The Traitor, Part 1

Content warning: This story contains explicit sex scenes.

Outskirts of Seattle, Kulshan, Northern Union.
September 3rd, 1765.
Eighteen months and twelve days after the Seattle landings.

The 120mm mortar shell left its firing tube at just under five hundred meters per second, traveling upwards in a high arc. If it had eyes, it would have seen the ruined outskirts of a city, blasted into rubble by a year and a half of artillery fire, speckled with neon tracers, smoke, and billowing clouds of black-and-white static as troops moved to engage through the rubble.

But it didn’t have eyes, so it saw none of that. The shell reached the apex of its arc after forty-five seconds of flight before beginning its long descent back down along with several dozen of its brethren. Strobing beams of coherent infrared light annihilated some of its compatriots, the heat causing their fuses to cook off prematurely. Another pair were turned into shrapnel by a hail of tracers so dense that it looked like a solid beam. Miraculously, it survived the barrage long enough for its fuse to start getting a return from the rudimentary radio emitter in its nose. Frequency shifts aligned, and had the shell possessed a brain, it would have felt satisfaction at a job well done for a split second before it ceased to exist.

Fifteen meters away, Private Ravi Bhatavadekar looked up just in time to notice a brief flicker of movment as something fell out of the sky, and then everything went black.

Everything hurt. Everything hurt a lot. He tried to moan, but nothing happened. There was a muffled voice. It was saying something in a language he didn’t immediately recognize. Not any of the familiar syllables of Hindi, at least. None of the bouncing tones of Mandarin, nor the chained harshness of Russian. Lots of stops, lots of sibilants… Not Basho, at least. He spoke that, and there weren’t enough ‘oo’ sounds for it to be Basho.

It came to him. It was Norse. A great language for stereotypes. The snakes spoke with a lot of sibilants, because of course they did. Hissss. He tried to laugh, then noticed the pain again. It really hurt, like his head was about to explode.

He tried to reconstruct the sequence of events. He’d been at the ruined train station, told to hold the line and wait for reinforcements. The enemy had been there, shooting at him. He’d shot over their heads, like half the conscripts did, and they’d stopped shooting at him after that. The rumor mill moved quickly, as did the tales of those who survived: make it clear you’re not a threat, and they won’t treat you like one. Ravi wasn’t a threat, despite the military equipment he’d been wearing. He didn’t want to be there any more than the snakes didn’t want him there; he was happy to leave well enough alone. Then he had turned to wipe his brow and…

Oh. Right. Something came down and exploded. So much for not being treated like a threat. At least he wasn’t dead.

Someone asked him a question. He tried to respond, but his mouth didn’t move. That was less than ideal. He tried to take a deep breath, at least to make some noise. That didn’t result in any movement either. That was much more concerning. Breathing is important, he remembered. Ravi tried not to panic and failed miserably. He did get his eyes open, at least. Pure white light assaulted his senses, and he screwed his eyes shut in pain. More voices assaulted his ears, still in Norse. Something sounded urgent.

“Can you hear me?” That one was in Basho. Progress!

“I can hear you,” he tried to reply. Nothing came out of his mouth.

More voices in Norse. Something cool and metallic pressed against his scalp.

“Try again. Can you hear me?” A woman’s voice. She sounded tired.

“I can hear you.” This time there was actual sound, but it wasn’t his voice. Something digital and computerized, flat and inflectionless.

“Good. You’ve been injured very badly. You’re very, very lucky to be alive at all.”

“What happened?” Ravi was grateful that the machine speaking for him didn’t put any emotion in his words. He didn’t want to let the enemy know he was pissing his pants in panic.

“It’s… bad. Can you stay calm for me?”

That wasn’t good news. Ravi knew what to do: a joke. “Give it to me straight, doc.” It didn’t even get a chuckle from the disembodied voice.

