The Confederation, a group of independent worlds bonded together for mutual trade and defence, have a dirty little secret in how they make their trading ships - hijacking the souls of dead transgendered. Please follow one subject's rebirth into the Confederation.

Apologies in advance, this one's mostly setup. Thanks to Bailey Summers for test reading (but not editing - all mistakes are mine), sorry I couldn't implement all of your suggestions.

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Crap. The car in front of my just stalled in the intersection, so here I am stuck behind it. Who stalls in the middle of the intersection? Starting off, sure, but nearly out the other side? I hear the deep honk of a truck off to my right, and turn in frustration at the driver in front of me in time to see the truck enter the intersection at full steam on a red light. I don't have time to verbalise the swear words running through my head before my world turns into one of complete pain, and I blank out.

I come to, and all I can see is white. At least I feel no pain, I must be on good drugs. I must be lying down if I've only just come to, but I can't tell if I'm lying down, sitting, or anything like that. In fact, I can't feel any part of my body. I try to blink, and I can't even do that. It's right then that I realise I'm not in hospital, but that I'm dead. Almost as soon as I come to that realisation, I feel a sort of presence in my head.

"Hello?" I ask.

"Ah good, you can communicate. Excellent". I don't actually hear those words, I sort of feel the concepts being conveyed, and mentally translate the concepts to those words.

"I suppose I'm dead?"

"Good, quick on the uptake too. Do you mind if I tell you what is going on, then ask some questions?"

I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed - am I talking to God? I don't even know which questions I should be asking right now. Well, if I'm going to be told what is going on, that sounds like a good start.

"Seems fair enough, as long as you'll answer some of mine too." I respond.

"OK, well we have a project to build a living creature we need a soul for, and we're hoping you might volunteer for the project."

Oh dear, this sounds very mad-scientist. "Volunteer" sounds like they're at least going to ask first.

"So this isn't an afterlife then?" I ask.

"Well, technically it is after your life, but what we've done is caught your soul in a soul trap before you pass on. If either you or us decide this isn't going to work, we release you from the trap and you go on to whatever afterlife you would have gone to if we hadn't interfered. Do you know what a soul trap is?"

I don't even have to mentally verbalise as response, if that even makes sense, as the presence continues after clearly picking up on my confusion.

"The soul trap is a magical construct that catches souls passing on from nearby dimensions, and we have a sieve that grabs only those matching the rough outline of what we're after."

I'm feeling overwhelmed by this point, so the question I ask is not the one I really want to ask, but picking up on something in the last communication.

"Only from nearby dimensions? Not from your own?"

"Long story, but yes, you are correct." I get a feeling of frustration at that, like this person has been trying to solve that particular problem. I also get a clear flash that this person I'm communicating with is male.

OK, the curiosity is getting to me, I have to ask.

"So can you tell me about this project you want me for?"

"We're building living spaceships. Only a small fraction of the control is actually alive, the rest is conventional, but the engineered DNA needed for this project comes from dragons and demons, and if we let the living organism develop a soul as it starts to live, what we get isn't very desirable."

"So I get to be part of this thing before it is alive so it doesn't try to eat you?"

"Got it in one. Now, can I ask you some questions?"

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. Living spaceships? I guess the questions he wants to ask may give me additional information.

"Go ahead."

"You are familiar with automated devices?"

"Yes."

"Please think about what you are familiar with, and try and project it to me."

I think about cars, planes, the space shuttle, and computers.

"Ah good, you are familiar with the concept of programming. Can you think about that a bit more?"

I think about my work as a computer programmer.

"Excellent, now ho much do you know about magic?"

I respond pseudo-verbally this time.

"In my world, magic is basically the stuff of legend. I have played games that use magic in one form or another, I'm sure completely unrealistically, but I'm open to the concept."

I get a sense of annoyance that I don't know anything, and a sense of relief that I'm not what I translate as a holier-than-thou type that things magic is the work of the devil. Before I think about it I'm transmitting again.

"No, I don't think magic is inherently evil. Like anything else it's a tool, which is neutral by itself. It may enable evil to do evil, but it's still a tool."

I sense surprise.

"You read that from me?"

"Well, I get a very vague sense of your reaction to the information I'm projecting to you. I figured the rest out my myself."

"Good, average psychic potential, quick deductive skills. Part of the sieve process was to catch a soul that cared for the greater good?"

I thought about that. Yes, I had walked away from jobs that I thought were morally suspect, and when consulting to some government-owned companies in third world countries I had actively suggested paths that were for the good of the country rather than the individuals involved - something that I had got into trouble for a couple of times, but I also like to think garnered my a bit of respect.

"Once again, good to see. The sieve is usually close but not always right on, which is why we do these interviews." I hadn't realised I was projecting these thoughts until I received his response.

"What do you think of organised militaries?"

Well, I'd been in cadets when in school for my required sporting activity, and always had a healthy respect for the military defending us and our way of life, even if I decided my mathematical education and love of computers wasn't going to get me anywhere useful in a military carer.

"Good. Now, onto something a bit more personal - in your life you were a female trapped in a male body?"

Well, to have something that personal that I hid from everyone my adult life just casually stated like that did cause me some surprise. Oh, I can recall as far back as when I was three years old trying to figure out why a girl like me had boy bits, but I could never convince anyone that I was both serious and not just "going through a phase". By my mid-teens I was all big bones and lean muscle, and hair sprouting everywhere. By the time I found about about hormones it was all to late, I'd never pass as female, so I had resigned myself to a life pretending to me something I physically was but knew I never really was. My discomfort at leading a "male" life was another major reason why I hadn't gone any further with the military.

"Ah, surprise and shock based on social conditioning. Would it be a problem if I said a condition of this was that you would become female?"

"Not at all! That would be fantastic!"

"Good, good. Now, there is one last delicate question. If you were to become a fully functional human female, would you have problem having sex with a man you were working for?"

Oh, right. He wants me as a sex toy. As soon as I had formulated this thought, I felt humour.

"No, let me explain. Part of the process of keeping you sane as a living ship is to create a human extension of yourself inside your new ship self. That way you can still interact with others as a human. Part of the process of preventing dragon and demon instincts from taking over is for you to take a male human partner, who is technically the captain of the ship because some territories of the confederation don't trust living ships. It helps the bonding process and the suppression of unwanted tendencies if you are in a happy sexual relationship."

"Do I get to pick this captain?"

"To some extent, yes. There is a pool of qualified applicants, you select from them until you find someone you like. It has to be a happy sexual relationship for it to work, so we don't want to force you to be with someone you'd be unhappy to be with. So, do you think you could live with this?"

"Yes, I think so."

A feel a smirk come back at me.

"We don't have a lot of time because we can't keep you awake like this without at least a brain for a while, but I really need something a bit more definite than 'I think so'".

"One more question, if I may." I feel assent. "Is there any way of getting back to where I was before I died?"

"Not that we know of. We have no idea what dimension you came from, and no method of travelling between dimensions. You might be able to look into other dimensions, but the odds of finding the right one are so low as to be unfeasible, as you'd have to stumble across the right dimension in a galaxy close enough to your place of origin for you to recognise. You could search for millennia and not even get close, or worse, get close and never realise it."

"So that's basically a no." I think for a bit - there's not really much else to do, and I don't think I'm ready for the afterlife. Being able to be what I always felt I was inside is too great an attraction to pas up. "Yes, OK, I'm in. What do you need me to do?"

"Think about your ideal female image, the one you'd like to be, and we'll put you back to sleep. Try to keep this image even when you dream that you're not human."

"OK."

I felt the presence withdraw, and so I thought about whom I'd like to be. I had been six foot two inches, and I didn't want to be short, but I didn't want to be so tall for a female it stuck out. Near five foot nine would be right, I thought. Rich, chestnut brown hair framing an oval face with just a hint of a heart-shaped chin, green eyes, athletic but curvy body, the waist narrow but not unreasonably so, hairless except for eyebrows, eyelashes, and my aforementioned head of hair, and an average C cup bust. I held this image and my awareness drifted off.

I was dreaming then, strange dreams of flying with leathery wings, of fighting tooth and claw, of using sex to corrupt well-meaning males, of pulling myself along the ground and up walls at high speed with my tentacles, of eating people far smaller than myself while nesting my clutch of eggs, and other strange things. I tried to focus not just on staying my ideal image, but also on my sense of me both as an individual and as a human.

Then I woke up. I was in the dark in some kind of liquid, and I tried to swim to the surface. I realised straight away that I was actually lying in some kind of bathtub, and all I needed to do was sit up. My lungs were full of fluid, and when my head broke the surface I coughed and retched up the liquid into whatever it was I had been lying in. When the spasms died down I realised I could feel my breasts moving on my chest, and a fantastic feeling of relief swept through me, realising my body finally matched my mind and soul.

Once my lungs were clear, I felt around myself a bit and noticed what I could only describe as an umbilical cord going from my belly button into a hole on the side of the bathtub I was in. After a few clear deep breaths this fell away. I noticed the air was humid, and started to worry about the darkness. I reached around and felt something skin-like completely surrounding me, with hard supporting struts running through it. It wasn't so much a bathtub as an elongated sphere I was in, with liquid up to the halfway mark. I felt upwards and felt something hard, without the skin-like covering. I also felt an odd pressure in a location I just couldn't put my finger on. Feeling around, I found the edges of the skin-like area and the beginning of the hard area. I could feel a seam through the middle of the hard area.

I found I was mentally calculating the exact size and dimensions of the area I was in, although in some units I was unfamiliar with. Even with the irregular shape, volumes and areas popped into my head almost as soon as I wondered. I thought about some complex maths problems, and the answers become immediately obvious. I was performing complicated mathematical operations at a prodigious rate, even if this didn't help me get out of here.

I pushed on the hard area again, and once again I felt the odd pressure in a place I couldn't locate. I remembered the comment about a "living ship", and realised that probably the body I was noticing as my own was probably only part of my new body, but the only one I could mentally cope with, being the only one I had experience to directly relate to. Thinking about this, I concentrated on the area where I felt the pressure, and tried to flex it in some way. My efforts were rewarded when the hard thing parted like a lift door, and light spilled in. I reached up and pulled myself out, finding it surprisingly easy to do so.

I found myself in a room with the hatch in the middle of the floor, with a bed on one wall I designated "left", a bookshelf on the opposite wall, a door without any obvious handle or opening mechanism with lots of scribbling over the top in front of me. Turning around I found a toilet-like thing along the "back" wall. I was still dripping wet, so I grabbed a towel off the bed and dried myself off, revelling in the sensations of my new body.

I clearly wasn't in my imagined body, although my new body was close. The most obvious difference was that my new breasts were huge, I estimated a DD cup, being firm high and round. My waist was a bit narrower and my hips a bit more flared. My hair colour looked about right, although still being wet was still a bit dark. Feeling my face I was pretty sure I now had the classic "perfect oval" face, the jaw wasn't quite how I had imagined myself. Without having a mirror to check, I suspected my new body a teenage boy's sexual fantasy version of how I had desired myself to look. I now had a type of "look at me, aren't I gorgeous" body that was very flattering but not quite the "good-looking girl next door" image I had been looking forward to.

Once dry, I looked at the bookshelf. The spines of the books all had the same kind of scribbling on it as appeared over the door, clearly what passed for writing here. The books on the top shelf seemed thinnest, with quite thick volumes at the bottom, so I picked a book at random from the top shelf and opened it. It was clearly a children's book of some kind. I found it interesting that there were books but no computer.

I noted I was still naked, and looked around for something to cover myself with. The bed sheet looked to be some kind of fitted sheet, so I went with wrapping the wet towel around myself, tying it off over my generous breasts.

I flicked through the children's books, finding the simplest started on the left. It looked like sentences ran left to right, like English but unlike Arabic, so I worked through them to understand the language. Some of the books had a speaker stuck on the side, so I was able to understand how to pronounce the language as well. I'm sure I would have an unusual accent, but the important think was that I could understand and be understood.

I won't bore you with the details, but it appeared my memory was now exceptional. I learned the basics of the language very quickly, and found that the writing above the door translated to "Read all the material, then open the door."

The second shelf was a modified encyclopaedia. I say "modified", because there was no history or geography in it. The science was interesting, they were obviously a bit more advanced than us but not by much. Nanotech was common. Magic was altogether different, and it was quite enlightening.

Magic could only be performed by living things. According to science, one couldn't travel faster than light, but magic allowed one to rotate through other dimensions in ways impossible to describe, teleporting faster than light, in a process generally known as "spinning". The problem was that except for the most advanced, human mages couldn't teleport interstellar distances with safety with any weight much beyond themselves. This had initially been solved with banks of bacteria genetically engineered to be magically active to act as giant batteries, which allowed them to travel between solar systems with cargo. However mages could only teleport somewhere they had been, or were currently visualising magically, so trade was restricted between only a few worlds discovered by accident, then mages would take apprentice mages along to learn the routes.

The breakthrough came with nanotech allowing neural links between mages and computers, granting the computational power to allow spins to unknown locations. However, they needed to be placed in sealed containers so as not to die on arrival in most locations - spinning directly onto the surface of a planet was a sure-fire recipe for missing by a few meters and ending up embedded in rock. Most of these looked like the cabin of an old-time airship, kept aloft by gravity-cancelling magic, with directional fans to manoeuvre with.

I could see it wasn't far to go from a mage neural linked to a computer with a battery of magical bacteria all the way through to living spaceships. Presumably this was the source of my new-found mathematical and memory ability, I was probably half computer in some fashion.

Since demons and dragons had been mentioned in the interview, and in my dreams too, I found the sections on them interesting. Among other things, dragons fly by magic, and have a maximum speed determined only by how much pain they are prepared to suffer from friction with the air. I could see how this ability would be useful as Demons have an amazing ability to sustain damage and regenerate, and also to adapt to whatever environment they find themselves in. These could both be useful in hazardous environments.

The other information from the encyclopaedia was interesting but mainly a duplicate of information I already knew of from Earth, even if I didn't know exactly how it all worked. It was useful to be able to discover the terms and conventions of this language and culture.

The third and final shelf was information on living ships, including how each individual part worked and the theory behind all of it. My guess is understanding was the key to controlling my new body, not that I had figured out how to feel any of it yet beyond the hatch.

I had assumed that living ships would be easily damaged, mentally comparing squishy people to hardened tanks, but that was by no means the case. Living ships may have living cells to control magic, but a nanotech swarm permeates all the living tissue. The combination of nanites and magically active cells allows structures that don't exist in nature to be designed and grown, such as skeletons made of diamond. The diamond skeleton is completely redundant, and has holes permeating it for the living tissue and nanites to reach through. If a section is cracked through shear force, the diamond in the area is pulled apart almost atom by atom, the crack reached, and the skeleton rebuilt. As there is redundant reinforcement everywhere, a short-term break while the diamond is "reset" isn't normally an issue. There's also an exoskeleton of layered diamond plates and carbon fibre composites for armour, although it is covered by a thin layer of living tissue to both act as a bumper bar and also better sense and direct magical energy. This layer regenerates incredibly quickly by design and the infusion of magic energy into the demonic cells, but even with that is discarded either by shedding in damage conditions or normally by reabsorbing to internal nutrient pools, to then be used in the next round of material creation.

However, the computer systems on board are conventional, if somewhat more advanced than Earth standards through miniaturisation, with redundant couplings to the living cells that my soul was bound to. As my human body could move independently through my soul being split and residing in it and the ship, even if the ship was cut in half, I would be able to control systems in both halves until I ran out of energy. Interestingly the human body was created in the "focus chamber", with the core neural and computer systems, and it the body was destroyed the fragment of my soul that animated the body would automatically return to the chamber where a new body could be grown - or maybe even have a new body already waiting for me.

It seemed my soul couldn't be stretched over to great a distance, and if my human body got to far from my ship body, the soul would "snap back" and the human body would fall dead, apparently of a brain seizure. My ease at getting out of the chamber was explained when I saw that although the body was patterned after human norms, this body too had diamond bones and magically-enhanced cells with nanites, stronger than normal and able to regenerate.

The construction process was to put together a framework and a pre-established focus chamber in a huge chamber of raw nutrients and conventional components, and let the system grow according to plan, supervised by the computer controlled nanite swarm from the focus chamber over a two year period.

After reading all this I stopped and thought. I'd basically been reading for three days straight, and hadn't had to go to the loo or eat or drink anything. Thinking about this I realised I was thirsty, if only from water loss from breathing, but was quite capable of going longer. I decided I should be prepared, and drank some water from the fold-out cleaning basin above the loo.

Right, now to get out of here, still clad in my by now dry towel. I knew the procedure now, and walked up the door, placed my palm flat within a few millimetres of the door, and said "Open" in the local language.

"Got One!" shouted a nearby male voice. I turned to look, and there was a fairly average looking man dressed in some kind of military uniform. Equivalent to Sergeant from the information I had read. Tall, dark fair, fantastic blue eyes, gorgeous to look at. A thought percolated at the back of my head that on first seeing him I had thought he was average, but now he clearly wasn't. Probably hormones kicking in, and I idly wondered if that was why I hadn't had any human contact until now.

I looked closer and saw he wasn't actually wearing regulation uniform. He had the hot-weather shirt on with standard insignia, sure, but something resembling tight bicycle pants underneath with no footwear certainly wasn't, but I wasn't complaining too much as it gave me a good view of the not inconsiderable size of his package.

"Hello there, little lady." he said, smiling generously at me.

"Umm ... hello." I responded, tentatively. I was having some very odd feelings percolating up from the region of my stomach.

"You know you don't actually need that towel." he said, and I couldn't help but noticing that his package was starting to firm up.

"If it's all right with you I think I'll keep it on for the moment." I said, tearing my eyes away from this hunk of a man to look around. I was in some kind of long hallway, with doors on both sides spaced about the width of my room apart, with men about every ten doors. Apart from the one closest to me, all were sitting in chairs, and the one addressing me was standing next to his chair.

"Look, don't be shy, I'll show you there's nothing to worry about." he said, and started to unbutton his shirt. I stared, mesmerised, as he stepped around me and into the room I had just stepped out of, all the while he was still in the process of taking off his shirt.

He discarded his shirt on the floor, and motioned me inside.

"Come on, let's talk in here with a bit of privacy."

I was entranced. He looked so good. At the back of my mind, the thought was running through my head that people grow up with their hormones and learn how to handle them, but I had none of that experience and wasn't coping with female sexual urges.

I found myself back in my room, the door sliding shut behind us, now no-one was near it. My nice cosy little room seemed so much smaller with someone else in it. I looked up into his eyes, and before I knew it his hands were around my waist, and then we were kissing.

The kiss felt fantastic, and I reached up to put my arms around him, revelling in the feeling of his hard muscles. He took this as his cue for one hand to wander south and start a gentle massage of my butt. We rubbed close together, and the towel started to become loose. I didn't care, the sensations I was feeling sweeping my body were just too intense. More rubbing and kissing followed, and the towel fell away. The sensation of our chests rubbing together was fantastic, and I could feel his turgid member trapped between us, still in his skin-tight shorts. His hand not engaged in caressing my butt slid down his shorts on one side, and the head of his penis broke free. That hand returned, higher this time, and started stroking the outside of my breast. I moaned, staring deeply into his eyes, sucking on his tongue.

He clearly judged me ready and gently pushed me back to a sitting position on the bed with one had, while the other shrugged off his pants. I was sitting there with his giant trouser snake staring at me in the face. I reached up to touch him with one hand, while I leaned forward slightly to kiss it.

He broke my intent by leaning forward himself, gently pushing me back and rotating me so I was lying on the bed. He knelt down, now above my as I was lying on the bed.

"Do you want it?" he asked. So much for "talking" in private!

Yes, I wanted him, more than anything. I had dreamed of being taken as a woman for so long, now the reality was right here above me I was unable to put my desire into words. I nodded as I spread my legs and reached up for him, pulling him down towards me. He swung his other leg across so he was now kneeling between my legs, with his hands resting on either side of me.

He gently lowered himself so the tip of his penis was rubbing my inner thigh, and his hard chest just lightly rubbing my rather prominent nipples.

"I need to hear the words." The grin on his face was so big it almost threatened to split his head open. He was enjoying teasing me, the bastard!

"Yes, take me." I managed to moan out.

He lifted his torso up so I had a clear view down between the valley of my cleavage to his engorged dick, and with my head propped slightly by the pillow I could just make out it nudging my outer lips. My need to be penetrated was so intense it was almost painful.

"Please." I pleaded.

The grin on his face changed from the look of a tease to the look of someone knowing they are about to enjoy themselves very much. He started to push in, I was so wet and so willing there was almost no resistance. Unfamiliar nerves cried out in pleasure as I felt every vein rub against my insides. He was going so slow! I could feel a slight tickling on my thighs, and realised I could feel his pubic hairs against my skin. A moment later I felt his balls against my thighs, and he was in all the way.

I looked up into his face, and his look was one of concentration. I recognised the look as one I had worn a few times, he was trying hard not to enjoy it so much he came to early. I reached up and pulled his head down to me, and initiated another long kiss, with him unmoving deep inside me.

He then started to move out slowly, and the pleasure I felt from down below was amazing. His next thrust in was slightly faster, and I was into a massive mind-blowing orgasm by the time he was pulling out again.

I would say I "lost track of time", but my computer half was intensely aware of every passing second. I certainly lost focus. I had come three times before he stopped kissing me and moved his head down to lick around my breasts. I had another by the time he started sucking on the breasts themselves, and I think if I was capable of it I would have passed out when he placed his mouth over my left nipple and sucked while flicking the nipple with his tongue, and simultaneously rubbing the right nipple with his hand.

I had another orgasm after that, and realised I was starting to become a bit too sensitive. I needed him to finish.

"Please, come inside me." He looked up from his attention to my chest, smiled, nodded, and leveraged himself back up. He started pounding into me. He'd been this fast before, always varying the speed, but never for this long. He'd done a masterful job of holding off and seeing to my pleasure, so I wanted to help him get over the line. His legs started losing their rhythm, and I knew he was close. His face screwed up in an expression that almost looked like pain, then he jammed himself up as far as he could inside me, and held it there.

I didn't know if I would or not, but I felt him. I felt the spurt inside me, I felt his penis spasm inside me, and the feeling set me off into one last unexpected orgasm. I felt four distinct spurts, and then he collapsed on top of me. I hugged him hard.

"Thank you." I said, and I really meant it. Now I knew how it felt, and it was fantastic, far better than it ever was when my body was male. Of course, when I was male I couldn't actually orgasm without imagining I was the woman, which is quite difficult when so aware of the contrast between what I wanted to feel and what I was actually feeling, so my experience is probably not typical.

I found myself lightly crying. After so long pretending to be someone I wasn't, pretending to be male to fit into society's expectations, and so I could have children even if I never felt them growing inside me as I so desired, I could feel the helpless frustration of years lifting off me.

He noticed me crying.

"Are you OK?"

"I'm fine. Positively brilliant." I smiled back at him. "Thank you so much."

He was starting to soften inside me. I squeezed bit to savour the feeling, but unfortunately this caused him to pop out.

We lay there for a while, cuddling, but after a little bit I realised he was nervous about something.

"What's wrong?"

He jerked as though I'd poked him with a hot iron.

"I can't say." he responded. "Look, you need to stay here, but I have to go."

He quickly disengaged, and started to clean himself up.

"Why?" I asked, disappointed.

"Sorry, I can't say. Please don't ask any more questions."

I wanted to ask more questions, but I also wanted to do whatever my lover wanted me to do. The last thought seemed a bit odd, and while I was thinking about it, he finished cleaning himself up, dressed in his two items of clothing, and left. Once he was gone I decided to clean myself up. While I was doing so I felt some kind of mechanical movement, like I was in a truck starting to move or similar. I quickly finished up and wrapped the towel around myself again.

After a bit of movement, there was an abrupt stopping sensation. The door opened up, with an apparent small closet past it. Written on the wall was "Please enter naked and stand still."

OK, so I took the towel off, and entered the cubicle. Some kind of green laser lights flashed over me, and I realised I was being measured. The text on the wall changed to "Please wait." I recalled some information from the encyclopaedia, the wall was probably covered with nanobots that were grey on one side, and a colour on the other, and could flip over to change the appearance of the paint on the wall.

Soon a section of the wall slid out revealing what looked to be a drawer, with a small amount of clothing inside. White bra, panties, and blouse, with a dark red uniform jacket and wide-pleated skirt of the same colour coming to just above the knee, with matching flats. The pleated skirt looked a bit out of place to me, but I knew it was the style here for ease of movement. I knew that red uniforms were reserved for non-citizens acting in a role with the Confederation. I had learned from my third row of books that those like myself having souls with no association with, nor memories of the Confederation in which I now lived, wore red uniforms. Once in a ship, I'd owe the Confederation the cost of the ship, and once worked off I could become a full citizen.

Each solar system within the Confederation had its own rules, but the Confederation controlled trade between systems. It was effectively a merchant navy, plying trade between systems at set rates. Sure, there were some independent operators, mainly working in niche markets or under the control of an individual system, but the Confederation provided a base level of service to all members. Those who are citizens who made up most of the staff wear dark blue uniforms. There was also a police division responsible for enforcing the laws who wore dark green uniforms, and a diplomatic division that wore uniforms of a deep purple.

I put my new clothes on, since that was my obvious course of action. Once dressed, the left hand side of the closet pivoted open, and I turned to look.

There was a man in a dark green uniform, handsome enough, and although older, possibly better looking than my lover without a name. I didn't feel the same need that I felt before, and at that point my previous suspicions were confirmed. My erotic interlude had been an exercise with two purposes, first to make sure that I was comfortable in my new body, and second to take the edge of my need. I idly wondered what would have happened if I had failed the test in some way.

I had been expecting a blue uniform, not green, but I didn't really know what was going on yet. The rank indicated was that of Commodore, the rank above Captain.

"Miss, what is your handle?"

A "handle" was a one or two syllable word used as shortened form of one's name, to be used in situations either casual or time-critical. The documentation had warned me to select one.

"Kim, sir." I had selected it as a contraction of Kimberley, a name I had always liked. It had the added bonus, as far as I could tell, of not being a common syllable in the "Basic" language I was now speaking, so I'd probably get away with it, not conflicting with anyone with more seniority.

"Right, Kim, follow me."

We walked through a series of corridors, filled mainly with blue uniformed folk, eventually coming to a lift. We went inside, he pressed a sequence of buttons which I knew also checked fingerprints and DNA, and the lift started down.

"So, Kim, are you going to give me a head job?" he asked. Although said with all seriousness and a tone of command, I had a feeling he was testing me.

"Not unless it involves an extra rank, sir." I smiled back.

"Ah, but you don't know what rank you were going to start at, do you?". The right side of has face had just the hint of a grin.

"I assumed sub-Lieutenant after basic training while my ship was being built, and Lieutenant after that, as per the regulations, sir."

"Quoting rules at me, Kim?"

"Only letting you know I wasn't bargaining from a position of ignorance, sir." I gave a crooked smile, letting him know I was teasing rather than genuinely trying to validate my position.

"Right, well, we're ..." as our lift stopped moving, "here." The door slid open, and we quickly marched through another series of corridors. I saw a few green uniformed staff with no other colours, and assumed we had moved to a military area of whatever complex I was in. We stopped at a coded door, and he placed his palm in a reader, and the door opened, revealing what appeared to be a conference room.

My eyes were drawn to the first purple uniform I had seen, a woman sitting at the head of the table. We had entered via the other end. There were three dressed in blue on the right, and four in green on the left. She motioned to me to sit down at the chair opposite her, at the end of the table closest to the door I had just entered via. As I sat down, smoothing my new skirt as I did so, my escort sat down with the other greens on the left of the table. The woman in the purple diplomatic uniform looked with a questioning look at my escort, who nodded back. Clearly the incident in the lift had been a test.

"Good", she said to my escort, then turned to me. "Miss, you are aware most people in your position become members of the trading fleet?"

"Yes, ma'am." I said, wondering where this was going.

"Would you have a problem if you were instead a military ship?"

"No, ma'am." As I said it, I did wonder. The section detailing buying your way out of debt and into citizenship assumed I was going to be a trading ship.

"Any questions?" I got the feeling she was sizing me up.

"Just two. The obvious one - why?"

"And the other one?"

"The regulations I've read assume that I pay my way out of debt as a trading ship." One of the blue uniformed members was nodding at this, so I ploughed on. "I would like to know the payment schedule as a military ship."

"We'll get that to you as soon as possible. As to the other question, well, that has to remain classified for the moment. Suffice it to say we have a credible long-term threat." She looked around the room. "Any objections?"

No-one said anything, so she continued.

"You'll go with Lieutenant Garz," she nodded at one of the blue unformed females, who inclined her head to me, "and go through standard basic training. After that you'll be sent to the military training. To save time, we'll start building you at the same time, Commodore Tunz," she nodded at the officer who had guided me down here "will act as design co-ordinator."

Again, she looked around the room, and seeing no objections said "Dismissed."

Just what had I been drafted into? That I wasn't being introduced to anyone was starting to concern me - it said that either they were in an awful rush for some reason, or "need-to-know" was ingrained in the culture, which didn't sound right for a trading confederation.

Anyway, I followed Lieutenant Garz, and I went through another series of corridors and a "lift" that went sideways, then through another set of corridors, and then into what looked like office space. There I had to sign a "foreign induction form", which had in it pretty what I expected, saying I was agreeing to the laws and regulations of the Confederation as a member of the services, acknowledging my debt, and that I could not apply to become a citizen until my debt was paid off. I was to gain the rank of "Specialist Recruit", to be reviewed after completing basic training.

I was then assigned a barracks, and I felt a sensation of movement, coming not from my body as I thought of it, but something else. I realised my "focus chamber" was being moved. I was given an ID badge and rank marking to put on my shoulders. We then went to get one more uniform, two "combat outfits", which consisted of running shoes, shorts, and a halter top with built-in sports bra. I did ask about that, and apparently everything is custom made to fit me.

While this was going on, I tried to also focus on my other half, and try to feel around that part of me. I could sort of feel the tunnel that bit of me was on, but I'm not sure how I was doing so.

Lieutenant Garz led me into what appeared to be a barracks of some kind. On my right, six double bunks were pressed up against and perpendicular to the wall, with scattered folding chairs up against the left wall. Three young women in similar red uniforms to myself were sitting together about halfway down. At the end was an open entrance to what appeared to be a toilet and shower block.

"You've brought us some fresh meat?" said one of the young women, while eyeing me up. I noticed her and another were far more generously endowed in the chest department than I was, to the point of being Jessica Rabbit-like caricatures of erotica movie starlets.

"Whoo hoo! Another norm!" whooped the third, looking very pleased with herself.

"I'll leave you four to get acquainted, then." said Lieutenant Garz. "Kim here is the last joining your little group." With that she left and closed the door behind her.

"I'm Pif," said the more normally built one with medium length black hair and steel-grey eyes, "and the two vixens here are Jet", indicating a strawberry-blonde with deep blue eyes and breasts that could only belong on a port starlet, " and Kart.", indicating a mocha-skinned beauty with dark curly hair, deep brown eyes, and similarly oversized breasts to Jet.

"Norm?" I asked.

"You and I wanted to be normal, so ended up looking this hot. They wanted to be this hot, and ended up smoking."

"Right, so we wanted to be normal, thus the tag. Not common, I take it?"

"You two are the only ones out of the twelve we know of." said Jet.

"Right. Succubus DNA?" I asked.

"Smart girl." said Kart, clearly not pleased by the state of affairs.

"Just in case you've spotted something we haven't, why did you come to that conclusion?" asked Jet.

"Well, they are fairly open they use draconic DNA for flight and demonic DNA for regeneration", I started, "and succubi are the best regenerators who don't rage out on massive damage, focusing on using magic to 'fight or flight' instead, which would require a cool head. They don't want their ride to lose it's cool and go all aggro on them."

A subtle nod went around the other three present.

"Anything else?" Jet asked.

"Well, they're guys and all guys are perverts, so that was probably their excuse." Smiles from Jet and Pif, and a slightly sickened look from Kart. "Well, we know they want us to partner up with someone. Demons are naturally chaotic and destructive, but they bow to group organisation from a strong individual. Most demons fight to establish dominance, but..."

Kart jumped in "succubi establish dominance through sex." Again, she didn't seem very happy about this.

"Yes, and also through observation of others fighting. They're much more cautious, since they don't have much physical protection, and can feel a lot of pain even if they regenerate it almost immediately." I add.

"They want their captains to bonk us into submission." Pif said, somewhat excitedly. "Much more fun for everyone than fighting!" I must say the idea did cause a not unpleasant tingling in my stomach's vicinity.

"Can I put my stuff anywhere?" I asked, since I still had my clothing under my arm.

"Sure, knock yourself out." Jet responded. I looked over at the bunks, beside each bunk at the wall were two lockers, and all but three of them were open. I picked a bunk with two open lockers, and started hanging my clothes up in one of the lockers.

"What are we doing now?" I asked.

"Ship design!" shouted Pif.

"You mean our new bodies?" I asked.

"That's the one." Jet responded.

"Not to sound dense, but where are the plans?" I asked.

"Ah, that explains it. Not plugged in yet?" Kart asked.

My confused expression must have given me away.

"Brain box still in transit?" Kart continued. I realised she must be referring to the other half of my body.

"Yes." I nodded, feeling my other half still moving.

"Right, well, the three of us are plugged into a node that has all the plans."

"Shall we hang off until Kim can join us?" Jet asked Kart. "Saves doubling up?"

"Well, what are we going to do in the meantime?" Kart asked back, but from the look on her face she had a pretty good idea.

"What about a shower?" Jet asked. Jet and Kart were now pretty much ignoring Pif and myself.

"Sure, but I have trouble cleaning my back, can you hep me?" Kart returned, and I had no doubt from the body language it was going to be a bit more than that.

"Love to, but only if you do me!" Jet had placed particular emphasis on the "do".

Pif shook her head in mock exaggeration. "You two!"

"Hey, not our fault if you're a stick in the mud." Kart retorted, as she was grabbing a towel. She seemed the happiest I'd seen her so far.

"Those two are incorrigible." Pif said, turning to me.

"Their ideal woman is bi-sexual and a nymphomaniac?" I asked, the pieces falling together.

"You're not?" Pif asked, looking at me curiously.

"I might be bi-sexual, I haven't really given it a lot of thought. I certainly jumped the bones of the first guy I came across, but that was more self-discovery than anything else. I don't feel any urges in that direction now, at least. You?"

Pif's answer was grabbing me in a hug. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" she gushed. "I was starting to wonder if something was wrong with me."

"You're the same?" I asked.

"Yes! Sex is intriguing and I can't say I'm not very interested, but I don't feel like I have to be doing it all the time like all the others." Pif said.

"Others?" I asked, giving her a last squeeze and letting her go.

"Yes, there were four others, they left two days ago. Apparently there was another group of four before them, but they left just before I got here."

"Right, which gels with this place having twelve beds and me being the last of the group. Maybe they expected us to all be here together?"

"Possibly. I expect transsexuals with military experience aren't as common as they had hoped."

"You're probably right there, Pif." I thought for a moment. "Can I ask a question?"

An impish grin crossed her face. "You just did!"

"Har har. No, if this is really a different dimension, how come so much is in common, like clothing?"

She looked at me like I was an idiot, then comprehension flitted across her face.

"You're from a world without magic?"

"Yes. Is that unusual?"

"Well, you're the first I met. To answer your question - dreams somehow cross dimensions. If something is popular enough in one dimension, the idea leaks across to the dreams of those in other dimensions. No-one sane has figured out how to cross the dimensions while alive, although demons do it regularly, no-one considers them sane."

That stunned me, it was big and not something I had prepared for. Pif kept going.

"Some mages are better at it than others, and can actually communicate at an individual level with specific communication, not just group to group large scale concepts. However, it does mean if something is big in one dimension, these in other dimensions become aware of it and tend to copy the trend, even with local variations."

"That explains a lot." I said.

A very loud moan interrupted my thoughts from the shower area, prompting a smirk from Pif.

"Sounds like someone's having fun." she said. "We kind of got side-tracked before." she continued.

I blushed, figuring out where she was going with this. She suddenly looked mortified.

"No, no! I'm not asking you to go to do that with me!" she got out hurriedly. "It's just that ... when we need to go looking for captains ... will you go with me?"

"Sure!" I said, thinking about her concerns. I had no idea what the process really entailed, but the idea of double dating seemed like a good one, especially if ship-women that didn't want to jump the first guy they came across were rare, I didn't want to suffer date-rape because some guy expected me to be easy.

"Girlfriends, right?" she asked, with a big grin.

"Purely platonic, which of course means we need to share all the juicy details" I said, with a grin just as large. We shared a hug, and just before it got awkward, I felt my other self settling into place.

"I think I'm here, if you know what I mean." I said.

"Did you memorise all those network protocols?" Pif asked. I nodded back.

"Well, it can get a bit weird." she added.

I held my hand up in a stopping motion as I felt something connect to the external wall of my focus chamber. I could feel a network connection, and with my IT background was quickly doing the local equivalent of pinging the server it was connected to. I then fumbled around a bit until I got the connection protocol right to access the files on the server. There was a lot of text, a base plan, and three modified plans, labelled "Jet", "Kart", and "Pif". I made a copy of the default and labelled it "Kim".

"Started already?" Pif asked.

"Not really, just copied the default."

"You need a bit of time to digest it all?" she asked.

"Thanks for understanding." I nodded, then sat down on one of the chairs and tried to get through it all.

Most living ships follow a standard pattern, although the size varies. The majority is a triangular wedge at the front, which is the cargo area. Along the two sides lie a rotating wall that opens - consider a circle with a square inside it, then extend it to make a rod, with a sixth of each end being full, and the middle two thirds having only the top and bottom of the bits between the circle and edge of the square filled in. That gives you a large opening, rotate 90 degrees and its closed. In larger models this was repeated a number of times end-to-end down each side of the ship, which each rod able to open independently.

Ships would then land normally in water and then front up to "docks", triangular indentations, rotate the door rods, match levels either by controlling the water level, raising or lowering the docks, or on low-tech worlds, attaching to rings under the water and pulling down. With levels matched, loading vehicles can drive straight on and off.

Aft of the main cargo level is the living spaces for crew and passengers, normally over a number of levels. The bridge is usually in the centre of this area, protected by as much space as possible from any asteroid impacts or similar. The entire cargo area at the front likewise acts as a buffer. Also in this area are two energy reservoirs, globes of magically engineered bacteria. Only one is necessary for normal operation, but the second is there for redundancy. Behind that are two paddles, looking a bit like two table-tennis paddles, mounted vertically side-by-side. These are used to create part of the motivating field for movement, similar to what a dragon does between its wings.

The designs for us warships was similar, with the differences at the rear. The external difference was most obvious, just in front of the rear paddles was an oval wing-like construct that wrapped around the rear of the living section. The front cargo section was identical to normal, which would help for docking and similar, but the rear living section was externally shaped somewhat like a reflection of the front, being more pointed than the typical roundness. This rear point was what the oval wing was wrapped around, touching the top and bottom of that section. The notes indicated that each side of the wing acted like a pair of paddles in its own right, and so the motivating force could be three times that of a typical ship as a result.

Internally, instead of two energy reserves there were now four. Two were in the typical position on either side just behind the cargo/living area transition, while the other two were at the rear of the pointy bit, with the wings wrapper around for protection.

Typically heavy magical conduits went from the energy reserves to the paddles, and lighter conduits to the various external surfaces to help push away small objects, and perform minor magic such as bonding for docking and cleaning. In our case, these conduits existed, but also heavier conduits went to portals on the leading and trailing edges of the wings, and the edges of the door-like rods that opened to the cargo areas. It seemed that these were there to allow us to throw large amounts of magical energy at our opponents.

Size-wise we were also at the smaller end of the scale, but out energy reserves were architected at the top end of the range, as if for much larger ships.

I looked at the plans of the others. Jet had placed a double-size stateroom just in front of the bridge, with her focus chamber underneath. Kart and Pif had two staterooms just behind the bridge, linked by a wall that could retract downwards. Kart had her focus chamber underneath the one on the right, while Pif had placed hers under the one on the left.

Looking closer at Jet's design, I noted she had a spa pool in the corner of her double-sized stateroom, and the access panel to her focus chamber was through it. I commended her skills in misdirection.

Otherwise things looked pretty similar and not much had been changed between them. All had four levels in the living area, with staterooms on the top two floors and barracks-style accommodation in the bottom two floors.

By the time I had completed my assessment and looked up and around again Jet and Kart were back, smiling like the cat that just got the canary, back in uniform but with slightly wet hair.

"Back amongst us?" Jet asked.

"Yes. Wow." I said. "A lot of information to take in."

I paused for a bit.

"Nice idea with the spa pool, Jet."

Pif rolled her eyes. "Oh, please. Like that hasn't been done before?"

"How do you know? Is there some other source of information?" I was curious.

"Well, no, but it's so obvious someone else must have done it before."

"Have you been told we're the first warships?" I asked, and they all nodded, although Kart was a bit hesitant.

"So who's to say anyone has needed to think like this before?" I asked.

"Ha! Told you so!" Jet looked triumphant.

"But if you're going to hide it, why do it in your room?" I asked. This took Jet aback.

"I mean, we need access to that room when? When our human body gets killed and we need a replacement, right? Hopefully that'll never happen."

"Yes," Pif said, "but the notes says it's best to keep the focus chamber and the bridge central and together, and the captain's room close as well."

"So why not put the focus chamber right next to the bridge, and have it open up somewhere inconspicuous in the level above?" I asked.

Everyone seemed to perk up at this.

"We'd want to put it in a slightly different place for each of us, maybe something like this."

To try and look like I wasn't favouring anyone I split their design choices, placing a double stateroom with wall that slid down to the level below in front of the bridge, then a corridor behind the bridge with the focus chamber on the other side, opening up into a small area in the level above, with a shower to wash off the gunk and a small drawer to keep clothes and a towel in. A hidden door from there led into a corridor.

"Having the alcove means you don't need the clothing you normally keep in your stateroom, which is the obvious reason why usually it opens into your stateroom."

