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"Okay, here goes nothing." Kamala pushed one last button and held her breath for a few seconds.

The lights in the engineering command section faded on gradually, some of them flickering before steadying, and the control panels and monitors came to life one by one.

Everyone waited a few more seconds and let out a series of relieved sighs.

"Guess nothing's gonna blow up," Asuka said. "Yet."

Kamala grinned. "I figured it was too much to hope for that everything would've just been turned off instead of physically damaged."

"About time we had a lucky break." Asuka hooked her ankle on the handrail running along the platform to prevent herself from floating away. "I'd recommend against turning anything else on, like the centrifuges; for all we know, the crew cut the power off to prevent something even worse from happening."

"Good point." Kamala aimed her ultratool at the control panel and attempted to access the ship's intranet. "I've memorized all the info on the Enterprise that I could get my hands on--like I said, I wanted to join the crew as soon as the ship was built--and this ship's layout is remarkably similar. I'd say it's at least a generation or two ahead of the one we were building, but it's familiar enough to--oh, here we go, I'm in."

Roger took his ultratool from his belt pouch. Kamala nodded.

"I'm linking you up." She added him to the connection she'd just established and began feeling her way through the computer. "Okay, a lot of the systems are locked down, which isn't surprising. Unfortunately, we don't have any of the passwords, so I'll have to hack in." She launched passcracks at the engineering crew's logs and engine status records.

In the corner of her eye, Asuka glanced at nothing in particular for a split-second. "Morrison just reported in. Seems he's found something." She turned toward the door. "I've asked Tank to keep an eye on things while I go see what Morrison's found."

"Uh-huh," Kamala muttered, already keeping most of her attention on her exploration of the computer. Amazingly, her passcracks had already unlocked some of the records. She flicked her ultratool at a bank of monitors on the left and routed the information to them. "Here we go. Looks like the main computer made the final log entry; it shut everything down after the crew died."

"Guess there was no point in keeping it all running." Seth shook his head. "Creepy."

"Is there anything in the records about how the crew died?" Marissa grabbed the edge of the console and pulled herself closer.

"Haven't found anything yet. That'll most likely be in the med-bay logs." Kamala nodded at the data scrolling past on the monitors. "Recent log entries indicate a catastrophic failure in one of the engine components."

"The ship wasn't in danger of blowing up or anything, was it?" Roger's face took on an alarmed look as he glanced around at the displays.

Kamala held out her lower-right arm and clasped his hand. "No, nothing like that. Turns out it was just a faulty piece of equipment. When it broke, it damaged the jump engines severely enough that the ship had to drop out of hyperspace. The engines will have to be replaced, and that can't be done without docking at a station or planet that has the parts and tools they need. Of course, there's no way to get to a suitable repair facility without jumping back into hyperspace."

"So this ship isn't going anywhere. Great." Roger shrugged. "Well, at least we have a place to live until we figure out what our next step should be. Unless we run out of air."

"I'll see what I can do about that." Kamala found the environmental control systems and launched a diagnostic app. It ran a thorough scan on the software and hardware, and sent what it found straight into her brain. "Air, heat, and all that stuff is still functional, just deactivated. I'm switching it on now."

Roger grinned and threw his arms around her. "Alright! Progress."

She laughed as they started to drift away from the controls. She coiled her tail around the handrail and pulled them back--then she drew him closer and pressed her lips against his.

He froze for a second, but didn't try to back away. Her hearts pounded and she kept the kiss going for a long moment before breaking contact and sucking in a deep breath. She stroked his cheek and grinned.

"Now that's progress."

He looked uncomfortable for a moment, but kept his smile in place. He kissed her again--but Marissa cleared her throat and both of them turned to face her.

"What about the centrifuges? Can you get them started?"

"I think so. They're not damaged, either; the computer just shut them down because...well, the crew didn't need gravity anymore." Kamala sent a command to the console and smiled when it responded. "They're spinning up now. It'll take a few minutes for them to reach full rotation, but we'll have gravity in the crew quarters and other key areas then."

