Chapter Three

Rev 3

I pulled my eyes from Commander John Lennon’s frozen smile, and turned to look at the other silent bodies. These Terrans had found their ultimate freedom. More importantly, they’d given their lives to buy their families a chance to live. 

Now the burden of helping the escaping colony ships was firmly on my shoulders, as impossible as that was.

I’d woken this morning to begin another day as a reluctant assistant to the worst kinds of torture of Terrans. A physician who was forced to prolong suffering. 

 Now I was going to end my day as a free woman helping free Terrans to escape the Empire. Assuming I lived that long. 

This change didn’t all happen today — it had always been inside me, waiting for this moment. My mother had planted the seeds when I was a child, and several professors had watered them. Today they’d finally blossomed. For the first time, the moments of my life that had brought me to this point stood out with perfect clarity. All connected, all part of the chain. 

Except maybe for the part where I became a traitor to my own people. I never would have dreamed. 

But now I was. If I was caught, the Captain would undoubtably give me to the Stazi for interrogation. Once depleted of Orgone, I wouldn’t be any tougher or stronger than the average Betan, and the Stazi had an entire book of special tortures for traitors.

I shivered briefly at that thought before my courage rose again. They had to catch me first, and I intended to make that very, very hard.

I started by ducking into the ultrasonic shower stall to wash the blood off myself, and then pulled on some green scrubs, my thoughts racing faster than my hands could move. I saw with terribly clarity what the Terran strategy had been. They’d correctly predicted that the Captain would fall for the chance to deliver a single, decisive blow, and had deliberately grouped their ships just close enough to be taken out with our largest AMAT. The Captain must have thought they were concentrating their formation to break through our blockade. Or perhaps he just fell into the trap of believing Terrans were as stupid as our propaganda described them. Whatever his reason, he seized what he thought was his good luck and fired the warhead into their midst, caring little that the near stellar-grade explosion would blind his sensors for many hours afterward. It didn’t matter if all the Caridians were destroyed.

Little did he know that the Terrans would deliberately sacrifice their entire fleet of warships to buy time for their colonists to slip away in their unarmed ships. 

That thought staggered me. Did freedom mean that much to these Terrans? That they’d sacrifice so many lives and their entire fleet for this one small chance for their civilians to get away?

I shook my head, amazed and terrified by a kind of courage I didn’t understand. How could that awesome burden now be in my hands? I had never been brave.

It wasn’t too late to turn back. Given what I now knew, I had the power to end this rebellion and become a Hero Of Aria. That would earn me a cozy planet-side assignment with some Admiral, practicing the medicine I loved. All I had to do was tell the Captain where the colony ships were going. It was all in the memclip I’d swallowed.

Or I could follow my heart and join these crazy, free, irrepressible Terrans. Crazy as in insane? And free? How could they ever be truly free? The Empire was so large, so powerful.

I was struggling with second guesses when my door slammed open and two huge Stazi marched in, dressed in their black leather uniforms and Vendorian steel armor, their sallow faces full of arrogance; malevolence oozing from every pore. The oldest of the Stazi looked me up and down, his crinkled eyes making it clear that he’d like nothing more than to strap me down to his torture table for a while.

The evil in his face was all it took to steel my resolve. Doubts vanished. I had no doubt the Captain had promised me to these Stazi for their entertainment once my empowerment faded. His way of currying favor. It would never occur to that bastard to ask me first, and it wouldn’t have mattered what I answered.

While the older Stazi continued to stare lustfully at me, I saw the younger Stazi moving from gurney to gurney, checking the Terrans. After the fourth one, I saw his eyes open wide as he realized what I’d done. He ran to check the last gurney, and saw the dead but smiling officer.

“They’re dead, Commandant,” he cried excitedly. “All of them. She killed them.”

“What?” the Commandant roared. He tore his eyes from me long enough to confirm what his subordinate had declared, and then lunged toward me, grabbing my right breast to jerk me off the floor and slam me back against the bulkhead. Like all Stazi, he came from the upper crust of Betans, and was larger and had many times normal Betan strength. He would be very hard to kill while encased in that armor. 

“Explain yourself, Lieutenant!” he demanded, his breath stinking of rotting meat.

I looked down at his broad fingers as he dug them cruelly into my breast, tendons standing out like steel cables as he used all his strength, trying to hurt me. His powerful grip would have crushed a Terran to jelly, and it would have painfully injured a Betan woman, but his grip was more pleasant than painful to me. Was he so arrogant that he didn’t care that I was empowered? Or was he convinced that I’d never fight back, never defy him?