"Sneaky!" Kart seemed to like it. "How'd you come up with an idea like that so fast?"

"I used to work in security."

"What, military police?" Pif asked.

"No civilian, as a computer security type, but we had to worry about the physical security of computers as well."

The other sets about making similar modifications. Pif had hers exit half-way between levels in a stair well, Jet had hers exit into a corridor like me, and Kart had hers exit into the floor of the shower in another stateroom, with a hidden compartment for her clothing.

"I'll just try and keep people out of that room," she explained, "and hope I don't have to use it when someone is in there."

I also pointed out that by having corridors and other open areas around our focus chambers, and heavy armour around them, that any explosion would likely dissipate down the open corridors before effectively compromising our chambers.

"Does anyone have long term plans beyond this war, or whatever we're currently facing?" I asked next.

"How long term are you talking?" Jet asked.

"Well, some rough calculations shows that it takes nearly 200 years for a standard cargo ship to pay herself off." I said, "but we're combat ships, so it's likely we're going to cost more per unit of cargo we can carry than normal."

"So we could be in debt forever." Kart said, somewhat morosely.

"Likely we'll pay off faster during the difficulties, whatever they are." Pif said.

"But we'll need to differentiate ourselves after that." said Jet. "What's a good starting point?"

"Medical services." Kart piped up. We all looked at her, interested. "As I see it, with our enhanced senses and energy capacity, we should be able to spin at least three times further than anyone else. Speed counts in medical disasters, to get in as quickly as possible to start helping people."

"Right, so what do we have to do to differentiate?" Jet asked.

"Increase low-level magical conduits to the barracks areas to use as hospitals." Kart responded.

"Put in more walls and air-locks for separation if something is airborne." Pif added.

While they were talking I was busy modifying my design, and making notes as a template for the others to apply as well.

"Nice work Kim," said Kart, "but you also need to add more sensory conduits to aid in diagnosis."

I did that, and Kart nodded her approval.

"I take it you have some medical experience?" I asked Kart.

"That was all I was allowed to do as a mage." she responded, sadly.

"You were a mage slave?" Pif asked.

Kart nodded. "In the world I came from, all people with black skin were slaves. Those who were mages were only allowed to practice medicine, nothing else."

"And you don't want to become a slave again?" Pif asked, gently.

Kart nodded and burst into tears, and we all quickly joined her in a group hug.

"I was so happy when I found everyone was treated the same here, regardless of race." she sniffed, "only to have it all come crashing down with the financial situation and when it was obvious I was going to have to be subservient to a captain."

"Yeh, right." said Jet. "A pretty woman like you should be able to wrap any man around her finger. You may have to do what he says, but if you control his mind, he's only going to order you to do things you want to do."

We were all a bit close together, but Pif and I nodded our agreements.

"You really think so?" Kart asked.

"Sure!" Jet said. "Haven't you seen how easy it is for a pretty young thing to get a guy to do just about anything with some casual flirting?"

This provoked a new round of tears. "But I don't know how!" she howled.

"Hey, we were all physically male not that long ago." Jet said. "You think any of us know how? We just have to observe other women and copy. Should be easier with our new memories."

"In this together?" Pif asked, winking sideways at me.

"Absolutely!" I chimed in.

"For one and all!" Jet intoned, with a smile on her face.

"Thanks." Kart blubbered, the sobbing stopping.

After we all calmed down, Jet piped up again.

"Any other ideas?"

"Diplomacy." I said, and got some quizzical looks.

"Look, we know this is a trade confederation, and that confed has a diplomatic arm used to broker treaties between groups having trouble getting along, right?" That got nods from all around.

"Well, we're armed which gives us some defensive credibility, as Kart pointed out we're likely to be the fastest to get anywhere. These are good arguments for using us for diplomatic missions, but we need a bit of pomp to seal the deal. Any ideas?"

Pif made the obvious suggestion that all staterooms on the top floor be double-sized. Jet suggested a few large, private meeting rooms, so that two teams from different groups could have their own meetings separate from the main meeting room, so three meeting rooms seemed right. Kart suggested turning airlocks from the cargo/living transition area into diamond-windowed lifts to take delegates up and down with a view and without having to take the stairs. We toyed with having a garden somewhere, but couldn't manage to find the space. The closest we could come up with was to have one wall on the primary meeting room be a holographic wall, so it could look like a garden scene.

While they were coming up with ideas, and I was making notes on how to implement them, I was also looking at the magical conduits. With the extra sources and huge number of extra emitters, even just on the large-scale level for weapons, the conduit network had become just too interconnected, and I was worried about surges from combat strikes causing problems, so I put in a network of cut-outs, to act as both surge protectors and to guide differing flow levels.

Kart also suggested a gym, so we all put one in at the front of the third level with a view out over the cargo area, taking out a bit of the barracks. Since the barracks were mostly intact, just segmented, our various changes had reduced maximum occupancy by only a third, even with the top level having only a quarter occupancy with the double size staterooms and the meeting rooms. Cargo space hadn't been changed. I then suggested rather that double-size staterooms we have three-bedroom apartments like you find in some upscale hotels, because that way diplomats could take the master bedroom and assistants could take the smaller rooms. That would also help if we ever had to transport families for any time. Jet liked the idea, and also changed her captain's room on the second deck to be the same, suggesting that the two smaller bedrooms could be studies or private spaces for her and her captain, while normally sharing the master bedroom. It also made the place we were going to spend our lives a lot more home-like. We all liked this idea, and all made the replacements, even if it meant a little more lost space.

We all agreed our changes were a reasonable compromise, as long as the lead designer we'd have to get all changes approved by agreed with us.

Then we went into the minutiae, working out all the subtle little details from routing of plumbing in top areas though to having independent air, water, and food recyclers for the air-lockable barracks areas. By the time we had everything nailed down to our satisfaction, nine hours had gone past.

"Done?" Jet asked.

"All done!" I agreed. I'd taken on the responsibility of making most of the changes as I had an "eye for detail", which I had wondered more than once if it just meant everyone else was lazy. I knew that wasn't really the case, with my background I just tended to order things automatically that when questioned became obvious it was for redundancy reasons.

"Happy?" Jet asked the other two.

"Yes!" from Kart and "Certainly!" from Pif.

"OK, a shower is in order for everyone." Jet said, looking pointedly at Pif and myself.

"All right, all right." Pif mumbled good-naturedly. We all stripped down to our underwear, grabbed more underwear and towels, and headed for the showers. It was what I had been expecting from our ship designs of the barracks areas, with a corridor with what appeared to be frosted glass separating out the shower heads on one side of the corridor, and hooks to hang clothes and towels on an the opposite wall. Each frosted glass separator had a gap of nearly nine inches at the bottom, and coming to the height of around six feet, much taller than any of us. Beside each shower head was a liquid soap dispenser on one side, and a combination shampoo/conditioner on the other.

Like the others, I stripped of completely. It seemed we were all going into individual shower cubicles, which was fine by me. Soaping myself up was an interesting experience, and I discovered just how sensitive not just my nipples were, but the whole breast and even a lot of the skin near them, and most of my inner thighs as well.

I heard a chuckle, which I identified as Kart's.

"One big erogenous zone, huh?" asked Jet.

I blushed, realising I'd let out a small moan.

"Two, actually." I responded, not letting them get to me. "Chest and thighs."

"You figured out the head detaches?" Pif asked.

For a moment I thought she meant my head, before realising she meant the shower head. I hadn't, but reaching for it, it came away leaving a tube behind that seemed far to small for the amount of flow coming out. It was far to intense on my chest, but dialling the pressure down did feel pretty good just about everywhere on my new sensitive skin. Too good, in fact, so I quickly finished up before giving them any more ammunition to tease me with.

"I'm clean!" Jet declared.

"Then come here, hot stuff!" Kart exclaimed. I was drying off by this point, and say Jet clearly as she stepped around the partition. It was amazing her massive breasts stood that high on her chest without any support. Succubus trick, I was sure of it.

Pif and I exchanged martyred sighs, then broke out in a case of the giggles as we finished getting dressed and went out to the main area.

"Sorry if I embarrassed you in there." I said to Pif once we were out of casual earshot.

"No harm, no foul. I spent longer my first time in there." She had a wicked grin on her face. I couldn't let her get away with thinking I was a prude.

"Ah, but you don't know how long I took the first time when I'd just got out of the tank!"

"Really? I was strangely numb at the time."

Oh no, I didn't want her thinking I was a sex fiend!

"Well, only kind of, it was more a self-exploration than anything erotic." I confessed.

"A bit embarrassed then, are we?" Pif seemed to be enjoying herself.

"You aren't with those two getting it on in there?"

"Well, maybe a bit." A caught a hint of the same embarrassment.

"You tease! You're just hassling me because they did it to you!"

"Busted!" she laughed. "Although it was easier when I first got here, the other group of four engaged in almost constant group sex. No-one noticed me experimenting in the shower."

We chatted about not much until the other two finally revealed themselves. Shortly afterwards, Lieutenant Garz walked in through the door.

"Right, ladies! Combat drill in five, change to sports uniform and meet at the gym."

As she left I quickly changed, but struck up a conversation while doing so.

"So, they're obviously watching and probably recording everything we do."

"What!" was the shocked reaction from Kart.

"C'mon, the timing? She turns up just after you two have made yourselves respectable, just after a shower, just after we've spent nine hours brainstorming?"

"It's just a coincidence." Jet jumped in.

"Unlikely," Pif jumped in to my defence, "they're putting how much of their time and money into us? Of course they're monitoring us to make sure we don't try and kill each other or anything." I'm glad she said it, it was almost exactly what I had been thinking too.

Kart suddenly looked a lot more nervous.

"Lighten up!" I said. "Look, they said I was the last, right?" She nodded. "And the previous lot basically had a continuous orgy, right?" Again she nodded. "So if it was a problem, they would have found someone else and not told all of us I was going to be the last."

Kart visibly relaxed.

"C'mon girls, gotta go!" said Jet, bounding out of the room. Pif and I hastily followed, with Kart bringing up the rear. I wiggled my behind a bit more than I really needed to, then tuned on her with a smile plastered from ear to ear.

"Good view?" I asked, quickly turning back around and giggling "Sprung!" to Pif.

Combat was interesting. There were two instructors there, a man and a woman both in the green military uniforms. They were careful to make us practice on each other, because we were fairly close to indestructible. As the first timer I learnt that we still felt pain, and quite a lot at that.

After three hours of that - in my old body I would have been exhausted after five minutes - it was another shower and a visit to the mess hall. We all drank a lot, primarily juice, and ate very little.

After that we had a visit from the "lead designer", who never gave his name, and got all our changes approved. With the reduction in number of fittings, but increase in quality we wanted, the cost overall only went up to two percent, and didn't really attract much of his attention. My suggested changes for the energy distribution were a comparatively huge additional six percent, and we got a lot more arguments from him about that. Kart wavered and nearly decided to give up on that change, but the three of us stuck to our guns, and he grudgingly agreed it was a very good design for load-shedding and redundancy. I think he was put out that we had designed it rather than him.

After he vanished it was mage school. Apparently not only were we transsexuals with military experience, we were transsexual mages with military experience. Some souls are naturally better at channelling magic, and apparently that as one of the selection criteria.

This was one area where Kart, having previous training, just blew all over the rest of us. I seemed to have a knack for sensing, Kart was really good at life magic but that may have just been prior training, Pif was clearly better than the rest of us at raw energy work, like producing flame out of nothing, and Jet seemed to have something going for physical objects, which of course she demonstrated producing a dildo out of thin air. For the only one of us never to have known magic before, I thought I was doing pretty well even if I couldn't do much beyond figuring out exactly what everyone else was doing - that and levitating pens.

Interestingly, our instructor, one Mage Hok, said it was likely our natural aptitudes came from our dragon DNA. Dragons had different colours which reflected their primary affinity. Red was life, and he was convinced Kart was red aspected. Although the base colour of a ship could be changed at any time to any dark-ish colour, the highlights always stayed the same bright colour. The base colour was changed to reflect the ship's current assignment, so for us it would be a deep green. Apparently guessing the colour that would eventually show up as highlights on a ship's external skin was something of a game between the mages. Pif was likely blue aspected and good at working with energy, and Jet likely green aspected and good with physical objects. He was reserving judgement on me until I actually got good at something, which resulted in my acting in a most unladylike fashion and sticking my tongue out at him, which elicited much laughter from all present.

"Mage Hok, why is it a guessing game as to a dragon's DNA aspect?" I asked as the others were leaving.

"Out of respect from dragons, who are mightily cantankerous if you annoy them, we don't take DNA from any living lines of dragons. Instead we pull them from bones of dragons on dead worlds."

"So because you take the DNA samples from bones you don't know the original colour?" I ask.

"Yes."

"So why don't you just use the same samples for multiple ships?" I asked.

"Curious, aren't you? I wonder if that has something to do with your better sensing." he seemed to muse to himself. I cleared my throat and he jumped as if he was off in his own little world, which he probably was.

"Oh, I'm sorry my dear. Well, dragons are mystical creatures, and we've found in the past that using the same donor for multiple ships at the same time leads to some undesirable effects."

"Such as?" I prompt him.

"Oh, mental closeness, followed by an inability to separate thoughts. Usually one of the pair goes insane. We do screening now to make sure nothing like that happens again. Most unfortunate, demons are much easier. We only have five succubii lines for all ship creation, did you know that?"

"No, I didn't. I don't even know how many of these facilities there are." I responded.

"Don't you? Oh well, two officially, three in reality. This one is something of an open secret for experimentation." He looked at his PDA. "Oops, sorry must run. Nice chatting!" and he was off. I got the distinct impression he realised he'd said something he shouldn't and was running off before I could ask further questions.

The server we had been using was disconnected as I walked back to our barracks. When I got there Lieutenant Garz was there.

"Right, grab your clothing everyone, we'll clean the soiled stuff later, we're moving out."

"Where are we going?" Pif voiced the question we were all eager to ask.

"Ship lay-down, where we put your focus chamber in the tank and start seeding growth of your new bodies."

Actually, we got to a docking facility to find giant tanks in place. I felt my other-self being moved, and could feel my friends focus chambers being moved as well. Inside the cargo ship were four giant tanks, and soon our focus chambers were rolled in. Tentacles from the roof moved each focus chamber into one of the tanks, and I saw communication fibres snake in from the edges of the tank to ports on my focus chamber. Once connected, I could feel a smaller server built into the edge of the tank, with just my own schematics inside. I could feel the nanites start to spread out to begin construction.

We lifted off, and I discovered we were in a temperate part of the globe we were on. Two days and twelve spins later, we found ourselves on what appeared to be a volcanic island in the middle of a great ocean on a planet I estimated was around two hundred light years from our starting point, apparently called "Vechog". Our tanks were rolled out into the ocean a few kilometres apart, fastened to the sea floor by cable, then our human selves were dropped off on the island along with our Lieutenant.

The next few months were a study in boring. Sure, we learnt lots about military procedures, tactics, martial arts, small arms combat, and so forth. What was interesting is that all ship-to-ship combat we studied from history was all over two thousand years ago, nothing seemed to have happened recently.

After three months our tanks had been expanded four times, by adding rails and pumping in more solution, and spaces were starting to appear in our new ship bodies. At this time we sat all our exams to be promoted to officers, which were almost a formality with our enhanced minds. I say "almost" because I was only doing OK in magic studies. Generically I was good, only a tiny bit behind average, but I hadn't specialised with a strength in any one area like the others. I continued to maintain an ability to sense better than the others, but this had become mainly an issue of range.

We were no longer Specialist Recruits, but Midshipmen instead.

This was now also the time to pick ship names, which would also act as surnames for us. We were encouraged to pick something "culturally significant" from our old world, although this was more to cut down the risk of clashes.

I named myself "Harpagornis", after the giant predatory bird from New Zealand that hunted its prey in forests rather than soaring or scavenging like most other birds its size, with a three metre wingspan.

So here I am, Kim Harpagornis.

The Confederation, a group of independent worlds bonded together for mutual trade and defence, have a dirty little secret in how they make their trading ships - hijacking the souls of dead transgendered. Please follow one subject's rebirth into the Confederation.

This time we get a variety of action, and the bad guys hinted at last time are revealed.

---

Some changes were coming that made us all nervous.

Shortly after arriving we'd met the other eight in our team, who had arrived before us. It had been too late for them to make the diplomatic and redundancy changes we had sorted for ourselves, but they did manage to get the medical adjustments to a lesser degree. This differentiation had been the odd source of tension.

Now we were allowed to "meet" the others on the island. Teams had been flown in to help with the fit-out of our ship bodies as the spaces expanded. We were to anonymously join these teams, and this was to be treated as something of a test, to see how long we could go without getting singled out as the actual human arm of the ship. We could communicate with team members as our "ship" selves through computer links and speaker disks, and were advised to try to speak in a different voice to maintain our cover.

Also, a number of officers who had been selected as our potential captains were being given special combat and tactics training. We had been given photos of all twenty four of them, double our number. We were expected to fraternise with them in in the officers club, and make our selection of our captain, provided he agreed. They were not told our identities, but knew we would be there. The rest of the installation teams acted as our cover.

This was all starting to get a little close for comfort, especially Kart who had never quite got over her fear of being a slave.

We had special dispensation as part of the test to wear the green uniforms of the military instead of our usual red of non-citizens, and the first few visits to the officers club I found quite enlightening, seeing how everyone reacted and interacted.

Jet and Kart turned out to be a bit boy-crazy, so Pif and I often ended up drinking or eating together. One night we turned up together in little black dresses and high heels instead of our normal uniforms.

"Two prospects, your five o'clock!" Pif hissed at me.

"Good evening ladies, mind if we join you?" asked a voice from behind me.

I turned to have a look as Pif said "Sure!"

Before I knew it, Pif and I had been moved back into the booth with a scrumptious looking man blocking both of our exits to the main floor. Even better, both were on the approved list of potential captains.

"Hi, I'm Tag and this is Dirk" said the man opposite me, sitting next to Pif.

"I'm Pif, and this is Kim", Pif said, introducing us.

"So, you ladies come here often?" Tag asked.

Pif and I just looked at each other and giggled and the corniness of the line. I suppose at least they were trying.

"Where else are we going to get something approximating decent food around here?" I asked.

"Have you eaten yet?" Dirk asked.

"Not yet." Pif responded. We only needed to eat about once every two days, although we did tend to consume a lot of high-sugar drinks such as fruit juice.

"You got your eye on anything you'd like?" I asked Dirk, sitting next to me, as innocently as I could.

[[You tease!]] Pif messaged me through our ship-to-ship communications network.

[[Shut up, I'm working the room! :-)]] I responded.

[[More likely your cleavage! :-)]] she retorted.

"Umm, the steak looks good." he dialled up something on the table's computer. I ordered a chicken salad, and Pif ordered a small soup. I didn't catch what Tag ordered.

The standard getting-to-know you conversation ensued, although I nearly lost it at one point.

"Must be tough with the prospective ships on the prowl, huh?" asked Tag at one point.

"Exactly what do you mean?" asked Pif, a hint of danger in her voice.

"Well, we all know there are ships looking for captains around here. I mean, look at those two" he indicated Jet and Kart working the bar, "it's pretty obvious who they are."

"Actually, I think it's great." I jumped in, getting the attention of everyone at the table. "Guys who only have one thing on their minds go after the huge breasts, and we don't really want to meet their type anyway. It leaves the good guys to us normal girls."

"You're not exactly normal," said Tag, redeeming himself, "you're both gorgeous, but you don't have that take-me-now look that those ship girls have."

[[Score! How are we going to embarrass them by telling them who we are?]] By her words and the smirk on her face, Pif was looking forwards to this.

[[We don't. At least not yet, it'd be nice to have a normal relationship where they're not looking to "captain" us.]]

[[Good point. But you owe me!.]]

[[I'll always owe you, Pif.]]

"Anyway," said Pif, "I think that enough on those types of people for a while. Hey, have you guys covered what the Yeerap did at the Battle of Gethys?"

So off we went into a military discussion. By the end of the evening, I was leaning more towards Tag than Dirk.

[[Hey, would mind if I swapped with you? I like Tag more than Dirk.]]

[[That'd be great, I was thinking Dirk was more my kind of man than Tag.]]

"Excuse us, we need to visit the ladies." I said.

As they moved to let us out, I heard Tag mumble "Always in pairs."

It hadn't been that long when we came back, I sat beside Tag and Pif beside Dirk. I leaned in towards Tag.

"We always go in pairs so we have someone to have a lesbian fling with, " I whispered in his ear, "why do you really think it takes us so long?"

I timed it badly, he didn't snort his drink out his nose.

"What was that?" Dirk asked.

"I'm not repeating it!" Pif said, apparently stuck between being mortified and breaking up with laughter. We'd figured out some time ago the reason our senses were so good at multi-tasking was all the actual thinking was done by our real brains back in our focus chambers, freeing up grey matter in our human bodies for other functions, such as for senses and motor skills.

"Probably safer not to repeat it, no." Tag recovered.

"C'mon let's get out of here." Dirk suggested, so we all ended up leaving to go for a walk along the boardwalk foreshore.

"Why don't we go on the sand?" Tag suggested.

"Heels?" I asked.

"Take them off, then!" Dirk said.

"But then we'll get sand in our stockings!" Pif interjected.

"Take them off too!" Dirk said.

"I think they're trying to get us to strip!" I said in an overly fake soft voice to Pif.

"Sshh! They'll think you're drunk!" Pif replied. We looked at each other and started giggling.

"Women!" Dirk said.

"I supposed we need to make it up to them." I said.

"I guess I'll live with a bit of sand." Pif said.

"So we both pulled off our heels. I took the opportunity to lean on Tag.

"Thanks!" I said, giving him a quick peck on the cheek.

We went for a walk, but not much else happened. We joked around a bit more. Eventually they offered to walk us back to our places. We were no longer in barracks, but the tiny units that low-ranking officers get. Our units were in the same building, with mine on the second floor and Pif's on the third.

We walked up the stairs together, Pif and Dirk in the lead, and Tag and I peeled off at the second floor, saying our good-byes. We approached my door.

"Umm - I had a really good time tonight". Tag started, a bit nervously.

"Thank you, I enjoyed myself too. Shall we do it again sometime?" I asked.

"That'd be great!" he said, a little too enthusiastically. "Same time, same place tomorrow night?" He was eager as a puppy dog.

"I'd like that." I said. The moment stretched and I opened my door. I waited a bit, hoping he'd get up the courage to kiss me. He didn't seem to be getting the message, so I gave him a peck on the cheek and went inside, closing the door.

Men! I couldn't have made it more obvious that I wanted him to kiss me. I pulled off my heels and my now ruined stockings with a mounting sense of frustration. A quick bit of magic over the sink extracted all the sand and then fixed the stockings.

[[So, get a kiss?]] Pif messaged me.

[[No, the idiot. I had to give him a peck on the cheek.]]

[[Well, Dirk is a really great kisser.]]

[[Just a kisser?]]

[[Well, he went for a bit of a breast grope. I'm not having that on a first date!]]

[[You liked it though, didn't you?]]

[[You know me too well!]]

[[I did get a date for tomorrow night.]]

[[Do tell! Anywhere exotic?]]

[[In this dump? Not likely! Same time same place tomorrow night.]]

[[Dirk's taking me for a secluded picnic tomorrow night.]]

[[You mean he's after some nookie. :-)]]

[[Well, yes, but if he's gentleman he might get more than he bargained for. Did I tell you he's a *really* good kisser?]]

[[I think you did.]]

[[Well, I think I need some relief. See you in the morning?]]

[[Sounds like a plan. Yes, see you then.]]

I knew exactly what she meant by some "relief", I had a yearning down below. I stripped naked, conjured up two small vibrators, and set about massaging myself, imagining it was Tag ravishing my body. After feeling much better, I took a shower to clean off, grabbed a nighty, and lay down in bed.

Now, we don't really need sleep as humans do anymore, but to maintain the cover it was useful. Normal humans have two hemispheres to their brains, and unlike humans some mammals can have one hemisphere sleep at a time. We ships had eight neural loci in our hybrid neural/computer brains, one for each corner of the focus cube, which could both concentrate on different tasks and sleep independently. Without the physical stresses each only needed an hour and a half of sleep a day. Instinctually we slept our brains in four shifts of two loci each, overall taking around six hours during which we were three quarters aware.

During this down time I mentally reviewed every piece of information I could get my hands on from the local network. It was getting a little boring, the next supply ship was due tomorrow, and that would freshen things up with the latest news dump from around the galaxy. I understood Pif did much the same. Jet was apparently working on some supplemental income already by writing erotic horror stories, and I didn't have much idea what Kart did.

All twelve of us got up at 5am for magic lessons, before joining the other workers in the officer's mess at 7:30 for a quick bite to eat before grabbing a boat to work for the day. The scuttlebutt was that they had figured out who the ship was, a stacked blonde named Mar who didn't join the rest of us for breakfast. I happened to know it was because she was a late sleeper and grabbed cereal in her room before running out the door, but it seems the local lad who was convinced he was the god's gift to women had finally noticed she wasn't eating, and assumed that means she was the ship.

I was moved to a new section, and to further muddy the waters I sent a message as myself the ship to the supervisor about a mistake me as the human supposedly had made. I actually just hadn't got to that bit yet, but I'm sure it further threw those trying to guess my identity off the trail. All this cloak and dagger stuff was an interesting diversion, as I'm sure it was intended to be.

That night Tag took me to one of the new movies that had come in on the supply ship that day. I had a hard time empathising with the female lead as she was a bit of a ditz, but it was entertaining. We held hands through the movie but that was it. We continued to hold hands as he walked me back to my place.

This time when I opened the door, I tilted my head so my cheek was towards him, closed my eyes slightly, and he took the hint and gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek. I think he was really starting to fall for me, and was so worried about messing it up he wasn't relaxing at the critical moment. Well, at least I got something. The conjured vibrators got another workout.

Much later Pif told me at length abut her picnic date with Dirk. There had been a lot of kissing, but had stopped rather suddenly when Dirk had rolled such that his very firm member was pushed into Pif's thigh. He was so embarrassed about the whole thing not much happened after that. We both agreed we were falling for our respective guys.

The next night at the door I tilted my head again, but at the last moment I twisted my head back so he got me on the lips. I quickly snaked by arms around the back of his neck and gave him a slow kiss. His arms reflexively closed around my back, and I snuggled into him.

"Mmm, this is nice." I whispered, and we kissed some more. Soon I realised he was firming up nicely, and then he realised I could feel him firming up.

"Sorry!" He said, jerking away like I'd given him an electric shock.

"What's to be sorry for? You like me, I like you, what's the problem?" I had managed to keep one arm around him, and he was too much of a gentleman to break the hold.

"I don't want to force you into something you don't want."

"So how about we agree no hands below the waist until we both agree otherwise?"

"That's OK with you?" he asked, almost incredulous.

"Look, Tag, I really like you, and I want to know if we can take this further. We have to try to find out." I gave a slight tug to pull him back towards me, and I gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. "Is that OK? I don't want to go too fast, but I don't want to stop either."

"You're really something, Kim." he said in admiration. "Start in the officers club again tomorrow from 7?"

"Only if you give me another kiss." I winked back at him.

"I can live with those terms." he said, with a smile that melted me.

We broke for air and the night a few minutes later. By unspoken agreement I smiled and closed the door. Yes, the conjured vibrators got another workout.

This went on for another month. Some of my fellow ships had started to pair off, and once someone had agreed to be their captain they had to revert to the red uniforms.

Tag and I were getting along really well. We had agreed to allow touching of the butt, which was nice to massage and be massaged when kissing, but we hadn't gone further than that. On the odd occasion in his room (which was large with his better rank), we had shed our tops, although I retained by bra, and kissed and cuddled on the bed while watching shows on the screen.

A month had gone by when Pif had some news for me late one evening.

[[Dirk has accepted!!!> she sent me.

[[What, accepted that as a mere male that you can boss him around?]] I responded in our typical banter, although I was dying to know what she actually meant.

[[No, you fool! He's agreed to be my captain.]]

[[Congratulations! That's wonderful!]]

[[And we've celebrated with some more fun. He did me up the butt for the first time.]]

Pif and Dirk had been going at it like bunnies for two weeks now, and had been "heavy petting" for some time prior. I was happy for them.

[[What was it like?]]

[[When are you going to ask that hunky Tag to be your captain? C'mon, you're the last one now!]]

[[No dodging the question! So how was it?]]

She gave me a detailed description of the nights performance, and in return I had to tell her about Tag tracing his fingers around my upper body, and how much I wanted him.

I had to face up that I needed to ask Tag, but I just didn't know how to do it.

Next morning around 10 I got a message from command.

[[Kim Harpagornis is required to report to Command room 3-5-67C at 0900 tomorrow to discuss captaincy.]]

Oh dear, now I was in trouble. Presumably this was going to be the "hurry up and commit" talk. Although I was really looking forward to being committed to Tag, I had this niggling fear that he wasn't going to take the deception so well, which is why I hadn't broached the subject. I was enjoying just being in his company and being a normal woman as long as I could.

I had another meeting with Tag that night, and he seemed really subdued. After dinner he invited me up to his room straight away, indicating he had something he wanted to talk about with me in private.

"What's up, honey?" I asked, expressing my concern.

"Well, you know how I'm here to study tactics right?"

"Yes."

"That's not all I'm here for."

"Go on."

"I volunteered to be a ship's captain."

"I had figured that out, you know."

He looked at me with an expression of shock.

"The timing was pretty obvious." I explained.

"Anyway, there were twenty four of us for twelve ships, the new fast scouts you've been working on." "Fast Scout" was the cover story for us. "Eleven of them have now picked captains."

"So you think it's fairly likely that you're not going to get the gig?" I asked.

"That's what I thought." he said. This sent off alarm bells in my head. "I'd been wanting to be a captain since before I knew what it really meant. It's been a life-long dream of mine."

"That was the another reason for thinking you wanting to be a captain, you haven't exactly been subtle about that."

"But I've grown very fond of you, and it was reconciling to not being a captain if I could be with you." Admitting this was obviously pretty rough for him, so I rubbed him on the leg.

"You don't know how happy am I to hear you say that." I said.

"But that brings me to the problem. I've been ordered to report tomorrow morning to command about my position. I've talked with the other guys, and none of them have been called."

I had sinking feeling, as I now knew exactly where this was going. Of course I knew I was being watched, and of course any of the other girls would have said I was going steady with Tag. I'd taken too long and they were going to force the issue in the morning. Could I bring myself to tell him before then?

"Dirk seemed to think I had probably been selected by one of the ships."

Of course, Dirk would. He knew Pif and I were close, we knew Tag and I were an item, and he now knew Pif was a ship. It wouldn't take a great leap on hearing Tag was the only one being invited for him to figure out that I must be the last remaining ship. Thankfully he kept his mouth shut about why.

The look that passed over my face must have lead him to think I'd jumped to the same conclusion he had.

"Kim, I need to know before I do something foolish. Do you love me?"

We'd never actually said the words to each other.

"Yes, Tag, I love you. Do you love me?"

"I do."

"Say the words."

"I love you, Kim Harpagornis." Ship names were all secret at present, so there was no reason for me to keep my last name from him.

I hugged him and cried at the same time.

"This brings me to my next problem." he said. I looked up quizzically. "It'd be a black mark against my service record to volunteer as a captain and then pull out when asked unless I had a good reason."

Oh no, what was he planning? He was fumbling in his pocket for something.

"Kim, would you do me the honour of being my wife?" he said, going down on bended knee while pulling out the ring and showing it to me,

I was crying and giggling at the same time. This was not one of the things I had expected.

"I need to know something first, Tag." I said through the tears. "Are you asking me because you love me, or asking me to avoid a bad service record?"

He visibly blanched. I don't think he'd realise just how it came out.

"I love you, Kim. This is just the thing that gave me a kick in the arse to make me do the right thing."

I nodded at him, and he slipped the ring, a thin gold one with a clearly visible but not overly large emerald on it.

"To match your beautiful eyes, diamonds are so passe." he said, and I laughed even through the tears, hugging him close to me.

"Thank you so much. I love you, Tag."

"I love you too, Kim."

"Just so I get this right, you're prepared to give up your dreams for me?"

"Small price, baby. It took these orders to make me realise this."

It was now or never.

"Tag, there's something I need to tell you. I'll understand if you want to take the ring back."

Now his face was full of concern. More than that, he was mortified.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I know the name of the last ship."

"But that's classified! How'd you find out?" He's smarter than that! He should have figured it out just from the comment! I suppose he's a bit too emotional to think clearly. OK, time to hit him over the head.

"It's Harpagornis." I said, looking him dead in the eyes.

"But that's..." he started, trailing off in wonder.

"That's right honey. I'm the last ship."

He was so cute, stunned for words like that.

"You can have me and your dreams, although it might be a very long engagement." Rules were that a ship couldn't get married until she had paid herself off. He finally managed to collect himself.

"You're serious?"

"One hundred percent. I know how important this is to you, I wouldn't mess you around."

"But this is fantastic!" he looked lost for words again.

"DId Dirk tell you Pif was a ship, and he's agreed to become her captain?" This brought a reaction out of him.

"The little so-and-so! No he didn't. We all knew someone had been selected, but not who."

"He must have realised if he let the cat out of the bag the penny would drop about me. I'll have to thank him for that."

"So you and Pif are both ships? I would never have guessed, you're both so normal."

"You know in first training Pif and I were both called 'norms' because we didn't look or act like overstuffed horny porn stars."

That got the first laugh out of him so far. This was going well.

"Tag, I have something just as important to ask you. Tag Hargel, will you be my captain?"

"You know the regulations, right?" he smirked at me.

"You mean the 'must keep your underwear clean' one, or the 'must determine if you are sexually compatible before committing to a captain/ship relationship' one?"

"I think you know what I mean."

"I think I do. Come here and kiss me."

The kiss was slow, languid, and deep, full of intense emotion as we gave ourselves to each other. After some time we broke for air.

"I take it the agreement is off?" he said, referring to our no-touching-certain-areas policy.

I stood up, kicked off my heels as I removed my jacket. The blouse came off next, as I shucked my skirt. I was left standing in just my bra, suspenders, stockings, and knickers.

"Touch me anywhere." I confirmed. "But first you have to take some clothing off."

I sat back down on the edge of the bed as he stripped himself off in nothing flat. Soon he was completely naked, and we lay on the bed together, kissing and cuddling. Hand were roaming all over. He really did have a nice stomach.

I had heard from the others that the first time a guy tends to come inside you too fast, but the cure for that was to make it not his first time. So when I could feel his hardness pushing against my panties, I told him to lie back as I got up. I turned my back and took off my bra while winking at him over my shoulder. I tossed the bra over his head as I turned back around, so he got a full view of my breasts. I sunk to my knees and kissed his cock, then came up a bit and wrapped my breasts around his cock, while straining my head down to lick the tip.

He moaned appreciatively, but the friction on my sensitive breasts was a bit much, I'd need some lubricant to try it properly. I freed my breasts and bent down further to take his member fully into my mouth. I reached behind him with a free hand, and pulled on his back. He got the message and came up to a sitting position. I looked up into his eyes as I sucked and licked on his cock, with one hand assisting and occasionally gently tickling his balls, while the other hand massaged one of my nipples in full view of him.

I pulled back my body a bit so he could see what I was doing - my free hand moved south from the nipple, down to my panties which they pushed down to my knees, although I had to bend a bit and momentarily broke eye contact. Now he could get a full view past my breasts, obstructed only by his cock as I gazed up at him, while I started playing with my nether regions. By the time my hand got there I was already soaked.

After my hand was there for a bit it had sufficient lubrication so I swapped hands, using my lubrication as my hand wanked his lower cock while my tongue paid attention to his upper cock.

"Kim ... please ... I'm not going to last ... " he managed to get out. I couldn't easily talk with him in my mouth, but I continued to gaze into his eyes, made it obvious I was pumping myself harder down below, and nodded at him, before turning my mouth into a vacuum with a writhing tongue massaging him.

"Not ..." was all he managed to get out before he blew his load into my mouth. I swallowed as it came, savouring the combination of salty and sweet flavours. I kept gently licking his dick as he deflated, and made sure I had swallowed everything before coming up to kiss him.

"Thanks." I said, breaking the kiss.

"Thanks!?!" he said in amazement. "I should be thanking you! That was amazing!"

"Well, maybe you can show me how much you appreciate me until you're ready to go again." I said, and rolled over so I was now lying on my back on the bed.

He got the hint and started lavishing attention on my neck, licking around my ear but thankfully not in it. He moved down to my upper chest above my breasts, then shifted focus below them. He came back up and lavished some attention on the nipples, and I had my first orgasm of the evening. As I was spasmming his hand entered by wetness. This was really good and I never wanted it to stop. Soon his head left my breasts and wandered downwards, paying attention to my ticklish belly-button. Then he was lapping at my wetness, with one hand reached up to play with my nipples, alternating between them. I had my second orgasm then, and it went on for a while.

"I'm ready." he announced.

"I'm more than ready." I responded, grabbing his arms and pulling him up. I could feel his hardness nestling against my entrance.

"Am I your first?" he asked. What a bloody stupid question to ask at a time like this!

"The first I've loved." I responded truthfully.

"No, I mean, are you a virgin?"

"Not after the number of times I've played with myself thinking about you." I said, seeing the shocked expression on his face and taking advantage to shove my hips up so he slid inside me.

"You're a bad girl, Kim." she smirked.

"Shut up and have you way with me before I change my mind." I said, easing myself back down while keeping him inside me.

Well, he was fantastic. His penis was a little shorter than average, but it was wide, with prominent veins, and he felt absolutely divine siding in and out of me. He gently took a nipple in his mouth and rolled it with his tongue while having his teeth lightly on it without actually biting, and my third orgasm rolled through me for the evening.

By the time he eventually came again, I'd had a further two orgasms, and I came with him to make it six total. He collapsed on top of me, utterly spent.

He woke up a few hours later, and we went around again. Afterwards I asked the question again."

"Tag honey, will you be my captain?"

"Of course, I'd have to have rocks in my head to say no."

I quickly filed with command that I, Kim Harpagornis had asked Tag Hargel to be my captain and he had agreed. Hopefully that would make the nine o'clock meeting go faster. I also sent a message to Pif.

[[Hi Pif! Tag said yes. Remind me to thank your hunk for not tipping him off.]]

[[Yay! So, how many times have you done it so far? And can he get you over the line?]]

I actually started with the story about how he'd thought some nameless ship was grabbing him, and how he proposed to me as a result. She thought he was sweet but "gormless". We then had a great conversation about what and how we'd done with our respective boyfriends.

At 6:30, while we were having another round, a message came back that my special dispensation to wear green uniforms had been rescinded, and I still had the meeting at 9. Afterwards I asked Tag.

"Tag, I've got a problem."

"Yes, you've drained me dry and I can't get it up."

"No seriously, I filed that you accepted being my captain. They've rescinded my dispensation to wear a green uniform, and all my red ones are back in my unit."

He figured out the problem, looking at my green uniform on the floor.

"That's going to be fun, watching you walk back to your room in only underwear and a blouse." he smirked at me.

"What, and let everyone else get a look at your fiancé in the near-nude?"

"Err ... well ... what do you want me to do about it?"

"Go to my room and get e a change of clothes!"

"But it's not keyed for me!"

"Trust me, it'll open for you." I'd set up a channel some time ago so I could operate the room system from my ship communications system. After a long day it was nice to walk into the room and have the room at the right temperature and the shower already steaming for me. Opening the door was trivial.

Soon enough he was out and back with a change of uniform.

"No underwear?" I asked, arching and eyebrow.

"Oh, umm..." he seemed lost.

"That's OK, it just means I have to go back there for a shower. Such a disappointment that I can't have a shower here with you, while I spread soap all over myself and slide up against you."

His eyes lit up. "I could come back with you."

"Yeh, right. Have you seen the size of my unit? I can't lift both arms at the same time in that shower without smacking my elbows. Two people in that shoe-box?"

He looked crestfallen.

"Don't worry, once it's official I'm sure we'll be able to move in together." That certainly perked him up.

I dressed hurriedly, and almost flew back to my room for a shower and a complete change of clothing. The charade now over, there was no need to go for breakfast, but I thought I owed it to everyone.

[[Pif, I'm going to breakfast in the red uniform.]]

[[Showing off to the masses?]]

[[Something like that. Come join me and I'll show you the ring!]]

Pif actually got there first, and when I sat down to join her, both of us in our red uniforms, you could have heard a pin drop in the mess. After the conversation resumed I picked up lots of "Them? I would never have guessed!"

Pif loved the ring, and was quite chuffed we had passed so well for so long.

I fronted up to my work unit before they caught the boat out, apologised for stringing them all along, and went to my 9am meeting, which turned out to be a formality in paper-work, although I think the Commodore was miffed he didn't get to read us the riot act for making him wait so long. After that Tag and I took a supply craft out to my ship body, and we both helped out as best we could.

Later that day I was notified of promotion tests. That night Tag and I moved to our new unit, only slightly bigger than his old one, and we engaged in a bit of slippery debauchery in the shower. The next morning I sat the tests, and did well in all of them, even the magic one. Within an hour of leaving I received notification of my promotion to Sub-Lieutenant. Tag received his notification, and with some help from me in cramming, he passed them and was promoted from Commander to Captain.

Things proceeded apace, and soon my ship body had finished growing, just the fit-out to complete and some settling in to do. The other had expressed their expected colours, but I had expressed silver highlights, which wasn't on record, at least that anyone was admitting to. I even discovered what Pif had been hinting at but not actually telling me, that succubi DNA included an anus that self-lubricated once something was in it. The second time I learnt it hurt if a finger didn't go in first to trigger the lubrication. I had wondered why none of this was documented anywhere, we seemed to have manuals for everything else.

At one point, Tag looked over how much I was going to owe and whistled.

"Glad it's not me that has to pay that back!"

"You sure? We can't get married until it is paid off, regulations and all that."

He looked a little alarmed.

"No, I meant.... Oh crap, my foot's stuck in my mouth, isn't it?"

"Well, maybe if you put that talented mouth of yours to use somewhere else...."

