This is adult material.  If you're under the age of consent,
leave.  If
you're afraid reading poorly-written descriptions of sexual
behavior might
scar your mind, don't blame me.  I'm not paying your shrink
bills.  You're
here because you want to be.  Do not republish this material
without my
permission.


Co-M-fort ch. 1

by Enkidu

(exhib.)


	What was I to do? Earth was a tired old place, a
resource-starved antiquity less and less relevant amidst the
burgeoning interstellar network, its ecosystem hopelessly
impoverished by its thirty billion inhabitants. In the face of
endless endemics turned pandemic, the global corporate res
publica had given up hope in research and turned to imitating the
controlled burn technique. My future looked to consist of
swabbing arms and injecting outmoded antibiotics into filthy
refugees. That or agribusiness, which mostly consisted of
monitoring the chemical detritus of lagoons turned into algal
growth media. My biology degree now seemed almost as useless as
literature.
	So what's a boy to do? The space-lanes beckoned, but Stelacor,
Kaseika, Uranus Mercantile and the other transplanetary corporate
giants had little interest in hiring a low-scoring slacker like
myself to babysit budding ecosystems. Exobiology was an academic
discipline, emphasis on academic. The universe had yielded no
life-forms more advanced than mold, and none of those showed any
hint of our miraculously unique sentience. Terraforming was an
industrial process, a profit driven race to an approximation of
sustainability and not a scientific endeavor, where even
attempted at all. Yet hyperdrives and gravtech had made
off-planet trading a reality and space travel improbably safe and
comfortable. So the void was littered with trade ships of every
size and denomination endlessly shuffling bits of one world to
another. And none of them wanted anything to do with me. So, I
ask you, what's a boy to do?
	In reality, I posed that question to my contact at the temp
company, a very severe woman past a hundred whose hair, slicked
back and straightened to exactly shoulder length as the latest
fashion spam dictated, was beginning to turn gray. She leaned
back a bit in her foam-padded office chair and stared, pursing
her lips, half at myself and half at some indeterminate point
behind my left ear, with that expression which I've since learned
signifies that my worth to receive some crucial information's
being weighed. Finally she drew a portentous breath and said in
wavering tones:
	"There -may- be a type of work to which you with your...
various... qualifications may be well-suited. You'd have to
perform various tasks outside your academic expertise, but then
everyone aboard hyperdriven ships multitasks to some extent, you
know."
	"Of course, of course." I nodded vigourously, not wanting to
discourage her. I didn't know the first thing about spacers'
habits aside from the cheap dramas piped in through my wristwatch
and the touchscreen in my otherwise empty one-room sleepchamber.
I didn't bother pointing out that the pipe-sealing, comms-cable
testing and other jobs she'd thrown at me in the past four years
since I'd picked up my degree had hardly put it to any use.
	"I could put you in touch with the captain of a small rock-tug
who may be interested in someone like you, if you'd like. She can
go over the details and evaluate you herself."
	"That would be great, thank you."I said, not wanting to let on
that I was surprised at the reversal of protocol. Every previous
employer had not bothered to even meet me through a net-chat
until after I'd signed the contract and read the introductory
prep-files.
	"Good. She'll be at the Yucatan docks tomorrow and the day
after, I believe. I'll mail you the details in a bit. Step
lightly."
	"Step lightly" I replied and prepared to leave. She cleared her
throat. Turning, I was somewhat perplexed at the trace of a smile
on her smooth, glossed, normally wooden lips.
	"One more thing, Adam. Keep an open mind."
	With that she turned her chair and I stepped out of her office
into the muggy lakeside thoroughfare.
	Stepping from band to band along the covered multispeed
walkways, I considered the preparations necessary for a
cross-continental trip. Disappointingly few. One switch would
safely turn every electrical appliance in my dormitory cube off.
My pet cactus wouldn't miss me for a couple days. My credit
account was paid in full. If I were to vanish off the face of the
Earth...
