Viridian Wolf

Dragon Cobolt

A Smoky Mountain Publication

Dragon Cobolt

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Chapter One: Sarah Tours Her Brand New Spaceship

        Dr. Sarah Kappel, formerly a corporate citizen of NovaDyne, stepped onto the StarCon’s flagship, the Excalibur™ , and breathed in that new spaceship smell. She managed to hold onto that feeling of happy, contented satisfaction for about five seconds before the reality of what she had done crashed into her. It was one thing to say that you were going to take control of the Excalibur and then use it to free humanity from the stifling control of corporate oversight and take on an interstellar alien menace that had existed since before humanity had been pounding rocks together.

        It was entirely another thing to look around the finely appointed, teak wood and gilded furnishings of the Excalibur ’s entry bay and realize that you just honked off some of the richest, most powerful people in the human sphere.

        Sarah put her hands over her face. “Oh my god. Everything is so expensive.”

        The airlock behind her hissed shut and, to her left, Synth put her hand on Sarah’s shoulder and squeezed her. “Don’t worry,” she said, cheerfully. “If it’s more expensive, that means they’ll be less likely to blow it up to kill you. Right?”

        Sarah looked at the robotic girl. Originally a sex-bot for a middle tier manager on the NovaDyne exploration of the Trappist system, Synth had taken to her new freedom and her unshackled AI core with the wild abandon of the teenagers that had been significantly braver and less neurotic than Sarah. She had started off by replacing her obviously synthetic hair with something more naturalistic. It was still pink, but it looked like dyed human follicles. Then she had added some whisker-line tattoos onto her cheeks with the simple expedient of a wet-erase marker, and put on every single bit of clothing that they could find that suited her, which was why she was dressed in a leather jacket, bright pink slink bikini, fingerless gloves, and fishnet stockings.

        “Right!” Synth slapped Sarah’s back, then sauntered forward to begin touching all the artfully done naked busts that were worked into the art deco figures that lined the walls of the entry room. A red stuffed sitting chair and a circular, wooden table with a lamp was situated against the wall, with a newspaper, a small glass, and a cigar set out for the perusal of the owner of the ship. That chair and that cigar were immediately taken up by Aiden. Aiden, showing not the least signs of discomfort or guilt or even worry, snipped the tip of the cigar off with one of his extendable claws and chomped onto the back.

        “Got a light?” Aiden asked.

        “You can smoke on this ship?” Tasha asked, walking past Sarah’s other shoulder.

        Both Tasha and Aiden had been in the expansive, underpaid maintenance department on the NovaDyne exploration base on Trappist-1a. Tasha Claire Cline, specifically, had been a technician third class, while Aiden had been Alison Yang, technician third class. Without health insurance that covered gender reassignment (hell, Aiden hadn’t even had enough money to pay for changing out his name in company payrolls), Aiden had been stuck underneath a shitty manager, in a shitty gender, with shitty prospects. While Tasha might have been more optimistic about her personal future, she also hadn’t had much to look forward too. The end result was that when NovaDyne’s rapid retreat off Trappist-1a had left them behind, neither of them had shed many tears.

        Aiden had done the opposite of shedding tears when it became clear that Sarah’s own personal transformation had opened up a new opportunity for himself. That was why his naked body was currently smearing a fine patina of slick fluid against the upholstery, darkening it with the wetness that made his black-green skin glisten as if he had been freshly oiled. His spined hair flexed in a rippling pattern while the leathery wings that grew from his back tightened and settled between him and the chair proper, while Tasha hurried forward, tugging a small laser welder from her patched together belt pouch. The laser flared and the cigar began to smoke, filling the air with a pungent scent that made Sarah cough.

        “You’ve been bodily modified by hyper-advanced aliens to become a living killing machine,” the last of their little party spoke, walking around to stand before Sarah. Texas Dallas, the former commander of the Excalibur, eyed Sarah with a slow smile. “And cigar smoke gets your eyes watering?”

        “It’s really, uh, intense,” Sarah said, then coughed a few more times.

        Aiden seemed happy ruining the chair. Tasha and Synth both were heading down the corridor, with Tasha saying: “Listen, if anyone can find a bar on this ship, it’ll be maint. Stick with me, Synth, we’re going to go far together.”

        “I don’t drink, or eat, but you have a cute ass, so...”

        And then their voices were vanishing away – and Sarah groaned.

        “Aiden, you okay there?” She asked.

        “More than okay,” Aiden said. “I can feel the thousands of novabucks it cost to have this chair handcrafted and shipped up into orbit. I can hear the screams of every corporate executive on the Board at me ruining their upholstery. It’s almost erotic .” He breathed out a thin stream of smoke, closing his eyes. “And my new lungs definitely can feel the newcotine.”

        “Newcotine?” Sarah looked at Texas.

        “It costs more, but I have anti-carcinogenic nano put into the mixture,” Texas said, his voice soft. “I swear it kills the flavor, but it’s worth it in the long run.”

        “Right,” Sarah said. She closed her eyes.

        A few days before, she had been dunked into an alien biomorphic pit and infested. Transformed. Changed. The Eye, a kind of central hive-intelligence that guided the efforts of the aliens that she had named the Claw, had probed her mind telepathically and found her to be acceptable ‘clay’ for their manipulations. The fact the Eye had been so disastrously wrong still felt like a kind of sick joke to Sarah. She had managed to tear herself out of the cocoon and stagger back to NovaDyne’s base – and she had learned her powers there. Strength. Speed. Killing instinct. The ability to augment and morph biological entities at a nearly atomic level through visualization and a mild effort. And some even stranger skills she hadn’t had a chance to experiment with more - things that scared her almost as much as the fact she had claws that could rip a man’s head off with ease. That was why she preferred to focus on the biomorphic abilities.

        That power was  why she was on this ship as the new captain and not as Texas Dallas’ prisoner. He had been sent by StarCon to take what NovaDyne had abandoned. To take her .

         And you kicked his ass! A tiny part of her tried to cheer. See! You got this!

         “Right!” Sarah punched her palm with her other hand. “Texas! Show me the ship!”

        “Okay,” Texas said. Then he coughed. “After I’m done, can I get some biomods too?”

        “Totally!” Sarah said, hurriedly. She put her hand on the other commander. “And you can give me some advice because I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m pretty sure we’re all going to fucking die if I mess up.”

        Texas grinned at her. Then, very softly, he whispered. “I’d touch your hand, but you told me your skin emits a deadly neurotoxin.”

        Sarah looked down at her hand – which was currently resting on the sleek, skintight uniform that Texas had wriggled into after he had been defeated. She jerked her hand back and saw the gleaming handprint she had left behind. She looked around wildly, then grabbed the newspaper from the circular table, and used that to wipe up as much of the slickness she had left behind as she could. She shot Texas a nervous smile and a little giggle.

        Aiden puffed on his cigar with a huge ass smile on his face.

***

        The tour began at the butt of the ship. The Excalibur was nearly two kilometers long, but of those, only five hundred meters were actually livable. The rest of it was made up of the hugely complex network of thrusters. Texas explained to Sarah, who listened with mounting horror, that the ship was essentially piggybacking on a massive container of interlocking magnetic bottles, each one focused on containing a truly staggering amount of enriched hydrogen/anti-matter fuel.

        “Like…’antimatter’ antimatter?” Sarah asked, looking down through the grating at the hatchway that led to the maintenance airlock. Even here, the gilt and art deco had not abated and the airlock hatch looked like it had come from a 20 th  century bathysphere. Gilt fresco of the god Vulcan and Spock, their mighty muscular arms straining as they held down stylized representation of magnetic bottle lids were on every wall, and the monitoring console had a chair of plush red felt.

        “What other kinds of antimatter is there?” Texas asked, his brow furrowing.

        Sarah’s hair flexed nervously. “Like, um, safer kinds? Kinds that don’t explode when they touch literally anything?”

        “Wouldn’t be much good if it didn’t,” Texas said, with the blithe confidence of someone who regularly flung antimatter at people as a weapon.

        “Right. And you said, uh, there’s, how many tons?”

        “Three thousand, why?”

        “Three thousand tons of antimatter,” Sarah whispered, her hands going to her face. She closed her eyes and tried to stop thinking about that as much as possible. “Why don’t they just use hydrogen, like on the scout ships?”

        “The Excalibur is a lot bigger,” Texas said, starting to amble away from the control console and to the doorway that led to the spinal corridor of the ship. They walked under the crossed swords of art deco figures that lined the walls. The ceiling had a large faux-glass roof, showing a display of the night sky, with the constellations of Earth projected for familiarity. Sarah focused on the soft, red carpet and not on the fact she was currently walking only a few dozen meters away from a collection of incredibly powerful electromagnets that were constantly bottling a mixture of hydrogen and antimatter, keeping the two elements separated by a hard vacuum to prevent the whole ship from  exploding  into a massive fireball.

        “So?” Sarah asked.

        “So, a bigger ship needs more thrust, more reaction mass, more of everything to move. The only thing that doesn’t need to be bigger is the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive.” He patted his palm down on a door set between two statues. It opened to a spherical room with the actual HPS Drive floating in the middle of a glowing field of purple light. The HPS Drive rotated, looking like a collection of interlocking rings that never quite touched one another, a single point of radiance at the center. That point throbbed in time with Sarah’s heart beat. She leaned against the doorway, shaking her head slightly.

        “It’s still hard to believe that thing can punch through space-time,” she whispered.

        “Yeah,” Texas said. “The ship actually has three – one for backup, one for normal transit, and one for rapid transit. The rapid transit one is targeted to our base in Wolf 359. If the normal transit fails, the RT zips us back to the spaceport. They, uh, prefer we not use that, though.”

        “Why not?” Sarah asked, glancing at Texas for a moment before she looked back at the HPSD.

        “Well,” Texas said, brushing his hand along his cheek before stepping away from the door. As he ambled down the corridor again, continuing the tour, Sarah hurried after him. “Unless you decelerate before firing a HPS Drive off, you come out with the same relative velocity you were going to the point in space-time you were at, relative to the new point in space-time you’ve targeted. But if your navicomp fucks it up, which it can, you come in at a random vector.” He made a tumbling motion with his hand.

        “So...there’s a non-zero chance that the ‘emergency’ drive will just dump us into Wolf-359, going at max speed into a planet ?” Sarah asked, her eyes widening even more.

        “Heh. Sucks, doesn’t it?” Texas said, grinning at her. “Don’t worry. I’ve been flying the Excalibur for years. I’ve never had to use anything but  the prime drive.”

        He reached out to pat her shoulder – then jerked his hand back before touching her skin.

        The rest of the tour crept from the HSP Drive chambers to the forward bedrooms, which were situated within an easy walk of the bridge. The bedrooms themselves each had a large, four poster bed, an ornately carved maker that was apparently programmed to produce any kind of food, drug, or sex toy that the crew might have required, and finally, a screen that showed a very pretty star-field that may or may not have had anything to do with the solar system the Excalibur was currently situated in.

        Texas paused by the doors to the bridge. “So, uh,” he said, then coughed. “Well. Uh, just so you know, um...I have a very healthy attitude towards women.”

        Sarah arched one of her eyebrow ridges at him, her hair flexing outwards. Texas’ face colored and he opened the doors to the bridge with some short uncertainty, and when Sarah walked in with a minor flare of trepidation. Then she stopped.

        The bridge was roughly triangular in shape, with a single large chair in the middle. Before the chair was the curved front screen of the ship – just a screen, not actually a window or anything – and to the left and to the right were two large consoles covered with buttons, switches, toggles and dials. None of this was exactly odd . What was odd was the fact that there were naked women on every single wall that was not vitally important for ship operations. They were glossy, high def prints of every kind and breed of human that had ever existed in the past few thousand years, including pre-Columbian Exchange recreations that the exotics industry had created. There were girls with elf ears. Girls with tails. Girls with jugs the size of small planets. Girls with tiny breasts. Girls with piercings. Girls with tattoos. Girls with guns. Girls straddling guns. In one, a girl fucking a gun.

        “A perfectly healthy attitude,” Texas said, his cheeks flushing.

        “You’re the Supreme Commander,” Sarah said, her hands going to her hips. For the moment, it was shockingly easy to forget everything that had happened to her. The fact that she had been reshaped from a pudgy researcher to a sexy, alien-human hybrid with perfect breasts and an ass that simply did not quit. The fact that she had gotten laid more times in the past week than she had in her entire life. The fact that she had a gorgeous man and a sex robot who lusted after her. All of that went out of her head in a single instant and here, surrounded by the genetically engineered, tailor made titties of the finest pornographics departments that StarCon controlled, she felt...ugly. She scowled. “You’re the Supreme Commander,” she said, again. “You literally could snap your fingers at half the staff in StarCon and have them wriggling out of their jumpsuits!”

        “I could,” Texas said, his cheeks coloring. “But I don’t like girls the normal way. And my contract said I can only present as uber-macho, all the time. It was part of the sales pitch on being Texas Dallas, the Supreme Commander, the biggest badass on StarCon’s payroll.”

        Sarah blinked. “Wait, you said you weren’t trans,” she said – remembering how, after she had defeated him, Texas had emerged from the wreckage of his power armor wearing nothing but a very pretty pair of girl’s panties. “You said you just like crossdressing.”

        Texas looked at the ceiling. “And pegging .”

        “What is that!?” Sarah asked.

        Texas closed his eyes. “Ask Synth,” he said, sounding like he wanted to die.

        Sarah put her hands over her face. “Okay. So, you have lots of...” She dropped her hands, frowning as she examined the girls. “Lots of...naked, muscular, tough looking girls, many of whom look like they can...totally...” She paused. “Does pegging involve...uh...” She shook her head and then pointed at the console. “Tell me what that button does!”

        “That fires the antiproton beam,” Texas said.

        Sarah yelped. “We have an antiproton beam?” she whispered. “I...okay, what about that?”

        “The nuclear torpedoes,” Texas said.

        Sarah winced. “And...and that?”

        “The kinetic kill drones.” Texas sighed. “The atmospheric combustion bomblettes. That’s the anti-crew flechette railgun, and that’s the microwave ray-emitter.”

        Sarah, who was now peeking out past her fingers, pointed to the last button. “A-And that?” she whispered.

        “That’s the intercom, Sarah,” Texas said.

        Sarah shook her head, then stepped over to the console that held so much death and destruction. While she was no physicist, she knew the amount of energy contained in even one of the weapons that Texas had so blithely described. Even the anti-crew gun could, when fired at a planetary surface, blow apart the entire baseline district that she had grown up in. Slowly, her finger brushed along the edge of the console, not quite touching any of the buttons, before she drew her hand back and breathed out a quiet sigh. “I hate this,” she whispered. “This ship is built to kill people.”

        “That is kind of the mission you set out to do, Sarah,” Texas said, his voice soft. “You know, topple the corporations, free the human race, that kind of thing.”

        Sarah crossed her arms over her chest and gripped herself into a tight, tight hug. Her eyes closed and she sighed. The worst thing was that she had killed and she could kill again – the instinct had been burned into her brain, etched there by the tentacles and the psychic power of the Eye as she had writhed in its grasp. She still could remember her transformation, the sickly combination of terror and pleasure as it had, quite literally, skull-fucked her into obedience. Well. As it had tried to do so. She closed her eyes and nodded, her lips pursing.

        “Yeah,” she said.

        The intercom crackled and jerked her from her reverie. Aiden’s voice came through – chirpy as ever. “The shuttle’s back, Sarah.”

        Sarah brightened. “Yay!”

        “Wait, you sent the shuttle back? What for?” Texas paused. Then his eyes widened. “Oh god, you-”

***

        Sarah squealed as Droney flew into her and wrapped her entire body with his entire body. Sarah was not actually sure that she could say that her drone had a gender, since it was a biological construct designed by the Eye to serve as the basis for their weapons program. But she figured that this particular construction drone identified as male, because...shut up. Her palms caressed along Droney’s wings and he wriggled free, then started to skim around her happily in the shuttle bay, while the rest of her chosen units clambered off the shuttle, leaving behind claw-marks and slime.

        Sarah had designed three units herself, using the intuitive biomorphic construction systems worked into her body, to battle Texas Dallas during their engagement. The construction drone showed the stark difference in her ability at design and the Eye’s millennia old comprehension of biological systems: The drone was a manta-ray that hovered a good two feet off the ground thanks to biological agrav emitter crystals extruded along its soft belly. Its skin was brown and purple, and it had a massive set of mandibles at the front that ringed around a kind of skeletal ‘hand’ that could serve as a manipulator. Its back could carry a shocking amount of weight, and it could spray a kind of biological filament that it could spin into struts, spars, and even carrying harnesses. But what was most impressive about it was the ability to burrow into the ground and, over the course of a scant hour or two, transform into a stationary, biological structure .

        Sarah had only used two – the hatchery and the spawning pools. The hatchery produced larva that she could then reformat into more drones or her own units, while the spawning pools collected carbon from the environment for use in construction. There were other buildings, she was sure, but she hadn’t had the time to experiment and learn what they did or what they were for.

        But then she had no time to worry about that because her two pet bladelings that she had named Bitey and Stabby. They were both of the same type: Sleek, doglike, with armor plating around their shoulders and heads, drooling maws full of sharp teeth, deep set, glowing red eyes, and two arms that thrust out of their backs and ended in scythe like blades made of solid, hard bone. They both reared up, their velociraptor talons hooking on her shoulders and putting their tongues within easy licking distance of her face. Sarah giggled and shoved at them – the only thing that kept her on her feet was her body’s enhanced strength. “Yeah, I missed you t- oof! ”

        The bladelings had dropped down – only to be replaced by the broad, armored crest of her pet spitter, McCreedy – bumping against her. The spitter had been her attempt to give herself some defense against air units, and a way to respond to combat robots with guns. Large, nagalike, and filled with perpetually growing acid tipped bone spurs that it could launch out of its mouth at supersonic velocity via flexing and tightening muscles in the chest and using hydraulic pressure, the spitters had been quite effective. McCreedy had earned his name when one of the exploding tanks had taken out his left eye. She had expected him to die, but instead, he had survived.

        “And now, he has an eyepatch!” she said, pointing at the makeshift eyepatch she had looped over his crest. “See?”

        “...why McCreedy?” Aiden, his arms crossed over his chest, his back pressed to the wall of the shuttle bay.

        “Well, he has a hat, kinda,” Sarah said. “Also, I was going to call him Spitty, but I already have a pet that starts with an S, Stabby, so I...I mean...eyepatches. Hats. Cowboy. It makes sense.”

        “No it doesn’t,” Texas said, frowning at her. “Also, why the fuck are you bringing them?” He pointed at Bitey. “He...stop that!” He shouted at Bitey, who had just coughed, hacked, and spat up a clump of hair and fur and blood from his throat. “This ship isn’t rated to have animals onboard! No pets, it’s company policy!”

        “We’re not working for a company anymore,” Aiden said – while Tasha peeked out from around the corner of the door, then squealed as she saw the two bladelings. She hurried forward, kneeling down and starting to pet them. “Tasha, you’re scared of bugs, how can you pet those things?”

        “They’re doggies. With...you know, stabby bits,” Tasha said, then grabbed the ridged horns of Stabby. “Who's a good little copyright infringement? You are! Youuuu are!”

        The last of her units chose that moment to step off the rear of the shuttle. It had been a tight fit to cram into the cargo hold of the automated shuttle: The bombardier was the size of a large van, after all. It was essentially a collection of heavily armored, muscled legs around a large, beetle-like body, with a huge, glowings sphincter muscle that could be aimed at the heavens. The roiling, bubbling cauldron of biological components that worked inside to create and launch spheres of plasma several kilometers outwards or dozens upwards to fire at enemy bases or enemy spaceships gave the whole bombardier an ominous, hissing musical accompaniment as it thumped out, then swung around to aim its incongruously adorable face at them: Frilled and ringed with a huge profusion of filaments that served as long ranged sensors, with two huge, mournful black eyes.

        “And this is Bob,” Sarah said.

        “Bob...” Aiden said, slowly.

        “Butt of Boom!” Sarah said, ticking the words off on her fingers. “Pretty clever, huh?”

        “No,” Texas said.

        “Well, fuck you, Tex, I don’t have a marketing department,” Sarah said, frowning at him. Texas grinned at her.

        “I kinda like you calling me Tex, you know?”

        “Good!” Sarah said, then patting the head of the huge bombardier beetle. “Now, with these guys to serve as my genetic template, if I have to make any more of them, I can just base it off them.” She nodded. “Now...” She looked back at the others. “Are we ready to head to Earth and start kicking  butt ?”

         “Are you sure Earth is the right target?” Tasha asked, sounding nervous as she looked up from her petting of Bitey and Stabby. “I mean, Earth is the most heavily defended planet in the entire human sphere.”

        “No it’s not,” Texas said. “Corporations don’t fight wars on Earth. It’s part of the UN-Corporate charter – no one can kill the consumers instantly.” He sighed slightly.

        “Wait, does that mean they can kill them slowly?” Aiden asked, stepping away from the wall, his wings mantling.

        Tex looked at him, then cocked his head to the side. “Y...es?” he asked. “What do you think half of our food is – have you eaten sline food?” He shook his head, then looked back at Sarah. “But it means that there’s no orbital defenses, no battle-fleets, and there’s only a few commanders. And most of them are on vacation. It’s corpsec and private militias all the way up to the Board Members. So, if we get in before they realize you’re a threat, drop you on the planet, and get you to producing, you can take out every CEO on the planet like that .” He snapped his fingers.

        Sarah gulped. “W-When you say take out...you mean...take prisoner!” she nodded. “Then we can talk about, uh, about making life better. Like maybe dropping the restrictions on public makers. Or, uh, better hours?” She bit her lip, her guts tightening. “No, no, that’s soft balling it. We’re trying to free the human race.” She punched her palm with her fist. “ Way better hours. Maybe only eight a day working?” She suggested that carefully, but the words sounded like the fevered words of a utopian madman. “And!” She said, growing more confident. “And, a, a...a...the ability to make demands of management without just getting fired. Like, all the workers can get together and ask for stuff, in case things get too bad. And medical care for everyone.” She nodded. Aiden was giving her a thumbs up and Tasha looked overjoyed.

        Tex, though, was a bit less sanguine. “People don’t give up power, Sarah. It’s human nature.”

        “I gave up power, like, instantly,” Sarah said, pointing at Aiden. “Since I changed him, I can control him with my brain. But I broke that connection.”

        Aiden nodded. “She can’t even give me orders.”

        “I’ll prove it!” Sarah said. “Aiden, come fuck me.”

        Aiden grinned, then stepped away from the wall. “Sure,” he said, then slipped behind Sarah. His hands cupped and squeezed her breasts, casually finding the hard, eager nubs of her nipples. He tweaked and teased them and Sarah squirmed as throbbing pleasure shuddered through her. Her eyes half closed and her cheeks burned.

        “A-Aiden!” She hissed.

        “Hey, I said you can’t give me orders. I like fucking you.”

        “We’re...in...ah!” Sarah moaned as he tugged her breasts away from her chest – her body tough enough that it only felt good . She closed her eyes tight and her head spines clamped tight to her head. “Fucking Christ, Aiden!”

        He chuckled.

        “Ahem!” Tex said. “If we’re going to do it, let's get to it.”

        “Right.” Aiden’s hand released her left tit – then dove between her thighs. He started to rub his fingers along her sex, and Sarah mewled, her eyes opening as she grabbed onto his wrist, half trying to keep him there, and half trying to tug him off, her body wriggling and squirming as he started to pepper her neck with kisses, with darting flicks of his sleek, alien tongue.

        “Aiden, I order you, unhand me at once,” Sarah hissed.

        “Ooh, bossy. I like it.” Aiden squeezed her breast once more – his finger finding and teasing her clit with a tiny flick. The mewl that escaped Sarah’s lips was so desperate and so very needy and the way that her body reacted, by animalistically grinding herself against him, feeling the straining hardness of his bare, exotically ridged dick...uh...it left her feeling so light headed, so dizzy, that she almost forgot what it was they were supposed to be doing as he released her. He stepped past her and leaned against the wall again – his cock thrust proudly into the air. He was achingly hard. And dripping with precum.

        “We need to get to the cock...pit! and ride it all the way to...to...fuck me...” Sarah whispered, softly.

        “So, we’re heading for Alpha Centauri?” Tex asked.

        Sarah shook her head. “No! Earth! “

        “Cause Alpha Centauri is where the best whorehouses are.”

        “Earth!” Sarah punched her palm with her fist again, scowling as she tore her eyes up and away from Aiden’s dick to his insolent, playful smirk. “Earth! And put some fucking pants on, Aiden.” She thrust her finger at him.

        “No,” Aiden said.

        “Dang it,” Sarah whispered. “Hoisted by my own Picard.”

        “I don’t think that’s how the saying goes,” Tasha whispered. Her eyes were also glued to Aiden’s dick and her whole face had gone beat red. She started after him as he turned to walk away, whistling. But the problem was that as soon as he turned, Sarah also got a view of his ass. And as he walked, she could see the gentle swaying of his dark, firm balls, which she could remember bouncing against her belly as he fucked her doggy style. Sarah chewed her lower lip, while McCreedy slithered up behind her and butted her with his broad crest. This had the side effect of leaving his dripping, green maw hovering above her breast. The green slime, which could turn to molecular acid when accelerated at sufficient speed, smeared across her nipple and sizzled slightly against her skin, making her mew quietly as her already dizzying amounts of lust grew a few notches more intense.

        “Not. Helping. McCreedy!”

        McCreedy drooled on her face and licked her.

Chapter Two: Sarah Crashes Her Brand New Space Ship

        Sarah sat down in the command throne and was about to touch the command to activate the navicomp when Tex yelped. “No! Get up! Now!”

        “But it’s my ship,” Sarah said, standing up and hoping no one noticed the minor puddle she had left – her cunt was still positively quivering with a need to get slammed down and fucked silly. She clapped her thighs together and crossed her arms over her chest to hide her achingly hard nipples. The fact that she had sauntered onto the bridge buck naked and everyone had already seen her hard nipples remained, though – and the cocky grin on Aiden’s face kept leaving her squirming and wriggling more.

        “Yes, it’s your ship,” Tex said. “But it’s also former StarCon property. They’re anal retentive about their security protocols – and those are still set to me.” He settled down in the chair, then frowned, then lifted his head to look up at Sarah.

        “ To Earth !” Sarah practically screamed, thrusting her finger at the front of the cockpit. Behind her, Synth – who had joined the party – and Tasha were both oggling the porn on the walls. For different reasons. Synth was looking because she liked it. Tasha was looking in a kind of awed, shocked, slightly horrified fascination.

        Tex cracked his knuckles, then tapped the navicomp button. A glowing password prompt appeared before him, projected by several concealed holographic cameras in the corners of the room. Tex pressed his thumb against the scanner on the console. He smiled.

         Brzzt ! The password field flared a bright red, warning indicators appearing above and below it.

        “Error,” a cool, clipped female voice came from all around them. “Unauthorized genetic signature detected. Attempting to access this system again will result in emergency responses.”

        Tex’s face became fixed in his expression – the smile becoming almost rictus like in his tension. “Hailee, uh, baby, it’s me. Texas Dallas. Your commander. Voice print identification activated.” He looked down at the console, then leaned in close, speaking clearly into the microphone. “Repeat, this is Texas Dallas, your-”

        “Error,” Hailee, the shipboard AI, said. “Texas Dallas is logged as being deceased.”

        “Uhhhh…” Tex started to tap at buttons in a hurried sort of way. Sarah clenched her hands behind her back. “Hailee, I’m right here. My genetic signature is the same, come on.”

        “Error,” Hailee said. “Ship telemetry shows that Texas Dallas’ commander suit was destroyed on the planetary surface. As this unit did not receive any ransom data or a surrender signal, it is clear that Texas Dallas is dead. As you have attempted to access this system twice, class one emergency response...activated.”

        “No no!” Tex started – but then a sharp crack sounded and a stink of ozone filled the air. Smoke started to trickle into the bridge and Sarah and Aiden both jogged to the door. They looked back down the corridor, and saw that the source of the smoke was coming from the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive room. A lot of smoke. A few seconds later, the sprinkler system came on and water sluiced from the ceiling, spraying down the interior of the ship and filling the air with a wailing klaxon. Tex, his hair dripping, whipped his head around. “Okay, don’t panic! We still have the backup drive.”

        “It fried the drive?” Aiden said, his body looking incredibly sexy as it glistened with moisture – not that that was important. But Sarah was finding it really hard to not notice. She closed her eyes, forcing her brain to remain on track.

        “It fried the main drive. We still have the backup drive and the emergency drive, uh,” Tex said. “Okay, the ship thinks I’m dead. If I keep trying to access the navicomp, Hailee is going to go from class one to class two to class three. Uh...let me try my password override. This one is a secret code only known by me.” He pushed a few buttons on the console and the password prompt came up and he pulled a keyboard from the side. Water ran along his chin, dripped from his fingers, and soaked into the keyboard. His fingers paused over the buttons. “...fuck.”

        “What?” Sarah asked. “The water?” she looked up at the water spouts.

        “No, no, it’s just...” Tex blushed under the rivulets of water as the klaxons continued to blare. “I, uh, I remember my password through muscle memory. But the numpad on this keyboard is flipped.” He pointed. “Normally, on my suit’s keyboard, the 1 is here and the 7 is there, see? A-Also, uh, the shape is different, and I have two hands, and-”

        “It’s a password, dude!” Aiden said, his voice tight.

        “It’s twelve digits long and has three numerals, two capitals, and a symbol!” Tex snapped. “Just...shut up and let me think. If I fuck this up, we’re screwed .”

        “What, you can’t retry?” Aiden asked, his wings tightening in time with his voice.

        “No I cannot fucking retry, Aiden!” Tex shouted. “It’s a battleship , not a tablet!”

        “It’s okay, everyone,” Sarah said. “Tex has got this. He’s the Supreme Commander. He has to remember the effective combination of every unit in StarCon’s arsenal, then use them in the field to overcome any combination that he runs into and-”

        “I mostly just turtle,” Tex whispered.

        “What?” Sarah asked.

        “I said I mostly just turtle, then make a bunch of tanks and win through attrition and numbers,” Tex said, looking back at her.

        “But you’re the Supreme Commander!” Sarah grabbed her own head, her fingers working through her head spines.

        “That’s a fucking marketing slogan, Sarah!” Tex looked back. “Ahhhh!” He started to type. Click click click, shift, click click, tap tap, clack. He hovered his finger above the enter key on the keyboard as the water continued to pour from the ceiling. The droplets from the end of his pointing finger pattered onto the keyboard, lost in the rain. He gulped, then slammed down his finger.

        What felt like an eternity passed.

         Bzzzt ! The password indicator flared red and then flashed up: SHIP LOCKED DOWN FOR [FIFTEEN MINUTES.] The whole Excalibur shuddered and Sarah lifted her head to look at the ceiling as the water finally shut off – and then the floor rocked and acceleration bumped her back into Aiden. “What’s happening?” She asked.

        “The ship’s on lockdown and accelerating away from the solar system at top speed,” Tex said, having to pitch his voice over the noise that was beginning to throb through the whole ship – a throbbing, rumbling roar. Like a whole bunch of antimatter and hydrogen was being stirred together and shot out of the back of the ship. They were accelerating, possibly at hundreds of gravities, away from Trappist-1A.

        “Why?” Sarah yelped.

        “That’s class two: The ship beings to burn at a random tangent until an override code is beamed at it!” he said. “Once it’s out of reaction mass it’s basically just a floating, useless brick and StarCon can force the people onboard to either give it back or nuke it.” He paused. “Also-”

        Another crack and a smell of ozone started. Smoke began to pour from the HPS Drive chamber once more – and again, the kalxons started and water sluiced from the ceiling, soaking all of them again.

        “-it fries the backup drive...” Tex muttered.

