“Now,” Sarah said. “The nanolathes that we still have are being used by Hailee to make new nanolathes for everyone.” She cracked her knuckles. “So, here’s what we’re going to do once they’re done...”
Sarah spent the next few hours waiting for everything to explode. A tiny part of her, remembering her life before her transformation and the hectic struggle it was to get anything done at all, preemptively flinched. But it turned out that a collection of intelligent, motivated people who had volunteered to finally do what so many of them had been talking about for years...were good at doing that thing. As the nanolathes came off the lines and the hybrids began to get used to using them, the plateau of Haven began to change. The smoldering ruins were built over by a new spread of nanotechnologically grown infrastructure, while drones skimmed off into the jungle, hunting out places where some low-impact metal mining could be undertaken. Sarah worked with some of the Havener biologists to work out the best way to get what they needed without hurting the local ecosystem, while the Haveners themselves marveled at being able to walk through the jungle without fear and without suits.
With the sites chosen and the mines built, resources began to flow towards the project on Haven itself.
The simple fact was that Haven, as a planet, didn’t exactly look like a promising place to begin their operations. Yes, there was plenty of biomass. But the Haveners – and Sarah – were horrified at the idea of reducing it into raw materials to build what they needed. And unlike Trappist-1A, Sarah had an alternative to harvesting the jungle.
That alternative was a massive, Hailee designed gravitic catapult. Using agrav emitters and a few buried fusion reactors, they were able to create enough force to fling just about anything into escape velocity. Sarah had polled the crew for who was the first who would want to test it, after they had fired up a few supply pods into orbit. Shocking exactly zero people, Annie had been the first one to try it. As she clambered into the sabot harness – built by several cheerful Havener engineers who had decided that the sabot being disposable would allow the emitters to put more power into the shove without risking crushing the subject – Aiden stepped up to stand beside Sarah.
“Thanks for the upgrade by the way,” he said, grinning at her – extending his own wrist tentacles as his nanolathe shifted on his forearm. He retracted them as Sarah blushed and smiled.
“I’m sorry I never gave you one before,” She whispered. “Looking back, it feels like a huge missed opportunity.”
“Not so,” Aiden said, grinning at her. “You got a lot of practice between my first upgrade and my second. I bet all that practice paid off and it’s why we’re not all puddles of protoplasmic goo.”
“Maybe!” Sarah said – then squeaked as Aiden reached down to casually grope her ass.
“Hey! I am your Supreme Commander,” Sarah said.
“Do you mind?” Aiden murmured, his hand sliding insolently down, to rub at her cunt. His fingers found the folds of her sex as he purred. “If we pull this off, you know, you can spend your entire day getting fucked.”
“Mmm! I have more ambition in my life than just being fucked.” Sarah bit her lip.
“Like what?” Aiden asked, his head cocking.
“Like- !” Sarah gasped – for three reasons. The first was because Aiden’s eager, dexterous fingers had slipped out of her cunt and found her clit. His fingers rubbed her in quick, darting circles, using the very tips of his half-extended claws to add an edge of danger, taking advantage of how very tough her skin was to do something that Sarah would normally cringe over. The second was that the Havener engineers had just jogged over to her and then frozen, their eyes wide as they saw their commander being openly fondled by one of her underlings.
The third reason, of course, was because the gravity catapult had gone off.
The boom of splitting air rattled every bone in her body and sent tree leaves cascading towards the ground in a chaotic flurry. The chunks of the sabot flipped off in every direction overhead, spidering out into the air. There was no sign of Annie. Sarah put her hand over her eyes to shade them and glanced at her internal mini-map. She saw that Annie was leaving the atmosphere.
“Annie?” She asked, trusting her instinctive connection to her subordinates to carry her words up to her.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhahahahahahhhhhhhhhahahahahah!
“Is she okay?” Aiden asked, licking his fingers casually.
“Yup,” Sarah said. “Having the time of her life. Annie! I need you to listen to me.”
Hooooooolllllllyfuuuuuuuuuck this is amazing! Ahaha!
“Annie!” Sarah said, louder now.
What!?