"That's a relief. Being stuck in zero-G would make us all turn puffy."

Seth chuckled and returned to his perusal of the displays. "How about a date on the logs? Any idea where and when this ship came from?"

Kamala checked the computer's final log entry and her jaw dropped. "The last log is dated March 2, 2147."

Everyone stared at her. She tried to think of something to say, but couldn't.

Damn. Just a few hours ago, it was 2070. And if the ship was also scooped up from the past and we just happened to end up in the same time, who knows how many centuries we've skipped?

She shivered, pulled Roger into a tight embrace, and struggled to keep her breathing steady.

Damn...

#

"What've you got?" Asuka walked over to Morrison and raised an eyebrow. He had his arm around one of the techs while staring at a door.

"Some kind of...bug. Or something." He shook his head and the tip of his tail twitched. "Like a cross between a spider and a centipede. Big suckers, too, at least three feet long." He nodded at the door. "We found a whole nest of 'em in the medical bay. Bastards attacked us."

"Anybody hurt?" She looked around at the rest of Morrison's team.

"We're okay," the girl he had his arm around mumbled. "One of them almost got its teeth into Henry. Or whatever the hell it has."

"It slipped through the door before we got it closed." Morrison waved a hand at his left leg. "It grabbed onto my leg, but I kicked it loose before it could bite me or inject me with anything."

"Henry shot it." The tech pointed. "It floated down the corridor. The rest are locked in the med-bay." She shuddered. "Unless there's an open air vent or something."

"Oh, great." Asuka opened her comm implant and connected with Kamala's ultratool. <Looks like we might have a problem. We're gonna need the internal cameras and other sensing devices brought online ASAP.>

"Sure thing," Kamala responded. "What kind of problem is it?"

<Bug infestation. Morrison thinks they might be what killed the crew.>

"Oh, shit. Okay, I'm on it."After a momentary pause, Kamala added, "So...do you know if they're all over the ship?"

<So far, we've only found them in the med-bay, but since we've barely started exploring...>

"Right. I'm in the internal sensors now; I'll see if there's a way to track these things."

Asuka jogged to the end of the corridor and found the spider-centipede on the floor. "Jesus Christ. That thing is just wrong."

"I wonder how it got on the ship," Morrison muttered.

"Could be something they were studying in one of the labs; whatever container they were in probably broke open when the ship arrived here. Or if they can survive in vacuum, they could've found their way onto this ship from anywhere." She captured a still from her eyes' input and sent it to all the currently active ultratools and comm implants. <Be on the lookout for these things, everybody.>

Morrison took his 'tool out of his vest pocket, tapped the surface, and a small hard-light display appeared above it. He pointed it at the door and a mass of yellow blips appeared in the holofield. "Well, we can track their motion when we're close enough, but we don't have a way to differentiate them from other life forms."

"Kamala's working on it."

Another voice--one Asuka didn't recognize--cut in. "Hey, everybody, we've just found the bridge. Or, well, control room. Or whatever. We were trying to find out where the ship has been and how it got here, and...well, you all need to see this."

<Is it a problem?>

"Could be."

<Okay, we're on our way.> Asuka located the tech's ultratool and headed back the way she'd come. She pointed at the med-bay door as she passed it. "That's locked, right?"

"Yeah, door and air vents." Morrison waved his ultratool. "I locked it down as soon as I was able to get into the system. Unless those horrifying fuckers can figure out how to crack my passcode, they won't be going anywhere."

"Good. Okay, let's go see what kind of trouble we're in now."

After finding the nearest ladder, climbing it to the core, and pulling themselves along it until they reached the forward centrifuge, they followed the signal until they entered a large, roughly circular room with control panels and chairs lining the walls and a half dozen other consoles in the center. Asuka followed the ultratool's signal through a door to the left, which led to a room that appeared to have planets and other bodies floating in it.

Well, that's...different.

"Hey, Bob," Morrison's techie friend said. "What's this? A holodeck?"

