Mew
by 8-bit
* * *The transport ship bumped and hummed and thrummed as it dropped through the lower atmosphere and Dana did her best to hold on to her lunch.
There were four of them in the cabin, two to a side: Dana and her bunkmate Kit on the left, their sergeant Max and the only male member of the group, Glass, on the right. The seats were padded and they were strapped in tightly so that, if it came down to it, they might survive an impact of over a hundred miles per hour. While that made them more safe, it also added to the seasickness—every little motion of the ship went right through Dana’s body.
Glass grinned at her across the small space.
“You look green,” he said.
“I’m fine,” Dana said. She was not fine. She felt something in her throat that was like a burp but not a burp, and she took deep breaths until it went away.
“Better not think about anything gross.”
“Fuck off.”
“Like boogers.”
The ship took a particularly violent lurch. Dana’s fingers wrapped around the arm rests.
“Hey, you ever eat shellfish?” he asked.
“Unless you’d like to walk the rest of the way, shut it,” Max said, without looking over.
“Yes Ma’am.”
Bump, bump. Until she joined the military Dana never knew that air could be so bumpy. She let her eyes unfocus slightly, keeping a point on the opposite wall within her field of vision but not looking directly at it. It was trick she’d learned in college on those nights when she was too drunk to close her eyes without getting dizzy.
“Just about there,” a voice said on the intercom. The shuddering evened out and there was another violent jerk as the thrusters came on. They were traveling straight down now. The little ship didn’t need a runway: it could land on a patch of grass only half as big as a tennis court.
She didn’t even feel it when they touched down. The robotics on the landers were so deft that it seemed like they were still in the air, but then the machinery around them wound down and the entire ship seemed to sigh and the doors opened.
Fresh, cool air filled the cabin. Dana breathed in through her nose. The air was fragrant, vaguely floral, unlike any scent on Earth yet somehow familiar. A tangible (and universally unacknowledged) relief passed over each of their faces, even Max’s. They unbuckled the many cumbersome buckles and straps and climbed out of the cramped cabin one by one, blinking and taking in their new surroundings.
It looked like Vermont.
Or maybe Scotland.
They’d landed in a flat area amidst green hills that stretched out in the distance behind the ship, green grassy humps that rose one atop another for miles but stopped short of becoming mountains. In the other direction the land dropped off and became flatter, and in the distance below became forest, visible only as a tiny green line in the haze on the edge of sight. The area they were parked in was about the size and shape of a football field. At the low end of it, on the forest side, was a flat grey building, the temporary base set up by the crew that had been there a week earlier.
The four of them turned around slowly, just looking. Landing on another planet wasn’t like taking a flight to Detroit. It was ok to do that. There wasn’t anyone around to call them tourists.
“Yeah, we’re going to need a better name for this place than MX2369-6,” Glass said.
They filed towards the building through the tall grass that was not quite grass. It was thicker, and its leaves wider than the grass back home, but it was still basically grass. Dana knew that if they decided to visit the forest the trees would look strange but would still be basically trees. The one thing she consistently felt when visiting an Earth-type planet wasn’t fear or anticipation anymore, it was deja vu: no matter where you went things tended to share the same basic shapes, because everything shared the same physics, and the human eye recognized all of those shapes by the age of two. Animal life was where it got weird—sometimes very weird— but plant life was always eerily similar to Earth’s.
The little makeshift base was surrounded by a wire fence at a distance of a hundred feet. As they approached it they saw a sign on the gate, printed in large red letters:
NO MEN BEYOND THIS POINT
Glass stopped. “What the shit?”
Dana walked around him and looked at it. “Heh.”
Behind them the transport ship was already lifting off, leaving its cargo of crates and boxes behind like strange square droppings.
“Sarge?”
Max dropped her pack, slipped a cigarette out of her breast pocket, and lit it.
“Hm,” she said. She squinted past the sign at the building, then at the line of trees on the edge of sight. “Ok. You wait here. Some of the locals are supposed to be in there, it probably has something to do with that.”
Information was always scarce in the first few days on a new world. The first people down—those very few and small crews like Dana’s—did a lot of learning very fast. Then the information was passed up through the ranks where it was presumably analyzed, and then, weeks later, it would be passed back down to everyone else, using different language, with some facts embellished and others left out entirely.
In the meantime those first crews—the expendables—found ways of trading unsanitized information amongst each other in the interest of staying alive.
Sometimes they did it with hand-painted red signs.
“Kit, you stay out here with him. Dana, you’re with me. Let’s find out what problem the locals have with our hairy-faced gender.”
“Maybe they met one,” Dana offered.
“Ohmygod so funny,” Glass said. “Maybe they want girls because they’re easier to slow cook, or it’s easier to plant eggs in their brains.”
“They’re human, dipshit.”
