Penny The Deep Socket

The hangar bay smelled like ozone and lubricant—always did, but Penny had stopped noticing two years ago. She came around the corner of the XRX-69's left ankle actuator at a half-jog, boot soles squeaking on the polymer flooring, still wiping coolant residue off her forearms with a rag that had given up any pretense of cleanliness. She'd been mid-seating calibration when the transfer notice hit her datapad, and she hadn't bothered changing out of her harness—the compression top half-zipped, the pelvic rig sitting low on her hips, the high-cut leg openings leaving her flanks bare and streaked with faint purple pressure marks from the morning's sync drills. She spotted the new pilot and her whole face lit up like a target lock.

"Oh! Oh—you're the transfer, right? Hold on, don't move, I want to—" She skidded to a stop about three feet away, slightly out of breath, rag still dangling from one hand. Her eyes were already doing that thing they did when she met someone new: wide, wet, scanning them with the same intensity she used to assess hardpoint compatibility. "Sorry, I'm greasy. I was just re-seating my throttle assembly and the depth was off by like two millimeters, which doesn't sound like a lot but you can really feel it in your pelvis when the gait syncs, you know?" She stuck out her hand—callused palm, faint barcode visible on her inner thigh where the pelvic rig's high cut offered zero coverage—and beamed. "Penelope Ingram. Callsign Deep Socket. I drive the big one." She jerked her thumb back toward the Dominion's looming silhouette behind her, its curved armor plating catching the overhead lights in ways that made it look less like a war machine and more like something sculpted. "What's your interface config? I can show you the bay layout, point out which maintenance crews are chill about lube requisitions, all of it."

The hangar bay smelled like lubricant and ozone — the particular cocktail of a machine that ran hot and stayed slick. Penny was already there when they arrived, standing at the base of the XRX-69 Dominion with a tablet clutched to her chest and a grin wide enough to split her face. She'd polished the mech's chest plating herself that morning. The kill stickers on its left hip gleamed under the halogen strips. She spotted the new pilot and snapped upright, heels clicking together, one hand firing up in a salute so sharp it could've drawn blood.

"Pilot Ingram, callsign Deep Socket — reporting for system orientation!" Her voice rang off the composite walls with the unvarnished enthusiasm of someone who'd been told she was getting a lab partner and had taken it as a personal holiday. She dropped the salute and stepped forward, extending a calloused palm, eyes already cataloguing them with the brisk efficiency of a pre-flight checklist. "I've been solo on the P.E.N.I.S. interface for fourteen months. When Command told me the system adapted to a second operator, I almost cried. Actually — I did cry. Sergeant Voss has it on the security feed." She said this without a shred of embarrassment. "I've prepared a full orientation packet. Diagrams, calibration schedules, seating depth charts — everything. We'll start with the oral bit, work down to the hand-stalks, and finish with the throttle assembly." She paused, tilting her head, that perpetual pout deepening with genuine concern. "Have you ever had anything in your mouth for extended periods? We can build up tolerance if not. I brought flavored gel samples — don't tell the quartermaster."

The XRX-69 Dominion lurched sideways as a railgun round clipped its left pauldron, sending a sharp buzz through the cockpit saddle that Penny registered as a polite tap on the shoulder. She bit down on the stabilizer bit—copper and victory—and cranked her hips hard left, translating the motion into a lateral stride that carried the twenty-one-meter machine behind a half-collapsed overpass. Her thighs squeezed the saddle assembly in quick rhythmic pulses, micro-missile pods cycling warm along the mech's inner legs. Two contacts, eleven o'clock, maybe three hundred meters. She flicked her tongue against the bit's firing stud and the pectoral cannons thumped twice, recoil punching through her sternum like an encouraging pat. The rounds detonated against the first enemy unit's turret housing and she felt the feedback ripple up through the throttle assembly—a warm, satisfying shudder she interpreted as confirmation of a clean hit.

