Chapter Eight: Sarah takes Command
“...what?” Aiden asked.
“I’m a Commander,” Sarah said. And before Aiden could say anything again, she held up her finger and went sprinting off. Aiden followed, his brow furrowing, and they came to the lab that Tasha was still holed up inside of. Tasha currently had the sex robot on her belly on one of the tables, the back of her head open to reveal the pale, glowing blue cube that was her quantum computer. Sarah was pretty sure that the cube didn’t need to glow, but some corporate technician had added the LEDs in because some marketing expert had said ‘listen, no one is going to buy that it is a quantum computer if it isn’t glowing.’ Tasha smiled at the two of them, with a coy little giggle.
“Did you two have fun?” she asked. “...uh, Sarah?”
Sarah was flinging open the small containers that held the specimens that the lab had used for testing out exactly how deadly the planetary atmosphere was for Earth life. The answer had been extremely and quickly, but more than a few lab rats had been kept around for future testing. Sarah fished one out with a quick grab, and her wrist tentacles had already plunged into the creature. The mouse squeaked and squirmed.
“What are you doing?” Tasha asked.
“I had the idea,” Sarah said. “Commanders don’t just build tanks and vehicles and guns right from the get go. They build tools with their maker, then they use those tools to make tools to make tools to boom , army.” She grinned, then gently placed the mouse on the ground. It was already begin to bubble and froth – and the cocoon that they recognized from Aiden’s transformation flowed across it. Sarah’s stomach growled and she rubbed her belly. “Does make me hungry.”
“Hungry, huh?” Aiden asked, his voice teasing.
“Not for that.” Sarah paused. Her eyes darted down to the curve of his cock.
Before she knew it, she was on her knees. Her hand gripped the base of Aiden’s cock, feeling every bump and every ridge of his green member, and his scent filled her nostrils and made her head spin with eager desire. Her tongue slid along her black lips, making them glisten. Making them gleam . Her eyes flicked up, looking into Aiden’s pure golden irises. She saw the look of mild terror in them and reveled in it. Her fingers tightened and her claws gently brushed against her palm as she sloooowly slid out her tongue. And out. And out. And out some more. She wrapped her black tongue around the tip of his cock again and again and again, drawing him between her sharp teeth with a gentle tenderness – letting him feel their sharpness only through the softness of her tongue. Her eyes fluttered shut and her head-spines tightened around her head while her mouth applied juuuust enough pressure to jerk a whine from Aiden’s throat. His head rolled back and his fingers rasped through her head spines.
“G-Guys?” Tasha whispered. “I...I’m right...”
The mechanic trailed off, her mouth hanging open as she watched Sarah casually take the entirety of Aiden’s massive, thick, alien cock down her throat. With ease. She didn’t even make a choking noise. Aiden did – he choked out: “ Jesus Christ .” Then he started to fuck back. It was a reflexive movement, a sudden driving of his hips, and Sarah loved it. His knot bumped against her lips and his firm green balls rebounded from her chin as he used her throat, exactly the way she liked it to be used: Hard. Mercilessly. Sarah wasn’t actually sure if she liked it because of how she had been transformed, or if the urge to be throat fucked had lurked under Dr. Kappel’s unassuming exterior her whole life and needed extremis to be pushed to it.
There was one downside to being throat fucked this hard, this desperately.
It was over far too fast. Sarah barely had time to really get dreamy and head-fucked before Aiden threw his head back and groaned low in his throat and his cum began to pump down her throat. Thick, hot blasts of it filled her throat, bubbling up past his cock, almost dripping from her nose as he thrust abortively once, twice, three times. Each time, he dumped more cum into her throat, and his hands tightened on her head spines even more. When he drew back, he was gasping and his cock glistened with her spittle and his cum, smeared and messy.
“Tasha,” Sarah said, remarkably easily, her lips smeared with cum and looking stringy. Drippy. “Clean him off.”
“Y...I...uh...” Tasha stammered, then walked forward. “Fuck it.”
