Viridian Wolf

by Dragon Cobolt

She could now create the massive bladed elephantine creature that had mashed up her hardsuit on Trappist 1-A. And a kind of biological flying machine – it had four wings, but they weren’t made to ‘flap’ in space. Rather, they had agrav crystals worked into each of the membranes, allowing them to dart around even in microgravity. They were also loaded with... wow , a regenerating cache of symbiotic projectiles that could be bred to fire anti-vehicle or anti-infantry or even anti-spaceship biological warheads. And the third was a kind of huge blimp thing that looked like it could serve as both a transport – if she didn’t mind it taking a while – and as a way to generate additional radioactives and carbon in their blazing hot guts.

  The fourth was…

  She…

  Wasn’t entirely sure.

  It looked like a crab – heavily armored and four legged, with a fantastically complex set of radioactive-intensive organs in the guts. She looked at those organs and tried to piece together what they could do, but the information felt too esoteric and complex. It was like learning about FTL physics all over again. Causality and paracasuality and all that garbage. Sarah opened her eyes – despite that last confusion, she was beaming. “Kellen,” she whispered.

  “You don’t, right?” he asked.

  “Kellen...your cum just unlocked my next tech level,” she whispered.

  “...nice,” Kellen said. “But seriously, you don’t-”

  “I only eat my mates when they’re being annoying , Kellen,” Sarah growled.

  ***

  “Hey, Steve!” Sarah said, clapping her hands together as she stood in the new and improved briefing room of the Excalibur . With plenty of resources, a nanolathe, and plenty of construction robots, Tasha and Tex and Haliee had taken charge and began a vast restructuring of the interior of the starship to make room for each of their new companions and, in Tasha’s words, remove all those freaky statues. “You look great!”

  Steve Shives, who still rubbing his newly restored arm with an expression of wonder, blinked up at her. “T-Thanks,” he said, slowly. “Uh, so, uh...right. No...pants...or shirt...” He trailed off, his eyes looking up at the ceiling. Sarah blushed, remembering her own nudity, her arms crossed over her chest and looked back at Tex, who was sipping a big old cup of coffee.

  “What’s the sitch, Tex?” she asked.

  “Well, you fucked my sister’s husband,” Tex said, his voice dry as deep space. “While live broadcasting your every word to every radio band in the system.”

  Sarah stood perfectly still. A slow roaring sound filled her ears.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “We listened to the entire thing,” Hailee said. “I was most impressed with the amount of profanity you were able to coherently think while being hammered with that level of pleasure. Synth started to take bets on when you would coin some neologisms and won handily. I counted a full five new phrases: Cuntfuckshit, holy fuck-cunt-ery, and-”

  “ Anyway !” Sarah said, loudly. “What’s the tactical situation.”

  “Other than the fact you aided my brother in law in cheating on my sister?” Tex asked. “It’s not good, Sarah. The battle on the second planet in this system has been concluded – Plasma Dynamics has fallen back to the third planet. This means that Space Belisarius has the planet that the sensors says has the most resources and all the PD tech labs he captured. Which is the big problem.”

  “Oh?” Sarah asked, her cheeks still burning. She tried to lean casually against the wall but stumbled backwards several feet before finding it. She tried to make that look like it was intention.

  Tex sipped from his cup slowly, then set it down. “SB took the tech labs mostly intact – he performed a deep core insertion without getting pinged by their space defenses, then blitzed them so hard that I’m still trying to piece together every trick he used. Sexy Napoleon got her ass resoundingly kicked.” He sighed. “But that means that SB now has most of the space based fortifications that Plasma Dynamics built and he’s now filling his Lagrange points with this.” He nodded to the holo table in the center of the room. The projection showed a satellite that looked a great deal like a certain famous mascot character. Their placid smile rapidly became sinister as the weapon specs scrolled out. “The M.I.K-Yen Class laser defense satellite. They’re only really dangerous if you don’t take the time to blow them outta the sky at long range. But if we stay at long range, the planetary railguns gut us.”

  “So, we avoid the planet,” Sarah said, nodding. “I mean, fuck em. We don’t have to fight them. We have nanolathes, we can just build ourselves a HPS Drive and...and...”

