“Come on Ander! You told me the ship would be ready today.” The disappointment in Violet’s voice was palpable. I lean on the wall outside the extra-solar drive core, watching Violet talk with the drive-tuning crew lead. I prefer to not deal with the crews, so I simply wait there, with Ganymede perched on my shoulder.

“No Violet, it will be ready soon, we just need to finish up the drive tuning.” He looked at his holo, “I’m sorry, but we’ll be ready in about an hour!” The guy was clearly sorry, and the new ship certainly needed the tuning so our jumps would be smooth, but we definitely wanted to be out of here sooner.

Violet rests her forehead on her hand, her eyes closed, “Okay okay, it’s alright, we’ll just wait in the cockpit, please send a message when you are ready.”

Ander raises his hands, happily acknowledging, “Absolutely, I’m sorry, but I promise you will be happy with the result!”

Violet’s mouth cracked a smile, “I’m sure I will, I’ll let you get back to work.” She turns, striding past me, her steps audibly louder than normal, making her way up the hall to the front of the ship.

I follow her past the maintenance tunnels and walk into the main cabin behind her, I sweep Ganymede from my shoulder, making him fly off to the corner, where he lands on a couch, folding in his wings.

I hug Violet from behind when she stops, resting my head on her shoulder. “You know, it’s been a long time since we’ve had a ship.”

She nods, looking around while her hands reach around back to rest on my hips, “First time I’ve ever bought one with someone else. I think it’s an improvement from the old one.”

We had emblazoned the name of the vessel on the wall, we decided on something simple. “Bolt”. An appropriate name, because a bolt of lightning is much like an arrow. They can ignite fire and be used as weapons. However, bolts of lightning are impossible to predict...

Violet turns herself around in my hug, wrapping her arms around my neck, getting close, “Well, we have to wait, so…”

“Sooo, sex?” I grin fiendishly, giving my best pouty expression.

She looks seductively into my eyes and in a single twisting motion she pushes me back onto the couch, grinning happily. “Sooo, sit down love… because I need to explain what I learned about this Dimensional Link concept.”

“Aww…”

She simply rolls her eyes and plops down beside me, “Okay I wanted to explain this on the way to pass some time but here we are, still waiting.”

I nod my head, and Ganymede takes that as an invitation, he spreads his wings and flies over, landing on my head. I simply look up at him, “Bird, you better not…” I then I look back at Violet’s amused grin, “I’m sure you think this is funny… what was it you were going to tell me?”

“It’s simple, this device is intense.” She pauses for a moment, tapping her fingers on my back, “the concept of a Dimensional Link is simple, it stores a massive amount of mass or energy in a parallel dimension, outside our own four, by throwing the mass into another dimension and keeping it there it can be ‘stored’ in a smaller area in our dimension, without the relativistic effects, and the device is like a door to that reservoir.”

“Okay it stores energy somewhere else, that basically makes it a super battery.” I pause briefly and smile, “Just how much energy are we talking about?”

She thinks about it for a moment, “Think… the mass-energy of stars.”

Nope, that’s fucking impossible. I don’t respond though, I kinda just… leave my mouth open.

Then Violet leans in close and using her right hand she closes my mouth, and she whispers, “I know you are thinking it’s impossible… I’m not sure myself… but it’s worth a look, right?” She makes a light grin before sneaking a quick kiss.

I nod happily, leaning back to coax Ganymede into flying somewhere else, “Alright Vivi, I suppose it’s worth a quick look.”

She taps a few buttons on another panel, “Another thing to do while we wait, don’t you think we should install our little AI friend into the new ship?”

I nod again, as my bird friend finally flies over to the front terminals, and I toss the AI core chip to Violet, which she adroitly catches.

Violet sits on the floor, opening a nearby panel, to start transferring Ed into the ship computer.

I lean back to rest my eyes, because it had been an early morning, and we’ll be on our way soon.

…….

I feel a soft poking on my side.

“Why poke why…” I mumble incoherently.

“Wake up missy, we are almost there.”

My eyes shoot open, “How long did I sleep?”

Violet’s sparkly blue eyes met mine immediately, “Not that long, just get up, we’re almost there.”

I push myself off the couch, following Violet to the flight cluster, “Not that long? Bullshit! You said it would take four hours!”

At first, she says nothing, but taps her controls as she sits, making the extra-solar drive spin down. “Yeah, but Ed can fly, and you looked so peaceful on the couch, but the tuning took another hour as well.”

