Wending her way through the narrow, gloomy spaces in the starship’s underbelly, Essa was suddenly aware of an odd tingling. She felt her hair stand up a little while she turned a slow circle, as best she could in a space barely wider than her shoulders. It felt like she was at the edge of a powerful electromagnetic field and after a moment of uncertainty she decided that the problem was on the other side of the bulkhead to her right.
“Hey Cap?” Her tone was her usual breezy singsong, just a little more upbeat than usual now that she’d found her prey, “Pretty sure I just found the problem. What’s in compartment …” she squinted in the dim light, “4-20-2-Q?” She was wearing a simple headset that looped over her ear with a tiny boom mic that connected her to the ship’s VOX. Any time she spoke it turned on and broadcast her voice to the ship’s common channel. Anyone who was also wearing one would hear her, but she was also broadcast to speakers on the bridge. She knew the captain thought this was pretty high priority so she didn’t worry about interrupting anyone up there. What was the captain’s name again? Wren? It was something about Earth birds, she was sure of that, but she couldn’t remember exactly. All the humans had names and most of them were different. How could she keep them all in her head? It’s just silly.
“That’s great, Chris,” the captain replied directly into her ear a moment later. He sounded like he was talking into one of those little boom mics as well even though he could have just used the mic at his station. “So, listen, I don’t know what’s in there, but maybe you can just go look, right?”
Essa’s always-cheery expression clouded just a little as she thought I told him it’s Essa, not Chris, but she’d only signed on with this crew on Astraeus Platform a week ago, so she wasn’t too upset. Maybe humans had trouble remembering names too? Hawk! Hawk? No, not Hawk. Something about birds, though. “For sure, I’m on it, Cap!” she responded, then turned and looked around uncertainly. She wasn’t even sure how to find the hatch to that compartment. Or exactly how to get out of this corridor. If it was a corridor. She might just be wriggling between the walls. It had happened before. Humans didn’t always make it obvious what was a door and what wasn’t.
“And Chris?” he called again.
Essa’s hair drooped a little, she’d never been very good at hiding her emotions and she was quite disappointed and maybe a little frustrated at being called by the wrong name. “Yeah?” she did her best to still sound chipper. She was pretty successful.
“D’ya think you could fix whatever’s wrong before the blue-hulls pick us up? They’re getting real close and they aren’t real happy.” Essa finally understood the tone in his voice, anxious sarcasm. She wondered how humans ever learned to communicate when they refused to just say what they meant. Their children must be very confused. It was her experience children, even human children, knew how to say what they meant.
Still, she had to be fair, she had forgotten about the urgency of the situation while she had been exploring the dark corners of the ship. It was a really interesting ship! She’d never been on one like this before, it had so many secrets to share! “You bet!” she chirped, making a decision to plunge on ahead since she didn’t remember passing a hatch on her way here. If she’d had room in the not-a-corridor she would have been skipping.
Essa’s brood-name was Criseyde Stiik and that was how she normally first introduced herself to humans, but they always seemed to have trouble with it. She had tried to break it down for them (“Try Chris-ah-duh and stick.”) but that wasn’t quite right and most of them weren’t even great at that. Her fathers had both always called her ‘Essa’ and she liked that best so she also encouraged the humans to call her that. It reminded her of home.
She was also more comfortable using that name among the humans since she was much too old to still have a brood-name and back home it would’ve been awkward. Some of us just take longer than others to figure it all out, she would announce as if she were an authority on childhood development. Someday she’d have a blossom-name. Maybe. She wasn’t sure if she even wanted a blossom-name. She definitely wanted to join a brood someday, but it had to be the right one. She wasn’t going to spend her whole life back on Dingir-Ge just because that’s what the Befores said they should do. There was too much to see, too much to learn! And the humans were her ticket to that!
Essa’s species — they called themselves Koeus, ‘Ko-Us’ to the humans — were the only intelligent aliens humanity had encountered as they expanded out to the stars near their home. The Koeus, had histories about other species they’d met, but that was so long ago nobody was really sure if the histories were real or just children’s stories.
It had been generations since the humans had found a way to travel faster than the speed of light, with their very clever folding drive, but they were still so very, very slow at so many other things. They seemed to fight with each other almost all the time for example, which absolutely confounded Essa. She was sure that was why they hadn’t gone very far from their birth-star yet. Essa’s home was just a little over 31 light-years away from their world, Sol and Earth, but if you could believe the Befores, her own people had travelled more than 200 light-years before The Settling.