We had talked a couple of times and he said he really did want to marry me, no matter how long it took. We'd taken some holos, me always in civilian clothes, and shipped them back to his family. Apparently his mother's brother had been a captain, but had been killed when his ship went psycho, and so the family weren't to keen on "ships in the family", as Tag put it.

Six months after we were first dumped in the ocean, we were ready to leave. Yes, the process usually took two years for full-sized cargo ships, but we were smaller and they'd used a more expensive process to get us ready sooner. Not that we had any choice about the timeframe nor about them placing the additional costs on the amount we owed.

Tag and I, and all the other captain/ship pairs, had moved onto their staterooms on their respective ships. First up we acted as submarines, wandering around a few hundred metres under water at around three hundred kilometres per hour. If we could survive that pressure, space would be easy, and it was a lot easier to recover from if something went wrong.

Next came the space trials.

It felt glorious to break atmosphere, and zip around without friction getting in the way. I picked up an incoming spin.

"Command from Harpagornis, incoming spin at Alpha-Delta-Three-Four-Seven, please advise." I was still the best at sensing, so it had been agreed that I would call sensor events.

"Group Alpha from Command, be advised incoming is unscheduled."

"Command from Harpagornis, incoming bogey is not one of ours, boxy metallic non-living, large magical discharge." I relayed, bringing up all the information I could on screen for Tag and sharing across microwave tight beam with my fellow ships.

"Group Alpha from Command, be advised this is not a drill. Exercise extreme caution and keep your distance."

"Command from Group Alpha, acknowledged." said Kal Rembler, captain of the Jenner and flight leader.

I picked up the edges of something.

"Group Alpha from Harpagornis, bogey is transmitting something on tight beam to the Jenner." I couldn't pick up the data, but I could pick up the fluctuations that told me there was a transmission.

I felt a magical build-up over on the Jenner, like what I expected from weapons test fire, and then it was gone except for some flaming debris.

"Command from Harpagornis, Jenner appeared to self-destruct after receiving tight-beam communication from bogey." I was scared shitless, but tried to stay calm and ignore the swearing and questions from nearby channels to command.

"Get us down, Kim" yelled Tag. "Enough water should block the microwave." I had started rapid shifts to penetrate the atmosphere as soon as he had the first part of the command out.

"Group Alpha from Command, descend with all speed to the ocean and submerge."

By the time that command had come in, all except one ship had already started to descend, then that ship disappeared in a flash as well. I'd had enough sensory input on it to figure out what happened.

"Group Alpha from Harpagornis, bogey appears to be transmitting some kind of self-destruct signal to us. Those with safety interlocks, disconnect all conduits except those for movement."

I didn't hold out a lot of hope, that was only four of us. I received the transmission next.

"Group Alpha, Command, from Harpagornis. Be advised I have received the signal. Some part of my focus chamber I can't control is attempting to get energy from the reserves to the emitters to enact a self-destruct."

"How bad is it, Kim?" asked an ashen faced Tag.

"I think we'll be fine, but I don't know about the others."

As I said it another of my ship mates blew up.

[[Kim, I just got the same code, but I'm managing it.]] Pif messaged me.

I was trying to isolate what the thing was that was doing this to me. I managed to isolate a small nexus of computer chips near the communications specialist chips. While I was doing this we lost two more ships.

"You trust me, Tag?" I asked.

"With my life." he responded.

"Group Alpha from Harpagornis, I'm about to fry chips in sector Gulf-Xray-Tango-two-seven-three."

I did so, and it hurt like hell in my head, but the push to self-destruct vanished.

"Group Alpha from Harpagornis, chips fried, feeling better, reactivating interlocks."

I physically crossed fingers, giving Tag a somewhat weak smile, and reactivate the conduits.

"Group Alpha from Harpagornis, I'm fine."

"Harpagornis from Command, take out that ship! Group Alpha from Command, sound off if you believe you're safe."

"Command from Retrack, believed safe." Phew, Pif was safe!

"Command from Garyal, believed safe, had received self-destruct." That was Jet.

"Permission to fire?" I asked Tag.

"Fire away!" he ordered.

I had been powering towards the interloper, as fast as I could go, and tried to launch an energy blast at it. By the time it got there there wasn't much left past a minor static shock.

"Minor damage, range too great."

"Keep firing as long as it doesn't slow us down."

"Yes, sir."

Next I tried a focused beam, regulated on the frequency they had been transmitting at, hoping to damage the antenna they were transmitting with. That seemed to get some reaction, although it wasn't in time to save another ship from going up.

"May have overloaded their transmitter, sir."

"Good work, keep at it."

A mighty blast went straight past me and impacted on the foreign ship. Pif, with her much better command of energy than me, had managed to get better range. Large chunks of the forward section of the boxy ship were clearly charred and sparking. Then it vanished.

[[Bogey spun!]] I yelled over the local ship to ship channels.

"Command from Harpagornis, bogey has spun out."

"Harpagornis from Command, did you get a fix?"

After doing a bit of number crunching, I shook my head at Tag.

"Command from Harpagornis, got good readings but they don't make sense. Readings indicate it spun to the same place it left."

"Group Alpha from Command, return to your cages." That was interesting, it was a different voice.

I took stock of the ships around me, it was just our posse of four.

[[Anyone else make it?]] I asked.

[[Red made it behind the planet, and I think to the ocean from there.]] Kart responded. Red was movement aspected and she could make it all the way to four percent of light-speed in space. [[Apart from that I think it's just us.]]

[[Well, that's just peachy.]] Jet said. [[Someone did an inside job on us. What the hell were those chips supposed to be there for?]]

"Back to cage as commanded, captain?" I asked Tag.

"Yes, ship." he responded. "And stand down from combat."

"That's wasn't fun." I muttered. "And an inside job, too."

"The self destruct chips?" Tag asked.

"You know about them?" I asked, suddenly not very happy.

"Sure, they're kind of an open secret. No-one supposed to know, but everyone does."

"As someone who would have died, and you along with me, if I hadn't had a non-standard interlock sequence installed, I'd like to know everything." My voice had gone a bit cold.

"Well, I know because of my uncle." Oh right, sore point all around. "Occasionally ships go bonkers, it's pretty rare. However, when they do they're too powerful for just anyone to stop. So self-destruct chips are installed in focus chambers for the protection of everyone else."

"And just anyone can trigger these?"

"Oh no, each focus chamber has parts from all three soul collection facilities. Each focus chamber has individual codes, and all three codes from all three facilities must be entered to blow a ship. Normally codes for rogue ships are spread by the standard info-burst method." That's usually used for news and so forth, every ship entering a system swaps their news with the local news server, and anything with an original timestamp older than a three months is removed from the "active" list. This way news is spread around the Confederation.

"So the enemy we've been put together to fight has just destroyed seven out of twelve ships by using our own highly secured codes, after apparently breaking into three different highly secure facilities?

"That's about it, yes."

"Actually it's worse than that." I realised.

"What?"

"They only sent me one set of codes. That meant they knew which ship had which focus chamber. Most of the ships are externally identical except for the markings..."

".. which no-one knew until two weeks ago." Tag finished the thought for me.

"Right, so we have insiders in the secure facilities and here on this planet."

"We need to bring the others up to speed on this." I said. "Permission to notify the three in flight with us?"

Just then I got an info burst from Jet.

"Granted." said Tag.

"Too late, Garyal just transmitted the same conclusions." I said.

"Then we have a lot to talk about when we get back."

We sat there in silence most of the way back, lost in our own thoughts.

Before too long, all ten survivors were together in a meeting room, along with the Commodore.

"So, to summarise, someone obtained your codes from all three secure locations, and knew which code to use on which target, so they've got secure data from here as well?" the Commodore asked.

"Yes sir, but there's more to it than that." Fix Quatar, Jet's captain said. "As I understand it, the ships identities have been heavily suppressed throughout, am I correct?"

The commodore nodded.

"So even if someone had access to all the ships here and could recognise them, how did they associate the exact focus chamber with the one ship with novel markings?"

"I see your point. At the original facility they were identified by DNA signature and frame number only. Any temporary names given were not supposed to be recorded."

"And that information was never referenced here?" Fix asked.

"That's correct."

"But it would have been easy for a worker to pick up a DNA sample of any of the ships here." I interjected. "So if a worker had access to all the ships, they could provide DNA and descriptions, which would be enough for someone with DNA and frame numbers to match up."

"There are boat logs, we should be able to find if anyone has been to all ships during fit-out." said Red, the sole surviving ship not of our original group.

The Commodore hit an intercom, "Get me the complete boat logs for the last seven months."

"That's a lot to get through, sir." said Neg Fnark, Kart's captain.

"True, but we don't want to tip our hand, and I'm sure the ladies here can get through the information quick smart."

Indeed we could. While I was scanning through the month of logs I was looking at, I asked another question.

"Sir, I've been reviewing my sensor logs from their spin, and it's very odd."

"Can you define 'odd', Sub-Lieutenant?"

"Yes sir. It looked like they were spinning to their current location, but the corrections for the curvature of space-time were massively off, even for long scale spins."

"Do you think it was some kind of self destruct?"

"No sir, I saw the same kind of signatures when they spun in."

"Any ideas, then?" I got the impression he was getting a bit frustrated with me.

"Only a conjecture sir, and I have nothing to back it up."

"Out with it then!"

"Sir, I think they may have been travellers from a parallel dimension."

"Kim, this is no time for stupid jokes!" Pif hissed at me.

"No, no, do go on. I want to hear this." said the Commodore, and I felt I had his complete undivided attention for the moment.

"Well sir, when we spin over large distances we need to make allowances for the curvature of space-time. They seemed not to be spinning in space at all, but making ridiculously large compensations for the curvature of space-time. One of the leading theories about parallel dimensions is that they only thing separating is from them is that their space-time is curved differently to ours. I know it sounds completely wacky, sir, but I can't come up with a better explanation."

All eyes were on me, and I shrank into my chair.

"Sir," Pif started, "we were originally told we were being brought together to combat a 'credible threat', but never told what that was. Are you in a position to enlighten us? It may help to refine our theories." She was looking sideways at me, and I had no idea if she was supporting me or not.

"This goes no further than this room without explicit authority from me, understood?" he said, looking around the room getting nods from everyone before proceeding.

"I assume you are all aware some mages can communicate between dimensions in dreams?" I got a sick feeling at this point, that I'd been right and we were in over our heads.

"Well, they get sort of 'pen-pals', and one from another dimension recently warned one of ours that his dimension had declared living ships an abomination against the divine, and that they had the capacity to travel between worlds."

He looked around for effect.

"So, young lady, your guess is probably dead on. Do you think you can figure out how to trace them back and spin to that location?"

"I can try, sir."

"Good, that leaves us with one more problem. You all destroyed your fail-safe chips, correct?"

"No sir, I didn't." said Red. "I managed to get behind the planet and then into the ocean before they sent a signal to me."

"Well, the problem is that the fail-safe has fail-safes. There are some emergency nanites that will start to take your neural cortex apart if they don't get a signal from those chips at least once a day. Normally the signal is sent every hour, so you have around twenty one hours before ... before things start to get unpleasant."

"Do you have a plan to neutralise the problem?" Kart asked.

"No, Sub-Lieutenant, I was hoping as the medical expert you could come up with one."

"Actually, I might have a solution," I said. "rather than finding and isolating these nanites, is there any way we can fake the signal to reset them?"

"You'd need the original codes."

"I certainly have mine burned into my brain, how about you three?" Nods came from all around.

As it turned out I needed help from Katz, but we we eventually figured out what needed to be done. We also figured out how to spot the nanites reacting to the code, and slowly eliminate them from our systems. Katz and I gave instructions to the other two on how to keep us alive.

Meanwhile, the other three were reviewing the logs. No-one had visited all twelve of us, but two people had visited six each. Further investigation showed that those two people had arrived on the same supply ship, worked for a week visiting six ships each, and left on the next supply ship.

Fix Quatar started asking questions while us ships were quietly swapping ways to stay alive. "So, what from here? Do we try spinning to the other dimension? Do we try and go after this person who took samples from our ships?"

The Commodore took over.

"OK, I know it's getting late at night, but I want all ships except Tarnakdoe up near where that ship spun out. Tarnakdoe is staying behind because she's still vulnerable to her codes. If the others survive the next two days unscathed, we can call for her codes and then repeat the process, purging her of the suspect chips and nanites as well, but until then it's too much of a risk to send her out."

"Harpagornis, as the one with the best logs of the event will attempt the spin to the parallel dimension. Spin in, gather as much information as you can as quickly as possible, and spin back. If you're not back in five minutes, we'll assume you're lost. The other three, fan out, and destroy anything that spins back that's not the Harpagornis. Take a marine platoon each in case it comes to that."

He looked around to judge reactions.

"Any comments?" I think we all saw it was the correct course of action, so there were no comments, apart from Tag's clarification quest after a moment.

"Confirming we are not to carry a marine platoon, sir?"

"That's correct. Risk, you understand." Meaning he thought it was a long shot and didn't want to lose too many marines if I stuffed up.

"Understood, sir."

"Dismissed, and good hunting."

So we found ourselves back up in space again.

"Talk about a baptism by fire." Tag commented to me.

"You had to say that before we spin into the unknown, didn't you?" I asked, slightly peeved. "I don't even know if I can get us back, and that's assuming we arrive in one piece!"

"Hey baby, it's OK." he said, reaching forward from his bridge position to stroke me lightly on the back of the hair. "It's a grand adventure, and if we die it's likely to be so quick as to not be horrible."

I snorted. "When did you become the adrenaline junky?"

His mood turned pensive. "When I'm trying to cover for my worry about if we have a future."

I turned and hugged him. "Whatever, we're in this together, right?"

"Absolutely. But I may have to fine you for inappropriate displays on the bridge." Fines? The bane of my existence!

"But there's no-one here to display too!" I moaned.

He chuckled. "I guess you'll just have to make it up to me later." He waved his hand signal for me to broadcast the message.

"Harpagornis spinning in three ... two ... one ... Spin!"

And I spun. My first spin I initiated, and it was inter-dimensional instead of a typical space jump.

"Bogey off the starboard bow!" I screamed, bringing it on screen. From the damage it looked to be the one the Retrack had fired on before, bless Pif.

"Fire!" yelled Tag, so I fired, a magically enhanced gamma ray burst from the left wing and a directed electromagnetic pulse from the right wing. Many sparks leapt from it.

"Disable or destroy?" I asked.

"Fire again to disable!" he ordered.

This time I shot magically enhanced lightning from both wings, letting it play over the opposing ship for a bit.

"I think it's done, sir." I smiled at Tag, but looking around nearby space and seeing a few more of the boxy ships, decided we had better get out of here.

"Permission to try and drag the disabled vessel back with us?" I asked.

"You think we can do it?" Tag asked.

"Wouldn't have suggested it otherwise." I responded.

"OK, go for it."

I manoeuvred myself so I was right on top of it, extended some tentacles to surround it.

"Spinning on your mark, sir." I said, finishing what I hoped were the return calculations.

"Spinning in three ... two ... one ... Spin!"

And I spun for the second time. There was a slight lurch, I think I failed to compensate correctly for the weight distribution of the other ship, and we were there, surrounded by our friends.

"Harpagornis to Control, returned with captured ship that attacked us before."

"Control to Group Hunter, dock and board with prejudice."

I retracted my tentacles and backed off slightly as the other three converged, the tentacles from between the rotating rods to the cargo space stretching to the disabled ship, and opening up internally as a tube for the marines to slide through. A bit of manipulation of apparent gravity and they basically slid in. The tentacles sealed against the outside, and the first marine down used a cutting tool to open the damaged armour, then signalled to the others to slide down and smash through.

It seemed I had done my job a bit too well, there was no atmosphere inside. From reports coming back a few dead bodies were littered around.

"Permission to go aboard, sir?" I asked. Captains generally couldn't leave the ship in dangerous circumstances, although it was at their discretion. Ship's human bodies were easily replaced, so we tended to go with full comms gear and relay back a video feed.

"I'd be the last one in, sir." I said at his pause.

"Go ahead, Sub-Lieutenant."

I suited up quickly, keeping a spare suit near one of the airlocks that led to a retracted tentacle near the bridge. I cycled through the airlock, and rather than sliding down the tentacle, stood at the leading edge as it extended.

[[Found something.]] came from Jet. I printed the text up on the bottom of the video feed I was displaying to Tag.

[[Be right with you.]] Pif responded.

[[OK, one of the old-style mage rigs, I think.]] Pif added on arrival.

[[Actually, I meant the wall.]] Jet responded.

[[What is it?]] Kart asked.

[[Yes, enquiring minds want to know!]] I added.

"You always chat like a bunch of schoolgirls?" Tag asked, since I was copying our texts to his screen.

"Only when there are icky boys listening in." I vocalised. "Did you want me to dress up like a school-girl later tonight?"

[[Well, that certainly changes things.]] said Kart.

[[Nearly there!]] I added, homing in on their position, passing a few marines and saluting them as I went.

As I walked in I saw the others looking past me, and two marines sweeping the area. Turning I saw what was on the wall of the room I had just entered. Hurriedly painted on the wall and still wet in our text, and not the strange text that seemed native to these people, was the following:

"We fight for all souls to be free. Those of you bonded to ships, our fight lies not with you, but those who have already damned your souls. Once they have performed the bonding ritual, your soul will never again move on in death. We mourn this, the end of your soul's progress, as it is lost to the void when your current existence ends."

"OK, religious nut-job alert." I said in the line-of-sight radio, which Tag also got through the video relay.

"Well, at least we have a better idea of why they want to bring low the Confederation." Tag said.

"What if they're right?" Kart asked in horror.

"Even if they are right, it's apparently too late for us, so why worry about it?" Jet responded.

"Remember, many religions persecute the enemy with made-up ideology." Pif brought up. "They know our technology is superior and they want to defeat our us for some reason. What better way that to scare us off using our primary advantage?"

"OK ladies, excursion is over." said the marine lieutenant. "Nothing here alive, no NNBC threats apart from their drive system which appears benign, so we can drop this hunk of crud on a beach somewhere at look at it at our leisure. Now it's time to bug out."

NNBC stands for Nanite, Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, basically weapons of mass destruction.

"Yes, sir!" I responded, clipped off a smart salute, and started back to my ship.

[[No point antagonising the locals.]] I sent to the other three ships, but didn't display that for Tag.

[[Fair point.]] Pif responded, and did likewise.

"Officer suck up" Tag added, laughing as he said it.

"There's only one officer I suck up, sir." I vocalised in the bridge. "Maybe I can demonstrate later."

"You be sure to do that, Sub-Lieutenant." he said, smirking.

Jet and Kart grumbled a bit, wanting to have a bit more of a look around, although Kart made it very clear it was because Neg Fnark, her captain, was asking lots of questions.

The marine lieutenant reported back to command, who ordered us to hold position while the Tarnakdoe was sent out to us. Once with us, Tag and I were ordered to hold position and fire on any more craft appearing, while everyone else escorted the ship down.

Red Tarnakdoe had the yellow aspect of movement, so she was best at telekinetically manipulating the other ship, and Pif as the energy specialist bled off re-entry energy. Once down the others all offloaded their marines. Pif and Dirk in the Retrack and Kart and Neg in the Zewhy were sent back up with an extra four officers each to act as officers of the watch. The plan was to have two ships always in guard position, two ships docked ready to take on marines and launch, leaving one extra for transition.

Once the Retrack and Zewhy were up on watch, Tag and I were sent down to pick up four officers as well, then we rejoined the monitoring position. Once everything was settled Tag and I retired for the night. We didn't do much more than kiss and cuddle after a day of such revelations, but it was nice to have him spooned up against my back with an arm around me. Meanwhile I was also chatting to the officers on watch through a speaker on the bridge, with two of them on my bridge at any one time.

Jet Garyal and Red Tarnakdoe kept on eye on the logs coming out from the analysis of the captured ship, and sent us summaries of the information gathered. Basically they seemed more advanced technologically, but less advanced magically - or at least they didn't use anywhere near as much magic in their ships, probably because they weren't living. Magic seemed to be used only for artificial gravity and inertial dampers impregnated into plates on the floor, and then a mage for actual spins. For power they had some kind of fusion power source, which in turn drove the primary thrusters out the back by accelerating the fusion products to near light speed. No-one wanted to be behind those engines when they powered up!

Kart had idly wondered about nanite threats. Although the ship had been cleared, one would have thought there'd be some nanites somewhere on a ship more technologically advanced than us. Upon investigation, it seemed that without magic cut-outs as we had, their method of preventing grey-goo accidents was that their nanites cut out when the primary power source went off-line.

Data was dumped off their computer core, although it took quite a while to get a working interface, and it was eventually decided to dump their ship into the sun. We shuttled around a bit so that the Retrack and Tarnakdoe were free to run it to the sun, and temporarily the other three of us were all in guard position with marines on board in case something should happen.

After that we settled into a routine, and I was ground-side with Pif when another ship burst into our space, in the same position as before. It was quickly disabled, and this time the marines got on board while there were still some living on the other side. Unfortunately we lost a few to flying nanite swarms that disassembled the marines before the ship's power core was blown. Nasty stuff.

We'd managed to figure out the rudiments of their language, and I'd also figured out that the inter-dimensional spin program they were using was tuned to that particular bit of space they were spinning through. I estimated it'd take them a month of calculations to spin through somewhere else.

I shared this information with the team, and the Commodore thought that they probably had more than one set of calculations and they were spinning through somewhere else as well, but only had that one set on that ship in case it got captured, so we wouldn't know their other points. His basis for thinking this was the suspected agents who had transferred off-world using our ships, so were presumably meeting up somewhere else.

We didn't really get anything out of the few survivors. I was sure a few of the ones who had been isolated were tortured, but the main groups were treated well. I found out why later in another meeting.

I wasn't actually there, Tag and I were with Jet and Fix standing guard, but we were linked in by encrypted tight-beam microwave, even with a two second round trip delay.

"OK, come to order." barked the Commodore.

"I don't think we're going to get anything useful from them, but one thing has turned up - it seems they've attempted to invade a few different cultures to spread their religion, but they've never had one follow them back. I think we have the key to this as well."

He paused, obviously for effect.

"One of their officers, separated from the others, has been coerced into revealing that they were taught the secrets of dimensional travel by a dragon around what we believe to be three hundred of our years ago. It was a silver dragon."

A fair number of eyes went to the screen Tag and I were visible on.

"This may explain why the Harpagornis was able to calculate the spin so much faster than anyone else was able to. We suspect the 'aspect' of silver dragons is inter-dimensional travel. We still don't know why we have no records of any silver dragons, nor why Kim has DNA from one."

"We want you to deliver a warning to these people to back off. We suspect if we let them know we can strike back, they'll leave us along and go find easier targets. We have recovered a number of escape capsules from their ship. We want you to return most of their crew to them, with a warning that we'll leave them alone if they leave us alone."

"Sir, isn't that just going to push the problem to another group of innocents?" asked Dirk.

"Maybe, but we've been at peace for centuries. We just don't have the infrastructure to fight a prolonged battle, and frankly, the Admiralty is concerned that the Confederation might fracture, those not being attacked not wanting to devote additional resources for a war until it's on their doorstep and too late."

That was a sobering thought.

"We have a recording for you to play on the local airwaves when dropping them off, here's our translation."

Some text flashed up on the screen.

"You have sent spies to infiltrate us. You have carried out pre-emptive strikes killing our citizens. We have defended ourselves against your aggression into our territory, and we have followed you back. As a gesture of good faith we return your crews to you. Leave us alone, and we will leave you alone."

"We're hoping that will be enough to scare them off. As far as we know no-one has ever managed to follow them back. Now, Kim, do you think you can get our entire strike force across?"

"Yes, sir. I should even be able to pre-compute return spins for two or three locations each." I responded.

"Good. Give everyone two escape points, one a common one for us all to spin out from, and scattered ones so if we need to break off we can spin back from different points."

"Sir, " said Leck Yral, Red's captain, "if they're paranoid religious nut-jobs, isn't there a fair chance they'll shoot their own crews down, either thinking it's a trick or they have been religiously contaminated?"

"Probably. Kim, how close can you get us to the surface?"

"If we spin from the corresponding location, it's probably safe from around twenty kilometres up. Atmosphere we can deal with even if it'll be very rough, but even cloud could be disastrous."

"That'll have to do. We've got six escape capsules, so we'll load up one each and keep the last one here for future actions. We spin in, fan out and get as close to the surface as possible, dump the pods, start the broadcast only after dumping them, then get out to the spread-out return spin points. If it takes them a month to calculate one set, it might give them pause if we escape from five different locations this soon."

He paused to look around the room.

"Any comments?"

None came.

"Right, we're go for six hours. Dismissed!"

We shut down our video link, and I got to work calculating spins. Only when I was trying to pre-calculate such that others could use it did I realise how tough it really was. Without realising it before, my neural pathways were guiding my computer calculating chips in ways I hadn't realised. I'd only done enough for five return vectors when everyone else joined us in our suddenly crowded section of space.

The information was dense enough we needed to do tentacle data exchanges, radio just didn't have the bandwidth. However, I did give everyone all five return vectors, so if one area had a giant warship on top of it or something they could pick a different point.

The Commodore had actually come up on the Tarnakdoe, and transferred over to us.

"Commodore on the bridge!" I announced from attention as he came in.

"As you were." he stated. The bridge looked fuller than it ever had before, with all four of our temporary officers, myself and Tag, and the Commodore. The officers had all been tasked with data collection while we were in enemy space.

"Good to have you on board, sir." said Tag.

"If I had to pick a ship, and the Admiralty did want me to come on this one, I'd pick the one most likely to get back if it all goes pear-shaped. Sub-Lieutenant, how long could would it take you to plot a return course from any point we happened to be at?"

"From my extremely limited experience, about three to four seconds, sir." I replied.

"That's about a month better than anyone else I know." he said.

"Right you are, sir." I said back, trying to maintain a straight face.

"Return Group from Flag, descend to atmosphere." the Commodore announced. "Sub-Lieutenant Kim, lay in a course to your designated spin point and relay."

"Aye, sir." I also flashed up in a corner of the main screen the spin point, our position, and the intended path.

Soon we were in position, all fanned out in a circle, facing outwards.

"Return Group from Flag, synchronisation from Harpagornis, spin in thirty seconds. Follow plan and silence until broadcasting message."

"Return Group from Harpagornis, hold position." I announced, making last corrections for everyone's exact position and orientation and passing them across.

"Spin in three ... two ... one ... Spin!" I announced, and we were through.

We were now in silence, not passing messages to each other. I dove forward and towards the ground, tearing down at nine times the speed of sound. Much faster and I'd have trouble with wind opening the cargo bay to let them out. I opened two rear doors on opposing side at the same time to even the airflow, and chucked out the escape pod with a tentacle. As soon as the tentacle was back inside, I slammed the opening rods shut and lifted for space, starting to play the message.

"We're being fired on by an orbital platform!" yelled one of the officers. I had already spotted it, and was bringing up avoidance vectors on screen.

"Missiles!" I shouted.

"Point defence!" yelled Tag. I started firing small bursts at the oncoming missiles to disable them. Easy at this range, but it would get a lot hairier as we got closer.

"What's the closest you can get to them and keep this up?" Tag asked.

"About thirty kilometres." I answered.

"Calculate a spin from there?"

"Can do, and in time."

"Play chicken, ship." he ordered.

So I changed my course to head straight for the orbital platform. I broke atmosphere and accelerated to the maximum speed I could manage, about one percent of light speed. Dragon flight is interesting, you don't accelerate through reaction, it's more like pulling on the space/time fabric of the universe. The best analogy would be swimming - you tend to drift in the direction you were last going if you don't provide power, but you can quickly speed up to a maximum and slow down again by applying power.

At this speed I was four seconds from impact. I felt a wrenching pain in the left wing, then we spun.

"Tactical, status?" ordered Tag.

"Back in our dimension, spun at twenty-five kilometres or point zero five two of a second before impact, sir."

"Probably having a brown trouser day. Err, sir." Tag said, catching himself with the Commodore lurking behind him.

"Any sign they reacted?" the Commodore asked.

"They had been launching two missiles per second until we sped up, then they jumped to eight, sir." the tactical officer stated.

"And they fired an X-ray laser at us right at the end, which is why I'm in great pain, missing a chunk of my left wing, and why we spun five kilometers late." I said, breaching protocol by talking out of turn, but glaring at the tactical officer for not noticing we'd been hit and I'd lost two of the emitters.

"You OK?" Tag asked, suddenly concerned.

"I'm still space-worthy. Not letting you down that easily, sir." I replied.

"Comms, how are the others?" the Commodore asked.

"Retrack, Zewhy, and Tarnakdoe are back," said the comms officer, "Garyal not present, sir."

Jet! What had happened to her?

Then Jet appeared.

"Garyal returned, sir." said the comms officer.

"At Zewhy's spin point, and with fore structural damage." I added.

[[Jet! What happened?]] Actually that was Kart as she was closest to Jet. Speed of light does make a difference at the rates we communicate.

[[Tangled with an orbital platform blocking my path. Shot down all the missiles, but they scored with an X-ray laser. Big hole in the front cargo bay, hurts a bitch.]]

[[You too?]] I asked. [[I lost a chunk of my left wing.]]

[[They were damn fast to react given the lack of notice we gave them.]] Pif noted.

[[At least we all got out.]] Jet responded.

[[I cheated, I played chicken and recalculated a spin a twentieth of a second from impact.]] I sent back.

[[Ho ho, and with the Commodore on board!]] Jet sent.

[[Captain's orders, that's my defence.]] I responded.

Well, after the metaphorical dust settled, we figured out some interesting things. The missiles started firing the instant there was clear line of sight to us from two of the orbital platforms, plus a fraction of a second for speed of light delay. One had visibility throughout the whole operation, and when firing commenced one that didn't have line of sight because the planet was in the way started indirect missile launches.

From this we deduced the initial firing was some kind of automated system. We suspect because we spun inside the atmosphere with line of sight to only one platform that defeated some of their checks. The increased rate of fire started from different platforms at different times, so we suspected that increased firing rate was when humans took control.

Stationary weapons platforms were something of a foreign concept to the Confederation. Space combat in general wasn't common, and when it did occur it was ship-to-ship or with ground-based planetary defences. Possibly with living ship technology, if you're going to get something up there it may as well be spin-capable. The closest they had was a couple of zero-g manufacturing facilities at LaGrange points in various systems.

Jet and I got fixed back up fairly quickly, since the pattern of our ships had already been established, we just got dumped in a nutrient tank and let regeneration and the nanites do their job. The wing was re-grown in 12 hours, although it didn't feel quite right for flying for another day or so after that. Jet took about a day to heal up, but had no residual effects after that.

Digging through the captured ship turned up a gold mine in an unexpected location - one of the rooms had a corpse in it with a PDA with an electronic encyclopaedia loaded. Eventually that ship was towed to the sun as well, but the PDA proved interesting. It seems their spin technology, being mage-based, was incapable of handling vessels over a size limit not dissimilar to our own size - and we, while not small, were certainly not even medium by Confederation standards.

It also seemed they were not native to that dimension. Some demonic horde known simply as "The Foe" had been wiping them out in some other dimension, and a silver dragon known only as "Kalrissa" had taught them how to escape before their dimension was completely overrun. Reading between the lines, the demons had attacked living ships first due to the greater magical energy, so living ships can been on the outer when their religion renamed itself "The Faithful" and "returned to core family values" after the shift, which we read as "completely re-invented to suit our needs after escaping something horrific."

As Pif summed it up "They've been scared witless and are bullying others to try and overcome how scared they are."

We maintained a "heightened state of readiness", but not much happened after that.

Based on a trick Kart had heard of while in his first life, we swapped very small samples of living cells between the five of us, and used it to create psionic links to communicate telepathically. It was somewhat like the messaging we had been using, but you could feel emotion over it, couldn't be jammed or intercepted, and seemed to be instant rather than be limited by the speed of light. After telling Tag of what we had done, he volunteered a small bit of muscle from his upper arm, and I found I could communicate mentally with him as well, although I had to initiate it and it wasn't as clear as with the others.

I remembered all the SF shows I watched in my previous life, and was intrigued with the idea of teleportation. I started experimenting with an empty cargo canister while station keeping. Basically I calculated a spin but excluded everything except the thing I wanted to send from the field. After a couple of nasty accidents, I had it down safely, but could only cast outwards, I couldn't get things back.

I tried showing it to my fellow ships, but they could only "cast", as we began calling it, a few kilometres, while I seemed to be able to do it from around the range of lunar orbit. It was still a very neat trick, and saved us all some time getting to command after landing in water.

After the combat the Commodore put us ships all in for recommendations for promotions, and this was approved a week later. We all passed the required tests, so the five of us were now Lieutenants. We had a girl's night out on the "town", such that it was, to celebrate.

After two months with nothing happening, dangerous duty loading were removed from our payments. Only one or two ships were up at any one time, and none on hot-standby with marines ready to jump at a moments notice. The money coming in was now only just keeping up with the interest on our repayments, which wasn't making any of us happy. The employee pay we received as lieutenants got paid into an account we could use as spending money, or transfer to the ship loan, but the amounts involved were almost inconsequential next to the size of the ship loan. Still, given I didn't want to go backwards, and I could get Tag to pay for just about anything I needed that I couldn't conjure myself, most of my salary went on the ship loan as well. Conjuring clothes saved a lot of money, given I was something of a clothes horse, as were all the others, come to think of it.

Some mage boffins turned up to study the "casting" I was doing. Once I found out it paid, I made sure the other four ships got roped in as well for "comparative purposes" and to see what could be rolled out to the fleet. Being a trade confederation, all they were thinking about was easier cargo off-loads. I sought out the marine lieutenant, and talked to him about combat insertions using it. The problem with combat insertions was that the target area had to be free of solids, but he was interested as the marines were bored too, and we had a lot of fun trying out some manoeuvres.

Tag and I still had fantastic sex, but it wasn't as urgent or as frequent. We had settled into a mode where we knew we had all the time in the world to be with each other, and were loving just being together and doing things together.

It was something of a relief when Jet, Fix, Tag, and I were summoned to command one day.

"Right, something is finally happening. The Admiralty has got off their collective behinds and wants to change some things. Fix, you're going to be taking charge here soon. I've received approval for you to sit your Commodore's exams, although unfortunately it's an acting position only. As soon as you pass, I'm out of here."

I knew Fix was actually the only captain in the group who had arrived here with the rank of Captain, Tag and the others had been Commanders on arrival, so him getting the promotion made sense.

"Tag, the Harpagornis has been ordered to shuttle me to Rigel Three once Fix takes over here, and apparently the boffins have more tests for you two to try and discover more about silver dragons."

"Jet, because your captain is going up a rank, you'll have the opportunity to sit your Lieutenant-Commander exams. Outside training, a ship isn't supposed to be more than three ranks below her captain, preferably one or two, but you haven't been with us long enough for that."

"Kim, everyone's interested in you as the only one to calculate inter-dimensional spins in anything close to real-time, you have no been declared a strategic asset. You get to sit exams for a rank increase as well."

"Sorry Tag, nothing for you."

"It's good, sir. My sister has a house on Rigel Four, I might be able to catch up while we are there."

"Right, dismissed!"

We all shuffled out into the hall. Jet and I took one look at each other, squealed, and gave each other a giant hug.

"The others will be so jealous!" Jet said excitedly.

"Hey, don't we get any of this action? Fix asked.

Jet and I winked at each other, grabbed our captains, and pulled them into a four-way hug.

"Man, that's better!" Tag exclaimed.

"Dinner to celebrate?" I asked.

"Time to dress up!" Jet squealed.

"Think we can get the boys here into something decent?" I asked.

"Hey, we're right here!" Fix said.

"And loving it by the location your blood's pooling." I winked at him.

"Hey, steady on!" Tag said.

"Two hours? Officer's mess?"Jet asked.

"We'll make it!" I said, pulling Tag off. It was going to be close to get back my ship in time, but we can cast back to be here in no time.

<<Hey, Jet!>> I thought at her when I was showering.

<<Wazzup?>>

<<I'm planning on wearing stockings and suspenders. What say you do the same and we give our men our panties halfway through dinner?>>

<<For sure! Wow, are they going to be squirming!>>

<<And hopefully get us squirming later, but yes.>> I smiled back at her. This was so much better with emotional context.

Dinner was nice, both looked very studly in their tuxedos. The men got only slightly drunk, even though they were putting a lot away. Not that Jet or I could actually get drunk, given our thinking was all done back in our ship bodies and our nanites took care of the rest.

Just before dessert came out, Jet and I got up and went to the ladies room without saying anything, only winking at our respective partners.

"They're going to love this!" Jet said, as we fixed our makeup and pulled off our panties, putting them in our purses.

We walked back together to the table.

"Better, girls?" asked Tag.

"Oh, much better." i said. "I feel so much freer."

Jet giggled.

"What are you two up to?" Fix asked.

"Oh, nothing" we responded in stereo, pulling out our undies and placing them in our captain's suit jacket pockets.

"Is that what I think it is?" Fix asked.

"Why don't you find out?" Jet asked.

I didn't expect him to, but he actually put his hand down to Jet's thigh. She had a dress with a huge slit in the side, whereas I had gone for something tight over the bodice and loose and flowing over the legs. She spread her legs slightly and he actually slid his hand over her leg and down to her crotch.

"Wow!" he mumbled.

Tag looked at me, and I just looked back at him. We communicated enough, paraphrased it was "You too?" and "Yes, my idea." He grinned.

I leaned over towards him so I could whisper in his ear.

"There's a reason this dress is so loose and flowing, I could sit on your lap and likely no-one would notice what we were doing."

Jet had clearly overhead that. Well, if I hadn't intended her to, I would have used the mental link with Tag.

<<You didn't tell me that!>>

<<I thought it was obvious! We have no accommodation here any more, we need to get back to our ship bodies to get to bed, so if you don't want it to be obvious you have to hide it somehow!>>

<<You're a bad girl!>> she thought playfully.

<<Why, thank you!>> I responded, equally as playfully. <<From you I'll take that as a compliment!>>

My only answer was the sense of uproarious laughter.

We had desert, and the entendres were flying thick and fast. Afterwards Jet and Fix went straight to one of the boats, but I suggested a walk in one of the parks to Tag. Even though the accommodation blocks averaged four stories high, they put parks between them so the view out the window would be trees rather than another building.

"Honey, exactly what are you planning?" he asked as we neared the park.

"We're going to find somewhere you can sit so that I can sit on your lap."

"But there are so many apartments! Anyone could see us."

"Even if they do see us, and I don't doubt some will, they're only going to see us necking. We're not in uniform and we're off duty, so it'd be hard to ping us for 'conduct unbecoming'."

"I'm really not sure this is a good idea."

"Your secondary brain seems fairly sure." I glanced down at the not insignificant bulge in his pants.

"Here we go." I said, motioning to a small tree stump. The wood looked old and soft, the tree had probably been cut down after dying.

He held both my hands as he sat down, unwilling to let me go. I flowed as I sat down, straddling him, my dress concealing everything.

"Umm, honey, I have a problem." He was still zipped up.

"Oh, poor baby." I said, leaning forward to lick his neck as I playfully ran my fingernails, only just within regulation length, up and down his sides under his jacket, which he had unbuttoned as we left the officer's mess.

"Please." he pleaded.

I sort of fluffed my skirt at the front with one hand so I could get the other underneath the skirt, and undid the velcro-like fastenings that all clothes here used. I fished inside, pulling his underwear down just enough for his cock to spring out.

"Mmm, looks like I found something tasty!" I gushed.

Keeping the hand down their for guidance, I rocked up and forwards, then back down, impaling myself on his dick. Due to the angle he couldn't get full penetration, but it was certainly far enough in to provide me with more than adequate stimulation.

I withdraw the hand, bringing both up behind his neck.

"You are so wet!" he said.

"You think I haven't been looking forward to this as well?" I asked.

He started to move.

"Uh uh! Slowly, this time. Try to pretend you're not in me." I gave him a slow kiss, putting as much emotion into it as a could. I brought up the psychic link between us to the lowest level, and let my love for him flow across it. I felt a sense of wonder from the other side.

The dress I had on was a halter neck with an open back, so he was free to run his hands up and down my back. We continued to kiss, and slowly but surely we started the tiniest of movements down below.

After a bit one of his hands moved to the side of my breast where it joined the ribcage, he knew that drove me crazy, mainly with desire for more touching. I slapped the hand away.

"No, honey, we don't want anyone to think we're doing anything inappropriate!" I winked at him.

The torrent of emotion coming from him was almost getting confusing, the love, the lust, the wonder, and the fear of getting caught spicing up the whole event. I caught a slightly analytical side coming through.

"No honey, no maths to stave yourself off. Come for me."

He looked deep in my eyes, and I felt an element of tension add to the mix.

<<Yes, I'm close too, come for me.>> I sent directly into his mind. His hips arched up, pushing his lovely cock all the way into me for the first time that evening, and that sent me over the edge even as I felt his seed start to pump into me. I made sure to let him feel the emotion of the orgasm he had triggered in me, and my love for him.

We'd learnt early on that sharing the emotions was fine, but trying to share the actual sensations stuffed things right up. It reminded me too much of my past life, and he didn't like the feelings of submissive penetration.

We just sat there, feeling our love pour between us as he emptied himself into me. Eventually we both came down from orgasmic high, and shortly after that he slipped out of me. I pouted, triggering a gentle laugh from him. I reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved my panties, and deftly snuck them back under my dress, doing my best to dry us both off. I made a show of pulling my hand back out, and having a good sniff.

<<Heavenly.>> I sent, before shoving them back in his jacket pocket, and standing up in a whirl away from him.

"Oops, did I forget to tuck you in?" I asked impishly.

I'd never seen him turn so red so fast before, as he slipped himself back inside and fastened his pants back up. If you looked closely you could see the area around the fly was slightly damp.

"Someone could have seen us!" he hissed.

"Unlikely, your backs to that block and there's no clear line of sight to the others. I was careful, you know."

His face softened. "I can't stay angry with you."

"You were never angry, just embarrassed." I said, then not wanting to seem like I was rubbing in our telepathy, added "We know each other to well."