I take my seat and try to remember some of the manuals I read when we were buying the ship, because the interface is a bit more complex, and objectively just different than what I had originally learned to fly on. As the extra-solar drive winds down light from the outside universe blueshifts back up to visible range, and to my surprise, there is little to be seen.

“This is weird… usually we go places that at least have some light.”

Violet taps her fingers on the side of her interface, staring at the screens, “It is definitely strange Ali… I’m not accustomed to this either.” She shrugs, “Well Ed, let’s start a spectral scan, look for anything more unusual then darkness.”

As the scanner spin up, colors blaze across the screens as Ed tries filtering the image data, he searches and displays the little that he does discover.

Violet jumps out of her seat and runs in front of me to the right-most screen, “Look over here!” She drags her finger across the display, circling a particularly strange orb in the data. “Focus your scan here Ed, because this looks promising.”

Ed waits for a moment, “There does not appear to be anything of interest here.”

Violet laughs and pokes the screen making several small marks then she spins around looking at me, “Sweetie, fly this way, and Ed, look here for gravitational spikes, and I think you might change your mind.”

After I set the flight vector, she winks at me and waves me over. I happily oblige and stand by her side, resting my fingers lightly on her hips.

Ed remains silent for what must have been several minutes, when the image on the screen begins to clear.

Violet holds up three fingers placing them lightly on my chest, mouthing, “three…. two… one…”

“You seem to be right Violet”, she pumps her fist lightly against me before walking back to her terminal, “that is a mass concentration consistent with a planet which could support life.”

I look at Violet, shrugging my shoulders, she returns the gesture and taps a few buttons on her panel, “Keep scanning Ed, since there’s not much light out there.”

Ed quickly speaks up, “There is a geologically active planet, you can’t see it in the spectrum, but the gravity well is certainly there. It’s a K-type world, uninhabitable, and it’s alone, drifting in interstellar space.”

I look at more of the data as Ed streams it to the displays, “So, it lost its star… does that prove anything?”

He responds quickly and flatly, “I haven’t the data to speculate further.”

Violet rests her finger on the display, “This world hasn’t been impacted, certainly not by anything with the mass sufficient to knock it away from a star, the mantle is liquid, not solid, and suddenly this Dimensional Link is sounding less and less fictional...”

I shrug my shoulders and slip back into my chair, “I guess we should fly in and… just look around?”

Violet slides back into her seat beside me, “My thoughts exactly.”

I wave my hand across the panel, plotting a path down to the surface. Violet reaches over to me, taking my hand in hers, squeezing lightly.

As we approach, Ed speaks up again, “with our increasing proximity, I will be able to resolve more information, streaming now.”

I tap into the feed on my panel. “Holy shit, how is there a body of water in interstellar space?”

“That’s not water Ali, that’s this world’s atmosphere, an ocean of oxygen and nitrogen…” she looks at the data with both the excitement of an explorer, and the sadness of a human, seeing a world that died, “and look at the trees… they have been completely petrified, gravity is tearing them apart over as time passes…”

“Petrified?” I ask, unfamiliar with the term.

“Solidified, the organic material basically turned from living plant material, into something with more resemblance to rocks, then life. Very weird.”

Then something catches my eye, “This might lead us to what we should be looking for, there are massive cave systems on this planet, if I was trying to hide from the cold I think I’d hide underground.”

Violet nods, “Right! This world is geologically active, Geo-thermal interactions might be the key!”

So, we work at scanning for caves with unusual heat signatures for a few mindless hours, flying over oceans of liquid air, and dead ecosystems, destroyed by causes evolution could never have prepared them for.

We discovered plenty of false-positives over several hours, and Violet yells my name the same way every time.

“Aliiiice!”

“Yeeeesss?” I jeer, as I look over at Violet’s monitor, “Is this one real?”

“This one is it, I’m sure of it, there are massive heat signatures and metallic properties in the signature, it has to be something both artificial and active!”

“Alright, for the record, you were sure of the last one. I’ll just set us down nearby.”

Finding a landing spot was simple. But finding one that was also close to a cave and not sitting in a bath of liquid air? Another issue entirely. I had to set the ship down a few kilometers off from the cave, a small hike, which could have been beautiful if this planet still had a star.

With a small dampened thud, the landing struts push into the ground and lock in place.

