Space station of the sluts

Station Chief Megan Xio felt doubly naked as the black-haired Consortium tech passed his hands above her body, readouts in his pupils gleaming like distant stars. Her skin was naked before the eyes, flesh and electronic, that peered not only at but through the skintight turquoise seal of her daysuit; her trust and charge, Saturn VI Station, was naked before the chip in his brain, spreading and unfurling as a set of schematics and diagnostic results.

“Ah,” the tech said, and then, “Mm-hm.”

He was not unattractive, as far as Megan could judge such things: slim, athletic; olive-complexioned with a pointed chin and gently-hooking nose. His hair was longer than hers, swept straight back in faintly-gleaming waves where hers simply stood a quarter-inch straight up in a stationer’s burr. She wondered if his dark skin were purely genetic, or if he spent time downside somewhere with a real atmosphere and direct sunlight.

She also wondered when he would be done and off her station. And what the final bill would be.

“It’s two problems, not one,” the tech said at last. He made a little closing gesture, touching his fingertips to the heel of his palm, and the dull sparks of active data vanished from his left eye. His right still gleamed, flicking, Megan knew, through pages and pages of station data. A strip on his breast read “L. Shaylan” in gray letters, real cloth sealed to the outside of his daysuit’s weave rather than an electronic display. That made sense — in a catastrophic station failure, bodies floating for days before recovery would lose even the tiny drip of power needed for a glowing nametag.

“That meteor that struck your station was filthy. You’ve got more atmospheric contamination than your life support system can filter. Your daysuits are providing secondary filtration like they’re supposed to, but the gasses are lightly radioactive as well as toxic. It’s not enough to hurt you, but once it’s inside the daysuit it starts interfering with the nanocomputers in the weave. Your people aren’t sick — or not badly sick, anyway — but they’re wearing suits that are reacting to bad data. And suit power is down for everyone due to the demands of the actual filtering, which is manifesting as general wearer exhaustion.”

He shrugged his slim shoulders gently. His own daysuit was plain black, apart from the gray lettering on his breast and the triangular Consortium logo just above it. “Clean the station air up and all the symptoms — glitches, really, not symptoms — should go away.”

Megan let out a long breath; realized she’d been holding it for longer than she needed and breathed in hastily, feeling embarrassed. She kept her suit transparent from the collar up to reveal her face, like most stationers, but she could still feel the slightly artificial smoothness of its filters inside her nose. Of course it was safe to breathe. Or no less safe than it had been for the last six weeks, anyway.

“That’s…good,” she said. “It’s not an insane alien virus, at least. We all knew something came in with that meteorite, when so many people started getting sick, but there were so many symptoms that didn’t make sense, and of course my medtech always got us out of the daysuits before she took a look…”

Shaylan laughed. “I’m as glad as you are,” he said. “Every time we get a biologicals call from an isolated station like this one we’re half-convinced it’s going to be the long-awaited First Contact, and the man on the scene is going to end up fighting green-skinned monsters in the corridors. Not that they’d arm a lowly tech for anything short of a confirmed invasion.”

He gave her a friendly smile, and Megan forced herself to return it. The man was certainly pleasant. But he was a pleasant outsider, and one she was likely going to owe a lot of money.

“How much are we talking to fix it?” she asked bluntly.

Shaylan sighed. He looked faintly wounded, as if he’d been hoping for more small talk, or at least more alien fantasies. “Depends on how fast you want it done,” he told her. “The crap’s everywhere right now. If we ship in a station’s worth of spare oxygen, I could have you clean in a day, plus travel time. Generating your own from hydroponics…that’ll take longer.”

Megan kept her expression neutral. “Longer” was an understatement. Hydroponics had been hit almost dead-on by the meteor. Jury-rigged tanks of algae grown from backup stock were keeping them afloat, but venting whole sections’ worth of atmosphere — on top of what they’d already lost in the initial impact — would start to tax her slender reserves very quickly. And the Consortium rep knew it, obviously. He had access to the same data she did, damn him.

