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.