I learned one or two things in the last couple of months. Firstly, the framework for a starship, in comparison to shield generators or power cores, really wasn't all that expensive. Secondly, you could have it towed to anywhere you wanted via a Rift-capable tug. That was important as we couldn't go through the gate without being noticed. Theoretically, we could have hired somebody to jump us out of here, but Rixa had kind of become my hunting grounds. Well, I guess our hunting grounds. Sam had pretty much gotten into it just as I had, and X-Talia was always up for taking on the pirates or sometimes the mercenaries. They had gotten wiser in the last four or so months, and the pickings have been starting to dry up. It's getting to the point where they either flew in groups of four or better or were just straight up hard to find. I'm fairly certain there has been a concerted effort on their part to find us, but space is vast and in the asteroid fields, one chunk of metal looked a lot like the other when you didn’t have a transponder squeaking out your location or use of the grave drive to alter your position. We were all pretty much invisible. That said, we did have to move operations. We were found and fortunately for us, it had been a small fleet.

We had gotten the frame. It would be a class C sized ship. All we had was class B sized parts, so we were gonna wire the thing up with multiple redundancies. Not as efficient when using credits, but I wasn't paying for most of the parts anyway. Sure, there was the cabling and all the auxiliary processors and stuff, but most of the hull plating and structural supports were coming from the melted and reworked pirate ships, and everything else was being traded through David for those few things we couldn’t make or salvage. We had a lot of missiles in stock. Currently, we had a disagreement on what this ship's name was gonna be. I was going for the Revenge. Sam wanted to name it Rixa after the star system it was being created in, and X-Talia had a whole list of names, all of which were technically better than both our suggestions, but I was unwilling to admit that.

Our little drone hauler turned factory was working at full speed to crank out hull plating. Its radiators glowed a cherry red as it tried to dissipate the waste heat into the cold vacuum of outer space. The as-of-yet unnamed vessel was starting to take form. It was gonna have two hulls, an inner hull built much like all the other ships I'd ever been on and an outer hull that would be armor plated. The space between the two hulls would have a host of repair drones along with a lot of the wiring and other cables needed to feed the shield and gravity emitters. There would be a total of six freight containers, three on each side, to function as drone bays. Right now, we only had two of the freight containers. There was somewhat of a catwalk that ran the entire length down the spine with places marked out for the various power cores, shield generators, and gravity drives. A nice fat location marked out for a Rift Drive should we ever be fortunate to get one. Painfully slowly, we were enclosing that stretch of open inner space. At the moment, only the head was enclosed.

The bridge still smelled like fresh paint. Most of its screens and consoles had been new for the sole fact that we needed to keep everything compatible. Beyond that was a large spacious galley. Radially from there, we had four rooms, two on each side. The port side had bedrooms, and the starboard side had Sam's Medical Bay and the head. Beyond that was main engineering and X-Talia. X-Talia was a rack servers. A lot of servers. She took up a rather large area and produced a lot of heat. Currently, we had a lot of radiators outside of this area radiating the heat out into the void. That had been a lesson in ship design. I was painfully unaware of just how many pipes and conduit it took to move that much heat from the inside to the outside. Space was cold, but there was no conduction or convection, which made getting rid of the heat difficult.

Other things on our shipbuilding exercise that I somehow had not been capable of mentally placing: all the auxiliary systems we needed to survive. Waste reclamation, water recycling, gas storage, etc. The list seemed to go on. Fortunately, this stuff was handled mostly with standardized modules designed to attach underneath the flooring. In many ways, shipbuilding had been reduced to buying a module and clamping a hose to its ports. It made it easy for an idiot like me. X-Talia was the one handling the hard part of figuring out how to get everything to work appropriately and where it should go. On the same note, however, as X-Talia's server rack grew, so too did her ability to automate things. We already had a dozen spider-like drones swarming around the deck, welding plating in place. A small fleet of salvage drones, basically converted mining drones, were taking apart our most recent kills and feeding them into the mini foundry. An untold number of limpet drones, small flying things that move small items from one point to another, worked perpetually to keep things moving. It was X-Talia's true power unleashed, and that power would only grow with time. It was almost scary.

"What do you think about this?" Sam asked, turning her tablet around to show me a digital rendering of a nude woman who had long white hair, pupil-less white eyes, pointed ears, and onyx-black skin.

"It's a Drow?”

"Yeah, how did you know?"