“Yes they are,” Max said, “So if you see anyone, be nice. You shouldn’t though—this is wilderness even by this planet’s standards.” She went in through the gate.
The building was a squat grey matchbox made entirely of thick, insulated plastic panels, six feet by eight. They were light but durable: a giant cube of them could be air dropped into almost any location and formed into a workable structure within hours. It wouldn’t stand up to hurricane force winds but otherwise it was good enough until something permanent could be built. They went in and down a narrow grey hall, their boots making hollow clomps on the plastic floor, and Max knocked twice on a door marked MEDICAL and opened it without waiting for an answer.
It wasn’t much as far as medical bays went. Two cots along the back wall, two on the right, and some square cabinets made of the same grey plastic as the rest of the building here and there. A cheerful looking cadet stood by one of them holding a syringe and some gauze. Her hair was long and black and tucked back under a cap, and she had the fair skin and hint of freckles that was the trademark of the Black Irish.
“Hi!” she said. “You must be Sergeant Slate. Private Quinn.”
Dana and Max didn’t even look at her.
They were looking at the cot in the center of the room. Three girls in their late teens were sitting on it, in a neat row.
All three girls stood up and smiled brightly when they saw Max and Dana.
The one in the middle was Asian, or mostly. Her eyes were slate grey and more rounded than usual, but there was no doubt about it: her ancestors had come from the island of Japan on Earth. Her hair was cut just above the line of her shoulders so that it swung when she moved her head.
The one on the right had curly, sandy blonde hair tied back with some sort of vine, and a healthy tan all over her body.
The one on the left was a redhead. Her hair was straight, copper colored, and her skin was so fair it was almost white, except for a slight sunburn on her shoulders. Freckles were sprinkled across her nose and cheeks, across her chest, and here and there elsewhere.
Dana could see what their skin looked like from head to toe because they were wearing almost nothing but skin.
Almost.
Their outfits were identical and resembled, to Dana’s eyes, sexy Halloween cat costumes. The design was... minimalist.
There were four parts to the outfits. The “top” was little more than a bra, made out of a furry material that looked to be real leopard skin. It was small and strapless, just enough to cover the girls’ breasts, and narrowing to a thin two inches as it ran under their arms.
The bottom was a loin cloth made of the same material. There was a small triangle in front and another in back, held in place by a leather belt. The two sections were just large enough to cover the girls’ sex—there was a wide space on each hip, at least four inches, that was just skin.
That was all quaint and tribal and expected, but it wasn’t what Max and Dana were staring at.
Each of the girls wore a pair of small fuzzy cat ears in their hair. The ears poked straight up and were pointed forward, just like they’d be if they belonged to actual house cats. Dana couldn’t see how they were attached; there must have been thin leather straps hidden somewhere beneath the girls’ hair.
And completing each outfit was a fuzzy cat tail made of the same spotted material, attached to the back of the loin cloth. The tails were long enough to touch the floor and have about a foot left over, so that they each curled where they came to rest behind the girls’ ankles.
Quinn stood between the two groups of women like an intermediary at an international meeting.
“Max, Dana: meet Am, Cleopatra, and Isis.”
The girls waved and smiled brightly.
“Mew,” said the one in the middle.
Max was the one to stop staring first. She leaned towards Dana and said, under her breath: “Save any clever comments for your diary.”
Dana nodded understanding with a barely visible tick of her head.
“So!” Quinn clapped her hands together. “Let’s get you guys up to speed. First thing is that they do speak basic English, but keep it to short words and short, direct sentences. It’s not their first language or even their second. We think they preserved a knowledge of English sort of how we preserved a working knowledge of Latin. That would make sense, because any documents they had left over after the crash would have been written in English.
“These three girls have been nice enough to let us run blood tests and stuff. Almost no one else will. They’re afraid of technology— mainly electronics, but pretty much anything that they can’t tell how it works by looking at it. Some of them are slowly agreeing to meet with us but only if we leave all gadgets behind, including vehicles, which means we have to walk for miles just to say ‘hi’.”
“Why aren’t these three afraid of us?” Max asked.
“Because they’re teenagers and they’re testing the bounds of their society like any teenagers. Also, they live separately from the rest. That part’s kind of interesting, I’ll get to it in a moment.”
As Max and Quinn talked the three girls poked around the room, picking things up and putting things down and opening whatever drawers weren’t locked (most were). They were very... well, curious. Their movements were graceful and had an unstudied elegance. When they picked something up to inspect it, they didn’t put their hands right down on it and grasp it like a person from Earth would—rather, their hands would move towards it from the side with a sort of backwards curving motion that seemed to start at the wrist, then their fingers would wrap around it carefully, then they’d pick it up and duck their heads down towards it. Then, usually, they’d sniff it.
Dana waited for Quinn to address the elephant in the room. Eventually Quinn caught her looks and did that.
