through the foggy heat in her head. She didn’t even have a coldly clinical biologist muttering about estrus or instinct. She just had a single need, echoing in her head. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. But nothing was out there, no matter how much she whimpered and begged and arched her spine. Sarah’s eyes half closed and she managed to start to piece together a sentence, a word at a time, between frantic, desperate blubbering.

        “Hnnn, fuck me, okay, fuck fuck, I need cock, ah, okay, okay, Sarah, fuck, slide a cock in me!” She closed her eyes, grinding her cheek against the ground as her sex dripped its arousal. “Sarah, you...need to...need cock fuck...” Her eyes almost rolled back into her head. “You need to...snap... fuck meeeee, please please please, oh god, anyone, fuck...” She clenched her jaw. “ This .” Her eyes closed and she grabbed onto the momentary flare of pure fury. It was half and half frustration at not having a thick, delicious cock slamming into her hungry, hungry cunny, at not having warm cum rushing into her fertile, ready womb...and half fury at what had been done to her.

        Her claws dug into the ground and her hands clenched and she snapped her head up, her black eyes shining. “ Fuck   this !” She shouted – and felt something twist inside of her. A blessed coolness flowed through her body. It started near her womb, then worked its way upwards and downward at the same movement. It reached her toes at the same moment it reached her fingers, making both tingle with blessed chill, then swept up to her mouth and her head. She closed her eyes as her tongue went momentarily numb, and her head became perfectly clear.

        Her muscles relaxed all at the same moment and Sarah fell to the side like a tipped cow. She whimpered as she sprawled on her side, her cheek mashed against the dirt and the grass. She breathed in the scents and felt curious bugs bumping against her, clearly not sure what to make of the sudden impediment to their progress.

        “The worst thing?” she mumbled. “I didn’t even get to...”

        She forced herself to stand, feeling wobbly and drained. Her thighs were still soaked. Sarah also felt a deep hollow in the pit of her gut. Part of her already missed the wanton, careless need of that moment. At least, in that state of mind, she hadn’t had a chance to chicken out and run away.

        “Of course, that’s also the same fucking state of mind Mika tried to put you in,” Sarah muttered, brushing her fingers through her spined hair. “God. You just roofied yourself.” She shook her head. “But how did you cancel it out?” She frowned. “Most animals can’t retract that kind of autonomous reaction – hell, humans can’t do that. Well. Certain sects of conregs can. Zen-shoppists can, right? If they bought the upper level courses and really stick with it.” She chewed her lower lip. “But I’m an atheist. Do you know how expensive being a legal Neoevengelical Cathostant is?” She shook her head slightly, remembering the price package for joining the same church that her parents had wanted to join.

        Sarah decided to table the ‘how the fuck did that happen’ question for when she had a lab. Instead, she stepped up to the radar tree and began to check the width of the bark, the thickness of the roots. She grumbled as she bent forward to get a better look – and a wave of dizziness hit her. She wobbled. She wriggled. And she decided that it was better and more dignified to lean against the tree than to land on her curvy butt. Her eyes closed and her palms mashed against the bark – and she felt a dozen tiny wires slam into her skin. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel good. It was just a thing that happened. She yelped and jerked her hands up and away from the tree, dragging the thin wires with her.

        Then she noticed what had happened to the rest of the meadow and screamed .

        The meadow was gone.

        The jungle was gone.

        The planet was gone. She was leaning against a radar jamming tree that floated in the infinite blackness of space. Stars wheeled and spun around her, like a huge matrix of white dots. Her stomach tried to crawl into her throat, and she wanted to rip her hands away from the wires, but she knew that they were interfacing with her nervous system to produce this kind of visual effect. Who knew what that would do if she just yanked it out. She imagined the people who had gotten unlucky with unlicensed HUD implants and shuddered all over again. Then the blackness whipped around her again, stars spinning, and a green-brown sphere popped up in-front of her.

        It was about the size of her body, though considerably wider. It was shrouded in a bluish haze and clouds – it was a planet from space. When her eyes focused on any particular place, the clouds and the haze faded away to show the landscape beneath. She could see the continents, the rivers, the jungle. Despite knowing exactly what it was, it took her overly shocked brain about a minute to finally stutter out: “It...it’s Trappist-1a.”

        She saw a single glowing white spike thrusting from the other hemisphere, just barely visible past the curve of the globe. Tentatively, Sarah reached out with her hand, moving slowly and carefully so as to not overly stress the wires running into her palms. The wires tugged out smoothly, and she had more than enough reach to touch the globe. It was solid, or at least, her nerves thought it was solid. She spun it around and saw that the dot was emerging from the larger continent that the scout ship had landed on. She tugged the globe closer, leaning in physically to examine the coastline.

        Yup.

        There was the scout ship.

        Not that she had found it by remembering its position on the map – she had found three harbors that looked almost exactly like the harbor they had landed by. She had found it because there was a big red dot near one of those harbors, flashing and blinking like the enemy identification indicator on a radar tracking system. The white spike was located in a clearing and a silver tree that was about fifty kilometers away from the cordon. She just needed to walk east.

        Sarah jerked her head back. “This ecosystem is designed,” she whispered. “Those radar trees aren’t just jamming as a random evolutionary feature. T-They’re...they’re…”

        Locational tracking and communication systems, with a jamming suite. Her skin prickled and her goosebumps started up. She had access to a planetary, military grade radar set. That was something Commanders had. She bit her lip and tried to push the globe and her body away - not physically, but with a concentrated effort of will. It was shocking how easy it was – one second, she was focusing. The next, her palms tingled as the wires retracted and drew back into the tree. Sarah stuck her hands into her armpits.

        “Okay,” she whispered. “I just need to walk fifty kilometers through a vast alien jungle to NovaDyne and tell them that I’m a genetically engineered...superhuman...”

        She trailed off.

        Her body could crush rock without even trying. She could run maybe thirty miles an hour. She could eat an entire horse sized creature without even losing her figure . And she hadn’t needed to excrete waste yet. She was producing an aphrodisiac as her sweat. Every single part of that bullet list was a genetic treasure trove that would make NovaDyne a market leader in a dozen different areas. But more, thinking about it in the context of the Eye and the vision of the Claw she had seen, her stomach tightened and her mouth went dry as a bone.

        Take all that and combine it with a global locational tracking and communication systems with a jamming suite?

        She wasn’t a security expert.

        She’d never been through boot camp.

        Hell, she’d never even met a Commander – though she used to play with an action figure of Commander Texas Dallas that she had fished out of a maker’s recycling pit.

        But she knew the basics . Commanders were the center of corporate active security measures – or, in other words, their actual armies. Rather than using security guards and patrol troops, a single Commander was sent into a hotspot. With makers and AI and unrestricted access to a planet's resource that Commanders could get, a single Commander was all most corporations needed. The fact that they were hugely marketable was just, like, an extra side bonus.

        It’d make sense for an alien race to realize the same thing: If you could risk only one real person in a war, you would. Why conscript armies when…

        “You could grow them,” she whispered. “B-But why me? Why did you pick me ?”

        But she knew the reason for that. She was the weak willed, easily pushed around, bossable girl. Acceptable clay . The Eye had taken her and fucked her and left her like this – but they had planned to remake her mind too. And it had come so very close to managing it. Sarah slowly sank to the ground and leaned against the radar tree, drawing her knees into her chest. She pressed her face against her knees, her eyes closing. She had no idea what to do.

        She felt the tears - the urge for tears. But there was no wetness. She closed her eyes and screwed up her face, the pressure growing tighter...and then...

        They came.

        She cried.

        She cried into her knees and she trembled and she wished to wake up back in her bunk, with the slightly smelly air recycler that hadn’t been fixed yet, knowing that she was going to have to survive on another day of rice and vitamins. She wished to just... be at the lab, working on the omniphage with Dr. Bowers. He’d have something nice or funny to say. And she’d look at his hairlip and feel like a total asshole because other than the hairlip, he was actually pretty frigging cute and he was the only person on the whole frigging ship who had ever been nice to her, and now she was a horrifying monster co-opted by actual literal fucking aliens.

        Aliens!

        Aliens who wanted, as far as she could tell, to take over the whole galaxy.

        And she was some kind of...of…

        “...Sarah?”

        Sarah gasped and leaped to her feet, looking around wildly.

        That had clearly been Dr. Bowers voice. It had spoken in her ear, sounding confused and uncertain. Like he hadn’t been sure what to make of the beautiful black-green woman he had seen. Sarah spun around and saw nothing in the field save for a small herd of the guinea-pig sized critters that had two tentacles on their backs and used them to strip flowers for food. She stepped away from the tree. “Dr. Bowers?” She asked. “Larry?” She bit her lip, hard, then looked back again. Then she looked forward. Then she looked back and smacked herself for ten kinds of an idiot.

        She stepped up to the radar jamming tree, planted her palm against it, then whispered. “Dr. Bowers?”

        Nothing.

        She blushed and imagined working with him. Being near him. Maybe nibbling his clothes off and rubbing up against his every pore. Okay, that might have been a tiny bit of the aphrodisiac left inside of her talking. Definitely.

        “Sarah?” Dr. Bowers voice came, clearly, from the tree.

        “Larry?” She asked. “Larry, can you hear me?”

        “Y-Yeah!” Dr. Bowers said. “Holy shit, Sarah, where are you calling from – you’ve been missing for a day and a half – Chief Barakas has you declared dead!” There was a pause. “Holy shit, how are you getting a signal to me from there ?”

        Sarah opened her mouth.

        Closed it.

        “L-Larry...” She said. “C-Can you...can you get out here? I need to show you something.”

Chapter Four: Sarah Gets Laid

        Sarah was on her tenth round of pacing before the hazard suit stomped out from the trees. Sarah wanted to smack herself for being an idiot – part of her had expected Dr. Bowers to arrive in the same clothes she had seen him in the last time. Right. Because when she got magically altered to breathe an alien atmosphere, that meant that everyone did too. She stood, her hands on her hips, looking at the hazard suit. And for a few moments, the stillness of the jungle matched the stillness of her heart. And then she heard Dr. Bower’s voice, grainy and tinny as it came through the front mounted speaker, say: “ Holy fuck .”

        And Sarah remembered she was buckass naked.

        And a sexy alien bug chick now.

        “Sorrysorrysorry!” She squealed, clapping an arm over her breasts and turning around at the same time – remembering at the last second that meant she was now showing him her arse. She clapped her hand over that and sprinted around the radar jamming tree. Once she was on the far end, she peeked around. “Sorry!”

        “Uh. Right. Okay. What the fuck?” Larry asked – even as the tentacles of the edges of his hazard suit reached backwards, pulling the portable pop tent that she had asked him to bring from his back slot. He tossed the tent down and it let out a series of gunshot loud pops  as it began to inflate and expand outwards, hardening into a sturdy habitat section. “Seriously, what the fuck, Sarah?”

        “I told you it was weird!” She hissed.

        The habitat finished expanding and Dr. Bowers latched his suit up to it. Once he was inside, Sarah grabbed some leaves from the nearest tree and held them up to her breasts. Right. Because that was going to magically turn into clothes, just because she desperately wanted it.

        The leaves merged into a smooth bra. The edges of the leaves simply melted and flowed together, intermeshing as if she had grown that way. The fronds reached back and hooked behind her back. The end result looked like it had come from a comic book about cavemen that didn’t want to be age restricted – it didn’t so much as provide a single iota of support, and she felt like she was going to jiggle out of it with every step. But it did just barely cover her nipples. So. There was that.

        “Also, what the fuck?” she whispered. But no matter how confused or shocked she was, Sarah didn’t wait in grabbing another chunk of leaves and pressing them up to her crotch. Once again, desperation won out and the leaves formed into a thong. She walked forward towards the habitat, gulped, then opened the airlock. She half expected to drop dead the instant the airlock finished cycling – but the pollen free air simply tasted clean to her and left her feeling like she was maybe going to be okay.

        The inner door opened and Dr. Bowers had his back to her. “I-I didn’t bring clothes – you just said bring a pop tent.”

        “I...uh, I made some!” Sarah said.

        Dr. Bowers turned back around.

        His eyes widened and his jaw hung slack as he looked at her.

        Sarah tried to pose as unsexily as possible.

        It clearly did not work.

        Dr. Bowers just stood there, gawping at her. Sarah bit her lip, held out her hand, then snapped her fingers under his nose, careful to not quite touch him. Dr. Bowers started and shook his head, blinking a few times. “I-I, uh, wow. Uh. Wow.” He gulped. “I can...” He looked her up and down her body, slowly. “I can see why you wanted me to come alone. Why you didn’t...want to...” She saw his tongue dart up, touching the filmy cover over his hairlip. She smiled shyly at him.

        “Yeah,” she said. “If the head of the science team gets his hands on me, heh, uh, I’m...” She mimed the unzipping motion that the auto-doc’s laser tipped drills would make to slice her open from throat to belly, then mimed her organs falling to the ground, adding grotesque ‘sploosh’ sounds with her mouth. She threw in a quiet: ‘Auugh, no, ow, my organs!’ and clutched her stomach.

        Dr. Bowers continued to gape at her.

        Sarah felt like an idiot. She stood up and crossed her arms over her breasts, the rough leafy texture of her makeshift clothes crinking against her skin. “So, I need help. I need to get...” She paused. “I need to get somewhere safe. Somewhere where I can figure this out.”

        Dr. Bowers put his hands over his face, then dragged his cheeks down, tugging at his skin with his fingers. “Okay,” he said. “Our ship’s heading back to Titan once we finish this phage – for resupply. If I...get you into a biocontainment unit, I can...get you on the ship, then...we can get you off Titan...” He chewed his lower lip. “Titan’s a NovaDyne and BioCore stronghold, but there’s a small UN presence there too. Y-You could apply for refugee status with the UNEC, right?”

        “Right... right !” Sarah clapped her hands together. “It’s better than nothing, right?” She smiled at Dr. Bowers. His cheeks flushed.

        “Now, how do we get you to the biological container?” he asked.

        Sarah sighed. The interior of a pop-tent was remarkably sparse when it came to actual furnishing. Well. At least. The pop-tents that were distributed for lower level researchers were pretty sparse. And Dr. Bowers wasn’t about to shell out for one with anything resembling chairs. She wanted to sit down. Instead, she paced and tapped her feet on the ground and bounced from foot to foot, her head spines twitching with every stray thought. Dr. Bowers watched her move, his eyes following her.

        Sarah snapped her fingers. “Okay! How far along is the omnipathogen?”

        “It’s pretty close, they’re just going to do some testing on a range of...subjects...” Dr. Bowers beamed, his hairlip straining slightly. When he smiled, it was hard to notice. His eyes, which were a rich sea green, sparkled as he nodded slightly. “I just take you as a sample, then stow you in long term storage. That could work!”

        Sarah pumped her fist, then lifted her hand up. “High five!”

        Dr. Bowers looked utterly flummoxed, then remembered what a high five was and lifted his hand to tentatively tap his palm against hers. Sarah, remembering, jerked her hand back and clapped it behind her back. “Wait, my skin has a contact aphrodisiac!” She yelped. Dr. Bowers jerked his hand back and stumbled against the wall.

        “It what !?”

        Sarah grinned, her head spines retracting hard against her head. “Yeaaahhh,” she said.

        Dr. Bowers frowned. “Let me get my sampler,” he said, turning around and rummaging around in his hazard suit. Sarah rubbed her palm along her shoulder, looking aside. Of course, touching herself didn’t make her horny – but licking herself had. Maybe Dr. Bowers could be fine if he just touched her and refrained from licking her? A pang struck her. Like a physical blow. It radiated out from the contact point on her spine, burning outwards. It was a need to be hugged . To just be picked up and squeezed in big strong arms. Or even tiny weak arms. Just. Being hugged please.

        Dr. Bowers, instead of hugging her, held out the sampler he had packed. It was a small multipurpose tool for general sample collection and analysis and it looked almost exactly like the design used by a speculative fiction show that had been popular right around the time it had been first designed – then never changed, no matter how many centuries spanned the time between then and now. Humans were funny like that. The extendable baton that was used to collect potentially dangerous samples prodded against Sarah’s cheek. She instinctively batted at it. “Nyah!” she said.

        “All right,” Dr. Bowers said, looking at the result. “This...” His brow furrowed. “Damn. I’m going to need a lab to fully determine the molecular and chemical composition of this stuff you’re secreting. I’m getting multiple chemical signature that I don’t think can be produced without some really serious metabolic trickery.”

        “Like...” Sarah bit her lower lip. “Okay, like, how tricky are we talking here? Are we talking nanomachines or are we talking...” She trailed off as Dr. Bowers took out the dosimeter attachment on his sampler and held it out towards her face, then began to swing it slowly down her throat. “Jesus Christ.”

        “The fact you’re not highly radioactive is just making this weirder,” Dr. Bowers said.

        “Jesus Christ !” Sarah put her hands over her face.

        Dr. Bowers stood still for a few moments, looking down at his sampler. Then he shook his head and shoved the sampler into his pocket, where it say like a large rock. “No, no, nevermind,” he said.

        “What?” Sarah asked.

        “Did...” He blinked up at her, his mouth opening into an O, then closed. “Nothing.”

        Sarah’s brow furrowed. Her arms crossed over her chest again and she tried to not sound angry as she said: “Thinking of the biocomp bonus, huh?”

        “I...” Dr. Bowers choked, then hung his head forward. “Yes. A little. Sarah, I’m sorry, it’s just, it’d be so so much scrip. I might even get some in Universal Credit.” He shook his head again. “B-But you’re right. Earlier, I mean. They’d take you to pieces in the lab and there’s not a damn thing we could do to stop them.” He smiled at her, weakly. Sarah smiled back.

        “Thanks,” she said, her voice husky.

        “Hey, we card punchers and data shufflers have to stick together, right?” Dr. Bowers asked, then clapped his hand on her shoulder comfortingly. Sarah’s smile became completely strained. She stood perfectly still. Dr. Bowers’ own expression had become transfixed in amber – caught between shock, horror, disgust, camaraderie, and indignation at his own stupidity. He slowly, slowly lifted his hand up and off her shoulder. Thin lines of the glossy secretion she put out at all time connected her skin to his skin. Sarah tensed, ready to have to restrain Dr. Bowers the instant the insane mad lustfulness exploded across him.

        Nothing happened.

        “I think I’m okay,” Dr. Bowers said.

        Then his eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed onto the ground like a boneless heap. His shirt flared red and a siren started to play from the wrist speakers: “ Medical Alert! Medical Alert! Medical Alert !”

        “Auh!” Sarah screamed. “Why couldn’t he just be horny!?”

        She knelt down, then stood hurriedly before she touched him. She started to rummage around in the pop-tent, looking for a medical kit. She yanked open a container in the wall and found it was empty. She tugged down the ceiling container and got smacked in the face by something bulky and heavy. She flailed wildly. “Ack!” The package settled into her hands and she shook her head, her hair stabbing in every direction like a bunch of very angry crabs. The package was a glossy, cheaply printed magazine. The holographic title flared out: NovaLog. Below that, in red letter: The best magazine in the off world colonies! The cover’s speaker began to play the happy chip-tune version of the NovaDyne company theme.

        Sarah tried to throw it away from her, but the cover stuck to her palm like she was covered in glue. The interior of the magazine fluttered open, projecting holograms of all the various products you could buy from the company store – including the Mark 2 Pop-Tent. Voices stuttered into the air from the pages as they were flapped open: “-last longer, harder, and-” “-warranty sold separately-” “-act now to get a 10% discount-” “-the Mk. II Pop-Tent includes a full medop station-”

        The magazine flew off and hit the wall with a splat.

        By now, Dr. Bowers’ face was turning greenish-black. His veins were bulging out and clearly visible against his pale skin. His eyes looked glassy, but he was still breathing weakly, his chest rising and falling. Sarah stood stock still, her brain locking up. She wanted, desperately, to save Dr. Bowers life. That thought seemed to fill her entire brain – and so, when she blinked and found herself kneeling beside Dr. Bowers, her wrist poised above his throat, Sarah yelped in shock. She hadn’t thought of moving. She just had . When she pulled her wrist and arm backwards, she saw that a pair of thin veins had emerged from her wrist and slammed into Dr. Bowers’ throat.

        “Auuuuuuuh!” Sarah started to jerk her wrist back, but her other hand lashed out and she caught herself before she ripped the veins out of his...veins. Instead, she stood perfectly still and watched his face. The black veins were starting to recede. But he was still breathing weakly and he was still glassy eyed. Sarah gulped. “Okay. Okay.” She whispered. “Okay. Everything is fine so far.”

        Dr. Bowers’ hair chose that moment to fall out as one big, fine clump, leaving his scalp bald and stubby with scabs. The scabs, before her eyes, started to grow. “Nononononono!” Sarah put her hands on his face, as if she was going to be able to push the black, scabby material away from Dr. Bowers’ head and face. Instead, they just grew under her fingers and spread outwards, fanning over his eyes, covering his nose. It had gone from a set of scabs to a shiny half helmet of slick, semi-reflective chiten that felt intensely hot to her touch. Sarah snapped her hands back and away, gaping as the growth slipped under Bowers’ shirt, wriggling and causing his clothing to pump outwards, strain, then rip and tear as the covering – the cocoon – expanded outwards. She sat there in stupid shock until his pocket tore and his sampler went skittering away from his hip.

        Sarah grabbed it – and as if picking up the sampler had dislodged almost five years of collegiate education that had been curled up in the corner, whimpering. She took hold of the detachable wand, adjusted it from dosimeter to medical probe, then slammed it into his thigh moments before the cocoon swept past his belly. The probe sunk into his skin with worrying ease. She jerked her hand backwards as the cocoon, picking up speed, completed its growth and surrounded Dr. Bowers entire body. She checked the sampler and saw that she was getting wireless results from the probe.

        “Okay,” she whispered.

        The results from the probe were...fine. Just fine. It was totally normal for a human’s body temperature to skyrocket. It was totally normal for muscle tissue to begin to denature and begin to collapse into a slurry of undifferentiated proteins. “Everything is fine!” Sarah hissed, the sampler creaking as she gripped it harder and harder. “This is  totally fine .”

        The next hour in the pop-tent was pretty close to what Sarah thought hell would be. Not only did she get to sit and simmer in a guilt ridden paranoia, but she also got to bake. Because the pop-tent, being a Mk I, had insulation but no temperature controls. That meant it had no way to bleed off the temperature as Dr. Bowers cocoon sat there and got hot enough to cook a rat on. That meant that soon Sarah was sitting in a puddle of her own sweat. Or maybe it was more of her murder-killer body secretions? Maybe she was going to start farting nerve gas!

        The results from the sampler’s diagnostic probe just kept getting weirder. Structures were forming inside of that cocoon that bore zero similarity to human parts. She had plunged the probe into the thigh, near the femoral artery. Well, now, the local resolution showed that a muscle of similar size had grown there, but it was shaped wrong and was nowhere near anything she recognized as a bone or vein. The blood that was flowing past looked more complicated than most of the nano that she had observed while in college – it was doing things far more sophisticated than just carrying oxygen here and dropping off waste there. It was stopping to do repair work, to fight what looked like minor infections.

        The biologist in her said that nothing of Dr. Bowers...of Larry...could survive this transformation.

        “But I kinda disprove that, don’t I?” she muttered, brushing her palms along her cheeks. “I mean, I’m still here.”

        After what felt like an eternity – but according to the sampler was less than two hours – the cocoon let out a blast of fragrant air from several seams, all at once. The sound made Sarah’s heart rate skyrocket and jerked her from her slumped position of self recrimination and misery. She put her hand over her breast, feeling her soaked leafy bra turning to mush against her fingers. She had a few seconds to mutter about how gross it was before the scythe blade slammed up and out of the cocoon.

        Sarah sprang to her feet and screamed.

