Dry, No Lube Ch. 06: Skulduggery

This is, in some ways, a different sort of Pixy story. It had been marinating in my mind for quite some time, so I finally bit the bullet and set it down. I'd been wondering about the viability of a Juno spinoff, but this story has told me that's not a great plan. But? Once I write something down, published or not, it has "happened." So? Here you go.

If this is a little darker than Pixy's previous adventures, that's only because her service aboard Desperado has always been a bit tentative. Let's hope for better things in her future! [hint, hint...]

I do hope you enjoy!

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Prologue

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The unblinking vidcam churned on in its corner, buried in the wall and then hidden behind a translucent paintscreen, completely unnoticed by the writhing men on the bed.

Not that they'd have cared, though. They were being pleasured by the wet lips and expert fingers of Sharaya Suryasta, which meant they were oblivious to everything but what she was making them feel deep in their minds, souls, and balls.

She was excellent, recruited from the pleasure ships orbiting IV-Kovolev-D and then sent to the Army's best sexual-enhancement training courses, the ones they saved for prospects bound for service with generals and diplomats and people like that. And Warrant Officer Suryasta had been top of her class, as well as top of several men, meaning she'd been sent off to work for the shadowy "Subcolonel Smith" and his weirdo aide Captain Corcovado, which might have even been his real name.

Nobody in the rest of the Army, once she'd left the school, had heard much about her ever again.

And now she knelt above a planetary viceroy and his chief of staff, a noxious little sadist with a small dick that now pushed insistently into Suryasta's eager mouth while his boss, possessed of a significantly larger penis and three mutated testes, watched from his pillow. He's a three-bagger, Smith had cautioned her, so it'll take awhile before he's relaxed enough for you to kill him without danger.

She'd tossed her long hair, definitely outside of Army regs, and curled a contemptuous lip at the colonel. "Do I look like I'm worried about emptying as many balls as I need to, sir?"

He'd smiled at that, grimly, knowing the value of his woman: WO Suryasta had never, ever failed an assignment, and she didn't intend to fail this one either. She had no clue why she'd been sent to liquidate these two minor functionaries; she didn't really care, though. Maybe Corcovado knew, maybe not; hell, maybe Smith didn't even know. It didn't matter.

They were soldiers. They followed orders.

The little chief-of-staff moaned, her hair wrapped tightly around his graceful fingers as her mouth flickered along the base of his head. He'd tasted like sweaty underwear when she'd arrived, but by this point in the evening he mostly just tasted like her: like her spit and pussy, and like his boss' semen from when he'd taken sloppy seconds earlier. He was as hard as he'd ever been, she knew, her tongue curling against the big vein on the top of his shaft, and her brain allowed a tiny moment of satisfaction when she reminded herself that, if she did her job right, he was as hard as he'd ever get.

The camera, she knew, was watching.

Killing two at a time was a challenge, she reflected as she hummed on his cock, her fingers resting on his hairy thigh. She'd wrapped the other hand firmly around the viceroy's triple nutsack, marveling at its heft. He was her very first three-baller in the Army, though she'd encountered a lot of them back on that squalid Kovolev fuckship. She wondered idly about her batting order; the idea was that you obviously killed the more dangerous one first, but she was having trouble figuring out which one that was.

She thought it might be the viceroy. He certainly had the power. The chief-of-staff was odious, sure, and quick, but she figured she'd be able to murder him calmly enough once his boss was done.

Sometimes it mattered how the killing happened. When she'd first come to work for Smith, he'd sent her on simple, direct assassinations, or as an assistant to more experienced women. Those had usually been done with cautery, or a pistol, but later there'd been times that the thing needed to look less specific: like a suicide, say, or a lover's spat. Other times he'd wanted it extra-gruesome, to serve as an example for the enemy.

Or, at least, for Subcolonel Smith's enemies.

This was one of those times. "Go ahead and use the knife, Sharaya," he'd advised in his grave, cool manner from behind his desk aboard the Kilven. "Make it nice and bloody." She'd smiled, tight-lipped, accustomed by nature and experience to limit her revelations, and now as she felt the chief-of-staff's balls quiver against her chin she decided he was close enough to cumming that she could get started on his boss.

