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Ellis Bjørnestad, captain of the survey ship Walküre_, finds himself with a new passenger. Thing is, in deep space, you've got a lot of free time, a fair number of decent ideas, and absolutely zero gravity..._

So this is a sequel to the last story, "To that fine, fine music." In it, Ellis and Jack get to have a little more fun, a slight bit of plot develops, and, you know. Stuff happens. You can read the tags :P As always, share and enjoy, and please chime in with criticism and feedback! If you like the story, that makes me happy. If you don't like it, the only way I can get better is if you tell me.

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

"Objects in motion" by Rob Baird

---

Tartarus Docking Ops cleared my ship, the Walküre,for departure and I cinched the straps of my pilot's seat down, too hard, for effect. After all, I had a guest who needed to be shown how serious things were. She followed my lead, and just to be extra sure I leaned over and pulled them tighter still for her.

"Hey!" Jack protested. Like me, she wasn't wearing much -- shorts and a light shirt -- and the straps cut sharp valleys into the jaguar's soft fur.

I raised an eyebrow. "Yer the one who wants to be a spacer, lady," I pointed out, as though I was merely concerned for her well-being instead of slightly miffed by her presence. I had not asked for the young feline's company, and she didn't really belong. You know how it is, dogs and cats and all that.

"Yeah, but..."

"Door's right back there."

The jaguar flattened her ears, and gave a deliberate tug with deceptively strong arms on the harness. Then she crossed them over her chest, narrowing slitted eyes at me. Cold, blue fire. Well, whose fault was it she wanted to tag along?

It's not like a lone wolf thing, exactly; we koolies sort of look wolfish, maybe, but we're herding dogs -- we play well with others! Still, since my last partner had left, I'd gotten used to having the ship all to myself. I smoothed down the grey fur of my arms, mentally prepared myself, and switched on the radio.

"Tartarus Control, this is Walküre, departing via Kochab, Saker, and Beta Alcyonis. Requesting departure clearance. Over."

"What are you doing?"

"Tartarus spins," I explained. "The docking rings spin faster. If I tell them which way we're headed, they'll release us so we don't have to waste any fuel getting on course. Just takes 'em a moment, so you've got time to psych yourself up for the catapult launch. It'll be a few --"

"Walküre, Tartarus Control. Launch sequence initiated. Five seconds. G'day."

"Uh --"

"Brace yourself," I told her, and then the magnetic catapults fired. This, for you ground-lovers, is a sensation that is very much like being kicked in the spine by a large, frustrated horse whose mother you have grievously insulted.

Jack had not finished screaming by the time we were clear enough of the station to burn the main engines, and I pushed the throttle forward a few notches. I glanced over at the jaguar, whose eyes were wide, with ears pinned back so they disappeared into her red hair.

"You okay there?"

"We're alive?"

I shrugged it off, being the world-wise captain type who is not bothered by such things. "Yeah. Tartarus ain't got a super powerful cat, you know? Big stations, hell, they'll be four or five times as powerful."

Jack made a face, and then rubbed at her neck; I gathered her throat was raw. "Why?"

"Easier to use their energy to get us goin' somewhere than to use ours." Tartarus had a massive array of solar panels to drive its catapults and station-keeping thrusters. "All our fuel, we gotta take with us."

"And you don't carry fragile cargo, I gather." She toyed with her harness. "I guess it'll be okay. I was in stasis for the trip to Tartarus; I don't remember any of this. Can I undo my harness?"

Watching her, it was hard not to feel just a little bit sorry for the spotted feline, who looked rather much out of her depth. "Not all the way," I said. "You can loosen them a little." I showed her how, and when she could breathe again she sighed gratefully.

"Your engines are still running, right?"

"Mm-hmm." Walküre was purring like a kitten, to the extent that kittens had engines capable of developing seventy mega-newtons of thrust (well, they could when new, anyway, and I didn't generally bother explaining the... ah, the tedious practicalities of the difference). "Steady one gee until we get to jump speed."

