Chapter 9

“This is decidedly unpleasant...” Beatrice groaned.

Lou sighed, looking up at the ceiling as he tried to let the headache that was filling his skull ease. But it was hard. The past three days, he had been doing nothing – not enjoying his lovely wife, not reclining in the idle comfort of pastoral life aboard an interstellar starship, not even trying to think about how he planned to handle resuming his normal duties as a prince once the lighthugger had reached the SOL system.

No.

Instead of any of that, Lou had been spending his entire week studying the basics of stabdrive construction. It required several degrees in physics that he simply did not have and a grasp of mathematics that left his head pounding. He had been raised on a diet of Newton and the surviving pieces of work by Archimedes, not on the fundamentals of scientific figures with names like Totally Not Steven Hawking and Skip Bowling Get Laid Instead. The Neopolitan Star Kingdom, on the whole, liked to think of their universe as being an orderly, Newtonian one and used devices like stabdrive only under the extreme duress of the war with the Bugs.

And now, Lou had to build one.

It was less hopeless than that sounded. The schematics and tutorials and fabrication patterns that he had access to were all excellent at guiding him towards the end product that he wanted. It just took effort – and it was effort that he resented. But the schedule that he and Beatrice had worked out together, in the long, quiet evening after he had broken the news to her, the news that the Federated States were likely constructing a weapon to aim at her, that the evidence of that weapon was located on their starship, that the only hope they had to foil their plan was to reach it during the narrow window projected by Cornelius ... well...

It didn’t have a lot of room for breaks.

Beatrice’s other bodies were at work handling the construction of the actual life support unit that would be strapped to the stabdrive properly. This was, comparatively, the easy part of the mission. Constructing spaceship hulls was a centuries old skill and humanity had broken it down to the point where a sufficiently determined child could handle it. That just left him and her moth body, trying to focus on untangling the steps in constructing the stabdrive itself.

It wasn’t going to be a large stabdrive. In fact, it being a large stabdrive would have been counterproductive if he wanted to survive the crossing from the lighthugger to the Invisible Hand. As it was, the drive would be able to exceed the thrust of the lighthugger – which was currently chugging along at a stately one gravity. All he needed to do was accelerate at two gravities long enough for him to catch up with the Invisible Hand, which was coasting. It would, in fact, continue to be coasting for the better part of half a year.

It’s crew was all asleep, contained in non-Newtonian fluids and filled with acceleration drugs and cryogenic buffers. They could wait until their ship was relatively close to the SOL system, then activate their stabdrive at max power, dropping in a matter of hours from 90% the speed of light to a relative stop. It was how most starships operated – more efficient, in terms of reaction mass, than the long, slow coasting that Lou and Beatrice were on.

If the ships had only been going at intersystem speeds, this entire operation would have been ludicrously easy. A chemical rocket could have carried Lou the distance required – no need to build a highly sophisticated piece of technology that he barely understood. But the problem was that they were in the void between solar systems, traveling as close to the speed of light as humanity could possibly go. They were traveling so fast that the stars were distending, that the light ahead of them was shifting from visible light to hard radiation and the light behind them was dipping below red to become infared. The were traveling so fast that time itself was distorting like taffy – for every second that passed on Lou’s ship, three second passed on Earth.

This warping of space and time had another effect, one that was invisible to Lou.

He (and every other kilogram of his ship and his wife) had been getting more and more massive. It took more energy for the ship to accelerate now than it had a month ago, and it would take even more energy to accelerate a month in the future. It was all well within the power curve of the lighthugger’s stabdrive – but for any personal shuttle that he would need to make, he would need to overcome that added energy requirement.

Hence...

“Okay,” Beatrice said, standing up, her antennas drawn tight. “That’s it.”

“Huh?” Lou lifted his eyes from the technical schematics he had been reading.

Bea placed her hands upon her hips. “We have been working upon this drive for days. You are exhausted, I am irritated, and we have enough time in the schedule to take a break.”

Lou rubbed his thumbs against his eyes, working grit out of them. “Bea-”

“I have read a great deal of books about humans now,” Bea said, cutting him off. “All of them say that humans need to take breaks. They need to let their minds rest. And I believe that I am learning the same thing.” She shook her head. “You would think that you, of all people, would understand this fundamental human condition. That is the basis of your ethos! Of your polity’s ethos!”

