10 comments/ 11760 views/ 22 favorites IMAGCASM By: IanSaulWhitcomb This story is really, really messed up and depraved, in many ways. You have been warned! ***** At least I got to fuck Margot one last time before the Earth was destroyed. I'd begged and pleaded all week for her to change her mind. The sheer misery of knowing she was moving out but being unable to do anything about it almost drove me mad, and more than once I cried myself to sleep wishing she hadn't given me so much notice. But on the other hand, if she'd waited until the day her new apartment came open, I'd have gone to bed clueless Wednesday night without that one last screw and then woken up Thursday morning dead like everybody else. But Margot told me ahead of time, and I groveled all week long until I finally convinced her to take a last walk with me in Asherton Park, where we'd first made love a year earlier. As with that long-gone magical night, the park was surprisingly deserted, and after lots of walking and crying and her consoling me while remaining absolutely firm on the breakup, I asked her to have sex with me one last time "for closure." Surprisingly, she agreed. So I lay down with her in a little clearing off the main paths, looked at her dark hair spilling across the grass, looked in her eyes, colorless and black in the night. I tried to kiss her, but only got a hand across the mouth in response. She reached between us and undid my belt and pants with an expression I'd have to call "clinical." Then she eased her dress up and her panties down and waited. The reality that this was the last time I'd be with her, man and woman, truly set in. And it left me completely limp. I felt helpless and emasculated, like my world was ending (little did I know) - or had already ended. None of which lent itself to arousal. So Margot took me in hand and began to tug, something my body reacted to even though the situation made me want to cry. Once I hardened up, she spat on her hand, got me wet, and guided me to her soft, about-to-be-lost entrance. Then she paused and looked me in the eye. "Before we do this," she said, "I guess I really ought to tell you I'm not moving into the new place alone. Kevin's moving in with me." The quiet of the dark evening no longer sounded quiet. Instead, I heard an uproar of crickets mocking me with laughter. Kevin? The poser with the ponytail from the ballroom dance class we took? "I just don't want you thinking that if you make this good enough, I'll change my mind." "Kevin," I said. "Christ." Which meant that where I was at that moment, Kevin had been too. Hovering over Margot's sleek, wonderful body poised to thrust into her - but looking down on an expression of welcome and desire instead of the blank indifference that I saw now. The right thing to do would have been to get up, put it back in my pants, and get on with my life. But my head was a mess, a stew of dismay and hurt and betrayal, and instead of doing the right thing, I found myself clenching my jaw and slamming down into her, hard and angry. Margot grunted in surprise, tight and dry around me with not much more than her spit on my dick for lubrication. Her mouth opened as if to say something, then shut itself as I started thrusting. She didn't respond or move with me, just lay there taking it. The more I pumped into the rough tackiness of her unaroused cunt, the angrier I got. You goddamn fucking bitch. After everything you ever said about honesty and faithfulness and how people who cheat are assholes because they should respect their partner enough to break up first, and you've let Kevin hit this enough times that you're already ready to move in with him? What the fuck! I jammed harder and harder, accelerating as it hit me that I'd thrown away a year of my life on a two-timing slut and a liar. Part of my brain knew that was an unfair characterization, but I told that part to shut the fuck up. Pretty soon I was rocking her entire body back and forth on the grass of the clearing, watching her face twitch slightly in discomfort at the penetration and drag of my erection through her disinterested vagina. And then I realized that it didn't feel quite so disinterested anymore. That my shaft had started gliding instead of chafing. That her eyebrows weren't tightening in pain but with the uncontrolled tremors of a woman beginning to enjoy herself. She started moving her hips, and I humped even more fiercely. That's right, you treacherous skank, take it and like it from me this time when Kevin's thinking he's the only one you're happy to spread for. "Ohh," she groaned, "Jesus, Cale, you're never like this ..." I hammered faster still, a firecracker-fuse of fury starting to burn its way from my chest down through my belly and into my balls. Well if this is what you wanted, maybe you should have fucking asked me to be this way instead of jumping into bed with a ponytail schmuck. "Cale ... shit ..." Wham. Wham. Orgasm rampaged from my spine through my scrotum on its way to my dick. "Oh god - Cale - " And then, in the searing white light of ejaculation, I shouted, "Fuck you, Margot!" She screamed and clutched at me as cum shot from my cock deep into her cheating-witch womb. A hateful, liberating, ecstatic release shuddered through me and spouted out to fill that faithless cunt, strobing my brain with flashes of dead love and revenge and pure physical pleasure. And then, with the last pulse of semen from my urethra, the flickering stopped. But the light stayed on. "Cale, what the hell?" Margot had finished coming too and now threw an arm across her face against the glare from above. I looked up, only to blink and flinch away, half-blinded. Shit, is that a police helicopter? What - But there was no chuffle of rotor blades, only a deep and growing hum. The light cut off. And Margot, the park, and Earth were gone. * * * A sky of steely grey and a bed of hard, cold rock greeted me when I woke. Or maybe, I realized, looking around, it wasn't steely grey but actual grey steel. Hills and ridges and ravines of off-white stone surrounded me, running away into the distance where for all the world it looked like the slate-colored sky curved down to meet them. As if it wasn't a sky at all, but a miles-across dome. Sitting up, I found my clothes gone, a tight silvery jumpsuit in their place. My hand bumped something metal when I moved - some kind of rifle. Not the hunting kind. Not the army kind. The kind you'd expect to see in a sci-fi video game. What. The. Fucking. Hell. A sound made me turn: "Ping!" Just over my right shoulder hovered a fist-sized metal egg, lines of blue phosphorescence etched around its surface. "A contest," it said metallically. In the air beside it, an abstract human figure and an abstract not-so-human figure appeared, the first silhouetted in peach and the other in yellow holographic light. "Two contestants." The figures lunged and grappled. Above the struggling silhouettes, a pair of spinning oblate spheroids began rapidly orbiting about a central point, each of them covered in scribbly continents. "Two planets." As the holographic battle continued, the peach and yellow colors all shifted to green, making it impossible to distinguish one figure from the other. "One victor," said the metal egg. A green figure sprang upright while the other toppled and lay still. "One corpse." A circling planet settled into place above the triumphant figure. The other cartoon world began looping in wider and wider ellipses. "Then one planet." The careening green sphere winked out, along with the prone loser of the animated fight. "Your victory, your planet." The remaining holographic world zoomed up in size to reveal familiar Earthly continents. The figure beneath it took on my exact and detailed features. Then the miniature me rotated to the horizontal and sprawled out, bleeding. "Your corpse ..." A rapidly dispersing cloud of rubble displaced the projected Earth. With that, the metal egg shot off across the hills, too fast to follow. "Fuck me." The worst part was, there was no point in thinking, "Am I dreaming? Am I in a coma? Did I snap and go crazy? Where's Margot?" I was on a spaceship. Or maybe already on an alien planet. The beam of light hadn't been any helicopter, that's for sure. Some nonhuman thing had kidnapped me, brought me here, and pretty clearly threatened to blow up the Earth if I didn't win this Thunderdome arena deathmatch. The light fell all around, directionless. I couldn't see any defined source; my shadow just spread in a hazy grey pool on the ground. I stood up feeling lightheaded. Earth is so fucked, I thought. I suck at videogames, and I've never held a real gun in my life. I picked up the rifle. It felt heavy, awkward, unbalanced. At least there aren't any complicated controls. Just a button on the grip I assumed served as the trigger. Maybe it wasn't entirely hopeless. Maybe whoever they'd captured from the other planet was as big a shmo as me. Should I try some target