Sarah pushed herself back up. She was now learning that while her new skull was quite thick and her new skin was resistant to impact...there was a limit. Kinetic impact was still kinetic impact, and her brain was not happy with being sloshed around wildly. The clubber lifted the now badly bent club up and over their head for another swing.
Sarah caught it. Her hand closed around the club and she wrenched it out of their awkward space suit.
“I’m not a fucking monster!” Sarah shouted, springing to her feet, her head spines flaring up, her fangs gleaming, her claws glittering as they extended to their full length. She glared at the two suited figures and tossed the gold club into the wall to her left. She had planned to just chuck it away so everyone would be far away from a weapon and the situation would deescalate. Instead, she ended up embedding the abused metal almost three inches into the wall of the habitat.
“...okay, I’m...not mentally a monster!” Sarah corrected.
The two suited figures remained perfectly still.
Tasha was the one who spoke up first. “...Dr. Kappel?”
“Yes! Thank you!” Sarah sagged with relief.
“Dr. Kappel, uh, no offense, but what the fuck?” the clubber asked. She reached up, then depolarized their helmet. Under the glass, they looked like the classic tomboy: Short cropped hair, hazel eyes, lots of freckles. Their facial features were somewhere between sline and middle class, with the epicanthic folds making it an even bet as to which way she’d go. Her hair was blond, which Sarah guessed was a dye job. She pointed at Sarah. “You’re green.”
“I know,” Sarah said.
“And have spine hair,” she said.
“I know.”
“And fucking claws!”
“I know!” Sarah put her hands over her face.
“And...amazing tits...”
“Aiden!” Tasha hissed.
“I...sorry, just... wow ...” Aiden said, shaking her head behind her helmet. Sarah, who had gotten quite good at forgetting she was naked, crossed her arms over her breasts and glared at her.
“If your name is Aiden, why are you in...” Sarah’s eyes narrowed as she tried to find the name-plate on the spacesuit that Aiden was wearing. “Alison Yang’s suit?”
Aiden glared at Sarah. “Because changing my official name costs nearly two thousand UC to log with the UN, and almost as much in novabucks to get a change on my company citizenship card,” she, er, he said. Voice flat. Sarah wanted to hide under at least fifty layers of shame blankets. She put her hands over her mouth.
“Oh god. I’m...uh, sorry! I, uh, shit!” she whispered.
Aiden rolled his eyes while Tasha put her hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. Well, gently for a space suit squeeze. Space suits were usually stiff, so to get a shoulder squeeze to actually get felt, you kind of had to clench your hand as hard as you possibly could. And even then it was fifty fifty. But from the way Aiden smiled at Tasha, it had worked.
Sarah blushed, looked around, then grabbed one of the overdone curtains from the window. She tugged it down with a series of tearing pops , then wrapped herself in it like a crude cloak. Thus attired, she smiled weakly at the two suited figures. “So,” she said. “Uh, Aiden Yang, uh, you’re with...”
“Maintenance,” Aiden said, his voice warming slightly.
“And you, Tasha...” Sarah read off her suit. “Cline?”
Tasha smiled, shyly. “Also maint. I’m Tasha Claire Cline, or TCC, and I work with Aiden. Technicians Third Class!” She gave a little salute. She paused for a few seconds. “N-No one calls me TCC.”
“We were repairing one of the water fountains when the alert came,” Aiden said. “In the garage. The doors shut after our shift super, and when we tried the keycards after him, they bugged out.”
“Let me guess,” Sarah said, her lips pursing. “You hadn’t updated them?”
“It’s five hundred novabucks to upgrade them!” Aiden said, his voice growing tight with anger. “We’re maintenance! We’re not made of fucking money here!”
“Preach it,” Sarah said. Then, hurriedly. “I mean, I agree! I, uh, I mean, if you’re...I’m not a preacher!”
Aiden put his hands over his faceplate while Tasha giggled.
“So, what happened to you, Doc?” Aiden asked.
“Uh...” Sarah looked down at her green arms, her shoulders. Her claws. Her head spines twitched. “Is there any part of this place that’s still pressurized? So we can talk without helmets and stuff?”
