The Unexpected Companion, Part Three 

Published: SWM 27Apr2024

By Shadar

(Part Two had Miki channeling her fantastic strength into flight power to bring the train to a stop, and then push it back away from a tunnel entrance and into a narrow canyon just before an AMAT exploded in the tunnel to blow the entire mountain apart. Having saved most of the people on the train, the two of them had to leave the area quickly to prevent the Arions from a further attack on the train. Given her shuttle was still up on her orbiting ship, Miki used an unusual but effective way to protect him as she personally flew him up to orbit. Very personally. There he meets Lexi, the AI First Officer who runs the ship, and learns how dangerous the Arion ship that shares their orbit is likely to be. Miki flies off to take the Arion ship out before they can attack again — if she can.) 

Miki knew she was in deep trouble the moment she had eyes on the Arion ship. These weren’t some scummy pirates flying a rundown tramper they’d hijacked before spacing the original crew. This was a modern ship-of-the-line in the Arion Empire’s Fleet, shimmering with a quicksilver-bright supersteel hull and armed to the teeth with the latest weapons. The smallest class perhaps — a Vega scout-ship — and comparatively lightly armed, it was still capable of destroying a small moon or devastating the populated portions of an undeveloped planet like Ostremity, if that was their goal.

Her heart sank even lower as the Arions immediately launched three missiles her way. They must have had probes flying in advance of their ship, extending their ship’s eyes over the planetary horizon. Routine for a military ship, but something pirates rarely were equipped to do.

Spotting the bright flare of the missile’s engines, visible from several hundred kilometers away given her enhanced eyes, Miki turned to fly straight at them, hoping that her tiny, non-metallic mass would allow her fly through the incoming cluster without detonating the warheads. By spinning through the center of them, she might be able to slice through the missiles’ propellant and engines with her blazing eyes, leaving the warheads flying on their own. Without propulsion or navigation, they’d be easy for Lexi to avoid. 

And if a warhead did detect her approach and trigger its proximity fuse, she’d be long gone before it could hurt her. Assuming these were AMAT warheads, that is. Unlike chemical explosives, whose detonation was very fast, or even nukes, the magnetically-contained capsules of antimatter needed to be shut down and then shattered explosively so their contents could disperse to begin reacting with the mass of the missile. That would take milliseconds to initiate while her head-to-head passage through the missiles would be better measured in microseconds. Which was a very good thing given her bio-field didn’t block antimatter. Speed and distance were her friends. 

She’d just started her rapid spin and was about to intercept the cluster of missiles when they suddenly turned sharply to the sides and thrusted away from her, going completely around her. 

She wasn’t the target! 

Looking back, she watched as the three rocket exhausts converged again as they shrank to dots in the distance. 

Her first instinct was to go after them. She was clenching her fists to brake when she realized that was exactly what the Arions wanted her to do. Catching those missiles was doable, but it would take time. Time the Arions would likely use to mount a massive second attack on Lexi’s ship once they had clear targeting on it.

Space battles have their own physical rules and probabilities, which Miki understood very clearly. It took her but an instant to decide that taking out the Arion warship would give Winston his best chance of survival. Once that ship was above the horizon, its ability to fire many different kinds of weapons would make it unstoppable. 

Lexi would just have to handle those first missiles alone. 

Continuing now toward the Arion ship before it rose above the planetary horizon, closing on it at twice orbital velocity, she was soon within range of the Arions’ longest-range lasers and particle beams. They flashed blindingly as they converged on her, crisscrossing the space between them as their combined energies and light-speed flashes heated her to a flaring heat that could have burned through the armor of a warship. Her bio-field flared as the intersecting beams of death washed over her, looking for the tiniest chink in her armor. 

But that was just the start. Ultra-speed rail guns began firing too, sending heavy V-steel jacketed uranium slugs her way. Rounds fast enough and dense enough to punch clean holes through anything less than a battlestar’s armor. Jinking wildly, trying to throw their targeting AI off, Miki thought she saw a way through the criss-crossing lattice of beams and rail guns, only to have a special group of lasers lock onto her face, blasting her eyes with the precise frequency of light that would dazzle her retina. They were one step ahead of her, exploiting a well known vulnerability of Galen-enhanced vision. 

Momentarily blinded, Miki realized with a shock that this scout ship had been armed and the crew trained specifically to take out a Velorian. More importantly, that meant that several levels of the Empire’s bureaucracy were involved in putting a ship like this out here. That sell-out from her unnamed enemy back on Pernakis was even deeper than she’d first guessed.

