Sal brought her corvette carefully into a powered orbit around the drifting cruiser, setting up a centripetal burn that would give her a good view of it from all angles. Taking no chances. Distress calls were urgent, but her own safety and that of her ship were more important. Sal may have been a junior officer, but she was no fool.

She observed the hulk visually while her sensors gathered their data. Any ship in this sector would be burning in one direction or another, but this one was lifeless, at the mercy of Einstein. The nearest gravity well was decades away at her present velocity. The description extended across the EM spectrum - no lights, no radio broadcasts other than the distress call, no little bits of chatter from on-board radio systems, no noise leaking from electronics or drives. Just infrared - it wasn’t frozen at least. A reasonable 23 degrees. That meant if it truly was dead, it couldn’t have been dead long, else it would have bled all its heat into the blackness until it was near indistinguishable from the background.

Its rotation was also suitable for passengers, and the hull showed no battle damage or shoddy repairs that would indicate involvement in piracy, so she brought the Little Knife slowly into a closer orbit, monitoring the whole time. The broadcast on the distress frequency repeated itself unceasingly, but there was no voice recording; text only. “URGENT. ASSISTANCE NEEDED. ENGINES AND AUXILIARY POWER FAILURE. ONE HUNDRED TWELVE PEOPLE ABOARD.” It identified the ship as the Incessant and some other standard information. Sal’s Corvette didn’t have nearly enough space for over a hundred but there was always a chance they just needed a spare part or a computer rebooting, so she’d do what she could to help.

Closer in, she initiated a scan for life signs and balked at what she saw - only one of the hundred and twelve still appeared to be alive. She knew from boring Academy exams that Relentless class cruisers had only twelve cryo-chambers primarily for medical purposes, so it was unlikely that the rest of the crew were on ice. Sal aimed the corvette’s entire comms array at the ship, broadened the focus to include all of it, and started her own broadcast to the single survivor: asking their condition and needs and suggesting some ways to reply lacking properly functioning radios.

As she cancelled the centripetal burn and configured the ship for approach and docking, Sal chewed her lip. Childhood stories of ghost ships swirled in her mind, scenes of skeletal mariners reaching out to curse the unwary explorer. She shook her head to clear it, and configured a few of the corvette’s exploration drones to launch as soon as it had a seal.

Sal slept while waiting for docking and to give the drones time to explore the ship and report their findings back to hers. Upon waking she reviewed the drone analysis over a hot ration pack. The results made no sense at all. The automatic analysis suggested two potential remedies: either cleaning the contacts on the pumps in the primary life support loop or replacing a fuse for a minor circuit on the bridge. They were completely separate systems and no symptom would suggest both of them. The circuit that the fuse protected was redundant, too, and would cause no problems unless the other one also had an issue.

She reviewed the footage of the first drone, getting her first glimpse of the inside of the dead cruiser. As suggested by the scans, there was no power to any of the systems inside and the interior was dark except for the remote cameras’ lamps, which cast eerie, flitting shadows as they moved around. No skeletal pirates extended grasping hands towards the remotes, indeed the ship showed no sign of ever having had people aboard at all. No corpses sat slumped over the desks on the bridge nor lying in bunks. One of the drones Sal had programmed to follow the life sign her scans had revealed, but it had chased around half the ship, never finding anything. One of the others had readings which made no sense at all, fluctuating wildly within the same location.

Sal finished revieiwng the footage and analysis and made her way grimly to the airlock, chased along by dread visions, now of alien lifeforms able to trick her scanners waiting around the corner. Pull yourself together she told herself, we’ll just go in, see if there really is anyone alive or anything obviously wrong, pull the logs, and leave.

Outside the airlock, the young lieutenant stripped out of her comfortable shipsuit and took her spacesuit from the rack, peeling it up her long legs and slim body. The material felt slick against her skin, the inner membrane interfacing chemically with it to permit wicking away sweat. She checked for wrinkles that could pinch the microtubules within its layers, running her gloved hands over the areas which she couldn’t check visually. The thin, skin-tight material covered her properly. Had Sal been dressing for another occasion, she may have taken satisfaction the way it accentuated her well-muscled abdomen, shapely behind and small breasts, but there was no time and no mirror.

