Alien Desires

Julia braced her feet against the metallic strip that ran the length of the zero-gee portion of the ship. Corresponding magnets in the soles of her pressure suit allowed her to walk in the gravity-free environment without floating away. With a jerk, the latch of the inner door of the airlock came open under her hands. The door opened inward, so that in the case of an airlock breach the vacuum would pull the door closed. Once inside, she closed the door behind her and locked it, not turning away until the indicator lights shone a reassuring green.

"I'm in the airlock. Equalizing pressure."

With a faint hiss, barely audible through the suit, the atmosphere was pulled out of the airlock, matching the vacuum outside.

"Pressure equalized. Opening outer door."

She swung the outer door open, and gasped as the incredible panorama opened in front of her. Directly in front of her Saturn sat, the ring system now nearly edge-on to her view. Beyond the looming hulk of the planet, several of Saturn's moons could be glimpsed in the distance.

"Snap out of it, Garcia." The voice over the radio in her helmet was slightly amused.

"Don't you have any poetry in your soul, Captain?" Julia replied, turning to grasp the solar panel which she had set there earlier in the morning. It was weightless in her hands, but she took care to keep her movements light and slow. Weightless was not the same thing as massless. If she moved too quickly, the panel would drag her with it, and the delicate object would be smashed into a million pieces if it struck any obstacle.

"Sure I have," came the reply, as she manipulated the controls that operated the thrusters on her backpack. Tiny jets of air puffed out, pushing her along the axis of the ship towards the solar panel arrays which stuck out from the surface of the ship like sails. "Oodles. When I have time. Which isn't now. Be sure to slow down before you get too close to the array. You want to be as close to a dead stop as you can get when you get there."

"I knew that before Akira was born."

"Doubtless." The voice over the radio was cool as the pilot joined the conversation. Her English was flawless, but there was the slightest hint of a Japanese accent. "Some of us require a head start."

"Hey!"

She could hear muffled snickers in the background as she began the slow, tedious process of removing the damaged panel from the matrix. Luckily, it was located on the outside of the array, so she only had to remove it, rather than taking apart multiple panels to reach the one that was causing the problems. "Is everyone watching this? Don't you people have anything better to do?"

Becky Moreau's voice flowed over the radio, her Louisiana drawl soft and liquid as summer honey. "Of course we are, sweetie. This is the most exciting thing to happen since we hit orbit. We're not going to miss this."

"Well, I hope you get your money's worth," Julia said, slightly mollified. But on the back of her neck, a prickle of sweat began to break out, and she was careful to doublecheck each move she made. Nothing like having an audience. And every damn one of them is at the top of their field. NASA doesn't send the second-string out to Saturn, that's for damn sure.

The electrical connections removed, she began to unscrew the nuts that held the panel in place, using her electric drill, which was fastened with a tether to her own belt. As each shining piece of metal came loose, she caught it in her glove, then transferred it to a pouch floating at her side.

"Nicely done." The captain's voice was quietly admiring, and she felt a surge of pride. "Don't let those get loose, Garcia. We're one hell of a long ways away from a hardware store."

"I brought along some extras. Just in case." She patted the pouch.

"Smart thinking," commented McCoy. "Nothing worse than having to make an extra trip."

"Exactly." The last nut came loose, and she pulled at the panel experimentally. It slid out of its slot easily, surprising her. She quickly snapped a ring-clamp around one of the holes provided for that exact purpose, so it wouldn't float away. She gently fingered the damaged section, which was covered in a spiderweb of cracks, with a hole the diameter of her little finger drilled neatly through the center. She held it up so her suit camera could view the damage. "You see what I see?"

"Yeah." The captain's voice was sober. "Damn good thing that didn't hit us. Though it would have given us a chance to see if this ship is built as well as all the engineers back home said it was."

Julia shivered. The Artemis had been built to withstand strikes by micrometeorites. The double hull, with meters of protective gel in between the two sides, was specially constructed to make sure nothing short of a cataclysmic impact could cause a hull breach. But the fear still lingered.

"Permission to throw this thing into Saturn, Captain?"

"Denied." The voice was dryly amused. "You know the lunatic fringe would lose their shit, Garcia. Some people think that we've already irreversibly contaminated Mars by setting a colony up there. Don't give them anything to scream about. Mission Control won't like it."

