Coreny went AWOL after debrief today, 6 hours worth of it now.
Okay, it’s not AWOL as in what’s really supposed to mean, but it does mean not joining for celebratory drinks, and not showing up to your bunk when it’s time to sleep—and Petra doesn’t need a second guess to know where Coreny has gone. Just not what the why is this time.
Airlocked doors slide open, one after the other, and open up to the rookies’ array of mech-docks. One of those bays is lit by half—ambients only, not the floods used for dam-rep assessments. Petra pushes aside a stolen rolling workshop—hers she notes from the stickers—that Coreny has wagon-circled around themself. She spies the repair rota on top of another roller, and on it that each one isn’t needed until at least tomorrow afternoon.
Coreny is a considerate sulker, if there was ever one.
“It’s not a big deal, Coreny,” Petra sighs.
Coreny has already folded knees up, and arms around, to make a backup perimeter Petra can’t so easily penetrate. “Someone could’ve died!” they squeal through their flesh and coverall fortress.
Petra pushes a hand through scrappy, self-cut hair—at least they let Stickler dye it, mashallah—and reassures them, “It was a training exercise. All we’re doing right now is training exercises.”
It earns Petra a grumble, but not a retreat.
“The point is to make mistakes,” she continues, resting the hand back on her hip and wondering if Coreny will look for where it’s gone. “To not make them, sure. But to learn not to freak out like this.”
“Field Het will burn my contract if I tell her,” Coreny replies, not looking.
At least it means they don’t see Petra rolling her eyes.
“She will appreciate it, Coreny. Head Office is up her ass about ten-thousand things, don’t make her worry about us rookies too. Let her go to them like, ‘they’re raw but they’re good kids, they’ll do.’ Khalas.”
It’s a week till the ship launches. Things just have to be quiet, even if not smooth.
“But it’s not,” Coreny says, and stops like missile duds in the dirt. “It’s me. Every mistake so far has been me.”
Petra wheezes, pushes on a roller and makes it shriek too.
She tells them, “I’ve—”
“No. It’s me,” Coreny interrupts. “I am the mistake.”
Petra stares down at the soggy, off-binary mess; kicks it gently as she can restrains herself to. Fire for no-effect, again. “Coreny, habibi,” she croons. “Coren-yyy…”
“Stop! That doesn’t work on me,” Coreny mopes, always unconvincingly. They shudder and shuffle about at the further probing of Petra’s boots. “I’m going to tell her and offer to quit, then it’s less paperwork and she can replace in time. Won’t be a problem anymore.”
Yeah. Considerate—and stupid.
Petra puts the boot on Coreny’s shoulder, and pushes till they fall apart with a disappointingly pitiful yelp. More-so disappointing is the lack of components that spill out, because if Coreny was simple like a machine then Petra could just pick them apart to find which part to swap out. Which does presuppose their kind of machines, the one parked and leering over them in the dock, are simple enough for that but yeah—Petra supposes that.
Petra’s smart, and Coreny’s another problem she’ll solve.
“It’s not that bad,” she says.
Coreny pulls themself up on an elbow, darts around for cover that isn’t there—except the trap of their own rolling workshop walls. “I already had to apologise this morning. Before the two mistakes from the exercise.”
Petra squats down, offers a hand and doesn’t wait for Coreny to work themselves up to it. She just gives them the look that always works, pulls them up and asks, “Yallah. There. Now tell me what mistakes, Coreny.”
They can’t even look as they fess up, “Left-anterior reserve for the Tirsetti Arquebus was 6 rounds short, and I didn’t man-fill or replace it with a full box. And I painted the hazard marks on my engine core the wrong way round, which is a total violation.”
Petra stares.
Now they look.
“Like it’s me! It’s me, Petra.” They go quiet, look at a closed door. “You should go, I’m wasting your time.”
Petra stares.
“Please, I can’t—”
“Shut up,” she says; touches tips of one hand’s fingers. Wait. The other hand goes to Coreny’s coverall-sleeve, to yank them in where they can’t escape Petra’s teeth. “I am here until you vow to abandon that silly idea, and that you’re going to bed, not the Hetman.”
Coreny looks at Petra like she’s shoved a warhead down their gob.
Petra breaks the silence before it slips down so far it breaks Coreny. “You guessed the sim-OPFOR’s plan twice as fast as the other new lance. I have way less paint-marker to scrub off my bot, that I know is ‘cos of you. And you spotted how the right knee-joint was slipping, saved a full tear-down if it broke.”
When Coreny tries to slide their head aside, Petra follows.
“Don’t you get it. You’re good! And I’m here long as you need me.”
“No-one needs me,” they mumble.
“Not what I said.”
“I know,” Coreny says. They tug loose, sit up against a roller propped against their mech’s foot—nowhere to go. “I just don’t know what to do with this gig, but I can’t go back. I don’t wanna go back.”
Petra tilts her head, tries to line up with Coreny.
“Oh Coreny. Moun-moun,” she babbles, like Coreny is the ship’s cat, and reaches for her locked-down, company-approved phone; opens it and tells Stickler to bring blankets. “Where did you work before this?”
