Princess of the Void
[side story] Talem & The Knife – pt 3 [R-18🩶]

Qiva ambles into the conjugal hab and glances around its rose-tinted confines. She pulls a scarlet-painted drawer open, eyes the sex toys inside, and shuts it again. “Kitschy.”

“It’s a conjugal hab.” Talem follows her in and engages the dampening field. He has a feeling this might get loud. “They’re supposed to be.”

“You got music in here?”

He points at a carrying case on the wall. “Remote’s right there.”

“Pick us something.” She pulls the remote off the wall and tosses it to him. She crouches slightly to investigate a kiosk built into a sconce decorated with painted grapevine. “What’s this?”

“That’s a rapid test. You put your thumb in the sleeve and it checks to make sure you’re clean. I dunno if they’ve gotten Eqtorans—”

The test panel lets out a chipper ping! and turns blue. Qiva pulls her thumb out.

“Oh,” Talem finishes.

Qiva steps aside. Her tail bumps his back and sweeps him forward up to the rapid test station. He sticks his thumb into the sleeve. Ping! Blue.

Qiva scratches her chin. “So we can fuck raw?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“All right.” She unlaces her chunky black combat boots. “You eat me out and I let you find out what cumming inside an Eqtoran feels like.”

“I’m not going to eat you out until you shower.”

She clicks her tongue impatiently. “I’m not gonna shower without a man to grope. So get your shit off.”

She shoulders her way out of her parka and carelessly tugs her top off. He mutely follows suit with her as she shucks her drab cold-weather gear. Beneath is a body beyond belief, sinewy strength and voluptuous fertility, forged to hunt and fight and keep a mate warm on long, freezing nights.

She bumps him with those heavy hips. “Put something on and warm up the water.”

He fiddles with the remote. No time to browse the LPs. He finds a playlist called Slow and Sultry and turns the shower on. He’s used to warm water on command, but he’s learned how the Harok pumps fire out a shock of polar cold before the steam rises, and he stays well clear as he cranks the heat.

He steps under the waterfall and watches his—his lover? Watches Qiva strip her wooly socks off and duck her head into the bathroom. She eyes the showerhead. “Goddamn thing’s so low.”

“Just sit on the bench and you’re fine.” His tail swishes to indicate the plastic-and-aluminum seat they’ve set by all the shower stalls to accommodate their Eqtoran colleagues while the permanent barracks are being constructed. “If your big fat ass doesn’t break it.”

“My big fat ass is gonna break you, you mouth off again.”

He scoffs, and pretends like he isn’t staring at the shapely globes of Qiva’s butt as they smush onto the bench, so packed with muscle they keep their springy roundness, even as her downy insulation folds and spreads at the creases of her thighs.

She grins. The fins of her fringe ripple. “That thought getting you hard, little goat boy?”

“Shut up and lean forward.” He steps behind her with a washcloth. “I’ll get your back.”

“Not that.” She takes the cloth from his hand and points at a coarse, bristly brush on a hook inside the sliding stall door. “Use that thing.”

He pulls it from its place, suds it up, and rubs it on Qiva’s back. “Harder,” she says. “Put some shoulder into it, little man.”

He redoubles his effort. Her spine arches. A pornographic groan emerges from her exhale. “Oooh, yeah. Fuck yes.”

Her fringe stands up then flattens like a stretching animal. He chuckles. “Who’s the pet now, huh?”

An arm lashes out and seizes him around the middle. He squawks and loses balance; a big wet hand catches his head before he cracks a horn on the wall and hauls him into Qiva’s lap.

“You are,” she says.

She turns around on the bench so he’s in the water flow, and opens her legs to give him more room to sprawl. Her sudsy mitts explore him, running from his crotch to his armpits.

Is it his imagination, or is her smile getting softer every time it appears? He recalls it as a mean leer. He belatedly remembers to struggle. Qiva rumbles a laugh and tightens her hold as she scrubs his hair.