The two nodded.
The pressurized section turned out to be the garage. The two maint-techs had jerry rigged an airlock by taking an airlock off one of the huge rovers and spot welding it to the door that led into the base proper. Once they were inside, they wriggled out of their suits while Sarah, who had taken just a few moments to program the order into the maker dressed herself in some clothes she had put on Craid’s tab. Since she had nearly burned through his entire checking account, she made sure to overcharge him to pay for a top of the line sports suit. The kind that would entirely seal her body to recycle sweat – or, in this case, keep her from rubbing neurotoxins on anyone.
The only downside was that she almost felt more naked in the suit than she had out of it. She looked as if her entire body had been painted in liquid laytex, drying tightly enough that it showed the folds of her sex and the bumps of her nipples. Noticing how sheer it was...made her nipples harden just a bit more. Sarah tried to ignore it as she waited for the airlock to cycle.
“You look good, tiger,” the sex bot said.
Sarah, who had not noticed the bot standing behind her, screamed and spun to face her. The sex bot was posing as erotically as she could – arms behind her back, chest thrust out, lips pouting. Sarah sighed. “Please,” she said. “Stop calling me that.”
“What name would you prefer, tiger?” the sex bot asked, her voice a husky croon.
Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it. “What’s your AI level?”
“Oh, tiger...” the sex bot crooned. “You want to know more about my little bimbo butt?” She giggled. “I’m a dummy little airhead, a stupid gamma-class with a level one learning hobble on me.” She giggled again, coquettishly. “You could put a cigar out on my titty and I wouldn’t even remember it tomorrow, tiger, that’s what a bimbot I am.”
Sarah gaped at her.
The sex bot cocked her head. “Do you wish to adjust my settings, tiger?”
“Dear god yes!” Sarah said.
“I have five pre-sets, or you can use my full option menu!” She crooned. “The pre-sets are sexy librarian, sheltered MILF in both married and recently divorced modes-”
The inner airlock door opened and Sarah held up her hands. “Please, uh, go into...diagnostics mode,” she said.
“Are you sure? That will take...” The sex bot paused. “Two hours.”
“Perfect,” Sarah said.
The sex bot nodded, then closed her eyes, her head slumping forward. Once Sarah stepped away from the bot, she closed the inner door, then turned to face Aiden and Tasha. Both of them were dressed in their maint jumpsuits – formless, ugly, gray things with big NovaDyne logos over the hearts. Aiden brushed his hands through his short cropped hair, while Tasha shook her head from side to side, sending her hair tumbling along her shoulders. She kept it long and had clearly applied some kind of high tech coating to it, since it looked completely unmussed by the suit. Seeing Sarah’s look, she blushed: “I-It’s only fifty NB for a smart spray, a-and I worked out my budget, I...I like...” She looked down. “I like looking pretty, okay?”
“It’s fine!” Sarah said, hurriedly. “Like, I get it.”
Tasha smiled.
“Talk,” Aiden said, sticking out his chin. “Now.”
Sarah sighed. And she told them everything. It came out haltingly at first, then in a bigger and bigger rush. She paused to answer some questions – and her voice caught when she came to the harder parts of the story. The tentacles. Dr. Bowers death.
The visions of humanity, reduced to nothing but one great big mushy mass of biomatter, used by some alien life form for god knows what. Everything. Once she was done, she was sitting down on one of the stools in the garage, next to the tool bench. Tasha had taken a stool next to her, while Aiden was pacing back and forth. Aiden punched his palm with his left hand, scowling.
“And they just threw you in a lab? Fucking assholes ,” he snarled. “Fucking assholes!”
Tasha gingerly placed her hand on Sarah’s shoulder, careful to squeeze the part of her that was covered with her skintight suit. “It’s okay. I’m sure, once we send a tachyon com to corporate headquarters. We can tell them what happened, and they’ll-”
“They’ll just send a Commander and fucking do anything they can to grab the Doc!” Aiden said. “You heard what she said she can do. She’s super strong, super tough, regenerates, she’s basically Superman, oh, also, did you forget the part where she...” Aiden trailed off.
