Sister Resister

by Kelli Jae Baeli

  Now, on this relatively small hunk of metal moving closer to an ice planet, I looked at this guard in the cell I’d made for him, who ate beans from a canister, not caring that some of it was wasted on the front of his shirt, and I wondered how anyone could fashion his whole life around blind obedience and oppression. How anyone could beat, rape, maim and kill, for no other reason but to enjoy inflicting pain and hardship. The hatred was bred into them, generation after generation until they no longer even knew where it came from.

  I gave him a shove with my foot and he came to, sat up.

  “Tell me something—” I glanced at the name stamped on his shirt. “—Cleet...” He grunted, and picked up the canister to dig out the remaining beans with the spork that had fallen on the floor. At least the floor was clean. It probably wouldn’t have mattered to him, though. “Have you ever had a thought of your own, ever?”

  He stopped chewing, stared at me, as if unsure that it was a serious question. Finally, the meaning was clear, and having had the last sporkful of beans, he threw the canister at me. I deflected it with the Merkel, and leveled the weapon at him again.

  “I should just blast you right now.”

  “Do it,” he challenged.

  “Only if you force my hand.” I stepped through the doorway.

  “Vaj,” he sneered.

  “Prick,” I shot back, before I hit the button and let the door close off my view of him.

  I pressed the lock button I’d seen Shrtz use, and swung the Merkel onto my shoulder by the strap, the sound of my footsteps ticking off the smooth walls of the corridor as I sidestepped the drying spots of blue blood on the floor.

  Noticing the food stains from the canister, I knew it was time I found something else to wear other than this skinsuit.

  I searched through the other two crew quarters until I found something I could live with. A soft undershirt and generic underpants, and a sturdy black Leathereen tunic and trousers, thick socks and boots. I was feeling more like myself again.

  I gathered up the other interesting or helpful items I’d found along the way, and headed for the Bridge.

  “How do you like my new threads?”

  Shrtz glanced over, gave me the once-over. “It suits you.”

  “So, what’s the deets?” I asked Shrtz, plopping down in the co-pilot’s chair.

  “Deets?”

  “Details.”

  “Ah. Well, I am learning all I can about the ship operation.”

  “If you figure out how to drive this thing, what are we going to do, then?”

  “In my estimation, we have two choices. Either we locate a habitable planet, or we die.”

  “Oh, you’re just trying to cheer me up.”

  6

  The boredom was the worst. After each of us chose between the two remaining quarters for ourselves, I fell into a routine. The chronocomm screen on the ceiling would light up after 8 hours of sleep-time, send a buzzing alarm and tell me good morning. Out the porthole, there would be no indication of change in time of day.

  Shrtz told me the sun in this solar system was almost two billion miles away from us. That’s why we could only see this glowing dot out in space, and not much more.

  There really was no night or day on a ship in space. Shrtz tried to explain it once but it all sounded like gibberish to me. All I know is that it had something to do with how close we were to Uranus, and that I could see the little glow of the sun several times a day.

  So each supposed-day, I’d get up, shower in the cramped water-module, run the sanisonic over my teeth, put on my Leathereen clothes, then head for the galley. I’d take a canister of food to Shrtz at the console on the Bridge. She was always awake and working on our predicament when I got there.

  Thankfully, she had figured out how to keep us in orbit the second day. I wasn’t keen on making a crash landing into an ice planet, so that was encouraging.

  We’d eat firstvitts together, chat about our situation, exchange pleasantries or complaints. Well, the pleasantries would come from the ceph, and the complaints would come from me. Shrtz didn’t seem to feel the need to complain.

  It was annoying.

  After that, I’d take a canister of food to the guard in lockup, and then settle back in my room to read from the ePad I’d found in my quarters, and bitch in my mind about the reading choices, when there were any to be found. Most of it was P-Murt propaganda. I missed my ePad collection of narratives. They’d taken that away from me when I was arrested. It was my most precious possession, and now it was gone.

