Chapter 12: The End of the Beginning

Almark. 14

It had been less than two days since she had been left to her task in the former maintenance bay, with almost forty designers and engineers, each of whom thought they were a better candidate for project leader. The funny part was that she didn’t feel even remotely intimidated by the crowds of people who seemed to take a form of pleasure in talking to her like she was an idiot.

Her callsign since she received her wings had been Halfpint. She was small, and she knew she was small. In terms of her ability to physically menace someone to lay down her authority, she was woefully lacking. But that had always been the case. She could argue - maybe even other people could argue - that her recent promotion to Air Marshal was simply the case of every better candidate being dead, but there were two arguments against that: First of all, wasn’t that always the case? They were at war; positions were opened up by the deaths of soldiers all the time, and they were filled by the best qualified, still-living person available. Secondly, that hadn’t been the case throughout the rest of her career, and she had risen through the ranks to flight leader through a combination of sheer determination, intelligence, and mental fortitude. Her former wing and those she had flown with in the past had all shown her the reverence and respect reserved only for those who led men in combat. All of them, every pilot and deck crew member she had ordered around, had been a bigger swinging dick than anyone in this room, and all of them had deferred to her. These fuckers wouldn’t be any different.

Right now, she was staring down a particularly irate engineer who had decided that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” he was yelling. He was one of those who thought, ‘he who shouteth loudest, winneth more arguments.’ He was an asshole. “These power levels are fifteen percent lower than the broadsword! Our fighters would never be able to keep up with them!”

“And?” she answered back calmly.

“And?” he balked at her. “And? What do you mean, And?”

“I mean that you are trying to make a point, one that I have already told you is wrong, so either you are wasting my time, you think I am not understanding your point, or you think that I am just wrong,”

“All of the above!” He almost screamed in her face.

Emylee smiled. It was one of those smiles an alligator might give a lost puppy. “What is the maximum operating speed of the XF-18 Broadsword in atmospheric flight?”

“1,628mph!” he barked defiantly, as if showing off the fact that he knew that information off the top of his head. “And with your power ratios, the maximum speed of the...”

Almark didn’t let him finish; she was in charge, and this fool would understand the gravity of that before he left the room for the day. If she had to embarrass him a little to drive that point home, so be it. “And what is the highest speed ever attained during an actual combat mission? Not the maximum speed on paper, the maximum speed that real pilots use in a real fight?”

The asshole - Johns, or Johnson, or Jameson, or some name being with a J - just blinked at her. She arched an eyebrow at him, waiting for an answer. The look on her face told the man that it wasn’t a rhetorical question. “I ... I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to tell you?”

“I...”

“1,285mph.” She cut him off again. “And I know that because I was the one who set the record. Do you know the average combat speed over the Battle of the Beach? Not even the ground support portion of the battle, but the actual dogfight.” Jack, or Jules, or whatever his name was, stuttered a bit. Emylee didn’t give him a chance to demonstrate any more of his ignorance. “It was 938 mph. Do you know why the Imperium wanted the Broadsword to be able to go 1,600mph?”

Jake, or Joe, or whatever, clenched his jaw. “Because, tactically...”

“It’s so they could say it could. That’s it. It was a publicity gimmick! Are you a publicist or just a fucking idiot!?

“But in space flight, that extra propulsion will be...”

“Completely offset by the lower mass of our design. Engine power, as you should know, is only half of the equation. More mass means bigger engines are needed; it means less maneuverability, slower acceleration times, and longer slow-down distances. The mass of our fighter is...” She arched an eyebrow at him again, waiting for him to answer.

“Lower,” he answered with a growl.

“Which means that acceleration, deceleration, and maneuverability will be better or worse compared to the Broadsword?”

“Better.”

“And if we added engines big enough to beat the Broadsword’s top speed, how would it affect that maneuverability?”

“Speed is life in aerial combat; you should know that!” He snarled at her.

“I asked you a question!”

“Fine, it will reduce acceleration!” He conceded with a growl, “But what does that matter when they are flying rings around us anyway?”