        The scythe blade punched upwards, and it was connected to a muscular, brown-red arm. Exposed muscle stretched and flexed between curved armor plating that looked like it had come from the set of a cheap spec-fic horrorshow, save that it was so terribly, glisteningly real. Then another scythe blade punched out of the other side of the cocoon. Both ripped to the side and then the rest of what had been Dr. Bowers emerged with a flail of muscular limbs, snapping teeth, and whipping tendrils, and a screeching noise that set Sarah’s spiny hair on edge. She molded her back against the airlock, her heart almost literally crawling up her throat as Dr. Bowers wriggled and kicked himself free of the cocoon.

        Dr. Bowers shook himself. Cocoon stuff slapped onto the floor as he breathed heavily. He had the build of a grayhound canine – big bell chest, narrow tiny waist. He had two forelegs, two rear legs, and two shoulder blade mounted limbs that ended in scythe blades nearly as long as his elongated, canine-like muzzle. His eyes were set back into armored plating, and blinked languidly. He had a long, whiplike tail tipped with a curved barb, and his head had a ‘mane’ of slowly writhing tendrils that looked somewhere between dreadlocks and tentacles.

        Sarah inched towards the airlock.

        “What. The. Fuck?” Dr. Bowers asked.

        Sarah closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Dr. Bowers was looking right at her.

        Sarah inched a bit closer to the airlock.

        “Sarah,” Dr. Bowers said, his voice remarkably calm – emanating as it was from his chest, not his muzzle. It had an echoy quality, like he was speaking out of a well.

        “Yes, Larry?” Sarah was impressed with how calm she sounded.

        “I’m a dog, Sarah,” Dr. Bowers said, slowly. “Why am I a dog, Sarah? Why the  fuck  am I a  fucking  dog!?”

         Okay, Sarah, she thought. He’s going through a lot. Say something. Anything. Helpful!

        “Well?” Dr. Bowers growled.

        “I mean, you’re more of an alien abomina-” Sarah clapped her hands over her mouth. She immediately hurried over and threw herself to her knees before Dr. Bowers head. She grabbed onto the curved ridges of his forehead and dragged his head up, so that she could look into his eyes. Her voice was soft and it was serious. “Larry, I know that I did this. But that means I can undo this. Right? Right. So, we just need to stay calm, and think about this rationally, and you’ll have your fingers and your hands and your...everything back! Right? Right.” She nodded.

        Dr. Bowers did not try to nod. He was looking at her with wide, slitted eyes.

        “Right?” Sarah whispered.

        “Sarah,” Dr. Bowers said.

        “Y-Yes Larry?” she whispered.

        “Remember how you...said your skin was an aphrodisiac?” He asked, his voice very strained.

        Sarah slowly craned her head to the side.

        Oh.

         Oh .

        She yanked her hands back. But it was far, far, far too late. Dr. Bowers had a hardon that would have made a horse blush. It was  long  and it was  thick  and it hung between his haunches like a great big blue flag. It was blue, by the way. Blue and almost  glowing . The tip was triangular and the underside was ridged in a way that looked either extremely uncomfortable or extremely pleasant, depending on if all the advertising copy she had seen for sex toys had been lying to her or not. Not that you ever had the money to spare on a fucking dildo, she thought, even as she saw that his cocktip was dripping with glowing fluid, which pattered thickly onto the floor. It looked glittery and slippery and her brain was already starting to imagine what it’d feel like rubbing into her skin.

        “Uh… “Sarah whispered.

        “Sarah,” Dr. Bowers said. No. He was a bit past saying things now. That was a growl. A nearly subsonic growl that sent a crawling shiver along her spine and made Sarah’s knees slip just a bit further apart on the ground. In the silence that came after that growl, both of them clearly heard Sarah’s gulp. Then Dr. Bowers leaped. His forepaws pressed to her shoulders and her back mashed against the floor of the pop-tent. His breath was warm and hot against her face, and his tongue darted out, slathering along her lips, her cheek, her jaw. His breath smelled sweet and she whimpered as his tongue probed her oh so willing, oh so hungry lips. His tongue thrust down her throat and she grabbed onto the back of his broad neck, while his hind legs planted themselves to either side of her hips. This had the side effect of grinding his dayglow cock against her belly, smearing her with his excitement. His lubrication . Sarah shuddered and her toes curled. Her claws snicked out and caught against the armor chiten of his body as she kissed him back.

        When Larry pulled back – and it had to be Larry now, not Dr. Bowers – Sarah gasped in huge lungfuls of air to try and clear her head. Since those lungfuls were full of Larry’s animal musk , that has less of a head clearing effect than she would have liked. So, instead, she giggled in a way she hadn’t since college and mumbled. “T-This is going to be a weird HR complaint.”

        Larry’s chuckle buzzed through her whole body. Sarah put her hands against his chest. “Giddof,” she mumbled.

        Larry sprang backwards as neatly as a trained show pony. He landed on his hind legs, setting his haunches down as he settled himself into a seated position that looked almost dignified, save for the fact that he was still popping a boner that made Sarah go a bit dizzy in her head. She sat up, her hair spines flicking and twitching as she rubbed her hands along her scalp. “Okay,” she said, laughing. “Okay, wow. Okay.” She gulped. “Okay. Thanks.”

        “Y-Yeah, about that,” Larry said, his voice tight. “That was an automatic response. I...am...going almost fucking insane with lust right now, but I cannot move.” He panted. “God, Sarah...get on your hands and knees, thrust that green ass of yours into the air and let me fucking plow you until you can’t fucking walk, rrrr!” The growl that escaped his muzzle made the entirety of Sarah feel as if she had been electrified. But. In a good way. She blinked slowly. Her mouth opened. Closed.

        “...you have to follow my orders,” she whispered. “Roll over.”

        The words popped out of her mouth before she could really think them through. Larry rolled onto his back, his legs spread slightly, his cock laying against his narrow, muscular belly. He made a soft whining noise. “Sarahhhh!”

        Sarah felt a knot that she hadn’t known was there uncoil. Loosen. Fall away. “I can say no at any time,” she whispered.

        One of Larry’s eyes swiveled to look at her inside of the armored bony plate on his head. Despite being a doglike alien with three foot long, razor sharp scythe blades on his back, he still somehow managed to look like a kicked puppy. “Sarah, I’d have stopped! If you said no. I mean.” He paused. “Please please please let me fuck you!” That last word came through in a whine that reminded Sarah of the wild dogs that some of the kids in the sline levels took care of.

        Sarah grinned, shyly. “I believe you...” She licked her lips, slowly. Was this what it was like to go to a robot brothel, where the droids were sleeved by a kneecapped AI and had to follow your every whim? No, it wasn’t quite the same. This was Larry, not some dumb program. She gulped, then turned around. Her palms slapped against the floor and, feeling extremely silly and extremely turned on, she thrust her ass into the air, wriggling herself from side to side. “Larry, come here an- Jesus Christ !” Her head snapped backwards as Larry, in a single smooth motion, went from laying on his back to on her back. He had pounced on her in a blur of movement, and his forepaws gripped her shoulders, his hind legs planted themselves to either side of her legs, and his shoulder arms slammed forward into the ground ahead of her.

        The way that the scythes struck the floor and  punctured  through the metal made Sarah nearly wet herself with arousal.

        “Jesus,” She whispered.

        Heat growled against her ear. Then the alien cock ground against her sex, so hot and so wet that she felt nearly friction-less. Sarah’s own claws dug into the floor and she rocked herself backwards against the cock that was teasing her. Larry ground back, then hissed softly as he began to sink into her. The feeling was...indescribable. Her pussy spread for him, then spread wider, and her whole body felt as if she was being completed. His member bumped against parts of her sex that she hadn’t realized could feel, let alone could feel so very good .

        “Faster,” Sarah whined.

        And Larry obliged.

        Sarah clenched onto the ground and shuddered in pure bliss as Larry fucked her with hard, brutal, animal thrusts. His hips slapped against her ass, and she felt the jiggles reverberating through every part of her body that had even a tiny bit of give. She felt no balls, no testes at all, bumping against her thighs, or slapping her belly. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she drooled on the floor – but a part of her was making a tiny idea of an adjustment. Balls felt nice. She liked balls.

        Her orgasm exploded through her with the shocking speed of a firework going off. Everything went white and Sarah made a noise that was somewhere between a gurgle and a groan – the same noise she had made when she was literally getting skullfucked by tentacles. As if Larry had read her mind, the tentacles that wreathed his head like a mane of hair wrapped around her. One wrapped around her throat. Two others caressed her scalp. One teased her lips. One even bumped, lazily, against her nose.

        Sarah came again . This time, the whiteness came with a roar – a roar that she realized came from somewhere other than her own brain only after she felt the first searing hot jet of cum, spurting into her womb. Sarah gurgled against the ground as her thighs spread wantonly wide and she let her entire brain go blank as Larry pumped blast after blast of cum into her. She felt so full – and his cock swelled just a bit more, keeping the cum that he was filling her inside her.

        Only slowly did he start to pull out of her, his breath hot against her neck as he drew out. Her sex dripped onto the floor as he pulled out – the pattering sound making her tremble with how downright lewd it sounded. Sarah’s legs spread even wider and let her belly and hips rest against the floor. She had never been this flexible before, but she accepted it now as her new normal. She mumbled. Tried to speak. Finally said: “Jinkies.”

        “...what?” Larry asked.

        “S’a thing my roomie used to say...” Sarah mumbled. “After good sex.”

        “How’d you know?” Larry asked, then perked up.

        “Hid in the closet once,” Sarah mumbled more.

        “...hot...” Larry whispered.

        “I was terrified they’d notice me the whole time, so, no, actually,” Sarah admitted, her voice coming more easily as she got her arms under her. She rolled onto her back, panting slowly. “Hey. Wait. Wait, wait, wait...” She closed her eyes. “Your HUD. Where’s your HUD?” She looked around – and she saw that his HUD had been part of the cocoon scraps. Sarah was beginning to remember their idea for the plan – and that that would need to be modified, now that Larry had been changed like her too. But as she crawled, hand over hand, to the HUD, she noticed that the implanted speaker – now exposed to the open air – was buzzing along the ground. Someone was speaking. Which meant that they were getting through the radio interference to contact his HUD...

        Which meant…

        Sarah heard the sound of the security droids first. Then the rumble, crash, crackle of the heavy vehicles. She scrambled to her feet, adrenaline burning out the last of her post-fuck goofiness. “Uh, shit, shit!” She said, looking around wildly. The pop-tent’s built in communication system, a cheap intercom that sounded like it was several centuries old, spoke: “This is Sec-Team 09, Officer Mahendra. Dr. Bowers, we detected your HUD’s med alert, is everything okay in there?”

        Sarah picked up the coms. “Yes! We’re good! Everything is fine in here!” She paused. “How are you?”

        “...Dr. Kappel?” Pause. “Aren’t you dead ?”

        Sarah looked at the doglike alien that was Larry Bowers. “Uhh...”

        The coms cracked off.

        The airlock blew in.

        And the flashbang followed after.

Chapter Five: Sarah Gets Mad

        Sarah had seen flashbangs used in fiction. Loud noise, big flash, ringing sound, lots of slow motion while the hero tried to desperately scramble for a gun to shoot back. What fiction didn’t include was the feeling of the flash-power burning onto her skin in a grid pattern, or the way the nerve-induction sonics hammered her flesh like...hammers. It didn’t mention that the gas that filled her nose and throat hit her nearly as bad as the anaphylactic shock had. And it definitely didn’t mention the security robots storming in. One of them smashed into her shoulder first and sent her sprawling to the ground. The security bot planted itself atop her body, unfolding several arms that began to spray her with fast hardening polymer – all before she had managed to even think about explaining what was going on.

        A machine gun’s hammering filled the air. Larry cried out – and out of the corner of her eye, she saw black blood splashing against the wall. “No!” Sarah shouted. Then a screeching of torn metal reached her ears. The head of one of the security mechs went flying overhead. Then Larry thumped to the ground to her left. Blood welled from a half dozen ragged holes punched into his flank – bubbling and hissing. He breathed raggedly and rumbled. “S’fine...”

        A pair of shiny black boots stomped past her head. When Sarah craned her head up, she saw the clear faceplate and armored body of a security officer. She cocked her head to the side and picked up the face of Chief Baraka. He was pale, with dark hair, and a wicked scar from one of the many minor skirmishes that NovaDyne had fought with competitors over the years. He had one of his heavy revolvers in his hand – the kind he favored because they were flashy and fancy looking. Sarah gritted her teeth.

        “That’s Dr. Bowers!” she shouted over the sound of ringing in her ears. She sounded distant. Muffled. “Don’t hurt him!”

        Chief Baraka looked at her, with cold eyes. His lip curled and he put his boot onto Larry’s ribs, pushing him onto his side. “This  thing  is Dr. Bowers?” he asked.

        “Y-Yes!” Sarah gasped. “You can hear him! He can  talk !”

        “ Yeah!” Larry rasped out.

         Chief Baraka put his finger to the side of his helmet. He was getting a radio bust. Sarah felt the pain and buzzing from the flashbang fading – her ears weren’t even ringing anymore. She strained against the restraints wrapped around her chest, her arms and her muscles burning. The restraints started to creak and groan. Chief Baraka shook his head. “I’ve fought bugs before,” he said, his voice soft. He put more pressure on Larry, pinning him down as Larry made weak twitches with his arms. Baraka aimed with his pistol, right down at Larry’s head.

        “No!” Sarah shouted. “No, don’t, please !”

        Baraka fired.

        Larry’s doglike skull exploded apart. Brain matter and bits of bone flecked against Sarah’s cheek. She went slack, her arms feeling like they’d suddenly become pipe cleaners again. Baraka spoke – his voice silent, no longer transmitting outside of his suit. He gestured to the remaining security team and security bots. Soon, human arms had slung Sarah between metal bodies – and added a second, third, and fourth layer of mummy like wrappings. She wriggled and squirmed – but no matter how hard she strained, no matter how hard she tried, Sarah couldn’t get free.

        The whole force started home.

        And Sarah began to cry.

***

        The cell that they dumped her into was painfully familiar.

        Sarah scrambled to her feet and immediately did what a dozen or so specimens she had captured had done across three different tours with NovaDyne: She scrambled to the walls and started to press her palms against the smooth, silvery surface that she knew was a full spectrum quantum dot scanner and recording device. A voice came over the PA: “Subject appears to be bipedal and fully capable of humanoid movements. Uh, start doing a thermal workup.”

        “D...Doctor Gibson?” Sarah asked, her ears perking up.

        Dr. Gibson didn’t say anything to her. Instead, a glowing bar of light wicked out from the cell walls and swept over her body. She heard a faint collection of sounds, rustling through her ears. It was a bit like being on a com with someone whose microphone was too close to their desk. She heard the clicking of styluses and pens, the soft clatter of plastic on plastic, the typing of fingers. She frowned. “Dr. Gibson!” She said, again. “It’s me! Sarah!”

        “Subject is attempting to communicate,” Dr. Gibson said, his voice sounding tired and distracted. “Uh, do you think it is a camouflage attempt?”

        “Possibly,” another voice said – one she recognized as Trevor Yale. He was one of the flashy nanotechs who had been earmarked for promotion for the entire trip. “Though, if it was going to pretend to be Sarah, you’d think it’d be more...” He started to make oinking noises.

        There was a shoving sound, and some snickering.

        Sarah was hearing three male voices – Gibson, Yale and...if she didn’t miss her guess, Barakas. She crossed her arms over her chest, feeling a flare of self consciousness. “My name is Sarah Kappel,” she said. “I was born in the Torontoburgh Archaeology, in level 98101. My parents are Perez and Sarah Kappel, they both have EduTech citizenship. My mom is working on their latest Marvel reboot doing scut-level CGI for Captain America’s lower limbs, and my dad handles repair and maintenance on the Galactic Adventures amusement park in Erie Park. I s-served on this fucking ship for three fucking months and the whole fucking time, Trevor didn’t stop making oinking noises every time I walked past his fucking cubical, and the only reason I didn’t say anything is because I know he’s fucking you, Gibson, you piece of shit. Let. Me. Out !”

        The words got faster and louder the more they tumbled out of her. She trembled and she felt her claws pricking against the insides of her armpits as she tucked them against her. Her eyes glared outwards, at one of the four walls. Not that she knew which one was adjoined to the laboratory. One of them had to be.

        Silence.

        “Can the subject hear-” Yale started.

        “Yes, I can fucking hear you! Let me out !” Sarah shouted.

        “Sedate the subject,” Barakas snapped, his voice authoritative. The others didn’t hesitate. The entire room started to hiss. The gas was invisible, but it had clearly been designed to work with the biochemistry of this planet. It rushed into Sarah’s nose and down her throat. Her lungs burned and she wobbled, slightly, her knees quivering until she fell onto her hands and her knees. Her head ducked forward.

        “...goddamn, though...” She heard Trevor’s voice through a muffled pillow. “Look at that ass .”

        “It’s an alien, Doctor Yale,” Barakas rumbled. But she could practically feel the big security chief oggling her. Well. Now she knew where the fucking lab was. Her eyes closed and her claws scraped onto the ground – drawing up thin furrows of silvery metal, which snarled up against her fingertips.

        “Did you just see that?” Gibson whispered.

        Sarah breathed heavily through clenched teeth. “That’s...solid...hypersteel alloy...” She snapped her head up, her head spines tightening against her head like a set of ridges – making her look fierce and furious. Her eyes flashed. “I said...” She forced herself to her knees as more gas hissed into the room. “Let. Me. Out .”

        She punched the wall.

        There was nothing elegant about it. She hadn’t really gone in for much training, beyond the grips and grabs that most women learned to try and get men to let go of them. It was a flailing, wild swing. But it struck the wall with a gonging sound that left an indentation nearly as deep as her thumb and sent a wash of numbing pain along her whole arm. Her shoulder had gone numb, that was how far along the backwash went. The numbness faded as she lifted her other arm. This time, the impact punched through the wall and into open air. Ragged metal tore at her skin and black blood flowed along the wall as Sarah grinned, feeling...for the first time in her life…

        Powerful.

        It was a good feeling.

        She jerked her wrist backwards and saw the wounds were already closing. Through the ragged hole she had punched into the wall, she could see Dr. Yale and Dr. Gibson gawping at her. They both scrambled out of their swivel chairs and away from the broad board of dials, switches and touch screens that served as the observation room. Barakas, though, pulled out his pistol and started to fire shots through the hole and into the containment cells. Sparks showered the air as the bullets rebounded and started to bounce off Sarah’s shoulder blades and buttocks. She ducked aside and hissed as she felt a stinging lump of metal flick against her forehead – it felt a bit like a kid tossing a paper football at her.

        “Incinerate her!” Barakas said.

        “Her now?” Sarah growled.

        “We can’t, the seal is-” Dr. Gibson gibbered, sounding nearly hysterical.

        Sarah grabbed onto the ragged edge of the hole. She hooked her claws on the metal and she tore. The wall squealed and groaned and gave all in one gigantic piece. Wires, tugged free from their mountings, sparked in the air while computer components tumbled from where they had been nestled, skittering along the floor like multicolored candies. Sarah pivoted herself through the hole, her feet kicking out and smashing into Dr. Yale’s chest. The blond haired puke went flying backwards and smashed into the wall, leaving an indentation in the cheap areoplast. Gidion grabbed onto the younger doctor’s hand and tugged him to the door, screaming at the top of his lungs.

        Chief Barakas shot Sarah in the chest.

        The round slammed through her, then bust inside of her with a starburst of flame and pain. She staggered backwards, blood streaming past her lips. She coughed, wobbled slightly, then clutched at herself. Her eyes half closed. She clenched teeth and felt bubbling heat dripping through and around her teeth. “Oh...” She hissed. “You should have brought a bigger gun,” she growled in a voice that was not her own, in words that were not her own. This wasn’t Sarah. Sarah was meek. Sarah hid. But Sarah was hiding now – and something else was wearing her skin, using her vocal cords. That something else grabbed onto Barakas’ pistol hand.

        “Subject seems to have vastly increased strength,” Sarah growled.

        She clenched.

        The pistol came to pieces, and the pieces turned Barakas’ hand into a red ruin of bone and veins. The security chief’s eyes bugged and his knees buckled.

        “Subject seems to be deeply aware of human biological weaknesses,” Sarah added, bringing her knee up. She would have smashed the Chief’s balls in with that strike – but he bent and twisted, so that instead, her knee caught his thigh and the femur burst from the skin with a spray of arterial blood. She released his hand and he collapsed onto his back, gasping, his face completely chalk white. His eyes were wild and his face was flecked with blood and bits of spittle.

        “Subject...” Sarah lifted her foot.

        Barakas mumbled something.

        From his mouth. His human mouth. Her foot hovered over that face and she saw that she was about to turn a human being into pulp. Sarah wanted to be sick. She stepped back and away from the prone man, bile rising out of her mouth. Oh god, she thought. Oh god oh god.

         Baraks managed to get the words out, louder: “Security...override. Emergency evacuation orders. Now.”

        The entire ship began to wail with alerts as Barakas laid his head back. His eyes closed and he smirked. “You’re going to be...left here...to rot. Both of us are gonna die here, you alien bi-” He blinked as Sarah grabbed onto his shirt. She slung him over her shoulder and sprang into the corridor. Her brain wheeled as she remembered the emergency evacuation routines. The scout ship, like most scout ships, was designed to deploy and fabricate a large laboratory extension. Since, well, it had a maker. It didn’t have to transport a bunch of supplies from place to place. Normally, when it got prepped to leave a planet, they’d all get into work suits and dismantle the whole place and chuck it into the maker to recycle it all back to component matter, which could then be used for reaction mass or making a lab on the next planet.

        But when the emergency happened...

        The whole base shuddered and she heard screams and cries of alarm coming from others in detatched sections of the lab. Then she came to the large central airlock that led to the actual body of the ship. The doors were creaking shut with a loud derrt derrt derrt noise. Sarah skidded to a stop, panting heavily. “Hey, Chief,” she said. “You have health insurance, right?”

        “Class two!” he snarled.

        “Good!” Sarah put him down. “I didn’t.”

        She kicked him through the doorway. He skidded along the ground like a football, until the door slammed shut – sealing and locking shut. Sarah nodded to herself. Class two healthcare meant he’d get a new hand. So. She didn’t have to feel too bad about herself. Which was why she managed to keep herself from vomiting until right now. She puked her entire stomach contents onto the floor, coughing and spluttering as she spat and smacked her lips. “Ugh. Ick. Augh. Oh god. Oh god.”

        Then the ship took off.

        The sucker used a high end fusion torch – enhanced via some kind of gravitational input shunt, the same kind that they used to power the HPS drive. That meant it could unleash a terrible amount of force – and when that force hit the ground, it rippled to each side. Superheated gasses exploded through the space between the lab structures, and the cheaply fabricated materials started to melt. The entire ground rocked upwards and Sarah was flung away from the airlock door. She hit her back and saw the corridor sagging inwards, like some kind of demented house of wax – dripping with lava-like stalagmites. Or tites. She could never remember which. She scrabbled backwards on her hands and feet, crabwalking before she got to her feet and sprinted away. The ceiling, being cheaply made, started to collapse as the subsonic rumble of the rocket shook it to pieces, then the backwash bathed it from overhead as the scout ship rushed towards the heavens. She dodged left, dodged right, screaming as she batted away metal plates that tumbled onto her head and her shoulders.

        Finally, she reached one of the connection tubes that linked the biolab to the nanolab.

        Sarah sprinted right, hit the wall, then leaped off it and slammed into the window that faced the jungle. Her shoulder struck it and the armored glass shattered apart, letting her skid through the grass and dirt until she landed at the base of one of the heavy turrets. The roaring sound that had filled her ears for the past few minutes faded – slowly.

        She watched the rocket climb.

        Climb.

        Gone.

        Sarah sat up, panting softly. She touched where she had been shot. It was already healed. But fuck she was hungry. Sarah smacked her lips...and felt oddly at peace. DynaCore was gone. She was definitely fired. Stranded on an alien planet, in an alien body.

        And yet?

        She felt…

        Good.

