Sapphire's Place - Valerie Hope's - "Second Coming: Easy as ABC "

The Truth Will Set You Free

Second Coming #3

By Valerie Hope

WHEN LIEUTENANT DAVID CAMDEN HAD fantasized at the beginning of his captivity about his return to Earth, it had been an image of himself, tired but undefeated, giving critical information to his planet’s armed forced to combat the Nbaru foe. He never imagined, those weeks ago when he and his reconnaissance unit had been taken prisoner along with members of the Texas resistance that he’d be returning in a pair of ultra-low-rise skintight jeans, platform shoes and a sequined tubetop, pulling on a long white cigarette and brushing platinum blonde hair out of crystalline blue eyes with long-nailed fingertips. He had looked forward to beef ribs and a cold beer, a warm fireplace and a real mattress, then. Now he looked forward to excursions into Neiman-Marcus (under Nbaru supervision) and Lord & Taylor. David Camden had dreamed that he would return after having killed several of his Nbaru foes. Never would he have suspected, upon returning, that he would have fucked more Nbaru than he’d killed.

But that was before he’d known that his return to Earth would be as a double-D-cup sexpot who’d gladly renamed herself April, a shallow, vain and vapid girl more concerned with her appearance and her talents in the bedroom than with the security and sanctity of her home planet. David Camden had been a soldier. April was a seductress, a plaything for the sexually starved non-breeding caste of the Nbaru military, conditioned to respond enthusiastically to their every sexual whim. She’d been converted from a patriot and freedom fighter into a sophisticatedly-engineered whore, and she’d never been happier in her life. Neither had her companions, her fellow prisoners. The men of Bravo-Niner, the crack recon unit sent out by the U.S. Army to gather intelligence on the Nbaru occupation of Earth, had been some of hardiest survivors of their breed. Now Todd Cartwright, Hank Jennings, Roberto Costa and Luke "Gonzo" Marquette, some of the toughest sons-of-bitches to ever draw breath, were primping and preening in their skintight revealing outfits, fixing hair, makeup and nails, calling themselves Courtney, Amber, Darcy and Cassi and working up plans to open a strip club-slash-bordello in the heart of occupied Dallas to cater to the desires of the Nbaru force of occupation.

April blew a deep lungful of smoke into the air above her head and tapped her ash elegantly into a fluted ashtray between them in the orbital shuttle carrying them back down to their ‘duties’ on Earth. During the course of their imprisonment, she and the others with her had been subjected to mental conditioning, torture, and medical alteration which had transformed them from hard young men into luscious young women. They’d had their feet and ankles altered in such a way that they could only comfortably walk in skyscraper heels, given an almost irresistible sexual response to the pheromones of Nbaru males, and been hopelessly addicted to nicotine, which acted as a powerful aphrodisiac to the Fuzzies (the somewhat derogatory nickname for Nbaru among humans). But something in the mental conditioning hadn’t worked on April. There had been a kernel of something in her that had resisted strongly and defeated the commands given to her during her captivity. There was some part of her that was still, and always, the lieutenant in charge of Bravo-Niner, sent deep into enemy territory to spy out just what the Fuzzies were doing and why.

That’s why her sky-blue eyes were scanning the horizon out the window of the Nbaru transport shuttle instead of perusing a clothing catalog like the others. It was a relief of sorts, to be able to think and observe in silence without being questioned about it by the watchful eyes of the Nbaru prison facility. She’d had to try extra hard to keep her front in place during imprisonment – not that she’d not thoroughly enjoyed being a pretty girl and fucking all those yummy Nbaru soldiers. The conditioning had made her very susceptible to distraction and unable to concentrate for extended periods – transforming her into a biddable little airhead blonde, effectively. But when she was quiet, able to be apart from the others (who made her want to act the bubbleheaded flirt very strongly, just to be like they were) and sit still, she found herself able to think and concentrate on the mission she’d been given by the Army. And that was what she was doing now, idly smoking her slender cigarette and observing.

