More than enough

You push away from the blonde engineer and climb to your feet unsteadily. Twenty-two years old and still never slept with a woman, but you had no intention of starting your sexual experiences like this.

"Go get cleaned up Ensign." You tell you engineer as you do your best to hide the erection in your uniform trousers. "I'm sorry about Lisa, I really am." You sigh and shake your head. "I'm sorry about everything. But if we are going to get off this damn island and back into space I'm going to need you to work with me, not attack me." As apologies go it wasn't your best, but you had always had trouble dealing with other people, especially women, and even more so beautiful women like Ensign Diana Smith.

Smith didn't speak to you as she climbed up the accommodation ladder to the main air-lock hatch that was standing open on this class M planet with its very breathable atmosphere, but she didn't attack you again either. Was that a sign of progress?

You straightened the collar of your uniform noticing the stiff paper of the breeding license in your breast pocket as you did. The absurdity of the document made you laugh. On Earth and the hundreds of other planets that the UTF now controlled were dangerously overcrowded, a license like this was worth easily as much as a good sized house. With mandated birth-control, there was no longer the chaotic growth that had so endangered Humanity in its first wild expansion into space. However, these certificates were given only to those men and women with the most desirable traits of breeding, honour, courage, intelligence and health.

The license in your pocket was sadly more useful on this planet to start a fire than it was to legitimize any hope for a family. The irony of a UTF document that entitled you to mate with as many women as you liked and to produce unlimited children on a planet like this that could easily support as many as ten billion more UTF citizens, was more than your stressed psyche could take and your laughter rang out over the sound of the flying bird-like creatures and the sound of the waves.

Apparently the things that made you the perfect officer in the eyes of the UTF, an icon whose genes they wanted propagated across the entire universe, did little to make you attractive to the fairer sex. In spite of sixteen years of the finest education that the powers that be spent on you first in the institute and then later when your potential was finally noticed at some of the best Universities in any of the many UTF planets, not one class had been offered on how to deal with people.

It was ironic, you thought as you kicked a pile of sand up into the air, you had a far better understanding of how the Gorgon could fly through space, yes even a better understanding of how it's hyperdrive could bend space-time to jump vast distances in a single heartbeat, than why one Ensign Diana Smith would attack you when she found out that her best friend and lover was dead.

You can think of at least five things to try to get the ship's systems operational again and had a pretty god idea of the materials needed to repair the damage in the hull caused by the torpedo, but had no idea how to get your engineer to start working with you or how to repair the damage you caused by that stupid attack on the beach.

You glanced back up at the Gorgon, not at the damage caused by the hard landing on this small island, but to wonder what Smith was doing, and if you and she had any chance of working together to get home.