“You can have fun for the next five minutes,” she said, grinning a bit. “Then you’re going to need to stabilize your orbit. The nanolathe has maneuvering thrusters and your rig has enough reaction mass to manage that. At least, uh...” She looked at the engineer. “It does, right?”
“Yup!” The engineer said.
“Okay, so, it does!” Sarah said.
I’m brimming with confidence, Generalissimo, Annie said, her voice sugar sweet and sarcastic in equal measures.
“Oh ha ha,” Sarah said, hands going to her hips. “Begin constructing the orbital platform.”
Aye aye!
Aiden grinned. “So, can I go back to finger fucking you?” he asked.
“I...” Sarah paused. “Sure.”
The structure that began to take place in orbit was thrown together with a speed that would have been considered blinding by the standards of most pre-nanotech developments. Even modern corporate activities would have taken considerably more time, factoring in the number of people. But the hybrids were able to not only construct, they were able to construct exponentially. By flinging collected biomass into space, to join the gathering swarm, they were able to begin to construct organic additions to their structure, while nanolathing in the components. They produced modified versions of the smallest ‘bioships’ that Sarah could produce, with their weaponry replaced with manipulator arms and nanolathes. Those bioships flung themselves out onto lazy parabolas, following orbits calculated out by Hailee to guide them towards promising rocks, rocks she had picked out during the long, looping motion of the Excalibur before her untimely demise.
Those rocks were found and transformed. Sprays of nanites and the whirring motion of the manipulator arms worked at lightning speeds to throw away useless silicates and expose the precious metals within. Each comet, reduced in size but little reduced in terms of mass, were then carefully shepherded back towards the orbital cloud...which, by the time the first had arrived, had been built into an actual, literal shipyard.
The design had been a collaborative, free wheeling thing – the shape of it shifting day by day as plans were put together, discarded, tested, tried, modulated, modified and generally fucked with. Sarah found herself working closely with Quiqup, a biologist who specialized in hive theory. Before becoming a hybrid, Q2 (as she preferred to go by) had been primarily using her knowledge on how to program robots. Now, with Sarah and her teaming up, they were creating new biological robots that followed similar swarming patterns. The construction drones had been joined by a half dozen new construct-types within the following weeks: Small spheres that rolled around the exterior of the scaffolding to check for faults, whippy octopus squid things that were built around a single agrav emitting crystal, who helped to gather up debris and bring them back for recycling. Huge brutes that could hold entire ships in place before crawling off around the exterior of the shipyard to move into new places.
In the end, the shipyard ended up looking like a cross between a heavily pregnant spider and the scaffold of some ancient skyscraper. Between the skeletal limbs of the structure were the massive, industrial nanolathes that turned the captured comets into streams of raw materials and parts, parts that were assembled by construction drones into sleek, deadly ships. Each ship was a different design – constructed based off the ideas and patterns that the Haven
ers had built. There were needle sharp attack ships with an insanely high thrust to mass ratio, crewed by computer-cores quantum linked to Hailee’s now much loved mind-core. There were ships that were lovingly referred to as ‘gunbricks’, heavy chunks of armor, shielding and bristling weapons, designed not to fly, but to be teleported into position by their micro-sized HPSDs and then left to soak up enemy weapon fire. There were biotransports: Long, fluted ships that looked rather similar to woodwind instruments, each one crammed full of smaller biological attack creatures. There were swarms of boarding torpedoes and landing pods. There were battleships aplenty, each one with enough shielding and weaponry to fight the old Excalibur to a standstill.
With each construction, the next ship was built faster , using the mistakes and the lessons learned on the previous one. The only thing that slowed them down was getting raw material – but they were able to produce more comet tenders and get more asteroidal chunks, day by day.
It was, in short…
“Fucking scary ,” Sarah whispered as she leaned back, her haunches touching her ankles. She closed her eyes, hanging her head forward.
