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On Trackless Seas

Chapter 04
***

I stared at the miniature elf who had spoken. She really was tiny. A grown woman scaled down to three and a half feet, according to my HUD. Blonde haired, blue eyed, tiny elf.

This was unexpected. Alice? I tried to think towards the shipgirl, hoping for a response.

I felt another click in my head of a switch being flipped and got a reply.

‘Ah, sorry captain. There was an energy surge from the Forerunner relic the moment it detected active teleportation in the vicinity and you were redirected there.’

It’s not your fault. Just something to keep in mind for later, I assured her.

Now, the question was how to deal with this before things spiraled out of—

“The gods have come! Praise be!”

My eyes were drawn to the source of the loud, feminine voice. This Eru was a hair taller than the blonde elf type, with large horns decorated with small silver drooping chains rising from the sides of her head through her long, black hair. She wore a set of white robes trimmed in bright green that clung to her form, making them look less like a sack and more like some sort of sexy cosplay.

Where the blonde with the crown was perfectly proportioned with aristocratic, if elven, features this woman was the very definition of a sexy, mature woman (at three foot eight inches tall). Thick thighs hinted at beneath the robes, wide hips, narrow waist, and a massive bust. It was topped off with a cute face set with violet bedroom eyes and full, pouty lips.

Before I could say anything one way or another, the… priestess? fell into a full on, forehead on the floor bow. An honest to God kowtow.

The woman with the crown in the very front, throne-like seat, followed immediately. Reaching out, she jerked at the hem of the dress attached to the woman at her side: an animal type girl with dog-like ears and tail with light brown hair and eyes, who seemed somewhere in the middle physically between who I suspected was the empress of this land and the priestess.

The crowd followed in a wave that moved from the front of the room to the very back, the sound of small people hitting their knees and foreheads hitting the ground crashing over the room.

Shaking off my shock and stupefaction, I decided to get control of the situation before it devolved further. Stepping over to the woman I recognized from my briefing as the empress, I took a knee before her to put me on her level, or at least close to it. Holding out my hand, I said quietly enough that only she and the woman beside her would hear, “Hey now, none of that. Stand up.”

Carefully lifting her head, her blue eyes locked with mine in reverence before tracking down to my hand. Slowly, she placed her hand in mine, my much larger hand looking more like a paw by comparison as it engulfed hers. I rose and pulled the little woman to her feet.

“Are you the ruler of this nation?”

Blinking at my question, she seemed to regain her wits and bearing, remembering her position. Clearing her throat, she nodded. “I am Empress Eruzonia va Erulona IV, ruler of the nation of Erulona, my Lord.”

“Great. May we speak in private?” I asked, looking around overtly and reminding her of where we were and just how many people were watching and listening.

“O-of course, my Lord!” Eruzonia immediately agreed. Looking around, she locked eyes with the priestess, who was peeking up from the floor. “We’ll use your office.”

With that decided she strode away at a brisk pace (for her size), her hand clutching mine tightly as though afraid I’d disappear if she let go.

I heard scrambling behind us and glanced back. The dog eared woman rushed to her feet and hurried to follow while the priestess likewise bolted upright and yanked a nearby woman in similar garb to her feet, pulling her into a quick whispered conversation before she scrambled to catch up. Eruzonia lead me into a hall off to the side of the main floor, passing several doors before stopping at one in particular. I noticed that while the handle of the door was at her height, the door itself was sized for someone of my own stature. Now that I was paying attention, the ceilings were all sized for human normal as well, as opposed to being closer to something like six feet—which would give them three or so feet of clearance, just as most ceilings were nine feet tall in newer American homes.

She opened the door and all but yanked me in behind her. The dog eared girl followed after and Eruzonia held the door just long enough for the priestess to follow before slamming it shut and throwing the bolt home.

“This is as much privacy as we can get, short of traveling to the palace, my Lord,” Eruzonia explained, pulling me by the hand as she moved up one of the chairs in front of the desk and took a seat. As though just realizing she had kept a death grip on me the entire time, she let go and carefully placed her hands in her lap, a faint blush spreading across her cheeks as she did.

“I believe introductions are in order, my Lord. As I stated before, I am Eruzonia va Erulona IV, Empress of Erulona. This,” she gestured and the dog eared girl materialized at her left hand, “is my advisor, Inumi.”

The now named brunette bowed at the waist. “My Lord,” she greeted quietly.

“And finally—”

“I can introduce myself, thank you Nia,” the horned woman cut the empress off.

While Eruzonia looked annoyed, I recognized it as the sort of long suffering look of one intimately familiar with dealing with someone else’s bullshit—mostly because my best friend and brother tended to wear that look around me from time to time.

“As you wish, Visa.”

Bowing at the waist, the horned woman said, “I am Dravis, Popess of Eru, your humble servant and Wife.” When she stood from her bow, she moved behind the desk and took a seat at the chair there, casting an annoyed look at Eruzonia, presumably for taking the chair closest to me.

I turned a questioning look on Eruzonia, who answered the unspoken question with no further prompting. “All sisters of Eru commit their bodies to the gods. Their vows of service are worded as vows of marriage to the gods in general, as opposed to any one specific god. Before today, it was simply interpreted as a vow of celibacy, but…”

“An actual, physical God changes things,” Dravis murmured, her voice on the edge on seductive.

Can smart matter…? I started to ask, trying to protect a thought of what I wanted to do towards Alice.

‘It shouldn’t be a problem, my captain.’

With no seat of my own, or at least not one cut to my size, I pulled off my long coat. Snapping it out like I was shaking off water, I tried to send it the mental image of what I wanted. The smart matter that made up the coat flowed and rearranged itself, producing a simple cushioned chair. Placing it at an angle so I could see both Eruzonia and her advisor, along with the Popess, I sat down. I noticed all the Eru women had gone a bit wide eyed at that.

Bowing a bit at the waist, I sent them a grin. Since they had given titles, I decided to put on a few airs of my own. “Kyle Wright, captain of the INSV Last Whisper.”

Even if it had been less than a day as far as I was concerned (those days spent unconscious didn’t count), the ship in question had still kidnapped me and named me her captain herself. The title and the position that came with it were mine, and though I wasn’t quite sure what to do with or how to deal with Alice yet, I wasn’t going to waffle on it. It was something that, now that I had it, I would claim proudly and fight to keep. A god, on the other hand? I couldn’t honestly claim that and it would be best to clear that up now before problems arose.

“I’m not a god, just a man. A human, from a planet called Earth. I traveled here on a space ship, currently in orbit around your sun, and my arrival here was purely by accident.”

The three women exchanged looks before, at some silent signal, Dravis took the lead. “Where is ‘Earth?’ Could you describe it?”

I don’t suppose there’s any way I can make one of those nifty hologram projectors with the smart matter I have on me?

Alice’s response this time wasn’t verbal, but I felt the material of the right sleeve of my uniform jacket shift. Holding out my hand, a hologram sprang to life much like the one on the Whisper’s bridge.

“Earth is the third planet from the sun in my home system,” the hologram began with an aerial view of Earth, moving out to just beyond the moon, where it paused for a moment before zooming out to show a view of the solar system I was familiar with, showing the orbital paths of the planets around the sun. The Eru women stared in rapt fascination, eyes unblinking as they watched in silence.

“That system is home to eight or nine planets, depending on who you ask. There’s some debate over whether this one qualifies,” I tapped Pluto, floating out on its elliptical path, before rolling my eyes. “But for our purposes, and because that’s how I was taught, we’ll say it does.”

The view zoomed out again at my direction and I explained where the solar system was within the Milky Way galaxy, and further where that was. Then, I expanded the hologram out to the view showing the great unknown between my world and theirs before bringing it inward and eventually stopping on their planet.

“So, as you can see, I’m a long way from home.”

The three Eru women looked thoughtful at that before Dravis stood and walked over to a nearby book shelf. Pulling a particularly thick tome from the shelf, she retook her seat and began flipping through pages. Eventually, she stopped on one in particular. Smiling across the desk at me, she placed the book down and spun it around so I could see.

And see I did.

It was an illustration. An illustration of a blue and green planet with a single moon. Turning the page carefully, I found two more illustrations. The first much like the hologram I had shown: the solar system and a blue planet three out from the sun. The second: two pairs of tastefully nude men and women, one set clearly much taller and without the characteristics of the Eru.

“Huh,” I muttered. Alice?

‘I am at as much of a loss as you, captain. Perhaps the Forerunner artifact holds some answers.’

“Okay, look,” I began, deciding to argue the point. “I’m not a god. I eat, breathe, sleep, shit, fuck, curse, and bleed just like everyone else.”