That anxious thought was still echoing in her head when an unseen string of rail-gun rounds arrived, the massive impacts sending her spinning wildly out of control, pinwheeling with her head ringing and eyes blinded, her limp arms and legs flying wildly, she flew right into the rail gun turret as it fired on her from the bow of the ship. 

She should have been splattered like a bug and incinerated by the high-kinetic impact, but instead her unbreakable body blew the rail gun mount apart before continuing inward to blast a huge hole through the ship’s bow armor, then crashing more than a hundred meters deep into the ship in a tiny fraction of a second, tearing through dozens of internal bulkheads and equipment rooms, destroying living quarters and machinery before finally coming to a crashing stop against the heaviest armor on the ship — the engine room bulkhead. She bounced off it to land in a heap of arms and bare legs and splayed blonde hair. 

The professional Arion crew quickly busied themselves sealing off the badly damaged hull, using the usual expanding foam that hardened into steel-like plugs. That at least stopped the decompression, but urgent collision alarms continued to sound along with intruder alerts over the intercom, telling everyone that a Velorian had crashed into them, and where she was now located. 

Marines of the specialized Velorian Defense Team rushed toward her location, intent on preventing her from recovering from the impact. They’d long trained to defeat an intruding blondie, using female Primes as adversaries during their training. They knew how narrow the time window was for success. Once the intruder shook off the impact and got her wits back about her, she’d be nearly impossible to subdue without a Prime. 

But the proud and arrogant Primes would rarely lower themselves far enough to serve on a secret mission that had the stink of politics on it, least of all on a small scout ship. They were warriors, not assassins, and they lived well on the huge battlestars. The result was the strange and often depraved ways the Supremis fought each other using what the Galen had given them as skills and weaknesses, but which violated everything that humans regarded as moral restraint. 

And today, their spirits were high because they had a surprise waiting. 

The first soldier who arrived on scene began firing his Mark 9 slug gun at Miki’s head as she tried to sit up, slamming her back again and again against the impregnable bulkhead, her pale hair flying wildly as he desperately tried to keep her down. Emptying his huge magazine into her head, his huge rounds nearly 20mm in diameter and powerful enough that the recoil alone would have killed a Terran shooter. They’d been designed to defeat the best Terran body armor, but were gross underkill for controlling a Velorian for long. 

Still, every time Miki started to come around again, he’d fire a few more rounds into her head, the crashing impacts of the armor-piercing rounds knocking her silly and unable to focus her eyes. The rounds that missed her made deep divots in the V-steel wall. During her fragmentary moments of consciousness, Miki’s panic began to grow. Between her partial blindness from the lasers and the way they kept shooting, they might be able to keep her down until someone showed up with gold. Desperate to avoid that, she launched herself blindly toward the shooter, but missed his legs as her eyes wouldn’t focus. Instead, she managed to grab hold of the thick barrel of his Mark 9. Pulling it down from her head, she buried it deeply in the softness of her breast, knowing it couldn’t possibly hurt her there. 

The over-confident Betan was grinning as he fired yet again, thinking she was already heading toward Ples’tathy. Her far softer flesh dimpled radically this time as the powerful round dug in until it crashed against her steel-hard pectorals. That sent it ricocheting back toward the shooter with enough power to knock the superhuman off his feet. While he struggled to hang onto his weapon while getting back up, Miki summoned the strength to squeeze the barrel in her grip, crushing the barrel just enough to ruin the weapon. The soldier had no idea as he fired again, and this time the barrel exploded into a cloud of sparks and shrapnel which threw the shooter across the compartment, tearing many ragged holes in his clothing. She could see the hurt in his eyes, but there was no blood. Betans are nearly as hard to injure as Velorians. 

A half-dozen other Betan soldiers arrived to begin firing at her now, most with Mark 9s but one had a legendary GAR, the most powerful personal weapon in the Arion military, and one that was only fired inside a ship in absolute desperation. It projected a circular laser beam powerful enough to cut a Terran in half, but the real power was the highly-charged ions it fired down the evacuated core of the beam, making it a particle beamer, or what some called an ion cannon. One shot could turn an armored flitter into so much molten metal and smoke, with the occupants utterly annihilated. 

