I couldn't breathe.

My hands scratched at my neck, eyes bulging out as the vacuum of space stole the last of the air from my lungs. It was cold. So cold and yet so hot as unfiltered radiation threatened to cook me even as I froze. Desperately, my tail waved around behind me, searching for something, anything to latch onto. I was an expert climber. If I could just find a solid surface, I could start making my way toward the airtight door that separated me from Engineering.

Something bumped me. I wrapped my tail around it and pulled myself to it. The momentum set us both spinning, and my heart sunk. It wasn't attached to anything. Tears freezing in my eyes, I tried to see what I'd grabbed onto.

It was a severed leg.

I wished I could have screamed. I tried to throw up, but the pressure differential between the inside of my body and out had molded the flesh of my esophagus together. As my consciousness started to fade for what was surely the last time, one final thought filtered through the pain.

How had it come to this?

* * * * *

"Name?"

"J'kabi. J-apostrophe-K-A-B-I. No last name."

I stood on the edge of the table, dressed in my finest jumpsuit. Pure white with pink trim that matched my skin tone, immaculately cleaned and pressed with the decorative metal cufflinks polished to a mirror finish. I'd broken out my grandma's tail rings too, each silver band carved with intricate leaf patterns representing the Aizi trees from back home.

Across from me, seated in a dingy grey rolling chair, a human male typed my name into the application. His jumpsuit was greyish-brown and rumpled, the Captain’s insignia on his lapel scuffed with years of neglect. His wiry black hair was unkempt, tight braids coming undone in a couple places. He looked like he'd just rolled out of bed. Which he might have! I knew these shipping crews worked long hours, so I wasn't about to judge a man for getting his sleep while he could!

"Age?" he asked, squinting at the readout through wire frame glasses.

"Twenty-five," I said brightly.

"Is that by the UGSC?"

"Sorry, what does UGSC stand for?"

"Unified Galactic Star Calendar."

"Oh, right, right…" I said.

Of course. I knew that. I brushed a lock of my white bob cut out of my face, a little nervous. My species was the newest member of the interstellar community, having just achieved spaceflight 15 years ago by our local calendar. I was only 10 when the word came through that we were not alone in the universe. Suddenly there were new measurement systems, cultures, languages, and technologies that we had to catch up on. It was all a little overwhelming.

Especially in a place like this. We were on Aëa, a hub world connecting the vast majority of the known populated systems. Dozens of species from across the galaxy came here to trade and do business. Boasting over 80% of galactic trade, Aëa was the economic center of what the humans called the Kepler Region, the Yii called the Plavidicus Expanse, the Mulvidians called Krrak'hata, the Seirogi called Aa'ach Otn…

You can see why I got confused sometimes.

"Sorry, I'm twenty-two by the UGSC."

"It's no problem… height and weight under 1 unit of Galactic Standard Gravity?"

"Twenty-nine point four-three-eight centimeters, and 580.632 grams."

"Perfect… you're an Aizu, correct?"

"Yes sir! Interstellar newcomers looking to find our place in the stars!"

"...biological profile green, aaaand done! Last question: why do you want to fly with the Horizon's Promise?"

I drew myself up to my full height and puffed out my modest chest. Tips from the global job market primers I'd been given in school ran through my head. Sell your strengths, downplay your weaknesses, and show all the bigger species what the Aizu can bring to the table.

"Well sir, I want to learn and do as much as I can for both the galaxy and the people back home. Independent shipping gives me the opportunity to visit new worlds and learn firsthand how the galactic economy functions. I may be small, but I'm quite skilled at electrical engineering. I'm certified for installation and servicing on all ship systems built to galactic standards. I hope to be able to demonstrate the usefulness of my brothers and sisters so that more Aizu get the opportunities that I have to join the interstellar workforce!"

The Captain smiled, amused. That was a positive reaction, at least!

"You can get off your soapbox, kid. I like Aizu. You're teeny, so you save me a full ton on cargo mass, and you can squeeze between the hulls on your own so I don't have to buy a miniaturizer. You're hired. Welcome to the crew…"

* * * * *

I got you, Kabs… just hold on…

There was a voice in my head that wasn't my own. Was this an afterlife? No, that was stupid. Aizu didn't even have a concept of an afterlife. Which meant, to my surprise, that I was still alive.

With a pneumatic hiss and the rustling of canvas, wind blew across my face and ruffled my hair. An emergency atmosphere pod! Air! I sucked down a giant breath and immediately threw up, my vomit floating in front of my face like a sickly green cloud. Dimly, the sound of a biohazard detritus vacuum passed by my head.

"Well, you puked, so that means you're alive at least. Here."

Something cold and metallic pushed through my lips. My mouth was filled with foul-tasting gel. I gagged and tried to turn my head to spit, but two fingers gently pinched my cheeks and held me in place.

"It's antirad and vitamix. It tastes horrible, but you need to swallow it so you can heal. You were in hard vacuum for almost a full minute."

I did as I was told, swallowing the disgusting mixture as fast as I could manage. Almost instantly, my queasy stomach stilled. Vitality began to spread through my limbs once again. I flexed my fingers, toes, and tail. Everything hurt, but as far as I knew, everything was still attached.

As my mental faculties began to return, I recognized the voice. I had been rescued by Cygnus, the lead engineer aboard the Horizon's Promise.

Cygnus was an Ancient, a species so old that their original name had been lost to time. Some said they were the first sentient species to evolve in the Milky Way, millions if not billions of years ago. Their home system's star had gone supernova before my planet had even cooled enough for life to form, and they had been space nomads ever since. If there was one person that could have survived, it was no surprise to me that it was her.

I turned my bleary eyes on her face, heavy exhaustion making me feel like I weighed a full ten pounds. A vast expanse of starry skin and two glowing eyes like twin suns stared back at me with a worried expression.

"Thank you," I croaked.

"Don't talk, you'll damage your vocal cords. Get some sleep and let the vitamix do its job."

I was placed against a soft abdomen. Warm skin pressed against my cheek. Though my vision was still hazy, I saw the outline of frayed fabric that had been jury-rigged to maintain modesty. She had not escaped unscathed herself.

Underneath me, the majesty of the cosmos played out across her bare skin. I had been placed on a patch of nebula, softly glowing reds, whites, and pinks swirling under my small body, interspersed with red and blue stars. I saw the blue light of a pulsar across from me, on the left side of her abs.

I curled up on this tapestry of stars, cuddling my tail to my chest. My fingers gently traced the darker pink patterns in its skin; a habit I'd had since I was a baby.

Thank you… I said again, but this time in my mind. Somehow, I knew in my heart that she'd hear it.

Rest up, Kabs. You're alive, and that's enough for now. I'll keep us that way. I promise.

* * * * *

"Siggy! We got an Aizu! You still down for the buddy program?"

That face had emerged from under a dismembered reactor control console the first time I'd seen it. Her cheeks were smudged with grease, though pink and purple markings still shone through here and there. Her hair was done up in a loose bun to keep it out of the way. Those otherworldly eyes made me a little nervous at first, but looking back all I could see was the sparkling friendliness that emanated from within.

"Sure thing, Skipper!"

"Come give her the grand tour. Mrrghak't'ha, take over for her."

A heavy snort came from behind, and an eight-foot tall, scaled humanoid edged past the captain with surprising grace for his size. A Mulvidian! I'd never seen one up close! Now that I had, I was suddenly very glad that he wasn't the one who'd signed up for the buddy program.

Siggy stood, wiping her face on a rag. Her right hand was almost entirely covered in red and pink markings that mixed with white on her forearm, her dark skin only peeking through in a couple spots on her fingers. I wondered what species she was. I'd met plenty of humans, plenty of Seirogi, and now a Mulvidian. I didn't remember encountering someone like her before, but that wasn't saying much. Aëa was such a big place, with so many species all intermingled. I could have walked right past a group of her species and never even noticed.

I hopped off the little platform on the captain’s shoulder and scampered my way forward on the railing. Us Aizu were tree-dwellers, so I felt quite at home anywhere I could climb and jump. I landed on a handrail and wrapped my tail around it, smiling up at my new "buddy."

"Good morning, Siggy! My name is J'kabi, it's nice to meet you!"

She giggled, and the starlike spots that speckled her neck and chin seemed to glow a bit brighter. Up close, she was strikingly beautiful. She had a heart-shaped face with a cute nose and full lips that were upturned in a smile that radiated happiness. A soft blue corona encircled her glowing yellow eyes.

And her markings! Now that the grease was off her cheeks, I saw that the pink and purple ripples on the left side of her jaw extended over her upper lip and across the bridge of her nose, shot through with streaks of teal underneath her left eye. Similar cloudy swirls covered her forehead and wrapped around to encircle her right eye. Underneath all the whirls and eddies, her skin was a deep, deep blue like the sky at twilight.

"Good morning to you too, J'kabi," she said, her voice warm and welcoming. "I'm Cygnus, or Siggy to some of the crew."

"That's a pretty name! What culture is it from?"

"It's a bit of a mixed bag." Cygnus unwrapped her bun. Shimmering purple hair cascaded over her shoulders, falling to the middle of her back in loose curls. I felt my breath catch in my throat. "My full name is Aliota Sygnati Teriam, which in the Ancient language means 'Arm of the Galaxy' or 'Galactic Horizon.' Our nomad fleets use the arms of the Milky Way as a horizontal reference point—it helps to mitigate rolling."

My little heart skipped a beat. An Ancient! A real, live Ancient! The first of the spacefarers! I silently cursed the rushed education I'd been given on galactic species. While Humans, Mulvidians, and Yii merited a full chapter each, the Ancients had barely been given a paragraph. I knew next to nothing about them. We weren't expected to ever meet one, and here I was not just meeting one, I was going to work with one! There was so much I could learn from her!

"I gave that explanation to some humans I used to fly with, and they made the connection to Cygnus, which is a cross-shaped constellation they use to navigate to Aëa from their homeworld. They started calling me Cygnus, and it's stuck ever since. And now this crew calls me Siggy, because our pilot Ot thought Cygnus sounded a little like Si'gei—'Star Girl' in Seirogi. So I've got a Seirogi nickname of a Human nickname of an Ancient name."

I nodded along in what I hoped were the right spots, trying to conceal my silent panic as best I could. I was so excited, so terrified, and so awestruck. I was going to work with an Ancient! I was the luckiest Aizu in history right now. If this went well, I was going to be the poster Aizu for our interstellar outreach program.

Okay, J'kabi. Deep breaths. Remember: active listening, don't interrupt, and pour on the compliments. You want her to like you.

"That's a lot of nicknames," I said.

Okay, that wasn't the worst thing I could've said, but I definitely could've done better. I was starstruck, okay? Both figuratively and literally!

"We've got a few of those around here," Cygnus said.

"Oh? Like what?"

"Well, you met the captain. We mostly just call him Skipper or Skips. Down here in Engineering it's just the three of us, so just stick to Siggy for the moment." Cygnus gestured to the Mulvidian. "He's gotta like you before he lets you call him anything but Mrrghak't'ha."

I swallowed, nodding a little nervously as I watched the hulking brute very delicately disassembling the console behind us.

