PrincessColumbia

  It took less than a heartbeat for Diane’s eyes to adjust to the dim room. Natural light came through the windows, which were partially covered with what looked to be some form of bst shielding designed to grant the people inside at least a little light. There were signs that the room had been the site of a firefight as well as having been damaged by the bombardment. Bloodstains smeared in a trail to a second door on the other side of the room which was now firmly closed, likely to keep out the smell that was going to start coming from the corpses soon. A hole had been punched in the ceiling and the floor beneath had an entire support beam sticking out of it. A pile of debris had settled next to it and through the hole it appeared there was more building above that was keeping the sun from illuminating the room more, likely another two stories that had been punched through.

  Around the perimeter of the room was rows of consoles, about half of them dark, two of the remaining were showing signs of malfunction due to damage, and only three remaining lit. Sitting in a chair, slumped down with one bloody hand pressed against his ribcage, the other holding a pistol on her, and one leg sitting at an awkward angle was a man, presumably the one who’d called for aid.

  He wasn’t quite what she might have expected. He had dark hair, maybe brown, and equally dark, piercing eyes. There was a slightly pinched look to his face, as though he was containing the pain of injury, but even through that she could see he was not just conventionally handsome, but there was a somewhat boyish, charming quality to his features. His eyes were a sharp, bright blue and betrayed an intelligence as he scanned her up and down in seconds. His clothing wasn’t what she would have expected of someone in a containment facility. They were mostly bck with some browns mixed in. He was wearing a trenchcoat over what appeared to be survival fatigues, mostly military in origin but to her untrained eye it looked like they had been given some extra tailoring. The way the clothing hung off his body was more reminiscent of a uniform worn with pride than what one might expect of either a prisoner or guard. In the former case, they’d be cast-offs, what was lying around that fit. In the tter the clothing wouldn’t be tailored.

  And since her helmet was down, she was able to take in his scent, which was surprisingly strong given the dust, ash, and gore hanging in the air. Nutmeg...and ginger! She found her mouth watering inexplicably.

  “Well,” said the man as he held his gun level and pointed at her chest, “You’re a tall one, aren’t you?”

  Her eyebrow went up as her mouth twitched into a smile, “I’ve been accused of this, yes.”

  He hmm’d, “And you’re not here with the feds?”

  She shook her head, “Nope. Independent.” He snorted with apparent skepticism. “No really, I’ve got a station a couple systems over. We were taking our newest ship out for a shakedown when we happened upon the feds,” she deliberately used his shorthand, “Firing down on your location. Kinda a human rights viotion.”

  It was his turn to raise an eyebrow, “‘Human rights?’”

  She blushed, “Ah, yeah, I’m one of the Lost. I was raised by a human caretaker and then shipped off to take over a station so I wouldn’t be Earth’s problem anymore.”

  A glint of suspicion crept back into his eyes, “You have me at a bit of a disadvantage, so I must ask; do you have any loyalty to Earth because of your upbringing?”

  She snorted, “Nope. My caretaker was an abusive bitch and Earthgov didn’t give a damn about me until I became First Found of Mortan. Hell, my best friend is a human who’d love to string up Eartgov by their collective entrails for leaving her and her people stranded on my station and then giving it to me without bothering to check if anyone was living there. Her boyfriend is...I think wanted in Terran space as, at the very least, a person of interest, and the station’s biggest ally outside of Mortan is The Chroma Syndicate. Pretty much nobody around me is a fan of Earthgov.”

  This got the man to lower his gun, to which Diane lowered her hands to her sides. He nodded in acknowledgement of her rexing her stance, “It seems we may have a common enemy, or at least a common irritant,” he said with a smile, “Might you have room on your station for one more? Or at least your ship? If I remain here I’m a sitting duck.”

  “I’m not sure you are,” she said with a conspiratorial smile in return, “Every single dead body on this base is wearing a Terran uniform and you have the T.I.A. so scared of you they’ve resorted to bombarding you from orbit when you have nothing capable of firing back.” She watched as his expression went from calcuting to intrigued surprise before adding, “Also, you’re not injured, you’ve been leaving drop-sign in our path and have been so stealthy our personal sensors couldn’t pick you up, you don’t do that if you’ve been shot or stabbed.”

  After just a moment of stunned silence, he barked a ugh, “Brilliantly deduced!” He folded his legs under him to stand, dropping the pretense of injury entirely. She could see his side was unmarred where he’d been covering it with his hand and she could see that the blood had long since dried. “The visage of a warrior and the mind of a detective, I think I might come to like you fairly quickly.”

