Tyler

The Huscarl class gunship was proudly emblazoned with a crisp 101 on her nose. The Huscarl had been a good looking aerospace craft on the drawing board, but she was all cold steel and sex appeal in the flesh. The aggressive cant to the wings. The gleaming barrels of her built in weapons. The ominous lack of a visible cockpit.

The gunship exuded speed, strength and raw lethal potential and she looked good while doing it too.

"We're professional killers. That means we have to look professional whenever we go kill people."

The phrase from one of his Marine Corps Drill Instructors at Navy Officer Candidate School in Rhode Island comes unbidden to Tyler Sarkin's mind as he makes his first walk around of his squadron's first physical aircraft.

The maintainers would arrive with the rest of the birds in the next few days, along with the bulk of the flight crews, swelling his command from six to around one hundred people. It was a heady feeling. It still hadn't quite caught up with him yet. It's not like the nerd squad were the only sci-fi fans among the Dauntless's crew. He'd played video games and watched movies as a kid too.

He'd even bought himself a plasma sword from Wichen Bridger so he could have a lightsaber dammit! And now he was commanding one of humanity's first aerospace fighter squadrons, preparing for deep space deployment, further from home than any human could have ever dreamed of being.

A firm squeeze on his butt brings him back down to reality as he smiles up at Cassie. The Seramali huntress was now his wife as well as his Wizzo, and for an angelic looking being, she could be damn dirty in bed.

That was another thing he'd have to work on how to tell his family when he sent a message home.

He'd expected this trip to be one way, and here he was, a commander of a gunship squadron with a wife who, and he couldn't stress this enough, looked like a cross between a normal angel and a biblical angel!

He imagined images of the Seramali warrior woman who had firmly taken her place behind and beside him would make some serious waves among certain religious groups back home.

"Sorry, was I drifting?"

"Yes, but it was cute, so I couldn't resist giving your back side a squeeze."

She smiles down at her lover. He's not short by human standards, but standing at just over two meters tall, she was massive in several dimensions, even without including her wing span.

Tyler considers her for a moment, savoring her beauty even in an olive green flight suit with the same intensity he had just been savoring his new ride with as they continue to walk towards the nose of the spacecraft.

His eyes slide along the skin of the flying machine, the usual human markings denoting intakes, places to step, not to step, where explosives for the ejection system were and rescue access are joined by some neatly painted words in English approximately where the cockpit would be. They had managed to get his little surprise for Cassie in place. The words were simple, just their names.

CDR TYLER "SK" SARKIN, and LT CASCADE "ANGEL" SARKIN.

A blush colors his cheeks as he remembers hearing his new callsign for the first time. SK for ‘Starkiller’, the original name of Luke Skywalker.

Sure he probably deserved it for his obsessive plasma sword training, but goddammit he had a fucking lightsaber! As for his beloved, her call sign was a bit on the nose, literally and figuratively but who was he to argue with the opinion of the flight room when she was his angel now?

"Oh! Is this normal for human spacecraft?" Cassie remarks, lightly touching the paint.

"Mhmm, more or less, for small craft like this anyway. Once we get assigned a plane captain as our chief mechanic his or her name will go on the nose landing gear door by ancient tradition. Not sure how it started honestly, but it's just how things have been done in the Navy back home ever since it did start. I suppose the idea of having "your" ride, even if you don't always fly it is powerful, both for flight crews, and for mechanics. There's a pride there you can generate."

"Mhmm, reminds me of sword polishing back in my home world's military. Every woman was issued an honor blade. It wasn't an offensive weapon, but more a badge of office. They were used for honor duels, so they needed to be kept sharp, but more important was polishing the material by hand. It took me a decade to truly master it! By that time I was applying for my first officer's commission! And hazing fledglings for not having their honor blades honed and polished properly of course."

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Cassie chuckles at the memory even as the age gap between them swings open for a moment for Tyler. A decade just to master polishing a damn sword, and that wasn't even the crux of her extensive work and life experience. She'd had two full careers, both in the military and out, an entire lifetime of experience... it made him feel very, very young in comparison.

"...Cassie, I... uhm. I'm worried."

"Whatever about my love?"

"Aren't I too... young for you? You've done all these amazing things. I can't help but feel like a kid around you sometimes. Like a boy with a crush on his teacher or something."

