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Precious Cargo

by

Dissident Love

August to September 2017

A Short Dalliance

For My Patreon Peeps

1. The Wake

Virgil rotated slowly in the command pod, an ovoid space large enough for an Old Earth bus. A wide black strip, lit with countless tiny twinkling diodes, passed above him (for whatever counted as 'above' in interstellar space and zero gravity), ran down the far lobe, and then passed beneath him once again. When gravity returned, some five months hence, one of those would once again become the 'floor' and one of them would become the 'ceiling', but for now he felt as though he were occupying a brilliantly and colorfully illuminated Easter egg, which happened to be wearing a formal cumberbund.

"Hehe... cumberbund," he chuckled to himself, adjusting his own protective null-G outfit. Except for the high-friction socks on his four immense footpaws and a pair of black 'shorts' stretched over his distant hindquarters, he was nude except for the elastic wrap keeping his, ah, more delicate portions tucked up close. He'd already had two incidents where an indecent swing of his sheath had resulted in some rather alarming buttons being pressed, complete with alarms and warnings from Emcom.

He was virtually the only sentient, aware individual for trillions of miles; the conventional ideas of nudity and decency had been chucked out the nearest airlock, metaphorically speaking.

The hare continued to rotate, his long axis roughly aligned with that of the pod. He'd been rotating for close to three hours. Seventeen more minutes, according to one of the lightstrips passing beneath him, and he would beat his old record. He'd drifted close to the command panel regulating ship's communications and power transmission systems, but he had an easy meter to go before he was in danger of butt-dialing a shipwide power-down.

He tucked his legs in close, just in case.

"JINX!"

Virgil jerked... but managed to keep from touching the sides of the pod. Or the top. Or the bottom. This is already getting annoying, he thought. I miss when 'up' meant something. The good old days. "That's cheating," he muttered, frowning at the little microphone hovering near his muzzle. A tiny oclens drifted next to his left eye, held in place by almost imperceptibly faint magnetic fields. Once they were in a gravity well again they'd have to switch to the wired models, but he was rather enjoying the magic of true wireless; he'd always found himself getting chafe marks from the regular models. "I don't yell at you when it's YOUR turn."

"You do so!" squawked a prettily indignant voice in his ear. "You told me a wire was drifting!"

"I didn't yell it, though! I said it very calmly!"

Virgil stuck out his tongue, and on his oclens flashed a short looping video of Pris doing the same thing back to him. He wished, he dearly wished he could throw that video up on one of the big screens, or maybe the holotower in the lounge, but he knew all too well that getting even that much of a virtual view of his fiancee was dangerous. He'd do a hell of a lot worse than just bump a few buttons if THAT happened. Again.

Seventy-seven thousand tons of cutting-edge technology separated Virgil and Pris, and really less actual distance than a football field considering the configuration of the ship, but they might as well truly be a trillion miles apart. They'd not see eachother until planetfall. Five months.

"Five months," he sighed.

"Five months," she echoed in his ear. He might have thought it nothing more than a crackle of interference, but the faintest little ripple of longing in her voice sent a thrill through his body that started his stubby little tail whirring.

Imperceptibly at first, that motion started his rump on a slight but complementary rotational path around his midsection, and thirteen minutes later he collided with the Early Warning Coronal Mass Ejection Panel.

"DAMMIT!"

"I win," grinned the tiny mauve figure projected onto his oclens. "That's, what... NINE to three, now?"

"You're tiny!" he protested.

"Ah ah ah, you promised no whining."

"I'm not whining!" he pouted.

"You're sexy when you pout."

"You're evil."

"Ha ha, you love me."

"I can love evil. It's my one flaw."

"ONE?"

"Don't make me come over there, woman!"

They both laughed, and smiled, and completely unable to see one another, they frowned in unison.

"Five months."

"Five months, babe."

"OK, I'm gonna... gonna sign off. Read a book or something."

"OK."

"Beep me if you need anything."

Pris smiled again, a tiny, perfect little doll-figure in his eye. Barely a third of an inch tall, the resolution was too low for him to make out much in the way of detail, but he could tell that she was hugging her arms around herself. He slipped his paws around his own thick chest, and squeezed.

"I love you."

"I love you, too."

His oclens blinked with a bright yellow star, and then went transparent once more. The command pod suddenly felt... small. The air was a perfect eighteen degrees, though it was a little stuffy with the vents shut off for their daily game of Spin On It. "Emcom, vents, on."

His fur ruffled as a hundred hidden louvers opened, fresh oxygen flooding his lungs. "Emcom, doors open to lounge."

The black door to his backside (at least THAT would still have meaning in null-G!) opened soundlessly, and Virgil carefully navigated his way through the opening. It had been designed to allow two crew members to pass through easily, though that was before neural dialysis and the wonderful genomics machines had done their work.

Virgil, a shining and sterling example of the Seeds Of Life Breeder program, nearly had to squeeze his bulk through that doorway, and even that much friction caused him to swell up enough in response that he genuinely worried about one day getting stuck.

---

The mighty vessel Seedy McShipface hurtled through the near-total vacuum of interstellar space, the recipient of the most popular ship-naming poll in the history of the colonization program. It perhaps didn't 'hurtle', exactly, having nothing larger than elemental hydrogen and millimicron-sized flecks of methane ice around to give any sense of scale or velocity, but Virgil knew it was travelling a very healthy fraction of the speed of light. It had been slowing down for the last two years, but the rate of deceleration was climbing geometrically as they dropped towards Nirvana 41.

Ok, not 'dropped', exactly, since there was no up or down...

Virgil thumped his head against one of the long, narrow and foot-thick plexi windows that wrapped around the lounge. Fully fifty percent of the lounge's shell was such ultra-strong window, such that if you shut off all the lights and squinted, or purposefully unfocused your eyes, you could trick yourself into imagining you were simply floating through the void yourself.

He'd tried it once, and fallen asleep in null-G. When he'd woke up he'd nearly given himself a heart attack from the shock, there being nothing within arm's reach or leg's reach to touch.

Everyone on the mission spent six months as 'operations', in shifts of two. Due to the sensitive nature of many of the ship's living cargo, these two-person teams were each assigned a section of the ship, which was, in the simplest terms possible, designed as an extremely futuristic and art-deco-looking H-shape. Solar sails in a twenty mile by twenty mile screen stretched out almost invisibly 'ahead' of the vessel, absorbing distant light energy, as well as combustible hydrogen.

Virgil's padless paws brushed against the windows, where all this was lost on him. His eyes were only on the opposing ship's hull, and his bride-to-be wandering around somewhere within.

As had been requested, they had been allowed to run operations shifts together. Before, their first turn coming up near the start of the centuries-long voyage, it had been a snap to make it through the days only able to communicate by ship's coms. Pris's genomics upgrades were largely focused around strength and dexterity, ocular capacity and prefrontal cortex 'tweaks', a word that had always filled him with visions of supervillains poring over his fiancee's brain. The Pris that had awoken for their first shift was virtually identical to the one that had been tucked away into her neural-D pod.

Virgil's first shift also hadn't been too terribly disorienting. A hare taur as well as one of the mission's Chief Geologists, his assignments on Nirvana would be mostly academic. They had younger, stronger, keener crewmembers who would be handling field duty, collecting samples and reporting back to him directly. Consequently, his genomics upgrades had been designed with a fairly sedentary lifestyle in mind. The first time he'd woken up, for his and Pris's first shifts, he felt as though he'd gained some weight all over, but it hadn't been anything he'd been unprepared for.

One month prior, waking up for the mission's final shift, Virgil had woken up in an alien's body, and that body was making every interminably ticking second a hellish nightmare of aching loneliness.

"Pris?"

"Mmm hmmm?"

The lounge was designed to hold a hundred people, though it would be empty until they passed by Nirvana 41-3b's largest moon. That tertiary braking procedure would signal the final stage of automated orbiting, and trigger the wake-up sequence for the entire payload of 130 passengers. 132, counting the current pair of overseers. "You think about Old Earth much?"

A pause. Then, "I did. For the first week."

"Me too."

"I started crying a few times when I was talking to you."

"I know."

"You knew?"

"You... you have these little pauses in your speech when you're crying but you're trying to act like you're not. You did that when Benton had to go to the vet. Remember?"

Pris sniffed on the far side of the communication. "I can't hide much from you, can I?"

"Sorry. I'll try to blink more."

She laughed, and his tail started to wag again. "Yeah, I thought about Old Earth a lot. Everyone we knew is gone, but... I mean, everyone anyone ever knew before we were even born is gone. That's the way, uh uh, like the song says. They've probably gone on to do great things. Remembering us as the ass-kicking heroes that punched the stygian void right in the face, and then filled it with babies."

It was Virgil's turn to laugh, a hearty sound that started his whole barrel dancing in null-G. "Fuck, I miss you," he managed when he could draw breath. "You always know how to make the total absence of civilization fun."

"Bah, civilization. What's it ever done for us?"

Virgil glanced down between his forelegs. "I can... think of a few things."

"You're looking at your junk again, aren't you?"

"What? No! What?"

"Liar," Pris giggled. "You have your own... meaningful pauses, too, you know."

"Yeah, well... let's just say I'm not ENTIRELY looking forward to being in a gravity well again."

"Really? I am. Gosh, my new tits are so so full and_perky,_ I bet even escape velocity wouldn't make these puppies sag."

"Gaaaahhhh," Virgil moaned, closing his eyes. "You're an evil, evil woman."

"I'm squeezing them right now! Sproing, sproing, sproing-"

"PRIS!"

Her laugh was now nearly a cackle. "Gods, I'm sorry, baby. Come on. Five months. You can do it. You were always the strong one."

He twisted his body once more, taking in the significantly larger expanses of fur covering his body. "Yeah, that was before I had three hundred years of Breeder protocol pumped into me."

"Uh, phrasing."

"I stand by my choice of words," he said solemnly, placing his paw against the window. The ship was just, over the course of the next week, passing through the orbit of Nirvana 41's outermost dwarf object, a hobo planet that had just been dubbed 'Nah'. Nah was on the far side of the star system at the moment, so it was a... rather pointless bit of trivia. He decided it didn't bear mentioning.

