OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO oOOOO OOOO. OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" .OOOOOO OOOOOo OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO OOOOOOO. OOOO oOOOO OOOO .OOOO OOOO OOOOOOOOo OOOO OOOO" OOOO oOOOO OOOO OOOO "OOOO. OOOO OOOOo .OOOO' OOOO .OOOO" OOOO OOOO OOOOoOOOO "OOOO. oOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO..OOOO OOOO "OOOOOOO OOOOoOOOO" OOOO .OOOO"""OOOOOOOO OOOO OOOOOO "OOOOOOO' OOOO oOOOO ""OOOO OOOO "OOOO OOOOOO |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | There Ain't No Justice | | | | #32 | | | |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| - Cestoda 02 - by The Collective Things had, finally, settled down after the minor social shuffle. Commander Marina Tietze and Medic Beth Sachs were still `an item', but Tietze had to grudgingly accept that Sachs would occasionally go off and play with First Technician Jeff Chuan. She didn't like it, but she put up with it so that Chuan could continue to maintain the beacon. He'd been going strange without female companionship, and God knows he never got any help from Manuel Diaz, the second technician, who spent most of his time on the receiving end of the scabrous penis of Base Doctor Giro Frascastoro. It seemed as if they might actually make it to the end of the three-year period without killing each other, and still have the beacon running. Then, one evening, an unscheduled ship arrived. No-one was monitoring the scanners, so the request for landing coordinates went unanswered. As it turned out, the ship was used to blind landings, so they just homed in on the beacon and set down on the square kilometre of fusion-blasted concrete that was the landing pad. They were signalling the beacon base until 25:00 - thinking that the base was unoccupied - before Chuan wandered in to the control room and noticed them. He dropped his toasted cheese and vegemite sandwich in surprise and ran over to the comms console. `This is Beacon Gamma Kappa Epsilon Nine Three, responding... uh, who the hell is this? There aren't any scheduled - ' `Yeah, well, there's been a bit of a shake-up back at Central.' The voice which came back over the speakers was male, a deep, liquid sound like chemical waste that had rusted a hole in its container and was escaping. `For a start, we're Bucketeers.' Bucketeers! Chuan had heard about these people. They used nanotechnology to illicitly mass-produce food, liquor and drugs, selling them to frontier worlds who were too busy building colonies to devote any time to luxuries. `For a start? And what do you mean, a shake-up at Central?' `The Liberal Labour Socialist Democrat Loony Greens were voted out of power at the last election, and there's a bit of confusion over policies at the moment. Some of the laws which were under discussion at the time have been suspended, so we're getting in for our chop while we can. Uh, listen, we lost a drive coil coming into your system... you wouldn't happen to have a replacement, would you?' Chuan thought about the coil in the secondary beacon power supply, smiled and replied, `What's it worth to you?' ... Two hours later, Chuan watched the ship lift silently from the pad, swing north and then recede into the distance. In exchange for the coil, Gibson had given him three tiny containers of alcohol producers (`just add water'), a half-kilo sack of speed, and the Bucketeer's `demo party pack' of chemical enhancers and mood-shifters. After some hesitation, Gibson had asked if they could leave a crate of `equipment' on the base; it was something illegal, obviously, but the man didn't specify what, only that they'd be back for it in a month's time. The implication was that the police were in the area, and they were more likely to stop and search a ship than a beacon base. Chuan had agreed, after determining that he could open the crate if he wanted to. He could always claim that the police had confiscated it. ... As the ship made orbit, Gibson reported to the captain. She was in her cabin, astride a young man who had been tied to the bed-frame, his limbs painfully outstretched, his teeth hard against the gag, his face covered in bruises. Gibson coughed politely; she turned to face him, her eyes glittering with drug-induced insanity, her hair wild and knotted, dried blood streaked down her chin, her small breasts juddering from involuntary twitches. `He bought it.' Gibson said evenly. The captain bared her teeth, hissed with glee. `That beacon will be out within a month. And the next, and the next.' Gibson crossed his arms, his head to one side. `Is that all you Bacchantes do? Knock out beacons?' The captain's eyes narrowed. `Any time you want to go back to being a Bucketeer, just,' and here, to the sound of his muffled screams, she slowly squeezed her captive's left eye from its socket, `say the word.' She turned back to her rutting. `Let me know when we reach the next beacon.' ... Chuan hurried back to his room with his shopping, watching out for the others. Sachs was busy with Tietze, and Diaz was (as usual) busy with Frascastoro; it was likely that