“Your first suggestion is beyond my price range,” she told him. There was no need for either of them to quote a figure. Oxygen was incredibly inefficient to ship; cheaper by far to generate at home. As long as you could retain enough atmosphere to generate more atmosphere, of course, a usually-theoretical paradox that Megan was not enjoying in its practical application. “Your second — how much weirder are these daysuit glitches going to get?”

She flexed her hand unconsciously, watching the skintight sheath flex with it. Daysuits were vastly preferable to bulky pressure suits, though less protection in a truly catastrophic failure. You were as close to naked as you could get and still be environmentally secure, right down to the flexible, perfectly-fitted sheaths that wrapped each external follicle of hair. People even had sex in them, the suits stretching internally or externally as needed, though Megan preferred true nakedness for her own encounters (in a safely-shielded cabin, thank you very much; risky fun meant ropes and paddles, not radiation poisoning or explosive decompression).

Megan hadn’t noticed any “symptoms” of the mysterious illness herself, but other stationers’ reactions had ranged from fatigue and muscular weakness to headaches, dizziness, and — most worrying to her and her medtech — temperature changes in both directions. She turned her blue-tinged hand back and forth, as if watching for changes in its seamless surface.

Shaylan clicked his tongue once in thought. “Pretty weird,” he said after a moment. The data in his pupils was still for a moment; he was conjecturing, not analyzing. “They’re functioning normally, but the data they report to your brains are going to be increasingly unreliable. False physical responses, sensory hallucinations. Some downright synesthesiac effects after a while — hearing colors and that sort of thing. Irritating, but probably not damaging. Even if your suit is telling you you’re burning up with fever, you’re not actually. You feel it, but it won’t damage your cells; kill your brain.”

Megan nodded. That about matched the experiences they’d had so far with the mysterious “plague,” people strangely sick or confused, then miraculously better, then relapsing again. And just enough cases of actual contamination — from people who’d been exposed to gasses without their daysuits — to keep her medtech looking for an external cause, rather than a suit malfunction.

She wondered how long it would have taken them to track it down alone. Consortium techs did good work, you had to give them that. If only they didn’t cost so much…

“There may be a third option.” Shaylan was flicking through data again, his eyes just slightly unfocused and sparkling with rapidly-changing readouts. “Your algae tanks use Consortium strains. The patches are proprietary, but I could temporarily modify them to feed on at least some of the toxic inorganics you’ve got in your air systems. The atmosphere might get a little weird, but it’d clean itself without having to vent whole sections. Call it three, four weeks of funny-smelling air. Fixing the daysuits will take that long anyway, so you wouldn’t be paying me any extra. Just the flat fee for the proprietary strain.”

Megan pursed her lips, pondering that. She wasn’t fond of outsiders on the station in general, especially not Consortium outsiders. But she needed his tech to do the kind of micro-level repair he was talking about anyway, and replacing one Consortium strain of algae with another hardly constituted a corporate takeover.

“That may be our best option,” she admitted. “Depending on the price. I won’t be signing my station’s autonomy away. I’ve heard stories.”

Shaylan sighed and ran a hand over his dark hair. “So have I,” he said. “Euphrosyne, Nereid; Waypoint IV? Slave-trades and viral bio-circuitry? They’re stories. Just stories.” He tapped his fingertips one by one. “Euphrosyne was already a slave outpost. Those people were literally brainwashed. The Consortium ‘freed’ them into desk jobs at a decent wage and we still had to plow their wages back into a fund for their descendants, because they wouldn’t touch it. Then we found out they couldn’t reproduce, either. So yeah, we ended up with free labor, but it wasn’t on purpose.

“Nereid didn’t have any survivors to enslave in the first place. Everyone that came off the surface was a Consortium worker because everyone that went down was a Consortium worker. No conspiracies, no forced buy-outs, just a whole mess of frozen corpses. And a pile of extracted metals that would have bought the repairs they needed a dozen times over — god only knows why they didn’t call us sooner.

“And Waypoint IV?” He made a face. “It never existed. It was a shell project. The parent company made it up to drive up our buyout price. We’re still in court with them a decade later — and because it’s in court, half the records are sealed. You want to try proving that a fictional station never existed and wasn’t taken over forcibly without documentation of the fraud? Be my guest.”