	Wait, what am I getting so glum about? Isn't that what I'm going
for, here? I trimmed my hair of that excess half centimeter it
had acquired, sprung for an expensive laser-guided exfoliating
shave while I was at it, dressed in my best "first day of work"
attire and caught the midnight jet out. By dawn I was popping a
stimulant tablet at pad Yuc-69-00 and glancing around waiting for
what would hopefully be my future boss. The spaceport crowd moved
somewhat more purposefully than the lackadaisical city-dwelling
office flunkies but was otherwise the same as anywhere on Earth:
dressed in loose, full-pants, full-sleeves attires, indeterminate
ages due to cheap genetank trips, roughly twice as many women as
men... the Y-plague had certainly left its mark, even here on
overpopulated Old Earth.
	"Hey, you, catch!"a commanding voice broke my reverie. I turned
in time to see a small green packet driving at my face. Twisting
aside, I caught it, fumbling slightly, before it hit the ground.
It was a sweetened alga patty. Cheap brand.
	"Not too bad. I'm Gray al-Hassan Mirad. This is my crate." My
attacker said, stepping up. "Light step, Adam."
	"Light step." I mumbled back incredulously. In the space dramas,
spacers were always tall, stern, imposing figures. The woman
before me was powerfully built but short enough that her head
barely reached my shoulder, and I'm no more than medium height by
any measure, twenty centi shy of 2m. Instead of the crew-cuts in
the vids, her massive pile of black hair was twisted in a
complicated wide braid reaching down to her... amazingly enough,
she had a waist. Her clothing was rather scandalous. Instead of
dropping vertically in the common, proper, preset figure-hiding
pattern, her tight gray shirt was tucked into snug pants of the
same color. The neckline was wide enough to fully display her
collarbones and low enough that beads of sweat rolled freely
across her dark tan skin. It was, if you can believe it,
sleeveless. Her sweaty arms twisted under the pull of sleek, lean
muscles and her fingernails lacked even the slightest trace of
paint. A tiny half-smile creased one corner of her mouth.
	"Let's eat and talk about the job." She nodded toward an open
hatch. Once inside she slapped a touchpad roughly and the hatch
clanged shut in a series of pressure seals. We took off our
shades. Her eyes were a pale silvery gray. "The old homeworld's
brighter than I like and hotter than anyone should like, anyone
ever tell you that?"
	"Well, no, to tell you the truth..."
	"You've never met anyone else who's ever been off-planet, I
know. They sent me your file, remember? Let me guess, I'm not
what you imagined a space captain'd be, right?" She spread her
arms and cocked her head. Small, wiry bundles of hair peeked from
her armpits.
	"Well, no. I mean, sorry, didn't mean to imply that-"
	"Don't worry about it. I know this is new to you. As long as
you're willing and able to learn, you'll probably still get the
job... one tiny factor considered." The sardonic half-smirk
shifted to the other corner of her mouth. I hurried to wolf down
my alga packet as she tossed the wrappers into a disposal chute.
"Come on, let's get the regular testing out of the way. Watch
your head." She slid rapidly through hallways I had to stumble
through half-bent. She took me from room to room having me try my
hand at various equipment. Once in a while, Gray would pop her
head out to exchange a few inaudible words with invisible voices.
The tests usually stopped when I tripped some safety mechanism,
which was dishearteningly fast. I began to feel I was failing
miserably, biting my lip as I tried not swinging a crate too
wildly through one of the cargo subdivisions on its teleoperated
winch. Gray kept a steadying hand on my shoulder, her pinkie
finger tracing my hairline absentmindedly. After a few tries, she
was running her hand through my short hair. A distracting,
indefinite presence lingered around me, almost like an
unidentifiable odor.
