Chapter 7

Deet. Deet. Deet.

“Okay ... I can almost see the numerals!”

I craned my head, trying to get a good look at Ali. She was trying to crane and twist her body around, using every bit of gymnastic funtimes that she had in bed (I swear, she was able to lick my balls while riding my cock cowgirl style. Not reverse. Regular cowgirl. Note to self: If we survive, try that.)

“Do you recognize them?” I asked, jerking my head slightly to try and see if I could knock my psychic suppressing hat off. No such luck. And worse still, the stomach acid in this big old sandworm motherfucker was up to my ankles. It didn’t start to really burn until you forgot that you had set your feet down. I jerked them up again, hissing as I saw that my beautiful, caramel brown skin had gotten a bunch of pinkish splotches on them. I shuddered against my restraints.

“They’re Doyen pictograms, the kind we give to the smarter mind ... to the smarter slaves,” she said, correcting herself. Mindless was the Doyen term for the non-psychic and Ali had plenty of evidence that they damn well had minds. She frowned. “We have an hour.”

“An hour? Who the fuck dropkicks someone into a sandworm’s mouth strapped to a fifty megaton nuke and gives them an hour to escape?” I asked, scoffing. “A Bond villain?”

We both sat there for a moment longer. My arms started to ache, complaining that I was putting all my weight on them and the bomb to keep my feet out of the muck. The only sound that came was the gurgle of stomach acid and the faint sussurations of silt sand sand passing along the sandworm’s skin.

Deet. Deet. Deet.

“So, what’s your idea?” she asked.

“I, uh ... I’m thinking.”

Psychic powers were no go. Ali couldn’t get out of her restraints. We were in a stomach. The stomach acid was getting higher. Slowly, a memory echoed into my mind. Ages ago, I had watched a Lets Play by a certain famous fast talking internet British funnyman and his australian friend. They had been making fun of Bond villains, but the Aussie had said: “You know, I bet if you put a regular person in that trap, they’d go, ‘fuck, I can’t escape’, and then die.”

Or something like that.

“Fuck,” I whispered, then wriggled. “Uh, Ali, can you ... splash stomach acid onto your chains?”

“If the stomach acid can’t eat through our skin, I doubt it will have much impact on metal chains, Abby.” Ali paused. “Abby, I just wanted to tell you-”

“Wait,” I whispered.

“What?” she asked.

“I love you,” I said.

“I was going to say that!” Ali said, sounding faintly aggrieved.

I grinned. “I know.”

A long silence.

“Was that another reference to a film I haven’t seen?” Ali asked, her voice prim.

“You know it! Also,” I said, a bright light flaring in my head. “I just had a really insane idea.”

“What is it?” Ali asked.

“Pfft, like I should tell you in case it goes wrong. Don’t you know anything about – ow!” I winced as she managed to kick me, despite the fact that she was chained to the other side of an atomic bomb. And not one of those tiny atomic bombs. This was a big one. I shook my head. “Okay. Fine. Remember the astral form water?”

“Yes,” Ali said, sounding chagrined. “I led you to a beach paradise planet and ended up getting most of the team almost eaten by the local vegetation.”

“In your defense,” I said, casually, closing my eyes as I tried to focus on what little psychic power I had. The helmet was preventing me from pushing my mind outside of my head, and it was preventing me on drawing power into myself. But it wasn’t stopping me from the thinking inside of my head, or tapping what psionic powers were there. That was not actually that much. But if I was lucky, I wouldn’t need much. “The local vegetation doesn’t nibble on Doyen. All part of the fun of interstellar travel and adventure.”

Deep doot.

“We have fifty minutes left,” Ali said. “So, what about the astral form water?”

“I’m going to make a tiny amount of it in my mouth. My astral form gets ejected, then I fly out and bring help.”

“Bring help?” Ali squeaked. “We’re on a different planet, in a different solar system.”

“No ... we’re ... not!” I hissed. “That was the last thing that hit me. I saw the dorsal ridge of this sandworm fucker before we got kicked in. Something about it was familiar. It was the same ridge I saw near Gateway. That fucker just wanted us to think we weren’t still on the same planet so we wouldn’t try something insane ... like ... this.”

