A FORWARD FROM THE AUTHOR.

The science fiction writers enjoyed their big starships and long voyages at "warp speed" to the stars. It was their sacred cow to write about matter and anti matter as they sped through space to the stars in their big, lovely starships. More often than not, their whole story was the 'never ending trip.' Someone give me a couple Excedrin, I have a warp headache.

The stories of UF-2 were not written for monetary gain, but to explain polarity travel. I am positive that the die hard, 'can't travel faster than light' believers, will be in an uproar. I have seen polarity travel in my dreams. I'm not smart enough to explain why it will, or will not, work so please don't ask me.

The Pash were star travelers. They figured out the polarity drive a long time before humans came up with the idea. The way polarity drive was explained to me, we are surrounded by a balance of energy. Stand outside on a still day. The air is all around us. It’s not pushing us one way or another. Walk outside on a windy day. The air is all around us, but it has more force on one side than the other and it pushes against us. Sit in a cockpit with a propeller behind it. The cockpit is pushed into the wind if enough thrust is vectored by the propeller. Sitting in the cockpit, we do not feel the wind, but we move through it. The wind (energy) is moved from the front to the back of the cockpit and we are thrust forward.

Polarity drive takes all the energy we don’t see, nor feel, from the front of the starship and moves it to the back of the starship. Time, matter, energy are interlocked, as there can not be one without the other. Because the starship is no longer a part of the equation since it sits in a void of matter and energy, time neither collapses nor expands, as Einstein postulated. The starship does not become a mass of condensed matter as it approaches the speed of light, per Einstein’s theory, for the same reason as the first. Rules and theorems are made as guidelines until we learn more.

“Matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed.” (Einstein)

Gas in your car is not destroyed when you drive. It is changed into energy as it moves your car. The fuel in a lighter is not destroyed as it changes into heat and light when it burns. Light changes to heat and matter as plants grow and the summers warm.

Space travel will not be like the science fiction writers envision. We will not travel to the stars at “warp speed.” By moving the energy from the front of the vehicle to the rear of the vehicle we will travel to any star instantly. Remembering matter and energy are the same thing, when we travel in a “Polarity Ship” we will move through planets and other solid forms of energy as easily as we do through non solid forms of energy (space). Tonight, pick a star. It is within reason to believe you could travel there in your lifetime and, in a polarity ship, that trip will only take… no measurable time.

All through humanity’s history, some man, or men, have tried to exert their control over others. The Vikings, the Celts, Pharaohs, Romans, Hitler, Cesar... The names of individuals and countries changed, but it was, and still is, the same through the history of mankind and even those not of man. If I remember my history correctly America issued every American a social security number when they started gainful employment. Then they issued social security numbers at birth saying it was for tracking population. I think it was after a war, or maybe I’m mistaken, I don’t recall, but American leaders said the nation needed a national identity card for each individual. They said it would stop terrorism.

Are we starting to figure out the problem yet? All bad ideas start out with someone calling them good ideas and then, with time, the masses buy into the hypocrisy. The national identity card was accepted and then came the microchip implants. Everyone would be able to have instant information about their health, was the guise that idea was sold under. I guess it worked because most everyone bought into it. Some said the microchip implant was the ‘Mark of the Beast’ and no one saw it coming because everyone had expected the numbers 666 to be imprinted on them somehow. The individuals who refused the implants were ostracized by the business world and the government. They weren’t driven into caves like the Bible said, unless one takes the meaning as to say they were denied public facilities and transportation.

Man’s adventure to the stars was what saved him from domination by a select few. If one was a Bible reader, then I guess that could have been the ‘Second Coming’. In space, free individuals no longer submitted to a microchip implant. Children were born who were freemen. Eventually the numbers in space outnumbered those on Earth. Money, or the lack of it, has put men in bondage or freed them depending on the use and the need for it. Those on Earth realized if they wanted an exchange of the wealth flowing among the traders in space; they would have to give up the law requiring that everyone had to have a chip implant before doing business with Earth.

With no limits, except the physical limits to travel where they wanted, and do what they wanted, mankind was free once more in the never ending cycle of bondage and freedom... or were they? Even those not of man had the same ideas of control or destruction.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>And now:

UF-2
By BarbieLee
Edited by Catherine Linda Michel

CHAPTER ONE

David cleared his throat. “Did you hear the question?”

“Uh, yeah, you wanted to know if I had noticed anything unusual going on. Want to clue me in as to what? I seem to be missing something you think is important.”

I looked out across the mass of stars in the distance. I never stopped admiring space in its infinity. From our outpost at UF-2 we were as far from the planet Earth as humans had reasonably explored. There were those who had gone farther, but they were individuals or pirates. Usually they never returned, for which mankind was grateful, as we didn’t know what they had run into in the way of life forms, or what physical abnormality had done them up.

Walking across the room, David reached up and put his right hand on my shoulder as he stared out into space with me.

“I think we may have picked up a virus, or bug, or God only knows what. Haven’t you noticed some of the men on this station seem to be losing body mass?”

David was looking at me as I turned my head to look in his eyes. “They know they have to keep up the exercises or they will lose muscle. Names?”

He shook his head. “Almost all the men. Me for one. I thought engineering had increased the gravity by ten percent when I was helping Sonya check cargo inventory in bay six yesterday. When I asked Jim in engineering if he was screwing around with the gravitational field, he said we were still running one g. He asked if he could turn it down to point ninety percent 'G' as he had been having trouble picking up tools lately.”

“And what did you tell him?” I turned my attention back to the stars.

“No, of course. If we have been infected with something, then I sure don’t want to start hiding the symptoms by turning down the gravity on the station.” David stepped in front of me and cupped his hands behind his back as he stared at the stars.

“Checking into medical couple days back. I had them run a full scan on me. I questioned medical about the others who have been complaining. They have been getting a lot of complaints lately. The men are saying they are not able to lift or pick up things as easily as they should.”

“And?” I walked over to my desk and punched in the code for the medical reports for the station. Nothing unusual in the reports besides that they were way up in men checking in with no apparent illnesses. That raised a red flag in my mind. “Why hasn’t medical alerted me?”

“They were going to. I came straight from there. I told Laura I would tell you. Her medical team didn’t find anything wrong with any of the men. I asked them to do a DNA match on me, comparing it with my DNA file. I have an anomaly in several places. My DNA code has changed from what I originally was designed with.”

It had escaped my mind. David was a genetically engineered human. He was a product of a rogue lab attempt to make the perfect human. That kind of experimentation had been outlawed when humans were playing God with our own DNA. Most of those test tube babies were freaks, not intended by Mother Nature. Hideously grotesque creatures, designed in a lab intended for harvesting body parts, they were neither human, nor a product of God. Laws were passed to stop the practice and it worked to a limited extent. There were some off world labs still doing it for money, in spite of the death penalty if they were caught.

I turned to look at David. He was one of the miracles of those unnatural experiments. He looked ordinarily human. The other miracle about David was, the lab where he was designed was raided by government agents. Those who designed David didn’t plan on keeping him. They were only interested in harvesting pieces until nothing was left to sell on the black market.

David was lucky he was a fully developed human baby when the raid happened. He was the only one left alive when the agents finished sanitizing the lab. When the body scans and blood tests came up, David registered as human. They sent him off to a government institution to be cared for.

There were a lot of things about David that nature probably intended to wait a few more millennium before she disclosed the information to humans. David’s IQ had never been measured for one. He had a photographic memory, he was psychic and could read mind thought at will, he was never sick and he could heal his cuts or wounds in a week or less, usually less.

Some of the aliens we had on our post would heal rather quickly, but besides the one Pash on board, none could read minds. Or, it was general consensus that a Pash could read minds. Either that, or it was their instincts that guided them. No one knew where the Pash came from and very few humans had seen one. Their numbers? It was anyone’s guess.

I don’t know if all Pash looked like the one that stopped at our outpost because I had never seen a Pash before Toni came aboard. We called her Toni because none of us could pronounce her real name. I was guessing Toni was a she, but no one knew that for sure either.

“David, can medical reformat your original DNA code from storage?” All of us had our DNA code in a medical locker in case a space anomaly scrambled us internally. One of the good things that came from all that experimenting with humans was that we could be rebuilt from our own DNA if the need arose. Luckily, my DNA had never been broken or messed up in all my years in space.

I heard a deep sigh as David inhaled and then slowly exhaled. “Tried it already. Whatever it is that screwed up my DNA, isn’t letting the original code re-establish itself. Medical injected me with the Corruption AIM 221 DNA code correction. That injection died before it got started, as if it had been injected in a foreign body and not its own, me. Medical then grew a six-cc batch in incubation and set it up with Corruption AIM 90X. It too was killed after injection.”

David turned and walked across the room to the exit. The wall silently slid open for his passage. He stopped and turned in the door. Shaking his head, he stared at me.

“Bill, we have seen a lot of things come and go while we have been together at this post. Everything we have come up against we have been able to handle.”

“Remember Gordy Falin? He was the explorer who dropped in on us two years, seven months, two days, and one hour back. He had a rider inside his ship that could osmose through the walls and hated other life forms. It took us weeks to track that thing down. We couldn’t trap it in any force field we had. We couldn’t kill it with any weapon we had. I thought we were going to die before you decided to set charges and blow off a section of the station with that thing inside.”

“I remember. If it wasn’t for the Pash we would all have died. We were fortunate Toni could sense that creature and lured it to a pod we could detonate. I guess all of us have a reason or purpose in life.” We were lucky to have Toni on our station at that particular time. The thing seemed to be a solitary creature and few in number.

Toni had been with us, off and on, for almost three years. She frequently came and went, much to the consternation of our traffic controllers. While our interplanetary ships looked somewhat like stacked rings or soup cans, her ship looked like something straight out of the old Buck Rogers movie archives.

Toni and her ship had smooth sweeping curves. Because we were a forward outpost, all space traffic to our post was considered enemy until otherwise recognized. Toni always set off the alarms when she dropped in from wherever she had been. It was suspected she traveled inner space, or some such, and couldn’t announce her coming.

I, for one, enjoyed her company tremendously. She was extremely attractive and I felt comfortable around her. Probably had a lot to do with the idea there were no secrets if she could read mind thought, like most of us suspected. It wasn’t always like that though.

I remember her first visit quite well. She dropped in right smack dab in front of the Control Center. The controllers on duty, Lan and Bree, almost had heart attacks when an alien ship appeared out of nowhere right in front of their noses. In all honesty, the whole damn station almost had a collective heart attack. Alarms were going off, shields were dropping as each part of the station was sectioned off, and for a few minutes, none of us knew what was going on. So much for being ready for alien attack. I couldn’t blame the rest of the crew though. I was trying to get on top of the situation and having no luck.

We were all running around like a bunch of brainless idiots when Toni called in for permission to dock with a crew of one. I beat it post haste to Control when Bree notified me a Star Cruiser with a crew of one had requested permission to dock with us. None of us believed a Star Cruiser could be flown by one person. There were other problems too.

No one had ever seen a star cruiser that looked like Toni’s ship. Those that looked like Toni’s ship were inner planetary ships, good for flying around a world or two, not for crossing galaxies or a universe. But... and that’s a mighty big but, we could track those kind of ships the moment they warmed up, much less started moving. Where we were sitting in space, we should have seen them coming for months. Toni’s ship didn’t match any of the known physics we worked with.

“Bill, is this stuff boring you?”

“Wha... I’m sorry, David, I was thinking about Toni. I’d like to have her in on this if possible. Is she on the station or is she off on one of her forays?” I turned my attention to David.

David was real still for a few seconds. “I talked to her fourteen hours ago. I’ll check and see if she’s still here. Bill, whatever this thing is infecting us is worse than that creature Gordy Falin brought on board. We have no enemy we can see and we don’t know where it came from. I suggest we quarantine the station. I checked outbound flights. No one has left the station since medical started getting complaints. Whatever it is, let’s find it and kill it here. We want to make sure we don’t contaminate the rest of the human population.”

“Quarantine? You think we have some unknown on board? You know if we go to a Death-Com Level and don’t find anything to report, we will become so much space debris ourselves. Command will send out a Star Destroyer and wipe us from existence if we don’t find something.”

Deep inside my soul I knew David didn’t want to go to Quarantine any more than I did. I also knew that, if he thought we were infected or had an unknown on board, then we had a visitor or visitors, even though we didn’t know who or what.

David looked as serious as I had ever seen him. “Quarantine, Bill. There’s no rational answer for what I am infected with. It is an unknown whatever it is. I told Medical to re-scan and test all the others who have been complaining about not feeling normal. I think though, that the answer is going to be the same as what they gave me on my test. Unknown DNA code breakdown. Unknown body change in progress. Unknown sequencing of DNA coding and not repairable.”

I cleared my throat as David waited in the door for an answer. I could be signing the death certificate of every life on this post. Hesitantly and reluctantly, I touched the keypad on my desk. “Control, re-transmit message to Command Central. This is not a drill. Outpost UF-2 is on Death-Com Level One for unknown contamination. This is not a drill. Security authorization, William, E for emergency, Six Twelve Six Three Alpha Omega Krang Himmel.”

I didn’t have to repeat my orders. No matter what anyone tried from that moment on, no one would be allowed on or off Outpost UF-2. We were either going to find and eradicate our enemy or we were all going to die together. All two thousand one hundred and six of us! Plus one, if Toni was on the station.

“Find me an answer, David.”

Before David could answer, the Pash walked in. An extremely attractive, lithe female, she was probably seven feet tall. She looked like a mix between humans and cats. She was well put together, even if she didn’t have the classic female hour glass figure. I wondered if the Pash were an experiment of mankind that escaped from a lab? But then, that starship of hers didn’t escape from any lab.

She had gold eyes with vertical pupils she could open or close at will. Her hair was more the quality of soft fur than hair. Tawny colored with streaks of black, she wore it shoulder length. She had beautiful hands with long sharp nails. Those nails served a bigger purpose than looks. I had seen the leftovers after a guy had unexpectedly attacked her, three months back. Twice her weight, he pulled a pistol on her. I wasn’t there, but they said she screamed and all forty six people in that room thought they were going to die.

Fights are taken seriously on an outpost. Whether it was from space psychosis, a brain virus, or plain old human nature to want to fight, we had to know the answer. Normally I would have both parties locked up until it was decided who had instigated the fight. There were two reasons I didn’t lock up Toni. Number one reason was, over a year before she had saved all our lives. Number two, I really didn’t think I could lock up a Pash.

I guess, deep down in my soul, there were a couple other reasons. I really liked Toni. She carried a blaster on her hip that was unlike anything any of us had ever seen. It was a fascinating piece of hardware. It wasn’t illegal to carry a weapon. In fact it was encouraged. On an outpost one might not have time to run to the arms locker if we were attacked. All our pistols were small, palm sized. Compared to that cannon Toni carried, we were wearing peashooters.

The height of stupidity would be to go up against an opponent when you didn’t know the rules of engagement. Deep down in my gut I had a feeling I could send the whole station to arrest Toni, and if she didn’t want to be arrested, she could kill us all.

During the inquiry I talked to several people who were there. They said her scream was unlike anything they had ever heard. To a person, they also said they never wanted to hear it again. It was something straight from the primal forces of life. The guy with the phaser ended up more like shredded meat than human when the one second fight ended. Medical was still putting him back together a week later.

David nodded his head in recognition at Toni. “I’m guessing you’re here for the same reason I am? We have a problem and it seems to have infected all of us.”

“I know.” She turned her attention toward me. “I heard the Death-Com Alert. I’ll help research for a cause if you wish.”

“Thank you, Toni. That’s very kind of you. Would you like to look on your own, or could I talk you into working with David?” If anyone was David’s equal in intelligence, it was Toni. She could possibly be past David in intelligence. I had never asked her a question that could stump her. If she answered me, she always seemed to be right. Sometimes she never answered. Sometimes the answer was so far above my ability to comprehend, my poor brain was left struggling to figure it out.

“I will work with David if he doesn’t mind.” Her voice was soft, almost a purr.

Hearing her voice, it was hard to imagine she could make any kind of sound that could curdle the blood, such as the witnesses described. “Thanks, Toni. I appreciate all the help I can get.”

David nodded in agreement. “Bill, if it’s humanly possible, we won’t die because of some unknown. Toni and I will find whatever it is. Even if we have to invent new ways to do it.” David stepped into the hall and the wall closed behind him.

In fascination I watched as Toni walked across the room to look out at the stars. If I hadn’t been looking I would have never known she had crossed the room. She glided more than walked. She made no sound when she moved. In all the time she had been with us, I had yet to figure out how she could walk so gracefully and silently.

“Toni? Do you have any ideas about what it is we're up against?” I turned and stepped up beside her to look at the stars. I was wondering if she saw things the same way humans did, or if her unique eyes were able to see things beyond human vision?

I felt her looking at me. Turning to look over my left shoulder, I was looking straight at those beautiful golden eyes. I always felt she was looking into my soul when she did that. As she stared at me, I saw something in her eyes I had never felt before. Chills ran up and down my spine. She knew what was happening to us. Deep down in my heart, I knew she knew.

I was left wondering as she turned and silently padded out of the room. I hated it when she had an answer and wouldn’t tell me what it was. Thinking about it, I realized she hadn’t stopped to offer her help in finding what was attacking us because she already knew. Did David know too? Was he softening me up for the realization that we were all going to die from some unknown virus or God only knew what?

I hated working with a genius. Sometimes they treated the rest of us like little kids who needed to be patted on the head and told, ‘everything will be alright’. My gut feeling was, we were all going to die.

David was waiting in the hall when Toni joined him. “Walk with me to medical?”

“If you wish.” She stepped up beside him as he headed toward the lift.

“Any ideas? I’m guessing you already read my mind and know as much as I know.” David stopped in front of the lift and looked over his left shoulder at Toni.

The doors to the lift silently slid open and Toni stepped on. She waited until David was standing beside her. “Medical. I have a lot of ideas, but then, so do you. I believe we are looking for cause not effect. The effect is already known. I can sense it in Bill, you, and all the others who have been infected.”

The lift stopped and the doors silently slid open. David stepped out. When Toni didn’t step out beside him he turned to look back at her. “Coming?”

She shook her head. “I can’t help you here. You’re looking for two things. You are looking for the cause and a cure. The cause didn’t happen in Medical. I’m going to cover the Post and see how wide spread it is. There has to be a beginning. Infection will be heaviest there and less the further one is removed from that area. Provided the whole Post isn’t contaminated, then I can possibly find the initial outbreak.”

David nodded in agreement. “Good idea. You need to take a medical scanner with you? All the crew members have their DNA coded. It can tell you which ones are infected.”

“No need. Those infected are sensed easily enough. Engineering.” The doors slid closed between them as Toni headed to Engineering.

It was less than twelve hours later when David and Toni asked me to meet them in control center. I was already there in my office, monitoring the space chatter. UF-2 was the topic of the day after we went to Death-Com. The rest of humanity in this quadrant of space heard our alert and was trying to guess why we had called for quarantine. I was still asking myself the same question. David and Toni walked in together. I was looking at my scanner and reading the latest reports from medical. I was trying to make sense of the reports.

“David, have you figured out what it’s doing to you? I know medical said unknown, but I’m betting you know.” I wanted an answer.

“Yes, I know.” David walked over to my couch and sat down.

Toni walked over to the window before she turned her attention back to me and waited for David to begin.

“Would you mind sharing that knowledge with me?” David was not only the smartest person in the universe; he was also a good friend. He held the position of consultant on our outpost and we were lucky to have him. He wasn’t in the military like most of the rest of us on the post. He could go anywhere he wanted. It so happened he liked being with UF-2. Only he and God knew why. He was basically in command, even if I held that position by title. Usually the crew would go to David instead of me with their problems. In all the years he had worked with me, he seemed content with his job.

