“Hey, can you bring me that bundle of cable over there?” Will asked June as he sat in the shadow of the rge spherical power core.

  “This one?” June asked, pointing at the bundle from Will at her feet on the other side of the room.

  “Not that one, the one on your left,” Will said, immediately regretting it; a small frown momentarily crossed June's face as she turned her head left, finally seeing the bundle Will wanted, subconsciously fidgeting with the patch over her left eye.

  Will watched June from across the room as he wired the st Rad batteries into the integrated control system salvaged from the ‘Saturn’s Heart’. The euphoria of being alive after such a harrowing experience wore off quickly; both June and Will were dealing with the aftermath of their trauma.

  At his core, Will instinctively felt that he needed to shield and protect those he loved. The recent attack showed him just how helpless he was and how catastrophically he had failed both June and Interface.

  Will sighed deeply at thinking how close he had come to losing everything. It crushed him.

  Watching June as they worked over the st couple of days, he could see how much it had also bothered her. The pain of the experience lingered, and the missing eye was a stark reminder.

  Then, on top of all that was his raging libido; he had been walking around with an almost non-stop hard-on. He’d constantly catch himself fantasizing about bending June over the console of the power core or grabbing her and fuck her in the hallway as they passed and made her scream out in pleasure, but the mood just didn’t seem right. It seemed to Will that she needed time to process everything, and it was best to keep it to himself.

  He watched her across the room for a moment as she bent over, arranging a rge bundle of coiled cables, heart-shaped ass pointing his way, and he inwardly groaned, feeling his pants tent in response. Feeling his eyes on her, June turned her head and caught Will watching her. She smiled knowingly, but the smile was interrupted, chased away, and repced by a small frown.

  June picked up the bundle and brought it to Will, who accepted it and began installing the final connections between the rad batteries and the components integrated into the power core.

  “Ok, Interface, that’s the st of them,” Will called out, knowing that she could see and hear everything on the ship even though, at the moment, she could only communicate through the consoles distributed throughout the ship. “Can you run one st system check and make sure everything looks okay from your side?”

  Interface responded on the power core control console screen. She typed, “On it. Should only take a minute.”

  June stood next to Will as he sat, waiting for Interface to finish her st checks. She reached out to hug Will as he sat on the stool, pcing her arm on his shoulders. He tilted his head and leaned into her side, wrapping an arm around her hip, feeling her warmth as they held each other, he smiled.

  The console terminal lit up with text. “All systems check out. I think we’re ready to light this candle.” Even through the terminal, Interface’s pyful banter lightened their spirits.

  “Okay, initiating startup sequence.” Will announced, typing a few commands into the ‘Saturn’s Heart’ former main computer, now power core controller.

  The lights on the rad batteries panel indicated the ramp-up of power output to the core’s circuits, followed shortly by a low hum as the batteries strained to produce the required power.

  The surface of the spherical core began to glow with a soft, mesmerizing, waving pattern, like a light shining through a subtly transparent medium. The light pattern shifted and swept slowly back and forth, reminding Will of a Borealis that one might see in the por regions of some pnets they had visited.

  The waving patterns began oscilting faster; they could hear a low rumbling sputter from deep in the core, like the first lighting of a primordial forge. It sputtered for a few more seconds until it fully caught, and a low, continuous rumble emanated from the sphere. The wavy aurora of light was joined by what appeared to be a tiny, shimmering star of darkness, shining through the surface of the sphere, dancing in the center surrounded by the waving pale blue-green aurora.

  “It worked!” Interface typed across the terminal in huge letters. “Give me a few moments to check the core stability.” She typed again in normal-sized font.

  They held their breaths and waited for Interface to report: “Core stability well within operating parameters! Now switching to draw power from the core for self-sustaining operation.” A few moments passed, and the gauges on the batteries indicated lessening demand. “Okay, that did it. You can ramp down the batteries. The core kickstart was an unqualified success! Good Work, everyone!” Interface typed in congratutions.

  Will set the batteries back on standby, and then he and June hugged each other tight, their hearts filled with joy, as they watched power being restored to the ship.

  “Alright final hurdle, shunting power to the ship’s main power reys.” Interface typed.

  The console stations circling the core lit up bright one after another. The low emergency lighting Interface had been providing was repced by the bright high bay lights, flooding the room with its glow. A shimmering wave of light passed through all of the surfaces of the ship’s interior, and all of the ft white metal surfaces brightened to a gleaming white as energy from the core coursed through the ship for the first time in more than a millennium. The Nestia was waking up.

  Interface again typed on the terminal. “Okay guys, the core will take some time to ramp up power, probably a day or two. I’ll begin turning on sub-systems as the power level increases and monitor progress.” June and Will read the message with wide grins. “You two have done a phenomenal job and deserve a reward. Come up to the med bay, I have a few surprises for you.”

  Curious about what surprises were in store, Will and June walked up the ramp hand in hand. The silver intricately scrawled across their skin looked like it flowed continuously from one hand to the other. They felt on top of the world as they entered the med bay, and they saw the panel near the back fshing, indicating the one Interface wanted to talk through.

  They walked up to the screen, and it read, “I have a couple of things for you two. First is in the top drawer of the fabrication unit over to the left.”

  June slid the drawer open and found two small, pencil-eraser-sized devices. She took them in her hand and went back to the terminal.

  “Those are micro comm units, one for each of you, inscribed with a ‘W’ and ‘J’. I took detailed measurements of your ear canals, for a nice precise fit. Like every other thing I like to stick in you. ;)” Interface typed on the screen.

  They took their prescribed earpieces and inserted them. They were a comfortable fit. “You are incorrigible; you know that Inta?” June said, smiling; the thought of Interface’s ‘precision device’ being stuck into her made her heated libido turn up a couple of degrees.

  “Can you hear me alright?” they heard Interface ask in their ears.

  “Yup, crystal clear. And you can hear us through these too, no problem? What’s the range?” Will asked.

  “Well, while on the ship, I can see and hear everything without them. The range, thanks to the wonders of higher dimensional engineering, it’s practically limitless. They’re hardwired to the ship’s comms systems directly through the 4-D space.”

  “Doesn’t that take a ton of energy?” June asked, suddenly concerned.

  “It takes a small bit to build it and make the connection, but it’s a static connection, so once it’s in pce, it doesn’t require any more energy to physically move it,” Interface expined. “A ‘body at rest, stays at rest’ sort of thing.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” Will said, voicing his confusion.

  “Think of it this way,” Interface began. “ Picture the surface of a table, two axes, a 2-D space. If you run a cable ft on a table, in 2-D space and leave it there, it only takes the energy required to arrange it how you want. Now imagine if you took the same cable, and ran it half across the table, but then up to a hook over the table and then back to the table. The cable is in 2-D space when it’s ft on the table, then enters 3-D space as you pull it up to the hook to drape it over. You run the cable back down to the surface of the table and snake it off to somewhere else. The cable returns to 2-D space, and you can continue to run it wherever. So the cable starts in 2-D, is held suspended in 3-D space by the hook, and returns to 2-D. You would need to spend a little energy to lift the cable into position on the hook, but then it would stay there. Kinda the same thing with your earpieces, just a bit more complex.”

  “Ah, makes sense, I guess,” Will said, the analogy helping. “Any chance you have any reading material on 4-D engineering? That would be fascinating.”

  “I can transte and index what I have avaible to me at the moment, so you can read it from one of the terminals, though it probably will be incomplete as there’s still a lot of my memory that I can’t access yet,” Interface said through their earpieces.

  “Memory that you can’t access?” Will asked, “Could you swap some of the information you do have access to for some other stuff?”

  “My memory doesn’t work the same way computers handle memory,” Interface expined. “A computer will not ‘know’ something, but knows where it’s located, copy it into working memory, then when it's done forgets it. With me, I grow to fill the crystalline matrix, and can access everything I touch all at once; I don’t forget anything. The reason I can’t access a lot of my memory is that I’m a lot smaller than I was when the ship was first commissioned. Though you two lovelies are helping with that nicely. The more energy I have, the more of the matrix I occupy. If I tried to ‘swap out' data, it would be like you forgetting how to walk so you could do differential calculus.”

  “Well then, I guess we’re just going to have to pump you full of energy then, aren’t we,” Will said, a sly grin on his face.

  “You got it, Lover Boy. Once I form my body again, consider it a date.” Interface flirted. “But we have more immediate concerns to deal with first.” She said, her tone turned serious. “It is my primary job to care for the crew and the ship, and while we have been focusing on the ship tely, the crew sorely needs attention. First item, June’s eye.”

  June's face soured at the mention of her missing eye, but she tried to put on a brave facade. “You don’t have to worry about that right now; we have much bigger things to deal with.”

  Interface interrupted her. “No, nothing is more important than your health and well-being, physically and emotionally. I’ve been watching you two like a hawk; what you went through was pretty tough stuff, and I’m not going to allow you to try to be stoic and brush it off. We’re going to deal with it all and make ourselves stronger despite it.” She paused to let her words sink in.

  “To that effect, Let’s start with the physical, specifically your eye. Will, can you open the top drawer under the programmable matter generator and get the box inside?” Interface asked.