Lou rubbed his thumbs into his eyes again, then planted his palms on the table as his wife looked down her almost invisible nose at him.

“Or!” she exclaimed. “Is this some kind of long buried example of machismo in my husband’s spirit? Are you unwilling to stop work lest you be seen as weak? Hmm?”

“No. I just ... want to get the engine finished and get this all over with,” Lou said. “Bea, if Cornelius is right, then the Federated States are a threat to you – not just-”

Bea placed a finger upon his lips. “Husband. The Federated States are inspired by your Nazis. And, I have read up on your Nazi movements, in all the histories. And do you know what I have learned? Firstly, the uniforms by Hugo Boss are very, very, very stylish.” She leaned in close. Her voice was a cool croon, one that made Lou’s tired brain somehow connect horny and scared together into the same part of his soul.

“Secondly ... they were fucking idiots.”

Lou snorted, then sighed. “We cannot underestimate our enemies.”

“Underestimate, no!” Bea said. “But I am a gestalt intelligence spread across multiple solar systems, with my mind suspended throughout trillions of bioforms. The essence of Beatrice, the core of my being, is cast across a space vaster than any empire of man.” She stood, her eyes closing, her four arms spreading outwards, her antennas unfurling. “I am no mortal woman, to be easily struck down by the machinations of skull measuring losers. Also, we have not had sex for twelve hours!” She paused. “T-Thirty two hours!”

Lou frowned. “ ... why did you correct yourself?”

“I did not preform fellatio on you while you slept. That would be quite rude,” Beatrice said, nodding. “I simply- I mean, I did not ... do anything!”

Lou laughed. “And here, I was wondering why I had had such vivid dreams last night. Beatrice!” He laughed. “You are utterly irrepressible – you are going to be the death of me once we get to Venus.”

“I can restrain myself whilst around your Neopolitan ... fuddy duddies!” Beatrice said, bringing out the new word with clear relish. “But we are currently light years away from any fuddy duddies-” She cut him off before he even got a word out. “Ah! Ah! Currently light years away from any non cryogenically stored fuddy duddies.” She grinned at him, her antennas twitching in a playful, mocking pattern. “Thus, I can be as lewd as I want! I could, for instance.” She paused, then bit her lip. “Suggest ... that...”

“ ... yes?” Lou prompted.

Bea froze, terembling.

“You can’t pick what lewd thing you want most, can you?” Lou murmured.

“Is it possible for you to inhabit three or six bodies at once? Are we quite sure about this?”

“Not without a significant amount of sophisticated surgery and technologies that run counter to my fundamental belief systems, no,” Lou said, smiling.

Beatrice pouted. “Then ... we could roleplay!” She clapped her hands together. “I could be the big bad bug queen! And you could be the innocent star prince!” She crooned. “Welcome to my lair, the spider said to the fly...” She leaned up against him, her hands going to his shoulders. Her smallish breasts pressed against the back of his head as she ducked her head down, whispering into his ear. “And then the spider fucked the fly’s brains out while the fly squirmed in the webbing and it was quite erotic. In a ... dominant female kind of way.”

Lou smirked, slowly. “You trying to be dominant? That I have to see.” He chuckled. “I mean, that alone has sold me on the-”

And that was when the loop of spiderwebbing slapped down around his eyes.

Lou yelped – but no matter what he did, he didn’t have a chance. Not only did his wife outnumber him three to one, but each of her bodies were coordinated and controlled by a singular mind. Also, they weren’t blind. Soon, his hands were webbed up behind his back and he was being carried out of the house – the bright sunlight almost shining through the webbing over his eyes. But then he was carried off into an elevator and felt the elevator whirring along the inner track of the ship. Lou was just about to get concerned when the doors opened and a humid, almost moist heat bathed his body. He was flung down against a wall – and felt the wall itself flow and click around his body. It felt like articulated musculature, contained within hardened plates of chitin and soft, spongy flesh. The feeling was both grotesque and familiar. It was the same material that Beatrice had used for her hives, but...

