Star Crossed Kindness
Copyright© 2026 by Dragon Cobolt
Chapter 15
Science Fantasy Sex Story: Chapter 15 - Two hundred years ago, humanity got a new definition - an alien generation ship arrived at the edge of the war ravaged SOL system and our new neighbors, the devonians, became an integral part of the new Human Union. But for Leo Tangent, the fact that every human has one or more devonian lover is just a little weird. He doesn't want pheromones to get in the way of his and his girlfriend, Gillian Brightly, and their relationship. But that's the thing about plans...
Caution: This Science Fantasy Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Fa/Fa Mult Teenagers Consensual Reluctant Romantic TransGender Military School Science Fiction Aliens Space Sharing Group Sex Harem Polygamy/Polyamory
“This feels ... almost... religiously incorrect.”
“I know...”
Tessa bit her lip, her face tensing.
“Okay.” She closed her eyes. “Put it in. Just. Thrust right in there.”
Leo tensed.
Readied.
Pushed.
“Fuck!” Tessa hissed between clenched teeth.
Leo yanked the long, hard metal pole out of the inner wall of the Leafari frigate, while the pair of them stood next to one another, helmets on and boots sealed to the floor. The hole had been circled three times and they had measured twice, just to make extra certain. Tessa looked down at her ruggedized handheld, her gloved thumb sliding along the touchscreen. She nodded. “Okay, step five, we need to vent some O2 through there and some Leafari blood.”
“Okay,” Leo said, kneeling down and flipping open the container. “This is so fucked.”
“I’d say it’s okay, it’s only synthetics,” Tessa said. “But I know what you mean.”
Leo hadn’t been born in space – but the thing was that Earther culture had been born in space. While bits and pieces of Terran culture had survived on the Earth’s surface through the Five Minute War, the vast preponderance of the survivors had come from the orbit and Mars, the population rebounding as the ecology was slowly pieced back together using the Arcship’s vast stores of terraforming tools and technologies that ... Leo now realized had been stolen from the Leafari Empire.
They might be assholes, but their genomic systems were pretty decent, he thought, while he took the first container of fabricated Leafari blood from the container. They couldn’t hope to match the genetics nor the type of the blood to the actual blood on the actual Frigate 55. But they were also not sure how exhaustive the scans were going to be when they arrived at what Skar said was merely called Staging-1. It was possible that the Fleetsoul was going to scan the ship at the atomic level and rapidly deduce that they were fakers. It was possible that some bored Devonian was going to check a single computer registry number, shrug, and wave them in.
Between those two extremes, Leo and crew weren’t taking any chances.
“Okay, that’s hole number sixty two,” Tessa said, clicking her teeth as Leo sprayed the blood artistically around the hole, then applied a patch, trying to match the panicky slap that someone might if their ship was hit by a kinetic that blew through depleted whipple shields and turned one of their crew to red mist. Once the patch was applied, air hissed into the room and Bolide’s voice came over the internal PA.
“We’re looking at good pressure, you didn’t hit any hole you didn’t were not meant to not ... hit!”
“Thanks Bee,” Tessa said.
“Eee! She called me Be! Midnight, Midnight! Tessa called me a cute nickname.”
“It’s better than fucking Mid...” Midnight paused. “Did you leave the PA o-”
The click of the speakers shutting off made Tessa laugh and shake her head. She swung her helmet up, breathing slowly through her lips. “ ... it still feels so fucking wrong.”
“At least they gave us step by step directions,” Leo said, swinging his toolkit shut with a click and clack. When Frigate-55 had been killed, the Union spacy had dropped a limpet drone onto it. That little drone had skittered around for almost a week. It hadn’t been very smart, but it had been decidedly dedicated, able to skitter here, there, and scan. Scan. Scan. Its scans had been biological and laser based, mapping out the internal structure of the entire vehicle, and charting every bit of damage. The humans had managed to pot the ship with a few through and through kinetic shots that had turned the crew entirely into red mist and jam.
Thus, this work.
This...
This awful, awful work.
There were some holy tenants that had survived even generations on Earth, and one of them was you never poke a hole in your own spaceship. Triply so when you were AUs away from port and far from any logistic drones and everything else that might serve as a help.
