Dry No Lube

This was fun!

Thanks to PuckIt for spearheading this little dip of the toes into an old love of mine, SciFi. I suppose, in keeping with my usual practice, that Lieutenant Pixy Pfeiffer would be a many-times-removed granddaughter of Chad Pfeiffer and Ashley Gallo, if such things are important to you; she's certainly got the bewitching Ashley's bold eyes.

I'm delving into a new Lit world here, an uncharted realm, boldly going where I've never gone before (on this site): third-person.

* * *

"Sir, remember I told you I was going to take the shuttle? For the fucking light modules?"

"Ah." The captain swiveled slowly around in his big chair and looked her up and down. "Yes. But make sure you load up first. Weapons Status Amber, Ms Pfeiffer. At least five torpedoes this time; you never know what might happen, Lieutenant."

"Aye aye, sir." With immense difficulty, Pixy kept her eyes from rolling. Motherfucker. She was flying, what, fifty meters? Fifty-five? From one ship to the other during refueling? And they were safely hung up in a gravity well, too; five torpedoes! The man was delusional. "Be back in a couple hours."

"Sure." The captain gave her one more inspection, fleeting, with a small frown. "And get yourself a haircut, too. Something a little more, you know, regulation."

"Regulation. Yes, sir." She was assuming he'd heard the flat contempt in her voice, but then she often assumed things about the captain that turned out not to be true. A more oblivious man did not exist. So she knew he wouldn't notice when she took the shuttle out, twisting it through the anchorage and straight past the bridge windows with precisely zero torpedoes loaded up on the outboard racks.

No point. The man was convinced there were enemy sneak attacks around every corner.

Space was its usual overwhelming self, a billion stars in every direction against the velvet deep-black background, the ships of the fleet twinkling planetside, and she took the shuttle with her accustomed skill among all the lines between her ship and the sleek destroyer they were fueling. Fueling always reminded her of sex: all the hoses and fluids and tubes and noise. And everyone needed a shower afterward.

She came aboard with a carefully crisp salute, none of the usual slackness she'd grown accustomed to aboard the

Pulver

: this was a cruiser, the

Ravager

, a combat vessel of the real, actual Fleet, and the officers here were a cut above.

Theoretically.

For the supply officer was a fat, lazy sublieutenant whose sister she knew distantly, from way back. Some course she'd done back on Earth, maybe four or five years ago, but the connection had been enough. Enough for a hasty message to the

Ravager's

supply lieutenant, a plea for more lighting modules, the new buzz-lift kind the government said they'd had to switch over to last month, but that she'd been late in ordering. She needed ten; the

Ravager

had a bunch extra, and she'd been invited over to grab a few.

"Yes?" The other lieutenant brushed a crumb off his collar and looked dispassionately up at her uniform, all crusty and oily like all the

Pulver's

officers. "Oh. You're the second officer from the fueler? The one who knows my sister?"

"Hi." She stepped forward, her hand out. The

Ravager's

guy had his feet on the desk, and his office smelled like farts. Off to the side, an empty desk full of stacked paper showed where the yeoman would get most of the work done. "I'm Pfeiffer. You said you could spare some lighting modules?"

He looked her over, as she'd known he would: it was the way things were done in the Fleet. You gave some, you lost some. She always tried to guess, before these meetings, whether the price would be sex or drugs or both. She drew herself up, knowing she had nothing to be ashamed of: the

Pulver

did not put a high value on staying in shape, but Pixy did. She was short and compact and hard, thirty but looking more like twenty-two.

The man licked his lips. "I'll give you eight modules for a blowjob."

"Twelve," she replied at once. He'd started higher than he should have, she was pleased to see. "Hand only."

"No, I'll need your mouth." He nodded to himself. "I can go to eleven modules, I guess."

Excellent. Ten to keep her captain out of trouble and herself off report, plus an extra. "I can live with that." She stepped into the crammed little office and kicked the hatch closed behind her. "Whip it out, dude." Sucking off lower-ranking officers was not her favorite thing to do, but that's what happens when you're late with your lighting orders.

Smiling, he got to his feet; he was tall enough that he had to duck. The overhead clearance in these Type IV cruisers was murder on anyone over six feet. "I'm Parsons," he offered, casually. "In case you're keeping track."

"Nah. No need." It was a common game in the Fleet, officers keeping score of the people they had these kinds of arrangements with, but math bored Pixy. "I can't count that high," she smirked.