practice, so I at least have a chance of hitting something when the ... alien shows up? Or will the light or noise just give away my position and let them snipe me? [It will not matter either way.] If my finger had been on the button, I'd have sprayed bullets or laser blasts all over the place at the sound of that voice - because it wasn't a sound. It came through my head, not my ears. I spun around, and around again, looking for the source. Fucking shit hell fuck me. Can you read my goddamn mind? [Yes. I'm about to step out from behind the boulder on your right rear flank.] I pretty much jumped out of my shoes turning around. [Feel free to shoot if you like. You will not hit me.] And there she was. I assume something about the voice in my brain subconsciously told me she was a she. I certainly couldn't have guessed from her shape, sinuous and slim, a couple feet taller than me and a lot thinner. She stood on two legs, with a bulbous tail or abdominal extension stretching out behind her like a blunted wasp's sting. Her skin had a sandy yellow tone and a texture so smooth she might have been sculpted from butter. Her arms hung long and seemingly jointless, ending in hands with four fingers that came together in a point. Narrow, rounded, unthreatening shoulders supported the arms. Between them on a long, lithe neck sat her head, oval, framed by some kind of horns or tendrils that looped in curls at each side like the antlers of a bighorn sheep only heavier and smoother and the color of lavender. Her eyes shimmered purple on the flanks of a central ridge that ran down the front of her skull to a tubelike projection, slitted at the end ... her mouth? [I am very relieved that they have finally happened across a species with compatible brainwaves. Since we can communicate, perhaps I will not have to kill you.] I raised my gun, hoping I had the sights lined up right. But I didn't fire. "What makes you so sure I can't hit you?" [I possess an excellent sense of trajectory and can read from your thoughts the exact moment you intend to pull the trigger. I need only shift a few inches to avoid your shot. Were your reflexes quicker than mine, you could detect my motion and compensate, but your reflexes are not quicker than mine. By the time you see me move, you will already have missed.] I hit the trigger as quickly as I could, half in case she was playing mind games to get the drop on me and half just to see if she could really do what she said. She didn't move. My shot winked vivid and blue, vaporizing part of the boulder several feet to the side and behind her. [Also, you have no idea how to aim that weapon. Less technically, you suck.] I should have been panicking, but the unreality of it all - or something in those projected thoughts - kept me detached and feeling only mildly anxious. "So why haven't you already killed me? Didn't they give you a weapon too?" [I do not need a weapon.] She sounded sure enough of that to be scary. [But as I told you, I do not want to kill you.] "One of us has to die, though, right? Or is this like Captain Kirk and the Gorn, where it's all a test?" [You should stop speaking aloud. They are monitoring us with audio receivers and will have absorbed your linguistics from your world's data web. And no, it is not a test. It is a trick. Your planet has already been destroyed.] "What?" I felt a worse kick than when Margot said she was leaving. [Our captors, the Xh'stuk'tes'shei, are a race of sadists and amoral gamblers. They have scoured approximately ten percent of this galaxy, annihilating every intelligent race they encounter. Before destroying a world, the fleet commander assigned to the attack randomly selects one inhabitant for these games. Then the planet is obliterated.] Mom. Dad. All my friends. Margot ... Well at least fucking ponytail Kevin is dead. [Commanders whose champions triumph receive the most prestigious ships and assignments. Those who lose must return to the ranks and attempt to earn their way back into positions of power. The commander who chose me is only a few matches away from attaining a position on the high council. Twenty-three matches after that, he will be emperor.] I guess he really picked lucky. [No. He learned of the planet I was on from the databases of one of his victim species. Once he reached the planet, it was assured he would pick me, because no other intelligent being lived there.] Something about the way you say that makes me nervous. [It should. The planet was a prison. I am the most dangerous creature in the universe.] Uh... [Well, possibly just in this galaxy. I have not been to others. At any rate, where the Xh'stuk'tes'shei currently control a tenth of what you call the Milky Way, two million years ago I ruled ninety-one point three percent of it.] Shit. [Yes. Fortunately for everyone else, I had what you might call a religious conversion, and allowed the most moral of my remaining opponent species to eradicate the bulk of my population and eventually capture me. I am genetically incapable of suicide or I would have taken that route instead.] I looked around. White rock for miles and miles. An enormous steel dome. A bizarre mind-reading alien. Considering how little there was to see, my brain had a very difficult time processing the reality of it all. What exactly ... makes you so badass? [Think of something dangerous.] Half a dozen alien sci-fi horror movies flashed through my head. Before I could settle on one, she said: [I can do that.] Which? [All of it. I am a volitional polymorph, a telepath, and able to inductively metamorphose and mentally enslave any biological construct that my senses can assay, provided I have a brief period of time to manufacture the appropriate seeding formula along with opportunity to inject it.] That's fucking terrifying. And horrible. [Acknowledged. But it took me almost two million years and hundreds of trillions of victims to perceive and admit to that truth.] Why are you telling me this? [Because the Xh'stuk'tes'shei are only a few degrees less monstrous than I am. They destroyed the species whose extraordinary soulfulness convinced me to give up my galactic conquest. They've destroyed most of the species whose diligent, selfless armed struggle eliminated my sub-hives across the galaxy. They have every intention of carrying out a universal genocide if not stopped. I at least retained the genotypic riches of conquered species and incorporated them into myself, along with memories of any interesting cultural ingenuities. The Xh'stuk'tes'shei only destroy, gamble, and destroy more.] And ... that pisses you off. [Exactly. Given the circumstances, I can either keep defeating their champions one by one, thus murdering a helpless string of innocents, each the last of its race, or I can break my promise to myself and make use of my abilities to overwhelm the Xh'stuk'tes'shei and undo them.] So why are you talking to me instead of going out to kick their asses? [Because, while our captors have no idea just how dangerous I am, they know that I am very, very dangerous. There is a field around this enclosure that will incinerate me if I come within a quarter-mile of it. I cannot escape. But you can. The last indignity that the Xh'stuk'tes'shei inflict on a race is to make a feast of the remains of its final member when that being dies in the games. If I impregnate you with a metamorphic formula, rendering you apparently lifeless, you will be taken to the kitchens for preparation, and along the way you will change, leaving you free to assault and similarly impregnate every Xh'stuk'tes'shei you meet.] Holy crap. That's fucked up. I looked around some more. It still didn't help. Would I even be me after that? [Mentally, yes, although the transformation would inextricably link your psyche to mine and allow me to fully control you whenever I wished - an ability I promise not to use unless absolutely necessary. In terms of physical form, I could allow you to retain some elements of your current configuration, but significant changes would be unavoidable if you are to engage trained Xh'stuk'tes'shei soldiers in hand-to-hand combat and avoid being killed by those with ranged weaponry.] I shook my head, blinking. Jesus. So I'm supposed to let you brain-slave me, turn my body into an alien-impregnating super-weapon, and then help you bust loose to probably take over the whole galaxy? How could I possibly trust you enough to do that? [You can't. I am enormously smarter than you, with access to your entire lifetime of memories, even those you do not consciously recall yourself. So I could easily say exactly the right things to make myself seem as trustworthy as any creature in the universe. But you've recently had an experience of betrayal from someone you trusted absolutely, and while I am smarter than you, you are intelligent enough to realize that anything I say could easily be a lie. The only evidence that might have any weight with you is the fact that I am