Space Relations Pt. 30

Finally, the ship's computer gave the all clear. Those wearing space suits could begin removing them, and the unsuited Uhura and Freya were free to leave the bridge.

"That's a big bitch!" Cruz joked, just as the Lieutenant entered the lounge.

Mario went over and slapped the woman on the arm. "Don't you call her that!"

"Why not?" Cruz asked. "She can't hear me; she's unconscious."

"Because it's rude!" Mario snapped. "How would you feel if somebody said that about you?"

"If I was unconscious, I don't think I'd rightly notice." Cruz shrugged.

In frustration, Mario shook her head and replied, "Women!"

"My, how the tables have turned." Cammie said, after having removed her helmet. "Not so long ago, you were one of us, Mario."

"I think he absorbed too much of blue lady's fear." Barbie commented. "Mario, can you make a Happy Kiss for yourself? It'll help you get rid of all that."

"I wish!" Mario frowned. "I'm sure I'll calm down by the time I take this stupid suit off!"

"Can I help you with that, baby?" Cruz asked.

"I don't know." Mario still sounded edgy. "What if you start calling me a bitch next?"

"I would never do that." The Latina answered. "You've always been my sun and moon, baby. I'm eternally yours."

Uhura watched as Cruz thought something at her favorite lover. After a couple of moments, Mario was seen blushing, before she broke out laughing. "Okay, you can come and help me un-suit. Can one of you guys attach the gas regulator thingy to the oxygen ball? Be sure the nitrogen intake is on steady increase."

"I'll take care of that." Cammie said.

"I can do it, if you want." Barbie said right after.

"Why don't all of you head back into the hub and change out of your suits?" Uhura spoke up. "I'm sure you're all tired of being inside of them. You can send Freya back here to help me take care of our visitor."

The Lieutenant caught the malicious glance Barbie gave her, the moment she mentioned the Nordic beauty's name. Very soon, she would have to address that. For the moment, Uhura would have to ignore her wife's jealousy.

As part of the crew filtered out of the lounge, Uhura went to gather the right gear from the rescue pack. The gas regulator was set to withdraw nitrogen, but it was fairly simple to reverse the process. She did notice that Mark was lingering by the lounge door. "Yes?"

"Oh, nothing." Mark said. "All that rescuing stuff got me hungry again. I was just trying to figure out if I should make quick sandwiches or something more filling. So, you think that energy being is gone from the ship now? Does that mean we're going to change back into our old sex, or are we going to stay this way forever?"

"I really don't know." Uhura shrugged. "Our present situation wasn't really covered at the Academy."

"You can write a new chapter, Cappy." Mark grinned. "What to do when your cock is gone, or when you suddenly wake up and have one. I'm going to go take this fucking suit off. I think it's giving me a rash because I've been farting ever since I put it on. Can farts give you a rash when you're wearing this absorbency garment?"

Uhura made a face of disgust at her cook.

"I'm just kidding, Cappy." Mark turned to leave. "By the way, that is a big bitch."

After setting the hose into the right aperture, Uhura removed the second oxygen ball from the giant's legs. Her science officers would have to run some scans and tests, but from what she was seeing, the thighs, knees, calves and feet looked human. The most disconcerting aspect was their strong blue color, like something out of Indian mythology. Actually, she noted, the alien's skin tone wasn't that much different than the safety blue of the spacesuits. Could that be a coincidence?

Freya walked in a couple of minutes later. "Cammie is taking the command chair for the time being. She wants to make sure the gas cloud doesn't suddenly appear to come after us. Hey, LT, can you do me a favor? Will you stand up?"

"Sure." Uhura nodded.

The moment the Lieutenant was upright, Freya came over and kissed her. It wasn't a quickie, either. If there were any doubts that Freya might spurn Uhura because she'd just become a woman, those were quickly erased. The black woman was breathless when the Nordic finally pulled away.

"Your wife just gave me a look that said she wants to rip my face off." Freya admitted. "Every time she does that, I'm going to find you and mess around with you."

"Out of spite, you mean?" Uhura asked. "Don't you think that will make things worse?"

"It's either that or I beat the shit out of Barbie." Freya held up her large fist. "Look at this. This is what you don't want to see when people get pissed off at a bar. If it comes down to jumping on a bed with you or shoving this into Barbie's face, I'll take the latter."