Megan held up her hands, laughing. “All right! I can tell this is an issue for you. Forget I said anything. Well — don’t forget that I won’t sign this station away, or its autonomy. But I’ll put Consortium scare stories from my mind.”

Shaylan had the good grace to look sheepish. He actually looked pretty good when he smiled, as odd as it was to think that. Megan could tell she was going to have to do some readjusting as long as this man was on her station. “Sorry,” he said, “Bit of a bugbear for me. Dispatch techs have the least control over corporate policy, and get to interact with clients the most. It’s not a great combination.”

Clearing his throat, he straightened up and looked around the meeting room. Megan had carefully moved them out of her office for the daysuit diagnostics — it had felt like too much of a violation to strip down and let him access her secured systems right there in her sanctum. Now she felt a bit silly about it. Clearly, M. Shaylan was just as nervous being on Saturn VI as she was having him there.

“Well,” Shaylan said, “I think we’re all done here, Captain Xio. I’m afraid I can’t let you look at the cultures, but I’ll want an hour or so to get everything calibrated for a new generation of algae. Might I trouble you for a cabin in crew quarters, after? The personal space allotment on Consortium shuttles is, ah, stingy. Even sharing would be an improvement, if you have a man on board who’d be willing to…?”

He trailed off, clearly seeing something in Megan’s face. She schooled it to polite blankness, wondering what he’d caught. Amusement, probably. She’d almost laughed out loud.

“Call me Megan,” she said gently, to soften the blow. “But, ah, Mr. Shaylan — there aren’t any men on board. This is a First Diaspora station.” His mouth made a little “O” shape of recognition, but she added anyway, “Gender-segregated. Or the founders were, anyway, generations ago. We’d probably hire a man if one applied. None have, that I know of. It’s a bit of a dead-end.”

Shaylan closed his mouth; cleared his throat. He even managed a crooked smile at his own error. “Ah,” he said. “Well then. I’ll just bunk on my ship, shall I? And, ah…feel free to call me Lavern.”

He bowed his way out, a rather formal gesture for a corporate tech. Megan tried not to giggle too hard. Had they really not warned him? When he hadn’t asked about the sickbay filled entirely with women, she’d assumed he’d known. Most people who came by Saturn VI did; it wasn’t exactly on any trade routes anymore. Either you’d known about it for generations or you passed it by.

Oh well. At least she’d gotten something out of the miserable day. Lavern Shaylan’s work in the hydro labs would tell whether she’d get any more out of it…

~

Independent stations were free of the odd hierarchies that ruled both corporate and military installations. Corporates and soldiers tended to see that as a weakness; Megan viewed it as entirely to their advantage.

Particularly at times like these, when Medical Officer Zanthia Brownlee — a woman with whom she would definitely have been forbidden to “fraternize” in a more structured environment — had her head buried neatly between Megan’s thighs, and was doing creative things with her tongue.

“God, Zanth,” Megan said. “You feel amazing.”

Red curls bobbed, a massive spill of them hiding the medtech’s face from view. A disembodied voice purred something unintelligible and self-satisfied. Warm lips brushed Megan’s thighs, circling, never landing for more than a moment.

Zanthia liked to tease.

“Kiss me,” Megan begged. She touched her friend’s curls with light fingertips. The cabin’s atmosphere was sealed and the gravity set low; strands of Zanthia’s hair floated about her hand in a soft cloud. “Kiss my clit, hon, please. I want you bad tonight.”

A soft giggle came from between her legs. Ghostly fingers danced along her thighs. Zanthia’s touch was always soft — she had the most amazingly long, slender hands. The medtech bounced gently on her knees, swaying in the low-gee at the edge of Megan’s bed. Her pale back arched down and away toward heart-shaped curve of her buttocks. Soft breasts swayed out of sight, touching first one of Megan’s legs and then the other.

“Don’t teeeaaaase,” Megan groaned impatiently. The redhead’s tongue was a flicker of warmth against her vulva, there and then gone again, never still. Megan could feel her breath coming faster and faster. Her cunt seemed to defy the grav settings — it felt thick, heavy, and wet, sodden with more than Zanthia’s spit. The air smelled wet and musky.