Coreny winces worse than what shrapnel would inflict.
Mechismo looked around. Where were the key buildings it was supposed to destroy, the significant symbols of the native race: the obelisk, the five-sided torus, the white building, the golden arches? There was nothing in sight but a few roads, two bridges, a lot of water, some quite insignificant low buildings, and the usual irrational native lifeforms.
Typical Krell planning.
Consulting its internal compass and comparing it with pre-programmed maps of the area, it discovered the large torus, the Pentagram — make that Pentagon — not far to the southwest. A good place to start.
But first, its laser sights locked onto a vehicle speeding away. The flickering annihilator beam flashed out, missing the car by approximately seventeen thousandths of its diameter. Swivelling its head, Mechismo fired again,and the vehicle became a dusty cloud of dispersing atoms. It was harmless, of course, but there was nothing like a moving target for recalibrating the instrumentation after a rough landing.Turning, it vaporized a disorganized crowd of fleeing lifeforms. Excellent.
Following the roadway, it clanked its way west before turning south between the rows of buildings. It would be inefficient — quite illogical, really —to let the opportunity go to waste. Blazing fire at just those points most likely to cause the flames to spread to surrounding areas, it continued along its way, the perfect destructive device
.---
I love how you can’t tell if Mechismo is on the wrong planet, or just phoning it in and disinterested.
The Krell was also the name of the dead race in Forbidden Planet, Robbie Robot’s appearance.
I also note they kind looks like a cross between V.I.N.C.E.N.T from The Black Hole (1979) and an AT-AT walker.
Also, due to a mistake on a fansite I was for years under the impression this was the official artwork and not the one above. I figured the artist just didn’t care Mechismo had not limbs. Nope, just a generic mechanical? monster not representing any of the pre-made monsters.
Cheap, crimson-dyed hair splatters around the head looking up at you. "You'd be dead if i wanted you to be," she sneers, half-full in both holes.
You cant forward, pulling yourself out of her slick ass just to press the strap above it all the way. "We goin' back to bratting?"
Her eyes roll. She takes it like she's fucking rifled. She has to catch the breath she hitches and swallow it before answering, "I could've cored the fuck outta you a million times over if i'd just aimed different."
This is definitely a good time for this conversation. Great choice, babe.
"And if i believe you?" you say, sliding a hand between her 'combat-optimised' tits — unfairly reduced without your input, to slip into tighter, meaner frames — and press it along the harsh edge of her chin, leaving it unsettled between choosing her cheek or her neck. "You risk your head and don't eliminate the main competition becaaause?"
"Because i have a crush on you. Obviously!" she mopes, an ambush without backup. What fight are you trying to win here. All the while she tries to slide her ass down the welded-in brig bed, but your hand moves down to her neck and she stills.
"Babe, I just forced six orgasms out of you," you say, thumbing her jutting, hickey-strewn jugular, "after the three you asked for."
"And we could be so much more if weren't such a bitch."
If you, babe, weren't on this corporate contract, under this feudal oath, in this syndicate debt, earning that asshole's trust. This conversation never happens outside of this cell. Somehow there's only room for it in the smallest place you both meet.
"Yeah," you tell her. "I could just collar you and just keep you here."
Maybe then you'll eventually figure out how to get it right.
"Hey!" she squeals, as much from the soft, absent-minded thrusting as from the tease as from avoiding-the-fucking-topic. "Fuck you."
"Bet I could make you beg for that collar, in exchange for another orgasm," you offer as a compromise.
"Anything I agree to while pissed-off, half-drunk, and cumming isn't binding," she retorts.
She's only one of those things, "so ask for it for now then."
"I don't want more sex with you."
You pull your hand back, slide out and fold onto your knees. The riveted walls seem to echo with the six different ways you could interpret that. "Okay," you say simply, "we can stop."
"Nooo!" she moans, shuffling back up. "You're so fucking dense."
You know you picked the safe option, not the right one. But that option loops you here, again and again.
"Look," you say, hands open like an 'all clear to drop' signal, "I don't shoot to kill either."
She knows that. Does she know what it means— "yeah, 'cos of your fucking business maxim about de-escalation or whatever."
Your legs swing over the side of the bed, feet nesting into a pile of cold, abandoned fatigues. "I don't shoot to kill because i don't wanna kill cute girls."
"Yeah. Cute girls you wanna fuck," she says, eyes tracing the path from your feet to the security door. "I know."
She doesn't.
"And kiss, and take to nice dinners, and more," you elaborate. Repair their shit you shot up, bribe their insurance rep to keep quiet, happen to refuel exactly where they need to dropped off.
"Uh-huh, lucky them." She steals the blankets for herself. May as well sew on a nametag for how often they're hers. "Don't have to rub it in."
You look right at her.
"Babe. There are no other girls."
It should only mean one thing. One thing.
"Then stop pulling out, and make me cum again," she says.
