HLNE 1

Bella looked around furtively. She knew that the suit was around here somewhere. There had to be a nook or corner with a box labeled, “HLNE-61.9” somewhere. Somewhere…

Bella chided herself for that thought. Of course that was just an idle wish. The Seraphs wouldn’t have kept it in plain sight, even in this well secured storage bunker ten thousand feet under the surface of the planet. After all, Seraphs were notorious for keeping safe things safer than needed. It’s what made their battle tanks impossible to destroy, their cruisers impossible to take on, and their bases…

Well. Nearly impossible to infiltrate. Bella allowed herself a small smile. She was one of those people that put “Nearly” in “Nearly Impossible”.

Clank. Bella fluidly ducked behind a looming storage container, a strange egg-shaped oval nearly the height of two men. A simple and quiet flick of a switch made her head-to-toe suit start up from its power-saving state and meld into the background, like shadowy silk. Another flick of Bella’s wrist and a translucent, needle-thin pike slid out from its sheath under her arm. She had orders not to leave any bodies- but it was war, after all, and if Bella was caught and killed she might as well take some of those damned aliens with her.

“Shkaralnth.”

Bella stood, utterly relaxed, and flexed her needle-arm slightly.

“Kash.”

Another clank. This time it was undeniably a footstep. Judging from its resonance, the Seraph was in full heavy battle regalia- impregnable armor and all. Bella gritted her teeth, then slowly let the needle slide back under her arm into its hidden state. Those suits had no vulnerabilities. She had literally seen one heavy Seraph trooper resist a tactical nuke explosion and come out mostly unscathed. Her little needle wouldn’t prick this prey.

“Kanath ul’ pathund. Vilus marat?”

“Nun.”

Two. Bella shook her head. The second voice had no footsteps to accompany it, but she could already imagine that the second Seraph was armored as well. Oh well. They wouldn’t be able to find her. The Seraphs made superior armor, but their sensors were still inferior to human ones. They wouldn’t be able to find her unless they bodily ran into her.

“Eyt… Bar’ath shamodu?”

“Nun.”

Clank. The footsteps halted. The voices were now coming from the same general direction. “Bonue, Shkaralnth. Tah’tis mar pathund ney, kash?”

“Kash, Nau. Mah’tis mar pathund.”

“Bonue.”

The footsteps started again, but this time they were receding. Bella slowly snuck her way up in their direction, taking care to stick to the shadows where her digital camo scales would be able to fade in better. Soon she came up to the place. A hulking Seraph stood alone, arm-cannon held aloft easily. Its companion must have left.

Bella watched. A hint of nervousness crept into her mind.

Seraph were generally seven feet tall, although Bella knew that a few rare ones could reach nine or even ten feet. Their armor wasn’t the only fearsome thing about them. Seraph had inferior sensors and weaponry compared to humans, but they more than made up for it by their cold and merciless combat in battle. The rumor was that not a single Seraph, over the course of the Thousand-year War, had ever run from its post or panicked. They always hit their targets, always executed their movements with robotic precision, and never retreated unless their commanders told them to. In essence, the entire Seraph military was the epitome of conventional human martial spirit.

It was a bit scary.

The only reason why the Seraphs hadn’t won the war nine hundred years ago was because of the sheer number of human ships and wanton destruction human weapons could bring to bear. Planet-destroying lasers, black hole missiles, and so much more rained down on Seraph settlements every day from millions of battleships and destroyers lined across the galaxy. The Seraphs were fierce on ground, and that made capturing their planets very hard. But their ships were pesky at best- hard to destroy, but easy to ignore. A human battleship could take hours of firepower from a Seraph cruiser. Accordingly, even the most cumbersome bombard-and-run operations resulted in little or no casualties, while their planets were rendered inhospitable.

