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Chapter7: Crossover.

While the ship was large, it was not the largest super-liner in the space fleet, but I still managed to get lost at least three times on my way back to the cabin. My mind flooded with thoughts of my future, wondering what I had gotten myself into. Would I be able to fulfil so many unknown duties, so many assignments. Could I live my life with one of my - possibly primary - jobs being a courtesan. In my lost muddle of a mind I walked passed my door twice before I realized where I was.

Entering the room, I first noticed the extra package of devices, storage crystals and padds I ostensibly would need for the upcoming training, as well as some metal encased box that had a note saying not to open until told to. I shrugged the desire to know off, and checked the itinerary. I must have wandered for longer than I thought, noting that the itinerary on the screen showed less than a half hour before I needed to be at the transfer corridor to the other ship.

I packed as quickly as I could, since I didn't own much it did not take too long. I then found the nearby anti-grav trolley, loaded up my collection of goods, and headed down to the transfer point. As I turned the last corridor down to the connecting airlock, I hear the slight thunk that indicated the hard seal between ships. I had the impression of having arrived early, no one else there to let me know the exact details of my transfer, but it did not take long before a security officer and the chief medical officer arrived. I smiled at the large bear, and had to check myself from getting to aroused. Remembering the caution the counsellor told me, I had to check myself and reel in my feelings.

I distracted myself a little and looked over at the security officer. He was almost as tall as the brown bruin, but his sleek dark skin had a stark contrast against the lighter colours of the flight suit. Quite a bit thicker too, and a good part of it muscles, but well toned and hidden under the blubber of his orkin skin. He had one of those permanent smile-grimaces that many 'phin's had, and was definitely all business. He looked me and the goods over with a quick approval, before checking his padd for the details of the transfer.

I don't know how long I stood there and had not much to look at but sterile corridor and the two key figures on the ship. When the airlock's relatively quiet klaxon sounded indicating the door opening, we all looked over to see the arrival. The female was skinny and lanky, a look I would later understand of someone who only had lived in low to zero gravity for too long, possibly even having been born in space. The coon-kin looked over with a curious expression and she seemed barely adult, though such looks are deceiving when it comes to animal-kin due to the more quick growth and learning they go through. She seemed to look between all three of us, and settling on the trolley looked over to me and said, "So this is our passenger. You do know this is no pleasure cruise."

I did not know what to say, so just smiled back at her and nodded. In response the security officer came over and said, "Yes, she will be your passenger. Please put your hand print here." He held out the padd to her for the biometric signature. She hesitated, looked up to him, a look that spoke volumes of being unaccustomed to such procedure, then placed her hand on it. The orkin looked at the results of the scan and nodded. "She is in your hands at this point." before nodding to the bear and walking his separate way.

The doctor was next to speak, "You do not look like the CMO of your ship. I was under the impression she would be here for the specific instructions regarding this person."

I could swear the coon blushed before nodding and saying, trying to be as professional as possible, "My mother is a little under the weather and sent me in her stead. I am a junior medical officer, so I can take whatever instructions you have over to here when we are through."

He nodded and handed her a padd. "The instructions are here." he said, then looked to me. "You will have to check in daily on this flight to the sickbay for check up and follow up evaluations. Nothing out of the ordinary for someone new to space travel. Good luck." he ended with and with a wink, turned about and headed back in the direction of the larger ship's sickbay.

The coon looked at me, as if sizing me up, and waved a dismissive hand, "This way." We crossed a long hallway that extended from the larger ship to the smaller freighter. There were no windows due to the slip section design of the corridor so I did not get a look at the ship I was to be travelling on for this leg of my journey. Passing the halfway point I became aware of the gravity difference as we passed from one artificial gravity zone to another, the transport set to a lower level.

"You'll have to get your space legs in quick order. Due to our size, we don't have enough mass to generate any noticeable gravity without powered plating, and our power needs for everything else are great enough as is to waste power on holding gravity to earth normal, so you'll have go get used to the point six gee's we maintain most places of the ship." I nodded and took extra care of my movements, not wanting to accidentally disturb things, or move fast enough to leap or trip on the way. I could hear the hum of machinery once we reached the other side, and realized that the docking arm had two levels, as cargo was getting passed back and forth on a lower level. The sounds of the heavy machinery reverberated in the painted metal corridors of this ship, giving a tinny sound to just about every bang and bump.

It was not long before we reached the quarters assigned to me for this trip. To say small would be a bit of understatement. The room was designed for four people to stay but was barely a one person corridor with bunks and lockers slotted into the walls. I unloaded my items into the assigned locker, locked it with my biometric signature, and then tapped a recall button on the trolley, which floated on its own back to its place in the wall on the other ship.

"You'll actually have this room to yourself, as you're the only traveller we are taking on this time. Sometimes we have mining crew, or sometimes those with little money that still need a trip. They would work for the ship during the trip, doing whatever tasks that ships of any size often have need for, but this time, we don't have any. So... Feel free to pick whatever bunk you want. Though it's just you, don't worry about pulling etra duties, just the norm." She smirked and motioned to the bunks with the comment. "However, before you can rest these instructions say we need to get you scanned into our medical system. So, this way."