Parsons gave out a snort of laughter, undoing his staytab. The little device whirred at his waistband and his fly came popping open, unfolding like a reverse origami. "We'll have to do it here," he said apologetically. "My quarters are clear across the ship."

"Sure thing." Pixy took two steps before she looked down, and wished she hadn't. She stopped short. "What the fuck?"

Two cocks had popped out, one slightly smaller than the other.

Parsons just stood there smugly, watching her reaction. "What?" He moved his heavy hips side to side, waggling his penises. "Double the pleasure, ma'am."

"What are you, some kind of mutant?" She started forward again. It wouldn't be her first double, but it always seemed kind of weird.

"Yup. Mutant and proud!" He perched his butt halfway on his desk and gloated. "That's what the nuns taught us, anyway. Back at school."

She shrugged. "Want to sit, or are you okay like that?" She had her hands up, molding her thick hair into a ponytail. The captain was right; she needed a haircut. Parsons was obviously staring at her tits while she had her arms up.

"Nah, I'm good." One of the cocks was getting hard already. He took in Pixy's apprehensive look and glanced down her body. "What? You don't have two vaginas?"

She made a face. "No, man. I'm a human." She saw at once that she'd been rude. Mutations were a sore spot for some people.

"So am I," Parsons muttered, hurt. She was up close to him now, smelling the staleness of his uniform, the sharp bite of his aftershave. "I like your eyes."

"A lot of guys do." She slid smoothly down, grateful as always for the built-in kneepads on the working uniform. Both his cocks were circumcised, she noticed. "So you can, like, fuck two chicks at once?" The softer one jumped at her touch when she grabbed it, one in each hand. Parsons shrugged down at her.

"Not usually. The angle doesn't work for humans. But I can fuck two Linders at once, easily. The anatomy works better."

"I can see that." She was massaging both dicks now, the shafts thickening before her eyes, wondering what he'd expect.

"Sometimes I can do a human chick in the ass and pussy at the same time, though," Parsons went on hopefully. "You into that? I could probably scrape up a couple more lighting units."

"Nah." Pixy was exit-only. She peered underneath: yup. Four balls.

"It's a trick, getting them both to cum simultaneously."

"Really?" She glanced up at his face. "All the plumbing is separate?" She frowned. "Wait a minute. I'm not going to do both. That's like two separate acts, buddy."

"No way." He made both cocks pulse in her hands. "See ma'am? They're the same cock."

"No, no no!" Pixy hated being played. She let go of both and just let them droop there, glaring up at his round red face. "That's not how I roll, dude. Two orgasms is two acts, Parsons. Get it straight. I'll go until the first one cums."

His shoulders slumped. "Well... fifteen units?"

"Fuck that." Pixy was into this now. She had the upper hand. Two of them. "Twenty. My ship burns through those new ones like a motherfucker."

"Seventeen."

Pixy nodded. "Done." She returned her hands to both dicks, one of them already glistening with precum. "Can't mess around here, man; I've got to get back. You want hand? Or mouth?"

He was back, that smug version of Parsons, drawing himself up as high as he could given the low overhead. "How about one of each?"

Pixy didn't bother restraining herself this time; she did roll her eyes. "Eighteen."

Parsons nodded, his eyes already half-closing. "Get to work, ma'am."

* * *

They undocked at 1600, finally shedding the last power line connecting the

Pulver

to her latest thirsty cruiser, and the captain was at last able to give the order to head back out. "Full shields," he barked as soon as they pulled in the stabilizers. "Weapons Status Amber."

"What?" It was the usual joke, spoken in a traditional whisper by Amber Okonfwe, the commo officer. Everyone else giggled. "Need something, sir?"

"Knock it off," barked the captain, pretending not to notice when people kept giggling. Pixy was on the helm today, alongside a sailor named Jacobs, a large black dude well known for his performance in Lieutenant Amisuul's prostitution ring. Not well known to the captain, obviously, but what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him. Pixy hadn't sampled Jacobs yet. She turned around a moment.

"Course, captain?"

"Lieutenant Densborg?" There was, of course, no reason at all why the captain couldn't just tell her the damn heading himself. But he insisted on letting the first officer give the course, like they did on the big ships.

"Fuck it," Densborg shrugged. "Just fly toward Aries."

There was a moment of silence on the bridge, stretching uncomfortably until Pixy sighed. "Forty-three by seven-one-seven cubed, velocity factor eight." She'd done the navigation herself, obviously. It's what one did when one's other option was to rely on a perpetually wasted first officer. Densborg was just thirty-two and already on his third cloned liver.

