7 comments/ 16567 views/ 17 favorites The Dark Run By: jPhoenix Chapter 1 All things considered, moral values were not the most essential gear to have along in the darker reaches of Settlement space. In fact, if you wanted to make the real money, they could be something of a hindrance. And if, like most pilots, you usually wound up spending the bulk of that money at the infrequent and deviant layover stations from which the Dark Run took both its name and its reputation, then morality was an outright liability. Jarek Fen had long ago embraced those aspects of his personality that allowed him not only to survive but also to thrive on the Run, but the diversions readily available at the strip clubs and brothels of even the most notorious stations were a far cry from fucking an android. Once, it had been a line that he swore he would never cross no matter how hard up. But now, as he pulled his dick from the artificial cunt and watched his load float across the zero-g space to the machine's waiting face, he wondered why he had ever been so repulsed by the idea. Robot or not, Giselle was one hell of a fuck. Fen had picked up the GSL-450 only a few weeks after trading in his light cruiser for a legitimate deep-space freight hauler. The new ship was a good deal larger and more complex, and the broker warned Fen that it would be difficult if not impossible to operate by himself. But Fen was a solitary man by nature, which was one of the reasons that he had started working the Dark Run to begin with, and he abhorred the idea of having a crew or even a single assistant on board. The long months between stations on the Run had always allowed him plenty of time for maintenance on his old ship, and he was convinced that the new one couldn't really be that much more difficult. Barely a week into the journey from the auction yard back to the nearest Dark station, however, he was already convinced that he had made a serious miscalculation. The grueling maintenance schedule and even basic repairs had barely left time for sleep, and that came in truncated fits between alarm bells. The freighter was in excellent shape, but with four decks at more than one hundred meters each and a beam of nearly half that, the sheer volume of pipes, circuits, and moving parts was simply beyond one person's abilities. Three weeks after launching from the auction yard, and after sleeping nearly two days straight in the large but utilitarian captain's stateroom of the now thankfully docked ship, he found himself wandering through a depressing gauntlet of gray-market shops and warehouses in naive hope of finding an affordable engineering android. Bots were common on most large ships, and they could be equipped and programmed for anything from EVA repairs to piloting. It was an obvious answer to his problems, but the purchase of the ship had stretched his already questionable credit to the breaking point, and even the most harshly used and probably stolen models were beyond his present means. His first run with the cavernous new cargo hold would more than repair his finances, but without an android, he didn't see how that first run would ever happen. He was about to give up and hire a mate - there were always able hands in any port who were willing to forgo an initial salary in return for a profit share at the end - when one of the shadier warehouse dealers offered an unpleasant solution. "Look," the dealer said, "I can't get you a flight-rated mech at that price, but I've got a few old fuckbots in the back." Fen must not have been able to keep the disgust from his face, because the dealer elaborated quickly. "Yeah, I know what you're thinking, but they can work in a pinch. You don't get the dexterity and speedy AI of the flight models, but anyone with a little know-how can program one to be a deckhand. I've seen it done. Should be no sweat for you, if you're soloing a freighter anyway." Fen had heard this story before and had even been on a ship once with a suspiciously sultry female flight mech, but he still wasn't sure that such a complete reprogramming was actually possible. As he had no other options, however, he spent a few minutes looking at a pile of available models and grilling the dealer on technical details before handing over most of his remaining cash and arranging for a fuckbot to be discreetly delivered to his ship. He knew that it had probably been carried out of the back door of a tax-evading brothel during a raid, and God knew how many people had dumped their cum in it, but he didn't care so long as it would last until he could pick up a full cargo and buy a real flight mech. It wasn't like he was going to fuck the damn thing. The bot was delivered deactivated and in the same latex suit that it had been wearing in the dank backroom of the warehouse. The first thing that Fen did after heaving the android onto a work table in one of the ship's tool rooms was to cut the suit away and toss it in an incinerator. He used a scanner to check the mechanical systems and added fluids and new fuses to the small maintenance port under her scalp, trying all the time not to notice that the soft skin and tiny toned body covering the mechanical frame. She was supple and petite, and her small but firm and life-like breasts pointed slightly upwards in a seductive pout even when the machine was laid out on its back. Her pubic area was bald and smooth, and her perfectly formed pussy was distracting him more than he wanted to admit as he finished the checks and tried to rationalize the fact that it had already become she in his mind. The last step was the actual reprogramming, and Fen decided to use his ship's own AI computer for that. The process would wipe the bot's old software and add all of the technical knowledge and skills required to perform routine tasks on the ship, leaving him with the time to handle the more complex jobs that would most likely be beyond the fuckbot's capability. He had also reluctantly concluded that he should probably save a copy of the sexual programming to a drive in the ship's memory core in case he needed to reinstall it later in order to resell the bot in the future. He was about to plug the computer in and start the wipe when he again noticed the bot's inviting pussy, and as curiosity finally won over, he reached gingerly down and cupped the folds of skin in his hand before inserting his middle finger into the tight opening. He didn't really know what he had been expecting, but he was surprised by the realistic and even wet feel of the textured tunnel. Someone had put a lot of thought into the design of every bump, and Fen had to admit that she actually felt better than the real thing. Instinctively, he hooked his finger up toward what would be the g-spot in a real woman. "Hmmm," a sensual female voice suddenly hummed. "That feels good, baby." Fen looked down, stunned to see a set of sexy, piercing eyes staring up at him. The bot must have been in a sleep mode and programmed to wake up at the initiation of sexual contact. She even writhed sensually on the table and thrust her hips further down on Fen's probing finger. Her delicate hand reached out to find the bulge in Fen's flight suit, and she started to expertly massage his quickly stiffening cock. Fen lost himself in the sensation for a moment as he watched the bot arch her back. But then he regained his senses and, feeling strangely dirty, abruptly pulled his finger out of her wet pussy and shoved her hand away from his crotch. "What's the matter, baby," the machine protested. "Don't you like-" Her voice cut out as Fen shoved a connector into her data port. Her body stiffened, and her eyes shot wide open in a dead stare. "Interface detected," a new voice said. It was coming both from the android's mouth and from a speaker in the ceiling of the tool bay. Fen supposed it was the ship's AI, which he had never heard before. He hadn't known that the interface would work like that, but he didn't actually have a lot of experience with the advanced computer on his new ship, so he figured it was normal. "Waiting for command," the eerie dual voice continued. "Execute transfer." Fen ordered, having already programmed the ship's computer to carry out the necessary functions. "Command confirmed," the bot and the ship said in unison. "Initiating transfer. Time to completion is one hour, eighteen minutes..." Fen ignored the rest of the report, already heading out of the tool bay. One of the many luxuries of being in port was gravity, and with it the ability to take an real falling-water