Her pussy still ached from where the viceroy had pumped into it not five minutes before, his semen still running thick down her inner thigh; her hand on his body felt nothing but total relaxation, complete lassitude. She'd drained him four times now, and she figured she could be quick enough to leap onto him, her hand going for the knife she'd hidden in the headboard, and slash his throat while his chief-of-staff was still ejaculating and wondering where her mouth had gone.

Then, she could deal with him. And once he was incapacitated, she could start carving them both. And the camera would catch the whole thing.

The hairy little fellow beneath her arched upward, his leg tensing beneath her palm, a strangled moan cracking from his throat as she bore down. Every sense of hers was on alert now, a deer in a shooting gallery, the timing clear in her mind. Her task was well-rehearsed: the moment she knew he'd start to spurt, he'd be completely unable to do anything as she murdered his master.

So? She got ready.

The knife was clamptaped along the top of the headboard, four shining inches of titanium, sharpened to a keen edge by her tattooed apprentice Nia, the unit's scum-bitch. The viceroy lay sprawled, his penis amazingly beginning to lurch back into thick, sticky life against her fingertips, but it was too late for him now as the dick in her mouth trembled, firming, launching.

She was off the chief-of-staff at once, his cum fountaining grandly into the air, her fingers flexing toward the hidden knife while her other hand convulsed hard around two of her target's balls. He was grunting, the breath leaving him even before she knelt on his chest, and he still didn't quite know what was happening as her knife plunged hard into the side of his neck and then ripped across, her arm dragging it from the shoulder as Corcovado had taught her so many months ago.

The other man's semen hadn't stopped arcing before the viceroy's blood joined it, twin streams pumping like the Imperial Fountains on Hyksos III. She distinctly felt the three-bagged cock give a twitch against her foot as the viceroy started to bleed out, but by then she was already springing off his body and back onto the mattress, squatting, ready to lunge at the chief-of-staff.

Who was twisted off to the side, fumbling for the bedside table with his cunning eyes fixed on her reddened blade and his fingers going for the basket-drawer...

Suryasta did not wait, did not try to gather herself or plan her assault or seek a new position: she attacked at once, driving forward from her sex-strong thighs, her body smacking into his wide-eyed face and bearing him to the floor beneath her, the knife already coming down into his chest as his head struck the deck.

"Goddammit!" she grunted, her hand clamping over his mouth as his eyes went wide: she was using a swept-sheepsfoot blade, for slicing, and it didn't want to slide neatly into the man's torso. She angled it further down and forced it in, hard and slow, his breath coming out in strangled gasps between her fingers. The force of her strike drove her hand painfully hard against the hilt. "Come on," she muttered, willing the blade to find something useful behind those ribs.

The man heaved, almost bucking her off, and in desperation Suryasta bore down on the hilt. Her hand slipped past it, onto the blade, and the tight sting on her palm sent a wave of coldness into her whole arm; she gritted her teeth and persevered, using her other hand to drive the blade, the knife finally penetrating up into a lung.

By that time she had her other hand, slick now with new blood, on his neck, throttling him as a Plan B. She wasn't sure what finally made him lose consciousness, but it hardly mattered: after awhile he stopped struggling enough for her to adjust her grip on the knife, wrench it back out of him, and sweep it once, hard, across his throat. It all stopped after that, her nude body covered with his blood, cradling her own cut hand as she willed her legs to push her to her feet and turned to make sure of the viceroy.

He lay on sheets turned crimson, his hand pushed against his neck; the staring eyes he turned on her didn't see much, she knew. He was still alive, on a technicality, but he'd be gone very soon. She ignored the death-rattle from the chief-of-staff as she crossed quickly into the bathroom, shoving her hand into the Portable Surgeon the hotel advertised in every room, then grimacing slightly as the suturing iron within went to work on her hand.

Smith was already talking when she left the bathroom and found her earpiece. "Report!"

"They're away," she snapped briefly, controlling her breathing. Every whore knew how to avoid panting like a racehorse when talking to a man. "Minor damage to my hand. I'll start carving, then do my cleanup and be out in twelve minutes, sir."

"What was in the basket-drawer?" the man's low, even voice rasped in her ear. "Was he going for a pistol? Our assessment was that he was unlikely to have a weapon." Yep, that was Colonel Smith: always curious about whether their assessments were correct. A data nerd if ever there was one.

"Standby." She stepped over the chief-of-staff on the floor, and by now he wasn't even convulsing much anymore. The bedside table held a tiny injection meter, the prepackaged kind you could buy at the pharmacy already filled. "Injector," she reported briefly.