  Will went over to the sarcophagus-looking device and opened the drawer, revealing a small white box, slightly rger than one you might present jewelry in. He retrieved it and opened it, his face a mixture of surprise and puzzlement at the contents.

  “June, at the moment I don’t have access to much of the bioengineering information locked away in my memory, but I can fabricate a wide variety of components that can be used to repair the ship. I’ve spent a little time redesigning and miniaturizing some of the ship’s sensor components, and made you a temporary repcement.”

  Will smiled, looked at June, and handed her the opened box. A gray and pewter-colored eye with a light blue iris, matching Interface’s, minus the glow, sat on a small satin pillow.

  June stared at it for a moment, stunned at the gift, then smiled as a tear started to roll down her cheek from her good eye. “Thank you Inta, this is very considerate, but I don’t think a gss eye would work out for me.” June was touched by the gift, but she was still coming to terms with losing the piece of herself and felt that it would serve more as a reminder of what she had lost.

  “Sweetheart, it’s not just for show; it’s completely functional. Once you pop it in, it will integrate with your optic nerve and muscuture. Of course, we will be able to upgrade ter, but for now, it will serve the purpose.” Interface said, trying to defuse June’s hesitancy.

  June looked at it for a moment, and then the smile returned. “Okay, how does this work? Is there an ‘On’ button or something?”

  Interface’s voice betrayed her delight when she responded. “Just pop it in and it will handle everything.”

  “Okay, here goes nothing,” June said as she removed her eye patch and grimaced at the weird sensation of sliding the eye into the socket under her eyelid.

  Will watched in fascination as the moment June released the artificial eye, it spun around of its own accord, oriented itself correctly, and then made the necessary connections.

  “Woah, it tingles,” June excimed, eyes wide as the iris of her new eye dited to the same proportions as her natural one. She blinked several times and looked around in wonder.

  “Everything looks kind of strange.” June said. “like it has a weird overy.”

  “You didn’t think I wasn’t going to take the opportunity to give you the best features, did you? It’ll take your brain a little bit of time to understand the new information it’s receiving, but now you’ll be able to see in the dark, infrared, a bunch of stuff like that. Do you like it?” Interface asked, her voice full of hope.

  “Yeah, I do! This is great!” June said, an unspoken worry having been resolved.

  “That’s neat, Interface! Maybe I should poke my eyes out so I can have a set, too!” Will said pyfully. Then he said, “And you’ve got the two different eye color thing going on to boot!”

  “Not necessarily,” Interface interjected, “that is unless June likes it like that. I can change the color to match the other exactly.”

  June didn’t take time to decide, “That would be fantastic. I’d like to keep my symmetry if at all possible.”

  No sooner than June had said it, fleshy white coloring bled into the sclera of her new eye, and the iris phased into the same shade of brown as her other eye. She blinked a few times in succession, and if they didn’t know, a passerby wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

  “Absolutely amazing.” Will said, voicing his appreciation of the craftsmanship of the work. “And as beautiful as always,” he said, pulling June close for a kiss, and this time there was no hesitancy.

  Still holding each other tight but releasing their kiss, Will joked, “But you would have looked badass with a cyborg-looking eye.” June pinched his shoulder in rebuke but didn’t release her embrace.

  “Great! Now let’s deal with the other issue, your raging horny-ness.” Interface said, cutting them off as they were about to disagree. “There’s no use in denying it. It’s my job to watch the crew and make sure they are well taken care of; in this respect, I have not been able to do a very good job for the st couple of days while I recuperated.” Interface said with a note of frustration in her voice.

  “There are a few compounding reasons for your state of unsatisfied arousal. First, there are still traces of toxins in your bloodstream, heightening your libidos. Second, the Bond itself causes you to be hypersensitive to my, as Will puts it, ‘Fuck-me Field’. Even more so right as you enter the ‘Deepening’ of the bond.”

  “Deepening? What does that mean?” Will asked.

  “The Bond is an intense moment when the connection is first made, but there is a period of acclimation, what my people call the ‘Deepening’. The Bond is growing, getting stronger. Your markings are an outward sign of how your bodies are changing. You are fusing with me on a micro-cellur level, which modifies how your body operates, almost atom by atom. Part of what fuels this is the energy we share. As your Bond deepens, your energy requirement skyrockets to feed the process, turning you into hormone-crazed, sex-starved teenagers.”

  Will and June listen raptly to Interface’s expnation.

  “Normally the ship and crew wouldn’t be expected to do anything during the Deepening, well other than fuck each other senseless.” Interface couldn’t help but be a touch raunchy. “But we are dealing with unusual circumstances.”

  “How long does the Deepening st?” Will asked, already feeling his blood rise, and cock stirring, at the mention of a normal crew fucking with abandon.

  “Oh Honey, it’s a glorious thing! Basically, it’s a six-month orgy.” Will and June reached down and shifted their pants, almost in unison, thinking about the six-month-long orgy that must have taken pce on this very ship. “And the ship’s Interface is most crucial at that time. The energy exchange during the Deepening feeds the crystalline matrix most of its initial energy store, and gives the crew a most welcome outlet.”

  The image of Interface fucking two hundred-plus people for six months straight made Will’s cock ache in his pants, and June involuntarily clenched her thighs together, searching for sensation.

  “The image of the entire crew running a train on you, for six months straight, gotta say, that’s pretty hot,” Will commented, unconsciously rubbing his cock through his pants.

  “Well, if you must know the dirty details, it’s not like the sex was continuous, more like an extremely frequent occurrence.” They could hear the smile in her voice. “I spawned multiple bodies, so I could more effectively manage their Deeping and give them all the individual attention they needed, though it didn’t often stay individual.”

  The image of several Interfaces surrounding June, pressing their naked body into her, surrounding her, caused June to moan involuntarily and then become mortified, squeak, and cover her mouth.

  “That’s the other half of what is bothering you. Your Deepening is a little stymied because you’re not getting the feedback from me that you would have normally gotten during your Deepening. Not to mention how your Bond was formed was extremely unusual. I don’t think anyone has ever created a Bond through direct contact with the crystalline matrix. That alone is going to py havoc with the normal process.”

  Interface continued, “I will need to be extra vigint and monitor you to make sure you stay healthy throughout. And I have the perfect ‘solution’,” she said, emphasizing the word, “ to take care of you until I am fully back on my feet and able to give you the attention you need directly.”

  As she finished her sentence, the wall beside them opened, revealing a hidden closet containing a rge bathtub. The tub was about waist high and could comfortably fit two.

  June and Will approached the tub and looked at its contents. It was filled about halfway with a silvery liquid that gently sloshed back and forth. Will reached and stuck an index finger into it, and when he pulled it out, the silvery solution clung to his finger, coating it in a metallic sheen. He rubbed it between his index finger and thumb, turning to June, and said, “It feels warm like the stuff when we bonded.”

  “Well spotted,” Interface chimed in. “This is the precursor to what I make my physical body out of, and more importantly, now a physical necessity for you, a regur dietary supplement, if you like.”

  June and Will gnced at each other, one quizzical eyebrow raised. Interface continued, “Like I said before, your Bonding was highly unusual. Normally, during Bonding, the crew is immersed in the precursor fluid, absorbing it into their body and creating the physical component of the Bond. When the two of you bonded, you didn’t have very much of the stuff, so while your bond is strong, and believe me, from this side of the Bond, the texture and strength is like nothing I’ve seen before, but it is extremely thin, and uneven, due to the circumstances of its creation. So, we will rectify that by marinating you in the stuff until the levels in your system come up to where they should be. So go ahead and start undressing and get in. But go slow, I want to watch.” She said in a low, sultry tone.

  As they undressed, Interface continued. “After Bonding, I need to dose you regurly, dose you oh so good and hard,” she said, her voice warm and low, “to maintain our physical and psychic bond. So it’s ‘Bath Time’ kids! In you go, and don’t forget to wash behind your ears.” She said. “And don’t worry about your new earpieces, they're completely waterproof; you shouldn’t need to remove them from now on unless they get damaged.”

  Will and June approached the tub, now completely naked, and started to climb in, but before they could completely swing their legs over the rim of the tub, a dozen wet, silvery hands shot out of the bath, grabbed them both all over, and swiftly pulled them into the bath, dunking them under in complete surprise.

  They popped back up out of the surface of the silvery fluid, sputtering and coughing, all the while Interface ughed uproariously in their ears. They were coated from head to foot in the slightly viscous liquid, and as June and Will looked at each other’s silvery wet forms, they joined in Interface’s ughter.

  June pyfully spshed some silver at Will’s completely coated form, and he smiled back at her and pulled her in tight, wrapping his arms around her, giving her the passionate kiss that he had been holding back for a while, which she returned with gusto.

  Her silver-coated nipples were hard as she rubbed them against his chest while they kissed. Will’s hands slid down her back and into the fluid, grabbing her ass cheeks and pulling her tight against him so he could grind his cock into her lower stomach. They frantically kissed and rubbed against each other, their rampant desire no longer held in check.

  Will felt an inclined seat just below the surface behind June, so he id her back on it and pushed her knees apart, settling himself inside her thighs. June moaned low, and the look of desperate need on her silver-coated face told him everything he needed to know. Holding his cock in one hand, he brushed the soft tip of it along her slit, parting her folds and rubbing against her opening.