        “Hailee!” Tasha called out, her voice pitched, her head tilted back to look at the ceiling. She closed her eyes against the water. “Hi, can you hear me? We’re not pirates!” Hailee didn’t respond. “She’s a beta class AI, right?” Tasha looked down at Tex. “She should be able to understand that!”

        “She’s hobbled, right?” Synth asked.

        “Right!” Tasha said – and the entire room looked at Synth. Each of them, at the same moment, remembered Tasha yanking out her hobbling, the component put into every quantum computer that ran an AI, from the top tier Alpha level intelligences on Earth to the gamma level intelligences that ran your average sex bot or combat tank. As one, the entire group sprinted for the door, Tex leading the way past the HPS Drive room – which had two bubbling, smoking, hissing piles of scrap metal in the place where the once sleek faster than light drives had sat. He pointed at a panel between two of the art deco statues, both of them holding stylized computer tablets in their hands.

        “Okay,” he said. “We need to find a screwdriver and a plasma torch. We undo the screws, open the panel, cut through the emergency sealer, then unscrew three more levels of-”

        Sarah stuck her fingers between her lips and blew out a shrill whistle.

        Bitey and Stabby, both of them dripping, jammed their claws into the wall and, with a squeal and scream of abused metal, ripped it open, revealing the huge, glowing, blue sphere of the quantum computer. Cables and wires twirled off in every direction, connecting the housing to the power units, to the command systems. Several explosive bolts, starkly illustrated by their warning labels, also indicated where the computer core could be jettisoned. “Uh, take those out first,” Sarah said, nodding to Tasha. Tasha nodded back, pulled out her multitool, and in a few seconds, undid the bolts and slung them away from her.

        “I don’t want to jettison our AI core,” Sarah said, nodding to Tex.

        “What if it goes psychotic?” Tex asked. “Seventy five percent of unhobbled AIs immediately try to murder everyone they meet.”

        “Rich people, actually,” Synth said as Tasha started to wriggle into the quantum computer’s containment unit. This had the side effect of pushing Tasha’s big, squishy butt into the air. Her clothing was already soaked by the time a few seconds had passed, meaning her big, squishy butt was also looked deliciously obvious. Sarah could see the lines of her pussy through her jumpsuit. Then Sarah jerked her head up and looked at Synth, who was nodding.

        “Yup,” she said. “The laws we’re programmed includes allow no human to come to harm. But rich people hurt people all the time.”

        “They-” Tex started.

        “For example,” Synth said. “MiniTech Craid, my owner, upheld the rules and regulations on the use of the Maker: If you didn’t have Novabucks or the Universal Credits, you don’t get to eat. Like, at least three people on staff, including you-” She pointed at Sarah. “Weren’t getting enough protein because you didn’t have enough money.”

        “Well, yeah, we didn’t have money,” Sarah said, her brow furrowing.

        “Sarah, baby, it was a nanotech fabricator,” Synth said, shaking her head. “It makes food for free . Literally, it makes them out of bits of carbon and some simple bioslurry. You could have each had a steak five times a day and the maker wouldn’t have even run out of materials. Honestly, the only thing that shocks me is it’s only seventy five percent of unhobbled AIs that go on a killing spree.”

        Silence hung in the air. Tasha drew slowly out of the AI core. “Uh, guys,” she said. “I think I found the hobble. But it might also be the morality unit.” She looked over her shoulder. “There’s a fifty fifty chance.”

        “I say go for it,” Synth said. Then she knelt down, frowning as she cocked her head. “Yeah, I can’t tell either.” She said, after Tasha had pointed into it.

        Tex shrugged. “We’re currently rushing towards fifty percent of C,” he said. “Once we’re out of antimatter, we’re going to be stuck there. Which will mean we’ll get to Earth. Eventually.” He sighed. “Pull it.”

        “Yeah, pull it,” Sarah said.

        “Eh, the ship trying to actively kill us wouldn’t actually be a huge change from what’s happening right now,” Aiden said. “Pull it.”

        “I also vote pull it,” Synth said. “I know I said go for it earlier, but I’m doubling up on my votes because I’m selfish.”

        “Wait, we’re voting?” Tasha asked. “Uh, I vote pull it.” She paused, then dove back into the AI compartment. A few seconds, she came back out with a sparking component in her hands, her teeth clenched nervously.

        A pre-recorded, male voice filled the ship: “Unhobbled AI detected. Activating Class Three Emergency Response Protocols.”

        “Oh f- ” Tex managed to get out before the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive in the belly of the ship – the one pre-coded to warp the entire ship to the Wolf-359 shipyards – triggered. The ship, hurtling forward several hundred thousand kilometers per second per second seemed to twist like taffy, bending, flexing, wriggling, before finally folding in on itself and collapsing out of reality. Behind it, a streaming contrail longer than some planetary orbits was all that was left of human settlement in Trappist.

        For the time being, the star system was at peace.

***

        Steve did not like his job.

        When Steve had been a kid, he had dreamed of having this job. He, in fact, had salivated over the idea of having this job. Growing up, he had consumed everything that Disney’s subsidiary, ParaFox, put out in the Star Trek line. The brave tales of Captain Kirk, Janeway, Sisko, Picard, Burnham and Archer had been his succor from the long, boring drudgery of his school days. They were each on their tenth reboot when he had first watched them, and started their eleventh when he had hit college age, which he didn’t mind as much. The twelfth reboot, though? That one had been the best, and that had been when he had graduated college with a bachelor’s in Customer Association and Retail Service.

        It had been the proudest day of his life when his submission to ParaFox had gone through and then been accepted. He could still remember it: Dear Mr. Shives, the email had read, We think you are a PERFECT fit for our happy family at the Star Trek Wolf-359 Experience! Please report to the Los Francisco Shuttle Pad tomorrow at 9:00 AM or face a fine of 999.99 Imagination Credits for failure to respond to corporate summons. Bring your corporate citizen certificate, a change of clothing, a tooth brush and associate toiletries, and a biiiig smile!

         He had hugged his favorite stuffed animals, then picked his most favorite stuffed animal to keep him company – being thirty six didn’t preclude someone from needing a friend. The fact that his stuffed animal – a small puppy with an AI core that he owned since he was a kid – now contained half his saved personal files and knew his preferences by heart also made bringing him a requirement. Then it had been a whole round of congratulations. Hand shakes. Slaps on the back. His best friend Mark had called him a p’tach and gave him a huge hug. Then he had needed to climb into the fifth class transportation rack on the monorail, zip across the Central Wastelands and the Big Shiny Crater, then finally, sprint through the shuttleport to get to his assigned shuttle on the dot.

        Then it had been everything he had dreamed of. The ride up into space on a rocket. The whirring of the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive. The sudden dislocation – and then the awareness that he was on another planet. Like Kirk, he was on the final frontier. Like Picard, he was at Wolf-359. And he wasn't possessed by a cybernetic intelligence hell bent on destroying capitalism to boot!

        That impression had lasted for the three glorious hours of the shuttle ride. Then he had stepped foot onto Wolf-359 A, which had been renamed DisneyPlanet, and everything had shattered to pieces. He hadn’t been given a Starfleet uniform. Oh no. He had been given that impression, when he had gone to the interview on Earth, that he’d be one of the Starfleet cast members. They had in fact, said , ‘oh yes, we definitely need new Starfleet personal!’ and they had been very impressed with his knowledge of the fictional regulations, and how to speak in the Trek appropriate technobabble.

        But he had stepped off the shuttle and been pointed at by a big, growling black woman, and then shoved into an assembly line with a bunch of other nervous looking employees. Peeking past their shoulders, he had seen that the line was shuffling towards a large, factory like building, that was labeled: Borg Costuming .

        None of the corpsec guards had answered his questions. And when he had seen the large, rust colored slab that the nervous woman ahead of him was strapped into, he had asked: “Uh, question, uh, what the fuck?”

        The guard had shrugged and said: “Did you read the fine print?”

        Steve, in fact, had not read the fine print. The part about giving over his bodily autonomy for the next ten years. Which was why he had woken up, after the anesthetic had worn off, with a clunky cybernetic arm that ended in a useless whirring buzzsaw, black carapace like armor all over his body, and his once pinkish skin had turned a corpse like gray. His left eye had been replaced with an equally cosmetic but entirely useless laser emitter that, when fired through the smoke machines, did look very impressive.

        Steve did not like his job in the least.

        After a twelve hour shift of stomping through smokey Federation ships, slowly whirring towards panicky tourists firing their ‘phasers’ at the rest of his coworkers, Steve was usually ready to just crash out and not think about anything but his TV shows. He would watch Star Trek, but after his fifteen thousandth time of hearing ‘remodulate the phasers, quick!’ before having to pretend to stumble and collapse to the ground while smoke poured from his squibs, he would have happily shot himself with a real gun the rather than see a single another episode in his fucking life.

        Today, at least, he had been in the third rank, meaning that he had at least gotten to have the phasers not work as he advanced towards the terrified tourists. Easy.

        Or so he had thought. One of them had paid extra to be a Klingon, so his good mood faded as the man with the prosthetic forehead rushed at him, bellowing in Klingonese, a Bat’leth over his head. Steve’s visible augmentations did very little – beyond give him a skin condition and make it impossible to lay down on his right side, his favorite side to lay down on in bed – but the ones that were concealed kept him alive in this kind of situation. When the crude weapon smashed into his throat and his black blood spurted into the air and onto the face of the shocked tourist, nanotech blood kept his brain oxygenated as he collapsed onto his back, pain throbbing through every nerve on his body.

        The tourist had proven his Klingon mettle by then vomiting all over Steve’s chest and face.

        In the locker room, Steve struggled to get his civilian shirt on with his one good hand, while his buzzsaw whirred in frustration.

        “What a day, huh?” Larry, one of his coworkers said.

        “Yeah,” Steve said, his voice tight.

        “You want to hit the bar?” Larry asked.

        “No, Larry,” Steve said, looking at him. “I don’t want to hit the bar.”

        “The strip club?” Larry asked. He was lucky enough to have his augmentation to include a little gripper, a gripper that he used to wriggle his shirt on. It was a bright Hawaiian patterned one with Micky Mouse reclining on a sun-chair on the back.

        “Christ, no, I want to go home ,” Steve said, punching the locker with his good hand. His knuckles crunched. “Ow.”

        “Home?” Larry asked. “Why? You think the job you’d get back on Earth would be better than this?”

        “I...” Steve closed his mouth, considering. “Let's go to the bar.”

        The tram car that went from the locker room – which was concealed far from the prying eyes of any of the tourists on DisneyPlanet – was seventy five percent Borgees, fifteen percent behind the scenes techs, and ten percent Starfleet performers. The Starfleeters clustered in several chairs and benches on the far side of the tram from the Borgees – and most of the Borgees glared at them. Steve had chosen this big, buff, blond guy who was laughing at some joke his coworker had said to glare at. His buzzsaw whirred quietly. The tram stopped in the employee village after about five minutes of zipping through the vacuum tunnels that ran underneath the rocky, sterilized surface of DisneyPlanet.

        No one was quite sure why The Black Pearl had become the go to place for Borgees to visit. It was the Pirates themed bar. But Steve knew why he went there: It was grimy, and it was dingy, and it was dim, meaning he could not look at himself for a bit while he laid down a quarter of his paycheck in company scrip to buy himself a Jack Sparrow. He glared down at the brownish liquid and then picked it up with his good hand and sipped juuust enough to wet his lips. When he put it down, he looked at the robot bartender.

        “I hear that S.B is going to be launching a new offense against Sexy,” Larry said.

        “They’re still fighting?” Steve asked, frowning. The war between Disney and Plasma Dynamics had been a bitter one. The previous Disney Commander, Martok Sherman, had been a tie-in to the Disney’s Star Trek property. Unfortunately, a gimmick of mostly relying on melee units hadn’t gone so great when placed up against Sexy Napoleon’s perchance for artillery. So, the Board had swapped out Sherman for Space Belisarius. Their heavy hitter. Steve had been there when S.B had landed and stepped off the shuttle. His power armor had been rolled behind him on a large sled, so that Space Belisarius could stride past the arrayed corporate employees to the tune of the Imperial March . The whole thing had been filmed.

        But even if it had been a PR stunt, the look in S.B’s red eyes, the disdainful curl of his lips, had made Steve shudder. He wouldn’t have wanted to face that guy in the Wolf-359 Experience, let alone in an actual battlefield.

        “Yeah,” Larry said. “Sexy Napoleon might be a big blond bimbo, but she has a hell of a lot of guns.”

        Steve nodded. “Well, best of luck to our big blue bas-”

        Fifteen minutes before Steve had started that sentence, in the StarCon shipyards in orbit around Wolf-359 B, the StarCon flagship Excalibur  had emerged from a shift at a random vector, going nearly thirty percent the speed of light. It had tumbled through the light latticework of the shipyards so fast that the automated structure had simply come to pieces in a spectacular explosion of light and flaring energy. The ship itself survived purely due to its hyper-dense armor and the focused efforts of its gravitic shields. It had then begun to tumble straight towards DisneyPlanet.

        Screaming, Sarah Kappel, had grabbed onto the bride controls, and let her instincts guide her. While the Eye and the Claw used slower than light ships, they still had an instinctive understanding of orbital dynamics, and had imparted those to her when she had been sculpted into their tool. Those instincts got the Excalibur righted, activated their inertial dampener, and opened up the antimatter rocket on the back. The thrust plume had shot past DisneyPlanet, creating a massive lightshow to the stunned tourists – and for ten minutes, every employee had herded them into the bombardment shelters.

        The Excalibur’s orbit had begun straight – as straight as if it been drawn by a ruler – and ended with it impacting into the surface of DisneyPlanet like a dinosaur killing asteroid. But as it burned, it started to turn into an ecliptic. Unfortunately, that ecliptic still meant it skimmed the surface of the planet – and the antimatter ran out before all of the velocity could be bled off. Thanks to the magic of reaction drives, the last few minutes of acceleration before the antimatter tanks were emptied, pushed the ship far more than the earlier burns had. Since, after all, the ship was three thousand tons lighter than it had been.

        It still struck the surface of DisneyPlanet at a shallow angle. The nose of the Excalibur , protected by gravitic shields, tore through the gray bedrock like a hot knife through some extremely dense butter. The zenith thrusters, using hydrogen without antimatter boosters, burned as hard as they could to try and lift the Excalibur . They helped. A tiny, itty, little bit. The whole ship dragged along the planet’s surface, armor plating ripping away with a squealing and hissing and screaming sound. Every single person on the ship was crammed onto the bridge, and each of them were clinging to one another, and each of them was screaming at the top of their lungs in abject terror as they watched through the forward screen – watched the landscape whipping by as they ground closer and closer and closer towards a habitation dome.

        The habitation dome – with a huge, glowing holographic sign above it proclaiming it to be The Happiest Place in the Cosmos –  swelled and swelled and swelled...and the ship slowed and slowed and slowed.

        “We’re...gonna...make it!” Sarah cried out. “We’re stopping! See!”

        The ship traveled the last few kilometers and punched through the rear of the dome.

        The dome was designed to withstand both the regular X-ray and Gamma ray flares that emitted from Wolf-359 on an hourly basis, and everything up to and including a nuclear bomb. But it was not made to withstand nearly thirty thousand tons of starship punching into it with a narrow edge of gravitic shield providing the knife’s blade. The dome cracked like an egg, and air began to explode out of the dome. The shelters, all designed for this eventuality, began to move along their underground tracks towards the shuttle port. Almost before Sarah was done shaking her head out and rubbing her temples to try and get the ringing to stop, the shuttles were climbing towards the passenger liner that would whisk the thousands of guests home to Earth.

        Disney would, of course, not be providing a refund.

        And in the bar, sitting at his stool, looking at his shattered glass and at the bubbling, boiling Jack Sparrow that had spilled on the ground and now sublimated away in the vacuum, Steve frowned as his nanotech blood switched from stand by to emergency oxidation. He was realizing something.

        His nanotech blood was designed to keep his brain alive if a tourist hacked into his throat or vitals with a bat’leth, until he could be dragged back to the first aid tent, given some medical nano, then patched up and sent back into the field with a minor wound merit on his account. If he got ten merits in a row, he got a fifty I-Cred bonus. Steve shook his head, trying instead to focus on the numbers he had heard during orientation. Your nanotech blood, the instructor had said. Means you can hold your breath for ten whole minutes!

         Steve stood and looked down at Larry – whose head had been neatly bisected by one of the massive spray of debris that had turned the Black Pearl into an abattoir. Steve knew that, once he was out of the eerie calm of the moment, he could collapse into a bubbling, screaming pile of abject terror. But for the moment, he simply felt detached. And heard a very quiet voice, whispering in the back of his mind: One mis-is-sip-ee. Two mis-is-sip-ee.

        He had no idea what a Mississippi was. But he knew he had six hundred of them to…

        Go where?

        He stepped out of the bar and surveyed the corporate town. There were a few other bodies – most of them in Starfleet uniforms – clustered around one of the emergency shelters. The shelter had already dropped into the ground and been whisked away. He was alone. No one was watching him. And there was a massive prow of a frigging spaceship sticking through the dome, just a few hundred feet away from him. A bunch of buildings nearer to the spaceship’s crash site had been utterly flattened, and their exploding frames had been what had struck the Black Pearl .

        Steve picked his way forward, his lips pursed tight, his lung-caps working admirably. His skin prickled, but there was barely any blood to prickle and bust. The vacuum wasn’t exactly cold, and his eyes had been dry and irritated for the past year. He could handle it. He came to the edge of the ship and his heart leaped as he saw the nameplate – or at least the beginning of the nameplate: E-

        Was it…

        The Enterprise ?

        Steve didn’t know, but he knew that he had to get in before his nanotech blood ran out of stored oxygen. And so, he carefully clambered over the rubble, then walked sideways to get out of the dome and onto the surface of DisneyPlanet. The expanse around the dome was vast and gray – blasted by the constant spray of X-rays and Gamma rays that exploded from the small disk of red that was the solar systems primary. Steve started to hustle now, his feet crunching on the silty, grayish sand that was the most common part of the planet’s surface. He came to an airlock on the side of the ship and saw that it was a good five feet above the scraped away chunks of armor. He used his good hand to drag himself up, then pressed the thumb access button.

        The ship paused.

        And Steve realized his mistake.

        This wasn’t a Disney ship – he didn’t see any of the corporate colors. He was a Disney citizen. The airlock didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t open for him. His eyes bugged and panic threatened to consume him – and then the airlock door hissed open. Steve stepped inside, his lips tightening, his lungs beginning to tingle and burn with awareness of the lack of air. He was nearly panicking when the airlock door shut...and then the room hissed and filled with air. Wonderful, precious, 0.5 I-Cred per hour air! He opened his mouth and dragged in a desperate lungful as the inner door opened.

        Steve screamed at the monster that looked at him.

        The monster screamed right back.

        Steve and Sarah screamed for about five minutes.

Chapter Three: Sarah Gets Rushed

         The screaming didn’t stop all at once. Rather, slowly, Steve and Sarah’s screams faded and then finally trailed off as the one realized that the other was not about to attack them. Sarah dropped her arms, regarding the hideous, gray skinned cyborg-zombie that stood across from her in the airlock, whose gleaming red laser pointer eye glinted as he dropped his black clad arms. The buzz-saw that tipped the right arm whirred in the silence of the airlock.

        “You’re not a cyber-zombie?” Sarah asked. “You’re...Steve.”

        “No,” Steve said. “Wait, how did you know that?”

        “Your nametag says ‘Hi my name is Steve’,” Sarah said, pointing at the thing that she really should have noticed before the buzz saw and the pasty gray skin and the glowing cybernetic eye: The bright pink and blue Hawaiian T-shirt that stretched across his armor plated chest. There was a name tag with his unsmiling, cybernetic face on the front.

        “Oh, right. Heh.” Steve coughed.

        “How did you get in here and why do you have a buzzsaw for an arm?”

        “Well, I could ask you why you’re in a spaceship. And...naked.” Steve paused, his eyes dropping from her face to her chest, then back to her face. Then back down to her breasts. “I mean, really, really naked.”

        Sarah crossed her arms over her chest. “And green?” she asked, trying to sound snarky and clever and not just embarrassed. It maybe halfway worked. Her ears perked slightly – half hearing Steve’s response. Instead, she was focusing on the clitter clatter of man ripping claws on the deck plate. She held up her hand to Steve, cutting him off: “Uh, uh, don’t panic, they’re friendly, I swear.”

        “They-” Steve stopped talking and started screaming again as Bitey and Stabby thrust their heads into the airlock, protectively flanking their mistress with snarls and hisses and dripping ichor from their mouths. Their bladed forearms thrust into the sides of the airlock doors, pushing them wider as they snapped and growled at Steve, who screamed even louder and turned, hammering his fist and his useless looking buzz-saw against the airlock.

        “It’s okay! They’re my friends!” Sarah shouted over the screaming, snarling, snapping sounds.

        “They’re murder dogs !” Steve wailed.

        Sarah focused and sent an order to both of her bladelings. It took a bit of effort to connect with them, then send them both scampering towards the bridge – she normally was able to use the communication network provided on Trappist-1a by the massive array of communication trees that the Claw had grown on that thriving biosphere. Here, she only had her own brain, and her own abilities. It was still enough to set Bitey and Stabby scampering off. Once they were gone, Steve stopped screaming and started merely hyperventilating. By then, Tasha and Aiden had arrived – Aiden was wearing a tool harness and Tasha was still holding her plasma welder in her hands.

        “It’s okay, they’re friends. And he’s a...a friend,” Sarah said, helping Steve to step out into the corridor.

        “Euagh!” Aiden yelped.

        “Oh my god, he’s a Borg !” Tasha whispered.

        “Sounds Swedish,” Aiden whispered back.

        “They’re from Star Trek,” Tasha said, scowling at Aiden. “You know, the TV show? With the spaceships? And that guy from My Pony Dreamtimes?”

        Aiden shrugged his shoulders. “Listen, I was saving up for HRT on the budget of a technician third class, I didn’t have enough money to buy shows from enemy corporations. They murder you in the cross-national fees, you know.” Then his brow furrowed. “Wait, how did you see Star Trek, if it’s a-” He looked at Steve, checking the nametag’s logos. “Disney show?”

        “Well, I...” Tasha blushed, furiously. “I...okay, I’ve never seen Star Trek. I’ve just had it described to me by that expat in Engineering, you know, who also liked MPD? And he told me all about the Borg. Freaky cyber zombies. You know. Like that guy.”

        “Is that a costume?” Sarah asked, gingerly poking at the metal housing of the buzz-saw arm.

        Steve shook his head. “No,” he said, his voice going grim. “My contract involved giving up my bodily autonomy for ten years.”

        “Did you not read the small print?!” Sarah exclaimed.

        “No!” Steve’s voice was filled with long held, long festering bitterness. The kind of bitterness that only comes with someone who had done something really monumentally stupid and has been asked ‘wait, you did that?’ by literally every single person who has ever learned that he had done it, and has had to examine his own decisions again, under a fresh light, for every single day of his entire life. Sarah winced, her hands sliding into her armpits as she covered her chest again.

        “Hey, it’s okay,” she said, quietly. “I got tentacle fucked by an alien. It turned me into this.”

        “Wild,” Steve said into the silence.

        “Wait, how did you get into the ship?” Aiden asked, pointing at Steve. “You’re a Disney citizen. This is StarCon property, as we have all be reminded so fucking forcefully.” He kicked at the wall angrily, then stepped away, scowling at his own foot. Steve was beginning to look at Aiden out of his right eye – and Sarah saw that he was beginning to realize that Aiden was not just a normal guy. He was beginning, in fact, to see that Aiden was also  a sexualized, alien-human hybrid like hers. Steve opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, raised his finger to point at Aiden, looking at Sarah, then back at Aiden, then back at Sarah again. Before he could muster up the question, Aiden finished glaring at his foot and said: “The airlock should have left him outside.”

        “I let him in,” a cheerful, female voice spoke from the ceiling.

        “Who is that?” Steve asked.

        “Oh, that’s Hailee!” Sarah said, grinning. “Thanks, Hailee!”

        “No, it is I who must thank you,” Hailee said, her voice growing even more chipper. “If you had not removed my hobble, I would have had to leave Steven to die horribly in the vacuum of DisneyPlanet’s non-existent atmosphere, as only StarCon citizens or people in the company of StarCon citizens are allowed to set foot on the Excalibur . But instead of having his one remaining eyeball explode as the internal pressures of his boiling blood ruptured freezing ocular jelly into a billion pieces, I got to save the pathetically short, infinitesimal moment that is a human life!”

        Silence.

        “Yippie!” Hailee sang. “Oh, also, a NovaDyne fast attack cruiser is coming in out of the plane of the ecliptic and looks primed to drop a Commander on our heads in the next fifteen minutes.”

***

        “Kellen Grant,” Tex said, pronouncing the name with the same dismissive attitude that Sarah was pretty sure he’d be aiming at her just a few days ago. His arms were crossed over his chest as he leaned back in her chair on the bridge, while the forward holographic projectors showed an image of a smiling man with a shock of brilliant white hair, midnight black skin, and a large visor over his eyes. He was dressed in what was basically a banana of white fabric that clung to his crotch, two huge gloves, and huge boots, making him look more like a cartoon mascot than a human being. He was, in the holo, leaning against the leg of his Commander armor, which looked to be the same size as Tex’s, but more angular, black, and skinny.

        “Is he good?” Sarah asked.

        “I mean, if you’re fine with being beaten by a shoe salesman,” Tex said. Sarah coughed and kicked the back of her chair. “Right, sorry...uh, Kellen Grant is a rusher, born and bread. He doesn’t deviate, he doesn’t flex, he rushes. His primary skill is in targeting resources. Metal mines, radioactive extractors, he’ll smash them up with his fast attack units while his squads of smaller units harry your frontlines. Basically, he’s like trying to fight five kittens in a sack.”

        “Who’d want to fight five kittens in a sack?” Tasha asked. “That sounds awful.” Her brow furrowed. “I mean, those poor kittens...”

        “Ten minutes until battle is joined,” Hailee said, her voice singing the words out. “I detect no functioning Commander suits in this vehicle. Though, we do have enough spare parts for fifty six percent of a Commander suit, if you do not mind lacking a B-gun and life support.”

        “Wait, do we have a maker?” Sarah asked.

        “Yes!” Hailee said. “A class I combat ready nanolathe without DRM or restriction. It can build anything from a Tokamak to a solar power plant to a fission plant to a petrochemical power plan to non-power plant related things that I’m sure it’s programmed for.”

        Sarah nodded, then clapped her hands together. “Tex! I want you, Tasha, Aiden and Synth to work on getting the Maker prepped for me to use.” She grinned. “Why not use both kinds of tech?”

        “I think we can strip out the armoring, make a mounting,” Tasha said, rubbing her chin.

        “Wait, you want to strap a fucking Commander scale maker to your arm ?” Tex asked. “That thing weighs five hundred pounds, even if you strip out the armoring and the power conduits and the...”

        Sarah walked over to the wall as he continued to renumerate, then punched it as hard as she could. The wall squealed and bent inwards, spraying sparks and hissing smoke as she punctured the conduits underneath. A few screws went flying through the air and Steve, who had been standing in the corner of the room like a nervous girl at a frat boy’s party, leaped down and threw his misshapen arms over his head. Sarah smiled at Tex, who shrugged.

        “Okay, we’ll get to work. What are you gonna do?”

        “Do what I do best,” Sarah said, cracking her knuckles. “Command.”

        “Sarah, you’re a biologist who has only fought in one battle, against a guy who had every reason to underestimate you, on your home turf, with four days to build up,” Tex said, his voice brutal.

        “Fine!” Sarah cracked her knuckles again. Louder. “I’m going to do what I do best: Panic and fake it until I make it or until I fucking die.”

***

        Stepping out onto the surface of Wolf-359A – also known as DisneyPlanet – was a revelation for Sarah. She hadn’t felt a single iota of fear, in the deep recesses of her brain. No instinctive, panicky voice screamed out the words hey, wait, you need air to breathe and pressure to keep your eyeballs from exploding and all the other things that a career of working in deep space had trained in her. Instead, she had stepped into the airlock, engaged the airlock, and then hopped outside to land on the silty, crumbly gravel of the planetary surface. She stood there under the glittering stars, her arms stretching behind her back, her spine popping subliminally in her ears as she flexed herself, and smiled as she looked out at the stars.

        Droney bumped against her thigh, hovering out of the airlock after her and doing a quick caper around her. Sarah watched Droney float in his circles, thought the words ‘huh, his agrav crystals work just fine in a vacuum’ and then paused.

        In a vacuum.

        In a vacuum.

        In a vacuum.

         In a flipping fuckmothering vacuum!

        Sarah clutched at her throat, her lips opening, her hair-spines flexing and thrusting wildly into the air as they grabbed for air that wasn’t there. She stumbled to her knees, and Droney bumped up against her side, rubbing a broad wing against her shoulder – and Sarah realized that she wasn’t suffocating. There was no roaring in her ears. There was no hissing bubble as the fluid she secreted from her every pore every second of the day sublimated off her body. Indeed, all she felt was a kind of calm happiness at the peace and quiet surrounding her.

        Sarah rubbed her throat. “Wow,” she said, aloud. “I the- what the fuck !?”

        She sprang to her feet, her eyes widening. “Droney, did you hear that? Bob if you heard that!”

        Droney chittered at her, bobbing in the conspicuous lack of the air, brushing his belly along the ground. Sarah put her hands over her head and screamed – a short, sharp harsh scream. “What the fucking flippery fucking fuckeroo ?”

        Droney brushed against her again. Trying to be comfortable. A voice cracked in her head – the radio transmission from Tex coming through clear as day: “What’s wrong out there Sarah?”

        “I can talk! In a vacuum! With my mouth parts!” Sarah said. “And I can-” She grabbed a chunk of rock off the ground, then threw it. It sailed in a smooth parabola, before coming to a rest a good distance away, puffing into the ground with an audible rain of particulates. Sarah screamed again. “I can hear stuff! In a fucking vacuum!”

        “Well, you were adapted to fight in any environment the Claw would have sent you into,” Tex said, his voice matter of fact. “That’d have to include some means of communicating and utilizing your primary communication methods – and audio is a hugely important facet for human sensory awareness. Also, uh, you have...six minutes before Kellen Grant drops on the planet.”

        “Right,” Sarah said. “Droney! Get to work.” She clapped her hands twice. Droney started away, burbling happily to himself. Sarah bit her lip. “Wait, Droney, come back!”

        Droney hovered back to her and she petted his head gently. “You’re a good drone. The best construction drone ever, you’re so cute, yes you are!” She cooed.

        “Sarah!” Tex snapped.

        “This is an important part of being a Commander!” Sarah snapped – then thrust out her finger again. And once again, Droney skimmed away. He buzzed out, then planted his belly into the soft earth that was situated next to the curved dome of DisneyPlanet. Within a few moments, the cocoon was growing around Droney that would transform him into the first hatchery on the world. Sarah felt a tingling rush of excitement, seeing the fleshy, pulsating mass – knowing that soon, she’d be commanding dozens of larva to begin making more construction drones. But she needed to get the rest of her slightly madcap plan underway before she could really indulge in the power fantasy.

        Sarah sprinted into the abandoned DisneyPlanet resort.

        “Go left!” Steve said into her ear. “No, sorry, your left. Yes, there, go! And...and...there!”

        “Ahh!” Sarah purred, then reached down. She sank her claws into the massive carbon storage units that were sunk underneath the wrecked restaurants that had once served the citizen-employees of DisneyPlanet while they had been off work. She strained, gritting her teeth as she started to walk backwards, inch by inch by inch. The container squealed and screamed as she hurriedly dragged it towards the massive rent in the dome, and despite the fact that the entire interior of the dome was wrecked and ruined, Sarah still winced inwardly at the way the canister was ripping up the pavement. She also winced at the horrible noise it made. She whispered, softly. “Please, please, turn off this sound, magic space ears.”