“You took shrapnel to your face and neck. Your brainstem was mostly severed, along with most of your facial nerves, and there’s copper fragments in your brain. We think your heart and lungs kept running on their own long enough to keep you alive, but you had a seizure in your suit when they tried to get you out. It almost killed you.”

“Are you going to amputate?” Exosuits were powerful, both for good and for bad, and they required careful movements to keep the hydraulics and servos in check. A seizure inside of the suit was pretty much the worst-case scenario. But, all of what she’d described was survivable. Ravi was still alive, so there was hope.

“We had to. You’re on a life support rig right now, your voice is being read off of what’s left of your facial nerves.” Ah. That was why he couldn’t feel his body; he was a head hooked up to a bunch of tubes. Neat tech, though. Last he’d seen (in a pirated medical drama, so perhaps not the most modern depiction), you had to use blinks to communicate anything like this. The vocoder must have been a wartime development.

“How long until you can grow it back?” Chop-and-grow was the be-all, end-all of thaumaturgical trauma medicine. If there was something wrong with a body part, just cut it off and regrow it with magic, and if there was something wrong with the entire body, just cut it off below the neck and regrow it. He wasn’t a religious crank, he knew that regeneration would put everything right back where it used to be, though without any scars or tattoos. It wasn’t something he could have afforded, but it wasn’t particularly exotic.

“That’s the problem. We can’t regen your brain. You’ve got bits of copper wire in there, and a slow bleed. If we try to regenerate you without removing it, the arcs will fry you. And we don’t have a spare neurosurgeon who can remove it before the bleed kills you.”

“So, I’m dying.” It didn’t feel as devastating of a revelation as he thought it would be, just a morose realization. “How long do I have?”

“An hour or so, if you do nothing. About seventy years, if you’re up for a new body.”

“Conversion?” He would have laughed, if he could. Propaganda loved to depict the snakes forcibly converting prisoners, annihilating their souls in the process and turning them into mindless automatons. That wasn’t something that actually happened, of course, that simply wasn’t how it worked. Anyone with an internet connection knew that, at least if they cared to find out. But the offer was supposedly always on the table for POWs.

“Conversion, yes. You know what that involves?”

“You rip my soul out and put it in a body with less holes in it.”

“More or less.”

“Do I have time to think about it?” Conversion was just too much to think about. It wasn’t like he was particularly attached to his body. Or what was left of it. But Ravi couldn’t think about what he could be; that was just a step beyond what he could emotionally handle right now.

“Not really, but the fact that you aren’t cursing at me indicates that it isn’t going to be a hard decision for you.”

She did have him there. Any real essentialist wouldn’t be having this conversation. “Yes, then.”

“Okay. I’m going to record your consent.” She sounded a little relieved, but not any less tired.

“What now?”

“Just a few moments.” There was a click somewhere, and the whir of computer fans. “This is recording an identifier for your mind, or soul, whatever you want to call it. This will let the magic pull the parts of you that are you out of this body and put them into a new one.”

“What am I going to… be?”

“You’re getting a baseline human body, at least vaguely close to what you currently look like. No time for any preferences, we pre-ran it while you were unconscious. And no alternates, sorry, you’re still a prisoner.” He felt a vague sense of disappointment at that. Ravi wanted to ask something, but he didn’t know what.

There was another click, and he felt movement. The doctor spoke again. “Alright, we’re going. Any words you want to say?”

“Are there words I should say?”

“Some people want to. It’s not required, we’ve got good equipment.”

“…no, I guess not.”

“Alright, standby.” Someone removed the metal pressing against his scalp. He felt a brief movement, and then the doctor’s voice came out of a speaker somewhere close to his ear. “This is going to sting. You’re going to feel a little bump in the back of your mind once the ritual goes off, touch that as soon as you feel it.”

Whatever Ravi was about to reply with was cut off by the crack of aetheric discharge. It felt like he was being slurped up by the world’s most powerful straw. His last thought was that the doctor had lied about it just stinging.

Ravi woke up with a groan. This time it actually made a noise. That was an improvement, at least.