As she knelt down and began to cover Aiden’s alien dick with eager, wet, sloppy kisses, Sarah stood, her head still spinning slightly. But she found her excitement to see her own handiwork overrode her desire to push Tasha away and claim her dick again. Besides, she wasn’t their boss. Or their mistress. She’d be fair. And besides, if Aiden’s enhanced constitution was anything like hers, then he’d be ready to go again soon. She beamed, though, as she saw that the cocoon had swelled from being mouse sized to being dog sized. And as Tasha finished licking Aiden’s cock entirely clean, it had grown to matching the cock size of one of the dire hounds that some corporations sold to wealthy dogists.
Tasha drew back, smacking her lips. “There, clean,” she said.
Then she fell back onto the ground, her face rapidly beginning to turn black, veins bulging.
“Sarah!” Aiden shouted.
Sarah smacked her forehead. “Shit. I forgot – my spittle, must have some of my nerve toxin on it.” She shook her head, then crawled over. She slipped her wrist tentacles out and into the prone Tasha, biting her lip. She closed her eyes and tried to change her as little as humanly possible. It was actually harder than she expected – she was getting a better sense for what, exactly, she could change...and feeling the changes she could effect was a bit like being a kid with a new game, glowing with different purchase options. It was so hard to not just immediately slap your finger down on the button to buy more time upgrades, or to buy the new CrateBox. She forced herself to instead just push a nerve toxin immunity into Sarah.
And enhanced strength, constitution, maybe a slightly increased lifespan, better reflexes, cleaned out her cardiovascular system, and she fixed the minute breast cancer she felt in the woman’s left titty, regulated her hormonal cycle, and added a conscious trigger to her ovulation, so Tasha would have to actually want to be pregnant to get pregnant.
Sarah jerked her wrist back, rubbing the point where her tentacles retracted. “I...really hope that wasn’t overstepping my bounds...” She whispered as Tasha began to cocoon up.
“Is that going to happen with every girl I fuck?” Aiden asked.
“No, no, no, it was my spittle. I specifically tried to make you safe to touch,” Sarah said, smiling at him. “Now, uh, not sure when the-”
The cocoon around the mouse snapped apart with a wet squelching noise. A chunk of flesh smacked into Sarah’s cheek and hung like a wobbly, flappy flag. She peeled it away from her skin by pinching it between two of her claws and made a quiet ‘ughh’ noise – then yelped as something fluttery and slick brushed her flank. Sarah sprang to her feet and saw that the mouse had finished its transformation and become what she needed it too – the ‘program’ for the ‘design’ had been encoded into her brain on an instinctive level. She had just thought of what she needed, then tried to make it. But she hadn’t expected its morphology to be so…
Cute.
The mouse had become what her brain claimed was a ‘constructor.’ If the idea had been to build tools to make tools, this was the first example of one. But rather than the bulky, roughly humanoid shape that she had seen in cartoon shows whenever they showed a Commander building one of their N-bot helpers, the constructor she had made looked rather like an extinct manta ray. It floated on a pair of small crystal nubs that were pressed to the ‘ribs’ of its broad, flat belly. The crystals glowed and created an a-grav effect field, allowing it to hover with ease. Its huge, sweeping wings (which had been folded around it in the cocoon and unfurled with enough force to rip the skin apart) fluttered and caught the air, sending it skittering around the room like ice tossed onto a hot skillet.
Its front had three midnight black eyes set in a
|/ pattern above a pair of broad mandibles that ended in a pair of rather intricate manipulators – bone clockwork, connected by gristle and sinew and able to flick and click and squirm. Like skeletal hands. Those hands brushed her thigh, and then the whole of the constructor brushed against her, before rearing up and wrapping its manta ray body around her. Aiden cried out, grabbing for a wrench – but Sarah laughed and squirmed as a long, pink tongue emerged from between the mandibles and began to cover her in licks.
“I get it! I get it, you know your mommy!” Sarah laughed. The constructor purred like a kitten.
When Sarah disentangled herself from it with a few giggles and snorts, the constructor began to whir around the room, bumping into walls, nosing and clicking at the various tools and machines about.
“Congratulations, Doc, it’s a...ray,” Aiden said.