“Here we are, let’s go!” I grab my helmet and clip it onto my suit, hermetically sealing it, and grabbing an oxygen canister, and magnetically attach it to my back.

Violet opens the hatch, the portal to this darkened world. She extends her hand out, “After you dear?”

“You want me to go out on the dead, scary, dark world first? I’m flattered… truly I am.” I pass by her, and she softly slaps my ass.

“Of course, how else would I know if the ground was going to collapse under us?”

I point back at the ship, “It holds that, so we should be fine.”

“Sure, but sometimes you weigh more than the ship.” I just know she has her eyebrow raised, and waiting for me to respond seriously.

Maybe I’ll not respond so seriously… I casually activate my mass manipulator and I set it to double my height. I feel myself growing, as my perspective shifts and my hips and shoulders broaden, my legs extending rapidly outward.

“I didn’t mean to test the floor Alice!”

I spin around and look down at my now diminutive wife, “I am SO not heavier than the ship at thirty meters.”

“True enough”, she shrugs and reaches up to my hand, pulling me along, “Then let’s go!”

As we walk along, I contemplate returning my height to my normal so it doesn’t feel slow to walk along with Violet, then I realize growing her would have the same effect, so I do that, slowly expanding my wife’s body, until we are walking at the same size. She doesn’t notice though, because she is too excited observing the readings coming in from her scanners.

We walk for about a minute, and the downward slope flattens as we turn around a corner into a larger part of the cavern.

In here, the ceiling rises hundreds of meters up, and the floor is separated into several partitions, connected to the ceiling by massive columns, which make it difficult for women our size to maneuver. I lean over the first, looking down before I step over to find an unpleasant sight.

It takes only a few moments to process. But I know quickly, I’m looking at the remains of thousands of people… “Goddess… that is horrifying.”

Violet leans over as well, “Well at least we know something of what happened.” She looks over the visceral scene, then closes her eyes, “I still don’t understand why these people would drain their star and bring it here… to freeze and die?”

I look around, “This cave is very fortified these massive walls and pillars… maybe they came here to hide.”

Violet stands up and comes to me, “Unfortunately, these bodies aren’t likely to tell us… so we should find the device and leave.”

“Violet… Wait a moment.” I look around us again, upon the grim remains of a long unknown struggle.

She looks back to me and around at our surroundings, “I know this is an awful thing to find, but think of the things we could learn? They don’t need it anymore…”

“Sure Vi, but whatever this is… or was, it looks like this was the last stand of a group, or even a civilization… can we take their… like, crowning achievement?” I gesture around me, “It seems so… wrong.”

Violet doesn’t immediately respond, looking back to the mass grave that stretched out before us, “Normally… I would leave it…. But an active Dimensional Link… containing that much mass-energy? We can’t just leave it here, because we’ve left a quantum trail, anyone could find it.”

“That’s true.”

“And, if they died to protect it, I doubt they would want it falling into the wrong hands.” She smiles a little.

I laugh lightly… “Are we the wrong hands?”

We both grow silent for a few moments, and I notice Violet looking down at the ground sadly, so I take her arm and pull her toward me.

“I didn’t mean anything by that sweetheart, it would be better with us then in the hands of terrorists or pirates, because we are… ethical… pirates…”

Violet pulls herself away and walks toward the entrance at a brisk pace. I guess I shouldn’t have said that, but I suppose I should get the device. I look up and realize it’s only a couple hundred meters up, I can easily reach it if I grow a little bit more.

I place my hands on my hips and trigger my suits mass manipulation unit and feel the familiar tingle of energy flowing into me. I look down at my feet as I expand from my current thirty meter height, my feet growing outward over the floor below as they stretch farther and farther away.

As I grow my perspective shifts, and I notice less detail on the ground, but can more easily see over the edges of the walls of the cavern now. As I reach a hundred meters, I can clearly see that these aren’t alcoves, or tunnels, it’s many other connected chambers. This isn’t just one room.

I tap my microphone. “Violet… there is a lot more here than we originally saw, there are hundreds of caverns that I can see from up here.” I listen intently for a response. But I receive nothing but static, and I bump my head on the ceiling as I reach almost three hundred meters in height.

“Ow…” I mutter, as I stoop down and rub my head and whisper to myself, “Never grow when you are distracted Alice… when will you learn? Ugh.”

I reach down and forward, stretching a little to make up the last twenty meters and grab the device. When my hand makes contact it breaks free of its connection and falls to the ground, darkening the cavern around me.