“Hey, he’s awake!” That was Hindi, not Basho.

He cautiously opened his eyes, experimentally wiggling his fingers and toes. Everything seemed to be intact. He was looking at the ceiling, or at least what would have been the ceiling if not for the half-dozen faces crowding over him.

“Uugh. What… where am I?” He sat up, looking around the… train car? It was silly, but the first thing he noticed was that it was a nice train car, not the run-down ones he was used to.

One of the faces spoke. “We’re headed east.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Ravi looked around at the group. They were all identical, average-looking Indian men, wearing the same set of fatigues and plain green-brown shirt. NU camo pattern, he noticed. They could have passed as identical siblings. “Wait. Are we all…?” He looked down to discover that someone had dressed him at some point.

“Like this? Yeah. They apparently only have one body for ‘Indian male’, so it’s what we got. Citra, hit him with the questions.”

“Questions? And Citra? Isn’t that—”

“We have some bets about your answers that need to get settled. And yeah, it’s a woman’s name, that’s the point.”

Citra pushed the other men back to not crowd him so much. “Okay. You a conscript?”

“Yeah,” Ravi replied, “got drafted a few months ago.” One of the men cursed.

“Billet?”

“Infantry.” Citra made a victorious fist.

“So why the new body,” he asked, “gender or scales?”

“What?”

“Gender? Or scales? You don’t end up in a new body this fast if there’s not something wrong with you.”

“Uh, neither? I was a disembodied head for a bit, got fucked up real bad by shrapnel.”

Another man leaned in. “So you’re saying you were totally happy with your body? No wondering about being a woman or a dragon, no sort of detachment from your from body, and totally fine with normal, hetero relationships?

“Uh. Doesn’t everyone wonder about that stuff?”

Citra and four of the others shared a look. Something was communicated but not said.

Citra spoke, “What’s your name?” She sounded… apologetic?

“Ravi.”

“Okay, Ravi. Let’s skip to introductions. I’m Citra. Girls, wave when I call you. Lia, Aaliya, Sona, and Aisha.” They waved. “The other two are Kiran and Arya.” The first four were women’s names, the last two were unisex.

“But you’re all…” There was just too much to take in. Ravi felt like he was drowning.

“We’re all in these bodies. They’re not us. They’re temporary. Ask our guard why.”

“Guard, singular?” A welcome distraction from his spinning thoughts.

“We’re all still prisoners, for now.” She turned towards the front of the mostly-empty train car. “Hey, Sven! The new girl wants to know what’s going on!”

“I’m not—” Ravi tried to complain.

“Who’s the new one?” the man asked in passable Hindi, rising from his seat. He had slitted green eyes and a proper NU Army uniform, marking him as an actual transhuman, not whatever the eight of them were. Ravi belatedly realized why there was only one guard: without their exoskeletons, a dragon could turn them all into so much viscera and burnt flesh in seconds at this distance.

Citra pointed towards him. Right, they all had the same body. Presumably their jailer couldn’t tell any of them apart from each other either.

“Okay. I don’t think anyone read you your rights, so: this serves as your formal notification that you are now a prisoner of war under the Oslo Accords. You are required to provide us with your military identification, so that we may inform a third party of your capture. If you are wounded, we will provide medical care. You will not be harmed or deprived of basic necessities, but you may be imprisoned. Do you understand?”

“No, I— didn’t you already give me medical care?”

“Yeah, sorry, I’m required to read that off, we’ve already got your tags too. You eight are all special cases, so you get special treatment. Most of your folks don’t immediately go for conversion the second they get a chance, but you lot did. That and if we leave you with your ex-comrades, there’s a good chance they’ll try to kill you.”

“What? Why?”

Sven looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “Are you fucking dense? You converted. You know what this war’s about, right?”

“Well, I’m still me…”

“Not to them you aren’t. Well, a lot of them, anyway. And since we have an obligation to keep you alive, here you are.”