“They worship cats,” she said. “But you got that part. It’s actually less of a religious thing and more of a cultural thing; even the non-religious dress and talk like that.”
“They have cat atheists. I love it,” Dana said.
“Yes, well, it’s not any sillier than worshipping snow peas or adverbs or giant invisible men with giant invisible beards,” Quinn said. “They take it very seriously. In fact, killing a cat here for any reason, even self defense, is punished by death. Notice I used the word punished and not punishable. There’s only the one sentence.
“As for the way they talk and act, it’s considered proper and very attractive for a woman to move and behave as felinely as possible. They practice it from a very early age.”
Dana watched as Blonde Catgirl (she’d forgotten their names already) climbed up onto one of the cots and crawled across it on her hands and knees, looking at one of the wall jacks. She touched it, then pressed the button beside it (which did nothing—the button was the emergency jumper). Her body was tight and lithe, the indented line of her spine a gentle curve down her back. The triangle of animal skin just barely covered her ass.
She was gorgeous. They all were. The way they moved only drew attention to it.
At least they’ve discovered the bra, Dana thought. They wouldn’t be afflicted with saggy boobs like women in so many primitive cultures.
Blonde Catgirl dipped her head and inspected a place lower on the wall, her shoulders bunching cutely. Then she looked back past her arm at Dana and smiled.
Dana realized she was ogling and tuned back into the conversation.
“You probably noticed how they greeted you with the word mew,” Quinn was saying. “That word actually has many, many meanings for them. You know how, in Chinese, the same word can have four different meanings depending on the inflection? Well by my count they have at least eighty inflections of ‘mew’, and those are just the ones I’ve recorded. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s twice that. There aren’t many words in their language at all—it’s all how they pronounce them.
“In addition to all the sounds that our mouths can make, they can make some that we can’t. For example, they can purr. Watch. Cleo, come here a sec.” Quinn snapped her fingers. “Cleo!”
Asian Catgirl looked up and padded over, smiling. She walked on the balls of her feet, putting one foot in front of the other, her thighs flexing gently. The color of her eyes—slate grey—was startling on a Japanese girl, and beautiful. She stopped in front of Quinn and looked at them curiously.
“Scratch the back of her head,” Quinn told Dana.
“Yeah, I’m not doing that,” Dana laughed.
“Don’t be shy. They like it.” She reached over Cleo’s shoulder, slipped her hand up into her hair, and scratched the back of her head and neck as if petting a cat.
Cleo’s back arched. The movement came up through her body like an involuntary thing, a ripple from her midsection to her shoulders. Her head tilted back, her eyelids drooped, and her eyes rolled up in a kind of ecstasy. It was if she had dropped into a trance.
Her breasts began to rise and fall slowly in the fuzzy bra. A sound began to emanate from her chest: a deep, rhythmic, sensual sound.
She was purring.
“Come on. It’s a sign of affection. They like to be touched.”
“I’m good, really,” Dana said.
“Oh fine, ya big baby.” Quinn stopped petting the girl. Cleo blinked and seemed to come back to herself, smiled at them, and padded back to rejoin the others, her ass moving pertly beneath the loin cloth.
They like to be touched.
Go ahead. Give her a belly rub.
Scratch her back.
Pet her... arm.
Dana was embarrassed for having thought it. It was an innocent custom. No wonder they were keeping the men out, though.
“This is all very adorable, Private, but is that all the ‘No Boys Allowed’ sign is about? The men in my unit may talk like fratboys but they know I’d crack their skulls if they even looked the wrong way at one of these girls,” Max said.
Yet another argument against belly rubs, Dana thought.
“That’s not it. It’s because they’re... well, they’re in heat.” A hint of a blush flashed across Quinn’s cheeks, quick and then gone.
Max stared at her for a long beat.
“Come again?”
“You heard me right, Ma’am. Like a lot of animals, the young women here will go into heat if they reach late adolescence without having had a child—that age being about 18-19 for humans.
“We think they evolved that way because they had to, to propagate the species. Humans on this planet were dangerously close to extinction for a thousand years or more. The original ship couldn’t have had more than 500 people, and a lot of those must have died in the crash or after, as supplies ran out and they were forced to start eating the local plants. And with no technology... simply cranking out enough babies to not go extinct was a real challenge. Girls went back to having kids at sixteen, fifteen, like the dark ages. The population has stabilized and they’re pretty much like us now, but the trait remains in the young women.
“Their behavior becomes erratic, like... well, pardon the phrase, but like a cat in heat. If any man walked in here they’d almost literally jump him, and they’d become aggressive to any women. Violent, even. That’s why they’re forced to leave the village and live apart from the others until it passes, which is until they get knocked up, or they turn 21 or so.”