/// CW: drug abuse, light gore, & suicide references. ///
You're sitting in what must be a bunker from... 3(?) wars ago? Seems like 3. It's too fucked up even for the locals to wanna re-use. What it makes for instead is a very conveinent place to curl up and bleed out, service pistol in the one hand that still functions.
Protocol says you should— well now seems like a better-than-normal time to ignore protocol. It always included dumb rules like don't fuck the other pilots and don't put contraband flavour in your ration fluid.
Whatever flavour 'passionfruit' was it was good.
What's a fruit, anyway? Technician said the word once. Stop touching each other you degenerate-fucking-fruits.
Whatever it is, it at least tastes better than the stashed combat stims you just squirted down your throat. Makes it so it doesn't feel so bad to bleed out, but the oncoming overdose also makes it look a lot like there's flashlights scattering a haze down from the surface.
Huh, you remember, bleeding out does leave a trail doesn't it.
There's a really big knife peeping around the corner, and it almost gets dropped with a yelp when you viscon with the eye peering through its reflection.
The eyes don't glow like you're used to. And, "hey," doesn't feel like the standard response either.
"Uhh, hey?" a voice says back.
There's another couple voices that come from even further behind it, and then it continues a bit more puffed-up, "Attention pilot! You are surrounded. Please surrender your weapon and prepare for capture."
The nerves are cute. You suppose this is a first for it too; take your pistol, drop its mag, flick the safety, unchamber the last round and—
Well, you guess you slide it across the floor.
"Pilot. Are you now disarmed now?" it asks.
"What," you reply, confused. "No?"
"But the pistol—"
Oh, right. It only said the pistol, But its eyes don't glow, so it probably doesn't have— "One second. I have like a one-shot in my—" BANG! "—shit okay, that's empty. There's two knives and—"
After a moment a retreated knife peers back out. It takes a few moments to interrupt your muttering, still relaxing from the one-shot not being an attack or maybe— "Aren't you pilots supposed to normally like—?"
"Yeah," you say succintly. Yep, that.
"Oh. And you're not gonna—?"
"Not without the pistol at least." That would've been the easiest option; perfect recall makes it an effortless, automatic task to feel a cold barrel on your temple. The thought of recreating that isn't a particularly attractive one. "And i'm not gutting myself, blegh."
"What about the um— the suicide thingy. Like the tooth?"
You swear your brow raise is audible, knocking a few loose concrete chips from crumbling support columns. "Myth," you explain. "Heard they tried it on one girl—" Pilot. Pilot. Pilot. Shut it, brain. "—but one hit to her angrav in testing and the unmuted shock made her rattle about enough to set it off. Utter fucking clownshow."
You like to imagine that she knew her handler was in the profile of where her mech fell; foam and blood-bile spilling out over a smile.
You look down at your ruined arm. The deliberately replaced one. It isn't damaged but a shot in your upper arm has oozed blood down into the joint until it was too jammed to operate.
"Hold on. My implant has a... it's got an aftermarket laser cutting tool in it. Y'know, in the arm for jacking—"
"Jacking—!?" the voice startles quietly.
"Jacking into the mech. Fuck's sake." You manage to pry open the forearm cover with a loose piece of mostly-rusted rebar. "Okay, shit. It's a real mess in here. One minute."
It would probably be useful to have another cutting tool to disable this one. You're not paying quite enough attention to even remember how you ask for it, the whole room has slowly started spinning, but—
"To cut off the cutting tool?" it says, a little baffled. This is getting weird. When were you supposed to bleed out? "I mean... can't we just cuff you now?"
"No," you say, as if it's incredibly obvious. It's fun to say it. To backtalk. Though that's a protocol-and-handler word. "I could— have off the hand."
That doesn't seem correct.
"Have cut the handcut."
The floor feels cold again.
The mildew looks a lot pinker than it did earlier.
"What?" it asks.
"Y'know... the hand."
"Okay... well, shit. No, you go and—" the voice mutters. You bet it was gonna ask something like what if you just didn't cut it. Does it think you're some protocol-following sucker? No, this is your game now. You're clearly winning too. "Alright fine, someone's getting the tool. You mind if i have a look now?"
"What. You wanna give me the handbook?" you snort. That's a good one. Maybe if it did you could rip out all the pages on protocol and not fucking the other girls and stuff them in your open wound like second-rate gauze. Or is it third-rate? Regular gauze is second. First-rate you think is some expanding chem-shit.
You never get first-rate. You don't even get passionfruit flavour.
You'd need someone else to splice it into the feed for you anyway; your arms, your head, it all feels a bit too wobbly and spread out over the spinning room. What am I even winning? Maybe it's a bit of control, to choose to bleed out—
Oh. Her hand is cold too.
She's cute.
Her eyes don't glow either.
Why don't they glow?
Everyone's eyes are supposed to glow.
"Fuck she's— no, fuck the tool, I need an OD syringe or something. I don't know. Where's the fucking medic?"
You think a smile would look good on her lips too. Nothing spilling out between them this time. Maybe she'll have one when you wake up. But that always takes a while. eEvery time the techs are different, and the handlers have more lines on their faces, and more greys in their hair. And then handlers are different too and they're soft again.
