PrincessColumbia

  The electric beeping of many an infernal notification device had been the bane of humanity since they had invented the things 200 years ago (outside the pod) or 600-ish years ago (in-game...what year was it even supposed to be besides “four centuries in the future”?). Having said electric beeping going off such that it woke you from a dead sleep felt, to Diane, like the most evil, vile torture and was proof positive that she was actually being punished for her sins.

  Blindly, she spped at the end table next to her bed, but all she found was her mini tab. Groaning, she picked that up and turned the screen on, the little device thankfully being designed to take environmental conditions into account with showing the brightness of the screen and it lit only dimly to show...no arms, notifications, incoming calls, or messages.

  And yet the infernal beeping continued.

  Ready to break something, she settled back onto her pillow and closed her eyes as she called “C’mput’r, wha’s the beeping?”

  The synthetic voice that wasn’t quite Katrina’s voice replied, “There is no beeping detected by the station’s microphones in or in proximity to your quarters.”

  The racket was really starting to irritate her. Growlingly, she replied, “Where’s Katrina?”

  “Hey, boss. Unfortunately, I gotta agree with my much less personable automated response systems; there’s no beeping in or near your quarters. Are you still asleep? I’ve found research about humans having somnambunt episodes where they carry on conversations in response to both real-world stimuli and the contents of their dreams. I can research if the same is true for Morvucks.”

  Her eyes popped open and she lifted the mini-tab into view to see the time. Four in the damn morning and I’m hallucinating a beeping or ringing of some kind... And it was about that time she saw the little notification throbber in the corner of her vision pulsing in time with the tone, which she now recognized as a variant of the ‘incoming call’ warble that messenger apps used when someone was trying to reach out to another user for real-time voice or video conversations. ...I guess the in-game HUD has a chat function? “Never mind, Kat, figured it out. Go back to...whatever it is you do first thing in the morning.”

  “I don’t sleep, boss, so no ‘morning’ for me. Get some rest, you’ve only had about five hours sleep so far.”

  “I’ll try. Thanks, Kat.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” came the reply as Diane flicked her wrist to bring up the HUD.

  Her eyes were absolutely bsted as the HUD’s visuals manifested in front of her at full brightness. Wanting more to just get the ringtone to stop than dig through the brightness settings, she covered her eyes with her hand and squinted through a gap in her fingers to tap through to the screens to find the ‘Pyer Chats and Messages’ pane which she’d never used before since she didn’t have anybody in-game that she’d have reason to contact.

  There was nothing on the screen.

  Brows pinched together in frustration but knowing she was on the right track, she scanned the interface and realized there were a few tabs to the chats and messaging screen; Favorites (the currently active tab), Contacts, Messages, Chats, and ‘Nearby.’ Frowning, she tapped the ‘nearby’ tab and almost sighed in relief to see a line with a name she didn’t recognize next to an icon or avatar with a stylized something she was too tired to make out. There were some details and stats she couldn’t care less about and a little skeuomorphic icon indicating the caller was in some proximity Diane was now making a mental note to hunt down the setting for and turn it to “zero feet” so she would never get a random call again. Sighing, she tapped the throbbing ‘Accept Call’ button and closed her eyes tight, closing the gap in her fingers to block out as much of the HUD’s light as she could.

  “It’s four in the god-damn morning for my station, this better be good.” She didn’t bother to mask or hide the growl in her voice.

  “Ah, I was betting the nearest other pyer would be the station commander. Good morning to you too!” came a woman’s voice that was almost too perky.

  Diane sighed the sigh of the damned, “Is there a reason you’re waking me up before my arm is set to go off?”

  There was a chuckle that Did Things?? for Diane that she was too tired to contempte, “Your crew member here is refusing to let anyone off my ship. If you can give the order to let us aboard I can be out of your bed-head hair.”

  Diane grumbled for a moment then said, “...why didn’t they call me via station comms if I’m needed there?”

  “You’re apparently set to ‘do not disturb’ while you’re sleeping, princess,” came the amused reply.

