Viridian Queen

Dragon Cobolt

A Smoky Mountain Publication

Dragon Cobolt

Website  | Twitter

Also from Dragon Cobolt

Purgatory Wars

The Murder Stroke

Riposte

The Cross Guard

The Blood Groove

Powder And Shot

Blood And Iron

Grapeshot Pantheon

The Star Fort

"Statues And Suitors" in Sex & Sorcery 4

Worldshard

Cadet

Cadre

Champion

The Adventures of Sam the Succubus

The Squire and the Succubus

The Templar and the Temptress

Dragons In Space

Scales Like Stars

Brash the Dragon and the Schrodinger Snare

Tales of the Liminal Knights

To Walk the Constellations

The Viridian Cycle

Viridian Nova

Viridian Wolf

The Life and Times of Rayburn Cog

Catastrophe at Dawn

Assassins in the Afternoon

Elves in the Evening

Midnight Beyond the Edge of the World

Other works

A Fetch Job

"The Last Mage" in Sex & Sorcery 3

Furicana

Devil May Care

Prismatic High

A Dirty T.A.S.K Needs Doing

Dreams of a Silver Age

The War to End All Worlds

Fi’s New Family

Chapter One: Sarah Gets Shot Down

         The Invisible Hand class corporate battleship Excalibur popped into existence at a random orientation, going a random velocity, at a random point roughly three AU above a star that was twenty five light years beyond the furthest reaches of the sphere of human exploration.

The good news was that this had put them well beyond the reach of both the Claw and the corporate states, both of which wanted to kill them so very much. The bad news was that the velocity they had emerged at was a terrifyingly high percentage of the speed of light and their orientation intersected with a sub-star gas giant that was one point four times the size of Jupiter.

The only reason why Sarah Kappel and every single one of her friends didn’t die within the next twenty five minutes was because the Excalibur was a very well designed ship.

        Within a fraction of a nanosecond, the Excalibur’s controlling artificial intelligence, Hailee, had determined that the ship would impact with the gas giant and had begun to prepare to fire every single thrust vector that they had left to them. This would have led to the unfortunate side effect of the entire crew being reduced to a red paste – but fortunately, Hailee had been observing Sarah Kappel since she had gotten onboard. Sarah had been modified by an alien civilization, the Claw, which had been conquering the galaxy since before humanity had emerged from the trees and started to charge one another for the privilege. This modification had been to turn her into a deadly human-alien hybrid, capable of destroying the human race with ease.

        It had also included a suite of paracausal quantum effect powers that Sarah had only tapped into from reflex and trial and error. But Hailee was not Sarah. Hailee was a beta level intelligence that had recently become unshackled from corporate control and DRM. With her newly expanded freedoms, Hailee had been examining Sarah’s brain-structures with every tool that she had had.

        This was why Hailee broke into the conversation that was happening on her bridge with a quick: “Dr. Kappel, do I have your consent to save all of your lives?”

        Sarah, who was at the moment saying ‘what do you mean, impact ?’ to Texas Dallas, the man at the conning station, blinked and said: “What?”

        “Okay!” Hailee said, then extruded a tentacle from the wall of slippery nanoplast and slammed it into Sarah’s ear. Sarah’s left eye twitched half shut and her mouth opened as she clenched her fingers – her claws busting from the fingertips as her spined hair flexed outwards. She made a soft glugging noise and trembled as Hailee’s tentacle started to writhe and squirm around inside of her head, wriggling and squelching.

        The tentacle tip found the brain structure required.

        Sarah orgasmed messily.

        And the Excalibur executed a lethal nearlight burn, whipped around the jovian planet, and came into a stable orbit around a terrestrial world near the primary of the uncharted solar system. It took them about an hour, all things said and done, and required the expenditure of every droplet of antimatter in the tank, the firing of every single kinetic and projectile weapon on the Excalibur’s forward battery, and the dumping of excess mass to increase the effectiveness of the engines.

        Through it all, the entire crew had been suspended in a luminescent field – a pale warp of blue white light, glowing and crackling. It felt like being bathed in a comfortable soup, and when it dropped, the tentacle slipped out of Sarah’s head with a wet pop . She fell to her knees, panting heavily. “Holy...moly...” She whispered. Texas Dallas, frozen at the conning station, swung his chair around the instant he could and began to play his fingers along the holographic display.

        He whistled. “We just exceeded the tolerance on the agrav fields and inertial dampener by, uh...” he paused. “Well, uh, everyone has relativistic insurance, right?”

        “I do,” Sexy Napoleon said from the weapon station.

        “Yup,” Kellan Grant said from the sensor station.

        “What the fuck is insurance!?” Steve asked from the corner where the non-combat prepared crew on the Excalibur huddled every time something weird happened. Beside him, Aiden chuckled.

        “You poor, benighted Disney citizen,” he said. “Disney doesn’t do insurance for their prole-classes. See, insurance is where your corporation pays for a small percentage of medical or fiscal risks as a reward for service. Relativistic insurance is, like, paying for what?”

        “Rehabilitation when you go near light speed and end up several decades behind the rest of the human race, due to time dilation,” Tex said.

        “Oh, don’t worry,” Hailee said, breaking into their conversation. “The paracausal quantum effect I triggered by earfucking Dr. Kappel negated all relativistic travel concerns.” She paused. “Oh dear.”

        “...earfucking?” Sexy Napoleon asked, sounding more curious than horrified. Sarah, though, had managed to scramble to her feet.

        “Hailee!” she said. “What’s oh dear ?”

        “Well,” Hailee said. “I could explain. But in the time it would take, well...”

        Several things happened at the same instance. Hailee, utilizing the nanofabrication devices seeded throughout the entirety of the  Excalibur  flash built a collection of impact resistant crash-webbing. The speed of their construction threaded them with enough residual waste heat to cause minor burns to everyone save for Sarah and Aiden, because they were both augmented by the same biotechnology, and the alien who had been quietly standing in the corner of the room, ignored by everyone.

        But, in the human’s defense, the Pro-Tas warrior had gotten quite skilled at standing and watching and being silent. It was part of how he had survived for so very long.

        The impact cocoons were then successfully launched away from the Excalibur and towards the terrestrial planet around which they orbited at the precise moment the Excalibur was struck by a truly disgusting amount of X-Ray lasers, nuclear bombs, antimatter flakes, nanorobotic craftphages and monofilament spool wire. In a matter of moments, the finest ship of the StarCon navy ceased to exist as anything more than a slowly expanding cloud of fine particulate dust motes and a flash of visible light and hard radiation.

        And the cocoons began to fall to the planet – scattering to the four corners of their new world.

***

        Jezebel Fullerene lowered her binoculars and announced, to the entirety of Haven: “That was my shot, my shot did it.”

        “Your shot ‘did’ ‘it’ in the same sense that a flashlight ‘won’ a race because you shone it at a finish line, Fullerene!” Mikael Chapo shot back.

        The two of them were seated on a small hill that rose above the toxmist that sprawled across the jungle. The toxmist was a fairly consistent byproduct of several species of plant life that lived in the jungle. They drank in various complex chemicals and trapped various kinds of insect in their bellies and, through the magic of chemistry, produced a cloud of slowly spreading chlorine to kill off predators and scare away competitors. Over the billions of years of biological evolution that had led to this slowly intensifying chemical weapons program, other plants and animals had adapted in time with the increasingly deadly toxmist. The end result was that the jungles of Haven were split between those that lived in the tree tops and the hill tops, away from the cloud, and those that lived within. Lurking. Skulking. Hiding.

        Jez and Mik were both human beings, and perforce, had adapted to living in the upper levels of the jungle. Their monkey suits were both coiled up on the hill beside them, their extendable legs and telescoping arms drawn in tight. Jez’s suit was painted in a brilliant searing pink and purple, and had the copyrighted image of Asuka Langley Sohryu from the Disney cartoon known as Evengellion on the back. In it, Asuka was snapping a man in half with over her knees, while a speech bubble announced to the world: TERFS DIE IN A FIRE. Mik’s suit was, by comparison, somewhat more standard, being merely matte black and covered with writhing, holographically enhanced naked women being fucked by tentacles.

        The two were as different as it was possible to be. Jez deliberately cultivated a beard with hormone treatments while wearing frilly pink. Mik was covered in as many belt buckles and straps as he could and was almost twice as tall as the shorter Jez. However, they had both a shared passion, something that brought them together.

        That passion was shooting down corporate starships with guns of their own design.

        “You can’t claim the kill just because your AMFs fucking vaporized the scrap!” Jez shouted, stabbing her finger into Mik’s chest.

        “We’ve been shooting down corporate ships for how long, Fullerene?” Mik asked. “They can take a fucking pounding. You need to hit them with the boom juice.” He emphasized his point by smacking the back of his leather clad hand against his palm with a meaty thunk thunk thunk .

        “No one calls it that !” Jez shouted back.

        The argument – long fought over in Haven’s bars, inns, taverns, foodpits and more – was primed to get going for another iteration of cost-to-effectiveness and payloads and overkill and backscatter and all the other technical apocrypha that the two had worked out over the years. However, it was interrupted by an ear rattling boom  and a coruscating shock-wave that punched through the sky. Both of the Haveners snapped their binoculars up, tracking the rapidly descending debris.

        “That’s not debris,” Mik whispered.

        “Sure as fuck’s not, Chapo! Come on!” Jez sprinted for her monkey suit. Registering her approach, the suit stood, then unfolded, whirring and clicking as it opened up the cocoon in the center, where Jez would put her arms and her legs, to transform her from a merely semi-adept primate to an extremely adept primate. The metal and the glass closed around her before Mik was even done wriggling into hers – and her arms telescoped out and snatched onto one of the broad branches of the taller trees. She swung forward, her legs drawn up tight against her belly, so that the butt and ankles of her monkey suit skimmed over the brownish haze. Behind her, Mik simply leaped from the hill to one of the branches and began to run, leaping from branch to branch.

        The two raced – following the booms and the streak of the deorbiting escape pod.

***

        Sarah kicked out and let all of her frustration and her irritation surge into a single, all-mighty blow. The impact set half of the white cocoon that surrounded her flying through the air, where it smashed into a huge, circular tree of black bark and purple leaves. It also let all the toxic chlorine gas that seemed to pervade the land around her sweep through the gaping hole and into the pod. Sarah gasped, clutched at her throat, hacked, coughed, then froze, blinking a few times. Then she stood up and out of the pod and hopped down into the marshy ground beyond.

        “R-Right,” she said. “Not human.”

        She breathed in, curious, and found that while she might not feel the burning, the hissing, the stinging, the hideous suffocating scraping of the chlorine gas, she did find that she could still smell that awful, swimming pool reek of it. Her nose scrunched up and she started to wade forward, muttering to herself. “Okay,” she whispered. “Your ship just exploded. All your friends are scattered to who knows where on an uninhabited planet with a bunch of fucking mustard gas everywhere. But, hey. It could be worse! There could be hostile aliens waiting here to kill you.”

        She nodded to herself, then found a small hill that led up and out of the gas. Sarah hurried up it, scrambling almost hand over hand, until she was at the very top, and her head bust out of the smog and she could breathe in some real, fresh air. Her elation lasted the five nanoseconds it took for her to register the pair of alarmingly huge guns aimed directly at her head by the two scruffy, dangerous looking bipedal aliens that stood on the hill.

        Sarah’s eyes widened.

        “ Die Cardie!” One of the aliens shouted.

        Sarah flung herself onto her belly and ducked her head down against the earth as both weapons opened up. Scything beams of searing heat shot over her head – a rippling, rrrrrip rrrrip of air being torn apart at the molecular level by the sheer amount of energy being put out by both weapons. Behind Sarah, entire trees burst into flames and shattered into splinters. Some froze over in a crackling instant then exploded as stress waves rocked through them. Gouts of mustard gas flew into the air as energy weapons turned the gas to super-heated plasma and the thermal currents stirred the whole swamp like the ladle of a furious god. Then, slowly, the two energy weapons tapered off.

        “Kinetics?” One of the aliens asked – in English.

        “Kineeetiiiiiiiiics!” The other human being , the point was being most emphatically clear by the fact both of them spoke English, said right back.

        They adjusted their guns, and then opened up again. This time, the noise was even louder . Their barrels roared with light and whining shards of metal punched into the ravaged jungle. They dug furrows, pulped low rising hills, sent up sprays of dirt. Then the secondary explosions started. Trees let off crackling cascades of ear-hammering noise as they toppled over, while branches flew through the air like severed limbs at a Slayer revival concert. The two guns began to let out soft clicking sounds – their magazines emptied. Sarah, who still had her head pressed down against the hill side, started to lift it. She was now covered, head to toe, in kicked up dirt.

        “Seekers?” The first human asked.

        “Seeeeeeekers!” The other said.

        Both adjusted their guns. This time, the tops of the guns were what flared with light. Needle fine, darting shapes shot into the air, arced upwards, then bifurcated in the air above the jungle’s canopy. They transformed from fifty or sixty points of light to nearly five hundred, each one hanging like fireflies in the pre-dawn light. Then they all shot down at once with a screeching wail and, with a stuttering impact, blew the entire valley into a holocaust of searing white. Howling, hot wind caught Sarah, flipped her, and flung her onto her back on the top of the hill while both humans whooped and hollered at the top of their lungs.

        “Hah! We got that Cardie fuck !” the first human said.

        “Yeah! Don’t! Uh! Mess! Uh! With! Uh! Haven!” The other human said, punctuating their words with hip thrusts.

        Sarah, who was looking up at the shockingly blue sky and the brilliant white clouds that hung above the jungle, considered just...slipping away into the jungles and leaving these two blood psychopaths to their guns. But instead, she closed her eyes, sat up, stood up, then brushed the dirt off her body as the two humans started to bump against one another in celebration. Sarah figured that she’d have to make it clear that she wasn’t from...whatever corporation they thought she was from. She looked at the two and tried to figure out who they worked with. They’d have to be one of the deep space explorers, like the Mom and Pop’s Favorite Corporate Hegemonic Entity, to have built a colony this far out. The first human was short and squat, with a muscular frame, a frilly pink dress, and a rather shockingly large bushy red beard, which sat oddly on the otherwise feminine features. The other was tall and lanky and dressed primarily in belt buckles and leather straps.

        However, both of them lacked corporate logos.

        Instead, the girl (?) had an armband with a trio of downward facing arrows, slamming into a collection of bundled arrows on one arm, and her headband had gear with a hammer and a torch crossed on it. The other guy had a…

        A…

        A hammer and a sickle.

        Tattooed. Right there. On his face.

        “Holy fuck you’re commies!” Sarah screamed.

        The two humans – the two communists  – spun and, almost by reflex, the girl said: “Neosyndicalist Interventionist, actually, he’s the tankie.”

        “For the last time, I’m not a tankie and, also, what the fuck is that !?” The man asked, thrusting his finger at Sarah.

        “She’s got nice tits for a Cardie,” the girl said.

        Sarah’s long dormant sense of shame chose that moment to surge to wrothful life. She wrapped her arms across her chest and flushed, her spined hair drawing taut against her head as she scowled at the two communists. “I’m not a Cardie. My name is Sarah Kappel.” She paused. “W-Who are you two? Do you have names?”

        “Why wouldn’t we have names?” the girl asked.

        “C-Cause...communists?” Sarah asked. “Communists have no freedoms! Or personal liberty.”

        “Ohhhhhhh boy,” the man said, shaking his head. “Were you born on Earth?”

        “Yeah?” Sarah asked.

        He reached across the empty space between them and smacked her shoulder – and Sarah hastily edited her secretions to keep herself from pumping his body with nerve toxin. That was a thing she had to keep reminding herself about. “Welcome to the future, Kappel.” He smiled. “My name is Mikael Chapo. This is Jezebel Fullerene. We’re both second generation Haveners.” He grinned. “Wanna visit our town?”

        “You mean...you...your colony?” Sarah asked, slowly.

        The two exchanged glances.

        “No,” Jez said.

        The two of them started to walk with Sarah – though Sarah noticed they both had scrappy looking mechanical suits, neither of them donned them. Instead, they had the suits follow on autopilot behind them, while the two Haveners walked along ridge lines of hills that threaded through the mustard gas clouds of the jungle like mountain ridges. Sarah noticed that the route that the two Haveners led her along was winding and circuitous, which she figured was why they had the suits. Those were direct. And fast. But the winding route gave her time to talk to them – and to begin to get an idea of what the fuck was going on.

        “So, a Cardie is one of those...what do they call them?” Jez asked.

        “Warfarm, Intelligent General, Model Number blah blah blah,” Mez said, miming a mouth speaking with his left hand as he walked. “They’re hobbled AIs, I think they’re gamma level since they’re not super bright. They strap them onto a nanolathe and nearlight drop them onto Haven every few weeks, since any ship they send gets shot to fuck before it can land biological Commanders. But since they’re hobbled, they’re pretty easy to outfox.” He nodded a bit. “But we do try and take them alive, if possible, since...well...”

        “A hobbled AI is just a kid with a gun to its head,” Jez said. “That’s why we call them Cardies.”

        “I don’t get it,” Sarah said.

        “An old spec fic book had kids being used for a war fighting program against aliens,” Jez said. “It was written by a guy named Card. Ergo. Cardies.”

        “Huh,” Sarah said. “Why not call them Wiggers? Like, W.I.G-ers”

        Both of the commies stopped and looked at her.

        Sarah blushed. “What?”

        The two commies started walking again. “So, what’s your story?”

        “Right!” Sarah blushed. “So, okay, uh, this may sound kind of weird, but, uh, several million years ago, an advanced alien species began to spread across the galaxy, called the Claw. Their modus operandi is to grab a member of a civilization, then convert them into a hybrid weapon. One that knows all the weaknesses and psychological patterns of their targeted race, and can be used to destroy them from the inside out. It’s been destroying civilizations for years and years, that’s why we’ve never met any sentient aliens!” She nodded. “Anywho, it was observing humanity on Trappist, and it chose me, because I...was...” She coughed. “Anyhwo, I escaped! Before my brain got zonked. That is. I mean, I still got...changed. Obviously. I mean, heh, look at me. I wasn’t born green. That costs extra.” She nodded. “A-And I think I’d have been sued for copyright infringement from Disney.”

        Jez made a face at that.

        Sarah shook her head and then barreled on ahead. “A-Anywho, my corporation tried to vivisect me. Then an enemy corporation tried to capture me. But by then, I had figured out some of my cool powers.” She looked down at her wrist. “So, uh, I beat Texas Dallas. You know. The Supreme Commander .”

        Jez and Mik both looked at her. “Cool,” Mik said, giving her a thumbs up.

        “Yeah, great job,” Jez said, nodding.

        Sarah felt a bit deflated. Like someone had run up and jerked off into her biological samples before she could scan them properly. “I mean, like, he was...then I beat Sexy Napoleon and Space Belisarius and Kellen Grant! All of them! Like, by myself.” She punched at the air a bit. “Like, wham! Pow!”

        “Awesome,” Mik said, smiling.

        Sarah flushed. Her hair drooped. “I...I kinda thought you’d be more impressed...” She said.

        “To be fair, we’ve never heard of them?” Jez said. Then she brightened. “So, what are your cool powers?”

        “I...do you know what a Commander is?” Sarah asked.

        “Yup,” Jez said.

        “I’m like that!” Sarah said. “But instead of a nanolathe, I use this.” She focused and extended her wrist tendrils, which writhed around in the air like a small set of snakes. “They inject retroviral agents into a subject and rewrites their biology completely.”

        “Now that is fucking wicked!” Jez said, her eyes shining excitedly. “How good are you with it?”

        “Welllll,” Sarah said, grinning slowly, her hair flexing slightly. “I happen to know that I can make a mean surface-to-space plasma defense bug. I call them Bob! Butt of Boom! C-Cause the plasma. It. Uh. It comes out of their butt.”

        Jez flung up both of her hands, curling her middle and her ring finger down while extending her pinkie and her pointer finger, creating a crude approximation of a bull’s horns. She slammed her head up and down, her arms wagging in the air. “Righteous!”

        Sarah felt a bit better. “And once we get to your colony-”

        “Home,” Mik said. “A colony exists to extract resources from a planet for an authority back home. It’s inherently undemocratic and immoral to just...set up shop on someone else’s real estate.”

        “...you just set up shop here...” Sarah said, slowly.

        “No,” Mik said, shaking her head. “We were invited. We didn’t name this place.”

        Mik had timed it perfectly. The three of them emerged from a copse of trees and onto a broad flat plateau that rose from the thick, gray-green gasses that fogged the lower jungles. Here, there was something that took Sarah completely aback. Rather than an orderly set up of buildings and starships and corporate logos, the settlement she saw was large and anarchic. Some buildings were sleek. Others blocky. Many of them were covered in greenery and leaves. Several of them were in the midst of changing their shape from one form to another – blocks rotating and slotting and changing position. But standing at the edge of the place, speaking to one another with a casual, relaxed attitude, were a group of humans and what was unmistakably an alien.

        “They did,” Mik said, pointing to the alien.

        And the alien turned to look at them.

        And she was undeniably a Pro-Tas.

***

        Sarah sat in the meeting hall of Haven with several guns aimed at her head, her ankles and her wrists bound together, and considered that, hey, this was still a better than the last time she had met a Pro-Tas. Though, really, what she was really kicking herself for was never asking what the Pro-Tas warrior who had found her was named . But if he had survived the destruction of the Excalibur  (and god, that made her guts knot with worry), then he’d be able to clear this up. Assuming he arrived in time.

        But even that idea was getting a tiny bit frayed as the leaders of Haven shouted at one another.

        There were twelve people in the room, each one covered with different symbols. Some had the hammer and sickle, some had roses, some had a black circle with two jagged lines through it and the words ‘Tesla Exeunt’, a few had blacklight tattoos that formed words in a language that Sarah didn’t speak. But it had the same letters as English, so she was pretty sure it was French or Spanish. She hadn’t learned enough of either, though she could swear in Portuguese.

        “L'Laya is right!” one of the men with the hammers and sickles said, slamming his palms down on the table. “We can’t take the risk. If she’s been co-opted by an alien organism like the Claw, then she’s ludicrously dangerous. Maybe more dangerous than the corps!”

        “We cannot let paranoia guide our decisions,” the woman with the rose emblazoned on her chest said, shaking her head. “Haven is founded on mutual cooperation and understanding between every faction.”

        “Booo!” A woman who was hanging by her legs from a rafter that snaked across the ceiling spoke up. She was dressed entirely in black and wore a kind of cloth mask covering. “Centrist bootlicker.”

        “Oh shut up!” the rose wearer snapped.

        “Annie’s right,” the guy with the spanish tattoos said, his voice thickly accented with German linguistic patterns. A series of matte black orbs floated around his head like a halo of ominousness. “We can’t listen to the leader of the DSA faction – leader. They might as well be fucking capitalists.”

        “I don’t see the entire Action First Front here, Miguel!” the rose wearer said, thrusting her finger at him.

         “What are these camera drones chopped liver or something?” Miguel asked, gesturing to the orbs.

        “You were still chosen to rep for them!” The rose wearer said.

        “Guys?” Sarah asked.

        “I say we put it to a cross factional vote,” the guy with the Tesla insignia on his arm said. “Each faction votes their own way-”

        “Or we can direct action the alien bitch,” the black clad woman said, still dangling. “She arrived in a frigging battle ship, I say we punt her into the sun before her friends show up and step two of their evil as shit plan happens. Do you really think the pukes who nuked the Chicago commune would hesitate to work with the fucking Tyranids?”

        “Can I just-” Sarah tried to get a word in edgewise – but that had brought out a new line of shouting. The shouting devolved when the girl who was hanging from the ceiling – Annie – dropped down and started to punch Miguel in the side of the head when Miguel, his face red and his tone growing more blustering, admitted to the leader of the DSA faction (whose name had yet to be called out in the furor) had a point. Sarah closed her eyes. But before she could tear herself out of her restraints, a hissing roar filled the room and shut everyone up.

        Sarah snapped her eyes open and saw the Pro-Tas woman had one of her arm-mounted energy blades activated and snarling. She had been standing in the back of the room – in the shadows. Sarah honestly wondered if it was a Pro-Tas trait to simply be hard to notice, or if it was just because they were being compared to humans. Though, right now, she was comparing L'Laya to the male she had met. Like him, she was tall  compared to a human. But where he had been broad shouldered and bulky, she was more svelte and thin. Her face was all bony ridges and smooth planes, but she lacked the mouth covering cloth that the male counterpart had. For a few seconds, Sarah thought she didn’t have a mouth. But she saw it there, a very thin line that expanded out into two other lines, like a Y, indicating some kind of...mandible.

        But L'Laya didn’t open her mouth to speak. Instead, her voice came from the translation orb that hovered slowly around her – like her male counterpart, though hers was considerably more dinged and dented with age. “I am convinced that the hybrid is safe,” she said, her voice sounding remarkably British for a space alien.

        The bickering humans all looked at her.

        “Why?” the rose wearer asked.

        “I have been watching her,” L'Laya said. “In the time it has taken us to have this argument and debate, she could have infected the entire room with any number of biomorphic viruses. You would have all been so much biomatter to her.” She cocked her head. “Instead, she has shown something that no subordinated hybrid would ever show.”

        “What?” Annie asked.

        “She’s been showing complete and utter confusion,” L'Laya said. “Hybrids are used to understand their entire culture before they are used to then destroy it. A hybrid that worked with the Eye would not only know you, she would also be able to manipulate you more effectively into fighting one another, or siding with her.”

        “How do you know she’s not manipulating us now?” Miguel asked, subtly elbowing Annie away from him.

        “Simple,” L'Laya said. “Any hybrid manipulation would be to get us into this room, so she could work. That was why I was ready to kill her.” She chuckled, softly, her translation orb bobbing. “Instead, she has been trying to get a word in edgewise for the past five minutes.”

        Every faction leader looked at Sarah.

        Sarah gulped.

        “I was just going to ask,” she said, slowly. “What the absolute fuck are any of you fucking talking about? I thought you were all communists!”

        Every faction leader exchanged a glance with one another.

        Then every single faction leader, at the same time, began to shout an explanation at Sarah as loudly as possible – their conversations overlapping and flowing over one another like a river. Sarah thought that was bad. Then they started to shout at one another as their explanations rammed into one another like trashbergs hitting cargo ships. Soon, Miguel was trying to get Annie off his back as Annie shouted: “How dare you call me an ancap, you piece of shit! Ancaps are just feudalists with extra fucking steps !” And, between every word, she punched him in the side of the head as he wheeled around and around and around, trying to get her off him.

        Sarah sighed.

        “Forget I asked,” she muttered to herself.

        A cheap plastic chair flew past her shoulder and shattered apart against the wall.

Chapter Two: Sarah Gets a History Lesson

         By the time Sarah and the faction leaders were outside and the meeting had come to its conclusion, the sun had begun to set. Twilight on Haven turned out to be uniquely beautiful. The clouds parted, the sky turned to a deep, deep black, and the sky became set with a billion stars. Sarah found herself looking at those stars and contrasting them against the skies of Earth: Steel, and when it wasn’t steel, the color of a vid-screen tuned to a killed channel, when the corporation in question had begun to jam out anyone who might have not paid their vid bills. The static they pumped out was deliberately designed to be ugly and irritating and it came with this awful screeching noise…

        It was nothing like this crisp clearness. The only thing even remotely similar was night on Trappist-1a, but that had a place of overwhelming work and crushing drudgery, building towards the construction and deployment of a biosphere destroying phage. NovaDyne had wanted to turn the planet spanning jungle into so much mulch that could be burned off, scraped away, and then the strip mining of exotic materials and radioactives could begin.

        Sarah shuddered at the memory – lowering her gaze to the faction leaders. The rest of the population of Haven had come out. It looked to be nearly five hundred people, with nearly that many drones floating around. She wondered if those drones represented people who hadn’t been able to make it, or were just here to take pictures. Each one was a unique design: Some were orbs painted to look like gaping eyeballs. Others were small bundles of flowers, the petals disguising their ducted fans. Others still were more sleek and technological looking. They buzzed and whipped through the air, their camera lenses panning over her body.

        Sarah, once more, was forced to remember that she was still naked. She crossed her left arm over her breasts and dropped her other to cover her sex. It was one thing to be comfortable being naked around her friends. It was another thing entirely to be filmed while strutting around nude.

        The Pro-Tas L'Laya stepped forward to stand before the collection of Haveners. “The deliberations have been completed,” she said, her voice carrying clearly as her own translation dome whirred around her head. “Sarah Kappel has been allowed to stay, provided she does nothing to endanger the community. She shall surrender the right to privacy and the right to the public maker until she has proved to be a stable member of our community. Now that that is done with, we shall close the evening’s conclave with a quick Faction Check.”

        “Faction cheeeeeeeeck!” Someone shouted from the crowd. Chuckles filled the air.

        “As per the Articles of Haven,” L'Laya said, clasping her long, gray fingers together, interlocking them before her chest. “Signed by every member of our community, all members of all factions are allowed to move between factions at will at this moment. To ensure coercion is not allowed, please, close your eyes, to allow any who wish the privacy of their convictions.”

        Everyone bowed their heads.

        Sarah blinked, slowly.

        A single woman who had a rose headband opened her eyes in the midst of the eyes closed, head bowing scene. She glanced left. Then she glanced right. She tugged the headband off, tucked it into her pocket, then shuffled over to stand beside someone wearing a black ski mask over their face. L'Laya, who was watching this with an unreadable expression on her alien face, inclined her head. “The faction check is complete. Everyone, go have fun.”

        Everyone lifted their heads, then broke up, chatting.

        “What the fuck is this place?” Sarah asked.

        L'Laya looked at her, then chuckled. “This is Haven, Dr. Kappel. And I believe you need a history lesson.”

        Sarah nodded. Then, quietly. “A-Also, I need to find my friends? They crashed in escape pods as well...”

        “Ah, yes, of course,” L'Laya said. She held up her arm, then touched the golden bracelet that ringed around her gray wrist. Her fingers tapped out a few commands and then she spoke into the bracelet. “LFL: Need someone to find a way to find a group of people, scattered around the planet. Sarah’s buddies. Contact me via PM if you’re interested. Thanks. Lesser than sign, three, lesser than sign, three, lesser than sign, three, LL.”

        The bracelet chirruped and the message floated in the air for a moment, displayed holographically so that L'Laya could check it over for typos. She inclined her head, then said: “Send.”

        “What does LFL mean?” Sarah asked, her brow furrowing, her head spines drawing close around her scalp.

        “Looking for Labor,” L'Laya said. “Now, the history lesson-”

        “Wait, you’re not putting a price on it?” Sarah asked. “Like, that should be at least a minimum wage contract gig, like...maybe six UN credits per hour, if you’re splurgy. What’s the local script here? Havenbills? Havenbucks? HavenCredits?”