Julia said something rude under her breath about Mission Control as she removed the new panel from its tether and began to slot it in place, her movements even more careful than before. The panels cost tens of thousands of dollars each, and as the captain had reminded her, once one was broken, it was useless. Her breath was loud in her ears as she slowly reversed her work, fastening the new panel into the solar matrix securely, then connecting it to the system which sent electricity from the array back to the ship.

"There," she said at last, blowing out a sigh of relief. "It's in."

"That's what she said," Moreau said, with a low, throaty giggle.

Julia could hear the captain snort in amusement. "Stay there a second, Garcia. I want to check the power flow."

"Roger that." Grateful for the gift of time, she hung dangling in space, her mind drifting away as she looked at the awe-inspiring sight in front of her.

And people thought the pics from the Hubble were impressive, back when it first came on line. If humanity had a view like this, they would all get a serious case of religion. This is unbelievable.

Julia let her eyes wander into the middle distance, tracking the billions of chunks of ice in the rings as they emerged from Saturn's shadow, tumbling and whirling in a dance so beautiful, so complicated, that the most powerful computers on earth couldn't predict it.

Her eyes were caught by a flicker of motion deep within the A ring, which was the outermost of the main rings. Something seemed to be moving there. Something that wasn't moving in concert with the rest of the material.

"Huh," she said, intrigued. "I wonder what that is?"

"Wonder what what is, Garcia?" the captain asked, her voice brisk. "The new panel checks out five-by-five. Please return to the airlock."

"Hold on," she said, her voice dreamlike in her own ears as she watched the object approach. "There's something out there. Out here. It's coming closer."

A confused babble was cut off by the captain as she shut the other members of the crew out of the radio link. "Garcia." Her voice was calm, but firm. "Report your observations. What do you see?"

It seemed to float toward her on wings made of starlight and gossamer, impossibly ethereal. The shape was difficult to grasp, as it twisted and turned and folded until the eye was forced to blink, moving in tune with its own internal choreography.

Quicker than Julia could have dreamed, it crossed the distance between the ring and the Artemis, hurtling up the axis of the ship until it came to a halt, barely an arms-length away.

"Oh," she breathed, her hand reaching out involuntarily. "It's so beautiful."

"Garcia, report.

"Garcia.

"Garcia?"

" Garcia!! "

*****

Helen Sandusky swore in frustration and pulled off her headset, slapping it down on the arm of her seat on the bridge. For the past five minutes, she had been calling for Garcia, with increasing fear and urgency. But the Hispanic woman hadn't responded.

"All right. I'm going out to get her. Moreau, take over for me here. Keep calling her and let me know if she answers. She just might have a bad radio. Akira, see if you can get a camera on her. Let me know what you see.

"Doc."

"Captain?" With her military background, McCoy nearly saluted, responding involuntarily to the snap of command in her voice. Despite the situation, the sight nearly made Helen smile.

"Follow me." With a lunge, Helen moved towards the door to the bridge, using the handholds in the walls to fling herself down the long hallway.

"What does her bio-readout show?" she asked over her shoulder as she neared her airlock and her own EVA suit.

McCoy pulled up the readings on her palm-held computer and frowned at the results. "Nothing that stands out, Captain. She's alive, that's for sure. Breathing, heartrate and temperature are all slightly higher than normal. But that's not strange, considering she's been doing an EVA. Brain activity doesn't show anything out of the ordinary." She shrugged as they neared the airlock. "Sorry, Captain. I wish I could tell you more."

Helen nodded, a short, curt gesture, as she shoved her legs into the lower half of her EVA suit. A touch of a button, and the upper half lowered from overhead, locking into place. She began a rapid check of her systems. "All right. Get down to medbay and prep for a patient."

McCoy blinked at her. "A patient? What do you think is wrong?"

"If I knew that," she snarled, slamming her helmet into place, "I wouldn't need a doctor, now would I? Go!"

"Well?" Captain Sandusky demanded, four hours later. Her eyes were red from lack of sleep, and her face was lined with weariness. "What's wrong with her?"

McCoy ran her hand through her hair, grateful that the medbay had some gravity, due to the spin of the hub, though it wasn't close to earth-normal.

