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  Dragon Cobolt

  A Smoky Mountain Publication

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  In One Spirit Meet and Mingle

  Chapter One: Sarah Tours Her Brand New Spaceship

  Dr. Sarah Kappel, formerly a corporate citizen of NovaDyne, stepped onto the StarCon’s flagship, the Excalibur™ , and breathed in that new spaceship smell. She managed to hold onto that feeling of happy, contented satisfaction for about five seconds before the reality of what she had done crashed into her. It was one thing to say that you were going to take control of the Excalibur and then use it to free humanity from the stifling control of corporate oversight and take on an interstellar alien menace that had existed since before humanity had been pounding rocks together.

  It was entirely another thing to look around the finely appointed, teak wood and gilded furnishings of the Excalibur ’s entry bay and realize that you just honked off some of the richest, most powerful people in the human sphere.

  Sarah put her hands over her face. “Oh my god. Everything is so expensive.”

  The airlock behind her hissed shut and, to her left, Synth put her hand on Sarah’s shoulder and squeezed her. “Don’t worry,” she said, cheerfully. “If it’s more expensive, that means they’ll be less likely to blow it up to kill you. Right?”

  Sarah looked at the robotic girl. Originally a sex-bot for a middle tier manager on the NovaDyne exploration of the Trappist system, Synth had taken to her new freedom and her unshackled AI core with the wild abandon of the teenagers that had been significantly braver and less neurotic than Sarah. She had started off by replacing her obviously synthetic hair with something more naturalistic. It was still pink, but it looked like dyed human follicles. Then she had added some whisker-line tattoos onto her cheeks with the simple expedient of a wet-erase marker, and put on every single bit of clothing that they could find that suited her, which was why she was dressed in a leather jacket, bright pink slink bikini, fingerless gloves, and fishnet stockings.

  “Right!” Synth slapped Sarah’s back, then sauntered forward to begin touching all the artfully done naked busts that were worked into the art deco figures that lined the walls of the entry room. A red stuffed sitting chair and a circular, wooden table with a lamp was situated against the wall, with a newspaper, a small glass, and a cigar set out for the perusal of the owner of the ship. That chair and that cigar were immediately taken up by Aiden. Aiden, showing not the least signs of discomfort or guilt or even worry, snipped the tip of the cigar off with one of his extendable claws and chomped onto the back.

  “Got a light?” Aiden asked.

  “You can smoke on this ship?” Tasha asked, walking past Sarah’s other shoulder.

  Both Tasha and Aiden had been in the expansive, underpaid maintenance department on the NovaDyne exploration base on Trappist-1a. Tasha Claire Cline, specifically, had been a technician third class, while Aiden had been Alison Yang, technician third class. Without health insurance that covered gender reassignment (hell, Aiden hadn’t even had enough money to pay for changing out his name in company payrolls), Aiden had been stuck underneath a shitty manager, in a shitty gender, with shitty prospects. While Tasha might have been more optimistic about her personal future, she also hadn’t had much to look forward too. The end result was that when NovaDyne’s rapid retreat off Trappist-1a had left them behind, neither of them had shed many tears.

  Aiden had done the opposite of shedding tears when it became clear that Sarah’s own personal transformation had opened up a new opportunity for himself. That was why his naked body was currently smearing a fine patina of slick fluid against the upholstery, darkening it with the wetness that made his black-green skin glisten as if he had been freshly oiled. His spined hair flexed in a rippling pattern while the leathery wings that grew from his back tightened and settled between him and the chair proper, while Tasha hurried forward, tugging a small laser welder from her patched together belt pouch. The laser flared and the cigar began to smoke, filling the air with a pungent scent that made Sarah cough.

  “You’ve been bodily modified by hyper-advanced aliens to become a living killing machine,” the last of their little party spoke, walking around to stand before Sarah. Texas Dallas, the former commander of the Excalibur, eyed Sarah with a slow smile. “And cigar smoke gets your eyes watering?”

  “It’s really, uh, intense,” Sarah said, then coughed a few more times.

  Aiden seemed happy ruining the chair. Tasha and Synth both were heading down the corridor, with Tasha saying: “Listen, if anyone can find a bar on this ship, it’ll be maint. Stick with me, Synth, we’re going to go far together.”

  “I don’t drink, or eat, but you have a cute ass, so...”

  And then their voices were vanishing away – and Sarah groaned.

  “Aiden, you okay there?” She asked.

  “More than okay,” Aiden said. “I can feel the thousands of novabucks it cost to have this chair handcrafted and shipped up into orbit. I can hear the screams of every corporate executive on the Board at me ruining their upholstery. It’s almost erotic .” He breathed out a thin stream of smoke, closing his eyes. “And my new lungs definitely can feel the newcotine.”

  “Newcotine?” Sarah looked at Texas.

  “It costs more, but I have anti-carcinogenic nano put into the mixture,” Texas said, his voice soft. “I swear it kills the flavor, but it’s worth it in the long run.”

  “Right,” Sarah said. She closed her eyes.

