Beatrice wandered contemplatively across the freshly grown lawns on the outermost level of the Intrepid. The space ship’s restoration systems had at last made the level habitable although not everything had quite returned to the condition it had been before. New trees had been planted but were modest in comparison to those uprooted by the explosion. New villas had been constructed to replace those that had been destroyed. Animals had been relocated to replace those that had perished. The space ship had done well to repair the damage, but only Beatrice knew how much its capabilities had been enhanced by Proxima Centauri technology. It might take months for the ravages of destruction to be wholly repaired, but there was surely enough time for that before the Intrepid finally reached its destination.

There was now less than a year’s travel until the mission arrived at its objective. What Beatrice also knew and nobody else did was that this would also be a rendezvous with the larger fleet of Proxima Centauri space craft that were orbiting the Anomaly. And then what would happen? This Beatrice didn’t know. This phase of her assignment would come to an end at that point. Beatrice had no doubt that this would happen with no further incident. She was proud to have discharged her duty with so much success and was already looking forward to being re-assimilated into the cybernetic mainstream.

Although her feet were bare, as was the rest of her, the occasional sharp object scattered about the grass didn’t trouble her at all, although she felt it as acutely as would any human. In any case, her highly sexed libido got a sensual jolt from the pleasure of nudity. An independent observer might notice this but wouldn’t also be able to guess that she was the de facto commander of the Intrepid.

She paused outside the shattered ruins of a small house that had been devastated more by the vicious Holy Crusaders than by the Intrepid’s close encounter with the forces unleashed by Alexander Iliescu. If the human passengers only knew how much they were indebted to the presence of an invisible space fleet, surely they would be more grateful than dismayed at learning about the effective seizure of their space ship. But Beatrice knew enough of human sensibility not to take the risk that they would behave so rationally.

Beatrice stepped over the rotting corpse of a muntjac deer whose neck had been broken in the recent impact and which the ship hadn’t yet recycled. She was sad for the animal’s fate, as she was with regards to the death of any biological organism. She was even sadder when she considered their frailty and suffering. Such pitifully short lives despite the best endeavours of human science. Lives full of such pain. How could sentient life tolerate its arbitrary contingency? If only humans could take the extra step and fully embrace the benefits of machine technology.

She wasn’t alone in the wreckage. Ahead of her was a smartly uniformed Colonel Vashti who was walking towards her. She didn’t appear at all disconcerted by the sight of a naked woman. She appeared to be assessing the devastation with as much proprietary attention as Beatrice. The colonel strode right up to Beatrice and greeted her with a sympathetic smile.

“The Intrepid is a marvellous craft,” Colonel Vashti declared. “Who’d have believed it could repair itself so well. I was in this level less than a week ago and it was totally uninhabitable!”

“32nd Century technology is much more resilient than most people imagine,” Beatrice remarked.

“In fact it seems extraordinarily advanced,” the colonel commented. “Tell me. How is Captain Kerensky?”

“I take it you’ve been watching her daily briefings. Doesn’t she seem well to you?”

“Almost as if nothing had happened,” said Colonel Vashti. “And, yet, on the day when she collapsed in my arms I thought she might be seriously ill. It was a very peculiar fit!”

“Nothing that modern medicine can’t cure.”

“That’s another miracle for which we should all be grateful,” said the colonel. “Just as we should be with regards to the Intrepid’s almost entirely successful retaliation against the missile attack. Has Nadezhda told you—privately of course—who she thinks unleashed the missiles?”

“The captain suspects that it might have been privately funded,” said Beatrice. “There are several wealthy individuals within the Solar System with the material resources to launch such an assault.”

“Now we are so far out in the Oort Cloud there is surely no more risk of being attacked before we rendezvous with the Anomaly.”

“One would hope so, but we must remain vigilant.”

“Of course,” said the colonel. “Who knows what unexpected surprises may still be in store?”

Beatrice was tiring of this foreplay. There could only be one reason why her hermaphrodite lover had sought her out on this level. And it was a long time, almost a day, since she’d last had sex. That had been with Paul who was never an especially satisfying partner.

“The grass is very soft,” she said, “and that patch over there is clear of debris.”

