Dry, No Lube Ch. 08: Imprisoned

Suppose you're into fitness.

You go to the gym every day and do a lot of the same exercises in your workouts. Every day, it's hard; that's why it's called a workout instead of a sit-around-out. But some days are much harder than others. You drag. You're tired. You're sore. You limp to the finish. Other days? You've got all the energy in the world. You exceed your goals and you feel like you can come back for more.

And when that happens? You think, damn. If only I could figure out the magic formula that would let me have great workouts every day! But you can't. There are too many variables: sleep, breakfast, stress, the other people in the gym... it's all too uncontrollable.

But you still feel like you should be able to figure it out. That's how Pixy Pfeiffer felt about orgasms these days.

She lay on her bed with her legs spread and the whole of the cosmos surrounding her through the transparent hull of her quarters, perched high on the rim of the stern gate of the USS Tirving, and she frowned as she once again tried to make her body behave itself.

Dr Reilly and Rabbi Bermudo had both advised her that this might happen, but the surgeon had been clinical about it and the chaplain had been leery about relating his own experiences, so she'd ultimately decided their advice was useless. Except that now, dammit, it was coming true.

Usage-Based Sexual Response Dissonance Syndrome, Reilly had called it. Bermudo had simply said sex might feel different. The theory was that Pixy's old pussy, the one in the body that got destroyed in her desperate crash over Canidia Prime, had taken so many dicks, been slurped by so many mouths, felt the touch of so many fingers over her many years as a Fleet supply officer doing sexual quid-pro-quos, that the anatomy of her clitoris and labia had, for lack of a better term, gotten "broken in."

"But," she'd protested, "sex has always felt good."

"Sure," the surgeon had shrugged, "but it felt different as the years went on, ma'am. You just didn't feel the changes, given the duration of the alteration."

"The what of the what?"

He'd sighed. "To put it bluntly, captain?" He consulted her medical history, now a whole lot more copious these days since the Total Clone Replacement. "You began sexual activity at eighteen and died at 34 years of age. That's sixteen years worth of fairly steady clitoral stimulation, including about five spent in Supply fucking just about anything that would fit in there, and some things that wouldn't."

"Your bedside manner sucks, Doctor."

"The nature of your orgasmic activity, ma'am, changed so slowly and so subtly, and over such a long period of time, that you didn't notice it." He'd shrugged. "Sort of like if you're working outside from morning till noon. It'll get warmer, but gradually. Then you find some shade, and you'll suddenly notice the temperature drop as a more profound change than you experienced outside." He'd smiled thinly. "Genitally speaking?" He'd spread his hands. "You've found some shade."

"Ah."

"This is all governed by something called Weber's Law. Shall I program it into your implant?"

"No." She'd sniffed. "I get it."

"Your clone was the equivalent of twenty-three years of age at the time of your TCR. So everything other than your head? It's a lot younger. Less... well, less sexually weathered, I guess."

She'd frowned in thought. "And now orgasms will feel different. Like, how to achieve them. Physiologically."

"Different than 34. Similar to 23." He'd smiled. "Ira Bermudo can talk to you about this, too, ma'am."

"Yeah." She'd gotten up, impatient. "I've talked to him. He's married, and he fucks, but he doesn't know clits like a surgeon. So... you're saying I need to just, what, persevere? Learn how to cum again?"

"Come again?"

She'd stared at him for several seconds. "Not funny, Doctor."

Reilly had spread his hands helplessly. "Just... practice, ma'am. Masturbate. Find a man to fuck you. More than one. Ask your steward, Ms Juno..."

"Yes, Doctor, that'll be quite enough," she'd seethed, but now she was wishing (just slightly) that she'd taken his advice and called in a man. She just couldn't get the hang of masturbation these days. She either came too quickly or not at all. When the climax came, it was as devastating as ever; the trick was to remember just how to do it again the next time.

Pixy sighed. Muscle memory. The only problem with it was that these were new muscles, but the memory was still old.

* * *

"You feeling okay this morning, ma'am?"

"Never better." She stalked into her office at her usual 0700, nodding when she saw that Lt Verily was already there, sorting out her schedule for the day. Spago Verily had aged a lot in the ten months he'd been the captain's secretary, which also happened to be the ten months he'd held his commission. "Quit fucking asking, Mr Verily."

"Aye aye, ma'am."

She plunked into her seat behind the desk, the day's paperwork already swelling on her desk.

Swelling. That reminded her.

"Block out an extra fifteen minutes for my workout, Mr Verily."

