This is a distant-future science fiction story. It involves a teenage boy and a young woman in her early twenties, and although no explicitly sexual relations are involved, there exists an element of erotic tension in the boy’s mind that is manifested physically in the story. There are also some off-screen F/f references.

Be forewarned: It is L – O – N – G. At more than 40,000 words, it is technically a novella-length piece.

Be forewarned: There is considerable emphasis on the science fiction aspects of the story. This story is an attempt to write in the spirit of a Robert Heinlein juvenile, perhaps the spanking novel RAH never got to write. The spanking action is widely spaced throughout the story, including entire chapters with no spanking action at all. If this is not your thing, do not bother going further.

You may distribute or archive this story without permission, as long as it is reproduced unaltered (well, grammatical corrections OK!) and in its entirety.

-= SYNOPSIS =-

Upon completing their program at the Starfarer’s school at age fifteen, exceptional students are selected to spend a year on a colony world, to see how they adapt to local culture. Nathaniel was the top of his Starfarer’s class, and was awarded his dream assignment to a colony world on the frontier of human-explored space. He will meet his greatest challenge, though, in the demands of the harsh, inhospitable colony world: Ocean…

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Ocean, Chapter 1: Tank (F/m-teen, Non-con, SF, Novella)

Nathaniel’s muscles burned with lactic acid. Each stroke of his arms and kick of his legs felt like it was the last before the fabric of his muscles was pulled from bone. His vision was starting to tunnel in, tinged by blackness on the edge. When he could not take another stroke, his head broke the surface and he gasp for breath, only to take in a mixture of brine and air. He coughed violently, gasp again–this time carefully synchronizing his gulps of air with the waves–and submerged. He pulled is arms, and kicked. In the murk ahead, he saw the faint lime-green luminescent outline of the platform. Four meters…Pull, kick…Two meters…Pull, kick. Touch. He burst through the surface and sucked in air savagely. He could care less how much water he inhaled now. He only cared about the chronometer display on the platform wall: 00:29:48.45.

“Goddamn,” came out of his mouth more as a cough than a word. “Goddamn,” he said again, this time to clarify.

“Need a hand?” Abby shouted down to him from the control mezzanine, but the artificially generated waves were already beginning to dissipate.

“I did it!”

“Yes, you did. Now, are you going to drown as an encore?”

“Nope,” he said up to Abby with a grin.

Nathaniel slipped low into the water, feeling its icy chill pull the heat away from his burning muscles. Then, in a strong kick, he launched himself toward, then up onto, the ladder. As he pulled himself up the ladder, he could feel the yoke of Ocean’s 1.42 Earth Standard Gravity returning, like a lead-lined lab coat.

He retrieved the towel he had carefully left for himself on the platform, and started up the next ladder to Abby’s control station for the Tank. He paused at the top to slowly turn his head and scan the interior of the dome that contained the Open Water Simulation Tank. Spotlights cast patches of illumination on the interior the dome.

“I did it,” he said more quietly this time, more for himself than to Abby.

“Yes, you did,” Abby echoed. “Not bad, kid, not bad,” she said with a wink and grin.

“Now I can make the ‘graphers.”

“Well, I would make sure you could repeat that performance, on demand.” Abby was always a check on Nathaniel’s enthusiasm.

“Yeah, yeah, but I did it. Once. If I can do it once, I can do it a thousand times. That’s how physics works.”

“Oh, it’s physics, is it?” Abby raised an eyebrow.

Abby was a grad student in kinesiology. She ran the Tank in the evening to support her thesis research. “This is the sixth night in a row you have been out here, right?”

“Yeah, I’ve been shaving off time every night, and I did not want to stop. I have this all plotted on my tablet, I can show you.”

“That’s alright, the proof is in the numbers,” she said with a nod toward the chronometer. “But how did you swing this in your schedule?”

“Oh, well, yeah I have been putting in a little overtime. But I scheduled the Tank time through the proper channels and all.”

