PART 2: THE SPREAD
The others were waiting for her when Amanda arrived at the left bulkhead, straightening her hair as she came up the corridor.
'What kept you?' A trim, black-haired helm op as tight-lipped
below
the belt as she was
above
it asked, her arms crossed and her hips cocked. Amanda flipped her the bird and fingerprinted the door pad. With a blip, the access hatch status light flipped to green, and the group entered, every one of them ignorant of the helm op's attitude except for the op herself. Amanda must have been the last one back, because the lockdown sequence ended and the bulkheads retracted, allowing the groups behind bulkhead doors on both sides onto the bridge. She scowled at Amanda's backside and followed them in.
'Alright people,' Flint said, meeting them on the deck behind her newly released captain's chair, looking the same as she had done hours earlier, having only needed to sit and command things while her crew investigated the ship's potential threat for her. 'Let's hear it. Is this rust-bucket on the brink or do we have a critter on our hands?'
'I don't know Rooms, it feels off. We scan the ship, find nothing, and yet when was the last time we had a habitation breach alert?' A tall, blonde-haired male named Wes Orbison said. Rooms nodded.
'I tend to agree with that, Orbison.' She said.
'I can't believe this, we're literally at our destination and we're being held back from port,' the snippy little helm op said. Her name was Kelsie Chambers, and she was curt and officious and very
by-the-books.
She was also full of dust and cobwebs, but
that
had nothing to do with her posting on a lonely cargo ship and everything to do with the thorn she could be. She was short-tempered and quick to burst and hardly an attractive bed-mate because of it. Amanda wasn't sure she'd even had sex yet, and she was only half joking about the thought.
'You know the rules, we let an undocumented biological onto a new planet, we could destroy the whole ecosystem. Docking is prohibited anywhere unless the scans are clean for 72 hours.'
'So that's it, we wait it out up here and dock in three days,' the weapons operator said, a muscular black man unoriginally named Mike Black said, sitting coolly on the edge of a console that certainly wasn't supposed to have ass on it, period. Rooms ignored his posture -- she was good like that.
'That's the only plan we can go with, we have no other choice. In the meantime, we do six-hourly sweeps every day until this blip is just that on the radar, and live off the dog food. Got it?' Groans emanated from five mouths, but no one disagreed.
'Rays? Planning on sight-seeing somewhere on
this
ship anytime soon, or are you already on shore leave?' Rooms said dryly to Amanda, who was staring blankly out through the huge curving front shielding at the planet below. She blinked and seemed to force herself to pay attention, scratching her leg idly with one hand.
'Uh, yeah -- no, that makes perfect sense. I'm sure we'll be down there in no time.' Rooms raised her eyebrow at her quizzically but said nothing and dismissed the crew.
Jogging to catch up to her, Amanda called out to Kelsie as they left the bridge. 'Hey!' She said. Kelsie turned briskly to her, her razor-straight hair flicking as if it were a bunch of little blades. She glared through her beady black eyes at the taller woman.
'What?'
Amanda smiled, unabashed.
'I'm sorry I was so rude to you before. I want to make it up to you -- come back to my bunk?' Due to the tiny, disconnect-able nature of the habitable area on the ship, the crew's "rooms" were more like walk-in lockers on their sides, thin and built into the space between bulkheads, they existed anywhere a free spot could be found -- in a wall, under an uneven room or structure, or in the case of the captain, in the spare cavity above the bridge. The crew was literally the final afterthought in the construction of the ship; but then, that's what you got for a cargo-first lowest-bidder ship building contract. Because of this, Amanda's 'bunk' as they called them was really just a wall cavity with a thin, claustrophobic wireframe bed and a storage box riveted into the ceiling above it. She'd had to hang her sheets up on two nails she'd welded to the walls on either side of the door for some privacy to change behind, until she'd given up trying and just used a lot of colorful language to berate anyone who walked in on her while she was dressing or undressing. Kelsie raised an eyebrow and cocked her hip, looking for all the world like a mother about to scald a child who had stolen her no doubt shitty little offspring's lunch or something.
Her mouth forced closed by Amanda's hand, Kelsie struggled under the bigger girl's weight, but Amanda had got the jump on her and she was at a disadvantage. She'd just landed on her ass on Amanda's bed after being "bumped" to fall there, when the girl had come down on her hard, and now she was pinned, panting through her nose as she tried to fight. But she was small and petite and Amanda was larger and more driven, and her free hand mercilessly fingered her pants as it tried to unbutton them. She got it and Amanda grinned evilly as she unceremoniously ripped them down as far as she could. Then, she wiggled herself up the girl's body, straddling her, and forced her own pants, which she'd undone while Kelsie had been distracted, down until her womanhood was revealed. Cramming herself against Kelsie's body, Amanda leaned down over her body and breathed into the immobilized woman's ear.
