Scouts (7 page)

“It’s a little late to keep from getting worked up now,” I said, my voice already husky. My cock swelled in her hand.

She chuckled low in her throat. “I thought you’d see it my way.” She pulled my shorts down, turning them inside out on my thighs. My cock bounced out into her hand. Shirley squirted some lotion onto it and spread it around. Her hot breath played over my ear. “Do it for me. Real quick. Just let it go; don’t hold back even the slightest bit. You’re young. So strong. I bet you splatter all over the sink.” Her arm snaked around my back, holding me.

No one had ever talked to me like that. My hips jerked. I put my hands out against the mirror-bright wall in front of me. Her hand made slick, wet sounds against my cock. I watched in the mirror, watching her hand move, watching her smiling into my ear. She saw me watching and looked into my eyes.

“Do it,” she said. “Do it now.”

Spasms ran through me, closing my eyes involuntarily. A sharp breath blew out through my gritted teeth.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. More.”

My body tensed under her skilled caress, ecstasy thundering in my ears. White and black warred behind my eyelids. My knees trembled, but with her shoulder behind me, supporting me, I didn’t collapse.

As I finally returned to my senses, I felt a warm, wet washcloth running over my skin. She cleaned me meticulously. Her reflection smiled back at me. “You are going to make one incredible Scout, Challers. I can tell.”

I smiled weakly, still breathless. I didn’t know what to say.

She went back out into the bedroom and tossed me a clean uniform. “Get dressed,” she said, “and come to bed. I still need to show you how to operate the controls.”

Still trembling, I changed into the clean uniform.

Using the circular Scout’s bed turned out to be a fairly simple matter. A set of controls at one end controlled firmness and temperature, and with the firmness set low, it could be pushed and spread to make little hills and valleys. I smoothed out a shallow depression—something vaguely shaped like my old sagging mattress.

“Do you move around much in your sleep?” asked Shirley.

She had changed into an outfit much like mine, except white instead of black. It left little to the imagination, but I managed not to let it get to me much.

“I don’t know. I suppose I don’t, because I would have fallen out of bed if I did. It wasn’t very big.”

“All right. Then we’ll deal with that if it comes up.” Shirley just made herself a soft pillow-like lump and a fairly firm sleeping area.

A white sheet came from a set of low shelves. I ran the fabric through my hands. As alien as everything else in this trip had been, the sheet felt familiar.

Shirley caught my thoughtful expression. “What’s on your mind, Challers?”

“Just remembering the way my mom tucked me in. The sheet felt just like this.” I pulled it to my nose. “Doesn’t smell like home, though.”

“In time, the chamber will come to be your home.” She touched a switch by the bed and the room lights went dark. Only a dim outline around the doorways remained illuminated.

I felt tears coming to my eyes. I didn’t want to cry, but I missed the familiar sounds of the station, the sounds and smells of people moving in the chambers around me. The academy felt empty and cold, no matter the air temperature. I swallowed hard, clamped my jaw shut, and lay down, wrapping myself in the sheet.

Shirley put a hand on my shoulder. “Feeling a little homesick?” She got up, retrieved a container from a cabinet near the bed, and pulled a tab on it as she handed it to me. Fragrant steam wafted from the open top. It smelled of milk and chocolate.

“More than a little. Am I ever going to see them again?”

“It’s possible. It happens. You might have an assignment that takes you back there, but I can’t make any promises.”

I sipped from the bottle and set it aside. “Have you ever gone back home?”

“Once. Things had changed. It wasn’t home anymore.” She patted my shoulder, then went back to her side of the circle.

“Will you just hold my hand? I feel alone.”

“Of course, Challers. I’m always here for you.”

I stretched out my hand and she took it gently in hers. She didn’t speak, didn’t touch more than just that. She wasn’t my mother, she’d never be my mother, but it did feel better just having her there. She threw the sheet over the both of us, and I closed my eyes.

After a time, I slept.

The melancholy stayed with me through the night, and into the morning. Shirley climbed to her feet and leaned down to offer me her hand. She pulled me up with surprising grace.

“You’re strong,” I said.

“It’s part of our regimen,” she said. “You’ll gain a lot of strength in the academy, too. Come on, we have Physicality before breakfast.”

For the morning routine, we met Masters and Valka in the gymnasium. We each had a workout routine created for us—a combination of stretching, resistance training, and something they called “partner movement.” This last part was something like a couple’s dance performed in slow motion with an emphasis on grace, fluidity, and harmony. After Masters and Shirley demonstrated, Valka and I tried it. It would have been easier with music. It also would have been easier if Valka could have kept a straight face. We kept breaking up giggling.

The whole time, I couldn’t help admiring her body. It was there, right in front of me, flexing and moving. Up close, her nipples stood out against her pale skin, clearly visible through the sheer black fabric of her uniform. Her stiff, curly pubic hair was similarly apparent. I tried to maintain my concentration and avoid an erection, but I could only manage somewhat.

After a while, we caught the gist of it and, at Masters’s instruction, we gradually sped up our movements. With sweat starting to soak into our uniforms, Shirley called a halt and told us to cool down with a walk around the gym.

Once we were a few steps away from our tutors, Valka turned to me. “How was your night?”

