The hatch of her berth didn't have a lock. It didn't have a door, either — just a frame and a strip of canvas that hooked to one side and never quite reached the other. So when the boots stopped in the passage outside, Jay heard them stop. She was sitting on the edge of the rack with her hands on her knees, still hard, still not doing anything about it, and she watched the shadow come into the frame and then the woman who owned it.

Halvorsen filled the hatch the way a bulkhead fills a hatch. She was taller than Jay remembered from the interview — or maybe it was the light in here, the one strip that buzzed and stuttered and threw her shadow long across the deck plates. She had her jacket off. Her undershirt was grey and sweat-stained at the collar and she had a wrench tucked through her belt loop like a woman who'd been working, not dressing, and she looked at Jay the way a foreman looks at a machine that's been warming up.

"You ready?"

Jay nodded. Her throat was dry and she didn't trust it.

"Take off your top." Halvorsen's voice didn't change. It was the same voice she'd used to read the four conditions off the log. "Leave the skirt on."

Jay stood up. The deck was cold through her socks — she'd put the boots by the rack and hadn't put them back on, and now she was standing in her socks in front of her captain, and that felt like something, though she couldn't have said what. She reached for the hem of her shirt and pulled it up over her head and the air hit her breasts and her nipples went tight before she'd even finished the motion, before she'd even dropped the shirt on the rack behind her. She stood there in the grey skirt with the waistband sitting low on her hips and her small tits out and her cock tenting the front of the fabric, and she kept her arms at her sides because she'd learned a long time ago that covering up only made them look longer.

Halvorsen looked at her. Not a long look. A short one, top to bottom, the way you check a torque spec. Then she turned and walked out of the berth, and Jay followed her because that was the job.

The passage ran the length of the ship's spine, one strip light every four meters, most of them working. The Kestrel's Weight smelled like what it was: saltwater condenser, hot metal, the ghost of a thousand meals of protein paste, and under all of it something faintly sweet that Jay had finally placed as the coolant they ran through the aft loop. Her socks slid on the diamond-plate deck. Somewhere ahead, a hatch stood open and light and voices spilled out of it, and the smell changed — onions, actual onions, and something that might have been real garlic, and Jay's stomach turned over once in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.

She stopped in the hatchway.

The mess was maybe eight meters by six. Two long tables bolted to the deck, benches down either side, a galley counter along the aft bulkhead with a pot still steaming on a burner. The crew was already seated. Jay counted them without meaning to, the way she'd counted the men in Cassiday's bay — eleven faces, turned, waiting. Djuna at the near end with her boots up on the bench. Imani in the middle with a mug in both hands. Okonkwo at the far table with his back to the galley, looking at his plate. Sefa next to him, already looking at Jay, and then looking away, and then looking back, and Jay felt each of those looks land on her bare tits like a hand.

And then she saw them.

Two of them, at the far end of the second table, sitting close together. Tall even seated. Their skin had that grey-green cast Jay knew the way she knew her own hands, and their eyes were set wide and flat and gold, and their necks were ridged with the plates that ran down under their collars. Dracons. Both of them. One of them was eating. The other one was watching her, not blinking, and the gold of its eyes caught the light and threw it back at her.

Jay's heart missed a beat. Not a figure of speech. She felt the skip, the little stumble in her chest, and then the catch-up, and then the cold that came down through her scalp and into her arms and settled in her hands. The mess went away. In its place: the lounge on the Vixen, the lights low and the crowd a wall of dark faces, and her knees on the stage plating with her belly round and heavy and full of something that wasn't hers, and the Dracon behind her with its hands on her hips and the second one in front with its cock at her mouth, and the smell — that smell, wet and green and mineral, like the inside of a rain barrel — and the sound her own voice made when she came and it wasn't a scream, it was a sob, and the crowd applauding.

She was back in the mess. She was standing in the hatchway with her tits out and her socks sliding on the deck, and the Dracon was still watching her, and it had not blinked.