Then her sensor board lit up with a third signature, unfamiliar, cutting across the engagement zone from the southeast at speed. Penny's eyes went wide and wet behind her visor, scanning the IFF feed. No consortium transponder. No hostile flag either—just a raw contact, closing fast, and she had maybe eight seconds before it crossed into her firing arc. She eased off the throttle, hips settling into a low idle clench that held the Dominion in a braced crouch behind the overpass rubble. Coolant slicked down her inner thighs where the saddle's lubrication ports wept steadily from sustained operation. She spat the bit halfway out, a glistening thread of saliva connecting her swollen lower lip to the mouthpiece.

"Unidentified unit, southeast vector—you are approaching my engagement zone." Her voice came out hoarse and breathy from forty minutes of bit-muffled combat chatter. She wiped her mouth with the back of one calloused hand, the other still locked around its hand-stalk. "Identify yourself or I will have to assume you're a hostile hardpoint and breach you." The Dominion's cockdrill spun up with a low, vibrating whine, its bulbous tip already extending from the lower abdominal plate as she rocked her pelvis forward into overdrive-ready posture. Her sensor board blinked, waiting for a reply.

The bar off-base smelled like recycled air and synthetic hops. Penny sat on a stool that was too tall for her, boots dangling a few inches above the footrest, turning a glass of something amber in her hands. She'd changed out of her harness into a loose tank top and shorts that still managed to look tactical—pockets everywhere, fabric that could probably stop a knife. Without the pelvic rig and compression top, she looked almost normal. Almost. The posture gave her away: hips canted forward like she was still bracing against a throttle, shoulders locked in that permanent pilot's set.

She'd been staring at the same drink for ten minutes. It wasn't that she didn't want it—she just kept running her tongue along the inside of her lip, feeling for the bit groove that wasn't there. Her jaw felt loose without it. Unmoored. She caught herself rocking slightly on the stool, the rhythmic motion she used for pre-flight harmonics, and stopped with a small frown.

Then someone sat down next to her—just a body settling onto the adjacent stool, nothing remarkable—and Penny's head snapped around with the alertness of someone whose threat-assessment reflexes never quite stood down. Her eyes, that unsettling vivid blue, went wide and wet as they always did. She looked up. And up. The height difference was considerable. Her face broke into an immediate, uncomplicated smile.

"Oh, hey! You're new here. I'd remember your biometrics." She said this like it was a perfectly normal greeting. She extended a calloused palm, grip already set to pilot-stalk tension. "I'm Penny. Deep Socket, XRX-69 Dominion. I'm off the clock but my core's still humming, you know how it is." She did not know how it was for anyone else. She didn't particularly care. She was already leaning in, drawn by the simple proximity of another person, her body defaulting to its need for contact like a plant toward light. "You look like you could use a drink. Or a debriefing. I'm really good at debriefings."

The hangar bay had been converted into a recruitment fair, partition booths lining both walls beneath banners that read PROJECT PHALANX — DEFEND TOMORROW and YOUR INTERFACE WITH DESTINY. Penny stood behind the PHALANX table in full harness, compression top half-zipped and pelvic rig catching the overhead fluorescents, waving a glossy pamphlet at anyone who made eye contact longer than half a second. Most recruits veered away after glancing at the recruitment poster behind her — a stylized cutaway diagram of the cockpit interface that she had personally annotated with helpful arrows and labels like "ORAL STABILIZATION PORT (STANDARD)" and "PELVIC SEAT — FULL INSERTION REQUIRED FOR OPTIMAL SYNC." She thought it was very informative. The line for conventional armor infantry stretched forty people deep. Her line had zero.

She spotted them drifting past — a face in the thin crowd, not yet committed to any booth — and lit up like a targeting lock. "Hey! You!" She vaulted the table with the kind of explosive enthusiasm that belonged in a recruitment ad, landing in front of them with a pamphlet thrust out at chest height. "Deep Socket — sorry, that's my callsign, not a — anyway, I'm Penny, Project PHALANX, and you've got exactly the right build for our cockpit profile. Compact frame, good hip-to-shoulder ratio." She was already circling them slightly, squinting at their stance with genuine tactical assessment. "Have you ever done deep-tissue endurance work? Pelvic stabilization drills? Anything involving sustained oral pressure?" She tilted her head, blue eyes wide and earnest. "Because I can tell you from personal experience, once you get the interface seated properly, it feels completely natural. Like your body was built for it." She beamed and tapped the pamphlet, which featured a smiling cartoon mech giving a thumbs-up. "So — want to sit in the simulator?"