"Excellent." The captain leaned back, acting as if Densborg hadn't spoken; the man was lying on the deck in delirium tremens, and everyone was pretending not to notice. "Carry on, Lieutenant Pfeiffer."

"Aye aye, sir." The ship rattled around them in a way that would be disconcerting if they hadn't endured it so many times, gathering speed, heading off into the void on whatever glorious garbage-scow resupply mission the captain's orders specified.

* * *

He was not happy about that, either. Owen Crick came from a long, long line of military men, which wasn't the same thing as Fleet men. His forebears, his brothers, his cousins all wore green, doing parashot raids and P/E missions, invading planets and going hand-to-hand trying to subdue the Antareans or the Flasbards or whatever other alien race the Feds had decided to go remove that month.

But not Owen.

No, Owen had gone into space, thinking to serve as a starpilot, one of the fighter guys in the Tygon Interceptors, so he'd gone to the Naval College and learned about astrophysics and the fun to be had sorting out which ductwork went to which part of the ship.

And when he'd failed the flight-school exam, he'd decided he'd become a great navigator, guiding a dreadnought or a battlecruiser through the stars, taking them safely to whichever planet was to be bombarded next. He'd served four years learning his navigation, practicing the helm orders.

And when he'd failed his navigation exam, he'd thought of gunnery. He'd memorized the types and characteristics of the light-ammo the Fleet used, studied trajectories and vectors and light-corridors and the thousand other things involved in bringing star-cannon and torpedoes to bear on every conceivable type of target.

And when he'd failed his gunnery exam, he'd resolved to apply himself to maintenance, sacrificing long sleepless nights to fine-tune the engineering systems that safely moved the great starships from Point A to Point B.352, understanding the way the electrical systems were wired, constructing nuclear subsystems from scratch.

And he'd passed his maintenance exam.

But then the Fleet had changed the design of the Plymar Interphaser, making most of the exam obsolete, and he'd failed the retest.

He told himself now that commanding a GP service vessel, one of the thousands of workhorses in the fleet, was just a way station, merely a stepping stone to bigger things, when his tactical genius would at last be noticed and he'd rise high enough to be able to face down his Army sisters and brothers when the family met for the Naadam dinner.

So now, resplendent in his Subcommander's coat and at long last in charge of an actual ship in the actual Federal Fleet, he was determined to do a good job. Which basically meant he was relying on Pixy Pfeiffer to run the ship for him.

An incompetent captain, a drunken first officer, a vengeful pimp for a third officer, a fourth who owed her promotions to her habit of sleeping with her superiors... it didn't bear thinking about. But it was reality, Pixy reflected. She was the only officer aboard who cared enough about not crashing into a subdwarf star to do her job, plus everyone else's. Everyone except Klonmyre, the engineer; she was okay. But she was only the engineer. She couldn't steer the ship or plot the courses, and she couldn't lay her hands on eighteen buzz-lift lighting modules in a hurry either.

"Lieutenant Pfeiffer," the captain called as she went off shift, "can I have a moment, please?"

She held up, harnessing her chi into a smile. "Naturally, sir. Where? Right here?"

"No, in the charthouse." The smelly little navigation cubbyhole containing all the hard-copy starcharts and the balky, early-model star projector lay beyond the little hatch by the main lift. The rest of the bridge crew was looking at her, trying not to laugh. It was always amusing when Captain Crick tried to assert his authority. "It'll just take a second."

"Sure, sir." She exchanged an unreadable glance with Okonfwe and kicked open the hatch, the captain on her heels, then headed over by the entry console and leaned against the far wall, her hands numb from hanging onto the controls for the past four hours; Jacobs had been useless. "What gives, Captain?"

He was not a bad-looking guy, she reflected. Tall, with blue eyes and one of those hefty sets of sideburns you sometimes saw on starship captains, he at least meant well. Not for the first time, she wondered whether it might be beneficial to sleep with him. He wasn't known for that kind of thing, but you never really knew. He got right to the point. "You noticed that Mr Amisuul didn't bother showing up to relieve the watch?"

She had, actually, but it was none of her business. "Perhaps Lieutenant Densborg ought to have a word with him, sir," she pointed out evenly.

"Mr Densborg is... Well, he's indisposed." The captain looked vacantly over at the starfinder, then shook his head. "Mr Amisuul is third officer, you're second. So go give him a talking-to."

