Crash Course on Heroism Ch. 01

Welcome to a whole new universe! I don't write too much sci-fi, but a commissioner dared me so here I am. This story is planned for five chapters, but we'll see how it's going when we get there.

The idea for this one comes from Moonwing, who you may recognize as the guy who commissioned Becoming Monsters: Stay In Vegas.

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Chapter 1: The Crash Part

I was no stranger to waking up in unfamiliar surroundings that I had no business waking up in. Bit of an occupational hazard, really. Starship pilots have a reputation after all, and we strive to make sure that reputation remains in place no matter what the regulations say.

I couldn't see much in the second or two I could keep my eyes open. The lights were dim, nearly dark, and what there was didn't seem consistent. And the headache. The headache meant I was either REALLY messed up or else I'd drank entirely too much the day before. And I wasn't allowed to drink aboard ship during solo scouting runs. Didn't mean that I didn't do it, obviously, but it meant I didn't do it enough to get hung over this badly. I coughed a couple of times, experimentally. "Computer, time?"

There was a beep in response, but nothing else. Not a good sign. Everywhere on my small ship had access to a fully-conversational semisentient program to help interface and chat with. Helped with cabin fever, too. Since mine was not set to beep, a woman's voice being superior in every way imaginable, that was a problem. It meant something was severely messed up, to the point that it probably wouldn't respond to diagnostic calls to say exactly what was messed up. Nothing to do but try. "Computer, diagnostic check."

Another beep, kind of sad-sounding. Yup. That confirmed it. Solving this one was going to be done without assistance. Given that I was now conscious... or conscious-ish, anyway... it was time to do what I could. Okay, work from the inside outwards. I was conscious and breathing. I wiggled all ten fingers and toes, one by one. Focus on what I could feel since opening my eyes hurt, my clothing felt like I was in my piloting jumpsuit, the seat was the kind of foam-leather-rubber texture of the actual crew seats, though whether it was the pilot seat, the radar screen, or the diagnostic station I wasn't sure. Okay, didn't need to have my eyes open for the next test. Movement. My try didn't last long.

"Ugh..." Not the most elegant response in the world, but appropriate. My head, neck, and jaw worked fine. My fingers, wrists, toes, and ankles did as well. It was everything ELSE that felt like a pane of glass that had just been dropped from low orbit. Oh, and I was definitely buckled in with a five-point harness, which meant the pilot seat. I never bothered elsewhere. Another shift, another groan of pain.

Please do not try that again until you can move safely.

Say what? The words sounded like they came from inside my own brain. It wasn't a voice sent through the implants, either. It was like I was thinking thoughts for myself. Sexy ones, the voice sounded like the kind of one that narrated shows that came on between midnight and four in the morning. A woman's, smooth and sensual.

I felt it as a blindfold was slipped over my eyes, though I was perfectly fine with that. The seat got leaned all the way back. There was a click, my harness being released. A tug at my jumpsuit, the sound of tearing and cutting, and the feel of cool air on my chest. Something was touching my skin, something that felt cool and smooth.

Drink. It will help.

Something touched my lips, feeling soft. I latched onto it, and a tasty liquid of some kind started coming out. I found that I was famished, both hungry and thirsty like I had been out for a long time. Behind the... nozzle? Nipple? Something like that, anyway. Behind it was a large, soft tank. I didn't know how much it would hold, but it was both there and the source of what I was drinking. The things touching me kept exploring my body, though what they were checking for I could not know. It felt... nice. Comforting in a way, erotic in a wildly different way. Whichever you choose to believe, I felt myself wavering on the line between awake and asleep, in that hazy, half-dreamy place where you're not quite sure which you actually are.

A memory struck. A week ago, returning from a fairly routine courier run to find that the scheduling manager had switched out. It happens, duties always rotated to make sure that everyone learned and nobody's bad habits became irretrievably entrenched, but this choice was... questionable. We'll go with that. Some words were said about the decision to put him there and the qualifications of anyone who might think that was a good idea. By me. Loudly. In front of witnesses. For some reason this was deemed to be disrespectful. Which it was. And that got me put on scout duty.

I took another long suck of whatever delicious elixir it was that my mysterious rescuer was offering. Really was helping, too, I could almost feel the warmth radiating from my belly outwards to counteract the cool air of the cockpit. Cool air I'd become all too familiar with in the last few days.