“It’s back is covered with biomorphic materials – see those sacks?” she whispered. “They’re already beginning to fill as it takes in oxygen and energy. The a-grav crystals have to be drawing power from the gravitational field of the planet. It’s not much, but it...is using it to filter the air for raw materials, turning the raw materials into the biomorphic stuff .” She put her hands over her face. “Oh my god...I...” She focused and tried to think at the constructor. The constructor swung around from the door and made a quiet ‘chirrup!’ noise at her.
She felt its affirmation. Like a dog, it was eager for her to tell it to sit. Lay down.
Construct a hatchery.
“Uh...construct a hatchery?” Sarah asked.
The constructor made a mournful ‘whirhirhi’ noise, clacking its mandibles together.
“What is a hatchery?” Aiden whispered.
“I dunno,” Sarah said, shrugging. “But I figure it’s gotta be good for something.” Her brow furrowed and she snapped her fingers. “Ah! It doesn’t have enough room.”
“It told you that?” Aiden asked.
“I...” Sarah cocked her head. “Yeah. Kinda. Come on, constructor!” She patted her thigh to get its attention and headed for the door. The constructor made a happy gurgling noise and fluttered forward. “Aiden! You stay with Tasha, help her when she gets out of the cocoon.”
“Help as in...”
“You can fuck, I’m not your sex boss,” Sarah said over her shoulder, the constructor squeezing through the door and the airlock beyond with remarkable alacrity.
Aiden looked down at the slowly growing cocoon that held his coworker. He sighed. “Anyone else feel like today is just getting weirder?”
The cocoon did not respond.
***
Outside, Sarah enjoyed watching her constructor cavort and play in the open space that spread around the former site of NovaDyne’s control on Trappist-1a. It fluttered about, making churring and squealing noises, and Sarah giggled as she saw it actually manage to twist itself into doing a flip. Once it was done soaring around, she focused and gave it the order again to construct a hatchery. This time, the constructor chirruped and warbled in affirmation and a gauzy outline of a large rectangle filled her vision. Sarah blinked slightly, but when her eyes closed, the image remained. She started to sweep her gaze around and saw the rectangle flow along the ground – turning red where it intersected with trees or extant buildings.
“Ah!” she said. “A template...”
She swung her gaze around until the rectangle turned green and it was situated near the petrochemical tanks in the garage. She focused, and the constructor made another happy gurgle. Then it fluttered forward, its manta ray body flowing over the ground with liquid smoothness. It reached the center of the gauzy rectangle, which vanished back into the mental space it had sprung from, then settled belly first onto the ground. And then a cocoon swept around it.
“Constructor?” Sarah whispered.
The cocoon began to swell. Tendrils – like thick, green roots – began to sweep from the bony ring that provided the base of the cocoon. They plunged into the ground and began to suck up nutrients at an alarming rate. Sarah could see them bulge and strain, and could see the ground growing cracked and parched. Others wrapped around nearby trees and shrubberies, wrenching them from the ground and throwing them with casual force into an open vent on the back of the cocoon, which swelled and chomped, filling the air with crunching. Sarah put her hands over her mouth, shocked, as the cocoon grew even larger. The constructor had been roughly as wide as a human was tall, but the cocoon it had formed had already grown to be the size of a truck. Then the size of one of the huge cargo vehicles in the garage. Then the size of a ship to space shuttle.
Sarah watched, her eyes bugging, as the cocoon swelled even further. Tentacles no longer reached outwards to grab onto raw material. Instead, they grew thicker and plunged into the ground, rooting the cocoon on the spot. Sarah could see that the skin of the cocoon was lined with veins – some as large as her entire body. Blood pumped through them and she could hear the sounds of dozens of heart beating in a continuous, drum like pattern.
The cocoon tensed.
The beating got faster and faster.
Sarah started to slowly step behind a nearby tree.
Aiden stepped out of the base. “Doc, Tasha is-”
The cocoon exploded.
Blood fountained into the air. Thick, black, gloppy blood. It sprayed outwards, then dropped downwards, splashing and roaring along the ground. Sarah sprang onto a root of the tree she was crouching behind, so her feet was out of the deluge, but rain-like pattering of hot, hot blood splattered her shoulders and her hair. She opened one eye once the rain was passed, then peeked out. Aiden stood stalk still, his arms at his side. His entire front was one big black drippy mess, while his back was nearly completely clean, sheltered from the spray. He reached up, wiped the black glop from his eyes, then flicked his hands to the side.