Fingertips trailed down one calf and then vanished from Megan’s skin. A moment later, she heard a breathy moan, and wet lips pressed against her slippery folds. Zanthia rocked forward on her knees and parted Megan with a deft flick, her tongue sliding between the dripping labia.

Down near the cabin floor, wet flesh squelched almost daintily. Megan felt Zanth quiver beneath her; heard a gentle schlick-schlick-schlick sound as the redhead’s body began to rock rhythmically up and down. She moaned distracted irritation at her partner.

“Play with me, Zanth, not yourself…”

Zanthia’s tongue flicked up and down in response, darting up the length of Megan’s wet slit and over her clit, a lightning back-and-forth that made the station chief gasp and clutch at her friend’s hair. A wave of pleasure swept over her, fading back into foggy-headed lust as the tongue dove down again, wriggling in between heavy folds to lap her slick inner walls. It curled and uncurled in a lazy rhythm, exploring the first few inches of Megan’s passage. Zanthia’s nose rubbed teasingly at her clit each time the redhead rocked forward.

“Oh god, Zanth.” Megan forced her hand to unclench. She wadded bedsheets up in her other hand instead, turning her death-grip on the auburn curls into a clumsy, stroking pat. “Deeper, god — you’re so good with your tongue, lover. Let me feel it inside me. I want to oh god damn it!”

Megan broke off and jerked upright in the middle of her sexy-talk. A bright red icon flashed in the corner of one eye, casting an eerie glow on a quarter of Zanthia’s startled (and sticky) face. She swatted at the air angrily. The priority signal blinked once, chimed in her ear, and shifted to an open channel. Audio only — not video, thank you very much — but every bit as unwelcome.

“Cap…Captain Xio,” Megan snapped, coughing once to clear her throat. She made an apologetic face through the ghostly display at Zanthia.

The redhead grinned and sat back, folding her arms beneath her naked breasts. Her bottom settled comfortably onto her heels. Megan wrenched her attention away from her medical officer’s curves with real effort. No one on Saturn VI was exactly fat — you couldn’t be on a stationer’s heavily-regulated diet and exercise — but Zanthia certainly tilted toward the plusher end of the spectrum. Sitting half-curled on Megan’s floor she looked like a particularly delicious, thoroughly edible pin-up.

“Captain?” It was Shaylan’s voice. His ID floated in front of her eyes, of course, but Megan hardly needed it, not with that polite baritone on the other end of the line. “Is everything all right? Station readouts said you’d sealed your cabin.”

Megan bit back irritation. She did not like having someone else checking her station’s status reports. “Everything is fine, Mr. Shaylan,” she said. “I always seal my cabin for, ah, sleep.”

Zanthia grinned through the readouts; stretched forward like a cat and nipped playfully at Megan’s toes. Megan prodded the cushiony redhead with a foot, not very effectively.

“Oh.” said Shaylan. “Well, when you unseal it, don’t be alarmed if there’s a bit of a funny smell. The new algae strain is making some weird byproducts out of the contaminants from the meteor. Your analyzers don’t show anything harmful, but it’s kind of…floral.” She heard, rather than saw, his shrug. “I put the standard ‘working as intended’ message template in your inbox. I thought you’d want to read it and make any changes you thought necessary before broadcasting it to the station.”

Megan sighed. That was depressingly thoughtful of him, all things considered. He could have sent a message out to all forty-odd inhabitants without running it by her first, if he’d wanted.

“Thank you,” she managed. “Was there anything else?”

“Mmm…I can probably have my gear set up to start daysuit repairs tomorrow,” Shaylan said. “I have a blank spare if you want me to start with yours.”

Megan nodded, then remembered to speak out loud. “That would be useful. Thank you.” Daysuits were individually coded — they had to be, to run the kind of close neural interfacing that the visual/kinesthetic controls required — and a blank could be set up for her commands within an hour or two. It would certainly beat spending a day, or days if the repairs proved complex, in a bulky pressure suit. “If that’s all…?”

“Yes, sorry. Enjoy your rest. Oh — did you want me to feed the analyzer data on the algae byproducts to your Medical Officer?”