Scout duty was... well, it was way more glorious in the movies than it was in real life. A lot of empty space sniffing around the common shipping lanes for people with the incredibly bad luck to be stranded in places that made the middle of nowhere look like a casino. The sheer amount of space out there meant that even the "busiest" routes had incredibly low chances of actually meeting anyone, much less anyone in need of assistance, unless I happened to check EXACTLY the correct light-second to catch you AND whatever was left of your ship both kept you alive that long and managed to return enough signal that I could find you. Not impossible, but definitely an occasion to buy a few lottery tickets or get a lot more serious about religion.

Since fuel wasn't free, that meant that scouts, and by extension me, needed another job. Updating charts. Go out to a place that hadn't had a scan in a while, or which was unexplored. Poke around a bit to get readings. Head to the next place with a good communication array and sync the new data. I remembered realizing I was about a day away from getting to do some actual exploration, getting excited, and heading that way. I remembered downshifting from warp to lightspeed, catching a blip a decent chunk past where previous exploration had happened, and emerging to realspace as fast as I possibly could to reverse course and see if I could find the blip. It might be a starship. It might be a meteorite with an unusually starship-like composition. Either way, I was going to find out. I was going to make sure that if there were people there, they would be alright. Once more into lightspeed state, for the momentary hop into the vicinity of what my sensors caught.

A shudder ran along my body at the impending thoughts. The motion brought me back to the present, briefly, and I could feel that the smooth hands touching me had changed how they were doing so. They were changing their pressure, deeper where my body could take it, much lighter where it couldn't. They were focusing on areas I'm not sure were strictly necessary for diagnostics or healing. The comforting drink was still available, and I definitely drank more as my stomach felt empty again, but the feeling of those hands was no longer medical. I felt my body start to react to it. Despite the ambient pain in my torso, I was getting hard. It was a slower process than usual, to be sure, but it felt inevitable. Kind of glad that it still worked, I rather enjoyed using it as often as I could find willing partners to use it on. Which, space pilot, I could fairly often.

Relax, this is the intended response. Healing works better with certain chemicals that are analogues to human endorphins, the more in your system the faster and more completely you will recover.

Alright. Well, I'd had stranger healings by a long shot, and much less pleasant ones. I made the decision to comply with the voice in my head. Not a sentence which inspired too much confidence in most circumstances, I should note, but it seemed to work in context. I could just relax and let those hands do what they wanted, let myself feel good, and apparently heal faster. I drank more. If what the voice was implying was right, whatever it was might be a healing serum of some kind. And it was delicious, in any case. Couldn't tell you what it tasted like, but it was good.

My mind drifted back, to the moment I came out of lightspeed. No matter how fast you were going, physics was physics. Energy bleed and momentum meant you'd come back to realspace at most 0.1c... and, thankfully, I was going MUCH slower than that, having only made a short hop at barely over light speed. When my sensors started their job, my movement could be measured in a comprehensible amount of kilometers per hour. About a million, sure, but comprehensible. Actually getting any meaningful lateral momentum generated was an exercise in futility at those speeds, which meant that when my sensors confirmed what the ping was I had all too few seconds to comprehend the readout as I slammed the emergency reverse.

G forces immediately started doing their best to push me forward, away from the chair and into the biting grip of my harness. That much closer to my screens, as I saw a dense cluster of metallic rocks entirely too broad to avoid. "Dense" might be a relative term in space, with tons of actual emptiness between the hazards, but since it was a matter of seconds away there was not a way for me to drop enough speed to matter. All I could do was try to point the ship where there were vaguely fewer rocks to hit and pray it was enough. It didn't really matter the size of what I hit. At that kind of relative speed, the forces involved would be plenty to ruin my day.

Almost made it, too. The chances of what happened were, if anything, lower than a clean pass-through. Within a hundredth of a second of each other, first my right wing, then my left, clipped something in the field. This resulted in a MUCH sharper reduction of speed combined with a lot of spin, the shock through the ship shattering some of my console and launching it at me with enough force to, in fact, ruin my day. The suit did its job, though, the non-newtonian properties of the substrates hardening instantly on impact to distribute the forces to the sides and back to the chair... which I wasn't touching, unfortunately. The forces involved, therefore, did transmit a higher-than-healthy amount to my chest, slamming me into the scantily-cushioned seat to transmit a similarly higher-than-healthy amount of force to my back, and my body kind of decided at that point that consciousness wasn't en vogue.

Extrapolating from there, since I had no remaining memory to go by directly, the emergency life support had to have worked to some extent. I would not be alive otherwise. Presumably, there was presently a rescue of some kind in progress no more than a couple of days later. That in turn implied that the emergency autopilot had also functioned, since I'd have been spinning rapidly along, moving at almost a percent of the speed of light.