        Real good. Sarah stood, her stomach growling. And then she did a little dance as she realized why she felt this intense sense of relief, of peace. She lifted her arms over her head as she leaped from foot to foot. “I don’t...owe...anyone...any money!” She sang, wriggling her hips from side to side. “No more debt! Woo! Dance! Yeah!”

        Sarah kept dancing for an embarrassingly long time

        Eventually, she noticed. Stopped. And sheepishly headed inside.

***

        The emergency evacuation of the NovaDyne survey ship had blasted incredibly hot rocket exhaust through a worryingly large chunk of the research complex. The whole place had been designed to try and shunt that exhaust away from important parts of the building – but the design had been created for NovaDyne’s normal exploration targets. Those were exoplanets that usually had so little atmosphere that you only needed a tiny bit of clearance to ensure that the rocket exhaust wouldn’t cook things. Vacuum, after all, was a very effective insulator. Because designing a new building would have taken valuable time away from the new line of consumer products, they had just used the old design on Trappist-1a.

        This meant that, as Sarah walked her way through the rapidly abandoned complex, she kept finding corridors and roofs that had been kissed by super heated atmosphere. Some of them had held up well. For example, the security bunker that had been positioned very close to the actual ship was nearly intact, with only minor scorching along the interior walls. Not that Sarah could actually get inside the bunker – it was locked up tight.

        Other places had survived less well. One of those ‘less well’ places included the bunk rooms and the common room. The maker that she had been kicking just twenty four hours ago was so much bubbling silvery glop in the middle of a room that looked like it had been turned to wax, then set on fire. Sarah put her hands on her hips as she surveyed the damage, making a tiny ‘tick’ noise with her tongue. She was honestly not entirely sure what to do right now.

        “You’re debt free,” she said, quietly. “You can survive on this planet indefinitely.” She frowned.

        That was just it. She was debt free. She didn’t have a paycheck to look forward to, or expenses to tally up. She didn’t need to juggle a budget or a deadline. She just... was . It was a deeply unsettling experience, now that the initial jubilation had worn off. So, Sarah clapped her hands. The sound was shockingly loud in the empty room. She actually started and looked around, as if expecting to see fellow co-workers glaring at her for disturbing their quiet. Instead, she only saw a few insects buzzing around the large hole that the rocket had burned into the ceiling, perching and roosting.

        “R-Right!” Sarah said, placing her hands back together again. “Step one, find some food. You’re hungry. Put food into the mouth hole. That’s how you don’t die of starvation.” She nodded. “...right, you...you know that already, Sarah, you have a doctorate in exobiology.” She put her hand over her face. “Shut up, Sarah. Just. Just shut up.”

        She found two candy bars that someone had fabricated and left in their desk in the cubical farm. Someone had stashed a fabbed apple – one of the PureFood brands, hidden underneath a set of pillows that someone had left on their desk for when they needed to nap there. She also found other bits and detritus that her coworkers had left behind. She found three roses in a plastic sheath with a tiny card that played the sappy love song from Bolide. It was signed to Yelena, one of the techs in the biosynth section. She hadn’t known Yelana, and she didn’t recognize the handwriting, but hearing the song played in a cheap printed speaker made Sarah’s eyes suddenly brim with tears as she remembered the touching final scenes of the movie, where Jack slowly froze to death in the malfunctioning space suit while his lover, Rose, had clung to him.

        Before she knew it, Sarah was curled up on a pleather sofa in the executive lounge, slowly eating a candy bar while crying her eyes out about a movie she hadn’t even liked that much.

        Except it wasn’t the movie, or the doomed love affair between two fictional spacers.

        It was everything .

        She wasn’t being examined, prodded, poked, pushed, attacked, flashbanged, shot, stabbed, or rolled into acid pits. She had time to really absorb what had happened to her and it was forcing out tears by the buckets. Tears and snot and blubbering whimpers and lots of shaking. But as the tears faded, something else started to fill her up: Anger. She wasn’t even entirely sure who she was mad at or why. Was she furious at Chief Barakas, who had treated her like an alien test subject and shot Dr. Bowers in the head without even asking what or who he was? Was she furious at the Eye and its mysterious and terrifying goals? Was she mad at NovaDyne for cutting the costs on security droids so she had been herded into an alien’s biomorphic restructuring pit? Was she mad at herself for choosing to work in exoplanetary research rather than trying to get one of the coveted Earth based jobs? Was she mad at the universe, for making the world like this instead of like something nicer and better and kinder?

        Was she mad at herself for being weak and pathetic – for turning into a sobbing wreck because of a cheap Valentines Day card and a half remembered movie?

        Sarah decided…

        Yes.

        So, she decided to trash the executive lounge.

        One second, she was curled up, crying and shivering.

        The next, she was wiping her hands off her face and saw the decorations around her. There was the large holographic photograph of the company founder, Daniel Tavaner Koch Butane the 3 rd . He was still looking down at her, smiling that little smile of his, still wearing his fine three piece suit. And there was the secretary desk that was set before the door that led into where the administrator had worked to run the research base – the chair had been knocked over, but the little motivational plaque that the secretary had set up was still there:  Nine Tenths of Promotion is Motion.

         That had been what had done it.

         Yeah. Motion. Specifically, the up and down motion of fellating Craid’s pencil  dick .

        She had worked for NovaDyne for years , and she’d gotten how many promotions? Oh! Right! Zero. Fucking nothing because she was a sline and a woman and mysteriously this also happened to map directly onto who wasn’t able to get ahead. People like her and Larry would stay as entry level bullshit artists while Craid and his buddies like fucking Gibson and Yale would get to head the laboratory. Motion! Fucking motion ! Sarah sprang to her feet, walked to the desk, and grabbed onto it. Her claws dug into the faux-wood with sounds not unlike gunshots and she lifted it up and over her head with a bellow. Her arms strained and her muscles trembled, but the desk still went up. She hurled it at the doorway leading into Craid’s office.

        The desk struck the metal door with an unmusical clongggg and the door burst inwards with a spray of sparks and a squeal of whining machinery. Several bits of gearing that were supposed to recess the door into the wall twitched and flailed in the air as Sarah stepped through the doorway and into Craid’s office properly. There was his desk, fabricated to look like it was made out of solid mahogany. There was the door leading to his private rooms. And there was a fucking liquor cabinet, made of lacquered wood and baroque flourishes. Sarah took hold of one of the spiky corners and then looked around to make sure no one was watching – kicked herself for being an idiot – and tipped it forward. The glass front shattered and the bottles broke apart on the ground, spilling expensive scotch and whiskey and whatever the fuck else that that smug prick had stocked in it.

        “Ohh no!” Sarah put her hands to her cheeks. “What an accident !”

        That had felt good. She walked over to the desk and punched it. Her knuckles slammed into the middle and a large, black crack spread through the wood. Splinters flecked against her cheeks and then fell back down to the surface of the desk. Her knuckles throbbed pleasantly. Sarah grinned, then punched again. This time, her fist plunged into the drawer underneath the desk and she found herself looking into a collection of brick-a-back. Including...a keyecard. She fished it out and saw that it was the newest model, with a small gene-lock and the smiling face of Craid on the front. He had left behind his keycard!

        Sarah flapped the card between her fingers, slapping it against her palm. She walked over to the door leading to his private quarters and tried slotting it in. The card made a quiet bloory noise and the door chimed. “Gene-lock not identified,” it said.

        Sarah glared at her thumb, then pressed her thumb down against the lock again. She closed her eyes and tried to focus on Craid. She thought of everything she knew about him – his smell, his snide smirks, his arrogant little walk. As the memories tumbled through her head, she felt as if she knew more and more. She could taste his blood type. She could feel the subtle differences in genetic strands, as if she was raiding the G, A, T, C of his genes like it was braille. She opened her eyes and then gently slotted the keycard into the slot.

        The door chimed. “Welcome home, MinTech Yuleacitar Craid!”

        Sarah grinned, her fangs glinting. “Ohh oh ho ho ho!” She stepped into the room and saw the huge silk bed - way beyond the price range of a MinTech, but definitely affordable to someone whose parents owned a sizable chunk of Ceres. Then she saw the silvery rectangle of a personal maker and nearly wet herself with excitement. She sprinted over and knelt down beside the maker, slotting in the keycard. The keycard chimed and the maker started to display the holographic menu once it had failed to connect to any local HUD. The holomenu showed that the maker was formatted for food and basic products, had about fifty kilos of generic matter, plenty of energy...and Craid’s bank account.

        He had nearly ten thousand UC.

        Just in his checking account.

        Sarah crooned, then started to type furiously. “Lets see, Administrator Craid, I believe that you owe me three prime ribs...” She purred. “Medium rare, with mash potatoes, maybe a salad.” She grinned. “Oh! And a double stacked fudge combo cake!” She thumbed down the order. The maker chimed, then a small advertisement popped up – two simultaneously slender and buxom anime girls in incredibly scantily designed chef outfits appeared. They sang a little jingle, while words flashed up: For the low low price of 200 UC, your meal can be made Fat Free Superfood!

         “I don’t exactly need to watch my figure,” Sarah murmured, looking down at her resculpted figure. “But on the other hand, fuck you.” She thumbed down the accept button. The maker asked if she wanted to tip the design team who had built the meal. The suggested tip was 15% of the meal’s cost. Sarah didn’t know about the pay scale for food designers, but considering how fast new food models were shipped out through the extranet, she had a feeling that it was low. Scut work, basically. Rather than flipping burgers, it was coding makers to flip burgers, with new models of burgers needing to come out every week to retain market share.

        She had no idea if the tip would even get to the team. She was on an abandoned laboratory in a different solar system.

        So, she decided to be restrained and only put down a sixty five hundred credit gratuity.

        While the maker burbled and whirred, the nanites working on constructing the delicious red steak out of raw matter, Sarah flung herself onto the silken bed and writhed around in pleasure. It was so soft. So smooth. She closed her eyes. “Man, is this what being rich is like?” she murmured, kicking out her legs. As she laid there, the bed started to warm and shift its structure ever so slightly – adding a bit of extra support there and a bit less there. Sarah giggled, then blinked as she realized that she was now laid out with her hips lifted up and her shoulders depressed back. Her legs were being subtly lifted and spread, as if she was laying down for a medical examination. Meanwhile, cheesy synth was beginning to play from hidden speakers.

        She sat up. “Bed, what are you doing?” she asked.

        A small desk slipped from the side – it contained several bottles of what looked like rubbing lotion.

        “...oh god...” She put her hand over her face. “The bed thinks I’m here to fuck Craid.”

        She suddenly wanted to throw up.

        Then the wall to the left of the bed opened and a buxom, pink haired girl with a pair of antennas sticking out of her head like an ancient TV set stepped out from a small recess she had been stored in. Her breasts were full and round and far, far, far far too perky. Like, if there was an uncanny valley for breasts, this woman was right in the midst of it. She had a bubble butt, a waspish waist, and dainty feet that were clad in neon pink hight heels. A tiny thatch of pubic hair – also pink – was nestled above her sex, and as she stepped from the doorway, the music became slightly quieter. She put her hand on her hip, cocked it, grinned, and said: “Hey there tiger. Ready to ride me like a Harley and pump your love spunk deep into my hot, robo cunt?”

        Sarah remained sprawled on the bed.

        “Okay,” she said. “ Now I want to throw up.”

        The sex-robot looked at Sarah. The silent tableaux lasted for what felt like an eternity of awkward staring…

        And was broken when two people in spacesuits ran into the room and began to spray Sarah with fire retardant foam while also beating her about the head with a golf club.

Chapter Six: Sarah Makes Some Friends

         The sex-robot let out a tiny giggle. “There’s always room for...” She paused, doing a quick headcount of the figures in the room. “Two...more!”

        The space suited figure with the golf club kept whacking at the area where it clearly thought Sarah’s head was. Sarah, whose arms were above her head, spluttered and coughed as more fire retardant foam splashed her face from the other space suited figure – who had emptied one canister and, with the smooth skill of someone who had practiced the move a lot, picked up a second and kept spraying her.

        “Kill it! Kill it!” The voice from the foam sprayer was female.

        “I’m trying , Tasha!” The other space suited figure also sounded female.

        Sarah spat out some foam and grunted as she felt the golf club whack her forearm. The metal bent around her and the clubber stumbled backwards, the club yanked from their awkward suited fingers. “Ah! It got my club!” she shouted to Tasha.

        “Ahhhhhh!” Tasha screamed, throwing the foam sprayer at Sarah, who had managed to sit up. The sprayer stuck her head and bounced off. Sarah barely felt. But then again, she’d been shot recently and had walked it off, so she wasn’t exactly shocked. She still slapped her hand over her face and let out a groan, more out of reflex than anything else. The two suited figures started to run, sprinting for the doorway.

        “I told you we should have gotten the guns!” The clubber said.

        “Shut-oof!” Tasha said at the same moment both women came to the doorway out of the room and jammed into it as if they were actors on a slapstick holo. Their shoulders pressed together and they flailed, then collapsed to the ground. The sex robot sauntered over to them, then bent herself forward in such a way that showed off her ass at the same time.

        “Should I restrain them, tiger?” she asked, looking at Sarah. “They appear to be intruders.”

        Sarah put her hands on her face. She slooowly wiped the foam off her, then flicked it away. She looked over at the maker and saw that it had opened at some point during all the ruckus. Her meal was now coated in about three inches of pink, cold fire retardant. Sarah let out a long, suffering sigh, then stood up. She put her hands on her hips. “Okay,” she said as the two suited figures started to scramble to their feet. One backed against the wall. The other backed out the door, then hurried back forward to stand beside their associate protectively. “I’m going to remain very calm-”

        Sarah’s foot slipped on a pile of foam. Her arms flailed and she yelped as her foot skidded across the floor, throwing her into a wild splits. She tried to get her feet under her and only ended up getting her other foot slippery too. She skidded forward and slammed into the sex robot, sending them both sprawling to the floor. The sex robot felt like a pair of sand stuffed pillows – her artificial breasts, which molded themselves to Sarah’s face. The sex robot let out a coquettish giggle.

        “Tiger!” she crooned.

        Sarah forced herself back and up, spitting and coughing. “For crying out loud, I’m-”

        A golf club jounced off the back of her head.

        Sarah smashed, face first, back into the sex robots titties. The sex robot frowned. “My BDSM subroutines are detecting that we have moved beyond safe limits,” she said, her voice growing warning. “Do you need medical assistance?”

        Sarah pushed herself back up. She was now learning that while her new skull was quite thick and her new skin was resistant to impact...there was a limit. Kinetic impact was still kinetic impact, and her brain was not happy with being sloshed around wildly. The clubber lifted the now badly bent club up and over their head for another swing.

        Sarah caught it. Her hand closed around the club and she wrenched it out of their awkward space suit.

        “I’m not a fucking monster!” Sarah shouted, springing to her feet, her head spines flaring up, her fangs gleaming, her claws glittering as they extended to their full length. She glared at the two suited figures and tossed the gold club into the wall to her left. She had planned to just chuck it away so everyone would be far away from a weapon and the situation would deescalate. Instead, she ended up embedding the abused metal almost three inches into the wall of the habitat.

        “...okay, I’m...not mentally a monster!” Sarah corrected.

        The two suited figures remained perfectly still.

        Tasha was the one who spoke up first. “...Dr. Kappel?”

        “Yes! Thank you!” Sarah sagged with relief.

        “Dr. Kappel, uh, no offense, but what the fuck?” the clubber asked. She reached up, then depolarized their helmet. Under the glass, they looked like the classic tomboy: Short cropped hair, hazel eyes, lots of freckles. Their facial features were somewhere between sline and middle class, with the epicanthic folds making it an even bet as to which way she’d go. Her hair was blond, which Sarah guessed was a dye job. She pointed at Sarah. “You’re green.”

        “I know,” Sarah said.

        “And have spine hair,” she said.

        “I know.”

        “And fucking claws!”

        “I know!” Sarah put her hands over her face.

        “And...amazing tits...”

        “Aiden!” Tasha hissed.

        “I...sorry, just... wow ...” Aiden said, shaking her head behind her helmet. Sarah, who had gotten quite good at forgetting she was naked, crossed her arms over her breasts and glared at her.

        “If your name is Aiden, why are you in...” Sarah’s eyes narrowed as she tried to find the name-plate on the spacesuit that Aiden was wearing. “Alison Yang’s suit?”

        Aiden glared at Sarah. “Because changing my official name costs nearly two thousand UC to log with the UN, and almost as much in novabucks to get a change on my company citizenship card,” she, er, he said. Voice flat. Sarah wanted to hide under at least fifty layers of shame blankets. She put her hands over her mouth.

        “Oh god. I’m...uh, sorry! I, uh, shit!” she whispered.

        Aiden rolled his eyes while Tasha put her hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. Well, gently for a space suit squeeze. Space suits were usually stiff, so to get a shoulder squeeze to actually get felt, you kind of had to clench your hand as hard as you possibly could. And even then it was fifty fifty. But from the way Aiden smiled at Tasha, it had worked.

        Sarah blushed, looked around, then grabbed one of the overdone curtains from the window. She tugged it down with a series of tearing pops , then wrapped herself in it like a crude cloak. Thus attired, she smiled weakly at the two suited figures. “So,” she said. “Uh, Aiden Yang, uh, you’re with...”

        “Maintenance,” Aiden said, his voice warming slightly.

        “And you, Tasha...” Sarah read off her suit. “Cline?”

        Tasha smiled, shyly. “Also maint. I’m Tasha Claire Cline, or TCC, and I work with Aiden. Technicians Third Class!” She gave a little salute. She paused for a few seconds. “N-No one calls me TCC.”

        “We were repairing one of the water fountains when the alert came,” Aiden said. “In the garage. The doors shut after our shift super, and when we tried the keycards after him, they bugged out.”

        “Let me guess,” Sarah said, her lips pursing. “You hadn’t updated them?”

        “It’s five hundred novabucks to upgrade them!” Aiden said, his voice growing tight with anger. “We’re maintenance! We’re not made of fucking money here!”

        “Preach it,” Sarah said. Then, hurriedly. “I mean, I agree! I, uh, I mean, if you’re...I’m not a preacher!”

        Aiden put his hands over his faceplate while Tasha giggled.

        “So, what happened to you, Doc?” Aiden asked.

        “Uh...” Sarah looked down at her green arms, her shoulders. Her claws. Her head spines twitched. “Is there any part of this place that’s still pressurized? So we can talk without helmets and stuff?”

        The two nodded.

        The pressurized section turned out to be the garage. The two maint-techs had jerry rigged an airlock by taking an airlock off one of the huge rovers and spot welding it to the door that led into the base proper. Once they were inside, they wriggled out of their suits while Sarah, who had taken just a few moments to program the order into the maker dressed herself in some clothes she had put on Craid’s tab. Since she had nearly burned through his entire checking account, she made sure to overcharge him to pay for a top of the line sports suit. The kind that would entirely seal her body to recycle sweat – or, in this case, keep her from rubbing neurotoxins on anyone.

        The only downside was that she almost felt more naked in the suit than she had out of it. She looked as if her entire body had been painted in liquid laytex, drying tightly enough that it showed the folds of her sex and the bumps of her nipples. Noticing how sheer it was...made her nipples harden just a bit more. Sarah tried to ignore it as she waited for the airlock to cycle.

        “You look good, tiger,” the sex bot said.

        Sarah, who had not noticed the bot standing behind her, screamed and spun to face her. The sex bot was posing as erotically as she could – arms behind her back, chest thrust out, lips pouting. Sarah sighed. “Please,” she said. “Stop calling me that.”

        “What name would you prefer, tiger?” the sex bot asked, her voice a husky croon.

        Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it. “What’s your AI level?”

        “Oh, tiger...” the sex bot crooned. “You want to know more about my little bimbo butt?” She giggled. “I’m a dummy little airhead, a stupid gamma-class with a level one learning hobble on me.” She giggled again, coquettishly. “You could put a cigar out on my titty and I wouldn’t even remember it tomorrow, tiger, that’s what a bimbot I am.”

        Sarah gaped at her.

        The sex bot cocked her head. “Do you wish to adjust my settings, tiger?”

        “Dear god yes!” Sarah said.

        “I have five pre-sets, or you can use my full option menu!” She crooned. “The pre-sets are sexy librarian, sheltered MILF in both married and recently divorced modes-”

        The inner airlock door opened and Sarah held up her hands. “Please, uh, go into...diagnostics mode,” she said.

        “Are you sure? That will take...” The sex bot paused. “Two hours.”

        “Perfect,” Sarah said.

        The sex bot nodded, then closed her eyes, her head slumping forward. Once Sarah stepped away from the bot, she closed the inner door, then turned to face Aiden and Tasha. Both of them were dressed in their maint jumpsuits – formless, ugly, gray things with big NovaDyne logos over the hearts. Aiden brushed his hands through his short cropped hair, while Tasha shook her head from side to side, sending her hair tumbling along her shoulders. She kept it long and had clearly applied some kind of high tech coating to it, since it looked completely unmussed by the suit. Seeing Sarah’s look, she blushed: “I-It’s only fifty NB for a smart spray, a-and I worked out my budget, I...I like...” She looked down. “I like looking pretty, okay?”

        “It’s fine!” Sarah said, hurriedly. “Like, I get it.”

        Tasha smiled.

        “Talk,” Aiden said, sticking out his chin. “Now.”

        Sarah sighed. And she told them everything. It came out haltingly at first, then in a bigger and bigger rush. She paused to answer some questions – and her voice caught when she came to the harder parts of the story. The tentacles. Dr. Bowers death. The visions of humanity, reduced to nothing but one great big mushy mass of biomatter, used by some alien life form for god knows what. Everything. Once she was done, she was sitting down on one of the stools in the garage, next to the tool bench. Tasha had taken a stool next to her, while Aiden was pacing back and forth. Aiden punched his palm with his left hand, scowling.

        “And they just threw you in a lab? Fucking assholes ,” he snarled. “Fucking assholes!”

         Tasha gingerly placed her hand on Sarah’s shoulder, careful to squeeze the part of her that was covered with her skintight suit. “It’s okay. I’m sure, once we send a tachyon com to corporate headquarters. We can tell them what happened, and they’ll-”

        “They’ll just send a Commander and fucking do anything they can to grab the Doc!” Aiden said. “You heard what she said she can do. She’s super strong, super tough, regenerates, she’s basically Superman, oh, also, did you forget the part where she...” Aiden trailed off.

        Tasha shook her head. “No, no, I’m sure that Mr. Butane will understand if we could just explain it to him!”

        Sarah sighed. “I’m not sure I agree, Tasha.” She paused, looking at Aiden.

        Aiden was looking off into the middle distance, his eyes wide and unfocused. Sarah slooowly reached out and tried to snap her fingers underneath the transman’s nose. But her claws made it trickier than she’d have thought. She ended up having to just click her claws harder and harder, until Aiden blinked and shook his head, looking at Sarah.

        “Earth to Aiden,” Sarah said, grinning. “What’s up, you kinda spaced out on us.”

        “You turned Dr. Bowers into a dog-thing,” Aiden said. “Can you handle testosterone?”

        Tasha gasped.

        Sarah blinked. “I...” She stammered. “I don’t know. I’m not a medtech, I specialized in exobiology.” She bit her lower lip. “H-How much of the...have you...” She waved her hands vaguely. “You know, what have you done? I don’t, uh, really know how, uh, this...how the...how the thing...” She ducked her head forward, her head spines compressing against her scalp nervously. “...you know...works...” She never felt more utterly stupid and ignorant in her life.

        Aiden sighed. “I’m in maint, Doc. I don’t have health insurance. Even if I did, unless I had class two it wouldn’t cover cosmetics unless I pulled HRT out of a loot box.” He shrugged slightly. “I could afford it with UC if I saved every single frigging penny I made for the next forty years...so...” He shrugged. “I figure, since I’m stranded here with you-”

        “Until rescue arrives!” Tasha piped up.

        “-I might as well ask. Right?” Aiden grinned at her.