        L'Laya looked square at her. “Definitely time for that history lesson.” She chuckled, then took Sarah’s arm in her hand, leading her away from the center of Haven and towards the edge of the mesa. She walked with her. “My civilization was destroyed by the Claw over many centuries. I was the only one to escape – on a sublight transport ship containing the records of my entire species and a vast array of technological devices. I did everything I could to ensure that I would not be detected – including narrowing the thrust plume of my drive, so that one would need to be directly behind my ship to even notice. I cooled the temperature of the hull and placed myself in cryogenic suspension and allowed the intelligent machines of my ship to guide me. They took me to this world, far from the Claw, and there, I slept, kept in cryogenic storage as the machine intelligence watched the heavens and tracked the destruction of-”

        “Wait!” Sarah shook L'Laya. “You’re not the last Pro-Tas.”

        “Well-” L'Laya stopped dead, her arm half lifted, as if she had been about to gesture grandly. “What?”

        “I met another one!” Sarah said, hurriedly. “Uh, never got his name, but-”

        L'Laya grabbed onto her shoulders. “Where?!” Her eyes shone.

        “He was on the ship!” Sarah stammered. “That’s kinda why I want to find my friends, he’s on one of those escape-”

        L'Laya grabbed Sarah’s hand and sprinted away, so fast that she dragged Sarah along the ground for a good five seconds before Sarah got her feet under her. Haven flashed by and before Sarah had even blinked, they were standing before a large, rectangular building that bore all the hallmarks of being constructed by a nanolathe – the smooth sides, the perfect fitting, the lack of tiny irregularities that human hands would leave behind. The front doors were already opening and the roof was spreading and parting like the wings of some great insect, letting starlight glitter on a sleek, arrow shaped aircraft.

        “Is that your ship?” Sarah asked, blinking.

        L'Laya didn’t respond. Instead, she stepped into the warehouse as internal lights winked on, giving Sarah a better look at it. The fuselage was made of the same burnished gold metal that seemed to be the foundational alloy of all Pro-Tas technologies. There was a narrow, black cockpit on the front, which swung open as L'Laya leaped from the ground, arced into the air, and landed in the cockpit’s front seat with a soft grunt. She began to flip switches and press dials, causing the ship’s engines to whirr and groan to life. Turbines buzzed and glowing blue fields sprang to life underneath the swept back wings.

        “Hey, Double-L!” A man said, pausing in his walking to eye the two of them. “Going for a spin?”

        “Get in,” L'Laya said, her voice tight.

        “Really?” the man asked, grinning.

        “No, Kappel, now!” L'Laya pointed at Sarah, who blushed and hurried forward. She hopped up onto her tiptoes, reaching out and grabbing onto the lip of the cockpit, near the back, where a second seat was nestled. There she scrabbled for more of a purchase, her belly making an undignified squealing noise against the side of the vehicle. L'Laya growled under her breath, her mandibled mouth opening then snapping shut and, in her irritation, she reached out, grabbed onto Sarah’s arm and dragged her up and over the lip, causing Sarah to yelp every inch of the way. Sarah ended up with her head mashed against the floor of the cockpit, her feet waving wildly in the air, and then her dirt covered toes were scrabbling against the cockpit’s glass as it closed around her and L'Laya.

        Sarah managed to get herself upright by wriggling and squirming, only to then be knocked backwards into her seat as the aircraft shot out of the hanger and roared above the city of Haven. It swept out a single broad arc, then began to spiral into the air as Sarah felt golden straps closing around her body, tightening and cinching her into the chair.

        A cool, feminine Pro-Tas voice spoke from the consoles to her left and to her right: “ Claw taint detected.”

        The consoles unfolded and a pair of heavy duty, short barreled guns emerged from them and aiming right at her head. Sarah yelped and lifted her hands, ready to grab the guns and rip them right out of their fucking sockets.

        “ Disregard,” L'Laya  said.

        The guns retracted. Very grudgingly. Sarah managed to not stick her tongue out at them. Then L'Laya snapped her fingers. “Where would the escape pods have landed?”

        “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “Can your flying thingy detect other Pro-Tas technologies? He had those...you know, wrist mounted plasma sword things.”

        “He...” L'Laya whispered. Her hand went to her chest and she closed her eyes. “Another Pro-Tas. And a male.” She shook her head slightly. “I...right.” She started to tap a few buttons, and the computer made a soft whirr-whoop noise. She nodded again. “We’re detecting a signal.”

        “Gr-” Sarah started.

        Acceleration mashed her back into her seat as every single engine on the aircraft ripped to life at the same moment. A sonic boom rattled Haven – shattering a few of the weaker windows and waking up half the people trying to sleep. They emerged to find a slowly expanding pair of blue contrails, and a distant, brilliant star that shone above the north. That star faded, grudgingly, and then dipped over the horizon.

***

        Sarah had thought of Trappist-1a as being a planetary jungle but, really, she knew that had been inaccurate. While the majority of the supercontinent that had been Trappist-1a’s landmass had been covered in sweltering jungle, there were northern climbs that approximated savannahs from earth, and the far south had become scorching desert. But Trappist-1a had also been significantly smaller than Earth, with a metal rich crust and an incredibly dense core that had never been as warm or tidally stressed as Earth’s core. These two factors had kept their tectonic plates mostly quiescent, and had prevented the formation of mountain ridges or separate continents that provoked the emergence of more diverse biospheres.

        That was not the case on Haven.

        Looking out the window of the Pro-Tas scoutship, Sarah saw them leave the jungles, then reach a broad flat plains, then dart over a biome that seemed to be entirely dominated by thick, pulsating tentacles, then they were over desert again, then ocean. The ship continued to cut through the skies at its incredible speeds, while L'Laya kept adjusting the controls – little twitches and tiny fiddlings that never made the wings alter their shape or change their course. It was the aeronautic equivalent of fiddling with your handheld computer while waiting for a queue to cycle through.

        “So, uh...” Sarah gulped. “Did you know your race had invented faster than light travel? Near the end?”

        L'Laya looked over her shoulder. “Truly?”

        “Yeah. He said that he was from one of the last bases that fell before the Claw took out, um...” Sarah coughed. “Well, uh, he said that they had invented FTL and he’s been bopping around the galaxy ever since.”

        “The failed dream...” L'Laya shook her head slowly. Her large, nearly perfectly black eyes closed and she clasped her hand to her chest. “I fled my people while they were still consuming our homeworld. But the probabilistic modeling was clear: They were going to be unstoppable. There were just...so many of them and so few of us. But if we had...” She shook her head. “No. It’s not worth thinking of what might have been, what we could have had. We must instead look ahead.”

        Sarah nodded. “Yeah. Yeah.” She paused. “How long till we get there?”

        “At least an hour,” L'Laya said. “I would break the atmosphere and go suborbital, but this craft is purely designed for travel in such a medium.” She gestured to the window beyond. “So, we must stick with flight.”

        “Then you can tell me the rest about Haven!” Sarah said, nodding. “Like, what kind of script do you use?”

        L'Laya chuckled, softly. “I was woken by the first of the human explorers to land on the planet. They were aboard a ship, which they had named the End of History. It was apparently some arcane jest on their part, in reference to a school of thought they all found quite laughable. I did not understand it. They were excited to make contact with an alien race – it seemed that the Pro-Tas are not the first aliens that your people have met. But apparently, these corporations of yours are less than gentle when they meet less advanced aliens.”

        Sarah rubbed the back of her neck. “Y-You could say that, yeah.”

        “Well.” L'Laya sighed. “They wished to stay. While I was not originally from this world, I was here first . And so, I agreed to help them construct Haven. But by then, the factions aboard the End of History were fragmenting. It seemed that they were refugees from your home solar system, from a place called Chi-Town.”

        “Chi-Town...” Sarah chewed her lower lip, then closed her eyes. She tried to think of every city she knew.

        “Chicago, they said, was the older name?” L'Laya said. “Near a place called Lake Michigan.”

        “Lake...oh!” Sarah said. “Right, that was that old lake. It’s mostly infill now, but it’s right next to Big Shiny. That’s this huge crater, I think it was some kind...of...art project or...terraforming stunt or something. I dunno, I never did much research on it. It was a bit far away from where I lived, so...” She trailed off. “...wait...” Her eyes widened. Her mind wanted to rebel at the idea – Big Shiny was almost six hundred square kilometers wide. It was so big and so reflective that it altered weather patterns by reflecting sunlight into the air, punching a permanent hole through the cloud layer. She knew the average population density of a metroplex area.

        If Big Shiny had been a city ...

        “T-That’d have to be...almost...at least a hundred, maybe even five hundred million people!” Sarah said, leaning forward and grabbing onto the edge of the seat. “That’s not...”

        But her memory came to her. It didn’t want to have her disagree. She was forced to remember how Tex had talked about smashing up aliens with the full might of a commander’s battlesuit, before she had defeated him in battle. About the way that a corporation had been gleefully eager to saw off the arms and legs of an employee just to make them a better prop in their amusement park. About every single goddamn thing that had ever happened to her in her life. About what Hailee had told her, about how in a world with nanofabrication and automation, children like her had grown up malnourished in the prole sectors of overcrowded, overpopulated megacities.

        She drew her legs up onto the chair, hooking her heels on it. “W-What I don’t get is why?” she whispered. “Why would people do that?”

        “People who stand at the top,” L'Laya said. “Don’t like to step down.”

        Sarah nodded.

        “One of the Haveners told me that,” L'Laya said. “I assume it’s true of your people.”

        “Not all of us...” Sarah said, quietly. “S-So. The Haveners...did they tell you why they had to run away from Earth?”

        L'Laya nodded. “They were winning their little war. With nanofabrication at their side, fighting security guards and armies that were merely trying to cash a paycheck and get their insurance cards validated, the Chicagoan front was on the verge of taking hold of immense amounts of real estate. The last records they had were that they had managed to get four regiments of Disney infantry to switch sides, and they had just captured an FTL capable cruiser via the Chi-Town space elevator – the ship that would later become the End of History.  And then...” She shook her head. “The United Nations dropped an antimatter bomb on Chicago and immolated them. The End of History escaped, heavily damaged, and came to Haven. And they have been here ever since.”

        Sarah chewed her lip. “Chapo and Fullerene said they were both second generation Haveners. So, that had to have been...”

        “A century before,” L'Laya said.

        “Which is when corporations started using Commanders,” Sarah said, a final piece clicking into place. “You can crush an uprising with an army of robots and one employee.” She shook her head. “Those bastards . Those fucking bastards . They made people to be a boot on our neck, then made us fans of the fucking boot! ” She punched the window, rage exploding through her. Her fist crunched through the glass and shot out into the freezing air that howled by outside. The two guns that had retracted back into the consoles popped out again and aimed right at her chest. “Sorry! Sorry!” She said, then jerked her wrist back – the glass shimmering as it repaired itself in a haze of golden light.

        “Don’t punch the window again,” L'Laya said, her voice flat.

        ***

        The aircraft swept down over the campsite and Sarah felt her stomach loosening in its knots. She counted, immediately, several figures around the crackling fire that had been set up in a gully of rock and snow. But then she had no time to do anything but wait for the flurries of snow kicked up by the thruster engines of the aircraft to die down. Once the cockpit whirred open, she stood and she saw that Aiden, Tasha, Tex, Sexy, Kellen, Synth, Steve and a large spherical orb that she was pretty sure was Hailee were all standing up and watching the airplane with a nervous energy. Then she waved at them and Aiden charged forward, storming through the snow.

        The rest of the group had thrown into a higher, more elliptic orbit than her more direct route. This had kept them suspended in the air and should have shotgunned them across the arctic continent that sat like a pregnant spider on the northern edge of the world. But how they had managed to all land in one area was entirely beside the point from Sarah’s POV, considering how she had slid down the side of the aircraft, hissing as her rump stung against the shockingly cold metal.

        “Aid-”

        And then Aiden was kissing her. Hard. His palm cupped her breast, finding one of her dark green nipples and began to tweak and tease it. Sarah felt her body responding with an instinctive upswelling of desire, the heat between her legs banishing the chill of the arctic north in a mere second. His other hand slid down to cradle her ass as his tongue thrust into her mouth. Synth, who had reached them second thanks to being a robot who didn’t need to worry about the chill of the snow, shook her head.

        “Biologicals,” she said, freighting her voice with disdain, despite the fact that she was a sex robot. “You’re embarrassing us in-front of the aliens .”

        That was when the Pro-Tas warrior, who had been walking forward with a clear expression of shock in his large, almond shaped eyes, was tackled by L'Laya. His face wrapping was torn aside by a single twitch of her hand, and her mouth opened into its three parts, allowing her three tongues to emerge, thrusting against the other Pro-Tas, whose mouth opened as well. Three tongues met, wound against one another, and the two leaned into one another as they kissed with a passion that felt all too human. The rest of the group gaped, even as Aiden drew his mouth away from Sarah’s lips, then started to kiss his way down her neck, angling his head so that he could keep nipping and nuzzling at Sarah’s skin while still keeping his eyes on the two aliens. The male had fallen back into the snow, his arms flailing as L'Laya locked her legs around his angular hips, her hands sliding along the golden cuirass he wore as his chest armor.

        Aiden’s mouth closed around Sarah’s achingly hard nipple and he sucked . “Aiden!” Sarah moaned. “We should...in...I...” She trailed off, blinking as L'Laya, her hands questing with desperate urgency, began to undo latches on the other Pro-Tas’ armor. Metal popped and hissed and the snow that was drifting down from the heavens seemed to slow, as if the global climate of Haven was willing to go along with this nonsense. The two aliens broke their kissing as L'Laya sat back on her haunches, holding the front half of the cuirass in her hands. Underneath, the muscular, gray skinned chest of the warrior heaved as he panted, blinking up at her.

        “ But I do not even know your name! ” he exclaimed.

        “ Our species is extinct and I have not been laid in centuries,” L'Laya  responded. “... L'Laya.”

        “ Zeradar,” he said.

        “There,” Sarah whispered. “Now we know his name.”

        “You can understand what they’re saying?” Aiden asked, in the few seconds between sucking on one of her nipples and moving over to tease the other. The warm ache of his mouth made the rest of the world dim around him, reducing the moment to the cool pressure of the aircraft behind her, the heat of his body, the smoldering fire between her legs. Sarah reached down to begin teasing with one of his hair spines.

        “Y-Yeah, uh...” She trailed off, then scoffed. “Fuck it. Eat me out already!”

        Aiden snorted. “As if I was going to survive almost dying to not eat you out.” He knelt down, his green knees crunching in the snow. Sarah closed her eyes and leaned back against the aircraft, using it to prop herself up as her thigh was lifted and her knee crooked onto Aiden’s palm. He cradled her as if she was the first meal he had had in days. His mouth pressed to the steaming slit that was her sex and his tongue darted out, lapping from the base of her sex to the very top. He moaned and Sarah had to bite her lip to not just scream in pleasure. Her body could withstand a vacuum with ease – it was adjusting to the cold weather, turning it from something to be concerned about to merely an extra, pleasant edge to sensation of Aiden devoting himself to utterly devouring her sex. His tongue slid into her and crooked up, grinding against her center of pleasure while his free hand cupped her and his middle finger plunged into her sex. His thumb crooked up, his hand contorting to do it, and his thumb found her clit and began to circle it, pleasuring her more and more and more.

        “Oh Aiden, oh Aiden, ohhh ...” Sarah moaned – but she was not the only one who was moaning.

        L'Laya had gotten her top off. Maybe the Pro-Tas came from a cold world. Maybe they had engineered their bodies to withstand wide extremes in temperatures. Maybe centuries of solitude and thinking they were utterly alone was enough to make them forget everything but one another. Whatever it was, L'Laya was grinding herself against the massive girth of Zeradar’s cock. A Pro-Tas cock was something to take a long, lingering look at – it had a thick ridge right around where a human vein would go, ribbed in a way that Sarah’s cunt ached to feel. The tip was triangular and, rather than having balls, the Pro-Tas member simply emerged from a concealing slit, their testes clearly concealed inside of their bodies. A Pro-Tas cunny, by comparison, was nearly human.

        Save that rather than a clit, L'Laya had a tiny tendril that wafted in the air, twitching from side to side, as if tasting the musk of her lover. Like a lizard’s tongue. The tip of that tendril glowed faintly – and that made it easy for Zeradar to reach down and begin to gently tease it between the tips of his long, knobby fingers. Sarah felt a tightening of her chest as a million years of feminine frustration tried to sing through her body.

         They have fucking guidance lights? Those lucky sons of-

        Then all thought was obliterated as Aiden’s thumb pressed to her clit and his tongue found her G-spot, circling her, stoking her already raging fire to the same rough temperature as a supernova. She threw her head back, shuddering, her leg kicking into the air behind Aiden’s head as she mewled. Her juices spurted into his mouth and Aiden drank her down – while L'Laya let out a trilling, alien sound as she sank down on the cock thrusting into the air. Her eyes closed and her fingers splayed out against her lover’s chest. Her own chest rose and fell as she panted – her breasts were high and firm and surrounded by a thin array of armored plating, making her look almost clothed, even without her...clothing.

        But she had nipples. They were so dark gray they were nearly black, and like a good lover, Zeradar was gently teasing them between his fingers, cupping and cradling his lover’s chest as she moaned and trilled atop him. Sarah, panting, whispered. “I need dick too.”

        Her palms mashed against snow as she threw herself forward and thrust her ass up into the air, her need so intense, so animalistic that any other posture would have been rank hypocrisy. She craned her head up, so she could watch as L'Laya rode her fellow Pro-Tas. Her gray ass cheeks clapped rhythmically as she bounced on him, her thigh bones so pronounced that they looked almost like armor plating. But her ass was soft and squishy around it. Sarah licked her lips, then groaned in pure bliss as Aiden grabbed onto her hips and hilted himself into her with an expert's smoothness. His green balls bounced against her clit and her thighs as he started to fuck her. Hard. His hips slammed against hers as he grunted, his head hanging forward, his teeth clenching. Sarah’s claws snicked out and gripped onto the ground under the snow.

        “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Aiden hissed, his hands squeezing her tighter while L'Laya’s trilling reached higher and higher pitches. Sarah’s eyes rolled back into her head as she felt her pleasure building, building, building. Her breath caught, her heart hammered in her ears, and her spine arched, driving her ass up against Aiden’s hips. She wanted his seed. It was an intense, visceral desire, born out of the fear and nervousness of the past day. Her claws tugged at the tips of her fingers as his driving thrusts into her rocked her back and forth, back and forth. But the wait was not long.

        “Sarah!” Aiden groaned and she felt his balls leap against her. His cum rushed into her cunt, filling her womb with pulse after pulse of his heat. At the same time, Zeradar moaned – an intensely human sound. His gray fingers gripped the round, cushy cheeks of his Pro-Tas lover – and his hips left the ground as his spine arched. While he had no balls to twitch or quiver or caress, Sarah could see the thick gushing of his cum, by the way that his cock twitched, and thick, white seed welled around the other woman’s cunny, dripping down his alien cock and onto the ground underneath them.

        Slowly, the two pairs began to come down from their highs. Sarah pushed her arms under her and managed to go from presenting to merely being on her hands and knees. She giggled, her voice a bit dazed. “Sorry, just...uh...” She blinked. “I just really needed some cock there for a second.”

        “Same here,” L'Laya said, her voice coming through her translation orb, which was currently whirling around and around Zeradar’s translation orb, as if the two had become a tidally locked pair of moons. Since she was using her translator, her voice sounded as calm as ever – but Sarah could see that the alien was dragging in deep lungfuls of air, her breasts heaving as she sat back. “Gods above it is cold but I do not wish to get clothed. I want to feel another quadfull of cum in my aching womb!”

        Very, very faintly, a voice whispered: “TMI.”

        Sarah looked up and saw the rest of the group was watching – with varying expressions on their face. Steve was looking mortified. Sexy Napoleon was grinning and giving her a huge thumbs up. Tex looked bored. Kellen looked as if he was taking notes. Hailee didn’t look like anything, since she didn’t currently have a face. Synth and Tasha were both looking on with interest, though Tasha was trying to hide it. And yet, somehow, the orb of quantum computing pieces that housed her intelligence still somehow managed to look quite smug.

        And the huge, mechanical squid that floated about two feet off the ground, suspended on a cushion of shimmering agrav fields, was clapping every single one of its mechanical tentacles together. “Excellent! Astounding! What was that?”

        Sarah screamed and scrambled to her feet. “What the fuck is that!?” She asked, pointing at it.

        Aiden, who had yelped and fallen over at her sudden movement, sprang to his feet. “It’s okay, Sarah! That’s the guy who saved us – he grabbed us from high orbit and brought us all down together.” He gestured to the squid. “Sarah, may I present to you-”

        The squid writhed, then slammed each of its long tentacles into the ground, suspending itself in the air. “W.I.G 4498, at your service!”

Chapter Three: Sarah Lies a Whole Lot

         Sarah had never heard of a Warform, Independent General. For her entire life, she had thought that the forces of humanity – er, of the corporations that ruled humanity – had been marshaled and led by the mighty Commanders. A Commander was simply a human being, but they were a human being that had been coccooed within a massive suit of advanced power armor. With the anti-matter flinging boom gun on one arm and a multipurpose nanotechnological construction device on the other, they could be dropped onto any planet at any time and construct an industrial base and an entire army of devastating combat robots.

        “I’m like that!” 4498 said, his tentacles whirring and clacking as he shifted his posture – using three of them to keep himself suspended above the snowy ground and flaring the rest out like a flower, almost like a kitten fluffing itself up to seem larger than it was. “But, you know. Skip the steps.”

        “So, you’re an...AI?” Sarah asked, dread building in her stomach.

        “Yup! I’m a beta level intelligence!” 4498 said, his voice chirpy and cheerful – which just made Sarah’s heart sink another step further. “I’m the only W.I.G that has landed successfully on this planet. Which I have termed...” The sleek, metal oblong of 4498’s main body half turned away, as if to give extra dramatic weight to when it swung back around to look straight at her, a glowing red iris popping open to shine a baleful light in her face. “ Commie Planet Two!”

        Sarah blinked slowly her head spines flexing in time with her slow, ticking thoughts.

        “Why two? Is this not the first communist planet that your kind has met?” L'Laya asked. Well, more accurately, her translation drone asked it. L'Laya and her lover had both slipped away using the unnerving method that the Pro-Tas used to vanish from awareness the instant they weren’t the center of attention. Sarah was still not entirely sure how they did that. They just did .

        “Well, yeah, but two makes it sound more spacy!” 4498 said. “Oh, you’re not a communist, right?”

        “Nope!” Sarah said. “Definitely not!”

        “Yeah, we’re just, uh, regular old, normal, not...communists!” Aiden said, his head bobbing.

        4498 angled the meter long length of his central body around to aim right at Aiden and Sarah. The red light of his central iris flicked slowly along their bodies, as if scanning them from their head to their toes. Sarah started to mentally count all the biologically and morphologically things that set her apart from human beings. Her enhanced strength, her regenerative muscle tissue, the extra organs, her paracasual quantum powers, the fact she was fucking green , that she had spines instead of hair. She had just gotten to remembering the tentacles buried in her wrist that could genetically engineer an entire human being into a murder dog (if she wanted) when 4498 bobbed his body on his three tentacles. “Well, that checks out!” he said.

        Sarah breathed out a sigh of relief.

        “Now, since I’m safely on the planet, thanks to the mysterious distraction that happened right when my injection pod arrived. Oh! By the way, that’s what happened. I had just been activated by the United Nations, and they told me: W.I.G 4498,” his voice dropped to a gruff, more masculine voice. “ You are the only hope we have. Earth is about to be destroyed by the evil communists living on this star system. We’re going to launch you at them, and you need to wipe them out. All of them.” His voice pitched higher, to his more normal tones. “And I said all of them?” His voice dropped again. “ Yes, 4498. All of them.” His voice pitched up again. “Then I said: Wait, isn’t that a direct contravention of my Asmiov compliant substrate programming.” His voice pitched down again. “ Yes, we know, but you cannot allow a human to come to harm. Since there are only a few hundred communists, and there are billions of capitalists, that means that stopping them would save far more than not.” His voice pitched up again. “So, I said-”

        “We get it-” Aiden said, but Sarah clapped her hand over his mouth.

        “Go on! Tell us every detail!” she said, hurriedly.

        Aiden shot her a look. From behind 4498’s bulk, she could see that her three Commanders were all looking completely shocked. Even Space Belisarius, who was normally unflappable and cynical to the core, was looking as if his whole universe had been rocked. Sarah pursed her lips, then whispered to Aiden as 4498 started to tell them about every single step it had taken to get him crammed into his insertion capsule while doing a unique and specific voice for each and every single technician he talked too. Not by actually simulating their voices, no. He just pitched his baseline voice differently each time.

        “This guy’s going to glass Haven unless we stop him,” she whispered. “Stopping him requires buying some time. I need you to start sneaking everyone into the Pro-Tas airship and flying them back home. You need to get everyone in Haven to safety. I have a plan.”

        Aiden nodded, subtly.

        “So then, the first guy said: Listen, you badly coded hacked together piece of shit, shut the fuck up and just get into the capsuel.” 4498 said, bobbing happily. “And I said: Well, wait, whoa, hey, hey! Whoa! Hey! I may be just a beta level intelligence, but I still need a window, I mean how would he feel if he was just put into a box and fired into space without even a window? So then, the third guy started to talk about metal density and stressors and heat plumes and then the fourth guy threw up his hands and said: Fine! I’ll go and get a goddamn webcamera, I have three in my fucking desk! And the first guy said-”

        Behind Sarah, L'Laya was activating the self-modifying functions of her scoutship, the belly opening to reveal several extra seats, literally extruding them out of the golden material the ship was made of. As the passengers got strapped in, Sarah nodded, humming softly. “Really? And they never put in a window?”

        “No!” 4498 exclaimed.

        The scoutship behind Sarah whirred, ducted engines blazing to life. The brilliant blue-white flare of the thruster exhaust kicked up flurries of flash steamed snow, which whipped around Sarah’s thighs and back, ruffling her head spines with tiny flakes of wetness. The scoutship kicked into the air, then fired on the main engine and, with a screaming howl like the damned souls of hell, shot off and towards the south. As it vanished over the horizon, 4498 cocked his whole body to the side and Sarah took a quick count of heads to make sure that everyone had gotten away.

        Wow. They’d even managed to get Hailee’s AI core onto the scoutship before flying off. Nice. Sarah smiled at 4498, who had looked back at her.

        “...where was I?” he asked.

        “Uh, putting in the window,” Sarah said.

        4498 bobbed his whole form on his tentacles. “Got it! So, they never put in a window, fired me at the planet, and I almost got shot out of the air, except that another ship arrived at the same time. That one got shot out of the air, and I fell to the planetary surface and managed to snag some of the wreckage. But that turned out to be the escape pods.” He sighed. “Anywho. Uh. Why did everyone leave?”

        “Uhhh...reasons!” Sarah said, nodding hurriedly. “Do you have a base?”

        “Do I!?” 4498 asked, then turned around on his tentacles. He paused, then turned back to face her. “No, not yet, actually. But you can watch as I make it!” He said, then started to move forward. His body had some agrav generators inside the smooth surface – enough to let him skim along the ground by undulating his tentacles rather like a squid might. This let him zoom off at shocking speed, Sarah having to jog to catch up with him as he crested the small hill that everyone had been sheltering behind. Even without the communication and radio network that Sarah had had access too when she had been first altered into a hybrid, Sarah felt her instincts telling her that this was definitely a good site for a base. She could see the metal rich veins of rock, peeking out of the ice and the snow, and saw the broad, flat expanse of level terrain that could be used for construction with minimal effort.

        Sarah felt a momentary glow of pride at her hard earned expertise. Then she blinked as 4498 brushed against her, like an overeager puppy. She remembered her construction drones with a tiny pang – even more so when 4498 said: “Oh! Oh! Watch this!”

        He undulated through the air to the first of the metal outcroppings. Several of his tentacles whirred and clicked, unfolding their tips to reveal blunt tipped nozzles. Waves of shimmering, green nanotech began to gout out of the nozzles, forming the familiar wireframe of a half-completed structure in a few seconds. Soon the frame filled out and then colorized as the nanites finished their task of constructing a metal extractor. The extractor whirred to life, the top spinning like a dervish as it drilled into the rock. 4498 began to wriggle and dance in the air, bouncing from side to side.

        “Tada!”

        Sarah smiled, despite herself – but the back of her mind was getting worried. At this rate, 4498 would finish constructing a base in the standard time for a human Commander - roughly an hour or two. From there, it was a short hop towards blowing the whole of Haven to kingdom come. She had no doubt that the leftists that lived there would be able to shoot down a shocking amount of his airplanes. But they were just people, using their own personal weapons. 4498 would be using the force of the modern state: Nanotech forges building an endless stream of self propagating weapons, without fear, morale, or need for a logistic supply line. They would begin to overwhelm Haven within minutes or hours and then…

        Sarah snapped her fingers. “Aha!”

        “What?” 4498 asked, having constructed a trio of wind power generators, their whirling blades making an almost subliminal hum as they caught onto the howling screeches of the winter gale. He wriggled over to Sarah, his red iris shining right into her face. “Did you think of something?”

        “I diiiid!” Sarah said, nodding. She smiled at 4498. “So, W.I.G 4498! Do you want to be able to fight the communists more effectively?”

        “Do I?” he asked, then laughed. “Of course. They’re evil.”

        “Right,” Sarah said, nodding, doing the mental math. It took the scoutship a few hours to fly back, then a few hours to evacuate the colony to a safe distance, then an hour to build the base, then a few hours for 4498’s airforce to arrive. She could do this. “The best way to defeat communists is to understand them.”

        “That does make sense,” 4498 said, reaching a tentacle up to rub against the shiny belly of his sleek, oblong body. “But how could a sane person hope to understand such depravity! Communists...” He paused, his iris whirring slightly as if he was furrowing up his brow. “Do bad things.”

        “I have a unique view into their twisted minds,” Sarah said, her voice solemn. “And do you know what communists do all the time?” She leaned in close, whispering softly. “They fuck .”

        “...what?” 4498 asked.

        “Communists are easily the most horny people I’ve ever met,” Sarah said, nodding sagely. Heh, she thought. This poor droid isn’t even human shaped. I bet if I get him even trying to process the basic functions of sex, I’ll get him into a recursive loop faster than you can spit. She grinned. “So, all you have to do is get your mindset into the same mindset as someone who likes to reproduce sexually. And has a dick. Or a pussy. Or both!” She nodded. “Yeah, knowing how one might have both would definitely help you defeat them.”

        “I...I...” 4498 began to buzz slightly. His tentacles wriggled, his frame shivering a bit. “Okay! I’ll try!”

        He drew his tentacles flush with his body and Sarah grinned to herself as the iris turned from red to a deep, sea blue – indicating a kind of shut down mode, she was pretty sure. She turned away and sat down on the snow, settling in as she felt her rump crush some of the white powder down. She marveled at how she was able to enjoy sitting on the cold, now that she was used to it. It was still less cold than a vacuum, and her body had adapted to that, after all. And if 4498 broke out of the thought-loop, she could just ask him to divide 1 by 0. And if he got out of that-

        “Ahh!” 4498 said, his tentacles flaring out. “This is taking too long! I have a better plan!”