Across the room Blonde Catgirl yawned and stretched, a full body stretch, her fingers twining above her head. Her waist was tiny; the line of her ribs was exquisite. She flopped back onto the cot, rolled over to face the wall, curled up and went to sleep, just like that. Her skin had the healthy glow that was unique to people in love, people who have just won the lottery, and pregnant women when their hormones are making them good crazy instead of bad crazy.
Dana looked over the others. Asian Catgirl had gotten a first aid kit open and had her face all the way in it. And Redhead Catgirl was... looking back at her.
Dana looked away quickly. Looked back. The girl was still staring at her.
“Hi,” Dana said.
The girl smiled. She took two steps forward, stopped. Her fuzzy faux cat tail glided to a stop behind her ankles. Her body lacked the perpetual baby fat that’s common in some redheads; she was lean, lanky. You could bounce a quarter off of any part of her.
She took another step, hesitated, then padded the rest of the way across the room to Dana, stopped maybe a foot in front of her, and clasped her hands behind her back.
“Um,” Dana said.
Very slowly, the girl began to lean in.
As their faces got closer Dana thought, absurdly, that the girl was going to kiss her, but she did something that was somehow more startling: she touched her nose to Dana’s and looked into her eyes solemnly.
Of course. It’s how house cats greet each other: they touch noses. Dana laughed. The girl smiled but did not remove her nose. Her eyes were emerald green, very pretty, very present. A vaguely floral scent emanated from her.
“Aw, see? She likes you!” Quinn squeed.
Is no one else seeing any innuendo in this?
Dana stepped back and cleared her throat. “Mind if I go get some air, Sarge?”
“Everything all right?”
“I’m a little lightheaded, actually.”
“That’s the atmosphere,” Quinn said. “It’s more oxygen rich than Earth. You’ll get used to it, and might even find that you have more energy than usual.”
“Awesome.” She turned and left, avoiding the girl’s eyes. It was like being looked at by a question.
A puzzled look crossed Redhead Catgirl’s face as the door closed. She sniffed at the air. Slightly—unnoticeably, unless you happened to be looking right at her as it happened—her pupils dilated.
“Mew?” she said, and began to walk towards the door.
“Whoa there!” Quinn got in front of her. “Sorry, heh, you guys can’t go out that way.”
The girl craned her neck and looked over Quinn’s shoulder.
On the other side of the room, Asian Catgirl pulled her face out of the first aid kit, sniffed at the air, and looked in the same direction.
Fifteen minutes later Max joined them by the gate and produced the softpack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket. They all smoked except for Kit.
“So, Captain Havard has a full unit about twelve hundred clicks east of here. We’re going to meet with them and trade Glass for one of their women. Then it’ll be all boys on the left, girls on the right, happy family.”
“I’ve never been on a planet that rotated backwards before. Does that mean west is east?” Glass asked.
Dana opened her mouth and closed it. She wasn’t sure. “Sarge?”
“East is always the direction in which the planet rotates on its axis, regardless of the direction in which the planet rotates around the star, or the star itself rotates,” Max said. She pointed towards the forest. “That’s east. Come on guys, this is basic training stuff.”
“Wait though, that means I was right. East is west here.”
“No. East is east. East is always east.”
“I get it,” Dana said. “She means that the planet’s upside down.”
“Oh my god,” Kit said. “Are you both retarded?”
The sun was setting. It created a spectacular display of pinks, oranges, yellows and purples, untainted by pollution. Dana made a note to not drop her cigarette butt on the ground when she was finished with it.
The transport ship that came for them was much larger than the one that had brought them down from the main ship. Its engines screamed deafeningly as it touched down in the field, blowing a fifty yard swath of the grass type stuff flat. Glass and Kit walked towards it, their heads bowed against the wind. Dana did too, but Max stopped her.
“You’re staying here.”
“What? Why?”
“Someone’s got to stay with Quinn. Glass can’t, I need to pick his replacement, and Kit’s green.” It was Kit’s first tour (in the absence of human vs. human combat, a “tour of duty” was considered to be the months or years it took to secure a single extraterrestrial planet). It was Glass’s third, Dana’s fourth, and Max’s number was undetermined. Dana put her age at about forty, and assuming that she had joined up when she was young, that gave her nine, maybe even ten.
“Aw man. It’s not like she needs backup. They’ve got groups of unarmed, half naked teenage girls living alone in the woods. The place is as dangerous as a wink.”
“I don’t like leaving people alone.”
Dana opened her mouth, Max gave her a look, Dana closed it, that was that. Forty seconds later the ship took off, blowing its fake wind everywhere.
The planet was stupid and the fake plastic “base” was stupid and catgirls were stupid and grass-that’s-not-grass and trees-that-aren’t-trees were stupid and being punished for being the best member of the squad was stupid.
The stupid sunset was stupid too.
Dana flicked her cigarette away, walked six steps, sighed, and went back for it, tucking the spent butt into her sleeve pocket.
