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The steel starts to sweat when we submerge. The difference in temperatures between the unventilated engine heat and the frigid depths causes our collective anxious breaths to condense on the hull. Because of this fact, fractal mold can grow rather quickly on surfaces and instruments and sleeping personnel, such as myself. Many enlisted women have to spend hours scraping the walls, and I have to spend precious minutes of my lucid moments shampooing the fur of my ears and tail with my limited water ration. Blessedly for us, we only have to submerge under two circumstances; when we are hiding, or when we are hunting.
The sound of klaxons is a distant distraction from my sleep, and it forces open one eye. I paw at the metal wall of the narrow bunk and moan, tracing the path of slowly dripping condensation down olive-gray metal. We’re submerging; I wonder for which reason. My tail flicks lazily while I slowly get my bearings, but I only truly wake up when I feel a fist clasp around it. The sensation almost makes me jump, but there’s nowhere to pull away to. I turn in the narrow space to better see the woman who is tormenting me. I definitely recognize her, but her name escapes me at the moment. I’d scratch her, but regulations ensure my claws are short and dull.
“Get enough sleep, XXXXX?” She says my name, but I don’t recognize the sounds. I’ve been recognizing myself less and less often, surely an effect of the drugs they keep me on. My whiskers twitch and I start to purr in response to stress. It calms me down but doesn’t save me from harm.
“No.”
“I need the bunk,” she says, peeling off a blue and white sailors uniform stained with sweat and oil. “You don’t do anything anyways.”
I don’t know what to say at first. The first things that come to mind are childish; I’m tired too, I was here first, it’s not fair. I finally settle on something indisputable. “I’ve got two hours until my assignment.”
“Whatever,” she says. She is climbing into the narrow bunk, and I feel her naked body pressing against mine. Her smell is overpowering, her muscles tense as she puts an arm around my waist. “You don’t mind, do you? If you’re gonna be lazy you can at least share.”
It’s not like I have a choice; she’s blocking the way out of the bunk. At this point it’s basically fine anyways. I used to get anxious or upset at being groped or fucked in my sleep, but I’m so tired from the drugs that I try not to lose minutes that could be better spent resting by worrying instead.
I close my eyes and rest against the lumpy pillow. My thoughts drift, trying to recapture sleep as the woman behind me touches me. I don’t know what it is about myself and the two other intelligence operators that the crew finds so appealing. In my limited conversations with them however, I know my experiences are not unique. Perhaps its just that we’re too tired to ever say no; limp and slack bodies that can be played with like dolls. She’s squeezing the soft skin of my belly, bringing her fingers down through the dark hairs to my pussy. Even in my half-sleep, I meow weakly.
Her fingertips are pressing against the soft nub of my clit, easing inside to the first knuckle, and I’m slipping deeper into sleep. It’s so easy now to let intimate touch become background sensation, something to sooth me back down. She’s coaxing my tail out of the way, and I feel something rigid and warm rubbing between my ass-cheeks. I think I mumble something, but my mind is elsewhere. Hot breath raises the hairs on my neck and I shiver as a greased finger slides between my legs, pressing against my asshole. I stir and almost wake as it slides in, a burning sensation that eventually eases. She complains about how tight I am, but I barely hear her words, just the sounds.
Why do they always use my ass? I’m not like the other girls, I have a cunt they could easily fuck. It wouldn’t hurt as much, it wouldn’t feel so dirty or wrong. Perhaps they just expect it after fucking my fellow headcases, or it’s a preference. Maybe it’s just the easiest hole to access while spooning in a too-narrow bunk.
I can feel her hips wiggle and struggle to position themselves as she rubs her cock between my thighs. I’m dreaming now, walking somewhere that feels familiar, perhaps a farm or orchard from my childhood. It must have been drawn from a childhood memory because the scale is wrong. The sky is bright white, which makes the bombers stand out even more in contrast. The bombs start falling and I just watch. I can feel her penetrate me, and I’m standing in the middle of fire, letting it fill me. My body tenses and limbs constrict around it, holding me down. I try to hide from the fire, falling to the torn earth, but it’s ubiquitous. The fire is a part of me.
