Xenofestation 2-04: Orbital Decay

By Paragonas Vaunt

Disaster strikes, in deep space and beneath the sucking mud of a remote planet, as scouts, pilots and participants in the Xenoplantation Programme face their greatest challenges and their deepest fears yet. Success means freedom or riches, but one wrong move, one step too far, and their rash actions may consume them. For the Chimes of Doom are only a few steps away...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paragonas Vaunt
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215806135

Paragonas Vaunt

Transgressive fiction with a dark & detailed undercurrent.The hottest stories. The twistiest tales.Whether you like your stories long and langorous, brief and breathless, or dark and dirty, come with me on a journey into the crooked world of filth maven Paragonas Vaunt.

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XENOFESTATION 2-04

~ORBITAL DECAY~

Paragonas Vaunt

Copyright © 2023 Paragonas Vaunt

All rights reserved

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Reader Advisory

This is a work of erotic science fiction, and a very rude one at that. Intended exclusively for an adult audience, it graphically depicts scenes of a highly sexual nature and situations of peril/horror.

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Cuntent Check

Cunt Quotient: 11

Fuck Factor: 18

Cock Contingent: 0

Cover imagery by Celia McKinley

No part of this book or its accompanying artwork was created with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools or processes.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Entry 2-04/A – Second Chances

Entry 2-04/B – Sinews of Resolve

Entry 2-04/C – Clutch

Entry 2-04/D – Repulse

Entry 2-04/E – A Sticky Situation

Entry 2-04/F – Grace and Favour

Entry 2-04/G – Dance Card

Entry 2-04/H – Orbital Decay

Entry 2-04/I – Resumed Thrust

Entry 2-04/J – Close, But No Cigar

Entry 2-04/K – The Last Waltz

Coming Next…

Note From The Author…

Hatching Now…

Connect With Paragonas Vaunt…

Entry 2-04/A – Second Chances

Independent Space Vessel Daisy Love, in orbit above Centero III

From the moment Centero appeared as a muddy smear on the Long Range Scan through to the moment they dropped into orbit, Ortiz had a bad feeling about it. Bathed in the glowering light of an aged red dwarf star, Centero was old, sullen, its life-forms hidebound by countless millennia of reducing diversity and stagnation.

She didn’t want to be here.

The planet looked no better from low orbit than it had on the LRS, the smoggy haze of its atmosphere shrouding the pestilential mud-field which represented fully eighty per cent of the surface, the remainder being briny oceans so brown with minerals they were almost better described as soup.

Ortiz stared up at the image on the Ops Deck screen, sitting cross-legged on the floor while she carefully cleaned and re-oiled the joints on her powered armour.

She didn’t like the look of it at all.

She’d be the backstop on this mission, carrying the heavy armament in case anything went snaky. On the other side of the compartment, Livvy and Vonica had already laid out their lightweight forage suits, checked them carefully, and then left them to one side. The forage suit was designed for more flexibility and mobility than Ortiz’s armour, and it offered less protection as a result. But once this mission reached its critical phase, the two of them would run without even that scant covering.

Ortiz liked the thought of that even less than she liked the planet, even if she knew it was the most efficient way to get what they’d come for.

She glanced at her two companions.

Vonica was helping Livvy into the figure-hugging rubberised bodyglove containing all her biomonitors and environmental controls, working over her companion’s body with the easy intimacy of a lover, before standing back to admire the result.

You’ve cleaned that part three times now.

It took Ortiz a moment to realise Vonica had said the words out loud. She was so used to the three of them communicating using their nexus link, the cranial implants which allowed them to share their minds at the speed of thought, that the rare occasions one of them actually used her voice seemed almost quaint. Slow, like hand-writing a letter in an age of electronic communication.

She didn’t answer Vonica directly. But she put down the part in question, an elbow joint, and picked up the next piece, a connecting ring.

She started to wipe it with a cloth.

You’re worried, said Livvy, also out loud.

No I’m not, Ortiz replied abruptly, over the nexus link this time, and while that was probably truthful she knew she was not telling the whole story.

She wasn’t sure she knew the whole story.

Tactical View, she said out loud.

The image on the Ops screen shifted, swooping out to a simulated view from a vantage point several thousand kilometres above Centero’s north pole.

It looked no more inviting from this angle than it had from any other.

A tiny silver speck slowly orbited the disk of the planet, just above its equator.

Ortiz gestured and the view zoomed in, the sliver of silver rushing towards her until it filled the view.

The Daisy Love.

Their ship.

Their home.

She’d been a military vessel once, a Gadot-class protected corvette. A racer, a fierce hunter, a sharp-edged arrow of a ship, capable of taking on anything fast enough and foolish enough to attempt to catch her. For the first five years of her life she’d been a scout, probing ahead of the main fleet, her torpedo racks giving her sharper teeth than her size suggested and her jump drive allowing her to flee anything too big for those teeth to handle.

Then, almost as soon as her career had begun, a collision with a fuel carrier had ended it.

It wasn’t a big accident, but it had twisted her frame out of shape. She’d been deemed beyond economical repair and, stripped of her jump drive and her avionics and with her once-deadly torpedo racks plugged with cement, she’d been sent for scrap.

In the military, you didn’t usually get a second chance.

But it was easy to decide a ship wasn’t worth saving when you had shipyards that could easily build you as many replacements as you wanted. For a newly-discharged civilian like Ortiz, though, warships weren’t quite so easy to come by, and when she was starting up her independent outfit she’d been forced to look for a merchant vessel, something like a small passenger ship or a mixed-use freighter. By necessity, her choices were between something fast and fragile or something slow and tough, neither option with any genuine offensive capability. There was no possibility she’d be able to get a ship that could handle itself in a real fight.

But then.

When Ortiz had found the hulk, mouldering in a backwater of the Pallas breaker’s yard, the battered little corvette had still been cocooned in the tow-webbing they’d used to drag her clear of the accident that had ended her fighting career,