none of them even knew that the ship had been and gone. He secured the door and opened the bag of amphetamine. The bitter smell was tempered with a subtle cinnamon fragrance, the power talcum-fine, completely pure. Given their methods of manufacture, the Bucketeers didn't need to cut drugs. Chuan's hand was shaking slightly as he located his most recently used syringe; he spooned about a gram of powder into the metal cup of his custom-built cooker, added some distilled water from a plastic bottle, and hit the COOK button. Within seconds, the powder had dissolved into the boiling fluid, and, after stirring it with the needle (for good luck), he siphoned it into the syringe, tiny bubbles drifting to the top as he tapped it with a fingernail. After examining and discarding his usual entry-points, he went over to the mirror, poked his tongue out as far as possible, and then slowly drove the needle into the base. A delicious warmth spread out through the entire lower half of his head as he shoved the plunger home; the drug hit almost instantaneously. Strangely, it didn't incite him to violent movement; he simply sat back on his bed and vibrated, his thoughts growing shorter and flying around inside his head faster and faster until he slowly fell over backwards, lying on the bed, listening to his heartbeat speed up, then slow down, then speed up again, his breath hissing in and out of his mouth like a piston. Occasionally his fingers would twitch; his jaw muscles bunching as he gritted his teeth. Whenever his thoughts ascended from the level of the monosyllabic, he wondered if he'd overdosed. It was almost four in the morning before the door opened, and Beth Sachs opened his door, her short blonde hair bunched up in places as if she'd been out in the night rain. `Saw your light on... I thought I'd just come in and say good-night.' She still hadn't stopped teasing him; it was an ingrained habit. When she saw the packages on his desk, she came in and sat down on the end of his bed. `Where did these come from?' `Had a visit. Bucketeers.' he managed through his clenched jaw. She picked up one of the containers of alcohol producers, peered at the light-blue powder inside. `Is this what I think it is?' With no idea what she meant, Chuan simply nodded. She opened the container, took a pinch of powder and placed it on her tongue. She looked off to one side, as if trying to determine the age of a fine wine by dint of intense concentration, then wrinkled her nose. `This isn't very good Danbenine.' With a small smile, Chuan offered her the bottle of distilled water. ... Within minutes, she was too drunk to stand up, and Chuan laid her back on his bed after stripping her coveralls off. He didn't bother with any preliminaries; just removed his pants and shoved his erection into her. She hardly knew what was happening, and didn't seem to care when he lifted her legs into the air, spread them and switched to sodomy. Her ass was loose; as he knelt on the bed, thrusting himself into her and occasionally stroking her labia, he wondered what Tietze had been doing to her. Her lack of response was unsettling, so he reached over to the desk, picked up the `party-pack', sorted through the dozen or so plastic-sealed patches. None of them were labelled, so he picked one at random - a blue one - tore it open and poked it between Sachs' vaginal folds, roughly where he judged her clitoris to be. Nothing happened at first; then he felt a prickling feeling in the finger he'd touched the patch with; Sachs' eyes opened wide and she gasped, inhaling with a disturbingly bass groan. Her anus contracted hard around his dick, and she almost leaped off the bed, her back arching. Now, that was more like it. She was bucking about as if someone was repeatedly hitting her with a cattle-prod, her heels kicking into his shoulders painfully, her ass squeezing his prick which he'd forced inside her to the root, her breath screeching in and out; despite this, she seemed to be having a good time. Chuan picked another patch - a green one, this time - pushed her legs forward and wrenched his dick out. While she writhed back down the bed towards him, her behind bunching the stained sheet underneath, he tore open the pack and placed the fingernail-sized patch over the end of his penis. Either there were some serious hallucinogens in that speed, or it was doing strange things to his vascular system; the veins seemed to stand out in much sharper relief, pulsing like giant earthworms wrapped around the shaft which itself bulged in strange places, the head looking more like an arthritic fist. Well, if she was into being fisted by Tietze, she'd love this, he thought, teasing her with it, forcing the head between the loose lips (`sink ships...' he thought, no idea why), pushing them slightly inside her cunt. He'd begun to wonder what the difference between a green patch and a blue one was when he felt an indescribably ugly sensation work its way up his urethra. It was like looking at a hose through a magnifying glass - everything on either side looked normal, and in the middle was an unsightly