"Hey, Luana. I think it's for navigation. Or stellar cartography." Bob shrugged, took off his baseball cap and waved it at the planet and stars hovering around him, and put it back on. "We were just playing back a record of the ship's last few jumps; that's it in the center, by the way."

"Ooooh!" Kamala's voice, from behind Asuka. She turned and found Kamala slithering into the room with Roger beside her and Hitomi, Seth, and Marissa behind her. Kamala looked around and grinned. "This is gorgeous! What is it? A map room?"

"Looks like it." Bob pointed. "I don't recognize any of the planets, of course, but the onboard computer has that one listed as 6 Lyncis b. Apparently, it's the site of an Earth colony spread out over a dozen space stations."

"Nice!" Kamala circled around the planet, beaming, and glanced upward. "I wonder where the projectors are."

Morrison cleared his throat. "Um, you said you found something that could be a problem."

Bob nodded and said, "Resume playback."

The computer's representation of the ship--labeled ISC Challenger--moved away from a structure that looked like a series of rings linked together by a latticework frame, forming a sort of tunnel.

Huh. That looks a lot like the jumpgate we were building. Asuka arched an eyebrow. I wonder how many of them there are now.

Roger pointed his ultratool at the Challenger. "Looks like it's drifting. This must be after the engines got knocked offline."

The whole room blanked out. Asuka glanced around.

"That must've been when it ended up here." Kamala crossed her upper arms over her chest and fiddled with her ultratool in her lower hands. "Whatever the hell it was, it probably overloaded the sensors."

"The exterior cameras recorded a flash, and suddenly everything we just saw here was replaced by the debris field and nebula we found ourselves in." Bob glanced at the ceiling. "Next record."

The Challenger reappeared, surrounded by the same wreckage that had flattened the repair bay. Bob pointed at the stream of reddish light flowing past the ship.

"That's not actually a nebula. The crew was able to scan the area before everything went down the toilet." He raised his left hand and swept it to the side, and the holo-projection zipped past, moving to an area far ahead of the Challenger. When it stopped, a sun filled the room.

A tendril of light extended from the sun and vanished into the distance.

"Oh, boy." Kamala slid closer to the sun and shook her head slowly. "I don't like where this is going. Something's pulling the sun apart, right? Ripping its outer layers away?"

"Yep." Bob did the sweeping gesture again, and the image zipped back to the Challenger and kept going, finally arriving at an enormous accretion disk. And at the center of the glowing disk was a point of utter blackness. "And that's where the stellar material is going."

Asuka groaned. "Lemme guess. Black hole--and we're being pulled in, too?"

Bob sighed. "Yeah. It'll take a while, since we're so far away, but if we don't find a way to get our asses to another star system before we're pulled in too far, we're dead."

#

Oh, you've got to be shitting me! Roger slumped against the nearest console. We survive all this, and now we're about to be spaghettfied.

"How long have we got?" Asuka said.

"I haven't crunched the numbers yet, but I'd say a few months."

"Months?" Morrison cocked his head. "Hell, that should be plenty of time."

Hitomi stepped forward and stared at the black hole. "Months, years, decades--we'll still die if we can't find a way out of here."

Kamala wrung her hands and glanced around, trying to keep a grip on herself. "Well, there's got to be something we can do. Maybe...how about the shuttles I found in the hangar?"

"If any of them are designed for long-range flights..." Roger trailed off and shrugged. "We have no way to know where to go--where there's a colony or station or something that can help us survive."

"Hmm." Kamala traced a claw over her lower lip. "I'm sure I can access navigational data--star maps and whatnot--but they could be out of date by now. Or we could've been dumped so far from charted space that any maps we find will be useless."

"We could still use the shuttles to scout around. Who knows, maybe we'll stumble onto a ship that actually has functioning engines."

Asuka nodded. "Whether or not we figure out where to go, sooner or later anywhere will be better than here."

"Excellent point." Kamala took a deep breath and held a hand out to Roger. "Wanna help me check out the shuttles?"

He walked over to her and took her hand. "If it means a chance to get away from the smell of all those rotting bodies for a while, I'm all for it."