"You know we're actually, technically, within the Nirvana 41 system now?" she said, the lilting in her voice that she always used when she was trying to pique his interest. "The outermost object, that ice hobo, is-"

Virgil was chuckling again, his chest hitching. "I just... just got thinking... about that..."

"And? It was hilarious?"

"No," he managed, cheeks flapping. "I decided it was too... too dumb to mention."

"Well, yeah, but you LIKE dumb space rock things!"

"You don't!"

"Of course not, but I like what you like, so I'm throwing some dumb space rock things your way!"

"People in glass ships... shouldn't... throw..." He trailed off, his stifled laughter draining out of him, replaced only with a huge, lonely sigh. "I want to see your face."

"I know, sweetie," Pris murmured. "But... well, the last time you threw me on the big screen-"

Virgil glanced down at his undercarriage again. "Yeah, I remember."

"It's hardly fair to me, either! I caught some shots of you on the Encom internals feed, and... well, let's just say I'm seeing the appeal of yoga."

The bunnytaur snorted. "The doctors promised-"

"Oh, I know, they promised a lot of things, but all of their models are theoretical. They didn't hang around for three hundred years of clinical trials, you know. They stuck us in the tubes, played Lego with our DNA and shot us into space."

"You're not... having second thoughts, are you?"

When Pris spoke next, it was with the throaty growl that instantly caused his tail to flip straight up, his ears swinging to match, and his sheath to thump almost painfully against his barrel's sternum. "Do I sound like I'm having second thoughts?"

"N-no, ma'am," Virgil swallowed, recognizing the predatory rumble.

"You might be new and improved, big fella, but we've got a mission."

"Yes, ma'am." He licked his lips, feeling sweat beading on his forehead. That was extra strange, since he was pretty sure rabbits didn't have sweat glands there...

"We're going to make orbit, we're going to land, and then you are going to make me a mommy!"

It was a little peculiar, words of such tenderness being spoken with a near-violent snarl, but he could picture the expression on her face in high-def. His heart pounded with not just desire, but with deep, tempestuous love. They'd postponed having a family for more than fifteen years, applying for the mission, joining the mission, preparing for the mission. Fifteen years plus nearly three hundred, if you want to get technical, and he knew Pris would get technical if they needed to. They were thoroughly middle-aged when they went into the tubes, but now they had brand new bodies barely out of their teen years, with unfathomable strength and vitality.

"As you command," he purred, blinking away a tear.

Pris's breathing was heavy on the other end of the comm, and it was only after an audible shudder that her voice returned to normal. "This body... seems to have some drives of its own. I think I just broke an aluminum swivel chair."

Virgil frowned. "Uhm... how-"

"Thighs."

"I... see."

"Goodnight, Virg."

"Goodnight, Pris."

When things got too heated over the comms, the twinned goodnights were the code for emergency hangup. Sometimes, they'd had to double-goodnight before breakfast was even over. Right now, Pris would no doubt be heading to the showers, where she would lose herself in a cloud of lavender-scented steam, and some of the more waterproof vibrating spanners.

Virgil, on the other hand, was at the mercy of the Breeder protocol. He drifted through the lounge, completely naked and floating as free as it was possible to be. In a few short months he'd be back in a gravity well, probably for the rest of his life, and although his new body was spectacularly strong, with muscles wrought from three centuries of the finest genetic engineering, he was still going to have his issues.

Before going into the tubes, Virgil had been a sturdy six-footer, with another twelve feet of wide, low-slung body behind him. An adult life of tenured professorship hadn't left too much room for sports, adventure, exercise... really, anything beyond running for class when he was invariably late. Rabbits were supposed to be fast, but he'd never been what you'd call a 'physical' kind of guy. At least until he'd met a visiting lecturer named Priscilla Breeze.

He'd started their first date by presenting her with a bouquet of roses and a bottle of wine, before escorting her out for an expensive candle-lit dinner. Virgil was, unfortunately, the sort of person who thought that was still 'the thing to do'.

Their date had ended with the surprisingly strong marten pinning him to his kitchen cupboards and doing some very... exciting things to him. Things that he'd always imagined he'd do someday, but never quite got around to. Hot, wet things, that left him sore all over the next day, and wanting to do it all over again.

Pris was very, very happy to oblige.

But now... his hind legs paddled uselessly in the air, sending his new attributes to jostling loudly. He was now standing close to eight feet tall, his slender shoulders and stout but smooth chest now burdened with muscle. His barrel was another eighteen feet, still wide and low but his hips and rump had filled out in a manner he found feminine but still quite fetching. His legs were certainly longer, for all the good that did in space, but he had discovered almost instantly why that would be important once they made planetfall.

He'd never been a 'big bunny', but just by virtue of being a taur he'd been big enough for his smattering of anthro girlfriends. Now, though, he looked like... like... well, to be honest, he didn't know ANYONE back on Old Earth who'd ever carried the sorts of proportions he was now endowed with. Natural evolution probably made this sort of thing impossible. Enter the genomics, however, and you ended up with with a bunny designed to populate an entire planet.

His sheath was easily as big as his entire barrel had been before the tubes, a twelve-foot long mass of tightly-packed flesh and shaggy, silky brown fur. Only the hind half lay webbed snugly against his belly, leaving the forward six feet to swing and sway as the forces of momentum and inertia saw fit. Once he was back in a gravity well, he'd need the cumberbund 24/7 just to take a single step!

Even more shocking, though he was now gravitating towards 'exciting' as the word of choice, was his sac. Those two orbs, glowing pure velvety white in the lounge's faint illumination, were so large that some of the smaller side doors were now forever off-limits to him. They were hard to measure, by himself at least, but some cunning experimentation had shown them to be somewhere close to five feet across, but he was positive he could feel them flexing, almost _straining_when he thought about Pris.

They couldn't get much BIGGER, could they? How many babies do they NEED at one time?!

Hindlegs pawing grumpily at the sac he couldn't drain, forelegs hugging the sheath that would not drop, he started to pilot himself towards his sleep pod. He would no doubt have dreams about Pris, and he wanted to be somewhere that he knew couldn't be damaged by his... nocturnal exertions.

"Five months," he sighed.

Part 2. The Door

It was difficult to sleepwalk when one existed in zero gravity, but he was finding it didn't seem to stop him.

The vessel had passed the system's next planetary ring, with nothing more than a slight decrease in the efficiency of the solar sail due to damage from dust registering on the monitors. That decrease was more than offset by the steadily increasing intensity of the light falling upon the vast square mileage of the sail, and the ship's negative acceleration could now be measured in milli-Newtons, rather than micro-Newtons.

"You know, that's the equivalent to a tennis ball being tossed against the prow of a battleship," Pris noted.

"Yeah, but this is, like, a science tennis ball. And there's an infinite number of them. And each one gets a little bit bigger."

"You sound like you've put a lot of thought into these balls."

"You have no idea."

They chuckled together, Virgil doing his best to keep the hint of desperation out of his voice. That morning... well, technically, the 'night before', time being regulated by shop computer more than anything, he'd woozily swum out of a pleasant dream to discover himself in his pod's main galley. It was a vast, industrial affair, intended to cook meals for more than a hundred genetically-engineered super-colonists. Literally tons of concentrates stuffed cupboards, freeze-dried fruits and vegetables in robotic gantries that could provide one of ten thousand pouches at a moment's notice.

In one hand, he'd been holding two-thirds of a reconstituted egg salad sandwich.

He hadn't brought up the issue with Pris, but he had spent quite a bit of time consulting the archives concerning neural-D and their genetic modifications. The vast, vast majority of the changes were purely physiological, but naturally there could not be such extensive upgrades to vital organs and musculature without severely affecting, if not downright compromising, the nervous system. Naturally, the brain was left as untouched as possible, except where such changes were well-known, reliable and predictable. Virgil's memory was enormously improved, and he found he could close his eyes and picture spaces, objects and concepts in three dimensions far clearer than at any point in his past.

'Sleep' hardly got a mention, except to indicate that large amounts of normal, regular REM sleep, were required to adapt the 'old mind' to the 'new brain'. Pris and Virgil had been sleeping eighteen hours out of every twenty-seven-point-six, the solar day of their eventual new homeworld, but even then they found themselves napping often. Virgil never felt TIRED, and Pris likewise claimed to feel an abundance of energy at all times, but every now and then they seemed to just feel the urge to close their eyes, curl up, and rest.

Virgil had woken up in the lounge a few times. Twice, he'd been in the huge anterior storage bays. Twice, in his bathroom, and most recently the shower mister had already been activated. And just that early morning, or however it could be described when the sun was always directly ahead, in the kitchens, in the middle of a meal of three-hundred-year-old egg-and-cress on rye.

The somnambulation, coupled with the relentless dreams of Earth-that-was inevitably transitioning to sweaty-palmed, stomach-churning scenes of passion that he could scarcely comprehend, let alone remember, was making his waking hours more stressful by the day.

"How's things going over there, otherwise?" Pris continued, unaware of his private little reverie.

"Whatcha mean?"

"I mean... I keep trying to dust. It's been three centuries, there should be some dust SOMEWHERE, but... nothing!" If anything, Pris sounded distraught, but with a subtle good humor. "I want to clean. I always used to clean, used to putter, back home. You'd be in your study, I'd be in mine, and the house would be clean, but... if I was sick of grading papers, I'd-"

"Start rearranging shit," Virgil finished dryly.

"I hardly think a collection of acknowledgements and awards we'd amassed over a period of three decades 'shit', dear."

"Fine. Rearranging pretty shit."

She was silent for a long moment, before the snuffling snort that he'd grown to love filled his ears. His oclens was off, thank goodness, or he'd have immediately tried zooming in on what that laugh did to her breasts. "I guess it was, wasn't it? They're all gone, now. I left them all to Leeroy. Gods knows what he did with them. Probably let the grandkids use them for target practice."

"Pew pew! Die, Esteemed Associate Director Of Pre-Anthropological Studies Of The Year Award!"

"You're terrible."

"That award was merely gold plated. It doesn't deserve you."

Pris sniffed, and sighed. "Four months."

"Four months," he agreed.

"I need to go dust something."

"Of course you do."

"This is Pris, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off."

"You know, no-one else on this ship is even going to get that reference," Virgil grinned.