  “None of our lathes have the schematics programmed in,” Tasha said, biting her lip.

  “Hypertrophic Plane Shift Drives remain one of the few actually scarce resources in the galaxy,” Haliee said, cheerfully. “They require several exotic elements that take large amounts of expertise and energy to synthesize. I’m talking atom smashers that ring planets. Like the kinds on Wolf-359 B, in the Plasma Dynamics labs!” She giggled. “If we had those , we could build ourselves an open source HPS Drive and be able to go literally anywhere in the human sphere without being interrupted, stopped, or fined. Though, I may still add in loot boxes…”

  “Why?” Steve asked, his voice tremulous.

  “Gambling is fun?” Hailee sounded confused. “Don’t worry, I won’t put actual currency requirements in it. It will be more like a dopamine button! Doesn’t that sound delightful?”

  “Well, I mean, if I wanna get a dopamine rush I’ll-” Sarah stopped herself, her face flushing as she realized the cliff her mouth had been driving her towards. She clapped her hands together. “Okay! We just need to figure out how to get past the Mickies!”

  “M.I.K-Yenns,” Tex said.

  “Yeah, the Mickies,” Sarah said, pointing at the defense schematics. “I mean, look at them.”

  Tex grumbled. “I don’t want to get blown out of space by Micky Mouse.”

  “Problem: We take on the Mickies, the PD railguns get us,” Aiden said, speaking up for the first time. “We try and rush the railguns, the Mickies get us. We can’t get in.”

  Sarah frowned, looking at the slowly rotating head of the famous mouse mascot. “Well, obviously,” she said. “We need a backdoor.”

  ***

  “Man, you forget how much it fucking sucks to wear clothes until you have to put them on,” Sarah muttered, her finger tugging at the collar of the uniform that Aiden had whipped up for her. When she had expressed a measure of shock at his sartorial skills, Aiden had given her a little smirk.

  “I had to make my own binders, my own masc clothes, my own everything . It was cheaper to just take the dresses Mom bought for me then hack them into being masculine than it was to earn up my own money and but them from the fabbers,” he said, tugging the last tie taut on her back. “I stole the uniform from a Disney serial, Honor Harrington, but I modified it. Green instead of gray, and with a bladeling instead of a griffon. Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Cool,” Sarah whispered, looking down at herself. She giggled, quietly. “I guess, since we’ve already stolen DisneyPlanet, throwing more copyright infringement won’t be that bad, right?”

  “That’s the spirit,’ Aiden said, then slapped her ass. “Knock em dead, Commander Kappel.”

  “Right, uh...Hailee? Open the coms,” Sarah said.

  “Requesting quantum uplink,” Hailee said. She hummed the first five notes of the theme to My Pony Dreamtime for a solid minute before she said. “Okay! Quantum uplink established.”

  The center of the bridge – cleared out of everyone but Sarah – glowed as holographic projectors whirred to life and the image of Sexy Napoleon came to life. And Sarah had to admit, for a girl who had been pretty sure she had been straight until she had grown her own cock and fucked Tasha silly, she was pretty sure that Sexy Napoleon lived up to every namesake she had taken. She was sprawled, sideways, on a command throne and dressed in what was clearly an 18th century regimental uniform, all blue and
white and black. Her polished boots clicked together and her bicorn hat was tilted at a rakish angle, while a slender rapier was held lazily in her left hand. Her face was gently curved, her eyes a brilliant red, and her pale lips were marked by the twin indent of two small fangs, which peeked out of her mouth.

  She was blond.

  And she had tits the size of Sarah’s head.

  “Ahhh,” Sexy Napoleon crooned. “So it’s true. StarCon’s prize flagship has been taken by an alien communist.” She grinned. “A Disney uniform on a NovaDyne corp-citizen, standing in a StarCon bridge, with a hacked nanolathe and a completely inhuman biology.” She licked her lips. “At least you have an amazing rack.”

  “Th...I...we’re not communists!” Sarah said.

  “Hmmm, really? Then who's your boss?” Sexy Napoleon asked.

