(1.2)
The wave originated, according to Starling’s projections, from a small planet at the edge of the cluster. It was in an otherwise empty system that hadn’t appeared on their initial scans, shrouded by a cosmic veil.
It looked to be barren. It had no atmosphere, but showed signs of considerable internal activity and was surrounded by a thin ring of debris. Estelle took the Goose into low orbit and woke up her away-team.
This was a longer process that she’d hoped.
Maura and Zora were in sour moods after an all-night bender. They’d missed breakfast and lunch, but at least on empty stomachs they were able to buckle a few plates of their armor. But while the captain wasn’t looking they replaced several of their ammo-cartridges with candy bars.
Lucine wasn’t in her cabin. Estelle found the priestess instead hovering cross-legged in the ship’s dance-hall. She was orbited by cupcakes and she levitated them into her mouth one by one. “Captain,” she lilted, gazing dreamily, “will you join me? The joy that your mind emanates when you are eating is more delectable than any dessert.”
“Got a mission, Lucine.” Estelle’s stomach rumbled. “But maybe after.”
Princess Csilla wasn’t in her cabin, either. Estelle found her in the long-range communications hub, fielding subspace video calls from five different alien suitors. She shape-shifted every time she changed screens, instantly matching whichever species she was talking to. She was red, then green, then rainbow; one-eyed, then three-eyed, then all eyes; fleshy, then scaled, then porcelain; always beautiful, always elegant, always regal, always annoyed.
She finally dismissed the last of them (“do not call me again unless you’ve claimed the hide of the Calydonian star-boar, you utter bore”) and transformed back to her usual iridescent appearance. “Captain, thank the stars. Ever since I returned to father’s court, the overtures have been nonstop.” She smoothed her dress and sniffed. “Lesser nobility is the worst.”
“Right. Need you for an away-mission, princess.”
“Oh, captain, I spent all morning on my hair.”
“You’re a shapeshifter.”
“I still have standards.”
Io was the only one who appeared on time. The last they’d seen her she’d just eaten a broken lounge-chair dipped in chocolate fondue and she’d been rolled away to digest. But Io was nothing if not remarkable and she appeared fully prepared for action, arms and tentacles restless with excitement.
Estelle glanced up at her innocent smirk. “How, uh, how was the chair?”
Io licked her lips and patted her stomach. It was the only stomach aboard that exceeded Estelle’s in sheer protruding roundness. But Io was now eight or nine feet tall and strong enough that the excess mass never seemed an inconvenience.
“Glad it’s sitting well…I’d outgrown that chair anyway. Alright, everyone: we found a weird planet. I just want you to go down and take some readings. Make sure everything’s safe.”
“Anything we need to kill?” asked Zora.
“I hope not. As far as we can tell, there’s nothing down there but geological activity. But be careful. Something put out an energy wave strong enough to disable a shuttle engine. Again, I just need some readings. Take a quick look around and come right back.”
“Good,” moaned Maura. “Quick sounds good. If I don’t get a real breakfast in me in the next hour or two, I might die. Clip my wings, I could eat a whole Hirudinid shuttle-leech.”
“I could eat a whole shuttle,” groaned Zora.
Maura rounded on her. “Well, I could eat a whole ship.”
“I could eat a space-station.”
Estelle shoved them through the hatch. “Get down there before you start eating planets.”
Estelle bounced back as the turbolift door slid shut. She’d stood too close, forgetting her size, and the door had hit her stomach. She straightened her jacket and steadied herself and tried not to turn too red in front of the ensign who entered on the next deck.
“Ensign,” she wondered, once they were underway, “why is your head on backwards?”
“I tried one of Doctor Bufo’s pills.”
“Oh, good.”
The doctor was waiting on the bridge with his host. As she arrived Estelle discovered more evidence of his free samples: the comms officer was working his console with a third arm, the helmsman had two heads, and the sensor technician was now a mermaid.
Starling was still himself. “Away-team will be touching down momentarily, captain.”
“Carry on. Doctor Bufo, how long is my crew going to be, um…”
“I’m very sorry, captain. As these are merely my free samples, their effects will sadly not be permanent. They will last somewhere between eleven minutes and eleven days, depending on chemical makeup and the migration of certain nebulae.”
Estelle mouthed the words back to herself. She slowly sat herself and tried not to look at the sensor technician’s tail. “Bridge to engineering. Anything from the doctor’s shuttle?”