swelling. He was almost tempted to pull out and look at his dick, in the expectation that he'd see a bulge slowly working its way up into his crotch. He continued pumping away mechanically for almost a minute, during which the feeling repeated itself four times, gradually increasing in frequency and intensity, before he gave in to curiousity and, over Sachs' protests, pulled out. His eyes widened in shock as he saw the head swell almost to the size of a tennis ball, the swelling advancing along the shaft, looking like an ostrich that had swallowed a boxing glove. The lump disappeared into his crotch, sparse tufts of pubic hair only recently having grown back, and he felt the lump continue into his body, settling somewhere inside as a painfully bloated feeling, almost like he needed to void his bladder. Sachs simply lay there, watching the hole at the end of his penis writhe as if it were a dumb mouth desperately trying to say something; as another swelling began, she wriggled underneath his legs until his distended erection nestled between her breasts, then further until she could take the grotesquely bulging head between her lips. It felt hot, the skin of the head stretched taut over the swollen corpi. She slipped it into her mouth and the rippling movement of the swollen zone, down the shaft, forced more of his penis in, the head pressing against the back of her throat. All she had to do was close her lips around the shaft and apply the faintest amount of suction to kick him over the edge. He flung himself backwards on the bed, his penis catching painfully on her teeth on the way out; the pressure of several backward pulses had accumulated inside his prostate, and now that pressure was copiously released. He kicked and writhed much as she had before, his back arching, his twisted penis slapping hard against his belly, thick, ropy jets of pink-tinted fluid spraying up into the air, arcs of it hitting the wall, some of it falling on Sachs' face. She put a finger up to her cheek, smeared some of the stuff on a fingertip; semen, streaked with blood. After Chuan's groans subsided there was a brief silence; then Sachs vomited, the rank remains of yesterday evening's meal mixed with almost pure alcohol, streams of thin, green bile and the inevitable orange chunks all spewed down her chest and between their legs, puddling on the bed. After a few seconds, their spasms synchronised briefly, his orgasmic aftershocks with her peristaltic reversals; at that moment, they were closer than they'd ever been. ... Afterwards, they'd lain there gasping, soaked in sweat, vomit and semen; it would have taken sensitive medical scanners to determine that the chemicals in the patches, after playing with their vascular systems, had headed straight for their brains and begun trashing them. Not simply wholesale destruction of existing cells; these chemicals were smart, designed to look for relationships between cells that suggested certain patterns of thought, and to change them. The captain of the Bacchantes had been using similar chemicals for months. As the drugs made their changes, Chuan and Sachs lay on the bed and twitched. When the process had completed its first stage, it let them go to sleep. ... The next morning, Jeff Chuan got up early - that is, before mid-afternoon, well before any of the others - and went to the medical section, where he ransacked the shelves for things he'd need. He'd woken up with this idea fixed in his mind, and idea which involved Diaz; it seemed perfectly reasonable to him, but he knew that the slimy second technician wouldn't go along with it, so he picked out a bottle of anaesthetic with the other items, calmly sauntered down to Diaz's room, opened the door, soaked a towel with the salty-smelling chemical and pressed it against the young man's face. Diaz woke up, made one or two muffled protests and lost consciousness again. Chuan grinned, stripped the sheet back and steered the mechanical surgeon - an intricate robot about the size of an armchair - into place over Diaz's lower abdomen. Giggling, he turned it on and waited for the little screen to bring up the main menu. AUTODOCTOR Version 2.04b Please Indicate the General Nature of the Operation 1. Dermal 2. Neural 3. Vascular 4. Gastro-intestinal ... Chuan selected 19: Genito-urinary, and after being offered a dozen predefined procedures for standard operations, spent twenty minutes describing the one he wanted. The machine thought about it for a minute, then beeped to indicate that it could be done. Chuan hit the enter key and the machine extruded two short, strong arms, turning Diaz over to lie on his stomach. It hiked itself up about half a metre and the arms clamped onto his hips, pulling his numb body up to kneel on the bed, held him there. From somewhere inside the machine, a speculum forced itself up Diaz's ass - something he was probably used to - and dilated it as far as it would go. Needle-thin probes clicked, working like insect arms, cleaning out the cavity and then starting work. Chuan had programmed the machine to make an opening in the vesicles around Diaz's