(Note #1: All comments and constructive criticisms are welcome and appreciated.

Note #2: All artwork in this Chapter was created by Faith Desky.

Note #3: And finally, thanks to volunteer Literotica editor TheNyxianLily for her help with editing.)

Calley awoke and looked over a chronometer on the room’s wall to see she had slept a little over six hours. Never being one to lie around in bed, she rose and went to take her robe out of the storage unit when she saw that another of Alezanna’s, a pale green one, had been moved to Calley’s side. She smiled to herself and made a mental note to thank her shipmate for the gift as soon as she saw her. She also wondered what gift she could get the Bellixan. Clothes were out of the question, as anything Calley bought the fashionable mechanic wouldn’t meet her high standards. A new garment stitcher was likewise a bad idea, as the young medic knew little about them overall. And she could already hear Alezanna’s voice explaining that you don’t buy an artist new tools, you let them choose the tools they use for themselves.

She continued to ponder the question as she grabbed the green robe and a pair of her own underwear of a matching shade. She made her way around the aft of the ship to the bathroom where she proceeded with her daily hygiene rituals. Being in the bathroom made her think about the previous day’s sex with Sal. She wondered if she would have time for more with him today but doubted it as his watch would probably be beginning too soon. Unbidden, her mind re-examined the events with him in the last few days. She tried to heed his advice not to think about their relationship too much, but there was something about it nagging at her. She replayed what happened in her head and the more she did, the more she realized she’d need to talk to him to figure out the puzzle bothering her.

Her shower done, she slipped on the robe and her underwear before making her way to the galley. She found Sal sitting in the nearby communications station reading something from the ship’s computer library. He was dressed in a closed black robe and a pair of green slippers. Calley had always noticed that while she and Alezanna usually went around the ship barefoot, Sal almost always wore slippers on the cold deckplates. It was the one way he was different than most spacers she’d encountered in her travels. “Good morning,” she told him as she went to him and gave him a quick kiss.

“Good afternoon,” he replied. Neither was referring to any particular time of day, as the Ravenfang was in deep space with no planetary revolution to reference. Spacers usually greeted each other by referencing how far away their duty shift on the ship’s watch was. Since Sal’s was coming up sooner than Calley’s, it was her morning, his afternoon and Alezanna’s evening.

“What’s our status?” she asked him as she went to the galley’s shelves and started putting together her breakfast.

“Normal,” he said before correcting himself. “Well, about as normal as it gets for this run. We got the ship pointed in the right direction and sent out our last zaireon pulse right after you went to bed. Alez took the watch and is looking over the data. She hasn’t reported any problems so we should be able to get underway again soon.”

As she poured herself some vitamilk, Calley asked, “When you say ‘our last pulse’, do you mean it as our most recent or that we should get to Rangxu after this jump?”

“Based on how far we’ve come so far, I think this’ll be our last puddle jump.”

“One way or another.”

Sal rolled his eyes as he told her, “Oh Gods, not you too! Bad enough I have one pessimist on my ship. The last thing I need is another one.”

“Sorry,” she said as she grabbed a citrus fruit out of the galley’s refrigeration unit. “I guess Alezanna’s rubbing off on me after all this time.” She hadn’t meant it as a double entendre, but after what the two women had gotten up to the day before, she realized it was.

As if reading her mind, Sal commented, “Not an unpleasant thing, in my experience.” He then looked at her examining the galley’s shelves for what to add to her meal and said, “Leave some room. Alezanna‘s watch’ll be over soon and I was gonna make some sandwiches for the three of us.”

“Okay,” Calley said as she took a seat at one of the galley’s two tables and started peeling the skin of her synthfruit. “I’ll be glad when this run’ll be over. Not just ‘cause we’ll be safe at last, but, I guess also because we’ll have a better idea how to move forward with things.”

Collondo closed whatever file he’d been reading and turned his attention to her completely. “Are you talking about the repairs, setting up the next run or something more personal?”

The question caught the medic by surprise and she answered, “I guess all three, honestly. The ship’s usual business I trust you to handle. The repairs, Alez and I can tackle. Probably more her than me. I’ll fix up communications and help out where I can, but some of the other systems are gonna be too tough for me.”

