Chapter 5

Captain John Tangent, Tactical Officer Lieutenant Trianna Yang, Starbase Commander Quincy Lagrange and the phantasmal alien psychic known as Pixie stood together in the observation bay of the New Interstellar Alliance’s one and only ‘hot lab.’ Situated upon the now abandoned surface of the Earth, in the farthest reaches of the Gobi Desert, Hot Lab 1 had been constructed in a tearing hurry using every bit of flash fabricated material that the orbiting starbase could provide and was made for one purpose only: To see if the mysterious alien Voyulon traders could be trusted.

The four of them watched in mute focus as a Class-1 Railgun was mounted into place at the central laboratory, several kilometers away. The vidscreen displayed the image through grainy, cheap pickups, chosen to be easily replaced if something went catastrophically wrong. John tapped his fingers together, while Trianna crossed her arms over her chest. “Banging one snake lady,” she muttered under her breath.

“I wish more people trade this kinda stuff for banging snake ladies,” Pixie said, giggling. John smirked slightly – a private smile that none of the others were privy too, as Pixie was only visible or audible to him.

“Testing in five,” Quincy said, brushing his fingers through his long, wavy blond hair. He looked good in the skintight outfit of a UNN commander, cut to properly fit his waifish figure and slender build. As a femboy, certain codes of military conduct were bent to allow for him to practice that most respected of Earthborn religions – this was why he got to keep the high heels, which he clicked against the ground in the only sign of nervousness that showed on his steely, feminine features. “Four. Three. Two.”

The Class-1 Railgun fired directly into the shield emitters. Designed by the alien Chemdemdemdemar, field serfs of the terrible Zemturga Totality, the emitters looked nothing like what a human might make. Instead of hard steel and gleaming crystal, they were nothing but a series of interlocking flower petals that were banded in copper wire. Those wires flashed and the railgun slug stopped about a meter away from the emitter. Then the railgun fired again – the cloud of conductive metallic vapor that the railgun blasted out with each shot occluding the screen. Then it fired again, and and again, until the heat warning indicators flicked on.

“If that was one of our shields, it’d be so much scrap by now,” Trianna said, watching the screen.

“The base didn’t blow up at least, so there’s nothing wrong with its power fields,” John murmured.

The screen cleared.

The shield emitter was undamaged, and several glowing tungsten darts shimmered in the air before it before dropping to the floor with a clang that went entirely unheard by the cheap camera feed. Pixie threw her arms up.

“Woooo!”

John and Quincy shook hands, and the Starbase Commander beamed. “We’ll have the new emitters in place before the day’s out.”

“What’s your orders for after that?” Trianna asked.

“We’re heading for Sigma Draconis II.” John chuckled. “I think it’s time we see the Totality from the inside now.”

Delta Vee bounced on the tips of her toes as she watched, palms pressed against the glass, as her beloved Avenger got slowly and painfully dismembered. Butchered. Mutilated. “My baby girl! My sweet baby girl, they’re ruining her!” She groaned, pressing her face against the glass as a few other pilots lounged around in the observation room of the starbase fabrication facility. Articulated arms – running on computer control – swung and buzzed around her fighter at incredible speeds, peeling away fuselage and taking out components so swiftly that between blinks it was like her ship was completely dismembered.

“You are aware of the concept known as a refit, right?” Kat asked, her tail twitching irritably from side to side.

“I’m aware of the concept of a refit,” Delta said, pushing away from the window, scowling at the chief engineer of the Excalibur. “But these Voyurlong-bullshit shield emitters are freaking flowers!” She swung her hand back to the window, her timing utterly perfect. A sleek arm unfolded and placed a delicate bundle of flowers and copper into the hull of her ship, leaving a great deal of extra room where the old shield emitters would have gone. “I don’t want to trust my life to a flower.”

“You trust your life, every day, to a collection of goo and water,” Kat muttered, watching with interest as the articulated arms started to ... weld the flower in. Somehow.

“I do not!” Delta said.

Kat, without looking, reached out and flicked her forehead. “Dingus.”

Delta rubbed her forehead, scowling. “Hey! I don’t fucking risk my life ... my ... I ... my brain isn’t goo and water. It’s- I ... there...” She spluttered. “There’s other stuff too.”

“Not from what I can tell,” Kat said.

Delta grumbled under her breath. “Says the girl who goes into freaking heat.”

“Hey, don’t knock going into heat. Going into heat’s great,” Kat said, her ears twitching up.