They’d come in low over the West Coast and occupied San Francisco and streaked across the desert, low, only a few hundred feet above the deck. Their west-southwest course took them across Las Vegas, one of the centers of Nbaru military presence (the catlike aliens considered pyramids to be symbols of government, so their initial landings were in Giza, Memphis and Las Vegas to surround and control the Great Pyramids, the Mud Island Pyramid and the Luxor Hotel and Casino) – now converted into a ground-to-orbit supply depot and munitions dump. The land around the City of Sin was devastated for miles around from the first real clash of armed forces in the conflict. The Fuzzies had taken the field against the 82ndAirborne, the 2nd Armored Division and the 7th Light Infantry Division and heavy losses had been inflicted on both sides. Earth armor and protection was largely from impact and explosion and Fuzzy armor and shields were to repel a burning or melting attack. So the Fuzzy plasma rifles had cut through the ceramic armor of the M1A2 Abrams tanks just as easily as their 100mm high-explosive rounds had battered through their combat vehicles.

The other topography that April got a good look at, for the first time, was the largest settlement of Nbaru on the planetary surface, a huge gridwork cube sitting just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, a few hundred yards from the Barringer Meteorite Crater. The place was jokingly called ‘Kitty City’ by the humans, but it was actually a huge undertaking. The Nbaru had lowered the cube – two miles on a side and nearly a half-mile high – from orbit; it contained, humans suspected, over six thousand Nbaru workers and soldiers. Fuzzy military presence was thick around the structure – had there been an attack on it while April and the others were in captivity? – and the Fuzzies had built a long gantry across the desert and down into the crater. From her vantage in the transport, April could see that there were Nbaru in sophisticated breathing gear crawling around the bottom of the crater. Perhaps it was a clue to something. It was hard to tell, and hard to concentrate. She was reverting again, back to ‘airhead’ and away from her mission. It took all she had, sometimes, to force her mind into discipline. Normally she could handle it without a problem, but there was one thing which she had no defense against, one thing that broke through her concentration and had her right back to the giddy blonde featherbrain that the Nbaru had made her into – she was getting horny again.

She tried to find a way to force it out of her mind, but it only made it worse. Her pussy was absolutely tingling and her nipples were stiff little points underneath her snug tubetop. Only a session with a virile Nbaru warrior or maybe some spirited play with some of her fellow prisoners would ease the itch.

"Damn," she said softly, feeling her mind start to drift.

A short redhead with bombshell curves and deep, russet eyes smiled in sympathy as she lit a cigarette and put a soft, manicured hand on April’s knee. "You losing it?" she asked in a soft, suggestive contralto.

April blinked. "Losing what?" she asked.

"Concentration," the redhead said. "I can only last about twenty minutes or so, but it’s up from fifteen. Any longer and my little kitty just gets the best of me."

April was dumbstruck. She’d thought that she was the only one who’d resisted the conditioning. But the redhead – her name was Brittany, but April could remember that she’d once been a colonel in the Texas resistance named Bruce McDonough. She’d been a sunburned balding man going to paunch in his late ‘forties then – nothing approaching the angel face and stripper body with the long, straight auburn hair and the perky tits that sat across from her now.

"You can, like, fight it too?" April asked. Originally it had been frustrating to her that she couldn’t get through a sentence without resorting to using words like "y’know," "like," "so," or "totally" – usually with two or three "oh my God"s thrown in for good measure. But now it was second nature, not even thought about anymore. Much less how she’d come to describe things with words like "adorable," "cute," "yummy" and "sweet." Those were the things it was useless to fight against.

"Since the beginning, baby girl," Brittany said. "Others, too. But we saw what, like, happened to you and we decided to shut up about it."

April had been punished when she’d declared openly that she’d realized they were being converted into women by the strange prison they’d been in. It had put a high emphasis on keeping one’s own counsel, but now that the prison and its constant surveillance was behind them…

"Most of the girls who had military training and stuff were able to, y’know, keep out the conditioning," Brittany explained. "Your people, and two or three of mine. The rest are totally lost. They’re, like, fuck-bunnies and there’s nothing we can do."

April snuggled closer to Brittany, both to keep the conversation quiet and also to rub her now very sensitive breasts against the redhead’s arm. April’s legs were crossed and one foot was swinging back and forth wildly in an attempt to masturbate herself against her jeans. It was working, a little, but not quickly enough.