"What's on the label?"

She frowned down, standing in a blood-puddle. She needed to get to work. "I can't pronounce it."

"Show the camera, Sharaya."

"Sir." She turned, lifting the device up to the corner of the room and holding it until the colonel spoke once more in her ear.

"Got it. I'll look it up. You get to work."

He had an answer by the time she was done arranging the viceroy's severed limbs into an artful pile by the door. "It's a coagulant."

"What's that, sir?" She was attacking her skin with a drywipe, scraping away the sweat and sex and blood. She checked her chrono: still three minutes to get dressed and leave the hotel.

Smith sounded amused as he speculated. "I suppose he was thinking he could solidify his blood, so that he'd still stay alive after you stabbed him? It's a drug used in field surgery, to keep the body oxygenated for limited periods. Until the patient can get sutured and off to a haemo."

"Mhmm." She didn't care much. She rolled her stockings up her legs.

"Interesting. His decision wasn't to fight back. It was to die, then return." Smith often mused about things like that, but Warrant Officer Suryasta had other things to concern herself with. "Get to the rendezvous, Sharaya. Captain Corcovado is already there with the shuttle. We're still on schedule." She nodded, already digging the camera out of the wall.

The door slid neatly open, letting in fresher air from the hall. Suryasta leaned out, checking her escape route, her bag banging against her leg as she passed from the abattoir she'd turned Suite 239 into. She turned quickly, pulling a stasis gun from the bag and doing something complicated with the lock as she shut the door.

The right people would find the body and read the message. Smith would make sure of that.

The night air was a cool, refreshing wall as she walked calmly from the hotel and across the old-school sidewalk. The streets here were still using concrete, looked like; this planet was moving along nicely, but it was still primitive enough to be charming. She wondered idly how the place would do once someone picked a new viceroy.

She saw the headlights coming straight at her, but she didn't really understand what they meant. WO Suryasta came from the moons of Lestad, advanced enough that nobody had seen an actual automobile in more than three generations. So she stood in the street, frowning uncertainly at the lights as they grew bigger and bigger, the car's speed impossible for her to gauge because she had no idea anything on mere wheels could move so fast. Her eyes caught the lad behind the wheel, head turned, paying no attention to the soldier in the road bracketed by his headlights, and she was still trying to figure out why the vehicle wasn't autostopping when it smashed straight into her at high speed.

Subcolonel Smith had no cameras around to see what happened.

They found her head six whole meters away, in a patch of shadow that made sure they discovered it too late to get her into a haemodrive. The constable who picked it up, holding it by its lustrous hair, marveled at the look of frustrated confusion she'd died with. Too bad, the man figured.

She'd been a real hottie.

* * *

Part I: Pfeiffer

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Pixy brooded, staring down into the bowl. "Juno. How long have you been my steward?"

The little redhead leaned back from inside the XO's cabin's tiny galley space, where she was disinfecting the dishes. "What's that? You'll have to speak up, ma'am."

"Fuck off," Pixy muttered.

"What?"

She cleared her throat and set down the chopsticks. "You've been my steward for, like, almost two years. Right?"

Juno scrunched up her pretty face, the freckles leaping around. She looked about twelve, Pixy reflected, an innocent and naïve waif. But she was anything but. "About that, ma'am. Since you came aboard." She turned off the acid bath and frowned into the dining cubby. "Out of curiosity, why do you ask? Is this about Payne?"

Pixy snorted. "Payne is your obsession, not mine." She sighed and leaned back in her chair, looking once again at the bowl. "In all this time, Juno," she began patiently, "you have failed to master the proper method of cooking macaroni and haggis the way I like it."

"Then your palate sucks," shrugged the steward. "I cook like a maniac, ma'am. You just need to climb aboard and enjoy my fucking food."

"I do. Most of it." She turned and stared moodily out of the hull, trying to take solace in the stars out there. "But... mac 'n' hag takes a certain panache. A certain subtlety. You're a good cook, but you just don't seem to be able to figure it out."

The steward blinked, then turned the disinfector back on. "Make your own. Ma'am."

Pixy bristled. "Given the fact that I'm supposed to be using Payne as my steward instead of you," she said severely, "I would think you might want to rein in your saucy fucking mouth a little bit, before I fire you and bring him up here."

The little woman laughed easily. "You're not going to replace me with Payne. You don't like that nauseating little prick any more than I do."