"Hey. Hey! Can you hear me!? Pilot?"
You blink and don't open your eyes. Too heavy. You ask her, "You know what a passionfruit is?"
You blink and the bunker isn't so cold. It's walls are suddenly a sterile green-grey. They don't spin as much. Who the fuck's the dude with the clipboard, you think, and move on. The thought slipping out easily, your lips don't even have to part to do it.
Where did she go? She was just—
You try to look around, and don't see her. On the side where you're missing an arm there's a bowl next you. You start to blink again, and dream of whatever the fuck was the weird purple ball in it.
(context) imperial pilot that's been taken prisoner; who's far too smart to be loyal, who saved her own life with the self-servedness that now leaves her alone. because she has leverage. a datavault with encoded files for imperial intel: mechs, weapons, bases, VIPs, etc.
and every day after the first, she's letting her control slip handing over another password. not for survival, but for sex. for an intimacy and comfort buried in the purported cheapness of transacting merely for her base desires. for a temporary warmth in a cell that feels so cold, and makes her so small when it's her alone.
that tight-rope she walks because getting to feel safe means making herself vulnerable. an unbearable abyss she finally needs to fall into, giving up a phrase that unlocks all the files. her tears sinking into the rebels skin as she comes, panicking that she's dead. being told she's a good girl, asking if it means she's good like the rebel.
stuck being utterly dependent on the girl who stole her jacket and ripped off the patches and medals. the bottomless, unsateable need to be close. getting to borrow the jacket back. not to be hers, that's unbearable. but to feel her functional owner wrapped around her waist, her neck, filling her nostrils with sandblasted leather.
yeah i uhh, i like thinking about that hehe. mechismo is likely headed for short epilogues for its final part, so might see this there.
The Op-Chief's quarters drown in red. A privilege of command; to 'borrow' the focusing lenses of a disassembled laser and tape them over her room lights, your sweat turned to blood in its shine.
Not that she's your superior, even as she pins you down and oozes the command to report back to her in your ear, "That's it, doll. Grind for me. You like it?"
Face-down in the pillows, you have to imagine her: an arm at a perfect 45° down, a pillar of thorn-wrapped muscle pile-driven into the small of your back; the crimson wrapping over her bare shoulders that would encompass your own breadth twice over; mottled brown eyes set in her face like chambered rounds. She doesn't move, a hunter stilled to perfection in the deep snow. She lets the strap sit inside you, in the teeth of her trap, and leaves you — in your want, and your need, and your desperation — to roll your throbbing lips up to the hilt and push your ass into her abs as much as she'll allow.
"I love it, Daddy," you moan, like a wounded faun. "I love your cock so much, Daddy."
Every time you say it she loosens her hold and lets you fill yourself a micrometre more. You must've said it more tonight than you've ever called her Sir or Chief.
But then remember: she isn't actually your superior, is she?
"Aww," she croons, but then presses into the uneased sinew at the base of your forcibly-arched spine — as if she knows — and teases, "You sure you're not lying to me?"
"N-no, Daddy," you blabber, spitting the sheets out from between your teeth. Your words loop on themselves like corpses in a trench, "I love it, daddy. I love being filled by your cock, I—"
She pushes her fingers into the aux-ports beneath your ears, and jerks your head back till it jars against your cringing shoulder-blades. Your artificial cortexes bleed till the anti-flash buffers kick in, and she questions you again, "You'd never lie to Daddy, would you?"
"No," you whimper, because this is a game. It's just a game. A game. A game. You feel yourself loosen from it, "Of course not—"
Her hand slips out of your ports and forces itself down on your temple. Your neck twists till you're perpendicular. A torn muscle causes you to writhe under her palm, and she seethes around a whipping tongue, "Then why haven't you told me you're a spy?"
Exposure.
Panic swallows all the protocol meant for that word, it comes out with the fucktoy-drool, "Ahh! No-no-no-no. Wait, Daddy—"
She removes her hand from your emptied skull.
There's red everywhere.
You think — know — that she keeps a gun on the bedside table. Now is when you remember you didn't see it coming in. Your hands can't see it to take it; she won't even let the strap fall out, leaving you to shudder through the prismatic shock routed into your cunt, as you writhe heedlessly into hilt and hand and the peripheries of orgasm.
The click is slow, indulgent.
Your mind and vision turn white; a blank canvas to turn red with you. The cold barrel isn't even on your skin, but it freezes needy shivers into stillness. Your body subsides, hands fall above your head.
You know what it looks like to wait for it.
She breathes — then snorts in disappointment. Why did you stop? And rakes nails over a small row of tattoos she put there herself. You had let her too close even then. Her next instruction is simple:
"Keep grinding on my dick if you wanna live."
You have never disobeyed one of her orders, and don't now. You buck up into her with a series of shrivelled and stochastic vertical leaps; in time as neurons burn out just to command your body once, and are then replaced, and burned out, and replaced.