She began to haul their cargo to the base to burn energy. It felt good to move. The boxes and crates were filled with food, medical supplies, things concerned with staying alive and nothing else. Nothing of any entertainment value, for instance, and there wasn’t exactly satellite TV here. It would be just her and the scenery until the others got back, which might be a day or longer. The transport ships were tightly scheduled; when they came, they came, and when they didn’t you sat in a field for 48 hours counting your fingers.
When the sun had set and the unfamiliar constellations had materialized in the sky, Quinn came out to see her.
“Hey, I can do this for a bit. Take a breather, get acquainted with the girls.” She tossed her jacket on a fencepost.
Dana grunted something noncommittal.
“Come on, if someone doesn’t watch them they’ll get into everything.”
Dana glanced sideways at her, tossed the box on the pile, and went in.
The girls were still milling around the room. A jar of tongue depressors had been dumped on the floor and the little wooden sticks had been kicked all around, but that seemed to be the extent of the carnage. When Redhead Catgirl saw Dana enter she made a yee! sound and ran over. Dana gave her a tight-lipped smile.
“You are affectionate, aren’t you.” She pulled a chair away from the wall and sat down. “So, how much English do you guys speak?”
The girl cocked her head and made a trilling, questioning sound.
They probably only knew a hundred words, if that, Dana thought. If it was anything like the people on Earth who knew Latin so they could read the bible (or at least nod at the appropriate moments in church), then they might know more, but still wouldn’t be fluent enough to have a conversation.
Dana pointed to herself. “Dana,” she said. “I forgot your name already, sorry. I’ve been calling you Redhead Catgirl in my head.”
“Raid-haahd,” the girl said.
Dana laughed. “Yes, redhead.”
The girl said it again. Her accent was beautiful, lilting; it was like Italian being spoken with an Irish accent, if such a thing was possible. She turned to the other girls and said something in their strange, pretty language, then pointed to herself.
“No, your name isn’t Redhead, that’s the point, that’s why I was—oh, never mind.”
The girl beamed at her. She bent and touched the material of Dana’s sleeve (which must have seemed just as strange to her as her own outfit did to Dana), rubbing the coarse green fabric between her fingers, then ducked her head down and sniffed it. Her back was bare except for the thin strap of her “top”. There was a map of freckles across her shoulders that trailed off to pure white skin on her lower back, then the swell of her hips and the loin cloth. The bare spot on her hips made it clear that there wasn’t anything else under there.
“So, do I have to get sniffed by everyone I meet on this planet or can you just pass along the word that I’m—”
The girl stretched her body upwards. Her nose touched Dana’s neck.
“—that I’m ok smelling, or maybe you have ID cards or something. You know, like a scratch and sniff ID cards.”
Lightheaded.
It came like it did before, in a wave that tried to distance her from herself. She blinked it away. It was the atmosphere, and the exercise. Her body had been gobbling up all that extra oxygen and then she’d stopped cold, but she was still getting all the extra oxygen. She wasn’t a doctor and had no idea if that was even how the body worked, but it sounded good.
Redhead stood abruptly and, deft as a minx, slipped one leg over both of Dana’s and sat down, straddling her like one straddles a chair backwards. She was light as a leaf. The backs of her legs were warm, and Dana realized that that was because of the way she was dressed:
Loin cloths cover the front and the back—not the bottom.
“So ah, is this... part of the greeting ritual too?”
A puzzled expression crossed the girl’s face. She reached out to touch Dana’s cheek, then jerked her hand away as if she had been burned. Then again, slower this time, and this time let her fingers rest on Dana’s cheek: one on her temple, one by her ear, one below her ear, and the pinky trailing off. Her eyes wandered all over Dana’s face.
“What, I look weird to you? Looking the same is about the only thing we have in—”
The girl kissed her.
Right on the kisser. Her lips were soft and moist.
“Whoa there.” Dana pried her off. “That’s ah... I know some cultures greet by kissin but I’m pretty sure they don’t use tongue.”
Redhead tried to come in again. Dana held her back by the shoulders.
It’s because she’s in heat. She’d probably kiss anything with lips.
She hadn’t gone after Quinn or Max, though.
Some chemical thing. For whatever reason she likes the smell of you. Or maybe—well what, you thought there were no lesbian catgirls? Statistically there have to be.
Lesbian catgirls in heat... FROM OUTER SPACE.
Lightheaded again. This time it was stronger. Her eyes wanted to lose focus, and it took some effort to keep that from happening.
“I, ah... you are about a hundred pounds of gorgeous, you are, but if I got caught mackin on a catgirl within two hours of landing I’d get a bad reputation. Or maybe a good reputation. But it’d be a reputation. Also, Max might dent my skull.”
The girl made the questioning sound and looked at her with those big, green, Disney movie eyes.
