KRAKEN

KRAKEN

Vivian Vixen

Copyright 2015

This is a work of fiction.   Names, characters, places, dialogue, and everything else are products of the author's imagination.   Any resemblance to people or events, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

NOTICE, WARNING, DISCLAIMER, AND ALL THAT:

All participants are 18+, 100% willing, not blood related, 100% human during sex, well read, finished their homework, eat their vegetables, yada yada yada

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1

Aydra was crammed up in the sub-engine, body folded like a fetus deep in the massive recesses of the Kraken. Somewhere inside the grime and mess of wires was a loose bolt and a belt that needed tightening, but right at that moment her hand was pressed between her legs, vigorously sliding against her work pants, driving herself to the edge of ecstasy. She glanced down at her watch.  A little less than two minutes until they’d be accelerating again and she’d have to get out before it was hot enough to kill. It’s hard to cum under that sort of pressure.

She had just enough time to finish the job she’d actually been sent in there to do. Sweating hard, she took the towel dangling out of her back pocket and dabbed at her forehead and around the patch over her left eye.

It was stupid idea to masturbate in there, but she hadn’t gotten any privacy in days and she needed it. She couldn’t risk jilling herself even in her bunk.  Ever since she’d survived her first few days with the crew, she’d been perfectly cautious about arousing any of them.

It wasn’t a comfortable area to work, but she liked it well enough—it was the only place on the ship where she felt alone.  Anywhere else—the mess, the bridge, the holding bay, even the sleeping quarters—you could hear someone shouting orders, or the faint buzz of voices speaking softly over the broken intercom which never quite shut off all the way.

And, though the men knew better, there was always the unclear threat from any one of the sex starved pirates. She knew very well what they were capable of. Battle chiseled masses of steel-like muscle and grit, the men onboard were a virile force to be reckoned with.  No one touched her nowadays, even though she was the only female with them. She’d had to work incredibly hard, and risk everything, to prove herself to them.  She still remembered her first day and night on board. Brutal pain—savage pleasure.

Down here she had her back to warm steel and all she could hear was the sometimes gentle, sometimes violent rumble coming from inside the behemoth of an engine.  Anywhere else in the ship she was confined to a gravity that reminded her of her childhood on Spersta—a planet with a gravity about half the standard—and she didn’t like to be reminded.  In the sub-engine maintenance room, at least where she was laying right then, there was almost no gravity.  Just enough to keep her planted on her back.

Less than two minutes.  Up to her shoulders in wiring, hands deep inside, her fingers nimbly inventoried rows of bolts until she felt the loose one.  Passing the wrench over the head, she cranked it down.  Bolt tight in place, she pulled her hands out and punched an update into her handheld which followed with directions to the loose belt, about fourteen degrees above the spot she’d just been working on.

Aydra took a deep breath and dove back into the grease and steel.  The watch beeped at her.  One minute.  She felt for the line of bolts and then lunged into the machine enough to curve her elbows uncomfortably further inside.  She grabbed the belt and unclipped it, removed a link, and tried to wrap it back around.  It gave her some resistance, but finally relented, slipping into position with a piece of the tip of her finger.

Aydra’s shout of pain was drowned out by the sound of the main re-booster starting up. She yanked her arms out and looked down at her left pointer finger, the nail cracked down the middle and the tip of flesh torn off and pouring blood. She slipped the finger in her the corner of her mouth as she lifted the handheld to her face.

“Patch me in to the Captain.”

There was confirming beep and then brief static as the line was connected.

“I need to fire this thing,” came the hoarse bark from the other end.

“You’re all set to fire, captain,” said Aydra, eyes closed.

The line went dead and she gathered her tools as she heard the belt she’d just been working on catch and start to spin.  Fuel flooded a chamber beneath her.  The first combustion was enough to wake you up, or send you stumbling up on the main levels, but down here the concussive shock nearly made Aydra black out.

Almost immediately the heat was unbearable and Aydra slid herself through the chute to the outer-engine compartment as quickly as she could.  She came out on the plastic flooring of a massive room which housed, in close quarters, the four engines and six re-boosters.  This was the largest ship she’d ever worked on, and possibly one of the largest unregistered ships carving out its spot on the edge of space.

She had to be careful walking there.  There was just barely enough gravity to hold you down and it was common to hear of guys who’d tripped, or stepped too hard, or moved too quick and sent their bodies helplessly crashing into the uninsulated side of a running engine, their bodies an unrecognizable, smoldering pulp once anyone noticed they were gone.

Aydra tiptoed to the staircase and pulled herself into the second level where the main’s computer was held.  It was a solid square meter of pure power, running every single thing and communicating with ships across lightyears and endless star systems.  Somewhere, the ship was probably running a hack through a bank on Spersta.

Pirate ships like this one were well known for slipping into a quadrant and stealing billions from planets, then disappearing.  Aydra had thought she would be embroiled in battle when she signed the four year contract as a mechanic on the Kraken, but she quickly learned the work of pirates was often less interesting than reported in the news, or spoken of by the travel-weary in bars.

The only stories you ever got from pirates were ones that you never cared to share with anyone ever again.

2

She looked down an aisle of secondary computers to where Erthur was hardwiring a connection to a financial institution somewhere far away. He was kneeling, bent over a mess of wires, wearing just a pair of oil-stained blue jeans. The muscles in his broad back rolled and churned, star-tanned skin glistening with the sweat of his exertion. Aydra had to bite down on her lip to steady herself before she went over to him.

She and Erthur had a good relationship—his faith in her was the reason she wasn’t chained to a bed; her loyalty was why he wasn’t a frozen corpse floating through space.