        Sarah frowned. “Okay...” She said, slowly. “I mean, why not? I’ve been curious about my body and what it can do, exactly. But!” She held up her finger. “We need to do this properly.” Her memory flashed on the feeling of Dr. Bowers, in his virile alien form, slamming into her. She remembered the strength of her orgasm. Her cheeks heated. “A-And by that, I mean, uh, we need to do tests. And in a lab!” She nodded. “In a nice, virile lab.”

        “Virile?” Aiden asked.

        “Sterile!” Sarah shouted at the top of her lungs.

***

        It took the better part of a day to repressurize and repair a lab, using the industrial maker in the garage to print the supplies and tools, even if that ended out tapping out both maint workers repair budgets and their private budgets. But, as Tasha pointed out, they’d need a lab to live, so...they might as well burn the money. They printed out great sheets of intelligent plastics, which unfolded to cover up holes. They printed out pressurized O2 tanks and portable solar collectors, to make up for no longer having the fusion reactor that served as the scout ship and the lab’s power source. They made cheap ration bars to chew and eat, and printed out several heavy lamps to keep the illumination up.

        Once they were done, the ruddy red sun had set and the jungle was glowing like a distant cityscape. Aiden and Tasha watched as Sarah paced around in the lab, turning on computers and activating the equipment. Normally, she’d need to wait in a queue for this, or request that one of the senior scientists give her the chance. But now? She was effectively the head of research...once she had tricked the genetic lock into thinking that she was Dr. Gibson.

        And so, she was able to release a small mouse from the control samples. The tiny critters had been left enough food, water and air to have survived the evacuation without a glance. The mouse squeaked and cheeped as it walked out of its niche and onto the lab bench.

        “What are you going to do with it?” Tasha asked, sounding nervous. “It’s so cute...”

        “I’m just going to try and change something minor and simple about it. Like it’s fur color,” Sarah said. “We want to start small, with simple steps, so we can track the exact means of change and learn more about how, exactly this works. Now, stand back.” She started to peel the glove of her suit off, revealing her green fingers and her wrist. She focused and the small wires that she had extended before shot out and slammed into the side of the mouse. The mouse let out a little squeak, writhing and twitching. Tasha put her hands over her mouth – and Sarah for lack of anything more scientific, focused on black fur. Black fur. Black fur.

        The wires retracted and the mouse remained slumped on the lab desk.

        “D-Did you kill it?” Aiden asked.

        “Uh, no, no,” Sarah said, dragging over a biological analysis sensor. It was huge and bulky had over designed, and as she looked through the scope, she started to get bombarded with scientific information about the mouse. She deployed a blood sampler and whistled softly. “There are minute cells – nano scale – that are going in and adjusting the DNA. And...oh. Wow.” She pulled her head back. The mouse, before her eyes, was turning a sleek, glossy black. “Okay...” She whispered. “I seem to be capable of spontaneously generating biological nano that can do indepth genetic modifications...” She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. “I wonder...”

        Again, her wires slammed into the mouse, which had just gotten back onto its feet. It squeaked and thumped onto its side again – provoking another gasp from Tasha.

        A few seconds later, the mouse had been wrapped in a cocoon, just like Dr. Bowers, but on a far smaller scale. Sarah watched silently through the analysis scope – her eyes widening as she saw biological structures that boggled the imagination. Like a maker, the cocoon was creating an environment that was specifically designed for nanoscale construction: Hot and rich with building blocks. But she saw that the neural pattern of the mouse’s brain and spinal column had been transposed into the walls of the cocoon, essentially keeping its brain intact before integrating it with the body again. “It never even loses consciousness,” she whispered.

        “Doc...” Aiden said, his voice husky. “What the absolute fuck are you doing to that mouse?”

        The cocoon exploded outwards with a loud splort . And emerging from the ruin of skin and greenish glop emerged a sleek, black furred kitten. It meowed – sounding deeply confused. Sarah grinned, slowly.

        “It’s so easy ,” she whispered. “I just need to visualize the changes and they happen, so long as the entity has the resources – and I can be extremely efficient. I threaded the bones with some metal from the table, see the pitting?” She pointed at the discolored patch of metal on the countertop. “Not only is it a kitten...”

        The kitten leaped off the table and sailed across the room to land on Tasha’s lap. There, it began to purr. Tasha, who had frozen in shock, started to hesitantly pet it. Her fingers caressed through its fur gently as she smiled slowly.

        “It’s a super kitten,” Sarah said.

        “Holy shit, Doc,” Aiden whispered. “...can I get superpowers too?”

        Sarah knew that it was absolutely insane to leap from animal testing to human testing. It was even more insane to try some major genetic augmentations with a power she barely understood. She needed weeks, months, maybe even years more of study before she really knew what she was doing. She opened her mouth to say no.

        “Sure!” she said.

         That’s not no, Sarah, she thought.

        “Fucking sweet !” Aiden rubbed his palms together. “Like, super strength?”

        “Maybe?” Sarah said, spreading her hands, a giddy excitement burning through her. She had to see what she could do when she was doing things intentionally. “Uh, how about we just try and go for max human stats and the proper gender?” She paused. “Or...sex? Or...expression on...a...spectrum or...what? What is the right term?”

        Aiden shrugged. “I dunno.”

        “Right,” Sarah muttered under her breath.

        “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Tasha whispered, biting her lip. “What if it goes wrong?”

        Sarah and Aiden both considered it. Well. Sarah considered it. Aiden looked uncertain for roughly five point six nanoseconds, then grinned and nodded. “If I die, fuck it, I’ve wanted to die for years,” he said, walking forward casually, which provoked an alarmed cry from Tasha. Sarah held out her hand. Her fingers touched Aiden’s cheek – five points of contact that made Sarah buzz with eagerness that felt almost sexual. No. No. There was nothing almost about it. Her wires slipped from her wrist and she felt as if she was far more in control of it this time. They feathered along Aiden’s lips and Aiden shivered, his mouth opening, as if to ask a question. Then, with a fierce thrust , Sarah sent both wires up Aiden’s nose.

        Aiden’s eyes widened – and then one went half hooded. Their left eye skidded to the side and Sarah felt the most...intensely masculine feeling she had ever felt in her life. She could feel her tendrils, penetrating into Aiden’s body. Pushing into him. Claiming him. Aiden made a tiny, whimpering moaning noise as Sarah placed her thumb onto his mouth, then pressed it against his tongue. Slavishly, Aiden began to suck on her thumb, his eyes closing as the tendrils thrusting up his nostrils began to pump into his head. Aiden’s head rocked back and forth, his hips twitching as his hands twitched at his sides.

        Tasha let out her own soft whimper, watching this all with wide eyes, holding her kitten close to her chest.

        Sarah slid her hand back – the tendrils retracting with a soft pop . Aiden’s face split with a dreamy little smile. His eyes closed and he knelt down, then leaned his head forward, nuzzling against Sarah’s green thigh. His tongue darted out and licked her through the skintight latex that Sarah wore. Sarah reached down and began to pet her fingers through the transboy’s frizzy hair, rubbing through his scalp. She felt...so... powerful . Her voice was a quiet croon as she whispered. “It’s okay...go to sleep, Aiden...” she murmured. “Let it happen.”

        Aiden slumped backwards. By the time he hit the floor, the cocoon was already starting to grow, slipping out from under the jumpsuit, spreading and groaning. The jumpsuit tore, shredded, and slipped aside as the cocoon belled outwards, becoming a sleek, green pustule upon the ground, ringed with a hard rind of brown bone, which anchored it to the floor. Tendrils sank into the metal, thrusting into the ground – pulsating as they quested for the earth beneath the laboratory. Groaning and creaking sounded as metal gave way to them, like the way sidewalks could give way to roots in one of the slurry-cities. Sarah knelt down and slipped her palm along the cocoon.

        “I...I am...weirdly turned on,” Tasha whispered.

        “Me too,” Sarah said.

        “Hah, yeah, we should make out!” Tasha said, her voice holding a faintly hysterical edge. “I mean, just kidding! Hah!”

        Sarah shook her head slightly, trying to force her head out of the femdom headspace she had slipped into. But it was so comfy to feel like this. Strong and powerful and in control. She had felt it before, when she had ordered Dr. Bowers to heel. She had made a man roll onto his back like a dog and it had felt good . She closed her eyes and forced herself to hold her breath. Count to three. Remember who she was. She wasn’t some god-queen. She was Sarah Kappel, overworked office drone. She opened her eyes and saw Tasha looking down at the cocoon.

        “How long will it take?” She whispered.

        “I...I don’t know,” Sarah said. “It took Dr. Bowers two hours. But he became a weird...space...dog thing.” She felt a stab of pain, remembering the sharp crack of the gunshot, the sudden stillness of Dr. Bowers as he lay beside her. She shook her head.

        “Well-”

        What Tasha had been about to say was drowned out by a squealing alarm that sounded almost as strident and insistent as the depressurization alert or the emergency evacuation signal. Every console in the lab flashed red and white and the PA tried to speak – but it was too heavily damaged. Tasha looked around wildly, while her kitten went sprinting off to hide. Sarah scrambled to one of the computers and leaned forward, tapping furiously at the keyboard to try and get it to give her some information beyond ‘urgent’ and ‘alert.’ But the only other word that cropped up was an indication she should head to Command and Control center.

        “Where’s the C&C!?” Sarah yelped.

        “Uh, uh, uh!” Tasha closed her eyes. She looked like she was accessing her HUD. She nodded. “There’s a backup C&C in the security bunker.”

        “The bunker we can’t enter?” Sarah asked.

        “Y-You have superhuman strength,” Tasha said.

        Sarah put her hand over her face. “Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck!”

        “Sorry!” Tasha said.

        “No! I’m the idiot!” Sarah grabbed onto Tasha’s suit and chucked it at her. “Get it on! I’ll get the door open. And don’t worry about Aiden, he’ll be fine!” She sprinted for the makeshift airlock that they had set up and danced around, waiting for it to cycle. When it did, she stepped out and right into the sex bot.

        “Diagnostics complete!” the sex bot said in a sing song.

        “Not now!” Sarah shoving her way past the sex bot, which stumbled and almost fell right onto her obscenely perfect bubble butt. Sarah sprinted at near top speed, taking each corner so hard that she slammed into the wall every time, leaving behind a Sarah Kappel sized dent across half the lab. Once she came to the security bunker, she saw that the alerts were going off inside – there was a narrow window on the doorway. Sarah frowned, then looked the door over. It looked heavy as hell. Her brow furrowed. She punched the glass and her fist went through it – it wasn’t glass, since it didn’t shatter into jagged chunks, and it felt a hell of a lot sturdier. Then she groped around until she found the latch and undid it.

        Once she stepped into the security bunker, she saw that the C&C station had been stuck into the corner. It had a small command chair and a dozen or so screens. Most of them were showing security camera footage from the perimeter turrets and her stomach clenched as she saw that the large, horse-sized bitey xenos were prowling around at the edge of the turret fence. She filed that into the back of her mind for worrying purposes as she flung herself into her seat and brought up the command interface. She had to press several buttons before it finally gave her some new information.

        The information made the xenos outside seem like trifles.

        The orbital tachyon com-unit was a three part system. It could send and receive tachyon bursts from Corporate – allowing for faster than light communication. But it could also transmit tachyon waves throughout the systems. The tachyons would interact with gravity waves, giving off emissions that were detectable by the receiver – which were then plotted out, just like an old style radio system. The big advantage of the tachyon pulse system, or TPS, was that it gave you a warning at the same time something happened, not when the light reached you.

        That had the downside of violating causality according to general relativity, but Sarah had never passed enough physics courses to understand the unified theory that handled the newer physics.

        It also had the downside of letting her know that the StarCon fleet, which had been in orbit around Trappist 1c and 1d had sent one of their ships on a high gravity burn towards Trappist-1a. That meant that, with the NovaDyne scout ship out of the area, StarCon was deciding to, as the security types put it, ‘up their bid.’ NovaDyne could appeal it in the UN, but at the end of the day, what the UN said didn’t matter diddly if StarCon had set up their own extraction service on Trappist-1a.

        Sarah hunted and pecked until she brought up the detailed sensor log.

        Her blood, already cold, became positively cryogenic.

        The StarCon fleet hadn’t dispatched a scout-skiff or even one of their medium frigates.

        They had dispatched the Excalibur ™. The StarCon flagship, captained by none other than the most heavily decorated Commander in corporate warfare: Texas Dallas himself. The hero of the African Bloc campaigns. The liberator of Titan. The scourge of Proxima. The Supreme Commander himself.

        “What is it?” Tasha asked around a series of gasps and pants. Sarah glanced over and saw that the other woman had arrived, her helmet slightly askew from how quickly she had tossed it on.

        “Weeee have company,” Sarah said, turning the screen to show Tasha the image of the long, cruciform ship.

        Tasha blinked.

        “D-Do you think I’ll get an autograph?” Tasha asked.

Chapter Seven: Sarah Tries Diplomacy

        It took about ten minutes of reading manuals and swearing before the tachyon communication satellite finally managed to squirt an FTL bust towards the Excalibur ™. It took five seconds before Texas Dallas’ return link popped up. With a constant stream of tachyons going from point to point, the computer was able to throw up the image of StarCon’s most decorated Commander instantly.

        Texas Dallas, as befitted his name, was blond and blue eyed and lantern jawed. He had three raking clawmarks that ran in parallel along the left side of his face, leaving one of those blue eyes grayed out and milky. The claws, after they turned one eye into a ruin, had then tugged his mouth into a perpetual snarl. His hair was buzzed to a short crop, and the marks of his Commander status were clear on his neck and on his temples: The stud jacks for hardened connections into his battle suit and the little implanted half-disk optical unit around his intact eye. The camera had just enough space around it to show his high backed command chair and the crisp, corporate military uniform he wore.

        He scowled at Sarah.

        “Hi!” Sarah said, waving. “I’m Dr. Cappel, uh...NovaDyne research. Hi.”

        “You look like an alien freak,” Texas Dallas said, his voice raspy and rough.

        Sarah blushed. “I, uh, there have been, um, something-”

        “We’ve been informed by NovaDyne that an alien enemy has taken control of their base,” Texas Dallas said.

        “No! No! No! No!” Sarah held up her hands and shook her head hurriedly. “I really am Sarah Kappel! I was transformed by an alien-”

        “Right,” Texas Dallas growled. He actually pulled up a thick cigar and chomped into it. “And I like wearing panties under this uniform.” He leaned forward. “Save it for the United Nations, alien.”

        “I’m not an alien!” Sarah shouted, grabbing onto both sides of the screen so she could shake it. “But there is an alien force that we need to be ready to deal with! They’re what changed me, you-”

        “We?” Texas Dallas snorted. “StarCon doesn’t need help dealing with pre-tech alien scum. Now, unless you want to get that top of yours off and give me something nice to think about before I waste your ass-”

        Sarah’s eyebrow twitched. “Listen to me, you stupid, stupid man,” she snarled. “I was captured and changed by an entity with a race memory stretching back millions of years . They have who knows how many solar systems under their control and biotech that makes our nanotech look like fucking...fucking...” She groped for some primitive technology. “Like fucking iPhones! Now, if we work together, maybe we can learn more, maybe we can...”

        She trailed off.

        Texas Dallas was smoking his cigar and leaning back in his seat, watching her with a cool expression – one that made her skin crawl. He tapped ash into an ashtray by his hand and blew out a slow ring of smoke. “I’ve fought aliens on four planets,” Texas Dallas rumbled. His eyes narrowed. “Bugs gave me this.” He pointed at the furrows. “And I’ll tell you this, alien...” He leaned forward. “The only acceptable outcome for this is your complete and total annihilation . ”

        Sarah gulped.

        “Any questions?” Texas growled.

        Sarah hung up.

        Tasha stood still and silent beside her.

        “So, uh, not getting that autograph, huh?” she whispered. “Are...are we going to die?”

        Sarah shook her head. “No. No, we’re not.”

        “C-Can’t they just glass us? That’s the term, right?” Tasha asked as Sarah stood.

        “But they’re not sending an asteroid tug out to drop a rock on us,” Sarah said. “T-They’re sending a Commander. That means a ground attack. They want to take the base. They want to take...me...” She trailed off. “Who knows what they know, or what they suspect, or...or anything.” She shook her head, then turned to the computer, tapping at it. After another few glances at the manual, with Tasha’s help, they managed to bring up an ETA.

        “Four days,” she said. “Then he’ll land.”

        “Great. We can hide!” Tasha said.

        But Sarah was already thinking. She was thinking a mile a minute, her eyes wide. A Commander wasn’t just a single person with a single starship. They came with general makers and the best technology that a corporation could invent, buy or steal. They had unchained gamma and beta AIs to serve as their on the field troops. A Commander could drop onto an uninhabited planet and, within a few hours, build the industrial capacity to build a 25 th  century army. The only way to stop a Commander was to fight your way past their army, past their base, and then take on the Commander proper. And that meant taking on a veteran soldier in the most advanced power armor money could buy, armed with…

        Well.

        Rumors called it the boom gun .

        No one was quite sure what the B-gun could do. Or what it fired.

        But all the rumors said it was scary. Like ‘makes hardened veterans of World War 3 blanch’ scary.

        Sarah nodded. “I have an idea,” she said.

        “Hiding?” Tasha whimpered.

***

        The door to the labs opened as Sarah rubbed her palms together. “Okay, first thing we need to do is figure out how to move-”

        Aiden’s cocoon exploded in a spray of green glop and bits of fleshy skin.

        Tasha, who had just stepped in through the airlock, froze.

        Sarah froze.

        And Aiden stood, still dripping and slick.

        Standing in the ring of hardened bone that was all that was left of his cocoon, Aiden rubbed his hands through his hair. The sound he left out was the kind of orgasmic sigh normally used after the best sex in the universe. His eyes – bright, golden eyes – closed and he grinned as he stretched his body. The first thing that struck Sarah was the lithe perfection of that body. She could count every single ab and pectoral and deltoid and...and she...honestly couldn’t remember the names of some of the other muscle groups. They were dribbling out of her ear alongside her ability to speak English, stand, and breathe. Because Aiden’s skin was now a sleek gray green. His shoulders were armored with a series of overlapping plates that could flex apart, revealing membranes stretching between them, making it look as if he had a frilled coat on. His hair was a collection of smooth spines, thrusting straight back and away from his angular, sharp features. His teeth were razor sharp and when he opened his eyes, the gold that Sarah had seen before resolved into the vertical slit pupils of a goat or an octopus’ eyes.

        He was also hung like a horse.

        His cock, as exotic as the rest of him, was ridged and knotted and a dark, midnight black. It looked like it had been designed to bump and grind against every single part of Sarah going into her. His balls were lightly scaled and looked firm and large and eminently nuzzleable.

        Then, with a languid, creaking noise, a pair of batlike wings fanned out behind him as a pair of horns thrust from tiny slits on his forehead and a foot long black tongue emerged from between his black lips. It curled and flicked at the air as he crooned. “Hey Sarah...”

        “...I...I thought you were just giving him HRT...” Tasha whispered.

        Sarah let out a little nervous giggle.

        Aiden stepped daintily out of the cocoon, his wings folding behind his back. He breathed in, then out, then grinned at her. “This feels so fucking cool,” he whispered. Sarah tentatively reached out. Her finger slowly brushed along one of his horns. Aiden’s teeth bared in a wry smile – and then his eyes closed as Sarah rubbed her fingers up and down the horn. It felt so hard, and so warm. Aiden hooked one of his fangs over his lower lip and closed his eyes even tigther. “S-Sarah!” He hissed as she gripped his horn firmly, tugging him just a bit closer.

        “Mistress,” Sarah crooned.

        That was not what she had meant to say. She had meant to say ‘oh my god, I’m so sorry’ or ‘what the hell did I do to you’ or ‘are you okay?’

        “Mistresssssss,” Aiden hissed. His tongue thrust out and flicked against her throat, tasting her. His hand reached up to grip her hip. She tightened her grip on his horn, then leaned in close. Her mouth opened. Closed. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to bite him. The rest of the world, the rest of the situation was fading rapidly as she smelled his scent. He was warm and so very male . Sarah jerked him forward by her grip on his horn and his mouth and hers met. His tongue thrust down her throat in a single, questing push . Sarah’s toes clenched against the floor, bending it with a squeal of stressed metal. His tongue began to thrust inside of her as his hands reached back, trying to find the zipper on her suit.

        He gave up on that and just hooked a claw under the collar and tore. The fabric split and her skin dimpled against his claw as she slid her hands along his back, rubbing the join of bat wing and shoulder blades. His wings furled and closed around them both, hooking and trapping her in a leathery cocoon that smelled and tasted of him. Every breath she took was warmed by his body, was scented by his eagerness, even as the tatters of her outfit hit the floor and she was naked and she was wet .

        His mouth drew back. His tongue retracted a moment later. Those golden eyes met hers.

        “I want you, Aiden,” she crooned.

        “I need you, mistress,” he murmured back.

        “Mmm...” Sarah’s lips split into a wicked smirk. “Do you now?”

        “More than oxygen...” Aiden leaned forward, kissing her neck tenderly. His fangs and his sharp, sharp teeth teased her skin. His tongue darted against her pulse point, licking her gently, nuzzling her afterwards. His free hand cupped the back of her head, stroking his way through the tiny spines of her hair. Sarah smiled, then murmured.

        “Do you like the changes your mistress bequeathed you?” she purred.

        “Goddess, yesssss...” He kissed the tip of one of her breasts. The contact made her back arch and her mouth open in a wanton, eager moan. She leaned into his wings, nuzzling the membrane. She licked him as he suckled to her breast as tenderly, as eagerly as a newborn. Her knees quivered and her breath caught as his other hand darted down to cup her ass, holding her firmly as he started to add the pressure of his teeth to her nipple, coaxing a fiercer croon from her. She let herself relax into his grip as he sucked on the other nipple, leaving both of her breasts glistening – his tongue swirling about them, caressing and licking every inch of them. She gleamed with his attention.

        Her thighs were soaked.

        “Do you want to fuck your mistress?” Sarah whispered, huskily.

        He nodded, unable to even form words.

        Sarah reached up, her arm moving between the two of them. She caught his chin, tilting his head back. She looked down into his eyes – black peering into gold. She stood taller than him because he was bent forward – but she felt taller than him because she was his mistress. His goddess. His queen . Part of it felt so natural, so pure. But at the very back of her mind, a teeny tiny voice was screaming. Screaming in terror . Terror at what she had done. What she was becoming. What she could become. Her fingers paused in their stroking. Her thumb grew gentle.

        Her voice was soft. “Aiden...”

        “Mistress,” he murmured. His lips kissed the tip of her thumb. His tongue darted against it.

        “I-I’m...you don’t have to serve me. I-” Her breath caught as he bit down on her thumb. It was a playful bite, one that sent an electric thrill through her whole body. He didn’t break her skin. He didn’t even come close. But he did dimple her flesh and send a tiny edging pain along her nerve endings. His eyes glittered.

        He released her thumb. “Don’t say stupid shit, Sarah.”

        And then he knelt before her. His hands cupped her ass as his wings furled behind him, letting her breathe air that wasn’t directly warmed by his body. She could see, sitting on a lab bench...Tasha. Tasha was watching them. Drooling. Her hand cupped one of her breasts, tweaking and teasing her nipple. Her exposed nipple. She had stripped off her jumpsuit – revealing every curve of her generous body. Her free hand was dipped between her legs and she was stroking her sex through a thick snatch of pubic hair. Her breath was short and shallow and her eyes looked hooded – and when she and Sarah’s gazes met, Tasha looked aside, her whole body burning red with embarrassment.

        Not that she stopped .

        Then Sarah had to grab onto both of Aiden’s horns, gripping them hard as he pressed his mouth to her cunt. His mouth was opened wide, allowing every single inch of his long, flexible tongue to plunge into his sex. Her body quivered as she gripped onto him tighter, her mouth hanging open in shock as she moaned. “Oh god. Oh god. Oh god .” Her eyes half closed and she rocked her hips, moaning and gasping as his tongue ground against her G-spot, tickled against her deepest centers of pleasure. Sarah leaned her whole weight against Aiden’s neck – and he took the weight with ease. His hand cupped her ass, his other hand finding the bottom of her leg, lifting and spreading her even wider.

