Celebrations and Hostile greetings

Arriving back to the ready room a short time later, the others were still involved in a discussion over the appropriate response to the Council’s order. Rye gestured for Dustin to retake his seat, then leaned down to whisper in Meli’s ear; as Dustin watched, the Velca woman’s ears flickered from intense debate into surprise, before settling on amused delight as she nodded and excused herself from the table.

Seeing both the Rabyth and Velca getting up to leave the room, Emely dragged herself out of full planning mode to ask what was going on. Rye’s blush returned in full ****, and for a moment, Dustin thought the bunny girl was going to either flee the room or blurt out everything they’d just done in front of everyone assembled. Thankfully however, the Feliax woman picked up on her lover’s cues.

“Everyone, we’ll take a brief break. Yril’k, Aricia, Defia, could I ask you to excuse us for a minute? I believe the rest of us need to have a quick word in private with our engineer. Yril’k, would you be so good as to continue discussing the requirements for the hiding spot with the others while we’re gone? Thank you.” The redhead then busied herself with herding the rest of Dustin’s lovers into the ambassadorial bedchamber - Aricia’s eyes going wide as the wall revealed it’s hidden opening, causing Dustin to have to do his best not to face-palm as Sammie shrugged and offered him a hand up before following the others.

With the wall sliding shut behind them, Emely turned to Rye. “You got your next stage of pairing done, didn’t you?” She said, causing the bunny girl’s blush to deepen before the blonde gave a subtle nod. “Yea… kinda showed Dusty what I’ve been working on and… Oww, fuck, careful Emmz, I’m sore!” The last part of her answer coming out as a pained exclamation as the fox girl turned into a red haired missile, knocking the Rabyth woman over onto the mattress in an excited hug - before apologizing profusely.

Meli meanwhile sighed and headed to the automat. “I’ll get you some balm, love.” She said, although her ears were fluttering with excitement, and she too hugged Rye shortly after handing the bunny girl a pot of ointment.

A little while later, Dustin sat with Sammie and Naera, the trio watching as Emely, Meli, Trea’k and Bleu fussed over Rye almost as much as the ladies had fussed over Meli and Trea’k when they’d announced their pregnancies. “What did you and the bunny get up to that’s gotten this reaction, captain?” Sammie said, taking an offered snack from Naera before almost **** on it when he told her.

“That… fuck, why the fuck has that got this reaction?” She said, wheezing as she wiped her eyes from the coughing fit. Naera giggled next to her. “Sammie, it’s not about what they did, it’s about the meaning in it. It’s like… Starlight, how do I explain this to a human? Rye talked it over with me - no, not the sex, the whole ritual thing. Apparently, she’s got plans for how she wants to treat the audience for the final part of their paring and wanted to see if I minded doing the catering - but that’s not important right now. It’s like… every step of pairing is important, right? But the last two - doing something new, that’s what this one was, yea, Dustin? It’s special for a Rabyth. I’m not explaining very well… maybe ask Rye about it later? It might make more sense coming from her.”

The dark-skinned woman leaned back on her elbows at that. “Huh. Fair enough. So if it’s so special, why aren’t you also over there congratulating her on getting a piece of Dustin then?” she asked, then broke into giggles at Naera’s response. The short-stack had scrunched up her face, pouted, and muttered “because I’m jealous”. For a moment, Sammie’s reaction seemed to phase the green-skinned woman, before she leaned forward and gave Sammie a shove that rapidly turned into the two play-fighting over Dustin’s lap.

Dustin shifted uncomfortably in his seat as the weave countdown concluded. It’d been three weeks since they’d started flying for the council system the day after his bathtub jaunt with Rye; three weeks of a surprisingly low amount of sex and a painfully large amount of meetings to talk about meetings. Emely had taken her role as coordinator of their approach to the council’s recall order very seriously - he was pretty certain she’d had discussions with half the crew by this point. For Dustin personally, the fox girl had held a brief discussion with his other lovers, and had then told him firmly that she would be ensuring he wasn’t frustrated while he studied up on diplomatic protocols.