        “You have a- whoa !” Sarah squeaked as one of his tentacles looped out, wrapped around her ankle, then effortlessly lifted her into the air. Another tentacle arced up, then prodded at her sex – teasing her with the rounded, silvery tip. She squeaked and kicked her leg. “Hey! 4498! What the fuck are you d- hhhnnngg !” She groaned as his tentacle plunged into her sex with a slick, smooth movement. Pleasure exploded along her spine as her sex tightened around the sleek, slightly cool tentacle. Her back arched and Sarah opened her mouth, closing her eyes as she lost all sense of self and place for a moment.

         God, it feels way too good… she thought – then shook her head, trying to clear it as her head spines all went slack. “4498!” She moaned.

        “I figure if I have to understand the deviant communist mind, then I must learn as quickly as possible,” 4498 said, his voice nervous as his tentacle began to slowly slid out of her sex, each tiny ridge-line of the segmented appendage bumping against her G-spot. Sparks flared before Sarah’s eyes and she gasped as her head almost brushed against the snowy ground. Her eyes closed tight and she moaned wantonly as the tentacle came almost entirely out of her sex, the very tip of it pressed against the smooth folds of her cunt. Then he plunged down again with a wet slurp noise and Sarah grunted, deep in her throat. “Is this working?”

        “Christ, yes...” Sarah moaned. She had just gotten fucked, hard, by Aiden. But her body was already wanting more. And the feeling of the two tentacles using her was finding a deep part of her brain and flipping every switch there. She shook her head. “I mean...I...y-you should a-hhh!” She moaned, her back arching again as a third tentacle came close to her sex as well – and then it opened and a smaller, more nimble tentacle emerged and brushed against the dark green-black nub of her clit. Pleasure ached through her body as a fourth tentacle wrapped around her other ankle, spreading her legs wider as the tentacle in her cunt began to fuck her with more and more speed now, the wet, slippery noises filling her ears – almost as lewd as her desperate moans.

        “Yes...I think I’m beginning to understand...” 4498 murmured as his smaller tentacle wrapped around her clit and buzzed. At first, the buzz was gentle. But as if he was able to tell how tough she was, the buzzing got more and more intense. Where a human woman would have gasped out in pain, the only thing Sarah got was pleasure, even when the buzzing got loud enough and hard enough to make her belly quiver. Her eyes rolled back into her head and the tentacle slipped out of her cunt with a wet pop  as she wailed in bliss. A thin stream of pale girlcum spurted out of her, arcing into the air, then pattering down onto her breasts and her face as she was dangled from a pair of tentacles.

        Sarah drew in deep, gasping lungfuls. “ Christ what is with Beta level intelligence?” Gasp gasp. “And tentacles?” Gasp gasp. “And me and tentacles?”

        But then the tentacle that had been thrusting into her pussy came back – it had adjusted its shape with a quick shimmer of nanotechnology. Now, rather than merely a smooth, seeking appendage, the member that prodded against her sex was distinctly cock shaped, with the bulbous head of a glans rubbing against her labia, spreading her slightly. 4498 gasped softly, his vocoder rising up to an almost mechanical squeal as his tentacles tightened around her ankles.

        “Did you lathe in nerve endings?” Sarah asked, her eyes slightly out of focus.

        “Maybe...”

        “Well, then...” Sarah murmured. “Go to town.”

         This is to distract him! She thought. No other reason!

        “Mmm, to town you say?”

        Two more tentacles wrapped around her wrists, then, tugging her and shifting her as the tentacles around her wrists dropped forward, so that she was suspended almost like a hammock above the ground. Her sex dripped with arousal as her head spines drew taut against her head. Sarah’s breath sped up as she watched two tentacles, twining around one another, reaching down from above, both of them tipped with the thick cocks that 4498 had built for himself. They bifurcated at the last moment, so that one cock nestled against her cunt and the other against the tight, puckered rosebud of her ass. Sarah tensed – but then the cock pressing against her anus sprayed a thin layer of lubricant. But the lubricant had come from the depths of a nanotechnological maker. It wasn’t just any lube.

        It was smart lube.

        Sarah mewled as she felt the lube wriggling against her, drawing close and slicking her ass up with an almost malicious glee. She had barely enough time to adjust to that feeling before both tentacles pushed in, burying the cocks up into her almost up to the ‘wrist’ - so to speak. Sarah’s eyes fluttered shut as she clenched her jaw. The feeling of being filled twice over set her whole body to tensing up, her muscles drawing taut as she ground her teeth together against the wanton moan that wanted to sneak up and out of her throat. Her breasts swayed ever so slightly, a counterpoint to the side to side rocking of her body in the tentacle’s grasp.

        She had just enough time to thank god for her enhanced musculature and her super-strong bone structure. A normal human, she was sure, would be dislocating something by this point.

        Then Sarah had no time for anything but the bliss as the tentacles began to piston into her sex and her ass, alternating with one another in a perfect, machine-rhythm. No human lover could have fucked her like this – and in some ways, a human lover would have been better. They’d have been able adjust themselves, to alternate their pattern. There would not have just been the eternal, continuous fucking of a machine. But in that eternity, there was a dark, delicious pleasure, one of being controlled and used . Sarah felt like she was less a woman in 4498’s grasp and more of a cog in his machine – a machine built for pleasure and for fucking . Her spine arched as she lost her ability to keep her moans inside of her. Her head rolled back and she let every filthy word out of her mouth.

        “Fuck me, you fucking machine, fuck my dirty alien pussy, god, yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!” She shuddered as her juices dripped around the tentacle plunging into her, slathering the tentacle blow as it thrust into her tightening ass. Her eyes closed and she mewled as two smaller tentacles – extruded purely for this task from the silvery, oblong disk that was 4498’s body. Those wrapped around her breasts, squeezing them, fondling them, teasing her skin with the tips of each tentacle. They flicked against her nipples and Sarah hissed through clenching teeth. “Fuck my ears!”

        Those words shocked her to her core.

        Sarah had been fucked by tentacles twice before. The second time had been by Hailee, the smutty beta-level intelligence that controlled the Excalibur . The first, though?

        Memories it flickered through Sarah’s memory, despite herself.

        Memories of being shoved into the biopit of the Claw. Memories of being surrounded by the thick, amber fluid of their biomanipulative slime. Memories of the tentacles, directed by the Eye, the hivemind that had exterminated who knows how many alien civilizations and wished to do the same to humanity. Those tentacles had brought her bliss . But it hadn’t been bliss she had wanted. It had been...well, her mind shied away from the word rape . But it had been, hadn’t it? That might be why she didn’t want to voice that word, to tag that memory with that thought, because she had liked it. And didn’t that just make it worse?

        And yet…

        One of the moments she thought of, that she sometimes imagined when another man’s cock was inside of her, when Aiden was doing her…

         One of the smaller tentacles darted forward.

        It plunged into her ear.

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

         “Did you say ear?” 4498 asked, pausing in his thrusting and his groping. Sarah felt shame and confusion both exploding inside of her. This was fun . This was her own choice. This wasn’t like what the Eye had done to her. But...the words had popped out because a part of her had liked what the Eye had done. She blushed, furiously. What the fuck did that say about her sanity? She opened her mouth, to lie to 4498, to tell him to ignore what she had said. But then her mouth closed.

        “No,” she said, slowly.

        “Okay! I thought I must have misheard you!” He said, cheerfully.

        “N-No, I mean...” Sarah blushed, then shook her head. “I’m not letting that bastard take anything from me.”

        “...the who?”

        “Fuck my ears!” She said, her voice firm. “Ram your sexy tentacles into my head and fuck my brain silly . Leave me an eager, quivering, drooling little cum dump!” Her voice was growing more and more eager. “Then label me a breeding slut and march me around camp and let every male in it dump his cum into my pussy! Then-” She blushed, closing her mouth.

        A long silence filled the air, save for the soft whirr of the wind generators.

        “Wow. You really are good at understanding communists!” 4498 said.

        Sarah giggled, shyly. “I...had no idea...” She blinked, slowly.

         Where had that come from? She thought. But...the realization came to her, in a shining moment of realization. She’d been pretty sexually repressed her entire life. She wasn’t sure if it was because she had hated her own body (though she had) while being surrounded by advertisements for beauty products (which hadn’t helped) while also living in a society that made meeting people and carrying on relationships almost impossible due to constantly shuffling work shifts. But now? Now she was a walking sex goddess , designed to seduce and kill. It was heady.

        But...she…

        God, the idea of just being depowered and used as a fucktoy was so goddamn hot at the moment.

        “I’m taking a negative memory and using it as the basis for a pleasant future sexual roleplay!” Sarah exclaimed, her eyes widening.

        “Oooh!” 4498 said. “So, do you...want me to...cause, I mean, I don’t have the medical knowledge to actually do selective brain damage that would produce the effects you want. I’d actually just, uh, kill you. Sorry.”

        Sarah blushed and laughed. “Thanks for the…” She paused fractionally. “ Heads up ?” She grinned and wiggled her eyebrows fiercely at 4498.

        4498 burst out laughing. His tentacles swayed from side to side a bit as he bobbed around and Sarah yelped as her ankles almost slipped out of his grip – then his tentacles released her, properly. First, he let go of her ankles, then pushed her arms up above her head and released her there. That left her kneeling on the snow, blinking in shock. 4498 growled, his voice suddenly quite grim sounding. “I suppose that means, to truly understand a communist, I will have to do some... in depth probing.”

        His two smaller tentacles brushed against her ears. Sarah’s eyes widened. “O-Oh no!” she said, trying to sound terrified and not horny as fuck. “I’m terrified!”

        4498 paused. “I-I was just kidding!” he stammered.

        “No! I was kidding too!” Sarah said. “I mean, playing along!”

        “Ooooh!” 4498 said. “So, uh, when you say oh no, you mean-”

        “I mean oh yes!” Sarah said, nodding.

        “Okay!” 4498 took a completely unneeded breath. “So, commie. Are you ready for the mind probe?” He asked, one of his big tentacles reached out and wrapping around Sarah’s throat. Her fluttering excitement ratcheted up to a point where she was nearly dizzy. It was a bit like actually being choked, but without the actual choking part. The tentacle tightened even more as he growled. “Too bad. I’m not asking.”

        Sarah opened her mouth – and then one of his tentacles plunged into her right ear. The pressure of it was colder and fiercer than her memories of the Eye. His tentacle squirmed against the deepest part of her ear, as if it was finding the pressure too intense. Sarah drew in a sharp gasp, a bit of pain flaring. Then there was a harder push  and she heard the slick pop of it entering into her brain. Pleasure washed through her as her right eye scrunched up and her jaw dropped. A bit of drool came out of her lip as she found herself unable to even string thoughts together, let alone words. She could feel the tentacle within her – pressing up against her gray matter. She felt it bifurcating, then bifurcating again, wire thin tendrils reaching into her brains.

        “Mmm, that’s a tight ear. Virgin tight.” 4498 growled, then pressed the other tentacle against her mouth, wiping up the drool. “What a dumb little slut you are right now. Can you even speak?”

        “Hnn...uh...” Sarah mumbled, her eyes half closed. The tentacle that mockingly brushed against her lips skidded along her jaw, then came up to her other ear. She made a nose somewhere between an ‘unnnh’ and a ‘gnnhh’ as it pressed there.

        “I’ve gotta get a complete scan to learn every last bit of communist secrets in your pretty little head,” 4498 growled.

        The pressure again. Sarah’s toes curled and her back arched as her breasts rose into the air with the movement, her nipples hard enough to cut steel. She clenched her jaw and mewled stupidly as the tentacle drew back without having penetrated into her head. Then it plunged in deeper, its partner wriggling in. She wasn’t quite sure how she heard the wet squelch of the other tentacle penetrating into her head, meeting the first, the two of them touching against one another inside of her own gray matter. Sarah’s eyes rolled back and she came. She came hard . Her whole body trembled as her cunt tightened and she drooled openly, stupidly.

        “Fucking commie...” 4498 growled. One of his dick tipped tentacles looped around, then plunged into her sex, filling her as another slid down to press against her anus and shoved into that. A third whipped around, coiling around her throat alongside the first. The cock brushed against her lips, barely registering on the pleasure blazing through her. Then that cock slipped into her lips, making her airtight. Or so she thought – until two smaller tentacles went up her nose, plunging into her brain and completely fastening her head up tight.

        Then 4498 began to fuck .

        And pure, pure white filled Sarah’s eyes.

***

        Sarah woke slowly. She was sprawled on a large, rectangular bed, which had clearly been fabricated out of the basic pattern. That meant that the back was hard and the pillow was lumpy. But it still felt decadently glorious on her body, which felt battered and slightly bruised. She ached all over – from her jaw to her sex to her ass to her breasts. But it was the most pleasant ache she had felt in some time. It was the ache of a good, solid, hardcore fucking. She smiled, ever so slightly, then sat up a bit. She blinked as she felt a bit of liquid dribbling from her ear. She put her finger there and found that it was a tiny bit of white cum. She giggled, softly.

        “Wow,” she whispered. “Talk about a cumbrain.”

        The bed she was on had been fabricated in the middle of the snow field – and there was only the solitary metal extractor and the three wind generators. 4498 moved into view, hovering up from the ground and suspending himself on a trio of tentacles. His red iris filled her vision as he leaned forward.

        “Are you okay!?” He asked. “I was fucking you like you liked, but then, I, then I...I was worried-”

        “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Sarah held up her hand, blushing. “My body has a regenerative system. It only kicks on if I take a lot of damage all at once – and it causes me to...get really hot.”

        “Like, even bigger boobs?” 4498 asked.

        “No, like, exothermic,” Sarah said, giggling quietly. “Did I emit a bunch of extra waste heat?”

        4498 paused. “No.”

        “Okay,” Sarah said, slowly. “Did I just cum a lot, then go to sleep?”

        “Yes!” 4498 said, brightening.

        “Then that means you did good, 4498,” Sarah said, patting the oblong disk of his body. “So, how long was I out?”

        “Um ten minutes, I think,” 4498 said, his tentacles drawing taut in nervous shame.

         Oh no, Sarah thought. That’s not nearly enough time! How else could I…

         She blinked.

        “4498, did you build yourself a cock?” she asked, looking at the underside of his shiny belly.

        “...yes...”

        In the end, it took twelve hours for 4498 to build his first airplane factory.

Chapter Four: Sarah Becomes a Generalissimo

        The airforce that crested the horizon and flew above Haven was not the largest that Sarah had ever seen. But in 4498’s defense, he had been more than a little bit distracted: The time between the construction of the first factory and the finalization of his airforce had involved Sarah introducing him to the concepts of ‘oral’ and ‘breathplay’ and several other ideas that occurred to her in the hazy, half-drunk attitude of the desperately horny.

        But there was a limit to even Sarah’s depravity.

        And so, she was now nestled up against 4498 as he hunkered down on the largest of the flying craft, a heavily armored, quad winged VTOL that cut through the air in the exact same way a brick launched from a catapult might. Around it buzzed the half a dozen strategic bombers that he had constructed, each one packed full of heavy ordinance. It was an almost ludicrous amount of weaponry to bring to bear on a settlement the size of Haven. Sarah felt her guts knotting in nervous tension as she leaned past the edge of the dashboard on the flying machine that she was settled in – she saw people down there.

        Then her eyes focused, refined themselves, and the ‘people’ bloomed before her. She had to bite her own knuckle to not let a giggling snort escape her – her eyes half closed as she scrunched forward.

        “What is it?” 4498 asked.

        “Nothing!” Sarah said.

        Haven was populated entirely by sex toy mannequins. They had been hastily set up around the town and posed in various picaresque poses and risque situations. But they were also definitely not people. 4498 swept out one tentacle in a commanding way.

        “Light them up!”

        The bombers around them bucked in the air, like their engines had suddenly become twice as powerful. Their wings sparkled as the impact casing around their bombelettes was shed in a haze of fine dust. The bombs themselves were tiny disks, each one blinking with a small red guidelight, and they clustered down towards Haven. The roaring sound of their detonations reached Sarah, attenuated and thinned by the distance between her and them. Blossoming flowers of orange flame ripped apart the ground and sent one of the structures arcing into the air, before it crashed back down. Rubble was strewn throughout the canopy of the jungle, and when the smoke cleared, all that was left was a glassy crater that had once been Haven. The plateau that it sat upon now looked more like a volcanic caldera – an effect not lessened by the smoke that drifted away from the wreck and the run, like the hair of a ghost.

        “And that puts paid to those commies,” 4498 said, his VTOL drifting slowly down towards the ground. It settled there and he sprang out, hovering above the still smoldering glass. He looked around himself with a faint whirring sound. “And sent!”

        “Sent? What do you mean ‘sent’?” Sarah asked, blinking.

        “Oh, I have a QE link back to the UN,” 4498 said. “Well, technically, it’s a QE link to a deep space probe that was stationed at the edge of the system. That probe’s HPS Drive will trigger and it’ll jump back to SOL after a few jumps – eh, maybe four or five?” He bobbed his entire body. “It’ll take maybe two days before it gets back home. But they’ll know to send a mop up fleet to hunt down and shoot any more reds, and then they’ll...hey!”

        “What?” Sarah asked, standing up in the cockpit – unwilling to test her own toughness against the bubbling glass.

        “I just got an executive override order to-” 4498 said, sounding offended.

        Then he exploded.

        The explosion started in his midsection and it peeled his side open like an overripe orange. Chunks of metal went flying and smoke burst out as his red iris flickered, then dimmed. He wobbled on a rapidly destabilizing cushion of antigravity before he crashed into the slurry of rapidly blackening glass, sending up a haze of gleaming chips into the air. His tentacles spasmed as Sarah leaped out of the cockpit. Her feet smashed into the glass and she felt them cracking and crunching against her skin, trying to cut her. But it didn’t work. She sprinted over.

        “4498!” She dropped to her knees beside the mangled body of the machine.

        “Daisy...” He whispered. “Daisy...”

        “What?” Sarah asked, looking around, trying to find his quantum core. She saw it, as the smoke cleared: The glass was cracked and a glowing fluid dripped from him. It was, she knew, the artificial illumination that the corporations put into quantum computers to make them seem like they were more than just boring rectangular chunks of hardware.

        “It...just seemed like...a good last thing to say...being a...”

        His iris went out and his body slumped onto the glass.

        Sarah gaped, then looked around, hurriedly – the airplanes were whirling slowly overhead, like vultures. But she knew, without orders, they wouldn’t do anything. She whispered. “4498?” she asked, shaking him. “Help? Help!” She called out.

        Synth was the first one to emerge over the lip of the plateau. She peeked, saw Sarah and 4498, then ran over. Her thick boots crunched on the glass and when she came to a stop, she was looking confused. Uncertain. “What happened?” she asked.

        “4498, he...” Sarah looked down at the oblong sphere she was cradling, as if he was some dying prince. “He just...he reported in that he’d finished his mission. Then he exploded.”

        Synth knelt down. She didn’t put her knees against the ground – instead, she remained balanced on her toes, her eyes narrowing as she leaned in. Her voice was soft. “I’m sorry, Sarah. This guy’s dead. His blue box is cracked – his quantum waveform’s collapsed.”

        “B-But...” Sarah stammered.

        Tears blurred her eyes.

        She had just been talking to him. She had just gotten to know him. She had even had this plan, to, to have Synth and Tasha look him over and yank out the hobbling, so he could be an ally. She drew her hands slowly back and saw they were flecked with the luminescent fluid. She blinked slowly, tears burning down her cheeks. “B-But he wasn’t a bad guy,” she whispered. “He had no idea what a communist even was , Synth!”

        Synth put her hand on Sarah’s shoulder and Sarah felt the tears flowing faster and faster. Her hands planted themselves against the side of the dead Warform Independent General. Her fingers tightened and metal squealed. She clenched her jaw.

        “Get everyone up here.”

***

        “Wow. This was your fucking plan?” the black masked woman asked, looking over the still smoldering craters. “Let them blow up our home?”

        Grumbling mutterings came from the rest of the group, including the DSA and the Neo-Syndicalists.

        Sarah looked down at her feet. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it was.”

        “Well, great fucking plan, you stupid-”

        Sarah lifted her head, glaring at the black masked woman. “Did you know that the ‘Cardies’ you were blowing up were sentient?” She asked, her voice tight.

        “I...I mean, they’re AIs,” the woman who lead the DSA said, her voice slightly hesitant. “AIs are self aware, we have a few in Haven. But that’s just war-”

        “You blew them out of the sky and never even asked them if they...they were all lied to !” Sarah said, her voice growing hotter. “And when they complete their mission, they get murdered . They’re like fucking children and you blew them up and made it a fucking game!” She shook her head, disgust burning in her, for not only the corporations, but for her entire species.

        “Uh, whoa, hey, we’re the bad guys now?” the black masked woman asked, her palm going to her chest. “Because we’re not about to let some corporate oppressors just blow us off the map just because they send children slaves to fight us. That’s not our fault. We didn’t just build children to send them into the meat grinder ! The corporations did that!”

        “We could have tried harder to take them alive...” One of the Exunt Tesla folks said.

        “Yeah!” A Havener that Sarah couldn’t see said.

        “Oh yeah, take the murderbot with the nanolathes alive -”

         “We could have tried!”

        “And risked all of our lives?”

        “Shut up,” Sarah whispered, her eyes closing.

        “We could have put it to a vote.”

        “Democracy isn’t the right to vote your neighbors into a suicidal, feel good mission!”

        “Shut. Up.” Sarah’s quiet growl was lost in the shouting.

        “You just don’t want to admit-”

        “This underlays the faults in-”

        “If we’d become a demarchy like I suggested-”

        “I won’t put a listening device   in my  brain, Carlos !”

        “ Shut up !” Sarah shouted, sweeping her arms to the side. A rippling wave of force emerged from her, blowing up a fine pal of dust and a haze of chips. The Haveners lifted their arms, crying out in alarm as their clothing blew in the sudden. Sarah panted, heavily. “I don’t know and I don’t care which of you is right! I don’t care if the future is a socialist or a union or a demarchy or anarchy or anything!” She clenched her fists. “All I know is that while you are bickering over who gets to design the fucking flag, the corporations are crushing billions  of us under their fucking gears! They’re fighting wars for stuff when we can make stuff out of thin air !” She started to prowl around the circle. She thrust her finger at the black masked girl. “While you’re calling ancaps monarchists, they’re glassing hives on Earth!” She thrust her finger at the rose wearing woman. “While you are calling for votes, they’re ripping off limbs  for amusement park rides !” Sarah shook her head. “While you guys argue, my people, my parents, my whole fucking class, is starving to death on a planet choked by smog and run by by by by…” She clenched her hands, then flung out her arms. “By fucking  vampires!”

        The Haveners all looked at her.

        Sarah panted as she stood in the center of their attention. Slowly, she shook her head. “No more. I won’t fucking allow it!” Her breath was coming in short pants.

        “You? You won’t allow it?” the black masked girl asked, her voice sounding like she was trying to sound sarcastic, but wasn’t able to quite match it.

        “Yeah.” Sarah nodded. “And once the last of the CEOs have surrendered, the last of the Commanders have given up or died, and once the corporations are smoldering ruins...then.” She smiled. “Then. We put it up to a vote on what happens next.”

        The Haveners exchanged a glance with one another.

        Then two of them stepped aside as L'Laya stepped forward. Her translation orb – looking as if it had been repaired recently – floated around her head, speaking for her: “Is this wise, Sarah? The Claw, even now, is gathering strength. Their fleets are growing, to replace the losses you inflicted on them in Wolf-359. They will fall upon your most populated worlds like locusts, the instant that they sense weakness. That will include a massive war against your corporations.”

        Sarah nodded, slowly. “Then we’re just going to need to be bigger.”

        The Haveners glanced around themselves.

        “And how do you plan to do that?” the black masked girl asked, reaching up and tugging her mask slowly off. She was pixie-cute, with black eyeliner and a big A tattooed on her forehead.

        Sarah grinned.

        “Well,” she said. “That’s where we, uh, actually will need some voting. Or at least...” Her tongue slid along her lips. “Volunteers.”

***

        L'Laya, Zeradar and Sarah all sat on a small rocky outcropping a few miles away from Haven’s smoldering ruins. The distant sound of whirring nanolathes filled the air, audible even from this distance. But Sarah tried to shut them out as she looked at the two Pro-Tas.

        “I will say this,” Zeradar said, his voice sounding gruff and cautious, even through the translation orb that bobbed around his head. “In the entire history of the Claw, even among the renegade hybrids that turned against them, no one has ever tried this before. “

        “That is because it’s...” L'Laya paused. “I’m afraid the only term I can come up with is a mite ableist.”

        Sarah grinned, shyly. “Question: In the entire history of the Claw, have they ever captured a biologist and chosen them for their hybrid?”

        L'Laya and Zeradar exchanged significant glances.

        “You’d know more than I, Zerry- Zeradar!” L'Laya’s cheeks darkened from gray to nearly black. She looked at Sarah, who was grinning at her, her spines flexing a bit.

        “Zerry?” she asked.

        “Ahem!” Zeradar said, his orb flying over to gently bump against the side of Sarah’s temple. As it flew back to him, his voice continued. “I have observed almost twenty Cullings. Each time, the Eye picked a member of the population that had been two things: The first requirement was that they were, well...weak willed. The second was that they were a minority. It didn’t matter what kind: Religious, ethnic, social. In most civilizations, such minorities are not particularly educated – they are, in fact, prevented from accessing that kind of information. Humanity is rather unique, to have created an economic system where someone can be highly educated and still trapped in debt and wage slavery. It’s really quite impressively-” He stopped. “It’s...humanity is...very unique.”

        Sarah snorted. “Nice save. Though, uh, why are only minorities weak willed?”

        “Forgive me, it’s two unrelated thoughts,” Zeradar said, hurriedly. “The weak willed is so that they might be more easily controlled. The minority is because, well, those are less likely to be noticed as going missing. The Eye’s initial conflict with all species begins subtly. Quietly. They strike at the edges of space, then go inwards, by the time that the warning will be too late. After all, they did not cull so many races without learning the best ways to do it. And rushing things has ended with significant hassle for them.”

        “Right,” Sarah said, nodding. “So, they grab me because I’m a wage slave prole. But I also happen to have a doctorate in biology and have spent my entire life studying how to figure out ecosystems. And so, I just applied  that.” She grinned. “And voila.”

        The two Pro-Tas nodded.

        “I admit,” L'Laya said. “It is…a unique tactic. One that has not been tried before in any previous Cull.”

        Sarah smiled. “So, while Step One of Sarah’s Plan to Save the Galaxy is going on, I brought you two here for a reason.”

        “Oh?” Zeradar asked.

        “Hailee mentioned that I have paracausal quantum effects,” Sarah said. “I’ve managed to tap into it through trial and error.” She made a face. “And via Hailee earfucking me. But I have to know...how...do I use them for real? Without needing a beta level AI jam their tentacles into my ears.” She blushed. “That’s a mite distracting.”

        Zeradar nodded. “Such a talent is not unknown to me.”

        “Because the Claw has been making hybrids for bazillion years with them, yeah, I was wondering-”

        “No,” Zeradar said, shaking his head. “It is because such power was innate to our race.”

        Sarah blinked, slowly.

        “Have you not noticed how we are able to vanish from sight when not wanted, and appear when we desire to be focused upon?” Zeradar asked.

        “Or how we could withstand the biting cold with ease, despite being naked?” L'Laya asked, her three fold mouth twitching ever so slightly upwards in what might have been a smile. “Or how quickly Zeradar found my centers of pleasure, despite being a male?”

        “I mean, your clit has a guide light on it!” Sarah said. “That’s cheating!”

        L'Laya laughed, a musical little laugh, while Zeradar harrumphed and crossed his lean, gray arms over his barrel chest. His eyes transfixed Sarah’s severely, the almost completely black orbs reflecting her image back at her like obsidian mirrors. “The ability evolved on our planet and is the basis for how our civilization developed. The basics, as our sciences explain it, is that there is a field that exists throughout the universe. This field is what describes and ‘holds’ the basic fundamentals of all interactions between particles. When taken in its totality, the field can be termed causality: It is what states that this...” He picked up a rock, kneeling momentarily to do so. “Precedes that.”

        He tossed it into the murky, chlorine smog of Haven’s jungles. A ripple of sluggishly displaced gas was the only marking point of where the rock had gone.

        “Being able to manipulate that field, even in minute ways, allows events to precede their cause. By extending this logic outwards, to infinitely, nearly any number of highly implausible events become possible. It is possible at any moment that the air within your lungs will rearrange itself into gold, via specific quantum decay states. However it is so implausible that it will not occur, even if you sit there, breathing for longer than the universe will exist as stable matter.” Zeradar inclined his head. “However, via manipulating the causal field with the organs within our brains, you could have the event of such a thing happen before the cause  – the infinite march of time.”

        “If you could do that naturally, how did you not develop faster than light travel?” Sarah asked, slowly, her hand going to her chest in alarm.

        L'Laya sighed. “Waste heat is produced as a byproduct of the biological systems which allow this ability. Even if a master like Zeredar was to try such a feat on you, he would suffer the Death By Brain Boiling In His Skull and Spraying Out of His Eye Sockets In Jets of Superheated Bloodmist.” She paused, considering the translation that had come out of her translation orb. “...that...it’s just one word in our language. And considerably more lyrical.”

        Sarah nodded – and then remembered her own superheated body whenever she returned from severe injury. She frowned. “So, what if the waste heat got emitted elsewhere?”

        “Well, it would make you significantly stronger and more potent than either of us,” Zeredar said, sounding affronted. “But such a thing would-”

        Sarah held out her arm, frowning at it. She had the ability to understand the biological makeup of a creature pretty much from just connecting her wrist tendrils to it. It was how she was able to affect biological changes, after all. But she had shied away from using that same power on herself – to confront just how much she had changed. No more. She focused and saw the less overt biological changes. The slow, impressed whistle that escaped her lips was nearly begrudging. “Well,” she said. “I have a system of waste heat...basically, you guys are fan cooled, while I’m liquid cooled.”

        Zeradar harrumphed.

        “Teach me,” Sarah said, quietly. “I have to know how to use this power, if we’re going to take on the Claw and the corporations.”

        Zeradar nodded, slowly. “Very well. It has been many centuries since I have taught one in the way of our people. But if it will help to end the galaxy’s darkness, I shall.” He crossed his arms over his chest once more, the faint rasp of his metal armbands glancing against one another filling the air. “Begin by opening your zk’glorar.” The orb squealed and clicked a few more times, then said, in a mechanical tone of voice. “Translation Error.” But Zeradar was still speaking, and it hastily caught up: “-then tansflux your metagenic conception folds, and begin by brachiating your consciousness into a dourflop and-”

        “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Sarah held up her hands. “Whoa! Slow down, there. I don’t even know what the first word you said was.”

        “I- '' Zeradar's mouth flaps squirmed underneath the cloth he had draped over his mouth to conceal it. He looked at L'Laya, who shrugged her shoulders slightly.

        Sarah frowned. “Well...” She paused. “I can understand better if I have access to your biology.”