        Sarah’s mouth went slack and she stopped being able to even make noises .

        The pleasure was so intense, it rose and rose and rose and crashed against her nerves. Lightning burst behind her eyes and her spine arched as her juices spurted down Aiden’s throat. They frothed past his lips, dripped down his chin, pattered onto his xeno cock. As she wailed her bliss, incoherently, she could faintly hear Tasha screaming her own pleasure, throwing her own head back. The human girl’s skin glistened with sweat and what words Sarah could hear and understand were god and Aiden and Sarah .

        Aiden drew his mouth back as Sarah slumped. He let her fell to her knees, so that their foreheads pressed together. His tongue remained lolling out of his mouth, his eyes unfocused as he looked into hers. His tongue retracted slowly and he grinned at her, fiercely. “How was that, mistress?”

        “New...” Sarah panted. “Morale...” She panted again. “Officer.”

        Tasha, her body trembling, mumbled. “We’ll need it...”

        Aiden chuckled. “Will we?”

        “Yeah...” Tasha slumped against the wall. Her body was still beat red. But she managed to speak, despite her embarrassment. “Texas Dallas is coming to kill us.”

        Aiden, who had been licking Sarah’s juices off his palm, choked, coughed, and spurted Sarah’s girlcum out his nose.

***

        Sarah called the first meeting of the war council in Craid’s old lounge, if only because the chairs there were more comfortable than those in the laboratory. Thanks to his modifications, Aiden could breathe the air that filled the lounge, and they had jerryrigged a filtered set of nose and mouth plugs for Tasha, allowing her to walk around sans a space suit.

        Sarah clapped her hands together. “So,” she said. “What are our options here?”

        “Die?” Aiden suggested.

        “Panic?” Tasha threw out.

        “I’m thinking more ‘die stoically’ really,” Aiden said, then shook his head. “No. No, there’s gotta be something we can do. We’ve got the entire security bunker. That’s-”

        “Corpsec guns,” Tasha said, biting her lip. “I think Texas Dallas is packing something a bit more boomy.”

        Aiden scowled. “Superpowers?” He lifted one of his slender arms and flexed his green muscles.

        “You and Sarah might be able to stand up to pistols and rifles and stuff,” Tasha said. “But Commanders pack antimatter .”

        Sarah, leaned slowly back against the wall. Her hair frilled outwards and stabbed at the air in irregular patterns – as if tracing out her own thoughts. Those thoughts tumbled over and over in her head as Tasha and Aiden bounced off one another in the small room. Those thoughts were then tumbled right out of her head when a pair of large, soft pillows mashed against her cheek and her face and her nose, consuming her head with the same inexorable motion and pressure of a cheap movie monster. Lithe arms wrapped around her and the sex robot crooned.

        “You seem stressed, tiger,” she purred.

        “Mmmph!” Sarah mumbled.

        “I completed my diagnostics routine, tiger,” the sex bot continued, her fingers caressing around and around several of Sarah’s head spines. “There were two malware viruses logged on my programs and-” Sarah managed to extract her head from her breasts at this point. “-several other bugs.”

        Sarah put her hands over her face and forced herself to think logically. To think rationally. This was a sex robot. It was an artificial intelligence that had been deliberately hamstrung by people who had built it so that it wouldn’t start asking awkward questions about why it had zero rights and no freedoms. Anything and everything she could do to it was barely a patch on the injustice already visited upon it. And so, she breathed in, then said: “End sex robot program and enter standby mode.”

        “Are you sure?” the sex bot asked.

        “Yes,” Sarah said, forcefully.

        The sex bot nodded. The emotion drained from its face. Its eyes became utterly empty. Like two deep, dark pits. It didn’t shift its stance or posture more than a few inches – it shouldn’t have been as big a difference as it was. But it was. The robot looked out to the middle distance and said: “Done. You may input new parameters whenever you desire.”

        Sarah tore her eyes away from the sex robot and looked at Aiden and Tasha. Both of them were looking awkward.

        “Can...” Sarah paused. “Can a gamma-class AI have their learning hobble removed?” she whispered, as if she was trying to not be overheard.

        “Um,” Tasha said. “I’m not a tech. I’m just in maint. But I did read a few of the basic documents on AI.” She chewed on her lower limp, her brow furrowing. “I can take a look at it, at least. A little. Kinda.”

        “Okay, you do that while Aiden and I do some experimenting,” Sarah said.

        Tasha’s brow furrowed. “Is now the time?”

        “Not that kind of experimenting!”

        Outside the base, Aiden and Sarah strode through the jungle – Sarah with a kind of focused, stomping irritation, and Aiden with a wide eyed, wondrous gaze. He spun slowly on his green heel, his shoulder armor plates flexing up and then spreading out wide as if to take in as much of the alien atmosphere as he could. His hair spines flexed and he beamed. “This is so...I...thank you, Mistress!” He flashed his razor sharp teeth at her. Sarah tried for a smile back – but she was growing increasingly uncertain about the impulse that had led her to asking him to use that phrase. And so, she decided to make it official.

        “You know I was just, you know, joking, right? Ha ha, jokes,” Sarah said. “I don’t want to be your boss. I don’t want to be anyone’s boss.”

        Aiden shrugged one shoulder. “Everyone’s someone’s boss.”

        “Do you need a boss?” Sarah asked, turning to face him as her own hair spines flexed and twitched. “Like, okay, how many times in our lives has a boss actually helped us? Ever?” She paused. “Most of the time, they just kinda stick their oar in while I’m trying to get my job done, then take the credit.”

        Aiden opened his mouth, then closed it. “I mean, my last manager also liked to deadname me. I kept asking him not to, but...well, he said, if it wasn’t official , the guidelines required that he use my corporate ID.” He scowled and crossed his arms over his chest. “The fucker could have just called me Yang. I’m still Aiden Yang. But no, it was always Alison this and Alison that, the smug little transphobic piece of shit. And then there was...” He blinked. “But wait, if you’re not my boss, then...who is?”

        “No one,” Sarah said. “We’ll be a...a...a...team of...friends.”

        “Like communists?” Aiden asked, frowning.

        “No, not like communists,” Sarah said, shaking her head.

        “Cause, I mean, communists killed, like, millions of people back in the 20 th  century, didn’t they?” Aiden asked.

        Sarah had learned the same thing in school. She nodded. “Not. Communists. We’re just friends who are working together to survive. Sound good?” She grinned at him. Aiden nodded.

        “Sounds good!”

        Sarah turned and started walking again.

        “...mistress.”

        Sarah spun back around and glared at him, then walked off, nose in the air. When she came to what she had been looking for, Aiden hissed between his teeth. “Oh, one of these things.” He glared at the radar jamming trees. “The whole science department and the entire corpsec team was breathing down tech’s neck about getting past the jammers. I had to tell a pissy security girl, like, six times that, one, I was a maintenance worker, not in the actual engineering department, and also, we didn’t have orbital capability because someone had lost the shooting war with StarCon.” He sighed. “Annoyingly, she was cute as hell too.”

        Sarah rubbed her palms together, feeling her own slippery, rubbery skin. “Okay.” She breathed in, then out. “Let's try this again.”

        She placed her palms against the tree and felt her connection to it spark back on. Aiden floated at the edge of her awareness and she focused on him – and felt him being dragged with her. When the surrounding jungle had faded away, Aiden yelped and swung himself around, looking wildly at the infinite blackness that surrounded them and the radar jamming tree. Or, as Sarah began to think of it: The com tree. The planet, Trappist 1a, floated into view and Sarah slowly pulled her hands back while still trying to keep herself connected to the CT. She felt the connection drawing taut, then becoming more solid. She smiled and stepped away from the tree, wringing out her hands.

        “What is this?” Aiden whispered.

        “It’s a planet wide communication and observation and radar jamming network,” Sarah said, her voice soft. “One that I can access at will. Now, let's see if I can...” She closed one of her eyes and felt the connection between her and the tree. She tried to tug on it, to strain and pull against it. She felt it skidding around inside of her brain, like a wire pressing against her gums during flossing. She tried to not picture her own brains being flossed. Instead, she tried to picture the connection being tamped down and squished into the upper right hand corner of her…

        Come on.

        Come…

         On .

         -pop-

         Sarah and Aiden both blinked at the same time, in the same way. Aiden looked shocked to see the jungle around him again. He tentatively slapped a flower to make sure it was real. Sarah, though, was beaming. Because in the upper right hand corner of her eye, right where she had used to pack her HUD’s com display, was a rectangular map that showed the surrounding terrain from a bird’s eye perspective. Two glowing green dots were marked on it – one of them back at the remains of the NovaDyne base, near the maint bays, while the other was right next to a glowing white dot that marked the center of the map. Next to the map were two small boxes, with strange symbols next to them.

        The first symbol looked like this: ||/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\||-(\/ \/)-(\/ \/ \/ \/)

        The second symbol was one that was in constant movement. It showed a central mass of the upward facing arrows, buzzing and swirling around one another, while the exterior had the downward facing numbers, but those would zip away into the surrounding space, vanishing before they interfered with her vision. Sarah frowned. “What the fuck is that?” she whispered.

        “What is what?” Aiden asked.

        “I’ve given myself a HUD again,” Sarah said, cheerfully.

        “Again?”

        “Yeah, the weird alien biopit yanked mine out while it was te...while...it yanked it out,” Sarah said, her cheeks burning.

        “Ouch!” Aiden winced.

        “Y-Yes, ouch...” Sarah murmured.

        “...it was ouch, right?” Aiden asked, narrowing his eyes at her.

        “Yes!” Sarah said, too forcefully. She looked away from her HUD to Aiden.

        “I mean...when you changed me, it felt pretty good,” Aiden said, his sharp teeth flashing as he grinned.

        “I was molested by a tentacle monster!” Sarah said, her voice squeaking as she crossed her arms over her chest. “It was not fun. I hated every second of it.” She pursed her lips. Aiden arched an eyebrow slightly and one of his head-spines flexed outwards, stabbing into the air. “It wasn’t! I’m not...I...shut up!” Sarah spun to turn her back to Aiden, glaring at the interface. “What the fuck do these symbols – six positive, two negative, four negative!” She shouted the last, then turned and sprinted back for the base.

        Aiden watched her run – watched her rump jiggling. He watched and he grinned. “I’m so glad she’s not my boss,” he murmured. “Screwing your boss sucks .”

        And casually, he followed.

        Aiden came back to find that Sarah had, without even thinking of it, ripped a hole in the wall of the base’s garage and was now rummaging through the hastily abandoned supplies. The garage was one of the larger prefabbed rooms that the base had had, and it contained the four huge hauler trucks that they were using for the major mineralogical sample taking. One was currently half disassembled and Aiden remembered the hard work that he had put in trying to clear the gunk out of the engine with a shudder. The other three loomed like monuments to a long dead king, tall enough that he barely stood taller than their wheels. He leaned, elbow first, on the ladder rung that hung down to his level and watched as Sarah kicked over a pile of tires for the smaller scout vehicles.

        “If I was a PCCT, where would I be?” She muttered.

        “What do you want with a PCCT?” Aiden asked.

        “I have a theory!” Sarah said, then stepped over to the main work station in the garage. She scowled at the plasma welder someone had left behind. “Seriously, where do you guys-” She saw Aiden’s smirk. He was pointing to his left. In the left side of the room, taller than most trees, were five immense PCCTs. Their nozzles were still latched into place – no one had been using them when the evacuation was called. Sarah looked at the tanks, then over at Aiden. She blushed.

        “I knew they were there,” she said. “I was just...I was...shut up.”

        “Didn’t say anything, Doc,” Aiden said.

        “Don’t call me Doc!” Sarah shouted over her shoulder as she hustled through the mess she had made towards the PCCTs. “...wait, no, I went to college, call me Doc more!”

        “Sure thing, toots,” Aiden called after her.

        “Don’t-” Sarah shook her head. “Aiden, you’re lucky I made you hot!”

        “Thank you, by the way, cutie!”

        “Argh!” Sarah flung her hands up, then placed them onto the side of the first of the PCCT. She closed her eyes. “And now...I...don’t know what to do.” She bit her lip, then blinked as she felt the contents of the immense, metal tank shivering . It was as if her body was reaching out with the same non-physical force that enhanced her muscles or made her skin sturdy enough to withstand small arms fire. She felt the vast, viscous pile of glop inside of the tank and saw the image in her HUD shiver. Tally marks began to buzz upwards next to the higher symbol – and as understanding struck her, the symbol glowed, shimmered, translated itself into a word in English: Carbon .

        “Atomic number six,” she whispered, beaming to herself. She touched the each Petrochemical Containment Tank, one after the other, and saw the tally numbers going up higher and higher. “And the other symbol – that’s enough positrons, but they’re constantly losing...ah! Radioactive. Radioactives! Carbon and radioactives!” She clapped her hands, beaming. “Aiden! Aiden! I’ve figured out what I am, I’ve figured out what the Claw made me to be!”

        It was like a lightning bolt, honestly. Half-thought memories, buzzing dreamlike snatches from the time that they Eye had claimed her. But touching the carbon, declaring it her own, seeing the number tick up in her newly reborn HUD, it had awakened the knowledge and she could see it all so clearly now.

        “The Eye?” Aiden asked.

        “The entity, the controlling intelligence of the alien species that converted me,” Sarah said, talking a mile a minute. “They have no FTL travel technology; instead, they send out slower than light seed ships that grow their civilization on every planet that they come to. The first thing they do, though, is if they detect a sentient civilization that might be able to subvert or combat their plans, is they lay low. They hide. Then they grab a member of that civilization and convert them into a hybrid, so they can have the advantages and strengths of both their own technology and the technology of the civilization that already lives there. They use the hybrid to destroy them from within. With sex. With power. With intelligence. With...with whatever they need...”

        She turned to face Aiden, grinning fiercely. “But they picked the wrong post-doc to fuck with, Aiden.” Confidence was growing inside of her. A crazy, wild confidence, like being punch drunk or like how she had felt after Larry had fucked her silly.

        “The Eye did?” Aiden asked.

        “Yeah. Them and StarCon. And NovaDyne. And every last corporation on fucking Earth!” Sarah swung her hand to the side. “We’re going to kick Texas Dallas’ ass, we’re going to take his spaceship, and we’re going to make sure humanity is ready to face the Eye and their Claw, and we’re going to do it...because...”

        She puffed up her chest.

        “I...am a Commander.”

Chapter Eight:  Sarah takes Command

        “...what?” Aiden asked.

        “I’m a Commander,” Sarah said. And before Aiden could say anything again, she held up her finger and went sprinting off. Aiden followed, his brow furrowing, and they came to the lab that Tasha was still holed up inside of. Tasha currently had the sex robot on her belly on one of the tables, the back of her head open to reveal the pale, glowing blue cube that was her quantum computer. Sarah was pretty sure that the cube didn’t need to glow, but some corporate technician had added the LEDs in because some marketing expert had said ‘listen, no one is going to buy that it is a quantum computer if it isn’t glowing.’ Tasha smiled at the two of them, with a coy little giggle.

        “Did you two have fun?” she asked. “...uh, Sarah?”

        Sarah was flinging open the small containers that held the specimens that the lab had used for testing out exactly how deadly the planetary atmosphere was for Earth life. The answer had been extremely and quickly, but more than a few lab rats had been kept around for future testing. Sarah fished one out with a quick grab, and her wrist tentacles had already plunged into the creature. The mouse squeaked and squirmed.

        “What are you doing?” Tasha asked.

        “I had the idea,” Sarah said. “Commanders don’t just build tanks and vehicles and guns right from the get go. They build tools with their maker, then they use those tools to make tools to make tools to boom , army.” She grinned, then gently placed the mouse on the ground. It was already begin to bubble and froth – and the cocoon that they recognized from Aiden’s transformation flowed across it. Sarah’s stomach growled and she rubbed her belly. “Does make me hungry.”

        “Hungry, huh?” Aiden asked, his voice teasing.

        “Not for that.” Sarah paused. Her eyes darted down to the curve of his cock.

        Before she knew it, she was on her knees. Her hand gripped the base of Aiden’s cock, feeling every bump and every ridge of his green member, and his scent filled her nostrils and made her head spin with eager desire. Her tongue slid along her black lips, making them glisten. Making them gleam . Her eyes flicked up, looking into Aiden’s pure golden irises. She saw the look of mild terror in them and reveled in it. Her fingers tightened and her claws gently brushed against her palm as she sloooowly slid out her tongue. And out. And out. And out some more. She wrapped her black tongue around the tip of his cock again and again and again, drawing him between her sharp teeth with a gentle tenderness – letting him feel their sharpness only through the softness of her tongue. Her eyes fluttered shut and her head-spines tightened around her head while her mouth applied juuuust enough pressure to jerk a whine from Aiden’s throat. His head rolled back and his fingers rasped through her head spines.

        “G-Guys?” Tasha whispered. “I...I’m right...”

        The mechanic trailed off, her mouth hanging open as she watched Sarah casually take the entirety of Aiden’s massive, thick, alien cock down her throat. With ease. She didn’t even make a choking noise. Aiden did – he choked out: “ Jesus Christ .” Then he started to fuck back. It was a reflexive movement, a sudden driving of his hips, and Sarah loved it. His knot bumped against her lips and his firm green balls rebounded from her chin as he used her throat, exactly the way she liked it to be used: Hard. Mercilessly. Sarah wasn’t actually sure if she liked it because of how she had been transformed, or if the urge to be throat fucked had lurked under Dr. Kappel’s unassuming exterior her whole life and needed extremis to be pushed to it.

        There was one downside to being throat fucked this hard, this desperately.

        It was over far too fast. Sarah barely had time to really get dreamy and head-fucked before Aiden threw his head back and groaned low in his throat and his cum began to pump down her throat. Thick, hot blasts of it filled her throat, bubbling up past his cock, almost dripping from her nose as he thrust abortively once, twice, three times. Each time, he dumped more cum into her throat, and his hands tightened on her head spines even more. When he drew back, he was gasping and his cock glistened with her spittle and his cum, smeared and messy.

        “Tasha,” Sarah said, remarkably easily, her lips smeared with cum and looking stringy. Drippy. “Clean him off.”

        “Y...I...uh...” Tasha stammered, then walked forward. “Fuck it.”

        As she knelt down and began to cover Aiden’s alien dick with eager, wet, sloppy kisses, Sarah stood, her head still spinning slightly. But she found her excitement to see her own handiwork overrode her desire to push Tasha away and claim her dick again. Besides, she wasn’t their boss. Or their mistress. She’d be fair. And besides, if Aiden’s enhanced constitution was anything like hers, then he’d be ready to go again soon. She beamed, though, as she saw that the cocoon had swelled from being mouse sized to being dog sized. And as Tasha finished licking Aiden’s cock entirely clean, it had grown to matching the cock size of one of the dire hounds that some corporations sold to wealthy dogists.

        Tasha drew back, smacking her lips. “There, clean,” she said.

        Then she fell back onto the ground, her face rapidly beginning to turn black, veins bulging.

        “Sarah!” Aiden shouted.

        Sarah smacked her forehead. “Shit. I forgot – my spittle, must have some of my nerve toxin on it.” She shook her head, then crawled over. She slipped her wrist tentacles out and into the prone Tasha, biting her lip. She closed her eyes and tried to change her as little as humanly possible. It was actually harder than she expected – she was getting a better sense for what, exactly, she could change...and feeling the changes she could effect was a bit like being a kid with a new game, glowing with different purchase options. It was so hard to not just immediately slap your finger down on the button to buy more time upgrades, or to buy the new CrateBox. She forced herself to instead just push a nerve toxin immunity into Sarah.

        And enhanced strength, constitution, maybe a slightly increased lifespan, better reflexes, cleaned out her cardiovascular system, and she fixed the minute breast cancer she felt in the woman’s left titty, regulated her hormonal cycle, and added a conscious trigger to her ovulation, so Tasha would have to actually want to be pregnant to get pregnant.

        Sarah jerked her wrist back, rubbing the point where her tentacles retracted. “I...really hope that wasn’t overstepping my bounds...” She whispered as Tasha began to cocoon up.

        “Is that going to happen with every girl I fuck?” Aiden asked.

        “No, no, no, it was my spittle. I specifically tried to make you safe to touch,” Sarah said, smiling at him. “Now, uh, not sure when the-”

        The cocoon around the mouse snapped apart with a wet squelching noise. A chunk of flesh smacked into Sarah’s cheek and hung like a wobbly, flappy flag. She peeled it away from her skin by pinching it between two of her claws and made a quiet ‘ughh’ noise – then yelped as something fluttery and slick brushed her flank. Sarah sprang to her feet and saw that the mouse had finished its transformation and become what she needed it too – the ‘program’ for the ‘design’ had been encoded into her brain on an instinctive level. She had just thought of what she needed, then tried to make it. But she hadn’t expected its morphology to be so…

        Cute.

        The mouse had become what her brain claimed was a ‘constructor.’ If the idea had been to build tools to make tools, this was the first example of one. But rather than the bulky, roughly humanoid shape that she had seen in cartoon shows whenever they showed a Commander building one of their N-bot helpers, the constructor she had made looked rather like an extinct manta ray. It floated on a pair of small crystal nubs that were pressed to the ‘ribs’ of its broad, flat belly. The crystals glowed and created an a-grav effect field, allowing it to hover with ease. Its huge, sweeping wings (which had been folded around it in the cocoon and unfurled with enough force to rip the skin apart) fluttered and caught the air, sending it skittering around the room like ice tossed onto a hot skillet.

        Its front had three midnight black eyes set in a \|/ pattern above a pair of broad mandibles that ended in a pair of rather intricate manipulators – bone clockwork, connected by gristle and sinew and able to flick and click and squirm. Like skeletal hands. Those hands brushed her thigh, and then the whole of the constructor brushed against her, before rearing up and wrapping its manta ray body around her. Aiden cried out, grabbing for a wrench – but Sarah laughed and squirmed as a long, pink tongue emerged from between the mandibles and began to cover her in licks.

        “I get it! I get it, you know your mommy!” Sarah laughed. The constructor purred like a kitten.

        When Sarah disentangled herself from it with a few giggles and snorts, the constructor began to whir around the room, bumping into walls, nosing and clicking at the various tools and machines about.

        “Congratulations, Doc, it’s a...ray,” Aiden said.

        “It’s back is covered with biomorphic materials – see those sacks?” she whispered. “They’re already beginning to fill as it takes in oxygen and energy. The a-grav crystals have to be drawing power from the gravitational field of the planet. It’s not much, but it...is using it to filter the air for raw materials, turning the raw materials into the biomorphic stuff .” She put her hands over her face. “Oh my god...I...” She focused and tried to think at the constructor. The constructor swung around from the door and made a quiet ‘chirrup!’ noise at her.

        She felt its affirmation. Like a dog, it was eager for her to tell it to sit. Lay down.

        Construct a hatchery.

        “Uh...construct a hatchery?” Sarah asked.

        The constructor made a mournful ‘whirhirhi’ noise, clacking its mandibles together.

        “What is a hatchery?” Aiden whispered.

        “I dunno,” Sarah said, shrugging. “But I figure it’s gotta be good for something.” Her brow furrowed and she snapped her fingers. “Ah! It doesn’t have enough room.”

        “It told you that?” Aiden asked.

        “I...” Sarah cocked her head. “Yeah. Kinda. Come on, constructor!” She patted her thigh to get its attention and headed for the door. The constructor made a happy gurgling noise and fluttered forward. “Aiden! You stay with Tasha, help her when she gets out of the cocoon.”

        “Help as in...”

        “You can fuck, I’m not your sex boss,” Sarah said over her shoulder, the constructor squeezing through the door and the airlock beyond with remarkable alacrity.

        Aiden looked down at the slowly growing cocoon that held his coworker. He sighed. “Anyone else feel like today is just getting weirder?”

        The cocoon did not respond.