  She grinned at his ugh, finding herself quite enjoying the sound, “Before we get too chummy, my ‘detective’s mind’ won’t sit easily until I know why they had you locked up. I know,” she said with a raised hand, gesturing that he wait for her to finish, “That it’s the T.I.A. and we probably should take that as an admission that they were up to no good in holding you here, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day...” She trailed off, gesturing to him to take the conversational baton.

  His expression darkened, “A fair question, and it has a simple answer; they were keeping me here and alive to try and flush out my family.”

  Her own expression fell, “...what?!”

  He nodded, “We...well, we’re not a normal family by Terran standards. We were selected, bred to be the finest examples of humanity ever created. We were supposed to fight in the Gaxy War. We were given facilities, training, equipment, all the learning we could absorb...but no parents.” Diane didn’t bother to hide her scowl and he nodded, “We learned to rely on each other for anything that wasn’t for the purpose of the efficiency of our learning how to fight their war...and then when the war was over, they cast us aside. If cryo was a thing, they’d have put us on ice so they could save us for the next war!”

  Diane was feeling a knot of fury in her belly. What he was describing was monstrously familiar. While Diane’s family didn’t have soldiers in it, hers was a rarity in the Republic, which had drafted as many able bodies as they could as the st war drew to a close. There were a good many stories about veterans of that war who’d served loyally but after had fallen through the cracks. There simply wasn’t a robust enough infrastructure in the wake of the nukes being dropped on the eastern seaboard and the walls going up. An entire generation starving and dying from malnutrition meant that some difficult choices had to be made when it came to the cold calculus of who got the resources and who didn’t, who got to eat and who had to do without. There were far, far too many stories from that time period where whole families were found dead from starvation because someone in charge got greedy or zy. But it was the abject betrayal of finding out that a vet had died homeless and hungry that turned the stomach of anyone with a conscience. Men and women who’d given their health, bodies, and sometimes even their minds and their country hadn’t taken care of them as they’d been promised. Actual, real heroes had been cast aside and forgotten.

  Heroes like Diane was not. Spooks and spies didn’t get to be heroes, they worked in the shadows to make sure the heroes could do the good and right thing.

  She cast the thoughts aside, they’d do her no good here, “So what happened next? Why are they keeping you locked up?”

  The man’s smile was dark, full of fury wrapped in a shell of hate, “The people in charge of the program wanted us erased. We weren’t told as children, but the project to produce supersoldiers using genetics was illegal. With the war over we’d become a liability.”

  Diane felt a bit of gorge rise up in her throat, “...and they were going to kill you to cover their backsides.”

  He nodded, “Even so.”

  Diane felt her fist shaking as she clenched it in fury. She felt a slight buzz under her right gauntlet and looked down at the dispy. “Well,” she said in a slightly choked voice, “I’ve managed to download all the data from their computers that I could gather, shall we continue this on the way back to my station? I’d like to sift their data and having someone who knows their procedures and methods will help immensely.”

  He smiled at her, practically beaming, “I think that’s a capital idea. I don’t believe we’ve actually introduced ourselves. My name is Benjamin.” He stretched out his hand to shake.

  She csped his hand with hers and smiled back, her belly flip-flopping in something that wasn’t nerves and entirely unreted to the subject of their conversation up to that point. She didn’t have time to examine that, though, she simply said, “Diane Somni’els, nice to meet you, Benjamin.”

  “Please,” he smiled and winked in a way that she felt like he was inviting her into a secret, “Call me Ben.”

  The Joan of Arc had four rooms dedicated to non-ship-specific functions that the crew could use for leisure; the observation deck, the galley, the common area, and the multipurpose room.

  The multipurpose room was, essentially, a holodeck but without the Trek-specific name. When not in use it was basically a big empty room (or rather, big by an Interceptor-css ship’s standards, it was barely bigger than Diane’s living room in her quarters on the station). When a crewmember reserved the room, however, they could load up any holo-environment they liked. So long as they didn’t use the room when someone else requested it, they could almost live in the multipurpose room.

  As they had a little under 23 hours to get back to the station via FTL, the crew adhered to their normal rotations, bare-bones crew levels notwithstanding. This meant when Diane needed a sparring partner and J’Jesi was awake at around the same time, she’d had to approach the Crotuk with the request as the smaller woman was probably the only other person on the ship that wouldn’t break in half with a slight tap from Diane.

  Not that Diane was upset with the choice of sparring partner. The engineer brought a form of martial arts she hadn’t seen before, and though the other woman was inexpert, she was adapting and learning quickly as she went up against Diane.