Tasha shook her head. “No, no, I’m sure that Mr. Butane will understand if we could just explain it to him!”
Sarah sighed. “I’m not sure I agree, Tasha.” She paused, looking at Aiden.
Aiden was looking off into the middle distance, his eyes wide and unfocused. Sarah slooowly reached out and tried to snap her fingers underneath the transman’s nose. But her claws made it trickier than she’d have thought. She ended up having to just click her claws harder and harder, until Aiden blinked and shook his head, looking at Sarah.
“Earth to Aiden,” Sarah said, grinning. “What’s up, you kinda spaced out on us.”
“You turned Dr. Bowers into a dog-thing,” Aiden said. “Can you handle testosterone?”
Tasha gasped.
Sarah blinked. “I...” She stammered. “I don’t know. I’m not a medtech, I specialized in exobiology.” She bit her lower lip. “H-How much of the...have you...” She waved her hands vaguely. “You know, what have you done? I don’t, uh, really know how, uh, this...how the...how the thing...” She ducked her head forward, her head spines compressing against her scalp nervously. “...you know...works...” She never felt more utterly stupid and ignorant in her life.
Aiden sighed. “I’m in maint, Doc. I don’t have health insurance. Even if I did, unless I had class two it wouldn’t cover cosmetics unless I pulled HRT out of a loot box.” He shrugged slightly. “I could afford it with UC if I saved every single frigging penny I made for the next forty years...so...” He shrugged. “I figure, since I’m stranded here with you-”
“Until rescue arrives!” Tasha piped up.
“-I might as well ask. Right?” Aiden grinned at her.
Sarah frowned. “Okay...” She said, slowly. “I mean, why not? I’ve been curious about my body and what it can do, exactly. But!” She held up her finger. “We need to do this properly.” Her memory flashed on the feeling of Dr. Bowers, in his virile alien form, slamming into her. She remembered the strength of her orgasm. Her cheeks heated. “A-And by that, I mean, uh, we need to do tests. And in a lab!” She nodded. “In a nice, virile lab.”
“Virile?” Aiden asked.
“Sterile!” Sarah shouted at the top of her lungs.
***
It took the better part of a day to repressurize and repair a lab, using the industrial maker in the garage to print the supplies and tools, even if that ended out tapping out both maint workers repair budgets and their private budgets. But, as Tasha pointed out, they’d need a lab to live, so...they might as well burn the money. They printed out great sheets of intelligent plastics, which unfolded to cover up holes. They printed out pressurized O2 tanks and portable solar collectors, to make up for no longer having the fusion reactor that served as the scout ship and the lab’s power source. They made cheap ration bars to chew and eat, and printed out several heavy lamps to keep the illumination up.
Once they were done, the ruddy red sun had set and the jungle was glowing like a distant cityscape. Aiden and Tasha watched as Sarah paced around in the lab, turning on computers and activating the equipment. Normally, she’d need to wait in a queue for this, or request that one of the senior scientists give her the chance. But now? She was effectively the head of research...once she had tricked the genetic lock into thinking that she was Dr. Gibson.
And so, she was able to release a small mouse from the control samples. The tiny critters had been left enough food, water and air to have survived the evacuation without a glance. The mouse squeaked and cheeped as it walked out of its niche and onto the lab bench.
“What are you going to do with it?” Tasha asked, sounding nervous. “It’s so cute...”
“I’m just going to try and change something minor and simple about it. Like it’s fur color,” Sarah said. “We want to start small, with simple steps, so we can track the exact means of change and learn more about how, exactly this works. Now, stand back.” She started to peel the glove of her suit off, revealing her green fingers and her wrist. She focused and the small wires that she had extended before shot out and slammed into the side of the mouse. The mouse let out a little squeak, writhing and twitching. Tasha put her hands over her mouth – and Sarah for lack of anything more scientific, focused on black fur. Black fur. Black fur.
The wires retracted and the mouse remained slumped on the lab desk.
“D-Did you kill it?” Aiden asked.
