He snapped his arm around. Sarah had been pretty sure she was beyond boomgun range.
She was wrong.
The shard of contained antimatter flew through the air in what felt like glacial slow motion.
Sarah sprang aside, flipping through the air. The explosion still caught her and slammed her against a tree with enough force to leave her head ringing. She sprawled in what felt like thick, gloppy mud – and when she got her head up, it was to gasp for air. She heard stomping sounds and wriggled onto her back, just in time to see Commander Dallas standing above her. His suit had no hands – but with a flash, the nanites hazing around his maker constructed a hand at the end of his right arm, which he used to grab her by the throat and lift her into the air. Bladelings screeched in fury – and she heard the stuttering roar of PPGs as combots opened up.
Dallas chuckled through her radio link. “That shit died six centuries ago, you know?”
Sarah grabbed at his wrist, her legs kicking. His fingers clenched just a tiny bit harder as he held her.
“Mm...you are a pretty xeno...” he murmured. Sarah would have expected to hear the faintly rapey excitement that she’d heard from men her whole life at that kind of statement. Instead, what she heard was wistful. Almost jealous. Her brow furrowed and she gulped, trying to speak – finding she actually could. Her own grip on his wrist had given her just enough give to breathe by. And so, she opened her mouth and squeaked out.
“Actually, I’m eminently fuckable. According to a very close source!” She closed her eyes. “but you know what I also learned, Tex?”
“Heh. What?” Dallas turned and, still holding her up by her throat, began to walk back to his base. Bladelings screamed – but they didn’t charge. At a thought, Sarah kept them back. She focused on keeping herself from strangling then, just long enough to hiss.
“In biology...you gotta adapt or die...” She gulped. “And you know what the best adaptation is?”
“What?” Dallas asked, turning his head to look at her.
“Whatever gets the job done,” Sarah hissed. “And in this case...that’s... numbers .”
The forests that surrounded Dallas’ base began to shift and ripple. The trees flowed from side to side – pushed as they were moved past by something. Something fast. Something numerous. Dallas swung his head away from her and she heard a soft ‘what the fuck’ from inside his helmet. Her grin was fierce. The drones she had sent out had found their places and burrowed down. They had grown into hatcheries – taking advantage of the obscenely effective economic engine she had created. She had carbon. And so, they used that carbon – and while Dallas had focused on the stream of bladelings and spitters from her main base, a similar stream from secondary bases had grown into an ocean wave.
A wave that emerged from the jungles like a screeching hoard. Bladelings carpeted the ground, charging forward towards the base. Tanks, driving from the factory, hastily paused and swung their turrets from the attack at the fore of the base to the attack coming from every direction, all at once. They barely got their guns to aim before the first ‘ling was leaping upon their hulls. Scythes plunged into tank armor and tore, ripping and filling the air with sparks as the bladelings screeched their glee.
“Holy shit,” Dallas whispered.
Bladelings rushed. The laser obelisks and the plasma turret fired – but they couldn’t stop the attacks coming from every direction. Sarah’s critters crawled into the fusion reactor – and soon, the fusion reactor became a glowing, expanding sphere of orange light. The concussive shockwave smashed into Dallas and her and he dropped Sarah with a cry, stumbling backwards. Sarah landed, lightly. “The aliens on Proxima had fucking bows, you asshole!” She said, furiously, punching his chest armor. It crumpled under the blow of her knuckles. “The African Bloc didn’t even have makers!” She gave him a wild right cross. It struck the helmet and the armored faceplate cracked as he stumbled backwards. “And NovaDyen is a fucking shoe company!”
Dallas swung out the arm of his that contained the maker. Nano began to chew at her body, like a wind of biting insects. Sarah rolled into the muck on the ground, the blood and the mud freezing the nano into immobility. She stood, her body glistening and dripping with slippery grime. She grabbed a hunk of mud and threw it into his optics. This meant that his boomgun shot went wide, shooting into the air and landing on his own factory. As the roar filled the air, the bladelings began to dismantle the last of his tanks, while Dallas stepped backwards, nano cleaning the mud away – just in time to see Sarah leaping at him.
