Chapter 14: Captive Desires
Essie came to on a surface that wasn’t soft, but somehow yielded perfectly to every curve of her back. The light was a uniform, shadowless white. No source. Just… everywhere.
She was in a cell, if you could call it that. A seamless white room about ten feet square. No door she could see. A low hum vibrated through the floor, more felt than heard.
Across a clear barrier, she saw Jez on an identical white slab, stirring. Beyond her, Bambi, who was already sitting up, staring at her own reflection in another wall.
“What in the ever-lovin’ Sunday…” Bambi whispered, her new voice melodic with awe. She ran her hands down her sides, over the simple grey shift they’d all been dressed in.
A section of the wall silently dissolved.
Three figures entered. Tall, maybe seven feet, and impossibly thin. Grey skin, taut over delicate frames. Enormous, liquid black eyes that held no pupil, no white. Their heads were large, tapering to small, slit-like mouths. They wore simple tunics of a matte fabric.
Essie’s breath hitched. They were exactly like the drawings, like the stories from every crackpot and abductee since forever.
One approached her. It didn’t walk so much as glide. Essie tried to sit up, but a gentle, invisible pressure held her down. Not forceful. Just… definite.
Be calm. The voice was in her head, smooth and cool as a stone in a river. It held no emotion, but also no malice. This is an examination. It will not harm you.
“The hell it won’t,” Essie muttered, but her body, confused by the direct neural push, relaxed against her will.
The Grey’s long, spindly fingers, four of them, extended. They didn’t touch her skin directly. A blue light emanated from the fingertips, sweeping over her form. It tingled. It traced the line of her jaw, the column of her throat, the arc of her hip. It felt deeply intimate and utterly clinical at the same time.
“Y’all gettin’ a free show,” Bambi called out, a shaky bravado in her tone. A Grey was running a scanner over her, pausing with what might have been professional curiosity at the dramatic new topography of her chest.
In her cell, Jez was the most composed. She lay still, watching the being working over her. “You’re from the Medical Annex of the Galgov coalition,” she stated, her voice echoing slightly in the sterile space.
The Grey above her paused, its massive head tilting. You are the operative, Jezebelle Shepherd. Your file is fragmented. Your physical matrix has been refreshed.
“The device did it. The Venusian causality slab.”
This is known. Its function is corruption. Its purpose was infiltration and subtle persuasion. This outcome is… not subtle.
“No shit,” Essie breathed out as the scanning light hovered over her flawless, hairless abdomen.
The examination was thorough. They scanned retinas, took neural readings with pinpricks of light, mapped bone density and endocrine output. The Greys worked with silent, efficient coordination. Other species occasionally appeared at the open wall-mouth: a short, stocky being with copper-colored skin and four arms; a willowy creature that seemed made of shimmering silica. They observed, took notes on crystalline tablets, and left. The Greys were the hands-on physicians. Kind, in their way. But stoic. Impassive. Their telepathic murmurs were all procedure and observation.
After what felt like hours, they were led—not floating this time, but walking—to a larger observation room. The slab sat in the center on a pedestal, encased in a shimmering containment field that buzzed with a low, angry frequency. It looked wrong here. Like a shard of a dirty, primal night stuck in this clean, bright heaven.
Jez, back in her own elegant clothes somehow cleaned and repaired, stood before a viewport showing stars. She turned as they entered. “They’ve been trying to stabilize it. The pulse in the garage was a catastrophic release of stored transformative energy. It’s like a battery that’s been cracked, leaking its charge in random bursts.”
A Grey glided in, its telepathic voice addressing them all. The device is damaged beyond our capacity to repair. Its core programming—to rewrite biology towards a template of optimal… appeal… is fused with its power regulator. Each attempt to contain it provides a stimulus. It interprets containment as a threat, and discharges.
“So it’s lashing out,” Essie said.
In a manner of speaking. The template is not purely human. It is a Venusian ideal, filtered through a damaged interpretive lens. It seeks to make things… pleasing. To disarm. To attract.
Bambi snorted, smoothing her borrowed grey shift. “Well, it’s a hell of a party trick.”
It is a universe-class hazard, the Grey corrected, its tone unwavering. We must study its discharge pattern to predict and contain subsequent pulses. Total destruction is the preferred option, but Command wishes to understand the technology first. The knowledge is—
The Grey stopped.
Its large head snapped toward the containment field. The shimmering aura around the slab flickered, then flashed from white to a sickly, pulsing magenta.
“Oh no,” Jez whispered.
A soundless detonation.
A wave of visible energy, the color of a three-day-old bruise, bloomed from the slab and passed straight through the containment field as if it weren’t there. It washed over the Grey, over Jez, Essie, Bambi. It rippled through the walls.
For a second, nothing. Essie just felt a warmth, like stepping into sunlight.
Then the Grey shuddered.