So you came to this point trying to rescue a potential unknown ship? Even knowing that you were off the beaten path, where few would be? And you did so rapidly, effectively, and only failed due to circumstances well beyond your control? Which you survived, against odds that would take our strongest computers an eon to calculate? How very interesting.

The massage the hands were giving changed dramatically at that point. One hand came up to the side of my face, the other went south to begin stroking the hardness my rescuer found there. Ah, one of those. The source of the elixir I was drinking was removed, replaced by a warm, soft weight. Two of them. Breasts, good-sized ones by the feel of it. I was a fan in any circumstance, and this was no different. Nice and firm, too, a high-quality pair.

One oddity, though. The texture. It didn't feel like human skin. Now whether this meant the broad scales I felt were from the skin of an alien species or some kind of outfit I couldn't know. Not without my eyes, and I was still blindfolded. I resolved to not care. Without a way to meaningfully affect things, healing being promised, and the alternative to resistance was a pretty skillful handjob paired with boobs in my face? Easy enough choice to make.

My breath started to come more quickly, a couple went raspy as she picked up her pace. It felt really good, and it had been far too long since I had done anything involving the companionship of anything but my right hand. Her right hand felt way better than my own. It didn't take much longer before the actual focused effort sent me over the edge, shooting off into the cool air

Very good. This will help. Let it all out, let it go, let the feelings wash over you so that you can heal. There is a long way to go yet, but you are at least going in the right direction now.

I felt myself being wiped up, then covered by a blanket of some kind. The voice in my head didn't speak further, and I drifted into those hazy dreams once more. Dreams from a very long time ago.

The dreams that a kid named James Malcolm had, years ago. Back when I found out what it would take to be a pilot, shrugged, and told the teacher "worth it." The dreams that sustained me through the blistering academic course load I'd need to survive in space. It's what kept me going through kilometers of running and hundreds of lifted weights. I wasn't a natural, I had to struggle to pass classes that others aced seemingly effortlessly. Others were more fit, or came from families of pilots and knew all the tricks beforehand. Some people like me, fighting with all they had to break into the coolest career on Earth or elsewhere.

I guess that part helped. For the first time in my life, I was cool. I had signed up to be a hero, space pilots were heroes, without whom society would collapse. Everyone knew this. The average guy named Jim from high school, destined for a bland office job? Gone. James Malcolm got groupies. They used to joke that it was practice for when we actually became pilots. You may have noticed, a bit ago, that I wasn't the kind of person to turn it down. That was not a recent development. Through college I was the underdog story. The fighter, never getting the top of my class but NEVER failing or giving up. Even when I really should have, a couple of times. Which meant that my bed was never empty for long. It was awesome. It was addictive.

It also almost cost me everything when I wasn't quite discerning enough, and the combination of a disease I should have avoided and the angry boyfriend of a girl I should have avoided nearly resulted in permanent injuries. Chalk it up to lessons learned. Pity I couldn't get elective credit hours for it.

I guess that helped, since I made it to commencement on time. Ish. There was one summer that I had to scramble more than I should have to make up for a semester where I couldn't do certain things. Then came The Program, full of people with dreams like me, with a graduation rate of 25%. The failures would go to an easier school for strictly cargo and tugboat operations. Or, as we liked to call it, the Consolation Prize Academy. I wasn't about to settle for that. One grueling year, the first week losing nearly 10% of the class to the Consolation Prize and then on average one a week until literally the day before graduation. Congrats, James, you made it, and then the hard part.

Working.

Space Pilots are human like anyone else, but what we've been through and trained for is unique. OPUP. Only Pilots Understand Pilots, that's the unofficial catchphrase. So when I got to the actual job doing actual cool things, I found out we did the uncool things ourselves as well. Which meant that people who had the same dreams as me often found themselves doing the paperwork. Scheduling, supply orders, training tracking. The only thing we didn't do was the bulk of the mechanical and repair work, though even there we were heavily involved. It was a daily struggle to get onto routes so that I could get flight time, unending studies to earn and keep more qualifications, and over all not nearly as much heroically rescuing people as I'd hoped for or been led to believe would happen.

I eventually got myself to the point that I got my Courier certifications, in addition to keeping my other qualifications, and those missions tended to be a bit more glamorous than the baseline. Then it brought me to the events that brought me to... this.

Ah, so you have a name. That will make this easier, James Malcolm.

"Who... are you?" My voice was a bit froggy, though not bad.

Your eyes are healed enough to be able to take themselves the rest of the way. It is about time for you to see that.