“Don’t worry about it. I can pitch in as well. Haven’t had much call to use my mech skills since Alez came aboard, but I used to do my part to keep the ship up and running. I know my way around a set of tools, believe me. We’ll all be busy for a while.”

“At least we can sync up our sleep schedules. That’ll be nice. Maybe even fun,” she added suggestively. She’d enjoyed her first night in bed with both her shipmates at the same time and was looking forward to more.

“These are gonna be long days, Calley. Getting this wreck fixed up is gonna take a lot of effort, time and starcred. After a hard day of haggling with dealers over parts, welding the hull back together and dealing with half of our systems being damaged, I don’t think I’ll be up for any bedroom shenanigans.”

“And I predict that when you slide into bed with two naked women, you’ll find energy reserves you didn’t know you had. If you’re slow to get started, Alez and I can always take care of each other until you get in the right mood. Worse comes to worse, I can put together some pills in the medbay to help you out.”

“Gods almighty!” Sal declared as he shook his head. “You’re becoming obsessed! What kind of monster have we unleashed on this poor galaxy?”

“One that’s hungry for flesh!” Calley growled in an exaggerated gravelly tone. “And fruit!” she added as she took a big bite out of her citrus and loudly chewed it with her mouth open to emphasize her bestial nature.

Sal burst out laughing at her act and cautioned her, “Be careful. You keep that up, I’ll have to put you on a leash!”

The young woman took another bite of the citrus and arched an eyebrow at him suggestively.

“Not like that, you crazy girl! Talking to you today is like navigating a field of plasma mines!”

“I can’t help it,” she said after swallowing the citrus in her mouth. “It’s been a crazy couple of days and I’m still getting my bearings. But y’know, leashes and all that stuff brings up something I wanted to ask you about.”

Sal raised an eyebrow of his own as he told her, “Well, that opening makes me nervous, but the floor is yours, Calley. Ask away.”

She finished off the rest of her vitamilk and left the table, taking the last of her citrus with her and splitting it into two slender halves. She moved to where the captain was sitting, trying to do it seductively as Alezanna might. Sal smiled at her as she approached, though she wasn’t sure if he was charmed or amused. Regardless, she sat on his lap and casually slipped half of the remaining food in her mouth while putting the other half in his. As they both chewed it she put her left arm around the spacer’s neck and reached up to stroke his hair. She chose her next words carefully and spoke them a little slower than her normal pace. Their conversation thus far had been fairly casual but she was about to make it more serious.

“Yesterday,” the Gynapsi began, “in the hot tub, you told me I didn’t need to call you ‘Master’ because you didn’t need to have that kind of relationship with me. Okay, that’s fine. But the day before, in the cockpit, you were kinda acting like my master. Ordering me around, getting me to do and say things I didn’t wanna. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve to be treated like that. You warned me you were gonna do it and I agreed to most of the punishment. But wasn’t that you being the Master? Or was it you being the captain dealing with a bad crewmember?”

He thought about it for a few moments before answering. When he did, his words were careful and deliberate. Calley was happy to see he was not dealing with the subject frivolously. She had asked him the question in all seriousness, and he was answering in kind, slowly and carefully.

“That’s a very good question, dear. My first reaction when I realized you’d been spying on Alez and me probably would have been anger. But at the time, we had to see what was happening to the ship and then figure out how much trouble we were in. So we all kinda forgot about the peeping situation to deal with the job at hand.”

“You did,” she corrected him. “You and Alezanna. Me, I had problems getting focused at first.”

“I noticed. But anyway, I shelved the whole issue because we were all needed to get the ship moving again. Not the time to get upset and confine you to your quarters or anything like that. So we all got busy and did what we had to do. After your spacewalk and we got the zaireon pulse fired off, we suddenly had nothing to do so that was when we could deal with the voyeurism issue. But by then, I was kinda tired and not in the mood to blow up at you. Worse, I could see you were beating yourself up about everything way worse than I thought you deserved. What kind of asshole piles on when a girl’s kicking herself like that? Not me, I can tell ya. That got rid of any anger I had left. So I decided I needed to take another tack with you entirely.”

“Honestly, I kinda wished, some times in there, that you’d just get mad and yell at me. I could’ve handled that easier than what you made me admit.”