My suit lamps activate in response, lighting the room around me, and I choose to take the risk and just grab the device despite that little incident.

When I pick it up, nothing happens? Which is good I guess.

I hear a little static on my headset, but it just sounds like interference, so I decide to quickly investigate the higher platform, and see something rather peculiar. I see thousands of tiny structures, lining the walls and crevices.

Looking closer, I realize that they appear to be little homes.

These people didn’t just hide here…

They lived here.

How very interesting.

…

How very enticing…

I rest my hand on the ledge and peer closer, at the ruins of a civilization.

And all I can think of is, how easy it would be to flatten these puny buildings…

How good it would feel.

What is this feeling?

I rest my finger atop one of the structures, knowing that no one needs this little structure, it’s pointless not to see what happens right?

I slowly, carefully, press it down, obliterating the walls and ceilings in a little puff of soot.

I shot of pleasure runs down my spine.

What a feeling…

As I revel in the pleasure I just experienced, my free hand finds its way to my left breast, while I raise my hand over another dozen structures and hold my hand there… building the anticipation of feeling that pleasure once again…

Feeling the power of being an enormous woman. In another life I would be the right size to fit in these puny buildings. But fate had changed my life, now I stand here, at almost any size I wish to be.

I slowly… and ponderously rest my hand atop them… feeling the creaks and groans of the ancient buildings fighting the weight of my slightest touch. Then suddenly the cavern shakes, and in an instant, I’m knocked back on my ass.

Surprised, I tap my mic again, “Violet, what’s happening?”

Still just static.

“Shit!” I activate the mass manipulator again to reduce my height until I can fit through the entrance again. As I slowly descend, cracks start to form in the walls and floor.

“Oh shit! What the hell?” I squeal in surprise, unaware of what could have possibly caused the cavern to collapse.

The cracks begin to rapidly give way to flowing lava, and I still need to shrink another 50 meters, and even worse, the Dimensional Link is entirely unaffected by the mass manipulator, it doesn’t shrink at all. It grows in my hands, from little trinket, to minor inconvenience, to a significant impediment.

“Shit, shit, SHIT!” I scream, into the room, since Violet can’t seem to hear me, or worse, ignoring me!

I hunch down and start making my way out, holding the core tightly against my body, as I reach my normal fifteen meters. Fortunately, I start to hear Violet’s voice over heavy interference, “….ice…. A..ice… hat… t… f..ck di…u do…?”

“I only took the Dimensional Link! Nothing else!” That was a fucking lie, and I knew it, but could crushing little buildings have caused this? That’s not related at all. It can’t be.

“Ge.. out her…!” her voice was clearer, closer, which is really good. I continue around the last corner to the exit, and I am stopped in my tracks.

“Violet… I can’t reach you, there is a flowing wall of lava in the way!”

Violet doesn’t immediately respond, but the cavern behind me is collapsing. “Shit!” I extend my wings, backing up slightly, I lock my helmet and push forward with all the force my wings and legs can generate.

I scream as I break into the thin flow and out the other side, my wings dissolve immediately on contact with the lava, my HUD starting to throw errors and damage assessment at me, while the immensely heavy molten rock continues to flow down my suit.

“Aaiiiieeee, it burns!” Goddess this is hot! Why… did I do that? I feel extreme heat on my arms and try to shake some of it off to no avail, but fortunately the suit mostly protected me, because if someone tries to run through lava without protection, they wouldn’t be thinking about it.

The inner layer is now cooling and fusing to my armor, making it harder and harder to move. But through the unscathed part of my visor, I see a bright light.

The open door of the Bolt!

I roll forward, into the opened aperture. Groaning upon contact with the floor. I look back out to the planet, watching as the ground collapses and falls away, dropping into the mantle of the planet.

“Goddess.”

I struggle forward, closing the hatch and trying to open the locks on my suit.

Except they are covered with partially molten rock.

“Hey Violet, still mad at me?”

I hear a little laugh over the comm. “No, sweetie, if you hadn’t made me mad, I wouldn’t have been here to keep the ship from falling into the planet.”

I breathe a sigh of relief, “Good, and you know, thanks for saving me from the booby-trapped cave.”

I see her through the one good spot of my visor, coming to me and kneeling by me, “Thanks for jumping through lava to get to me, because I don’t know what I would have done if I lost you.”

I smile and attempt to release the suit lock.

Violet smiles, “I’ll get a hammer.”