(BSS Oregon Trail,
Black Star Shipyards, Dimiya System)
There had been quite a crowd gathered for the official
launch of the Black Star Company’s newest ship, their first large freighter
design called the Oregon Trail.
Painted in their signature all-black look, the Oregon Trail was designed with an internal hold to carry up to 160
standard cargo containers, stacked in blocks of 16. Eighty percent of the ship
was the hold, which was generally kept in vacuum and null gravity. The reason
for that was that it helped prevent the spread of any parasites that might sneak
aboard one container from infecting the rest of the cargo. It also had the
added benefit of making it so that if there was an accident in flight, the
number of things that could go wrong went down dramatically when you didn’t
have a big tube of air with a bunch of heavy containers that had been secured
by their weight now suddenly flying around in zero g. They loaded and secured
everything in vacuum and zero g, which meant they never had to worry about what
happened if the air escaped or the gravity turned off.
The rest of the ship was primarily engineering spaces, of
course, with the massive engines that were able to send such a bulk through
space at anything other than a slow crawl, and quarters for the eight-man crew,
as well as some passengers if any cared to make the trip on a freighter. While
any passengers and crew the Oregon Trail
might take on were not going to be living in luxury, there was enough space for
them to at least have more comfort than was normal on a freighter.
Megumi knew all this, of course, because she had the job of junior
engineer on the Oregon Trail! She was
a Nomad, which is why you had a cute (in her opinion) human girl with a Japanese
name on a planet mainly inhabited by Knelfi. She’d been taking classes at the Shvehona
City College to get Engineering certifications and some skill XP, when she
found out that Black Star was going to be at the Career Fair! How cool was
that? The biggest and best company run by a Nomad in the game was hiring at her
school! She went by to check things out, and boy was she surprised! They had
gone all in on the recruitment, with four tables!
She’d just gotten her certifications, so she was super happy
to be chosen as the junior engineer for the Trail.
Not only was she going to be working for the coolest company on Dimiya, but she
was going to be able to learn in the field on one of their newest ships! How
cool was that? Super cool!
Now that the official launch was over, though, she had to
make sure everything was ready for when the ship started taking on cargo. There
was so much to do! It was too bad that she didn’t get a chance to hang out at the
party more. The owner was so dreamy, with the dark and dangerous vibe he gave
off. And his harem weren’t shy about his exploits, so the whole company knew
that he’d done a lot of ‘stamina training’. But she didn’t expect the owner to
pay attention to her, not until she did something awesome to—
Whoosh!
Hmm? Why was that hatch opening? There shouldn’t be anyone
coming in here for a while. All she was doing was tuning up the engines, after
all. Ooh, it was probably the Chief, looking to make sure she was working hard!
Well, she’d show how hard she was willing to work! She stayed bent over in the engine
space where she was working, and just called out, “Hey Chief! I’m just tuning
up these engines a bit! They were on factory standard, which is fine for new
engines, but I tweaked them a bit, and we’re going to have about five, maybe
ten percent more power over factory settings! That’ll get us a bit more speed
and turn!”
She yelped in surprise when a hand came to rest on her hip,
and she became very aware that she was only wearing a skin-tight ship-suit,
thanks to the narrow spaces she had to get into sometimes. Then a voice that
most definitely WASN’T the Chief’s came from behind her. “Oh good, I was
wondering what my cute junior engineer had gone off to do so quickly after the
ceremony.” She knew that voice, that was the owner’s voice! Oh god, and he was
touching her butt! This was like something out of one of those movies she’d
been watching with her roommate before she’d gotten the job with Black Star!
The owner chuckled softly, and a voice whispered in her head.
“Such interesting images in your head.
The one with the pretty engineer who gets taken on top of her engine is a nice
one. Would you like to make it a reality?” And his hand wasn’t rubbing her
butt any more, but going oooh! That was not her butt at all, but something much
more exciting. Oh god, the skinsuit was tight enough that it probably showed
everything to him! So embarrassing!
