Dry, No Lube Ch. 03: Disrupted

"Oh, well, I'm sure you're right." Pixy shrugged. "There's no reason for us to be ready to defend ourselves against an unknown enemy of unknown strength and unknown capabilities, with no way of knowing whether they know more about the political situation than we do, but with every indication they'll have no trouble detecting us and blowing us out of existence." She glared hard at Klonmyre. "Why go to quarters?"

"Aye aye, ma'am." She sounded unhappy, which made sense; nobody liked being the officer who had to get everybody up, explain a new rota, and make the crew execute it on the fly. But whatever. This was Fleet; that kind of shit happened.

"Read this shit," she snapped, slapping at the tabslate in Klonmyre's hands, "and be ready to implement at 0315. Comprehend?"

"Comprehend, ma'am."

"Good." She strode over to the latrine, where the hatch slid open to show Herriott still dripping into the sink while he waited for the clotting agent to work. "I've got to piss, Herriott. If you're going to leave, leave now." He just swung his head mournfully over at her, the blood connecting his face to the dispenser like melted cheese, and she sighed. "Whatever." The hatch closed automatically. "Hit the lock." The latrine was tiny, and she brushed Herriott's ass as she passed behind him. "Fuck. Sorry, Herriott. I'm not trying to molest you."

"Like you haven't done enough, ma'am?" He flapped a hand weakly at his nose, now slightly but perceptibly flattened against his face.

"Yeah, well. You shouldn't have laughed at me." She squeezed the staytab at her neck, her fingers triggering the code for the trousers to drop; the last thing she needed was for her entire uniform to come off in here with Herriott. "I'll just be a second."

"Huh." The tech looked pointedly away as Pixy descended over the bowl, the toilet's busy circuits blazing away as they determined who she was and molded the seat accordingly. There was that momentary pause as Pixy's brain decided that, yes, it was okay to let the piss out, and then she was sighing hard as the bowl tinkled. She glanced sideways, twice, to see whether Herriott was peeking, and when she realized he wasn't she couldn't decide whether she was relieved or annoyed.

Well. Relieved, obviously, in one way.

It was a long piss; she'd been holding it since she began her weapons-bay inventory an hour before. It was Donskoi's job, now that he was supply officer, but the captain "or his designee" had to sign off on it. And Pixy was now the permanent designee. She had learned long ago not to sign anything she hadn't actually counted herself, but the numbers had been right on the money. Donskoi stood silently at her elbow the entire time, and after that it had been straight up here to check the plot. She peered idly at Herriott's half-turned face as she filled the bowl. "See, Herriott?" she nodded, unable to hide her satisfaction. "That's how you throw a fucking kick."

"Yes ma'am." The blood dwindled in time with her pee, both drains glugging away in the small space, and Pixy had a hard time suppressing a moan as the dryer came on. It was calibrated perfectly, that hissing little jet of warm air wafting straight across her slit with its usual vaguely dirty tingle of enjoyment.

"You'll be fine," she told him, standing slowly up and stretching both arms while her pants worked their way back up her legs. This uniform badly needed a trip through the 'fresher, she reflected, feeling grit against the skin of her thighs. Or, fuck. Maybe she just needed a shower. "Get Doc January to slip you some regeneration spray. You're a warrant officer; this isn't your first day in the Fleet." The uniform settled itself around her waist, and Pixy felt almost physically the return of her mind to its duty.

"Ma'am." He sounded like he was healing; the man even made a pathetic effort to scoot closer to the dispenser and make more room, and Pixy eased around him. She could smell blood and pheromones in the close space; he was scared to death of her.

"Right." She went to kick the hatch, then stooped back to his head and lowered her voice to a fast hiss. "Laugh at me one more time, Herriott, and I'll rip your dick off and jam it up your ass. Comprehend?"

"I get it, ma'am," the man said, weary and wary, and Pixy nodded pleasantly at him as she stepped back onto the bridge. At once the place's antiseptic sense of purpose embraced her, and she swept her eyes over the plotting board as she always did when she came onto the bridge. Klonmyre had been right; the scope stared back at her, barren.

"Like this? Since you came on?" It was odd; there should at least have been something. Probes, drones, even a cargo vessel on the far edge; something. "Totally blank?"

"Totally blank," Klonmyre shrugged. "We're interstellar, though, so it's not too unusual?"