At that moment, I altered the roof of my mouth to produce the same water that we had run into on the planet. Or, more accurately, the same microbial psionic parasites. Normally, you don’t want microbial psionic parasites, but this was a special occasion. What I hadn’t quite counted on was the fact that an astral form would feel the helmet differently than a physical one. As I emerged from my own skull, I smashed into the helmet as if it was an incredibly solid wall. I jerked backwards, smashing my head into the other side of the helmet, then collapsed downward. I sprawled in the air, with my head nestled against my own junk, and groaned quietly. Getting teabagged by yourself did seem to fit my mood.

“Did it work?” Ali asked.

Yeah, I said. Silently. Since I was in my astral form.

“ ... Abby?” Ali asked.

Right! I forced myself to float upwards, twisting left at the last moment to avoid braining myself again. I looked at Ali, wishing I could do more than just heroically rescue her. It just felt like such a dick move to fly off and leave her here alone. But if I didn’t get my ass in gear, we were both fucked. I didn’t even bother trying to look around the area we had been dumped. The terrain was too different from the terrain near the city – yeah, I know, planets could have multiple kinds of terrain, weird, right? Instead, I flew up. And up. And up. And up. And up.

An old joke that I had heard once: Anyone can go into space. You just need to drive your car up long enough.

Well, this was true of astral bodies. And thanks to being unbound by petty things like air resistance, my continual inertia-free acceleration built up speed so fast that I actually had to stop going up and start going back down well before the sky turned black. Even with that counter-acceleration, I was still pretty high over the planet before I felt myself coming to a stop. I rubbed my chin, looking down at the world that slowly spun beneath me. I say slowly, but I was in orbit now. I just had to remember where Gate was, then fly so that I was over it, then fly down to them, then find my friends, all before my girlfriend-

Something fast and bright shot past me so fast that I leaped to the side and screamed like a little tiny baby girl. But you’d be scared too if a massive hunk of steel and plastic shot past you at orbital speeds. Okay. That was the Angel Grove. It was ... in a geostationary orbit over the city! I turned, then started to take advantage of the fact that continual acceleration builds up in a goddamn hurry. I shot after the Angel Grove, gaining, gaining, gaining. I saw it growing larger and larger by the moment, my hands stretched before me in classic superhero style. I started to bleed off speed until I was approaching it at a stately walk.

I started to hum the Blue Danube as I got closer and closer to the skin of the reaction mass tank. Then I was through and ended up remembering too late that a massive tank full of liquid water was not actually filled with nice lights. I tumbled blindly through that, then past cables and wires and pipes, then at last, into the living section of the ship. I orientated myself, then flew to the cameras. There was the city. I aligned myself with the telescopic nose of the ship ... and then flung myself forward.

I shot down through atmosphere and clouds and felt a real sense of vertigo. It was easy to ignore while going up – especially when you were focused on getting places and not letting your girlfriend fucking explode.

Harder when going down. The ground was shooting towards me. Faster. Faster.

Too fast! I started to decelerate as the ground swept up towards me as I kicked my legs out before me, as if I could fire deceleration flames out of my feet like Azula. My arms spread and I tensed for the impact. Instead, my legs plunged into the ground as I slowed to an almost stop, then started to bob upwards. I shook my head, chagrined. Right! Astral body! Duh! I shook my head.

There was the city.

I mentally recreated what I had seen of the city, did my best guess, and then flew at the wall like a great big blue cannonball. I flew through stone and wall, emerged into a room that held a Doyen noble watching two gorgeous cheetah girls dance and wriggle for his amusement. Their hips twitched from side to sides and they lifted their arms above their heads as the Doyen tapped his chin, looking thoughtful. I tore my eyes from their silk swathed breasts and flew left. The next room held a pair of glowing fog banks whose differently colored edges were starting to intermix and flow together, while the room filled with echoing, disembodied moans.