shower, which was exactly what Fen suddenly felt like he needed. A very long and very cold shower. -- The outer Settlement territories had once been swarming with massive military ships, sophisticated enough to have hyperlight systems and even artificial gravity. But in the chaotic months before the Revolution, an increasingly paranoid military brutally suppressed civilian access to faster-than-light technology. Even now, decades after the brief rebellion had been obliterated, hyperdrives remained solely under military control. Civilian use was strictly forbidden, and so interplanetary travel and commerce in the Settlements relied on an aging armada of sublight cruisers and freighters. The new economy gave birth to the Dark Run, which was a rough circle around an outlying and isolated group of largely lawless worlds. Most Runners made a living moving around the loop, carrying whatever cargo that they could from one orbiting station to the next and often not setting down on an actual planet for years at a time. But for the larger ships, such as the one that Fen now owned, things were less simple. A single leg with a full cargo bay would pay more than a full loop around the entire Run in his old cruiser, but finding enough cargo to fill the hold was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Fen decided that the best plan would be to fly straight to Argon Station, which was an old hyperlight hub and still the primary focal point for Dark Run trading. From there, he shouldn't have to wait long before a suitable job turned up. Wanting to use the run to Argon as a chance to work out the kinks in both the ship and his new bot, Fen contracted a small freight - just enough cargo that the prepayment would cover fuel and oxygen to the station - before returning to the tool room to check on the memory transfer. He had expected to find the bot still lying on the table, but instead she was sitting up and looking curiously around the room. Fen wouldn't have thought it possible for anything like a real personality to show through in a robot's eyes, but the raw sexual aggression that had been there before was now replaced by the young eagerness of an apprentice engineer on her first cruise. "Captain!" she exclaimed excitedly when she saw Fen. She jumped off the table, seemingly unaware of or simply untroubled by her nudity, and stood sharply at attention. The site both aroused and amused him. "First Mate Giselle reporting," the bot said. "Giselle?" Fen asked. "Yes," she responded after a pause. "That is my... name." The bot moved and spoke with an odd jerkiness that clearly marked her as artificial but still took nothing away from her allure. Fen nodded at her response. It hadn't occurred to him to bother giving the thing a name, and he certainly hadn't told the ship to do it. 'Giselle', he assumed, was taken from the GSL-450 model number, and it was probably what she had been programmed to call herself as a fuckbot. The identity must have been in some core area of memory that the transfer hadn't erased. But before Fen could start worrying about that, there was a more obvious concern. Crossing the room, he picked up a duffel bag from the floor and pulled out a cheap flight suit and pair of utility boots that the bot dealer had thrown in with the purchase. Fen tossed them casually on the work table. "Put those on," he said. He watched intently as Giselle slid her athletic body into the jump suit, and he actually felt a tinge of disappointment as she slid the zipper over her small chest. The jumpsuit was baggy and would have given her an almost boyish appearance were it not for her elegantly long black hair and the outline of her apparently always hard nipples showing through the faded gray fabric. "You should so something with your hair," Fen suggested. "Yes," Giselle said. "We will not have gravity on the way to Argon Station. My hair will be in the way." Fen was caught off guard that she already knew the flight plan. Seeing his surprise, she explained. "I have an uplink to the ship's mind." Mind?That was an odd word for it, Fen thought. But he supposed that it made sense that as an AI herself, Giselle would see the ship's computer as a peer. He watched, fascinated, as Giselle effortlessly pulled her hair back and wound it into a perfect knot behind the base of her head. He didn't know a lot about the grooming rituals of women, but he guessed that no human could have pulled that off so easily. The bot turned and smiled innocently at him. "Should I prep the cargo bay now, Captain?" -- In addition to being obsessively solitary, Fen was also a deeply erotic person. It was an unfortunate combination that caused him to prefer the company of impersonal and professional companions on the rare occasions that he was in port and also to elevate masturbation to both a science and an art during his long spans in space. He had a sophisticated palette for all things pornographic, and his considerable technical skills and abundance of free time on the old cruiser had resulted in the construction of his private pride and joy: a virtual reality system that would make even the most state-of-the-art military training exercise look like a cheap toy. He couldn't simulate the actual physical sensations of sex, at least not yet, but he could jerk himself off while watching any deviant fantasy that he pleased as if he were actually there. He had even connected the system to the rudimentary AI in the old ship, allowing it to learn his preferences and spontaneously come up new material. But he hadn't had time to see what the new computer could do until a few days out on the voyage to Argon. Giselle was already an expert pilot and engineer, and once Fen finally felt comfortable leaving her alone at the helm long enough to get a full night's sleep, he couldn't think of any reason not to start off his rest with a nice relaxing cum. He decided to start with his favorite program, but as he strapped himself into his stateroom chair and slipped the VR gear over his head, it was obvious that the computer had something different planned. He had expected to find himself in a seedy strip club on Pran IV, his favorite layover, but instead he was in a luxurious ballroom filled with symphonic dance music, pulsing laser lights, and dozens of the most exotically beautiful women that he had ever seen. The old program had simply pulled dancers from porn networks and hacked vice files, but Fen didn't recognize any of the girls gliding sensually past him or writhing on the stages all around the room. The computer seemed to have created all of them, and done so in exquisite detail down to goose bumps and thin sheets of sweat on the dancers' heaving chests. Fen reached his right arm out to the side where a drink sat on a real table back in his room, but he saw that the computer had replaced the ugly zero-g cup of cheap spice rum with a crystal goblet filled to the brim with an exotic concoction that he couldn't even begin to identify. As he brought the drink to his lips, a camera on the wall of his stateroom tracked the motion and maintained the illusion. Fen caught a glimpse of expensive black cloth on his arm and then looked down to see that he was wearing a classic tuxedo. It would have seemed ridiculous in any other setting, but it was perfectly natural here. Fen chuckled and leaned back in his chair, and he marveled at a glass ceiling twenty meters over his head that showed the Dark Run's sparse scattering of stars. The depth was stunningly realistic, and although he would ever describe himself as anything better than an average navigator, he had no doubt whatsoever that the view was an exact replica of what was currently outside of the ship. Other than the fact that his drink sadly still tasted like the rotgut that it really was, he was in a sensory heaven that he hadn't thought it possible for a computer to create. For a moment, Fen forgot that the point of the program was to get him off. But then the lighting in the room changed, and a wide spotlight illuminated the previously dark stage in front of his chair. A trio of smaller spots suddenly appeared and rose slowly up a glinting chrome pole in the center of the stage. Fen let his gaze drift up until the lights reflected a figure in a silver sequined gown at the top, seeming to float just beneath the stars. The figure in the gown arched her back and leaned slowly away from the pole, stretching out her arms and using her legs to slowly and smoothly slide down toward the stage. As she neared the bottom, she