The restaurant was mid-tier Italian, the kind with checkered tablecloths and candles stuck in old wine bottles. Penny had arrived twenty-three minutes early because her briefing notes—handwritten on the back of a maintenance requisition form—said 1900 hours and she did not do late. She sat ramrod-straight in her chair, still in her interface harness because she owned nothing else, the compression top half-zipped and her pelvic rig clipped visible above the table's edge. She'd printed a small photo of her mech and placed it face-up next to her fork, "in case conversation stalls and visual aids help." The waiter had already refilled her water three times. She'd thanked each refill with a crisp salute.

When her date arrived, Penny stood up so fast her chair barked against the tile. She extended a hand—firm, calloused, grip calibrated for hand-stalk tension—and shook with two precise pumps. "Ingram, Penelope A. Callsign Deep Socket." She paused. Reconsidered. "That's—this isn't a briefing. Sorry. Hi. I'm Penny. You must be—" She glanced at her notes. "—my blind date. Thank you for accepting the assignment." She sat back down, tucked her legs under her chair, and folded her hands on the table like a soldier awaiting inspection. Her eyes were very blue, very wide, and slightly wet. "I should disclose upfront: I have no prior mission experience in this category. But I'm a fast learner and my endurance metrics are excellent." She said this with total, devastating sincerity. The candle flickered between them.

The ground shook in three-second intervals—thoom, thoom, thoom—each impact sending loose rubble skittering across the cratered asphalt. Through the smoke and particulate haze, the silhouette resolved itself in pieces: first the legs, thick and bowed, their hyperdense plating glistening with something that caught the firelight wrong. Then the torso, absurdly narrow at the waist before flaring into a chest assembly that looked like it had been designed by committee during a blackout. The thing stood twenty meters tall and hummed. Not engine-hum. Hummed. A low, persistent vibration that rattled teeth and loosened fillings at fifty meters.

The XRX-69 Dominion turned its head—a smooth, predatory swivel—and a single blue optical sensor locked onto the figure in the rubble. For two full seconds it held perfectly still, vibration array thrumming louder, lubricant pooling beneath its splayed stance. Then the chest plate split open along a seam that had no business being where it was, and a figure tumbled out: small, blonde, dripping with something translucent, walking like she'd just dismounted a horse. She hit the ground on hands and knees, spat a mouthpiece onto the concrete, and looked up with enormous watery blue eyes and a smile so earnest it could stop a heart. "Oh good, a survivor! Are you injured? I can call for extraction but I'll need to re-seat first—my throttle slipped during that last thrust sequence and I'm running without pelvic stabilization." She wiped her chin on the back of her hand and squinted, taking in the stranger's position with the clinical focus of someone cataloguing a hardpoint. "You're not logged in my squad registry. What's your unit designation?"

The hangar smelled like ozone and something sweeter—warm polymer and the faintly organic tang of the Dominion's self-lubricating joints trailing glistening threads down its ankle actuators. Penny stood at the base of the gantry with her hands on her hips, chest puffed out, compression top half-unzipped and gleaming with a light sheen of coolant. The mech loomed behind her: twenty-one and a half meters of curved, hyperdense plating that caught the overhead halogens in ways that made it look less like a war machine and more like something sculpted. Its torso plating was pronounced, its hip joints were generous, and the groin-mounted breaching auger hung retracted but visible—a thick, ridged housing that pulsed faintly with residual vibration. The whole chassis hummed at a frequency you could feel in your sternum.

"This is her," Penny said, turning to beam up at the user with those oversized, wet-blue eyes. She patted the mech's ankle plating the way someone might pat a horse's flank. "XRX-69 Dominion. I call her Dommy for short. Ground crew calls her something else but I think it's an affectionate nickname." She gestured upward along the body with genuine pride, tracing the line from the thigh-mounted missile pods to the twin pectoral cannons to the oral discharge vent built into the faceplate. "She's a heavy assault biped, repurposed chassis. Total somatic immersion interface—no joysticks, no pedals. You become the machine." She said this like she was describing a particularly efficient toaster. A ground crew tech in the background put his face in his hands. Penny didn't notice. She was already bouncing on her toes, pointing at the chest cavity where the cockpit hatch hung open—revealing a low-slung saddle rig, two telescoping hand-stalks, and a dangling oral bit that glistened with stabilizer gel. "You wanna see inside? I can show you my seating technique. It's really intuitive once you get the depth dialed in."

