Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories From: an2154@anon.penet.fi (Equus) Subject: Catherine The Great (scifi, interspecies) Date: 16 Dec 92 23:53:53 GMT Angry red and orange of Ching Tai Optics image enhancer... "... Jojo left his home in Tucson Arizona / For some California grass... "... Grey bullet wrapped around my legs, silver where the air-film clings... "Ichi, ni, san, chi... " The moon shining in cold blue pseudo-colour of the SysCyber and she sings to it and it isn't even hers... "... I've got the brains / you've got the looks / let's make lots of money... "... "Lover" sings the bullet... "... Now look at me like a Stormtrooper in Drag / I bet you feel exactly like I do... "... The Life And Adventures Of Catherine The Great Talking Mining Colony Holovid Blues by Equus "Showtime!!" I groaned as a loud drum roll echoed through the air followed by a shrill major-chord fanfare of synthesizer horns and strings backed by a slippery fretless bass glide. I rolled off the inflatable into the warm water of the Silvermoon's tank and with a couple of strokes I reached the edge and climbed out. A nasal voice began to sing a lyric over the relentless urgency of the music; as ever, I hadn't a clue what the words were, my half-sleep state making my incomprehension that much more acute. Picking up a white bathrobe that lay at the poolside I put it on, savouring it's seductive touch on my wet skin as I tied the cord around my waist. "Turn it down for God's sake, I moaned. The volume diminished a trifle. "How can I concentrate to kick the software into action with that unholy row." "This is your culture Greenacre!" the voice of the captain came from above and beyond the pool wall, probably from the engineer's console; "late twentieth century, Gary Numan even! Have you no soul you philistine!" I groaned in reply "Yes I know, `We Take Mystery To Bed' 1982, Beggars Banquet Records. I like it but I prefer to be awake to like it." I closed my eyes and concentrated: ++ SysCom Cyber Corporation ++ ++ Cyber 8 Cerebral Enhancer ++ ++ Concurrent N.O.S v5.3 ++ ++ ++ Initializing... ++ ++ System OK. ++ Biomonitor - Blood sugar -20% nominal ++ Blood press 70/115 nominal ++ Blood O2/CO2 nominal ++ OK The green characters flitted across my vision, appearing as though they were half a meter before my eyes; they weren't, of course, they were being fed directly to my optic nerve from the biochip implant in my cerebral cortex, a SysCom 8, one of the third generation models that I'd had fitted at the same time as the vocal chord range extension and the Ching Tai Optics system fitted to my left eye. Hell, wasn't that an operation to remember! I thought of the word "chronograph" and the green characters vanished to be replaced by a row of figures in the peripheral region of my vision which informed me that the time was 0822(shipboard) and the date was the fourteenth of July 2332. I opened my eyes and willed the green figures away and duly away they went. "Well, where's the show this time?" I asked as I climbed the spiral stairs to the middle level of the bridge. Sliandra looked up from the main drive console as I reached the top of the staircase, her green cat eyes shining from her pointed leopard face, framed by the golden yellow of her flowing mane. I would never quite get used to seeing her. She was a Leopard caste Amthren, a race descended from feline analogues on a world in the Rishthrane Sector, one of the races that had found we Terrans rather than the other way around. According to the history books, we'd called them "Were-Cats" at first; indeed they looked like some sort of a bipedal cross between a tall human and one of the Terran great cats, but that was before we'd learned each other's language and before we'd learned of the business acumen of the leopard-caste. I'd first met her on Track's World towards the end of the Dralasite Conflict in the summer of `29. With my usual lack of discretion I'd taken a job as a mercenary pilot, flying an antique mark 3 Stinger fighter for what turned out to be the losing side. My stolen single-seater just about made it to Track's where I had run across Sliandra smuggling arms to the winning side and in need of a good pilot. Sliandra stood up and put her spotted furry arm across my shoulder. "Party time is out in the Urgenic Deeps, a mining colony," she said in her lightly accented English. "Terrific, three weeks sub-light from any half-way safe jump zone and then we have to find a way through the mag-storms," I grumbled. There was a whistle from the pool below, and a squark, followed by a strange cross between the two. It was a curse in Delphine which roughly translated into "Your mother fucks sharks," which is a pretty heavy expletive in anyone's language, in Delphine it was very heavy indeed. Sliandra and I looked over the rail to the pool below; Silvermoon was swimming in lazy circles. She whistled again: "The last time I was there we nearly got wiped by a freak storm, I don't want to go back! Come back to bed Peter!" the last was added in a falling cadence, a heartfelt entreaty. Sliandra shot me a look of stifled humor and I grinned back. "I'd love to Silver, but The Chief has a job for us," I warbled back in Delphine, invoking the SysCom to pull my modified vocal chords to make the necessary sounds. Silvermoon turned a