But humans couldn’t destroy every planet they came across. And that meant land battles. Land battles, overflowing with casualties and lost lives. It was a bloody business. Now almost everybody human wanted to negotiate with the Seraphs, to somehow find peace. Their language matrix was almost decoded- at least it had been when Bella left, it might have been finished by this time. Once it was translated humans would be able to communicate with the Seraph government, reach a diplomatic conclusion, and…

Bella would instantly become useless. She narrowed her eyes, annoyed. All of her training, everything she learned from preparatory school to the Academy, would become unnecessary. How would she fit into the new “normalcy” of life? How? It almost made one wish that…

No. Bella shook her helmeted head firmly. Of course she wanted peace. War was bad and war was cruel. Nobody sane would prefer another millennium of combat over a finally actualized armistice…

Of course, war hadn’t exactly done wonders for Bella’s psyche.

She shook her head again and slid away from the still-standing Seraph, towards the fifth section. The final one that she hadn’t checked yet…

The package labeled “HLNE-61.9” had been a captured top secret shipment. Somehow, an experimental Seraph cruiser had rammed and boarded a messenger ship about ten relative months ago. The tracking sensors on the package had led Bella here, where as an expert infiltrator she was to extract the contents and return them to human hands. She didn’t exactly know what was in them… but it was some high tech. War-changing tech. Tech that would tip the tables in humanity’s favor and give them a bargaining chip to help sue for peace.

What kind of threatening weapon would make the Seraphs negotiate? Bella thought hard as she crept through the rows, fingering the suit back into power-saving mode. It couldn’t be a bomb or missile. The Seraphs already had seen catastrophic weapons beyond their own, and they still fought. Perhaps it was a psychological weapon, or some kind of bioweapon that would kill them all like a disease. Bella could only guess at the thing that could make a Seraph feel fear.

Then she saw it.

It stuck out like a proverbial sore thumb. Or, rather, like a rectangular box in the midst of several hundreds of ovalish storage bins. The thing was a dark gunmetal color, further verifying its human origins. And Bella thought she could see some writing on the side…

Finally. She hurried closer.

Bella had been right. Letters were etched into the side of the package- human ones, decipherable ones!- And she bent down with a rapidly beating heart to read them.

HLNE.

And next to it,

Variant 61 Model 9.

It was HLNE-61.9. The miracle ex-machina war-ending technology. And what was stranger was that the whole package couldn’t have been larger than a human person, both length and width wise. It was almost like a coffin.

Armor? Bella thought. She looked around. There was no way that she was lugging this entire thing back to base by herself. She reached behind to the small of her back and unhooked a miniscule keycard. Then she swiped it, across the nearly invisible seam lining the “lid” of the box.

The thing silently opened. The lid floated up, to the side, and down to settle on the floor by itself. Bella only had a moment to admire the first rate technology behind the case itself when she looked down.

And gasped, out loud, despite herself. “What the-” she cursed, before catching herself and stopping. Bella quickly looked around and made sure that nobody was nearby, then turned her stunned gaze back into the coffin.

What the hell?

It was a corpse. But a corpse like Bella had never seen before. The face itself was deathly white, shaped in human proportions but with silvery eyes and a thick lining of whitish mucus over a barely perceptible maw. The nose was flat, only slightly protruding from the rest of the face’s features, and had no nostrils. The chin was sharp, almost pointed. The ears were strange as well, long and pointed as well, and smooth tentacles lay dead where the hair would have been.  

From the neck down, however, things looked slightly more familiar, although still strange at that. The nude body looked like a human female’s. Breasts? Bella squinted, breathing heavily through her helmet as she examined the corpse disbelievingly. Then she looked over the rest of the torso- just like a human’s except the color of bone. Hands, feet- five fingered, with nearly imperceptible webbing trailing between the digits like a gauzy insect wings. Smooth, hairless skin. And at the crotch-

Bella recoiled slightly. Why the hell was the thing- the corpse- like an anatomically correct human female except for the head? Was this the result of some perverted experimentation? Those Seraph bastards-

No. Wait. It dawned on Bella suddenly. It could be…

A Seraph. In the flesh.