	As the container clanged to the floor once again, I swallowed
and turned to try to justify myself somehow. To my surprise, she
wasn't even paying attention to the results but looking dreamily
at my hunched shoulders. Her finger wandered from my hair past my
ear and traced my jaw line. Then she drew back and crossed her
arms against her chest, pressing her small breasts up. The corner
of her mouth twitched in its constant smirk.
	"That's good. We can teach you enough to get by. There's one
test left, but first you should meet two of the other crew
members."
	We dodged through the narrow corridors to a passenger room.
Someone had scratched off its original designation and the door
now simply read "fun" in a looping scrawl. Inside were a couple
of closets bolted to the walls and a wide, fairly expensive
looking bed, a strange extravagance to find among the otherwise
sparse furnishings of a spaceship. Then again, I didn't know
spaceships from internships. Footsteps padded behind us and
followed us in. I turned to see two women, both even shorter than
Gray, standing expectantly between me and the exit. The captain
moved between them and pointed to the first, a frail, delicate
long-haired blonde with pale milky skin and light blue eyes.
	"Silke here is our cybertech. Comms, nav, automated sequences,
anywhere our idiot of a computer system needs a prod, she does
the prodding." Silke grinned and lifted a hand to display the
control fiber embedded along her thumb then turned her head
flipping a few wispy golden strands aside to reveal the optic
input port in her occipital lobe. "Silke?"
	The girl simply nodded, wordlessly, smiling up at me. Gray
turned to the other, a plump little woman with curly hair, full
lips and dark brown skin who was twitching her fingers
impatiently on her thigh.
	"Lana does the grunt-work" both younger women snorted a laugh
but their captain didn't miss a beat "around here. Mechanical
maintenance, anything from the water cycling to the hyperdrive,
she's it. She's also-"
	"Yep I'm amazing. Light step, Adam. Can we just get to the good
part, boss?" Lana whined, exasperatedly, twitching her foot. Gray
shrugged.
	"I'll take that as a yes. So, Adam, you might notice we're all
female." Lana raised an eyebrow at this and looked very
dramatically down at herself. Both underlings had apparently just
returned from outside and were sporting the shapeless columnar
unisex shirt and pants encouraged by the Terran civic planning
authority. Gray continued.
	"The Y-plague may have hit hard on Earth, but when it spread to
the colonies, it was truly devastating. The interplans don't
really like admitting it, and since they own the commnets they
just don't. The main solution was to limit spaceship and
first-generation colonist populations to females only to avoid
dealing with it. It was a tidy corporate-style refusal to include
reality in their calculations."
	"The reality being" Silke piped up in a voice as thin and sparse
as the rest of her "that it turns out women like having men
around. Least some of the time."
	"Yeah, you got your uses." Lana added, staring intently
somewhere at my midsection. I felt my face getting hot. Gray
continued, unperturbed.
	"So even though more men have begun emigrating and being born
out there..." She glanced up" We've still got a little shortage
for the next few generations. Do you know how long a jump from
here to Terce Centripeta takes?"
	"Several months?" I answered hesitantly. She nodded.
	"Right. A hundred or so standards all told from grav to grav.
Which works out to almost a third of an Earth year. That's a long
time to be cooped up in a tiny metal case, you know? A long,
lonely time." I nodded dumbly and she continued, saucily flipping
her rich mane of hair out of the way and leaning back against the
door. "So whenever ships stop by the homeworld they hire some men
for general help and one very specific type of... help. It's not
exactly in the official job description. So here's the last part
of your evaluation." The two women flanking her were grinning
wickedly.
	"Drop your pants."
	"Huh?
	"Drop it all, in fact. Strip, my lovely."
	"Um, my physical records..."
	"Hmph!" All three wrinkled their noses in frustration. Gray
added. "They never record the best details. You do realize what I
was saying before, right? Exactly what your primary duties would
be?"
	"You hire men to, ummm..." I swallowed "to act as...
companionship."
	"That's one way of putting it, sure."