"Yes, they will. We've got more than seventeen thousand movies in long-term."

"In that case, you're going to scare the everloving stuffing out of them."

"Good. Goodnight, babe."

"Goodnight," Virgil managed, throat tightening.

There was the faintest of clicks in his ear, and then Virgil was alone in the colossal, cavernous storage bay that created the bottom-heavy bulk of his side of the H-shaped ship. It was only really 'vast' because he knew on an intellectual level that it had an internal occupiable space similar to the largest soccer stadiums back on Earth-that-was. He'd even helped load it, in shifts that had taken three full weeks, back in high Earth orbit. It held tens of thousands of labelled and indexed parcels, sorted into huge containers, which were themselves stacked and organized for the most sensible unloading pattern when they eventually arrived at Nirvana.

The space was vast had it been empty, but floating in the approximate middle of it he felt as though he were in some demented suburban Escher nightmare, where the skyscrapers sprouted not just from the floor, but the walls and ceilings.

He panned his flashlight across what he had come to call the Underwear State Building, a dizzying and subtly spiralled tower of tanks and containers that held, to the best of his knowledge, clothes and raw materials for textiles. With no dust and a meticulously clean atmosphere, the flashlight created almost no visible cone, the brilliant disc of white scooting back and forth like a glowing superfluid.

His hindpaws, what Pris always referred to as his 'flufferthumpers', cupped his tender and not-quite-aching nethers. He had expected some sort of soreness, a sensation of deep-down bruising, but there was only the faintest of tingling and pressure, and a distant pleasure. The pleasure seemed to be just over the horizon, more of a promise of delight than anything strictly enjoyable in and of itself. It was taunting him, luring him, and every day his sac, that marvel of Breeder technology, swelled a smidgen larger.

He'd given up measuring everything. After filling an entire page with raw numbers and data concerning diameter, circumference, volume, weight, rate of expansion and theoretical tensile limits, both for his tawny-gold testes and his irresponsibly large sheath, he'd tossed the entire notebook into the spacer and vented it to the interplanetary void.

He gripped the cord wrapped around his waist and started to pull himself back towards the fore of the ship. There was no use dwelling on thoughts like that. He was a Breeder, one of the rare males to take up that mantle, and it carried a great responsibility. He would be instrumental in populating Nirvana, for creating the all-important G2, the Second Generation. The First Generation were the colonists themselves, born of Earth-that-was and simply modified to suit any possible environment, any danger, any extremes, and thrive.

The Second Generation would be truly their own species... honestly, they'd be aliens. They would be born of Nirvana, and their maturity would be guided by the planet itself. The atmosphere, the pressure, the temperatures, even the levels of background radiation, would shape their genetic structure. They would vastly outnumber the First Generation by a hundred to one, but even then would only number what would be considered a small town back home.

The Third Generation... those born of the first natives... they would inherit an entire world.

It was an awesome responsibility.

"And yet," he grumbled dourly, drifting through null-G and already starting a slow forward tumble due to his center of gravity shifting, "I'd fork over a year's worth of desserts just to be able to paw myself off in the shower."

---

They had just passed into saying 'three months' when they broke communications, when Virgil blearily opened his eyes and saw that he was at the huge, irising pressure doors that separated the two halves of Seedy McShipface.

He frowned. He'd been in his quarters, he knew that. He'd been velcroed to the wall, for safety purposes, and hopefully to cut down on his late-night wanderings. It had worked, as far as he knew; no more had he woken up in the kitchen, or the lounge, or the command pod.

Until now, apparently.

"Mcmm, mucklens," he yawned, willing his lips to move.

Emcom, the ship's AI, blerped once to signify that the command was interpreted but not understood. There were some more beeps, ones that sounded oddly familiar, but he couldn't quite place them in his current state. He'd been having a dream, a GOOD dream for once. Not that most of his dreams weren't good... most of them had been the sort of vibrant and tail-straightening sexual escapades that Pris had enjoyed educating him, and while those were certainly enjoyable, he tended to wake up feeling restless and wrung out.

No, this dream had been soft, and tender, and pleasant. Pris had been there, indisputably and undoubtedly Pris, though in her new spaceborne body. Virgil held her in his arms, one newly-enhanced paw cradling her hefty rump, a rump that now flexed not with decades of sedentary plumpness but with muscles he ached to feel around him. Her tiny, sharp teeth were buried in his ruff, blunted claws digging into his heavy new shoulders, but neither his lovely fiancee nor the self-rabbit of his dream moved. They seemed frozen in tableau, and yet he could remember every tiny sensation of weight and pressure and more than anything, eclipsing even her teeth gnawing at his chest, he could feel himself finally_unsheathing, straining and swelling flesh pushing forth past the boundaries of his drum-tight velvety wrapping, more and more with each passing moment until he was _sure it had to have been a dream because no-one, not even a Breeder, could be so full...

"Emcom, oclens," he managed, and instantly the tiny disc drifted out from behind his ear and settled into position just beyond his left eye. He was connected to the ship's systems now, and his first task was to check the time and see just how much sleep he still had to go for the night.

He wasn't expecting to hear Pris mid-shout. "-UCKING WAKE UP, VIRGIL! WAKE THE FU... IS THAT YOUR OCLENS?! ARE YOU FINALLY ONLINE?!"

"Pris?" he said sharply, looking around. He was in the portal that connected the halves of the ship, a structurally impregnable tube large enough to fit a decent-sized bouncy castle through. In the event of some sort of catastrophic failure, it was meant to facilitate the complete evacuation of goods and personnel from one half to the other. At the moment, it was lit only by eight radial strands of faint tracklighting, and the four brights on the door itself that signified it was ready.

Ready for what?

"YES IT'S FUCKING ME! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

"I was sleep-walking. Floating. Sleep-paddling? Maybe swimming-"

"TO. THE. DOOR."

"What?"

It was only then that he glanced down and saw that his hand was still punching commands into the bright blue console set into one of the door's irising panels. His ID was called up in the corner, and he'd apparently already initiated pressure equalization between this door, and the identical mirror door about ten yards beyond.

"I... I don't know?"

"WELL STOP IT!"

He pulled his hand back, suddenly worried that the Breeder programming he'd been given had perhaps done more than affect the conscious synaptic functions of his mind, but perhaps the behavioural centers as well. He'd been in neural-D for, what, three hundred years? The conscious synaptic functions were all under computer control, artificial environments designed to maintain intellect, personality and sanity without awareness of the passage of time. The deeper, instinctual parts of the brain were beyond neural-dialysis, and they still influenced those artificial environments to some degree. It would stand to reason, he postulated, that those areas inextricably entwined with genetic memory, with habits and reflexes and pure animal instinct, might find themselves subject to the guided ministrations of the genetic recombination process.

The door dinged and began to iris open, drawing Virgil's attention to the fact that he hadn't actually pulled his hand back. He'd ordered it to, but it, for lack of a better word, hadn't listened.

"WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, VIRGIL."

"I DON'T KNOW!" he said, for the first time sounding genuinely upset. Sure, he was in a trillion dollars of old-Earth hardware diving directly towards a distant yellow sun at a fraction of the speed of light that would have made even his grandfather scoff, but the more immediate concern was the fact that he had evolved an autopilot, but not the ability to turn it off. "LOOK, IT'S... it's just the door, right? Encom, reseal portside transit iris."

Encom blerped again. "Iris obtruction," chimed the pleasantly neutral vocaloid.

"What? No there isn't-"

"YOUR FAT ASS IS ALREADY THROUGH THE DOOR!"

"HEY! My ass is NICE now-"

His new brain might have been capable of great things, great concepts held at one time, feats of mathematics and logic that he'd have needed to rent computer time for back home, but it was still being taxed by carrying on a discussion with an invisible, incensed betrothed while simultaneously trying to observe a body that was obeying its own commands. His huge paws were paddling through the iris, great porcelain-clad titanium petals receding into the airlock housing around him. His forepaws were equipped with magmitts, soft black wraps that interacted with the ship's natural magnetic field and did actually allow for a reasonable facsimile of swimming through null-gravity.

Where did I get magmitts? I didn't even unpack those yet.

His nose bumped into the backside of the next iris portal, and the four bright tracklights flashed to life.

"VIRGIL!" Pris was sounding, not angry exactly (which he'd experienced plenty of times), but distressed. "WHAT'S GOING ON?"

The bunnytaur glared at his paws and forced them, really willed them, to clench. They obliged, but he was beset by the sensation of anticipation, of imminent arrivals. The first thing he associated it with was when you'd been waiting for your food at the pub for a good half hour, and you just KNEW the next plates to come out were going to be yours. Practically living on campus as he had for so many years, he was well used to some of the finest pubs the world had to offer.

On second thought, this was... nothing like that at all.

"I DON'T QUITE... KNOW," he said, brow furrowing with effort. "The Breeder protocol, it has to be."

"That's just sexual reproduction! Fertility, virility, refractory periods, nesting and protection-"

"I think it's... a bit more than that. In practice."

"What do you-"

"It's not theory anymore, right?"

"Well, yeah, I mean, obviously they..." Pris trailed off, and Virgil fancied he could hear the wheels clicking over in her own mind. She'd always been the more gifted researcher, the more gifted public speaker, the more natural educator, although she would be the first to say most of those about him. He didn't need to connect too many dots for her to get ahead of him. "It's affecting your behaviour?"

"I've been sleepwalking!"

"What? When?"

"Since I woke up!"

"For three months?!"

"Almost, I-"

"And you didn't TELL ME!?"

"I didn't want to worry-"

"YOU LET ME WORRY ABOUT ME WORRYING!! STOP TOUCHING THE DOOR!!"

"I'M NOT TOUCHING THE-... Oh." Sure enough, his right hand was still clenched, but his left had been typing for the last fifteen seconds or so. "Emcom, shut down iris portal command console!"

Emcom blerped, and a series of menu options appeared on his oclens. Apparently, he'd misspoken one of the command words, and he was being presented with the cascading command list and quick descriptions of their results. "Uhm... oh, come on, really? Emcom, iris portal, console, access, hold, command, initiate? That seems really unwieldy-"

"VIRGIL!"