Cygnus leaned in close and whispered to me. "Once he warms up to you, it's Mrrg or The Mrrgster." She spoke a little louder. "He hates Mrrgerburger, but he lets me call him that because I'm his only friend."

Mrrghak't'ha barely glanced up from his work. "Siggy, I swear to Krangkt, I'll shove an impact wrench so far up your butt, I'll finally be able to dismantle the cryo chamber surrounding your heart."

Cygnus didn't rise to the jab, turning her attention back to me.

"I'm sure if you stick around long enough we'll find one for you too."

"I'd like that," I said, looking down shyly.

"I love your patterns, by the way. Do they have any special significance?"

I beamed her a wide smile and presented my arms and tail for further inspection. My bubblegum pink skin was patterned with stripes a few shades darker on my arms, legs, back, hips, and tail.

"Thank you! On my homeworld, we live in Aizi trees, so this striping helps us hide among the leaves!" I gave my pure white hair a toss, and winked my blue and purple eyes. "Our hair is the color of their flowers and our eyes are the color of the stamens, so when a bunch of us huddle up in the same tree, it looks like it's blooming."

"Oh, that's so cute!"

My heart swelled with the compliment. She sounded genuine more than polite. She might really be interested in me! Okay, return the compliment, return the compliment.

"Thank you very much. I've got nothing on you though. Your markings are incredible."

"Awww, thank you!" Her stars sparkled again. Success! "I don't know if we have any cool evolutionary reasoning to go along with ours, but in Ancient legends we say that when we adopted space as our new home, space also adopted us."

"Well one way or another I love it. I think you look beautiful."

"Uh oh, Siggy!" Mrrghak't'ha said from inside the console. "I think she liiiiikes you!"

"Shut up, Mrrgerburger; it's her first day. Let Kabs do a couple trips with us before you start laying into her."

My smile widened. "Kabs? Is that my nickname?"

Cygus returned the smile. A whorl in the nebula on her cheek almost touched the corner of her mouth, seeming to draw the smile out wider.

"I'm trying it out. Let's see if it sticks…"

* * * * *

Cygnus was crying. As I clawed my way back to consciousness, I felt the abs under me heaving with sobs. I tried to move, to comfort her, but even lifting my head sent spikes of white hot pain through my brain. I was nowhere near recovered yet.

I curled up against the abs, clutching my head, when all of a sudden the pain subsided. At the same time, Cygnus let out a shuddering breath.

I had known her long enough now to understand what was happening. The Ancients had tactile telepathy. One touch, and they could feel what another person felt, think what they thought, and know what they knew. If a person was injured, they knew where and how bad. If those injuries were painful, they could take that pain for themselves while the injury healed.

That's what she was doing for me. She was shouldering my pain all by herself while I slept. Immediately I sat up, but the white-hot stab behind my eye sockets that followed nearly made me throw up again.

Are you okay? I heard in my head, and an outpouring of despair washed through my mind with it. Suddenly I was leaning against the edge of our little emergency atmosphere pod with my own body laying on my abs, tears streaming down my cheeks.

I fucking told Skipper that we couldn't go FTL through the Arcturus system! The planetary collision there had scattered micro asteroids across a billion square kilometers! We're not a fancy gas freighter; we can't maintain kinetic shielding with the power draw of FTL. One rock the size of a blueberry, and we're toast! But nooo, Skips wanted to play space cowboy and take the slingshot route. Well, look who's right and who's DEAD!

No. Wait. I hadn't told Skipper any of that. These were Cygnus's thoughts, in Cygnus's body. I moved my tail, and I felt the friction in both my tail and the abs my tail was resting on.

Then I was back in my own body, and my thoughts were my own.

Sorry… You don't need all that.

I frowned. You don't need all that. You're dealing with all this pain and anguish, and you're trying to take mine too?

You were whimpering in your sleep. I couldn't just let you suffer while I have the ability to do something about it.

Well stop it. You shouldn't have to take all of my pain, all of your pain, and the responsibility of keeping us both alive. Let me handle my own pain, and then once this vitamix goop finishes fixing me, we can figure out how to stay alive together. Okay?

Okay…

Slowly, my pain began to sink back into my body. It felt like I was leaching it straight from her skin. The sensation traveled from our points of contact all the way up my body, until it reached the spots it was coming from. Fuck, there were a lot of spots that hurt. Ow… okay fuck, ow…

I-I don't suppose whatever medkit you have has any painkillers…?

No bio-green… there's blue, and there's red. I don't fucking know why we even have red, there hasn't been a Yii on board as long as I've flown with this crew.

Sorry, I'm still bad with the color codes. What's the difference?

Blue is poisonous to all but humans, and red is for arsenic-based DNA.

Oh…

Hands ruffled through a cloth bag. Ampoules clinked together as fumbling fingers scraped them from their elastic holding bands.

Hold up… there's some green sedative. That might help you, but it's dosed for my size, not yours.

I tried my best to control it, but a shuddering whimper was forced out of my nose as pain shot through my spine. It felt like I'd been stabbed between every individual vertebrae all at once.

Don't you dare, I thought as the pain started to leak out again.

Well what do you want me to do?!

I… I don't know. But not that…

I rolled onto my back, panting as the pain in my spine returned at full force. My eyes were squeezed shut, but I fought back any attempt Cygnus made to try and steal it away again. She had enough to worry about without taking that too.

Hold on, I have an idea. Open your mouth?

I opened my mouth, the joints in my jaw cracking. I had been clenching my teeth while I slept, and now the muscles on both sides of my head were sore. The tip of a subcutaneous injection needle rested on my lower lip.

Prepare yourself… this is probably gonna taste worse than the vitamix.

Cygnus depressed the plunger for less than a second. A single drop of sedative oozed from the needle and dripped onto my tongue. My face scrunched as the bitter, chemical taste made me cringe hard enough to lock up the muscles in my neck and shoulders. I snapped my teeth shut and forced myself to swallow. Cygnus's finger gently massaged my neck as I tried to work up enough spit to swallow again. It tasted awful. The worst thing I'd ever put in my mouth.

That's the best I can do. I couldn't control the dose any better than that, so I hope that'll be both enough and not too much…

How will we know if it works?

I'd never get the answer to my question. With the bitter taste still on my tongue and burning down my throat, I was put back to sleep as instantaneously as though a switch had been flipped.

* * * * *

Meal times were my favorite. The nature of my job had me spending more of my time outside the inner hull than in it, running down wires and patching circuits, so most days this was the only time I got to socialize outside of the engineering crew. Don't get me wrong, I loved the engineering crew! Cygnus was always so friendly and Mrrghak't'ha had started warming up to me after only a couple of weeks. I felt safe calling him Mrrg now, though any more than that and I was scared he'd try to eat me. There were some pretty big lizards back on my homeworld—hence why we lived in the Aizi trees—so I was naturally much more scared of him than I probably should have been. He was actually really sweet, truly!

The Horizon's Promise had a crew of eight. There were the three of us in engineering who handled the stem-to-stern maintenance, a bridge crew consisting of Captain, Pilot, and Navigator, and the Loadmaster and Assistant Loadmaster who handled the cargo. All in all, the species dispersal on the ship was three humans, two Seirogi, one Mulvidian, and one Ancient.

And, of course, one Aizu!

The Seirogi, Ak and Ot, didn't often eat with us. While they were carbon-based like the rest of us, their primary source of food was a sort of thick syrup of dissolved nutrients and minerals that was so concentrated it would be incredibly toxic to the other species on board. To prevent cross-contamination, they tended to eat directly after the rest of the crew.

As such, I didn't get much time with them beyond passing in the halls on my way back to Engineering, which made me a little disappointed. They were the most fascinating to me, because they deviated from the humanoid template the most. They had four arms and four legs, supporting an insectoid abdomen, an armored thorax, and large, bulbous heads with two sets of compound eyes and a retractable proboscis between two sharp pincers. I loved the way the light reflected off their iridescent, bluish carapaces, and the sound of their chitinous feet tapping down the passageways.

Cygnus and I always went to lunch together. As a part of the buddy program, Cygnus had the responsibility of ferrying me to and from any locations within the ship. Ships built for multispecies crews had to factor in the largest species that could be expected to operate aboard, and as the Mulvidian could grow to over ten feet tall, the inside of the ship was a massive cavern of metal and glass for someone of my size.

To keep me out from underfoot and save me the calories I'd spend hopping after her, Cygnus carried me. She had been issued a little shoulder platform that I could stand on, but most days I simply sat in her hand, tail wrapped snugly around her wrist.

"Hey, look who it is! Siggy and Kabs, the bookends of spaceflight!"

Mei, the Horizon's Promise's navigator, always greeted us this way. Once it had become common knowledge that our two species were the oldest and newest interstellar partners, everyone teased that I was a baby who'd been saddled with Galactic Grandma. I pouted in front of them, but truthfully, I didn't mind it! I was really fortunate to get such an experienced mentor, and no amount of teasing was going to dampen my mood.

"Humans still have physical books?" Cygnus shot back. "I thought all your trees went extinct like a thousand years ago."

Mei placed a hand on her heart, faux shock on her face.

"They didn't all go extinct. We saved the Joshua trees. Humans have a habit of preserving ancient relics of times long past… that's why Skips hired you, after all."

"And here I thought it was the human urge to be a colonial 'savior' to the native species."

"Okay, ouch. You're talking to the colonized here, not the colonizer."

The particulars of human society still baffled me. They were among the most biodiverse species in the interstellar community. Even amongst our own crew, the three humans we had looked nothing alike. The captain's skin was a rich, dark brown, with hazel eyes and black, wiry hair that he kept tightly braided to his scalp. Mei, by contrast, had paler skin with yellow undertones, almond-shaped brown eyes, and pin-straight black hair that she pinned back in a bun with two sticks. And then our loadmaster, Harun, had skin that was somewhere between the two, the darkest eyes of them all, and an impressive, well-kept salt and pepper beard. I didn't know about his hair; he always kept it covered with a beautifully embroidered cloth scarf. It was hard to believe they were all the same species, sometimes!

Unfortunately, from what little I'd learned about their culture, humans seemed to forget that about each other too. This wonderful variance in appearance had been used to fuel wars, explain bad luck, or even punish those that did not match the dominant cultural hegemony simply for existing. This was all a couple thousand of years ago at this point, of course, but humans had one of the longest-running memories of any species I'd ever come across.

Cygnus leaned over the table, giving Mei a kiss on the forehead.

"There," she said. "For your bruised ego."

"Fuck you."

"I'd say buy me a drink first, but that shit you humans make would kill me."

"It kills plenty of us, too. Just slower."

I was still… unclear on the relationship between Cygnus and Mei. It was obvious that they flirted, but Cygnus and Mrrg flirted too, and that was explicitly established as non-romantic by both parties. Cygnus got a bit more sexual in her flirtations with Mei though, and her starry cheeks sparkled when they engaged in verbal banter. To my knowledge, there wasn't anything going on between them, beyond an obviously close friendship, but… I wasn't sure.

