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  Oh, and never touch anyone again, a snide, dark part of her brain muttered. Because I’m sure Dr. Bowers would love for someone who can crush rocks with her bare hands – her bare hands with frigging claws – to touch his-

  “Walking time!” Sarah announced, clapping her hands together and walking forward.

  It took her shockingly short time to find one of the jamming trees. And it wasn’t even that she had spotted the distinctive pattern of clearing and flowers that surrounded each tree – the part of the jungle she had been walking through was thick and viney. One second, she had been pushing her way through foliage. The next, she had stepped out and boom . There was a silvery radar jamming tree. Sarah felt faintly disquieted at how easily she had found it.

  Also, how not thirsty she was.

  She had been walking around, buckass naked, through the jungle for who knows how long now. She glistened constantly. Was it sweat? She actually didn’t know. So, before she walked to the tree, Sarah lifted her wrist to her face, as if she was about to check her perfume. She licked herself – and it tasted sweet, not salty. What was she excreting?

  A sudden heat flared to life between her legs.

  “Y-You...have got to be kidding...” She whispered as her knees turned to rubber and her nipples became puffy and hard. Her cheeks flushed and she looked at her glistening skin, breathing in a slow, ragged breath. Her breasts rose and fell with every movement she made, her eyes slowly hooding as she whimpered and the heat stoked hotter and hotter and hotter. Her knees turned from rubber to water and she fell to them, thumping onto the soft grass. She whimpered softly, her head ducking forward as she panted and arched her spine. No.

  No, she didn’t arch her spine.

  Her spine arched itself. A desperate animal instinct, burning through her.

  Then, the heat went from hot to unbearable.

  A noise whined between her teeth as she rolled her head back, her claws digging into the ground as she spread her thighs and thrust her ass into the air. “Fuckfuckfuck!” She hissed out, barely able to form words through the foggy heat in her head. She didn’t even have a coldly clinical biologist muttering about estrus or instinct. She just had a single need, echoing in her head. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. But nothing was out there, no matter how much she whimpered and begged and arched her spine. Sarah’s eyes half closed and she managed to start to piece together a sentence, a word at a time, between frantic, desperate blubbering.

  “Hnnn, fuck me, okay, fuck fuck, I need cock, ah, okay, okay, Sarah, fuck, slide a cock in me!” She closed her eyes, grinding her cheek against the ground as her sex dripped its arousal. “Sarah, you...need to...need cock fuck...” Her eyes almost rolled back into her head. “You need to...snap... fuck meeeee, please please please, oh god, anyone, fuck...” She clenched her jaw. “ This .” Her eyes closed and she grabbed onto the momentary flare of pure fury. It was half and half frustration at not having a thick, delicious cock slamming into her hungry, hungry cunny, at not having warm cum rushing into her fertile, ready womb...and half fury at what had been done to her.

  Her claws dug into the ground and her hands clenched and she snapped her head up, her black eyes shining. “ Fuck this !” She shouted – and felt something twist inside of her. A blessed coolness flowed through her body. It started near her womb, then worked its way upwards and downward at the same movement. It reached her toes at the same moment it reached her fingers, making both tingle with blessed chill, then swept up to her mouth and her head. She closed her eyes as her tongue went momentarily numb, and her head became perfectly clear.

  Her muscles relaxed all at the same moment and Sarah fell to the side like a tipped cow. She whimpered as she sprawled on her side, her cheek mashed against the dirt and the grass. She breathed in the scents and felt curious bugs bumping against her, clearly not sure what to make of the sudden impediment to their progress.

  “The worst thing?” she mumbled. “I didn’t even get to...”

  She forced herself to stand, feeling wobbly and drained. Her thighs were still soaked. Sarah also felt a deep hollow in the pit of her gut. Part of her already missed the wanton, careless need of that moment. At least, in that state of mind, she hadn’t had a chance to chicken out and run away.

