The Rig Saga: Episode 01

Hey fellow lit-lovers, thanks for stopping by. It's been a while since I wrote something and even longer since I last submitted a story on here. It's been a crazy year, and so much in my life has changed since my last published story. I've had more than a dozen concepts playing around in my head in that time, but none excited me enough or had the legs to be pulled into a long-form story. But with this submission I believe I have something special, and this could be the start of a (at minimum) three-part series! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I loved writing it. Since this is my first submission since coming back online, I'm eager to hear your feedback and comments: not just on how you felt about this story, but where you see the subsequent parts going. I'd be delighted to take your comments on board to build something more exciting, engaging, and of course, sexy.

Disclaimer: This is a slow burner. I'm trying to build enough of a world for me to play around with and keep things fresh. There's gratification at the end, however, if that's all you care about (wink). Also, the muse for Lillias in this story is the gorgeous Lillias Right, at least in terms of proportions. Feel free to self-insert, as I'm sure you do for all the other weird and wonderful stories on this website.

All my love -- Astro.

---

The sheets slid off my body as I slid to the edge of the bed and sat up. I cancelled the alarm that was scheduled to go off in twenty-seven minutes. The paper composite curtains on the far window didn't cover its full width. Golden dawn rays broke into my apartment each morning, waking me up far earlier than the bedside clock ever could.

I got up and walked across to the window. The loose mats beneath my feet slid on the metal floor as I did. I was still groggy as I slid the curtains open, and my eyes burned in the sudden wash of light that greeted me. Tears pooled in a slight haze across my sight as I rubbed my eyes. Gripping the edges of the window frame, I let out a big yawn and hung my head for a few moments, letting the sun wash over my bare torso. When I pulled my head up again, my eyes had adjusted to the light.

I scanned across the platforms. Sheet metal and fiberglass facades stretched out across my field of view. Windows, grilles, cut-outs and curtains contrasted against them reminded me of a gap-toothed kid in my class, from primary school. Some windows had signs, flyers pasted on them. Some had flags. One of the cut-outs on sub-deck three had a wind-chime. I always wondered if its tinkling ever stopped. At this hour, already there were people either milling around or going about their morning routines. Figures, shadows, silhouettes flitted in and out of view through the picture-frame like windows. My eyes, however, were drawn to one on sub-deck six, four decks below me and on the south wing, immediately to the right. If I would've been assigned even the quarters right next door, my view of that window would've been entirely cut-off.

From the sliver of view afforded by my vantage point, I could make out the potted plants on the sill. The sun rose slowly over the horizon of the top deck, and gradually the decks below submerged under the daylight's tide. But sub-deck six was still bathed in darkness. The window I was looking into was fringed with neon red.

She had brought someone over

This was the seventh time that I had looked through that window on sub-deck six and seen the red-lit interior. It was the second time after figuring out what that indicated. Starting about three months ago, it was once a fortnight that I'd wake up and find that flat oozing crimson. Then, three weeks ago I watched as the flat's occupant left the Sonar, arms entangled with one of the tug pilots. My vision was swimming in a rum haze, but just before the couple disappeared out of sight I spotted the pilot pulling a strap of her velveteen dress down and kissing her on the shoulder. I didn't miss the hand slipping down to grab her ass either. I had slapped a twenty down on the counter and rushed out of the bar, but the two seemed to have disappeared in the plumbing. The next morning I had woken up with the first rays of daylight pressing painfully on my lidded eyes. Head throbbing, I had half-stumbled to my window. Looking out at subdeck six, I had found the flat's interiors enveloped in red.

I had hung out at the Sonar the whole last week, and had actually managed to not drink myself into an inky blindness for the past three days. But I hadn't spotted her. I had sat at the counter till close, keeping watch at the door. She never came in, or went out, for that matter. I had found my way back to my flat. The last thing I remembered seeing before I passed out was the shaft of amber light from the halogens outside, stabbing through the tiny gap between the curtains and the window.

The intercom rang as I was dumping my morning rations into a bowl. I padded up to it and pressed the green button on the panel.

"Hey gorgeous," a husky voice came through the speakers.

