Space Debris

"Happy to help and I don't intend to," he said. "I apologize for the accommodations. I live on this ship alone and I don't get much company."

"I'm sure it beats a Jaguar cockpit."

"Never had a human guest on the ship either. Just a few inspectors, shaking me down in deep space."

Claire bit her lower lip and nodded. "You're an Upright." The canines at the Academy were tall but never this tall.

"Good guess. I hope that's okay because there's not much I can do about it," he finished with a chuckle as the sirens flicked to Green and the air vents stopped. He reached up to his helmet and freed several latches before pulling it off and over his head.

The Upright standing before her was a horse or at least he had the head of one. Free of his giant helmet was an equine head with a chestnut coat and a darker brown mane. He shook it out with a bestial huff of breath. His face with long and chiseled like a regal, war statue that some general might ride, but she'd realized she had never seen any live horse in person. The neck supporting it was strong, thick and long, much of it having been in that giant helmet. "Hi," he raised a few fingers from the helmet in a wave and she gazed from him to her dumbstruck reflection in his helmet.

"Sorry, I..."

"Your fine," he smiled and turned to place his helmet in the closet. "It's not like I've seen a lot of human women up close. Especially... never mind." He definitely had stolen a glance at her chest.

Claire had half-tuned out as it was difficult to hear him with her helmet on and his off. She unlatched her helmet with a simple twist and rolled it forwards and off before taking a deep, satisfied breath of slightly better processed air. Leaning back against the wall, she sighed in relief. "Much better."

"If you want to wait inside," Sam reached over and pressed another toy-like button to open the opposite airlock door into the cabin. "It's a little clumsy getting this thing on and off and the airlock isn't huge, you know?"

With a nod, she tucked her helmet under her arm before stepping up but Sam's bulky suit was taking up more than half the width of the room. With her back to the wall and Sam's as well, she slid herself past him with a winced as her chest dragged against the crinkly bulk of his suit. Thankfully, it gave way with ease, unsurprisingly hollow. Once clear of him, she stepped through the doorway into a short corridor with a lit room at the end of it. Halfway down was an intersection and she slowed as she approached, her hand hovering by her gun again.

"Just me in here, I promise." Sam called, perhaps hearing the slowed cadence of her footsteps. She rounded the corner with caution regardless and found the door to the head, left open. A tile floored and stainless-steel-walled room with a sink, shower, toilet and an EZ Wash cabinet for laundering clothes. The sink was taller and the shower head higher than standard. A second look at the toilet had her realize it was also larger than standard: the space had been build for him or at least someone his size. A hanging towel was purple and plush, clashing with the cold aesthetic of a spacecraft head and it looked softer than any towel she'd used in years.

Even from the doorway she could spot the discoloration in the corners and build up under the faucets, hair at the drains and the uneven color of the toilet with a jumbo-sized seat left up. A man lived here alone and the room needed a thorough cleaning, beginning with fire. She winced and turned away.

Across from the head was another open room, little more than a closet with two, military-style and human-sized bunks on either side with storage lockers in the wall between them. The room seemed unused for some time and rightfully so as Sam was far too tall to fit in any of them.

Claire relaxed and walked the rest of the way to the cargo ship's bridge, with the light of the red dwarf star shining into it through the auto-darkened view glass that made up almost the entire far wall. She paused in the bulkhead to survey the scene.

The bridge didn't hide well that it had once a pure utility had been all but converted into a studio apartment and it was the messiest space she'd ever set foot in. The walls were covered in posters and mementos, personalized far beyond what the military would allow, looking more like a bar room's bathroom. A recess in the back corner had been converted to an extra-large-sized bunk with mismatched sheets and an old blanket, untucked and haphazardly strewn across the non-standard mattress. There were a few drawers left half-open of a bolted-down and mismatched cabinet.

What remained of the bridge functionality had been makeshift-relocated onto cable-wrapped arms that hung from the ceiling, bringing together the consoles of what was three different stations within reach of a single, central and massive Captain's Chair in the middle-front of the room.