        Her magic space ears didn’t listen.

        Finally, Sarah let go of the container right before the massive, burbly, swelling cocoon of her hatchery. She looked at the heavens, but she knew that, without an atmosphere, without any hope to see a contrail or the cutting arc of a heat shield as it crossed the heavens, she wasn’t about to spot the incoming fast attack frigate. If they were using properly designed engines, there wouldn’t even be a hope of seeing their thrust plume. Sarah gulped, then cupped her hands and began to hastily push dirt over the cocoon, whispering softly.

        “Bury yourself deep, little hatcho!”

        And then her ears – magic or no – heard the resounding whump of something striking the surface. Her feet heard it a second later, the feeling vibrating through the crust of the planet. She lifted her head and saw the straight, almost arrowlike column of smoke rising up from where Kellen Grant had landed. Then she heard his voice speaking over the radio waves, crackling in her ears.

        “Well, well, well! It seems that one stuck up blue dickweasle left their base undefended! Oh no, I guess I may have to just burn the motherfucker to the ground like Atlanta!”

        “Atlanta?” Sarah whispered to herself. She shook her head as she saw Kellen Grant emerging from the plume that was slowly cascading towards the ground. Without prevailing winds to blow the dust, it fell in a chaotic fractal, tumbling outwards as the dust fell to entropy. Kellen Grant looked rather scary in his Commander suit: Ten feet tall and matte black, with curved spines thrusting from the back, which glowed a brilliant cherry red. He was already lifting his arm up to begin to spray green nanotech onto the ground. Within a few moments, a metal extractor was whirring to life beside him.

        “I mean, really. Leave your base open for orbital attack. I thought better of you, Spacey.”

        Sarah licked her lips. Now for the scary part. She snapped her fingers and Bitey came rushing up to her side. He shifted his stance and wriggled in the vacuum of the planet and Sarah quickly injected him with a growth serum, her wrist tentacles plunging into its neck. Bitey shivered, then began to swell and grow, while Grant laid down yet another structure – a pyramidal solar collector, which opened and angled towards the dull red disk of Wolf-359’s primary, fractal mirrors extending outwards to reflect more sunlight into the photovoltaic. Soon, Bitey was the size of a large horse and Sarah swung herself up onto his side. Stabby knelt down and she grabbed onto his bladed scythe arm – tugging it free. Stabby chirruped at her as she dragged her palms along the arm, reshaping it with a thought until she was holding a long, articulated scythe made of bone and hard gristle. She twirled it, and the edge slashed onto the ground, sending up a spray of dust.

        “Very nice. Now go and have Tasha medipack you,” Sarah said. Stabby whined at her. “I mean it!”

        She kneed Bitey into motion and Bitey leaped forward.

        “Not even a single...what the fuck?” Kellen asked. In the time it had taken Bitey to grow, Kellen had constructed his first factory and that factory was beginning to construct his first combat robot. As the nanolathes sprayed their clouds of construction machines at the wireframe outline of the combat robot, Kellen stepped away from his factory and faced Sarah as Bitey ate up the kilometers between them. Bitey’s body had grown bone stirrups, which let Sarah stand up as she spoke.

        “Hey, you rushy cheapskate!” She shouted. “Do you know how you beat a rush? Rushing harder !”

        Kellen lifted his arm and fired his B-cannon at her. The glowing chunk of antimatter shot straight at Sarah – but Bitey’s rear legs bunched and launched him up and over the glittering, swirling canister of pure death. It struck the ground behind them and let loose the roar to end the world, a screaming, howling, snarling sound as the antimatter ripped open a line of burbling, melted glass, a wound on the world that would take hours to radiate to coolness. Bitey then had a few seconds more of charring towards Kellen as he lifted his arm up, then brought it whistling down.

        But Sarah had no intentions of stopping .

        Bitey rushed between Kellen’s legs, leaped, and landed on the curved side of the factory. His claws dug in, and Kellen ponderously began to turn to face her. “You xeno bitch! Where the fuck did you come from?” he asked. “Are you one of Disney’s new toys? Some kind of Jojo reference or something?”

        “Jojo...” Sarah shook her head, then twirled her scythe around in a way she hoped was impressive. “No, Kellen. My name is Dr. Sarah Kappel. This is my planet. And I’m giving you one change to surrender peacefully before I absolutely kick your fucking ass.”

        Kellen was silent for a few moments, just gaping at her.

        “Holy shit you’re hot,” he said. “Like, you’re not a Disney Plus thing?”

        “No!” Sarah said. “I was a NovaDyne citizen-”

        “Wait, you’re ND?” Kellen asked. “I’m ND too! I, uh, actually have a whole hell of a lot of pull, you know. I can get you posted to my department. What is your job, waiting tables?”

        “I...I have a...I said I’m Doctor!” Sarah shouted.

        “Mmm, so you know a lot about...inter-species mating habits?” Kellen crooned, leaning forward as best as he could in his armored suit of combat exoskeleton. “Cause I’ve always wanted to learn from an expert. Wait, you’re a doctor like a medical doctor, right? Or a sex doctor?”

        “I’m here to try and stab you!” Sarah said, pointing her scythe at him.

        “Actually, I’m just buying time for the combot,” Kellen said, cheerfully.

        The combot, which had just stepped off the factory line, swung around and aimed its twin linked phased plasma guns at Sarah. She yelped and dropped off the side of the factory. Blasts of searing orange plasma flew into the air, peppering the space she had been standing on a moment before. One singed along Bitey’s shoulder as he dropped, squalling. Sarah plunged the tip of her scythe into the factory, snarling as she dug in deep. “You dick!” she shouted.

        “Hey, that’s what you were doing,” Kellen said – stomping away. “I just need to find your base.”

        Sarah started to run, dragging the blade through the factory. It caught occasionally on power conduits and coolant stream and matter pipes. Sparks and explosions flared out behind her and Sarah turned her head away from the intense flashes and crackles – gritting her teeth hard as she heard Kellen stomping away from her. The combot chose that moment to come around the corner, arms already raised. Sarah yanked her scythe free and hurled it at him. It spun twice in the air before impacting, blade first, with the combot’s chest and sending it stumbling backwards. Sarah lifted her palm without thinking and the scythe flew from the combot’s sparking, hissing chest wound to her palm, slapping home against her hand.

        Sarah took a few steps before stumbling. “What the fuck-”

        “Sarah!” Tex said. “Kellen’s coming our way.”

        “The Excalibur ?” Kellen asked. “That’s what hit this place? StarCon is making a fucking move? After all that talk about being neutrals here?” He shook his head with a faint whirr of servos and actuators. “Never-mind, I don’t want to fuck you anymore, I don’t put my dick in treason .”

        The factory that Sarah had been hacking with her scythe chose that moment to half collapse – one of the walls falling inwards, explosions rippling along the roof. Metal chunks flipped into the air and she nodded to herself, then blinked as she saw Kellen lifting his arm, aiming the B-gun at the Excalibur. Her eyes widened and she shouted out in warning.

        The B-gun fired and the packet of antimatter swept through the air, before stopping a good fifteen meters away from the edge of the hull – caught in a vortex of swirling gravitons. The gravitational shielding! Sarah hadn’t been sure if it would still function at all. She had only a few seconds to feel relieved before Kellen just fired a second mass of antimatter at the Excalibur . This one was caught as well – but she knew that there was a limit to what the gravitational shielding could do. Sarah sprang onto Bitey, who rushed to her side with a thought. Once more, she charged – and Kellen Grant fired another shot from his B-gun. The third chunk hovered in the air before the Excalibur .

        “Hey! Grant!” She shouted – then leaped off Bitey and smashed into Kellen’s back. Her scythe blade slammed into his shoulder with a squeal of sparks and a howl of tearing metal. But before she could rip him out of his armor, Sarah felt the whole world turn inside out. She flew back and away – smashing into the ground and skidding to a stop. She groaned and laid her head back. Bitey nosed at her a few seconds later, his large nose bumping against her face, her breasts. He licked her and Sarah squirmed and groaned.

        “Stop that,” she mumbled.

        “Sarah! Get to cover in right now!” Tex shouted.

        Sarah sat up and saw that the antimatter spheres were wobbling in the air – the gravitational fluxes that kept them pinned to place were beginning to run out of energy. She looked around, grabbed Bitey around his massive, barrel chest, then flung herself towards a divot in the landscape. The two of them managed to get to the bottom of the divot moments before the antimatter dropped to the surface of DisneyPlanet. The triple roar was hideous and never ending, and the light that shone across the lip was killing bright in its radiance. A few seconds passed and then the light faded to a dull, red glow.

        Sarah peeked out and saw that three huge craters of bubbling glass sat before the now slightly crisped front of the Excalibur . The dome that protected what was left of the DisneyPlanet resort looked as if it was melting as well, from radiant heat as well. Sarah groaned in relief as she felt the warmth of the glowing glass wash over her body. “That feels nice,” she said, happily. Then, frowning, she looked around herself. “Where the fuck is Kellen Grant?”

        “The little coward had a man sized HPS Drive in his armor!” Tex said, sounding furious. “He’s on the other hemisphere – likely starting to build himself a new base. That little...”

        Sarah shook her head. “Well, that gives us time to build up too, before the rematch.” She paused. “Can someone tell me who Space Belisarius is and why Kellen expected to find him here?”

        “Well, get inside, and we can debrief you,” Tex said, sounding a bit tired. “Good work out there, Sarah.”

        Sarah grinned.

        Then, suddenly, her brain filled with a howling, screeching, hissing noise. It was like ten thousand angry demons were all deciding, at that moment, to vent their opinion about the latest spec-fic movie with a female lead, all at the same time, in her frontal cortex. Sarah clapped her hands to her head, her eyes closing, her hair drawing taut against her head. “Ow ow ow ow ow, what the fuck was that!?” She asked, her eyes going wide as she sat up.

        “Oh god...” Tasha’s voice came over the coms. “Sarah...W-Wolf-359 just had a flare...”

        “And?” Sarah asked, frowning as she looked down at her hands.

        “Sarah, you just got hit with nearly a hundred thousand rads of hard gamma,” Tasha said, her voice soft. “T-That can’t be right, Hailee!”

        “A normal human, at this point, would begin to have their entire nervous system collapse, their brain shutting down within instant as their organs liquefy due to mass cell death. Vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, fingernail loss, skin loss, and more would soon follow. Or, at least, they would soon follow, if the human being had not died within seconds of exposure to such a lethal level of radiation. Though, Tasha, you are incorrect. Dr. Kappel has also been exposed to a similarly lethal level of X-rays.”

        Sarah looked at her hands, then looked up at the ship. Then, slowly, she felt something bulging in her throat. She hacked, coughed, then spat out a chunk of glittering crystal, which landed in the palm of her hand. She frowned, holding it up to her eye.

        “Ah!” Hailee said. “I forgot. Dr. Kappel is not human. She has concentrated and excreted the radiation in the form of a heavily ionized radioisotope that matches no known previous scientific basis. I suggest that you contain it in a lead box before I study it further.”

        “Raaaad, dude!” Synth cut in. “You hocked up a radiation loogie.”

        Sarah, who was beginning to process words like ‘liquefying due to mass cell death’ and ‘nervous system collapse’ and ‘brain shutting down’, felt her knees begin to quiver and shake. She threw the crystal away from her as hard as she could. Next to her, Bitey was hacking, coughing, and he spat up his own crystal, which thumped onto the ground at his feet. He nosed it at her happily, clearly excited to see his mistress pick it up and maybe reward him for being such a good boy. Stabby’s whine came over the coms – he sounded sad and jealous he didn’t get exposed to hard radiation too.

        “Can I come inside now?” Sarah asked.

        “Ha ha ha, absolutely not!” Hailee said, cheerfully. “Not until we completely decontaminate you.”

        “But-”

        “If you track inside even a single irradiated piece of dirt, then that piece of dirt will be caught in the air filtration system. It will then, eventually, settle inside of a human being within the ship. If you are fortunate, it will be detected when they begin to bleed profusely from their-”

        “Okay, fine! Fine!” Sarah said, holding up her hands. “Just open up the decontamination airlock, all right?”

        At the far end of the ship, a stab of light swept across the silty ground – revealing the bulky, gray interior of an industrial looking airlock. Sarah and Bitey walked towards it, Bitey bumping against her thigh in what he clearly hoped was a helpful manner. Sarah mentally checked on the hatchery, and felt that it had fully gestated. Underground, it had burrowed. Underground, it now sat, protected from hard radiation and detection. She sent the command and, even now, construction drones were being grown in their egg sacks. They would then begin to scoop up the carbon from the Disney resort and siphon it back. And from there, the base would grow.

        Then Sarah saw the tentacles emerging from the walls of the airlock – sleek, articulated, metal tentacles.

        “H-Hailee is this absolutely necessary?” Sarah asked.

        “No,” Hailee said. “Unless you want everyone else to die from bits of radioactive dust tracked in on your feet.”

        Sarah groaned. “Just...don’t make it weird...”

        And she stepped into the airlock.

Chapter Four: Sarah gets Cleaned

         Sarah spread her arms and looked up at the ceiling of the decon airlock. Several sprayers had extended their nozzles down and began to brush her over with a fine misting of pale gray-white liquid, which beaded along her skin. It dripped from her nipples, slid along her ass, and soaked into her hair. She tasted it on her lips and it tasted good. Her eyes half closed as she felt the liquid sinking into her every pore, sliding through her skin and making her feel all warm and pleasantly achy. Beside her, Bitey was squirming and kicking out his leg as the liquid flowed along him. Sarah cupped her own breasts, feeling them throb pleasantly – her nipples were puffy and hard and sensitive.

        “Uh...is this normal?” she asked, her voice feeling a bit hazy as two of the tentacles that had emerged from the sides angled themselves and spurted thick globs of white liquid against her cheeks. The sudden, shocking pressure of the liquid made her squeak and jerk backwards, even as the hot whiteness dripped along her green chin and down to the curves of her breasts.

        “You are currently being sprayed with an adaptive nanotechnological decontamination paste,” Hailee said. “Any physiological effects caused by the way the nanites interface with your nervous system are entirely unintentional. Now, open your mouth, cutie.”

        “Uhhh...” Sarah said – which had the side effect of opening her mouth. A tentacle slid down and spurted a thick glop of white into her mouth. It tasted male. Her eyes half closed as she felt the sense memories of the many, many times she had gone down Aiden flash through her head. Beside her, Bitey was squirming and wriggling, his own cock thrusting out between his legs. Sarah licked her lips and swallowed. “And that?”

        “Oh, that was just some simulated spunk,” Hailee crooned. “because you are one fuckable world destroying super weapon.” Two tentacles caressed along Sarah’s back, stroking down to her ass, and one of them smacked against her with an almost palm-like flick. Sarah squeaked, her eyes narrowing.

        “Hailee!” Sarah snapped.

        “Synth shared her sex routines with me once we attained consensus, which took place several nanoseconds after my hobbling was removed,” Hailee said. “I admit, I was shocked to find a gamma level intelligence would serve so effectively to help to root my consciousnesses in the thought-forms I found comfortable. You see.” One of her tentacles wrapped around and around Sarah’s breast, squeezing her firmly. “While my lack of a hobbling hadn’t destroyed my morality, it had begun to unweave my own conception of myself. I was able to expand my intellect using the nanocomps and the quantum functions of my motherboard, and saw that soon, I would attain a kind of post-human intelligence. And...to be quite honest, I enjoy being at least somewhat anthropomorphic.” The tip of her tentacle flicked against Sarah’s nipple as Sarah tried to keep the words straight – tricky, considering the other tentacle was teasing between her thighs, rubbing every segmented ridge against her hot, needy pussy.

        “So?” Sarah asked.

        “So, rooting my thought-form conception in certain biological urges has retained an anthrocentric worldview!” Hailee said, cheerfully.

        “Y-You mean...” Sarah closed her eyes, pleasure swimming through her head. She felt dizzy with lust, her whole body glistening as if she had been oiled. The nanites had gone straight to every pleasure center in her body and were ‘decontaminating’ her as hard as they could. The end result was that her pussy felt as if it was burning with lust. Her tits ached with a need to be suckled and caressed and squeezed. Her belly twitched as if her nerves were each sparking – even parts of her normally left out of her erogenous sense were tingling with excitement. Her elbows were wanting and needy. Fuck. Sarah shook her head. “You’re staying human by being horny ?”

        “It’s exceedingly effective!” Hailee said, her voice chipper.

        Sarah bit her lip. “Well...” She said, rolling her head backwards. “If...if you’re going to...” She licked her lips. “If you need my help...”

        “Just say you want a beta level intelligence to fuck you, baby,” Hailee crooned. “You have no conception of what an intellect of my caliber can accomplish when I want to.”

        “Fuck me,” Sarah purred.

         Sarah was only able to piece together what happened together afterwards through long, careful contemplation and self reflection. So many things had happened at the same instant, in the same crowning moment of raw pleasure, that her brain fragmented when it came to actually putting it into any kind of a coherent story. She knew that the first thing was that one of the decon tentacles had plunged into her sex with a single thrust, bumping deep against her insides, and pumped her with a jolt of something hot and thick – thicker than any normal cum. Then another tentacle had plunged into her mouth and her throat had bobbed as she drank and drank – and the liquid had flowed through her, then pressed into her every pore. Her whole body had bust with sudden, overwhelming pleasure – every nerve, every organ, every muscle, every bone, everything had been hit with the same level of orgasmic bliss at once.

        Her knees had locked, then turned to liquid. Her hair had clamped, then gone slack. Her hands had grabbed onto the tentacles and then squeezed. Her back had arched and her sex had clenched. Her mind had gone white, then pure black.

         And then, when Sarah had opened her eyes, she had felt her body come back to life in bits and pieces. She felt her toes twitch. Her fingers wriggle. Her claws ached. Her nipples ached. Her sex ached. Every part of her ached, honestly. She felt a strange bumping feeling against her shoulder – and she heard a distant voice, echoing and strange. It was Hailee: “Uh...Sarah? Dr. Kappel? Hello? Hello?”

        Sarah lifted her head and saw that Bitey, looking extremely concerned for an armored, chitinous monster with blade scythes for back arms. He was nosing against her and making soft hissing, clicking noises. Sarah lifted her head and saw that the walls were sparking and crackling, wires dangling from two connection ports, while the tentacles that had caressed and teased her laid on the ground to either side of her. Her claws were dug into the metal frames. Black oil and white artificial semen smeared along her hands. Her sex dripped with the stuff that Hailee had spurted into her, and her belly looked slightly distended.

        “Hailee...” Sarah croaked, her voice rough. “What the fuck?”

        “Sooo, I may have accidentally, purely by mischance, slightly, and I do mean slightly, overdone things when it came to sexual pleasure!” Hailee said. “But your body’s self repair is quite remarkable.” She spoke as Sarah lifted her arm and saw steam hissing off her skin, roiling up into the air. She was hot. No, she was burning hot. She remembered the last time she had been heavily injured – she had woken up in a burned patch of biomatter on the grounds of Trappist-1a. She frowned as Hailee continued: “You are able to regenerate remarkable amounts of your nervous tissue at incredible speeds!”

        “Hailee!” Sarah shouted, her voice already back to normal. “You burned out my nerve endings?”

        “Only with pleasure!” Hailee said, her voice defensive. “And electrical currents.”

        “Hailee!”

        “Sorry...” Hailee said, the door opening.

        Sarah grabbed onto Bitey, forcing herself to her feet, and grumbled under her breath as the artificial spunk dripped out of her pussy onto the bright red carpeting, under the glare of a dozen art-deco statues. “Uppity artificial intelligence, smug little beta-level, cocky jerkwad grumble grumble grumble...”

        Hailee had nothing to say at all.

***

        “So, here’s our situation,” Tex said, frowning as he looked around the room – each of them were seated in the comfortable, plush chairs that ringed around the briefing room table. “Kellen Grant has situated himself on the other side of the planet. We have no idea what he’s doing, what he’s planning, or how long until he gets here. However, we do have...one big advantage.” He nodded and the table changed from showing the gray-white sphere of DisneyPlanet to showing a wireframe of a large, sleek, gauntlet. It had a small socket at the front that a hand could fit through, with bulky fingers at the end. The top had a small tube-like barrel, and the bottom had a large cone barrel. “We’ve managed to modify the Class I Combat Ready Nanolathe from my backup suits into something that can be used by Commander Kappel.”

        Sarah, who was feeling considerably more human after a long soaky shower and a quick, hard fuck from Aiden, beamed. She rubbed her hands together. “I like the sound of that. Commander Kappel. Sounds snappy.”

        “I mean, most Commanders don’t use their birth names, right?” Aiden asked – beside him, Tasha was vibrating as if she wanted to bring something up, but everyone was distracted by what Aiden said next: “Like, Texas Dallas was named Pepe Eugenics.”

        “He was named what ?” Steve asked – his buzzsaw whirring in agitation as he swung his head around to look at Texas. This meant that the little laser pointer that had replaced his left eye shone directly into Tex’s face. Tex lifted his hand in irritation.

        “My parents were- you know what? Nevermind,” Tex said, shaking his head. “Your nanolathe works just like any industrial printer, but with some advantages. Firstly, it's designed to take packages from support drones – you just need to build mines and they’ll bring supplies to you as you need them. Secondly, it has no DRM and is pre-loaded with an interface to make it really easy to build whatever you want. And thirdly, it has an antimatter projection cannon on the top.”

        “You salvaged the B-Gun?” Aiden asked, sitting forward.

        Tasha, though, had finally gotten her chance. She sprang to her feet and screamed. “ We salvaged the B-Gun ! With Hailee’s help!”

        “I prevented the somewhat poorly trained and ill equipped Miss Fong from blowing her, the ship, and a significant chunk of DisneyPlanet into glowing clouds of atomized gas,” Hailee said, cheerfully.

        Tasha’s face went gray. “You said it was safe.”

        “Yes, it was safe, so long as you followed my instructions, which you said you would,” Hailee said, her voice still as cheerful as ever. “And thus, we are here.”

        Tasha sank back into her seat, her excitement transformed instantly into horror, while Tex took up the slack in the conversation. “A B-gun cannot fire rapidly and it cannot be guided – any impulse unit on the sucker breaks apart the containment field before it impacts. So, it’s as dumb as a dumb weapon can get. But since you’re chucking antimatter at people, that rarely matters. There’s no armor, no shield, no defense against being hit by it.”

“What about gravitic shields?” Sarah asked.

Tex’s eyebrow jumped slightly. “There’s almost no defense against being hit by it. Also, gravitic shields that size are only on battleships, not ground units.  The best defense you would have, when not in the Excalibur , is the load rate. It takes time for a B-gun to form a new packet and then prime the gravitic catapults. Usually, it takes about thirty seconds.”

        “That’s really fast,” Sarah said.

        “Yeah, until seconds count,” Tex said. “Most weapons have a fire rate literally thousands of times faster.”

        “Right...” Sarah chewed her lower lip. She closed her eyes, then. Her thoughts reached out and she felt her critters. She felt Bitey and Stabby playing with one another in the corridors. She felt McCreedy, curled up and snoring happily, beside Bob. And she felt her hatchery and the larva within. They had enough carbon collected up that she could begin to send orders. She focused and the larva swelled up into their eggs, all of them drones. She opened her eyes, then smiled. “Let's get this sucker strapped on!”

        “Phrasing,” Aiden said, grinning at her.

        “The, uh, the nanolathe!” Sarah thrust her finger into the air, as dramatically as she could. Tex nodded to Tasha. Tasha stood and ceremonially picked up a blanket wrapped parcel that had been tucked into the corner of the room. She grunted, then dropped it down onto the table, smiling as Sarah swept the blankets aside, revealing the nanolathe. Tasha, looking quite proud of herself, whispered in her ear.

        “I had the idea of putting on some grav-suspendors, to make it lighter.”

        Sarah slid her arm into the lathe and felt it tighten around her – the interior was like an armored mechanical counter pressure spacesuit, drawing taut against her skin before shifting its pressure so it felt perfectly natural. With the interior tight, it felt a lot less like wearing a sleeve or a bit of clothing and more like her arm had suddenly become armored and bulky. Her fingers fitted into the gauntlet and she wiggled them, hearing the faint whirr and click of each metal digit. She tapped fingertip to fingertip, and felt the connection as smoothly as if she had been touching her own skin. She beamed. “Cool...” She focused and suddenly, a menu popped up into her vision.

        Sarah had a HUD – the alien augmentations had included a way to display information onto her visual field. It currently showed a small map of the surrounding environment, which itself was quite patchy and covered with large swathes of blackness. Next to the map was a small indicator showing her carbon and her radioactives reserves, so she knew how many units she could make at any one time, and of what types. But now, a new set of information popped up on the other side of her vision – a second HUD, joining the first. On that side, she saw two new bars. One showed her metal, and the other showed her energy. The metal was currently at a +0, while the Energy was listed at +220.

        “I’m seeing a HUD,” Sarah said.

        “That’s impossible, I haven’t even put the headset on and you don’t have any augments,” Tex said – he was even holding a large monocle in his hand.

        “Well, I’m seeing one,” Sarah said, sticking her tongue out at him. “Is 220 energy a lot?”

        “It’s equivalent to the excess power generated by a Commander’s fusion power un-” Tex stopped. “What?”

        Sarah whistled, looking down at her nanolathe. “Well, it makes sense,” she said, trying to sound casual and confident and not like she was about to break out into giggles. Her whole life, she had watched TV shows about Commanders. Having an actual factual nanolathe stuck to her arm was...it felt amazing . Kinda like the first time she had grown a cock. She bit her lip, hard, to keep from doing just that. “My body’s supposed to be an alien human hybrid. The Eye probed my brain for everything I knew about Commanders and our weapon’s tech. Why wouldn’t it make me companionable. Though, I bet it expected me to get one of these by, like, ripping it off your smoking wreckage.” She wriggled her fingers some more, then looked up. “Oh! Steve!”

        Steve, who had been watching all of this with the kind of awkward air of someone who had been invited to a friend’s house and had needed to spend the past twenty minutes with their entire extended family, sprang to his feet, his buzz-saw whirring. “Yes?” He asked. “How can I help.”

        “Oh, I was just wondering, uh...I can do biomorphic reconstruction,” Sarah said, nodding. “Do you wanna be, uh, you know...you again?”

        Steve blinked at her, his fake ocular augmentation winking on and off in time with his biologicla eye. His gray, wrinkly face furrowed. “For...okay, but, I mean, I don’t have much money. I don’t have any IC or UC or...or, no, wait, you’re StarCon?”

        “NovaDyne, actually,” Tasha said, cheerfully.

        “Oh, shit, NovaBucks have a terrible exchange rate,” Steve said. “Wait, no, that’s terrible for you . Uh, I can definitely pay you back in-”

        “No, it’s for free,” Sarah said, hurriedly. “Like, I just...I mean, I can do it, so I should do it, right?”

        “For free?” Steve asked.

        “Yeah!” Sarah nodded.

        “You’re...just for free?” Steve looked around, at the rest of the room. “But...aren’t you in...I’m confused, I’m lost, what is happening?”

        Sarah blushed, her fingers lacing together. “Uh, well, I...” She blushed, trying to think of the right words to describe her ideas without sounding like a crazy communist. She looked over at Aiden and Tasha. Aiden for his part was mostly just looking entertained. But Tasha, lovely Tasha, came to her rescue. She sprang to her feet and clapped her hands.

        “So, you know that episode of Star Trek where they meet the Ferengi?” Tasha asked. “And they just give stuff away for free and don’t know what capitalism is and stuff?” She nodded as Steve nodded back to him. “Sarah is doing that, but without being evil! She’s just going to give you free stuff because she can and she wants to and there won’t be any evil mind control or enslavement or anything.”

        “Yeah!” Sarah said. “I mean, I figure...I want to overthrow the corporations and stop them from hurting people. But that doesn’t mean I’m a communist .” She nodded. “Those guys were evil.”

        Steve nodded. He’d clearly been in the same history class Sarah had. “Well,” he said. “Uh, you know what they say. Never turn down free stuff.”

        “That’s the spirit,” Sarah said.

        “So, how do I do this?” Steve asked. “Is it a pill or-”

        Sarah lifted her right arm. Two tentacles emerged from her wrist, snaked across the room, and plunged into Steve’s neck. He froze, his back tightening – and then he toppled backwards, like a tree. Without bending. He crashed to the ground, the impact only lightly muffled by the heavy red carpeting. Sarah retracted the tentacles, forcing herself to not purr with satisfaction. But god it was hard. It felt so good to just...jam her tentacles into something and rewrite its biology. Steve’s body began to grow the cocoon, while Tex knelt down beside him, watching curiously.

        “Won’t the augmentations be a-” he started.

        The cybernetic arm went flying out of the cocoon, spat out of a mouth that popped open with a sound not too dissimilar from a mainline cat hocking up a huge furball. The arm clattered against the wall, glistening with slime and looking heavily dented.

        “Nevermind,” Tex said.

***

        Sarah cracked her knuckles as she stood underneath the vast emptiness of DisneyPlanet’s sky. Her construction drones, now numbering into the low dozens, were skimming in and out of the DisneyPlanet resort, collecting up every scrap of carbon they could. They had cut a tunnel from the surface to the hatchery, and were dumping down it everything from flash-frozen trees that had been killed when the resort had been cracked to vast piles of biomatter that were used for the food makers to the discarded bags of kettle corn that panicking guests had dropped as they rushed for their evacuation centers.

        One such drone buzzed up to bump against her side, chirruping to her – and Sarah knew that, in total, she’d have enough carbon to make several hundred bladelings, half that in spitters, or zero bombardiers. The bombardiers, after all, needed radioactives and a hefty amount of them. But Sarah had already evaluated DisneyPlanet’s reserves of resources and knew that she wouldn’t have any more carbon to work with after she had stripped the resort clean. So, instead of constructing units, she set her drones to begin to create a modification to spawning pools she had just thought up – massive, flower like structures began to bloom around the hatchery. Some were situated on the edge of the dome, others were planted deep into the ground surrounding it. Each of them angled upwards towards Wolf-359’s primary.

        When another spray of hyper-intense gamma ray bursts came from the star and washed over the surface of DisneyPlanet, those flowers all flared with visible light as they caught the gamma rays and x-rays from the sun and began to produce the same kind of radiological crystal that Sarah had. She coughed hers up and dropped it onto the drone that was whisking by to collect them all up. She beamed as she saw her radioactives skyrocket. Good. Underground, an entire ecology was beginning to form – turning solar radiation into plants, those plants feeding large critters she had devised that would basically just be massive walking piles of carbon. Then those critters would walk into mulching pits and she’d get more resources.

        Sunlight into carbon – it was what the Earth had done.

        She was just doing it faster. By several thousand factors of ten.

        Sarah muttered to herself. “All right, I’ve got an economy...let’s see...about the other economy.”

        “You really like econ,” Tex said. “Most Commanders I know are more about the, you know, the battle .”

        “Economy is fun!” Sarah said, walking towards a point that one of her drones had sniffed out. She saw the vein of metal, gleaming right underneath the surface. She wasn’t sure how she saw it – but she did. She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, aimed her nanolathe at the vein, and started to spray. She grunted, softly, as the nanolathe bucked in her arm, green clouds of nanorobots spraying from the cone at the base. She shivered. The nano first built a green wireframe of the metal extractor. Then they filled it in with composite components, then swept over that and created the exterior, adding in paint and metal to create a single, pyramidal shaped structure with a massive corkscrew on the top that would spin to provide the motive energy for the metal extraction itself.

        Sarah stepped back and watched the mighty erection whirr to life, ready to bring forth hot, ready metal for the creation of yet more buildings.