  She reviewed her options; she could either wake up enough to dig through her mini-tab to find the right part of the station to call to reach whoever was the harbormaster at this hour, wake up enough to give Katrina a coherent order to deal with the situation, or wake up enough to go down and handle it herself. None of the options included going back to sleep before the issue was dealt with.

  Groaning, she sat up, removing her hand from her eyes but keeping them firmly shut. She grabbed her bnkets and sheet and removed them from her body, shivering slightly in the comparative chill. She liked the cold, damnit! It was unfair that the lovely, wonderful body she had in-game should be so sensitive to it. “Fine, give me a bit and I’ll be right down. Which docking bay?”

  She was rather pleased that she actually had to ask. Last week they’d finally completed construction on a second docking bay with seven brand new airlocks to dock even more craft at her station, which was becoming a necessity as traffic continued to increase over time. Her actions with the svers and status as ‘First Found Daughter’ on Mortan was drawing attention to them, letting people know that the sleepy little system known as Darksky had another port of call for ships to park at on their perpetual journey going from point A to point B. Fortunately they weren’t so popur that they’d need a third docking bay for a while yet, but she put the priority from ‘standard’ to ‘high’ in the build queue so it and all the prerequisite builds and research would be done as soon as possible.

  As she put her feet on the (thankfully carpeted) floor, she heard the woman caller ask someone apparently nearby, “Which docking bay is this again? Right,” and back at the virtual microphone for the HUD she said, “Docking Bay Alpha.”

  Diane parted her eyelids just enough to gratefully confirm the HUD had remained in position where she’d activated it and answered the call instead of hovering in front of her the entire time. Now she could move around without interrupting the call to dismiss the HUD. “Okay,” she said with a jaw-cracking yawn, “I’ll figure out the airlock when I get there, unless you know it offhand.”

  “Oh, yeah, Cargo 1,” came the chirped reply.

  Right! We finally finished the inspections and repaired all the damage from when the svers tried to force themselves off before I released the docking cmps! She felt a surge of pride that her crew had performed as diligently as they had. Katrina’s initial diagnostics had turned up everything ‘green,’ but a visual inspection had noted the guide-rails for the cmps were warped, the ship attempting to unch with the cmps in pce having torqued the metal. It had put that airlock out of commission for some time. Whoever this pyer was turned out to be their first ship using it since the repair, if Diane’s memory served. “Right, thanks,” she said as she finally got out of bed and walked over to her closet, “Just so I know what I’m getting into, why are my people refusing to let your people off the ship?”

  The reply was underscored with an amused note that Diane was far too tired to parse, “There’s some regution they’re saying I’m not following...? Honestly, I think it’s just the NPCs adhering too strictly to their scripts.”

  Diane selected a suite and pulled the hanger off the rack and transferring it to the hook outside the closet, “...kinda immersion breaking calling the person you’re talking about an NPC right in front of them, isn’t it?”

  As Diane used the light of the HUD behind her to select a blouse, the woman answered, “Eh, they’re programmed to ignore anything that refers to the game as a game, so it’s not like it hurts their feelings. Besides, I’m calling you on the P2P in-game chat. That’s also immersion breaking.”

  Diane hung the blouse’s hanger on the hook with the suit and bent over the in-closet chest of drawers to open the drawer with her hose, grabbing a pair and tossing them over her shoulder to the bed before opening the drawer with her bras to grab one at random, “I guess, but there is the whole Commander mythos that...eep!”

  She was turning away from the closet and had clutched the hem of her shirt and was about halfway to pulling it off over her head when she looked at the HUD now that her vision had adjusted to the light...and saw the woman who had called her smirking with slightly smokey eyes…on a video call that Diane had blindly accepted. Mortified, she yanked her top back down, doubly embarrassed that someone had now seen her sleep shirt, which was a light pink cami that looked like a muscle-tee if you squinted and tilted your head. The effect was somewhat ruined by the dainty pink bow that was maybe two inches across that nestled right between her breasts on the neckline, which was a very generously plunging neckline at that granted any viewer a tantalizing view of her rge endowments. It was thin, it was silky, it was absolutely the girliest article of non-underwear clothing she owned, and it was an absolute indulgence. She’d purchased it over the station’s network from one of the new clothing shops that had cropped up on the promenade. She’d been simply too embarrassed about buying it at all let alone in person, but figured the one indulgence in her in-game feminine nature wouldn’t be untoward so long as nobody saw her in it.