"Just about right, I think." he said, taking me in another kiss.

"How about we get back to our quarters?" I asked.

"Where's the nearest boat?"

"There's a small remote controlled one that's been on the beach just over there for the last two minutes."

"You're too good."

"For you? I try to think of everything."

We just snuggled when we got back. It was more than enough.

---

For your information:

Ship	Captain	Colour	Speciality
Kim Harpagornis	Tag Hargel	Silver	Unknown
Pif Retrack	Dirk Lunga	Blue	Energy
Jet Garyal	Fix Quatar	Green	Physical
Kart Zewhy	Neg Fnark	Red	Life
Red Tarnakdoe	Leck Yral	Yellow	Movement

The Confederation, a group of independent worlds bonded together for mutual trade and defence, have a dirty little secret in how they make their trading ships - hijacking the souls of dead transgendered. Please follow one subject's rebirth into the Confederation.

Sorry, no space battles this time, only social disasters.

---

Overnight I finished the exams, so when that was signed off in the morning I was now officially Lieutenant-Commander Kim Harpagornis. Jet beat me by a few minutes, but I said I was the real winner as it was only because Tag screwed me for longer. Fix passed his later in the day, then spent the rest of his first day as Acting Commodore doing hand-over from Commodore Jaral, our commanding officer to this point.

Official handover was midnight, but I wasn't really expecting the boat I noticed motoring towards me just before 1am.

"Tag, wake up." I shook him.

"Not another round honey, I'm tired."

"You beast!" I shrieked at him in mock anger. "Another round? You haven't done me since last night!"

"Wow, hold on!" he said, now waking up properly. "What did I just say? Shit! Sorry, sorry, sorry!"

"Save it! The Commodore's about here!" I said, jumping out of bed.

"Nice view!" he said, his concentration entirely on my jiggling chest. OK, maybe he wasn't completely awake yet, but the succubus in me did have the slightly loose chains of cartilage and tendons looped through my breasts that kept them looking completely natural, without sagging or hurting when moving around too much, like jumping out of bed.

"Is that really the time?" he said, looking at the clock reading 12:58 over the door.

I gave him the stare.

"All right, all right."

I was fully dressed in uniform when he only had his undies on.

"I'll go meet him." I said, heading down to the cargo bay. By the time he pulled up, I was standing there with the rod rotated open and the ramp down, lapping gently against the waves that were thankfully small right now.

"Permission to come aboard?" he asked formally.

"Permission granted. Welcome aboard, sir." I snaked one of the smaller cargo tentacles from the roof out to pick up his luggage, while giving him a snappy salute.

"I suppose that captain of yours is asleep somewhere?"

"No sir, he's waiting for you on the bridge." I said as the ramp retracted as we walked up it. The Commodore looked slightly disappointed. Actually Tag had only just got his uniform on and was waving the shaving wand over his face, but at least our stateroom opened onto the bridge.

<<We're on board and heading for the bridge. I told him you were already there.>>

<<Will be by the time you get there.>>

The cargo tentacles slung his bags from one to the other Tarzan style, sliding them gently into the lift just before we go there.

"Very slick. You been practising that move, Lieutenant-Commander?"

"No, sir." Actually I hadn't, but when you have as much compute power as we do, calculating throws and catches to minimise jarring is actually very simple.

"Of course not. And how long as your captain been on the bridge?"

"Ever since we knew you were coming, sir." At this the lift opened and we stepped out. There was still a short walk to the bridge. The bags stayed in the lift, going up to one of the double staterooms on the top deck.

"And how long ago was that?" he was clearly enjoying himself trying to put me on the spot, so I played up to it.

"I'd prefer not to say sir."

"Umm." He suddenly seemed a bit nervous. "I didn't interrupt anything, did I?"

"Only sleep sir." I thought I'd throw something in to liven him up. "Not for lack of trying though, sir." I winked, and that got a short guffaw out of him.

"How long to Rigel?" he asked.

"Once we break atmosphere, it's only two spins. Traffic control around Rigel will take longer, sir." i was relaying this to Tag as well.

"It's supposed to be three spins, Lieutenant-Commander."

"That is true, sir."

"Not being too ambitious for your first super-light spin?"

"Sir, after being the first dimension spinner on our side ever, I'm hoping I can manage a slight extension of usual spin range in a ship with this much raw magical power for its size."

"Just checking." he said with a grin, as we round the corner and stepped into the bridge.

"Commodore on the bridge!" I announced, bringing Tag out of the captains chair he had only just sat down on, and into a salute.

"As you were," the Commodore intoned, "and with only the three of us, let's make that the last of the formalities until we're planet-side again."

"Aye, sir!" we responded together.

"Tag, can you get this crate into space?" he said, obvious aiming for a ribbing by the gleam in his eye.

"Hey, I resemble that remark!" I responded.

"Kim, get us out of here before I am subjected to any more bad jokes from either of you two." Tag ordered.

I stuck my tongue out at him. "You're only jealous I got in first." As I said it I brought up on the display screen our position, already a kilometre up, with projected path to the proposed spin point.

"Long way around?" the Commodore asked.

"Rigel's currently on the other side of the planet from us." Tag responded quickly as I mentally fed him the information. "Kim prefers not to aim through large local masses if she doesn't have too."

"Good thinking, but if she hasn't jumped before, how do you two know each other that well?"

"We've been meshing very well, sir." Tag replied.

"Jaral, not sir, at least for now." the Commodore replied.

<<Nearly there, can I spin as soon as we get there?>> I asked.

"Spin when ready, ship." Tag responded verbally for Jaral's benefit.

"Aye, spin, spin, spin!" I said, not even slowing down as we approached the spin point. This was an easy spin as we were going for distance to an area without much even in the way of cosmic dust. The next one, into the heart of a complex moon system around a massive gas giant, was going to be much harder.

"Smooth for your first jump, Kim."

"Thank you sir."

This was actually a bit more complicated since I'd never been there, but I had the charts and could calculate where everything was supposed to be. I gave myself fair margin for error.

"Spin calculated, estimated flight time one hour on arrival." I had actually ceased moving this time, but with nothing for a few light years for reference no-one noticed.

"Spin on my mark." Tag replied. "Three ... two ... one ... Spin!"

I had already looked up Rigel Three's control frequency.

"Rigel Three Flight Control from Harpagornis, arrived by spin, squawk follows." I announced us to flight control, followed by a data packet indicating current location, ship size, and current instructions.

"Harpagornis from Flight Control, follow inbound beacon Hotel Lima Eight Zero One." A data packet followed containing confirming details.

"Flight Control from Harpagornis, following inbound beacon Hotel Lima Eight Zero One." I acknowledged.

"Fifty seven minutes flight time on this course unless they divert us." I informed everyone. "But I can get you there in about thirty three if you'd like, sir."

"Better not break any rules, Kim."

"Oh no sir, that's how long until I'm in casting range of the spaceport."

"How safe is that?"

"My accuracy isn't one hundred percent at that range, I'd have to aim you about half a centimetre above the deck, sir."

"I think I can survive a fall from that height, Kim."

"I should hope so, sir, I've survived longer falls in high heels when I was learning."

"Can you come with me? We are supposed to report in together."

"Not for another ten minutes after that, sir. Otherwise I'd be casting my human form further than conventionally acceptable for soul separation."

"That only saves thirteen minutes then, Kim." Tag said gently.

"Certainly, but think of the coolness factor to be the first to arrive that way."

"They won't know that, Kim." said the Commodore. "There are a fair number of mages who have memorised the pattern at immigration and can teleport there."

"Yes, sir. But not too many mages can do themselves, two others, and luggage. It would at least raise an eyebrow."

"Young lady, officially I heartily disapprove of your flippancy and sense of theatrics. That said, let's do it."

We probably shouldn't have, it turns out there's too much paperwork to fill out because none of us was registered as a teleportation-capable mage. By the time we'd cleared immigration, I'd been docked long enough for a normal immigration. At least Tag and I were both now registered as teleportation-able, so it's be faster next time. I'd suggested we register him as well in case I needed to cast him sometime when I wasn't going to be joining him.

The Commodore thought it was a huge joke at our expense.

"See, I told you officially I didn't approve."

"Yes sir, but you were out faster than any of us!"

"Privileges of rank." he paused, as if debating whether to relate an anecdote to us. "And having a history of unusual arrivals, I've filled out most of the weirder paperwork already."

We looked up who we were supposed to report to, and she wasn't available for another six hours. We made an appointment, then all trudged back to my ship body to get some sleep. Well, the others slept, I caught up on the latest info-burst. Interestingly there was an email for Tag. I decided to be good and not open it.

When he got up, I told him about the email. He told me to open it and read it to him.

"I take it Jan Geltone is your mother?" I asked.

He groaned.

"What does it say?"

"Dear Tag, please thank Commodore Jaral for his kind advance notice you and your lovely fiancé were coming to the Rigel system. Your father and I have moved up our plans for visiting your sister to coincide with your arrival. Please notify Kess when you arrive."

I knew Kess was his sister, but I hadn't heard him refer to his mother by name,

"We've been set up."

"The Commodore?"

"Oh, probably everyone." He paused, a worried look came over his face. "Look, you know I'm not ashamed of you, but given her history I'm afraid how Mum will react if she finds out you're a ship before she gets to know you. We can tell my father and Kess when Mum's not around, in fact Dad's probably figured it out already."

"I understand, but I'm going to embarrass you horribly as compensation."

He smiled. "That's OK, I know you love me too much to really hurt me."

I pouted. "You take all the fun out of it!"

"Better send a message to Kess. You got her address?" I nodded.

"Dear Kess, in Rigel Three spaceport, awaiting finding out what my actual orders are in a few hours. Will let you know when I know what's going on. Love, Tag." He paused. "Send it from my ID and register that ID to you, so the ship ID doesn't go on the email, no point giving the game away."

"Way ahead of you, big boy, how do you think we got the first message?"

We decided to go out for breakfast, just to get our feet on a different planet. Since we'd already completed formalities, a quick combined fingerprint and DNA scan got us out the door. We found a nice but overly expensive bistro nearby, and ate there, playing footsie under the table, watching the world go by. When the Commodore got up I told him where we were. He grabbed a quick cereal breakfast, a short workout in the gym, and a shower before leaving. He grabbed an earpiece on the way out with my private crypto on it so he could find us easily. We finished up and moved to join him, heading off for our meeting.

The meeting was anti-climactic, about a quarter of the Admiralty was there and the rest would review the video log later. It was basically a debrief of everything that had happened so far. After the first session the numbers halved, and then it got into even more details, reviews of logs, and over-analysis. They were interested in the ship-to-ship psionic links, but the idea wasn't foreign to them as they already had a network of mages to do something similar for flash-priority traffic that didn't require bits of people to be distributed. They did find the combat implications interesting, though.

They found a lot of interest in the casting process, and eagerly reviewed the recommendations from the marine lieutenant we had worked with on what worked and didn't in their mock combat simulations. We were basically told to hold while they discussed this.

I was happier, because I'd been placed on "special secondment to the Admiralty" status, which got me a decent pay that ate into the principle of the loan almost as fast as combat pay, even if it was only going to be for a few days.

We sent an "In military hurry-up-and-wait limbo, will get back to you." message to Kess. Real-time video wasn't really an option as Rigel Four was in the same orbit as Three, but on opposing sides of the gas giant, and radio had to bounce of Rigel Seven, giving a seven second round trip delay. The daily period of Rigel Three and Four was the same, slightly less than the standard 24 hours, so every Sunday morning and some Saturday mornings the time between 2am and 3am didn't exist to compensate. I made sure to calculate the local variations into my internal calendar.

I noted ship-me was getting a lot of attention from gawkers. Rigel Three had a lot of military traffic so the base green wasn't unusual, but I'm sure the unusual inclusion of wings and silver highlights were setting a few tongues wagging.

The next day was filled with an almost identical set of questions to the previous day, from all the people who hadn't turned up yesterday but now felt they had to ask the same questions. We gave a few demonstrations of casting, then were asked to come back tomorrow. We were also told that for now casting was classified.

I relayed this back to my four sister ships, who of course then grilled me on what was going on. Jet 'fessed up to the others about our panty-less dinner, and I was forced to tell everyone exactly what I had done, all the while Jet pretend-complaining that I hadn't told her about the voluminous dress trick. It was good to catch up with the girls again, and fantastic we could do it over this distance.

The next day we were told they wanted to do more testing on casting, and had two normal cargo ships lined up they wanted me to teach it to in carefully controlled steps.

Tag noted that we were currently using space in a heavily congested spaceport, and maybe we should move to another less congested facility, pointing out there was a secure scientific facility on Rigel Four that could be used.

"No problems in theory Captain, but I would like to know your ulterior motive." said the Vice-Admiral he was pitching this to.

"My sister is on Rigel Four and I haven't seen her in four years." he admitted sheepishly.

"Fair enough. Neither of the two ships we had in mind is here on Rigel Three, so Four is as good as anywhere. Hold on a minute while i draft up the orders."

Actually we waited outside his office while a rating did all the paperwork as instructed, but we got what Tag wanted.

"Dear Kess, managed to wangle it so our little project has been transferred to Rigel Four. Be there soon-ish. Love, Tag." was the message he dictated to me as soon as we had a copy of the orders.

Unexpectedly we got a reply just as we completed emigration transfer forms. Everything was interconnected in-system, so we wouldn't have to do immigration on Rigel Four.

"About fricking time! Mum & Dad driving me crazy here. If this mythical "Kim" doesn't show up, I'm not taking responsibility for your health! Ret still thinks you faked the holo or paid some floozie off. :-) Cya, Kess." I knew Ret was Kess's husband.

We made good time, and put down in a nearly empty dock in a crescent bay overlooked by the research facility. We checked in with them, then we headed back so I could change out of uniform. It was colder on this area of Four, more a cool temperate than the tropical weather we had on the equator of Three, so I went for a warm black skirt that came to mid-thigh with black boots with a low heel that came to three-quarter thigh. Above I had a had a deep green turtleneck jersey, covering a peach scoop-necked sleeveless top, in case it was warm enough inside to take the jersey off. I also conjured up a brightly coloured scarf for contrast.

We grabbed minimal bags, because any clothing we needed I could just conjure up, and off we went. From the facility we requisitioned a small electric golf-buggy like vehicle, and drove to the local high-speed train station. The vehicle was remote controlled so I piloted it back to the facility as we got tickets and boarded the train, and Tag sent a message to Kess telling her what train we would be on from his little-used PDA.

"I've become used to a much nicer assistant." He smiled at me and we had a quick kiss, before going back to gently holding hands while watching the scenery flash past.

We covered the five hundred kilometres to Kess's place in a little over an hour and one train change.

"Tag, you scoundrel!" someone boomed as we got off the train.

"Ret!" Tag yelled back, and they went up to thump each other on the back like some bizarre gorilla ritual.

"So who's the lovely lady?" Ret asked, giving me the once-over.

"Ret, this is Kim, my fiancé, so hands off or I'll stick my sister onto you. Kim, this is Ret, my brother in law and all-round trouble maker."

They had the friendly camaraderie of people who respect each other and have spent a lot of time around each other. The good mood was infectious.

"I have to ask," Ret queried as he grabbed my bag, letting Tag carry his, "how much did my brother in law pay you to come on this little jaunt?"

"One heart," I said, the answer jumping into my head, "but that's OK, I gave mine to him in return."

"Oh boy, she's a keeper!" Ret said, then looked funny at Tag. "My lord, you're serious about this one, aren't you?"

"This one?" I interjected.

Tag had the good graces to look embarrassed. "I was serious about all of them."

"All of them?" I asked, my voice rising.

"Don't worry, " Ret said, clapping me on the back in a way hat would have knocked me about if I wasn't enhanced, "you're only the fourth he's been engaged to in two hundred years."

"Hey! The first one was only seventy years ago!"

<<You're not helping!>> I passed to him privately.

"Seventy four, but who's counting?" Ret asked.

"Is there something you'd like to tell me, honey?" I asked, but it wasn't a very icy tone. Honest.

He turned and placed a hand on each shoulder.

"I thought I loved them. The first time neither of us was ready, the second was a gold-digger who left when she found out my family didn't have as much money as she thought, and the third. Well, yes."

"Jill was with Uncle Hep when Qualyata went up." Ret said quietly. It didn't take too much to figure out what he was talking about. Hep must have been the ill-fated brother of Tag's mum, Jan Geltone, which his ship went mad. I had no idea now if the ship killed them, or the ship self-destructed by remote command and took them with her.

I moved in and hugged him.

"We've got each other now. Even if, heavens forbid, something should separate us, I'll always treasure our time together."

"Thanks." he said quietly, we were both misting over.

"C'mon you lot, before night falls and we freeze to death." said Ret, breaking the melancholy mood. "Car's over here."

He threw my bag into the boot, and held the boot open for Tag to put his in. He shut the boot, then ran around to open the passenger door.

"For me? You are getting polite in your old age." Tag grinned at him.

"Get stuffed." Ret said, with the sweetest smile on his face you could imagine.

"Thank you, Ret." I said, stepping up and giving him a peck on the cheek before rotating into the car.

"Hey, kisses only for me!" said Tag, climbing into he seat behind me.

"I'll make it up to you tonight." I said, while Ret was outside with the doors closed and couldn't hear. "Especially if you want to stay behind me, if you get my drift."

Ret climbed in and set off speeding down the road. He pointed out a few local landmarks, before we pulled into the driveway of a nice big house in the middle of nowhere. It had one of those roundabout style rings in front of the house, and he pulled into a gap before jumping out of the car and running around to open my door.

"My lady, a pleasure." he said, doffing an imaginary hat.

"A gentleman and a scholar, so rare to find good breeding these days." I said, showing I could return the favour, as I threw a curtsey.

He laughed and went to grab the both the bags, a fact that didn't go unnoticed.

Tag looked meaningfully at me, so I opened the psychic link.

<<I think you passed.>> he said.

<<I think he's going to be the easy one.>>

<<You're probably right, but you've already won me over.>>

<<That's all that really counts in my book.>>

"You two going to stare moony-eyed at each other all evening, or are you coming inside?" he laughed, and we looked sheepishly at him and quickly followed him inside.

Kess called out from the kitchen, so Tag and I went that way while Ret took our bags up to he "usual room", wherever that was. I was following Tag, so the first I saw of Kess was her head as she enveloped Tag in a hug.

I waved, and she broke the hug just enough to grab me and pull me into a three-way hug.

"Kim! Good to finally met you!"

"Likewise, I've heard so much about you from Tag here."

"None of it's true, I assure you. Thanks to my informative brother, I know next to nothing about you."

We broke the hug and she motioned for us to sit down at the kitchen table. Tag and I held hands without really thinking about it as we sat down.

"OK, I need the goss. How'd you meet?"

"Boring, unfortunately. I was in the officer's mess with a girlfriend, but it was busy so the two of us sat at the only table available which was for four. This strapping lad and another decided to join us so they had somewhere to sit down."

"He try anything straight away?" she asked, as Tag made wounded faces, clearly in jest.

"No, actually his partner in crime sat next to me. Tag and I hit it off later hat night, when we went for a walk on the beach."

"What number date?" I knew exactly what she was asking, and Tag coughed quite badly at the question.

"Not until after he proposed, about thirty."

"Really?" she asked.

"No reason to lie." I responded. "As long as you're equally as honest when I give you the third degree."

"Maybe when the boys aren't around." she smiled.

"An excellent plan." I smiled back. "We have to keep some secrets."

"Help with dinner?" she asked.

"Sure!" I said.

"Mum and Dad are out, they'll be back in an hour or so." Kess said to Tag.

"Right, I'll go see what Ret is up to."

Well, I could hear from here, watching some kind of sporting show on the holo.

"Sports!" I rolled my eyes at Kess.

"It does have some good points." she defended.

"Only the sports with men in tight clothes." I smiled back. "And it keeps them out of our hair."

"Yup, that's most of them!"

"Right, so what needs doing?"

"Nothing actually, I have a roast on, and I'll throw some peas, corn, and beans on when it's nearly ready."

"Any cleaning need doing?"

"Not really."

"OK, I'll set the table then."

"Sure, but not this one, the one in the dining room through there." she waved in the general direction of a door.

Actually I didn't know what the correct method of setting the table formally was here. I guessed it was the same as in the officer's mess. I checked on-line, found a minor difference with the desert spoons, and had everything laid out quickly.

Soon we were back at the kitchen table, having a mug of tea each.

"I saw Ret taking the bags upstairs." she started.

"And you want to know why my bag is so small for somewhere so cold?" I asked.

"Pretty much."

"You like the scarf? i asked, which I had undone and left hanging loosely over my shoulder.

"Yes..." she said, obviously unsure where this was going.

"Here, have one." I said, conjuring an identical one onto the table in front of us.

"Ah, a mage like Dad! How long will this last?"

"Oh, that's permanent. None of that ectoplasmic stuff for my future sister in law."

"So it can't be dispelled?"

"No, it's real. Can still be disintegrated like anything else, though."

"Neat!"

"Oh yes, saves a bundle on clothes. I had to take a seamstress course to be able to make something that looked half decent. My first efforts were like a blind mad one-armed woman's creations."

"That bad?"

"Oh yes, you have to hold it all in your head at once when conjuring, If you're making it normally you only have to concentrate on a bit at a time."

"So you're doing something with that ConFed research station?"

"Yes, but it's classified, sorry."

"Is that how you really met Tag?"

"Yes, we were both stuck on some backwater for a different stage of this project."

"So how'd he propose?"

"It was actually really sweet. Did you know he'd volunteered for the ship captaincy programme?"

"Lord no. I knew he wanted to, space has always been a big dream of his. Mum would freak, though."

"That's what he told me. Anyway, we'd been dating for a while, and he comes to me one evening really upset. Turns out he'd been selected as a captain, but he realised he didn't want to do it if it meant he had to give me up. So he proposed, saying he was going to use the "changed circumstances" clause as a way out of the program."

"Wow!"

"Yes, well, I of course asked if he was proposing just because he had cold feet about the program. I didn't want to be an excuse. You know what he said?"

"No, go on!"

"I love you, Kim. This is just the thing that gave me a kick in the arse to make me do the right thing."

"That sounds like him."

"Then I asked him, 'Just so I get this right, you're prepared to give up your dreams for me?', and he responded, 'Small price, baby. It took these orders to make me realise this.'"

"Wow! You must have made an impression."

"Well, he certainly made an impression on me."

"And you seriously hadn't gone all the way when he said this?"

"No, that came later. The furthest we'd been before that was second base."

"A guy doesn't get past second base in thirty dates and proposes? We are talking about my brother here?"

"Apparently even the immature ones grow up eventually."

She laughed at that. "You know what they say, you can only be young once..."

We finished together in chorus "... but you can be immature forever!"

"But you have done it since then?"

"Like rabbits at first, when work allowed." I smirked at her. "A lot more casual now."

"Is he good?"

"You really want to know if your brother is good in the sack?"

"Sure why not?"

"Actually he's pretty good. Likes anal every now and again, which is tough since he's so wide, but even then I still get off on it. How's Ret?"

"Long, thin, knows what to do. His stamina is almost too good, sometimes he doesn't get off, but it feels fantastic on my side and he reckons the ride is better than the ending."

"How long have you been married?"

"One hundred and thirty nine years. Married at forty eight."

"Everyone in the family have nanites?"

"Yes, my two have left home. Emma just hit fifty and is engaged now."

"You have holos? I haven't seen them."

She pulled out a slide show and went through a whole lot of family shots. We were still there when the door opened.

"Mum, Dad, in here!" Kess shouted. "With company!"

"That no-good brother of yours finally made it?" a rapidly approaching female voice shouted back.

I heard Tag fall over himself in the entertainment room.

<<OK, honey?>>

<<Banged my knee, trying to get there before Mum does!>>

The woman who walked in could almost have been Kess's twin, and the man behind her a somehow simultaneously more rugged and and more weathered version of Tag.

"Mum, Dad, this is Kim." said Kess.

"Hi!" I said, walking up to them and giving them both a quick hug, as Tag tumbled into the room, smacking his shoulder on the door frame.

"Dinner's nearly ready, everyone into the dining room." Kess hollered loud enough for Ret to hear over his sports show, before adding quietly to me "Not you, you can help."

Their parents were obviously busting with questions, but acquiesced to their daughters request in her own house. I suppose it also meant questions and answers didn't have to be repeated for Ret.

I helped Kess serve up.

"Still got the desert spoons around the wrong way!" her Mum muttered as Kess went past.

"Blame Kim, she set the table." Kess whispered back.

"Oh no, not you too?" she said, louder this time and directed at me.

"Mum! Let us at least start before you hoe into them!" Tag interrupted, drawing smirks from the other two males present.

"What did I do wrong?" I asked.

"You did it the formal, civilian way around."

I remembered things were the other way around in the officer's mess.

"I was brought up in a civilian household, why should I do things the military way? And it's not like this is a state dinner."

"More like an interrogation." Ret mumbled, just loud enough to be heard. He got glares from Tag and his parents for that, and put up his hands in mock surrender.

"OK, OK! But I get grumpier the longer I go without food." he said, and even though it wasn't all served, started heaping food onto his plate.

Kess and I brought the last platters in, and we sat down next to our respective partners. Tag's parents were at the opposite heads of the table, and we were arranged to it was all males at one end, all females at the other. We all started to serve ourselves.

"So, do you have dinner like this with your family often?" Tag's dad asked me, obviously probing for information.

"No, there was a car accident and I lost my parents and brother." Technically true but not in the way most people would think.

"What happened?" asked Tag's mum, with genuine concern in her voice for the first time.

"I'd rather not if that's OK with you, it's a painful piece of my past. I want to move forward with my life, not look backwards at things that can't be changed."

That kind of put a damper on the conversation, so I tried to bring up something else.

"So, Tag and I are working on something classified for ConFed, but what does everyone else do?"

"Dad's a mage." Tag said.

"Kim's a mage too, dad!" Kess said. "Pretty decent one given the scarf she conjured earlier."

"Is it still around?" he asked.

"It's permanent," I said, "not an ectoplasmic construct."

"Oh?" he asked, apparently intrigued. "How do you hold it all in your head at once to conjure it?"

"A seamstress course, a very good memory, and lots of memorisation." I laughed.

"So we could go for a shopping trip, not buy anything, and you could make it when we got back?" Jan asked, her eyes lighting up.

"Yes, but I'd have to pay the designer a royalty, so it's not completely free."

"Saves a bundle, though, I bet."

"Sure! Maybe we could have a girls dressing session later." I suggested.

"Maybe tomorrow, I have an early morning conference call." Jan said. "Kess's place is lovely, the only problem is it's a few hours behind the main commercial centre. It was supposed to be later, but due to conflicts got moved earlier, unfortunately."

"We have to get up early too, we have to get back by 8am, What do you do that needs conference calls in the wee small hours?"

"I'm a VP for a software programming company."

"That's actually how I met Kess," Ret jumped in, "I work for the same company. Jan invited Kess along to a company function, and we hit it off."

"A bit of a coincidence, my first job before manifesting as a mage was as a software programmer."

Jan laughed. "Neither of us are programmers, I'm VP of marketing and Ret's in project management."

"When did you manifest?" Ret asked, interested now.

"Aforementioned accident." I responded.

"Oh, right."

"Kess and Ray, who wants to go first?" I asked, trying to shift the topic.

"I paint for a living." said Kess.

"Wow! Do you have a studio here?" I asked.

"Yes, would you like to see it later?"

"That would be great!"

"Ray, that's your cue." smiled Jan to her husband.

"Officially I'm an investigative mage."

"Police?" I asked.

"I work for ConFed, I consult out to local police forces that need my help."

"Get to travel a lot then?"

"He travels too much." Jan smiled at her husband.

"Yes, but it means I get to memorise them so I can teleport you there instead of having to catch a ship."

An expression of distaste came over Jan's face.

"You know you're going to have to get over that one day." Ray said back, full of concern directed at his wife, but I'm sure a sideways glance to me was a significant one. I'm pretty sure he was letting me know he knew about me.

"Tag gave me the summary," I said, "so how about something more pleasant?"

"Right, hot stuff," Kess said, looking at her brother, "how did you meet Kim?"

This would be interesting, she'd heard my side of the story.

"Well, we were at the officer's mess..." he started.

"We?" Ret interrupted.

"Dirk Lunga was with me."

"Yeh, I remember him, good guy."

"Anyway, the base we were at was a training base, and we'd heard there was a new group of ships that had just come in for growing."

His mother visibly flinched at that.

"So we thought we'd head down to the officers mess to have a look."

"Because you knew ships were all oversized and easy, right?" Kess teased her brother.

"Err, well, actually it was just we wanted to play 'spot the ship'". He paused. "Anyway, the mess was more crowded than usual, probably because everyone else had the same idea, so there weren't too many seats around."

I had noticed the mess got quieter while we were there, I hadn't realised everyone was trying to spot us.

"So that's why there were so many blokes clustered around the new blonde bombshells at the bar." I jumped in. Tag had the decency to look pained.

"Anyway, I'd noticed these two good looking women hiding up the back a few times." Tag continued.

"We'd been trying to keep out of the way, just get some food and get out, since it had turned so busy with guys ogling the new arrivals." I helped out.

"So one night they weren't in uniform and were at a table for four."

"It was the only one left when we arrived." I said, but started to get the vibe from Kess I should be letting Tag tell the story.

"So we invited ourselves to sit with them. I actually sat down next to the other girl, Pif, but she was a bit straight, and Kim here had a sense of humour closer to mine. Then they went to the ladies, and when they came back decided to swap seats." He nodded at me, so being cued I said something.

"Yes, Pif and Dirk were a better match, the both have a straighter sense of humour, so we decided to swap when we got back." I nodded back at Tag.

"Right, so later when we left we decided as a group to have a walk on the beach, although the girls kicked up a bit of a fuss at that idea."

"We were in heels and stockings!"

"You went anyway." he said, smiling at me.

"Honestly? You were the nicest guys Pif and I had met while we were there." I replied. "Also, it was nice to finally get some attention with all the guys there drooling over the bombshells."

"Was that why you were dressed up?" Kess asked.

"Pretty much."

"So he still needed something to whap him over the back of the head to notice a nice girl?" Kess said, looking at her bother while a smile on her face, obviously still teasing him.

"Hey!" said Tag.

"So what happened after that?" asked Ray.

"Well, we saw each other every night from then onwards." Tag said to his father.

"So what triggered the proposal after only a month?" asked his mother.

This was going to be tricky.

"I had registered for the ship's captaincy programme." Tag admitted, which drew in a sharp intake of breath from his mother.

"Tag!" she exclaimed.

"Mum, it's my life, and that sort of stuff doesn't happen any longer."

"Jan!" warned her husband, then nodding at Tag to continue.

"Anyway, there were twenty-four of us and twelve ships, so of course we were all trying to pick who the ships were."

"So why go out with Kim here?" his mother asked.

"Originally, I never actually intended to go out with her, it was just one of those spur of the moment things."

"Kim, did you know this?" Jan asked me.

"He didn't tell me, but it was fairly obvious he was in the programme. In some ways that made it all safe, you know, a 'no strings' relationship?"

"So what happened?" Jan asked, now driving the conversation.

"She came to mean too much to me." Tag said, squeezing my hand, and I blushed.

"I started to feel relieved when the announcements came about the pairings off. It was down to two ships left and fourteen potential captains, so I started to relax."

"Why didn't you just withdraw?" Ret asked.

"Didn't want a black mark on his record for pulling out half-way through a selection?" his father asked, and Tag couldn't meet his face.

"Yes." He looked up again. "Then one day it all changed. I heard the eleventh ship had chosen a captain, and then I received orders to turn up to a selection panel tomorrow morning. I asked around and found out I was the only one who had been asked. Scuttlebutt had that this stacked blonde Mar was the last ship, and I'd bumped into her the day before at lunch and had a bit of a conversation with her."

I hadn't known that it had got around that the woman I'd set up as the likely ship, nor had I known Tag had talked to her. His fear seemed a lot more practical now.

"So you thought she was going to ask you to be her captain?" Jan prompted.

Tag nodded. "Then it all fell into place for me. I couldn't give up Kim. I knew a mage on base who was a good conjurer, so I went to him and got to make the ring for me. I proposed that night."

"And I nearly didn't accept." I said. "I wasn't sure if he was proposing because he loved me, or because he was trying to weasel out of a black mark on his record."

"Because if family circumstances change you get excused from the program." Jan recalled.

"Right." I agreed.

"So what made up your mind?" she asked me.

"I put the question straight to him, he said ''I love you, Kim. This is just the thing that gave me a kick in the arse to make me do the right thing.' That wasn't enough to convince me, I knew how much he wanted to be a ship's captain, so I asked 'Just so I get this right, you're prepared to give up your dreams for me?'. He responded 'Small price, baby. It took these orders to make me realise this.' The look of sincerity and love on his face was enough to convince me." No need to mention I had actually accepted the ring in between those two snippets of conversation, nor what took place immediately afterwards.

"That's so sweet." Jan said, looking with relief at her son.

We had just about finished off the main at that point, so after Kess, Jan, and I cleared everything away and served desert. The men talked about sports and us women talked about fashion and Kess's art.

Dinner would down and Jan made excuses to go to bed since she had to get up early, and the rest of us moved to the entertainment room so the men could watch some other sporting event.

Then came the question I was dreading.

"Was that actually how it happened?" Ray asked his son.

"Yes, dad." Tag asked, looking a little confused.

"He knows." I told him.

Tag looked a bit worried, and Kess said "Knows what?"

"What we left out was what happened immediately afterwards." I said.

"What are you going on about?" Kess asked.

I looked straight at Ray. "I told him I knew who the last ship was."

He smiled at me. "Did he get it?"

"No, but given the emotional ringer he'd just put himself through, I excused him that." I replied. "I had to tell him the name of the ship."

Ray was clearly enjoying his son squirm. "Did he do the fish thing with his mouth?"

"Yup!" I smiled back.

Kess had obviously got it. "But you're not..." she gaped at me. There was a pause while this sunk in.

"Would someone fill me in? I've clearly missed something." Ret said.

"I told Tag I knew the last ship's name was Harpagornis."

Ret still looked blank.

"Honey, that's Kim's last name." Kess put the pieces together for him.

"Holy crap! Your mum's going to have a cow!" Ret exclaimed.

"Which is why I presume you told her not to tell your mother?" Ray asked his son.

"Yes, dad. I wanted mum to get to know her before telling her."

"You know the longer you wait the greater her sense of betrayal will be, don't you?" he asked gently.

"That was actually the reason I hadn't asked you to captain me earlier." I told Tag. "I was afraid you'd have nothing to do with me after my deception."

Tag didn't say anything, clearly trying to process all of this.

"You have to tell her in the morning. Make it after her call so she's not flustered during it." his father said.

"But dad..."

"No! Trust me on this, you take longer than that, you'll turn your mother against you. It's going to be tough enough to bring her around on this as it is."

"Tag, we have to do it." I told him. "Ray's right."

"Kim, " he said, looking at me, "it'd please this old man if you called him 'Dad'. I'm impressed you didn't actually lie the whole way through."

"How did you know?" I asked. "You seemed to know even as you came through the door."

"I keep my ear to the ground, I knew Tag had signed up for the programme. I knew your last name from Tag's messages, so to satisfy my curiosity it was simply a matter of checking the ship movement logs around when he was entering the system."

"So when you said you'd lost your family in an accident, " Ret said, "you actually meant you had died in the accident, your soul had come here, and so you'd lost access to them?"

"Right in one." I said, winking at him.

"Since we're in the mood for confessions, " I said, "Dad, did you arrange for Jan's meeting to be moved so you could force our hand?"

He smiled. "You are a sharp one, it's going to be good having you in the family."

Tag spluttered at that one. "You devious so and so!"

"Guilty as charged!" he father smiled back at him.

"I have a question." Kess asked. "Why are you so ... well ... normal?"

"I wanted to be normal." I said. "I can't explain it much more than that."

"I can." chimed in dad. "When their human bodies are being fixed, ships are asked to think of their ideal body image." I nodded confirmation.

"They're all transsexuals, and have had male hormones floating through their system up to a few seconds ago, at least as they perceive it. The body image tends to be on the slightly sexual side, and the imagined libido tends to be the male-standard they are used to, which is higher than female-standard."

Again I nodded confirmation. "But none of us ended up how we imagined."

"Right, the succubus DNA that goes into them enhances certain things. They invariably end up with a larger bust size and a large libido than they wanted."

"Yes, I wanted to just be a normal woman, I only wanted a C up but got double-D."

"And you probably ended up with a normal male-level libido, so you avoid the most common problem between ships and captains."

Now I was intrigued. "Which is?"

"You may have noted there's a required review every thirty years, and ships are encouraged to switch captains."

"Yes, I assumed that was just to freshen things up."

"Partially, it is. The real problem is most captains can't keep up with the ship's libido, they get worn out. There's a fundamental power imbalance between a normal human and something as large as ship. The captain's only real balancing factor is the ship's inbuilt instinct to obey her primary sexual partner's orders. If he gets worn out, she starts resenting the lack of sexual relations, and the relationship breaks down."

"Wow. Is the compulsion really that strong?"

"Not really, it's low-level but insidious because it's not at the conscious level, and is backed up by the culture and regulations."

"How common are those like Kim?" Kess asked.

"It happens about one time in a hundred." my new father responded. "But they tend to keep their heads down and do their job, so they don't get noticed as much." He turned back to me. "I do have a sensitive question for you, though."

"Yes?"

"Had you had sex with my son before he proposed?"

I blushed like a beetroot. "Umm ... no."

"You dated this hot piece for a month without getting any?" Ret loudly whispered to Tag, before realising we were all looking at him went almost as red as I had.

"Excellent!" Ray exclaimed after Ret's outburst, and like everyone else in the room I looked at him in askance.

"It means even the low-level conditioning wasn't a factor when you agreed to be his wife. That decision was yours alone. If he had accidentally influenced you to accept, you may have grown to subconsciously resent it later."

"So Tag and I should be able to have a normal relationship?" I asked.

"Yes, your libido will be a bit higher than the average woman's, probably in the top fifteen percent, but otherwise everything should be as normal as it can be when one of you is two hundred and fifty metres long."

"You looked up my specs!" I said, joking with him. "Is that like looking up a girl's measurements in a dirty magazine?"

Ret laughed uproariously.

"Oh yes, you'll fit right in." Dad said.

Kess gave me a hug. "Welcome to the family, sis, no matter what mum says."

"Thanks everyone. I really appreciate your support."

"There's something else you should know, Tag." his father said. "Despite what you said to your mum, there are still problems, we just have better ways of dealing with it now."

"We both know about the remote trigger self-destruct circuits." I said, wondering if he was avoiding saying that directly. His eyebrow shot up at that.

"You know about that?" I nodded.

"Well, what I actually meant was that in around the double the incidence of your 'norms', about one in fifty, we get those who so wanted to be sexually active as females their ideal image was, to put it bluntly, a slut."

"And when that gets amped up by the succubii DNA?" I asked, in realising horror.

"Yes, they basically become uncontrollably demanding. We try to deal with it through counselling, and in some cases novel solutions with group sex. Some of them can't cope with their own lusts and start to engage in self-destructive behaviour. We try to spot it and deal with it before it's too late, and are generally successful."

"So in the case of Jan's brother Hep?"

"Yes, his partner ship, Mil Qualyata, wasn't coping. It was suggested that she might take on some additional volunteers for relief, but she wanted to remain faithful to Hep. No-one realised how far gone she was, but she lined up to ram into a docking station. It turned out the local commander and counsellor had suspicions and had obtained her codes, so they triggered them in self defence."

"And Jill was on board?" I asked.

"Hep was giving her a lift back to save on money while we were saving for the wedding." Tag winced.

"Just so you understand, that's why the interest rate on your ship repayment is so high, because the finance companies think the risk of losing the investment altogether is so high. After you've got half the principal paid off, with a psychiatrists recommendation, you should be able to switch to someone else with a lower interest rate and get the rest paid off faster."

"Thanks Dad, you've been a great help." I smiled at him, and Tag squeezed my hand, and I felt the warmth flowing through it.

Around then the pre-game cheer-leading started, and the guys attentions were riveted to the bouncing on screen. Kess and I shared a look, then snuggled up to our respective partners. I contacted Pif and gave her the highlights of the conversation, since she was in the same boat as me. She in turn expressed concern at how Jan was going to react.

After the game, he dad told Ret and Kess to go to bed as he had something to say to us in private about dealing with Jan.

"You'll have plenty of time in the morning. I know the facility you're supposed to report to, and I can teleport you there."

"Thanks, Dad."

"I think if you try and tell her, she might reject what you're telling her. It'd be best for her to figure it out herself."

"How do we do that?" I asked, curious.

"Get her some tea during the conference call out of uniform to reinforce how normal you are. Then turn up in uniform after her call, and be ready to get out. She was in the trading fleet at one point, so although red doesn't automatically mean ship, she'll figure it out. If she goes overboard, I'll deal with it, but I think she'll just clam up."

"I'll trust in your judgement, but I'm really worried about this."

"There's something else I wanted to talk to you two about alone. There's one other facet about succubi you may not be aware of, that may be relevant."

"Go on." I said, feeling quite nervous inside.

"You need to understand how natural selection has led succubi to their current state. They're one of the primary breeding forces among demons."

I nodded.

"Their outstanding regeneration has developed so they can survive the sexual molestation of their kin and in some cases to survive the birth of their offspring."

"We were told we couldn't get pregnant."

"Mostly true, although succubi are continuously fertile, there needs to be some common DNA for conception. As long as you don't get impregnated by dragons or demons, you should be fine. However, some magics do exist to allow ships to have children. The laws on this are deliberately obscured so you won't find it unless you know what you're looking for, but you need to be free of debt and married for fifty years, and in a relationship with the same captain for one hundred years before they'll let you do it."

Tag and I looked at each other. We hadn't even attempted to discuss children, so this was pretty deep stuff for us.

"However, that's not what I wanted to warn you about, I already have two lovely grandchildren thanks to Kess and Ret. There's another dangerous aspect to the succubi tendencies, which tends to inflict normals like yourself more than others."

