I awoke to the ship’s scream as she exited hyperspace. I furled my ears as I pressed my face against Captain Jonah’s nearly bald chest. (Though he has assured me that he is relatively hirsute by the standards of his humans.)

“Alarming, isn’t it?” He grinned at me in that particular way.

As always, my fright was washed away when I suddenly found myself in heat. At least in the mental sense, with my body soon following. I tossed the blanket aside and pounced on top of him. I leaned forward to look under myself as I positioned my slit to rub up and down on his erect member. Then I threw my head back, raised my tail, and arched my back as I purred.

He took advantage of my proximity to find each of my four nipples in turn with his tongue, but it wasn’t much of a challenge, given how prominent they suddenly were.

At the prompting of his hands on my thighs, I raised myself so that he could insert his penis into what he called my pussy pussy.

The nature of my people was for the female to accept the attentions of the male passively, but Captain Jonah said that he liked a more aggressive woman, so I rode his member as I matched his thrusts. My breath caught in my throat as I felt his seed release inside me, and then I roared as I climaxed.

He pushed me to the side and then stepped out of bed.

I curled up and lay there for a minute, regretting yet again the tens of millions of years of evolution on alternate Earths that ensured he could sire no young in me. We were both destined to die someday, each the last of our kind.

Then I stood and joined him in the shower. There, I felt frisky once more. I wondered what was wrong with me that I was so constantly in heat, though in my world, before it was destroyed, a woman my age would have been a mother twice over. At least I could always depend on the Captain to rise to the occasion. I dared not even think of what my claws might do to his bare flesh in an unnatural, unrequited mating frenzy.

After he left the shower, I washed all over to ensure that my fur only retained the spots that nature intended. Then, I took several minutes to blow dry my fur. Finally, I put on my panties, jumpsuit, and boots. I paused at the mirror to unzip my front by several inches. I might not have prominent breasts like the human women in the videos the captain kept to instruct me on human sexual positions, as I wasn’t even lactating, but he still looked when I did this.

Captain Jonah greeted me as I walked onto the bridge. “Morning, Iberia. Sleep well?”

As if the entire crew didn’t know where I slept and with whom. At this point, we might as well have a wedding ceremony. I tried not to show any annoyance, but I suspect that my ear tufts gave away my slight twitch. “Morning Captain, Java, Lenna, and Barnacle. What’s the situation, Captain?”

“Class-M2 dwarf star, one planet confirmed so far. It’s not on Earth’s charts, so we’re calling it RD-219 for now.”

I looked up at the system diagram on the main viewscreen. “That planet’s in the habitable zone, isn’t it?”

“And with possibly artificial radio signals.”

“Possibly?” I twitched my whiskers.

“Bosun Barnacle can’t figure it out.”

“Oh?” I glanced back at the aquarium wall that spread across the aft of the bridge and the hive mind coral within, then sat at my terminal, with my tail sticking four inches behind my stool. “Barnacle, send me that data. Yeah, that bandwidth is too narrow and regular to be natural, but the modulation is sloppy. Mind if I check the antenna?”

Barnacle’s flat, computer-generated voice showed no irritation through the speakers. “The control is yours.”

“So it is artificial?” Captain Jonah asked.

“It has to be.” I pointed at the waveform on my terminal.

“I bet they’re crabs.”

“Squids!” Java the raptor offered as she raised her crest of feathers.

“Turtles.” Lenna the lemur added.

“A coral hive mind.” Barnacle’s flat voice again sounded through the bridge speakers.

“I’m afraid you’re one of a kind, Barnacle.” I nodded back at their aquarium.

“We are but a tiny fragment of our true selves after the destruction of our world.”

“Very well, I’ll bet something non-animal, such as geologic or a global fungus.” I checked a few pulsars and received the expected radio spectrums. Our antenna was working fine. What was it with that signal? I sat back and ran my claws through the ruff at the sides of my face.

“I like girls with hair on the back of their heads.” Captain Jonah leaned over my shoulder and looked at my terminal.

The bridge appeared to darken as I felt my eye slits narrow. I looked past him. “Java, send me the latest system data.”