It was certainly possible. Another thing nobody had seen over the last thousand years of war was a living, breathing, Seraph. Or even a dead one, rather- one only saw their faceplates and hand-cannons, but never got to see their eyes or look into their faces. It was hard enough to capture one alive, and the dead ones were always unrecognizable. Humanoid- but unrecognizable. Bella had seen a few pictures and immediately wished she hadn’t.

But this was a… Seraph? Bella still found it almost impossible to believe. What were the chances of the first ever extraterrestrial species encountered by man being nearly identical down to the…?

Bella looked down at the crotch again, then looked away disgustedly.

Back to the plan. No use thinking about it here. She could ponder her heart out later in safe territory.

Well. It was a corpse. Bella sighed inwardly. That made her job infinitely harder. She couldn’t carry it out, when the bunker and its one and only entrance was crawling with Seraphs. A floating Seraph dead body would attract some attention.

Bella sighed and maliciously poked the belly of the Seraph. Instead of resisting her press, the skin seemed to cave in-

“Shit!”

Bella actually jumped back this time, heart hammering. It had almost been as if the entire thing had no insides…

What…?

Bella snuck back to the body and gingerly poked it again with a gloved hand. Once again, it compressed, before reinflating. Bella tried again, harder, then in different places. Then she finally reached out and, with trepidation, squeezed a breast.

It squashed under her grip, then sprang back into its original shape.

Bella took a long, slow breath and took a step back to let it all process in her mind.

It wasn’t a corpse. It was a suit. A costume.

A costume of a Seraph.

Bella looked at it for a second. Then two. Slowly, a whole minute passed as Bella stared at the thing with new eyes. Eyes that examined each pristine detail, each pore, each limb and feature made to fit a human’s proportions exactly.

And then she decided that her job had become decidedly easier.

Perhaps it wasn’t a Seraph, Bella thought as she stripped behind the box. The stealth suit came off, albeit with some difficulty. Next came her clothes, all the way down to her underwear. Bella stood there, shivering slightly in her simply cut panties and sports bra, looking down at the costume. Noting the realism of the surface, and the slit at the crotch that opened and led to a wet- and deep- inside as she prodded hesitantly.

Well, it looked like Bella had to strip. “What’s best for the mission, long live humanity!” as her long-ago drill instructor would have said in her stupid nasally voice.

God dammit. Bella rolled her eyes, looked around once more, then took off her underwear. First her panties- slip them down, kick them to the side- and then her bra.

Click.

She was naked. God it was cold. Why the stupid Seraphs couldn’t make their storage bins all internally conditioned and made the bunker room temperature, she didn’t know…

Poke.

One last poke. Bella looked at the face. It was angled, almost skull-like now that she took a careful second look at it. It even looked like the mask’s maw had sharp canines all around, underneath that layer of opaque mucus. She pushed an eyelid up and was surprised to see a silvery orb underneath, snuggly fitted in. Bella resisted the urge to touch its slimy surface, pushing down that ugly curiosity as she let the eyelid close again. Would she be able to even see, with that mask on?

Bella halted, then rummaged around in the box. She came up with a few things in her hands, including a case of contact lenses and rubbery ear plugs. Why bother with contact lenses, when there were clearly eyes already set in that mask…?

Bella looked at the costume. It lay there with a placid yet deathly look on its face. The thing was so otherworldly, and at the same time so lifelike. It almost felt as if Bella was about to slip inside a hollow alien corpse. The feeling was distinctly morbid.

“To hell with it,” Bella muttered. She reached in and grabbed it by the shoulders, pulling it unceremoniously out of its resting place in the form-cut foam. Then she reversed it.

The Y-shaped slit running down the back of the costume left no more question. Bella pulled the flaps apart and peeked inside. There was indeed a hollow cavity. It was also extraordinarily shiny inside, and Bella had to tilt it forward a little in order to see in the dim light. As she did so one of her fingers slipped into the costume by mistake. Bella recoiled- it was wet, and unnaturally warm. She hadn’t expected that- the outside was cool, almost cold to the touch.