Megumi gulped, not daring to move, or to turn and look, and
said, “But what about your girlfriends?”
The voice returned, outside her head this time, “My pets
know that I enjoy sampling delights from all over. They accept this, because
they know that I always come back to them. Sometimes, they join in. Oh, I see
that thought excites you. Perhaps next time I’ll bring one of them with me,
hmm? For now, why don’t you come out and let me get you out of that suit, hmm?”
And then the hand groping her spanked her butt, causing her to yelp in
surprise.
Oh goodness, she couldn’t wait to tell the girls from the
dorm about this! They were going to be so jealous! Trying not to shake her hips
too obscenely, she slipped out of the engine housing, and turned to find
herself face to face with the owner of the company, her boss. And he was
smiling at her, like a wolf watching a deer.
“Good girl. Now let me see what I get to play with today. Do
a good job, and I’ll give you the ride of your life.”
Oh goodness, the girls were going to be so jealous!
(Owner’s Office, Black Star Yards, Dimiya System)
Once I’d done my part in enhancing my image of a charismatic
playboy and womanizer by giving the young engineer of the Oregon Trail a story to tell her friends (which would only help the
story now spreading about Senator Virstina), I returned to my offices at the
Yards to do a bit of paperwork that Raven shoved in front of me the moment I
got in the door. Ah well, the ‘playboy CEO’ has to actually work at the ‘CEO’
part of things as much as the fun part sometimes. Of course, this was just me passing
time until my next meeting started. This one promised to be less fun than my ‘meeting’
with the young engineer, but it needed to happen.
Right on time, Alok Paxisys walked through the doors of my
office, with Zumrora at his heels. They both looked like they’d been having more
than a few nights with little sleep. I stood and offered my hand to each of
them. “Ah, gentlemen. So good of you to come. I hope you’re both doing well?”
Zumrora laughed at that, while Paxisys just grumbled. The military
spook nudged him with an elbow, and said, “I’ve been quite well. Fortunately,
the military has a history of not playing the kind of political games that
certain Senators were up to, and backed me when I told them, politely, to go to
hell unless they had written orders when they asked for some action against Black
Star. Idiots! Poor Paxisys, however, has been running himself ragged trying to
deal with them. Haven’t you, Alok?”
Paxisys mock glared at the two of us, before saying, “Well,
I can’t say that it hasn’t been an interesting couple of months, ever since you
went and killed all those X’thari. The ‘idiots’, as Zumrora puts them, were
very upset that you halted their plans for the expansion of the Confederacy.
The potential jump of being the ones to control access to an entire arm of the
galaxy with all the potentially untapped resources was making some heads spin.”
He sighed dramatically, and continued, “To have that dream
snatched so suddenly from them by the declaration of Nuevo Edo as a free port
was a shock, make no mistake. And following on the heels of the ‘lost
opportunity’ of the Imperial Civil War, where they might have ‘liberated’ a few
worlds from the Empire if things had gone on much longer! They were positively
distraught, I assure you! Unfortunately, it would seem that their grief made
them lose track of reason, which brings us to the actions against you, and your
company.”
I smiled as I leaned back in my chair, “Then it is so very
fortunate that they managed to get caught up in an internal struggle within
their faction, yes? And even the rather nasty insurance policy one of them had
was cleanly dealt with.” I paused, and said, “And as a happy coincidence, it
seems that all of those who were pushing for actions against my company are now
indisposed, or are too weak to do anything about it, while there are a great
many other shiny objects to distract them as the press tears into the Origin
Club.”
Paxisys grunted. “And it just so happens that the only
member of the group that was supposed to be meeting at the club that night who
survived was publicly seen having an affair with the CEO of the Black Star Company,
and they were seen both entering and exiting the building, giving them solid
alibis.”
“Yes, well, when I met with Miss Virstina to see about her
positions on my company, I found that she was a lot less set on things than her
compatriots were, and was simply riding coattails to reach higher. I made
certain to test how flexible she was during our discussion, and found it quite
enjoyable. And wouldn’t you know it, but even the backlash of a tryst with a playboy
is sliding off her when there are so many other, more interesting stories
coming out right now.”