“I know, but what does your Super think about you cheating your schedule? Who is he, anyway?”

“Uh, it’s ‘she.’ I’ve got Sarah, and she doesn’t know, doesn’t need to know.” Nathaniel knew Sarah would be distinctly unhappy about his regular late night cram sessions to complete his learning modules.

“Careful, Nat,” Abby chided. “On Ocean, everyone finds out everything.”

Not surprising, Nathaniel thought, given the colony population numbered only a few thousand inhabitants, spread out over a dozen inflatable platforms that comprised an artificial archipelago floating in a world-spanning ocean. The founders must have been a highly creative bunch, Nathaniel often mused, naming the world “Ocean,” officially replacing the Starfarer’s Register designation for the planet: HHW-2324.3.

“Well, let’s hope she doesn’t find out, because Sarah is a stickler for schedules,” Nathaniel said, continuing under his breath,”…like a lot of other people out here.”

She was indeed. When Nathaniel was assigned to Sarah, her first order of business in functioning as his Supervisor was to sit down with him and plan out a detailed schedule of his classroom hours, study period, chores around the hab, and so on. She was willing to accommodate his preferences for when he did what and where, as long as he did not skirt responsibilities and ensured a good night’s sleep.

Finishing off a last year of secondary school was emphatically not what Nathaniel had in mind when he shipped out to Ocean for his Year Out. He and his best friend Simon had graduated top of their class from the Starfarer’s School on Earth, and had the assignment of their choice. Ocean was among the farthest out of the colony worlds, way out on the rim of human-occupied space. The world in and of itself did not terribly interest him, but its proximity to the Frontier certainly did. A good performance here, and he was prime material for crew on the next deep space survey ship headed Outbound. A seat on the only ships that do real exploring: surveying promising Systems identified by the robotic precursors, first landings, first contact…all by the time he was seventeen years old!

But that would be two years in the future. For now, everything hinged on a good performance in his Year Out, the capstone for a brilliant career in the Starfarer’s School program. The Year Out was a chance to see how well students could perform field work: doing real science, coping with being away from home, adapting to local culture, customs, food, whatever. No problem, he and Simon thought.

Abby was waiting for an answer.

“Well, we can hope that Sarah does not find out about my Tank time, at least until am long off this rock…or drop, as the case may be,” Nathaniel swaggered as he looked out past the Tank through a section of dome material made from transparent sheet and gazed at the real Ocean.

“Not that this is a bad place, mind you,” he backpedaled as both of Abby’s eyebrows went up.

An enormous wave crashed against the barrier that separated Ocean from the artificial training Tank that could simulate the full spectrum of open-water conditions: from the usual bone-crunching waves, to the really serious, gale-force stuff.

Abby was not about to let an off-world juvenile disparage her home world.

“You get into the ‘graphers, you’ll get to find out what Ocean is all about. Swimming with Snarks.”

Graphers: Oceanographers. The only real job title worth having on Ocean. This was the title he was going to have to earn if his Year Out was going to go as planned.

Oceanographers, of course, were the individual researchers who studied Ocean, the world and its indigenous inhabitants. They took superalloy bathyscaphs to the bottom of ultra-deep trenches, trying to identify the bottom-feeders of the food chain. They coursed though through canyons in high-speed mini-subs, pursuing Krakens. And they swam with the Snarks, the 20-m-long carnivores that sat in a very well entrenched position on the top of Ocean’s food chain. Snarks were very, very smart sharks. Why did they need to be so smart, so fast, so big, though, if they had no natural predators? Why their elaborately evolved defense mechanisms–with which Oceanographers had became painfully acquainted from one nasty encounter after the other, sometimes with loss of life–if they lack predators? Why where Snarks so smart, so fast, so big, unless there was something else down there, something not yet seen? Questions you could spend a profitable year chasing, if you could qualify to be an Oceanographer.