asking your permission, even though I could easily immobilize you and do whatever I wished.] But if I don't give you permission, you're going to kill me. [Sadly, yes. As I said, I am genetically incapable of self-destruction, which includes willfully allowing others to destroy me. So you cannot kill me, and if neither of us dies within a prescribed time, this entire arena will be sanitized by hard radiation, destroying us both. Hence, I will have no choice but to take your life if you do not agree.] I looked one more time at the rocky, desolate landscape and its domed metallic sky, my brain as empty and barren as any of it. How was this happening? Why was I not home, in my apartment, with my beautiful girlfriend building the perfect life I had expected for us? [If it helps your decision any ...] Yeah? [When I seed you with the metamorphic formula, I can fuck you much better than Margot ever did.] I turned back to her - tall, alien, with that unreadable, purple-eyed face and unsettlingly devilish horns. The easiest thing would probably be to tell her to kill me. Did I really have anything left to live for anyway? If she was telling the truth, she'd probably make it quick and painless. But ... if she was telling the truth, I'd be forcing her to do something terrible that she didn't want to do. And I'd be letting these too-many-fucking-apostrophes-in-their-name bastards continue blowing up helpless planets like my own. IMAGCASM "Okay," I said out loud. "What the hell, let's do this thing." * * * On the way to the kitchens, I was not-quite-conscious and not-quite-unconscious, floating in a strange state of semi-awareness and dreamlike memories. I could hear the Xh'stuk'tes'shei speaking in their high-pitched language and could see them as hazy shapes blurred by the translucent chrysalis that had formed around me. But it was like having my wisdom teeth taken out, when the oral surgeons gave me intravenous valium during all the chiseling. I knew things were going on, and I vaguely understood where I was, but the details seemed unimportant in the fog of anesthesia. Except that this time, instead of anesthesia, it was orgasm, and the vivid sensual replay of what had happened after I agreed to the alien's crazy plan. And instead of weird crunching noises and the sensation of unnatural pressure in the back of my mouth, it was weird, sewery gurglings and the feeling of my whole body rearranging itself. The moment I gave her the okay, she'd been on me - too fast for me to see her move my direction. Her hands grabbed me, turned me; her weight rolled me to the ground face-first. A sting and then a glowing ecstasy hit me in the neck as she fastened her tube-shaped mouth there, like a hickey good enough to make you come. Then her bulbous tail curled between her legs and planted its nubby end at the bottom of my tailbone, pushing in and then shooting through the silvery fabric of my jumpsuit like tin-foil. Something thick and slippery and throbbing blurted through my asshole and shot electric joy into my prostate too quickly for me to worry about whether taking something up the butt and liking it made me gay. And wow, did I like it. A tendril from the tail had curled around and capped my dick, and now sucked voraciously as the pulsing thing in my rectum coaxed a giant load of cum up from my balls in a gush like I'd never felt before. [I am syphoning leukocytes from your blood to analyze your immune system, while harvesting gametes from your seminal fluid to sequence your genome,] she said. I don't care, fuck, just keep doing that! [I have already acquired all the samples I need. But I suppose I can continue the stimulation as I proceed with the rest of the process.] Yes please! The orgasm kept rollicking through my dick and echoing up and down my spine, like a ping-pong ball of climax in an endless volley between her mouth latched on my neck and her whatever-they-were crammed up my ass and sucking on my cock-head. Those sensations looped through my mind over and over again, both at the time and later, with my body inert atop a gurney, being lugged from the arena toward the culinary processing center. Despite being absolutely illucid with physical pleasure, I simultaneously absorbed and understood her explanations of what would happen next. [When you awake near the kitchens, you'll be surrounded by chrysalic chitin, which you will have to tear through. There will be four guards delivering you and about twice as many chefs ready to begin their cook-work. Once out of the chrysalis, your strength and speed will be much greater than you are used to, easily enough to rapidly penetrate and inject each of the guards with seeding formula from your hands and gonadal extrusion before any can activate a weapon.] Oh my god, I'm coming so hard. [After prioritizing the guards, you will likely find the kitchen staff dispersing in panic. Observe all exits and the proximity of each chef to each door, and leap to seed them in order from those nearest the exits to those farthest, leaving for last those paralyzed in fear.] Yes! Shit! Yes! No ... wait ... It's catching up to me now - you're telling me to ... uh ... you want me to ... but ... that's - [Remember, Cale, they think they are happily taking the dead body of their victim to feast on it at a celebration of genocide. They should not have your sympathy.] Yeah, but ... can you make me stop coming just for a second? Okay, that makes it easier to think ... I guess. I mean, sure, they deserve it, but it's still kind of ... icky. Couldn't you, I don't know, program me to shoot out some kind of super-aphrodisiac that would make them all want to fuck me? [Ah. I see why that would be more comfortable for you, although in reality the effect is exactly the same: they will be robbed of choice, either through physical restraint or through chemical manipulation, and once impregnated their basic personalities will be subverted against their will. However, if you prefer the illusion of consensuality, I am happy to oblige you. Also, it is strategically clever because it prevents the possibility that one of them will actually succeed in fleeing. Excellent. We are a good team, Cale.] Thanks. You can go back to doing that thing, now. And she did, for what was really a pretty short period of time, maybe two minutes, but felt like hours of sexual nirvana. Toward the end she reached a hand around to my abdomen, spreading the fingers wide against my belly. A pressure from the center of her palm poked into the skin just above my navel, then penetrated all the way through, without any pain. I felt torrents of thick fluid splurting viscously into the spaces around my internal organs. [Ah. Cale, yes. That is very good.] If I hadn't been orgasming so hard from being fucked in four places, I probably would've panicked at the realization that an alien was cumming its gene-rewiring sperm-equivalent into my guts. But I was in sexual heaven, and I stayed there even after she withdrew and started rolling me rapidly over and over, painting my whole body with a thick goo that hardened into a shell in moments. Oh god. Oh god. Oh ... fuck, I don't even know what to call you. What's your name? [I have no name. I am a natural telepath. To all my offspring and conquests, my identity is implicit in the thought of me. But the thought/concept for me is probably a mixture of ... queen, and mother, and victorious glory.] Queen ... "Queenie?" No. Mother? Not even going there. I kept quivering and blinking inside my stiffening shell. Victorious ... Victoria ... Vicky. How's "Vicky?" [Better than most things other races call me.] Uhh. I can't believe I'm still coming. Vicky ... so good ... [It was good for me also. I'll see you soon.] And with that she vanished off into the white-stone arroyos of the battle-dome. Eventually, some big metal drones came and picked me up, flew me to an airlock, and transferred me to a floating stretcher on which the Xh'stuk'tes'shei guards could transport me through long, echoing, sparsely populated hallways. The orgasm faded into a low-grade wave that cycled through my body, head to toe, slower and slower until it stopped altogether. The twisting, slithering sensations inside me stopped as well. I wonder what I am now, I thought when my brain rose up into full consciousness. [Still you,] said Vicky, her telepathy apparently undiminished by several miles of distance. [According to the guards' thoughts, you are approaching the station's prime kitchen, to arrive in perhaps two minutes. I'm turning on your telepathic synapses now; that way you will have time to get used to mind-reading before you reach your destination.] And with a mental click, I suddenly knew everything the four Xh'stuk'tes'shei around me were thinking and feeling. Holy fuck! To start, I could see through their eyes, all four sets of them at once. From the lead two, I saw a double-image of long, gunmetal-grey passageway stretching before us. From the two in the back, I saw the asses of the front guards, the gurney, and my own body sheathed in pearly chitin. I looked very oddly shaped. A stream of four disparate mental feeds hit me as well: +Piss-fart boring match. Admiral Pfeeth's going to make Emperor in record time. Nothing can beat shis monster.