Formality, really. You can, after all, engage the jumpdrive at any speed. But then you have to align yourself to your destination, and it's generally easier to do that before you start -- too many horror stories of somebody coming out of hyperspace with an asteroid rushing up to meet them.

"Where are we going, anyway?" Jack asked.

"Where am I going, or where are you going?"

"C'mon..."

We had less than a minute to go until the alignment burn was finished. "I've got a claim I want to follow up on. So I'm going to do that. Just gotta take care of something 'round Shikoku first. You... well... We'll find a good home for you, don't worry."

"I'm not sure I like the sound of that..."

"It'll work out. Now, listen up. Take a deep breath, okay? We're going to jump in ten seconds. Five... four..." I counted down, and pulled the throttle back to nothing. A green light flashed on my console, then lit up steadily.

Scientists with very precise stopwatches tell me that it takes infinitely little time to execute a Yachimovich-Shiokawa jump. One moment you're here; the next you're there, and that is that.

While the drive itself is spinning up, though, it does lock all your muscles, and it has a way of making you feel like you're suffocating. My vision went white; I tasted electricity on my tongue. Then I could see again. The little green light had gone dead. "Still there, spots?"

Jack blinked. "That was it? It lasted like three seconds."

"You were expecting something more exciting?"

"Maybe." She shook her head, muttered something about 'like my last boyfriend,' and then straightened. "So what now? We're at your salvage thingy?"

"God knows where we are," I grinned. It wasn't far from the truth. The jump drive, scientists with very precise rulers tell me, is infinitely accurate. Our computers, however, are another story. "Navigation computer will crank on our current position for a bit and then let us know. Until then..."

"Until then?"

I unfastened my harness, and with the snap of the spring the straps drifted away, so that I could push off with my feet into the open space of the crew cabin. Jack was frozen in place, watching me, so I did a quick roll, and caught my feet on the ceiling. Now I was staring at her upside-down -- more precisely, Walküre not being an especially tall ship, the maneuver put me at eye level with her chest... but who was I to complain?

She still seemed taken aback. I pulled her harness open, and then reached out to take her paw -- and to give her a little tug, so that she slipped from the seat with a soft, surprised gasp. "Oh!" I twisted out of the way as the jaguar drifted past me, her long hair starting to fan out like the tail of a comet.

"Careful," I warned her. "Look for a handhold or something. You don't want to land on a control panel and start the engine self-destruct sequence."

"I can do that?"

"You want to take the risk? Anyway, moving in zero gravity is like moving in your high school physics textbook -- all the ideal equations work. Objects at rest stay at rest; objects in motion..."

She landed in a soft crouch with her feet on the edge of the cockpit window, and reached out to snare a handhold. She got it on the second try, and then pushed off again with a little squeal, her tail lashing as she sailed by me. She spun with a dancer's grace, coming to rest on the hatchway that led to the cargo area. Now, for the first time since I'd agreed to give her passage, she was grinning.

Jack jumped again, more gently this time, and when she looked to be headed for an impact I reached my paw out to catch her. She didn't try to stop me; her body struck mine softly, and she laughed.

"So is this..." The jaguar shook her head, trying to get some of the hair from her face, and finally had to sweep it back with her other paw. "So is this why you guys go to space?"

I kinda forget how fun zero-gee is if you're new to it; for me it was old hat, and sometimes a little annoying. Anyway, she'd have to learn how to eat and use the toilet and all that stuff later, and I did not exactly look forward to this. But for now, she looked so damned excited... "Well. No, but let's call it a perk?"

"Cool," she said. The jaguar clung to me, claws sharp against my side, and glanced around at the flashing lights on all the consoles. "So what do you do now?"

"Now, we need to figure out where we are," I said. I carefully unwrapped her paw and nudged myself away, leaving her floating in the middle of the cabin. Drifting to one of the computers, I powered it on, and the tired old screen flickered to life. "And we need to see what's around us."

"How? What's that?" She pointed towards the screen, where a number was counting down rapidly. "Fifty-six million, seven hundred... no, wait, six hundred thousand... something?"