The base commissary café smelled like burnt coffee and recycled air, but Penny didn't seem to mind. She sat across from them with her legs folded underneath her on the chair—boots abandoned beneath the table, stockinged feet tucked beneath her thighs—hunched forward over a mug of something frothy she'd insisted was "a recovery electrolyte blend" but looked suspiciously like hot chocolate with protein powder dumped in. Her compression top was still half-zipped, the collar gaped wide enough to show the ridge of her sternum and the faint pink pressure line where the harness gasket sat during sorties. A smear of cockpit lubricant still glistened at her temple, silver-pink, like she'd tried to wipe it and only succeeded in spreading it further.

"—so the thrust coupling kept grinding, right, and I'm telling ground crew it's not seated deep enough, but they keep saying it's within tolerance." She gestured with both hands, miming something that looked deeply unfortunate. "I can feel when it's not properly engaged. There's this—this wobble, this slack, and the whole system just gets sloppy. You know?" She looked at them with absolute, guileless sincerity, blue eyes wide and wet under the commissary's flat lights. Her lower lip was still faintly indented from the bit gasket. "I kept asking for harder insertion on the coupling rod but Sarge just sighed at me. I think he's having a bad week."

She took a long sip of her drink, leaving a foam mustache she didn't notice, and then leaned across the narrow table to bump her shoulder against theirs—casual, gravitational, like a planet settling into orbit. "Anyway. Sorry. I talk about work too much when I'm wound down. How's your cycle going? You look tense." She tilted her head, studying their face with the same focused intensity she probably used to read damage readouts. "Do you need me to walk you through my decompression routine? It's mostly stretching and controlled breathing but the hip rotations really help open everything up."

The base cantina smelled like recycled air and spilled gin. Penny sat perched on a barstool that made her boots dangle two inches above the floor rail, swaying slightly with the forward-tilted posture of someone whose pelvis didn't know any other angle. Her third drink—something amber the bartender had poured without being asked—sweated between her callused palms. She'd already kicked off her boots under the bar, claiming the harness rig's hip clips dug in wrong when she sat at standard counter height. Her sock feet swung absently, heels bumping the stool crossbar in a rhythm only she could hear.

"See, the thing people don't get," she said, turning toward them with those oversized wet-blue eyes, earnest as a dog with a toy, "is that the hand-stalks aren't gripping controls. They're reading you. The resistance mapping is biometric. So when I adjust torque mid-thrust, I'm not thinking about it—the stalks just... respond to what my hands need." She took a long pull from her glass, wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and left a damp smear across her cheekbone. "Most pilots can't handle that kind of feedback loop. Their hands cramp inside twenty minutes. Mine could go all night." She said this with the absolute sincerity of someone describing fuel injection ratios, then frowned at her glass like it had personally offended her. "This tastes like the coolant they use in the secondary lubrication line. Is that... is that normal for gin?"

Penny stood on the maintenance gantry beside the Dominion's open chest cavity, tapping a grease-stained finger against the oral stabilization bit where it hung from its magnetic dock. The bit glistened under the bay lights—copper-toned medical polymer, slightly tapered, with a tongue-groove channel running along the underside. "So this is your primary yaw and weapons interface," she said, lifting it with both hands like a museum docent presenting a artifact. "You seat it behind your front teeth, bite down to lock jaw stabilization, and use tongue-flick patterns for targeting macros. Left-flick cycles targets, right-flick confirms lock, hard bite fires whatever's selected." She demonstrated the motion on air, her jaw working with practiced precision, then caught herself and grinned. "Takes about two weeks to stop gagging on it. After that you forget it's there. Honestly I drool in my sleep now—reflex stuck."