"You're right." Uhura nodded somberly. "That's a good choice."

Freya started laughing.

"I didn't mean it like that." The Lieutenant said. "I just meant that I have to do something about Barbie before things get any worse. As soon as we get moving again, I'm setting up a discussion with you, her and me. We can't have this kind of animosity when you two are posted only a few feet from one another. We can't have it on a ship this size, period."

"What about her?" Freya motioned to their new guest.

Uhura shook her head. "I don't know who she is or where she came from. Once she comes to, we'll start trying to communicate."

As it turned out, speaking to one another was not going to be a problem. With Cammie manning the ship, everyone else went into the lounge to wait for the moment when the giantess awakened. Mark had the munchies again, so he went into the kitchen for a bowl of pretzels.

"She's coming to, LT." Mario said. "I'm sending calming waves into her mind to keep her from blowing her stack again."

By this time, the giant blue woman had been set on the floor without the oxygen ball. The crew had been studying her strange garment of a brown, leafy material, which was arranged haphazardly and didn't look to clothe her body at all. Cruz had even cut a bit of it off for future analysis. Also, the woman had something that looked like blue hair in appearance, but upon closer examination its structure was more like very thin scales.

"She's almost awake." Mario repeated. To the alien, she said, "It's okay. Your ship was in bad shape. We brought you into our ship so you wouldn't perish. We're not going to hurt you."

"I feel happy." The blue woman said.

"Holy shit, she speaks English!" Mark exclaimed, while munching on her snacks.

The giantess kept her legs straight and her arms close to her sides, while she turned her head from one side to the other. Her dark blue eyes gaped widely at the sight of the crew around her.

"You were under distress." Mario explained. "I have the ability to remove the stress from your mind and to replace it with something nicer. You're very big. We're afraid that you might hurt us if you are in distress. We're soft people."

The giantess looked directly at Mario, scrutinizing her blonde hair and smaller face. She looked over to Freya, as if noticing how similar their blonde hair color was. After passing glances at Barbie and Cruz, her eyes paused on the Lieutenant and on her ebony color.

"I understand." The alien conceded. "Your people are very strange." She lifted her head, gazing at the contours of her breasts. Next, she glanced at her shoulder and arm. With some curiosity, the alien raised her hand and stared at her long blue fingers. "You have changed my body to become like yours."

"No, we didn't change your body at all." Mario shook his head. "This is the way we found you. Are you supposed to have a different body?"

"LT, I think I know what happened." Freya spoke up. "The energy anomaly on our ship must have transferred information over to the energy cloud. It told the cloud what humans looked like. With this blue lady in hibernation, the cloud must have manipulated her DNA the same way it did to us."

"How can that be possible?" Uhura asked. "We were only close to the energy cloud for about ten minutes."

"It could happen." Mario jumped in. "Look at how the energy changed all of us. It zapped us in like half a second!"

"The plasma discharges were as fast as lightning strikes." Freya elaborated. "Think of how much information could be encoded into that magnitude of energy bolt. That could be a million times denser that an electronic radio transmission."

"Mario, let me take over." Uhura said. Although she was hesitant, because she was in charge she went over and crouched down next to the curious blue giant. "What is your name?"

"I do not understand." The alien answered.

"What are you called?" Uhura tried to explain. "How do you separate yourself from others of your kind?"

"We think the same." The giantess said.

"They're a telepathic race." Mario interpreted.

"Just call her Blue, LT." Cruz suggested.

"Okay, we'll call you Blue because your color is blue." Uhura nodded. "Do you remember how your ship ended up in the energy cloud? Do you remember where your planet is?"

The giantess was thoughtful for a few moments. "I do not remember."

"This is going to be tougher than I thought." The Lieutenant said. "I'm going to try and say this as simply as I can. A cloud of energy captured your vessel. This cloud was intelligent. It was able to change your form into the body of a human female, albeit of a much larger size than usual."