  And then she was triple embarrassed when she realized that the only other thing she was wearing was a pair of Morvuck panties that were also pink (though not quite the same shade of pink as her sleep shirt), with cey panels on the hips and frilly appliqued flowers on the front panel and a tiny little pink bow on the hem right over her tailbone on the back...and a nice, comfy pocket for her proliferator genitals. She’d received them in a care package from a well-meaning if slightly eccentric older woman that had insisted that a Lost likely wouldn’t have appropriate underwear and had bought Diane approximately three whole cases worth, none of which would fall into a category that wasn’t ‘frilly, feminine, and fashionable’.

  Her brain caught up with her circumstances and a hand darted down to cover her crotch as the other arm covered her chest. It wasn’t like she was showing any ‘naughty bits,’ she was, technically, fully clothed, but it was clear the other woman was greatly enjoying what she was seeing.

  When it was obvious that Diane wouldn’t be continuing to undress (and, indeed, she was feeling very akin to a dino in the headlights in a star cruiser’s path), the other pyer teased, “Awe, is the show over? Oh well, I’ll see you soon, princess,” and the call disconnected, causing the HUD to vanish from sight.

  ~~~

  Diane stepped out of the auto-car and let herself stretch, almost cat-like, as it hummed off to its next system designated stop behind her. A quick shower and a protein bar had not been enough to shake off the tired from too little sleep, and she could tell she’d be running on tired all day. She could probably take a nap, but if she spent too much time alone in her quarters without first completely exhausting herself, she started to spiral into depression that was capable of keeping her awake the entire night and making her miserable the next day. If that happened, people would notice and start asking questions. Questions that would be well meaning but Diane couldn’t answer because doing so would be expining what she did before logging into the game, which would lead to realizations of what she was there to do now if any of the well-meaning people asking those questions happened to be S.A.I.

  Shaking off the thoughts that she dared not speak, she focused on her task at hand, dealing with, for the first time in months (or, as she’d checked on her real-time clock during her shower, just about 48 hours IRL) she would be speaking with an actual human person rather than an in-game A.I. The impromptu meeting was taking pce in the gravity interchange of airlock Cargo 1. Since the Cargo 1 bay doors were on the ‘top’ of the docking bay and cargo ships usually were loaded with beings that needed to keep a single direction of gravity in mind, the interchange was necessary. Where the normal airlocks that were arranged in a radial array around the sides of the bay allowed a ship to dock with standard airlocks, treating them like regur doors was simple. The interchanges on the top and bottom of the docking bay allowed two ships with standard cargo airlocks to dock on top and bottom, then a curve lined with gravity pting rotated the direction of ‘down’ to match the station’s, with Cargo 2’s interchange having a sharper curve since people and cargo would be moving along the ‘inside’ of the curve instead of the outside like was done with Cargo 1.

  One of her crew was there with a pair of security fnking him. He was standing somewhat resignedly in front of a woman who was about average height for a human, but her presence in the interchange outshone literally everyone else. Diane couldn’t even see all of her yet and was still feeling like a sheaf of wheat in the light of a warm summer sun.

  She blinked in surprise at her own thoughts, Where did that come from? she wondered. She had no time to ponder that as she closed the gap and moved so she could see the woman who had gotten an inadvertent show via the in-game pyer comms and Diane found herself wondering if the environmental controls were busted and making her feel hot and sweaty.

  Clearing her throat to announce her presence, she focused on her crewman, an ‘Ensign Jones’ by the name stitching and rank insignia. “Ensign, care to tell me what regution our visitor is vioting?”

