The Bymbiote

The small scout ship's landing gear slammed into the deckplating of the ISCS Venture, forcing Delphi's body against the tight restraints of her cockpit chair. With the Venture's landing guidance system dead, it had been up to her to guide her craft into the tiny port while travelling at several thousand kilometres per second, not an easy manoeuvre at all. But her skill and experience handing crafts like her diminutive scout skiff had made the procedure not only look safe, but easy. Fractions of degrees in any direction and she would have smashed into a docking crane, or careened off the hull itself. Taking a deep breath and a moment to praise herself for a job well done, she scanned her local camera feeds to get a grasp of what the rest of the docking bay looked like.

There was an eerie stillness to the surroundings displayed on each fisheye lens. The Venture was an exploratory craft, so its docking bay should be a bustling part of the ship any time it was out of jumpspace. But there was nothing. No pilots going through systems checks, no mechanics tuning up drive fins...a total ghost town.

Two shuttles, one on each side of the bay, sat in good condition from what she could tell. Another mystery to be solved on this trip, as if the Venture HAD encountered an emergency, those craft would have been the first to disembark and used to ferry survivors away from the danger. There were also escape pods that the crew could use to flee, but her cursory pass of the ship's hull revealed that none of those had been launched either.

"Curiouser and curiouser," she mumbled to herself. The restraints disengaged at the click of a button, allowing her to move to the cabin of her craft to suit up for a little extra vehicular activity. Something strange had happened on board the ICIS Venture, and Delphi was determined to discover what.

The clank of her exosuit's boots onto the deck confirmed to her what the HUD displays had said: gravity plating was at Earth Norm. As was atmosphere and residual radiation. Her suit didn't have a pathogen scanner, so her black-tinted helmet stayed on. She also slid a hand-sized object from a pouch at her side. Twisting the cycler, she armed the Particle Pistol, feeling the familiar whirr transmit through her suit. Something had turned this ship into a crypt, flying through space under inertia alone. And she had to find out why.

She slid through the half-open cargo door and into the corridor. One of the light panels flickered, and Delphi noticed that there had been damage to its control quarkitry. Her HUD lit up, feeding her information. Passive sensors slid over the slight scorch markings and confirmed her hunch.

"Weapons fire," she mouthed. From the looks of it, it was from a Disrupter. Only a few kinds of crew weapons were allowed on starships. Ones that had a chance of rupturing during a jump would have to receive an expensive refit. Disrupters targeted the nervous system, but also played havoc with electronics. Her Particle Pistol was another; a high energy stream of particles that could injure flesh but not damage a hull.

Another piece to the puzzle, and it made her grip the pistol even tighter. She adjusted the exosuit's power levels to their absolute minimum. It turned down her sensor suite's abilities, but it might keep her from being detected if there was someone else around. The bounty hunter took hesitant, slow steps forward down the dimly lit corridor.

The shuttle bay was located at the rear of the ship. From here, Delphi could head in several directions. Up a megalift would bring her to the medical bay, while down would lead her to engineering. Forward would bring her through everything else in the vessel, culminating in the bow-adjacent bridge section. She decided that would be her best bet to determine if the ship was salvageable, and to get access to some more systems.

The clean, spartan corridors looked like just about every other Explorer-class cruiser she'd ever seen. Dull, gunmetal hallways with blue deckplating. Display screens and maintenance jacks mounted into the walls at regular intervals, and occasionally, the corridor would split off and lead to other vital parts of the ship. She was about to reach her second junction when she came to a dead halt. The acoustic sensors in her suit picked up the sound of distant footsteps.

Delphi pressed herself against the nearest bulkhead, PP at the ready. As the noise got closer, she realized it was not the heavy clang of a military exosuit or the skittering of a sapiophage's claws, but the soft patter of standard shipboard footwear. That didn't mean whoever it was wasn't dangerous. Delphi kept silent and waited for whoever it was to come into view.

An enormous pair of tits rounded the corner, followed immediately after by the sluttiest looking woman the pilot had ever seen. She wore the tattered rags of a Spacefleet uniform in a way that concealed only the slightest bit of skin. Long, gorgeous blonde hair spilled down her back all the way to her voluminous ass. One of her pink-nailed hands was squeezing her breast, while the other was stuck firmly between her legs. She was speaking, but it was an incomprehensible word jumble punctuated by moans.