“Remember that horrible cartoon, with that bus that could drive to Pluto?” Tessa asked.
“Oh, right, the one where they turned into sound waves,” Leo said.
“Remember how they had that, like, graphic depressurization scene and all the kids had to learn how to save someone without a helmet? That shit gave me fucking nightmares as a kid,” Tessa said, shuddering as they headed to the next compartment.
“Well, he was okay ... that did help, right?” Leo asked.
“I barely remember that bit, I mostly remember his eyeballs freezing.” Tessa looked down at her handheld, frowning. “Okay, the high forehead types have a fifty six step procedure to properly and safely damage this valve, then repair it. Apparently, it got spalling damage, and for some reason, they don’t want us to fill this room with shrapnel. So, we’re going to start with ... the ... mineral sample hammers, uh, got those?”
Leo held out one.
“Okay, tapping in ... the ... camera program...” Tessa tapped at her handheld, whose camera turned on. A soft bleeping noise started to ring out as she swept the handheld around the room – the bleeping becoming a smooth tone as she sighted in on the corner. She walked over, holding the hammer up with one hand, the handheld with the other, then tapped a chip into the wall.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
The tone chirruped.
“The program says I did a good job, we have twenty two more bits of damage to apply,” Tessa said.
Leo took out his handheld, then snatched up a mineral sample hammer.
“Join the spacy,” he said. “Do science. Rescue people in far off places. Serve humanity via the vital logistics of intrasolar-”
“Get to chipping, twink.”
The most entertaining part of the voyage was not the illicit thrill of putting holes in their own life support systems, nor the artfully applied, then artfully removed via scrubbing, blood stains. No.
It was the bi-weekly ‘show Skar some new movie’ watch party. While the claustrophobia drugs were helping to keep everyone sane despite being stuck in a very, very, very small space with a very small number of people, there was still the matter of morale and breaks to consider. All work and no play made Jack a bad spacer, as the old rhyme went.
Thus.
Movie day.
“So, this film is a really good one,” Bolide said, bouncing on her toes. “But to grasp it, you need a teeny tiny bit of context-”
“Boooo!” Tessa called from the sidelines. “Make her sink or swim, Bee! Boo!”
“I dunno, it might be confusing...” Leo admitted.
Gillian, who was quite happily sqooshed between the muscular engineer and her svelte boyfriend, seemed placidly disinterested in weighing in. So, Bolide turned to Midnight and Skar. Skar put the nail in the coffin as she sipped from her drink bulb.
“Your culture is pretty easy so far,” she said, confidently. “Hit me with it unfiltered.”
Bolide pouted. “Aweh...”
She thumped down onto Leo’s lap, her head blocking out the opening scenes in black and white played – the narrator pronouncing the stage, showing the scenes on the map. Skar huffed. “See, I can follow this fine.” She paused. “Second world war? How many fucking world wars has your planet had?”
“Shh!”
The movie continued playing. Within a few minutes, Skar had stopped making commentary – not even a muttered ‘so, when do the Devonians show up.’
By the time the members of Rick’s Café Américain were singing La Marseillaise she was...
“Skar, are you crying?” Midnight whispered.
“S-Shut up!” Skar whispered, sniffing as she wiped at her nose.
As the plane lifted off and Bogart and Rains started to walk away into the mist, Skar crossed her arms over her chest, her tail lashing as she stammered. “I-It was okay.” She sniffed. “ ... s-so, he g-gave up his bonded because she’d be happier with another man and it was more important to him that she be happy a-and be able to d-do what he couldn’t. W-which is...” She sniffled again, then whimpered, then burst into tears as Midnight and Bolide both started to cluck over, petting her head and snuggling her.
“I gotta know what she thought about the Nazis,” Tessa muttered.
Skar emerged from the Devonian pile with a hiss, pushing the other two girls off her, her red cheeks having flushed even more. “G-Get off! I’m not a pouchling!” she huffed, her ears perking up. “A-And ... I guess I liked ... how...” She sighed. “T-That bit where those Frank people showed they were still gonna, ya know, be themselves was ... it hit.” She shrugged, drawing her knees up, while Bolide crawled around behind her back, then threw her her arms around her and hugged her from behind. Skar hissed and grumbled, but despite her words, her tail and Bolide’s twined eagerly. Midnight grinned, then scooched over to throw herself over Leo’s lap.