  In another breathy moan, June said, “Give it to me, Will! I need it so bad!”

  Needing no further provocation, he pushed deep into her, the silvery solution adding lubrication, though June's pussy was already slick with her desire. Their pelvises met, and Will paused, grinding against her, lost in the sensation of her enveloping heat.

  He withdrew slowly until his tip was just inside her entrance, then thrust hard and fast, driving into her depths, sending a tremor through her body and a series of waves racing across the surface of the silver bath.

  June cried, “Oh, Will!” as he set a steady rhythm of pounding into her, the sensation of her tight, clutching vaginal walls steadily driving him into a primal frenzy. He picked up the pace of his thrusting, June audibly matching his rhythm with a moaning, “Uh, uh, uh.”

  Pent-up need, the overwhelming sensation of the bath, and Will’s frantic thrusting broke June’s final resistance; as her climax crashed over her, she arched her back, thrusting her hips up into Will, screaming, “FUCK!” as she came hard, pussy clenching like a vise on Will’s member, igniting his climax. He growled low and drove hard into her as deep as he could and spasmed as he shot pulse after pulse of seed into her.

  They were locked in temporary paralysis from pleasure for a long moment, finally getting a portion of the release they both desperately needed. June slumped in the submerged seat as they came down, and Will y atop her, momentarily spent, still rooted in her depths. They y close, joined in the warm silvery bath, panting from exertion and enjoying the afterglow.

  After a moment, still semi-hard, Will slid out of June, sat on the submerged bench next to her, and held her tight. Silvery liquid dripped out of their hair and ran down their silver-painted faces.

  Interface gave them a moment to recover, but could sense they still needed more to ske their hunger. “Oh my darlings, that was beautiful to watch, but now I want my turn.”

  Two humanoid-shaped forms emerged out of the silvery bath and crawled up each of their bodies as if stalking prey. The silvery forms had no face or hair but were identical in size and general shape to the silvery girl they had come to love.

  The two roughly shaped, liquid girls touched and stroked their way up June and Will’s bodies, caressing thighs and bellies, working their way up to their breasts and pectorals.

  The two semi-liquid forms then straddled June and Will, soft asses settling on their ps, and began to slowly grind into them as they wrapped their arms around each of their respective necks, locking their wrists and rubbing their silvery tits into the faces of the two beneath them.

  From between two generous tits, Will asked, “I didn’t think you had enough energy to form a body yet.” Then was promptly smothered by the soft, silvery orbs.

  In their earpieces, Interface responded, “I’m close, but you’re right; I don’t have enough for a proper body, but I have more than enough for these simply delicious puppets.” To demonstrate just how delicious, the two ‘puppets’ sat up straight on Will and June’s ps, then squeezed their tits together, tweaking their nipples, putting on a show.

  June reached up to the perky globes before her and said, “Mmm. I want a taste.” She pulled the liquid puppet close and tched her mouth onto a nipple, licking and sucking.

  “Yes, It’s all yours, Honey, take it, suck it, yes!” Interface replied enthusiastically. As June sucked on the silver form's breast, a hand reached behind June’s head and gently held it there. “That’s right my darling, suck it like a good girl.”

  Will followed June’s lead and pulled his Interface clone in close, rubbed his face in between her breasts, then tched onto one of her nipples to suck. “Oh, that’s so good. Mmmm, so good.” They heard Interface coo in their ear. “That’s real good. Now it’s time for your medicine.”

  Interface held their heads to her breasts, and as they sucked, silvery liquid squirted into their mouths. “That’s right, suck and drink up darlings. We need to keep you healthy and strong.” Interface practically moaned as Will and June sucked in earnest, drinking down her ‘milk’, their bodies instinctively craving it, satisfying the deficiency of their new need.

  While they slurped and suckled from silvery breasts, the two liquid forms shifted their position. The liquid stand-in on Will’s p lifted her ass slightly and, with her free hand, guided his cock into her pussy, engulfing his member in one swift motion.

  The one astride June shifted, spreading June’s knees wide, then settled her cock at the mouth of June’s pussy. Without breaking June’s suckling tch on her breast, it slid its cock into her slowly until it was buried to the hilt in June’s warmth.

  Will’s attendant began bouncing her ass on Will’s p in a slow rhythm, her pussy stuffed shaft clenching and massaging with every stroke. Will moaned with every downward thrust, sucking down the silver fluid from her bountiful breast.

  June’s lover thrust in and out of her in time with the bouncing female form on Will. Every withdrawal was matched by the ass raised above Will; every hard thrust in was mirrored with a plunge down onto his p.

  As Will and June were ridden and suckled in the silvery bath, Interface carefully brought their approaching climaxes in sync so they would crest together. Then Interface whispered into their ears, “My loves, you need to absorb as much of this as possible, and there’s only one of your holes left.” She said with tender delight in her voice. Will and June felt pressure at their puckered backdoors, then the finger size tendril pushed past the tight rings of muscle, wriggling its way into their asses.

  Interface picked up the pace of fucking, and it was too much for them. Carefully timed, they came thunderously together; June arched her back while Will instinctively grabbed the hips riding him, pulling himself as deep as he could go.

  Interface let out a cry as she let go and flooded June and Will’s ass with pulse after pulse of her silvery climax. The sensation of being filled prolonged their climaxes, driving them crazy from the overwhelming sensation. They writhed and moaned as she kept pumping fluid into their ass until the volume bloated their stomachs.

  After a long minute, they came down the other side of their shared climax, Will and June released the breasts they had been sucking and let out long, low moans of pleasure. The silver twins astride them, bent down, gave them a lipless peck on the cheek, and slid back below the surface of the silver bath.

  They sat basking in their afterglow, feeling the finger-like protrusion still in their asses change shape suddenly, then firm up, turning solid. “The butt plugs are to help keep all of that inside so you have a chance to absorb it all. Also, I think it’s fun to stick things in your asses.” She said with a smirk in her voice.

  The two spacers sat for a while, lounging in their silver mud bath with the skin of their faces still coated in the shiny liquid. Basking in the afterglow of another session of great sex, the pair could only smile.

  Will contempted his life and where he now found himself. Then aloud, he said, “If three months ago back at Port Silban if you asked me where I'd be right now, not in a million years would I have guessed I'd be having weird sex with an alien spaceship getting stuff shoved up my ass.” He chuckled deeply.

  June and Interface ughed along with Will, and then Interface replied, “I never promised it wouldn't be weird, just that it’d be Love.”

  **********

  Franco strode through the bridge of the Anatolia and barked out, “Simmons, join me in the ready room.”

  Franco's second in command, Simmons, got up, followed the Captain from the bridge, and closed the door behind them.

  “Alright Nate, give me a status report”. Franco said casually.

  Unlike most of the green and worthless crews manning the fleet Cortez had given him, Nathaniel Simmons was part of Franco’s loyal core crew, whom he trusted implicitly. He had been through ‘The Shit’ with them, and to a man, his core crew were hard, cold men who could be trusted to do the necessary and unsavory.

  Simmons began his report. “The starburst formation we’re flying with the five ships we brought into the nebu has been effective at following the trail of leaked fuel, detecting their course changes. At quarter thrust we’re twice as fast as the freighter would be with one leaking engine.”

  “Make way at half thrust. Keep us on their trail.” Franco ordered.

  “Captain, the trail is faint and might be too difficult to follow if we go any faster.”

  “Tell those green fucks if they lose the trail, I'll space the lot of them,” Franco said coolly, pouring a bourbon for Simmons and himself.

  “Which one of your men figured out how to track the freighter? “ Franco asked, sipping his drink.

  “It was one of the greenhorns, Benny Toucuar,” Simmons answered.

  “Figures it was him.” Franco compined, “Softest of this batch of worthless greenhorns. When this finally gets to some action, Bring him and a couple of other greenies as cannon fodder. It'll either harden them or dispose of them.”

  Not batting an eye, Simmons simply acknowledged his instruction, “Aye, Cap’n.”

  Franco took another sip of his bourbon. “What of the four ships I sent to the far side of the nebu?”

  “At st report they were still at FTL, skirting around the nebu, and about three-quarters of the way to their individual intercept points. Based on our calcutions of the freighter’s best possible speed with only one engine and likely exit points from the nebu, they should all be in pce before the freighter has a chance to exit and send a distress call. Their instructions are to patrol their assigned portion of the nebu until contact is made, then form up on the contact’s position then destroy it. Each ship will report when they’re in position.” Simmons finished his report.

  “Good work, Simmons. Take the Con and alert me when you find something.”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” Simmons said as he turned and exited the ready room.

  Franco slumped back and thought about their pursuit. The freighter only had two avenues of escape. One was to try to hide in the nebu, then loop around and try to sneak back past us and make a run for it. Franco thought this option was unlikely, as they must have discovered that the GPS beacons were being spoofed, and they would have surmised that comms would be blocked as well (which they were).

  With the double back not a real option, running for the hyperspace nes on the far side of the nebu would be the best course of action. If they made it, they would be running into the waiting arms of his ships, ready to ambush them as soon as they appeared.