“Us?” Emylee laughed. “Are you going to be in one of these when the shit hits the fan?”

“What? No, but...”

“But nothing!” Emylee raised her voice to match his at that moment. “You are wrong; speed is not life in combat! What matters is the ability to get to that speed, then fire stably and maneuver effectively when you get there. There is no point having a ridiculously high speed when you not only won’t ever use it but it’ll also reduce your agility and stability as a gun platform on your way to getting there. The broadsword counters that with additional anti-grav engines, but those in turn add...” She waved her hand at him, gesturing for him to finish her sentence.

“Mass,” he finally said with a sighed huff.

“Which...” She rolled her hand again to keep him going. “Come on, I know you know it.”

“Alright, I get your point.”

Emylee took a breath and let it out slowly. “Look, what’s your name?”

“Kenneth.”

She blinked. She could have sworn his name started with a J, but now that she looked at him, she only had one thought. “Of course it is,” she muttered to herself. “Okay, Kenneth, I get it. You have a list of specs here, all these different things the Broadsword can do, and you want to beat them. There is nothing wrong with that. But you know how the Imperium works; everything is a pissing contest. ‘Our fighter is the fastest in the Galaxy!’ Well, cool, but no pilot in their right mind would ever take it that fast; the fighter would be useless; it can’t aim, can’t shoot, can’t turn, and can’t make a blind bit of difference to any dogfight going anything close to that speed. It’s a gimmick. I am telling you what our strike craft needs to do to be able to beat it, and that speed, coupled with a lower mass, means that it will outperform any Broadsword in any conditions.”

Kenneth nodded, his eyes dropping to the calculations on the holopad in his hand. “What else does the Broadsword overdo?”

It wasn’t a sarcastic question. It wasn’t even said in a brusque manner. His gaze was locked onto the readout as if a thought had just occurred to him. “What are you thinking?”

“The shields.”

Emylee paused. The shields were actually, in her opinion, one of the better features of the Broadsword, it was a point hammered home in spectacular fashion over the beach when she had lost them. There was nothing quite as effective at showing the value of a system as losing it, but... “Go on.”

“If lowering mass increases survivability through maneuverability, the shield generator is ... really heavy. And I think the beach has proven that relying completely on them in a dogfight is pretty fucking stupid.” He blinked and looked up at Almark, suddenly realizing how many of her friends died because of their failure. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t mean...”

“It’s fine,” Emylee held her hand up. Tactful, this man was not, but that wasn’t a crime. “Do you have any better ideas?”

“I ... think I might. Can you give me an hour?”

Almark nodded. “Works for me, let’s see what you can come up with.”

“You got it, Boss,” Kenneth said absently as he turned and headed back to his workspace. Emylee smiled to herself; it was the first time any of them had referred to her as a superior. She was about to ask if anyone else needed to show her anything, but the door to the hallways slid open, and the hulking mass of Mac stepped into the room.

She had to be honest; Mac had never made her heart skip a beat the first few times she had seen him, but to be fair, between her rescue from her downed strikecraft on the beach, the injury-induced fog of their night in the makeshift fort, and then the pain the early days of her recovery, she hadn’t ever looked at him properly ... Until she did. It wasn’t that Mac wasn’t attractive, she just had more important things on her mind. But since she had noticed him, it was all she could see. Just being in the same room as him sent a thrill down her spine. She was self-aware enough to consider the possibility that it may have been a form of hero worship, but the swooning looks on the faces of several of the other women in the room as they turned to look at the new arrival told Emylee that it wasn’t only her. She had a man who other women wanted. She had no idea why that mattered to her on such a fundamental level, but it did. The best part about it, though, was that Mac was completely oblivious to it. He simply didn’t see the way women looked at him, and - seeing them light up a little as his gaze found her in through the crowded room - he only had eyes for her.

God, that made her hot!

And she was now more than well enough to indulge the carnal need she felt every time she was with him.