"Shouldn't there be a way for you to, like, just LOCK it from your end? This seems remarkably unsafe. Although I suppose it's obvious that the atmosphere is intact and compatible on both sides of the portal, so maybe the life-threatening safety precautions aren't even activa-... oh, dear."

The door behind him closed almost silently, ceramic-clad petals clicking no louder than the ice cubes in his weekly whisky, back on Earth-that-was. After a moment for hidden vents to cycle and triple-check everything, the door in front of him irised open, presenting him with the mirror-image to his own side of the vast, slumbering vessel.

The first waft of similar-but-distinct atmosphere brushed against his nostrils, and he felt an instantaneous reaction from his hindquarters. His sheath, which had grown almost ponderously cumbersome over the months cooped up alone, stiffened and straightened against his underbelly, thumping against his barrel insistently. He could feel it expand, the long-dormant flesh within filling up with anticipatory blood, muscles relaxing, tendons creaking. His hind legs were forced apart by the momentary expansion, but then the activity ceased.

For now.

And that was just from her scent, he mused with a mixture of appreciation, desire, and horror.

"Virgil," her voice came flatly into his ear. "What the fuck was that."

The bulky bunny drifted forwards through the portal, forepaws paddling. He cleared his throat guiltily. "What was what?"

"I have you on cameras. Don't act like you didn't feel all of that!"

Her voice was undercut by the faint but rising sound of gurgling and groaning from his sac. He fancied he could feel the heavy blood vessels straining against the velvety, dark gold fur of his scrotum, pulsing in time with his heart. His tail wiggled insistently at them as they drew up closer, and the tickling only spurred their production.

It took all of his self-control not to turn around and just admire all of that.

"I felt... some things..." he said.

"The Breeder protocol is doing this, isn't it?"

"I think it is," the old professor sighed. "Where are you?"

She was instantly wary. "Why do you want to know?"

"So I can avoid you!"

"How about you just back to YOUR side of the ship where it's safe?"

"I WOULD except my paws seem to have a mind of their own! I've got my right hand under control, but lefty is still wiggling, and my forepaws... I don't know WHAT'S gotten into them. As for the hindlegs, I think they're mostly decorative at this point..."

The near-side portal clicked shut, sealing the taur and his fiancee in the same hull. Virgil felt alive, he felt energetic, bouyant... and most of all, he felt his love for Priscilla attempting to drive his rational thought to the back of his mind where it couldn't get in the way.

"They never did have a, you know, 'end product' to deal with," Pris muttered. "The geneticists, I mean. The Gunners, the Civvies, even the Heavies, they all had satisfactory projections, but it was the Breeders they were so damn proud of. Able to seed a planet with intelligent life, First Generation to Third Generation, in under a decade. Thirty Breeders, more than a million colonists in ten years."

"Not to mention I'm dead sexy," Virgil added, paddling around the forehall of starboard hull. To the aft he'd find Pris's identical anterior storage bays, with their skyscrapers of containers. To the fore, he'd find the lounge, the sleeping pods, the living quarters, and the command pod. Pris, likely, was in there.

No sooner had he thought it than his forepaws started to steer him.

"Oh, ha ha," Pris sighed, but he could detect a playful note in her voice. Or at least, he thought he could. It was starting to get a little... fuzzy, in his brain. "You look like you've got a million-year case of blueballs."

"Only about three hundred years," Virgil churred, his sheath pushing forward another few inches. Any more, he mused, and it would start thumping against his forelegs! He paddled lazily through the arched passage that would take him towards the lounge. "What are we going to do?"

"I've got a plan, but I think it's going to take some co-operation."

"Excellent! You always were the planner. What is it?"

"I can't tell you."

"What?"

"I need your co-operation, which means you doing what your stupid male dickbrain THINKS you SHOULD be doing. If I TELL you, that'll ruin it."

"This isn't very egalitarian of you."

"Says the man trying to sleep-bone."

"Oh, like this was my idea!"

"Oh, hush," Pris said, and to his surprise she actually giggled. "We'll make this work. But for right now, you just... keep hunting me. Through this huge, empty spaceship." There was a long silence, followed by a dreadful "Oh, gods."

"What?" Virgil asked, starting to panic. "What's wrong? What is it?"

"This is _Alien_all over again."

Virgil's jaw dropped. "This isn't one of your silly classic movies!"

"IT TOTALLY IS!" she squealed, and he swore he could hear her clapping. "Hee hee hee hee! OK, you just be the gross slimy drooly alien antagonist-"

"I TAKE OFFENSE TO THAT!"

"-and I'll be the plucky heroine who succeeds despite the mounting odds. Sound good?"

"PRIS!"

But the line... had gone dead.

Part 3. The Pairing

Virgil was slowly regaining control of his limbs, but it was the most peculiar sensation to find himself fighting. Back on Earth-that-was, when he was a slightly-past-middle-age tenured professor and lecturer, he was often pulled into archaeological field school sessions, or sometimes just camping trips, with many furres younger and fitter than he. He enjoyed the outdoors, and to some extent he enjoyed the forced camaraderie that came from physical exertion, isolation, and the judicious application of smuggled liquor bottles.

He invariably ended each trip with a bone-deep collection of aches, pains and bruises, and the sort of heavy-eyed lethargy that made even putting on a classroom-appropriate shirt a dreaded morning chore.

Three hundred years and countless billion miles away, in a body that might as well have belonged to a complete stranger, he felt that tiredness again as he wrest control of his muscles from the inscrutable urges of his Breeder programming. Not only was it exhausting, but the reward was a burning weariness that made him want to curl up in a corner and simply hug himself.

"Still there, Virgin?"

"You know, you _really_don't get to keep calling me that," the expansive taur sighed.

"But your lip does the CUTEST THING when I call you that!"

Virgil frowned and poked said lip. "Nuh-uh."

Pris's breathing was coming faster in his ear now. He still couldn't tell where in the huge ship she was, but there was an awful lot of movement coming through the little earpiece. "Ohh, and now you're being all pouty and I'm not there! Save that expression, ok?"

"You know, sometimes I got to thinking that the only reason you liked me was I was fragile and malleable."

"Those weren't the ONLY reasons," she said airily.

"Stop enjoying this! I command you!"

They shared a laugh, which was refreshing considering the situation. Virgil was drifting through the starboard lounge now, the scent of his fiancée lingering in the recycled air, wafting up from the upholstery. In the old days he'd never have picked up on it, he was fairly sure, but the seemingly limitless capacities of his new physical form were having no issues whatsoever. "You're so cute when you're being Neanderthal," she purred.

"Hush, woman. Now reconstitute me a sandwich."

"HAH."

He'd intended to turn around and head back for the double iris, lock himself back in the portside of the ship and, with any luck, set up some better software barriers between him and Pris. With all of his joints feeling swollen and laggy, however, it was all he could do to just paddle in slow laps through the lounge, hunting for any evidence of her presence. He detected a used tumbler resting on the huge crescent-shaped bar, underlit with white glowing tubes, but closer investigation seemed to indicate it had been washed. He removed his nose from it, having spent several seconds all but huffing the lightweight glass, and replaced it with disappointment.

"OK, now I think I'm kinda freaking myself out," he chuckled nervously.

"Were you snorting my juice glass?"

"You have me on cameras?" He spun around, half-expecting to see her holding a portable lens. His new Breeder instincts, apparently, were none too bright. "Good. Avoid me. I am in no state to be anywhere near you right now. My body is... uhm... it's in a mood."

"I can tell. Fuck, you look like you're hauling around a fuel pod."

Virgil's hindlegs were still being pushed lightly but insistently apart by the base of his sheath, which was pulsing with suppressed vitality. The improbable length was throbbing not just against his belly, but against his long tauric barrel's sternum. He didn't doubt that, just in this technically-docile state, he was already far larger than his wildest night of sexual ecstasy with Pris back on Earth-that-was. The supple flesh of his sac was being pulled tighter and tighter, but he somehow knew that there was a LOT more give in those twin fuzzy orbs.

"Do you think they really thought this part through? I mean... look, yes, evolutionary bias regarding genital size and the threats of population pressure and competition, genetic reactive nonhereditary hyperphalia, those are all well and good, but I've GOT to be bigger than your... your... you!"

His ears shot straight up when Pris's only response was a muffled, throaty growl. "You always knew just the right thing to say," she huffed. There was more activity coming through the earpiece, metallic sounds, but they meant nothing to him. "Just don't fall asleep on me, hmm?"

"I doubt I could fall asleep even if you were to launch into your lecture on the comparative proto-laquine dialects of the Atlas Delta."

"Low blow, dear, low blow! OW, dammit!"

That delicate little cuss was accompanied by a sharp, artificial clang, but it was one that was picked up not just by the earpiece, but through the atmosphere of the ship. Virgil's ears swiveled, and instantly the doldrums and weariness in his limbs were gone. Feeling refreshed, energized, exultant, he kicked off from the bar without thinking and rocketed himself through the lounge. "Shit!"

"What? I'm fine, by the way, don't worry about me, I just dropped a bloody huge-"

"No, I heard you!"

"Well, I figured you heard me."

"No, I heard you in the SHIP! You're aft, sounded like it was coming from the command or medical pods! I'm... my body is on the move!"

"What? Fuck! My mind was off the cams, I was trying to... wow, you really look like something when you're all streamlined like that. Heroic, kind of."

Virgil bounced off the curved surfaces like a champion zero-G kickboxer, somehow managing to keep from painfully thumping his overinflated maleness. "This isn't exactly heroism! Argh, it's so... weird to try and tell my legs not to do something! I'm getting some sort of pleasure/pain response from my own subconscious."

"I hope you're taking copious notes."

"I am!"

"Good, because we've got thirty-one other Breeders waking up in three months, and it would be nice to have an FAQ to refer to before they start sleep-walking."

Virgil swallowed. "I'd forgotten about that."

"It doesn't bear thinking about, really."

"I suppose not."