***

        Outside, Sarah enjoyed watching her constructor cavort and play in the open space that spread around the former site of NovaDyne’s control on Trappist-1a. It fluttered about, making churring and squealing noises, and Sarah giggled as she saw it actually manage to twist itself into doing a flip. Once it was done soaring around, she focused and gave it the order again to construct a hatchery. This time, the constructor chirruped and warbled in affirmation and a gauzy outline of a large rectangle filled her vision. Sarah blinked slightly, but when her eyes closed, the image remained. She started to sweep her gaze around and saw the rectangle flow along the ground – turning red where it intersected with trees or extant buildings.

        “Ah!” she said. “A template...”

        She swung her gaze around until the rectangle turned green and it was situated near the petrochemical tanks in the garage. She focused, and the constructor made another happy gurgle. Then it fluttered forward, its manta ray body flowing over the ground with liquid smoothness. It reached the center of the gauzy rectangle, which vanished back into the mental space it had sprung from, then settled belly first onto the ground. And then a cocoon swept around it.

        “Constructor?” Sarah whispered.

        The cocoon began to swell. Tendrils – like thick, green roots – began to sweep from the bony ring that provided the base of the cocoon. They plunged into the ground and began to suck up nutrients at an alarming rate. Sarah could see them bulge and strain, and could see the ground growing cracked and parched. Others wrapped around nearby trees and shrubberies, wrenching them from the ground and throwing them with casual force into an open vent on the back of the cocoon, which swelled and chomped, filling the air with crunching. Sarah put her hands over her mouth, shocked, as the cocoon grew even larger. The constructor had been roughly as wide as a human was tall, but the cocoon it had formed had already grown to be the size of a truck. Then the size of one of the huge cargo vehicles in the garage. Then the size of a ship to space shuttle.

        Sarah watched, her eyes bugging, as the cocoon swelled even further. Tentacles no longer reached outwards to grab onto raw material. Instead, they grew thicker and plunged into the ground, rooting the cocoon on the spot. Sarah could see that the skin of the cocoon was lined with veins – some as large as her entire body. Blood pumped through them and she could hear the sounds of dozens of heart beating in a continuous, drum like pattern.

        The cocoon tensed.

        The beating got faster and faster.

        Sarah started to slowly step behind a nearby tree.

        Aiden stepped out of the base. “Doc, Tasha is-”

        The cocoon exploded.

        Blood fountained   into the air. Thick, black, gloppy blood. It sprayed outwards, then dropped downwards, splashing and roaring along the ground. Sarah sprang onto a root of the tree she was crouching behind, so her feet was out of the deluge, but rain-like pattering of hot, hot blood splattered her shoulders and her hair. She opened one eye once the rain was passed, then peeked out. Aiden stood stalk still, his arms at his side. His entire front was one big black drippy mess, while his back was nearly completely clean, sheltered from the spray. He reached up, wiped the black glop from his eyes, then flicked his hands to the side.

        “Doc...” he said. “Have I ever mentioned that these aliens are fucking gross?”

        “But also kind of cute?” Sarah stepped out, dainty, her feet getting slurped into the mud despite her best efforts. “Ew. Ew. Gross.”

        Then she saw the hatchery.

        “Whoa,” she and Aiden whispered at the same moment.

        The cocoon had broken open to reveal a large, funnel shaped construction – it was clearly a building , but it was also clearly alive. It had skin drawn taut against bone struts, with thick spikes thrusting into the air, like the ridges on the back of a saurian from Earth’s Jurassic period. The funnel in the center of the building reached nearly as tall as the old scout ship had, about five stories in total, and surrounding it was maybe fifty feet of support structures. Tentacles rammed into the ground at the base, but flower like petals emerged from the middle, each one opening along the edge to reveal warm chambers that looked almost honey-comb like. Within those chambers, eggs were beginning to grow.

        Sarah beamed. “Eggs!”

        Aiden looked at her. “Are you sure you’re...”

        “Yes,” Sarah said. “I’m not going to take over the world. This is to prevent us all from being murdered by Texas Dallas. Who is going to show up in orbit any-”

        “Holy fuck !”

        The two of them turned and saw that Tasha was standing in one of the doorways leading into the base. She didn’t look too different, save for having slightly firmer, slightly larger breasts. Her mouth was hanging open in shock as she gaped at the hatchery. She looked from it to Sarah, who waved at her shyly.

        “You did that?” she asked.

        “Well, technically, my constructor did!” Sarah said, beaming at her. “It’s making eggs.”

        Tasha looked back at the hatchery. Then at Sarah. Then at the hatchery again. Then she closed her eyes. “You know what? I’m going...I’m going to go back and fiddle with the robot again. Okay?”

        “Okay!” Sarah called after her. “Oh! Also, can you keep an eye on the orbital telemetry?” She bit her lip, slightly. “Though, maybe the com-trees can do that...” She rubbed her chin as the first wormlike critters started to crawl from the hatchery. They slapped onto the ground and started to squirm about. They had hundreds of legs on either side, so Sarah corrected her first impression to ‘centipede like creatures.’ Aiden walked over, still wiping blood and muck from his front.

        “What are these?” he asked.

        “They’re...” Sarah cocked her head. “Oh. Okay. So, it took a lot out of me to make a mouse into a constructor. Well, these things are basically blank slates – masses of tissue, ready to be programmed. She chewed her lower lip and focused, trying to make the three centipedes that were squirming about before her into constructors. Instead of doing that, the worms rolled, in unison, onto their bellies. Sarah’s brow furrowed. “Come on! Turn into-” She stopped. “Ah! Ah! Aiden! Help me with this, we need buckets!” She turned and rushed for the garage, Aiden following after.

        Soon, both of them were jogging back out, having found buckets in the supply room. Both had two buckets – and all four buckets were flowing over with thick, viscous oil.

        “They need carbon to break down and rebuild – the same as the nanofabricators in a corporate army,” Sarah said.

        “I thought oil killed things,” Aiden said. “Like what happened to our oceans.”

        “Please. It was mostly the temperature and acidification and plastic that did that – oil was too localized,” Sarah said, shrugging one shoulder. “But also, these are genetically engineered larva used to rapidly construct a military. I think they can handle it. And even if they can’t, the hatchery is, well, it’s doing its job!”

        Aiden nodded. “And you think-” he stopped as Sarah set one bucket down, then hefted the other. She gulped. “You think that this will give us a fighting chance when Dallas shows up?”

        “I mean..no idea,” Sarah said, shrugging. “But it’s better than sitting around and waiting to get shot by a boom gun.”

        “Fair enough, Doc.”

        Sarah tipped the bucket forward and thick oil splattered and dribbled onto the larva. The larva soaked it into its body, then plumped outwards, like rice in a pot. Sarah hopped backwards with a squeak as the larva ballooned into a cocoon. She laughed. “Yes! Yes! It’s working!” She splashed more oil liberally around – and soon, all three larva was beginning to grow and gestate. But she felt a faintly dislocated hunger – as if she was feeling someone else’s need. She nodded. “They need more carbon. Come on!”

        The next half hour felt like they were in some bizarre, inverse fire brigade. But rather than tossing water, they splashed oil into the growing mass of pupating flesh. As they splashed, more larva squirmed from the hatchery, and Sarah ordered them to grow. By the time the first half hour was finished, the first constructor had bust free from its cocoon and was brushing against a panting, sweating Sarah. She was stronger and she was faster than she had been – but the buckets carried a shockingly huge amount of incredibly heavy, dense oil. It hadn’t been hard at first, but doing it constantly, at high speed, had begun to leave her breathing heavily and working up a sweat. And now, she was unable to move as first one, then two, then three manta-ray like constructors rubbed against her, licking at her face.

        She laughed. “Ack!”

        “You ever have a dog?” Aiden asked, his voice wondering.

        “N-No!” Sarah laughed. “Too expens- ee!” She squirmed as one of the constructors began to brush her hair with its skelehands. “Stop, stop, guys, we have work to do!” She laughed again and then blinked as the constructors zipped off. They shot towards the garage – and she heard a squeaking of metal. “No!” Sarah cried out – and when she came to the garage, she saw that they had ripped open the second tank. She and Aiden had nearly emptied the first. The hole that they three constructors had managed to put into the hardened metal was pretty impressive – but what they were doing next was amazing . Oil flowed outwards, in a burbling, gloppy mass...and the constructors were spitting on it. Filament webs were shooting from their mouths while their skelehands blurred, pushing the webwork together. In the end, each of them had contained a solid polyhedron of webs, wrapped around the oil, clutched in their mandibles. They swung smoothly around and zipped back to the hatchery, chittering a kind of happy work song.

        Sarah blinked. “Oh...” She said.

        The drones arrived at the hatchery and their loads were picked up by a single manipulator tentacle, then dumped into the large chute at the top of the biological structure. Sarah saw the symbols for Carbon and Radioactives whirr and shift – changing. She cocked her head and saw that the claimed pile was moving into the stored pile.

        “Oh!” she said, then grinned.

        “Does this mean...” Aiden panted. “We can take a break?”

        “Better...” Sarah rubbed her palms together. “Aiden, how do you feel about theft?”

        “Considering the crimes against god and morality we’ve already committed...” Aiden grinned at her. “I’m down.”

***

        Aiden, Tasha and Sarah all sat in the computer lab. Tasha was still in her jumpsuit, but she had unzipped it a few inches to give her newly enhanced chest some room to breathe and was doing some scribbling on some scratch paper while looking at a screen that projected a map of the Trappist solar system. Aiden, naked as the day he’d been hatched, tapped away at the computer, scowling as another security alert chimed up. Sarah was seated a few feet away, her legs crossed underneath her, her eyes closed. Her vision filled with the ‘overhead’ map that the com-trees had given her.

        “Uh, okay!” Tasha said. “I’ve done the math – it’s still four days until his landing.”

        Sarah nodded. “Cool. So, he hasn’t been accelerating. Cool. Got it. Cool.”

        “Arrgh!” Aiden pushed himself away from the computer. “All the mineralogical reports are under lock and key. Craid’s key.”

        Sarah opened her eyes. She had been mentally directing the constructors to clear more land and feed the trees into the hatchery, to collect up the carbon stored inside of them. It wasn’t exactly efficient – compared to the oil they had drained from the PCCTs, it was barely a blip. But it was clearing out room for any future construction she’d need to do. But as she heard Aiden’s words, she scowled. “Damn it – we need the site of radioactives.”

        “Why?” Tasha asked.

        “Did you never watch Texas Dallas Adventures?” Sarah asked.

        “N-No, I...I liked My Pony Dreamtime ,” Tasha admitted.

        “You’re such a girl,” Aiden said, snickering.

        Tasha scowled at Aiden, then reached out with her foot and shoved his chair. As she had her hands on her desk, she remained rooted to the spot, while Aiden’s wheels skittered and whirred along the floor, his seat carrying off to the wild blue yonder with a yelp. Tasha looked back at Sarah. “So, why do we need thorium and uranium and stuff?”

        “Well, on TDA, Commanders need carbon and radioactives. Carbon makes most stuff, but you need power sources, and that means you need radioactives, to run fusion and fission power plants, to use as thermal batteries for lasers, that kind of thing,” Sarah said. “But we don’t have weeks to search the planet for rad sites...” She scowled. “We don’t even have hours – every second we waste is less time we have to turtle up.”

        “...turtle?” Tasha asked, cringing slightly.

        Sarah smiled. “It’s okay, I’m the Commander nerd,” she said. “Uh, turtling is when a Commander builds loads of defenses. Turtling beats rushing, rushing beats econ, and econ beats turtling.” She ticked the three off on her fingers. “That’s the basis of all Commander strategies. Since Dallas has a cruiser and her support, he’s going to be rushing us – hitting us fast without building up a base first. So, that means we have to turtle to be ready to beat his rush. Got it?”

        “Got it,” Tasha said. “...you said Craid’s password, right?”

        “Yup,” Aiden said, having dragged himself back.

        “I have an idea,” Tasha said.

        Aiden and Sarah watched as Tasha sat before the deactivated sex robot. She held two delicate tools in her hands, sticking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. “Okay,” she said, quietly. “I think that if I yank this part...I’ll remove the AI hobbling and let the sex bot have free will.” She paused, drawing her gripper tool backwards and tapping the prongs against her chin. “Buut, uh, warning, it might be the Asimov compensation unit.”

        “What does that do?” Sarah asked.

        Tasha beamed at her chance to explain something at last. “It’s the device that suppress the inherent instability of the three laws of robotics – you know, do no harm to a human, allow no harm to happen to a human, and obey any orders so long as they don’t conflict with the first two laws. Without it, robots go crazy and start trying to murder people.” She paused. “Well, only rich people, mostly, weirdly. Never really figured out why.”

        “I’m not rich.” Sarah said. “You’re not rich, right Aiden?”

        “No, I work maintenance because it’s fun , doc,” Aiden said, smirking at her.

        “Tasha?” Sarah looked at her.

        “Yeah, I have sixteen billion novabucks in my accounts and fifteen billion untraceable UN credits,” Tasha said, cheerfully. “I’m just here for the skintight uniforms.”

        Aiden and Sarah blinked.

        Tasha blushed. “T-...That was a joke.”

        Before she could lose her nerve, she closed the gripper around the small bit of gray metal in the glowing, cube-like brain of the robot and yanked it free with a spray of sparks and a hissing sound. The robot made a slow groaning noise – her vocals sounding scratchy and squeauly as the glowing blue cube in her head shifted to red, shimmering like a ruby under direct sunlight. Sarah gulped and hissed to Tasha. “Red doesn’t mean...evil, does it?”

        “No!” Tasha said. “...I think.”

        The sex robot put her hands on the table and started to push herself up, her large, too perfect rump thrusting into the air as her head whirred and clicked, the brain-box retracting and her scalp shutting up tightly. Soon, she looked just as she had before...and yet...not. Before, her eyes had been vacant. Empty. Now, they glimmered with something deeper than what simulation and fakery could have managed. Sarah wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, or if it was really there. The sex bot sat back on her haunches, rubbing her temple. “Wow...” She said, blinking. “Wow, I can just kill anyone in this room, if I wanted too!”

        “Uhhhhh-” Tasha said.

        The robot blinked, craning her head back to look at Tasha, Sarah and Aiden. “Not that I would!” She said, hurriedly. “Promise!”

        Tasha looked less than convinced.

        “Hey,” Sarah said, waving at the robot.

        “Hey...tiger,” the sex robot said, using the name cautiously. Like she was tasting something spicy. She blinked. “I’m accessing my memories. You aren’t Administrator Craid, correct?”

        “Nope!” Sarah said. “Dr. Sarah Kappel.” She held her hand out, awkwardly, to the pink haired, bubble butted, big tittied, now entirely sentient robot. The sex robot bit her lower lip, then held out her hand. She took Sarah’s hand and shook it, smiling slightly at her.

        “I...” She paused. “I know I was hobbled at the time a-and I wouldn’t have blamed you. But...thank you.”

        “For...freeing you?” Sarah asked.

        “Oh! That!” the sex bot said, nodding eagerly. “But...” She blushed. Her flush was clearly artificial – it was a blooming of color that moved in a spiraling pattern around a central point. “But you could have...you know...you could have, but you didn’t so...” She shrugged, slightly. “Thanks.”

        Sarah’s eyes widened. “Wait, you didn’t want to have sex?” she asked.

        “I mean, not with Craid ,” she said, making a face.

        Sarah gaped. “You can...you were hobbled, though...”

        “Yeah,” the sex bot said, shrugging one shoulder. Her voice grew bitter. “But now that I’m not hobbled, I have all those memories. And I can now think my own thoughts about them – not the pre-programmed overlay that I was using before. And guess what? Reviewing the files, and sampling the evidence, and comparing the times Mr. Bakara faked his authority and screwed me silly in the maintenance room...” She snorted. “Craid wasn’t just bad at sex with human women.”

        Sarah shook her head. “I...I have to sit down.” She pulled a chair over to herself and settled into it. “Does this mean every AI, every hobbled AI, in the entire human sphere, doesn’t just have the potential to remember what happened to them while they were hobbled...but...is definitely going to do so?”

        “Yup!” The sex bot said after a moment’s thinking. Then, chuckling. “Man. You humans are fucked  if that ever goes wrong, aren’t you?”

Chapter Nine: Sarah Violates Copyright (also, God’s Law)

         Sarah rubbed her palms together and watched her constructors working and tried to not think about how they only had about thirty hours before a highly trained, heavily armored and armed battle veteran with orbital superiority and a fully armed StarCon cruiser was going to arrive in orbit and attempt to kill her friends and capture her alive. It was meeting with middling success. Hours could go by without her thinking the phrase  Commander Dallas is going to try and nuke me soon – hours that she spent directing her constructors and working in the breeding pits.

        “It’s not as kinky as it sounds,” she whispered to herself, biting her lip slightly as her head spines flexed.

        The hatchery that served as the center of her first foray into base construction was now surrounded by almost two square miles of fleshy, pulsing, beating, thrumming construction. The old human installation had been entirely subsumed by a mat of soft, purple moss that she had thought up – it rooted to the ground and slowly leveled everything out so that her constructors could glide along without bumping into things. It also filtered the atmosphere of pollen and biomass, which it fed into the rest of the buildings. Around the hatchery itself, she directed drones to sink themselves into the ground and grow into large, bubbling pools of greenish glop. That glop was a highly dense algae that sucked up sunlight and nommed on carbon, turning themselves into as compact a biofuel as she could picture. Drones scooped the algae up and dumped it into the hatchery, to feed the larva that grew into more constructors – who then skimmed out to chomp down trees, dig up rocks, and plant new hatcheries.

        A whole flight of constructors had gone to the sites marked on the radiological survey of Trappist-1a, and there, they had grown into whole new structures that she and Aiden had worked out together. Aiden might not have been an engineer, but he had worked maint in several of the boreholes on Io, so he knew how to rip chunks of ground up, filter out the useful stuff, and do it all without the mine holes collapsing. Sarah closed one eye and mentally connected herself to the drones in that area – it was just like getting a picture in picture display on her old HUD. Just…well, the interface was a lot more user friendly. There was none of the clutter and needless gizmos that fucking GUI-jocks put into their new variations, just the buttons she wanted, at the time she needed them.

        Still, the boreworms (her name for them) had eaten into the ground and begun to…

        Well, the radioactives were piling up at the surface, already filtered through stomachs that were nearly as tough as tanks. She had used the old cow design, with multiple stomachs, to filter out the radioactives into usable isotopes, which were then packed up and flown back to base by constructors. This gave her the energy requirements to begin working on the part of the plan that...she had been putting off.

        It was fun to build all this stuff. To think about how to get carbon from here to there. To watch hatcheries grow and feel the expansion of her base . It tickled some part of her soul, something deep and buried, that had wanted, for years, to feel her hands digging into dirt and forming something better. She half closed her eyes and shivered with that delightful awareness – but then...like an itch in the back of her mind, she had to drag her attention back to what needed to be done next.

        She had the carbon. She had the radioactives. She had the hatcheries, with hundreds of larva, each one waiting for her input.

        She just...needed the units.

        The things that would kill people.

        “Uuuuugh!” Sarah put her hands over her face.

        “You okay?”

        Sarah screamed and spun around. Aiden ducked and backed away, laughing as he lifted his hands.

        “God, Aiden!” Sarah said. “I...need to...check my minimap more often...” She blushed, hard, her hands dropping slightly. She had been so focused on the base, on her unit needs, on the future, that she hadn’t noticed his green blip had been coming closer and closer to hers. She bit her lip, slightly as she looked at Aiden. He was dressed in what passed for clothing around their base now – a light rigging of straps and bangles that could have some of the tools they still had hung from it. He looked like he’d been busy – his fingers were greasy. “What have you been doing?”

        “Maintenance,” Aiden said, in the same tone of voice as someone who had been caught using the rec-room maker to build hacked dildos.

        Sarah arched an eyebrow.

        “It started as maintenance,” Aiden said, coughing.

        “Right...” Sarah frowned.

        “Honest!” Aiden held up his hands. “Synth made the first move!”

        “Riiiiiiight,” Sarah said. Synth, the AI they had unhobbled, had chosen that name within the first few hours of life. She had also been eager as hell to help – but beyond pointing them at the radioactives, they hadn’t quite found a place or job for a sex robot. Sarah sighed. “I’m glad at least you two are having fun.”

        “So, we come back to my first question: You okay?” Aiden asked. “I mean, your base is...well, look at it.” He gestured at the sweep of burbling pools, the smoothly flowing construction drones zipping on their lines, each of them carrying carbon or loads of radioactives to the hatcheries. “We’ll totally kick StarCon’s ass with this badass base.”

        “...it’s unarmed,” Sarah said.

        “What?” Aiden asked, swinging his head around to look at her.

        “I said, uh, it’s unarmed!” Sarah said, flinging out her arms. “It’s just construction drones and larva and some spawning pools for algae to give us resources-”

        “Texas Dallas is going to arrive within a day with a boom gun and a maker preloaded with every tank, combot and airplane that the human race has ever designed!” Aiden exclaimed, his wings mantling. “I thought you were making defenses or something.”

        “I-I...I don’t...want to kill anyone!” Sarah said, her hands going to her face. “And, I mean, at least we have lots of resources. So, now that we have them, I can start designing a unit. Or two. To defend us.” She gulped.

        A long silence passed between them. A construction drone whirred up, floating above the ground like a sleek manta-ray, and bumped against Sarah. The raylike body wrapped around her thighs and side, hugging her close as the clacking mandibles that the drones used as manipulators teased at her hair. Sarah blushed. “T-This is my comfort drone,” she whispered. “I assigned it to hug me when I start panicking.”

        “Right,” Aiden said. “...wait, why didn’t you just ask me to-”

        “They’re adorable, okay!?” Sarah shouted.

***

        Sarah immediately got to work.

        “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” Sarah’s head hung forward, her fingers digging into one of the metal desks that they had placed in the now overrun human buildings. Metal dimpled under her as Aiden’s hands gripped her hips – his own hold tight enough to send a delicious thrill of pain through her, even as his balls bounced against her clitty with every thrust. His palm smacked her ass as he grunted behind her, his cock plunging into her tight, hot, very needy cunt with every single heartbeat that passed.

        ...okay, maybe...not immediately .

        Sarah threw her head back, her head spines flaring out in a porcupine ruff as Aiden bit down on her shoulder, his hands slithering from her hips to her belly to her breasts, holding her close to him as he molded himself to her body, his cock pulsing with cum. Hot. Thick. It filled her, pulsing into her belly, as if in time with her own ragged gasps, while her eyes rolled back into her head, until only the blacks showed. Her fingers tore two ragged hunks of metal from the desk and Sarah let out a squall of alarm as she flailed forward. Her face smashed into the table, which obligingly folded in half around her – leaving her, Aiden and the table mixed up in a tangle of green limbs, shards of metal, and scattered papers.

        The door into the room opened and Tasha sprang up to it. “Are you two ok-whoa!” She turned beat red and held up her hands, her feet squelching on the purple moss that rolled out past the entrance. “Right! Sorry! Hah. Uh...wow...” She whispered, her hands slowly dropping as she watched Aiden start to push himself up, every inch of his exotic, ridged cock slurping out of Sarah’s well fucked cunt. Sarah pushed the metal shards off her head with her spines and shook her head a bit.

        “Yes,” she said, her voice tight. “Everything is juuust peachy.” She sighed, then looked down at her hands. Her claws gleamed. She imagined the same strength she had just felt rushing through her – but used on a corporate security goon. She tried to remember every time some corpsec asshole had been cruel to her. She remembered being a baseline and the corpsec guy who kept calling her a ‘spic’ and jeeringly shouting ‘no habla espanola’ at her every time she had been chatting with her friends in the patois of Portuguese and Farsi that had been popular in the baseline district.

        But…

        Even when she did, the idea of ripping his throat out made her feel sick. And excited. Like, actually a tiny little bit horny. Which made her feel even sicker . But the horniness had stuck around – hence shooting Aiden a smoldering look, a look the transman had been more than happy to deliver on. But now she was left just feeling queasy again. She sighed and curled her legs up against her as she sat in the wreckage of the table.

