Boarding the Starflae

Argon and Morgo were plotting when the rap came at the door; they just had time to jump. Through it came a stubby creature no more than four feet tall, clutching a duster in one hand and a bucketful of rags and cleansers in the other. Double-taking on Morgo and Argon, who shoved the communicator back in his pocket, the guest put his hand to his tiny breast sincerely.

"I hope I'm not intruding. Julie—um, the acting captain—asked me to pick up the room. We haven't had a chance since the Uniteds commandeered the male crew."

Argon and Morgo, fearing for a moment their unsavory motives had been discovered, breathed sighs of relief.

"Oh, um, that's okay. We . . . Wait. Aren't you a Gob?" asked Morgo.

"Shorter than most, but yes. My name's Fuckface."

"What are you doing on an Earth ship? Aren't the Gobs and humans at war?"

"Yes. I was too small to be conscripted. The humans captured me when they burned out my town on Gabriel 5 and instead of tossing me in a camp they put me to work cleaning quarters on this transport."

"And they treat you good?" asked Argon.

Fuckface glanced here and there as though afraid of eavesdroppers. "Hardly," he confessed. "But it's better than being a POW."

Argon and Morgo traded meaningful looks.

"Well, you're free to skip this room if you like," Argon offered with a regal wave of the hand. "Save a little time. We don't really stand on ceremony. I've got the Dug Flu anyway, so I'd just mess it all up again."

Fuckface smiled. A Gob smile was not the prettiest sight in the world, mused Argon. "I'd be grateful. When the proper crew isn't on board I work every waking minute. I'm too small to really do all this by myself."

"It's perfectly all right." Argon stood and put a friendly arm around Fuckface's low shoulder. "However, there is something my compatriot and I were curious about and we were wondering if you might help us."

"Julie and Heather—she's the ship steward—know a lot more than me but I'll do what I can."

"Well, when we first came on board, one of the girls that came to meet us was acting a bit funny, and the captain—"

"First mate," Fuckface corrected.

"The first mate took some gizmo off the girl's belt and used it on her and it turned her into a perfect ray of sunshine. Do you know anything about that device, my Gobrin friend?"

"Oh, yes, that." Fuckface played with his chin. "That's a pretty new invention. I'm not sure they'd want me telling you about that."

"What harm could it do? Anyhow, do you really owe them any favors?"

Fuckface seemed to momentarily sway under the influence of a devil and angel on his respective shoulders.

"Thing is . . . On some of these more upscale transports like the Starflake, frankly, these," he dropped to a whisper, "these rich bitches can get pretty impossible. For me the Starflake's fine but I guess they're spoiled and insist on living how they've gotten used to. And in space that's not always possible. There's just not enough real estate, you're always inside so cabin fever's unavoidable. You spacefare, you know the drill."

"Ship fatigue. We just use tranques or, if it gets too bad, electric shock."

"Try getting a billionaire dad to pay you to do that to his daughter. No. Here, you need gentler means of managing human payload. That's where the DubL-M comes in."

"Dub—"

"DubL-M. Mood Manager. Double M. DubL-M. That's the thing you saw. RFID nanoware," he mimed firing a chip into his temple, "pow, right in their pretty little noggins, link it to a full-spectrum electropharmaceutical implant, and with the handheld unit they carry around you've got an array of temperaments and moods at your fingertips." He paced, counting fingers. "You start with the baseline, her natural emotional state, but work the parametric slides and you can get anything you want: suicidal to ecstatic, sheepish to confident, you name it."

"Wow," said Morgo. "If that's true, that blows the control halo away. Boxis' nav-cort persuasion device, too."

"That's 'cause it's linked to an implant. Biochemical. Beats the hell out of anything using remote influencing, radio waves, or any of that. Kind-of a shame because they don't use them for much. Dialing down anger, sorting out confusion, assuaging fear. To mitigate ship fatigue. From what I've seen so far, it works real good, but they don't go near its potential. It's like using a Maserati to drive grandma to bingo."

"Side effects?" asked Argon.

Fuckface shrugged. "Who knows? The payoff's so great no one seems to care, not even the dads."

"Fascinating," Argon confessed. "I'm gonna be brutally honest, I didn't think a servant would know so much about it."