He asked men or women to do a task and they did it, as if he was the commander. No one ever questioned his right to make suggestions without going through me first. Yes, I asked if he was sure about going to Death-Com. That was for my own lack of belief in myself, not in my lack of trust in David. I knew the lives of everyone on this space station were slowly ticking away if we didn’t find the contamination infecting us.

“Everyone not already infected needs to carry and engage their personal body shield. All personnel on this station need to do that immediately. Send everyone to medical and have a DNA scan and match it with their records. If they are infected they can turn off the body shields, as it is already too late for them. Those that aren’t infected must leave their body shields on until we sweep all rooms and compartments. Shields will be set up as we clean rooms. No one may carry anything in or out of any area besides themselves.” David waited to see how I was going to take implementing new regulations.

I hated personal body shields. “That thing Gordy brought in with him could pass through any shield as easily as it passed through walls. You think this thing can be locked out? You know the complaints are going to start pouring in as people are restricted in their movement. Personal body shields are a pain in the royal ass. They are hot…!”

“Bill, I know all that. The alternatives aren’t… I started to say not pretty, but that would be untrue.”

David hesitated as he looked at Toni and winked. “Although I’m sure what is happening to us humans could not improve on your looks.”

Toni smiled showing a mouth full of beautiful perfect teeth and long sharp canines guaranteed to scare the piss out of anyone who had never seen a Pash. She was looking at David. “Thank you for the compliment, David.”

Toni walked over to the window and purred. “Earth.” The screen changed to a hologram of Earth. It was completely covered with cities.

Toni pointed at the hologram. “You humans say it is a beautiful planet. That is not beauty to me.”

“Ancient Earth.” The hologram changed into a picture of a planet with continents and vast oceans of blue.

Toni turned and focused on me. “Some things change from a thing of beauty to something that looks dead. I studied the human history data. I realize your species is driven to explore and build. In my opinion your species killed a beautiful world by covering it with human designed structures. Most of your kind would disagree with me. They think they have to change or build on a world before it’s beautiful.”

“Although I don’t like what humans and their allies do to the planets they inhabit, not every change is for the worse. I suggest you keep that in mind.”

I had no idea what Toni was talking about. What I did get out of that conversation was that she didn’t like what humanity had done to Earth, and a lot of other planets along the way. I waited for Toni or David to give me what was most certainly going to be bad news.

She studied me before she continued. “David and I split the research. He was looking at the human factor and I was looking at the non-human factors. I’m not affected the way humans are. The Trogg seem to be immune also, as are any of the other non human life forms on this station. It looks like it was specifically designed for humans.”

“Designed for humans? What do you mean, 'IT'? What’s pretty about something that is changing your DNA code and is irreversible? What do you know about this Toni?” My curiosity was killing me. Somehow Toni and David knew what ‘it’ was doing to David.

David stood up and looked at his hands. “I wonder what my name would have been if I were designed as female?”

“Huh? We may all die and you wonder what name you would have been if you had been a woman? Has that thing infected your brain already?” I couldn’t believe it. We were under attack by an unknown and David wasn’t making any sense. I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of calling for Death-Com. If David had lost his mind I may have doomed us all.

“I like Sherry. It’s a nice name for a girl don’t you think?” David gave me a wink as he flipped his wrist in a feminine fashion.

I almost peed in my pants right there. On the advice of a mad man I had signed the death warrant of everyone on the station by following the suggestions of someone who had slipped a cog. Furiously I was thinking of what we could capture and kill so Command would believe we had eradicated our menace? Maybe I could shoot David and scramble his body so they couldn’t ever figure out it had been human? Could we pass the remains off as the perceived threat? Would Command buy the deception?

David laughed. He knew what I was thinking. “You might as well get used to calling me Sherry. I am going to be totally female in a month.”

“YOU WHAT?” Now I knew David was over the edge. His intelligence finally gave up on him. They say the line between a genius and an idiot is non existent, as they are the one and the same. David had slipped over to the idiot side of genius.

“I’m not crazy, Bill. What ever it is that infected us is changing the humans on this station to the female persuasion of life. If I am correct, I’ll be more female than anything you have ever met before in your whole life. Whatever is doing this to us is going to make us into the perfect female of the human species. You thought I was the perfect male of the human species. I wasn’t. I had a lot of defects. Whatever is changing us figured out all the coding in the DNA structure where we had design mistakes not yet removed by evolution or experimentation.”

“YOU’RE KIDDING! You have accepted this transition already? What are you thinking!” I couldn’t believe David could tell me a story like that and do it so calmly. It never entered into my male schizoid makeup, David had never screamed or shouted in anger or fear like the rest of us humans.

Then it dropped on me like a barge. David said, ‘changing us’. My legs turned to rubber as the implications hit home. I managed to find my chair and plopped into it before I fell down. Glancing over at Toni, my heart stopped. She was looking at me like I was prime rib or something. I faltered and then looked again. She was still staring. In desperation I turned my attention to David. At least he wasn’t devouring me with his eyes.

David acted like he never noticed as he continued. “Why not? Even if we find what is doing this and we figure out how to reverse the process, I don’t want to take the cure. Think about it for a minute. I never asked to be born. They made me up in a test tube and incubated me in a glass tank. If I am changed into a female why should it matter to me? One body design is as good as another. In this case, better. If my instincts are right, I will be a perfect species without any defects.”

Quickly he looked up at Toni. “Sorry, I meant human species.”

“I know.” Toni looked amused.

Glancing in my direction, David looked about as sad as I had ever seen him. “Bill, I am a genetic experiment of humans. I’m not even sure I have a soul. You and a couple billion other humans are positive you have souls. You were born in a woman’s womb conceived by a father, loved by a mother. My mother and my father were tubes of nutrient, fed through ports in my glass incubator. Male, female, or anything in-between, why should I care? What you see is design engineered in a lab. Something is going to redesign me into female form. For the past couple of days, I have felt my body changing. I think whoever, or whatever did this has a knowledge of DNA we may figure out in a few hundred years.”

“I don’t know if we are infected accidentally or if we are under a planned attack. You’ll know as soon as I figure it out.” David gave me a wink before he turned to leave.

In shock I watched as David walked out. Without a sound, Toni was right behind him. Alone in the office, I was left thinking of the possibilities. Maybe a rogue lab had found the DNA sequence that infected our station? But why turn it lose on us and how did they plant it on the station? If it was an alien race and they planned on wiping out the human race in a war where a shot was never fired, they either miscalculated how far mankind had spread among the stars, or we were a test case to see if it worked. Why us?

My mind was screaming in disbelief. Change to a female and David thought it was a good idea? I was positive he had lost his mind already, but then I wasn’t sure any of us had what could be called our right minds. Maybe David was the sane one and all the rest of us were control subjects? A person could go crazy trying to figure that one out if they knew humanity’s past.

Twenty thousand years back it was decided to clone humans and send them out to explore space. There were a couple of ideas supporting that concept. One, clones weren’t actually human, so if they were killed it didn’t matter. They weren’t thought of as being ‘real’ humans. Two, in spite of the best efforts of man to invent cognitive machines, clones could make judgements no machine could ever conceive of in tests. Thus, clones were grown and sent out to space.

Even with good ideas there can always be bad results. There was a small problem that mankind should have seen. If clones could think and reason, what made mankind not realize the clones would eventually not want to be used as throw-away explorers? I guess the brain chip we implanted in their minds was supposed to keep them under control. It was so laughable when I researched history and could see mistake piling up on mistake until it all came back to haunt us.

The brain chip worked in the lab, but not in space. With all the unknown energy forces and space radiation, something was bound to short it out. It all started with one clone who managed somehow get free of mind control. She figured out what humans had grown her for and what they did to her. Can we say “hate” with a vengeance? Humanity did it to themselves since they had designed clones to have high IQ’s so they could figure out unknown situations in space exploration.

That one came back to bite them right in their collective asses. The woman was designated m-four oh one. She became known as Emma. With her superior intelligence, she figured out what it took to short out the brain control chip in other clones. Tracking down hundreds of other clones and freeing them from mind control took her a few years, but it was like a snowball on a downhill run after that. One freed two, those two freed four, those four freed eight, and pretty soon hundreds of thousands, some say millions, had been freed from mind control.

Humanity was almost wiped from existence in the clone wars. The clones hated genetic humans and we hated clones. Both sides almost lost before a truce was called. Emma was the one who had started it and she was the one who stopped it. I guess she really was intellectually superior. She talked both sides into a compromise where clones would be accepted as equal humans. That had to be an oxymoron to anyone who studied history.

Clones were superior in intelligence and design and they wanted to be equal as humans? I bet Emma chuckled over that agreement until the day she died. She had to know genetic humans would never be able to match the intelligence of clones. David was an excellent example of that planning.

It was time to get the bad news from medical. I headed for the door and almost collided with it when it didn’t automatically open. “Passage.”

“Not permitted.” The soft feminine voice replied.

“Explain.” Why wasn’t I allowed to leave my station?

“Your personal body shield is not activated. Please engage shield before leaving room.” Came back softly to me.

“Damn!” David had already set in place the orders controlling movement on the post and I had forgotten. I walked back over to my desk and retrieved my personal shield from the pop up box. Sticking it to my left hip I activated the shield. I hated these things.

The old time science fiction writers had gotten a lot of things wrong. Shields didn’t let anything in or out. That included the air we breathed. The re-generators inside the devices re-oxgenated our air, dispersed our body heat, and stopped anything and everything from moving in or out of the shield area. That also meant sound and light. We isolated ourselves from the world inside these things.

What I now saw was a computer generated world. My shield would sample the environment around my body and update the graphics inside as I moved or walked. It might seem to the eyes that I was looking at the real world, but my mind knew better.

It only took a few minutes to walk to medical. They were busy as they scanned men and women pouring in for their DNA match to see if they had been infected or not. I was surprised to see women were also infected as the results came back. It didn’t look good as less than one in fifty results turned out negative as personnel were screened. Those infected turned off their body shields and left. Most of them looked at me in despair. I couldn’t blame them.

I was in command and supposed to have a plan for something like this. Even a cure. I couldn’t offer them anything at the moment. It was one of the few times I was glad I was wearing a body shield. Like all the others who had their shields on, I looked like a soft human shaped blur to those outside looking at me. The only way the population knew it was their commander was the color of the blur. Officers cast a soft blue while everyone else was colorless. As Commander, my shield cast a soft red-ish blue.

David stepped up in front of me and motioned me toward the testing chamber. Reluctantly I stepped into the chamber. Like hundreds of others, I wanted to know, but was scared to death of what it might tell me. The test chamber glowed as its shield was activated and the chamber was cleansed of any foreign unknowns. Reaching down with my right hand I pushed the deactivation on my body shield. My heart jumped when the test chamber shield collapsed.

‘NO! God NO!’ My mind screamed in sheer terror at the thought I was already changing into the opposite sex from what I had been born as. There was no use keeping my body shielded. I was infected with whatever it was David had.

David could see the terror in my eyes. He stepped up beside me. “Bill, take a deep breath. Remember, you are the commander of this post. What you do and how you accept this will be a sign to others who also are infected.”

“David, find a cure. Take whatever men, equipment, resources you need, but find a cure!” I whispered in his ear so no one else could hear me.

David looked at me with pity. “I will do the best I can.”

That angered me. I didn’t want his pity. I wanted his brain to find a cure. I wanted… I realized that what I was wanting was to not become a product of genetic engineering like David. Taking a deep breath to calm my anger I nodded in agreement. “Thanks David. All I ask from you is your best.”

UF-2 went into virtual shutdown mode. Crew movement was limited to the area they were assigned to. We scanned and physically searched for whatever it was that had invaded us.

Days are a product of measuring time by Earth measurements. On a station stuck on the fringes of known space, days were a number like any other number. I honestly don’t think anyone on our station understood the Earth measurement of 'day.' Very few had ever seen Earth, except in holograms. Earth was a name in history. That was all, just a name.

It had been ten days since we had gone into Death-Com. All personnel were assigned duty rotation, with constant poking and prodding into every nook and cranny in the station. We weren’t having any results. I was beginning to feel like we would never find what was infecting our post. With that feeling along came a second feeling of dread.

We had exactly ninety more days to report back to Command Central as to why we had gone to Death-Com Level for unknown contamination and or intruder alert. If we couldn’t come up with a valid explanation we were going to be looking down the barrels of a Star Destroyer. Star Fleet Command took a ‘better safe than sorry’ attitude when edge of space outposts became infected with an unknown. My mind was beginning to accept the idea of a genetic change as preferable to being blasted into so much cosmic dust by 'friendly fire.'

I had wandered down to the galley after reading the reports coming in from medical and control. All our efforts were turning up negative. Our search teams had yet to find the cause. Medical had yet to find a cure. I felt tired, physically and mentally. My mind was shut down from fatigue when David and Toni walked in. I was totally exhausted, as none of us had much sleep the past ten days.

“Want to see your infection carrier?”

“YOU FOUND IT!” I turned around so fast I almost fell out of my chair.

From the Editor: Chapter two will be posted Wednesday. Stay tuned.

“Want to see your infection carrier?”

“YOU FOUND IT!” I turned around so fast I almost fell out of my chair.

“Them.” David held his hand over my table and hundreds of little black balls or BB’s bounced and scattered everywhere.

“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING!?” I recoiled from the table as some of them landed in my lap. Furiously I brushed them away.

Toni had walked in along with David. She looked at me strangely as if she was studying me. She had been looking at me differently since this mess started. I chalked it up to nerves and lack of sleep.

“Bill, you're already infected so it doesn’t matter, but the truth is, they won’t react to you. These are a marvel of genetic bio-mechanical engineering. Way past what we could design.” David flicked one with his finger and sent it rolling across the desk.

“If we move out of the room they will start rolling in hide and search mode. They can sense bio-bodies and can tell if that body is infected with the DNA female coding or not. Not just males, because they also attack females who aren’t infected. It has to be their DNA coding or they will attack.” David smiled as he rolled a few more around on my desk.

“Attack? How, and with what?” I leaned over to get a closer look at one of the small black beads. It looked like a small ball bearing.

“It’s so simple, it’s ingenious. They propel themselves by forming a bump in their surface opposite to the direction they want to travel. As they roll, that bump forms continuously against the surface they are pushing against.”

David looked exasperated at my blank stare. “Take a round balloon. Then if you could put your finger inside push out gently. That forms a bulge. If the balloon is resting on a surface, and you slide your finger downward until you are pushing against the surface, the balloon will roll forward away from where you are pushing with your finger.”

Cautiously I pushed on one with my finger. It felt like a steel bearing. “But they are so hard.”

David smiled. “Yeah, but even steel expands with heat. They don’t use heat to form the bulge though, but some other means. I think it is part of the bio part of the thing that does that.”

“Then what? I don’t see something like that jumping on and digging into anyone. Surely we would have noticed them before now? Is there a micro organism on the outside and all we have to do is touch it or have it touch us?” My concept of weapons was not a BB unless it was propelled by a gun of some kind.

Shaking his head, David picked one up. “Not even close. When they sense an uninfected bio-organism they shoot the organism with a micro bio-mechanical organism. That organism in turn burrows into a host cell and starts to work. It clips the host DNA coding and inserts the re-programmed DNA.”

“Keep in mind that it doesn’t replace all our DNA strand, only parts of it. After that cell has replicated the new DNA strand, then the coding is sent into adjoining cells. And then more adjoining cells, until our whole body is built on the new DNA code.”

My hope of staying as me had returned, now that David knew how it infected us. I was positive David or Toni would figure out the cure now. “How soon before you can come up with an inoculation against this thing?”

“Probably not soon enough for what you want. Remember, it kills any DNA that is not a match for itself. I don’t know how they did it but they locked in the snippets where they spliced the code. I, and a dozen other crew members, gave a liter of blood each for DNA testing. Even the women want us to solve this problem. They don’t to be re-programmed any more than you or I. We have been trying to pull the strands apart in the lab. Everything we know about DNA is not working on this code.”

I looked down at my hands. In the short time I had been infected they looked softer, smoother and yes, even smaller than before. I was positive David had guessed right that first day. I hated him for being so smart. “I’ll send out a Death-Com Level Standby.”

It would tell Command Central we had found the intruder but not killed or isolated the problem. It would give us a reprieve from a Star Destroyer for up to a year. No one could come or go from the station, but at least we would be alive… If changing sex meant staying alive. Now that the problem of dying from a Star Destroyer had been pushed back, I was again hating the idea I was changing, instead of wishing I could live. “I’ll fill out the report and send Command Central a sample of the intruder. Can you neutralize those things or should I send them intact?”

“Send them a dozen intact. So what if someone gets careless and gets zapped? It'd give them someone to study and research on their end if it happens.” David pulled a packet out of his pocket as he reached down on top my table and pushed a bunch of the BBs up into it.

He held it out to me. ”Here, send these.”

“David! Drop them in a contamination container and make sure it’s sealed. I’ll fill out the report to go with it in an hour or two. I’m not sure I could make out an intelligent report at the moment, I’m so tired. What about all those others you dumped on my table? They are scattered everywhere.” I really didn’t want to stay in the same room with, even if they weren’t going to attack me because I had already been infected.

“Housecleaning has been programmed to find them. When you go back to your room, turn it on before you lie down. You wouldn’t believe the number of those things we are collecting in refuse. We will discuss this after you had your sleep and sent in your report.” David turned and left the galley as my sleep deprived mind was trying to understand what he had told me.

Toni waited and walked with me back to my room. “I will check with engineering and make sure housecleaning bots are set to scan continuously for the infection carriers. They could hide almost anywhere as small as they are.”

“Thanks, Toni. I’ll have to keep the uninfected personnel in quarantine until we are positive we have all those things cleaned from the station.”

She stopped as the door to my room opened. “Some changes are ordained.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I watched as she turned and walked off without answering. Damn. I hated it when she did that. If she meant I should accept the change those damn little monsters had programmed into my body then she was mistaken. David might not have any qualms about being a man or a woman, but I sure as hell did. I had heard there were men who changed to women and women who changed to men through the off world clinics. When a species gets dispersed as far and wide as ours; along with the scientific and medical knowledge to do just about anything, there were always those who would want to do almost anything. I definitely wasn’t one of those.

“Housecleaning on, now. Bed, now.” Part of the wall folded down with my bed, as another part of the wall opened up and a floating bucket slid out. The bucket was a robotic cleaning tool. It would gather up any dust and, I hoped, all those foreign BBs David had shown me. David’s little speech about those things not attacking someone already infected did little to quell my dislike of those things. I made it to the bed and died.

I dreamed of things foreign, but not in the normal sense. These things were foreign to a male. I dreamed of long hair that cascaded down my back and across my shoulders. Long sexy legs, and small delicate hands with long fingers. I dreamed of….!

“Eeeeee!” That scream came from me as I woke in shock. What I had dreamed was frightening and disgusting. I couldn’t believe I had screamed. I was still panting and close to hyperventilating as I tried to calm my heart, which was racing. Fighting the fear of finding what I was going to see, but with the need to see if my dreams were a premonition of things to come, I held up my hands to look at them. Were they really smaller, or was it my fear driving my mind? My boots had been flopping on my feet for several days now. I had been denying that my feet were getting smaller.

Reluctantly, I slid out of bed and tried on one of my boots. I didn’t have to reach down to pull it on. My foot fell into it like an abyss. There was no denying it any longer. Damn David’s intuition! Why me? God why me? Two hundred and seven crew members had escaped infection. Why couldn’t I have been one of them?

I laid back down on the bed and cried hysterically in my pillow until it came to me what I was doing. I never cried! Damn! What the hell was wrong with me? Slowly I rolled out of bed and padded softly across the room to the bathroom. I was going to have to drop into supply and pick up another uniform. The one I was wearing was too big for me, the same way my boots were too big.