“Music’s all right.” Her head’s bobbing. “Better than most of them. Thing you gotta know about Eqtoran girls if you’re gonna start fucking them. Thing called a peak.”

“What’s a peak?”

“Peak’s when music hits you hard enough you feel it hitting you.” Qiva shuts her eyes and nods her head to the rhythm. “Nice spot to be.”

“I just picked it randomly,” he says.

She opens one eye. “Looks like we both got lucky, then.”

“Luck has nothing to do with it. I yapped my way into this one.”

She hums. “All part of the plan, huh?”

He hooks an arm around her musclebound waist. “Yep.”

Her firm but careful fingers descend his body, trace his obliques down to his shaft.

“This fucking cock,” she murmurs. “It’s not fair.” She vents a sighing breath as she cups it in her palm. “Your ships and your guns and your gear and your fucking Empire. And now your cock, too. It’s not fair. Didn’t think it’d feel like that.”

Her chest expands and contracts against him. The understanding that this is a full person, not just some kind of living sex dream, settles uncertainly on him. He hesitantly rests a hand on her thigh. He doesn’t suppose this is a side she shows often.

Qiva was a soldier of the Eqtoran Republic. Qiva’s side lost. He tries to imagine how that feels, beneath the bravado and the muscle and the libido. Training your whole life to defend your home, dedicating your existence to it. And then losing before the war even begins.

“You okay?” he asks, quiet like someone would hear otherwise.

“Yeah,” she murmurs. “You’re gonna make me feel better.”

He didn’t think that was what he wanted. But it is. He wants her to feel better.

A chuffing laugh in his ear. “Standing at attention, huh, marine?”

“That’s usually what happens when you touch it.”

“Uh huh.” The toothy grin is back across her face. “Got yourself an Eqtoran fetish?”

“You got a Taiikari one?”

“Let’s see.”

Her arm snakes across his back. The muscles in it swell. She stands from the shower bench and boosts him into her arms as she rises, bridal-carry style.

He struggles for real this time. “Wait, wait—”

She strides out of the shower, sloshing water across the floor, and drops him onto the bed like a sandbag emplacement.

He sputters and shivers the water out of his tail. “We’re getting the fucking bed wet.”

A tensile creak from the springs as his bedmate clambers onto the soggy sheets. “Not sleeping here, right?”

“No, but—”

“Complain, complain.” Her skin glistens in the magenta light. “I got a better use for that pretty mouth.”

Her shovel-sized hand lands on his chest.

“Get on your back,” she says.

“You’ll break my goddamn neck,” he says.

“No, I won’t. Get on your fucking back, boy.” She pushes, and he lets himself be tipped over.

Her heavy tail plaps across his stomach, thick and squishy like a third thigh. Her hips sink until the damp skin of her ass is cushioned against his upper chest. Until he’s enveloped in the pillowy strength of this mighty warrior’s lower body.

Her leer shines from between the twin mountains of her breasts. “Breakfast time.”

She pushes her pelvis forward. Her folds nudge against his lips. He takes his cue.

An exultant moan rises from her at his first explorations. He kisses around her lips, explores the pliant, supple entrance, the anchoring tendons, the taut muscle.

He gives her a nip on the inner thigh. He lets a little bit of fang out. She—

Is that a whimper? Did he just make big bad Qiva whimper?

“Oh my fucking—” She slaps the wall and braces on it as her hips swivel and shift atop his tongue. “God dammit.”

He anchors his hands on her big round butt and buries his face between her legs.

Qiva lets out a strangled gasp. Her entire body reacts, the muscle locking up, the cushion quivering. Her pussy lips are as thick and plump as the rest of her,

He’s making out with her cunt, now, inhaling her, pushing as far as he can go, going at it like an animal.

“Fucking—fucking Taiikari.” Her spine arches. A bead of something wet and kiln-hot drips onto his forehead. He looks up and sees her tongue panting out of her mouth. She’s drooling on him. “How the fuck do you feel this good?” she snarls.