The chair was built for someone his size and was sleeker than any she'd seen, with the armrest-to-seat-to armrest in a single, gentle curve and high back, tapering toward the top. The entire thing was wrapped in leather, probably synthetic as the real thing was impossibly expensive this far from Earth. It was on a track, allowing it to slide back and forth from the modified control console, complete with a long lever at the base to release it. The chair appeared to be the only expensive thing that hadn't come with the ship.

Walking in, she glanced over to a huge pair of boxers on the ground before stepping up to the chair, currently slid back from the console at the far end of the track. The engineering of the whole setup wasn't up to code or any kind of standards but everything appeared to be working and she moved closer, between the seat and the three-section console. The controls were different but familiar and key functions had been modified to bigger buttons, dials and grips like the airlock doors had been. The ship could have been a former military transport or a civilian craft but from the buttons and the fonts of the controls to the state of the exposed pipes and conduits, the ship was likely older than she was.

"She's an old ship but she's never let me down," Sam's voice was behind her now and she turned around to find him leaning in the doorway, a very different silhouette now.

Sam's now fully-exposed neck was solid beneath his equine head, a pyramid down to shoulders so broad they almost touched both sides of the bulkhead. He stood in a red, flannel shirt that fit him perfectly, conforming to the inverted triangle of his torso and hugging massive arms like canon barrels, with the cuffs ending right where they should at the wrists over bowling-ball sized fists.

The shirt mostly concealed the bottom of his torso and from under it started a pair of gray, sweatpants that were baggy and a little too short, hugging muscled thighs as thick around as her waist before loosening around his knees. She blushed as her eyes caught another tightness between those thighs, as if he'd shoved two coconuts down the front of his pants.

He cleared his throat and glanced around nervously before stepping in and fetching a blue and white mesh and cloth baseball cap, fitted for a head shape and size like his. The cap read "Hawaii" across the front but as Uprights weren't allowed in many places on Earth, it was unlikely that he'd ever been.

"Impressive work, running this whole ship by yourself." Claire stepped back from the console as Sam stepped closer towards his seat. He grinned crookedly.

"Thanks. I guess you fighter pilots keep your hands full but these larger craft have a lot of redundancies. It's really nothing special. You fly your ship by yourself, I do the same. This ol' girl used to be used for laying mines in transit lanes, back when that was legal."

Human eyes broke away from the stallion to look around the room again, slowly appraising. "I've spent a lot of time learning to ID ships and I have no idea what this is."

"They haven't made them since before our parents were born. This is a S-12 Manta-Class Minelayer. She's a big pig meant for carrying a whole space-lane's worth of ordinance but when you clean all that crap out, you've got yourself a decent hauler that you can pick up at government auction prices."

"Even then. How's an Upright afford their own ship?"

Sam snorted as he laughed and it was the first time he sounded like a horse. "Long story. Short version is that it's better to be born into the free market then the military. I worked in a private shipyard and I learned to rebuild spacecraft so I didn't need to buy a nice one when it came time to do my own thing. I knew I could make her nice." Claire glanced from Sam back to the underwear on the floor and he chuckled again. "I wasn't expecting company."

Claire smiled and looked up to the towering stallion man, who had come to rest his hands on the back of the Captain's chair. "Sorry, that's rude of me. Space Force beat making messes out of me when I was young. They're pretty fascist about cleaning."

"Yeah. Just cleaning," Sam's leftover smile went crooked with a huff of a laugh and he glanced away. In the awkward silence that followed, her attention turned toward his cabinet.

"I don't suppose you have a change of clothes? I've been wearing this flight suit for entirely too long."

"Right. Those flight suits. They have the thing that goes up your butt?" He watched her with a crinkled grin and turned up his index finger for emphasis.

"Iron Undies!" Claire scrunched her face before she nodded and smiled with mock pride. "You've heard of the waste disposal system, I guess. You're always getting fucked in Space Force."

Sam blinked and straightened out his neck slightly instead of laughing. Perhaps he was even blushing but that would never show through his chestnut fur. He glanced away and towards the floor, bringing up a hand to scratch the back of his head, waiting a moment to speak.

