Archive of Our Own

The GSV Glory Before Might was only the third GSV Lededje had ever been on in her life, but that mattered very little to her.

Despite their posturing and their personalities, GSVs all seemed largely the same to Lededje. They were backups: little petri dishes of the Culture floating in space in case the worst ever happened and they needed to start over. Lededje wasn't sure how the "worst" could really ever happen to something so blown apart, so spread out, and so infectious as the Culture, but she wasn't Contact and never would be. Let them handle the thinking: Lededje was more invested in living than in the paranoid work of surviving, stockpiling, scheming. And so every General Systems Vehicles looked to her the way they sounded: general, generic. A billion souls inside a big, boring box whose job it was to be - for a given value of the word - good. Well-behaved.

'Welcome on board the Glory Before Might,' a ship drone greeted her as Lededje's module shuttled into one of the GSV's smallbays. 'Happy to have you, Ms. Y'Breq - I hear you're only docking for a quick visit...?'

'That's right, drone,' Lededje said, standing up as the module came to a smooth stop. She was dressed in dark wide-legged and high-waisted trousers made of loose fabric which whispered against her legs. Over a thin black camisole, she had on a sweeping black jacket with red and gold relief embroidery tracing its way across the arms and back. Black and deliberately worn open, it swung heavily against her calves when she moved.

'Where would you like to go from here?' the ship drone asked, putting up the layout of the GSV on the module's far wall. 'There are some very interesting parties happening -'

'No,' Lededje cut it off. 'No need. I want to go here.' She placed a finger on a point on the map, indicating the location of one of the ship's bays.

'Bay 2?' asked the drone, fields now a quizzical green. Lededje's desired destination was not very far from where the module currently was, but it very far afield from the usual habitats for biologicals. 'Are you sure?'

Lededje smiled. 'Yes, drone,' she said, voice canted low and deep. 'I'm sure.'

'Ms. Y'Breq,' the drone was still protesting two minutes later as the module arrived in Bay 2. 'Ms. Y'Breq, this is highly unusual for a first-time visitor...'

'I've lived on a GSV for six years now, ship,' Lededje replied. 'I think I know usual from unusual. Let me off here - this should be fine.'

'Would you like a terminal -'

'No, thank you. I'm only staying for a little while - until your rendezvous with the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly is over at most.' Lededje stood and walked to the door of the module. It opened, but only after a half-second pause that made the action seem almost reluctant.

'Ms. Y-'

'Goodbye, drone,' Lededje said cheerfully. She had no luggage to take with her. Her booted heels clicked smartly on the floor as she strode out into the half-gloom of the bay, and Lededje didn't turn back to see if the drone was watching or not.

Lededje didn't know exactly where she was going, but she kept walking. The ship bay was dark, with only general ambient lighting to give a sense of of the sheer amount of space it took up and the towering highness of its ceilings. It wasn't a space meant for humans to walk around in: everything about it boggled the mind. One's visual senses got confused because the only things which were in the bay weren't actually meant to be seen from the outside. There were no points of reference: no doors, no chairs, no other humans, just small ships, bigger ships, big ships, enormous ships. Was the ceiling three metres, ten metres, a hundred metres, a kilometre up? It was hard to say.

Lededje kept walking, eyes trained on the fuzzy horizon beyond.

Something, a few minutes in, tapped her on the shoulder.

Entirely calmly, Lededje turned around to face the ship av who had found her. 'I'm looking for the war club,' she said, before it could ask. 'I'm guessing it's wherever the GOUs dock, but everything here looks the same to me.'

The ship av, an alien-looking woman with bright cyan eyes and no visible pupils, blinked at her. Lededje just waited. Eventually, the av shrugged. 'Your choice,' she whispered, her voice sibilant.

The av's nonchalance didn't scare Lededje; neither did the matte black exterior of whatever ship or space or blister the war club was being hosted in, nor did the lousy door guard with its tricks. It was all a masquerade, and Lededje was someone well used to makeup for effect.