As I walked up to the potty and tried to find my water pistol I decided it was too much trouble. “Damn and double damn!” I dropped my pants and sat down. I realized I probably wouldn’t be able to aim it anyway. Probably end up peeing all over my pants and down my leg if I had persisted in doing it the ‘good old boys’ way.

David was waiting when I stepped out of the bathroom. He also had noticeably softened in looks. When he nodded and smiled knowingly at me I felt like throwing myself at him and strangling his neck.

“What the hell do you want?” It didn’t come out like the growl I intended. My voice cracked instead.

“Commander, you better get a grip and realize what you are feeling is only the beginning. There are one thousand, eight hundred and ninety nine others who are going to be looking to you for how to cope with this. If you are going to fall apart, then let me know now so we can replace you.”

David didn’t mean it as a joke. He was dead serious. When I sent us to Death-Com Level we stopped being a totalitarian leadership with Command Central designating who was in command. By law, we became a democratic isolation. The crew could vote in, or out, anyone as commander at any moment.

I wiped my eyes as I shook my head. “I can handle it. Give me some time.”

“Time is the one thing you don’t have the luxury of. The crew needs someone who will show them how to cope with this thing that they are all going through. Bill, when there is no other option but to go ahead, then there is no reason to try to back up. Are you ready to face that option, or should I call for a meeting?” He studied me as he waited for an answer.

Shaking my head I knew David was right. There was a small problem with that though. So many things were going on inside my body, I felt like screaming instead of giving orders. “Let’s get down to business. I have yet to fill out that report to Command Central. Give me an hour and I’ll get back to you. How are you coming on tracking down where we picked up those bio-mechanical organisms?”

David nodded before he turned to leave. “That’s our Bill, back on track. We will talk about it after you fill out the report and send it in. I’ll send up some clothes in a few minutes. You don’t look like a leader right now. Quite the opposite, you look like some adolescent trying to play grownup.”

“Out! I have a report to send in.” I found it not funny and I wanted to pick up something and throw it at him.

It was closer to two hours, rather than one, when I finished up that report and sent it off, along with the bio-mechanical samples to F.E.A.R. (Federal Experiments and Research). That was a research outpost set up by the government to check incoming contaminated or hazardous packages like the one I sent.

There were literally hundreds of thousands of those posts, like the spokes on a wheel. The package I sent would be trapped and locked up at the first F.E.A.R station. There they would examine it for any potential threat to humanity in two stages, contained and uncontained. If the package was deemed confinable, then they would ship it to the second F.E.A.R. station in the chain of command.

I had no idea how many F.E.A.R. spokes and hubs that package would have to pass through to get back to Command Central, but it was hundreds if not thousands. I guess misery loves company because, at that moment, I didn’t care if someone screwed up back at Command Central and got zapped by one of those damn BB’s.

David was back within minutes after the report and samples had been shipped. Toni was by his side. I didn’t know if it was because they had been monitoring the security channels, or if they knew I was finished because one or both of them had read my mind? Either way it didn’t make much difference. There were no secrets on UF-2 between David and me. And obviously no secrets between Toni and the rest of us.

Toni held up the uniform she had brought. I choked as I stared at it and then at David. Was this his idea of a joke? “You’re outta your ever loving mind! You can’t be serious?”

“As serious as a heart attack.” David looked serious himself. “You might as well, and the sooner the better. It will make it easier on all of us who have the same problem.”

“But...”

“No buts, Bill. You aren’t going to be able to sneak up on this because it’s going to happen whether you like it or not.”

“Your uniform, Commander.” Toni held the uniform out toward me.

I was taking quick glances between the uniform, Toni, and David. I would rather have died than what they were suggesting. “Can’t we wait a few weeks or...”

“Some are changing faster than others. It has a lot to do with their DNA. You are one of those who aren’t going to be able to wait.” David stepped up closer as he put his hand on the uniform for emphasis.

At that moment in time I really did prefer dying to what David was telling me. “How soon can I expect to start looking... uh... that is... I... expect…?”

“Expect to look female? Bill, look in the hologram reflector. You already do.” David glanced down at my feet.

Looking down I didn’t see my feet. My pant legs were drooping so badly my feet were hidden under folds of material. “Shit!”

“If your uniform wasn’t so big you would have already noticed you have the beginning of very nice breasts. I’ll make a wager with you. I bet you had to sit on the potty this morning.”

I never made a wager with David and expected to win. Oh, I made many bets with him, but I knew I was going to lose when I was doing it. Up until now, it was all in fun. “It’s that obvious already?”

“Yes.”

With a heavy heart and a reluctant hand, I reached out and took the uniform from Toni. “No cure?”

David shook his head. “We haven’t found one yet. Don’t feel you are all alone in this, Bill. All the rest of us are in the same fix. You will see that some of the crew are as advanced as you and some don’t even look like they have been infected yet. It doesn’t make any difference. We will all end up swinging our hips when we walk.” David turned and walked out of the room.

I stared in shock as I watched him leave. Was he rolling his hips as a last joke, or was it affecting him in that way already?

As I watched David leave, Toni smiled as if she was reading my mind. “Some things are ordained.” She turned and walked out of the room.

I watched her silently walk across the floor as she left. She didn’t roll her hips. I had never thought about that aspect of her walk before now. If I was going to be female I didn’t have to roll my hips either. I would walk like Toni did. Fuck this female life! I hated it already.

After dropping my clothes and slipping into the uniform and boots, I walked over to the wall. “Reflection.” Instantly a hologram mirrored image of me appeared. Damn David’s soul, he was right. I was looking at the image of a woman. Oh, there was still a lot of Bill left in there, but not enough so as to leave any doubt as to if I was female.

Men’s and women’s officer uniforms were different in the extreme. The men’s uniform had long sleeves, a turtleneck collar with their rank bars imprinted in gold on the collar. Best of all, we wore pants.

The female officer’s uniform was a sleeveless, sweetheart neckline, the rank bars were imprinted in gold over the left breast, and the skirt was a tight skirt. Their boots had a two inch heel for general duty. They wore four inch heels for dress regulation codes. It also didn’t escape my attention that the women wore tan colored pantyhose that bonded to their skin. That was the standard uniform, unless we went into space on field work. Then men and women alike wore full body jumpsuits and boots.

UF-2 was not a field research post in the aggressive sense, so we never changed from standard issue uniforms. UF-2 was more of a watch post to make sure no alien life forms slipped by us into the thick of humanity.

I felt UF-2 had done it’s job as I looked at the hologram reflection. Whatever it was, we had trapped, it was a real strong dose and some of us paid a hellacious price. No soldier wanted to fight an enemy that wouldn’t show itself. I was wishing we had been a research post. I would have accepted a jumpsuit to what I was wearing.

“Rotate.” I watched in fascinated shock as the hologram slowly turned, showing all sides of me. My God! From the back view I was showing curves and the side view was showing a small bust line. I stared at the face as it rotated back in view. There was very little doubt that the eyes and mouth were feminine. Not fully developed yet, but I could see where I was headed.

“Shit and double shit!” I had seen more than I wanted as I spun on my heel and headed for the door. When I found who was doing this to us I was slowly going to carve off very small pieces of him with a laser scalpel. Maybe take months or a year or more before I let him die. Or... maybe I wouldn’t let him die? Maybe I might just give him a dose of his own medicine and see how he liked it!

Toni, David, and a couple dozen crewmen were waiting outside my door when I stepped out. He gave me an approving glance. “We held an emergency meeting in council. Bill Wickman was relieved of duty as Commander of UF-2 as of zero ten hundred hours.”

“Whaa…” I didn’t think anything else could shock me after what I had seen in the hologram, but I was wrong.

David held up his hand to stop me. “As I was saying, we took a vote. Seeing as how Bill Wickman was indisposed and unable to carry out his duties as Commander in Chief of station UF-2. By legal vote and duly registered in the station’s log, Brandy Winters has replaced Bill Wickman as Commander in Chief.”

Furiously I was searching through my mind as to who Brandy Winters was. No one I could think of came to mind. “I’m relieved of duty then?” I really didn’t blame them. I had let all of them down when this infection invaded our station.

David shook his head. “No, you are replacing Bill Wickman, Commander.”

“I can’t replace me. I am...” Slowly it dawned on me. David and the crew gave me a new name and retired Bill Wickman.

“Brandy? Don’t you think you might have given me the opportunity to pick my own name?”

“Did Bill get a chance to pick his name? No, we are starting a new beginning here and the crew wanted a voice in who was going to be their Commander in Chief. Brandy received the most votes and was selected as our new commander.” David smiled, knowing he had backed me into either accepting the name, or rejecting my command. The bottom line was, I was either Brandy or out of a job.

Leaning over toward David I whispered. “I don’t get mad, I get even, Sherry.”

David winked so only I could see it. “Touché, Brandy.”

He turned to face the crew as he snapped to attention. “Attention.”

The crew snapped to attention at David’s command. “Guards remain, the rest are dismissed.”

Everyone dispersed except David and four women who were carrying military issue pistols on their hips and rifles slung over their shoulders. David turned to look at me. “Your guard, Commander. Ready to tour the station, ma’am?”

“I’m guessing this is to give the crew a look at their new commander, Dav... Sherry?” I was going to have a real hard time adjusting to the new faces and the new names.

Pointing down the hallway, David... Sherry, nodded. “Shall we inspect engineering first, ma’am?”

“Damn your soul, David. You’re enjoying this entirely too much. You call me ma’am one more time and I’ll have you court martialed.” I glared at David, hoping he was intimidated, if only just a little. I should have known better.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you ma’am, but I’m not one of your soldiers. You can’t court martial me. Bill should have left you more explicit instructions as to who was or wasn’t under your command.” He grinned back at me like a Cheshire Cat.

“Maybe not legally, but I’d bend the rules to do it if you don’t stop calling me ma’am. I believe I would be entirely justified in having you shot, if for no other reason than you are enjoying yourself too much.” I headed off down the hallway as I was arguing with Da... Sherry.

Toni had stepped up to my right as she walked along with me. It didn’t escape my attention that she had dropped her right hand down on that cannon she carried on her hip. If I didn’t know better I would have sworn she was my protector. She certainly had all the looks and signals that indicated she was protecting me, and she looked serious. My male ego was silently screaming that this couldn’t be happening.

With two guards in front of us and two guards behind, there was no doubt it was an official inspection of the station after a changing of the command. I knew there were going to be a lot of eyebrows raised as we gave the station an inspection. Hell, I would have raised my eyebrows if the tables had been reversed. I was wearing a female officer’s uniform and looking more and more female by the hour now instead of taking days.

As the days rolled past, the obvious changes took place on most of the personnel on the station. Sherry was unbearably cheerful. Toni was also hanging closer to me than I liked. Before this started she seemed friendly but distant, but I really liked her. Now she seemed more than friendly and, at times, I almost thought she was going to put her arm around me. If there had been any files on Pash I would have looked one over to see what was going on. Alas, there were darn few files and they didn’t tell me anything. Obviously, they didn’t hang around humanity very much. So why was Toni hanging around with UF-2?

I was in pain in more ways than one. My mental anguish was probably the worst pain I suffered. I hated going to sleep because I hated getting up and looking at the replication in the hologram. My physical pain was an added distraction I would have bypassed if given the option. Every woman understands the pain of going from adolescence to adulthood. Emotions run off the scale, from the top of the charts to the bottom of the charts, as hormones surge through their bodies. If that wasn’t enough, their bodies are stretching and expanding to accommodate engorged breasts, widening of the hips, and padding of the buttocks as their waists shrink. Achieving soft, shapely curves is the thrill of every adolescent female.

I was a lot of things, but thrilled wasn’t in my vocabulary. Suicide was in my thoughts an awful lot. I wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines either. Every day, Sherry was locking up three to four personnel in sickbay and having them sedated to prevent them from killing themselves.

Thank God for Sherry’s, and possibly Toni’s ability to read minds, or we would have been jettisoning those bodies into deep space, or worse. One of them had decided to demolish the whole station. She would have made it too, if Toni hadn’t intervened.

Toni was in Engineering when Clark-Dana decided to set the self destruct and wipe all of us out of our misery. They said Toni walked in a few seconds before Dana came charging into the room with a phaser in her hand. Dana was screaming she was going to save us all. Toni backhanded her and Dana dropped like she had been axed. If being alive meant anything, then Dana was lucky Toni didn’t use those claws of hers.

Morning and night were not in the life cycle of UF-2 as we had no day cycles. Personnel slept when they felt the need and worked or did other things as needed. I was leaving my office after a sleep. It had been almost three weeks since we had first been infected. Medical was no closer to figuring out how to reverse the infection. The reports we were getting back from Command were no help. They weren’t able to break the coding down and reverse it either. One would think, with all their labs, all their resources, all their skill at manipulating DNA structure, they would have had the answer by now.

I was slowly adjusting to the fact UF-2 was a post of females. Of the two hundred and seven crew members who had escaped infection, one hundred and eight were male. I also had accepted the fact I was female. The thing that made it possible to accept looking at Brandy in the hologram everyday was, I considered it a training exercise like Boot Camp. Soon the training would be over and Bill Wickman would be back.

Sherry met me as I was leaving my office. “I checked quarantine a few minutes ago. The crew is getting cabin fever.”

“House cleaning find any new intruders the past ninety six hours?” I motioned for her to follow me as I headed toward medical.

“One in cargo hold nine.” She picked up the pace beside me.

“Tell quarantine to hold them for another forty eight hours. If we don’t have any new collections then they may leave quarantine at their own risk.” It was funny in a warped way. We were the ones infected and the crew members who hadn’t been altered were the ones in quarantine.

Sherry had come up with the idea of drawing any of those critters out by having decoys roam the station. I wanted to know if it had been put into play yet? “Has medical and engineering come up with the traps replicating human DNA?”

“Launched the first two a couple hours earlier. They are going through the crews quarters first. We received a supply ship from M-4 a few minutes ago. It’s in isolation now. You want to go with me to check it over before it’s opened?” Sherry pointed toward the lift leading to the docking bays.

“Sure. My trip to medical was to see how they were doing on reversing the code we were infected with. I imagine you know already.” I stopped at the lift and the doors slid open. We both stepped inside.

“Docking” I commanded before turning to study Sherry as the lift sped off toward the docking bay.

It was unbelievable how feminine she had become. Long shapely legs, beautiful hands with long fingers, and long sharp fingernails. Her reddish hair framed an angelic face. Her eyes changed color from hazel to gold, or bluish gold, depending on God only knew what. She had full sweetheart lips that begged to be kissed and doe shaped eyes with ultra long, thick, lush lashes. As if that wasn’t enough, she had high cheekbones and a voluptuous body that looked as if it had been designed by a sex crazed, genetic scientist.

I didn’t have a bit of lesbian tendencies in my soul, but it wouldn’t have taken more than a hint of an invite and I would have been lying in her bed. I imagine the whole damn station felt the same way. Sherry had been right that first day when she told me about the virus. As David changed into Sherry, she became undoubtedly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

The doors slid open as the lift stopped at docking. Sherry pointed toward a containment chamber over to our right. “We have it shielded on the possibility it’s carrying something besides our standard shipment.”

I nodded as we walked over to inspect the shipment. Usually we never quarantined shipments between known stations. We really didn’t believe there was anything out there that could catch, or keep up with, our supply ships. However, since something had managed to get on our station without us figuring out how. We were no longer taking any chances. All incoming would be quarantined until cleared.

“Visual” We had stopped outside the shielded area. I wanted to look over the cargo ship.

A hologram of the ship appeared in front of us as if the shield was no longer there. I didn’t see any abnormalities. “Rotate horizontally”

The hologram rotated in front of us, as if the ship was on a big turntable. I let it go twice. “Rotate, laterally”

Sherry and I were looking at a ship as if it had been skewered from nose to tail and rotated on a stick.

“Standard” The hologram placed the ship back on the deck in normal position.

“I didn’t see anything on the outside. Scanners pick up any abnormalities?” I backed up and turned toward the crew who were watching the monitors.

“Seal to the hatch was broken and then repaired, Commander.” One of the women pointed toward the enlarged hologram of the hatch that had appeared in front of me.

“Sherry, did you request a seal on this shipment?” I was studying the hologram to see if I could see the repaired seal on the hatch.

She walked up and put her finger on the hologram. “Yes, it was possible our shipment had been intercepted in space, loaded up with the bio-mechanical balls, and sent on. I requested a seal on this shipment before they sent it.”

“Look at this seal. It’s been broken and then repaired, I suspect by the same intelligence that sent the bio-mechanical balls. There is molecular separation and repair on this seal. If we hadn’t been looking for it we never would have noticed. It’s almost perfect.” She touched the hologram with the long nail on her right index finger and ran it down the seal.

I had focused on Sherry’s hand and finger where she was pointing. Instead of worrying about contamination of the station, I was thinking I needed a lobotomy or a brain wash. I was jealous of how beautiful she was. “No one is to go inside the quarantine area. Take that thing apart with the bots and don’t leave any pieces together where one of those damn bio-mech balls can hide.”

It was going to take a few days to disassemble that ship. I turned on my heel to go. “Sherry, keep me posted if you turn up anything.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

That stopped me as I turned to reprimand her. She was smiling, knowing what she had done. I caught myself before my mouth opened. Sherry was in a Catch 22 situation as far as me being able to give her orders. She was a civilian and not under my direct command. I could reprimand her or fire her, but not order her to do what I requested. Yet, by default she commanded everyone under me. As much as I liked her and owed her my life several times over, she could rub me all wrong at times.

“You may be enjoying what you are, but I sure as hell am not! Would you mind trying real hard not take so much pleasure in what you have become? And while you’re at it, try real hard to stay out of my reach since I would like nothing better than to slit your cheerful throat.” I spun on my heel. I did my best to not put a swing in my walk as I left Sherry behind. I found I only made things worse. Women swing when they walk or they look clunky and awkward as they lurch clumsily forward with each step.

After I stepped on the lift, I looked back at Sherry. She shook her head and mouthed, ‘This is how you do it’. Smoothly and gracefully, she glided over to where the technicians where watching the monitors. With each step her hips rolled like a ballerina in motion, her full skirt accenting her grace.

I hated her! She didn’t lurch, she glided with each step. ‘Up yours!’ I mouthed back as she looked over her shoulder at me.

The door on the lift closed and I was thankful. What Sherry didn’t know, or maybe she did, I was consciously studying the way all the women walked as I headed back to my office. It was obvious which ones had been men and which ones had always been women.

Those who had been men lurched as they walked like men, instead of letting their hips swing with each step. It was obvious when Sherry pointedly made me think about it. Men walk differently than women. Even though we were female in form, the mind still functioned like a male. Etiquette classes were going to start in twenty four hours!

Toni met me in the hall as I headed toward my office. “Commander, I request your permission to leave.”

I shook my head as I motioned for her to walk with me. “Toni, I can’t give that permission. We are under quarantine. No one is allowed to leave. We received a supply ship less than an hour ago and it's contaminated with those damned bio-balls. Until we can reverse the process those things carry then I’m sorry, but no one is allowed to leave.”

Toni reached out and placed her hand on my shoulder stopping me. She turned me to look at her. “Brandy, I know your laws and rules pertaining to this station and to your species. Your laws say when any space traveler sets foot on your post they accept the laws for that post.”

As I watched in fascination, her pupils closed to vertical slits to drive home the point that we weren’t the same.

“Rrrrrrr” She let out a soft purr before she continued. “I’m not human and my species has no pact with your species. Neither I, nor any of my kind, are regulated under your laws. Our laws are simple, but explicit. Some that might interest you are; We do not take a life unless it is necessary. We do not take any property any life deems as theirs. We do not take another’s mate. We do not enforce our will upon another.”

“That all?” I held up my hand as she started to speak. “It was a joke. Toni, we make laws for the common good of all. I can not allow you to leave. There is no debate here. If you are carrying the virus or one of those bio-balls and carried it to another post, or even a settled world, we would have to quarantine more people than I want to contemplate.”