Why a whole species would decided to settle on a single planet was beyond Essa’s understanding. Even if it was the planet where they were supposed to have first grown. That’s what the histories said, they’d started on Dinger-Ge and that’s where they decided was their best home, but the histories got a lot of things wrong. Maybe they were wrong about that too.
No matter if the histories could be trusted, no matter what the Befores had thought was best, Essa wasn’t like the rest of her people. Her Brood-Fathers had known it all along, this daughter was not destined for the life they’d chosen, and when she had a chance to help some humans they had given her their blessing. Essa knew they hoped their little broodling would eventually find her way home to a proper role among her own people, but they had been incredibly supportive of her choice. Every time she thought about them her chest swelled with love and pride for how understanding her family was about her being different.
She had the best family of anyone in this whole galaxy!
She was a little sad for everyone else.
Her people called their home Dingir-Ge and as with her own name, Essa had found it easiest to explain to humans how to pronounce the name by using words they already knew: ‘Ginger’-‘She’. Except with a ’d’ sound instead of a ‘g’ at the start of ‘ginger’. That wasn’t right but it was less wrong than many humans managed. It was a tidally locked planet orbiting a very, very small red dwarf star and, for some reason she’d never quite understood, sometimes the humans called her a Cygnan. She thought maybe it was them being mean but she didn’t like thinking about anyone being mean on purpose so she just ignored it.
Dingir-Ge was a very different world from the home-world of the humans. Their world’s light side and dark side moved constantly, their weather changed constantly and even their most basic biology had developed around this constant shifting of weather and temperature and light-levels. It seemed so wild, so unstable that Essa usually just pretended it wasn’t real. How could intelligent life develop on a world where there was no way to predict when a storm might hit and when your planet just, all of a sudden and all of the time, decided to face away from the home-star? No wonder the humans were so strange.
Her people were so much easier to understand. Their world was stable and predictable. There was ‘day’ and there was ’night’ and the Koeus lived at Between. All human words but Essa had found herself thinking in human words almost all the time now. Between was where they had their cities, where they had their farms and where they made their homes. It was a good life, harmonious with Dinger-Ge and what the world needed and everything was predictable. Other than Utu, their home star. Utu was easily angered and slow to forgive. But the Koeus had learned how to weather Utu’s poor temperament. Between had many, many places for the Koeus to wait out Utu’s bad moods. When she was a little broodling she had sometimes misbehaved, hoping to make Utu angry, because those times, in the Below with her brood, warm and safe and away from the normal routine, those were some of her favorite times.
The Koeus were shorter than humans, even the tallest could never see eye-to-eye with them and Essa herself was almost comically short compared to some humans. By their measurements she was barely 147 centimetres, or 4'10" (The humans used two completely different systems of measurement and they didn’t even have a good way to convert from one to the other! Why were they so in love with chaos?) but compared to humans the Koeus were extremely strong. As Essa understood it, the humans’ home-world was smaller than Dinger-Ge and so they lived in a lower gravity environment, meaning they were taller, thinner and more easily … broken. She always tried to be gentle around humans. They did seem to be very fragile.
They made up for it in other things though. Their parent star was bright. Very, very bright. Humans couldn’t see very well in low light — more than one human had asked her if she could see in the dark, which is just silly, of course she couldn’t see when there was no light, but what they thought was low light and what she thought was low light were very different things. Humans were also very resistant stellar radiation. The human home-world was constantly assaulted by their star with the sort of radiation that would send her people into the Below. Humans even had something in their bodies that gave them more or less radiation protection and they seemed to make more of it if they were exposed to more radiation!
How could life have ever developed on such a erratic world?
Probably also as a consequence of their different evolutionary crucibles, they had vastly different coloration. Essa’s people were almost uniformly pale and, by human standards, blue-grey with vibrant eyes ranging from lavender to scarlet. Their other parts were similarly blue-grey with an infrequent speckling of something on the warmer end of the spectrum, but that wasn’t common.
The single strangest thing about humans, though, was what they called ‘hair’. They certainly had what she had come to know as ‘hair’ in human terms. But their’s were all dead. The bits on their head, the bits on their face, the bits everywhere else? All of it, dead! She was more than a little uncomfortable being around any of the humans who sported too much of that dead stuff covering their bodies. And some of them had a lot of it.
