The Space Invader Pt. 01

PART 1: THE DISCOVERY

Creeping slowly, cautiously into the hold, Amanda Rays, first navigator and co-helmsman on board the Premier Voyage de Michelangelo à Travers les Oceans (Michelangelo's First Voyage Across the Oceans, or the Michelangelo) slipped softly around the corner in her rubber-soled magnetic sleeping boots, her heart pounding. She swallowed as she cast her light beam across the empty floor, the unfinished plates of food and glasses of water still on the tables they'd set up in the doorway of their tiny transport ship some time ago to improve upon their lacklustre crew quarters. Jumping in fright as it happened, her radio earpiece squawked loudly.

'Report Rays, I see you active now in the hold. Anything yet?'

'Do you think I'd be standing quietly waiting for you to deepthroat a microphone before I reported in if I'd seen anything?' Rays bit back harshly, her already racing heart practically bursting. 'No, everything's just as we left it. Resuming radio silence until I have something worth calling in for.' She clicked her radio receiver off and gathered her wits before resuming her slow, methodical pace around the room. The hold was a large cargo area filled to the brim with armoured and sealed containers twice the size of old-fashioned shipping containers on Earth. They carried all manner of goods that the crew weren't privy to - as low-end employees of the lowest-bidder company to win a shipping deal for the lowest-rated companies, planets and transit corps - hence the lack of information or proper crew quarters. The ship was sixty-percent depressurised cargo, thirty-percent atmosphere-controlled cargo, and about four percent personnel manned. The rest was bulkheads and braille.

Because of this, the crew had only about a hundred or-so square feet of room to play with on a ship capable of transporting about a football stadium's worth of standardised containers. It was enough for hygiene, bunked beds, a few fitness & recreational items and a bridge. When they didn't eat on said bridge, they ate on a trestle table in the entryway to the hold. It was the next biggest space without eating on their beds, and no one wanted to spill anything on those sheets -- the vacuum washer wouldn't be done in time for bed.

Freshly docked at planetary spaceport and overdue for shore leave, the ship had been held up from unloading after external station scanners picked up an "unidentified biometric signature" on board. After a few too many jokes about the toilet overflowing and several arguments had passed, the crew had reluctantly been forced to investigate. That was when they'd started digging through the automatic logs and found that the ship's rudimentary maintenance scans had indeed been silent-reporting an unknown and unscannable bioorganic mass on board in several different places at different times, becoming active sometime about four pick-ups ago but picking up in activity after their last few stops before arriving at their unloading destination now, outside Tethys, the third moon of Saturn. That discovery had significantly dampened the mood on board, and now the crew were seriously investigating the possibility of an additional rider on their ship.

It [M1]wasn't uncommon for local creatures to hitch rides aboard shipping vessels, attaching themselves to cargo containers or occasionally slipping inside during open-door surface loading. Most are 'dealt with' when the cargo is depressurised in preparation for space-travel, but the few that manage to find cargo equipped for atmos-con. storage can survive quite some time before being found. It was less common, however, for those creatures to escape the shipping container while on-board, and positively rare for the ship not to notice them and alert the crew. It just didn't really happen anymore.

So here Amanda was; searching the hold, her tits effectively agitated and her ear still ringing somewhat, searching the hold with her torch. Her captain, a kind and generous but firm and straight-nosed woman named Flint Rooms, was controlling the search from the bridge, which in quarantine regulation obedience was in lockdown, the bulkheads connecting it to the rest of the ship firmly locked closed and self-sustaining, airtight telescope shields locked in place around each primary control station. The captain was the only one inside her sealed tube, overseeing the search conducted by the rest of her crew, with one member remaining in the bridge but outside the tubes to maintain a continuous watch inside the bridge itself. The nasally sound of her voice still rung in Amanda's ear as she played her light over the simple docking controls used to operate the mechanical loading arms attached to the insides of the hold.

It happened in a flash. One second she was moving one step at a time through the control area, scanning underneath the arm-mounted control screens and multi-joystick-like operating panels, the next her pantleg was pushed to one side as something impossibly fast slithered inside it. Amanda barely had time to jump backwards before she could feel it running up her leg with what felt like tens of tiny hair-like legs gripping her skin as it shot up her body. Watching as a lump rolled up the underside of her pants like a cat under a blanket, she gasped once -- just once. Then it was all over.

'Rays, call in. I saw a spike on the vitals just now. Anything in the hold?' Rooms said in her sealed tube, the internal microphones picking her up as if she were speaking right into them. There was no response. 'Rays, don't take this as a chance to pick up the finer art of pranking, chip in or I'll flush that sector into space right now and cop the personnel costs on the nose.' A few seconds of silence passed, then, Rays called in.

'All good captain,' she said. 'Tripped and lost my shit for a second there. Had to crawl after my light before I could make sure nothing was wrong. Hold seems clear to me.'

'Fine, fine. Take your time next time, I'd hate to have to start caring about you. Head back to the bridge, the others are almost done with their searches and once we flush the holds with space-air those will be cleaner than my panties back home. Besides, it's lunch time.'

Clicking off her radio and initiating the lockdown disable sequence -- which would complete as soon as all registered crew members biometrically authenticated at one of the two entry bulkheads to the bridge -- she sighed and clapped her palms against her knees.

'Guess it's an all-clear to report to the spaceport then,' she said to her shipmate, a youthful warehouseman and the most junior member of the crew, outside the tube. 'False alarm. Usually, it's our sensors that get dusty, but I guess it can happen to the big stations too.' She stood and stretched her back, waiting to be released from the lockdown chamber when her crew signalled outside the bridge.

In the hold, Amanda pressed her cheek into the cold metal floor, her mouth wide, rolling her lips across it as she squirmed. She panted rapidly and one hand was pressed into her pants-front tightly between squeezed-shut legs, her ass up in the air as she twisted and jerked in the corner. She curled up and shuddered, jolting against the wall and gasping in tiny jerky intakes of breath, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth wide open. After about a minute, she relaxed slowly into a foetal position on the floor, sighing contentedly with a wide, open smile on her face. She licked her lips and as her eyes fluttered open again, she bit her lip hard. Slowly, still shaking in her arms and legs, she got to her feet, her dark eyes focussing on something unseen far in the distance ahead of her.

Slowly, shakily, as if something had deeply shocked her body, she began to step towards the exit to the hold, her torch in one hand, the tightly gripped hem of her shirt clenched in the other, a dampness beginning to seep into the inner layers of her nightwear between her legs.

[M1]Setting up here that the creature came aboard from a planet cargo loading dock but it actually snuck on inside someone