You are Nathan Raxel, scoundrel extraordinaire. Non-relativistically speaking, you're about 30 years old, with a lean, wiry build from too many missed dinners, and ginger hair cropped close to your skull that nicely displays the scars that criss-cross your skull, relics of youthful mistakes in cranial implants (mostly recreational). You have a spaceship, The Corvus, and will do whatever it takes to keep it fueled and airworthy, be that smuggling, bounty hunting, salvage or when times are particularly tough, prostitution and piracy. You have a crew too, but they're more easily replacable.
Right now you're huddled in the bunk in your cabin as the ship tumbles silently through space. The ship is coasting through the outer edges of a star system, slowly heading for the inner planets. It is a region of high police patrols and with a cargo bay full of absolute contraband that would see you landed in prison for the rest of your natural life if found, the engines are powered down to conceal the energy signature of your ship from their sensor sweeps.
No engines. Which means the electricity and heating are gone with it. The temperature is below freezing and still dropping. At least the dripping of the pipes has stopped, though there's now a stalagmite of brown ice growing towards the stain in the corner of your cabin. You didn't look forward to dethawing the ship once it came out of silent running - the plumbing costs from burst pipes were a nightmare.
There had been a time many years ago, when you'd done this maneuver while trafficking a cargo bay of Polarian sex slaves. There had never been better times than those hours where you endured the cold with a bedfull of whores, with their bodies of thick, snow-white fur. You recall fondly their wet black noses, their rows of sharp teeth with which they liked to nip and their breasts like big soft pompoms. Just thinking about those days makes you randy as fuck. It's been months since your last roll with a woman or even woman-shaped alien. Shame the crew you've picked is so singularly unfuckable.
There's Anderson, your pilot and friend from way back. He is human, level-headed, handy in a tight spot. You shared a bunk with him once, but you'd both been extremely drunk at the time and you're fairly certain nothing happened. You try not to talk about it.
Then there's Fat Eric, another human, who got his name and his job solely on account of his vast girth. He's your plasmid expert, his excess body mass allowing him to reconfigure his body again and again without burning out. Plasmids are very metabolically expensive - a lesser man would literally be reduced to skin and bone after a few uses. Personality wide, he's as obnoxious as he is ugly.
There's Cordion, your little, lithe insectoid engineer. She's cute and green and scaly and not a day goes by where you're not tempted to tamper with her. You've got a hankering to put your dick in one of the spiracle airhole openings that run down either side of her body (just to see what it feels like), yet she's an obstinate lesbian. The aesthetics of male humans repulses her. Not to mention their size, strength and enthusiasm has her terrified that they'll damage her slender physiology and the delicate, brightly coloured wings that adorn her back.
Sycrax... after so long in space, its armoured, glittering black carapace is curved is such a way as to almost suggest the shape of a woman but Sycrax is more animal than humanoid, more pet than crew member. It skulks around the tight spaces inside the walls of the ship, feeding on pests. Technically it is fuckable but you don't at all trust it not to mistake your penis for a tasty space weevil. In addition, if Sycrax so much as tastes an insemination source, it will immediately swell up and explode into thousands of skittering, spider-like larvae, and nobody except Sycrax wants that.
Finally then there's Tarla, the medic. Having never seen her face behind its mask, you're not sure what species she is or indeed if she even is a "she", but the shape of the environment suit that covers her from head to foot, with its huge, globular breasts, certainly seems to suggest so. The only problem is that to get to them you'd have to pry that environment suit off her and expose her to a toxic oxygen atmosphere in the process. A risk you're willing to take. She's less keen.
Pulling the blankets tighter around your shoulders, your breath frosting in the cabin air, you sit up in the bunk, sliding your feet over onto the ice-cold floor. You need to fuck something before you freeze to death. Maybe you can order Fat Eric to give up his stash of pornography, or steal it when he tells you to piss off.
The cabin door seizes halfway open. The cold is doing your ship no favours - you'll be patching leaks for weeks after you dock. You step out into the cargo bay. The cargo, representing the investment of the entirety of your savings, is still there. You slide open the lid on the nearest wooden crate to inspect them. Thousands of liquid-filled glass capsules sit in neat rows in their protective foam packaging. Plasmids. Capable of doing almost anything. Including making you a very, very rich man.
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