Fuckface played his toe and studied it sheepishly. "When I saw it in action the Starflake's last time out, I was so impressed I had to know more. They keep some tech specs and draft sales brochures in the confidential section of the ship's library. I'm not supposed to read those, of course." With a wink, he rattled an ornament of keys on his belt. "My position might be lowly, but it's not always a disadvantage. I snuck in after lights out a few times and read 'em cover to cover."

"Wasn't that an awful risk?"

"I could have been sent to a concentration camp or even executed. I'm an enemy in time of war. They only tolerate me because they think I'm harmless." The Gob cocked his head at Argon and Morgo. "In fact, I'm not sure why I've told you any of this."

Argon gave Fuckface shoulder a comradely squeeze. "Maybe 'cause you guessed we might be able to help you. You tried to get your hands on one of these DubL-Ms, haven't you?"

"Yeah, but they keep them locked down pretty tight. My keys don't even help. Sometimes they take 'em off, like when they're swimming, but then they keep pretty good tabs on them, most the time."

"And you didn't go to all this trouble and take all this risk out of idle curiosity, did you?"

"No."

"You're on a mission."

Fuckface cleared his throat. "Yes."

Argon dropped to Fuckface's level and got him with both hands, claiming his complete attention.

"Why don't you tell me what that mission is. Maybe we can help you."

Fuckface's eyes narrowed. He pursed his lips into a frown. Argon could sense the simmering determination behind his tight, focused face.

"Revenge."

***

Now this was bad. It couldn't have been much worse if Argon had been forced to watch because his own daughter had a role in the thing. It was ironic because he'd been anxious for the play to start, until it did.

He and Morgo had been shifting restless buttocks in a pair of tiny adjacent plastic chairs in the Starflake's cramped auditorium for longer than he cared to remember. To make matters worse, Heather sat next to them for quite a while as they were all waiting for the lights to dim. He thought he'd dealt with her pretty well when they'd first come on board. Since their talk with Fuckface, though, suddenly they had even more to hide than they had before, and before they'd had quite a bit.

Unfortunately, hidden things had seemed to be exactly what this Earth woman had been after. Under the guise of small talk, she'd posed a raft of detailed, irritating questions. What mission had the Lechwerth been on? Since it had gone derelict, what'd happened to the rest of the crew? If they'd died on board—and if so, Heather clearly conveyed her condolences—would he and Morgo need the Starflake's help in getting word to the Troglodytes so they could give the lost souls right burial in ether?

There were plain answers to each of these questions. Respectively: the Lechwerth's mission was surreptitious rape and pillage; because the Lechwerth wasn't actually derelict, nothing whatever had happened to her crew; and because the Lechwerth was a pirated ship outside the authority of the Troglan government, the Trogs were unlikely to do anything about her lost souls had there even been any.

Argon had prevaricated the best he could, inwardly praying in the meanwhile that Morgo wouldn't pipe up with some inappropriate comment or revelatory affect. After all, he was still in his season, and the audience that had steadily shuffled in in the meantime to watch the rehearsal was just about all prime-for-breeding, college-age human females.

Luckily Morgo had kept mum, though his eyes had ranged around a bit too conspicuously and his pheromone odor had really kicked up. It was also lucky that Argon had found his muse and improvised fairly competent answers to all Heather's driving questions. He'd lied that the Lechwerth had been part of a convoy moving aid to a famine-ridden subject colony; the next ship along would deal with the Lechwerth's detritus, he'd assured her, and the contingency of the occasional waylaid vessel had been part of the convoy's mission from the beginning. He thought he'd done a passable job. As the lights had dimmed, though, and Heather had whispered a parting to him and risen to go back to her proper seat, he thought she'd studied him, and he wondered if he was really pulling this thing off.

The play was called "Monsters Crash the Pajama Party," of all things, and it had opened with four girls in shortened nighties and gowns, sitting Indian style on a throw-rug on the floor of a living room—that is, a sofa, coffee table, and couple of chairs arranged about the stage. The house had haunts, this being conveyed by a smattering of cobwebs taped to the stage ceiling and high up the walls, along with a plastic, twirling vampire bat. As Argon fidgeted, the chicks, huddled around the floor in pajamas, explained the movie's premise in stilted dialog: They were to spend the night in the haunted house as part of a sorority pledge, and, or so they'd inferred, their boyfriends were bound to return around midnight in monster masks to startle the would-be sisters, much to the amusement of all.