  “Of course, that’s also the same fucking state of mind Mika tried to put you in,” Sarah muttered, brushing her fingers through her spined hair. “God. You just roofied yourself.” She shook her head. “But how did you cancel it out?” She frowned. “Most animals can’t retract that kind of autonomous reaction – hell, humans can’t do that. Well. Certain sects of conregs can. Zen-shoppists can, right? If they bought the upper level courses and really stick with it.” She chewed her lower lip. “But I’m an atheist. Do you know how expensive being a legal Neoevengelical Cathostant is?” She shook her head slightly, remembering the price package for joining the same church that her parents had wanted to join.

  Sarah decided to table the ‘how the fuck did that happen’ question for when she had a lab. Instead, she stepped up to the radar tree and began to check the width of the bark, the thickness of the roots. She grumbled as she bent forward to get a better look – and a wave of dizziness hit her. She wobbled. She wriggled. And she decided that it was better and more dignified to lean against the tree than to land on her curvy butt. Her eyes closed and her palms mashed against the bark – and she felt a dozen tiny wires slam into her skin. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel good. It was just a thing that happened. She yelped and jerked her hands up and away from the tree, dragging the thin wires with her.

  Then she noticed what had happened to the rest of the meadow and screamed .

  The meadow was gone.

  The jungle was gone.

  The planet was gone. She was leaning against a radar jamming tree that floated in the infinite blackness of space. Stars wheeled and spun around her, like a huge matrix of white dots. Her stomach tried to crawl into her throat, and she wanted to rip her hands away from the wires, but she knew that they were interfacing with her nervous system to produce this kind of visual effect. Who knew what that would do if she just yanked it out. She imagined the people who had gotten unlucky with unlicensed HUD implants and shuddered all over again. Then the blackness whipped around her again, stars spinning, and a green-brown sphere popped up in-front of her.

  It was about the size of her body, though considerably wider. It was shrouded in a bluish haze and clouds – it was a planet from space. When her eyes focused on any particular place, the clouds and the haze faded away to show the landscape beneath. She could see the continents, the rivers, the jungle. Despite knowing exactly what it was, it took her overly shocked brain about a minute to finally stutter out: “It...it’s Trappist-1a.”

  She saw a single glowing white spike thrusting from the other hemisphere, just barely visible past the curve of the globe. Tentatively, Sarah reached out with her hand, moving slowly and carefully so as to not overly stress the wires running into her palms. The wires tugged out smoothly, and she had more than enough reach to touch the globe. It was solid, or at least, her nerves thought it was solid. She spun it around and saw that the dot was emerging from the larger continent that the scout ship had landed on. She tugged the globe closer, leaning in physically to examine the coastline.

  Yup.

  There was the scout ship.

  Not that she had found it by remembering its position on the map – she had found three harbors that looked almost exactly like the harbor they had landed by. She had found it because there was a big red dot near one of those harbors, flashing and blinking like the enemy identification indicator on a radar tracking system. The white spike was located in a clearing and a silver tree that was about fifty kilometers away from the cordon. She just needed to walk east.

  Sarah jerked her head back. “This ecosystem is designed,” she whispered. “Those radar trees aren’t just jamming as a random evolutionary feature. T-They’re...they’re…”

  Locational tracking and commun
ication systems, with a jamming suite. Her skin prickled and her goosebumps started up. She had access to a planetary, military grade radar set. That was something Commanders had. She bit her lip and tried to push the globe and her body away - not physically, but with a concentrated effort of will. It was shocking how easy it was – one second, she was focusing. The next, her palms tingled as the wires retracted and drew back into the tree. Sarah stuck her hands into her armpits.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I just need to walk fifty kilometers through a vast alien jungle to NovaDyne and tell them that I’m a genetically engineered...superhuman...”

  She trailed off.

  Her body could crush rock without even trying. She could run maybe thirty miles an hour. She could eat an entire horse sized creature without even losing her figure . And she hadn’t needed to excrete waste yet. She was producing an aphrodisiac as her sweat. Every single part of that bullet list was a genetic treasure trove that would make NovaDyne a market leader in a dozen different areas. But more, thinking about it in the context of the Eye and the vision of the Claw she had seen, her stomach tightened and her mouth went dry as a bone.

  Take all that and combine it with a global locational tracking and communication systems with a jamming suite?

  She wasn’t a security expert.

  She’d never been through boot camp.

