Dentata

The rings of Saturn took my breath away. They had been beautiful from the distance, the orbit of Titan lying far outside the rings' majesty, but up close I could see the finely striated caramel-cream rings of ice and dust in all their celestial glory.

Salacia

's trajectory through the system had it practically brushing the edge, and this last shuttle was racing to catch up before the tugs engaged and accelerated the starship on its exit towards Neptune.

Titan runs a catch-and-throw operation, sending tugs to catch ships and unmanned freight containers inbound from the outer planets and beyond, and using the tugs also to accelerate ships and dispatch containers outbound. I had heard about it often enough, but this was the first time I got to see it in action.

The tugs themselves looked like old-style rockets: cylindrical containers of hydrogen-rich fuel, no doubt refined from Titan's own hydrocarbon wealth, to feed the fusion cores and ion-propulsion systems. There were three tugs connected to the

Salacia

, their engines idle, as was the

Salacia

's own drive. They made such a peaceful quartet, floating in space ahead of us, against the backdrop of Saturn's rings.

The

Salacia

was a conical ship that rotated about its axis to produce internal gravity. Most of the ship space was at half-gravity like

Titan One

had been, but the outermost deck was at full standard gravity, and as luck would have it that was where my cabin was. I stowed my stuff away quickly and located an observation room where I, and a handful of other passengers, sat watching the rings below us in silent awe.

Before long, the tugs' engines flared to life, and for the next five days we lived with very distorted gravity, Saturn gradually diminishing in our wake.

*

I made a friend on the voyage. A nine-year-old called Hannah who had been born on the ship and spent her whole life there. Her mother was the captain, and her father the doctor. She had been ordered to stay away from me, but (as so often is the case) curiosity overcame obedience.

"Are you an alien?" she asked me one day.

"No," I replied, laughing. "I'm from Earth." We were alone in the canteen, and even Hannah was only half-inside, having been spying on me from the doorway. "My name's Sam, by the way."

"I'm Hannah," she said after a moment. Deciding to trust me, she came a little way into the room and sat. "I've never seen a yellow person before."

It had been a whimsical choice to make my skin an intense yellow, in memory of sunshine I might never see again. I was making my way ever further from the home I hated, swapping light and warmth for the cold dark. "I have chameleon skin," I explained. "I can be any colour I like."

"Oh, wow! I'd love that. Can you go pink?"

"Tell you what," I said, grinning at her enthusiasm. "I'll turn my lips pink - but it will take a few minutes."

"Okay." She moved seat, coming closer to see better. "Yeah, I can see them changing."

Of course, being a child, she wasn't satisfied with that. "Can you make patterns?" she demanded - it was certainly not an idle query. "Like spots and stripes. Can you do rainbows?"

I had to laugh. "One thing at a time, please!"

"Stripes, then. Do stripes. Yellow and blue - like your dress."

I tried - and then we both laughed over how stupid I looked. But that was how our friendship continued, with Hannah giving me a new challenge every day.

The zebra proved to be an instant hit with the crew. No sooner had I designed and mastered the black-and-white pattern, based on the pictures Hannah had found, than my clients were demanding it. Indeed, animal patterns in general were popular, the leopard especially, and they wanted me to growl and hiss and struggle like a caged wild animal.

I felt bad that what had started as a game between Hannah and I had turned into a widespread fetish, and didn't particularly like being treated like an animal, but I can't deny that I enjoyed it as well. The mood enhancer ensured that I would, philosophical objections aside.

The

Salacia

had a permanent crew of only twelve, with about forty passengers. It wasn't a large ship, and usually didn't employ a ship's whore, but they were certainly willing to take advantage of me. I don't think there was a soul aboard - Hannah excepted - who didn't at least once either visit me in my cabin or request me in theirs.

The doctor, Hannah's dad, made a point of pinching my nipples, knowing very well what would happen. The mood enhancer drove me wild with lust as the doctor took my tiger-striped body from behind, one hand gripping my long hair to use like a rein. (His wife, the captain, just liked me to wear her uniform and use a strap-on on her while calling her a whore and spanking her hard - a startling yet very satisfying role reversal.)

Overall, it would have been an unremarkable voyage if not for Hannah. We would talk for hours, sharing stories we'd heard about aliens and distant planets, or she would tell me about what lessons she had to do, and we would compare my childhood on Earth with hers in interplanetary space. It was nice to have someone innocent to talk to and forget for a while the craziness of my life.