To be fair though, I wasn't sure about a lot of things with this crew. The galactic social interaction primer we'd gotten in school had not covered insults as a primary source of communication. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that everyone on this crew hated each other. Yet six weeks aboard had shown me that this was not the case at all. As Cygnus explained it, if you're new and they're nice, they haven't decided if they like you yet. If you've been around for a while and they're still nice, they probably decided they don't like you.

Or something like that.

"May I interrupt the verbal fencing long enough to ask for the salt?" Skipper said. "It's on the counter over there."

"I'll get it!" I said brightly, unwrapping my tail from Cygnus's wrist.

I crouched low, my long, digitigrade legs curling under me like springs. I might be small, but I was tree-born from a planet with gravity three times the galactic standard. That countertop was well within my reach.

I kicked off from Cygnus's hand, soaring ten feet across the room with a grace and precision that would have made my ancestors proud. Mei let out a surprised "oh!" and Mrrg chuckled. Both him and Cygnus had seen me do this many times.

I landed lightly on the counter, my bare feet only skidding a little bit on the polished metal surface. The three broad toes on each foot had pads on the distal phalanges that gave me a better grip on vertical surfaces. However, they had evolved for trees, not metal and glass. I'd run face first into walls many times by now after an uncontrolled skid, so I considered my slight stumble here a win.

I squatted down before the salt shaker and wrapped my arms around it, ready to make the leap back. It was almost a third of my height and maybe half of my body weight, but that would be no problem. Galactic Standard Gravity made everything feel light to me.

Except it didn't budge. I frowned, tugging harder. It stayed put right where it was. Oh, right. Like everything else that wasn't bolted to the hull, the salt shaker was magnetized. I tried tugging from the top to see if I could break the magnetic seal by pulling at an angle, but all I accomplished was scooching it a couple inches across the countertop.

"Uhh… maybe I can't get it…"

Mei practically squealed.

"Oh my God, this is the cutest thing I've seen in my life!" She fanned her eyes, nearly crying from cuteness overload. "She's too little to break the magnet on the salt shaker!"

Cygnus came to my rescue, freeing the salt shaker and placing it in my hands. I sat in her palm, my cheeks dark pink with embarrassment.

"Don't worry about it Kabs," she said, her glowing yellow eyes squinting as she smiled. "I feel the same way every time Mrrg asks me to grab one of the big wrenches."

I smiled back, squeezing her wrist with my tail again. She had a way of making me feel comfortable and included, despite my size. My embarrassment was already beginning to fade away…

* * * * *

"Warning. Oxygen levels nearing critical levels. Air quality: poor. Estimated time to total depletion: ten minutes."

A sharp hiss of air roused me from sleep. My head, though foggy, wasn't pounding any more. I slowly stretched my tired, cramped limbs, and received no more pain than was to be expected. Either Cygnus had started stealing it again, or the vitamix had finished healing me.

"Oxygen levels rising… Warning. Oxygen levels low. Air quality: poor. Estimated time to total depletion: twenty-six minutes."

Cygnus was still leaning against the heavy canvas wall of our little safety pod. She looked tired. The glow of her starry skin was dim, and her eyes had dulled to a dark orange. The colors in the nebula beneath me were faded, almost muddy now.

"Welcome back," she said, her voice low and cracked.

Cautiously, I cleared my throat. It was a little scratchy, but otherwise okay. I trusted it to hold if I spoke out loud.

"How long was I out?" I croaked.

"Two days. Bummer for you; you woke up right as our oxygen ran out." Cygnus held up a small circular canister. "Just emptied the last of it."

"What happens then…?"

"The pod has a built-in CO2 scrubber, but I've damn near burnt it out by now trying to extend our air supply. We might get another hour out of it, after this O2 runs out." She sighed. "And then you'll fall asleep again, and not wake up."

"And you?"

"I've got these." She held her hand out. In her palm were about a dozen blue capsules. "O2 pills. They won't do you any good though; your body can't break it down the right way, and even if it could, most other species can't absorb oxygen through their stomachs. I figure I'll get another day or two before I join you."

My tired, sluggish mind struggled to cope with this news. I had less than an hour and a half to live. Granted, I'd lived for nearly three whole days longer than I expected to, but that didn't make much of a difference in the weight of this news.

"We have to get out of here…" I mumbled.

"Ninety-nine percent of scenarios where I open this pod end with your blood boiling in your veins, and this time I can't save you. I'll be fine a lot longer than you; space won't kill an Ancient until we suffocate. But I can't fit between the hulls, and Skips cheaped out on a miniaturizer after he hired you. I need you to help repair the ship."

As I woke up more, my mind became more alert. I was still sluggish from the low quality air, but it was enough to spot a kernel of hope in the dourness of our situation.

"You said ninety-nine percent… what's that last one percent?"

"A fucking miracle, and something that's probably too traumatizing to even suggest."

I pushed myself up on her abs, looking her dead in the eyes. I drew myself up to my full height of just under one foot tall, and curled my tail upward into an S shape to make me look bigger. It wasn't much, but it was all I had, and I knew how to use it.

"Aliota Sygnati Teriam, don't you quit on me now. If there's a chance, even a small chance, that we can survive this, don't you think it's worth trying?"

Cygnus's eyes flared up a little brighter. A soft smile pulled at her lips, showing me that she still held just enough hope to maybe pull us through this. I forced myself to smile back, despite our circumstances. We could do this. I believed in us.

"I'll hold you to that," she said, and a little twinkle graced her starry cheeks again. "All right, there's one idea that lets you survive the pod opening, at the very least, but you won't like it."

I vaguely waved my hands at our dingy, humid little capsule. "I don't like this. How much worse can it be?"

"I'll let you decide that after I tell you…" I wasn't sure I liked where this was going. I couldn't quite put my finger on why, though. "I can survive in hard vacuum. You can't. Neither of us have a space suit. So, if you really do want to make it out of here alive, I'm gonna have to be your space suit."

I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that. Surely she wasn't suggesting… what I thought she was suggesting.

"What do you…?"

"Every opening into my body is naturally airtight. So here's my idea: I swallow you, and carry you out of here in my stomach. The O2 pills will be constantly letting off oxygen for you to breathe and me to absorb through my stomach lining, so we'll both have more than enough air. The second we find one of your vacuum suits, I bring you back up, you get dressed, and we'll get to work fixing this ship."

My legs reacted before my brain had even finished processing. My body sensed danger, and when my body senses danger, it puts as much distance between me and the danger as possible. I shot straight up, hitting the roof of our canvas pod with a soft plap. There was practically no gravity, so I hit a bit harder than I expected, knocking the wind out of me. My grippy toes found purchase on the rough material, leaving me hanging there upside down, staring down at Cygnus.

"Excuse me, you want to do WHAT?!"

"Calm down, you're wasting air!"

"I-I… I know I said we should try anything, b-but I mean really, h-how do we even know that'll work? I'm like a sixth your size; will you even be able to swallow me? A-and if you really can s..s-swallow me… c-can you really, truly, a hundred percent guarantee that you can get me b-back out?"

To answer my concerns, Cygnus's skin undulated as she flexed each independent muscle group individually. Every segment of her abs, each band of muscle on her obliques, lower chest, mid chest, upper chest, at least three different groupings in her shoulders. Her neck swelled as she sequentially flexed every muscle around the biologically complicated area in a clockwise circle.

Her mouth opened, and I stared straight down her throat. The inside of her mouth was a dark black that shone blue where the light from the emergency pod's overhead LEDs hit it. I watched in horrified fascination as a wave rolled up her esophagus and across her tongue where an impressive number of muscle groups all contracted and relaxed, first in tandem, then in syncopation. Most humanoids had around 8 muscles in their tongue; I counted over twenty.

As if to show off, once the very last muscle on the tip of the tongue finished flexing, the wave of contractions traveled back down her body. This time every strand was flexing individually, turning her skin into a writhing mass of fast-twitch muscle fibers all competing for the processing power of my poor, oxygen-deprived brain. I was both disturbed and oddly fascinated, staring enraptured into her open mouth, then her chest, abs, and sides.

"Ancients have complete control over our musculature," she finally said. "Direct for skeletal, general for intestinal, but still more than enough to get you down and back out without injury."

"That's amazing," I said, still staring at her. "I… I-it doesn't make me any l-less nervous th-though…"

"Here, watch."

Cygnus scooted directly under the LEDs, opening her mouth again so I could see every little detail all the way down to the back of her throat. My transfixed brain studied the details of the mouth she was trying to stick me in. Her teeth were white and well-kept, soft cheeks a little bluer than her tongue sagging over the tips of her lower molars. She had no tonsils or uvula, the arch of her throat undecorated. Over the edge of her tongue, deep back past the point of no return, there was a solid mass of muscle where the opening of her esophagus had been just moments before.

She held up one of the O2 pills, then set it on her tongue. Without shutting her mouth, a ripple rolled across her blue-black tongue, ferrying the pill to her throat. My eyes followed its progress back. My jaw was clenched so hard my teeth hurt, and my nails were digging into my palm. Yet I couldn't look away as the little blue pill was shuffled to the back of her mouth with nothing more than the flexing of her tongue.

As she went to swallow, the mass in the back of her throat shifted. Air bubbles popped as slimy folds of flesh slithered against each other, rotating around to reveal a set of soft flaps that opened downward to reveal her throat once more. The folds of her esophagus gaped open to accept the pill from the back of her tongue. She was purposely doing this slow, so I could catch the whole process.

The pill vanished, the flaps closed, and her throat rotated backwards, toward her spine.

"They're called airlock sphincters," Cygnus said, reading the millions of questions on my face. "At rest, the opening rotates about eighty degrees, and those flaps form a one-way valve. Completely airtight."

Her abs clenched, and the process started all over again. The airlock sphincter unraveled itself in a marvelous display of biological engineering, and the pill popped back out onto her tongue, completely unscathed.

"W-wow…" I said.

"If I can do that with a pill, I can absolutely do that with you," Cygnus said, then swallowed the pill again. "I promise you, I'll take good care of you. This is only until we can get you a vacuum suit, okay?"

"I-I… I-I'm scared, Siggy…"

"Believe me, if I was in your position, I'd be feeling the exact same. But this is the only way we both survive this."

"Thousands of years of evolving ways to not get eaten are disagreeing with you…"

"Warning. Oxygen levels nearing critical levels. Air quality: poor. Estimated time to total depletion: twelve minutes."

"...b-but I g-guess we r-really don't h-h-have a choice, huh…"

"Not if you want to live, no," Cygnus said, turning behind her to activate the CO2 scrubber in the pod wall behind her. It stuttered and belched a couple sparks, but a well-placed smack ended its complaining, and it hummed to life. "We're down to the wire here. It's now or never."

Reluctantly, my toes released the roof of the pod. I gave a little kick off the canvas, drifting back down toward the floor. Cygnus caught me in the tender embrace of her hand, and placed me gently on the ground. I pressed my cheek against a cloud of space dust on her thumb as her hand withdrew.

"Here," she said, nudging a little wand-like thing about half my height into my arms. "Laser sterilizer. You're covered in sweat and your own puke. I'm not swa—er…" she hesitated as my eyes got wide again "…inserting you like that. Your, um, your clothes will have to go too."