  Jones turned his pad so she could see it, and dispyed was a split screen showing what appeared to be a cargo manifest with a pair of items highlighted in red on one window and a block text that looked like it came from a regutions document, which made sense given the other pyer’s comments on the comms earlier.

  Diane pinched the bridge of her nose and rubbed her eyes, “Ensign, it’s only just turning four-thirty in the morning, just tell me what the problem is, please.”

  “This ship is transporting cargo that’s banned from import onto stations with life support biomes that ck the capacity of a Css 5 popution,” he said as though that answered all the questions.

  Diane sighed, Then again, if he’s one of the lifers that was here when I took over, he might have just told me the Titanic was about to crash into the iceberg and I wouldn’t understand, “Okay, so help me understand. I was raised on Earth, I don’t know all the cssifications.”

  This seemed to perk the interest of the other pyer as Jones sighed and nodded, “Right, sorry, ma’am. Station life support cssification is based on maximum popution size. Css 1 would be, like, a space b. Just about 10 to 20 people, mostly canned air, imports 90% of their food and no on-board waste processing. Css 2 is…I guess small town sized? Like, a couple hundred people to maybe a thousand? They have heavy air recycling and grows most of the food needed on-station and a lot of waste processing is…”

  “Don’t go into details, please,” interrupted Diane as the protein bar threatened to demand return to sender, “But isn’t 20 people to a few hundred kinda a big jump?”

  Jones shrugged, “Anything between that usually gets engines strapped to it and called a starship. Not a lot of call for stations that can’t be small cities if they’re bigger than a b.” Diane gave him an ‘ah’ of comprehension and he continued, “We’re css 3, big enough to be a small city of a few thousand, maybe more if we do some sort of expansion that isn’t just docking bays. Css 4 would be, like, major commerce hubs or starbases that sit on courier lines or are built on stelr borders. They can house a small fleet of ships just for military purposes and usually have a pretty big merchant fleet. Css 5 are…big,” he stumbled at this point, seeming to look for an appropriate analogy.

  “Think the Death Star,” interrupted the other pyer. Diane turned her attention to the woman and had to keep her stomach from doing flip-flops for an entirely different reason than the one Jones had caused earlier. She was shorter than Diane (who wasn’t at almost seven feet tall, really) but above average for the women on the station. Her scent was definitely human, and she carried herself with a confidence that Diane couldn’t match on her best days…which had been few and far between tely. Her outfit was almost cssically ‘space rogue’ with a few spshes of anachronistic touches, like the odd mid-20th century bomber pilot’s helmet and the flight jacket that appeared to be lined with fur. Strapped to her hip was a side-arm that had clearly seen use, but also clearly was well cared for, and her dark blue pants were almost wrapped around assets that Diane had to tell her proliferator loins to calm the hell down. Diane could probably find a way to expin how she knew the woman’s button-up shirt was a lovely shade of red that framed the visible cleavage the woman was clearly proudly dispying, but she was dearly hoping nobody would ask why she was so focused on that particur detail as she was struggling to keep her eyes above the woman’s jawline…though the deep, chocote brown eyes that had a hint of impish sparkle gave Diane something to look at that was just as distracting as the pyer’s other physical features. “You know,” she continued, “‘That’s no moon…’ and all that.”

  Diane felt her jaw bob a couple times before she was able to say, “…right, really big and probably as self-sustaining as a pnet after it’s been in operation for a bit.”

  The other woman was smirking at Diane, Please don’t let me be looking at her like an idiot…like I’m an idiot, which I’m probably doing…oh, god, please end me now!

  The miracle of non-existence was not provided, but the miracle of an interruption was as Jones said, “Exactly, and her cargo is way too invasive for a Css 3. I wouldn’t even want to risk a Css 5, to be honest.”

  Grateful for the distraction from her endochrine system locking up, Diane took the pad from Jones and read the manifest again, “…‘Northern Tanabrian Deep Sea Eels’?” she blinked up from the tablet in confusion and repeated to the other pyer, “Eels?”