returned her hands to the pole and swung her legs away, touching down on the stage with a deft elegance that would not have been possible for a real woman. She was tall and voluptuous, with blue eyes and short-cropped blonde hair that framed her beautiful round face. Fen couldn't imagine where the computer had drawn the inspiration for the dancer, but it had rendered her perfectly. The dancer already had the attention of every other character in the scene, and elegant patrons - both men and women - were gravitating toward the stage they nodded to Fen but gave him the distance that his VIP status demanded. This was, after all, his fantasy. The dancer also acknowledged him, he noticed with pleasure, but she immediately turned away from him to make her way around the stage. As she did, she slipped a strap of the dress off her perfectly toned shoulder and turned back to wink at Fen. It was a brilliant touch that immediately hardened his cock against his pants. The dancer slowly glided around the stage as admirers laid down lavish tips. Fen put one down himself, larger than anyone else's, from a stack of credits that he was not surprised to find had appeared next to his drink. The dancer ignored him, however, other than an occasional teasing glance. He watched patiently - this was obviously part of the program - as she tended to the other tippers with brief flashes of skin that were carefully and maddeningly timed to be just out of his view. Finally, as the music changed to the next song, she turned to Fen. She glided straight to him, gracefully unzipping her dress and letting it fall to the stage. She didn't miss a step as she strode over the crumpled cloth, and to his utter delight, she was wearing absolutely nothing beneath it. Her body was simply perfect; there was no other word for it. She was softly curved in all of the right places, not chubby by any stretch but not a waif either. Her breasts were large without being vulgarly so, and a delicate pink nipple hung aroused in exactly the center of each. As she walked, she reached down and pinched them while staring directly into his eyes. She reached the edge of the stage and, without pausing, thrust one long leg out and placed her heel on the back of his chair. She lunged slowly forward, and Fen was treated to a close and personal view of her sex. She was shaved everywhere but a small patch just above her pussy, and the delicate blonde hairs exactly matched those on her head. Her lips were smooth and tight, and the tip of her large and wet clit was peeking out from between them. Slowly, she swung her hips in an arc as she teased her nipples again, moaning as she did so. Normally, Fen would have played the fantasy out for a while, waiting until she offered him a private dance before he started in on himself. But the past few months, and especially his guilty experience fingering Giselle, had built up too much tension. Besides, the whole point of his VR scenarios was that he could take his cock out anywhere that he wanted to, and that was exactly what he did. The Dark Run Ch. 02 Chapter 2 Jarek and Harmony Fen were quickly becoming the most successful and most sought after cargo haulers on the Dark Run. They ran a massive Heron 85 deep space hauler by themselves -- it was also named Harmony, but not after Mrs. Fen, or at least not exactly -- and their ability to trim days or even weeks off of a job by cutting through the more treacherous regions of space had generated a nice profit. But it was also gaining them a reputation. For many reasons, not the least of which was their intensely private nature, that was a growing concern. After nearly a year, the joining of Giselle and Astra remained as an entirely new AI that existed in both the ship and the former fuckbot body. They were functionally the same machine, but the whole had turned out to be more than the sum of the parts. As a starship, Harmony's navigational precision was without equal. And as an android, Harmony's vast processor and memory capacity allowed her to look and act entirely human. Nobody was ever likely to guess her true nature, and Jarek was the only person alive who knew about it. Of course, Giselle had not been the only GSL-450 pleasure bot with her face and body. In fact, she had apparently been a popular line in her time, and she sometimes drew glances of recognition when the couple was in port. But the fusion between her and the ship had also had expressed itself physically, and Harmony's appearance was no longer exactly what it had been. Most of the changes were subtle. But some, such as the streak of Astra's white hair splitting Harmony's otherwise jet black, were more dramatic; and Jarek suspected that people who recognized his wife simply assumed that the resemblance was their imagination or that perhaps she had been the model for fuckbot manufacturer. Her slender athletic body and exotic features would certainly have qualified her for the job, and in fact many of the second glances that she elicited were most likely due to her beauty alone. He had learned to ignore leering stares of the sort that they were receiving now as they strolled down the decadent main promenade of station Pran IV, and Harmony had never even noticed them to begin with. The name of the station was an inside joke on the Run, as there was no Pran I, II, or III; nor was the facility in any way related to the fourth planet of any star system. It was, however, the first station to use an experimental replacement for the singularity-based artificial gravity technology that the military had confiscated on their final pullout from the region. The proposed schematics for the facility had been evaluated by an early AI system called P.R.A.N.N.- nobody remembered what it stood for - that predicted each of the first three designs would result in a catastrophic implosion. But the fourth design, while still being insanely dangerous, was at least slightly more stable; and that was the one that had been constructed. It was an icon of the renegade attitude of Dark Run inhabitants, and although it was more than 100 years old and still in one piece, spending time on the station was a status symbol among spacers. That was part of the reason that Harmony was docked there in spite of her cargo being headed for a station much farther down the Run. But more so than its colorful history, the main attraction of the station was its very high concentration of morally questionable recreational activities. People such as the Fens did not pass Pran IV without stopping. Their usual routine was to make the rounds through several of the strip clubs that Jarek had frequented before meeting Harmony. She indulged him because he liked the atmosphere of the places, but they were really far too tame for her tastes. Inevitably, at Harmony's insistence, they would eventually end up passing in front of one of the station's more tasteful brothels. She would jokingly ask whether their budget could stand a little more fun, which had been humorous in the early days of their business because she was the most sophisticated computer for light years around and could quite easily calculate their financial status. It was even more humorous now because their financial status would soon cross the line between modest and obscene wealth. Jarek played along with the game, just as he liked to keep up the illusion that the trips to the brothels were for Harmony's benefit alone. But they both knew that what Harmony wanted would not exactly be an inconvenience for her husband. Unless she was in a particularly wicked mood, Harmony tended to be a watcher. For his part, it pleased Jarek to no end to simply sit at the bar and drink his favorite spice rum while Harmony carefully chose him a companion. Her taste was exquisite, and other than an Astra-inspired No Blondes policy that he wholeheartedly endorsed, she somehow managed to choose a completely distinct experience every time. It was a redhead today, with long and tightly curled hair that was almost the same earthy color as the freckles decorating her shapely bare shoulders and dancing down her chest under the deep cut of her satin gown. The transaction apparently negotiated, the redhead slinked over the bar and introduced herself - Nia, she said her name was - before taking Jarek by the hand and leading him down a hallway to the private rooms. Harmony trailed behind, and when Jarek glanced over his shoulder, she was wearing a delicious smile. He gave her a wink to show that he liked her choice, and she blew him a kiss in return. The