Come on, was everyone-

“Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Magnum! Yes!” Tycho’s voice filled my astral ears as I flowed into the room. There was Tycho, her fingers worked through the glowing blue sheets of the bed that I had fucked Beli on. Her lithe, ebony black body quivered, quaked really, with every mighty thrust of Magnum’s immense cock as he plowed her. I’d done some plowing in my time, but seeing it from outside of the act, I had to admit ... the term plow had a definite sense of accuracy to it. It wasn’t just that Magnum was fucking Tycho doggy style. It was that every thrust he planted into her made her whole body rock. Her knees lifted, her shoulders quivered, her head threw back, and her frizzy hair jangled about in secondary shockwaves of pure, erotic pleasure.

I should be offended, I thought. Save that this is perfect!

I grabbed onto every last iota of shame that I felt ... and grabbed onto my glowing blue astral cock. My hand started to pump as I watched Tycho’s breasts jiggle and bounce. Her voice was music to my astral ears as she looked back over her shoulder. “Ah! Fucking god, Magnum, you’re nailing me to the bed so hard I, ahh, I won’t be able to walk.”

“D-Do you have to be so ... vocal?” Magnum hissed, his jaw clenched, his eyes half closed. “I, ah, we shouldn’t be doing this. I’m your commanding-”

“Fuuuuuuck meeeee!” Tycho squealed and had an impressively messy orgasm.

Funny. I’d have thought Opal would be the one who would seduce our stoic captain. However, by that point, my cock was hard as a rock and I was feeling my own spectral pleasure peaking. That was the moment where Magnum snapped his head up, pausing in his thrusting. Tycho started to make an annoyed groan – but then the door opened and in came Opal and Ebony themselves. The two indian girls skidded to a stop, Opal’s voice petering off mid ‘Hey, Mag, we-’

“Oooooooh boiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” Opal squealed, and I could hear every I in that word. “Magnum, you’re being naughty.”

“Really?” Ebony asked. “While the Princess and Pirate are missing?”

“They’re missing?” Magnum asked.

“You didn’t get...” Opal blinked.

“It must have been blocked by the amount of psi-shields in this place,” Ebony said. “They didn’t come back into the...” She paused, lifting her head. “Pirate?”

“You feel him too?” Magnum asked, sliding slowly out of Tycho, making her pout and whimper. She rolled onto her back, sitting up.

“I don’t,” she said, frowning. “But my telepathy and empathy is shit tier. What do you guy sense?”

“I sense his horniness...” Ebony murmured, her voice soft. “Which isn’t unusual.” She focused, and I felt her thoughts echoing in my head. When Magnum had tried to communicate with me while in astral form, his thoughts had sounded distant and weak. Ebony came through nice and clear, which said quite a bit about her specialization. Pirate, are you there?

I’m here! I used some astral water makey stuff! To escape! We got captured! I thought, in a quick bundle, showing her quick flashes of everything that had happened. Ebony sighed dramatically, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Great,” she said. “You just had to stick your fucking dick into a spider.”

I flew through the warp last, which snapped shut almost on my ankles. I didn’t care that Tycho was getting a bit fast at closing them – this was the fifth place we had checked. But looking around, I felt a surge of excitement. The sun was in the right position. The volcano were in the right place. There was the pit!

“It’s there!” Ebony said, thrusting out her finger.

“All right, Tycho. Suit us up!” Magnum said. He started to sprint forward, his feet slamming into obsidian glass and silt. He didn’t worry about cutting his feet – the telekinetic field was already growing around him. He swelled to his warform, expanding and growing, even as Tycho lifted her hand. A warp snapped open and then swept forward, teleporting every bit of Magnum’s warform armor on. A similar flash armored up Ebony and Opal, then finally, Tycho as well. The original members of Beta Squad charged forward and I got a chance to admire their warforms in their full mecha-form.

Tycho’s armor was designed around mobility. There was less armor, but better joint connections on the arms and legs. Her shoulders had a pair of banana clip missile launchers, designed to launch dumbfire rockets. Dumbfire because guided munitions were expensive as heck. Like, we weren’t made entirely out of money in the PsiCom. Which was ironic, considering most of NATO and huge chunks of the former Warsaw Pact were footing the bill. But it also had to be a secret bill, which made it smaller than you’d think.