I spit in his face as I covered his huge hand with mine, adding all my strength to his. His eyes opened wide as my soft flesh yielded further, but not before his fingers started to bend the wrong way. He started to choke and his face turned red a moment before I felt something snap. He screamed as his knees buckled to drop me onto my back on the floor. He stood over me, jamming his foot in my stomach as he struggled to pull his hand from my grip.

As much as I wanted to make him suffer, I was worried about the second Stazi. I kicked the Commandant off me and leaped to my feet, spinning aroundto face the second Stazi, only to find myself staring down the barrel of his GAR. If I thought he would actually fire, I would have been terrified. But not even a Stazi was crazy enough to fire a GAR inside a ship. 

I put out my hand and walked toward him. “Just give me the weapon and I won’t hurt…”

My words were choked off as the GAR’s powerful laser flashed, and the hollow beam burned a hole through my scrubs, directly over my heart. The GAR then barked as it sent a few nanograms of anti-matter down that evacuated laser tube to annihilate a few nanograms of ordinary matter — directly against my skin. 

It felt like a microscopic sun had ignited against my chest. The heat was beyond nuclear, but the diameter of the annihilation zone was measured in nanometers. Still, it was enough to create a shockwave that blasted me backward through a heavy bulkhead, and flattened every bit of gear in my clinic against the walls and set the place on fire. I stared down at the angry glow that lit my cleavage, white-hot skin fading to red near the edges, the heat so great I felt the blood boiling in my heart. A brief moment of weakness came over me as my hart struggle to pump steam. Looking back into my clinic, I saw the Stazi rising from beneath a pile of debris, their uniforms on fire. They looked like they’d just stepped out of Hell itself.

I climbed back through the hole I’d made in the steel wall, edges melted and glowing, naked from my knees up, my scrubs vaporized by the fireball. My heart started to steady as my body cooled rapidly, the heat converting to Orgone. The Stazi also ignored the flames  they aimed their GARs at me. Two simultaneous GAR blasts would probably kill me now — I can only absorb heat so fast. 

I managed to dive to the side before they fired, and lashed out with every erg of heat vision I had, focusing my eyes on their GAR pistols. Both weapons burst into flames as the plastic parts began to melt and burn, and thankfully also the internal circuitry. The Stazi jerked their triggers again and again to no effect. 

I could have burned them as well, but I’ve never used my heat vision on a fellow Arion. I’ve seen too many videos of the meat being blasted off Terrans, often leaving white-bleached skeletons behind with skulls bulging outward and fracturing as the meat inside cooked. I could kill these Stazi the same way, but it would take a lot longer. As it was, their burning hair and leather uniforms sent a thick cloud of greasy black smoke to rise and spread across the ceiling. 

The maniacs didn’t even seem to care. 

I ran for the door, but they jumped in front of me, arms out, trying to grab me, each of them twice my weight and a head taller. I threw them to the side as I aimed for the locked door, throwing my bare shoulder into the armor-grade steel hard enough to tear it off its hinges. It smashed into the far wall of the corridor, flattening one of the guards. Stunned, he tried to get up while fumbling for his GAR, but I got there first, swatting the quarter-ton door away with the back of my hand and then delivering an upward punch to his solar plexus that launched him through the steel ceiling. I heard the other guard’s GAR charging up, and put my childhood gymnastics to use by flipping forward to land a barefooted kick into his chest. He flew backwards hard enough to bury his head in the steel wall at the far end of the corridor, his GAR clattering away. 

I turned the other way and ran, trying desperately to recall the shortest route across the ship. There were hundreds of corridors, but many of those dead-end into specialized compartments. The survivability of a battlecruiser depended on armored walls and short zigzagging corridors to locally contain any blast that penetrated the hull, as well as confuse and contain intruders. 

I’d be safer taking one of the back ways to Launch Control, and I’d gone managed to puzzle out a couple of routes previously, but I couldn’t remember all the turns. I didn’t have time for trial and error, and one wrong turn could leave me in a dead-end. I was going to have to run through the main causeway, hopefully moving fast enough to keep from being targeted. No Marine would shoot a GAR into corridors full of their own people, and the only Stazi bastards were in the charred remains of my clinic.

