“Captain Yoko Tani aboard the Iphis to Commodore Helen Towers on Mars-Col. We’re two days from Titan and the well’s running pretty dry around here. Twelvetrees and Leeson are both space cadets at this point, and I don’t mean that the way the Navy means kids who are still wet behind the ears. I thought I was doing a good job avoiding Marla Jones, but I’m realizing that she’s been doing pretty much the same with me. Just stays locked in her cabin all the time and won’t come out, so I have no way to gauge her status. I’m guessing my own IQ has settled down somewhere around 110 or so, but none of us seem to be going any lower anymore. I’m grateful for that, because the rest of the crew are a collection of gibbering idiots at this point. Any lower and I’d have to tell them when to fart.
“Those safety precautions we came up with have already saved our butts. I found Leeson trying to open an airlock because she thought it was stuffy in here. At this stage though, she couldn’t spell ‘algebra’ let alone work one out, so that door’s not going to open unless I open it. If it throws one at me that I can’t figure out, we’ll be shipbound forever. I was doing algebra by the time I was six, and at the moment, I’d love to be able to get as deep into it as I did back then. This must be how my sister Akemi feels up against me. Her IQ is 135. Poor, dumb bastard.
“We’re all a bunch of sluts as far as the sex goes, and Leeson, Twelvetrees and I have been soaking the sheets for the last five days. I can’t say I’m disappointed. When you’re this horny, your 80 year old grandma looks good and if she was here right now, I’d so lay it on her, y’know? That’s your grandma I’m referring to, by the way, not mine. God only knows what Marla’s doing to keep herself sane. Maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s flipped out. The bio-comp system says that she’s still alive, so I guess that’s something.
Something has been bothering me for the last few days, and I should have noticed this right off the bat. Call it stupidity on my part, ‘cause I do feel pretty stupid, but it dawned on me that I’ve sent you one of these reports every day, but I haven’t heard a peep out of you since we left Mars. That’s weird. Part of me hopes that it means that you’re currently on permenant KP, but if so, where’s your replacement? Somebody’s gotta be running the show there. Who is it? And why won’t they talk to me? If you hadn’t locked down the comm system so thoroughly, I’d be broadcasting everything to Earth Gov and letting them sort it out.
“I’ve considered that whatever that alien thing is... Whatever it’s doing to our heads... It may be blocking transmissions as well. Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard anything from Ardeen-Col on Titan or from you guys on Mars. That may indicate that the alien artifact is intelligent, which is a good thing. Maybe we can reason with it. I hope so, but any science fiction movie I’ve ever seen, humans that try to reason with an alien lifeforce generally end up having to kill it. I don’t know if that speaks poorly of humans or Hollywood, but somebody’s pretty short-sighted.
“I’m horny as a bull in a dairy farm. My grandfather used to say that one and now I know what he meant. I know how Captain Hart must have felt on the Farragut and I’ve dreamed about fucking Heather with a dildo over the nav console. If I had a dildo, I would. It’s almost time for me to go up to the bridge and I’m scared of what I’ll find there. None of us have any inhibitions left. Tani out.”
Captain Tani walked onto the bridge and sat down in the command chair. Leeson was seated at her station but she wasn’t even pretending to do her job anymore. She was buck naked in her chair, rubbing herself furiously and sighing contentedly, her feet propped up on the console.
She looked back at the captain. “Yoko-honey,” she moaned. “Like, where ya been, baby?”
“Filing a status report to home,” Yoko said, her eyes locked on what Brendy Leeson was doing. She felt a stiring between her legs and wanted nothing more than to go down on the engineer. “If anyone’s listening.”
“I’m listening,” Brendy drawled as she continued to stroke herself. “Tell me some pretty words, baby.”
Commander Twelvetrees sashayed onto the bridge at that moment, half out of uniform. She was wearing a non-reg blue miniskirt and her beige tunic was open, exposing a rather fanciful bra. She had on a pair of remarkably tall high heels and she was walking like she was selling it. She walked up to the command chair and gave Yoko a deep, lingering kiss. She giggled. “Like, hi, baby! How’s my Captain Cupcake?”
“Just fine,” Yoko sighed as she slid a hand down and rubbed beneath the other woman’s skirt and between her thighs. Yoko didn’t find any panties there and she wasn’t surprised. “Has anyone seen Dr. Jones in the past week or so?”
“Who?” Leeson asked, followed by a fit of giggles.
Heather sighed as she stood still, letting Yoko continue to feel her up. “I... Oh, yeah! That’s soooooo nice! I tried to knock on her, like, door-thingy, but she doesn’t say shit... Silly bitch!”
Yoko let out a giggle too. She hated doing that, but sometimes she couldn’t help it. “Well let’s go see what the silly bitch is up to.” She pulled her hand away from Heather’s crotch, which made the other girl pout. “You have the conn, Leeson.”
“Uh-huh,” Brendy said, not even knowing what that meant anymore.
Yoko and Heather made their was down to D-deck and to Marla’s cabin. Yoko raised her hand and knocked on the door. “Marla?” No answer.
She tried again. “Dr. Jones? It’s Yoko.”
Heather was leaning against the shorter woman, her left hand rubbing softly on Tani’s butt. “What do we do now?”
Yoko pressed a button on the bulkhead near the entrance. “Command override, Authorization: Captain Yoko Tani, Alpha Sigma Three Nine.” The door slowly slid upward, stuttering the whole way.
The two woman walked into the dark cabin and immediately saw their own breaths coming out in streaming little clouds. “It’s cold,” Heather remarked.
“No shit, Sherl... Sorry.” Yoko blushed. “Life support’s on minimal.”
“’kay,” Heather said. She fumbled for the emergency lights. She must have found the proper switch because very dim lights came on.
The cabin was a wreck. The bed’s mattress lay half on the floor, the sheets scattered. Electrical wiring was pulled down from the ceiling and hung loose in the middle of the room, about even with Yoko’s head. The computer console had been detached from the workstation and was missing, and most of Jones’ uniforms were scattered across the floor.
“Yoko?” Heather asked.
At first, Captain Tani thought the other woman was talking to her, but when she looked where Heather was looking, she saw why she’d called out her name.
One whole wall of the cabin was covered in print-out pictures of Yoko Tani from every angle: headshots, full-body, even a couple of nudes that looked like they had been taken in her cabin while she had been changing clothes. Where had Jones gotten them? Scrawled across most of them were words like “skank” and “whore” and “freak” in red marker.
“Where is she?” Heather asked, looking around.
“Sickbay,” Yoko said, walking briskly out of the door and down the hall, Heather stumbling after her in the high heels she was wearing. They made their way down the hall and stopped at the entrance to sickbay.
“Open,” Yoko said.
“Three equals nine divided by the square root of X,” the computer said. “What is the value of X?”
Yoko thought for a long moment, then looked at Twelvetrees in horror. “It’s still happening. I don’t know the answer!”