"Huh, I almost forgot about that." Morrison shuddered. "The fact that I appear to be getting used to it is more than a little horrifying."

Luana reached up to pat his arm.

"Since we only have two pilots," Asuka said, "it'd be a good idea to have them teach everyone how to fly the shuttles, assuming any of them are still functional."

"We learned the basics as part of our tech training." Roger shrugged. "Well, we haven't actually piloted anything yet, but we had to learn the controls to help us know what we're doing when we repair them."

"We'll let one of the pilots know if we need help." Kamala tugged on Roger's hand. "Okay, let's see what we can do."

He walked with her into the corridor and headed for the core. When they reached it, Roger chuckled.

"I was just getting used to having gravity again, and now we're back in zero-G."

"Well, we're weightless from here on." She grinned. "Here, get on my back and hold on tight."

"Uh..." He raised an eyebrow and she laughed.

"I can get us there faster than we would if we just pulled ourselves along."

"Well, okay." He moved behind her, put his arms around her, and fumbled around. Since she had four breasts, the odds of accidentally groping her were doubled.

She laughed again, took his hands and placed them firmly on her lower pair. "You know I've been hot for you since we met, so it's not like I'd be offended if you touched my boobs."

"Uh, well...heh." He blushed. "I, uh..." He shrugged again.

She chuckled, coiled her tail up like a spring, and backed up to the wall. "Hold on tight." She waited for him to secure his grip on her, then she sprang forward, launching them toward the forward section of the ship. She reached back with her lower hands and held onto his belt.

They moved fast enough for the air to ruffle Roger's hair. He closed his eyes and took a moment to enjoy the "wind" in his face.

In less than a minute, they reached the front of the Challenger and headed for the hangar. Kamala held his hands against her boobs for a few more seconds before letting go and floating over to the nearest shuttle.

"Okay, let's find out how lucky we are."

#

"You're not usually this quiet; how're you holding up?" Asuka reached up to put her hand on Marissa's shoulder.

Marissa shrugged and kept her eyes on the monitor in front of her. "Just worried about Boiler. Can't stop thinking about her."

Seth nodded. "Same here. Having trouble concentrating."

"You three are really close, huh?"

"We're in love." Marissa dried her eyes with her shirt. "It's weird...it took me a while to get used to our relationship, but once I did...now that she's not here, it's like a part of me is missing."

"Me, too." Seth hugged her. "We'll find our way back to her."

"If she's still..." Marissa winced. "Do you really think she's okay?"

"She's got to be." He smiled. "Hey, you wanna take one of the shuttles out and have a look around? Maybe we'll get lucky and find a TARDIS."

She managed a brief chuckle. "That'd be a pretty sweet ride." She sighed and turned back to the console. "Maybe later. For now, I should keep working on tracking whatever creepy-crawlies might be roaming the ship."

"Okay." Seth kissed her before returning to his console. "Good thing Roger remembered to send us the tracking app he cooked up for Kamala. Usually she's the one who's easily distracted, but this time he seemed a bit untethered."

Asuka grinned. "I think Kamala had him distracted."

"Yeah, she's been pursuing him pretty aggressively during the last few months. Maybe she'll get lucky while they're out looking around."

"Maybe. If nothing else, it'd give them time to relax and just enjoy each other's company, what with there being no immediate danger. In fact, when you two are finished here, you might want to take a shuttle for a spin. Might give you some time to decompress."

"Gah," Luana muttered. "Please don't say 'decompress' after what we've just been through."

Asuka winced and glanced over her shoulder at Luana. "Oy. Right, sorry, poor choice of words."

"Probably a good idea," Marissa said. "As soon as I finish this up and we're able to see where the 'spiderpedes' are. I'd rather not have one of those things jump out of an air vent at us on the way to the hangar."

Asuka smiled. "I'll let you work, then." Her smile faded. "I should get to an unpleasant bit of business I've been putting off. Something needs to be done about the corpses all over the ship."

"Ugh." Marissa shuddered. "I wouldn't be in any hurry to touch those, either."