I had planned on grabbing clothing and personal effects from my quarters on the way, but the sudden flash of red lights down the periphery of the corridor and the shrill tone of the Intruder alarm said I had no time. So much for leaving the Stazi alive — I’d figured it would take them a few minutes to extinguish themselves and get a call in to the Bridge, but they’d raised the alarm in seconds. Big mistake.

My timetable was screwed. I ran as fast as I could, bouncing off the walls as the overpressure ahead of me and my trailing shockwave combined to blast doors open as I passed them. All the while, my chest was aching as my breasts swelled. They were converting the GAR’s heat into Orgone and storing it, but far faster than I’d even done before. 

I was barely halfway across the ship when another blindingly bright beam sizzled past me to hit a group of Security ratings who were waiting for me at the end of the corridor. Two of them vanished entirely in the GAR blast and the others screamed as they dove to the side, bodies flaming, limbs missing. Shocked by the near miss and the bloody carnage, and even more that the Marines were now taking wild shots inside the ship, I suddenly realized how desperate the Captain was to stop me. Had he foreseen that this day might come? 

If so, then I’d badly underestimated my shipmates. After all the hazing they’d put me through, the crude, racist jokes, not to mention their lack of cooperation in the shuttle bay, I’d allowed myself to think of the Marines in particular as brutish and slow. Everyone always said the Arions were by far the greatest warriors who’d ever lived, but I’d chalked that up to more of our own propaganda. 

Not that it made any difference now. I was committed. My mouth had turned to cotton from the heat and my panic was a scant step behind me as I pushed myself even harder. I caromed around a dozen corners and dodged two more GAR beams before I found my path blocked by a large group of Marines. Thankfully they were just armed with standard-issue SHV rifles. The Mach 5 exploding bullets were infamous for turning Terrans inside out from a single shot. The Marines fired simultaneously and on full auto, the super-high-velocity bullets blasting me like a hypersonic hail storm, the combined impact of their explosions throwing me backward to land on my back, skidding helplessly down the corridor. They advanced on me, firing as fast as they could, the hail of bullets that missed me blasting huge holes in the steel bulkhead and floor behind me. The ones that hit me exploded to punch dozens of tiny holes in the walls, floor and ceiling, almost all the way to the shooters. They still advanced. My enlarged breasts shook so wildly from hundreds of dimpling impacts that they shook my entire body, but other than the ones that hit my sensitive nipples, they barely stung. Why were they even shooting these useless rounds at me? 

That thought had barely crossed my mind when another group of Marines arrived to concentrate more SHV firepower at me, the assault knocking me off balance. I slipped and fell to my knees, my hair flying around my head to blind me as they focused their fire their. The deafening roar of bullets hitting my skull was overwhelming, making it hard to think. 

And that’s when it hit me. Their job was to slow me down until the Captain could arrive from the distant Bridge. 

To hell with that! 

I sunk my fingers into the steel wall and leveraged myself back to my feet to charge into the Marines, my coordination all of as I ran like I was drunk. They continued to fire as I closed on them, most of them aiming at my eyes now, but the ricochets from my face cut most of them down. I plowed through the remaining Marines, only to be blasted off my feet as another GAR beam hit me squarely in the back. That micronuke-grade blast thew me forward down the narrow corridor at the speed of a bullet — and directly into a thick Grade 8 armored bulkhead. I crashed through the ceramic alloy face first to skid across a large room on my nose. When I finally came to a smoking stop, I lifted my head and looked through my tangled hair to see a dozen yellow-suited people staring down at me, shocked looks on their faces. Their uniforms said I was in Launch Control. My first bit of good luck since the Stazi had entered my clinic.

I tried to push myself up, but my arms weren’t obeying me. It felt like my nerves had fallen asleep. That was scary, especially when I saw silvery-looking patches forming on my skin. That second GAR blast must have heated my skin past the upper limits for nerve functioning. I had just enough control of my lower body to roll over on my back and slam my heels into the floor to lift my pelvis and then slam my butt down into the floor to bounce myself upright. 

Staggering as I found it hard to balance on numbing legs, I looked around to see every piece of equipment or furniture within five meters of me smoking, melting or burning, all from the reflected heat of my skin. Further away, a dozen people were cowering against a bank of windows that faced into the launch bays, several of them talking urgently into their radio headsets. Two yellow-suited men were reaching under their consoles to grab weapons.