	"She's hirin' ya to fuck our brains out, sweetie." Lana
interjected, cocking her hips. "Whenever we want it, however we
want it."
	"Hold off for a bit, would you, Lana?" Gray raised her hand.
"She's right, though, Adam."
	"So, the rest of the testing meant nothing?"
	"Oh, no." Her face hardened. "The testing was dead serious. I
can't afford to keep an extra crew member around doing nothing.
You'll be learning a bit of everything, and covering various
tasks for us. If your reaction time, coordination, geometry,
multitasking ability, familiarity with the various tech we use,
physics, etc. hadn't been adequate, we wouldn't be having this
conversation. However, this is going to be your core job
requirement. Your contact said you wanted to get out to space,
and unless you've got some corporate connections, this is an easy
way off planet. You're new, so without recommendations, a small
crew like ours is your best bet. Still, we want to get a look at
the goods before we invest, so, once again, peel off."
	"Don't worry. I dunno how picky Earth women are, but we'll
probably be happy with whatever you've got packed in there." Lana
grinned broadly.
	"Oh, they're pretty picky." I mumbled and reluctantly began
removing my shirt. The three grinned in unison as my chest came
into view. I hesitated with my fingers hooked into the waistband
of my pants. Was I really going along with this? I'd heard of
such arrangements and seen them acted out in pornographic
contraband, but could I really be this? Then again, this was
likely my one chance, in more ways than one. I dropped the rest
of my clothing rather unceremoniously, like ripping off a piece
of celltape. I stared at the ground. Lana was first to speak, a
bit strained.
	"Aw, yeah. He'll do. Can you get hard for us, so we can be
sure?"
	It was too much. I covered my crotch with my hands.
	"No reason to be shy. It's no different from doing it with any
other..."
	"Lana, quiet." Gray cut in "You didn't bother reading his file.
Our contact hinted at something about this. Have you had sex with
many women, Adam?"
	"Umm, no." I admitted sheepishly, staring at the ground and
feeling dizzy from all the blood rushing to my face. "Actually, I
haven't, you know, ever..."
	I trailed off into a long pause, shirt and undershirt bunched up
in one hand, pants and underpants wrapped around my ankles.
Recirculated air whispered softly through the ship's hull. Aside
from that, nothing was audible in the small room aside from
strained breathing. I glanced up, then quickly down again. Silke
was staring at me blankly, eyebrows raised. Gray's expression was
unreadable, her smirk slightly faded. Lana's mouth was hanging
open, her brown eyes wide in disbelief.
	"You tellin' me you never once dipped your meat before? Boss,
didn't you say he's twenty-eight local years old? That's what,
like seven hundred standards? You been hiding in a tunnel or
something? Are they really that backward here on this old rock?"
	"No, of course not." I answered miserably "I mean, I've been to
secondary school and higher training and post-graduate studies
and everything and I know others were getting together. I just, I
don't know."
	"You're not a strict homosexual or nothin', are you?"
	"Hells no he's not." Gray chuckled. "Not the way his eyes
skipped to my chest when he saw me in this shirt. Fuck's sake,
Lana, not everybody jumps on strangers like you do. He's just a
bit withdrawn, I'd guess. Hard gettin' laid when you spend all
your time locked in one room, right Silke?"
	"Kiss my ass, boss."
	"So wait" Lana started again" You're telling me hundreds and
thousands of groundcrawlers with fully functional cunts and
ovaries have been passing by a prime assemblage of man-parts like
you every day and year since you hit puberty, and none of them
ever managed to wrap their legs around you? You never reamed some
lucky girl back at school? Never even shined a clam in your
life?" I shook my head, almost in tears, wanting this humiliation
to end already.
	"Well, shit, Gray, we gotta grab him now. Not gonna get a chance
like this again."
	I heard footsteps and looked up to see the tawny-skinned captain
standing in front of me. She leaned in slightly, her pale,
colorless eyes intent. I started to croak a question.