"Places we might be," I told her. Walküre don't look like much, sure, but she has a top of the line spectrometer. It was, in fact, the spectrometer that was part of my predicament -- but at least it worked well. "It's matching up the stars it can see with its database." After a few sequences, the possibilities had dropped to only a million. Then ninety thousand. Forty thousand. Ten.

"And that?"

So now I had a problem. I wanted to be irritated at her insistence, but Jack's genuine curiosity was a little endearing. Also, she smelled rather nice, without the perfume or anything. Rather than doing anything untoward, I kicked myself away, leaving her peering at the console, and drifted over to check the remainder of the ship's systems. "It's part of my spectrometer."

"Your what?" I twisted around to see Jack staring at the scrolling lines intently, her tail lashing back and forth.

"It looks at the light coming from things, and makes an educated guess as to what's around us. The brightness ought to show density."

All my oxygen calculations, I was discovering, had been made on the assumption that I would be the only crewman. Well, I thought. As long as we keep our exertion levels low, it won't matter. Then I reconsidered, and turned the flow rate up. You know, just in case.

Jack had spun herself upside down. Her spotted tail was curled around one leg, and her hair fanned out as though, confused and trying to make the best of an awkward situation, it was trying every direction at once. Her skirt, cheerily, was similarly inclined.

"What's H? There's a bright spot of H here."

"That's hydrogen," I told her. "It's the most abundant element in the universe. Good job finding some."

"Aww," she pouted. The spectrometer made another sweep, and her head tilted, sending a ripple through her hair. "These are just element symbols, then? Fine, what about titanium?"

This close in? Not bad, Ellis, I grinned to myself. Picking it up that quickly meant it was nearby -- in worse circumstances a search could take days. Either way, I perked my ears up, widening my eyes as far as I could. "Titanium?"

She caught the excitement; her tail lashed faster. "Yeah. Titanium and... silicon and... aluminium, maybe? Right here." Her sharp-clawed finger stabbed towards the screen.

I pushed off the wall of my ship to join her, catching myself lightly on the edge of the chair for that station. "But... in those pairings, they'd have to be man-made..."

"Another starship?" she asked. "Or a space station? A derelict space station?" In the bowels of miserable places like Tartarus they told stories of such abandoned constructs, sometimes still with the bodies of their hapless inhabitants drifting in frozen slumber through aimless walls.

"Maybe," I muttered. "Hold on, I've always wanted to do this. Computer, open a channel to the unidentified vessel bearing 035 by 042." I'd never really had a reason to use the voice commands before; it made me feel very high-tech.

"Error. No object matches that description," the computer replied.

Well, so much for the air of mystery. "Fine, fine. Computer, open a channel to Shikoku Station and connect me to stationmaster Hoyle."

"What?" Jack frowned, and then it started to dawn on her. "Hey! You know where we were..."

"I have no idea what -- oof!" She had given me a half (or three-quarters) playful shove, and I went flipping end over end as the comms channel to the station opened.

"This is Hoyle. Who am I speaking to?"

"Hey Jeri." I snagged a convenient armrest to halt my spinning. "It's Ellis. Is his nibs in?"

A holographic image appeared, showing the skeptical face of an arctic fox. She narrowed her eyes at what I suppose was my own hologram; I was somewhat contorted. "'His nibs' isn't going to be very happy to see you, Ellis."

"I have his money."

Jeri didn't look convinced. "All of it?"

"That... depends on local rates of deflation." The vixen rolled her eyes, and then vanished.

With Jeri gone, Jack found her voice once again. She rolled, so that we shared the same orientation. "You knew where we were all along, didn't you?"

"Not exactly. But close. Even if the part where I told you where we were going didn't tip you off, finding the station should've."

"I don't understand..."

I shrugged. "You don't just stumble across shit like that. I mean, space is huge. You think you know huge, but... nah. It's so big it's hard to get yer little paws around. Kinda like --"

"Don't." I cocked an eyebrow, and Jack grinned. "Don't be obscene. Besides, you wouldn't have liked my comeback."

"Was it going to be about supermassive objects and gravitational lensing?"

The jaguar shook her head. "Was probably going to go the other way, to be honest."