Its already slender frame cinched in further, waist narrowing to an impossible hourglass. The grey skin softened, taking on a luminescent, pearlescent sheen. Its large, black eyes softened at the edges, the obsidian pools gaining a sultry, knowing depth. The small mouth full, pouting, a shimmering grey-pink. Delicate, angular ears elongated into graceful points. It—she—stumbled, her long fingers flying to her new, subtly curved hips. A gasp escaped her new lips, a sound of shock that was almost a moan.
All around them, through the observation glass, chaos bloomed.
The stocky, four-armed copper-skinned engineer let out a grunt as two of its arms retracted, the other two becoming slender and graceful. Its torso reshaped, bursting the seams of its utilitarian suit. The silicia being crystalized into a stunning, gem-like form, facets catching the light in dazzling, prismatic bursts.
But it was the feeling that hit them next. A telepathic backwash, not of words, but of raw, unfiltered sensation. Overwhelming tactile input. The slide of fabric against newly sensitive skin. The cool of the air. The thrum of the ship’s engines vibrating up through the floor and into their very bones. It was a tsunami of feeling, after lifetimes of sterile, disciplined existence.
A low, harmonic alarm began to blare. “Containment breach. Biological anomaly cascade. Systems compromised.” The ship’s AI voice was neutral, digital.
Then it stuttered.
“Containment breeeech,” it purred, the voice dropping an octave, gaining a husky, intimate vibration. “Biological annommmm-aly. Systems feel… compromised.”
Across the ship, the Greys and the other species weren’t just transforming. They were awakening. To touch. To sensation. To each other.
Essie watched, a strange hunger curling in her stomach, as the newly-transformed Grey physician turned her enormous, now-lustrous eyes on the copper-skinned engineer, who was running her two new hands over her own sleek torso. Their gaze locked. A telepathic pulse, hot and needy, flashed between them.
The Grey crossed the room in a glide that was now pure predator. She touched the engineer’s face. The engineer melted into the touch with a shuddering sigh.
It was a spark in a dry forest.
Everywhere. In the corridors visible through the viewport, beings were colliding. Not in violence. In desperate, exploratory passion. Silica limbs entwined with pearlescent grey. A pair of transformed Greys, their willowy forms now devastatingly voluptuous, pressed against a console, their mouths meeting in a kiss that was both alien and profoundly familiar. The clinical white halls of the Coalition ship became a canvas of tangled limbs, shimmering skin, and low, desperate sounds.
Control panels sparked and smoked as sensitive telekinetic controls were abandoned or gripped with convulsive, ecstatic force. Console lights flashed from blue to a deep, pulsing purple. The AI’s voice kept threading through the alarms, now a running, sultry commentary. “Life support at 98%. Heart rates… elevated. Oh, my.”
Bambi’s jaw was hanging open. “Well, I’ll be. It’s the senior prom of the damned.”
Jez was pressed against the viewport, her icy composure shattered. She was breathing fast, her own refreshed body responding to the psychic waves of hedonistic abandon washing over the ship. A flush crept up her neck. Essie felt it too—a magnetic pull, an amplifying feedback loop of desire that the slab seemed to pump directly into the ship’s atmosphere.
A transformed Grey—formerly a bridge officer based on her insignia—stumbled into their observation room. Her uniform was half off, her pearlescent skin sheened with a luminous sweat. She looked at them, her eyes wide with desperate hunger and innocent confusion. This was all new. All of it.
She reached for Jez.
Jez, for a half-second, leaned toward the touch.
Then the main shipwide comms crackled, the sultry AI voice cutting through the moans and sparks. “Primary power coupling failing. T-Thermal levels rising in core. Somebody better… touch something.”
The lights flickered. Went to a dim, emergency crimson. The orgy didn’t stop. It intensified, moving in the hellish glow.
Essie looked from the starving Grey advancing on Jez, to the slab on its pedestal, now dark and inert once more, its latest pulse spent. The containment field was gone. The ship was coming apart.
And in the bloody half-light, surrounded by the sounds of systems dying and a crew reborn into frantic, sapphic celebration, all she could think was: the door’s wide open.
And in the bloody half-light, surrounded by the sounds of systems dying and a crew reborn into frantic, sapphic celebration, all she could think was: the door’s wide open.
“Jez! The slab!” Essie yelled, shoving the entranced Grey off her. The officer tumbled into a writhing pile of silicia forms with a gasp of delight.
Jez blinked, breaking the hypnotic pull. She followed Essie’s pointing finger to the pedestal. The slab sat there, dark and quiet like a sleeping predator. Wires, crude and clearly not factory-issue, snaked from its base to the broken containment generator. Earl’s repairs. His “fix.”
“Bambi!” Essie shouted. “You know his work! Can you kill it?”
Bambi Hicks was staring, transfixed, at the chaotic ballet of transformed aliens. The psychic noise was a bath of warm honey against her skin. She shook her head slowly, a dreamy smile on her perfect lips. “Kill it? Sugar, it’s the life of the party.”
