Scouts (12 page)

When I opened my eyes, she had already retrieved a warm cloth and was cleaning me off. “Not bad for your first time at this. Do you understand what it is you need to do?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“I’m sure you’ll get it. Would it help if I brought someone in to demonstrate?”

I rolled my eyes. That was the last thing I needed. “No, that won’t be necessary.”

“This is a challenging technique for some folks, but everyone eventually gets it.”

I sat up and took the cloth to get the cum out of my navel. Her tone was really starting to get to me. “When we get out there, on our ship, we’re going to be partners, right? I mean, you’re the captain of the ship, but the whole reason I’m going through all this is so I can fulfill my responsibilities.”

“Of course! And I’m sure you’ll do just fine.”

“And so am I.” I stood up and crossed my arms, trying not to look petulant. “I know I’m having a little trouble fitting into the Scout culture, but I am getting tired of being treated like a child.”

She sat back, kneeling, and regarded me with pursed lips. “That’s a bit of an ironic thing to say right after wiping semen off your belly. I certainly wouldn’t be teaching a child the things I am teaching you.”

I tried to keep my voice level. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“The constant instructions to only orgasm when you tell me to. I know that rule. I know why I have it. I haven’t broken it. You don’t need to keep repeating it.”

She nodded curtly. “All right, that’s fair.”

“That’s not all, either. You’re always right there, right on top of me. I need some time to myself.”

“When we’re out on a mission, we’re not going to have that luxury,” she observed. “The ship is a pretty small space. If you can’t handle having me this close here, the ship will be even worse.”

“It’s not that I can’t handle it. It’s that I feel like you’re always watching me, evaluating me, judging me. Shouldn’t you be my friend, rather than trying to be my . . .” I stopped myself. I didn’t want to say the word; it was too much, too weird, too wrong.

“It’s my responsibility to make sure you learn what you’re supposed to learn, Challers.”

I sighed. She just didn’t get it.

She stood and pulled off her shirt. “While we wait for you to recover, let’s review yesterday’s touch techniques, just on my breasts this time.”

And that pretty much ended the conversation.

It was several days before I could make the mysterious rendezvous. For one reason or another, sometimes involving a bedtime orgasm, I found myself falling asleep before I could sneak away.

The time certainly wasn’t wasted. My classes went well, even Astronavigation. The way Shirley taught math was almost enough for me to forgive everything else. I stopped seeing mathematics as an obstacle between me and the fun part, and found the beauty in it, all by itself. Not only that, Shirley took a genuine delight in my success, as well. For the first time, I actually understood the math—really got it, rather than just memorizing the rules for pushing numbers and letters around on a page.

The concept we were working on, synchronization schema, was interesting even without the math. When a ship uses an orgone drive, it’s basically breaking down the fabric of the universe on a submicroscopic scale. The jump drives used by Scout ships use a highly focused spacewarp to “weave” the threads of local space into the fabric at the destination, and then travel along them to get there. After the jump, the threads return to their resting state.

In order for the jump to work properly, the vibrations in those threads have to be synchronized, and that’s where the math comes in. Computers handle it in practice, of course, but in order to understand how to operate the computers most efficiently, it’s good to know the math.

In History class, I was given my first research assignment. Using the tablet and the sources available to me through it, my job was to learn everything I could about the newgens, and their impact on the early Galactic Empire. My curiosity had already been peaked about these people, so I spent my free hours diving into the subject.

I learned that the gentank technology actually came before the orgone drives, so there were already newgens in the galaxy before the great scattering. Chevalier newgens were created in an attempt to construct a society free of gender discrimination by simply not having separate genders. Ovor newgens, who were a kind of egg-laying human, were intended to give women direct control of their fertility. There were dozens of others: people with four arms; people with armored, radiation-proof skin; people who only grew to a meter tall.

At the time of the scattering, each type of newgen was confined to one habitat, so when they built their warp drives and steered themselves out into the void, they brought all of the members of their type to one place in the galaxy to settle. Puregens, on the other hand, could be found all over. About half of the human stations could be found in the Old Stars, with a smaller number in the Coreward Reach and the Rimward Reach. Newgens were mostly moving coreward, where puregens moved mostly rimward.

For a long time after the scattering, the stations were fairly isolated from each other and developed different cultures and traditions. I particularly looked forward to learning about those cultures in detail, but first I was to produce an overview document, and I had to put off the more fascinating research until later.

The other classes weren’t as interesting, but they weren’t as challenging either, so in the end, they balanced out. Physicality reached a plateau very quickly, where the things I had learned in the first few days were drilled into me by constant practice. The sexual sessions, before dinner, didn’t improve any. My body was filling out and, even though it had only been a few days, I felt stronger, fitter, and maybe even a little bigger.

Through it all, the idea that the mysterious cadet was waiting for me, out among the grape vines, kept me going. Eventually, I managed to fake sleep without actually falling asleep and slip out of bed.

I went into the fresher. If Shirley woke up, I could say I had a sudden need to empty my bladder, but when I came out, she was still asleep. I fiddled around in there for a few minutes, making a little noise, but she didn’t wake up for that either. She was soundly asleep.

It was time to go.