Delta grumbled even softer. “Says the girl who can hear like a bat grumble grumble.”

“Did you call me a back?” Kat asked, frowning. “What does that even mean?”

The articulated arms pressed the wing fuselage in, then lasers hissed around the entire vehicle, leaving seams gleaming with cherry red metal. A sprayer hissed over as a final step, and the Avenger was left glossy and new, as if she had just come off the assembly line. There was no sign of the flower entombed within her metal hull, nor any hint that she had ever been opened again. Delta huffed slightly as she pressed her nose against the glass. “Well, at least the Zemturga can build a nice fabricator.”

“No shit, the war would be way easier if they couldn’t,” Kat said, throwing herself down into the observation room’s chair. She flung her legs up to hook over the back of the chair and laid her head back, so she was subjectively upside down to the young pilot. This view did give her a most excellent view of Delta Vee’s taut, peach-shaped, spankable ass, contained as it was in the nearly skintight UNN pilot jumpsuit. She grinned, slightly. “Hey, uh, DV, do you see that spot weld they missed? Near the ground?”

“Where?” Delta hissed, cocking her head, then bending forward, craning to try and view her Avenger from the lowest angle possible. This just so happened to push her ass higher into the air and drew the jumpsuit tighter.

“Gods, I love undress blues,” Kat whispered.

The door to the fabrication observation room opened and the Captain prowled in. Kat grinned at him as he saw her position, then tracked her eyeline to Delta, then back to her again. Her arched an eyebrow and pursed his lips. Kat stuck her tongue out at him, while Delta grumbled under her breath. “It’s also kinda unfair to just give us a shield buff. They should give us more guns too.”

“The additional firepower would kind of cut into your acceleration curve, DV,” the Captain said, his voice amused.

“Captain!” She spun around, jerking upright. “You ordered this-”

“I did,” he said, smirking slightly. “The shield improvements will pay for themselves. We’re about to set out for Sigma Draconis II. It’s one of the major trading hubs of the Totality – do you think that we can fabricate a housing for an Avenger that can make it look like, say, any of the Totality space fighters?”

Delta opened her mouth, then closed it. She put her hand to her chin while Kat rolled languidly from the air, flipping and coming to her feet in the same smooth motion. Her tail twitched as Delta tapped her thumb against her chin. “We couuuuuuuld mimic the Kruul Evil class interceptor,” she said, hesitantly. “They’re basically just shitty Avenger rip offs with extra spikes, no shields and no missiles and three more crew to manage their leaky ass fusion rockets.” She made a face. “Do you ever think the Kruul just build their ships like that on purpose?”

“Like what?” The Captain asked.

“So when they blow up they get as many Kruul and as many enemies as they can killed or maimed as possible?” Delta asked. “Like, according to the flight logs we have, half the pilots that go up against Evils get cancer from their dirty ships blowing up in dogfights.”

The Captain sighed. “I wouldn’t put it past them. Still, will the Avenger be able to fly with that Kruul shit on it?”

“Eh,” Delta said, waggling her hand.

“Can you put quick det charges to blow it off in a hurry?” the Captain asked, turning to face the engineer. Kat snickered.

“Pff, easy!” she said.

“Do it,” the Captain said, then turned to go.

“Wait, John, we can’t just fake being Kruul. They’re big ugly fucking ... copyright infringing uurks from that old book by the fuckin’ French guy,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Sartre, you know! He wrote the book with the dragons and the riddles and the ring that lets you make green telekinetic fists and stuff? Like, I am not dressing up as one! Not even if you can make a rubber forehead big enough.”

The Captain pinched the bridge of his nose, looking pained. “Delta Vee, once again, I am reminded of why you sat behind me for English,” he said. “And no. We’re not going to pretend to be Kruul in person. That’s what the computers are for. And only I need to go in person. And. Well.” He turned to someone only he could see. “Pixie?”

The sensation of telepathic contact was almost unnoticeable to Delta Vee and Kat. Kat’s left ear twitched and Delta scratched at the back of her neck. But between blinks, the Captain changed from a handsome, dark haired Terran with exotic, pale features to a tall, burly Kruul from their northern continent of their homeworld: Gray-brown skin, piggish snout, thick tusks, tufts of fur on chest, shoulder and more. He was dressed in a thick loincloth and loomed above them, burly and massive.

“See?” he rumbled.

“Ooooh!” Delta said.

“Yeah, that’ll work,” Kat said.