  Hell, she’d never even met a Commander – though she used to play with an action figure of Commander Texas Dallas that she had fished out of a maker’s recycling pit.

  But she knew the basics . Commanders were the center of corporate active security measures – or, in other words, their actual armies. Rather than using security guards and patrol troops, a single Commander was sent into a hotspot. With makers and AI and unrestricted access to a planet's resource that Commanders could get, a single Commander was all most corporations needed. The fact that they were hugely marketable was just, like, an extra side bonus.

  It’d make sense for an alien race to realize the same thing: If you could risk only one real person in a war, you would. Why conscript armies when…

  “You could grow them,” she whispered. “B-But why me? Why did you pick me ?”

  But she knew the reason for that. She was the weak willed, easily pushed around, bossable girl. Acceptable clay . The Eye had taken her and fucked her and left her like this – but they had planned to remake her mind too. And it had come so very close to managing it. Sarah slowly sank to the ground and leaned against the radar tree, drawing her knees into her chest. She pressed her face against her knees, her eyes closing. She had no idea what to do.

  She felt the tears - the urge for tears. But there was no wetness. She closed her eyes and screwed up her face, the pressure growing tighter...and then...

  They came.

  She cried.

  She cried into her knees and she trembled and she wished to wake up back in her bunk, with the slightly smelly air recycler that hadn’t been fixed yet, knowing that she was going to have to survive on another day of rice and vitamins. She wished to just... be at the lab, working on the omniphage with Dr. Bowers. He’d have something nice or funny to say. And she’d look at his hairlip and feel like a total asshole because other than the hairlip, he was actually pretty frigging cute and he was the only person on the whole frigging ship who had ever been nice to her, and now she was a horrifying monster co-opted by actual literal fucking aliens.

  Aliens!

  Aliens who wanted, as far as she could tell, to take over the whole galaxy.

  And she was some kind of...of…

  “...Sarah?”

  Sarah gasped and leaped to her feet, looking around wildly.

  That had clearly been Dr. Bowers voice. It had spoken in her ear, sounding confused and uncertain. Like he hadn’t been sure what to make of the beautiful black-green woman he had seen. Sarah spun around and saw nothing in the field save for a small herd of the guinea-pig sized critters that had two tentacles on their backs and used them to strip flowers for food. She stepped away from the tree. “Dr. Bowers?” She asked. “Larry?” She bit her lip, hard, then looked back again. Then she looked forward. Then she looked back and smacked herself for ten kinds of an idiot.

  She stepped up to the radar jamming tree, planted her palm against it, then whispered. “Dr. Bowers?”

  Nothing.

  She blushed and imagined working with him. Being near him. Maybe nibbling his clothes off and rubbing up against his every pore. Okay, that might have been a tiny bit of the aphrodisiac left inside of her talking. Definitely.

  “Sarah?” Dr. Bowers voice came, clearly, from the tree.

  “Larry?” She asked. “Larry, can you hear me?”

  “Y-Yeah!” Dr. Bowers said. “Holy shit, Sarah, where are you calling from – you’ve been missing for a day and a half – Chief Barakas has you declared dead!” There was a pause. “Holy shit, how are you getting a signal to me from there ?”

  Sarah opened her mouth.

  Closed it.

  “L-Larry...” She said. “C-Can you...can you get out here? I need to show you something.”

  Chapter Four: Sarah Gets Laid

  Sarah was on her tenth round of pacing before the hazard suit stomped out from the trees. Sarah wanted to smack herself for being an idiot – part of her had expected Dr. Bowers to arrive in the same clothes she had seen him in the last time. Right. Because when she got magically altered to breathe an alien atmosphere, that meant that everyone did too. She stood, her hands on her hips, looking at the hazard suit. And for a few moments, the stillness of the jungle matched the stillness of her heart. And then she heard Dr. Bower’s voice, grainy and tinny as it came through the front mounted speaker, say: “ Holy fuck .”

  And Sarah remembered she was buckass naked.

  And a sexy alien bug chick now.

  “Sorrysorrysorry!” She squealed, clapping an arm over her breasts and turning around at the same time – remembering at the last second that meant she was now showing him her arse. She clapped her hand over that and sprinted around the radar jamming tree. Once she was on the far end, she peeked around. “Sorry!”