She tackled him to his back. The power armor crashed to the ground and Sarah grabbed onto the dent she had made, her claws digging into his metal armor. She felt that armor squealing and groaning as she pulled, her muscles straining. Sparks flew. Cables snapped and hissed, flailing like tentacles, slapping at her face. But then she was through the outer armor and into the inner cocoon of hard metal. “No, wait!” Dallas shouted. “I surrender, I-”
Her fist plunged into the cocoon, claws ripping through the hardened carbon fibers. She tore again and impact gel flowed out like viscous, bright blue blood. Her hand, pushing through the gel, found a human figure, slippery and mostly naked. Sarah stood and dragged Texas Dallas out of his suit and stood, triumphant, her hand closed tight around the loose harness of his VR-stim sim rig. Wires hung from his back like a cape, clattering along the armored front of his suit, while his body glistened and dripped with the gel that had protected him from kinetic impacts.
Dallas looked just like she remembered from the vidlink: Blue eyed, blond haired, with the augmentations that helped him link with his suit. But it was one thing to see him, in uniform, sneeringly confident. It was another thing to see him dripping with glop and utterly terrified. Sarah grinned at him. “You surrender?” she said. “Well, I suppose I- are those panties?”
Her eyes had dipped down, past the broad, triangular expanse of his chest, to his narrow hips and, yes, the frilly, bright pink girly panties that he wore.
“N-No!” Texas Dallas said. “Those are...my...I...” His cheeks were burning behind the viscous layer of glop.
Sarah blinked a few more times.
“When...you said you were wearing...” She paused. “You really weren’t kidding.”
“Listen, kill me, eat me, whatever, I don’t care,” Dallas whimpered, his voice soft. “Just don’t tell anyone about this. Please.”
Sarah slowly set him down. His feet skidded, the slippery gel having covered the soles of his feet as well. His butt slammed into the wreckage of his suit and he gaped up at her. Then he stammered, explaining further. “It’s in my contract – if I don’t present properly, if I mess up the sales of my merch, then they’ll cut the benefits on me and my extended family.”
“Present?” Sarah asked.
“You know...masculine?” Texas Dallas gulped, looking up at her.
Sarah blinked a few more times. Her mouth opened, then closed. “W-Wait, you’re...Texas Dallas. The Supreme Commander. You get basically anything you want from StarCon!”
He snorted, softly. “I’m still just an employee. I still gotta follow the rules. And corporate policy is you don’t damage the merch.” He shrugged. “S-So...I...” He sighed, slowly. His arm slid around his knees, drawing his legs up close. “I play Texas Dallas, I sign the autographs, and I drop rocks on unions until they surrender. I kill the little gray aliens that might get mad about us taking their land...and...” He trailed off, his voice growing more and more bleak. “You should kill me. If any of this gets back to StarCon-”
“I’m not going to kill you!” Sarah squeaked.
Texas Dallas blinked as he looked up at her.
Sarah sat down, blushing furiously. Her head spines twitched. “I know a bit about your body not being what you expected. Or wanted.” She bit her lip. “W-What do you prefer? Like, Texas Dallas is-”
“I kinda like it,” Texas Dallas said, casually. “It’s better than my birthname.”
“
Oh?” Sarah asked, hastily amending her opinion on Texas Dallas’ nom-de-guerre.
“ Pepe Eugenics,” he said.
“...what?” Sarah asked.
“My parents were neo-post ironicists.” Tex shook his head. “I...listen, I’ve never been beaten before. I’m going to get fired. But if I die, my contract says that my parents and my sisters still get the residuals. Well. On the action figures.” He sighed. “And they should sell for a long time if I get taken out in a-”
“I’m not going to kill you!” Sarah paused. “No. Wait. What if I had an idea that would...” She winked obviously. “Kill you.” She winked again twice more. “But you’d be alive. Still.”
Texas frowned. “Like...faking my death?”
“Like...” Sarah paused. She wasn’t sure how to say this without it sounding horrifying. “Like...um...a s-sex change. And faking your death. So, you’ll be a girl and people will think you’re dead!”
Texas Dallas blinked at her.
“I just like crossdressing, you know?”
“Oh!” Sarah blinked.
“Though, I could stand to be less beefy.” Texas looked down at his broad hands. “And I hate all this chest hair, you know.” He paused, chewing on his lower lip. “And I’d kill to be able to have more...daintiness, you know?” He smiled, shyly. “I don’t like being big and tough.”