This stuff was hardly Shakespeare. It only took about ten minutes before Argon's lids started getting heavy with boredom, even as, next to him, Morgo sank ever further into a panting trance of excitation as he ogled the sexy young things on stage. Argon could detect his surging hormones as a heat that was more electricity than temperature.

Finally now, in the second act, the stage had gotten darker, three of the noisy girls had left, and maybe Argon could get some proper shuteye. He reclined with a too-loud, echoing scrape of his chair leg, and tried to doze. But he found he kept peeking.

The one remaining doll onstage—Pamela was her character's name, a short but shapely redhead—made her way nervously through the shadows, holding a waning, flickering candle that put off not a lot of light. She started studying the back of her arm, where Argon could see she'd scribbled something in black pen.

"'Bobby sure scared me with that story about there being a monster in this house,'" she read aloud, woodenly, not lifting her eyes from the black scribbles. "'It sure would be scary if there really was.'"

A pregnant silence as she looked up and nothing happened.

"I said," she repeated, "'It sure would be scary if there really was.'"

"We haven't got a monster," came a muffled voice from backstage.

"What?"

"We haven't got a monster. Pete Dunning was playing the monster but he went off with the Uniteds and the suit's too big for anyone else."

The lights came up. An older, gray woman with a script and clipboard, presumably the director, came up the stairs from the front row as the other three girls emerged from backstage. "Well, damn," the woman said. "I guess we could use a stand-in but without the suit . . . I mean, it's a real physical role. We kinda need it to play off of."

"We're going on in like two days!" 'Pamela' shrewed. "We've got to get this thing down or we're all going to look like idiots!"

"I know, I know," the director consoled.

"We can't do it without the monster! The monster's the main part! Maybe we can . . ." 'Pamela' cast about for some sort of solution. "Maybe we can—hey, what about the Trog?"

Argon snapped out of his bored trance. She was pointing right at them.

"The who?" asked the director.

"You know, the Trogs? The shipwrecked ones? The one on the left's about Pete's size."

Snapping to as well, Morgo clutched his knees. "What? Us?"

"Yeah, that could work," the director mused to the girl. She waved at Morgo. "Would you mind? You'd have to wear a costume, if it fits, and you do look about right. There wouldn't be any lines; not in this scene, anyway. You just have to be menacing, grab at the damsels, carry them off, that sort of thing. Make it scary."

"Um, yeah?" Morgo consented, discreetly repositioning himself and getting up. "Sure?" Argon could tell he was having trouble buying their good fortune. Argon was, too. Who would be doing a favor for whom, exactly?

"Hell yes," he whispered out the corner of his mouth. "Be casual. Go with it."

"Come on up. Don't be shy." The director waved Morgo toward the stage. "Take five, girls. We'll get our guest star suited up and pick up where we left off."

"Why put a monster suit on someone who's already a monster?" Argon heard a girl in the audience mumble, and this struck him as a fair point.

***

Oh, boy, this sure smells, thought Morgo as he peered through the eyeholes of the muggy monster head the director and 'Pamela'—he'd learned her real name was Natalie—had pulled over him. His pheromones were acting up again and it didn't help that the suit made it at least ten degrees hotter. It also didn't help that he was harder than silver steel, and that he'd had to remove all his other clothes to squeeze into the thing, which clung to him like a second skin.

The good news, though, was that as he stood backstage with Steph, Heather, and Brooke, the other three girls in the cast, he'd caught sight of a couple DubL-Ms, presumably belonging to two of them, arranged in a tidy pair. It was a dress rehearsal, after all, and they weren't part of the costumes. He didn't stare; there was no point drawing suspicion and ruining such an opportunity. He would bide his time.

"Remember, girls," said Brooke, behind the scrim. "Everything for the play, for the art. Give everything. It's the only way to stay true to the vision. It's the only way to reach the audience. You may have to do things, and let things be done to you, that you never would in real life. Just go with it. You too, Morgo. I know you're new, but make sure you don't hold back." Morgo gave her an affirmative nod. He expected this would be the easiest demand anyone would make of him all day.