His destructive ion beam traced across the V-steel floor and up between her long legs as she sat against the engine room bulkhead, still dazed. Cutting a path that left the metal floor bubbling and melted wherever it touched it, the beam reached the short hem of her red skirt to trace across that invulnerable fabric without visible effect until it got to her bared abs, where her tightly-stretched skin flared white-hot as the beam moved upward to find her Vendorian tunic and blue jacket, which exploded into wild sparks. Rising further, the beam headed toward her left breast.

The experienced Sergeant in command of the Velorian Defense Team saw what was happening, and dove toward the shooter, trying to turn his weapon away from the young soldier’s obvious target, but he was too late. The ion beam moved into the Orgone field surrounding her breasts where it created a far more energetic explosion as it annihilated dirt and bits of food or whatever else that clung microscopically to her clothing. Ion annihilation inside a bubble of Orgone energy was devastatingly powerful, with the augmented explosion instantly sending a wall of flame across the compartment, burning anything that couldn’t withstand two-thousand degrees Celsius. The soldier’s uniforms burned away along with the furniture and fittings in the compartment. But given they were all Betans. and had a similar bio-field to Miki’s, they were again unharmed.

The same could not be said for their weapons, portions of which were destroyed by the heat, with synthesized parts melting as the steel frames and actions stretched and softened. Even the V-steel walls of the compartment began to oil-can outward from the greatly increased pressure in the sealed room. 

Miki was also smashed harder against the bulkhead, her glowing boobs flattening against her chest as they blazed like two tiny suns now, waves of Orgone briefly visible in the heat as they accelerated the ion annihilation. 

But none of that mattered when the half-melted door to the compartment was suddenly ripped off its hinges as a very tall young man entered the room, dressed in black leather from head to toe. He easily looked as young as Miki, his raven hair with its purple highlights and eyes glowing a deadly blue striking terror in her heart. 

The superman’s body was carved as if from a solid block of steel, his tight, hard muscles far more dramatic than Miki’s, yet he was just as beautiful except in a decidedly masculine way, his skin golden and burnished and flawlessly smooth like hers, but with a square jaw and the stunningly handsome face of a superhuman.

He was, of course, an ultra-deadly Prime, and the now disarmed Betan soldiers turned and ran naked out the doorway in their panic to escape. It did not pay to get between a Prime and his prey. 

Leaping across the room, moving too fast to track with the naked eye, he grabbed one of Miki’s boobs and lifted her from the floor by it, his fingers digging cruelly into her soft flesh as he slammed her backward hard enough to bend the normally unbendable V-steel bulkhead, the blow shaking the entire ship, throwing everyone off their feet. 

Shocked and horrified, Miki threw everything she had into her flight power, hoping to blast through the hull with the Prime in tow to escape into space where she could use her unique flight power to evade the flightless Prime. But before she could move, he grabbed her other boob and squeezed it so tightly as well that both of her Volatai went into spasm. Hanging there in agony, she was suddenly unable to fly. 

Cursing her stupidity at being caught this way, she overcame her agony to go to Plan B. Shaking her long, blonde hair over him, the strands increasingly coated with pheromones from her scalp, and with her own body responding strongly to his animal magnetism, the Prime pushed all the erotic buttons that the Galen had engineered into her species. She wrapped her arms around his sinewy neck as best she could and kissed him, hoping to transfer her more powerful tactile pheromones in an effort to unbalance him. It was well-known that Primes are the most susceptible of all living beings to Velorian pheromones.

He responded as any Prime would, his fighting stance changing to a more erotic one as his arousal surged and an erection rose that looked like a drug-fueled fantasy version of a phallus. Plan B was to use all her inner strength and powerful pheromones to drive him so wild during sex that he’d forget everything else long enough to open a window for her to escape. And then, once out of his grasp, she could tear through the walls of the ship and get beyond the gravity field, at which point the Prime would be helpless to follow. 

It was a good plan until his first powerful thrust entered her with enough power to have stopped a racing locomotive, slamming her back against the V-steel bulkhead, bending the unbendable steel outward as the impact shook the entire ship. She instinctively wrapped her long legs around him in her eagerness to excite him further, which unfortunately succeeded in his speeding up, pushing her closer to the throes of Ples’tathy, that mindless mating dance the Galen had programmed into every Velorian girl. 