Inside, the war club was loud and hot and smelt, strangely, of wood. It took Lededje a moment to realise that the dark interior was meant to be the lower deck of a sea-faring ship. Timbers creaked and the smell of salt and rotting meat filled the air. There were people - humans, avs, who knew? - at gunnery positions on either side of the long space, and every minute or so a thundering, ear-aching set of canon blasts rocked the whole place to and fro. Sounds of screams and moans provided an ample sonic backdrop for the whole ridiculous thing.

Lededje inhaled deep. She felt air fill her lungs and then, with all her might so she would be heard over the din, shouted, 'Are you role-playing ancient history because you want to know what it's like to be one of the creaky old boats you insult all the time? What's losing a- a- main mast like? Or a rudder? How many guns would you say you've got? I mean, is it a hundred guns to a single effector field or what? You-'

One of the gunners detached themselves from their post and came over.

'Led, my dear,' Demeisen said to her, brow ridges furrowed in mock despair. 'You're embarrassing.'

'So are you,' Lededje retorted, then stepped in and hugged him.

Demeisen paused for a moment, then his arms came up around her, a gentle cage of steel. 'I could crush you like a bug,' he whispered into her ear, his breath a wash of cool air that was stark relief against the humid, sweaty tang of the rest of the ship.

'Probably,' Lededje agreed, squeezing harder.

'Definitely,' the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints' avatar insisted.

'Utterly,' Lededje nodded, digging her chin into its shoulder. 'You could come so close to killing me before you'd have to stop.' Demeisen didn't deny that: that he would stop. 'Which is a lot more than what every other goody-two-shoes ship would do. Hello, Demeisen. How have you been?'

'Bored,' Demeisen crooned into her ear. 'So fucking bored.'

'I can help with that,' Lededje murmured. 'Scratch my itch and I'll scratch yours?'

'Deal,' he said to her, and for an instant his grip was tight, painfully tight, but then he let go and stepped back to hold her by her shoulders, looking her up and down. He grinned. 'Nice outfit.'

'Most people say it looks even better when I'm not wearing it,' Lededje grinned back. 'It's a good weapon, that way.'

Demeisen tilted his head. 'Oh?'

'Show me yours,' Lededje said, 'and I'll show you mine.'

The ship avatar wound an arm around her waist. 'Hold on tight, Dorothy,' he said. 'We're blowing this joint.'

'What's that?'

'Click your heels.'

'What? Oh, whatever, all right -' Click click.

They displaced.

x GSV Glory Before Might
    o GOU Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints

What the hell were you playing at doing a displacement from inside of me?

x GOU Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints
    o GSV Glory Before Might

The Do Not Disturb is sign up; don't you have any manners?

After six years on board a GSV, the claustrophobic and space-strapped insides of the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints were crushingly close-set, oppressively small, and so very, very welcome. Lededje thumped out of the displacement with her arms still around Demeisen and her back against a wall.

'Nice to see you again,' she said to him, breathless.

'You were on a good track back there, talking about weapons,' Demeisen said.

'Where did this module come from?' Lededje asked, ignoring his typically single-tracked inquiry as she craned her head around to look. 'It's even lousier than the last one.'

'Stole it,' Demeisen shrugged, lifting one hand to tilt her chin so that she was looking at him again. 'The ship's mad, but what else is new? We're the Culture, nobody's supposed to own anything.'

'And you can't steal what isn't owned, can you?' Lededje asked, nodding solemnly.

'They sure have given you an education over the last half-decade, alien girl,' Demeisen rolled his eyes. 'Going to give me a lecture on ethics next?'

'No,' Lededje said, hooking her arms around Demeisen's neck. She kissed both of his cheeks. 'Because you are an Abominator-class psychopath, and you're fine just the way you are.'

'I'm not a psychopath,' Demeisen objected, mirroring the action as he kissed both her cheeks in turn. 'I'm a high functioning psychopath. Anyway, how has life been down with the bios and the borings?'

'Good,' Lededje said, aware that the ship was matching her physical responses: closeness with closeness, touch with touch. She slid both of her legs up so that she was more comfortably locked against Demeisen as he held her pinned against the wall. 'I've gone to school. I've got a Full Name. I've seen a lot of things and been a lot of places and they've all been good.'

Demeisen waited.

