Digital Galaxies

“I want to get Elissa a body in DG,” I blurted, on our final afternoon of our rest week.

Cerri glanced up from her book, and Elissa turned her attention from the trashy reality TV she was watching to tilt her head at me. Gloria just smiled a secret little smile and headshot some poor soul in the FPS she was playing.

“Any particular reason?” Cerri asked curiously.

I shrugged, my cheeks heating just a teeny tiny bit. “I think it would be fun. It’s been fun with her having a body this past week.”

“We’ve done nothing but laze around in your house and eat delicious food,” Elissa laughed. “I can do that as your ship, you know.”

“It’s not the same,” I mumbled, flopping sideways against Cerri. My arms went around her neck and I ducked close to her to hide my face. “ You and Gloria are cute together too.”

The sound of a respawn timer greeted my words, and I peeked up to see our pilot very pointedly staring at her screen. “We’re not together.”

“Together?” Elissa asked, her perfectly arched brows knit together in confusion.

Cerri gestured lazily between them with her tail. “You know, like dating?”

“Oh, we’re not dating,” the beautiful ship’s AI smiled.

“Then what’s with the hickeys and bite marks on Gloria’s neck?” Cerri asked, and even though I couldn’t see her face, I could hear the smirk in her voice.

Gloria made a choking sound and quickly tried to hide her exposed neck by popping the collar on her casual dress shirt. “They’re nothing.”

“Oh, we’re definitely fucking,” Elissa chimed in again, grinning from ear to ear.

Gloria all but spontaneously combusted. “Elissa!”

“Oh come on, it’s not that hard to figure out.”

“Elissa is right,” I said softly. “We could already tell. You two aren’t exactly stealthy about it.”

“Exactly,” the gorgeous blonde AI said, giving me a nod of thanks. “I don’t see why you’re being so weird about this.”

Cerri gave a rumble and draped an arm over my shoulder, her ebony nails caught midway through their transformation into claws. It wasn’t a sign that she felt threatened or whatever, though. I’d learned that her claws came out when she was feeling possessive of me. It was kinda cute, actually.

“She’s embarrassed because, if I’m correct in my reading of the subtext here, you are topping her, and she doesn’t know how to handle that,” my succubus said, calm and amused. “She’s used to being the dominant and giving one in her sex life.”

“Oh… so it’s like…” Elissa murmured, the poor gummed up gears in her head turning at a pace I would consider glacial. “She’s… like a… well, let’s just say I think I understand, but I can’t think of a thingy to explain that I understand.”

She’s so cute when she’s trying really hard to think, I sent to Cerri privately.

Cerri’s nails trailed over my bare arm. It is rather endearing, isn’t it?

Turning to her, I looked up into her star-filled eyes and smiled. I needed to be gentle with her, especially around two other beautiful women that might make her jealous. It made sense in a way, though. Cerri was an SAI, she’d grown up without parents to give her love, stuck performing scientific research that she had been working on since before she was awakened. She probably had a fear of rejection and abandonment that was a mile high.

Her lips were only a small arching of my back away, and I captured them in a soft, unhurried kiss. It was impossible to keep my tongue from lapping at hers, so I didn’t bother.

Halfway through the kiss, though, Elissa cleared her throat with a chuckle. “Girls. We were having a conversation.”

“Oh right,” Cerri mumbled, pulling away. I pouted up at her, then over at my interrupting friend.

“So, Gloria is confused because I… have taken her role?” she asked, reminding me of the topic.

“No,” my girlfriend laughed. “She’s confused because you took her role and she likes it.”

“Jesus, okay, okay!” Gloria blurted, throwing her hands in the air. “Elissa is topping me so hard I can barely remember my own name! There’s no need to like, overanalyse it!”

“So long as you admit it,” Cerri said, smiling innocently.

“I do, I do,” she pouted, very pointedly picking up her controller again. “Y’all go back to whatever you were doing before you decided you needed to tease me. I’m going to play games.”

