Space Relations Pt. 29

"Should I keep doing it nor not?"

"You'll have to figure that out, baby." Cruz told Uhura. "Once you make that decision, you pass it on to the rest of us. We all know that dealing with Barbie is going to be the toughest thing for you. You must quell that disturbance first, before it tears the unity of crew apart. The fate of the Space Relations may very well hinge upon your success as its highest authority."

"Oh, stop it with the melodrama." Mark pushed Cruz off the bed, so he could get off right after. "I'm going to make you a combination cheesecake and ice cream cake. That's after I make dinner, okay?"

"Baby, if you make a cheesecake for me, you can count on me sneaking into your bunk later."

Mark stood there, gazing at Cruz's pronounced curves, before he turned his attention to Uhura's athletic and also shapely body.

"Damn." He said, scooping up his shorts. "I'm going to hit the humidifier first, and then I'll get started on dinner. We're still on this casual, topless kick, right?"

The big, naked man ducked through the hatch and was soon out of sight.

Cruz walked over to Mark's big mirror hanging on the wall. "You know, I already had a habit of checking my appearance a few times a day. It's gotten exponentially worse since I've become a woman."

Uhura watched the Latina take Mark's pink brush and start combing her hair with it. The black woman even stared at Cruz's fat butt and thighs. In the mirror, Cruz could see where the Lieutenant's eyes were going, but she didn't make a fuss of it this time. This allowed the voyeur to keep watching.

"I think you're very attractive." Uhura said, as she started to leave the bunk.

"I think the same about you, LT." Cruz admitted, turning to face her.

"If I made a move on you when I was still the Captain," Uhura started. "Would you, you know, would you have messed around with me?"

"No, definitely not." Cruz shook her head. "That log you used to have between your legs would have sent me running. You'd have to cut off about a third of it before you come anywhere near me. Now that I'm a woman, I'm much more comfortable with you also being a woman. If you change back into a man, stay the hell away from me!"

To prove her point, Cruz put her index fingers up in the shape of a cross.

Uhura couldn't tell how serious her science officer was, but she certainly sounded serious. Since the Lieutenant still had her wife to worry about, she picked up her sweats and wordlessly left the bunk.

"LT, we're picking up an anomaly in space." Freya announced, sometime later when the flight crew was situated back on the bridge. "Within this anomaly, I'm reading frequent electromagnetic discharges similar to the strange ones we've been having here on the ship."

Pensively, Uhura leaned forward in the captain's chair. She understood what that meant. Those discharges were the cause of the various sex changes his crew had gone through. "Can you give me a visual of this disturbance?"

"Negative." Freya said. "The anomaly won't show up in the visible light spectrum. I'll try different energy scans until I find something I can graph onscreen. Whatever this is, it is huge. It is the size of a city, at least. Roughly, we're looking at fifteen to twenty kilometers, but the size isn't constant. It is contracting and expanding every few minutes."

"Like an explosion?" Cammie asked.

"No, not really." The Nordic woman replied. "An explosion causes matter to break apart at high velocity. This is something different. The closest analogy I can think of is lightning within a storm."

The Lieutenant thought this over for the next few moments. "Let's track this thing. Maybe we can learn something about what happened here on the ship by studying it."

"It is moving away from us at a slow rate of speed." Freya calculated.

"Don't get too close." Uhura cautioned. "If this is similar to what we encountered on Saturn, we don't want to attract it to our ship."

The crew did get an idea of what they were looking at when Freya switched the main screen over to ultraviolet. The electrical anomaly was shaped like a large cloud, with intermittent flashes of lighting that went from one end to the other frequently and pushed at the boundaries. The edges of the cloud truly were difficult to define, as if they were in a constant flux.

"LT, we have a sudden energy reading in one of our bunks." Barbie spoke up.

Uhura's wife was being cold and professional, and not warm and friendly as she usually was. Uhura didn't like that attitude at all, but she had more pressing concerns at present. "Is this an occupied bunk?"

"Negative."