She releases another one of those yelps as her body doubles over. Her tail lashes and thwomps back down into his chest with a lewd smack. His fingertips press into the generous cushion of her asscheeks. Even with the powerlifter might of her muscles, there is so much smush that he can sink almost knuckle-deep into her trembling body.

Her thigh lifts from one side of his head, and she flops onto her back next to him to a groaning complaint from the bedframe, dripping with shower water and sweat, gulping air.

He ratchets himself up to sitting. “Why’d you stop?”

“So I don’t break your goddamn neck,” she says. She blinks the haze away and rolls onto her side. Her breasts squish against his arm, then spill across his chest as she leans over him, prodding him with their piercings. Her arm snakes across his body. “And cause this misses me.” She closes her fist around his cock.

He lays back down as she slides on top of him. She presses the head of his cock to her vulva; he feels the slippery eagerness, the throbbing pulling heat that waits for him.

“Admit it, first,” he says.

“Admit what?”

“Admit that Taiikari men are good lays.”

“Taiikari men are good lays.” She lifts her hips. Her tail slips under his leg and pulls it up to a bent triangle that presses a soft indent into her powerful ass.

“Oh.” He didn’t think she’d actually say that. He has no rejoinder prepared.

She lowers herself onto him; her heavy gunmetal-gray breasts smush and flatten against his chest and engulf him to the chin. One hand lays possessively under the back of his head.

“Your beer still sucks, though,” she says.

Her hips slap against his. She swallows him whole.

An expletive tears from his lips and muffles into her body. She isn’t holding back now—all the forbearance she showed in front of her minions has dropped away. She sings her sensations in a cracked, sonorous alto. She exults in him. Just like last time there is barely an inch at a time to move; she takes over entirely, sealing him in, not so much cowgirl as a close embrace; his face against her neck, her stomach flush to his. He feels it harden and soften again as her core muscles piston her against him.

She’s so heavy. So full and solid and warm. This must be how Taiikari girls feel, he realizes. This perfect, engulfing pressure.

“Fucking shit,” she wails, as her insides churn and her skin slaps a steady crescendo against his. “How. Is. It. So. Good.” She sounds angry about it. Her eyes are wide and filmy.

She cants her pelvis to one side and grinds it against him and he lets out a desperate syllable into the great trembling weight of her chest as he slides further inside, encased in her roiling, squeezing core. She’s so tight it almost hurts, the way her velvety flesh is milking his. His hands stray along the sculpted bulk of her torso and clutch at her ass, which claps percussively with every bottomed-out stroke.

Her weight shifts. Air hits his face as her breasts slide lower, freeing him from her cleavage. “Hey,” she says.

He looks up. “What?”

Her head tilts, her snout slips past his cheek, and her tongue fills his mouth, hot and sweet and pulsing. Her kiss is deep, forceful, and brooking no hesitation on his part.

She pulls back and leaves him gasping. She sits up on top of him, her breath coming in sharp stabs, her face dazed and triumphant.

“You are cute,” she says. She breaks into a barbed grin. “Nava was right”. She laughs. The music swells. “You’re fucking cute.”

Her hand finds his neck again. Her thumb pushes into his mouth. He sucks it eagerly and gazes hypnotized at the place they meet, his cock shining with her juices, in and out and in and out in forceful pumps that bounce her full, curvaceous frame.

“I’m keeping you.” Her hips swirl. “Fuck the Pike. You’re mine.”

A panicky excitement laces his limbs. Keeping me? Qiva, keeping me? I’m Qiva’s? His heart slams against his sternum. Does she know how important those words are to a Taiikari? Is she just being macho, or does she mean it? And is he such a hopeless case that it excites him this much?

Her voice keeps rising. Her hand is working furiously between her legs. The shockingly feminine whimpering is back. “Almost,” she groans. “Almost—”

She locks out. Her legs shake violently. Her eyes shut. A broken cry issues from her heaving lungs.