“I know. That’s exactly why I made you admit it. Sometimes, a guilty person is made to admit what they did so they can understand the punishment they’re about to get. But in your case, the admission was the punishment. So, yeah, to answer your question, that was me being the captain dealing out discipline to an officer. Maybe not the sort of discipline I saw dished out when I was in the militia, but the sort that seemed right for that moment.”

“Oh, okay,” Calley acknowledged his explanation. She’d gotten the answer she’d requested, and should have been satisfied with it. But then why did she feel disappointed, she wondered. She wanted something more, but didn’t know what it was.

Sal seemed to have more he needed to say too. “But you know…” he said before he let his words trail off.

“Yes?” the medtech prompted him, grateful that he was going to continue. She wondered if he was realizing some truths about that night or trying to articulate what he already knew. Either way, she was happy he might give her whatever new explanation might satisfy her.

“After I made you admit what you did,” Collondo finally continued on, “it could have stopped there. The captain side of me would have been satisfied. You’d crossed a line, I punished you by making you own up to it, end of story. But then, when I made you look at why you’d done it, I was crossing a line of my own. In the moment, I’d have said I was still being the captain, but I think the captain… receded for a while. And somebody else stepped up. Not the Master, I don’t think. Just me. Just Sal. I wanted to know why you’d done what you’d done and since I was already pushing you past your boundaries, well, I figured a little more pushing wouldn’t hurt. And then you said you were attracted to me. Well, to Alez and I at first, but I made you admit you fantasized about me solo too, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Calley confirmed. She then realized he might have asked the question rhetorically.

Either way, he continued on. “Alez said that was when she allowed herself to think about you as a possible lover. Same goes for me. I knew Alez would wanna take you to bed eventually, and again, same as me. But I also realized we had a huge problem. You didn’t see yourself as a potential lover. You’d never make the first move to seduce either of us, and weren’t ready to accept that move if it came from one of us. So I had to get you to a place where you could see that you could be desirable.”

“By ordering me to strip down?” the young spacer asked incredulously.

“Well, yes,” the older one answered sheepishly. “See, I thought you were beautiful. Still do, incidentally. But you didn’t see yourself that way. So I made a conscious effort to try to make you see yourself as I saw you. I’d already seen you naked before so—”

“Wait a second,” she interrupted him. “When did you see me naked?”

“A couple of sub-cycles after you came aboard. Alez was on watch and listening to that Bellixan opera music she likes. I can’t stand that shit so I was in this very seat with the lights out looking up some info on where we were heading. Not trying to set up a run or anything, ‘cause then I probably wouldn’t have noticed you. You came out of your stateroom without a stitch of clothing on. By the time I noticed you, you’d already passed me by on the way to the head. A couple minutes later, you passed by again but this time I got a better look at you. You looked half-asleep so I didn’t say anything ‘cause I figured you’d be embarrassed. Anyway, you went back to your room and, I assume, back to sleep.”

“But in the cockpit, you said I had to strip down ‘cause I’d seen you naked and we had to even things out.”

“I did. Now in my defence, you’d said you’d watched Alez and I make love a bunch of times, whereas I’d only seen you that one time. And even then, I didn’t even see both your boobs. Just the left one when you were going back to your bed. And everybody knows it doesn’t count unless you see the set.”

Calley was about to ask what “it” was supposed to count towards but she realized that her lover was being flippant. So she steered the conversation back to the eventful confrontation in the cockpit by saying, “I just thought you were ordering me to strip ‘cause… well, honestly, I couldn’t figure out why you were interested.”

Sal’s tone turned serious again as he told her, “I was trying to empower you, Calley. It was a strange and, as I look back at it now, rather blunt way to do it. I think I could be accused of abusing my authority over you. But empowerment was what I was going for. And I use the word “empower” very deliberately here. When someone is attracted to you, you have a power over them. How you use it is up to you. You can just keep it light, maybe flirt a little or you can break their heart. It’s your decision. That’s a power you can have, Calley. But I couldn’t make you see it. So then I told you to take off my pants so you could see the effect your body had on me. And you finally saw it, meaning the effect, not my cock, but I guess my cock too. But that finally got the point across, thank the Gods. It was about the only thing I could think of, and I almost didn’t ask you to do it ‘cause I was afraid it might freak you out.”

