So, here is the first chapter preview of my new Sci-Fi Mature Harem novel Like A Fine Wine.
Right now, I’m about halfway done with it and ideally I will be able to publish it before the week is out, though I’ve been feeling kind of shitty recently (don’t worry, almost certainly not Covid, these are issues I’ve been having off and on for awhile now and they’re just flaring up for some reason), so it’s kind of a crap shoot whether or not I’ll manage to finish it this week.
If you are a 1$/month Patron over on my Patreon, you can also read Chapter 02 right here!
Jack Lennox set down the sleek black kit bag that contained his entire life and looked out the window at the stars that had once guided him.
Up until a few weeks ago, he had seen something in that universal field of stars.
Now he saw nothing. He felt as adrift as an escape pod jettisoned from a dying starship somewhere in deep space, with no distress beacon and dwindling resources.
With a heavy sigh, Jack sat down on the smooth, plush couch in the private receiving bay he had been instructed to go to by his mysterious employers. He asked himself what, exactly, he thought he was doing. It had been two days since he’d accepted this job and he still didn’t have something even resembling an answer.
After fifteen years of certainty, I don’t know was a terrifying thing to live.
As he settled into the comfortable material, he tried not to fidget. It was unbecoming of a Galactic Marine to fidget. Of course, he wasn’t a Marine anymore, was he? He turned away from the window. The ship he was waiting for wasn’t here yet. Booting up his Link, the little microcomputer nearly every human had embedded in their brain that granted them access to the galactic internet, he saw that he still had about fifteen minutes before they were schedule to arrive. Well, he was used to the whole ‘hurry up and wait’ thing.
Although he’d made himself hurry up, it wasn’t like they’d been yelling at him through the messages to be precisely on time.
Then again, based on the research he’d done for this strange job, (he hadn’t jumped in totally blind, much as it felt like), the woman running the show would no doubt expect a strict adherence to the timetable.
Being an administrator for over a dozen massive corporations over something like forty years would probably do that to you.
Jack sighed softly and sat back in the chair, rubbing his eyes. What was he doing? This might be the craziest thing he’d ever done.
Signing on with a glorified fixer-upper crew.
He’d at least read up on the job, because it sounded a little weird, but had learned that this was a real thing. There were a lot of instances of people flying out into deep space, looking to snatch up some land or get the jump on some kind of natural resource, so they’d drop an outpost or refinery or starport on some distant world, and then figure out that they’d screwed up. A ton of different things could go wrong on freshly discovered worlds, which meant that there were a lot of abandoned ships, buildings, and space stations out there.
Some people made their lives as salvagers, harvesting places like this in the no man’s land of deep space, but sometimes other corporations bought up the property and sent out ragtag teams to patch them up before sending their own crews out there. It was just one of the thousands of ways you could earn credits way out there in the barely charted regions of the galaxy. But even after getting past that initial skepticism, the more he looked into this job he’d found and applied for, the stranger it seemed to become.
The project was small, and it was being put together by a woman named Maureen Sharp.
When he’d done a little digging through public records, he became more and more curious as to why a woman like her was putting together a scrapping mission with such a small scope. She was sixty five years old, (and still pretty damned hot, in an ice queen sort of way, going off the pics he’d found), and ever since becoming an executive of a mining corporation she’d started working at as an entry level data manager at twenty seven, she’d seemingly dominated business. She had gone on to become an executive or top-level administrator of some kind for, among other things, an intergalactic shipping company, a top-tier hospital that serviced a colony of a hundred thousand, a mega ad campaign designing company, and a publishing company.
Most recently she had stepped down from being the CEO of a vacation organization company that she herself had started some ten years ago.
So why was she doing this?
There had to be something he was missing, but he didn’t know what, because although she’d been good about getting back to him once she’d accepted his application, she’d been oddly evasive about the nature of the job itself. Well, some of it. She told him where they were going, a few of the contracts they’d picked up, the kind of work they’d be doing once they got there. But she hadn’t said much when he’d asked why they didn’t have a larger crew. According to Maureen, there were just six in total so far, herself included.
And he couldn’t find any intel on any of the other crew, he didn’t even know their names.
Despite the fact that he was sometimes a slightly paranoid person, he couldn’t ignore the fact that his instincts were telling him to do this. That was as close as he had to any kind of reason why he was doing this.
That and the fact that he felt completely adrift and directionless in his life now.
