Chapter 5

2081 a.d. – The Fourth Month

Spatial Experiment

The great ship had entered the asteroid belt. The two princesses took their assigned turn on Bridge watch, manning the heavy lasers they used to clear their orbit of asteroidal debris.

'I wish I could straddle my legs around this fucking great gun and fire it up my cunt, ' Beth thought, sending the erotic image directly into her sister's mind.

She'd just finished carving up several large rocks into little pieces of gravel that could no longer threaten the great ship and was imagining the huge maw of a giant pussy threatening them so she could slice it into great chunks of raw, orgasmic cunt meat with that magnificent, sizzling beam. Striking a frozen ice asteroid with the superheated laser quite often shattered a target into thousands of brilliant, tiny shards, creating an expanding sphere that sparkled for a few seconds in the light of the distant sun, and she imagined herself right next to one of those exploding rocks, her body pulverized by thousands of tiny, razor-sharp slivers at they exploded outward.

'Gods, girl, ' Béla pleaded with her ever-horny sister, 'lay off with your overactive imagination before one of us actually tries one of your crazy stunts!' She didn't suggest which one of them might ... Beth didn't need any more encouragement. She wouldn't hesitate to throw herself '(or me)' in front of a fiery comet if she thought they could get a more powerful orgasm by doing that. 'Better keep that thought to myself, too!'

'Sometimes I feel like I want to be out there when one of those rocks explodes, perforating my body with thousands of those sharp, brilliant little shards, ' Beth mentally replied, knowing all these continuous erotic thoughts were making Béla so horny she could hardly stand there and watch the monitors. She knew that Béla's sweet pussy was quivering with desire. She could even smell it.

'There's nothing stopping you from going out there... ' Béla thought back, her forced calmness surprising her sister.

'We can't live in a vacuum, can we?' Beth asked, suddenly hopeful of a brand new erotic adventure.

'Humans can't, ' Béla responded, deliberately baiting her sister. 'I've never tried... '

The two princesses left their mental conversation at that while they continued their watch. Béla was happy, though. She had finally succeeded in getting Beth's sexually obsessed mind off her constant erotic teasing. It occurred to Béla that Beth had become the more dominant of the pair. Béla liked being dominant, too, but she usually seceded to Beth's wishes, allowing her to control their sexcapades most of the time, especially the 'what' and 'how often' parts.

'We're both dominant, ' Béla decided, 'but with different people.'

After their watch, they went to the communal bathes. Béla looked at her sister quizzically. "Well, are you going to try it?" she asked, casually baiting her sister.

Beth was still thinking seriously about it, obsessed with the idea of experiencing a new sensation. It was a big chance she was taking. It was possible that she just might explode in a vacuum like a big balloon. That thought was pretty exciting to her, too.

'Well, okay, ' Beth thought bravely into her sister's mind. 'Here goes!'

She vanished.

Béla closed her eyes and dream-walked outside the great ship to look for her. She wasn't worried about Beth. Nothing short of actual vaporization with a blaster could kill either one of them at this stage of their abilities.

Béla located her sister and floated over beside her. Beth's hair was standing straight out from her head. When she'd teleported from the communal baths, her hair had been wet. Now, it was frozen. The water had instantly evaporated from her hair, leaving it looking like that.

'You look funny!' Béla thought cheerily, sending an image of her laughing along with an image of what Beth's hair looked like.

'I feel funny!' Beth thought back, still amazed at her sensations as her flesh began to freeze solid.

She turned her head to look where Béla was dream-walking. There were ice crystals around her eyes and nose where moisture had vaporized into the vacuum. Beth was holding her mouth shut to keep her tongue from hanging out. She couldn't blink, as her eyelids had frozen. There were ice crystals forming on her nipples and her skin was rapidly turning gray as the blood beneath her skin solidified. As Beth moved again, her skin cracked where it had frozen and still-warm blood sprayed out of the crack, instantly crystallizing and evaporating into nothing as the infinity of space sucked it away.

'It's really, really, really cold out here!' Beth decided, beginning to panic. 'I'm going back in!'

She vanished.

Béla woke up. Beth was sitting waist-deep in the water next to her. The water was boiling around her as hydrogen molecules froze and separated themselves from the oxygen molecules in the water. After a moment, as her skin temperature got closer to normal, Beth began to shiver violently.

"I suppose that's a natural reaction to being dumped into a vacuum," Béla suggested. "How do you feel?"

"I feel fucking frozen!" Beth exclaimed, still shivering. "The first thing that happened was that the air was just sucked right out of my lungs – through my mouth, my eyes, my ears ... My eardrums burst! That hurt more than everything else did! And my tongue was hanging almost a foot out of my mouth! I even had air coming out of my butt! And then I started to freeze! My eyes froze open! My skin was frozen and started to crack! I even had an icicle growing between my legs as moisture was sucked out and froze down there."