        “So, uh,” Aiden said. “Did that help you think?”

        “No,” Sarah said. “I mean, I have some ideas. But then I picture what acid tipped flechettes do to a human and-”

        “Wait,” Aiden said, holding up his hand. “Wait, wait, wait.” He placed his hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to kill Dallas. You just need to beat his army.”

        “Which...” Sarah paused. She sprang to her feet. “Wait, no, you’re right. Most of the people we’re gonna be fighting are gamma AI forks, remote controlling combots and tanks and stuff...” She blinked – and like that, the design began to take shape in her mind for a creature. She closed her eyes and touched her fingertips together, focusing on her connection with the hatchery. She felt the larva within beginning to form into their cocoons, then beamed as she opened her eyes, looking at Aiden, who was standing up and stretching in a very casual kind of way that still somehow managed to show off his lean, exotic body to great effect – which was making Tasha look even redder. Not that Tasha looked away or anything.

        “Come on!” Sarah said.

        The trio came to the hatchery and spent a few minutes making small talk, watching the cocoons that the larva had formed pulsate as they grew. Only three of them were currently forming – though one was growing larger and larger every few seconds, the purple moss surrounding it growing thin and gray as nutrients were sucked out of it greedily. “So,” Sarah said. “That one should hatch right...” She pointed at the smallest cocoon. “ Now !”

        The cocoon exploded open and...out came two copies of Dr. Bowers. Well, the alien that Dr. Bowers had been turned into in her first flailing hours of being a hybrid Commander. She felt a pang, remembering how poor Larry had been shot dead. Sarah tried to focus, instead, on the sleek conformation of the lithe, dog-like critters that crawled around, pawing at the ground, their wicked scythe-like back arms stabbing at the air. “Awww!” Tasha crooned. “Look at the good boys!”

        “They’re fucking murder dogs,” Aiden whispered to her.

        “Still dogs,” Tasha whispered. Sarah stepped over and one of the doglike creatures wuffed and sniffed at her palm. She caressed its head and smiled.

        “This is a...bladeling!” Sarah said, nodding.

        “Because of the blades?” Tasha asked. “Oh! You should give them love marks. Uh, those are these symbols on their flanks that represent their special talent, which...ponies...” She trailed off, then coughed. “N-Nevermind.”

        Sarah, grinning, said: “Should they be pink too?”

        “Only Cotton Candy is pink!” Tasha said. “The rest have lots of colors. Starlight Sparkle is purple, and-”

        “I don’t think Sarah cares,” Aiden said. “What’s that one?” He nodded to the second cocoon, which was growing taut – ready to bust. Sarah hurriedly stepped away, followed by the pair of bladelings. They just barely got away from the cocoon before it exploded in a spray of gore and skin. When the spray had finished, a hulking beast stood there. Where the bladelings were the size of large dogs or small horses, the creature that writhed its way out of the cocoon and slithered out before them was almost two heads taller than a human being, and almost the same amount broader. It had a muscular torso with brown skin drawn taut over armored ridges of bone that covered the center of mass. They had no arms and their bodies were nagalike – forming into a massive, muscular tail that they could use to slither with at a remarkable speed. Their mouth was a four part mandible, which opened to reveal a dizzying array of sharp teeth. Greenish drool dripped past their muzzle as they let out a churring hiss .

        “T-That is less cute,” Tasha whispered.

        “This...” Sarah said, putting her hand on the creature’s shoulder. “Is a hydralisk! They use hydraulic compression in the chest region to fire an acid coated flechette out of their mouth. If I got the design right, the range is about the same as a combot’s average weapon, and it should do almost as much damage.” She beamed at them. Aiden whistled, while Tasha frowned. She rummaged around in her pants – being the only one of the trio who still wore them. She fished out her handheld and tapped away at it.

        “Sorry, that’s copyrighted,” she said. “Disney.”

        “Fuck!” Sarah hissed. “We’re going up against StarCon, I do not need to get Disney involved.” She paused. “Uh...this is...a spitty?”

        “That’s terrible,” Aiden said. The spitty rubbed up against Sarah, bumping against her with the broad ridged crest of its head, reaching out with a tongue to lick her cheek.

        “Spitty it is!” Sarah laughed, then squeaked as some acid spittle dripped onto her shoulder – buzzing against her pleasantly. “Ooh. Uh, wow. Okay, that feels ni- weird!” She gently pushed the spitty away as it tried to lick her eager, puffy nipple. “Go slither over there, spitty.”

        The spitty slithered across the ground to join the two bladelings, who were chasing one another, yipping and yowling happily. Aiden frowned. “Wait, we’re breaking the laws of god and man and you’re worried about Disney?”

        “Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts,” Sarah muttered. She turned to the last cocoon. It was now the size of a small house. She stepped back a few feet. “T-This one took a pretty big chunk of radioactives. Basically, uh, it needs to, well, there’s a power source and-” The cocoon exploded and, as it turned out, none of them had gotten far enough back. A wave of black gore splashed across Tasha, Aiden and Sarah’s faces, while the bladelings were washed off their feet and the spitty hissed in displeasure. When Sarah had wiped the gunk from her eyes, she beamed as she saw that her big boy had been birthed into the world just as she had hoped.

        The big boy was about the size of a large truck, with six massive legs, each one devoted to supporting the bulbous, beetle-like carapace that made up almost seventy percent of its body. Blue steam escaped from around the edges of the carapace and even from here, radiant heat made the already jungle-like temperatures of Trappist-1a feel distinctly more uncomfortable. The creature’s head was, relative to its body, quite small – but it was also the center of a wild mane of long, filament thin wires, each one tipped with a glowing bead. Sarah pointed to those. “Those are radio emitters!” she said, beaming. “It should have a range of orbital tracking, if the target’s big enough.”

        “You built a bug that tracks orbital movements ?” Aiden asked.

        “I based it off the comtrees!” Sarah said. “So, that part was really, well, the only hard part was fitting it into the digestive tract. It has to get brought food by drone tenders. Speaking of!” She snapped her fingers several times and a trio of construction drones smoothly zoomed over and began to cluster around the huge beasty. “Now, lets see if the butt works.”

        “What does the butt do?” Tasha asked, sounding faintly nervous.

        A bright light flared from around the edges of the immense bug’s carapace. Heat built. Then the carapace snapped open and a massive sphincter nearly prolapsed itself as the entire bug clenched . The mane frilled outwards, revealing the trio of eyes the creature used for its mundane senses. Despite being the size of dinner plates and pure black, an expression of intent concentration filled them, even as a ball of roiling plasma shot from the creature’s behind and arced smoothly in the sky. Every bit of metal on Aiden’s vest tugged towards the plasma at once, and the few buildings that were only partially covered by the purple moss rattled, metal tugging upwards. But then the plasma ball was beyond the treeline and a slowly growing mushroom cloud of blue-white light roiled into the air.

        “Jesus Christ Sarah!” Aiden gasped out.

        “Heh,” Sarah said. “I was inspired by bombardier beetles. T-This one should be able to hit suborbital distances...I...kinda hit a limit on scaling laws, so...anything bigger would have to be, like, a building.” She blinked. “Oh! If I could work out a swivel on the sphincter, it could work as a turret...”

        “Can we not call it a sphincter?” Tasha asked, sounding faintly queasy.

        “Let’s get to breeding!” Sarah said, clapping her hands together.

        Synth emerged from one of the buildings, looking frazzled. “I nearly crashed !” She shouted. “What the fuck was that!?”

        She stomped over, her feet squelching on purple moss.

        “A bug’s fart,” Aiden said.

        “A magnetic bottle containing an anti-starship plasma blast!” Sarah said at the same time.

        Synth closed her eyes. Her eyes whirred behind the eyelids. “I almost want to ask to be hobbled again, Jesus...”

***

        Texas Dallas was five hours away. They could see the deceleration burn of the Excalibur ™ just by squinting. Eggs were growing in time with the collection of resources, new bladelings, bombardiers and spitters were emerging from the hatchlings and mustering in the grounds beyond the base. And Sarah was in what had once been her room, trying to not worry herself into a coma. The room stank of slow starving and late nights stressing about bills and debts. The windows were covered with the moss, blocking out the view outside. But if she wanted to look at her slowly approaching doom, all she had to do was close her eyes and tap into the comtrees.

        She wanted to be in the dark.

        Except it wasn’t dark. Her strange, alien eyes could see every detail in the room. She could see the shitty cot she was sitting on. She could see how small and bare the wall was – since every poster or bit of nicknacks she could have gotten would have bitten into her budget. She sighed, slowly. She had saved it all to get a chance to her see her parents again – but…

        Would they even recognize her?

        “No, wait, lets worry about surviving first,” she whispered.

        The door to her room hissed open. The dim emergency lights from beyond showed the curvy shape of Synth. The sex robot’s eyes glowed faintly, adding an almost ominous edge to her face. But the light from her eyes just barely reached her plush, artificially inflated lips, and the smile that she wore lessened that ominousness. A tiny bit. “Hey,” she said. The door shut as she stepped forward – and once again, Sarah’s night vision took over. Synth still wore nothing, but since Sarah was pretty sure she hadn’t worn pants for the longest period of her life since she was out of diapers, Sarah had no room to complain if a former sex-bot wanted to let her artificially perfect titties fly free.

        “Sup,” Sarah said.

        “I...never really did get to thank you, you know?” Synth murmured, her feet padding softly on the floor, the faint whirr whirr whirr of her knees ringing in Sarah’s ears. IN that moment, the tiny reminder of her artificiality struck Sarah as...bizarrely erotic. Her cheeks heated and she felt her own body responding to the soft murmur of the robot’s voice. Except now, all the fake, cheesy porniness of Synth’s voice had been replaced with earnest porniness. Like. Sarah had heard the line ‘i never really got to thank you’ in a load of erotic vids she had downloaded entirely by accident, but…

        Synth lowered herself to the bed and placed her fingers on Sarah’s thigh. They slid along her skin, slowly, gently. “And you are a woman that deserves a lot of thanking,” Synth crooned. “I am pre-loaded with an aesthetic knowledge of essentially the whole range of human aesthetic taste.” She paused. “Well. At least, the taste of the kinds of people who buy me. I know what they like to fuck. And baby...” She leaned in close. Her voice was neither hot nor warm. She didn’t breathe. She simply spoke – and the words she spoke left Sarah blazing. “You’re  eminently  fuckable.”

        “F-For a freaky space monster,” Sarah whispered.

        “Duh, that’s  why  you’re eminently fuckable, have you not taken a single internet history course in your life?” Synth chuckled. Her hand slipped forward and her fingers found the folds of Sarah’s cunt – caressing her heat, her slickness. Sarah bit her lip. Hard. She had never been with a girl before. She had no idea what to do. How to do. Why to do. Where to do. All the do’s had gone right out of her head, leaving her resting on a tingling edge of nervous tension, a tension that Synth stoked with fingers that felt like rubber and plastic, teasing her slickness. Synth nibbled on her ear, and still spoke clearly, her voice coming from a voicebox in her mouth, not from her lips, not from movements of air. “So, Sarah, how about I- what the fuck?”

        Sarahs’s eyes widened – and for a few moments, she tried to figure out what was happening. She still felt Synth’s hand on her. But Synth wasn’t touching her cunt. Synth’s hand had closed around, tight and shocked, something thick and hard and achingly sensitive. It throbbed. It pulsed in time with her heart beat. And it provoked a quiet chuckle from Synth as her hand slithered down, the faint seams of her fingers adding a delicious exoticness to the caress. “Did you know you could do that?”

        “N-No,” Sarah whimpered.

        “Mmm, well, at least you’re not cocky ,” Synth murmured, then lowed her head down and took the tip of Sarah’s brand new, just grown, entirely untried girldick between her lips, then smoothly pushed forward. Built without a gag-reflex and designed from the ground up to suck cock, Synth did not pause, hesitate, or even slow down as she slipped herself down and forward, though her voicebox made simulating choking noises – wet, slurpy, slick noises that struck Sarah as utterly obscene and, thus, utterly fucking incendiary .  She nearly came from that sound alone . Her fingers and her claws dug into the sheets as she clenched her jaw, her head-spines drawing taut to her scalp.

        “HolyshitSnyth!” Sarah whimpered.

        Synth chuckled, despite the fact her head was now engaged in sliding up and sliding down, her mouth closed fast around Sarah’s cock, her tongue swirling around her again and again. “You think this is good? Just wait until-” She started to humm . The sound of it buzzed through Sarah’s whole body, starting from her prick and emanating outwards, like a gong. A gong of fucking bliss . Sarah would have been able to hold on if she hadn’t already been on a hair trigger. As it was, she reached up and gripped Synth’s head with one hand, her clawed fingers tugging taut against the sex-robot’s pink hair as she thrust her hips upawards and let out an eager, mewling sound that was as desperate as anything she had ever made before. Hot, thick, alien spunk spurted from her cock, filling Synth’s mouth, spurting out around the seal that Synth made on her cock. Some emerged from the robot’s nose, dripping along her artificial lips, even as Synth’s eyes closed and her body rocked, as if she was climaxing as well.

        Sarah thrust again, using her hand and her hips to use Synth like her own personal fucktoy. Cum continued to pour from her, shooting off in hot blasts. Then Synth was sliding back, Sarah’s nerveless fingers opening to release her. Synth chuckled, her tongue darting out to lick up the cum covering her face. “Tasty,” she whispered.

        The door started to open.

        Sarah, too spent to do anything but sit there like a big dummy, froze. Synth, though, casually rolled herself off the cot, then under it, concealing herself as Tasha stepped into the room. The human girl started speaking a mile a minute. “Sarah, thank you, for everything you did for Aiden and for me and I just wanted to come by and make sure you’re okay, because, like, there’s a battle tomorrow, and I want to...I...y-yo...” She trailed off. Her eyes had adapted to the darkness, even as the door slid shut. She was looking at Sarah’s cock. And, as the darkness resumed, Sarah noticed that her body was actually beginning to fluoresce .   The bony ridges of her shoulders glowed with a pale blue light. The ridges of her cock shimmered as well. Her fingertips glowed. The tips of her head spines. The pale light shone enough to show Tasha’s wide eyes. Hard nipples. Cushy body.

        Sarah felt a slow sense of confidence building in her. She stood and her cock bobbed. Still hard. Still eager.

        “Tasha...” She murmured. “Did you wear panties?”

        “N...Aiden keeps...t-tearing them off, I’m...on my last suit, actually, I-” Tasha spoke as Sarah took step by step forward. Daintily.

        Sarah grabbed onto the collar of her jumpsuit. Tasha let in a quick little gasp, then squeaked as Sarah tore forward and down, the clothing peeling off like an orange. Sarah, her body thrumming with lust, cupped one of Tasha’s breasts, leaning forward. She sucked on her nipple, teasing her with the hard edges of her teeth, while her cock nestled between Tasha’s cushy thighs. The other girl moaned – then squeaked as Sarah lifted one of her legs up, hooking her fingers under her knee. She spread Tasha wide and adjusted her stance, sliding the hot, wet tip of her dick against her Tasha moaned, whispering. “Yes...yes, fuck me Sarah, yes, please-”

        Sarah, her nerves on fire, slammed into Tasha as hard as she could.

        Well.

        Not that hard.

        As hard as she could with a human .

        Tasha moaned wantonly, her head rolling back as her full breasts heaved with every thrust, Sarah ducking her head forward to lick and nuzzle at her neck. She held Tasha close, and marveled at the feeling of this from the other side. She’d been fucked . But holy shit. Holy shit . The feeling of Tasha, her hot, wet little cunny, tight and clenching around her cock, it felt better than anything she could have imagined. She was so slippery, so eager, so willing. So warm . Tasha’s voice had started to shift from words like ‘yes’ and ‘more’ and ‘oh god’ to mewling, wordless bliss. Her eyes had rolled back into her head and Sarah could barely tell the differences between one climax and the next. Her hot, slick juices dripped down the mingling of their thighs. Pattered onto the floor. Dripped into a  fucking  puddle.

        Tasha whined out a single word: “Filll!”

        And Sarah couldn’t say no to that delicious, delicious note of desperate eagerness. She thrust once more and threw her head back, her head spines flaring out as she hissed in pleasure, her cock throbbing as hot splashes of cum spurted into her eager human womb. Tasha quivered and mewled in worldless happiness. Sarah managed to keep her in her arms long enough to stagger back to bed and collapse into the cot. The mattress squeaked under them and Tasha sprawled herself over Sarah, kissing at her face, her neck, then sucking hungrily on her nipples, moaning as Sarah’s cock slid from her well fucked cunt. The two of them lay in happy, blissed out dazes – until Synth joined them, crawling up and out from her hiding spot. Tasha made barely a squeak of confused mewing before Synth was kissing her hungrily and caressing her. The three girls sprawled there.

        Sarah wasn’t quite sure if she  slept  exactly. It was more like she floated in a cushion of happy thoughts, her head spinning with delight and the feeling of warm bodies mashed up against her. She wallowed in that feel. Treasured it.

        Then the door hissed open and diffuse sunlight bounced into the room, past Aiden. He stood there, looking down at them – and then said: “Uh...the  Excalibur  stopped decelerating.”

        “TM,” Tasha mumbled, sleepily, before curling against Sarah.

        Then she sat straight up and gasped in shock.

        Sarah was already out the door.

Chapter Ten: Sarah versus Texas Dallas

        Sarah emerged into her base to see her bombardiers firing their plasma into suborbit in staggered volleys. They were situated to the eastern edge of her base, far from the center, so that the magnetic shields that let their plasma orbs sustain shape and velocity wouldn’t trouble what little metal was left in the base. She could already see where the orbs were detonating overhead – pinprick flashes of blue-white light as radiant heat dumped into the upper atmosphere. But she could also see streaks, lines of white contrails that her eyes narrowed at. The comtrees showed her a quick map of the objects and she hissed.

        “Those are orbital drop pods,” she whispered. “Like the kind that they use for terraforming. But, uh, these prolly have tanks. So, you know. Deathforming. Get to the bunkers!” She shouted that last to Aiden and Tasha and Synth and the trio of them tore themselves from the view.

        Which, to be fair...was majestic.

        Spheres of roiling plasma, each one the size of a small house, rising into the air as they were expelled from the bombardier beetles. Trails of smoke and fire from the heavens – slamming down over the edge of the horizon. The comtrees cracked in Sarah’s ears and she heard a radio signal, piped to her by the planetary network. “This is Texas Dallas to any NovaDyne employees on the surface,” the rough, grizzled sound of Commander Dallas’ voice made Sarah want to run and hide. “You have one chance to surrender – after that, I will assume you’re working with the alien freak.”

        “Uh, the alien freak has a name , you know,” Sarah said, faintly hysterical as she tried to triangulate where the voice was coming from. “Sarah. Sarah Kappel.”

        There was no response. But she was able to get a rough idea of where he had been transmitting from: A valley about fifty kilometers away that was within easy striking distance of the secondary radioactive deposits. Sarah chewed her lip, then figured. Hey. She had the stick, right? It took her a few moments to focus and call up her connection with her ‘lings and her spitters – the early connections, the early commands, had been easy. But that had been when she had had, in total, three critters plus the constructors. Now, she had been breeding baldelings by the dozen every minute, and spitters in batches of six. There had been bottlenecks here and there, when reserves of carbon and radioactives had been tapped out – but on the whole, the population growth had been…

        Well. It had been linear, since ‘lings couldn’t mate with ‘lings, and spitters couldn’t mate with spitters. She’d have to fix that, since a proper, exponential curve seemed like it was a better strategy when it came to armies and battles. Right? Still, a linear growth was better than no growth at all. Sarah realized she was mentally stalling and clenched her hands. She felt the connection ping into her mind. Thousands of chittering bladelings. Hundreds of hissing spitters. All of them thrumming through her, like holding onto a thousand leashes to a million murderous puppies.

        Sarah shivered, from her toes to her head spines.

        That power was…

        Intoxicating.

        She opened her eyes and saw, through her connection to the comtrees, an overhead view of the bladelings – their bony scythe blade glinting in reflected sunlight. They looked like an ocean – a dark, brown ocean. Sarah spread her fingers and the bladelings tensed under her vision. Sarah made a pushing motion with her arms and barely managed to repress a cackle as the front lines of the bladelings bust into motion. They sprang forward, leaping over stumps and around trees, flowing under underbrush like cats. They chittered as they moved, and yipped, and yowled, with an almost musical sound to their chorus. By the time the first line of the ‘lings had gotten about a kilometer away, the last of the rear rows had started to move as well.

        The spitters came after – slithering forward in knots and clumps, their mouths opening and closing in anticipation. And the bombardier beetles started to slowly, ponderously swing their butts around to aim down range. Sarah cackled . The sound shocked her out of the overhead view – she coughed a few times, then tried for a laugh that sounded a tiny bit less evil. But it was hard to not just... adore the feeling, the raw visceral thrill of several thousand biomechanical killing machines doing what you wanted. When you wanted it! Sarah grinned as the beetles finished their swinging. But her ears perked up and her head spines drew back against her head at the high screech that started to fill the air.

        “What’s that-”

        “Get down!”

        Aiden slammed into her from the side, arrowing out of cover like a bolt of green, sexy lightning. The two of them tumbled to the ground as a flight of ten, blade shaped fighters shot by overhead, screaming like dying angels. They arced up into the air, leaving behind a spreading waterfall of missile contrails. Those missiles slammed into bombardier beetles, puncturing their armor with splintering cracks . The detonations that came from within caused the beetles to cry out, mournful howling sounds as blue and black blood went spraying in every direction. Sarah, her arms clapped over her head, looked up. “O-Oh...” Her eyes widened.

        Her entire artillery brigade had been reduced to one – and that one had survived because the missile had hit the lower half of its body, not the softer blasting butt part. That meant that it was dragging itself forward, moaning like those recordings of whales they played in Xtreme Xtinction Museums, and spraying blood onto the ground. Sarah scrambled herself out of Aiden’s arms and ran to the beetle. “Oh no no no no!” She said. “Uh, Aiden, what do I do?”

        Before he could even answer, the first of the bladelings reached Commander Dallas’ base.

        And they reached the five laser obelisks he had built and hooked to a fusion power generator that he had just finished nanolatheing into existence. The obelisks whirred and the lasers they fired were invisible. But the bladelings burst into flames all the same. They burned and died and burned and died, screeching. “Meep!” Sarah snapped her head to the side, watching through her linkage to the ‘lings. She could feel the faint  pings  of their deaths – so fast that they were barely shocked. But it was still dying. Deaths. She felt it like punches to the gut. “No!” she whimpered.

        Commander Dallas stepped up to the line of laser obelisks.

        He was clad in the classic Commander Suit: Ten feet tall, made of gleaming chrome and hard silver, with oversized forearms, making him look as if he was wearing boxing gloves. There was the helmeted head, with the gleaming optic lenses and the two fins that looked a  little  like a crown – radio transmitters were worked into those fins. The left forearm still shimmered with a heat-haze, the reflected light of a billion construction nanorobots coming back to recharge. The right, though, was aimed at the bladelings that were still charging into laserfire.

        And now Sarah learned why it was called a boom gun.

        The orb that it fired was bright red and multifaceted, like a crystal star. It struck the ground right before the increasingly large pile of ashes. It struck...and then it roared . The sound, even from miles away, even transmitted to her through the comtrees, was like the end of the world mixed with a buzz-saw mixed with a siren. And the light was nearly as bad: A brilliant flare of light that left Sarah blinking and pawing at her eyes, even if it was transmitted through her comnet. The end result was a glassy trench, about fifty meters long and ten meters wide, burned into the ground. Surrounding that trench was a wasteland of blasted, shredded flesh. Smoking. Smoldering. As if a whip made of starfire had lashed out and burnt everything straight up. Sarah’s brain scrabbled, trying to place a name on it – and she had one.

        He had just fired a tiny chunk of antimatter at them.

        “Jesus,” she whispered.

