Dry, No Lube Ch. 07a: Command

She'd blinked. "I'm a transfer from Service Fleet, sir. The Assignments Officer had no idea what the fuck to do with me."

"Huh." Reikki had settled into Captain Ledicki's old quarters with no trouble, even though his glance made it clear he thought he was slumming it: this was his second command, but his first had been a larger and more powerful cruiser. Pixy never had found out what he'd done to get demoted and banished before she'd been on her way to Kavirell. Express shuttle, no less! "Well. We'll do what we can to get everything inspected and signed over before your conference, then when you get back we'll talk more seriously about roles and responsibilities."

It had been a grimy, exhausted Pixy that had boarded the express shuttle after that week, but as she'd stared at the receding frigate in the rear viewport she was satisfied that she'd left a good ship and a sound crew for Reikki to begin whatever redemption journey he'd need to take. Well. As "good" and "sound" as anything ever got on Sector Four.

She'd had no clue that was the last sight she'd ever get of the Desperado.

"I'm sorry, sir!" She had to shout into the voxbox over the static of the grubby connection to make sure he'd hear her. "I had no idea this was going to happen. Nobody gets promoted out of Sector Four!"

"I'm not terribly happy to be losing such an effective XO," Reikki mused, his face crinkling in the static. "It means I'll actually need to put in work making Chonny Delmer into a replacement for you."

She shrugged helplessly, wondering how such a subtle gesture looked on his end. So she made sure he got it. "Can't be helped, sir. It's Fleet. Dry, no lube. Listen, can you send my steward Wrae Juno with my duffel case? She'll know what to pack and what to leave."

"I'm not sending your steward anywhere," he snapped flatly. "She's the XO's steward, and you're not the XO anymore. She's also the ship's legal specialist, and she's holding a Galactic Medal of Valor. Though she won't tell anyone what it's for..."

"For being a good cook, sir." Pixy knew full well what it was for. The Army had been very grateful to her for killing a traitorous field-marshal. "I really need her, and I think she'd agree."

"Well, I'm not letting her go. She's an asset to the ship."

Pixy took a deep breath, frantically toggling along the tabs in her balky implant. "Captains can request their own stewards, sir, and Fleet always concurs."

"Then do it, Pfeiffer. Jump through the hoops. But I'm not letting her go without orders." Pixy had not been terribly surprised, a week later, to read on the Fleet newsletter that Jens Reikki, newly appointed to command the frigate Desperado, had been seriously wounded in an onboard mishap involving a kitchen knife and an unfortunate kidney injury; the surgeon was reportedly taking good care of him, though the wound had been somewhat more severe than originally thought.

Pixy was only surprised he hadn't been shoved out an airlock and killed.

The expected text from Juno had floated onto her tabslate the next day. GOOD NEWS. SKIPPER IN SICK BAY. DELMER JUST RELEASED ME. I'M COMING TO JOIN YOU.

Pixy allowed herself a brief smile before she dressed for dinner. She was moving in oddly rarefied circles now, spending long days with the other P/E captains, hashing out doctrines for the big new ships that would carry the Army to invade the worlds of the Bacchanal Arm, starting with the Calinda Group. She'd learned much around that wooden conference table, the six of them coalescing quickly into a group of enthusiastic tacticians with a vaguely piratical air.

At the head of their weird little family were the founding mother and father of the K-ship concept, bar-Murphy and Leeuwen. They'd made it very clear that they were not anyone's boss: theirs was not a unit, but rather six independent ships, drifting through space, invading planets. It all sounded very exciting, and interestingly non-Fleet-like. Pixy soon learned that two K-ships were already operational in prototype form, and that the two senior commanders had already taken them on a brief operation that had placed two Army battalions on a trio of Cathos Vremein moons out near C-Cassavetes.

"We identified some issues during these missions, and each of us is going to be tasked with writing doctrine to spell out how to fix those issues once all your vessels get operational."

Leeuwen had risen next, giving them a rundown of a typical mission as she'd experienced it on her ship, the Angradal. "So the general idea is that the Army descends from our ships, with our guns providing interlinked fire support so that they can place themselves where they want to go. They used to just crash the planet in P/E shuttles using whatever Fleet ships were in the vicinity."

"That never went well." The other subcommander, Elon Borgia, spoke lazily up. He'd served with one of the fleets that had supported Army operations in the Spirals. "Fleet's good at fighting off enemy ships. We suck at ad-hoc bombardments."