So here he was: formerly Sergeant Jack Lennox of the Galactic Marine Corps was now signing up to be an ‘as-needed assistant’ to a surprisingly lowkey salvage op run by a (retired?) businesswoman who, if she’d gone into the military, could probably be a four star General by now. He was positive he was missing something, but he was also willing to admit it might just be as it seemed: Maureen had dominated boardrooms for decades, maybe now she just wanted something totally different. And this was pretty damned different.
Though even still, it really wasn’t like boardroom execs to head out into the field and rough it on distant, dangerous planets.
Jack looked up again as he caught movement through the window beside the airlock he sat in front of. There it was, the ship. It was a sleek, new ship, shiny white metal edged with chrome, the windows tinted black from the exterior. It was edging its way sideways, towards the airlock. It was small. While he was used to mega cruisers that could easily house a thousand personnel, he figured this one would likely max out at a dozen. Jack grabbed his kit bag and stood. When he’d gotten accepted to the job, they’d told him to hop up to the nearest space station and they’d pick him up there before whipping him off to the outer reaches of the galaxy.
As he watched the ship settle in and listened to the clanking sounds of the airlocks connecting, he realized that this was likely his last opportunity to turn away from this course. The job was kind of open-ended, but Maureen had said it would take at least a month, probably longer. But as he waited, it occurred to him that he wasn’t going to turn away from this. He’d known it in some deep, basic way that he needed to do this, even if he didn’t understand why, since the beginning. Since before he’d signed on and packed his life up.
The airlock door was opening now.
He half-expected to see Maureen herself inside the airlock. Instead, he found himself staring at a very attractive, mature woman with pale blonde hair, bright green eyes, and smooth, tan skin. She had an easy, though slightly amused, smile as she laid eyes on him. She was wearing a white tanktop and white jogging shorts. She filled them out quite nicely, with decently padded thighs and sexy hips, as well as some big breasts pressing against her shirt.
“Hello, you must be Jack,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
“Come aboard,” she said, making room for him in the airlock. “But I’m going to tell you right now: don’t call any of us ma’am. We’re on a first-name basis on this ship, and that applies to you. Plus, we’re all heading into middle age and you know how people can be about that. My name is Sylvia. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, too, Sylvia,” he replied as he stepped into the airlock.
“I’ll be giving you the tour and introducing you to the crew. You’re the last one we needed to snag before heading out to the great black yonder.”
As he stepped in, she initiated the airlock and it closed and started doing its thing. He found himself looking at her face. God, but she was a beautiful woman.
“What, uh, role do you have in this expedition?” he asked.
“I’m the doctor,” she replied. “I keep you all healthy. And I can assure you that I will be giving you a very thorough...examination, sometime soon.”
“That makes sense,” he murmured, wondering if he should read into the oddly suggestive way she’d said that.
Good fucking God did he love older women.
And this was one fine example of a sexy, mature lady.
The airlock finished and they stepped out onto the ship. A short alcove led into a large corridor that cut across it, running nearly the length of the whole ship. There was a door directly across from them, and another close to the left.
“We’ll start the tour here,” Sylvia said, leading him onto the bridge to the left.
Jack knew that even smaller ships like this typically needed a three-person crew to run a bridge. That was, unless, you had the credits to pay for a streamlined, easy-access bridge that was closer to a cockpit, and one talented pilot to run it all. Usually with the help of an intelligence program. He got a look at the talented pilot.
And, as she turned around in her seat and stretched, opening her legs, he got a look up the short skirt she was wearing and he saw her bare pussy.
He immediately looked back up at her face.
She was a dysil. Like most in her race, this pilot had smooth orange skin and small black horns growing from her forehead. He could even see a spade-tipped tail drifting behind her. She had fiery red hair and fiery red eyes to match. Given their appearance, many people tended to tag dysil with the slang term devil, and although some regarded this as derogatory, which was why he’d never used it, he had noticed a lot of them seemed to kind of lean into it. So far, all the dysil women he’d met had all been very...erotically motivated.
And judging from the way she was staring at him, the fact that she was wearing a tanktop that was struggling to contain some immense breasts, and she hadn’t closed her legs yet, he thought that this woman was similarly minded.
“This is our pilot, Riley,” Sylvia said. She rolled her eyes. “Close your legs, you slut.”
“Oops,” Riley said, glancing down. She closed her legs but leaned forward. Her huge orange breasts nearly tumbled out of her shirt. “How embarrassing.”
“Mmm-hmm. You have no subtlety,” she muttered. “Come along, Jack.”
“Very nice to meet you,” Riley said, grinning slyly.
“Uh, you too,” he replied, following Sylvia.