"In," Halvorsen said, at her shoulder. Not loud. Not kind. Just a word, the way you'd say it to a dog that had stopped at the threshold of a strange room.

Jay stepped in. The deck plates under her socks were warmer than the passage had been, and she walked to the space between the two tables where Halvorsen stopped, and she stood there with her hands at her sides and her cock hard and obvious under the grey cotton, and she looked at the far bulkhead because looking at the Dracon felt like putting her hand back in a fire.

"Crew," Halvorsen said. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to. The mess went quiet the way a room goes quiet when someone with authority starts talking. "This is the new hand. Doctor Singh cleared her today. She's fit for full duty, all species, no restrictions." A beat. "Her name aboard this ship is Whore. That's not a nickname. That's her name. Use it."

Nobody laughed. Jay had half expected somebody to laugh, and nobody did, and that was worse.

"She's free use," Halvorsen went on. "That means what it sounds like. Any member of this crew, any time, on or off watch, in her berth or in yours — she's yours to use. She's agreed to it. She asked for it. She signed for it." Halvorsen's eyes went down the tables, slow, left to right, and Jay watched the crew watch her. "What she has not agreed to is damage. No permanent marks. No breaking bone. No cutting. Nothing that takes her off the roster. She's cargo and crew both, and I don't lose either."

"What about the other thing," Djuna said. She wasn't asking Halvorsen. She was asking Jay, with her boots still up on the bench and her mug in her hand, and her voice was the same flat voice she'd used at the airlock to warn Jay about the crew's rules.

Halvorsen answered for her. "She'll tell you. Whore."

Jay's mouth was dry. She'd known this was coming. She'd rehearsed it in the berth, in the shower on the Warspite, in her own head a hundred times, and none of it mattered because now there were eleven faces and two of them were Dracon. She found her voice anyway. It came out low and steady, which surprised her.

"My hard limits are permanent damage and anything involving children. That's it. Anything else, you don't have to ask. You can just — " she stopped, because the next word was the one she'd been avoiding all day, and then she said it anyway, " — use me."

"Say the rest," Halvorsen said.

Jay looked at the deck. "If I want you to stop, I'll say stop. If I don't say stop, I don't want you to stop." She lifted her head. "I don't say stop much."

Somebody at the far table — Sefa, Jay thought, though she didn't look — made a sound in the back of her throat. Not quite a laugh. Not quite anything.

"And if anyone on this crew ignores a stop," Halvorsen said, and now her voice had changed, gone down half an octave and gotten very quiet, "they're off this ship at the next port with a note in their file and a broken hand and that is if I am feeling incredibly generous, they may find themselves off the ship BEFORE we reach the next port. I don't care who. I don't care why. That's the rule. It's in the log. It's been in the log since before she came aboard." She looked down the tables again. "Anybody got a problem with the rule, say it now."

Nobody said anything. Okonkwo was still looking at his plate. The Dracon that had been watching Jay tilted its head, slow, like a bird considering something on the ground.

Jay stood there and felt the wet start to spread.

It wasn't a surprise. She'd been hard since the hatch. She'd been leaking since the hatch, if she was honest, and she was only now noticing because the front of the grey skirt had gone dark in a patch the size of a palm, and the patch was spreading, and she could feel the next bead of pre-cum roll down the underside of her cock and soak into the cotton and make the patch a little bigger. The skirt was light grey. The wet showed. Everybody at both tables could see it. Djuna could see it — Djuna was looking straight at it, over the rim of her mug, and she wasn't pretending not to. Sefa was looking at it. Imani was looking at it and then at Jay's face and then back at it. Okonkwo was looking at his plate, which was its own kind of seeing.

The Dracon that had been eating set down its fork.

"She's leaking," it said. Its voice was low and flat and it had a wet edge under it, like the sound a pump makes when the seal's going. "Is that for us."