She doesn’t understand. Around here you see someone you like, you walk up and give em a sniff, and then the two of you go into the bushes and do your thing. No trying to act cool or worrying about saying something stupid. No stressing over her meeting your weird family, or when you find out that she’s terrified of stuffed animals. No courting, no dating. No pickup lines. Just ‘hi there’, you smell nice, sex. Without the ‘hi there’.
That actually didn’t sound so bad.
It wouldn’t even be a crime: Dana was a Marine, not a cop, and the girl wasn’t a victim or a suspect. She wasn’t a science experiment either. What she was was soft, and gorgeous, and from her eyes emanated a blank need that was powerful.
“But this is just a little too weird for a Sunday night,” Dana finished the thought out loud. “Assuming it’s Sunday here.”
Redhead seemed to get the gist but showed no signs of getting up. Dana tried to lift her gently; she resisted. She ducked her head forward, not for a kiss this time, but to stare at Dana with a solemn, serious expression that looked comical on her cute face. It was a look that said take me seriously and had the opposite effect.
“Aw, come on,” Dana laughed. “You’re making me feel bad.”
The girl’s pupils began to dilate. They grew until her irises were just thin green rims. It was eerie; it was like looking into the eyes of someone peaking on acid, or—and Dana hated all of the cat metaphors but there they were—like a cat that has spotted something in the bush.
And then something happened.
Her eyes flashed gold, or seemed to. For a moment there seemed to be a reflection in them, just for an instant, like a mismatched frame in a movie that had accidentally been spliced in with the others.
Dana blinked. She wondered if she was hallucinating from the extra oxygen.
It happened again, and this time she was sure of it: there had been movement, like a tiny image deep in the girl’s eyes. Not a trick of the light, not a reflection; there was nothing behind her but the wall anyway.
She looked closer.
There. There.
She must be hallucinating, because for a moment it had looked like—
A pleasant looseness spread up her neck and down her back, a sensation like warm water being poured into cold.
She looked closer.
There was something she needed to see, something she was almost grasping but not quite, something that kept slipping away each time she got close, like—like—
Like being in a long dark tunnel with a point of light at the end that opened up into wide green fields with millions of swaying flowers and rising up above them on a warm fragrant breeze that carried her up, and up, and over a jungle full of dark broad leafed trees to a clearing in the middle and floating down into it, into soft grass, and letting out a sigh and sinking down through it into a warm and safe and drifting darkness that enveloped her.
Dana’s hands dropped to her sides and hung loose. She let out a sigh.
The radio was crackling.
“Quinn? Dana?” Kit’s voice.
It was annoying, insistent. Dana came back to herself unwillingly, like swimming upwards through soup.
“Anyone there?”
There was something on her lips that felt like heaven. She opened her eyes a crack and saw pale and lightly freckled skin, and beyond it copper colored hair. Redhead Catgirl was kissing her. As she came back to herself Dana became aware that she was returning the affection.
“Hellooooooo,” the radio said.
Dana fumbled for a headset with one hand. Her other hand seemed to be resting on the girl’s thigh. Hm. Dana gave it a squeeze, which caused the girl to suck in a breath and make a high, kittenish sound. She slipped the headset on.
“Hm,” Dana said.
“Dana? That you?”
“Uh huh.”
“We need the exact coordinates for the base, Hollywood’s making a list.” Hollywood was the pilot.
“Ok.” The girl’s ass felt like heaven. It was a magic ass. It had to be a magic ass.
“Um, they’re on the side of the radio.”
Dana glanced sideways dully. The numbers were green LEDs towards the bottom of the display. She began to read:
“Three... four... dot... seven...” She read the rest of them off.
“Dana...” Kit’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Are you drunk?”
“No.”
“You’re slurring. Like, bad.”
“Amnot.”
“Hang on.” Sounds of a keyboard. “Is your headset on straight?”
“Yuh.”
“No it’s not. Check it.”
“It is.”
Redhead Catgirl paused her affections and looked at Dana questioningly. Dana rolled her eyes and pointed at the headset. The girl cocked her head and sniffed at it.
“No, it’s not, or if it is, it’s not working. It says your upper brain activity is only half of what it should be. Will you check it again, please?”
“Your upper brain activity’s only half of ‘sposed to what it’s be.” She cackled. It was a good comeback.
A very long pause.
“Where’s Quinn? Put her on.”
“She’s outside... somewhere.” Dana looked at the door and thought deep thoughts about it. She thought: if a door is closed, how could you know if someone was on the other side? How could you know if anything was on the other side? There might be nothing. The entire universe might be right there, in that room.
“Go find her please.”