Zumrora laughed “So, now that you’ve created a bunch of
chaos, yet again, what do you have in mind for going forward?”
I looked over to Zumrora, and winked, “Don’t think I don’t
know that you’ve probably got money riding on this. Anyways, I’m going to be
doing some rebuilding, and once we get our fleet back to where it was, if not
better, I plan on doing some exploration of the Gateway network.”
Zumrora leaned forward. “The Nuevo Edoans showed you their
little ‘address book’ of Gateway Addresses?”
I smiled, and said, “Oh, yes. But exploring the Gateways isn’t
something you can do with a single ship. All our Gateways have defenses, so why
wouldn’t Gateways in unknown areas? And we know that one or more of those
Gateways must play home to the X’thari, so it isn’t something you can just run
out and send shuttles through to check things out. Even with an all-Nomad crew,
that would be very risky, since you’d be telling them where you came from.”
Zumrora nodded. “And no reason on giving the X’thari a
reason to show up any earlier than they might otherwise. Speaking of which, I
have a couple requests from the military. First, they’d like to see about
buying weapons from you, and second, they’re interested in some ‘training
exercises’.”
“Oh? Well, let’s start with the weapons. What are they
looking to buy, exactly?”
“To be frank, they want to buy those FTL weapons you have,
and the torpedoes you used at Nuevo Edo. Bombers had been thought to be a waste
of space for the last few development cycles, but you’ve shown they can be very
nasty, and an FTL weapon? Yeah, that is scary to pretty much everyone.”
“The Dragonbreath torpedoes I’d be willing to sell to the
Navy, sure, along with the Dragon Bombers. But the Starbolt is something I’d
like to keep a close leash on, for obvious reasons. Especially because it really
is just a torpedo with a hyperdrive that has had the safeguards removed. Oh,
there’s more to it than that, but that is the entire secret of how the Starbolt
works inside tarpits. Currently I have them locked down requiring effectively
the same level of command authorizations as people use for Exterminatus
weapons. The only reason they were on the Starlight
Raven for that run was because I didn’t know how much force I’d be facing,
so it was the perfect time for weapons tests.”
Zumrora sighed. “Well, that’s to be expected, but the fleet
commanders will be happy to get those bombers, even if the fighter pilots won’t
be happy about a ‘downgrade’.”
“Hah! Fighter pilots aren’t happy unless they’ve got the
fastest thing in space. That will never change. So, what about these ‘exercises’?”
“Well, they Navy has started taking possession of the
Assassins they ordered from you, and the CSN Luvon Gilrie has been commissioned and has a full crew. What they
don’t have is experience with the kind of weapons and tactics that you’ve used with
the Black Stars. The Navy wanted to know if they could put the Gilrie on detached duty to shadow one of
your fleet groups to gain some experience.”
“Well, Zumrora, send the captain to me, and if they aren’t
an asshat, I’ll allow them to join with us temporarily so they can learn a
little.”
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Be sure to read my published works!
Frozen Soul series (Sci-Fi Supervillain story):
Frozen Soul https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071R125QT
Tales of the Void Traveler https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZZ52G37
Rules-Free VRMMO Life (Dark Fantasy GameLit):
Volume 1 - Tutorial
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071VPRNDB
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rules-free-vrmmo-life-stuart-grosse/1128941349?ean=2940161995297
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0774T354X
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rules-free-vrmmo-life-omnibus-i-stuart-grosse/1128953195?ean=2940162052081
Book I - Game Start https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071LT5WGL
Omnibus I - Books 1-4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077X2KR7Y
City of Champions Online (Superhero GameLit):
Issue I - Origin Stories https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075SHXQS1
Lewd Dungeon (Dungeon Core GameLit):
Book 1 - Welcome to the Apocalypse https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BB34DHF
Omnibus 1 - Books 1-4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FBPF6HR
The Kalipshae Affair (A First Contact Short Story): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0739V6R6T
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