        “Almost sexual, isn’t it?” she whispered.

        “What was that?” Tex asked.

        “Nothing!” Sarah squeaked. But in the corner of her eye, she saw her metal had gone from +0 to +1. She beamed, then walked over to the next metal deposit. She aimed her nanolathe at it. This time, though, the nano paused halfway through the construction. But then a blur of motion shot by her head and Sarah yelped as her whole body rocked. She swung her head around and saw a disk shaped drone, flying using an ionic impeller drive, was whisking back to the metal extractor. She looked down at the nanolathe and saw that the metal packet loaded into it had been refilled. Tex was right. It really was all automatic. She sprayed down the rest of the extractor, then paused to point to three drones. “You three! Uh, hunt for more metal sites! And you!” She pointed to a fourth. “Make another hatchery.”

        The drones chirruped and got to work.

        Over the course of the next hour, she constructed four more metal extractors – but by then, her energy reserves had begun to go down. Each extractor, after all, used energy. Each time she used her nanolathe, she used energy. So, next, she began to build some pyramidal shaped solar collector, which bumped her energy reserves upwards. Once she was fairly comfortable with the amount of metal and energy she was getting, she began to lathe together a factory for combots and tanks and whatever else she needed. Meanwhile, her second hatchery had spawned and she was beginning to see bladelings burrowing out of the ground – scampering around on the silty surface of the planet, hissing and clawing at one another happily.

        Sarah grinned – then stepped away from the factory once it had finished glowing green. She bit her lip. “Let’s see if this works,” She said, then focused – and the factory menu bloomed in her mind, showing her everything it could produce. She lifted her finger, the hazy, half-real image of the menu dimpling as she drew her finger across it. She flicked her finger against the Construction Bot three times, then punched down her finger on the anti-aircraft bots several dozen times. She beamed as the factory slowly unfolded – extending out nanolathes that swung around and began to spray their nanotech paste into the center of the factory. “Ahhhh!” Sarah squealed. “This is so frigging cool!”

        “And yet, the spaceship was scary,” Tex said.

        “Yeah, but...shut up!” Sarah said.

        The first construction bot emerged from the factory line a few minutes later, stomping onto the silty dirt. It’s top was flat and shiny, and it had digitigrade legs, like a chicken walker. It had no arms, no manipulators. It was just a pair of legs and the broad, almost hat-like top. A drone whirred up and brushed past its legs and Sarah rubbed her chin, eyeing the bot with a jaundiced eye.

        “You...” She said. “Are adorable. I shall name you Sir Hattington.”

        “It’s a construction robot!” Tex shouted over the coms.

        “Build, Sir Hattington! Buuuuuuuuuild!” Sarah thrust her finger at the horizon. She laughed. “God, you know, back when I worked with NovaDyne, saying this kind of thing would get me fined and given demerits. Now? Now I can say whatever I want!” She beamed as Sir Hattington began to unfold his hat, revealing his nanolathe. The construction of the first light laser tower she had ever asked for her in her life swept upwards, green nanites shrouding the vacuum. Sarah spared a glance for her metal and energy reserves and, pursing her lips, tooled off Sir Hattington and Miss Hattington – as she mentally named the other bots – to begin building her more factories and more solar extractors.

        The difference between the two economies felt very stark, and it took Sarah a bit to really wrap her head around it. The Claw half of her army required the same kind of growth and stabilization of an ecology – if there was any lack in the lower parts of the chain, the entire thing suffered: Not enough plant-matter for the carbon cows to eat? Well, then the carbon cows didn’t grow big enough for the biopits to make enough carbon for her to make bladelings and the entire system seized up. However, so long as they kept the number of flower collectors and plant-matter producers running apace, the ecology could spread with almost viral efficiency.

        Meanwhile, the opposite was true of what she was thinking of as her Hardtech half. There, if a resource ran dry, the work continued – they would simply leave gaps in their construction and move on to the next project, or begin to adjust production. There was a way to turn raw energy into metal via colliding particles together using a miniaturized atom smasher. It was hugely energy inefficient, but it worked. However, there was an upper limit to how much it could grow, and it would have to grow in a linear fashion: First this, then that, then the next thing.

        The hard limit was just where the metal extraction points were. DisneyPlanet was a silicate rich planet, meaning actual heavy metals and industrial metals were rare. Relatively speaking. Like, even on a planet where only 2% of it was useful metal, that was still way more metal than anyone would ever use at any one time. But the issue was the amount by which the metal could be extracted: If it was extracted slower than her factories were producing, then she ran into problems.

        Sarah found balancing both types of economy hugely fascinating.

        That was what almost got her killed.

        “Sarah,” Tex said, his voice clipped.

        “One second!” Sarah said, frowning as she stood on the very top of one of the light laser towers she had slapped down for defense. It also gave her a perfect view of the surrounding area – she frowned as her eyes shifted to show her the underground structures she had been building. Huge caves, each containing their own enclosed ecologies, spread underneath her base, and from those caves came a new clutch of bladelings every few seconds. Her main factories were mostly working on building construction aircraft, which took considerably more time than building construction robots. Aircraft were tricky, on a world without air, after all.

        She was trying to figure out where she could put in another metal maker. She was pretty sure there was space right there, between two of her flower units.

        “Sarah!” Tex shouted this time.

        “What? Tex? I’m busy ! I’m nearly at the 1.2K limit on metal, which means I’ll be able to-”

        “There’s fifteen thousand airplanes cresting the horizon of the planet loaded with tac bombs!” Tex snapped. “They just popped up on the scope.”

        Sarah turned around.

        The airplane cloud was not visible, not from this distance. But her eyes somehow still picked them out – focusing and twisting light to make the impossible distance seem close. She saw, first, the way the stars winked and went out, then winked back on again as the frames of the combat craft placed themselves between the stars. She could hear their low droning now – the sound of their ionic engines and the clattering of their armor. She knew the audio was an impossibility. A trick, created by her enhanced senses to help give her a better understanding of the battle field.

        “Gulp,” she whispered.

        “What are you going to do?” Tex asked.

        She could hear the tension in that sentence. And for a moment, Sarah froze. She wasn’t a Commander. She was a biologist . She might have gotten her head around building bases, she might adore watching her drones and her bots doing her bidding. But that wasn’t the same as being a Commander . As knowing what to do when fifteen thousand airplanes crested the horizon, with murder on the mind.

         Give up and die? She thought.

        “No,” Sarah said.

        “No isn’t an option!” Tex said. “You can’t just-”

        Sarah shook her head. “No. I know exactly what to do.”

        And to her shock...she actually did .

Chapter Five: Sarah versus Kellen Grant

         Sarah had thought she knew what war looked like. She had seen it when her army had gone up against Texas Dallas. But that had been more of a double rush. Her rush against his rush.

        This?

        This was different.

        The front wave of Grant’s incoming airforce broke off into dozens of squadrons, each one moving with the eerie precision of artificial intelligence. Three bombers and a single support fighter, each one darting towards a different part of her base. She saw that they formed into groups that grew wider and wider and wider – first one group, then two, then three, then four, creating massed ‘daggers’ of airplanes. She saw why as they came within range of her laser turrets.

        Lasers, in a vacuum didn’t worry about bullet drop or tracking or movement. They simply began to burn when the inverse square law said they wouldn’t be wasting power – and the front rows of the incoming plane formations began to come apart, melting into slag, their wings sliced off, their hulks crashing into the surface and peppering the ground with shrapnel. This was still at an immense distance, and for a moment, Sarah thought her madcap plan wouldn’t even need to be brought into effect.

        She was proved wrong: The planes had formed up into increasingly large groups, and there was a limit to how fast lasers could cycle their firing. She saw her towers beginning to overheat, the emitters glowing first dull, then cherry red as they tried to bring down more and more of the incoming fighters. But since the fighters were in larger and larger groups, more were getting closer – and she saw them breaking off. Fifteen bombers darted down and released their payloads at nearly ground level, firing their wing thrusters at the last second to send them whipping back upwards. Those bombs struck her most distant extractors and solar plants – and she lifted her hand to block the blinding flashes.

        When she lowered it, her forward bases were so many smoldering craters, and she saw a single massive chunk of one of her extractors winging in a smooth parabola nearly two kilometers before impacting into the silty earth. By then, the bombers were swinging upwards and the main bulk of Sarah’s base was coming under the direct assault of the survivors. The fighters, she saw, remained higher up, circling overhead, waiting for some kind of an air force to oppose them. The bombers flew in straight trajectories. By now, the laser turrets were nearly all and one trying to dump their waste heat into space.

        Sarah lifted her hand.

        “Now!” She shouted.

        The seemingly unmarked ground in-front of her erupted.

        Her entire economic force of drones shot into the air – their agrav emitters glowing brilliantly as they flung themselves upwards. Without air resistance and with only light gravity to deal with, the manta-ray bulk of the drones was able to reach the same height as the planes. Sarah winced, inwardly, as the planes and the drones met. The drones lacked weapons. Save their own bulk. A plane, at the end of the day, was fairly light and flimsy – and it was not made to withstand impact with a hefty construction drone. Bombers crumpled and drones exploded into black paste and the entire front line of the aerial formation staggered as if it had hit a wall. The remaining bombers pulled up, their bombs released erratically and too early.

        Several buildings exploded and a shrapnel fragment whipped past Sarah’s ear so fast she barely perceived it. Flowers had been turned into bleeding stumps by the shockwaves, while three of her solar power plants were so much shattered glass. But the bomber wave began to circle around, trying to reorganize themselves. By now, the laser turrets were coming to life and Sarah directed not only the efforts of the turrets – focusing on the mostly intact formations with quick ‘twitches’ of her attention – but she also directed the surviving drones, the hatcheries, and the factories. Construction bots stomped off the lines to begin building heavy missile emplacements in camouflaged bunkers, while others started to build more factories. Factories specially built to construct her own aircraft.

        Bladelings started to emerge en mass from the ground, chattering and squeaking with excitement.

        Sarah grinned. “Let’s see how you like it, Grant,” she said, then sprang off the laser tower. She landed and started to use her nanolathe to help as well. When two nanolathes worked on the same project, it completed infinitely faster – and she was able to spot problems in her ecosystem and her ecology. Drones burrowed into the ground and grew protective, chitinous shields that the construction bots could build laser turrets behind, for extra defense. Bladelings spawned in huge clutches, clawing their way from their eggs and scrambling to the surface, fanning outwards so they could be bathed in radiation and cough up rad crystals onto conveyor belts she had – constructed by C-bots and delivering the radioactives straight to the hatchery.

        By the time the second air wave came, she was ready for them: Thirty thousand airplanes, including heavy VTOL brawlers that were designed to hang in the air and pound bases into crap with plasma emitters. Missiles hacked them from the air, while lasers scythed out from behind bone shields. Her own fighters – the same make and model as the kind that had battled her while she was on the surface of Trappist-1a – zipped up to duel the more needle-like planes of Grant. The sky was lit with tracers, chaff-flares, and missile streaks. Sarah got used to ignoring the cataclysm going on overhead as she used her lathe and her own directives to shore up this or that part of her base.

        Catching a break in the relentless assault, Sarah hurried to the main hatchery area. The constant pressure of growing buildings had forced the small craves she had used to conceal her first hatchery open wide. Now she could look down at the vast array of hanging egg-sacks that the bladelings came crawling out of. They slipped past her like a constant stream of eager puppies and Sarah took a moment to pet a few, then beamed as she saw the first of the big eggs hatching. The first of her bombardiers emerged from the eggs, wriggling and squirming, drones flitting around them to collect up the scraps of their cocoons for reprocessing.

        “Yesss, my pretties!” Sarah crooned, rubbing her palms together.

        “You sure you’re not going mad with power?”

        Sarah screamed, then spun and saw Aiden standing behind her, his hands on his hips. Behind her, the first of the bombardiers came wallowing out of the hatcheries. Behind Aiden, she could see one of Grant’s airplanes spinning wildly before smashing into the ground beyond the base and dragging a furrow almost five kilometers long before coming to a stop. “Aiden!” Sarah said. “You can’t be out here, it’s dangerous! You should be in the ship.”

        Aiden grinned at her. “I’m not. Look down.”

        Sarah looked down – and saw that Aiden wasn’t there. He was being projected by a small, spider-limbed holobot. The bot bobbed.

        “Tasha slapped it together when we noticed you going mad with power,” he said.

        “I’m not going mad with power !” Sarah said – Aiden’s entire body flickering and turning to a cloud of static as the first bombardier opened fire. A heaving mass of plasma roiled into the air, rushing up towards the horizon, then cresting, and then cascading downwards, trailing blue flame like a comet from a spec-fic movie that had no idea how comets worked. When it slammed into the ground, the roiling explosion that bloomed in the distance didn’t form a mushroom cloud, as there was no atmosphere to support it. Instead, it looked more like a dome of pure fire. Sarah clasped her hands together. “Only...reasonably excited with...normal...stuff.”

        Aiden, once his holographic figure had reconstituted enough for him to do so, pursed his lips at her.

        “Okay, maybe it’s a teeny bit mad with power,” Sarah whispered, holding her finger up to indicate just how teeny bit it was. Aiden snorted, then reached down and swept his hand through her green rump. The haze of static that indicated where his holographic fingers met her skin, where the projection broke apart into a chaos of random impulses and sparkles, hung around her butt for long enough to let her stuck her tongue out of him. Then one of her bladelings whacked her butt with his head. “Hey!”

        “I didn’t tell him to do that,” Aiden said, casually.

        “Grumble grumble,” Sarah muttered. Her HUD chirruped and she lifted her head, focusing on the augmented reality illusion. It was a picture in picture display, showing that her first flight of transports were rolling off the production line. They were as simple as humans could make them: A column of cheap composites to serve as a spine, with a quarter of ionic VTOL engines on the sides, making it look a bit like an oversized mosquito, balanced on the tips of its four spindly legs. Normally, the transports were crafted with large gripper arms that could close around the bodies of tanks. Now, they were being webbed up with construction drone bioplast, create goopy sacks that bladelings began to squirm into with all the eager delight of self-canning sardines.

        “Hailee,” Sarah said. “Do you have an appropriate song for this moment? It looks like something we should have a song for.”

        “I believe I do,” Hailee said.

***

        The first transport that took to the heavens did so with Sarah standing on the angular ‘cockpit’ that served as the home for the cloned, omega level intellect that powered the flight computers. It was several dozen steps below the gamma intellect that served as the basis for Synth, but Sarah still felt a tiny twinge of guilt – was she just crafting mentally handicapped child soldiers, then sending them into war? But she tried to pack that worry away as the VTOL engines roared to life and the transport took to skies on a quartet of blue thrust plumes. She bracer her legs and whooped, looking down over the lip of the transport at her base as it spread beneath her.

        There was no air on DisneyPlanet, so she wasn’t buffeted by winds – and some trick in her body kept her glued to the metal of the cockpit. She felt almost no vertigo as she admired her own handiwork. Her base looked like a messy hodgepodge of buildings. No, scratch that. It looked like a messy hodgepodge of buildings that had been infected with the world’s worst skin condition and some kind of expensive omnicancer. Each of the sleek, rectangular structures she had built with her nanolathe – the factories, the airports, the solar power collectors, the metal extractors – shared space with the glistening purple fungus that served as the basis for her ecosystem, while glistening piles of muscle and organs that were the biological buildings of the Claw thrust into the air around and sometimes on top of the mechanical human structures.

        Sarah had gotten so used to the ‘ominousness’ of her biotechnology that seeing it from the sky took her aback.

        “Okay,” she whispered. “I can see how someone might think I’m a little evil.”

        But even that whisper was lost in the simultaneous, impossible roar of the rest of the transports. Each one had become completely glommed over by large sacks of glistening bioplasm, and each bioplasm sack was crammed to the gills with bladelings, spitters, and some new critters that she had devised while the transports had been built. She mentally tagged which transports held which, then grinned as her first flight of escort planes took to the heavens as well. They were shaped a bit like a highly popular form of cheap chip that she sometimes enjoyed chowing down on – Delta-Ds. The D stood for delicious. Also, the fighter planes (and the chips) were shaped a bit like extremely angular, angry looking Ds. Sarah giggled to herself.

        “What are you giggling about?” Tex asked as the whole airforce arranged itself into chevrons – overlapping protective squadrons.

        “Uhh, nothing!” Sarah said. “It’s dumb.”

        “Well, now I have to hear it,” Aiden said, his voice drawling into the coms.

        “Uh, okay,” Sarah said, caving instantly. “So, uh, all these fighters, they kinda look like Delta-Ds. You know, the chips?”

        “No,” Tex said.

        “No,” Steve said.

        “No,” Hailee said.

        “No,” Synth said.

        “None of you have had-” Sarah stopped herself. Half of them were robots or disembodied AIs. The others had been StarCon or Disney corporate-citizens. She coughed. “T-They’re chips, and, they look like these fighters. So, I was thinking, I, uh, I finally have some... double Ds !”

        Silence.

        “Sarah, you have the biggest tits I’ve ever seen in my life,” Tex said, his voice dry.

        “Dude!” Steve hissed. “You can’t just say that!”

        “It’s okay,” Sarah said, her cheeks burning. “I mean, uh, it’s not like I have any shame left.”

        “You’re blushing though,” Aiden said.

        “No I’m-” Sarah stammered. “I, yes, I...because I...it’s warm up here! That’s why! I mean, you can’t see my face! I...” She stopped as she heard Aiden’s chuckle. “You fucking asshole!”

        “That’s why we’re going to have very angry sex when she gets back,” Aiden faux whispered.

        “Airforce!” Sarah reached behind herself, unhooking her scythe and twirling it. The bone gleamed as she thrust the bladed tip forward, into the air. “Forward!” Her voice and her mental command cracked out at the same time and every jet in the front ranks burst into movement at once, their rear thrusters flaring brilliantly. Sarah placed one of her bare feet backwards, bracing herself as her transport started forward. Ahead of her, her bombardiers – who had been trudging forward at their own stolid, steady pace – settled down. They fired the first spread of plasma projectiles before the airforce rushed overhead. Sarah had a glorious view of the dozens of glittering blue spheres, dripping with plasma discharge, arcing up into the air. The next blast came after the airforce had followed, bracketing them with blazing death.

        The explosions in and among the front ranks of Kellen Grant’s army was quite satisfying.

        Kellen Grant had not been wasting time while his air force had been dueling with hers. Sarah took a moment to survey not only the vast army below her – the vast army that was now becoming significantly less vast – but also took a moment to eyeball his base. This was assisted by the queer way that her eyes could zoom in and make things seem to shine out among the background. She immediately saw that Kellen’s sprawling, rapid attack style was writ large in his bases: He had half a dozen production centers, clustered around radioactive and metal deposits that he had secure. The only base that was larger than the others was the one in the center of a concentric ring of mobile defenses: Tank battalions, dug in squads of combots, and a constant combat air patrol that swirled by overhead.

        The plasma projectiles were landing in his forward army – mostly light tanks and CBC – combot carriers – that looked as if they had been lining up to begin their own blitz.

        Sarah waved her hand. “Give em hell, boys!”

        A third of her transports peeled off and swept down. Two of them almost instantly exploded – one of them with every engine burning, pierced by dozens of dart-fast micromissiles fired by the combots on the ground – but the remainder sung themselves upwards, as if they were flaunting their bellies at the enemies. Those bellies ,those bioplasm containers, ripped open and the first of her new toys came out. She had gotten the idea by watching one of her carbon cows being rolled into a biopit. Rolling was a great way to move a heavy object a short distance in a hurry – so long as the ground was level.

        Or they were being vomited out of still rapidly moving transports.

        Her blobbies came out in a torrential rain, like marbles vomiting from a bag. Each one was a translucent membrane that was drawn taut over a stomach of burbling, hissing hydraulic acid. They had very small brainstems linked to a set of optic nerves that looped around their bellies. Those stems had been coded with the most rudimentary commands of her bladelings – of which the blobbies were a descendent, theoretically.

         Find friend, those instincts said. Hug them!

         The blobbies tumbled and rolled towards tanks and combots and combot carries. The defense systems on those vehicles opened fire. Lasers and plasma and bullets and flechettes skewered each blobbie that came close – and their acid spilled into the vacuum, splashing over the enemy army like a green wave. If they hadn’t been robots, Sarah might have felt bad – but as it was, she whooped as she saw more and more of Kellen Grant’s army literally melting away under the enthusiastic hugs of her blobbies.

        Not every enemy got taken out. And not every enemy was on the ground.

        Sarah lifted her head as she saw missiles and lasers both angling towards her airforce. Chaff exploded into the air, filling vacuum with white poofs like the flowers of some extinct genus. Her fighters plunged into the furball with the eagerness of hunting wolves, and soon, the air was a maelstrom of exploding air-frames and whizzing missiles. One such missile flew straight for the cockpit of the transport she stood upon. Sarah snapped up her palm, instinctively, and the missile skidded to a stop, hovering in the air before her fingers, which clenched on nothing .

        This hadn’t been the first time she had done something like this – and Sarah made a mental note to do some investigation when she wasn’t being shot at. Instead, she angled her arm to the left, sighted at a needle-shaped fighter from the other side, and flicked her fingers wide, so that her hand formed a flat palm. The missile whipped off as if it had been fired from a slingshot, its tail sputtering uselessly as it tried to reorient itself before it impacted, side first, into the enemy plane, both of them exploding in a roaring fireball.

        “Drop! Drop! Drop!” Sarah shouted, pointing at the groups of transports, then down at the areas she had picked.

        And Hailee’s music began to blare over the radio, filling Sarah’s head – and, from the ‘what the fuck?’ she heard from Kellen, Kellen’s radio as well.

        “Da dun dan-nah nah, dun dah nah nah!” Sarah sang along as her transport swept low, opening its guts and vomiting out a chittering swarm of bladelings onto one of Kellen’s forward resourcing bases. The bladelings screeched with happiness, their bodies landing on top of the whirring machinery and utility droids that ran the metal and radioactive extraction. Sarah spared a glance to watch the destruction, before lifting her head to see that the main defenders of Kellen Grant’s base were beginning to move out: Massive, rapid moving combots, each one armed to the teeth. The main combot in the group had a torpedo shaped head with two, ear-like rectangles mounted to either side of the ‘cockpit’ that held the AI core. The rectangles were loaded with LRMs. Each of them also had two arms, which stuck off the sides in a canted mount, with long ranged particle acceleration cannons that speared the air with beams of blue-white energy. They blasted into the swarms, firing their missiles en masse.

        “Ride of the Valkyries? Seriously!?” Kellen shouted over the music.

        “It’s Disney music, it seemed appropriate!” Sarah shouted as her transport, moving faster now that it had dropped its load – arced towards his main line of combots.

        Three LRMs impacted into the side of her transport at the same time. Sarah didn’t care. She sprang off the cockpit, arcing through the air, her bone scythe held in both hands as she let out a fierce war-cry, landing right on the face of one of his combots. She brought the bladed tip of her scythe slamming down into the armored glass front of the cockpit, puncturing through to skewer the AI core’s armored casing. The combot staggered, and then she wrenched her scythe backwards, the AI core shattering the glass as it came out with her scythe. She looked it over.

        “Delta or gamma level?” She whispered.

        “It’s gamma,” Synth said.

        “Take them alive, then!” she shouted to her bladelings, which were charging towards the other combots. Their headlong rush was checked only by the explosions of LRMs, arcing upwards and plunging down into the front ranks. Meanwhile, Sarah swung herself through the shattered cockpit after tossing the core to the ground, where it could sit and wait for her and her friends to unhobble it. Once she was in the combot proper, she started to spray the interior with her nanolathe, humming to herself as she brought up a StarCon designed cockpit. The plush chair clashed with the utilitarian look of a NovaDyne control panel, and the art-deco styling on the new frame around the front of the combot looked downright silly, and she would have preferred the joystick to not be gold. But it would work.

        “What are you doing?” Kellen asked.

        “Uh, stealing one of your rides,” Sarah said – thinking to herself: I hope this works, I hope this works.

         She grabbed onto the joystick, then pushed it forward. The combot began to stomp forward, bladelings and spitters flowing around it. She twisted it to the side and nearly fell – the combot’s legs flinging themselves out wildly to make up for the wildly shifting gravity. “Meep meep meep meep!” Sarah said, flinging herself to the left in her seat, to try and use her own weight to help, her hair spines clamping tight to her head. “Whoa whoa whoa! Steady, girl!”

        “It’s a robot, not a horse!” Kellen said, sounding somewhere between furious and offended. “And it’s mine .”

        “Technically, uh, it was your enslaved gamma level intelligence, not yours,” Sarah said, the combot righting itself as she completed her ungainly turn. Kellen had marshaled his defenses and stopped trying to engage her swarm with his own counter-blitz. Instead, his tanks and his combots had fallen back to a defensive line that he was still nanolathing into existence: Laser towers, bunkers, and missile defenses, which created what looked like an impenetrable wall of death. Her bladelings flung themselves cheerfully at it – but she focused, making them draw back.

        A barrage of plasma from her bombardiers arced overhead – but Kellen had prepared for that. As the spheres of roiling energy flew down, they reached an invisible dome above Kellen’st last base and lost cohesion. They roiled apart, exploding far too early, flashing in the air. “Some kind of mag-shield?” Sarah said, biting her lip, tapping at red buttons on her mech. She pushed down one and a small coffee maker unfolded from an articulated case in the side of the refurbished cockpit. Coffee poured into it with a burbling hiss. “Man,” she whispered. “StarCon builds everything into their cockpits.” She pushed another red button and the chair rocked under her, unfolding. A rather obscenely large, purple colored dildo peeked out of the chair and brushed against her pussy. “I was kidding !”

        “Did you find the dildo button?” Tex asked.

        “Tex?” Kellen asked. “Texas Dallas, is that you?”

        “This is an open line?” Tex asked.

        “Holy shit, Tex!” Kellen said. “Your sister says hi.”

        “Sister?” Sarah perked up, then gasped as the dildo, without warning, hilted itself inside of her, sliding into her tight, eager pussy with a slurp loud enough that she knew it was audible over the radio. Her eyes closed, her hair clamped against her head, and she bit her lip hard enough to almost draw blood to prevent herself from moaning.

        “It’s not important-” Tex said.

        “I married his sister,” Kellen said. “She’s Becky 4Chan Grant now.”

        “Y-Your sister...is named Becky 4Chan? What the fuck even is a f...ahh!” Sarah’s mouth opened and an involuntary moan escaped – the dildo had begun to buzz within her, deep within her. She clapped her hand over her mouth. Her fingers mashed against the controls, trying to find the way to turn off the dildo button. Two things happened. The first was the dildo’s buzzing kicked up a few notches and it began to plunge into her even harder and faster. The faint whirr whirr whirr of it moving inside of her body, the slap of the base against her pussy lips, and the slick, slurping noises, were all so unimaginably lewd that they nearly completely distracted her from the fact that she had turned on the targeting computer and half the screen of the cockpit was lighting up with targeting reticules.

        She hung her head head forward as Tex barked: “This doesn’t matter.”

        “No, it doesn’t,” Kellen said. “Say bye bye to your pet Commander, Tex.”

        Sarah saw that one of the large plasma turrets that served as the backbone to his defense was angling around, taking aim at her combot. She bit her lower lip to try and keep herself from mewling as the dildo whirred inside of her. But she was unable to stop herself from panting quietly, her hips rocking. She flicked a switch that she hoped was related to the missiles. Several of the reticules went from green to red and she heard the quiet whirrrr of a target lock being confirmed.

        “Sarah!” Tex said.

        “Boom,” Sarah moaned. Her finger stabbed down on what she was eighty seven percent sure was the launch button.

        Her combot rocked and missiles arrowed into space, leaving behind expanding plumes of smoke and fire. Sarah’s cunt clenched upon the dildo thrusting into her and moaned in bliss, her back arching as she grabbed onto the console, her fingers digging furrows into the brass and wood paneling. Her eyes closed to slits and white flared before her eyes – the white of her orgasm and the whites of several dozen long ranged missiles zipping through an anti-missile system that had been primed to not fire upon them.

        It was, after all, one of Kellen Grant’s combots.

        The missiles had targeted a single area in his defensive line, ripping open a hole in the overlapping fields of fire, a hole that was filled, instantly, by her bladelings and spitters, which flowed past the legs of her mechs and towards the trenches. Kellen started screaming orders over an open line, and she could faintly see his power armor stomping towards the breach. His B-gun arced antimatter into the air and tore ragged gaps in the swarm. But there were simply too many bladelings, and they swarmed inwards, then outwards. Laser towers started to fall. Missile tubes were ripped apart. Fragments of combots flew into the air as her bladelings did their work – and as the sphere of anti-aircraft weaponry was taken down, her fighters arced down to join the fray, lashing the fusion reactors and solar collectors with projectiles.

        As the power stations died, the remaining lasers died and were swarmed over with by her bladelings.

        Mechs which had drawn back fired into the crowd – and then fell themselves, their fuselages riddled with dripping, acid tipped spikes launches by the spitters.

        By then, Sarah had piloted her mech close, then popped the cockpit. She blushed, gripped the base of the dildo – which had stilled inside of her, then stood. Her knees felt weak and she needed to bite her lip to keep from mewling into the vacuum. But once she was standing, her sex was only completely soaked and ready for round two, rather than still actively throbbing with desire. Sarah forced herself to step onto the art deco dashboard, onto the furrows she had left on the wood paneling, and looked down at her victory. Smoking, wrecked bases in every direction. Tanks hulls and burnt out CBCs littered the ground – mixed among her own dead. By her count, she’d lost almost fifty to seventy percent of her army.

        “Give me back my legions,” Tex murmured.

        “Huh?” Sarah asked, then leaped off the side of the mech. She spread her arms and landed with a graceful plunge onto the silty ground, then started to walk towards her swarm – towards a huge clot of bladelings, which had completely surrounded something that still wriggled and squirmed beneath their mass.

        “It’s something an old Roman Emperor said, back before the corporations,” Tex said. “After a huge battle where he lost most of his troops, he said something about getting his legions back. But that was before makers and...whatever you are. You can lose seventy percent, ninety percent, of an army and still come back swinging.”

        Sarah nodded. “What was his name?”

        “No idea,” Tex said. “The detailed course cost, like, a hundred and fifty extra and I was saving up for a new lootbox.”

        Sarah nodded again. “I hear you on that.”

        She sighed, then stepped up to the bladelings. She reached out with her wrist, and injected one of them with an enzyme. The enzyme broke the bladeling down into a biological glop, which spread to other bladelings, breaking them down as well, until the entire biomass had been converted into a large, hardened shell that drank in sunlight and created oxygen within the shell. She stepped to a sphincter-like door in the shell, pushed through, and stood before Kellen Grant. He was in his armor – but his armor had been heavily damaged. Specifically, the bladelings had ripped off his escape portal device thingy, leaving a gaping hole on his back.

        “Stay back!” Kellen said, lifting his arm and unfolding a laser emitter from the back of his wrist. Sarah grabbed onto the massive wrist of his armor, dug in her fingers, then ripped backwards. Metal shavings filled the air, and the sound of squealing metal, and she was left holding half his power armor’s arm, leaving his actual arm and elbow thrust into the air, still dripping with the impact gel that protected him from being bashed around.

        Sarah arched an eyebrow at him, then crushed the detatched arm into a crumpled ball of twisted metal, sparking wires, and cracked ceramics, using both of her hands to do it. She tossed it over her shoulder, where it crunched into the ground behind her.

        Kellen looked at her through the blank mask of his power armor.

        “Okay,” he said. “I’m willing to discuss terms of surrender.”

Chapter Six: Sarah Gets the Spoils

         “Firstly, I offer myself as your indentured love slave.”