“It was rough,” I said. “Missed my bed back home.”

She nodded and made a small sound.

“You?” I asked.

“I slept pretty well, actually. That bed is a marvel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. What do you think of Masters?” I tried not to let the feelings that still lurked in the pit of my stomach color my voice.

She shrugged, made a noncommittal sound, and leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Looking forward to Astronavigation class?”

I pulled her close and shuddered in anticipation. “I can’t tell you. I want to know everything. I want to know how the ships work, how those drives work, how far they can go and why. I want to crawl inside a ship and just look at the engines. I want to open the panels and see how the computers are wired up.”

Too soon, Shirley’s voice cut our moment short. “Hey, lovers! Come clean up. Breakfast in ten minutes.”

The showers off the gym were a collective system, a set of nozzles pointing into one waterproofed space. I expected the exercise to leave my libido at something of a lull. After all, back on the station, that was always the best way to work out my frustrations. Seeing Shirley and Valka stripped down, however, started getting me excited again. Valka noticed and smiled, blushing as I watched her wash her body. Too soon, she rinsed off and stepped into the warm air vent to blow herself dry.

“Are you going to be all right?” asked Shirley, coming up behind me as I had my turn under the vent.

“No, I’ll be fine,” I said. I was a little hard, but not enough to be painful. I stepped into the dressing area beyond and walked up behind Valka as she dressed. I put an arm around her belly and nuzzled her neck.

She laid a hand on my cheek, and then patted it gently. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

Breakfast wasn’t quite the feast that the previous night’s dinner had been, but there was plenty of food available: eggs, yogurt, breads, and fruit. The four of us ate together, again, in a mostly empty mess hall.

Valka found a moment between bites to ask whether Shirley and Masters would be teaching the academic classes as well as Physicality.

“Yes and no,” she said. “There will be prepared material, like lectures and readings, but we’ll be there to answer questions and make sure you’re absorbing the information. It will be just the four of us in most of your classes.”

“Most?” I asked.

“You’re not the only cadets in the academy, as you’ve seen. Some of your classes may have other cadets, and their mentors. If another ship comes in with recruits, you could have more classmates for your entire run here.”

We finished breakfast and headed to the classrooms. Each one had desk space for eight students, arranged in an arc around a lectern. Above and behind the desks was an observation area where our mentors could keep track of our work. Waiting for us, at each desk, was a slab of dark gray plastic with our names glowing on the surface in orange letters above an orange outline of a hand. Each sat on a black pouch, clearly fitted to allow it to be carried over the shoulder.

I placed my hand where it was indicated. The handprint flared and disappeared, replaced by a standard tablet operations screen. A hologram flared up in the center of the room as we took our places behind our desks. The image portrayed an old woman, my grandmother’s age, dressed in a Scout’s white uniform.

“Welcome to Technology class, cadets,” said a recorded voice, synchronized with the hologram’s movements. “These are your new tablets. They contain all of your reference materials for your classes, basic simulators, and a link to the academy datastores. These will be your primary information tools throughout your careers as Scouts.”

I poked tentatively at the interface. It used the same basic protocols as the machines back on the station, but far more advanced and responsive.

Valka shook her head in open-mouthed wonder. She had the technical specifications readout for her machine displayed on the screen.

“Challers, do you see this? This thing has more processing power in it than all the machines on Stakroya combined!”

“Now if you’ll settle down,” said the hologram, “we’ll get down to today’s lessons concerning the efficient use and proper care of your new equipment.”

An hour and a half wasn’t enough to even scratch the surface of what our new toys could do. They had their own holographic projectors, as well as holographic and audio recording functions, and could interface with any piece of Scout equipment via line-of-sight infrared beacon.

That class ended, and after a short fresher break, the next one started. History hadn’t been taught on Stakroya Station, so this was entirely new material for me. The closest we had gotten were tales some of the older folks told around the banquet table during celebrations.

Here, we started with the founding of the Scout Service at the end of a time known as the “Planetary Era,” when all of humanity’s settlements were located in one system. The discovery of orgone drives scattered them to the stars. We saw how the basic geography of the known galaxy traced all the way back to that event.

No one was exactly sure where the first system was, though various experts had their theories on the subject. It had to have been in the high-density region between the Sagittarius Arm and the Perseus Arm of the galaxy, but there were dozens of stars in that area that could have been the origin star. Within fifty years, every star system in the area had been visited, if not colonized.

The area between this high-density region and the Perseus Arm came to be known as the Rimward Reach, and the area towards the Sagittarius Arm came to be known as the Coreward Reach. Between them was known as Old Stars. Each of these three bands of stars had an “upstream” and “downstream” section.

The main things most stations needed for long-term habitation in a colony were volatiles like water and hydrocarbons, and metals like iron and aluminum. Most star systems have at least some of these resources, but the stations that found them in fairly dense, easily harvested asteroid fields did better than those that had to scavenge over wider areas of space, so that became the standard practice.

After History, we returned to the gym for another hour of Physicality. This hour was quieter than the first hour had been. We spent the hour in stillness, learning more of the meditation techniques Shirley had introduced me to the night before. There were a few minutes of meditation, followed by a discussion of situations where this kind of control would be useful, and then a few more minutes of meditation.