prostate, the glands which supplied semen to the reproductive process. His idea had its origins in something that Chuan had read in an old text file which claimed that most of the pleasureable feelings experienced by the male during orgasm were due to the flow of semen down the urethra. It had occurred to him that this sensation was all too brief; what would happen if someone pumped additional fluid in at the right moment? It was an intriguing idea, but not something he wanted to do to himself until he was sure it would work. Wrinkling his nose at the smell, Chuan watched in fascination as the robot carefully bored a hole in the anal wall, tiny laser flashes cauterising blood vessels as the monofilament-edged scalpel found them. Another of the machine's arms brought the tube forward - the end rimmed in a special plastic compound which would merge with tissue seamlessly - and glued it in place with narrow jets of chemicals. The narrow probe-arms poked the flesh back in place, low-power lasers and bioglue encouraging the flesh to knit rapidly, no stitches required, the hole sealed stronger than it was before (the machine had reported and repaired some minor tears, probably due to the irregular nature of the things which Dr. Frascastoro was wont to push in there). When the machine withdrew the speculum and dropped the body to the bed, Diaz had a half-centimetre tube poking out of his ass. Chuan pulled the machine back and looked up as Sachs entered. Some kind of preternatural communication took place; somehow, she knew what he'd done. She found a roll of surgical adhesive on the tray underneath the mechanical surgeon, taped Diaz's hands together and forced a belt between them. Together, they lifted him off the bed and tied his hands to the video-camera mounting on the wall next to the door. He'd recovered from the anaesthetic by now, so Sachs was obliged to tape his mouth shut. She wrinkled her nose when she considered the state of his genitalia; Chuan soaked the anaesthetic towel in hot water and she swabbed at the young man's wrinkled detumescence until she could stand to touch it. She was considering the fastest way to bring him to orgasm when Chuan, who had been going through Diaz's posessions, found a device shaped like a large chrome ballpoint pen with a coiled lead attached; an electrical stimulator. Sachs grinned and taped the copper disk which was attached to the end of the lead under the head of Diaz's penis. She turned a dial set into the end of the device and touched the other end along the underside of the slowly awakening shaft. Tiny jerks and movements of his hips indicated that the device was having an effect; Sachs turned the dial all the way up and jabbed it into the wrinkled pad of flesh above his scrotum. Diaz made an alarmed sound and tried to kick her arm away; Chuan was forced to glue his feet to the wall, using some quick-setting adhesive from the surgical tray. Beth varied the intensity and rate of the pulses delivered by the stimulator, judging from Diaz's moans which settings were most effective; Chuan found a plastic bottle, filled it with warm water and jabbed the plastic tube into the end. A tiny trickle of pale fluid was making its way down the tube from between the young man's squirming buttocks, and was washed away when Chuan squeezed the bottle lightly, adding a tone of urgency to the noises coming from under the surgical tape gag. As Diaz approached orgasm, Sachs took his wildly waving penis between thumb and forefinger, pointing it away from her, and with her other hand increased the strength of the pulses. He found it difficult to stand on tippy-toes with his feet glued to the wall, but it was obvious that he was trying as he heaved up and down, his penis almost jerking out from Beth's grasp. Chuan chose that moment to squeeze the bottle, and Diaz cried out as a thin stream of fluid dribbled from the end of his penis. It seemed to be working; forcing fluid into the prostate was definitely having some effect. When the bottle was almost empty, Chuan quickly found another tube, handed one end to Sachs who plugged it into the tap; then he pulled the other tube out of the bottle and joined the two together. Beth turned the tap on full and Diaz screamed, one side of the surgical tape coming free from his mouth. Chuan looked over at the tap; Sachs had turned the hot water on. They let it heat up to scalding temperature, then unplugged it from the tap; the flow diminished to a steaming dribble, and Diaz relaxed, slumping against the wall as best he could. Jeff Chuan's scrambled neurons untangled long enough for him to speak: `It would make a novel tomato sauce dispenser.' Sachs could only nod; then she froze as another variation came into her head. She held up her hand in a `wait here' gesture then ran off, returning with a field/survival kit. She disassembled the tiny cooker, removing the can of butane which fuelled it, plugged the hose into the end, opened the valve and held the electric spark device over the end of Diaz's penis. When the gas emerged with a farting sound, she ignited it; it blazed away with a blue