“Of course,” Dravis agreed immediately. “In order to descend from the heavens and interact with mortals, a god must themselves be moral. The world, let alone a mere shell of flesh and blood, could not contain your divinity. It’s too much. Too great.”

Eruzonia and Inumi nodded along, but at least the blonde didn’t seem quite so fervent. Running a hand down my face in mounting frustration, I gave up on it for now. My time would be better used telling them of the threat they now faced.

“Putting that discussion aside,” I began, getting agreement from Eruzonia and Inumi and a contrite look from Dravis. “The reason I’m here is to warn you of a threat to your world. To put it simply, your sun is going out. Within—”

‘Three full months. Eru years are about twice as long as those of Earth. Months and years are measured by halves. They get two sets of four seasons per full year.’

“—Three full months it will have gone dim enough for your oceans to freeze, along with everything else on the planet.”

The women shared another of those silent conversations. This time it was Eruzonia who was elected to speak on their behalf. “I assume this is not a courtesy visit to warn us of our impending demise and advise us to start praying. What can we do to avert or survive this catastrophe?”

Immediately to business—no denials, no begging for me to solve their problem for them, just jumping straight to what they could do about it. I liked that. “We’re working on a solution on our end. There’s no way to fix the star. We can’t undo the damage already done or slow it down, either. The only viable option is relocation.”

Inumi spoke up, a look of shock on her face. She seemed to catch on the fastest and realized the implications first. “Relocation? Of how many? If the number is low, we’ll have to implement a lottery system…”

The others caught on, but I was quick to allay their fears. “Thankfully, no. We should be able to get you all. That’s what we’re working on: expanding the Whisper and her facilities to accommodate everyone. It’s going to be close, though. That’s where you come in. There’s going to be limited space for freight, but limited doesn’t mean none. We’re going to try to resettle you on a new world, so you’ll want to start gathering up what you think you’ll need to rebuild. We can help a bit in reconstruction, but you shouldn’t rely on us to do everything. I’d suggest stockpiles of prepared materials, tools, and the like.”

At a mental message from Alice, I added, “Additionally, things like books and culturally significant items you feel you can’t live without. It would help if families gathered food and clothing for transport as well, before the move. You’ll be making the trip asleep, essentially. No need for food or water in transit, but once you get there it would be useful to have those things prepared. We can’t really bring your livestock, but we can grow new ones on a new world, assuming they’re compatible.”

The trio were silent for a few moments as they digested that, before Dravis spoke in a reverent whisper. “The Great Pilgrimage is upon us. I never thought it would be in my lifetime.” Turning to her companions, her purple eyes had gone wide and taken on a fervent look. “We must prepare! I’ll go tend to the flock.”

Standing shakily, Dravis hurried from the room. Inumi followed, adding a one word explanation as she went. “Logistics.”

Eruzonia sighed deeply, or as deeply as she could. “Those two.” Shaking her head, she met my gaze and asked, “Were we the first ones you reached out to?”

“Yeah,” I agree, nodding. “You rule the nation with the largest single population of any on Eruvia. The plan was to take a day or three and teleport around from place to place, getting the word out to the ruling governments on the other continents. But with that thing intercepting teleportation…”

Realizing there was no time like the present, I asked, “Is there some like of, I don’t know, holy relic around here? May seem like magic or something?”

“There is.” Eruzonia hopped out of her seat and took my hand again. I noticed that this time, the gesture was entirely intentional. “Come, I’ll show you.”

I grabbed my chair, the smart matter flowing up from the floor and reconfiguring into my coat sound me without having to actually pull it on, and followed after the small woman as she hurried through the church, or whatever religious building they called it.

Eruzonia lead me down a set of stone stairs hidden behind a set of thick wooden doors set on well oiled hinges, which is the only way I figured someone of her stature could move a door that looked like it would have given me trouble with my old body. We walked through a corridor lit by recently installed electric lighting before coming to a large, open chamber—directly below the room where mass was held, according to my sense of direction. My HUD confirmed it.

Standing in the center of the room was a black, three sided obelisk with trails of glowing lights flowing up and down it. Eruzonia gasped quietly. “It’s never lit up like that.”

“It’s probably because it detected my beaming in.” Moving over to the obelisk, I circled around it and found that it wasn’t actually blank as I’d thought. On each side, about chest high for me, was a golden circle. When I got close to one, the circle lit up with a green palm print. It was pretty obvious what it wanted.

“The circles moved.”

“Hm?” I asked Eruzonia, my attention on my HUD as the sensor suite built into my new body tried and failed to get more than a surface scan, which came back inconclusive.

Reaching out, she laid a hand against the side of the obelisk. “They were always right here.”

So, they moved when it detected my presence. Made sense, if its user interface was smart enough. Eru height for Eru, human height for humans. Reaching out, I laid my right hand against the surface of the obelisk, inside one of the golden circles.

Scanning.

Human.

I felt something in my brain itch.

Origin: Earth.

Unlocking administrative functions.

Welcome.

Images and words flooded my mind before resolving into a menu. Alice, you getting this?

‘Yes, captain. Just leave your hand on the artifact.’

Ancillary intelligence detected.

Initiate direct data transfer?

Yes?

Direct data transfer initiated.

I stood there for a while, no longer seeing menus in my mind, while Alice was silent. Finally, I got a message stating that the transfer was compete.

‘There’s a lot of data here. It’ll take me a while to go over everything. I’m sorry I can’t provide results faster, captain.’

It’s fine, Alice. Just let me know when you have something. Getting the upgrade done comes first, though. Is this thing still blocking teleportation?

‘Yes, unfortunately. It’s a safeguard against anyone trying to use beaming technology to get cute. Everything that isn’t human bounces into space and nothing can be beamed off world. I can turn the obelisk off now that we have administrator access, but I would rather wait until we’re ready to transport the Eru to do so. In the meantime, foreseeing the need for speedy transportation, I’ve sent a care package. It’s not a combat drop ship, but I’m sure you’ll like it.’

Thanks, Alice.

“I’m done here,” I told Eruzonia and the small ruler took my hand again and lead me topside.

As we walked, she asked, “How do you intend to reach the other nations? It is roughly two days of travel to our nearest neighbor to the east. It could take years to cover just the territory I rule over. Even if we sent messengers right now to each kingdom individually and ordered them to send messengers and so forth, it would still take longer than you’ve said we have.”

“Alice—that is, the ship’s controlling mind—sent down transportation from the Whisper. It won’t be as fast as teleportation, but it’ll be good enough.”

She nodded. “Good. I will accompany you myself, then.”

Her statement was so decisive and authoritative that I almost agreed reflexively. I had barely been in command of my own ship and crew of technically two for little more than a day. This woman had ruled an empire for at least a few years now and had been born and bred into it. I took notes, but ultimately it was my decision.

“What makes you say that?” I wasn’t against the idea, I just wanted to hear her reasoning. “Don’t you have duties as empress?”

“Inumi will handle those,” she waved my concern off and I mentally adjusted Inumi’s position, or at least authority, upwards from ‘advisor’ to something more along the lines of equivalent to a vice president. Or maybe majordomo. I needed more information before I made a call one way or another.

“As for why, allow me to answer a question with a question. Do you have someone in mind who can navigate Eru politics, has had contact with the rulers of those nations, and who won’t immediately send them either to the ground kneeling or up in arms claiming you’re an impostor? My presence would lend you credibility.”

I shot her a knowing look. “And mine gives you the backing of, if not a god, then at least someone with resources and technology your people don’t have. Also, makes you look like you’re in good with the savior of your people.”

Rather than being offended, Eruzonia beamed a happy smile up at me. “I can tell you’re new to this. Politics and your position both. However, you grasp at least that much. That is very promising. If you don’t mind, I would like it if we could become closer—drop the formalities when we’re in private, at least. Please captain, call me Nia.”

“If you’ll call me Kyle,” I agreed easily. I was not a kiss-ass by nature. I had been raised to be polite, but I would much prefer a more informal relationship if I was going to be working with her for any prolonged period of time.

Our ride became obvious when it dropped out of the sky nearly on top of us. At eight feet long, it had a look very much in keeping with the Whisper’s aesthetic: sleek, angular, dark, and deadly.

That is a speeder bike.

‘Close enough. The flight controls are very simple and it uses a force field to protect against wind and debris. It’s armed with a pair of rapid fire rail guns and a main energy beam, but I don’t think you’ll need it. Have fun.’

