Star Side

Chapter 1

Stellar date (Earth Time): 08-25-2914

I thought I just had the worst case of constipation in my life.

Hey, the bowl trouble hits the best of us. I'd always been so regular—not that you need to know that, but since we're talking about what I just painfully dropped into the toilet, we're there. You're here. Hi.

Thing is, I'd been regular with just about everything in my life, digestion aside. I'd been born with a staunch, healthy body, even if it's not the prettiest. I rarely got sick, and when I did I got through it twice as fast as the normal person. Because my sturdiness was the only thing I could be proud of when it came to my mannish body, I didn't give in to help easily when I got hurt or sick. Thus, when I got this case of the stuffies that stopped me from standing and left me sobbing and heaving, I was an idiot and didn't press the emergency call button, which would have gotten at least Naomi over. I figured I'd push it once I'd ruptured my colon and was bleeding all over the place, but not before I had the chance to flush away the turdy evidence of my shame.

But my colon hadn't even been involved when I finally passed whatever was making all my stomach muscles seize. Rather, something smooth and round passed from, well...the other hole.

My relief from the pain had nothing on whatever tingly, hot horror came when I saw that speckled, purple and blue EGG—honest to god EGG—floating in my toilet bowl amongst a little swirl of blood and, what I could only assume, was some sort of birthing fluid. It was the size of two of my closed fists put together and looking a little stretched from having been squeezed through (insert more swearing and screaming and some flailing) my birth canal.

Yeah, I'd gotten a little bloated of late. Yeah, my stomach had gotten rounded. But I hadn't exactly been on top of my exercise regiment for the past month or so and I'd always been one to gain weight easy (because my body was ready for the cave man times rather than the space age, ugh). There was no one to impress here in the space boonies either, and life wasn't going anywhere, so I was a little depressed. But like hell was I going to stay that way, but right as I was getting to doing something about it I started getting all the symptoms of constipation and just figured I'd been eating too many protein supplements. They did cause constipation. They had these chocolate kinds though I'd been craving fresh meat so I settled for those, because chocolate...

Oh lanta, had those been pregnancy cravings?

There was just one problem about that screaming in my head as the terrible cramps came on again to push out yet another egg into my toilet.

I was a virgin. Painfully, utterly virgin. And on birth control, which was a requirement for all astronauts, no matter their occupation or relationship status since space travel was notoriously bad for pregnant women and their fetus.

And my name wasn't even the Holy Mother Mary. It was Jolene.

A heavy scratch on my door distracted me from my surprise labor.

"Jo," crooned the lava and smoke voice. "Let me in, let me in, you are scared. You are hurt."

No way was I having an alien watch me take the biggest dump of my life. I'd threatened him with a taser should he break the door before locking it tight.

But now I was passing eggs, with no idea where said eggs came from or how they could have gotten in me in the first place. My vision darkened as I started checking out with both panic and contractions. The third plop into the toilet bowl was particularly loud and the scratching stopped.

"Jo? Is it born?"

His question shot through the haze of painful hysteria like lightning.

Born? He couldn't even see, how did he...