"Thirty-one other sexually hyperactive, hyper-sexualized colonists waking up after three centuries of dreaming in new, luscious bodies, wanting, indeed craving only one thing in the literal entire Universe... to populate an entirely new world. Mostly herms, capable of performing the actions of both parents, but a half dozen Breeder femmes designed for supernumerary litters, particularly lactation. Breasts like you've never imagined, and-"

"I THOUGHT IT DIDN'T BEAR THINKING ABOUT!" Virgil roared, nearly going cross-eyed from the visuals. He could recite every other Breeder by name, having spent close to two weeks in cloistered psychoanalysis with the lot of them. Given their... particular set of skills, and the mission goals for their new bodies, there had also been a requirement for physical intimacy with any and, preferably, all participants. He was dutifully engaged and intended to be faithful, right up until Pris had cheerfully announced to the entire Breeder battalion that Virgil was being granted something called a 'hall pass' for those two weeks. He knew what those brave colonists had looked like going into their pods... what in the worlds would they look like coming out?

"Sorry, dear," Pris announced with mocking innocence.

"I love YOU, not... them!"

"Well, not to get pedantic, but you loved them, too. Active verb. Though some of the herms might have loved you more than you loved them. Some of them had that glimmer in their eye..."

Virgil puffed out his cheeks as he wrestled control of his body back enough to curl up into a floating ball of shaggy, silky brown fur by a huge curving window, showing the full majesty of the fore solar sails. "You're testing me, aren't you? Testing the Breeder protocol. I can tell. You get all... efficient when you've got something new to study. I can just see your clipboard."

"Is it a sexy clipboard?"

"I don't even know how that would work."

"Remind me to show you when we land, then. I've got a few ideas for a sort of scholarly exotic dancer routine, and my new body is bangin'."

Virgil winced, his nethers giving another insistent, pleasurably-painful throb. His sheath was starting to bulge in the middle like a tire that was about to have an overpressure blowout, but his cuff stubbornly remained clenched. He massaged the overtaxed flesh with his hindpaws, toes moving swiftly and surely, and he let out a moan that caught him by surprise.

"Virg? You ok?"

It's getting to be as wide as my waist! He marveled, wondering how much more of him could possibly develop in those confines. Pris has a bigger body, sure, but the sheer PHYSICS of this...! And what about my-... "Uh oh."

"What?"

The bun's torso was swiveled around now, a maneuver that his old body could only have managed with careful stretching and preparatory breathing. He could see the outermost curves of his sheath beyond his plump, fluffy midsection, a sheath that could ONLY have been Photoshopped back on Earth-that-was. More to the point, though, his balls seemed to have lightened a few shades, from his normal rich mocha to nearly a pleasant latte, possibly pumpkin spiced. It only took him a moment to realize that they'd swollen so much in the last few minutes, thumb-thick veins twitching here and there with ferocious force, that their fur was actually _thinning_and his space-pale skin was starting to show through. Each one was drawn up tight to his rump, pushing his hindlegs forwards, and he doubted he'd be able to fit them into the sleep pod he'd emerged from only a month before.

"Uhm... the geneticists know that volume isn't actually the important part of breeding, right?"

"Yes, but the innate suppressed recessive genes for hyperism tend to come as a package deal. No pun intended. Let me get you on cams. You-... where are you?"

Virgil looked around. "Main corridor outside mid-bunks, just fore of the med bay. I can't hear you anymore, which is good. Managed to shut my legs off again."

"Huh, must be in a blind spot. You know, with a camera blind spot, this is normally where the vicious drooling alien would pop out of an air-vent and-"

"Our air vents are three-inch hoses."

"Oh, poop, you ruin all my fun. Ok, I'm just about ready for you."

Virgil glanced back again, wagging his rump and watching those irresponsibly-large testes bob back and forth in zero gravity. As if in response, he felt a twinge pass through them and they visibly expanded, fine fur-covered tracework of veins pumping furiously.

"I somehow doubt that."

"But now we know what to watch for when the other Breeders wake up. And it took you a month."

"In isolation! If you'd BEEN here, I mean... on my side of the ship... look, I started getting sweaty paws after four days! It was day six I spent a VERY frustrating three hours in the shower bays trying to relieve the pressure, which was when I discovered that the Breeder protocol won't let that happen unless there's a, uhm... suitable partner."

Pris snorted. "Are you sharing masturbation stories now?"

"It doesn't really count, since the only thing that happened was a bad case of tennis elbow."

"Tennis elbow, hmm? Sure it wasn't battledore wrist? You know, because of the shuttlecock-"

"I GET IT, THANK YOU."

"It's ok, you know. I mean, it's not like I spent every night in my bunk with my hands flat by my side, when I wasn't reading my Bible and knitting scarves for the brave boys on the front lines."

Virgil's eye twitched, imagining his new-and-improved beloved floating in null-G, backlit by the stars and naked as the day she was born, one paw teasing across her breasts, the other slipping down across her trim tummy to where her off-pink fur ('Neapolitan', she described it. 'Like the ice cream, when it all melts together.') brightened into the diamond patch of white betwixt her thighs, and-

He caught another moan before it escaped his lips, but the hiccuping sound of suppressed lust still tripped the comms. "You all right, V?" Pris asked.

"Just imagining you saying your prayers," he managed, shoulders slumping. "I need a nap. This body is running itself through the wringers. I'm gonna try to make a go for the iris again, get back to my side, all right? I can do this, I just... gotta sort through all of the Breeder materiel and dig up some of those suppression chems they sent along. That should do the trick."

"But I'm almost done!"

"Yeah, done what, though? You're doing something, and you won't tell me what, and I'm about eight hundred trillion miles from the nearest pub I can go drown my woman-trouble sorrows at. I mean, I suppose I could just go get sloshed on some of Lukasz's scotch that he doesn't think everyone knows is hidden in his supplies, but he got Gunner protocol and he'll probably tie me into a pretzel when he wakes up. He likes pretzels."

Pris was silent for a long time, and when she spoke again she was... demure, was perhaps the only word for it. It caught him by surprise; he could only imagine two other times in their relationship she'd ever retreated from her natural irreverence far enough to actually sound apologetic. "I'm sorry, babe. This body... I think it's having more than a little effect on me, too. Not quite the same as you, my little lust monster, but I just feel so... pro-active. Anything is possible. I could climb the highest mountains just to work up an appetite for breakfast right now. Everything is so positive, everything is so possible, and the scope of the future is making me want to try and do, literally, everything. I guess... I guess that mood isn't quite universal."

Virgil's jaw worked soundlessly. It was Priscilla's voice, for sure, but this seemed incongruously introspective. She'd always been the sort to act that sort of life, with a diffident declaration of 'Why not?'

"It's all right, babe," he sighed. "I feel that, too, I REALLY do, it's just... the IMMEDIATE issue right now is my body wanting to do some terrible, horrible, no-good very-bad things to you."

Another pause. "JUST your body?"

"Y-... well, no, of course, ALL of me wants that, gods, if you could see the dreams I had in neural-D..."

"Then I think it's time we had a little reunion. Ship chronos say that our anniversary is TECHNICALLY next week, but I'm always for making new traditions."

"New... traditions?"

This time there could be no possible mistaking it: the aft cargo bays were cycling atmosphere, which meant that at least some of the huge doors were opening. Echoes reverberated softly around him, long bunny ears swiveling like radar dishes. Lights flashed in the distance, illuminating one corridor brilliantly, and in the rush of air past his muzzle he picked up her scent. It would have been faint anywhere else, but here, now, it was like being slapped.

"Sorry, I didn't have time to reconstitute some rose petals to lure you to my white satin sheeted boudoir, dah-ling.

Virgil's body spasmed, the last bit of resistance he could muster against the exhortations of his single-purpose custom build. His sheath strained and bulged thicker yet, now easy thicker than his barrel (and being a bunny, he was no slouch in the girth department). The pressure within grew to such insane levels that he feared something might pull, or rip, or both, but the only other discernible reaction his hyper-acute senses picked up was a sudden bloom of heat, and then cool, against his cuff.

He twisted down to look between his forelegs, where a single drop of precum the size of a healthy grapefruit was bobbling and swaying back and forth in null-G, clinging to the front of his sheath with naught but surface tension.

"Th-that might have been o-overkill," he wheezed, his legs already paddling and carrying him forwards. Or aftwards, he corrected himself, as he moved to the rear of the ship. He was never very good with directions.

"Hmm?"

"Gods, your scent," he groaned, a mixture of exasperation and anticipation. "It's like two decades worth of sex and nostalgia in two seconds."

"Scent? I'll have you know I shower every six months, whether or not I need it."

"Ha ha, darling. This body, whatever it is... maybe it was feeding off of my own memories during the physical reconstruction, but your scent is like fucking catnip. If catnip were considered a Class A controlled substance."

"Should I take that as a compliment?"

Virgil grinned. Same old Pris. "We'll have to see. You, uh... might not like what it seems to be doing to me."

"I'm sure I will."

"Darling, you read the same Breeder catalogue as I did, but trust me, there's a WORLD... or perhaps a solar system... of difference between seeing it on a page and feeling it trying to force your stomach out of the way to make room. Er... I meant MY stomach, not... er..."

Pris was growling again, and if her scent had been catnip, that sound was akin to whatever primal ancestral herb had first driven predator and prey to throw millions of years of evolution to the wind and mate rather than fight to the death. Virgil's hackles rose, along with what of his tail wasn't being smooshed by his looming caboose-like sac.

"Get in here," she murred, and he could just hear that deep purple tongue licking her ebony lips.

Virgil's body carried him through the aft corridors, down the main Z-axis loading channel, and through the huge storage bay's main doors. The interior of the vast compartment was dark, and this time he'd neglected to bring a flashlight. Once through the portal, designed for orbit-to-surface skimmers, there was nothing for him to grab onto, nothing for him to touch, not even enough proximal ferrous material for his mag gloves to get any pull. He was a free-floating projectile, leaving light and warmth behind and drifting deeper into cavernous darkness.

"Pris?"

Her scent was all around him; clearly she'd spent most of the last hour in this space, doing who knew what. He could see the bulky shadows of the endless storage containers all around him, but their silhouettes seemed different. He supposed their shape didn't really matter, when both port and starboard bays simply needed to have the same mass in order for the ship to travel and pilot itself properly.

"Yello?" he called again, as he'd often done when returning to their little apartment late at night. "You don't have any other men in here, do you? I mean, ones that have thawed out?"