She stepped away from the desk and closer to her man... her man, and linked her arm with his. “I’ll be back in an hour,” she called out to the room of engineers. “Feel free to break for lunch.” There were a few affirmative nods, but aside from the swooning women, most didn’t even look up. She let Mac turn her and lead her out of the door, then leaned up and whispered into his ear. “I want to suck your cock.”

Mac almost tripped over the deck plate as he looked down at her with wide, surprised eyes.

“I have a new office we need to christen,” she purred up at him as she guided him in the opposite direction to the elevators and down toward her new office. It was nearby, ideally placed for her role, and close to the team she was working with, so it only took a few minutes of walking to get there. Mac stayed quiet, but there was no missing the bulge in the front of his pants that shook with every heavy step he made. Emylee tried to keep her eyes ahead, but the corridors were busy, and more and more of the female crewmembers passed them by, each of them casting a lingering glance at the hunk she was with. Every new glance made her wetter, made her hotter, made her want him more and more. She could feel her cheeks flushing, she could feel her heart pounding, and she could feel her breathing getting more and more ragged. Jesus, she couldn’t remember the last time a man had made her this excited; in fact, now that she thought of it, she didn’t think a man had ever excited her this much. She felt like she was in heat.

Mac swallowed hard as Emylee stopped him outside her door, then unlinked her arms with his so she could punch the access code into the locking mechanism. The door swished open, and she stepped inside, her fingers lacing back with his to drag him in behind her. The lights were dim, but it wasn’t dark; there was more than enough illumination for Mac to be able to see the passionate fire behind her eyes. “God, I want you,” she breathed, shoving him back against the wall and crashing her lips to his. There was a hunger in her, a carnal need; he was her man, and she wanted to taste him, she wanted to pleasure him, and she wanted to swallow him ... She sank down to her knees, her eyes never leaving his, but her breathing became increasingly ragged as her fingers fumbled needily at his belt.

She loved the look on his face, the parted lips, the awed expression as his breath caught in his throat, both from the urgency of the situation and the unexpected intensity of her desires. It was clear that tonight was not going to be a simple romantic encounter. This was a fix; he was like a drug to her, and she had held herself back for too long. She wanted to be that woman, the one to totally lose herself to the ambitions of her desires. She wanted to fuck for no other reason than because she wanted to fuck. She wanted to suck his throbbing cock, and swallow his cum, just because she felt that burning need to give him pleasure, to show him how much she wanted him, to show him how fucking sexy she found him.

She had always held herself back; she used to talk - maybe even think - a big game, but she had never followed through. Well fuck that! That Emylee had died on the beach; this was the new Emylee, and she wanted to be unrestrained, free from those self-imposed shackles. She wanted to be free from antiquated ideas about demure women who needed to be led around the bedroom, free from obsolete ideas that women didn’t have sexual needs of their own. She was never going to work her way through men like a common whore, that wasn’t her, but now that she had a man she trusted completely, she wanted to give all of herself to him ... she was going to give him everything.

She deftly undid his belt and then his pants, bared skin to warm air. She looked up at him with a voracious, unapologetic hunger, her eyes full of desire and promise. With a final, hungry glance, she took him into her mouth. She took him deep! She didn’t care about the gagging, slurping noise from her throat, one that may have embarrassed her in a former life; all she cared about was the deep, throaty, guttural moan that rumbled from his chest as his head rolled back. She ran her tongue along the underside of him, tracing those veins that bulged out from his shaft. She was well enough to kneel for him, she was well enough to take him like this, but she wasn’t quite well enough for sex, not yet anyway, but she couldn’t fucking wait for the moment she could bend herself over, or spread herself open for him, or climb on top of him, and take this fucking monster inside her. He was big, he was really fucking big, Mac was a mammoth of a man, and his dick was perfectly proportionate to the rest of him. Thick, long, and powerful. There was no way on God’s green Earth she would ever be able to fit all of him into her throat, not without causing an injury to herself, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to make a damn good show of trying.