I’d learned a lesson with the Stazi — target the people and not the weapons. I had just enough feeling in my legs to stand on my toes and pinwheel around while blasting everyone with my heat vision. The entire control room was in flames when I came to a stop. The terrified controllers were under their consoles screaming for help, their weapons forgotten. These were technicians, not soldiers, and they’d never looked into the eyes of someone who was capable of burning them alive. Only one of them was brave enough to aim his GAR at me, and I unleashed a blast of heat vision to destroy it.  

Once again, they’d been prepared to use GARs inside the ship. The Captain had obviously authorized unrestricted weapons release. That had always been a last resort defense option against a Velorian intruder. Unfortunately I wasn’t nearly as powerful or as tough as a Protector, but I was carrying more Orgone than ever before. So much so that I felt a bit off-balance now, my boobs at least two cup sizes larger than normal now.    

My weakness wasn’t energy, but heat. Shockingly, I saw more patches of silver on my skin. Another direct hit and my brain would likely shut down, dropping me to the floor in spasms, possibly even killing me. I needed a few minutes to absorb the previous blasts before I could handle more.

My original plan was useless now. I couldn’t just jump into a scout ship and pilot it away. The interior would catch fire instantly and destroy all the equipment. I had to cool off first, which wasn’t going to happen if they kept firing GARs at me. Security had obviously trained for this eventuality. Slow me down and heat me up.

Maybe I could commandeer a scout from outside. Scarily though, once I was outside the hull, I was fair game for the HGARs. They had many times the power of these handheld GARs. One shot could finish me off, or blast a scout ship that I’d commandeered into a cloud of sparks.

I had to keep moving until I figured something out. I ran clumsily toward the doorway of Launch Control, only to have another GAR burst clip my left shoulder, rendering my left side numb again. I held my glowing left arm with my good one and kept going. I desperately needed to find an airlock. 

I saw directions for Lock 16, and ran toward it, running fast again as my lower body cooled. I saw the open door of the lock coming up, a wave of relief filling me as I saw my way out. I ran past the final doorway before the lock, only to be violently jerked backward and off my feet as someone grabbed my hair. Before I could get my feet under me, a second huge hand closed around my throat to lift me from the ground, squeezing hard enough to make my vision go dim. Blinking, I found myself staring into the Captain’s face. 

He shook me like a rag doll. “So, the bleeding hearted bitch wants to share her blood on behalf of the rebels,” he growled, his voice so low and powerful that it vibrated the bulkheads around me. “Abandoning your people? Deserting me? All for some fucking Frails?”

My heart fluttered like that of a captured bird, my thoughts fragmenting as my mind raced in too many directions at once. I couldn’t overpower the Captain. Hell, I’d used my heat vision on him during lovemaking — it turned him on. I’m not even sure I could bring him down by jamming a GAR into his mouth and firing it. There was nothing I could do to hurt him. 

He saw the wild panic in my eyes and laughed. Pulling my face closer to his, he growled. “Glori dearest, you are going to tell us everything the Terrans told you. Then you’ll get to watch them all die. I’ll even let you push the firing button. Then we’ll talk about your new job — as ship’s whore.”

I felt the strength draining out of me. I was too terrified to think now. I’d been focusing all my thoughts on escaping the ship. But escaping the Captain? Impossible. He never lost at anything, least of all war. He was going to kill all the Terrans and then kill me after the crew was done with me. Treating me like a captured Velorian.

He saw the defeated look in my eyes and laughed all the more. Turning, he lifted me and waved my naked body in front of the men, still holding my neck, as he announced:

“Watch me drain this overstuffed whore until she is as weak and helpless as a Scarnian gutter cat. Then she’s all yours.”

The men cheered. 

I closed my eyes and shivered in horror, remembering the lecherous eyes that followed me as I walked around the ship. And that’s when it hit me —  he had to drain my Orgone first. Given my inflated chest, I still had a chance.

Back on Aria, I’d heard Primes boasting about fighting Velorians. They described how the combatants couldn’t kill each other no matter how many blows they landed, so they resorted to draining each other of Orgone, weakening their opponent until they could squeeze their hearts to a stop. 

