She woke up from a bad-dream nap, the taste of metal filings in her mouth; it was always like that, with repairs underway. The whole ship was filthy, with epoxy and fresh weld seams everywhere amid a constant stink of ozone. The message chime sounded again, and Pixy dragged her head across the pillow to look incoherently at the plot repeater mounted to the headboard. They'd put it there from Densborg's quarters now that she was acting as First Officer. "What the fuck?" she barked into the intertube.
"Urgent, Lieutenant Pfeiffer. They need you at the shuttle dock." Sounded like Klingmann, on the bridge watch. Good kid.
She felt her belly sink. That fucking supply run should have been back awhile ago... "Is Mr Amisuul back with the converters?"
Klingmann paused, and when she replied she managed to sound carefully diplomatic. "It's Mr Amisuul that needs you, ma'am."
She swore loudly without bothering to shut off the speaker. Fucking Amisuul. "Does the captain know?"
Again, that careful diplomacy. "I'm not certain the captain knows Lieutenant Amisuul's name yet, ma'am."
"Roger." She yawned and stretched, sitting up naked in the bed. Space outside her viewport was frosted with stars and choked with ships all around them. "I'll be right there."
* * *
Part I: The Basin
* * *
Pixy was not amused. "This is not the way I wanted to spend my afternoon, Mr Amisuul."
"Sorry, ma'am." He was careful not to look back into the crew bay, where Pixy was busy swabbing that other lieutenant's semen out of herself. This wasn't the first time she'd done that around him; once, he'd even left some of his own in there, but that had been many months and a thousand tribulations ago, almost like it had happened to someone else. She'd become a hero since then, and he hadn't, and that was not the kind of gulf he knew how to bridge.
She knew how, but wasn't interested.
So he kept his eyes forward. Besides, he was flying the shuttle, and he'd never been more than adequate at that kind of task. Pixy sighed behind him. "This is one of the kinds of things you have to do now, Amisuul. It's not what you asked for, but I just don't have the time anymore." She made a last swipe, put the drywipe into the incinerator, and then sighed as her uniform did itself up.
She was enraged, if she was being honest with herself, and Pixy Pfeiffer was usually honest with herself. Amisuul was not cutting it at all, and he needed to be told that. She took a deep breath, then pitched her voice toward careful neutrality so that he wouldn't miss the message. "Mr Amisuul," she announced, "you need to step up your duty performance."
He started, the shuttle yawing a tad as he clenched reflexively at the controls, for in the careful language of Fleet-speak she'd just delivered a torpedo shot at immediate range. That loaded Fleet phrase,
duty performance:
it alluded to things like evaluation reports, confidential personnel files, counseling memos, even the distant specter of a court-martial: no subordinate ever liked to hear that phrase from a senior officer's mouth. He was far too ashamed to glance back as Pixy climbed through onto the flight deck.
She knew she'd rattled him. Good. She let the silence build; the sailors always knew when Lieutenant Pfeiffer was pissed, and now Amisuul knew it too. She was beginning to despair of ever turning him into a borderline competent supply officer.
The complication, of course, was that he wasn't truly responsible for supply: she was, as Second Officer. But now she was also the acting First Officer, which meant she had far too much to do and needed to delegate. So Rocky Amisuul had become the part-time supply officer.
"It's just... It's far too much to do, ma'am," he complained now, hating himself for whining. You didn't whine in Fleet. You shut your mouth and you did your job. But lately, Amisuul's
job
had become
jobs
, and he'd discovered he just didn't have enough energy. "I'm not sure I can do it."
"Bullshit." She glared evenly over at him. "What? Is it the sex? Because I'll tell you, a supply officer who can't fuck is a useless piece of shit." She sniffed, still smelling that other lieutenant's sweat in her nostrils; she'd ended up with her face in the hollow of his neck, gripping onto him with both arms and one leg as he'd cum from above her, his beard leaving a raw red patch on her right shoulder. "You can fuck, Amisuul; we both know that. What's the problem with this stuff?"
She'd explained The Rules to him when they'd started this game, while they were still on the way to the repair basin, limping along under half solar power. "Supply guys work according to a very simple set of Rules, Mr Amisuul." She'd detested her own tone, all dry and didactic, but she'd had much to do then and little sleep to do it on.
"You offer to barter the shit you've got too much of, in exchange for the shit you've got too little of. There's always an officer asking for a favor, and another one granting the favor. The officer asking the favor is expected to sweeten the deal. Right? So, you do that with the same old shit supply officers have been using forever: money, drugs, or sex."
But usually it was sex, especially in this particular sector. They were far, far from home, far from wives and mistresses, aboard claustrophobic ships where even the onboard prostitution rings grew stale after awhile, the customary bedwarmers becoming too much like spouses. So supply officers usually looked forward to these kinds of visits as a chance to sample a new hole.
And Rocky Amisuul had been unable to make that happen today.
So, faced with a better supply geek than he would ever be, he'd panicked. And then Klingmann had gotten on the intertube, so now Pixy had rented her vagina to the sublieutenant aboard the frigate
Janzee
. For forty dozen power converters, sure, but still: a lowly sublieutenant? And it had been Amisuul's job. "Was it because he was a guy?" she asked abruptly. "I didn't think you minded it in the ass."
"Well... it's not my favorite," he admitted. Pixy's eyebrows rose in surprise.
"Dude. I thought your bedwarmer is a man."
Amisuul glanced over; every officer in the Fleet kept a bedwarmer, but it wasn't considered polite to mention them. "What about it, ma'am?" he replied evenly.
"Well, I mean, I'm just saying..." Pixy trailed off, in the unusual position of feeling awkward before a subordinate. The silence grew heavy, edged, as their ship loomed larger in the viewport. She cleared her throat. "You don't fuck him?"
"No." Amisuul sighed. "He really does just warm the bed. We snuggle. Talk. Whatever. But no." He shrugged. "I get more than I need, auditioning the sailors in the prostitution ring; you know that." She nodded; pimping the ship's whores was a traditional part of a Third Officer's job. "That's the problem, see. Between keeping the whores in practice and these supply pukes you're making me fuck, it's just too much. You know... physiologically."