"Hmmmm. I don't own many clothes since I invested in the EZ Wash and certainly nothing in your size." She chuckled. "I keep some blue jeans around for when I have to visit a hub and these sweats around for the ship. I haven't set foot anywhere with weather in so long, I don't even own a jacket. I've just got this shirt and... aww heck, you need it more than I do." He hurriedly unbuttoned the red, flannel shirt, embarrassed he had not led with the offer. One button. Two, three, four. Claire watched as the towering stallion revealed the physique his the shirt had been both hinting at and hiding, raising her brow as he neared the bottom. When he shrugged it off in a rush and balled it up to offer it to her, she bit her lip and stared.

Sam was absolutely jacked. The few, human junkers she'd met had been closer to the shape of his spacesuit than the shape of his body, with neglectful diets and habits from solitary lives at the fringes of society. But Sam's towering stature and doorway-blocking shoulders wore muscles like only a near-eight foot tall, man-stallion could. His shoulders were more broad than her legs were long, with perfectly sculpted pectorals like small end tables. A thick, sculpted core supported all the mass of his chest, shoulders and that giant, corded neck with ribbed lats and an eight pack of abs, cut short of complete by the crinkled waistband of his sweatpants.

Claire was unresponsive to the offered shirt, her jaw hanging open and Sam glanced away shyly. "Sorry I don't have more clothes. The EZ Wash. And they only make coveralls in my size. Anything like humans wear is a specialty item. Expensive. stuff" He took a step closer to a combined arm's reach and offered her the giant, flannel shirt again.

"You work out," she finally spoke, still not finding his eyes. Her mouth care to rest biting her lower lip, dumbfounded.

He nodded. "It gets pretty boring out here. I'd lose my mind if I didn't stay active. I just do body-resistance stuff without a weight room. Bands, pull-up bar," he nodded upward to another addition she hadn't noticed before. "Lots of downtime out here so it's a lot of working out and reading."

"You read?" Her attention returned to his, finding his eyes. He offered the shirt again and this time she took it. It was the first time she'd touched real flannel. Natural weaves were rare in space and this one was quite soft and still warm and she wondered if this was what his pelt would feel like. "What do you read?"

Sam chuckled. "Oh, mostly contraband. Hemingway, Vonnegut, Douglass, Chomsky, Marx."

Even as she nodded, Claire realized she didn't know any of them but it certainly answered some long-burning questions that he even read as a hobby at all. "Where can I change?" she said softly.

"You can use the bathroom." He gestured back to the corridor but she pulled her lips crooked over gritted teeth at the thought of it.

"You should maybe spend some of that free time... cleaning. Just turn around and close your eyes. No peeking." Modesty wasn't a strong value for anyone who grew up in the close quarters of the military.

"Sure, I'll be a gentleman," he gave a small chuckle and turned his back away. "Besides, you're a human."

"Right," Claire nodded, crinkling her brow. What did he mean by that?

She set down the shirt on the armrest of the Captain's chair and clicked off her suit-mounted control monitor before she unfastened the front of her flight suit down to her crotch. She pulled her shoulders free before shimmying the suit down her chest, revealing the black, nano-fiber weave sports bra that kept her breasts breathing and fairly-comfortably restrained despite their size, thanks to active-dampening technology. The military wouldn't be so generous as to make such a bra standard issue but it was a personal and worthwhile indulgence for a woman with her figure.

From the flayed upper body of the suit to hips was the ribbon cable of life-support functions, from the monitor box to her iron undies and she felt around on the underwear side to find the quick-disconnect and detach it.

She was always excited to get them off which made the last few moments tortuous. Cadets often whispered that they were engineered to be mildly annoying, even without the probe engaged. Soldiers and pilots weren't meant to be comfortable.

With the connectors detached, she glanced to Sam before she doubled over to pull the suit down around her ankles then stepped out of the skin-tight flight suit. It had no separate shoes or boots as there was no need. Each pilot suit was custom fitted from head to toe, which made it possible for women pilots with her proportions to fly at all. Support crew weren't so lucky, her mother had once warned her when she was a developing teen as a thinly wrapped encouragement to study harder.

She looked back to Sam once more and his back was still turned and so she pressed the button to power down and disengage her thick, high-tech underwear. With a hiss, a yellow light at the front flashed and they slackened but did not release. She tapped her foot with nervous energy, feeling a warmth in her lower back as the nanobots that had been recharging in there rushed back into her bloodstream. A nanotube withdrew from her bladder, a pin prick followed by the worst part: the slow, careful withdrawal of the anal probe, a vital part of the waste management system that was also used to monitor body temperature. She gave a relieved exhale as it slipped free of her then the yellow light turned green and the underwear slackened further, allowing her to bend down and peel them off completely. They fell the last few inches from her ankles to the steel floor with a heavy thud.

