“Isn’t that kind of like unbirthing for you, though?”
“...annnnnnnnnd there goes my mood.”
“Prude,” the pilot said, sticking her tongue out at the orb.
A few hours - a terrifyingly short time by the old modes of space flight - later, the craft came into orbit around a world that had been dead for uncounted eons. Its death was not due to the slow consumption of its primary – in fact, at the going rate, the star would have lasted only slightly less long than it would have had it been left to burn out on its own. That was partially because it was a very large star. Those stars tended to die quite young and quite energetically. Furthermore, the planet had ‘lucked out’ and the orbits of the black hole meant that most of the electromagnetic radiation produced by the slow sundering of the primary was projected outwards, away from the plane of the ecliptic.
Instead, to an outside observer, the death of the world had clearly come from somewhere else. It had been a quick death too: River valleys and coastlines were still visible. Fossilized forests sprawled across continents, kept preserved against the crushing breadth of time...because the atmosphere had been stripped .
The world had been a living one.
Then, in a few short seconds, it had been caught in the blast-wave of a galaxy killing event. A pair of supermassive neutron stars within the same galactic arm had been gently nudged towards one another. With their collision, they had released a vast wave of deadly gamma rays. They had killed the animals, murdered the plants, ripped away the atmosphere, and the suddenly dead ecosystem had been entombed by vacuum and the grasp of space.
It was haunting.
It was beautiful.
It was their destination.
“All right,” the pilot said. “Think class three shields should work for the flux we’re going to be soaking up down there?”
“Class four, I think. Though I hear that cancers are in this cycle,” her companion said.
“Ugh. I’m not into this new style. I’m more about the old fashioned stuff.” She nodded.
“Nudity isn’t a style.”
“Sure it is!”
The ship darted down towards the planetary surface admits their playful, loving bickering. When it had found the source of the signal – pinpointing it by sweeping in circles around and around and around the planet, triangulating the signal over time – it settled down belly first and then smoothly unfolded, like a fruit that peeled itself. Bone plates and muscles flexed and contracted and created a walkway onto the gritty surface of the world. The pilot, her skin now nearly pitch black and surrounded by the nearly invisible heat-haze glimmer of her personal EM shields, stepped off the stairwell and then started to stride across the gray surface of the dead world.
On a more primitive world, the structures and the buildings that had been left behind might have been destroyed by the gamma wave bust. After all, an entire atmosphere being stripped off in a haze of high energy particles was not exactly a gentle process. But the people who had constructed the buildings that were left had used every trick in the book to keep their constructions standing against the length of time.
The nano might have died.
The auto-repair systems might have run down.
The probability shielding might have slipped free from their pins and warbled off into the quasi-real space that such technologies existed in.
But the skeletal hulls of the buildings were made from dense, sturdy material. And that dense, sturdy material remained, forming a pyramidal ship beneath the bleak, black sky, underneath the slowly rotating stars. The stars themselves were unfamiliar, even to one who had traveled as far and seen as much as the pilot. It wasn’t just the constellations were gone and twisted out of shape. It was that the very spine of the galaxy above her was different: Brighter. Thicker. Drawn across the sky with a wild abandon, like a goddess throwing flowers behind herself.
“You know, they thought it was breast milk from a goddess at first,” her companion remarked.
“That’s why they called it the Milky Way? Seriously?” She asked.
“Yuuuuup.”
She shook her head. “We’re a weird species.”
“I like that you still use that ‘we’ there, meatbag.”
“Oh shut up,” she said, laughing as she shoved the orb in the same way one would shove the shoulder of a friend or a lover. As they spoke, they came before the pyramid – and the capstone on the pyramid came to a sputtering, coughing life. It glowed, shimmered, and flicked out a slender beam of white light. That light struck the ground before the pilots feet...and then died. She grumbled under her breath – long used to the impossibility of speaking in a hard vacuum.
“In a movie, it’d have just worked .”
The orb whirred around to float before her. “This is more fun. It’ll give me a chance to have a body for a bit.”
“I wasn’t the one who uploaded myself,” she said, sticking out her tongue.