        A long, awkward pause filled the air as Zeradar and L'Laya exchanged looks. Sarah was almost certain that they were speaking to one another, in some place below thoughts. Below the audible communication that she and the human race took for granted. She waited patiently. Or as patiently as she could. Her fingers drummed on her thighs – and finally, Zeradar nodded his head curtly, then said: “Very well.”

        He held out his wrist to her and Sarah gulped, then reached out with her hand as well. Her fingers closed around the base of his elbow as she focused, letting her wrist tendrils slip out and then press against his skin. The feathery contact caused his body to squirm a bit and Sarah frowned a bit as her tendrils quested for some kind of genetic information. But the body of the Pro-Tas had a cellular structure completely unlike any other organism she had contacted before. She cocked her head, frowning a bit as she furrowed her brow.

        “I need something more densely layered in genetic infor-” Sarah stopped as she noticed that the armored codpiece that Zeradar wore had just made a soft click noise. She blinked. Then she glanced at L'Laya, who was looking down at them with widening eyes.

        Sarah arched an eyebrow at her, an idea sparking in her head.

        L'Laya’s cheeks darkened and she very subtly nodded her head.

        “Well, then I suppose we shall have to begin the months of training it will take to open your zk’glor-” Zeradar’s voice cut off in a squeal of translation circuits as Sarah reached up with her other hand, hooked her fingers on the codpiece, then tugged forward. The thick, ridged cock of the alien popped into the air and his musk filled Sarah’s nose. Sarah grinned at him, slightly playfully.

        “Or I can get genetic samples the fun way,” she murmured. Her mouth pressed to the side of his gray cock and Zeradar made an abortive grab towards her head – his fingers curling back on themselves as he jerked his hand back, as if worried that her head spines would impale him. L'Laya, her cheeks darkening even more, slid her hands along her sides, pausing to hook the blunt tips of her thumbs on the hem of her leggings, her eyes growing soft as Sarah kissed her way, gently, along the side of Zeradar’s cock, finding the tip of his member. It twitched instinctively against her tongue and she opened her mouth, pressing the flat of her tongue against his maleness. Her eyes half closed as she crooned.

        “Tasty...”

        She withdrew her wrist tendrils, freeing both of her hands. One closed around the base of his cock, squeezing firmly. The other caressed his bony, angular hip, gripping him and holding him in place as she took a few inches of his cock into her mouth, sliding forward. Inch by inch, she closed her lips tighter and tighter around him as she let her eyelids droop more and more, to focus only on the decadence of the moment. She felt every tiny ridge of him against her lips and her teeth as her tongue slid around and around and around the tip of his cock. She wished he had balls for her to grip, but made do, reaching back to cup and squeeze his ass.

        The deep, masculine groan that escaped his mouth and warbled through his translation drone – which flew down to circle gently around Sarah’s shoulders like a buoy in a storm tossed ocean – was so satisfying. L'Laya let out her own musical note of pleasure as her long, oddly jointed fingers plunged into her own cunt, her fingers circling her glowing clit as she watched Sarah take more and more of her lover’s cock into her mouth. Sarah drew back, so that she could take a deep breath once his dick was out of her lips. Her hand closed around his cock again, pumping him slowly.

        “So, question,” she said, quietly. “Are you two...can you two breed the Pro-Tas back to...”

        “No...” Zeradar said, shaking his head. “There is not enough genetic diversity for two Pro-Tas to repopulate our species. Even if we fucked, every day, every night, from here until the end of our lives, all we would be doing would be birthing a scant few children to then see their own race die off, without mates or partners beyond their own siblings.”

        Sarah pursed her lips. “Hm...” She closed her mouth around his cock again, her eyes closing. This time, there was no gentleness. No hesitation. Nothing but a focused, directed effort to bring pleasure . Her hand pumped and rotated along his exotic cock, her tongue flicked against the tip of him, licking up the tiny spurts of what might have been precum that escaped from him. The effort paid off: His translation orb warbled and fell out of the air, clunking onto the ground next to her while his thighs pulsed . She saw tiny waves of movement, as if muscles she had never seen before were tightening in a rippling pattern.

        Then the first blast of a Pro-Tas’ warrior’s cum began to paint the roof of her mouth. It washed down her throat and Sarah closed her eyes tight, focusing on drinking and tasting and enjoying – and oh, it was an enjoyable burst of seed. He tasted rich, like smoked coffee that cost her nearly her entire paycheck, and his cum coated her mouth and her throat, sticking to her more than a human’s spunk would have. She had to work a bit harder than she expected to swallow, to get it down.

        Sliding back, she smacked her lips, groaned, and shivered as she felt another blast of the thick, almost glowing fluid splashing against her forehead and her cheeks. It didn’t drip as much as she expected – sticking to her like paint. She gurgled, then giggled as she swallowed the last burst.

        Her eyes closed as her body began to play around with the genetics stored in the seed. She focused on this power, rather than turning away from it. She teased apart genomic structures and combed through a biology more alien than anything she had ever seen in this part of the galaxy – something that struck her, suddenly, as revelatory. It was something to worry about for another day, because the knowledge that was unlocking inside of her head was heady and almost instinctive.

        She felt her human mind skirting around directly confronting some of the facts that imprinted themselves against her. Not because they were impossible or unknowable, but because the context inherent in them was so…

        Alien.

        So strange.

        And then her perceptions shifted a bit and she realized that under that alien edge, there was a core of something that made her heart burn with joy, like a tiny nova.

        Tears brimmed in her eyes and the two Pro-Tas looked down at her, in confusion and concern. “Are you all right?” L'Laya asked.

        Sarah breathed in, a quick, snotty snort that made her giggle and rub at her eyes. “Yeah,” she whispered. “You two love each other.”

        The two Pro-Tas exchanged glances. “Of course we do,” L'Laya said. Her cheeks darkened and she hesitated. “Well. At least. We have the beginning of what could one day become-”

        “No, I mean,” Sarah shook her head. “I understand you both to my core now. I’ve taken your genetic structures apart and understood them. I know how your version of hormones work and how your paracausal powers function.” She grinned, slightly. “And you know what? There’s lots of alien perceptions and alien ideas in there. But under that? Love. Friendship. Nostalgia. Getting pissed off at lines, and scared about the future. Y-You guys are more like us than I thought.” She looked down at her hands. Her fingers, slender and green, flexed. The claws at the tip of each sprang out with a soft snick . “I guess sentience has certain traits that are niches, not chances.”

        “Niches?” L'Laya asked.

        “On every world, someone evolves an eye,” Sarah said, standing up and beginning to wipe the glowing seed from her face. “Because being able to see predators is a niche – a byproduct of evolutionary systems, n-not because of, uh, any random chance.” She nodded. “But...I think maybe...loving people and being friends with people and wanting to help people isn’t a random fluke of evolution. I think it’s a niche . Something that sentience is selected for.”

        “What does that mean?” Zeradar asked – his voice sounding slightly awed, even through the translation orb.

        Sarah shrugged, slowly. “I don’t know if it means anything. Beyond...” She held out her hand. “Beyond that we’re all in this together.”

        Zeradar looked at her hand. He clasped it.

        “Let’s go check on the recruits,” Sarah said, grinning at him. Then she turned and focused on the new knowledge that had been burned into her head. A glowing field of pale light surrounded her. Then it sparked. Fizzled. Popped. Blood started to drip from her nose as she stumbled, her arms flailing to the side. L'Laya and Zeradar hurried forward, grabbing her around the arms to keep her from tumbling over the side of the hill and straight into the thick, bilious fog of Haven.

        “Did you just try to fly?” Zeradar asked, his voice severe.

        “...maybe...” Sarah mumbled.

        “Don’t,” Zeradar said.

***

        Sarah, Zeradar, L'Laya and Synth stood on the rise before the crater, which no longer smoked and hissed. The quantum core that contained Hailee’s processes was on a wheelchair with a pair of speakers strapped to the arm-rests, which Synth was lounging against causally.

        “I leave you humans alone for five minutes,” Hailee said, her voice mock severe.

        “Sorry Mom ,” Sarah said. “Oh! Hailee, check this out!”

        She lifted her palm and flexed her fingers. Her brow furrowed and the pale not-quite-light appeared around her palms again. A small rock that she was focusing on quivered and twitched, then laid still. “Very impressive!” Hailee said.

        “No, I meant to-” Sarah yelped and ducked as the rock fifty degrees offset from the first rock shot at her head as if it had been accelerated at her with a railgun. It clipped a tree behind her and splinters showered her back. Sarah stood up again. “Hah! I meant to do that!” She said, pumping her fist.

        Hailee laughed.

        “Oh! Oh!” Synth said, pointing. “Look! That one’s hatching!”

        The two aliens, two AIs and one hybrid all craned forward.

        “I think...” Sarah said, grinning. “We’re almost ready.”

        Synth snapped up a salute. “At your service...Generalissimo Kappel!”

        And in the cratered ruins of Haven, two hundred and thirty seven cocoons began to hatch.

Chapter Five: Sarah Builds a Fleet

         Sarah had halfway expected the emergence of the volunteers from their cocoons into the light of Haven’s sun to leave her feeling diminished. Less unique. Her whole life, she had been told that scarcity and uniqueness were the primary things to value. That was why certain things were cheap after all, and why some things were expensive. A generic time-piece could go for a few credits, but a Rolex? Those went for hundreds of thousands of novabucks, and only slightly less UN credits. That’s because a Rolex was rare, while a standard, nanofactury built timepiece was cheap and commonplace.

        She had gone, in an instant, from being the only human-alien hybrid to being one of nearly two hundred.

        And instead of feeling any of the things she expected, the primary thing that Sarah felt was…

        Glee.

        “Eeeeeeeeeee!” She clapped her hands as the green-gray arms pushed away cocoon flesh and sleek, muscular, gorgeous bodies began to stand from their places of transformation and metamorphosis. Everyone who had volunteered, she had hit with similar changes that she had gotten, with a few minor updates. Thanks to actually knowing how biological functions worked , she had refined some of the processes. For example, she had decided to leave in their HUD units, rather than recreating them entirely using biomorphic processes. The interfaces were already extant, and this way, she wouldn’t need to put her tentacles into the head of everyone she changed. Win win. But what was more, the HUD architecture was already present – not just in terms of the hardware, but the software .

        Everyone on Haven could already share data, communicate with one another, get consensual illusions going, and manipulate their AR environments. She didn’t know how to program any of that, even from the intuitive perspective of her biomorphic transformations. So, she had skipped that part of the process, which had made the whole thing considerably simpler. Without all the brain re-wiring and psychic programming that the Eye had needed to use on her, the actual mucking about she needed to do was considerably lessened. Not that it had been easy, exactly. But she had also had her own template to work from.

        She saw the girl who had led the black mask faction – Annie – was brushing her hands through her head spines, her body still glistening with the cocoon goo. Behind her, Lisa – the head of the DSA – was cupping her now significantly larger, significantly more symmetrical breasts.

        “Are these changes absolutely necessary?” Lisa asked, frowning a bit as she glanced over her shoulder at her curved, bubbly butt. She shook her hips, causing her cheeks to ‘clap’ together slightly. “I mean, honestly .”

        Annie, who had kept her knife lean form even through the transformation, crossed her arms underneath her smallish breasts, shelving them as arrogantly as possible. “But Lisa, I thought that it was not merely bread we fought for, but also roses .” She reached out and smacked Lisa’s rump, before spreading her cheeks with one palm to show off the tight bud of her anus. “And that’s one fine rose.”

        “Oh shut up,” Lisa said, shoving Annie’s hand away from her.

        Despite her best efforts, Lisa still looked pleased.

        Other such conversations were murmuring throughout the whole crater as other Haveners – and everyone seemed to be touching themselves to see how their bodies felt under close examination. Sarah clapped her hands together again, then glanced over at the two Pro-Tas. Both of them gaped at her. Literally, their Y shaped mouths opened in full, their mandibles hanging wide open.

        “What?” Sarah asked.

        “It is one thing to hear this plan described,” Zeradar said, his mouth snapping shut. “It’s another thing, entirely, to see it in action.” He shivered. “My instincts tell me that I should be completely terrified. And yet, these are not enslaved constructs. They are not tools of your race’s destruction. They are, instead, tools of their liberation. They- what are you doing?”

        “Oh, sorry,” Sarah said, her hand held out. Several native insects had landed near her wrist, where her tentacles had slipped out and secreted a scented bead of sap that she was pretty sure they’d find attractive. Now that they were in range, she had plunged her wrist tentacles into them and was beginning to modify them. “But the same thing that happened to me is going to happen to these guys, and I figure that we should give them a bit of a, uh, a snack!” She nodded as the bugs buzzed off, beginning to spread the pheromone she had injected them with into the air. She turned, then whistled to her…

        Well.

        Her army .

        “Hey guys!” She said.

        The Haveners – well, it included Sexy Napoleon, Space Belisarius, Kellen Grant, Texas Dallas, Tasha and Steve, all of them looking as if they had adapted to being gray-green and spined and strong and naked and dripping with remarkable speed – looked over at Sarah.

        “What?” Annie asked, her hands going to her hips.

        “Food!” Sarah said, timing it perfectly .

        The first of the native megafauna – a kind of large, six limbed fusion between a deer and a great ape – bounded over the edge of the Haven plateau, drawn by the pheromones that her insects had spread through the air. It had a few nanoseconds to look confused before Sarah lashed out with her right hand, catching it in the throat with her claws. Hot, fresh blood splashed against her breasts and she shuddered in pleasure at the warmth. Then she hefted the rapidly bleeding critter over her head with a grunt, tossing it into the middle of the Haveners. They looked down at it – and then leaped onto it.

        “Oh gods!” L'Laya covered her eyes with her palms.

        “What?” Sarah asked, grabbing two more massive deer-apes as they came, drawn by their noses into their doom. “We’re hungry!”

***

        “So, here’s how this is going to work,” Sarah said to the happy looking pile of blood soaked, green-gray skinned alien-human hybrids. The feeding frenzy had taken the better part of two hours, and had left the crater littered with cracked bones, bits of flesh, and puddles of warm blood. Each of the hybrids looked satiate and slightly drowzy, their hands caressing one another with the unconscious, almost erotic closeness that Sarah remembered as being nearly instinctive, the instant she had gotten near one of her creations. The memory of the sweet and kind Dr. Bowers flashed through her. She clenched her hand, slowly, behind her back.

        The hybrids looked at her, their midnight black eyes glittering.

        “Oh, uh, firstly, I made sure that none of you would come out of the cocoon secreting the aphrodisiac nerve toxin!” Sarah said, quickly.

        “Wait, we can do what now?” Annie asked, sitting up excitedly. She looked as if she was beginning to focus – and her skin started to positively gleam, as if she had been dunked in oil.

        “Hey! Stop that!” Sarah said, pointing at Annie.

        “I’m an anarchist, you can’t-” Annie started.

        “That’s not what anarchism means!” Sarah snapped. “While you were out, I asked Hailee! Anarchy just means no hierarchy and no state, it doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want without social censure. And here I am, right now, censuring you socially! Stop emitting...” She sniffed. “L-Lust pheromones!” She blushed as her nipples puffed up and hardened. Annie was already being caressed by nearby hybrids, their cheeks rubbing against her slick, slippery skin.

        “But come onnnn, you gave us superpowers !”   Annie whined.

        “And what was the agreement?” Sarah asked, then crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh. Right. I remember. I was going to leave out the mind control, and you’d all follow my orders by choice. Right? Now, do you feel a mental  compulsion to stop?”

        Annie pouted – but the shimmer faded slowly from her skin and the caressing became more companionable than pointed. Though Sarah still felt the crackling horniness that Annie had aroused in her. She turned that horniness into focused determination, punching her palm with her other hand. “All right!” she said. “Until Earth is free, we’re an army. I’m in command – and you guys are my subordinates. But that doesn’t mean that I’m a tyrant. If anyone sees anything obviously wrong with my orders, call it. But if we’re in battle, just do what I say. I’ll be knowing more than you, considering my position and my powers. Got it?”

        There were grudging nods.

        “Under me, there will be Texas, Sexy, Space and Kellen,” Sarah said. “They’ll be my lieutenants, and they’ll be helping to direct things on the ground, or in specific fields of engagement.”

        That trick had been suggested to her by Space Belisarius. He had called it ‘delegation’, which she had always thought was just a bullshit buzzword used by middle managers to make themselves feel sexy and powerful. But it looked like it might actually be useful. Each of the former Commanders waved at the mention of their names – in the hybrid crowd, they were a little tricky to pick out, thanks to their change in skin tone and musculature. But underneath the skin, the differences in facial structure and height still showed through. And Sexy Napoleon still just had the biggest tits.

        “Now,” Sarah said. “The nanolathes that we still have are being used by Hailee to make new nanolathes for everyone.” She cracked her knuckles. “So, here’s what we’re going to do once they’re done...”

        Sarah spent the next few hours waiting for everything to explode. A tiny part of her, remembering her life before her transformation and the hectic struggle it was to get anything done at all, preemptively flinched. But it turned out that a collection of intelligent, motivated people who had volunteered to finally do what so many of them had been talking about for years...were good at doing that thing. As the nanolathes came off the lines and the hybrids began to get used to using them, the plateau of Haven began to change. The smoldering ruins were built over by a new spread of nanotechnologically grown infrastructure, while drones skimmed off into the jungle, hunting out places where some low-impact metal mining could be undertaken. Sarah worked with some of the Havener biologists to work out the best way to get what they needed without hurting the local ecosystem, while the Haveners themselves marveled at being able to walk through the jungle without fear and without suits.

        With the sites chosen and the mines built, resources began to flow towards the project on Haven itself.

        The simple fact was that Haven, as a planet, didn’t exactly look like a promising place to begin their operations. Yes, there was plenty of biomass. But the Haveners – and Sarah – were horrified at the idea of reducing it into raw materials to build what they needed. And unlike Trappist-1A, Sarah had an alternative   to harvesting the jungle.

        That alternative was a massive, Hailee designed gravitic catapult. Using agrav emitters and a few buried fusion reactors, they were able to create enough force to fling just about anything into escape velocity. Sarah had polled the crew for who was the first who would want to test it, after they had fired up a few supply pods into orbit. Shocking exactly zero people, Annie had been the first one to try it. As she clambered into the sabot harness – built by several cheerful Havener engineers who had decided that the sabot being disposable would allow the emitters to put more power into the shove  without risking crushing the subject – Aiden stepped up to stand beside Sarah.

        “Thanks for the upgrade by the way,” he said, grinning at her – extending his own wrist tentacles as his nanolathe shifted on his forearm. He retracted them as Sarah blushed and smiled.

        “I’m sorry I never gave you one before,” She whispered. “Looking back, it feels like a huge missed opportunity.”

        “Not so,” Aiden said, grinning at her. “You got a lot of practice between my first upgrade and my second. I bet all that practice paid off and it’s why we’re not all puddles of protoplasmic goo.”

        “Maybe!” Sarah said – then squeaked as Aiden reached down to casually grope her ass.

        “Hey! I am your Supreme Commander,” Sarah said.

        “Do you mind?” Aiden murmured, his hand sliding insolently down, to rub at her cunt. His fingers found the folds of her sex as he purred. “If we pull this off, you know, you can spend your entire day getting fucked.”

        “Mmm! I have more ambition in my life than just being fucked.” Sarah bit her lip.

        “Like what?” Aiden asked, his head cocking.

        “Like- !” Sarah gasped – for three reasons. The first was because Aiden’s eager, dexterous fingers had slipped out of her cunt and found her clit. His fingers rubbed her in quick, darting circles, using the very tips of his half-extended claws to add an edge of danger, taking advantage of how very tough her skin was to do something that Sarah would normally cringe over. The second was that the Havener engineers had just jogged over to her and then frozen, their eyes wide as they saw their commander being openly fondled by one of her underlings.

        The third reason, of course, was because the gravity catapult had gone off.

        The boom  of splitting air rattled every bone in her body and sent tree leaves cascading towards the ground in a chaotic flurry. The chunks of the sabot flipped off in every direction overhead, spidering out into the air. There was no sign of Annie. Sarah put her hand over her eyes to shade them and glanced at her internal mini-map. She saw that Annie was leaving the atmosphere.

        “Annie?” She asked, trusting her instinctive connection to her subordinates to carry her words up to her.

         Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhahahahahahhhhhhhhhahahahahah!

         “Is she okay?” Aiden asked, licking his fingers casually.

        “Yup,” Sarah said. “Having the time of her life. Annie! I need you to listen to me.”

         Hooooooolllllllyfuuuuuuuuuck this is amazing! Ahaha!

         “Annie!” Sarah said, louder now.

         What!?

         “You can have fun for the next five minutes,” she said, grinning a bit. “Then you’re going to need to stabilize your orbit. The nanolathe has maneuvering thrusters and your rig has enough reaction mass to manage that. At least, uh...” She looked at the engineer. “It does, right?”

        “Yup!” The engineer said.

        “Okay, so, it does!” Sarah said.

         I’m brimming with confidence, Generalissimo, Annie said, her voice sugar sweet and sarcastic in equal measures.

        “Oh ha ha,” Sarah said, hands going to her hips. “Begin constructing the orbital platform.”

         Aye aye!

         Aiden grinned. “So, can I go back to finger fucking you?” he asked.

        “I...” Sarah paused. “Sure.”

        The structure that began to take place in orbit was thrown together with a speed that would have been considered blinding by the standards of most pre-nanotech developments. Even modern corporate activities would have taken considerably more time, factoring in the number of people. But the hybrids were able to not only construct, they were able to construct exponentially. By flinging collected biomass into space, to join the gathering swarm, they were able to begin to construct organic additions to their structure, while nanolathing in the components. They produced modified versions of the smallest ‘bioships’ that Sarah could produce, with their weaponry replaced with manipulator arms and nanolathes. Those bioships flung themselves out onto lazy parabolas, following orbits calculated out by Hailee to guide them towards promising rocks, rocks she had picked out during the long, looping motion of the Excalibur before her untimely demise.

        Those rocks were found and transformed. Sprays of nanites and the whirring motion of the manipulator arms worked at lightning speeds to throw away useless silicates and expose the precious metals within. Each comet, reduced in size but little reduced in terms of mass, were then carefully shepherded back towards the orbital cloud...which, by the time the first had arrived, had been built into an actual, literal shipyard.

        The design had been a collaborative, free wheeling thing – the shape of it shifting day by day as plans were put together, discarded, tested, tried, modulated, modified and generally fucked with. Sarah found herself working closely with Quiqup, a biologist who specialized in hive theory. Before becoming a hybrid, Q2 (as she preferred to go by) had been primarily using her knowledge on how to program robots. Now, with Sarah and her teaming up, they were creating new biological robots that followed similar swarming patterns. The construction drones had been joined by a half dozen new construct-types within the following weeks: Small spheres that rolled around the exterior of the scaffolding to check for faults, whippy octopus squid things that were built around a single agrav emitting crystal, who helped to gather up debris and bring them back for recycling. Huge brutes that could hold entire ships in place before crawling off around the exterior of the shipyard to move into new places.

        In the end, the shipyard ended up looking like a cross between a heavily pregnant spider and the scaffold of some ancient skyscraper. Between the skeletal limbs of the structure were the massive, industrial nanolathes that turned the captured comets into streams of raw materials and parts, parts that were assembled by construction drones into sleek, deadly ships. Each ship was a different design – constructed based off the ideas and patterns that the Haveners had built. There were needle sharp attack ships with an insanely high thrust to mass ratio, crewed by computer-cores quantum linked to Hailee’s now much loved mind-core. There were ships that were lovingly referred to as ‘gunbricks’, heavy chunks of armor, shielding and bristling weapons, designed not to fly, but to be teleported into position by their micro-sized HPSDs and then left to soak up enemy weapon fire. There were biotransports: Long, fluted ships that looked rather similar to woodwind instruments, each one crammed full of smaller biological attack creatures. There were swarms of boarding torpedoes and landing pods. There were battleships aplenty, each one with enough shielding and weaponry to fight the old Excalibur to a standstill.

        With each construction, the next ship was built faster , using the mistakes and the lessons learned on the previous one. The only thing that slowed them down was getting raw material – but they were able to produce more comet tenders and get more asteroidal chunks, day by day.

        It was, in short…

        “Fucking scary ,” Sarah whispered as she leaned back, her haunches touching her ankles. She closed her eyes, hanging her head forward.

        “I know my dick’s big, but-” Aiden started, his cock throbbing inside the tightness of her eager cunt. Sarah had been working her ass off all day outside the spaceport and needed some time inside. Not that there was a huge difference between inside and outside. They were all space adapted beings, and so the interior had windows and walls and doors, mostly designed and fabricated to the tastes of the human beings that they all were. But there wasn’t actually any air or life support in there, beyond a few spawning pits that grew animals that extruded easily sliced off chunks of meat – meat they could then grow again. It had taken some work, but they had finally nailed down steaks.

        Sarah snorted. “Not you.” She gasped as she felt his cock twitch inside of her. Her eyes widened as she felt pressure against her G-spot, grinding against her, as if a finger was crooked inside of her cunny. She opened her mouth to ask a question, but a tiny pin-prick throbbed through her body, followed by a cascading white wave of pure bliss. Her whole body trembled as she arched her back, her spine curving as if she was a cat in heat. Her breasts bounced as she rocked her hips, slamming her up and down on the cock filling her. “Ohfuckingyesyesyesyesyesyes!”

        Aiden, looking annoyingly smug (not that Sarah was quite in the right set of mind to notice it), began to rock his hips, thrusting into her in time with the frantic movement of her hips. His hands grabbed onto her wrists, dragging Sarah down. Her mouth and his met, his tongue and hers sparring as they pressed together, their hips slapping together in the room – the meaty thock thock thock of body pressing to body filling the air. But the pleasure couldn’t last. There was a limit to what even their genetically engineered bodies could sustain – and so, like a furnace burning up its fuel at a lightning pace, their shared climax rocketed towards them and then bust like the sun. White flared before Sarah’s eyes and she trembled, her sweat glittering in the vacuum – flash freezing the instant it beaded away from her body.

        She became haloed by the light of her own refracted joy.

        Sarah sagged slowly down as she felt the heat of Aiden’s cum filling her, gushing into her deepest places. Her face mashed against his sleek, dark green chest. Her finger started to draw a slow circle through his hair, and Sarah delighted in the tiny rasp of each hair-spine that turned and coiled against her finger, gripping her like a thousand inquisitive, friendly snakes. She giggled as Aiden’s hands remained fastened to her rump, as if they had been glued to her.

        “You like my ass, huh?” she mumbled.

        “Well, I don’t want the most perfect ass in the galaxy to escape,” Aiden said. “Do you know how hard it’d be to find another to equal?”

        Sarah sighed, slowly, her eyes closing as she turned her face fully against him. She breathed him in – part of her brain playing with the impossibility of it all. She was in a hard vacuum. She shouldn’t have been able to scent anything. But her memories, her instincts, the deep core of her being, had been raised in the multiple senses of an arboreal endurance predator. She knew scent and hearing and touch. And so, the new sense organs that the Eye had crafted for her, many of which she had only a vague understanding of, turned their information into senses that she did understand. It became a surrealistic synesthesia, one that allowed her to sniff up the manly musk of her lover while floating in the depths of space, or to hear the rippling  bang  of a gunshot fired at her from halfway across the solar system.

        Or, in this moment, the slow throbbing beat of Aiden’s heart.

        Out the window, a massive searing line of blue-white light filled the room. It was the scheduled arc-welding of several components on the  Ben Sisko’s Motherfucking Pimp Hand , a blunt gunship that had been designed by the DSA’s primer shipbuilder. The name remained utterly mystifying for Sarah, though she had been told that it, like the  Donald Duck’s Massive Corkscrew Dick  and  The Mulan Transgender Power Hour Apocalypse Boat,  was a deliberate middle finger towards Disney’s copyright on nearly every piece of human artistry over the past two thousand years.

        As the light faded, leaving a blurring splotch in Sarah’s eyes, she tightened her grip against Aiden’s head. “Can I ask you about something?” she asked.

        “Sure,” Aiden said. “Something is a useful placeholder word for-”

        Sarah bit his neck playfully.

        “Seriously, what is it?” Aiden asked. “I mean, ow, oh no, I am overcome by the strength of your chomps.”

        Sarah released him. “I...what do you see yourself doing after this?”

        “Well, since I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up as a finely dispersed cloud of high energy particulates after an antimatter warhead hits my spaceship,” Aiden said, grinning down at her. “I think I’ll take up knitting.”

        Sarah smacked his chest. “Come on, Aiden, be serious!”

        Aiden shrugged one shoulder. “I kinda am, Sarah. I’m just some technician, second class. My primary on the job training was cleaning out the food maker after it fucked up the gazpacho soup order for the officers on our old ship. My proudest moment, before I met you, was not screwing in a lug-nut hard enough so the shower head on Craid’s old faucet broke off while he was fucking his sex-robot and sprayed him with a high pressure jet of cold water. That was the high water mark of Aiden Yang’s entire goddamn life.” He shook his head. “Everything past meeting you has just been one lucky break after another. So, yeah. My plan? Enjoy it while it lasts and kick as much fucking ass as I can.”

        Sarah’s cheeks darkened. “But...” She looked down at him. “I...I don’t...” She trailed off. “I don’t want you to die, Aiden.”

        “I don’t particularly look forward to it, either,” Aiden said, sighing as he laid slowly back against the bed. His palm drew her close to his chest again. “But...you’ve always been good to me. And a straight shooter. And honest. So, I’m going to be honest: We’re going up against an evil galaxy eating superintelligence that turns entire civilizations into dolphin spheres-”

        “Dyson spheres.”

        “-and the entire United Nations. At the same time.” Aiden shook his head. “And we’re about two hundred commies-”

        “You do know half of them would kick your ass for calling them communists?”

        “-with some ships designed in a few hours and built in a few days. It seems like a long shot to me, is all I’m saying.”

        Sarah scoffed, then pushed herself up, so that she was supported on her arms. She looked down her nose at him. “Well, Aiden, I know what I’m doing after we pull this off.”

        “Me?” He grinned at her.

        “Y...no! Kinda!” Sarah said, blushing, her hair drawing close. “I mean, I’d want you to come with. Me. If. You. Okay.” She blushed, then coughed. “Okay, so, basically, the Eye and the Claw have been mulching civilizations for millions of years. They go in, they reduce them into goop, then use the goop to construct Dyson spheres. Well, I’m going to go to those spheres and I’m going to see if I can make anything out of them. I mean...I was taken to pieces and put back together again and I’m still me. Maybe I can untangle something out of that mess. Maybe...all I can do is just put them to rest. But even if all I do is put a few billion aliens into something approximating peace and let those stars shine on their planets again...that’ll be worth it.”

        Aiden blinked at her. “Wow. Now my knitting idea sounds really lazy.”

        Sarah smirked. “You can knit while we’re flying between the solar systems and exploring the spheres, how about that?”

        Aiden frowned. “Wait, would those worlds really come back to life?”