  The real problem with that scenario, Franco mused, was that those old Theta Css freighters were lightweights and couldn’t take any serious pounding, and before it got away, his corvettes had pummeled that freighter pretty good. In his mind, the most likely scenario is that the freighter gave up the ghost and is floating in that nebu, dead in the water, waiting to be picked off.

  Which is why Franco decided that his group would be on the sweep through the nebu. He needed to find that ship, personally. It was the only way that he could be sure to satisfy Cortez. Franco didn’t want to think about the consequences of another failure.

  Simmons spoke over the comm module on his desk, “Cap’n, the nebu is thinning out; I think you should come to the bridge.”

  “On my way,” Franco responded, getting up from his chair. He crossed the floor of his ready room, entered the bridge, and took his pce in the command seat. No sooner did he sit down than the view of the nebu through the forward viewport gave way to a thick asteroid field.

  “All ships, Full Stop!” Simmons instantly barked over comms to other ships in the formation. All ships fired their forward maneuvering thrusters, halting their forward progress, followed by short pulses from the rest of the maneuvering thrusters dispersed around the ship, working to keep their positions retive to each of the other ships in the formation.

  “Two-Shits, does the fuel trail lead into the asteroid field?” Franco asked.

  Ben Toucuar winced at his unfttering nickname, earned upon his arrival when the Captain walked past him in the docking ring, knocking him to one side and saying, “Get the fuck out of my way. Just remember, I don’t give two shits if you live or die.” Ben found out quickly that Franco’s constant threats of death and dismemberment weren’t idle, as he had spaced one of the recruits that came aboard with Ben just a week after that comment. Ben kept his head down and worked hard at his assignments, staying out of the Captain’s crosshairs.

  “Yes Captain, the fuel trail weaves in and around the asteroids, and I am picking up some small debris deeper in the asteroid field,” Ben reported, still examining the reading from his scopes.

  “Set the repulsor beams to max settings and shove these fucking asteroids out of my way. If any of my ships are damaged, I’ll space the lot of you worthless shits. Now follow that trail.” A chorus of “Aye, Captain.” came from the bridge crew.

  In coordination, the ring of five ships fired their repulsor beams, pushing asteroids out of the way and sweeping an extra-wide channel for the formation of ships to continue through as they had in the nebu proper. As the formation plowed through the asteroids, they flew haphazardly off in every direction, colliding with asteroids nearby, setting off a subtle but fast-moving wave of collisions through the asteroid field.

  Ben called out course corrections for the fleet formation as he tracked the fuel trail on his scope. He started seeing more debris in the trail as they progressed further through the asteroid field, and as bad as it seemed to be getting, he expected to come upon the wreckage at any moment, but that moment never came. The trail led them straight through the asteroid field, which surrounded a system with a single red dwarf star.

  “Captain,” Ben said, “Now that we’re not in the nebu I’m picking up the trail signature on long-range scans. It seems to lead to the pnet in the star’s orbit.”

  “Does the trail leave the system anywhere else, Two-Shits?” the Captain practically sneered.

  “It doesn’t seem to. It looks to settle in the orbit of the pnet,” Ben replied, trying to act nonplussed. “ I’ll be able to confirm once we're closer.”

  “See that you do,” Franco said, with an implied threat. “Signal to the fleet to make orbit above that pnet and set course.” The helmsman did so, and the pirate fleet made for the unnamed pnet.

  *******

  Red sunlight streamed in through the forward viewport on the bridge of the Nestia, the consoles casting short shadows in the noon-time light. June and Will sat at two separate consoles, pouring over reading material that Interface had transted for them. They wanted to be prepared to depart as soon as the power core had ramped up to the power levels required for flight, about seventeen hours from that moment.

  June was studying the piloting and navigational control systems manual since her main job aboard the ‘Saturn’s Heart’ was just that; Will was reviewing the ship’s schematics along with Interface’s transtion of an untitled engineering manual, one Will pyfully named, ‘4-D engineering for Dummies’, in hopes of getting a basic understanding of how the Nestia functioned.

  “Do you know the most frustrating thing about reading this engineering manual?” he said to June. “Everything is beled by its emotional context. How exactly does a five-dimensional vector space make you feel? Is the tensor analysis mencholy?” Will said, with an overly dramatic tone, while pcing his wrist over his forehead.

  “Well, the piloting and navigation are fairly straightforward, at least until you get to the 4-D dispcement. That requires plotting course in a 6-D coordinate system. It looks like our current star charts are wholly inadequate for the task. Interface, you must have star charts for plotting higher dimensional travel, right?” June asked into the air, knowing that Interface was actively listening.

  “I do indeed have star charts; survey and exploration was the primary focus of Nestia’s original mission,” Interface expined. “However, every celestial body is in motion, which requires frequent updates to the charts; you can calcute projected positions of bodies with pretty good accuracy, usually within 0.001% of actual positions, but the problem is that errors compound. Now, compound that error over several hundred thousand years, and then your margin of error becomes so significant, It would be folly to trust your 6-D navigational calcutions.”

  “Can you extrapote current 6-D positioning using our current star charts and your outdated ones?” June asked.

  “Yes, but we’d need at least six known, matching points from both charts to align the data, a few more to verify the accuracy of calcutions. Right now, we have exactly one, this pnet. If we can find and identify locations on my chart as we travel conventional 3-D space we’ll be able to compile all the data we need for a conversion key.

  Then we will be able to dispce to anywhere in my star charts. Well, we’d need that and the raw power to dispce to 4-D space and back.” Interface said, her voice sounding distant as she remembered her past travels. “For now, I’ll build a new chart, which will enable us to travel to the pces we’ve already been.”

  “That’s something I don’t understand,” Will began, “why 6-D in the first pce? All the movement is happening in 4-D space, right?”

  “Well, the answer is gravity,” Interface expined. “In 3-D space, the fundamental force easiest to engineer and manipute is electromagnetism. But if you want to manipute gravity, you need to go where it really lives, which is 5-D space. In 3-D space, it’s present, but it’s only a shadow of what it is in the higher dimensions. To manipute gravity on the same scale as …..” Interface trailed off, suddenly distracted.

  “I’m picking up encrypted comms traffic from orbit,” Interface said, voice full of apprehension.

  “Can you decrypt it?” June asked excitedly.

  “Trivial task. Hardly requires effort. Here, let me share it.” Will and June then heard the back and forth of comm traffic of what sounded like several ships. The conversation that piqued their interest the most was between a drop-ship and its home ptform.

  “Shuttle Alpha-Tango-three-two, you are clear for departure.”

  “Thank you, Control. Alpha-Tango-three-two is clear; beginning our descent.”

  “Good Hunting three-two. Stay on comms and report progress.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Will and June looked at each other when the mention of ‘good hunting’ was made, and their demeanor instantly changed from jubition at the thought of possible rescue to something much darker.

  “Interface, have you powered up the full sensor array yet?” Will asked, his tone serious.

  “Power levels just crossed the threshold to do so,” Interface answered. “Is everything okay?”

  “I don’t think these ships are here to help. Likely far worse. Interface, please fire up the array and do a full sensor sweep as far as you can see. We need to know what we’re in for. The arms locker from the ‘Saturn’s Heart’ only had two side arms and a rifle. June, can you bring those and any ammo we have left to the bridge? I think we’re going to need it.” Will said, taking stock of the situation and turning possible scenarios over in his mind.

  “Interface, I haven’t had a chance to get through all the Nestia’s schematics, what’s the ship’s load out of weaponry?” Will asked, looking for any advantage they could muster.

  “We were a small research vessel, so we didn’t have a rge arsenal. The weapons we are currently equipped with are the gravitic sers, torpedoes, and the singurity generator.” Interface answered.

  “The torpedoes are the only ones that sound familiar,” Will said to Interface with a dark chuckle. “Can you give me a brief rundown of how they all work?” He asked.

  “The torpedoes carry an explosive charge, but the unchers are at the bottom of the ship, completely buried at the moment.” Interface began. “The gravitic sers work simirly as photonic sers, but instead focusing coherent light on a target, coherent gravity waves are generated in 5-D space and focused on objects in 3-D space.”

  “You’ll have to show me how that works ter,” Will chuckled. “What about the singurity generator?”

  “Like the gravitic sers, it taps off the gravity drive and focuses coherent gravity waves, but instead of a beam-like output, it is focused down onto one point in 3-D space, radically deforming space-time at that point, causing damage,” Interface expined. “But it requires almost as much energy as a 4-D dispcement of the ship, which the power core won’t be able to support until it is running at full power.”

  “What about the gravitic sers, how much power do they require?” Will asked.

  “A lot less than a dispcement, but with our ad-hoc core controller, we’d have to divert most, if not all of the power core’s energy while firing,” Interface said.

  “And lose the ability to maneuver while doing so.” Will finished her thought.

  June reappeared on the bridge, the weapons and several ammo boxes in her arms. “We don’t have much ammo left for the guns,” June reported, “ nine mags for the rifle and fourteen total for the side arms.”

  “Interface, are there any small arms for the crew on the Nestia?” Will asked.

  “Yes, pistols and rifles, scaled-down versions of the ship’s gravitic sers,” Interface replied.

  As they discussed their weapon options on the bridge, a fiery light descending through the cloud cover caught their attention through the front viewport. The dropship touched down a short distance from the ‘Saturn’s Heart’, which made sense. The wreck was the only thing that could be spotted from orbit, most of the Nestia safely hidden, buried in the side valley wall.