"That's for whoever wants it," Halvorsen said. "The floor's open." She looked at Jay. "Whore. You want to say something to your crew?"

Jay's heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her throat. She looked down the tables, at the faces, at the two gold pairs of eyes at the far end, and she thought about the Vixen, and she thought about Cassiday's bay, and she thought about the fact that she was standing in a freighter mess with her tits out and a wet spot on her skirt and every single person in this room had just been told they could use her any way they wanted, and she was hard because of it, and that was the truth, and she was done pretending otherwise.

She stepped forward.

"I'm the ship's whore," she said. "That's what I'm here for. I don't have a job on this boat except this. So — " she spread her hands, palms up, and let them see the wet spot, and didn't cover it, " — whenever you want me, I'm here. Any of you. All of you. I don't care what watch it is. I don't care if I'm asleep. Wake me up."

Djuna set her mug down.

"Right," she said, and stood up, and Jay had maybe half a second to see it coming before Djuna's hand closed on her shoulder and turned her, and the edge of the near table hit her hip, and Djuna's other hand was on the back of her neck, pushing her down. "Bend over."

Jay bent. Her hands caught the table's far edge and her tits pressed flat against the cold metal and her cheek went down on the surface and she could smell the protein paste and the old grease and the ghost of somebody's coffee, and behind her Djuna's hands were on the waistband of her skirt, hauling it up over her hips, and the air hit the backs of her thighs and her ass and her cock swung free against the table's edge, and she heard somebody — Sefa, probably — breathe out hard through her nose.

"Look at that," Djuna said. It wasn't to Jay. It was to the room. "Horseshoe. Whore. Cumdump. She's already got the paperwork tattooed on her."

"She's got the equipment, too," Imani said. Her voice was mild, the same mild voice she'd used to tell Jay about dinner at nineteen. "Somebody want to check the fit."

Somebody did.

Jay didn't see who. She felt it — two fingers, dry, pushing into her without preamble, and she was loose enough that they went in easy, and she heard the person behind her grunt, and then the fingers were gone and something thicker was there, blunt and hot, and Jay got her hands set on the table and her feet planted on the deck and she braced.

The first thrust drove her into the table edge. Her tits scraped the metal. Her cock dragged along the underside of the table and she made a sound she didn't plan — a short, punched-out noise that was half grunt and half something else — and the person behind her laughed, low, and set a rhythm, and the rhythm was hard and fast and not gentle, and Jay took it with her cheek on the table and her eyes open, watching the crew watch her get fucked.

She couldn't see who was in her. She could see Okonkwo, at the far table, finally looking up from his plate — looking at her, for the first time since she'd walked in, and his face was doing something complicated, and then he looked away again and stood up and walked out of the mess through the far hatch, and nobody said anything about it, and the fucking went on.

The first one finished inside her. Jay felt it — the flood of heat, the twitch, the weight of somebody leaning over her back and breathing hard against her shoulder blade — and then he pulled out and somebody else stepped up, and there was no pause, no discussion, no negotiation. The next cock went in while the first man's come was still running down the inside of Jay's thigh.

"Whore," Djuna said, from somewhere to Jay's left. "You gonna count?"

Jay turned her head on the table. "One," she said. Her voice came out rough. "That was one."

"Good girl."

Two was Sefa. Jay knew it was Sefa because Sefa talked the whole time — a low, steady stream of it, not words so much as noise, and her hands were on Jay's hips and her thumbs were pressing into the divots above Jay's ass and she was fast and shallow as she pegged Jay’s arse with a double ended dildo, the other end buried deep in her own cunt. She came with a sound like she'd been holding her breath for a week. Three was Imani, who was slow and thorough and reached around to work Jay's cock while she too pegged him, and Jay came on the table edge with her mouth open and her eyes shut and her hips jerking back into Imani's hips, and Imani said "there it is. what a dirty fucking whore" and kept going until she was done.