“You’ll have to excuse her,” she said as she took him back towards the airlock intersection. “She’s a rather...free spirit. And she has a thing for cute young human men.” She glanced at him. “Though that’s not unique,” she murmured. “Here,” she led him into a door directly across from the airlock, “is our observation lounge.”
The room was a simple one, just two comfortable couches with a small table between them facing the far wall, which was nothing but window looking out onto the void. Right now it showed stars, just that infinite field of stars. One of the couches was occupied by a woman, a woman he was familiar with.
Maureen Sharp. Businesswoman extraordinaire.
Sitting on the couch, staring at one of three tablets around her, wearing black business casual, her dark hair in a conservative bun, she looked exactly as she had in the most recent photos he’d seen of her. And his initial impression was right: she was hot. Goddamn. She stood up as they came in, setting the tablet aside. She was almost as tall as he was, and she was a sturdy, stout woman, with some pleasant curves. Her hips and thighs filled out her pants and her breasts looked pretty big. She still seemed to be in pretty good shape.
“Mister Lennox,” she said, stepping up to him and offering her hand. “I’m Maureen Sharp.”
“Good to meet you, ma-, um, Maureen,” he said, feeling uncomfortable with the first name basis. And not just because he’d been in the military.
She seemed like a woman you called ma’am.
A small, slightly amused smile touched her lips. “Maureen is indeed fine, as I’m sure Sylvia has told you. Despite the fact that I expect everyone here to do an excellent job, we are rather casual and informal. I’ve had enough formality to last me a lifetime. I’m glad you agreed to join us on our little expedition. If my instincts are right about you, you’re going to be...very useful.”
“Well, I like to think I’m pretty useful, though I imagine you were able to put together a team of experts for this, and I’m no expert,” he replied.
“Ah, so you studied me, too.”
“Only seemed fair.”
“Indeed. I’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t. And although yes, everyone else aboard this ship has had decades of experience in their field, well, let’s just say that there’s something I believe you will bring to the table that all of us can make good use of,” Maureen replied.
“What’s that, exactly?” he asked. “I mean, I’m not trying to talk myself out of a job or anything. Don’t get me wrong, I can work my ass off if I need to and I’m a decent learner, but...I guess I’m not sure how I fit into all this?”
“Don’t worry, Jack. How you...fit, will be revealed soon enough, I’m sure. And I’m sure you’re up to the task. It’s nothing you haven’t handled before,” she replied.
“I...” He wanted to ask more questions, but he had the impression that Maureen was the kind of woman who would answer you in exactly the manner she intended, and she’d given him all he was going to get. “Okay,” he replied.
She smiled. “Good. Now, if you will excuse me, I’m afraid I must continue checking over these contracts.”
“Not a problem. Good to meet you,” he replied.
“And you.”
She sat her wonderfully big ass back down on the sofa, grabbed one of the tablets, and began studying it again.
He followed Sylvia back out into the corridor. “That’s our boss, and my best friend,” she said. “We’ve known each other for quite awhile. Okay, here’s the next section, the kitchen and dining section,” she said, stopping by the next intersection and turning to the left. He followed her inside and marveled at the room. The kitchen was fully stocked with all sorts of high-tech food-making gear, including a walk-in fridge and freezer combo, packed with no doubt months of food. The dining area had eight chairs around a large, round table. Currently there was a woman sitting there, a very intimidating and attractive woman.
That seemed to be par for the course onboard this ship.
The woman was very tall, probably six four or six five, and built. She had a big frame, developed by a lot of working out. She reminded him of a Marine. She had very pale skin, alert green eyes, and chin-length red hair pulled into a ponytail.
“This is Elizabeth. You two should get along well, she was a Marine, too. She’s here for security purposes,” Sylvia said.
Elizabeth looked at him with something like discomfort or apprehension. “Hello,” she murmured, then cleared her throat.
“Hello,” he replied. “You were a Marine?”
“Yeah, twenty-five years,” she replied. “Got out two years ago.”
“She was a Staff Sergeant,” Sylvia murmured.
“Nice,” Jack said.
“Mmm.” She still looked uncomfortable.
“Well, let’s continue, Elizabeth is no doubt busy brooding, as usual,” Sylvia said.
Elizabeth sighed. “Piss off, Sylvia.”
“Glad to see your wit’s intact.”
Elizabeth just sighed again and turned back away from them. They left the kitchen. Did she have a reason not to like him? Maybe because he was twenty four and out of the Marines now? He knew career Marines who had disdain for anyone who left before a decade, some two.