“I know my dick’s big, but-” Aiden started, his cock throbbing inside the tightness of her eager cunt. Sarah had been working her ass off all day outside the spaceport and needed some time inside. Not that there was a huge difference between inside and outside. They were all space adapted beings, and so the interior had windows and walls and doors, mostly designed and fabricated to the tastes of the human beings that they all were. But there wasn’t actually any air or life support in there, beyond a few spawning pits that grew animals that extruded easily sliced off chunks of meat – meat they could then grow again. It had taken some work, but they had finally nailed down steaks.
Sarah snorted. “Not you.” She gasped as she felt his cock twitch inside of her. Her eyes widened as she felt pressure against her G-spot, grinding against her, as if a finger was crooked inside of her cunny. She opened her mouth to ask a question, but a tiny pin-prick throbbed through her body, followed by a cascading white wave of pure bliss. Her whole body trembled as she arched her back, her spine curving as if she was a cat in heat. Her breasts bounced as she rocked her hips, slamming her up and down on the cock filling her. “Ohfuckingyesyesyesyesyesyes!”
Aiden, looking annoyingly smug (not that Sarah was quite in the right set of mind to notice it), began to rock his hips, thrusting into her in time with the frantic movement of her hips. His hands grabbed onto her wrists, dragging Sarah down. Her mouth and his met, his tongue and hers sparring as they pressed together, their hips slapping together in the room – the meaty thock thock thock of body pressing to body filling the air. But the pleasure couldn’t last. There was a limit to what even their genetically engineered bodies could sustain – and so, like a furnace burning up its fuel at a lightning pace, their shared climax rocketed towards them and then bust like the sun. White flared before Sarah’s eyes and she trembled, her sweat glittering in the vacuum – flash freezing the instant it beaded away from her body.
She became haloed by the light of her own refracted joy.
Sarah sagged slowly down as she felt the heat of Aiden’s cum filling her, gushing into her deepest places. Her face mashed against his sleek, dark green chest. Her finger started to draw a slow circle through his hair, and Sarah delighted in the tiny rasp of each hair-spine that turned and coiled against her finger, gripping her like a thousand inquisitive, friendly snakes. She giggled as Aiden’s hands remained fastened to her rump, as if they had been glued to her.
“You like my ass, huh?” she mumbled.
“Well, I don’t want the most perfect ass in the galaxy to escape,” Aiden said. “Do you know how hard it’d be to find another to equal?”
Sarah sighed, slowly, her eyes closing as she turned her face fully against him. She breathed him in – part of her brain playing with the impossibility of it all. She was in a hard vacuum. She shouldn’t have been able to scent anything. But her memories, her instincts, the deep core of her being, had been raised in the multiple senses of an arboreal endurance predator. She knew scent and hearing and touch. And so, the new sense organs that the Eye had crafted for her, many of which she had only a vague understanding of, turned their information into senses that she did understand. It became a surrealistic synesthesia, one that allowed her to sniff up the manly musk of her lover while floating in the depths of space, or to hear the rippling bang of a gunshot fired at her from halfway across the solar system.
Or, in this moment, the slow throbbing beat of Aiden’s heart.
Out the window, a massive searing line of blue-white light filled the room. It was the scheduled arc-welding of several components on the Ben Sisko’s Motherfucking Pimp Hand , a blunt gunship that had been designed by the DSA’s primer shipbuilder. The name remained utterly mystifying for Sarah, though she had been told that it, like the Donald Duck’s Massive Corkscrew Dick and The Mulan Transgender Power Hour Apocalypse Boat, was a deliberate middle finger towards Disney’s copyright on nearly every piece of human artistry over the past two thousand years.
As the light faded, leaving a blurring splotch in Sarah’s eyes, she tightened her grip against Aiden’s head. “Can I ask you about something?” she asked.
“Sure,” Aiden said. “Something is a useful placeholder word for-”
Sarah bit his neck playfully.
“Seriously, what is it?” Aiden asked. “I mean, ow, oh no, I am overcome by the strength of your chomps.”
Sarah released him. “I...what do you see yourself doing after this?”
“Well, since I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up as a finely dispersed cloud of high energy particulates after an antimatter warhead hits my spaceship,” Aiden said, grinning down at her. “I think I’ll take up knitting.”
Sarah smacked his chest. “Come on, Aiden, be serious!”