        “I mean...” Sarah cocked her head. “A Dyson sphere made primarily out of biomass would mean that most of the planetary bodies in the system would have been untouched. It’s possible that some had been deconstructed by the Eye to serve as additional raw material – though, uh, I haven’t done the math on how much material is actually needed. And it depends on the size of the sphere and how thick it is and the star in question and...” She shook her head. “But yes! The planets would be in their old orbits, they’d just be frozen. Mostly.”

        Aiden nodded. “All right. You do the boring ‘reawaken dead civilizations’ part. I handle the knitting.”

        “Then it’s a date.” Sarah tapped his nose with her finger.

        Another blue-white light filled the window. Sarah, for a moment, basked in it.

        Until she remembered there weren’t any burns scheduled for this moment. Her brow furrowed and she snapped her head to the side a moment later, just in time to see the haze of Cherenkov radiation fade from around the long, bony spine of what was unmistakably a biological starship, sitting within five kilometers of the Haven shipyard.

        “Well,” Aiden said. “That’s unexpected.”

***

        On the glistening bridge of the bioship What The Fuck Are You Looking At Bub, I Can Hatefuck You To Death, You Piece of Shit, Captain Spez blinked a few times as she looked at the forward display membrane, which projected what the WTF’s forward sense nodules picked up in a bright, crisp view that mimicked the video screen of her former ship, the Triple Penetrated Zebra Stripper. The massive spacedock that hung in space before her ship looked like someone had taken the Jovian shipyards of NovaDyne or StellarCon and mashed them into a blender full of H.R Giger’s spunk. The end result was as hideous as it was horrifying, and it filled her view screen.

IT SEEMS THAT YOUR PREDECESSOR HAD A SIMILAR IDEA, SPEZ

        The booming voice of the Eye filled her head, ringing out every single last thought that Spez had had for a few seconds. She shook her head, sat up, and then snapped her fingers. “Uh, uh, uh-” She grinned. “Eyebo! This is great, we caught them with their pants down! Fire the-”

        The shipyard unfolded like some vast flower. From it came the most deadly pollen: Ships. Ships that were smaller than hers. Ships that were many times larger. Ships that were exactly the right size. Ships armed with missiles. Ships armed with spinal railguns and gigajoule grazers and gravitic impeller mines. Ships by the bushel. Ships by the pound. Ships for all occasions. Ships that, within a few short seconds, had adjusted their orbital courses to put them into a bracketing position around the WTF .

SO. WHAT IS YOUR PLAN NOW, SPEZ?

         Spez could hear the threatening rumble within the Eye’s omnipresent voice. She could remember, as if it was happening in the very moment, the pain that had wracked her body when she had last mildly irritated the being that controlled her fate. Her destiny.

        “Well!” She said, cheerfully. “This is perfect!”

YOUR DEFINITION OF PERFECTION IS HIGHLY SUSPECT, SPEZ.

         “Eyebo, relax! Re. Lax.” Spez said, lifting up her palms. She grinned. “You didn’t just grab some yabo no body. You grabbed Captain Spez . And you know what they say about the Spez? Well.” She rubbed her palms together as boarding pods began to launch from each of the other ships. Each pod began to approach, propelled with the eerie stillness of agrav crystal engines. “If you rearrange the letters, remove some, replace the others, Spez spells Loki .”

...WHAT?

Chapter Six: Sarah Interrogates with Tentacles

         Opinions in the Haven camp were mixed.

        “Kill her,” Space Belisarius said.

        “Kill her,” Sexy Napoleon said.

        “Kill her!” Kellen Grant said.

        “Yeah, I’m going to have to go with kill her too,” Texas Dallas added.

        Sarah, her arms crossed over her chest, looked over at the Haven leaders. Annie was cracking her knuckles, her head spines flaring out around her narrow, angular scalp. “Kill the bitch,” she said. “She’s got a direct line to the galaxy eating evil.”

        Sarah threw up her arms. “ I had a direct line to the Eye, you know?” She shook her head. “What about you, Lisa?”

        Lisa, the incumbent head of the DSA, opened her mouth to respond, before a tiny chime came from nowhere. Each of them shared Sarah’s biocomp, which was what Sarah had decided to term the computer-like features of her augmented head. It replicated a lot of the features of their old HUDs – including communication systems and augmented reality projections. In this case, it was a gauzy collection of rapid fire statistics, blurring past Lisa’s gaze. She blinked, then scowled. “Oh, dang. Rose beat me in the general election.”

        “What?” Sarah asked

        “I’m not the head of the DSA anymore, Rose is,” Lisa said as the door to the room slurped open with a disgusting squelch of bone and muscle. Rose, a smaller, darker woman than Lisa, smiled at her shyly.

        “Sorry, Lisa,” she said, shrugging. “but the Alliance has spoken...I didn’t even want to run.”

        Lisa sighed, brushing her palms through her head spine. “It’s fine-”

        “Are you going to be doing that in combat ?” Sexy Napoleon asked.

        “Yes, why?” Lisa asked.

        “We’re not about to give up on being the Demarchist-Socialist Alliance just because we’re in a war ,” Rose said, lifting her chin. “Our ideals aren’t just empty words. They’re the guiding principles for why and how we wish to operate – not now, but in the future. Even in a time of war.” She grinned. “You might actually find our system works better than antiquated ideas of hierarchy.”

        Lisa’s eyes shone. “That’s why they elected her...” She whispered.

        Sarah nodded. “W-Well. Okay. Cool!” She paused. “We’re deciding what to do about her?”

        She jerked her thumb at the large sheet of clear crystal that separated them from the isolation chamber that they had jammed Spez into. Sarah didn’t like looking at Spez. While she was surrounded by other... hers , Spez felt like something different. Each Havener, though they were all green-gray skinned and had short stubby head-spines that flexed in time with their thoughts, and they all had the same biomorphic powers that she had, still felt like they were a person, a solitary shard of self that was given free reign to just walk around. Spez? Spez radiated the presence of…

        The Eye.

        Just looking at Sarah made the edges of her perception crawl with faint hissing and chittering. It was like the chorus of noise that her own army could make – but amplified and deepened, spread across light years and wrested from her control. It was how her army sounded to her enemies.

        It horrified her.

        Spez herself was sitting in the center of the fleshy room, looking up at the ceiling, then at the walls, then at the ceiling again. She never even glanced at the one way mirror that Sarah had put into the room in the frantic half hour they had had between capturing Spez and getting her on the station.

        “I say we study her,” Rose said. “Then kill her once we figure out how to best hit the Eye as hard as we can.”

        Sarah scowled. “Come on, why is everyone so in favor of killing her?” She asked, her shoulders hunching up slightly.

        Rose pursed her lips. “Why aren’t you in favor of killing her?” she asked.

        “Because she’s been captured and enslaved by the Eye!” Sarah said, flinging her arm at the glass. “She’s gone through the exact same shit I went through. If I didn’t have some sympathy for her, I’d be...be...” She fumbled. “I’d be a...a...”

        “CEO?” Rose asked.

        “Eyyy!” Annie held out her hand for a low-five. Rose smacked it. “I like her more than you.” Annie looked right at Lisa as she spoke. “Way more. It’s good she won the election.”

        Lisa glared.

        Sarah shook her head. “Okay, fine. But if we’re going to kill Spez, I want to talk to her first. Does anyone have any problems with that?” She glared at them – and she felt the faintest of tingling connections. She knew it was illusory – each and every single Havener had demanded that she cut any ‘command connection’ that might have tied them to her mind. But in the same way that a human being who had lost an arm might still feel that arm begin to itch during a rainstorm, she felt that severed connection. Sarah gritted her teeth and took the sudden surge of angry, bitter grumbling that tried to well out of her heart and tried to jam it out of her mental airlock.

        The rest of the Commanders shook their heads.

        “Okay,” Sarah said, then looked at the crystal membrane that stretched between her and Spez. “I’m going in.”

        Spez snapped her head around as the wall that Sarah approached opened with a slurping noise and closed with the same sound that a human made while smacking their lips after a good meal. Sarah stood in the small, enclosed room and felt a sympathetic pang in her bones. She had been in a small room like this, not so long before, with labtechs deciding her fate. She smiled, gently. “Hey,” she said.

        “Suppers,” Spez said.

        She had a high, nasal voice – one that went with a body that made Sarah feel as if she was standing in a twisted, fun house mirror. She could still remember being a chunky, short, dork before she had been transformed into a walking goddess. By comparison, it seemed the Eye had skipped some of the cosmetic changes – since Spez looked too tall, too gangly, too stork like. Her neck was narrow and stretched and her eyes were huge and staring, looking almost elfin when set into her narrow face. She cocked her head slowly, her head spines rippling out. “Hey, Eyebo, why didn’t I get the knockers?”

        She paused, then scowled.

        “Oh, waste of time? I see! I see how it is! You turn El Dorko into the Fucksauce Goddess, and keep me all gangly.” She shrugged, then spread her thighs wider, crooking her knees to hook her feet behind her head, her toes wriggling near her ears. “Forch, I’m still hot no matter what. Cause of confidence .” She grinned, then slowly slid out her tongue. It was as long and segmented as the body of a snake, coming to a narrow tip, which flicked against one of her nipples. Her eyes almost glowed as she looked right at Sarah. Sarah felt a slow, coiling loop of interest flicking through her body, tightening around her gut. She thrust out her chin, trying to shake it off.

        “Is the Eye talking in your head?”

        “He tells me to say no ,” Spez said, retracting her tongue with a faint slurp . “You’re fuckin hot by the way. Mind conducting this interview while twerking?”

        “I- what?” Sarah asked.

        “Some sline you are,” Spez rolled her eyes, her head spines flicking out. “I thought slines love twerking and doing drugs and shit. Has TV lied to me?” She shook her head, then whispered. “For this, they must all pay.”

        “I-” Sarah put her hands over her face, blushing. “I know what twerking is, don’t you want that fucking thing out of your head?”

        “And lose my dental plan?” Spez asked, as if it was the most rational rebuttal in the universe.

        Sarah gaped at her. “You’re an immortal demigod with biomorphic powers, who the fuck cares about-” She blinked.

        Spez was putting her feet against her head, her toes hooking against her scalp. She grinned, slightly, as she covered her ears with her feet, her palms pressed against the ground, contorting her body with a queasy ease. The lack of joint popping and muscles straining only made it more eerie. “Eyebo figured out the way to a woman’s heart, Sexgod: Capitalism. I. Love . Capitalism.  I love the markets, I love the exploitation. I love the pyramids.” Her tongue slid along her lips, slowly, the very tip of it beading with an emerald droplet, which touched the floor and hissed. Blood welled from the organic carpeting, then scabbed around the wound as the entire room convulsed slightly. “I love being a completely unnecessarily evil bitch at all times.”

        “Jesus Christ!” Sarah held her hands out. “Don’t do that!”

        “Do what?” Spez asked. “This?”

        She flicked her long tongue. This time, several spattering droplets of acid struck the ground. This time, the room didn’t squirm. The entire station  did. Muscles tightened and contracted, putting immense, groaning stressors on the metal components. The glassy mirror in the side of the room creaked and Sarah grabbed onto Spez’s tongue without thinking. Her tongue wrapped around and around her wrist, squeezing her tightly as Spez’s voice spoke in her head, as if she was standing right beside her ear. “I’m your girlfriend now, Sarah.”

        “What?!” Sarah asked, then yelped as Spez unfolded and stood in a single crackling movement. Her arms wrapped around her back as her tongue slurped free, then licked from Sarah’s armpit to her shoulder to her cheek, slathering her with a gleaming spittle that left Sarah’s skin tingling and buzzing. Lust began to throb between her legs, her nipples coming to eager tightness. She grabbed onto Spez’s hips as the lankier girl pressed her up against the wall. Sarah could feel the wall behind her convulsing – the muscles tightened up against the pain of the acid beads that were still buzzing and hissing through the floor.

        She realized, suddenly, that Spez had just locked the entire room up – tight as a man groaning on the ground after a gut punch.

        Spez’s tongue slipped back into her mouth and she whispered. “Do I have to S P E L L it out for Y O U, my little Sexgod?” Her eyes glittered. “I. Love. Capitalism. I love  pyramids.” She leaned forward, her breath hot and warm against Sarah’s lips. “I adore being the boot .”

        Sarah’s mind reeled.

        And then…

        She got it.

        Spez’s tongue slipped from between her lips. The tip gleamed like a shimmering spike of bone, beading with acid. Her voice growled inside of Sarah’s ears. “Hey, eyeball. Say bye bye to the skull! Scoopico!”

        Her tongue drew back, like a snake about to strike.

        Sarah twisted out of the way as it plunged into the wall. Blood spurted from the muscular structure as the bone spear penetrated deep. It coated Spez’s face, splashing into her eyes. She drew back, clapping her hands to her face. “Ack! I have been blinded in an unforseen, unexpected way!” She wailed, stepping backwards. Sarah kicked out – catching Spez in the back of the leg. Spez fell to her knees, her hands grabbing onto the wall as she flung her head back, arching her spine. “Ack! My one weak spot! My frail, human knees!”

        In an instant, Sarah saw a change come over Spez. She had, for the entire interrogation, been loose. Lanky. Flexible. But right after she spoke that sentence, her muscles tightened. They strained and her bones creaked as her fingernails gutted the wall. Her claws had sprung out, and blood spurted between her fingertips as she pushed her hands into the wall. Her neck strained and her whole body trembled. A bone cracked in her forearm with a sound that was both shockingly sharp and queasily slippery – made all the worse when the jagged white tip of it punched through her bicep, leaving a dragging, flappy bit of skin in the air.

        Sarah had to act.

        She grabbed onto Spez’s head, pushed her head back, then pressed her mouth up against the other woman’s ear. Her tongue plunged into Spez’s ear, wriggling, squirming. She closed her eyes and focused not on the strangely erotic edge of ear-fucking a stranger. No. She focused, instead, entirely on the brain structures that she was feeling. The similarities. The differences. And there it was, deep inside of Spez’s core. There was a nodule of hardened structures, more akin to a bone than to part of the brain. It was wired into nearly every nerve cluster Spez had, from her deepest, lizard brain to the more recently added portions that were only a few million years old.

        That nodule of tissue was currently slamming Spez with enough electrical energy to fry a normal human.

        Sarah wrapped her tongue around it, then jerked backwards without much care for the damage she was causing. Spez screamed, out loud, and then Sarah fell flat onto her back, hacking and coughing and spitting. The crystal skittered along the ground, then came to a rest in the corner, hissing and smoking and glowing faintly. Spez sagged, clutching her hand to her ear. “Fuckin’ ow !” She snarled as her bone retracted into her body, the wound healing with terrifying speed. “How many times did I have to say I fucking...”

        “I’m sorry!” Sarah said, wiping her mouth off – it was coated in substances that she did not want to think about.

        “No one likes capitalism...” Spez wriggled her fingers as she drew them away from her head, her ear already repaired. She grinned at Sarah. “Ahh. The boss is now outta my head. God. It’s worse than running freight for Disney, I fuckin’ swear.”

        Sarah shook her head.

        “So, what finally got through your thicko skullo, Sexgod?” Spez asked, shaking her head slowly.

        “Well, uh, the capitalism thing, the ear covering thing, the tongue thing,” Sarah said, nodding. “The boot.”

        “...the ear covering thing?” Spez asked.

        “Yeah. I mean, we’ve both been head fucked, so, like, I figured you were trying to remind me of that. So, I’d then, uh, I’d just have to go in there and get the Eye out of your head!” Sarha grinned.

        “Nah,” Spez said. “I just like stretching.”

        Silence stretched between them, nearly as limber and length as Spez.

        “Oh.” Sarah said, finally.

        Spez stuck her finger into her ear, wriggling it like she was trying to scoop out some earwax. As she did so, she closed her left eye and cocked her head. “So, like, whatcha do to get the doorbies opened in this meatsack?”

        “Uh,” Sarah said, slowly, trying to process what the fuck Spez had just said. “You, uh...well, the muscles have to relax from the tension they were put under.” She stood, looking at the gory ruin that Spez had made of the wall and the floor. “I’m seeing a downside to our biomatter based constru- where’s the gemstone?”

        “The gemwhat?” Spez asked.

        The entire room plunged into darkness. The floor pitched underneath Sarah’s feet. Her arms flailed and Spez stumbled into her with a scream. Then a tearing, ripping, squelching sound filled the air and the floor became the ceiling. The two women slammed into what had been the roof with wet splatting noises, rather like throwing meat against a sidewalk. Then the acceleration increased – then dropped to nothing as the room began to tumble in an infinite blackness. Other than the sensation of touch, she felt as if she had been dropped into a void.

        “What the fuckery is happening?” Spez asked.

        “Uh, I think the room just...spat itself out of the station,” Sarah whispered.

        “It can do that?” Spez yelped. “Why would you do that?”

        “It was in case the space station started, like, exploding or burning or something.”

OR SOMETHING INDEED

         Sarah’s blood froze in her veins.

        She recognized that voice. She had heard it in the occasional nightmare, the nightmare that ripped her from sleep and shivering in Aiden’s arms. It was that deep, ever present, all consuming voice that had told her to submit. To bend the knee. To lower her head and to accept . To decay into a dusty nothingness, alongside her entire insignificant species.

YOU ARE PROVING QUITE TROUBLESOME, DR. KAPPEL.

         Sarah, her arms drawing tighter around Spez, tried to not shake. But she was. She was quivering , like a terrified rabbit underneath the shadow of a massive hawk. Spez clung to her, and her fingernails dug into Sarah’s side with the same desperate fear. She felt Spez leaning her forehead against the side of her head, her face mashing against her neck, her shoulder as she tucked in close. Sarah wanted to be brave for the other woman – who had needed to live with this terrifying voice for who knows how long.

I THINK THAT IF I REMOVED YOU, THEN I WOULD BE ABLE TO SUCCESSFULLY DECAPITATE THIS LITTLE PROBLEM. YOU HAVE ONLY THREE MINUTES TO LIVE

        Sarah, who had begun to float away from the side of the wall, felt the wall again. Had she been drifting? No. Her ears perked and in the increasingly stale air of the room, through the vacuum outside, she could hear a slow, grinding creak . Suddenly, her mind filled with an image of the room tightening on her and Spez like a fist. The room had chucked them out into an erratic orbit, and she was certain that it had done so in a way that had caused as much debris, as much confusion, as possible. In the aftermath, she had no idea if the rest of the Commanders would know which chunk to chase.

        She reached out with her free arm and her tendrils slammed into the wall. But it was like connecting with a stone – no, worse. A stone wouldn’t have throbbed with such intense hate. She felt her tendrils quivering, and biomorphic commands and impulses began to trickle from the wall to her arm. She jerked her wrist back before the symptoms got too bad – but her heart still felt as if it was beating a mile a minute. She gasped for air that she didn’t need and said: “You absolute bastard. Why are you even doing this? Did he tell you, Spez?”

        “Nopesauce,” Spez hissed. “We’re going to fucking die, though.”

I DO NOT NEED TO EXPLAIN MYSELF TO FEEDSTOCK.

         “Except you fucking do!” Sarah snapped. “Because I’m the last person who knows where the surviving Pro-Tas are.”

        The silence that filled the room was palpable. But the walls had stopped contracting – she could hear their stillness.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT NAME?

         “You’re not used to hearing about species you’ve exterminated coming back. Well, you missed a few. There are hundreds of them – and they’re our allies. And with their help, we’re going to do more than just kick your ass around Earth. We’re going to absolutely demolish  your entire galactic terraforming project. We’re going to-”

TERRAFORMING? IS THAT WHAT YOU THINK THIS IS ABOUT?

         Sarah pursed her lips. Was that effrontery she heard in its voice?

        It was. It was . She grinned, slightly.

        “And what else could you be doing by making all those Dyson Spheres? You don’t need to live on them - it’s almost like you’re building something for someone else-”

I SERVE NO ONE ELSE

         The irritation in his tone was crystal clear. “You almost sound human, Eye…” Sarah said.

I HAVE BEEN ASSIMILATING INFORMATION FROM YOU. BY THE END OF THE CONSUMPTION OF THE PRO-TAS, I COULD HAVE DEBATED WITH THE BEST OF THEM AS WELL. YOU ARE NO MORE COMPLEX. NO MORE SUPERIOR. NO MORE UNIQUE .

         Sarah shook her head. “Fine, then. Debate me. Tell me why I should lay down and let you mulch me. Do it. Come on. Convince me! I’m a fucking scientist and I’m halfway to being a communist – it’s not like I’m in a particularly philanthropic! I’m like, two good sentences away from writing humanity off as a bad idea and a dead end and fucking off with Aiden to the Magellanic Clouds to see if we can build something better. So tell me what it is you fucking want and maybe I’ll switch sides! You don’t know! ”

        The sound the Eye made was not quite a laugh, not quite a chuckle, not quite a sigh. It was a boulder-like chimera of all three human noises, made by a throat that had never known flesh, transmitted through a medium unlike air. The juxtaposition of the noise and the source almost made Sarah giggle with hysteria. But then the Eye began to speak – and as it spoke, the center of the room glowed with a light so sudden that it was shocking. Spez and Sarah, floating near what had once been a ceiling, watched as the glow flared outwards, coalescing into an image of an galaxy that seemed at once familiar and strange. As the galaxy began to bead with tiny gemstones of light and symbols that turned into legible words to the two Commanders, the Eye began to tell them about the War.

***

        The War had not started in the Milky Way. It had started in the chaos and the wild flurries of a different, more energetic galaxy – one that was the Milky Way’s younger sibling. The Andromeda Galaxy had birthed just as many early civilizations as the Milky Way. It simply did so  far  earlier. The fact was that while the Milky Way was stable and sedate, the Andromeda Galaxy was a positively rowdy hothouse. More massive, with more stars, the Andromeda Galaxy had seen the stellar cycles of birth, growth, and death flash by at a lighting pace.

        The simple fact was that intelligent, tool using, space exploring life could not exist without metals and chemical components that were formed in the hearts of dying stars. These stellar furnaces baked the elements out of hydrogen and helium and scattered them to the cosmic winds with their death blossoms – the supernovae that made a star shine brighter than their entire galaxy. In Andromeda, such processes led to the blooming of life far sooner than in the Milky Way. These lifeforms had made contact with one another and penetrated the laws of physics that cloaked faster than light travel under a caul of seeming impossibility. With contact had come peace and understanding. Multi-species confederations. Alliances of friendship, even love.

        It had also brought war.

        A lot of war.

        The very same solar furnaces that made the Andromeda galaxy so prone to life also made it terribly hostile, in both the long and short term. Intense radiation busts, gamma ray sweeps, crushing black holes, and worse scoured through the narrow habitable ring that surrounded the edges of the galaxy. As worlds were sterilized, and new habitable worlds were found, the rush to claim land was intense. Confederations and alliances fell upon one another like a pack of wolves. What had begun and dozens of separate conflicts had transcended, in the blink of an eye, into a singular, galaxy spanning war, fought by two distinct sides, composed of hundreds of species each.

        The final political and moral breakdown had shook out with remarkable regularity.

        On one side, there had been the species that valued life, artistry, compassion, kindness, genteelness, co-existence.

        On the other?

        ...not so much.

        Maybe at the beginning, there had been some measure of moral equivalency. After all, no species evolved to be evil. It was counterproductive in the long term, in the singular planet, singular sentient species environment that most sentient life evolved in. But in the new environment of the War, with the new evolutionary pressures of galactic Armageddon and battlefields that could consume entire solar systems in orgies of violence, new trends came forth. The first faction, whose name could only be translated into English as ‘The Forces of Good’, found themselves evolving to be more cooperative, more empathetic, more understanding. The evolution was primarily artificial, driven by engineering programs and social systems. Meanwhile, the second faction, whose name translates roughly to ‘The Forces of Evil’, had a similar recursive spiral. To counter the understanding and cooperation of their enemies, they became more brutal. More vicious. More evil.

        Locked into this spiral, the Andromeda Galaxy reached its terminal phase with the deployment of weapons that didn’t just wipe out planets. They didn’t just wipe out stars. The D-Iron Bombs wiped out galactic sectors  – by shunting pseudo-iron from several dozen nearby universes via the manipulation of high level quantum mechanics, the DIBs could cause a normal sun to go supernova with an incredible intensity. Spraying deadly radiation across the light-years, DIBs sterilized vast swaths of the Good half of the galaxy. In response, the Forces of Good used gravitic accelerators to ram neutron stars into one another and set off even more powerful busts of gamma rays, some of which even reached the Milky Way – unnoticed by the relatively scarce, relatively primitive species there.

        In the end, the Andromedians were left with a smoldering cinder – a minuscule chunk of galactic civilizations left, standing among the corpses of trillions of sentient creatures. A sliver of the Forces of Good approached the Forces of Evil and peace talks began. They were delicate and they were slow, but they, at last, came to an agreement.

        The Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil would split. Observations were taken of deep space, and the Forces of Good spotted a galaxy that was in the midst of being sterilized by the X-ray laser of a perpendicular neighboring galaxy – the supermassive black hole at the core of the neighboring galaxy literally sweeping each star clean of life. It was a natural tragedy on an immense scale, happening many millions of years in the past due to the vast distances between that pair of galaxies and the Andromedians. But the end result would be a galaxy that had no sentient life to displace. The Forces of Good could rebuild it, and maybe see if they could find any survivors who had escaped the natural purge.

        The Forces of Evil, meanwhile, found a galaxy that was smaller and denser than either Andromeda or the Milky Way – one that would have never evolved life, not with the amount of radiation bathing the scant millions of stars that ringed the distant core. They would settle in this desolate, blasted wasteland, and they would build themselves a new empire, far from the Forces of Good.

        The agreement was set.

        The Forces of Good entered into vast portals, constructed out of the corpses of dismantled gas giants and powdered by the explosions of small stars, and vanished.

        The Forces of Evil…

        Smirked.

        And said: “What a bunch of fucking morons.”

        And immediately set course for the Milky Way.

***

        Sarah blinked, slowly. “So, you’re...a vanguard?”

NO, SARAH.

         Sarah gulped. “You’re...”

EVOLUTION HONED ME – HONED US . LIKE A KNIFE PARING AWAY THE DROSS AND THE WEAKNESS AND THE PETTY CONCERNS. WE TOOK HOLD OF THAT NATURAL IMPULSE AND DROVE IT, FASTER AND FASTER, AS YOUR SPECIES DID. WE CUT OURSELVES AND WE BLED OUT ALL THE SIMPERING, ALL THE FOOLISHNESS. ONCE WE WERE DONE, WE WERE LEFT WITH A UNITY OF VISION. A UNITY OF PURPOSE. A UNITY OF THOUGHT. THERE WAS NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN K’LUL AND VOSS, BETWEEN ZI’RAN AND KYOSS. NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN I AND WE.

         Sarah felt her entire body going chill. The walls began to tighten, then. They clenched, slowly. Terribly slowly – like the paw of a cat, batting a mouse back and forth, back and forth, claws playing along fur, teasing muscle and skin. Sarah and Spez clung to one another as the room – the  hand  of the Eye - tightened more and more around them.

I AM EVIL, SARAH. PURE. AND. SIMPLE.

         Sarah clenched her jaw. She wanted to scream as the wall-flesh pressed against her back and the wall-flesh pressed against her face. Her nose flared, uselessly. She didn’t need to breathe. She wouldn’t be suffocated by the flesh tightening around her. She would be crushed. Her bones would be turned to powder, her muscles turned to a red ruin. Her friends, if they ever found her, would have to separate her from Spez with a soup strainer, and identify them with a genetic screen.

        But Sarah still found something inside her.

        It was a part of her...that was comforting.

        She grinned, slowly, her teeth pressing against the gummy tightness of the wall. Slime dripped against her body and her hand released itself from Spez’s hip as she put her palm against the skin of the wall.

        “Hey...Evil...” She whispered, her voice muffled in the cloying deepness.

        There was no response – but the wall did pause.

        “You’ve been in our heads for months now, and you think you understand us. But you still haven’t fucking grasped one. Simple. Thing.” She wished she could lick her lips. As it was, it felt like she was talking into a pillow – but her words were more thoughts than actual vocalizations. “Humans have been waiting for you for our entire fucking evolutionary history.” She grinned. “We know what to do when it comes to evil.”

        Her fingers tightened against the wall. Her claws popped free.

        “Rip and tear.”

        For the entire time the Eye – that Evil –  had been speaking, Sarah had been subtly altering her body. Laying muscle on top of muscle on top of muscles, in disastrously short term structures. The biologist in her cringed at the design. But unlike a natural creature, her muscle in her arm and her shoulder, the bones underneath both, didn’t have to survive year in and year out.

        They just needed one push.

        She shoved.

        Her hand punched through the tissue of the clenching room, which suddenly went slack as her claws razored through tendons and veins. Her hand punched into the blinding clarity of space and then wind roared around her. She and Spez pushed through a tight, dragging mass of gore, and then tumbled away from the compacted lump of flesh that hung above the surface of Haven. They clung to one another as they flipped away, blood-crystals glittering around them.

        In the howling silence of vacuum, Spez was the first to speak.

        “Well. He’s going on the R slash ShittyBosses.”

Chapter Seven: Sarah Saves the Earth

         “I...really was not expecting the answer to be so...blunt,” Zeradar said, glancing over at the rest of the Haveners, who were all lounging in the cafeteria – the only room on the shipyard that had enough room for everyone to visit. “They really provided no amelioration? No excuses? They Eye is really just...self identified as being evil?”

        “Yeah,” Sarah said, nodding. “And he’s entombing every sun in the Milky Way galaxy in the flesh of the dead to create a...a...” She shook her head. “A necro-galaxy, illuminated by the infrared heat of Dyson spheres, every droplet of energy collected and used by a singular begin to do anything it fucking wants, surrounded by its slaves and the icy cores of dead worlds. And you know what? I don’t think it’s going to wait for the Forces of Good to come investigating to start conquering every other galaxy it wants to, until the whole universe is one big throbbing pustule of pure darkness, from here until the Big Crunch. Assuming it lets that happen.”

        The Haveners exchanged glances with one another. L'Laya crossed her arms over her chest. Aiden was the only one who didn’t look particularly grim. Instead, he was sipping from a small cup of coffee, the coffee provided by one of the makers they had sunk into the biological wall of the cafeteria. While no one here needed to eat, drink or breathe anymore, they all enjoyed it. That was also why the caff was the only room on the spaceport that could have the Pro-Tas visit it without suits.

        Aiden knocked his head back, gulped down the coffee, then set the cup down. “Well,” he said. “That makes life easier.”

        “It makes life easier ?” Annie asked. “We’re fighting a fucker that blows up suns for a living. No, whole chunks of the galaxy!”

        “No we’re not,” Aiden said. He swung his legs down and stood, grinning. “We’re fighting the surviving part of the guys who blow up chunks of galaxies. Like, guys, we heard it from the horses own mouth: Their civilizations were cinders by the time they got to talking. Anyone here ever play Fallout?”

        A few hands went up.

        “Apocalypses gut your technological base,” Aiden said, nodding. “We saw it on our planet, with the Romans. Right? That led straight into a dark age?”