I stopped dead in the middle of setting down the sterilizer. "I gotta be naked?!"

"J'kabi, please. Modesty is the least of our concerns right now."

I pouted my lip out, turning my back to her and my attention to getting clean. The laser sterilizer was a handheld bar that was meant to be waved over an area to remove contaminants before applying medical aid. Just like the salt shaker though, it had magnets in the handle that allowed it to be attached to a surface either horizontally or vertically so the user could have both hands free.

I very carefully set the bar on its end, the strength of magnetic attraction ripping it from my fingers at the last centimeter. It wobbled on its end for a moment like an antenna in solar wind, but thankfully settled upright. Magnets were a bitch for me when I was feeling well; in my current state, I don't think I could have even budged it if it'd fallen over.

I snuck a furtive glance over at Cygnus. She had her back turned to me, respecting my privacy. With trembling hands, I slowly began to peel my top off, revealing more of my pink, striped skin.

As I tossed my shirt aside, I finally took stock of my body. I felt shrunken. I had a thin frame at the best of times, and it was even thinner now. Having eaten nothing but a few mouthfuls of vitamix in the last half-week, my ribs were starting to show beneath my breasts. I was actually quite gifted in the chest for an Aizu, something I was at least a little proud of. I had almost a handful on either side, though now, they were nearly flat against my chest. What little width my body retained was in my hips and legs, though not as much as there should have been. The form-fitted waist of my pants was loose and starting to slip down. I'd probably lost close to 60 grams, an unhealthy amount of weight for someone as small as I was.

I tried not to think about how much easier I was to swallow now…

I shimmied my pants off my waist, my nose wrinkling as the smell hit me. Cygnus was right not to want to… well, anyway, I was stinky. Living in an atmosphere pod without a shower would do that to anyone. I was quite hygienic, normally!

Balancing on my tail, I stretched the hem of my pant leg over one broad foot, then the other. Stepping out of my pants, I shimmied the tail hole down until they fell off onto the floor, and that was it. I was naked, about to take a laser shower to appease a much larger woman who wanted to eat me.

Needed to eat me, to save my life, I reminded myself. Deep… well, you can't take deep breaths right now… um… slow breaths, J'kabi.

I turned on the laser.

The little contraption whirred to life. Sensors identified its orientation, my orientation to it, and the size of the area requiring sterilization. It deployed itself accordingly, telescoping upwards to match my height. A vertical line of blue light washed back and forth over me, and my front side was very suddenly clean as the events of the last few days were vaporized from my skin with a sound like angry mechanical bees.

I repeated with my back, then presented my armpits, the bottoms of my feet, the insides of my thighs, my ears, the underside of my tail, and anywhere else I could think of that might be dirty still. I only stopped when the sterilizer chirped, a green indicator light informing me that I was clean enough to perform surgery on. My pink skin had gone reddish, I smelled like ozone, and my hair was standing up like I'd been electrocuted.

I look good enough to eat… I thought wryly.

"L-Let's get this over with," I sighed, battling residual static electricity for control of my hair.

Cygnus spun around. I covered what little breasts I had with my hands, crossing one leg in front of the other to shield my nethers. I felt my cheeks burning with embarrassment. I'd never been naked in front of anyone before. The embarrassment coupled with what was about to happen made me tremble in place under the gaze of those twin suns.

Cygnus, for her part, was very careful to respect my delicate mood. Though I couldn't tell where she was looking, her gaze seemed to hold my own. They didn't waver, didn't wander down my body like I was some piece of meat, and didn't size me up in a sexual manner. The compassion with which she regarded me reminded my panicked mind that this was my friend. She wasn't a predator, coming to gulp me down to fill her belly out of hunger; this was my friend, who was doing her very best to save us both from the hell our lives had become. Looking back into those warm, glowing eyes, I felt a little of my fear dissipate.

"W-wait…" I said as she reached for me. "You… you should probably swallow me headfirst. I-If you try to go feet first I'll start kicking, and I d-don't want to hurt you…"

Cygnus nodded. Without breaking our shared eye contact, she placed her hand on the floor in front of me. I hesitated, but only for a moment. The air in my lungs was deeply unsatisfying, and it was getting worse with every breath. It was now or never.

I stepped onto her palm, and she lifted me up.

"Don't worry, Kabs. I'll take care of you. I promise."

I half-smiled, unable to speak. My tiny heart was beating a mile a minute. I was biting the inside of my cheek so hard it hurt. Everything felt tingly, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. My tail nervously wagged, the tip curling and uncurling.

"I trust you," I finally said, my voice barely above a whisper.

She opened her mouth. Her hot breath washed over my face.

I shut my eyes.

She pushed my head past her lips.

The moment my cheek pressed against her tongue, I was overcome by a sense of calm that cut right to the center of my soul and banished my anxieties. I felt the warm embrace of Cygnus's mind envelop my own, a strong, steady rock to cling to in the maelstrom of my own emotions. I poured all of my fear into her, my primal urges to flee, my anxiety that even this would not be able to save us. She took in everything, and returned only hope, love, and assurance that we would live to walk on natural ground and breathe the atmosphere of a planet again.

It was overwhelming. My mind was not built to handle a connection such as this. I had no experience, beyond the brief linking two days ago. My physical nudity was all but forgotten as every aspect of my sentience was laid bare before her, like pages spread out on the floor for her to sift through. She walked the halls of my mind with impunity, stopping here or there, taking memories of my homeworld, my birth tree, and my family and sending them to the forefront of my mind.

My head pushed forward into her throat. A solitary spike of fear pierced my heart and was just as quickly washed away. Once I was calm and stable again, I felt Cygnus's mind retreat from my own. Yet I knew that she was still there, ready to soothe me the second I needed her.

My senses returned. It was wet, slimy, and oppressively tight, but also… soft. It felt comforting, in a way, like a warm, tight hug. I wasn't sure if that was my own thoughts or the residual calm that the Ancient had instilled in me. In the moment, I was simply grateful that I found positive sensations in the experience.

I began to feel movement from outside the esophageal walls. Bands of muscle contracted, then pulled away as Cygnus adjusted the musculature of her neck to make more room for me in preparation for the next swallow. Pulsing arteries on either side of me retreated, the flow of blood still audible, but muted. Her trachea dropped and pushed outward toward her chin.

She claimed my shoulders, drawing them almost tenderly into her with soft peristaltic contractions. I felt them slide out of their resting alignment, bending forward toward my chest. The Aizu could rearrange a few things to fit too. We weren't high on the food chain, so being able to squeeze into small spaces like knotholes, root clusters, or between dense branches was essential to our continued survival. Our collar bones were made of cartilage and the joints in our hips had a fair bit of give, allowing us to squeeze through any crack wider than our heads.

Ironic that an evolutionary advantage against predators made me slide down throats easier.

Even with the help of my flexible body, I felt the sides of her neck straining, stretched nearly to their limits to accommodate me. I winced. This couldn't have been comfortable for her. Small as I was, I was still much larger than anything she ate on a regular basis. I was surprised she hadn't gagged yet.

No gag reflex, Cygnus said, her voice in my head bringing a reassuring warmth. We lived so long in a sterile environment with no danger of poisoning that we lost it.

Strangely, I found I already knew that. In fact, I knew that Ancients born on hub worlds like Aëa, where species from all biological profiles intermingled, were starting to re-evolve their gag reflexes. But not Cygnus. She was star-born, on a habitat in the horsehead nebula that had been spun up to 1G so the children's bones would develop right. It seemed that I'd been gifted some of her memories, too.

Th-thump, th-thump, th-thump.

I was passing her heart now. I felt every beat in my chest, a constant reminder that I was in her, surrounded by her vibrant vitality. It was so steady, yet so dominating that I felt my own heart slow to match its rhythm. We had become perfectly in sync, body and mind. I felt a wave of emotion rising inside of me at the thought, and I almost started crying. I was closer to another person than I ever had been or ever could be again, and it felt so beautiful.

My hips joined me in the warm embrace of her soft flesh. My foot gave a little kick, and I felt an inquisitive probe brush my consciousness. I tried to send back that I was okay, but I didn't know how, really. Before, I could focus on the area of contact between our bodies, and just kind of… think in that direction? It was difficult to explain, because it was a sensation that very few people had the capacity to even grasp.

Which direction should I think in if she was all around me?

I'm okay, I thought, over and over again, hoping she would get the message. I felt a small prickle in the back of my head, and the querying thought left me.

My hips were past her collarbones now. It was all downhill from here. Ahead of me, the esophagus was twitching and contracting. Probably another airlock sphincter, opening wide to accept me into her stomach. The thought was still uncomfortable, but between the boundless intimacy and my own acceptance, it was no longer panic-inducing.

A ring of muscle stretched over the top of my head at almost the exact moment Cygnus's lips closed around my shins. Open ahead, closed behind. Only one way to go.

My tail was slurped through the Ancient's lips like a noodle. Hot, massaging flesh caressed my feet, ushering them down to join me as I was expelled from the esophagus into her waiting belly.

It was utterly dark inside her. Aizus had good night vision, but that still required light. None penetrated the flesh that now enveloped my entire form. I felt my way forward on the slick, pliable floor, my hands sinking deep into ridged flesh that crawled over my hands up to my wrists. It was so, so slimy in here.

With the bad came some good. The gentle fizzle of the O2 pill deeper inside reminded me that fresh, oxygen-laden air was in here with me. I breathed in through my mouth, a little scared of what it might smell like in here, and finally felt my lungs fill to the brim. The fog in my head cleared almost immediately, my senses suddenly coming into sharp relief to transmit the details of my surroundings to my brain.

It was wet; that was the first thing. I felt stomach juices washing over my hands as they sunk into the pliable stomach walls, ripples grazing my breasts. There was a bizarre, almost gelatinous consistency that squished under my contact points, quickly coating me in slime.

It was much louder than I expected as well. Though the heart was less powerful than when I was traversing her gullet, the steady beating still dominated this space. I both felt and heard the air filling her lungs, the walls above and to the sides outside of my fleshy prison encroaching as her diaphragm pulled down. Below me, the occasional gurgling bubbles of air in her intestines filled my ears with squishy, soggy groans.

The last thing I noticed was the heat. My home planet orbited closer to our star than most other worlds, so I was used to heat. I'd always felt a slight chill in my bones everywhere else. The climate controls were always too low for my comfort. Even on this ship, with a Mulvidian on board! Sinking into this stomach, I was the warmest I had been since I left my home behind. I found comfort in it, mixed with a tinge of nostalgia and homesickness.

As I pulled my tail through the sphincter, Cygnus's mind brushed my own, offering comfort and support.

Are you all right? she asked.

"I… I think so…" I said aloud.

Surprisingly, I was all right. At least, more all right than I had expected myself to be. The steady beat of her heart permeated my surroundings and helped to ground me. I found it oddly difficult for my own heart to break rhythm from hers, which did wonders for my anxiety. Since I was small my heart was still beating faster; two beats to her one. But it wasn't racing.