“Well, right now, I’ve got to swim myself back to my hab and plunge into a module I’m only about halfway through, and I have a midterm exam tomorrow!” Nathaniel said as he toweled off his head and neck, more vigorously than he needed to–he was trying to warm up. The Tank was usually at 15 C, which was only representative of the maximum equatorial surface temperatures on Ocean during the orbital summer, but a more realistic temperature for simulating Ocean would have resulted in hypothermia in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.

“Ouch! Gonna be a late one for you too,” Abby said as she powered down the controls.

Nathaniel had begun to shiver uncontrollably and knew he had to get changed. He walked a few paces behind a translucent privacy screen, still well within earshot of Abby. He pealed off his skin suit and pulled the towel from side to side across his back and backside. He stepped out of the skinsuit, now a mound of wet, shear fabric at his feet.

“‘Burning the midnight oil,’ I think is the old Earth expression,” Abby said loudly, so Nathaniel could hear from behind the screen.

“Yeah,” Nathaniel replied as he jumped on one foot and tilted his head, trying to get the water out of his middle ear.

“Well, just remember that your academics and your Super’s evaluation count just as much as your Tank times in the application,” Abby hollered over the screen as she collected her research materials and stuffed them into her knapsack.

“Yeah, yeah,” Nat said, and slipped into his fleecy training suit. He collected his wet skinsuit from the floor and his tablet and stuffed them into his pack.

It was representative of Ocean’s collective ethic that, in order to qualify for the Oceanographers, you had to display a level of physical performance that would boarder on the extreme back on Earth. Never mind that, on a real Ocean expedition, you would be dead a half-dozen different ways if you wound up in the water without an environmental survival suit. Hypothermia, drowned under 5-m waves, eaten by a Snark. Never mind that most Oceanographers work in deep water where, if you found yourself in the water without an atmospheric-pressure suit, you would be loony from narcosis, and even if you could make your way to the surface, your blood would boil with dissolved nitrogen. Never mind. Ocean was a tough world, and demanded tough inhabitants. And the ‘graphers where the sturdiest of the bunch.

As with every colony world, the local color could always be traced back to the founders. The consortium that funded the original Ocean colonizing expedition had adopted some credo that was probably trendy at the time–this was five decades ago, before Nat’s parents were born–which basically boiled down to the tired mantra that “technology had made humanity weak,” and that a full spectrum of mental and physical challenges were necessary to keep us fully human. This was reflected in the culture and customs on Ocean in so many ways that Nathaniel could pass a boring lecture by just trying to catalogue them. The lectures themselves, for example, were a completely outdated mode of education on Earth, having long been replaced by individual sims that worked simultaneously on various levels of conscious and subconscious information processing. But not on Ocean; classes were taught with a teacher at a board in front of a room of students. No jack-in sims, not even full sensory holographic projections. Nothing. Just a teacher and stylus at a board, reasoning everything out from scratch. Quaint. Of course, the lectures were recorded and could be fully accessed afterward. Nathaniel rarely needed to, however, because he had mastered most of the course material before he ever shipped out from Starfarer’s School. The only topics he was weak on, understandably, were the details of Ocean’s exquisitely balanced ecology, which was the subject of tomorrow’s quiz, and tonight’s independent study module. By Nathaniel assessment, the study modules were, of course, obscenely low-tech, with large portions of just pure text!

As he an Abby parted ways and he headed back to his residence habitat, he recollected again just how badly things had gone for him since he and Simon had arrived. They jumped into the Ocean System and then dropped down from orbit with a routine supply shipment, presenting themselves to the colony Administration with great aplomb. The new wonder-boys from the School had arrived! And with perfect timing, the colony assistant director had informed them. They were just in time for the quarterly tryouts for the Oceanographers, which was, of course, the assignment they came to Ocean to accept. It was just a matter of reviewing their course transcripts–flawless–a physical exam–flawless–a checkout on standard control equipment–Simon and Nathaniel would have passed this exam when they were eight years old–and an Ocean open-water certification test. Should not be a problem, Nat recalled thinking. He was a good swimmer and fully checked out on shallow water diving techniques. But when he saw the Tank for the first time, his stomach lurched. Doing 1500 m in 30 standard minutes should not be a problem, he thought, but in 1-2 m white-capped waves was another matter entirely. They had only scant days to practice before the tryouts, and neither Simon nor Nathaniel were making the mark. Hopefully the pressure of the real tryout would push them to peak performance.