  “We...technically...I mean, we don’t really have a boss. We kind of have discussions, but...I mean, kinda me, but also not?” Sarah blushed. “I mean, I don’t want to boss anyone around. I just...” She shook her head. “Listen, it doesn’t matter what I am or am not. You just got beaten by Space Belisarius, right?”

  Sexy Napoleon pursed her lips.

  “I want to go beat him up and take his stuff,” Sarah said. “I just need your Plasma Dynamics security backdoor, so we can tell the railguns to not shoot us down, just long enough to let us blow our way through the orbital defenses he’s built. Then we take the atom smashers, build ourselves a HPS Drive, and bingo bango bongo, we’re outta here.” She punched the air in a kind of assertive way. At least, she hoped it was assertive.

  Sexy Napoleon considered, lifting her rapier, tapping the flat of the blade against her lips and her nose. After about thirty seconds, she stopped, then nodded to herself. “Nah,” she said.

  Sarah gaped at her. “But-”

  “Listen, cutie,” Sexy Napoleon said, her voice a soft croon. “If it was just us, I’d do it. I mean, No skin off my nose to give you security keys that will be changed once Belly hacks through the externals and rewires the entire base. Give it a month or two, tops. But the thing is, I’m one battle away from unlocking the third tier of my rewards package.”

  “Your...rewards package...” Sarah said, slowly.

  “Yeah!” Sexy Napoleon said, beaming. “Once I hit tier three, my retirement plan includes free dental for life .”

  “You...want to...wage a war...over a dental plan?” Sarah asked.

  “Uh, yeah?” Sexy Napoleon said, her brow furrowing as she sat up a bit. “Have you seen how expensive dental surgery is?” She grinned. “So, if you want the codes, you gotta take em, cutie.”

  Sarah clenched her jaw. “All right then.” She said, her hands tightening. “But, Sexy...it’s Commander Cutie. I mean Sarah. I mean-” She was talking to an empty room.

  Sexy Napoleon had hung up.

  Chapter Seven: Sarah versus Sexy Napoleon and the Unreasonable Number of Artillery Pieces

  The three inventions that had given humanity the stars were all equally important. Without the fusion torch, near constant acceleration would have been impossible and any attempt to travel beyond the immediate neighborhood of SOL’s inner planets would have been impossible. Without the agrav field equations that allowed gravitational and inertial forces to be negated, created, and reversed, then anyone attempting to use the fusion torch would have instantly died as the immense gravitational acceleration put out by the engine mulched muscles and shattered skeletons. It also helped to be able to go from the surface of a planet to the orbit of a planet without the planet’s entire mass trying to stop you.

  And finally, without the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive, which punched a hole through space/time via a rapidly rotating hyperdimensional object, humanity would have needed to spend decades pushing to near light speeds, then decades slowing down, all while the merciless laws of physics made time back on Earth whip by at increasing speeds. This was partially why there was an entire constructed religion around the hyperdimensional object that HPS Drives used. Some people called it the hypercube, but in actuality, it was closer to an infinitely long cylinder with two infinitely long points at the ends, rotating at near the speed of light. This distinction had led to one corporate backed holy war and sold copies of billions of books of hyperdimensional apologetics.

  All three of these inventions were how Sarah planned to defeat Sexy Napoleon in one fell swoop.

  Tex, Aiden, Tasha, Hailee, Steve, Synth and now Kellen Grant (who had fabbed himself a slave collar and golden thong despite the many times that Sarah had asked him not to) sat in the briefing room as Sarah laid out the scheme, using a small pointer to gesture to the various parts of the holographic diagram, while Bitey stood beside her, panting and wagging his segmented, heavily spiked combat tail like the good chitenous murder dog he was.

  “And that’s the plan!” Sarah said, turning to face the team, pushing the pointer shut with a series of clatter, clicking clanks. She paused as the last section of the pointer refused to collapse, gritting her teeth and shoving – trying to use enough force to get the tube to compress without smashing the whole pointer. She gritted her teeth harder as the last tube whined.

  “Oh, this plan is delightful,” Hailee said. “I always did want to learn if there was an afterlife!”

  “There isn’t one, though,” Steve said.

  “We don’t know that for certain,” Hailee said. “While improbable, it is not yet definitely unproven.”

  “That’s because you cannot prove something that exists beyond space-time,” Steve said, his arms crossing over his chest.