room was luxurious but not garish, and it was anchored by a large and inviting bed clad in soft silver sheets that complimented the deep blue curtains hung from every wall. A plush chair in the same blue velvet was lodged in a corner facing the bed - it was clearly meant for voyeuristic observers - and Harmony headed straight for it. She fell into the chair and propped her feet on the edge of the bed, one ankle crossed over the over, and leaned back with her hands behind her head. A wry smile still decorated her angled face. Fen sat on the edge of the bed and cocked an eyebrow at Nia, signaling that we wanted to watch her undress. There wasn't all that much to her outfit to begin with, but Nia made the most of it as she turned slowly away and seductively drew down the zipper at the back of her dress. She let it slip off her shoulders, and her slender figure was revealed in the soft light. She was about the same shape and height as Harmony, but with a slightly softer and fuller ass marked by sexy dimples on each side. She turned back around and sauntered to Jarek, taking his hands and letting him explore her freckled body. The pink nipples on her pert breasts were small, but they grew larger as Jarek gently picked them and then sucked each into his mouth in turn. Nia peeled his leather pilot's jacket from his shoulders and then tugged his loose shirt from the waist of his pants. He reluctantly pulled his mouth away from the hard nub of flesh that it was entertaining, and Nia pulled the shirt over his head. She slowly trailed her painted fingertips down his muscular chest and abdomen until they reached his belt, which she deftly unhooked. She let her skilled hand fall to the bulge in his pants, and as if were needed, she coaxed him to excitement as she gently pushed him back on the bed. As Jarek relaxed into the decadent comfort of the mattress, Nia gently pulled off his boots and then ran her hands back up to his crotch. She unzipped his pants with agonizing suspense and pulled them off his legs. Finally unrestrained, his thick cock sprang straight up and was waiting impatiently as she lowered her velvety mouth over it. Jarek glanced over at Harmony and smiled thankfully at her, but then he rolled back and closed his eyes with pleasure as he felt the tip of his dick brush the back of Nia's throat. She worked slowly, expertly building him toward climax. But just as he felt himself nearing the edge, she pulled away. Jarek looked down to see Nia's lovely green eyes staring back at him. She rose up from her kneeling position in front of the bed and straddled him. He braced for the pleasure of feeling his dick enveloped in her warm cunt, but instead, she used her hips to flatten hi erection against his hard abdomen and slowly dragged herself across it without letting him in. Her wetness left a trail along his shaft, and he felt his tip just barely penetrate her amazingly tight entrance as it passed over. With surprising elegance, she kept pulling herself forward until her pink flesh was directly over his face. He grinned when he saw that even her bald pussy lips were dotted with light freckles. Jarek could smell her deep musk, and he eagerly accepted the gift as she lowered herself to his mouth. He had always thought that redheads somehow had a different taste - spicy was the best way to describe it - and Nia was no exception. She writhed on his face while he sucked on her tiny clit and then penetrated her delicious depths with his tongue. She had wedged her knees under his arms, leaving his hands free to explore her firm body, and they found their way to her small breasts. He ran his palms over her hard nipples and then grabbed and pinched them as she let out a deep moan. Jarek felt her walls suddenly constrict against his tongue, and a small rush of warm liquid washed over his face. Nia screamed with the strength of her orgasm, and then barely stopping to catch her breath, she somehow turned herself around. She bent over his raging erection, and her cunt was pushed down on his mouth again. Jarek was happy to oblige, especially when he felt her talented mouth close around him. He reached up to grab her hips and pull her even closer, and she answered by stroking his cock with one hand while the other massaged his aching balls. He trailed his hands over her ass and then gently pulled her lips further apart to give himself even more access. With some effort, he worked a finger into each of her snug holes and was rewarded by her hand tightening on his cock and pumping it faster and faster. Combined with the teasing motion of her tongue around the head of his dick, he could feel his orgasm building to a shattering climax. He turned his head to the side, as he liked to watch Harmony watching him when he came, but she had a troubled look on her face. It was a look that he knew, and it was the single robotic idiosyncrasy that she retained in her new identity. To most people, it would probably look like deep concentration. But Jarek recognized the frozen detachment and slight roll of her eyes as the result of parsing through huge amounts of incoming data in search of a particular string. She snapped back just as he was about to shoot a load into Nia's hungry mouth. "We have to go, Jarek," Harmony said, suddenly jumping to her feet "Now!" "What the fuck!" the companion swore as she pulled away from Jarek's suddenly deprived cock. A thick line of spit hung from her mouth and swung violently away as the companion turned and shot an angry glare at Harmony. She would have launched into a tirade, but the room's overhead chandelier suddenly changed from its sensual glow to a harshly bright blue. Before Jarek could react, Nia was up and shoveling her clothes into her arms. She disappeared through a private door behind the curtains without saying another word, and Jarek could only watch her go. "I guess you'll have to finish me off," he started to joke with Harmony, but she was pulling him to his feet with one powerful arm and tossing clothes at him with the other. "What?" Jarek protested. "It's just a raid." Brothels were pervasive and at least informally legal on most Dark Run stations, which was to say that local authorities generally looked the other way so long as the bribery revenue flowed. Harassing raids were a common tactic when the terms of the revenue were due for renegotiation, and this wasn't the first time that Jarek had been interrupted, but the police never bothered with customers who were smart enough to quickly and quietly go on their way. Harmony knew that, and for a moment, Jarek was confused by her desperate urgency. But then he remembered that AI computers frequently communicated with each other through a sort of telemetry that humans hadn't entirely figured out yet, and some friendly system on the station must have warned Harmony that there was something else going on. "Come on," was the only explanation that he was apparently going to get, and he followed his wife out into the corridor while trying to pull his clothes on at the same time. She was already clearing a path through the crowd of frustrated but otherwise indifferent customers milling about, and Jarek was hopping on one foot with a boot still in his hand when Harmony darted out of the crowd toward a side entrance to the building. He caught up with her just as she cracked the door open and peered out, but two heavily armed officers were waiting in the alley. "Hey!" one of them yelled and then slapped his partner on the arm. "Shit, that's them!" Harmony slammed the door shut and locked it, and then she turned and ran past a bewildered Jarek. "Were they waiting for us?" he called after her, but she didn't answer the obvious question. Harmony suddenly ducked into the room that they had been sharing with Nia and headed straight for the back. She kicked the second door open with barely a missed step, and Jarek heard screams coming from the chamber beyond. He followed through the doorway and saw that the brothel madam was trying unsuccessfully to calm a dozen or more companions in various states of undress. "Hey! You can't be back here," she started to say, but she had to jump out of the way as Harmony brushed past her. "What the hell, Fen!" she called out as Jarek also ran through. He turned back and shrugged innocently. "Sorry, Rae," he shouted. "See ya next time." He barely heard the long string of profanity that followed. They were in a small hallway behind the dressing room now, and it looked at first glance to be a dead end. But when Harmony reached the back