“What’s going to happen to us?”

He shrugged. “It’s up to you. We want you to work, but we can’t make you work. So you can either contribute by doing something, or you can sit in a camp until the war’s over.”

“And importantly,” Citra chimed in, “if we do the former, we get whatever bodies we want.”

Sven nodded. “If you want something different, gender or whatever, they can get you that in a POW camp, but it’ll probably take a few weeks and it’ll be plain human baseline. If you want anything else, you need to do at least the bare minimum to earn it.”

Ravi struggled to let that sink in. The little alarm bell in the back of his head was getting more urgent.

Sven continued, “Personally, I would recommend the first option. It’s in your own self-interest at this point. You converted, so as far as ODI cares, you’re on our side now.”

“But I was injured! If I hadn’t, I’d be dead! They’d und—” He stopped. No, they wouldn’t understand.

“Yeah. Sorry, kid. For what it’s worth, I think you made the right call.”

“Kid? We’re the same age! Why are you acting like—”

“This,” he interrupted, tapping his chest, “looks like it’s early twenties. This,” he tapped his head, “is fifty-eight, and has kids your age.”

Ravi blinked. “When do I have to decide?”

“By the time the train stops. About six hours.” He moved to return to his seat.

Citra made eye contact with him. “Ravi. Your body’s just a shell now. You can just change it. And normal guys don’t wonder about what it’s like to be something else.”

He could feel himself turning red, partly with embarrassment, partly with anger. Whether it was with himself or with Citra was hard to tell. “I’m not— I like having a cock!”

Citra looked looked like he… she? was about to laugh. One of the others spoke up. “Honey, you can keep that.”

He made a choking noise, and the thing that had been Ravi Bhatavadekar shattered into a million pieces.

It had taken half an hour and some serious ugly-crying, but the thing that had been Ravi had managed to pick up most of the pieces and put herself back together. She was Vaya, now. The name had been the easiest part for her. The harder part was waiting to actually change.

“So, what happens now?”

“Well, depends where you want to go,” Citra replied, “I’m sure they can find you something not too offensive, and you can get yourself a nice custom.”

She shook her head. “I want to stay with everyone else.”

The others shared a glance. “We’re going back into the fight on the other side. Devil’s Hand, Traitor’s Legion, whatever they call it.”

Vaya set her jaw. “Then I’ll do it too.”

Kiran spoke for the first time. “This isn’t the draft all over again. Don’t feel like you have to fight.”

She felt the spite well up inside of her, an endless pool that she hadn’t realized was there. “You know what I did before the draft?”

Kiran shook their head.

“I worked at a mall. I lived out of my car, because I couldn’t afford even a slum. You know how much help I got from my country?”

Kiran scoffed. “Jack shit?”

“Yeah. They scooped me up for being homeless and stuck me in a suit worth more than I make in a year. And then they stuck a blocking unit behind us, because why waste good volunteers on a meatgrinder when you can hold conscripts at gunpoint and make them do it instead,” she spat. She didn’t realize she could put so much hate in her voice. “So yeah. Fuck it. I’ll fight.”

Citra raised an eyebrow at the sudden outpouring of emotion. “Then hurry up and wait with the rest of us.”

“Take a good look folks, that’s your new home,” Sven called out. Vaya looked out the window as the train slowed. It was a military base, the same the world over. Sparse buildings, wide roads built for armored vehicles, nothing she hadn’t seen before. There was a big sign on the station in a half-dozen different languages:

WELCOME TO FORT BLOODLAND

“Bloodland?” Citra asked.

“The water features change to blood during full moons. Fairly mundane by continental standards, you’ll get used to it, whole continent’s haunted. You eight follow me, unless you want to end up with the rest of your old coworkers.”

The train slowed to a stop. The station was clearly designed for disembarking prisoners; it was enclosed with chain-link fence. The group followed their “guard” to the back of the train, getting off outside the main POW concourse. Waiting for them was a woman wearing a heavily customized SIB— skin as dark as night, bright blue eyes, and a perfectly shaved head. As far as SIBs went, it was certainly distinctive.

