“Ha...haaa ha ha ha! Y-Yeah! As if!” Sarah reached up to tug on the collar of her shirt before she remembered she wasn’t wearing one.
Space Belisarius nodded. “I can have the part fabricated within the day. If you wish, you and your crew can come down to visit. Hell...” He smirked. “If you accept I-Credits, I’d be more than happy to purchase some of your marvelous bio-organisms. We can discuss your future plans, and you can head on to your next solar system with my blessing.” He bowed to her. “You have my word.”
“Wow!” Sarah said. “Uh, yeah, that sounds great!”
Space Belisarius smiled. “Then I shall see you once your thrust plume overhead, I shall lay out the red carpet.”
“Yay!” Sarah clapped her hands together as the holographic image faded and fizzled to nothingness. “Finally. Diplomacy worked.”
“It’s a trap,” Tex said, leaning against the wall.
“Trap,” Aiden said.
“Definitely a trap,” Tasha cut in, leaning around the computer console she was futzing with in the corner.
“Sorry, mistress, but it’s a trap,” Kellen said.
“Absolutely a trap,” Sexy Napoleon said.
“Don’t ask me, I walked into a Borgification plant by accident,” Steve said, holding up his hands when Sarah looked at him. Her eyes swung to Synth, who shrugged.
“I think the accepted nomenclature is femboy these days,” she said.
Sarah mouthed ‘what’ at her, then glared up at the ceiling.
“I don’t think it’s a trap!” Hailee said. “It’s more of a prelude to an ambush!”
Sarah scowled. “Listen, guys. I’ve been changed against my will into an alien-human hybrid killing machine and thrown into a war against every corporation in the human sphere. Right now, I think that the Eye knows where I am and is going to be showing up with a fleet of...whatever the Claw uses for spaceships. Maybe like, really big space whales or something.”
“The what and the what?” Steve asked.
“So, you know what?” Sarah stood up, then slammed her fist down into the armrest of the throne, folding the composite and the faux-wood down with a splintering crack. “I’m going to fucking assume the fucking best, and SB fucks me over, I’ll rip his throat out with my own fucking claws, and not one moment before!” She panted, slightly. “I-I mean...I won’t...rip his throat out. But I...I may smack him around a little.” She blushed. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”
Silence hung in the bridge. Sarah looked down at her knuckles, then lifted her hand up, flexing her fingers. Her claws glinted. She looked at them and remembered the juicy gush of blood from the animal she had disemboweled, back on Trappist-1a. She closed her eyes, shaking her head.
“Okay,” Tex said. “But we can at least do paranoid preparations, right?”
“Sure!” Sarah said, nodding.
“...seriously, the what and the what ?” Steve asked.
“The Eye is the hive intelligence that controls an ancient space faring biotech civilization called the Claw,” Sarah said. “T-Their goal is to...to...honestly, I don’t know. I just got...flashes before I ripped my way out of the transformation cocoon and escaped. I saw images of humans, controlled by fungal growths, marched en mass into biopits. Mulched down for the biological equivilent of spare parts, then turned into...” Her brow furrowed and she tightened her jaw. The memories weren’t pleasant to recall – like jagged claws, raking through her head. “T-There’s...they...want to...”
She saw the star/thing, fusion form in collapsing gravity. It was centered around system, gas giants, huge, ponderous, moon/worlds, surrounding the gas giants, warmed within, cold beyond. Under ice, flowing, swift, sentience, growing. It came/arose, and it wished to become/be/all/entity.
“T-They came from...an...an ice world. In orbit around a gas giant,” she said, her voice catching as she closed her eyes and thought more, trying to recall everything. But with the jagged half-memories, there came other things, other things she’d preferred to have forget. Not because they hurt. But because they had felt good. The feeling of one of the tentacles plunging into her ear, filtering into her brain and finding her HUD implant and tugging it out. She had cum . She had cum hard at the feeling of it. She shook her head, blushing.
She saw the seedships, sprawling and fat, glutted on billion strong biomatic reclamation systems, thinking a single thought every ten centuries as their glacial metabolism kept their hive-swarms in flash frozen storage sacks. They floated between the star/things, and they wanted more.