“It almost did. If you’d just pulled it out yourself, I probably would’ve panicked, I think. But the way you told me to do it, undoing your pants myself, that gave me a few seconds to get ready. So you handled it the right way. And now that I think about it, I guess I can say that about the whole scene in the cockpit overall. And if you crossed a line, well, I guess I can forgive you.”

A silence descended on the two. It could have been a time for them to embrace but neither felt that would be right. Something was still nagging at Calley, and Sal could tell. Her brow furrowed in thought as she replayed the events of that fateful scene again. He’d just remembered them himself and cleared up his motivations. She felt she needed to do the same. And as she did, she found the truth that she was denying, the clarity she was seeking. Once she found it, she returned to the present to find Sal looking at her intently. He was waiting for her to speak so she could share whatever it was she had just found.

“Now that I think about it too,” she began, “I have to admit something. When you made me strip, I was embarrassed, ashamed even. But, also… well, you had to see my panties were wet too, right?”

“Yeah, I noticed. I didn’t think too much of it. I’d never seen a naked Gynapsi before that one time so I wasn’t sure if that was just a quirk of your species or not. Like how Fakarrans all have inverted nipples, Palutans are all hairless or Daian women start lactating when they reach puberty and never stop. Or so I heard. I never met any Daians.”

“No, it’s true. I had a couple of Daian women co-workers when I served on a starliner. They had to drain their breast milk every morning.” Her voice dropped to a near whisper as she continued. Despite the fact that no one was in the room with them, she couldn’t help but treat the subject surreptitiously. “But no, my panties were wet for the normal reason a woman gets like that. You ordering me around, telling me what to do… Sal, I was turned on. I couldn’t admit it to myself right then and there. But now, I can. And since we’re going over it again, it’s only fair that I be as honest with you as you were with me a minute ago.”

She took a deep breath before continuing a little hesitantly. “Do you think… maybe… you could be like that again? In charge, I mean. Ordering me around. Not all the time. And not when Alez is with us too. But sometime, when it’s just you and me… we could…”

Sal lowered his voice to match her pitch. “Yeah, we could. We’ll have to take it slow at first. Figure out what is and isn’t okay. Make sure we establish firm boundaries. Definitely use a safe word. But yeah, I’d be happy to help you explore that side of yourself.”

She gave him a long kiss in gratitude. Its length gave her time to do a quick check on her feelings and she finally found herself content. She no longer felt anything eating away at her. It seemed like all her questions about that night, whether they were directed at Sal or herself, had finally been answered.

When the kiss ended and the two caught their breath, Sal’s voice returned to its normal pitch as he stated, “But just to be clear: This exploration isn’t happening today. This is the sort of thing we’ll have to take our time with. And since it’ll be my turn on watch soon, time is exactly the thing we don’t have right now. Unless you wanna go explain to Alezanna why she has to pull two shifts on watch.”

Calley let out a chuckle and told him, her own voice going back to normal as well, “No, I’m not sure she’d be too happy to do that. And I don’t mind waiting a bit. The sex we’ve had so far has been great as it is. I’m more than happy to do more of that. Lots more.” With this in her mind, she suddenly thought of something new. “Hey,” she asked him, “can you do sixty-nines?”

“Oh sure, used to do ‘em all the time when I was married. Not so much since Alez and I got together though.”

“Yeah, she told me she had a problem with ‘em. But if you’re okay with ‘em, then that’s something else I wanna try out.”

“Fine by me,” he acquiesced with no resistance. He glanced at the chronometer on the comm station’s display and suggested, “Let’s get to the bed then.”

“No, not yet. First, I wanna make sure I can handle my end of the fun.” With that, she shifted herself off him onto her feet. Standing next to him, her hands quickly undid the knot of his sash. She opened his robe to find him wearing a pair of black boxer shorts. She reached for both its sides and pulled the waistband down.

As he raised his posterior up to allow her to remove the underwear, he asked her, “You really wanna do this here?”

“It’s as good a place as any.” She put her left hand on his hip and pushed it slightly to the side. He got the message and turned the chair to the side so that he was facing her. She noted his penis was at full length, though not quite at the angle she thought would indicate full hardness.

“Before you get started,” Sal said, “do you mind taking off your robe?”

“Why? Once I kneel down, you’re not gonna see much from that angle.”