“Yes, actually,” replied Straya, who sounded mid-chew. “We detected some particulate matter and residual radiations. The analysis will take a while, but we’ll keep you posted. Could be big.”
“Big.” She twisted and contended with her gut as it escaped her uniform once again.
“Captain,” wondered Dr. Bufo, “my host has noticed you struggling to cover the overabundance of adipose tissue that has accumulated over your abdomen.”
“Thanks.”
“I count size-modulation among my myriad specialties. If you like, I could look into engineering a pill.”
Estelle contemplated him. “Your host, is she?”
“Yes. She has carried me for ten years, now.”
“She didn’t want to call me fat herself?”
“Ah. You misunderstand, I’m afraid. My host is quite distracted by her connection with me. The fact that she noticed anything at all is remarkable. It is a complement to your unusual corpulent allure.”
“…thanks. Why’s she so distracted?”
“It is a natural consequence of our symbiosis. We share a powerful psycho-orgasmic link.”
The host did have a tendency to smile and touch herself whenever the toad didn’t need her motor skills. Estelle turned back to the viewscreen with a shaky breath.
“Contact from the away team,” reported Starling. “The shuttle has landed and they are moving out onto the planet’s surface. Stand by. Princess Csilla has tripped over a candy-bar wrapper.”
Estelle’s face sank deeper into her hands.
“Goose, are you reading this?” called Maura. “It’s barren, like you said. But, like, more than barren. It’s completely smooth.”
Starling started a new scan. “Confirmed. All the geological activity we read is internal. No tectonic movement on the surface. Fascinating.”
“And it’s soft to the touch,” said Zora. “Pliable. My feet sink into it a little.”
“It is familiar,” added Lucine.
“I’ll get a sample,” said Csilla. But a minute later her voice returned, much less confident. “Captain, the ground just moved. I’m getting some wild readings.”
“I read them as well,” said Starling. “But they do not conform to known seismic phenomena.”
Estelle looked up. “What is it?”
“It appears to be a…a ripple, captain.”
“A big one!” shouted Zora. “The land’s moving like a big, rolling wave. And the ground—it feels—it feels like—”
“Like the planet is jiggling,” said Lucine.
“Holy nebulas,” gasped Estelle.
Caelius opened his console. “Can you get the shuttle back in the air? I’ve located a large crater in the topography, around the planet’s equator.”
Estelle sat forward. “No. Get them out of there. Straya—Straya, do you have a projection of the wave pattern that struck the doctor’s shuttle?”
“I do, captain, but I don’t understand what to make of it yet.”
“I think I might. Play it as a sound-wave.”
The bridge went silent. Straya uploaded the data to the communicators and a moment later the speakers filled the ship with a loud, long, resounding rumble. The crew stared up in amazement.
Estelle uncovered her ears. “A burp. A burp on a planetary scale. That’s what hit your ship, doctor.” She stood and leveled her gaze at the smooth sphere on their viewscreen. The Goose had drifted enough that they could now see the crater and the image became horribly familiar.
“That isn’t a planet,” she explained. “That is a belly digesting a planet.”
“Fascinating,” said Starling.
Caelius blinked and shook his head. “What do we do?”
“Well, I know what I’d want after a meal that big. Divert reserve power to the tractor beam. Configure it for a seismic belly-rub.”
The officer’s lounge was unusually quiet. Eyes were wide and distant. Maura and Zora finally finished their breakfast, but without the usual ribald gusto. Lucine stared ahead in wonder. Csilla kept shaking her head. Io was the only one who got up for seconds.
“We’re setting out a perimeter of warning buoys,” Estelle eventually announced, to fill the silence. “Should keep anyone from venturing too close.”
Maura nodded slowly. “Not the kind of food-coma you want to interrupt.”
“Millennia of indigestion,” breathed Lucine.
Csilla couldn’t take it anymore. “How is it even possible? I know space is really, really big and really, really weird, but…what kind of creature can eat a whole planet?” She pushed away her own meager, untouched meal.
“You really want to know?” asked Estelle, lowering her voice. “Straya and Starling did run some tests on the sample you took.”
“And?”
“We can’t identify the species, but, uh, we did find a distant relative.” She glanced over her shoulder. They followed her gaze and their eyes went even wider.
Io continued rummaging through the kitchen cabinets. She poured a jar of radioactive mustard onto her ham-and-carbonite sandwich, thought for a moment, and then ate the jar. As she chewed, she finally noticed everyone staring at her and looked back with her perfectly innocent smile.