Sven greeted her. They conversed in Norse, leaving their words unintelligible to Vaya, but their body language was clear: the two had known each other for a very long time. Vaya looked to the rest of the group, hoping someone spoke Norse. All she got were shrugs.

The two finished talking, and turned their attention to the eight identitical “men” in front of them. Sven spoke first, in Basho.

“This is Sergeant First Class Kamau. If you want to fight, she’ll get you fighting. You’re hers now. Good luck.” With that, he hopped back on the train, leaving the eight of them alone with her.

She spoke. “You’re all conscripts, yes?” Nods all around. “Anyone not changing their gender or species?” No nods this time. “Can’t say I’m surprised. Okay. Follow me.” She took off, running. Vaya looked around for a moment, trying to figure out what to do, before they jogged, then ran, after her.

The sergeant was fast. Vaya’s body wasn’t in bad shape— it was at least as athletic as the one she’d lost —but she was struggling to keep up. The blessings of the bioengineers, she figured. Exactly how much physical augmentation SIBs had was a matter of some debate, but it was enough to let the sergeant run circles around them without even getting out of breath. She supposed she’d get a real answer on it soon enough anyway.

They ran for what felt like three kilometers. Well, the sergeant ran. The rest of them sprinted. By the end of it, they were gasping for breath. They had stopped by some building, with a sign on it in Norse that she couldn't read.

“Welcome to training,” she yelled over the panting, “you lot are lucky! You’ve got at least a few weeks of Essie basic, and that's enough to let you skip the boring shit. I'm not going to treat you as trainees, you've already been in combat enough to end up here. Losing combat, I would add. Who wants to win it?” She received a few out-of-breath “yes ma’am’s” from the group.

She scowled. “This isn't your old country, and this isn't your old culture. We don't do that. If you are referring to me, use my name, ‘boss’, or ‘sergeant’. Same goes for officers. Boss, name, or rank. Some people prefer last names, some don’t care; I like first names. But none of this ‘ma’am’ or ‘sir’ shit. Honorifics are for losers, and we aren’t losing. Got it?”

Vaya tried to process that. An Indian NCO would never accept anything besides their rank and last name. She'd seen men get lashes for anything less.

“So,” she continued, holding open the door, “let's get you into some real bodies.”

Sergeant Kamau— Nadira, apparently, but her first name hadn’t stuck in Vaya’s head yet —had explained the system. Pick your base, tweak it until you’re happy, hit submit. Vaya had resisted the urge to laugh at the absurdity of it once she’d been sat down in front of the computer. It was literally a character creator, right out of a video game. The options were a bit different, but it was still a character creator all the same. The lack of any serious body shape options, she’d explained, was because it meant that they only had to manufacture one size for everything. Every SIB was exactly one-point-eight meters tall, and they all wore a size 10 boot. The feminine ones even all had the same bra size. Mass manufacturing, even for the human form.

There wasn’t a slider for body shape, just six preset bodies to pick from, masculine, feminine, and androgynous, each with a pair of genital options. And a slider for some… attributes. Does anyone not just move all of these all the way to the right, she wondered to herself, maxing out the “penis size” slider. Well… maybe not all the way, Vaya concluded, moving it back down a tiny bit. It looked a little inconvenient at that size.

The rest was less exciting. There were some face and skin color options, but she selected the “automatic” checkbox instead. It promised to make her look something like her, even without access to her original body and across genders. Which was useful, because the face she was wearing right now wasn’t even her old one. Vaya spent a few seconds wondering what had happened to her old body, if it was still on record somewhere or something, before moving onto hair. That was easy; she’d had nice jet-black hair before, and it wasn’t too hard to imagine a more feminine hairstyle. She marveled at being able to simply toggle body hair where she wanted it. No need for shaving.