He surges, bear-hugging her by the narrowest point of her big thick hourglass and pushing as hard as he can. She yelps with surprise and flops onto her back, her breasts wobbling with the impact and then settling out from her muscle-packed chest. He seizes her leg and lifts it, hugging her massive thigh to his chest and spreading her open. He hammers into her with all the strength he has.

Her breast fills his palm, spills out from it and between his fingers, it’s so goddamn big and soft and beautiful. “Talem,” she cries. His name. His name in her mouth. Her shining skin. Her eyes feral and locked on his. Her teeth like daggerpoints. Her strapping, muscular body arching and twisting in the throes of the pleasure he’s giving her. He wants to cry, it’s so perfect.

He gets too lost in her. He drops his guard. One massive hand anchors on the bedframe; the other seizes a handful of his ass and yanks him off balance. He lands heavily, laid out on the plane of her stomach. Her webbed feet link behind his back. Very quickly, she’s in control again, clinching him in place as she bucks and gyrates.

“This what you wanted?” she purrs in his ear. “You having fun fucking the fishface?”

“Yes,” he gasps. “Fuck yes.”

“Me too.” She tugs him further on top of her. “God dammit. Me too.”

Her tongue again, dragging across his face. He licks her right back, tastes the perspiration that shines between her bouncing breasts. She laughs and it’s still dark and jagged but it’s not cold anymore.

Her big hand is warm in his hair. She scrunches her fingers against his scalp. “Like a pet.”

“Fuck off.” His voice is so tremulous and breathy.

She slaps his ass. “I know you have more for me,” she whispers. “Let me feel it raw.” Her tongue slides across his ear. “Give it to me, Talem. Fill ‘er up.”

His name again. He feels it building. Why does it get to him so much when she says his name? This tight grip is possessive now, covetous, not just tight. This night isn’t just a wet, wild night with a stranger. It’s the start of something. Those teeth—well, they’re still terrifyingly sharp. But the shiver they bring out as they dig gently into the skin of his neck isn’t from fear.

“Who’s your mistress?” she rasps. “Who’s holding you down?”

“You are,” he pants.

“Who’s gonna drain you dry? My name, little conqueror. Say it.”

“Qiva,” he cries, and she yanks his tail, and he cries out, and they both feel the first erratic, jerking pump of his cock as its payload bursts. She shoves her tongue into his mouth again. Her saliva has an alien tang to it, a bright acidity that tingles his tonsils as her tongue rams down his throat, and he cries out into her yawning jaws as another hot, boiling throb ravages him, shoots down his spine, and she makes this erotic noise in her throat, this scratchy mmmn as her pulsing cunt coils and pulls and drinks its fill.

He goes limp on his panting gray bed. Her snout tips down against his face and kisses the salt from it.

He flops his arm across her expansive trapezius, tucking it behind her head. The fins of her fringe wriggle against his palm.

“What happened to no kissing?” he asks, a tired taunt formed from the remnants of his scrambled brain.

She seizes him by a horn and shoves him against her snout. Another dense, claiming kiss.

“That did,” she says.

She chuckles and drops him back into her broad embrace. “It’s the music, maybe. Got me feeling kissy.”

He notices it again, the music. His tail swishes weakly to its rhythm.

She nudges him. “You wanna see it?”

“See what?”

“The creampie you just stuffed in me, dumbass,” she says. “What else?”

He draws himself out with a wet, shivering sigh. The pale load he pumped into her follows, oozing from her blushing vulva, glazing the cleft of her ass, pooling against the broad limb of her tail.

“There we go,” she coos. “Good little conqueror.”

“Gods of the fucking Firmament,” he murmurs. “I do have an Eqtoran fetish.”

“Good,” she says. “Cause we ain’t square yet.” Her hands close around his shoulders and draw him back into her arms. “You fucked up, little man.”

“What did I do?”

“You overthrew my fuckin’ democracy,” she says. “And you kissed me.”

“You kissed me.”

She smugly kisses his nose. “You didn’t stop me.”