The drones had reported good pressure and gases on the Incessant but there were some suspicious markers - trace volatile organics - and besides, she didn’t trust the drones’ reports. And double besides, SOP for rescue expoloration was to use breathing apparatus in case of undetected toxins. At her neck, the suit opened into a gasket onto which she fitted the helmet, fitting the breathing mask over her nose and mouth. Finally, she donned the suit’s backpack containing its power unit and oxygen supply, clipping the power and hose connections together.

As she did so, straps tightened the breathing mask as suit sealed against the ship’s atmosphere, and the visor’s display came to life. Overlays of the suit’s self-diagnostic of its seal, connection to the Knife and the bio-sensors showing her own vitals scrolled past. A soft chime in her ear confirmed that everything was as it should be, except for reporting an elevated heart rate. Only to be expected she told herself.

The airlock whirred as it cycled, and Sal stepped in. Then waiting an eternity for another cycle, and a hiss as the last pressure differential equalised, pulling through the iris and into the black unknown. Her suit’s lamp came on automatically. Right, first let’s see if there’s anyone alive.

Sal cautiously pulled herself into the airlock antechamber and scanned around for anything untoward. There wasn’t much to see without power, though, so she moved on. As she did so, she felt and heard something touch the back of her helmet. As she was floating at the time she couldn’t turn properly to see what it had been and then, when she did reach a bulkhead and handhold, her visor flickered and went briefly black, as if it had auto-dimmed, before coming back transparent with her normal displays.

This is not the time to have a suit glitch for fuck’s sake, Sal thought, nervously. She looked around and saw the offending item - a pair of pliers - spinning slowly towards the wall. Strange that she hadn’t seen it though - it couldn’t have been moving fast and so come from behind her as she came out of the airlock. And strange that her helmet glitched out just afterwards. She tried to slow her breathing back down. Her HUD was already overlaying a map of the Relentless class, and she set up a marker to show the route to where her sensors were saying the last living crewmember was, pushed off through the darkling ship.

The Incessant was a big ship, and it took several minutes to get to the indicated location in an officers’ mess. Sweeping her lamp slowly across the space revealed no-one, living or dead. She requested a more precise fix from the Knife and manoeuvered towards the end of the room, inspecting the blank displays, cabinets, seating, but finding nothing. The indicated location moved around a bit as she searched, but she put that down to sensor imprecision. For a moment she held her breath… she thought she could hear something, a soft sound, like clothing against skin, or… breathing. It was too indistinct to decide if it was her imagination.

The lieutenant left the mess in the direction of engineering, intent on pulling some fuses to try and restore power.

In the blackness of the room she had vacated, the lifeform that had been petty officer Holly Tomlinsson opened its eyes. The scene it sensed was quite different from the one Sal had seen, her visor having fed her a sanitised version, seamlessly overlaying empty seating over lifeless sub-lieutenants, black screens and steel shelving over Holly’s nude body.

The device which Holly had attached to Sal’s helmet needed time to prepare the officer for the next stage. For a while at least, she needed to remain hidden. Yet she was also the best bait, sitting here drawing Sal all the way to the opposite end of the ship from engineering, giving the device time to work. She closed her eyes again, waiting for the next stage.

Sal was working her way slowly towards the rear of the Incessant, heart hammering in her ears. Every so often she stopped to try and listen again, or to strain her eyes to try and spot something she thought she had seen. Her eyes were starting to ache, and she was blinking a lot. It felt like her vision wasn’t quite keeping up with her movements. It felt better if she stopped moving for a bit. If she just stayed still, the difference was almost soothing. She caught herself a couple of times just staring at the walls which seemed to fade away to be replaced by… well, she couldn’t really describe it, patterns, or swirls or something. Then she’d blink and move on. I never thought an unpowered ship would get to me this much she thought to herself.