"Who are the others?" April asked.

Brittany blew out a cloud of smoke, and, seeing her companion’s discomfort, snaked a slender hand between the blonde’s legs and began to stroke April’s aching crotch. April moaned and slumped back a little, as anxious for the information as for the release. It was such an incredible relief to discover she wasn’t alone anymore.

"Your Bravo-Niner crew, for one," Brittany said. "Amber, Courtney, Darcy and Cassi. Me and my two second-in-commands, Ashlyn and Bethany. Chelsea is another – she was in the Marines before she joined up with us in Texas. Also, the scientist, Dawn was able to hold on a little. She’s no good as a scientist any more, but she’s one of us. All the others – Aimee and Andi from your group, Bobbi, Bridget and Brandi from my group, Cami and Christi, Danica, Danielle and Dori – they’re useless."

"They’re cute to look at," April moaned, now grinding her crotch against Brittany’s practiced hand.

"But they won’t help us," Brittany said. "They couldn’t go a day with Nbaru cock."

"Help us what?"

"Break out of prison," the former colonel said. "Why do you think we all, like, volunteered for your fuck club? Because we think it’s a ticket out."

"I still, like, have to figure out what the Fuzzies are up to," April panted, close now to the edge of orgasm. "It’s part of my mission."

"I know," Brittany said gently, nuzzling April’s slender neck. "Just tell us how we can help."

April wound her long-nailed fingers in Brittany’s kitten-soft hair and groaned. "You’re helping a whole hell of a lot right now," she breathed.

* * *

The girls had been taken out of the transports under guard and shown to their temporary quarters. Since the Nbaru in charge of their transformation – apparently a high-ranking breeding male – had given them carte blanche in the setting up of their new club, the quarters would only be temporary until they could find a suitable location. So the girls were given limited access to the ‘controlled zone’ in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and allowed to scout out any good locations. The girls also made several excursions into the now-abandoned shops and malls to just help themselves to clothing, shoes, makeup, jewelry… whatever they wanted. And these girls wanted a lot. The little ATV that the Fuzzies had assigned to them as transport – manned by, arguably, the luckiest Nbaru guard on the planet – was soon packed inside and out with bundles, bags and boxes full of the girls’ selections. They even found a few leather/latex fetish stores around city center that allowed them to express their kinky sides.

April made some notes of the decent locations they’d scouted, all within a certain distance of the shuttle port and all well within the Nbaru sphere of influence. Brittany, Darcy and Amber were with her, speaking in hushed tones while Cassi, Ashlyn and Bethany systematically fucked their Nbaru guard into a state of semi-consciousness. The guard had experienced more sex in three hours as a non-breeder than most breeding males had experienced in a lifetime. He was going to have a lot to brag about in the barracks tonight. And the way Ashlyn, Amber and Cassi were working, the poor thing wasn’t going to be able to get it up for weeks.

"The first thing we have to do is make contact with home," April said. "It’s, y’know, going to take some doing and stuff to convince ‘em it’s, like, really us."

"Totally," Darcy said. "We don’t even know if, like, our authorization codes are even, y’know, current any more."

"I know," Brittany said, pulling on her cigarette and making an outward show of looking at the warehouse space around them. "And then we have to arrange a pick-up."

"Maybe not," April said, lighting a cigarette of her own. "I’ve been, y’know, thinking. Maybe we’re more valuable right where we are and stuff. Y’know? I mean, like, we’re in good cover and position to gather more information. Maybe command will want to, like, leave us here."

"You think?" Amber asked. "We might be, like, more interesting as research subjects."

"That’s totally up to command," Brittany said. "First thing, though, is we have to get access to communications."

"No prob, baby," April said. "I can fuck a Nbaru out of anything. All I have to do is find the right Nbaru. They, like, give the non-breeders all the supply and warehousing jobs because they think that sort of stuff is beneath breeding males. And I bet there’s some lonely little pussycat over in, like, the quartermaster’s office that would just love to swap us a radio for a night with the four of us."