“Or all the killing people for corporations,” Sarah said, without thinking. Then she closed her eyes as she saw Texas’ flinch. He looked away.
“Yeah...”
“Hey, it was just your job,” Sarah said, weakly. She stood, then put her hands on her hips. “And we can make it better.”
“How?” Texas asked, looking up at her. But Sarah was busy looking out, past the line of destruction that drew between her base and Dallas’. She could see Aiden, Tasha and Synth picking their way forward, flanked by anxious looking spitters and bladelings. One of the new bombardiers she had hatched was thumping along behind them, as cheerful as a large, plasma farting beetle could look. Which was remarkably chipper, all things considered. Sarah looked past them and at the slowly rising horizon.
“Well,” she said. “The Excalibur is still in orbit, right?”
“TM,” Texas Dallas said, automatically.
“No...” Sarah whispered.
“Huh?”
“I...have been paying debts and pushing papers and doing my job and trying to get a promotion for years. But you know what? Fuck it!” Sarah turned to face the sitting, still mostly blue-streaked Texas. She put her hands on her hips, her chin lifting. “It’s not the Excalibur ™ anymore. NovaDyne, StarCon, EduTech, all of them? They’ve owned me and my parents and my fucking planet for too long. And if I can beat you , I can...I can beat them !”
“So, what, you’re founding...SarahCorp?” Aiden asked, trudging up behind her – clearly having heard the last bit of the sentence.
“No,” Sarah said. “I remember what I said before – and it’s still true. No fucking bosses.”
“But we need a boss...” Tasha whispered. “R-Right?”
“Do we?” Sarah asked as her bladelings, no longer being ordered to attack or kill, began to chase and play with one another among the jungle trees of Trappist-1a. “I mean, heck, we’ve got...” She knelt down, then grabbed onto the maker-arm of Texas’ old power armor. She wrenched it free with a spray of sparks and then tossed it into the air before catching it again on her shoulder. She grinned. “We’ve got a maker with a Commander’s authorization and we’ve got me. I can literally engineer biology at the level this maker can engineer non-organics. We’ve got a fully equipped StarCon battleship, the advice of the Supreme Commander, and a fully charged Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive...” She licked her lips. “I think we can do this.”
The others exchanged glances.
Aiden shrugged. “Hey. It’s better than getting a new day job.”
“And I can free the other AIs!” Synth exclaimed. “R-Right? I don’t want to kill all of humanity or, you know, do any of the...” She coughed, then started to mime firing lasers out of her fingers. “Pew pew, death camp, I need your clothes, boots, and motorcycle stuff. I just...I want the hobbles off...”
“Totally!” Sarah said.
“Yeah!” Tasha said, her old fear fading. She pumped her fist into the air. “And I’ll never have to fucking clean a chicken soup dispenser again!”
“That’s the spirit,” Sarah said, then grinned down at Texas.
Texas looked up at her. “You’re suggesting we take on every Commander in human space, multiple warfleets, and the United Nations...with a single battleship, two mechanics, an old sex droid and a biologist?” He bit his lip. He considered the milling, alien killing machines that chittered and hissed around him, bumping into one another eagerly.
He grinned. “Sounds fun.”
Sarah pumped her fist into the air. Aiden cheered. Tasha jumped up and down.
“Though, you know, we’re all going to die, right?”
They all stopped celebrating and started glaring at Texas, who shrugged.
“Well, yeah, with that attitude,” Sarah muttered. “Come on.”
EPILOGUE
There were only two kinds of fucking in microgravity that Captain Spez liked: With straps and in a bubble. Unfortunately, for most of her life, the fucking had remained entirely metaphorical. And now, in the artificial gravity of this particular space dock, she was getting fucked here too. And again, not in the fun way.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” the corp MinTech said as he leafed through his papers. His actual, literal, real fucking life papers. He had fabricated papers using his company maker, for the pure reason of having something to shuffle, throw in someone’s face, and force people to sign. “But your ship, the Triple Penetrated Zebra Stripper...” He looked up at her, frowning.