“It’s not about what I can see. I’ll probably close my eyes after a while anyway. It’s about knowing you’re naked. It makes the blowjob mean more.”

“If you say so.” The copper-haired spacer untied her own robe’s sash and shrugged the garment off. It fell to the floor, leaving her standing in just her underwear. With her breasts at the level of his eyes, she saw Sal’s gaze was drawn to them. “Make sure you get a good look,” she told him. “I wouldn’t want it not to count.”

With that, she knelt down on the spot where her robe had fallen and took his phallus in her right hand. She’d held it a little on the night he took her virginity, but her attention had been distracted then. This was her first time really playing with it for a while. She wrapped her right hand around the skin near its base and began stroking it. Sal went quiet as she moved the skin up and down the organ. Her eyes were on his foreskin, which would reveal some of his glans when she pulled the skin back and re-envelop it when she pulled the foreskin forward again. It’s like a dirty game of peek-a-boo, she thought to herself.  This brought a smile to her face but she didn’t let it linger. From what she’d seen in the holo-vids, she didn’t think a man would appreciate jokes about his penis.

She listened to Sal to see if he’d give her a hint on how to proceed. Maybe not in words, as she’d already noted how Sal didn’t seem like a vocal lover. She hoped his breathing might shift or maybe he’d let out a moan or a sigh, but no such direction came from him. She looked up at him and found he’d already closed his eyes, as he had predicted he would. Well, that was quick, she thought. She entertained the idea of simply asking him out loud what to do but decided not to. Not out of shyness but out of boldness. She wanted to see if she could satisfy him without instruction. After all, he’d already brought her to several orgasms in the last few days without asking her what to do and she wanted to do the same.

She let go of his phallus for an instant to adjust her grip. She noticed the angle showed he was already more excited then when she’d started. She remembered how he’d told her that a penis was always honest and saw he was right. She grabbed it again, closer to the head this time, and pulled the foreskin back. His purple glans came out fully, the first time she’d seen it clearly as, when he’d taken her virginity, she hadn’t been able to get a good look at it. Even in the subdued lighting of the ship’s common area, she could see the cockhead was quite darker than the shaft it was attached to. She was also glad to see it seemed no dirtier. As a medtech, she knew there was no reason a healthy man would have a dirty helmet on his tool but she was still relieved.

Calley moved her head forward and gave the tip a quick lick. She didn’t know what his cock would taste like and found it had no taste at all. She explored the cockhead further with her tongue and confirmed the lack of taste. She also noted that Sal’s breathing didn’t seem to change. It seemed she would have to do more than this to get him off. It was when she tongued the widest circumference of the glans, right before it connected to the shaft, that she felt Sal twitch a little. Hello, what’s this? she asked herself as she continued to run her tongue along the bell-end. The Gynapsi was thrilled to find she had discovered a new way to please her man. She made a mental note that, going forward, she would make sure to give his crown all the attention he could handle.

Emboldened, the young woman explored more of his penis with her tongue. When it touched his frenulum, where his foreskin was anchored to his cockhead, Sal moaned aloud. Calley noted this and licked the underside of his shaft, which elicited a series of sighs from him. She was very pleased with herself as she felt she was making good progress at finding what he liked. She continued to explore and found he was less responsive to the side and top of his shaft being licked. When her tongue reached his scrotum, she had to navigate carefully through the hairs around it. Again, he didn’t seem to have much of a response. Remembering something she saw in a porn vid she’d seen long ago, she took one of his testicles into her mouth and gently sucked on it. It made him stiffen up somewhat but as she looked up at him, he seemed less pleased and more concerned. She decided not to linger on his ball sac.

Having scouted her area of interest, Calley decided on a plan of action. She moved back up to his cockhead and enveloped it in her mouth. She was careful not to graze his organ with her teeth. Instead, she made a ring with her lips and moved them across the crown of his glans. As she did so, she noticed something else that surprised her. Not only did Sal’s penis not have any taste, it had no smell either. When she’d explored Alezanna’s vagina with her tongue, Calley had inhaled her companion’s musky scent. But her nose, now mere inches from his pubic hairs, detected no scent coming from the man. Making love to a man, she realized, did not require as many senses as making love to a woman.