slow somersault in the pool before protesting about the earliness of the hour and that she wanted something to eat before calculating the jump vectors. I smiled as she swam for the exit tunnel. She had been serious in her offer of a return to her bed. We had been lovers for almost as long as I had served under Sliandra's command. I remember reading that the first trans-species bonding contract had been ratified back in 2098, seven years after the communications breakthrough between our two races that followed the Honshu Incident. Dolphins were a common sight around the spacelanes, their natural psi abilities making the mind warping task of translight navigation relatively trivial. Slightly less common was pair-bonding between our two species, but we shared an unstoppable curiosity and so it was not unknown for certain individuals to, shall we say, experiment. "You haven't asked who we're flying for yet," said Sliandra. "I almost hate to," I replied, "but you're going to tell me anyway, right?" "Fat Charlie," she said with a broad smile which exposed her wicked looking teeth. "Oh Hell's Donkeys! Not The Archangel." "The very same. And there's more; we're shipping mucky books." "Pardon?" "Erotica, Pornography, Holovids and Simstim's of reproductive behaviour." "You're kidding!" "No, it's on the beam! Apparently out on the mining colonies there are nowhere near enough Stepfords or real females to go round and a chronic shortage of reading literature; first out there with some good clean fun is going to make a killing!" "Let me guess: chronic imbalance between the sexes out there" "Eight hundred to one at the last count; one hour with a Stepford sets you back five hundred Galcreds." "Szjat!" "So you see, plenty big Galcreds for Mr Archangel if he gets there first, and plenty big rake off for pretty leopard, pretty dolphin and not-so-pretty human into the bargain." I shook my head, smiling at Sliandra's favorite way of referring to her crew. "Why aren't we shipping Stepfords instead." "Two reasons I can think of," said Sliandra, licking her left forepaw and starting to wash behind her ears: "First up, a good quality cybernetic streetwalker is going to command a purchase price of 10k Creds at least, and all Stepfords are custom built remember so the lead- time is horrendous. Second, they have no room for them up there and so our kind sponsor is getting us to haul some top quality porn for him. Ahh, that's better." She added the latter as she scratched under her chin with her forepaw. "Knowing Fat Charlie the Archangel, it won't be top quality; nothing of his ever is." I gave a rueful grin, the fast-cred and shady deals of our irregular client were well known. "We shall see; we load Charlie's crates and some top-flight laser mining kit which he's also selling to MagCorp at nine hundred hours, dock Lima Nine, out by ten thirty and if pretty dolphin gets her fishy act together we go translight by midday. So take your places gentlemen please and let's get this show on the road!" She indicated the pilot's chair, raised on a dais on the middle deck behind the helm. As I took my place and began to invoke the docking release procedures the old Paul Simon song "Crazy Love" came over the JBLs installed in the roof of the flight deck - the song which had caused Charlie DaPalma to be known as "Fat Charlie the Archangel" to the crew of the SpaceFreighter CSF367/66 Catherine The Great ever after. It had soon become apparent that translight by midday was off the cards when Sliandra had appeared in the docking bay at nine fifteen carrying her black attache case. I was supervising the loading of Fat Charlie's dubious crates and the rest of the cargo when she wandered across to me. "I'm just off stationside; I have a little business to attend to." "There aren't, perchance, any manifest disks in there are there?" I said with a smile. She rattled the case. From within came the chink of bright steel chains and who knows what else. "Are there ever?" she said back and, with a jaunty stride, she walked down the loading ramp towards the travel tubes. That's my captain, never let business get in the way of pleasure. True enough it was fifteen hundred hours before I nosed the bulk of our Spacewhale from the cargo bays of Rigel 2's transit station and out on impulse power for the jump zone. Silvermoon and I were both wired up to Catherine's computers and we idled the time away by playing a game of speed-chess between course alterations and vector recalculations. I had just gained the upper hand in the fifth game when we were interrupted by Rigel control. "Sliandra," whistled Silvermoon, "warm up the charms; Rigel have given us the next path out." "Got it. Charm drives leaving pre-ignition state for hot standby," came the Captain's reply, the ship shuddering briefly as the magnetic plasma bottles fired into life in a flip of electronic switch-states, holding within their annular swirls the myriad swarms of the monsters of quantum physics. Flipping my computer into synch with that of the drive' I was treated to a brief subliminal flash of the triple-starred and skeletonned "Psi Hazard Warning" logo and the message that prolonged use of inertial simulators can lead to distortions of mental acuity, followed by a short message from the Hawkins Corporation telling me to have a nice day. Then came the