Now I was getting very worried.

"Succubi have effectively been bred to be dominated, often painfully, as those who can't cope don't get to breed. Although your libido is lower, the need for domination, although low, hasn't changed. For those ships who engage in sex often, just being underneath most of the time is sufficient. For ships who engage in sex less often, there is a tendency to need a slightly greater level of domination, and this can express itself in usual ways. Just increasing the frequency of sex is often enough to stave it off, others engage in a little role-play where she has to do what he says. Sometimes a little bit of pain during sex is what's required instead." Tag was turning red as a beet hearing this from his father, and I know I was blushing down to my breasts. "Every ship deals with this in her own way, and it's usually unnoticeable in those getting regular relief once or twice a day. Regardless, Kim, if you think you're slipping into a problem related to this, I urge you to get professional help as fast as possible."

"Thanks, I think." I said, still feeling horribly embarrassed being lectured on my future sexual kinks by my prospective father in law.

"It's a bit different for those who fail the first test." He seemed to be waiting for me to respond.

"The man outside the door?" I asked, being careful not to blurt out to Tag details of my first sexual experience as a proper woman.

"The induction process is highly classified and I don't have access to all of it, but there's a magical compulsion to increase your libido off the scale, and they wait to see what happens. The earlier soul-screening means most pass, but a few don't. That small minority end up with female captains, and the domination component for lesbians tends to end up very kinky."

Tag made muffled choking sounds, and my red flush reinforced itself again.

"I didn't really need to know that." I said. Dad winked back at me, and I was sure he'd told us that just to get a reaction from us.

"You don't really need to worry," he continued, "the Confederation has a vested interest in you surviving sane long enough to pay off your loan, and will normally schedule you for psych evaluations every year for the first ten years, and then trail off the frequency after that. They look for things like this, and they tend not to warn you straight up, as fear of something like this can create a worse problem than the issue they're warning you off. I think you're level-headed enough to take the truth, as as they say, forewarned is forearmed."

"Thanks Dad, I do appreciate you telling me all this, even if it is a bit much to take in."

"That's my girl. Now, off to bed, you've both got a tough day ahead of you tomorrow."

I hugged him in thanks, and took Tag by the hand and we went up to our room. Tag and I went to bed, and although we both got naked and kissed and cuddled, not much else happened. The importance of the evening's conversations and the threat of the morning had a lot to do with that, but given Tag's embarrassment at our last public outing, I think that the walls were not completely soundproof and his parents were in the next room had something to do with it as well.

I got up and had a shower when Jan was on her call, and dressed in a nighty and robe before going downstairs to fix breakfast. I did pass Jan some tea from off-camera while she was on her call. Tag had a shower after me and came downstairs in uniform.

Jan's call went a bit longer than expected, and soon dad was downstairs too.

"Uniform time." he told me.

I looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes, I know she's not off her call, but stay in here. Oh, thanks for breakfast."

I went up to our room and conjured my red uniform, then set about getting dressed. After one try I had learnt before not to try and conjure a uniform straight on. Clothes support one's body, so trying to create them directly tends to involve them merging with the top layer of skin, which is very painful. I'm just lucky I'm a regenerator, or I may have needed skin grafts or something.

I came back downstairs and Jan was still on her call. Tag and Ray were devouring their sausage, egg, toast, beans, and hash browns. I sat down with them and had an orange juice.

Finally Jan got off her call, and came to the kitchen. "Thanks for the tea." she called, before stepping in, and then she stepped in and saw us. The shock on her face was obvious as she saw me in my red uniform, and her mug slipped out of her hands. I telekinetically caught it before it hit the ground, and smiled as I realised dad was doing the same.

"You..." she got out, still in shock, then her face turned to a snarl of rage.

"Get out!" she screamed. "Get out of my house!"

"It's Kess's house, darling." Dad said in far to reasonable a tone of voice, and I feared for him as her eyes that looked like they could kill turned to him.

"Shut up!" she yelled at him before turning back to me. "Get your filth out of my sight!" she screamed at me.

With all the dignity I could muster, I stood up carefully. I tried to keep my tone as civil as possible. "Have a good day, dad! Tag?"

"You stay right there young man! What the hell do you think you're doing?" Tag was standing up, and placing a hand on my shoulder I felt him him open our link for the first time.

<<Let's go, Dad needs to calm her down.>> Tag sent to me.

"And you! How can trash like you dare to refer to my husband as your father!"

We walked out of the kitchen, down the hall, and out the front door, all while his mother was screaming at him to come back and condemning me as scum of the universe. Just as we were closing the front door, we heard her change to great sobs before announcing "Oh Ray! I've lost him too!"

<<What now?>> I asked Tag. <<I doubt your father's going to be able to teleport us any time soon, and it's a bit too much of a walk to the train station.>>

<<Can you ask for flight clearance to come pick us up?>>

<<I could, but wouldn't that freak your mother out more?>>

I could sense his temptation to do so anyway, so as to show he wasn't caving into his mother's phobia, before it gave way.

<<You're probably right, much as I would love to rub her nose in her prejudices.>>

I enveloped him in a huge hug that he returned. It felt good after the confrontation for him just t hold me. Always doing more than one thing at once, I did a search through the local network for any other options.

<<Got it.>> I thought at him. <<There's a taxi service in the area, we can get them to run us to the train station.>>

<<Do it.>> he thought back. <<Let's walk to the road.>>

So we walked arm in arm down the driveway to the road. I sent a message to Kess explaining what had happened, apologising profusely, and telling her we'd called a cab. I sent another to Ray just mentioning the cab and apologising for the trouble, even though I didn't know when either would read it. SIx minutes later a taxi pulled up for us.

We sat in the train with me snuggled up to him, both lost in our thoughts, concerned for how things were going to work out with Jan. When the train got close I requisitioned the same remote controlled cart and had it meet us at the station.

As we reported in, we were directed to a conference room.

"Mage Hok!" I said to the solitary occupant of the room.

"Kim!" he exclaimed. "How's my curious student?"

"Great, thanks. How are you?"

"Well, I was puzzled, but now you're here I have a better idea. Are you the one I've been hearing about who came out silver?"

"Yes, that's me."

"Silver indeed! Any idea what your speciality is?"

"That's classified, but to be honest I'm still not sure myself."

"Probably why we're here. And the others?"

"You were spot on."

"And who is this fine man?"

"Oh, sorry, Mage Hok, this is my captain, Tag Hargel. Tag, Mage Hok was our first magic instructor."

They shook hands and grinned at each other. It looked like they'd get along, thankfully.

We sat around making small talk until an Admiral walked in.

"First up, Tag and Kim, you're allowed to tell Mage Hok here everything that's happened so far. His team is going to be experimenting first with your casting ability, and after that with your extra-dimensional ability."

"Ma'am, does that include the political situation?" Tag asked.

"Yes, in fact he's the one who first received the warning that led to the creation of your series of ships. That's why he was involved in your first lessons, Kim. Tag, you are to report to Mage Hok. Mage Hok, you are to report to me on at least a daily basis. We've cleared you for an initial two weeks of work, which may be extended as required. Any questions?"

We all shook our heads, then Tag piped up.

"Ma'am, I have a potential breech of classified material."

A raised eyebrow from her was all he needed to continue.

"My father is a ConFed Investigative Mage. Before we arrived he already knew more than he should have, such as the dimensions of the Harpagornis. I suspect he's only digging because of the family connection, but with his ConFed recognised skills he may turn up more than anyone intended."

"What's your fathers name?" she asked.

"Investigative Mage Ray Harjob, ma'am."

"Hold on a minute." she worked furious on a keyboard for a minute.

"Hok, he's already got enough clearance to be let in on this, and his investigative skills may be useful in resolving the political situation. He's not currently assigned, we could pull him onto your team. What do you think about that?"

"Any problems working with your father?" Hok asked Tag in turn.

"None at all. My mother, maybe, but my father's fine."

"Anything I should be aware of?" Hok probed.

"Tense family situation. My mother's brother was killed when his ship's self destruct sequence was activated when she went rogue, and my mother has personal problems with ships as a result. We left when my father was calming my mother down after she found I was now a ship's captain."

"You don't believe this would cause a problem?"

"No sir, I think both myself and my father are capable of handling the situation."

"In that case, Admiral, I think I'll take up your offer. Ray has a good reputation but I've never worked with him."

"Done then, I'll make the offer after we break. Anything else?"

No-one had anything further to say.

"Ok, dismissed!" Tag and I gave snappy salutes while Hok gave a cheery wave. The Admiral left and Hok guided us to a smaller meeting room.

"So, what's going on? Start from the beginning." he asked.

We spent some time laying it all out for him.

"OK, we've been tasked with casting first, and I'll leave the political situation until we find out if your father will be joining is. So, Kim, my obvious question to you, is why can't you get your human body back to your ship body?"

"I cast by building up a spin field, and then excluding myself from it. It doesn't work for things outside my body."

"Yes, exactly. Your body, not your ship body. Your soul and thus the magic extends to your human body. Even if your focus chamber is doing the spin calculations, you should still be able to centre the spin field on your human body."

"Really?" I asked in surprise.

"Yes, it's exactly what mages do when they teleport. The difference with us is that we don't have the computational power for blind jumps. We need to have a connection to a place, usually by memorising features of it. Then we kind of feel the path to the known location magically rather than calculating the path, and spin through that 'feel'. It's just different ways of plotting the same course."

That gave me a lot to think about.

"Can I give it a try now?"

"No," he laughed, "we have to set up a lot of sensors, magical and mundane, first. We've always known in theory these were flips sides of the same thing, after all that's why we mages designed living ships in the first place, but now we may be getting real cross-over, which could be invaluable to both."

As we worked through the day, we found I could get my human bit back to my ship bit. I could even get my human body to spin to places I could directly sense with either my human or ship senses. Hok seemed to think I'd eventually get the memorisation trick, but that it took years to develop for mages so was likely to take even me months to develop.

It also seemed I couldn't teach my casting trick to ships or mages just by describing it, I needed to communicate psychically to teach it. Once learnt, no-one else seemed to be able to pass it on.

Although mages couldn't cast heavy objects, they did seem to be able to cast things up to about ten percent of their own body weight to anywhere they could normally teleport to. It was thought this could revolutionise the fast courier business, as mages couldn't teleport too often without depleting their personal energy, but the energy loss was far less with casting.

I got an email back from Kess telling me that she'd been woken up by the ruckus, but that there was no need to apologise and I was welcome back any time, regardless of what her mother thought.

Dad popped in, literally, at the end of the day.

"Hi Kim! Where's Tag?"

"Biological break, he'll be back in tick. Since you're here I assume you've been roped into this too?"

"Only to find out what my son and daughter in law are up to."

"You know I'm not technically your daughter in law yet, thanks to regulations preventing me from getting married until I've paid off my debt, it's going to be a very long engagement."

"I've read the preliminary material from Hok, it says you have a psychic bond with with Tag?"

"Yes, but we did cheat a bit on that."

"Doesn't matter, if you have that kind of bond and still both want to get married, the service is a mere formality." His smile melted my heart, and I hugged him, sobbing in happiness.

"What did you do now, dad?" asked Tag, returning from the toilet.

<<It's OK, he's just made me very happy.>>

"Women!" he said, but the smile on his face put a lie to his tone.

"So how's the situation with mum?"

"Tense. Kess made it clear you were both welcome back tonight, and your mother threatened to leave. I told her she needed to let Hep go, and that if she wanted me to teleport her home she was going to stay and make nice. She said she'd catch a ship home instead. Kess actually laughed at that, which didn't help. I said if she was prepared to do that, it was a bigger step than playing nice with you. She caved at that point."

"Tension plus." I moaned.

"It's not that bad. Once we'd got sorted out that she wasn't running away, I had the conversation I had with you last night, pointing out that 'normals' like you are the lowest risk category, and that we all knew Tag had his heart set on being a captain even if she refused to admit it, and you were the best choice both as a person and as a risk. I asked if she wanted to drive you away and have Tag go heartbroken to a floozie of a ship and blame her for losing the love of his life."

"Going for guilt trip city?" I quipped, liking this less and less.

"I'd rather it hadn't come to this. She really is a lovely person except for this one blind spot, because she never got over her grief from Hep. I think she actually blames herself for Tag losing Jill as well, because it had been Jan's suggestion that Jill catch a ride with Tag."

"That's a nasty mix." I commented.

"Yes, it has been, but there's never been a way of directly addressing it before. I'm hoping you can act as the lance to excise this boil."

"Thanks for the lovely analogy." I said with a slightly sour face.

"You are most welcome!" he said with such buoyancy I couldn't help but smile.

"Thanks, I needed that." I said.

"Right, back to work. I have some questions on the situation, if I may?"

"We've got the time, they're doing tests with the casting learn rates for the other ships, seeing how long they need to practice to do various things." Tag said.

"Can we do it in the Harpagornis?" he asked. "I want to spend some time there to start to memorise, I can see it might be handy to be able to teleport to my son and daughter-in-law."

"How much do you trust me?" I asked him.

"Not as much as my son does."

"OK, you can go second then." I grabbed Tag in a big hug and gave him a deep kiss. In the middle of the kiss, I did the reverse casting trick and teleported us back to my bridge. I broke the kiss.

"Be right back." I said, and disengaged then cast myself back to Ray.

<<Tease!>> Tag thought at me.

<<I'll make it up to you, I promise!>>

<<I may hold you to that.>>

<<As long as you hold me, I'll be happy.>>

"Sorry, only practised enough for one at a time." I said, giving him a less saucy hug and bringing us back to my bridge as well.

"Don't I get the platinum service?" he asked.

"Sorry, tongue only for the captain." I said with as straight a face as I could manage.

He looked like he was going to say something, then let it pass.

<<I think dad wimped out.>> Tag thought at me.

<<Agreed. Pity.>> I thought back with as much cheekiness as I could manage.

"The bridge probably isn't the best target. The front right lift is best." I said.

<<I just figured out the artwork.>> Tag sent at me,

"Why the lift?" Ray asked.

"Well, it has access to all levels, is almost pure diamond for viewing, and has air-lock functionality so even if hull integrity and atmosphere is lost, it should still be safe."

"Makes sense."

"There's also murals on the floor and ceiling of the front right lift, three dolphins intertwined on the floor and a stylised sun being eclipsed by a water world on the roof."

"Specifically unique to act as a teleportation key?" Ray asked.

"Exactly." Tag said, as if it had all been his idea in the first place. "Not only that, but if someone arrives uninvited, they're already isolated."

"It was one of our design objectives when we considered what we'd do after the current conflict, and diplomatic ships was one of our ideas. The other three in my generation have similar but different murals on the front right. The front left is left blank for regular use, to avoid unnecessary questions." I said.

"The exact designs were wiped after creation for security reasons, but there was mention the last four ships were modified for diplomacy and medical use. Can I get a tour?"

So rather than the planned meeting, we ended up giving him an impromptu tour of me.

"So where is your focus chamber and exit?" he asked at the end.

"Not telling. Only my three fellow ships know, and then only because we did our designs together. We all have them in different locations with different access methods, though."

"Not even Tag?" he asked.

"Oh well, of course Tag knows. I might need him to bring a change of clothes." I said flippantly.

"You don't have them hidden in the exit?"

"Of course I do, along with a shower. No, I may need him to move people away from the exit point so no-one knows where it is, or meet me with some equipment for whatever situation we find ourselves in - because no doubt we will be in a situation if I've just lost a human body."

"You've really thought this out, haven't you? Not just that, but the teleport point and everything else."

"I intend to keep your son and I alive as long as humanly possible, dad, but I'm sure I haven't thought of everything. Overconfidence is a weakness."

"Most new ships go heady on either the power or the sex."

"I've always tried to be practical, and in my last life I was paid to be pre-emptively paranoid."

He looked askance at me.

"I was a computer consultant, mainly in networking and security, with a heavy programming element for both. However, there was no magic that I know of in the world, which is why I get the basics wrong occasionally. I've read the theory, but I'm sorely lacking in the practical experience."

"We need to get back to talking about these others, though." he said.

We ended up having the conversation in the lift, to give him memorisation time. We broke when Hok asked for a meeting. Ray announced his intention to try and track the mystery workers who had taken DNA samples. He didn't think it would lead back to the Faithful, but thought he might find a connection to whoever leaked the self-destruct codes.

Hok was intrigued at the issue of passing the casting knowledge only via telepathic transfer. He wondered if this was how the religion of the so-called Faithful survived, that only mages sufficiently brainwashed would be passed the dimension-spanning knowledge needed in their minds to secure themselves, both to bully others and to escape the Foe, should they turn up again.

Then the end of the day came.

"You know, we could just stay here." I said hopefully.

"You're not wriggling out of this any more than she is." Dad intoned. "She needs to confront this, and if you don't help deal with it, it'll always be hanging over you in this family."

"I know you're right, but that doesn't mean I'm looking forward to it."

"I don't think any of us is looking forward to it." Dad replied.

"I'm with Kim on this one." Tag joined in.

"You're not getting out either." Dad gave him the hard word as well.

"So, when do we hit the firing squad?" Tag asked.

"Hang on a tick." I said, holding up my hand.

<<Calling Kess.>> I said to Tag.

"What's she doing?" Dad asked.

"Calling Kess to see if the coast is clear."

The video link picked up. She wasn't actually seeing me, but a generated image of me in casuals in my stateroom.

"Kim!" she exclaimed.

"Sort of." I said. "Computer generated me, real me is in a secure area with Tag and Dad."

"It's safe for the moment, she's in our study, with Ret, trying to ignore each other as they work."

<<It's clear.>> I reported to Tag.

"Thanks, we'll be there soon." I said to her, at the same time telling Dad and Tag "Jan and Ret are in the study, can you get yourself there Dad?"

"How soon?" she asked.

"Hang on, I'll ask." I responded, while at Dad's nod I gave Tag another kiss and teleported us both to right behind Kess.

"This soon enough?" human me and video me asked in stereo, as I disengaged from Tag.

"That's more than a little odd." said Tag, gesturing at the two of me.

"She's my evil twin!" we both said together, pointing at the other one.

"Oh, no." Tag and Kess rolled their eyes together, before I felt something and stepped sideways to make room for Dad as he popped in. He wouldn't actually have come in sharing space with me, but we would have been close enough to risk tripping over each other.

"What did I miss?" he said.

"Kim is just demonstrating her very rough approximation of a sense of humour." Kess replied.

"Help me, help me! I'm trapped in a computer!" video-me said, apparently banging on the screen. Kess hit the disconnect button, and I pouted.

"You know, I have to find excuses to travel like that more often." said Tag. I gave him a mental image of me poking my tongue out at him.

"No sense rubbing it in." Dad said, indicating my uniform.

"Eep! Be right back." I took a second look at Kess in jeans and a pastel blue top with puff sleeves and sandals with a small heel, and dashed up the stairs to our room to change out of my red uniform into a similar top that was pastel green, jeans, and flat sandals instead of heels so we were closer to the same height. I re-did my hair from the military bun into something closer to her style as well, then came back downstairs.

"Going for the twin look?" Kess asked. Tag and Dad were nowhere to be seen.

"Going for the sister look." I replied, eliciting a smile from her. "They decamped to the entertainment room?"

"Of course. Now help me with this salad."

We spent the time preparing dinner in idle chit-chat, getting to know each other. I didn't have much to contribute, not wanting to contribute much from my previous life, and not having been around that long here, but with my ready access to the local network could cover my lack of knowledge by pausing and looking things up. It was actually fun, because I found things I'd never have found otherwise.

"Now, you need to announce that dinner will be ready in five." she said.

"Is this your way of letting your mother know I'm here?"

"See, I knew you were more than a pretty face."

I debated silly comments, and decided to conserve my quips.

"Dinner's ready in five minutes!" I yelled down the hall.

<<You trying to invite something?>> Tag asked.

<<Yes, you to dinner.>>

<<You know what I mean,>>

<<Kess's idea, blame her.>>

<<You know I'm not looking forward to this.>>

<<You and me both.>>

Kess and Dad both insisted that we all sit in the same positions as last night, so Jan would be sitting on one side of me and Tag on the other. She was the last one to show up. The men were engaged in another conversation about sports, but were also carefully watching our end of the table.

Jan asked if we were still able to do the fashion clothing thing we had discussed before. She seemed a bit nervous about it, but I assumed she was just trying to do the right thing against her judgement. We then talked the rest of the evening about what we were going to try, and I sensed approval from the other end of the table that we were at least trying. I think everyone notes she hadn't said it was OK for me to call her Mum, though.

After dinner the men went back to their sports, and the three of us women went to Kess's room. We brought up various designs on the screen in her room which was linked back to ship-me, and then I'd conjure versions tailored to us, sometimes with colouring changes.

The system was that we got a 2-D picture of the design. I could then download the full design for a small fee, which allowed me to accurately model on screen how we would look since I'd scanned everyone's sizes. Of course, just because it looked good on screen didn't mean it felt good wearing it. I'd download an average of eight designs before finding something we actually made, an average of two or three times for each design. I was scrupulous about recording everything I actually made along with any colour or textile changes, along with the actual measurements used, and fed this back to pay their royalties in real time. It ended up costing a fair bit, but not as much as if we'd brought half of that in stores. I had a great time, and I think Kess did too, but Jan was giving off odd vibes, like she couldn't decide if she should be having fun or hating me.

At the end, Jan said she wanted to pay her share of the royalties. Not wanting to make a big thing about it, I only told her about the per-unit royalties, not the up-front design royalties. She then made a big production out of deciding she didn't really want some of the items if they were going to cost that much. I'd already made the payments, but she didn't know that, and again I didn't want to make a big thing out of it. I was pretty sure she was trying to bait me into an argument so she could paint herself as the victim, whether to others or her own convoluted mind I wasn't sure.

I didn't argue with her, just took notes of the items she now didn't want, and put them aside in a suitcase I conjured, saying I'd only register the items she actually wanted. Of course the money was long gone, but it kept her happy and got me out of trouble.

Kess and I went down for some tea after that, and she agreed Jan had been acting really weirdly and was probably trying to manufacture an incident. Tag decided to retire to bed early, mainly to collect on my earlier promises, and Kess said she'd talk to her father about her mother's odd behaviour.

It was hard keeping quiet, I'm pretty sure Tag was doing his level best to make me moan as loudly as possible, and with his mother in the next room. I thought I'd created an exhibitionist monster, but he informed me later he just wanted to rub his mum's nose in the fact we were enjoying ourselves. I told him he was a bad man given we were trying to build bridges.

Next morning I made breakfast again, before Tag and I popped to work. Most of the day was pretty boring, especially for Tag, as all we did was cast objects and animals around and have vast amounts of measurements made.

That night we found out Jan had made an escape during the day, apparently she had to go to her office for work and would be back tomorrow. We actually had a fun evening.

The next day was more casting and measuring, until just before 10:30 when I got an unexpected call from a legal firm.

"Coopers Legal for the Harpagornis Corporation."

Since there were legal problems with non-citizens entering into contracts, for royalties and some other stuff Tag and I had set up a corporation with him as sole director and 51% owner, and myself as 49% owner. I suddenly had a really bad feeling.

"Please hold." I said, and got Tag who was bored on the bridge reading some basic training material on magic and teleportation, as he wanted to have a better understanding of what was going on.

<<Tag, I have a legal firm on the line for our corporation. I used it to run the royalties for our little fashion event the other night.>>

<<On screen.>>

"Tag Hargel, director of the Harpagornis Corporation, what can I do for you?"

"Sif Panvox here, I'm sorry but we've had a fairly serious allegation that one Kim Harpagornis has been conjuring products we hold the license for in this system without paying royalties. She hasn't acted directly with us, but she's registered as a mage in your corporation which has royalty arrangements with us, so we wanted to get your position."

"Just hold on a moment while I look up our records." Tag said.

<<What's going on?>>

<<Your mum is screwing with me. She had me make some stuff, then said she didn't want to pay for it. I already had, but humoured her and pretended I wasn't going to register the items in question so to avoid the argument. All records on your screen now.>>

<<Send these to him.>>

<<Done.>>

"Sif, I've just sent you a copy of our records. I've talked with the mage responsible who says everything occurred as per the records. If there's any discrepancy I'd love to know."

"Hold on a minute." There was some furious typing on the other end. "Your records match ours exactly."

"So what's the problem?"

"We've been presented with a number of garments which we have been told have not been placed on this list, nor paid for."

<<Honey?>>

<<Not a chance. I registered and paid for everything, including noting textile and tailor changes, actually before I did the conjuration.>>

"Sif, our conjuration process uses computer assistance. I understand our system has checks in place so no item can actually been created until after it's imaged in the computer, and final imaging cant occur until after your royalties have been paid." Nice ad-lib there.

<<The royalty payment verification number is sewn into each garment in micro form, the exact position on file with each application.>>

"Furthermore, the payment verification number is sewn into each garment, in a location filed with each application."

"I wish everyone had a system like that."

"We take these allegations very seriously, and are happy to split the costs of independent verification with you, pending the outcome of the investigation."

"Any preference on verifier?"

"None at all at this stage, I'll leave that up to you, but we reserve the right to have it checked again later."

"OK, that's reasonable, I'll have it done today."

"Thanks, get back to us via the same contact route."

"Will do." and he signed off.

<<I recorded the whole thing, I think you need to get your father in here now. Now we know what the 'urgent work' thing was your mum had to do.>>

<<Can you put me through to him?>>

<<Done.>>

"Hi Tag!"

"Dad, you need to get to the Harpagornis as soon as you can without dropping stuff."

"What's wrong?"

"Mum's gone off the deep end."

He teleported to the lift and was in the bridge before I was, my human body was helping with the tests and I begged off saying I had to help Ray with something.

We replayed the video recording of the call, and I described the process I had gone through with the royalties, and his wife's strange requests at the end,

"Yes, Kess mentioned that, she thought Jan was just trying to provoke an argument."

"Well, that's what I thought too. Do you mind if we call Kess, I have something to ask her?"

"Sure."

So I called Kess, who was luckily available.

"Kess, remember that bag into which I packed the clothes your mother didn't want?"

"Yes."

"Is that still in your room?"

"No, you didn't come back for it, I think Ret put it in the basement."

"Sorry, my fault. Can you check with Ret?"

"Hold on."

A few minutes later she came back with Ret.

"It's not where I left it." Ret said. "What's going on?"

"Shall I show them?" I asked the others. Tag was ashen-faced, and I could tell he was worried about where this was going, but Dad nodded. I played back Tag's discussion with Sif down the line.

"So what happens now?" Kess asked.

"Well, assuming there are no surprises, the investigation will clear us, but dump your mother in hot water for making a false report." Dad replied.

I did some very quick on-line checking.

"I may understand what she thinks she's doing." I said.

"What?" Tag asked.

"Well, the lawyer said the complaint was made against me. As a non-citizen, my right of counter-claim is severely restricted. She probably thought she'd get me in trouble, and if it backfired there's nothing I can do. But she's stuffed up because everything was filed correctly through a corporation with all directors and majority owners being citizens."

"Tag's the sole director?" Dad asked.

"Yes, and on file he owns fifty-one percent and I own forty-nine percent."

"Crap." he said. I'd never heard him swear before.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Law firms in this system are allowed to pursue criminal charges against individuals making claims of illegal activity they know to be false."

"So they'll sue mum?" Tag asked.

"Yes." Dad responded grimly.

I did some more searching.

"Actually, there's a way round that, but it's not going to be fun." I said.

"Explain." Dad said, obviously stressed.

"She can plead temporary insanity to avoid it. There's plenty of precedent, but it would mean she'd get a mark against her as a prejudiced individual. They may legally force her to undergo court-sanctioned therapy."

Well, that hung in the air, no-one said anything. I decided to put my foot firmly in my mouth.

"Can I assume from the lack of response that everyone is thinking that might not be a bad thing, but the family repercussions are awful?"

Again, everyone stayed silent, but they all looked guilty. I guess I'd been spot on.

"All right then. We need to find out how much they want to sue for, and see if we can pay it off quietly?"

"No." said dad firmly. "We split the difference. Tag, get Sif back on the line and tell him we think the report came from someone with a family grievance who may be temporarily mentally disturbed because of recent trauma. That should hold them off making any decision until they know more."

"Shouldn't we be contacting Jan?" I asked.

"Not yet, let's wait for the report to come back so we have a firm position. Tag, make the call." Dad ordered.

<<Put me through?>>

<<Doing it now.>>

<<Let everyone else see it, but he only sees me.>>

<<Done.>>

"Hi Sif, I've done some investigation on our end and have some relevant info."

"Yes?"

"It seems one Jan Geltone has had a recent trauma and may be temporarily mentally disturbed. She's the prospective mother in law of our mage in question. She had ordered the items concerned, but then declined to pay for them, and is believed to have removed them from a third parties property without the owner's permission. I'm transmitting a list of the items concerned, it's a subset of the original list."

I transmitted the list, wishing he'd given some notice he was going to commit to that.

"All the other items are at the residence I'm transmitting now," Damn him again! OK, that was easier. "if you need to inspect them, although none of the parties involved own that property, we can co-ordinate with the owners."

"Anything else?"

"No, that's it."

"OK, I'll pass this list on to the verifier."

"No problems. Again, if there's anything we can do to help, we take these allegations very seriously."

"Noted. I'll let you know soon."

"Thanks."

<<Cut it.>>

<<Done.>>

"Smooth, bro." Kess said.

The next hour was tense, then we received a call back from Sif.

<<Call from Sif.>>

<<Put it on.>>

"Hi Tag. The verifier has concluded that the items on the list you provided as removed without permission are the items in our possession. Looks like a time-waster, sorry about that, we'll refund you your portion of the verifier costs and claim it back plus damages from the person reporting."

"Good to hear, but the mage concerned has indicated she'd prefer to handle it in-family. Can you send us the bill for all your costs and we'll pay it on her behalf straight away, as long as we get the verifier's report, her original report to you, and an itemised invoice from you, and transfer of authority to pursue?"

"Don't see why not, saves us the trouble. I'll get that to you soon."

We got the full details four minutes later. The costs were significantly padded, and damages were times two instead of times three as we were taking the risk.

"Hefty but reasonable under the circumstances. Pay it." Dad said.

Tag winced at the cost but approved the deal. We looked at the video of her original report, and no-one was happy with it.

"Now I get my wife on the phone and read her the riot act. Kess, I don't want you to hear this."

"OK, cya!" and she cut the connection.

"Call her now?"

"Go for it, use my ID and record it."

It rang, and then she answered audio mode only.

"Hi Ray, what's up?"

"You know what's up, your little stunt trying to drop Kim in it is beyond the pale."

"What are you talking about?"

"Don't bother, their lawyer has shown me the video of your report. Unfortunately for you, Kim had paid for everything before she created it and had the royalty authority number sewn into each garment."

"It doesn't matter, the little bitch is a non-citizen so she can't do anything."

"If you talk about Kim like that again, I will divorce you."

Silence on the other end.

"Right, now that I have your attention, Kim didn't pay the royalties directly. She and Tag have a company set up to avoid non-citizen legal problems. That means, whether you intended to or not, you've knowingly made a false claim against a corporation."

Silence from the other end.

"You still there?" Dad asked.

"Yes, Ray." You could feel the iciness down the line.

"Right, so from here either you pay a huge fine, or you pay a smaller fine and get a black mark for being involved in a hate crime, or you plead temporary mental insanity. Either of the last two is probably going to result in instant termination from your VP job for 'conduct unbecoming'."

"'Hate crime', Ray?"

"To a court it's clear you are unfairly prejudiced against ships, and have engaged in criminal behaviour for no other purpose than to advance that prejudice."

"Oh dear."

"I don't think 'Oh dear' quite covers it."

---

For your information:

Name	Relation
Kim Harpagornis	Narrator
Tag Hargel	Kim's Captain
Kess Gelhar	Tag's sister
Ret Samkeg	Kess's husband
Jan Geltone	Tag's mother
Ray Harjob	Tag's father
Hep Tonegel	Jan's brother, deceased
Jill Winivora	Tag's ex-fiancé, deceased
Mil Qualyata	Hep's ship

The Confederation, a group of independent worlds bonded together for mutual trade and defence, have a dirty little secret in how they make their trading ships - hijacking the souls of dead transgendered. Please follow one subject's rebirth into the Confederation.

A return to some action!

---

"What do you suggest?" Jan asked, and I could sense fear in her voice.

"You really want to know?"

The pause was longer than "significant."

"Yes."

"Hep died a long time ago because he chose to captain the easiest ship going, then couldn't keep up with her demands, and didn't want to face up to his mistakes." There was strangled yelp from the other end. "It's time you got over that. Kim is nothing like that, she's sweet and some of the other ships refer to her as "normal" like it's a bad thing because she's the complete opposite of Mil."

"So what do you want me to do?" came the extremely sullen reply.

"Beg for her forgiveness, and agree to get professional help. If you agree to that, I'm sure I can work out something with Tag and Kim to keep anything official going on legal records anywhere. We may even be able to get Tag's corporation, as the aggrieved party, to buy out the legal case and then drop the whole thing." Of course we'd already done everything except the "drop" part. "But to do so would need the agreement of all the shareholders which would mean you need to convince Tag and Kim."

Again, a long pause.

"Do you think I should get professional help?"

"If you had a mutant cancer that had bypassed the nanites healing, and it was affecting your work and personal life, wouldn't you want it fixed?"

"Of course, but this is completely different." Jan said defensively.

"No it's not!" Dad thundered back. "Your career is over unless you beat this sickness, and you're alienating your son and daughter with it. Your son has chosen to marry a beautiful young lady who has everything going for her, and you want to sabotage that. You've betrayed your daughter's trust by lying to her, stealing from her house, and setting up one of her friends for a crime she didn't commit. It's exactly the same, you're just to stubborn to admit it."

The line cut off.

"Line's cut, sorry." I announced.

"Call her back." Dad ordered.

"Diverting to voicemail, carrier side-channel reports it's been switched off."

"Hang up."

"Done."

Silence reigned for a moment.

"You two know her better than me." I intruded. "Is there any chance we have to worry about self-harm to avoid facing the issue?"

The concern radiating off Tag doubled, as he looked at his father.

"I'd like to think not, but then I'd never anticipated this silliness." Now he looked concerned as well.

"She's switched her phone off but not her PDA." I announced, having been trying to find her.

"Audio capability?" Dad asked.

"Tied to her phone."

"Can you send her a message?"

"Sure. If you want I can even track delivery of the message and get a rough location for her."

"OK send this from my ID: Call me back in five minutes or I'll report to the police that I'm concerned about you committing self-harm, and get charges filed officially so they can chase it up. No going back from that."

"Last chance to re-word?"

"Send it."

I sent it and traced the delivery through the network.

"OK, she's near somewhere called Pavtulcue." I looked it up on the map. "That's just off the train route back to Kess's."

"Put me though to Kess."

"Ringing."

"Hi Kim!" said Kess, as we looked at an empty art studio.

"Actually it's me." said her father as Kess walked into view. "Your mum is on the way home. Can you grant Kim access to your security system?"

"Sure, what's going on?"

"I wish we knew, but we're pretty sure she's lost it. She's been called on what she's done and I think she's refusing to face up to it."

"Hold on a tick." She was entering a code in the background, then I got the access codes to her security system.

"I got the codes and I'm in, thanks Kess!" I said.

"Right, now your mother should be back in ... " as he paused I looked up the train timetables and flashed up a number on screen "... around an hour and a half. Make sure you're not there, and you're no-where she might bump into you."

"Dad?"

"I want to see what she's up to, to determine her state of mind. All three of us can teleport there in seconds if we need to."

"OK, Ret's in at work today."

"Can you contact him and see if your mum has been in the office at all since she left yesterday?"

"I'll find out and call you back." and she cut the connection. She called back five minutes later.

"No, he did the old 'has my mother in law been in, I'd offer her a ride' routine, and security told them she hasn't been in since just before Tag got here."

"Thanks, now make sure you're out in plenty of time!"

"Sure dad. Love you all!"

"Love you too sweetie." Dad said, Tag waved to her, and I flashed up "Love you too - Kim" on the screen, then for once I cut the connection first.

"Now we wait?" Tag asked.

"Now we wait." his father confirmed. "But we have a heap of other work to be done. By the way, those two people who visited all the ships? They were here to install cargo management trackers, and went back to a military base they haven't left since. I need to go interview them to make sure as soon as we get this sorted out. Kim, get back to whatever Hok had you doing, let us know as soon as the security system picks up anything."

"Yes dad" I said, and cast myself back to the testers.

"Fine woman you have there, son." he said to Tag.

"She can still hear you, you know." Tag said. Dad's only reply was to smile.

She took half an hour longer than we expected to get there. We hadn't followed through on our threat and informed the police, since dad wanted to judge her state of mind first.

"She's home!" I announced to Tag and Dad, standing on the bridge. I brought up the video of her walking up the driveway.

"No taxi?" Tag asked.

"Maybe that's what's taken her so long." Dad said.

She walked into the house and dropped her purse and bag on the floor by the front door.

"Not good, she usually places them on the side-table." Dad commented.

From there she went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea, we got the video from the phone there. After finishing her tea she went up the stairs. We didn't have video coverage there, just motion sensors.

"She's going into your room, she's moving around." I told dad.

"She's leaving your room, moving to ours?" I wasn't sure what was going on here.

Dad's face set.

"She's gone to our bathroom. The house management system shows power draw from the hot water system, so she must be running the taps."

"This isn't good. Kim, can you get your human body back here?"

"In the middle of something, I need two minutes. Sorry, still officially on the clock and we haven't declared a family emergency yet."

"Keep it that way, but we don't have two minutes. OK Tag, you're with me."

They vanished from the bridge and re-appeared in the front entrance of the house, and they went quietly up the stairs. I maintained audio from downstairs.

"Kim, call the ambulance!" I faintly heard from Dad. Knowing they couldn't hear the video from upstairs, I sent back a thought to Tag.

<<Calling now, what's wrong?>>

<<She's slit her wrists in our bathtub.>>

<<So we'd be the ones to find her?>>

<<Just get that ambulance!>> I could sense the fear and frustration.

<<Still ringing.>>

They answered, and I explained the situation.

"You're in a remote area, we're an estimated eleven minutes away."

"Hold on, I may be able to help, I'm teleportation-capable. Can you give me their exact location?"

"Sure." he bliped it to me.

<<Get Dad to teleport back here.>>

I managed to get free from actual work, and said I needed to do something for Ray and would be back in five minutes. I spun to the bridge and then cast myself to the ambulance's location, immediately jumping out of the way.

"Tell the ambulance the crazy woman they just about ran over is their teleportation ride."

"Oh, right." It screeched to a halt, turned around, and came back. A man and a woman leapt out, leaving only the driver inside.

"Sorry, one at a time."

I grabbed the woman and spun for a corner of the lift. No-one else there, back to the ambulance, grab the guy, spun to another corner of the lift which was now on the bottom deck adjacent to one of the medical bays. This time Dad and Jan were there.

"Grade AA medical facilities this way." I said, assisting them to carry Jan though a corridor, and airlock, and into the medical facility. She was actually still conscious, something I hadn't realised, but moaning very quietly.

"Suicide attempt?" the woman asked.

"We believe so." Dad answered.

"Where are we?" the man asked.

"Ship, Harpagornis. Can you get me flight clearance to your hospital?" I responded, while the woman was applying a tourniquet to her arm to staunch the bleeding.

"You still got the dispatcher on the line?" he asked.

"Yes!" said the dispatcher. I'd kept him on speaker. "Organising now."

He blipped an authorisation code, which I immediately blipped to flight control and took off.

"There in seven minutes. Sorry, no blood of the right type ready, and we'll be at the hospital before I can synthesise some."

"We'll pump her full of saline for now." he said. I extended a saline bag pre-warmed to human body temperature with an attached drip and let them put it in.

"Either of you healers?" the woman asked as she applied a tourniquet to the other arm.

"Not enough for this." Dad said.

"Sorry, never been trained." I responded.

"I'll see what I can do. Ship, can you lend me some power?" the woman asked.

"Yes. Let me know how much you want." I started low and she started to heal the worst of the slit veins.

"Actually a little less, this is delicate."

"OK." I responded, as she continued the careful work.

"ETA one minute." I announced to all, including the dispatcher, although I'd been giving him a telemetry feed. The hospital had a standard triangular docking arrangement on the roof, as well as a few helipads.

"How do we transfer her to the cargo bay?" the man asked.

"Actually, the lift outside can lower beneath the ship." I said. "Just get her there and I can drop you all on one of the the helipads."

"Helipad two, Harpagornis." said the dispatcher.

"OK."

The gurney she was lying on got pushed up slightly from the floor to expose its wheels, and the drip transferred to a pole on the gurney, and we wheeled her out to the lift just as I was getting into position and a team was arriving on the pad.

Everyone left, leaving me by myself. I spoke to the dispatcher.

"Everyone away, requesting return authority."

"Transferring you to general flight control with return authority."

Once I had my return under control, I cast my human body back to the house and collected Tag. I'd been giving him mental updates throughout. I hugged him without the kiss this time as I pulled him back to the ship.

"Rough day." I said.

"Tell me about it." he responded.

"Well, I have to get back to being prodded and carrying twice my weight in sensing equipment."

"Good luck with that."

"Thanks."

The rest of the day was an anti-climax. Dad called part-way through to get me to transfer all the legal stuff we had to the hospital, apparently she was physically safe and he was working on getting her sectioned. I really admired the concern for her in his voice.

I got fined by ConFed for running off without authorisation, and docked pay, both ship and salary, for the time away. It was annoying and I told Tag, but I understood it was unfortunately what I had signed up for.

I got a call from the ambulance service asking how I'd teleported to their ambulance without a memorised point to jump to, as that could be extremely useful for them to get to patients faster. I told them that because of my concern for a family member, I'd used a risky technique with a one percent chance of smearing me over a ten metre radius. They decided that wasn't something they wanted to teach their ambulance workers. I did mention what had happened to Hok's team, and the cover story I had provided, so later if this went mainstream they could contact them about the "improved" technique. I got fined again for breaching need to know.