Eventually the pain behind her eyes was enough that she let her suit dose her for it, felt a tiny prick in her neck and then relief. The lag in her vision got worse but bothered her less, the floating feeling of zero-G amplified. It’ll be fine… I’m not going to have to fight anything… She shook her head and everything swam. This feels weird, I only asked for a tiny dose… but the thought was lost half-formed as Sal spaced out again, lost in swirling patterns.

As a secure area of the ship, main engineering was closed off and Sal had requested cutting equipment to be delivered by drone from the Knife to gain access. Positioning the cutter had been too much, so she’d programmed the drone to hold it and cut into the door, then drifted away to stare at nothing. I need to get to med-bay after I’m done here she thought, sluggishly. She could feel vibrations from the cutting through the hull. It was weirdly distant, and weirdly focused between her legs. Had she been thinking straight, she would’ve been delaying or abandoning her mission at this point, but such common sense was too much thinking for her present state.

The interior of the Incessant seemed to fade away and Sal was distracted by a world of perpetually shifting patterns, her being drawn this way and that by each successive wave of it as it broke against the shore of her perception. The cutting equipment was moved out of the way by the drone as she floated, unaware, lost in impossible geometries. Eventually she returned to a semblance of awareness and set off into Engineering, unconscious of how the vibration she had started feeling was persisting.

Her suit helmet showed the way to the bank of fuses she needed to try, although her progress was slowed as her limbs seemed too light, or too heavy, or in any case weren’t doing exactly what she told them. She missed handholds, bumped into walls, failed to make it through openings. All the while, her suit helmet was also showing her strange, compelling, distracting patterns. She was affected deeply enough now that an increased intensity, even while she was mostly conscious, didn’t trigger any alarm.

Pulling and replacing the fuses was also a difficult task, requiring more fine motor control than Sal currently posessed, but after four tries the first fuse her suit was telling her to replace was back in its slot and… nothing. At least, until she had got the second fuse out and she started to feel and then hear a low vibration - in addition to the one which, mysteriously, was still buzzing in her pussy - increasing in pitch and intensity for a while, then settling down to a quiet hum. Her nipples indented the tight membrane of the spacesuit. Sal stared at the fuse in her gloved hand for several seconds, before carefully replacing that one. It only took three tries this time.

After a few minutes, low-level lighting came on. Then, one of the display screens in the room containing the fuse bank came to life - tiny self-diagnostic text for the time being. As Sal headed clumsily for the bridge, she felt movement in the previously stale air and her visor showed her ever more wonderful, swirling patterns. Sal’s degrading state of mind meant that the device hacking her suit didn’t need to spend as much processing power disguising the dead, staring crew who floated in some areas of the ship, the fractal, interlocking tapestry doing most of the covering up, conserving the tiny thing's limited battery.

The lieutenant wasn’t aware enough to realise that her visor’s navigational overlay was not directing her towards the bridge any more, nor that it was unusual for her to be rubbing her pussy through her suit. By the time she arrived at the destination Tomlinsson’s device was guiding her towards, the first phase was finished.

The steady injection of drugs into Sal’s bloodstream eased off now that she was primed, so she had a little more awareness as the doors labeled “MEDICAL” hissed open that this wasn’t where she expected to be, but not enough ability to think that she did anything about it. Once inside she stared around dumbly, trying to work out what to do, still absently touching herself, when a ping on her HUD alerted her to that life sign she’d been tracking. Something seemed weird about that, hadn’t it been…? Sal shrugged to herself and proceeded through the apparently abandoned med-bay reception, following her navigation to one of the medical suites.

As the door to the suite slid closed behind her, her visor once again glitched out. Except this was not due to it being taken over by alien technology, instead it was because that technology had finally run out of power and could no longer keep the truth from her. But as Sal stared at Holly, waiting for her by the bed, and at the dead doctor, eyes bulging and staring unseeing at the wall, she found it impossible to process that truth.

