Taking charge of the high explosive loads...

Just like the audience watching one of those "whodunit" pictures, sitting on the edge of their seat to the tune of a scare chord only to have a foreboding door open into empty space, Drew found herself anticlimactically staring around an empty bridge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. In the relative silence, she could hear not just the sounds of hundreds of tools striking metal and feet tromping through sheet metal hallways, but the occasional echoing shriek or grunt from somewhere in the distance, telling her that the female crew were already getting 'introduced' to their new shipmates.

The environment on a warship was comparatively prudish compared to the cities - not only were the bunks sex-segregated, but even visitation wasn't allowed (it was, after all, hard enough to get any sleep packed like sardines into hot bunks without slurping, slapping, and shrieking being added to the mix). That meant that when officers and crew wanted their 'needs' taken care of they had to fit it in (so to speak) during brief breaks and downtime on watch and at a mess hall that took on new meaning.

Drew raised a hand and put a lacquered fingernail up to her lip nervously. The chaos in the chain of command was so endemic that when she was given her uniform and identification papers and assigned to this ship ("DD-996" the plaque at the helm said - did the vessel even have a name?), the spaces where the names of her new commanding and executive officers should have been printed were blank. When she'd pointed this to one of the other female officers on the train, the reply had been nonchalant disinterest and reassurance that the Navy would surely have gotten around to scraping enough qualified officers together by the time Drew actually arrived on the ship.

In a way this was worse than walking in on an orgy of degradation, Drew thought, her eyebrows arching in concern as she kept one eye on the doorway. Naturally, she couldn't go to her quarters until she had reported in to her commanding officer and been dismissed. If the kinds of 'discipline' for minor infractions that Drew had seen in training were indicative at all of how it would be on a real warship, she didn't want to chance doing something that would land in her in hot water. That meant that poor LtCmdr McKnight was bound to stand around the bridge with no responsibilities... and open for use by anyone.

A tense few minutes passed with Drew standing at attention near the helm. Through the huge lead-sheet glass windows, a mob of inexperienced yet eager sailors was painting the deck and performing checks on the rocket-torpedo launchers and the steam catapults for launching heli-cycles. A few of them shot brief hungry glances at McKnight, but for the moment, she was well out of their reach and the men knew it. Trying to thread the needle between rudely ignoring them and doing anything that would be taken as an actual invitation, Drew smiled cheerfully and waved while striking a 3/4 angle pin-up pose for them.

Before she could start to worry about enlisted men finding an excuse to come up to the bridge and hassle her, Drew heard a distinctly mechanical sucking sound coming from one of the walls - in contrast to the more common sucking sounds made by a woman getting her mouth used. There was a maze of twisting, turning glass tubes coming up from the floor and intertwining with the ship's controls - the pneumatic messaging system, a warship's primary means of communication (copper was, after all, too valuable a resource to use on telephones or intercoms if cheap glass and steel could do the job instead). A little red flag popped up as the cylindrical, phallic-looking message canister came to a stop and the vacuum-cleaner noise of the pneumatic tube died down.

Since she was the only officer on the bridge it fell to LtCmdr McKnight to receive and respond to the message. Curiously, she opened the message canister (which was slightly moist and lubricated - goodness knew where it had been already) and read the report. In blocky military letterhead, the message read "SUPPLY PROBLEM IN THE MAIN MAGAZINE, POTENTIALLY URGENT ISSUE RE: BATTLE READINESS. PLEASE ADVISE."

Drew's red lips curled into a pleased half-smile. The shell magazine? That was her department, as it so happened. She wasn't quite sure why - her scores in mathematics had been mediocre at best - but it certainly beat being stuck in an engine room, she'd figured, so she'd accepted the posting enthusiastically. It looked like she wouldn't have to stand around on this deserted bridge looking like an open invitation and that was what mattered - so, message clutched in her hand, Drew began smartly and purposefully marching her way to the magazine. That was no easy task, with so much foot traffic clogging an already-confusing maze of narrow winding corridors. But she got there eventually.

Buried in the core of the monstrous warship, even better protected than the stockpiles of rocket fuel, was the main magazine. Green sheet-metal shell boxes, each the size of a boxcar, were being stacked from floor to ceiling. To make the ship ready for launch, the first few were being broken open. The edges of the well-armored warehouse-like space were taken up by hoppers feeding conveyer belts to supply high-explosive 'democracy' to every gun on the ship. The exception was the main gun turret, which was belt-fed; A quartet of precarious ladders stretched up to the magazine room's ceiling, with a string of 800 lb shells held together with metal links dangling from the aperture leading to the forward gun turret.

Upon seeing it, Drew was immediately glad that her usual position would place her in the fire control center abovedeck; she could only imagine how much those dangling belts of artillery shells would swing from side to side in rough seas. She immediately resolved to strictly enforce this area as a 'semen-puddle-free zone'. Nevermind those ladders - even loading the hoppers for the smaller-caliber guns was obviously hazardous, with ample opportunities to get one's hand or entire arm crushed.

Giving her white boots a sharp click, Drew cleared her throat and whistled sharply to try and grab the attention of the baker's dozen of men in Navy denim who were crowded around another one of the mammoth ammo boxes, breaking it open with oversized prybars. When they turned around and Drew walked closer, she noticed the two girls who were a part of the loading crew, backed up shoulder-to-shoulder against the shell box and looking profoundly relieved to see LtCmdr McKnight walk in. Their skin and pristine white uniforms were totally unsoiled at the moment - which the Lieutenant Commander suspected might be the crux of the dispute here.