The Captain grinned – then between blinks, he was back to human. He turned to go. As he left, Kat nodded, then murmured. “ ... was he still kinda hot as a Kruul?”

“I wasn’t gonna say it,” Delta said, snickering.

Kat flipped her off.

“Anyway, I never did get that,” Delta said. “Why did they call it English class if we were reading French books, huh?”

Sigma Draconis was an orange-red star, almost twenty light years from the SOL system. In the vast war between the Interstellar Alliance and the Zemturga Totality, it may have seemed strange that one of their forward posts had been so close to the homeworld of one of the Alliance’s members, but the three dimensions of space and the operation of the Space Opera Field that permitted interstellar travel made borders and security a deeply complex and tricky topic. Stars weren’t placed between lines drawn on maps: They were small pinpricks surrounded by potential forts that could be occupied. Some solar systems had been near perpetual battlefields, with logistic lines running into them from both sides, orbits shifting when and where people could arrive and leave safely.

So, Sigma Draconis had been left to the Totality even when the Alliance had been a growing concern, heavily secured by several direct star-lanes leading deeper into Totality territory and protected by the simple fact that the UNN had had more important things to deal with: Defending their own territory, protecting human colonies and Alliance starships from attack as the war wound closer and closer to its catastrophic end.

And now that humanity itself had been scooped off the Earth and scattered throughout Zemturga space as Pleasure Slaves, there was even less reason to ward the system from SOL.

That didn’t mean Sigma Draconis was undefended.

Not in the slightest.

Trade-1, the largest trading station in Totality space, was in joint custody by the Myg’gar’gar and the Paw, one of the formerly aligned Yip-Paw-Lop species and both the Mygs and the Paw had enemies within the Totality as the Totality itself frayed apart without an external enemy. The Mygs were at war with the Urghats and the Paw were at war with the Kruul and the Vornash. It was that fact that had given John some pause as he laid in bed, considering the approach to Trade-1, listening to the faint hissing sound of the Space Opera Field as they cruised through Tier Four at superluminal speeds.

Tier Four was risky, but-

“Give you ... pawwwwwws?”

He jerked his head up, blinking as he saw Pixie, who was laying her head against his belly, grinning up at him.

“What?” he asked.

“You were thinking about how it gives you pause! The Paws gives you Pause!” Pixie grinned, then focused – her lithe form shifting into a credible replica of ‘what if she had been a Paws girl’, her ears perking up, sleek and black and eager, her long and sinous tail twitching as she put her hands against his belly and extended her new sharp, midnight black talons. “But, no, it should be fine. Trade-1’s a trade station. If you’re not showing up to blast shit with lasers, they should let you in.”

“I’m thinking of pretending to be a Kruul renegade,” John murmured. “Not every one of them follows the Articles of Cruelty, right?”

“Mmm,” Pixie nuzzled against his chest gently.

“Hmm,” John said. “But the rest of the crew will have to wait. Or wear face concealing helmets – human bodyforms are close enough to the Yip-Paw-Lop.” He chuckled. “Or Sensurians, but I don’t think we should pretend to be them.”

Pixie snickered. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind.”

“That’s because you’re the horniest girl I’ve ever met in my life,” John said, his voice amused. “And Delta Vee takes notches out on her belt when she seduces new ones.” Pixie giggled at that, then squirmed, wriggled, then threw herself across his belly. Despite her not actually existing, the weight of her pressed down on his chest and compressed him into the bed. John lifted his arms, wheezing, but Pixie had already wriggled herself around again so that now her thighs were cocked open above him, her sex pressed against the light tuft of his chest hair. Her grin grew wicked.

“I could be hornier, you know,” she crooned.

“I find that slightly hard to believe,” John said.

“I mean, being a symbiotic psychic construct that lives in your brain, I can basically do any kink you want.” Her grin was playful. “Bondage! Shapeshifting into any alien girl you want. Oh! Oh!” She took his hand, then guided it to her throat, grinning wickedly. “Breathplay!” Her voice crooned softly. “Earfucking? Noooose fucking!”

“You made those last two up,” John said, yanking his hand from her throat.

“Or did I?” she wiggled her eyebrows dramatically.

John narrowed his eyes.

“I have access, through the potent psionic ability of psychometry, to the entirety of humanity’s vast array of perverse thoughts and images!” Pixie said, putting her fingers against her temples, grinning wickedly as she looked down at him. “Care to rumple a dragon? Or a goddess? Or a girl you had a crush on in high school?”