  The woman shrugged, “There’s a buyer at the end of this particur trade route that wants to start a terraforming project on a moon around some gas giant in the Orion cluster. It’s never had any life on it and these things,” she gestured back through the interchange in the direction of her ship with her thumb, “Don’t require an existing biome to thrive. They’re mineral-vores or whatever the scientific term is, so some water-dwelling species use them to kick-start new colonies. Rocks go in, biological material comes out, instant new biome.”

  “Which is why we cannot let them on our station,” said Ensign Jones, “If even one gets into the life support biomes…they won’t see the metals that make up the station as anything more than a fancy rock, and they proliferate like crazy.”

  Diane lowered the tablet and asked, “But they’re not coming on the station, right?”

  The freighter captain snorted, “Hell no! You’d have to breach the cargo bay just to get one out, and I had to get the client to pay for a special retrofit that made my hull indigestible to these beasties. If anyone cracked the seal it’d take a team of specialists just to reseal it. I’ve got so many guards on that bay right now in addition to the security reinforcements that it’d take your station’s entire security team to get through to it. Nobody’s getting one of ‘em off until the client takes receivership of ‘em.”

  Diane nodded, “So the stop here was for…?”

  “Shore leave,” answered the other pyer, “Yeah, we live on this thing, but there’s only so much FTL tunnel you can handle until everyone gets a little stir crazy.”

  Diane nodded at that, remembering her experience on the trip to and from Mortan. “Well,” she said as she handed the tablet back to Jones, “I think the best solution is to have the ship dock long enough to get a rotation of crew off for shore leave, disengage the airlock to give the ship and the station a space gap while the crew are enjoying their leave, then re-engage for the next rotation. That lets the crew off to enjoy some time not inside the same four walls and keeps the station as safe from possible contamination as one might expect in this situation. None of the eels come aboard, problem solved.”

  Jones made a sour face but nodded, “…yeah, okay. But we should set up scanners to make sure…”

  Diane felt somewhat vindicated when both she and the other pyer gave the NPC an arch look. She shook her head and sighed, “Katrina,” the hologram rezzed in next to her, making the freighter captain startle a bit, “Are your scanners monitoring the bay?”

  “Passive monitoring at all times, of course,” reaffirmed the digital assistant.

  “Can you do active monitoring while the ship is docked and locked, please?”

  Katrina gave a little salute, “Will do, boss-dy!”

  As she rezzed out, the captain turned a raised eyebrow to Diane, “You made your Katrina a catgirl?”

  Diane shook her head and took the tablet from Jones again to see the ensign had a completed memo waiting for her signature. She scanned it to confirm her orders about the ship and the shore leave rotation before taking the stylus from him, “Nope, she picked that herself.” Signing the order, she passed the stylus and pad back to the ensign, who turned to the security guards to give them new orders.

  The woman blinked in surprise, “I’ve never heard of a Katrina doing that…”

  Diane turned to her and very carefully didn’t look directly at the woman whose scent was already causing her body to have certain…heightened responses. “Our station got an experimental upgrade shortly after activation. It gives Kat a little more freedom of expression without worrying about the possible degradation to the OS.”

  As though intending to short out Diane’s mental processes, the woman casually stepped just a little bit into Diane’s personal bubble. She felt some sweat begin to form on the back of her neck as the woman practically purred, “Well, that’s fancy. Is she an S.A.I. and the devs needed an excuse to put her on your station?”

  Diane’s throat went dry for a reason having nothing to do with the woman’s proximity to her. “No,” she said a little more forcefully than she intended, “I mean, I don’t think so. She’s never said she’s an S.A.I., so I’m assuming she’s…” she took a deep breath and risked a look at the woman’s face. Concern was etched onto it and Diane realized her emotions had gotten the better of her again. “Sorry, I…lost a…well, not a friend, I barely knew them, but they’re…” she shook her head, unsure how to continue.