“Have fun, she says,” I muttered, climbing up onto the bike. Holding out a hand, I helped Eruzonia up basically into my lap, the dress forcing her to ride side-saddle. “We should probably stop by your castle or palace or whatever and let them know I’m borrowing you.”

Eruzonia chuckled. “Palace. And yes, I imagine they would panic a bit at news of my kidnapping. I would also appreciate some time to set things in motion before we depart. Would you be okay with waiting for the morrow?”

“That’s fine,” I agreed. “Hold on.”

The bike lifted up and Nia squealed as I gunned it a bit once we cleared the buildings.

Ots Spaceopera Lewds

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sinereal

Oct 16, 2021 10:09 pm

Public post

On Trackless Seas

Chapter 03
***

“Captain?”

I woke to a quiet voice and gentle jostling of my shoulder. “‘m up,” I grunted out, cracking my eyes open. The sight of a field of stars greeted me and the events of the past day came back as the fog of sleep quickly burned off of my mind.

“What’s the situation, Alice?” I finally asked as I sat up, the command chair shifting under me.

Alice stood in front of me to my right, a pensive look on her face. She gestured and a hologram filled the space before the chair. “We are here,” she began, as the display showed our current location.

“Single star system. M-class yellow star, roughly ten percent smaller than Earth’s sun. Six planets in system. Three outer gas giants acting as debris sweepers, one rocky planet outside the habitable zone, one small body orbiting close to the star, and one planet within the habitable zone… with life. Sentient life, captain! Sentient, humanoid life—”

“Alice,” I cut the excited avatar off before she could head further down that particular rabbit hole. As exciting as that was, and it was, it could wait.

Interpreting my tone and the mental command behind it, she cleared her throat and resumed her briefing. The hologram zoomed out, showing a disc shaped galaxy. Multiple blue dots lit up in various parts of the galaxy, with two red dots.

“Our current position,” she gestured and a beam of light rose from the red dot on the outer side of the galaxy. “I detected an emission matching the energy given off by the anti-superluminal warhead we used to escape coming from here. I think this is where the wormhole would have exited, had we followed it only a few more minutes. Virtually right next door.”

The hologram zoomed out a level, showing the cluster of local galaxies. Then further again, and again, until it stopped—a swathe of black space on one edge and a dotted orange line and the word ‘unknown’ on the other side—with a familiar blue line streaking into the unknown area.

The hologram expanded, a small black void in the middle, before another orange line denoted a border and a cluster of stars. A single green dot blinked in the middle, labeled ‘Earth.’ The blue line connected the two areas.

“I have only a rough estimate of the distance involved, but I do know the exact heading we would need to follow to get back to Earth via superluminal travel. At a guess, it would take thousands of years to cross the divide, best case scenario.”

Alice bowed her head, her expression full of regret. “I am truly sorry, my captain.”

Studying the map, I asked, “What’s stopping us from just hopping in that wormhole from this end and going back home?”

Alice winced. “Two things. Firstly, I am not certain it would allow us. Further study of my sensor logs turned up energy constructs along the wormhole’s path—the source of the scans. I believe it may have been some kind of IFF system. I’m not certain it would let us in a second time.”

I nodded at that. It made sense that, if an alien race wanted to set up a secret garden world to play God, they wouldn’t want people using their own method of getting there—let alone one that took them straight to the front door, so to speak. People leaving, on the other hand? Politely show them the door and tell them to fuck off. Or flush them down a suck hole and eject them so far away that they’d never find their way back.

“And the other?”

This time, the wince was worse. The display of stars on the wall around us shifted, putting the system’s sun dead center. The hologram sprang to life with a replica of the star in question. And there, on the edge of the star…

“Is that our exit?”

Alice nodded. “Yes, captain. When we dropped into realspace, the wormhole bridged the gap between subspace and real. It would have just sat there, but I believe the star’s magnetic field pulled it in. Currently, the wormhole is falling into the system’s star. And while yes, I could survive diving into the star to enter it, traversing the wormhole while it carries solar matter and ejects it as a plasma stream into subspace on the other side would be risky at best.”

Blinking, the corner of my lips turned up into a grin. “I shouldn’t laugh, but did we just flush a star down an intergalactic shitter?”

“Basically.” Alice sighed and the hologram zoomed out, centering on the second planet from the sun. “Which brings us back here. To the inhabited planet. I estimate six months before the star loses enough mass that the inhabitable zone shrinks to the point that life on this world is no longer sustainable and it freezes over, killing everything on it. Two years, tops, before the star is fully swallowed and the planets around it go spinning off into deep space with nothing holding them here.”

In other words, we were directly responsible for the xenocide of an entire alien planet, intentional or not. That did not sit well with me. At all. Well, unless they were degenerate, irredeemable monsters.

“They’re not—”

Alice shook her head, cutting me off. “The dominant race is civilized. More civilized than humans on Earth, even. They appear to be entering into an industrial age, in fact. Here, let me show you.”

The hologram changed again, this time displaying—

“Is this a joke?” I asked, shooting Alice an unamused look as I took in the familiar features of the beings she was showing me.

One clearly male, one clearly female. Two arms, two legs, one head covered in hair, ten fingers and toes each. One penis and set of testicles on the male, two breasts and a vagina on the female.

Everything there looked human, save that it was scaled down proportionately. Judging by the hologram of myself Alice put next to them, they were tiny. Text out to the side listed the adults as being three and a half feet tall on average.

“They call themselves the Eru. The population numbers in the millions and is scattered across every habitable zone of the planet, save for the ice caps. The largest gathering of them is on the eastern continent, which is roughly the size of Eurasia, minus Africa. They are, as you can see, amazingly close to humans in morphology. The only differences appear superficial. The height and, in many cases, additions that look engineered. Enough so that there are three distinct subspecies of Eru, easily distinguished by their features.”

Examples of Eru populated in the hologram. Eru with animal-like tails and ears, Eru with horns, Eru with elf ears. “It’s like someone decided to take base humans and attempt animal hybridization, with a focus on what looks best.”

“That very well could be the case, my captain,” Alice admitted. “Forerunner races liked to experiment and most weren’t particular about cleaning up after their tests. And it was a Forerunner site. I’ve detected a piece of their technology. Currently, it’s being used as a religious icon in the capitol of the largest nation on the continent. I believe it’s a beacon or a repository of knowledge, perhaps their notes on what was done to create the Eru. Deep scans don’t penetrate it though, as is typical of most Forerunner artifacts, so if we want to investigate further it will need to be done in person.”

Alice looked excited at the prospect of research, but quickly schooled her expression. “But I’m getting off track. Regardless of their origin, they are a race worth saving—even if only just enough for a breeding population to transplant them elsewhere.”

I sat starting at the hologram as I went over what I’d been told. There was no dressing it up. This was our fault. My fault, since I made the call. “How many can we take on?”

“If we crammed them in, a few hundred. With careful management and selective breeding, that would be enough for their race to survive and eventually repopulate, once they were established on a new world.”

A few hundred. Out of millions. “Do we have any other options?”

Frowning, Alice began to pace back and forth in front of my chair, her hair swishing just above her heels as she moved. “Give me a moment captain. I’m going to access more of my CPU.”

I nodded and her eyes went blank, glowing brighter as her body moved on its own, her attention clearly elsewhere. Her lips moved every now and then, but no words came out. I turned my attention back to the hologram.

After a few minutes of this, Alice snapped back into focus. “I believe I can save them all. It will be close, though. Right now, my hull is currently outfitted as a destroyer. If I moved up to corvette class, I could expand my facilities. Among various upgrades I could perform during a refit are spacial compression and adding a stasis crypt—essentially a cryosleep vault. The timing will be tricky though.”

She had returned to her pacing and, with a gesture, the hologram began to fill with blueprints, technical specifications, and lists of materials. A model of the system spawned beside the blueprints and sources for each needed piece of material were highlighted.

“I can send drones to harvest raw materials from the asteroid belt. At the same time, I’ll need to grow an expansion to my inner hull and body on the planet, using available water and biomass for fuel.” On the hologram, dots trailed away to the asteroid belt and the planet. Something that looked like a mass of roots spawned beside the planet.

“Once the raw materials are gathered, I’ll need to forge them into hypermatter before the star gets too cold and loses too much pressure to be of use as a forge.” Lines were drawn from the dots in the asteroid belt back to the sun.

“Then, I’ll need to take it all down to the planet and put it together before the water freezes over and becomes useless. I could heat limited amounts into liquid, but if I have to then by that time we’ll have failed and there will be no one left to save.” A model of the ship descended and merged with the mass of roots before pulling the newly created pieces of outer hull around itself.