Nothing more to it. Bella gave a protesting sigh and brought it down to her knees, then lifted a foot and sank it slowly into the warm mess. It was fleshy and strange, almost erotic. Bella felt herself become a little excited, and blushed without realizing it. She had nearly forgotten- was that even possible?- about her strange fetish. Month upon month, year upon year, and Bella had been virgin the entire time. She hadn’t even had time enough to think about carnal pleasures since- well, since she had been a teenager living in New California.

Bella tried to snap herself out of her reverie and pushed her other leg into the costume. Then she pulled, letting the inside slide wetly over her calves and up towards-

She stopped and looked at the costume. Bella had almost forgotten about the realistic inserts that she had noticed while poking at the costume from the outside. Grimacing, Bella reached in and carefully slid them inside her- surprisingly easily. She was wet. Or it was wet. Or both. God dammit. Bella was nervous but aroused. Why had she been chosen for this mission anyway?

Oh. That was right. She had volunteered. Before they even gave out the details. She had been restless for more action and hadn’t known that it was an extraction operation.

More like an insertion operation, right now. Bella felt another plug rubbing her ass and reached back, feeling the molded structure. The exhilaration was definitely starting to win out over her trepidation, and Bella took it and pushed it up and in. She shivered a little, but not from the cold this time.

Bella experimentally wriggled her hips around, and felt the plugs only roll around slightly. They were tightly inserted into her anus and vagina. Bella wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not- at least, her crotch was telling her it was. She made another face and pulled the costume skin up her toned belly towards her breasts. The moist flesh easily pushed itself onto her and flattened like realistic skin.

Now the arms and breasts. Bella reached out at an awkward angle, then pushed her arm through the sleeve of the costume with some difficulty. It was tight- in fact, it was tight everywhere, like a skintight costume that was a tad too realistic both inside and outside. But she managed to get her hand through the channel, and wiggled her fingers into the corresponding cavities for her digits. Soon her new left hand wiggled in front of her, dry and white and strange- but at the same time, moving according to her thoughts. It was disorientingly erotic to Bella, and for a second she had to pause.

But she had to go on. Through the haze of pleasure starting to cloud her mind, Bella reminded herself that she was in enemy territory, half naked and unarmed.

Her right hand reached down to the weight of the two facsimiles slightly larger than her own breasts. They slid on slowly, like some perverted bra, and stayed in place long enough for Bella to slide her right arm into the channel. Her new right hand reached back and pulled the back seams together, and…

And just like that, Bella was a bone-white female alien neck-down. Or Seraph. Or whatever. She didn’t know what it was but god it made her horny so she didn’t care. Bella looked down her front, which was mostly obscured by two huge breasts that certainly didn’t belong to her… But no. They belonged to her now. Bella ran a hand over the right breast and was surprised to find that her touch was translated to her real breasts underneath. Bella tweaked a black nipple and jumped back, electric waves of mixed pain and pleasure radiating down the length of her body.

How?

Bella tried to pull the breast off and found that it was stuck. A small seed of panic set into her mind and she pulled more, and she felt pain and then-

Pop. It parted slightly from her body, and Bella felt her real breast underneath escape what seemingly was a suction pulling the costume’s chest closer to hers. She sighed in relief and let it pull itself back into place. For a second, Bella had thought that she had been stuck in the costume.

And what if that had happened? Bella felt the heat under her waist and writhed a little. But all she could see of her body was a lithe, pale body, one that didn’t belong to her, move in the same way. And that made Bella so horny, made her want to reach inside with those slim fingers and masturbate furiously-

No, no, the mask! The mask was left. Bella was still here, a horny soldier up to her neck in a perverted alien costume that was several degrees too realistic. But if that mask went on- then-

Then what?