Hmf. "Sounds like somebody needs a lesson in --"

Before I could continue with... well, with being obscene... the hologram switched on again. Nicola Caronia looked cross; the wolf's good eye burned, and the patch that hid his left eye made him look even more sinister. "Ellis."

"Hey, Nichi."

"I hope this is about you surrendering all your assets and agreeing to involuntary servitude," Nicola growled. He was not given to charity. Word was, he'd inherited Shikoku station. Word also was the previous owner had not been so keen on said inheritance. Nobody had seen him lately to ask, though.

"Let's not jump the gun, here, Nichi," I said. "I'd like to stay on good terms with you." For him, I was willing to stretch the definition of 'good terms' a little -- chiefly anything that kept my body intact.

Nicola frowned. "Somehow I doubt that's really in our future, Ellis. You're..." His good eye blinked. "Why are you sometimes a leopard? And why do you look like a girl?"

I turned to search for my companion; the jaguar was drifting slowly between consoles, sometimes right-side up and sometimes not, her attention focused on our conversation. "Uh. Motion sensors keep switching to my passenger here. This is Jack. Wave to Mr. Caronia." She did so; his gaze did not become appreciably less stony. "She's my first mate."

"I'm not sure that phrase means what you think it means," Nicola grunted. "Where's my money, Ellis? You owe me eighteen thousand dollars."

Eighteen? "Hey, hey, Nichi. What's this about eighteen? We agreed on fourteen."

The camera view, I gathered, had switched back to the jaguar, because Nicola rolled his eye. "I don't know, is it really fourteen? It told me it was eighteen. I'm sure you're familiar with that kind of confusion. Do you have it or not?"

"I have six," I offered.

"Vaffanculo," the wolf swore. "God, Ellis, you're as bad at math as you are at salvage."

"Look, you know Claudio bailed on me and took your money, I --"

"Shove it, Ellis; that and a film crew will get you a touching drama. Real tear-jerker; not a dry eye in the house." He paused, and then bared his teeth. "Get real, you bastard. Six is an insult."

Nicola was what you might call a 'nice person,' but only in a mirror universe far different from our own. "Six is what I have. I've got a good line on a salvage property, just need to file the claim. Got it certified from one of the good guys."

"You worthless, stinking son of a --"

"Dr. Bosch says it could be the big one."

That gave even Nicola pause. "Cat Bosch?"

"Call her office if you want. Come on, hoss. Six now, and you can have your twelve as soon as I land a backer and bring the claim in." I smiled, and turned my palms towards him, trying to look pious.

"Six now," the wolf agreed. "The rest in two weeks."

I had won. This was grandstanding. "Don't be stupid, Nichi. You know a salvage op is two months plus. Ride me now, and you lose your chance at the big payout for a measly six grand, and this old bucket."

Nicola Caronia's sigh came as a rumbling growl. "Fine. But this is the last time you pull this on me, Ellis. You have that money for me when you come back, or I'll have your ship tagged for every merc in the sector. Fuckin' deadbeat." He waved a silver paw, and the hologram vanished.

"Charming man."

I shrugged, and pulled myself to a terminal where I could wire the six thousand over to Jeri's bank account -- she'd handle the rest. "He paid for the spectrometer, and a few other repairs. See, thing about our relationship... it coulda been real simple." Watching the money vanish from my account was a little heartwrenching.

"But no?" Jack bobbed up next to me, putting an arm around mine to keep herself steady. "'Cause nothing ever is in this wild and crazy business of yours?"

I ignored her. "Trade was, we'd carry some stuff for him -- me and my pal Claudio. Then that went south, and he wanted the money to make it good. I mean, ain't his fault; that's a fair request. We got about three quarters of it, then Claudio got to thinking that could buy him a lot of distance from ol' Nichi."

"So he took the money and ran?"

I kicked at the floor in my irritation, gripping my armrest to keep in place. "Worthless fuck," I snarled. "Been tryin' to make up the difference ever since." And because I got to tell the story, I also got to leave out the cut of my own I'd hidden from Claudio -- the share that had kept me in business long enough to scrounge up the six thousand I'd just paid Jeri and Nicola.