"Hi Lil." I replied.

Lillias and I had been going steady over the past year, ever since I got back from Rig 9. She was one of only three people who had my intercom's call code.

"Caught you early today."

"Early for me or early for you?"

Lil's big yawn coming through the speakers answered my question. I chuckled.

"I don't wanna go to work today."

"You wanna hang out?"

"We both know that's not really an option. Tug 17 came in last night."

"So I heard."

"So you'll be out at the quarantine dock the whole day, ticking off items from the cargo manifest."

"How do you know my job better than me?"

"Babe, it's my job to know."

"No it isn't."

She giggled at that.

"Well I know because I was an apprentice there when I was 17."

"Alright. I believe you." I sighed, grinning.

"And because I was an apprentice, I know that Sanjiv Rao doesn't like his workers coming in late."

I glanced at the time. I had maybe twenty minutes to get out the door and travel six sub-decks down to the quarantine docks.

"Since you're such a smart-ass, why don't you tell me more about my job over dinner?"

"Maybe I will. If you suck up to me." Her voice dropped conspiratorially. She knew I knew this was an open line, and that people could be listening in. I called her bluff

"Would it involve kneeling and begging."

"You know it will, pretty boy."

"Can't wait."

"Mm hmm"

"Alright I gotta go, catch you later bub"

Fifteen hours later I was outside Lillias's flat on sub-deck 1. I rapped on the door and leant against the frame. I was still wearing my dock overalls. I had called Lil earlier in the afternoon to let her know I would be late to the dinner. She told me not to bother going home to shower and change.

"You can use mine." She had told me. We had moved into the stage of our relationship where both of us had a change of clothes at each other's places.

I heard Lil's feet padding up to the door, which she opened a crack before shooting her hand out, grabbing my arm and jerkily pulling me in through the slim opening. It didn't really go well because I stumbled, and the next moment both of us were on the floor, me laying on top of her. Her robe had come undone amidst my flailing for purchase, and now my cheek rested on a warm, fleshy orb, bare as the day she was born. Approaching footsteps rang out in the corridor and Lil barely had time to cover up as two senior officers walked by the door, which lay fully ajar now. They hesitated for half a step, taking in our sheepish grins, before hastily moving out of frame. I turned back to Lillias and shook my head.

"Lil, you idiot." I muttered. She grimaced and pinched the bridge of her nose.

"I know those two." She whined. "They were at a dinner dad hosted for the main deck staff last month."

"Well, now they know what colour of panties you wear."

Lillias's eyes flew open and she pushed me off, checking to see if her robe had been able to protect her modesty. When she saw that it actually hadn't flown up all the way, she punched me in the arm.

"Asshole!" She crossed her arms and sulked.

"Aw babe," I consoled her while trying very hard not to smirk, "You know only I know about that."

I rubbed her shoulder. The robe, still unsecured at the top, began inching down her shoulder, exposing the top of her F-cups once more.

"Besides, they missed the one thing that was more scandalous than your g-string."

"And what would that be?"

I leaned in and whispered in her ear.

"The look in your eyes when you opened the door."

She melted. Her eyes dropped to the floor and she tucked a lock of loose hair behind her ear.

"You think I have nice eyes?"

"I think you have the most striking baby-blues I've ever seen." My fingers traced the inside of her robe collar, brushing her skin from the side of her neck. Her hand caught my wrist before my fingertips could venture down to more exciting territory.

"You're such a snake charmer, aren't you." She said, her eyes beginning to get smoky again. I reverse the grip she had on my hand and kissed the back of her palm.

"I can say the same about you."

Lillias leaned in and we kissed. She broke it off just as our breaths started coming fast and heavy. Her hand pushed firmly on my chest.

"As much as I love the smell of salt and dried lampreys on a man, you need to take a shower." I brushed her palm off and leaned in for another kiss, but she pulled back.

"And, I spent most of my week's pay on this rabbit saddle. If you let the stew get cold I'm throwing you off the flare stack."

She yelled incoherently into my mouth as I gave her a sloppy kiss anyway. Just as I felt the nubs on her chest poke from under the robe, I pulled back, got up and headed for the shower.