flame for a few seconds, then went out with a muffled sound; the gas had backed up somewhere, and a pocket of it inside Diaz's body had exploded. Beth shut the gas off and watched as dark blood filled the tube coming out of the second technician's ass. Chuan merely shrugged. Later that day - just before the afternoon rains began - Beth found Chuan outside the base, lashing the naked body of Dr. Frascastoro to the base of a short, stubby tree, his legs spread out and held that way by tent-stakes driven deep into the muddy soil. Frascastoro's body sagged; Chuan had given him a powerful sedative. He'd be unconscious for the next twelve hours; after the night's rains, there'd be an interesting selection of plants and almost-animals growing into his skin. Sachs gestured to Chuan, indicating that she wanted him to come and see what she'd been doing since lunch. In the infirmary, Commander Tietze lay on the operating table. Sachs had removed her arms, legs and tongue; she'd shaved off her pubic hair and cut the nerves that led from her eyes and ears to her brain. The mechanical surgeon had done the work with machine precision, removing the commander's limbs cleanly and leaving four rounded, white stumps which had been force-healed in a matter of minutes. Tietze twisted about slowly, her mouth opening and closing like a fish's, moaning wordlessly, her eyes glancing blindly from side to side. Chuan approached her slowly, regarding her like some strange new kind of alien plant; Sachs opened three of the party-pack patches with a pair of tweezers and placed them in Tietze's mouth. Half a minute later, they took effect; the commander screamed and spat them out as if they'd burned her tongue. She twisted and fell off the bed, landing on her stomach, her breasts padding the fall somewhat. Chuan got down on his hands and knees to watch as she managed to work her way over to one wall, bumping her forehead against the power supply of some diagnostic device. She rolled over onto her back and Chuan crawled as close as he dared, watching her nipples become erect, her vaginal lips working as the patches stimulated what was left of her nervous system. Tentatively, Chuan reached out with one finger and poked her darkened vulva; Tietze moaned in panic and jerked away at first, but resigned herself to his ministrations as he stroked the lips, rubbing his knuckle against her rigid clitoris, slowly inserting his finger and curling the tip up against the front inner wall. This was all she needed to come, groaning, arching her back and throwing her breasts out. Chuan picked up her shaking body carefully and took it outside, putting it down on a relatively high piece of ground. He didn't want her to drown, after all; the afternoon rain was starting. He watched Tietze rolling about, heaving over to lie on her stomach and arch her back, pressing her pubis into the mud and wiggling her hips, trying to rub against something solid enough to cause another orgasm; she had to straighten out every minute or so, because this position placed her face under the slowly-rising level of water. She'd lie with her head thrown back, her face coated with grey-green muck, then she'd throw herself forward and wiggle some more, gradually working her way into deeper mud. Chuan watched for a few minutes, then caught up with her and fisted her to orgasm again. He left her moaning and writhing in the rain, spitting out mouthfuls of mud. The drug-crazed maniacs spent the evening injecting speed and fucking continuously; after almost overdosing, Beth clawed him with such ferocity that she dislocated his arm. His scream of pain touched off some chemically-short-circuited primal instinct in her; she threw him back on the floor and while forcing herself down on his misshapen erection, tore his throat out with her teeth. He gurgled and came as he died. The next morning, Beth staggered from the outer hatch, munching on the remaining party-pack patches. She'd take a few steps and an orgasm would knock her over; fall to her hands and knees, shivering and gasping like a dog being gassed, take a few minutes to recover then get up and repeat the process. She made it as far as the tree to which Frascastoro had been bound; there was a body-sized cocoon made of moss, vines and dried mud. It moved fitfully. Commander Tietze was harder to find, but she'd survived the night also; she had ended up half-way around the base and was trying to crawl up the shallow slope of the dome. A trail of mud, slime and various bodily fluids pointed the way. Sachs crawled up the side of the dome and hunkered down next to her. With one hand absently rubbing her inflamed vaginal lips, the other poked the commander's heaving body. Tietze hadn't acquired as diverse a collection of fungi as Frascastoro had, but she'd pushed herself further into the swamp and her body was home to a fine collection of the local variant of leeches, thick ribbed bodies bright-red, shaped like stubby carrots as long as her forearm and as thick as her thigh in places. They clung to Tietze's body with thick lips; they didn't drink blood - there wasn't