  One thing that was very different from her sparring sessions with Leki or Kaor was J’Jesi would start fighting like a pissed off wet cat when she was in a position that she perceived as losing. This forced Diane to up her game and she started going for pins and holds instead of the punches, kicks, and sshes she would have used with Leki or Kaor. It was her spars with Kaor that helped her with J’Jesi, as the Morvuck was more the engineer’s size, where Leki was nearly a match for Diane in height.

  About the third time J’Jesi was pinned to the mat, she tapped out, “Alright, okay, you’re better than me! Bitch!” As harsh as the words were, the tone of voice took the sting out of them and the Crotuk’s scent was more along the ‘amused’ spectrum, with a tiny hint of something that could be jealousy.

  Dojo rules applied, of course, so Diane immediately pushed herself off the Crotuk. She reached down to help the engineer up, and for a moment J’Jesi looked like she might reject the hand out of pride, but eventually she did take the hand and climb to her feet.

  The motion wasn’t exactly graceful, but it was full of controlled power. Obvious and visible muscles flexed and rippled under skin glistening with sweat, and owing to the rigorous nature of the workout, neither of them were wearing much in the way of concealing clothing. This meant Diane could see all of what the Crotuk had to offer save for the areas that would be covered by a swimsuit. Due to J’Jesi’s human-raised life, much like Diane she wore workout clothing appropriate for a human woman about her age, that is to say a very supportive sports bra and yoga pants. Since they were sparring, they’d both opted to go without footwear of any kind. The smaller woman kept her hair short, which honestly made sense given her job in Engineering.

  Long hair in such an environment would have been a nuisance at best. Diane had honestly considered cutting her own, a thought that pgued her every time she put on her armor and had to deal with pinning up her hair, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do so. She’d gotten used to it being long and was taking care of it per Delih’s instructions and she spent less than a fraction of a percent of her time with her armor on.

  J’Jesi made it work nicely, though, especially with her toned physique. Diane honestly couldn’t remember ever seeing a woman with a body like the engineer’s and she found it fascinating. Even Kaor wasn’t as muscle packed, which given she was a little taller if Diane was guessing, meant that her Morvuck friend didn’t look all that different from the average human woman when fully clothed. J’Jesi would never be able to hide her muscuture and given what Diane had seen of her outfits (which, admittedly, wasn’t much), she didn’t even bother with hiding it. Diane oddly found herself admiring the bravery of the NPC.

  And she just realized she was actively ‘admiring’ the other woman at that very moment. And J’Jesi had noticed if the smug grin on her face was any indication.

  Her face turned bright crimson and she released the hand she realized she was still holding, “Oh...uh, sorry...I’m...uh...”

  J’Jesi’s snickering bordered on an ugly cackle, “Oh, it’s fine. It’s just good to know that the Sappho’s Journey crew were right about you being a useless lesbian.”

  Diane blushed and scowled somewhat petuntly, “Okay, what does that even mean?” Diane was struck with sudden inspiration and decided to go with it, “I mean, you’re a Lost who grew up among humans, too. You seem to have picked up more of their weird sng around sex than I did.”

  J’Jesi seemed slightly taken aback, “You never tried to date in high school?”

  One corner of Diane’s mouth turned down in a frown, “I was kinda a loner. My caretaker pretty much went out of her way to keep me from properly socializing, there were a few guys I hung out with during css, but my after school activities were pretty much books and gaming.”

  The Crotuck’s grin returned full force, “I see. Well, you know how humans are dimorphic for reproductive purposes?”

  Diane nodded, “Male and female, yeah.”

  “Well for a lot of their history there was a ruling css that decided that sex was going to be strictly along those lines and set up the culture to adhere to the biological sexes as the basis for who had power and who didn’t. Women were carriers as well as the source of gametes...” J’Jesi must have read Diane’s confusion on her face as she crified, “Oh, right, Morvuck’s are kinda dimorphic, too.”

  Remembering the statistics she read during the character creation process, Diane shrugged, “Mostly, there’s some with neither set of genitalia but besides that everyone’s got a womb.” She chuckled, “It’s only about forty percent of us that have a penis as well.”

  J’Jesi’s grin turned slightly mischievous as she trotted over to the edge of the mat to grab her towel, bending at the waste to pick it up, “Don’t get too cocky, for Crotuks both the men and women have penises. It’s only the carriers that don’t.”

  Diane’s blush fred up full force again, “Uh, oh...um. I didn’t...know that.”