More mobile.

“O-Okay, Beatrice, ha ha, very funny,” he said, trying to sound brave.

A thin, needle sharp arm emerged from the wall above his head. The tip of it caressed slowly along his neck and Lou felt both goose-flesh and excitement run along his skin at the same moment as the tip hooked underneath the blindfold, then slit it off his face – cutting it with a smooth jerk of a single inectoid limb. He found that he was in a room bathed in green light. The once familiar shape of the life support systems of the lighthugger had become ... overgrown. Flesh and chitin both flowed over and through the machinery, replacing gurgling and hissing pipes with slowly throbbing veins and a faint, pulsing heart beat. The light itself came not from wall mounted illumination but rather from small sacks of buzzing firefly like creatures that cast their cold green light across the room. Most of the room was faint impressions of glistening muscle and curved, half buried machinery, and the door was lost in shadow. He didn’t see any sign of the three bodies that had carried him down to this part of the ship.

Lou gulped, feeling his throat dry despite the humid moistness of the room. His clothing began to stick to him as sweat beaded along his skin – and he started to sit up, trying to tug his wrists free of the restraints.

A soft almost purring sound came from the darkness. And then Beatrice’s voice spoke from around him. Not from a single throat, but from every part of the walls and the darkness – worming into his head like the dark croon of a wicked goddess.

“What do we have here ... a Neopolitan prince...”

Rubbery darkness shifted among the shadows – and a single long, elegant leg stepped from the shadows. Lou’s eyes widened as he saw that Beatrice had slipped on a high heeled shoe that looked as if she had carved it from her own discarded chitin plating, adding biomechanical flourishes to the heel and the sole so the distinctly human artifact had an eerie, alien edge to it. His eye roved along the sleek black-blue thigh to curved hips of her moth body. Her lower arms were crossed over her belly, while her upper arms held a long riding crop in her hands, and her face was concealed behind an ornate fusion of chitin and a beaked opera mask that left only her lips exposed, lips that were skinned back to show sharp, sharp fangs.

The riding crop smacked against her palm as she purred. “Your forces think you’re dead, my pretty prince. No one is coming to rescue you...” She stepped forward, rolling her hips, her moth wings fluttering in the pale green light. “No one is going to save you from me.”

Lou’s dick had never felt harder in his life. He was pretty certain that he couldn’t speak, even if he wanted.

The Bea reached up, taking her mask, tugging it off. “This is the part I will be playing! I’m not actually going to torture you, and the United Human Polities and I are not at war any more, that is a deception that is part of the-” She paused. “What? Did I do something wrong?”

Lou groaned, laying his head back against the wall. “Beatrice!” his voice almost had a whining edge to it. “I don’t know if you can get the bends from arousal and terror, but...” He laughed. “You don’t break character during a roleplay!” He paused. “I-I think. I ... don’t ... actually know how ... I mean, it’s not like there are rules for this kind of thing, are there?”

Beatrice blushed. “O-Oh! I’m sorry, I just, I didn’t want to frighten you! I just wanted to arouse you!” She grinned. “I did manage that latter part...” She smiled. “Now, uh ... where was I?”

“Forgetting my restraints?” Lou murmured.

“Yes, I- what?” Beatrice yelped as Lou sprang to his feet, the wall having relaxed its grip upon him. A moment, he had grabbed onto his wife, twirled her around, and pinned her against the wall, his grin playful. Beatrice trembled, from her antennas to her toes, and whispered. “Y-Your physicality remains intimidatingly arousing, my space prince...” She whispered as he pushed both of her upper arms above her head, her lower arms hooking around his hips as Lou leaned in close – then bit down onto the mask and jerked his head to tug it off and fling it aside. Looking into her eyes, he purred.

“Looks like I’ve turned the tables,” he whispered.

“A-Ah, well, um...” Bea trembled a bit more, her nipples hard enough to cut plasteel. “I-I still have two other bodies.”

Lou grinned – then, upon hearing a faint sound of movement, slipped aside. Her wasp body, who had been creeping up behind him, instead blundered right into her moth body, their breasts pressing together, their arms flailing as they tried to remain standing. Lou tugged his shirt off, twirled it into a quick, tight rope, then looped it around the two bodies, tying it off so that they were both held together, bust to bust, nose to nose. Both bodies glared at him.