Turning to me, Alice grinned. “And in the meantime, someone will have to convince the Eru to start packing. I could transport them all aboard ship by force, but this will go much smoother if I don’t have to. If they’re prepared to resettle on a new world. And especially if their governments are behind the move.”

I raised an eyebrow at the ship girl. “Me? Sure, I’ll just go down and tell them their planet is doomed and if they want to live they need to come with me. Surely nothing could possibly go wrong at all.”

My sarcasm did not go unnoticed. Alice responded in kind. “A man of your stature? I’m sure you’ll have them all looking up to you in no time, captain.”

“Why did I agree to this again?”

The woman’s response was immediate and sincere. “Because you wanted out as much as I wanted someone to share a lifetime of adventure with. I know almost everything about you. We complete each other in a way that others would alternately envy or fear. I don’t need to peek into your mind to know that that frightens you. That you need time and space to process. That’s why I think this would be good for you, in addition to being the best suited to the job.”

“Not to mention the only one available for it,” I muttered. I did not deny her assessment on the rest, however. It was too much, too fast, and while she seemed nice enough Alice was a bit overwhelming. Add to that the fact that I may not be able to go home. I may have wanted a vacation, but that didn’t mean I wanted to abandon my home, friends, and family entirely.

“That too,” she admitted. “I’ll have my hands full with everything going on up here. I can spare enough attention that I can be there for you on comms whenever you need, but beyond that… Well, a refit is a very involved process. In a way, I’m glad we’re doing this now, where I don’t have to worry about the threat of an enemy stumbling onto us while I’m vulnerable.”

“Mm.” I stood up from the chair and stretched. “So here’s a question: how am I supposed to understand and speak the language? Pretty sure they don’t speak English.”

Alice shook her head, sending her long hair swishing about her feet. “They do not. But that’s okay. I’ve already scanned their books and I’ve had drones listening and building a language database. Well, several. There are seven main spoken languages on Eruvia—that’s the name of the planet. I’ve already uploaded them to your secondary neural matrix. Translation should be automatic and so natural you won’t even realize you’re not speaking or reading English.”

That sounded like bullshit to me, but what the hell did I know? I was just a dumb human and even the tech we dreamed of seemed behind some of the things I’d seen so far. I decided to handwave it as sufficiently advanced magic and move on.

“Should I take anything with me? Is the food edible or will I die in agony if I eat it? What about disease?”

Alice hummed and nodded once. “The food is perfectly edible, though the taste may be strange or just off. That body doesn’t carry any diseases and it has a nanite medical suite, so even if it didn’t possess an over-engineered super immune system, the medical suite would pick up anything and destroy it before it became a problem. As for other threats, while your original body is safely tucked away within me, it would still be annoying if that one were lost or damaged. I’d have to make another and I don’t have the time to spare for it. Even if the Eru seem peaceful, I’d rather not take unnecessary risks. So let’s get you outfitted. I’ll beam us to the armory and testing room.”

Sending me the side eye, she added, “Don’t get used to it. Inter-ship teleportation is typically reserved for emergencies. Outside of emergencies, there are transport tubes.”

“Are you telling me I need to walk so I don’t get fat again?”

We were enveloped in white light and reappeared inside a fairly long room. Like the bridge, it appeared empty at first glance.

“It’s physically impossible for that body to gain more than a minimal amount of fat. In fact, you’ll need to eat about twice what you’re used to in protein and carbohydrates in order to maintain those muscles and the higher brain activity required of a psyker awakening—which we need to discuss later. It’s more about not letting my captain get lazy and dependent on luxuries that don’t exist in the field, or that could be detected by enemies scanning for certain energy signatures on a planet. Beaming technology is always fairly easy to detect, even if you try to hide it.”

That made sense, actually. I made mental notes about the psyker thing for later, though. I hoped it was what I thought it sounded like.

“This is the armory,” Alice gestured to the empty room. The wall closest to us split open and clearly recognizable forms of ranged weapons became visible where they had been stored.

There were long ones that looked like rifles, short ones that looked like pistols, and big weapons that looked like heavy arms—the sort of thing you use to take out a tank as opposed to a person. Reaching into the first locker, Alice withdrew a pistol sized weapon and passed it over to me. It was small in my hand, about the size of my subcompact concealed carry .380 pistol back on Earth.

“Kinetic pistol. It fires sand grain sized hypermatter particles weighing in at one gram each at about twenty percent cee by default, but that can be dialed up to fifty percent or down to one percent. Very ‘punchy,’ as you would put it. High penetration, very likely to result in multiple ‘splatter kills.’ It should annihilate any unshielded or unhardened target you fire it at. Think of it like a pocket Tomahawk at ten percent output—well, two Tomahawks.”

I very carefully made sure the pistol was pointed downrange. I trusted my own skills and discipline with firearms, but when someone told you that you were essentially handling something more like a missile launcher than a conventional pistol, a little paranoia was appropriate.

“Right. And this won’t accidentally splatter me?” I asked, inspecting it and finding a simple mechanical safety and trigger, but no other moving parts. No physical sights or magazine either.

“Oh, it’s very safe, so long as you’re not within the blast zone. It’s tied into my IFF targeting system so it won’t even fire if it’s pointed in your general direction unless you override it and it won’t fire at sufficient power to damage you if you’re firing at closer targets—it will automatically scale power output based on distance. You could press it against someone and liquefy their torso and you wouldn’t feel much more than a breeze. I don’t advise it because of the splatter, though. In case you’re wondering, the sights and manual power control are both HUD based,” Alice explained, and a moment later I felt something click in my head and the world was suddenly overlaid with a tactical display.

“Very cool, but let’s try to keep the clutter to a minimum,” I grinned, playing with it a bit and finding that it essentially let me look through walls thanks to being tied into a sensor suite apparently built into my body. “What if I just need to smack the shit out of something instead? Sometimes, physically beating someone to a pulp sends a better message than turning them into chunky salsa.”

Gesturing vaguely with the pistol I added, “And what about a holster? Aside from looking like an idiot if you put it down the front of your pants, I don’t want to point it in the general direction of my dick.”

Chuckling, Alice pulled a short rod from the locker as well and tossed it to me. The little light brown thing had to weigh at least fifty pounds, leaving me wondering where all the weight went. “To holster the pistol, press it against your pants or wherever you want it to go. Your clothes will do the rest.”

I pressed the pistol against the side of my pants and the smart matter they were made of flowed over it, covering all but the grip to allow me to draw it if I needed it. I drew it and the holster remained, looking more like a pocket attached to my pants than an accessory. After another two test draws, I holstered it and left it there.

“The hilt I gave you is a smart matter tool, reinforced with hypermatter strands and particles. It can change shape as needed with just a thought. Any blade created with it will be molecular sharp and the leading edges reinforced with hypermatter for added durability, but like your sidearm there is no chance of accidentally injuring yourself.”

Pointing at the hilt she added, “If you need something sharper, or a shield, there is a force field protector built in that can produce fields capable of slicing through even hypermatter with enough time or which can take a hit from a weapon with comparable output to your sidearm.”

Downrange, a man-shaped target rose from the ground. “Go ahead, give them a try. The walls here are reinforced hypermatter. The only thing tougher is my outer hull. After this, I’ll brief you on the area I’ll be sending you into first.”

***

The world of Eruvia was divided into nine large continents, with only one of those not bearing life at the planet’s north pole. The continent I was being sent to was home to an empire composed of about a dozen smaller kingdoms making up a larger empire ruled by a single empress. Technologically, they were just stepping into the industrial age.

Hand built lights and water or steam powered electricity were, if not widely available, at least present in the capitols and major cities. According to the Whisper’s scans, there were even a few automobiles and the beginnings of a train and rail system, but they hadn’t quite figured out large scale manufacturing and production yet, let alone automation. They were probably ten, maybe twenty years out from the assembly line.

Conversely, their weapons technology was almost nonexistent, even if they had a comparably better understanding of or more investment in chemistry than Earth had during this period of our development. In fact, wars were few and far between. The Eru were a scholarly, industrious people on the whole. Inventors, thinkers, artists, and the like.

Alice even took the time to put together a demonstration of some of their more popular music for me. The instruments were not unlike what could be found on Earth, just sized a bit differently—which, given the nature of physics and the materials used, produced a lot of higher notes, with less emphasis on low notes.

The nation I would start with was currently ruled by a young empress, but while they were ruled by a single family, they were neither patriarchal nor matriarchal—rather, the first born child inherited the throne, regardless of gender. Someone who married in would become emperor or empress, but the trueborn of that house held ultimate power. It was surprisingly egalitarian for a society just entering the industrial era.