The only way to communicate with other ships, or with the main ship in orbit (assuming it was on the right side of the planet), was through the high powered radio that was sitting next to Dana on the table. It was a new planet; there wasn’t exactly cell phone service. They all carried ground to ground radios, of course, but those weren’t capable of communicating with a ship at thirty thousand feet hundreds of kilometers away, like the one Kit was in.
“Fine,“ Dana said, and didn’t get up. The girl’s arms slipped around her neck in an embrace and they resumed their makeout session. Slowly, tentatively, exploring. Dana’s hand moved up the girl’s side and touched the underside of her left breast. Whatever that fuzzy material was, it was awesome. Dana wanted to roll in it.
“Are you going?”
“Uh huh.”
“I don’t like this, will you go, now, please?” There were bumping sounds as Kit’s headset was taken away from her.
“Dana?” Max’s voice.
“Heeeeey Sarge!”
“I want you to get up and find Quinn right now.”
“Aw man. Kit’s just bein a... whatever the word for bitch is.” It occurred to her that the word for bitch was, in fact, bitch.
“NOW.“
Max’s voice was an electric rod down her spine. It was the voice from her training, and the need to obey it was deeper and more powerful than any other instinct she possessed, even her sense of self-preservation. Her ability to carry out an order instantly and flawlessly was the only clear definition she had for herself. It was what made her a good soldier, one of the best. It snapped her out of her daze like a stick breaking.
“Yes Ma’am,” she said.
She took Redhead by the upper arms, lifted her easily, set her on her feet, and stood up. Her legs felt wobbly. Her entire body felt like taffy. She began to march towards the door, carefully, aware that a misstep would probably send her falling onto her face. When she reached the door she gripped the knob and leaned her weight on it.
A trilling, questioning noise came from behind her. The girl had followed.
“They say I have to go because my brain’s being stupid and you smell nice,” Dana explained. She indicated the headset.
The girl looked at it and seemed to understand. She couldn’t possibly understand what a headset was or what it did, but she did understand that when Dana had put it on, she’d started to act differently.
She reached out deftly, plucked the headset out of Dana’s hair, and dropped it to the floor. ”Private McCarthy,“ Max’s voice came faintly from it. She kicked it away.
Dana looked at her dully.
Over Redhead’s shoulder she could see the other two girls approaching. They were looking at her, sniffing at the air, their pupils dilated, walking in that elegant, feline way of theirs. Their thighs flexed gently with each step.
Then Redhead pressed against her and kissed her, and Dana forgot why she was standing at the door in the first place.
She closed her eyes and felt the girl’s tight body. A low, musky, intoxicating scent filled her nose: Eau de girl in heat, maybe.
Hands. Hands, all over her.
There was a tug at her belt. Hands, trying to get into her pants. Dana was unable to explain to them how a belt buckle worked or even make any judgement about that turn of events other than to feel it happening.
Finally they got it, and Redhead’s hand slithered into her underwear, and Dana stopped being able to think anything.
The night was balmy, on the lower edge of humid, the air fragrant with strange pollens. Quinn trudged towards the base with the last of the grey plastic containers slung over her shoulder like a little Black Irish Santa Claus, sweating lightly in her undershirt and fatigues.
When she reached the base she tossed the container on the pile with the rest, wiped her forehead, and lit a cigarette. The air carried the familiar yet unfamiliar smells of alien plant life: the grass-type-stuff had a sweetish odor, and whenever the breeze blew it brought something more floral from the direction of the forest. Like lilac mixed with sage. It was pleasant, but she was comforted by the familiar taste of tobacco all the same.
The experience of visiting an Earthlike planet was not unlike eating Thai food for your entire life and then, one day, trying Chinese.
There was a sound beside her in the grass. She tensed, reaching for her sidearm, then relaxed. It was just Blonde Catgirl: Isis.
“Damn but you guys are stealthy, aren’t you? What are you doing out here?”
Isis pointed down the hill.
“Oh, right. You don’t have toilets here. Heh. I bet you wouldn’t even know how to use one, yeah?”
Isis smiled. She was holding a large purple flower, over six inches in diameter, shaped like a giant carnation. She held it up, indicating that she wanted Quinn to smell it.
“Oh, no thanks. I got wicked allergies. Come on, let’s go see what your friends are getting up to.”
As she turned towards the door Isis darted forward and pressed the flower over her face. Quinn jerked her head back, taking an involuntary breath in surprise. She grabbed the girl’s wrist and pulled it down sharply.
“No, not cool. I know you guys are a little more free with your personal space around here but you’re going to have to dial it back when you’re in our bases. Some of the people you’ll meet—Max and Dana, for two—might have broken your arm just now, before they even processed that you were just trying to be friendly. And I know you don’t know what allergies are, but I’m probably going to have a stuffy nose for the rest of the night now.”
A thick, pungent, cloyingly floral odor filled her sinuses. Her eyes began to water. She blinked and rubbed her nose, but it seemed to get stronger with time.