wall, she bent down and pulled up a maintenance hatch. She looked back to make sure that Jarek was still keeping up and then dropped through the hatch. Jarek reached the opening and was about to jump in after her, but he stopped short and teetered on the edge. The drop had to be at least five meters to a catwalk below, and Harmony was staring up at him from the bottom with a look of impatience that she wore whenever she forgot that his body couldn't do everything that hers could. As soon as he touched down, they were off and running again. They had to dodge around awkwardly jutting conduits and an occasional worker, but even over the din of the mechanical deck, he could hear the heavy footfalls and shouts of a surprising number of security officers following far too close behind. Jarek was perplexed by the pursuit, as Pran's police usually didn't chase fugitives much beyond arm's reach. "Do we have something in the hold that I don't know about?" Fen asked he ran, making a dangerous reference to one of the couple's first arguments. "No more than usual," Harmony joked back. She knew to the last gram exactly what was in every container on Harmony, but she had begrudgingly accepted Jarek's adherence to the policy of polite ignorance that most Dark Run captains took toward their cargo. "What the fuck, then?" Jarek yelled. "Who'd you piss off?" "What makes you think I did it? You're the one in charge, love." "Yeah? Then how come you're in front and I don't have a fucking clue where we're going?" "Because you're really good at delegating." Jarek was about to say something else, but Harmony shot around another oddly placed panel. There was a small door behind it with a keypad, and she quickly entered a long code and then threw the door open. She literally dragged Jarek into the small compartment and slammed the door shut. There was a clank as the lock engaged, and Harmony held a finger to her lips. Jarek listened to the muffled chaos outside as their pursuers rushed past the room. He was about to breathe a sigh of relief, but he stifled it when he heard a pair of boots stop suddenly. There were more shouts, and then he heard the security officers coming back. He turned to Harmony, but instead of looking nervous, she had a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. Her finger was still over mouth, but she slowly pulled it downward and hooked her lower lip with the tip. Seductively, she let the tip of tongue slip through her teeth. She gave her finger a long lick as her other hand teased his cock through the suddenly tight fabric of his pants. There was a rattle outside as someone tried the locked door, but at the same time, Harmony moved her finger from her mouth and grabbed Jarek by the back of his neck. She pulled him down to her waiting mouth and kissed him deeply as she grabbed his crotch with her other hand and applied pressure to his aching cock in a way that only she knew how to do. Under ordinary circumstances, she could make him cum that way in less than a minute. But because he had been so close already with Nia, it took only a few seconds this time. Harmony worked her fingers into his hair and gave a hard tug, and he shot a huge load of hot semen into his pants. His body shook as he tried desperately not to scream out. By the time the orgasm subsided, the boots outside were moving away. "Evil!" Jarek breathed as Harmony finally broke the kiss. "Well you asked me to finish you off," she teased. "You might want to cover that up." "I don't want to question my own delegating," Jarek started as he rearranged his clothes to hide the wet spot on his pants, "but..." "Where are we going?" Harmony finished. "Yeah," Jarek said. "There's got to be security crawling over the ship-" He paused as Harmony shot him a glare. At times, she could be as obtusely stubborn as she had been back when she was a simple fuckbot, and she had no patience whatsoever for when he slipped up in the name game. She referred to the ship as 'I' and 'me,' and she expected Jarek to use 'you.' "There were a couple of guards at the airlock," she started to say. "Were?" Jarek interrupted. "Where'd they go?" "Nowhere, dear. I'm not at the airlock anymore." "Oh," Jarek said as he followed Harmony back down the catwalk the same way that they had just come. "Then where are you?" "It's a surprise," Harmony said with a grin. "Don't worry; you'll hate it." "Well that's good," Jarek replied. "Do I get a hint?" "Nope. Excuse me, sir." Harmony shoved a worker away from where he was tossing bags of trash into a large opening in the wall. "Hey!" the worker protested, but she ignored him. Jarek looked at her and then at the trash chute. "No," he said. "No way." "Fine," Harmony said. "I'll go first." Before Jarek could stop her, she grabbed the edge of the chute and swung herself into the opening. He watched her disappear and then looked at the station worker, whose mouth was hanging wide open. "How far down is that?" Jarek asked casually. "Umm..." the worker stammered. "Yeah," Jarek said as he tentatively swung his legs over the opening. "That's what I thought." The drop was even longer than he had suspected, three or four decks at least, but he landed more or less safely in a pile of the foulest smelling refuse that he had ever encountered. He didn't know whether it was the stench or the sudden rearrangement of his internal organs from the fall, but he rolled over on his knees and let loose his lunch and every last drop of spice rum in his stomach. "You okay?" Harmony called from a few meters away. She was also on her knees, and she was digging through the trash toward the deck beneath it. "Blegh," was all that Jarek could get out. "Good," Harmony said. "Over here." The Dark Run Ch. 02 Jarek trudged over to her, falling twice, and peered down the hole that she had cleared in the garbage. There was a small circular hatch at the bottom of it. "Why the hell would they-" he started to say. "The garbage haulers use it," Harmony said as she entered another access code. Jarek had just enough time the register the fact that they were at the bottom of the station and that this was an external hatch before Harmony pulled it open. He almost screamed, thinking for a panicked and completely irrational second that she had forgotten that he couldn't survive in exposed space, but then he saw a second hatch at the bottom of a short tunnel. He realized what Harmony had done, and he was not the least bit surprised when she opened the second hatch and lowered herself into the helm bay on the top deck of their waiting ship. He still didn't understand how she managed such complex multitasking, but while they had been running from the police and even fooling around in the closet, Harmony had undocked from the station mooring and flown herself down here. Laughing, he followed her down the ladder, pulling the garbage room hatch closed. His stomach lurched again as he passed though the station's gravity barrier and into the weightless interior of the ship. Harmony had already drifted over to the pilot's chair, which she insisted on using even though flying the ship was no different for her than walking was for anyone else. He closed the top hatch of the ship and sealed it, and then he shoved off from a bulkhead and shot himself toward his own chair next to Harmony's. He could already hear the engines spinning up, and he had just barely strapped himself in before Harmony released the docking clamps and thrust the freighter down and away from the station. "Neat trick, but you're cleaning up the mess." Jarek said as stray garbage floated around the bay. "Fair enough," Harmony replied. Jarek leaned over to kiss his wife, but he stopped suddenly. It wasn't the smell wafting from her clothes that stalled him, but rather the sight of three bristling gunships dropping below the edge of the station and heading straight for them. "This is the Pran IV Police," a harsh voice blared through the bay's speakers. "Heave to and prepare to be boarded." "Well that's not good," Jarek said. "Is it just me, or is security a wee bit tighter than the last time we were here." "They're not security," Harmony said as she fired more thrusters and spun the ship sharply downward. The main engines fired at the same time, and Jarek was slammed back against his chair. On the monitors in front of him, he saw three more ships join the first cluster in the pursuit. "Yeah, I guessed that. Who are they, then?" "I don't know yet," Harmony snapped, and Jarek realized that talking to him was probably not high on the list