The eyes were the last and most difficult pick. Draconic eyes apparently didn’t come in brown like her human ones, even if they did come in literally every other color. She settled on a prismatic combination of blues, oranges, and purples, and hit submit. The screen displayed a loading bar for a few seconds, then directed her to “enter the chamber”, and gave her a number. 002. Like she was at a deli, picking up a sandwich.

“Um.” She looked around for the sergeant. “Sergeant? What’s the chamber?”

“Right through there.” She motioned towards wide metal double doors. They had a red spinning beacon over them, lit up. “Wait until the buzzer sounds and the panel shows your number, then go in and follow directions.”

Another of the group fell in behind her. “Um… Citra?”

“Nope, I’m Lia. I think Citra was first in. Which one are you?”

“Vaya. Guess we won’t have to share a face for much longer.”

The beacon light turned off, and a buzzer sounded. The display flicked to 002. Vaya took a deep breath and pushed through the doors. Inside was… not what she had expected. She didn’t really know what to expect, frankly, but this wasn’t it. The floor was a fine array of golden cylinders, each maybe a millimeter across, making a nearly solid floor out of them. On the ceiling was a massive apparatus of electronic components, arranged in a series of rings. The walls were covered in jutting copper wedges, like a recording booth made of metal.

A screen on the far wall provided instructions, along with an androgynous voice. “Fully remove your clothing and place it in the receptacle.” A blinking light indicated a laundry chute next to the entrance. She noticed that the doors had shut behind her, with the inward-facing side also covered in wedges.

“Are you a person? Or a recording?” Vaya asked, trepedaciously.

“I’m a person, dear. I’m in a booth with a microphone and a bunch of buttons. Now take your clothes off.” She did her best to look embarrassed as she disrobed, but she didn’t really feel it. The body she was in just wasn’t her; it felt more like a suit of armor. Once she had put her clothes down the chute and stood fully nude, the voice spoke again.

“Stand on the footprints with your arms at your side, and remain still.” A pair of foot-shaped depressions in the center of the floor formed. Vaya realized what she was looking at: a reusable physical thaumaturgical diagram. No lasers burning sacred geometry onto wood or paper, just millions of tiny pistons. It must have cost hundreds of millions of rupees— at least millions of pounds; she wasn’t quite sure of the conversion. She took a cautious step onto the platform, as if it might not hold her weight, but it tolerated her without issue. Belatedly, she realized that it was probably built to hold dragons too.

With her feet nestled into the indents, the voice continued. “A device is going to surround your head and take some readings. Try not to move.”

The massive apparatus on the ceiling descended over her, surrounding Vaya’s head with an array of… somethings. Some sort of thaumic sensor, presumably. She could almost feel the air fogging up inside; something was chilling the sensors as they worked.

“Scan looks good. Please grasp the handholds to your left and right and remain still.” Most of the machine withdrew, leaving behind a pair of brassy cylinders on poles on either side of her. They were worn where others had grabbed them, like a statue polished by thousands of passersby. She grabbed them, and watched the floor move, millimeter-diameter pistons moving up or down to draw the imprint of a diagram on the floor. A projector flickered to life somewhere, drawing diagrams with light on her skin.

“Remain still. There will be a brief flash of light and a stinging sensation. Shift as soon as you are able.” Great. Shifting, that was something she definitely knew how to do.

Vaya didn’t have time to worry about it before the room glowed with power. She wasn’t sure where it was coming from, and didn’t have time to think about it before there was a distinct and sharp smell of ozone, and then her body was glowing with power too. There was a flash, and a feeling like she’d had a rubber band snapped against every square centimeter of her skin. Something in her mind changed. Or soul? She wasn’t sure. Something was suddenly there that wasn’t there before. She poked at it, and there was a brief falling sensation.

There was the clunk of a door unlatching on the far side of the room, and the voice spoke again. “Please exit the chamber through the door.”

“Wait, did it— oh.” Vaya looked down at herself. At herself.