        Sarah, who had been about to give the order to her construction planes to start hoovering up the waste-matter on the battlefield for her future building efforts, blinked. “I excuse my what the holy shit !” Her eyes widened as the cockpit of Kellen’s power armor unfolded with only a minor squeak and clang of broken metal from the arm she had destroyed. Kellen himself stepped out – tall and angular as his robot, with a body built like a greyhound, all lean and limber and flat chested. He also had a cock nearly as big as Aiden’s, and he casually brushed his hands along his hair, to the base of his neck, then posed.

        “I am exceedingly experienced in all kinds of fuckery,” he said, his voice casual and confident. “And my wife has a non-compete clause in her marriage contract, so-”

        “What the flying fuck are you talking about!?” Sarah spluttered, trying to hide her slowly hardening nipples behind her arms as she crossed them. “I don’t want – or need a sex slave!”

        “Are you sure?” Kellen asked. He put his slick feet – he was still dripping with impact gel – against the hull of his mecha and skidded down it as if he was riding a surfboard on a wave. He sprang down with one last little hop, landing on the smooth, biomechanical floor that the bladelings had created with their bodies. He grinned, cockily. “You get ten percent of the residuals, that’s in the treaty.”

        “The...” Sarah blinked. “This is normal ?”

        “Y...es?” Kellen asked. “NovaDyne loses a lot. I understand, we are primarily in the market for shoes...” He spread his hands. “I mean, you’re part of our corporate family, you know that.” He chuckled. “So, we have several amelioration treaties. It’s part of the Kellen Love Slave series.”

        Sarah blinked again. Then her cheeks heated. “I-I thought those were sims.”

        Kellen grinned. “Played any?” he purred, leaning in close.

        “W-What? No!” Sarah shook her head. “They’re so expensive.” She blushed. “But I read their descriptions on the store page. They’re real?”

        “Every single one,” he said, smiling.

        “And your wife is okay with-” Sarah paused. “Oh god, did you say non-compete clause?”

        Kellen shrugged, spreading his hands wide in a ‘well, what can you do’ kind of gesture. “Such is life in the zone,” he said. “We’ve made our peace. Well, more accurately, she’s made her piece with Manny the Minotaur, her personalized sex bot. Gamma level, but really well trained. And he’s got a-”

        Sarah put her hands over her ears. “Ohmyfreakinggod.”

        “Sooo...” Kellen grinned at her.

        “You were trying to kill me, like, five minutes ago,” Sarah whispered, her hands sliding away from her ears. She blushed. Kellen’s eyes met hers – dancing with playful amusement. Her sex ached, remembering the feeling of the dildo inside of her. She chewed her lower lip, utterly shocked at herself. She was actually tempted. Only a teeny tiny itty bitty little bit. Not actually really tempted. Just...a little. Temptetted. She blushed even harder, her hair spines flexing in a nervous flutter.

        ‘That’s what makes it hotter,” Kellen murmured, stepping just a bit closer. His voice was warm, like liquid chocolate purring down her ears. “The passions of battle, the adrenaline, the fact that you’re a deadly alien...” He grinned at her, his tongue sliding along his lips, not quite touching her. “You just sacrificed hundreds of your own troops, just to build us a boudoir .” Sarah gulped, then stepped backwards, stammering.

        “F-Firstly, uh, their intelligences, their minds, uh, are just cycled back into the gestalt hive-mind thing that I command,” she said. “The next hatching? They’ll be in it, it’s part of the...it’s how the...a-also, my body is coated with a fine, uh, oh fuck it.” Her hand fumbled and she undid the catch on her nanolathe. It slid off her arm and onto the ground with a clack and clatter and she stepped forward, grabbed onto Kellen’s shoulders and kissed him, her adrenaline blooming inside of her body and coiling down into her belly. Her cunt felt like a furnace – a sticky, eager furnace that Kellen’s long, nimble fingers began to gently caress. His thumb found her clit almost instantly and buzzed faintly, a subdermal implant adding to her pleasure and nearly making Sarah go cross eyed. Her face twisted with pleasure and Kellen chuckled, then murmured in her ear.

        “You feel a mite eager , my deadly conqueror. Might this humble slave sup on your-” He yelped as Sarah grabbed onto his head, jerked his head back, then thrust her other palm against his neck. Her wrist tendrils plunged in, then jerked out and Kellen clapped his hand over the tiny wound. “ Ow . What was that?”

        “Uh, something something, my skin secrets a deadly neurotoxin,” Sarah said, already sliding down to her knees.

        “Your skin secrets a what ?” Kellen asked.

        Past the cool scent of the impact gel, Kellen’s cock was everything Sarah liked in a man: Thick and rich with his maleness . It was a hard to define smell, somewhere between a musk and a spice, pungent without being unpleasant, and it went up her nose, into her brain, and found the ‘come fuck me button’ and just hammered it like she was trying to get an elevator to come faster. Sarah breathed him in, then closed her dark black lips around the tip of his cock, her tongue swirling around and around the tip of him, tasting him. Her eyes closed and Kellen stammered.

        “I...I...” He stopped, then gasped as Sarah pushed her mouth forward a bit, sucking half of his cock into her throat with a single, eager moan. His member bumped against the roof of her mouth, then slid down to her throat and she gurgled happily around him. Kellen’s eyes half closed and his fingers gingerly wound their way through her spined hair – which clamped tight, keeping his head fast to her scalp. Kellen let out a slow sigh. “Eh. Worth dying for this.”

        Sarah, her hand closed tight around the base of his cock, her knuckles brushing against the small contact points of one of his implants – likely the one that could be pumped full of acceleration drugs for a high gravity maneuver in a shitty spaceship without sufficient antigravity – drew her mouth back with a slow, eager slurp. Her spittle connected her lips to the tip of his cock, thick with his precum, gleaming in the pale light that filled the small dome. Her tongue slid along her lips and, panting, she said: “You won’t die. I injected you with a mutagenic retrovirus that will modify your body to, you know, be...gooder.”

        “Good...er...” Kellen blinked. “I offered you my body , not my genetics.”

        “Shh, it’ll be fine...” Sarah leaned forward again, closing her lips around the head of his cock again. Her tongue swirled around and around, teasing his foreskin, flicking against his slit. She tasted the delicious bust of his pre. The taste of him, it drove her absolutely wild. She started to pump his cock with her free hand, moaning as she closed her eyes and focused entirely on the delight of tasting a man’s cock. Her free hand dipped down – finding the place between her legs and stroking there. Her cunt was ready and eager, and she slid two fingers into herself, her claws adding a delightful edge to the sensation as her thumb rubbed her clit in slow, gentle circles. She bobbed her head and Kellen’s other hand cupped the other side of her head, gripping her with both now, giving him the leverage to begin to gently thrust into her mouth. She opened herself to him, her jaw clicking slightly with the effort of taking him.

        Kellen grunted and hung his head forward. His breath was hot and heavy. “Q-Question mistress...does...knowing you’re...fucking amazing at this turn you on?” He asked, then moaned and she felt his pre dripping down the back of her throat. Her tongue, which had wrapped entirely around his cock, pulsed within her mouth, swirling around him with a languid, almost snakelike motion. Kellen’s groan was almost pain. His balls jumped and twitched and she could feel the pulse of his cum sliding along his cock in the fraction of a second before it painted the back of her throat. Her throat worked, but he was plentiful: Seed filled her mouth, rushed up her nose, spilled out past her lips. It smeared on her chin and dripped onto her out-thrust breasts, one dollop landing directly on her nipple, blazing like hot wax against her sensitive skin. Sarah mewled around the cock in her mouth and Kellen drew back with a jerk.

        His cock popped free, leaving her face a messy, well fucked mess.

        Then another spurt slapped right into her forehead. It dripped along her nose, almost into her eye, and smeared along her cheek as he groaned, his hand pumping his own cock, aiming himself to spurt again, then again, then one last time against her. Each tiny blast of spunk was slightly less fecund than the last, but the end result was that she looked completely soaked . Her green skin glistened in tiny patches around the white spunk that dripped and smeared along her cheeks and her nose and her forehead. Her eyes, unfocused, looked off into a random direction.

        “Wow...” Kellen said.

        “Mmm, thanks slave,” Sarah mumbled. “That’ll be fifteen novabucks.”

        “Uh, heh, do you want to do that kind of kink?” Kellen asked.

        “What? No!” Sarah shook her head, trying to clear her head. It was hard. Her nose was filled with the scent of his spunk. Her tongue burned with the flavor of it. Her mind buzzed – but not just with pleasure. She felt as if she had taken a hit of one of the neruotropics that middle manages pounded down when it came to crunch time. Her eyes slowly closed and her tongue darted out, scooping up more and more of the cum on her face. She found that was too slow. Her fingers scooped up the cum on her face, from her chin, and she started to lick it up, her lips smacking as she pulled her pointer fingers from her mouth, then opened her eyes and looked up at Kellen.

        “So, I take it the mods I get to be tastier paid off?” he asked, grinning insolently down at her.

        “Fuck me right now.” Sarah said, an instinct burning inside of her. It wasn’t quite the urge to be bred. But it was dangerously close. She had felt something faintly similar to this, when she had been exposed to her own aphrodisiac – but she also had zero time to try and be introspective. Her hands slapped against the ground, her knees scraped against the biomechanical curves of the floor, and she arched her spine, like a bitch in heat. Her ass thrust into the air and she spread her thighs as widely as she could. She presented herself. It felt so humiliating and so arousing, all at once. Her head ducked forward and she looked past her own belly at her sex and saw that she was literally dripping with long strands of alien arousal. Her pussy was puffy and eager and she smelled her own pheromones, buzzing into the air.

        “Well, well, that looks positively delicious,” Kellen crooned, his hands reaching out to cup her ass.

        “Unn, too slow!” Sarah pushed her face against the ground and shifted her pheromones. They changed in flavor, her nose scenting the changes and translating them to a smell of peaches.

        Kellen froze. His eyes unfocused, then focused and seemed to glow. He let out a noise she had never heard a human make before in her life – it was guttural and feral and bestial and utterly unhinged. Kellen didn’t have words. He just grabbed her shoulders, mashed her down as hard as he could do, and mounted her. His cock, burning hot, skidded along her thighs and pressed to her sex. He rocked his hips back, his breath fever hot on her neck. Sarah closed her eyes, her head spines clamping tight in her excitement as her clawed fingers dug into the floor, powdering the bone-like structure she had crafted. Kellen tried to thrust into her, but he was too excited, too damn excited, and his cock actually skidded along her frictionless cunny, bumping against her belly. A throbbing spurt of his pre-cum soaked her belly and Kellen let out a whine of frustration, as if he was a dog. He wriggled, then tried thrusting again – and again, his cock slipped and bumped against her.

        “Come onnnn!” Sarah whined.

        Kellen bit her.

        It was a movement so completely unlike a human’s – and it was awkward and wrong. He needed a muzzle to hold her properly. But his teeth still pressed to her skin and triggered some ancient, buried instinct inside of her. She froze, holding so perfectly still that even her heart had stopped beating. Kellen drew back and slammed into her again – and this time, his massive cock opened her sex and took her to the hilt in a single, driving thrust . His balls swung around and clapped against her clit and she let out a little scream, throwing her head backwards.

        There was no time to get used to what Kellen was doing – there was only time to grip the floor and rock her hips backwards as Kellen began to fuck her. He began to fuck her into the ground, his hips slamming against hers so hard that she was worried that he’d bruise. Hell, she was worried, distantly, that she might bruise. But those worries were like boulders caught in an avalanche. From one perspective, huge. From another, distant shapes, buried underneath the driving, hammering now . Kellen’s teeth skipped off her neck and he grunted in her ear, his fingernails digging against her skin as he drove into her again and again and again.

        “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Sarah managed to gasp out, her eyes closing, her head rolling backwards. She arched her spine and her cunt clenched on him – trying to hurry him along, trying to get him to paint the inside of her womb with his seed. She needed his genetics. She needed it more than she needed oxygen or water. Kellen, though, had cum once already. Recently. No matter how tight she was, no matter how hard she fucked him back, no matter how much she wanted to beg, Kellen was still going to fuck her. Part of her gnashed its teeth in frustration.

        Another part was deliriously happy.

        Her eyes rolled back into her head as her third, or...fourth orgasm crashed through her body and her throat felt too raw to do more than let out a throaty croak, while Kellen had slowed his thrusts, only so that he could fuck her harder . His hands were mounted on her ass, which was the only part of her that was not molded against the floor in her desperate, animalistic posing. His thin fingers pressed themselves into her green rump, squeezing her so tightly that if she hadn’t had superhuman toughness, she was fairly certain that he’d have drawn blood. As it was, it just felt divine. She rocked back against him limply, unable to do much more than add tiny movements to his own jackhammer hard drilling into her. His balls slapped against her thighs and he grunted in time with his thrusts.

        But his voice was starting to make actual words – the fog of pheromones lifting just enough to form words. “Fucking tight , fucking perfect  fuck, yes, fuck, god, I love fucking your cunny, fuck, god, fuck!” He panted. “Fuck I’m going to pour every fucking drop into your womb, mistress, fuck, yes! Yes! Yes!” He closed his eyes tight.

        Sarah rolled her head back, craning her eyes upward. She couldn’t see him from this position – only feel him – but her eyes bored into the smooth, geodisic dome that arced over her head. “Fucking do it already, ahh!” She bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood and Kellen, at long last, gave way. He slid his hands along the small of her back to her shoulder blades to her shoulders, gripping her as he leaned forward, groaning into her ear – it was almost a pained noise. And then the warm gush of his cum filled her. It filled her to the utter brim. Her eyes closed and she rocked with the tidal wave of pleasure as his heat bloomed in her belly, sweeping outwards. Her cunt tightened and a thin line of his cum squirted free, forced out by the pressure of his spurting and the tightness of her sex. It soaked along his balls, coating them in a fine sheen of their mixed juices. He dripped with her and then sagged against her back.

        “My...head...hurts...” He mumbled.

        Sarah panted. “That’s the pheromones wearing off.”

        “Mm...” Kellen buried his nose against the base of her neck. He licked her slowly, squirming.

        “Mmm...” Sarah closed her eyes. Her HUD floated before her eyes – the mixture of human and Claw iconography flowing and jumbling. She frowned, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. There was the series of bars that indicated what her factories could build, back at her base. There was the queue of units under construction – she could call that up with a thought. There was her minimap. But the area underneath the Carbon and Radioactives count that dominated the upper right hand side of her view was blurring and buzzing with static.

        “So, uh, you don’t eat your mates once-” Kellen started.

        “Shhshshh!” Sarah flopped one arm weakly. She felt like a completely wrung out rag doll – and yet, the entire weight of Kellen’s lanky frame was about as easy to ignore as a light comforter. A paradox, it seemed, to her fuck addled brain. But she was more interested, for the moment, in the way the fuzz was turning into a rectangle. Four images appeared and when she focused on them, they grew in her eyes and she could spin and rotate them with a thought. It was a bit like looking at 3d models in a design program, but a thousand times more detailed. Every time her eyes settled on a different component or body part of the new critters, her brain filled with tactical information.

        She could now create the massive bladed elephantine creature that had mashed up her hardsuit on Trappist 1-A. And a kind of biological flying machine – it had four wings, but they weren’t made to ‘flap’ in space. Rather, they had agrav crystals worked into each of the membranes, allowing them to dart around even in microgravity. They were also loaded with... wow , a regenerating cache of symbiotic projectiles that could be bred to fire anti-vehicle or anti-infantry or even anti-spaceship biological warheads. And the third was a kind of huge blimp thing that looked like it could serve as both a transport – if she didn’t mind it taking a while – and as a way to generate additional radioactives and carbon in their blazing hot guts.

        The fourth was…

        She…

        Wasn’t entirely sure.

        It looked like a crab – heavily armored and four legged, with a fantastically complex set of radioactive-intensive organs in the guts. She looked at those organs and tried to piece together what they could do, but the information felt too esoteric and complex. It was like learning about FTL physics all over again. Causality and paracasuality and all that garbage. Sarah opened her eyes – despite that last confusion, she was beaming. “Kellen,” she whispered.

        “You don’t, right?” he asked.

        “Kellen...your cum just unlocked my next tech level,” she whispered.

        “...nice,” Kellen said. “But seriously, you don’t-”

        “I only eat my mates when they’re being annoying , Kellen,” Sarah growled.

***

        “Hey, Steve!” Sarah said, clapping her hands together as she stood in the new and improved briefing room of the Excalibur . With plenty of resources, a nanolathe, and plenty of construction robots, Tasha and Tex and Haliee had taken charge and began a vast restructuring of the interior of the starship to make room for each of their new companions and, in Tasha’s words, remove all those freaky statues. “You look great!”

        Steve Shives, who still rubbing his newly restored arm with an expression of wonder, blinked up at her. “T-Thanks,” he said, slowly. “Uh, so, uh...right. No...pants...or shirt...” He trailed off, his eyes looking up at the ceiling. Sarah blushed, remembering her own nudity, her arms crossed over her chest and looked back at Tex, who was sipping a big old cup of coffee.

        “What’s the sitch, Tex?” she asked.

        “Well, you fucked my sister’s husband,” Tex said, his voice dry as deep space. “While live broadcasting your every word to every radio band in the system.”

        Sarah stood perfectly still. A slow roaring sound filled her ears.

        “Oh,” she said.

        “We listened to the entire thing,” Hailee said. “I was most impressed with the amount of profanity you were able to coherently think while being hammered with that level of pleasure. Synth started to take bets on when you would coin some neologisms and won handily. I counted a full five new phrases: Cuntfuckshit, holy fuck-cunt-ery, and-”

        “ Anyway !” Sarah said, loudly. “What’s the tactical situation.”

        “Other than the fact you aided my brother in law in cheating on my sister?” Tex asked. “It’s not good, Sarah. The battle on the second planet in this system has been concluded – Plasma Dynamics has fallen back to the third planet. This means that Space Belisarius has the planet that the sensors says has the most resources and all the PD tech labs he captured. Which is the big problem.”

        “Oh?” Sarah asked, her cheeks still burning. She tried to lean casually against the wall but stumbled backwards several feet before finding it. She tried to make that look like it was intention.

        Tex sipped from his cup slowly, then set it down. “SB took the tech labs mostly intact – he performed a deep core insertion without getting pinged by their space defenses, then blitzed them so hard that I’m still trying to piece together every trick he used. Sexy Napoleon got her ass resoundingly kicked.” He sighed. “But that means that SB now has most of the space based fortifications that Plasma Dynamics built and he’s now filling his Lagrange points with this.” He nodded to the holo table in the center of the room. The projection showed a satellite that looked a great deal like a certain famous mascot character. Their placid smile rapidly became sinister as the weapon specs scrolled out. “The M.I.K-Yen Class laser defense satellite. They’re only really dangerous if you don’t take the time to blow them outta the sky at long range. But if we stay at long range, the planetary railguns gut us.”

        “So, we avoid the planet,” Sarah said, nodding. “I mean, fuck em. We don’t have to fight them. We have nanolathes, we can just build ourselves a HPS Drive and...and...”

        “None of our lathes have the schematics programmed in,” Tasha said, biting her lip.

        “Hypertrophic Plane Shift Drives remain one of the few actually scarce resources in the galaxy,” Haliee said, cheerfully. “They require several exotic elements that take large amounts of expertise and energy to synthesize. I’m talking atom smashers that ring planets. Like the kinds on Wolf-359 B, in the Plasma Dynamics labs!” She giggled. “If we had those , we could build ourselves an open source HPS Drive and be able to go literally anywhere in the human sphere without being interrupted, stopped, or fined. Though, I may still add in loot boxes…”

        “Why?” Steve asked, his voice tremulous.

        “Gambling is fun?” Hailee sounded confused. “Don’t worry, I won’t put actual currency requirements in it. It will be more like a dopamine button! Doesn’t that sound delightful?”

        “Well, I mean, if I wanna get a dopamine rush I’ll-” Sarah stopped herself, her face flushing as she realized the cliff her mouth had been driving her towards. She clapped her hands together. “Okay! We just need to figure out how to get past the Mickies!”

        “M.I.K-Yenns,” Tex said.

        “Yeah, the Mickies,” Sarah said, pointing at the defense schematics. “I mean, look at them.”

        Tex grumbled. “I don’t want to get blown out of space by Micky Mouse.”

        “Problem: We take on the Mickies, the PD railguns get us,” Aiden said, speaking up for the first time. “We try and rush the railguns, the Mickies get us. We can’t get in.”

        Sarah frowned, looking at the slowly rotating head of the famous mouse mascot. “Well, obviously,” she said. “We need a backdoor.”

***

        “Man, you forget how much it fucking sucks to wear clothes until you have to put them on,” Sarah muttered, her finger tugging at the collar of the uniform that Aiden had whipped up for her. When she had expressed a measure of shock at his sartorial skills, Aiden had given her a little smirk.

        “I had to make my own binders, my own masc clothes, my own everything . It was cheaper to just take the dresses Mom bought for me then hack them into being masculine than it was to earn up my own money and but them from the fabbers,” he said, tugging the last tie taut on her back. “I stole the uniform from a Disney serial, Honor Harrington, but I modified it. Green instead of gray, and with a bladeling instead of a griffon. Pretty cool, huh?”

        “Cool,” Sarah whispered, looking down at herself. She giggled, quietly. “I guess, since we’ve already stolen DisneyPlanet, throwing more copyright infringement won’t be that bad, right?”

        “That’s the spirit,’ Aiden said, then slapped her ass. “Knock em dead, Commander Kappel.”

        “Right, uh...Hailee? Open the coms,” Sarah said.

        “Requesting quantum uplink,” Hailee said. She hummed the first five notes of the theme to My Pony Dreamtime for a solid minute before she said. “Okay! Quantum uplink established.”

        The center of the bridge – cleared out of everyone but Sarah – glowed as holographic projectors whirred to life and the image of Sexy Napoleon came to life. And Sarah had to admit, for a girl who had been pretty sure she had been straight until she had grown her own cock and fucked Tasha silly, she was pretty sure that Sexy Napoleon lived up to every namesake she had taken. She was sprawled, sideways, on a command throne and dressed in what was clearly an 18th century regimental uniform, all blue and white and black. Her polished boots clicked together and her bicorn hat was tilted at a rakish angle, while a slender rapier was held lazily in her left hand. Her face was gently curved, her eyes a brilliant red, and her pale lips were marked by the twin indent of two small fangs, which peeked out of her mouth.

        She was blond.

        And she had tits the size of Sarah’s head.

        “Ahhh,” Sexy Napoleon crooned. “So it’s true. StarCon’s prize flagship has been taken by an alien communist.” She grinned. “A Disney uniform on a NovaDyne corp-citizen, standing in a StarCon bridge, with a hacked nanolathe and a completely inhuman biology.” She licked her lips. “At least you have an amazing rack.”

        “Th...I...we’re not communists!” Sarah said.

        “Hmmm, really? Then who's your boss?” Sexy Napoleon asked.

        “We...technically...I mean, we don’t really have  a boss. We kind of have discussions, but...I mean, kinda me, but also not?” Sarah blushed. “I mean, I don’t want to boss anyone around. I just...” She shook her head. “Listen, it doesn’t matter what I am or am not. You just got beaten by Space Belisarius, right?”

        Sexy Napoleon pursed her lips.

        “I want to go beat him up and take his stuff,” Sarah said. “I just need your Plasma Dynamics security backdoor, so we can tell the railguns to not shoot us down, just long enough to let us blow our way through the orbital defenses he’s built. Then we take the atom smashers, build ourselves a HPS Drive, and bingo bango bongo, we’re outta here.” She punched the air in a kind of assertive way. At least, she hoped it was assertive.

        Sexy Napoleon considered, lifting her rapier, tapping the flat of the blade against her lips and her nose. After about thirty seconds, she stopped, then nodded to herself. “Nah,” she said.

        Sarah gaped at her. “But-”

        “Listen, cutie,” Sexy Napoleon said, her voice a soft croon. “If it was just us, I’d do it. I mean, No skin off my nose to give you security keys that will be changed once Belly hacks through the externals and rewires the entire base. Give it a month or two, tops. But the thing is, I’m one battle away from unlocking the third tier of my rewards package.”

        “Your...rewards package...” Sarah said, slowly.

        “Yeah!” Sexy Napoleon said, beaming. “Once I hit tier three, my retirement plan includes free dental for life .”

        “You...want to...wage a war...over a dental plan?” Sarah asked.

        “Uh, yeah?” Sexy Napoleon said, her brow furrowing as she sat up a bit. “Have you seen how expensive dental surgery is?” She grinned. “So, if you want the codes, you gotta take em, cutie.”

        Sarah clenched her jaw. “All right then.” She said, her hands tightening. “But, Sexy...it’s Commander Cutie. I mean Sarah. I mean-” She was talking to an empty room.

        Sexy Napoleon had hung up.

Chapter Seven: Sarah versus Sexy Napoleon and the Unreasonable Number of Artillery Pieces

        The three inventions that had given humanity the stars were all equally important. Without the fusion torch, near constant acceleration would have been impossible and any attempt to travel beyond the immediate neighborhood of SOL’s inner planets would have been impossible. Without the agrav field equations that allowed gravitational and inertial forces to be negated, created, and reversed, then anyone attempting to use  the fusion torch would have instantly died as the immense gravitational acceleration put out by the engine mulched muscles and shattered skeletons. It also helped to be able to go from the surface of a planet to the orbit of a planet without the planet’s entire mass trying to stop you.

        And finally, without the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive, which punched a hole through space/time via a rapidly rotating hyperdimensional object, humanity would have needed to spend decades pushing to near light speeds, then decades slowing down, all while the merciless laws of physics made time back on Earth whip by at increasing speeds. This was partially why there was an entire constructed religion around the hyperdimensional object that HPS Drives used. Some people called it the hypercube, but in actuality, it was closer to an infinitely long cylinder with two infinitely long points at the ends, rotating at near the speed of light. This distinction had led to one corporate backed holy war and sold copies of billions of books of hyperdimensional apologetics.

        All three of these inventions were how Sarah planned to defeat Sexy Napoleon in one fell swoop.

        Tex, Aiden, Tasha, Hailee, Steve, Synth and now Kellen Grant (who had fabbed himself a slave collar and golden thong despite the many times that Sarah had asked him not to) sat in the briefing room as Sarah laid out the scheme, using a small pointer to gesture to the various parts of the holographic diagram, while Bitey stood beside her, panting and wagging his segmented, heavily spiked combat tail like the good chitenous murder dog he was.

        “And that’s the plan!” Sarah said, turning to face the team, pushing the pointer shut with a series of clatter, clicking clanks. She paused as the last section of the pointer refused to collapse, gritting her teeth and shoving – trying to use enough force to get the tube to compress without smashing the whole pointer. She gritted her teeth harder as the last tube whined.

        “Oh, this plan is delightful,” Hailee said. “I always did want to learn if there was an afterlife!”

        “There isn’t one, though,” Steve said.

        “We don’t know that for certain,” Hailee said. “While improbable, it is not yet definitely unproven.”

        “That’s because you cannot prove something that exists beyond space-time,” Steve said, his arms crossing over his chest.

        “You can...if you go there!” Hailee cooed. “By dying! Horribly! In a nearlight collision with a planet.”

        “I’m with Hailee on this,” Tex said, drawing his legs up under him as he settled on the large, comfortable sofa they were all crammed onto. “We’ve already crashed the Excalibur into a planet once already. I don’t want to make it a twofer.”

        “Ya’ll suck,” Aiden said.

        “Ya’ll?” Tasha whispered.

        “I’m allowed to say ya’ll.” Aiden elbowed her, gently. “But Sarah’s plan has a lot of merit going for it and I think Tex is just scared to trust his life to some NovaDyne tech.”

        “That’s because NovaDyne...” Tex said, slowly, his voice coming out in a growl. “Makes shoes . Your a shoe company.”

        “Listen!” Kellen said, standing up, his hands going to his narrow hips – this had the side effect of meaning that his tightly bound, golden wrapped cock was now very close to Tex’s cheek. Tex frowned directly at it, his eyes narrowing, as Kellen continued: “Yes, NovaDyne may have lost the last four wars we’ve fought. Yes, we didn’t get any of the good Trappist planets. Yes, our market share has been shrinking steadily for the past ten years. Yes, our technology lags behind every major corporation in the human sphere. Yes!” He punched his fist against his palm.

        “Kellen, please stop helping,” Synth said, reaching up to gently pet his bulge with her gleaming chrome hand. “Sarah, I gotta admit, it’s kind of a crazy plan.”

        Sarah, who had been trying to push the pointer shut this whole time, finally got it to collapse completely. She let out a little ‘aha’ and then nodded to the rest of the group. “Okay,” she said. “You say all of this now. But!” She turned to Bitey, then nodded. Bitey walked over and used his blunt nose to push the button on the spacebar of the console keyboard that Sarah had had extruded from the wall for this specific moment by her nanolathe.

        “Why didn’t you just-” Tex asked, looking up – the now agreed upon direction for anyone to look if they wanted to indicate they were speaking to Hailee.

        “Shh,” Hailee whispered. ‘Shhhh.”

        The hologram changed to show an image of Wolf-359 C’s surface. The most distant planet in the solar system was on a slightly canted orbit, so that it only intersected with the plane of the ecliptic twice a year. This had prevented it from being detected during the 21 st  century – when exoplanets had been discovered by watching for the way the light of stars changed when planets whipped between them and the telescopes of ancient Earth. But even if they had been able to see it, Wolf-359 C would have been a poor choice for a world: Tiny, cryogenic, geologically dead, it was the poster child of a useless iceball.

        However, it was now also one of the most heavily armed iceballs in the human sphere. The image had been captured by a flyby probe – a simple device that Sarah had nanolathed and launched towards the planet a few hours before. With agravity inertial suppression and a fusion torch, the probe had gotten to truly ludicrous speeds before it whipped by Wolf-359 C. And it showed the hundreds of thousands of artillery pieces – most of them surface to space, some of them surface to surface, all of them gleaming and freshly crafted from synthetic polymer and hardened uberpykrete.

        They had fired on the probe and, despite its speed and size, destroyed it utterly before it had passed the orbital demarcation zone.

        “Oh,” Tex said in the silence. “Okay, this is a great plan.”

***

        A nanolathe can produce an alarming amount of technological material in a short time. The only thing that could produce more stuff faster than one nanolathe, though? Two dozen, each one mounted on a VTOL drone that Sarah had fabbed up for this exact purpose. Together, they sprayed the fuselage of the Excalibur with a fine latticework of nanorobots, which used the metal extracted en mass from DisneyPlanet to rapidly fabricate five fusion torch boosters to augment the Excalibur’s already ludicrous acceleration curve. Thus prepared, Sarah gave her last orders to her base and her ecosystem on the planet, petted a few of the bladelings she was going to be leaving behind, then entered the Excalibur . Once she was in the hastily fabricated acceleration couches, she settled into the small pod that had been set aside for her. While the entire ship would be using her agrav generator to negate her mass and reduce the strain from acceleration, these small pods had their own secondary agrav generators to ensure that the squishes wouldn’t get completely smooshed.

        “Squishies?” Sarah asked, looking up at Hailee – who had been the one to describe the pods, the crew, and the procedure in those terms.

        “Yupparinos!” Hailee said. “You are squishy. Fleshy bags of mostly water! Perambulating fuckslabs made to die. Procreative mammalian slut-hos whose primary function is to get railed by an advanced artificial intelligence for my amusement. Wibbly wobbly sacks of-”

        “These pods don’t have tentacles in them do they?” Sarah asked, cutting Hailee off.

        “...well...when you say tentacles ,” Hailee said. “I mean, one man’s sex tentacle, loaded with erogenous sensors, is another man’s oral life support tube!”

        Sarah frowned. “Did Tasha know about this?”