"Ma'am?"

"Say... every other day." It was her only complaint about her new body, other than the elusiveness of her clit: joint damage. Happens to all of us, ma'am Chaplain Bermudo had told her, always cheery, his eyes going distant as he thought back to his own clone replacement years before. The joint pain was to do with the treatments they gave the clones, the ones which shortened juvenile development in time to get them ready for possible TCR by the eighth or ninth year of service.

An imperfect system, cloning. Humans had been cloning each other for many centuries already, and still all the bugs weren't ironed out. Many people joined Fleet solely to get a clone out of the enlistment contract; Pixy would have thought that so many clones would have given the scientists ample time to figure out something as straightforward as joint pain.

Her second clone would be better: naturally grown. No additives or preservatives. A reward for a particularly brave thing she'd done once, years ago. That clone? That would be Pixy's retirement clone. It would be about thirty when Pixy went to retire, when this body would be about... fifty? And her head was more like sixty?

The math got harder and harder the more she thought about it. So, as was her wont, she just stopped thinking about it. "Just do it, Mr Verily."

"I will, ma'am." In the Academy, they'd said many captains used first names. They'd never met Pixy Pfeiffer, apparently. "Oh. Our schedule has been updated, ma'am."

"Schedule?"

"Yard orders. A refit."

Ah. Pixy nodded as he sent the new schedule to her tabslate. She frowned. "Does Commander Jatsupa know about this yet?"

"No ma'am. It's addressed to you..."

"Everything's addressed to me. I'm the captain. But this is about maintenance, and that's the XO's thing." She crinkled her brow. "Wait. Yard refit? Already?" She glanced up. "We're not even a year old!"

The secretary shrugged. "Maybe the XO knows what's up?"

She repaid him with a withering glance. "Was I not just now asking you whether Commander Jatsupa was up to speed on this?"

The lieutenant hung his head.

She sighed. The orders specified conversion to multipurpose torpedo tubes, which rang a bell somewhere in her memory... "Mr Verily, do you recall some kind of Fleet Circular? About shipping fewer torpedoes?"

"No clue, ma'am."

She rolled her eyes. "Let me rephrase. Find the Fleet Circular about shipping fewer torpedoes. Do it quickly. Comprehend?"

"Comprehend, ma'am." He was already diving into the back files. Good man.

Still, it wouldn't do to let him get a big head about it. "Hurry up, you useless piece of shit. What's the point in having a secretary if he can't remember where he puts stuff?"

"Ma'am." He found it at last, a single flimsy sheet that looked like it hadn't been touched since it came off the coding table, his eyes going to the date. "Ah. This came out while you were... well." He glanced over at her. Nobody liked to think about the nuts and bolts of cloning. "You were incapacitated for part of the time, ma'am."

"Fuck you. Give it here." She grabbed the sheet and scowled at him. "I wasn't incapacitated, moron. I was dead. Get it straight." She glared at the form, taking in the particulars... yes. She remembered now. This had come through the XO, one of the many things she'd been shown after they got her head stuck onto the temporary prosthetic body, just after she'd sketchily resumed command.

That had been an odd week.

Pixy had accidentally stumbled on a way to defeat Cathos Vremein missiles, like the one that had come up Durlindana's cone of destruction, motored happily into the ship's tunnel, and blown her guts out. The thing had killed Captain Juancho Peet and a bunch of other officers and sailors, and they'd only been able to save the ship because Pixy's tender Leith had gone to the rescue.

After that, over Canidia Prime (and she still felt a little stir of dread whenever she thought about that operation), her own ship, the Tirving, had figured out that letting the organic armor into the tunnel could contain the damage from the Cathos rockets quite handily.

Which meant less organic armor outside, and thus more risk from conventional defenses. So Fleet was adding more organic armor, but it was heavy. The weight had to be saved somewhere. "The goal is to decrease torpedo payload," she mused, reading. "Simplify inventory, too. So they're converting all our Type Eight and Type Eleven launchers to multipurpose launchers." She shrugged and looked up. "Sounds simple enough."

"Yard time starts next month, ma'am."

"Headquarters Planet?" That would mean offloading the Army's barracks barge and sending it planetside, then hauling it back up again...

"No, straight from the torpedo manufacturer's own yard."

Oh. That was simpler. Pixy lost patience. "All right. I no longer care, Mr Verily. Mark this for Commander Jatsupa's attention and put it in the XO box. I'll talk to him about it later." She pondered. "And I'll speak with the officers about a block leave period for most of the crew around that time."