  I missed being an active member of the Sister Resisters. Taking part in strategic strikes on capital power grids, militia encampments, munitions depots, medical facilities, and food warehouses. I didn’t feel bad about that thievery, because all of the locations were associated with the well-being of the moneyed elite, and none of the booty ever seemed to make its way into the populace, except when we stole that medicine and food and distributed it to our underground network who made sure it got to those who needed it most. We kept the guns and ammunition for ourselves.

  On the ePad pilfered from my crew quarters, I found a role-playing arcade game that allowed the player to be a P-Murt guard who went around shooting resisters. Interestingly, whenever one of the resisters was shot and killed, the shooter screamed, “Abomination!”

  I also found some information about the ship. It was apparently the last of its kind; an original colony vessel which had been used to escape the dying Earth. The others had already been sent to the scrapheap. I read that the hull of the prison transport ship was reportedly made of Graphene Aerogel and Amorphous Metal. Whatever that was. The lighting in the corridors was made from bioluminescent bacteria. I didn’t like the sound of that. Bacteria in the walls?

  Ultimately, the technical data about the ship held little interest for me. I was fine leaving all that technical blork to Shrtz.

  Unwilling to wile away the hours in a game that meant me pretending to be a P-Murt shooting my own people, I made a game of disassembling the Merkel and putting it back together again, always trying to beat my last best time. Anything to keep my mind occupied.

  When that ceased to be interesting, I’d nap. Or visit with Shrtz. Or wander about the ship, searching every corridor and storage nook, looking at everything, fiddling with various gadgets and knobs.

  All the while, every glance out the clearshield and portholes would give me the same view. Circling Uranus. Always always circling circling Uranus.

  It was a frustrating level of smegdom I had never known. Never mind that I preferred terra firma under my feet, rather than a spaceship. I liked open air, even if it was often polluted air. At least back on Pangea, I wasn’t trapped in a metal container, hurtling through space.

  That’s when I would inevitably visit with Shrtz at the console. Asking her questions about the only habitable planet that had been in this solar system; the one we hoped to call home at some point. Even though the general consensus was it had become a ruined planet, it helped keep the depression at bay. It was a shot in the dark of space, but perhaps the only hope we had.

  She cushioned the blow by announcing that we had a hypershield again. Apparently, the nose of the ship was covered in a mixture of gallium and some other organic stuff that regenerated. The shield coating allowed most space dust and debris to bounce off the ship while in hyperspace.

  “So, we can use the zippy-zipper thing again?”

  “Not without fuel.”

  “Well thanks for that, Sally Sunshine.”

  Skirting the dismal developments, she told me a day on Earth was 24 hours long, and on Uranus, it was only 17. But the most interesting tidbit was that Earth had daylight for an average of 11 hours per day. On Pangea, the daylight was only there for six hours, and our sun was often shrouded in the pollutants that were a regular part of our lives. Breathing masks were common for those who gave a smeg about living longer. If we managed to make it to Earth, and it wasn’t still destroyed, we’d have l
ong days to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine that Shrtz told me were plentiful.

  After three weeks, we seemed no closer to getting ourselves out of orbit around Uranus. Shrtz spent most of her time reading and studying the ship. But no amount of reading was going to solve our most pressing problem: food. The supplies were running perilously low. Shrtz had even suggested we might have to consider the guard as a food source. I rolled my eyes until she told me it happened quite a lot in space when ships went adrift.

  I would not be chowing on the guard. I would lie down and die of starvation, first. Unless Shrtz decided to eat . I wasn’t entertained by that thought at all. The calamari eating the human, or whatever.

  I no longer wanted to read the smeg on the ePads, so I made myself familiar with every part of the ship. I even began to understand some of the symbols on everything, and what they meant. I crawled around in hatches and searched for food.