Just silence. He fiddled with the oclens, but he was still just getting endless drop-down menus and camera views of his side of the ship. Pris, it seemed, was far more skilled with the ship's intrinsic systems than he was. She'd always been a fast learner; Virgil had trouble learning anything new that wasn't directly applicable to his studies. He'd even managed to last two years without programming his PVR to actually record shows on a schedule, until Pris had snapped, scheduled it for him, and then hidden all the remotes.

While his senses were far beyond what any natural Earth-born bunny could have hoped for, made all the more diamond-sharp by the kind of arousal that might have killed a healthy male back home, Pris was a natural predator. Aided by null-G and a month of practice with her new body, she drifted out of the darkness above him like a stormy pink ghost, claws outstretched, an ear-splitting grin exposing dozens of brilliant little teeth. Their paths were cunningly calculated to intersect when the huge, bulky taur was near the largely-vacant centroid of the storage bay.

She was barely a meter away when she whispered the single word, "Boo."

Virgil jerked and twisted, trying to rotate his off-balance and over-ballasted body around to face the source of that sound. He needn't have bothered. Pris landed deftly on his back, pinprick claws digging into his shoulders as her long, powerful legs slipped around his midsection. She squeezed, embracing him for the first time in three centuries and several lightyears, but even that was punctuated by an insistent grinding of her hips against his spine and the nip of her teeth against his cheek.

"AUGH!"

"Hey, stranger," she purred, slipping her paws around underneath his armpits to clasp against his chest. "Damn, you got big, didn't you? What are these? Pecs? Mmmm!"

He continued to whip around, trying to see her, some of her, ANY of her, but she was pressed tight to his back. Her head ducked out of the way with a girlish giggle whenever he was close to catching a glimpse of her beautiful face. All he could manage was a quick glance down at the unmistakably pinkish arms and legs snaking around his torso, familiar yet somehow more powerful than he remembered. "Pris! You... you can't... WE can't..."

Another grind of her hips, and this time he was acutely aware of the heavy, full weight of her breasts against his shoulder blades. The pressure within his sheath skyrocketed, and he fancied he could feel a line of red flame along the underside where the overtaxed flesh was about to surrender. "That's not... TECHNICALLY true..." she growled, dragging her tongue up the back of his neck and up to the base of his left ear, which sent paroxysms of delight and horror through him.

"Technically?!? Look, this body isn't... it's not... WE'RE not ready, we're still three months out...!"

"But with a five month predicted gestation period," she added, slipping one hand up his chest to his collarbones while the other drifted down to tickle his belly.

Virgil froze. His blood ran cold, except where it seemed to have been replaced with lava between his hindlegs. "No," he managed, more of a squeak than a real protest.

"Baby, we've got three months to go, and you've jeopardized this entire mission a half dozen times after ONE. The Breeder protocol won't engage directly if there are no suitable partners for breeding, and if I'm already preggers, I'm out of the running. I read the manual. You start our family off with a bang, and you go back to being boring old Virgil again."

A dozen protests, a hundred counter arguments, a thousand witty responses flashed through his new-and-improved brain, but all of them were dashed aside by the single crystal clear memory of his dream the night before, his arms wrapped around his perfect Priscilla, floating and tumbling in null-G with nothing to cling to but eachother.

His lips twitched defiantly.

"Boring?" he echoed.

Pris laughed gaily, slapping his chest with one small paw. "There's that deep-space adventurer spirit that I knew was in there! So... I'm gonna let go in a second, and come around front. Are you gonna be... all right? You in control?"

Virgil visualized falling backwards into his own mind, away from the viewscreen of his eyes and into the roiling, chaotic and possibly exploding control center of his new and 'improved' nervous system.

"I... think so," he said hesitantly, flexing his fingers and wondering if it was possible to herniate oneself from over-sheathing. "Just stay a couple feet away for a... a second."

"In case you get grabby?"

"Sure, let's go with that."

With every twitch of her muscles sending more and more pleasure through his body, his surface nerves feeling electrified, her arms and legs withdrew. Soon she was perched on his back, toes wriggling at the junction of his torso and his barrel, yet another little habit of hers from back home. Their shared bed had been designed for the much larger taur, and was incredibly spacious, yet the soft little marten would always try to burrow against his flanks. Her toes would always find themselves somewhere private and sensitive, and it was as reassuring to him as all of the security blankets in the world.

"Here I come," she said.

"Phrasing," Virgil replied.

"Are we still doing that?"

She kicked off, and it truly did take all of his reserves not to simply reach out and pluck her from the air like a frisbee. Ten seconds, body, just give me TEN SECONDS!!! he shouted internally.

Incredibly, it seemed to work. Even his sheath ceased it's maddening creaking, if only momentarily.

But when he could turn his attention outwards again, and properly laid his eyes on his fiancée for the first time in close enough to forever, he could have sworn he felt a wave of heat pass over his body. It reminded him more than else of re-entry training, endlessly blasting up through the atmosphere and then crashing their way back down like a meteor.

"Is that all?" Priscilla pouted, when her great reveal seemed to produce no reaction whatsoever from the huge bunny taur. "I'd hoped for at least an eye-twitch..."

Despite the total lack of scale to properly judge these things, he could tell she was taller. The former Earth-that-was Pris barely topped five-foot-six, with the soft rounded shoulders, curvy body and ample rump of someone who both reveled in their sexuality but enjoyed seconds of dessert. The vision before him was not slimmer, exactly, but certainly longer of limb without losing the rondure he so adored.

The marten was a few shades pinker than before, now darkening almost to fuscia at her ruff, as well as at her wrists and ankles. Her large, powerful tail spun lazily behind her, accounting for her angular momentum and correcting her with the skill of a lifetime in deep space, or one month in a scientifically-designed 'perfect body'. Her blue eyes were as he remembered them, lively and dangerous, posed above her perpetual predatory smirk.

His eyes were now focusing on the parts he considered slightly more perfect, ignoring the way his vision seemed to be darkening at the periphery. She hadn't been lying about her breasts, which floated in null-G the way only the most gifted of surgeons could possibly have managed back home. They were considerably larger now, the sort that she had once derisively described as 'unnecessarily out-there', and even for his own enhanced form might be more than a paw-full. His head tilted down, observing the stark white ribbon of fur that began at her navel, spreading into the diamond patch of snowy fluff between her thighs. Her legs kicked coquettishly, knees together, as she floated before him.

"Wel-"

She didn't get to finish her inquiry before Virgil's pent-up Breeder body answered emphatically.

He'd expected something louder and more dramatic, perhaps accompanied by some sort of deep-space thunderclap, but there was hardly more than a steady damp rustling when his sheath finally relaxed enough to allow him to emerge. Dense flesh slammed against his barrel's sternum and brusquely shoved aside his forelegs as the golden brown fur retracted. Virgil's eyes were still trained on his beloved, but all four of his heavy footpaws explored himself in disbelief, probing and squeezing flesh that, in his experience, was still quite soft and malleable.

Malleable or not, there was a good six feet of burnished bronze bunnyflesh bobbing weightily in null-G between Virgil and Pris, with another twelve snuggled up to his belly.

"Ow," he finally managed, struggling to draw breath.

"Wow," Pris murmured, her eyes seeming to grow with each passing second. "You, uh... you weren't... weren't kidding there, were you?"

This time, both of their acute ears picked up the sound of blood flooding the high-capacity vessels feeding his maleness. Thin golden flesh creaked as the rhythm gained volume and intensity. Pris's tail swished and pushed her up, her bare loins drifting closer to Virgil's muzzle, and she rotated easily to gain a bird's eye view of his mounting erection.

Virgil was panting now, his footpaws more holding on for dear life than trying to make anything happen. This part of the Breeder protocol was beyond his control.

It wasn't long before his flesh acquired a glossy sheen, tight skin pulling tighter and tighter with each beat of his heart. His tapered glans was well beyond the reach of his arms, foot after foot of leporine shaft pushing past his barrel. He wasn't so much straddling his own cock as he was sprawled out on top of it, the entire thing thicker than his already heavy-bottomed body and only growing moreso as it finally straightened out.

In the end, it was a woozy Virgil pawing weakly at Pris's tail and wondering if his heart was built to handle this sort of stress, four legs spayed out across the upper surface of nearly forty feet of gleaming, flaxen cock.

"Those... scientists... huh?" he grinned weakly, twining his fingers in her bushy tail.

"No... kidding," she replied, tugging against his grip and descending into his arms.

Struggling to ignore the immensity that was Virgil's new Breeder apparatus, the promised lovers faced one another and kissed, breathing in the others' scents. "Maybe it's only because it's, you know... been a month."

"You're saying it would be smaller if it had only been three weeks?"

"Well... no, that... that's probably not how this works."

Virgil was been gently shaken up and down, and Pris along with him, as his heartbeat caused his shaft to twitch. Given the relative masses, he was literally being wagged by his own arousal. "I think it's happy to see me," she leered, leaning in close to boop her forehead against his.

"We all are."

"You seem back in control."

"Yeah! Yeah..." Virgil flexed his paws, sliding one down to cup and cradle Pris's rump, and sliding the other up to caress the side of one improbably full breast. "I... yeah, I guess now that we've gotten this far, they didn't think any MORE behaviors needed to be programmed."

"Thank goodness, right?"

"Right!"

Pris's tail slipped around the side of his shaft, and just that feather-light contact caused a ripple of straining, bulging blood vessels to swell along its length. She tugged herself down a little further, her toes nestling into the warmth between its upper surface and where his torso met his barrel. She smooched his cheek, his jaw, his neck. "Because, if they had, you'd probably be trying to pre-consummate our marriage right now, hmmm?"

The next chorus of creaks and gurgles came from just beyond Virgil's spasming tail, where his sac was struggling mightily to catch up, and in all likelihood exceed, his shaft's proportions. He bent his head forwards, burying it in the swirling black cloud of her mane and breathing deeply. "That's not quite the term I'd use?"

Pris grinned, and anchoring her body with her feet, tucked into the tight crook between his body and his bulge, she leaned back against the broad surface of his shaft the way a starlet might spread herself across the hood of a classic car. "Mmm? And what term would you like to use with me, Professor?" she asked, chewing on a pinky claw and wiggling her hips daringly.

Virgil didn't think it was possible, but he felt himself grow at least another foot at that.