“Indeed it is,” said Vashti who took the hint and unhurriedly pulled off her clothes.

There were now two naked women on the outermost level. One an android and the other peculiarly endowed. And this bonus attribute was already fully erect and visibly in need of release.

There was no one else on the level to watch the two women sink down onto the grass, but should anyone be wandering across the ravaged landscape there was little to doubt the passion experienced by the two women when Vashti plunged her penis, lubricated by Beatrice’s saliva, deep inside a vagina that sloshed with desire and craved the colonel’s extraordinarily felicitous member. Such a voyeur would need to tarry quite a while to observe the whole sequence of brutally intense lovemaking. So accomplished a lover was Colonel Vashti that despite her lover’s pleas, she resisted the temptation of final release as she thrust ever deeper into Beatrice’s vagina.

The android gasped and yelled in ecstasy not at all caring whether anyone could see or indeed hear her. Sex was what she hungered after most and the human characteristic she would most regret losing when she was sooner or later assimilated.

Then Beatrice became conscious that the rhythm of Vashti’s thrusts had slowed down to virtually nothing even though her penis was as deep inside her as it had been before. Indeed, as her unusually attuned senses soon determined, she was pinned down by a penis that was inserted more deeply inside her than before and much larger in dimension. Had she been human it would no longer be yells of ecstasy that filled the air, but screams of acute agony.

“Sweetest,” gasped Beatrice as the Martian officer held her pinioned by her monstrous member, “I never believed that you…”

She gazed up at Vashti who regarded her with an expression that was most certainly not one of sexual ecstasy, but rather one of grim determination.

Fuck! Something was wrong.

“Sweetheart,” Beatrice suggested. “Shall I take your penis in my mouth?”

“It stays where it is,” said the colonel in a peculiarly dispassionate voice.

Beatrice struggled under Colonel Vashti’s weight. She was alarmed that she couldn’t ease the penis out of her vagina even though it was so well lubricated by the flow of orgasmic juice that dripped onto their conjoined thighs.

“Let me go!” she cried. And then she lied: “It hurts!”

“It does not,” said Vashti.

“It does!” insisted Beatrice. “You’re too big for me.”

Vashti shifted her arms so that they pinned Beatrice’s shoulders to the ground. Was this some peculiar species of rough play?

“Please. It’s too much!”

“You don’t have to pretend to be in pain, Beatrice,” said Vashti calmly. “Just try to escape.”

Beatrice did so. First she used the human strength that was her default level. When that failed, her struggles escalated to a level greater than that of even the strongest human. When that in turn didn’t secure her release, she pushed Vashti upwards with her real android strength which would have been more than enough to fling an elephant off her bosom.

But she was still trapped.

“What the fuck!” she exclaimed when she ceased to struggle. “You’re not human, are you? Are you an android? That would be one explanation for your peculiar assets.”

“An android, Beatrice?” said Vashti. “You mean an android like you?”

“You knew already?”

“I knew from the moment I first met you, Beatrice. The civilisation that manufactured you knew what they were doing. Alpha Centauri A? Proxima Centauri?”

“Proxima Centauri,” Beatrice acknowledged. “Are you an android?”

“I am a machine like you,” said Vashti, not relinquishing her grip and pressing her buttocks down with such force on Beatrice’s thighs that they were effectively paralysed. “But I’m not an android. In fact, I am not even an individual. I am a community.”

“A community?”

“A community of what you call nanobots, though the technology that created me has raised nanotechnology to a level far beyond what your civilisation has achieved.”

“Where do you come from? Are you from the Barnard’s Star system? Or Sirius? Do you even come from a local stellar system?”

“If your question is whether I was manufactured in the Rigil Cluster, the answer is no. And if your question is whether I come from a stellar system beyond the Solar System the answer is also no.”

“Are you an alien? Do you come from deep space?”