“Ugh!” She put her hand over her face. “They didn’t have FTL. They do now, they pulled that information from my mind. But...each time...” She gritted her teeth, thinking through and unpacking what the seedships had been stuffed with. Race memories uncoiled inside of her, jagged like thorny tentacles, pricking her with images of forms she had never witnessed before. The gentle starfish that drifted in the planetary oceans called them shren-fallia and they had been slaughtered, ripped from their homes and thrown into the pits by creatures adapted to oceans by the Eye, guided by his will, by...a hybrid, like her. No, not like her. One of the shren-fallia that had been twisted, blackened and armor plated, sensual as they saw it and deadly in one. The hybrid had been the last to…
Into the…
Sarah fell to her knees.
“Sarah!” Aiden knelt beside her. “Stop, do-”
“Shut the fuck up!” Sarah hissed. She knew it hurt, but she wanted to understand. Another image, another race of sentience devoured. The galliee , the trasdon, the urnud, the pro-tass, each with their own shape, their own culture. Each turned into...no...not into a seedship. A new image uncoiled in her thoughts. A view from a pro-tass hybrid, their mouthless face transformed into a parody of beauty, all dripping tentacles and writhing fins. They looked up, the last view before they threw themselves willingly into the pit, the last of a race two trillion strong and with a history stretching across half a million years.
The sun…
“T-They were... shrouding the sun...” Sarah hissed, then collapsed forward, her palms planting against the floor. “Oh god. I know what they’re doing, Aiden.”
“What?” Aiden asked, and when Sarah lifted her head, she saw the rest of her friends and allies were looking at her with the same concern she heard on Aiden’s voice. His strong hand squeezed her wrist as Sarah closed her eyes, and realized that she was crying. Thick streaming tears, pouring from her eyes, the pain sliding out of her with them. She drew a shuddering breath and let Aiden draw her to her feet. Once she was standing, she whispered.
“I need to see a star map.”
***
Once more, into the briefing room. This time, though, Sarah punched in key-combinations that she hadn’t used since college. “Do you guys know about the Great Filter?” she asked, curiously, as the projection map showed the known galaxy. The Milky Way sprawled in the air, with the human sphere projected in a wobbly, wibbly golden orb – which then subdivided further into corporate zones, their flags shooting up and out of the plane of the galaxy, unfurling and waving. The patchwork conglomeration of humanity looked painfully small next to the sweep of the galaxy.
“Yeah, I heard about it in school,” Tex said, nodding. “We beat it.”
Steve smiled. “Yeah, there was an episode about it in the twelfth Disco reboot. Uh, it’s a theorized ‘filter’ that wipes out civilizations once they reach a certain point of technological development. It’s the answer to the Market Paradox.”
Sarah nodded. “The Market Paradox: If every race develops capitalism, then where’s all the markets?” She shook her head. “It has been the standing theory that all races that attempt to use communism inevitably destroy themselves, as we almost did during the Cold War.” She punched in a few more keys, inputting new coordinates. Blue and white and red and green spheres began to bloom across the galaxy – most of them only a few lightyears wide, but several of them reaching out to encompass hundreds of solar systems rathe
r than dozens. She chewed her lower lip, then stepped backwards as the last of them – the pro-tass sphere – expanded out of the galactic core. “These are all the civilizations that the Claw has wiped out.”
“Jesus Christing shit!” Tex sprang to his feet.
“Yeaaaahhh...” Sarah whispered. “M-Most of their stellar domains were small – none of them invented the HSP Drive. But it looks like the theory that communism wiped them out is wrong: Communism didn’t do it. The Eye did. With the Claw. But wait, look at the stars. They’re all red giants.”
“Yeah?” Tasha asked, cocking her head. “Is that weird?”
“Totally weird,” Sarah said, nodding. “Life, as we’ve determined, only evolves in specific situations: you need liquid water, you need a geologically active planet, and you need a relatively stable sun of a certain temperature, with a broad goldilocks zone for best effect. Red giants are too cold, if you’re close enough to get warm, you get cooked by the radiation or torn apart by the gravity. But what if they’re not red giants?”