She started to bob her head, throwing her mouth as far down his length as she could, her tongue swirling and rubbing along his as she did; one hand cradled his full, heavy balls, the other one held onto his hip, using it as leverage to pull herself onto him faster and harder. She was fucking her own face onto his cock, and looking up into his eyes the entire time. This was a blowjob that porn holos were made of; this was dirty, slutty, depraved, and fucking perfect! She wanted him to remember this; she wanted his hand working up and down his whole length in the dark of night, thinking of her like this, at the times she couldn’t be there to take him, she wanted to be his fantasy come true, she wanted to be the woman who gave him new ones.

She was soaking wet; she could feel the warm dampness against her thighs as she ground her knees together against the deck plates. During the repetitive, facefucking bobs of her head, her attention had drifted inward; her gaze remained fervently lifted towards him, yet it avoided the direct plunge into his eyes. However, when she abruptly returned to the present by another deep moan from his lips, she discovered his eyes intensely fixed on her.

Yes! That is what she wanted; she wanted to see that lust on his face; she wanted him to be starstruck by her desires and her unabashed wantonness; she wanted to hear his pleasure and see his euphoria, safe in the knowledge that she was doing this to him. That he was looking down at the girl of his dreams, her mouth full of his cock, and nothing on her mind but the unabashed, unrestricted need to get him off. She pulled herself off his cock, panting under the exertions as her hand lifted from his balls to wrap around him, starting to stroke him hard. “Fuck, Mac, I love your cock, I love the taste of you on my tongue. God, I could suck you for hours. Don’t hold back, okay? I don’t need a warning, I want you to cum in my mouth.”

Mac just growled, One of his meaty hands reaching down to grab her hair, and he roughly pulled her back onto him, thrusting his cock back into her mouth. She dropped her hands, both of them, and clamped them behind the small of her back, holding her own wrists as she let him guide her up and down his cock with powerful, determined, dominant movements. Fuck, she came a little, only a small one, just from the sensation of her clit dragging against the soaked material of her panties and from the sheer eroticism of what she was doing to him. She was making him lose control; her Mac, always so reserved, always so gentle, always in such control over himself, a man capable of unspeakable violence, had always treated her like the most delicate of flowers, but now he was pulling her gagging, drooling, frothing mouth up and down his rampant cock with an animalistic intensity. She was making him do this; she was having this effect on him!

She pulled off him again and spat her throat slime onto his cock before looking up at him. “I love you, Mac, I fucking love you! I want you to have all of me; I am yours. Fuck my face and feed me your cum, please, baby, show me that you need me as much as I need you. God, I can’t wait to fuck you!”

His eyes blazed wider. “Fuuckk,” he growled as he impaled her face back onto himself again. His voice was filled with both lust and astonishment. His grip tightened on her hair, pulling her back onto him with fierce urgency. She moaned around his cock, the vibrations sending shivers down her spine.

With a series of deep, primal grunts, Mac thrust up into her mouth as he pulled her onto him harder, his cock crashed into her gag reflex, causing her to wretch and cough, but she didn’t try to pull back. She wanted to take it; she wanted to show him how far she was willing to go ... for him, only for him. His cock pushed through it, past in, and slid deep into her throat. The sensation was incredible, like being in a never-ending orgasm, the way his cock jerked, throbbed and pulsed in the tight confines of her bulging throat. She could taste him, the sweet saltiness of his precum smearing onto her tongue every time he pulled her back to the tip before plunging back in deep again. She moaned around him, her eyes pleading for more.

Mac let go of her hair and placed his hands on her head, guiding her rhythm as his hips bucked, thrusting deeper and faster into her mouth. He was getting into it now; he was taking command like she knew he would. He was everything she could have ever dreamed of in a knight in shining armor, and she was determined to be everything she could ever want. She had always been a sexual woman; she was never short of arousal around the right man, but this was the first time she had ever felt like she had really found him. He fucked in harder, faster, and a little rougher. She gagged, but instead of pulling back, she pressed forward, taking every inch of him that she could. She clawed at the rough material of his pants, unable to contain her need for him.