With the Prime thrusting hard enough to have collapsed a building, Miki screamed in orgasmic agony now, soaring into the wildest passion she’d known since her coming-of-age Rites back on Velor. As with all Companions, she’d only been intimate with Terrans since that one and only time with her classmates back on Velor.

In that confused, head-spinning state, she was overwhelmed with desire from his crude penetration, each thrust filling her with indescribable pleasure as the Prime managed to penetrate all the way to her Inny, that band of nerve rich muscle that was a deeply buried part of her vagina. Deliberately located by the Galen at a point too deep for any lesser species to reach, and with a hundred times the nerve density of any Terran woman’s clitoris, the sudden surge of impossibly intense pleasure drove her screaming into a flurry of orgasms, her explosion of passion taking her thoughts back to that orgasmic dream-state of Ples’tathy, back with her male classmates gathered around her, all of them invited to share her Rites. Their job had been to keep her in Ples’tathy for as many days as was required for her to ovulate, at which point am expert would arrive with the technology to retrieve the now fertilized ova and transport the zygote to the Maternity Engine where it joined the zygotes from other girls undergoing their Rites to become the basis for the next generation. 

It was a distinctly Velorian way to become a woman, engineered by the Galen for their own exclusive purposes. 

Her first Ples’tathy had also been the moment when the billions of Maierk — those highly intelligent bacterium-sized Galen organisms that circulated in her blood with their companion retro-viruses — took a snapshot of her DNA, enabling them to greatly slow her aging from that moment on, or even reconstruct her body after a great injury by taking her back to the moment of her Rites. 

The Prime knew none of this as he growled and showed his teeth like the predator he was. Every Arion male grew up with the dark fantasy of someday proving themselves in such a way, using their manhood and a Velorian’s Ples’tathy as their weapons. It was also why Velorians had started calling them Orcs, a racist slur that many Arions perversely embraced. For they had no greater desire than to proudly sully a true Velorian in combat, keeping their nymphomaniacal prey trapped in continuous orgasm long enough to drain her Orgonic powers to enhance their own. 

But Miki was not your usual Velorian. Just as her attacker erupted into his first orgasm, she clenched her inner muscles with all her strength, struggling to deny his release. He went berserk on her, hammering painfully on her shoulders to release him, pounding her body halfway through the V-steel floor and wall in his desperation. Barely conscious now beneath a beating powerful enough to have crushed a main battle tank, Miki took advantage of the fact that he’d released her Volatai. She channeled her returning flight power to smash her back harder and harder against the already damaged bulkhead, augmenting the power of his thrusts, their combined blows so great that entire sections of the ship began to shake apart now, inside and out. The young Prime reached out to try and shut down her flight powers again, but she locked hands with him and managed to hold on for a few seconds before he managed to rip himself free. Reaching for her neck as if to throttle her — a critical mistake — she threw every bit of flight power she could muster into one final crash into that bulkhead, finally tearing the thinned-out V-steel enough to go completely through it and into the Engine Room.

There she leaned back away from him while using her extreme flexibility to pivot her waist enough to grab for one of the antimatter containment vessels behind her. Each held a few grams of that deadly form of alternate matter inside a superconducting magnetic containment bottle. Wrapping her arms around that vessel as the Prime tried to pry her away to continue his deadly rape, she pressed her bare chest against the magnetic structure as the Prime’s frantic thrusting brought her back to orgasm again. But this time, instead of holding back her energies and focusing on her own pleasures, she blasted what remained of her remaining Orgone into a single blast that traveled through her body and then deeply into his, swelling him with superpower before she collapsed limply against the containment vessel, spent and deflated. That desperate move could have been her last if not for the terrible emptiness she felt growing in her now shrunken breasts. 

She remembered how she’d ended a violent protest back on Pernakis by emptying herself this way as she walked toward the crowd during a developing thunderstorm. That inter-dimensional emptiness, which was how she drew Orgonic power across the barrier, began instead to draw power from the nearest source. A dozen very powerful lightning bolts came out the clouds to try and fill the emptiness, heating her body to incandescence, the thunder knocking people off their feet as she continued walking toward the crowd of protestors, who turned and ran in panic. No one died that day, and no one underestimated the Emperor’s concubine after that!

That same emptiness was now working on the superconducting magnets and the power sources that drove them. Sparks and bolts of electricity rose from the equipment to envelop her breasts, trying to fill them, so much power escaping that the current flowing into the electromagnets was completely shorted-circuited into her body. That caused the magnetic flux to collapse inside the chamber, if only for the briefest moment before emergency systems cut in. 