A wave of knowledge about my surroundings followed. This gelatinous goo was the result of some kind of chemical reaction between her stomach acids and her stomach muscle, a protective layer not secreted, but created as a byproduct of achieving chemical equilibrium. Similar to how aluminum exposed to air developed a layer of aluminum oxide that prevented rust. I appreciated the tie back to a more banal example. As much as I loved learning about the biology of other species in the galaxy, this was far more up close and personal than I'd ever wanted to get. My mood was still fragile!

The heat got an explanation too. There were two main killers in space: the pressure drop and heat loss. Cygnus had already demonstrated how her species dealt with the lack of pressure. To combat heat loss, they had developed high-heat bodies coupled with incredibly dense, insulating fat not unlike the blubber of some seafaring mammalian species. A half-inch of an Ancient's fat layer was comparable to the insulation in the Horizon's Promise's inner hull.

Still blind, I rolled myself over, clumsily pulling my knees to my chest and then walking them down the stomach's curve as gently as I could. It was really quite malleable in here, and I wasn't taking up very much room. I could adjust myself quite easily.

I laid on my back, trapped air bubbles rolling up my spine and escaping between my shoulder blades with little splrtch noises. The warm gel layer quickly formed to my body. I tried to stretch my leg out, but I bumped the wall a lot sooner than I thought I would, making me jump.

"Could you… could you swallow my headlamp? The dark is making me claustrophobic. I-it's on my belt."

Of course.

I felt myself sink down, then float off the bottom of her stomach, the laws of inertia wanting me to remain still while she moved around me. Stomach juices floated up with me, touching my legs and sides before she leaned forward and I heard them impact the wall of the stomach again.

A few seconds later, slimy flesh folds slid against each other as the esophageal sphincter rotated back into the open position, and my headlamp landed to the right of my head with a thick splat. I fumbled blindly for it, raking my fingers through the gel until I snagged the headband with my pinky.

Precious light flooded into the stomach, and I got my first look at the inside of my Ancient companion. As it turns out, the inside was a lot less decorated than the outside. Her stomach was the same midnight blue as her mouth and throat, with occasional, sparsely placed stars that did little more than reflect my light. The gel was clear, giving a slick sheen to everything. Deep wrinkles ran through the muscle on all sides, the roof sagging down like pillowy curtains. Though a few drops still floated in the air, the juices in here clung to these ridges and ravines, held in place with surface tension. I saw the O2 pill floating in one crevice, gently bubbling.

That was something else that had gotten explained by Cygnus's knowledge transfer, though this one wasn't natural. The O2 pill didn't actually contain O2, it contained carbonic acid. Carbonic acid was produced in all oxygen-dependent, carbon-based life, and was used to transport carbon dioxide from the cells to the lungs for removal from the body. In Ancients, however, it was carried to the lining of the digestive tract and broken down into glucose and oxygen in a form of lightless photosynthesis that provided both emergency calories and a few more minutes of traversal through hard vacuum. This much of the process was natural, and could be attributed to the natural development of a space race.

With these building blocks in place, ancient Ancient geneticists had used gene editing to modify their species' stomachs so that carbonic acid could be introduced orally, and achieve the same effects. Over a few generations, their entire species' reliance on the scarce and aging materials needed for space suits was edited out of their DNA.

The idea of such a thing was absolutely mind-boggling to someone like me. With every explanation inserted into my head, I felt the millennia of existence between our two species ever clearer. The earliest-known Aizu civilization was a mere 25 thousand years ago. We were barely a blip in the universal timeline compared to the Ancients, and for the first time, I really started to appreciate the gravity of that title. While we were just dipping our toes into the galaxy beyond our little dirt ball, they had conquered the natural challenges of their planet, lost that planet, and then readapted to the most inhospitable environment in the entire universe. They were, indisputably, the Ancients. Being not only in the presence of, but also inside, someone of such incalculable grandeur, I felt completely insignificant.

Hey, none of that kind of thinking, Cygnus chided me. Whoops. I kind of forgot she could hear my thoughts. You're nowhere near insignificant. In fact, you're more significant than me right now.

"How?" I scoffed. "You're amazing! You don't even need a space suit. Outside of this bubble, I'm useless…"

Okay, that's not entirely true, Cygnus said. I just forwarded you a snippet of the knowledge we got transferred back in school. I guess without the context of growing up on a colony ship, it makes us sound a lot cooler than we actually are.

"What do you mean?"

I mean that just because we can survive without a suit doesn't make it the safe or practical thing to do. One cut and we lose all our pressure protection, and we're just as dead as any other species. It saved us parts for the air systems, but that's about it.

"Okay, but I was in a medically induced coma for two days because I was out there for less than a minute. I'm literally in your stomach right now because I can't handle it."

"And I can't handle electrical repairs in places with three inches of clearance," Cygnus was talking out loud now. I felt her voice reverberate through me, transferred to my body through the stomach walls. "Call me amazing all you want, but I'm just a walking atmosphere pod right now. All I'm good for is keeping you alive, because you're going to get us home."

"R-really…?"

"Look, you said you trusted me. Well… I trust you. This situation needs both an Ancient and an Aizu. So let's stop comparing hrrghk to krrng, and make some graahkh."

"…You've been hanging around Mrrg too much…"

A sharp stab of grief washed over both of us. I wasn't sure which of us it came from.

Silence filled our mental link, both of us wrapped up in individual thoughts. There were no words, just memories. Laughing faces, greetings in hallways. The way Mei cried when experiencing too much of any emotion, happy or sad. Mrrg's reaction the first time Skipper had him try a lemon. Harun's warm smile, and quiet, devious humor.

I hadn't gotten to know Harun very well. He kept to himself, down in the cargo hold with Ak. But the few times I did get to spend with him were some of my favorites in the crew. He had a talent for guiding conversation into absurd territories that kept us from noticing the sneaky little things he'd do. A couple weeks ago, he'd held a very in-depth conversation with Mrrg about Mulvidian culture, and just kept passing him the salt while they talked. Mrrg wouldn't even notice, and would salt his food every time before setting it back on the table. There was a pile on his plate by the end of it. That meal had ended with Mrrg jokingly performing a traditional Mulvidian mating chant for Cygnus, while Harun and I tried to sneak more and more chopsticks into Mei's bun before it ended.

I think it was his leg I'd clung to when the ship first ripped open.

"Do you think anyone else…?"

"No," Cygnus sighed. She did her best to mask the grief that accompanied it. "I've been pinging the internal net every hour, and nothing. I think we're the only ones left…"

For the first time since entering her body, it was my turn to send comfort. She responded with a fleeting flash of gratitude.

"Well, we won't be the only one's left if we waste the last of our air feeling sorry for ourselves… it's time to get moving."

I felt her mind envelop mine, drawing me out of my body to meld with her again. I nestled back into the soft cocoon of muscle. The pulse of her veins grew stronger and stronger in my consciousness, and I closed my eyes, letting our hearts beat as one once again.

As J'kabi's eyes closed, mine opened. The inside of our depressing little cosmic life raft greeted me, as it had every time. Even so, in the deepest recesses of my mind, I still held on to a childish hope that this was all a dream, and the next time my eyes opened I'd be back in my rack with J'kabi snoring in her shoebox-sized bed on top of my locker. 

She was always so cute when she slept. She curled up in a tiny ball and wrapped her tail between her legs so she could hug it. I made the mistake of telling Mei how cute it was one time, and every night after that I'd had to chase her nosy ass away from our room so she wouldn't squeal herself into a mental breakdown.

Even in these dire straits, watching J'kabi sleep had brought me some level of comfort. The first day had been the hardest. I couldn't bear it when she was still recovering, watching her shiver and whimper as her body healed from the ravages of hard vacuum. The first time she slept soundly through the night was a huge relief.

My eyes wandered over our meager supplies, compiling the same list I'd made a thousand times before. I had a dozen O2 pills in my pocket. The atmosphere pod came with a spare oxygen bottle, a CO2 scrubber, a heat lamp, a biohazard vacuum, a waste dehydrator, some water and calorie bars, and a medkit.

The oxygen and water bottles were empty, the CO2 scrubber was on its last legs, the vacuum was full of J'kabi puke, and I never wanted to see a waste dehydrator again, let alone use one. The only usable items left in the medkit were half a tube of the antirad/vitamix blend, a couple sheets of NeoSkin, and the laser sterilizer. 

Everything marked blue or red in the medkit was discarded. I repacked it with the NeoSkin, laser sterilizer, vitamix, and the last full calorie bar. There were still a couple bites left on a second one, and both of us were about to need all the calories we could get. With a quick warning to J'kabi, I chewed up a big bite for myself, then wrapped the last chunk in a bit of wrapper and sent it down for her. A tingle of gratitude warmed the back of my head.

I clipped the medkit to my belt on one side, and the oxygen bottle on the other. There was a refill station by both external airlocks, next to the suit bottles. We'd need one or both of them to still be functional in order to get J'kabi into a suit. If not, there were redundancies on every deck. Surely at least one of them would still be usable.

The CO2 scrubber whined, sputtered, and died. I sighed. I guess we wouldn't be reusing this pod. Without a scrubber, we'd have to burn a bottle of air mix every couple hours to keep the oxygen content at breathable levels. Of course the first pod I'd grabbed had a faulty one. We were literally scheduled to check our emergency equipment next week.

If only the universe would give us catastrophes when they were more convenient, I thought wryly.

When this all went down, I had just gotten out of the shower. My uniform was laid out on my rack. I was just reaching for my jumper top when a shotgun blast of white-hot rock, ceramic, and metal shredded it. The edges barely had time to char before the air left the room. A second later, a foot to the left, and I would not have been alive to save J'kabi. Even a scratch would've halved our odds of survival.

"Warning. Oxygen levels nearing critical levels. Air quality: severe. Estimated time to total depletion: one minute, forty-five seconds. If you would like to leave a final message for your emergency contact, audio recording has been activated."

"Wow, fuck you," I snapped.

I took one last look at the inside of the pod. Though these canvas walls had kept us alive, they would not be missed. The past seventy-seven hours had been hell, and I was more than ready to get moving. I had my supplies, I had no open cuts, and I had J'kabi safe and sound in my belly. 

Here it goes… I thought to myself.

With one last, deep breath, I tapped the control panel on the wall of the pod, and our bubble of safety burst. 

Every orifice in my body tightened. My face and neck swelled as the pressure dropped. My ears popped, and everything went quiet. The canvas pod repacked itself for the next deployment, the whine of its motor reduced to vibrations in the deck below my feet. The silence was absolute.

Space always felt so cold. I knew that was a misconception; space had no temperature, because there was no matter there to have a temperature. Scientifically, space wasn't cold, it was making me cold. What I was feeling was my own heat radiating out of my body.

Yet science lacked the proper terminology to capture the experience of space. The sensations felt by a sentient being did not align with numbers and measurements. Space was cold. Space tingled, like pins and needles in my extremities. Space was light and fast, unburdened by air resistance or atmospheric pressure.

We're in vacuum now, I informed J'kabi.

I know, she replied. You've got me looking through your eyes right now. 

Right, yeah. Sorry, it's a little different doing this with someone who can't do it back. I'm used to people wandering around my head instead of staying where I put them.