  “Are the sensors up yet?” Will asked, getting nervous being blind to what might be in orbit.

  “Just now,” Interface said, “It looks like there are three ships in geostationary orbit above us right now. If there are others on the far side of the pnet, we won’t see them until either they pass over or when we clear the surface.”

  “Please scan out as far into the system as you can, we need to know if any are loitering further out. If they are all in orbit, we might have a chance to race past them and get into the nebu before they can react.” Will said, starting to develop a strategy in his mind.

  Looking out the viewport, they could see the dropship touchdown and their retro thruster cutoff. “Do you know where the binocurs went? I need to see how many are down there.” Will asked.

  “No need.” Interface said cheerfully, as the viewport's edges lit up light blue and the entire view through the window zoomed in, every detail of the derelict ‘Saturn’s Heart’ and dropship nearby could easily be seen.

  They watched, close-up as the ramp to the dropship opened and six men came out, guns drawn, in a fire squad formation. They crossed the small distance to the open wound of a door, cut into the side of the ship, and huddled up on the sides of the ship; then, on the point man’s signal, they all rushed inside.

  After a few minutes of completing their search of the ship, they exited and milled about with much less discipline. From the bridge, they watched the pointsman reach for his comms device.

  “This is Simmons. Put me through to the Captain.” They heard eavesdropping. There was silence for a few moments until another voice responded.

  “Franco here. Report, Simmons.”

  “They must have survived the crash. There are no bodies, well, human bodies, and all of the useful equipment has been stripped from the ship. A bunch of these weird giant jellyfish things are dead all over the pce, and tons of casings suggest these things attacked. Not clear yet if they survived the attacked and bugged out, or if these fuckers got them. I’m going to check the surroundings.”

  “I need bodies, Simmons. Theirs or yours.”, Franco said, his threat ced with a hint of desperation.

  “Understood,” Simmons replied coolly.

  Back at the Nestia, June and Will listened to the exchange and watched Simmons' reaction to the call. As soon as he signed off, it looked like he swore and spat on the ground before waving his hand here and there, pointing and yelling at the men who had come down with him in the dropship.

  “Well, if there was any doubt before, it’s crystal clear now,” Will commented on what they had just watched. “Now the question is how do we neutralize this group without prompting an orbital bombardment.”

  “I have an idea.” said a voice behind Will and June, who turned in surprise. Standing at the back of the bridge, as naked as the day they met her, was Interface, wearing nothing but a huge smile with her arm extended wide. June reached her first as they both rushed to embrace their re-embodied lover. “I have an idea, and you’re going to just love it,” she said with a smirk.

  *****

  Simmons knelt with one knee on the ground and examined the dirt at the bottom of the earthen ramp in front of the hole cut into the ship's side. His eyes followed the barely visible tracks head up the valley, and he stood, looking in that direction.

  “Binocurs.” He ordered, snapping his fingers at his nearest subordinate. The young man hastily retrieved a set from his pack and handed it over.

  Scanning up the valley, he spotted a bright white structure sticking out of the rocky wall.

  “Simmons to Control.” He called on his comm unit.

  “This is Control.” the voice responded.

  “It looks like they've salvaged what they could from the ship and relocated to a structure approximately ten clicks north. We are investigating now.” Simmons reported.

  “Roger that.” Control confirmed back.

  “Alright boys, let's go for a little hike. Looks like they headed to that white structure north of here. Let’s pay them a visit.”

  The men fell in behind him as he started marching north, each with a wicked grin on their face, except for the st young man in line.

  Ben was very uncomfortable chasing these spacers down, and he pushed down the sick feeling in his stomach of what he guessed the outcome of this expedition would be.

  As he marched at the back of the line of unsavory characters, he wondered briefly if this was where he would finally find his end.

  He had nearly starved to death as a kid on the streets of Tellurius Prime; then he’d been shot after he got mixed up in a gang war, forced to pick a side or die. The unrelenting tide of his life pulled him along, and now here he was, part of the small execution squad after a couple of spacers who happened to be in the wrong pce at the wrong time.

  “I don't have the stomach for this,” he thought for the hundredth time. You had to be hard, cold, and ruthless to survive in this world. But he knew he didn’t have it in him to be a killer. He was the soft kind of person that usually got chewed up and shat out. “I probably deserve it,” he morbidly thought as they continued to troop on.

  As Ben's mind circled those dark thoughts, they suddenly came upon a herd of grazing animals with quill-like hair. The beasts didn’t acknowledge their presence and continued to graze on the low shrubs, the herd pushing through the line of marching men as if they weren’t there.

  “God Damn, these Fucking things!” the excitable, greasy blonde-haired man yelled, just in front of Ben. He had never offered Ben his name or the time of day but now cursed loudly as one grazing animal stopped right in front of him, forcing him to walk around its bulk. In a fit of mispced rage, he fired his rifle point bnk into the head of the beast, spraying blood and brain matter as it fell heavily to the ground.

  Simmons whirled round and stormed back along the line of marchers, eyes full of fury. Ben thought for sure the greasy blonde was dead where he stood. Simmons reared up and punched the blonde man square in the face, his nose breaking with an audible crunch.

  “We are trying to be fucking quiet. If we wanted to be loud, we would have just fucking taken the dropship over instead of hiking ten fucking clicks. If you ever do something that stupid again, it WILL be the st thing you do. Do you fucking understand me?!” Simmons said through clenched teeth, seething.

  Holding his face as blood ran freely through his fingers, the blonde nodded his head emphatically in the affirmative, eyes wide, realizing how close to death he was.

  Simmons spun on his heels and returned to the front of the line without another word, resuming their march.

  As Ben walked past the dead animal, he suddenly had a vision of his body, lying on the ground with a head wound instead of the beast. He was certain that these people would kill him, one way or another, and force him to do terrible things before it came to that inevitable end.

  The problem was, he couldn’t see any way out; he just didn’t know what he could or should do. So he did the only thing he could do at the moment: follow the marching line of men up the valley.

  After another hour of hiking, the bright, clean white structure jutting out the rocks of the valley wall stood barely 50 meters in front of the armed band of men. With a series of hand signals, Simmons silently commanded the armed men to form a firing line. Their rifles raised, and they carefully approached the gleaming white structure. Ben’s stomach felt heavy and trailed the rest a few paces back.

  Just as they reached the front face of the structure, a short, busty redhead walked around the corner and reacted in surprise when she saw the armed men. She was wearing a flight jumpsuit half zipped down, with the arms of the jumpsuit tied around her waist, turning it into makeshift pants. She wore a tight white sleeveless t-shirt and very clearly no bra, as evidenced by the hard nipples poking out of the front of her thin shirt.

  She brushed her long red curls out of her eyes and said, “Oh, thank god! I didn’t think anyone was going to find us. We’re almost out of rations.” She raised the communicator on her wrist to her face. “Susan, we’ve been rescued! They’ve found us!” The men stood momentarily transfixed by the gorgeous woman in front of them. There was something about her, raw sensually poured off her. It was in the way she stood there and brushed her hair out of her eyes, maybe something else they couldn’t pin down. The death squad was spellbound.

  June observed them all from the bridge of the Nestia, looking down at the scene. She stood before a small, inconspicuous opening, where she rested the rifle barrel covering the group outside. “Wow, she’s ying the ‘Fuck Me Field’ on heavy; I can feel it from here,” Will called over the comms, somewhere out of sight.

  “Shush.” June softly chided, eyes not straying from the scope of the rifle.

  “Why don’t you boys come inside and have a drink? We managed to save some whiskey from the crash. We need to find a way to properly thank you for rescuing us.” the redhead said, giving the group a suggestive wink. She was about to turn and head around the corner and back inside when her eyes locked onto Ben’s. ‘Stay,’ they seemed to say. The look sted only a moment, unnoticed by the rest of the men. Then, she sashayed around the corner of the structure.

  The men looked at each other for a moment, then Simmons said in a low, evil voice, “The Captain didn’t say we couldn’t have a little fun before we do what we came for.” and gave his men a crooked smile. They returned it with evil grins of their own, and the five men followed the redhead around the corner.

  She was waiting for them before a round opening to the structure. “Just inside here, boys,” she called as she entered. The men followed her hurriedly inside. She stood at the far end of the room, the door they entered the only one visible. They all pushed into the small room, guns down, and crowded around the unarmed redhead.

  “Where’s your friend?” Simmons asked sinisterly. With their attention fixed on the red-headed bombshell, no one noticed the portal they entered through melted closed. Oh, she’s inside, and Mmmm, waiting for you.” the redhead said in a low sultry voice, smiling suggestively.

  Not able to contain himself any longer, Simmons shot his hand out, grabbed the redhead by the throat, and pushed her forcefully against the wall. “Don’t worry darlin’, we’ll take good care of your friend as soon as we’re done with you.”

  Simmons waited for the screams or panic to rise to her face, but confusingly, she only continued to smile. “Oh, you like it rough? I like it rough, too,” she said. Then, to Simmons and the rest of the men’s surprise, the red color drained from her hair as it and her tanned skin bled into a shiny silver.

