Assisse was very determinedly avoiding anyone’s gaze as they sat down for breakfast. Which was why she was completely unprepared as Scales elbowed her in the side.

Hard.

“What the hell, Scales!?” the woman grunted irritably as she tried desperately to keep herself from spraying half masticated food chunks all over the table.

“You abandoned me,” the other woman grumbled, staring venomously into her friend’s eyes. “To him.”

Jason liked to think he was a picture of innocence as he spooned another mouthful of vaguely yam flavored purple goop into his mouth.

“I did not!” Assisse shot back, shoving her friend in the shoulder. “I… lasted longer this morning.”

Scales gave her friend the gimlet eye. “Yeah, well the fact that I’ll be walking bowlegged for the rest of the day says that ‘longer’ wasn’t and isn’t long enough.”

Jason reached for the sugar. Or at least, the sugar equivalent. The yam porridge thing wasn’t exactly what he’d call a great combo with sugar, but it was at least better than it was without.

Marginally.

“The two of you make me sound like some kind of rapacious beast,” he noted idly as he sprinkled grey flakes into his bowl.

Scales reptilian eyes flitted round to him. “Amongst my people we have legends. Legends of creatures that come in the night, promising all manner of sensual delights.”

“Sounds fun,” he said.

“I’m sure it is, until those men of the night fill those foolish enough to accept offers with such seed that they swell and explode,” Scales continued.

Jason paused, the next spoonful of goop halfway to his mouth. With very slow and deliberation motions, he put it down again.

“Vivid imagery,” he said. “Just what I wanted while I’m having breakfast.”

Though he supposed the notion wasn’t too dissimilar from depictions of succubae. Just with the genders flipped and the grisly fate of the victim reversed from becoming a dried out husk.

Or at least, that was what he assumed happened to guys in those stories. He’d never had much reason to explore the particulars of what succubae did beyond the moniker that they were sex demons, with all that implied.

Scales for her part had just enough shame to look embarrassed, for a second or two, before she rallied to glare at him again.

“Yeah, well I wanted to wake up feeling filled and refreshed. Not like I’d gone five rounds with a pent up Turox.”

Assisse was very stubbornly looking at nothing as the conversation dragged on. He had a feeling that his sergeant wished she was anywhere else.

“Regret it?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow as he glanced back to Scales.

“Irrelevant.”

Jason grinned. It was always nice to be appreciated.

Still, he could admit that he did feel a little guilty. He was well aware that he could have ‘slowed his roll’ in the bedroom if he so desired. Unfortunately for Scales and Assisse, it had become something of a guilty pleasure of his to leave his partners somewhat exhausted.

Maybe it was a male thing? Maybe it was a human thing? Or maybe it was just him?

He didn’t know.

What he did know – and now perhaps somewhat regret – was that Scales had less stamina than even a Shil’vati. Because by the end of round two, she’d gone rather… limp. At which point he might have stopped, for obvious reasons, if it weren’t for the woman begging him to continue.

Which segued nicely into his next statement.

“You didn’t ask me to stop,” he pointed out. “Quite the opposite.”

Scales eyes darted to the side.

“A lady has her pride,” she noted primly. “To ask to stop an engagement before a man has reached climax. Well, I might have had to surrender my rights as a woman.”

She glanced back at him. “Of course, that common perception assumes a gentleman only reaches his climax the one time. Not… however many times you did.”

She turned to Assisse. “…Do you know how many times he finished?”

The woman continued to stare into her porridge. “I can’t say I do.”

Likely on account of the fact that she’d spent more time passed out than not. It was enough to make him wonder if his sergeant had a medical condition. He’d heard of guys dropping off to sleep the moment they finished, but he’d never seen it happen quite so promptly in anything but rabbits.

“Yes, well the point remains,” Scales frowned. “I think in future I might need to call in more support before I try to climb the mountain that is your libido, Jason.”

He chose to take that as a compliment.

“All I can say is that Yaro has my respect,” Assisse grumbled. “How that girl’s not in a wheelchair yet, I do not know.”

Scales nodded. “Neither do I, though at least now we know why she always did that irritating little smile of hers when we pressed her for details.”

“Damn furball,” Assisse grunted.

Jason just continued to enjoy his breakfast, his ego adequately stroked.

Plus sex. A threesome even. That had also been nice.

Though, he had to wonder if it still counted as such, given that it had been less tackling the two ladies opposite him at the same time, as it had been the pair taking turns. Because, however close the two woman’s relationship might have been, it apparently did not extend to the bedroom.

