You have been long in the skies. You have passed near horrors.

You have scavenged things perhaps

You are on the bridge, checking your course home, with the increasingly useful aid of the Urchin. You
do not hear strange voices from outside the engine, and drowning them out is not why you talk loudly
about trifles with her. New Winchester is almost exactly at the Reach's center of mass, and so moves
little, but other objects can and do drift to block your path. You do not let your hand shake as you
compute their orbits forward from your most recent observation tables. You ask the Urchin again about
the beautiful flowers she saw in Traitor's Wood. You do not ask her about anything else she saw in
Traitor's Wood.

A crewman steps onto the bridge. He looks dazed, awed, compelled. You learnt that appearance well in
the first few weeks after you brought the Incognito Princess aboard. Later, you saw it less on other
faces, and felt better composed in her radiance: an acclimation, you thought, the building up of a
tolerance. But when she truly directs her will, that avails your crew little. You have very little trouble
with discipline now.

"Captain," he relays, "you will come to the First Officer's cabin."

Yes, of course, this is your engine and she is your subordinate; that is not in question. You choose to
allow her to order you about thus, because it makes her happy, and you'd never want to make her
unhappy. How could you?

"Thank you," you acknowledge. The Urchin looks strangely worried. You reassure her that you will not
encounter the orbits of any of these rocks until tomorrow. She does not look less worried. You reassure
her that you know that you, she, and the crew are afraid, but you've made this passage many times, and
there is no cause to believe anything will stop you from reaching New Winchester. She still does not
look less worried. You do not wish to keep the Princess waiting. You cut a sentence short and hurry into
the corridor.

You fix your gaze on the hatch which is your destination and stride towards it swiftly. There is nothing
behind you. Your boots clank on the deck. The steel plates of your locomotive are thick, and had they
been breached so as to allow the entry of anything from without, the air would already be unfit to
breathe. This reasoning is sufficient. To look behind you is not needful, and so you will not. You attend
to the sounds of your boots on the deck, and of your inhalations and exhalations of the thin chill air
which tastes of steel, oil, coke, and cold sky.

You reach the hatch to the Princess's quarters, and gently knock. Her footfalls within: a joyous patter of
crushing blows. The hatch is opened. She is incandescent. She is the first day of spring with blinding
sunshine. She cannot be described in languages less than celestial.

She is wearing her uniform. (The crew of your engine wear uniforms. The Princess joined you
equipped with her own: a blue coat, worn low on her shoulders, with shining epilauttes you believe are
pure gold, and trousers of impossible crispness and perfect fit. This uniform had clearly been made by
someone who had never exchanged one word with a skyfarer, yet somehow understood what a
skyfarer's uniform would be, should be, without all the sweaty toil and grimy disorder of actual
skyfaring. You had at one point vaguely entertained the notion of perhaps making a polite suggestion
that the word "uniform" implied uniformity, but to look at your other uniforms alongside hers was to
make them appear filthy, tattered rags unfit for a skylark, and you at once dropped the idea of her in
same.)

"I'm glad you're here!" she trills. "You'll come in, of course." You do, wondering whether the needful is
some emendation of her plans.

She is joyous, yet does she hasten to shut the hatch behind you? Does she twist the lock with such
undue force as to make the metal groan? Is there something else in her gaze than entitled innocence?
You have without thought turned to observe all this.

The Princess speaks. Even now, her words are perfectly true; her voice is truly perfect. She does not
distinguish in the slightest between normative, descriptive, and imperative.

"Recent events have been distressing. This should not affect me, but it does. I am slightly hysterical,
Captain."

She takes two steps forward.

"This is a serious matter; we lack the medical apparatus to treat this condition. I don't doubt your
engineers' engineering, but I won't risk using untested contrivances for this."

She steps forward again. She fills your vision. Her breath is a gentle, soothing breeze.

"You will obtain an equivalent result, with your lips, and tongue."

She takes your hand; her skin is impossibly soft and smooth; her grip is safely unbreakable. She leads
you to her bed and guides you to your knees before her.

Her use of the trousers is deferred, presently; the belt buckle thumps into her polar bear rug. Nothing is
worn underneath, save stockings. She places her fundament on the mattress's edge. She rests one foot
on the rug, and then the other, a pace apart.

Her thighs are as the rest of her: skin spotless, smooth, and soft, with not one pinhead's area otherwise.
Their shape is almost that of ideal youthful feminity to be loved and lusted for, and you could not say
why it would be otherwise, but there is something subtly incongrous (in how the muscles shift?); a
tiger's poise and beauty does not drive men to marry or impregnate it.

You feel all this in only an instant, for your gaze is rushed inexorcably to where those thighs meet, and
then there is only a knowledge...no...a color; a single glorious, shining hue that crashes through your
mind, and your body is joyous ache and hunger and without thought your knees crash to the deck and
your mouth is rushing into that wonder and its taste is all!