"It's a common race in fantasy games."

"Oh. Well, what do you think?"

"About what exactly?"

She put the tablet next to her head, smiled, and said, "Me."

It took me a second to figure out what she was talking about. We had been sitting at our new galley table. I was assembling one of the stupid spider drones, and Sam had been sitting in her chair in nothing but a black tank top and panties, with her red-skinned legs stretched out and her feet on the table. She'd been playing with her tablet for a while, and now I knew what she was doing. It took me just another moment to realize she was talking about changing her appearance.

"You wanna look like a drow?"

Sam gave me a wicked grin. "I'd keep the horns and tail."

It would seem that my hot succubus Gothic Doctor Chick wanted to now be a hot drow Gothic Doctor Chick. It wasn't my body. She could do what she wanted, but I could get into it.

"I'm not gonna complain, but it might clash with your wardrobe a bit."

Sam turned the tablet around and looked down at it. "Shit. You're right."

I shrugged. "Just add a little white for contrast."

Sam poked at a tablet. "Mm." It had cost a small fortune to outfit Sam's laboratory. She had been giddy about it. Watching her excitement had been near infectious. Once she had calmed down over all the new equipment and getting everything in its right place and fussing over cabinet layout, her grin had changed from excitement to something more devious. Or more specifically, deviant. She then proceeded to enlist my help in fulfilling some sexual fantasies. I wasn't complaining, but there had to be more to the succubus motif than just the looks. The girl was insatiable.

X-Talia popped into the seat across the table from me. She could do that now due to the holo projectors mounted in the ceiling. She also had enough cameras installed that she could keep an eye on everything. Sam had the weird fetish of making sure X-Talia could see us when we did anything together. X-Talia was still using the two-dimensional animated image. She appeared facing directly towards me, which meant it would probably be a strange angle for Sam. The girl made of blue light grinned, her hair gently floating down to her shoulders as though she were in an almost weightless environment.

"There's a message."

"From who?"

"Sam has a message."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

I stared at X-Talia. Sam also looked up at her.

"Why are you telling me?" I asked, because it was the obvious question. X-Talia's image shifted, likely changing to something that would be perfectly reasonable from Sam's angle but made her look flattened and distorted from mine.

"I just forwarded it to your tablet, but with your permission, I'll divulge the information Zoia wanted to send directly to Grant."

"Oh, okay."

X-Talia's image flickered back so that it was pointed at my perspective.

"Zoia?" With that, I looked towards Sam because she didn't seem surprised she was getting messages from Zoia . Sam noticed and looked up. She smiled.

"Yeah, Zoia."

"You've been talking to her?"

"Mmhmm," Sam responded, clearly delving into the chunk of the message that was meant for her eyes only.

"Okay." Then I turned my attention back to X-Talia. "So what's with me?"

"She would like some help."

I cocked an eyebrow, hoping X-Talia would continue. "Zoia has been tracking a guy with a 125,000 bounty." My eyebrows rose on their own accord this time. That was a lot of money. "The guy fell off the map a long time ago and hasn't been heard or seen from in a while. Zoia found some information that points to the guy's new name and what he's currently doing."

With that, X-Talia seemed to be finished. The slight smirk and the way her eyebrows twitched told me she wanted a leading question.

I obliged. "And what does this have to do with me?"

"Reginald Maximus. He's in charge of the Sentinel mercenary group."

"You have got to be freaking kidding me. How does a wanted man end up running a mercenary company? Did nobody vet the guy?"

X-Talia shrugged.

Sam giggled. She looked up, her eyes twitching between me and X-Talia before apologizing and returning her attention back to her message. How long had she been talking to Zoia? Seemed like an awfully long time to be reading a "hey, how you doing" type thing.

"So?"

"So what?" I asked.

"Are we gonna help her?"

"Of course, we are," Sam answered.

My attention went back to Sam. "We are?"

"Yeah. Why wouldn't we?"

"Because she's a scary bounty hunter and might take us in," I pointed out the obvious.

"Nah, she's a sweetheart."

"A sweetheart?" That was the last thing I could ever imagine Zoia Rajirie being called.

"She's also curious if we're willing to install a docking clamp for her ship to attach to ours."

"A docking clamp?"

"I've already altered the design," X-Talia replied, much to my surprise.

"I've already been voted out on this, haven't I?"

Both women nodded.