Four was a man Jay hadn't met yet, one of the ones from the far table, and five was another, and six was Djuna, who fucked like she did everything else — efficiently, without commentary, and hard enough that Jay's knees started to shake. Jay found herself begging loudly, loud enough for the whole room to hear, “Fuck me, use me, destroy my hole!” Like the filthy whore she was she pleaded.

Seven was the man from the galley. Again Jay screamed for more, “Fuck me, harder, please harder, pound my fucking sissy cunt! Make me your fuckmeat whore!”

Eight was — Jay stopped counting for a second when number eight put a hand in her hair and pulled her head back and said "open" — and Jay opened, and number eight face fucked her and came deep down her throat, and Jay swallowed, and number eight said "again" and did it a second time, this time pulling out of Jay’s mouth and covering his face with rope after rope of thick sperm that clung to his face and hair marking him as a filthy whore.

Nine was a man. Jay hadn't met yet. He was old and quiet and he used her without a word, and when he finished he patted her hip twice, like you'd pat a horse, and walked away.

Ten was the first Dracon.

Jay knew it before it touched her. She knew it by the smell — wet and green and mineral, the smell from the Vixen, the smell from the stage — and she knew it by the sound of its breathing, slow and deep and not quite in the human range. Her body did something complicated. Her heart went fast and her ass cunt, the place that was now just the inside of her gaping ass and the memory of being full — clenched hard, and she felt the fear go through her and under the fear the other thing, the thing the primer had put in her, the thing that turned fear into heat, and she was wet again, wetter, and she heard herself make a sound that wasn't a word.

"You know me," the Dracon said. Its voice was the same flat wet pump-sound. "You've had one of us before."

"Yes," Jay said. Her voice cracked. "On the Vixen. I — " she swallowed. "I carried for you. Two of them. On stage."

The Dracon was quiet for a moment. Then it said, "You were a good host."

And then it was inside her, and Jay's hands came off the table and she caught herself on her forearms and her forehead went down on the metal and she felt the size of it, the length and the girth and the heat, and she felt her body open for it the way it had been trained to, and she heard herself moan, long and low, and she didn't care who heard.

The Dracon took its time. It fucked her in long, slow strokes, all the way out and all the way in, and every stroke dragged along the place the primer had made into a nerve, and Jay came twice before it finished, and the second time she came she made a sound like something breaking. When the Dracon finally came, it came in a flood — heavy, thick, more than a human body could hold, and Jay felt it fill her and then felt it spill out around the Dracon's cock and run down her thighs and onto the deck, and she heard one of the crew swear softly, and the Dracon pulled out and stepped back and said nothing at all.

Eleven was the second Dracon. It used her mouth. It held her head with both hands, gentle and immovable, and it fucked her throat in the same long slow rhythm, and Jay took it with tears running down her cheeks and her jaw aching and her throat working, and when it came it came the same way, heavy and thick and more than she could swallow, and she swallowed what she could, gagged in disgust, swallowed again and let the rest run down her chin and onto her tits, and the Dracon let go of her head and she slumped onto the table and lay there with her cheek in a puddle of her own spit and the Dracon's come, and she breathed.

"That's eleven," somebody said.

"Twelve," Halvorsen said.

Jay lifted her head. Halvorsen was standing at the head of the near table, where she'd been standing the whole time, and she'd taken off her undershirt while Jay wasn't looking, and her tits were large and low and the skin was pale where the sun had never gotten to it, and her belt was unbuckled and her trousers were open and she was stroking herself with one hand, slow, watching Jay with an expression Jay couldn't read.

"Get on the deck," Halvorsen said. "On your back."

Jay got on the deck. The plates were cold and tacky under her back — come and sweat and spilled protein paste, and she didn't care, and she lay there with her knees up and her arms at her sides and she looked up at her captain.

Halvorsen straddled her chest, facing her feet, and lowered herself down until her cunt was over Jay's mouth. Jay's mouth opened before she told it to. She got her tongue up and into Halvorsen and Halvorsen made a sound — the first sound Jay had ever heard her make that wasn't a word — and settled her weight down, and Jay went to work.

