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.”