Mario looked to be catching random thoughts from the giantess. "They didn't have sexes like we do. They were asexual mostly, except during their breeding season where some of them became male and female. After that they went back to being asexual. Her people were like, fishy I guess. They swam through their ship. That's why she was having so much trouble when we first found her. Her human hands couldn't operate the ship's controls anymore. She couldn't get the, what are they called, the membranes to close up so the hydrogen and vacuum of space couldn't reach her. Her people can process oxygen, but not as much as humans can. When she thought she was dying, it wasn't because she was deprived of oxygen, but more like she was drowning in it. Her alien mind went spastic because she thought the oxygen overload was going to kill her, when it was really fine for her new human body. And then she freaked out because the other people on her ship were all dead, and their bodies had changed into human form as well."

"Plus her ship was spinning around faster than a top." Freya added. "Talk about waking up to a bad day."

"What is a human female?" Blue asked. "Teach me to use this body."

Uhura sent a certain question to Mario.

"I think she's a good person." The blonde man answered. "I don't think she'll try to hurt us."

"No hurt." Blue said. "Only questions. Many questions."

"Let's get her vitals checked." Cruz said.

"She doesn't even know how to use her arms and legs to get up." Mario discovered. "We have to show her everything, like a baby."

With the two science officers taking over, Uhura took a step back. She glanced at Freya, who was as fascinated as she was, and at Barbie, who was guardedly standing a few feet further away. When Mary managed to get the giantess to sit up, Uhura felt things were stable enough to pull away and take care of the next most pressing problem on the ship. "Barbie, Freya, both of you come with me. Mark, go watch TV. Cruz, Mary, if you need me I'll be in the kitchen."

Uhura sat at the end of the table, with the two women she was closest to on either side of her. Barbie had her arms crossed and couldn't even look in her direction. Freya looked smug, on the other hand, as she sat with hands on her hips and looked to be beaming her perfect round breasts at Uhura's wife. Hopefully the Lieutenant could pacify the tension between them. With Barbie spurned and contemptuous, and Freya haughty, she knew it wasn't going to be easy.

"We need to get a couple of things out in the open." Uhura started. "No, let me rephrase that. We need to talk about our feelings. Barbie, would you like to start?"

"I have nothing to say." The redhead huffed.

"Please, Barbie. This sniping between the two of you has to stop."

"I'm not sniping at anyone." Freya said.

"Oh, you want to know what the problem is?" An irritated Barbie said, pointing across the table. "That bitch right there is trying to take my husband away!"

"Barbie, there's no need for..." Uhura started.

"It's true." Freya revealed. "I am trying to take your spouse away, Barbie, but not your husband. Will you allow me to explain?"

"See, she even admits it!" Barbie accused.

"Will you let her have her say?" Uhura asked.

"What more is there for her to say?"

"Barbie, calm down."

"No!"

"Barbie!" Uhura finally snapped. "You're acting like a high school brat!"

At this, the angry woman bolted to her feet. "I am out of here!"

"Sit your ass back down!" The Lieutenant demanded. "If I don't smooth things out between you two, I'm afraid I'll have to restrict you away from the bridge!"

"Yeah, right," Barbie shot back. "So you can spend more time with her!"

"I'm in love with your spouse, Barbie." Freya divulged.

The redhead was leaning toward the kitchen door, but looked directly at Freya when she'd said that. It took a moment for the distracted Uhura to realize that Barbie was reading the blonde's thoughts. When the full significance of the words sunk in, Barbie's anger looked to subside into a profound hurt.

"I want to tell you how it happened." Freya went on. "It has a lot to do with how Cruz and Mark are always telling us to be open about our problems. You know, don't let little things fester until they become big things on such a small ship as this one. Well, I changed into a woman and I had a big problem with that. Then I followed their advice. I became a new character with no biases or baggage. I went from being the most powerful man on this ship to being the most powerful woman. I didn't know how to be a woman, but I still have the same competitive edge I had before. I saw the Captain as the single person in the ship that I'd like to associate with the most. I suppose I explored my feminine side too much, as I had no experience in when to stop or when to hold back."

When Freya paused, Barbie pressured her. "Keep it going. When did you fall in love with my husband?"

"I don't remember the precise moment." Freya shrugged. "It happened very quickly. Even after the Captain switched over to becoming a woman, the emotion within me is still strong and persistent. What's worse is that I can't stop feeling that I'm better than you are as LT's partner. I know this is irrational. I've tried to suppress this idea and the emotions behind it, but it ebbs out of me naturally. Right now, while we're talking here, I'm wishing you would leave the kitchen so I can flirt with Uhura." The blonde threw her hands up. "That's as open as I can be about the situation. I'm sorry."