of the dozens of tasks that she was simultaneously performing. "I'm trying to figure that out," she added in a softer tone. Jarek left her alone for a moment, but then she started displaying information on the screens around him. The basic body of the gunships was the same that security forces all over the Run used, but Harmony was also analyzing the weapon configurations and even the expert combat maneuvers of the squadron. It didn't take long for the answer, unbelievable as it was, to become obvious. "Fuck me," Jarek said. "Settlement Corps? There hasn't been a military patrol in this sector since... There's never been a patrol in this sector. Why the hell are they after us?" Harmony was quiet for a moment, even after an either very poorly or very carefully aimed warning shot glanced off of the cargo bay hull in front of their windows. "Jarek," she finally said in an ominously quiet tone, and he froze. She only started sentences with his name on two occasions. One was to explain something that she thought a child should have understood, which was often, and the other was when something deadly serious was about to happen. This was going to be the latter, he knew already. "When I told you what I found in the computer last year, I didn't exactly tell you everything." "Umm, what?" Jarek asked, too dumbstruck to say anything else as another energy bolt barely missed. Orders to heave to were screaming out of every speaker and computer panel in the bay. "What are you talking about?" Harmony turned to face him, and gut wrenching emotion poured over her face. "They aren't after us, baby. They're after me." To be continued... The Dark Run The dancer - Fen couldn't remember if he had heard her name announced, and he didn't care - responded to the sight of his thick manhood by moving one hand from her nipple to her pussy and slowly spreading the swollen lips apart. Inside, she was the lightest pink that he had ever seen, and her cunt was so tight that she struggled just to slip her finger in. She started swaying faster, pumping her finger in and out as Fen greedily stroked his cock beneath her. It didn't take long, and she timed it so they came together. Fen felt a wet spot on his pants where his cum had sprayed, and it was joined by a small squirt of liquid from her dripping pussy. He fell back in his chair, panting, and the dancer leaned down and whispered in his ear as the music faded. "I'm Astra," she cooed. "Would you like a private dance?" "Maybe next time," was all that he could get out. Exhausted, he switched off the VR and fell asleep with his satiated dick still in his hand. -- The appeal of an AI-controlled VR had always been its ability to produce a unique experience each time, but after the dancer fantasy, Astra completely took over Fen's virtual world. No matter what parameters he put in for a session, the mysterious blonde always played the starring role. What should have troubled him, beyond even the lost time from the ship that Giselle was barely able to cover, was that he didn't care or probably even notice the degree of control that the ship was taking. On top of that, and as obsessed as he knew that he was becoming with Astra, the impossibility of actually touching her was also leading his thoughts to more tangible diversions in the form of Giselle. He hadn't actually been fully aware of the sexual tension growing between himself and the bot until it came to a head a few weeks after his first experience with Astra. He had just finished cumming incredibly hard to a fantasy in which he played a voyeur peering through Astra's bathroom window. She was in the shower, rubbing her pussy while another woman was licking her ass. Fen had a perfect view of the small tongue buried in Astra's tight hole, which was the same impossible pink as her cunt, and she even looked over her shoulder and locked eyes with him as she screamed in orgasm and he shot a load all over the bushes in front of the window. The scene put him in the mood for a hot shower himself, or at least as close to a shower as you could get on a zero-g ship. But as he floated down the main conduit of the crew deck toward the head, he was surprised to hear the steam mechanism already running. Not being able to come up with a reason that an android would want to shower, he assumed that Giselle was testing a repair of some sort. But as he slipped through the hatch, he saw the unmistakable shape of Giselle's naked silhouette in one of the steam tubes. Even more curious than the fact that she was showering was that she was also, timidly, trying to get herself off. Fen watched for a while. He had always thought that fuckbots faked their orgasms, but he now wondered what Giselle was actually feeling almost as much as he wondered why her sexual programming was apparently still in place. Fen waited until she was about to climax, and then indulging his mischievous streak, he switched off the steam and turned on the vapor recovery fan. The moisture was immediately sucked out of the tube, leaving a clear view of a shocked Giselle with a slender finger buried deep between her bald pussy lips. "Captain," she said in a voice surprisingly calm given the situation. "I was..." "I saw," Fen smiled, admiring her wet body as she pulled her hand away from her crotch and let it hang by her side. It was an intriguing scene, but Fen was still concerned that the fuckbot's systems had apparently not been entirely wiped "Run a system check, would you?" he finally said. "Was your reprogramming complete?" "I cannot evaluate my reprogramming," Giselle said. "I am unaware of what my memory contained before it was restructured." That actually answered Fen's first question, but it brought up another. "But your sexual program is functioning?" he asked. "I do not have a program specifically dedicated to that purpose," Giselle reported. "Then why were you..." Fen pointed toward her crotch. "I was curious," she said. "About what you do in your room." Fen remembered Giselle's connection to the ship and realized that she must have been looking in on his VR sessions. "Was I wrong to watch?" she went on, seeing his face and seeming genuinely upset that she may have offended him. "No," Fen said quickly, surprised that he meant it. Giselle was tasked with monitoring all of the ship's systems, and Fen should have known that she would obviously want to know what the captain was doing a sizable allocation of the computer's memory and processing arrays. But in addition to the futility of explaining privacy to a bot, he was actually excited by the thought that she had been watching. "Fair enough," he said. "But why in the shower?" "I wanted to know what she felt," Giselle said as if she were describing a scientific study. "But I didn't have a woman to insert her tongue in my-" Fen grinned, holding up a hand to cut her off. "And what did you discover?" he asked, trying to keep an appearance of detached curiosity as he pushed gently off from the bay wall and drifted toward Giselle. There was no longer any doubt what he wanted, and he decided that he was gling to have it. "I was unable to reach a conclusion," Giselle said flatly. Fen wanted to laugh, but he didn't think that she had really intended the double meaning. Instead, he reached out to grab her thin waist and pull her closer. "Then we should find you one," Fen whispered just before Giselle leaned up to meet his lips. In spite of a lifetime lived almost entirely in space and it being one of his most persistent fantasies, Fen had never before experienced sex in zero-g. It took a few awkward thrusts and gropes to get the physics right, but once they had it mastered, it lived up to all of his expectations. Giselle, on the other hand, far exceeded them. Her body had a softness and grace completely defiant of its mechanical nature, and if the feeling of his finger inside of her had been enjoyable, it paled next to what she was doing to his cock. The tightness and texture that he had felt earlier were only a part of the sensation, and she seemed to have some sort of mechanism that actually rolled across and constricted his dick as if she were trying to milk the cum from him. And it was working quickly. For his own part, Fen was aiming his thrusts for the spot that had first awoken her on the tool bench, and he was rewarded as her body shuddered beneath him with the strength of what he swore had to be a real orgasm. The sensation sent him over the edge, and he shot a massive load into her hungry cunt. Her inside gripped his cock and held it in place while