"Intersystemic," Pixy corrected absently, and now there it was: a sense of unease, worming through her awareness like a marsupial finding its way to a warm, stable pocket where it could thrive and grow strong. Klonmyre was only a few weeks removed from the engine room, but she had Surman on as her watch chief. "How about it, Chief?" Pixy asked the quiet little Tygon. "Ever seen space this empty?"

"Not often, Ms Pfeiffer." The Tygon licked her lips. "Maybe a quick active scan might show something?" Pixy and Klonmyre looked sharply over, but Surman was a weapons tech from way, way back; she was predisposed to believe in active scanning. "Maybe something smaller than lightspace resolution can show us on the plot?"

Pixy squinted thoughtfully out the front viewport, conscious now that everyone on the bridge was staring at her; Klonmyre, especially, seemed riveted. What am I worried about? she stormed at herself. What do I suspect, here? We're still at least ten hours from any reasonable chance that the Cathos Vremein can know we're here, especially in lightspace. "We can't readily do a weapons scan at this speed," she mused; she was entirely unsure whether she had the authority to order any of this. Dropping out of lightspace was serious business, given the time it'd take to reset everything to get back into it.

"I can wake the captain," Klonmyre muttered at her elbow.

Pixy shook her head. "I'm authorized to approve course corrections," she said slowly. "If we do this, I can make the call." The blank scope taunted her; faintly she was aware of Herriott crossing to his station, glancing nervously as he went. She nodded to herself, her mind massaging the problem, the math shaping itself. "We can go to .65 lightspace, throw out a scan, and see what comes back without having to do a full reset."

"Might still be too fast, ma'am." Surman was nodding, though, her approval stern; she saw where this was going. Pixy could almost sense her claws twitching, the chief was so fucking eager to run her weapons systems.

"Well. Make it .62 then." She jerked her chin toward the helmsman, her mind made up. "Set it up, Ms Klonmyre. If it doesn't work, we'll drop to .60 and keep scrubbing speed until the scan goes." She looked at Surman's fierce yellowish grin. "Go for it, Chief. Set up your shit. Let me know when you're ready to hit the button."

"Aye aye, ma'am." The relish in Surman's voice was really indecent, Pixy told herself, but then weapons people didn't usually have much work to do in Service ships. They tended to get antsy. But the Tygon moved like she was getting ready to seduce a virgin as she slunk back to her console, her voice going all throaty as she started the flow of orders to her tech. Pixy wondered whether Surman would orgasm when the return image went up onto the plot.

Without even wondering whether she should, Pixy took the captain's seat. It felt like it was made for her, but then it had felt that way ever since the Battle. The bridge was, once more, all focused energy: everyone doing their jobs without any fuss, just calmly checking their references and throwing their switches, with Surman over on the weapons station dominatrixing her crew through their checks. Pixy was updating the log when the Tygon spun in her pressure chair.

"All set for weapons scan, ma'am."

"Great." Pixy stowed the autolog stylus. "Okay, Klingmann. Go ahead and make your speed .62 lightspace."

".62 light, ma'am." The reply came back crisply enough, and with a velocity change Pixy could feel in her intestines, the ship dropped back. A quick glance at the ETA clock atop the plot showed how all this was changing the arrival time, the thing drifting sluggishly backward and forward as the whims of space-time astrophysics made themselves felt in the fabric of the ship. Klingmann frowned at her display, then nodded. "Squared away, ma'am."

"Very well." She took a breath and tapped at the log. "Okay, Chief. Go nuts." The hatch hissed behind her.

Surman practically jabbed her claw straight through the board, she was so eager to do something, anything even remotely weapons-related. Watching her as the Tygon's returns began to bounce back, Pixy couldn't help but wonder whether Amisuul, the actual weapons officer, would have handled this with quite such transparent relish, but she decided not. Amisuul was talented on the weapons station as long as there were actually weapons to fire, but the subtleties of the scanning part of the job did not enthrall him.

A few more seconds passed, Klingmann trimming the ship carefully at her new velocity. Surman was frowning. "Anything?" Pixy wondered how impatient she sounded. She forced herself to take a sip of her tea.

"No, ma'am." The chief glanced fiercely over her shoulder. "It's all fucking garbled."

"Ah." Pixy shrugged. It'd been awhile since she was a weapons officer, but from what she remembered there'd been no real chance of a clear return at that speed. It just wasn't what the sensors were made for. "Reset, Chief. Same signal strength. Helm? Point six zero."