“You know, I kinda have a theory about this,” Leo said, scratching his jaw.
“Hmm?” All the girls in the room looked at him at once, Skar’s brow furrowing.
“Okay,” Leo said. “The bonding chemistry between Terrans and Devonians, is it that different from between you and a Leafari?”
“I dunno, it feels pretty different,” Skar said, frowning.
“It feels different but is it different?” Leo asked. “You went through a full medsci sweep, they didn’t notice any tracers that were any different from a prior bond. It was just a classic B-, as far as they could tell.”
“As far as they could tell. That was after months of huffing your pheromones,” Skar said, defensively.
Bolide leaned back onto her elbows, using the cushions they had spread along the cargo hold to proper her up. Her brow furrowed. “There has to be some biological difference. How else do you get the HU, which rules, and the Leafari Empire, which drools?”
“That’s just it, though!” Leo said, growing excited. “The big difference isn’t biological. Skar, are there Leafari who can bond with multiple Devonians? Or Devonians that don’t need a bond as much as other Devonians? Or bonds that grow, then fade away?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “But there’s surgical fixes for that shit-”
“The big difference isn’t biological. It’s social.” Leo nodded slowly. “The Leafari evolved on the same planet as the Devonians.”
“Assuming any of us did evolve,” Skar said, frowning.
“Not this again!” Midnight groaned. “There’s fossil evidence all over earth, and genetic-”
“There’s also a big fuckoff alien spaceship buried in your mantle, and that alien spaceship has a quantum fuckery faster than light communication device built into it!” Skar shot back. “How do you know the Precursors didn’t engineer each of us out of natural bullshit! There’s millions of years to hide tampering.”
“Ancient aliens is bullshit,” Midnight said.
“Yet, provably fucking true!”
“Guys!” Leo said, holding up his hands. The two Devonians looked at him – then glanced at Bolide, who gave them the tiniest of nods. They both relaxed, while Leo continued, doggedly. “The Leafari either evolved or were created or engineered on the same planet as the Devonians. So, look at it like this. You’re a hunter gatherer society, and there’s another species that bonds like how Terrans and Devonians bond. There’s probably lots of social structures that develop around this – some nice, some not so nice. Hunter gatherer societies were at war a lot, even if those was were way less bloody than future wars.” He waved his hand. “But what we do know is that when agriculture gets invented, you have a load of pressures to embrace slavery.”
Skar nodded, mutely, while Bolide looked uncomfortable.
“On earth, at least, agriculturalism led to states, states and kings led to stratification. There were some upsides – more food, for example, meant more people, meant more artisans and creatives. There were some downsides – priests, kings, slavery, larger wars.” Leo shrugged. “I’m too much a partisan of my planet to say I want the whole of human history to have gone differently, and I’m not an anthropologist, so ... I don’t even know if I could make a better one. But ... on our planet, there were just Terrans. On your planet, there were Leafari and Devonians, and there’s now the bonding process, which gets hooked into that system. I bet kings and queens who could secure Devonian bondmates got all the advantages. Devonians, when they’re bonded, are great at math and spatial reasoning, and they keep the kings more stable, less prone to go onto random stupid wars.”
“So ... they had better kings?” Midnight asked, arching an eyebrow.
“And if you have better kings, then you don’t get no kings,” Leo said, quietly. “Systems on Earth only really get tossed when they become so unable to work that they have to be replaced. I have to assume that social evolution on Leafaros is the same, because the same pressures and the same realities apply. The kingdoms persisted, and thus, the slavery of the Devonians persisted. Meanwhile, on Earth, we had kings be replaced by the mercantile class, and autocrats, and fascists and democracies, and communal states. We fought so, so, so many wars to decide who gets to count as a human that we finally realized that the only way to survive is if that answer is yes, everyone counts.”
He smiled.
“Then... then we met the Devonians.”
Skar nodded, slowly. “That, um, that tracks,” she said, quietly.