"Fortunately, Omega and I can turn off our olfactory receptors. But we'd still have to look at the bodies. And touch them." Asuka turned to the door.

"I'll help." Hitomi walked over to her. "Since I'm just a machine, bad odors don't bother me."

"I think we've seen that you're much more than 'just' a machine, but thanks for offering to help. This'll make it go a bit faster."

"I'm almost done," Marissa said. "I'll be able to direct you to the morgue as soon as I'm able to track the bugs."

"Thanks. In the meantime, I guess we should get started." Asuka led Hitomi into the corridor and out of sight.

"Huh," Seth mumbled. "What the hell?"

Marissa cringed. "What's about to go horribly wrong now?"

"No, nothing like that. I was just looking through some of the Challenger's records and found this map of the explored galaxy. As it was in 2147, that is." He frowned and scratched his cheek. "I found this chart of planets and colonies, including alien civilizations that have been discovered, and...well, it just looks weird."

Marissa walked over him and he moved aside to give her a look at his monitor. It showed her a section of a spiral arm marked with color-coded flags which represented colonies and outposts that originated from Earth and a small handful of alien races.

"One of the really interesting things is that most of the aliens we made contact with were machines--automated probes and such. Many of them were actually machine civilizations."

"That's kind of cool. As long as they're not Decepticons."

"Heh. Most of those were originally built by organic races and are still growing and evolving long after the people who built them became extinct. But what really got my attention was this." Seth tapped a few checkboxes on the bottom of the display, removing all Earth worlds from the map.

Marissa leaned forward. "Okay, yeah, that does kinda jump right out at you." In the center of the map was an empty "bubble" of space a little over two hundred lightyears across.

"Earth is in that empty area. No alien species were found in there, even though quite a few planets had ruins, artifacts, and technology left over from alien civilizations."

"Yeah, I remember talking about this with Boiler. The Sagan found abandoned cities on at least one planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. And the remains of a colony at Proxima."

"There were numerous alien races in this area, but they've been gone for centuries or longer." Seth stared at the display. "It's like everything within two hundred lightyears either died off or was wiped out by something--except Earth."

#

"Looks like you're getting the hang of it already." Roger smiled.

"Amazingly, it's not that hard." Kamala grinned and tapped one of the thruster controls. "And it helps that everything's touchscreen and can be configured to each user's preferences."

"Yeah, that's pretty slick." He leaned over to look out the side window. "Damn, I hope we find something useful soon. There are so many things we need to worry about--food, water, medical supplies."

"Yeah." She sighed and played around with another control, sweeping one of the shuttle's cameras over the wreckage drifting all around them. The shuttle they'd chosen seemed to be designed for scientific expeditions, so it had cameras and other scanning devices. She'd set the ship to scan everything for life signs, but after an hour out here, they hadn't picked anything up.

Roger watched her for a moment and seemed to realize that her mood had taken a downturn. He gazed out the window for a moment, then he chuckled. "Another thing I should look up is the winners of the Super Bowl between 2070 and 2147, just in case we manage to find our way back home."

Kamala grinned again. "I probably should be aghast at the thought of that sort of manipulation, but honestly, I find the idea quite appealing. Win just enough money to buy a house somewhere and live comfortably for the rest of our lives. Or maybe start up our own business."

"Sounds good. I don't know if I'd feel right about not having a job, even if we had enough money to get by without one. Having our own little business might be worth the investment."

He's talking about us being together. Kamala beamed. Sounds like he's actually considering a relationship. Yes!

She took a slow breath and waited for her elevated heart rate to return to normal. "So, uh...when we talked earlier about...well, about us..."

"Before we found the Challenger, right?"

"Yeah. Did you really mean it, or did you say you were interested just because you thought we were gonna die?" She couldn't look him in the eye while she waited for his answer, afraid that if she did, she'd look like she was begging.

"A little of both, actually." He reached out to hold her upper-left hand. "I really, really like you. I've always considered you a friend. And I think we could be more than that." He blushed and looked away. "And when I thought we only had an hour to live..."

