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On my own packship, I had plenty of smart matter available, and I used it to create an outfit for Airlock. It swirled around in the air, following the vague gestures from my fingers—I really controlled it with my mind, and my hand gestures just helped me to focus—until I had a big, loose, baggy lump of a shirt to put onto Airlock. Before she could even object or know what I was doing, I flung the garment at her, and it wrapped itself around her. It hung loose around her body, so loose that her large breasts and generous curves were in no way visible. I made it dark black to hide any hints of her feminine form.
I raised my gaze to her face, which was still too distracting. Even with her body losing all form and visible sexual characteristics, her face alone was impossible to ignore. With her body covered, her face was even more striking, and the intense femininity of her full lips, soft eyes and brows, and long lashes were probably enough that my crew wouldn’t be able to focus.
I willed more matter down, forming a mask over her entire face. She could see out of it as if she were wearing nothing, but it covered her face entirely. She looked like a giant bag with a white, face-shaped mask covering her entire face. No…I needed my crew to have a hint at what they were fighting for. They needed aglimpseof what human women had to offer.
I changed the mask. I had it form images of her eyes, photorealistic, but not three dimensional. Flatter and less vibrant than seeing her eyes in the flesh, but beautiful and striking nonetheless. It still wasn’t enough, so I had the mask fall away just on her lips. She was looking down at the baggy clothes I’d forced over her nakedness, and she looked up and spoke. When she spoke, the mask avoided covering her mouth even as it changed shape. I could see her true lips and teeth and tongue as she spoke. It was just enough. My pack wouldn’t go into a sexual rage when they saw her like this, but her mouth would be enough to give them something to fight for, and to make them want to stay here for a chance at getting their own human.
“What the fuck, Thuliak?” she said, touching the mask. “First you wanted me naked, and now…”
“You aremine,” I growled, “I won’t have any other men looking at you as I do.”
She grinned, which was achingly beautiful, especially through the mask. My eyes were laser-focused on her mouth at all times, and my cock started twitching as I thought about what it would feel like between those warm, full lips.
“Do we get those garbage bag suits too?” Weapons asked.
I shook my head and waved a hand. A room began to form within the cargo hold. I didn’t have time to custom design this, so I simply asked the machine intelligence to build something “suitable for two human women,” and gave it access to the Lexikon so it oculd figure out what would be good for them.
The room formed around them, quickly locking them in.
“What the fuck?” Airlock asked, looking at the square room that had suddenly locked her friends inside.
“They’ll be safe there,” I said. “Now we go to the bridge. This mode of transport we are about to use will likely be uncomfortable for you the first few hundred times, but you’ll get used to it.”
“What do you—”
I’d have made it more pleasant for her, but I was already late to the bridge, and each second counted. I had the floor catapult us right at the wall. It blasted us up and over at incredible speed. If the wall stayed as hard as it had been, we would have simply crashed against the wall, splattering our flesh and crushing our bones to dust. Instead, the wall swallowed us up whole, and once we were inside the flesh of the ship, it pushed us through its insides the same way you’d squeeze a thick paste through a long tube.
It spit us out directly into the bridge. My battle crew was ready and at their stations, but none of them were looking at me.
Every single man’s eyes were on Airlock. Specifically on her lips. She was wincing and muttering something to herself as she looked around in confusion. I was staring at her mouth too. At her tongue. At those lips.
Kantar, my helmsman, managed to tear his eyes away from Airlock’s lips and bring his attention to me. “Captain,Harbinger’sGrasp Drive is reaching maximum power. They’ll be in the system within two minutes. What are our orders?”
The hivemind shot packets of information into my head. It also assigned priority markers to all of the information. My biological brain wasn’t strong enough to process so much at once, so it had to work to organize the overload of information into something I could actually comprehend.
It came in like a flood, but I was good at pulling important drolets out of a tidal wave of information.
I told the Hivemind to make Airlock comfortable, and to do it how I would if I had the time to focus on her.
It formed a chair for her, one that was smaller and more padded than any chair I would want to sit on, but airlock sat down and seemed comfortable, even as the chair locked her in.
“It’s for your own safety,” I said as I saw her struggling against the restraints.
My brain had processed a lot of the new information, and I’d begun to form my own plan. We had less than a 35% chance to obliterateHarbingeras its Grasp Drive powered down, and if we took the shot and missed, then we’d more or less be guaranteeing open warfare between both packs. I didn’t like this option. The moment I fully engaged withHarbinger, if any other ships Grasped into the system in support of Harbinger, I’d lose.
I needed to at least buy time for my allies to get here.
“Any updates from Rhulgar and Eriok?”
My comms chief shook his head. “We haven’t been able to find them.”
Grasp Drives worked by manipulating gravity and “Grasping” toward wherever the ship wanted to go. As far as we knew, it was truly impossible for anything to move through space faster than light, but the Grasp Drive simply warped spacetime until two very distance points in space were right next to each other for long enough that the ship could cross over before the points snapped back to where they belonged.
This meant that communications faster than light were very tricky. We had to use our Grasp Drive to throw a lot of broadcasting beacons across the galaxy. The Hivemind was pretty good at guessing where a particular packship was, but it was never perfect. It had a good guess where Eriok and Rhulgar were, and our Grasp Drive was bending space and throwing hundreds of beacons out per minute, but until one of those beacons’ comms wave hit Eriok or Rhulgar’s ships, they wouldn’t know we needed their help.
“Diplomacy,” I said, though the word left a sour taste in my mouth.
Khetar liked to fight. It went against our natural instincts to negotiate rather than to fight. The only thing that drove us more than fighting…was fucking.