We walked past the airlock as the trolley floated back across, and she pressed a set of buttons to seal and pressurize the local side of the airlock. Several indicators lit up to indicate the cycling was complete and the liner was indicated the seals on the upper floor were ready for future release. We then went inward to the central corridor and headed toward the front of the ship. I started getting the impression that windows were a commodity on smaller ships, having not seen a porthole yet, but the ship had a comeliness that I could understand.

The walls were not elaborately covered with plastics to hide the plumbing and circuitry letting everything hang in neatly tied bundles to the bulkheads they routed through. Paint was chipped in spots from wear and buffed in others, giving some odd gradients to the colours - many caused by exposure of older very different colors of paint. Used to being on the streets as I had been, it did not surprise me much at all and I could feel more than see the sense of 'home' that the ship had to it. Side corridors branched off infrequently, leaving large areas that I assumed were individual cargo holds between everything.

I was caught slightly off guard at how long the ship seemed, for we had not reached our destination when an announcement came on the ship wide intercom. "Hang on, we're un-docking and then going to a minute long full throttle burst." I saw the coon act quickly, realizing she had actually grabbed a bulkhead the moment the initial ping of the announcement started. I barely grabbed on myself when there was a loud clunk as the docking locks released, a hiss as the airlock finished its seals as the ship flexed away from the liner. Then I felt my muscles tense as the gravity shot up, but in the wrong direction as the engines fired. No inertial dampening, or not much, I thought to myself, but the startling realization was that I barely felt the need to hold onto the bulkhead. I felt stable even under this movement, and realized I had instinctively moved my legs into position for the maneuver.

When the burn was done, and we were travelling at an impressive speed of just shy of a kilometer-per-second, and still accelerating but under less power, she let go and had a quizzical look on her face. "Maybe you already have space legs, but I still believe you're pretty green." She giggled and led me down the corridor, which seemed shorter now that we were moving and in barely a couple dozen more steps arrived at the medbay.

Her mother I could see quickly why she was indisposed at the meting, for she had the obvious bulge to her belly and much more prominent bosom of being in her later term of pregnancy. Though shorter than her daughter and having a bit of a travel worn air to her, she was still quite lovely, dressed in barely a gown that draped lightly over her body. She reached to a table and picked up a pair of glasses, which partly surprised me considering the alternative technologies for eye care, but I shrugged it off, after all this ship probably did not have the facilities for such a surgery, and they either did not have the funding or the time to take a visit to get the work done.

"So... You're the passenger we're to carry." She looked me up and down with eyes that acted like medical scanners, taking in what felt like every hair, every twitch of muscle as I stood in front of her. "Conversion, high quality by the looks, though there are definitely some other...." her voice trailed off as she noticed her daughter was handing the padd to her. She took it, like a doctor would a clipboard form an assistant and appraised the information. She held one corner up to her eye and I could tell it was not her near-sightedness, but a retinal scan to get access to some of the information. "Oh... Really..." She muttered, glancing through her glasses to me, then under them to the padd. "Sit." She said, and it was her daughter that indicated the medical bed.

I clambered onto the small bed, and laid back. The display over my head lit up as the automatic sensors started reading my vitals. I heard her tap the instruments a couple times, paging through the information and saw from the corner of my eye her point some of it out to her daughter. "Would you believe it?" she commented at one point, and frowned suddenly as she read something. On which instrument I could not tell, but I looked over at her. "Nothing to worry about. The informatino says this modification is stable, but I don't know how that can be." I kept staring at her, and she paused to notice my look. "Oh. They haven't told you." She looked at the padd again, as if looking for instructions whether she could pass information on or not. "I suppose they think it safe since we're the last ship you'll be on before the asteroid base we're dropping you, along with half our cargo, off at. So. How much did they tell you?"

I had to think for a moment, and shrugged mentally. "Not much more than I could tell touching myself and looking in a mirror." I had to admit, disappointment apparent in my voice.

"I suppose they felt there were spies everywhere, and I can understand why. It says here that you were not told due to being followed on earth, on the launch ship, on the station, and possibly even on the superliner. However, they know you're the only biological transferred to this ship, as our own scans and theirs of all the freight match. And all the freight we picked up is not in a pressurized hold, so we'd have an easier time detecting if something was hiding in a container waiting to get out. You're skunk, but not just skunk. They mixed in bits of genetics the likes of which I've never considered, but they comment that the tests showed you were a viable candidate." She paused for a moment further, and looked at something more before continuing, "How much do you know about the intergalactic genetic knowledge trade restrictions?"

I was dumbstruck, having never really heard about it. My body language made it apparent my lack of knowledge.