"Yeah, that's why Skeffen and I evolved this concept." Leeuwen glanced over at bar-Murphy, and Pixy had the sudden insight that the two of them must be fucking. Or bedwarming, at the very least: they had that finishing each others' sentences vibe. "Our idea is that all the support duties get handled by us, up in the K-ships. We bring our own interceptors to deal with planetary defenses, and we grab any Fleet warship within reach to help out with ship-to-ship stuff in low orbit."

"Everybody does what they're trained to do," bar-Murphy nodded, "instead of what they're volunteered to do."

"Anyway. We arrive. Army sends out a recon to the surface. They locate the objective, we pin ourselves in geosynch just above, and we open fire. Once the ground commander says it's time to go, we send out the whole Army battalion. They do their placement, start fighting, and then we stay up above them as they secure their spacehead."

"Spacehead?" Pixy had figured out on the first day that she'd need to ask questions, and that these were people who'd answer without pissing her off.

"Yeah, that's what they call a secured area where they can set up a base and then go off and do... whatever it is they do." Leeuwen shrugged. "Meanwhile, we hang out up there and shoot what they need us to shoot, then pick them up and move them if they ask us to."

"While the planetary defenses pound the shit out of us." A skinny commander on the far side of the table, Juancho Peet, sniffed.

"That's why we're so heavy. Organic armor appliques. Burst torpedoes. Our own interceptors." Leeuwen nodded soberly. "We did all right out at Cassavetes," she finished, glancing at bar-Murphy.

"That is a problem, though." He was squinting at his tabslate. "My ship was pretty mauled after the operation. The armor needs time and UV light to grow back, and of course we had to move all the way back to a depot to reload with ammo and resupply the Army."

"Can we get tenders?" Pixy surprised herself when she brought it up. "Is there a way we can bring a smaller ship with us, carrying stores and shit? They can plus us up after we extract, then we can move on to the next objective while they head back to a depot?"

Bar-Murphy eyed her, nodding in approval. "Adding tenders is one of the action items we identified, and Fleet has already approved it."

"Oh." Pixy blushed. Of course someone had already thought of it.

"Good instincts, though, Pfeiffer. I'm already toying with the idea of having you figure out how that K-ship/tender relationship ought to work. Given your background."

"My background, sir?"

He smiled. "The tenders will be GP vessels from Service." He waited while she nodded; Pixy had spent twelve years as a lieutenant on GP ships. "Fleet Central has identified the ships and is routing them toward us now."

Pixy smiled. "We're each getting an armored P/E ship, seven Interceptors, an Army battalion, and a GP Service ship?" Her eyes shone. "We can almost start our own war with that."

"And win it," Darveen agreed, jotting at his 'slate.

"You people were selected, in part, thanks to your penchant for independent action and high decision-making evaluations." He shrugged. "And also because nobody else in Fleet wanted these gigs. It's an unproven concept. Nobody seems to want to put their careers on the line."

Pixy rolled her eyes. When, she asked herself, hadn't she put her career on the line? It was a habit she had, and it had usually paid off until now.

* * *

She met the man outside the skatepark on the corner of Ceviche and Third, right outside the pub. Well, not really met; more like smashed into as she clumsily turned the corner without looking. "Shit. Sorry." She looked up into a pair of dark eyes, and then it happened: a magnetic pull from him as his gaze flickered over her, evaluating. Liking. She was already blushing before he opened his sculpted mouth.

"I'm not." His voice rolled out with suave assurance. "You can run into me again, if you like. Maybe even lose your balance. So that I can grab you."

She found that she was smiling, a big toothy one, open-mouthed. She was in civilian clothes for the first time in months, wondering how they fit, but the look in his eyes told her they fit just fine. "I'm Pixy," she winked at once. She liked what she saw, a trim guy, maybe forty, with a pencil mustache.

"Narvon." He took her hand and gave it a dry kiss, the usual custom here on the Kavirell worlds. She squeezed his fingers. "People call me Jack, though."

"Why the fuck would they do that?" His hand was warm in hers, and she decided she might just want to go to bed with him. He was ideal one-night-stand material.

"It's a nickname, from the Academy."

"You're in Fleet?"

He shrugged as if it was unimportant. "I'm serving, doing my part. How about you? You look like you're the sort of woman who might have nicknames, too." He winked as her smile spread.