“Brandy, what part of ‘I am leaving’ did you not understand? I will be back in less than forty eight of your hours.” She dropped her hand off my shoulder as she turned and headed for the docking bay.

It didn’t escape my attention, she had addressed me as Brandy rather than Captain or Commander. I was caught up in emotions as I watched her step into the airlock leading to her ship. As Commander of the station, I wanted to stop her. As her friend I wanted to let her go. I com linked to Control. “Linda. The Pash is leaving. Don’t try to stop her.”

“Understand Captain. Under what orders?” My com link replied.

“Emergency relief. Contact Command Central and notify them that a Pash left our station, our quarantine has not been lifted.”

“I’ll notify Command Central.”

Except for the part about telling Command Central, I didn’t think there was one darn thing any of us could have done to stop Toni. If that cannon she carried on her hip was any indication, she probably carried more firepower on her ship than we had on the whole station. I certainly didn’t want to get in a fire fight with her and find out I was right.

I looked up as Sherry had stepped into my office and was patiently waiting in front of my desk. “What did you find?” I was working on the daily report I had to keep up with Command Central after declaring Death-Com Level.

“You will notice it in the information report from docking, but I wanted to tell you myself. We found the same bio-mechanical balls on the cargo ship as the ones that infected our station earlier.”

The first thing that sprang into my mind was impossible, but remembering the seal, I halfway expected as much. “How much or I guess I should ask, how many?”

“Several thousand count. They were scattered all over the cargo craft and even up in the electronics. I understand why we were infected without realizing it. They are inert, except for shooting that DNA cutter into anyone not already infected. It’s impossible to see or feel what they are doing with the naked eye. The action is too small and too quick to see.” Sherry walked over to the window where she could look at the stars. She was wearing a blue dress that hugged her body like paint. The tight mini skirt emphasized her tiny waist and abundant hips, the same way the deep, plunging top clung to her huge breasts.

“You have a plan for finding out how they are getting their bio-mechs on our ships? Also, do you have a plan for catching them once we figure out the first question?” I stood up and walked over to the window. I was looking at the infinite number of stars, while thinking about the infinite life forms they had spawned or could be spawning. It was sheer hypocrisy to believe humans were the only intelligent life. Mankind was bad at measuring other life forms by our standards. When we first started exploring we had met other space travelers, but they didn’t have the ability to push out in space past their own universe, so we didn’t classify them as intelligent. That kind of thinking made me realize how dumb our own species was.

“Commander, as hard as it is to believe. I think they are stopping our cargo ships and loading the bio-mechs on them.”

Sherry let that sink in before she turned to look at me. “Remember, nothing is impossible, only improbable. What we think in our minds is limited to what we believe is possible. Remember Einstein’s theory was, nothing could travel faster than light. We believed that until Remmy designed and tested a warp drive ship.”

“I remember my history. As usual, the science fiction writers had it all wrong. They designed space ships that looked streamlined and propelled them with fuel or matter and anti matter. We propel our ships like the writers envisioned, but they look like building blocks so each pod can be self sustaining in case of catastrophic disaster.” I wondered where Sherry was going with this conversation?

She closed her eyes as she nodded. “Our warp drive ships look like tin cans, or boxes, or a combination. Smooth sleek lines are not in any of our interstellar ship designs. The flat or bulky designs of the ships are necessary for warp travel. Those ships travel faster than anything known as the anti matter drive reacts with the matter drive.”

Sherry sighed. “There is a theory of something even faster than warp drive. Although only a theory, what if someone figured it out already?

“Do you have an idea how and why we are receiving those bio-mechs? Or, are you rambling to see if I am paying attention?” I knew Sherry never rambled. If she didn’t have something intelligent to say, she didn’t speak. I also knew she was priming me for something I wasn’t going to believe.

“We are under attack. I mean the human race is under attack.”

That one choked me. “How? When? Why didn’t I receive an alert from Command Central?”

“Because they don’t know it yet. You are the only one I have told this to. So far it’s only my gut feeling. I can’t prove it yet. Some ‘thing’ is trying to wipe out humanity.” Sherry looked back out into space as if she was searching for what this 'thing' could be.

“Okay, give me what you have.” I walked back over to my chair. Lately I couldn’t stand on my feet for more than a few minutes at a time or my arches started killing me. They were hurting now.

Sherry waited until I sat down. “Your feet hurt?”

I had kicked my flats off and was rubbing my feet. “Stick to the problem at hand. Tell me why you think humanity is under attack from an unknown?”

“I’m trying to tell you, if you will listen. Your feet hurt don’t they? It’s because your heels aren’t high enough….”

“You’re out of...”

“Don’t interrupt me.” She took a deep breath. “They are good, and I mean really good, at understanding DNA and how it works. Think about it, Brandy. With our hundreds of thousand of years we can do what with DNA? We can make babies any sex we want. We cut out damaged pairs from the DNA that causes hereditary defects such as blindness, Parkinson’s, and thousands of other defects. We grow spare body parts upon request. We can design almost anything a human wants, such as smaller or bigger breasts on a woman, or blue or brown eyes. Yet for all our knowledge of DNA, we can not change skeleton or bone structure after the person has matured.”

She turned to look at me. “Along with your body shape, your bone structure changed. You have the bone structure of a woman, not a man. It wasn’t done with a laser scalpel, but with DNA coding. Humans don’t have that kind of knowledge. Your feet hurt because you are not wearing a high enough heel to support your instep. Humans haven’t figured out how to do that with DNA.”

Way down inside my stomach I got a sick feeling. My body had been redesigned and reprogrammed by God only knew what. I had no idea where it would stop. “You’re working on the code aren’t you? I know our lab technicians are giving it their all.”

Sherry held out her hand and studied it before she answered me. “Have you noticed every infected person on this ship looks at the few males like they were prime meat? I bet you have been thinking about inviting one to bed yourself.”

That made me blush from my head to my feet. “No I haven’t... been thinking... I guess I have.”

“I know you have. It is your body chemistry. It comes as part of the package. I promise, if you have sex before you take your birth control shot, you will have a baby. You and every other infected female on this station are as fertile as a rabbit. It’s part of the battle plans our enemy has drawn up.”

“Oh God…!” The idea I could have a baby had never entered into my psyche. The idea I was a woman was tolerable as a short term concept. We were the most advanced intelligent race ever, at least that we knew about. I was positive medical could find a cure. Now, Sherry was telling me I could possibly not only have a baby, I was designed as a baby factory! Damn those who did this!

FROM THE EDITOR: As a certain "Leaper" used to say... "Oooboy!" Chapter 3 will be posted on Friday. Stay tuned and thank you for commenting, kudoing and reading this great story.

UF-2 by Barbie Lee Edited by Catherine Linda Michel

Sherry walked over to my couch, turned sideways and gracefully sat as she put her hand behind her legs to hold her skirt. “If we have babies they will only be girls, no matter what we do or try. We can not change their sex to boys. Those girls will carry the DNA we are carrying and they will have only girls and on and on.”

My mind was screaming in horror. My stomach was rolling as Sherry explained to me what the DNA changes had been. Obviously a whole lot more than I wanted to admit.

“Remember in your history where male tsetse flies were irradiated and made sterile? Then they were released by the millions into the wild. After they bred with the female, both adults died after the female laid sterile eggs. It didn’t take long before the tsetse fly was extinct, except in the lab.”

What was Sherry getting at? “You aren’t suggesting we are sterile? You said we could have babies?”

She held up her left hand and studied her long nails. “Only girl babies. It wouldn’t have done any good to sterilize the human males on the station. We don’t mate like tsetse flies. Even if the males were sterile the females could go on breeding and having boy and girl babies. The human race wouldn’t be in any danger of being eradicated.”

“Think about it. If we can only have girl babies, and those babies grow up to have only girls, and on and on until all that is left are girls. The war is fought and won without us ever seeing our enemy or them firing a single shot. Even if it takes a few hundred years to wipe us out as we spread the code of only girls being born, it’s a beautiful plan.”

Sherry shook her head. “I don’t think they know how wide spread the human population has become or how many of us there are. It would take time eternal for humanity to be wiped out like that if they think we are a couple space stations more or less, and our home planet is not too distant, then the plan would have worked.”

“Obviously they had a human or humans to take DNA samples from and formulate to their design. Probably space travelers who had run into them on their home planet or in space. If you plan on breeding a species out of existence, then you need what that species considers attractive females as bait. Thus we have been designed as every male’s fantasy girl. We will end up with beautiful facial features, big breasts, incredibly tiny waists, and baby bearing hips.

My com link spoke to me. “Captain, the Pash is back. She docked without requesting permission. Should we send guards down to…”

“Let her do what she wants. She’s immune and we are already... Let her come aboard.” I tapped my com link off.

Turning my attention back to Sherry I blinked in disbelief as I digested what Sherry had told me. “You’re not serious?”

It was a reflex reaction as I stared. I couldn’t help myself as I took a good measure of Sherry. After a month she was already a good portion of what she had been describing. Unconsciously I felt my waist and caught myself before my hands made it up to my breasts. I already didn’t like what I had become. Sherry was telling me I was going to look like those female freaks on the rest and recreation stations that pirates and space travelers frequented. Those women were hideous freaks with breasts so big the women...

“NO! Not me.” I had been to medical the day before. I was thinking of having my breasts reduced from what they described as a thirty eight D, back to a thirty two A. I chickened out at the last minute. The idea of someone fondling my breasts even if I really wasn’t a woman made me want to cry. How did women put up with it? I hated being a woman. I certainly wasn’t going to carry the extra package Sherry was describing.

“Won’t work.” Sherry put her petite little hands under her own full breasts. “The design is fluid. I imagine it was some pirate they received their information from. I also imagine he had returned from some bordello where that kind of woman was fresh in his mind. If that kind of woman was the ultimate turn on for mankind, then they would design the bait to look like her.”

“What do you mean won’t work? If you are telling me my breasts will grow to... Anyway, I can make surgery as often as needed. I’ll be damned if I’m going to look like the poster babe for some Trader’s Post.” Sherry was wrong on this one. I could put the brakes on the changes surging through my body.

“Brandy, you are fooling yourself if you think you can stop what is happening. This isn’t a little DNA manipulation like humans have been doing for thousands of years. This is definite coding for a specific body form. Who ever did this knew how to realign the genomes, telomeres, and nucleotides of the DNA.”

Sherry rose from the couch and walked over to the door. “If the life forms doing this figure out how wide spread the human race is and sends out those bio-mech balls to any of the busy traffic hubs, it wouldn’t take more than a few years to contaminate our species. In a way, we were lucky they sent their DNA weapon to an outpost like us. We were contaminated and found the cause before it spread.”

As I watched Sherry leave, I glanced down at my hands. We were lucky? Something had changed me into a damn woman without my consent and we were lucky? Funny, I didn’t feel so lucky! “Security, place all the men in quarantine in the lounge. They are off limits to all the women on this station. Medical, all women are to receive birth control shots immediately.”

Would it be enough to keep anyone from becoming pregnant? Up until now only the natural women had been inoculated against pregnancy. Military and company rules were, no babies and no children on an outpost station. Now most of the whole damn station was almost nothing but women. From my own feelings, I knew those women either wanted men, or soon would. Sherry was right, it was an ingenious war. And I hated it.

My door slid open as I was trying to get my emotions under control. I glanced up to see who it was. I was looking at Toni. Suddenly I hated her. God, did I hate her. She was immune to what we humans were suffering. I hated her for her slim lithe body, because she didn’t have breasts to speak of, nor wide hips, nor... I hated her for all she didn’t have. “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT!”

She looked at me with pity. “I am not your problem, Brandy. I am only trying to help. If you...”

“DAMN YOU TONI! I don’t want your sympathy nor your pity. I certainly don’t need your damn help. We are screwed! Every damn one of us on this damn Out Post who were infected are royally screwed!”

My emotions boiled over as I walked up in front of Toni, screaming at her. “THAT DAMN DAVID DOESN’T MIND THAT HE’S A BITCH! I HATE THAT BASTARD! IT’S NOT FAIR! I DON’T WANT TO BE A... a... a...”

“Woman?” Toni said the word I couldn’t.

“DAMN YOU!” I was running on pure emotional hatred of what I had become as I brought up my right hand to slug Toni.

She easily caught my right wrist before I connected. I responded by bringing up my left hand to do the job. She easily caught my left wrist with her right hand. That made me even more furious as emotional tears of frustration streamed down my cheeks. “TURN ME LOOSE YOU FREAK!”

Toni easily pulled me to her chest. I was helpless as a kitten against her unbelievable animal strength. Screaming expletives and crying at the same time, I struggled in vain to be free. Never in my whole life had I ever been held captive against my will. My rage boiled into a fury of unGodly proportions as I struggled. A lifetime later, emotionally and physically spent, I stopped struggling as I cried.

Toni bent over to her right and swept my legs out from under me as she picked me up like a child. If I hadn’t been so emotional, I could have admired the animal strength she possessed.

She carried me over to the couch, gently laid me down and sat down by my waist. With her right hand she brushed my hair out of my eyes and wiped my tears. “Everything has a reason. There are some things ordained by an intelligence greater than you suspect.”

As she rose to her feet, I felt embarrassed by my emotional outburst and ashamed because I had directed my hate for what had happened at Toni and David. I was not a leader by any definition. I had let my emotions run wild. Leaders do not think with emotions, they think with logic.

“I’m sor... sorry. It’s not your fault. Please... forgive me. I always thought you were a beautiful woman. I can’t take back what I said and undo...”

Toni smiled as she winked at me. “Captain, I can feel your emotions. You don’t need to apologize. I understand the emotional flood humans experience. Pash feel emotions too though in a different way. Let’s keep this misunderstanding between the two of us. This station needs a Captain. There isn’t anyone any better qualified to do the job.”

“Tha... thanks.” I sniffled as I wiped my eyes. I was so ashamed for what I had done. Toni was treating it as if it was nothing. If I had displayed my little emotional temper tantrum in front of anyone else I would be locked up in medical right now.

“When you feel up to it, I found the source of your bio carriers. Sherry should ride along also. Meet me at my ship in two hours.” She walked out the door without waiting for an answer.

Source? “WAIT!” But the door had closed behind her already. Two hours? I was ready now. Surely we could reverse engineer the code if we had the original code. I didn’t know if I could wait two more hours. Her ship? I had no idea if any human had ever been inside a Pash starship? There was no mention of it in any of the scant information we had in archives.

After I pulled myself together, I touched my com link. “Locate Sherry and have her meet me at Toni’s ship in two hours. Tell her to pack for any contingency.”

“Affirmative, Captain.” It spoke back to me.

I made good use of the two hours. I changed into a jumpsuit and boots as I tossed Brandy’s dress and flats into the trash. When I returned, I was going to be Bill or die trying. After Toni pointed out who had done this to me I was going to accept nothing less.

After making sure my sidearm was operational and charged, I picked up a spacesuit from supply and added an emergency pack to my load. I was gasping and wheezing as I stepped off the lift where Toni’s ship was docked. Damn! I had never noticed everything being so heavy before. Next time... I caught myself. There wouldn’t be a next time like this. Bill wasn’t a wimp. Before this was over I would be Bill, not some weepy, teary eyed, weak little woman named Brandy.

Sherry had beat me to the bay. She was a beautiful woman, there was no doubt. Extreme in the plus measurements like the women who frequent the Traders Posts. Which, I had become acutely aware, I was one myself. I glanced down at my huge breasts. Soon to be rectified I was sure.

A door appeared and a landing ramp materialized beside Toni’s ship. “Molecular flow.” I was standing beside Sherry as I studied the ramp.

“Has to be. We might as well go have a talk with the enemy and see if we can come to an agreement for ceasing hostilities.” Sherry took a short glance in my direction before she picked up her bags and headed up the ramp.

I was following her up the ramp as I struggled with my bags. “Has Toni told you what this is about?”

“Brandy, Sherry, welcome aboard. This is a personal ship, not a passenger ship, so it’s going to be a little cramped. Drop your gear by the hatch and please sit in the chairs in the aisle.” Came from my right as I boarded Toni’s ship.

Gladly, I did as Toni suggested with my bags as they were heavy. Toni was reclining behind a console at what I thought was the rear of the ship. She pointed toward my left. “Brandy, if you will step to your left and stop, a seat will be waiting for you.”

Sherry had already stopped a few steps up the aisle to my left. I watched as a recliner materialized under her. She sat down and then laid back.

“Some ship.” She remarked.

“Yeah.” I stepped up behind her and looked before I sat down in a recliner that wasn’t there a millisecond ago.

“Relax while I move away from UF-2.”

I was waiting for the sound of energy being thrust so we could start moving, but I didn’t hear a thing. I wondered when we were going to start moving? “Take long to warm up this ship?”

“Not long.” Came from behind me.

“Please stand up.” Toni put her hand down on my shoulder.

“Change of plans?” I was wondering why we weren’t moving. I stood up as Sherry rose in front of me.

“No, we are at my home. Please, won’t you follow me. Leave your equipment on the ship, if you don’t mind. There is no threat to you here.” Toni was stepping off the craft as she was talking.

Did Toni call our cargo bay her home, or did I misunderstand? The aisle was narrow and Sherry couldn’t get by me until I moved. Our recliners had formed back into the ship, or wherever they materialized from. “We must have engine problems or something?” I looked back at Sherry before I turned to leave the ship.

“Something.” She had a laugh in her voice.

“My God! Are we inside a hologram?” Standing in the door I was looking out across an expanse of a lush green world.

Toni was standing at the bottom of the ramp. She waved her hand around her. “Brandy, please, welcome to my home.”

I didn’t understand? Toni called a hologram her home? I was positive we had never left the docking bay. I was also positive we never jumped to hyperspace. We had the most advanced starships in the intelligent world. It took a lot of computer power and maneuvering to get ready to jump into hyper drive, going from star to star. Much less the braking on the other end of the trip.

I turned to look back at Sherry. “Holograms look so real don’t they? Pretty good to generate one inside a docking bay.”

Sherry laughed as shook her head and pushed me with her hand to get me moving down the ramp. “Brandy, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe you are a couple billion light years from UF-2. If you don’t mind, I would like to see Toni’s home. We are the only humans to ever visit.”

“Billion?”

Sherry managed to push me to the bottom of the ramp and walked around me. “Plus, some dimensional side travel tossed in for good measure. We couldn’t phone home if we wanted to. We aren’t in our dimension any longer. Earth and all the worlds mankind has populated don’t exist any longer.”

“WHAT! YOU’RE KIDDING!” I was thinking about a hologram and some weird joke between Toni and Sherry.

“Brandy, don’t get me wrong. Humanity still exists, but not in this dimension. Toni’s species travel not only from star to star but through dimensions as well.” She motioned me to follow. “Let’s go see Toni’s home. It’s a rare invite. We are the only humans to be invited to a Pash home.”

“O… kay.” I followed Toni and Sherry into what I would call an Ivy covered entry.

Where are they? Who are they? What in space is going on here? All will become clear in the next exciting installment, entitled "Secrets? We don't need no esteenking secrets" or "Holy crap! _I_'m the alien?"

Please be so kind as to comment and kudo the story. Barbie and I greatly appreciate your interest the story and thank you for reading.

Toni was waiting as I walked in. “Thank you for coming. Refreshments? Food if you like? We will eat in the dining room in four hours. If...”

“Wait a minute. I thought we were going to engage the life forms that had done this to me… us… Sherry and me. I’m tired of looking like a damn female poster babe for some Trader Outpost. I plan on getting that damn DNA coding and returning to my old self. Me… Bill.” I wanted Toni to know why I had agreed to come along on this ride. It wasn’t for dinner on some damn planet, in some damn galaxy, a billion light years from my outpost.

Toni nodded. “Understood Brandy. I will take you to the life form who designed the DNA infection.”