“Isis... what was that?”
Isis put her hands together, palms in, as if praying. Then she placed them against her cheek and cocked her head to the side.
It was the universal mime for sleep.
Quinn had just enough time to realize that before it happened.
A dense heaviness filled her body. It seemed to come from the inside, to radiate out from her bones. Her vision narrowed and Isis seemed to get very far away... then very close... then finally to dissolve into a blur of sandy curls and tan skin.
Her eyelids drooped and she flopped into the springy grass-type-stuff like a marionette whose strings had been cut, the cigarette still hanging loosely from her fingers.
Isis straddled her catch.
She ran her nose up Quinn’s chest, across her shoulder, down her arm, lingering for a moment at the hollow on the inside of her elbow. When she reached the hand with the cigarette she reared back and hissed.
She batted it away. Then, for good measure, pulled Quinn’s hand away from it.
Dana lay on the grey plastic floor, looking at the ceiling. Her eyes were pointed that way, anyway.
Redhead’s hand was in her pants and her body was arching and relaxing, arching and relaxing, lying still, sometimes jerking as if she had been stung by a bee.
It was slow, almost contemplative sex. Their faces were flushed and the both of them seemed alternatively confused and helplessly caught up in the movement of the other’s body. When they hit upon something pleasurable it was almost by accident, and they would try desperately to repeat it, often failing and then grinding together in frustration as they tried to regain the moment.
Had Dana been in her right mind she would have been able to give some helpful suggestions, but she wasn’t. Her perceptions were a blur of heat and scent and when her eyes did focus she saw only the girl’s intensely beautiful body pressing down against hers before some little movement made her tilt her head back and lose focus again. She wasn’t a talker in bed, even half out of her mind; the only sounds in the room were her heavy breathing and the occasional half curious, half pleading mews of the girl.
They were like two teenagers who didn’t speak the same language and had never heard of sex. They didn’t know what it was but It Was Good.
They didn’t even notice when the medical bay door opened and Cleo and Isis entered, carrying a limp Quinn between them.
They placed Quinn on a cot and began to inspect her body, communicating via their pretty, unintelligible sounds. They seemed to want to duplicate whatever Redhead was doing with Dana. Earlier they’d been curious and tried pawing at Dana themselves, but that had ended... badly. A scratch across Cleo’s shoulder, and another across Isis’s thigh, told the story: Dana belonged to Redhead.
So they sniffed and pawed at Quinn. They touched her hands, pulled up her undershirt, were briefly fascinated by the dog tags on the chain around her neck. Cleo tugged her fatigues down just far enough to expose the top of her dark bush but was unable to get her belt off, and although Quinn was dressed mannishly her body was a woman’s, her hips were curved instead of straight, and the pants wouldn’t go down any farther. While Cleo did that Isis kissed the unresponsive soldier on the lips, first tentatively, then deeply, running a hand through her hair.
Whatever they expected to happen didn’t seem to be happening.
They looked at each other and made disappointed sounds. Isis left, returned with the purple flower, and pressed it over Quinn’s mouth and nose again.
Whether it was the pungent smell of the flower or whether her body had coincidentally picked that moment to start fighting off the drug wasn’t clear, but Quinn’s eyelids fluttered. She mumbled something incoherent and began to struggle weakly, semi-consciously. Awake and sober she could have taken both girls at once but she hadn’t had time to recover and she was outmatched. She bucked, made an aimless motion in the air with her hands, and went limp again.
They left the flower on her face, ensuring she would stay that way.
Across the room Dana and Redhead continued writhing against each other like two people having the same dream about sex. Cleo approached and said something in their strange, pretty language.
Redhead swiped at her.
Cleo said it again, more urgently. She pointed to the door. The message was clear enough: We have to go.
It had no effect, though, and finally Cleo and Isis had to risk the scratches and pull the two writhing women apart, which they did as quickly and as gingerly as they could, ducking out of the way of Redhead’s clawing hands with preternatural deftness.
Once separated from Dana, Redhead seemed to come to her senses. Her pupils dwindled back to a normal size and she looked around as if she didn’t know where she was.
“Rrr?” she said.
Cleo repeated the statement a third time and Redhead nodded agreement. They lifted Dana, ducked under her arms to support her, and walked her out the door. Dana went along docilely, looking dazed and shell shocked (but in a good way); there was no hint in her eyes that she had any idea what was going on.
In fact the only person who could have explained what was happening to them was unconscious, lying on a cot and breathing, with each deep and slow breath, the pollen of the flower which would be called the Kattan Somnolucus once it was discovered by English-speakers some months later, and which meant, literally, sleeping flower of Katta.
The starlight was bright enough to see by. They walked out of the shadow of the base with a senseless Dana propped between them, helping her when she stumbled (which was often), down the hill, through the fragrant grass, into the dark.