It was still a sore spot, because it meant I'd had to pass up on a few lucrative contracts from mining corps in the sector -- they were in Caronia's sphere of influence, and if it didn't look like I was trying to pay him back, Nichi had the power to make my life very miserable.

"Musta been valuable cargo, huh?"

"What?"

"If you're still paying it off. Must've been valuable." She rested her muzzle on my shoulder, cocking an eyebrow playfully. "What was it? Something illegal? Drugs? Counterfeit money? Diamonds?"

"Naw."

"Guns? Are you a gun-runner?" she asked. The Walküre was not much of a freighter, which seemed to have escaped Jack's keen sense of adventure and intrigue.

"Naw," I said again, a bit more crossly.

"Well, what then?"

"A passenger. 'Cept, see, they didn't know when to keep their mouth shut, so I spaced 'em."

The jaguar rolled her blue eyes, and then bit down on my shoulder with deceptively sharp teeth. "Funny."

I had the sneaking suspicion that she saw through most of my demeanor. "It don't matter anyway," I grumbled, and pushed her off towards her chair. "Strap back in, why don't you?"

She arched her lithe back to catch the headrest, flipping herself over it and settling down. Inertia carried her hair forward, obscuring her face, and for a moment I allowed myself a grin at what I had found myself getting into.

I've had enough practice dealing with shifts in gravity that I don't often bother strapping in -- you don't get enough gravity as it is, and it seems a shame to waste it, right? "Ready to go?"

I heard the harness click. "Yep."

"Alright, let's do this." I cracked my knuckles decisively, feeling very much a captain. "Computer, lay in a course for Nav Point B via Beta Alcyonis, throttle ahead one-third."

"Did you mean, 'Lay in a course for Navboy Beefeater I'll see on this'?" My ears flattened, and I heard the jaguar snicker.

"Computer," I tried again. "Lay in a course for Nav. Point. B-as-in-bravo. Via Beta. Alcyonis."

Instead of the pleasant chime of a well-processed command, I heard a buzz again. "Error. Nav Point Bees-in-gravel is not found in the current flight plan."

Jack stretched out in her chair, craning her head to look at me and then sticking out her tongue. "Computer, set a course for Nav Point B via Beta Alcyonis."

Now it chimed. "Course calculated. Total delta-v required for maneuver: 3.4 kilometers per second."

"Showoff," I muttered to the cat. "Computer, engage at one-quarter throttle."

Gravity stretched languorously, got out of bed, and dragged itself back into existence. We had about five minutes of it, which was not enough to do much more than remember that, against all odds, people had evolved in the thing's presence.

"So," Jack said; she had loosened her belt enough to twist around in the seat and peer at me. Her muzzle rested atop it, and her ears were lifted. "We're going to your salvage thing now?"

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"The claim?" She nodded. "I dunno. Metallic. I hope it's valuable." I couldn't salvage anything substantial myself; the Walküre wasn't big enough. I'd have to sell the rights to a bigger company for a percentage.

"How'd you find it?"

I cocked an eyebrow. "A good surveyor never tells a thing like that."

"I could bribe you..."

Leaning back against the wall, I kept the eyebrow lifted. "Yeah? With what?" Jack didn't answer, but she licked her lips slowly before shrugging her stocky shoulders with a devilish lightness. "Fine. I'll hold you to that, though."

Teeth flashed in her grin. "Count on it."

I didn't really intend to give her much time to tarry -- the burn would be over soon, and then we'd have some time to kill. "I heard about it from another captain. See, so, here's the thing, right? A Yachikawa jumpdrive will take you anywhere instantly. I mean anywhere. Anywhere in the universe. So if you fuck up the numbers..."

"Get lost?"

"Right. Jump computer's only good for so much precision -- mine's..." Well, who could mind a bit of exaggeration? No need for her to know the old analog beast was only rated for a hundred parsecs. "Mine's good for about a thousand light years with tolerable safety limits. I have nav charts for most of the galaxy, though."

"Okay..."

