And so, the Hoes Land

The brush rustles softly as the Doctor and I creep forwards, trying to avoid stepping on any of the smaller fallen branches that litter the forest floor. Rackham and Bonny are behind us, alien pistols drawn and ready to fire, while up ahead I can just about see Read leading a group of pirates in a decent approximation of a skirmish line. I suppose the crew being far closer to her than if she'd had to disguise herself as a man has made it easier to pass on some of what she learned in the army, even if the number who she actually trusts to put it into practice can be counted on two hands. Contrary to what you might expect, we're advancing at dusk rather than night - the Hoix are normally used to manufacture the guards we'll be up against because of their superior night vision, but that advantage isn't anywhere near as pronounced at dawn or dusk and the sun is low in their eyes this way.

As I told Rackham, the remainder of the guards would normally have been called back to the main base in the face of the sort of losses her crew inflicted the first time the met, so it takes a while before Read whistles for us to stop while she takes her hand-picked women ahead to start the attack. We see flickering lines of green light stabbing through the treeline around the enemy camp in both directions - but normally these 'lobotomites' are used as guards for lack of any good alternatives, so it's not long before Read's women overwhelm the group facing this side of the camp and call for us to join them as they charge inside. Rackham snaps at us to follow, and the Doctor and I advance at a leisurely jog alongside Bonny and try not to step in any puddles of Hoix on the way.

"Come on," the Doctor ignores my yelp as she suddenly tugs me by my collar into a building, "we've got some business while they're busy." I shake off her grasp and follow her to a terminal surrounded by crates, where she quickly starts up the sonic screwdriver and does something that makes the screen go all wobbly. "We're not leaving them to off each other, are we," I ask, "only-" She waves my question off before I can finish it, as the lights above us start to flicker brighter and brighter. "No chance," she replies, "anyone making those things is bad enough that they could be fighting Edward Low and I'd only be able to say that they deserved each other." It occurs to me that the Hoix may have been even worse off than I first thought, if she was saying that about a man who once burned a man alive as part of a joke.

"No," she continues, "we're - well, I'm - stopping whoever runs this place from using the ship they must have parked somewhere around here. There's no power plant on the map I found-" She gestures to the incomprehensibly fast scroll of images and text. "-so they must have this place wired into their main reactor. And I've hacked into their power regulation system, so if I trigger a back-feed by reversing the polarity of their external capacitors..." She abruptly shuts off the sonic screwdriver and gestures at the flickering lights with a flourish. There's an awkward second where nothing happens, before the entire lot suddenly go out. "One ship's reactor," she grins, "nicely bricked. They won't be going much of anywhere or doing much of anything for a few hours."

Abruptly a Hoix staggers through the door behind us and falls flat on its face. The Doctor walks over to it carefully and scans it with the sonic. "Kill-switch," she tuts, "must've been installed so their bosses wouldn't have to worry if they lost control..." She sighs heavily. "Still better off than they were when they first went under the knife, I suppose. C'mon." We move out of the building and take a look around. One of the flat-roofed cabins making up the base is burning up on the far side of the compound, while the large domed structure at the center is surrounded by pirates. Rackham turns to us as we approach, a considering look on her face. "Your doing, I take it," she says dryly, nodding towards the steam rising from the seams of the main door and the unmarred corpses of Hoix scattered around it, "one of my girls took the palm off of her hand when she tried to open it, but by the sounds we heard afterwards we've got nothing to worry about from whatever was in there."

The Doctor looks pensive for a moment, then nods. "Right," Rackham continues, "I'll not shoot you for running off, since you did us such a service, and I suppose I can't hold much against you after you so kindly told us where and when was best to attack, but..." I sigh. "You're still annoyed at us for costing you that sloop or whatever you were chasing when we showed up," I finish for her. She nods and waves her pistol in my face. "Absolutely bloody furious," she confirms, "which means you-" She gestures at me with the gun. "-get the wonderful job of helping Anne and Mary figure out what's salvageable from this mess." The two women in question protest vehemently - and with a lot of cursing - about being left out of whatever the Doctor's punishment is, but Rackham shushes them both. "The Captain punishes prisoners as nice as this one," she says archly, "you signed the articles, you don't get to complain. Now then!" She gestures to the building we just left and then begins to walk over to the crew.

"Just so you know, she's a screamer," I call after her, ignore the Doctor's indignant gasp and Read jabbing the barrel of her pistol into my back.