…You have no idea how nonsensical that would have sounded to me an hour ago.

You're doing very well, though! I've only ever done this with a handful of non-Ancients before, and most of them freaked out within five minutes.

I can understand why. I literally feel myself floating around in my own stomach right now.

Try swallowing yourself. I'm going to be processing how I feel about that for months after this…

I pushed the thoughts of what we were doing to the back of my mind, getting my bearings once more. The Horizon's Promise was set up like a skyscraper. A transport ship like this operated under continuous acceleration, so its decks were stacked in the direction of thrust to take advantage of thrust gravity. Engineering was the bottom of the ship, then Berthing, where we were. Cargo was a double-deck in the middle, then Mess and Recreation, Navigation, and finally the bridge as a sort of half-deck at the very top. 

We were in the main hall, an octagonal shaft that ran straight down the middle for the whole length of the ship. The once sterile, white-painted metal was dull and dirty, flecked with carbon scoring and the residue of some boiled liquid I didn't want to identify. The edges of the titanium plates at my feet were dented and discolored with heat stains. LEDs flickered in cracked plexiglass housings along the edges of our passageway. That was a good sign for us. There was at least some power.

I chewed my lip, contemplating our options. Cargo and Navigation had exterior airlocks. We had suits in both locations, as well as the gear locker back in Engineering. Ahead of me, the two-inch-thick porthole of the Cargo hatch was completely shattered. Behind me, the Engineering hatch was peppered with marble-sized holes.

That worried me. If the fusion reactor was damaged, it could have irradiated the entire deck. Ancients were no strangers to radiation, but even we had our limits. I didn't want to take the risk until I saw exactly how bad the damage was.

What do you think, Kabs? I asked.

I think that bite of calorie bar is in my hair, she replied. 

Focus, please.

S-sorry… 

She was quiet for a few minutes. I felt her little mind grasping the problem, turning it this way and that, listing pros and cons for every option. I kept my opinions to myself, leaving her to her own devices except to feed her things like floor plans and inventory when she needed more information. 

I don't want to risk it either. Space already tried to microwave me once; I'm not keen to try it again.

Up, then?

Yeah. All the sensor data is routed through the bridge anyway. Let's go Cargo, Navigation, Bridge, pull the black box, and use that to plan our next moves.

I like it. Let's do it.

I pushed off from what had been our floor, getting a feel for the near weightlessness. J'kabi rose inside of me, and I felt a sudden urge to burp. The sphincter to my stomach tightened in response.

For a moment, I was floating peacefully in the air. I closed my eyes, and I was instantly back home, reliving my first day of zero G training. I was so scared the first time the floor didn't come back. I remember spinning there in the void, eyes closed, until my instructor came to my rescue. The sense of calm he imparted through the linking carried me through the rest of that day.

Over the course of several seconds, I drifted down until I landed back on the wall a couple feet aft of where I'd started. Ooh, that was tricky. We had a roll and a pitch spin simultaneously. Probably due to some level of explosive decompression. I wouldn't know where or how bad until I looked at a damage report. It wasn't enough to generate more than slight gravity; no more than one rotation per hour on both axes. We were very, very slowly tumbling out of control, while traveling hundreds of kilometers per second.

Add firing the maneuver jets to our list of tasks when we get up to the bridge, I said. See if we can't get this spin under control.

I let my legs drift out from under me, reaching down to grab a handrail. Under thrust, we used magnetic lifts or ladder rungs welded to the keel side to traverse the central passageway. In zero G though, if all the hatches were open you could tug a rung and float all the way from Engineering to Navigation. No such luck in our case. All doors designated as airtight barriers were set to fail closed.

The muscles in my forearm flexed, adjusting my approach angle. This was why Ancients had such precise control of our musculature. We spent half our lives weightless, pulling maneuvers just like this one. I had to travel almost 10 meters straight up, with spin gravity tugging me backwards and sideways, while accounting for a gradual decline as I approached the axes of rotation. Without the ability to adjust the most minute angles of my trajectory, I could miss my target and fall all the way back to the bottom, overshoot it and cut myself on the shattered porthole, or simply stop dead in the middle of the corridor with nothing to grab onto.

Once my approach was perfect, I pulled.

J'kabi hit the bottom of my stomach and wiggled a little. My heart skipped a beat as I realized that I'd forgotten to account for the extra half-kilogram of free-floating mass inside of me. Her inertia was working against me, slowing my ascent. It wasn't much. I could still make it. I should still make it…

Everything okay? J'kabi asked. Your heart sped up.

It was close. Too close for comfort. Fortunately, traveling toward the center of the spin lessened the impact of her extra weight, and I was just able to catch the rung below the Cargo hatch with my fingertips.

Yeah… yeah, we're fine.

The hatch was machined from a single piece of four-inch-thick, reinforced titanium on a sliding rail. On the keel side, a smaller, manual hatch allowed access from the ladder in the event of power loss. In the event of atmosphere loss, however, both hatches were sealed with an electromagnetic lock that even a Mulvidian alpha female couldn't budge. 

A cautious yank of the crank wheel confirmed that the emergency systems still had juice. If I had my tools, I could pull a panel and cut the feed lines, but I dared not try in my current state. Effort was oxygen, and every sharp edge threatened to pop the balloon that was me.

That left the porthole, a circular opening maybe 40 centimeters wide. I could probably squeeze through there. I was pretty broad in the hips though; it was going to be close. Thankfully I'd lost some weight on the calorie bar diet, so I had more wiggle room than usual.

Kicking off from the floor, I drifted up to examine the hole more closely. The edges were mostly clear, save for a few shards of reinforced glass laminate poking past the rubber sealant. I pressed my fingertip against one of them. It wasn't too sharp, but it could still cause a cut or a scrape if I forced myself past it wrong. It wasn't loose enough to remove, either.

I gave a mental sigh, and yanked my tattered jumper over my head. Like I'd told J'kabi, modesty was the least of our concerns. If I was lucky, I'd get a vacuum suit top in the next room, and if I wasn't, I'd just have to be tits out in space for a while. 

With a foot gently tapping against the hatch to keep me upright, I stuffed my jumper into the groove around the perimeter of the porthole. I felt a small twinge of nervous embarrassment in my head as J'kabi realized that I was topless. Before she got a handle on her thoughts, I caught a few memories of her sneaking glances at my ass or my abs while I was changing, and just a little hint of sexual attraction. J'kabi you little minx. Was Mrrg right?

I bit my metaphorical tongue. That was something to unpack later, assuming we survived this. I wasn't entirely sure of my own feelings for her, and I didn't want to make judgments on that until after we got off this emotionally-charged rollercoaster.

I unclipped my belt and passed it through the hole first. Using my hands to press my jumper firmly into the groove, I turned my body perpendicular to the hole and pulled the two of us up and through.

It was tight. My hips scraped against the sides, and I felt more than one shard poking me through the padding of my jumper. My heart stopped and so did the rest of me. J'kabi bumped gently into my diaphragm. 

With shaky fingers, I felt around the edges where the pressure was the strongest, and found fabric. The glass hadn't pierced the material. I was still protected.

I placed my hands on either side of the porthole, and started to ease my hips up and out with very cautious wiggles. Inch by inch, rearranging my musculature to make room around the sharpest pieces. Once the widest part of my hips were on the other side of the porthole, the rest of me slipped right through without incident.

Just like J'kabi going down my throat, I thought, unbidden.

Heeeeyyyy!

Sorry. Intrusive thought.

The cargo hold was an open area. The corridor turned into a ladder at this point, with two tracks on either side for the magnetic lifts. I scooped up my belt as I floated past, and snagged a rung about halfway up to survey the damage.

It was a mess. Pieces of about a hundred black magnetic crates were strewn across the walls, floors, and ceiling, broken apart by the crash and reattaching wherever they landed. We'd been transporting fertile soil for the agricultural moons in the Cygnus Loop. Rich brown dirt was strewn everywhere, its moisture boiled away into a light fog that blanketed the still, empty space. 

Here and there amongst the shattered crates and scattered earth, I saw the telltale blue-green of Seirogi blood. Ak must have been in here when it happened. A long, grisly streak smeared across the port wall pointed to his fate. I turned my eyes away. I already knew what they'd find, and I didn't want to see it.

The airlock was to starboard. There were two doors that led to the outside: the shuttle bay doors for loading cargo, and the crew airlock where the suit locker was. The interior door to the crew airlock was blown off its hinges, the rent metal scraps that remained bent nearly in half by some massive force. Bits of magnetic debris peppered the doorframe.

I plotted a course through the destruction, and kicked off the ladder. Here at the center of the ship, the pitch spin was at its weakest. As I approached the outer edge of the vast, empty compartment though, the roll spin would pick back up. I had to arc my trajectory so I'd land where the airlock would be, instead of where it was at the moment. 

My feet touched down on the starboard wall, calves flexing to counteract the return of tangential velocity. J'kabi lurched in my stomach, bumping against the inside of my abs. I gave the outside a reassuring pat, which she returned. Steeling myself, I gritted my teeth and poked my head through the battered door frame to see if the cosmos was kind enough to grant us a miracle.

It wasn't.

* * * * *

I was very suddenly back in my body. One second, we were peering through the door of the cargo airlock, the next, crushing disappointment overwhelmed my frazzled brain, and I was once again staring at slimy blue-black folds as warm, squishy muscle massaged my nude body.

My legs kicked before my brain caught up to them. Fortunately, with how slimy and squishy it was in here, my feet just glanced off the pillowy ridges without injury to either of us. A splash of stomach juices floated into the air.

"What happened, I wanna see!" I protested.

Cygnus's mind touched my own again, and my head throbbed. It felt like my frontal lobe was trying to escape out the front of my skull. The comforting presence of my friend retreated, leaving me with a bizarre feeling of isolation. 

I'm sorry. You've taken all you can handle. Your mind's too overwhelmed for me to do more than talk.

"Can you try again?" I pleaded. "Please, I wanna see!"

J'kabi, you need a break, Cygnus warned. You're not built for this. Take a breather, and we'll try again later.

"Okay…" A gentle prod sent me sympathy. Even though the contact made my temples throb, I tried my best to hold onto it as it drained away. The inside of my own head had never felt lonely before.

Alone in a stomach, with no hope of getting out any time soon.

Without Cygnus's calming presence, the primal fears I'd kept at bay began to resurface. The tip of my tail curled and uncurled against my fleshy roof. I slipped my feet into the pool of juices at the bottom of her stomach, feeling their warmth run across my skin. I trapped a deep ridged fold between my legs and squeezed it for comfort. Blood pulsed through the veins as various muscle groups contracted and relaxed against my thighs. 

Grinding against me, trying to break me down into more easily digestible chunks. 

No. That's not what was happening. I mean it was, but that's just because the stomach did that to everything. It was a stomach. That was its whole purpose. I took shuddering breaths through my nose. We weren't using it for that purpose. I was not in here to be food. On top of that, I was not going to digest before we found my suit. It would be a couple hours at least before I had to worry… probably… 

Don't think about it, don't think about it…

Helloooo? Cygnus interrupted.