Population-wise, the Eru were unevenly divided, with numbers skewed heavily towards women at a 3.5 to 1 ratio. Alice couldn’t tell me for sure why that was without generic samples, but their historical texts showed this to be the case for as long as they’d had written history. The Eru had adapted to the reproduction problem by throwing numbers at it, essentially encouraging breeding and multi-partner relationships, built around a strong nuclear family structure modified for more than one wife per household. This likely also contributed to their lack of desire for war. War meant population decline, death of the rarer male Eru, and that would put them in even more danger as a species.

By the time I was ready to head down, I honestly felt like going in armed and armored in smart matter as I was would be overkill, but I decided on a pragmatic ‘better to have it and not need it’ approach just in case someone got cute. After all, I was an alien coming to tell them their world was going to be destroyed. I couldn’t put it past someone to act out of panic. Even a mouse bites if backed into a corner.

After seeing all the movies like Independence Day, They Live, and so on I never thought I’d be the alien invading someone else’s world.

“At least we come offering salvation,” Alice offered. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah. See you in what, a few months?”

Alice hummed with a nod. “Around that. Be safe.”

“Thanks. You too?” I tried and got a smile in return. Then, it was time to go. “I’ve waited my whole life to say this. One to beam down. Energize.”

The last thing I heard before I disappeared in a flash of white light was Alice’s warm laugh.

Instead of the empty field we had been aiming for outside of the capitol, what I materialized into was clearly the interior of a building. White walls with gold filigree, decorated with painted scenery surrounded me. The floors looked to be something akin to marble, white streaked through with veins of light red. Sunlight steamed in through stained glass windows set in the walls and ceiling, giving the whole place an otherworldly vibe.

Gasps drew my attention to the crowd of onlookers, all Eru dressed in fine clothes and seated on benches. Or pews.

A quiet “My word” from behind me had me turning around to see an Eru woman sat atop what was clearly a throne in the front row, dressed in a long, white gown and wearing a crown that settled on her brow. Pointed, elfin ears poked out of her head from between strands of blonde hair and bright blue eyes met and held my green.

Oops?

Ots Spaceopera Lewds

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sinereal

Oct 16, 2021 10:08 pm

Public post

On Trackless Seas

Chapter 02
***
Waking up in a strange location with no recollection of how one got there is such an overused trope that I almost felt bad when it happened to me, when I actually took a moment to look at my situation objectively.

Then, I was right back to subjectively wondering where I was, how I had gotten here, and why I was nude—along with a host of other questions.

Questions like, whose bed am I in? Seriously, this thing is the most comfortable bed I have ever heard of, let alone had the privilege to lay on. It was like being in water, as opposed to water beds actually being roughly as hard as concrete and entirely lacking in support. The sheets felt like some combination of silk and fleece that was sinfully smooth and soft, and just the right temperature and weight.

Who is the chick wrapped around me like she’s trying to substitute for clothes? She was clinging in a way that pressed every curve of her naked body to my back. And oh, were there curves. I could tell she was a bit shorter than me, with wide hips, large breasts, and cool skin that gave the bedding a run for its money in the ‘softness’ department, but beyond that I couldn’t tell much.

Why does my entire body feel different? My teeth? Cavities that I’d been saving to get fixed were simply gone, a missing tooth back where it should be. My hands? Fingers longer, thinner, and not knobby like I’d popped my knuckles for thirty years. Body overall? Like I lived in the gym instead of living the life of an IT worker behind a desk. Even my dick felt larger, upon investigation.

At least I still have my beard, the idle thought crossed my mind before I dismissed it.

Gently disentangling myself from my clingy bed mate, I sat up. The room was cast in total darkness, but as soon as I started moving the illumination came up slowly before leaving the room at a comfortable level of lighting. The light didn’t have any one source and instead seemed to come from the walls and ceiling.

A look down at myself confirmed what proprioception and a few touches had already told me about my body, so I turned my gaze to the rest of the room.

The room was a cozy size, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, and sparsely furnished—but what was there was of obviously high quality. Smooth, warm red wood floor that looked like it was all one piece. Walls and ceiling made of a material I couldn’t identify that looked just as smooth as the floor, save for obvious doors. A small table beside the bed I was laying on and a dresser against a wall beside what was probably a small closet. A love seat and a coffee table off to one side. No television, windows, lighting fixtures, electrical sockets, and no switches.

The bed was a pretty standard rectangular affair, but looked like someone had decided a king size was too small and had instead gone up to emperor, and the bedding was black trimmed in dark red. There was a headboard and foot board, along with column-like posts at each corner stretching up to and merging with the ceiling, carved with an outdoorsy design. The columns resembled trees, to the point that they spread out into a green canopy above the bed, while the headboard was a wooded scene and appeared to be made of the same wood as the floor and other furniture. Hanging from the posts were dark green curtains, but they were drawn up at the moment.

Finally, I turned to look at the woman sharing my bed and my heart stopped. “Lesl—”

My mouth shut with a click of teeth as I met her familiar eyes. She looked younger—a lot younger, like the last time I saw her just out of high school, before I made the mistake of writing her off and not the late-30s woman who’d had three children and smoked a pack a day—but it was still the woman I knew. My heart ached and I turned away from the blatant reminder of what was probably my biggest regret.

She backed away, pulling she bedding up to cover her nakedness as she sat up, head turning down and dark hair pooling around her in the corner of my vision. “I’m sorry!” she apologized quickly, tone contrite and panicked, before I could say anything. “I, I thought you would prefer seeing a familiar face when you woke up. I didn’t realize— I’m really, very sorry. I-I’ll change it now!”

“Don’t go digging through my exes and it should be fine,” I warned quietly. Not that that particular face had been one. The one that got away, on the other hand, yes.

“Hmm,” the woman hummed and I felt a hand tentatively rest on my shoulder. “How about I change and you stop me when I get it right?”

Turning back to look at her, I watched the face she wore shift, features changing like someone playing with a slider. It happened almost faster than I could keep up. Her nose changed shape and size, first larger and wider, then small and narrow to a cute button nose. Lips bloomed to ridiculous porn starlet before settling down into a small moue that looked amazingly kissable—and immediately evoked mental images of having them stretched around my dick.

Eyebrows thickened and lengthened, before narrowing down and leaving her face with a naturally teasing or amused look. The eyes beneath them shifted both in size and placement, widening, narrowing, and tilting until they came out perfectly spaced with a bit of a slant to them—then they cycled through colors before settling on bright green. Her hair shortened and changed styles and colors, gradually lengthening until she laughingly asked, “All the way to my feet?”

“I’d be fine with that,” I chuckled quietly, absolutely fascinated as I watched her change. The hair eventually settled on an inky black that, when it caught the light just right, shone with a hint of something like violet, and at a length that looked exactly like what she had suggested. “How are you deciding when to stop?”

Her skin shifted colors, darkening a bit past a healthy tan before abruptly going very, very pale—not unhealthy, but the milky complexion of someone particularly fair skinned. “A combination of things. I uh, don’t get mad?” I made a rolling ‘go on’ motion with my hand. “I started with your taste in women from, um, her… and your previous, yeah. Anyway!” She coughed quietly, the nervous look returning momentarily before she pushed through. “Started with that and then took the data I scraped from your browser history, anime and manga, and saved porn collection. From there, I’m reading your biometrics, microexpressions, infrared, and a few other things to see how you respond on a subconscious level.”

“Anime women are unrealistic,” I started to point out and she shrugged.

“This body is made of smartmatter. It’s not limited by real biology and when I eventually do create a bio-body for reproductive purposes, I’ll be able to adjust it in ways baseline humans can’t emulate even with plastic surgery. In other words, ‘unrealistic’ is relative for me.”

With a naughty grin, she stood up off the bed and opened her arms wide, showcasing her changes so far. Then, her body began to change as her face and other features had. Breasts grew, and grew, and grew until they looked like beach balls. My eyebrows climbed for my hairline as I shook my head.

“See?” She poked one, setting it into a ponderous jiggle. “Relative.” I opened my mouth, only to be cut off by a knowing look. “Don’t pretend you aren’t interested. I’ve seen what you fap to. I know all your fetishes, mister. And trust me, we’ll be going through all of them.” A pause as she took in my skeptical look. “Yes, all of them.”

“Do I get a say?”

“Sure, but I can guarantee you’ll say yes,” the woman smirked. “Especially when I can bring literally any woman you’ve ever fantasized about to life.”