Although we joined everyone for our usual dinner, I couldn't face sleeping in the room with a bathroom where Jan had tried to kill herself, so I left a remote to relay video from the room so I could hear if anyone called, and Tag and I slept in our combined stateroom on the Harpagornis. Kess had arranged for professional cleaners to come in the next day and remove the bloodstains from the bath and the floor, the latter from when Tag and Dad had dragged her out.

I filled in my ship-mates on the problems of the day. Kart offered to teach me some magical healing techniques, which was very welcome, I'd been quite scared through it as to how I would have handled things had it been Tag injured and we were in the middle of nowhere. Kart and Red seemed to think that a relationship with a captain should be professional and sexual, after all that's why they kept separate rooms, so they could have individual times. They didn't think there was any need for families to be involved. Jet believed in professional and sexual, but not in individual time. Pif privately expressed the opinion to me that Jet may be one of those who imagined themselves as sluts and may get into trouble later. Pif thought it romantic that Tag and I were trying to make things work even with family problems, and hoped she would get to met Dirk's family one day.

Dad called later to let us know Jan had been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, and treatment started for her phobia from that incident many years ago.

The next day at work they were done with casting, and moved on to the dimensional transfer spins.

"I'm not sure I want to try random spins to unknown dimensions." I said when the subject of targets came up. "Dimensions could be discreet and I suspect we'll end up smeared if we target something that doesn't exist."

"And there's probably a good reason no-one has figured out how to cross dimensions before now." Hok added. "I agree with Kim."

"Could we just make a few jumps to the one dimension we do know?" asked one of Hok's assistants.

"No, too dangerous." Dad said. "We warned them off, they seem to have left us alone. Any jaunts into their dimension could be seen as a threat and hostilities will restart."

"Mage Hok, you seem to have a number of inter-dimensional correspondents." Tag started. "Is there any way we could try to spin to one of them?"

"Possibly, but the danger involved in tuning the process when we don't have an exact fix is going to be difficult." he said.

"Why don't we try casting to one of them?" asked another assistant. "That way we can check if it works before trusting anyone's life."

I for one was mentally head-slapping that I hadn't through of that.

"Kim?" Hok asked.

"Well, it's much harder to cast than spin, for me at least." I looked around and saw the various mages nodding. "However I have cross-spinned before, so I may be able to do it."

"It's worth a try, then." Hok declared. "Let's start working something up."

I entered a mental link with Hok, with our hands on each other's heads, and he picked someone he knew who should be asleep now. We managed to make contact with her, and after some time explaining what we were doing, and me working hard to try and lock down where she was dimensionally, I cast a box prepared by one of the assistants. As part of the test, neither Hok nor I knew what was in the box.

We encouraged her to wake up and open a box if she could find it, and we waited for her to come back. It was three hours later that we found her again.

<<This is fantastic! I was too excited to get back to sleep. Thanks for the necklace, although the box it was cracked and seemed to have fallen from a great height.>> she sent to us.

<<I couldn't be precise so I aimed high.>> I explained.

<<Can you describe the necklace?>> Hok asked.

<<Gold, fine links, large ruby as the centrepiece with very small diamonds laid around it. A king's ransom!>>

I passed this information back to the assistant who had prepared the box, and he nodded.

<<Thanks, how long until you normally get up?>>

<<About another ...>> followed by something about three or four time measurements we didn't quite get.

<<Sorry, we don't understand what you just indicated, probably because we measure time differently from you.>> Hok explained.

<<I suppose we don't even speak the same language?>> she asked, picking up immediately what the problem was.

<<I wouldn't expect so. We may need to touch to initiate a mental link to communicate.>>

<<Well, that better be with Kim then, because physical male to female contact outside family is forbidden here.>>

<<Right, we'll leave you to it then. We intend to arrive in around half of one of our days, hopefully that will be sufficient. Can you try to broadcast your position?>>

<<Looking forward to it!>>

We drifted away from her, then broke the contact between ourselves.

"Well, it looks like we have successfully initiated contact." Hok said. "From what we can determine it's a magically aware pre-industrial society, and we aim to cross-spin there later today. Kim and I will be the only ones to leave the ship, but most of you will be on the Harpagornis for measuring and so we can get your impressions of cross-spinning. As an external operation, Captain Tag will be in command in my absence. We also want to get baseline measures on magical flows and any changes in universal constants in this other dimension, so that's a lot of work for everyone. Start moving equipment to the Harpagornis cargo bay, and do all your tests there to check the equipment and for comparative purposes. Move, people!"

Tag and I called Kess and told her we wouldn't be making it tonight. Dad wasn't coming with us, but he wouldn't be making it either, he was off to Bunmir to chase up some leads in his investigation.

We were all ready to go by 6pm. We lifted into space, as spinning in or from an atmosphere creates problems as the air is rapidly displaced. This spin was quite complicated as it was inter-dimensional and around two thousand light years. I was aiming for space near the planet our contact, Lishkoa if I got that right, was on.

"You may proceed, captain." Hok stated.

"Ship, spin on my mark." Tag ordered. "Three ... two ... one ... Spin!"

I wrenched us through a spin, and it wasn't my best.

"Aye sir, spin completed."

A couple of the people on the bridge and in the cargo area looked a bit green.

"Thank you, captain." Hok said formally. "Remarkably smooth for the complexity of that spin." I think he was more trying to settle everyone else, as for this spin we'd agreed that bridge audio should be relayed throughout my ship.

"Begin measurement protocols." Hok ordered. "Captain, find our contact and arrange to drop the contact team there."

"Aye, sir." Tag replied. "Ship, please find our contact."

"Outside useful sensing range due to safety distance, sir."

"Time to range?"

"Eight minutes, sir." <<It would be thirty if we were following traffic control's standard maximum speeds, but there's no-one to run into out here.>>

"Close the gap, ship." <<Just as well.>>

"Aye, sir."

"In orbit over Bim, commencing search." I said a few minutes later, looking for the signature of the radio tracker embedded in the necklace.

"Contact found." I said. "Proposed trajectory on screen." I said, as I brought up an image of the planet, our contact's location, and my proposed path to reach it.

"Thank you ship. Environmental?" Tag asked one of the sensor specialists on the bridge. She'd been working as soon as I had specified the location, although we didn't have line of sight.

"Hold for line of sight." she said, as I raced around the planet.

"On a rocky narrow isthmus sticking out into a bay. Looks like a lava plug in an old volcano where the side collapsed and let the sea in. Sheltered from worst effects of wind, sub-tropical area. Currently just before local midday. Tilt places them in late spring, estimated temperature 20 Celsius. Good farming land on the inside of the volcanic rim, it's eroded flat near the water over the years. Adequate farming land on the alluvial plains to the north of the volcano, stretching off to a nearby mountain range which is the source of the alluvial material. Pre-industrial, can't tell you much more than that for now, sir."

I of course had access to all the same raw sensor information, since she was using my senses to obtain this data, but it was instructional to learn how she directed my senses and what conclusions she drew from this. Apparently ships tended to pick this up from sensor specialists and their own experiences over the years, but the nature of the system was that for missions that required it there would still be sensor specialists, the whole "two sets of eyes are better than one" philosophy.

"Thank you environmental. Do we have a visual on the location?" Tag asked.

"On screen." I replied. Our angle was fairly low but getting better, seeing a view of a rocky ring, what would have been an island in the middle except for the narrow isthmus joining it to that part of the ring opposite the entrance. Except for the peak of the ring, which was covered in a tough hardy brown grass, it was fairly green inside. Animals that could have been sheep appeared to be grazing. The most apparent feature was what appeared to be a castle on the rocky knob in the middle. The land there had a shear cliff facing the entrance, but the smoother rear had harbours on both sides, using the rock for protection from any waves that made it through the external gap.

"Looks to be a perfect harbour." Hok stated.

Yellow report lights flashed up from environmental and tactical. Standard rules were that if someone had information they wanted to bring to the attention of the captain, they activate a light. The captain would then mention the position's name, allowing that officer to talk, who would nominate when they had finished by "sir" or "ma'am".

"Tactical?" Tag asked first.

That was also my queue to change the tactical light from yellow to green.

"Seem to be heavy ballista and catapults on both sides of the outer entrance. The castle also has ballista designed to be aimed upwards, sir."

"Conjecture, tactical?"

Typically only facts would be stated, on first request, if the captain wanted the officer to add opinion he or she would ask for it.

""From the upwards pointing ballista on the castle I think we can assume they have to defend against dragons or flyers of some kind. In that case the weapons are probably magically enhanced in some way, sir."

"Thank you tactical. Environmental?"

The "Thank you" was my cue to turn off the reporting light, and to the officer to get back to whatever they had been doing.

"There are scattered dwellings outside the castle which have higher than usual magical signatures. Our contact location is in one of them, sir."

"Conjecture, environmental?"

"Suspect mages conducting experiments are housed outside the castle for safety of those inside, sir."

"Thank you environmental. Mage Hok?"

"From the apparent number of mages, we have to assume magical defences and I agree with tactical on magical enhancements to weapons. We have no idea if our contact has managed to warn the locals, or if she has been believed. We don't know the language so may run into trouble trying to convince them of our intentions."

<<Do we even need to contact them?>> I asked Tag mentally. <<We can get all our readings from here.>>

<<True, but I think the plan from the brass is to open trade relationships with them.>>

Of course, I should have realised that would be at the forefront of a trade confederation's priorities.

"Sir," Tag said, "maybe we should get all our readings from up here, then do a quick fly-over and land outside their external harbour. That way they can send someone to meet us or not, but we likely won't be shot at."

Hok looked around. "Comments on that proposed course of action?" he asked. Some of the mage types looked like they weren't happy with the idea, but no-one said anything.

"OK, Captain, give me a proposal." Hok stated.

"Ship, modify proposed course to do a fly over from the southern approach at half local speed of sound, increase if fired upon, and aim to land two kilometres past the opening." I updated the approach on screen.

The light from tactical went up.

"Tactical?" Tag asked.

"I recommend five kilometres until we have a better idea of their weapons range, sir."

"Thank you tactical. Ship, amend course to land five kilometres past the opening, but hold here until observations are complete."

"Aye, sir."

"Acceptable, sir?" Tag asked.

"Yes, captain." Hok replied, then went down to the cargo deck to help supervise the experiments.

It actually took two hours until everyone was happy with their observations. As I was just inside the upper atmosphere, I was actually visible to those on the ground if anyone cared to look up.

Hok finished conferring with one of his assistants, then announced "Captain, please proceed with your landing as planned."

"Ship, commence landing."

"Aye, sir."

I came in as planned, before I sensed something and Tactical yelled something a moment later.

"Incoming Fire!" yelled the tactical officer, one of the few things he is allowed to yell outside normal bridge sequence.

<<Magically enhanced ballista, approaching and mach 4.>>

"Evasive!" Tag replied, the mental command getting to me before the verbalised one, and I jinked to the side. "Tactical, free!" That was the code freeing tactical from normal bridge communication rules, so he was allowed to provide updates as he saw fit, and for me to bring up a green reporting light on his console.

"Seeking!" yelled tactical, as indeed it had changed direction so it was still on a path to intercept us.

"Ship?"

"Evading." I stated calmly, flying straight and level until it was nearly on me, then I rolled to the right and put on a temporary burst of speed so I was going mach 5 sideways. The thing missed easily, but looped around to still be aiming.

"Still seeking!" yelled tactical. "Two more inbound!"

"Point defence!" Tag responded. We'd "talked" about this during the time we were waiting, and we'd agreed to try and avoid accidentally shooting anything on the ground. I used a rear-ward facing emitter to blow the first ballista out of the sky even as I slowed back below the speed of sound. Ships as large as myself casually breaking the sound barrier made one hell of a sonic boom, and we didn't want to scare them too much.

"First destroyed!" updated tactical.

"Ship, combat spin underneath incoming, then point defence. Now!" Tag said calmly.

Not to many others could calculate a short-range in-atmosphere spin that fast, but it took me less than a quarter of a second, and I successfully destroyed the extra missiles. It would have created two nasty bangs, one from the air rushing in when I left one location, and the other from it being displaced when I arrived. The violent upwards shift in air created a few wisps of condensation.

"Area clear!" announced tactical.

"Ship, gain height at just less than the speed of sound, then resume course."

"Aye, sir."

"Recommend not landing at this time, sir." Tactical continued, still being under free instructions. "Range of weapons is probably to the horizon."

"Ship, take us straight up to the edge of space, no sonic booms unless fired upon."

"Aye, sir."

"Conjecture, tactical?" Tag asked, putting tactical back under normal rules but asking for comments.

"Only safe approach would be from distance using planet curvature and their own mountains as cover. No sign of weapons mounted on the plains facing side of the volcano, sir."

"Thank you tactical. Mage Hok?"

"We have the initial information we needed, let's go back and see if we can contact Lishkoa and try for contact again tomorrow."

"Ship, recommended spin course?"

"One cross-spin and one light-spin, sir."

"Not one as before?"

"Not tracking someone so we don't need to do it in a single jump, this way is smoother, sir."

"Thank you ship. Mage Hok, do you want to set up instrumentation before the return jump?"

"Yes, actually, especially since it will be a cross-jump only, it will help us isolate the different components."

So we waited while everyone checked that was ready, then we spun back to our dimension and then home. Rigel Four was less congested than Three, so we managed to get down in less than half an hour. By the time everyone was clear, it was 10pm. Tag and I cast to Kess's house, since I detected through their security system that a person I assumed to be Ret was still in the entertainment room.

"Hi guys!" Ret greeted us. "Busy day?"

"That's not the half of it." Tag said, exhausted.

"The cleaners came and did everything today."

"Thanks, Ret." I said. "I just need to feed my man and get him into bed."

"Kess is in the bath, don't interrupt her unless it's urgent." Ret added.

<<Only cereal, I don't think I could wait for anything more than that.>> Tag thought at me as he plopped down in a chair.

I wasn't going to let him down after a day like today, so I went to the kitchen, grabbed a big bowl, and cheated by conjuring a bunch of already cooked tender cubes of beef. So what if every one was completely identical? Then some plain rice and peas and corn. I wanted to put a bit of onion in for flavour too, but didn't have enough memory of samples to make it properly, nor time to quickly brown some. I tossed what I had together, and brought it back out to him where he was zoning out watching the news. Since it wasn't sport I thought I'd sit down as well.

"Hey, that smells great!" Ret said. "How'd you make that so fast?" he then asked, his eyes narrowing.

"Trade secret." I responded as Tag tucked into it.

"I'm still a bit peckish, can you make me some too?" he asked, hopefully.

"And knowing you, with plenty of cheese?"

"You know me too well, even if it means another kilometre on my morning run."

"Coming right up!" I went to the kitchen and repeated my conjuring trick, although since he'd already eaten I only made about a third for him. Kess kept plenty of cheese in the fridge, so it was easier for me to quickly grate some and mix it through rather than try to conjure something I wasn't that familiar with.

"Thanks, Kim." Ret said as I handed him the bowl. Tag was just finishing up.

"Did you inhale that or something?" I asked him.

"Pretty much, now just ready for bed."

"Goodnight, Ret!" I said, as I let Tag lean on me as we went up the stairs. He hadn't slept well the previous night, worried about his mother and his part in everything. We'd had to get up early this morning, so given it was quite late now he must be close to running on fumes.

I helped him strip off and get into bed, and he was asleep by the time I had likewise stripped and got in with him. It was cool in the room, just the way I like it, so I snuggled up against his back, placing an arm around him. Even asleep, he took my hand in his and squeezed in.

He slept much better that night, and in the morning he had his usual hard-on, while spooned into my back with us both on our left sides, and with his arm over my rib cage and the hand gently cupping my left breast. I lifted my right leg slightly, opening a bit of space, and wiggled around a bit so his hard on was pressed against my cleft. This felt really good, and soon a little bit of lubrication escaped me and sat between myself and his hard dick.

I started moving ever so slightly, to spread the lubrication around. I felt him start to stir, which was only to be expected given the stimulation I was giving him. I felt warmth and a feeling of contentment radiating off his surfacing brain. I shared me feelings of love and joy with him, and he snuggled into my back a bit harder. His level of awareness seemed to go back down again.

Being quite flexible, I was able to rotate my shoulders so they were a bit flatter and could turn my head around so I was looking straight up, while still keeping my hips in their current position. This shifted his hand slightly on my breast, and his awareness started to increase again. I reached down with my left hand, gently caressing the head of his cock and my clit at the same time.

<<Mmmm.>> he thought at me, his eyes still closed, sharing his enjoyment of the sensation.

<<Good morning, hot stuff.>>

<<Exactly what are you doing to me?>>

<<You're the one snuggling quite forcefully into me with a hard on, not that I'm complaining in the slightest.>>

<<Apparently my subconscious has excellent taste.>>

I giggled mentally at him. <<All of you has excellent taste, but after a stressful few days I think we both need to to finish what you started.>>

<<Like this?>> he thought, the hand already on my breast starting to make small circles. I twisted my head around a bit further so I could kiss him, although the angle was a bit awkward. His eyes snapped open.

<<That's a good start.>> I said, rocking my hips against him.

<<Doggie or missionary?>> he asked, cocking an eyebrow.

<<Missionary, I want to see you.>>

He pulled back his hips just far enough for his hardness to be free of my hips, and I twisted them around to face him. I snuck my right arm under his body so I could feel his back, as he pressed himself forwards again. I was so slick, and him already partially covered with lubrication, that he slipped right in.

<<Oh, yes.>> we thought at the same time.

He pulled himself on top of me as I spread my legs so he could penetrate further. He leveraged himself up quite high, so I could see down the gap between us to see him penetrating me. He thrust a few times like this, then lowered himself so our chests were just lightly rubbing against each other. We looked into each others eyes, the love and wonder still felt so fresh. My arms were now wrapped around him, and I pulled harder so his full weight fell onto me. Even though he was significantly heavier than me, with my reinforced skeleton and musculature it was never going to hurt. There was quite a pleasant almost-burn sensation from where my breasts were being pulled backwards and forwards by his thrusts as they were sandwiched between us.

We started kissing again, somehow choreographing it so we never bumped teeth even with his by now quite violent thrusts. I spread my legs even wider, pushing my hips slightly off the bed to give him better access. Our hip bones were now meeting quite forcefully.

<<That's it, I need it hard right now.>> I thought.

<<You OK, you haven't orgasmed yet?>> He's right, I usually would have by now.

<<Building for a big one, the only thing wrong is I need you harder!>>

He took that as instruction and began really pounding into me. I knew if I was human and not a regenerator I'd still be loving this now, but really regretting it later. He'd reached that point men get to where even language in thought isn't really normal, I was just getting waves of emotion from him. Lust, love, dominance, respect, and a building insatiable desire to empty himself into me.

I let him feel my love for him, my joy at his actions, my complete submission to his alpha male, and my massively building orgasm.

Then I knew he'd passed the point of no return, and the explosion of animal passion sent me off into orgasm even before the first of his seed erupted into my belly. It was hard and fast, and by the time I'd come down from it his deflated tool had already withdrawing from me. I felt a sense of of loss as it slipped out, a desire to continue being dominated by such a fantastic man.

<<Sorry honey, look at the time, we need to get going.>> he said, and made a mad dash for the shower. The stupid idiot had forgotten we had an extra hour and a half after the late finish last night.

I caressed myself a little, to help ease the sense of loss at my man running away while I was still fired up. I gave up in frustration and went to join him in the shower.

<<You do remember the extra time we have this morning, right?>> I said, stepping in.

I felt the flash of genuine guilt.

<<Sorry, I forgot, I seemed to have woken up preoccupied and not thinking straight.>>

I could feel his genuine remorse and so didn't want to push it. I gave him a deep kiss in the shower, and put a hand down to play with his member, but it was not rising to the occasion.

<<Sorry honey, I guess I'm still too stressed.>>

I let go with the hand, and pulled him into a hug as we continued the kiss.

<<That's OK, you seem a lot less stressed than before.>>

<<Getting shot at yesterday when we were just trying to help, after the business with mum has just put me on edge.>>

<<I know, I needed the stress relief just as much as you.>>

<<I'll make it up to you, I promise.>>

<<I'll hold you to that, buster!>>

My hair was now quite wet as I hadn't put it in a shower cap before getting in, so I was going to have to handle it properly.

<<I'll leave you to your lovely hair.>> Tag thought, and stepped out of the shower.

I looked at his body with longing while he dried off, then shook myself into action, doing a proper shampooing and conditioning of my hair, even though as a regenerator I didn't really need the conditioning. Somehow the process of doing normal things a normal woman would do made me feel more grounded.

Much refreshed I exited the bathroom, dressed in uniform, and went downstairs to see what was going on. The other three were already there.

"Made you breakfast, sweet stuff!" Tag said, shoving some toast with honey and a big glass of apple juice in my direction.

"Because you go to SO much more effort than I do." I responded, poking my tongue out at him.

"Good point, Kim." said Ret. "Since it takes you no effort to make something, can you make me some breakfast, then?"

"You've already eaten!" Kess said.

"Didn't stop him last night, he saw what I made Tag and wanted more." I added.

"And you haven't even gone for your run this morning!" Kess added.

"Hold on, hold on, the nanites will just increase my metabolism, no extra fat on this supreme body!" Ret defended himself.

"Yes, but that doesn't help muscle mass, and I do so love your muscles." Kess said. "There'll be something in it for you tonight if you have a proper run now." she winked at him.

"Doesn't Tag get forced to go for a run?" Ret asked in mock outrage.

"He's already exercised enough this morning." Kess laughed, and Tag and I gave it away with a slight blush from both of us.

"You cant do that!" Ret continued with his mock outrage. "Kess will have to clean the sheets and I get less nookie time!"

"Idiot, you're the one who does the non-clothes washing." Kess playfully slapped him.

"Cleaned anyway." I said, waving my fingers and having a slight shower of sparks dance between them.

"Magic's so boring," Ret said, "removes all the juicy evidence so I can't collect blackmail material."

"You're into blackmail?" I asked, joining him in the mock outrage stakes.

"Sure! How else do you think I landed a girl this hot?" he said, grabbing Kess and pulling her onto his lap, and they gave each other a big kiss.

"Flattery will get you everywhere." Kess said to him, giving him one last peck before jumping off and loading the dishwasher.

"Be done in a tick." I said.

"Nah, you can just use your magic fingers." Ret smiled.

"They're reserved for Tag." I deadpanned with the "clueless bimbo" look, then pretended to look like I'd just realised something fantastic. "Oh, you mean using magic to clean them?"

Unfortunately Ret had finished eating and drinking, or it may have ended up everywhere based on the way he laughed so hard he coughed. It would have given hours of ribbing material.

I transferred the last of the toast to one hand, and used the other to carry my plate and glass into the kitchen, where Kess grabbed them and loaded them into the machine.

"Why don't you use your magic more often, you know, for mundane things?" she quietly asked me.

"I just want to be normal." I said, somewhat sadly.

"Hey cheer up, I think of you as my normal but goofy future sister in law. I don't think of you as a ship or a mage."

"Thanks, Kess." I said to her, giving her a quick hug. "You don't know how much that means to me."

"Actually, I think I do." she said somewhat cryptically, giving an odd smile.

"Right!" she said louder. "I have a shed-load of work to do today, and Ret has to go for his run, so you lot need to run off somewhere and play with your toy soldiers."

"But there's only one toy soldier I like to play with." I pouted, looking meaningfully at Tag's crotch. Kess rolled her eyes at both of us.

Tag swept me up in a hug and kissed me passionately.

<<Whoa! Big boy! Where did this come from?>>

<<Aren't you going to teleport us?>>

Yes, OK, that association was entirely my fault. I teleported us back to our stateroom on board me, and yes I know how loopy that sounds.

"A flair for the dramatic, husband-to-be?"

"Any excuse to express my love to such a wondrous lady as yourself."

"You know we have three quarters of an hour before anyone expects us."

"I do, but I also know that someone's going to turn up early to look at their equipment after having an idea overnight."

"I do so hate it when you're right like that." I pouted at him, but let humour flow across our link.

Hok turned up a few minutes later, timing it I think he started walking from his office at pretty much the exact time I teleported in. I'd have to ask him how he did that sometime. He gave the welcome news that he'd authorised combat pay for yesterday, and wanted us to try and contact Lishkoa again.

Hok and I joined again and went searching for her.

<<Hello, Lishkoa. I'm sorry if we created problems yesterday.>> Hok greeted her.

<<When I told them to expect travellers from another dimension in a flying ship, my fellow mages scoffed, so no-one believed me.>>

<<And after we showed up?>>

<<One of our scryers was convinced it was a cross between a dragon and a demon.>>

<<That's understandable, the magic involved does give off a lot of strange signatures, and she is a living creature, with a human soul bound into her.>>

<<It's alive?>>

<<Actually, I'm the soul bound into the ship.>> I jumped in.

<<Really? Why would you agree to such a thing?>>

I tried to state only the truth from a certain point of view, as Hok had.

<<I died, and there were things I had left undone. Beyond that, I'm afraid I'm a bit embarrassed.>> It would be embarrassing to admit I used to have a male body.

Hok jumped back in before any more questions were asked of me.

<<Is there any point us coming back again, or are we likely to be fired upon again?>>

<<I can't guarantee anything. You did win some credit by clearly having good offence but only using it to defend yourselves.>>

<<We had considered landing outside the mountain range. Could you get there to meet us?>>

<<I can teleport to a nearby farm.>> We got a rough image of a map, with the farm placed relative to two tunnels through the walls of the volcano.

<<Kim?>> Hok asked.

<<I have it, and have matched it up with our aerial records.>> I shared with them.

<<Around the same time as our flyover yesterday?>> Hok asked.

<<I'll be there. I'll send up an illusion of a glowing bird to show you exactly where I am.>> Lishkoa thought.

<<We can track the necklace if you still have that.>>

<<No, it's being investigated after yesterday.>>

<<Fine, we'll go with looking for the illusion then.>>

<<Be great to finally meet you in the flesh!>>

<<Yes, see you then.>>

We withdrew from the link.

"We launch in eight hours, captain." Hok said.

We had agreed to keep the cargo bay clear this time in case we had guests, so the amount of equipment was reduced, and that which remained was moved into the various barracks areas. With a bit more time on our hands, I tried to talk to as many people as possible to gain a better understanding of what they were up to, and filter the summaries back to Tag so he had some clue as well.

Today we'd be going there in two spins like our return yesterday, so they could get the cross-transition only in the other direction. Apparently my first spin yesterday, with the distance and the cross-dimension in one spin, was too complex for them to be exactly sure of what they were looking at.

We spun on schedule, and the queasier members of our crew reported it was much smoother this time as two separate spins. We came down over the horizon from our target, and flew in low to the arranged meeting spot.

As we came in I could make out a comparatively miniscule phoenix rising, with a glowing trail leading to a point on the ground. As per the plan, I cast Hok and myself down to the ground near the base of the glowing trail. Hok mad memorised my lift, as Dad had, and was to teleport back there at the first sign of trouble. Being the supposedly expendable one, which I understood intellectually but was not very happy about, I was to hang around to see if the situation was recoverable, and bug out if I deemed it wasn't.

A red-haired lady dressed in the likeness of a formal medieval gown stood before us, with a man next to her dressed on what looked like regal finery from the same period. I assumed the lady was Lishkoa, and hoping my knee-length skirt was not offensive, curtseyed to them, before approaching Lishkoa. Hok and the other gentleman eyed each other warily.

I placed my hand out in front of me, palm up but edge on to her, just below neck level, as I understood from Hok this was the formal way of requesting a mental link in their society. She mirrored the move, and our palms touched. I extended my mind to the point of the contact of our flesh, and felt the mental contact establish.

<<Greetings, Lishkoa. I am Kim, and this is Hok with me.>>

<<I thought you were the ship above us?>> Lishkoa asked in confusion.

<<This body is an avatar so I can interact with people more normally.>>

<<So you're in both places at once?>> she asked, excited now.

<<Yes, my brain resides in the ship, but my soul extends to both ship-me and human-me you see before you.>>

<<Amazing!>>

<<Who is the gentleman with you?>>

<<Oh, this is Prince Zoopeg, youngest of the King's sons.>>

<<Are you effectively acting as translator for him?>>

<<Unfortunately yes. He's not skilled enough in magic to protect his mind in a link such as this, so he may not form a link with Hok.>>

<<Thank you, I will inform Hok. Are you interested in seeing aboard my ship?>>

<<Yes, but I will ask Zoopeg.>>

We broke the link. I curtseyed to Prince Zoopeg, then turned to Hok and spoke fairly rapidly.

"This is Prince Zoopeg, youngest son of the King. He's not allowed to form a mental contact with you due to his inability to shield. I've offered a tour of our ship, which Lishkoa is currently relaying to him.

"The King is probably concerned at our combat ability after yesterday's display, so wants to send one of his sons to show he is serious and wishes to pay us full diplomatic courtesies. However, his youngest is probably the most disposable, so sending him indicates he's extremely wary." Hok commented.

"Agreed."

Lishkoa and Zoopeg were now nodding at us, although Zoopeg looked extremely worried.

"Tell Tag to land so we can board."

I brought up my report light on Tag's console, needing to do this in sequence so everyone else knew what was going on.

"Ship." he said.

"Mage Hok requests landing for diplomatic passenger pickup, sir."

"Thank you ship. Commence landing."

"Aye, sir."

I brought myself down a short distance away so I didn't squash any building or fences. I didn't land so much as hovered at ground level, and opened up a cargo bay door and extended a ramp down.

Lishkoa took my hand, more in a "holding hands" style than the formal style of before.

<<Hok and Zoopeg should walk ahead of us, and we can translate from behind.>>

I relayed this to Hok, and for the benefit of brevity I won't repeat everything translated.

"Hok, is this your ship? She's huge!"

"Actually, the ship is not mine, her captain is on board. I'm in charge of the flight, a group of three ships, but we only brought one today. Also the ship is a living ship with a human soul bound into her, with an avatar who is providing translating duties."

"You have more like this one?"

"This is actually the smallest one."

That's because the other two were traditional cargo ships. We walked up the ramp into the cargo area.

"Why is the inside empty?"

"We are a confederation of trading worlds, and trade is most important to us. Even diplomatic ships such as this one have half their internal space dedicated to cargo so they can perform trading duties. The living quarters are at the rear."

Zoopeg was following Hok to the left-hand lift, the un-patterned one, even as we continued to translate. The prince seemed to relax a little at the explanation.

"But surely you have military forces?"

"Yes, but extremely limited in number, mainly for policing actions. We have found that invasion costs more than trade, both monetarily and in lives. It's really not worth it."

He was clearly trying to wrap his head around this concept.

"But what if someone insults you?"

"If someone does something bad enough, we simply don't trade with them anymore, we basically ignore them in all ways."

"But what if they then attack?"

"We are a Confederation, each member world provides money to run the trading fleet, and a small amount of that is used to run our police forces. No one world has the strength to defeat even a small fraction of the combined police forces of all worlds, so no-one tries."

"So you have a shared military bound by treaty to defend against any nation that proves aggressive?" he asked, seeming to grasp it at last.

"Yes, exactly."

We had been walking slowly, so it was at this point we reached the lift.

"Please, come up to our meeting room."

The nerves reappeared on Zoopeg's face as the lift slid smoothly upwards, and he visibly relaxed when we made it to the main conference room. The holo at the back was playing a gentle garden scene with water flowing through some channels.

<<Yes, it's an illusion.>> I sent to Lishkoa.

From there things were reasonably straight-forward. We explained we were only a scouting team, gave them some gifts as a sign of good faith, and asked that they allow one of our diplomatic teams to negotiate to establish trade relationships. Zoopeg proved he was a prince once negotiations actually started by broadly hinting at offering the everything but promising nothing. He was actually pretty good once in his element. We agreed to return the following day to get the answer as to if they would allow a diplomatic team to approach. As a time saver we lifted off, showing them the bridge screen information on the holo wall, and then cast them down to the castle as we flew over it. We didn't get shot at this time.

We had been careful to not let them see the bridge nor the patterned lift ,as the last thing we wanted if things turned sour was for them to try teleporting in anywhere important. In fact they had seen no-one except Hok, myself, and a rating who provided drinks and biscuits. At the end we had shown them one of the double-sized staterooms, but that was as far as it went.

We spun back to base uneventfully, and we got back to Kess's place quite late. Tag had eaten dinner on the bridge while we were flying back from Rigel's spin-in point, so there was no need to feed him and we went straight to bed. because of the late hour, I let myself quietly out of bed in the morning, showered and got ready before waking him up.

<<Morning, sleepyhead, time to get up.>>

<<Well, I can't sleep now, the best pillow in the bed has mysteriously vanished.>> I knew he was referring to me.

<<Get up and get moving, I'm pretty sure your dad is downstairs.>> I'd heard three voices coming from downstairs, and was pretty sure he was one of them. Ret or Kess had changed the codes on the security system so I couldn't cheat to check any more.

<<OK, moving.>> he said, pulling himself out of bed.

<<Oh, the temptations you give to a girl.>> I said, grinning and indicating his morning woody, before quickly scurrying out of the room.

"Dad!" I said, giving him a bug hug as I walked into the kitchen.

"Hey, Kim! How's that layabout son of mine?"

"Cleaning up, he'll be down soon."

"What have you two been up to, stealing in during the middle of the night?" Ret asked.

"Probably a romantic dinner somewhere." Kess winked at me.

"I wish!" I responded.

"Secret stuff again?" Kess asked.

"Unfortunately yes." I said, then going for the redirect "What have you been up to dad?"

"I'm up to my neck in secret stuff too. I'm going to check on Jan before going back to the secret stuff, though."

"How is she?" I asked.

"We were just talking about that. The doctors say it's too early to tell, they have her under a mild tranquilliser at the moment. Physically she's fine, but mentally they think her bias has been allowed to remain for too long and it's going to be hard to work through."

There was a lull at that, although I was relaying it to Tag.

"Kim, the doctors have asked if you might be able to make yourself available as part of the healing process, but have warned it is unlikely to be pleasant."

"Sure dad, I'll do anything I can to help." I thought for a moment. "I'd like to have someone with me for support, though."

"Thanks, Kim. I don't think that will be a problem." The look of approval in trying circumstances on his face made me feel good inside that I was doing the right thing.

"Well, I'm gone, be back later." Ret left with his running gear on.

We pottered around, me mainly cooking and cleaning since I only had an orange juice. Tag came down the stairs in uniform, and I had a hot plate of breakfast ready for him just as he walked in.

"You sure you're up to helping with mum?" Tag asked. Kess was looking at us oddly.

"I think so, but I won't know until I try." I replied.

"How do you two do that?" Kess asked.

"What?" Tag said, while I simultaneously said "Sorry?"

"You" she pointed at me "had his breakfast ready at exactly the right time. You" she pointed at Tag "knew what we'd been talking about while you weren't in the room. It's spooky."

"You haven't told her yet?" Dad asked with amusement in her voice.

"Are you holding something out from me?" Kess asked, realising that there was some great secret she wasn't privy to.

"We have a psychic bond." Tag announced proudly, and I gave him a peck on the cheek. he should be rewarded for the pride he showed in our link.

"That's not normal for ship / captains, is it?" Kess asked.

"No, it's very rare." Dad said. "Reasonably common between sister ships, but very rare to the captain."

"So you two are living in each other's heads?" she asked, now curious.

"Not really," I said, "it's more like we can whisper privately to each other, very fast."

"And we can also choose to share our emotions with each other." Tag added.

"Can you share senses? 'Cause that would be wicked during, you know..."

Tag and I both visibly winced.

"Kess, you know I want to be normal. How would you feel if you sprouted one of those poles between your legs and felt you needed to shove it into anything warm?"

"Umm ... " she looked around at the two men in the room, and clearly modified what she was about to say to avoid offending them. "I don't think I'd be at all comfortable with that."

"Exactly. Trust me, we think we can do it, but it always feels very wrong when we start to try."

"But you can share how much you love each other during it, right?"

"Oh, absolutely, and it's why we're sure we want to be together forever." I said, smiling at Tag and losing myself in his warm brown eyes, as we shared with each other what we felt for each other.

"Flight control to Kim and Tag! Come in, Kim andTag!" Kess said.

"Sorry Kess." we said in stereo, both blushing slightly as we broke our gaze to look at her.

Dad was smirking. "That's why I let her call me dad, with those two like that there's no chance they won't get married the second they can."

Kess grabbed Tag and I in a big hug.

"I'm really happy for you both." she said. "Tag, you deserve some happiness." She broke the hug and backed off, and I could tell some kind of joke was coming.

"Kim, you seem like a kind and intelligent girl. Whatever possessed you to get engaged to my brother?"

"I was secretly brainwashed by his evil sister as part of one of her nefarious schemes." I smiled back at her.

"Touché." she smiled back, and I knew everything was going to be OK.

Tag finished his breakfast while Kess, Dad, and I chatted. I cleaned up and then we teleported back to ship-me, and then walked hand-in-hand to the main base building, rather than casting since we had the time and weren't officially on duty yet.

We walked into the appointed meeting room, to see dad there with Hok.

"Where have you two been?" dad asked.

"Sir, we have another seven minutes and thirty four seconds to report." I said.

"OK, we may as well start while we wait for everyone else." Hok said. "We're hoping they will give the green light to a diplomatic visit, so today we're going to guide a diplomatic ship in a cross-spin and back again. Once we've done it a few times, we'll go and see their King and do hand-over. Before that though, we're going to have to hand over everything we know to the diplomatic team, and that includes on the Faithful, anyone involved in cross-spins needs to know what they might be up against."

The entire morning was spent in discussions with the purple-uniformed diplomatic team. reviewing all our reports, video of the various incidents, asking us why we did certain things and what we thought of their reactions, and so on until we were all thoroughly sick of it.

Then we were off to do the spins. One of the two women in the diplomatic team, a Captain Rix, took me aside.

"Kim, I understand we need to do some kind of psychic link before I can initiate a cross-spin?"

The look on my face must have given me away.

"Never met a ship who's fully paid off before?" she smirked.

"No ma'am, not that I knew of, anyway."

"That's OK, I take it as a compliment when other ships don't make me. You new?"

"Nine months, three days, ma'am."

"Can we do this transfer thing now?"

"No, ma'am, Mage Hok wants us subjected to more sensory equipment when we do it."

"Makes sense. Let's go find him then."

We did the transfer with lots of machines and mages watching us.

"Intriguing." Hok said on reviewing the first notes from the mages. "It seems there was some kind of flare of demonic energy between you two during the transfer."

"That makes sense, since the only things we know that can cross dimensions are demons, and we're both part demon." Rix said.

I was immediately puzzled.

"Mage Hok?" I asked.

"Yes, Kim?"

"If we can only cross because we're part demon, how did the Faithful's mages do it?"

"I was just wondering the same thing, Kim. My best guess would be that their spin assistance devices have a demon bound into them."

"Sir, given their complete and utter fear of demons, doesn't that seem a little unusual?"

"Yes, it doesn't make sense, does it? An interesting conundrum."

"Sir, I have a theory." one of the mages piped up.

"Yes Farley?"

"We know about demons, but we have no idea about the capacity of silver dragons. Maybe they have the same ability, and that's why the Harpagornis has an easier time of it, being able to lean on the heritage of both her DNA donors."

"Interesting theory, and worth investigating, but it still doesn't explain how the Faithful manage their spins."

"Yes sir, but we understand a silver dragon was involved in their acquisition of the ability. Is it possible they took body fluids or parts from this dragon and use it to somehow power their rigs? That might also explain our inability to pass on the casting ability, it needs some silver dragon ability to pass it on."

"Lieutenant-Commander Kim, " I was surprised at Hok's formal address, he usually seemed to avoid formalities - it certainly seemed to attract the attention of everyone around us, "remind us all what happened to the two captured ships?"

I realised he desperately wanted to be able to inspect their spin drives.

"They were towed into the sun to guard against possible problems with their nanites, sir. Their nanites were sufficiently different from ours it was difficult to determine their function, and we did lose a number of marines to nanites that disassembled still-living marines."

"You didn't try to stop them?"

"All the scientists and mages available to the base at the time concluded they had all the information they needed from the ships. The orders came from a Commodore and I was a Sub-Lieutenant at the time and not involved in the destruction, sir."

"And why do you think the Commodore made that decision, Lieutenant-Commander?"

"Because it is standard operating procedure to destroy potentially dangerous uncontrolled nanites, sir?"

I was starting to get the feeling this performance was not to dress me down, but because he was working up to some point for everyone else's benefit.

"And is there any way we can obtain more of these ships for study, Lieutenant-Commander?"

"Maybe, sir. The answer should be no, because we warned them off saying we'd leave them alone if they left us alone, and we're not in a position to start a war against them, sir."

"Maybe, Lieutenant-Commander?" he asked, still on his high horse but cresting.

"There might be another vector, but it is classified, sir."

"And unlikely to bear fruit anytime soon, Lieutenant-Commander?"

"Yes, sir."

"So we're on the verge of discovering something really important, and because standard operating procedure says to destroy rather than contain, we can't get any further at present?"

"That would appear to be the case, sir."

"Right!" and now he seemed to be addressing everyone else. "That's why I've been saying for years that SOP should be changed. They could have been ordered to tow it into the moon's high orbit and leave it there, which would have neutralised the nanite threat."

He paused, surveying everyone again.

"Right, back to work, everyone. You two," he indicated RIx and myself, "in my office now."

We walked to his office wondering what was going on.

[[Nicely handled.]] RIx sent to me on ship-to-ship messaging.

[[If I knew what he was winding up for, I might have helped him out by answering differently. Still, we don't know if the ship had some kind of transponder the Faithful could have used to track it, and we don't know if some backup system could have brought the nanites back on-line to repair the ship. Parking it in high orbit and leaving it unmonitored would still have been risky.]]

[[True. He's probably just sore he wasn't brought in for the original investigation.]]

"Right, " he said as I closed the door behind us, "sorry about ambushing you in there, Lieutenant-Commander, but I needed you to be honest. This isn't the first time we've lost valuable research material because of that particular piece of procedure."

"Yes, sir." I said, still not particularly happy about it.

"Now, in there you said 'Maybe'. What was that all about?"