"What kind of nicknames?"

He leaned in, warming to the conversation, his hand still confident around hers. "Maybe something like 'Sexy Little Morsel?' Something along those lines?"

She giggled. "That's not much of a nickname. It'd be quite a mouthful."

"I've got a mouthful." His voice was a murmur now, the man clearly entranced by her. Pixy shivered. It had been awhile since she'd felt this kind of attraction, the exciting tang of quick, anonymous chemistry.

"I'll bet you do." She thought about reaching down and just grabbing his balls, right there on the noisy street, but refrained. "Firehole,"she said at last, flushing as she said it. "That's my nickname." He laughed at that, loud and rich, his whole body shaking. She was responding already, shifting her weight to give her pussy room to breathe in the unfamiliar civilian robes. "What?"

"That's a nickname that could mean several different things, Pixy." He was caressing her hand now, gently. Knowing exactly what he was doing.

"It's short for 'Fire-in-the-Hole. I'm in Fleet," she added unnecessarily.

"That's not much better," he snickered. "Do things tend to explode when you're around?"

She arched an eyebrow and realized, in the kind of decision that felt like she'd just snapped a pair of scissors through a thread, that the flirting had run its course. "I'm in the visiting officers' quarters over on Hyllty Street. Room 14. If you can find it, I'll let you in and you can see if anything does explode." She'd been in that conference room all week, and now she was in the mood to forget all about it. She suspected this guy was just the fellow to help her do it. She slid her hand out of his and turned away. "See you later, maybe."

He knocked around 2300, as Pixy sat pleasantly tripping on about 3cc of Anchor, the drug doing its bit with great effectiveness as it roamed across her synapses. She'd avoided getting wasted during the conference, but they were scheduled to leave tomorrow morning for Basin 114-IV to finish fitting out their ships and she'd decided this would probably be the last time she'd be able to cut loose.

So it took her a few seconds to realize that the knock was a real knock and not a fake knock conjured up by the singing molecules in her brain. She was curled nude in a blanket, leaning her head back to stare along the sleek plane of the picture window overlooking the same quarter of the city she'd been looking at all week. The knock came again. "Enter!" she called, Fleet-fashion, wondering who it could possibly be.

"Room 14," he announced softly, stepping in with the grace of a dancer, and then as Pixy blinked up at him she remembered everything from the sidewalk outside the Ceviche skatepark.

She smiled.

"Jack." Her lips curled around the word the way his hand had curled around hers. She smiled slowly, remembering the delicious creamy feel between her thighs under the civilian robes. Her buzzing eyes took in minutiae now: a slight muss to his hair, a strand out of place on his mustache, even a rumple in his collar. "If I kiss you, will I taste another woman there?"

He chuckled. "I hadn't realized we were exclusive." He smiled down at her. "You might, indeed, taste someone else," he allowed, "but you'll perhaps be interested to know I cut things short with her so that I could come see you."

"Interested? No." She closed her heavy eyelids in hazy pleasure. "Turned on? Yes."

His eyes blazed already. "Show me."

Pixy smiled a feline grin. This man was not wasting any time. "Show you?"

"Yes." He leaned down, his long fingers plucking at the blanket around her shoulder. "I'm not into words. Actions have always made more sense to me."

"You're a visual learner," she giggled, releasing her muscles to the will of the Anchor and the man above her, eyes closing again as she felt him unwind the cloying fabric from around her. She enjoyed the thrill of all this, the excitement of touch and sound and smell over sight, her mind providing images to go along with what her flesh was telling her. Her head was cotton and syrup. She felt the blanket slide to the floor and she let her leg follow it, her foot thumping to the thick carpet with a thud that seemed to set up a vibration in her whole body. She knew he'd be staring at her long, swollen slit, knew the greedy expression he'd have.

And she certainly knew how wet she was.

"You weren't kidding." Her body sang suddenly with the shock of his strong hands on her skin, his fingers tracing the curves of hip and thigh and ribcage, one hand coming to a rest on her firm little tit: it squeezed briefly, weighing. Evaluating. Pixy willed her eyes to stay shut, but she let her body have free rein to squirm beneath his as he rested his knee on the settee behind her.

Pixy sighed, still treacle-brained, as her nipple shuddered to the inquisitive flick of his fingers. "You cut things short," she mused, "with this other bitch. So I suppose I won't taste her on your dick?"