Erthur was the only man on board that Aydra thought about, or even considered having to herself again. He was handsome, with kind eyes despite his circumstances. He seemed like a good man who’d simply fallen in with the wrong crowd.

They’d run into each other in cramped hallways, forced to press together as they squeezed past. They always moved slowly. They’d talk sometimes, chest to chest. Desire sizzled between them, but they each had their reasons for never taking it further.

Aydra dreamed about him sometimes, coming into her quarters at night, crawling on top of her, ravishing her until the morning alarm rang.  She dreamed often of tasting him. Any of him, all of him.

Maybe one day. For now they maintained a charade of platonic friendliness.

“Erthur!  How’s the work,” Aydra shouted.

The computer technician leaned back on his heels. “Rough.  Captain wants a crack on a zeta-protected hedge over eighteen lightyears from here.” He sighed, grabbed his stubbled chin in one hand, and cracked his neck loudly. “It’s just not happening.”

Aydra put her tools down and walked over to look at the problem. “You want to get this done?” She pointed to the computer behind Erthur. “Route the twinning supply from that computer in sequence with the one you’ve got there.  That’ll give the q-spacer enough juice.”

Erthur took a look and bit his lip, worried.

“Listen, you get that done and the zeta-crack won’t be too hard.” Aydra broke open a panel and stretched out a translucent wire. “Just make sure nobody trips.  You’re only going to be able to keep the line open for a few minutes, tops.”

Erthur shook his head. “Right.  Best shot.” He smiled at Aydra. “Cheers.”

This was the bread and butter of pirates everywhere.  It was hard to pull a decent profit from a true raid, ship to ship.  It took months of planning to find a government craft’s plot and to intercept it at the right spot where reinforcements couldn’t get to it in time.  You lost a lot of men on raids like that, lost some good artillery.  And that’s only if you didn’t mistake a fake convoy for a real one.  It was only if you won.  You only made money if the guy you kidnapped was worth enough.  Or if the technology you captured was advanced enough to sell well on the black market.  There’s always someone willing to buy—the question was for how much.

But Aydra didn’t have to worry about that.  She was just a mechanic, even if she did know how to work the computers.

All she cared about was what to be prepared for, where she was heading next.  She picked up bits and pieces listening to the whispers over the broken intercom.  They were on their way back to the main system, Sol, and lucky too.  They’d land just as soon as her contract was up.

Thing was, with contracts like her, and pirates like them, they kept their word.  If you were mid-flight, between systems and your contract ended, you’d either sign on for another tour, on their terms, or get ejected naked into the vacuum of space.  If you were resting and refueling at an outpost planet you might spend the rest of your days there.  But, if you were lucky enough, you might end up somewhere populated, a good spaceport where you could work your wares and move on to the next job.

She heard that they were going to dock around the Plutonian moon Charon.  It was as close to Earth as a craft with notoriety as theirs could get without being noticed.

Charon was an unofficial waystation, the last populated stop before venturing through interstellar space.  Anyone with money or sensibility stopped at Oberon, around Uranus, before going on.  For the rest—the desperate and needy, the hopeless and hopeful—Charon was their last chance.

It was Aydra’s best chance.

Many were born there, a few went by choice, and some were marooned—but anyone who managed to get out never went back unless they had no choice.  It didn’t matter what part of the galaxy you had been raised in, from Mars to the wispy edges of the Centaurus Arm—where even Earth was forgotten—everyone had heard stories about Charon.

The city there had been born in the early twenty-third century to much fanfare.  It was an autonomous civilization, handed over to the men and women who built it.  It was to be home to the very first launchport into interstellar space.  From the Charonian orbit, ships would set out for Alpha Centauri, then Sirius, Arcturus, Pollux, Castor, and onwards to the unnamed worlds scattered in the emptiness of space.

The city on Charon rose from the planet like a pyramid, the central structures rising proud and tall, over six kilometers into the airless sky.  Then, as supplies and funds had dwindled, or as workers had been killed, injured, or drawn into other pursuits, the buildings became gradually smaller, less grandiose, until, at the base of the pyramidal city, the smallest and most pathetic structures rose from the dust, or were dug into the ground.  It became clear in short order that one could do anything on Charon.

Markets for drugs or weapons or the bits of classified data that could lead to influence back on the home worlds sprang up and anyone who could afford the lengthy and expensive trip to Charon would have access to the best and worst that had been, or would ever be, offered.  In the deepest recesses of the city, over the endless stretching centuries, strange cults, fueled by wicked drugs, became the powerful lords of the whole Charonian metropolis. 

Stumbling into the wrong territory without the cash or skills to make yourself useful would lead to becoming the de facto entertainment.  You would be strung up on their most potent hallucinogens and your brain hardwired into a screen to let them watch your terrors. 

What happened then varied from group to group and time to time.  You might be flayed, burnt, drained of your blood drop by drop.  You might be starved, or have your organs placed outside your body and in front of your eyes and fed.  They might remove your bones, one by one.  You might be violated in the most sickening of ways.

And a city with the money and access to the best of everything in the known galaxy could afford the best of medicine, so you might be kept alive for months, or—in rare circumstances, for the particularly hearty—years to come.

Recordings of the hallucinogenic death trips were sold, but could rarely be found—possession of such videos was illegal on almost every world one could think of.

Not on the Kraken, though.  Aydra walked past a room where a few had gathered to watch a new video a crewmember had recently smuggled.  The glimpses were enough for her.  As she entered her private quarters she silently hoped such images would stay out of her head as she lay on the bed.