"Figure it like this: any Fuzzy that comes in our place is going to have one thing on his mind. Us," Amber said. "So anything we might have going on in the back rooms will be, like, our business."

"Unless Mree or S’kaaru come around," Brittany interjected. "Those two have a funny way of deciding what’s our business and what’s theirs."

* * *

"Firebase Ladybug, Firebase Ladybug, this is Bravo-Niner, over," Cassi repeated, turning the dial over to a new frequency. Only static answered the willowy, freckled brunette, but she wasn’t discouraged. She’d been the radio operator back when she’d been a tall, hook-nosed man the others called "Gonzo" and she’d known everything there was to know about the machinery she was operating. And as long as she didn’t get horny, she had access to all that training and knowledge. It was easy, when her kitty wasn’t purring, to keep her head and not fall back into the comfortable bubblehead she’d become. Amber, Courtney and April had spent the better part of an hour with tongues, fingers and a big blue vibrator named Godzilla to make sure that horniness would be a long time returning.

Some of the others – Brittany’s crew, mostly – had provided a night-long distraction to some nonbreeding males in Supply while Bravo-Niner had helped themselves to captured Earth equipment. April had been a mastermind; she’d used her influence with Mree and S’kaaru – their supervisors among the Nbaru – to obtain and renovate an old theater as their new club. There was a small courtyard just inside the lobby where they’d planted orange and lemon trees. The sweet, pungent odor of the fruit, while pleasing to humans, was almost too much for the sensitive noses of the visiting Nbaru and they stayed away from that area as much as possible. The Nbaru had originally been against the citrus trees, but when April had intimated that the scent and juice of the fruit drove human women into frenzies of sexual abandon, they’d relented.

So in a small bunker beneath the courtyard, where the original occupants had stored gardening implements, the women of Bravo-Niner and their resistance cousins had stockpiled all their captured equipment – radio, scanning equipment, and a couple crates of M-16A2 assault rifles and ammunition.

But more than the equipment, they’d learned something extremely important about themselves, something that could easily prove to be the Fuzzies’ downfall. Their conditioning, while all-pervasive and extremely effective, was completely counteracted by human adrenalin. While stealing the weapons and supplies, the freedom and lives of all the women of Bravo-Niner were at risk. Once the adrenalin, the self-preservation hormone, had kicked in to respond to the emergency, the girls found the mental and organizational clarity they thought had been pulled from them forever. Unit cohesion and battle discipline had sprung back into their minds as if they’d never been gone. It was a key piece of the puzzle that the Nbaru hadn’t taken into account. And it could be used against them.

April leaned in closer over Cassi’s shoulder, trying to hear the radio operation over the clink and clatter of their new gymnasium. The girls were jamming out to their tunes (they’d ‘helped themselves’ to a CD store on their excursion into the city, as well) and working out to keep their already breathtaking bodies toned and trim, and the noise from the room was quite overpowering. Elsewhere were the saws and tools of the renovation crew who were hard at work converting the theater along April and Brittany’s specifications.

"Firebase Ladybug, Firebase Ladybug, this is Recon Bravo-Niner, over," Cassi repeated, trying a different frequency range. Surprisingly, a crackling voice responded over the channel.

"Recon Bravo-Niner, this is Firebase Pocketwatch, we copy you, over. Reported you were MIA, over. Confirm."

Cassi clapped her hands and bounced deliciously in her seat at the sound of the voice. She and April shared a tight breast-to-breast hug of congratulations before the radio officer responded with, "Report Bravo-Niner captured by unfriendlies in map reference square GB-22, over. Taken prisoner and released planetside, over."

"Standing by for authorization code transmission, Bravo-Niner. Proceed, over," the faraway voice told them.

Cassi tapped a few keys with her long, manicured fingernail and the radio began to transmit the authentication codes for Bravo-Niner. There was more static, a few beeps, and finally the faraway voice responded. "Welcome home, Bravo-Niner. Good to have you back."

April couldn’t contain her happiness. She kissed her radio operator full on the lips.