	"Sshhh." She traced a hand across my lips then moved it behind
my neck, pulling me down to her. "Just focus on me for a bit,
right? Smell me, taste me... close your eyes." She kissed me,
softly at first, then pressing her lips almost painfully to mine,
sucking the breath out of me. She moved one hand to my chest,
caressing it in small circles, and the other to my flacid penis.
She broke the kiss and moved our heads past each other, slowly
stroking my member. Her neck smelled of metal and sweat, and some
subtle indefinable aroma. Without even thinking about it, I began
to move my lips along the taut muscle of her nape, feeling the
oddest urge to bury my face in the pleated black mass of hair
trailing behind her. I wrapped my arms around her, resting my
palms on her hips, and felt her press up into my touch. By the
time I worked my lips up to her earlobe, she pulled back. I
opened my eyes. She smiled broadly, eyes unfocused, and stepped
aside, displaying her handiwork to the other two: my penis was
almost completely hard, jutting thickly out from my pubic hair.
As soon as she broke the spell, though, I remembered my tension
again and it shriveled faster than a popped balloon. Apparently
it had been enough. Silke and Lana both nodded in approval, eyes
shining. Gray wiped her mouth and spoke, a bit hoarsely.
	"Well, if you want the job, it's yours. Don't worry. Since we're
a small crew and can't afford to pay you standard rates, this is
a 'no experience necessary' position."
	"We provide on-the-job training." Silke's thin voice twisted her
pale lips into a gentle smile.
	"And we'll be providing lots of it." added Lana "You have to
make up for lost time, you know?" Gray shrugged at this.
	"Well, you'll have an easier time of it than if you got hired by
some construction or mining vessel to service a dozen women.
Still, keep in mind you'll be here for our pleasure. You have to
be willing to perform to our tastes, and you have to be
available. Even if your prick's tapped out, your mouth and hands
should still be ours to use."
	Sensing I was expected to do so, I assented. She went on.
	"You'll also have to keep your body the way we want it. We might
want you to grow your beard out, or shave your pubic hair. We
won't ask you to do anything irreversible, don't worry." She made
a calming gesture. "And we won't be causing you any undue pain.
By the way, I have to warn you, some captains take a bit of
liberty with the whole 'undue' aspect. I'm not one of them. Oh,
and lastly, you have to understand this is a one-way trip. Once
we arrive on Terce Centripeta, your contract is over. We can
recommend you to other ships and it's not usually difficult
getting a ride out, or you can stay in system if you want, but
it's an unspoken rule that no ship will keep you for more than
one voyage in a row. Now" she took a deep breath "if you still
want to get off this planet, we'll take you. If not, that's no
problem. I hear they're more uptight than ever back here about
sex, so if you like, you can pull up your pants and walk out of
here like this conversation never happened. What do you say?"
	My breath froze. I thought about my career - over if this ever
got out. Short thought; hard to end something that never started.
I thought about family and friends I'd be leaving behind, all
distant or nonexistent. I thought about my hollow sleep-box of an
apartment, and smiled inwardly at leaving it behind. I thought
about jacking off to fleeting images on my screen every night
before slouching off to my cold empty bed, then about the taste
of Gray's neck. Finally, something gave me pause:
	"Can I bring my cactus on board?"
	"Your what?"
	"It's a plant. They grow in deserts. I keep one in a pot."
	"Is it very big?"
	"Only about a palm's length."
	"Is it very dirty? Does it produce many spores or seeds or
whatever?"
	"No, no, it's been growing in the same nutrient mesh since I got
it, and never flowers."
	"Oh." Gray seemed stumped for a second. "I don't see why not.
We'll give it a going over with the toxin sniffer just to make
sure."
	"Well then, I guess that cinches it." I swallowed, out of ideas
to stall any longer. "I accept."
	Thus began my career as what I later heard colloquially
described as a working stiff.