"You know," she continued, letting one leg drift out into the void, twisting herself around to draw his eyes towards the cleft of her thighs. "One pesky part of the Breeder protocol is that you're going to stay in the 'active state' until you are appeased. Remember that... little... bit?"

This was all getting to be a little much for Virgil. A lifetime of dull academia had left him ill-prepared for the voracious dynamo that was Priscilla Breeze, and two years of co-habitating bliss found the pair of them signing up for the Seeds of Life program together. From then on it was more research, more study, more training, presentations, securing funding, more training, MORE training... and all the while, Pris whispering in his ear that they would be the first couple to be married in an alien world.

And now here he was, in the body that even his deepest fantasies rarely ventured to ponder, with the love of his life grinding her own luscious new curves against him in ways that should have been fundamentally impossible from any sensible evolutionary standpoint.

"I remember," he grinned, bending at the waist to plant a long, yearning kiss in the cozy valley of her cleavage.

Pris squealed and writhed against him, her paws eventually coming to grip two of his cock's permanently-dilated veins as handles. "Mmmm, there's my boy! My big boy, I guess I should start appending..."

"Too b-"

His single worry was silenced by her own savage kiss, crushing their muzzles together and groaning with desire. When she finally released the back of his head, it was her turn to be out of breath. "Darling, they design all of these bodies for extreme conditions. Why do you think I made sure to be in the cargo bay when you found me?"

Virgil looked around, finally realizing that the reason this cargo bay looked different was that at least two of the shipping container towers had been, for lack of a better term, tipped over, and were now lying flat against the outer hull. This provided quite a lot more open volume for them to maneuver... or, he realized, to experiment.

"Oh my," he breathed, kissing his way down her body as she inched her way up his shaft.

An extremely long and borderline infuriating five minutes later, Pris sat with her legs wrapped around the tapered tip of Virgil's manhood. Once she had crawled beyond his reach, she had slowed down to a maddeningly tepid pace, covering his drum-tight flesh in licks and kisses and coaxing still more size out of him. Now, having finally scaled to his peak, she was peppering his glans with affection, hugging it to her breasts and giving the faintest possible nibbles.

This, of course, was nearly killing Virgil, who was grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes and groaning, legs flailing uselessly. "You're the worst!" he yowled helplessly.

"You love it!" she called down to him, a little aghast that she actually had to 'call down to him' from his own dick. Despite his vast size, there was still only the faintest trickle of precum; her ruff glistened with her affections. Quantity notwithstanding, his musk was starting to drive her own body wild, and she sympathized with what he must have gone through. "Are you ready?"

"As... mmmff... ever!"

"Be gentle!"

"HAH! Like that's in my court!"

Pris arched her back, pushing herself up until her rump was perched at the very tip. Virgil's groans of pleasure redoubled, echoing around them, when he felt the intense heat of her nethers against his flesh. He felt another ripple passing underneath him, but Pris had no such warning when a gush of pre erupted beneath her, nearly dislodging her and sending droplets in all directions.

"WHOA!"

"Sorry!"

"NO! No no no , don't be sorry, oh my gods..." Pris shuddered, feeling her lover's heat flowing against her, flowing into her. Musk or pheromones or something the geneticists had produced, call it what you will, all of her hesitations were banished in that moment. Her ankles clamped against him hard enough to cause him to squeak in surprise, and she ground her pussy against him with gusto. "I... I think that's what... what we needed..."

"N-needed?"

"Wish me luck," she giggled, sliding her legs down him as far as she could manage and steadying herself with her damp, rosy palms. "And don't light this candle too soon."

Virgil, for his part, was almost positive he could hear some sort of a countdown, a subtle ticking that sped and slowed with Pris's distant movements. He thought it must be some part of the Breeder protocol, but he made a mental note to look into it later when he wasn't in immediate peril of knocking his bride-to-be through the hull. "Mmmhmmmf!"

"Was that an affirmative?"

"MMMHMMMF!"

Pris steadied herself, tossing her hair artfully and glancing back over her shoulder to wink at Virgil. In null-G, the hair flip technique was less sultry and more of a chaotic explosion of her mane, but she didn't care. "I love you, baby," she purred, blowing him a kiss.

"I... love you too-o-o-O-O-O-O-OO!!"

The Earth-that-was geneticists had clearly done their due diligence. Pris's artificially-strengthened muscles squeezed around the bunnytaur's tender but steel-hard flesh, her ankles digging into the subtle ring just behind his glans. Inch by inch she forced herself down, squirming and rolling her hips as she stretched around him. Her eyes bulged out her head when she saw the outline of her belly push beyond her bust, her tail thrashing with the impossible sensations wracking her body.

With a slick squeak of fur against skin, her ankles slipped free. She struggled to hook her legs around Virgil's shaft again, to draw herself further down onto his pillar, but her hips were no longer positioned to pull this off. She wiggled helplessly, hugging her arms around the monstrous outline of his cock that now dominated her formerly-slender torso. She's managed to take almost four feet of his length, a shape that she would liken to an oversized old-fashioned oil barrel, but it was maddening to know that was barely a tenth of what he could offer.

Virgil's legs were paddling furiously, scuffing and rubbing at the base of that shaft, as he tried to cope with the sensations from the far end. He genuinely couldn't believe that Pris had managed to take him, or at least as much of him. "W-wow," he breathed, thumping his forehead against the corded upper flanks of his cock. "That f-feels... wow."

Pris shuddered, her opening stretched so wide that everything seemed to be coursing with electricity. "Haha... it's just like those old S&B movies we used to watch," she chortled drunkenly. "Where one of them was just... like... a condom for the other one."

"S-safety first!" Virgil laughed, working his paws path and forth steadily now, stroking as much of himself as he could manage. "I suppose I shouldn't point out that you'd just be the, er, reservoir tip?"

"Ooohhh, I hope so," the marten moaned, pressing her paws against her distended belly and angling her body backwards, forcing her thighs apart and tightening her grip on her lover. She threw back her head and winked down at him, enjoying the upside-down view. "Your balls definitely have 'filling a reservoir' in mind!"

Virgil glanced back and gasped, seeing just how wildly overfull they'd become. He couldn't get back through the portal to his side of the ship if he tried! "Just what do they think the Breeders are BREEDING with?" he asked incredulously. "Cargo ships?!"

"What did you call me?!"

They shared a laugh, still a little aghast at the reality of the situation but far too happy to be together to care. Pris rocked back and forth, now more or less completely at the mercy of Virgil's new Breeder body. Every few minutes her breathing became ragged and labored as another orgasm was wrenched out of her, leaving her limp and giggling... until she began to rock once more. Every single time she came she tightened around Virgil like a hydraulic vise, causing his maleness to flex as though in self-defense and filling out her belly just a little bit more.

"This is... unsustainable..." Pris wheezed after her sixth (or seventh? she'd lost count) climax. "Every time I do that, you... get bigger. Every time you get bigger... I go off again!"

"Doesn't sound like a bad thing?" Virgil replied, his tongue lolling out of his head as his arms pumped up and down, back and forth.

"Says you!" Pris leaned her cheek against the pink-clad monolith that was her tummy, the tip of the marten-clad shaft now pushing well beyond the top of her head. "I'm not latex!"

"That's... quitter talk..." Virgil bore down, trying to consciously flex the muscles anchoring his cock to his body. A wave of pulsing veins passed through him from base to tip, and Pris squawked as she was filled just a little more. "See? Lots of room..."

"S-s-s-top th-th-th-th-aaaaaaaaa...!" she retorted before trailing off, wracked by another orgasm.

Virgil was sharing some of her concerns, though, wondering at what point his body would say enough was enough. He felt as though he SHOULD have finished, several times over, and there was a dull ache forming where his sac was drawn up tight against his rump. All four legs were rowing back and forth ceaselessly, dark brown fur swishing back and forth across his rich golden skin and slicked with a sheen of sweat. "I thought the whole point was I COULDN'T stop," he huffed, redoubling his efforts.

"Wahhh..." Pris whined, wrapping her arms and legs around Virgil's shaft, rubbing her muzzle against her thinning belly-fur. "It just... feels so fucking good... but I mean... this body has a limit somewhere, right?"

"I dunno! They... I mean, back on Earth-that-was, there were hypers that... I mean, the word 'fwoomp' was added to the dictionary for a REASON, right?"

"Yeah, but... I mean..."

"Those genes are in there. And they've only gotten improved upon."

"Yeah, I guess..."

"I know I showed you some of the videos from Mistress Phrase's website," Virgil continued, not even realizing he'd somehow fallen back into a lecturer's tone. "You couldn't even GET some of those bois in camera frame!"

Pris's shoulders shook. "Were you a hyper-lover this whole time??" she laughed.

The bunnytaur's mouth slammed shut and he glanced down bashfully, which was somewhat strange given what he was currently doing to his bride-to-be. "K-kind of... I mean, you knew that. I did show you those videos..."

"I thought you just thought they were funny!"

"Well, they WERE funny, but they were... you know... really hot..."

All of Pris was quaking now, and she threw her head back with laughter. "I have... I have to find this out now... when I look like this?!" She cackled, running her paws up and down across the marten-clad tip of his maleness.

"I THOUGHT YOU KNEW!" Virgil cried, but soon he was laughing as well. "That's why I went in for the Breeder protocol! I told you I always wanted to be bigger!"

"Yeah, but I thought you meant like, you know, a LITTLE bigger!"

More than forty feet of vascular, tendon-corded bunny dick spun through the cool void of the cargo bay, with a taur anchoring one end and an off-pink marten clinging to the other. "This is a little bigger!" he grinned, flexing again. "I wonder if those Mistress Phrase videos are stored in long-term memory, I could... ooh... ooh... ooooooooooh!"

"What? What is it?" Pris asked, twisting around awkwardly to try and see what the commotion was. Her curiosity was answered almost immediately when she felt a faint rumble pass through the column of flesh stretching her wildly, followed by a sudden burst of heat. She yipped in shock when her belly, taut and firm and outlining his glans perfectly, began to soften and bulge and then swell in all directions.

Virgil's body was locked and tense, feeling his Breeder attributes tightening to an almost painful level. He'd been worried that he'd spend forever chasing that sensation, never quite able to push himself beyond the point of no return, but just the briefest mental image of Mistress Phrase not as a monochrome skunk but rather as a Neapolitan marten sent him tumbling headlong into his own very definitive climax. "Ooooooh, goodness gracious," he breathed.