Megan tried to keep her voice level. “I’ll pass it along to her,” she said, eyeing Zanthia’s antics on the cabin carpet. Curled around Megan’s ankles like a dog, the redhead had one hand busily exploring between her own thighs, while the other played with Megan’s toes. The room smelled strongly of sweat and pussy, though half of that was no doubt Megan’s.

“Important call?” Zanthia asked sweetly, after Megan reached out to swat the call away.

“It would have to be, to get through my privacy settings. I’m going to have to talk to that man about what constitutes a priority message.” Megan pressed her lips together in frustrated displeasure.

“Ooh, man? You have boys calling you after hours, now?”

Zanthia uncurled herself with a giggle, and rose to join Megan on the bed. Soft flesh spilled into Megan’s lap as freckled arms reached out to entwine her. Their breasts pressed together, large and pale squishing into slender and dark. The medtech stole a long, lazy kiss that was heavy with the smell of cunt.

“Time to remind my captain why she’s my captain,” Zanthia purred into Megan’s ear. She pressed hot lips to the seashell curve, breathing wetly. Megan closed her eyes to savor the sensation; cupped Zanthia’s bottom as she fell back into the low-gee bed’s embrace. Their bodies bounced lightly together, airy and carefree.

“Show me,” she whispered, as the lights dimmed.

~

Zanthia spent the first morning after the Consortium tech’s arrival bored and horny.

Her medical “wing” — two small rooms, an isolation chamber, and an office — already smelled pungently floral; clearly her life support was cycling from the new algae tanks. Plant poop in my air filters. Great. At least it beat daysuit breakdowns.

Her patient load cleared out fast: three-quarters of the “sick” were getting bad data from their suits, just like Megan and the Consortium tech had said. The rest needed a shot of detox and, ironically, to get back into their suits, at least until the new atmo had cycled for a few days. Whatever the glitches were, they weren’t as bad as actual organic contamination.

With the last of the patients gone, Zanthia settled into her office chair and pulled up the readouts from the algae tanks. She flicked through the columns of data. Nothing seemed dangerous — natural esters rising from the algae blooms, organic but harmless. The daysuits could probably be set to filter the smell out entirely if people wanted.

Zanthia sighed and leaned back in her chair. Her heels drummed discontentedly on the floor. Megan had rolled right over and gone to sleep after their tussle in her cabin. Forgivable, given the station chief’s workload, but frustrating…

“Right,” Zanthia said aloud. She locked her door with a gesture, then, after a moment’s thought, went ahead and sealed the atmosphere as well.

The touch of a fingertip opened her daysuit at the chest. Zanthia wiggled free, the almost-invisible shimmer collapsing down into a neat little square in her hand. Her projected “clothing” flickered out and vanished, leaving her standing naked on the dry friction-matting.

“Much better.” Zanthia grinned at herself in the section of the wall set to reflective. She ran a hand through her scarlet curls, upper and lower; primped and popped a hip at her mirror image. “Sexy lady. You’ve definitely earned a break.”

Blowing herself a kiss, Zanthia opened a desk drawer. Her favorite toy lay within: a long, flexible tube, domed at one tip; plain and unadorned but obviously phallic. Plugged into a daysuit it could shift its size and shape any number of ways. On its own, well…on its own it was just a big dick, which suited Zanthia’s mood fine.

“Hello, dear,” she giggled, hefting the dildo. It had a pleasant weight to it, and a soft firmness. You could bend it, but only a little, and the core stayed deliciously stiff.

“Mmm. Oh, yes.” Zanthia lay back in her station chair. She kicked her feet carelessly over the armrests, nestling her bottom all the way back. Tilting, she thrust her pussy up toward the ceiling.

“Give it to me,” she whispered, “yes.” She brushed the head of the toy against her slit; gasped for a moment at its cool touch. Her pussy felt hot and sticky, already dripping, as if her daysuit had been holding back a flood of juicy arousal. “Fuuuck,” she moaned. It was all Megan’s fault, really. The chief had left her so horny. And gone off early to closet herself with a man, too — Zanthia felt a pang of irrational jealousy.