In such joy, your lips and tongue lick and suck and caress what you cannot see, every speck of your
mouth is too overcome with her liquored honey to feel the shape, but you need no guidance, no
thought, only this drive! She responds with unsteady breaths, but her stance is adamant. Your loins
already ache, helplessly responding. Your tongue shifts, and is inside something warm and soft and far
too right to be this wrong. She moans, and you nearly orgasm. Your lips thrill and twitch from her taste.

Some minutes pass like this, your every nerve committed utterly to the pleasing of her, your senses
filled with her light like a Neath sailor caught by the Sun. Your mind is burning.
She quivers violently. Her breath falters. And then a sound: an ordinary pleased squeal at first, but too
perfectly controlled, too steady, and it only becomes more so; it is a high, pure, note of the finest
orchestral quality, resonating from within her, but no sooner do you realize this than there is a
thrumming, buzzing undercurrent that makes your head swim and ears tingle, and then it is over before
you can make sense of that. She has actually slipped from her sitting position, catching herself on the
mattress on one elbow. Her breath is deep, but again steady.

"Oh, that was wonderful!"

For you, it was wonderful, marvelous, fantastic, glamorous, enchanting...terrific. But no one would
ever say it was "nice". She places a hand under your chin, raising your head tenderly.

"At first," she says, already poised again, "I only brought you here to aid with my distress. With that
done, though...I have desires! I haven't had an assignation in far too long; trustworthy lovers don't last,
and a princess musn't be seen to be wanton. But you will be discreet."

Your clothes come off. Her attire follows. She places you in her bed. She climbs atop you. You scream,
partly of joy.

You are outside the Princess's quarters.

There is no sense of lost time. You recollect every moment of those hours. You remember every
meeting of your lips and tongues, every grip that was stupefying pleasure and unheeded pain, every
moment of her enjoyment of you. You can still see her astride you, gleefully commanding you not to
breathe rather than troubling to choke you. Your mouth is still full of the rich nectar of her seat on your
face. Her voice flows through your mind, instructing you how to proceed after she pulled her legs up
and you came to be atop her. You can still feel the mind-erasing, soul-consuming ecstasy of every
petite mort which, you think now, increasingly seemed to approach réel mort.

Yet, somehow, you only now notice the crippling, burning ache which fills your legs, and has left you
prone on the deck, from being held in certain attitudes so long. You are only now aware of the torment
in the muscle of your tongue: alike in nature, yet somehow even worse. Your lips are beyond chapped;
the outer layers of them are simply dissolved. Your loins are utterly spent, and the agony there has
given way to numbness. Your mind feels as though holes were drilled through it. You are unbearably
thirsty; your throat feels full of sand, though that was as much due to all the screaming. Yes, you did
quite a lot of that, though you're not so certain why. The combined pain is indescribable!

Long minutes pass as you sprawl there, hearing the engine's steady chuff. It is painful to breathe. It is
pain to think. You can only dream of the pure cold cascades of the Regent's Tears. At last you make an
attempt at your pocket watch, only for what seems to be a single great bruise covering your torso and
arms to trigger what should have been a tortured screech but came out as only a dry rasp. After perhaps
several minutes insensate, you are roused by the engine's ringing bell (an adaptation of an akin naval
usage). This makes the pocket watch needless by informing you that it is now the subsequent morning.
You remain more poorly than you can ever recollect having been.

Fortuitously, it is customary for engine officers' cabins to be adjacent or nearly so. Having become
somewhat accustomed to the pain, you realize that your own skyborne abode is mere yards away. There
is a tap there, piped to the potable tank. You try again to move, and realize that something is terribly
wrong with your left hand, though you cannot say what, and recall the frequency with which her
fingers interlaced with yours.

Then you envision the night again, and let her effervescent and incandescent glory fill your thoughts,
and you can overcome the pain - again. You crawl over the steel but barely notice that. Your mind is
enraptured by her joy. She used you until she broke you, and that thought fills you with delight! You
were hers! You are hers! You made her happy, and more!

Beaming with recollection of her gasps of pleasure, you barely notice pain as you crawl to your cabin.
Your thoughts of her convulsions bring you across the cabin to the tap. You drink, and the stale,
metallic water is the best you've ever drunk, but it is still greatly inferior to the revisited taste of her
superhuman releases into your mouth. And you laugh aloud, remembering the sweetly, adorably
inhuman noises that came from her, as you reel to your bunk and crash into it.

Many times in the subsequent twelve hours, dreams wake you enough to laugh, cry, or scream,
particularly that last.

[Endnote: I was considering finding a way to work "simp" into the closing paragraphs in a play on its
modern versus older usage, but the older sense is not documented before 1903 which is well after
Failbetter's POD.]