Lededje put her head on his chest. 'And all of it is so good that sometimes it drives me crazy. Everyone I meet is happy, and if they aren't happy it's because they want to be unhappy. Some days I wake up and I can't believe where I am, how great everything is - and some days I wake up and I feel like screaming because it's all too perfect. Don't get me wrong,' she said, aware that she'd spoken more to Demeisen - whom she hadn't seen since Sichult - than to all the therapists and acquaintances-who-were-therapists-in-disguise that every Mind had ever sent her way. 'I don't want Sichult or anything about my old life back. But sometimes... Sometimes everything feels too easy.'

Demeisen stayed still. Lededje, who'd met many ships over the intervening years, squeezed the back of his neck. 'This is where you pat my back sympathetically.'

He patted her back. Lededje's smile deepened. 'Plus one to your limited empathetic capacity?'

'I'm going to get rid of it as soon as you're done blubbering and get back to talking about how you've weaponised your clothes,' Demeisen reassured her.

'Good,' Lededje said, her face hurting now from her smile. She drew herself backwards until Demeisen had to hold her all the way up. Her hips locked against his as she crossed her legs behind his back. 'About my clothes - they make me attractive. They're something people look at, and then they have to keep looking afterwards. A lot of people find me very inappropriate, did you know? But if I tell them anything about my history, they want to treat me kindly when all I want to do is fuck my way through my GSV's interstellar trip.'

'I'm very sorry for you,' Demeisen intoned, deadpan.

'Don't be,' Lededje shook her head. 'Did you know S.C. came calling?'

'I think someone sent me a note about it,' Demeisen shrugged. 'Bla bla bla could she would she is she type psychological survey nonsense. I told them, "did you see her in action or are you just fucking blind?" and they didn't ask me again.'

Lededje cups his cheeks. 'I said no.'

'Whoop-ee,' said Demeisen. 'Bit of a pity, but it's your life.'

'And how have you been?'

'Me?' Demeisen asked, fake surprise on his face. 'Little old me? Oh, you know. Hanging around, watching space dust float. Thanks for the transmissions, by the way; I never really read any of them so don't ask me if I forgot to send you any replies. I didn't.'

'As long as you got them,' Lededje said, still smiling. 'Lonely?'

'Abominator-class pickets,' Demeisen said, drawing them up as he straightened his spine, 'do not get lonely.'

'Designed that way, weren't you?' Lededje asks, pushing up against Demeisen until her breasts were flush with his chest. 'I learned about that, how they make - give birth? - to Minds and ships. Okay, so you weren't lonely.'

They locked eyes.

'I was bored,' Demeisen admitted. 'I am bored.'

'No new toys?'

'Oh, plenty,' it said, immediately brightening. 'Three years ago they came up with a new backwards-facing sensor and I spent a few glorious months getting my insides ripped out so that they could fit it in properly.'

Lededje leaned in and kissed him. Demeisen paused, then pressed his mouth back onto hers. Lededje waited.

'You realise that I get totally and absolutely nothing out of you secreting your organic fluids all over me,' the ship av pointed out. 'Don't know if you heard the phrase Meatfucker yet, but that's not what you might think it means and I'm not a Meatfucker anyway.'

Lededje kept waiting.

Demeisen glowered at her. 'I'm happy to oblige if you want, but I expected a bit more from you, if you know what I mean. There are hundreds of other ship avs out there who are happy to bump and grind to the boring human beat, but I'm not one them. I don't know humans. I don't like humans. All you lot do is take up space that I could be using to put ammunition.'

'How about a friend?' Lededje asked. 'As opposed to a human. I'm willing,' she said, 'to sit here and listen to you tell me about the latest and greatest in your cargo holds. Not because I give a single shit about any of it, but because it makes you happy.' She took one of his hands by the wrist and tugged it towards her, placed it on her left breast, slid it under the strap of her camisole. 'Which is to say, I'm happy to be here and talk with you again, and if you can provide me with something that gets me wet and doesn't try to talk to me about my feelings, even better.'

'A billion humans,' Demeisen complained. 'A billion, and you come here?'

Lededje stopped smiling for a moment. Not entirely, but she softened her expression, dropped some of the bravado, and let her voice go quieter as she ran her fingers along Demeisen's throat. 'Yes,' she said. 'A billion people, and I wanted to come back here.'