Eventually the bombs stop falling. The fire burns out to near extinguishing, just warm coals resting within my abdomen. I’m no longer constricted, free to lay against the cool mud, and I don’t mind it getting in my fur. I wander the familiar farmlands now terraformed by explosives. I make the mental note to discuss my dreams of land to my handler. She’d like to know about anything unusual like this.
I am awoken by fingers rubbing and sliding into my ears, and it startles me almost to the point of hissing, eyes dry and wide open, clawing at the walls where dark mold is already growing in perfect star-shaped patterns on the green metal. The sensation is too much, the touch too intimate. I pull away as much as I can in the tiny bunk, scrambling to slide out as I crawl over her legs. I stand and almost swoon from orthostatic changes. The insides of my thighs are sticky from cum, and I look for my clothes in the red glow of the emergency lights.
“What’s wrong?” My partner asks, and she sounds genuinely upset. “Did I do something wrong?”
It’s hard even to answer, because I don’t feel like she did anything wrong. I just shake my head and whimper, wanting to sleep again, but startled awake. It takes a couple tries to put my naval whites on, fumbling with buttons that won’t quite clasp together.
“What did I do? I’m sorry.”
“I have…” I can’t finish, I don’t know what I have to do, besides report to my handler eventually.
“Hey come back, asshole, you-”
I’m already gone, spaced out, wobbling through dimly lit halls. It hurts to walk and my thighs rub together, flesh sticking to itself. I try to put that out of mind. Have I eaten today? Did I eat yesterday? It’s hard to know. I’m so skinny, they tell me it’s why I look so pretty, but I know I should probably eat.
I don’t know how to get to the mess hall, but my feet do, so I follow them. Hold the railing going down the stairs, you don’t want to fall. I feel mold under my fingers and I withdraw my hand as though bit. I wipe it on my skirt and hope I remember to wash it with vinegar. My tail flicks nervously as I pass by some women I don’t recognize, but clearly recognize me. They don’t touch me, which is probably good. Or maybe it’s bad, maybe they don’t like me.
I get my food from the lady at the counter and it hurts when I sit. I shift awkwardly, curling my tail into my lap. The food is not very good right now. We haven’t met the supply ship recently, so we just have the canned goods. The meat on my tray is chunky and gelatinous. I put it in my mouth and it tastes of fumes and mold, though I know it should be safe. Women sit around me, talking. I can’t follow the conversation and wouldn’t be able to interject my own thoughts. It hasn’t been long since we submerged, so the women can still light their cigarettes. Smoke clings to the ceiling, and dim light shines through it. My whiskers twitch, but at least the smell of tobacco hides the smell of the food.
One of the women that looks the friendliest sits next to me on the bench and puts her arm around my waist. I look up and she smiles at me with smoke-stained teeth. I try to smile back. I’ve been told that my smile has gotten stupider since they started giving me drugs.
By the time I’ve finished eating as much as I can stomach (not much), I know it’s time to go to the front of the sub. Handler must be waiting for me.
I pass through more dark halls, walls lined with pipes, pistons, metalworks. The submarine is a thin tunnel of loud machinery and mold. I once had a book, when I remembered how to read. I know it had been important, and I know I had left it out. When I opened it, there were just spirals of mold that stuck the pages together with gossamer strings, eating the ink. The mold is contained infinity; limited surface area, infinite diameter. I fear it, and it makes me sneeze.
The medical ward is the only place mold is not permitted by any means. When I open the door, acrid vinegar assaults my nose. My handler is standing there over the still body of my fellow intelligence officer. A kindred headcase. They fucked her brain with chemicals until there was nothing left, just like me.
“Good…” my handler checks her watch, squinting in the low light. “Hm. It feels wrong to say good afternoon.”
“It’s evening for me.” It’s always evening for me. All I ever want to do is sleep. I can’t remember if I was always like this, or if at one point I had energy.
“Anything to report?”