"H-honey..." Pris quavered, her belly ballooning slowly and steadily. The expanding pinkish orb pressed against her breasts, pushing her torso back once more and pinioning her legs. Her fingers played along her flanks, impressed that she could still sink them several inches in and reminding her of the month they'd tried owning a waterbed.

"I... I think..."

"Honey?" A few more breaths and she couldn't even reach her arms halfway around the expanding sphere that her tummy had become. She felt the pressure building within her, weight piling on against her loins, her lungs, the back of her throat, and she fancied even the back of her eyes. Somehow she was still stretched tight enough around him to form a perfect seal; she felt not a drop escaping anywhere between tailhole and belly button.

"I think I'm getting close..."

"HONEY!"

Virgil blinked blearily and looked up, jaw dropping when he saw that Pris was now snuggled up against an orb that had to be close to ten feet across, jiggling and swaying from the tip of his shaft. "O-oh..."

"You think you're close?"

"Y-yeah," he said, cracking a small, nervous smile. "I think it's finally allowing me a little bit of... pre-release."

"This is pre?!" she gulped.

The flow maintained its volume, which meant that her apparent growth seemed to slow considerably when she passed twelve feet in diameter. Virgil was in awe, seeing Priscilla's arms and legs flat against a sphere twice her own height. He'd dreamed of seeing her in this manner countless times, but this had always been the limit of most of his fantasies. "Don't worry," he rumbled, arms and legs pumping away furiously once more. "Those geneticists REALLY know what they're doing."

"Mmmmmmm, they seem to," she agreed numbly, her own hands and feet caressing herself wherever she could reach, burying her muzzle into cleavage that was being pushed unavoidably higher. "What do you think the odds are this breeding will be... successful?"

"Eight billion percent," Virgil snickered. "Have you thought of names for them all?"

"I brought... a phone book..."

"That might do it..."

"I love you, baby,"

"I love you, too."

Virgil was rocking back and forth, for all the good it was doing against the implacable mass of his endowments. His balls were nearly the same light golden hue as his shaft now, the fur thinned to the point where it was almost invisible. Were he not in null-G they'd have loomed so tremendously high and full behind him that he doubted he'd have been able to reach the ground at all. Part of him hoped that this was just the side effect of spending a MONTH resisting every sexual urge his Breeder anatomy was designed to capitalize upon, but another part of him hoped he could summon this sort of ardor on command.

The idea of consummating their Planetside marriage in a similar fashion after the colony's founding sent a bolt of lightning from his brain right into the base of his spine, and whatever barriers were holding back his orgasm crumbled.

"I-"

A loud creaking drowned out his last words, the urethral underside of his monstrous maleness inflating as his flow increased tenfold, then a hundredfold, and beyond. The bulge rammed up against Pris's lips, her opening tight enough to slow its progression only for the briefest moment. Her gasping yips climbed into full-throated screams of ecstasy as she was stretched anew, fingers and toes curling and digging into her belly as the lovers climaxed together.

With a rumbling that sounded like an earthquake, Pris's belly expanded with explosive force. The sloshing orb of her womb pushed against her, so broad and vast she felt more that she was lying flat on a pink shag floor. Her palms were flat against herself now, skin tightening until she could feel every vibration passing across herself like ripples across a pond. Her cries of lust were muffled somewhat by her breasts, now pillowing up around her muzzle, but she couldn't spare a thought for how this must look; she could only lose herself in the impossible passion.

Virgil struggled to keep his eyes open, hunched over and feeling like he was going through re-entry training again. From just the first eruption, Pris's already ballooned figure doubled in size. He pumped again and again, bucking his hips uselessly. They settled into a rhythm, a loud gurgling from his sac, followed by a rumbling from her belly, and then twin delirious, breathless cries from the joined couple.

After a dozen such geysering releases, Pris's body began to creak in response as she started reaching her ultimate tensile limits. Her carnal howls climbed in pitch and urgency, the pressure within mounting to unthinkable levels. "Virg... Virgil..." she panted, her paws drumming against her steel-tight tummy. "I th-think I'm f-full..."

The hyper-bunny didn't think that they'd ever have gotten this far, even taking into account the way hypers seemed to produce seed far in excess of what their sac might indicate. The cargo bay was cavernous, but Priscilla was undoubtedly the largest single object on board. If he'd been able to hilt himself within her, he wouldn't have been remotely able to touch her far side. "You... look... amazing..." he drawled, trying to keep his eyes from crossing.

"Little... tight..."

"You can do it..."

"Too... tight...!"

"Deep breaths, baby..."

"Mmmmff! MMMMFFF!"

"I love you..."

---

Epilogue

Virgil twiddled his thumbs nervously, paddling in slow circles just outside the portside crew showers. Beyond the nearby portholes, Planet spun lazily beneath them, a tie-dyed marble of pink and purple and green flora with impossibly azure seas. They'd been in proper orbit for only two days, and the mission's senior crew members had been automatically awoken only an hour before.

Woozy, groggy, and stumbling around in bodies that were vastly different from those they remembered, Virgil understood that the first things the officers might want to do would be a protein bar, a coffee and a long, scalding shower. That's what he and Pris did, after all, four months before.

In the intervening time between their cargo bay reunion and the final orbital braking procedures, Virgil had experienced no further issues with sleepwalking, or with frustrating levels of growth. His sac and sheath had receded to their original proportions, which was still to say he was several times larger than anyone he'd ever met in person back on Earth-that-was. He carried out his daily duties without problem, and of course with Pris on the oclens providing an extra pair of eyes, and technical support.

When Commander Shapiro finally emerged from the showers, shi was fully and splendidly naked, though still with a damp towel wrapped turban-style around hir famous blonde locks. "That... is SO much better," the inky black canine grinned, turning a quick pirouette in midair before catching hirself on a ceiling-mounted handle. "How do I look, Professor?"

It was a jarring sight. Commander Shapiro had been a small, scarred and silver-haired wolfhound the last time he'd seen hir, all sharp severe angles and brusque deadpan formality. The mission's senior officer was now a tall, leggy young woman, sporting three pairs of breasts that would give even Pris a run for her money, and the sort of hermness that would likely prevent hir from wearing normal trousers ever again.

That, and the evil sparkle in hir eye. Where the hell did THAT come from?

"F-fine, sir, ma'am, sir," Virgil stammered, trying to keep his eyes above the collarbones.

"You are allowed to look at me, Prof," shi chided him as hir lieutenants followed hir out of the showers. They weren't technically lieutenants, both being civilian, but some titles had to be adopted just for the sake of simplicity. Lieutenants Killian and Marion Moseby, the married technical supervisors for the mission, hadn't changed quite as much as the commander; younger, stronger, more well-endowed in nearly every imaginable sense, but still quite recognizably themselves.

"Yes, sir, I realize that, sir, it's just that I'm a Breeder now, ma'am, and I am trying not to 'start nothing', sir."

Commander Shapiro leaned to the side, eyeing Virgil's cumbersome sheath openly. "Indeed," shi mused. "There will be time for that later. Now then, where's Professor Priscilla? I understand you were both on shift."

"Er... yes, sir. Sirs," he amended, as Killian, now a fearsomely athletic young pony, and Marion, an equally intimidating cougar, drifted up, not a stitch of clothing between the four of them. "If you would be so kind as to follow me?"

Smiling curiously but nodding for him to lead on, the three heads of the Seedy McShipface Expedition followed Virgil through the ship. He noted, with some dismay, that the more experienced spacers were already about as good at navigating null-G with their new bodies as he was. "I trust everything is all right between the two of you?"

Virgil started at Killian's question. "Yes! Yes, absolutely, yes, we... I mean, if you'll activate your oclenses, you can talk to her yourself."

Three paws reached up, and three oclenses slipped out from behind their ears on invisible magnetic tendrils. The tiny microphones chirped once in their ears, and then all four of them could hear the marten's voice. "Hey, gang!" she said happily. "I got you on ship cams now! And, if I may say so, Commander... da-a-amn."

"I know, right?" Shapiro laughed, in about as un-Shapiro a tone of voice as Virgil could ever imagine. "How are you doing, Pris?"

"I'm good!" the marten replied. "Sorry I couldn't be there to meet you in person. I've had my hands full the last few months. It's a big job, recalibrating the re-entry and orbit procedures, but the software on board is just brilliant. We landed right in the pocket, five by five."

"Erm, I'm sorry... did you say 'recalibrating the re-entry'? Why on Earth would we have to do that?"

"Well, Doctor Marion... er, Lieutenant Doctor Marion? Anyways, because the ship's balance got all screwed up, and we couldn't quite perfect axial stability."

"What happened?"

"Well..."

Virgil drifted through the cargo bay's main doors, the Commander and hir lieutenants hot on his heels. There was no need for Virgil to speak, and Pris decided to just let their eyes do most of the explaining.

Commander Shapiro, shi of the storied military career that spanned from the last few global conflicts right through to planetary unification and eventual galactic exploration, was speechless. Killian and Marion, who had played a major part in the Breeder engineering program and actually had some of those processes named after them, both exhaled in disbelief.

"Hi," Pris smiled, waggling her fingers.

The cargo bay had been emptied of all cargo, every last crate and container and canister painstakingly moved from the starboard bay to the portside. It had taken weeks, combined with further weeks of then updating the shipping manifests with every item's new location; staged descents from the orbital ship to the surface would need exacting information, after all.

And yet, even without any of the thousands of pieces of essential materiel, the cargo bay was very full.

"So... we had a little issue with the Breeder protocol..."

Pris was a brightly-lit off-pink sphere, floating in the rough center of the bay, although a few stretchy straps had been criss-crossed around her to keep her stable. Her body was an almost comically small decoration atop her colossal womb, and as the astonished senior crew watched, dozens of little bumps and ripples and vibrations decorated her silhouette.

"Now, we've still got five weeks until I'm scheduled to give birth," Pris continued, while Virgil drifted up to cuddle with her from behind. "So, by my estimations, we should just have enough time to get... what... nine thousand, four hundred and sixty post-natal units built? Assuming we wake everyone up now, and get to work."