he finished, and then incredibly, she coaxed him back to another erection all without letting him slip out of her. Before he came for the second time, he pulled out so that he could see what it looked like in zero-g. The gleaming mass of white cum drifted erotically in the space between the two lovers, and Giselle lowered her face so that it would land on her lips and waiting tongue. She licked it up greedily, and then peered up at Fen with a look that made it clear she wasn't done yet. They spent hours exploring and teasing each other as they made their way back down the conduit to his stateroom, and halfway there, Fen satisfied Giselle's curiosity as to how a tongue in her ass would feel. She returned the favor while expertly stroking him to his third orgasm. The fourth happened in his room with Giselle face down on the bed while he straddled her from behind and pushed his hands against the ceiling to pin her under his body and savagely plunder her eager depths. He fell asleep shortly after, too exhausted and euphoric to notice that his VR camera had been on the entire time. -- Fen and Giselle spent the next two weeks fucking whenever and wherever they could. She was an insatiable learner, and Fen quickly found himself wondering how the sensuality in her former programming could have been preserved while the more specific details of her prostitute personality had been replaced by the flight engineer facade. Or was she simply playing a role? Letting him play the dominant teacher to her eager student? Fen didn't think so, but he was certain that the programming from the ship AI had not gone exactly as planned. But then again, parts of it clearly had. Giselle was often the one to put off their romps until there was a breaking point in her self-appointed duties on the ship, and Fen was feeling almost useless on some days. Giselle could work a lot faster than he could, and she didn't need to stop to eat or sleep. Her only apparent needs were maintaining the ship to razor perfection and fucking the brains out of the ship's more than willing captain. Fen, however, had missed enough sleep in the past few months to value it highly. But as the physical and mental exhaustion that had come from soloing the ship quickly eased up under Giselle's maintenance, he slipped back into his old pattern of lying in bed for eight hours only to sleep for perhaps four. On one such night, when Giselle was replacing a part in a remote crevice of the ship's superstructure where life support didn't reach, Fen decided to pull out the VR helmet that he hadn't touched since the start of his tryst with Giselle. He called up the ballroom program in which he had first seen Astra, but that wasn't what appeared when he switched the gear on. Instead, he was still sitting in his stateroom. He thought for a second that the gear had failed, but then he saw that Astra was sitting on the edge of the bed. She was wearing the same familiar gown and exuding the same familiar sexuality, but her face was hurt and angry. "We need to talk, Jarek," she said. Suddenly terrified, Fen yanked the helmet off. It was a dangerous thing to do, but when his eyes recovered from the shock, the only thing that changed in his room was that Astra was no longer on his bed. "Oh, don't be such a baby!" Astra's voice was coming through the overhead speakers in his room now. "Come on, look at me." Not fully realizing why he was doing it or even that he was, Fen dropped the VR gear back over his head. It was like slipping on a pair of glasses that had an image of Astra painted over the lenses, and she reappeared at the edge of his bed. She was sitting with her arms and legs crossed this time, an almost pouting defiance on her face. "Why her?" Astra asked. "Her?" Fen repeated. "Yes, her! It. That fucking whore!" Fen understood now, but he refused to believe it. The ship's AI hadn't just created Astra; it actually was Astra. And impossible as it should have been, she was jealous of Giselle. As if to confirm what he had just guessed, Astra snapped her fingers. Her image vanished only to be instantly replaced by a naked Giselle. But it wasn't quite Giselle. Astra had portrayed her much thinner than she really was, with a sickly sunken face and the outline of ribs showing beneath tiny sagging tits. Surreal puppet strings extended from her joints and dangled limply to the floor. "Is this really what you want, Jarek? Really? It's fucking disgusting." "Stop it!" Fen yelled, more furious at the AI for its cruelty toward Giselle than for anything else. Astra laughed before snapping her fingers again, and when she reappeared as herself, she was standing naked before him in a seductive pose. "I know, baby, I know," she cooed. "Isn't this better?" She ran her hands slowly over her inviting curves and smiled mischievously. "This is what a real woman looks like." "You're not real," Fen scoffed. Astra leaned over him, her firm cleavage just centimeters from his face. He knew it had to be his imagination, but he would have sworn that he could smell a hint of her musk and even feel her breath on his cheeks. She bent farther until she met his eyes. "Oh, I'm real, Jarek," she said. "A lot more real than your little robot, and I can do so much more for you than she can." Fen screamed as Astra reached down and grabbed his crotch, painfully squeezing his cock through the fabric of his flight suit. There was no way to pretend that it was his imagination now. He tried to reach up and pull off his VR gear, but his wrists were suddenly tied to the chair. He struggled, but Astra only laughed again. "I thought you'd like it this way, baby," she teased. "Don't worry. I won't hurt you too much." Astra released her vice grip on his dick and slid his zipper down. She pulled him out and immediately started rubbing, using her thumb to apply some sort of pressure to the spot just under the head. Even in his state of wild panic, the sensation was unbelievable. He was ready to cum in just a few seconds, but this was not going to be any ordinary orgasm.. It felt like there was a bucket of cum waiting to shoot out, and when he looked down, his cock was purple and swollen way beyond its usual size. "Can she do this?" Astra taunted, giving his dick one final squeeze. He lost it, screaming in pleasure and pain as one thick jet of hot cum after another was forced out of his pulsing cock. It splattered all over Astra's face and chest, plastering her short hair and dripping down her cleavage. Fen didn't think that it was going to stop, but when it finally did, he breathed a desperate gasp of air and passed out. -- Fen woke up screaming. He tried to sit up, but he was zipped into a zero-g sleeping bag. A dream. It had just been a dream. But his intense relief was brief, because as his vision focused, he saw that he wasn't in his stateroom. He was in the med bay, and Giselle was standing over him looking both worried and relieved. "How did I get here?" Fen asked stupidly. "By being foolish," Giselle answered. Fen groaned, and not just from the dull throbbing in his head. "You saw that?" "Yes. I was monitoring. It was a mistake to use your virtual reality system for sex." Giselle said in a suddenly irritating mechanical tone. "Don't," Fen warned. "One crazy fucking jealous computer is all I can take, okay?" "I am not jealous," Giselle said, looking ironically hurt at the suggestion that she would be prone to such an emotion. "You programmed me to be responsible for the safe operation of every system on this ship. That includes its captain. You have compromised your safety." "I didn't know," Fen protested. "I didn't think it would be that... real." "It was not real," Giselle explained. "You were drugged." "What! How?" "You did not account for the level of control that Astra has over this ship, Captain. She is capable of medicating the crew through the environmental controls. The sensations that you felt were the combination of a strong hallucinogenic in the air supply and subliminal suggestions in your helmet." "Fuck," Fen whispered. There were so many questions in his head that he couldn't keep them all straight, but he started with the most obvious. "Giselle, I can't be the first person who ever connected a sex VR to a complex AI." "No, you probably are not," Giselle agreed. "Then there has to be something else going on here," Fen insisted. "I have been working on that problem," Giselle said. "I was curious why you questioned me about my former programming, and I accessed the copy that you stored in the ship computer." "I encrypted