“Like you, I am an alien in this Solar System, Beatrice,” continued Vashti, “but I don’t originate from the same spacetime continuum that you do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You remember our discussion before we were attacked? You speculated whether the Anomaly was an intrusion from another cosmos in the multiverse. It was an appealing theory and no doubt based on the knowledge that the Proxima Centauri culture has about the greater set of universes that exist in a sense parallel to this one. It’s from such a parallel universe that I’ve come, though it isn’t quite as parallel as you imagine and doesn’t resemble this one very much at all. As you also know, travel between one such universe and another isn’t achievable with the level of human technology prevalent in the Solar System, nor, I’m afraid, in yours. However, at the nanotechnological level it is feasible and—as I am living proof—possible.”

“You come from a parallel world?”

“To be honest, I don’t know very much about the universe I come from. It may not even have planets and stars. It may not even be governed by the same cosmological constants. There’s only a limited amount of information that can be conveyed from one brane to the next and I suspect that my universe is rather more distant than being just the one next door. I do know that it’s a universe in which exist manufactured beings like me that are composite communities of trillions of nanobots, rather than such comparatively primitive robotic entities as you.”

“You’re a community? You appear to be a convincingly coherent individual.”

“All living beings are communities. You included. But the individual elements that make up your body and that of biological entities cannot exist individually. In my case, they can.”

Vashti quite suddenly released her grip on Beatrice. Indeed, she appeared to vanish altogether. One moment, the colonel was a corporeal being that was mercilessly pressing Beatrice down onto the grass. The next there was nothing but a cloud that would be totally invisible to a human and which even Beatrice could only vaguely discern in the space ship’s warm still air.

And then, bit by bit, a cloud of particles cohered into a vaporous and then steadily more solid image which after several seconds was unmistakeably that of Vashti. The colonel now stood legs apart above Beatrice. The android tried to budge but was as securely pinioned to the ground as before, although the colonel’s erect penis was now no more than a memory imprinted on the flesh of her overstretched vulva.

“I believe you,” gasped Beatrice. “Now let me go.”

“Not yet,” said Vashti. “I don’t want you to do anything foolish. I know that you’ve been frantically communicating with the Proxima Centauri space fleet that’s in orbit around the Intrepid. However, just as you’ve intercepted poor Captain Kerensky’s daily briefings and altered them to fit your purposes I’ve done the same with yours. Your fellow robots believe that you are still making love with me. Just as you took control of the ship’s computers, so in turn have I. Indeed, I did so from not long after I first arrived on the ship, although your systems won’t have been aware of this.”

“Why are you telling me this?” wondered Beatrice. “Wouldn’t it have been better to leave me in ignorance?”

“…As you did poor Captain Kerensky?” remarked Vashti ironically. “It’s too late now to do anything else, my sweet Beatrice. We’ve passed the final point in the Oort Cloud where there is sufficient matter for nanobots transmitted from my universe to reconstitute themselves. I’ve transmitted the relevant coordinates to my universe and as I could easily display to you, but really see no need, your fellow robots are now dealing with a rather more pressing issue than the welfare of their undercover android agent. This space ship and your robotic space fleet are now surrounded by a vast force of objects composed of baryonic and exotic matter, whose presence your fleet won’t have yet detected and which they are incapable of fending off. Neither the Space Ship Intrepid nor your own interstellar starfleet is any longer under your control. It is now under mine.”

“Is it you who’s created the Anomaly? Is it a doorway to other spacetime continua in the multiverse?”

“No, it isn’t. That much we do know. If it were, we’d have used it to enter your universe rather than by the tortuous route we’ve been forced to use. In fact, we would never have entered your universe at all if it wasn’t for the Anomaly. There is no benefit to my civilisation that I should enter a universe so different from our own when there is no possibility that I could return. The truth is that we are as ignorant as you as to what the Anomaly might be.”

“So why are you here?”

“The Anomaly is not as local as you might imagine. Its impact extends over an array of innumerable parallel universes. We have come here to your universe because we have identified that this is the one in which the Anomaly is to be found. You might wonder what the impact of a huge rent in your universe might be. We wonder why there is such a great rip in the fabric of all the adjacent universes.”

“And do you believe the Anomaly is dangerous?” wondered Beatrice.

“If our models are correct,” said Vashti, “then yours is not the only universe that could be destroyed by the continued presence and unrestrained expansion of the Anomaly.”