“Do you think this will stop- ah!” They both gasped at once, for Lou, his eyes having adapted to the night colors of the room, had spotted the spider body, lurking and waiting. He had stepped forward, reached down, and plunged two of his fingers into her sex, cupping her ass with other hand, holding her light body against his chest as he began to finger-fuck her unexpectedly. This seemed to throw the entire hive mind for a loop – even the walls convusled slightly as Bea’s face on three bodies looked shocked – and pleased. “Ah ... yes!” her was body moaned, grinding her nipples against her moth body, while her spider body clung to him.

Lou chuckled – feeling raw. Dominant. His voice purred in her ear. “You need to try harder than that to beat me, hive mind.” His finger found her spider-clit and rubbed in slow, eager circles, riding the line between pain and pleasure. Spider-Bea let out a high pitched chittering noise, her mandibles flaring wide as all six of her arms gripped onto him – two at the shoulder, two at his biceps, one on his wrist, the other on his hip as she tried to keep herself standing. Moth-Bea’s antennas went to full extension while Wasp-Bea began to buzz, her wings vibrating as her eyes went out of focus.

“Whose my eager slutty little hive mind?” Lou purred.

“Me! Me am!” Bea moaned, her spider eyes drooping. “Ah! Nnh! Yes! Nooo, don’t stoooop!” She whined as his fingers – slick and slippery – pulled from her sex. She let out a tiny mew – and then her eyes widened as he reached out and thrust both fingers into her wasp-body’s mouth. As her tongue swirled around his fingers, tasting her own juices, her moth body panted and whispered. “Lou, pl-”

“Lord,” Lou crooned. “Call me your Lord.”

“Ohhh...” Beatrice’s breath sighed from three bodies at once, her antennas all going slack, her eyes half shutting as arousal quaked through her – the muffled moan that came from her Wasp body feeling even more arousing than the others. Lou grinned, then purred into the spider body’s ear.

“Web your moth down, ass in the air, thighs spread, cunt ready.”

“Y-Yes Lord...” She nodded, and then wobbled forward. Her moth body was too excited to even walk properly – her wasp form had to grab onto her arm to try and steady her. In the end, both bodies dropped to their knees, Lou’s shirt hitting the ground next to them as the relatively loose knot came free. Lou slid his pants slowly off and both her wasp and moth body’s eyes looked at his cock, widening with eagerness, while her spider body moved, squatting and using her spinnerets to slap down thick matted webbing onto the both body’s palms, pinning all four of them to the ground. Beatrice panted, softly, her dark tongue sliding from her lips, her antennas tightening up with excitement as her wasp body and her spider body grabbed onto her thighs, spread them wide and pushed them forward, so that her knees were tucked almost against her own elbows. This left her ass thrust into the air – and her cunt dripped with arousal.

“Do you want your Lord’s dick, little hive mind?” Lou walked past the wasp-body, caressing her hair, making her moan softly.

“Yes,” Bea said through each body. “Yes, we want my lord’s cock so bad, we need it, we need it so bad, ah...” Her wings beat in a jagged little twitch. “Please. Fuck me. Fuck my slutty cunt so hard, fuck us, yes!” She tried to strain herself, to compact her body even more, to push her ass out just a tiny fraction more towards Lou as he knelt behind her. “Please, lord, yes, please, please, plea- AH!” She screamed across three throats, her two other bodies falling onto their backs, their bodies twitching and trembling as Lou, with a single motion, thrust himself entirely into the slightly cool pussy of her moth body. He groaned and didn’t even try to delay himself, to go slow, to even try to get her off.

Not that he needed to try on that mark.

“Yesssss!” Be gasped – her spider body arched her back, thrusting her hips into the air, squirting her pleasure around three fingers that she plunged into her own sex. “Fuck we! Yes!”