The entire rest of the group blinked at her.
“...what are they?” Aiden asked.
“Oh! They’re Dyson spheres!” Hailee said.
“They’re Dys- hey!” Sarah glared at the ceiling.
“Sorry, I just figured it out,” Hailee said, her voice chipper as ever. “A Dyson sphere is a technological – or in this case, biological – shell that surrounds a sun and collects all of its energy. That energy is then utilized by a civilization for whatever ends it desires. They were determined to be cost inefficient when the HPS Drive allowed us to travel faster than the speed of light – but there serious consideration about constructing one by the year 3100 if we hadn’t developed the HPS Drive. From a distance, a solar system with a Dyson sphere would appear to be a red giant – the shell would need to radiate heat, and as the sun was entirely enclosed, waste heat would produce a similar glow to a red giant. The only indication that anything was different would be the lack of exoplanets or dust clouds or any kind of radio transmissions.”
“So, that’s what’s on the line,” Sarah said, her voice soft. “If the Claw takes over the Earth, they’ll turn every last human being into biomatter tools, then rip our planets apart and make them into a Dyson sphere to...” She paused.
“Do what?” Tasha asked.
“I have no idea,” Sarah said, slowly.
“And they’ve done this to every other race they’ve ever met...” Tex whispered, leaning forward to look directly at the galaxy map.
Steve gulped. “The big bad alien menace is way less fun when it’s real and not just a TV show, huh?”
“Yeah,” Sarah whispered, her eyes settling down on the map of the galaxy. Despite each alien civilization having a different hue, her eyes – for the moment – saw nothing but red. Blood red. Pouring across the map, copious and dripping. She reached down and punched down on the ‘end display’ key so hard that she impaled the keyboard, filling the air with a spray of sparks. “Ah!” She jerked her finger back, wincing at the thin line of smoke that rose from the damaged console. “Ooopse. Dang. Crap.”
“We’ve got one advantage, though,” Aiden said, breaking his silence. He smirked at Sarah. “We got you, Doc. None of those other races had a hybrid that changed sides, right?”
Sarah closed her eyes, trying to delve deep into the fragmentary memories of the Eye. She winced, then opened her mouth. She looked at Aiden, then gave him a big thumbs up, her smile so wide that her jaw started to hurt. “Exactly! Never ever happened before. Uh, I’m completely, one hundred percent unique. The Eye will never know what hit them! Hah! Yes.” She punched her fist into her palm, then wrung her hand out and winced. “Gonna go, uh, get ready for SB’s ambush a-and or completely ordinary, nice, not an ambush party!” She walked away as hurriedly as she could.
In the briefing room, Aiden slowly leaned back in his chair and blew out a slow sigh. He glanced left. Tex was ducking his head forward, his hands clasped between his legs. Tasha was chewing her knuckle and looking worried. He glanced right. Steve and Synth were both exchanging a glance. He glanced up. At the far end of the room, Kellen Grant and Sexy Napoleon were both looking equally as grim and dour. Aiden shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Wow!” Hailee broke into the silence. “Sarah is getting much better at lying. It took me zero point two picoseconds more time to pierce her deception this time!”
***
At the edge of the solar system, a puckering fold in space time had begun to appear. It was the far end of a crude hypertropic plane shift agitator: A rotating, infinitely long cylinder of hypothetical matter, spun up and crafted by a plane shift drive. When space time folds, it has the same effect as a gravitational field – and at a certain point, gravity grows strong enough to not merely bend light, but to entirely prevent its escape. When this happens naturally, astrophysicists call it a black hole. Or a singularity, if they wanted to sound cool.
When it happens synthetically, during a plane shift, it is called a different, less cuddly name by military specialists and tactical analysts: A stealth insertion field.
Commanders had an even more blunt name for it.
They called it a buttfucking.