"You're such a dickhead!" she called out after me. I responded by stripping out of my overalls and throwing them at her face. I shut the bathroom door just in time as she charged up to me. I stripped out of my boxers, which had a coin-sized wet patch on the front. I turned the water on and stepped into the warm stream. Only sub-deck one's denizens got access to hot water. No one on this level was ranked lower than Second Officer -- only two levels less than the top. And Lil was able to maintain her flat here because, well, she was special.

***

When I had first laid eyes on her, she had been on a scaffolding on sub-deck seven, doing an inspection of port B's HVAC. I had been off-loading some cargo off one of the tugs when I spotted her legs hanging out of one of the ducts. A moment later, they disappeared into the duct as well. She came out an hour later from behind one of the heat pumps. Sweaty, a bit greasy, with some loose hair clinging to her forehead. No body else had noticed her, maybe they were too busy pretending to be busy. She scanned the dock until her eyes met mine, and she beckoned me over with a single curled finger.

I stomped out my cigarette and walked over. I stood behind her as she bent over the heat pump, explaining to me what was wrong with it. The back of her work overalls had an iron-on patch spelling on a single word in all caps -- "PIG". Half an hour later, I grunted as I pulled out a shit-crusted heat exchanger. She snapped a couple of photos of it with her PDA, tapped in a request log and slid her PDA in her pocket. She thanked me and began walking away.

"The least you can do is buy me a drink." I had called out.

She had turned around and I remember seeing the look of surprise flash across her face. She folded her hands and one of her eyebrows cocked up, in an expression that reminded me of my mum.

"Last I checked, I wasn't getting paid to fix a heat pump. I could've unloaded half a tug in that time."

It had looked like she was weighing my words very carefully.

"If you need a hint, the Sonar's got some good lagers on tap."

"Get the broken heat exchanger to the scrap warehouse before close. Eddie at the desk will tell you where to find me."

So I did, and just in time too. I found a rather bored-looking Eddie on the way out. He looked like one of those people with that expression carved permanently into their face.

"The HVAC lady told me to bring a broken heat exchanger from port B over. She said you could tell me where to find her."

He regarded me with unblinking eyes.

"Quite a few ladies in HVAC." He replied.

"The one doing inspections. What's that department called?" I racked my brains.

"Inspections department?" Eddie ventured.

"Yeah, the one from the Inspections Department."

"Quite a few ladies in the Inspections Department."

"Short, brown hair, nice rack."

Eddie just stared at me.

"P. I. G.? Is that a division?"

Eddie's eyes widened.

"You want Pig?"

"That's... her name?"

"She's got a lot of names and a lot of titles."

"She said you knew where I could find her."

Eddie shook his head.

Later that night I had sat at the bar counter at the Outboard club on Upper Deck A. I had been there for an hour, and close to burning out on my evening's budget of alcohol after just one drink. I stuck out like a gangrenous toe. Top deck officers and passing ship captains all gave me the side-eye as they passed by me. Dressed in a tee-shirt, a denim jacket and Hi-Vis pants, I had only been allowed in after I told the bouncer that I was with Pig. She had eventually turned up, and looking at her transformation broke something in my brain for the next half an hour.

Gone were the grease-crusted overalls and steel-toed boots. "Pig" was dressed in a figure-hugging olive number that shimmered like eel-skin. Her hair was loose, bouncing around her upper back as she walked. Her feet were encased in platform shoes and as she walked towards me, I caught a whiff of her perfume. It smelled like flowers and ash. I saw her take one look at the reflector tape on my trousers and realised she hadn't been expecting to see me dressed the way I was either. A couple of months into dating, she told me that that was what got her curious about me in the first place.

"And the fact that you asked me to buy you a drink."

"What's wrong with that?"

"First of all, no-one who knows who I am asks to catch-up after office hours. Even if they do, they're the ones offering to buy me a drink, not the other way around."