“All yours, Iberia. As you can see, it’s what we’d expect from a red dwarf system with life. The planet tide locked early and close as a prolate spheroid. Then, as the star’s rotation lifted the orbit, the tidal forces lessened, and the mountains at noon and midnight subsided into massive continents. We’ve only seen the star-facing one, but another must be on the dark side. The atmosphere is half the density of Earth’s, mostly in reduced nitrogen, but the oxygen levels are about the same. Clear indications of a global ocean passing around the star-facing continent, with a few glaciers seen floating in from the dark side.”

I ignored Java and focused on the star data. “Hey, Captain, I’ll raise the stakes on the bet.”

“Oh?”

“Loser has to clean the septic system.”

“Agreed. Now, Iberia, what makes you think you’ve won?”

“It’s the star. It has hardly any copper but plenty of iron and aluminum. No complex cells or lifeforms.”

“And what does this mean for the signal?”

“Well, they’re not using copper wiring or silver either, which means…” I returned to my terminal and wrote a program to try various aluminum circuit configurations. As I watched the display, I wondered at the vast amount of training in science and technology I had picked up in just a few, or was it many years aboard the ship? I had been one of the few members of my race with even basic literacy before the ship arrived, and I vaguely remembered decades of study since. Yet how could that be when I was only a few years older than when I had first met the Captain? Then, the simulations stopped at a waveform match. I ran a few tests on the output and then turned to the aft of the bridge. “Barnacle, I’ve managed to decode their aluminum electronics waveform into a binary string. It’s all yours.”

“Decoding.” Barnacle fell silent for a few minutes, then spoke again. “I’ve found a video stream. Sharing.”

I turned to the main viewscreen that now showed a crablike creature in some underwater structure, burbling along in what was obviously a language.

“Fnording carcinisation! Well, it’s been nice knowing all of you, but it will take me weeks to wash the stink of the septic system out of my fur.”

“Always bet on crabs.” The captain did a mock bow to the bridge crew and then turned to me. “Hold on a moment, Iberia.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Before you go wading through the crap, I need you to shake me loose some booty. I want to study these aluminum electronics up close.”

“As you command.” I turned back to my terminal. “We shouldn’t risk contaminating the ship or shuttles with a trip down into such an alien biosphere. There are some signals from L1, but it seems to be just a few communications satellites, hardly worth our trouble. Barnacle, give me a radar ping on this structure that’s orbiting the planet.” I sent my view to the main viewscreen.

“Captain, authorization to break radio silence?” There was no emotion in Barnacle’s artificial voice to indicate if they were chastising me or just following orders.

“Authorization granted. One ping only.”

As we waited the twenty seconds for the radar ping to travel to the target and back, I marveled at the incredible technology of our ship that would close that distance in mere hours. The gravity drive, the artificial gravity, and most of all, the hyperdrive, none of these could be explained in terms of the physics I had learned. And even if the new physics behind such wonders could be mathematically described, the engineering effort to carry it off would be extremely difficult. Why didn’t these systems require at least the same effort to maintain as our life support, fusion reactor, sensors, and auxiliary craft? What else was Captain Jonah hiding?

He winked at me, and I turned back to my terminal as the radar data was overlain on the infrared and visual scans. “It’s a space station. If we get out there to trim off the solar panels and radiators and chop it between these two modules, we should be able to fit the two halves in our docking bay. A week in hard vacuum should make the internal components safe to handle.”

“Approved. Barnacle set an intercept course. Iberia and Lenna suit up with reaction packs. Java will pilot the shuttle. I’ll handle the bridge.”

“Aye, Captain.” We all replied together.

An hour later, the crab people of RD-219a responded to our approach with several radio signals and a few missile launches. Barnacle recorded the former and shot down the latter in the boost phase with the ship’s main laser cannons. I’d help them decipher the language later. The ship assumed a trailing orbit behind the station and sent the shuttle forward. When we arrived, I pushed away from the shuttle to cut the port solar arrays off with my laser pistol, and Lenna cut the starboard panels. Then, we nudged the panels away with the leverage of our magnetic boots against the station’s hull. As we jumped over to the shadowed side of the station, I spotted some of the crabs scurrying around behind a window. Perhaps I’d find out later if they even had a word for pirate.

The severed radiator panel steamed out some sort of fluid as I pushed it away. I suspected it was ammonia.