Of course. My dreams. “I dreamed of land, I think. Maybe a field once for farming turned to war. There were shells falling until the stopped, and I walked through an orchard.”
“Do you recognize the field?” She stares intently through her dark glasses. I sometimes wonder what she’s even able to see. I can see everything, even in the dark; my tapetum lucidum glinting green in low light.
“It seemed familiar. Perhaps from my youth.”
She takes close notes and brushes a strand of golden hair behind her ear.
“Thank you. That is most useful.”
I look to the woman on the table beside us. She is nude, like I will be. Her eyes are open but unfocused, and I know that she is asleep, pupils blown open into dark pits that consume her face. Without thinking, I find myself touching her, hesitant fingers caressing her waist. My handler looks up from her preparation of drugs when my colleague twitches.
“Sorry,” I say, though I don’t mean it. I don’t mean a lot at this point.
“It’s okay,” my handler says. “Touching is fine. Get over here and undress.”
Of all the things I have forgotten, shame was one of the first to go. I strip, letting my skirt and blouse crumple into a formless heap on the floor. The low red light makes the material look pink. I know what happens next; handler will give me the drugs I deserve. It’s a stack called quies, for good girls only.
“Open your mouth.”
Her fingers taste harsh from isopropyl, the scent stinging my nostrils and making my whiskers twitch. Only after her fingers are removed from my mouth do I taste the pill she placed under my tongue. Benzimanix is bitter and tastes like poison. I don’t remember much but I do still remember the first times I tried to take it sub-lingually. I spat it out and threw up all over the deck. I forget when I got used to it.
“Lay down on your side.”
The steel table is cold against my naked skin, and I breathe slowly to still my beating heart. The cold is familiar at least. As I can feel my handler’s fingers slowly pulling my tail away from my legs, I close my eyes and bite my lip.
“Hm,” handler mumbles while using a damp rag to wipe away dry cum from my ass and thighs. Something presses against me and I try to relax as my handler pushes a lozenge of ahypnol inside my rectum. I imagine that I can feel the chemicals dissolving through my mucus membranes already. I know that I am beginning to feel the kick from the pill under my tongue, a form of energy flowing through my synapses that I’d regularly never know. She washes her hands with yet more isopropyl.
“Alright. Give me your arm.”
I lazily watch the needle slide into the crook of my elbow, and wonder if and when my veins will collapse. Perhaps it will start crunching when the needle goes inside. The onierozine is a flow of ice straight to my heart, and I feel it’s effects instantly. My eyelids won’t open, my limbs won’t move. It doesn’t even feel like I have limbs or eyes. I feel like nothing at all, a prisoner of electric thought stuck within my own corpse. Breathing is hard. My ribs don’t want to move. An impossible to measure amount of time passes.
Drop.
My consciousness drifts out of my body. I watch myself for a moment from the corner of this small metal room, and see a frail naked body laying on a table. Handler is touching my shoulder and kissing my forehead while I sleep, but I can’t feel it.
As though a ghost, I pass through the thick walls protecting us from a hundred feet of water. The water is very dark; if it weren’t for a faint blue glow from above, I would never be able to orient myself. I drift through the water ahead of the submarine, my temporary home. I cannot see, but I can hear and smell. Whalesong somewhere far to the north. It is faint, they must be miles and miles off. I can smell naval mines, but they are ours. Listen… Listen. I do not know where I am. It is dreadfully isolating down here. I am afraid.
Three.
Oh, I can hear something. Wait, it’s inside my head. I perk my ears, trying to see if what I heard was real.
Two.
There it is again. A low roiling churn. It probably isn’t natural. It’s very distant. I travel to the furthest extent I can, before my consciousness starts to flicker, stretched too thin.
One.
I open my eyes. I never think I have the strength to, but handler’s words compel me.
“It’s been an hour. Status report.” She is chewing on the butt of an unlit cigarette.
“Drop me, I think I heard something but I can’t be sure,” I slur out, words melting together.
“Description? Bearings?”