solid green characters: ++ CHARM DRIVE STATUS - HOT STANDBY ++ ++ - HELM CONTROL ++ My vision flipped to an external view of the the ship, a view supplied by her computers directly to my visual cortex. The gravity lines of local space superimposed themselves in white upon the blackness of space, a distant ship a red pyramid with the words "CPV890/75 Aleister Crowley" floating beside it, Rigel 2 a purple distant sphere, red lines marking incoming and outgoing flight vectors. A green dot flashed before me indicating that drives were now under my mental command and I started to invoke the ignition sequences for the neutrino pulse that would flip Catherine The Great across two hundred parsecs of space on a wave of tachyons. ++ INCOMING TRANSMISSION - JUMP WILL BE SUCCESSFUL ++ Silvermoon received the same message, whistled her readiness and, with a flicker of concentration I put the charm drives online. Twenty seconds before we left Rigel we arrived at Urgenic Deeps Jump Zone T4. The Charm Drives entered their wind-down sequences and Sliandra transmitted the message we received before we began our journey across the vastness of space. Tachyon travel was incredibly safe; you knew if your jump was successful before you made it; if you didn't receive a clear jump message it meant that you made the jump wrongly, transmitted a "No Jump" message and flatlined the charm ignition sequence and so you never made the jump in the first place and, therefore, never transmitted a "No Jump" in the first place. Yeah, I don't understand it either and I've flown charm drive ships for fifteen years. The trick to FTL travel was getting to the right place first time as "Clear to jump" signals had to be transmitted as soon as you came off the wave. Silvermoon soon let us know that we had got where we wanted to be by leaping from her pool with a squeal. "Right on the button! Am I beautiful or am I beautiful!" I put Catherine The Great into a 50 kiloclick elliptical intercept of the last calculated position of the mining colony we sought, angling the ship to spiral up and out from the gravitational whirlpool we had created by our arrival, flying along the distorted white lines of the tortured gravity field, the turns and climbs and impulse-drive acceleration seeming to push me back into my seat as the inertia simulator fed my brain with the fantasy that I was experiencing G- Stress. I admit to being one of the old-school of pilots; I found flying a lot easier on hallucinations. "Yes my darling," I transmitted to my lover over the intercom, "But let's get out of this gravity well before we celebrate." Five minutes later, just as I DSed the Upcom, Sliandra brought the McKinley Outboards up to power and we accelerated to a smooth one tenth the speed of light, Silvermoon retracting the shields from the front of the ship and guiding us on visual towards the flickering blue star where lay MagCorp's selenium operation and twelve thousand lonely ore-jockeys. The lights had dimmed for the night-cycle on Catherine The Great's flight deck as I slipped into Silvermoon's pool, the water that enveloped me seeming to flow forever into the deep blue-blackness of the endless night of space. The ship flew onward to our destination on autopilot, the sleeping SysCom set to interrupt me should the Spacewhale's systems detect anything untoward. I swam to the spaceward rim of the pool and looked out to the myriad stars and galaxies. Something brushed across my dangling legs and moments later a grey shape broke the surface of the water beside me. Reaching over I caressed the pointed snout that angled itself towards me, her skin smooth and soft to the touch. She opened her mouth, making a clicking sound in her throat. Delphine sweet nothings, simple sounds that bonded us together as tightly as any contract. She pushed past me, my hand slipping across her back and to the side of her dorsal fin. She dived, spiraling around my legs, her teeth nibbling playfully at my legs as I seized hold of her tail, allowing myself to be pulled underwater, using my purchase to pull myself up her back to seize hold of her dorsal as we glided through the dark water, slowly surfacing to breathe together in a shared gasp. I loosed my hold of her and she turned around with a languid flip of her powerful tail to slip like a shadow towards me. "Love?" she asked, the sound a tiny, delicate thing in the Delphine language. "Love," I replied as she nosed into me and I took her head in my hands and let her push me backwards so that her lithe, warm body covered mine, the word no less tiny and sweet in my tongue. As I went under I wrapped my legs around the back of her strong tail and we pressed our bodies close to each other. Deep below her skin I could feel her heart beating slow and mighty within her graceful frame. I felt a wave of comfort breaking over me, my eyes closed and my breath held but my mind afire with love and wonder at the flowing beauty that I embraced in our sub-aquatic ballet. Like quicksilver we flowed through the dark waters of the pool; our light was the glow of the stars and our bed was of warm, still water. We surfaced together, again breathing a single gasp, and again we dived into the spectral roaring silence of the pool, an underwater silence of low sounds and heartbeats, spiraling by degrees down into the depths as