"I don't know," she admitted, hating the helpless feeling inside her stomach. Over the captain's shoulder, she could see the figures of Kumiko Akira and Becky Moreau peeking around the doorframe, their faces set in identical expressions of worry and concern.

"Can we come in?" Becky asked worriedly. "Or is she under, you know, quarantine?"

"A little late for that," Alex said dryly, and the two lovers entered the room hesitantly, looking at Julia's form on the cot. The dark-skinned woman lay utterly still, the only movement the rapid rise and fall of her chest. "Trying to keep her isolated until we could get back home would be an exercise in futility. What would we do? Lock her in here and feed her through a slot in the door? This ship wasn't set up for a quarantine situation.

"She's got a fever," she said, ticking through the points on her fingers, trying to attain through repetition the clues her waking mind had missed. "A hundred and one point seven. Not enough to put her in danger, but it's worrisome. Her pulse is rapid. Ninety-four beats per minute. So is her respiration.

"But her bloodwork came back clean. She's not sick. Not with an infection, at least. And besides, how the hell could she catch some sort of alien virus? She was outside in a damn EVA suit. Anything big enough to get inside her suit would have killed her through explosive decompression. And there wasn't even a hiccup from her biomonitor or her suit readouts. There was no loss of suit integrity. So it can't be that. It has to be something internal, but I'll be damned if it looks like a heart attack or a stroke or anything like that."

"No one's blaming you." The captain set a hand on her arm. "We just have to wait until she wakes up. I'm sure it will be soon." Despite her brave words, Alexandra heard the quaver in her voice. There hadn't been a single fatality on any of NASA's missions since the Fortuna had limped back to Luna Base after the Ceres disaster, with one woman dead and a man held under twenty-four-hour suicide watch following his attempted rape and subsequent murder of Dr. Bonner.

Waste of time and air, she thought. Captain Dorsey should have left Mead on Ceres. If she was feeling real generous, she could have left him a suit.

Sandusky interrupted her bleak thoughts. "You've got her on an IV?"

"Yeah. That's the one thing I can do. Her blood sugar is way low."

"Alex?" Kumiko eased into the room, her delicately carved face set in an expression of concerned perplexity. "Why do you have her arms tied down?"

Alex flushed. "Because...because she kept trying to, you know, touch herself. Even though she was asleep." She nodded towards her waist. "You know. Down there. I didn't want her pulling out the IV tube in her sleep.

"In fact," she said pensively, caught by the thought, "if it weren't for the fever, I'd say that Julia is showing all the outward signs of a woman in a state of extreme sexual arousal. It accounts for the rapid pulse and the respiration, as well."

"And her nips are hard and pointy," Becky pointed out helpfully. She wandered another step further into the room. "You can see them through her shirt." One corner of her mouth twitched. "I wonder if she's wet?"

"Moreau," the Captain began warningly, but another voice interrupted.

"Is it just me?" Kumiko said softly, "or are her breasts bigger?"

"Whose?"

"Julia's."

"Than what?"

"Than they were before," the Japanese woman said, with only the tiniest hint of impatience. "I came out as a lesbian when I was thirteen," she added. "And believe me, I've seen my share of tits in my day." She shrugged fluidly. "I know that Julia wasn't interested in me. But I was interested in her. And I've looked. More than once. I would swear they look bigger."

Alex chewed her lip, looking at the prone figure on the cot. Part of her thought that Akiro might be right. Garcia's boobs did look bigger. Never small, they now tented the front of her t-shirt impressively. Through the cotton cloth, the outlines of her erect nipples could be seen, pressing firmly into the fabric.

"I'm sure it's just your imagination," she said quellingly, though she filed the thought away for later. She had all the medical records of every member of her crew at her disposal. It wouldn't take long to do a quick measurement of Julia's bust, even if it was just to disprove a ridiculous theory. "Now, I'm sure you all have something to do? Somewhere else? Julia's not going to magically wake up just because you're standing here staring at her. And Captain," she said, making her voice firm, "you've been on duty for fourteen hours straight. I have to insist you go to sleep. Don't make me pull rank."

"Julia..."

"Her life is not in danger. And what do you think you can do?" Alex softened her voice. "Go to bed, Helen. She'll be here when you wake up. I promise."