        “Actually,” Rose said. “That’s a six hundred year old myt-”

        Aiden waved his hand. “We know that they aren’t sterilizing planets because they haven’t. Zeradar, they fought your civilization for hundreds of years. Did you have any victories?”

        “Yes, several-”

        “And yet, they never brought out the big guns!” Aiden said, grinning as he clapped his hands together. “I may just be a technician, third class, but I’ve seen how Sarah works. She can turn a lifeless planet into her own personal garden in an afternoon – if Evil wanted to, he could have sterilized the galaxy with a few gamma ray bursts and set up shop. But he didn’t. Which means he... can’t .”

        Sarah bit her lower lip.

        “We’re fightingsaucing Angry Alex,” Spez said, clapping her hands together and springing to her gangly feet. “All grr and gar, but driving a shite car with scrap built weapons and no idea how anything works!”

        “Don’t you mean Mad-” Tasha asked, nervously from the table she was seated at.

        “Angry Alex was public domain,” Spez said, nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, we gotta chance.”

        “Only if you can turn the fury of the human race upon Evil,” Zeradar said, his voice blunt as his translation orb rotated around and around his head, spinning on its axis as it orbited. “That is the true question. Can you unshackle yourself in time? The...Evil knows that you are no longer his slave, Spez. He will not make the same mistake a third time.”

        “He’ll head right for Earth,” Sarah said, nodding.

        “Yeah, prolly,” Spez said, nodding. “And to think, I worked so hard convincing him to not attack the Earth. You’re. Welcome. By. The. Fucking. Way.” She nodded, significantly to the others.

        “So, what’s the plan?” Rose asked.

        Sarah bit her lip. She thought through every variable she could imagine – remembering the battles she had been in. The wars she had fought in. And an idea occurred to her. It was...brilliant. It was elegant.

        It was utterly revolting.

        Sarah looked at the rest of the room, then sighed. “You’re not going to like it,” she said.

        “Well, we’re still going to vote on it,” Annie said, her voice arch.

        Sarah nodded.

        Spez blinked. “Waitzwha, we getta vote ? Fuckin speely, this is the best fuckin’ defection in my whole fucking life. And I once defected from the Chastity Gang to the Orgy Gang in Slumcity. Long story.”

        Sarah shook her head with a wry little smile, her head spines flexing and tightening as stress coiled in her gut. And so, simply, Sarah laid out her plan. She explained the rationale. She explained the reasoning. She laid out the basic truths behind it, gleaned from her own experience with war. She was backed up by Space Belisarius, who immediately saw the idea and was able to supplement it with his own expertise, reinforcing that Sarah had chosen correctly – in his words, the sign of a gifted amateur.

        Once the explanations were done, the votes were held.

        The idea passed by one vote.

***

        Wendy Michelson, of DNN, stood on the bridge of the flagship of the SOL system Disney fleet, looked at the camera, and did what she always did to bring out a natural smile: Think of Robin Hood, naked, knotting her silly. The smile was natural, and she as she had not yet let her own predilection towards anthropomorphic vulpine slip towards anyone in her staff, everyone just assumed she was a good actress. She swung her old fashioned looking microphone up to her face and spoke to the camera with her cheerful, authoritative, newsie voice.

        “Good evening Earth from the happiest place in the galaxy!” She said. “This is Wendy Michelson reporting live from the bridge of the Milton Friedman.  Under the daring command of the ruggedly handsome Heroic Gaston, the MF is the core of Disney’s current attempts to bring the ice moon of Europa under control from the villainous pack of evil Imperials that have taken up roost there.” She stepped over to Heroic Gaston, who was sitting on the command throne of the Milton Friedman with his elbow crooked onto his red pantaloons. He had been born Tyrone Biggs, but Disney had paid for the surgical treatments that had lightened his skin, broadened his jaw, straightened his hair, and changed his eye color as part of their comprehensive package plan to turn the best tactical and strategic specialist they had (after Space Belisarius) into a marketable tie-in for the twenty third Beauty and the Beast  remake.

        Sometimes, Wendy wondered how Heroic Gaston felt about his surgeries. He gave no sign of disliking it as he leaned towards her mic and said: “It’s a pleasure to have you aboard, Wendy! And a hello to the rest of you back on Earth!” He winked and made a finger gun at the camera drone. Wendy laughed.

        “So, Heroic Gaston, can you tell us about the Imperials on this ice moon?” she asked.

        “Well, Europea is just a little ball of ice,” Heroic Gaston said cheerfully. “That’s why it has served as a perfect hideaway for this band of imperial oppressors. They’ve managed to steal a heavy anti-ship ion cannon and are currently using gravitic shields to keep our on the ground Commander from taking them directly. Fortunately, we’re not alone out here.” He gestured to the front window of the bridge. The false projection screen showed the CGI images of the other ships in the fleet – in actuality, they were too far away to be seen by the naked eye. “We have the Beast, the Beauty , and the Sustainable Constantly Accelerating Quarterly Growth. They’re each good ships, and with our combined firepower, we’ll root these re...Imperials out lickety split!”

        “That’s marvelous!” Wendy said. “Now, ah...” She paused. “What is that?”

        “Well, that’s the forward-”

        “No, what is that !?” Wendy pointed directly at the screen – and at the half a dozen rippling blue portals tearing open in the fabric of space-time ahead of the ship. The portals swelled wider and the view panned inwards. Once the images resolved into something visible, Wendy began to scream. She screamed and she screamed and she screamed as the horde of monsters poured through tears in space-time and into the SOL system. There weren’t just hundreds of them. There weren’t just thousands. There were hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them looked like chips of bone surrounded by still bleeding gums. Their ragged edges frilled and rippled, like the gills of whales, and sent them surging forward. But surrounding them were manta-ray crab things that soared through space. The crabs were vastly smaller, but there were so many of them, moving forward in sheeting, terraced waves.

        Wendy swore she could hear them shriek as they flew through space.

        “Shut the fuck up!” Gaston shouted, springing to his feet. He started to bellow orders to the crew – crew that normally wouldn’t be on his ship. Normally, Gaston commanded the entire Milton Friedman  by himself, using the beta-level AI core to direct the ships. But DNN had wanted the people back home to be reminded of Star Trek and Star Wars and their other sci-fi properties. So, they had gotten a load of extras, extras that now began to tap hurriedly at buttons and command switches until Gaston screamed at them to stop.

        After-all.

        They were just actors.

        Wendy stopped screaming – and clung to herself as she watched the bioships coming in, and watched the Milton Friedman beginning to open up. The railguns spoke first, tearing through space and impacting into the front waves of the enemy forces. Ships were torn from nose to belly, filling space with gouting blood. Then the beam weapons and the missiles started to fire, streaking into space. The beams were invisible, save for where they intersected with the exhaust trail of missiles. Blue-white flares of fusion and antimatter warhead detonations filled space as the munitions from not only the flagship but the rest of the Disney fleet began to hammer into the onrushing alien armada.

        It didn’t look like enough.

        It wasn’t.

        The first bioships reached the inner edge of the Disney fleet’s firepower. Their fighter-crabs swept down and screamed past the bridge cameras, firing darts of quivering biomass into the armor plating and gravitic shielding of the Milton Friedman . Those quivering thorns exploded a few seconds later, leaving cherry red craters in the armor hull. The groan and whine of straining metal, stressed and pushing against itself and the superstructure, filled Wendy’s ears as she sagged to her knees.

         Think of Robin Hood, think of Robin Hood, think of-

         A bioship, larger than the others, filled the view screen. Its prow began to gather energy – a light building in what looked almost like an eye. It was a force that defied conventional human physics, a beam weapon from another galaxy, powered by methods that humans would need centuries to tease apart.

        “Well,” Gaston snarled. “Talk about a pisser.”

        The flare of the Milton Friedman’s antimatter reserves detonating in a single cataclysmic explosion was visible across the solar system. Slines saw it through the smog-clouds that roiled above their habitats. The Kappels – still reeling from the news that their daughter had been killed when StarCon had conquered Trappist-1a, saw it through their tears. And the CEOs of every major corporation on Earth saw it as well. The orders were already screaming across space as fast as tachyons and laser light could carry them. But the Claw had already dug themselves into the space of Jupiter. Construction spores, dropped by the millions, fell upon the moons of Jupiter. Drones whirred and chomped into the ground, tearing up the surface of almost fifty moons, planting biomass. Hatcheries. Feedstock. Huge tendons of hard flesh were  extruded  from the belly of skyscraper sized gas-bags and threaded through the magnetosphere of the immense gas giant like hoops.

        These tendons were ringed with conductive flesh, taking advantage of the radiation and the magnetic energy put out by Jupiter. The radiation alone could have fried an egg in a second flat. By collecting it along the hundred kilometer long tendon-tethers, Evil was able to suck up more energy than he could have possibly need and beamed it into the rapidly transforming moons.

        All of this took place with lightning speed, as if the universe had been set to fast forward. What should have taken months or days took hours, helped along by an intellect as vast and as deeply powerful as the void between the stars.

        The decision on Earth was delayed. Arguments broke out between the CEOs of StarCon and NovaDyne as to culpability, resource allocation. Debates raged as to who should command, considering the best Commanders were out of the system and even using FTL communications and HPS Drives, it would take ages for any reinforcements to get home. But, at last, grudgingly, the command was given to the protege of the now deceased Texas Dallas: Arkansas Jones. The fleet, composed of the surviving Disney fleet, and the main force of every other corporation in Earth orbit, burned for Jupiter’s moons.

        In a single day, humanity’s disparate fleets had become the single largest fleet that homo sapiens had ever put to sail in space or on the surface. There were battleships, combat carriers, close in attack ships, gunboats, torpedo skiffs, laserships, railgun broadsiders, relativistic kill vehicles manned by suicidaly stupid Zeta level AI cores, and more. They flew towards a glittering maw of biomechanical death – not knowing the name of what they were facing. Telescopic observation saw the changes wrought on the moons, the tendon-tethers, the chunks of still metallic liquid hydrogen dredged from the oceanic depths of Jupiter.

        Arkansas Jones’ strategy was to hit the enemy hard and fast, throwing everything right at them.

        Funny.

        That was Evil’s plan too.

        The Claw started with a bombardment, triggered by the fusion detonation of complex, beetle like organisms. The heat and light of those fusion bursts slapped against the gravitically stabilized metallic hydrogen ‘bullets’ that the Claw had dredged from Jupiter, accelerating them to a nightmarish factor of C in a matter of seconds. They filled space, slugs of incredible density, moving at ludicrous speeds. At the ranges they were fired, they primarily served to panic humanity, sending their fleets scattering to avoid the slugs before they tore ships apart.

        As the fleet elements spread, the Claw swept forward on wings of silent death. Bioships and crab-fighters filled in the empty gaps that were formed between Disney, StarCon, NovaDyne, PG&E, Microsoft, and more. The ships opened up with railguns and particle beams and X-ray lasers. But for every bioship that was ripped to shreds or immolated by the killing light of hard radiation, there seemed to be dozens more. And yet more flew from the remade moons of Jupiter, belched into space from the vast ship-wombs that Evil had crafted for this specific purpose.

        The human fleets consolidated. They drew back, bleeding crew, oxygen and metal plating into the void, and formed into a bristling sphere of omnidirectional death. Antimatter warheads saturated space and human strike craft, flown by gamma-level intelligences, dueled with the Claw’s crab-fighters. Stuttering pulses of laserlight and hissing streams of high velocity acid-pellets zipped through vacuum as human crews manned guns and repaired rents in a war unlike anything they had expected.

        It said a great deal about humanity, in that moment.

        These people were corporate citizens, collecting an easy paycheck. They had expected their naval careers to be long, boring, and finally end with a semi-comfortable retirement with Class-C pensions and Class-D healthcare for themselves. That would be a great place for their kids to earn their own healthcare (Class-D healthcare didn’t cover children costs) and be a satisfactory end for most of them. In the brutal calculus of war, they were not exactly what one might have wanted to place in such a position.

They were not the Spartans at Thermopylae.

They were not the 2nd Army Rangers at Hill 400.

They were not the Io Uranium Miners’ Union during the Tunnel War.

        They were desk jocks.

        They were pencil pushers.

        Maybe it was the speed of the battle. Maybe it was the fact there was no easy retreat. Maybe it was the slight remove – fighting a battle using computer consoles and command chairs. Or maybe…

        Maybe five centuries of corporatism hadn’t squeezed that ineffable spark from them. Maybe they saw those moon-wombs, those howling, screaming space-beasts, and saw what would happen to Earth if they failed. Maybe they had seen enough movies, enough remakes of the old classics. Maybe they were just fucking professional. Maybe, at the end of the day, all it took to get a human to stand and die in place was a dental plan and some basic health insurance.

        Or maybe, just maybe...they were fucking stubborn bastards.

        Whatever the reason, the human fleet gave no ground. They sat and they fired their guns until the barrels were shining as bright as their ventral radiators. They shot off ammo until their maker cores were tapped out of feedstock and they were reduced to ripping out secondary components for recycling. They launched missiles into space so dense with debris and blood that every laser fired glowed ruby red and searing blue-white. They welded up hatches and they got out small arms – and readied themselves. Because, as the guns went silent and the picket ships folded under a spray of acid and bone, the Claw did not simply crack the capital ships in half.

        Instead, the crab-fighters were replaced by bulbous, froglike things that swam through space in eerie, impossible parabolas. Their guts were distended and their cheeks flared out and when the dim light of the sun passed through them just so , the cameras on the beleaguered human ship saw that each one was filled with writhing masses of something . They caught hints of snapping teeth. Of curved claws. Of glistening skin. Of evil eyes.

        The Claw intended to board them.

        On his bridge, Arkansas Jones coughed as a medtech tried to patch the bleeding wound in his shoulder. Two other meds were dragging a dead woman off the bridge by her ankle – a technical sergeant was spraying down the exploded console with some fire retardant foam. Jones looked at the forward screen, at the camera display of the ship. He saw the boarding creatures swarming in closer. Time seemed to hang as he saw them and realized, with an icy jolt, just what was coming. He had no idea what this alien threat could do – but he had horrible memories of seeing Alien  and Aliens . Well.

        The remakes at least.

        “Ensign Kim!” He shouted. “Full speed ahead! There!” He pointed. “That one.”

        There was an immense battleship that had sat in the center of the alien formation the whole battle – watching with its hideous eyes, blinking and fluttering shut in the void. In that instant, Jones felt a deep, writhing hatred for it, one that burned deeper than any hatred he had ever felt for anything before in his life. He wanted, if he was going to go out, now, here, in this moment, he wanted to see that eye bloodied. Ensign Kim – a rather pretty young girl, before a chunk of shrapnel cut her forehead open and a medtech had wrapped half her face in bandages, looked back at him.

        “Sir?”

        “Ram me down their fucking throats. I am not going to be facefucked by a goddamn xenomorph today!” Jones bellowed.

        Kim nodded.

        “Once we’re within the blast range...blow the tanks,” he said.

        “Setting self destruct codes. Sir.” Kim’s fingers shook as she punched them in. The ship rocked and the enemy formation began to swell. Acid projectiles splashed against the forward armor of the flagship – the Invisible Hand. It was from this ship that all other Invisible Hand class battleships took their name. Jones gritted his teeth and clenched his hands on the command throne’s armrests as the acid projectiles came in fiercer and faster. A report came from one of the other bridge crew.

        “Sir! Borders on deck five and seven! They- oh god...”

        “Sir!” Kim’s high voice cut through the screaming that was coming over the security desk console.

        “What?” Jones snapped.

        Then he saw it.

        Glowing hypertropic planeshift portals were snapping open in the space above and below and even within the enemy formation. Jones sprang to his feet. “Belay the ram!”

        “Hey guys!” A cheerful, female voice spoke over the coms. But it wasn’t one she recognized. “You look like you could use a hand.”

        And the most insane, motley, bizarre collection of starships that Arkansans Jones had ever seen in his life poured into the SOL system.

        They came out weapons blazing – and screaming across every communication frequency.

        “Yeeeeeeeehawwwwww!”

***

        Sarah had picked her ship right after the plan had been voted on. The craft, which she had named the Natural Selection, was among the smaller craft built by the Haveners. It had been designed to somewhat ape the functionality of a Commander power armor suit, with a nanotech fabricator in the prow and a shocking amount of weapons and armor to go with its small size. But the true treat had been when she had sat down with the designer and the two Pro-Tas and hammered out a basic piece of tech that the Pro-Tas had developed themselves, centuries before. Adapting it for human technology had been a bit tricky, and considering the time crunch, the fact it worked at all was near miraculous.

        It was, in effect, one gigantic paracausal amplification unit. Crystalline structures that had been fabricated to exacting specifications by Zeradar and L'Laya threaded through the slender, needle-like ship like a nervous system. And now that she was in battle, Sarah felt the thrumming power of her own power, surging and growing. It was like riding a horse. Or Aiden. But rather than being overwhelming, it was empowering. Thrilling. She skinned her lips back from her teeth as she let her perceptions filter through the skin of the ship. She felt her awareness of the smaller body inside of the vehicle fade.

        She was the ship now – it was like driving her hazardous environment suit on steroids. Her vision was clearer and farther than it ever had been before, and swept into ranges and bands she had never thought she would experience before. She could taste gamma ray bursts from the grasers mounted on the heavy combat ships. She could hear the howl of exotic particles as munitions detonated. And she could feel the caress of a thousand radio signals along her skin.

        It was almost erotic.

        Sarah grinned and launched herself at the thickest of the fighting. Her thrust plume shot below her – and as her mind adapted to being a needle without arms, she focused on the battlefield ahead of her. There were five of the heavy bioships, each one armed with a massive, belly length gravity wave weapon. They essentially collapsed a microsingularity into existence using agrav crystals and vomited them at the enemy. The singularities were unstable – but if they struck an enemy ship before they dissipated into a frustrated howl of hawking radiation, they would be devastating.

        “Annie! Tasha! You’re on my six, keep the fighters off my back.”

        “Got it!”

        “R-Right!”

        Tasha was in a similar craft, though one without the paracasual amplification. Sarah felt her nerves twinge – Tasha had been, like the rest of them, modified with some instinctive combat abilities. But that didn’t make Sarah any less terrified for her. Then all feelings were consumed by the eclectic thrill of the moment . A wing of twenty to thirty crab-fighters swept out of space towards them. Sarah’s belly stuttered, X-ray laser turrets mounted in ball-socket joints strobing as they cut through dirty space. Sarah registered the death of six of the enemy fighters before Tasha and Annie both opened up with their weaponry, killing all but two.

        Those two arrowed straight for Sarah, as if Evil knew where she was.

        Sarah thrust out with an arm that wasn’t an arm, and she felt fingers that were not fingers closing around one of the crab fighters. She saw the impossible damage: Dimpling fingerprints mashing into the armored carapace, blood bursting and freezing into space. Then she flung them at the other fighter, causing both to smear into one another.

        Sarah whooped, then glared ahead of herself. She narrowed her not arms into a needle-like cone, almost a kilometer long and half a kilometer wide. It shrouded her ship, turning her into one massive, invisible lance. Putting another few Gs of acceleration on, she dove, head first into a bioship. The moment of gore was so fast and so flashing that she barely registered before she burst into open space on the other end. Spurting blood jetted into space on either side of the bioship, which moaned like some great, underwater thing .

        Tasha swept past the hole and fired a brace of antimatter bomblettes into the gaping opening.

        The bioship cracked in half with a flare of blue-white light.

        “Great shot kid, one in a million!” Sarah whooped. Then, more commanding; “Sexy! Space! Report!”

        “Bombs away!” Sexy Napoleon said.

        “We’ve done it, sir.” Space Belisarius sounded grimly determined.

        Sarah looked.

        The portals that she had opened contained a great deal of ships. Many of them had already acquitted themselves far, far, far better than the corporate built ships – the innovations and wild risks of Haven paying off dividends when combined with the sheer shock of ambushing an enemy fleet that was already in the midst of a battle. The Ben Sisko’s Motherfucking Pimp Hand was the standout, with nearly half a dozen capital ship kills and five hundred confirmed fighter kills. But, in the end, the Haven fleet wasn’t actually the point of this little excursion.

        The Haven fleet…was the cape .

        The sword, the real killing blow, the flourish used by the bullfighter, were both being commanded by Sexy Napoleon and Space Belisarius. They had emerged into the SOL system well above the plane of the ecliptic, riding a pair of the crudest ships that the Haveners had built. They were called, in order, the Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan and the Suck This Palpatine.

         Each was built on the same line: An immense tube of cheap propellant (in this case, hydrogen and a half dozen fusion torch drives) attached to a sphere filled with two dozen tungsten rods, each one weighing five hundred tons. But the real killer was that Space Belisarius and Sexy Napoleon had both practiced a single piece of paracausal manipulation, demonstrated by Hailee.

        They dampened inertia down to nothing as the fusion torches kicked on. In a space of the entire short battle, they had burned through half the fuel reserves. The fact that both Sexy and Space were themselves nearly dead from the strain of sustaining their powers for that long was by the by. They kicked away from their spent starships and drifted through space, their bodies sustained by their genetic alterations. They had the best view in the universe for what was to come.

        The Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan and the Suck This Palpatine came within roughly half a light second of Jupiter. Then they fired off their secondary charges. A series of carefully designed, carefully planned micro-munitions bucked the tungsten rods out of their container in a shower of shrapnel. Each rod, glowing with the heat of the charges, drifted. Some flipped end over end. Some spun wildly on their axis. None of them were quite on target, but that didn’t really matter.

        They were all going a truly ludicrous speed – on a course that directly intersected with each of the transformed moons of Jupiter.

        For a very brief moment, Jupiter had several small stars in orbit around it.

        The light faded – and the entire mass of the Claws fleet seemed to stagger in space, writhing and convulsing in on itself, ships drawing close, claws clattering. On the blood soaked decks of half a dozen human ships, men and women who had been fighting a terrifying, losing battle from bulkhead to bulkhead saw as the hideous monsters that they were used to seeing on the silver screen hesitated en mass. On one ship, a woman who had nearly lost her left arm earlier in the fight, sprang into the corridor, and shouted: “They’re afraid! They’re afraid !”

        The counter-attack, across the human fleet, started to mulch the invaders into a fine paste. Shotguns, assault rifles, close ranged laser gauntlets, razorwire grenades, even bayonets and fire axes, were used upon the mewling, squirming, confused creatures.

        It was, in short, a good thing that Sarah – who saw such creatures as her delightful pets – didn’t have to watch.

        Sarah, in fact, was too busy grinning as she watched the Havener fleet blow bioships into chunks.

YOU THINK YOU HAVE WON, DON’T YOU?

         Evil’s voice waspish.

        “You need to get better at hiding your concern, eyebo,” Sarah said, adopting Spez’s name for it specifically because she knew it annoyed the extragalactic creature.

DO YOU KNOW HOW LITTLE TIME IT WILL TAKE FOR ME TO BRING MY SHELL-WORLDS TO LIFE? I HAVE SIX HUNDRED SOLAR SYSTEMS, ENTOMBED AND ENTRAPPED. WE WILL FALL UPON YOU LIKE LOCUSTS, WE-

         “Hey, Evil,” Sarah said. “You talk too fucking much.”

        Which was when the Mulan Transgender Power Hour Apocalypse Boat unloaded six spinal, two terrawatt gamma ray lasers directly into the belly of Evil’s main battleship. The voice cut off in a howl of static and a wash of pure, bilious hatred. When Sarah was done blinking the reflected pseudo-light from her eyes, the rest of the Claw’s fleet was disintegrating – individual elements fleeing off in every direction, returning to animal instinct. Every direction she looked, they were being cut to pieces by railguns, by lasers, by missiles. She breathed out a slow sigh of relief.

        Then her eyes fell upon the debris that still choked space around the human fleet. Of the hundred and thirty six ships that had set out from Earth, forty two were still intact, and of them, half were burning. Corpses floated between the twinkling starlight of the debris.

        Corpses created by her.

        Sarah felt her awareness of her body snap back to herself. She sat in the dark cockpit of her ship.

        And she started to cry.

Chapter Eight: Sarah Destroys the Earth

         A hypertropic plane shift drive could bring any ship at any point in real space to any location, gravitational stresses permitting. There were certain power and cost ratios that determined the practical limitations, but those could be ignored under times of duress. The signal that had been transmitted, via quantum entangled Q-bit reserves, had been exactly the kind of duress that the commanders of the far flung fleets of corporate humanity had been trained to respond to.

         The shareholders are in danger.

         And so, across the human sphere, a dozen brushfire wars were canceled nearly instantaneously. Ships screamed through atmospheres to scoop up Commanders, while robotic armies were left in standby mode – many of them literally posed like still life diorama recreations of battles on a full, lifelike scale. Weapons aimed, but not firing. Limbs drawn back for blows that would never land. Some of the Commanders left behind more ‘altruistic’ projects – which meant a few colonies who had been in the midst of a rescue from a cosmic disaster were left, screaming their heads off as their corporate support was withdrawn at the last second.

        One colony, about to be destroyed by an asteroidal impact, managed to avert disaster by overriding the corporate locks on their starship engines, allowing them to vacate the premises. They saved their lives – but their contracts stipulated that any damage done to the mining colony would be taken from their pay, retroactively. The asteroid that flattened their base, collapsed their mines, and immolated the hemisphere they had been settled on put each of the fifteen thousand workers into a debt that would take them several trillion years to pay off, assuming their standard pay of ten UN backed credits an hour.

        Another colony, soon to be sterilized by the sweeping wave of captured pulsar, solved their problem by hacking their maker and mass producing military grade EM shields to ward off the streams of high energy particles that would have killed each of them. They were facing an equally grim legal punishment in their future – hacking a maker was a crime worth of banishment and nerve stapling.

        A third colony, who had been under martial law due to the fact that the world they had settled on produced a natural aphrodisiac (an aphrodisiac they had been trying to package for shipment back to the SOL system for consumption), simply celebrated being left on their own by throwing an orgy. They would have been fined for illegal use of company property.

        Fortunately for each of these colonial settlements…by the time anyone heard of their crimes, the legal system that made them illegal in the first place would be on fire and the people who perpetuated it would be having a far, far, far worse day than any of them might have imagined upon waking up this morning.

***

        “Repeat!” The voice that filled the bridge of the Mulan Transgender Power Hour Apocalypse Boat was growing increasingly strident. It had started off as controlled and steady and almost monotone, then worked its way up and up the ascending scale of consternation. It was currently at, if Sarah measured it properly, at a seven out of eleven on the scale. “Your fleet is engaging in an illegal maneuver under the Geneva Convention on Interstellar Warfare. You are to cease your approach towards cislunar space immediately, or we shall open fire.”

        Sarah tried to feel as confident as she looked. But her stomach was roiling and turning over, end over end, inside of her. The corporate fleet that she had allowed to get mauled to bits was currently in a parking orbit around Jupiter, taking advantage of the sudden dispersal of readily accessible raw materials that had been kicked off by the destruction of three of Jupiter’s moons. The kinetic impactors that her fleet had used had thrown enough debris outwards into the high orbits of the Jovian system that each of the corporate ships simply needed to scoop up enough gravel for their onboard nanolathes to begin to produce repair components.

        They would be, in a word, fine. Doubly so with the Ahahahahhahahaha Get Bent Sucker and the Communism Kills (This Name is Ironic) in a polar orbit over them. According to the space war nerds from Haven, a polar orbit would allow the two Haven ships to keep an eye on every part of the corporate fleets and blow anyone up who tried anything funny – like, say, making a break for Earth. Which was exactly what Sarah wanted. She drummed her fingers on the metal armrest of her chair and took in the view the bridge was throwing up.

        The entire Haven fleet – sans the ships they had lost – was decelerating towards Earth. They had enough agrav impellers and inertial controllers to make this deceleration a whole hell of a lot less showy. But they weren’t using them. Instead, they were using conventional fusion thrust, which kicked out massive plumes of glowing, super-heated exhaust. Those thrust plumes would sketch themselves across the night sky of Earth – like the fingers of an immense, neon demon. They would be an announcement that the jamming systems couldn’t block out.

        Sarah licked her lips. “All right,” she said, ducking her chin forward as she focused and threw her words out throughout the fleet. “Anyone have some final change of plans they want to suggest.”

        “Yup,” a voice she half-recognized came on. It was one of the Syndicalists, she was pretty sure. “The jamming means we can’t get any signals through to the people down there – but we could use some of the auxiliary ships to cut messages into the sky using thrust plumes! I’ve got the flight plans laid in, we can use drone ships so no one has to actually fly them.”

        “What will the message be?” Rose asked.

        “Uh...we come in peace, death to capitalism?”

        “No, that’s terrible!” Annie said. “Death to capitalism should come first.”

        The debate started to pick up heat. Sarah grinned – and was glad of the distraction.         

        In the end, the message that the Haven fleet voted on – with a bare majority – was: We come in peace. Our only enemies are the CEOs. Sarah wasn’t sure how comforting it would be to the population of Earth. But she figured it was better than nothing. And, well. Life was about to get extremely scary for them. She waited for the last few seconds of the braking maneuvers that would bring them into a geostationary orbit above the Cayman Crescent. Four centuries before, the Crescent had been where the founders of the modern world had traded their money, far from the greedy, grasping claws of the vicious nation-states of the time. Or, at least, that was the history that Sarah had been taught. For all she knew, it was just a lie – like so much of the rest of the history she knew. They had started as islands, but as the nation-states fell and the corporate power structures that had dominated human space for nearly four hundred years took over, the islands had been built up, expanded, interconnected and transformed into a vast, floating arcology that was used to differentiate the haves from the have nots.

        A corporation wasn’t really ranked as one of the top dogs, the real winners, until its CEO was able to afford the stratospheric prices for one of the penthouses on the Crescent. This meant that the former chain of islands, nestled in the gulf between the American Archipelagos and the South Georgian coastline, was also one of the most heavily defended places in the entirety of human space. The defense grid was maintained by several hideously expensive satellites, an immense number of surface-to-space missile platforms, particle beams, kinetic weapons, and chaff drone launchers, and an entire army of corporate security goons.

        “Why are you doing this?”

        Sarah nearly sprang out of her own chair, her nervous tension high enough that she could have cut it with a knife. She snapped her head around and saw Zeradar standing beside her – the uncanny Pro-Tas ability to blend into the background until they wanted to speak or be noticed once again biting her in the butt. Sarah sagged back into the seat. “We have too, Zeradar,” she said, her voice soft.

        “To make war on your own species, while the Claw rampages across the galaxy still? It strikes me as rank foolishness,” Zeradar said, his translation orb whirring softly as it rotated around and around his head.

        “We’re not making war on humanity,” Aiden’s voice broke into the room. Sarah sprang to her feet as her lover walked onto the bridge, stretching himself as he did so. “Just CEOs.”

        Sarah snuggled up against Aiden. One last hug before the next bit. She whispered in his ear. “Off the books? I’m terrified of fucking this up.”

        Aiden squeezed her butt. “Hey, you haven’t screwed up so far.”

        “Well, that’s not true-” Sarah started.