He is too out-of-breath to summon a rejoinder to this clear injustice.

“I was just gonna humiliate you,” she says. “Then your cock was too good. Then I figured I’d ride you raw and pass you down. But you’re too cute.” She shakes her head as she tips them both over, side-by-side. “Too fucking cute.” She rubs his horn. “Now I’m keeping you.”

“You were just gonna give me to your friends?”

“Still gonna do that,” Qiva says. “Just gonna take you back after.”

“Oh.” His tail curls in. “So what. This was gonna be a one-night punishfuck kinda thing?”

“Yep.”

“And now it’s…”

“Now it’s gonna be a however-the-fuck-long-I-want punishfuck kinda thing.” Her big hand has moved from his horns to his lips. She’s exploring his face like he’s a pliant little statue. “What you said, you said about every Eqtoran. Not just me. Got a lot to make up for. And I got a whole knife that’s gonna ask me how it was to have a Taiikari boy.”

She leans in. Her blunt snout presses against his nose. “Do you know what I’m gonna tell them?”

“What?”

“I’m gonna tell them I haven’t came like that in years,” she says. Her hand wraps gently around his horn and tilts his head down, into the crook of her neck. She fits as much of her as she can against as much of him as possible. “It’s fatter.”

“What?”

“Your cock is fatter than an Eqtoran’s. And it’s got this thing on top.” She traces the head of his dick. “Hits all the angles just right. That’s why it feels so goddamn good.”

A chiming chord of ridiculous pride sounds in him. “Is that all Taiikari or just me?”

“Dunno,” she says. “You compare much with the fellas?”

“Uh. No. Are you gonna try another?”

“Why would I try a Taiikari that might not have a fat cock,” she says, “when I’ve got this Taiikari that has a fat cock?”

“Fair point.”

“And an Eqtoran fetish.”

“You have a Taiikari fetish.”

“I like fat cocks and boys who do what they’re told.” She sits up and heads to the bathroom. “That ain’t a fetish. That’s normal.”

He finds his scattered clothes. She emerges from the bathroom shimmying back into her combat cargos.

“How about it?” she asks.

He turns the music off and zips his uniform up. “How about…”

“You ready to get passed around, little conqueror? Cause Shan’s already called next.”

His shirt tangles momentarily in his horns. He deliberately tugs it down over his bruised, love-bitten chest. “That’s the girl with the nose ring?”

“Tongue ring, too.”

“Oh.” He chews the inside of his cheek. “I mean… if she called it.”

***

Qiva stomps the snow from her boots and shepherds Talem into her knife’s barracks. It’s similar to the one he’s used to, but a few meaningful degrees colder, with all its bunkhouse mattresses tugged from their frames and piled into the center of the prefab. And it’s full of Eqtoran girls. About a score of them. Most of them are females like Qiva, brawny and bodacious, but he sees a couple of keepers, including that tattooed one who introduced herself. She waves shyly at him.

Qiva beelines for a beat up card table, dragging Talem with her, and drapes her coat across a folding chair. She eases into it and kicks another one out for him. “Who’s that?” comes a curious voice.

“Sergeant’s new man,” Nose Ring replies. Shan, he reminds himself, as she looks at him with quizzical, hungry eyes.

The Eqtorans circle him like, well. Sharks.

“He’s a Taiikari?”

“Yup.” Qiva snaps her fingers. “Beer.”

A bottle is opened and passed to her from a minifridge. That’s not regs, he almost says, but not much about Qiva’s knife is, he’s realizing.

“I’m not the new man,” Talem says. “Just a guest star. One more cycle and the Pike is taking off.”

“Hmm. Nah.” She takes a swig. “Transfer to Harok.”

“I can’t do that. I’m needed on the Pike. And it’s so goddamn cold out here.”

“Told you,” Qiva says, evenly. “I’m stealing you. We’ll keep you warm.”

“We?”

“Me and the knife,” she says. “You’ll sleep with us.”

An excited murmur starts up. “Sarge fucked a Taiikari. I’ll be damned.”