"Oh." She placed her other left hand over his, cupping it between hers, but still couldn't look at him. "And...?"

"I want to try it. I'm just having a little trouble getting past...well..."

"Ah. It's too 'weird' for you?"

He chuckled again. "When I was in the med-bay after you saved my life, Boiler came to see how we were doing. She kept nudging me in your direction, and when I said it hadn't really occurred to me because it was too weird, she just looked at me like I'd farted."

Kamala laughed. "Given her background, I imagine she did."

He blushed again. "Yeah. She said that she has three biological parents and is in love with two humans, and one of her friends is a human brain in a robot body, and another friend is able to phase his body through solid objects, so she's the wrong person to talk to about stuff being weird. Kinda put things into perspective."

"But you still can't quite take that last step?"

"Uh..."

"Hmm. Okay, hold that thought." She tapped a few more glowing buttons on the touch-panel. "There. I've set the shuttle on autopilot; it'll keep scanning for life signs and ships with intact hulls, and will steer around any debris large enough to damage it." She released the buckle on her seatbelt and floated free, flexing her spine and rubbing her lower back. Fitting her huge, snake-like body into a chair designed for humans was always awkward at best.

She pushed away from the console and drifted into the passenger compartment. A row of seats ran along the right side, while the left was taken up by a workbench which was presumably used for analyzing samples and whatever other scientific work the shuttle had been sent out to do.

The bench should work. She tugged on its edge and turned herself to face Roger. She smiled and unhooked her double sports-bra, flicked it away and raised a brow ridge. "Does this help?"

He blushed, but grinned at the same time. "It certainly does."

Her hearts pounded again. She unbuckled her tool belt and hooked it around one of the bench's legs. Moving slowly, she slid her denim skirt down the length of her body, pulled the tip of her tail through, and tossed the skirt over her shoulder. "How about this?"

"Things are definitely looking better." He glanced out the cockpit windows. "But if one of the other shuttles passes by and the people inside see us..."

She took her ultratool from its pouch on her belt, aimed it at the panel inside the doorway, and sent a command to the shuttle's computer. The door closed behind Roger, blocking them from view of anyone outside.

He smiled, but it faltered quickly. "And doing it in zero gravity...uh, I hope I don't get motion sickness."

She nodded at the bench. "One of the benefits of having four arms; I can keep one pair around you and hold us both to the bench with the other pair."

"Yeah, that could work."

"Come here." She held onto the bench, reached out with her tail and coiled it around his waist. She tugged gently, pulling him to her, and slipped her lower arms around him.

"I, uh..."

She kissed him, holding it for a long moment before pulling back a few inches. She gazed into his wide, startled eyes, and smiled. "That seems to help."

He nodded and leaned in to kiss her again.

She took his hands and moved them up to her breasts.

He glanced at her chest and laughed softly. "I'm not sure where to start."

"Anywhere you like." She turned, keeping her upper arms around him, held onto the bench with her lower hands and slid her upper hands over his back, down his chest, and stopped at his belt. She unbuckled it while giving him another, longer kiss. When their lips parted again, she breathed, "Here's a good place to start: I love you."

He stared back at her, startled again, and broke into a brilliant grin. He opened his mouth, hesitated, and finally pulled her into another embrace.

Still can't say it, eh? She unzipped his pants and pulled them down. That's okay. Small steps. Just getting him out of his clothes is practically a miracle. She glanced down and grinned.

"Looks like I'm on the right track, at least."

"Yeah, definitely." He pushed back long enough to take his shirt off and returned to her arms, sharing an even more passionate kiss with her. He stroked her cheek and smiled. "I think we can stay out here for another couple hours before everybody else starts wondering what happened to us."

"Sounds good," she whispered, and pulled on the edges of the bench, pinning him lightly to its surface, and aimed a saucy grin at him. This is gonna be the best two hours of my life.

#

"Well, I'm glad someone is having a good time." Asuka stood in the doorway and raised an eyebrow.