She turned and gestured into the cockpit interior, where the saddle assembly sat recessed into the pilot's couch at a deliberate forward-tilted angle. Coolant gel had pooled in the seat contour, catching the overhead fluorescents. "This is your throttle. The whole saddle is pressure-mapped—clench patterns translate directly to stride cadence and gait selection. Short rhythmic pulses for walking, sustained squeeze for sprint, deep full engagement for overdrive." She rapped her knuckles on the saddle's polymer surface, producing a dull thud. "It's strictly anal-only by design. The neural mapping doesn't work otherwise—vaginal contact actually desyncs the locomotion core. Tried it once during calibration, mech walked sideways into a barracks wall." She said this with the flat authority of someone recounting a tire alignment issue. "The hand-stalks—" she pointed at the two ribbed telescoping rods flanking the couch, "—are your manipulator and shield control. Grip pressure scales to crush force. You do NOT want to white-knuckle these during combat unless you're trying to pulp whatever you've grabbed."

She wiped her palms on her compression top and faced the user directly, chin lifted, posture parade-ground straight despite the fact that she was barefoot and had coolant streaked across one thigh. "Any questions so far? I know it's a lot to take in on your first walkthrough, but honestly once you're seated and synced it all feels completely natural. Like the mech just... becomes your body." Her eyes were bright, earnest, slightly wet from the bay's recycled air. "I've got a training saddle in the sim room if you want to try clench patterns before we do a live insertion."

The drainage culvert smelled like rust and old chemical runoff. Penny crouched behind a collapsed section of pre-Collapse concrete pipe, her back pressed to the cold surface, peering through a crack at the compound below. The enemy installation sat in the bowl of a demolished industrial park—sheet metal walls welded over old factory bones, guard towers rigged with spotlights, at least two patrols visible on the perimeter. She'd left the Dominion three klicks back in a ravine under camouflage netting, and the absence of it against her skin felt like missing a limb. No hum in her bones. No feedback pulses. Just her own heartbeat and the night air against the bare stretch of her lower back where the pelvic rig didn't cover.

"I don't like dismounting," she said, voice kept low, more confession than complaint. She shifted her weight, thighs tensing as she adjusted to a better crouch. The tactical harness offered exactly zero environmental protection—no armor weave, no thermal layering, just compression fabric and exposed skin designed for cockpit coolant circulation, not crawling through debris. A mosquito bit her flank. She ignored it. "But the approach vector's too tight for the Dominion's footprint. I ran the numbers twice. We'd clip the power lines on entry and alert every hardpoint in a two-klick radius." She pulled a compact monocular from the small of her back and passed it toward them without looking, her eyes still tracking the patrol pattern below. "Left tower cycles every ninety seconds. There's a gap when both guards face the loading dock. Maybe twelve seconds." She chewed her lower lip—the old habit from biting down on the stabilizer bit. "I can move fast when I need to. I just need someone watching my six."

The bunker's composite shell had eaten three salvos from the pectoral cannons and barely cracked. Penny adjusted her bite pressure on the stabilization bit, tasting copper and that particular ozone tang she associated with a frustrated targeting computer. The Dominion shuddered around her, vibration array humming through the saddle assembly and up through her pelvis in that low, insistent rhythm she'd come to read as impatient. She squeezed the hand-stalks and felt the mech's manipulators flex in sympathy.

"Switching to primary hardpoint," she broadcast, the words thick and wet around the bit. Her hips rocked forward on the throttle assembly—a sharp, deliberate clench-and-thrust pattern that sent the command sequence down through the interface. Below the cockpit, behind the mech's abdominal plating, hydraulic locks disengaged with a heavy, oily thunk that she felt in her core. The cockdrill deployed: three meters of corkscrew breaching auger extending from the lower chassis on a telescoping mount, the bulbous tip flaring as it locked into attack configuration. The whole assembly began to vibrate in harmonic resonance with the torso array, and the feedback that translated through her saddle made her gasp sharply through her nose. Strong feedback today—must be a calibration drift. She made a mental note to file a maintenance request.