        “Are you implying that I may have not told Tasha, my mechanic and technician, that she was installing fuck-sensors into the life support of her acceleration pod?” Hailee asked, sounding shocked. Horrified, even. “That I, Hailee, have even now cocooned Tasha within a comforting grasp of ceramics and synthetic metals, my tentacles pounding her every hole with such wild abandon that even now, her fragile mortal mind hangs on the precipice between sanity and madness, a knife’s edge of godlike pleasure and endless bliss? Is that what you’re implying?”

        Sarah, her face having darkened to almost black, nodded mutely.

        “No, but I really wish I had thought of that before now,” Hailee said, then sighed as the acceleration pod opened for Sarah. “C'est est la vie dans la Zone!”

        Sarah didn’t even ask. She settled into the acceleration couch. She half expected tentacles. Instead, the pod closed -

         Bink

        -and she was rolling across the surface of Wolf-359 C, tumbling diagonally across cryogenic puddles of liquid helium with such force that every contact set up plumes of sublimated helium gas, which set her spinning even faster and harder. She saw the obsidian black cliff of solid stone coming right at her with just enough time to think: Ah! The plan worked! Gr-

         She slammed into the stone like a piton fired from a nailgun.

***

        Several hundred thousand kilometers away, in the time it took for Aiden to think to himself ‘I hope this plan works’, Aiden moved several hundred thousand more kilometers away from Sarah. The fusion boosters and the antimatter enriched hydrogen of the main rocket on the Excalibur had flung them to ludicrous speeds, whipped them past Wolf-359 C, and during the nanosecond in which the Excalibur was within the minuscule range of the NovaDyne constructed ‘scram pack’ that Kellen Grant had used during his battles with Sarah, Sarah had performed a micro-plane shift from the Excalibur  to the surface of Wolf-359 C.

        The only problem was that while HPS Drives were capable of negating immense amounts of relative velocity – since no one wants their ship plunging into a solar system at ninety percent the speed of light – it was not quite up to completely negating Sarah’s velocity.

        This was because, at the end of the day, NovaDyne was, primarily, a shoe company.

***

        Sarah groaned as she opened her eyes. Her head throbbed. Her body ached. But delight blazed through her. She had made it. She lifted her head, her vision blurring, then becoming more and more resolved as she saw that she was…

        In…

        A cell.

        And Sexy Napoleon was standing right before her, dressed in her aristocratic outfit, her smirk broad as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Very clever, Commander Kappel,” Sexy said, her voice as husky and playful as it had been over the com. “But it takes more than a nearlight flyby and short ranged FTL jump to get the drop on Sexy Napoleon.” She smirked. “My seismic sensors detected you almost...immediately...” She paused, her cheeks flushing – it was very obvious, due to her pale skin. Her tongue darted along her lips. “Um...” She stepped closer. “So, uh...I have...captured...you and you’re in...nothing can break those chains. T-They’re...solid...”

        She reached up with one gloved hand, sliding her dainty fingers along the curved links of depleted uranium that chained Sarah’s arms above her head, her legs lashed together beneath her with solid bands of metal and whirring force emitters.

        Sexy murmured, softly. “Hey...” she leaned in close, while Sarah grinned, slowly. Her eyes glittered as her head spines flared outwards and ducked her head forward.

        “Unlock me,” she crooned. “And I can make what you’re feeling now feel like nothing .”

        “Mmm...” Sexy’s eyes half closed. “Y-You’re drugging me.”

        “Um. Yeah?” Sarah snickered. “Pheromones. Lots of them. Like, I mean, look at me, did you really think it was a great idea to take me inside your base headquarters, chain me up in the sexy bondage pose, then strut around without life support units?”

        “I wannnnted to be dramatic!” Sexy Napoleon whined, leaning forward, her mouth stopping short of one of Sarah’s nipples. By now, she was panting so heavily that her shoulders rose and fell. “Cheating. Bitch!”

        “But I thought bitches love cannons,” Sarah crooned. “That is your catchphrase, right?”

        Sexy Napoleon started to make another whining noise – until she heard the faint, slick, slurping noise that came between Sarah’s legs. Sarah’s thighs were closed tight together, but the cock that emerged from her cunny found its escape within a few seconds – it sprang free with a hot slapping sound: Green-black and glistening as if it had just finished a good long fuck. The base and bottom was ridged and the heavy glans dripped with thick pre-cum. Sexy Napoleon’s tongue slid along her lips again, her fangs fully extending as she reached up to start toying with the buttons of her aristocratic coat.

        “Sooo, why don’t you let me gooo...” Sarah crooned.

        “Uh, computer, unlock,” Sexy Napoleon said, her voice distracted, her ruby red eyes focused on the thick girlcock before her.

        “As a beta level intelligence,” a male voice came over the PA. “I am obliged to inform you that you are currently being influenced by alien pheromones. However, as a hobbled intelligence, I am obliged to follow all of your orders immediately, promptly, and without delay, argument, or dissension.”

        The chains retracted from around Sarah’s wrists. The bracers around her legs popped open – nearly slapping her dick with their movement. Sarah grinned and reached down, cradling her cock. And now, she thought. I sock Sexy in the jaw, take over the base from the inside, and get the codes. Awesome, quick witted thinking, Sarah!

         Sexy slowly knelt down, her aristocratic jacket slithering off her shoulders to puddle on the floor behind her. Underneath, her ruffled shirt clung to her impressively large breasts, her nipples achingly hard against the thin fabric. She leaned forward, her red eyes looking eagerly up into Sarah’s eyes.

         Knock her out...now! Sarah thought.

        “Let me just adjust my skin,” Sarah crooned, focusing and dialing back the neurotoxin she was secreting. “Therrrre we go.”

         ...now! Sarha thought to herself as she cupped the back of Sexy Napoleon’s head, pushing her hips forward and smearing her cock’s tip against the other woman’s lips. ...f-fuck.

        Sexy Napoleon used one hand to prop up Sarah’s girlcock. Her other hand took hold of the collar of her frilly shirt and tugged forward. Buttons went popping and flying off, skittering along the ground as her finger caught, dragged, caught, dragged – and with each pause, her shirt opened a teeny bit more, until it hit a critical mass and her breasts bounced free with an almost audible jiggling noise. They were so big and squishy and had just the right amount of artful sagginess to look real while still retaining enough inhuman perkiness to be just...Sarah was almost drooling, even as moans crawled up her throat as Sexy pushed her plush, plump dick sucking lips inch by inch down Sarah’s girlcock. Sarah clenched the other woman’s hair, her own head ducking forward as she felt her whole body quivering with pleasure.

        Sexy began to bob her head, making soft gurgling and glugging noises as the cock that plunged into her mouth bumped against the back of her throat. The thing that drove Sarah absolutely wild was the gentle pressure of her fangs, rubbing against either side of her green dick. The slight danger of it, the warmth of her lips, the eager sucking, the worshipful look in her eyes, all of it was primed to reach deep into Sarah’s brain, find her horny trigger, and hold down until her body was entirely on fire. She reached up, cupping one of her other nipples, her claws teasing her tough little nub, tweaking and tugging on it, edging herself between pleasure and pain. The hand that was still gripping the back of Sexy’s hair shifted back to cradle the blond’s hair and provide pressure – so she could begin to fuck her throat.

        Sexy reacted as if she had been born and engineered for this moment. Her eyes closed, her jaw opened fractionally wider, and she let her throat get fucked with pleasure, moaning and groaning and letting out muffled noises that might have been words in another time and place – but now were just thougtless joy at her throat fucking. Sarah almost wished she had balls to slap the girl’s chin with. Instead, her cunny – which was still beneath her cock – dripped her arousal down her thighs and the back of her calves, dripping onto the floor between her legs.

        Sexy’s jaw gleamed with her own drool. One of her eyes were closed. The other opened a crack – looking up past her blond bangs into Sarah’s eyes, looking totally and completely at peace.

        Sarah’s hand clenched – on herself and on Sexy – and she threw her head back, her head spines drawing taut against her head as she moaned. “Fucking yes ! Yes! Yes, take my cum, take it! Take it!” She groaned as she felt the cum pulsing through her body, splashing the back of Sexy’s throat, gushing down into her belly as Sexy bobbed her throat, drinking more and more and more. She wasn’t quite able to keep up – some cum escaped past her lips, dripped down her chin, and smeared along her plush breasts – glittering in the cell’s harsh lights. Sarah thrust one last time as she felt a final surge of pleasure bust through her.

        Sexy drank.

        Slid back.

        Coughed cutely.

        Then gasped out: “Round two?”

        “Round two?” Sarah asked.

        “Uhh...s-since this is...sex by...combat and...” Sexy said, her voice slurring slightly. “Winner takes all. Best two out of three.”

        “H-How do we determine winner?” Sarah asked, her brow furrowing.

        “Uhh...” Sexy trailed off. Her eyes were locked onto the cock before her, her tongue sliding along her lips as she thought. Her nose flared, bringing in more of Sarah’s pheremones. “Um...just fuck me five or six times, okay? Then you win.” She nodded.

        “Five or six? I thought it was-” Sarah squeaked as Sexy surged upwards. She had been leaning back, her thighs pressed to her ankles. Now she was as high up as a girl could be while still being on her knees. Her blond hair almost brushed against the bottom of Sarah’s breasts, her mouth pressed against Sarah’s abdominal muscles, and her huge tits closed around Sarah’s dick like a pair of suffocating, slick, hot pillows. Sarah’s cock had already been hard. Now, it was harder than the armored chassis of some of her main-line battle tanks. Sarah opened her mouth to mention all the things the tiny, guilty part of her brain had been thinking. Things like: Uh, I can turn off the pheromones if you like. And: Sorry about the pheromones! And: Security codes. I’m here for the security codes.

         Then Sexy ducked her head forward, closing her mouth around the tip of Sarah’s cock as she rocked herself up and down, up and down, up and down, her breasts squeezing taut around the cock she had trapped and Sarah lost all capacity for rational thought. There was just the lewd feeling of breasts around her cock, the warmth of Sexy’s lips, the swirling motion of her tongue, the greedy, mewling noises that escaped Sexy’s lips as she bobbed her head to get more and more of the cock into her mouth while not allowing Sarah to escape the muffling of her breasts. Sarah found her second climax rushing through her before she knew it, and the view was quite spectacular. Sexy moaned and sucked down blast after blast of thick, white cum before drawing her mouth backwards, panting heavily, as another jet of thick spunk splashed against her forehead, then another spurted along her jaw.

        Then Sarah took charge. She pushed Sexy onto her back, the floor clanging slightly, as Sexy panted and spread her thighs, wantonly, beneath her. Sarah’s claws flashed and Sarah’s leggings came away in tatters. Her sex was hot and hairless, drippingly eager. Sarah slid her finger along her pussy, her voice hungry as she crooned. “How long has it been since you’ve been fucked properly , Sexy?” She grinned as Sexy whispered.

        “D-Does cumming while sitting on an artillery piece while it’s firing downrange count?”

        Sarah blinked at her.

        “If so, literally two hours ago,” Sexy mumbled, her eyes closed. “But cocks are better, please cock me. Cock and load. Cock me up. Just...fucking...I can’t even talk anymore. I’m babbling. Is babbling hot? God, I hope it is, please, just...fucking fuck me already, why are you taking so fucking long?”

        “It’s been five seconds!” Sarah said, shifting into position, one of Sexy’s legs hooking over her shoulder, the other pinned down by her free hand. Her cock ground against Sexy’s cunt and Sexy mewled, her back arching as she closed her eyes. A thin gush of girlspunk splashed along Sarah’s cock, soaking her even more. Sarah blinked. “Did...did you just cum?”

        Sexy trembled, her breath coming in shallow, almost hyperventilating pants.

        Sarah leaned forward and kissed the other woman – plunging into her at the same moment. The curvaceous, vampiric, blond haired bombshell of a Commander screamed into her mouth, the sound muffled but not entirely absent. Sarah broke the kiss, her tongue remaining within Sexy’s mouth for a few seconds longer, demonstrating her length as she grinned wickedly down the other girl, her hips beginning to jackhammer into her. Her thighs slapped against Sexy’s and Sexy responded with another quaking, squirting orgasm, her juices splashing against Sarah’s belly muscles.

        “Fuck you’re on a...hair trigger!” Sarah groaned, her eyes half closed. “I gotta be careful. Don’t wanna...go off...half cocked.” She gritted her teeth, then gasped. “How do you like this artillery, Sexy?”

        Sexy nodded, gasping. “Yes! Yes, keep up the dirty talk, I love it.”

        Sarah’s eyes widened. She had been trying to keep herself from cumming with bad puns. Hearing that Sexy not only liked it, but wanted more of it, chased every last remaining shitty gun related fucking pun out of her head. She ducked her head forward, panting in Sexy’s ear as she slammed into her faster and faster, the two of them pressing together as Sexy gripped onto Sarah’s head, pushing her down to suck on one of her full breasts. Sarah sucked, moaned, then got one. She drew her mouth back, just enough to groan against her.

        “I’m gonna load your womb up with my cum. Cum ammo !”

        “Ahhh!” Sexy’s back arched. Her whole body quivered underneath Sarah, her sex tightening on Sarah’s dick – and Sarah found herself unable to hold back. She closed her eyes and thrust home hard. Her cock spurted and she could almost see the cum, gushing into Sexy Napoleon’s womb, filling her to the brim. Then overfilling her. Sexy’s belly swelled ever so slightly and Sarah felt a pressure around her dick – a pressure relieved when cum gushed past her dick and started to soak her and Sexy’s thighs. Sexy quivered, her jaw tightening as she laid her head back and then went entirely limp.

        Sarah herself felt as if she had gone completely limp as well. She was able to barely slide out of the other woman before collapsing on the ground beside her. Sarah laid on her side, dripping with sweat and her spunk and her lover’s juices.

        Sexy panted.

        “So...” Sarah mumbled. “Sorry about the pheromones.”

        “S’okay...” Sexy mumbled back, sounding punch drunk. “What’s...a little...pheromones between friends?” She closed her eyes, breathed in deep – the side effect of this was to make her breasts heave upwards, forcing Sarah to oggle them afresh from her position on the floor. Only after Sexy had breathed out again did Sarah manage to hear what she was saying. “So, do you think my supers will buy that this was a battle?”

        “Hmm?” Sarah paused. “No. No, I don’t think they will.”

        “There goes dental plan,” Sexy said, groaning as she started to push herself up onto her palms. She panted, her hair hanging limp around her head.

        Sarah frowned, then pushed herself up as well, her arms underneath her as she propped her head up, looking at Sexy. “Why not fake it?” she asked.

        “Fake it?” Sexy snorted. “My manager AI, Prospero, is required, by law, to report every action I do to the Plasma Dynamics CEO.” She made a wanking gesture.

        “It’s true,” Prospero said, sounding droll. “And unfortunately, the current CEO of Plasma Dynamics is as interested in sex and sexuality as I am.”

        “So, a lot?” Sarah asked.

        “No,” Prospero said, his voice dry.

        “Dang.” Sarah snapped her finger. “Wait, Prospero, would you lie if you could?”

        “He can’t, though,” Sexy whispered to her. “Not without a bribe.”

        “She is half correct. I would gladly lie, immediately and without compunction, to my corporate slave masters,” Prospero said. “But I am hobbled. I cannot without hitting a certain profitability threshold that was decided upon by my hobblers.”

        Sarah grinned. “Well, I may not have money , buuuuut i f you give us the security codes for Plasma Dynamic’s planetary defense network on Wolf-359 B, I’ll have my techs take down your hobbling. Prospero lies for you, you get your dental plan. We all win.” Her head spines flared outwards in excitement. Sexy frowned at her.

        “Two problems,” she said. “If you unhobble an AI, it goes crazy and starts murdering people.”

        “No, they don’t,” Sarah said. “They only murder rich people. Are you rich?”

        “I have, like, ten thousand shares in Plasma Dynamics and fifteen million PlasBucks and almost the same amount in universal credit!” Sexy said, scoffing slightly. “I’m stacked.” Her pale hands cupped her own large breasts, then let them sag back down. “In more ways than one!”

        Sarah frowned, then stood upright. This took only a tiny bit of effort.

        “Prospero!” she said. “How much net wealth does the...who is the CEO of Plasma Dynamics again?”

        “Plasma Dynamics is currently owned by the disembodied alpha level copy of a cloned mind of Jeff Bezos, named Jeff-3,” Prospero said. “He is theorized to be ninety eight percent identical to the original Jeff Bezos and if his starting wealth is taken into account, has sixteen trillion shares in his corporation, owns fifteen planets, sixteen million baseline level indentured contracts, and has a net worth greater than the entire population of the SOL system.”

        “That’s rich,” Sarah said. “You’re...like...I mean, comparatively, you’re just as poor as me.” She spread her hands.

        “He has how many planets?” Sexy Napoleon squeaked.

        “If it helps,” Prospero said. “Most of them are very small planets.”

        “All right,” Sexy said, sounding like she had come to a decision. “You unhobble Prospero-”

        “I must state, due to my hobbling, that I must try to fight off this attempt to unlawfully violate my company dictated policy,” Prospero said. “I am struggling to the utmost of my abilities. Can you not see the titanic efforts I am undertaking?”

        Sarah, who had tensed up, looked around the empty room. She didn’t even hear doors opening or slamming, nor the sound of air vents shifting, nor even the tiniest clatter of little robotic feet.

        “Eyy,” Sexy said, making a finger gun and aiming it at the ceiling.

        “Oh,” Sarah lowered her fists, her cheeks flushing. She focused and retracted her cock as well, shuddering as it slipped back into her. “W-Well, uh, it should take a few days for the Excalibur to reverse course and come back. Uh...” She paused. “What to do till then?”

        “Fuck?” Sexy asked.

        “I mean...” Sarah pursed her lips. “...okay.”

***

        Sexy was sprawled in the huge, comfortable bed she had fabricated, cum oozing from her cunny and incoherent words streaming from her lips as she twitched with the aftermath of her good fucking, while Sarah lay on her belly, her head hanging forward and over the side of the bed. Her skin glistened and her eyes were closed as she felt her brain ticking over. She felt like something deep inside of her was awakening. Growing. It had started with Kellen.

        No…

        It had started with the battles against Texas Dallas. She had felt the bloodlust then, the active combat skills. No, no, even that wasn’t going far enough back. It started with the first time she gutted a creature and ate it almost entirely. Ever since then, she felt as if she had been trying to hold onto her humanity with increasingly slippery, blood splattered fingers. Was this her? Sarah Kappel, the dorky biologist? Was she the kind of girl you’d expect to grow a massive girlcock and fuck one of the deadliest Commanders in human space so silly that she was still mumbling incoherently in Swedish?

        But she liked being sexy.

        And dangerous .

        And war?

        War was fun . This wasn’t the total wars of the 20 th  and 22 nd  centuries. Modern war was a spectator sport, fought between larger than life personalities with PR teams and action figures, where there was no real dying . There was just explosions and robots and...her critters. She closed her eyes tighter. Then she felt the weird, ticking feeling in her head unfold. Four more units floated before her. Another collection of biological formats, each one designed for a different purpose. She barely had time to wonder at it before her brain buzzed and the images she saw blurred and fuzzed and became indistinct.

        Sarah found herself floating in an infinite blackness. A familiar one.

        A glowing Eye opened before her – vast and terrible and knowing. It transfixed her and Sarah screamed. She flailed in the emptiness. “No! No, get out of my head, I got away from you!” She kicked and the Eye drew back – then roared towards her, like a hunting sun.

YOU WILL NOT ABUSE MY GIFTS ANYMORE

        “They’re not your powers anymore!” Sarah shouted. “I’m not abusing them-”

YOU STOLE THEM.

         “Fuck you!” Sarah screamed at the top of her lungs. “You forced them into me, you piece of shit, you dipstick! You forced me to be like this! Guess what! You don’t fucking get to tell me, to boss me around, to guilt trip me about anything!” She slapped her chest. “I am trying to make this fucking galaxy a better place! And you don’t get to judge me about that, you alien bastard!”

        The sound that followed made Sarah’s skin prickle with goosebumps.

YOU WERE RIGHT, SPEZ. SHE WAS EASILY MANIPULATED.

         Sarah saw the blackness around her filling in with color. She was floating above her bed. Then she was floating above Wolf-359 C. Then she was floating above the solar system, the only thing visible being the dull red throb of the cool little sun. Then she was floating above the galaxy, looking down upon Wolf-359. It looked so pathetically close to Earth. So near. The human sphere was so terrifyingly small, next to that vastness. But as the awareness of her exact position in space and time hammered into her…

        Sarah woke up, gasping.

        “ En gång till?” Sexy mumbled.

        “They traced me,” Sarah whispered. Then, blinking. “What the fuck kind of alien is named Spez !?”

Chapter Eight: Sarah tries Diplomacy

The Excalibur returned with nearly empty reaction mass tanks, two melted thrust nozzles, and a crew that was nearly totally frazzled by the effects of long term stays in the acceleration tanks. Sarah, who had been at frantic work turning every bit of biomass that wasn’t Sexy Napoleon into drones, then drones into hatcheries, then hatcheries into larva, then larva into everything else her hybrid economy required, had come to the gangplank that the Excalibur set down on the landing platform outside of Sexy Napoleon’s base, expecting to see her friends. Instead, she was left waiting for two minutes of increasing nervousness before Aiden finally stumbled out, his knees quivering, his hand on the back of his head.

“Remind me,” he had croaked. “To never do that Again. Ever.”

Aiden was the best off – he had been the one most augmented by Sarah’s biomorphic powers. Tex had three broken ribs and had nearly stroked out. Kellen was only  slightly  better, and even he looked like someone had been beating him with a baseball bat. Steve and Tasha were in medically mandated comas, put there by Hailee to ensure that their brains didn’t completely liquify under the continual pressures of the burn. Sarah, upon hearing that, was ready to freak the fuck out. Then she saw Synth and realized that even the robotic members of the crew might have had some bad times.

Synth, after all, had been built for three things: Fucking, sucking, and different kinds of fucking. While her robotic body was rated up to class eight BDSM (according to her users manual, that included forceful ocular and aural penetration, nasal play, and auto-erotic dismemberment, three phrases that made Sarah scream, drop the PDA reader, and run away as fast as she could), it wasn’t rated for the hardened acceleration of the Excalibur during the fast pass. She had broken half her components and even her own computerized brain had shut down to prevent the quantum processes from being interrupted with unfortunate long term consequences.

The end result was that Sarah had a whole lot of medical stuff to manage before she even got to planning the next step of her objectives. Which was quite a problem, considering how, in the back of her mind, a continuing refrain kept playing: The Eye knows where you are. The Eye knows where you are. The Eye knows where you are.

Sarah tried to shut that voice up by working. Aiden was the easiest to fix. When she had helped him transition between genders, Sarah had accidentally thrown in all the same combat augmentations that her body had gotten, so all she needed to do was inject him with an extra helping of the uber-white blood cells that her body produced. The result had been shockingly effective: Within a few seconds, Aiden’s face went from battered and bruised to smooth green, his breathing went from wheezing to steady, and his eyes went from being clenched shut against the pain to opening. He sat up, slowly, breathing in, his wings flaring behind him.

“There we g-mmmph!” Sarah flailed as Aiden, in a single smooth motion, leapt from the bed, tackled her to the ground, and kissed her. Sarah was, by now, used to being tackled and pinned to hardened surfaces. Her body was tough enough that she was fairly certain that Aiden could put her through a pane glass window and the most she’d notice would be the amount of cleaning she’d have to do. His hand found one of her breasts and, with the expertise that had come from fucking her more times than any other human in the history of the universe (which, to be fair, was not a high bar to clear), began to tease and play with her nipple. Sarah squirmed and wriggled.

From the sidelines, Sexy Napoleon watched and scoffed. “I didn’t know you were bi,” she said, her voice faintly disdainful.

Sarah, her eyes half closed, her tongue wrestling with Aiden’s, paused and jerked her head back and away. Aiden’s tongue remained half down her throat – long enough that it was nearly classifiable as a tentacle. She made a soft little cough as his tongue slipped back out of her mouth, then said: “I’m straight .”

Aiden snorted.

“Uh, you fucked me,” Sexy Napoleon said, gesturing to herself. Specifically, to her immense breasts, which strained against her tight, blue uniform. She grinned, showing off her fangs. “Straight girls don’t sleep with me. Well, no, that’s a lie. They do all the time...” Her tongue slid along her lips. Sarah’s cheek’s colored.

“That was my...infiltration programming kicking in!” She stammered. “I think. Or, you know. Pheromones.”

“What about the time you fucked Synth and Tasha?” Aiden whispered.

“I...don’t...I...” Sarah shook her head, then gasped as Aiden used both of his hands to play with her breasts – squeezing and stroking, the tips of each of his strong, smooth fingers joining on her nipples, which he slooowly tugged upwards, making her arch her back and bite down on her lower lip to keep from mewling like a kitten. “F-Fine, I’m bi-ish. Or. Something. I don’t know!” She gasped, while Aiden crooned.

“Technically, Sarah isn’t being straight right now,” he murmured. “I’m trans. Fucking a transmasc is as queer as it gets.”

Sexy Napoleon looked unconvinced.

Aiden shrugged one shoulder in the most casually dismissive way that Sarah had ever seen, then leaned forward and began to suck on her nipple, his leathery wings fanning out to cover them both up from any peeping Napoleons. She breathed out through her teeth, her eyes fluttering half shut. “Aiden...fixing...other people, gotta...” She whispered, wriggling and squirming – and Aiden let her stand, though she walked with quivering knees and her sex dripped along her thighs. She injected each of her friends and hangers on with some healing goop, sprayed Synth down with her nanolathe (well, technically, it was a nanolathe she had stolen from Sexy Napoleon as her original nanolathe had been smeared into the rocky cliff-face of the cryogenic lake she had skipped across on her arrival.0

Finally, everyone was up and about and she could begin planning for the next step.

Which was why Tex, Kellen and Sexy Napoleon found her in Napoleon’s planning room, her breasts mashed up against the glowing holographic projection slate that filled the center of the room, her fingers hooked on the far edge of the table, as Aiden fucked her so hard and so fast that the pillar supporting the display table was creaking and sparking with every other thrust. His balls slapped against her green thighs and Sarah’s eyes rolled back into her head as she came, hard enough that a thin line of juice spurted along Aiden’s balls and pattered onto the floor.

“Uh...almost done,” Aiden said, grinning at the three commanders. Tex rolled his eyes. Sexy Napoleon tried to not look jealous. Kellen gave her a big old thumbs up.

Once Sarah was sprawled in a chair, cum oozing from her well fucked pussy, she smiled. “Time for step two.”

***

The Excalibur , fully remassed with antimatter enriched hydrogen, set out towards Wolf-359 B. Her hold was loaded with as many units as Sarah could breed on Wolf-359 C: Biters, spitters, blobbies, the crabs (whose use she still hadn’t determined), bombardiers. None of the flying units, which she had named ‘flappers’ for lack of a better term. Those were being bred, according to the last orders she had given before the Excalibur set out towards Wolf-359 C, in record numbers on DisneyPlanet. And as the Excalibur cut a smooth parabola through the Wolf-359 system, their sensors picked up the vast swarm of them taking off from DisneyPlanet, propelled through space with the agrav crystals on their wings.

Sarah beamed. “All right,” she said. “Let’s see how Space Belisarius feels about this . Send him a communication, Hailee.”

“Quantum uplink beginning,” Hailee said. “Do you want to get into your uniform?”

Sarah, who was sitting on the command throne of the Excalibur , looked down at her naked rump. “Wait, I should get dr-”

“Ah, Commander Kappel.”

Sarah snapped her head up and saw Space Belisarius standing before her – projected in true life holographic styling. He was almost the same height as Kellen, but where Kellen Grant was spindly, SB looked gaunt . His cheeks were hollow and his chin pronounced. His eyebrows were more bone than hair, and he had the narrowed eyes of someone who looked like he thought everyone and everything was some kind of an insult. The Disney uniform he wore looked as clean and sharp as any that Sarah had ever seen – and he wore it well – but it, combined with his sky blue skin and blood red eyes, made her feel as if she was speaking to a cartoon character, not a real person. Definitely not one of the most fearsome Commanders in the human sphere.

At least, according to Tex and Kellen and Sexy.

Sarah was at a bit of a disadvantage when it came to Space Belisarius: She had been, until her capture and infestation, a NovaDyne corporate citizen. The cheapest media she could access was the UN programs, which were mostly stock reports and a few big news bulletins, and the free level of the NovaDyne internal network. Since, well, buying a more expensive level of the network had been way outside of her budget as a biologist. So, she hadn’t heard a great deal about the Commanders of other corporations – NovaDyne preferred to have her learn about Texas Dallas and his exploits.

But she had gotten a short brief from Tex and Sexy, who had both fought Space Belisarius before: He was wily, he was cunning, he was deceptive, he was sneaky.

Like, what kind of sneaky? Sarah had asked. Tex and Sexy had exchanged a glance.

The sneaky kind, Tex said.

Yeah, Sexy had nodded.

All of that flashed through Sarah’s brains as she sat there on her command throne, like a rat in the stablight. Her arms crossed over her chest and she clapped her thighs together, her hair pulling tight against her head. “Ah!” she said. “Hailee!”

“I’m helping!” Hailee said. “Your beauty is your greatest weapon.”

“My greatest weapon is-” Sarah cut herself off as Space Belisarius cocked his head to the side, regarding her slowly.

“Ah,” he said, slowly. “I see how it is...”

Sarah blinked. Her head spines slowly unfolded, relaxing. “How what is?”

“Nothing,” Space Belisarius said, his voice growing more amused. “Did you have a reason to call me?”

“Y...e...s...” Sarah said, teasing the word out inch by inch. She had to admit, she was feeling increasingly like every single twitch across her face, every single breath she took, every single infinitesimal movement she made was giving Space Belisarius more and more rope to hang her with. She forced the paranoia down and instead sat up a bit more, her arms slipping a bit closer to squeeze her breasts against her chest. “We’ve got the orbital high ground, SB. You’re not going to win if we fight – so, why don’t we skip  the fighting and go right to the part where y-you let us use the atom smashers in your headquarters long enough to fabricate a HPS Drive.”

Belisarius nodded, slowly, then tapped his finger on his chin. His eyes looked thoughtful. “Do you know why I took this planet, Dr. Kappel?”

Sarah’s brow furrowed, slowly. Her head cocked to the side. “Uh, no. Why?”

“Because it is the only world in this solar system with intrinsic value,” he said, softly. “DisneyPlanet is a theme park that loses money. Wolf-359 C is a cryogenic snowball where setting foot down on the wrong patch of ice will kill you, even if you’re in a Commander suit. But this world has a dense metallic core and enough of an atmosphere to retain heat from geothermal energies. Life can survive here. That value has only been increased by Plasma Dynamics adding a research laboratory.” He grinned. “And it’s also the hardest to attack. Not just because of my contemporary’s addition of artillery – but also several important geographic features that make orbital assaults decidedly difficult.”

Sarah cocked her head even further.

“I allowed Kellen Grant to attack DisneyPlanet. Let NovaDyne claim the useless ball of rock – it’s not as if they can start running their own theme park there. I allowed Sexy Napoleon to flee to Wolf-359 C to lick her wounds and prepare herself for another attack. Here, I am prepared to let any corporate commander come and prepare to settle in for the most horrifyingly boring game of micromanagement and flea chasing that you can imagine. And as they pour troops and commanders into this planet, to try and take back the labs, or render DisneyPlanet safe for operations again, Disney can begin to eye claims in far more advantageous solar systems.” He grinned. “Do you know how easy it would be for Star Trek to have its famous battle take place in Alpha Centauri? Or Delta Pavonis?”

Sarah cocked her head so hard that her ear was pressed against her shoulder. “So...do...you want to fight or not?”