Sometimes one of those orders was loud, to warn when needed, but never mean. When she called you 'doll' and took your mechanical inexperience as appropriate-to-rank — an electric touch on your shoulder as she demonstrated how to correct the fault — not a failure at the studies taken to emulate the experience expected of your cover, it just became so much easier to listen to her over the infrequent, dispassionate missives from command.
"I can explain, I—" you try.
"You don't have to — doll. I know," she interrupts, repositions to let you sink further into the bed till it on its own is inescapable.
Before this — from selection at fourteen, induction at sixteen — you had forgotten what sheets felt like. Even the course on seduction had been taught on the same padded floor where your cadre was bedded, trained, fed; where it was tricesimated, viscemated, decimated.
It did not teach you about the feeling in your chest now. Now that she sees, and tells you that, "I found out about your sabotage plan months ago — and you still haven't set it off."
You couldn't. Too soon.
There was more to report on, to be sure of.
And setbacks, couldn't forget those.
Your return missives would plead for additional time; share outdated intel and promise how close you were to what they actually asked for.
It all made sense — and was so easy to forget, knee-deep in mech-guts and their disassembled parts that you'd skim to build explosive devices that still weren't set off, that you started to ignore the repeated orders to finally do — when you listened to her.
You can tell her that, you can explain, "Y-yes, because I—"
"Shut up," she orders. "The only sounds you make now are 'Yes Daddy' and moaning like the incompetent, traitor slut you are. Got it?"
It's too late to explain.
She enunciates that fact with the barrel to your neck.
"Yes Daddy."
"Good. See, that's what I want." She retracts, trails those nails over your ass and wraps them you under to dig them into your thigh. To pull you into stoccado and see how much you want to live. "I always wanted an imperial trophy; always thought it'd be some miserable captain bitch I'd need to break in. But a spy — who fell in love with me. Oh that's too good. You did fall in love with me, right doll?"
Your body bathed in pools of crimson light, shadows rock back-and-forth to cast fleeting, promised wounds on your skin.
You want to live so fucking bad.
"Yes Daddy."
She feels it in your body on her hips; sees it in the lingerie you slip to the side, ribbon-straps soft as non-synth silk, shrugged off your shoulders to tangle like loose cables vomited out of a salvaged frame. In the piss-thin broth served at the mess, that you ate at the same table when she started to abandon the officer's one for yours.
Deniably, of course. She was just there to sit with all of her crew. Who all ate at a different time. On the deck.
"You'd spend every night in your bunk fucking yourself to the thought of me finding out — and punishing you," she sneers.
She isn't right. She isn't. Your nights were dedicated to the mission, to Empire. To finding each and every fault in the ship, in its conduits and tubes and bays. All the spots where you could line up points-of-failure to domino from a prior one.
And you could always find more. There always had to be one more, with a kiss from her inbetween each.
But the will to explain, be understood, ebbs to the need to feel good:
"Yes Daddy."
To feel the kisses that fall on your back, on the marks she's left; wet as the sheets under you.
"This is everything you've ever wanted, isn't it? To spend the rest of your days as blissed-out fucktoy, coming on my leash."
She speaks like it's the game you share; uses the words that don't mean themselves after you've come — not like your superiors' did. Where here in the kerning between the letters that spell out your faux-captivity there's room to receive a comfort unmonitored for from the cameras that once watched you on your padded floor.
"Yes Daddy." You would still be closer to that comfort on a leash, even if you never felt it from her again, and needily dare to ask, "T-then you wanna keep me?"
She circles the barrel through your pillow-smothered hair.
"Oh. Forever, doll," she says.
Her call, to let it grow long and incongruous to regulation — an indulgence on her part — to dye it in colours that are seeping into the pillows through your sweat as you strain over her plastic cock.
"But oh, that wasn't 'Yes Daddy,' was it?"
Already a fuck-up. If only the blood-red was real, to choke and drown rather than blind. That tease — she's your superiors; has picked you to conduct the quintation and expel the last unviable candidate in your cadre. Your sister's life runs over the mat, red where you'll sleep one last time before you're sent out.
You realise you've stopped moving, except to ball your fists over your face and hide from the proferred knife in your memories.
"You can say 'No Daddy' too," she asks, suddenly still as you.
It isn't loud.
"No, Daddy."
Like your sister, not your superior, and the sound that poured from her opened throat.
"Keep grinding," she whispers even quieter.
You resume stiffly, till she pushes between your shoulders and you've leant so far forward she can just tilt back to pull out. The lubricant she spills over your ass is cold, but warms as her both palms rub it around her cock and she brushes it over your lips. You can see her wiping her hands on the sheets, before she picks up the gun again.
You hadn't even thought about how it must've been out of her hands, right where you could've reached it, been able to see it and didn't.
She starts to fuck you herself, reaches around to fondle tit then throat; to raise you up till your back wraps over her front, to breathe in your ear and let the stale air wash over your clit. It trembles to be touched, and if she won't—
"Nah-ah, doll. That's mine now." She takes your wrist before you can, entangles both of your limbs over your stomach. "You think you should you be punished for disobeying?"
The threat flutters through you: clenched between flinching vocal chords, what drips out you squeeze into the hand that steals yours.