"You'd be better off talking to Investigative Mage Ray, sir. He suspects there's still a Faithful operative active in our dimension. If such a person exists, they may have some method of getting home. If we can get hold of that, or trigger a rescue by the Faithful, I'm sure we can get away with doing what we want to their tech if it's in our dimension, sir."

"There's a lot of 'ifs' in that sentence, Kim." I relaxed a bit at his shift from my rank to my name.

"True, sir. I just wanted to let you know the chance of getting some information was not zero."

"Rix, what do you think?" Hok asked.

"We don't know if some backup system would have re-enabled the nanites, and we don't know if some kind of tracking device was still on the ship. It would have been risky to leave it anywhere. I think the decision to destroy was the right one, the mistake was made earlier when they should have brought in a specialist team to deal with the analysis for something that important, not just use whoever they had on hand."

Hok looked slightly surprised she had disagreed with him.

"You're probably correct, Rix." he said grudgingly, then paused as if in thought. "Kim, how's the repeatable calculation going?"

Normally when calculating a spin you calculated just for the current factors. With a bit of work you could create a "repeatable calculation" from a unique spot to another unique spot. One still had to make adjustments for the time, as all the celestial bodies moved around, so the trick was to recalculate for different future times and then include some interpolation so the current time could be plugged in an a spin calculation for "right now" would drop out. There was also some adjustment for size and shape of the ship spinning. It's what I had done back at Vechog when we were doing our drop and run of the prisoners.

"Done, sir. I've finished two cross-spin calculations that should be smooth for six months and rough for two years, one for each direction. I wouldn't use them after that."

"OK, file them on the local server. Rix, grab the data from there. Kim, let your captain know we'll be heading off soon, we can do the initial landing and then we'll leave the rest to the diplomatic team."

"Aye, sir."

"Also Kim, make sure to allow Rix to get your casting trick before you go, she's agreed to the transaction."

"Transaction, sir?"

"Ah right, no-one's told you yet?"

I shook my head.

"Well, you seem to have the unique ability to teach mages and ships how to do this casting trick. We're a trade confederation with powers to control a desired monopoly."

I saw where this was going.

"So the Confederation has set a price for me to teach it to others?"

"Exactly. You get half, the rest goes into registration and licensing who will handle the applications for you. To prevent the monopoly provider from being swamped, it's initially restricted to those above a certain rank or those with approved ConFed priority, but you won't have to worry about that, R and L will handle it for you."

He typed something on his desk's keyboard, and I received an email from registration and licensing with all the details. My cut was about the same as a week's worth freight hauling, or a day of combat pay. Hopefully I'd get swamped with requests and I could pay myself off faster.

"Sir, what about those I have already taught?"

"Is that just your ship-mates and the two testers here?"

I nodded.

"They were all paid by ConFed to test the process, so they're excluded as part of the proving process. Send a message to R and L anyway to make sure it's all entered into databases."

"Right you are, sir." I paused. "What about cross-spinning?"

"Same deal in theory, although currently it's declared a strategic ability and no-one is allowed to apply for it. ConFed can still direct you to do it, and in a move I'm not sure is entirely legal, the price is set at one credit while it remains declared as strategic. The flip side of that is you need to be on 'special secondment to the Admiralty' status and pay for them to so direct you, so it won't be a complete loss."

"I'm betting you'll be paid off in fifteen years." Rix said, smiling.

"Don't you believe it, they made us force grow and made us pay for it. More like thirty."

"Still, that's better than the two hundred year average."

"Yes, really it is fantastic, I wasn't looking forward to making my fiancé wait that long."

"You're engaged? Of course you are!" she said, looking at my ring. "Congratulations! That hunky captain I saw before?"

"The one and the same!"

"Ladies," Hok interrupted, "I'm due to leave here in twenty minutes, and I have a fair bit to do before then. Would you mind doing this somewhere else?"

"Aye, sir!" I responded as for a formal acknowledgement of an order even though he phrased it as a request, and the two of us left for a casual stroll down to our respective ships. Halfway there registration and licensing sent me another message, authorising me to teach casting to Captain Rix Phaistos.

"I just got authorisation to teach you casting, shall we do it now?"

"Might as well." Rix replied.

We linked hands and I spent thirty seconds mentally describing the procedure and pushing the pearl of knowledge that seemed to activate the ability.

A cargo canister appeared next to me, a few millimetres above the dock, and made a empty clanging sound as it settled.

"That's really neat, thank you!" Her good attitude was infectious. "I can think of a huge number of pranks to do with this. Sorry, I have to go!"

She winked out, and I could feel the traces of the spin and knew she'd gone to her bridge.

I sent a message back to R and L confirming completion of the training. It was only a few moments before they confirmed she had agreed and my ship debt reduced by a small amount - small, but if this happened frequently enough, it would make a big difference.

I spun back to my bridge.

<<Nudge me.>>

"Ship?" Tag asked.

"Confidential information to relay, captain."

<<Why don't you just tell me mentally?>>

<<I need to show you.>>

"Thank you, ship. My stateroom."

We walked in, and I brought up the various messages from registration and licensing on screen to show him.

"Honey, that's fantastic!" he said, and I bounced excitedly into his arms.

"The only ship I've taught under the new arrangement is paid off, and thinks with this I can be in thirty years!"

"That still seems too long for an engagement." Tag said, somewhat downcast as he released me.

"It's a whole lot better than another two hundred years, when you've doubled your age."

"You know I was expecting to only wait a year or two when I proposed, right?"

"Don't complain to me. You also thought you were giving up your dream of being a ship's captain. Now you get that with " and I rubbed my hands up my sides " added bonuses."

He laughed.

"Not wrong there! And how I love your added bonuses." his hands caressed the underside of my breasts.

"Down, tiger." I said. "We still have a mission and hand-over to do, we're due to launch soon."

"Always the spoilsport."

"But you know I'll make it up to you later." I winked, opening the door and moving back out to the bridge. Tag stayed behind to have a proper read of the documents.

In her own body, a ship effectively gains half a rank, so I outranked and could order around everyone from a Lieutenant-Commander down. However, today's tactical officer was a Commander, so she outranked me. As such, I silently sat down in my chair, the only one without a console, next to the captain's chair.

Tag came back in a few minutes later.

"Captain on the bridge!" I announced through a speaker rather than in person, so the behaviour would be the same when my human body wasn't there.

"As you were." Tag said.

It was eleven minutes later when I raised a report light.

"Ship?" Tag asked.

"Mage Hok has just teleported into the arrival lift."

"Guide him to the bridge, thank you ship."

"Aye, sir."

"We're all on the bridge." I relayed to Hok. Well, in fact I'd already said it in anticipation of Tag's order.

"Be right there, Kim."

[[Rix, we have Hok on board, are you ready?]] I messaged the diplomatic ship.

[[No, my group is walking from the meeting he just left.]] she messaged back.

<<Tag, the diplomatic group are walking from the meeting Hok just left, so they'll be a few more minutes until they reach the Kutnarhaa.>> I sent to my partner.

Hok had the bag he always carried with a spare change of clothes in case we got stuck somewhere, so clearly he thought it possible we'd have to stay longer than planned. He walked into the bridge. "Captain." he nodded in Tag's direction, as he placed the bag against the wall near the door.

"Mage Hok," Tag replied, nodding back. "The diplomatic team is proceeding to their ship in a more sedate fashion, they'll be a few minutes."

"No need to wait, captain." he responded.

Flight control liked separation, so they'd probably prefer us to lift off first.

"Ship, request clearance."

I'd already filed a flight plan and had it approved, so it was a simple matter of requesting a window.

"Clearance granted for departure in thirty seconds, captain."

"Proceed, ship."

"Aye, sir."

So we lifted off, made it out of the atmosphere, and spun to the cross-spin point. A few minutes later the Kutnarhaa spun in, only a few second's travel out of position, and moved into the correct spin position.

[[Ready for cross-spin?]] I messaged Rix.

[[Ready as I'll ever be. You'll be right behind me?]]

[[About a second, just long enough to check our out-spin signature.]]

I raised my report light.

"Ship?" Tag asked.

"Kutnarhaa reports ready to spin, requesting that we lock in our spin a second behind after scanning, sir."

"Proceed."

"Aye, sir."

[[Confirmed, give me your countdown.]]

There was a pause before I got the next message.

[[Spinning in three ...]] RIx said.

"Spinning in ..." I said on board.

[[two ...]]

"Three"

[[one ...]]

"Two"

[[spin!]] arrived and she was gone within a hundredth of a second.

"One" and I checked her out-spin signature, it looked like it went as planned.

"Spin!" I announced, and there we were, near the Kutnarhaa.

"Ship, proceed to landing point on planned approach."

"Aye, sir."

"Tactical, keep an eye out."

"Aye, sir." the Commander responded. She'd been picked for this mission as one of the best at spotting threats from low-tech, high magic worlds.

We landed as before, and got out to find only Lishkoa and the farmers there. I cast out, and raised my hand in their formal request for mental contact.

<<Greetings, Lishkoa.>> I said.

<<Greetings, Kim.>> she responded. <<The king has agreed to meet with your diplomatic team.>>

<<That's good because they were impatient and came with us, they're waiting overhead in their own ship.>>

<<I must relay this news.>> she said, breaking contact.

She sat down, careful not to crush her skirts, and closed her eyes, and appeared to go into some kind of trace. After a minute she broke out of the trance, and stood up again, bringing her palm up. We re-initiated contact.

<<This is not entirely unexpected, but we assumed that you would bring the diplomatic team in your ship.>>

<<I have duties elsewhere, and they didn't want to rush things.>>

<<Anyway, the chancellor has asked if your other ship can set down in the water immediately to the south of the castle?>>

My reply went not to her, but to Rix via ship-to-ship message.

[[Rix, they want you to land in the sea immediately to the south of the castle.]]

[[Hold on a tick.]]

There was a pause, presumably while something was discussed on board the Kutnarhaa.

[[Be there soon. You going to stand high guard?]]

[[I'll ask.]]

I raised my report light.

"Ship?" Tag prompted me.

"The locals have requested that the Kutnarhaa land in the sea to the south of the castle. The Kutnarhaa has agreed, but ask that we stand high guard while they land, sir."

"Tell them we will. Thank you, ship."

[[Yes, we'll stand high guard.]] I sent to Rix.

<<They are on their way to land.>> I told Lishkoa.

<<Thank you, I better get back then.>> Liskhoa replied.

<<Farewell and may luck be with you, Lishkoa.>> I said.

She looked at me oddly.

<<Farewell to you too, Kim.>> she broke contact, closed her eyes to concentrate, and spun out. The signature looked like she'd gone to the castle.

I had a quick look at the farmers and then spun back to my bridge.

"Ship?" Tag asked without prompting.

"Contact complete, sir."

"Right, get us up and to a high guard position."

"Aye, sir." I said, lifting off.

If a ship is landed and loading or unloading cargo, every second can count if something nasty comes along. In areas with an element of danger, often one ship stays in the "high guard" position, directly above the first ship but just out of the atmosphere. That way, any need to fire on incoming meteor showers or similar is not hampered by atmosphere, as well as getting better deep-space sensor readings. Downwards, a good view of the surrounding area unrestricted by low-to-ground horizon issues in case of incoming dragons or other peevish fliers is obtained.

Two minutes later we were up in high guard position.

"Captain, may I have a word?" Hok asked.

"Yes, Mage Hok?"

"Are we likely to be here for a while?"

"I would assume at least an hour, until the diplomatic team feels comfortable the ballista and catapults that are now above it aren't going to be a problem."

"Would you mind if I did a quick trip down to the surface? I'd like to check something about the local sheep."

Well, the look on Tag's face was certainly one of confusion.

"In our first visits we received some very off magical readings from a number of the sheep, one of my assistants asked if I had the time if I could grab some wool samples from the normal and unusual sheep."

The tiniest hint of a smirk crept onto Tag's face.

<<The master becomes the errand boy?>> he sent to me.

<<Seems so.>> I communicated humour back.

"No problems. Would you like Kim to cast you to the surface?"

"Actually if she could come with me I'd appreciate that. Preferably to a valley or similar area without line of sight to the volcano so they don't pick up our spin signature."

<<Have a problem with that?>>

<<No, but something stinks about this.>>

<<Probably you when you make it back.>>

<<Har har.>>

"Ship, accompany Hok as directed."

"Aye, sir."

I placed hand on Hok's shoulder, and we were down on the surface. I got an instant mental flash of an explosion in the near future. I saw him pull his PDA out of his pocket, and the sense of doom increased markedly. A very quick scan using my more unusual senses indicated Hok had nothing sharp on him, nothing to cut wool off a sheep with. While a part of me was exceptionally concerned at the image of an explosion, another part of me wondered if he had left the cutting implement in the bag he had brought on board with him.

<<Panic!>> It was more the emotion than the word I sent to Tag.

Hok was punching something into his PDA, but it was facing away from me so I couldn't see it. At the same time I was scanning his bag, and found something I didn't want to find.

<<What?>> Tag replied, concerned.

I replied simultaneously in a number of forms.

<<Radiological alert, Hok's clothing bag has a low-level active nuclear source!>>
"Radiological alert, in this ship!"
[[Rix, Radiological alert, suspected nuke smuggled into me by Hok in clothing bag.]]

The Confederation, a group of independent worlds bonded together for mutual trade and defence, have a dirty little secret in how they make their trading ships - hijacking the souls of dead transgendered. Please follow one subject's rebirth into the Confederation.

Epilogue to follow.

---

I started to do a number of things simultaneously.

On board, I tried to cast the bag out myself, but a complex set of wards prevented me. I could however pick it up telekinetically, so I started to lift it into the air and into an open area away from the walls.

On the ground, I went to tackle Hok, trying to prevent him doing whatever he was doing to the PDA.

Hok saw me coming and twisted so I couldn't reach the PDA, but I knocked into his side and sent him sprawling. His face took on a look of triumphant victory as he made one last press on the PDA.

Presumably some kind of radio signal had been sent. I had the speed of light on my side, and had just under a tenth of a second to figure out what to do. I had a very bad feeling about Hok wanting to be out of the line of sight of the volcano, and therefore the Kutnarhaa inside the volcano.

I did the inverse of my casting trick, I spun two thousand kilometres away, but excluded the bag from the spin. The nuke went up six hundredths of a second later.

On my bridge, everyone heard the pop and the lower air pressure as I had excluded everything for a metre around the bag, including air, from the spin.

From the ground, there were two massive sunbursts, one just over the horizon and one a fraction of a second later lit up the sky above us. From space, the burst underneath me obscured everything else.

Since I was in contact with him, I tried to teleport Hok back to the ship, but a similar set of wards prevented it from working.

"What have you done!" I yelled at him.

His triumphant look turned to one of worry.

"You ... you're dead!" he said. Right, he knew exactly what he was doing and that it was a nuke, and expected my brain to be in little pieces right now. Out goes one theory.

"You're assuming I didn't know what you were up to, and Tag wasn't ready to toss your warded bag out an airlock as soon as we left?" I bluffed, not wanting him to know how close it was. I was also relaying this to Tag.

"How much do you know?" he asked, looking very coldly at me.

Some long standing questions of my mysterious origin all fell into place for me.

"That your cross-spinning technology was crap, and you needed to merge your silver dragon magic with demonic magic, but your home dimension had no way to do that?" I asked, and by the ashen look on his face I knew I'd struck gold.

"That you planned to blow up the vast majority of my body up there, leaving you to plunder my intact human body down here for combined dragon and demon DNA, while the diplomatic teams has been rendered unable to report back?" I guessed again, because that was the only thing that made sense.

He still seemed to be struck dumb.

"By the way, if the best you can come up with is a lame excuse like needing to cut wool, you should at least have something sharp on you."

I had intended that to be the final insult to him, but unfortunately it seemed to do the opposite. He laughed.

"So, I made one mistake at the end. I bet you figured the rest out just now?"

<<Bugger, tipped my hand.>> I thought at Tag.

<<How's he planning on getting out of this?>>

<<I bet you somehow he leaked the repeatable calculation to the Faithful, and they'll turn up very soon to rescue him.>> I realised as I thought it at Tag.

I didn't answer Hok's question, but that in itself was probably an answer.

"One thing is bothering me, though, why not just steal a sample from me?"

"You're still a babe in the woods when it comes to magic. You know, I tried to make sure that the silver dragon DNA ended up with someone from a no-magic world, to make tricking you so much easier."

<<Careful honey, if he's baiting you like that, he still thinks he can salvage something from this.>> Tag commented.

Tag was right, and I had no idea what Hok was planning and no time to figure it out. I needed to put him on ice, but how do you capture a mage? The only answer I was traditionally aware of was by knocking them out, but I suspected these hither-to unknown wards might provide an answer as well. The wards were presumably something the Faithful had stumbled across that we didn't know about.

So while he was busy gloating, I punched Hok, as hard as I could, right in the chest. Not as hard as a human would, not even as hard as my enhanced musculature and skeleton would allow. I punched as hard as I could with a massive telekinetic force behind it, so my hand actually went through his heart and shattered his spine. With my right arm embedded in his chest cavity, my left reached for the necklace under his clothes he'd never worn before and I ripped it off, before spinning to one of my medical bays.

<<In medical two, I've shattered his heart and spine.>> I thought to Tag.

<<I'd join you, but the Faithful could turn up any second.>>

"Ship, get us into firing position on the calculated spin-point."

"Aye, sir."

"Tactical, get me some options against the Faithful's ships."

Now, if this happened three days ago I'd have no idea what to do and Hok would be dead, but I only did this thanks to my recent lessons from Kart on using magic for medical uses. Understanding the problem with Jan, Kart had showed me a technique to use magic to place a body suffering trauma into a kind of suspended animation, so that no matter what the injury I could get someone to where a specialist could deal with the problem. It took a lot of power to start, the kind only ships, groups of mages, or mages over a thousand years old have access too, but once going only extremely slight top-ups are required to keep it active.

I had to extract my hand from his chest first, and a few bits came back out that I'd rather not think about. The pain and shock had caused him to pass out, so there was no problem placing him on a gurney and into suspended animation. By not causing trauma directly to the head, hopefully someone could work medical miracles on him later and we could interrogate him.

<<Be there soon, I need to wash.>>

I cast myself directly into the shower, and stripped off while starting the water. I had a bit of a cry at the betrayal, Rix's death by nuclear blast, and the personal violence I had been forced to perform.

<<You OK?>> Tag asked, concerned, clearly feeling some of my metal trauma through our link.

<<As good as can be expected under the circumstances.>> I thought.

I finished my quick shower, got dressed quickly and headed out to the bridge, taking my customary seat next to Tag.

While in the shower, tactical had suggested given their almost purely technological ships and fearsome nanites, that if a ship did turn up we should take advantage of their surprise in the fraction of a second after arrival to hit them with their own weapon, an X-ray laser to punch two holes through the hull, then form a magically enhanced electrical circuit through the holes, essentially electrocuting it from the inside. After some time of that, multiple pinpoint X-ray lasers to punch through to their fusion generator and disrupt it. Tag had ordered me to do this without delay should one of their ships arrive.

<<Tag, should I try calling mentally for help?>>

<<Who can we trust?>>

<<I was thinking of Pif and Dirk, they're still stuck on guard duty on Vechog, and can get a marine platoon on-board pretty quick.>>

<<Good idea, but word might leak from them to someone else. Don't contact unless a Faithful ship actually turns up.>>

<<OK, Tag.>>

It was another three and a bit hours before one of the boxy metallic ships spun in exactly on my calculated point.

"Firing!" I shouted, but by the time I had finished the shout the twin holes had been punched in it's hull and electricity was lancing through it. It was tough controlling that much positive charge down one path and that much negative charge down another without the two crossing before hitting the ship. After wrestling with the charges for just over three seconds, the last of the fluctuations that indicated things were shorting out faded, so I dropped the electricity and fired X-ray lasers from all five emitters as tightly focussed as I could.

The five holes punched through the hull were just over a millimetre in diameter, and all converged on where the fusion generator was located, now unregulated from the shorted out computer. It just shy of a second to get there, and if the ship wasn't already dead in space it just wouldn't have worked due to movement. Containment was lost and plasma vented through the parts of the ship closest to the fusion generator.

"Faithful ship disabled!"

<<Pif, can you get me?>>

<<Yes, but it's like there's cotton wool in the part of my mind talking with you.>> I understood what she meant of getting her reply, the intent of the mental communication was oddly muffled.

<<I'm in another dimension, Mage Hok was in league with the Faithful and tried to trigger a nuke inside me, and I've just disabled a Faithful ship. Any chance of some backup?>>

<<Wow, you don't do thing by halves, talking to Dirk now.>>

"Ship, did you get through to the Retrack?"

"Yes, co-ordinating now, sir."

"Tactical, any signs of danger?"

"Still scanning, isolated weak life signs from the left and right rear areas, sir."

<<OK, how do we get there?>>

<<Get to this location ... >> and I relayed the co-ordinates of the calculated cross-spin point << ... and let me know, we'll pop across and transmit the calculations to you.>>

<<OK, we'll grab some marines and get there. Twenty minutes to planet-fall, five to load marines, and then the best I can do is three spins. First one should be under a minute to calculate, next two will be around 10 minutes each.>>

Normally ships got a good feel for their current location by calculating various spins away to keep our minds busy, so it was usually fairly quick to spin away from somewhere you'd been for a while as you could use bits of other calculations done. Once somewhere new, you had to work up a complete set of calculations. My gift as a silver was to do this much faster than anyone else, for Pif to do it in ten minutes was a testament to our basic ship design, training from me, and her willingness to do slightly rough spins that could make people a bit sick.

<<Thanks, I'll relay.>>

I brought up my report light.

"Ship?"

"Retrack reports estimated arrival time with marines of fifty minutes, sir."

"Thank you, ship, I think we're all going to be a little nervous until then. Tactical?"

"The ship seems mostly dead, there are a few life signs from the the rear sections on the sides which escaped the electrical shocks, sir."

"Thank you tactical. Environmental?"

"The air ionised through most of the ship, and I think most died from a combination of electrical shock and fried lungs. Life support is out, but there are still a few who avoided the ionised air in the rear areas and are now in space suits, sir."

"Thank you environmental. Tactical, any sign of nanite activity?"

"None I can pick up since the fusion generator vented, but all reports are these guys are very good at this, sir."

"Conjecture, tactical?"

"It looks safe, but I wouldn't want to go over there, sir."

I think that's pretty much how we all felt.

"Thank you, tactical. We wait."

A few minutes later I heard from Jet.

<<What are you up too now?>> she asked.

<<Pif up to something?>>

<<Where are you? You're oddly muffled.>>

<<Another dimension. Sorry, I think it's classified.>>

<<Dirk's asked a platoon of marines to be ready for some unscheduled training. I asked Pif privately what was going on and she told me to ask you.>>

<<Tell Fix but no-one else, but a Faithful agent high within ConFed just nuked one of our diplomatic ships and the people they were negotiation with, and almost got away with nuking me as well.>>

<<It's an internal job?>>

<<Don't tell anyone this just yet, not even Fix, OK?>>

<<Err ... OK.>> I could sense her hesitancy.

<<Mage Hok brought on his overnight bag with a nuke inside. I confronted him and he admitted he was a Faithful agent.>>

<<Holy mother of cow!>>

<<Yes, exactly. We don't know who else was in on it, and we don't know what is bugged, so please don't go repeating it.>>

<<I copied your trick with Tag and took some of Fix's muscle fibres, I presume it's OK with him if I tell him mentally?>>

<<Fine with me.>> I thought, somewhat surprised that she'd allow that level of mental intimacy. I had time on my hands, I may as well chat for a bit. <<How's the link going for you?>>

<<I only use it when I have to. Neither of us are really comfortable with sharing thoughts. Sharing bodily fluids and a bed is fine, but we need some privacy!>>

<<Be that way, then.>> I said it with teasing humour. <<I'm happy with Tag, our link is open at least at the emotional level almost all the time.>>

<<Eww!>> She thought back at me. <<I can't bring myself to do anything but language. You sappy lovebirds!>>

Half an hour later, tactical raised a report.

"Tactical?"

"One of the space-suited individuals has moved to an airlock, I think they are manually blowing it, sir."

"Conjecture, tactical?"

"Probably decided after this time that staying there and doing nothing is a death sentence. My guess is getting out to see if any of their escape capsules is functioning, sir."

"Any chance of that, tactical?"

"There's no signs of even standby power in them, so if they are repairable it'll take enough time for us to respond, sir."

"Thank you tactical. Ship, fire on any escape pods launched in our direction."

"Aye, sir."

We were in the opposite direction to the planet, since the cross-spin solution was optimised for a ship facing the planet, and I'd stationed us behind, from the belief that primary sensor sweeps would be in front of them towards the planet to see where we were, given that both ships should be in at best molecule sized pieces.

The person inside did make it out, and went to inspect the escape capsules on that side of their craft. Apparently writing them all off, the space-suited individual went to the other side, and used a maintenance hatch to enter the rearmost escape pod on that side of the ship. The inspection had taken them around ten minutes, Pif was due in roughly ten.

Five minutes later I got the call from Pif.

<<We're here, but some of my passengers aren't happy about it.>>

<<Relaying.>> I responded, raising a report light.

"Ship?"

"The Retrack has arrived and is in our position for us to relay cross-spin co-ordinates, sir."

"Thank you ship. Tactical, what chances of that escape pod launching?"

"Only just got low power up, I think from the suit to try and kick-start the on-board electrical system. At least a minute, I think, sir."

"Thank you tactical. Environmental, do you concur?"

"Yes sir."

"Ship, cross spin, send calculation, cross-spin back, on my mark. Mark!"

Didn't give me a lot of time, but I was expecting it. I even threw in my scans of the ship so their marines could plan their attack. Back where we were three seconds later.

<<You didn't hang around, things tense over there?>> Pif asked.

<<We have a survivor trying to get an escape pod working.>>

<<Thanks, relaying. Working out the variables for your calculation, hopefully be with you in less than twenty seconds.>>

<<Thanks Pif, you're a real life saver.>>

<<Tag, Retrack here in less than twenty seconds.>>

Then they were here. After about five seconds, I felt Pif casting marines into various places on the doomed ship.

<<That was fast.>> I sent to her.

<<We had been planning assault plans based on the previous ship layouts well before you even called.>>

<<I should have realised.>> I thought back at her.

"Retrack has marines boarding the Faithful ship." Tactical called out.

I raised my report light.

"Ship?"

"Requesting permission to board the Faithful ship after it has been secured by the marines, sir."

"After a sample from their mage's spin rig, ship?"

"Yes sir."

"Permission granted."

"Aye, sir." I went to put on my space suit with the video rig embedded in the helmet.

<<Pif, I need to get onto that ship when it's secure, I have good reason to believe there's something up with their mage's spin-rig.>>

<<Do tell.>>

<<I'm pretty sure DNA matching my silver dragon DNA donor is going to turn up somewhere in it.>>

<<Oh, this is going to be good. Spill the beans.>>

<<I guessed what Hok and the Faithful were up to, and he didn't deny it. Their spin technology enhanced by this silver dragon has pluses and minuses compared to ours based on demonic magic. I was an experiment to merge the two and gain the benefits of both.>>

<<Right, so they needed our techniques of merging demon and dragon DNA to pull this off, and then when he was attempting to nuke your brain he arranged to have your human body out of range.>>

<<Yes, why is that?>>

<<Because your soul is bonded to both parts of you. If your ship body is destroyed, the soul re-centres on your human body, and since the soul provides the gateway to magic...>>

I jumped in, figuring out where this was going, disappointed with myself I hadn't figured this out myself. <<... they get a magically active vegetable they can mine for essence to power their spin drives, a regenerator who will survive forever.>>

<<Yes. Glad I'm not you, they'll probably try again. However, it makes you wonder what happened to that original silver dragon that tried to help them.>>

I shivered to think, it was probably kept brain-dead or in a coma somewhere, before realising something didn't make sense.

<<Then why did they try to get me to blow up along with everyone else when we first contacted them?>> I asked.

<<Maybe they didn't.>> Pif was obviously being smug I hadn't figured this out. <<Hok was on the base with us when we were designing ourselves.>>

<<You think he got access to the designs and figured out we wouldn't self-destruct?>>

<<Yes, but he probably thought we'd be rendered helpless by doing so.>>

<<That's an awfully big risk to take.>> I thought. <<So he faked learning about the threat to get himself put into the project, so he could deliver the silver dragon DNA and be involved in the project, biding his time until he could get me safely.>>

<<Seems the most likely sequence of events.>>

I sent the concept of swearing, without actually picking individual words.

<<Well, that's one way of avoiding being labelled unladylike for swearing, I can't repeat that to anyone!>> Pif thought, now with humour. <<Hang on.>> she then thought.

<<OK, you're clear, we've got people in the rig room expecting you.>>

<<Thanks, Pif. If you get fined for skylarking like this, I'll do my best to pay it for you.>>

<<I'll hold you to that!>>

I cast myself to the room with the rig, and saluted the marine lieutenant, who was awfully familiar as we'd trained together before.

"Ma'am." he said.

"Lieutenant, my intention is to cut the rig away and remove it to my cargo bay for later analysis, however this is your show." I said, showing deference to the person trained for this situation. "Any dangers I should be aware of?"

"No, ma'am." he said. "I take it you're responsible for disabling the nanites?"

"Yes, lieutenant, I electrified the whole ship, ionising the atmosphere, and then took out the fusion generator."

"Thanks, ma'am, no losses to those nanites this time."

"Excellent news, Lieutenant." I beamed at him. "How'd it go otherwise?" I started work on using telekinesis to detach all the bolts and connectors holding the rig in place.

"We've captured three survivors, including one trying to bring an escape pod back to life. Not even a scratch on our team. We've got one of their escape pods in case we decide to return them like before."

"I'm not sure what the brass are going to do this time, Lieutenant."

"When do we ever?" he smiled at me.

"Not wrong there." I agreed, continuing to work.

"By the way, we have someone working on getting a dump from their computer core."

Soon the rig was cut free.

"Thank you, lieutenant. I'll be spinning back to my ship with this rig."

We saluted, and then I spun back to my cargo bay with the rig. This whole sequence had been relayed back to my bridge via video.

"Ship, anything else?"

"No, sir." I responded from speakers on the bridge, while spinning my human form from the cargo bay to my stateroom to take off the suit. I did switch off the video feed before starting to disrobe.

"Ship, get me the Retrack on screen."

"Aye, sir."

"Tag!" Dirk said.

"Hi Dirk, we've got everything we need, what do you think we do from here?"

"Well, this is your mess, but I think once we've got their computer downloaded we scuttle their ship and skedaddle back to base."

"Sounds like a plan, if you can give us a copy of the computer core we'll go back to Rigel and face the music, while you get back to Vechog."

"Sounds good to me, hopefully we don't get too much stick from Fix."

"Does he know what you're doing?"

"We told him we were doing unscheduled training."

I butted in. "Jet asked me what we were up to, and I had to give her the executive summary version to stop Fix from kicking up a stink."

"I thought it was too easy." Dirk said.

"Your next supply ship two days away?" Tag asked, assuming the schedule hadn't changed. Dirk nodded. "I'd suggest keeping all info private on Vechog at least until then, or until you get direction from the Admiralty, after we get into trouble back in Rigel."

"Better you than us." he paused, looking at something off-screen. "Marines bugging out now."

[[Data transfer follows.]] Pif sent over ship-to-ship, with the dump of the computer core taking around thirty seconds after that.

<<Thanks, Pif!>> I sent back mentally with the thought of a cheery wave.

"OK, Pif tells me you have a copy of their computer core, we are out of here." Dirk said.

"Good luck and good speed, Retrack." Tag fare-welled his old friend.

"You too, Harpagornis." Dirk replied.

They spun and were gone. Now, while this was going on I'd got into my normal uniform, and had cast down to the place I'd punched Hok. I looked around for the warding necklace, and checked that without being worn it had become inert. I carefully picked it up and spun back to my stateroom, before exiting onto the bridge.

"Ship, get us out of here."

"Aye, sir."

We spun back to our dimension, unsurprisingly to find the Retrack there.

"Back to Rigel, ship."

"Aye, sir. Calculating now."

[[Here you go, Pif.]] I said, calculating her jump for her.

<<Nice and smooth! Can you do the next one as well?>>

<<Not from here, sorry, and Tag wants to get back to Rigel with all speed.>>

<<Well, you've saved me half an hour, I don't want to worry the plebs with more rough transits. Thanks!>>

<<Always, Pif.>>

Pif spun out a fraction of a second before we did.

Well, when we got back to Rigel we went to Rigel Three to visit the Admiralty. Tag had invoked a procedure that had apparently been shared with him for dealing with the suspected traitors in the Confederation. Basically it involved everyone from the rank of Vice-Admiral up being triple-checked by security and then locked in a room with a giant table shaped like the circumference of a circle, with Tag in the middle.

Tag relayed everything that had happened, then I was invited in, along with a data link to a display, to show logs of what had happened. We didn't have Hok's confession, but we did have logs of the nukes going off, including the fact one of the nukes was in Hok's bag and the strange conversation with him on the bridge. That a Faithful ship showed up also made it fairly clear Hok was in league with them.

The only "Admiral of the Fleet" present asked me for my conclusions.

"Well, sir, it seems from what I got out of Hok on the ground was that this was a plot by the Faithful to use our techniques to merge the silver dragon essence they had with demonic essence. I suspect he was the one to obtain the self-destruct codes, and he was one of two who knew our naming choices before we left for Vechog. While in mage training he certainly had access to touch all of us to obtain DNA samples. It seems likely the first attack was an effort to destroy the other ships and immobilise those of us with the new cut-outs in place, but he didn't anticipate our burning out of the chips involved. The second plan was to destroy my ship body, and use my non-sentient human body, with soul completely fled to it, to extract what they needed for their next generation of mage spin rigs, sir."

"Do you have any suggestions for follow up, Lieutenant-Commander?"

"Yes, sir. We should verify his story and see if there is something in the captured mage rig that has DNA matching mine. It does explain why I have silver dragon DNA when we have no record of any, but I don't trust anything from him now without independent verification. Speaking of which, I have Hok's body in suspended animation, it may be possible to revive him and interrogate him, sir."

"Thank you, Lieutenant-Commander. I think that will be all?" he looked around and no-one seemed to have any other ideas.

"Right, Lieutenant-Commander, you are dismissed. Captain, I have a few more questions for you." I saluted and spun out.

A few minutes later I got a thought from Tag.

<<You had to do that, didn't you?>> he mentally groaned at me. <<They're off on the security implications of your casting ability to non-memorised locations.>>

Over the next three hours until he escaped, I could feel Tag's frustration level rising. He wanted to do something, not just talk about it.

Eventually he escaped, and some marines accompanied us to get Hok's body. I needed to keep my human form with the body once out of my ship self to maintain the suspended animation field. It was late at night by now, so Tag begged off and went to bed, after wheedling out of me a promise to come wake him up. On entering surgery, I had to scrub in.

"What happened to him, log to the chest?" the surgeon asked.

"Actually I punched him." I replied. His face said further explanation was required.

"Sorry, TK-assisted punch. He'd just set off two nukes, I had to take him out quickly."

"Crap, magical TK?" he asked, and I nodded.

"Well, that makes typical trauma magic harder. You've kept him in this suspended state since then?"

"Yes, it's been nine hours."

"How many years magical medical study?"

"None, sir." By his look I was made to feel guilty. "I've been informally trained in a very limited range of medical fields via psionics."

"Right, well, can you bring just his chest cavity out of suspension a tiny bit, so we can get an artificial heart/lung machine set up while we repair the damage?"

The next two hours were an amazing learning experience for me, seeing these skilled surgeons use magic to rebuild him and scalpels to remove what they didn't want - and tongs to hold some of the rib fragments in place while they re-set them, and then re-knit the flesh around them. I was never going to look at a set of tongs holding ribs at a barbecue the same way ever again.

Eventually he left for recovery, with the drip holding a very powerful pain killer that made it difficulty for mages to concentrate enough to do pretty much any magic, especially teleportations.

"Good job for an amateur, Kim." the surgeon, Kog, said as we left surgery.

"Thank you, sir." i said, taking off my scrubs and revealing the red uniform underneath.

"Ah, a ship, I hadn't realised, although that does explain the raw power with lack of fine control." he said. "Haven't been with us long?"

"No sir, nine months, sir."

"Well, you seem to have a knack for it. Did you know we run remote learning courses for ships?"

"No sir, I'll be sure to look into it. It would make sense given my design."

"Your design, Kim?"

"One of my design goals was troop transport, sir. I thought medical support would be useful, and I took the standard barracks unit they wanted me to install and increased sensor points and added a number of low-power magical emitters, one set each for each bunk, so the barracks could become an emergency field hospital."

"Interesting, any other design additions?"

"Yes, sir, there are a number of independent barracks, each with normally open airlocks for entry, and local life support system to each barracks, so any air-borne diseases could be isolated from the general ship's community."

"Hmm, that could be useful. Do you know anything about this casting ability I've heard mentioned around recently?"

"Yes, sir." I said, not wanting to give too much away, "I was one of the first with the capability."

"Interesting. I'm about to get off-shift, how about I buy you dinner and we can talk about the potential field-hospital uses?"

"Wouldn't that be breakfast, sir?"

"All depends on your point of view, Kim. My house is actually around the other side of the planet, I just work here. Means I get the pay for the night shift while working what my family considers days."

"Very clever, sir."

"Just Kog, thanks Kim."

By the time we got to breakfast I had already paid the exorbitant fee to get access to their downloadable ship training programme. I was working through the massive amounts of information, although I realised a lot of it would be unusable without a large amount of practice.

Kog and I were talking about the issues with dedicated medical ships, namely that although exceptionally useful, the requirements for them are infrequent enough that such a ship would probably never pay itself off. Recalling the hospital ships of Earth, I was wondering if it might be possible to come up with a model where local governments paid for "hospital ships" to visit areas and deal with background demand, fixing long-term problems that could wait, so they could focus resources on acute care. He'd said it had been proposed before, but the margins were too low, combined with the un-proven model, made it too risky for anyone to want to commit a dedicated ship to it. I counter-suggested that they should try and make the medical modifications to barracks-style accommodation a standard option, then they might be able to get ships years later once out of debt to give the model a try. I also suggested maybe combining with sponsorships might make the model more attractive.

Then he got a page to come back to the hospital regarding Hok, and he invited me to come back as well. We walked in on another doctor looking at a holo overview of what appeared to be scans of a chest.

"Zul, what is it?" Kog asked.

"I was comparing a post-operative scan with the standard yearly scan to see if we missed anything." he said. "Last years scan wasn't on file, but the previous years was. Look at this rib here." he said, highlighting a rib at the lower front.

"But the timestamps..." Kog said.

"Exactly."

I was looking at it trying to figure out what it was that had them so interested, then I checked the timestamps of the two images, and it was obvious.

"So the calcification around this rib indicates previous breakage in the two year old scan, but it's not there now?" I asked. "Could it be some recent healing magic?"

"No, trauma healing magic works by forcing the body to go back to it's last healthy template, although the template can be temporarily disrupted if the damage was caused by magic, like with your punch." He looked at me, and I gave him an apologetic look, that must have been why the surgery took so long. "This was a years old injury, and would have settled into his template. Without extensive cosmetic bone work, and I see no evidence of that in his file, nor need to do it, it should still be there."

"So we're likely looking at an impostor?" I asked.

"Yes." Zul said.

"Give him a full body scan." Kog said.

"I already initiated that, it should be here soon."

When the full body scan turned up, it showed slight discontinuities in the wrist area.

"Well, that proves it." Kog said.

"Hand transplant?" I asked, almost incredulous.

"Yes, fools the scanner that does fingerprint and DNA scans. To do the DNA test it takes a single dead skin cell, which will have the DNA of the donor hand."

"So the real Hok got killed and dismembered sometime between two years ago and now?"

"Well, his last check-up was due in May last year," it was January now, "but I can't find any records from that, I suspect he dodged it somehow." said Zul.

"Right," I said, "well that explains why he didn't accompany us in mid-April when it would have made sense for him to follow me, he wouldn't have been able to avoid the check-up where we were." I was deliberately vague about where that was.

"Why would he have been following you?" Kog asked curiously.

"Sorry, I think that's classified." I thought for a moment. "You need to report these findings to the Admiralty."

"I'll write up a report ASAP." Zul said.

"Can you give me your report number so I can reference it in mine?" I asked.

"Sure, if you'll do the same for me."

"Can do, but you probably won't be able to read it."

"That's OK, it just saves time if someone with enough clearance to read both comes across my report first."

"Fair enough."

So we both filed our reports, Zul's with the raw data, and mine with my conclusions from their discoveries. Not having much else to do until someone got back to us, and with both of them now off-shift, we all made our excuses. Kog teleported home just before I did.

I stripped, had a quick shower with a shower cap, dried off and climbed into bed with Tag, who didn't wake up so much as surface just enough to put his arm around me. I snuggled into him, sharing our love at a subconscious level.

Of course I wasn't idle, I was still working my way through the medical course work. I may be able to download the raw information to my computer parts almost instantly, but that was very different from understanding, I still needed to read it all and think about it to properly comprehend the information. It was good to have a change of pace in my mental stimulation, and good that the more I learnt, the more effective I would be using my medical resources in an emergency.

I was also considering Hok's public querying of what happened to the previous ships. At one level it could have been an attempt to have another Faithful ship, should we encounter one, kept around so he could activate something on it or get access to some tech he had decided he needed, but it felt like it was more than that. I did a bit of digging, and found he'd actually published a video of it. I reviewed the video to try and get a better handle on his angle, when I noted that the quality was about one to two percent worse than I would normally expect. I did some digging, and found that the low-order bits of the colour coding looked completely random, even in areas like walls where it didn't look like they should be varying. My guess was that he had somehow coded my spin calculations and hidden it in the low-order bits of the video. If true, it meant there was another Faithful agent around somewhere, who had accessed the video, retrieved my spin calculations, and then got it to that ship that followed my spin path. I wrote up this conjecture and fired it off to the Admiralty. Since tracking down Faithful agents was explicitly part of Dad's brief and I had standing orders to tell him anything relevant that no-one had countermanded, I fired off an encrypted message to him with what had happened so far and my suspicions.