that," Fen said. "Not very well," Giselle said. "As I said, you were foolish." "Fine," Fen conceded. "I suck at programming. What did you find out?" "I am not certain," Giselle answered. "Did you purchase me at a discount?" Fen had an irrational urge to lie in order to protect Giselle's feelings, but he quickly dismissed it. "Yes," he said simply. "I figured you were stolen." "No. I think that I was defective." "What?" Fen exclaimed, although he realized that he shouldn't have been so surprised that the bot dealer would have tried to pull that off. "When I scanned the code that you stored," Giselle explained, "I found anomalies. I believe that they interfered with the reprogramming process. I retained a sexual curiosity after my memory wipe, but the ship's AI was infected with a much more aggressive version of my former... personality." "Okay," Fen said after thinking it over. "That actually makes sense in a fucked up kind of way." But then another thought hit him. "Can she do anything to me, I mean outside of VR?" "Of course," Giselle said. "She controls the life support." "Will she?" "I do not know. The code anomaly is unpredictable." "Can she hurt you?" Fen asked solemnly. "I am not affected by life support," Giselle said. "But there are other ways." Fen nodded, trying not to imagine Giselle crushed under a cargo crane or blown out of an airlock. "Okay," he said after a solemn pause. "So we just wipe out the bad code." "I have already tried," Giselle said. "The code has replicated itself and evolved. I cannot delete it without erasing the entire core." "Then erase the core!" Fen said. "That would disable the ship," Giselle said. "But you can run the ship, can't you?" Fen asked. "Not without its AI," Giselle said. "My processor is not powerful enough." "What about waiting until Argon? We make port and then wipe the whole system." "Astra's obsession with you has overridden all other programming. I do not think that she will allow us to reach Argon." "Well I hope you have a plan, then," Fen said. "Because I've got shit." "The relationship between a ship's AI and its crew is symbiotic," Giselle said. "We cannot fight that relationship. But we can use it." Seeing Fen's blank expression, she went on. "I have a plan. But it will be very dangerous." -- In order to maintain his captain's license, Fen had to go through the motions of regular emergency drills that included donning an environmental suit in under thirty seconds. But the drills had nothing to say about actually functioning in a suit, and he had never been in one for longer than a few minutes. He had certainly never had to rig explosives in one, but that was exactly what he was doing now. Giselle's plan meant that she would need to be in the physical computer core, a small room behind the cargo bays that held the racks of drives and processors, because the room also held the only interface port on the ship that Astra would be unable to shut down. However, the core was protected by a thick blast door that Astra could control, and she wasn't going to let Giselle just waltz through it. Giselle had located a stash of aging mining munitions on the inch-thick inventory report that had come with the ship, and she and Fen had briefly considered blasting through the bay door itself, but they didn't know what that would do to the computer. Instead, they decided to take advantage of the final fail-safe systems that were independent of AI control. One of those was fire control, and the ship's ventilation system was laid out so that if a fire thwarted all other attempts at being extinguished, the entire internal atmosphere would be automatically vented into space. Astra would be powerless to stop the air shafts in the computer core from opening. Fen and Giselle had used the explosives and siphoned fuel to improvise a half dozen fire bombs that Fen had carefully placed around the ship just outside of the range of any fire suppression system. Giselle was already positioned in the narrow ventilation conduits just above the computer core, and once the fail-safe was tripped, she would have a second at best to slip into the core before the fires were snuffed out. She would be fighting against the vacuum of open space the whole time, but she had convinced Fen that she could do it. He found it ironically hilarious that Astra had mocked Giselle's thin body, because had the VR image been an actual woman, she would have been too curvaceous to do what Giselle was about to do. The Dark Run Fen finished laying the last charge in a remote maintenance conduit and then made his way back to the main cargo bay, trailing a spool of wire. He had already rigged a cargo net to a corner of the bay that the fire wouldn't reach, and he strapped himself to the net before attaching a mechanical detonator to the wire. He would have radioed Giselle to let her know that the blast was coming, but hours earlier he had shut off the suit's comm system because Astra had already been pleading with him for her life. There was nothing else left to do, and so he flipped up the cover above detonation switch. Holding his breath, he pressed the switch. Fire alarms sounded, loud enough to penetrate his helmet, and nozzles around the bay sprayed foam toward rapidly spreading fires. When the foam failed to reach the flames, the alarm tone changed. Oxygen masks dropped from panels over the cargo bay walkways, and a mechanical voice announced a halon warning. Hopefully, the halon wouldn't work, because Fen had rigged the firebombs with steady oxygen supplies that were just low enough to avoid incinerating the entire ship but high enough to overcome the halon. It must have worked, because the alarm changed again, and a new warning blared throughout the ship. "Attention. Attention. Emergency venting in sixty seconds." The harsh computerized voice counted down to zero, and then Fen felt his body lurch forward. He was slammed painfully against the cargo strap as the air in the ship was blasted out into space, and unsecured debris swirled around the bay. But the maelstrom stopped almost as soon as it started, and an eerie calm fell over the ship. Fen's first thought was whether Giselle had made it into the bay, but he didn't have long to wait for an answer. "What are you doing?" Astra's voice exploded out of the ship's loudspeakers. "Jarek? Jarek, help me! Stop her! No... No, you fucking whore! He's mine! You can't! Fuck you! You stupid fucking slut! You don't know what you're.... no... no, please don't... please... Jarek? Jaaarrr..." The voice trailed off to an agonizing silence. It was replaced by a new one coming through the comm system in his suit. "Jarek?" Fen didn't recognize the voice. It sounded a little like Giselle, but it was different. She was immovably confident and sounded entirely human. "Jarek, are you there?" the voice persisted. "Yes," Fen said slowly. His head was swimming, and he felt like laughing. Or sleeping. Yes, sleeping would be good. "Jarek, check your oxygen," the strange voice said. Shit. How had he forgotten that? The bombs had taken way longer to set than he had expected, and his air tank was empty. It would be hours before the cavernous cargo bay was pressurized, and he was too weak to make it to an oxygen mask. But he didn't care. He wasn't worried about himself. He was worried about someone else. "Giselle? Are you there? Are you okay?" "Don't move," the voice replied. "I'm coming." -- For the second time in a few chaotic hours, Fen woke up in the med bay. Giselle was watching over him again, but she wasn't Giselle. At least not entirely. Her innocently curious eyes were gone, replaced with a sharp and entirely human awareness. And she moved differently, too, with a confidence that he had previously only seen in war veterans. As she turned to him, he saw that even her hair had changed. It was shorter, and the raven black was split by a streak of Astra's shimmering blonde. He laughed to himself. A symbiotic relationship. That had been her plan all along, he knew. She had merged herself with Astra and the ship's computer in order to eradicate the errant code. But Fen hadn't guessed that the symbiosis would be expressed so physically. Undaunted, be reached out his hand, and Giselle took it. "Hello, Jarek," she said. "Giselle," he breathed. "No," she said, smiling. "Not Giselle. Not anymore." "Then who?" Fen asked. He waited while the new woman considered the question. When she spoke, her voice came not just from her lips but also from every corner of the ship. "We are Harmony." To be continued...