But a moment was all that was needed as a few atoms of antimatter found a few atoms of the unprotected containment vessel and exploded in annihilation. That explosion tore more of vessel apart, releasing more antimatter, which exploded to tear apart more of the engine room, quickly reaching the other containment vessels to start an unstoppable chain reaction.

The resulting annihilating blast of escaping antimatter traveled the length of the ship in seconds, creating the perfect annihilation of matter and antimatter as it ate the entire ship and everything in it. In one single long flash, the ship was gone, blown apart as it was converted into pure energy. 

The multi-gigaton detonation of the ship’s entire supply of antimatter would have cracked a planet open if it had been on the surface. As it was, even in orbit, the expanding wave of antimatter blew Miki and her unwanted passenger far away, where she put her flight power to work by diving deeper and deeper into the thickening atmosphere, the annihilation of air molecules behind her growing star-bright as it expanded her way. The fastest of the anti-atoms finally reached her to pass through what was left of her bio-field to burn their way into her skin, reacting explosively with contact. 

She and the Prime screamed in pain while Miki flew totally out of control now, glowing like a meteor trying to become a star as the Velorian and Prime hugged each other while balling themselves up for protection, flying hypersonically as they impacted the face of a granite mountain, crashing deeply into the hard rock a half-second before the outer layers of the mountain were utterly annihilated by the arriving wave of antimatter, causing a star-like flash. 

All around their impact point, in a circle many kilometers wide, the surface layer of planetary rock was annihilated, with the massive atmospheric blast sending a lethal shock wave outward for a hundred kilometers and beyond, the ground wave triggering massive rockfalls for further hundreds of kilometers as entire mountains shook before tumbling into the wild valleys below. It was the closest thing to a planet-killing impact.

The ground tremors were so strong that they knocked people off their feet planet-wide as they ultimately circled the planet several times, toppling buildings and tearing apart roads and rail lines while terrorizing everyone still alive.

In orbit…

Far overhead, Lexi was preparing to fight off the approaching missiles that had evaded Miki on her way to the Arion ship. Working in massively parallel fashion, she activated Motive-5, her personal combat android which had a powerful Lans21-antigrav, a huge pair of Maxi7 power sources and a Lancorp82-custom AI in a cyborg body that was congruent with Velorian norms. 

Given that Lexi existed as a distributed AI, she carved off an instance of her consciousness and downloaded it to the android body and set it to autonomous mode. 

Now there were two Lexis, both of driving bots.

The new instance of Lexi woke up moments later to remove everything but her flight uniform, none of which would survive what she had in mind. Walking to the nearest airlock as she swung her arms to loosen up her synthetic body, she exited through a small hull-bot airlock, her two-meter height making her feel huge. Hull-bots rarely stood taller than one meter. 

Floating just outside the small outer airlock door, she sync’d up a final time with the ship’s sensors and got updates from the central AI while waiting for her body to adjust to vacuum, starting with emptying her lungs and other cavities. Long ago, it had been found that humans are very uncomfortable around androids that aren’t breathing, so every bot now had lungs. Or things that sounded like lungs.

This particular bot had started life as an Acme Sexbot Fantasy Model-32 before Lexi bought it, used and worn out, and began a series of modifications to make it more Velorian’esq. That involved adding the most powerful black-market motivators that the Vendorians sold, which she very illegally modified to get 371 NHI out of them, all the while retaining its Sexbot programming as well. Given that Sexbots were by convention strength-limited to 1 NHI in Terran mode and no more than 5 NHI in Emergency, illegal probably wasn’t the right word. Lexi was now a weapon, especially given that her SynthFlesh V9.71 cyborg flesh was far closer to Velorian than Terran standards.

She sent a “good luck” to her other instance as she pushed off with her elbow to begin drifting away. A fifty meters and now fully autonomous, she rotated herself toward a calculated point on the planet below, tensing her muscles as she extended her arms like a diver, and used her internal antigrav to accelerate so fast that she disappeared in a literal blink of an eye. 

While the original instance of Lexi remained on the ship, preparing to fight off the incoming missiles, the new Lexi was going to try to recover what she hoped was Miki’s body, which her sensors had tracked all the way to the ground. Nothing else could have escaped that anti-matter annihilation. 

But whether Miki was still alive and in one piece was a real question. 

To be continued…