Lara was smiling. She was almost always smiling anyway, because the Goshians had discovered inner peace centuries earlier, but now the smile had a more amused quality to it.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What, Lara?”
“You may have met your match, Jerri. I would be careful if I were you. Kitari do not like to be tested, and Atlas is not Taylor.”
“Tell me about it,” Jerri sighed. They were both hot, but in utterly different ways. “I’m going to grab a shower. I’ll see you later.”
Jerri grabbed a shower, cursing the entire time. Taylor was easy to handle. He never really called her out on her shit thanks to their shameful secret past. But Jerri didn’t have anything on Atlas—yet. He was new to the ship and new to her. He thought he could order her around like the average ensign and that was a huge mistake. On his part.
She soaped herself aggressively, planning all the ways she could take him down a peg or two. Problem was, she didn’t know him that well. Seduction was the easiest way to fuck with a guy’s head, but Kitari males usually didn’t mate with human females. They preferred the textured cloaca of the women of their own species. Human pussy wasn’t rough enough for most of them. Kitari sex was legendarily painful. Jerri had heard if one or both partners didn’t come away with an injury that took over a month to recover from, it wasn’t even considered sex. That made Atlas intimidating on several levels.
If she’d been Captain Janus, she would have told him to get the fuck off her ship. Putting a Kitari commander on the Audacity was basically like announcing a forced retirement ahead of time. Kitari were almost never second in command, at least not for long. They were ambitious, as well as aggressive and dangerous and, according to rumor, deviant.
“He’s got no fucking right,” she grumbled to herself as she grabbed a towel from the back of her bathroom door and made vague rubbing motions over her body. These showers used vapor, not water, and the final cycle was always a swift blow dry, so the toweling process was really more for emotional purposes and habitual satisfaction than anything else.
He had every fucking right, actually, and she knew it. She just really didn’t like it. It had been a very long time since anybody called her out and demanded she behave herself. It was very galling. Jerri had settled into her groove on the ship. She liked her groove. It was comfortable, and it mostly consisted of her getting away with everything short of murder.
Dressing herself in her sleepwear, a pair of boxer shorts and an oversized t-shirt, she got into bed. If she was banned from all places where recreation might happen, then bed was her last refuge. Of course, she was also very well entertained in bed with the contents of her various screens and audio devices. But she didn’t need to try them to know they’d been deactivated. The sea of gray across her walls where the pretty red and green LEDs used to blink told her that her entertainment suite had been turned off remotely. What an absolute fucking asshole this Atlas was.
She was immediately bored with nothing to do, sitting cross-legged in bed with a scowl on her face. Even that became tedious fairly quickly. She couldn’t manage to keep it up, which was very annoying.
Technically she could have spent some time looking over the star charts for the upcoming mission, ensuring there were no likely hazards due to emerge in the next however long, plotting out potential escapes, yadda yadda, but why do that when she could watch something mindless?
Yes, her walls had been deactivated, but she had a portable pad too. Grabbing it off the in-built bedside shelf, Jerri pulled the blankets up over her head and flicked it on. It powered up immediately. A slow grin spread over her face. This was going to work. Not as well as the holobay, of course. Nothing was as fun as the holobay. Being surrounded by fantasy worlds with absolute realism was one of the best parts of serving on the Audacity.
She booted up a game that involved picking squares out of a grid of squares and determining both by luck and logic which of them contained a theoretical bomb. It didn’t sound like fun, and it wasn’t nearly as much fun as almost any other recreational activity she could think of, but it was a game that came pre-installed on the pad for cultural reasons and possibly didn’t count as entertainment. Arguably.
Fwip!
The blankets were tossed back without warning. Commander Atlas was standing in her room with his burning gaze and his overt musculature that bordered on the obscene.
“How the fuck did you get in here?” She’d argue that she’d cursed out of surprise, but she’d really cursed because she was absolutely pissed at being caught.