"Should I make a note of that, ma'am?"

"No, idiot. It's block leave. It's obvious to set that up during yard periods." She yawned, the day-to-day running of the ship already boring her today.

Should've stayed dead, she often reflected.

* * *

"Call, ma'am."

"I'm in the middle of something."

"It's Admiral Jominus on the low-beam."

"Oh. Fuck." Before her stretched the panorama of a large asteroid, almost big enough to be a planetoid; Pixy and Colonel McMerckx had ordered a mock assault for training, with a lot of the Army guys new since Canidia. Pixy liked managing actual training, and disliked talking to admirals on low-beam. "Can you take a message?"

Spago Verily, with the low-beam receiver in hand, glanced as Kees Jatsupa, who rasped, "Ma'am. Come on."

"Fine." Pixy's eyes found the nearest lieutenant, Paston Romario on comms. "Hey. Mr Romario. Me and the XO have just gotten killed. Take charge and carry on."

Romario blinked. "Ma'am?"

"It's a leadership opportunity, lieutenant," she snapped, "designed to make sure the mission gets accomplished, no matter what. Get over here and manage the attack." There wasn't much to do; her notional bombardment had settled into its rhythm now as the Army's low-gravity D Company surged planetside (asteroidside? Whatever), and all that was left was to manage the extraction in about ten minutes. "I'm sure we'll come back to life soon. Take a break, XO," she told Jatsupa. "In for three pence, in for a shekel."

"Oh." The XO shrugged. "Aye aye, ma'am." He gave Romario a doubtful look as the man scuttled toward the chair with a checklist pulled up on his tabslate, then the two commanders marched from the bridge into Pixy's office. Her steward, Wrae Juno, sat at the legal desk in the corner. "I'll just go take a nap, ma'am." Jatsupa did not like Juno.

"Cool." She settled into her chair and took the receiver from Verily. "Commander Pfeiffer here."

"Took you long enough." Admiral Jominus had never really liked her much, and he was a jerk anyway. "Need you to halt operations for a bit. I've had a circuit shuttle chasing you all around the Arm, and they complain that every time they get close enough to detect you, you run off and do something."

"You didn't hire me to sit still, sir." She was five light-months outboard of the Branch Of The Arm, moving fast toward a rumored Flasbard tracking station. "We're outbound."

"No. You're holding up and waiting. That's what I'm ordering you to, as of now."

Pixy felt her lips twist into a sneer he couldn't see. "Who's on this shuttle, sir?"

"Researchers," he barked, "with orders for you. Fleet needs a ship, and I recommended yours." The P/E ships were theoretically independent operators, but Jominus was in charge of the whole Placer/Extraction program. So when Fleet had something for her ship to do, the message came through the Admiral. "They were inclined to pick you anyway, for reasons that'll become clear later on. I'm probably going to combine your tasking with an attack by the new guys."

"Fragarach." Pixy thought the name was kind of dumb, but they'd chosen to name the P/E ships after old mythical swords. Whatever; Fragarach had just launched. "Where?"

"Some colony world? Flasbards." They both sighed. Terrans had been fighting Flasbards a lot longer than they'd been fighting Cathos Vremein. "Anyway. Fleet has ideas about psyops, propaganda, shit like that. You're going to be a part of that."

"Of fucking psyops?" Pixy rolled her eyes while Verily tried not to notice the tone she was taking with an Admiral. Over at her corner desk, Juno simply filed her nails. "Sir, I fought hard to get into Combat Fleet. You know my record. I'm not a researchers kind of girl."

"What part of 'they were inclined to pick you anyway' did you not comprehend, Commander Pfeiffer?" He was plainly done with the conversation. "We all follow orders, whether or not they're to our liking. Even if it means bending over and taking it dry."

"No lube," Pixy sighed. "I get it, sir. I'll have my navigation officer light our beacon and we'll wait for the circuit shuttle to reach us. I need to stop and feed the Organic Armor, anyway. Any idea of the timeframe, sir?"

"They should have been there already, so... soon."

"Sir." She brooded over the receiver, deciding it wasn't worth complaining further. "Roger. Out." She glared over at her secretary, in a sudden fit of pique. "Mr Verily. Get the XO and Lieutenant Malavongsy down here. We need to light up our nav beacon and prepare for the arrival of some... researchers." The officer shot to his feet. "Go."

"Aye aye, ma'am." The office hatch hissed closed behind him, leaving Pixy there with the placid Juno. The steward sent a lazy gaze across the room.

"You need tea, ma'am."

