Chapter 7: Fruity

The dreaded day finally arrived. They dressed in the cumbersome pressure suits, which for three of them were now rather oversized, and made themselves climb up and down to the cryo unit. It was a wreck, as they knew, but at least the bodies were neatly bagged and taped, and anonymous apart from a label.

One by one, twenty-eight times, they solemnly despatched their dead colleagues through the escape hatch, after Kaygoo had given them the signal that the bodies would have a trajectory into the fiery sun.

“I feel bad that I can’t remember them,” muttered Melissa as she closed the hatch for the last time.

“I know,” Isobel touched her arm with her mechanical hand. “But they’d understand. In fact they’d be thrilled if they knew we’d succeeded so well that we had new brain cells.”

“We have to make the mission a success, in their memory,” suggested Susan.

“Yes,” agreed Leila, “that’s what they’d want.”

They clambered back to the control unit and undressed into their lightweight minidresses. They huddled together, consoling each other with hugs and caresses, while they waited for one of them to provide a fresh impetus. With the spaceship’s low gravity it hardly took any effort to stand even for hours.

“So what now?” asked Melissa eventually. It had been the end of something.

“I don’t fancy being stuck in here for another millennium and a half, to be honest,” said Isobel.

“Yes it’s all changed now,” agreed Susan, “the mission and what we’re trying to do. Well, let’s have a look at these planets.”

They all moved over to the big screen, so Leila could bring up the scanners.

“There’s one planet,” she pointed, “looks about the right temperature to be habitable, a suitable distance from its sun, and big enough to have an atmosphere. Though it’s a bit small and not turning that slowly.”

As they drew nearer the girls couldn’t help checking over the analysis rather hopefully. The atmosphere was thick enough to give the surface protection from meteorites, solar flares and too much radiation. Gravity would be about 0.25g, which would be okay with the modifications they’d already made to their bodies. There was surface water, even.

“Only two percent free oxygen,” Leila read off the atmosphere analysis with a sigh, “forty-nine percent nitrogen, forty-eight percent carbon dioxide, one percent various trace gasses like argon. It’s not habitable.”

“Looks like it’s not detecting any life at all?” said Isobel. “Well, just plant life.”

“No that’s right,” Leila was peering at the data. “It’s a youngish planet, compared to Earth.”

“Oh well,” sighed Susan, “we need oxygen, whatever’s down there. Where’s the next star system?”

“Three hundred and seventy years.”

“Shit,” groaned Melissa. “We’ll go insane in three hundred and seventy years cooped up in here!”

“You’re not saying you could get bored with sex?” grinned Isobel, stroking Melissa’s pert, creaseless ass.

“Suppose...” mused Izzy two months later, “we could breath CO2 instead of our normal air?” They were lazing in the farm, surrounded by CO2-breathing plants - it had finally occurred to them that, while they were making up their minds about a fifth person, they had enough spare budget to have a garden there with a lawn, and ‘sunbathe’ in the low-level radiation coming in through the translucent roof. The greenery was pleasant and they’d found the oxygen-rich atmosphere made sex even better.

“That’s a bit fundamental isn’t it?” asked Melissa.

“Yeees,” agreed the molecular biologist, “it wasn’t ever done on Earth, but once you start thinking about it ... in principle we just need to strip the carbon atom then we have two oxygen atoms; though the bond is strong.”

“What about animals?”

“There won’t be any, with so little oxygen. Well, as far as we know. Anything that breathes CO2 is a plant. On Earth at least.”

“What about the plants?” asked Susan. “Generating oxygen I mean.”

“Well to change the whole atmosphere... “ Leila answered, “it will happen over time, but we’d be talking millions of years.”

“Oh.”

“But if we could create some spare electrons in the lungs...” mused Izzy, “we might be able to knock an oxygen atom off the CO2 molecule, in one lung, breathe out the CO and pass the oxygenated gas to the other lung...”

“We have plenty of electrical energy in the body, don’t we?” Melissa remembered.

“All the signalling in the body is chemically generated electricity,” Izzy nodded. “And we’ve got two lungs. Plasmons ... Let me work on it...” she disappeared off to the Research Unit.

“What shall we do for our fifth person?” Susan asked the remaining two.

“Another five foot girl?” said Leila. “Isn’t that what we decided?”

“Yes, okay, I was just thinking about kickstarting the process really. We could clone one of us, for example, or...”

“I’ve been developing a plant,” Melissa was grinning. “A little side project, in the farm. Would you like me to show you? It might help us decide.”

“A plant?” Leila asked.

“There’s a connection?” Susan was trying to guess.

“Mmmm, well I think so.” Melissa stood up and led them over to a corner, where she steered them to a bush, hidden mysteriously within a group of larger bushes. On it were hanging a number of large, pink fruit. The fruit were cylindrical, about 25 centimetres long and and 4 or 5 across. The lower end was rounded and slightly bulbous, and the whole surface was strongly textured.

“Liss,” Susan laughed, “so this is why you’ve been spending all that time in here!” She hadn’t looked at such things much on the knowledgenet, but she knew what they looked like!

“They’re just about ripe,” smiled Melissa, letting go of her and reaching forward to pluck one. She gave a twist and a tug, and there it was in her hand. “Or grown. Actually they don’t really ripen they stay nice and firm for a long time. Help yourselves,” she was heading back to the lawn.

Leila and Susan stood watching their friend slip her dress off, lie down, scoop her long blonde hair to the side, open her legs and begin to work the fruit inside her slim little body. It obviously wasn’t the first time. Melissa was grinning in anticipation, working it to and fro, lubricating it as she went, with her plentiful pussy juice.

Susan found herself caressing Leila’s pert ass next to her, while the fruity sex unfolded in front of them. Leila’s perfectly formed little body leaned back into her, and in a moment their dresses were on the floor too, and they were rubbing their firm, sensitive tits together, and their plump mons, looking sideways at Melissa’s writhing form, while Melissa gazed back up at them.

“God, that thing in her pussy really sets her off,” Leila murmured.