She held up her hand when I started to ask when. “Please, time is meaningless, a few more hours won’t make any difference. After dinner, I promise, after dinner we will go see the life form you seek.”

She swept her hand toward a hall. “Please, you have a room down the hall. If you do not desire refreshments at the moment, then make yourself comfortable. If you need for anything, ask. My home is your home. I have been away and must take care of business. I will be back in less than an hour.”

Dumbfounded, I watched as she walked out of the house. I looked at Sherry who seemed to be studying me.

“Fuck this!” I didn’t want a room, refreshments, or to wait to get back to being Bill.

Walking over to the door I looked and looked a second time. Toni and her ship were gone. “Well hell!”

I tapped my com link and... nothing. I tapped it again. Bad com link? “Sherry is your com link working?”

“Yes and so is yours, but not here. Brandy, why don’t you relax. Toni has left. There is nothing you can do about it. I’m going to my room and check out the creature comforts. I would strongly suggest you do the same.” Sherry left me standing there in the doorway as she walked off down the hallway.

Emotionally, I exploded as I spun on my heel and watched Sherry step into one of the rooms off the hallway. I wanted to go see the little weasel that turned me into a woman and I wanted it NOW not an hour later. Fuming, I headed off down the hallway knowing there was nothing I could do until Toni decided it was time. I should have stayed on UF-2 until she decided it was time.

As I walked past a door, it slid open silently. Stopping, I hesitated. Was I invited in? Tentatively I entered the room. My nerves started settling down. There was soft music playing. I didn’t recognize the tune, but it was eerily beautiful. I had been too focused on getting my hands on the thing that had made me into a woman, to pay any attention when I walked into Toni’s home. Now I noticed the walls were light pink rock or a damn good imitation thereof. The floors were a light gray rock. The furniture was quaint. It looked like wood. Humans had figured out how to make imitation wood several millenniums ago. Real wood was expensive to grow. Probably less than one person in every hundred million had ever touched or seen real wood.

There was a long, sweeping, blue cloth couch that curved around a corner of the room and a matching chair by the door. A vanity, dresser, and a really soft looking bed, big enough to take up most of my room back on UF-2.

“Your bath is drawn, Mistress.”

I jumped out of my skin before I focused in on where the voice had come from. There was a droid standing in one of the doorways leading off the bedroom. It was an odd looking droid as it looked more like two poles side by side, with two horizontal poles for what passed for arms. It didn’t have feet or rollers as it hovered.

“I don’t need a bath.” I had a chem clean before I left UF-2. I was positive I didn’t need another one yet.

“Please Mistress, Master would be most happy if you would.” It waited in the door for me to accept.

“I told you, I don’t want a bath. Go sweep some dust or trim some plants or whatever it is you do.” I was getting exasperated with this dumb bot.

“My functions do not include trimming plants, Mistress. Am I addressing you incorrectly? Is there another formality you would like me to address you as?” It waited patiently.

“Yeah, call me Bill or Captain.” I was getting steamed over at that thing calling me 'Mistress.' I was only barely tolerating being Brandy until this was over.

“Protocol for humanoids indicates that it is not correct to address you as Bill, Mistress. Unless you wish to command Master’s home then Captain is also incorrect. I have information you are to be addressed as Mistress, or Mistress Brandy.”

“Mistress Brandy?” I choked on that one. “God no, I couldn’t stomach that one. Let’s go back to square one.”

“Square one? I am sorry Mistress I have not had a lot of input of humanoid expressions. Please explain.” It was still patiently waiting as only a droid could.

“Forget it. And forget that bath bit too.” I was getting tired of this dialog with a droid. Personally, conversations with bots were a waste of time.

“I apologize if I annoy you, Mistress. Your bath is waiting.”

Damn, I had forgotten how single purpose minded a bot could be. I was going to go have to take a look at that bath to get this thing to stop annoying me. “Sure, why not? Lead on, broomstick.”

It moved back into the room it had come from. As I walked into the room I saw a huge tub filled with water. I had died, I was sure. No one, but the rich, could afford to take a water bath. Us lesser people took a chem bath which was a combination of ultra sound, and aerosol spray. Water was recirculated on a post. No one wanted to drink someone else's bath water no matter how much it had been evaporated, condensed, and filtered.

I couldn’t resist as I stuck my finger into the tub. That was either the best hologram in captivity, or that was real water. It was tepid, begging for a body to climb in. That body had to be me. I dropped my gear and clothes in record time. Sticking my foot in I almost fainted it felt so good. The rest of me followed that foot. No need of letting the foot enjoy the whole bath.

It took me awhile to start playing like a duck as I slid under the water and held my breath. I was in heaven. No telling how long I played. Eventually it was time to leave my little trip to paradise. I should have taken my clothes in with me. When I climbed out they were nowhere to be seen.

“BROOMSTICK, WHAT DID YOU DO WITH MY CLOTHES?” I was dripping water all over the floor as a bot approached with a huge towel. I knew it was a towel because I had seen pictures of them. We had no use for them on UF-2. We didn’t take wet baths.

“Your clothes have been retired, Mistress. You will find appropriate body coverings laid out on your bed.” The droid held out the towel.

“Retired?” I got a sick feeling down in the pit of my stomach that told me that my jumpsuit and boots were not going to be the clothes I would be wearing to Toni’s dinner.

It didn’t answer as it left the room.

Padding barefoot into the bedroom my stomach did a flip flop as I looked at what was laid out on the bed. “Screw that!”

Staring at the outfit I decided I had two choices. I could wear the towel the rest of the evening, or I could wear what was on the bed. “I’m going to kill Toni when I get my hands on her.”

The bots were marvels of engineering. They may have looked like sticks, but they could obviously manipulate molecular flow in the same way Toni’s ship could create a door where one didn’t exist. I had one of them help me dress and get ready for dinner.

As I finished dressing and walked out of the room, the droid hovered behind me. “Mistress Sherry is in the garden to your right. Would you care to go there?”

“Why not?” I wanted to see if they had done to her what they had managed on me. Of course, Sherry would probably enjoy the five-inch stiletto pumps. I hated them.

Sherry was bent over, smelling a huge red velvet flower of some kind. “You look beautiful, Brandy.”

“How...” She was psychic, she didn’t have to be looking with her eyes to see.

Sherry was wearing a metallic blue dress. The bodice looked painted on, the full skirt shimmered and flowed a liquid blue. She was wearing matching heels with a stiletto heel. The dress had full gossamer, billowed sleeves. On her wrists I counted four of the most beautiful blue stone and silver bracelets I had ever seen in my life. Her long, dangle earrings were a perfect match. I had seen some of those women who frequent the Trader Posts and they were over endowed. If that’s what turned men on, Sherry could put all of them to shame.

“You’re a beautiful woman, Sherry. A little too much for my taste, but still the prettiest woman I have ever seen. I take it you have found what you were seeking?” I walked up beside her as I reveled in the scents of Toni’s garden. Every thing looked real.

Sherry turned to look me in the eyes. “Am I attractive to you? Do you want to make love to me?”

“Gasp!” Escaped from my mind and my lips. “Uh... yes, I mean no... I mean...”

I took a step back to put some space between us. “When I get back to me, I mean when Bill...”

“Confused aren’t you?” Sherry stepped up close and put her hands on my shoulders as she studied me. “Let me unconfuse you.”

If I had seen it coming... Hell, I don’t know what I would have done. Sherry pulled me in and planted a big, passionate kiss right on my mouth.

It was the biggest shock I had ever received in my whole life. It took me a few seconds to react as I pushed her back and wiped my mouth with the back of my right hand. “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”

Stepping back to put even more space between us so she couldn’t surprise me a second time, I glared hatred at her. “What the hell was that all about? Have you lost your mind?”

I went ballistic when she smiled and winked at me. She held out her hand and looked at her long sharp nails. They were blue to match her dress, and jewelry. “Not confused any more, are you? I’m not what you want to take to bed. That was the last of Bill, thinking I was what you were wanting to make love to. We just put that idea out in deep space. Brandy, no matter what, there is very little of Bill left.”

Her bracelets tinkled as she rolled her wrist, curled her fingers and rested the points of those long sharp nails against her palm. “You felt revulsion when I kissed you. Would Bill have felt like that? In spite of you denying it, you are a woman. A very beautiful one too, I might add. You would have noticed if you hadn’t been so focused on admiring my looks and hating your situation.”

“I’m not…”

“A woman?” She cut me off. “I think if you look in the hologram replicator you will see a beautiful woman, and that woman is you.”

Sherry put her petite hand under her breasts. “You think my breasts are big? You haven’t been noticing your own.”

She dropped her hands down and rested the heel of her hands on top of those abundant hips of hers, while cupping her impossibly small waist. “Admit it, this body was a turn on for Bill. When you finally notice your own you are going to be even more shocked.”

Unconsciously I dropped my hands down to my waist. It took all the conscious effort I could muster to not look at what my hands had found.

Sherry smiled as she nodded in acknowledgement. “Too busy thinking about getting Bill back. You never noticed did you?”

“Bill...”

“Is never coming back.” She completed the sentence I didn’t want to hear.

“Fuck you! I will get back. I am not going to be a damn woman the rest of my life.” I wanted to jump on Sherry and strangle her for what she was saying.

“First off, you can’t. We are both women. Second, yes you are, whether you admit it or not. You can deny it every day for the rest of your life, but hat is going to be one long, miserable life if you do.”

“Toni is back. Let’s go meet her company.” Sherry walked back into the house, leaving me standing there.

Damn! I hated that woman! She was probably right. When she kissed me I felt violated. Bill would have jumped all over Sherry after a kiss like that. I wanted nothing more than to put space between us. I looked down at my huge breasts. Double damn! Those bimbos at the Traders Posts were also-rans compared to Sherry and myself. My long gown was of a semi sheer, layered, chiffon, gossamer, type material. Softer than anything I had ever felt, it was a bustier design, with beads or stones in intricate patterns. There were no stays or ribs. It hugged every curve like paint. At my hips it flared out into a full, billowed skirt and the hem swept the floor, followed by a full, ten foot train.

It took me awhile to calm down as I ran through my mind what Sherry had so pointedly taught me about myself. Sighing in resignation, I took a deep breath before following Sherry back into Toni’s rock house.

Straight into the middle of a couple dozen Pash. “Oh...”

Sherry was standing between a couple of them, holding a glass, and carrying on a conversation.

Toni held out her hand toward me. “Brandy, please let me introduce you. Everyone already knows you, but I feel you should be introduced.”

Hesitantly, reluctantly, I walked, with my skirts quietly rustling, over to where Toni was and put my left hand in her right.

There were two Pash standing in front of us. “Brandy, I want you to meet, Misalachula, and Breveanolesa.”

The one to my left held out her hand. “Please, call me Missy. It is hard to roll my name in your language.”

I took her hand. “Missy, good to meet you.”

The one on my right held out her hand. “Call me Brev. Tonlosania was right. You are a beautiful woman.”

I blushed as I took her hand. “That’s very kind of you to say.”

As Toni introduced me to the others I couldn’t but help notice that Sherry was watching me like a hawk. I was wondering if it was because of what she had done to me earlier in the garden or what?

After the introductions, Toni put her arm around me. I was feeling too much closeness and affection from Toni after that event with Sherry. I tried to put some space between us. Toni wasn’t having any part of it. Her strength was something I would never be able to best.

One of Toni’s stick bots floated into the room and stopped in front of me. “Mistress, the table is ready.”

Toni swept her right hand out indicating a hall leading into another room. “Please, shall we?”

“As you wish.” What I wished was that Toni would stop holding me so close.

Toni and I led the others into a large dining room with a long, dark, wood table. I was thinking how beautiful that room and furnishings were, even if they were artificial.

Toni walked me up to an ornate chair at the end of the table and pulled it back from the table. “Please be seated, Brandy.”

I struggled with the dress and the train before I found my seat. “Thank you.”

The other Pash and Sherry had lined up on both sides of the table and waited. Toni walked to the other end and took her seat before the guests seated themselves.

Toni held up a tall skinny, long stemmed glass filled with a red liquid. “A toast.”

Everyone held up a similar glass as I did the same. I was feeling awfully strange and foolish as I held my glass up.

“It’s my birthday. I am of age to take a wife. I ask for a long and happy marriage.”

“Long and happy marriage” Rang from all those around the table.

“Lareu eh samp los vesapen.” Missy nodded toward me.

Toni looked sharply at her. “Please! Brandy does not speak Pash nor read mind thought. Speak her language when she is present.”

“My apologies, Mistress. I was in error. Please forgive me.” Missy was looking at me.

“My apologies for not understanding your language. It had never occurred to me I would be talking to more Pash. You are rare among my people.” I smiled, hoping to smooth over the error Toni thought Missy had made.

“Thank you, you are too kind.” Missy held up her glass to me.

The rest of the Pash held up their glasses to me and I felt embarrassed by it all. I took a sip of my... boy was that smooth stuff, whatever it was.

The dinner was delicious. Or I was thinking it was. That red stuff must have had a screwdriver in it, because somewhere about the second glass, my mind became unscrewed. If it had been alcoholic I would have sworn I was plastered to the gills.

Somewhere in all that conversation I heard it was Toni’s birthday again. I was wishing I had brought her a birthday present. My mind was definitely not engaged as I heard someone say that Toni had found his mate for life. “His?” Humm, fancy that... giggle. Boy was she going to be surprised. Could I have some more of that red stuff? God it sure tasted good. What was that stuff anyway? My hearing is going, along with my eyesight. Did someone say I was Toni’s fiancée? Nah, never work... I like Toni a lot. Bill even wanted to get her in his bed, but as anyone could tell, I’m not Bill. Giggle... Look, I have big boobs and... oops, no that’s gone. Yeppers, gone, gone, gone. Gimme some more of that red stuff. Boy is that stuff good. Did Toni say she wanted to be my mate? Hell, sure why not…? I love that girl. She’s such a fox. What say we get married? Is any of that red stuff left? Gimme a shot wud yuh?

I opened my eyes thinking I'd had a bad dream. It wasn’t all a dream, since I was looking at one of those stick bots. I started to rise up and my world swirled. “Ooooooohhhhhhhh.”

I held my head as my eyes tried to refocus. “I’m in serious pain.”

“Would Mistress require a medication for pain?” The stick had moved up beside my bed.

“No, it’s not physical pain, it’s a 'can’t get the world to stop moving' pain. What in the hell was that stuff I was drinking?” My world was slowing down enough for me to focus on the stick droid.

“Mistress drank a lot of things. Could you be more specific, or would you like me to name them all?” It patiently waited.

“Never mind. I probably wouldn’t understand anyway.” I tossed the cover back. I was dressed in a pink, sheer, filmy nightgown. It hid nothing as my breasts pushed pointedly at the material. Great! I had no idea who undressed me or who dressed me in this nothing number.

I rolled my legs off the side of the bed and stopped as my world wobbled. “I have to get the market on that damn red stuff. I can sell it at the Traders Posts and make a fortune. It will sneak up on you and grab you before you know what hit you.”

“Mistress is ready for her bath?” The stick had moved away from the bed as I sat up.

“Bath? Uh... sure, why not?” Standing up, I unsteadily headed for the bathtub in the other room.

Standing beside the tub I couldn’t find the closures on the nightgown. “Bot, I need some help getting out of this rig.”

The bot floated up in front of me, held out one of its stick arms and the gown fell to the floor.

“I was going to do that.” I had a strong suspicion it was molecular flow or whatever. The bot was the key to the zipper, or buttons, or binding.

I could get used to those baths real easily. They were a touch of heaven. I took my time, until I happened to remember we had a date with a DNA virus programmer.

When I toweled off and walked back into the bedroom, I almost screamed. “No way! Where’s my old clothes?”

Bot was waiting beside the bed. “Those you wore the day you arrived have been recycled.”

“RECYCLED! RECYCLED MY ASS! GET ME A JUMPSUIT OR I’LL WRING YOUR SCRAWNY LITTLE NECK!” There was no way I was going to wear what was on the bed.

Minutes later I was furious as I stepped out into the hall. Yes, I was wearing a gown, and heels, and... If they thought I was ready to kill when we left UF-2 they were wrong. NOW, I was ready to kill as soon as I got my petite little hands on a phaser. I was hot as I searched the house for Toni, Sherry, or anyone. It was a huge house and it took me a long time of searching. I didn’t find anyone to take my anger out on.

Looking outside didn’t help. There weren’t any neighbors, or streets, or transportation tubes. There was a hundred foot clearing around the house and then a forest of some kind. Not any trees or vegetation I recognized, but then what would I know? I had never seen a real forest of any kind.

Finally I ended up in the garden by the pool and fountain. I found a place on the rock bench and fumed. Over time, my fury settled as I watched the water trickle from the fountain into the pool, and the aquatic life flash to the top before they disappeared in the depths again.

I heard the click of heels on the rock floor behind me before I turned to look at Sherry. “They took my clothes.”

A smile spread across her beautiful face. “Funny, but you seem to be wearing some.”

Standing up I swept my hand down in front of the silken, light green, breaded gown. It was strapless and I was wearing a matching scarf around the neck, draped over my left breast and down my back. “You aren’t funny. I was referring to my jumpsuit. This isn’t a jumpsuit, in case you forgot what one looks like.”

I lifted up my hem, and stuck out my right foot. The shoe matched the dress. It had a four inch heel and I felt like I was walking on my toes. “Running is not an option.”

I tried to push my heel off with no success. “Have you noticed we... I and my outfit seem to be attached to one another. I can’t get dressed or undressed without one of those damn stick bots helping me. I strongly suspect molecular bonding.”

Walking over to where she was standing in front of me Sherry started to raise her hand to my face. I slapped it away.

“None of that funny business. You aren’t going to kiss me again.” I backed up a step.

A smile spread across her face. “No, I think you have the idea now. You like women, but we aren’t what you want to take to bed. That’s natural feelings as a woman.”

“Fuck you. I’m not a woman.”

She sighed. “Okay, some things you still have to learn.”

“Toni has returned and we need to go see those life forms who sent us our virus.” She turned and headed toward the other room.

“Now wait one damn second. If you think I’m going like this then you are outta your ever loving, screwed up, psychotic mind.” Unconsciously I dropped my hands down on my hips.

She waved with her right hand as she stepped into the other room. “Suit yourself. You want to stay here then that’s up to you.”

Staying behind was not part of my options. I tried to run to catch up, but four inch heels are not track shoes. Anything other than a walk, with fluid motions of the hips, was not possible. I don’t think my breasts would have let me run even if I were wearing track shoes. Women who looked like Sherry or me were not runners by the laws of physics.

As I entered the room I caught sight of Sherry going out the front door. “Would you wait up?”

She stopped and turned. “I thought you weren’t coming. Change your mind?”

“You bet your life I’m going. I want to wring some answers out of some low life forms that did this to me.” I stopped beside her as I looked at the ship parked in front of us.

“Geeze... that’s a ship!” It was twenty times bigger than Toni’s ship. It also had flowing lines that made it look like it was moving a million light years a second when it was just sitting there.

“Let’s go meet a virus designer.” Sherry stepped out ahead of me.

I followed her to where we were under the ship. No windows, no doors, nothing except smooth flowing lines from front to back to side. A light flashed and we were inside.

“Please take your seats.” Toni was standing beside us pointing toward a couple empty seats. We weren’t the only passengers on that ship. I recognized the other Pash that had been with us at the dinner party.

Sherry and I found our seats and, no sooner had I sat down, then the seat reclined. Glancing over at Sherry she winked at me. “We are there.”

Our seats rose back up into the upright position. I was having a hard time believing we had traveled anyplace. After thinking about that last ride with Toni, it could be possible.

All the Pash stood up as Sherry and I rose out of our seats. Toni motioned for me to walk up beside her. “Brandy, please?”