That in turn had translated to her sitting under the desk for four hours at a time while Meli and Trea’k quizzed him on matters from the correct way to shake hands with different species through to the required greetings when he first arrived in system. In theory, it should have been an extremely enjoyable experience - but Emely’s approach was far more insistent than normal. Instead of relaxing into her mouth, any sign of him growing hard was met with rapid, intense and almost mechanical feeling fellatio until he could focus on his studies again.

He’d raised the issue about how… not intimate? it felt, with her on the third day and she’d just shrugged. “I’m not enjoying it either, sir. But you need to focus, and out of all of us either me or Meli are the best for this. And I’m not going to make her sit under the desk in her condition…” He’d been about to complain further, but at that point the other women staged a rather pointed intervention explaining exactly how long his fox girl had pushed herself out of the rotation for time alone in his bed in order to monopolize him in this way, and he’d rapidly shut up.

The fact that he knew Emely had given up her near-worship of him just to make this a success, and the weight that put on his shoulders to get everything right was only one part of why he was uncomfortable as normal space flickered into view around them. The other was his dress uniform - which, by all accounts, he’d need to be wearing basically the entire time he wasn’t asleep while he was in system.

Thankfully, the screen flickering to reveal a grizzled looking reptilian space traffic controller with a colonel’s insignia on his uniform distracted Dustin from the terribly designed collar of his official outfit. Giving the answers that Emely had drilled into him with weeks of work, he breathed a sigh of relief when the vidscreen went dark after they’d been given a strict path to follow to their berth in an outer ring of the vast constellation of space stations that made up the council’s bureaucratic heart.

Sola slid into her docking bay a short while later, heavy clamps descending fore and aft to lock her in place. Dustin winced at that - he’d known they were coming; Meli and Emely had discussed them at length as well as the reasons the council took their security so seriously, but it wasn’t a nice feeling knowing they were basically sealed in. At least, the council thought they were sealed in. Sammie gave him a thumbs up as the weave arms retracted from her head, and Dustin grinned. That’d been Rye’s contribution to the entire affair; apparently, there was no way to passively spot people looking for weave routes - and who would look for a route from inside a system this populated and well travelled, even if they were docking in a space station far outside the normal system boundaries?

Humans, that’s who. And Sammie’s single gesture meant that no matter how trapped the council thought the Solar Ascent was, they could get away. Of course, the associated gravitational collapse from a weave-bubble popping in the dock would one hundred percent be treated as an act of war - so it was a last resort move, but it certainly beat trying to fight their way out to a regular jump point past all the defensive batteries, if the worst were to come to pass.

That whole backup plan relied on the fact that this system, alone out of all the systems they’d visited, sprawled far beyond the planetary limits. The council had existed for so long, they thought every route in and out of their command system would be charted and so it would be safe to fill the ‘dead’ space on the outer perimeter with yet more space stations. It turned out that humanity’s gift for the weave had found a spot they’d not mapped yet.

Hoping against hope that he’d not need to use that jump, Dustin left the bridge under the command of Trea’k, straightened his uniform, and went to join the select party Emely had hand picked by the docking port. They would be making their first report to the local station commander to let the council know they had arrived, and would then move on to the full meeting that they had been requested to report to when the council was ready to see them.

A moment’s stride later and Sammie’s hand grabbed hold of his, the pilot spinning him around and kissing him quickly before taking her place at his side. “For luck” she muttered, before dragging him onward. “C’mon, captain, we’ve got to go make humanity look good.”

Dustin grinned. Emely had insisted on Sammie’s presence for two reasons - one, it meant that there would be two humans in the party which apparently showed deference to some old tradition or other, with bonus points for it being a couple. But more importantly - if things went south, they had someone that could probably hijack a shuttle to get them back to the ship, even with the system’s defence grid taken into consideration.

Emely had chosen the last two members of their party for similar reasons; while she was going herself to ensure any diplomatic changes could be responded to rapidly, she’d also picked Yril’k in the event of combat-like danger, and Bleu in the event of medical emergency. Both were also ritually symbolic - the Vex’ess being a council species, and the Querii being known as exceptionally peaceful… and it meant that Trea’k and Meli could both stay safely aboard Sola. For some reason he couldn’t place, Dustin was oddly glad of that fact as he stepped off the ship, despite the efficient looking three-armed clerk holding a clipboard waiting for him.