Enlisted girls tended to be heavily used, and looking at the way that that high command had them dress, it wasn't hard to see why; although the outfit covered a lot of skin, relatively speaking, that same familiar message was coming through loud and clear. The ladies' uniform, on this ship anyway, was a blue minidress with a sailor-style striped collar surrounding a low neckline and two rows of three brass buttons running down the snug midsection, with a pretty red bow in the middle. Beneath the cutesy ruffled white fringe of the skirt was the requisite garterbelt and a pair of blue-white striped stockings.

A broad-shouldered man with rippling biceps, an arrogantly-jutting chin and the pugnacious squint of a boxer gave a slow, unenthusiastic salute, which was mirrored by the rest of the crewmen (the two girls were much smarter with theirs, giving the deck sharp little stomps with their heels for emphasis).

"At ease. Though you may want to work on your salutes, fellas." Drew said with a click of her tongue. "So what's the beef? Looks like everything'll be ship shape as soon as you get those hoppers loaded. If you need more tools, I can talk to the quarter-"

"Yeah, uh," the man whose lead the others followed butted in in a gravelly voice, "Petty Officer 1st class Mangano reportin'. It's great they sent you down here to help keep us company, doll, but I got a serious under-manning problem here to report to my new commandin' officer in gunnery. Be a dish and go track down a El-Tee-Cee McKnight for me, would ya? Tell him that if he wants this tin can loaded and ready for a scrap by the time we splash down, I'm gonna need a bigger detail than this." He scratched his stubble-covered neck and half-turned away as if he'd said all that needed saying.

"You can take it up with Lieutenant Commander Drew McKnight of DD-996, standing right in front of you, fathead." Drew kept up her outwardly friendly smile, delivering the jab lightly with a wink for emphasis - met with the Petty Officer's raised eyebrow and a poorly-hidden exasperated grunt. It was an undeniable fact that women with first names that could be mistaken for a man's tended to rise to the higher ranks in the Brass. It was expected that the guys would make a show of doubting any girl in front of them was ranked as highly as their nonexistent male counterpart; that little exchange showed up so often in the movies that guys felt obliged to play dumb in such a situation, even if common sense ought to make it abundantly obvious that a female officer in front of them was the "Leslie" or "Ollie" (or "Drew") they were looking for.

"So tell me the problem already, seaman." Drew said with a sassy little tilt of her officer's cap.

"Yeah, alright." he huffed. "They put 10 men down here to do a 12-man job, that's all. And we got a, uh, availability problem with blondie and red, there." he indicated the two enlisted women with his thumb.

Immediately one of the girls' hands shot up. "Lieutenant Commander!" she said sharply. "Ma'am, we already informed the Petty Officer that since he's said the pre-loading needs to be completed, myself and Seawoman Mellon here will not be available for use until the job's done!"

"Ey! Ey!" Petty Officer Mangano pointed accusingly. "You're violating the whatsit, the... uniform code that says no dame will dress in such a way that discourages, uhh..."

"You need your eyes checked, seaman?" Drew said with another condescending smile. "They're wearing their normal uniforms, from where I'm standing. You boys keep your hands to yourselves until all those nice big, round shells are in the right tubes. And with them, I figure you have more than enough hands to take care of it. Oh, and congratulations, Mangano - you just earned yourself two weeks of late, lonely 4th watch with that bit of insubordination. Didn't they teach you to always wait until an officer is finished speaking before you start yapping?"

The Petty Officer began scrunching his face up and shifting his pursed lips from side to side, as if chewing a plug of tobacco. One of the other crewmen, a handsome blonde youth with a perpetual smirk, cleared his throat and raised his hand. "Permission to give the Petty Officer my report, commander."

Drew, feeling quite satisfied that these boys were falling into place faster than she expected, nodded her assent. Instead of speaking openly, though, the blond crewman came up and whispered in his ape-like NCO's ear... Mangano, in turn, nodded slowly and unclenched his fists. "Alright then. You heard Lieutenant-Commander McKnight. You too, ladies. Now then... it is, uhhh, the Petty Officer's duty to inform the commander, in case she has not been informed, that fire control is still having sensitive electrical work done, and not ready to receive her command. And since I already done finished my reports, see, I think I'm well within my rights to request that the Lieutenant-Commander bend her pretty ass over, so I can inform her of a few other things."

Drew's twinkling eyes went wide in surprise - she hadn't considered that. The two enlisted girls looked at her with sympathy but eagerly returned to busying themselves. The enlisted men with them, for the moment, settled with having one of each of the girls help them with a prybar, so they got to grind up against the girls' backsides even if they were too busy with loading to do more than that.

"Well, I can't really afford to linger down here too long... Could I just.. give you a hand, or let you rub yourself out against me, pal?" She spoke casually, twisting her foot against the floor indecisively before turning around and bending over a few degrees.

"Nah, nah, that's not allowed." The seaman who'd given his petty officer that advice before crossed his arms and smirked at the Lieutenant-Commander in the tight latex top. "Naval regs, ma'am. In the magazine room where there's a serious slipping hazard, all ejaculate has to be swallowed or otherwise deposited in a dame."

"Yeah, and besides," Mangano said, unbuttoning his top and tossing it aside to reveal his bulky ice-box of a torso and the thick mat of curly black hair covering it, "I'm asking for 'use', which means anything that gets me there, sugar. So if, say, I was to give your ass a good hard spanking first in front of all the men, just 'cause that'd make me feel real nice right about now..." he chuckled, reaching down and giving Drew's ass cheek a firm squeeze before forcefully pushing against her back to make her bend over low enough to touch her toes...