* * *

"So, like, we’re to remain in position and report back regularly," Brittany told the assembled lovelies. They were in their brand new dressing room, pulling on their skintight clothes (again the work of the Fuzzy imprisonment – they were psychologically conditioned to wear the tightest, most revealing clothing they could find) and fixing hair, nails and makeup. All of the girls were expert by now, after having practiced for weeks at wielding the applicator sponge and mascara wand. Their earliest attempts had been ludicrous, making them look like streetwalkers with a palsy in their hands, but over time they’d refined their techniques and shared their discoveries. And access to human magazines again like Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Elle with all their makeup and beauty tips had also made a huge difference.

"Are they going to get us out?" Chelsea, a former member of the Texas resistance under Brittany’s command, asked.

"Only if we’re in immediate danger," Brittany answered. "They want to leave us in as good a position as possible to, y’know, gather intelligence and stuff."

"So keep your eyes and ears open," April commanded. "We are to get as much intel on why the Fuzzies are here as we can and give it to headquarters. Firebase Pocketwatch is just about twenty-five clicks away, and they can get to us if they have to."

"Any, like, objectives?" asked Ashlyn, another Texas resistance fighter who’d been in principal processing with April. Like all the girls who’d been assigned to ‘A Group’ in prison, she’d chosen a name beginning with ‘A.’ The girls of ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D’ groups had done the same. It made them feel more like sisters.

"Yeah," April replied, tossing her platinum blonde locks out of her eyes. "First and foremost, find out why the Fuzzies are here. Secondary objectives are to, like, figure out why the Fuzzies are interested in Arizona and what they’ve done with all the natural-born women they’ve captured. We’re totally authorized to use any means necessary."

"Do they, like, know what’s happened to us?" Courtney asked.

"Yeah," Brittany answered. "They don’t believe it, but they know. We told them why the Fuzzies had done what they’d done to us – the non-breeders and stuff – and they say it gels with what they’ve figured out so far."

"Any chance of a cure?" Darcy asked.

Brittany struck a suggestive ‘centerfold’ pose, her tousled red hair spilling over her generous breasts which were held together deliciously by a tight pink leather bustier. "Do you really want to be cured, Darcy?"

Darcy giggled, running red-nailed hands over her own dusky breasts. "No way."

"They think they may be able to help us overcome the worst of the mental conditioning," April said. "Maybe, in a month or so, we can go a day without being fucked. But it’s iffy. They, like, need to know a whole lot more."

"Who would want to go a day without being fucked?" Cassi giggled.

* * *

The grand opening of "The Pussycat Club" was a smashing success. Nbaru non-breeders were there in throngs, sitting at the small tables around the stages drinking and eating and making their selections for the evening’s sexual entertainment. Those few breeding males who came in were seated in a different section, treated to the finest in food and beverage and catered to in every way but sexually by the sexy and seductive girls. Massages were a big favorite among the breeding males, as was watching the girls with their Nbaru lovers or, even more popular, each other.

The club ran basically like a strip club – there were two main stages and four smaller ones where the girls danced in various states of nudity, in ones and twos. The Nbaru who wanted to show interest could approach the women and ask them to visit their tables, often leaving a token of some sort like money, jewelry or clothing to curry the girl’s favor. Originally the Nbaru had thought this was insulting to the women, but April and Brittany were able to convince them that it was an ‘old Earth custom’ and should be respected. It made the ‘madams’ feel good to know that their girls were getting a little something for their efforts.

Once the girls were through dancing, they could visit any Nbaru that had asked and get as cozy as she liked. There were private rooms available, but they were seldom used. Most of the time the lucky Nbaru would clear the table where he was sitting and just take the girls there, or sit back and receive oral gratification. Oral sex was a huge hit with the Fuzzies, since the ferocious dental arrangement of their own females made it impossible with their own species. Once word got around, the girls found themselves giving blowjobs right and left. Those girls who had a natural aptitude for the act – Bethany, Chelsea, Amber and April, mostly – were in high demand.

Non-breeding males who both desired the same girl could either fight it out in one of the pair of little arenas set aside for Nbaru ritualized combat, or they could elect to share her at the same time (which the girls found themselves liking an awful lot). So the Nbaru got laid or sucked off, the girls got very wealthy, and everyone was happy. Word of the Pussycat Club was attracting Nbaru from bases and encampments all over the planet’s surface.