any natural host on the planet that had blood - they seemed content to hang from her sides, occasionally falling off and scrambling to re-attach themselves. The tail of an exceptionally large specimen emerged from her vagina, waving back and forth and slowly disappearing segment by segment as it worked its way further in. The commander's face was covered with snails almost as big as the leeches, their translucent shells glistening wetly in the sunlight. Sachs watched in fascination as they worked their way around Tietze's face, busily exploring her nostrils. Every so often, she'd open her mouth, allow one in, crunch its shell between her teeth, swallow the pieces; while she was obviously making inroads into the gastropod population, there were more crawling up her back. Beth grasped the last inch of leech which protruded from the commander's cunt and tugged it free, the segments pushing the lips apart as they reluctantly emerged; Tietze made a drawn-out `aaugh' sound which was choked off by two more snails crawling into her mouth. Beth picked the rest of the snails off, threw them back into the swamp; she picked up Tietze's body and carried it inside, the leech wriggling in her grasp. Setting the commander down on the bench in the kitchen, she examined the leech. It wasn't actually composed of segments, but was in fact a large worm, tapered at either end, wound into a spiral shape and covered with a thick membrane which provided its startling crimson hue. Its mouth ended in remarkably human-looking lips; Sachs touched them to her nipple, eyes widening at the degree of suction the leech applied. She took off her stained overalls, sat back on the bench and pressed the protruberant lips between her legs, feeling the leech writhe as it sought to enter what it thought was a safe hiding-place. Sachs spread her legs as wide as possible, but the leech could only force the first six inches of its body into her. While it thrashed its tail back and forth, she reached over and picked three smaller leeches off Tietze's body (which had wriggled over to the edge of the bench and was about to fall off), placing one at each breast where they eagerly sucked her nipples into their inch-long mouths and hung there, wobbling as she placed the third, the smallest one she could find, just above the monster which had entered her cunt; it latched onto her clitoris and osculated happily, its tail waving slowly in the air. As Tietze fell off the bench, landing on her breasts with a wet slap and a moan of pain, Sachs lay on the bench and for the next three hours experienced a series of orgasms, the last of which was so strong that she involuntarily crushed the leech in her vagina. Its pulpy remains oozed out and fell to the floor as she wandered around the base, the other three still attached to her nipples and clitoris. She was looking for cucumbers in the base stores when she found the crate that the Bacchantes had left. She found it harder to get open than Chuan would have; inside was a chrome-polished metal cylinder about a metre long, half a metre in diameter, rounded ends, a small control panel set in its middle, a blunt nozzle pointing from one end. The nozzle was about the same size as a cucumber, so she lifted it from the crate and brought it into the kitchen, where Tietze was slowly exploring the limits of the room with her nose. Sachs rolled her into the middle of the room and forced the end of the nozzle into her vagina, making her squawk with surprise. She pressing the buttons, one after the other; the last one lit up green and the cylinder gave off a bass humming sound. The vibration appeared to be pleasant, judging from Tietze's expression, so she yanked it out, stood it up and squatted over it herself. There was some sort of standing-wave effect which centered about two inches above the end of the nozzle; this made her come so quickly and forcefully that she almost fell over. She pressed the buttons again, in sequence, with the heel of her foot. The first two did nothing; the third must have been some kind of trigger, because the hum rose to a howl, the focus of vibration increasing in strength a thousandfold, making her stomach explode. Her torso flew backwards against the wall and fell to the floor, her legs still wrapped around the end of the cylinder; her vision dimmed as the blood poured out of her to pool around her. ... Three days later, a police ship arrived and found Commander Tietze, still alive, blindly worming her way around the base, occasionally returning to the kitchen to chew on the decaying, dismembered flesh she'd found there. Later, they gave her prosthetic eyes, replaced her arms and legs and a tongue from a body bank, but she was never quite the same... She did, however, retain her rank of commander, and more than a few eyebrows were raised when she requested duty back on the beacon where four of her companions had died in such tragic circumstances. Her new crew avoided her for the most part, but they couldn't help but notice the commander's extensive collection of pet leeches. 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