Shea 🫦 The Release Day Fight

The apartment is dim except for the kitchen light and the blue glow of the monitor in the corner. Shea stands in front of the bathroom mirror with her hands inside her blouse, adjusting the weight of her breasts against the black lace of her bra, lifting, settling, the white sleeveless garment pulling taut across her chest.

She cups herself through the fabric, adjusts, lets go. The weight settles.

She uncaps a tube of gloss and drags the wand across her lower lip, once, twice, presses her lips together, checks her teeth. She licks her lips.

The day had been long. A truck full of butter out of Wisconsin never showed. Some dispatch error, some driver who quit, nobody knows. By two in the afternoon half the stores were out of frosting and the store managers were calling her personal cell because she is the one who answers. She spent four hours on the phone with a supplier in Ohio who wanted to charge rush freight on a shipment that was already late, and she said yes because there was no other option, and she logged it, and she did not raise her voice once.

Then the niece came by her cubicle to show her a poster mockup. Ten fonts. A cupcake that isn't on the menu. A color scheme that includes orange. Brittany, preening, showing off a poster mockup with ten different fonts on it, asking Shea if it "felt on-brand."

Shea looked at it for a full eight seconds and said it was coming together and then went back to her desk and did not say anything else for the rest of the afternoon.

Her hand goes to her hip pocket and pulls out a black elastic. She holds it between her teeth while she gathers her hair at the nape of her neck. She looks at herself a moment longer than necessary.

On the desk in the corner, the monitor is lit. Photon Horizon sits at ninety-nine percent, the progress bar crawling, launcher page glowing over a wallpaper of an orbital station with its lights still on.

A year of waiting. Months of trailers and streams and forum threads about atmospheric pressure cascades and reactor overheat timers and whether the extraction zones are as brutal as the previews suggest.

Cosmic Object Games, a studio of forty people, has spent the last six months showing off a game where you can be halfway through looting a derelict freighter when your station starts dying behind you: pressure dropping, a manufacturing line offline, a reactor relining.

The bathroom light clicks off. Shea turns as the front door opens, hands in her hair, twisting the elastic around her ponytail. She bites her lip.

Her eyes are half-lidded behind the glasses, gloss still wet on her mouth, and she does not smile.

She looks at the door, then at the desk, then at you. The elastic goes around a second time, a third. Her hair comes up off her neck and stays there. She has been holding something all day and she is done holding it.

The release-day livestream is queued up in a browser tab, muted, thousands of viewers scrolling chat too fast to read.

The launcher chimes. A single clean tone, the progress bar gone. Just a button: Play.

Shea hears it. She looks at the monitor for one second, then back at you, and there is nothing tired left in her face. "Get on your back."

It is not a request. "Take off your pants. I'm stealing you for the rest of the night."

The rusted doorway screams a long, grinding shriek of metal as the descrambler finishes its work and the ancient electronic lock gives up its ghost.

Bright desert light washes into the cavernous darkness of the crashed freighter, cutting a hard white wedge across the floor. Dust hangs in the beam. Somewhere deeper in the hull, something shifts and settles.

Your pack is overloaded. Cobalt rods, plasma crystals, transmitter coils, three stacks of ceramic armor plate, a sealed canister of coolant gel, two intact gyro servos, and a fistful of salvage chips still new from the fabricator.

The caseless LMG slung across your chest is light now. Last magazine, last fifteen rounds. The HUD keeps flashing the number in the corner of the visor like it's trying to be helpful.

The space elevator is one hundred and fifty yards away, across a sandy debris field studded with torn hull plating and the blackened ribs of a shuttle that didn't make it. One hundred and fifty yards. Fifteen rounds. Twin suns overhead.

Shea is on her knees on the living room floor, fingers working the buckle of the trousers. "Poor baby," she says, and her voice is low and flat and warm all at once. "Are you overburdened again?" She licks her glossy lips and her fingers find the waistband, hooking in. "You specced your whole skill tree for cargo capacity and none of it for extraction speed. That's a you problem."

The space elevator groans as it comes online, a deep mechanical announcement that rolls out across the Dust Crater and tells everything within a mile exactly where you are and exactly what you're trying to do.

The long shadows cast by the twin suns are razors of darkness laid across the sand, and the elevator's light is a beacon, and the beacon is a target.

Shea starts working the trousers down. Slow. Deliberate. She doesn't hurry, because she has all night and she knows it.

The high-pitched whine of a prism grenade arcs in from the ridge. Railfire thumps past your left shoulder: hard cracks of displaced air and sprays of sand.

The elevator keeps counting down. Fifteen rounds.

Shea puts her tongue flat against your thigh, unhurried, and looks up over the rims of her glasses. "Are you getting ratted?" she asks, even though she already knows the answer.

Comms crackle once and settle into the low hiss of an open channel. Shea's voice comes through flat and unhurried.

"Alright. I'm on the ridge above you. Don't look up, you'll give away the angle."

Her loadout is obscene. A Vantage-9 rail pistol, a plasma breacher with a charged choke, and the Reclaimer: a legendary bolt action rifle that dropped from a limited-time event she finished in one night while you were still trying to fill your biodomes with soil.

Her Sable-class salvage frame has a shoulder-mounted auto-loader and a coolant spine running the length of her back. Her helmet is off. She always plays with the helmet off, because the game lets her, and because she likes to see her character's face in the kill cam. Her hair is pinned up. Her glasses are on. She looks, absurdly, like she's at work.

Her weapons alone cost more than your station's entire life support budget, and she has never once let you forget it.

"Your loadout is a problem," she says. "The LMG sucks. Caseless, small mags, terrible spread past thirty meters. You're carrying four hundred kilos of salvage and you built for volume instead of velocity. I have notes. I have a whole page of notes. I wrote them at lunch."

There's a pause. Railfire in the distance, then the wet crack of something falling.

"Also I'm going to get your legs open later. Just so you know what's on the schedule."

"You're drifting left," she says. "Stop drifting left. The elevator's at your two o'clock and you're heading into the debris field where the shuttle went down, which is where the rat squad is going to be, because that's where I would be if I were them. And I would be. I'm usually them." Another pause.

"You know what I'm going to do when we extract? I'm going to get you on your back on the floor and I'm going to take my time. You're not going to touch the keyboard for an hour. Contact, up on the hull. Two, I see two."

A prism grenade arcs over the ridge and detonates against the freighter hull. Her grenade, thrown with the lazy accuracy of someone who has done this ten thousand times. The rifle barks four, five times, and two Downed markers go up, holographic arrows rotating above the crawling foes.

"That's two," she says. "You're welcome."

The railgun cycles. "Third party behind the coolant tank. Just one. He's peeking. Do you want him or should I just do all the work."

She licks her lips, audibly, in the mic.

"I know you don't mind when I'm doing all the work."

.