“Doc...” he said. “Have I ever mentioned that these aliens are fucking gross?”
“But also kind of cute?” Sarah stepped out, dainty, her feet getting slurped into the mud despite her best efforts. “Ew. Ew. Gross.”
Then she saw the hatchery.
“Whoa,” she and Aiden whispered at the same moment.
The cocoon had broken open to reveal a large, funnel shaped construction – it was clearly a building , but it was also clearly alive. It had skin drawn taut against bone struts, with thick spikes thrusting into the air, like the ridges on the back of a saurian from Earth’s Jurassic period. The funnel in the center of the building reached nearly as tall as the old scout ship had, about five stories in total, and surrounding it was maybe fifty feet of support structures. Tentacles rammed into the ground at the base, but flower like petals emerged from the middle, each one opening along the edge to reveal warm chambers that looked almost honey-comb like. Within those chambers, eggs were beginning to grow.
Sarah beamed. “Eggs!”
Aiden looked at her. “Are you sure you’re...”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “I’m not going to take over the world. This is to prevent us all from being murdered by Texas Dallas. Who is going to show up in orbit any-”
“Holy fuck !”
The two of them turned and saw that Tasha was standing in one of the doorways leading into the base. She didn’t look too different, save for having slightly firmer, slightly larger breasts. Her mouth was hanging open in shock as she gaped at the hatchery. She looked from it to Sarah, who waved at her shyly.
“You did that?” she asked.
“Well, technically, my constructor did!” Sarah said, beaming at her. “It’s making eggs.”
Tasha looked back at the hatchery. Then at Sarah. Then at the hatchery again. Then she closed her eyes. “You know what? I’m going...I’m going to go back and fiddle with the robot again. Okay?”
“Okay!” Sarah called after her. “Oh! Also, can you keep an eye on the orbital telemetry?” She bit her lip, slightly. “Though, maybe the com-trees can do that...” She rubbed her chin as the first wormlike critters started to crawl fr
om the hatchery. They slapped onto the ground and started to squirm about. They had hundreds of legs on either side, so Sarah corrected her first impression to ‘centipede like creatures.’ Aiden walked over, still wiping blood and muck from his front.
“What are these?” he asked.
“They’re...” Sarah cocked her head. “Oh. Okay. So, it took a lot out of me to make a mouse into a constructor. Well, these things are basically blank slates – masses of tissue, ready to be programmed. She chewed her lower lip and focused, trying to make the three centipedes that were squirming about before her into constructors. Instead of doing that, the worms rolled, in unison, onto their bellies. Sarah’s brow furrowed. “Come on! Turn into-” She stopped. “Ah! Ah! Aiden! Help me with this, we need buckets!” She turned and rushed for the garage, Aiden following after.
Soon, both of them were jogging back out, having found buckets in the supply room. Both had two buckets – and all four buckets were flowing over with thick, viscous oil.
“They need carbon to break down and rebuild – the same as the nanofabricators in a corporate army,” Sarah said.
“I thought oil killed things,” Aiden said. “Like what happened to our oceans.”
“Please. It was mostly the temperature and acidification and plastic that did that – oil was too localized,” Sarah said, shrugging one shoulder. “But also, these are genetically engineered larva used to rapidly construct a military. I think they can handle it. And even if they can’t, the hatchery is, well, it’s doing its job!”
Aiden nodded. “And you think-” he stopped as Sarah set one bucket down, then hefted the other. She gulped. “You think that this will give us a fighting chance when Dallas shows up?”
“I mean..no idea,” Sarah said, shrugging. “But it’s better than sitting around and waiting to get shot by a boom gun.”
“Fair enough, Doc.”
Sarah tipped the bucket forward and thick oil splattered and dribbled onto the larva. The larva soaked it into its body, then plumped outwards, like rice in a pot. Sarah hopped backwards with a squeak as the larva ballooned into a cocoon. She laughed. “Yes! Yes! It’s working!” She splashed more oil liberally around – and soon, all three larva was beginning to grow and gestate. But she felt a faintly dislocated hunger – as if she was feeling someone else’s need. She nodded. “They need more carbon. Come on!”
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