"S-sorry, what did you say?" 

Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news first?

"I-I don't think i-it really matters much…" I pouted.

The good news is we found the source of the explosive decompression.

"Hoorraaaayyy."

The bad news is, whatever punched out the airlock also shredded our suits.

"Yeah I kind of guessed that." My leg trembled, and the squishy muscle squirmed between my thighs.

I'm gonna see what I can find here that's salvageable. The refill station's fucked, but there's a bottle or two of air mix that survived. Maybe we can get some suit pieces too.

"O-okay…"

Cygnus's body bent forward. I rocked in the stomach like a hammock. The floating blobs of bluish stomach juices impacted the back wall, surface tension sucking them down into the pockets between the ridges. Down by my feet, I felt the mush of the calorie bar starting to drain into her intestines. The water level dropped, leaving my bare skin cold and a little tingly.

That could be me soon. 

No, it couldn't. It wasn't going to be. I had told Siggy already that I trusted her. She was gonna get me out of here. I knew it, and perhaps more importantly, I believed it. This was a protective measure. I would in fact be dead right now if we hadn't done this!

If only my dumb instincts would get the message, I'd be fine. Primitive Aizu brain didn't care about such trivial things as oxygen and spaceships. Most of the fauna on my homeworld were very big and very hungry for little pink snacks. With lizards the size of an Aëan bus, birds with 10-meter wingspans, and giant moss salamanders that were damn near invisible until they moved, primitive Aizu brain was extremely concerned with not getting eaten. I was in a stomach, and it wanted me to get out of the stomach. It was taking conscious effort to stop myself from kicking and scratching with my toe claws. 

Oh, fuck yes! The atmosphere pod survived! More air, fresh medpack, fresh CO2 scrubber… worst comes to worst, we can buy ourselves another week with this!

"C-cool…"

It was getting hard to breathe. Was the O2 pill running out already? No, it was still bubbling away in a fold somewhere. The air in my lungs still satisfied, but it felt like I needed more and more to keep myself alert.

Hey, I don't know what you're doing in there, but it's starting to give me a stomach ache.

I tried to release the stomach fold, but my legs wouldn't respond to my commands. My mouth was dry, my head was light, and I was starting to get tunnel vision as the light from my headlamp grew dimmer and dimmer.

"S-siggy…? I-I think I-I'm having a p-panic at..tack…"

Oh, Kabs… The genuine worry and compassion in her voice almost made me burst into tears. Do you need out? I can get us somewhere I can pop this pod.

"N-no! I-I… I d-don't w-want to waste it, y-you just g-got it. I-I can h…h-handle it. Just i-ignore me." 

Kabs, your two choices are come out or calm down. If you start hyperventilating in there, you'll use up more oxygen than I can replace, and then we're both fucked. We can reuse the pod if we need to.

"B-but that'll w-waste air… H-how will I get into my suit?"

Don't worry about the future right now. We'll make it work.

I tried to hold my breath, but my chest spasmed. The air was forced out of my mouth with a painful cough. My eyes were starting to tunnel again, and it only went away when I took short, quick breaths. Already, the air in here was starting to taste stale.

"What… w-what do I do? H-how do I calm d-down…?"

Um… breathe slowly. In through your nose and out through your mouth. While you're doing that, name five things you can see.

"I-I see a stomach, w-which is kind of my problem right now."

Fuck, okay… um. The other senses are probably out too then… Shit, um…

The slimy ridge slipped from between my legs as they finally obeyed me. I switched to rubbing my foot through the groove instead. It took concentration to do that. The zigzag pattern was engaging, and the soft slickness felt oddly nice on my toes. It wasn't enough to calm me down, but it was something.

The pain in my temples flared up again and the twitching, squirming, slimy stomach was quite suddenly replaced with the fully nude exterior of my Ancient friend's body.

"C-Cygnus! What the fuck?!"

I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I didn't know what else to do! All of the usual grounding exercises hinge on your surroundings, so I thought maybe I could shock you out of it, but I didn't want it to be a bad shock and make it worse…

"So you sent me mental nudes?!"

W-well you got all nervous when I took my top off, and you let slip that you stared at my ass when I got dressed—

"…y-you weren't supposed to see that! I-I… th-there's a… an interesting… nebula? Back there…?"

Kabs, eighty percent of my skin is nebula. N-not that I'm saying I mind it! I don't! Really, I don't! I just… the body around me swayed, inertia dragging me along a half-second later …fuck, now we're both panicky, and I'm starting to feel woozy…

"Shit." I was too, though I couldn't be sure if it was lack of oxygen or my continuing panic attack. "M-maybe popping that pod is the best option after all."

I'll head toward Mess and Rec. 

The body around me went into motion again. Muscles external to the stomach shifted against my side and my back as Cygnus twisted and weaved through the debris field that our cargo hold had become. Muscles internal to the stomach clenched against me, grinding that sticky gel residue into my skin. 

To take my mind off of the full-body groping I was getting, I turned my thoughts to the far better sight that had been implanted in my brain. Despite the initial shock, her strategy had merit. Even if she weren't absolutely gorgeous, the cosmic tapestry running across her skin was so visually busy that it consumed my attention. 

The white and pink nebulas that covered her torso and her right breast spiraled outward from a ringlike galaxy on her left breast. The nipple was almost lost in the whites and oranges, only visible by its shadow. Beneath that breast, an irregular spattering of white supergiants dotted the area where her stomach was. I had a vague memory of laying on that pattern a couple days ago. 

Her hips were like the sky at twilight, deep blue and covered in stars. If I looked close enough, I saw that some of those larger stars weren't actually stars at all, but galaxies! There was also this eye-like gas cloud in the… the crease of her, um… her pubic mound. 

It was only fair. She'd seen me naked already. And she did send this of her own free will. It wouldn't be bad of me to look a little right and a little lower, right?

We came to a stop and my cheek smushed into the stomach wall. Instantly, my fragile calm was shattered and reality crashed back in. I peeled my face away from the twitching flesh, strands of gel sticking and then dripping.

I both felt and heard the pop of the shelter going up. I heard it! Sound had returned! Precious, life-sustaining atmosphere was just on the other side of this fleshy prison.

I’m not proud to say I lost all composure then. My whole body collapsed into trembles that wracked my tiny frame and robbed me of any control I had left. My legs twitched, errant kicks smearing the thick wrinkles around. I wasn’t even trying to control my breathing anymore, panting with my mouth wide open. Some of the gooey coating dripped onto my tongue, and I retched and spat. Though it was mostly flavorless, my mind told me it was the worst thing imaginable. 

A powerful squeeze seized me, stilling my pathetic squirming through sheer force. Cygnus’s throat squelched, the esophageal sphincter unraveling moments before my head was pushed through it. 

My exit was much faster than my entrance. I was blinded by her slimy midnight blue throat, my headlamp smothered in its clutches. I felt a squeeze ripple up my entire body, and the next thing I knew I was passing her lips to spill out uselessly onto her galactic abs.

I clung to her, digging my fingernails into her skin. My toe claws clenched, little pinpoints finding purchase around her navel area. When she reached down to touch me, my tail wrapped tight around her wrist and didn’t let go.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I whimpered.

“Hey, it’s okay, Kabs,” Cygnus soothed. Though her voice projected calm, I sensed a little surprise at my reaction.

“N-no, it’s n-not!” I said. Tears welled at the edges of my sky blue corneas, dripping down onto the white supergiants beneath her left breast. I was behind those stars, only a few seconds ago. “W-we barely g-got a-anything done b..buh…b-because I c-couldn’t h-handle myself!”

“Kabs, you were literally swallowed alive. I would have been more surprised if you didn’t freak out.”

“Y-yeah, but w-we can’t keep going like th-this… st-stopping every five m-minutes to let me h-have a p-panic attack…”

The hand at my back hesitated, then rested on top of me. Her thumb stroked my side. My tail wrapped tighter around her wrist and pulled her closer. The weight was comforting.

“I told you already, don’t worry so much about the air. There’s spare bottles all throughout the ship. We’ll have enough. Especially now that we have a pod with a working scrubber.”

“B-but we don’t know wh-what’s survived.. Wh-what if we don’t find more? What if we c-can’t assemble a full s-suit ever and we’re trapped here like this and a-all of th-this w–”

“Hey.” Cygnus’s voice took on an uncharacteristically commanding tone, and I quailed a little. Her hand rubbed on my back. “Thinking like that won’t get us anywhere! I said I was going to get you out of here, yeah?”

“Y-yeah…”

“So I’m going to get you out of here. I’ve lived in space my entire life. I know this ship from stem to stern. We will find more air, and we will get you into a suit. I promise you, everything’s gonna turn out okay.”

“O…o-okay…”

The abs underneath me rose, pressing into my cheek as Cygnus took a deep breath. I nuzzled my cheek against them, smearing stomach goop onto her skin. I probably looked icky right now. The arm in front of my face was covered in that same stomach goop. The blue, semi transparent gel overlaid on my pink skin was giving me gross purple splotches.

“Sorry… I didn’t mean to yell,” Cygnus said after a couple more deep breaths. “I know this is scary for you. It’s scary for me too. I’m trying my best to hold it together, but all I want to do right now is curl up in a ball and cry.”

“Oh Siggy…” I gave the underside of her breast a gentle kiss, and squeezed her wrist with my tail.

“I know you’re relying on me for emotional support, but sometimes I won’t be able to provide that. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to help. I just don’t have the emotional space to take on more than I already have. I’m sorry I snapped at you, and I’m sorry if it happens again.”

“It’s okay… I’m sorry too… I-I don’t want to give you more things to worry about.”

Cygnus nodded, and rested her back against the wall. We lay there for a long while, each lost in our own thoughts. I felt the tug of her mind through her warm, starry skin. It was like a bottomless pool, tempting me at all times to dive in. If I wasn’t careful, I’d find her replying to my thoughts, or me replying to hers. Each emotion was shared. It was a form of wordless communication for which I’d seen no equal in the entire galaxy. Ancients truly were remarkable.

That was part of my problem, I think. From the very beginning of our friendship, I had been in awe of her because she was an Ancient. As a result, I had saddled her with the weight of my unreasonable and uneducated notions of what an Ancient was. All the knowledge, experience, and accomplishments of her race… I placed them all on her shoulders. Of course when things went wrong, I looked to her for everything. To lead, to comfort, to fix it all and make everything better. Laying here on her abs, I was struck with the realization that Cygnus and I were the same age. She was 22 by the UGSC, too… wait, twenty-one?! I was actually older than her!

I looked up at her face, between her breasts. A blush stole over my cheeks, but I was a good girl and I didn’t sneak any more looks. As she looked back, her yellow, sunlike eyes turning orange with exhaustion, I saw her in an entirely new light. She was more like me than I had ever cared to realize. We were both just young adults, doing our best in these near-insurmountable circumstances.

I’m so sorry Cygnus, I thought. I’m sorry for putting you on a pedestal you didn’t ask for. I’m sorry that it took me this long to see you for who you are, and not what I thought you were…

Her index finger stroked my head a couple times. I didn’t know if she could hear me or not, but I knew the sentiment had reached her all the same.