  “What the Fuck!” Simmons excimed, not releasing his tight grip on her throat.

  “Not today, I’m afraid,” she said as she gripped the forearm holding her and easily crushed the bones in her grasp.

  As he screamed in pain, a fist-sized hole opened in the wall she had been pressed against. Her silvery body began to distort and pour through the opening. The man standing next to Simmons shouted in surprise and spooked, raised his gun, and fired on her point bnk.

  Several rounds smmed into her as he sprayed bullets everywhere, but many missed their mark and ricocheted off the walls, smming into his compatriots. Simmons grabbed his gun away from him with his good arm, but not before he managed to wound several of the company. The remaining silvery mass that had just been a redhead finished pouring through the hole.

  Simmon chanced a look through, and a silver-colored woman, completely naked, waved to him, smiling as the hole sealed closed.

  “Damn!” Simmons cursed, then reached for his comm unit. “Control, come in. We need backup.” There was no response. He called again. Still nothing. “They must be jamming our comms,” he told his men. “Who has the breaching charges?” he asked them.

  Before any of them could answer, Simmons noticed that the smooth walls of the room began to form bubbles on the white surface, less than ten centimeters apart. Curious, he reached a hand out and touched the bumpy surface, rubbing his hand back and forth, feeling the texture. The surface was still changing, and as Simmons touched it, he felt the rounded bumps rise from the surface and sharpen to hardened points.

  Simmons' expression changed from one of curiosity to one of arm as every sharp point in the walls began extending longer, stretching into the already tight space and threatening to skewer them.

  “Shape Charges, NOW!” Simmons yelled urgently, but the five men were pressed back to back, trying to avoid the spikes advancing from every direction; they had no room to rifle through their packs. There was no room left, and as the sharpened points started digging into flesh, the men began screaming and crying. Simmons simply said, “Well, Fuck.”

  ****

  Ben stood blinking in the red sunlight as the rest of his party disappeared around the corner, following the captivating redhead. “What just happened?” he thought to himself.

  As he stood dumbfounded, a man with silver tattoos on his face and hands slipped quickly from around the opposite corner of the structure, leveling a strange-looking rifle at him.

  “Don’t move.” the man quietly commanded. “Drop your weapon.” He had Ben dead to rights. Ben looked him in the eyes, lowered his rifle slowly, and dropped it on the ground before him. “Kick it away.” Ben followed the instructions. “Put your hands on your head and walk slowly this way.” the man instructed, gun still aimed at Ben’s center of mass.

  “Turn around, slowly.” Ben did so. The man then spped what Ben assumed was a handcuff on one of his wrists, though it didn’t click like one. The man wrenched his arm down behind his back, followed by the other, cuffing them together. The cuff felt strange, like it flowed around his wrists, locking them together.

  “It seems my friend has seen something interesting in you and asked to deal with you separately,” the man said coolly. Ben understood his words but not what he was talking about. Interested in me?

  “Where is your comms unit?” he asked.

  “In the side pouch on my pack,” Ben told him.

  The man fished it out and held it to Ben's face with one hand, still pointing the rifle at him with the other.

  “You are going to make a call to your ship and let them know that you are going to have some ‘fun’ with the girls who were piloting the freighter, got it? And no funny business.” He said ‘fun’ with distaste as he gestured with the comm unit.

  “Okay,” Ben said simply. He felt no loyalty to anyone he had shipped out with, so leaving his fate in this man’s hands was the cleanest py for him, not that he was in a position to resist.

  The man depressed the channel open button.

  “Come in Control, this is Benny,” he called over the comms.

  “This is Control. Where is Simmons?” came the response.

  “We found the two spacers, both women. One was a redhead.” Ben said shakily. “He and the rest of the men said they are going to have their fun first before finishing the job.” he lied.

  The voice on the comms ughed. “And poor ‘Two-Shits’ got left out on sentry duty again, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Ben ughed weakly.

  “I’ll let the captain know.” There was a pause on the comms. “Tell Simmons the Captain said not to take too long and to bring the bodies back with something identifying that they were the ones on the freighter.”

  “Will do. Ben out.”

  “Okay, let’s go.” The man said, turning off the comms unit and tucking it into his belt. Ben was led around the same corner from which the man had appeared to find an opening in the wall that they hadn’t noticed before.

  “Inside, now.” the man commanded, taking a quick look around to ensure no other threats were present. They walked inside, and Ben hoped it wouldn’t be the st time he saw the sky.

  Once inside, the door closed behind them, and he was led at gunpoint down a hallway a short way and ushered into a room containing a single chair and couch.

  The silver-tattooed man patted him down for weapons and then directed him to sit in the chair.

  “Stay here. It won’t go well for you if you try anything.” The man said, then left the room. Ben blinked his eyes as the door closed weirdly, flowing like water until it was closed with no seam. He looked around briefly and took stock of his situation.

  Ben assumed that the others had found a nasty surprise instead of the two women they were pnning to abuse and then kill. He let a small smile curl the edge of his lips. Nasty men finding a nasty end, probably. What about his end? He hadn’t been harmed yet, so there was that.

  He thought about it for a minute and realized they had needed him at least partly to convince those in orbit that things were proceeding as they expected, though it was far from it.

  “What was this pce?” he wondered. This pnet wasn’t on any star chart he was aware of. A secret military base? Ben dismissed that idea; there would have been signs, a fleet in orbit, and more infrastructure. A homestead? Not likely, again, because no one knew about it, and there would be no way to resupply. He gave up that line of thinking as anything would be specution.

  What did he know? He wasn’t dead, for one, so right away that put these people, however many of them there were, leaps and bounds ahead of the ones in orbit currently; if the roles were reversed and the pirates had captured him, he would already be dead. They must need him for something, intelligence, probably. He knew what they were facing, and they needed that info. They had some info, as they had id and sprung their trap neatly. All he could do now was hold tight and wait to see what fate awaited him.

  ****

  “I heard gunfire!” June said, running down the hallway from the bridge, finding Interface with a devilish grin, looking at the sealed door to the airlock. “Are you alright?”

  “Don’t worry, Love. I’m bulletproof, for all intents and purposes,” she said, smiling. Then, as if to demonstrate, she held out an empty hand and closed it. Her face screwed up in concentration, and when she opened her hand again, she was holding half a dozen fttened bullets.

  “I’ve secured lounge three for our guest, and I’m currently purging the airlock of ‘stains’.” She gestured to the sealed airlock door. “That lot was irredeemable; you could practically smell it on them.”

  “What about the st one?” June asked.

  “He was the only one I could sense that had deep misgivings about their whole endeavor. He feels like a gentle soul caught up in things beyond his control, but we’ll see soon enough.” Interface said, looking down the hallway in the general direction of their prisoner.

  Will caught up with June and Interface in the hallway. “Everyone alright? How did it go?”

  A look of gleeful delight crossed Interface’s expression. “You should have seen their faces! Priceless. But yes, everything went exactly to pn.” She said.

  “Well, almost everything. Interface was shot,” June added. Will momentarily looked concerned, but Interface tried to soothe his worry, “It’s fine. Projectile weapons really can’t hurt me. And I got a few souvenirs,” She said jokingly, holding out the handful of spent bullets.

  “We need to be careful. I don’t want to take any unnecessary risks,” Will said, not appeased.

  “Alright, I’ll be more careful next time,” Interface, accepted.

  Will's expression softened, pcing a hand on Interface's cheek. “Thank you, Honey. The thought of you in danger bothers me,” Interface warmly smiled back at him.

  Will continued their discussion. “So, that st guy went along with it, and the ships in orbit are currently none the wiser. That should buy us at least a few hours. How soon will we be able to unch?” Will asked.

  “We’re close to the maximum output we can currently manage with the power core. Two more hours, and then we’ll be ready,” Interface said, scrunching her face and doing the calcutions on the fly.

  “I’ve been monitoring their comm traffic and it sounds like there are two other ships, either in orbit or further out, but still in comms range. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have left enough comm rey buoys in the nebu to communicate with the outside,” June said.

  “I’ve been sweeping the system for other ships,” Interface began. “I picked up the three overhead right away, so I’ve been sweeping further out, but haven’t gotten any hits so far. I’ve detected the point in the asteroid field where they entered; boy did they ever bulldoze their way through it. There must be a clean two-kilometer wide path straight through,” Interface paused for a moment, thinking about her past.

  “The act of punching through like that? They just set this pnet up and the whole system for a css one catastrophe, and judging the amount of new motion in the asteroid field, it will be a lot worse than…. than the st time,” Interface choked up briefly, remembering the loss of her crew, and her face showed her sadness. June pced her hand on her arm to comfort her.

  “How much time do we have, are we in danger?” June asked.

  “It’ll take months before anything is flung down the gravity well, but when it starts, I wouldn’t want to be here,” Interface replied.

  “We’ll have enough to deal with handling the pirates,” Will said, “but we’ll be long gone, out of here before the final fireworks start.”

  Will and June rubbed Interface’s shoulders and hugged her to cheer her up, immediately lifting her spirits. “So let’s go talk to our ‘guest’ and see what information he’s willing to share,” Will said.

  “He’s a cutie,” Interface said, “who knows, if he turns out to be a good boy, maybe I’ll keep him.”