Which was where the Pussycat Girls really went to work. Many of the Nbaru liked to chat afterwards, and the girls were encouraged to ‘go geisha’ after they’d done their duty and provide conversation. The Nbaru liked to simply look at the girls almost as much as they liked to fuck them. So the girls who simply circulated around in evening attire, smoking their slender cigarettes and looking stunning, were in as great a demand as the ones being humped on top of bar tables. And the ones in the evening dresses were the ones who were asking all the right questions.

April and Brittany had arranged with the Nbaru to close the bar every evening at 0400 hours and to re-open it at 1100 so that the girls could have some time to rest, clean up and make themselves presentable. After all the Fuzzies were chased out, that was when the girls would stockpile all of their gathered information and report back to Firebase Pocketwatch. And through their efforts, the Pussycat Girls were beginning to piece together a very strange and disturbing picture.

All it really took was a suggestive smile and a very innocent "What kind of work do you do?" from the women to start to get an overall idea of what the Fuzzies were busy doing on the planet Earth. A russet-furred Nbaru named K’rowra who worked in a division called "Orbital Surveillance" explained that his job was to scan the skies from orbit and from the hundreds of radio telescopes the world over the Nbaru had captured.

"What are you looking for?" Darcy had asked, running a long-nailed hand up the Nbaru’s well-muscled thigh.

"You don’t want to know, Human Darcy," the Fuzzy had replied, and the slitted yellow eyes had betrayed fear.

A raucous party of three Nbaru wearing the parallel blue stripes of the Science Division on their foreheads had come in that night as well, laughing and joking as they’d taken turns on Amber for the better part of an hour. The redhead had thoroughly enjoyed herself and put on quite the show (she was one of the loudest of them when it came to orgasms), getting herself a beautiful diamond-and-sapphire choker from the thankful Nbaru. The three Fuzzies were on their way from a camp on the East Coast back to ‘Kitty City’ in Arizona and had talked at length about their operations in the Barrington Crater.

"All planets have had asteroid debris impact their surface. Some of the most beautiful lakes on Nbaru Prime were formed from these impacts," one of them had told the sweaty, glowing Amber. "But you humans have always assumed that these impacts all happened to you by accident."

Amber put on her best bubblehead demeanor, twirling a shockingly red tress around one long-nailed finger. "You mean, like, somebody shot an asteroid at us?" she asked.

"Apparently your species has not always been the dominant one on this planet," another Nbaru supplied. "You have speculated that an asteroid impact may have caused the extinction of the large reptiles that ruled your Earth long ago, allowing mammals like humans to evolve and develop. It never occurred to you that perhaps this was done on purpose?"

Amber sucked a fingernail contemplatively, trying to look vapid while absorbing as much as possible. With her sexual hungers satiated for the time being, it was easier to concentrate on retaining information.

"We are investigating the meteor impacts on this planet for such evidence," the third Nbaru scientist said. "We have reason to believe that your Barrington Crater might possibly be one such impact point."

"Who would want to hit us with an asteroid?" Amber asked, playing up the ‘helpless little girl’ act. One of the Fuzzies put a protective arm around her in response.

"Not to worry, little Human Amber," the Nbaru told her, nuzzling her neck. "We don’t even know if it was on purpose. And if it was, we would protect you."

It had been Dawn and Bethany, after a long session of playing with one another for the pleasure of the breeding males, who’d unearthed the biggest and most valuable nugget yet. Dawn was in the lap of a Nbaru field marshal, running her long-nailed fingers through the thick fur of his striped mane and wiggling in such a way as to keep the Fuzzy commander in a constant state of arousal. Bethany, wearing only a pair of thigh-high patent leather boots and a diamond bib choker that had to have been worth millions, idly stroked the inner thigh of a Nbaru tactical advisor with the platform toe of her boot while smoking a cigarette in the sexiest, Marlene Dietrich way she could.

"Did you like our little show?" Bethany asked playfully, licking her lips. They liked to tease the breeding males. It was fun to watch them squirm.