  The loneliness forced me to seek the company of Shrtz more and more often. She taught me a game called chess, though I never was any good at it. It required a great deal of visualization, and thinking ahead, and I wasn’t very good at that. So much for my imaginative narratives. I thought I was pretty good at conjuring images in my head. Apparently, they had to be fictitious stories, or I fell short. Shrtz would play with one of her tentacles while the others were still at work on the navcomm console. She could beat me with seven tentacles tied behind her back, and her eyes and brain still working at our predicament. It was annoying.

  Overall, I’d found Shrtz to be kind and intelligent, though her big brain had still not found the solution to our perpetual orbit. But since it took me two weeks to operate the doors and the cleansing rooms properly, I couldn’t be critical.

  By the middle of the third week, though, I had figured out how to use a nutrient replicator I’d found. Good thing, too, as the canisters were all gone, by then. We were left with only tubes of paste that kept us alive, but were exceedingly unpleasant tasting. The idea that we would drift endlessly in space eating hideous paste, was not exactly a future I wanted to have.

  Agitated, I punched the activation button for the Ambient Screen on the wall of my quarters and it turned my view of Uranus into a fantasy scene, complete with green objects called trees, and mythical creatures called deer and rabbits and bears and even a completely absurd invention called birds—obviously modeled after airplanes and spaceships. There were all kinds of them on the Ambient Screen, of all colors and many sizes. They would fly through the air, pumping feathery arms, and soar like miniature passenger shuttles. I had to suspend my disbelief just to enjoy them. Fleekers and dolobarts, sure. That was normal. But deers? Rabbits? Bears? Who came up with this stuff?

  I’m sure if these things really existed, my grandmother would have mentioned them. But at least it gave me something to look at rather than the desolate, black void of space with periodic views of one side of a bleak, blue ice planet.

  Soon fighting another bout of boredom, I left my quarters to make my way down the corridor to the one Shrtz called hers. Peeking through the window on the door, I saw her there on the bunk.

  My brain could barely make sense of what my eyes found. Shrtz lay on her bed with her legs up in the air. One tentacle snaked inside herself. Another toyed at something else—let’s just say she was circling Uranus in more ways than one. Two more tentacles writhed at her nipple cups, as her body undulated on the bed.

  In spite of my discomfort, I found myself aroused. It had been a long time since I’d enjoyed carnal pleasures. The Militia had busted everyone in that club before I had a chance to get the jumper off that sweet little greenie I’d pushed into a dark corner. Now, if I wanted to meet those needs, it wasn’t going to be with Cleet, the guard. That left Oh Tentacled One. And it was becoming more and more likely that my last days would be spent on this ship. Was I to die craving that satisfaction, that intimacy?

  I wondered, then, what relations would be like with a ceph. The ache between my legs insisted I should entertain the idea more seriously.

  From her position on the bunk, Shrtz saw my face in the little porthole, and her tentacles rose up and billowed in my direction. Reaching out to me. Mindlessly, I hit the green button by the door, and it slid open.

  I stepped inside the room, and as if mesmerized, was drawn to the oscillating appendages. I breathed in the air, thick with feralmoans, and with no rational restraint, I shimmied out of my Leathereen and other clothing and stood naked in front of my ceph friend.

  Shrtz kept her slit-iris eyes glued to mine, as she moved from the bed toward me.

  A limb coiled around me, and then another, and they suctioned to my skin, lifted me off my feet, sliding me up the wall, and suspending me there.

  Though I had seen Shrtz do this to restrain the guard, I knew this was not an attack. Even though I couldn’t speak. Or move. The effects of the feralmoans in my brain saturated every thought. I craved the tentacles. I wanted the tentacles. I felt like my eyeballs were darting back and forth and hibernating in my brain.

  Slick, throbbing flesh swelled and deflated like the tentacles had lungs, and they caressed my skin. It was divine, and I no longer cared that we were different, the two of us. No longer cared what was right and proper. I wanted the release that only carnal pleasures could bring. Nothing else existed, then. Not the ship, not the guard, not the terrible paste-food, not the endless vastness of space around us, or the planet we circled.