For a long moment, Demeisen's eyes were unblinking. But then he slid both of his hands down to her waist, and tucked his thumbs under her waistband. It did not say anything for a while.

'If you could pick,' Lededje asked, 'any effector technology to have, what would it be?'

'Are you talking about to carry around as a faster-than-fuck warship, or just -'

'For yourself,' Lededje said, watching Demeisen come to life again. 'Total refit with all options on the table.'

'Fuck, Y'Breq,' Demeisen breathed, undoing the buttons on her trousers. 'You know how to talk to a ship.'

'I told you,' she grinned. 'I got an education. By the way,' she added, 'I'm more than happy if you'd rather not with your av and use something else as a proxy - just make me... comfortable, and I promise I'll be a good audience.'

Demeisen stopped moving his hands, and a moment later the wall behind Lededje morphed. She felt him strip her out of her pants, and then she was sliding down into a seat that felt like a saddle. Handholds appeared so that she could push herself up, and then the saddle started - gently - to vibrate. It was barely a hum, but the seat warmed and Lededje felt her eyes go half-lidded. 'Mmm,' she nodded. 'Nice.'

Demeisen backed up, sitting down in a chair that had appeared behind him. 'So, effector fields. How much have they taught you? How much have you learned? Do you know what an e-grid is yet?'

'Pretend the answer is yes,' Lededje gasped, squeezing her thighs together. 'You can masturbate to the technical details all you want; I'll just...' The vibration sped up and she ground her hips down against it. 'Be here. Listening. Doing the same. You know. Ha!'

Demeisen watched her and smiled. 'Okay,' he said. 'Well, I'd start by getting rid of Elements 12 and 13; the tech's getting a little outdated, but only because of a big-brain breakthrough by a couple of Minds who were working on far-field effectors. God, one of those things...'

'Could really, ah, fuck someone up?' Lededje asked, innocent. She felt herself starting to get properly wet as she angled the seat up against her labia, avoiding her increasingly-sensitive clit to draw it out. She was getting slowly slicker.

'Someone?' Demeisen exclaimed. 'More like an entire orbital. Blow shit up so that sensors would be white-out in every spectrum for light years out. Give every ship in that volume snow-blindness for seconds. Would you like something in you?'

'Please and thank you,' Lededje gasped, and a moment later there was something ovoid and smooth pushing up into her cunt. It stayed there a while, just breaching her, then started moving, pistoning in and out with a slow, sinuous motion. 'God, that's good.'

'I just spent the last three minutes filtering through an astonishingly large amount of pornography for this,' Demeisen tutted. 'It'd better be.' He flipped his chair around so that his arms were braced on its back, then inched it closer until he was near enough to touch. His fingers grazed Lededje's nipples through her camisole, and she moaned at the sensation. 'Squishies,' Demeisen shook his head. 'How you lot survive on the ground is beyond me.'

'Someone in S.C. could probably tell you,' Lededje gasped. 'I hear there are agents who've worked for them for centuries.'

'Oh, one or two or three or ten,' Demeisen agreed. He pinched her left nipple, sending a wave of heat down her chest and stomach. Lededje pushed harder down against whatever was fucking her and felt it grow in size. 'I hear we might take one of our really good ones and incorporate him into a Mind-state one day.'

It was hard to concentrate, but Lededje fought for it. The look of impressed appreciation on Demeisen's face was enough to make it worth it. 'What would they do with that?'

'Put it in a GOU?' Demeisen suggested. 'Depends on whether it goes insane, of course, but considering the resume I think it'd fit in perfectly. Anyway - did I tell you that I got into another, much smaller and very disappointing altercation after Sichult?'

'No,' Lededje groaned, closing her eyes as the dildo expanded enough to make her ache in the best of ways. 'No, because you never replied to - fuck - any messages - fuck - remember?' She pressed herself up with nearly trembling arms, felt the way the position deepened the thrusting action. It was getting larger still, the thing inside of her, and the stretch was glorious. 'Oh, fuck, Demeisen.'

'I'm not human,' he told her, propping an elbow up on the chair back and watching her with his chin resting on his palm. 'But in lieu of having a real fist, this should do. Want anything else to go with it?'