"You can say 'No—"
"Yes Daddy," you tell her before she can falter.
You don't deserve the way her tongue curls when she does. Because she corrects, she does not punish. Not unless it's void-jockeys in her repair bays, joking about suspending you from their missile racks to fuck from both ends. She needs you to give her a reason like that, "Need to be punished for being a spy?"
So you move one across the board, like it's still a game: "I didn't choose to be— I never wanted to set—" Thwack! "Yes Daddy!"
It flushes a sudden, white heat across your sensitive cheek — before it cools, washes over like the shockwaves of some poor, distant pilot-fuck's self-caused meltdown — as she takes the reason like a captured piece, and whispers, "Don't worry. I know you didn't choose, doll. That's why you're here and..."
She hesitates. Falters. Radiates — and dials back the core.
"...not — in the airlock."
Like the jocks were about to be, before the Captain talked her down.
"I'll take care of you," she continues, pulling you closer and closer as she rocks the strap into you. An open intention to refuse her own duties. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
You drip onto her thighs.
"Yes. Daddy."
The words are small and perfect, each rewarded with a thrust that makes you lean your head back over her shoulder, where you nip at her ear and smell the grease in her till your knees have to finally give out and she uses the arm across your stomach to brace you.
She untucks her legs, pulls out and leans back into a bunched-up duvet and pulling you with her. "You can say, 'Thank you, Daddy'."
It's easy to listen to her.
"Thank you, Daddy."
"Now, do you wanna come?" she asks.
"Yes Daddy," you say, and move to reposition yourself on her.
But she stops you, holds you cheek-to-cheek so the wetness of both of them confluences like a river. What're you supposed to do after this? Is the game supposed to end. You can't go back to a repair bay, you have to go somewhere else.
She doesn't stop you when you reach for your clit, and she follows. Runs over your taint to slicken her fingers before pushing inside.
There's truth in bodies, where you've ruined it in words.
You can see the gun, it's fallen off the bed where neither of you can reach it. She almost chokes, "You can say, 'I love you, Daddy'."
/// CW: light peril and implied threat of sexual assault. ///
"Nah, this is too good to be true," the merc-rebel-something mutters. She turns, twiddling the combat knife in her hand and stopping only to point it at you. "You wanna tell me what trap i've walked into, sweetheart?"
You eye the databox, stuffed with weeks and months of upcoming junta plans; and more besides. Enough intel to butcher hundreds of their bootlickers, least until they figure out they're compromised.
"I have it — for my own reasons," you taunt like the bellow of rotten, felled tree. "Making my mark, if you have to know."
"Is daddy-dictator's special girl staging a rebellious phase in her twenties?" the merc mocks. "Smuggle a bunch of data to what? Sell for tattoo money?"
You didn't plan an answer for a question like this, and it's hard not to just gawk and fumble at your cuffs.
"Maybe — if it's not a trap — the intel lasts a week," she continues. And besides that, you urge in your own head. "That's the only part with access dates in years. Rest is outdated crap."
"W-what do you—"
You shut your mouth when she stalks up, lifts your chin with the little blade's point with just enough force to dip it in red.
"You living out some little fantasy right now?" she asks, as much curioused as annoyed. "Because I really think that'd be a mistake."
It takes a lot not squeal. "I-I'm a valuable hostage, my family will pay well."
"They will," the merc muses, "and I think you knew that." In a glance she's seen right through, smiles at the confirmation you haven't realised you just gave away. "You leaked your convoy's route didn't you? Playing hero. Thinking you're gonna make us a pretty penny and then waddle back to your parties and soirées."
You buck up above the point of the knife, "You think I like being around them? They're monsters. And I have to pretend to be one, and you have no idea what that does to you."
Her brow raised, she stays quiet, listens.
"But i stood up, just like you did. I'm doing what I can."
And she laughs.
"Ah-hahaha! Oh saints, how many years you been saving up that little speech, sweetheart? Or bleeding-heart I should say."
"Too many," you spit.
"Hmm. Good answer," she smirks, putting a hand on your shoulder and hoisting you towards her own mech. "You're staying restrained."
"B-but i'm helping you!" you gasp.
"Your round ass for ransom helps me — you don't," she makes clear, enunciating it with a squeeze that presses into your collarbone. "And I don't trust you, so i'm not interested in giving you the chance to try anything. Don't think I haven't killed prettier things than you.
Don't think I regretted it either."
---
The merc bags your head first. Stuffs a mule-bit in your mouth overtop of it, so you're forced to swallow the loose fibres under your teeth as you gnaw on it in cortisol and pothole-induced chatters.
This isn't the edible part of the plant. You remember a 'land exchange ceremony' where you had to a drink a thick, green bowl of its stewed leaves and were sure the locals were making a joke about how bitter it was. You vomited it out-of-sight, sure your father would fucking shoot one of them if he saw it. Mostly because you hated the sound. the loud screech, and the crying after. The palace was far enough away to forget that was just part of the production process here.