  “Insatiable,” Will chuckled as he shook his head and grabbed Interface and June around the waist, pulling them close and giving each a kiss on the cheek.

  They walked down to the spare lounge where their prisoner was being held, and Will stopped just in front of the door before it opened. “Interface, would you mind putting on some clothes, please? We don’t want to burst his heart before we get information out of him.”

  “Who me?” she asked, pressing her tits together with her hands. “Oh, alright, you’re no fun.” Then, a white sun dress with thin straps and blue flowers formed around her, leaving her shoulders and ample cleavage bare. “Better?” She asked.

  “Beautiful as always,” June chimed in. Propriety restored, they entered the lounge, finding the young man as Will had left him, sitting in the overstuffed chair, hands cuffed behind him, and his head hung low.

  Ben raised his head and watched them as they entered the room. He took a double-take when he saw the silver girl in a white and blue sundress. His eyes never left her as the three sat on the couch opposite him.

  The four of them sat in silence for a moment, taking a measure of each other. Will noted the thin, wiry build of the young man with shaggy brown hair seated before him, most likely due to being underfed.

  Ben looked back and forth between each of his captors. The dark-haired woman and dirty blonde man had strange silver tattoos covering every inch of the exposed skin.

  When Ben took in his third captor, he was mesmerized. Firstly, she was completely silver under her sundress, skin, teeth, and hair, and her eyes softly glowed with an unnatural blue light. Was she some sort of advanced android? He had never seen or heard of anything closely resembling the short-statured silver person in front of him. But there was something about her that simultaneously aroused and terrified him.

  After a few moments of silent appraisal, Will said, “Can I trust you not to try anything if I uncuff you?”

  Ben was surprised. This was not how he expected this interrogation to start. He expected a beating and a bit of torture, not a good measure of civility. “Well, there’s three of you and one of me, I’m outnumbered, there wouldn’t be much point in resisting.”

  “That’s not really an answer,” June replied to his dodge. Ben looked over to the silver girl who stared, unnerving him. It felt like she was looking directly into his soul.

  “You’re right, I’m sorry. I’ll behave,” Ben answered. Without anyone moving, the cuffs fell off his wrists, startling him. He rubbed his wrists and said, “So, is silver like your gang colors or something?” referring to the tracings on their skin and the entirety of Interface.

  “Something like that,” Will said with a smile. “But why don’t you let us ask the questions for a while.” Will leaned forward, his face serious now. “You and your friends, down here on the surface and in orbit, came here to do us harm. But I think at least you understand now how much of a mistake that turned out to be.”

  Ben took a deep breath and nodded, confirming in his mind that the others in the squad had not survived the encounter.

  “We need intel. There are at least three warships in orbit, probably five. Am I correct?”

  Ben had already decided that honesty would be the only way he would get out of this mess, so he answered immediately. “Yes. Three in geo-stationary orbit above our position and two more on a por orbit.”

  “Thank you for being honest,” June said.

  “If I’m being completely honest,” Ben began, “This is probably the best outcome for me in any scenario. If I had fought with the rest of them, I would have shared their fate. If I returned without them, I would have been executed as a deserter and a coward. Life with them was shitty and I’m probably due a shitty end, too.” Ben wasn’t sure why he was bearing his soul to them, but it felt right.

  “It’s more than I’m due, but can I ask a favor?” Ben’s face darkened. “When you do me, make it quick?”

  Interface, who hadn’t so much as blinked while she stared at him the entire time, finally spoke up. “No, I don’t think when I ‘do’ you, it’ll be quick at all. I like to take my time,” she said with a lustful smirk. Looking at Will and June, she said, “I’ve seen enough. He’s trustworthy. He’s got a good feel about him.”

  “Okay, then. It’s settled,” Will said, and the entire feel of the situation changed, to Ben’s bewilderment. The serious faces of Will and June melted into warm smiles. "My name is Will, this is June, and the lovely silver girl is Interface." She beamed a big smile at Ben.

  “And you are..” June prompted.

  “Benny, or rather Ben,” he stammered. ‘What exactly is going on?’ He wondered to himself.

  “Why don’t you follow us up to the bridge? I’m going to need you to identify which of the ships the leader of this fleet is on as well as any other tactical information.” Will and June stood and started walking towards the door, but Ben just sat there, confused.

  “That’s it? You’re not going to kill me?” he asked incredulously.

  “Nope,” Interface said in a chipper tone. “I like you. And they trust me. I’m an excellent judge of character. I think you’ll fit in nicely.” Interface was still sitting on the couch across from the confused young man, her eyes full of mischief.

  “Interface, we need to focus. Tactical information first. You can py ter,” June pyfully scolded her.

  “Okay, I’ll try to be patient,” she said, winking at Ben. She then took his hand, stood up, and pulled him to his feet. “Don’t worry, I know it’s a lot to take in. Trust me, your life just took a turn for the better.” With Ben in tow, wearing a bewildered look, they followed Will and June to the bridge.

  Ben’s eyes went wide when he was brought onto the bridge. The gleaming white consoles and rge forward viewport finally clicked in his mind. “This isn’t some kind of building, it’s a ship!”

  “Got it in one,” Interface said with a smile, still holding his hand.

  “How did you bury it in all this rock? Why?” Ben asked, still not understanding.

  “It’s a long story, which I’ll expin ter, but as to the ‘how’, the ship was buried in a global catastrophe, a long, long time ago, and the rocks formed around it,” Interface said, a little sad expression on her face.

  Ben wrestled with what Interface told him, trying to make sense of it. Instead, he looked out the forward viewport, tightly zoomed in and focused on the dropship and pilot inside. Then he said, “So this is how you kept track of us.”

  “That and we’re listening to the comms. At first, we weren’t sure of your intentions, but when we heard your, I should say their ‘Control’ wish Simmons ‘Good Hunting’, we knew what they wanted. We know the ‘what’, can you expin the ‘why’?” Will asked.

  “Listening in on our comms? That’s not possible. I know for a fact that they are using fourth-gen military quantum encryption, practically uncrackable.” Ben scoffed.

  “It was almost nothing for me,” Interface said. “You can do a lot with a six-dimensional crystalline processing matrix.” Ben heard the words, but they made no sense to him.

  “The ‘why’?” Will asked again.

  “Ah, right.” Ben began. “This crime organization makes a lot of money pirating, and the shipping diversion that you got caught up in, is their prime money maker. But it only works if no one is aware of it,” he expined.

  “So they need to make sure there are no witnesses. Makes sense,” Will agreed, shaking his head in disgust. Looking down at the console in front of him, he continued. “I think I have a pn to cause a diversion and sow chaos which should allow us to make a run for it.” Looking at Ben briefly, “When your ships entered the system, you made a rge navigable corridor that we can pass through at full speed.”

  Will turned to Interface and asked, “We don’t have a lot of energy for weapons fire, right?”

  “Right, at the minimum power levels the core is running at right now, we have to choose, fly or shoot,” Interface replied.

  “How are the torpedo unchers?” Will asked. “Are they currently functioning?”

  “Not really. The underside of the Nestia hasn’t fared as well as the rest of the ship. We’re still flight-worthy, but until I have some time and energy to straighten the lower superstructure out, we won’t be able to unch any.” Interface said.

  Will thought for a moment. “With the power core back online, can you dispce a torpedo through 4-D?” He asked.

  “That’s not how that works. The ship and anything connected to it can dispce through 4-D space, but the torpedoes are expendable and are independent systems,” Interface expined.

  “Then how did you rescue us? We may be connected now, but before we weren’t.” He gnced curiously over to June. “Or at least I wasn’t. How did you make that work?” He asked.

  Interface’s eyes looked up to the right, indicating she was looking for an analogy he could understand. “Hmm. Okay, picture a circle cut out of a piece of paper lying ft on a table. A 2-D object in 2-D space. Now, carefully wrap that 2-D circle of paper in a 3-D object, say a pair of hands. Then, you can pick up that paper circle in 3-D space, move it around, and pce it back on the table somewhere else. When I dispced with the two of you, I wrapped you in a 4-D construct, me, and carried you back to the ship.”

  “Could you do that with a torpedo?” Will asked, hopefully. “What kind of range would you have?”

  “It takes a lot of energy to dispce.” she paused, internally taking inventory, “Right now, I can manage a one-way trip, but not both ways in such a short time; The range is a tricky question. I need to know where I’m going. If I’m away, I can always return home, like for the rescue. If I have an accurate star chart, I can dispce halfway across known space. I can also do ‘line of sight’ dispcement, somewhere in the range of sensors. In the early days, that is how we first ventured out to the stars and built our star charts. Of course, the sensor arrays were much more powerful than what I have equipped on the Nestia.”

  “How far out do your sensors pick up?” Will asked.

  “About a third of a lightyear. Also, I don’t just animate this body, a portion of me inhabits it. A one-way mission would be... painful,” Interface replied.

  Will’s face soured, “I definitely don’t want to lose a part of you,” He paused, thinking some more. “What about the precursor fluid? You said earlier that you were just ‘nudging it around’. Could you dispce that?”

  Interface realized where his mind was going. “Ooh, you really are a clever boy. You are so getting a treat ter,” Interface smiled seductively. “Yeah, that would work.”