With a groan, the medical officer thrust the long, floppy toy into her cunt. She jerked in her chair, feet kicking. The slick, wet, stretching sensation took her breath away. She kept the default setting deliberately large, big enough to strain a pussy mostly used to fingers and tongues, and her walls swelled around it, clenching tight.

Zanthia began to pant loudly in the confines of her little office. She thrust the toy as deep as it would go, bottomed out, and withdrew again, letting all but the tip slip from her body. The cream-colored shaft gleamed with her wetness. Zanthia breathed deep, drawing the horny pussy-smell into her nostrils. It made a dizzying combination with the sweet floral smell of the recycled air.

“Fuck me,” she panted, “fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!” Determinedly, she began to pound her pussy, working the big shaft two-handed. Her wrists slapped against her clit as she pounded away. The rosy lips of her cunt spread wide, and with a distracted pawing at her desk controls she set the ceiling to reflective, blinking up at herself in pleased surprise as the mirroring came online.

Zanthia watched with hungry eyes as the thick cock worked in and out of her. The lines of her labia stretched tight, drawn into an almost perfect “O” shape by the toy’s girth. She could see a trail of sticky white cream drooling down toward the pucker of her bottom as the dildo filled her to overflowing. Zanthia dipped a finger in the wetness; raised it to her lips and lapped the tangy cunt-juice with the tip of her tongue. She felt like drooling in the hot, heavy air. Sugary airborne esters mingled with the sweaty taste of horny cunt on her tongue.

“Harder,” she whined, her voice high-pitched with need. “Fuck me harder.”

Her wrist moved in response, pounding away as hard as she could manage. The cock seemed to be swelling inside her, filling her pussy to the brim; stretching its walls into a perfectly-molded sleeve. Zanthia’s tongue hung out of her mouth as she battered her cunt with the long, flexible tube. Lewd squelching sounds filled the air, and the rhythmic slap-slap-slap of her wrists against her skin.

“C-cumming,” she gasped, “cumming!” One fumbling hand worked her desk controls, pulling up Megan’s message box. Zanthia keyed for Recorded Message. “Oh, Station Chief,” she groaned. She raised her voice; made it loud and husky and just a little overwrought, like a cheesy actress reading a porno script. “Chief, this cock’s so big. It’s fucking me so hard. Come fuck my cock, Megan. Come stretch your pussy with me…ohhhh, god!”

With a shriek, Zanthia spasmed in her seat, one hand slapping against the armrest. The whole chair spun dizzyingly as she rammed the fake cock as deep as it would go and clenched her thighs tight around it. Waves of pleasure turned her dirty-talk into wordless little grunts, saved and recorded for Megan’s enjoyment.

At last, the plastic cock slid from Zanthia’s grasp, slipping down into the seat of the chair to rest, its tip still nestled inside her, against one thigh. Zanthia opened her eyes and stared up at her reflection: breathless, disheveled, and very flushed, her cheeks almost as red as the blood-suffused folds of her cunt. She touched her clit tenderly and almost came again, feeling embarrassingly loose where her walls still clutched at the dripping shaft.

There was pussy juice everywhere, smeared in sticky swipes along both of Zanthia’s thighs, and her chin was wet where she’d apparently drooled on herself. The medtech blushed, adding to the roses in her cheeks, and hastily killed the reflective setting, wiping the ceiling back to blank white.

She didn’t know what had gotten into her — her masturbation was usually indulgent, yes, but not quite that pornographic. What had she even been thinking, leaving a message like that for Megan?

A little smile quirked Zanthia’s lips despite her misgivings. Well, it hadn’t been the most responsible thing in the world. But it would be fun to imagine the station chief listening to Zanthia’s graphic moans in the middle of her workday. Maybe she’d even queue it up while she was working with that tech. Zanthia could just see her struggling to keep a straight face as her lover whispered filth into her ears.

Megan would be cross later, of course. She might even come down to the medical wing and discipline Zanthia. Wouldn’t that be interesting…?

Gently panting flower-scented air, Zanthia reached for the base of the sturdy cock. It was most definitely time for another round.

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