Meanwhile, the play went on. "'Gosh,'" Morgo saw Natalie, as Pamela, read off her arm as she tiptoed across the stage. "'I'm not sure it was such a good idea to try and go wiz by myself. It's really dark in here.'"

Brooke, the close-cropped brunette, tugged at the shoulder of his suit. "Okay, you're up. After the next line. Really grab her. Make it sizzle!"

"'Bobby sure scared me with that story about there being a monster in this house. It sure would be scary if there really was.'"

Feeling excited and ridiculous at the same time, Morgo put his arms above his head and, with a growl, staggered on stage with a histrionic sway of the legs, as though stomping a city flat. Natalie met his gaze, palmed both cheeks, and screamed in what sounded like not entirely fake terror. Suddenly, she could act? She backed away but her shapely bottom bumped up against a coffee table and, cornered, she merely stood, yelped, and shook her head, begging him wordlessly, as he closed the distance with her and got her by her slender waist. The candle tumbled in a spill of wax and flickered out on the floor.

"Oh, no!" she cried, still reading. She clenched her little hands into pitiful fists and pounded them weakly against Morgo's chest. "It's the monster! It's got me!"

"Rawr!" growled Morgo. Unable to help himself, he slid one furry hand under Natalie's nightshirt and thumbed the washboard of her ribs, then groped the feathery, fleshy knoll above them. She wasn't wearing a bra and her alabaster swell tantalized his palm, giving him yet another throb in his loins. He ranged his fingers over the soft front of Natalie's naked boob under her shirt, her eraserhead teat like a tender button that poked at the fabric of his costume.

Man, he wished he wasn't wearing this thing.

He slid his other paw along her hip, using the waistband of her skimpy panties as a guide, and groped her milky derriere through the silky fabric of her slippery undies. "Erm," he grumbled reflexively, louder than he would have liked. "Succulent schoolmaid. Grabbable girlmeat."

Since hitting him didn't seem to work, Natalie pushed at him with her open hands. She turned away. "Help!" she squealed. "Help! Someone help me! The monster's going to have its way with me!" She pushed hard enough to force Morgo back a step and wriggled to her left, turning to flee.

"Yes!" the director, sitting in the front row, exclaimed gleefully. "Wrassle her, Morgo! Really fight, Natalie! Howl!"

"I've got you now, little kitten. I'm gonna take you to my lair."

"Help! Help! It's got its hands all over me!"

Wily Natalie managed to turn her back to Morgo, but he brought the arm he'd slipped over her ass around her front and hugged her with his forearm at the waist, drawing her back to him and bouncing the fleshy pads of her velvet bottom against his furry pelvis. He worked her nightshirt up her hip, baring her stringy satin pantalettes, and ogled her butt as he pumped his lap over it. Erg, rutting. Through the costume, his stiff root sidled into the crevice of her slinky rump. Her panties crinkled. The twin slopes of her nubile seat caressed his gooey organ, and a hot surge flushed through him that rose vertiginously fast. God, these Earth girls got him going.

"What's that? Did you hear that?" squealed Brooke, offstage, keeping to the script. "That's Pamela! She needs our help!"

"Quick!" said Stephanie. "Let's go!"

"I've got you now, my little pet," Morgo ad-libbed. He was working his hips now, grinding his stiff, oozing member up and down in Natalie's creamy furrow. As she meekly struggled, she lost a hairpin and her red mane, which had been done up into a scruffy bun, fell with a tousle down her back as she bent, in her trembling resistance presenting her tasty fanny by accident.

"It's got me! Oh, woe, it's got me right where it wants me!" She was reading off her arm again.

God, he wasn't even going to have to go up her, he was going to drain his fetid alien scrotum right here in this filthy costume. A couple more stolen grinds and he cleared the crest, knotting in bliss, Natalie's felicific, jiggling bottomswells coaxing jet after throbbing jet of nasty spume out of him, creating a frothy pool as the smelly gobs of juice accumulated. One last, as he wauled and yarbled in ecstasy.

He gripped her by her twiggy waist and savored another rub of his spending root against her squishy fanny, marveling at her shapely, petite figure. Then he flung her onto the sofa, where she lay akimbo, hyperventilating, and spirited away stage right with a final banshee yell just as the other girls came on.