“I don’t know. Maybe an engine, maybe to the north-east,” I drool.
“Investigate, I’ll bring you up in another fifteen minutes.”
My eyes shut tight, the chemicals still clinging to my every muscle. I breathe slow.
Drop.
Which way is up? Where even was it? I drift out, feeling the cold of the water or the table my cadaver is laying on. Where am I? Of course, the ocean. Focus is hard, thoughts running in a chemical loop. Sound, I’m here to find a sound.
It’s faint, but the closer I listen, the more I’m positive that it’s a diesel engine, common for monarchist submarines. I count seconds, surely missing my mark, but can at least gauge approximate distance. It’s impossible yet to tell if they’re moving toward or away.
Three, two, one.
I’m dubiously awake again. I hear water drip on the floor. It appears I’ve wet myself, urine mixing with vinegar and alcohol. What a disgusting creature I am. I don’t even have control over my body. My handler is wiping it away with a rag. She doesn’t comment on the fact.
“Report?”
“There is a submarine maybe six or seven miles to the north-north-east, monarchist diesel engine, I can’t determine if it is approaching or fleeing.”
“I’ll alert the authorities. Keep monitoring and I’ll be back shortly for your report.”
Drop.
I drift back into sleep. My focus lapses for a second before the stimulants remind me what to do. I listen, and can’t pull my mind from the distant hum of an engine. It is neither retreating nor advancing. Good. I sit in the dark waters, focusing on it, trying to determine if perhaps there is another submarine near to it. Sometimes monarchists travel in packs. After indeterminate time, I can tell that there is no one else. They are alone, and we are not. I smile a little.
I can hear whispered communications through the water, but they are ours. It is spoken in a passive voice, as is the style. At 16:38 a monarchist submarine was discovered… and I know that I was the one to discover it, even if nobody else finds it. Later I won’t remember it, I don’t ever remember my time spent. Quies tends to make reality a dream, and most people don’t remember dreams well. In this particular case, I am most people.
Fish swim around and through me. I know that they cannot perceive me, because I am not actually in the water. I am on a metal table in a clean room. My thinking suddenly shifts, and it is because the body affects the mind. When I try to shrink my perception, fighting against the drugs, I can see the reason. In my handler’s absence, two women have entered the medical ward. I feel as though I recognize them, and that feeling makes me feel stupid. I have spent my last two months with the same thirty-five women. Of course I should recognize them, and yet I couldn’t name either of them.
One is touching my hair, rubbing the base of my ears. She picks up a penlight and shines it in my eyes. My body stares aimlessly. My mouth drools when she sticks a finger in it. The other woman is touching my legs, tugging them apart, picking up my limp tail and draping it off the edge of the table.
I take the smallest measure of solace in that if they hurt me, they will be punished.
Looking any longer would hurt too bad, but I can feel the ghosts of sensations in my pelvis and lips. I drift back into the dark depths, suddenly anxious. Suddenly the vast space of perception is far too small. My mind needs to be larger. I need to not only be asleep, but a corpse. I ache.
Above, the keel of a sub chaser carves a wake across the water’s surface. Another girl very much like me is taking a dose of drugs probably smaller than mine, to give her own handler accurate, minute to minute information as they narrow in on the enemy.
I’m getting dizzy, and feel nauseous. My head swims; perhaps a new wave as the drugs in my systems cycle, perhaps disgust at the distant knowledge of what is being done with my body. My remote viewing starts to go dark, and dawning realization comes into play. I’m not getting enough oxygen. They’re choking me. My limp body can’t even struggle. It would hurt too much to try and watch. Better to just stay here and hope they’re done soon. It has to have been long enough, they must be wrapping up. Then I can just wait for my slow, stupid mind to forget about the transgression.
Just keep waiting. I try to repeat a mantra but forget the words. So I wait. A part of me wishes to simply explore the submarine, as though it’s my first time. Handler has absented herself, my body is being abused, the enemy vessel I’ve located is being hunted, my job here is done for now. I’m lost. I do not recognize myself. And yet my mind stays out in those frigid depths, waiting and watching. Time passes.