She felt it building, that telltale tightness in the grunts coming from his chest, a hitch to the breaths falling from his lips, an increase in the precum leaking from his cock, and a little more power to the twitches of his shaft in her throat. He was ruining her throat; she knew it would be sore later, but not only didn’t she care, she wanted it, she craved it; she wanted Mac to walk her back into that hanger with the taste of his cum on her breath, the flush on her cheeks and the smile on his face, and she wanted all those swooning women to know that she had just pleasured the man that they would never be able to touch. He was hers!

“Fuck, Em, I fucking love you!” he grunted through panted, breathless breaths. “I’m gonna cum!”

Emylee redoubled her efforts, pulling another deep gasp of pleasure from Mac as she took him harder, deeper, and faster than even his hands were insisting on; she could feel his balls tightening up; they weren’t quite hitting her chin, but she could feel the weight of them shift as they swung. She felt him hardening in her mouth, bulging more against the tight seal of her lips. She fucking loved the taste of him on her tongue as she moaned out a “mmhmm” onto his shaft.

He stopped fucking in quite as far, no longer stretching her throat but stabbing quickly and frantically and urgently in and out of her mouth. She smiled to herself; she knew what he wanted; she knew he wanted to cum onto her tongue so he could taste him properly. But she had a better idea or at least an amendment to it. She fucked herself on harder and faster, feeling those twitches grow and listening to those gasps getting more raspy.

“Fuck!” he erupted into her mouth with a grunt loud enough to probably be heard in the hallway outside the door. Splash after spurting splash of him spurting onto her tongue. She relished in the taste of him, delighted in it, humming loudly as more and more of him pumped powerfully into her mouth. His prodigious load was as proportionate to the size of his as the rest of his cock was, and her cheeks had to bulge a little to take all of it without swallowing. More and more of him flooded her mouth, bathing her tongue and her tastebuds as she kept her eyes locked onto his.

Finally, he released his grip on her head and let her pull off slowly, sucking hard along the entirety of his length to make sure that every last pearl of him was in her mouth before she looked up at him and opened her mouth to let her see everything he had given her. He groaned loudly, purring as his cock twitched a little more at the sight before she closed her mouth and made an intentional show of gulping loudly, swallowing him all.

“Holy Fuckin’ shit, Em, that was ... wow,” he panted.

“Yes, it was,” she purred happily, the cat who quite literally got the cream, “And thank you, I needed that.”

“Thank you?” he laughed. “Jesus, wha’ d’I do tah deserve you?”

She grinned and stood up, kissing his cheek happily as she tucked him back into his pants. “Oh, you deserve much more than that, and I want to give it to you.” She turned and made to saunter off to the room to actually have the lunch she was supposed to be having, but he grabbed her wrist and spun her back to face him.

“I love ya, too, Em.”

She beamed happily at him. “Let me get a drink; then I’m going to kiss you.” She purred at him

“Aye, lass, that you are.”

About forty minutes later, her wish came true, and Mac escorted her back into the maintenance bay, a beaming smile on his face and a flush on her cheeks. She kissed him goodbye before he left, and she headed over to join her team. One of the women who had swooned earlier looked over at her, then to the closing door, before back to her again. “Lucky bitch,” she grinned playfully.

“Yup,” Emylee grinned back with a wink. “Yes, I am.”

Michaels. 7

Serge Valdek was many things. He was brave, noble, and tactically brilliant. He was not, however, good at letting down his walls. Michaels had been friends with the man for over a decade before he really saw him let down his guard, really open up, stop being Valdek the Imperium Admiral, the hero of Signus IV, the leader of fleets and warriors alike, and start being Vadlek the man. That first particular night had taken two full bottles of Capricorn Whisky between them to break through the facade. It had gotten easier since then, three decades of friendship had seen the two very different men become the closest of friends. Michaels: passionate, courageous, and authoritative; Valdek: stoic, intelligent, and tactical. The only thing they had in common, at least at first, was the fact that both of them lived to serve and lived to command men in combat. But the age-old saying, older than the stars themselves, was as true now as it was in the earliest days of human interaction: opposites attract.