There was a tug at the blindfold. It fell loose. Summoning up the willpower from all of my life, I opened my eyes. It was her eyes that struck me first, a faintly luminous blue. This focus expanded to her skin, also glowing faintly blue-white and gently scaly. The expression on her face was an odd combination of nervous, nurturing, and frisky. She had, as I'd surmised, a very nice pair of breasts which were glowing notably brighter than the rest of her. There was no clothing on her bipedal body, nothing but those scales and that glow. Her hands seemed to have four claws each, but they were either retractable or she was so good at avoiding using them when she didn't want to that I hadn't even felt a hint of them before now. Her neck was hooded like a cobra's, flared wide, but she didn't seem to be acting angry or threatened. A tail extended behind her, also snake-like. Half of me wanted to be terrified, but the other was rational enough to note that if she wanted me dead then spending the time and energy to heal me was less than sensible. Her movements were slow, subtle and winding, as if trying her best to not make me panic. Mostly worked.

Good, you are healing nicely. Please do not try to move, you are not ready for it yet and you may harm yourself. We still need to get you to the point we can get you out of this cockpit and into a proper medical facility.

"Who are you?"

I do not have a name as you think of them. My designation is Mu One Seven, a medical unit.

"Mu One Seven? Are you saying there are seventeen of you?"

She paused, seeming to do some thinking. I am the fifteenth of twenty-four medical units of my hive.

"I... I see." There was a lot to think about. Alien species weren't exactly common in Human space, but they weren't unknown. It was entirely possible, after all, for our territories to completely intersect and not know it given the kinds of variety that galactic biology could create. This one could either breathe oxygen (or nitrogen), or else didn't need to respire... but she seemed human-like in a way that most aliens simply weren't. I mean, she had boobs. Mammalian configuration wasn't a normal feature that popped up a lot, the circumstances that led to it being pretty rare even among life-bearing worlds. "I guess I need to rephrase. WHAT are you? What is this Hive?"

The Hive is the Hive. You are not the first to ask this, and I have no better answer for you. The Hive will speak to you as soon as you are ready, but you need to heal before then.

She leaned in, pressing one of those glowing boobs to my face. My lips found a familiar feel, this was the source of the healing drink I had been enjoying. Huh. You know, I could imagine worse ways to get it. Especially when she reached down and started playing with me again, to much the same end point some time later. Really did seem to be working, I was breathing more easily and seeing better.

Are you going to require the ship's computer for anything during your recovery? You will be with us for at least... she looked at the time display on one of the remaining consoles. Twelve days.

I nodded. "I will need it to be able to send some messages. That long will... make me late. Even if my ship can be repaired."

We can arrange for both in addition to the computer.

I sighed. "That's good." And I meant it. There were rules and protocols in place for a lot of things. Damage to the spacecraft. Medical leave. Unavoidable delays. Crashes, rescue calls. Alternative messaging means. Contact with aliens. Some of those were mutually exclusive, so when I was stuck dealing with, literally, an unavoidable delay due to a damaging crash causing medical needs along with being rescued by an unknown alien? And sending all that home via alternative means? It was a bit confusing. I'm sure the answer to it was buried in a book somewhere, but it was one I either hadn't read or couldn't remember.

And if it existed, the computer it was supposed to be on was nonfunctional due to its attempt to give me an extremely aggressive hug earlier.

Rest now. The process to come is going to be a long and difficult one. We have some work to do even before we get you out of here and into the Hive properly.

She tucked me in again. This time around, when she encouraged me to sleep, my dreams did not come. I slept. Deeply. The next day or so went the same way. Wake. Drink. Heal. At one point, three glowing insectoids came through, carefully removing and taking with them every computer system they could. Another nap later, and Mu One Seven was accompanied by another serpent. Together, they slid a stretcher of some kind under me. They braced me, strapped me in with tender care, and stabilized every joint of my body.

I felt them lift, and they carried me out. Through the cockpit door, through the hallways, out to an exit hatch. They didn't attach a helmet or breath mask to me before opening up the airlock. The air barely moved, and while it smelled odd I didn't have any problems breathing it. The pressure and composition had to be similar to Earth-normal, which raised infinitely more questions than it answered.

Smoothly, they walked me through halls that were narrow and textured more biologically than the metal and plastic I was used to. They turned into a room and lowered me carefully onto a bed. No sensors were hooked up to me, at least not directly. They tucked me in, made sure I was comfortable, then turned and left. I had no idea what exactly this place was, but it seemed that this would be home for a bit. I could only hope it would prove to be as hospitable as Mu One Seven had been.