Mission accomplished: I returned to the ship’s dock with Lenna as Java used the shuttle’s laser to cut the station in two at a module connector.

When Java brought the two halves of the station to the ship, we went inside and found a few dead crabs ruptured by the sudden decompression to toss into space. While their biology was undoubtedly fascinating, we didn’t want it on us.

We had just finished lashing the sections down when Captain Jonah’s voice sounded over the radio. “Everyone, get to the bridge. We’ve got incoming.”

“From the planet?” I responded.

“From hyperspace.”

Lenna and I washed each other’s suits in the airlock, then only removed our helmets as we ran to the bridge.

On the main viewscreen, I could see the flashes of half a dozen of our pursuers appear out of hyperspace, each the same shape and size as our ship.

“Barnacle, prepare for a jump!”

“Captain, no! There are billions of intelligent creatures below us. We need to get to a safe distance.” I turned to him as I pleaded.

“We’ve got no choice. They’re trying to take back control of the ship. Barnacle, engage.”

The gloved hands I held to my furled ears couldn’t block the ship’s shriek in my mind as she struggled to climb out of the planet’s gravity well into the fifth dimension. And I could only imagine the blubberings of a billion crab people below us as their world suffered catastrophic tidal disruption.

The artificial gravity wavered briefly, and then the ship righted herself. We watched for a few minutes until we were confident that we were alone in hyperspace.

“We seem to have escaped.” Captain Jonah stood. “Lenna, go check on the dock, then take some time off. Java, you have the bridge. I’ll be in my cabin if you need me. Iberia, put the suit away, then join me.”

I followed the two off the bridge, then stood there momentarily as Lenna walked back to the dock.

Captain Jonah turned back to face me. “Is there something bothering you, Iberia?”

“You’ve killed another world, and you have no regrets?”

“It was them or us. Thankfully, you managed to score enough booty to keep us in operation for a while longer. Now put away that suit, come back to my cabin, and we can relax.”

I drew my laser pistol and pointed it at Captain Jonah. “My family, my friends, my entire race! They all died for your foolishness! Do you have any last words before I stop you from killing yet more worlds?”

“Yes, I do. Iberia put the pistol on safety and hand it to me.”

I looked in shock as my gloved hands did precisely as he ordered. “What? How?”

“The ship isn’t the only one with a chip in her head. Now go to sleep, Iberia.”

I collapsed into his arms, and all faded to darkness.

I awoke to a screaming sound in my head and sat up. As I looked around the dark room, I wondered where I was and what I had been doing.

“Alarming, isn’t it?” The man lying next to me on the bed grinned.

He was my Captain Jonah, my mate, and I suddenly needed his attentions.

He grabbed my left leg and pulled that over him, so I straddled his legs. Then he shifted his grip to my hips, which he guided me to lift me.

I recognized the position he was nudging me into as the “Reverse Cowgirl.” Another wordplay of his human language was that cows were already female bovines, and the reverse part of it seemed to be that the position was anatomically impossible for bovines. I myself wasn’t a bovine, so I howled like the cat I was as I settled on his member. As always, it was impossibly good, exactly what I needed. If not for the species barrier, he would be the perfect mate.

Later, we walked down the corridor with arms around each other when I stopped to look through a window at a strange structure in the ship’s dock. “What’s that?”

“It’s the station from RD-219.”

“When did we go there?”

“There’s been so many worlds that you must have lost track. Why don’t you take some time off?”

“I couldn’t sit around doing nothing while the rest of the crew was so busy.”

“I’ll give you a perfectly valid excuse. Iberia, didn’t you say you wanted to have a kitten?”

“When did I say that? And how could that happen when I’m the last of my race?”

“You talk in your sleep. I’ll implant a clone into your womb, and this time, I’ll mix in even more of my genes. Let’s see if we can get a decent ponytail or at least pigtails.”

“Oh, Captain, you and hairstyles. If you want, I could just wear a wig.” Wait, what did he mean by this time?

“So what’s the answer, Iberia?”

I considered the proposition for a moment. If we mixed our genes into offspring, then we would be mates in every sense of the world. “Yes, of course!” I leaned up to lick at his stubbly cheek.