  Maintaining her hold of me, aloft against the wall, another of Shrtz’s wiggly appendages rubbed the already swollen nub between my thighs. Still another appendage slithered across my chest, suction cups finding purchase on erect nipples, and the suction began, as I moaned helplessly.

  The writhing member below then pushed inside me slowly, inciting a gasp of surprised pleasure as I felt the pulsating appendage slipping deeper inside, pushing at the walls of my wanton womb.

  Soon, two more appendages wound around my legs at the knees and held them up and wide, supporting me effortlessly against that wall as the invading tendrils continued their maddening work.

  It was too much. In a body-shaking burst of desire and need, I climaxed.

  After the waves of pleasure subsided, Shrtz lowered me gently to the floor again, and I ran a hand along the slick tendril still embracing me. I regained control of my voice. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  Shrtz smiled. “Your pleasure is my pleasure.”

  I wondered if Shrtz had the same anatomy as a human, aside from the tentacles. My hand slid down her human female stomach to the secret I sought. Shrtz opened to me, and I let my fingers explore beneath the folds of skin I had before found repulsive. Now, they were a mystery to be solved, and I was all-in.

  The female opening was familiar, yet different in a tactile sort of way. Once I pushed two fingers inside, I felt the rings of muscles along her female canal. Felt them pulling my fingers inside, and then my other fingers, and opening still more, I felt the ceph suck my entire hand inside, sinking all the way to my elbow as I gasped with surprise. All around my forearm, I felt the muscle rings squeezing me, caressing me. It was equal parts strange and glorious.

  The ceph’s other tentacles smacked against the wall, suction cups engaged to hold herself upright, and she made a guttural growling sound like a whale-song. She rocked into me, pumping at my arm until the inner lips shimmied and shook, and I sensed the new release of the chemicals that had me engaging in such debauchery with this odd species of woman on a relentless orbit around an ice-planet in the void of space.

  Then I felt the warm wetness spewing out over my arm, and looking down, I saw the inky liquid pooling on the floor beneath us.

  I understood now, why so many used to call an octopus an ink fish. I had been flooded with the juices of this erotic half-sea creature, and was literally elbow-deep in octopussy.

  It was like an erotic massage of the sort I had never known. As the lips and muscles relaxed, I withdrew my arm and hand. It was coated in more
dark liquid.

  Perhaps a victim of the chemicals she had just emitted, I was aroused again. I spun Shrtz around, pushed her against the wall, so that her nipple cups stuck there, then I sank to my knees behind her and plunged in my hand, deep again. Her female mantel opened once more, undulating against my arm like a giant muscular throat.

  One tentacle wandered back and stroked the top of my head, the other writhed along my breasts, and still another wiggled between my thighs.

  I could barely concentrate on the invasion I had inflicted, for it had been turned on me. All the while Shrtz moaned and writhed, stroking me, another appendage squirmed into my folds, one suction cup attaching to my clitoris, sucking it, as the tip of the tentacle invaded me again.

  This glorious dance continued, mutually, until both of us had release.

  Trembling, we sank to the floor and after a moment, Shrtz gathered me up in her slick arms and carried me to the bunk. She pulled me close as I tried to calm my pounding heart.

  My head on the ceph’s chest, I heard three separate beats. I’d have to ask her later about that. If a ceph has three hearts, I wondered, do they love three times as much?

  Adrift in space, I now let my mind meander as well. I didn’t care that my days were numbered. I could live out those numbers in carnal bliss, held fast in eight tentacles.

  It was more comfort than I had ever known.

  7

  I woke, enfolded in sinewy arms.

  Without that delicious sensation, I would have thought it was merely a bizarre dream—this carnal carnival of delights with the most sensuous hybrid that ever lived.

  I looked up at Shrtz, smiling.

  “Your pleasure is on your face,” Shrtz said.

  “My pleasure is everywhere,” I said. “I don’t know why I waited this long.”