I did as she requested as Sherry stepped up behind me. Two Pash stepped in front of us and the others dropped into formation behind us. There was a flash and we were inside a huge room. There were several spacecraft around. Some of them I recognized as those that space pirates or explorers jump space in. Others I didn’t recognize. They were oddly designed craft. None of them looked like starships. These craft would be for traveling between planets in a solar system.

A door opened on the far wall and a delegation was headed toward us. I thought I had seen most life forms, but these were beyond being odd creatures. They had four extensions for legs, which were padded on the ends. I was guessing the four extensions at the sides were arms, or what served as arms, and four eyes on stalks on top. Reminded me of a walking mushroom with about the same color and texture.

The delegation stopped approximately ten feet away. Two of them in the middle stepped forward.

“Please, walk forward with me.” Toni put her hand around my waist as she urged me to step forward.

It didn’t make any difference, I wanted a closer look at these creatures. If they were the virus inventors then I wanted my... Well, no, I really didn’t think I should be touching them. No telling what I might pick up.

We stepped up and stopped. They took a couple steps toward us. We took another couple steps toward them and so forth until we were only a foot apart. I almost gagged. Up close they looked more like a frothy mass of boils, or pus pockets.

Toni nodded her head. “Speak in this language. My mate is not wearing a neural thought transmitter. She will not understand unless you speak in this language.”

One eye on each mushroom turned to look at the companion before focusing on me again. The one in front of Toni touched something inside that mass of puke it called a body. I almost lost my cookies.

A small hole appeared in the middle of one on the left and I heard it talk. “We did not know. It was a mistake.”

“A mistake nevertheless. You did not consult us. You know we would not have agreed. Terminating life forms is not allowable. What will you do to stop the design?” Toni was as serious as I had ever seen her.

“The design is not reversible.” The one in front of me answered.

“I see. Payment must be made to those damaged.” Toni waited.

“What is the price?” The one in front of Toni responded.

“Neutralize the process. Give those infected, trade rights with the Trag and their allies.” Toni never wavered.

“Price is too high. We do not agree.” They were focusing on me. I was wishing I had brought a phaser.

Toni put her arm over my shoulder. “Price is cheap. The alternative will not be so cheap.”

Why did I get the feeling I was the bargaining chip in this conversation?

“It was a mistake.” The first one reiterated.

“Mistakes have to be paid for. One can not make a mistake on life forms and say it shouldn’t happen. Pash do not make mistakes.” Toni ran her fingers through my hair as she was talking.

“We didn’t know.” The second one canted.

“I heard you the first time. Excuses are not accepted. Meet the first price or regret the second price.” Toni dropped her hand down on my butt. I almost jumped out of my skin.

“We have to council.” They were walking away from us without turning around.

Toni put her hand in the small of my back, urging me to rejoin the others. “Don’t step away from the group. If they could kill you the situation would change.”

“Kill me? Give me a phaser so I can defend myself.” I couldn’t believe Toni would take us to a meeting unarmed.

“You couldn’t defend yourself against the Trag if you had a star destroyer in your pocket.”

There was a flash and we were back on Toni’s ship. “Please take your seats and let’s go home. It will take them a few days to decide in council.

“That’s it? That’s the meeting? What about the coding to the DNA virus? Make them give us the codes.” I couldn’t believe our meeting with the life forms who had sent us a virus was over after a few words.

“Brandy, please take your seat. I’m sure you could ride standing up, but for safety's sake, please sit down.” Toni was motioning me to go find a seat.

“But...”

“Please?” Toni turned and walked to her chair where she pulled a console out in front of her.

“Shit, I should have brought a phaser and...” I found my seat and it reclined.

The seat rose back up almost immediately. “You can’t tell me we are back already?”

“We are at the center of Pash civilization. Please join the others and me in our Capital.” Toni offered her hand to help me up.

“Yeah, sure, why not?” I rose out of the seat. There was that now familiar flash of light again.

Toni had her arm around my waist as we were standing on an observation tower in virtual space. There was nothing around us except the platform we were standing on.

I wobbled. “Jeeze, I was thinking we would be on the ground with buildings all around us. You did say, the Pash capital, did you not?”

“Below us is the capital. Built in space. We did not destroy any worlds in building our culture. God makes worlds, we build cities.” She pointed below us.

I looked. In space there is no up or down so toward the feet is down, toward the head is up. I was looking at an area of habitation structures below us. Not nearly large enough for what I would consider a central Capital for an intelligent species such as the Pash. “That’s it? That’s the whole Capital?”

“We don’t have any need for central control like humans do. We made our laws many millennium back. They were simple. They worked then. They work now.”

She pointed out to the stars all around us. “We scattered to the stars, each one making sure they followed the Pash rules.”

I had no idea how we were breathing in space? Either I was in some hologram and this was an illusion, or they were able to compress a magnetic field around us and hold in oxygen without using walls or glass.

There was yet another flash and we were inside a great, round room. All her friends from the dinner were sitting in a panel before us. Toni bowed her head in acknowledgement.

I was envious of her transporter as much as I was of her ship. Those things were great for moving from point A to point B. I noticed Sherry was off to our left by a huge arched entry. I was wondering if she had received a tour like I was getting?

The Pash named Missy stood up. “You are of age Tonlosania. Have you considered your choice?”

“I have. At first I thought there had been a mistake.” Toni glanced in my direction.

Way down inside my soul I got a queasy feeling. Something was about to happen and I felt a part of whatever it was.

“You were guided to this one who is named Brandy Winters?”

“It has been ordained.”

“Tonlosania, there may be no mistake. A mate is taken for life.” Missy was studying me.

“As it is written.” Toni was also staring at me.

“Whaa….” That sick feeling was growing by leaps and bounds.

“Then it has been ordained.” Missy’s cat eyes were boring into my soul.

Toni turned her attention to me as she took both my hands in hers. “I have given my soul to you. I only ask that in time you learn to love me. If that is too hard to accept, then I ask you to accept me.”

“Lo…lo…ve... Toni, I don’t love you. I can’t love you. Bill loved you but not as Brandy. I can’t possibly until I change back to Bill.” I was trying my best to explain Bill loved her, not me, not Brandy.

“Maybe in time? If you can’t find it in your heart, then I will return you to your people.” She waited for an answer.

“When I am Bill then...”

“The virus is not reversible. You will never return to Bill. Please…”

“NO, YOU’RE WRONG! YOU HAVE TO BE WRONG!” I pulled my hand free and was crying as I fled from the room past Sherry.

I was stopped at the end of a hall that seemed to go nowhere. “She’s wrong, she’s wrong, she’s wrong.”

I collapsed on the floor as I curled up in a ball and cried.

“She’s not wrong. You are. You’re wrong... about almost everything.” Sherry sat down on the floor beside me. She pulled my head over into her lap and put her hand on my shoulder.

“She’s wrong. She has to be wrong!” I sobbed as I wiped my eyes.

“Where do we start? I guess one place is as good as any. She is not a she.” Sherry leaned back against the wall.

“Whaaat? You’re outta your ever loving mind! What do you mean she’s not she? We are talking about Toni, aren’t we?” The tears had stopped like a spigot turned off.

Sherry was looking at me with a smirk on her face. “Toni is a male as are all the other natural born Pash. Pash have never had a female baby. They have male babies just as you and I were programmed to have female babies.”

“But... but…?”

“If they are all males how do they have babies?” Sherry was smiling from ear to ear.

I was wiping my cheeks as I sat up in awe of what Sherry was telling me. I was studying Sherry’s eyes, trying to make sense of what she was telling me. “They clone?”

“Not hardly. They pick mates outside their race. That was what threw Toni off for awhile. They really do feel a draw toward a certain mate. Toni was drawn to you. Believe me, he was as confused as any Pash could ever get.”

“Do you remember the first time you met Toni? He showed up on UF-2, walked straight up to your office, took one look and left the station. Because Pash are slender built cat creatures you thought he was a she. You wanted to get closer to Toni and he was trying to avoid you while figuring out what went wrong. Neither one of you realizing everything has a purpose, or as Toni put it, ‘ordained’. When the virus was turned loose on the ship, Toni was caught between the proverbial rock and the hard place. He knew you were the mate he had been sent to spend the rest of his life with. Yet, he was guided as a Pash to help find a solution. One of those 'damned if we do and damned if we don’t' situations we humans find ourselves in a lot of times.”

I wiped my eyes. “There isn’t a cure is there? I’m going to be Brandy for the rest of my life.”

Sherry laid her hand on top of my arm. “There is a reason for everything. You and I can only have girl babies. Pash can only have boy babies. You and Toni are destined to be the beginning of a new Pash civilization. You will be the proud parents of the first two girl Pash in their history. Your girls will grow up to be beautiful, intelligent, wise and legendary among the Pash. When they have babies they will be boys or girls. You and Toni will be remembered until the end of time as the Mother and Father of the new generation of Pash.”

“You can see all this?” Even though I had known David for years, I never knew he was a seer.

“I can’t see all the future, but where it changes history as much as what your involvement does, then it’s easy enough to see.”

She stood up. “Let’s get back to the others, shall we?”

FROM THE EDITOR: Chapter 5 will be up on Wednesday. Barbie and I want to thank everyone for the wonderful comments and kudos and we encourage you to continue reading and commenting. Thank you all very much.

Toni was still standing where I had left him in the middle of the room. The other Pash were still quietly waiting too.

Hesitantly I walked up to him, afraid he would spurn me for running off like I did. Afraid he wouldn’t forgive me for pointing all my hate at him for what had happened to me. “I’m sorry, so terribly sorry.”

Looking down at the floor so he wouldn’t see the tears that were leaking out of the corners of my eyes, I begged forgiveness. “I know you must hate me. I was wrong. I won’t blame you if you hate me.”

Toni put his hand under my chin and lifted so I had to look at him. “I was as bad. Please forgive me. I could not contemplate a cure, for I was in love with Brandy. If you had found a cure then I would have to spend my life without a mate. That was too painful for me to bear. Is it too late to ask for you to be my mate, or do you hate me too much?”

Crying, I threw my arms around him. I pulled him in and cried with my face buried against his chest. “I love you Toni. I have always loved you. I didn’t understand, but you have always held my heart in your hands.”

He stroked my hair as he rested his chin on my head. Then he stated out loud, “I take this female as my mate. I will provide for her and protect her with my life. From this time forward until the end of time, she is to be known as my mate.”

“So be it.” Echoed from the Pash gathered up in their group.

“Let’s go home, darling.” Toni swept me up in his arms like a baby.

I wrapped my arms around his neck and laid my head against his chest. I admired his strength as he carried me across the room like it was nothing.

There was a flash of light and we were outside Toni’s ship. He carried me in and sat me down in a chair that formed from the floor. “I will teach you all our ways. I will teach you how to fly our ships and how to understand and speak our language.”

He walked back and sat down, pulling a console out in front of him. “We’re home.”

The wall formed a door and ramp. He picked me up out of the chair and carried me down the ramp, standing me inside the door of his home. “This is your home and my home.”

“When is the wedding?” I was wondering if I could invite any friends?

“We had our wedding. The council gave their approval. Brandy, if you want out you may do so anytime you like. I will take you back to your station.” He stepped in front of me, turned and was watching my eyes.

“We are married?” I coughed out.

“Yes. Do you wish a human wedding?” He waited.

“I had kind of, well, I don’t guess...” I was kind of hoping for a little more ceremony or something. Sheesh, I had turned into a woman and yes, I really wanted a wedding with all the trimmings.

“I see. I’ll arrange it. Would a wedding on UF-2 be okay or would you prefer someplace else?” His eyes had closed to narrow slits.

“It’s not important. Forget it. I was being a jerk again. Please forgive me. We are married. If that’s good enough for you then it’s certainly good enough for me.” I giggled as I said it. What difference did it make? Who would know? Obviously I was going to spend the rest of my life with the Pash. If they considered us married, then that was fine by me.

“It is important.” He swept me up in his arms and carried me to the bedroom. Gently laying me down on the bed. He leaned over and kissed me.

I thought I would have a hard time warming up to kissing Toni, but he was still the same person I fell in love with back on UF-2. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him in as I planted a firm heavy kiss on his lips. Then I let my fingers do the walking down to his... ‘Oh my lordy!’

There was no way I was going to get out of that dress without one of those stick bots using their molecular magic on it, but I didn’t care. I was a woman in heat. My afterburners were hot and in hyper drive. I ravished Toni and was ravished by him again and again, each time thinking I had given it my all, but that was my mind thinking, not my body.

I can only figure Sherry had been right when she said we had been reprogrammed as female sex machines, designed for fun and pleasure. It was a good thing I married a man with the stamina and strength of a cat. I was a babe in heat and on the prowl.

“Morning Mistress.”

Licking my lips to get some moisture on them, I rolled my head over to look at the stick bot. “Morning, Stick. Where is Toni?”

“Master is gone for the morning, Mistress. I have your bath ready.”

“Thanks.” I rolled out of bed, stood up, and turned my back to the bot. “Undo me please.”

The dress fell to the floor. I pushed down my nylons and stepped out of my heels as I headed toward the other room and the bathtub. “Thanks. You are a gentleman.”

After the bath I stepped back into the bedroom and smiled as I shook my head. “Obviously the Pash like.. or Toni does.”

I headed out to the garden after I finished dressing. Toni’s place was so beautiful. I was beginning to suspect it was real and not artificial manufactured stone and wood and probably real plants.

Stick followed me out. “You wish to eat in the garden, Mistress?”

“No, what I need is a sense of belonging. What are my duties?”

“Your duties will be explained to you, Mistress. When would you like to begin lessons?”

“Lessons?” I had no idea what lessons I needed.

“You are to learn Pash, are you not, Mistress? The transport is parked in front. You are to learn how to control a Pash starship are you not, Mistress? You will learn the Pash dimension, Mistress. When you are four thousand of your Earth years old, you will have learned the most valuable lesson of all, Mistress.”

“Oh? I have to wait until I’m four thousand years old to learn the most valuable lesson do I, my little friend? And pray tell, what lesson is that?” I was amused that it was going to take me so long because, even at our best at replacing human parts, most of us didn’t make it past six hundred. I was positive I was going to be a disappointment to the little guy when I kicked the bucket before I learned my most valuable lesson.

“You will learn you can never learn everything, Mistress.”

Laughing, I reached over and tapped the stick on what should be his shoulder. “Hey, I am ahead of the game. I already know that lesson.”

Sherry walked in. She looked great in a flowing yellow gown belted at her tiny little waist. She was wearing matching five inch heels, long dangle earrings, and a long scarf, kerchief style off her shoulder. “I thought I would drop by. You are absolutely glowing. How was your wedding night?”

I sighed in bliss. “Impossible to put in words.”

Sherry nodded. “I know.”

That caught my attention. “You didn’t?”

She nodded. “But I did.”

“Anyone I know?” I was curious if Sherry was playing the field.

“Meliss. You met him at the party.” Sherry grinned.

Silently I moaned. “Don’t mention party. There was a whole lot about that party I don’t remember. I do remember to not drink the red stuff. That drink will sneak up on you and grab you when you ain’t looking.”

“Yeah, I kind of noticed you got the blind staggers along about the second glass. Rule of the road. DO NOT drink more than one glass.” Laugh lines formed around her eyes as she looked at me.

I put the back of my right hand up against my forehead. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

She got serious. “I dropped by to give you a couple more rules of the road.”

“Okay, do I need to sit down, or can I take this standing up?” I was wondering how serious it could be?

“You’re pregnant.”

I stumbled for the bench as I felt a rush of blood to my head. “I should have sat down. So soon?”

“Yes.” She walked over and sat down beside me.

Sherry put her hand on my shoulder. “He implanted two eggs in you. One of those eggs will absorb one of your eggs. That will be your first baby girl. The second egg will hibernate until the first baby is born. Then it will absorb one of your eggs and that will be your second baby girl.”

“Two…?” I felt faint.

“Pash carry only two eggs. They can have two babies, no more. They seed their mate at the first sexual mating. You and Toni will have two beautiful girls.” She was looking at my eyes.

I felt relief at the fact that there could only be two, but at the same time, I felt disappointment that I wouldn’t have more, I felt cheated. I had no idea what I felt. “Only two?”

“Toni would not have made you marry him. He would have let you go back if you had asked. He also wouldn’t have shared his seed with you if he didn’t love you with all his heart. The Pash only get one chance at propagation. It’s a total commitment for them. They mate for life. If their mate dies through an accident, they don’t remarry.”

Tears involuntarily trickled out of my eyes. “I love him with all my heart and soul, Sherry. I don’t know if it’s that crazy DNA mess I’ve been screwed with or if it’s something else, but I really do love him. He’s the kindest, most caring man I’ve ever met. He brings out feelings in me I never would have known with any other man. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s as if a part of me is him and he is a part of me.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I know. I married a Pash too, remember?”

“Is it them, or is it that screwed up DNA that makes us feel that way?” If anyone knew the answer, Sherry would.

“A little bit of both.” She took a deep breath.

“There’s more?” I knew Sherry and there had to be something else.

“You are the key player in the Pash and Trag negotiations. The Trag don’t mess with the Pash. The rules to the game are, no fighting between the Pash and Trag.”

“You plan on getting to the meat of this conversation before I have my baby?” Sometimes Sherry was exasperating in how slowly she could explain something.

“You are a Pash.”

Sherry held up her hand to stop me when I started to protest. “By marriage, you are a Pash. The Trag are caught in a quandary. You are Pash, but also human. That means they can’t send out their DNA virus to wipe out the human race because that would qualify as declaring war with the Pash because of one marriage.”

“But you married one too. You said you did.” Why was I the key player in this? Sherry was... “I’m sorry. I... You know you have been as human as... Shit... that isn’t what I meant. You are…”

Sherry nodded. “I know what I am. I’m test tube. Geneticly engineered and you’re natural born. Probably the reason that DNA virus didn’t work on me the same as it did you. I’m pregnant too, and I will have two girls, just like you.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, Sherry. You’re probably more human than any of the rest of us. God knows we have been carved from the original DNA as mankind tried to eliminate all the defects.” I put my hand on her shoulder. David or Sherry. She was and still is my best friend.

It was time to change the subject. “Stick offered me some breakfast. I don’t know what they call food around here, but I’m betting we can eat it. Would you eat a bite with me?”

“Sure. I thought you would never ask.” Sherry rose gracefully and walked with me to the dining room.

Stick had already set two places. It looked like steam was coming out from under the plate covers on the table. “I guess he overheard me. Unless he did this when you came in, that little guy is really quick.”

Sherry laughed as she sat down by my right. That left me a plate at the end of the table. “I feel like the Captain at a formal dinner. I sat here the other night also.”

Sherry shook her head as she picked up her fork. “You really are dense for a Captain. Don’t you talk to your droid? I’m betting he is calling you, Mistress. Brandy, you are Mistress of your domain. You are going to be sitting at that specific place until you die. Didn’t you notice Toni sitting at the head of the table the other night? He is Master, but he will defer to your desires. I have a suggestion for you. Rule with silk and satin shackles. Make him desire to do what you like, because he will be rewarded greatly for it. Treat him with love and affection and never, ever demand from him. I promise your love for one another will only grow stronger than it already is.”

Laughing at her, I took a sip of my drink after double checking to make sure it wasn’t red. “And pray tell, how did you become so astute in the ways of a woman’s wiles?”

Sherry giggled and pointed a finger to her head.

“Oh... I should have known.” She could read minds. All those years of reading female and male minds taught her more than any woman would ever know about pleasing men. I wonder if Meliss knew how much of a gem he had acquired when he married Sherry?

“He will know soon enough.” Sherry giggled.

Damn, she was reading my mind again…

We had finished our meal. and Sherry and I were strolling through the house exploring. I was finding it hard to believe the house could be built out of natural rock and be so beautiful and warm. It was absolutely gorgeous. The gray stone in the entry was divine. The pink, yellow stone in the bedroom was soft, warm, and pleasing to the senses. The brown stone in the room that Sherry explained was a den, was soft Earth tones.