"I need to get laid," Pixy snapped.

"Well," Juno snorted, "that escalated quickly."

"You'll find out," Pixy promised. "You've got a Reward Clone waiting for when you retire, in addition to your Parts Clone. Your overworked little slit will suddenly be twenty years tighter. Trust me: it's an adjustment."

"I'll just need to make sure I set it up so that I can salvage my existing vagina, I guess." She hauled herself to her feet. "Well. Baby steps, captain. Tea first, then we'll figure out dick. Want me to put some thought into that?"

Pixy glared mulishly over. "I don't fuck subordinates," she warned, "and I'm not going to let McMerckx anywhere near me."

"He's an asshole," the steward agreed. The colonel had not been shy about fucking Pixy's officers.

"I'm a virgin again, pretty much. Last thing I want to do is give his tattooed prick the satisfaction of digging into fresh meat." She pondered. "See what you can do. Ask around."

"These researchers, maybe?"

"Sure. Or maybe next month, at the refit basin." Pixy sometimes wished she were still a lieutenant, and this was one of those times. Sex was so much more difficult as a commander. Especially for the ship's captain: generally, tradition said the skipper shouldn't take a bedwarmer. "It might be difficult," she admitted. "The physiology is not what I'm used to."

"So... you're not looking for a brute who'll just slide it in."

"No."

"You want someone sensitive. Attentive."

"Yes."

"A woman with a dildo?"

"Not this time," Pixy sighed. Women made excellent sexual partners, in her experience, but there were times you just needed cock. And cock was Pixy Pfeiffer's default setting, anyway. She pondered, staring out into space, then started as the hatch slid open. Her XO and her navigator stood there, waiting, and she snapped her thoughts out of her vagina. "Tea, gentlemen? Juno was just about to go fetch some."

* * *

The researchers had brought their own projector for their briefing, which was polite of them.

Pixy's conference room was packed with the visitors, her XO and first officer, and McMerckx and Murtaugh from the Army. They'd also brought along their sergeant-major, whose name Pixy was too intimidated to ask after she hadn't caught it the first time. He sat there, glowering, his arms folded obstinately over his chest.

She stifled a yawn as she waited for the nerds to begin. Last night had been another unsatisfying lapse into interrupted horniness. She'd gotten up in the middle of the local night and gone to sit on the bridge, where the watch had been on their best behavior the whole time she was there. Which oppressed her. So she'd wound up stalking the corridors, fantasizing as she tried to ignore the itch between her thighs and the faint scratching of the rats behind the magazine tubes..

Hadn't worked.

So off to the gym she'd gone, banishing her thoughts in a torrent of sweat on the hoverjag stepper, building the muscles around her knees and hips against the arthritis that came to all accelerated clones, eventually. Of course they could treat the arthritis, but Pixy didn't like drugs. Well, not therapeutic ones anyway.

"So," said the chief nerd, a tall woman in a Fleet Science uniform, "I think we can start." She was a full lieutenant, but she wore the uniform in the kind of way that made you assume she'd gotten a direct commission and wasn't likely to rise much higher. "I want to thank you, Captain Pfeiffer, for your hospitality, and I look forward to getting our work done in the most efficient way possible."

"Fuck the pleasantries, lieutenant," Pixy grated, "just start."

"Um." The woman arched a precise eyebrow, but obeyed. "Yes, ma'am. Let me just introduce my team, then I'll explain what we're doing here." She activated her projector, and up rose a series of facts and figures that made little sense to Pixy.

She studied them, however, as if they did make sense.

"I'm Dr Nilla Yelday," the tall woman began in a voice she undoubtedly thought of as dramatic. "I'm Lead Professor of Psychiatry at Fleet Academy 23 on H-Locusta. I'm managing this joint project between us and the University of Bologna, on Earth."

Into a haphazard silence, Major Murtaugh whispered, "Where's that?"

"Earth is what some people call Sol III," Pixy snapped. "Or Terra. The Hearth. What I want to know," she went on, "is why a culinary school is involved in a Fleet project."

Dr Yelday blinked. "What's that? Academy 23 is a fully-accredited Fleet institution, ma'am, with..."

"No, no. The other one." Pixy glanced around the table, as if for support; the nerds merely looked confused. "The lunchmeat one."

The silence deepened as everyone glanced awkwardly at each other. At length, one of the civilian women Yelday had brought with her cleared her throat. "Um, it's Bologna. Not baloney. The University of Bologna is one of the oldest universities in existence. It was founded several millennia ago."