“I’ve already slept with every girl I had a crush on in the high school class,” John said, dryly. “I’m very attractive and somewhat charismatic.”

Pixie pouted. “No! ... you’re extremely attractive.” She snickered. “So so on the charisma, though.”

John clasped his hand over his chest, rolling his head to the side and throwing out his tongue as if he had been shot dead by an arrow. Pixie burst into giggles, then leaned down, whispering softly as she bent herself almost in half. “Here, I’ll kiss it better.” Her hand snaked under his cheek, and John was able to draw his tongue back into his mouth just in time as she pressed her mouth to his. It was at times like this it was almost impossible to think of Pixie as anything but a living, breathing woman – eager and wanting and wet. And ... from a lot of perspectives, she was. Sure, her body might have been a fine dusting of psychically active pollen threaded throughout his brain, but the scans that Doc Carothers had done had pinned down Pixie’s physical self.

She drank of nutrients from his body, and she breathed out psionic energies. She could tickle his mind with her etheric hands, and touch the world around herself with psychokinetic fingertips. And she could damn well kiss like a woman. When she drew back, John was panting softly.

“This must look damn peculiar to the security cameras,” he murmured.

She grinned. “Two words.” She held up her hand, unfurling one finger. “Technopathy.” She unfurled a second. “Exhibitionism!”

John blinked at her. Then he looked at the small feed pickup in the corner of his room. Then he looked back at her.

“You know the security team only checks if the AI alerts them, right?” he asked, his voice playful. “No one is watching us.”

“Drat!” Pixie grumbled – then squeaked as John grabbed her hips, tossed her onto her back, and pinned her into the bed. This time, the kiss was not set to stun: He had set it firmly to kill. Her mouth and his locked together, her tongue warm and wanting and eager, snaking between his lips, finding his mouth. Her legs wriggled, then swung wide – hooking around behind his back as she put ankle over ankle, holding him in place as her fingernails dug into the back of his scalp, holding him close. When the kiss broke, she was panting heavily. “Ah, well, never the less,” she whispered, dazedly.

“Heh,” John said, his eyes gleaming warmly as he looked down into her eyes. “You know, if you keep...” He blinked as she wriggled, squirmed, and shimmied her way down his body, so that her face was mashed up against his pectoral muscles and her crotch pressed warm and wet and wanting to his groin – blazingly hot even through his undershorts. He chuckled. “If you keep trying to only take kinks that please me, I may think you’re trying too hard to fl -nnhh...” His eyes half closed as a gyration of her hips ground against him so lewdly that his hips bucked despite himself.

“To flnnhh you?” Pixie looked confused. “Whatever could that mean, Captain?”

John laughed. You can read my mind, Pix, you little goober.

She grinned, then blushed. “ ... yeah. And ... I get that worry too.” She wriggled a bit – not lewdly this time, just squirming like she was trying to boil off her nervous energy. “Like, how much of me is me, and how much of me is me pleasing you?” She frowned. “Oh! Obviously, I should just close myself off from your mind, think of a kink, then force you to do it!”

“Or, uh, you could ask politely, as adults are known to-”

“Ooohooooo! You muuuust dooo iiiit!” Pixie oohed, wiggling her fingers at him as she slid her hands away from his head. Then she put her palms against his chest. “God, you’re ripped though.”

“Thanks,” John said, dryly. “The injections the med-techs give us work very hard on maintaining muscle tone.”

Pixie giggled. “Okay!” She grinned. “Can you be a big buff dragon stealing me from a tower and railing me so hard that I convert from being a princess to being a dragonfucker?”

John blinked down at her. He drew back, sitting on his haunches. “ ... huh!”

“What?” she asked, sitting up.

“I just didn’t expect an alien to have such an incredibly Earthling style fantasy,” John said.

“I never said it was a Terran dragon,” Pixie said, grinning wickedly. “Are you aware of what the Hylano conception of a dragon looks like?” Her eyes glittered as she shimmered – and her body began to change. Her skin darkened until it was emerald green, and hardened until it was all sleek planes and sharp edges of chitin. Between the chitin was bunched, almost biomechanical muscles of a Hylano – but where the only Hylano male that John had ever seen was all long limbs and narrow body, Pixie’s form retained a wasp waist, a sleek, flat belly, a chitinous exoskeleton that jacketed around a pair of hefty, lightly ribbed breasts, tipped with dark green nipples. Her upper arms bifurcated into uppers that stretched above her antenna, while her lowers spread to either side of her as she laid back, her mandibles opening and closing daintily.