The draining took advantage of the fact that Supremis women had been genetically engineered with a dense array of nerves that ran from our breasts to our uterus, all to nurture the Galen infants that we were designed to carry. And, of course, they’d replaced the human breast with an identical-looking organ that stored the necessary Orgone. The Primes back on Aria had said it would take several Primal males to drain a well-endowed Velorian, and likely as not she’d suck them dry first. Protectors were highly trained in all the ways of Supremis combat, and they were stronger than even a Primal male. Plus they had pheromones that no Arion male could resist. Whoever succumbed to orgasmic fever first would lose the contest, given that’s when the energy flows were maximized.

But what if I didn’t resist? What if I willingly yielded all my power to the Captain, all in one orgasmic rush? Could I truly overload him? Could I exploit his arrogance and his very low regard for me. He might suggest such a tactic from a Protector, but he’d never see it coming from me. 

I had to push him into kal’lar, a state of sexual frenzy, and then I had to lose myself in ples’tathy, a state of continuous orgasm that would ensure my Orgone metabolism went wild. Given the twisted nature of Arion foreplay, the only way to push him out of control was to try to kill him. Lethal violence and violent sex had always been two sides of the same coin when it came to Primes.

I started by punching and kicking him with everything I had, the shockwaves from my blows knocking Marines off their feet up to a thirty meters away, but it still wasn’t enough to hurt this superman. He let me dangle at arm’s end as I flailed at him, treating me like a misbehaving child, enjoying my useless punching until I kicked him hard enough in the balls to have knocked a flitter truck a quarter mile. 

Instead of causing him pain, my kick only pushed him further into kal’lar. He growled and slammed my back up against the steel wall, jamming his legs between mine to lever them open as I fought back. Given I’d always yielded to him before, my resistance amped him up that much more, and that coin flipped over. Despite our frequent love-making, there was no gentleness now as he took me with a thrust so powerful that he smashed my backside halfway through the steel wall. I reached down to grab his dick and squeezed it with enough strength to crush solid steel, pushing him back at the same time, but he did not yield.  He fought back, trying to split me in half with his super-powered fucking. 

A Terran would have been torn to tiny shreds by his sexual violence, and a Betan would have been gutted from his thrusts, but his sexual fury merely pushed the buttons the Galen had engineered into all Supremis females. My eyelids fluttered and my eyes rolled up in my head as a wave of indescribable pleasure and desire washed over me. A million pleasurable nerve endings awoke deep inside the ring of muscle deep inside me that Terran women don’t even have. I bore down on him with enough strength to crush steel, locking him in place, and he began to shout hoarsely as the kal’lar took him. 

The berserker sexual frenzy of a Prime had started. 

Any fears I had left evaporated as my body lusted to keep him inside me. I wrapped my arms and legs around him to encourage him to take me deeper yet, wanting to devour him as ples’thay took me. I screamed our enough to shatter windows as I fell into a tsunami of orgasm, waves upon endless waves, my breasts flaring with blazing heat as my Orgone metabolism went into overdrive. 

He’d never seen me in ples’tathy before, and he roared like a lion celebrating his kill. He milked my endless orgasm by drawing my essence into himself, lightning bolts flashing as the wetted contact of our fucking conducting us together. My mind fragmented into a crescendo of fireworks as my orgasms overwhelmed me, each new sparkling flash of ecstasy thrilling me more than the previous one. My only conscious thought was that of emptying everything I was into him. 

I don’t know how long our fucking lasted, but somewhere in all those fireworks I heard him scream. An agonizing, horrible, high-pitched scream that sounded nothing like the Captain I knew. Struggling to focus my eyes, I saw but a blurry outline of his body — he was white-hot and blazing  with Orgone. Bolts of greenish-blue lightning flashed outward from every corner of his body. 

Some part of his crazed mind must have realized what I was doing to him, for he punched me hard enough to lift me off him and throw me across the room. I got up and tackled him, on top now, taking him to myself as I concentrated on feeding him power each wave of ecstasy releasing more. He swung his massive fist again, this time knocking me back hard enough to crush a heavy console beneath my back. I gripped him with every bit of strength inside me, adding the power of my arms and legs to desperately continue our violent fuck. 

He understood his danger now, and tried to blast me with his heat vision, but he was shaking so violently from energy overload that he couldn’t focus. He was starting to spasm so violently that it was all I could do to keep riding him, his violently flaming eyes cutting down three Betans. He had so much power available now that his next flash of heat vision melted a long slash in the hull, his eyeballs nearly exploding. 

The air around us instantly turned to fog as the compartment explosively decompressed. I grabbed a girder and hung on, my legs still wrapped around the Captain, holding him with my inner grip of steel. Around us, everything else was flying out the slash in the hull and into the void.