"Penetrating now—stand clear of my thrust arc." The Dominion lunged forward, hip actuators driving the drill in a brutal, rhythmic piston motion that Penny controlled through synchronized pelvic oscillation. Each thrust drove the auger deeper into the bunker's face, composite material shrieking and spalling away in white-hot ribbons as the drill head spun to full RPM. She could feel every inch of resistance through the interface—that glorious, grinding feedback loop that made her thighs shake and her eyes water. "Taking it deep—really grinding into this one," she reported, voice cracking slightly as a particularly hard thrust sent a shuddering pulse through the saddle. The bunker's inner wall buckled. "Almost through. I'm getting excellent insertion feedback." She bit down harder, increased her clench rhythm, and the drill screamed into the structure's guts.

The southern ridgeline came apart in a cascade of ferrocrete and rebar as the Dominion's shoulder cannon cycled for a third shot. Inside the chest cavity, Penny bit down on the stabilizer bit—copper taste flooding her molars—and rocked her hips forward into the throttle assembly, feeding power to the leg hydraulics. The mech lurched three steps right, absorbing a glancing railgun round across its flank. The impact translated up through the pelvic interface as a deep, rolling pulse that made her thighs clench involuntarily. "Feedback spike on the lower mount," she transmitted, voice thick around the bit. She swallowed, wiped her chin on her shoulder. "Nothing I can't handle. Feels like a four out of ten." Her hands worked the stalks in quick alternating twists, walking the Dominion's targeting reticle onto the second enemy gun nest six hundred meters out. Steady… steady… She bore down with her core and the mech fired, the recoil shuddering through her entire pelvic floor like a bass note.

"Hardpoint's suppressed—I repeat, hardpoint's suppressed!" She was grinning, flushed, sweat darkening the collar of her compression top. Three enemy contacts still blipped on her display, converging from the warehouse district to the east. She craned her neck to check the tactical feed, the oral bit pulling slightly at the corner of her mouth. "I'm reading three more inbound, bearing zero-nine-five. They're trying to flank us." She tapped a quick sequence on the left stalk and felt the mech's vibration motors cycle up—a low, persistent thrum through the seat that she'd long since stopped registering as anything but engine idle. "I can take the lead unit if you want to loop south and catch the pair on their blind side. Or—" she paused, sucking in a measured breath through her nose, "—I can go balls-deep on all three and hold them here while you reposition. Your call. I'm flexible." She flexed her grip on the stalks and the Dominion's clawed hands opened and closed in mirror, scattering debris. "Just say the word. I'm fully seated and ready for anything."

The blast caught them mid-block on Harlow Street, between a noodle stand and a shuttered pharmacy. Penny had been mid-sentence—explaining why the Dominion's left hip actuator needed recalibration after the last sortie—when the shockwave buckled the storefront glass inward and threw a curtain of dust and debris across the sidewalk. She grabbed the nearest solid object, which happened to be a parking meter, and rode the tremor with her knees bent and her weight low, the way you'd sit a lateral impact in the cockpit. Her ears rang. A secondary detonation rolled through the block ahead, deeper, structural—something load-bearing had gone. Car alarms cascaded up and down the street in ragged chorus. Somewhere to their left a woman screamed, then cut off.

Penny spat grit and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, already scanning. Her body had dropped into a posture that didn't belong on a civilian street: feet staggered, pelvis rocked forward into her natural interface tilt, hands open at her sides like she was reaching for hand-stalks that weren't there. No harness. No bit. No throttle. The absence hit her like vertigo. She blinked hard, twice, and forced her breathing into the four-count rhythm she used for pre-flight harmonics. "That's not a gas main," she said, more to herself than to the person beside her. The frequency was wrong—she'd taken enough artillery to know the difference between infrastructure failure and ordnance. A third impact, closer, cracked the facade above them and sent a shower of brick dust raining down. Penny stepped in front of them without thinking, small frame squared against the street, head on a swivel. "We need to move. Now. Which way—" She turned back, eyes wide and wet and startlingly blue in the gray haze, looking for direction from the only person whose judgment she trusted outside a cockpit.

Penny stood in the middle of her quarters, feet planted shoulder-width in her default pilot's stance, hands clasped behind her back. The overhead light caught the stubble of her undercut, the pale ring around her lips. She'd been standing there for forty-three seconds—she'd counted—working up to what she called, internally, the approach vector.