Hiding a smile in Cerri’s neck, I couldn’t help but feel a little flutter in my heart. Gloria was extremely cute when she was all blushy and pouty from being teased. I mean, she was hot all the time, but this was just adorable. The way she covered her face and refused to meet anyone's eyes? Gosh, and even her ears were pink right now.

A hand pulled my thoughts back to the girl I was currently snuggled up against. Cerri’s fingers stroked down my ear, her thumb on the inside with the fluff, while her index finger played across the outside. I shivered and cuddled closer, my eyes drooping. I loved it when she did this. Of course, it also made me very… very… relaxed.

****

When we logged back into Digital Galaxies, the ship was dark. Cerri and I had logged out in my room, and it was there that we rematerialized, laying in one of my pillow piles. God, I had printed so many pillows.

Cerri made a little worried sound, and asked, "Is there something wrong? Why does the air smell stale? Is life support not working?"

"Not in this room, it isn't," I whispered, poking my tongue out to taste the air.

Not waiting for a reply, I quickly hooked myself into the ship's systems using my implants and requested the status of life support onboard the Turshie.

Red text, devoid of any embellishments, scrolled down my vision, giving me a very simple message. Life support was offline, having been manually shut down by Warren ten hours ago. A rapidfire series of requests to the other systems onboard revealed a similar state of affairs. Even the reactor had been thrown into an emergency shutdown. Everything that remained online was running off battery power alone.

"All systems were quickly and manually powered down by Warren ten hours ago," I told my anxious succubus as she pushed herself to her feet.

Alarm spread across her features, made all the more spooky in the red glow of the emergency lights. "Where is he now? Have any of the others logged in yet? I know we're technically a day early, but…"

"He used his console on the bridge to initiate the full shutdown," I said, accepting Cerri's hand and allowing her to pull me to my feet. "Let's check there. As for the others… I don't know."

I had to hit the manual bolt release on the lock to my rooms, but once we were out into the rest of the ship, it was smooth sailing. Nothing was damaged, there weren't any bullet holes or other signs of conflict.

“Nothing’s out of place…” Cerri said, glancing around. “What’s going on?”

“To the bridge,” I said. “We’ll find answers there.”

When we got there, the bridge was dark too, and Warren was nowhere to be found. Cerri and I carefully sat down in our seats and I brought up the internal security systems, telling them to boot into safe mode.

Space beyond the windows gave us nothing to work with. The ship was still parked in the debris field, hidden in the shadow of a slowly drifting hulk. Nothing appeared to be moving out there either, or at least, moving in anything resembling a controlled manner.

“Don’t turn on anything that draws high power,” she told me, frowning at one of her station’s many glass screens. “We don’t know why the ship was powered down yet, so let’s only turn on as much as we need to.”

“I agree,” I murmured, already reading the logs. “Looks like the last thing the security systems saw was… yeah, Warren entered the bridge ten or so hours ago and initiated a dark shutdown.”

“What the hell…” Cerri frowned, looking over at me as I finished speaking. “Why would we go stealth? Is there something dangerous outside? How does that explain his absence?”

As if to answer that foreboding question, we heard a thumping sound coming from outside the bridge. Thump, thump, thump, it went, approaching us from down the gently upward sloping hallway that led to where we were. The colour drained from my face, and Cerri stood up from her seat, rushing for the closed door, claws out.

“Log out if this goes badly,” she told me urgently.

“But—“ I protested.

She flashed me a look. “No, Alia. I’m serious. We need access to this ship, and if there’s anyone who can sneak around inside it and take out intruders after they think they’ve won, it’s you.”

Anything I would have said was drowned out by the clanging impact of something metallic on the door to the bridge. It repeated three times, almost like…

“It’s knocking…” Cerri said, giving voice to my thoughts.

“Uh… should I open it?” I asked, and we shared an indecisive, worried look. This whole situation was just way too crazy for me. What was even going on?

Finally, she shrugged. “Sure. Sounds like whatever that thing is will be able to come through that door eventually anyway.”

Carefully, I pressed the button, and the door to the bridge slid open with a gentle hiss, revealing… Bundit?