Michaels was quickly learning that Valdek was a changed man now, though. He supposed that was to be expected. Michaels had dedicated his life to the corps. He knew Marines who had managed to keep a semblance of family in their lives, but being posted away from home for years at a time, the constant fear of death, and the nightmares that came with combat—it wasn’t easy. Michaels had never managed it; in fairness, he had never really tried.

Valdek was different. He had not only managed to keep a family in his life, but he had thrived in one. His wife, Danica, had been the one person who had seemed to see through him and break down his walls with a simple glance, and he had loved her completely. Her death, a few years ago from a particularly virulent strain of Marhuvian flu, had been a tragedy, and it had damned near broke the man. But he held it together for their son.

God, he had never seen a man fight his inner demons with the power and ferocity that Valdek had. It was a sight to behold. Michaels knew some strong men; he’d known hard men, but when it came to battling his own mind, Valdek was a force unto himself. As much as Michaels wanted to claim he could match that kind of mental fortitude, he knew damned well that he wouldn’t have been able to get close. Battling yourself took a special kind of courage and fortitude, and the Admiral had it by the fucking truck load.

And then the Imperium had killed his son. Danjel was all that Valdek had left; he was the last living link to the man that the Admiral had been when he wasn’t commanding battlegroups. It was like his friend had split himself into two people: one side of himself for the Navy, for service, and for the men under his command, and the other side of himself for those he loved. But now, with Danjel’s death, that second, more private part of his character had been cast adrift, its anchor to any tangible part of the Galaxy gone forever. If a home was where the heart is, Valdek was heartbroken and adrift. It was haunting to see the man looking so lost.

But every now and then, when the whisky was flowing and the happier memories given voice with loud, rapturous laughter, Michaels could still see the smallest snippets of the friend he thought he had lost.

They’d been drinking for hours. Valdek had given the fleet its orders and retired for the evening, and the Colonel was just killing time until news of Captains Taylor and West’s procedure came through. Even then, he didn’t have much to do until they got back to Fort Ironholm and Cerberus.

“I remember this one guy, Corporal Williams,” Michaels laughed. “We were on a hill during the 3rd Signus campaign when those scaly bastards tried to retake the planet with a strike force ... anyway, we were on this hill, completely surrounded, cut off, and it was the middle of the night, pitch fucking black. We were starting to run out of ammo; it was looking pretty dicey for a moment there. We were getting ready for the next attack; we knew it was coming, when Williams suddenly jumped to his feet, ran over to the latrine area, and came back with his arms full of bottles of piss...”

“Piss?” Valdek snorted. “Why would you piss in bottles?”

Michaels blinked through eyes swimming in Whisky. “‘Cause it was a small area, and you don’t want to lay in piss ... obviously. So you piss in a bottle and shit in a hole and bury it.”

“Why don’t you bury the piss?”

“Hole’s not deep enough; it soaks back to the surface, and you do not want to spend a night laying in a puddle of it ... Anyway ... Williams runs back over and starts dumping these bottles next to everyone on the firing line. There were fifty of us, and we’d been up there for a week; there were a lot of bottles. The whole platoon is just looking at him like he’s gone fucking crazy, full-on section-eight. But just as I’m about to ask him what the fuck he’s doing, we hear the roar. You know the roar, those lizard bastards used to bellow like fucking animals just before they charged, lethal fuckers if they got up close, but at least they were kind enough to let us know they were coming.” Michaels could barely speak through the ripples of laughter. “So we hear the roar, and Williams picks up one bottle and just fucking launches it toward the sound, and I mean a proper baseball pitchers throw, he fucking hurled thing as hard as he could. Just as he does, we see them charging out of the brush, the bottle smashes right in front of them, and I shit you not, all of them turned around and dove for cover.”

“What? Why?”

“They thought they were grenades!” Michaels howled through his laughter. “I’m not joking; that lucky bastard managed to hold off a whole company of battle-hardened Khuvakian warriors, for an entire night, by throwing bottles of piss at them!”