“So good, yes, mmmm!” her wasp form trembled, laying on her side, one of her legs crooked up so that her knees was pressed against her side, a remarkable display of her own flexibility. Her latex black fingers had buried themselves into the black folds of her own sex and she was fingering herself there, her other hand cupping and squeezing her own large breast, tugging gently on her nipple in time with Lou’s feral, brutal thrusts. His balls clapped against the blue-black thighs of her moth body as her moth-body went beyond the ability to even speak. She simply mewled and moaned and gasped, her body barely rocking in time with his fucking. She was rooted fast to the floor, and the only thing that moved was the tiny jiggle of her rump and the rustling of her hair and the wiggling of her antennas.

It was too much. After so much hard work, after so much stress, after the build up, Lou had no endurance and no willpower.

He slammed hard, slammed deep, and he came. He came hard. His balls clenched and the thick, purple cum that he had gotten as a lark filled his wife to the brim, then overflowed. And still, he came fucking into her, his hips moving with spasmodic, twitching motions. Another surge came and he let out a choked moan as he came into her a second time, a wave of pleasure roiling through him as he clutched her hips tightly enough that if she had been human, she would have bruised. His body trembled and he panted, then went limp, hanging his head forward. He opened his eyes and saw that Beatrice had been destroyed. Cum didn’t just drip from her pussy, it soaked her belly, it coated her thighs, it dripped and puddle onto the floor. In his wild frenzy, Lou had stirred it around inside of her - and this body didn’t have a womb. All the excess simply...

Came out again.

The end result was it looked as if he had cum inside of he six, seven times. Not just ... twice.

Lou grinned, slowly as he heard his wife’s panting moans. “Well, well...” He managed to purr the words out, despite his thundering heart, despite his burning lungs. He looked back, then gently took hold of his wife’s arm, tugging her wasp-body forward. She looked at him in dazed, cock drunk confusion. Lou crooned. “You made quite a mess, little hive mind. Naught hive mind. Dirty little slutty hive mind. Look at all this cum...” He turned her head with his hand, gripping her hair. “Look at how much cum is wasted.”

“M ... Muah?” Bea mumbled, unable to quite form words.

“You know what naughty little slutty hive minds do when they make a mess?” Lou purred. “They clean it up.”

He pushed forward and Bea made a confused noise – and then her yellow face pressed to the blue-black thighs of her moth body, her eyes the only thing visible over her own rump. Her tongue flicked out and she moaned, muffled, against her own sex as her moth body flung her head back and let out a keening mewling noise. “Lord! Ah! Master! It’s too much! Nnnh!” She quivered. “Ah ... I’m losing my mind!” She moaned as Lou used his own hand to keep her wasp body’s head against her sex.

“Come on. Lick yourself clean, hive mind,” Lou purred.

He was hard again.

Oh to be a teenager, he thought.

When, after three hours, he was completely spent, collapsed on his back, with each of his wife’s incredibly well stuffed bodies around him, laying on him, cuddling against him, Lou nodded and said: “How was that?”

“I believe that I like femdom!” Bea sounded drunk.

Work fell into a rhythm. Study, build, plan, occasionally fuck. The telescopic observations of the Invisible Hand told a comforting story: It was as cold and as quiet as any starship was capable of being while still maintaining their cryocrypts. It was impossible that anyone onboard was awake at all – Lou would need to dress in heated armor and survival gear to walk around inside, assuming he didn’t just stay in his life support suit.

The only problem that came with the planning was when, two months later, with the first test of the stabdrive, Beatrice learned that Lou planned to be on the ship heading to the Invisible Hand.

“You WHAT!?” Bea exclaimed from three mouths simultaneously, while Lou was watching the readout from the small spar of metal that pushed the stabdrive out ahead of the lighthugger. That was the only way to test the thing safely – to fire it out front of the ship, while simultaneously pushing the main drive up to compensate for the counter-thrust. Even that was a risk, considering the energies contained in a stabdrive, but Lou had exhaustively gone through the calculations over a three day period. Even if the worst, most catastrophic explosion occurred, there was enough void between the ice armor and enough ice armor between them that the end result would be acceptable damage to the ship. It still hadn’t been any less nerve wracking.

The end result, though, had been that the drive had checked out on everything the tutorials said that it needed to check out on. It was capable of sustaining two gravities of acceleration at demi-light speed for long enough to catch up with the coasting Invisible Hand.