“Don’t mind her,” Sylvia said as she took him across the hall to the opposite door. “She’ll warm up to you, she just never developed very good people skills. Here is our rec room.”
This room was like the lounge, but bigger and with more stuff. He spied a huge table with a lot of chairs around it next to a shelf packed with all manner of games. In the center was a giant U-shaped couch, aimed at a large TV that was hung directly over the door. To the right were some arcade cabinets and a few comfortable looking chairs.
“Wow, this is really nice,” he murmured.
“Yes. Maureen wanted to make sure we’d be comfortable for the duration. Come along.”
As they headed back out into the corridor, a woman appeared in the doorway, another redhead, though much smaller in stature. She was equally pale, her red hair down, framing an extremely attractive face, and she regarded him with bright blue eyes.
“Ah, good. This is Anya, she is our geologist,” Sylvia said.
“The young man I’ve heard so much about,” she murmured, offering her hand. He shook it. Her skin was so soft and smooth. She wore a robe that was a little open at the chest, showing off some nice breasts. She had an air of easy confidence about her, the effect heightened by the lilt of her Russian accent. “So good to finally meet you.”
“How much have you heard, exactly?” he replied uncertainly.
She smirked. “Maureen looked through hundreds of men for this position, so, naturally, when I heard she had finally picked one, I was curious. I guess not so much heard about you as looked into your history...”
“Wait, hundreds of people were considered?” he asked, glancing at Sylvia.
She looked annoyed, glaring at Anya. “Let’s just say that Maureen is very...exacting.”
Anya glanced between the two of them. “Oh you haven’t told-” She paused, then regained her smirk. “Oh well, you will know soon enough. I’m sure I’ll be seeing much more of you later, Jack. Have fun,” she said, and slipped off into the kitchen.
“Let us continue,” Sylvia said. The questions were beginning to mount. They all seemed to know something he didn’t, and his suspicion that he was missing something only grew stronger. What was the real reason he’d been picked out of apparently hundreds of candidates? Or wait, she’d said men, specifically, and so far, he’d met only women on this ship. There was one crew member left, and he’d be willing to bet they were a she.
So why did they specifically want a man?
“These are the bedrooms,” Sylvia said as they passed rows of doors. There were four to either side. “This one is yours.” She brought him to the last one on the right and opened the door. He supposed the questions would have to wait.
Jack stepped inside and looked around. It was bigger than he’d expected. Honestly, after traveling between worlds, packed into barracks like a sardine, he was happy even just to have a fucking cot in a room by himself. He tossed his bag onto the bed, which was a damned queen size and looked really comfortable to boot, and studied what he had. The bed had drawers built into the frame, to save the need for a dresser. There was a desk and a chair over by one of the windows, a small table with two chairs around it for eating, and a big TV mounted on the wall. As far as he was concerned, this was definitely traveling in style.
“Come on,” Sylvia said, stepping back out, “we’ve got one more person for you to meet and the rest of the ship to see.”
He followed after her.
“This is my domain,” she said as they came to another intersection bisecting the main corridor. Stepping through, he found himself looking at a shiny, clean, white-tiled room packed with gleaming silver technology. An infirmary. He saw a pair of examination beds, several shelves and cabinets packed with top-tier medical equipment and technology, all of it brand new and perfectly clean. There was a glass door at the back of the room. Through it, he could see a glass table inside of a sterilized clean room.
“Is that a surgical bay?” he asked.
“It is,” Sylvia replied. “With the help of the onboard intelligence program, and probably Elizabeth or Riley, I can perform a lot of different kinds of emergency surgery.”
“Good to know,” he murmured.
“Yep. Come along.”
She showed him to a room dedicated to utilities routing. Basically, the room that controlled things like heating and cooling, atmospheric processing, waste management, power distribution. The things that made the ship functional and livable. After that were a few storage bays packed with crates, and finally, at the rear of the ship, easily the largest room by a long shot, was a hangar bay that also granted access to the engines.
Taking up most of the hangar was a land rover clearly meant to handle dangerous or difficult terrain, a shuttle meant to hop between a ship in orbit over a planet and the planet’s surface, and a pair of huge metal containers.
The last member of the team was inside the shuttle, wrist-deep inside of an exposed section of the ship, tools and gear around her. She was, he saw, also an alien. A xenian. They were obsessed with technology, so much so that they installed visible nodes of tech in their bodies from quite a young age. The woman he saw before him was a good example of what the average xenian looked like: petite, with milky white skin, and glowing white eyes. Her brown hair was short and functional. She wore a simple black generic technician’s jumpsuit with a lot of pockets. Everything about her spoke of clipped, cold efficiency.