Jute. It's called jute, you remember. 11.768MG from this entire continent, and about half of what it's allowed to produce. The other is raw minerals, shipped without care to the extra weight because it makes sure there's nothing here worth rebelling over. Makes sure no one can make anything out of it processed.
That's the theory at least. Doesn't explain who's paying for her. She doesn't look like one of the locals, like the people she pulls your hood off to, after 4 hours of trying not to vomit again as you rattled about in her scout mech's storage bin.
"Now youse believe me? Little Miss Junta, out of daddy's palace for a stroll in her smoking convoy," the merc purrs.
Her hand slips over your shoulder, through your heat-fucked hair and over your cheek, where the yanking of the bag has scratched a peace garden into the tear-stained makeup under your still-blinking eyes.
You stumble, lose your footing but only fall an inch as another hand sinks into your gut. It reminds you of one of those tree-cutting attachments, used for clearing land for plantation.
"There there, I got you sweetheart" she murmurs mockingly, slipping the bit back in before you can say—
You're not sure what you should.
You don't know these people. But it's hard to meet their stares for more than a moment, slash-and-burn fires in their eyes. The fires that throw up smoke you can see from a hundred miles away from behind ten layers of razorwire and a line of autogun implacements. Where this plan felt much more predictable.
You're not sure if you want her to explain it either.
She knows better, you're sure. The longer you've spent on this world has only made you feel like you know less and less.
"You waiting for a fucking bonus? A round of applause, perhaps?" one of them asks, an officer — or leader, if that sort of formality doesn't match. His pushed-back chair scrapes across the floor, pushing aside rotting fibres strewn across it. "You're paid for each contracted period; 50% at start, 50% at end, that's it."
"Can start with telling your man to fix my piece," your captor demands, or offers. It's hard to tell. One of the men at the table seems to hover around throwing his cards down. "There's a lot of dead men to clean out of the toe pads."
The 'officer' doesn't signal the sitting man to move. "You'll go with him then, yeah?" he asks.
Your eyes are adjusting now. It's only a moment before they've locked with his. You can't tell what your captor is doing but she's not moving either. He continues, "She can stay—"
"You're forgetting Section 16. Exceptional duties," she interrupts. "Think i'm at least due for a cut on the ransom. Besides, you're getting her databox for free. There's months worth of good intel there."
There's not. She said—
"It's free because it's useless to you." Unlike you. He circles the table, his hand hovering over loaded guns and dice. Maybe the merc is more predictable than them. Profit-motive alone is a little more... clean. "You radio'd that the convoy looked underarmed but normal. And you chose to engage it while on regular patrol, right?"
"Yeah," the merc grits past your ear, like the speckled concrete chips that have clawed under your dress from being made to crawl in them.
"Then it's not exceptional. Doesn't matter who the fuck she is." He's standing in front of you both now, taller. "Now show-and-tells over. You can supervise repairs while i look over my intake."
Your gut's squished a bit tighter. "And leave you here with her?"
It all clicks a little too quickly, and a little too late.
The officer's hand wraps around the little of your arm that shows in front, still drawn behind to raw wrists in junta cuffs. His thumb presses till your flesh turns whiter than it already is.
He leans over to whisper it in the merc's ear, "the fuck you think we're going to do?"
She yanks you back, head bouncing between pilot-suited tits. "Kidnapping her is escalation. That's Section 33, escalated scenarios, which means anything routine activity from here counts as Section 16," she non-answers. The words cock in her mouth like a loaded gun that hasn't fired yet.
It's just profit-motive. That's all it is. All it is. Your ransom must be worth a dozen of her contracts. She must figure they're testing to see if they can cut her out—
"You knew where to grab her!" the officer shouts. The less-drunk half of the table scrambles to their feet, but no one's armed just yet. You try to keep still, pretend like somehow he won't notice you're there even as he's screaming about you. "How long have i been paying you? trusting you? All that fucking risk. So why're you pulling this, huh? Wanna tell me what's going on? Don't think i didn't see the same stupid tip--"
"Hey! Merc-bitch," the table pipes up, the more-drunk half of it, with few chips and a lot more bottles where he's sitting. "You wanna piss off and let princess play with her new daddies?"
This one's looking at you. It's worse than hate, and twists at whatever face you're making. You can't even tell. Stupid passenger in your own— what? What is this now? Own body except not anymore. Your own plan except it's the merc's now.
Your own punishment?
Hh you are so fucking stupid. 'Your' punishment. Ha! Except your father will do so much worse than just shoot someone for bad leaf soup. The humiliation of it. His own daughter. Almost as bad as stealing one of the tin medals off his chest. If he could keep count of those either. Stupid as he is. And now without autoguns and razorwire and razorwire and more-fucking-razorwire to compensate.
Your merc's wrapping you closer, till your heels start to fall off. You don't even realise how much you were moving till you're forced to stop.
The officer's in his table-piper's face, pied with alcoholic blush, "Shut. The fuck. Up."
He's just trying to control the situation too. Yeah. You're the fucking bad guy here. Daddy's done what they're just joking about. Joking. Because you're the bad guy. You deserve a little of the risk for once.