“How do I look?” she buzzed in the elegant, musical Hylano version of Terran.

John reached up to tug at his collar, which felt quite tight, a fact rendered only slightly perplexing by his shirtless state. “I, ah, forgot Hylano women are so ... fetching.”

“Big titty mantis babes, you mean?”

“Well, yes, but I was trying to be more classy about it,” John murmured, his eyes drinking in her body. He slid his hands down to his own hips, drawing back a bit so that he could lift one knee, then the other. His dick sprang free, bobbing slightly as he licked his lips slowly. He didn’t need to work hard to be aroused by the gleaming elegance of a Hylano female – but the nervous excitement in the back of his mind only worked to make him more aroused. He didn’t know what their conception of dragons was. What would he end up looking like when Pixie wiggled her fingers and let her powers to control and shift perceptions go.

He frowned, slightly. The fact she could so readily change how he saw the world was a little alarming, now that he thought about it. And now that he had thought about it, he wondered why it had taken him this long to even think that thought. Was that itself some trick of her powers? Or was it just that the merger felt so natural, so easy, like he had been waiting for it his whole life and hadn’t known it? Pixie, who had lifted her hand, dropped it, looking at him with concern.

“Oh,” she said.

“Oh what?” John asked.

“I just realized that too,” she said. “Uh, I promise, I won’t change your perception without your permission.” She put her long, elegant fingered palms against his chest, sliding one to cover his heart. The thumping in his chest felt all the more present with her hand pressing to him. She sat up, them laid a curved cheek-mandible against his pecs, her antennas tickling his nose like dandilions being brushed against his face. John screwed up his face, trying to not giggle, squirm or sneeze. His hand reached up and he brushed her antenna back, letting them lay flat against her head as she spoke. “I really don’t uhhhgnnh!”

She twitched, quivered, then gasped – and John was about to ask her if she had been hurt when her antennas bopped back up and slapped his nose and lips again. John made a face, then sniffed and almost sneezed as something tickled the back of his nose. He drew back, his hands on her shoulders as Pixie remained faintly wobbly – her compound eyes glittering, her mandibles opened in the Hylano version of a slack jawed face of orgasmic pleasure. Ahegao, he believed the term was. His hands cupped her green cheeks, pushing her mandibles back together.

“Pixie?” he asked.

“A-Antenna are erogenous zones...” she whispered.

“Oh,” John said, blinking – a little nonplussed. He let himself grin. “They also tickle.”

“Mmm.” Her eyes glittered as she tilted her head, letting her antennas bob to the side. “A-Anyway, uh, I really don’t want to mess with how you see the world. The very idea feels abhorrnt. Like ... kissing your sister.” She paused. “Like, my sister, not your sister. Do you have a sister?”

“Only child,” John said, amused.

“Dang,” Pixie said, then clicked her mandibles. “But, like, I want you to trust me. And I want me to trust me. Remember, I am only a few days old.”

“I prefer not too, honestly,” John admitted, grinning at her wryly. “You, for one, make a far better babe than baby.”

“Aww!” She clicked her mandibles, her antenna twitching eagerly. “Anyway! You promised me a dragon! Come on! Dragon it up!” She paused. “Oh, right.” She snapped her fingers. “I hope you like transformation sequences.” She said, as John drew his hands back, looking down at them. They seemed completely human.

“I don’t even know what-” John started, then gasped as he felt a strange heat growing inside of his body. His bones ached and throbbed – but they ached and throbbed in the same way his manhood did when he was truly, deeply aroused. It wasn’t painful, it wasn’t irritating. It was more ... focusing. Like he couldn’t bear to draw his attention away from it, even as his chest began to itch. He reached up, panting softly as his fingernails scraped at his skin – and to his shock, his skin began to peel away. Rather than bloody red sores beneath, though, there was instead a flash of brilliant emerald green. His bones ached harder and he groaned, stretching his head forward – and he felt his spine crack and begin to stretch upwards. The ache above his buttocks grew more intense and he felt a pressure against his skin, which burst as a thick, stubby tail began to grow from himself. His hands scratched more eagerly, spreading away from his chest, peeling huge dry clumps of skin away. No gore. Just more gleaming scales, bright and shining in the ship lights. His fingernails sharpened, hardened, and his shoulders bunched as he felt more pressure.