“Hello, Lieutenant,” said Tomlinsson, and something about her voice was odd to Sal. The timbre was too pure, glassy. Sal also couldn’t keep her eyes from her breasts which seemed larger than any she’d seen in the academy shower block. The naked marine smiled and it sent a shiver through her. “Come over here, Sal,” she said, in that too-pleasing voice.

Sal felt the impetus to just follow orders, even without knowing Holly’s rank, even knowing for sure she was not in her chain of command. Something stopped her though, something penetrated the suppression of her critical abilities to tell her this was a bad idea, that something was off, wrong…

Holly’s smile faded to a serene blankness on seeing Sal’s hestitation and she pushed herself over to her side. “Come, you’ll feel better after I’ve treated you,” she said, embracing her, squashing her tits against Sal’s body and pushing her towards the bed. Sal struggled, grabbed a handhold, tried to throw the naked woman off her, but she was still clumsy, still weak - she missed the handhold and her efforts to fight off Holly accomplished nothing, and she was steered inexorably to the bed.

She continued futilely struggling as Holly’s iron grip cuffed her into the bed’s restraints. As her helmet was removed and she inhaled the strangely sweet ship’s air - air that surely had been stagnant until just minutes ago - Sal spoke for the first time. “Who are you,” she slurred.

The erstwhile petty officer beamed at her. “I am Holly Tomlinsson, and you are Lieutenant Sal Vanamund. I am pleased to make your acquaintance!”

“Who… what’s your rank?” Sal asked, unable to work out what was wrong. She was feeling unwell, and in sickbay, that was fine. Holly’s stiff nipples swayed at her eye level.

“I am Holly Tomlinsson, and I am going to help you!” She cut away Sal’s spacesuit, and smiled beatifically at Sal’s intake of breath as it slipped over her nipples, at the way she arched off the bed when the cold trauma shears touched the sensitised skin of her crotch.

I’ve never felt… sick… in this way before she thought, deliriously. But then Holly was doing something with a large glass tube filled with a milky, opalescent liquid, fitting it into the machinery that surrounded her and the bed. Without warning, the bed’s restraints tightened down on her, immobilising her while a robot arm smoothly inserted a catheter into her arm. It wasn’t painful, merely tingling a little.

“Perfect!” said Holly, “now we can get started. I can see you’re ready!” Her fingers were already brushing Sal’s pussy which was indeed dripping. She flipped herself over Sal, bringing her mouth close to her ear, whispering into it, “everything up ’til now - the hypnotic patterns, the muscle relaxant - that was just the appetiser, now you’ll really be a part of us!”

Sal didn’t really understand all that of course and was merely vaguely aware that becoming “part” of some undefined “us” was somewhat ominous. She couldn’t bring herself to be worried about it though; it just… was. She felt a pleasant warmth suffusing her as whatever was in the liquid dripped into her veins, and whatever else dripped out of her pussy. She tried to rub her thighs together but the restraints prevented it. It’s so nice that this rescue mission feels so… nice, she thought.

The warmth brought with it an increasing clarity, of sorts, as if she was being defrosted. This is… not normal, she thought. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I am Holly Tomlinson!” repeated Holly.

“No but… this is… something’s… what is going on? Why do I feel so, um…” she left the thought incomplete, a mixture of still being able to properly articulate her sense of unease and, to the extent she could articulate it, being too embarrassed.

“So turned on?” Holly had no such compunction. “So fuzzy? So yummy? It’s all part of the process, little one!” It did little to reassure Sal.

“What process?”

“The one we’re completing now with that medicine,” she said, happily, gesturing at the vial of fluid being pumped into her. “It’s remodelling your neural pathways now, but it hasn’t finished and the drugs are wearing off already because you were a bit slow getting here, that’s why you’re getting these weird thoughts, but don’t worry, it won’t last long!”

“Remodelling my… take it out!” Sal tried to scream, but it came out more like a whimper.