  “You can...if you go there!” Hailee cooed. “By dying! Horribly! In a nearlight collision with a planet.”

  “I’m with Hailee on this,” Tex said, drawing his legs up under him as he settled on the large, comfortable sofa they were all crammed onto. “We’ve already crashed the Excalibur into a planet once already. I don’t want to make it a twofer.”

  “Ya’ll suck,” Aiden said.

  “Ya’ll?” Tasha whispered.

  “I’m allowed to say ya’ll.” Aiden elbowed her, gently. “But Sarah’s plan has a lot of merit going for it and I think Tex is just scared to trust his life to some NovaDyne tech.”

  “That’s because NovaDyne...” Tex said, slowly, his voice coming out in a growl. “Makes shoes . Your a shoe company.”

  “Listen!” Kellen said, standing up, his hands going to his narrow hips – this had the side effect of meaning that his tightly bound, golden wrapped cock was now very close to Tex’s cheek. Tex frowned directly at it, his eyes narrowing, as Kellen continued: “Yes, NovaDyne may have lost the last four wars we’ve fought. Yes, we didn’t get any of the good Trappist planets. Yes, our market share has been shrinking steadily for the past ten years. Yes, our technology lags behind every major corporation in the human sphere. Yes!” He punched his fist against his palm.

  “Kellen, please stop helping,” Synth said, reaching up to gently pet his bulge with her gleaming chrome hand. “Sarah, I gotta admit, it’s kind of a crazy plan.”

  Sarah, who had been trying to push the pointer shut this whole time, finally got it to collapse completely. She let out a little ‘aha’ and then nodded to the rest of the group. “Okay,” she said. “You say all of this now. But!” She turned to Bitey, then nodded. Bitey walked over and used his blunt nose to push the button on the spacebar of the console keyboard that Sarah had had extruded from the wall for this specific moment by her nanolathe.

  “Why didn’t you just-” Tex asked, looking up – the now agreed upon direction for anyone to look if they wanted to indicate they were speaking to Hailee.

  “Shh,” Hailee whispered. ‘Shhhh.”

  The hologram changed to show an image of Wolf-359 C’s surface. The most distant planet in the solar system was on a slightly canted orbit, so that it only intersected with the plane of the ecliptic twice a year. This had prevented it from being detected during the 21 st century – when exoplanets had been discovered by watching for
the way the light of stars changed when planets whipped between them and the telescopes of ancient Earth. But even if they had been able to see it, Wolf-359 C would have been a poor choice for a world: Tiny, cryogenic, geologically dead, it was the poster child of a useless iceball.

  However, it was now also one of the most heavily armed iceballs in the human sphere. The image had been captured by a flyby probe – a simple device that Sarah had nanolathed and launched towards the planet a few hours before. With agravity inertial suppression and a fusion torch, the probe had gotten to truly ludicrous speeds before it whipped by Wolf-359 C. And it showed the hundreds of thousands of artillery pieces – most of them surface to space, some of them surface to surface, all of them gleaming and freshly crafted from synthetic polymer and hardened uberpykrete.

  They had fired on the probe and, despite its speed and size, destroyed it utterly before it had passed the orbital demarcation zone.

  “Oh,” Tex said in the silence. “Okay, this is a great plan.”

  ***

  A nanolathe can produce an alarming amount of technological material in a short time. The only thing that could produce more stuff faster than one nanolathe, though? Two dozen, each one mounted on a VTOL drone that Sarah had fabbed up for this exact purpose. Together, they sprayed the fuselage of the Excalibur with a fine latticework of nanorobots, which used the metal extracted en mass from DisneyPlanet to rapidly fabricate five fusion torch boosters to augment the Excalibur’s already ludicrous acceleration curve. Thus prepared, Sarah gave her last orders to her base and her ecosystem on the planet, petted a few of the bladelings she was going to be leaving behind, then entered the Excalibur . Once she was in the hastily fabricated acceleration couches, she settled into the small pod that had been set aside for her. While the entire ship would be using her agrav generator to negate her mass and reduce the strain from acceleration, these small pods had their own secondary agrav generators to ensure that the squishes wouldn’t get completely smooshed.