What? Bella would still be there anyway. Still there, stuck under a different skin, but there anyway. Excited and wet like a teenager actualizing her weird fetish.

That served to turn Bella off, but only slightly. Therefore it was still with more lust rather than reason in mind, that she pulled on the mask. No- her new face. Her new-

It was dark. No eyeholes. Panting, Bella pulled it back off and looked around, before finding the contact lens case. Her coated fingers slipped in the fluids, then she leaned back and slid one contact in, then the other.

It was black as well. Bella blinked, frowning into the air. It should have worked- why hadn’t it worked? They were important, somehow.

She had to at least try. Bella felt around and found the rubber earplugs. In they went, and Bella was suddenly completely vulnerable. If a Seraph walked in on her, she wouldn’t be able to hear it coming. And that was the last straw.

With deep, heavy breaths, Bella felt for the mask and pulled it on. Tubes slid into her nose and a big, squishy mass went into her mouth. Her tongue found a cavity and wriggled in. Her teeth slid into the costume’s hollow incisors. Her small ears went into twin flaps where the warmth mashed in with them. Shaking hands pushed her stray strands of hair out of the way, then pulled the mask’s flaps over the back of her head, where they sealed shut by some magic of their own.

Deafened, blinded, gagged and plugged, Bella sank to her haunches and waited with bated breath.

She took in another breath.

Then another.

Wait. Nothing was happe-

And suddenly, light.

And hearing. And tasting, and smelling, somehow. Bella had one pure moment of sensory overload as all of her disabled senses were brought back to life.

Then, suddenly, pain. Uncomfortable pain.

Pins and needles on her skin, as little hooks attached the false skin to her real one through her pores. As they connected the costume to her nervous system, letting her feeling of touch come back to her one pinch at a time.

Then the costume’s gag suddenly extended itself down into her throat, pushing its way into her digestive system. The anal plug under her did the same, punching its way up and writhing through her intestines. A sliver of wriggling something invaded her urethra.The vaginal insert only plunged itself deeper-

And then, silence.

Not actual silence. Bella could suddenly hear well enough. But the pain was gone, and now she truly felt the sensations being conveyed through her suit.

It was strange. Bella still knew that she was wearing the suit. But the suit was now covering her, apart from her and yet communicating the texture of the grilled floor. At the same time, Bella knew that her feet were stuck in a warm, wet, and tight place, but that feeling somehow lurked only in the background of her mind.

It was the same with her vagina. And her breasts. And, as Bella ground her newly sharpened teeth, her mouth and tongue. She blew out and a bubble of mucus burst, letting her monstrous jaw  taste the air.

And how could she see? Bella had her eyes open inside the costume, but she knew that there were no eyeholes. She reached up to rub her eyes, and by instinct she closed them. Her vision dimmed and went dark too. Almost as if she was blinking. With a burst of adrenaline, Bella realized that she was seeing through the contacts. They were somehow transmitting the visuals of the outside world back to her actual eyes.

Bella turned. And looked at her reflection in the curved surface of a silvery Seraph orb.

Alien eyes, blinking almost disbelievingly. Mouth open, gasping for air, a black tongue licking fangs from beneath a curtain of drool-like mucus. A skeletal face, with brows furrowed in pleasure. A pale body, with finned fingers stroking firm rounded breasts.

Funny, Bella thought. She was doing that too. And she moved, and it moved. The reflection suddenly became coy, and Bella realized that she was doing that under her mask. She flipped her head back and the alien in the mirror-like surface did the same, tentacles writhing.

Such a sick fantasy. But it made Bella so horny, so aroused, knowing that she was that alien woman in the polished silver, that white-skinned monster with tentacles for hair and a skull for a face. That she was actually underneath, her, plain old Bella, in actuality completely blind and deaf, her mouth filled to the point that she couldn’t even muster a whimper, deep reaching inserts molded to fit her vagina and- Her white, agile fingers slipped down to her clit. Stroked her lips. Massaged her g-spot. Then dove in.