They’d steadfastly held to the cardinals rules of a ‘devil’s threesome’; no touching and no eye contact.

Whatever, he shrugged. Still had sex.

------------------------

Sex or not, life continued.

He had been amused to note that, however much the rest of the crew badgered Assisse and Scales for the details of their night with him, discreetly or otherwise, the pair kept their lips sealed. Which, given that Yaro was already doing the same, only served to increase his ‘mystique’ and irritate the rest of the crew in equal measure.

Still, it was nice to be back on the Whisker.

Because, while he was relieved that Pernora was – hopefully – investigating the oddities around Hela and her ship, there was no denying that he garnered a fair amount of safety by being back in space.

Which he could also admit was a little odd, given that the Whisker was a warship on patrol. At any moment a horde of ravenous pirates could have jumped into the system and the tiny picket ship would have been Gurathu’s first line of defense against them.

Fortunately for him, unlike his possible imagined abductors turning up in the dead of night, he figured the chances of an actual spaceborne attack happening were so slim as to be non-existent.

Yes, Gurathu had a pirate problem in the past, but that had only been because it had been such easy pickings. The moment the planet had put measures in place that made raiding them even a little inconvenient, the raids had stopped.

…Or changed modus operandi, but that had little to do with his relief at being back aboard the Whisker.

Which was the reason why he didn’t entirely jump out of his seat when both Kernathu and Tisi bustled into the engineering bay.

“Jason, you’ve got to see this!” Kernathu cried, excitedly waving her data-pad in his direction.

A little bemused by the show of excitement from the usually gloomy young woman, he glanced at Tisi’s equally gleaming face, before tentatively taking the thin device.

Looking at the screen, he didn’t quite know what he was looking at to begin with. But as his eyes roamed slowly over the runic Shil’vati text, he found his eyebrows climbing up his forehead.

“You patented my mouse design?” he asked.

Kernathu nodded excitedly. “I did.”

He just looked at her, then back down at the device in his hands. “Thank you, but…why?”

Sure, mice were handy little tools, but he hadn’t invented them. He’d just made an adaptation for Shil’vati systems. Which he could readily admit hadn’t been entirely simple, but that had been one he’d been learning to do before he’d been conscripted.

Given that it had only taken him a few days to adapt the code and print off the parts for it, it hardly seemed worth patenting.

Given that, again, he hadn’t been the one who came up with the idea.

He frowned a little. “Actually, can we even do that? Given that I didn’t come up with the idea?”

Tisi placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “We didn’t patent the concept, we patented your specific design. Now it’s up on the data-net for others to download and use, but they pay you a royalty each time.”

That was… cool? He didn’t really see all the excitement to be honest.

Still, I suppose I shouldn’t be knocking a few extra creds in my… Jason’s thoughts trailed off as he looked at his royalties accrued since the mouse had gone live.

“I… ah…. think the program might have a glitch,” he said, wrestling his suddenly uncooperative tongue into submission.

“What? Why?” Kernathu asked, practically snatching the data-pad from him to look it over.

Jason just stood there, finger still numbly outstretched. “Well, the number at the bottom had a few too many zeroes attached.”

Kernathu stopped in her inspection of the device to frown at him, as if he’d just wasted her time.

Fortunately, Tisi stepped in before the smaller woman could say anything. “Yes, Kernathu and I were also a little surprised by how popular it was. We thought it was a decent product, which was why we patented it in the first place, but even so, the response has been surprising. Especially given that we really didn’t do anything to advertise it.”

Jason stared numbly at the numbers again as the device was dumped in his hands.

“Of course,” Tisi continued. “I wouldn’t expect those number to stay that high for long. I imagine people back in the Imperium are already scrambling to make their own equivalents of your ‘mice’.”

Jason didn’t bother to correct her on her incorrect use of the word. Or perhaps it was the correct use? English could be a confusing beast at times, especially when that single word was used in a conversation that had thus far been entirely Shil’vati.

He could well imagine that some egghead in the Imperial palace was already scrambling to come up with a proper Shil word for his mouse. The Shil’vati were pretty particular about things like that. Unlike English, which just stole and adapted things from other languages without a care in the world, the Shil language was a much more carefully crafted and codified beast.

“Thank you,” he said again, but for the first time with genuine emotion beyond amusement behind the sentiment. “Kernathu, Ma’am.”

“You’re welcome,” Kernathu and Tisi both beamed.

Well, it seemed that he was now, if not wealthy, than close to it. Especially given that the note at the bottom of his royalties summary had happily pointed out that his device had yet to be delivered to all domains under the Imperium. Nor had all the details of royalties from worlds it had been delivered been collected yet.