On the day of the tryout, they both started out strong, but after inhaling what felt like three consecutive lung-fulls of icy saltwater, Nathaniel went into a near seizure that made the lifeguards–one of whom was Abby–consider pulling him out. Simon, however, performed brilliantly, only missing the target time by about 20 seconds. Given he was still “slagged” after traveling 230 light-years, the admissions panel decided that coming in only 20 seconds off target was acceptable. Nathaniel did finish the course. In 00:34:05.23. Sorry, kid, but tryout again next quarter.

Simon shipped out the next day to the research vessel “Shakelton” in the South Polar Regions.

On the same day, Nathaniel showed up for school, tablet and stylus in hand.

The idea was that Nathaniel would spend the next quarter year brushing up on the local ecology by completing the last term of the normal secondary school program. In principle, he would fit right in, since he was the same age, in standard years, as the Ocean kids in his class. Then, provided he could pull his butt though the Tank in under thirty minutes, he would be off to join Simon doing fieldwork and then bring his friend up to speed on what he had learned.

He was assigned a Supervisor, a “Super,” just like most of the other kids on Ocean. Like all colony worlds, most children on Ocean were born ex-utero, so the fact that Nathaniel was there without his parents did not make him unique. Once kids reached twelve or thirteen standard years, they were weaned away from the nannies and the nursery, and expected to live up to the responsibilities of adulthood. The best way to do that was to pair kids up with a young adult that would simply set a roll model. The Supervisor, as he understood it, was more like a big brother or sister than a parent or guardian. They were only five to seven years older than the kids they supervised, and they were supposed to identify with you, to be sympathetic. Follow in your Super’s footsteps, and by the time you were sixteen or seventeen, you were a full citizen and out on your own. This was how colony worlds worked; you grew up fast.

As he boarded the cable car that took him from the Tank back to his habitat, he thought about Sarah, the Supervisor he had been assigned to. She was probably twenty-two or twenty three, and just starting postgraduate studying in Engine Mechanics. Nathaniel could appreciate the demands that would make on her time. He knew his own mastery of Quantum Gravatonics would not come until he had long, lonely years between the stars to devote to intensive and uninterrupted study. But for now, he had to get that seat on a Ship heading Outbound. Learning QG would come later…

He tossed his bag in one corner of the cable car and plopped into the low couch in the other corner. No one else was in the car, he was delighted to see, so he could spend the five minute ride home the way he liked to: with his face plastered to the window like a tourist. He cupped a hand over his forehead to block out the single dull light in the car, and stared out over the vast, unending ocean. Ink black water leapt up toward the cable car, bursting into a spray at wave’s peak and, occasionally, misting the window for a few seconds before the shrieking wind striped the drops away. The car occasionally rocked as the winds shifted, but it mostly kept a constant list of about twenty degrees. Already in his short stay on Ocean, Nathaniel had seen the entire cable car transport system between the various habitats shut down twice due to inclement weather. Surely, Nathaniel thought, they could come up with a more reliable means to move the few kilometers between the floating habs, but the exact solution escaped his exhausted mind. He thought he had better de-focus for these few minutes, in light of the long night of study ahead of him.

The grind and bump of the cable car hitting the station jolted him out of his light reprieve. “Time to get to work,” Nathaniel thought. The corridor leading to Sarah’s apartment was empty–the hab really had no nightlife, nothing like the dorms back at Starfarer’s. Nathaniel slowly opened the door and cautiously listened for any sound of activity. Delighted, Nathaniel concluded that Sarah was not yet home, and could discreetly dispose of the wet skinsuit and towel without having to hide them until later. For now, he tossed them out of his bag into his bedroom, and headed for the shower. The alkaline crust left behind by the Ocean water was starting to itch.