She didn’t have a good grasp of that part of human physiology. For them, hair was such a basic thing most of them couldn’t even understand her questions about it. What she did understand was that what you could see, on their heads, on their faces, in their armpits … other places … those were all the dead leftovers. The only parts that were alive were beneath their skin. Waste product, all over them and the humans treated it like it was practically a sex-organ! Their hair was something to be immensely proud of only to cut it away in a month or two, whenever they wanted to display their dead plumage in some other way.
Regardless, she loved the humans, she was in awe of the humans in so many ways, even if they were utterly disgusting from time to time.
The Koeus, on the other hand, had what humans would call ‘hair’ but it was a living extension of their bodies. Essa wasn’t a biologist but what she understood was that her species, in the absence of bright light, had developed a way to sense electromagnetic fields. An extremely sensitive solution. In a very real way Essa could ‘see’ an electromagnetic field, she could ‘feel’ electromagnetic waves in the same way she could feel the sun on her skin or the wind on her face. Even in total darkness, Essa’s people were almost never truly blind.
Humans produced the most wonderful electromagnetic patterns and shapes and it was amazing to watch how they changed as one human interacted with another. Or how a human interacted with her…
So when Essa got the sense that whatever was wrong with the captain’s — Peregrine! No, that was dumb! Humans didn’t have names like Peregrine! — ship, she didn’t just sense it, she could feel it, it was like her fingers had brushed over an unbalanced motor. A pleasant tingle teased and caressed her head. It felt … it felt good! So good Essa almost wanted to just close her eyes and enjoy the moment. There was a thrum from compartment 4-20-2-Q, and she felt it from head to toe and everywhere in between.
Essa stroked the frame of the hatch curiously. This was definitely it, stencilled beneath the cloudy porthole was 4-20-2-Q in chipped, flaking black paint that was only slightly darker than the grime covering the rest of the cold metal. It looked like it hadn’t been used in a very long time, maybe never since Captain … Captain … Crow? Ugh, it was so frustrating! Literally anything could be a name when it came to humans! They might even decide something like ‘stone’ could be a name. They probably would.
The hatch looked like it hadn’t been used maybe since the captain had bought the ship. Except the lever. It was smudged clean. Someone was in there, or had been in there recently.
The thrum coming from the compartment had decreased briefly as she made her way aft but it rose dramatically when she was clear of the corridor — it probably was a crawl-space, she decided — and approached the proper entrance. It made her hair poof up so it formed a halo around her head. Standing at the entrance to the compartment now, touching the door, she was starting to feel lightheaded. The Koeusian woman closed her eyes briefly as a particularly intense wave of electromagnetism crashed into her and sent a thrill through all her hair. The poofy crown she now wore and the needy, frustrated curls in her beneath her coveralls.
“Chris!” the captain shouted into her ear and she jumped. She hadn’t even noticed that she had one hand creeping between her legs and the other cradling a breast over her coveralls. “CHRIS!” the captain repeated over the VOX.
He seemed to be cranky a lot. He didn’t have to be so cranky. Captain Bird, whatever his name was.
“Yeah Captain?” she started, hoping she sounded … well, however humans would want her to sound in this situation. She guessed it probably wasn’t turned on by an EM field coming from an empty compartment and distracted by what it was doing to her nethers.
“We cleared the fold shadow but those blue-hulls are gonna be on us any minute! I need you to figure out why my goddamned fold drive isn’t working!” He sounded really cross. Then he added in a tone that Essa thought could be fear, “Right fucking now, please!”
“Mmmhmm!” Essa replied, not quite trusting herself to speak as yet another pulse from the compartment sent a thrill through her that made her hair — all her hair — stand up and a deep warmth begin to spread down below. She took a steadying breath, “Going in now, Captain!”
“Great, because Chris? If they pick us up, they’re putting you on the penal ship right along with the rest of us, they don’t care you’re new!” Human languages were confusing and subtle but Essa was sure now, the captain was afraid.
The poor guy. He seemed like he would probably be really nice when he wasn’t convinced he was about to spend the rest of his life in prison for smuggling … smuggling … Essa realized she didn’t know what they were smuggling. She decided it was humanitarian supplies. Humans fought so much and other humans tried to help the losing side so much that they even named stuff like food and water after themselves. That’s definitely what they were smuggling.