The academy was dark, lit only by the dim glowing outlines around the doorways. I encountered one or two Scouts, but I kept my focus and walked by them as if I belonged there, and they didn’t question me. The promenade, in contrast, was busy and noisy. Crowds filled the passageway, spilling out from the clubs, amid a riot of music and lights. There weren’t any cadets mixed in with the Scouts and locals, but in the noise and confusion, I had no problem slipping past them.

On the oxygen deck, I could hear the distant sounds of water, but I could hear nothing of the robots or other inhabitants of the gardens. There was enough light to see outlines, but no more. The vineyard lay on one side of the path leading down to the water. I stepped over a low hedge of plants, towards a tall, multi-legged machine standing immobile among the vines.

Something clanged. I looked up. A dim light shone from a hatch in its side, silhouetting a head and shoulders leaning out over one of the “shoulder” joints on a massive leg.

“Come on up,” she said.

The rough, pitted surface of the robot’s leg made for an easy climb. When I got to the shoulder, she took my hand and helped me inside. I found myself in a broad space about the size of a standard cargo container, illuminated by a utility light in the middle of the ceiling.

My hostess closed the hatch, then nodded her head at me with a wry smile. “Glad you could make it. I’m Trace.”

I nodded back, trying to keep from staring at her enormous breasts. They were easily bigger than her head, tipped with nipples that poked out from her clingy cadet shirt. She didn’t have those tits when she met me in the hallway. I had never seen boobs that big on any woman, much less a woman as small as her.

“And you are?”

Her question knocked me out of my breast-induced trance. “Oh, um, sorry. I’m Challers. Challers Dizen.”

I collected my wits and glanced around the chamber.

At one end of the space, a desk had been created by setting a door panel across a broken robot chassis. On top, a tablet projected a holographic image of the grapevines below. That was how she had spotted me coming. In the middle, a group of chairs, clearly taken from the academy, stood in a circle around a low table. On the far end, some kind of vegetation lay on metal racks, apparently to dry.

“So, welcome to the hideout. You’ve probably got lots of questions. Like, why my boobs are twice as big as they were when you saw me last.”

“I suppose.”

“If you weren’t going to say it, you at least were thinking it.”

She went over to the drying rack and plucked a small cluster of leaves. Rubbing them between her hands, she let the dry dark-green shreds fall into a bowl. I watched this strange operation, only half listening to what she was saying.

“I’m shipping out soon, so my keeper put me through the tank. He says this will enhance our ‘performance.’ Me, I just think they look weird, like it’s not me anymore.”

She scooped the greenish-brown flakes into a strange little spoon, and then held the handle up to her lips. She sucked on it, briefly, then something inside the spoon flared red and a curl of smoke rose from the other end.

Smoke, for station folk, was a bad thing. Usually, it meant something had shorted out and was in the process of breaking. Worse yet was if a fire got out of control. There were two ways to fight a fire on a station; you could seal the section and let it use up the oxygen, or you could seal the section and evacuate the air. Either way, anyone trapped inside would likely die. No one ever started a fire on purpose. If they needed heat, it came from an electric element. The concept of making smoke on purpose, of starting a fire, was the worst sort of blasphemy.

She saw the alarm on my face and chuckled. “Here,” she said, crossing the room to offer me the handle end. “It’s just a pipe. Have some smoke. Makes it easier to take all the vack-yack they hand you around here.”

The little smoke-spoon didn’t look like any pipe I had ever seen in the station’s plumbing, but I decided that blasphemy was exactly what I was in the mood for. I took the “pipe” and tentatively sucked on the hollow handle end. It was metal, and just a little moist from her lips. An acrid scent filled my nose and I coughed, spewing the smoke into the air.

“You get used to that,” she said, taking the implement back from me. She sat, leaning her chair back precariously, and propped her feet up on the table. She took more smoke.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, taking the seat next to her. “Showing all this to me.”

“Gotta show someone. I’m leaving soon, and if I don’t pass it on, it’ll all just go to waste.”

“Do the Scouts know about this?”

She laughed so hard I was afraid she’d fall out of her chair. “That’s the whole point, Challers! They don’t. Or if they do, they don’t care. No, this is a place to get away from the keepers and just be who you are, without having to worry about what anyone else thinks.”

She passed the pipe back to me and I took just a little smoke, letting it fill my mouth the way I saw her do it. It helped keep me from coughing.

I passed it back again. “What happens if you get caught?”

“They’d probably take this old robot apart, or else fix it up or something, and rip out the plants. It would ‘interfere with performance,’ but I doubt we’d get punished. What are they going to do, send you home?” She gestured with the pipe, leaving trails of blue smoke in the air.

“That wouldn’t be so bad, if they did.”

“See? Nothing to worry about.” She took more smoke and handed it back.

“So, after you go, I need to find someone else to pass this on to?”

“Yeah, but you have plenty of time, right? You only just arrived.”

I breathed in some more smoke. I felt something strange happening behind my eyes. I wasn’t exactly dizzy, but I definitely felt more comfortable. “Yeah, a few days ago.”

“Don’t rush it. The more people know about this place, the more likely it is to get discovered.”

I looked over at the hatch. “How do I get in when there isn’t someone to see me on the monitors and open the hatch?”