Cassie beams down at him. "Oh my sweet man, you needn't worry about such things... age means very little in this galaxy of agelessness. Experience is what really counts, and while I have plenty of that, you have experience in things I don't, and as we walk together, we shall face new experiences and learn as a pair... and perhaps eventually more... and when you're a century old and I a mere century your senior, you'll truly see that a bit of an age gap means quite little when we shall be just as young and vibrant as you are now. It's all about what you've done, not how old you are, and you humans have done quite a bit in your lives already."

"Ah yeah, we have a phrase for that back home. It's not the years, it's the mileage."

"Mhmm. Indeed. You humans by that metric are quite high mileage indeed, the youth of the galaxy, and I include myself in this, tend to be quite... sedate, for their first lifetime. It's a critical flaw of the universe as my people see it. It's one of the reasons we push our daughters so hard. It's so easy to just... drift. To go play pirate or bounty hunter. To join a gang and cause trouble. To not better oneself and seize all the true advantages of not aging besides living fast and staying young forever... hence why I have allowed myself to age more or less normally. To remind myself of the years. Of the time."

Cassie brushes at her hair, graying slowly, and her feathers. Though extremely well taken care of, Tyler can see that both have likely lost their luster a bit as Cassie's body has aged. "I shall soon undergo a healing coma. Both for the sake of my new duties, high g maneuvers are no place for old women after all, and to better handle the rigors of having a young, healthy, and virile lover."

Tyler blushes as the angelic beauty gives him a lewd look, a blush racing across her cheeks in turn.

"You almost broke me after our victorious simulator run. I had always thought such men were fantasies, but you humans are made of sterner stuff indeed. So aggressive. I would have thought you were trying to impregnate me."

Now it's Tyler's turn to blush harder still. "I... uh. Was. Actually. A little. Hoping. Maybe."

Cassie's laughter is like the ringing of bells. "You flatter me greatly, my love. I am very glad I waited for a worthy male to present himself. I could have found my way into a marriage before... but with you, I feel a joy in my heart that I had not known was possible. Worry not about your heirs, I shall provide them for you. After my body has returned to a more youthful, fertile state more appropriate to child bearing... and perhaps after our first tour aboard the Tear. Missing out on flying and fighting with you by my side because I can't see my own ankles would make me very sad indeed."

"True, though knowing you're aboard the Tear and I need to keep you and our children safe would make me capable of killing capital ships in nothing but a space suit through sheer force of will alone."

"Mhmm... Is that so?"

"It is very much so, my lady."

The silence between them is comfortable as Tyler takes Cassie's hand, their fingers interlacing automatically as he leads her around the nose. If the first surprise was there, hopefully they'd managed to get the other surprise done too before sending 101 to her new home.

Luck, and the generous bribe he'd offered the guys painting his bird had been with him however. As the aircraft of the squadron commander she was due to be the "color bird", which meant she needed a bit more than just her CT tail flash and ident number like a normal plane. But no squadron patch and colors yet limited what they could do for 101.

While 101 didn't have her final paint job yet, Tyler had a degree of latitude with nose art, something he'd agreed to allow and even encourage in his new squadron. And as they move around the nose 101's nose art is waiting.

A beautiful depiction of a Valkyrie on horseback, a full set of wings spread on both rider and steed as the woman prepares to throw a spear from the saddle. That the woman bore a striking resemblance to Cassie was only somewhat coincidental. He'd only specified that the Valkyrie be blonde, but apparently the techs had seen Cassie on one of their inspection tours and decided to go all the way.

"This is..." Cassie's voice catches in her throat a bit.

"I figured I wanted a way for you to be flying with me even after you're taken off flight status for laying our first clutch."

The empty hangar goes quiet, and Tyler worries for a moment that Cassie's actually upset. The silence is broken by the sound of a zipper traveling down, as his angel frees her generous bust from her flight suit. She normally wore a sports bra arrangement of some kind to keep her girls under control, but clearly she had other plans when she got dressed this morning.

"If I can inspire such feats of valor in you, inspire such dedication, devotion and love in you to always want me by your side when you go into harm's way, even when I am kept out of the fight... shall we christen our cockpit with a feat of lovemaking? I might not be ready for motherhood just yet, but making new life is an art form, and I would practice that art with you, over and over again, until we're certain when the time comes, that our children shall be masterpieces."

Tyler's not sure if his manhood or his heart is throbbing more. The mix of lewd and sweet overstimulates him slightly by attacking different desires at once. His lizard brain takes over however, perfectly sure of what it wants to do with its mate, even as the higher brain functions try to sort themselves out. It seems their inspection of Valkyrie 101 was going to take a bit longer.