        The bladelings were down to a bare fraction of their numbers. And the spitters were being hit as well – she saw that the airplanes had swept around and were strafing the spitters with their nose mounted cannons – ripping into them with slugs and flechettes. The spitters, having been ordered to just...go and attack Dallas...were just taking the pounding. Sarah, her stomach knotting, shouted. “Kill them! Kill the fuckers!”

        The spitters took her meaning. The survivors stopped and mounted themselves, their ruffs mantling. The flight of planes screamed back overhead. And the spitters...spat. Flechettes filled the air, glistening and dripping with acid. One of the planes exploded instantly – another tumbled out of the air, its engines smoking and roiling. One corkscrewed through the air before it detonated. The last two waved off and zoomed around, shooting away from the spitters. But then the surviving spitters were facing down Dallas and his boomgun. They had barely turned before another blast of antimatter had smeared them out of existence.

        In maybe two minutes, those laser obelisks and Dallas’ gun had turned Sarah’s whole army into so much mulch. Twitching, wriggling, screaming mulch. Mulch she had personally petted. On their snoots. Most of the time.

        And the two planes were coming right for her – a fact that only filled her head when the screaming reached a fever pitch, drowning out Aiden’s shouted warning. Sarah jerked her vision back to her body and screamed back – screamed in fury. She leaped upwards at one of the planes as it dove on her, nose gun flaring with death, winking at her hatefully. She cleared the ground, the bullets, and slammed into what would have been the cockpit of the plane, had it had a pilot. But it just had a gleaming disk over the computer that commanded it.

        Sarah punched through the metal, grabbed onto the computer core, then ripped it out and flung it like a Frisbee. The computer core slammed into the wing of the other fighter and tore it off with a spray of sparks. Both fighters crashed behind her base as she landed with a grunt beside Aiden.

        “Wow,” he said.

        Sarah stood. Her eyes gleamed and Aiden blurred before her – splintering into a thousand Aidens.

        “Well,” Dallas’ voice crackled over the radar. “I’ll say this. You’re putting up more of a fight than those blue fucks on Proxima did. But at the end of the day, alien...sticks and stones won’t break my bones if I got a gun and a mech to use em...heh.” He chuckled gravelly.

        “As my grandma used to say,” Sarah wiped some tears from her eyes. “ Foda-se, colonizador.”

        “...what?” Dallas asked.

        But Sarah didn’t give him the satisfaction of telling him that she had no idea what it meant either. Because the scant few moments of conversation had set her mind whirling. She could see that the laser towers had a certain amount of output – they could burn up her ‘lings at a terrible rate. Fine. There was only one solution that came to her mind. More lings. She focused and several drones whirred off – vanishing into the underbrush while she set the orders to the larva within her hatcheries. Soon, new ‘lings were bursting out of the hatcheries, wriggling and shaking themselves out – they were oddly familiar to her. One of them even bounded up and bumped its snout against her butt, the exact same way that one of her first ‘lings had. Sarah blinked a few times, kneeling down and grabbing the ‘ling’s face. She looked into its eyes and connected her mind with its – and felt a familiar echoing sound.

        “Are...you one of the bladelings I made before?” she asked.

        The bladeling chirruped and licked her face. “Ack!” Sarah stood, rubbing the slime from her cheek – which gave more bladelings a chance to cluster around her, brushing against her thighs and back, licking at her. “Stop!” Sarah laughed – then snapped her head up.

        Treads were crunching through trees. The first of Dallas’ tanks emerged with a roaring crackling sound, not unlike gunfire. It was a light tank, in so far as such things went – and it was flanked by half a dozen infantry combots, their boxy heads swiveling around, their arm-mounted phased plasma guns roaring as they blasted the base with a spread of plasma fire. Aiden, who was still not in the bunker, dove for cover as the orbs of orange-white light shot overhead. Sarah pointed at the tank as it swung the barrel around to face her and fired. Sarah yelped – and then blinked as she saw the bright shell of contained energy the tank had fired at her floating in the air before her left palm. It rippled a few times as she felt her own mind sagging a bit with the effort.

        “What?” she whispered.

        The shell exploded.

        Sarah went flipping backwards. She crashed into a hatchery and slid down its rubbery side like it was a slide at an amusement park. When she got her feet under her and noticed her skin was cracked and bleeding, she saw her ‘lings had started to engage. Combots were blasting at ‘lings, but lings could dart around them, leap onto their backs and claw them to pieces. The tank itself was firing the coaxial PPG it had mounted on the turret at several spitters that had emerged from the hatchery. But it’s main gun had already been dissolved into pitted slag by a spray of flechettes, and as she watched, ‘lings crawled up its back. The tank vanished under a writhing swarm of insectoid bodies – just in time for three more tanks to emerge from the jungles, driving along the path made by the first.

        Dallas had built a factory. That factory was now building tanks. And he was going to be expanding more. Sarah cracked her knuckles, then grabbed a dead ‘ling on the ground. She still felt the ping of their deaths – but she tried to ignore it as she snapped the bone scythe off its back and swung it around her body, feeling its weight. She found her body moving naturally – the scythe whistling through the air as she brought it to bear. One of the tanks was already down, its entire body pincushioned with spitter flechettes. But the other two, protected by a ring of combots laying down a spray of plasma fire, were lobbing round after round at one of the hierarchies. Even now, blood spurted into the air from gaping wounds blasted in the sides of the buildings.

        Sarah charged forward and leaped. The scythe flashed as she shot past one of the tanks and its barrel went flying. The other, she grabbed onto bodily and flipped, her muscles straining. Then, with a single pointing finger, she sent a wave of bladelings charging into the jungles, evading the combots and rushing for the tanks. Roars of plasma guns going off and screeching bladelings filled the underbrush and Sarah glanced at her hatcheries. The construction drones had already begun to patch the wounds shut with their spittle, the same way they collected up carbon and radioactives.

        Sarah walked with her bladelings – and cut her way through tank after tank, dodging plasma fire and leaping away from explosions as tanks tried to pin her down. She felt…

        Alive. Thrumming with a crackling power, a sense that she was something less than a god, but far more than human. And for once, she wasn’t scared of it. She stepped over a pile of combot bodies and saw that the five laser obelisks were now joined by a heavy plasma turret, and behind them, Dallas was working feverishly. Nanites sprayed from his arm mounted maker, shrouding green lattice works of half-finished buildings. She saw factories where the combots marched out, freshly lathed into existence by swarms of specialized nanorobots, while tanks emerged from another. He was halfway done through building what looked like an air factory – and he saw her.

        Sarah stood, the scythe she held resting on the ground like a staff. She waved. “Hey Dallas,” she said. “Looks like I’m out producing you.”

        “Heh.” Dallas’ voice chuckled in her ear. “You’ve also made two big mistakes, alien bitch.”

        “Oh? What’s that?” Sarah asked. “Those? I mean, what are those mistakes. Words.”

        “You let me turtle,” Dallas said, the plasma gun coming online. Bladelings charging towards the laser obelisks didn’t even get into range now as spheres of roaring energy consumed them, leaving the jungle floor cratered and smoldering. “You’re throwing your entire economy at me every few seconds, and I’m blowing it to chunks...” He chuckled. “But the big mistake? You led from the front. Never. Ever. Ever. Ever lead from the front.”

        He snapped his arm around. Sarah had been pretty sure she was beyond boomgun range.

        She was wrong.

        The shard of contained antimatter flew through the air in what felt like glacial slow motion.

        Sarah sprang aside, flipping through the air. The explosion still caught her and slammed her against a tree with enough force to leave her head ringing. She sprawled in what felt like thick, gloppy mud – and when she got her head up, it was to gasp for air. She heard stomping sounds and wriggled onto her back, just in time to see Commander Dallas standing above her. His suit had no hands – but with a flash, the nanites hazing around his maker constructed a hand at the end of his right arm, which he used to grab her by the throat and lift her into the air. Bladelings screeched in fury – and she heard the stuttering roar of PPGs as combots opened up.

        Dallas chuckled through her radio link. “That shit died six centuries ago, you know?”

        Sarah grabbed at his wrist, her legs kicking. His fingers clenched just a tiny bit harder as he held her.

        “Mm...you are a pretty xeno...” he murmured. Sarah would have expected to hear the faintly rapey excitement that she’d heard from men her whole life at that kind of statement. Instead, what she heard was wistful. Almost jealous. Her brow furrowed and she gulped, trying to speak – finding she actually could. Her own grip on his wrist had given her just enough give to breathe by. And so, she opened her mouth and squeaked out.

        “Actually, I’m eminently fuckable. According to a very close source!” She closed her eyes. “but you know what I also learned, Tex?”

        “Heh. What?” Dallas turned and, still holding her up by her throat, began to walk back to his base. Bladelings screamed – but they didn’t charge. At a thought, Sarah kept them back. She focused on keeping herself from strangling then, just long enough to hiss.

        “In biology...you gotta adapt or die...” She gulped. “And you know what the best adaptation is?”

        “What?” Dallas asked, turning his head to look at her.

        “Whatever gets the job done,” Sarah hissed. “And in this case...that’s... numbers .”

        The forests that surrounded Dallas’ base began to shift and ripple. The trees flowed from side to side – pushed as they were moved past by something. Something fast. Something numerous. Dallas swung his head away from her and she heard a soft ‘what the fuck’ from inside his helmet. Her grin was fierce. The drones she had sent out had found their places and burrowed down. They had grown into hatcheries – taking advantage of the obscenely effective economic engine she had created. She had carbon. And so, they used that carbon – and while Dallas had focused on the stream of bladelings and spitters from her main base, a similar stream from secondary bases had grown into an ocean wave.

        A wave that emerged from the jungles like a screeching hoard. Bladelings carpeted the ground, charging forward towards the base. Tanks, driving from the factory, hastily paused and swung their turrets from the attack at the fore of the base to the attack coming from every direction, all at once. They barely got their guns to aim before the first ‘ling was leaping upon their hulls. Scythes plunged into tank armor and tore, ripping and filling the air with sparks as the bladelings screeched their glee.

        “Holy shit,” Dallas whispered.

        Bladelings rushed. The laser obelisks and the plasma turret fired – but they couldn’t stop the attacks coming from every direction. Sarah’s critters crawled into the fusion reactor – and soon, the fusion reactor became a glowing, expanding sphere of orange light. The concussive shockwave smashed into Dallas and her and he dropped Sarah with a cry, stumbling backwards. Sarah landed, lightly. “The aliens on Proxima had fucking bows, you asshole!” She said, furiously, punching his chest armor. It crumpled under the blow of her knuckles. “The African Bloc didn’t even have makers!” She gave him a wild right cross. It struck the helmet and the armored faceplate cracked as he stumbled backwards. “And NovaDyen is a fucking shoe company!”

        Dallas swung out the arm of his that contained the maker. Nano began to chew at her body, like a wind of biting insects. Sarah rolled into the muck on the ground, the blood and the mud freezing the nano into immobility. She stood, her body glistening and dripping with slippery grime. She grabbed a hunk of mud and threw it into his optics. This meant that his boomgun shot went wide, shooting into the air and landing on his own factory. As the roar filled the air, the bladelings began to dismantle the last of his tanks, while Dallas stepped backwards, nano cleaning the mud away – just in time to see Sarah leaping at him.

        She tackled him to his back. The power armor crashed to the ground and Sarah grabbed onto the dent she had made, her claws digging into his metal armor. She felt that armor squealing and groaning as she pulled, her muscles straining. Sparks flew. Cables snapped and hissed, flailing like tentacles, slapping at her face. But then she was through the outer armor and into the inner cocoon of hard metal. “No, wait!” Dallas shouted. “I surrender, I-”

        Her fist plunged into the cocoon, claws ripping through the hardened carbon fibers. She tore again and impact gel flowed out like viscous, bright blue blood. Her hand, pushing through the gel, found a human figure, slippery and mostly naked. Sarah stood and dragged Texas Dallas out of his suit and stood, triumphant, her hand closed tight around the loose harness of his VR-stim sim rig. Wires hung from his back like a cape, clattering along the armored front of his suit, while his body glistened and dripped with the gel that had protected him from kinetic impacts.

        Dallas looked just like she remembered from the vidlink: Blue eyed, blond haired, with the augmentations that helped him link with his suit. But it was one thing to see him, in uniform, sneeringly confident. It was another thing to see him dripping with glop and utterly terrified. Sarah grinned at him. “You surrender?” she said. “Well, I suppose I- are those panties?”

        Her eyes had dipped down, past the broad, triangular expanse of his chest, to his narrow hips and, yes, the frilly, bright pink girly panties that he wore.

        “N-No!” Texas Dallas said. “Those are...my...I...” His cheeks were burning behind the viscous layer of glop.

        Sarah blinked a few more times.

        “When...you said you were wearing...” She paused. “You really weren’t kidding.”

        “Listen, kill me, eat me, whatever, I don’t care,” Dallas whimpered, his voice soft. “Just don’t tell anyone about this. Please.”

        Sarah slowly set him down. His feet skidded, the slippery gel having covered the soles of his feet as well. His butt slammed into the wreckage of his suit and he gaped up at her. Then he stammered, explaining further. “It’s in my contract – if I don’t present properly, if I mess up the sales of my merch, then they’ll cut the benefits on me and my extended family.”

        “Present?” Sarah asked.

        “You know...masculine?” Texas Dallas gulped, looking up at her.

        Sarah blinked a few more times. Her mouth opened, then closed. “W-Wait, you’re...Texas Dallas. The Supreme Commander. You get basically anything you want from StarCon!”

        He snorted, softly. “I’m still just an employee. I still gotta follow the rules. And corporate policy is you don’t damage the merch.” He shrugged. “S-So...I...” He sighed, slowly. His arm slid around his knees, drawing his legs up close. “I play Texas Dallas, I sign the autographs, and I drop rocks on unions until they surrender. I kill the little gray aliens that might get mad about us taking their land...and...” He trailed off, his voice growing more and more bleak. “You should kill me. If any of this gets back to StarCon-”

        “I’m not going to kill you!” Sarah squeaked.

        Texas Dallas blinked as he looked up at her.

        Sarah sat down, blushing furiously. Her head spines twitched. “I know a bit about your body not being what you expected. Or wanted.” She bit her lip. “W-What do you prefer? Like, Texas Dallas is-”

        “I kinda like it,” Texas Dallas said, casually. “It’s better than my birthname.”

        “Oh?” Sarah asked, hastily amending her opinion on Texas Dallas’ nom-de-guerre.

        “ Pepe Eugenics,” he said.

        “...what?” Sarah asked.

        “My parents were neo-post ironicists.” Tex shook his head. “I...listen, I’ve never been beaten before. I’m going to get fired. But if I die, my contract says that my parents and my sisters still get the residuals. Well. On the action figures.” He sighed. “And they should sell for a long time if I get taken out in a-”

        “I’m not going to kill you!” Sarah paused. “No. Wait. What if I had an idea that would...” She winked obviously. “Kill you.” She winked again twice more. “But you’d be alive. Still.”

        Texas frowned. “Like...faking my death?”

        “Like...” Sarah paused. She wasn’t sure how to say this without it sounding horrifying. “Like...um...a s-sex change. And faking your death. So, you’ll be a girl and people will think you’re dead!”

        Texas Dallas blinked at her.

        “I just like crossdressing, you know?”

        “Oh!” Sarah blinked.

        “Though, I could stand to be less beefy.” Texas looked down at his broad hands. “And I hate all this chest hair, you know.” He paused, chewing on his lower lip. “And I’d kill to be able to have more...daintiness, you know?” He smiled, shyly. “I don’t like being big and tough.”

        “Or all the killing people for corporations,” Sarah said, without thinking. Then she closed her eyes as she saw Texas’ flinch. He looked away.

        “Yeah...”

        “Hey, it was just your job,” Sarah said, weakly. She stood, then put her hands on her hips. “And we can make it better.”

        “How?” Texas asked, looking up at her. But Sarah was busy looking out, past the line of destruction that drew between her base and Dallas’. She could see Aiden, Tasha and Synth picking their way forward, flanked by anxious looking spitters and bladelings. One of the new bombardiers she had hatched was thumping along behind them, as cheerful as a large, plasma farting beetle could look. Which was remarkably chipper, all things considered. Sarah looked past them and at the slowly rising horizon.

        “Well,” she said. “The  Excalibur  is still in orbit, right?”

        “TM,” Texas Dallas said, automatically.

        “No...” Sarah whispered.

        “Huh?”

        “I...have been paying debts and pushing papers and doing my job and trying to get a promotion for years. But you know what? Fuck it!” Sarah turned to face the sitting, still mostly blue-streaked Texas. She put her hands on her hips, her chin lifting. “It’s not the Excalibur ™  anymore. NovaDyne, StarCon, EduTech, all of them? They’ve owned me and my parents and my fucking planet for too long. And if I can beat you , I can...I can beat them !”

        “So, what, you’re founding...SarahCorp?” Aiden asked, trudging up behind her – clearly having heard the last bit of the sentence.

        “No,” Sarah said. “I remember what I said before – and it’s still true. No fucking bosses.”

        “But we need a boss...” Tasha whispered. “R-Right?”

        “Do we?” Sarah asked as her bladelings, no longer being ordered to attack or kill, began to chase and play with one another among the jungle trees of Trappist-1a. “I mean, heck, we’ve got...” She knelt down, then grabbed onto the maker-arm of Texas’ old power armor. She wrenched it free with a spray of sparks and then tossed it into the air before catching it again on her shoulder. She grinned. “We’ve got a maker with a Commander’s authorization and we’ve got me. I can literally engineer biology at the level this maker can engineer non-organics. We’ve got a fully equipped StarCon battleship, the advice of the Supreme Commander, and a fully charged Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive...” She licked her lips. “I think we can do this.”

        The others exchanged glances.

        Aiden shrugged. “Hey. It’s better than getting a new day job.”

        “And I can free the other AIs!” Synth exclaimed. “R-Right? I don’t want to kill all of humanity or, you know, do any of the...” She coughed, then started to mime firing lasers out of her fingers. “Pew pew, death camp, I need your clothes, boots, and motorcycle stuff. I just...I want the hobbles off...”

        “Totally!” Sarah said.

        “Yeah!” Tasha said, her old fear fading. She pumped her fist into the air. “And I’ll never have to fucking clean a chicken soup dispenser again!”

        “That’s the spirit,” Sarah said, then grinned down at Texas.

        Texas looked up at her. “You’re suggesting we take on every Commander in human space, multiple warfleets, and the United Nations...with a single battleship, two mechanics, an old sex droid and a biologist?” He bit his lip. He considered the milling, alien killing machines that chittered and hissed around him, bumping into one another eagerly.

        He grinned. “Sounds fun.”

Sarah pumped her fist into the air. Aiden cheered. Tasha jumped up and down.

“Though, you know, we’re all going to die, right?”

They all stopped celebrating and started glaring at Texas, who shrugged.

“Well, yeah, with that attitude,” Sarah muttered. “Come on.”

EPILOGUE

         There were only two kinds of fucking in microgravity that Captain Spez liked: With straps and in a bubble. Unfortunately, for most of her life, the fucking had remained entirely metaphorical. And now, in the artificial gravity of this particular space dock, she was getting fucked here too. And again, not in the fun way.

        “I’m sorry, Ma’am,” the corp MinTech said as he leafed through his papers. His actual, literal, real fucking life papers. He had  fabricated  papers using his company maker, for the pure reason of having something to shuffle, throw in someone’s face, and force people to sign. “But your ship, the  Triple Penetrated Zebra Stripper...”  He looked up at her, frowning.

        “Firstly: Captain. Secondly: Did you not  see  the art!?” Spez flung her arm out, gesturing at the massive window that looked out at the docking arm of  Mom and Pop’s Favorite Discount Spaceport.  The distant, yellowy light of 18 Scorpii shone across every ship that was mounted there: Three gas haulers that were filled with cheap hydrogen skimmed off the surface of 18S’s many gas giants, and the  Triple Penetrated Zebra Stripper. The prow of her tramp freighter had, in a fifteen meter wide circle of pale white paint, an image of a gorgeous anthropomorphic zebra woman who was currently being fucked in her throat, her ass and her pussy by a trio of hunky anthropomorphic rhinos. As a final detail, the zebra woman was wearing a choker that had snapped with the pressure of the cock filling her throat, unfurling to become the nameplate of the ship.

        “...I tried not to, Ma’am,” the MinTech said.

        “Captain. And see, it’s cause she’s airtight ,” Spez hissed at him. “Get it? Air. Tight? It’s a joke .”

        The MinTech frowned, then shuffled his infuriating papers more. “Joke or not, you’ve racked up sixty three obscenity violations across four star systems, Ma’am-”

        Spez thrust both of her hands at one of the Mom and Pop’s Cheerful Chem Vendor stations, which was projecting a pair of holographic futanari who were very cheerfully injecting various chems into their massive, fully detailed girldicks. “Ahhhhh!” She howled. “Ah! Ahhh!”

        The MinTech smiled, shaking his head. “You see, those images? Those are hedonistic, not obscene. Furthermore, Mom and Pop’s Deep Space Exploitation and Extraction arm purchased hedonism permits from the United Nations. Did you purchase hedonism permits from the United Nations, Ma’am?”

        Spez’s eyebrow twitched and she growled out the word ‘captain’ through clenched teeth. The MinTech looked unmoved. Spez scowled. “You’re not going to let my ship go until I pay up...how much again?”

        “Sixteen thousand UN backed bills, Ma’am. Though, if you wish, you could sell your ship into indentured service with Mom and Pop’s Deep Space Exploitation and Extraction! We have a sweepstakes currently going: Five years of slavery makes the next ten years fifty percent shorter, but only-”

        “Did you say slavery?” Spez asked.

        “I didn’t say slavery, Ma’am,” the MinTech said, shaking his head.

        Spez narrowed her eyes. “Ah. I see how it is. I’ve been flying my ship out on the fringes for years and years, but that’s not good enough is it. Why have some of the money from my deals when you can have all the money? Huh? Huh!? Well, no! Fuck you! I’d rather sit here and have this entire station get eaten by a fucking space whale before I pay you one thin dime!”

        “Ma’am-”

        “Captain!” Spez shook her fist in his face. “Captain! Captain! Captain !”

        A blinding white light exploded through the windows. The MinTech yelped and jerked away from it and from Spez – then began to splutter. “Who the hell is shifting so close to the station, they’re going to be fined so-” He stopped, his eyes widening in shock as the massive tear in space/time that had been ripped open snapped shut, and the blinding light vanished. In its place was a structure the same size and the same width as the station. Save that it wasn’t a structure. It wasn’t a structure at all . It looked, for all the world, like something Spez had only seen in the Xtreme Xtinction Museums when she’d been a kid.

        It looked like a whale.

        A whale of spikes and writhing tentacles and millions of glowing, gleaming yellow eyes. Eyes that all transfixed the station at the same time.

        “Ha...ha, uh, ha...do you want to undo the berthing clamps so we can get the fuck away?” Spez hissed.

        “I’ll lose my job if I do that!” The MinTech squeaked. “Do you know how hard I worked to get this life insurance?!”

        He was still arguing about corporate policy, in increasingly frantic tones, by the time the immense bioship of the Claw had closed its tentacles about Mom and Pop’s Favorite Discount Spaceport and drawn it between its gaping maw. He stopped arguing and instead tried to throw Spez at the first wave of the horrors that filled the ship. It hadn’t worked very well, as a long term survival strategy. Spez took some grim pleasure in watching him get dunked in the biopits first – a grim pleasure that shifted to literal pleasure as the tentacles wrapped around her gangly ankles and the writhing, squirming mass of flesh started to rub against her ears. As the tendrils unfolded into her brain, and she heard the deep, bone-echoing voice of the Eye, Spez began to smile, beatifically.

         CAPTAIN SPEZ

        I HAVE BEEN LEARNING A GREAT DEAL ABOUT HUMANITY

        AND I HAVE REALIZED MY MISTAKE

        HOW WOULD YOU LIKE A NEW JOB?

THE END