Chapter 4

	Those were NOT nemesians!  They looked like burn victims, bare flesh with small patches of fur remaining.  The only fur visible was small patches above their eyes.  The faces were flatter than a nemesian, there were no outlets for their ears, and...
	Muli's brain short-circuited her observation of the aliens to remind her that she had three aliens on her ship, and she was completely alone and separated from help of any kind.  She responded immediately.
	"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
	She screamed in absolute terror for the first time she could think of.  The three aliens moved, and she was already headed for the hatch at full speed.  She dove through the hatch and managed to hit the ground running.  She wasn't even thinking beyond the thought of getting AWAY.  Already on the upper floor of the access tunnel, that meant her room.  The entire run to her room she feared they were right behind her and would have her if she tripped or stumbled.  On arriving she didn't see them behind her, so she took the time to grab what little furniture she had and barricaded herself in after sealing the door shut behind her.  It was two small plastic chairs, a metal table, and her bed pad, but it still made her feel a bit more secure.  Not that it would really matter though, the door slid into the wall, it didn't swing open.
	She sat on the floor for a little while, shaking while running down a mental list of all the horrible ways the aliens were going to try and kill her.  It suddenly occurred to her that she didn't have any idea of what they had done since she ran out of the cargo bay.  The command deck...was down one floor.  The nearest ladder was a few seconds running away, but that would involve unlocking the door.  She couldn't control her ship from here, but she could access the cameras and status monitors.  She pulled a small portable console out of her desk, and connected to the ship's computer.  
	First connection was to the camera on the aft side of the cargo bay.  The alien craft was still secured in the wrapper arms, holding it just above the floor.  There was no sign of the aliens, and the hatch leading into her ship was closed and sealed.  She did shut that behind her, didn't she?  There's no way she would have done something as stupid as leave it open, right?  Next camera was the far aft end of the access shaft near the cargo bay.  The aliens were there, and they had taken their helmets off.  They couldn't have gotten in if she had sealed it on her way in, so the aliens must have sealed the door behind them.  Which meant, they didn't want her to escape.
	Had this whole thing been a trap?  A predatory species seeing a lone member of another, laying in wait to strike?  But if so, why had Houston gone quiet?  Why were there no other attackers?  Were they that confident that these three could get the job done?  A million different thoughts ran in her head, a non-stop torrent of why's and what if's.  The only thing she knew with any clarity was there were three aliens, inside of her ship, and they were between her and her weapons or the controls of the ship.  Muli wished she had bothered with self defense classes before she had gone into the Deep.  "What do I need to know hand to hand for, I own weapons!" was the reasoning she had used back then.  After all, in space your opponent wasn't supposed to get onto your ship in the first damn place.  And she had not only invited them in, she had left the fucking hatch open.
	Keeping an eye on the monitor on her portable console, she dug around in her clothing closet for that old monitor she never threw away.  It had some power issue, but it did function most of the time.  She connected it to the console, and linked it with the cargo bay's camera.  She kept the main monitor focused on the aliens who were thankfully moving as a group, and the older monitor on that alien craft.  Wanting to slap herself for not thinking of it sooner, she began recording.  Something horrible might happen to her here, that was a possibility, but she could get information out with a high power burst broadcast.  She could warn everyone else about this sucker-punching species.  They sent out distress signals and then hit you once they got on your ship.  But...
	Had they attacked her?  She looked back through her scattered and panicked thoughts.  Had they actually made any move towards her?  Before she ran, they had moved, that's what made her run to start with.  And they had moved, right as she had screamed.  She ran that in her head a few times before it clicked.  They hadn't moved towards her, they jumped because she screamed and probably scared them.  As a matter of fact, wasn't the one on the right falling as she turned?  She re-examined everything from the time she first heard the distress call until she had locked herself in her quarters.  Their behavior was strange, but wouldn't an alien's behavior be alien?  They hadn't done anything hostile that she could think of, and didn't appear to be carrying weapons of any kind.  Was she really under attack?
	The ship was the deciding answer.  If it was fine, then the distress call was a decoy.  She took a closer look at it, wishing the camera in the cargo bay zoomed in closer than 5X.  The bottom half of it wasn't quite the tube she took it for at long distance.  Instead, it looked like some sort of child's toy.  Shiny, with those pathetically thin legs and misshapen bowls on the end of them.  Located below the small hatch the aliens had come out of were four small attitude thrusters in an unusually familiar four-direction arrangement.  There were small windows all over both halves of the craft, but most seemed to be around the middle.  What mattered to her though, was the top half, and that one open side.  She looked at it carefully, but didn't recognize any of the parts beyond simple things like hoses and wires.  Still, it actually looked damaged, and not made to look damaged.