Sherry had to explain a lot of the rooms to me because I had no idea. I guess being born and growing up in space meant I had missed a lot in my education about what a family home looked like. I was in love with Toni, his friends, his ships, his... our home. OUR HOME! I kept repeating it over and over in my mind as Sherry and I walked through the house.

Sherry led me back to what she called a study. “It’s a beautiful home, Brandy.”

Walking over to an overstuffed brown couch, I sat down, leaned back in the corner next to the arm, and pulled my legs up under me. “I wish Toni was here.”

“He’s busy in council.” Sherry found the other end of the couch and sat down.

“Doing what?”

“I guess it’s time for the rest of the express lessons, Captain. Take a deep breath and don’t interrupt me or this is going to take a really long time.” She folded her legs up under her as she reached down with her right hand and wrapped it around her right ankle.

I was thinking how beautiful Sherry was. She was an absolute living doll. Everything she did was so female. It was hard to remember her as anything but Sherry.

She studied my eyes for a second as I heard her sigh. “The Pash have Clans. Did you ever study Scottish history?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Remember, Pash are of the cat family. Their society is structured on Clans. The eldest clan would be... When you learn Pash you will understand. I will call them Number One Clan for now. The Number Two Clan would be the second in the hierarchy, or importance.”

She rolled her hand over, palm up, curled her fingers and looked at her nails before returning her attention back to me. “Toni came of age yesterday. How old do you think he is?”

That caught me off guard. “Uh, well, ah, I’m not sure. Twenty something I guess.”

“And how old are you?” Her eyes were gleaming.

“Are you going to tell me I robbed the cradle? I’m a hundred and sixty two.” I was wondering if Sherry was going to tell Toni he had married an old woman?

Laughing she shook her head. “Hon, I already had a good idea of your age. You don’t get command of an Out Post before you are a hundred. If you think Toni is twenty, then that’s a start. You might want to add a few zeros to his age. Their years aren’t exactly the same as our years, but he is over two thousand years old.”

I choked and coughed. “You’re joking!”

She made the motions of drawing an X over her heart. “Nope, God’s own truth. He turned of age yesterday. That meant two things for him. He was allowed to marry without his parents permission, and he ascends to command of his clan. His dad, your father in law, has stepped down as leader of the clan.”

“Honey, you married into the Number One Clan. Toni is head or leader of all Pash as of yesterday.”

FROM THE EDITOR: Barbie and I want to thank everyone for all your wonderful comments and kudos. Don't forget that UF-2 Book 2 will follow after Book 1 concludes, without any breaks. Book 2 is already fully completed and in editing as I type this.

UF-2 Book 1 Chapter 6 By Barbie Lee, Edited by Catherine Linda Michel

“Toni…” I know my mouth fell open because my brain stopped working.

Sherry giggled. “That’s right, Toni.”

She got serious. “He really would have let you go back to the station if you wanted. It had to be of your own free will to marry him. If you decided to leave, he would have never married and that would have been the end of his lineage.”

“But you said there are always two. What about his brother? Is he married?” I didn’t understand.

“That’s what has put you smack dab into the middle of the equation with the Trag. Toni’s brother was killed by the Trag. Like humans, the Pash are explorers. Toni’s brother happen to be the first to run into the Trag. I understand the Trag are more vegetable than animal. They like to dissect things. Their favorite things they like to dissect are animal forms. Then they do what they have become good at, designing DNA cutters to eliminate that animal life form.”

I slapped my hand over my mouth in horror. “Oh my God!”

Sherry sighed as she shook her head. Her earrings tinkling with the slightest movement. “Pash don’t kill unless provoked. They certainly don’t take lightly to one of their own being dissected. Remember, the Trag are vegetable life, not animal. A death or two means nothing to them. Losing a few hundred would be a 'ho hum, who cares' event. A few thousand deaths might get some attention, but not much.”

“The Pash went after them with a vengeance the Trag had never felt before. The Trag understood death better than they had ever understood it in their whole history before the Pash stopped the slaughter. It was understood if the Trag tried any of their DNA virus tricks on the Pash then the Trag would be wiped from existence.”

“How did you learn all this?” I found it hard to believe anyone, even of Sherry’s intelligence, could pick up all this information in the few days we had been living with the Pash.

A smile crossed her face. “The Pash are telepathic, I am...”

“Telepathic. Duhh. I don’t guess you have to verbalize the knowledge to share it.” Would I never learn?

She laughed. “Don’t get too smug doll, your time is coming.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I searched her eyes for answers.

“That little girl you are carrying is changing you as we speak. After Pash mate, their wives change to look like Pash as their child develops. It’s sharing of life forces between mother and child. You won’t see any alien wives among the Pash because they morphed to look like Pash with motherhood.” She winked at me.

In shock I stuck my hand out to see if I was growing nails like Toni’s.

Sherry giggled when she saw the shock on my face. “Don’t worry dear, you’re different in more ways then to be the first to give birth to girls. Your physical looks won’t change. It’s part of the DNA virus. You are going to be the first mate of a Pash to not morph.”

“Then what? You said my time was coming. What did you mean by that?” I took a real close look at my hand to make sure I wasn’t changing.

Sherry pointed a long slender finger at my head. “Becoming telepathic is not a physical change.”

“You gotta be joking!” I wasn’t sure I wanted that kind of change any more than morphing to look like a Pash. Although I was warming up to the idea that looking like a Pash would be much better than the Trader Post Bimbo figure I was endowed with. Courtesy of the Trag,

“Toni’s home and I need to be going.” Sherry rose up off the couch.

“When will you be back?” I enjoyed Sherry’s conversation immensely. I was wishing she would stay.

“We go back to have a meeting with the Trag tomorrow. I’ll be there with you. Listen to Toni and act like the Queen you now are. Don’t do anything rash. You were Captain of a Space Post, remember to carry yourself with authority.”

She was walking out of the room as Toni walked in. “Hello, Toni. Bye Toni.”

He nodded his head in acknowledgment. “Bye Sherry.”

Toni motioned for me to stay put when I started to get up. “Please, you are so beautiful. I want to stand here and drown in my love for you.”

Tears involuntarily came to my eyes as I rose off the couch. Walking over to him, I wrapped my arms around his neck as I stared into those beautiful, intelligent cat eyes of his. “I love you so much it hurts. You are so beautiful... handsome. I have been doubly blessed. My heart aches to be close to you when you are out of sight. I am the luckiest person in any universe.”

Toni leaned over and kissed me. I was lost in him as my emotions flooded my soul. With love he swept me off my feet and carried me to the couch where he laid me down. My emotions were off the scale as he fondled my breasts and...

Did he ravish me, or did I ravish him? Talk about animal love! Bless those Trag and what they did to me, for I was an animal myself when it came to making love. I could never get enough.

It was much later, and I was lying beside Toni, his left arm under my head. I was tickling his lips with the ends of my long hair. He could stand it for only so long before it got to him and he would have to rub his mouth to get rid of the tickle. Then we would do it all over again.

“I need another one of those baths.” I was tickling his nose with my hair as his lips were getting immune to my teasing.

“Okay.” Toni shoved me off the couch, stood up, picked me up and carried me through the bedroom to the bathroom.

I could see it coming. “NO. I’m still dressed. NO TONI! DON’T YOU DARE!”

I was still screaming as he tossed me in, heels, dress, and all.

I came up spitting water and coughing. “You beast!”

He leaned over the tub. “You said...”

I wrapped both hands behind his head as I put my feet against the edge of the tub and pulled with all my strength. Toni came in on top of me and water went everywhere.

He came up spluttering. “That was uncalled for.”

Wrapping my arms around his neck I dragged him back under as I planted a kiss on his lips and we made love like a couple of fish as we balanced our need for air with our passion for love.

A lifetime later I had my back to the edge of the tub, and Toni was wrapped up in my arms. I was gently raking my nails across his chest. “I’m so in love.”

He rolled over in the water where he was facing me. He cupped my face in his hands. “Thank you for loving me.”

That brought the tears. I couldn’t speak as I looked into his eyes and cried. I could not imagine life without him. I now knew what they meant by soul mate. He was mine and more importantly, I was his.

I could have spent my life like that, but Toni soon escaped, asking me if I would mind getting dressed.

When I stepped out of the tub, I couldn’t believe how heavy that dress could get when it was wet. Stick was there to get me out of my wet clothes. I was thinking I had to introduce these people to velcro, and zippers, and other closures. The idea I was in my clothes until Stick did his molecular whatever was ridiculous. I was positive I couldn’t cut the material. It may look like fine material, but it was armor plate tough.

An iridescent blue gown covered in embedded blue stones was laid out on the bed as I entered the bedroom. I sighed as I studied the gown. “A little over the top for a day at home isn’t it?”

With Stick’s help, I finished dressing when Toni walked back into the bedroom. He was undoubtedly the most handsome devil I had ever laid eyes on. I was so in love it hurt. I also knew formal dress when I was looking at it. Toni was dressed formally. A bolero style jacket over a white ruffled shirt, black skin tight pants with a dark blue stripe down the outside of each leg. He was wearing a weapon on his right hip and a sword on his left.

“My soldier, would you care to take a girl to dinner?” I would have rather taken him to bed.

He walked up in front of me, took my left hand, raised it as he bent over and kissed it. “You are so beautiful. There is a banquet this evening in your honor. Be yourself, nothing more, and absolutely nothing less.”

That took me back. “Toni, I don’t know your customs. What if I make a fool of myself? I would be so ashamed if I embarrassed you.”

He put his arms around me and pulled me into his chest. “You could never do anything to embarrass me.”

“You say that now. Wait until later when you want to hide in shame.” His shirt was tickling my nose.

It was a different ship waiting outside the house than the one Toni usually flew. It was still a slick little ship. I figured it was for going over to the neighbors, not for star jumping. I also wasn’t going to walk up the ramp in those four inch heels Toni liked to see me wearing. At the bottom of the ramp he gathered me up. I wrapped my arms around his neck and laid my head down on his shoulder. He gathered me, my gown, and my train, and carried me in his arms into the little runabout.

It took me a little bit to get situated in my seat. My gown was a bustier top and barely, by the barest minimums, covered things that needed covering. My tiny waist was cinched in so tightly I could hardly breathe. The skirt flared out to about six feet around me and was held out in shape by some gossamer material almost as light as air, but resilient.

I was wearing a multi strand necklace of blue stones. My earrings were spirals of blue stones and, like Sherry’s earrings, they tinkled with the slightest movement. Stick had done something to my long brown hair. It sparkled and glistened like strands of shimmering light, every strand perfectly in place as it cascaded down to my hips. My eyes were so over done that those girls at the Traders Posts would have looked like also-rans. I guess my blue eyes went along with my blue nails, which were two inches long and sharp enough to be called weapons.

Toni had settled into his seat beside me when I finally decided I was going to have to drown in that dress as it billowed out around me. He patiently waited until I gave up. I started laughing.

“What’s funny?” He looked puzzled.

“You should have hung me up. This dress was definitely not designed for sitting.” I giggled.

“I’ll keep that in mind next time.” He pulled the console into his lap and placed his right hand on the screen, as he ran his fingers on his left hand over the left hand screen.

“We are there.” He pushed the console back, stood up, and held out his right hand.

I took his right hand in my left and stood up. I didn’t have to straighten up my skirt or my hair as they magically went back in place. Between the iridescent blue material that looked like flowing liquid, and those blue stones that radiated light like small stars, I was glowing in more ways than one as I turned and took Toni’s arm. “I love you with all my heart.”

Toni beamed as he smiled. “You are a credit to your kind and mine. I could have never loved another.”

He escorted me to the door. Either the ship was sitting down in a recess, or there was a platform raised up even with the door. I wasn’t going to have to depend on Toni to carry me down the ramp. I have no idea if I would have had the courage to step off the ship if I had been looking up instead of down at my feet when Toni and I stepped off the ship.

When I looked up my heart jumped up in my throat. There were thousands of Pash lined up on each side of a walk. About six hundred feet to the other end of the walk were two Pash sitting on blue stone chairs. It had to be a man and woman. The man was attired similarly to Toni, and the woman was wearing a blue gown.

Toni caught my right hand in his left. “Please, walk with me.”

I stepped forward with Toni, my knees knocking so badly I thought I was going to fall down. It was deathly quiet and the rustling of my skirt and the tinkling of my earrings were magnified a thousand-fold as I walked with Toni, who made absolutely no sound at all. With each step, my heels clicked on the stone tile. I swear the sound carried to the end of that huge room and back again. I could hear my twelve foot train 'shish' as it slid over the stone trailing behind me.

All the Pash lining the walk were focused on me. I could see them turn their heads as we passed them one by one, but not a sound did they make. It was eerie. as if all sound had been removed from the world except for the sounds I made. My throat was cotton dry by the time we had walked the longest six hundred feet I had ever walked in my whole life.

We stopped six feet in front of the man and woman. Turning loose of my hand, Toni kneeled on his right knee and bowed his head. “I present to you my mate.”

As the man studied me I felt like he could hear my heart knocking. “Did you take Tonlosania as your mate of your own free will?”

I glanced over at Toni who had yet to rise. I held my skirt as I curtsied and bowed my head. “I did, and I have.”

“Rise.” The man stepped up in front of Toni. He took a jewel encrusted sword and scabbard off his hip and held it out horizontally in front of Toni.

“By rite of passage, I pass on to you the leadership of the Escubanesa Clan.”

Toni stood up, removed the sword he was wearing and slipped the jeweled sword in its place. “I pledge my service to our people. If I am half the leader you were then I will have served our people well.”

The woman stepped up in front of me. “Rise.”

I raised my head and I was looking into the eyes of a female Pash, a beautiful woman by any standards. She was a contrast in study. I could see intelligence in her eyes beyond human understanding. She looked old in intelligence, but young in looks. These had to be Toni’s parents that Sherry was telling me about.

I saw a sparkle in her eyes as laugh lines formed in the corners, but she didn’t laugh. “You are everything I have heard and more. Already intelligent beyond your years. You bring the change promised to us through the millennia.”

She removed a blue jewel encrusted dagger from her left side and held it out to me. “By accepting, you pledge your unwavering support to your mate, your King, until the end of life.”

I reached out and put my hand on top the dagger but didn’t pick it up. “I pledge Toni my support and more. I pledge him my life and my undying love until the end of time.”

She nodded and I put the dagger on my left side. She lifted a blue jeweled crown off her head and placed it on my head. “By rite of passage, I pass on the title of Queen to the one named Brandy. She shall bring us a new millennium.”

Tears were trickling down my cheeks as I tried to act... God, I had no idea how to act. I held my hand out to Toni’s mother. “Does protocol allow me to give you a hug?”

She smiled as she held out her hand. “You are a Queen, protocol allows you to do whatever you want.”

I closed in and hugged her neck as I whispered in her ear. “We need to have some really long discussions. I beg for your advice to be a good leader.”

“You already are. You are a natural born leader. It has been ordained.” She squeezed me before stepping back.

“Please your highness, how should I address you?” I was scared I would make a gaffe' and embarrass Toni.

“I am Lass. My mate is Dre. We do not use formal titles except in rare instances. Tomorrow, when you meet the Trag, will be one of those instances where formal titles will be used.” She took my hand. “Please, everyone wants to meet you and touch you. They have already heard so much about you.”

“Toni?” I hesitated.

He gave me a quick kiss and a wink. “Mother is right. It is you they want to meet. They already know me. I’m old stuff to them. Most of them have never seen a human before. Go and enjoy yourself. I will be close by.”

“But...” I was in the middle of a dozen Pash. I had never seen so many beautiful people in my whole life. They were also the best mannered and most courteous people I had ever met. No one grabbed me, no one stepped on the hem of my dress, no one stepped on my train as I followed Lass and moved among them. It had to be the cat qualities in their bloodlines. I could only wish to be half as graceful as they.

It was hours later that I met Sherry and her mate, Meliss. I wrapped my hand around her neck and gave her a heartfelt hug. “I’m so glad you stayed and married a Pash. I pray you and I can work together, for I value your intelligence and your advice more than you will ever know.”

“You may get tired of me before we kick the bucket. That little girl you are carrying is going to make sure you live a really long time as she infuses her genes with yours.”

Sherry turned her attention to Lass as she held her skirt, bowed her head, and curtsied. “Your Highness. It is a pleasure to meet you.”

Lass was beaming as Sherry rose. “So formal are you. You are not to be underestimated. Your intelligence speaks volumes. I have been hearing rumors about you. It seems that the Pash have been doubly blessed that Melissandevoledo chose you as a mate.”

Sherry bowed her head before answering. “I am the one who has been honored and blessed. I pray I am a credit to the Pash as Melissandevoledo’s mate.”

Lass smiled as she placed her hand on Sherry’s stomach. “They tell me you are a seer? Why do you not see your own?”

For the first time in my life I saw doubt in Sherry’s eyes. “I have seen.”

“Tell me, Seer, what have you seen in your own future?” Lass stepped back and waited.

“You ask about our child. I will give Meliss two healthy boys.” For the first time Sherry wasn’t sure of herself.

“Are you certain, Seer? And what about Brandy? What did you see?” Lass gave a quick nod in my direction for emphasis.

“Again you ask about children. I see two healthy girls.” Sherry was back on solid ground.

Lass placed her hand on my stomach and nodded. “She will bear two girls as it has been ordained.”

Lass turned her attention back to Sherry. “I see confusion and delusion where you read your own future. You do not feel worthy of such an event. You keep calling yourself a test tube experiment. I know of this type of life reproduction. It is not the fault of the life that is created, as you had nothing to do with it. It would be the same as one of us saying we were to blame if we were born to the Pash, or Wern, or any other species.” Then she turned back to me.

“Do not be surprised when you give birth to your girls. They will grow up to be leaders of a new generation of Pash.”

I was looking at Sherry who had a look of shock and doubt all over her face. Turning to look at Lass I saw nothing but seriousness. Obviously, my mother in law was a seer herself. If she wasn’t, she was a darn good con artist because I believed everything she said.

The news about me being pregnant with girls, spread like wildfire, although I was no longer the sole object of attention in that hall. All the Pash wanted to touch Sherry also.

I lost Lass in the crowd and that was where Toni found me. “You look beautiful.”

I slid my arms around his waist as I laid my head up against his chest. “And you look handsome, my Lord. I’m in love with your people, they are all so courteous and kind, and handsome, and beautiful.”

I snuggled in close to his chest. “Your mother is such a sweetheart. I hope she teaches me how to be like her.”

Toni pushed me back and kissed my forehead. “My mother is fascinated with you, my Queen. As is my father and everyone else. I most of all.”

I looked into his beautiful, yellow cat eyes. “I need to pay my respects to your father.”

“He’s looking forward to talking to you some more. Personally, I think he wants to admire your figure some more.”

“Me? But all your women are so slim and fit. Even your mother is such a fox. I wish I had her figure. She looks like she could run ten miles and never break out in a sweat.” I ran my hand down his arm as I was talking. Toni was pure muscle. Every time he picked me up, he made it seem like child’s play.

Toni put his hand in the small of my back and steered me toward the other side of the hall. “There are benefits to being slim. There are also benefits to having your figure. Never forget that, what makes you one of us, also elevates you above the rest of us. Your blue eyes are a wonder to everyone. None of us have ever seen blue eyes before. Someone asked me if the only color you see is blue?”

That tickled me and I laughed. “I guess all of us jump to conclusions at times. Blue eyes, blue color? Sure... makes sense to me.”

Toni’s dad was staring at me as we walked up to him. I curtsied and bowed my head. “Your Highness, it is such a pleasure to meet you again.”

He reached out and put his hand under my chin, raising my head to look into my eyes. “I should have never doubted. When Tonlosania returned after the first time he saw you, he said there had been a mistake. I agreed with him and told him to forget you. His mother disagreed. She said the only mistake was to not go back. Tonlosania heeded his mother’s advice and returned to the place where he was ordained to meet his mate. Again he came back and said it could not be. Again I agreed and again his mother sent him back, admonishing him to wait, for it was ordained.”