The buttfucking opened and a dartlike shape emerged, like a needle carved out of pure blackness. It hung in space for a scant moment, as if catching its bearings, before it finally stretched out almost organic wings. The wings caught onto the swirling mass of charged particles that marked the edge of the heliosphere within moments. Via a method that would have been familiar to a sailor from Earth’s ancient past, the wing’s membranes shifted so that they tacked against the solar winds, and with the grace and speed of a charred dandelion seed blown on cyclone wind during the last of the great Californian firestorms, the needle blackness shot towards Wolf-359’s ruby red heart.
Without a thrust plume and with an armored hull only a few infinitesimal fractions of a Kelvin above the deep cold temperatures of interstellar space, the ship was almost invisible to any conventional sensors. A direct LADAR sweep would have picked it up, as would have the more esoteric scanners that human Commanders sometimes used to sniff out a buttfucking.
None of those were aimed outwards, not during the Excalibur’s relatively gentle drop towards the second world of the solar system.
Neither side knew that a third had come to join the party.
Neither side knew that nothing would ever be the same.
Chapter Nine: Sarah gets screwed by Space Belisarius
Sarah felt a momentary pang of sadness when, after she stepped off the Excalibur’s gangplank and into the fancy art deco foyer of the Plasma Dynamics (now Disney) research base, she tensed herself for immediate attack. It was just the life she had now. Sudden attacks were a thing she’d have to worry about. But instead of a sudden attack, she instead found herself standing before Space Belisarius in person. In the flesh, without the holographic veneer, he remained as gaunt and blue as she had remembered – but there was an almost magical animating energy to his body – his every move was so full of powerful grace and refined elegance that Sarah was actually gaping a little as he stepped forward, took her hand, then leaned forward and kissed her knuckle.
“A delight to see you, Commander Kappel, in the flesh, and, of course, you look stunning in your uni...” He blinked, slowly. His lips turned black.
Sarah, who was still gaping at him, blinked a few times. Then it hit her like a ton of bricks. “Oh! Fuck! My skin secretes a deadly-”
Space Belisarus faceplanted into the carpeted floor and two spheres rolled around the corner. They sprang out sets of legs at the ends of their movements, transforming instantly from spheres into quadrupedal, heavily armored and heavily armed weapon platforms.
“-nuerotoxin..” Sarah whispered.
The two combat robots opened fire at the same time. The rest of the Sarah Gang – the Kappel Gang? Whatever – were still walking down the gangplank and had enough time to ru
n back into the Excalibur before the bullets started to chew up the red carpeting, blow apart the statuary, and punch holes into the faux marble that lined the walls. Powder flew into the air as Sarah scrambled behind cover, plaster and marble and chips of wood pattering onto her back. The drones kept their shooting up, their legs stomping on the floor as they started to try and skirt around her cover. Shell casings pattered and pinged into the floor – some landed in the carpet, but many hit the marble floor proper.
The gunfire stopped and Sarah peeked up and over the lip of the now heavily shredded planter she had ducked behind. The tree was so many smoking splinters and the bushes had been ripped to pieces and a slow groan filled the air as the corner of the stone planter gave way and spilled half the dirt onto the red carpeting. “I-” Sarah started.
The two combat robots had finished reloading. Bullets filled the air again and Sarah flung herself down. Dirt flew. The splinters splintered further, reducing to parts smaller than the human eye could see. The heavy thud thud thud of the dirt absorbing the impacts and being flung into the air sounded a great deal like Sarah’s own racing heart. The combat robots finished shooting again, their guns clicking and hissing – their barrels glowing red.
Sarah stuck her head out again. “Can-”
The combat robots switched to rockets – the red tipped projectiles unfolding from their bellies like the world’s least sexy testacles. Sarah screamed and stood, running to the side. “Heaaaaaaaaaaal!” She shouted as the first rocket whisked past her calves and exploded into the wall. The concussive force picked her up, flung her across the room, and smashed her into the outstretched arms of one of the massive, bronze art-deco angels. Smoke roiled around her shoulder ears rang as she sat up – seeing the combat robots slowly beginning to swivel around to face her.
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