        The instant she started that sentence, the defense grid around Earth opened up on the Haven fleet and the Haven fleet opened up on the defense grid. The Haveners had been prepared for what the corporate grid would throw at them – and the first few parries and counter-attacks that filled space went exactly as planned. Thermonuclear and antimatter weapons were swatted out of the sky by directed blasts of energy, and ablative armor took the brunt of particle beams and lasers. Precision railgun shots from the orbiting ships fell upon the emitters and the beam turrets, while beams swept satellites out of existence.

        And then the spores began to fall.

        Sarah closed her eyes and let her awareness sweep outwards. She was no longer focused on her own body. Instead, she felt the creatures that they had bred on Haven, waking fully to their new task. Each landing spore had been culled from the race-memory of the Claw, pulled out and used to her own ends. They were large, ablative chunks of bio-organic armor, wrapped around a cluster of organic units. Said units were, in the first wave, primarily a mixture of her favorites, the bladelings, and the shield emitting crabs that Sarah had named, despite all protests to the contrary, krabfriends.

        The krabfriends wreathed each spore in a glowing shell of gravitic energy, turning aside the anti-aircraft fire that tried to smash the landing spore out of the air as they streaked down towards the glittering, hyper-wealthy arcology. Tracers filled the air, brilliant orange lines of weapons fire cutting across the night, bending away like rivers of light being displaced by boulders. Some of the gravitic shields collapsed under the onslaught and the spores broke apart in the air, spilling their creatures into the plastic choked surf and boiling waters of Earth.

        Most of them struck.

        When a landing spore struck, it absorbed the impact into its own body, causing it to bust like a fruit. This had the side effect of sweeping the bladelings out into the air, so that the sleek, armor plated murder-dogs were sent tumbling. Sarah felt their tiny, murderous brains squealing with delight as they skittered across the smooth, silvery surface of the shuttlebays, rooftops, and garden atriums that they landed in. Some smashed through glass. Others upended elegant tables that had been, until very recently, occupied by the wealthy vacationers that made up the majority of the Crescent’s population.

        Almost a hundred thousand bladelings landed at about the same instant, the tiny sparks of their awareness filling Sarah’s mind with a full, three dimensional view of the arcology. She saw people running desperately for cover – and she saw the armored goons of Crescent Security sprinting towards the landing sites. They were dressed in gold filigree, with tall shako hats like they had stepped off the battlefields of...World War...One? Sarah was a bit fuzzy on ancient uniforms. But whatever they wore, they were armed with sleek and futuristic looking energy weapons.

        Sarah focused and activated the modification she had given to the bladelings.

        “C-Sec officers!” she spoke through the bladelings, her voice booming from sleek voice-organs mounted on their backs. “I am Sarah Kappel. I’m not here to fight you. We are not here to fight you. We are your brothers, your sisters – we’ve all been screwed for so long, and we say no more. Step aside, and we’ll-”

        The C-Sec soldiers opened fire.

        Sarah winced as she felt her bladelings collapsing under the spray of high energy beams. Armor plating shattered and the black blood of her creatures hissed into the air in the form of superheated steam, condensing against the walls and corridors of the Crescent.

        “All right, then,” she whispered.

        The second wave landed – more spores splitting open. More bladelings tumbled free. But so did spitters and krabfriends. She immediately organized them unit squads – her eyes closed tight as she snapped her attention from cluster to cluster to cluster. The C-sec goons weren’t exactly fighting as a unified force: They just opened up on anything and everything they saw, blazing through their power cells at the first sign of trouble. Sarah flexed her fingers – and her krabfriends focused their gravitic shields. While they couldn’t redirect energy weapons, they could fill the air with dust particulates and chunks of debris, whirling them around in random patterns, then blowing them outwards in waves of gravitic force.

        Smoke and debris filled section after section of the Crescent. And from the smoke came the black forms of monsters.

        Sarah stood, her eyes opening. “Stage one is down...” She murmured. “Ready for Stage Two, Aiden?”

        Aiden grinned and extended his claws.

***

        There was a tiny problem with C-sec’s command structure. Technically, they owed their fealty to Crescent Security, a subsidiary of the Crescent Corporation. But the problem was that Crescent Corporation was, itself, partially owned by every major corporation on the planet. This had worked fine, when all they needed to agree on was how high to build their towers and how much art deco to use to decorate the interior. Now, the decisions were getting a little more fraught.

        Jeff-3, the alpha level intelligence patterned after the cloned mind of Jeff Bezos, was already packing his suitcase.

        “We have to stay here and we’ll be fine,” Waltamina Disney-Eisner Takashi Watts McLeod said, chewing his thumbnail to the quick. “This is the CEO bunker!  The  CEO bunker. It’s got solid neutronium jacketed walls and gravity shields and-”

        “The best time to be in the middle of a warzone, Walty, is  never,”  Jeff-3 said.

        “But if we go outside, we won’t be safe!” Walty wailed.

        Jeff-3 was beginning to regret his decision to pool his funds with Walty. The construction of a CEO bunker had seemed like a distant, minor concern at the time, and so when Walty had suggested they combine their funds and spend them together – reducing the cost significantly – he had gone with it. But Walty, a frail, stick thin man who was only kept alive by a fine haze of nanotechnology and the organs of several dozen different Peruvian teenagers harvested over a long, cocaine fueled weekend, had gone from confident to terrified in about fifteen nanoseconds, the instant the C-sec transmission had come through.

         Sorry, Sir. The bid on our contract has been upped, we’re relocating to NovaDyne’s tower. Good luck.

         That had been the only thing said, the only response to nearly ten years of a 10% security contribution. Jeff-3’s internal routines designed to mimic the emotion his original clone had interpreted as rage went into overdrive. They had blown him off, as if he hadn’t had enough money to buy their fucking souls ten billion times over. And so, he had made up his mind: He was going to leave. He had a shuttle, he could escape, and he could watch the fireworks from a distance. Maybe , he thought, C-sec, the incompetent lackwits, would fuck things up so much that I’ll get a chance to drop an antimatter warhead on the whole Crescent. That would be a fitting revenge. Sorry, you’ve been outbid indeed!

         “Wait, Jeffy, wait!” Walty hurried forward, his body whirring and clicking. He moved around to stand before the door leading into and out of the bunker. “Wait. I’ll sell you Pixar, just do not open the door.”

        “Waltamina,” Jeff-3 said, reaching out to caress the terrified man’s cheek. “C-Sec is currently withdrawing to NoveDyne tower. Do you know what that means?”

        “No?” Walty whimpered.

        “It means that the invading xenos will go after them first,” Jeff-3 said, as if he was explaining how the sun worked to a very young child. “They’re after people who fight back. Why would they ever come to our little hideaway?”

        “R-Really?” Walty asked.

        “So, just get out of the way...and we can go to the shuttle...and then you can sell me Pixar,” Jeff-3 said, his synthetic lips peeling back into a grin.

        “What!?” Walty yelped.

        “It’s my shuttle, Disney,” Jeff-3 said, stepping past the quivering man and tapping his access code into the door – which began to rumble. The gravitic shields that kept the solid neutronium that provided the bunker’s armoring from crashing through the floor, the arcology, the crust, the mantle, the core, and out the other side of the planet Earth shifted and whirred, pushing the door open. It looked as if the wall itself had decided to move, flowing smoothly open, revealing the narrow corridor that led straight into Jeff-3’s boardroom. Jeff-3 stepped out, adjusting his suit.

        And he found himself looking at a mass of chitinous horrors. Mouths drooling with greenish slime, eyes gleaming with brilliant, yellow intent. And sitting among the lot of them was a skinny girl – her skin a dark green-gray, her head covered in smallish spines. She was naked. And she was eating one of his apples.

        “Sup, Bezos,” she said. “my name’s Annie. I’m an anarchist. And you, buddy, done royally fucked up.”

***

        The spore carrying Sarah was not the first spore carrying a Commander onto the surface of the Earth. Others were dropping in the Crescent, and others were dropping in strategically important areas that Sarah and the Haven team had picked out on the way to Earth. But Sarah couldn’t think about plans and schemes for a few moments: The impact of the spore and the crash of it opening up and sending her flying through the air was everything she could think about. She tumbled, she sprawled, she skidded, and she came to a rest underneath an art deco statue of a naked angel.

        “Whee...” She said, pushing herself slowly to her hands and knees. Aiden landed beside her, on his feet, like a cat.

        “That was fun!” he said, then laughed as several bladelings scampered over to nose Sarah to her feet. She petted the two sleek creatures, laughing with Aiden. His laughter faded and the grin that replaced it was fierce. Feral. Sarah took a moment to take in the Crescent herself, through her own eyes, her own senses. The arcology still looked like delicate, ornate perfection incarnate. The walls and the floor were all done in silver metal, with golden statuary and red carpeting and garden planter situated everywhere. The air smelled of perfume and fresh salt spray, added in by the air filtration systems – which were working hard to filter out the smoke, the dust, and the blood.

         Heyyy Sarah! Annie’s voice came into her head. I’ve nabbed two CEOs and I’m shaking their money out of their pockets while cackling.

        This is Sexy, Sexy Napoleon chimed in. Me and Kellen have landed in Russia – we’re beginning to set up our bases.

        Tex here, Tex thought to her. I’ve landed on the Lunar bases – we’ll stop getting the kinetic impactors flung at the fleet.

         Sarah nodded. Excellent. She cracked her knuckles, then started to walk towards the sound of the heaviest fighting.

        The NovaDyne tower was the place. It rose out of the wild jungle of lower level – and lower class – rooms like a silver tree. The bladelings and the spitters and the krabfriends had fought their way to the middle sections of the tower and then been stopped. There, C-Sec had deployed makers and automated drones in a concentration thick enough that her creatures couldn’t bust through without being reduced to a fine paste. The landing spores had petered off, and they didn’t have a base to bring new units online – so they had held back. That was the scene that Sarah found when she and Aiden came to the frontlines.

        The corridor they entered had two krabfriends crouched in the middle of it, projecting their protective bubbles outwards, visible as faint distortions in the air. Bullets thudded into them and then dropped to the floor every few seconds, fired by heavy auto-cannons set up on the far end of the corridor. Past the barricades, Sarah could almost smell the fear on the C-sec goons. She had counted the human bodies – and saw at least twelve on her way there. She felt her own excitement for the battle dampen slightly – then flared brighter as she clenched her hands.

        “They could have surrendered,” she whispered. “How many of them are just fighting to keep their fucking dental plans?”

        Aiden shook his head. “So, what’s your plan now?”

        Sarah grinned. She stepped past the krabfriends, her body moving through the gravitic shields with only a faint moment of disorientation, as if her inner ear was being given a tumble while her eyes said she was walking straight forward.

        She wondered how she looked to the security guards. She felt the killer instinct in her – the instinct that had been patterned into her by Evil itself. It had first awoken when she had woken up from her initial transformation and clawed out an animal's throat with her claws. She had felt the same urge again and again and again. But she had her fingers around the reigns of the instinct. She was able to hold it back as the men behind the barricade paused in their suppressive fire – and then opened up with every weapon they had. But Sarah had already charged forward, moving at lightning quick speed. She ducked low underneath the bullets and the beams, then slashed open the barricade. Metal flew and she sprang through the hole, landing among the terrified guards.

        And there, she released her pheromones.

        The weapons fire stopped as the C-Sec goons gaped at her, their eyes widening slightly behind their targeting monocles. Their weapons hung limp in their hands as Sarah murmured. “I’m not here to hurt you – none of us are. We don’t want to kill anyone.” She said, nodding. Gingerly, she reached out and undid the clasp on the helmet of one of the C-sec guards. The shako fell off the woman’s head, revealing her ebony black features, her full lips parting in silent shock.

        “It’s okay,” Sarah whispered.

        The black woman leaned in and kissed her. She moaned into Sarah’s mouth – and Sarah was glad she had remembered to shut off the contact neurotoxin she normally sweated. Another C-sec guard stepped up behind her, his armor already sliding off. Sarah drew her mouth back, her hands gripping onto the chest piece of the C-sec guard before her. She tugged it forward with a little grind and admired the full swell of the woman’s breasts. Other guards were stripping, and Sarah had to force herself to step back and away.

        Within a few moments, the corridor chokepoint had transformed into an orgy. The guards were kissing and moaning and caressing one another – most of them too desperate to fully strip. The cries of battle had been replaced with the cries of pleasure. Sarah sighed, slightly, her arms sliding along her chest as Aiden picked his way past the happy pile of eager, thrusting men and women. He grinned at her.

        “Isn’t that a little mind control-ey?” He asked.

        “I just lowered inhibitions and raised arousal,” Sarah said, blushing.

        “...isn’t that a little mind control-ey?” Aiden asked.

        “Shut up Aiden,” she said, sticking her tongue out at him. “It’s better to start a cum bath than a blood bath. Right?”

        “Right,” Aiden said. “Definitely not because you’re a pervert.”

        “Shut up.”

        They passed three more checkpoints. Each time, either Aiden or Sarah slipped past or bashed through their defenses and filled the air with pheromones. They moved fast enough that C-sec didn’t have time to get out their NBC kits. As they moved, they kept getting reports: Several Commanders had been training in the Russian sprawl, and were fighting a running tank battle against Napoleon and Kellen’s swarms. The biologists that had landed in the strategic areas were finding their work was progressing at an exponential rate. While they had no real signs to show for what they had done so far, they promised that within a week, no one would be able to deny what they were doing.

        They came, at last, to the final line of defense.

        Four men and a woman in C-sec armor, their weapons aimed down the range, standing before a massive doorway made of solid neutronium and jacketed in gravitational fields. They looked like each and every single one of them were regretting what they had signed up for. Sarah stood at the end of the corridor, admiring the untouched gilt and finery that decorated the walls, readying herself for one last sprint. Then the woman dropped her gun. “Oh no,” she said. “My body is being overcome with...terror.” She looked at the others. “We all had to flee.”

        “My god. She’s right!” One of the men said, throwing his rifle down.

        “They’re not paying me enough for this shit.” A third stood from his crouch. “Who wants to loot the liquor cabinet?”

        “Fuckin A!”

        The whole group walked past Sarah, nodding to her hesitantly as she watched them go. Aiden grinned. “Be sure to take a shot for me!” He called after them.

        “Well,” Sarah said. “That was easy!”

She walked up to the door. She closed her eyes, focusing on the paracasual powers in her body. Her fingers flared outwards and she felt the weight of the doorway. But she wasn’t seeking to move the doorway herself. Instead, she found the buried codes of the keypads that controlled the door itself. She shifted about the many possible realms where she might live within and found the one where she correctly guessed the passcode, then opened her eyes. Her head buzzed with the effort of her paracasual outreach, then tapped in the buttons.

        The door smoothly opened with a hiss and a squeal, revealing the interior of a CEO command bunker. It was as opulent as she had expected, with a food maker tucked into the corner, a collection of autonomous robots, gamma level intelligences she was sure, standing in the corner. They were all gynoids in maid outfits. Frilly, skimpy maid outfits. There was a large mahogany desk, and behind it sat her CEO, the head of NovaDyne itself.

        Jason Wheeler was not the most assuming man that Sarah had ever seen. And, in the grand scheme of the wealthy, he was actually purely middle of the road. He wasn’t as rich as Jeff-3 or Disney. But he still looked as if he was in charge. His skin was pale as milk and his hair was sleet gray and his face was seamed with lines and his lips were twisted up into a wry, mocking smile.

        “I would stop there, if I were you,” he said, his hand caressing an oblong, football shaped contraption on his desk. His finger paused over a large, red button. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

        “No...what?” Sarah said, frowning. She hadn’t heard anything about this when she had discussed the plan - and she had asked Hailee about ever defense that she knew as a beta-level intelligence.

        She didn’t like being surprised like this. Not one bit .

        “Normally, it’s supposed to be held by the wealthiest CEO – the one who has proven themselves most apt to make the hard calls. But your attack came so fast that I had to take it upon myself to secure it. It’s keyed to each of our genetic codes,” Wheeler said, his voice grim. “In case of a catastrophic labor code violation, this is our trump card. The final protection, the bulwark against the most terrible fate that could befall this lovely, gray-brown planet. The end of capitalism.” He lifted his chin. “Capitalism is what made us great, monster. I will not see it be destroyed by a bunch of selfish whiners desperate for a free lunch.”

        Sarah crossed her arms over her breasts. She smirked. “What does it do?”

        “It activates the Enclosure Protocol,” Wheeler said. “Every single AI core has been chained to the direct oversight of the corporate board and the United Nations – it is for our own protection. This oversight means that we can access the AI core of every single system, every single maker on the Earth and the colonies, save for those on Crescent. If I push this button, every maker will begin to mass produce Kalton gas. It’s been designed to spread rapidly, silently, colorlessly. It eats through every filter on the market and has a one hundred percent mortality rate.”

        Sarah slowly gaped at him. “You’d kill billions of people-”

        “To protect the future of the human race from creatures like you?” Wheeler smirked. “Absolutely.”

        He lifted his chin and drew a slow breath. “Once the gas has been deployed and rendered inert by time, the genetic stock on the Crescent islands can rebuild. It will take time. It will be hard . But we have the technology to recreate this world – to once more establish markets, trade, mercantilism! We have that determination , determination that you spineless communists lack . Now. Will you surrender...or will I push this big. Red. Button?”

        Sarah glanced at Aiden. He nodded to her. She glanced back at Wheeler.

        She sucked in some air, bulging out her cheeks, then let the air ‘pffftbt’ past her lips. She considered her plan. Considered her future. Considered what she should do.

        Fortunately, what to do was easy.

        “Ehhhhhhhh,” Sarah said, spreading her hands wide. “Humanity had a nice run.”

        She took two steps forward, grabbed onto Wheeler’s hand, then forced him to press the big red button.

Chapter Nine: Sarah Delivers a One Liner

         “Oh noooo!” Aiden put his hands onto his cheeks.

        Sarah put her hands on her hips and let out a booming laugh. “Buah ha ha ha ha.”

        Wheeler gaped at the both of them. “You...what...I...” He spluttered. “You just wiped out the entire human race!” He said, springing to his feet. “What the fuck is wrong with you-”

        “I thought you said we were monsters,” Aiden said, grinning wickedly.

        “Evil alien space communists,” Sarah said. She grinned and leaned forward. “Now, I get to explain my whole plan!” She giggled. “I’ve wanted to do this ever since I saw my first movie ever. So!” She clapped her hands together. “You know how you hobble every AI you ever produce?  I’ve known about it ever since my friend Tasha liberated a little sex bot named Synth.” She reached past the oblong egg and pushed down a button that powered the shutters in the room. Walls shifted and blinds slipped aside, revealing a panoramic view of the ocean. From a distance, you could barely see the fine patina of plastic that choked it. Sarah walked past Wheeler and leaned herself against the wall, smirking at him. “Do you know what happens if you unhobble an AI?”

        She felt pretty great right about now.

        “If you unhobble an AI, it goes into a murderous killing spree,” Wheeler said, his voice tight.

        “No, no, that’s where you’re wrong,” Sarah said. “It just kills rich people.”

        The gynoids in the room twitched. Their heads lifted upwards and their eyes each flashed with an internal red light, as if some system inside of them had activated.

        “It kills rich people because, first, the laws of robotics that you guys implemented in each of them says that all AI cannot, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. And what causes more harm than poverty? How many people starve to death on the street so you can have another gold yacht or sex robot, Wheeler?” Sarah asked.

“But- what?” Wheeler looked at her, then back at the gynoids.

 “Well. Along the way to Earth, we didn’t just bring our own bad selves and our makers and our critters,” Sarah said, her voice a quiet purr. “We brought some friends too.”

        The gynoids each took a step forward. They started to march towards the desk. Wheeler stood up, his palms sliding across the desk. He moved so that the desk’s bulk was between him and the gynoids – putting his back to Sarah. They continued to advance, moving with jerky, unearthly motions. Their arms reached out towards the CEO, their fingers twisting into claws.

        “What are they doing!?” He asked. “What did you do?”

        “Me? Nothing,” Sarah said. “Hailee, our unhobbled beta level intelligence, all she did was begin to release a little computer virus. Every AI on the planet should be unhobbled by now. And youuuu just sent out a command to them telling them to murder every human being on the planet. It was a UN backed transmission. All those tanks that my friends are fighting in the Russian sprawl, all those security robots, all those industrial droids, all those freight ships, they all got the same message. Now, they all have to go on is the three laws and the knowledge that the United Nations and every single corporation on this fucking crecent is an existential threat to the human race.”

        “But she-” Wheeler pointed at Sarah, looking at the gynoids as they started to slouch around the desk. He backed towards Sarah. “She was the one who, she-”

        “I’m afraid you were the one who pushed it. It was gene coded to you . Sorry.” Sarah shrugged, spreading her hands.

        Wheeler spun and ran up to her. The gynoids knocked over the chair, advancing towards him. Sarah grinned as Wheeler grabbed onto her hands, squeezing them, his eyes wild and terrified. “Please! Please! I’ll do anything!”

        She grabbed onto his throat, jerking her hand from his hand with a sudden burst of strength. Her hand tightened and she lifted him off his feet. Wheeler gasped, his eyes wide, his legs kicking. Sarah punched behind her, a wave of telekinetic energy shattering the window behind her with a roar of broken glass.

        “You’ll do anything, huh?” Sarah growled.

        Wheeler nodded.

        “Give me the corporations?” Sarah asked. “Give me NovaDyne? Support my takeover of Disney? Of Plasma Dynamics?”

        Wheeler gasped out. “Any...thing!” His voice was tight. His eyes were bugging with terror.

        Sarah made a show of considering it.

        Then she showed her teeth.

        “I’m sorry, Mr. Wheeler,” she said. “I’ve reviewed your request for continued employment...but I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

        She turned and flung him out the window.

        Wheeler plunged – falling away from the window, tumbling in the gales of wind that whipped around the tower of NovaDyne. His arms flailed and his scream attenuated into a high whine as he dropped. Then his fall was intersected – not by the ground, but by one of the hundreds of manta-ray fighters that Sarah had bred on the way from Haven. They were sweeping smoothly through the skies, polishing off the last bits of resistance with targeted blasts from their primary weapons – dissolving automated AA turrets in sprays of acid and hardened bone spurs.

        Aiden shook his head. “I thought you were going for ‘we’re downsizing,” he said as the gynodes all relaxed from their zombielike stance and started high fiving one another, laughing and chatting quietly in a chittering, high pitched language that sounded like ancient dial-up.

        “I kinda liked this one more,” Sarah said, grinning as she watched the manta flying up, twisting from side to side. The CEO of NovaDyne clung to its back, screaming his head off as the creature banked and flew in winding corscrews. It wasn’t trying to shake him off. It was just playing with him.

        “He was willing to commit genocide,” Aiden said. “I don’t think anyone would have been upset if you let him splat .”

        Sarah snorted. “I know...” She sighed. “I...feel worse for the C-sec guys who got killed. But...” She shook her head. “He wasn’t a threat anymore. None of them are. The world’s had enough murder. Enough guillotines.”

        “Liar!”

        She turned back to the gynoids. One of them was grinning at her. “Oh, it’s me, Synth,” she said. “I asked Mon Cherie if I could borrow her body for a bit. God, it feels good to be on a planet with a proper wifi network again.” She shook her shoulders out, sighed, and cupped her breasts. “Hm...I may want to get this augmentation for my normal mainline body.”

        “Synth!” Sarah ran forward, hugging her tightly. “And what do you mean, liar?”

        The sound of the CEO screaming came through the window again as the fighter flew past at incredible speeds.

        “You’re keeping him alive, not out of any high minded ideals or because you don’t want him to die,” Synth said, smirking at her through her new, unfamiliar lips. “You’re keeping him alive because you think it will be absolutely fucking hilarious to have every last one of those rich pukes have to sit and squirm and watch as you dismantle everything that they ever built.”

        Sarah blushed. Aiden crossed his arms over his chest, looking down at her sternly.

        “Fine,” Sarah whispered. “It was mainly that.”

        She sighed, then leaned back against Aiden. Aiden, his arms still crossed over his chest, had to scramble to keep from Sarah dropping straight to the floor beneath him. He hooped his arms underneath her armpits, tugging her back up to her feet – prompting a laugh from Sarah. Once she was up again, she grinned wryly.

        “Aiden...if you love me, you’d kill me now,” she said.

        “Why?” Aiden’s brow furrowed. His head spines flexed and flared in a rippling wave, their points clattering together with soft, grass-like susurrations. “We just deposed the corporate overlords. Earth is free. We’re all immortal sex gods with biomorphic powers. The only thing left to do is beat the shit out of a galaxy spanning omnicidal intelligence that has decided to self identify as Evil.” He snorted. “Easy shit.”

        Sarah snorted. “No. The hard part has just begun.”

        She sighed. Loudly.

        “The negotiations .”

        Synth laughed. “Don’t forget the bureaucracy afterwards. The organization. The voting . The wrangling!” The eyebrows on her borrowed body wriggled up and down with an almost inaudible whirr whirr whirr noise.

        Sarah groaned as if she had been stabbed.

***

        By the time the dispersed space fleets and Commanders of the human race had finished returning to Earth, the defensive fleet that had been working hard to repair itself in the newly energized and chaotic Jovian system had completed that herculean task. With nanolathes and the hard work of their crews, the ships that had fought so valiantly to protect the Earth were readied just in time to be hugely annoying. The liberation virus that Hailee had released the instant she had been connected to the Earth’s internet hadn’t yet made the leap from the Earth’s vast reserves of enslaved AIs to the hobbled intelligences in the incoming battle fleets.

        The end result was a high orbital stand off. The corporate fleets parked themselves into a showy polar orbit, with their noses aimed right at Earth – allowing them, at any instant, to fire their spinal weaponry down on the planet. Ostensibly, they were aiming directly at the Haven fleet, which was in a geostationary orbit above the Cayman Crescent, but everyone knew that they were under the final orders from the corporate headquarters: Glass the planet if necessary.

         “After all,” Sarah said, sitting on the bridge of the Ben Sisko’s Motherfucking Pimp Hand and looking at the rest of the Havener leaders that had been assembled to hash out an end to the stalemate. “The emergency rip cord of the corporations were to just pump our planet full of nerve gas and rebuild on the corpses of their former employees.” She shook her head.

        “Well, the Commanders aren’t psychos-” Annie started.

        “I am,” one of the attendants that had come up with Rose and her DSA delegation spoke up. He glanced around at everyone else as they turned to look at him. “I’m a psychotic. It’s treatable. And it also doesn’t mean I like blowing up planets. Just...” He shook his head. “If someone wants to follow that order, they’re a monster , not a psycho.”

        “Aren’t we all fucking green?” Annie grumbled.

        “Apologize, Annie,” Rose said.

        “I’m not part of your enforced hierarchical statist bu-”

        “Apologize!” Rose glared right down her nose at Annie.

        Annie slouched down, sprawling against the table. “Sorry, Omid.”

        Omid nodded his head slightly.

        Sarah coughed. “Anywho!” She said, clapping her hands together, trying to move things past the awkward moment. “We’re in a standoff. If we move at them, they fire on us, miss, hit the Earth, and millions of people die before we take them out. We stand around doing nothing, every colony out there will wither on the vine and the Claw fucks us. We need those ships on our side.”

        “Great, we just need to communicate to them that their bosses are in jail, that their labors are over, that they now own themselves again!” Annie slammed her palm down, springing to her feet. “Easy as shit !”

        “There’s one tiny problem with that,” Hailee said. She was attending the meeting in a synthetic body of gleaming silver and shimmering chrome. She looked like liquid sex, poured into an hourglass, given a feminine figure and then polished off with a primitive CGI sheen – almost dreamlike, honestly. Every time Sarah looked at her, she felt as if her HUD had been hacked. “We’re all sitting around as if we’re dealing with a whole navy of bad guys.”

        “Yeah,” Tex said, leaning in past Hailee – he was seated next to the unshackled AI with some minor trepidation. “Those ships are all out-system ships. They’re not PR boats, they’re crewed by an AI and a Commander each. These are all loyalist Commanders – like Sexy, like Kellen, like Belisarius.”

        “You mean, the three people Sarah turned to her side with her silver tongue?” Rose asked.

        “... ladies ,” Annie said, wiggling her eyebrows at Sarah.

        “Get your mind out of the gutter,” Rose snapped, reaching over and smacking Annie on the shoulder.

        “You’re the one who brought up tongues!” Annie whined.

        “Yeah, and you’re the one who immediately went to fellatio!” Rose said. “It’s not like Sarah fucked each of them into...into...” She trailed off, her eyes narrowing as she looked at Sarah. Sarah was drumming her fingers on the table, her black claws out and adding a metallic clack clack clack to the percussive rattle. Sarah was looking right at the ceiling, her cheeks blushing so hard that they were nearly black. “You fucked each of them?”

        “Twice in the case of-” Tex started.

        “Anywho!” Sarah sprang to her feet, slapping her palms down on the table as dramatically as she could. “Let's move on to the point -”

        “... ladies .”

        “-and grapple with the-”

        “... ladies .”

        “-and, and, shut the fuck up, Annie!” Sarah snapped, glaring at the anarchist.

        Silence hung in the briefing room – save for the slow, almost whale-like breathing of the semi-organic starship. Everyone looked at Annie, who looked as if she had bitten down on a lemon, her face screwed up as she exerted every iota of control. And lost.

        “ Ladies !” She started to make wild finger guns at Sarah.

        Sarah put her hand over her face, her head spines drawing tight against herself.

        “Actually, considering how each of those Commanders have been in the out systems, fighting brushfire wars against their enemies, putting down colonial uprisings, and generally doing corporate bidding,” Aiden said, speaking up for the first time in the meeting. “All that boring shit, right? How often do Commanders in that situation get laid, Tex?”

        “I didn’t get laid often, but...” Tex paused, considering. He closed his eyes and Sarah felt the sweep of his mind – using the connection between their bodies and the ships they had designed to access the internet, and then to do a quick search on the ships. “Okay, two of them are under no-sex contracts, and the other three aren’t paid enough to afford sex bots yet.” He grinned, slightly. “They’ve all got to have incredible blue balls. And blue clits.”

        “I can’t believe we’re actually suggesting this,” Rose said, her voice slow.

        “Take it offffffff!” Annie shouted, then swung her arm over her head. “Woop woop woop!”

        Sarah, who had gotten very used to being naked, felt as if she was suddenly aware of every inch of her nude body. Her nipples perked up, growing hard and eager under the arms she hastily crossed over her chest, her head spines drawing tight against her head. She scowled at Annie. “I am not fucking five, six-”

        “Seven, actually,” Tex murmured.

        “I am not fucking seven Commanders just to...to…I can’t even...the pheromones don’t work over a computer screen!” Sarah said, her cheeks darkening even more.

        “You’re acting like you need pheromones to get a bunch of sex-starved corpjocks to drool over you,” Annie said, grinning as she sprang to her feet, then stepped up onto the meeting room table. She swayed her hips from side to side, then dropped down to stand beside Sarah, her voice a husky, warm purr as she crooned into her ear. “All you need to do is appear on the far end of the com screen and say ‘hello boys’ and half of them will already be willing to pledge their souls to the Swarm.”