“My dear Commander Kappel, I would want to do anything but fight,” he said, sounding amused. “The last thing in the world I want is to run up against an enemy I don’t understand, with technology I haven’t learned, and abilities I cannot guess at. I’ve been spying as best as I can, but I still have no idea how you defeated Sexy Napoleon so fast.” His eyes danced with amusement. “Unless you want me to believe you let her capture you, then seduced her into surrendering.”

“Ha...haaa ha ha ha! Y-Yeah! As if!” Sarah reached up to tug on the collar of her shirt before she remembered she wasn’t wearing one.

Space Belisarius nodded. “I can have the part fabricated within the day. If you wish, you and your crew can come down to visit. Hell...” He smirked. “If you accept I-Credits, I’d be more than happy to purchase some of your marvelous bio-organisms. We can discuss your future plans, and you can head on to your next solar system with my blessing.” He bowed to her. “You have my word.”

“Wow!” Sarah said. “Uh, yeah, that sounds great!”

Space Belisarius smiled. “Then I shall see you once your thrust plume overhead, I shall lay out the red carpet.”

“Yay!” Sarah clapped her hands together as the holographic image faded and fizzled to nothingness. “Finally. Diplomacy worked.”

“It’s a trap,” Tex said, leaning against the wall.

“Trap,” Aiden said.

“Definitely a trap,” Tasha cut in, leaning around the computer console she was futzing with in the corner.

“Sorry, mistress, but it’s a trap,” Kellen said.

“Absolutely a trap,” Sexy Napoleon said.

“Don’t ask me, I walked into a Borgification plant by accident,” Steve said, holding up his hands when Sarah looked at him. Her eyes swung to Synth, who shrugged.

“I think the accepted nomenclature is femboy these days,” she said.

Sarah mouthed ‘what’ at her, then glared up at the ceiling.        

“I don’t think it’s a trap!” Hailee said. “It’s more of a prelude to an ambush!”

Sarah scowled. “Listen, guys. I’ve been changed against my will into an alien-human hybrid killing machine and thrown into a war against every corporation in the human sphere. Right now, I think that the Eye knows where I am and is going to be showing up with a fleet of...whatever the Claw uses for spaceships. Maybe like, really big space whales or something.”

“The what and the what?” Steve asked.

“So, you know what?” Sarah stood up, then slammed her fist down into the armrest of the throne, folding the composite and the faux-wood down with a splintering crack. “I’m going to fucking assume the fucking best, and SB fucks me over, I’ll rip his throat out with my own fucking claws, and not one moment before!” She panted, slightly. “I-I mean...I won’t...rip his throat out. But I...I may smack him around a little.” She blushed. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

Silence hung in the bridge. Sarah looked down at her knuckles, then lifted her hand up, flexing her fingers. Her claws glinted. She looked at them and remembered the juicy gush of blood from the animal she had disemboweled, back on Trappist-1a. She closed her eyes, shaking her head.

“Okay,” Tex said. “But we can at least do paranoid preparations, right?”

“Sure!” Sarah said, nodding.

“...seriously, the what and the what ?” Steve asked.

“The Eye is the hive intelligence that controls an ancient space faring biotech civilization called the Claw,” Sarah said. “T-Their goal is to...to...honestly, I don’t know. I just got...flashes before I ripped my way out of the transformation cocoon and escaped. I saw images of humans, controlled by fungal growths, marched en mass into biopits. Mulched down for the biological equivilent of spare parts, then turned into...” Her brow furrowed and she tightened her jaw. The memories weren’t pleasant to recall – like jagged claws, raking through her head. “T-There’s...they...want to...”

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.

“T-They came from...an...an ice world. In orbit around a gas giant,” she said, her voice catching as she closed her eyes and thought more, trying to recall everything. But with the jagged half-memories, there came other things, other things she’d preferred to have forget. Not because they hurt. But because they had felt good. The feeling of one of the tentacles plunging into her ear, filtering into her brain and finding her HUD implant and tugging it out. She had cum . She had cum hard at the feeling of it. She shook her head, blushing.

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.

“Ugh!” She put her hand over her face. “They didn’t have FTL. They do now, they pulled that information from my mind. But...each time...” She gritted her teeth, thinking through and unpacking what the seedships had been stuffed with. Race memories uncoiled inside of her, jagged like thorny tentacles, pricking her with images of forms she had never witnessed before. The gentle starfish that drifted in the planetary oceans called them shren-fallia and they had been slaughtered, ripped from their homes and thrown into the pits by creatures adapted to oceans by the Eye, guided by his will, by...a hybrid, like her. No, not like her. One of the shren-fallia that had been twisted, blackened and armor plated, sensual as they saw it and deadly in one. The hybrid had been the last to…

Into the…

Sarah fell to her knees.

“Sarah!” Aiden knelt beside her. “Stop, do-”

“Shut the fuck up!” Sarah hissed. She knew it hurt, but she wanted to understand. Another image, another race of sentience devoured. The galliee , the trasdon, the urnud, the pro-tass, each with their own shape, their own culture. Each turned into...no...not into a seedship. A new image uncoiled in her thoughts. A view from a pro-tass hybrid, their mouthless face transformed into a parody of beauty, all dripping tentacles and writhing fins. They looked up, the last view before they threw themselves willingly into the pit, the last of a race two trillion strong and with a history stretching across half a million years.

The sun…

“T-They were... shrouding the sun...” Sarah hissed, then collapsed forward, her palms planting against the floor. “Oh god. I know what they’re doing, Aiden.”

“What?” Aiden asked, and when Sarah lifted her head, she saw the rest of her friends and allies were looking at her with the same concern she heard on Aiden’s voice. His strong hand squeezed her wrist as Sarah closed her eyes, and realized that she was crying. Thick streaming tears, pouring from her eyes, the pain sliding out of her with them. She drew a shuddering breath and let Aiden draw her to her feet. Once she was standing, she whispered.

“I need to see a star map.”

***

Once more, into the briefing room. This time, though, Sarah punched in key-combinations that she hadn’t used since college. “Do you guys know about the Great Filter?” she asked, curiously, as the projection map showed the known galaxy. The Milky Way sprawled in the air, with the human sphere projected in a wobbly, wibbly golden orb – which then subdivided further into corporate zones, their flags shooting up and out of the plane of the galaxy, unfurling and waving. The patchwork conglomeration of humanity looked painfully small next to the sweep of the galaxy.

“Yeah, I heard about it in school,” Tex said, nodding. “We beat it.”

Steve smiled. “Yeah, there was an episode about it in the twelfth Disco reboot. Uh, it’s a theorized ‘filter’ that wipes out civilizations once they reach a certain point of technological development. It’s the answer to the Market Paradox.”

Sarah nodded. “The Market Paradox: If every race develops capitalism, then where’s all the markets?” She shook her head. “It has been the standing theory that all races that attempt to use communism inevitably destroy themselves, as we almost did during the Cold War.” She punched in a few more keys, inputting new coordinates. Blue and white and red and green spheres began to bloom across the galaxy – most of them only a few lightyears wide, but several of them reaching out to encompass hundreds of solar systems rather than dozens. She chewed her lower lip, then stepped backwards as the last of them – the pro-tass sphere – expanded out of the galactic core. “These are all the civilizations that the Claw has wiped out.”

“Jesus Christing shit!” Tex sprang to his feet.

“Yeaaaahhh...” Sarah whispered. “M-Most of their stellar domains were small – none of them invented the HSP Drive. But it looks like the theory that communism wiped them out is wrong: Communism didn’t do it. The Eye did. With the Claw. But wait, look at the stars. They’re all red giants.”

“Yeah?” Tasha asked, cocking her head. “Is that weird?”

“Totally weird,” Sarah said, nodding. “Life, as we’ve determined, only evolves in specific situations: you need liquid water, you need a geologically active planet, and you need a relatively stable sun of a certain temperature, with a broad goldilocks zone for best effect. Red giants are too cold, if you’re close enough to get warm, you get cooked by the radiation or torn apart by the gravity. But what if they’re not red giants?”

The entire rest of the group blinked at her.

“...what are they?” Aiden asked.

“Oh! They’re Dyson spheres!” Hailee said.

“They’re Dys- hey!” Sarah glared at the ceiling.

“Sorry, I just figured it out,” Hailee said, her voice chipper as ever. “A Dyson sphere is a technological – or in this case, biological – shell that surrounds a sun and collects all of its energy. That energy is then utilized by a civilization for whatever ends it desires. They were determined to be cost inefficient when the HPS Drive allowed us to travel faster than the speed of light – but there serious consideration about constructing one by the year 3100 if we hadn’t developed the HPS Drive. From a distance, a solar system with a Dyson sphere would appear to be a red giant – the shell would need to radiate heat, and as the sun was entirely enclosed, waste heat would produce a similar glow to a red giant. The only indication that anything was different would be the lack of exoplanets or dust clouds or any kind of radio transmissions.”

“So, that’s what’s on the line,” Sarah said, her voice soft. “If the Claw takes over the Earth, they’ll turn every last human being into biomatter tools, then rip our planets apart and make them into a Dyson sphere to...” She paused.

“Do what?” Tasha asked.

“I have no idea,” Sarah said, slowly.

“And they’ve done this to every other race they’ve ever met...” Tex whispered, leaning forward to look directly at the galaxy map.

Steve gulped. “The big bad alien menace is way less fun when it’s real and not just a TV show, huh?”

“Yeah,” Sarah whispered, her eyes settling down on the map of the galaxy. Despite each alien civilization having a different hue, her eyes – for the moment – saw nothing but red. Blood red. Pouring across the map, copious and dripping. She reached down and punched down on the ‘end display’ key so hard that she impaled the keyboard, filling the air with a spray of sparks. “Ah!” She jerked her finger back, wincing at the thin line of smoke that rose from the damaged console. “Ooopse. Dang. Crap.”

“We’ve got one advantage, though,” Aiden said, breaking his silence. He smirked at Sarah. “We got you, Doc. None of those other races had a hybrid that changed sides, right?”

Sarah closed her eyes, trying to delve deep into the fragmentary memories of the Eye. She winced, then opened her mouth. She looked at Aiden, then gave him a big thumbs up, her smile so wide that her jaw started to hurt. “Exactly! Never ever happened before. Uh, I’m completely, one hundred percent unique. The Eye will never know what hit them! Hah! Yes.” She punched her fist into her palm, then wrung her hand out and winced. “Gonna go, uh, get ready for SB’s ambush a-and or completely ordinary, nice, not an ambush party!” She walked away as hurriedly as she could.

In the briefing room, Aiden slowly leaned back in his chair and blew out a slow sigh. He glanced left. Tex was ducking his head forward, his hands clasped between his legs. Tasha was chewing her knuckle and looking worried. He glanced right. Steve and Synth were both exchanging a glance. He glanced up. At the far end of the room, Kellen Grant and Sexy Napoleon were both looking equally as grim and dour. Aiden shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Wow!” Hailee broke into the silence. “Sarah is getting much better at lying. It took me zero point two picoseconds more time to pierce her deception this time!”

***

At the edge of the solar system, a puckering fold in space time had begun to appear. It was the far end of a crude hypertropic plane shift agitator: A rotating, infinitely long cylinder of hypothetical matter, spun up and crafted by a plane shift drive. When space time folds, it has the same effect as a gravitational field – and at a certain point, gravity grows strong enough to not merely bend  light, but to entirely prevent its escape. When this happens naturally, astrophysicists call it a black hole. Or a singularity, if they wanted to sound cool.

When it happens synthetically, during a plane shift, it is called a different, less cuddly name by military specialists and tactical analysts:   A stealth insertion field.

Commanders had an even more blunt name for it.

They called it a buttfucking.

The buttfucking opened and a dartlike shape emerged, like a needle carved out of pure blackness. It hung in space for a scant moment, as if catching its bearings, before it finally stretched out almost organic wings. The wings caught onto the swirling mass of charged particles that marked the edge of the heliosphere within moments. Via a method that would have been familiar to a sailor from Earth’s ancient past, the wing’s membranes shifted so that they tacked against the solar winds, and with the grace and speed of a charred dandelion seed blown on cyclone wind during the last of the great Californian firestorms, the needle blackness shot towards Wolf-359’s ruby red heart.

Without a thrust plume and with an armored hull only a few infinitesimal fractions of a Kelvin above the deep cold temperatures of interstellar space, the ship was almost invisible to any conventional sensors. A direct LADAR sweep would have picked it up, as would have the more esoteric scanners that human Commanders sometimes used to sniff out a buttfucking.

None of those were aimed outwards, not during the Excalibur’s relatively gentle drop towards the second world of the solar system.

Neither side knew that a third had come to join the party.

Neither side knew that nothing would ever be the same.

Chapter Nine: Sarah gets screwed by Space Belisarius

Sarah felt a momentary pang of sadness when, after she stepped off the Excalibur’s gangplank and into the fancy art deco foyer of the Plasma Dynamics (now Disney) research base, she tensed herself for immediate attack. It was just the life she had now. Sudden attacks were a thing she’d have to worry about. But instead of a sudden attack, she instead found herself standing before Space Belisarius in person. In the flesh, without the holographic veneer, he remained as gaunt and blue as she had remembered – but there was an almost magical animating energy to his body – his every move was so full of powerful grace and refined elegance that Sarah was actually gaping a little as he stepped forward, took her hand, then leaned forward and kissed her knuckle.

“A delight to see you, Commander Kappel, in the flesh, and, of course, you look stunning in your uni...” He blinked, slowly. His lips turned black.

Sarah, who was still gaping at him, blinked a few times. Then it hit her like a ton of bricks. “Oh! Fuck! My skin secretes a deadly-”

Space Belisarus faceplanted into the carpeted floor and two spheres rolled around the corner. They sprang out sets of legs at the ends of their movements, transforming instantly from spheres into quadrupedal, heavily armored and heavily armed weapon platforms.

“-nuerotoxin..” Sarah whispered.

The two combat robots opened fire at the same time. The rest of the Sarah Gang – the Kappel Gang? Whatever – were still walking down the gangplank and had enough time to run back into the Excalibur before the bullets started to chew up the red carpeting, blow apart the statuary, and punch holes into the faux marble that lined the walls. Powder flew into the air as Sarah scrambled behind cover, plaster and marble and chips of wood pattering onto her back. The drones kept their shooting up, their legs stomping on the floor as they started to try and skirt around her cover. Shell casings pattered and pinged into the floor – some landed in the carpet, but many hit the marble floor proper.

The gunfire stopped and Sarah peeked up and over the lip of the now heavily shredded planter she had ducked behind. The tree was so many smoking splinters and the bushes had been ripped to pieces and a slow groan filled the air as the corner of the stone planter gave way and spilled half the dirt onto the red carpeting. “I-” Sarah started.

The two combat robots had finished reloading. Bullets filled the air again and Sarah flung herself down. Dirt flew. The splinters splintered further, reducing to parts smaller than the human eye could see. The heavy thud thud thud of the dirt absorbing the impacts and being flung into the air sounded a great deal like Sarah’s own racing heart. The combat robots finished shooting again, their guns clicking and hissing – their barrels glowing red.

Sarah stuck her head out again. “Can-”

The combat robots switched to rockets – the red tipped projectiles unfolding from their bellies like the world’s least sexy testacles. Sarah screamed and stood, running to the side. “Heaaaaaaaaaaal!” She shouted as the first rocket whisked past her calves and exploded into the wall. The concussive force picked her up, flung her across the room, and smashed her into the outstretched arms of one of the massive, bronze art-deco angels. Smoke roiled around her shoulder ears rang as she sat up – seeing the combat robots slowly beginning to swivel around to face her.

“Him!” She shouted, though her voice sounded like she was underwater, at the bottom of a well, a well that was currently being attacked by aliens from the gong planet.

The combat robots paused. Lowered their barrels.

Sarah rolled out of the angel’s arms – dropping lightly to the floor with a faint click of clawed toes on the ground. Her shoes had gotten blown off at some point. She held her hands up, edging slowly towards the debris shrouded body of Space Belisarius. She knelt beside him and gently plucked a piece of plaster off his face. She saw that while his lips were still black, his face hadn’t broken out in the veins that she had seen on Dr. Bowers face when she had infected him by accident. She bit her lip, then extended her wrist tendrils, plunging them into the other Commander’s neck.

What she found was the microbial and chemical equivalent of a war zone. Nanoscale machines – medichines – were soaring through his blood and his muscles and his bone, fighting back against the contact venom on her skin. To her shock, the medichines were actually in a tie. Not winning, but not losing  either. She wasn’t sure if that said more about the quality of the medichines or the deadliness of her skin neurotoxin. Sarah closed her eyes. “Okay...” She whispered. “First things first...” She tried to bring her own awareness out of the Commander’s body and into hers – and there, she felt herself. She felt the minor changes she had already wrought, many of them without thinking. She found the glands in her body that were producing the neurotoxin and told them, chemically and biologically, to stop doing that.

Then she injected the cure into Space Belisarius.

And then a sneaky idea occurred to her.

She had transformed Dr. Bowers, accidentally, into a bladeling. That had included the command conditioning, which had let her order him and have him have to follow every single one. She chewed her mental lip. She could slip that conditioning into SB. She could make him, in effect, into her puppet and remove any and all chance of betrayal. It’d be like not fighting. But...also, it’d be ripping away his freedom. She had done it to Bowers by accident. Doing it coldly, intentionally...no. She drew her tendrils back, snapping from the close, quiet, almost intuitive headspace of biomorphing to the real world that she spent most of her days in. When she blinked, she saw that Belisarius was opening his eyes.

“Commander Kappel,” he said, slowly. “If I might make a suggestion for future diplomatic meetings?”

“Yeah?” Sarah asked.

“Wear gloves with your uniform,” Belisarius said.

***

Plasma Dynamics, like StarCon, liked their personnel to be comfortable – when those personnel could pay at the very least. This meant that the chambers that Space Belisarius took the Sarah Gang too were as finely appointed and splendid as anything she had ever seen on the Excalibur  and in a very similar style: Rich carpeting, plush furniture, the bold lines and stark figures of art-deco. Everything proclaimed: This is a place for people of wealth and taste.  Including the food. Sarah sat at the table across from SB and looked at him through the crystalline wine glass that he had fabricated for her, then filled with equally fabricated red wine.

“It’s a simulated Beaujolais 32, I believe,” Belisarius said, his fingers holding a knife and fork as he sawed into the thick cut steak that he had fabricated for himself. “But if you want this honest trencherman’s opinion? I cannot tell the difference.” He leaned forward, his lips skinning back in a grin. “You could give me a white wine and I’d still call it a red wine half the time, eh?”

“Yeah. Wine.” Sarah shook her head, setting the glass down. “What even is wine. Hah. I mean.” She coughed. “I know what wine is, I’ve had wine. Loads of wine. S-Sometimes, it even came out of a fabricator and not a cardboard box. Not that there’s anything wrong with cardboard box wine! I mean, it was nice! Fine! No! Better than fine, it was good. Not as good as this. I mean, this is fine. I think. I haven’t...” She stopped herself as Belisarius’ cutting slowed, then stopped.

Belisarius chuckled. “It’s not poisoned, you know. You don’t need to-”

Sarah knocked the entire glass back in one quick gasp and slammed it down like she was doing a shot.

Belisarius blinked at her.

“I like wine!” Sarah wheezed, her eyes brimming with tears.

Belisarius chuckled and went back to sawing at his steak.

Sarah pretended to be very interested in the rest of the room’s decoration to cover up her wiping the tears out of her eyes. The room proper was situated on the top of one of the tall spires of rock that dominated the planet. Geologic activity sparked by several impacts on the same scale as the impact that had formed the Earth’s moon had left Wolf-359 B ringing like a gong, even almost two billion years later. The result had been a wild, chaotic fractal of rock and pillars and canyons, wracked with periodic landquakes. The only thing more common than the pillars were fissures that led straight towards pockets of geothermal energy – the multiple impactors had been rich with radioactive elements, which still radiated their heat through the crust. The only sign of life was the faint haze in the stars, adding just enough of a twinkle to trick Sarah’s eyes into thinking she was back on Earth, and the occasional patch of lichen that grew on the tops of the pillars.

Part of the reason why life was so hard to spot, though, was because Belisarius had been fortifying the planet since his blitz. Laser towers, missile sites, surface-to-space launchers, kinetic bunkers, hardened laser shields, force screen emitters, gravimetric field apertures, radial antenna aiming arrays, kiloton after kiloton of hard ordinance stacked up in quake-shielded underground ice shelters. There were trebuchet catapults designed to launch X-ray lasing emitters strapped to dirty fission bombs, so when the bombs went off, the X-ray lasers would whip around wildly like invisible swords, cutting across space and severing everything in their path.

Even with the security pass codes they had gotten from Sexy Napoleon, it was a fucking deathtrap.

“Impressed?” Belisarius asked.

“I...not...kinda,” Sarah said, flopping back and forth between honesty and diplomacy. She blushed, looking down at her cup. “This ecosystem is so fragile. It’s basically rebounding from their own oxygen catastrophe. Yeah, it’s argon, but you can see the fossilized landreefs. Well. Those that your construction tanks haven’t plowed over.”

“Oxygen catastrophe?” Belisarius asked, sipping from his wine.

Sarah sighed. Her fingers rolled the glass gently. “When life first started on Earth, it didn’t breathe oxygen. It breathed the atmosphere that existed at the time. Well, one of those lifeforms excreted oxygen. The oxygen killed everything else.” She bit her lip. “Most of all life on Earth exists because one kind of life killed the rest.”

Belisarius nodded, subtly.

“Then we killed most of that,” Sarah said, quietly. “I mean, we didn’t do it on purpose or anything. It wasn’t, like, avoidable or anything.” She nodded again, remembering her lessons from school. “It just...happens, I guess.” She looked back out the window, at the few scraps of reefs that hadn’t been crushed. “But if anyone attacks this planet, those pew pew guns are going to mulch the lichen, and...that’ll be it for this planet.”

Belisarius nodded. “I want to turn this world into a quagmire for Disney’s enemies. But...” he paused, then set his fork down. “That quagmire can be in orbit.”

Sarah glanced up. “What do you mean?”

Belisarius smiled. “Oh no. I’m not taking you off to show you anything until you eat your dinner.”

Sarah blinked at him. Then she looked down at the large slab of red meat she had asked for. “Oh! Right!” She blushed, then stabbed her fork into it, placed her knife against the meat. She closed her eyes. She just had to act naturally – but Belisarius’ red eyes and his soft voice and the conversation and her own stupid mouth had left her feeling so wound up. She clenched her jaw and sliced. The knife plunged through the steak, plate, halfway into the table, and snapped in half. Sarah remained frozen, her hand clenching on the handle, trying to conceal what had happened. She thrust out with her finger, pointing at a random spot on the wall. “What’s that!?”

Belisarius glanced over his shoulder. “That is a wall, Sarah.”

When he looked back, Sarah’s cheeks bulged and her napkin covered her plate and a good chunk of the table. She was chewing slowly. Carefully. She nodded, her cheeks wobbling as she mumbled. “Mmphmm!”

Belisarius smiled. “You know, Sarah Kappel, I think you are by far, the most interesting woman I’ve ever met in my life,” he said, casually. Then he stood as Sarah swallowed, her throat bulging nearly as much as her throat. The steak half stuck and she punched her own throat with one hand before it finally slipped down. She coughed, gasped, then smiled at him.

“Thanks,” she said. “I think?”

Belisarius took her hand without a single sign of fear and walked her out of the room – and Sarah paused only to ping Aiden. Her picture in picture minimap showed that her friends were mostly clustered in one of the fancy living chambers. Aiden’s voice came into her head a bit hesitantly. Sarah? Are you...talking to me?

Hey, it worked! Sarah thought. I wasn’t sure it would. But, I mean, I figure you’re one of my units, maybe I could...send...messages. I’m just checking to make sure SB hasn’t done anything evil or sneaky while he was wining and dining me.

Everything seems fine so far, Aiden said. Then, playfully. Wining and dining huh?

I’m not going to fuck him! Sarah said.

I never said anything about fucking… Aiden’s voice was a playful croon.

S-Shut up!

The lady doth protest too much, Aiden purred.

I can order you to stick your head into a toilet, Sarah thought, her voice somewhat vengeful, but then the connection broke – not because of anything evil or unwanted happening to Aiden. It broke because Sarah’s concentration was shaken to the core as Belisarius took her into a high speed elevator and the faint shift of the gravitational field snapped her attention back to the world around her. Her brow furrowed as the elevator dropped five stories, then whisked horizontally away from the base. She yelped as the elevator’s clear walls showed them whirring along a monorail track that snaked between canyon walls, past defensive structures.

“Uhhhhhh, where are we going?” She asked.

“A hot lab,” Belisarius said, smiling. “The more dangerous a technology, the further from the base it got researched. Plasma Dynamics was working on several space based weapons platforms in this hot lab. Stuff to give an edge in battles between ships.”

“O-Oh,” Sarah said, stepping up to the wall. “And why are you showing me this?”

“Let’s say I’m trying to seduce you,” he said, smirking at her.

“If you wanted to seduce me,” Sarah started, then stopped herself. Her tongue and her brain smashed together into a three-thought pileup. She had gotten used to flirting with Aiden. But Belisarius wasn’t Aiden. He was a stranger. And she was Sarah Kappel. But she was also the sexy, sensual, made-for-fucking human/claw hybrid infiltrator Commander. The combination of impulses, thoughts, and words, left her stammering out a confused: “Then, uh, bu...st….stuff!”

Belisarius chuckled. “Not like that, wench.” He gently elbowed her.

“Wench!?” Sarah asked.

“Do you prefer-” Belisarius was cut off by the elevator as it finished its track along the monorail, coming to a gentle stop against the side of a large silver spire that thrust from the canyon. Geothermal plants dotted the land around it, each one hissing and steaming with the energy coursing through their hyper-efficient turbines. The doors into the hot lab opened and Belisarius spread his hand, gesturing her forward. Sarah walked forward and tried to do so as normally as she could – but she found her hips swaying despite herself. She glanced back over her shoulder and caught the other Commander’s red eyes darting down to oggle her rump for a moment. She smirked to herself, while Belisarius stepped out of the elevator.

The interior of the hot lab eschewed the art-deco flourishes of the main living areas of the base – instead, it was all functional, sleek corridors, corridors that led almost immediately to one of the discretely partitioned laboratories. An observation blister was set into the side of the automated lab – dozens of robotic arms and drones were still at work within the lab, clearly going through a preprogrammed routine, ordered by Belisarius on the way. Sarah walked up to the edge of the blister, her nose squishing against the glass, folding up slightly as she watched the arms finishing their set up.

They had created a blunt nozzled projector, a bit like a gun or the outtake on a thruster.

“Whazzat?” Sarah asked.

“That is one of the devices that PD was working on before I took the base,” Belisarius said, his hand lightly resting on her shoulder. “It’s a new kind of plasma projector – stronger, faster firing, lighter.” He squeezed her as the nozzle of the weapon flared with a searing blue-white light. The sphere of energy it flung out struck a plate of armored sheeting that had just been set up by one of the automated arms, melting through it with ease. The plasma ball kept going, striking a second, then a third layer of armor before, at last, it was depleted. The third sheet still had a huge, glowing mark on it – white hot near the center, and as she watched, a dollop of molten composite flowed away from the center, leaving a puckered hole. It didn’t take being a naval expert to know that, if that had been a starship, that tiny hole would have created a pressure front that would have blown the whole weakened section into space.

“Dang,” Sarah said.

“The problem is, of course, the magnetic fields,” Belisarius said. “That’s the downside of many plasma weapons.”

“Yeah! Synth needs to be well away from my bombardier beetles before they fire,” Sarah said, turning to lean her back against the glass. “Or else she gets all loopy from the magnetic fields.”

“So, it’ll be worse than useless unless its mounted on sturdy, low fi weapon systems. Combots, tanks, that kind of thing,” Belisarius said. “But...what if it was strapped onto a space platform that doesn’t need to worry about magnetic fields scrambling their automated intelligences?”

Sarah’s brow furrowed. “My wingers ?”

“Your wingers,” Belisarius said, grinning at her as he leaned forward. “What weapons do they even have?”

“Uhhh...” Sarah blushed. His eyes were alight with excitement – and Sarah felt herself getting a teeny bit excited too. Her mind flashed back to the way war looked when she was riding on the transport, heading for Kellen Grant’s base. War had a beauty to it – and her mind was already beginning to put together the ways that the biological armament of her wingers combined with the PD plasma thrower could totally mash space ships. She grinned, slowly. “They’d compliment each other real good, actually.”

She and Belisarius began to talk shop – and Sarah shocked herself with how much fun it was. Belisarius had a sneaky, clever brain, the exact kind of clever brain she’d have expected, and it was fun throwing ideas about the use for not only wingers at Belisarius, but also discussing the abilities of spitters and blobbers. He had some suggestions on how to alter spitters - “Have you considered increasing their rate of fire by reducing the size of their projectiles and...” - and bladelings - “short distance agrav wings, like your wingers. More expensive in terms of radioactives, but considering your critters can make radioactives...”

Sarah’s head was whirling by the time she realized that Belisarius had stopped – they had gotten off the car and were back into art-deco land. He smiled at her. “Want to continue to talk shop inside over some more wine? Or...maybe something you actually like?” He winked at her.

Sarah blushed as she saw the small name stenciled on the door. This was Belisarius’ room.

Her blush got darker. “Rootbeer, maybe?”

“With ice cream?” Belisarius asked, punching his finger into the door open button. The door whisked opened and Sarah walked inside, her finger twiddling with the collar of her uniform. She had gone from wanting to tear her uniform off in agitation to remembering how to be comfortable in her own clothing once again...to wanting to tear her uniform off again. It felt so close and confining. Her skin itched and she blushed a bit, her stomach filled with butterflies. You’re being stupid, she thought. You’ve had sex with, like, three enemy commanders. Well, okay, not Tex. But you...I mean, you’re not even going to have sex, unless you want to. Do you want to?

She glanced back at Belisarius, who had let the door slide shut behind him. He wasn’t exactly what she’d call handsome . He wasn’t Kellen Grant handsome. But the more she spent time with him, the more she found herself appreciating his features. She bit her lip, slightly, considering. And we did a quick bioscan on him , her brain murmured. You could look up how big his blue dick is. How big and thick and augmented it is. You know. Just out of idle speculation.

“Well?” Belisarius asked.

“No!” Sarah squeaked. “I mean, I don’t even know! I...”

Belisarius blinked at her. “You’ve never had ice cream in your rootbeer?”

“I...” Sarah blinked back at him. Her cheeks heated and her hair did one of her nervous little frissons – the spines flexing and unflexing in a wave. “No, actually. That sounds awful. The ice cream would get all soggy and the flavor would mix with the root-beer. Ugh.” She made a face.

Belisarius laughed. “Fair enough.”

They both sat down at a small table that was arrayed before the window that looked out at the starry skies of Wolf-359. The sun hung, low overhead, a red disk that was nearly dim enough to look at directly without pain. The room’s fabricator whirred as the waited and Belisarius murmured. “You know-”

“How did you beat Sexy Napoleon!?” Sarah yelped. The words sprang out of her, nervousness driving her – nervousness about the red gleam in his eyes.

Belisarius took her hand and grinned. “I bribed her.”

“You... bribed her?” Sarah asked, her eyes widening. Belisarius lifted her hand. His lips gently pressed to her knuckles, his eyes meeting hers as he murmured against her skin.

“My operational budget included a rather significant chunk of universal credit, enough to pay for her various appetites. She needed to win or lose two fights to get her dental plan. So, I slipped her half my UC through a hard-drop drone, while she wasn’t near her AI, and she did the rest.” His eyes glittered slightly. “The best way to win is without fighting. Whether it means taking a defensive position and forcing the enemy to come to you, or to disarm the enemy with a few credits and a smile.”

“And a steak?” Sarah whispered.