When the Myatotia claimed my homeland as their territory, I was… some age surely younger than I am now. I remember the idea at least of some kind of religion. There were cycles of history and that’s why some people such as myself could know things that weren’t; the future acts upon the past. The goal was to break the cycle over the course of multiple lives, to simply exist for eternity without it. Particularly heinous acts would slow your journey, and cast you into hell, burning and freezing for a thousand years before the chance to reincarnate. I don’t remember my re-education, but I remember the shape of the classroom. I remember the desks and chalkboards and the shape of the teacher’s brilliant orange hair in it’s bun. I remember being told everything I had learned since I was a baby was false. There were no saints and cycles and reincarnation, and there certainly wasn’t a hell. Socialism with Myatotic characteristics didn’t have room in their cosmology for the divine.
All of a sudden, however, I was in hell. My mind is stretched thin, blacking out and phasing further and further away from my body. No matter how far I go I can still feel the abuse, even when I look back and can barely make out the shadow of my submarine in the hazy blue glow. I hear shouting, likely from my Handler, but hands are still on my body. I am close to the sub chaser, and can hear the heavy thud thud thud of depth charges being deployed, see the frothy white bubbles of them crashing into the water, sinking, and… Yes. I was correct. Below me I see another submarine, the faintest shadow below me, barely darker than the yawning abyss. I think I smile, and everything explodes. Burning bright cavitation bubbles send out shockwaves that rip through my mental projection. I watch their hull cave and crack. I perk my ears to try and hear the rats inside scream, but it’s over too fast. The ship splits in two and bodies, real flesh and bone bodies float around me.
Three, two, one.
Handler is wiping vomit from my lips. She is so kind with me, so gentle even as I am at my most vile and disgusting. I’m always grateful to have someone as caring as her watching over me.
“Report?”
“Enemy vessel eliminated. We… we got them.”
I hardly feel her patting my shoulder. “Good girl.”
“Can… May I stay up here, ma’am? I’m in pain.” I swallow and it tastes acidic.
She considers for a moment and then shrugs. “You may. You’ve earned it.”
I try to enjoy the drugs as gnawing anxiety creeps closer and closer. Handler helps; she pets me behind the ear, and the scritches calm me down. I stare at the white tile wall.
Handler whispers after what feels like a quiet eternity. “I’m sorry. I feel like I let you down. I’ll try to not let that happen to you again.” It’s surprising hearing this kind of shame coming from the woman I’ve given your life to.
“I’m okay,” I barely mumble. I feel the pain on my hard palate, the fire against my pelvic floor. Perhaps the drugs are wearing off. Experimentally I try to move, and end up wiggling a finger.
“If it’s any consolation, they’ll be punished.”
“I don’t know who they were.”
“I do, don’t worry. Perhaps I can talk the captain into keel-hauling them.”
I giggle only slightly at the thought. “How barbaric.”
“These are barbarous times. But I’m sure that we’ll make it through. Have you put thought into what you’ll do when you’re a civilian?”
I shake my head as far as it will go, neck stiff and unresponsive from the drugs.
“Don’t think I’ll make it that far.”
“You’re the one that can see what hasn’t happened yet. Tell me where you see yourself in five years.”
Drop.
The grass is green. I’m in naval whites with pins on my chest. Stones with names rise from the ground around me. I don’t know where I am, but the sky is gray and there are buildings rising in the distance. I am woefully alone; Handler isn’t here. A box is going into the earth. Three women raise rifles and fire in salute. The stone before me is fresh, and has a name on it that I don’t recognize.
Three, two, one.
“I’m not sure where I am. Perhaps I’m still in the navy.”
“It’s a fine enough career.”
“You weren’t there.”
The pressure in my ears changes, and I squirm in agitation. I hate it here. We must be surfacing, our mission accomplished until the next descent.
Handler just smiles and shrugs. She knows exactly what it is that I am implying, and struggles to light a cigarette in the low oxygen room. “So it goes.”