Bolide leaned back on her elbows, nodding slowly.
“You know that makes our jobs infinitely harder, right?” Midnight grumbled, throwing herself onto her belly again, sprawling across his lap and resting her chin on Gillian’s knee. Gillian snorted.
“It’s way harder to fix a biological problem than it is to fix a social problem,” Gillian said. “We need to invent-”
“No, you got that totally backwards, Gillian,” Midnight said.
Gillian opened her mouth.
Closed it.
“Fuck,” she said.
“You know this is all just a theory, right?” Skar asked.
“No it’s not!” Bolide said, furiously, pushing herself to her feet and putting her hands on her hips.
“Yeah, it’s a hypothesis,” Tessa said. “I’m a fucking engineer and even I know that. If something is true, we’d predict that this would be true. Now we test it by checking to see if reality bears out the prediction. If Leo’s right, then Leafari can join the Human Union because our differences are just cultural, not biological. So, if that happens, we know it’s true. Probably after Leo seduces one of them.”
Leo blushed.
“Leafari can’t bond to Leafari, so there’s no way a Terran can bond to a Leafari,” Skar said. Then she paused. “Right?”
“I am not,” Leo said. “Going to seduce any Leafari.”
“He’s totally gonna seduce a Leafari,” Tessa muttered.
“The plan is to not even go into the space base!” Leo exclaimed.
“Absolutely gonna do it,” Gillian said.
“No, he’s gonna seduce a Leafari and the Fleetsoul!” Bolide chimed in.
“The Fleetsoul is a super-intelligent AI, it ... Skar, does it have a gender?”
“Yeah,” Skar said.
“I ... I...” Leo stammered.
“And she’s a woman,” Skar said, her voice completely straight and level, her eyes pitiless.
“Yessss!” Bolide pumped her fists. “Seduce that Fleetsoul!”
“She’s fucking with me,” Leo said, almost plaintive, desperate. “You have to believe me, Skar is just fucking with me.”
Midnight just smiled enigmatically, and started to slap his nose with her tail tip.
“And... there.”
Gillian turned away from the screen and smiled at him.
“We are now the smallest mixed crew to have ever reached this far out,” she said.
“Damn you, Icarus-2!” Bolide hissed, shaking her fist dramatically at the ceiling, as if she could curse that mission which, fifty years before, had managed to reach Uranus before looping back – after launching a bevy of probes into the deep deep dark of the outer solar system. There remained the last of the great gas giants, Neptune, waiting for someone to be bold and stupid enough to cruise that far out. Icarus-1 had been the mission that had skimmed Saturn’s rings and returned with some of the most breathtakingly beautiful shots that the solar system had ever seen.
But in truth, there was very little out in the edges of the solar system that were worth visiting with human boots – not when there remained so much in the inner system that needed to be studied, explored, understood.
Still.
“How many people were on the Icarus-2?” Leo asked.
“And why didn’t they call it the Daedalus?” Tessa asked.
“Huh?” Midnight asked.
“Icarus was the guy who fucking crashed,” Tessa said.
“But the entire Icarus run went off without a hitch,” Bolide said, blinking. “And you can’t name the mission after Daedalus, he was the guy who built the rocket ship, not flew it.”
“That-” Tessa pinched the bridge of her nose. “Nevermind, Bee.”
“Now, we wait and see if the close in observation systems start to get tetchy,” Skar said, sitting at the tactical console in the small bridge – it was quite cramped with the engineering crew up there, filling up the back space. Everyone went silent, watching and waiting. The soft chirruping of a laser communication came through, and Bolide clicked her tongue softly.
“We’re getting a com signal, putting it on,” she said.
The screen flicked on and the bored looking face of a gold and silver skinned Devonian dressed in the black carapace of a Leafari uniform. She sighed and spoke in the Leafari language, which Skar said was called Leafari, and when people had asked her about the other languages, she had looked kinda confused and said ‘what, you mean the slave tongues?’ and then everyone had gotten really depressed.
Of course, the past few weeks of cruising had been spent learning it. Leo was quite proud of himself when he checked the computer translation and saw that he had been entirely correct when he thought she had said: Frigate 55, identify who is still alive aboard there.