“Uh, no, no,” Sarah said, dragging over a biological analysis sensor. It was huge and bulky had over designed, and as she looked through the scope, she started to get bombarded with scientific information about the mouse. She deployed a blood sampler and whistled softly. “There are minute cells – nano scale – that are going in and adjusting the DNA. And...oh. Wow.” She pulled her head back. The mouse, before her eyes, was turning a sleek, glossy black. “Okay...” She whispered. “I seem to be capable of spontaneously generating biological nano that can do indepth genetic modifications...” She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. “I wonder...”
Again, her wires slammed into the mouse, which had just gotten back onto its feet. It squeaked and thumped onto its side again – provoking another gasp from Tasha.
A few seconds later, the mouse had been wrapped in a cocoon, just like Dr. Bowers, but on a far smaller scale. Sarah watched silently through the analysis scope – her eyes widening as she saw biological structures that boggled the imagination. Like a maker, the cocoon was creating an environment that was specifically designed for nanoscale construction: Hot and rich with building blocks. But she saw that the neural pattern of the mouse’s brain and spinal column had been transposed into the walls of the cocoon, essentially keeping its brain intact before integrating it with the body again. “It never even loses consciousness,” she whispered.
“Doc...” Aiden said, his voice husky. “What the absolute fuck are you doing to that mouse?”
The cocoon exploded outwards with a loud splort . And emerging from the ruin of skin and greenish glop emerged a sleek, black furred kitten. It meowed – sounding deeply confused. Sarah grinned, slowly.
“It’s so easy ,” she whispered. “I just need to visualize the changes and they happen, so long as the entity has the resources – and I can be extremely efficient. I threaded the bones with some metal from the table, see the pitting?” She pointed at the discolored patch of metal on the countertop. “Not only is it a kitten...”
The kitten leaped off the table and sailed across the room to land on Tasha’s lap. There, it began to purr. Tasha, who had frozen in shock, started to hesitantly pet it. Her fingers caressed through its fur gently as she smiled slowly.
“It’s a super kitten,” Sarah said.
“Holy shit, Doc,” Aiden whispered. “...can I get superpowers too?”
Sarah knew that it was absolutely insane to leap from animal testing to human testing. It was even more insane to try some major genetic augmentations with a power she barely understood. She needed weeks, months, maybe even years more of study before she really knew what she was do
ing. She opened her mouth to say no.
“Sure!” she said.
That’s not no, Sarah, she thought.
“Fucking sweet !” Aiden rubbed his palms together. “Like, super strength?”
“Maybe?” Sarah said, spreading her hands, a giddy excitement burning through her. She had to see what she could do when she was doing things intentionally. “Uh, how about we just try and go for max human stats and the proper gender?” She paused. “Or...sex? Or...expression on...a...spectrum or...what? What is the right term?”
Aiden shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Right,” Sarah muttered under her breath.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Tasha whispered, biting her lip. “What if it goes wrong?”
Sarah and Aiden both considered it. Well. Sarah considered it. Aiden looked uncertain for roughly five point six nanoseconds, then grinned and nodded. “If I die, fuck it, I’ve wanted to die for years,” he said, walking forward casually, which provoked an alarmed cry from Tasha. Sarah held out her hand. Her fingers touched Aiden’s cheek – five points of contact that made Sarah buzz with eagerness that felt almost sexual. No. No. There was nothing almost about it. Her wires slipped from her wrist and she felt as if she was far more in control of it this time. They feathered along Aiden’s lips and Aiden shivered, his mouth opening, as if to ask a question. Then, with a fierce thrust , Sarah sent both wires up Aiden’s nose.
Aiden’s eyes widened – and then one went half hooded. Their left eye skidded to the side and Sarah felt the most...intensely masculine feeling she had ever felt in her life. She could feel her tendrils, penetrating into Aiden’s body. Pushing into him. Claiming him. Aiden made a tiny, whimpering moaning noise as Sarah placed her thumb onto his mouth, then pressed it against his tongue. Slavishly, Aiden began to suck on her thumb, his eyes closing as the tendrils thrusting up his nostrils began to pump into his head. Aiden’s head rocked back and forth, his hips twitching as his hands twitched at his sides.
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