Marissa glanced up at Asuka, turned back to Seth, and snickered. "Sorry. It's Luana and Henry. They're the ones who're having a good time." She shook her head and stifled another laugh. "They forgot to turn their comlink off and, well, um..."

Asuka nodded and chuckled. "Ah, they started humping it out as soon as they were alone?"

Seth nodded.

"I noticed the way they were looking at each other, then when they volunteered to take a shuttle out for a look around, I put two and two together." Asuka wiggled her eyebrows. "Actually, I've been assuming that quite a few of us might want to 'blow off some steam.' Probably just a reaction to nearly being killed."

"Yeah, the thought did cross my mind." Seth flicked a glance at Marissa.

Asuka nodded at the door. "Now that we can track those spiderpede things, feel free to go blow off some of your own steam. We've finished moving the bodies into the morgue, so you won't have to worry about running into any of 'em on the way."

"Tempting." Marissa exchanged another look with Seth.

He grinned. "I'm feeling particularly 'inspired' by the show Luana and Henry just put on."

"Ah, to be young again." Asuka chuckled.

"Well, actually, you are."

"Not really. I'm...over eighty. Quite a bit over, to be honest." Asuka shrugged, stuck her hands into her pockets, and leaned against the wall. "It's just the body that makes me look fourteen."

Marissa arched an eyebrow. "Now that you mention it, I've been wondering--"

"How'd I end up in a teenage prosthetic body?"

"Yeah."

Asuka shook her head and sighed. "My previous body got mangled by a rocket, and I needed to get back into action as quickly as possible. So I had to take the first available body and have it modified for combat. Took less time to upgrade it than it would've to wait for an adult body to be shipped in. After that, I decided to stick with it until it gets damaged irreparably, because having your brain removed and installed in a new body still isn't one hundred percent safe and even when it works, there's an adjustment period to suffer through, not to mention all sorts of issues that can pop up."

"Huh. Guess I never really thought of all the things that could go wrong."

"The procedure is becoming more routine nowadays, but at best it's kind of a pain in the ass. And now that we're here--wherever the hell 'here' is--we don't know how long it'll be before we find a planet with sufficiently advanced technology. So for the foreseeable future, I'm stuck in this teenage body that has tits the size of bee stings."

"Still, you're an adult. If you've been thinking about letting off a little steam, yourself, there's probably someone around here who--"

"Eh." Asuka shrugged. "Thanks to this body, if I had sex with a guy who really is a teenager, no one else would give it a second thought--but to me, it'd be too weird and creepy. My only other choice would be to find an adult who likes the idea of fucking a kid, which would definitely be creepy." She sighed again. "So the only option left for me is, um, solo flights." Then she grinned. "Which I do a lot. 'Cause, y'know, what else can I do?"

The corner or Marissa's mouth turned upward. "Well, rumor has it that you seemed to find Otto quite appealing, and he looks like he's around fifteen."

"But he's kind of in the same boat; he's several decades older than he looks, so it would've been as close to normal as I could get. But he's with Shakira, and you couldn't pry those two apart with a crowbar." Asuka rubbed her hands over her face. "Besides, they could be on the far end of the universe, for all we know. Anyway, like I said, if you two need to take a break, I can keep an eye on things for a while."

Marissa slipped her arm around Seth's waist. "It wouldn't feel right without Boiler, but she wouldn't want us to stop living our lives."

"Like I said before, we'll find our way back to her. Somehow." He kissed her. "Until then, we still have each other."

"Ah, go on, you two." Asuka waved her hands, shooing them away from the console. "We don't know how many opportunities we'll have for some R&R; take advantage of it while you can."

Morrison's voice suddenly cut in over the speakers. "Huh. What's that?"

"Uh, guys," Luana said, "I think we might have something, here."

"Guess we better put our clothes back on," Morrison mumbled, fading out of the microphone's range. A moment later, he said, "Hey, wait. What--oh, shit_!"_

Static.

Asuka rushed over to the console and pushed the send button. "Henry? Luana? Can you hear me?"

Nothing but static.

Asuka looked up at Marissa and Seth. "Oh, hell..."