Barbie looked to her spouse. "What do you think about all this?"

"Seriously, I wonder if Freya will still feel this way if we became men again." Uhura admitted. "That makes me very nervous. I know it is a selfish thought, but there it is. I am glad that we're starting up a dialogue between us, however."

"I thought about that." Freya nodded. "If both Uhura and I became male, I don't think I'll be chasing after him. I respected the Captain as a man. I never crossed the line with him before and I don't think I ever will. All bets are off with me as a woman."

"Well, say something." Barbie told her spouse.

"I like Freya's attention, but I don't want to leave you out in the cold, either." Uhura answered.

"You want both of our attentions?" Barbie scoffed. "Because you don't love me anymore?"

"No, it isn't that." Uhura denied. "Think about our history here on this ship. I had a thing going with Margo before you became part of the crew. Later, I married two women. I was never physically intimate with Willow, but I did enjoy flirting with her. Barbie, you had no problem with me messing around with any other woman on this ship until Freya came along."

"Willow was shy." Barbie said. "She wasn't trying to yank you away from me, like this horny bitch is."

"I was shy as well." Freya replied.

"Well, you're not shy when you have a pussy, are you?" Barbie snapped. She looked to catch herself a moment later. "Okay, you two really want to hear it, so here it is. Freya is better looking that I am and she's in way better shape than I am. If it was a race between me and her for my husband, I know I would lose."

"You keep calling LT your husband." Freya pointed out. "But she's your wife now. I don't know. Maybe this will all change after the next sleep cycle, now that the energy anomaly is gone and we might change back to our former selves. Until then, I'm sorry, Barbie, but you are married to a woman."

"So anything goes while you're the opposite sex?" Barbie looked incredulous.

Uhura smirked. "On this ship, anything goes regardless."

"That's true." Freya chuckled. "LT, I'm sure you and your wife have a few things to discuss. Would you excuse me?"

Uhura nodded. The blonde vixen stood up and went around the table to Barbie's side. When the two women faced one another, Freya very obviously fluffed up her hair. Freya then strode off and made her exit.

"She just flirted with me." Barbie said, once the married couple was alone.

Uhura went over to her wife. For a moment, she hoped Barbie wouldn't reject her, before she relented and put her arms around the redhead. "You hardly ever lay a finger on me, ever since I became female."

"It takes some getting used to, okay?" Barbie confessed. "Every day, I keep hoping you'll turn back into the man I married."

"I'm still that same person inside."

"You could have fooled me." Barbie said, finally relaxing in the black woman's embrace. "The person I married didn't have tits."

"Let's turn that around a little." Uhura contemplated. "If you suddenly changed into a man and started chasing Freya around, I would probably be just as jealous as you are now."

"I don't think I'm going to change." The redhead negated. "I think Cammie and I are going to stay as we are."

"For the sake of argument, would you chase Freya all over the ship if you were a man?"

"I'm not in that situation." Barbie answered.

"Will you for one second use your imagination?"

"Okay, fine, she's very attractive. I'll give you that much. But she wouldn't be my first choice on this ship."

"Really?"

"Maybe this is a hang-up for me, but if I wanted to fool around with a girl, I'd choose a girl who was a little smaller than I am. I guess this is because I'm chubby."

"You're not chubby at all!" Uhura countered. "You're sultry and saucy and..."

"You asked me a question." Barbie halted her. "So let me answer it. I would choose Willow first, but she's gone now because she couldn't keep up with the rest of us. I would choose Mary second, as a woman and not a man like she is now.

"What about the women on the ship now?"

"I'm getting to that." Barbie wiggled her head at Uhura. "First, I would choose you, of course. After that, maybe Cammie. Cruz can be really goofy sometimes, regardless of what sex... that person is. I don't know how to feel about Freya yet. I hate her, but at the same time I don't."

"You don't hate Freya." Uhura said. "You're just projecting your vulnerabilities on her."

"You heard what she said! She said she's competing with me for your attention! You like that, don't you? You'd kick me to the curb in a second if she came in here naked! What's this I hear about you sneaking out of our bunk to go into her bunk not too long ago?"

Uhura was surprised, as she didn't think her wife knew anything about that.