Delphi let the perplexing woman pass, seeing no reason why she ought to have anything worth hearing to say. Either that was some kind of malfunctioning sexbot, or there was something horribly wrong with a crewmember!

She risked the slight power increase and turned on her lifesigns detector. Invisible pulses sweep out into the corridor. The data it gathered bounced back to her wrist-mounted console after an agonizing wait, though her chronometre told her it had only been a few seconds. There were several more human, or humanoid, lifesigns up ahead...but there was something else.

She keyed the display to zoom in, then queried the result that her console was giving her. It looked like there was a life form up ahead, but it was as big as the room itself. Actually, as she zoomed out the map, she chuckled mirthlessly at the idea her readings were correct.

"Either my equipment is messed up, or there's a creature half the size of this ship all around me!" she said with a nervous laugh. Delphi swept her arm around more, and the anomaly faded into a null reading. She sighed. For a moment there, the bounty hunter thought she was in big trouble!

Something in her gut was eating at her about this ship. After a few years as a star hopping bounty hunter, she developed certain instincts that told her when there was something wrong was about to make itself known. This had the feeling of one of those moments, and, much like the tentacle beast emporium on Kraxis, Delphi got the feeling she was going to get wrapped up in it somehow. But she had bills to pay! And if she fled from this contract, who would hire her? She couldn't pussy out...not until she got more information!

The already limited light in the corridor faded further, with some non-damaged luminescent tubes flickering. That could either be a localized collapse of the ship's illumination system...or at the very worst, a glitch in the ship's dark matter reactor. That could be a symptom of a larger problem than just some illumination troubles. If the crew is incapacitated, the reactor could reach negative mass and the Venture wouldn't be worth much to anyone after it disintegrated.

She backtracked to the megalift, which was experiencing its own power-related glitches. Luckily, the adjoined ladder made for an expeditious descent to the reactor level. Strange, almost lurid noises came from the stuck elevator car below her. It almost sounded like someone had left a pornography holo play at full volume. Delphi cracked a smile.

The reactor level was in worse shape than the one above. Her boots landed in roughly 30 cm of pink fluid. It resembled the coolant used in the reactor, but was more viscous and opaque. Delphi trudged through the muck, exosuit making it no less effort than taking a Sunday stroll in the park.

It didn't take long to get to the reactor, as the large amount of space required took up the majority of the deck. The emergency door had been burst open, and more pink fluid was flooding out into the corridor from inside. Great. She didn't have a lot of engineering knowledge, especially on these old reactors. She'd have to rely a lot on her rig, her cranial implant, to provide her with the details.

Once past the door, however, she saw a reactor room that appeared to be functioning in perfect order. The large dark matter reaction chamber was undamaged. Examining the consoles to her left, she saw nothing but stable power readings across the board. Aside from the fluid all over the floor, there were no power problems at all! That was a relief. But what was causing the outages?

The fluid around her feet thickened. At first she thought she imagined it. But it increase its hold on her boots. She stumbled back, but it only gripped more!

"What the fuck?" she gasped. Delphi watched in horror as tendrils of fluid rose out of the morass. The pink goo was ALIVE?! She fired her pistol at the nearest few. Jets of blue light sliced apart those she hit, sending them back into the puddle. But if the whole deck had this fluid covering it...

One tendril lashed out at her, grabbing her left arm. She shot it off with her PP, but more gripped her right wrist and kept her from aiming. She stomped her feet, trying to break free of the muck, but it wouldn't let her get free! The strange fluid crawled all over her exosuit. She thanked the Stars she hadn't taken her helmet off! Though the goo was soon up to her neck, at the very least, she wouldn't be suffocating.

Just as that comforting thought entered her mind, the HUD on her helmet lit up like a Liberation Day fireworks show. BREACH DETECTED. Her heart rate, already increased, hammered in her chest. How was this goop getting through a layer of neosteel?!