"Bully." But Captain Sandusky's lips twitched in a tired smile. "All right. I'm going."

*****

After the rest of the crew had left, even the captain, with many backward glances, she puttered around the medbay, cleaning up the few bits and pieces of waste material that she had left lying around the small room. On the cot, Julia lay still, though her chest rose and fell rapidly. Her face was damp with sweat, and her black hair was plastered in spiky points to her forehead.

Alexandra looked at her fondly, remembering how Julia had adamantly refused to cut her hair during the grueling cutdown period, where the candidates for the Saturn mission had been slowly, ruthlessly winnowed out. She had engaged in an epic battle of wills with Director O'Halloran, who was equally inflexible in her belief that long hair was a danger in outer space. To say nothing of the inconvenience in zero-gee, the director had once had to rescue a trainee whose hair-bands had snapped on an EVA, leaving him in grave danger of choking to death on his own hair.

Finally, the director had called Julia in and gave her an ultimatum: Cut the hair or find herself booted to back-up status. Furious, Julia had seized a pair of scissors off the woman's desk, hacked her hair off to shoulder-length, and threw the shining mass down in front of her like a gauntlet.

"There," she had snarled, her very tone a challenge. "It's gone. But after this, if I don't get named to the crew, I'm going to make your life a god-damned misery."

And the day they had broken lunar orbit in the Artemis, Julia had started growing it out again. While not the glorious, shining mass it had been before, reaching nearly to her hips, it now stretched to the middle of her back. Alex's fingers itched to stroke it, but she held herself back.

She doesn't like women, she thought regretfully. At least, not the way I want.

She shook herself. How could she pine after a woman in her sickbed? And if she didn't have Mary and Corbin here with her, at least she was able to eat the crumbs Kumiko and Becky let fall from their table when they were pissed at each other. Which was fairly often.

In fact, Alex thought idly, feeling her loins heat at the thought of the lesbian lovers, she might invite herself into their cabin later tonight. They had hinted that she would be welcome in a threesome, and her spouses back home had let her know before she left lunar orbit that they didn't expect her to be faithful during the entire five-year voyage. And being with two women was something she hadn't indulged in for a very long time.

"We'll keep each other entertained," Corbin had murmured into her hair, giving her a last hug as Wendy, Peter, and John had bounced around them, excited by both a trip to the moon and by 'Mom's adventure.' "Mary and I will have our hands full enough with this crew without worrying about whose pants you're in up there." A raised eyebrow, lifted towards the heavens, indicated exactly what he was thinking.

A soft, slurred voice interrupted her reverie. "Alex?"

"Julia!" She spun, looking at the younger woman. Her eyes were glazed, but, thankfully, open and aware. She reached her side in three long strides, her fingers falling to the inside of her wrist automatically. Still feverish. And the pulse was pounding under the fragile skin. "How do you feel?"

The woman tried to move, then stopped, seemingly surprised by the loose bonds which kept her arms tied to the sides of the cot. "Hot. Tired. What the fuck happened?"

"What do you remember?" she asked carefully.

The dark-skinned brow furrowed in thought. "I was on an EVA, right? Replacing a solar panel." She blinked. "I saw something. In the rings." Her voice grew soft and wondering. "It was so beautiful."

"What was it?"

"I..." Her voice cut off as she was racked by a violent shudder. "Ow! Shit!" Her legs drew up towards her middle, and her biceps tightened as her arms tried to fight loose from their bonds. "Fuck, that hurts!"

"What is it?"

The dark-haired woman panted. "Ever had really bad menstrual cramps? When you were on your period? Double that." She bit back a moan. "Let me loose, Alex, please?"

"Sure." There was no reason to keep Julia bound, now that she was conscious again. With quick movements, she undid the ties that kept Julia's wrists bound to the sides of the cot. Without a word, the woman curled on her side, hunched into a fetal position. Her face shone with sweat, and the muscles in her jaw bunched as another fierce spasm flooded through her.

At last, the tremors eased, and Julia smiled weakly up at her. "Wow. That sucked." She swept black hair back from her temples, grimacing as her fingers encountered the sweat-clotted mass. "Urk." She plucked the damp material of her shirt away from her body distastefully. "Any chance of a shower, Doc? I feel like I've got spiders living in here."