“I negotiated with Numadesi,” Xuejiao says, a little smug. “She got to greet you. I get to have you first.”
“Ah, now my wives haggle between themselves as though I’m a prize stallion.” Anoushka holds her arms out. “In that case, you’ll have to work for it.”
“The labor of undressing our admiral. Oh, so arduous.” The lieutenant laughs and begins to take off Anoushka’s armor. She alternates between impatience and savoring: now a plating is unclasped fast and tossed aside, now a segment of mesh is slowly peeled off as though it is an act of unveiling a sacred weapon. She kneels to unclasp and slide off Anoushka’s boots, and kiss Anoushka’s shin.
The bath fills quickly, the water swirling ruby and garnet, fragrant with the scent of roses and stargazer lilies—Xuejiao’s selection. Anoushka slides in and pulls Xuejiao in after her. She combs her fingers through her wife’s hair, the sleek length of it like the pelt of a temporal seal, sable touched with lambent blue. Most of Xuejiao gleams, a series of modifications, some skin-deep and other more fundamental. Blue-and-white motifs mantle her shoulders and biceps, giving her the patina of hand-painted ceramic. More covers her throat, weaving around ball joints that shine blackly at her elbows and knees. The look of a fine, graciously made figurine.
Anoushka kisses Xuejiao’s neck, detouring to an avian clavicle, then up to lavender-painted lips. Her hand drifts over her lieutenant’s stomach and a hip glazed in cobalt flowers. Even in the steaming water, the porcelain sections remain as cool and frictionless as a mannequin’s. She thumbs the boundaries where flesh and ceramic layer meet, the soft pale skin and the smooth hard blue, this juxtaposition that is Xuejiao. The living work of art that sings and thrums for her.
“Do you want,” she whispers into her lieutenant’s ear, “to be taken apart?”
“Yes.” Xuejiao gazes at her with half-lidded eyes, her rose lenses in full blossom, petals spread wide within her irises. “Open me; unravel me. Bring me to pieces, commander.”
Disassembling her wife’s modular body is a delicate discipline that requires layers of authentication from Xuejiao, a maze of accesses that unlock for Anoushka alone. She takes the lieutenant out of the water and spreads her on the opal floor, then begins the process of unlocking the joints at shoulders and hips. A twist, a click, and one arm comes off. The femoral connectors take longer, but she’s had plenty of practice.
Beneath her Xuejiao breathes faster, trembling as she is rid of her limbs one by one. The expression of ultimate trust, of supreme intimacy. When Anoushka stops, the lieutenant whispers, “One more, Admiral.”
She bends to kiss her wife’s blue, luminous throat, and hooks her finger into the notch of a doll-joint. Undoing her wife like this was her idea, at the beginning, but Xuejiao has taken to it the way a bee takes to nectar. “One more.”
By the time she is done Xuejiao is mostly a torso—a beautiful torso in a halo of seal-pelt hair—with a single leg joined to her. The other limbs Anoushka arranges around them, close within reach, framing the body of her wife. Then she strokes the one attached foot, cradling an ankle, caressing her way up the knee and then the thigh. Xuejiao lies a portrait of exquisite asymmetry, her breasts rising and falling rapidly.
“Let me taste you,” the lieutenant says. “I’ve missed the ambrosia of you, the delight and richness of my admiral.”
“Such poetry rolls off your tongue.” Anoushka puts her mouth to a sapphire-tipped breast. When disassembled, Xuejiao is that much more sensitive—a quirk of her sensory array, the feedback wired into her cortex. Each contact between tongue and nipple makes Xuejiao arch and shudder, and when she presses her palm to her wife’s cunt she finds it sopping.
Her fingers work inside Xuejiao as she sucks on the nipple, the etched-porcelain texture of it like an icicle in her mouth. In almost no time Xuejiao quakes and clenches down on Anoushka’s hand, the heat of her within a contrast to the cool of her without. Flesh organs next to porcelain artifice.
Xuejiao pants, trembling from the aftershocks. “My turn, Admiral.”
Anoushka extends a seat from the wall and props Xuejiao between her knees. She strokes the dark hair, slides her knuckle—still wet—under the pointed chin. “Put your lovely mouth to the test, second of my wives.”
Her lieutenant has excellent control and as she clutches Xuejiao’s head to her it is as if her wife means to truly devour her, to consume the fire of her through this conduit between her thighs. Xuejiao’s jaw works without tiring and her tongue is as supple, as hungry, as a little serpent.
She comes into Xuejiao’s mouth with a hiss, a grunt. A slow exhalation.
Later, she reassembles Lieutenant Xuejiao and carries her to bed. In the dark they lie clasped, sweaty limbs and oxytocin haze. Anoushka runs her hand down Xuejiao’s spine and thinks, This is home. But there is an element missing. Not ennui precisely. Anticipation of something more that has not yet come, anticipation of bite and thrill. She has gotten too comfortable.
When the boarding request comes, she authenticates it. She disentangles herself from Xuejiao, dresses lightly, and notifies Numadesi where she will be meeting Benzaiten in Autumn.
She receives the AI in a small boardroom. As before, Benzaiten has come in person rather than in virtuality. It means xe is more concerned with surveillance through digital channels than with physical eyes and ears—xe is concerned, Anoushka is almost certain, with interference from the Mandate.
Xe makes no objection to Numadesi’s presence and drops