“Lyra,” Sylvia said. Lyra didn’t replied, didn’t even notice them, staring unblinkingly into the open panel of the ship, near the top of the ramp that admitted passengers access. “Lyra!” Now she blinked, then looked over at them.
“Sylvia,” she said. “I see our man is here. I’d shake your hand but I’m busy. I’m performing maintenance on the stabilizers. This should have been done before we left port.” She turned her attention back to the open panel.
“Ever diligent,” Sylvia murmured. “Lyra is the most...focused of us all. And we’re all very driven, focused women, so that’s saying something. If she ignores you, like she’s doing right now, don’t take it personally.”
“I’m not ignoring you,” she said, still staring into the panel. “I told you: I’m busy. This is important work.”
“Yes, well, I’ll let you get back to your ‘important work’,” Sylvia replied.
“Wait.” She looked at them again, focusing on Jack. “Turn around in a complete circle, slowly.” She paused. “Please?”
“Uh...okay,” he replied, and did as she asked. Why did she want this exactly? Everyone onboard was, in one form or another, fucking weird. But it was surprisingly not very off-putting, except maybe Elizabeth, but that was only because she was a damned ex-Staff Sergeant and he already felt guilty as it was for opting out of the Marines after only four years. In a way, it was refreshing. All of these women were so...blunt. But in a good way. There seemed to be very little pretense, and he appreciated that. None of them seemed to be faking anything.
In the Marines, fucking everyone was tough.
Some were actually tough, but too many, he’d found, were just punks with over-inflated egos compensating for insecurities, lording their perceived superiority over anyone they could find to talk down to.
Or maybe he’d just been unlucky, and kept running into assholes.
He finished turning in a circle. “Hmm,” Lyra said after a few seconds. “Good.” She turned back to her work.
Sylvia laughed softly. “Good, huh?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Well, let’s leave you to it,” she said, and began leaving the hangar. He followed after her and began heading back down the corridor.
“So, uh, what was that about?” he asked.
“Couldn’t say,” Sylvia replied, though something about her tone made him think she was lying, she knew exactly what that was about, and was very amused about it, “Lyra’s just a weird girl sometimes, is all.”
“Uh-huh,” he murmured.
They got back to his bedroom and stepped inside. “So, any questions?”
“Yes, a few,” he replied. He decided he was going to try and at least get some kind of answer. “The first, biggest one is: what am I doing here? Like I said earlier, I’m not trying to talk myself out of a job or anything, but it’s looking like not only do you have all your bases covered, but you’ve got them covered by a wide margin with all these experts. I’d be surprised if anyone here wasn’t over twice my age and had spent more years than I’ve literally been alive in their field.”
“No, you’re right on both those accounts,” Sylvia replied. “Youngest one here is Elizabeth and she’s just over twice your age.”
“So then why am I here?”
“Oh, you know...reasons,” Sylvia murmured. He crossed his arms and waited. She sighed. “I promise, you’re here for a very good reason, Jack. I believe that you will find this assignment very likely the most...pleasurable one you’ve ever been on.”
“Can you be a little more specific? Your pilot said I was apparently chosen out of hundreds of people,” he replied.
“You were, and I think you’re perfect for the job we have in mind. Right now though...why don’t you get settled in, get the run of the ship, and just try to relax? I promise, the exact nature of your job will be revealed to you, and within the next twelve hours. Until then, trust me. Okay?” she asked, looking intently at him.
He considered it. So, Maureen wasn’t the only one being evasive, and he was right: there was some hidden reason as to why he, specifically, had been hired. What could it be? It wasn’t like he had some hidden talent or something. Okay, he was good at combat, he could survive pretty well, and he kept his head if a situation went sideways without warning, but that was true of millions of people. What was it they were expecting him to do that was so special?
Finally, he decided to just do as she asked and trust her, because although she was clearly being evasive, he didn’t feel like he was in danger. This had less the paranoid feeling of someone trying to fuck him over, and more the feeling of his friends trying to keep him in the dark while they planned a surprise party or something.
“Okay,” he said.
She looked relieved. “Thank you, and I promise, it will be worth the wait.”
He watched her walk out of the room, his eyes drawn to her ass. She had a really hot ass. Then he looked around his room again, his eyes finally settling on his kit bag and, with a sigh, he got to work on ‘settling in’ to his new life.