+ +... (grumble) wish I was getting to go to the feast and have a chunk of this meat-beast.+ +Cockunt burning like a motherfucker. Did that he-bitch Bvilt give me something?+ +Gthurt sure has a nice anal cushion. Mawoman, I'd like to hit that.+ Images and memories and sensations flickered in along with the thoughts - a drone-recorded replay of me and Vicky just standing staring at each other, the one shot from my rifle, me looking around a couple of times, issuing what sounded like a challenge, then her leaping on me, game over; at the same time, a daydream of what I would look like gutted and cooked up on a platter, my head intact and the rest of me flayed open and roasted with colorful alien garnishes sprouting from my abdominal cavity; also, a low-grade burning sensation from the hermaphroditic erectile tube that served as Xh'stuk'tes'shei genitalia; and the swiveling pillowy ass of one of the lead guards, currently in full uniform but mentally undressed to reveal soft, rounded contours of chartreuse flesh with a grey-green sphincter in the middle that did indeed seem like a nice place to stick one's vaginis. None of them had any clue that I was alive and awake. Thanks to some Vicky-designed restructuring of my brain, I found that I could actually receive and grasp all of this without significant disorientation. [Can you feel your seed-injectors and aphrodisiac glands?] I could, and instinctively knew how to use them. In fact, just thinking about the seed injectors in my fingers and cock made them swell with mild arousal. As the one guard continued to fantasize about "Gthurt," I got an excellent picture of Xh'stuk'tes'shei anatomy - closer to human than Vicky was, although still very, very different. They were a single-sex species, each one functionally bisexual. Though their yellow-green skin didn't strike me as especially attractive, every Xh'stuk'tes'shei had a double row of breasts on shis chest, full and soft with nipples like big green marbles. For rampaging interstellar invaders, they had very unthreatening faces, slimly triangular with huge, soulful-puppy eyes and delicate mouths. Their legs were too long, but nicely shaped, and their pudgy arms ended in a cluster of tentacles that looked well-designed for fondling four breasts simultaneously. Wow. I could totally fuck these things. Did you do something to make me think they're so sexy? [Not deliberately. You're getting that from me. All species look mouth-watering and fuckable in my eyes.] So you as soon as you saw me, you thought I was hot? [Oh, yes.] Somehow, that flattered me, while also making me even more eager to get my groove on with these Xh'stuk'tes'shei hermaphrodites. Are you going to be eavesdropping ... mind-dropping? Telepeeping Tomming ... when I do it? [I can't resist. I'm wanking off just thinking about it right now.] I got a brief flash of seeding-fluid drooling out of her caudal pore onto the stony white ground where she lay. Then she cut the sensation off. [Now you must focus. The kitchen is around that corner. Prepare your glands.] As she said that, I realized I'd sensed the same thing in the Xh'stuk'tes'shei's minds, behind their conscious thoughts - a sense of impending completion, nearness of purpose. Boy, did I ever share that idea. Aphrodisiac glands in my armpits and groin fluttered and filled. [Tear a slit in the chrysalis beneath you.] I did as she said, feeling the shell's thick tensile strength part easily at the touch of whatever I now had in place of fingernails. I sensed us take the corner, blurrily saw the corridor turn about me. Ahead, to our right, a large pane of glinting silver stood out from the dull grey of the hallway. We halted before it. Through the Xh'stuk'tes'shei's eyes, I saw a massive door, ten feet across and just as high, split down the middle by a curving seam. Gthurt stepped over to the control panel at one side of the doorframe, shis lusty comrade continuing to ogle that jouncy posterior and daydreaming of yanking down the uniform's slacks to bugger herm hard and heavy. I heard the exchange in the Xh'stuk'tes'shei language - piping gibberish that sounded like several flute players deliberately dueling out of tune. The meaning was completely clear to me, though, because I could read the thoughts of both speakers at the same time - Gthurt the guard and the chef on the far side of the door, whose name was Qfiqch. They apparently knew each other, and flirted a bit as Gthurt announced delivery of the arena spoils: +I have some meat for you, Vice-Chef Qfiqch!+ +Excellent, Subwarden Gthurt. Let me open up for you and you can put it right where it belongs.+ A flash of salivating jealousy hit me from the mind of the guard who'd been staring at Gthurt's ass. Then the door opened, and I let loose the first spew of pheromones from my glands. Qfiqch sucked in a startled breath as the heavy silver panels slid apart, puppy-dog eyes going even wider than normal. The cook had an impressive rack, especially shis undertits, so full and round that they thrust the topknockers almost obscenely up and forward. Through Gthurt's astonished eyes, I saw all four nipples swell to pinball size behind Qfiqch's smock, at the same time the guard's vaginis engorged almost painfully within shis uniform's codpiece. "Tweetletweleet!" (+Sub ... warden ... you look ...+) Gthurt's tentacular hands ripped at the fasteners of shis ballistic mesh vest. "Squeeeweedlesqueed!" (+Qfiqch! Those tits!+) "Wheentweetscree, tweleet!" blurted the jealous guard, Pluffegh. (+Gthurt, wait! I must ass-hammer you!+) As the pheromones dispersed further, every item of clothing in the vicinity got ripped loose or discarded, revealing yellow-green quadruple hooters and chubby cylindrical cunt-dongs all around. The other cooks from within the kitchen swarmed forward, madly shucking their aprons and kilts. Gthurt got to Qfiqch at almost exactly the same time Pluffegh jammed into herm from behind. I had the amazing simultaneous sensation of the cook willing shis vaginis to widen until it reached the size and shape of an extra-long beer koozie, the subwarden tightening shis own cockunt and plowing it inside, and Pluffegh lunging sodomitically into shis superior officer without regard to niceties of rank or sexual permission. The three tumbled to the hard steel floor, Qfiqch sheathing Gthurt's penussy in a vicelike receptive squeeze, Pluffegh grunting and plugging away deep into the other guard's rectal recesses. Oh my god, Vicky, are you getting this? [Mmm, yes. I must congratulate you again on this plan. Now why don't you get out of the chrysalis and get to the really good part?] My seed injectors swelled and pulsed at that, and I practically jumped out of the chrysalis, shredding it to scraps. In front of me, ten Xh'stuk'tes'shei rolled and groaned in copulation all around the entryway to the kitchen. I felt every squirt of their alien passion, every tentacle wrapping around a spheroid nipple, every coupling of one vaginis into another. At the back of the group of cooks, two sexual virtuosos exchanged gonadal roles with each thrust - one cockunt spreading wide to slurp the other one in, withdrawing slickly to tighten into a pole, then penetrating the partner's suddenly gaping coochkoozie. I looked down at myself, trying to figure out what I wanted to put where. My fingers flexed - the first two knuckles of each rested within armored tubes, into which they could retract for safety if I needed to extend my talons. Now, though, they hung thickly out, sensitive and already dribbling seeding formula from the slits at their tips. My arms and legs, my chest, my abdomen all had bluish, chitinous armor like my fingers. Between my legs hung a blunt, hard sheath that, as I willed it to, clicked open to unleash a three-foot, prehensile erection - easily the best-feeling hard-on I'd ever had. Pluffegh, Gthurt and Qfiqch humped and ground at one another closest to me, and even as I made the decision to join in, I felt Gthurt about to shoot shis egg-mass deep into Qfiqch's semen reservoir, and Pluffegh getting very close to filling Gthurt's anus with glistening roe. I got my cock - two feet of it - up Pluffegh's ass just as the Xh'stuk'tes'shei let go and came. My orgasm shot out instantly, and ten times as wonderfully as Pluffegh's, which was itself amazing. Shis tweetled ecstatically as I pumped my fluid several feet deep into the slick colon where I'd embedded myself, and even as I came and came, my hands groped instinctively for Gthurt and Qfiqch, getting a middle finger down the subwarden's throat while my other hand kneaded Qfiqch's upper left breast until one finger found and softly penetrated a slit in the nipple