And the fact that Lillias was the Rigmaster's daughter might have had something to do with that. The Rigmaster was the top operations authority on the Rig. Being at the head of the only stationary structure for at least a hundred nautical miles out in the deep waters meant that the people who worked for him saw him more as the president of a small country than the captain of a ship. Rigmaster Murphy was in charge of making sure the twenty-thousand or so people on the Rig were fed and sheltered, that trade fostered between Rigs, that ships sailing these waters had a safe port to dock at, and that the Rig was self-sustaining for months on end, if not years. Lillias was one of his six kids, and the eldest among her female siblings. While the rest of her brothers and sisters had gone to officer cadres, Lillias had struck out in the trades. That made her the only one amongst the Murphy clan who you'd ever find below subdeck 2.

"Why 'Pig'?" was one of the first questions I had asked her that first night at the Outboard.

"Because I'm usually smelly, greasy, and covered in all kinds of shit." She had winked at me, taking a sip of her beer.

"But also because I'm usually digging around in ducts and poking out of vents. With the amount of ductworks required around the Rig, they can't send out mechanical pigs to inspect each and every one of them. So I'm the pig."

Pigs are mechanical devices used in piped networks to clean and monitor the condition of pipes. Traditionally used in oil and gas and chemical plants, these cylindrical devices are like spring cleaners for the insides of pipes, detecting and knocking off any build-ups of debris on the walls. Maintenance did have a couple of mechanical pigs leftover as a legacy from when the Rig was producing. These days, with fewer spare parts and human substitutes easier to come by, "pigging" was going more the elbow grease route than the nipple grease one.

"And lastly, it throws people off. When you have something like that written on your back, people are far less likely to look at you as if you're anything more than a sub-deck slug."

***

Back in the present, I chuckled as I put my spoon down.

"Something funny?" Lil asked me from across the table.

"Nah."

"Why were you smiling?"

"Nothing, I just... remembered something you said a while ago."

"About what?"

"Doesn't matter." I rose from the table, dinner plate in hand. I kissed Lil's forehead despite her extremely quizzical expression, collected her plate and went to the sink. When I emerged five minutes later, drying my hands on my trousers, she was standing at the window, looking out. I walked up behind her, encircled her waist with my arms and rested my chin on her shoulder. She wasn't wearing any perfume today, yet she smelled sweet, with a tinge of tartness. I breathed in her skin and her voluminous hair. Lil reached across with her one hand and cupped my chin. It was inky black outside the window, and the dim amber lights in her flat made for ghostly reflections of the two of us on the windowpane.

I didn't care as much for all the other conveniences in Lil's flat as much as I did about her sea-facing ports. I had spent the last fifteen years of my life staring through windows into the Rig, not outside. My mother always told me that one day we'd have enough money to rent a flat with windows that looked out, but that never happened. I had eventually moved out, and at Rig 9 while my staff quarters weren't sea-facing, the crew room had a giant corner window that looked out towards the water. I had watched quite a few spectacular sunsets through those panes, sometimes standing rooted in one spot for an hour straight.

Out at sea, one could usually spot a few pinpricks of light in the evenings, stretching far in the horizon until they met their counterparts from the skies. Tonight was no different. Smaller vessels bobbed with the waves, their lights floating on the ocean surface like will-o-the-wisps, while bigger ships anchored far from the rig presented like so many glittering cat eyes. The last tug ferrying cargo to and from the ships had docked at the ports a while ago, waiting out the night. In the inky blackness, and without any visual nav-aids from the rig, the journey of even a few nautical miles was perilous. Previous Rigmasters had had too many vessels crash into the rig's concrete pillars or into one of the many dozen smaller boats satelliting it, so they had long ago decreed that no transports between any anchored vessels and the rig would take place after dark. If the ships wanted to ferry passengers and cargo between themselves however, they were free to do so at their risk.

I stroked Lil's belly over the robe. Soft and round, it had a comforting warmth that radiated even through the downy fabric. Days were starting to get shorter and the winds were getting chillier. When I was a boy I remember mum and I would share a single cot at night -- the only one she could afford -- and she'd put me to sleep on many a winter night rubbing my tummy just like that. I had eventually grown out of it, but since Lil and I had started dating I realised I really like giving belly rubs too. And I had not received a single complaint yet.

Lil broke the silence.

"I don't want you working down at the ports anymore."