though we could have swum together among the shoals of stars, the gas- cloud shallows and the deep emptiness of space that surrounded us. My lover lay on her back when we next surfaced, deliberate movements of her tail keeping us afloat in her microcosmic ocean. "Lover... " she trilled, the sound splashing through the surface of the water. "My Beauty," I whispered in return. No more words were necessary in her language or mine; indeed, in those times before our peoples had spoken, each to each, no words could have expressed the unity of our hearts and souls. And no words could do so now. With a twist of her sinuous frame she brought us to the brink of intimacy and, for our shared love and with endless gratitude, I slipped inside her. We both gave a cry as I gained possession of her and she of me, sliding deep into the liquid cave of her passion. Her sleek grey body pushed hard against me and I held her as tightly as I could to my chest, my head pressed against the underside of her beak, my legs entwining around her tail, weaving a tapestry of human and dolphin threads. I lay deep within her, drinking the sensation of her hot, damp cleft wrapped tight around me. We dived again, turning a somersault in the silent waters. I clung as firmly as I could, keeping hard and fast within her, her puissant muscles that propelled us causing her molten warmth to tighten and relax endearingly around me. We both gave a cry of ecstasy as we broke the surface, gulping air as again we dove below the surface, her grey-blue delphine shape sparkling with the starlight that seemed to shine in constellations from her night black eye. Countless were our turns that night, countless the spirals and volutions of our lovemaking. For an age our essences mingled in glorious synergy in the limpid salt waters of the pool, our skins wet and shining, clinging hard and furious to each other, my hands roaming over her glistening body as we turned and rolled before I spilled my soul deep within her body. The endless, immortal night spun on towards eternity as we drifted apart for a moment, the pearls of our lust scattering throughout the waters. Then together we lay. We wept as we lay together on the hydrostatic bed, my head supported above the water, the bed on which we lay submerged some twenty centimetres below the surface of the pool, her head across my chest shiny silver and weighty. For our love and for each other we wept: weeping tears of thankful, poignant joy for our sharing of the gift of life, weeping gentle tears of devotion to the salt water for the gift of each other. There are those that will tell you that a dolphin cannot weep. But they are wrong. As we lay still and I held her, tracing the line of her permanent smile until she opened her beak and she nibbled my hand with a gentle, caressing pressure, we wept for the pleasure and the beauty of our company and our love. And then together we slept. The rest of the journey to the mining colony was, from a pilot's point of view, uneventful. Two days into the journey Sliandra with the assistance of Catherine's computers finally cracked the entry codes for fat Charlie's cargo pods. Inside the first one we opened was a note from the Archangel himself which congratulated us on breaking the codes; he may have been a shady customer but he had a sense of humor. Contrary to expectations his wares were of quite a high quality but, as is ever the case, the product was of mixed artistic merit. We watched a few of the holovids whilst sunning ourselves around Grecian splendor of the flight deck pool, awarding them points as we watched the bump and grind and dubious dialogue. Sliandra performed as Master of Ceremonies for our entertainment. "Ladies and gentlemen," she began, "for your further viewing pleasure this evening, Archangel Productions are proud to present," there was a pause as she checked the label on the HV disc: "Satraganarius Sex Party." Silvermoon and I fell about laughing. Silvermoon, squeaking her chortles, back-flipped across the pool, drenching Sliandra in the process. "Careful, you'll damage the merchandise!" roared Sliandra as she started the recording. We counted thirty two seconds between the two actors meeting to the moment he climbed on top of her. The dialogue consisted of stilted, badly rehearsed phrases and groans, the actors kindly informing us when they were coming, Silvermoon informing us that she had never fully understood the phrase "I'm coming" as it always sounded like the speaker was trying to catch up with their partner. I reached over the edge of the pool, laughing as she rubbed against my arm that dangled in the water. The Delphine phrase for the moment of bliss that the actors so cruelly were massacring in three dimensions above our heads approximately translated into human speech as the word "together". Sliandra consulted the manifest printout that we had found alongside Fat Charlie's note. "Hey you two, there's one here called `Dolphin Lust'" "Seen it!" we chorused from across the pool. "Any good?" "Sharkbait!" whistled Silvermoon. "We saw it at the pleasure complex on Kapella last year, based on a scene from a late twentieth century celluloid format movie." "Easy Travel to Other Planets?" asked Sliandra. "Yes, sort of a graphic rendition of the love scene; totally ruined the atmosphere of the original," I