All the self-sealing stembolts failed to arrest the flow of intelligent slime as it seeped into the slowly growing cracks in her outer protection. Once after another, systems in the suit failed and showed up on her inner diagnostics as red boxes. Propulsion, low-gravity assist, atmospheric processing, even eventually the HUD itself flickered out of existence, leaving her in a partially transparent helmet.

Wriggle as she might against the pull of the fluid, it refused to let her go. In slow motion, her exosuit dissolved around her. So too did the bodysuit underneath it, leaving her naked and afraid. It took her helmet off with a quick tug from one of the tendrils, spilling her black hair all over her face and removing the last of her potential protections. She looked down at herself and saw her whole vulnerable body on display. The goo was translucent enough to obscure nothing, though the life-or-death situation didn't leave her time to be modest.

A twinge of something at the base of her spine made her yelp! A strong force of pressure, followed by a pins-and-needles sensation around her entire back. It was followed by the sound of static, almost as if her ear was right next to an archaic, malfunctioning speaker.

"Host," a monotone voice said through the haze. "Host connection online." It sounded as if the person speaking was speaking through a fluid, but it was intelligible. Delphi looked around to try to find a source, but all she found was more goo.

"Who's there?" she asked. It made a sound like an unintelligible mass of consonants. Delphi locked on to a single dicernable part of the burst of noise. "How about I just call you Zyx, then?"

"Designation acceptable. Zyx. I am Zyx."

"Where are you, Zyx? I can't see anyone but this goo!"

"You see me," it said. Dozens of tendrils leapt up from the pink sludge, almost as if it was taking attendance. They flopped back down into mucky incoherence after a moment. "I am...substantial."

Delphi had to admit, that made sense. The goo couldn't do everything it had done if it was but an insensate blob. "Then how are we talking?"

The base of her spine tingled. "The connection. Direct feed into Host's nervous system. Simulated auditory sensation. Crude, but effective. Would use exchange of nucleic acid strands for communication, but Host species primitive."

Being tethered to such an intimidating creature made her fear of being held in place worse. If it could do that with the connection...what else could it do?

"Are you responsible for why we lost contact with this ship?"

"Crew of Venture investigates me. I investigate them. Investigation proved...difficult."

Delphi remembered the brain-dead looking crewmember she saw. "Are they all...brain-sapped?"

"Host will see for herself. Zyx will show."

Before she could ask how that would happen, the puddle of goo rushed at her from all directions. She felt it grow denser and denser, yet remaining at the same thickness around her. It was defying all her ideas of the laws of conservation of mass, but it didn't feel any heavier either. Potentially the suit was encasing her in a coating that did the work for her, much like the limbs of her exosuit took the weight and stress of carrying something heavy. But this was to an absurd scale! Once spanning the deck length of a cruiser, almost all the visible fluid had coalesced into a bodysuit. The incredible density had turned the fluid opaque, however. At least there was that. But there was yet more goo to go!

"Need more room," the entity said. Pink goo dissolved into her skin, feeling like carbonated bubbles percolating over almost all of her body. The bubbles focused their tingling on several locations, and Delphi watched in frightened confusion as her body changed.

The first to expand was her breasts. Her pert handfuls pushed outwards, deforming and stretching out like her body was caught in a taffy puller. There was no pain, however. Only the bubbling and the pressure from outside. The bubbling was starting to feel good, in a strange way. Like a hundred thousand little tongues dabbing at her flesh.

"Aaah~" Delphi gasped, attempting to wriggle but unable to move more than a few milimetres in any direction. The goo had her encased, and whatever it subjected her to, she could not even squirm away.

More popping around her hips and thighs told her what was happening next. Her carefully cultivated physique was dissolving away, replaced with superfluous, squishy flesh! The muscles didn't change, however. If anything, she felt stronger as her body filled out!

"More surface," demanded the goo. Her ass felt the expansion next. She felt ridiculous, unable to look backwards to see her cute squeezable butt become a rumproast in a haze of sensation. The sizzling of slime stopped at her holes, though Delphi had a bad feeling that wouldn't last long.

"S-stop! I already look like a bimbo slut!"

"Host unhappy. Zyx will amend."

The fluid surfed forward, sliding into both her holes at the same time. The feeling of violation was made worse by the spike of pleasure as it started reshaping her internally.