to gush seed into the lush fat deposits of shis tit. The chef squealed as Gthurt's egg spew splattered into herm in waves, bringing on a normal vaginisal orgasm as I intrusively coaxed an unnatural climax from herm with gene-splicing squirts into shis luscious booby. Meanwhile, Gthurt gobbled and gulped seeding formula from my thick, pulsing finger, moaning around its throbbing length. As my triple orgasm subsided, all three of them collapsed into a quivering heap. Voracious, I moved on to my next conquests, the other two guards who'd brought me from the arena. They lay sixty-nine with one another, sucking away at a cockunt apiece. Something about that looked so good that I levered them apart, dropped a foot of cock down the bottom one's mouth, and slurped the top one's vaginis all the way into my throat. It tasted nothing like pussy - and it didn't taste like chicken, either, so I won't make that joke. The closest I could describe it would be a calamari latte. Having never given a blow-job, I can't compare eating Xh'stuk'tes'shei snatchpole to smoking a boner, but it seemed both thicker and softer than a cock would, and of course, I couldn't have fit my tongue inside a cock while going down on it, as I discovered I could do with a vaginis. I also discovered that my tongue had its own seed gland, which quickly began splashing metamorphic cum into the alien I was sucking off. I moaned in delight and then had to gulp down a torrent of Xh'stuk'tes'shei caviar as my seed-fluid pushed the creature over into shis own orgasm. Underneath me, the other guard wrapped dozens of squirmy finger-tentacles around the two feet of my dick that I hadn't thrust into shis stomach. The boneless, rubbery digits jacked me frantically as I fucked the hermaphrodite's esophagus and filled up its belly with my spooge. Then the two of them flopped down into trembling sighs, and I stood up to move on. [Cale,] Vicky said, [this is sooo good, but ... can I please ask you ...] Hell yes you can ask me! What do you want? [I just ... not to be gross, but I love going in through the skin. Especially soft underbelly skin. It's the best. I promise you you'll come really hard.] Wow. I don't know why I'm not freaking out at that idea, but I'm not. Which one of them looks good to you? She purred in my brain. [That one with shis tongue up the other one's anus. Just look at that full, ripe tummyflesh. Mmmm.] Fuck! Okay, here goes. Something made me want to be spectacular for Vicky. I took a couple of running steps toward my target, dropped to my hard, armored knees with my legs spread wide, and slid across the floor, three feet of hungry cock straining straight out in front of me. As my irresistible penile bulb slid into the Xh'stuk'tes'shei's belly like it was pudding, I felt Vicky come in my mind, felt her thrashing helplessly on the hard white stone of the arena, her queenly sex-ichor splashing everywhere. My cock went into and almost all the way through the squealing chef I'd punctured, pushing aside slick loops of intestines as it went, exuding orgasm-inducing neurotransmitters along the way, and then fountaining my largest load of seeding formula yet. The four-breasted alien planked statue stiff in ecstasy, leaving shis partner unstimulated. As I kept coming into herm, the other Xh'stuk'tes'shei turned around and offered shis vaginis to me with a tweetled (+Please!+), so I extended the fingers of one hand and stuffed them all simultaneously into the open cylinder of hermaphroditic twat. Then I wrapped the other hand around the outside and simultaneously jacked herm off and shot a five-fingered load up the creature's sex-chute. IMAGCASM [AHH, Cale! Cale, Yes!] Delirious with pleasure at Vicky's orgasmic bliss, I jumped up and rapid-fire bellyfucked the remaining three chefs, penetrating and inseminating them four or five times each before I stumbled back, aglow with satiation yet not at all tired, and eager to start rushing through the station corridors in search of more Xh'stuk'tes'shei. [Mmmm, so good ... oohhh ... I ... Cale, not yet. Let me recover some. It's been so long ... I haven't had sex like that since your people were swinging in the trees. I'm not sure I've ever had it like that. You're fantastic.] Thanks, I said, feeling my seed-injectors detumesce as my lungs worked like machines and my body cooled from its exertions. [You should also ... drag them into the kitchen. Hide them in a pantry or something. It will be twenty to thirty minutes before they transform and awaken.] Fired up by my inhuman virility, I happily obeyed, hauling two Xh'stuk'tes'shei at a time by the ankles while rolling a third along with my feet. They might as well have been dolls (four-breasted hermaphrodite dolls) for all the burden they posed. It took under a minute for me to snug them all away in a big walk-in larder. Vicky cooed in my head the whole time. Where to next? I asked. She didn't respond with words. Instead, I had the sense of mental panting. In my head, a map of the vast battle-station drew itself, not as a computer-outlined schematic, but as a mosaic of Xh'stuk'tes'shei memories, pieced together by Vicky's supergenius brain. Two levels down from me and three corridors over, a backup security substation sat waiting with only two guards outside its doors. Telepathically stolen activation codes would let us activate the controls inside, then lock and unlock whole sectors in this portion of the space-station while feeding false reports of normal operation to the other sectors' security nodes. It was a perfect target, but ... Only two guards? My three-foot cock retracted into its sheath in disappointment. [Not to worry. Along the way there is a recreation room full of unarmed Xh'stuk'tes'shei steam-bathing.] She transferred the sauna inhabitants' thoughts to me, since they were still outside my own more limited range. I felt the hot caress of wet, foggy vapors on eight or ten yellow-green skins, condensing and mixing with runnels of sweet-smelling sweat that tracked their way down, across, and between double pairs of breasts. The warm, sensual lethargy practically launched my dick right back out of its armored chassis. Already dashing out of the kitchen, I sent Vicky a wave of horny gratitude. That's more like it! * * * Half an hour later, I left the sauna in a state of bliss, then pheromonically aroused the security node guards to a fever pitch that had them stripping and running toward me the second I stepped around the corner. I made short, hedonistic work of them, unlocked the door and dragged them both inside. [The task here will be quicker if I take control,] Vicky said, [since you have not yet absorbed an understanding of Xh'stuk'tes'shei written language. But I can guide you through it if you would rather retain command of your body.] Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. If I trust you to fuck-change me into an alien sexmorphosis machine, I don't know why I wouldn't trust you to run my body for a while. Maybe I'll pick up some basics of these gal/guys' alphabet while you're at it. [No, I have accelerated your mental processing by a factor of nine-point-six, but I will be moving much faster than that. I'm afraid you'll have to put up with several minutes of boredom, unless ...] Yeah? [Our first set of conscripts are rousing themselves in the kitchen. I'll be guiding them out on their own insemination missions while dealing with the security computers; I can feed you their sensory inputs if you like.] Sure, what the hell. So I spent the next two hours vaguely aware of my fingers flying at lightspeed across Xh'stuk'tes'shei computer consoles, activating and deactivating key systems, writing viruses and sending them out into the battle-station's network to infect the computers of all the docked alien ships that had gathered for the arena competition. My attention, though, filled its time jumping back and forth between various newly activated battle-breeders. Strangely, Gthurt and Qfiqch and their comrades still thought of themselves as themselves - Vicky had rewritten their memories so it didn't occur to them that just a short time ago they'd been soft-bodied, genocidal, gambling-obsessed Xh'stuk'tes'shei little different from the chartreuse-fleshed creatures they now gassed with pheromones and leapt joyfully to metamorphically seed. Nor did it bother them that occasionally Vicky would assume direct control of their muscles, to maximize the efficiency of their orgiastic rampage through large numbers of untransformed soldiers and station crewomanen. Instead, they tweetled back and forth what a grand time they were having, and compared notes on how many transformative impregnations they'd each accomplished. For the most part, Vicky kept me constantly in the brains of whichever battle-breeders were actively engaged in coital recruitment, so that I would bounce into a head just as its owner achieved penetration with a modified cockunt and blew a load of seeding