Her hearing, however, was quite involved in what was going on. It was that sense that was guiding her, more than sight, taste or touch, through her first experience with fellatio. She was pumping her fist from the middle to the base of Sal’s shaft. She could tell this was pleasing him by the way his breathing grew louder. The copper-haired spacer was concentrating on keeping her mouth sealed around the bell-end of his cockhead and heard herself noisily gulping down the saliva that was accumulating in her mouth. When she did so, she heard Sal catch his breath. The slight suction caused by her swallowing was pleasing him even further, she realized.

As she began carefully applying more suction to his glans, she was rewarded with little yelps and sharp intakes of breath from her lover. They were music to her ears. She felt a surge of pride as she revelled in knowing she was doing well. Not only was pleasing her man nourishing her soul, it was exciting her as well. Her left hand dove into her underwear to begin pleasuring herself. If she could please herself while bringing him to orgasm, she reasoned, then surely she could get him off while he did the same to her when they tried sixty-nining in the future.

Calley worked herself into a rhythm that seemed to please the both of them. She moved the fingers of her left hand in time with the pumping motion of her right. She also worked her tongue along the bottom of Sal’s cock, especially the frenulum. His sounds and head movements were getting more intense, but Calley failed to notice. Her attention was split between keeping up the blowjob and the pleasurable feelings emanating from what she was doing to herself. As a medtech, she should have realized the way his pre-cum was leaking out of the urethra indicated how close his orgasm was. Perhaps, had her focus been directed solely on the man she was fellating, she might have been prepared for it. But what happened next took her completely by surprise.

With an exhaled “Ahhh”, Sal ejaculated. The first jet took up what little room in her mouth that wasn’t occupied by his penis. Its sudden appearance shocked her so much, both her hands immediately stopped moving. Unfortunately, Collondo’s base instinct took over and he thrust his pelvis forward. Calley’s lips were still wrapped tight around his cock and when he pulled back, it served to stimulate a second jet of sperm to leap into the little remaining space in her mouth. The young woman’s shock had dissipated when he’d thrust into her mouth as she didn’t like how it felt. But it also made her realize she had to either spit out his cum or swallow it. With a loud choking sound, she forced her throat muscles to accept this new offering. She finally found something in this encounter that she could taste, finding his liquid surprisingly salty.

As she took in his ejaculate, she started pumping his cock again with much greater speed to force the last of it out. She also resumed strumming her own privates as the rush of emotion she was feeling had brought her much closer to her own climax. Just as she had before, she performed both actions at the same speed. Sal came to his senses as he felt the Gynapsi still quickly stroking him despite him being spent for the moment. He was about to tell her to stop when he realized she was still worked up and had a great view of Calley’s face as she got herself off. Her body shook as the waves of pleasure flowed through her. But as always, the feeling left before it had worn out its welcome and Calley calmed down. Opening her eyes, she saw her lover looking down at her with a smile on his face.

“You dirty girl!” he told her as he reached down and took her right hand in his left. He helped her get to her feet and she immediately returned to her former seat on his lap. “You wonderful, beautiful, dirty girl. Pulling double duty, were we?”

“Why should you be the only one having fun?” she asked rhetorically. His answer was to pull her face in close for a long, open-mouthed kiss. She was a little surprised he was kissing her as she’d just had his sperm in her mouth. But it didn’t seem to bother him one bit, which pleased her. The Gods, it seemed, had blessed her with a lover free of hang-ups.

They continued kissing for a few minutes but neither was working themselves up. They both knew their alone time was running out and soon Calley rose and went to the galley to wash her hands in its sink. Sal brought her robe and the two made sandwiches for themselves and their fellow crewmember in the cockpit. As they were finishing up, Alezanna’s voice rang out over the Ravenfang’s intercom system announcing there was only a few minutes left before the ship’s next scheduled jump.

Calley and Sal made their way to the cockpit where Alezanna, dressed in a white robe, ceded the pilot’s station to Sal. Before she could sit in her usual seat, the Bellixan’s eyes fell upon Calley. “I just gave you that robe and already it’s dirty?” she asked her friend.

“Oh, yeah,” the medtech said with some embarrassment. “Thanks for the gift. But I kinda dropped it on the floor earlier.

“It looks better on you than it does on me anyway. When it’s clean, that is. The colour matches your eyes. But if you’re going to fool around with Sal, the least you can do is hang up what you’re wearing. The armoire is right next to the bed, after all.”