"Ok then," I pressed my lips together and returned my attention back to the circuits I was trying to put together. X-Talia winked out of existence. Sam giggled again.

Sure seemed like a rather long message.

"So, Grant?" Sam asked, leaning back in her chair and setting her tablet down off to the side, putting her full attention on me.

"Sam?"

"We're together now, right? Like a couple?"

We hadn't really discussed it very much. It was a situation where we were stuck together. Thing was even if we were in such a situation where we weren't stuck, I couldn't actually see separating. That might just be my lack of experience with relationships, but in general, I thought things were going pretty well.

"Um."

"Like if we were not, uh, if we didn't have to worry about bounties or anything, and we could just live on a station, we'd still be together, right?"

"I think so."

"Right. So we're a couple then?"

"Yes." I tried to say it with some type of certainty so it didn't sound like a question.

She smiled. "Great. So if we're sticking together, then I really need to know your stance on polyamorous relationships."

"Huh?"

Sam giggled again. I must have looked just as confused as I felt. She leaned forward and poked the table.

"What is our policy for seeing, dating, or just having casual sex with other people?"

"Well, I thought that, well, I thought that we're kind of seeing each other exclusively because there is nobody else."

Sam giggled again. "Right, but let's assume we didn't have to be completely exclusive out of necessity. What is our policy?"

"I don't know."

"Ok. So we should probably figure that out. Um, I guess, question number one. Let's go with, I guess, casual sex. In our relationship, is it ok for me to visit a brothel?"

"No."

"Ok. Why?"

Was this something I had to be delicate with or was this something to just be blunt with? "Because I don't want other guys' dicks in my girlfriend."

Sam laughed, a bit more than a giggle this time. "Fair enough, but what about girls?"

I was trying to have a problem with the concept, but the only thing I was coming up with was some type of arousal. "Um."

"Ok," Sam said rather cheerfully. "So if it helps, my stance on casual sex with other people is that I'm ok with it so long as I get to approve of it and possibly join, or watch, or record it."

There had to be something more to the succubus thing with this girl than just the looks. Sam was definitely a weirdo. "OK. I think I get it."

"Ok. So what about actual relationships?"

I thought about it for a moment, but I still couldn't force myself to have a problem with other women. It had to be a guy thing. "I like the idea of approval, and I still don't like the idea of sharing you with another dude."

"OK. On my end of things, I want approval and I want the option to be part of it."

"OK. Is that settled then?"

"I think it is," Sam said, nodding her head with an air of finality. "So for the second part of this..."

"Second part?"

"I would like your approval to have a relationship, including sex, with Zoia."

"Zoia?"

"Yeah."

"The scary bounty hunter chick?"

"She's not scary," Sam chuckled. I sat back in my seat and thought about it.

"Well?" Sam prompted.

"I mean, I guess."

"Great! Unfortunately for you, I don't think she's into guys."

"I think I'm ok with that."

Sam picked up her tablet, flipped it back on, and started poking at it. I was left to sit there and wonder, what the hell? The whole conversation had been a little odd, but as this was my first real relationship, maybe it was normal. There definitely had to be more to the succubus thing than just the looks.

"Sam. Is there more to the succubus thing than just the looks?"

She looked up from her tablet and gave me a shrug. "I don't know. My childhood was a little messed up. I'm setting ground rules now, so if there is something to it, at least consent is involved."

"Ok."

Sam went back to poking at her tablet. I went back to poking at my systems control boards or whatever the heck it was, but the only thing I could focus on was that Sam was now indeed my girlfriend, and she also wanted to be Zoia's girlfriend. Sam would be with another girl, and that got me a little hot and bothered. I looked up from my work and ran my eyes from her black painted toenails along her calves, knees, thighs, her black panties, and up her black tank top to her sexy little necklace. She was still poking at her tablet.

"Sam."

"Hmm?"

"I'm horny now."

The woman grinned. "Oh? Are you implying that it's my fault?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"And you want me to take care of that?"

"Yeah, I think so."

Sam poked at her tablet a few more times and set it off to the side. "X-Talia?"

"Yes?" said X-Talia as she popped into her previous position, her two-dimensional form facing Sam.

"Grant is horny."

X-Talia lifted an eyebrow. "What do you want me to do about it?"

"Start recording."

X-Talia gave a snort of amusement and then said, "Sure," and then disappeared. Sam turned back towards me. "You think Zoia would be willing to watch?"

"I... This is just getting weird."