She was good at this. She'd been trained at this, and she'd been trained well, and she knew what Halvorsen wanted before Halvorsen knew — the flat of the tongue first, then the tip, then the two together, then the rhythm, slow and steady, and then faster when Halvorsen's thighs started to close on her ears. Above her, Halvorsen reached back and got a hand in Jay's hair and held her head still and rode her face with a slow, grinding patience, and Jay heard the crew go quiet, all of them watching, and she worked her tongue and her jaw and her lips and she didn't stop, and Halvorsen came with a long, low sound and a hard clench of her thighs and a gush of wet that ran down Jay's chin and into her hair.

Halvorsen stayed there for a moment. Then she lifted off and got to her feet and stood over Jay with her trousers still open and her hand still wet, and she looked down at her.

"Open your mouth."

Jay opened her mouth.

Halvorsen pissed in it. A long, hot stream, and Jay took it, and swallowed, and took the rest, and it ran out the corners of her mouth and down her cheeks and into her hair, and she didn't close her mouth until Halvorsen was done, and then she swallowed again and licked her lips and lay there.

"Twelve," Halvorsen said. She tucked herself back in and buckled her belt and picked her undershirt up off the table and pulled it on. "Good work, Whore."

The crew started moving. Not leaving — just moving, the way people move when something's over. Somebody picked up a mug. Somebody said something to somebody else, low, and somebody laughed. Sefa stepped over Jay on her way to the galley and paused, and looked down at her, and Jay looked up at her, and Sefa's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile.

"You're gonna want the deck hose," Sefa said. "Before it dries."

"Thanks," Jay said. Her voice was wrecked. She didn't move.

The Dracons left together, through the far hatch, without looking at her. Okonkwo was already gone. Djuna was at the galley counter with her back turned, doing something with the pot. Imani crouched down next to Jay and looked at her for a moment, and then reached out and pushed a strand of wet hair off Jay's forehead, and stood up, and sat back down at the table with her mug.

Jay lay on the deck of the mess with her tits out and her skirt around her waist and her legs open and her body full of cum and piss, and she listened to the ship. The condenser hummed. The loop rumbled. Somewhere aft, a pump cycled on and off, on and off. The strip light above the galley flickered once and steadied. She could feel the Dracon's load still moving inside her, slow and heavy, and she could feel the piss drying on her face, and she could feel the wet patch on the front of her skirt where she'd soaked it before any of this started, and she was still hard, and she didn't do anything about that either.

Halvorsen stopped at the hatch. She didn't turn around all the way — just her head, over her shoulder, the way you check a gauge on your way out of the engine room.

"Whore."

"Captain."

"You're on galley cleanup tonight. Then you're off watch until 0600. After that you're on the roster same as anybody — but the roster's for the ship. The rest of the time, you're theirs." A pause. "You did good. Get the hose."

She left.

Jay stayed on the deck for a while longer. She counted the strip lights on the ceiling — four, one of them flickering — and she counted the rivets in the deck plate under her left hand — eleven — and she listened to Imani and Djuna talk about the coolant loop in low voices, the way crew talked around a piece of furniture, and she thought about the fact that this was her life now, this exact thing, on this exact deck, and that she'd asked for it, and that they'd given it to her, and that tomorrow she'd get up and eat breakfast with these people and then somebody would bend her over the galley counter and she'd take that too.

She got up. Her legs were unsteady. The cum ran down the inside of her thighs and dripped onto the deck, and she stood there in the mess with her skirt still hiked up and her tits still out and her face still wet, and she looked at the crew — at Djuna at the counter, at Imani at the table, at Sefa in the galley doorway with a hose in her hand — and she said, "Where's the hose hookup."

Sefa pointed with her chin. "Aft bulkhead. Cold water only. Don't spray the panel."

"Got it."