"Well, to put it simply, there was a scientific communication of genetics with other species so that habitats could be made, and cross species diseases could be understood. All straight forward, and every medical student has to know at leas the basics of this histroy. "As part of it were restrictions on how much genetic cross-breeding could be performed, how much insertion of genes from one race could be given to another. For the most part it keeps things locked to a single planet, hence why animal-human hybrids are common, with animals from earth and humans. There are also some species out there that are more curious about interbreeding, and so have proposed a limited amount of genetic tweaking to go on with their own genome. There is a race in particular that is very curious about this due to their own nature, but they also have the highest restrictions on who is allowed to perform such experiments. Humans are one race they have all but banned all tweaks, due to our own mutology."

My head was swimming, I could already tell that she was going to say that I had been tweaked with some of this genome, but I was a bit apprehensive as to what it could be.

"No one in our race can properly pronounce their name, but we call them chameleoids for short, since that's their primary genetic mutation. They can limitedly shapeshift." She tapped some information on the bio-readouts of the bed and the padd. "From this information," she continued, her voice like a giddy school girl. "and this is very spectacular, you already exibited some genetic patterns that were already close, so they tweaked it all in."

"All?"

"You have spliced into you, not just the predominant skunk features, very pretty by the way, but some segments of a race called the Velorax in our voice approximation, which are reptilian. And a decent chunk of the chameleoid's dna." She tapped down, skimming over note after note. "Most of the rest are simple tweaks, memory enhancement, vision expansion - you can probably see a little into infra-red and ultraviolet - asthma correction, epilepsy blocking..." her voice trailed off again, and she had to blink back and forth, switching displays on the bed, I started feeling a little frantic with all the delays on this information telling, eager to just finally know what had all been done. "And psionic gain. This is the most all-encompassing tweak I have ever seen. I wonder who did some of this engineering." She hummed a bit as she took in the volume of information. "They haven't been able to re-rate your psi yet, according to this, and they are eager to know the results of a lot of this. No wonder they want such scans every day."

I heard the bed shut down, and sat up, gazing at the two of them. I could feel the odd mix of relief and frustration hit me at once. Relief to know what had been done, frustration because now there were new unknowns. How high was my psi rating, could I actually assume different forms at will? I recalled what little I knew of the chameleoids. They were a xenophobic race, not because they couldn't fit in, but past experiences had told them not to trust others as they had been made slaves several time in their history due to their abilities. I recall that humans, and their own history with slavery actually had helped the relationship with their race, but they were slow and cautious. Considering their life spans easilly covered a thousand years - though no one really knew how long one lived for - it made sense that they felt they had time to spare. Perhaps that is a reason we even had part of their genetic pattern to work with. Psi rating increase, the counselor had mentioned about that, but I wondered what kind of rating I could have. If I had started with latent, and it wasn't gone, then I was at least latent. She had commented about leaking, which I believe suggested that I was stronger than simply latent. It sturck me how long I had sat there with introspection and being stared at by the two coons.

"Ineresting," the mother said, as she hopped up onto a table. "We have transported almost a dozen recent converts, and you are the only one who seems comfortable in your new skin. Most are itching from phantom sensations or their fur, or can't seem to sit or lay without their tail getting in the way. I've had to deal with nearly a hundred sprained tails from that." She chuckled in a bemused way.

I had to supress a laugh, but failed somewhat, the giggle still coming out. "I guess that information sheet doesn't have my extended history. I suppose it's easier to say part of my personality has flip-flopped. I used to be a strong introvert, and now... Well, I've had more sex in the past couple days than I have in my entire life, and well.. I find myself thinking back and wondering why I was so shut in. This... This just feels more natural."

She laughed at my honestness and openness, "Considering the diametric shift from male to female, yes, I could see that personality swing." She looked down but only briefly, "Says here you've been given a marker to block ovulation, and with the incredible immune system from the reptilian regeneration youv'e been given, I'd say enjoy. You can't get pregnant without the marker being removed, and it's likely you're immune to just about every disease of every species, or at least quite resistant to it." She examined the pad with an intense look of being handed some grand experiment to toy with and pouted. "Too bad I'm not to investigate."

That took me by surprise, I never suspected about trans-species diseases, trans-galactic diseases for that matter. I suppose I expected part of the regiment given me would be innoculations, but to have it done at the genetic level was almost too much.

"Well. Scans are done, and stored. I'll keep this datapadd, as the results have to be added to the considerable log. Sandy, you can take her on the brief tour." she said to her daughter, then looking back at me, "I doubt they let you know how long, but you'll be with us for twenty days. We're not a fast ship, can't make our own hyperspace tunnels and have to rely on natural or static jump points, and have many other stops before we arrive at your destination. Sure we could get there directly in a few days, but distrupting our regular circuit would cause undue attention to us."

I hopped up onto my feet and noticed that neither of them were wearing shoes, I kicked off mine, and the floor felt good under my footpads. I flexed my toes and took note of the naturalness of the sensation, as well as the increased control of my steps without the shoes interfeering. Picking up my shoes I commented, "Guess I've got a lot to learn." I took half a step toward the door with intent to return my shoes before pausing. "Apart from the daily checkins, what tasks are asked of me?"