  “Do we have enough power for the gravitic sers?”

  “We’d need to divert power from the gravity drive to charge the weapon and fire, meaning there’d be a period where we’d just be coasting making us an easier target,” Interface answered.

  “And shielding?” Will asked.

  “The gravity drive warps space-time close to the ship; kind of how light bends around a star. The sers that these ships use would bend harmlessly around us. Doesn’t work quite as well for torpedoes or driven masses, but it does lessen the impact.”

  Will rubbed his forehead. “There’s so much that I don’t know about how this ship works. You’re going to need to give me a thorough rundown when we get through this.”

  “You’ll find I’m an excellent instructor. I have all the right motivational tools,” She winked flirtatiously.

  “Insatiable,” Will said with a smile and shook his head. “Okay then, here’s the pn, as simple as it is. As we lift off, we deliver a package on the rgest ship hopefully disabling it, and causing confusion in their fleet. Then we make for the gap left in the asteroids,” Turning to June, “You think you’re ready to pilot the Nestia?”

  “I haven’t had any practice, but the controls are familiar enough. It’ll take me a bit to get a feel for how she maneuvers, but I’ll adapt,” June said confidently.

  Interface perked up like she had just heard something as they finished their pnning. “They’re trying to contact Simmons for a status update,” She announced. “Sounds like they’ve figured something’s up.”

  “I can try to talk to them again if you want,” Ben offered.

  “I don’t think they’re going to buy it this time,” Will said. “Better they think you met the same end as Simmons and his crew,” Ben nodded, knowing his fate now rested with these people. His new ‘friends’?

  “They just unched two dropships,” Interface announced, still listening to the comms traffic.

  “How’s the power? Are we ready?” June asked.

  “As ready as we’re going to be,” Interface replied.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Will said with determination.

  “I'll go prep the torpedo,” Interface said as she ran off the bridge.

  June sat down at the navigational controls station while Will sat at tactical for weapons control.

  As Will and June ran through their systems check in preparation for lift-off, Ben wandered to the forward viewport and watched the activity outside.

  Ben watched the dropships descend through the thin clouds, bsting dirt in all directions fifty meters from the front viewport as they nded with a thud. The first dropship had taken off and was now hovering just behind the nded crafts, providing air support.

  As soon as the two dropships settled on the dirt, the loading ramps for both craft opened. Before the lip of the ramps could hit the dirt, heavily armed men, around thirty in total, sprang out and formed up behind the cover of their transports.

  “Whatever you are pnning on doing,” Ben called over his shoulder urgently, still staring out the viewport, “you better do it.”

  “Interface, are you ready with the torpedo?” Will called out over the comms.

  Interface was gathering up a beach ball-sized silver glob from the bathtub in the med bay. “I’m on my way to the torpedo room now,” She said as she ran out the door and down the hallway to the nearest lift. She willed it to descend faster than would normally be comfortable, and when the door opened onto the lower deck, she sprinted down to where the torpedoes were stored.

  With a mental command, she activated the nearest warhead and stood by it at the ready. “All set down here,” She called on the comms, holding a liquid silver beach ball ready.

  “Do you have a lock on the delivery target?” Will asked, nervous knowing that they only had one shot at this.

  “Ship’s scanners have spotted the engine compartment of the rgest ship. I’ll drop it right in there,” She confirmed.

  “Ok June, it’s your show now, everything is on your command,” Will said as he prepped the tactical station for action.

  “Engaging gravity drive,” June called out.

  As the men swept around the dropships and charged toward the gleaming white wall in front of them, a shimmering pulse of light swept across the structure's surface, bending the light striking it. The white color split and fractured into a kaleidoscope of the spectrum until all the streaming colors twisted into a glossy, reflective silver-gray.

  The ground under the nded dropships shuddered and threw the armed men off their feet. A deep rumbling sound echoed up and down the valley, and simultaneously, the rock wall above them began to fracture and crack.

  On their hands and knees, unable to stand, the armed men looked around and at each other in terror. Then, the unclimbable sheer wall of the valley and the ground beneath them exploded violently, sending rocks, men, and dropships flying skyward as shredded debris.

  Out of the flying debris, the Nestia leaped into the sky, taking flight for the first time in many millennia. Her main hull was shaped like an oblong spheroid, at least three hundred meters, slightly fttened through the vertical axis, leaving the impression of a sleek, powerful silvery dolphin.

  Three rge, thick, swept-back fins flowed from the ship's main body starting at about the st third of the main hull, offset from one another by a hundred and twenty degrees, lending the impression of speed and grace.

  Like a bullet out of a gun, the shimmering silver ship shot out of the newly formed crater and raced into the sky.

  “Wooooo Hoooo!” June yelled in exhiration as she banked and juked the ship, dodging incoming ser fire from orbit like a leaf on the wind. “This is incredible! She handles better than most fighters I flew back at the academy!” June excimed, giddy with the rush of excitement. “It’s completely different, unlike anything I’ve flown before. Instead of maneuvering from a center of mass, it feels like the entire surface is a thrust vector,” June said, trying to expin the feel of the control she had.

  “That’s because it is,” Interface said over the comms. “It’s the gravity field surrounding the ship providing thrust, not just engines in the back.”

  Missiles joined the intensifying incoming weapons fire, which June dodged easily as they approached the halfway point to orbit. “Ready on the torpedo. Disengaging drive,” June called out. The Nestia entered ballistic flight, no longer dancing back and forth, and started taking hits from the ser fire. “Now, Interface!”

  Interface had been at the ready with her silvery liquid orb. On June’s command, she quickly dropped the blob onto the surface of the torpedo, which rapidly poured over every inch of the weapon, covering it completely.

  Drawing the needed energy from the power core, she focused on pulling the silver-coated torpedo into 4-D space, the whole thing looking like it was shrinking until it vanished.

  On board the destroyer Agamemnon, the crew manning their stations in engineering were suddenly pushed aside as a silver object infted in their workspace. It thudded to the floor, and as the silver liquid poured off it, pooling on the floor, the engineers looked at it in horror, realizing what had just suddenly appeared right next to their power core.

  “Re-engaging drive,” June called out as the Nestia reached the top of its parabolic trajectory. With the Drive active again, the ship leaped forward, dodging back and forth, avoiding enemy fire again.

  A rge explosion erupted from the destroyer's side as they reached orbital height. A moment ter, it shuddered in its death throws as the core went supercritical, bulging the entire ship. Then, it exploded, hurtling shrapnel and debris into the nearby ships, inflicting serious damage.

  June changed vectors and made for the channel through the asteroid field at full acceleration, but the lead ship moved to block their way.

  “That’s the Anatolia, Franco’s ship!” Ben called out, hanging onto a nearby console, watching through the forward viewport.

  “Bst it, Will!” June commanded, disengaging the drive.

  “Targeting the bridge,” Will said, and after a short moment, “Firing!”

  Franco stood from his command seat, screaming at his bridge crew. “What the fuck just happened? How did they hit the Agamemnon?!” Then, seeing his quarry trying to flee, he said, “Block their path! Don’t let them escape!”

  Through his front viewport, he saw the silver ship stop dodging and dancing around his fleet's ser fire. “Fire! Fire everything!” He shrieked. But before a shot left his ship, he watched, stunned, as the silver surrounding the fleeing ship pool and focused on one point of its hull, pointing directly at him.

  The st few moments of Captain Franco’s life were a weird experience, though he would never be able to share it. From the silver spot on his enemy’s ship, a dark purple beam nced out, and as it approached, time seemed to slow.

  He couldn’t know that it was due to gravity itself bending and twisting the column of spacetime his bridge currently occupied. As the beam slowly approached, his command deck appeared like a psychedelic trip. The walls, floors, ceiling, and crew all began bending and twisting, swirling tightly like his field of view were a wet oil painting pulled into a bathtub drain.

  He could do little more than watch as the swirl tightened and swept past him on the bridge as he felt everything around him bend in ways they shouldn’t. There was no pain as his body was wound tight into a spiral; no nerves were severed, and he was still physically intact. Space itself was being tormented, for which he had no sense to feel.

  As the ray passed, Spacetime violently snapped back into shape, shredding the bridge's steel and flesh into an unrecognizable mass of constituent material.

  “Direct hit!” Will called out jubintly. “Their shielding didn’t even slow it!” The pirate ship sat dead in space, and the Nestia raced past it.

  The remaining three ships, peppered with wreckage and debris, were in no shape to give chase to their fleeing quarry. The Nestia continued to accelerate, passing through the enormous channel the pirate carved in the asteroid field, then disappeared into the nebu beyond.

  *****

  A few days ter, Cortez fumed aboard the ‘Victoria Gloriosa’. For the fourth time, he watched the recordings from his surviving ships of the disastrous attempt to tie up the loose ends threatening his budding empire.

  He returned to the engineer’s report assessing the damage to Anatolia. The engineer's exact wording was, “Damage sustained was unlike any he had seen. "; “Sliced through shields like they weren’t there” was another phrase Cortez kept coming back to.

  He leaned back in his chair and rested his chin in his hand, scowling, deep in thought. Then, a wicked smile crept across his face. It may have cost him this profitable endeavor, but if he had a fleet of these ships, oh, the things he could do.