"I'm just saying—"
"Just stop saying."
"Let me handle her," your merc offers, firm enough to make it obvious it isn't one.
She's pulling you more into her side, hand on your hip in a show of clamatory suggestiveness. She's less risk. You still want less risk.
"It can be payment for 16," she continues. This doesn't help her and now you're leaning into her. Her voice lilts a bit louder, "And if she needs a daddy, i've given her some guidance already."
You can her scar-splitting smile through the corner of your eye. You've seen enough smiles at those fancy balls to spot the bullshit ones, and spot the way she scans for if her comment satisfied or not.
You play your part and whimper.
Pitched just like your empty shell of a prop boyfriend likes and doesn't question. A fear that swirls with pleasure, water down the oil cap of an engine. She squeezes your hip bone in response, and you cow. There's still plenty of room to ruin this even as a prop yourself.
"You stays on your side of the camp," the officer finally says. "Keep her locked down, not my fault if she gets out." He sidles in closer one last time. "Keep her quiet. Not my problem if someone else gets in."
You know what you'd said now. Between the bit and her legs if you have to.
I promise you won't regret this. I promise I promise I—
All she says is, "let me know when you've got a line," and turns, "come on sweetheart. I wanna hear you say daddy."
The broken war-machine falls to its knees, embroidered with a hot-white trim in the three perfect holes of its precious, now-former, systems; spilled out, as black smoke, except for its heart.
That falls out after.
“Hey. Princess,” you say to her, brass hard-but-hollow, the used shells her imperial-blonde hair rushes into, as she breathes into the dirt pushed underneath painted nails, as boots tread on them before she can reach for her pistol.
“You,” she snarls, twisting on bent limbs. “Fucking asshole I’ll— Hey!”
You hoist her up at an elbow, till her few, furious trembles collapse into a copacetic dangle and watch a local, mouse-analogous species squeeze itself under some muddy shrapnel.
“Princess”, you mutter, “you wanna live. So you’re gonna yield to me, okay?” And that’s rhetorical, because ‘deathwish’ isn’t in her—
“Not a chance in His hells,” she shrieks, kneeing herself free, and reaches — not for her holster, which is still full — but for your face. Crack! You catch it after, bring it behind her back to lock in re-used, disposable cuffs. “I can… I can take care of myself,” she protests.
“I know. That’s the problem — I won’t let you hurt my people.” You yank her back, till she trips and is left leaning on you, “Now yield.”
“No,” she squeals, “why would I ever trust you again?”
You trusted me?
Fuck, Princess. You’re dense as tungsten-tips.
You baulk at her, unseen from behind, and reswallow the budding softness before she feels it, “Cos these guys will bleed you out for fun. And I’ll let them, if I have to.”
There’s a wet shuffle-over-fallen-log, the familiar pitter-patter of light, temperate rain on plastic poncho. Another hunter who’ll see her in a moment. So you rock her around, without mind to the furious look painted like camo on her face, and take her at the small of her back — and pull her into a kiss.
“Fuck— it really is,” the hunter starts to mutter, before the words catch in his throat.
You know him; too new not to take it by-the-book, not too dumb not to listen to you when it counts. “Sir, what’s happening?” he asks.
You have to make this count.
“What? She’s a pretty thing, ain’t she?” you muse, as if you’ve pinned her to the wall for nabbing extra rations, and not—
He’s got his rifle over his shoulder; tall-as-him, rounds as big as her cock; is too drilled to not be gentle with it. He’d seize up if you drew on him, and it’d take him too long to respond in kind. “I had a thing with her back in the royal college.”
“Uh huh — before you betrayed me,” she cuts in, and you will her to shut-up and wonder if she still loves fingers squib-loaded down her throat.
“Before they realised I was a saboteur, Princess,” you remind her, though her eyes look the same as the first time she realised it. “We were never on the same side.”
“Never on mine,” she hisses, her own heart fallen out too. “Trying to fake your own death and blaming it on me…”
You would fill into the silence, And it would’ve kept you away, and, Still you found me, if you weren’t aware of the audience, so stuff yourself with unload pride, “Offered to take you with me, didn’t I?”
She looks like she’s gonna cook-off, “You don’t know what I was—”
“Sir,” he reminds, and you look at him; realise he is gentle, because his rifle is kick-stood on the ground and you didn’t hear that. His hand rests on his holster, “She’s on the hit list.”
Pilots to be put down. Machines to scorch, so no one else can use them.
Pilots like assassins, in their bonded semi-mechs; merchant third-sons with an insecurity to smother in bodies and merc hires; and ex-noble fuck-ups with nothing left but what they can prove.
Pilots like her, who’ve seen the gun and are nuzzling into your shoulder so deep you can hear the little killer’s loose heart pressed between your chest and hers.
“Look— Fuck— I— I yield,” she whimpers.
You run a hand up her back, to rake through her hair and tip her back.
“Then scrap the mech,” you say past her, looking in her eyes and slipping to her that same fear, before swelling viciously upon her desperate sweetness, “I’m not done with this one.”