Her pussy felt the same tingling and pulling sensation that the rest of her body had endured. However, due to the location, this was multiple times more pleasurable. It felt like her whole nether regions were being massaged by someone who really knew what they were doing. And the inability to move only added to the experience. She couldn't see it, but she knew that she was moistening. The slight dewing turned to a trickle, which increased again to an outrageous drizzle. Her vaginal moisture soon eclipsed the human norm, and her gushy pussy was soon steadily feeding its moisture to her suit.

Her ass suffered a similar fate, though this was even more extreme than the changes to her pussy. It was entirely remodelled into a primarily sexual organ, gaining the same moisture release system as her slit offered. This was introduced to her when the tendril licking her ass slid itself inside easily. The lubrication provided made Delphi the perfect buttslut.

"More...more!" the voice in her head demanded, raising itself to excitement for the first time. How this was supposed to happen was beyond Delphi's distracted faculties to comprehend, as she was already bowed out like a common Red Light City whore.

But the goo was nothing if not creative. Above her clit, a second bulb grew. This one was made entirely of the goosuit's surface, rather than her altered body. However, she felt it as if it was her own skin. It took the shape of an almost equine penis, made entirely out of the pink slime. Its flared tip was quickly inundated with dripping release. A transparent pink fluid leaked from her arousal. Due to the pleasure corrupting her system, she didn't mind that she had gained a cock from this experience. She was more concerned about what would happen next!

The fluid had entirely receded. What she wore now seemed to encompass the entirety of the gooey entity. Delphi found herself taking more halting, jerky steps forward. Zyx was walking her body forward, against her will. Every attempt to divert her path was met with the same resistance as she'd experienced trying to move an inch when she was stationary. The goo brought her to the nearest megalift, which took a circuitous path to the Venture's bridge.

"Don't be afraid," the creature said. Its voice was now almost human in inflection. It had raised itself as well, going from inhuman depth to an androgynous tone. "I mean you no real harm."

"You've mutated my body! You've taken over this ship and done Stars only know what to the crew!" Delphi shouted. If she could have taken a swing at the creature, she would have. As it was, she did her best to scowl.

Quick-release doors opened onto a sea of moans. More than a dozen humans mingled amongst each other in three separate piles among the bridge's many stations. Three engaged in double penetration near the sensor readout, while two were bent over the main viewing screen and offering their rears to an even bigger crowd of corrupted crew. All were comical parodies of the female form. Swinging breasts and cushioned asses both jiggled from impacts, dribbling with sweat and...other fluids. Some had dicks, others did not. All wore some variation of Spacefleet uniform, torn apart or popped out from the inside.

At Delphi's reluctant arrival, the orgy paused for but a moment. The wriggling crew chanted "Welcome to the Bridge, Captain!" before returning to their carnal buffet.

"As you can see," the alien said as she swept Delphi's hand around the control room for the entire ship, "My previous efforts to control humans were...somewhat unsuccessful."

"What did you do to them? Are they even human?"

"Of course they are! They're also...a little bit of me. They all retain a connection to me, allowing me to communicate. Watch!" Delphi's spine warmed, and one of the nearly naked crew stumbled up and over. A large, oozing prick bounced between her thighs before she came to a complete halt, sketching a rough salute that made her massive breasts jiggle.

"Captain Steven Triggs, ISCS Venture," the buxom beauty said.

"Steven?"

The 'Captain' nodded. "Of course! Well, that's my old name. The Captain hasn't given me a new one yet, but I await her decision!" She beamed at Delphi, but her eyes were falling on the pink goo around her. Being worn by the creature in command is a confusion situation.

"Gosh, you're right!" it said, then reached out with Delphi's hand and placed it on her shoulder. "I henceforth declare that your name shall be...Nanci!"

Nanci beamed. "Omigosh, what a cute name!" Seemingly unnoticed to the bimbo Captain, her long prick shot a couple thin ropes of watery cum onto the ground. It looked like even excitement could make these drones cum. She clambered back into the sex pile, which welcomed her with cheers of "Welcome Nanci!" and "Pleased to meet you, Nanci dear!" She disappeared into the tangled mess of altered flesh that writhed and gyrated without a care for anything more than the moment. Delphi watched, mouth agape.