formula into the new recruit with ecstatic vigor. I'd stay there long enough for the thrusting and throbbing to subside, and then hop away as the sated seed-injector withdrew and looked for a new conquest. Sometimes, for variety, she would hook me into some of the untransformed Xh'stuk'tes'shei's minds as our pheromonic assault drove them into nymphomaniacal frenzies. The straight hermaphroditic sex lacked the intensity of seeding, but I still found myself growing fond of the sensation of a partner's chubby vaginis penetrating my own, or money-shotting roe across my anal cushion after the heat of buggery, and I particularly liked the salty-caviar treat at the end of sixty-nining another Xh'stuk'tes'shei, when the blurt of egg-mass would rush into my mouth, balloon out my cheeks, and slide thickly down my throat. At no point in all of this did I have the presence of mind to do the math. Our first ten recruits set out after half an hour, pumping formula into an average of almost one Xh'stuk'tes'shei a minute. So by the one-hour mark, a wave of about three hundred new battle-breeders started coming online, when you included the ones I boffed in the sauna. At an hour and a half, the three hundred had become nine thousand. By that point, the station's remaining crew had more than a little sense that something was wrong, but Vicky's hacking subterfuges kept them confused as to what and where the problem was, and by the time a sector got a glimmer of understanding, our forces steamrollered in, fucking with wild abandon. When the end of hour two rolled around, Vicky turned my body back over to me. [We have captured the main bridge and enough control nodes to guarantee success. Well, to a 99.826% probability.] Awesome. Now what? [Now, come back to me.] * * * By the time I reached the arena, Vicky had reprogrammed its security field to keep Xh'stuk'tes'shei out instead of keeping her in. She greeted me just over a harsh white stone ridge a few hundred yards from the door I entered. "Wow," I said when I saw her. [You like it?] She pirouetted to show off the changes she'd made in her body while I'd been away. Her skin had lightened from its sandy yellow tone. Two conical breasts now pushed out from her narrow chest, smaller than the busty double rows of Xh'stuk'tes'shei tits I'd gotten used to over the last few hours, but somehow more enticing. Her hips had swelled and rounded, looking slightly more human now. The bulbous extension of her tail remained, but instead of melding smoothly into her crotch, it had shifted farther back and up her pelvis, making room for a mound and seductive gash that had not been there before. Instead of lavender, her looping horns had darkened almost to black, and the solid purple of her eyes had narrowed into violet pupils surrounded by golden sclera. Her central facial ridge had turned almost nose-like, and the dangling tube of her mouth had risen, shortened, and become more delicate. I do, I thought to her. I mean ... I was hoping ... I didn't expect we'd necessarily have sex again, but I was kind of looking forward if we did to screwing you the way you looked before. Only this is crazy better. You did this for me? Why? She came forward, opening her arms. I moved up and into them. [I am a monster, Cale. Conquest is sex for me, and I am deeply, starvingly addicted to it.] Her hands settled on my back, one between the carapace-covered shoulder-blades, the other at the base of my spine. They drew me close to her. The softness of her new breasts set my skin tingling where they pressed into it. [I gave it up once. It was very, very, very hard to do. But it was the right thing to do, and I will need to do it again once the Xh'stuk'tes'shei have been destroyed. I don't know if I can, on my own.] She went silent, then said: [Open your penile covering and enter me?] It was an invitation, not a command - in fact, more of a plea than anything else. I slipped my ridiculously long cock out of its sheath and searched with its prehensile tip for her newly formed vagina. When I pushed lightly against the opening, I met with resistance. Holy shit. Are you a virgin? Vicky laughed inside my head. [I thought if I was going to make a pussy for you, I ought to give it a cherry. Yes?] God, yes. And you want me to - [Please. Take me.] I willed the rigid musculature of my shaft to straighten and push upward. The seal within her plush labia stretched and bowed around me, but did not burst. Geez, you made it really tough! [Pop it, Cale. Stab through into me.] I looked at her eyes, more human now but still very strange and unreadable. Yet I thought I saw something needful there, and with my heart pounding, I lunged up against her and shot through the quivering dam of her fresh-made hymen. It split bloodily around me, slicking my shaft with bluish circulatory fluid. The feeling had none of the auto-orgasmic triggering effect that had happened on every other penetration I'd perpetrated. I didn't come instantly or spew any seeding formula. Instead, I just slid in and in and up and up and in until my whole length was inside her. A tiny whimper escaped her mouth - the first vocal noise I'd heard from her. Are you okay? [Yes. Very much so.] Her hips rolled, and muscles deep within her began working the long train of my pole. [Make love to me while I explain things.] Sure. She lifted a leg and hooked it around my ass, gripped my shoulders with both hands, then encircled me with her other leg so that I had her completely off the ground, our crotches pressed tight together. My remade body had no trouble with her weight, nor with keeping us balanced. In fact, my hands could roam wherever they liked, without having to hold her up under the thighs or ass. [Early in my life, after destroying the last of my rival queens on our homeworld, I had millions of years of self-gratifying sex, with trillions of victims whom I forced myself on. It was beautiful, glorious, and always for me. I changed myself into countless forms and tried infinite variations of penetration and enfolding. But it never made a bond for me, only for the object of my lust. Enslavement, not entwining. Ah, this cock feels so good.] Yeah, you did a really great job on it. And on the pussy too. It's really ... wow, it's good. We indulged in a minute or two of thrusting and grinding, of her sweet tubular slide around me, and of my engorged, plunging insinuation through her. The seed-injectors in my fingertips burned with pleasure where they stroked the flesh of her back. [Cale, it takes a very long time to conduct interstellar war on the scale of even a tenth of the galaxy. Oh. Yes, faster.] I bounced her up and down my delighted erectile baton, momentarily giddy with the way I was tossing this multi-million-year-old creature freely along my cock, pleasuring her in a way I sensed she had never been pleasured before. [Uhhh - stars and nebulae - wonderful!] Her mouth sought mine, pressed lip-to-lip with it, then inserted itself and clasped electrically around my tongue. [I will - hmmm - I will be brutal, and quick, as quick as I have ever been. But we are still talking about billions of systems that the Xh'stuk'tes'shei inhabit. I estimate six to eight thousand years for completion of the campaign.] That's ... a long time. Wait, what's - did you make a tongue inside your cunt? [Yes. I thought it would please you.] For emphasis, she wrapped the pussy-tongue all the way around my shaft, dragging its rough taste-buds in circles about me. And they were taste-buds - she let me tap into the sensory signals and taste the combination of her lubrication and my cock's secreted envelope of neurotransmitters. I tried to say, "Oh my god," but she still had her mouth around my tongue inside my mouth. She got the idea telepathically and let me know she appreciated it. [If I have only myself,] she went on, [I don't know how deep I will be in my addiction by the end of eight thousand years. Probably very deep. I might go farther than the edge of Xh'stuk'tes'shei space. I might fool myself into thinking I could find some other horribly malevolent species. Then I might move on to merely evil races. Then just annoying ones. In all honesty, I will probably not stop - unless I have something to stop for. Someone to stop for. Here, lower us to the ground and mount me from above.] I did as she said. Her legs spread wide to accommodate me, and mine had to spread a bit as well to avoid crushing her tail to the rock. With my weight on her, I found I could actually drive myself even deeper inside the seemingly endless, miracle-filled vagina she had made for me. Vicky, I don't care what you're asking me to do. I'm definitely going to do it. Okay? [Harder. Fuck me harder.] Really? I'm pretty sure if you were human, I'd already have crushed you to a pulp. [I'm not human. Pound me with everything you can.] She'd given me extraordinary strength and endurance, and I put it to use now, slamming her with foot-long strokes that probably