"It's complicated." Pixy prodded mulishly at her food. The crew were beginning to talk, she knew. Sailors could be superstitious, and even when they weren't, they liked things just so. Life aboard a starship at war was a precarious balance, almost a dance. Everyone had a place to be and a job to do. That's the way people liked it, and commanders screwed with that at their peril. Pixy, who'd had plenty of shitty captains herself during her thirteen years in Fleet, knew all this implicitly. "You know it's not simple, Juno."

"Fuck that." The redhead wiped her hands and leaned against the galley partition, petite and self-assured with that air of competence about her, like she had everything planned out. Like she already knew what was going to happen. Pixy hated that, since it was an attitude she'd been trying to cultivate herself for her whole career.

She suspected Wrae Juno did it better.

"It is simple, ma'am. I've checked the regs." The steward bit into a fresh jarga fruit, just dropped off yesterday from the hydroponic bins aboard Oleander. "You're not the skipper. You're the acting skipper. Nothing says you need to take on the captain's steward." She paused critically. "Though, your own steward would have no objection to you taking over the captain's actual quarters. Since they're just sitting there, unoccupied."

"Yeah."

"And it's not like Captain Ledecki needs them. She's dead." They both reflected on this. The captain was dead, it was true, her spatial needs reduced now to the haemodrive unit that hummed in Doc Borowicz' freezer while her brain in its shattered skull awaited transplant into her clone. Maybe. If her clone could be located and shipped. If the transplant worked. If the bomb that had killed her hadn't damaged the brain, anyway; Borowicz wasn't sure. "I'd love to be the steward in an actual captain's quarters," Juno went on dreamily.

"Doesn't solve my problem." Pixy slurped at her mineral milk. "Fucking Payne. Captains' stewards are full-timers. They're not like you, with your legal duties. Payne is literally a useless mouth to feed, with no job at all except keeping Ledecki's vacant quarters clean." Pixy sighed. "I should take Payne and give you to Mr. Delmer. Since Fleet seems to have zero sense of urgency about assigning a permanent captain."

"Fuck you." Juno spat out the jarga pit. "I'm not working for Delmer."

"He's the acting XO," Pixy pointed out mildly. "He's entitled to a steward."

"Well then," Juno giggled, "it's a good thing this ship carries an extra steward at the moment. Isn't it."

Pixy stared. "You're saying I should give Chonny Delmer, who is merely a lieutenant, a full-time steward to attend to his personal needs?"

"Why not?" Juno swallowed the last of the fruit. "He's been acting as XO for months. Seems like it's only fair. Besides, he's a promotable lieutenant, so he's almost a commander."

"Subcommander."

"Like you." Juno bared feral little teeth. "Look, whatever. Just don't make me work with Mr Delmer, please? Pretty please?" Her big eyes took on their usual sly expression. "If Mr Jeyne needs a steward, however, I'm fully available to meet his every need."

"Fuck off," Pixy snarled. Jeyne was Pixy's bedwarmer, and Juno had long been conspiring to get him into bed. "Over my dead body."

"I can arrange that," the steward muttered, staring fixedly at Pixy; yes, she could. She had murdered several officers already, though Pixy had to admit she'd improved the ship in doing so. "But I won't. Probably."

"Gee," Pixy replied, her voice small, "thanks."

"Staff call at 1400, ma'am," Juno announced, lapsing back into steward mode from girl-at-a-teashop mode, "then you need to endorse that Legal shit I left in your office this morning. And the OOD is due with a report in about..." she frowned up at the chrono next to Pixy's light-lizard, "well. Now."

On cue, the hatch slipped open. Pixy still thought it sounded odd, or rather that it didn't sound odd: she'd spent most of her career in the Service Fleet, where the hatches all made anemic grating and squeaking noises. Here, aboard an actual Combat Fleet warship, they whispered smoothly open. Standing in the doorway was Dahlia Wollz, a midshipman Pixy had stolen from one of the Academies. "Beg to report, ma'am. The Officer of the Deck sent me."

"Go, Ms Vagina." Pixy had given Wollz that nickname as soon as the girl had arrived, though she now realized it might be time to stop using it: after all, she'd had Commodore Krynne give the girl a warrant as an acting Junior Lieutenant. Pixy had slotted her as Assistant Fourth Officer, working with SLt Charlatul in Supply. My old job, Pixy mused now.