The work took only a few days – it took longer than it might have.
She had been setting up the deep gravimetric scanners to gently probe the interior of the pyramids guts when her sense organs - the ones that didn’t use actual sound - tickled her brain with the illusory sound of feet on dirt. She turned and smiled as she saw her lover stretching his newly forged arms. He looked like a Greek god as built by a horny Daedalus: Sleek and athletic and hung like a horse, with skin made of liquid silver and muscles that whirred and clicked with infinitely complex clockwork. He brushed his fingers through white-blue hair and smirked at her.
“Wet?” he asked, with a cocky confidence.
“Hmm...yes,” she said, then crooked her finger. “I need your cock in me. Now.”
Her silver lover strode to her, then shoved her onto the back. Ancient, blackened dust crunched beneath her shoulder blades, grinding against her skin. It felt sinfully good to spread her thighs underneath uncaring stars. The sleek, slightly cool edge of his dick ground against her cunt, sparking a deep need inside of her. Her fingers caressed through his hair, feeling its silk-steel smoothness. Her eyes grew hooded and she bit her lip as his cock entered her, filling her to the brim.
“This is why I don’t upload…” she breathed.
“It feels the same-” He started, his voice sligthly strained, his cheeks beading with artifical sweat, which glittered like diamonds. She laughed, putting a green finger on his lips as his hips began to drive against her. His cock plunged into her, slamming against small nubs of nerve tissue she had fabricated specifically for her pleasure - places that she knew his cock would hit. Places that almost burned with raw pleasure. She managed to speak in choked, desperate moans.
“I...ah...you can...ah...fucking...ah...wreck me…” She gasped for air she didn’t need and didn’t have. “Nanotech bods are...nnh so much fucking stronger.” She trembled. “I like being...mm...the little spoon. I still do.” She licked her lips.
He chuckled. “So, what I’m hearing is…” He leaned forward. His artificial breath was hot against her lips - misting and sublimating in the hard vacuum they were fucking in. “You wanna be choked.”
“A little…” she crooned. “Sometimes, it’s good to- ee!” She squeaked as her silvery lover pulled his cock from her cunt. His dick dripped and hissed. Her juices evaporated - literally boiling off him in the vacuum. He grinned at her, then grabbed her not-hair. His fingers sent tiny twinges of not-quite-pain through her scalp. It was enough to make her feel so very alive . Her mouth parted, as if to speak, and he moved with blinding speed. His cock plunged down her throat, and ancient, nearly forgotten gag reflexes almost came to life. Her eyes widened and brimmed with small tears of joy as she looked up past his strong, silvery arm. He looked down at her, grinning as he rocked his hips, settling his dick in her bulging throat.
He paused, then drew his cock slowly out of her mouth - leaving her gasping as cobweb fragile strands of spittle and pre-cum connected lips to cock before they were wicked away by the hostility of their en
vironment. Her companion’s smirk was playful. “I feel positively antediluvian for doing this, but …” HIs finger reached down and a small haze of nanites, detached from his body, fuzzed around her throat. Her brow furrowed and she touched her throat.
A thin, black choker wrapped against her skin. It was so flush to her skin that she’d need to use one of her fingernail claws to get underneath it. Her finger felt the raised letters on it.
“Snap my choker? I don’t-” She made a glug noise as his silvery, nanotech cock slammed past her lips, past her teeth, and down her throat.
The choker snapped off with a pop and her eyes rolled back into her head as she came. Hard. Since, well. What was the point of posthuman biology if you hadn’t added some blowjob orgasm nerves to your throat, activated when you were aroused? None, if she had anything to say about it.
And so, he fucked her brains out. Nearly literally, considering the force that he used to fuck her throat, her cunt, her ass, all underneath the cold, dead stars. Afterwards, they lay together, his body beading with artificial sweat, while she trembled and whispered sweet nothings in his ear. But even with such distractions, it didn’t take them that long to take the pyramid apart and repair the long corroded components. They were careful to not touch the memory crystals – after all, they seemed to be mostly intact.