It broke my heart to leave her. "Write to me!" she called as the airlock door closed.

"I will," I shouted back, my vision blurry from tears. And then the shuttle was away, taking me and a few others to the Neptune observatory.

*

Neptune is so far out that the Sun is no more than a dazzlingly bright star, and yet it's enough to illuminate the astonishingly deep blue of the planet. "It's all the methane," one of my fellow passengers explained. (Aaron, I think his name was. Something beginning with 'A', anyway. A for anal.) "It absorbs the red and infrared, but you can see sunlight reflecting off the clouds at the poles."

Which was true, and at the same time both fascinating and disappointing. Fascinating that this monochromatic gas giant actually had a visible weather system, and yet disappointing that the stunning blueness of it was made somehow imperfect by these traces of other colour.

And then there were the rings, broken and nothing compared to Saturn's magnificent array, but which seduced the eye nevertheless.

"It's beautiful," I said.

The observatory,

Minerva

, was a long, narrow, segmented tube that spun unnervingly fast. One revolution every six (or so) seconds. "People live in that?" I asked, causing some laughter.

It was getting longer too. There were two new segments under construction a short distance away.

The dock was at one end, thankfully not itself revolving. On exiting the airlock, we had to catch a rotating ladder and climb 'down', the spin-induced gravity asserting itself swiftly.

Gradually it stopped feeling so impossible, but the curve of the floors took some getting used to, and the change in gravity between floors was profound. The inside felt initially like a maze, in part because each segment was designed differently, often with a very specific purpose.

My cabin was in the fourth segment on the third floor. Standard gravity. My chest had arrived with the previous shuttle and was already inside. I unpacked my pot plants and sun-lights, and put the print of the Algoran mountains on the wall. It's important to have somewhere that feels like home.

Then, with skin the azure of Neptune itself, I went exploring.

*

I took no more than five steps before a voice stopped me. "Hi - Are you Sam?" The voice belonged to a young woman with a friendly face, long blonde hair, and eyes that were the palest blue I'd ever seen.

I nodded, and she smiled tentatively. "I'm Celeste," she said. "I was supposed to meet you at the dock - I love your skin! - but I got held up, sorry! I guess you found your cabin..."

"Uh, hi," I said. "Yes."

Celeste laughed. "I know. I talk too much. Sorry. Um, I'm supposed to show you around...?"

"I'd like that."

It was immediately obvious that she had given this tour before. "Welcome to

Minerva

, the Neptune observatory, home now to over one thousand humans. We are a self-sufficient colony - well, ninety-nine percent, anyway - and the outermost in the Solar System."

"Any aliens?"

She smiled. "A few."

As she talked, we walked. Sometimes upstairs into lower gravity, sometimes downstairs. "Upstairs is mostly workspaces and recreation, downstairs is maintenance and services." And by downstairs she meant the two levels below quarters, a dark maze of pipes, ducts, machinery and electronics where the heavy gravity added to the sense of oppression.

"Power and data," she explained. "Waste reclamation. Air and water. Hull monitoring and repair."

We didn't stay more than a minute.

Minerva

was like a miniature city. There was a school, a hospital, whole segments dedicated to growing and processing food of various sorts - and there were many canteens, of course, which acted as much as social spaces as places to eat and drink.

"Are you hungry?" she asked as we passed through one.

"Famished. I haven't eaten in hours."

Once we were sitting, I asked, "So, are you a whore?"

It's always interesting to see people's reactions to that question. "No!" she cried out, startled, and blushed beneath my inquiring gaze.

"Why not?" I pressed. "You're certainly pretty enough."

"I -"

"There's nothing wrong with being a whore..."

"Well, no, but -"

The poor girl had turned quite red. I laughed, letting see that I was playing with her. She sighed with relief, and smiled. "That was mean."

"Yes, but I wasn't lying. You are pretty."

She blushed again, and looked away awkwardly. "I'm not into girls."

"Well, I'm not a girl."

She stared at me, disbelieving. "You're ... trans?"

"Non-binary."

"Huh." She continued staring at me like I was an alien. Admittedly a blue-skinned alien, but still. Eventually she broke the silence. "I have no idea what that is."