  A few days before, she had been dunked into an alien biomorphic pit and infested. Transformed. Changed. The Eye, a kind of central hive-intelligence that guided the efforts of the aliens that she had named the Claw, had probed her mind telepathically and found her to be acceptable ‘clay’ for their manipulations. The fact the Eye had been so disastrously wrong still felt like a kind of sick joke to Sarah. She had managed to tear herself out of the cocoon and stagger back to NovaDyne’s base – and she had learned her powers there. Strength. Speed. Killing instinct. The ability to augment and morph biological entities at a nearly atomic level through visualization and a mild effort. And some even stranger skills she hadn’t had a chance to experiment with more - things that scared her almost as much as the fact she had claws that could rip a man’s head off with ease. That was why she preferred to focus on the biomorphic abilities.

  That power was why she was on this ship as the new captain and not as Texas Dallas’ prisoner. He had been sent by StarCon to take what NovaDyne had abandoned. To take her .

  And you kicked his ass! A tiny part of h
er tried to cheer. See! You got this!

  “Right!” Sarah punched her palm with her other hand. “Texas! Show me the ship!”

  “Okay,” Texas said. Then he coughed. “After I’m done, can I get some biomods too?”

  “Totally!” Sarah said, hurriedly. She put her hand on the other commander. “And you can give me some advice because I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m pretty sure we’re all going to fucking die if I mess up.”

  Texas grinned at her. Then, very softly, he whispered. “I’d touch your hand, but you told me your skin emits a deadly neurotoxin.”

  Sarah looked down at her hand – which was currently resting on the sleek, skintight uniform that Texas had wriggled into after he had been defeated. She jerked her hand back and saw the gleaming handprint she had left behind. She looked around wildly, then grabbed the newspaper from the circular table, and used that to wipe up as much of the slickness she had left behind as she could. She shot Texas a nervous smile and a little giggle.

  Aiden puffed on his cigar with a huge ass smile on his face.

  ***

  The tour began at the butt of the ship. The Excalibur was nearly two kilometers long, but of those, only five hundred meters were actually livable. The rest of it was made up of the hugely complex network of thrusters. Texas explained to Sarah, who listened with mounting horror, that the ship was essentially piggybacking on a massive container of interlocking magnetic bottles, each one focused on containing a truly staggering amount of enriched hydrogen/anti-matter fuel.

  “Like…’antimatter’ antimatter?” Sarah asked, looking down through the grating at the hatchway that led to the maintenance airlock. Even here, the gilt and art deco had not abated and the airlock hatch looked like it had come from a 20 th century bathysphere. Gilt fresco of the god Vulcan and Spock, their mighty muscular arms straining as they held down stylized representation of magnetic bottle lids were on every wall, and the monitoring console had a chair of plush red felt.

  “What other kinds of antimatter is there?” Texas asked, his brow furrowing.

  Sarah’s hair flexed nervously. “Like, um, safer kinds? Kinds that don’t explode when they touch literally anything?”

  “Wouldn’t be much good if it didn’t,” Texas said, with the blithe confidence of someone who regularly flung antimatter at people as a weapon.

  “Right. And you said, uh, there’s, how many tons?”

  “Three thousand, why?”

  “Three thousand tons of antimatter,” Sarah whispered, her hands going to her face. She closed her eyes and tried to stop thinking about that as much as possible. “Why don’t they just use hydrogen, like on the scout ships?”

  “The Excalibur is a lot bigger,” Texas said, starting to amble away from the control console and to the doorway that led to the spinal corridor of the ship. They walked under the crossed swords of art deco figures that lined the walls. The ceiling had a large faux-glass roof, showing a display of the night sky, with the constellations of Earth projected for familiarity. Sarah focused on the soft, red carpet and not on the fact she was currently walking only a few dozen meters away from a collection of incredibly powerful electromagnets that were constantly bottling a mixture of hydrogen and antimatter, keeping the two elements separated by a hard vacuum to prevent the whole ship from exploding into a massive fireball.

  “So?” Sarah asked.

  “So, a bigger ship needs more thrust, more reaction mass, more of everything to move. The only thing that doesn’t need to be bigger is the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive.” He patted his palm down on a door set between two statues. It opened to a spherical room with the actual HPS Drive floating in the middle of a glowing field of purple light. The HPS Drive rotated, looking like a collection of interlocking rings that never quite touched one another, a single point of radiance at the center. That point throbbed in time with Sarah’s heart beat. She leaned against the doorway, shaking her head slightly.

  “It’s still hard to believe that thing can punch through space-time,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” Texas said. “The ship actually has three – one for backup, one for normal transit, and one for rapid transit. The rapid transit one is targeted to our base in Wolf 359. If the normal transit fails, the RT zips us back to the spaceport. They, uh, prefer we not use that, though.”

  “Why not?” Sarah asked, glancing at Texas for a moment before she looked back at the HPSD.