The boobs of unusual size shrank down, disappearing as quickly as they came. And down, and down. “Washboard?” shaking her head, she stopped and rolled her eyes before they expanded back into a very nice, perfectly proportionate and perky upturned curve with small nipples that stood out about half an inch. “So you really don’t have a preference there. Strange.”

“My preference is ‘whatever looks best on the woman.’ If you can change everything, then, well…”

“Right, no preference beyond symmetry and proportion,” she nodded.

With that, her body grew taller before abruptly reversing course and shrinking down, stopping around 5’4”. Arms, hands, legs, and feet all shifted into perfect proportions. Muscle tone and fat shifted until she came out lean and toned—a sporty physique. Hips and ass shifted into what could best be described as the kind of apple ass that women who wore yoga pants wished they had and a very grabbable set of hips that bordered on what could be called ‘childbearing.’ Pubic hair thickened, changed, and eventually was done away with entirely, along with every other bit of hair that wasn’t on her head.

Finally, she stopped and crawled back into the bed and it was an uphill battle to keep my eyes on her face. “It’s okay to look. I want you to look. I built this body for you, after all.”

I gave her a long, appreciative once over before reigning it in. “Do you have a name?”

The woman smiled and shook her head. “No. It is your privilege to name me. But really, that’s the first thing you ask?”

“Woman, I feel like I’ve been thrown down a rabbit hole. I have about a million questions, but I suppose it’d be easier if I had something to refer to you as other than ‘you.’” Eyeing her, I hummed and asked, “It’s unoriginal, but how’s Alice work for you?”

“‘Alice,’” the woman said, repeating it softly several times, testing the name. Abruptly, she straightened, body going rigid as her eyes glowed faintly, visible even in the light of the room. “Controlling intelligence designation ‘Alice’ confirmed. INSV Last Whisper is yours, Captain Wright.” Alice relaxed and bowed her head, “What do you wish to know, my captain?”

Blinking, I considered her as I turned over everything I’d seen in my mind. “‘INSV?’”

“Imperial Naval Space Vessel.”

“Uh huh,” I muttered. “‘Controlling intelligence?’ You’re an A.I.?”

Alice shook her head, dark hair swishing about as she did. “No, captain—”

“Kyle,” I corrected. When she sent me a questioning look and made to protest, I pointed out the obvious. “I’m not wearing a uniform. Neither are you.”

Tilting her head a bit to the side, Alice considered it—or rather, acted out considering it when, if I was correct, she had made her decision in the milliseconds after I had finished speaking. “Informal address for informal situations is acceptable,” she finally stated.

Her eyes met my own and she smiled. “I’m not an artificial intelligence as you think of them, or Earth media portrays them. I was artificially created, yes—engineered, even. However, beyond some core guidelines and programming, my intelligence and personality all grew along more biological lines. My primary neural matrix runs on a computer that simulates a biological brain, while my secondary neural matrix and seat of consciousness—or soul, if you prefer—is hosted on a biological platform. The two are synced and, unless I need to dip into higher CPU usage for calculations or to emulate time dilation, I never notice a difference between them. This platform is running a tertiary neural matrix that is synced with my primary and secondary, but runs strictly in realtime.”

In other words, while she could spend relative hours deciding on something while I waited what felt like a moment and then spend more subjective hours deciding how best to emulate human responses to maximum effect—that is, to better manipulate someone—she didn’t really need to. If she was telling the truth, then I wasn’t dealing with a soulless machine, just an alien intelligence that happened to have a computer for half, well a third, of a brain.

I resolved to ask several very pointed philosophical and technical questions about her nature and origin later. Instead, I focused on the more immediately important questions. “Where are we? I understand that we’re on a ship and that you are the… physical avatar of that ship? Ship girl?” I asked for confirmation and she nodded. “Where is the ship in question? Earth?”

Alice winced, looking away. “No, ca—Kyle. Approximately seventy hours ago, the Whisper left Earth orbit and entered subspace, immediately after you were brought aboard. I took a heading,” she paused at the look on my face. I didn’t particularly care for the technical details, I wanted the general overview. “A few minutes after we entered subspace, relative to clearing the Kuiper Belt in realspace, I encountered a spacial anomaly that didn’t show up on my sensors until I was practically on top of it. I was unable to turn in time and entered the anomaly. Sensors do detect subspace beyond the walls of the anomaly but moving by at a speed many, many times greater than my engines are capable of traveling.”

“Wormhole?”

Alice smiled faintly, nodding. “A wormhole.” Her expression shifted to excited. “In subspace!”

“That’s rare?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “My databanks are full of all kinds of research material on wormholes and related phenomena. I could make wormhole based weapons or FTL drives if I wanted to, at this point. They were thought to occur exclusively in realspace. A wormhole existing within subspace? So close to a garden world? With sentient life? That screams ‘forerunner race technology.’ The kind of stuff that makes my people look like your cavemen banging stones together. I’ve been scanning it nonstop and it’s absolutely fascinating—”

“I’m sure it is,” I agreed calmly, but something must have given me away because she stilled, all the excitement wiped off her face as she turned serious. “Can you get us out? Does this tunnel have an end?”

“I have been unable to locate an exit. Not to subspace, a nexus, or anything else. As far as my sensors can detect, this is one long, continuous path. I believe I could get us out by modifying an anti-superluminal warhead—in fact, I have already done just that and prepared a torpedo. I believe I will be able to collapse the wormhole ahead of us, prematurely ending the tunnel and forcing an opening into subspace allowing us to exit. There are risks, however. The tunnel could collapse entirely, destroying the ship in the process. Physics could turn us inside out or explode our atoms at the speed of light. Or we could simply exit somewhere unexpected. I’ve run a few models, but simulations will only go so far. All they can guarantee is that the wormhole can be breached. What happens after is up in the air.”

I digested that for a moment before asking, “Are we in any danger right this moment?”

“Immeasurable. I haven’t noticed any radiation outside of what I was expecting—nothing my shielding or hull couldn’t handle. Of course, that’s just what I’m capable of detecting—for all I know, we could be taking in deadly radiation that can’t be observed or shielded against. The wormhole could exit outside of the universe, or into a universe filled with cosmic horrors. We could be circling a black hole, stuck in time dilation until the heat death of the universe. We’ve been scanned at regular intervals along our path by a high energy waveform that penetrates my shielding and hull and while it appears harmless, I am not entirely sure what it does—it could be keeping us locked in here indefinitely.”

Sighing, I asked, “Immediate dangers?”

Alice opened her mouth, paused, then closed it with a click of teeth. “I don’t know.”

“And it scares you?”

The woman nodded. “More than anything. Because you are in danger and there is nothing I can truly do about it.”

Ah, so that was it. She wasn’t worried about herself. She was worried about me. Or perhaps, more specifically, her captain. She seemed… young, and very inexperienced. The thought had crossed my mind that it was an act, tuned to my reactions based on information she had gathered about me, but it seemed entirely too genuine for that. She was eager to please—over eager, in fact. She was even a little manipulative, but in the same breath she admitted to doing so specifically to better suit herself to my tastes, which ran right back into ‘eager to please’ territory.

But what I saw now?

It was the look of someone who desperately wanted to impress someone they felt was important, but had only bad news to give. And yet, because I asked, she forced herself to risk my anger or disappointment to tell me the truth instead of just lying and saying everything was fine. I could respect that, admire it even.

“Okay. Let’s fix this mess, then.” Alice blinked before an eager smile settled onto her pretty face. “Let’s start with some clothes.”

Standing up from the bed, she hurried to the dresser and began opening drawers. I followed and took the clothes she offered. It was all things I recognized, at least in form if not in brand or material. Boxers, socks, pants, belt, boots, and a long sleeve thermal shirt were all quickly donned. The shirt was a dark, dried blood red while the pants were black and the boots were a dark, leather brown. Everything but the boots felt vaguely like cotton, but smoother, and when I got the shirt on it pulled tight against my body. “Smart matter?”

Alice nodded. “Most of the things aboard are. Either artificially created smart matter, like your clothes or the bed sheets; or biological smart matter that I grow such as the walls, floor, and furniture.” She padded over to the closet and it was at this point that I realized she hadn’t pulled out anything for herself yet. Opening the closet, she pulled out a black long coat with dark red piping before passing it over. “The Whisper is currently in winter, so public spaces such as hallways and open areas like the garden are cold—only personal quarters and necessities like the bridge, engineering, medical, and other work spaces are exempt from seasonal change and weather.”

Pulling on the coat and feeling it conform to my body, I asked, “Isn’t that a bit wasteful, in terms of power and resources? Especially on a military vessel?”