".60 aye." Klingmann rubbed at her shaved head and gave her levers a practiced nudge, Klonmyre watching over her shoulder. The ship was still sounding fine, all the sensors nominal; the Fleet's GP service ships were known to lose stability at translight velocities, though the effect was unpredictable and it required a sharp eye on the consoles. A moment passed while Klingmann scanned her boards, but she didn't report until Klonmyre gave her a nod. "Squared away, Ms Pfeiffer."

"Very well." Pixy was well aware, now, that Captain Reye was standing right behind her. She didn't care; what they were doing was good, sound tactics, though she was hoping the captain wouldn't ask why they were doing it. She wasn't sure she could articulate it beyond a hunch, and Zonn Reye was not as a rule a man who valued hunches. The ETA clock was going apeshit. "Whenever you're ready, Chief."

The pregnant seconds that followed Surman's finger had more tension this time; Pixy's uneasiness infecting everyone. Pixy watched as Klonmyre clasped her hands deliberately behind her back, resting them right above the curve of that little ass of hers, and stepped casually up to her side. "How've you been sleeping, Ms Pfeiffer?" she asked with a carefully casual note in her voice, as if she was asking about the state of a pet snapdog. Heads pivoted all around the bridge, everyone taking in the studied calmness, and Pixy had no trouble matching Klonmyre's tone.

"Not too badly, Ms Klonmyre." It was true, too; Donskoi was a natural. Pixy suspected he'd been part of some ship's prostitution ring, once upon a time. She shifted her weight now, the ache still lurking there deep in her pussy. "Pretty well, actually. Yourself?"

"Just fine, ma'am," came the soft reply, but somewhere near the comma there was a tightly controlled whoop from Surman. Both officers pushed themselves to the casual gesture, a leisurely swing of their two heads. "Chief Surman," Klonmyre called, back in officer-of-the-deck mode, "report."

There was no need, of course; the repeater was already telling the story Surman's scanners were showing her, the sublight backscatter clearing away as if by magic, and Pixy was already giving the order even as her eyes searched the plot for the answer. "Resume original course and speed, Klingmann."

"No." Captain Reye, close behind. "Check that. Resume original speed. Alter course half a degree to port." Pixy waited, her purple eyes still flowing across the repeater, figuring the captain would explain himself if he felt like it. "Make sure you recalculate the new heading first, Ms Klonmyre. It's fine to use the star plotter; matter of fact, you can make the corrections using nothing but the collapser bar. We won't be on the new course for more than a few parsecs."

"Sir." Klonmyre was already disappearing into the charthouse, leaving Pixy alone with Reye. He cleared his throat.

"I'll take over, XO," he told her quietly, and Pixy was already stepping aside. He clearly had a plan; his body language said it, and the shapes on the plot told her why. "Why'd you authorize the scan?"

"Hunch, sir."

"Hm." Reye nodded shortly and took his seat in the big chair. "Good hunch." The plot was showing a strange cloud a few million kilometers away. "When we shoot another scan," he went on coolly, "we'll crank down the resolution. See what's there."

"Sir." She frowned; she'd never seen a contact like that. "And if the contact changes its aspect to follow our new course, it's shadowing us." It wasn't a question. "I'll check my references, try to figure out what kind of fucking signature that is."

"Great." Reye was not a fan of profanity on the bridge, but he usually let it go from Pixy. "I'd recommend starting with the Combat bulletins; they're probably still in the coding table." Of course they were. Nobody aboard a Service ship read the Combat bulletins, not while hauling chalk between the settlements out on the Perimeter. Pixy took the short trip down the ladder and straight into the wardroom, van Angus' silent little kitchen still taunting her, and headed for the corner where the coding table sat. She had to pick a collection of dusty coffee mugs off the coder before she could fire it up.

The wardroom was totally deserted, its hatches closed; one led up to the senior officers' quarters, the other to the squalid corridor where all the juniors and subs lived. A rat was nosing efficiently along the rim of that second hatch, but Pixy didn't even notice the fucking things anymore.

The government search function, integral to all the Fleet bulletins, was a pain in the ass; it took her over two minutes to figure out how the goddamn machine wanted her to search for the signature of that weird, distant cloud. She frowned, checking what the bulletin said against the repeater mounted on the forward wall; Surman's same data from that first scan stared back at her, and Pixy sat back on the couch in irritation.