"That makes two of us."

"Is that like when, um, your..." She trailed off, making vague gestures with her hands.

"I have no idea what that means," I said, "but if you're asking to see my genitals, maybe we could go somewhere more private?" There was a large party of diners across the room from us.

"No, I -" She forced herself to stop, and glared at me. "You really are mean."

I reached over and took her hands, which she allowed reluctantly. "Do you ever get moods where your body is just itching to have sex? - and I don't mean 'make love'. It has nothing to do with romance. It's about answering your own fundamental need to be excited."

"I've, ah, never even had sex," she whispered.

"But surely you've touched yourself? You have had an orgasm, yes?"

She almost seemed to shrink inside herself, and she shook her head.

"Then we really do need to find somewhere private," I murmured. "Preferably somewhere you can feel relaxed."

Celeste was quiet for a long time, lost in thought. "There's one more place I need to show you," she said at last. "A secret place that you must promise never to speak of to outsiders."

"I promise."

The existence of ever more segments was a little overwhelming. We passed through one with a transparent hull, almost as if the two segments either side were connected by a slender bridge through the vacuum of space. Watching Neptune and the stars whirl constantly over my head was quite dizzying.

"There's Nereid, the source of most of our raw materials," she said, pointing. The icy surface of Nereid, one of Neptune's moons, glittered in the sunlight, and the surface was dotted with mines and refineries. "It's always surprising to come here and realise that

Minerva

is spinning," she added.

"Is this the secret?"

Celeste laughed. "No. That's in here..." She opened the airlock to admit me into the next segment, dazzlingly bright after the darkness of space.

I found myself facing a curtain of green, and it took me a moment to process what I was seeing, and feeling, and smelling. It was a curtain of ivy trailing from above, and beyond it was a forest, trees thrusting up from damp soil, branches tangling above me. The smell of fresh air...

"What?" I asked. "How?"

Celeste laughed, clearly delighted with my reaction. The air hummed as a bee flew past, and I followed its flight with astonishment. "You've got bees."

"Uh huh. Come on." She led me through the trees that thinned out to reveal flower beds and park land, a riot of colour and natural life. "Twenty metres in diameter, one hundred metres long, and ten years in the making," she said.

We skirted a pond whose curved surface baffled the eye, and followed the path beside a narrow stream that flowed from a waterfall at the far end.

A bright sun-light tube ran down

Minerva

's axis, and the air was warm. Here and there, people sat talking or lay sleeping, and some children played a game with a ball that seemed to defy physics.

"How do you like it?"

I could only nod, quite lost for words. It was like a fragment of Earth, and at the same time utterly alien. Beautiful.

At the far end, as the stream met the base of the waterfall and the path diverged into the surrounding thicket, Celeste stopped. "Do you swim?" she asked.

"No."

"Don't worry, it's not deep." She undressed and jumped naked into the pool, the water coming up only to her breasts. "Come on. Let's see your genitals, you mean not-a-girl."

It was all a bit surreal. A cylindrical garden in a madly rotating tube at the edge of Space, with bumblebees, and a naked nymph in a secluded pool beneath an impossible waterfall. Surreal and wonderful. I stripped quickly and waded in, my bare feet searching for purchase on the smooth rocks beneath the cool water.

Soon I stood facing Celeste who had hardly taken her eyes off me and my swollen nipples that jutted out provocatively. "Just don't pinch them," I warned, bringing her hands to my breasts.

"I wasn't -" she started, then gave me a puzzled look. "Why not?"

"Because I won't be able to keep my hands off you if you do."

Her eyes widened, and for a moment she seemed tempted to find out, her fingers brushing those tender tips a little more firmly than I liked... but then she eased off. "There's a place," she said, "a secret place that I've never seen, where I've never dared to go."

The hunger that never died was building swiftly in me in response to her teasing. I wanted to kiss her, but sensed no such desire from her. There was something suddenly playful about Celeste, though. "Who's seducing who, here?" I asked.

She laughed. "Follow me." She turned and swam to the waterfall, and disappeared through the curtain of water, leaving me to wade inelegantly after. Taking a deep breath, I plunged through... into a shallow cave.

Celeste reclined languorously on a wide, smooth shelf of rock that was wet but not slippery. I pulled myself awkwardly from the water to sit by her. "This is a place for lovers to meet," she said, "if they have nowhere else to go."