Yes, it seemed he was now just a little on the wealthy side.

-------------

It had been nearly three days since Kernathu and Tisi had unveiled their ‘gift’ to him, and Jason was still feeling the high.

“Could you stop smiling like that? It’s creepy and gross.”

Jason liked Glider. Unlike most of the Shil he’d encountered, the long-eared woman had an almost delightfully acerbic attitude towards him – and everyone else, bar Tisi. Sure, it had taken a few weeks for it to come out in force after she’d grown used to him, but now it was here, it was on full blast.

It was a breath of fresh air to be honest.

Though he imagined it helped that he didn’t actually spend a great deal of time with the woman. He could well imagine that while her personality was fun in small doses, he’d find it… grating after enough time.

Predominantly because he was exactly the same way.

Which was why, as he continued gazing out the Whisker’s forward display monitor into the inky blackness of space, he also continued to smile. Wider.

And hum.

Jauntily.

“Ugh,” the woman groaned as she continued to tap away at the console in front of her. “I could pull rank on you to get you to stop? You know that, right?”

“You could, you very well could,” he allowed.

Given that he was fresh-ish out of basic, without even his tertiary training to his name, just about everyone on the ship outranked him. He was the low head on the totem pole. Technically he should still only be an acting-recruit, given the lack of said training, but whoever had pulled strings to get him shipped out to Gurathu had apparently also been required to get him promoted to a full private for that to happen.

Which was kind of ironic when one thought about.

“You think I won’t?” Glider asked.

“I think it would hurt your pride to be forced to rely on the infinitesimal difference between our ranks to get me to shut up.”

It also helped that the chain of command between the Navy and the Marines was a little fuzzy. Not a lot. Just a little. The end result of which being that while a Navy officer could give a marine of lower rank orders, said orders could be countermanded by any marine that chose to do so, even if they were of a lower rank than the initial naval officer.

It also helped that unlike on Earth, pilots were not all automatically officers. Which was good, because he would well imagine some part of him dying inside if he were ever forced to salute Rocket.

And he had been entirely correct about Glider’s ego, because the woman just scowled, but did not give him an order to stop smiling. Or humming.

Fortunately for her, he wasn’t so much of an asshole that he derived more than a tasteful amount of pleasure from annoying her. Which was why he stopped humming.

He didn’t not stop smiling though.

It wasn’t every day that a man’s net worth multiplied. And he really did need to do something nice for Kernathu and Tisi for being the driving force behind his recent good fortune.

You know, besides the kiss on the cheek he’d given the engineer. He might have done more, but he’d worried for the woman passing out given just how blue she turned just from a light peck on the cheek.

He might have done the same to Tisi were it not for the fact that the woman blushed almost as much from just watching him give Kernathu a kiss. And that she was an officer and the ship’s captain.

Different etiquette between enlisted and officers, even in a military as alien as the Shil’vati.

Though he hadn’t exactly been blind to just how disappointed – even crushed – his captain had looked after he’d given her a solemn handshake in thanks for her efforts.

Idly he found his gaze moving over to the asteroid fueling station that was their very purpose for being in the system. Well, specifically, they were there for the gas giant the station orbited, but in practical terms, the station itself was the lynchpin for any ship planning to refuel on the precious hydrogen required for ships to make an FTL jump.

Sure, the Shil’vati’s anti-grav system allowed large ships to enter the gravity well of worlds they realistically had no business being in, but even an idiot would be able to guess that a ship that refueled from industrial pumps would fill up faster than one using its own air intake filters.

Even as he watched, a small blob detached from the station, drifting down to the gas giant ‘below’.

“Ever wonder why the military doesn’t use automated drones for more than just civilian stuff?” he asked idly.

“We do use drones,” Glider rumbled, not looking up from whatever she was using. “Though if you’re asking why we haven’t replaced you, me and everyone else on this rust bucket with cheaper automotons, I don’t have an answer for you.”

“You don’t?” he asked with genuine surprise.

The woman shrugged. “Apparently there’s a technical bottleneck somewhere according to an article I read. In which case, you’d know more than me.”

This time it was his turn to shrug. He’d have to do some research later, because the only bottleneck he could possibly imagine keeping the Imperium from legions of knock-off terminators was the AI.

Which was a shame, because he wouldn’t mind being made redundant, and thus not sat on his ass with little to do but stare out into the nothingness of space.

Which was why reality chose to spite him by making the section of space he was looking at suddenly less empty…