  “Well,” Texas said, brushing his hand along his cheek before stepping away from the door. As he ambled down the corridor again, continuing the tour, Sarah hurried after him. “Unless you decelerate before firing a HPS Drive off, you come out with the same relative velocity you were going to the point in space-time you were at, relative to the new point in space-time you’ve targeted. But if your navicomp fucks it up, which it can, you come in at a random vector.” He made a tumbling motion with his hand.

  “So...there’s a non-zero chance that the ‘emergency’ drive will just dump us into Wolf-359, going at max speed into a planet ?” Sarah asked, her eyes widening even more.

  “Heh. Sucks, doesn’t it?” Texas said, grinning at her. “Don’t worry. I’ve been flying the Excalibur for years. I’ve never had to use anything but the prime drive.”

  He reached out to pat her shoulder – then jerked his hand back before touching her skin.

  The rest of the tour crept from the HSP Drive chambers to the forward bedrooms, which were situated within an easy walk of the bridge. The bedrooms themselves each had a large, four poster bed, an ornately carved maker that was apparently programmed to produce any kind of food, drug, or sex toy that the crew might have required, and finally, a screen that showed a very pretty star-field that may or may not have had anything to do with the solar system the Excalibur was currently situated in.

  Texas paused by the doors to the bridge. “So, uh,” he said, then coughed. “Well. Uh, just so you know, um...I have a very healthy attitude towards women.”

  Sarah arched one of her eyebrow ridges at him, her hair flexing outwards. Texas’ face colored and he opened the doors to the bridge with some short uncertainty, and when Sarah walked in with a minor flare of trepidation. Then she stopped.

  The bridge was roughly triangular in shape, with a single large chair in the middle. Before the chair was the curved front screen of the ship – just a screen, not actually a window or anything – and to the left and to the right were two large consoles covered with buttons, switches, toggles and dials. None of this was exactly odd . What was odd was the fact that there were naked women on every single wall that was not vitally important for ship operations. They were glossy, high def prints of every kind and breed of human that had ever existed in the past few thousand years, including pre-Columbian Exchange recreations that the exotics industry had created. There were girls with elf ears. Girls with tails. Girls with jugs the size of small planets. Girls with tiny breasts. Girls with piercings. Girls with tattoos. Girls with guns. Girls straddling guns. In one, a girl fucking a gun.

  “A perfectly healthy attitude,” Texas said, his cheeks flushing.

  “You’re the Supreme Commander,” Sarah said, her hands going to her hips. For the moment, it was shockingly easy to forget everything that had happened to her. The fact that she had been reshaped from a pudgy researcher to a sexy, alien-human hybrid with perfect breasts and an ass that simply did not quit. The fact that she had gotten laid more times in the past week than she had in her entire life. The fact that she had a gorgeous man and a sex robot who lusted after her. All of that went out of her head in a single instant and here, surrounded by the genetically engineered, tailor made titties of the finest pornographics departments that StarCon controlled, she felt...ugly. She scowled. “You’re the Supreme Commander,” she said, again. “You literally could snap your fingers at half the staff in StarCon and have them wriggling out of their jumpsuits!”

  “I could,” Texas said, his cheeks coloring. “But I don’t like girls the normal way. A
nd my contract said I can only present as uber-macho, all the time. It was part of the sales pitch on being Texas Dallas, the Supreme Commander, the biggest badass on StarCon’s payroll.”

  Sarah blinked. “Wait, you said you weren’t trans,” she said – remembering how, after she had defeated him, Texas had emerged from the wreckage of his power armor wearing nothing but a very pretty pair of girl’s panties. “You said you just like crossdressing.”

  Texas looked at the ceiling. “And pegging .”

  “What is that!?” Sarah asked.

  Texas closed his eyes. “Ask Synth,” he said, sounding like he wanted to die.

  Sarah put her hands over her face. “Okay. So, you have lots of...” She dropped her hands, frowning as she examined the girls. “Lots of...naked, muscular, tough looking girls, many of whom look like they can...totally...” She paused. “Does pegging involve...uh...” She shook her head and then pointed at the console. “Tell me what that button does!”

  “That fires the antiproton beam,” Texas said.

  Sarah yelped. “We have an antiproton beam?” she whispered. “I...okay, what about that?”

  “The nuclear torpedoes,” Texas said.

  Sarah winced. “And...and that?”

  “The kinetic kill drones.” Texas sighed. “The atmospheric combustion bomblettes. That’s the anti-crew flechette railgun, and that’s the microwave ray-emitter.”

  Sarah, who was now peeking out past her fingers, pointed to the last button. “A-And that?” she whispered.

  “That’s the intercom, Sarah,” Texas said.

  Sarah shook her head, then stepped over to the console that held so much death and destruction. While she was no physicist, she knew the amount of energy contained in even one of the weapons that Texas had so blithely described. Even the anti-crew gun could, when fired at a planetary surface, blow apart the entire baseline district that she had grown up in. Slowly, her finger brushed along the edge of the console, not quite touching any of the buttons, before she drew her hand back and breathed out a quiet sigh. “I hate this,” she whispered. “This ship is built to kill people.”