replied. "Caused a hell of a fuss when it came out in nineteen ninety seven you know. Music was by a band called Riding The Nightmare, got the soundtrack about somewhere," volunteered Sliandra, yet again astonishing us with her knowledge of late twentieth century Terran trivia. "Oh, here's a good one," said Sliandra, consulting the manifest further, "It's called `Kiss My Whip'." Again, the flight deck was rocked by laughter. The holovid flickered to show the image of tall Terran woman, dressed in nothing but a maid's white serving apron and carrying a tray of drinks, her ankles were manacled together. "Rrawor, pretty," murmured Sliandra. The music was dreadful, a sort of pastiche of the Western Spiral Arm pop music known as "Speed House" from the last five years; loud, brash and in two-four time. Eventually Sliandra killed the music track while leaving the dialogue track online and superimposed the music of a gentler era over the images; quite nasty ones too but the use of camera angles and the somewhat unconvincing screams of the victim making it obvious to all but the most committed and uncritical sadomasochism fan that this was not for real. By the time I nosed Catherine into the shuttle bays we had awarded the prize for worst HV to a truly horrendous piece of work which rejoiced in the title of "Mud Wrestlers of Lesbos." Mind you, we had taken copies of a few of the choicer HVs. "Just in case we get bored on those long crossings," Sliandra claimed. It didn't take Sliandra long to get bored. We shipped out of docking bays of colony Manta Seven a mere four hours after docking. Their facilities were primitive to say the least and I was not sorry to be heading back to civilization. We were hauling a cargo of ultra- refined alpha grade selenium. It had cost us the entire proceedings of the inward run to buy the purified metal but Sliandra assured us we could double our profits with the right buyer. We also carried a new piece of software in Catherine's databanks; Sliandra had hacked into the colony's computer and had appropriated a copy of a shiny new Unisis CAD program. Whereas Silvermoon and I spent the return journey to the jump zone watching the stars and playing chess, Sliandra occupied herself with a copy of a HV whose subject matter paralleled her own special interests and attempted to improve on the device depicted therein, the CAD package producing a three dimensional holographic projections of curious devices formed from steel wire, plastalloy girders and chrome plated chain. As to myself, well I do confess that I snuck a look at the dolphin video again... By the time we reached the jump zone we had a buyer for our metal on Kapella and a tidy profit from the whole operation. Sliandra had also decided that she wanted a change of decor on the flight deck from Classical Greek to Gothic which meant a dry dock break of at last three weeks on the planet famous for its pleasure domes. This was a cause for celebration for all of us but I shuddered at the thought of what sort of ship I would be returning to. It was a thirteen hour flight to the spaceport. Kapellan sector regulations insisted on a thousand-click separation between ships and a vector speed of no more than 0.03c for incoming vessels. We let the computers fly us in during the night-cycle and, at twenty one hundred hours I left Sliandra on the bridge haggling over the Dirac for a refit at a reasonable price. During Catherine's last refit (from 1920s Terran Art Deco to Terran Classical Greek) Silvermoon and I had combined our two cabins into one so that our cabin looked like the front of a temple to Poseidon with a large pool stretching out before it. The walls were curved and HV systems built into them were capable of projecting the illusion that the pool was merely an inlet of the crystal blue Aegean sea. The projectors were running as I walked in, giving the appearance that I had entered the room from an antechamber of the pillared hall of the temple of the Sea God. A white-sailed ship cruised far out to sea as the sun set as if behind the temple, the waters of the wine- dark sea reflecting back the warm golden rays. Silvermoon floated on the surface of the pool, her eyes half closed, her flukes sill and relaxed. Quickly throwing off my clothes I slipped into the pool beside her, floating on by back in the warm salty water. "You're pining again," I said softly. "Yes" she replied in English; "I miss the pull of the tides, the feel of the old sun upon my back, the... the... " She trilled a delphine word which had no translation in human languages. The word expressed the peculiar sensation a wave breaking had upon the skin of a dolphin. "I know," I replied; I miss Earth too: the crisp air across the ice fields, the pure white of the floes; yes, My Beauty, I miss all that too." We were quiet for a moment, both remembering our home world, she the wild and stormy South Atlantic and the delphine city of New Atlantis, I the merciless beauty of my childhood home in the Byrd glacial basin in Antarctica. When we made love that night it was with the slow languid tenderness that is born of shared memories. The sea had turned black and the constellations of Earth glittered overhead. The soft, repetitious splash of waves upon the shore found an echo in our movements until, at last, we let them lull us into sleep.