  “Uh. Right. Okay. What the fuck?” Larry asked – even as the tentacles of the edges of his hazard suit reached backwards, pulling the portable pop tent that she had asked him to bring from his back slot. He tossed the tent down and it let out a series of gunshot loud pops as it began to inflate and expand outwards, hardening into a sturdy habitat section. “Seriously, what the fuck, Sarah?”

  “I told you it was weird!” She hissed.

  The habitat finished expanding and Dr. Bowers latched his suit up to it. Once he was inside, Sarah grabbed some leaves from the nearest tree and held them up to her breasts. Right. Because that was going to magically turn into clothes, just because she desperately wanted it.

  The leaves merged into a smooth bra. The edges of the leaves simply melted and flowed together, intermeshing as if she had grown that way. The fronds reached back and hooked behind her back. The end result looked like it had come from a comic book about cavemen that didn’t want to be age restricted – it didn’t so much as provide a single iota of support, and she felt like she was going to jiggle out of it with every step. But it did just barely cover her nipples. So. There was that.

  “Also, what the fuck?” she whispered. But no matter how confused or shocked she was, Sarah didn’t wait in grabbing another chunk of leaves and pressing them up to her crotch. Once again, desperation won out and the leaves formed into a thong. She walked forward towards the habitat, gulped, then opened the airlock. She half expected to drop dead the instant the airlock finished cycling – but the pollen free air simply tasted clean to her and left her feeling like she was maybe going to be okay.

  The inner door opened and Dr. Bowers had his back to her. “I-I didn’t bring clothes – you just said bring a pop tent.”

  “I...uh, I made some!” Sarah said.

  Dr. Bowers turned back around.

  His eyes
widened and his jaw hung slack as he looked at her.

  Sarah tried to pose as unsexily as possible.

  It clearly did not work.

  Dr. Bowers just stood there, gawping at her. Sarah bit her lip, held out her hand, then snapped her fingers under his nose, careful to not quite touch him. Dr. Bowers started and shook his head, blinking a few times. “I-I, uh, wow. Uh. Wow.” He gulped. “I can...” He looked her up and down her body, slowly. “I can see why you wanted me to come alone. Why you didn’t...want to...” She saw his tongue dart up, touching the filmy cover over his hairlip. She smiled shyly at him.

  “Yeah,” she said. “If the head of the science team gets his hands on me, heh, uh, I’m...” She mimed the unzipping motion that the auto-doc’s laser tipped drills would make to slice her open from throat to belly, then mimed her organs falling to the ground, adding grotesque ‘sploosh’ sounds with her mouth. She threw in a quiet: ‘Auugh, no, ow, my organs!’ and clutched her stomach.

  Dr. Bowers continued to gape at her.

  Sarah felt like an idiot. She stood up and crossed her arms over her breasts, the rough leafy texture of her makeshift clothes crinking against her skin. “So, I need help. I need to get...” She paused. “I need to get somewhere safe. Somewhere where I can figure this out.”

  Dr. Bowers put his hands over his face, then dragged his cheeks down, tugging at his skin with his fingers. “Okay,” he said. “Our ship’s heading back to Titan once we finish this phage – for resupply. If I...get you into a biocontainment unit, I can...get you on the ship, then...we can get you off Titan...” He chewed his lower lip. “Titan’s a NovaDyne and BioCore stronghold, but there’s a small UN presence there too. Y-You could apply for refugee status with the UNEC, right?”

  “Right... right !” Sarah clapped her hands together. “It’s better than nothing, right?” She smiled at Dr. Bowers. His cheeks flushed.

  “Now, how do we get you to the biological container?” he asked.

  Sarah sighed. The interior of a pop-tent was remarkably sparse when it came to actual furnishing. Well. At least. The pop-tents that were distributed for lower level researchers were pretty sparse. And Dr. Bowers wasn’t about to shell out for one with anything resembling chairs. She wanted to sit down. Instead, she paced and tapped her feet on the ground and bounced from foot to foot, her head spines twitching with every stray thought. Dr. Bowers watched her move, his eyes following her.