Have you everseena Carmidian? Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell their gender.
By sometimes, I meanalways. Unless you’re another Carmidian. I mean, they’re usually pretty good about letting someone know, but…
Did I mention I wasreallyfarking drunk at the time? Not to mention, those tentacles were…
Wow.
Because, let’s face it. I’m gay, but if I limited myself only to human males, it’d be a damned boring life. Plus, some human guys are just plain assholes. I’ve had more and better sex with non-human species over the years than with my own kind.
Except I don’t fall in love with any of them.
Or, anyone atall. Because that’d be freakingstupid.
Falling in love can break your heart.
Or worse.
Farworse.
* * * *
Finally undisturbed, I rub one out while sitting in the captain’s chair and then clean up in the bridge lav. I’m sure I’m not the first guy to rub one out—or have sex with someone else—on the bridge during a long, boring, uneventful overnight watch.
Hell, I’m sure I’m not the first guy thisweekto do that.
That’s the only good thing about boring third shifts, and the only reason I volunteered to take this one when, as the nav officer, I’m usually leading first shift.
We’re going to be docked here for at least three weeks, and likely longer, while they off-load our inbound cargo, we get a communications system overhaul and retrofit, handle some routine maintenance, and we take on supplies and our outbound load of mining ore. I don’t know where that shipment is destined yet for sure, because Maxim Colonies hasn’t told us. That’s pretty much SOP. Once we’re cleared for service again, they’ll officially assign us to an ore processor route.
We have an ether-jump drive, which is why my ass is the navigator. When I was still in primary school, my aptitude testing in math, physics, quantum theory, and spatial processing meant that I raised more than a few flags over the years.
Ingoodways. Years before I graduated from primary, when I was about eleven or twelve, I already had companies bidding for me to sign hiring contracts with them in exchange for them paying my full tuition to secondary and getting my ether-jump nav certification.
Maxim Colonies eventually won, hands-down.
I long ago served out my mandatory contract time with them. Now I’m a freelancer, but Maxim Colonies and their ships keep me happy because of my record. I’ve never lost a ship, never missed a delivery deadline.
Sure, computers can plot courses. You can’t run an ether-jump ship without an AI auto-nav system. It’s not possible. The quantum calculations to place the branes, split the dimension planes, and connect the strings to the branes are too vast and complex for a human—or any other intelligent species—to accurately perform them in the time needed to make the jump.
But you can’t rely on auto-nav for ether-jump without a set of living eyes and a bio-brain as backup, either. Radiation and gravity fields and dark-matter mass—there are more factors, but those are the top three culprits—throw off sensors. Ether-jump vesselsstillneed a living navigator analyzing the hyper-com portal buoy locations and tweaking the jump course as a result, so you don’t end up emerging from a jump in the middle of a planet’s core.
Or in the middle of a star, like one of the first test ships did.
Three hundred passengers and crew lost just because some idiotic executive was certain the tech was foolproof, and they wanted to make a dick-measuring point that the AI was solid and produced better results than a human could.
They didn’t makethatmistake twice.
Hence why geeky goobers like me—not just humans, because ether-jump navs are recruited from across many sentient species—are hired to warm the ether-jump nav chair. We pretty much get to set our own rules and routes. Plus, captains don’t dare piss us off, because we can ground their fricking ships. Well, we can lock down their ether-jump engines, which restricts them to sub-light and tachyon drives that are practically like standing still when compared to the speed of an ether-jump engine.
In fact, I’ve gotten blown by more than one captain who made the mistake of pissing me off. They usually made that mistake only once.
Who wants their ass kissed when they can get their cock sucked?
There have been a couple of captains in my history who got bent over their desks and literally reamed out by me, too, if the session on their knees wasn’t enough to teach them, or they pissed me off beyond mysick-of-their-shitpoint.
Fortunately, my current captain is a nice guy, so I haven’t had to go the behavior correction route with him. Plus, I like him. Captain Xhogrhan is a quirky fricking Shalfin who wants to make money, but not at the expense of his life, the life of his crew, or his ship.
When we first met, before I could launch into my usual spiel to lay down the law before formally accepting the offered commission, he stuck out his hand, told me he hoped I’d agree to sign on with him, and that if I did sign on with him that he’d operate on the presumption that his ship was inmyhands, and he’d stay out of my way so I could do my job.