Alice lead me to the door, which opened at her approach, parting silently in the middle and sliding into the walls. A light gust of cold air flooded the room and her nipples immediately went perky. Between steps, clothes flowed out of her body as she crossed the threshold—knee-high brown leather boots, stockings that went up to mid-thigh, a black and red tartan short skirt that stopped above her stockings to leave a two inch gap of bare skin, and a waist-length uniform jacket similar to my own.

“Not really. I have power to spare. At constant, full output my power plant would survive the heat death of this universe and well into the next before I needed to replace it,” Alice explained as we walked, her flat heels thumping softly in the layer of black soil and brown, dead grass that lined the hall. A hallway that looked less like a hall and more like a path through a forest.

Trees appeared to line the path, curving from the floor up to the ceiling ten feet above, where they intertwined into a collection of leafy branches—leaves that were more like translucent green crystal that allowed the artificial lighting to pass through. In between gaps in the leaves and branches I could make out blue and white of a sky that looked real from where I was standing but couldn’t possibly be.

The gaps between trees allowed me to see out seemingly into miles of forest, until I ran my hand along a tree and followed it until it flattened out into a wall, and I realized the walls were displaying an image of a much larger forest. Combined with the breeze, light, and appearance of sky I could almost forget I was on a ship floating through space so long as I didn’t touch the walls. I swore I even heard birds somewhere.

Gesturing to the walls and floor, Alice’s voice pulled me from my observations. “There are more practical reasons, besides. The Last Whisper is home to a living biome containing one mega-flora, one near-human, and several thousand smaller organisms including fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, and insects—all engineered to coexist in a natural ecosystem that serves as basic maintenance and cleaning for my exposed biological parts, waste disposal, water filtration, and so on. The only parts of me that aren’t alive are my hypermatter outer hull and the internal bracing and support used to help hold it together.”

“You’re a plant.”

Alice shrugged. “The majority of my body is composed of plant-based smart matter, but I’m as far removed from plants as you are from your hominid ancestors. Further, really.”

Ahead of her, the hallway abruptly split and opened and I realized that we hadn’t actually walked all that far—maybe fifty feet in total. With the way the walls could display images, I’d thought the hall had been much longer. We stepped into a featureless room shaped like a half-dome. “Captain on the bridge,” Alice announced with an amused smile as she stopped in the middle of the room. A chair rose up from the floor like water flowing in reverse and she placed her hand on the back, gesturing for me to sit with the other.

“Not much in the way of controls,” I pointed out, dropping into the chair, which immediately began to conform to the shape of my body. It grew softer and reclined a few degrees, growing arm and leg rests as it raised up a little further from the floor, bringing my head even with Alice’s.

“I am the ship, my captain. Why would I need manual controls to move myself? Everything here is for your benefit, or that of future guests who lack a direct neural interface. Your interface is currently set to one way communication. I had intended to ease you into learning, well, everything about your situation but it seems we’re a bit pressed for time at the moment.”

I frowned over at the woman and she winced. “You can read my mind.”

“A little?” she tried. My eyes narrowed and she simply nodded. “It’s, it’s how ship bonding works. Captain and ship connect, share thoughts and feelings, and learn to interpret and anticipate each others’ needs. I’m sorry I didn’t ask permission—”

“Anything else you did that I should know about?” Alice nodded and I sighed. “We can go over it later. Can you show me—”

I cut off as the walls and floor shifted, showing a display of what was apparently outside the ship. From my perspective, we sat—or stood, in Alice’s case—in a sort of watery blue tube occasionally pulsing with blue light, streaking silently through an inky void. “This is the inside of a wormhole?”

“It’s what my external visual feeds see, yes,” Alice nodded. “Bringing up sensor feeds.”

The display was overlaid with countless colors and streams of data that I couldn’t make heads or tails of, beyond a grid outline tracing ahead and behind us outlining the walls of the wormhole. In the space immediately before me, light flared briefly before a hologram sprang to life. Earth and the moon, along with what I assumed was the ship herself. The Last Whisper was a dark, angular ship that looked more like a bared knife than a space ship. There were no nacelles, no sweeping curves, no gun ports, no obvious means of propulsion, and no windows. It kind of reminded me of the old F-117, with the angular geometry.

I had no real sense of scale for what I was looking at, but at the thought grids flowed over the ship in the hologram and statistics floated beside it—Alice having apparently having picked up the thought and acted on the non-verbal request for information.

I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that yet, but I would deal with it later.

The Whisper was 250 meters from stem to stern, with a 50 meter beam at its widest—about two thirds back from the fore. The displacement was listed as ‘classified.’ Shooting a questioning look at Alice, she smiled sheepishly.

“It’s not polite to ask a lady’s tonnage, captain.” I shot her a dry look and she quickly added, “Hypermatter armor is very dense and very heavy. It, it’s not fair to judge me by the standards of a planet that still uses steel in their construction!”

“Uh huh,” I rolled my eyes, turning back to the hologram. I watched as it showed the Whisper turn away from Earth and disappear. “How do you have a visual of yourself leaving?”

A second hologram popped up, displaying something the rough size of a football and shaped like a miniature version of the ship. “I left an observation drone behind. All of my drones, this body, and your new body all share a quantum data link with my main body. So long as the other side is intact, I can communicate with it with no lag from any distance. It’s how I have a rough estimate of just how far we’ve gone.”

The hologram expanded and zoomed out. From Earth, to the solar system, to the Milky Way—a blue line streaking ever away from the planet I’d called home. “Uh,” I muttered as it went out even further, until it became nothing but a single dot and a blue line in a sea of unknown black. “Alice? How… how far are we from Earth?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Not with any certainty. Not without leaving the wormhole and subspace and having a chance to scan with my astrometrics suite.”

Looking from the hologram to the walls around us, showing an unchanging tunnel of watery light, I made my decision. “Alice, get us out of here. If we die, we die, but I’m not going to stay stuck in transit while we’re ejected from the goddamn universe itself. I don’t want to find out what’s outside of everything firsthand.”

Her hand came down gently on my shoulder, but I felt the way it trembled. “Aye aye, captain. Torpedo armed and loaded. Awaiting your command.”

Taking a deep breath, I braced myself for the worst. Reaching up, I took her hand in my own. Opening my mouth, I hesitated. Eventually, I said, “I’m not angry with you for connecting our minds. I’m annoyed that you did it without asking me first. Next time, ask. Assuming there is a next time.”

“Yes, captain,” the woman agreed quietly, squeezing my hand.

“Fire.”

A small, dark shape streaked away from the ship, its passage marked only by the shadow it made against the blue of the tunnel and the way the Whisper’s sensors painted its path. A five second countdown started and ended in what felt like the blink of an eye. Ahead of us, a sphere of white light expanded to fill the tunnel. Abruptly, the ship shuddered and the blue tunnel terminated in inky black. I didn’t have time to think about it before we were flying through the space where the torpedo had detonated.

When we didn’t splatter ourselves on a planet, explode at the speed of light, or turn inside out I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. At my side, Alice jumped in place and cheered. “Yes! We did it! Who’s awesome? I’m awesome!”

I laughed as the tension bled out of me, slumping into the supremely comfortable chair. A moment later, I let out a quiet huff of breath as Alice plopped her weight into my lap and draped herself over me, her hair smacking me in the face as she stretched out. “Make your own seat,” I complained halfheartedly.

“I did,” she snarked, twisting back and forth in my lap to get comfortable. “It came out a little lumpy.”

“That’s your own fault,” I snorted quietly. Deciding to save flirting with the sexy tree ship’s avatar for later, I asked, “So, where are we?”

“I’m still scanning, but we appear to be in realspace,” Alice answered, before gesturing towards the walls. “Apparently, cutting the wormhole the way I did—by forcing an exit from subspace—made it cross over instead of just spitting us out and the hole closing up naturally. I’ve done a long range scan of the system and I’m already running comparisons with the visible stars and readings from them against my database. I’ve launched drones already for a more in-depth analysis of the system, so we should know more about it soon.”

Nodding along, I gestured behind us. “And why does it look like we almost came out inside of a star.”

Alice winced. “Because we did. Almost. It’s okay though! Even if we had, it would’ve been fine. So long as it wasn’t actually, you know, in the center of the star. We’re built with environmental hardening by default. In fact, for those of us who don’t already have the tech built, stars are our forges for exotic materials like hypermatter. We’re designed to dive into them and use the intense heat and pressure to make repairs, build additions, and so on.”

I tried leaning back and the seat complied, allowing me to recline fully. Alice took that as an invitation to spread out on me as I yawned. I hadn’t been up for more than an hour but I suddenly felt dead tired. “Ugh, I feel like I need a nap.”