"Bitch," Mary grouses for what seems to be the dozenth time, watching me lever open yet another crate full of strange blue leaves. "Why is she leaving us with this sad-sack, anyway?" I roll my eyes and rub one of the leaves between my fingers. "He probably doesn't even know what any of this is good for," she exclaims, as Anne hums in distracted agreement and pokes her way through the information on the monitor. "As a matter of fact," I reply, "I do know what this stuff is good for." And if I don't, I think, I soon will. "Forget the tech," I continue, "these plants are where the good stuff is. They're normally processed to make medicines, combat ****, narcotics - you name it, there's something useful out there that can be derived from it."

The pair of them immediately perk up and turn their attention to me fully, before deflating a little at my next words. "Of course, normally those derivatives are as addictive and bad for the user's long-term health as they are effective, so these're also hideously illegal to grow and transport. It's why they set up shop here, you see - nobody's going to look at a backwards mudball like this very hard, so they only needed to worry about moving it around." I smirk at their expressions, clearly trying to decide how long long-term is and whether they'd live that long anyway. "Fortunately," I interrupt their scheming, "humans are normally able to get significant benefits without drawbacks from the otherwise useless raw harvest."

"Really," Anne says, "and what sort of benefits are those?"

I hold up a hand to shush her, and luckily for me she seems too intrigued to take much offence. "I was getting to that," I say faux-testily. "Normally, the leaves are incredibly nutritious even when dried or cooked - pop a decent-sized one in your drinks once a week and you won't need to worry about scurvy or gout, for instance. They also normally promote healing, dull pain and generally help you fight off ailments-" I can practically see the... gold sovereigns? Whatever they use for currency around here, I can practically see them spinning in the ladies' eyes at the news, like I've just taught them how to piss out the elixir of life or something. "-when chewed, but the fun stuff comes when you start doing some basic refinements to it."

I grin as I press on, the pair now hanging on my every word. "Normally when you dry it, grind it and burn it the smoke produces a very mild euphoric effect when inhaled. Crushing it to a pulp and mixing it with **** normally creates a potent psychedelic. And the best one is that normally, when exposed to the air in a confined space like this one, for about four or five minutes..." And here's the other shoe, ladies, I smirk as I begin to swell to full hardness. "...the fumes from a large batch of freshly-picked leaves like the batches in these crates produce an aphrodisiac effect in human women so potent they barely care about anything but fucking until their bodies have metabolised it." I'm impressed that the biggest reaction that this 'revelation' gets is heavy breathing, blushing and what they think is 'discreet' squirming, considering that we've been in here for more than twice that long with at least three crates open.

That state lasts about three seconds. Not coincidentally, three seconds is how long it takes for Anne to drop her gun and knock me to the floor with a flying tackle that quickly turns into a spirited attempt to plug my throat with her tongue. I'm more than prepared for something as mundane as a sex-crazed pirate though and quickly turn the tables on her, wrestling her tongue into submission as I grab her tight, muscular ass in both hands. I feel Mary practically rip my pants down and bury her face in my still-swelling balls, moaning in delight as she lathers them up with her spit. I release Anne's ass and push her up and off of me. "Dirty girls," I remark, "aren't you?" Especially for the time, I think. "Fuck off," Anne spits, turning around and kissing the tip of my cock wetly, "it's been years since we've had a halfway-decent prick in either of us."

"It's been so long," Mary groans in agreement, running her tongue up my shaft until she's trading kisses with Anne between the pair of them working my cockhead over, "and this is more than decent." With her piece said, she drops her head down again and resumes slobbering on my nuts as Anne takes me in her mouth. Not being willing to warp the laws of physics with my expanded horizons - not least because there's every chance that they might take offence and fight back - I heave the pair off of me after a few seconds of Anne fruitlessly mashing my cockhead against the back of her throat and stand up. "What do you thi- Oi!" Anne's protest goes ignored as I drag her onto her knees, take up position behind her and **** her to tilt her head way back until I've got a straight shot down her gullet.

The first thrust bottoms me out in her throat and bulges it obscenely as My balls hit the top half of her face with a wet slap and completely smother her in musky, drool-coated flesh. Mary watches, mouth agape and paralysed with lust and shock, as I pound her comrade's throat like it's a living cockholster for a few minutes. She gags and splutters around my meat, spit bubbling and bursting around the 'corners' of the stretched 'O' of her lips as her body rocks with every thrust. "What are you two talking about," I ask as I let her have my first orgasm of the night, "don't you normally celebrate a big score like this with an orgy?" Mary nods dazedly, gaze fixed on Anne's slowly-swelling belly. "Uh-huh..." she replies faintly. "But never with somebody this... hah... big..."

I'm just pulling out of Anne's throat, curious to see if Mary's eagerness extends to sucking me clean before I repeat the process on her, when a shriek of ecstasy rolls across the camp, even audible through the walls of the warehouse.