Meanwhile, Ebony and Opal both had the heavy armor, to make up for their slightly weaker TK. This made them slower, but the armor had interlocking supports that let them both carry the big-ass guns. Ebony was carrying the main armament off a cruiser – a deck gun that fired shells as big as me. The ammo boxes bounced and jounced on Ebony’s back. Opal used her empathic powers to predict enemy attacks, which is why she had been given a crystal foci that would let her make a better psi-sword (or, in her case, psi-spear) and a massive shield that she could use to protect people.

Magnum was the middle of the road leader type.

But his mecha was painted red.

It made him go faster.

As I watched, he leaped, then plunged into the pit. A moment later, the sand worm slammed onto the cliff’s edge, its mouth opening as my body and Ali’s body went skittering out of its mouth on a wave of lime, the atomic bomb dragging with us. I flew forward and flew into my body – and then remembered why bodies were lame and sucked. Becuase while I had been out, my feet had been marinating in stomach acid.

“Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!” I squealed.

“You did it, Pirate Mask!” Ali exclaimed, then laughed as a careful twitch of the tip of Magnum’s psi-sword cut through the chain. She helped me to my feet as I tried to limp away. Every step was agony – and that agony made it real hard to focus on my biokinesis. I looked at Ali, grinning weakly.

“Course I, fuckthishurts!” I whimpered. I am not ashamed to admit it, I started to blubber like a big baby. But to be fair, stomach acid. It has acid in the freaking name! Ali set me down on a chunk of rock as the four other mecha stood around me. Magnum’s voice boomed from the speakers.

“You okay?”

“Bomb! Bomb!” I hissed.

“Oh!” Magnum nodded. “Right. Tycho, please.”

Tycho’s arm whirred and clunked as she lifted her mecha’s arm, pointing like a baseball guy baseballing his ball of bases. A portal opened as Magnum scooped the atomic bomb up and threw it through the hole. Baseball! That was what people said when baseball happened, right? I admit, I was feeling a bit delirious with relief and pain right now. The warp snapped shut and, over the edge of the horizon, a brilliant flash stabbed at my eyes. I lifted my hands, hissing and Ali whimpered in awe as, roiling and expanding and growing ... was a mushroom cloud.

I’d seen pictures. And movies.

But there’s nothing like seeing a nuclear bomb going off your own self to put the fear of the gods into your gut. I shuddered and Ali pressed herself against me. She whispered. “Y-Your people can build these things?” she asked, and I felt, for the first time ... that she was worried she had joined the wrong side.

“Y-Yeah,” I admitted. Don’t ask how many we have. Don’t ask how many we have.

“Fifty THOUSAND!?” Ali screamed.

“Estimates vary!” I said. Then I squeaked. “Spider! Spider!”

Magnum spun, his psi-sword roaring to life so close to us that I could feel the intense heat of the blade mashing into my face. But it was nearly too late: Victory Smith had burst from nowhere and she was in her version of a warform. I had thought her horse-sized spider form was scary. But it had nothing on the building sized spider. Her legs moved with a jerky swiftness that felt utterly wrong considering her size, and her low body meant that Magnum’s swung went clear over her many eyes. With his psi-sword missing by a mile, Victory was able to leap upwards and smash her body and spinnerets into Magnum, bowling him over.

Webbing flew and arms moved as the rest of the squad brought weapons to bare. Before I knew it, Magnum was completely webbed and Victory Smith had rolled herself to her side. I didn’t know that spiders could dark souls dodge roll, but Victory Smith sure as fuck could. This meant that the cannon shells meant for her instead struck the ground and filled the air with a haze of deadly shrapnel. Ali threw up her hand, a telekinetic field shimmering as thousands of sharp obsidian chunks smashed into it.

“Balls!” I hissed. “I need to heal!”

“I need to keep you safe!” Ali snapped.

“I wasn’t saying you should stop!” I said, even as Victory lifted one arm, smashing it into the barrel of Ebony’s rifle. The barrel aimed upwards and the overwhelming thoom thoom thoom sound of the shells flying up into the air added a terrifying backdrop to the squealing and groaning sound of metal and the crackling of psi-weapons. As I watched, Victory used two of her legs to create psi-swords, holding them despite not having hands. Her blades crossed and caught Opal’s psi-spear, shoving it to the side.