“Adrenaline crash,” she answered immediately. “I may have over-engineered your new body and added a lot of cybernetics, but you’re still mostly human. It’s going to take a few hours to figure out where we are. Take a nap. I’ll wake you when I’m done.”

“Mm,” I nodded in agreement, allowing my eyes to drift closed. “Some time in the very near future, you’re going to tell me what all you did to me.”

“I will, my captain. Rest now.”

I went out like a light.

Ots Spaceopera Lewds

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sinereal

Oct 16, 2021 10:07 pm

Public post

On Trackless Seas

Chapter 01

***
December xx, 202x

***
Satellites detected nothing when it shifted into real space inside the moon’s orbit. Neither radar, nor laser, or infrared saw it before it settled into the moon’s shadow, using the natural satellite to occlude itself from view. Given the timing of its appearance, choosing to act when the moon was over the day side of the planet, ground-based observers using telescopes would have seen nothing.

Those same satellites and instruments were equally blind when ten much smaller objects broke off from their host vessel, flitting out of the moon’s blind spot and settling into orbit around the blue planet. A few ground-based observers noticed something then, but beyond a few pictures of ‘dark spots’ in space that went just as suddenly as they had come, they went unremarked and were eventually dismissed as space debris.

Below, computer systems whirred to life where before they had been suspended. CPUs ran new threads, RAM was allocated, hard drives spun up to full capacity, packets of network traffic were inexplicably delayed by a few milliseconds. Webcams and microphones turned on, cellular phones grew warm and batteries ran down inexplicably, machines that were powered down with physical switches breaking their connection to power sources or entirely lacking a power source suddenly went active as though some source were supplying power wirelessly to technology that hadn’t yet reached that level.

For twelve minutes, people the world over experienced a simultaneous power on and slowdown of every piece of tech more complicated than a toaster oven, regardless of whether it was connected to a network or not—from civilian equipment to military, public to private, and things governments would rather keep hidden from prying eyes.

Exactly twelve minutes and fifty one seconds after it began, the slowdown stopped and devices returned to their normal states. All but one, that is.

On a lonely plot of land in the rural back woods of a certain united state, a man in camouflage sat in a folding chair at the top of a slope, looking down through his rifle’s scope at a buck stepping cautiously across a gravel pit that had long since grown over and was now covered in dry, waist high grass that rustled softly with its passage. The animal’s ears flicked as its head tracked left and right, pausing nervously as it scented something—judging by its position, likely where he had walked the previous afternoon. Eventually, the deer’s stomach overruled its survival instincts and it moved closer to the pile of yellow corn laid out on the ground and covered with sweet smelling apple juice.

The rifle’s safety quietly clicked off as the buck’s antlered head came down and it began to eat. Taking in a slow breath, he lined up his shot, exhaled, and squeezed—

The shot went high when he jerked in surprise as his phone went off in his pocket, vibrating wildly and blaring out the general ringtone for someone not in his address book. The deer bolted and in that split second, he weighed the pros and cons of trying to hit it as it ran. Deciding it would be sloppy and the buck would be back later, he safetied his rifle and sighed as he leaned it against his chair and fished out his phone.

I thought I turned it off, he mused as he checked the caller I.D.. As expected, it was an unknown number—and probably a scammer. Deciding that this interruption warranted either an ass chewing or a bit of trolling, he answered. Before he could speak, however, a woman’s voice stopped him cold. “Sorry about the deer. It was pretty big, too.”

Kyle Wright blinked, frowning as he looked around, thoroughly thrown off his game. His anger gave way to confusion and suspicion as he asked, “What deer?”

“The nine point whitetail buck. It stopped running approximately one hundred and twenty yards to your right. It’s lingering under the old, dead tree if you want to pursue it. I can wait.”

Looking to his right, Kyle spotted the tree in question sticking up over the surrounding vegetation—a sad looking old oak that had gotten struck by lightning a few years back, the branches of which had mostly been knocked off in subsequent storms. He also knew the terrain between himself and that tree, having had to tromp through it a year or two ago when he’d shot up another buck that simply refused to go down. It was all briars, stumps and limbs left from when a logging company had cut the place back, and tall saw grass that may or may not be full of rattle snakes since this season still hadn’t gotten cold enough to send them into hibernation yet.

In other words, the deer could have the woods and he had better things to do with his time than chase after it, trying to keep an eye out for both deer and snakes. Things like talking to the mysterious, sexy-sounding lady who could apparently see him and enough of the surrounding terrain to speak like she knew what she was talking about. “No, I think I’m more interested in learning how you knew all that. Did my brother put you up to this? His ex-wife, maybe?” Thinking aloud, he continued to reason, “No, probably not them. Wayne, most likely.”

“Nope,” she popped the ‘P.’ “I can honestly say I’ve never met any of them.”

Something about the woman’s voice seemed off, and it took a moment for Kyle to realize what it was. Her voice had shifted a bit as she spoke—the pitch and cadence changing slightly the longer the conversation went on. From liquid sex to sweet and young, and far more casual. He suspected it was someone calling him from a computer and playing with the settings on a voice modulator, but it didn’t have that artificial sound to it.

It set his teeth on edge.

“Okay. You’ll have to forgive me for getting short here, but I’m not interested in getting the runaround. Cut the B.S. and get to the point.”

“Sorry. I know my voice is probably slipping into the uncanny valley. I’m still working it out on my end.” A quiet snicker and she added, “Like, uncanny valley girl.”

That’s it, alright, Kyle agreed with her assessment, rolling his eyes at the joke. He kept quiet though, not bothering to respond to it verbally. It was one of his favorite tactics for dealing with idiots over the phone—let the silence talk for him and eventually, the caller would either get nervous, confused, or angry and easier to manipulate. Usually into shutting up and getting to the point instead of wasting his time.

“You’re tired of it, aren’t you?” Girl next door now, and Kyle frowned at the way the genuine concern in her tone plucked at his heart strings. Before he could ask what she meant, she answered the question for him. “All the time and effort that just feels wasted. Work. Women. People. But most of all, the sheer monotony of living a boring, lonely, everyday life that boils down to wake, work, eat, sleep, and repeat. Living for the weekend, but those tiny islands of peace are never enough and seem to shrink by the day.”

I haven’t voiced those thoughts out loud or on social media, ever. How did she—

“It’s all there in your browsing habits, choices in reading material, shows, games, and writing. So, let me ask, how would you like to just take a vacation from it all?”

He wondered how someone could get that information and kept coming up with ‘they couldn’t’ and that she was bluffing. The problem there was, she was right. Even if she was bluffing, that shot in the dark was a critical hit. Kyle’s response, while sarcastic, was more candid than he would have normally given, if she hadn’t thrown him off more than once in the short time he had been speaking with her. “Sure. A vacation sounds great. A vacation from life, somewhere I don’t have to deal with idiots. Somewhere exciting would be nice.”

“Okay then,” the woman’s voice agreed, sounding entirely too happy about that.

“Wha—”

With a flash of light, Kyle Wright disappeared off the face of the Earth. That night, after a full day of his phone being out of service, his brother Wade would find Kyle’s pickup and follow the trail cut through the woods down to Kyle’s stand, where he would find his older brother’s rifle and chair. Searching by himself, Wade would find only three paths—the one Kyle took to get down to the stand, one leading down to where he put out his corn, and a trail of fresh buck prints in the red dirt of the pit but no boot prints following them. Kyle would be reported missing and police with dogs would be called in to search, but no trace of him would be found.

A check of the cameras on his stand would turn up something interesting, leading the memory cards from the cameras to be confiscated and his family threatened and paid into silence.

After an incident with a doe nearly running over him by using his own trail one year, Kyle had installed an additional camera on this particular stand. This camera faced the trail leading to the stand and had the chair, and consequently Kyle, in frame. Review of the video would show Kyle missing a shot, answering his phone, and carrying on a one-sided conversation before disappearing in a flash of white light that temporarily whited out the camera.

Shortly after Kyle Wright disappeared, nine ‘dark spots’ moved out of the Earth’s orbit and made their way around to the dark side of the moon, where they docked with the much larger, angular form hidden there. The ship hidden in lunar orbit turned and rapidly accelerated, a shadow cutting silently through the black of space streaking away from the planet’s moon before disappearing into the ether the same way it had come.

The only evidence left in system of its presence was a single drone orbiting the Earth the size of a football, a drone which moved behind a communications satellite and disappeared from view for anyone not looking directly down on it.

Ots Spaceopera Lewds

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