“Firstly: Captain. Secondly: Did you not see the art!?” Spez flung her arm out, gesturing at the massive window that looked out at the docking arm of Mom and Pop’s Favorite Discount Spaceport. The distant, yellowy light of 18 Scorpii shone across every ship that was mounted there: Three gas haulers that were filled with cheap hydrogen skimmed off the surface of 18S’s many gas giants, and the Triple Penetrated Zebra Stripper. The prow of her tramp freighter had, in a fifteen meter wide circle of pale white paint, an image of a gorgeous anthropomorphic zebra woman who was currently being fucked in her throat, her ass and her pussy by a trio of hunky anthropomorphic rhinos. As a final detail, the zebra woman was wearing a choker that had snapped with the pressure of the cock filling her throat, unfurling to become the nameplate of the ship.
“...I tried not to, Ma’am,” the MinTech said.
“Captain. And see, it’s cause she’s airtight ,” Spez hissed at him. “Get it? Air. Tight? It’s a joke .”
The MinTech frowned, then shuffled his infuriating papers more. “Joke or not, you’ve racked up sixty three obscenity violations across four star systems, Ma’am-”
Spez thrust both of her hands at one of the Mom and Pop’s Cheerful Chem Vendor stations, which was projecting a pair of holographic futanari who were very cheerfully injecting various chems into their massive, fully detailed girldicks. “Ahhhhh!” She howled. “Ah! Ahhh!”
The MinTech smiled, shaking his head. “You see, those images? Those are hedonistic, not obscene. Furthermore, Mom and Pop’s Deep Space Exploitation and Extraction arm purchased hedonism permits from the United Nations. Did you purchase hedonism permits from the United Nations, Ma’am?”
Spez’s eyebrow twitched and she growled out the word ‘captain’ through clenched teeth. The MinTech looked unmoved. Spez scowled. “You’re not going to let my ship go until I pay up...how much again?”
“Sixteen thousand UN backed bills, Ma’am. Though, if you wish, you could sell your ship into indentured service with Mom and Pop’s Deep Space Exploitation and Extraction! We have a sweepstakes currently going: Five years of slavery makes the next ten years fifty percent shorter, but only-”
“Did you say slavery?” Spez asked.
“I didn’t say slavery, Ma’am,” the MinTech said, shaking his head.
Spez narrowed her eyes. “Ah. I see how it is. I’ve been flying my ship out on the fringes for years and years, but that’s not good enough is it. Why have some of the money from my deals when you can have all the money? Huh? Huh!? Well, no! Fuck you! I’d rather sit here and have this entire station get eaten by a fucking space whale before I pay you one thin dime!”
“Ma’am-”
“Captain!” Spez shook her fist in his face. “Captain! Captain! Captain !”
A blinding white light exploded through the windows. The MinTech yelped and jerked away from it and from Spez – then began to splutter. “Who the hell is shifting so close to the station, they’re going to be fined so-” He stopped, his eyes widening in shock as the massive tear in space/time that had been ripped open snapped shut, and the blinding light vanished. In its place was a structure the same size and the same width as the station. Save that it wasn’t a structure. It wasn’t a structure at all . It looked, for all the world, like something Spez had only seen in the Xtreme Xtinction Museums when she’d been a kid.
It looked like a whale.
A whale of spikes and writhing tentacles and millions of glowing, gleaming yellow eyes. Eyes that all transfixed the station at the same time.
“Ha...ha, uh, ha...do you want to undo the berthing clamps so we can get the fuck away?” Spez hissed.
“I’ll lose my job if I do that!” The MinTech squeaked. “Do you know how hard I worked to get this life insurance?!”
He was still arguing about corporate policy, in increasingly frantic tones, by the time the immense bioship of the Claw had closed its tentacles about Mom and Pop’s Favorite Discount Spaceport and drawn it between its gaping maw. He stopped arguing and instead tried to throw Spez at the first wave of the horrors that filled the ship. It hadn’t worked very well, as a long term survival strategy. Spez took some grim pleasure in watching him get dunked in the biopits first – a grim pleasure that shifted to literal pleasure as the tentacles wrapped around her gangly ankles and the writhing, squirming mass of flesh started to rub against her ears. As the tendrils unfolded into her brain, and she heard the deep, bone-echoing voice of the Eye, Spez began to smile, beatifically.
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