Lededje felt her eyes start to roll back into her head as the shape of the dildo changed: it lost length, but started to get girthier still, rounder.

Her hands nearly slipped on the handholds she had them on; her palms were sweaty. 'Fuck,' she swore, forcing her eyes to focus on him. 'A little help staying grounded w-would be good. Restraints?'

Demeisen tutted. 'Most people want to run away from Abiminators, not be held down by them. But if you'd like.' Straps came up around Lededje's wrists, relieving her of the pressure of balancing herself while keeping her pinned in place. Lededje tested them: they gave no quarter.

Demeisen kept the dildo inside of her moving. It made a loud, slick noise as he pulled it back until it almost slipped out of her. Then he grew it in size: a bit, a bit, then a bit more. Lededje spent a moment with her breath caught in a half-scream, knuckles going white as she fought the straps. When she gathered herself a moment later, Demeisen shoved it back into her and she was screaming.

It took half a minute to get a hold of herself, but Lededje got used to the gut-wrenching weight and force of the thrusts. 'This,' she gasped out loud. 'Does this come close to how you feel when you get to stretch?'

'Stretch, ha!' Demeisen laughed. 'Good one.' He inched the chair closer again and cupped her cheek so that she was looking at him properly. 'Yes,' he added, voice serious for a change. 'Isn't it glorious?'

'What happened -' Lededje got out '- during this "disappointing altercation"?'

'Cleanup duty,' Demeisen said, not letting go of her cheek. She didn't stop looking at him, either. 'An Eccentric gone completely cuckoo. Do you know what the equivalent of a slap drone is for a ship? For a LOU, at that? Some of those can be fast little fuckers, even if they're offensively speaking no better than fossils.'

Lededje, sweating through her camisole and dripping wet between her legs, thought about it. 'Oh,' she said, and then 'oh, oh, oh,' because Demeisen had put his hand between her legs to rest a thumb over her swollen clit. 'Oh, you had slap duty?'

'I tried my hardest to convince it,' Demeisen said, all sincerity, all of it fake. 'Tried my best to help it reform.' It moved its thumb, gathering up some of the wetness on her thighs to swipe over her clit. Every move felt like being electrocuted. 'But that kind of crazy can't be cured. If I can toe the line and someone else can't, does it really deserve mollycoddling and second chances? Mmm, no. Fuck that.'

He brought his index finger up and gently, so gently, but with inexorable, unforgiving pressure, squeezed her clit. 'One thing if it went and left on its own,' Demeisen crooned as Lededje screamed herself hoarse and came, thighs shaking and all the muscles in her stomach tightening as she clamped down hard on the fist-sized ovoid Demeisen had inside her. 'But it fought back. Do you know how long it's been since a ship in the Culture fought one of its own? Practically unprecedented.'

'Did you-' panted Lededje afterwards, coming down. The ovoid inside her slowly shrank and receded. The seat became a proper chair. Her hands were freed. 'Did you win?'

Demeisen dumped a towel on top of her legs. 'What kind of a question is that?' he asked, offended.

Lededje, sweat slick, grinned up at him. Demeisen wiped her down. She pulled him into her arms, putting his back to her chest and sliding both her arms around his waist. 'Next time I send you a letter,' she said, closing her eyes, 'reply and I'll come visit.'

'I end up in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, most of the time,' Demeisen grumbled, but the module's lights went down, and the floor became a lot more comfortable.

'That, we can leave for next time,' Lededje said solemnly.

'What?'

'Bumfuck-'

'Humans,' Demeisen sighed. Lededje snorted in laughter.

'Do you want to hear some other stories?' he asked her a while later, as the both of them drowsed together in the darkness.

'If all you had was that one altercation -'

'No, no,' Demeisen said, voice rising again. 'Very stone-age type tech, but I've been reading up on a naval conflagration that occurred on some rock from forever ago. It's called the Battle of Trafalgar...'

He did not stop talking for a long while; she, to the best of her abilities, did not stop listening, either. There were ships, and battles, and something about actors called Nel's Son and Nap O'Lion. Lededje eventually fell asleep to the wash of foreign words, Demeisen a cool, dense mass in her arms.