“Got it!” she called cheerily into the VOX, shoved down the lever, then heaved forward as the door groaned in protest.
“Well look at you!” Essa exclaimed, her voice full of gleeful wonder. “How’d you get here, mystery girl?” The compartment might have been an infirmary at some point in the distant past. There were a pair of metal slabs attached to the walls that could have been examination tables and a half-wall that created a tiny ‘office’ space with a desk and a chair. Whatever it had been, that was a long time ago. Everything in here was covered in a thick layer of dust and ship-grime.
Everything that is, except a large, gleaming metal sphere sitting in the middle of the room. It was supported, held in place, really, by various discarded bits of equipment from the compartment itself. There was a book wedged under one spot, an oblong chunk of broken plastic under another, a wadded up mound of fabric in another place. The sphere was taller than Essa, but not by much, and so shiny she could see her own distorted reflection in the surface as she stepped through the hatch. Embedded in the sphere, spread seemingly randomly around the surface, where illuminated circular patches. Those were lights mounted below the shell intended to communicate something about the functioning of the device, Essa was certain of that. She frowned briefly at it and watched the pattern of the lights, some solid, some changing, and she could almost understand what it was saying. It was a conversation in the next room over … if she could just …
“Ugh!” Essa shivered again, gasping as another electromagnetic pulse rolled off the sphere and bathed her in a delicious warmth. She braced herself against the bulkhead behind her.
“What’d you find?” the captain said in her ear. Of course he’d heard her talking to … it. Whatever it was. Except she knew what it was, it had already told her.
Essa took a moment to compose herself before she replied. She had the first syllable of a response out, ‘I’, but the device pulsed again and she her groin throbbed in reply. “I think it’s a guh—”, again the device and she reached for the nearest wall to steady herself, “Gravity generator?”
The humans had some space travel technology they called “folding”. Essa didn’t understand it, even though she understood how to repair and maintain the “fold drive” almost instinctively. The trick about “folding” was it was only possible if you were far enough away from any strong gravitational fields. A small device like this wasn’t really very strong, nothing humans would feel, but it was enough to confound a “fold drive”. A shackle.
The captain — Woodcock! Essa thought wildly then chased the thought and the accompanying mental image out of her head — cursed loudly then asked, “Can you turn it off?”
She squeezed her thighs tight together as the device thrumed — throbbed — again and Essa’s whole body shivered in sympathy. “Oh fuck yeah!” she gasped and pitched forward, catching herself with both hands before her head impacted the curved, chrome surface.
“Um, now, please?” the captain asked, for the first time sounding hesitant in addressing her.
“MmmHMMM!” was the only sound Essa could manage as she stumbled around the room, walking her hands along the gleaming surface as she tried to find an interface on this device. She squeezed her eyes shut and clumsily patted down her hair. It wouldn’t really help, but it felt like she should convince it to calm down and let her concentrate. Then then the device pulsed again and she dropped to her knees, “Ohhhhhh!”
Her nipples were painfully hard inside her coveralls and she decided the only sensible thing to do was to get them off as fast as possible. She grabbed the neck with both hands and yanked. The zipper rushed down the front then broke when it reached the bottom. Something positive, Essa hadn’t worn any underwear today — she really didn’t understand the purpose of putting clothing on top of other clothing, but it was a thing humans did and seemed to prefer her do as well — and in seconds she was naked and leaning against the curved, mirrored surface again. Well, naked except for her boots. She didn’t have time to get them off, she just frantically kicked her coveralls off over them.
She admired herself in the distorted mirror. Average sized breasts — by human standards — capped with dark blue-grey nipples, narrow waist, pleasantly curved hips, a little bit of a tummy swooping down to …
Throb! the device demanded her attention her again and she whimpered in reply. Her pubic hair vibrated and tingled in eager response to the EM radiation. Somehow she had found herself sitting on the compartment floor, leaning back on one hand with her legs spread wide, almost offering herself to the wonderful device. The device that was probably going to get them sent to prison for the rest of their lives. That’s for sure why it’d been smuggled on board their ship.
She giggled at the irony, someone had smuggled this machine on board a smugglers’ ship — Throb! “Oh fuck!” she wailed as her thighs twitched and her pussy clenched. For a moment all she could think about was how good it would feel to touch her little bean, her clit, just now.
She staggered to her feet as she realized the captain was saying something over the VOX. “— Glenhew down to help!” he sounded … was he worried about her?