She'd need to wait until the course change and another scan before she could check the signature against the Combat bulletin.

It was back, that strange twisting stir in her gut that she got when there was action in the near future. Before the Battle, she'd only ever felt it on the sports fields at school; her first decade or so in Fleet had been nothing more than sex and filling out forms, with occasional spurts of adrenaline while shuttles missed their docking times or gravity wells threatened to delay lightspace jumps.

But lately? Shit. Lately, it seemed like she was coming awfully close to death, awfully often.

The crackling intertube stirred her. "Next scan coming in now, Ms Pfeiffer," the captain said tersely; she hadn't even heard the servos whine as the ship returned to her original course. Pixy nodded to nobody, forced herself to focus, and gazed up at the repeater to wait for the high-resolution scan. Forty-five by eight point seven, times twelve bearing, at a range of 3.2 million klicks; those were the critical data points from the last scan. No delta on the observer-contact angle during this scan would suggest they were being followed.

Which would mean they'd been detected. Already, before the survey even began. Senseless, starting a war against a pack of alien trash when nobody even knew what they could do.

There was a little red indicator in the upper corner of the wardroom repeater, next to where the screen was cracked, that would show that o-c angle, noting any aspect change in the tracked object once the data came coughing from the ship's computers. The Fleet bulletin gave a list of unhelpful guesses about Cathos Vremein pursuit craft, with suggestions about their capabilities; it all seemed very speculative, but then Pixy supposed that's why the Pulver was here in the first place: to confirm Fleet's speculations. The bulletin had the expected enemy ship types ranged from least to most dangerous, and the ones at the bottom were said to be able to track lightspace Fleet vessels with an o-c delta of just two or three degrees on an altered course.

So that little red indicator had better wind up higher than three degrees.

The repeater blinked, the screen fuzzing a bit as it did its translight sifting, and then the red numbers fluctuated a few times before steadying in a grimly accusatory total, which stared down at her as she sat with the Fleet bulletin open. She frowned at the list, her eye drifting lower and lower to match what the repeater was telling her, a nearly unbelievably precise 1.2 degrees; at this speed and distance, that spoke of some really clever engineering. Pixy sighed, slapped the stained switch next to the wardroom intertube, and waited while it warbled up on the bridge.

"Yes, Ms Pfeiffer?" Reye sounded calm enough, she reflected, as she dropped her bomb; she never saw much point in letting these things drag out.

"Bulletin says we're fucked, sir."

"I see." She heard his chair cushion squeak as he got up. "I'll be down shortly."

She let the intertube die, then glared at the bulletin with her mind conjuring increasingly dark scenarios; Reye would want a briefing when he came down, and Pixy was still memorizing the specs as she heard his boots on the ladder. He was already talking before he reached the deck. "Go ahead," he snapped, sounding like a man with a lot on his mind.

"Oh, sir," Pixy said, feeling the smirk curl at the corners of her mouth, "this is a great day. We get to be the first Fleet ship to be pursued by a Cathos Vremein Disruptor Hive."

"Well. That sounds exciting."

"Oh, quite!" Pixy was gushing. She got this way sometimes, when there was nothing to do but laugh your head off at how absurd life was. "It operates by messing with the translight field, altering its frequency to change your course without you even knowing it."

The captain glanced instinctively at the repeater. "Ah. But we're on the same course as before," he shrugged. "So should I worry later, or not at all?"

Pixy grinned, feeling like an executioner, and dropped the next bomb. "That's the thing, captain. The ship stays the same relative to the translight field. The course change wouldn't even register as long as we stayed in lightspace." She shrugged. "Says in the bulletin that they start working at five million kilometers' range. So..." She watched him, unblinking, while he did the rest of the thinking.

"So." He nodded as she pulled out her abacus. "We need to drop out of lightspace to find out whether they've put us off course. Then, when we drop out, we're vulnerable."

Pixy's abacus clacked out its answer. "Rough math, sir. They probably came within range of us, oh, five and a half standard hours ago? A little more? At this point, we could be in a whole different galaxy than we think we are." She felt her own eyes go wide. Or, fuck. We could be heading into a supernova or some shit.

"No." Reye arched an eyebrow. "Klonmyre just did a course check, when we came off course. She says we're good."