  The other pyer cringed, “Oh, the R.A.I.D.S bots got ‘em?” She shook her head and sighed, “If it happened after the U.N. resolution, you could probably report it…but it won’t bring them back.”

  That’s the second time I’ve heard ‘Raids’ in retion to S.A.I., I should look that up some time. “No, they…no.”

  There was an awkward silence for a moment as Diane suddenly didn’t have to struggle to not be distracted by her physiological response to the newcomer. After a moment, the shorter woman held out a hand, “I’m sorry, I should introduce myself. I’m Caitlyn.”

  Grateful for something to take her mind off of the S.A.I….issue, Diane shook Caitlyn’s hand, “Diane; welcome to Matron’s Aerie.”

  Caitlyn’s smile returned, as did the glint in her eye that had the uncanny ability to make Diane short of breath, “Diane, that’s a lovely name. And, I must say, you have lovely taste in sleep wear.”

  Diane’s cheeks felt rocket hot as she stammered, “O-oh, right, uh…s-sorry about that! I didn’t mean…I mean, I didn’t realize…um…that wasn’t…uh…”

  Caitlyn made that chuckle that Did Things to Diane as she pced a far more familiar finger over Diane’s lips than the small amount of contact they’d had so far seemed to justify.

  Then again, she was still holding the freighter captain’s hand and reveling in the feeling of their skin-on-skin contact, even if it was just their palms. She felt like she might burst a blood vessel in her cheeks from blushing at this rate.

  Finger still on Diane’s lips, Caitlyn stepped closer so that only about a quarter inch of air was between them, “I didn’t figure you gave every pyer who comes calling a free show…but I enjoyed it.”

  To Diane’s abject embarrassment, a rattling rumble sounded from deep inside her chest. It wasn’t a growl at all. In fact, there was only one thing she could think it sounded like. She gawked down at her own torso in surprise, the sound cutting off. Caitlyn finally pulled her finger away as she gnced down where the sound originated from…which meant she was looking right at Diane’s chest and the sound started again.

  “Katrina?!” Diane’s voice cracked and the hologram rezzed back in again, “Can Morvuck purr?!”

  The hologram gave her a look like she’d asked if Morvuck breath air. “Yes…? You don’t remember purring before?”

  “No!”

  “Huh,” said the digital assistant in a very human-like sound of puzzlement, “You do it while you’re sleeping. At least while you’re dreaming, anyway.”

  Caitlyn’s grin seemed to grow wider, “So…Morvuck, huh? I’ll have to look that up, see if there’s anything else about your species that might be…interesting…”

  And then she stroked along Diane’s jawline with the tips of her fingers.

  And Diane purred louder.

  God, if you don’t kill me now, at least let me pass out from mortification and forget this happened… she prayed silently.

  She did not, in fact, pass out.

  Caitlyn was speaking, and it took a moment for Diane to register the words. “So, princess,” she smirked, “How about we have dinner tonight? Perhaps at the Commander’s Table? I’m sure I’d love to see you in something besides this fetching suit.”

  “…dinner?” Diane almost squeaked out, “Uh…sure! I can do dinner.”

  “Excellent!” Caitlyn stepped back and finally let go of Diane’s hand, she found she missed it already. “I’ll be there with bells on. For now, I have a leave rotation to organize.”

  “…right.” agreed Diane.

  “I’ll see you ter, princess.” The title wasn’t purred, not the way Diane was still doing, but it was probably the closest Diane had ever heard a human come to actually purring a word.

  As Caitlyn disappeared up the interchange, Diane’s line of sight on the woman was finally broken and she turned and almost wobbled away, Katrina wearing an insufferably smug expression as she kept pace. About a minute ter, Diane said, “…I just made a complete idiot of myself, didn’t I?”

  “That,” giggled Katrina, “Is above my pay grade to answer.”

  Diane speared the hologram an annoyed look and took a deep breath as the purring finally petered off. She pulled out her mini-tab and tapped out a message to Norma as she walked, Do we have a ‘commander’s table’?

  Diane hadn’t even made it to the tether when her mini-tab buzzed with a response. Do we have a WHAT?!

  PrincessColumbia