I blushed in embarrassment because I knew what Toni was looking at when he first visited that station. The funny thing was, I fell in love with him thinking he was she. In an odd way, things worked out. I was head over heels in love. “I’m glad Toni listened to Lass, your Majesty and took your advice under consideration.”

Toni’s dad closed his eyes as he laughed. “She is a diplomat too. You are a credit to your race. We are proud to accept you as a Pash, and one of us.”

I curtsied again. “You are most kind, your Highness. I pray I do not disappoint you too many times. I beg your favor as I seek your council if I am ever asked to make a decision.”

Again that chuckle of his. “Make a decision? You are Queen of the Pash. Of course you will make decisions. However I am afraid you seek advice from the one least qualified to give advice. Lass is the seer in our family. Seek her council when you feel the need.”

I glanced over at Toni and he nodded his head. “Mother is the one for advice. In time she will come to you for advice. Our daughters may not change you into a Pash, but they will change you.”

I blinked as I stared at him. Unconsciously I put my hand on my tummy. I was in way over my head and scared to death.

Toni took my arm. “I think we have been called to dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.” My nerves had killed my appetite.

“Sit at the Royal Table anyway. It’s tradition.” He guided me into another room.

Toni’s dad was right behind us. Before we waked halfway across the room, his mother stepped up beside him.

Toni guided me up to a huge banquet table with two large chairs at the head. I was left of Toni, and Lass was left of me, in front of a smaller chair. Toni’s dad was to the right of Toni.

The rest of the Pash and Sherry filed in and found places in front of the tables. Toni leaned over in my direction. “Be seated and they can sit.”

“Lass said I could do anything I wanted and it would be okay. Is that right?” I hesitated.

“Yes, within reason.”

I backed up behind the chair and bowed toward Lass. “Your Highness, I never had the honor to serve a Queen before. Would you please grant me this wish and sit here?”

Toni looked amused, Lass’ eyes were dancing as she moved to the Royal Chair and sat down. Toni nodded in agreement as he moved out and let his father sit in his Royal Chair. I moved to the left of Lass and waited for an indication it would be okay to be seated. Lass looked at me and smiled. “Please be seated.”

I managed with that full skirt and the train to sit down, even if I was sitting on the edge of my chair to do it. When I did, a roar swelled up from the banquet room, as the Pash cheered.

Toni’s dad leaned over toward Toni. “You are going to have your hands full. When she gets to be too much for you, then drop her off at our house.”

Toni laughed as he looked at me and mouthed, ‘I love you’. “Dad, you are wishful thinking if you believe I will ever let her out of my sight.”

I kept an eye on Lass and made sure to mimic her while eating. I did not want to make a gaffe' in a room full of Pash.

It was late, late, late when Toni took me home. I was so tired. Most of it was from nervous excitement, but part of it was physical from being on my feet most of the evening. I wrapped my arms around Toni’s neck as he carried me down the ramp off the ship.

“I can walk from here.”

“I know, but it feels good to hold you in my arms. You feel so soft and warm.” He walked into the house carrying me.

“Did I ever tell you, I love you?” I whispered in his ear.

“No, but you can start now.” He tried to bite me on the neck and received a mouthful of hair for his efforts.

“I love you, Toni. I love you so much I can not begin to tell you how much because words don’t explain.”

He laid me down on the bed, bent over, brushed the hair away from my face, and kissed me. “I know the feeling.”

I wrapped my arms around his neck. “Then make love to me.”

He kissed me and then pulled back out of my arms. “We need to get some rest. We have work to do tomorrow.”

Glancing around the room he removed his sword and pistol. “First things first.”

He lay down on top of me as he smothered me with kisses and then playfully put those fangs of his in my neck.

“Oh Master, I am yours to do as you wish. You are a man and I, a mere woman.” I giggled as I said it in mock of his strength.

Toni grabbed my wrists and held my hands up above my head as he stared into my eyes. I didn’t think I could have escaped if I had the help of ten men. But feeling mischievous I brought my knees up under him as I leveraged my heels against the bed. It tossed him over my head upside down up against the head rail on the bed.

I don’t know who was more shocked, Toni or me? “I’m sorry, Toni, I didn’...”

He rolled back down where he was beside me as he studied my eyes. “Bring that ‘mere woman’ by me again because I was believing that one.”

I reached out and dragged him in as I planted a big kiss on his lips. “Enough chatter. I’m your Queen. I demand you make love to me.”

Toni reached up and removed my crown and then down to my side and removed my dagger. He set them off to the side. “You are my Queen and I can not refuse your command.”

How Toni found me under that full skirt and gossamer petticoat was a wonder, but he did.

The next morning, I rolled over and was looking at Stick. “Where’s Toni?”

“Assembling the attack force, Mistress.”

That brought me awake, along with my heart up in my throat. “We are under attack? By whom? Why didn’t he wake me? Take me to him.”

“You are not properly dressed, Mistress. We are not under attack. No life forms have ever attacked the Pash. The attack force is for the meeting with the Trag. Now, if Mistress will take her bath, I will prepare her meal. It is going to be a busy day.”

I rolled out of bed and turned my back to Stick. “Undo me please. I really need to teach you about zippers.”

My dress fell to the floor and I stepped out of my heels. It felt sooooo good to be out of that thing. I rubbed my waist. I couldn’t believe I had managed to sleep like that. I must really have been wiped out.

After the bath I stopped in the doorway and stared at my clothes lying on the bed. “We must have a talk about my attire.”

I was finishing breakfast when Toni and several Pash walked in. I studied them. Warriors for sure and armed to the teeth. Toni had his cannon on his right hip, a sword on his left, and I guessed some kind of shield generator on his belt, right in front of his sword. The four Pash behind him were dressed in similar fashion. They also carried rifles of some kind.

Toni took me in from head to toe. “You did well. It is time to go.”

I rose out of the chair and walked beside him out of the house. Everyone’s mood had changed. These Pash were not going to a banquet, nor were they going to a social meeting. They were going to negotiate a bargain, or let blood.

The ship outside our house was huge, dark, and formidable. It scared me and I was only looking at it. I was guessing it was one of the Pash Star Destroyers. Our group stopped under the ship, there was that familiar flash of light, and we were in the bowels of the beast. If I thought it looked like business from the outside I was wrong. It looked like death personified from the inside. There were a dozen Pash at consoles and those were fire control consoles they were sitting at.

Toni put his hand in the small of my back. “Forward, my Queen.”

I glanced over at him. “Formal titles?”

“Yes, please. This is not a pleasure trip.”

He motioned me to a chair with a console in front of it. I sat down and it formed to my body.

He sat down in the chair beside me and pulled a console up in his lap. “As Queen, you are the Commander. Place your right hand on the right side of the screen.”

I did as he directed and felt a tingling in my hand.

“It has read you and accepted you as in control of the fleet. Place your fingers on the left side of the screen.”

Again I followed directions. Something I had never seen before blipped up in front of my face. A star chart unlike any chart I had ever seen before.

Toni ran his left hand over his console and one of the stars on my chart glowed red. “That is the Trag galaxy. You are going to fly us there. There are several ways to guide the ship to that destination. The easiest one would be for you to reach up and touch the red star.”

I did and my star chart disappeared, replaced by a universe chart.

Toni touched his screen and one of the planets turned red. “The Trag inhabit all the planets in this universe. The planet in red is where the meeting is to take place. Please touch it.”

My touch made the universe chart disappear and a planet hologram was in front of me.

There were thousands upon thousands of bright dots around us.

“Full view.” Toni, touched his screen.

I was looking out across space at thousands and thousands of ships. By their very design, easily identifiable as Pash ships. “My God!”

“Our meeting is here.” Tony touched his screen and a red dot appeared on the planet hologram.

I touched it and a view of buildings appeared in front of us.

“This one here is the meeting hall.” One of the buildings turned red.

I touched it and we were in front of that building. I now realized Toni did all that so fluidly and quickly I had never noticed he had taken us from point A to point B.

“Full battle ready.” Toni stood up and held out his hand.

I took his hand and stood beside him. We walked back to the lift. Two Pash disappeared ahead of us and then we were in the flash. I was standing beside Toni in the same hall we had been in two days earlier. There were a couple dozen Trag on the other side. I was guessing those things they were holding in their arms were weapons.

Four more Pash, and Sherry, dropped in behind us. I took a quick glance in Sherry’s direction. She was wearing black hip boots, with a four inch stiletto heel. Her micro mini skirt was tight. Her huge breasts couldn’t be considered covered by that flimsy chain mail brassiere she was wearing. Her long earrings were too much, like mine were. Her long, golden hair cascaded over her shoulders down to her hips. Like everyone else, other than me, she carried a sword on her left hip and a blaster on her right. Sherry was a fox, no matter how she was dressed, or not dressed.

Four Trag walked toward us on those funny legs of theirs, their eyes moving in agitation from us to the other Pash. Toni put his hand in the small of my back. We stepped forward to meet them halfway across the room. Sherry stepped up behind me to my left.

The Trag on my right waved an arm in my direction. “There is no need for this show of hostility. We Trag have no quarrel with the Pash.”

“My Queen informs me you have broken the treaty with Pash.” Toni looked more serious than any time I had ever seen him.

The Trag on my left motioned toward me. “You are Queen of Pash? You do not look Pash. This is trick.”

Toni shook his head. “It is not a trick. You met her two days ago. I informed you she was my mate. You said you had to take our terms to council for consideration. What is your answer?”

The Trag directly in front of me stepped forward and reached an arm out to...

Toni was holding his sword in his left hand. A green goo was dripping off the blade. The Trag that had reached out was missing half his arm. Green goo was dripping out of the stump. Toni had his blaster in his right and he had a fighters stance, legs apart ready to move in any direction.

“Dare to touch our Queen and you will forfeit your life. Next time it will be more than an arm.” He shifted his attention from one to all four Trag.

“I meant no harm. I only wanted to take a DNA sample to test if you speak the truth. She does not look Pash. Her eyes are not Pash. Her skin is not Pash. Where are the Pash teeth? Her fur is not Pash. You are lying to us. This life is not Pash.” The Trag who had lost an arm countered.

“I tire of your rebuke. She is my mate, our Queen, and most certainly Pash. I can offer a solution, a test, but if you touch her, you will die, along with all Trag.” Toni waited for an answer.

“I have to touch her for test sample.” He countered.

“Put your arm out, but don’t touch her or I will carry through my threat.” Toni tensed waiting for the Trag to try something.

The Trag extended his arm out, careful to not touch me.

Toni glanced in my direction. “Spit on it.”

I almost gagged. The smell was of something rotten. I managed to get some saliva in my mouth and spat on the Trag’s arm.

The Trag pulled back and left the room. All, except the three Trag in front of us, followed the first one from the room.

“Can you use a sword?” Toni was looking nervously about the room.

“I have used one in practice a long time ago. I’m better with a phaser.” I was looking to see what was making Toni so nervous.

“Pull your sword.”

I reached up over my back, not really expecting to wrap my right hand around a handle. The handle was there and I felt a hum between my shoulder blades. I could also feel it in my hand when I gripped the handle. I lifted a sword that was not there a second ago. As I brought it up and over I took a fighter’s stance. The blade cast off light beams in random directions. There was no doubt that a faint hum was coming from the sword.

The Trag backed up several steps as their eyes waved excitedly on their stalks. One of them turned and scurried from the room.

“What’s going on? They going to jump us?” I was trying to keep an eye on the whole room, while waiting for an attack.

“They were planning on it.” Toni looked like he had relaxed a little.

“I don’t think I would make a lot of difference. I’m not as quick as you are.”

“Quick has nothing to do with it. That’s the Queen’s sword. Only the Queen can pull it. It’s not there until you reach for it. Anyone else could search for eternity and never get their hands on it.”

“It’s a damn good thing Stick told me I had a sword between my shoulder blades then, isn’t it? I thought he was joking. It’s always there?” I took a close look at that sword. What was so special about it, besides it could disappear?

Toni never took his eyes off the Trag. “It goes with the Queen’s Crown and Dagger. When you accepted the position you accepted the Sword.”

Taking quick glances at the sword that seemed so special, I could not fathom why. “Maybe you should have told me more before we were married, my love. Anything else I should know that slipped your mind before our wedding?”

“You might try and be extra careful what you cut with that sword. It collapses molecular structure.”

“Oh shit! And I’m holding it!” I was considering handing it to Toni.

“Don’t even think it. Your molecular structure bonded with the sword when you accepted the title. If anyone tries to touch it they will be history. You can swing the blade through your body and nothing would happen. You can’t hurt yourself with it.”

Toni looked over and smiled a crooked smile. “Could we discuss history lessons at a later time?”

I wanted to take a deep breath, but that little nothing outfit Stick had bonded me into was ridiculously tight. My blue boots were thigh high with a four inch stiletto heel, my skin tight, blue skirt was so short it was more of an idea rather than practical. I felt like toothpaste my waist was so small. I was sure Toni could touch his fingers if he wrapped his hands around my waist. I hope he was enjoying my figure now because I was sure I would look like a barge ship when our little girl started growing. I had no idea how that little bit of bustier material could support those huge breasts of mine. I was positive the material was stronger than boilerplate. I would never claim I was dressed.

My conversation with Toni was cut short by the return of two Trag. One of them walked up in front of me making sure to not get close to me. I was positive it was the sword he was respecting and not the woman. I was also positive Lass had been involved in the revenge the Pash had taken against the Trag for her son’s death. Otherwise, the Trag would not have known about the Queen’s Sword. I could only hope to be half the woman she was, is.

The Trag studied me for a long, long time. “The test is mixed. We do not agree she is Pash.”

For the first time I saw a hint of a smile on Toni’s face. “Would you like a little proof at the point of her sword?”

The Trag was waving his arms as he backed. “NO! No need for hostilities.”

I was thinking how strange that they would fear a sword, yet the blaster Toni held in his hand was not that much of a threat. I was missing something.

The Trag grouped up in conversation, but those eyes of theirs kept looking in my direction.

What I never expected was for two of them to leap at me from the group. It was pure reflex reaction rather than skill, as I brought the sword up to block the weapon thrust at my eyes from the one on my right. No conscious thought was involved as the Trag’s weapon disappeared. I jumped to my right, straight into Toni as I tried to sidestep their charge. Toni was knocked off balance and stumbled to his right as I body slammed into him. He had involuntarily checked my movement. I two fisted the handle as I flat bladed a sweeping arc into the Trag nearest me. I had overpowered my swing, expecting resistance where blade met Trag, but there was none. The Trag just disappeared.

Because of my mistake I was pulled off balance and clumsily stumbled forward. The second Trag thrust his weapon at where I would have been standing had I not been so clumsy and fallen out of his target area. I planted my right foot and swung underhanded, bringing my sword up, hoping to cut his weapon in half. When sword and Trag weapon touched, the Trag weapon disappeared.

I was too close to the Trag. It snaked out an arm as a phaser came up in one of its other arms. I shortened the arc of my up swing and brought it down hoping to catch the Trag’s arm before it could wrap me up. What I saw was beyond my powers of comprehension. When the blade touched the Trag’s arm snaking toward my throat, the whole Trag disappeared.

“BEHIND YOU!” Blasters were barking as Toni shouted.

I spun on my left heel leaning into whatever? I only knew Toni had yelled and nothing else.

The other two Trag had decided to attack. I was lucky beyond belief that I had advanced rather than retreated when Toni yelled. They must have figured I was running when I started to spin, for their attack carried them into the sweep of my sword. I had it in a two fisted swing, waist high, and putting everything I had into it as I stepped forward. The sword met no resistance as it cut through the Trag and like the first two, they disappeared. I stumbled forward after meeting no resistance and only by the slimmest margin managed to keep my balance. I was standing where the Trag had been only seconds before.

I was scared out of my ever loving mind. I fully expected a couple thousand of them to come pouring into the room to finish the job the first four had started. “Toni?”

I could see laugh lines forming around his eyes as he and the other Pash stared at me. “Honey, your style is a little unorthodox, but I’m not complaining.”

“Let’s get back to the ship before they regroup. I’m not your mother and...” I couldn’t believe we weren’t already back in the ship headed as far away as we could get.

Toni put his sword and blaster back on left and right hips as he walked over in front of me. “Careful with that sword. It’s as dangerous to me as it was to the Trag.”

“The fight is over?” I couldn’t believe we weren’t about to be swarmed with a couple thousand others.

“It’s over. Put up your sword.”

Hesitantly I slipped it over my back and turned loose of it, expecting to hear a clatter when it hit the floor. There was no clatter. I could only imagine it was one of those dimensional portals it had slipped into.

Toni wrapped his right arm around my waist as his eyes gleamed. “The test is over. The Trag won’t be sending any more bio-balls to destroy the human race.”

“Test…?” I coughed. “They forfeited four lives on a test to see if I would kill them or not? And what were you shooting? I heard your weapons discharge?”

Sherry walked up beside us. “If that was an act with the sword, please don’t ever do it again.”

She leaned over and gave me a hug. “I’ll see you in a couple days. You need to drop back over at UF-2 and tell them the virus attack is over. You need to take them off Death-Com or those poor souls on that station will be stuck there forever. Command Central won’t ever lift a Death-Com alert.”

“Thanks for your support Sherry. I guess I’ll figure out what we did when Toni decides to explain it to me.” I hugged her back before she stepped back and disappeared in a flash of light.

We were back on the Pash Star Destroyer. Toni motioned me to the console. “Please, my Queen, take us home.”

We made it home, but not because I knew how or where. Toni guided me step by step. I also figured out we were traveling dimensionally as well as distance. Would the human race ever figure out how to travel through dimensions? I had no idea, but if they did it would be a long, long time. The other half of traveling through a dimension is figuring out how to get back where you left. Obviously the Pash had it figured out.

The place we stopped wasn’t home. I recognized Toni’s ship when we beamed off the Star Destroyer. The Star Destroyer disappeared. Toni took my right hand in his left and led me into the house. His parents were waiting.

I curtsied and bowed my head in respect to both of them.

“Please, you are the Queen of the Pash. Dre and I no longer deserve formal address.” Lass put her hand on my shoulder urging me to rise.

I stood up and looked into her eyes. “You will always deserve formal address, my Queen. A crown or a title does not make a Queen, nor does it make a King. Working toward the common good of all your race is what made you a Queen and Dre a King. I pray I do not disappoint you or my King as I try to be half the woman you are.”

Her cat eyes opened as she studied me before she answered. “The Pash could not be more fortuitous than having you reign as their Queen.”

She turned her attention to Toni. “I know my son well. He will be a good King.”

Lass put her hand around my arm and urged me toward the living room. “I heard the meeting with the Trag went well. You go back tomorrow to sign the treaty. A word of advice. Don’t let any of them touch you. They carry the nastiest spore on their bodies. It takes a trip through a field portal, the likes of which you don’t even want to think about, to get rid of the spore and lesions on your skin.”

I took a quick look back over my shoulder at Toni who was nodding his head in agreement. That was why he didn’t let the Trag touch me. A wash job through that field portal didn’t sound like something I wanted to experience.

“You’re welcome.” Toni laughed.

Darn him, he was mind reading again. Wait until tonight. I was going to do things to him he hadn’t ever...

Lass looked over at me, her eyes were wide open in shock and then she was laughing.

Jeeze, everyone was reading my mind. I blushed in embarrassment. I hadn’t planned on Toni’s mom knowing how we made love.

FROM THE EDITOR: This is the end of Book One. Book Two will follow as soon as I get it proofed, edited and ready to post. Hopefully by Wednesday at the latest.

Barbie and I are very pleased that you have enjoyed this story and we appreciate all your comments and kudos. Thank you all very much.