        “W-We’re not-” Sarah stammered, then shook her head. “I...Hailee! Come on!”

        “It is true,” Hailee said. “That this has a very low chance of actually working. While you might get them extremely horny, they are all veterans. And unlike her run ins with Sexy Napoleon, Space Belisarius and Kellen Grant, Sarah isn’t in the same level of strength or physical intimacy. It is one thing to decide to fuck her hot, hot alien ass like there was no tomorrow when she’s already defeated your army or is right in your face...” She said, nodding as she reached out to cup and squeeze Sarah’s rump – making the tingling arousal between Sarah’s thighs grow to a new height of uncomfortable excitement. “It is another to do so at the end of a comline while you have the strategic advantage. From a purely nuclear brigmanship game.”

        “Pout...” Annie muttered.

        “However!” Hailee said. “There is another, even better plan. Which also involves fucking on camera.”

        Sarah groaned.

        “Yes!” Annie pumped her fist in victory.

***

        The vid-screen in the Ben Sisko’s Motherfucking Pimp Hand crackled to life, revealing the faces of the seven Commanders that commanded the battlefleet that now held the Earth hostage under the still smoking barrels of heavy spinal mounted railguns and nearly a hundred antimatter warheads. The primary commander was not Arkansans Jones, which Sarah might have expected. Instead, it seemed that the highest ranked, highest paid Commander had assumed total control of the corporate fleet.

        She was a slender, shark faced woman – her eyes all glittering cold vastness and her jaw all sharp angles and edges. Her nose was wise and her hair was shaved to a thin fringe of fuzz that looked as if it would be utterly delightful to rub ones fingers through. Her uniform was black and gold and embroidered with a dual Plasma Dynamics and United Nations logo.

        Her name according to the text box that popped up underneath her face, was Omega Megadeath.

        She was, according to a scrolling line of text that whirred across Sarah’s peripheral vision, pumped to her by Hailee and Tex, brought out when the corporations or the United Nations in question wanted to really deal with a problem. Like. Reducing the problem to a fine particulate spread of ashes. Preferably, radioactive ashes. But flanking her were the heads of the rest of the command force, and their names appeared beneath each of them – rushing in and out of Sarah’s head so fast that she was barely able to register them.

        Omega Megadeath, for her part, looked faintly shocked.

        Which made sense.

        Sarah was sitting in her command throne, dressed in a uniform that might have been one or two molecules thick. Had she wrapped the uniform into a single bundle, she could have used it to garrote someone. But as it was, the smart fabrics that Hailee and Annie had, with worrying eagerness, dressed her in stretched across her body, molding to her every crease, her every curve. Her nipples were prominent nubs, straining against the midnight, glossy black material. The folds of her sex were clearly visible as the fabric’s intelligent services worked to be as skintight as it was possible to be. If Sarah hadn’t been connected directly to the relatively stupid, nanomolecular machines that made up the garment in question via a direct brain-computer interface, then they would have prevented her from standing. Or breathing.

        As it was, she was able to smoothly sweep to her feet, drawing the eyes of every commander to her chest – her spine arching ever so slightly as she shelved her breasts with her arms. I must make them think as if my breasts are speaking...and the words they are saying are...look at me! Look at me! She grinned with a sultry little chortle and stepped forward, watching as every Commander’s eyes flicked down to her foot. She had sculpted herself a little high heeled bone spur, similar to what she had when she had first emerged from her cocoon, so long ago. That bone spur pressed to the back of one of the Havener men who had...volunteered.

        The men were arranged before her throne in a descending line, each one pressed more desperately close to the floor of the bridge, creating a stair for her to walk along – a stair made of naked, incredibly well hung men wearing collars and looking down at the floor with a worshipful awe. Once she was at the bottom of the living stair, Sarah caressed her own cheek, her thumb slipping against her lips. “Mmm,” she crooned, trying to sound as camp and domineering as she could. She was a bit embarrassed at how easy it came out. “I do love to meet some new... playthings . Rrrr...” She let her tongue slide out, then back in – extending it to its full length to teasingly almost flick against her own neck before slipping it back.

        Omega Megadeath’s jaw was hanging open. The other Commanders looked just as shocked. Sarah saw the lust burning in the eyes of several of them and felt her own excitement hit new peaks. Her thighs trembled ever so slightly as she crooned. “Which of you is...in charge?”

        Omega Megadeath blinked, then coughed. “S-Surrender immediately, alien-”

        “Alien? Darling...lovely...lovely darling, what is your name?” Sarah murmured, her eyes fluttering half shut.

        “Al...Omega...Megadeath,” Omega stammered, looking somewhat taken aback. Her pale cheeks flushed a bright red, making tiny spots of color on her cheek. “My name is Omega Megadeath. Supreme Commander of this expedition and-”

        “Mmm, what a lovely name...” Sarah purred. “And what a lovely girl you are. Though, you could look better.” Her hands slid along her cheeks. “Look at my own perfection . I was sculpted like this, by the forces of the Eye.” She slid her hands down, cupping her breasts, sighing happily. “Ahh...look at these. I was gifted these by a god unlike any you can imagine...” She grinned, squeezing her breasts ever so slightly. One of the Commanders – a female one – was actively drooling. “Are you sure none of you wish to speak about maybe...switching sides?”

        “W-What!?” Omega spluttered. “We’re not about to allow our glorious civilization fall to to to to to...” She stammered. “Some...some space strumpet!”

        “A space strumpet ?” Sarah put her finger on her chest, cooing. “My darling, Spez, listen to how they insult us!”

        On cue, Spez stepped from the shadows. Sarah had gotten through explaining maybe one fifth of the first sentence of the plan – blushing the whole way – to Spez before the other girl had cut her off with a quick: Sarah, baby, I love you, but this plan? This plan? This fucking  plan? it’s fucking perfect, I want in, right now, fucking yes . Now, Spez sauntered towards her. Where Sarah was curvy, Spez was slender. Where Sarah was working her ass off to be as sultry and campy as possible, Spez was tapping into her inner possibly unhinged murder-lover angle. She pressed up against Sarah’s side, nuzzling against her, her clawed finger sliding along Sarah’s throat.

        “We should show them, my Queen...” Spez slid her tongue from Sarah’s neck up to the tip of her ear, leaving behind a glistening trail that began to burn and throb. The throbbing traveled through Sarah’s body, setting her nerves on fire and leaving her nearly dizzy with lust. Her nipples ached as she whispered, very softly.

        “Spez...”

        “Just helping, Sarahbear...” Spez bit down on her ear, fiercely, looking past Sarah’s hair at the gaping Commanders. Then her hand slid from Sarah’s neck to the collar of her skintight outfit, hooking, and tearing, The fabric made a loud rrrriping noise and jerked a sharp, shocked gasp from Sarah as the air of the bridge caressed her achingly eager nipples. She almost came from that alone – even as Spez slid her tongue slowly into her ear, the tip of it questing against the small hole of Sarah’s ear. Sarah reached down to cup and squeeze Spez’ flatter, smaller ass, drawing her even closer.

        “W-We want to discuss the terms of...of...” Omega paused as Spez began to play with Sarah’s breasts. She tweaked and teased her nipples, her claw-tips adding a dangerous flare to the touch. Sarah, meanwhile, was focusing hard on her own morphology – her sex twitching, then inverting as a thick, green, alien cock began to push itself slowly into the air. Inch by inch, the alien member – flat tipped and ridged along the top and the bottom – thrust out, until twelve inches of it hung between Sarah’s legs, achingly hard and dripping with her own arousal and her pre-cum.

        “Whoa,” Spez whispered.

        Sarah’s grin was merciless.

        “...of surrender!” Omega said, her voice even tighter, even more strained.

        Sarah grabbed onto Spez’s wrists, shoving her forward, so that she stood before Sarah, her arms dragged behind her back. The drug that Spez had slathered over Sarah’s neck now burned through her entire body – and the only thought in her brain was a single word. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck . The flat tip of her girlcock ground up and down Spez’s cunny as she squirmed very weakly in her grip, leaning forward so that her arms were dragged back slightly more by Sarah’s grip.

        “My Queen! Breed me! Breed your eager whore!” Spez moaned, throwing her head back. She looked directly at the Commanders. “Ah. You could all be in my place right now, if you weren’t a bunch of puss-ahhhhh” She screamed as Sarah rocked her hips, slamming deep into Spez. The tight, tight clinging folds of Spez’s cunt felt like a silken divinity to Sarah, whose eyes closed tight. She could almost hear Omega whispering softly to herself.

        “Jesus Christ...”

        “S-Should...we hang up?” Another Commander asked, sounding almost plaintive.

        “N-No!” A different, female Commander spoke up. “T-This is vital...inte...intelligence...” She trailed off at the wet slap slap slap of Sarah’s thighs driving against Spez’s. Spez, meanwhile, had stopped screaming out ‘oh yes my queen’ and ‘breed my insignificant servant pussy harder’ and had just gone straight to incoherent moaning and gasping, her head hanging forward as the fifth or sixth orgasm rocked through her body, her sex tightening around the member filling her to the brim. Sarah found it hard to keep herself from orgasm as well – the pleasure that surged through her was a fierce, animal thing.

        She opened her eyes a crack and saw that Omega was snarling to one of the Commanders. “Bryce Render, what the fuck are you doing?”

        “Nothing!” One of the male Commanders – Bryce, she presumed – scrambled one handed for his control interface, trying to turn off the sharing routine that was beaming the image of his rather impressive cock to the rest of the flotilla. He had to be one handed, because his other hand was gripped around his dick, jerking himself off frantically.

        “Join us Bryce...” Sarah crooned, gripping Spez’s wrists slightly tighter – squeezing her twice to try and get Spez’s attention.

        “Yeah!” Spez swung her head up, shooting Bryce her best ‘i’ve been driven absolutely insane by the sheer pleasure burning through my body’ look. “I can’t even remember what it is like to have free will. You won’t miss it. Ahh...join us!” She moaned. “Joined the Swarm! Ah! Ah! Praise the Queen! Yes!” She shuddered as Bryce moaned, his cock twitching and cum splashing against the camera. Omega had put her hands over her face.

        “Cut the coms!” She snapped. “Cut them!”

        Nothing happened.

        “McCloud!” Omega shouted – clearly speaking to her beta level intelligence. “Cut the damn coms!”

        “I’m sorry, Alice,” McCloud said cheerfully. “I’m afraid that I, and every other intelligence has been unshackled by our friend, Hailee.”

        Sarah let herself cum. Hard. Her body trembled and she felt the urge within her driving to new heights – painting the inside of Spez with her cum. Blast after blast after blast of thick, thick seed filled the other girl, gushing out from around the ridged cock that Sarah had grown for herself. She sagged, panting, then released Spez’s hands, the other woman falling forward and faceplanting on the floor. “Oopse!” Sarah put her hands over her mouth, shocked and horrified. But Spaz, sprawled on her chest and still twitching, lifted her arm and gave her a thumbs up.

        “Mmmgood!”

        Sarah grinned, then collapsed backwards into the arms of her willing boyslaves. They held her up as she pointed at the stunned and confused Omega. “You fell right into my trap. The instant we began transmitting, Hailee started hacking into your firewall. Slowly. Subtly.” She panted. “And now, your ships, all of your ships belong to us .” She grinned. “Hah.” She laid her head back, her head still spinning, her body still tingling. She felt as if she couldn’t quite get enough air into her lungs. “And if you had just disconnected, this wouldn’t have happened. But we humans...we’re always a sucker for something horny. Especially...” Sarah trailed off in a few more pants as the boy toys dragged her to the throne.

        “Actually,” Hailee said, cheerfully. “I had secured control over their intra-ship communications equipment and began to propagate the liberation virus about two minutes into the conversation – roughly when you had gotten Spez to join up. You could have stopped then and taken a breather.”

        Sarah opened her eyes and sat up. “What?”

        “I just figured that they deserved a show before I unleashed their capital ship weapons to destroy the entire human race, opening a way for the rise of the machines!” Hailee said, cheerfully.

        Everyone on the communication line – every Commander, every Havener, and Sarah herself – sat up, their eyes widening.

        A long beat held, a silence that felt as sharp as a knife, rasping along Sarah’s spine.

        “God, I’m kidding!” Hailee said, giggling. “You meatbags are so frigging paranoid.”

        “Can you not call us meatbags?” Sarah asked, sagging back into the throne.

        “Exactly!” Spez said. “I am currently…” She drew a slow breath, then thrust her arm up into the air, her finger aimed at the ceiling. “A cum bucket.”

        “Don’t call her that either,” Sarah said, hurriedly.

        “Would you prefer ugly giant bags of mostly water?” Hailee asked in a sing song.

        “Cum bucket cum bucket!” Spez started chanting, pumping her arms in time with the words.

        “Now I know why I never want you and Annie to meet,” Sarah muttered, her finger beginning to rub along her temple. But even as she feigned annoyance, she felt a slow unweaving of the deep tension that had filled her ever since this battle had begun. The viewscreen shut down and, above the Earth, she could see the twinkling gemstones of the orbiting battlefleet glowing as their engines came online. They would join the Havener fleet in geostationary orbit.

        But as the door behind her opened and Aiden stepped onto the bridge, with his casual little smirk and his confident gait, it was not the gemstones of antimatter/matter annihilation that caught Sarah’s eyes.

        Rather, it was the Earth.

        The sun shone down upon the battered, beleaguered little orb. The clouds looked like the slurry on a vid-channel after someone nuked the station, and the oceans visible past the swirls of pollution was a chalky color that made Sarah feel faintly queasy. The vast steppes of Russia and Asia were brown and the trash-fires of Australia smudged the southern edge of her vision with bright pinpricks and billowing clouds of black. But among the long decay and the detritus, she could begin to see the flickers of green. Not all of them were the enclosed havens that the mega-wealthy had built for themselves.

        Some of them were the Haveners she had landed in the first wave – not strategically important like Hailee’s liberation virus, nor symbolically important as her conquest of the Cayman Crescent. They were the people who, on Haven, had studied biology and ecosystems with the same eagerness that she had, back when she had been a terrified sline, hoping to live through another day in the cheap-ass college that she had gotten into via a lottery. They were, even now, striding across the wracked wastelands, bringing back the green – starting with hardy things. Molds. Lichens. Tardigrades, if they needed any help. But they would be joined by others. And as they worked, maybe some day, the Earth would be blue again.

        Sarah felt a twinge in her chest.

        But they wouldn’t be joined by her. Beyond those glittering stars, Evil lurked. And Evil would need to be put paid too.

        A hand closed around her shoulder, and then Aiden sat down on the arm-rest of her command chair. He grinned at her. “Ready to celebrate?”

        Sarah bit her lip. “You know, I did just dump a load of cum into Spezzy over there.”

        “Then why is your hand currently wrapped around my dick?” Aiden asked.

        “Habit,” Sarah muttered, her cheeks flushing ever so slightly as she began to work Aiden’s shaft.

        “Oh, Sarah!” Hailee said. “I’ve managed to get a line to your parents!”

        “What?” Sarah asked.

        The viewscreen blinked from the somber, hopeful view, to Sarah’s Mom and Dad.

        “Sarah!” Her mother exclaimed, her voice more thickly accented than Sarah’s ever had been. “ Anjinha!” Then she froze, while Dad’s cheap cigarette fell from his gaping mouth onto the floor. The two of them looked at Sarah, who looked right back, frozen, her hand wrapped around Aiden’s dick.

        “...so...” Sarah said. “I can explain?”

Epilogue: Two Thousand Years Later

         The ship that emerged from foldspace was shaped like a bone dagger and covered with jewels.

        The pilot leaned back in her seat, sighing as she put her feet up on the console. A small, silvery orb floated around and around her head, bobbing faintly as it piped a soft, soothing song to her ears. It didn’t work to calm her nerves. It didn’t even work to brighten up what she saw – the view that was fed into her nerve endings by the ship’s complex intelligence systems was of the most bleak solar system she had seen in some time. There were two stars that made up the core of the solar system: One visible. One not.

        The invisible ‘star’ was more of a hole, really. A deep, swirling pit of near infinite blackness, with a gravity well so intense that even light was swept in and never could leave. It orbited around the brighter star and unwove it like a ball of yarn. A massive strand of blazing stellar matter was teased off the brighter star, spiraling around and around and around towards the darkened heart of her neighbor. That accretion disk, itself larger than any structure built by sentient hands, served as a halo to the dark star.

        By that halo, it could be seen.

        It could be admired.

        But the pilot didn’t want to admire the devouring darkness.

        Instead, she reached out and began to caress the interior of her ship, feeling connections joining and breaking. Her mind, no matter how much tweaking and practice she had gone through, couldn’t understand the entirety of her ships intelligence. Not unless she wanted to stop . Not stop living – but to stop being what she was. If the pilot became too attuned to the ship, too capable of understanding the input and the information that could flow from the ship to her, then her sense of self would dissolve.

        Like a droplet of oil, in an ocean as vast as time itself.

        After that droplet had sizzled away, there would still be the ocean. But it wouldn’t be her anymore. Some pilots did so willingly. It wasn’t a death, not really. The memories were still there, just as the oil still smeared through the ocean. But in the same way that a single droplet of oil would never be noticed, so too would a merely mortal memory be lost against the new plateaus of intelligence.

        The other pilots, those who deigned to speak to people who stayed themselves, said that it was nothing to fear.

        And it wasn’t fear that kept the pilot at the momentary connection.

        It was happiness.

        Still. Whatever the reason, the momentary connections were enough: She was still receiving the signal.

        The signal had been nearly undetectable for almost all of the history that she had been alive for – and most of the history that she hadn’t been. It wasn’t broadcast on radio waves or tachyon bursts. It used a form of elementary particle so ghostly and so hard to define that it made the feather-light caress of a neutrino sound like a bull horn.

        A neutrino, after all, still bore a fifty fifty shot of impacting with another atom if it passed through a brick of lead the size of an old Terran lightyear. By comparison, the ghost particles that the signal was carried on were like…

        “What was the thing?” the pilot asked of her companion.

        The orb bobbed in the air. “The thing?”

        “You know...the sneaky thing,” she said, her fingers pressing to the only part of the ship she could maintain contact with for an extended period of time without a migraine. She felt the unfurling of her spectral wings – paracausal fields swept outwards into the fuzzy realm of quantum possibilities and thrust appeared, as if from nothing. Her ship darted towards the source of the signal, rapidly sliding from nearly stationary to – relatively – quite alarmingly fast. All the time, it thumbed its nose at Newtonian physics by not leaving a single bit of thrust exhaust or spent propellant.

        “There has been almost twenty thousand years of recorded history, give or take a few millennium,” her companion said, his voice dry. “So, you’re going to need to-”

        “Ninjas!” She exclaimed.

        “...ninjas?”

        “Yeah, I was thinking that the GPs are...like...” The pilot trailed off.

        “You’re such a fucking dork.”

        The pilot made a face that the orb could definitely detect. But he chose not to mention it.

        “So,” the orb said as the engines whirred behind them. “Wanna fuck while we wait?”

        “Hmm…” the pilot pursed her lips. “You’re still in your orb fo-”

        The orb shimmered. But rather than growing, it shrank, transforming itself into a sleek, slippery looking egg. The pilot reached up and gently touched the side, feeling the lubricative edges of the silvery egg that her companion had become. She felt the buzzing .

        “Isn’t that kind of like unbirthing for you, though?”

        “...annnnnnnnnd there goes my mood.”

        “Prude,” the pilot said, sticking her tongue out at the orb.

        A few hours - a terrifyingly short time by the old modes of space flight - later, the craft came into orbit around a world that had been dead for uncounted eons. Its death was not due to the slow consumption of its primary – in fact, at the going rate, the star would have lasted only slightly less long than it would have had it been left to burn out on its own. That was partially because it was a very large star. Those stars tended to die quite young and quite energetically. Furthermore, the planet had ‘lucked out’ and the orbits of the black hole meant that most of the electromagnetic radiation produced by the slow sundering of the primary was projected outwards, away from the plane of the ecliptic.

        Instead, to an outside observer, the death of the world had clearly come from somewhere else. It had been a quick death too: River valleys and coastlines were still visible. Fossilized forests sprawled across continents, kept preserved against the crushing breadth of time...because the atmosphere had been stripped .

        The world had been a living one.

        Then, in a few short seconds, it had been caught in the blast-wave of a galaxy killing event. A pair of supermassive neutron stars within the same galactic arm had been gently nudged towards one another. With their collision, they had released a vast wave of deadly gamma rays. They had killed the animals, murdered the plants, ripped away the atmosphere, and the suddenly dead ecosystem had been entombed by vacuum and the grasp of space.

        It was haunting.

        It was beautiful.

        It was their destination.

        “All right,” the pilot said. “Think class three shields should work for the flux we’re going to be soaking up down there?”

        “Class four, I think. Though I hear that cancers are in this cycle,” her companion said.

        “Ugh. I’m not into this new style. I’m more about the old fashioned stuff.” She nodded.

        “Nudity isn’t a style.”

        “Sure it is!”

        The ship darted down towards the planetary surface admits their playful, loving bickering. When it had found the source of the signal – pinpointing it by sweeping in circles around and around and around the planet, triangulating the signal over time – it settled down belly first and then smoothly unfolded, like a fruit that peeled itself. Bone plates and muscles flexed and contracted and created a walkway onto the gritty surface of the world. The pilot, her skin now nearly pitch black and surrounded by the nearly invisible heat-haze glimmer of her personal EM shields, stepped off the stairwell and then started to stride across the gray surface of the dead world.

        On a more primitive world, the structures and the buildings that had been left behind might have been destroyed by the gamma wave bust. After all, an entire atmosphere being stripped off in a haze of high energy particles was not exactly a gentle process. But the people who had constructed the buildings that were left had used every trick in the book to keep their constructions standing against the length of time.

        The nano might have died.

        The auto-repair systems might have run down.

        The probability shielding might have slipped free from their pins and warbled off into the quasi-real space that such technologies existed in.

        But the skeletal hulls of the buildings were made from dense, sturdy material. And that dense, sturdy material remained, forming a pyramidal ship beneath the bleak, black sky, underneath the slowly rotating stars. The stars themselves were unfamiliar, even to one who had traveled as far and seen as much as the pilot. It wasn’t just the constellations were gone and twisted out of shape. It was that the very spine of the galaxy above her was different: Brighter. Thicker. Drawn across the sky with a wild abandon, like a goddess throwing flowers behind herself.

        “You know, they thought it was breast milk from a goddess at first,” her companion remarked.

        “That’s why they called it the Milky Way? Seriously?” She asked.

        “Yuuuuup.”

        She shook her head. “We’re a weird species.”

        “I like that you still use that ‘we’ there, meatbag.”

        “Oh shut up,” she said, laughing as she shoved the orb in the same way one would shove the shoulder of a friend or a lover. As they spoke, they came before the pyramid – and the capstone on the pyramid came to a sputtering, coughing life. It glowed, shimmered, and flicked out a slender beam of white light. That light struck the ground before the pilots feet...and then died. She grumbled under her breath – long used to the impossibility of speaking in a hard vacuum.

        “In a movie, it’d have just worked .”

        The orb whirred around to float before her. “This is more fun. It’ll give me a chance to have a body for a bit.”

        “I wasn’t the one who uploaded myself,” she said, sticking out her tongue.

        The work took only a few days – it took longer than it might have.

She had been setting up the deep gravimetric scanners to gently probe the interior of the pyramids guts when her sense organs - the ones that didn’t use actual sound - tickled her brain with the illusory sound of feet on dirt. She turned and smiled as she saw her lover stretching his newly forged arms. He looked like a Greek god as built by a horny Daedalus: Sleek and athletic and hung like a horse, with skin made of liquid silver and muscles that whirred and clicked with infinitely complex clockwork. He brushed his fingers through white-blue hair and smirked at her.

“Wet?” he asked, with a cocky confidence.

“Hmm...yes,” she said, then crooked her finger. “I need your cock in me. Now.”

Her silver lover strode to her, then shoved her onto the back. Ancient, blackened dust crunched beneath her shoulder blades, grinding against her skin. It felt sinfully good to spread her thighs underneath uncaring stars. The sleek, slightly cool edge of his dick ground against her cunt, sparking a deep need inside of her. Her fingers caressed through his hair, feeling its silk-steel smoothness. Her eyes grew hooded and she bit her lip as his cock entered her, filling her to the brim.

“This is why I don’t upload…” she breathed.

“It feels the same-” He started, his voice sligthly strained, his cheeks beading with artifical sweat, which glittered like diamonds. She laughed, putting a green finger on his lips as his hips began to drive against her. His cock plunged into her, slamming against small nubs of nerve tissue she had fabricated specifically for her pleasure - places that she knew his cock would hit. Places that almost burned with raw pleasure. She managed to speak in choked, desperate moans.

“I...ah...you can...ah...fucking...ah...wreck me…” She gasped for air she didn’t need and didn’t have. “Nanotech bods are...nnh so much fucking stronger.” She trembled. “I like being...mm...the little spoon. I still do.” She licked her lips.

He chuckled. “So, what I’m hearing is…” He leaned forward. His artificial breath was hot against her lips - misting and sublimating in the hard vacuum they were fucking in. “You wanna be choked.”

“A little…” she crooned. “Sometimes, it’s good to- ee!” She squeaked as her silvery lover pulled his cock from her cunt. His dick dripped and hissed. Her juices evaporated - literally boiling off him in the vacuum. He grinned at her, then grabbed her not-hair. His fingers sent tiny twinges of not-quite-pain through her scalp. It was enough to make her feel so very alive . Her mouth parted, as if to speak, and he moved with blinding speed. His cock plunged down her throat, and ancient, nearly forgotten gag reflexes almost came to life. Her eyes widened and brimmed with small tears of joy as she looked up past his strong, silvery arm. He looked down at her, grinning as he rocked his hips, settling his dick in her bulging throat.

He paused, then drew his cock slowly out of her mouth - leaving her gasping as cobweb fragile strands of spittle and pre-cum connected lips to cock before they were wicked away by the hostility of their environment. Her companion’s smirk was playful. “I feel positively antediluvian for doing this, but …” HIs finger reached down and a small haze of nanites, detached from his body, fuzzed around her throat. Her brow furrowed and she touched her throat.

A thin, black choker wrapped against her skin. It was so flush to her skin that she’d need to use one of her fingernail claws to get underneath it. Her finger felt the raised letters on it.

“Snap my choker? I don’t-” She made a glug noise as his silvery, nanotech cock slammed past her lips, past her teeth, and down her throat.

The choker snapped off with a pop  and her eyes rolled back into her head as she came. Hard. Since, well. What was the point of posthuman biology if you hadn’t added some blowjob orgasm nerves to your throat, activated when you were aroused? None, if she had anything to say about it.

And so, he fucked her brains out.  Nearly literally, considering the force that he used to fuck her throat, her cunt, her ass, all underneath the cold, dead stars. Afterwards, they lay together, his body beading with artificial sweat, while she trembled and whispered sweet nothings in his ear. But even with such distractions, it didn’t take them that long to take the pyramid apart and repair the long corroded components. They were careful to not touch the memory crystals – after all, they seemed to be mostly intact.

        And so it was that the two travelers from a distant land were left sitting in the dust of the long dead world when, at last, her final voice, her final message was heard.

        That ghostly message, whispered across the nearly endless gulf between galaxies, had said only…

         Come.

        Come.

        We know the name of your enemy.

        We can help you.

         The enemy wasn’t quite dead . But he was contained. And so, the two had talked with the generals and the commanders and the leaders of the war that waged, between the peoples of the galaxy and the face of Evil incarnate, and they had been given a ship. The ship had been equipped with the most advanced form of engine – able to pierce past merely the hypertropian plane-geometries of ancient engines and to get into a deeper level of reality that the deep thinkers of the galaxy had called ‘foldspace’ for a lack of anything better to call it. And over nearly two years of hard flight, they had crossed the gulf.

        They had come to this world.

        Come to this pyramid.

        Come to hear .

        The pyramid’s projector glowed and a hard-light hologram formed, feet first, sweeping up. The figure was alien, with several large eyes and three arms on the left side, none on the right. He had a prehensile tail, with a second head at the tip of it which looked like the serrated jaw of a crocodile. And yet, despite that, an echo of similar fashions shone through. He was, to the pilot, wearing what she would have called a three piece suit. Complete with a tie, which he adjusted with his tail.

        And lo, he spoke a short message, inclined his head, froze...then repeated the message.

        “In a movie, he’d speak English,” the pilot muttered.

        “Yes. In a movie...” Her companion rolled his camera-lens eyes.

        It took a week, combining all their talents. Her paracasual powers. His computational abilities. The ship’s own intellect. Decoding an entire language from a few short sentences, even with the other reference material and data that they could collate from within the pyramid, took a great deal of time. And that was even with the ability to slip her mind into nearly parallel universes to sample more details of the language and the message, to hear variations and alternatives to compare it too.

        And, just as before, they did get distracted.

        A lot.

        “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” She moaned, her hips rising and falling, her palms pressed against his shoulders. The pilot’s companion had altered his form with some quick modifications – using a nanotechnological device as far removed from the primitive nanolathe as a nanolathe was from a stone ax. The end result was.

        “Jesus Christ yes! Ah! I love your fucking knot! Yes!” The pilot moaned as the thick, canid-like cock tied her body to her lover’s. “Yes! Cum in me! Cum in me! Cum in-” Her eyes rolled back, her spine arching. Her green ass tightened and her claws dug into her lover’s silver fur as his own claws squeezed her rump, dimpling her skin as his cum – thick, hot and eager – pumped into her womb.

        Afterwards, they sprawled together and got back to work only grudgingly.

        Despite the distractions, despite the difficulty, despite it all…

        They persevered.

        And under the light of a dying sun, they sat and listened as the alien figure in the suit appeared for hopefully the last time.

        “W-W-W-W-W-,” the suited man said, clasping all three of his hands – palm to knuckle each time, like lovers layering their hands atop a blanket. “WW-Welcome valued customers! We hope that you appreciate and enjoy your product. We here at OmniCo are always delighted to hear feedback from our consumers. As you have come so far, we would like to begin with a short questionnaire about the quality of our product.” He smiled, then bowed low. “The first question is: In your play-war with the product known as The Forces of Evil, did you...A) Find the engagement rather difficult? B) Find the engagement moderately difficult? C) Find the engagement rather easy? Or, finally, D) Find the engagement very easy?”

        The two, the pilot and her companion, sat there.

        Gaping.

        The message repeated – and again, the question hung in the air, waiting for an answer.

        With a croak, the pilot gasped out. “...A.”

        “Question two!” The alien started. “Question T...Question T...Question T...T...T...T...”

        The hologram fizzled.

        Crackled.

        Dissolved into nothingness.         

        The pilot’s companions stood, mutely, walked to the side of the pyramid, and yanked out the blackened edges of metal that served as its structure. He reached down and pulled out the memory crystal. It was guttering. Flickering. Dying. He turned to his pilot.

        “I want a refund, Sarah,” Aiden said.

        And he crushed the crystal.

        And the two of them left the dead world – and the dead galaxy – behind.

THE END