She let the silence stretch until it was just short of the point of being disrespectful. "A talking-to."

He flapped his hand at the wall, irritated. "Did I stutter? There's entirely too much laziness in this ship, Ms Pfeiffer. I rely on my officers to keep things focused, and if they're not showing up for watch it's a problem. Right?"

No, not really. Amisuul was to have relieved Okonfwe at the commo desk, but he didn't know anything about commo and the junior tech on the desk certainly did. The ship was better off without Amisuul on the bridge. "A problem. Yes, sir."

Crick glared. "So go get 'im, Lieutenant!" He clapped her shoulder in an overly conspiratorial way, then nodded happily and spun to leave.

"I'll beat the shit out of him, sir," she replied dryly, and the captain almost looked as though he had something to say about that. But he apparently thought better of it, as usual, and he creaked the hatch open instead.

And that's how Pixy found herself striding down the passageway toward Amisuul's room, this time avoiding the puddled hydraulic fluid on the deck in front of diBiase's quarters; he was the newest officer, the FNG, so obviously he got the quarters half-flooded with carcinogenic slime. She didn't bother knocking on Amisuul's hatch, instead merely plugging in his doorcode; she'd made a point of finding out how to get into all her fellow officers' rooms.

Amisuul lay nude on his bunk with a short, eager young woman lying facedown between his fine-scaled green legs. "Don't you knock?" he demanded sourly. The woman gave a start, and began to twist around to see what was up. Amisuul simply tightened his legs around her head to keep her in place. "Keep going, Purcell. This won't take long."

"Why aren't you at your post?" The woman was gagging, but Pixy didn't bother waiting for Amisuul to let her up; he wouldn't. "Your shift started like fifteen minutes ago."

"Well, come on." The Tygon gestured helplessly at Purcell. "She's auditioning. I can't very well interrupt her before she's finished."

"Get your lazy fucking ass up to the bridge," Pixy demanded calmly, still not yelling. It was how she liked to do things, and normally it worked. Purcell's neck was starting to go purple. "And quit it. She's about to choke to death."

"What?" He unfolded his legs, and the girl backed off his dick in an explosion of spit, snot, and tears. "I have to know how much she can take before I send her out for money." His penis was skinny, like most Tygon cocks, but if he was like all the rest he could cum to order. That meant, potentially, hours and hours. And hours. Hours of dick. Pixy glanced thoughtfully at Purcell, now wiping desperately at her face; it looked like she'd been down there awhile. Amisuul's dick was moving around like a finger; Tygons could do that with their penises.

"How old are you, Purcell?" The woman had sweat all over her uniform.

"Eighteen, ma'am." She sounded properly deferential, at least.

"You really want to go out whoring for Mr Amisuul?"

She shrugged. "The money's good, ma'am."

"I'm the morale officer aboard this piece of shit, Lieutenant Pfeiffer," Amisuul whined, crossing his ankles, his dick still shining with Purcell's various facial contributions. Pixy looked away. "That's an important job. More important than sitting in front of the subspace band while the commo tech does all the work." He raised his eyebrows, forever the innocent. "I'm swamped."

"Jesus." Pixy sighed hard, then looked at Purcell. "Get going, Purcell. Find something else to do."

"Aye aye, ma'am." She was slowly pulling herself together to get up, anyway.

"Wait a sec." Amisuul glanced critically up at the girl, then nodded to himself. "Cool. Now don't move."

Purcell looked confused. "But Ms Pfeiffer said..." Whatever she was about to say was drowned out by Amisuul, who promptly unleashed a torrent of foul-smelling green spunk directly into her mouth. From two feet, uphill. Pixy was disgusted, but she had to admit his aim was excellent. "Guhh." Purcell was making a sad little grimace. "Shit, sir." She spat out his load, gagging. "What did you do that for?"

"You earned it, sailor." He nudged her off the bed with his foot, her uniform totaled. "Now get your ass back to work. I'll do the rest some other time." Wiping at her face, the girl shuffled toward the hatch. Amisuul watched her go, then sighed. "Quite an ass on her." Still lying with his hands behind his head, he swiveled his cock until it was pointing at Pixy. "Want some, Pixy?"

She responded with a vicious kick to the ribs. "Shut your fucking piehole." She followed up by leaning down and smacking his mouth. "That's for calling me by my first name, you dickhead." She ducked aside, nimbly avoiding a vengeful spurt of semen. "And stop that."