Okay, I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, Victory Smith was, like, 50% scarier than I already through she was. Though I did notice that her psi-swords were ... kinda dinky compared to her size. More like psi-daggers. And she had no TK shield. This was pure biokinesis. And there was a limit to what-

Victory Smith, sensing danger, leaped and spun as Tycho finally got her rocket pods to bear. The Opal and Ebony leaped backwards as Tycho’s rocket pods flipped open, revealing the dozens of ready to kill explosive death shooters. They started to fire in streaking, rippling patterns. Rather than ducking or dodging or even shrinking, Victory Smith reared backwards. For a second, I thought she was going to shoot web.

I was ... half right.

She shot, all right.

Shot fucking lightning.

Electrical discharges that made my hair stand on end even from a distance reached outwards, feathering along the rockets, which started to explode in a series of bright white flashes. The rockets were so fast that most of them exploded in the air between Vicky and Tycho. But the rocket’s firing mechanisms were also slow enough that a few exploded right in Tycho’s face and chest. She was sent skidding backwards, her armor smoking, dozens of scars torn into the armor from shrapnel. Her arms had lifted to shield herself, but I could see sparks and flashes and crackles of lightning surging along her armor. I hoped to all the gods in the universe that warforms insulated against lightning.

So, Tycho’s missiles were out. Opal was trying to find a new angle of attack, but looked hesitant. And Ebony’s big fucking gun had been dinged up enough that I saw her trying to check the firing mechanism.

Time for plan F.

For fucking desperate.

“Abby?” Ali whispered.

“I’m going to do something stupid,” I whispered as I stood – my feet only half healed. Hey, you try and biokinetically repair your feet while still in agony. But doing this was more important. I focused and stepped forward, growing into my warform as Victory Smith smashed a cautious jab from Opal aside. My warform was unarmored – and with Tycho out of it for the moment, that wasn’t likely to change. But that was fine.

I didn’t need armor for this.

Victory sensed my approach. She spun, swinging a psi-dagger in a curving arc that would have slammed into my chest and impaled my physical body. But I grabbed her furred arm, tugged her upwards, so that her dripping mandibles and many eyes were on the level with mine. And then, forcing back every sense of disgust or horror that I might have felt, I leaned forward...

And I kissed her.

Right on her mouth-parts.

Don’t ask about the taste. And yes. I could taste through my warform’s lips. It was a psychotelekinetic transduction of flavor senses through the psionic expression of my body. And don’t ask me about the texture. Don’t ask me about any of that. Only know that I was holding a massive, building sized spider to my chest, with my cock pressed against her belly fur (like a tarantula) and it took every iota of my willpower to cram a lid over the screamy voice in my head going: Spiiiiiiiduhrrrr...

My voice changed mid word.

Becuase, quite suddenly, I was not kissing mandibles and dripping toxins. My lips were pressed to the rubbery black lips of a humanoid woman, and my hands were cradling the dark black wrist of Victory Smith in her sexy dominatrix drow form. Just. You know.

Building sized.

I drew my mouth back.

“W-What?” Vicky stammered.

“What!?” Magnum’s voice was muffled by webbing.

“Whaaaaaaaat!?” Tycho shouted through megaphones damaged enough to add an electrical warble to her words.

Opal nodded, her helmet clinking as her armor whirred. “Noice.”

Vicky still looked good in her humanoid form. She blinked slowly as she looked at me, her hair-spines clicking and clattering in a rippling pattern like the folical version of a double take. Her psi-dagger crackled, then buzzed, then dissolved from her fingers as her hand went to her mouth. Then she smacked me. Hard. I staggered and almost fell to my knees, my feet sending up clouds of semi-volcanic ash.

“How dare you!” She hissed.

“Hey!” I exclaimed, standing up, rubbing my still glowing cheek with a glowing telekinetic hand. “You were the one who injected me with knockout sleep poison after banging!”