"Is that what we are? Lovers?"

"No." She shook her head. "This isn't love."

"What is it then?"

"I don't know. A beginning."

I lay down beside her and we kissed, a long, soft, exploratory kiss. "An excellent beginning," I agreed, and kissed her again, while my fingertips brushed the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. When she tensed for a moment, and tried to deny me, I whispered in her ear, "Trust me," and kissed my way down her cheek to her neck.

Her legs parted for me, but I resisted the opportunity she gave me. "I can give you pleasure," I murmured, "but it is your duty to learn the paths to pleasure, to know your body as well as you know

Minerva

, so you can guide lovers to your own secret cave..."

Celeste sniggered. "You sound like a character from a cheap romance."

I was too used to being hurt to let it show. "Maybe you're right. My mouth needs a better purpose." I kissed that seductive spot above and between her breasts, and trailed kisses down across her belly, coming at last to a sweetly fragrant pussy amidst a profusion of blonde curls.

"Exquisite," I said, breathing in the raw aroma of her obvious arousal. "But perhaps you're right. It would be wrong to defile this virgin flesh." I eased away and slipped into the water, escaping through the curtain of water even as she reached for me with a cry of protest.

Celeste was too swift in the water. She caught me before I reached the bank. "Wait," she said, her hand gripping my arm tightly. "Why would would you do that to me?"

There was anger in her eyes, but mostly frustration. "What you're feeling," I said, "I feel all the time. Every moment of the day. For you, this moment will pass."

"I don't want it to pass."

"But it will, and then what? What is it you want from me? If it's only a quick fuck, you can pay me for that whenever you want."

She recoiled, shocked. "No, I -" She fell silent, blushing guiltily, and made no attempt to stop me climbing from the pool and dressing.

"My life is full of people who only want me for sex," I said. "Thank you for the tour," I added, and waved goodbye.

*

Minerva

was still very much an active observatory, or at least home to a lot of passionate scientists who could argue for hours over subtle interpretations of data that meant almost nothing to me.

"The great thing about Neptune," Andy said as I wrapped my lips about his cock for the third time in three days, "is that you can actually fly down into the atmosphere - and I don't mean drones, I mean actual manned missions." It was quite a nice cock too, and Andy was pretty cute. "You can't do that on Jupiter," he continued. "The gravity's too high. And even if you could survive that, the magnetic fields would rip the instrumentation apart."

"Do you want to come in my mouth?"

"Nah, let's have a go of those tits." I wrapped my breasts about his hard shaft and he was soon thrusting between them with vigour and admiring the sight of his own cock. "You should get bigger anes."

"Are you offering to pay?"

He laughed. "I'm tempted, aye."

"So, can you actually land on Neptune? It's mostly ice under that blue, isn't it?"

He chuckled again, though his cock maintained its rhythm. "Ice, aye, if you mean a sea of liquid carbon and pressure so high it rains diamonds. Ah, I'm close. Give me your mouth again."

I obliged speedily, capturing the stream of cum that burst forth.

And then there was the aptly named Roger, who regularly rogered me. "There's millions of them," he said. "So cold and dark you can only tell they're there by the way they obscure the stars behind them."

"Do you like my new shoes?" I asked. They were currently either side of his head. The heels were an inch higher than before, and their colour was codable so I could match them to my skin.

He grunted indifferently, being more interested in the pussy he was hammering away at. "That's why the observatory's here. We have telescopes examining every inch of the sky, looking for occlusions and using parallax for positioning."

"I know what parallax is," I said. "It's when two men take a woman, ass and pussy in parallel, coming together..."

"Ohh, yes!" Alexandra pressed her ass back against my mouth. "Go deeper," she urged, and sighed with pleasure as my tongue snaked within her. "I wish my wife would do this."

I paused long enough to say, "Her loss, my gain."

"It's not just her. We're all squeamish. One look at the Gnafr and we act like frightened children."

I judged her ready. Climbing onto the bed behind her, I pressed my synthetic cock to that tight ring of muscle. "Gnafr?"

"Like a cross between a beetle and a great white shark. When it opens its carapace, it's like looking into a gaping mouth, lined with thousands of teeth and big enough to swallow you whole..." She shivered. "Stuff of nightmares."