"If you jump further than your nav charts, maybe you'll never find your way back, 'cause you need the stars to find your position. What that means is, almost everybody follows the same jump routes."

Jack shrugged. "C'mon, get to the point."

"If you hunt around common nav beacons, sometimes you can find where people got a bit lost, or ran into trouble. My friend said a colony ship, the Princess Miranda Sachsenberg, sent out a distress call and disappeared about a century ago. I sniffed around for it, picked up a signal -- right location, right size... worst case scenario it's a mineral-rich asteroid."

"A dead ship... you'll just go... pick over their bones?"

I shrugged. "They ain't using 'em."

She glanced away for a moment, those blue eyes darkening. I knew what she was suddenly seeing -- that the hull of the Walküre was not all that thick, and that the empty space beyond was merciless and cold.

Jack stayed quiet until the engines cut out and we were weightless again. I floated over to the pilot's seat, checking the reactor to make sure nothing was wrong. Then I pushed the jumpdrive's power regulator forward, listening to the hum from well behind us. Reassuring, that.

"How does it work?"

"The engine?"

"Yeah."

"Pretty simple, really. The reactor generates a tachyon field calibrated to the inverse polarity of the destination vector, then --"

"You have no idea. You push a button and it goes?" Jack had freed herself from her harness, and was drifting next to me.

"Pretty much," I admitted. "The reactor spins up a big flywheel. When it's at full speed, I pull out the clutch and it powers up the jump rotor. There's some exotic matter in it; it interacts with the stator... somehow."

"Exotic?"

"Exotic enough to break the laws of physics, right?" As Jack had intimated, the truth was that the engine was totally opaque to me, and I had no idea how it worked beyond the switches that controlled its operation.

"When do we jump?" The jaguar had already gotten back into the swing of zero gravity; she was perched on the wall at a ninety degree angle to me, her hair drifting like ruddy seaweed.

"Not yet. Waiting game -- reactor takes a long time to charge the drive." The flywheel was only at a few thousand RPMs.

Jack thudded into me from behind, and wrapped her paws around me to keep herself in place. "What do you do when you're waiting, anyway?"

I twisted myself around carefully. "What you'd expect," I shrugged. "Read. Listen to music. Learn a trade."

She rolled her eyes again. "So your paws get a lot of workout, huh?"

Well, she'd started it, and anyhow there had to be some benefit to having a passenger around. So I grinned "Manual dexterity's a skill, spotted one..." In the absence of gravity her movements fluffed her fur up, rendering her stocky limbs a bit fuzzy.

I felt her leg hook around mine, warm and very soft. Nothing we were wearing did much to hide anything from the other; I pulled her against me, and felt claws dig into my sides as she returned my smile with just the right amount of heat. "Should I leave you alone to practice, then?" she smirked.

I try to limit the number of people who can smirk at me, as a proud sort of dog, but a willing jaguar fits the bill. Still, you have to draw the line somewhere. "You know," I rumbled. "What are you still doing up here?"

She looked at me a little questioningly, so to clarify things I uncurled her arms from around me and pushed her shoulders down. Jack looked up at me with a wry, knowing smile as she descended, and then caught herself by way of giving my pants a tug.

My foot nudged blindly for something to hold on to as her fingers pulled my jeans wide open. A beat. "Oh, right. They're not going to fall by themselves..." But she was industrious, pushing them down with her broad paws. "Mm. What do we have here?"

What we had here was already half erect, swelling with each pulse beneath the soft panting of the spotted feline's breath, melting into the steel grey of my crotch. I started a countdown in my mind -- how long I would wait until I gave her explicit orders -- but the jaguar didn't disappoint. The wet, slightly rough texture of her tongue dragged up the bare flesh of my shaft and I groaned my appreciation to her brokenly.

Jack giggled, and then dipped her muzzle lower; my cock glided through her silky fur as she nuzzled gently at my sheath, tongue teasing my sac. When she was satisfied, and my hips were quivering with the tension, she pulled back, kissing all along the side of my sheath and the slick pink shaft that now stood at full size before her.