And that’s when I saw my chance. Looking through the gash in the hull, I saw a scout ship detaching from its docking arm only just few hundred yards away. Without a second thought, I pushed the Captain’s seizing body away from me and then punched him hard enough to slam him into the bulkhead across the room. Before he could grab me, I started running toward the gash, the last of the air carrying me along. I focused all my willpower into making one final leap at the edge, and the strength of my legs was enough to propel me a thousand meters upward, reaching and then passing the edge of the ship’s heavy artificial gravity field, designed to mimic the 5G field Arions lived in back on Aria. Now that I was out of that field, I was little more than an unguided ballistic projectile, floating toward the point in space where I hoped the scout ship would be when I got there.  

I was halfway to that spot when the scout started his engines at docking power. Instead of accelerating away, I felt as if I was the one slowing down as my rate of closure went to zero and then negative. In what was literally a last gasp, I tried a trick an old-timer had once told me, and turned my head to violently exhale the air in my lungs to push myself faster forward. I was enough — barely. 

I managed to hook my fingertip around an engine cooling coil just as the scout’s engines throttled up. I hung on for dear life as the engine nozzle shook violently while driving the scout forward at 20Gs, the blast of 10,000C plasma only inches from my face. Carefully, slowly, I pulled myself up until I could grab a larger conduit with my other hand. From there I climbed into the machinery space just ahead of the exhaust nozzles.  

Staring back at the shrinking battlecruiser, I saw a giant, glowing man standing in the slash in the hull, shaking his fist as sparks flew from every strand of hair on his head. The massive battlecruiser quickly shrank to little more than a dot to be lost in the vast star field.

I felt strangely small and cold now as the remains of my ples’tahy faded along with my adrenaline high. My teeth started chattering in the absolute cold. Hugging myself to stay warm, I found that my proud breasts had faded to almost nothing. I’d blasted the Captain with so much Orgone that I’d kept little for myself.  

I wouldn’t survive long out here without it. 

I had to get inside. I began to work my way out of the engineering space and toward the outer hull, planning on climbing up to the emergency airlock. I had time now. We were headed out into the void. 

Not for long. I was still entangled in pipes and wiring when the the pilot shut down the engines and pivoted the ship around to reignite the engines at full thrust to scrub off his speed. 

He was going to return to the battlecruiser. 

I had but one chance now. I had to take control of the scout and turn it back around, and I had to do that before anyone on the battlecruiser realized what was happening and targeted us with their HGARs. They could easily blast us out of the sky, even at this distance.

The emergency airlock was twenty meters above me, but there weren’t any handholds, just smooth metal. I experimented with jamming my fingers into the hull, one hand at a time, and found I was able to get a fingertip grip. I began to climb, finding it was easier going than I’d expected.

The crew heard the bangs as I made my handgrips and began frantically pulsing the engines, slamming the ship with 20Gs and then nothing, also spinning the ship with the verniers, hoping to throw me off. I hung on with my fingernails, my legs flailing around as I continued making new handholds, steadily climbing, all my attention focused on the metal skin directly in front of me. The pilot nearly tossed me off the ship twice, but I finally reached the airlock control and the strong anchoring handle next to it. For safety reasons, the outer doors of emergency airlocks could never be locked.   

Pulling myself into the small lock, I pushed the door closed behind me, only to be slammed to the floor as the engines blasted at 20Gs again. The ship began spinning faster now, throwing me around inside the airlock. It was all I could do to kick the Pressurize button with my toe as I bounced off the walls. Air began rushing into the lock.

Realizing he couldn’t keep me out, the pilot shut down the engines, which allowed me to get a good grip on the inner door handle as I waited for the pressure to equalize. They were going to be waiting for me, weapons ready. 

The only good news was that this tiny ship would never survive an internal GAR blast, and I doubted the crew was going to commit suicide. They wanted to be heroes and deliver me to the Captain.

Heroes I could handle.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on increasing my Orgone metabolism. I didn’t have much left, but I needed whatever I had to be circulating in my blood. I was going to have to hit hard and fast.

During the last seconds before the lock cycle completed, I allowed my thoughts to return to the tens of thousands of Terrans on their colony ships. They had no idea that their fate was about to be decided inside this little scout ship. I prayed I’d someday be able to tell them the tale. 

And then the door chimed and began to open…

To be continued…