“We weren’t in the quarters. We were at the comm station,” Calley explained without a hint of shame or remorse. While she felt bad for dirtying up her robe and Alezanna noticing, she was very comfortable with everything else she’d done since waking up that day.

“Ugh!” the taller woman said with disgust. “That’s far too close to the galley for my tastes. We eat there, you degenerates!”

“You didn’t seem so bothered that time after we stopped on Yickson,” Sal said as he started flipping switches to get the Hi-Vel engines ready.

“A momentary lapse in judgement,” Alezanna told him. “And not the most comfortable of our encounters.” She was about to pick up her own sandwich when she paused and asked her shipmates, “Did you two at least wash your hands before you made this?”. Sal and Calley burst out laughing at the question and the mechtech joined in.

Sal activated the engines and once again the view outside the cockpit shifted as the Hi-Vels propelled the Ravenfang at amazing speed. With the ship underway, the captain turned his attention back to his crewmates. “Couldn’t have been as bad as the time we did it on the ceiling,” he ventured.

Calley shot an inquisitive look between Sal and Alezanna. The latter explained, “It was soon after Sal and I became a couple. I hadn’t finished fixing up everything that had been damaged by that pulse mine we’d set off on Halaak. I’d told Sal we were getting underway too soon but honestly, nobody aboard wanted to linger there too long after what had happened. Anyway, we’d just jumped out of the system when the gravity compensators went haywire. It was Goppu’s watch so Sal was available to help me get them fixed. But before I finished, Sal got frisky and the next thing I knew, the two of us had bounced off every surface of the reactor room as we joined the Zero-G club.”

“You joined the club,” Sal corrected her. “I was already a member.”

“How?” the dark-haired beauty asked him. “You told me you’d never brought a woman aboard the ship before I came along.”

“I hadn’t. Not to sleep with, anyway. But some brothels have zero-G rooms. Garroll, the mechanic I had before you, dared me to use one of ‘em one night. So I did. In my defence, I was rather cataclysmically drunk at the time.”

The three shared another laugh at that. The conversation soon drifted into other reminiscences of silly things the two older spacers had done with previous lovers or crewmates. Calley didn’t have many stories of her own to contribute, but was happy to listen to Sal and Alezanna’s tall tales. Despite the precariousness of the crew’s situation, flying a damaged ship on a shaky course, the cockpit was filled with gaiety and laughter. And though it was Sal’s turn on watch, neither of the women was in any great hurry to leave the cockpit. All were anxious to see the end of this disastrous run, too anxious to rest or be distracted by other activities. Even Calley’s newly-discovered interest in carnal pleasures lay dormant for the moment. It never occurred to her that a quick snuggle with her Bellixan crewmate might be a very pleasant way to pass some time.

Instead, all three spacers stayed in the cockpit and talked about whatever subject popped up. After about four hours had passed, even Alezanna started to speak of their arrival as being fairly inevitable. She then proceeded to re-align the ship’s meagre sensor package to a more standard configuration. Assuming they ended up in the Rangxu system, they’d need to navigate around the planet’s orbital traffic. Calley likewise prepared the communication systems to be active again after a few days of being idle.

As the hours away from their destination turned to minutes, the crew’s anticipation grew by leaps and bounds. By now, it was clear the nav info had checked out. They would reach wherever it was they were going. It was now a matter of seeing if they’d end up where they were supposed to be. In the final few minutes of their puddle jump, the three spacers fell silent and the only sound in the cockpit came from the instruments. As the chronometer ticked away the last few seconds, Sal broke the silence with, “Now we get to see if I’m as good a navigator as I think I am.”

With that, a chime sounded from the chronometer and Sal shut down the Hi-Vel engines. The view from outside the cockpit’s canopy changed and a planet appeared in the distance. The crew all held their breath as they realized it didn’t look at all like a standard terraformed world. But then the sounds of interspace chatter erupted from Alezanna’s communications screens. Wherever they were, there were people around.

The Bellixan ignored the transmissions and studied the readings from the sensor screens. She quickly checked data against the library computer as her companions eagerly awaited her verdict. Finally, she announced, “We’re on the far side of it, but my friends, welcome to the Rangxu system.”

NEXT CHAPTER: An old friend, some new deals.