The last kiss lingered -- then wet, smooth heat encircled my tip; I looked down, to see just an inch or so sunk between her lips, and she glanced up to meet my gaze with a wink. She suckled firmly, never letting that rough tongue linger long enough to be uncomfortable as she worked it over me. My hips bucked, and she had to put her arm around my waist to hold on -- I heard a little grunt as the effort pushed me a few inches deeper into her mouth.

She did it for real a second or two later, sucking hard as she lowered herself. The wet heat of her muzzle was exquisite, the pressure so intense that I nearly lost it right there. Fortunately she gave me a moment to recover before she began moving, bobbing her head softly.

You know how graceful it looks when you see folks moving in space? Even better when it's a jaguar with your cock stuffed halfway in her muzzle. I growled in pleasure, and I caught her tail lashing excitedly at the sound. "Good girl," I managed in a rough groan, and my paw closed around her ear, pulling her close, letting me thrust in time to her rocking muzzle. "Such a good fuckin' girl..."

Her panting breath ran in hot whispers down my shaft as she moved faster. I was starting to lose my resolve, bucking harder as the wet slurping sounds filled the small cabin. I felt her choke a little as one thrust pressed me deeper into her throat -- and the sharp pressure of teeth for just a moment. Gotta be careful in zero gravity.

Since she couldn't deep throat me, though, she settled for folding the warm, soft grip of her paw around the base of my cock, caressing the swelling knot with such a soft, expert touch that I couldn't help a shuddering snarl.

She picked up on the tension in my body -- the heaving, ragged pants as my back arched and my muscles locked, my sac drawing up tight. With a deep, feline purr she slowly dragged herself back up my length, sucking firmly, darting her tongue right against the tip until I let out a grunting bark and the first hot spurt of seed pulsed against her tongue. Fiery, aching pleasure seized me, radiating from where her lips were closed around my throbbing cock.

Jack gasped a little as I started to unload in her pretty little muzzle, and I gripped her ear, pulling her down further. "Swallow," I growled warningly, looking sternly down at her -- more clearly on either count than I thought I was going to be able to. "Every fucking drop." With a rumbling purr and a dancing light in her eyes she obeyed gamely, and I groaned again, feeling the rippling around my shaft as she took the thick spurts of my cum.

She kept it up until the pulsing throbs had slowed, and then stopped, and I thought I would pass out from the stimulation. I had to shove her away -- and though she didn't drift off, since she was still holding my waist, she got the idea. Straightening, she brought herself level with me, and grinned.

"More pent up than you have any right to be, after last night..."

Her playful mocking was, in any case, slightly undermined by the way she'd smiled as she swallowed my load. "Maybe yer just good at it."

"I'm good at a lot of things," Jack snickered; her stocky arms curled around me, and I let go with my foot so that, when her errantly waving tail struck something, we drifted freely in the cabin. "Kinda surprised you wanted me to swallow, though. Figured you'd want to see it on my fur..."

She was very frank, which I liked. Of course, she was also right. "Yeah. But that's tougher to clean up, you know, in..." I waved my paw; the two of us had drifted horizontally anyway, wandering aimlessly around the Walküre's cockpit.

"Of course," she teased; her paw wandered down to stroke over my erection, which had not really shrunk. "How, uh... rigidly logical."

"Yeah, I'm a pragmatist." A flashing green light close in my peripheral vision caught my attention; I twisted around to get a better look. "Jumpdrive's ready, though." I nudged the wall to bring me close enough to the nav computer to tap in a few commands. Hopefully it wouldn't take long to figure the jump coordinates -- the flight plan I'd filed at Tartarus had taken advantage of the station's computers to precompute everything.

Sure enough, even with the old analog navigation engine, the computer chimed almost immediately. "Course calculation... ready. Alignment... ready. FTL presequencing complete. Standing by."

"Computer --" then I caught myself. Visions of miscommunication presented themselves. "Why don't you do the honors?"

She hugged me with her free arm, and her tail curled around my leg. "Yeah?"

What could it hurt? Yeah. Pragmatism. "Might as well."

The jaguar grinned, her face lighting up and her voice decisive, like she damn well meant it. "Computer -- engage."