Aiden shrugged one shoulder. “I kinda am, Sarah. I’m just some technician, second class. My primary on the job training was cleaning out the food maker after it fucked up the gazpacho soup order for the officers on our old ship. My proudest moment, before I met you, was not screwing in a lug-nut hard enough so the shower head on Craid’s old faucet broke off while he was fucking his sex-robot and sprayed him with a high pressure jet of cold water. That was the high water mark of Aiden Yang’s entire goddamn life.” He shook his head. “Everything past meeting you has just been one lucky break after another. So, yeah. My plan? Enjoy it while it lasts and kick as much fucking ass as I can.”
Sarah’s cheeks darkened. “But...” She looked down at him. “I...I don’t...” She trailed off. “I don’t want you to die, Aiden.”
“I don’t particularly look forward to it, either,” Aiden said, sighing as he laid slowly back against the bed. His palm drew her close to his chest again. “But...you’ve always been good to me. And a straight shooter. And honest. So, I’m going to be honest: We’re going up against an evil galaxy eating superintelligence that turns entire civilizations into dolphin spheres-”
“Dyson spheres.”
“-and the entire United Nations. At the same time.” Aiden shook his head. “And we’re about two hundred commies-”
“You do know half of them would kick your ass for calling them communists?”
“-with some ships designed in a few hours and built in a few days. It seems like a long shot to me, is all I’m saying.”
Sarah scoffed, then pushed herself up, so that she was supported on her arms. She looked down her nose at him. “Well, Aiden, I know what I’m doing after we pull this off.”
“Me?” He grinned at her.
“Y...no! Kinda!” Sarah said, blushing, her hair drawing close. “I mean, I’d want you to come with. Me. If. You. Okay.” She blushed, then coughed. “Okay, so, basically, the Eye and the Claw have been mulching civilizations for millions of years. They go in, they reduce them into goop, then use the goop to construct Dyson spheres. Well, I’m going to go to those spheres and I’m g
oing to see if I can make anything out of them. I mean...I was taken to pieces and put back together again and I’m still me. Maybe I can untangle something out of that mess. Maybe...all I can do is just put them to rest. But even if all I do is put a few billion aliens into something approximating peace and let those stars shine on their planets again...that’ll be worth it.”
Aiden blinked at her. “Wow. Now my knitting idea sounds really lazy.”
Sarah smirked. “You can knit while we’re flying between the solar systems and exploring the spheres, how about that?”
Aiden frowned. “Wait, would those worlds really come back to life?”
“I mean...” Sarah cocked her head. “A Dyson sphere made primarily out of biomass would mean that most of the planetary bodies in the system would have been untouched. It’s possible that some had been deconstructed by the Eye to serve as additional raw material – though, uh, I haven’t done the math on how much material is actually needed. And it depends on the size of the sphere and how thick it is and the star in question and...” She shook her head. “But yes! The planets would be in their old orbits, they’d just be frozen. Mostly.”
Aiden nodded. “All right. You do the boring ‘reawaken dead civilizations’ part. I handle the knitting.”
“Then it’s a date.” Sarah tapped his nose with her finger.
Another blue-white light filled the window. Sarah, for a moment, basked in it.
Until she remembered there weren’t any burns scheduled for this moment. Her brow furrowed and she snapped her head to the side a moment later, just in time to see the haze of Cherenkov radiation fade from around the long, bony spine of what was unmistakably a biological starship, sitting within five kilometers of the Haven shipyard.
“Well,” Aiden said. “That’s unexpected.”
***
On the glistening bridge of the bioship What The Fuck Are You Looking At Bub, I Can Hatefuck You To Death, You Piece of Shit, Captain Spez blinked a few times as she looked at the forward display membrane, which projected what the WTF’s forward sense nodules picked up in a bright, crisp view that mimicked the video screen of her former ship, the Triple Penetrated Zebra Stripper. The massive spacedock that hung in space before her ship looked like someone had taken the Jovian shipyards of NovaDyne or StellarCon and mashed them into a blender full of H.R Giger’s spunk. The end result was as hideous as it was horrifying, and it filled her view screen.
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