#

"We should probably get back to work." Kamala sighed, glanced at her watch, and kept her arms around Roger. "But I don't want this to end."

"Neither do I." He smiled and rubbed her back slowly.

"Still think this is too weird?" She aimed a lopsided grin at him.

"I think I should've done this a long time ago." He smiled and kissed her.

"Well--"

A shrill beep came from the cockpit, followed by a muffled female voice.

"That sounds like Marissa." Roger frowned. "Can't make out what she's saying."

"Something about Luana's shuttle." Kamala gave him one more quick peck on the lips before pushing away from the bench and floating over to the door. She took a quick look around as she entered the cockpit and hovered over the console.

Roger plucked his clothing from the air and dressed before joining her. He buckled himself into the copilot's seat and took in the view. Not too different from a couple hours ago; chunks of metal surrounded them, colliding occasionally and spinning off in different directions, most of them silhouetted against the stellar material being drawn away by the black hole.

Kamala opened a channel. "Marissa, wanna repeat that last message? We didn't catch all of it."

"We've lost contact with Luana's shuttle. We're not sure what happened; Henry seemed startled by something he saw, then they were cut off. We've kept trying, but they're not answering us. We're not picking up their transponder, either."

"Oh, shit," Roger muttered. "I hope they didn't crash into anything."

"That's exactly what we're worried about," Asuka said. "We're asking everyone to search for them."

"We're on it." Kamala held all four hands over her controls. "Send us their last known position."

A window opened on the panel to Kamala's left and displayed a blip representing Luana's shuttle. Kamala steered toward it and accelerated.

Only a few moments passed before they reached the blip's location. Roger brushed his shoulder-length hair away from his face and stared out the window.

Whoa. His jaw dropped.

The shuttle was nowhere in sight, but directly in front of him and Kamala, only a few hundred yards away, was an enormous ship. Or maybe a space station. Sort of an elongated ovoid with a dark, mottled hull, the patterns on which seemed to ooze around as he watched. The hull was peppered with sickly yellow, glowing dots and lines, possibly interior lighting shining through viewports. The front end had a round opening set into it which bore an unnerving resemblance to a mouth.

Kamala stared at it with her mouth hanging open. "That's...big." She shook herself out of it and turned back to the console. "Uh, Marissa, we haven't found the shuttle yet, but we're staring down the business end of a huge-ass ship--and it appears to be intact."

"Alien, or one of ours?" Asuka replied.

"It's either one of ours, but from hundreds or thousands of years in the future, or it's alien." Kamala shivered. "And honestly, just from looking at it, I'm betting on alien."

Roger reached out to his console, aimed the sensors at the ship, and watched the scan results pop up on his screens. "Jesus. It's almost three miles long. Can't get a reading on the hull composition or any power sources."

A pulse appeared in the corner of his eye, like a diffused lightning strike--and the cockpit fell into darkness.

Roger twitched, shook his head, and stared at his control panel. The entire board had gone dark, as had Kamala's console.

"Uh...Marissa? Asuka? Can you still hear us?"

Silence.

"Oh, no," Kamala whispered.

The shuttle lurched forward, driving Roger back into his seat. He gripped the edge of his console and stared out the front window at the massive ship looming ahead.

"Is it..." Kamala sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Is it pulling us in?"

"It must be." He glanced at the blank control panels and shook his head. "Everything's shut down; there's no other way we could be moving this fast."

Before the words left his mouth, the slowly tumbling shuttle had entered the maw-like opening in the larger ship.

As the shuttle continued turning, the maw passed across the front windows--and closed, a giant metallic iris contracting until the shuttle had been locked inside.

Just before the iris closed, Roger caught a glimpse of a reddish vortex expanding toward the ship.

Kamala drew in another quick breath. "That...I think I've seen that before. When I watched a video of the Sagan leaving the solar system. The vortex it used to enter hyperspace looked a lot like the one we just saw." Her left arms reached out for him; her upper hand found his and latched on, gripping it like a vise. "We've just left our friends behind, and now we have no idea where we'll end up."