“It always works, sweetie. Now get out, there’s a line.”

Oh. Right. Lia was up next. Vaya hurried into the next room, which was a simple, if oversized, changing room.

“Hey girl,” Citra greeted her, “want a mirror?” Well, she assumed the woman was Citra.

She nodded. Citra motioned to the single mirror in the room, and she looked herself over. She looked good. Slim, athletic, toned… She even had abs now, something she’d never managed even when she’d been in the middle of a high-school gym rat phase. She wasn’t blindingly feminine, but—

“Holy fuck, is that thing the default size?”

And she had a fat cock, too. Which was rapidly becoming very hard. She tried to cover herself with her hand, which only served to deliver some more sensation to it. Vaya tried to yell at Citra, but only got out a “hhghhr” noise.

“Oh, come on, don’t be shy, I had a dick up until a few minutes ago.”

“But—”

“Sorry. Guess I should have asked if you even liked women first.”

Vaya produced a noise that wasn’t exactly a word, but one that she hoped sounded like a yes.

Citra just grinned and passed her a set of fatigues and boots. “I think they want us dressed instead of just fucking in the changing room. Which one are you?”

She took the offered clothes, not ignorant to the fact that Citra got another good look at her when she did so. “Vaya. Citra, right?”

“Yeah. This is going to be fun.”

Sergeant Kamau had given them a few minutes to get the hang of swapping between their new bodies. All six of them— three copies of the same SIB, two Bladewyrms, and a Sprinter. Vaya had almost jumped out of her skin when Kiran morphed into a Bladewyrm right next to her, the drilled-in fear reaction still persisting from basic. That had lasted until she’d put her own on. And half of them had been sent back in to get more fatigues, because they hadn’t realized that they needed clothes for each of their bodies.

After that, they ran again. This time it was a lot easier to keep up, her new body was good. Not superhuman, but definitely in better shape than she’d been. They were taken what felt like several kilometers to a concrete barracks building. When the nine of them stopped, they were only barely out of breath.

“Welcome to the 499th. You're in the training company, which is just the eight of you for the next two hours until everyone else gets back from the range. You’ve got your own bay, which you will keep clean and tidy for the next four weeks. You will also treat your new comrades with respect, because they are like you. Is that understood? If there’s mysterious bruises on anyone, someone’s going to explain it to me in the ring.”

That got a number of vocal agreements. Hazing during their own basic had been… rough, to put it lightly.

“Good. You’re on the third floor. Get yourself settled in.” With that, she shifted, spread her wings, and took off, leaving them in a cloud of dust and grass.

They took the stairwell up. Kiran gave flying up a shot, but the rest of them weren’t quite sure that they wouldn’t smack into the wall like an oversized pigeon. The bay itself was emphatically not what they’d expected. Instead of the tight, wall-to-wall bunks they’d all experienced, it was just single beds and wall lockers.

Vaya picked out a bed away from the stairwell, and towards the balcony. Balcony might have been the wrong word for it; it was more of a landing pad, a big concrete slab that jutted out into the air, obviously designed for dragons. The bed itself wasn’t anything to write home about, but she wasn’t going to complain.

Aaliya suddenly entered her view, breaking Vaya out of her thoughts. Aaliya was distinct, now, with pure-white hair and verdant green eyes. The hair was interesting, really. They all had the same length hair, presumably meant to be cut to whatever—

Aaliya interrupted her thoughts yet again by sitting down next to her. “Hey. Earth to Vaya.”

“Sorry. It’s just… a lot.”

“Yeah. Listen, um. When we were back in the changing room—”

“Heh. Changing room. Get it? We changed.”

“Hey! Look. Sorry, just… Do you want to feel yourself up as badly as I do right now?”

She blushed. “Gods. Yeah, it’s bad.”

“Wanna do it together?”

Vaya’s brain crashed to desktop.