Béla laughed, imagining an icicle hard-on between her sister's legs. She projected the image to Beth.

Still shivering, Beth laughed too, but she sent back the thought, 'That's not what it felt like!'

Over the next few days, most of Beth's long, luscious hair fell out, distressing her greatly. The medical officer, upon learning of her spatial experiment, determined that her hair had simply gotten too cold.

"It'll grow back, Princess," he told her. "The hair follicles on your head are still alive. With a microscope, you can even see your hair growing. In a few months, maybe even weeks, it'll look normal again and you'll forget all about it."

Beth returned to their shared quarters in a funk. Béla understood. She'd lost her hair in a fire a few hundred years after she'd left Babylon.

"Don't worry about his lack of interest," Béla consoled her sister, referring to the medical officer's attitude. "He just doesn't understand how much a girl's identity depends on her hair."

"I'm ugly!" Beth whined. "What am I going to do?"

"You're beautiful to me," Béla suggested.

That got her a really mean look from Beth. "I'm going to go blow myself up!"

She vanished.

"Wait!" Béla cried and teleported down to the arborium, looking for her.

'Where are you?' Béla shouted in her mind. She wasn't there! 'Where'd you go?'

She teleported back to her quarters. 'Praetor, where is Princess Beth?'

'Princess Beth is not aboard the ship, ' the Praetor responded.

'Where in the hell did she go?' Béla wondered. She closed her eyes and created an image of Beth, just before she disappeared.

'Where are you?' she asked, concentrating on the image.

'Nowhere ... Everywhere... '

'She never rematerialized!' Béla suddenly realized. 'Oh, great gods! She's in between spaces!'

Béla had no idea how she was going to work this. In this insane attempt to find Beth, she was going to teleport, pulling herself out of normal space, and not push herself back in! She formed an image explaining what had happened to her sister and what she was about to do and sent the image to the Praetor for historical reference, just in case...

'Do you have any data on this phenomenon?' she asked, hoping the Praetor had, sometime, somewhere, run across this phenomenon before.

The Praetor responded negatively, then it actually wished her success on her journey and please, if possible, bring back more information on the subject of the teleportation zone as a separate universe, as it had no data except for what the two princesses had, so far, discovered.

Béla teleported, pulling herself out of normal space. She stopped, not allowing herself to rematerialize, and expanded her awareness, trying to determine 'where' she was. Her only point of reference was the faint flicker of light from the image of her living quarters.

'Beth! Where are you?' Béla cried out in her mind. The nothing surrounding her sucked her thoughts away. She pushed against nothing, trying to expand her awareness.

'Beth, Darling, please don't be lost in here!' Béla pleaded, desperate for any kind of contact with her beloved sister.

When she tried, she found she could move, after a fashion – mostly closer or farther away from the image of her bed, her only other point of reference. In moments, though, she'd managed to move far enough so that her living quarters were no longer visible, even in this pitch blackness. Now, Béla had no clue as to what direction, if any, she went. When she pushed, she simply felt movement. It seemed that hours went by, but she wasn't about to return to the physical universe without her sister.

'Beth! Where are you?' Béla cried out in her mind, probably for the thousandth time.

She 'moved' again, and called out again. She was starting to get hungry but still she refused to give up.

'I'm probably travelling in circles, ' Béla thought, considering the horrible possibility that her sister might be forever lost in here. 'I'm not even sure if our individual minds use the same – 'absence' – to teleport through. She might be trapped in her own negative universe, separated from the rest of us, forever!'

'Beth! Please!' Béla cried again, becoming more desperate. She moved again. She touched something, then it was gone.

'There's something in here!' Béla realized, suddenly terrified.

Unusual life forms in unusual spaces was not a subject she could comfortably think about, especially after her experience with the 'living gown' that had tried to eat her. As she remembered the garment, it seemed familiar, somehow – like she should have known what it was when she saw it. As she thought about the living gown, it occurred to her that she was expecting something to happen. When nothing happened, she began to feel confused.

'I'm not being ... directed, ' she realized, surprised that she felt upset about that. 'I've achieved 'carte blanche'. I shouldn't require direction... ' But she knew that, occasionally, she received direction, and receiving direction helped her to focus. She didn't know what the direction might be, or who or what...

'Well, the 'who' would be the Praetor, ' but that didn't help. She needed to know the 'what'. Toward what purpose was the Praetor guiding her? And why did the Praetor sometimes steal her thoughts, or make her forget something? She knew this was important, but she didn't even know what 'great achievement' she might be being guided toward. The absolute mental silence meant that she was floating free, completely devoid of influence for the first time, ever. Even the Praetor couldn't monitor her thoughts in here...

Something brushed her arm!