Unfolding herself, she came to stand wearing only her bra. She glanced to Sam again but this time her eyes snagged on the chiseled sculpture that made up his back, arms and neck. A shadow drew over him, then her. In a moment, the entire room was darker and it drew her attention to the window. The ship was in a slow drift and the red dwarf left the view window, leaving them in artificial light only now.

Claire reached for the flannel shirt and rested her hand on it, squeezing the soft fabric between her fingers again. Flannel was the kind of textile she only knew from old shows on her datapad. The soft, smooth and still-warm fuzz reminded her of a petting a dog or a cat, like she hadn't done since she was a child. After another glance back, she tugged off her sports bra overhead, casting it aside on the armrest before reaching for the shirt again.

And then it disappeared along with the rest of the room in sudden, momentary blackness.

"COLLISION WARNING! COLLISION WARNING!"

The ship's computer barked from the console and the room lights came up red, just enough to see. Claire whipped around to the console and Sam did the same, at least until he noticed the naked, human woman across the small bridge from him. His eyes doubled in size and in the front of his sweatpants, a log-like mass dropped free. A slow-motion giant erupting into action, like a sea ship launching from the drydock of his equine sheath, pushing out a tremendous tent in the confines of his sweatpants before it was reclaimed by gravity. Instead of falling back in, it fell forward, still lengthening and gaining speed until it ran out of length like a stone on the end of a rope and it was tight for a moment before slackening tension sent it into a wobbly collision with his thigh. The concealed horse cock was down to his knee and with his height, that made it longer than her arm from her elbow to her hand.

"What the fuck!?" she screamed and covered her mouth, staring at the animal act, far different from how humans worked but obviously to the same effect. Sam brought his hands to his head, knocking off his cap as he clutched his head in panic.

"Shit! Shit! fuck! Shit!" Panicked, he stared down at himself with open hands, his body betraying his discretion. "I'm sorry!"

"COLLISION WARNING! COLLISION WARNING!" the computer reminded them impatiently before something hit the hull of the ship with a clunk and a tremor, sending them both staggering off balance. Sam's arms spread out to brace himself as he backpedaled toward the wall but his eyes couldn't tear away from Claire and the jiggling echo of the impact on her bare naked body. He hit back first roughly then slid down to land on his rear. Claire had managed to hang on to the Captain's Chair and her feet left the ground for a moment but she caught herself, her heavy breasts mashing against his nicest and most important piece of furniture. The tent in the front of his sweatpants rose with a throb, ratcheting up with arousal. After recovering her balance, she was staring right back at him, slack-jawed.

With a nervous chuckle after a long moment, Sam ran his hand through the top of his mane. "That wasn't so bad." But the red light was still flashing in the corner of her attention and Claire ripped her eyes away from Sam's monstrous swelling to the cockpit glass.

"Shit!" She rushed to the center-console of the horse-sized helm and tugged the long lever of the steering control hard to the right, squatting to move it with her entire weight.

Sam couldn't tear his eyes away from the beautiful, naked, human woman flying his ship until the last minute when the silvery steel outside the front cockpit window was bigger than the space beyond it. They were about to run right into a massive chunk of a capital ship!

The ship banked as Claire leaned harder into the stick with all her strength and weight. She lifted a leg to kick the throttle and the retro rockers roared at full blast, spinning the ship and much as stopping it. With some delay, space started to reclaim the view and Sam sighed in relief, getting back to his feet. "Nice flying."

"COLLISION WARNING! COLLISION WARNING!"

The next impact was much harder and it threw Claire back into the Sam-sized seat before a second bump knocked her sideways out of it, like a rag doll over the armrest and she landed hard on the metal floor before a third impact changed the ship's direction again, sending her sliding near him enough that he pushed off to intercept her before she slammed into the wall. The light of the room were strobing between the red dwarf's light and total occlusion of the window by a steel hull. They were tumbling against the Capital Ship they'd nearly avoided.