“NO!” she shouted. In her own ears her voice sounded like she was a heartbeat away from pure panic. That wasn’t going to reassure the captain if we really was worried about her. “I’m good. This is good. Please don’t!” Throb! She whimpered again as her sex quivered harmony with the device.
“They’re on us, Chris!” the captain countered, “We’ve gotta go now, we’re out of time!”
“I’ll,” throb “DO IT!” she howled as her eyes rolled back in her head for a moment. This thing felt so good! It was magical! Dimly, Essa hoped the captain would let her keep it.
Moving around the device she finally found a porthole of sorts on the far side. There was nothing covering it and through it could be seen an inner chamber. She had never been exposed to ancient human technology but if she had she would have instantly recognised this design: a bathysphere.
She couldn’t reach the controls from the outside but the porthole was just large enough for her, so she scrambled through the opening then flopped into what passed for a ‘seat’ in the centre of the chamber.
The EM field in here was unbearable. Essa could see the switch she knew would disable the device. It was right there! Right in front of her! All she had to do was …
THROB! Her hair vibrated both above and below and the sound that escaped her was more animal than sentient. The sensation was more powerful than anything she’d felt before. Her toes clenched into little fists in her boots, her pussy throbbed and squeezed and grasped at something that just wasn’t there. The device was telling her there was something hot and hard and absolutely perfect inside her and her body railed against the deception.
She knew what she had to do.
Her left hand grabbed her left breast roughly, twisting and pulling at her nipple until she cried out in delicious pain. Her right hand — she was right-handed — flew to her crotch. She gave her silver-blue pubic hair a welcoming pet before she pinched her clit between her index and middle fingers. “Oh-ho-hoooooo fuuuuuuuuck,” she whimpered as she began rubbing her clit left and right with an almost terrified urgency. The hollow space inside the gravity generator was immediately filled with the warm, wet, squishy sounds of Essa pleasuring herself. Somewhere very, very far away she could hear the captain saying something but that was incredibly unimportant just now. She sighed and gasped and cried a little as she rubbed her clit harder and faster with each passing second. She had never been so desperate to reach an orgasm quickly but, frustratingly, her body seemed intent on enjoying this moment.
THROB!!! the device hit her with another wave and she almost sobbed at how it subsided just before she reached her peak. “Fuck off you!” she shouted, “Help me fucking CUM!” It pulsed again. Her fingers were still working her clit and she had just happened to be giving herself a particularly harsh twist of her nipple. Everything came together at once for her and finally, mercifully, she reached her climax.
The Koeusian wailed, sobbing and giggling and kicking her feet against buttons and switches and dials as she tried to both enjoy the moment and to pass through it as quickly as she could so she could recover her rational mind. There was a wet spot collecting on the seat beneath her as her ego reasserted itself over her id. She managed to flip the switch and almost instantly she was plunged into darkness as all the lights inside the device turned off. Seconds later she felt the odd displacement, the beside myself feeling that accompanied every use of the human “folder” technology.
Essa lay spent, panting, covered in a sheen of sweat and positively glowing from the incredibly intense orgasm she’d just enjoyed. Now that the threat of incarceration was gone, she felt she had earned this moment of quiet bliss. She felt her pussy throb again but this time only in the memory of what had come before. “Right?” she said softly, addressing her sex as she often would when she’d had a particularly powerful experience.
The Captain cleared his throat, “G-great work, Chris.” His voice came over the VOX and he sounded … the humans had a name for — apologetic! he sounded apologetic. Her eyes opened wide, Captain Fowler! That was his name. Essa grinned at herself as she wondered how she could forget that his name was ‘Fowler’, then she immediately blushed. Everyone on the bridge had heard everything. That’s how VOX worked. You say something, everyone hears it.
“Thanks, Captain Fowler,” she panted softly. She decided she was just going to own it. There’s no reason to be embarrassed, just because everyone on the ship got to hear you cum your brains out. You saved them, it’s cool. That’d been Essa’s thinking, but deep down she was sure she would be looking for a new crew soon. Humans were less okay with stuff like that. She’d never understood quite why.
She really hoped Captain Fowler would let her keep the device when she left.
Updated to include the art of Essa done by the very talented artist and my friend Zimaja She has more, higher resolution art of Essa as well as her own OCs over on her Patreon and on BlueSky. Go check them out!