"Split the main screen." Uhura decided. "I want you to rotate a camera view on whatever section our crew is in. No, belay that. I'll take care of this myself." She used the override on the intercom, so her voice could be heard in the entire ship. "All personnel. This is the Lieutenant speaking. I want you to give me your status, and then I want you to make your way over to the bridge. This is urgent."

"It's me, baby." Cruz's voice answered a few seconds later. "The two men and I are in the lounge watching the telly."

"Are you all okay?" A worried Uhura asked.

"We're fine, baby. We're heading to the bridge now, LT. We'll see you in a minute. Oh, hold on. Mark has some biscuits cooking. She said they will be done in less than five minutes. We'll just go into the kitchen to turn the oven off."

"Give me one." Uhura said. "Barbie, are you still reading the internal anomaly?"

"Yes, LT. It hasn't moved. It is still in one of the bunks."

"Cruz," Uhura went back to the intercom. "It might be safer if all three of you went into the kitchen for those biscuits. If you hear the alarm, shut everything down and run to the bridge. I want you to stay in a group, and do not go upstairs into the bunks."

"That sounds juicy, LT." Cruz replied. "What's happening?"

"It's our energy spike." Uhura admitted. "It's hiding in one of the bunks. And we have a huge energy cloud out in space that might be made of the same thing. We'll give you the details when you reach the bridge."

Uhura reacted a little bit, when his remaining personnel joined them in the hub. He'd gotten used to seeing his flight crew topless and wearing shorts. Cruz was still topless and nice to look at, but the Lieutenant didn't expect to feel a sensual craving upon seeing the manly chests of Mark and Mario.

"Keep your shorts on, sweetie!" Mario started giggling, as her telepathy had caught Uhura's sudden lust.

It was so strange to see him like that, Uhura thought, so bubbly and warm as Mary had always been, but now in a small man's body. There was something sensual about Mario, Uhura could admit to herself. Both as a female and a male, that quality always seemed to shine through on her. As a person in general, Mary / Mario was totally fuckable.

Mark had brought in a basket full of biscuits, while the other two had brought in trays of refreshments. The trio went around to pass the snacks and drinks to anyone that wanted them. Only Barbie refused a serving.

"Come on, baby." Cruz was telling her. "You don't want cold biscuits later, do you? They're nice and warm right now!"

Barbie made a face at her.

"She's being a brat." Mario swished by, dropping off a drink before she turned toward Mark. "Just leave her portion right there on her desk. She'll start eating once we give her some breathing room."

"I wish you wouldn't read my mind like that." Barbie huffed.

"Tough titty." Mario replied. "Here's your drink. It's your favorite lemon-flavored soda. Don't spill it or you'll never get served by me again."

Barbie really wasn't the type to have public tantrums, but so many things had changed recently that Uhura wasn't as sure about her anymore. The redhead had been stewing for days now. The Lieutenant was glad when everybody had taken their seats without any further outbursts from anyone.

"Freya, tell us what we know about this anomaly outside the ship." Uhura ordered. "When she's done, Barbie call tell us about the anomaly inside the ship."

Patiently, the commander and his people waited for the information to be relayed. After the exchange, they all started throwing ideas out to one another.

"Those are intermittent plasma discharges." Cammie commented. "They're coming across as quick and regular energy fluxes that could potentially be interpreted by a ship's computer as an artificial electronic signal. The Beagle must have become aware of this signal when they went out to investigate it."

"And then something like this cloud got a hold of them and pulled them in." Uhura added. "It interacted with their body chemistry somehow, or at least with their captain."

"Maybe it didn't have time to interact with the rest of them." Cammie countered. "Maybe that's why the Beagle's crew was put into stasis. The cloud anomaly was going to manipulate them one at a time at its leisure. It could not do the same with us because we thwarted the stasis thanks to our telepath Mario."

"That implies almost a sentient intelligence." Uhura replied. "Or at the very least a very complicated virus or computer program."