  “And before you go staring at my crotch like you were the rest of me, I’m a carrier.” Diane felt like her face was going to light on fire as she deliberately looked anywhere but the engineer, who for her part just snickered again, “Anyway, the ruling css set things up so that only men get to initiate a retionship or it’s somehow a ‘sin’ or ‘improper’ or whatever. If a woman tries to start something, she’s strange and rude and stepping out of her pce, so over the centuries, women just learned not to start anything, even to the point of ignoring it if someone else was hinting because what if she was wrong? So even if the woman wants to sleep with another woman, she’ll be oblivious to the signals that the other woman is sending that she wants to take things further, even if it’s just to have sex.”

  J’Jesi walked back across the mat, Diane’s eyes drawn to her hips which had a sway she didn’t remember seeing in the Crotuck before. Maybe she pulled something, or her muscles are sore? Diane thought.

  “Sometime after the humans had their sexual revolution, lesbians started getting a reputation for being clueless about when another woman was making a move on them.” The Crotuck stepped a little closer than Diane expected, not uncomfortably so but a little surprising.

  Maybe Crotuck don’t have the same concept of personal space? Should I step back? Diane wondered, not sure how she’d do so without stepping on an interspecies ndmine. “I see, I think. So basically a woman will signal to another woman that she’s interested in a retionship but the other woman just doesn’t pick up on the signals?”

  J’Jesi chuckled, “Or just a roll in the hay, humans are kinda uptight about that. It’s like at some point they forgot that sex can just be for fun. ‘course, it’s easier for a Crotuck, especially a carrier. All we have to do is not have sex with both other genders and we’re not getting pregnant.” She put a hand on her hip, which was cocked out a little in a way that made Diane feel a little sweaty.

  “Oh, right...uh, trimorphic. Neat trick. I understand there’s a minority of women on Mortan that have pseudopenises that could probably enjoy sex recreationally if they’re not...ah, ‘receiving’ the penis.”

  The smaller woman...or rather, the carrier flicked her towel over her shoulder, cocking an eyebrow at Diane, “So basically, a woman...or someone that could pass as a human woman, could be standing right in front of the lesbian and basically telling her she’s interested and the lesbian would be oblivious. ‘Useless’ one might say.”

  Diane snickered at the expnation, finally understanding why Norma kept calling her a ‘Useless Lesbian’ whenever she’d ask about whether she was Caitlynn’s girlfriend, “Oh, that makes a few things make sense now!”

  J’Jesi simply stood, saying nothing as her grin grew ever so slightly more mischievous as her torso seemed to be shaking slightly with repressed ughter.

  Diane looked down at the carrier and reviewed the conversation in her head, looking for some cue she had missed before she remembered how J’Jesi had framed her st statement. Her blush returned with a vengeance as she stuttered out, “...o-oh!”

  J’Jesi snorted a ugh and asked, “So, your little thing with Captain Madi, is it exclusive?”

  Dianes mouth felt dry, she had to wet it with her tongue before she could say, “N...no.”

  “At work you’re my boss, outside of that, we’re equals. You try to bring anything into the job that should stay in the bedroom, I will dine on your entrails while you’re respawning, Commander.”

  This...was not a position Diane was accustomed to. A woman...or something enough like a woman her brain simply accepted her as attractively interesting in a way that made her sex parts pay attention, showing interest in her. While intellectually she knew that, if her body was interesting in that way to her then statistically there would be others who were simirly interested, she simply struggled to accept, even after the beauty sessions at the station and the attractive clothing and the many, many nights with Caitlynn and Norma’s pyful banter, that she could be attractive.

  And here was this carrier, one shaped in all the right ways to arouse Diane, telling her...not asking, not ordering, just stating as though it was a fact, that they were about to have sex. And if she understood the context clues, there would be no strings, no emotional attachments, just raw, hormone driven, naked as Adam and Eve sex.

  Apparently her gobsmacked silence had gone on long enough that J’Jesi had grown concerned, as her expression gained a pensive edge and she frowned, “Of course, if you want to, that is.”

  It felt like a literal dragon roared to wakefulness inside her. As though the titude of choice being added to the mix turned an otherwise sour recipe into perfectly made soul food, her interest and arousal rocketed from a two to an eleven on a scale of ten. Her pants were uncomfortably tight in regions that weren’t usually a factor for women born of human parents and she could almost feel her eyes diting. “Yes! Uh, yes...if...uh, Caitlynn said I should seek other partners.”

  Diane’s affirmative response seemed to be all J’Jesi needed to resume control, “Oh, Caitlynn gave you permission, did she? And you’re a good girl who does what she’s told, aren’t you?” While it was a question, it was spoken as more of a statement, as though Diane was going to do what she was told to earn the title of ‘Good Girl.’

  In that moment, Diane couldn’t think of any reason to object.

  PrincessColumbia