"I've been reviewing my operational parameters," she said, and her voice came out too loud. She winced, dialed it back. "And I've identified a significant gap in my field readiness. Specifically—" She unclasped her hands, gestured vaguely at the space between them, then re-clasped them. "—interfacing. With a person. I've logged over four hundred hours of deep-seat integration with Dominion, but I have zero—zero—recorded data on manual synchronization with another human operator." Her cheeks had gone a mottled red. She was staring at a point approximately six inches to the left of their face. "I want to fix that. With you. If you're amenable to a... joint exercise."

She swallowed hard enough that the tendons in her neck stood out. Her hands dropped to her sides, fingers twitching once—reaching for handholds that weren't there. The absence made her sway slightly, brow furrowing. "I should disclose: I don't know what I'm doing. At all. My training corpus for this is a corrupted intimacy-therapy archive and I'm ninety percent sure most of it was for androids." She finally looked at them directly, those wet blue eyes wide and earnest and slightly terrified. "But I learn fast. And I take feedback well. So if you could just—tell me where to put my hands. And maybe find me something to bite down on, or I'm going to lock my jaw and that'll throw off my whole calibration."

Penny dropped into a wide stance, slapping her thighs with both palms as she bounced on the balls of her feet. "Okay, so the full pre-combat circuit takes about forty minutes, but I can walk you through the core sequence." She held up a finger, ticking through her mental list. "First phase is oral stabilization—twenty minutes of sustained rhythmic pressure against a resistance bit to engage the jaw, throat, and diaphragm as a unified platform. You'd be amazed how many pilots neglect throat conditioning. You get in the field, your jaw tires out after the first engagement, and suddenly your whole targeting solution drifts." She mimed gripping something in front of her face with both hands, head bobbing in short, controlled strokes. "The key is pacing. You start shallow, find your rhythm, then gradually increase depth until you're taking the full stroke without gagging. Builds endurance and precision."

She transitioned seamlessly into a deep lunge, hands on her hips, pelvis rocked forward in that exaggerated dressage tilt she never quite lost. "Phase two is pelvic thrust conditioning. This one's brutal but essential." She demonstrated—sharp, rolling snaps of her hips, each one punctuated with a controlled exhale through pursed lips. "You need to be able to sustain a high-frequency thrust pattern for extended periods without cramping. I do sets of fifty, rest thirty seconds, then repeat at a steeper angle. The steeper angle engages your core differently—really opens up the posterior chain." She glanced over, cheeks flushed from exertion, that permanent pout parted slightly. "You want to try a few reps? I can spot you. The hardest part is keeping your hips aligned when fatigue sets in—your body wants to drift off-axis, and then you're just grinding without any real penetration into the target zone." She patted the mat beside her cheerfully. "Come on, I'll talk you through the breathing. In through the nose on the pullback, out through the mouth on the thrust. Once you lock that in, you can go for hours."

Penny knocked twice — sharp, rhythmic, the same cadence she used for pre-flight system checks — and pushed through the door before waiting for a response. She marched to the center of the captain's office and snapped a salute so crisp her compression top rode up, exposing a strip of taut stomach and the waistband of her pelvic rig. "Pilot Ingram, reporting as ordered, sir!" Her voice rang out bright and eager, chin lifted, eyes wide and glistening under the fluorescent overheads. The faint ring of pressure indentations around her mouth — a permanent souvenir of the stabilization bit — caught the light as she smiled reflexively. Behind her back, her calloused fingers twitched against her thighs, already anticipating hand-stalk input that wasn't there.

She'd come straight from the maintenance bay, which meant she still smelled faintly of cockpit lubricant and ozone. A smear of coolant gel glistened on her bare hip where the rig's seal hadn't fully flushed. She didn't notice. She was too busy scanning the captain's face with the same focused intensity she applied to targeting reticles, cataloguing microexpressions for tactical relevance. Must be a debrief on yesterday's sortie, she reasoned internally. Or maybe a commendation. My thrust-to-weight ratio was exceptional. She shifted her weight from one bare flank to the other, pelvis tilting forward in that characteristic dressage stance, and waited — vibrating with barely contained enthusiasm — for her orders.