	So the distress call was real.  She had picked them up, invited them to come out of their ship, offered assistance which was politely declined.  Then she had asked them to show them their faces, and they had complied.  And she had responded by freaking out, screaming at them, and running away.  She buried her face in her hands.  Her species first contact with aliens, and she was the screw-up on the scene.  It should have been a scientist, or a diplomat.  Instead, it was Muli, the biggest loser of a male-less litter.  If only someone else was here instead of her.  But she was here, and she couldn't pretend this wasn't happening.
	Looking at the aliens, she noticed their movements didn't seem so menacing when she wasn't assuming they were out to kill her.  They weren't carefully moving as a team through her ship looking for her, they were seeing an alien ship and they were obviously afraid.  They probably thought she was going to go for a weapon and come back.  Like she had thought of just a little while ago.  She felt a bit embarrassed about her behavior.  Sure, it was understandable, but this was something important.  First contact with an alien species.  She couldn't help but feel like she had messed it up.  She felt warm too.
	Were the aliens generating that much heat?  Switching the older monitor over to ship status showed temperature was still within the set acceptable range.  Why did she feel so warm then?  She set her room environment to cool down a bit for a few minutes, and felt the cool air blow on her from the vents in the ceiling.  All over her.  Looking down, she realized in the excitement of everything that she had been dealing with since she woke up a few hours ago, she never put on clothes before greeting her guests.  She didn't just meet aliens, she had showed them what her delicates looked like.  Why oh why couldn't it have been someone else?  Anyone else?
	The cool air felt good, but she still felt warm.  The temperature had dropped a little bit in her quarters, but she still felt warm, even as she felt the coolness of the air around her.  Panic came rushing back as she thought she had caught some disease from breathing the same air as the aliens.  Bringing up the status screen, she felt ice in her veins as she saw the yellow warning signal saying there was "something" in the atmosphere system.  Yep, she was going to die.  The alarm was replaced with confusion when the computer reported back that the "something" wasn't a virus, bacteria, or fungal spore.  It was a chemical compound.  Not complex enough to be a drug.  It was a pheromone?  That couldn't be right, could it?
	She looked down at her torso.  Her nipples were hard, easily visible through her bra.  That was from the cold, right?  An experimental touch told her it was not the cold, she was too sensitive for it to be cold related.  She shut off the cold air, feeling plenty cold on the outside, but uncomfortably warm on the inside.  Was this the plan all along?  Did their species fight using pheromones, using them to distract and weaken their opponents?  She recognized this feeling now, it was the same feeling when she was in heat.  It was unnatural, having that indescribably uncomfortable warmth when not in heat.  And it was starting to become very annoying.
	This was the plan she realized with a sinking feeling.  It didn't matter if she locked herself in, eventually the pheromones would take effect on her.  They had to have known this.  This was why they had taken their helmets off, to flood the air.  With this in mind, she resigned herself to the knowledge that she would be acting as a warning beacon to her species.  She wasn't going home alive.  All she could do is warn everyone else, keep anyone else from falling into this sneaky trap.  It wouldn't be too hard to circumvent it, a self-contained breathing system would take care of it easily.  Unfortunately, she didn't have one in her room.  If she had been able to trap the aliens in the cargo bay, she could have easily built one from what she had on the ship.  One mistake after another, leading to her current situation.
	She had a sudden flash of hope.  Her heat usually bothered her less after she had an orgasm, so she could uh, help herself through?  Back to the clothing closet, this time pulling out a semi-realisic replica of a male nemesian's penis.  She had heard real males didn't vibrate, but were still plenty good.  Standing with the fake dick in hand, she had to think for a second.  Was she really about to pound herself while she had three aliens walking around her ship?  She walked over to the console still sitting near the door from her earlier panic attack, and set the monitors to follow the aliens.  As long as she kept an eye on them at the least.  She would get through this, and find a way to get them out of her ship.  She just needed to deal with this right now.
	Three wildly unsatisfying orgasms later, things had not improved one bit.  She felt worse than when she started touching herself.  It just felt like it was getting worse and worse.  She was wrong, she wasn't going to get through this.  She could not defend herself against this.  But she could warn others.  She prepared her console to record her directly with shaky hands.  She had a message she had to send.