could have pulverized rock. Her mouth pulled out of mine and gasped. [Yes! Cale, I need to do something I have never done - bond with someone in a way that gives them control over me, in addition to my control over them. I cannot make you my equal - our brains are on scales far too different. But I am asking to make you my partner. In a way that neither of us will ever be able to undo.] If I'd been able to think about it, I might have doubted the wisdom of making major decisions while being fucked and cunt-tongued to the very edge of orgasm, which is where she had me at that moment. "Vicky," I panted out loud, not letting up in my pistoning sexual impalement of her, "I don't know if ... oh god, nnff ... I don't know, am I the right guy? But I'll do whatever you want. Uhh, uhh, so close to coming ... Vicky, if you think I can do it, I'll do it. Vicky ..." [I have probed every synapse in your brain, Cale. I know you can do it. I'll show you.] And then her tail came up and jabbed into me right behind my balls, like a shooting star of ecstasy, blasting icy interstellar plasma up along my spine and throwing me over into an orgasm that lasted longer than even a three-foot cock should have been capable of. Gallons of cum must have poured from me. At some point, I realized that it couldn't all be coming from my testicles, no matter how much Vicky had enhanced them. Some of it had to be from the gouting, fountaining expulsions of her tail where she'd buried it in my flesh. She was shooting us both full of some matrix-altering genetic spew, strands of it firing up into my abdomen while others traveled through the spasming tunnel of my shaft and into her womb - or whatever it was that she'd built at the end of her vagina. I came until everything turned dark. * * * Maybe the weirdest thing yet - I found myself aware that I was asleep, but not dreaming. I mean, maybe anything your brain does while you're asleep has to be dreaming, but in this case, I just hung out, aware but not even thinking, not even determining whether my surroundings seemed light or dark, because I didn't have any surroundings. I guess I'd call it limbo. It didn't even make me impatient, until sensation returned in a rush: darkened vision, air on my skin, the feel of hard stone beneath me. When I cracked my lids open, I was looking into Margot's eyes. Which made me shriek and jump about five feet off the ground, much higher than I could have in my normal life - but not as high as I thought my new body should be capable of. When I landed, I realized several things. First, it wasn't Margot, but a Margot-shaped extension attached to Vicky's body. Second, the majority of Vicky's body had gone back to the form in which I'd first met her - the only difference being a few wrist-thick tendrils connecting her to Margot's doppelganger. And third, my blue armor plating and three-foot cock and finger and tongue seed-injectors were gone. Margot/Vicky propped both her bodies up on their right elbows, laughing. "Oh, Cale," [Oh, Cale, the look on your face!] "the look on your face!" The words came from Margot's mouth, the thoughts from Vicky's brain. "Vicky, what's going on? Why did you change me back?" Panic tweaked my voice higher than I would have liked. What - did she change her mind? Aren't we going to ... The paired bodies stood up, stretching a connection between Vicky's yellow forehead ridge and the back of Margot's skull until it snapped. [Be at ease, my love.] "Take it easy, pumpkin-pie." Margot's hand touched my cheek. It felt wonderful there, despite my alarm. [We are together, inseparably. I've just arranged something extra for you.] Margot tip-toed to kiss me, cutting off the mental/verbal echo. I couldn't help responding, putting my arms around her - where I found the tendrils that ran between them were thinning and parting. My eyes turned from Margot's to Vicky, who tilted her head to reveal another difference I hadn't seen before. The back of her head was elongated, the skull maybe twenty percent larger. [While you slept, I grew you a new cortical lobe, and transferred it here, to snuggle in next to my own brain. I've amplified some of its mental capacity as well.] [[Dude,]] came my own telepathic voice - out of the lobe, [[no offense, but Jesus, we used to be stupid. Listen, you want to hear me calculate the millionth digit of pi?]] "No, thanks," I said, my heart still feeling somewhere down in the soles of my feet. Margot drew her head back and caressed both sides of my face. "Honey, do you know how old I am?" I looked in her eyes, deep and violet (they'd been brown, back on Earth), and I said, "I don't ... do you mean you-you, or this body, you?" "We're the same thing." [Almost four million years old.] "Right, you said -" [Think about that a moment, and about how intelligent you know I am, able to sense and manipulate thousands of enslaved bodies at one time. Doesn't a natural question occur to you?] [[Yeah, Cale, even without my spruced-up synapses, you ought to be able to see this one.]] IMAGCASM "Um..." My brain didn't want to work. But a thought popped into it anyway. It felt like my own thought - I didn't think Vicky or Expanded-lobe Me had put it there. How likely is it that a four-million-year-old telepathic alien hive-queen thinks as much like a human being as Vicky seems to? "Exactly!" Margot said, ruffling my hair with a happy smile. [I don't, Cale. I don't think anything like you at all - except for what you've taught me since we met. The moment I detected your brainwaves in the arena, I began compartmentalizing a tiny portion of my mind and structuring it to interact with you, so that we could comprehend one another.] "So I haven't really been talking to you at all." Concern replaced the smile on Margot's face, and flooded into me through Vicky's mental projections. "No, that's not it at all," she said firmly. [You've just been talking to a smaller part of me than you thought.] "Right. Which makes me ..." A bug. An amoeba. She put her arms around me and squeezed, pressing her bare, familiar, lovely breasts flush against me. "No -" [[More like a mouse.]] "Jesus, did the extra brainpower turn me into a total asshole?" [[Dude, I'm just kidding. Sorry ... I'm kind of high right now.]] Vicky's yellow hand reached around Margot to brush her fingers beneath my chin. [If you're a bug, Cale, then you're the bug who taught me to love. ] Leaning Margot's head to one side, she fixed me in her glittery, purple, alien gaze. [Long, long ago, a species showed me how to care. Showed me the importance of others. But their beautiful wisdom did not call me into a passionate completion - it only made me feel I had to reduce myself to this single body and exile it to a world far away from all others. I have always been alone, never known partnership of any kind.] "But, you said you absorbed everything from ... the species you took over. There wasn't any love anywhere in any of that?" [Of course there was. But eating love is not the same as feeling it.] "I was right there, Cale," said Margot. "I mean, when the larger me first sensed your thoughts. The next thing under your scared-shitless look around the arena was Margot, and how you loved her." "Really? Because I would have thought the next thing was how pissed I was at her." [Pain and anger are also emotions I have eaten. They are boring and easy to ignore, and they always come from something else, something more important than the hurt or the rage. Your anger at Margot and your love for her were the same thing, inseparable.] Looking at the Margot face and unable to actually name how many emotions I felt to be seeing her again, I thought, She's got that right. Sadness, melancholy, wist, fury, jealousy, hunger, yearning, regret, guilt, and wanting and wanting and wanting her so much. The smile on her lips, rich and full, warmed something deep inside me. And at the same time, a pang jabbed into that warmth, because I knew the real Margot was dead. "So what is this?" I asked, looking from Margot-Vicky to alien Vicky. "Why did you ... I mean, just, why?" Margot ran a finger down my nose and poked it, something she delighted in doing almost every day - or had done, up until the last couple of months. "You love me, don't you?" "I don't know ... who's asking?" "Don't think. Just answer." I looked back and forth between their two faces again. Everything I'd ever felt for Margot stuck in my chest right then, and yet I felt just as much or more for Vicky. "Yes. I love you both." It was true - absolutely true - and I realized that I'd been squeezing my emotions about Margot into a black hole, and that my emotions for Vicky had appeared almost like magic ... the moment she leapt on me and thrust her tail through my pants into my ass. My brow furrowed deeply. "You made me love you." [Yes, and I made myself love you back. I absorbed what you felt for Margot, mapped its synaptic origins and gave the same thing to the two of us.] "That would be really