We were going to get out of here. We had to. I just… had to learn how to deal with our survival method, somehow. Time, rest, and some emotional processing would help some. How much longer that enabled me to hold out though remained to be seen. 

“It was fifteen, by the way,” she said, startling me out of my thoughts.

“Huh?”

“You were saying we couldn’t do anything because you only lasted five minutes. It was fifteen.”

“Oh…”

“That’s also the second-longest a non-Ancient has ever linked minds with me. You should be proud of yourself, instead of beating yourself up.”

“Thanks.” I stretched my tired, achy limbs, then cuddled back under her breast. I was starting to get sticky. “Who… who was first? I-If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Old girlfriend. Nobody you would know.”

“Ohhh. So you’re um… g-gay?” 

Try as I might to restrain myself, hope–and shame for having that hope–welled up in my chest. I clamped down on it before it could slip through our connection; this was nowhere near the right time for that. I felt those eyes burning a hole in the top of my head, but I didn’t look up. I wiggled to the left a little to put her breast between me and her gaze.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I tell every human who’s asked me that question,” she said. I peeked out from behind her breast to see those eyes piercing me. “Once a species’ reproductive technology advances far enough, the societal pressure to be heteronormative disintegrates in a generation. The concept of gender’s gone in two.”

“O-oh! I didn’t mean it like that! Aizu are kinda like that too. Not with reproductive technology or anything, but more like… communal relationships, I guess? It’s pretty normal for multiple couples to make up one family unit, and swap partners and stuff. Males, females, and everything in between.”

“Oh, sometimes we do that too. I actually have three moms.”

“That’s really cool! I have two moms and three dads!”

“Oh wow. Sounds like you’ve got a big family.”

“When you have 16 kids, every extra set of hands helps.”

The steady breathing under me stopped as Cygnus took that in. “Sixteen?”

“Yup. Nine sisters and six brothers.”

“Holy fuck. That’s almost unimaginable to me.”

“Well, this is what happens when a prey species achieves an industrial revolution. We’re like… what’re those cute little fuzzy animals Mei loves… the ones with the big ears?”

“Rabbits?”

“Yeah, rabbits! Aizu are like if rabbits were the dominant species on Earth instead of humans. Big families, lots of kids.”

“For Ancients, polyamory is popular for the exact opposite reason. Birth quotas are very tightly controlled. Your chances of having a kid go up if you get three or four people to go in on it with you.”

My tail was cramping. I unwrapped it from around her wrist, draping it limply against her arm. I started tracing little circles around the stars on her belly. Her skin lit up in a trail that followed my finger, like a comet’s tail. I tapped on the stars, and they twinkled at me.

“When we get out of here, maybe we can meet each other’s families,” I said. 

Cygnus gave a wry laugh.

“I’d love to meet yours, but it’s gonna be a while before I can face mine. Linking and all…”

“Ohhhh, right. That might be a little awkward.” 

“I can already hear Momma Etyiashi. ‘Aliota, we could barely get you to eat your vegetables, and you go out and eat the tiny people now?’ ”

“Heeeyyyy!” I pouted.

“It’s what she’d say, I don’t know what to tell you. Lifers—er, Ancients who never leave the colony fleet—Lifers have no filter because they don’t know that lying exists.”

“Vegetables are tasty, too! I dunno what your problem was.”

“Vegetables are good. Hyponderas suck. Uhm… they’re this plant we curated. Think potatoes, rhubarb, lettuce, and blueberries all in one plant, except every part of it just tastes vaguely sweet and grassy. And they’re like seventy-five percent of our hydroponics, so we ate them every day.”

I felt curiosity rise in my chest, and with it, nervousness. I bit the inside of my cheek, unsure if I should ask the question dancing on the tip of my tongue.

“What did… what did I taste like?”

Cygnus sat up more, and I rolled down her front. I ended up in her lap, looking at her face naked and upside down. Oh shit, I forgot that I was naked! My cheeks burned with embarrassment and I hurriedly covered my breasts.

“You know, I wasn’t… actually paying attention. Like all that sticks out to me right now is that you were staticky from the sterilizer and when I put you in my mouth, your hair shocked my tongue.”

“Oh.” 

I didn’t know why, but I was disappointed with that answer. At the same time though, I didn’t know what answer I wanted to hear. If I tasted good, I’d be a little freaked out that even my friends found me tasty. On the other hand though, if I tasted bad, I’d feel guilty that Cygnus kept having to stick my stinky, bad-tasting body in her mouth. It was a no-win question for me.

“You didn’t taste bad, by any means. You kinda just tasted like… nothing.”

“I’ll take it.”

Cygnus snapped her fingers and slapped the floor, bouncing us a couple inches into the air. I clung to her pant leg with my toes.

“Sterile, that’s the word! You tasted sterile.”

“Must’ve been the sterilizer,” I teased. 

“Yeah probably could’ve put that together faster.” She scrunched her nose at me. “I’m tired, okay?”

“I think we both are.”

Cygnus yawned, resting her head against the canvas wall, then wiggled down onto the floor. 

“Pretty sure neither of us have slept well,” she murmured.

Wasn’t that the truth. I might have spent most of the last three days asleep, but that had been to heal from almost dying, and it hadn't been restful at all. As emotions calmed, exhaustion filled my bones, making my limbs heavy and clumsy.

“Maybe that’s why we had such a rough start.”

“Agreed…” Without looking down, she fumbled around in the bag at her side, then tossed the sterilizer at me. “Clean yourself up; you’re all sticky. Then we’ll take a nap, and try again in the morning…”

* * * * *

“You got the stuff?”

Mei was waiting for me outside the gym in yoga pants and a sports bra. After shift workouts were about the only times I saw her hair down. She had such long, beautiful hair. Jet black and pin straight, with a small streak of white at her temple. She used to tell me it was from hitting her head against the ladderwell her first time in zero G; a story I’d gotten probably fifty times. 

My own hair was done up in a messy bun, curls piled almost as high as J’kabi was tall and barely held together with a loaned scrunchie. This purple mane of mine was always breaking the ones I bought, but for some reason Mei had magic scrunchies. She refused to tell me where she bought them, too!

Ancients normally worked out in skintight bodysuits made with thin fabric that produced an endothermic (cooling) reaction when wet. Whatever material we made them out of though, I couldn’t find outside of the fleet. Thus, I too was in yoga pants and a sports bra. It was almost as good, which surprised me the first time I tried it.

“Okay I know that’s a reference, but you’ve never told me what it was referencing,” I said.

“Old Hollywood flicks, cop dramas and stuff. Means whoever asked it is looking for drugs.”

“What are drugs?”

“...Are you being serious right now?”

Sweat cooled on my neck and shoulders as the forced air system kicked on above me. I patted my neck and arms with a soft microfiber cloth, then tossed it in the laundry chute.  

“Assume that I grew up extremely sheltered in what could easily be described to other species as a utopia with little to no systemic issues or material concerns. Then you tell me if I’m being serious.”

“Damn, okay. You don’t know what drugs are. But you know alcohol, right? It’s stuff like that. Makes your brain feel happy.”

“Poisons, got it.”

“Accurate.” Mei twisted a strand of her long, silky hair between slender fingertips. “Soooo?”

“So what?”

“So do you have something to make my brain feel happy?”

“Ohhh! That’s what you’re asking about!”

“And it finally sinks in!” Mei threw her hands up in the air. “I thought you guys were supposed to have superbrains or whatever.”

“I use the extra wrinkles to hide my snacks. Here.” I tapped my wrist comm and flicked an image over to her. “You get one.”

"Scrooge."

"I don't get that reference either."

"It means you're being stingy." She pulled up her phone, and her eyes went wide. "Oh my goooooooddddd!"

"Keep your voice down!"

"Sorry, but she's just so cuuuuuute!"

Mei leaned against me, bumping my tit with her head. She excitedly zoomed in on the picture I had sent her: J'kabi curled up in her little shoebox bed, fast asleep and cuddling her tail. She had this adorable smile as she nibbled on the little tuft of fur at the tip. She must've been having a good dream.

"Thank you,” she said, dabbing happy tears from her eyes with the strap of her sports bra. “This'll give me serotonin for the rest of the week."

"You're welcome." I gave her a peck on top of her head. 

“Grooooosss.” She gave me a playful nudge. “You need a shower. You’re all sweaty.”

“You gonna join me again?” I tickled her ribs, and she squealed.

“Cygnus!” She feigned shock. “I can’t believe you’d suggest fraternization between the Nav Officer and the Chief Engineer!”

“Oh hush. You know Skips doesn’t care. So long as we do our jobs, our off time is ours to do with as we please.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. Some humans, with their eight tongue muscles, could turn the tip of their tongues into a three-leafed clover. Ancients had twenty-four. This tripled range of motion coupled with the finest muscle control in the galaxy made our tongues deadly weapons in any form of unclothed combat. 

To demonstrate this, I turned my tongue into a nine-leafed clover, and wiggled every tip at her individually. Her almond-shaped eyes widened again, and a blush swept across her cheeks. 

“You know I don’t like telling you no, but I have the midwatch tonight,” she said. “Skips wants that slingshot course by 0800.”

I pulled my tongue back into my mouth through partially clenched teeth. 

“No luck convincing him otherwise?”

“Nope. I gave him everything you gave me. All the star charts you got from your colony fleet, all the data from the asteroid spotters, and all the specs on our kinetic shielding. He says the risk is still minimal.”

“Mei, I really don’t want to go home through the Arcturus system. I have a bad feeling about this.”

Mei pushed herself off my chest, and stood up on her tippy toes to kiss me. I kissed back, but the sinking feeling in my gut didn’t go away. Her mind brushed mine, full of happy thoughts and reasonable logic. 

“I’ve done the calculations myself. You know how good I am at math, and I swear to god if you say it’s because I’m Asian I’ll stab you with my hairpins.”

“Again, not a reference I understand,” I said.

“Racial stereotype stuff; you probably wouldn’t get it even if I explained it.” She kissed me again, and transferred the math through her lips. “See? What are the chances it goes wrong?”

“One in eight-point-two million…” I pouted.

“And if it does go wrong, what are the chances of survival?”

“Seventy-six-point-two-three-six percent.”

“So why are you getting so uptight about this, you big worry wart?”

I sighed, and rolled my eyes. This was one aspect of dealing with the younger species that I was still getting used to: their eagerness to take risks. Yii and Seirogi were pretty good about sticking to the beaten paths, but Humans and Mulvidians saw the galaxy as their playground. Humans especially. Space was their metaphorical wild west, just waiting to be tamed. It was my experience, and the experience of my people, however, that space was much more likely to tame you.

“Because it’s more than triple the chance that something goes wrong than if we followed the shipping lanes. Like everybody else does.”

Mei giggled, and gave me a playful shove. She stepped past me, heading to her workout. I followed her with my eyes. Damn, yoga pants really did make her ass look good.

“If we all did what everyone else does, we’d never discover new things,” she said, giving me a sly smile that hinted at a double entendre. It was my turn to blush. “See you at breakfast, Star Girl.”