Aaliya looked nervous. “Just, cause, you know, I saw the way everyone was looking at each other— and you’re—”

Vaya’s brain recovered, with a new directive in it. Kiss woman. That was easy enough, there was a woman right there. She leaned in and smushed her lips against Aaliya’s. It was clumsy, and she didn’t care. Aaliya took a second to recover, then pushed her back onto the bed.

They were on each other like starving animals. It wasn’t just good, it was right. She had no clue what she was doing, and neither did Aaliya, and it didn’t matter. Physical contact was like a lightning bolt right to her brain. Vaya wasn’t sure how long it took her to come up for air.

By the time she did, Citra and Lia were two beds down trying to see how much of their tongues they could fit in each others’ mouths. Sona and Aisha were nowhere to be seen, and Kiran and Arya were out on the balcony doing something in dragon form. She caught a glimpse of intertwined tails before returning her attention to Aaliya.

“Wait, let me—” She pulled back. Had she done something wrong? Oh. Aaliya was taking her top off. That’s a good idea, she thought, scrambling to do the same, more skin to touch.

They noticed the tents in each others’ pants at the same time. Vaya said something first.

“Uh. Nice dick.”

Aaliya giggled. “Yeah? Wanna compare?”

“I have a better idea.” Vaya rolled on top of her, pressing their hips together with a sudden burst of confidence. “I've heard,” she said, gently rubbing their cocks against each other through the fabric, “that this feels pretty good.”

Aaliya made a little gasp noise, pressing her own hips forward. “Fuck, wait. Pants.”

“Fuck. Yeah.” They both scrabbled at each others’ belt, trying to get them off between kisses and grinding their bodies together. They were so soft, their skin newly sensitive, and—

“Holy shit, did you leak like that before?”

Vaya spared a glance down. “Did you? Gods,” she moaned quietly. By the time they got each other’s dicks out of their underwear, they were both beading droplets of precum.

“Mine’s bigger,” Aaliya teased between gasps. Vaya shut her up by locking lips and pressing their lengths together, grinding her hips forward.

“Somehow that’s less impressive when we had sliders,” she replied after she came up for air.

Aaliya grabbed her ass and pulled her in closer. “Shut up and get back to frotting,” she said, wrapping her hand around both of their shafts. They rubbed and pressed against each other, desperately kissing, sensitive skin feeling each others’ touch for the first time.

“I’m close— nng,” Aaliya didn’t manage to get much more than a warning out before she came, putting the thickest load Vaya had ever seen across her own abs. She wasn’t going to last long either at this rate, and she was determined to finish before Aaliya got too sensitive. A few more strokes and—

—and Aaliya rolled her over and kept grinding like she hadn’t even came, stroking both of them as she pressed their lips together—

—and then Vaya came. The pleasure was white-hot, like someone had set all the nerves in her cock alight, each spurt ripping out of her and spilling on her abs and chest. It felt like it lasted minutes, longer than anything she’d felt in her life, and Vaya could do almost nothing besides continuing to rock her hips and lose herself in the pleasure.

When her tunnel vision finally cleared, she wasn’t even out of breath. Aaliya looked confused. “Um. I think I could go again, actually.”

Vaya realized that she wasn’t softening at all. She gave herself an experimental stroke. “Huh. Same? Are you even… tired?”

“No,” she giggled, “Holy fuck.”

Vaya pressed a finger to her neck, ignoring the fluids on it. Her pulse was barely elevated. “What the fuck,” she said, “wanna go again?”

Their kiss was interrupted by the fully-nude duo of Citra and Lia. “Um,” Lia started, “we were wondering if you two might want to, um,” she trailed off.

Citra was more direct. “What she means is, mind if we join? Scissoring is fun and all, but I’d like to sample my options.”

Vaya glanced at Aaliya, who grinned. “Yeah,” she said, “I think we can work something out.”

“So, sergeant, how are the new kids?” the captain asked over the pops of gunfire.

“They could barely stop eyefucking each other the second they got into their SIBs. I think they’ll fit in just fine.”