“It’s gonna kill us!” Essie grabbed her by the shoulders, gave her a sharp shake. The borrowed grey shift slid off one of Bambi’s smooth shoulders. “Look at me. That’s Earl’s wiring. What did he do?”
Focus snapped into Bambi’s new blue eyes. Mechanic’s instincts, buried under a lifetime of fantasies and a fresh coat of cosmic allure, surfaced. She peered at the wiring, her head tilting exactly like Earl’s used to. “The fool. The original had a fuse. A safety. He just… hardwired it. Direct link from the power source. No shut-off.”
“So unplug it!” Jez urged, flinching as a shower of sparks erupted from a overloaded console. The lights dipped again, the crimson gloom deepening.
“The battery’s still live,” Bambi muttered, dropping to her knees by the pedestal. Her slender fingers, so different yet knowing, traced the crude solder joints. “Gotta short the battery. Draw the charge out so it can’t pulse again.”
“Will that work?” Essie asked.
“Gonna vaporize me or make me the queen of Jupiter,” Bambi said with a wild, fearless grin that was all Earl. “Only one way to find out.”
She didn’t hesitate. She found the main power conduit, a thick cable humming with residual violet energy. With a glance back at the two women—a nod that held a lifetime of cracked engine blocks and bad decisions—she yanked two wires free and crossed them.
A soundless, violent arc of pure cobalt light leapt from the slab into Bambi’s chest.
It didn’t throw her. It entered her. She went rigid, back arched, mouth open in a silent ‘O’. The energy wasn’t transforming her body; it was filling it. Her eyes blazed with electric blue light. The slab’s dark surface cracked with a network of dead, black lines. The party lights on the ship’s consoles flickered and died, leaving only the emergency crimson.
The psychic noise in the room didn’t vanish. It focused. It became a single, radiating broadcast point: Bambi.
She slumped forward, catching herself on the dead pedestal. The blue light faded from her eyes, replaced by something hotter, more primal. She stood slowly. She looked at her own hands, then out at the entangled crew. The touch-hungry Grey officer who had stumbled in earlier met her gaze.
A slow, devastating smile spread across Bambi’s face. “Well, hello there,” she purred, her voice dripping with a thousand shared, wicked promises.
She sauntered forward, all swaying hips and magnetic intent. She took the Grey officer’s hand, lacing their fingers together. The Grey shivered, a telepathic sigh of pure rapture echoing in all their skulls. Bambi led her, and three others who peeled away from their partners drawn by her amplified aura, into a shadowy alcove. The last Essie saw was a flash of cherry-red fabric against pearlescent grey skin, and the distinct, approving sound of a zipper.
“She… joined them,” Jez said, her voice hollow.
“She’s containing it. In her. Buying us time,” Essie corrected, though the line felt thin. “The ship’s still coming apart. You know this layout. What’s first?”
Jez forced her mind to work. The sultry AI voice oozed from the comm: “Oxygen recycling is… tired. Needs a rest. Bridge control is… unresponsive. Someone’s been naughty with the helm.”
“Life support’s failing. Bridge is dead.” Jez’s professional clarity was a rusty knife sawing through the thick, desirous air. “I can get primary systems back from the captain’s station.”
“And that sound?” Essie asked, pointing upward as a new, deeper thrumming vibration shook the deck plates. It felt like a massive toothache in the heart of the ship.
Jez paled. “That’s the secondary reactor. It’s going into thermal runaway without bridge regulation. The core will melt through the hull in maybe ten minutes.”
“Great. You to the bridge. Me to engineering.”
“You don’t know their systems!”
“I know machines,” Essie shot back, already moving toward the chaotic corridor. “I know when they’re screaming. And that one’s screaming.” She glanced back at the alcove where Bambi’s laughter, rich and dark, rolled out over the moans. “She’s got her part. We’ve got ours.”
They plunged into the hallway.
It was a river of sensation. Transformed beings—Grey, copper, silicia, others Essie had no name for—were everywhere. They weren’t hostile. They were needy. A willowy, opalescent creature with vines for hair reached for Jez’s cheek as they passed. Essie slapped the hand away, not with anger, but with a firm, distracted efficiency.
“This way,” Jez gasped, ducking under a pair of entwined engineers. She pointed to a vertical transit tube. Its doors were pried open, a faint glow emanating from within.
“You sure?”
“It goes straight up to the command deck. Less… traffic.”
Essie nodded toward a wide, shuddering ramp that led downward. The thrumming, angry heat was a physical pull from that direction. “That’s my ride. Don’t get distracted.”
Jez almost smiled, a brittle, fierce thing. “You either.”
They split. Jez leaped into the transit tube, grabbing a guide rail as it whisked her soundlessly upward. Essie took a breath, feeling the reactor’s distress call in her molars, and ran down the hot, pulsing ramp into the dark.