Stephanie Jobsworth had taken up the captain's quarters as her bedroom. The room was larger than the other quarters, fitted with amenities like a coffee station and a desk. It felt like home, like the room someone in charge would sleep in. She sat alone at the room's luxurious conference table.
Earth was a distant memory. The Company, her employer, had seen fit to send her, along with several others, on a colonization mission to TBG-903224's Star, or 2Big as they'd come to call it. As usual, their orders were short on explanation, filled with corporate drivel. Effectively, they were exiled with no way of communicating back home.
The conference table was a place to negotiate, to be in power while also navigating change with whoever was seated with her there. It was where she could enter the new world that tugged at her, demanding she recognize and participate in it, on her own terms. She sighed, anxiety flooding her once again. For that she would need the help of the biologist and software engineer named Iris.
Iris seemed genuinely happy. When she'd initially woken aboard the Naglfar all those months ago she'd been distraught about their predicament, demanding to speak with the person in charge.
Stephanie had tried to be that for her. She'd donned her air of professional confidence that she had always used in the real offices on Earth when staff came to her with their problems. Her calm demeanour and gentle but firm tone had given Iris a little bit of Earth here on the Naglfar, preserving The Company for just a little longer.
But she had needed Iris too. She'd needed her to keep up the act of being the obedient office worker who did as she was told and stayed at her desk doing her job most of the time. Instead she'd spent an increasing amount of time exploring the caves on this planet until she'd finally confessed what she'd really been doing there.
By then Iris had changed. Stephanie imagined the Iris she'd first met might have come to her sheepishly, confessing her activities in the caves as though coming clean about an affair she'd been having. Instead the conversation had been about secret pleasures and friendships, as though Iris had found the meaning of life itself in the depths of those caverns -- if perpetual sex with aliens had been the meaning of life. And yet there had been something else not quite said that existed beneath all of it, that made it so much more relevant and important than casual sex -- whether with aliens or with humans -- ought to be.
At first Stephanie had treated the matter the way she might treat any other situation that involved sex and someone as reserved and betrayed as Iris had been when they'd first met. She'd demanded to know who these aliens were, planned out a means of disciplining them for their infractions. It hadn't taken long for her to realise the ridiculousness of such a venture. Iris had tried to introduce her to the aliens on a couple of occasions, but she'd been angry, eyeing her as Stephanie the HR manager, looking at her disapprovingly and trying to decide which disciplinary action to take while Iris sat on her haunches, pointing to things that slithered around in the river of ivory white slime that flowed through the cave.
But she never took any action. What could she have done?
Things grew worse when Iris began storing some of the creatures aboard the ship in tanks in her lab. Stephanie had demanded she remove them from the ship. At the time she'd told her it was cruel to keep them in the tanks, only half believing the explanation herself.
Iris had ignored her and Stephanie had let the matter rest. Iris was an important part of their little crew and if keeping her morale up required that she have access to her pets then so be it.
A few weeks later Stephanie had been strolling the corridors before bed when she'd passed Iris's laboratory. There had been little sound from beyond the door, save for strange rhythmic sounds like small breaths of air. When she'd realised what she'd been hearing she'd felt herself begin to blush and left in a hurry, feeling as though she'd heard something she shouldn't have.
Laying in her bed, she'd imagined Iris in her lab alone. What was wrong with having a little fun being restrained by numerous tentacles while pleasured? The answer, of course, was that a lot of things were wrong with it. Where had those tentacles been? What were the aliens' intentions? And yet, the fantasy was still there. Not for the first time she'd reached for her night table, forgetting she wasn't at home with her drawer filled with ribbed toys in the small dresser beside her bed. Her hand had landed disappointingly on top of the flat faux wood of the cheap Ikea night table someone had seen fit to put in this room before the Naglfar's launch.
She'd made more trips down the corridor outside Iris's lab, always carrying a tablet with her to take notes. After all, she'd needed to build a case for why Iris was a bad employee deserving of termination for what she was doing on Company property. But she'd always forget to write anything down as she'd listened. The tablet's only use had been as something to hold on to, to reinforce for herself that she wasn't actually spying, that it was okay for her to stand there, her ear pressed against the door as she squeezed her legs together, twisting them slightly around her wet lips.