“There, there,” crooned Holly, “you’ll be feeling totally fuzzy soon, with none of those nasty doubts in your mind.” Nasty doubts… With each passing moment it became harder to remember why exactly she’d wanted to scream and protest and easier to slip into the pleasurable thrumming that filled her.

It got even easier with Holly slipped a finger into her soaked pussy, and the whimper that escaped her was for quite another reason. As it stroked away at her, she tried to hold onto her thoughts, but it was getting difficult. I don’t want to… be changed… Changed? How? What? Change was natural though, inevitable, what was there to doubt? As soon as she seemed to have grasped a thought long enough to think it, it seemed to just drip out of her. Holly is nice, I wouldn’t mind being like her… What is there to doubt? She only wants to… to…

Her whimpers turned to panting.

For me to… join her? Them? … She seems nice!

Her panting turned to gasps.

I feel like we’re—oh—already friends

Her gasps turned to moans.

I could be part—nngh–part of them… her

Her moans turned to screams

I am part of her!

“I AM PART OF HER!” she screamed, and came.

Holly was still stimulating her, more fingers having joined the first at some point, and Sal was still spasming with aftershocks of pleasure. Holly was whispering in her ear, “there we go little one, you are, you’re part of us, but this is only the start.” The next orgasm came quicker than the first, and the one after that came quicker still, until the gap between one and the next dwindled to nothing. The clarity brought about by the serum flooding her veins was drowned out by the non-stop climax, her mind and body changing as she squirted her free will all over the bed.

Holly shifted so she could use her tongue, laving Sal’s clit before plunging it into her, deep, deeper than should have been possible and further, but all Sal could think about was pleasure, love, and a new unwavering sense of belonging and kinship. Her pussy pulsed around her sister’s tongue, and tears flowed from her eyes.

Eventually she tired, even the work of the serum constrained by fundamental biological limitations. As her own muscular contractions weakened, she became aware of another pulsation within her, a sense of pressure and fullness. Holly’s tongue flexed and pushed while she gazed adoringly into Sal’s eyes, forcing the eggs into her womb which was still adapting to best incubate and nourish them.

Sal shuddered as Holly withdrew her ovipositor, felt with her own tongue around her mouth to see if she could detect it changing to become the same reproductive organ. It was already longer, more flexible, but still incapable of transmitting eggs. Holly joined her in a twining kiss, and Sal gradually lost consciousness to exhaustion, letting the serum complete its work

The transmission ended and Sal started her own reply, close enough now for a video response. “Lieutenant Sal Vanamund of the delayed Little Knife reporting, sir. Good morning, glad you got my preliminary. I can confirm everything in that - the Incessant is a total loss, must have been a drive explosion. One survivor, sub-lieutenant Tomlinsson, who was on a shuttle at the time is in my medbay due to the psychological shock, but physically healthy. I conducted a sweep of some larger pieces of wreckage after responding to her distress beacon and picking her up but most of it has been atomised.”

Sal clicked off the recording and shuddered another orgasm around Holly’s dextrous tongue. She hoped the others hadn’t been detectable on the recording, but her enhanced body was quite good at suppressing such things when it wanted to. Less good at suppressing its urges. The shape of her body no longer matched her navy photographs, but it was unlikely her captain would notice. She knew instinctively that her eggs would produce only a slight bulge in her abdomen, and her much fuller chest would be beyond the bounds of etiquette to comment on in any official capacity.

She thought about what awaited her on the station, still several days away. There were 1,218 women on the station who could be brought into Her Union like she had been - the thought pushed her over the edge and she gasped out another climax - and spread out across the sector. There were 4,711 men who were useless for their cause but some of whom may make for a pleasant diversion when suitably improved. She thought her captain would be good base stock, and sighed at the thought of it.

She pulled Holly up so she could lick at her in return, moaning loudly when Holly’s ovipositor returned to her clit. There was no need to be quiet for now and soon there would never be one again.