Tag started shifting around a bit, as he does shortly before he wakes. At the time I was actually wrapped in his arms, and the arm underneath me started rubbing my breast, while the upper arm started teasing the skin near my mound. Clearly he was awake, even if his eyes were still closed.

"Honey?" I asked.

"Mrfm." he mumbled back.

"If you keep that up, you're going to have to follow through."

"Mrfm." he mumbled again. Much to my satisfaction he did follow through, and it was very good.

While we were having fun cleaning each other in the shower, I filled him in on last night's events. While this happened, I got a video call from Kess.

When I answered it, it virtual mode because I didn't want Kess seeing exactly what I was cleaning at the time, it was actually Dad.

"Dad! You're back! Sorry, we're on Rigel Three, so this call is going to be slow." I said, trying to say as much as possible in one go so the round trip time didn't make the conversation painfully slow. "I hope you've read my message, it explains a lot."

"Chasing those two cargo systems contractors down was a bust, it doesn't look like they had anything to do with it. I know you've sent me a message, in fact that's why I called, but I can't open it here. I take it you've found something out?"

"That's the understatement of the week. Get somewhere you can decrypt that message now and read it, as soon as possible. It is very important."

"I haven't had breakfast yet, can I teleport to your lift in quarter of an hour?"

"Teleport to me and I'll get you breakfast." I paused, going slightly red. "Umm, that is once Tag and I are out of the shower."

<<Your dad is joining us for breakfast.>> I thought at Tag as I quickly rinsed the last of the soap off me and stepped out of the shower.

<<What about me?>> he asked, with little Tag at full attention.

<<If you're good, I'll have you for lunch.>> I grinned at him, then turned the water in the shower down until it was quite cold. Tag yelped, but it did have the desired effect of cooling his ardour.

"OK, I'll be right there." Dad said with a grin and cut the connection, as the round trip time finally caught up.

Not having much time, I used magic to dry off, and grabbed a nighty and robe so I looked at least halfway decent. He popped into the lift and I told him to come to the bridge. I was running a brush through my hair with one hand, as drying it with magic quickly always leaves it in a bit of a mess, while stepping into the kitchen and popping some toast on. As my hot taps were actually boiling when I wanted them to be, I had three steaming mugs of tea ready by the time Dad made it to the bridge.

"Through here!" I yelled from the kitchen in our apartment that was directly in front of the bridge, after opening the door of course.

He stepped into the room into the living area, with the kitchen at the other end from the door, and I closed the door behind him. He looked around a bit.

"This doesn't seem regulation." he said. "Nice, though."

"Most ships just take a standard stateroom and double size it, I modelled mine off a three bedroom apartment."

"With a proper kitchen?" he asked, as I brought his mug of tea over to him.

"Sure, I can just conjure passable food out of thin air, but I like to do it properly, even if it takes longer."

"Still trying to be normal?" he said, an I caught the serious expression on his face.

"Yes dad, I don't want the unusual to become normal for me." I said, giving him a peck on the cheek as I handed him his mug.

"What, not coffee?" he asked, looking at the mug I'd just handed him.

"I've never seen you take anything else."

"Kess can't stand the smell, so she doesn't have any at her place."

"Then come over here and I'll get you some coffee." I said. Meanwhile I quickly went on-line and purchased a license to use a conjuring template for coffee beans. I grabbed a coffee grinder from a cupboard and ground the beans while dad was watching, them stuck them in a coffee plunger and added boiling water. While waiting for the coffee to percolate I started on some bacon and eggs. Around when the toast popped up I relented and pushed the plunger down for the coffee, and served dad a coffee just as Tag walked in, all dressed in uniform.

"Oh yuck, he's got you making coffee now?" he said, wrinkling his nose.

"You only mentioned Kess didn't like the smell." I said in an accusatory tone to dad.

"He doesn't mind it, he's just winding me up." Dad said.

"Oh well, it was worth a try." Tag said. "Can I get some too?"

"Sure, do either of you want milk or sugar?"

"Both, thanks." Tag said first.

"Then make yourself useful and get some!" I said with a smile, as I shifted to buttering the toast.

"So what is so super-secret?" Dad asked, now nursing his coffee.

"Let's see, Hok was abducted sometime between May two years ago and now, probably murdered, had his hands removed and attached to an impostor working for the Faithful, who used silver dragon DNA they used to power their mage spin-rigs as the source to create my DNA, as they wanted more powerful spin-rigs and needed to merge demon and dragon DNA, which we can do but they couldn't."

I was saying this while standing over the stove, and paused to breathe and stir the scrambled eggs.

"Anyway, we think he leaked the codes to the Faithful, who staged the first attack expecting me to engage the interlocks leaving me defenceless so they could get my merged magical capabilities. We lucked out when we fried the chips, allowing us to fight back. So his second plan was to get my human body away from my ship body, set off a nuke inside my ship body, have my soul reside in my self-reliant but now vegetable human body, and mine me for whatever essence they wanted forever. We survived, but the entire diplomatic mission got done in by a second nuke meant to make sure no-one reported back before the Faithful ship arrived. With the help of Pif, Dirk, and a marine platoon, we disabled the Faithful ship when it turned up, captured three crew, stole their mage spin-rig for analysis, made it back here, got quizzed by the Admiralty all day yesterday, and then I was involved in surgery half the night to bring our fake-Hok back to the land of the living, and he is now dosed up in hospital an under guard."

I drew in another deep breath.

"Did I miss anything, honey?" I asked Tag.

"The bit where the false Hok hid your spin calculations in the low-order bits of the video he distributed, so the unknown Faithful agent could pass it to their ships?" he replied.

"Well, we think that's what happened, but we haven't proved that bit yet. How much cheese do you want in your scrambled eggs?"

"The usual, thanks. Dad will probably have the same."

"Umm - that's a lot to take in." Dad said,

"She did say it was urgent." Tag said. "You did, didn't you honey?" he asked me in mock concern, clearly teasing his dad.

"Well, that is why we wanted to fill you in straight away." I said, deliberately avoiding Tags question.

"OK, I need to know your evidence." Dad said, so over breakfast we laid it all out for him.

"Well, you need to start pulling apart that mage rig." Dad said to me.

"No fear! The propeller-heads back in the base can do that, I don't want to contaminate it if my donor DNA really is in there somewhere."

"Organise to do a run to the lab to drop it off. I'll pre-warn them of your suspicions, and get them to do the comparison tests. Then get back here as I suspect they're going to want you nearby when they are questioning Hok."

Since we were docked we'd let off our temporarily assigned bridge officers, and there was no need to pick any up for this short trip. I had contacted Registration and Licensing and told them of my availability, and due to the large number of high ranking ships here I'd actually done quite a fair bit of teaching through the night. Another day like that and I would actually have paid for the ship medical training programme.

We received the required clearance and went back to the base we'd been working from on Rigel Four. We had quite a productive morning with the egg-heads there. Recovering some deleted files from Hok's computer allowed us to confirm the spin calculations were encoded in the video as we had suspected.

Deep inside the rig in the area that acted as the interface to a mage they found a single neurone suspended in spinal fluid, the fluid being a match for my dragon DNA donor.

I also showed the mages the anti-spin ward, and determined how to extrapolate that to protect an area from unwanted inbound spins. I talked about what had happened with the nuke, and we reviewed my bridge logs, showing Hok was near the bag during all spins. We suspected he either had some way of temporarily disabling the ward in the bag, or didn't activate it until after our final spin.

While all this was going on we were officially informed Dad was taking over as the mage with the highest clearance already on the project.

Dad popped into the usual place.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Hok just died, he never fully regained consciousness." he replied, and I relayed to Tag.

"What happened?" I asked.

"His brain turned to goo, we think his nanites were set to disassemble his brain if he didn't perform some action every so often."

<<Yuck.>> Tag responded, as I had relayed that comment to him as well.

<<Yes, but I can turn yours to goo temporarily by touching a certain area.>> I mentally expressed sexual playfulness with that one.

<<Two can play at that.>>

<<Yes please, but your father is on board.>>

<<Party pooper.>>

"So what's the schedule now?"

"I need to meet with the various task heads and tell them it's situation as normal but to report to me."

"Most of them are in mage lab three on the base right now, where we're looking at the anti-spin wards." That's where my human body was. "A few of the scientific kinds are in conference room two discussing the mage spin-rig, Tag's sitting in on that one."

"Can you cast me to the lab?" he asked, and he was there straight away.

A series of meetings later, it had been determined that the original project aims of research into casting and cross-spinning were now resolved, although a new project should be initiated to further explore and map other dimensions. This project was now re-tasked with further investigating the rig to determine its limits, and also investigating the wards for potential development angles within the Confederation.

Afterwards Tag, myself, and Dad met up on my bridge to discuss things further.

"In all honesty," Dad started, "the main reason this group is being held together at this time is it's one of the few groups the Admiralty is fairly sure doesn't have a traitor." At our quizzical looks he continued. "Hok getting the spin calculation out the way he did indicates he probably didn't have someone else to pass it off to within the group, and he was being too closely watched to leave to deliver himself. The holo was viewed by far too many people, and it also went in a coded section of the info-burst updates for similar researchers, so we have no idea who the other spy is - but we know there is one, and in all likelihood not in this team."

"So where do we fit in?" Tag asked.

"Well, given Kim's ability to calculate cross-spins quickly, likely you'll eventually end up in the mapping project. I'd like to keep you around in the short term as I think Kim needs to be able to teach ships how to prevent inbound casts when she teaches them to cast, or we may end up in a situation where the Faithful find a way to teleport bombs inside our ships. We haven't seen any evidence of their ability to cast, but Hok has probably reported this ability back to them if they didn't know about it already, and given it's based on silver dragon abilities they can probably figure it out if they haven't already."

"Then back to Kess's for dinner?" Tag asked hopefully.

"We have a stop I'd like to make first, if you don't mind." Dad said. "I need to visit your mother, and would like both of you to accompany me."

I gulped, but nodded.

"How is she?" Tag asked.

"Under sedation but awake, they're doing it to dampen her emotional responses." Dad responded.

"So what do they want us for?"

"Well, given that you were the triggers of the ... umm ... event, they think they've made progress and want to see her reaction to the two of you." He paused before asking more gently "Are you OK with this?"

I'd moved closed to Tag, and taken his hand in mine. He squeezed it gently on hearing the last bit.

"We've got to do something." Tag said, looking at me as I nodded.

"Right, well then, Kim, can you cast us to the public foyer of the hospital?"

"Do you mind if I change out of uniform first?" I asked, and getting a nod I quickly went and changed into a pastel blue blouse with a black skirt that was tight around the waist, but flared to a loose flowing skirt around the thighs that was the current fashion here. I let my hair down and brushed it out, and then added a bit of casual makeup.

"Stunning, as always." Tag smiled when I emerged.

"Ready?" I asked, getting nods from both.

I had already looked up the hospital's co-ordinates and cast the three of us to an alcove of the entrance foyer. Dad led us from there to a small office and knocked on the open door.

"Ray! These are the two in question?" the man seated at the desk asked.

"Yes, Bar. This is my son, Tag, and his fiancé Kim." We all shook hands as he motioned for us to sit.

"Jan is in a delicate state at the moment, if we let her come too far off the drugs she gets alternates between rage and depression, but we also want her responsive. As she is prone to falls with the drugs, we have her in a wheelchair at present. The scenario we envisage is to be taking her to one of the many small gardens here, when Ray and Tag come up in front of her. The orderly pushing the wheelchair will stop as you greet her, giving Kim the opportunity to replace him. I want small talk only, nothing about her treatment or her problems. Once at the garden, Ray and Tag are to sit on a bench with Jan facing you, Kim to lock the wheels on the wheelchair and then join you two. If she becomes overly agitated, I want all three of you to leave together, as we don't want to reward the behaviour by letting her see either of you without Kim. Does that sound fair?"

"What happens after that?" Dad asked.

"I'll be nearby with the orderly. If we see you start to leave without her, the two of us will come in, and if necessary I will administer a sedative. I'll position myself where you three can see me from the bench. If I wave, start moving her together back to her room. I have a microphone on the wheelchair so I'll know what is going on. I want to keep it short, so expect the signal after five minutes at most."

He looked at us and we all nodded.

"Any other questions?" he asked.

"No." said Tag, while dad and I shook our heads.

"Just as a warning, we've made progress but this isn't likely to be smooth." Bar said, then picked up the phone, pressed some buttons, and said "Tan, could you please get Jan Geltone as discussed?" There was a pause before he said "Thanks." and hung up the phone.

"Right, we're on."

The hand-off went kind of smooth.

"Ray! Tag!" Jan called, seeing them in front of her.

"Hi sweetums!" Dad called back, going up to her and giving her a hug and a quick peck on the cheek, thereby causing the orderly to stop and allowing me to take over pushing duties from behind.

"What are you two doing here?" she asked.

"Just came to see how you were going." Dad replied.

I couldn't see her face, but I detected a slightly stiffening of the shoulders at this.

"Can we talk in the garden?" Dad asked, motioning us forward. He and Tag took up on either side of the wheelchair, but Dad took her hand in his.

"At least you didn't bring that harlot." Jan let slip just loud enough to not be under her breath. I could see the sides of Tag and Dad's faces, and I saw the pained look on Dad's face before he dropped his wife's hand. I wasn't happy, it was clear this leopard hadn't changed her spots.

"Jan, you know we talked about this." Dad said reproachfully, then clearly trying to change the topic, "Have you been keeping up with Yik and Nev?" That was a popular cooking show Jan apparently liked to watch.

Jan paused, still tense, and I wondered if she was going to allow herself to be redirected. It was at this point we reached the garden, and Tag waved at the door to open it and we all went through.

Jan sighed, letting out a lot of tension before saying "Yes, but it's not enough to fill the day in. I spend a lot of time napping and talking with the staff, but there's just not enough to do here."

"Can I get you any books or anything?" Tag asked, trying to be the conciliatory son. Dad had previously warned us she wasn't allowed anything electronic other than her room's holo control to avoid any further incidents.

"Yes, can you get me the book I left on my bedside table at Kess's?" she asked.

"Love, I brought that in yesterday." Dad cut in.

"Oh yes, so you did."

We were now in front of the bench, so Dad and Tag sat at opposite ends of the three-person bench while I locked the wheels. This was not going to be fun. I steeled myself and put on a happy face as I breezed around the chair and sat between the men, smoothing my skirt as I sat down.

"Oh Tag, is this your new girlfriend?" Jan asked, surprisingly happy. I glanced at Tag who looked surprised as well.

"Yes mum, but Kim's my fiancé now, remember?"

A dark look came over her face.

"No, no, you're not that thing!" she burst out. "Tag's dumped it and found a new girlfriend! I know he has, he's a good boy." She was starting to cry, and I glanced up at the doctor and was surprised to see he wasn't waving his arm yet.

"Jan, Kim is a very nice girl" I mentally thanked him for referring to me as female after Jan's use of neuter terms, "and she and Tag love each other very much."

Tag and I reflexively glanced at each other and took each other's hands.

"No, no, Tag, you can't! You can't do this to me! You can't leave me too!" Jan moaned.

I caught Dad looking in the doctor's direction as well.

"Jan, the only way Tag is leaving you is if you force him away." Dad stated.

She looked at me with venom in her eyes.

"Get out of here, slut! Leave me alone!"

Now Bar finally started waving his arm, and the three of us stood up to leave.

"No, no! Not you too! Just it!" Jan seemed frantic now.

We walked out of her line of sight in silence. She was crying inconsolably. I glanced at Dad, and saw just how much willpower it was taking for him not to run back to her. The doctor came to talk to us as the orderly started moving Jan back to her room, but thankfully the doctor guided us round the corner so there wasn't another confrontation.

"Shouldn't you be with her?" Dad asked.

"No, she needs to realise by herself that it was her actions.that forced all three of you away. Your wife has a strong will," I took that to mean stubborn, "and if I tell her something she will resist it. She needs to figure it out by herself to be capable of accepting it."

"Is that why you didn't sedate her?" Tag asked, and he nodded.

"So where from here?" Dad asked.

"We'll try again when we think she's ready, I'm afraid I can't tell you when that might be."

There was a pause while thoughts raced through all our heads.

"Right, well, if you don't need me I have other patients to attend to." Bar said, then quietly excused himself and walked off.

"Kess's place?" I asked. Dad nodded and vanished, so I grabbed Tag in one of our standard deep kisses and cast us back to my ship self and then on to Kess's house.

Ret was in the hall when we arrived, and took one look at our faces.

"Wow, rough day, huh?"

"We just saw Jan." I volunteered.

"Oh, right." he said, somewhat downcast, before yelling "Kess! The usual rabble!"

"Then get your behinds in here!" she called back joyfully from the kitchen.

Dinner was subdued, but friendly, and it certainly lifted my spirits even if I knew Kess and Ret were being a bit over cheerful.

As Kess and I were cleaning up without the men, I said "Thanks Kess, I really appreciate you making me feel welcome."

She put down the dish she was scraping food off and gave me a big hug. "You're welcome, sis." Her unconditional acceptance of me as her sister got me a bit weepy.

"So what's really bugging you?" She asked as I collected myself.

"It wasn't the 'harlot' or 'slut' lines, I was expecting that. The hatred, too. It was that she never referred to me in the feminine, always as 'it' or 'thing'."

She looked at me, and I could tell from the look in her eyes that she wanted me to be happy.

"You know what always makes me feel all girlish?" she asked, and I shook my head.

"Get your man to give you a good shagging." she smiled wickedly, grabbing my hand. "C'mon."

She led us to the entertainment room, where the men were watching the news, and she cleared her throat.

"Kim and I are going to our respective rooms, and would appreciate male company." she pronounced quite regally. I blushed quite solidly, giving anyone who was in any doubt as to what Kess meant exact information. She led me from the room, and we were giggling like a pair of schoolgirls as we were going up the stairs. I was feeling better already.

I entered our room and closed the door, and quickly stripped down and climbed into bed. Tag was in the room just as i was getting in, I would have flashed anyone else in the corridor.

"What's up?" he asked tenderly.

"Come here." I asked, patting the bed, and he came and lay down next to me, unfortunately clothed and on top of the bed. At least he put his arm around me.

"What's up, babe?" he asked again.

"Your mother called me a 'thing' and 'it'. I need to reclaim my femininity, and Kess's suggestion ... well, you know."

"But is this what you want?" he asked, stressing the "you" and in that moment I loved him all the more.

"Yes, Tag." I smiled at him, and the clothes fairly flew off. He was already quite hard, and I was already moist enough.

"Now Tag, I'm ready."

He looked askance at me.

"Please, Tag." I asked, and he slipped inside me, although a bit awkwardly. He was fantastic, however we were soon done.

"Again?" I pleaded.

"Kim, you near drained me this morning."

"How about in my butt then?" I asked. We didn't do it that often because it hurt a bit, even if it regenerated instantly. I knew I was much tighter back there and Tag really got off on it, but he didn't like the thought of hurting me.

"You sure?"

"As I could be."

"You may have to help me get it up."

"I'm sure I can." I said, reaching down to caress his manhood as I started kissing him again. Soon he had increased to half-flaccid, and I dove down under the bed to start sucking on him. While I was down there I managed to get a finger in my butt and move it in and out a bit to start the rear lubrication. Once we were both ready, I pulled my finger out and cleaned it off magically.

"Now, please." I said and rolled face down, legs spread.

"Like this, really?"

"Yes, please." I said. "You're not going to make me beg?"

"No, a lady should never beg." he said as he got up behind me. He used his hands to separate my rear cheeks further, and nestled his cock head against my quite wet rear entrance.

"Please." I moaned, pushing back against him. He applied some pressure as well, and the head slipped just into my tight rear entrance, flaring in a delicious combination of eroticism and pain. He pushed some more, and as he got further inside the lubrication made it easier for him. The stretching was still painful, but I was doing it for my captain. My other entrance was now so wet I was afraid I was going to stain the mattress.

Finally he was pressed hard up against me.

"Please lower yourself, I want to feel you against me." I requested.

I was crushed to the bed in a quite pleasant way. He brought his elbows down onto the bed to support him, and his hands brushed the sides of my breasts, causing me to squirm back into him.

"Play with them." I demanded, and he slipped his hands between my breasts and the sheet to start fiddling with my nipples. The lack of room meant it was a bit uncomfortable, so again I got that delicious mix of eroticism with pain.

"Oh, yes." I moaned. This was good. tag started moving inside me, back and forth, his shear girth stretching me. As he pulled out my regeneration kicked in, so he had some resistance when shoving himself back in. I fell into orgasm, this was fantastic.

I was lost in one continuous orgasm for ages. I found myself wishing that his cock was longer so it could ravage me better, that his hands had claws to maul my breasts better, but even as is I was proud my lord could dominate me so well. I glanced around a few times at his face, but it was difficult since I was jammed down into the bed. The rippling muscles I saw, and the indescribable look on his face, enhanced the still ongoing orgasm I was feeling. Finally, after quite some time given how I had depleted him so far that day, I felt a weak splash in my bowels. His lovely tool shrank and could not stay in my overly tight wetness, and he slipped out.

"Keep playing." I gasped out, and he flipped me over and gave me a long kiss while lying on one side of me, with one hand massaging my breasts and the other working on my ignored but literally dripping vagina and clitoris. I lovingly looked up at my lord and basked in his wonderful dominance of me as my orgasm subsided.

Without verbal or mental communication, we shifted to the other side of the bed and he spooned into my back, holding my firmly and I loved it. It wasn't until an hour later, long after he was asleep, that I realised the implications of my mental processes during our last round of sex.

Tag had been to good to me, he'd treated me all along as a lady. Sometimes he was in the dominant position during sex, sometimes I was, and sometimes we were in positions that didn't really have a dominant position. As a woman I loved this, and loved him for it, but my succubus half wasn't getting the domination it craved. This session had satisfied my lusts, but not my need for love, it had been raw sex without room for love making, and didn't fill my needs as a woman to share our love in an equal fashion.

I could see the dangers of proceeding like this. If it became normal, Tag might start treating me like that unconsciously outside the bedroom without thinking about it. I would either accept a role in what would essentially be an abusive relationship, or I would grow to resent him. I couldn't accept either of those options.

Dad's suggestion of role-playing now made a lot more sense. I could be normal most of the time, but sometimes in a distinctly different setting I could be the submissive slut my succubus half wanted to be, so as to work it out of my system. Because the event would have its own context it wasn't in danger of becoming normal. I would have to have a long chat with Tag when he got up, but also reinforce just how much I did love what he did, both then and normally. I worried I was falling into his mother's accusation of me being a slut and a harlot, but committed to myself that I was a strong woman and could beat it.

Now I just had to worry about who the Faithful were, and what they were going to try next. Not only that, but the question no-one had asked yet, who the Foe really were and what would we do if we encountered them?

The Confederation, a group of independent worlds bonded together for mutual trade and defence, have a dirty little secret in how they make their trading ships - hijacking the souls of dead transgendered. Please follow one subject's rebirth into the Confederation.

Universe is now open if anyone else wants to write in it, but for the moment if you want it to be canonical you need to run it past me because there's some bits I haven't told anyone. :-)

---

Our universe ended was with a whimper, not a bang. Those who use magic collect the ambient magical energy emitted by all living things, the same way solar panels collect light emitted from the various stars. The universe was in advanced stages of heat death, with only a few small pockets of life held together by the few remaining wisps of depleted magical energies.

I rechecked Jill's work. Her work, as always in this area, was flawless.

"Thank you, Jill. You have no idea how much this means to me." I hugged my eldest daughter.

Tag and I had named our first daughter after his dead fiancé, to honour her memory and remind those around us that ships could create life as well as end it. Much to my sorrow, Tag himself was long lost to me.

"Well, it's enlightened self-interest, I want to see my mum on the other side as well." she smiled at me, but I could sense her underlying fear.

We had no idea when we first encountered them, but the Faithful had been right about one thing, ConFed's collection method for souls used in ships had crippled them and prevented them from moving on hen dying. Methods had been put in place to correct this countless aeons ago, and I was the last of the soul cripples left alive, although countless numbers were lost, insensible and unaware in the cold soup that remained of the universe.

Jill and I had managed to scrape together enough magical energy for four uses of our joint creation. I had wanted so much to make it five, but we were suffering from diminishing returns at this point. I mourned that Red had to miss out.

"I love you so much, and I'll see you soon, but it's time for you." I told her sadly.

"I know mum." she said, and we dissolved into tears, hugging each other.

We eventually calmed our tears.

"I love you, Jill." I said.

"I love you, Mum." Jill said, and my last image of her as she disintegrated herself was a tear running down her cheek, but a smile on her face.

"I'll see you soon." I whispered to my empty living room.

I reflected on how much I had learned much over the years, combining the magical knowledge of countless dimensions, and my magical power had grown, as it does for all mages who live for so long, even if I has skipped a few aeons here and there. Our dimensions were all linked in time, all starting in parallel with identical big bangs, diverging from each other at still poorly-understood points where quantum processes differed by greater than usual amounts at different points in time. As such, they all fell into the slow but inevitable decay of heat death at the same point in their histories, so there was no point jumping from one dimension to another to escape. The only ones happy were the demons, as life ended and everything unable to move on joined them in the void. They winked out of existence happy as the magical energies waned.

Enough reflection, I spun through time. I had been calculating this series of spins for so long it came almost without thought. I still had the kernels of my four original ship mates, and used them to jump through time, dimensions, and space to the demise of the bodies used previously to the ones I had known them in.

I was there, cloaked and ethereal, as Jet's former elderly male body died of heart attack during orgasm, and I used the construct to push her soul on to the creation device in such a way that it wouldn't be crippled and would be able to move on. I was amused that he had died in his previous life much as I knew her in her next.

I repeated for Kart, and cried for the nobility of his sacrifice to save those he loved even as I pushed his soul into her new life. Two saved and able to move on.

Pif had died through friendly arrow fire in a charge on a forgotten asian battle ground, as an archer misfired and the arrow fell short into his own troops. He died from drowning in his own blood, and he too was successfully pushed.

Finally I got to my own death. Jill had made me promise on both our souls as a condition of her helping me that I would do myself, and not assist someone else with the last charge. I think she overestimates my nobility, although I would have considered something similar to save Tag or any of my children, you don't live as long as we all did without having a streak of self-preservation.

I watched the truck come down the hill towards the intersection, and I watched the car in front of my previous body's sailing through the intersection, mine close behind. A quick scan showed the driver of the truck awake, alert, and his brakes in good condition, and nothing wrong with the car. For a fraction of a second I was confused as to how I would die.

And then I realised.

I may have been shocked, but I always acted even when shocked, as I had found out over many years that hesitation always led to death or pain. I dropped pressure in the brake lines of the truck, and stalled the vehicle in front of mine. I winced as the truck sailed into the intersection and crushed my original male body inside my car, stuck behind the driver who had stalled for no good reason.

I had killed myself.

I used the last charge in the magical device to push my own soul such that I would be able to progress. Although still damaged, with willpower we would all be able to move on, and our souls would recover as time went on.

Things seemed to make so much more sense now. I had travelled through time often enough, even though the danger scared me to bits, to realise that paradoxes don't occur. The timeline is fixed as it has already happened, trying to change it in noticeable ways always ends in disaster. The only way to change something you know about is to do it in a way that won't be noticeable to your recollection. As for anything else, how do you know it didn't happen that way all long?

That said, nasty and even deadly coincidences conspire against with alarming regularity when time travelling, so one only does it when it is necessary. Still, undetectable to the sense of anyone on the planet of my birth, I hung around for some time to make sure my original family didn't suffer from my loss, making small nudges here and there, including one with a lottery ticket. I owed that much to them at least.

When I felt the time pressure was too much, I returned to the time I had left, appearing a fraction of a second after I had left.

"I'm coming, Tag." I whispered, and as a single tear rolled down my cheek, I too disintegrated myself.

THE END.

---

3rd July 4570: Initial mental interview.
9th April 4571: Focus chamber stable, human form decanted.
12th April 4571: Ship design.
13th April 4571: Ship lay-down in transport ship.
15th April 4571: Transferred to ocean of Vechog.
23rd July 4571: Promotion to Midshipman, selection of "Harpagornis" name.
1st August 4571: Meets Tag Hargel
3rd September 4571: Accepts proposal of marriage from Tag Hargel.
4th September 4571: Ship / Captain relationship formalised with Tag Hargel.
5th September 4571: Promotion to Sub-Lieutenant.
17th October 4571: Ship form decanted.
22nd October 4571: First contact with the Faithful, seven ConFed ships destroyed.
24th October 4571: Second contact with the Faithful.
26th October 4571: Returned prisoners to the Faithful.
2nd November 4571: Promotion to Lieutenant.
4th January 4572: Promotion to Lieutenant-Commander.
5th January 4572: Transfer to Rigel Three.
6th January 4572: Transfer to Rigel Four.
9th January 4572: Legal action against Harpagornis Corporation dismissed.
10th January 4572: First cross spin to the planet Bim.
12th January 4572: Escorted diplomats to Bim, nuclear attempt on Harpagornis.
13th January 4572: Entered ship/mage medical training.

The Confederation, a group of independent worlds bonded together for mutual trade and defence, have a dirty little secret in how they make their trading ships - hijacking the souls of dead transgendered. But are there other dirty secrets piled into the mess?

This one gets around to explaining the jarring sex scene in the first chapter of book one, and sets up the question - who really are the bad guys?

---

For a ship who is an active member of a trade confederation, I'd done an awfully good job of avoiding carrying any cargo. We'd done a quick run around of a number of secure locations for me to teach people my new tricks, before returning to the moon system of the Rigel gas giant to pick up some supplies first from Rigel Seven - finally I had a cargo run! From there it was picking up a load of new ships-to-be, human bodies and their focus champers from yet another highly classified world. Now we were once again at Vechog, the same world where my ship body had been created and I'd met Tag. The unloading of all that stuff from my cargo bay was just about finished.

"Kim?" asked the supervisor, someone I knew vaguely from my time here before.

"Yes Kad?"

"One of these is marked for you."

"Really?" I said as I was scanning it. It was, but I hadn't noticed it before - it must have been under something else. "Oh, OK, just leave it."

Soon they were all clear, and Tag returned from filling out paperwork. He looked quizzically on seeing me absently running my hand over the packaging label on the one remaining crate.

"They missed one?" he asked.

"No, it's addressed to me, now."

"Now?"

"I'm pretty sure it wasn't when it came on board, and there's a faint magical signature on the shipping docket."

"Do you think it's dangerous?" he asked protectively.

I smiled at him. It was nice to have a hunky man worried about me.

"No, I've scanned it. Inside is a block of wood with "Open in private" carved into it, and paper. Nothing magically active, no nanites, nothing."

"So what are we waiting for?"

"You too get back." I said as I snaked a tentacle from the roof to release the catches.

"Hmm." he said looking inside.

I grabbed the papers. There were three envelopes, labelled "Read first", a much thicker one labelled "Read second", and unsurprisingly "Read last".

"What are those strange markings?" Tag asked, pointing at the wooden block.

Oh dear, how had I not noticed that before? The carving of "Open in private" was written in English.

"Written in my previous bodies native language." I said, now becoming quite concerned.

"Have you ever used that here?"

"No." I replied.

"So it's not something someone's figured out from hints you've dropped?"

"Possibly. The Harpagornis name is probably unique to my original dimension, so if someone had access to records of various dimensions they might be able to figure it out." I said, now quite worried with visions of Faithful plots running through my head, or maybe someone locally who had managed to read my mind at some point?

"So, what's in the envelopes?" Tag asked.

"Pardon?" I asked. See, I didn't say "What?", or at least Basic's equivalent. Don't laugh, but I was trying to be more lady-like.

"If I know you, you're calculating fifteen different nefarious ways the Faithful could have pulled that off."

"I'm not that paranoid, am I?"

"Not when we both know they really are out to get you. But if you think it's safe, if it really is a plot, it's probably head games and we'll need to open the envelopes to play this out."

I sighed. Tag was right, even if I wasn't looking forward to head games. Anyway, there could be a completely innocent explanation for it. No, not even I was buying that.

They at least were labelled in Basic, and only the first was unsealed, so I pulled out the single piece of paper inside.

Dear Kim,
please keep this in confidence at least until you have finished reading it. Make your own decisions from there, but I would appreciate it if all original materials were destroyed, it might help protect my sources. Apologies that I must remain anonymous for now.

I handed the paper to Tag, before ripping open the second envelope and pulling out the papers inside.

To whom it may concern.
If you are reading this, you must have taken over control of one of the ship focus chamber facilities. You've probably worked most of this out by now, but since there is a lot of misdirection to prevent people from putting it all together, here is the truth of what you need to know.
Ships are our greatest strength, but here we must be mindful that we are combining a lot of potentially dangerous powers and inclinations into individuals. No matter how much the law of averages holds, we must remain mindful of those outside the averages that could cause shocks to our economic system.
It's well documented, even if unofficially, that ships include succubus DNA to control the ships sexually, but there's more to it than that. As well as succubus DNA, we have tentacle demon DNA for loading assistance, and for that we use a servitor tentacle demon, naturally submissive. To manage the human/ship separation, there's a small amount of insect demon DNA to lean on the demonic insect hive mind's ability to have a single soul and intellect across multiple bodies. Confirmed captains have additional nanites added that emit compatible pheromones to subtly influence the ship into at regarding positively any suggestions made (see on-site secure document 4ffda9a153db for more details).
Then we get to the dragons, known universally for pride and hoarding. During mental conditioning prior to awakening (see e787d3e01ae2), ships are subtly influenced to interpret their hoarding instinct towards our standard currency. Putting them into debt triggers both reflexes, to try and do they best they can do to get out of debt honourably. By the time they have paid off their debt, they have been conditioned for years to work within our system to gain the currency they wish to hoard, and so will continue to work with our commercial system, if not directly for us.
Although in 98.5% of cases we are aware of the dragon's colour from DNA matching with previous results, we pretend to not know as the guesswork helps give the ships a sense of uniqueness, feeding their pride and allowing us to leverage that. Any found to have orange dragon sources should be immediately terminated, as with their additional mental powers they are highly likely to either throw off the conditioning and/or figure out what we are doing to them. Those that we miss before leaving facilities are allowed to mature but are watched very closely, as too many accidents in less secure ship growth facilities would likely be noticed and various ethical groups and the senate would be likely to involve themselves to the detriment of the programme. Better to perpetuate the official myth that oranges are rare, and the restricted story that oranges don't integrate well with demons and the DNA merge is usually rejected before a soul is introduced to the proto-neurons. See d345598070dd for historical problems with oranges.
As well as the mental conditioning of ships while their brain matter is forming in their focus chambers and integrating with their integrated computer systems, a tests of conditioning integration are conducted immediately afterwards. Male soldiers are stationed outside the door of a ship once awake, orally given a dose of the pheromone such that it exudes from their skin. The amount extruded is orders of magnitudes higher than a captain emits, but it's there as a check. Such a high dose should trigger the insect demon conditioning, in turn triggering the other demon desires of submission and lust. If these are not triggered (around 1.2% of the time) a similarly-dosed female is presented. If this still does not illicit the desired reaction (around 47% of the time) the chances this ship will go rogue are unacceptably high and the subject immediately terminated. Afterwards an undosed superior officer of the same gender as the one eliciting the first reaction will make a sexual offer. Those that accept this offer (around 3.2%) are likely to end up too sexually demanding and are also terminated. Further details in 6f28a474bfe8. Note that conditioning is never placed in the computer sections as this is too easily found via self-audit and may promote feelings of distrust.
Selection is supremely important, and not just for ships. For captains, we want someone of above average intelligence, but not genius level as they are harder to predict and manipulate. Fit, healthy and with a bare minimum of thirty (preferably 100+) years of fertility in front of them (for males) or with a proven record of lesbian dominance (for females) to be able to keep up sexually with the ship is an absolute requirement. Most importantly, they need to have a sense of loyalty both to the Confederation and to their families, the latter for two reasons. Those loyal to their families are more likely to engage in a bond the ship instinctively knows is real, and so is more likely to trust. If things go really bad, family members can then become leverage against the captain, and therefore indirectly the ship. Conditioning of captains is prohibited as it's too likely to be picked up by either the ship thereby harming the relationship or relatives who may ask awkward questions that are hard to squash given the level of loyalty required usually is only found in those whose families benefit greatly from the Confederation, and so may have some pull to investigate. Please review 40bcce1aa081 (pre-qualification) and f8905777c92e (psychological evaluation) for more information on the selection process.
As I'm sure you're aware, we have fail-safe codes. Each secure manufacturing facility creates chips used in creation of ships, and every focus chamber includes chips from each facility. To avoid tampering, Nanites in the ship are programmed to start disassembly of the ship's neural networks if codes are not received from these chips. Upon receipt of digitally signed external signal to the chip, a catastrophic overload is initiated in the power storage systems. All codes are kept off-line under physical, technical, and magical security at each facility. Publicly, only the origin facility has the code for a ship, but any facility can provide the code for any ship if required. This information is only known by sector controllers with a security clearance of ultraviolet or higher. Code management procedures are documented in 3c5d26d76af6.
Lastly, the general prohibition on reprogrammable nanites holds, no matter their potential utility in controlling ships and captains. It took 1800 years to get over the second dark ages after the so-called "zombie apocalypse" when a virus invaded cerebral communication nanites. Despite the extremely low chance of this happening again, it's far too easy to obtain samples of ship flesh, frequently done in decontamination procedures and to a lesser extent in some criminal investigations. It only requires one reprogrammable nanite to be found to generate far too much interest in this programme that even we might be unable to deflect. Some current senators were involved in the last of the world sanitisations to eliminate the remainder of the infected just under 700 years ago, and they will not be brushed off. Given they would have public opinion on their side, the risk is just too great.

I'd been handing over the pages to Tag as I finished them, which was pretty quick. I didn't even know ultraviolet was a security clearance. I took a step back and thought about the consequences while he was catching up at human speed. Honestly I was feeling a bit green, a mix of anger and disgust working through me.

"If this is true..." he tailed off after finishing the last page.

"I know, I feel used too."

"Do you think they'd do that?" he asked, pointing at the bit on leverage of family members.

"Well, it all makes sense from a twisted point of view. I can see how people who think of the greater economic good without respect for ethics would come up with a plan like that."

"Yes, but still..."

"That people at the top think this changes a great many things?"

"Not wrong," Tag said, "but it does look they're actively hiding their activities from the senate. The question is how far this really does go."

"Probably not that far and compartmentalised, or something would have leaked by now." I agreed.

Tag then paused with his thinking face, and I could feel the surprise and concern coming from him. "I have a very bad feeling, and I don't know why this didn't occur to me before, but if Hok was involved at one of the original facilities and already has some codes from those he was involved in creating..."

I realised where he was going with this, and mentally slapped myself for not thinking the same thing earlier.

"... then the Faithful might try and mount an attack on one of those facilities to get the codes and disable the Confederation fleet!" I completed.

"Maybe there's protection for that sort of thing, self-destruct sequences or similar." Tag continued. "Given that they only need access to a single facility to get codes for all ships, sacrificing a single facility to protect the programme is probably acceptable to whomever wrote this."

"We won't know without access to those documents, and I can't see that happening. Just knowing those references would be impossible to explain."

"Maybe not." Tag had that evil grin growing on his face that worried me so much. "We could say when cleaning up we found a scrap that might have come from Hok with that reference number on it, but no context."

"Right, so if this is a fabrication from the Faithful to mess with us, doing so won't trigger anything. But if this is a real document, they'll believe Hok and therefore the Faithful know the protection measures." I replied.

"And take steps to address that sort of threat." Tag concluded.

"Clearly their procedures are broken because you honey, are a genius." I smiled at him, snaking my arm around his waist. I indicated the third envelope, raising an eybrow in question.

"May as well see how deep the rabbit hole goes." he replied, so I opened it.

Dear Kim,
Meet me at the corresponding location and time. If you really are a true silver, the obvious problem won't be an unassailable issue for you. Cross spinning is not a silver's most interesting talent.

After a quick check of my navigation database I could tell the location was fine, it was a completely empty area of deep space, something no-one else would stumble into. The date, however, was a week ago, long before I picked up the crate.

Whoever this was, they expected me to be able to travel in time.

Reference Material for the Confederation Universe.

Speech

"Text"	Normal speech
<<Text>>	Telepathy
[[Tex]]	Electronic messaging

Dragon Colours

Colour	Magical Speciality	Commonly...
Red	Life	Passengers, Live Cargo, Medical.
Yellow	Movement	Fast Couriers, Scouts. (aka Gold)
Orange (rare)	Mental	Distrusted, ConFed tries to avoid making them. (aka Bronze)
Green	Materials	Processing of materials in transit, Mining.
Blue	Energy	Hazardous Sites, eg. mining in extreme heat or cold. Combat.
Purple	Strength and Size	Largest ships, heavy cargo.
Silver (unique?)	Dimensional

Branch Colours
Uniforms are in colours according to a person's current branch - their branch may change several times in their career, and staff are sometimes temporarily assigned to another branch.
Ship base colours can be anything they want, although their highlights must be their dragon colours. It takes a ship up to an hour (depending on the degree of change) to change base skin colours. Colours are usually on the darker end of the scale.

Colour	Function
Blue	Merchant Navy (vast majority)
Green	Military / Police
Purple	Diplomatic / Government
Orange	Free Ship currently unattached
Red (not a ship skin colour)	Human form of ships still in debt, Civilians temporarily using military clothes

Note free ships not currently attached to Confederation tend to draw distrust - "What's their problem? Why have they chosen not to help us?"

Confederation Ranks

Officer Ranks:	Ratings Ranks, Navy:	Rating Ranks, Marine:
Admiral of the Fleet	Warrant Officer	Master Sergeant
Admiral	Chief Petty Officer	Staff Sergeant
Vice-Admiral	Petty Officer	Sergeant
Commodore	Leading Rating	Corporal
Captain	Rating	Private
Commander	Recruit	Recruit
Lieutenant-Commander
Lieutenant
Sub-Lieutenant
Midshipman

More to come, I'm just dumping stuff here for now. :-)