“We don’t know if they fucked.”

“We fucked,” Qiva says, and wipes beer foam off her snout.

“What’s your name, cutie?”

“You like Eqtorans?”

“I’m Knai. I’m from Taiqan. You ever been to Taiqan?”

“Ease up, girl. You’re spooking him.”

“You gonna share him?”

“You gonna get over 80 on your next CQC assessment?” Qiva looks sharply at the wilting woman who just asked.

Talem holds a hand up. The chatter stops. He scans the crowd. He points.

“Shan called next,” he says.

The nose-ringed Eqtoran pumps her fist and points excitedly to a mattress in the corner of the pile-up. “That’s me over there.”

“Let the poor bastard live,” Qiva says. “Man’s gonna get dehydrated.”

“Can he cuddle tonight, at least?”

“Cuddle. No.” Qiva snorts. “I know how handsy underfucked rangers get.” Her leg flops across Talem’s lap. “And he’s mine tonight. Told you already.”

Talem glances around the pile of mattresses and cushions. “You all sleep on the floor?”

“I’ve seen them cheapass bedframes you got in the Taiik barracks,” Qiva says. “They won’t stand up to what we’re gonna do to you.”

A rumble of laughter through the room.

“Someone get a beer for my man,” Qiva says. “And put a calm one on. One dude and you bitches go into heat in here.”

Cool, low-tempo music lilts into the barracks. Talem lowers his voice. “Do Eqtorans actually go into heat?”

“Don’t think about it yet.” Qiva flicks the cap of another beer off with her dagger handle and passes it to him.

“What’s your name?” someone calls.

“Uh, Talem.”

“Hiii, Talem.” This from a sleek aquamarine woman with a cute little snout, her voice saccharine and singsong.

“We gotta get a rotation going,” Qiva muses. “How many times can Taiikari boys go in a day?”

“I can’t just do that,” Talem says.

“Do what? Just once a day?”

“No. I mean transfer.”

“Figure it out,” she says. “Tell ‘em it’s diplomacy.”

An alpine-green Eqtoran with a jingling bangle in her fringe pokes her head up from the mattress pile. “Your Princess fucks aliens, right?”

“An alien. But yeah.”

“Well.” Qiva ratchets him in a little closer. “So do you, now.”

He shifts and tries to keep his horns from poking into the huge bicep that wraps around him like a neck pillow. “They’re not gonna let me off the Pike just so a bunch of huge sexy shark women can pass me around like a chew toy.”

***

The clerk thwacks the stamp onto Talem’s form and slides it across the counter. “Transfer approved.”

Talem blinks against the bright light of the duty station office. “What?”

“Your transfer is approved, Private Talem,” the clerk repeats. “The Black Pike thanks you for your service. You’re transferred to the Harok garrison.”

The Taiikari marine—and the half-dozen Eqtorans who followed him here—lean in to read the form.

“How, uh—” He looks up from the page. “What’s my assignment?”

“You were requested by a…” The clerk squints. “Sergeant Qiva-mek-Hvok.”

Qiva raises her hand. “That’d be me.”

“Right. Morning, Sergeant.” The clerk nods to Qiva. “It says here you’re to be assigned as the Eqtoran attaché to her unit, Private.”

“Knife,” he murmurs.

“Hmm?”

“It’s called a knife, ma’am.”

She shrugs. “As you say. Your job is to make sure this knife has what they need from their new Empire to operate as her loyal soldiers, yes?”

Qiva’s rumbling laugh settles in his gut as her hand settles out of sight from the clerk’s desk, on the small of his back. Shan’s tail nudges up against his hip. Another Eqtoran, one whose name he still has to learn, pinches his butt.

“Don’t worry,” his new sergeant says. “Talem here’s gonna give us everything we ask for. Ain’t that right, Talem?”

Talem glances at the hungry, razortooth smiles that surround him, and then back at the clerk.

“Fuck yeah,” he says. “Glory to the Empress.”