"Why can't that cloud be alive?" Mario asked. "Look at the way it gets bigger and smaller like that. It could be breathing hydrogen, for all we know. The lightning flashes could be electrical discharges like those in the synapses of the human brain."

"The expansions and contractions are irregular." Freya noted.

"Just because the inhalations and exhalations aren't regular doesn't mean that cloud is not breathing." Mario persisted. "Do you see a plant take a breath in and let a breath out? No, you don't. Maybe this cloud absorbs a lot and gives out a little, or vice versa."

Momentarily, Freya sat there full of thought. "I'll try to construct a graph showing the rates of expansion and contraction. That might help."

"We have an energy spike on level two!" Barbie announced. "The energy has moved from an empty bunk into Mark's bunk!"

"What the hell is it doing in my bunk?" Mark made a face. "Get that thing out of there!"

Freya was studying her console. "Our instruments recorded an energy spike in the exterior cloud, at the same moment we had the one inside the ship."

"They're communicating." Cruz guessed. "The one we have on the ship is reaching out for the one hanging out there in space."

"What if the one on the ship is like a baby?" Mario wondered. "If we get close enough to that cloud, maybe it will jump off the ship and leave us alone!"

"That sounds possible, LT." Cammie agreed. "Maybe our stowaway thought the Beagle was one of its kind when it went on board that ship. It put everybody into a sort of hibernation out of fear, once it realized it was not among its own kind. Then we came along and it left their ship and came over to us for the same reason. It is unprecedented, but it is a possibility."

"Why does it have to be unprecedented?" Mario held his hands up for emphasis. "We have these things called Sky Dragons on Earth. These are very rare sightings, but people have recorded videos of giant, semi-transparent creatures in the middle levels of the atmosphere. By giant, I mean the size of houses or buses. They kind of look like and move like sea life. They float up higher and higher in the atmosphere until people can't see them anymore. Why can't this thing on the ship be something like that?"

"If there is one thing we know, it is that we don't know everything." Cruz added. "We still have weird things discovered in Earth's forests and oceans all the time."

Mario pointed at her and nodded. "See? She knows what I'm talking about."

"This poses a dilemma for us." Uhura frowned. "If we get close to that cloud, our unwanted friend might jump off. At the same time, the larger cloud might decide to snatch us into it. If it suddenly puts us into hibernation and we are unable to prevent that from happening, we're screwed."

"When we entered Saturn's sheath, we changed the polarity of the ship numerous times." Freya recalled. "This might have put our stowaway off-balance. Maybe that's why it was unable to freeze us like it did the crew of the Beagle."

"I think she's right!" Mario exclaimed. "Remember when it tried to freeze us, and then it couldn't when I sensed it? That's when we were messing around with trying to magnetically attach the Beagle to us. And then we let the Beagle go and adjusted our polarity again! We all changed when we were asleep! That thing has to put us to sleep before it can change us!"

By this time, Mario and his blonde hair were bouncing up and down. Cruz had to go over and physically keep the little man in his chair before he started bouncing all over the bridge.

"Freya, what do you think about that?" Uhura asked.

The big, topless Viking considered this in a manly pose, with her hand rubbing at her chin. "I suppose it could work. I could match the cloud's polarity and bring the ship up close to it. Once we're in proximity, I'll go neutral, or slightly opposite. The cloud should draw in the thing we have on the ship and leave all else alone. I'll have to do this very quickly, mind you. If I don't, perhaps this larger cloud could affect us in some way we can't foresee. This could be dangerous, Lieutenant."

"We could seal off the bridge." Barbie said. "We could keep us in a neutral polarity the entire time, so the thing on the ship will stay away from us. We could even increase the polarity on the rest of the ship to make sure the thing stays in place until we get rid of it. This might actually work!"

Uhura marveled at her wife. Certainly, his old systems analyst ensign Willow would never have thought of that.

"That's a good idea, LT." Freya nodded. "If anything goes wrong, we do have our space suits in storage. Actually, I recommend we get into out suits right away, before we do any of this."