"We did, Human Bethany," the tactical advisor told her. "You and Human Dawn were wonderful. I wish I could take you home with me, to perform for me always."

Dawn giggled. "That would be fun."

Bethany exhaled a plume of bluish smoke, tossed her dark curly locks from her eyes with a sexy sway of the head and leaned forward to kiss the Nbaru tactician’s bare chest.

"It’s just too bad we’re not real women," she purred, kneading the Fuzzy’s pectorals with her slender fingers. "Then we could play for you when you were home, and at night you could fuck us over and over, and when you were away on duty we wouldn’t miss you so much because we’d have your sweet little babies to take care of."

"You are real enough women for me," the tactician told her.

"You mean you wouldn’t like me better if I was, like, a real girl?" Dawn asked, tossing her vanilla blonde hair over one shoulder with a sultry pout.

"You serve your purpose here admirably," the field marshal said. "And your ‘real’ females serve their purpose elsewhere admirably also."

"You mean they’re still alive?" Bethany cooed. "See, Dawnie? I told you they didn’t kill them. Our little babies are too sweet to do that."

"We did not put them to death, or imprison them," the field marshal said, tickling Dawn under her chin with a clawed forefinger. "They serve us in their own ways, on the ships, as you do down here. You humans are a remarkable species."

"Are the real girls on ships like we were on?" Bethany asked with childlike delight.

"No," the tactician said. "They are kept on the research ships, not the military vessels the way you were."

"What are they doing up there?" Dawn asked, sucking the field marshal’s finger playfully.

"Saving us all," the tactician said, and would say no more.

It wasn’t until the biggest group came in – a bunch of front-line soldiers from the field – that Courtney added another piece to their puzzle. The soldiers, still in battle dress, descended on the Pussycat Club with their blood high from conflict and proceeded to make every woman in the club quite sore in the jaw and thighs. Courtney, considered an expert in the field of satisfying multiple partners, was taken to one of the rarely-used private rooms by two Nbaru soldiers anxious to display their prowess to her. But they didn’t take into account the appetites of the woman and soon were fast asleep in a post-coital lethargy, giving Courtney ample time to inspect all their gear for any information she could find.

"Those rebreathers they wear," Courtney explained to her coworkers after the bar had closed, "don’t have an independent air supply. So I checked the filtration system and I found this installed just under some kind of ultraviolet light source."

She put an ampule of a greenish substance on the table in front of her. April let her cigarette dangle from a glossy, red-painted lip and examined the small vial.

"It looks like mold," she said.

"It is," Courtney said. "I had Dawn check it out under the microscope."

Dawn nodded. Although her capacity for concentration was vastly diminished, she was still the only scientist they had. The lithe blonde lit a cigarette before continuing.

"It’s not a strain found on Earth," she said. "It’s definitely alien. I checked it against all the information I could find in the books we took from the University library last month and the best I can tell is, it’s, like, a form of super penicillin."

"An antibiotic?" April asked.

"Yeah," Dawn said. "So I ran some tests. That stuff kills anything airborne on contact. I didn’t have much – just some mildew from the bathroom and bacteria from our own bodies. But it killed them all."

"Wow," Cassi said. "We could use something like that here on Earth."

"Wouldn’t work," Dawn said. "It’s too strong. Humans need some bacteria in their bodies just to work and stuff. That stuff would kill everything and our bodies wouldn’t function. I think it would do the same to Nbaru, too, if it was injected. The Fuzzies just, like, filter their air through it."

April looked at the vial between her fingers. "This looks like the stuff they put in the air system for the club," she said.

"It is," Chelsea said. "I got a good look at it when they were, um, installing it."

"You mean when you were fucking the construction crew," Darcy laughed.

Chelsea blushed. "They were cute, and it had been a while," she said sheepishly.

"Every Nbaru I’ve ever seen outside a base has worn one of those breathers," Brittany said. "I even remember that the transports wouldn’t pick up any Fuzzy soldiers that didn’t have them on."

"They must be super scared of Earth disease," Dawn concluded.

April looked intently at the vial. "Then we have to phone this in."

End of Part 3

since 11/27/02