"You'll have to find that out for yourself," he laughed, the heat off his body spreading down to hers as he stared openly at her bare skin. Pixy stretched on the settee, enjoying the freedom of showing off for a complete stranger. So much about Fleet life was controlled, even scripted; it felt good to just ignore everything once in awhile. She arched her achy back, letting the pain there build: it always hurt, even through the Anchor, but it was a familiar pain. Almost an old friend. And besides, she'd endure worse if it meant offering herself to this man.

"Take your clothes off, Jack," she purred, and her voice was a mocking silk ripple in her own ears. "Stay awhile."

"If you insist, Firehole." She let her eyelids rise then, watching as his staytab stripped off his clothes: the rumpled shirt he flung aside, and then his face took on a smug, greedy glow as he stood over her and waited while the sentient pants pulled themselves off his legs. She loved his body immediately: it was all lean, supple muscle, temptingly scarred here and there, smooth and graceful wherever her glazed eyes chose to look.

"Beautiful." She wasn't even sure whether she said it out loud, but she certainly thought it: the cock his trousers left behind was a delight, a glorious hard spar of trembling, veiny wonderment that loomed above her as he stepped coolly from his pants, setting off a delightful hairy jiggle in his compact, symmetrical scrotum. "Just beautiful." A tiny, orderly set of tattooed hashmarks ran down the right-hand side of his shaft like a line of proud soldiers. Pixy ran a lazy fingernail down the line, feeling hot soft-steel flesh. "Pinstriping?"

"A tally. Just something we do on my planet." He watched hungrily as she studied him. "Go ahead," he murmured, the two of them already naked and wanting, his hands on his hips. This was plainly a guy used to showing off for women, accustomed to watching them enjoy him, and why not? He was a splendid-looking man. Even without the Anchor, Pixy knew she'd be wanting him. "Find out for yourself. About how my dick tastes."

"Mmm." Pixy's muscles felt loose, liquid, like a dancer's as she sat up nude on the settee. She brought her eyes slowly into focus, the Anchor so powerful that she could have sworn she could feel her pupils dilate, concentrating on the perfection of Jack's penis. It seemed to swell even as she looked at it, the velvety blood-dark skin of its spongy head looking to her drug-addled mind like a meal, like dinner, the glimmer of his precum in its little slit inviting her.

And Pixy did not refuse, leaning in, eyelids sinking again as she followed her nose toward the rich, manly smell of his balls. The cock grew and grew as her eyes crossed, her mouth opening into the warm sexy fog of his body heat. Her fingers found his thighs, resting lightly on his skin as, almost without thinking, she engulfed his dick: Jack felt her breath, then her lips, then her tongue as one single chained sensation, lapping at his flesh.

Pixy loved tasting men. She was a people-pleaser in bed; it embarrassed her to cum first, so she'd spent a lot of time with her mouth wrapped around thick, hard penises. Especially during those years as a supply officer, where sexual quid-pro-quo was an expected part of the job. She'd found that every man tasted the same, basically, but with subtle differences in smell and texture that made each one special in their own way, and she enjoyed giving them pleasure.

Jack's long fingers combed through Pixy's dark hair, cupping her skull with an easy, confident pressure that let her know that he accepted her surrender. That she could trust herself to him. That she was in excellent hands, literally, so she let the drug relax her further, opening her lips, flattening her tongue, feeling the underside of his wide shaft slide over her taste buds. He groaned slightly, her hair screaming briefly in his tightening fingers, as she eased her throat around that thick, stubby head of his, swallowing him deep.

When her lips reached his rough, untamed pubic hair, she paused and looked up, pleading eyes in a slack-jawed face, their gazes meeting in a long look of satisfaction and understanding. He hunched forward slightly, stabbing her tonsils, and when she felt his balls resting on her chin with her spit flowing freely along them, Pixy pulsed her throat once, twice. Hands tracing his muscles, eyes riveted to his face, she worked him with her tongue and tonsils, never even thinking of pulling back until she was almost out of breath. And when she did, she slipped back with an oozing slowness that let him see his ridged cock shiny with her saliva, emerging from her mouth like a vengeful sea monster.

He drove his ass back, popping loose from her, an invitation to get off the settee onto her knees and serve him properly. She leaned against his legs, letting him feel her flesh, her hands curving around to grip his butt as she took him deep once more, tongue and lips fluttering. She leaned in, her mind craving touch, closeness, joining, tasting him once more.