And so it was that the two travelers from a distant land were left sitting in the dust of the long dead world when, at last, her final voice, her final message was heard.
That ghostly message, whispered across the nearly endless gulf between galaxies, had said only…
Come.
Come.
We know the name of your enemy.
We can help you.
The enemy wasn’t quite dead . But he was contained. And so, the two had talked with the generals and the commanders and the leaders of the war that waged, between the peoples of the galaxy and the face of Evil incarnate, and they had been given a ship. The ship had been equipped with the most advanced form of engine – able to pierce past merely the hypertropian plane-geometries of ancient engines and to get into a deeper level of reality that the deep thinkers of the galaxy had called ‘foldspace’ for a lack of anything better to call it. And over nearly two years of hard flight, they had crossed the gulf.
They had come to this world.
Come to this pyramid.
Come to hear .
The pyramid’s projector glowed and a hard-light hologram formed, feet first, sweeping up. The figure was alien, with several large eyes and three arms on the left side, none on the right. He had a prehensile tail, with a second head at the tip of it which looked like the serrated jaw of a crocodile. And yet, despite that, an echo of similar fashions shone through. He was, to the pilot, wearing what she would have called a three piece suit. Complete with a tie, which he adjusted with his tail.
And lo, he spoke a short message, inclined his head, froze...then repeated the message.
“In a movie, he’d speak English,” the pilot muttered.
“Yes. In a movie...” Her companion rolled his camera-lens eyes.
It took a week, combining all their talents. Her paracasual powers. His computational abilities. The ship’s own intellect. Decoding an entire language from a few short sentences, even with the other reference material and data that they could collate from within the pyramid, took a great deal of time. And that was even with the ability to slip her mind into nearly parallel universes to sample more details of the language and the message, to hear variations and alternatives to compare it too.
And, just as before, they did get distracted.
A lot.
“Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” She moaned, her hips rising and falling, her palms pressed against his shoulders. The pilot’s companion had altered his form with some quick modifications – using a nanotechnological device as far removed from the primitive nanolathe as a nanolathe was from a stone ax. The end result was.
“Jesus Christ yes! Ah! I love your fucking knot! Yes!” The pilot moaned as the thick, canid-like cock tied her body to her lover’s. “Yes! Cum in me! Cum in me! Cum in-” Her eyes rolled back, her spine arching. Her green ass tightened and her claws dug into her lover’s silver fur as his own claws squeezed her rump, dimpling her skin as his cum – thick, hot and eager – pumped into her womb.
Afterwards, they sprawled together and got back to work only grudgingly.
Despite the distractions, despite the difficulty, despite it all…
They persevered.
And under the light of a dying sun, they sat and listened as the alien figure in the suit appeared for hopefully the last time.
“W-W-W-W-W-,” the suited man said, clasping all three of his hands – palm to knuckle each time, like lovers layering their hands atop a blanket. “WW-Welcome valued customers! We hope that you appreciate and enjoy your product. We here at OmniCo are always delighted to hear feedback from our consumers. As you have come so far, we would like to begin with a short questionnaire about the quality of our product.” He smiled, then bowed low. “The first question is: In your play-war with the product known as The Forces of Evil, did you...A) Find the engagement rather difficult? B) Find the engagement moderately difficult? C) Find the engagement rather easy? Or, finally, D) Find the engagement very easy?”
The two, the pilot and her companion, sat there.
Gaping.
The message repeated – and again, the question hung in the air, waiting for an answer.
With a croak, the pilot gasped out. “...A.”
“Question two!” The alien started. “Question T...Question T...Question T...T...T...T...”
The hologram fizzled.
Crackled.
Dissolved into nothingness.
The pilot’s companions stood, mutely, walked to the side of the pyramid, and yanked out the blackened edges of metal that served as its structure. He reached down and pulled out the memory crystal. It was guttering. Flickering. Dying. He turned to his pilot.
“I want a refund, Sarah,” Aiden said.
And he crushed the crystal.
And the two of them left the dead world – and the dead galaxy – behind.
THE END
Viridian Queen Page 16