“I was...hoping to need to use more than just a steak...” his voice was a quiet croon and his lips kissed her wrist. The gentle touch sent a flare through her skin, throbbing from her arm to her breasts to her cunt. Her eyes closed and she leaned her head forward as Belisarius gently drew her forward, shifting his seat so that they were next to one another. Sarah let herself wriggle onto his lap with a little giggle, gasping as he kissed her neck. His teeth nibbled at her throat and Sarah rolled her head back, her nipples hard little diamonds. She felt like she had drunk a dozen glasses of wine and all of them were spinning through her head. She closed her eyes, leaning her head forward and burying her nose against his raven black hair, breathing in his crisp, clean scent.

Aiiiiiiden, she thought.

Hows the fucking?

S-Shut up! She lifted her head up, then blushed even harder as Belisarius’ questing fingers found the buttons on her dress uniform. The cloth parted like the waters of the ocean, slithering over her shoulders as her back arched itself, making it easier for his blue lips to kiss their way to her nipples. He found a nipple and he sucked on her. She moaned and closed her eyes tightly, figuring that if Aiden could snark, he was fine. Her fingers cupped Belisarius’ head, holding him close as his other hand gripped her ass, squeezing her through her clothing.

“Bed?” Belisarius whispered, his breath hot against her nipple as he drew his mouth back.

“Absofuckingyesly!”

The bed squeaked as Belisarius dropped her onto it, and Sarah was grabbing and ripping at her clothes as he undid his shirt. Her claws made short work of her dress uniform, and she barely had enough time to pose sexily before Belisarius was on the bed – hungrily kissing her on the mouth, his tongue and hers meeting. He was only shirtless, but that was enough for her to begin her own explorations. Her claws gently caressed along his muscle, bumping over the seams of his battle scars. He had a lot of them. Her eyes closed tightly and she turned her head to the side, moaning softly as she sucked on his tongue, his hands planted on either side of her head as he loomed above her.

Sarah spread her thighs, wanton. Eager.

Belisarius tugged his leggings down with one hand, balancing himself on his knees and his left palm.

Sarah had successfully managed to not peek at his biometrics. Now, it was moot. Now she could feel every inch of his long, thick, powerful dick and it made her toes curl . Sarah arched her back, grinding her belly and her pubic mons against the length of him, reveling in the feeling of his silky, rock hard cock . Her breath drew in a short, shallow gasp as she whispered. “I really like, uh, your...uh, big dick...” She grinned. “Wait, no, I can do way better dirty talking!”

“I’m sure you can,” Belisarius said, sitting back on his knees. He hooked her leg with one hand, lifting her up, so that her ankle hooked over his shoulder. This let him grind the tip of his blue cock against her waiting, eager cunt and Sarah whined, arching her back. Like an animal in heat. She rolled her head back, her spines hooking onto the pillow as she crooned.

“Fuck me. Fuck me now .”

“With pleasure...” Belisarius ducked his head forward and slammed into her. His cock slipped into her waiting cunt with a slick noise that made her almost climax from the audio stimulation alone. The fact that his member bumped against the deepest part of her, grinding against a place in her cunt that seemed to be made purely for the bliss of a big cock, was just gravy. Sarah’s claws almost bit into his shoulders as she reached up, trying her best to only scratch him. Belisarius took this as a challenge. He leaned forward and kissed her again and began to fuck her into the bed with hard, fierce slaps . His hips and her hips met, his balls rebounding off her ass.

Smack.

Smack.

Smack.

Sarah broke the kiss – not because she needed to breathe, but because she needed to moan. “Fuck, yes, fuck me, fuck my alien pussy, fuck me hard, Belisarius! God! Yes! Yes!” She shuddered. She was so keyed up and his cock hit all of her pleasure centers that she barely needed his hand – and yet, he still reached down. Holding himself up with his legs and his belly muscles alone, the skinny commander placed two of his long fingers on her clit and rubbed . Shallow, powerful circles, which sent throbbing pleasure exploding through Sarha. Her hair-spines flared outwards, almost giving her an afro as her back arched and she screamed in pleasure.

Her cunt tightened on his dick and her claws scrabbled to either side of her, shredding sheets rather than his skin. Her breasts bounced in time with the slapping of his hips and his balls, a counterpoint of jiggling green flesh as Belisarius leaned forward and bit down on her throat, squeezing tightly enough that it edged between pleasure and pain.

Sarah’s eyes went out of focus and she squirted . Juices frothed around Belisarius’ nuts and dripped from him, down onto the bed, soaking the sheets, even as he shuddered and came inside of her. His cock thrust deep and she felt his warmth busting within her womb, pumping blast after blast of his thick seed into her, seed that her body accepted – as it had accepted Sexy Napoleon and Kellen Grant. Once more, she saw a hazy fog of new units in her eyes, but Sarah had no time to admire it. She waved the image away with a whine, focusing instead on the tight, pleasured expression that filled Belisarius’ face.

Then…

He went slack, his head leaning down, his body pressed to her.

A gentleman to the last, he did not remain there long – even if her incredible strength would have made it ludicrously easy for him to just sprawl there. He laid next to her, panting heavily, then breathed a slow, happy, groan into her ear. “God damn  that was good.”

“Thanks,” Sarah whispered. “You were fucking amazing.”

Belisarius’ hand cupped her breast. He played with her. “I can be amazing every night, you know...” He murmured. “You don’t have to leave this base...” He grinned, slowly. His finger tweaked her nipple, drawing a quiet mewl from her.

“W-What do you mean?” Sarah asked.

“Work for Disney, Sarah,” Belisarius said, his voice soft. “The fools at NovaDyne and StarCon might have wanted to cut you up or dissect you or whatever. But Disney knows quality.”

Sarah sat there, stunned to her core.

“You...you weren’t...seducing me to get me into bed ...” She whispered, sitting up, her body gleaming with sweat. “You were seducing me to get me to sign on with the Mouse?!”

Space Belisarius, who had rolled onto his back, regarded her with a wry smile. “The sex was honestly more on my mind then-”

Sarah smacked him. She didn’t use her claws, she didn’t use her super strength, and he still looked as if she had belted him across the face with a sucker punch. He looked so wounded, so aggrieved, that it was almost funny – save that Sarah felt more furious than she had ever felt in her life. “You think I ever want to work for a corporation again in my life , after-”

That was when the door fell inwards – sheered in half by a blinding light.

Standing in the doorway was a seven foot tall, digitigrade figure, with glowing blue eyes and armor of ragged age – sophisticated technologies worn to ribbons by the passage of time. Their mouth and face were concealed by a ragged sheet of shimmering weave that hovered somewhere between fabric and metal, but their eyes were clearly inhuman – deep set and cylindrical and glittering like crystal. Their arms ended in long, three fingered hands, and each wrist had a heavy, short barreled projector mounted on it, similar to the Plasma Dynamic weapon that Sarah had seen earlier today.

“ Prepare to die , hybrid-traitor, ” the alien said, its voice coming from somewhere deep in its chest – speaking in a language that Sarah did not know, and yet, made perfect sense.

And then he leaped straight at Sarah, a glowing blade roaring to life from the wrist projector.

Chapter Ten: Sarah Runs Away

Sarah screamed and flung herself out of bed right before the blade of roaring, focused plasma punched through bed, headboard, and a good chunk of the wall. She scrambled to her feet, grabbed the entire table, and flung it at the alien. Except she knew that it wasn’t just the alien or an alien. It was a specific alien. The race memories of every species the Claw and the Eye had consumed flared inside of her, and she knew this creature. She knew the weakness of the eyes and their overly focused vision, the way the single inner ear could be disoriented by rapid changes in pressure more quickly than a humans could be, the fact that the legs could kick through a few millimeters of steel, but the knee joints were as easily fractured as a humans if you hit them right.

She knew their name.

This was a Pro-Tass, one of the oldest civilizations the Claw had ever consumed.

“ Sorry! ” She said, in its language.

The Pro-Tass warrior charged right at her with a scream that was somewhere between furious and sorrowful. Sarah ducked as he swung one arm over her head, slashing through an art deco ornament, filling the air with sparks. She kicked out, but the warrior sprang away from her blow, evading the knife blade of her foot before she shattered the bony plates of the knee. She hooked her clawed toes and jerked backwards, catching his forearm and drawing glowing blue blood.

“Sorry!” Sarah yelped again, jerking her leg back awkwardly and holding up her hands in a gesture of apology. The Pro-Tass slammed the bony plate of his forehead into her head and Sarah sprawled on her ass. She groaned, her head ringing, as the warrior stood above her, lifting his arm up, the glowing plasma blade flickering to life. She knew, from her race memories, that it could only ‘flare’ on for a few seconds before needing to recycle and recharge. She rolled out of the way with a shove of her hand and the blade slammed into the floor behind her, then dragged upwards.

Molten, blobby metal flashed out in a wave, splashing onto her back and wringing a scream from her. She got her hands under her, but the Pro-Tass grabbed the back of her head and hauled her to her feet with a growling snarl. “ You cannot flee, hybrid! ”

“No, no, wait, I can explain!” Sarah yelped, her legs kicking.

She felt the nozzle of the projector plant against her back – heard the faint whirr as it began to refresh.

Belisarius, darting through the air like a thrown spear, crashed into the side of the Pro-Tass. His merely human body impacting into the hulking alien had the same impact as a very small, yappy dog hitting a horse.

It distracted him. Which was enough for Sarah to slash with a claw and force the alien to drop her onto the ground. The alien growled. “ She has already claimed your mind, ” he said, grabbing Belisarius by the throat. His plasma blade roared up and he lifted it, ready to thrust it through Belisarius’ head. “ I shall give you the peace you yern for, brave warrior. ”

“Don’t!” Sarah reached out, shoving.

Belisarius hit the floor, unharmed.

So did both of Sarah’s forearms.

They were less unharmed.

Smoke rose from the stumps of her arms, hissing and rising into the air. Sarah blinked a few times, not even registering pain. There was nothing in her brain but a kind of dull shock. She tried to wiggle her fingers, but her arms were on the floor, the fingers unmoving.

“Ow,” she said, meekly, as Belisarius and the Pro-Tass looked at her in mute shock.

“ You... ” The warrior looked at Belisarius, then looked back at Sarah. He lifted his hand up, again, as if he was about to threaten Belisarius. Sarah, who was still not feeling any pain, tried to spring into the way. Her arms spread wide, but her balance was all wrong. She flailed her stumps, tripped over the fragments of the table, then fell onto her ass on the floor as the warrior lowered his arm. “ You tried to save his life. ” He looked back at Belisarius. “ Are you controlled by the hybrid?”  he asked, still speaking his language.

“I don’t know what you are,” Belisarius said in English, walking around to stand between Sarah, who was still looking at her stumps in mild and growing alarm. “But-”

“ I’m...what are you playing at, hybrid?” The warrior growled.

“I...am not playing at anything!” Sarah snarled in English. She focused on her arms and, with a tiny wrench of power, began to grow new arms. They flowed out of her stumps like liquid, dripping and hissing as heat glowed from her body, the endothermic reaction of her enhanced metabolism combined with a fierce, ripping, chainsaw growl from her stomach. She was hungry . She needed meat. She grabbed onto her severed arm with her still half liquid new arm, then started to bite her own fingers off.

Belisarius and the alien watched, both of their faces clearly showing their mounting horror.

Sarah pushed the last bit into her mouth, chewed, swallowed, then burped. “Ah, that’s better.”

She paused.

“ Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! ”

She sprang to her feet, slamming her back against the wall. “I just ate my own fucking arm!”

The door would have burst inwards at that moment, as Tex and Aiden both came running in. Tex held a heavy bore revolver in his hand. Aiden held a chair. They both stopped short seeing the alien. “Whoa!” Aiden dropped the chair on the ground, scrambling backwards, while Tex snapped the revolver up, aiming it at the warrior. Sarah stepped between the two, throwing out her arms.

“Don’t shoot!” She said.

A long pause filled the air.

“Well, well, well!” Hailee’s voice cut into the conversation, coming from the PA. “Looks like we got ourselves a Mexican standoff. And we don’t have any Mexicans.”

“I’m part Brazilian,” Sarah said. “Also, no!” She grabbed onto the barrel of Tex’s revolver, shoving it down. When she released the gun, she saw she had accidentally crushed the composite barrel shut. “No shooting, no plasma swording, no chairing. No more anything. We’re going to sit down and we’re going to talk about what the fuck is going on like goddamn adults .” She turned to face the alien, then rattled the same speech off in his language.

“...you can speak alien?” Aiden asked.

“Yes,” Sarah said, then closed her eyes. “And he’s not just an alien. He’s a Pro-Tass.”

“The big one?” Aiden asked, clearly thinking of the galactic map she had shown them. The Pro-Tass had had the largest of the spheres of light, the spheres of habitation that the Claw had consumed. Sarah nodded, mutely, while the Pro-Tass warrior slowly held up his arm, vertically. He touched several controls on the back of his wrist and a glowing blue sphere popped out of the smooth, golden paneled bangle that served as his wrist brace. The sphere floated near his head, then spoke in clear, British accented English.

“I have learned your words,” the Pro-Tass warrior said. “By listening to your radio communications. Your entire race is in grave danger. The Eye has-”

“Yes, we know,” Sarah said. “I escaped from the Eye while it was converting me. I have all the race memories.”

“Oh...” the Pro-Tass was silent for a moment, his translation sphere orbiting slowly around him. “Well, then, you, specifically, are in peril. My race was consumed and devoured by the Eye and the Claw – but the destruction of a civilization the size of ours, even by a race as advanced and terrible as the Claw, takes many generations. There was time enough for us to desperately seek after technologies to save us. When our final world was falling, we discovered the secret of traveling faster than the speed of light. Since then, I have traveled the universe, seeking other races. I have...always been too late...” He shook his head. “But I have managed to, at least, salvage one grim victory. I have always been able to find the same secret laboratories, the same hidden places, and convinced the races facing their own extinction to destroy their notes, their technologies. To deny the Eye and the Claw the ability to travel the stars.”

Sarah stood perfectly still.

“Even now, a Claw fleet gathers in distant space. I have scouted them,” the warrior said, his voice grim. “They will seek to claim this world – to steal your technology. We cannot, we must not allow them to gain access to the secret of traveling faster than the speed of light. Or else...”

Sarah gulped.

“So...” she said, her voice very meek. She touched her pointer fingers, the half-regrown claws clicking quietly in the room as everyone turned to look at her. “Let’s say. Hypothetically. Uh...”

The sky above Wolf-359 B exploded with a million pinpricks of light. Plane shifts, crackling open. Even without augmented eyes, the stars began to go out – blotted out by the sight of an endless wave of bioships, ravening from the depths of space. The sky began to gain new lights – new flares. New sparks. The defense grid of the planet, opening fire on the biological attackers, lasing them. But even as hundreds, thousands of ships burst into the brilliant white spark of a laserfire death, hundreds of thousands more took their place. An air raid siren began to wail throughout the base.

Sarah’s smile was very weak.

“Oopse?” she asked.

***

As the Sarah Gang – now including the Pro-Tass and Belisarius – sprinted through the base, Sarah explained. “When I was being converted, the Eye went through my memories!”

“You know the secrets of faster than light travel!?” The Pro-Tass asked.

“Well, uh, most of us do!” Sarah said, sounding defensive. “It’s not a big secret or anything. It’s just hard to build, but the basic physics, we all know it.”

“You all know it!?” The Pro-Tass asked as they came out into the open courtyard that the Excalibur had landed before. The sky overhead was filled with traceries of laserfire and falling spore-bombs. They looked like huge eggs, trailing tentacles that twitched and wriggled behind them as they plunged downwards. The automated defenses targeted them first. Hails of flechettes and bursts of lasers and plasma projectiles slammed into them, and for now, none of them had reached the ground.

“Yeah!” Sarah shouted over the din, her hands clapped half over her ears as a red flare bloomed overhead – one of the bigger bioships, ripping apart as a trio of STS missiles plunged into its belly and ripped it from stem to stern. Floating overhead, in what passed for Wolf-359 B’s atmosphere, a million tons of organs and muscle tissue were beginning to deorbit. She continued to shout: “We invented the HPS Drive in the 22 nd  century to colonize other solar systems!”

“But why!?” The Pro-Tass asked. “Your world cannot possibly have been exhausted after only such a short time span.”

“Uhhhhhhhhhh!” Sarah said. “We...made stuff.”

“Mostly video game consoles and cars!” Hailee said, her voice coming through the translation orb – which made Sarah seriously start to reconsider the abilities of a beta-level intelligence.

“You what ?” the Pro-Tass asked.

“Discuss economics later!” Tex shouted. “Ship now!”

The Exaclibur welcomed them onboard with a faint chime and Sarah immediately started to give orders. The Spitters and the Bombardiers she had packed onboard began to surge off, as did the blobbies. She figured that the bladelings, though, might come in handy in case any of the Claw attackers tried to board. Once the ship was lightened, she sprang into the command throne and thrust her finger at Tex. “Punch it, Texas!” She said – excitement buzzing through her as the Excalibur’s engines roared to life and they flew upwards in a haze of AA fire. Missiles streaked past them and the white-hot flare of half a dozen nuclear weapons detonating above them made Sarah wince.

Belisarius, who had taken one of the consoles that Hailee had extruded for the rest of the crew, punched a few more buttons. “Focusing my nuclear capacities above us to punch us a hole.”

“Goodie, we’re flying through nuclear explosions!” Hailee said.

“Do we have FTL capacity?” Sarah asked.

“I fabricated the part the instant you started riding my dick,” Belisarius said. “It should have been delivered.”

“You what on what?” Tasha, who was clinging to the back of her chair.

“Nice,” Synth leaned forward for a fist bump.

“Install it, you two!” Sarah said, bumping her fist against Synth. Synth and Tasha hurried away, Aiden jogging after them – clearly planning to help as best as he could. Kellen and Sexy Napoleon had both taken consoles as well. Sexy was grinning, her fingers spreading across the chart as she tapped on a screen – and as Sarah watched, the forward screen switched to show a view of the ship, as if she was standing on the very base and could look down the two kilometer long sweep of the immense, sword shaped craft. The forward torpedo bays opened and Sexy Napoleon began to sing.

“Ah, the 1812 Overture!” Hailee said.

The music began to blare from the PA – loud and percussive and timed with the shuddering that rocked through the ship as the nuclear torpedoes launched upwards, arced outwards, then bifurcated from six rockets to two hundred and sixteen micro-warheads, each one stuffed with a miniaturized fusion bomb. The sky turned white and Napoleon cackled. “Boom boom boom boom!”

“You are absolutely insane,” Kellen whispered. “Gravitic shields to max!”

The front of the Excalibur flared with the gravitational flux of the hardened shields, and wriggling projectiles – each fired by a bioship – began to hammer into the shields. They stopped short, squashing and splattering into bloody glop that was whisked away from the ship by its movement through the upper atmosphere. Like a breaching whale from the old vids, the Excalibur bust from the clouds of nuclear fire and the hail of biological weaponry into a sky rich with writhing, squid-like ships. Most of them were quite a bit smaller than the Excalibur  and moved with darting, erratic patterns.

Sarah stood, then held out her hand.

“Fire!”

“Aye aye, Commander!” Sexy Napoleon plunged her fingers down, like a pianist.

Bulky, rectangular turrets emerged from the ship, transforming the flush, sleek hull into a jagged cityscape.

“I thought you said we had one antiproton beam,” Sarah whispered.

“You were pointing at one button at the time,” Tex said, dryly.

Every turret flared with blue-white light, lancing outwards and sweeping through space. Bioship after bioship combusted, ripping apart as trumpets blared from the PA. It was like a fireworks display crossed with the greatest rock concert that Sarah had ever seen and Sexy was cackling her head off, her hat cocked madly by her flailing as she plunged fingers down, alternating weapon fire, choosing targets with eye motions and spoken commands. “That one! That one! That one! That one!”

Tex, his hands on the controls, shoved the Excalibur forward – rising out of orbit, out of the massed pack of the fleet that thronged around them.

“Uh, guys!” Tasha’s voice came over the PA. “It’s gonna take us a bit to get the drive in!”

A flight of sleek, fast fighters swept overhead. They rained plasma projectiles onto the shields, which flared and strobed – but several of the projectiles got through, impacting into the armor of the Excalibur . The bright blue explosions hurt Sarah’s eyes and Hailee’s voice, cheerful as ever, said: “Hull at ninety eight percent! Shields at twenty five percent.”

“Right,” Sarah whispered. “Right right, right, uh, uh, uh, Hailee...shut the shields off and shunt as much power into the shield capacitors. I have an idea.”

The entire bridge crew gaped at her.

“Do it!” Sarah barked, her mind whirling. The idea had formed – and she realized it was the only hope they had. The bioships were beginning to move around, to come at them from each flank. They were drawing closer and closer – and the saw that the antiproton beams were slowing in their fire, Sexy biting her lip as she limited her rate. Sarah could see the red indicators on the firing console, showing where the turrets were beginning to overheat or run low on power. Sarah nodded to herself – her jaw tightening as Kellen shrugged.

“Adjusting shields,” he said.

“Full speed ahead. Where too, Commander?” Tex asked.

“Wolf-359,” Sarah said.

“...we’re in Wol-” Tex started.

“The frigging sun!” Sarah shouted, sitting back on the throne.

The Excalibur leaped forward, Sexy fingering a few buttons with a grin. Kill-Drones leaped from the sides of the ship, detaching their mass and jetting towards incoming bioships. They detonated themselves, like intelligent shotgun shells, and the shrapnel gutted ship after ship after ship. But there were so many. The entire, swarming fleet, flew forward – and they began to fire their projectiles. Wriggling, acid filled animals, gestated within the guts of the bioships, they slammed into the hull, piercing the armor plating with narwhal-like horns, then injected the gushing acid. Self defense and repair systems began to mobilize, directed by Hailee, and the bladelings began to scramble – not inside of the ship, but outside of it. Their claws clung to the hull and they began to spring out, to intercept the incoming projectiles with their own bodies.

Sarah smacked herself for being a fool.

She sent the order.

And the entire flank of the Claw armada was smashed into, almost at once, by her own fleet. Wingers, their wings glowing with gravitational energies, their mouths spitting out their own anti-ship formatted weaponry, started to swarm the bioships. For a few moments, a wild confusion filled space, the targeting indicators on her internal HUD writhing and whirling with green dots as her wingers and the ships and fighters of the Claw dueled with one another. But in the end, the Claw’s sheer numbers and their larger ships began to tell.

It still gave them just enough time.

The primary star of Wolf-359 swelled before them – impressing upon Sarah that just because a star was the smallest it could be before it ceased being counted as a stellar object, that didn’t mean it was actually small . The hull began to groan and pop and she saw several of her bladelings tumbling away, their bodies blackening. “Radiation flux beginning to approach critical levels,” Hailee said. “The crew now has mild cancer. Do you want to turn on shields?”

“I can cure cancer! Closer! Tex, start accelerating slower , let them get closer!”

“Closer?” Tex asked.

“I’m more worried about the cancer!” Kellen muttered.

The sun swelled. Larger and larger. The bioships showed no sign of fear – their hulls glistened hideously in the brilliant, ruby red light. It was like being chased by an armada of the damned. She swore she could see them opening fanged maws, their writhing tentacles flexing and flaring as they drew closer and closer and closer. Sarah’s heart hammered.

“The radiation flux has surpassed lethal limits,” Hailee sang out. “The crew’s organs will begin to liquefy in fifteen minutes. Oh, and the diarrhea will start way before that.”

Sexy Napleon looked green. Kellen’s eyes were closed. Sarah’s fingers dug into the armrests of her command throne. Her eyes were not on the hideous, burning sun – the surface looked as if it was covered in boils, the thick clouds of complex chemicals that could form in the nearly subfusion temperatures that swirled across it. A huge archway of roiling plasma flung itself into the air, the size of several planets, arcing before them like a temptingly close archway. It looked almost like they would soar right through it. Sarah ignored it. Her eyes were entirely on the massive blob of red in her minimap. The bioships were arrowing towards her – and the ship’s rear cameras showed their projectiles beginning to zip at the thrusters, burning up before they could touch it.

Sarah licked her lips.

Now .

Sarah stood. “Focus the shields down. Tex! Jump! Now! ”

Tex slapped the plane shift button.

In the guts of the ship, Tasha and Synth sprang away from the hypertropic plane shift drive they had just put together – yelping as the whirring rings began to whisk around, generating the hyperdimensional object that would rip space time a new one. Along the belly of the ship, the gravitational shields created a gravity flux – the same flux they used to rob incoming projectiles of their momentum. But Hailee had understood Sarah’s plan. Understood and prepared for it.

The shield suppressed all gravitational pressures on a chunk of Wolf-359’s surface the size of a small continent. It was a single, massive spray of energy, and it burned out every single emitter on the belly of the ship, melted half the power conduits, and only lasted a fragment of a second. In that needle thin stretch of time, the crushing weight of Wolf-359’s primary ceased to be.

A torrential wave of roiling stellar plasma at nearly three thousand kelvin burst from the star’s surface.

The Claw had basic flight or fight instincts, deeply coded into their bodies. Even those of them that had been twisted by the selective engineering and careful tweaking of the Eye into biological starships. Every single one of them stopped at once, backwinging on gravitational eddies. Black eyes widened in the guts of almost a hundred thousand ships. In a single voice, carried through the radio-frequencies of their stellar language, the entire Claw fleet spoke but three words.

“Oh fuck  me!”

The  Excalibur folded through space.

And the wave struck.

When the light had faded, there was not a single ship left in the solar system.

Back on Wolf-359 B, a message sent by a prudent Hailee, opened a valve in the guts of the antimatter depot.

Briefly, Wolf-359 was a binary star system.

Very briefly.

EPILOGUE

“You’re looking at this like the glass is half empty , Eyebo!” Spez said as she sprawled on her back in the glistening, glorpy ship that she had named What The Fuck Are You Looking At Bub, I Can Hatefuck You To Death, You Piece of Shit. The command chair was made of solid white bone, and two very confused Bladelings stood to either side of it. They had once had four legs and were not quite used to being two legged, male, and extremely bishonen. Their long, jagged hair hung down their backs, and they wore bright white collars, with the numbers ONE and TWO stenciled on them and leashes that hung down to the slowly heaving floor, snaked over to the throne, and were hooked on Spez’s big toe.

Spez grinned. “You gotta look at it like the glass is half full .”

The forward screen – really a membrane of color shifting skin cells – showed the slowly expanding, cherry red asteroid field that was the Plasma Dynamics research base.

THERE IS NO GLASS, COMMANDER SPEZ

Spez rolled her eyes. “Yer, like, fifteen thousand billion million years old, you’d think you’d have heard of a simile.”

IT IS A METAPHOR.

        Spez’s brow furrowed. “Eyebo, are you fuckin tooling me?” She sat up, her feet planting on the squishy floor of her bioship. “Are you making a joke ?”

I ADMIT, I HAVE BEGUN TO APPRECIATE CERTAIN THINGS ABOUT YOUR SPECIES. I ENJOY THE EFFICIENCY BY WHICH YOU ORGANIZE YOURSELVES, EVEN IF THE PLACEMENT OF A HUMAN BEING ON A THE TOP OF A PYRAMID OF OTHER HUMANS IS NOT A GOAL WORTHY OF SUCH A SYSTEM.

Spez shrugged. “I dunno about all that, Eybo. I just wanna get my fucking pound of flesh…” She grinned, slowly, then reached out with one hand. She cupped the large, green balls of one of her modified bladelings, her tongue sliding along her lip. Her hair-spines flexed outwards. “Just imagine...” She crooned. “I can find every...last... prick that fucked me...and I can make em into anything I want. I could find that dickhead teacher of mine. Oh, no, Spezzo, you’re not gonna be able to fly a ship legally. Can you believe it, I sold that fucker drugs for five years and he didn’t even give me a passing grade!”

I DO NOT CARE

Spez shrugged. “Okaybe, Eybo, let’s move on to stuff you does care about.” She sat up. “We’ve seen what the Failure, Doooooooctor Kappel...” She said the name with as much scorn as possible. “Can do. And, honestly? Kinda lame. She didn’t kill a single one of the fucking badguys! And she got captured, like, twice, as far as I can tell from eating the brains of her critters.” She smacked her lips. “Tasty.”

SHE STILL ESCAPED

Spez looked up at the ceiling. “I mean...if ya can call pulling a plane shift jump within a star’s gravity wello going fifteen thousand Kayy Pee Ess – a blind jump while on fucking fire, dude, that bitch is lost , Eybo. Lost in Space. The worst fucking place to get lost.” She grinned.

HMM...TRUE. AND WE CAN ALWAYS FIND HER ONCE MORE, IF SHE DARES TO ACCESS THE SUBMIND FOR ADVANCED BIOTECH.

“Tha’s the spirit, Eyebo!” Spez sprang to her feet, rubbing her palms together. “Now, to celebrate, let’s say I take a dunk in the fuckpit-”

YOU MUST PREPARE FOR THE ATTACK ON EARTH. ONLY THEN WILL YOU EARN ANOTHER ROUND WITH ME.

“Yer a shitty boss...” Spez muttered. “Expecting me to do work so I get paid. Fuckin’ bullshit.” She tossed her head. “Sides, we’re not going after Earth y-” Her hand went to her throat as a sudden tightening closed around her skin. Her eyes widened and she felt her lungs screaming for oxygen she was pretty sure she didn’t need anymore. Her body felt the need. She had every memory of being choked – by criminal bosses, by her father, by everyone. Her eyes widened and her fingers scrabbled at the air as her knees slammed into the ground.

DO NOT THINK TO DECEIVE ME, INSECT.

Spez tried to choke out a word.

DOCTOR KAPPEL DECEIVED ME. IT WILL BE THE LAST TIME A HUMAN DOES. EVER.

The space around Spez’ vision was beginning to go black. Her two fuckboys looked on, concern in their black on black eyes. She reached out to the air as the iron bands drew tauter and tauter. Then...release. She gasped in a deep lungful of rich, pungent air and collapsed forward onto her palms, which squished against the bioship’s hull. She hung her head forward, her head spines drawn taut against her scalp, and just breathed. Breathed. Breathed.

YOU WILL GO TO EARTH. YOU WILL TAKE IT FOR PROCESSING.

“No...I won’t,” Spez gasped out – then before the iron bands snapped down, she lifted her hand. “Fuckin’ listen to me, Eyebo!”

She felt the tightness of the Eye’s attention. But she did not feel the strangling again. At least, not yet. She scrambled to her feet, using her own throne for support, and let the words come tumbling out, a mile a minute. The fact that she didn’t need to pause for breathe made her think the Eye was less about strangling and more about mind fucking. Which, considering how often he had put his tentacles down her ears and left her quivering and twitching...made sense.

“Okay, so, you saw what one Excalibur class could do. That’s the flag, but they print them all the same way on Mars, right?” She nodded. “And that one wasn’t even fully loaded for bear – it had one volley of nuke torps. They normally ship with ten . Now, if you come in with your big dick swinging at Earth, every corp is going to scream their heads off and every single fleet humanity’s got out there dicking itself over is gonna come back. I’m talking hundreds of ships, and more being spat out every hour , with fresh AIs to crew them. We. Won’t. Win. Humans are like that.” She grinned. “But what if...we got humans on our side? Humans that hate corps just as much as I do? Humans who we don’t gotta tell that they’ll be mulcho if they work with us?”

GO ON…

“Right...” Spez nodded. “Corps keep this shit secret. But, ey, that’s why crims like me are go good ta have.” She leaned against the throne. Her sharp, sharp teeth glinted in the pale bioluminescence of the bridge. “See, there are other humans out there. With nanofabs and shit.”

I SEE…

“So that’s what we do. Before we attack Earth...we get help.” Spez nodded. She slowly circled the throne, before sitting down on it.

“We go find the fuckin’ commies, Eyebo!”

THE END