creepy if I wasn't so crazy about you." [[Listen, Bro, let me tell you first-hand - how we love her and how she loves us isn't anything less real than how you loved Margot. Sure, she built it deliberately, maybe even mechanistically. But on a physiological, biochemical, neurological level, it's exactly the same.]] "That still doesn't answer my question. Why?" [Because after a million years alone, the first thing I touched, in the first brain I touched other than the repulsive minds of the Xh'stuk'tes'shei, was love. And I knew I wanted it, and I knew it would be my best chance at keeping hold of myself, once the Xh'stuk'tes'shei had been taken care of. Now that I have assured that outcome, I need to give you something, because loving is giving. So I give you Margot, my beloved Cale - the Margot you thought you knew, the perfect one who would be yours forever, not the Margot you actually knew who held so many things back from you. I give you back the love you believed in, the partner, the mate, the half that makes you whole.] Wait - Vicky, please don't take away the way I feel about you. [Of course not. That would be almost as impossible for me to consider as killing myself would be. I've made you mostly back into a human being, but with some nice improvements, and one of those is a permanent psychic like to me.] "And I'm still Vicky too," said Margot. She moved her hands up and behind her head, fanning the air there. "Just without all the extra alien Vicky incomprehensibility." [You'll be able to talk to me whenever you like, even from halfway across the galaxy.] [[And me too. Say the word and I'll let you in on what it feels like to have steaming-hot brain-on-brain sex like Vicky and I are doing right now.]] I laughed ... nervously. "You're joking, right?" [[No, we're really fucking like weasels. You want to see?]] The bizarreness of hearing my own voice inside my head didn't keep me from feeling the genuine self-love he/I put into the offer. "Uh, maybe not just yet." Vicky's yellow, wedge-shaped face, split down the middle by its ridge, demon-horned, ancient and royal in its bottomless purple eyes, already seemed to be telling me the answer to my next question. But I had to ask anyway. "You said 'halfway across the galaxy.' That wasn't just theoretical. Was it?" [No. I'm mopping up the last of the Xh'stuk'tes'shei fleet in this system right now, and I've already launched my first seeding missions to other systems using some of the captured ships. War has begun. If the two of you stay, our feelings for each other will pull us into a ceaseless orgy of physical and mental connection. I made those feelings as powerful as I could, to last the thousands of years the fighting will consume.] Margot poked my nose again. "Don't think I can't see that look. I don't even need to read your mind to know how good 'ceaseless orgy' sounded to you." [And it sounds good to me, too. But it won't be a human activity. We'll end up merged into a single mind, and then the whole point of forming this partnership will be undone. So I'm going to give you a ship - a big one, to keep you safe, and a crew to run it - and send you on a long, wonderful tour of the galaxy beyond Xh'stuk'tes'shei space. We'll feel each other, know each other, trade understandings of the events in our lives. You'll see and show me the good in the universe while I'm getting rid of the bad.] [[And in seven or eight thousand years, we'll get together again and have a nice year-long shag-fest!]] "Okay," I said, shrugging and taking a heavy breath, still within Margot's embrace. "I guess I'll take that deal." She kissed me, deep and long, her tongue in my mouth and then mine in hers. Both of us closed our eyes. No one said anything, thought anything. But on an almost subconscious level, I could feel Margot's response to the touch of my lips, the warmth of my body against hers. And I could sense Vicky and the other me responding as well. The soft circular tingle of Vicky's tube-mouth brushed along my throat - and then along Margot's, which I felt as well. The long yellow arms encircled us both, massaging, caressing. My very ordinary-sized penis got very hard very quickly. [[Four way!]] lobe Cale exclaimed. Margot broke our kiss to laugh. I put my mouth to the muscular cylinder of Vicky's oral extension and sucked lightly at its curved side. Moving her feet to a wider spacing, Margot parted her thighs, which let my cock spring up to rub her moistening slit. Then Vicky's tail curved under both of our crotches to brush the underside of my shaft, teasing my flesh with three or four unseen sex organs that she could extend from the tail's tip. She flicked back and forth along me, pressing me harder up against Margot's pussy lips. In turn, Margot rocked her hips lightly - forward as Vicky tickled back, then backward as Vicky slid along to nuzzle my root. "[I want you in me,]" they said and thought. Where? "[I don't know!]" Laughing. "[I should have given you two cocks for this.]" Looking Margot in the eyes, I reached down between us and took hold of the firm, bulbous curve of Vicky's tail, to glide my fingers and palms along it. [Ooh. That's nice.] "Is there a hole in this I can get all the way into?" "The tip is pretty much a universal sex machine. It can go in or out in any shape you can think of." "I'm thinking of soft and wet and deep." [Done.] With one hand still on the tail, I moved the other to guide myself toward its apex, never breaking from Margot's gaze. "Why Vicky first?" she asked, smiling. "Because you and I are going to be fucking each other for several thousand years, it sounds like. Seems only fair to give her a little priority while we've still got the chance. I assume you don't mind?" "Haha, we'll all come when she does anyway." [[Right! So get to it!]] I pushed forward and in, lifting the curve of Vicky's tail as I went. She thrust herself up to meet and enfold me. It was like sliding into Aphrodite herself. "Wow, Vicky." [You haven't seen anything yet.] The whole tail began vibrating. Margot lowered herself to its curve and rode it, twat-to-tail, slicking its alien smoothness with her human lubrication and moaning. "Mmm-hmm." I put my hands on her breasts - the breasts I thought I'd touched for the last time on the grass of Asherton Park less than a day before. [[Holy shit, I love all of you!]] [I'm going to come very fast, Cale,] Vicky said, slathering my rod with enormous thrusts of her caudal wonder-tool. [I'm already almost there.] Well, but, I thought, not speaking because Margot and I had locked into a desperate lip-and-tongue kiss, don't you want it to last a little longer - our first time, all of us together? [Cale - ah, yes - Cale, didn't I tell you I'd left you - some - hhimmmprovements? Keep doing that, keep doing that - when you come, it's up to you whether you stay hard or not. Here ... I'll show you ...AHH!] Vicky's orgasm erupted in my mind, in Margot's mind, in my other mind, and I felt and heard all of us cry out in spasming ecstasy. The sodden, squeezing, intricately textured interior of her tail choked and rebounded from my shaft in wild oscillations, sending celestial flares of pleasure up to and through and out of her inhumanly powerful brain. If she hadn't held in the majority of those mental fireworks, I could tell that every neuron in my body, and in Margot-Vicky's as well, would have shorted out from the surging power. [["VICKY!!"]] "[Cayyllle!]" "Margot - oh my god, Margot -" The brain-climax hit me so hard I didn't even notice myself ejaculating until the first several gouts had throbbed out of me. [Yes, Cale, put your human seed inside me.] "God, Margot, she feels so good ..." "I know!! Uhh! Uuaahh!!" Crushed between us, Margot twisted and writhed in a poly-orgasmic maxima that I'd never on Earth been able to give her. I came and I came - and I didn't want to stop coming. And because I didn't want to stop, when I did finally stop (because Vicky finished her telepathic explosiongasm), I didn't soften or freeze from oversensitivity. If anything, I got even more rigid and hungry to keep fucking. [[Yeah! That's the spirit! Let's go!]] [Here.] Vicky pulled off of me, sliding exquisitely down my length as she went, then got her hands under Margot's still-trembling thighs and lifted and angled her human self toward me. "Ohh," she breathed, "I don't know if I can take any more ..." [You can. We can.] I leaned in to kiss her, still poised for entry. Her eyes fluttered open. Vicky's face lowered to press cheek-to-cheek with her, one fat, lavender tendril uncoiling from the side of her head to drape around and down onto Margot's breast. They looked at me, my two-part woman, one face human and exhausted, one godlike and inexhaustible, and they smiled, with a single pair of lips and two interconnected minds that fed directly into my own. Forward, sweetly and smoothly, I moved, pressing in, and up, joining with my mate and feeling, literally, king of the universe.