“Ok, a few more minutes of mental vegetation, then gotta hit the mod,” Nathaniel thought as he stepped out of his fleece trainer and into the shower in one continuous movement. The scalding hot shower felt wonderful, as he never really warmed up on his own after a swim.

After five minutes in the shower, he turned off the tap and retrieved a bath towel. For the second time in the space of a half an hour, he vigorously rubbed himself down. As he opened the bathroom door, he noticed additional lights in the living room had been turned on.

He did not see Sarah until he turned to go into his bedroom. She was standing in the doorway to his room, with his wet skinsuit in one hand, wet towel in the other.

“Uh oh,” Nathaniel said to himself. “Not good,” he muttered under his breath, cursing himself for not disposing of the suit and towel as soon as he got home.

“Nat, I thought you were explicitly instructed not to train in the Tank until you were done with this week’s module.” Sarah was looking back and forth at the suit and towel before setting her dark brown eyes on him. Her dark hair was matted against her forehead. She had probably spend the day slumped over her lab equipment, Nathaniel concluded.

“Uh, yeah, but I can finish the mod tonight. No problem for the quiz tomorrow.” Nathaniel tried to sound confidently nonchalant. Sarah gave him a long look, and slowly turned her head as her eyebrows raised a notch.

Nathaniel slipped past Sarah as she walked out of his room to the laundry station with his suit and towel in hand. He pulled his bedroom door shut and went to his closet. He replaced the bath towel around his waist with pajama bottoms. He did not use the pajama tops, but instead just pulled on a clean t-shirt as Sarah gently reopened the door into his bedroom without knocking. Nathaniel was glad he had dressed quickly.

“But it is already 22h now, Nat. ‘Tonight’ is only two more hours,” she said.

Sarah was not unreasonable about curfew, but she did expect “lights out” by midnight, and had patiently explained her reasons to Nathaniel. Sarah had been convinced by the mountain of studies suggesting that adolescents who get any less than eight hours of sleep per night were just compromising their heath and ability to concentrate, and were not gaining a moment of “extra” time by cheating on sleep. The fact that Ocean had a 22 standard hour day meant that midnight to 7h local time was really only six and a half hours of sleep. “You can train all you want but you are never going to make the Oceanographer’s team if you make yourself sick from sleep depravation,” her usual explanation went. Given the exasperation evident on her face, Nathaniel figured he was in for the same lecture tonight.

“It will be OK…seriously. I can catch up on my rest over the Break. I got all the way through school pulling all-nighters.” Nathaniel was trying every tact he could to allay Sarah’s displeasure.

“Not here you are, young man.” Sarah clearly was not going to be put off.

“Look, I’ll finish the module in a couple hours and then be in bed by midnight. A quick review in the morning and I’ll be ‘Good to go’ for the quiz.”

Sarah ignored his protest and picked up his tablet from the small desk in his bedroom. She inspected the vertical bar graphs in the lower left corner of the display, the performance indicators from his learning module. Nathaniel looked down, as if studying the pattern of carpet at his feet, knowing he had a good six to eight hours of work ahead of him.

“Yeah, it is going to be a late one,” he thought, but he had made the qualification time! Nothing else mattered now!

Sarah looked up from his tablet and locked his eyes with a cold stare.

“Nathaniel, there is no way you are going to be competent for the quiz after a few more hours of work. No, I don’t think you will be writing the exam tomorrow.”

Nathaniel took a moment to register.

“But…I have to!” he stuttered.

“No, I’m going to explain to Elizabeth that you procrastinated finishing your module until it was too late, and that you will come in to write it over the Break…”

Nathaniel was having a hard time processing what she was saying. He just made the qualification time for the 1500 m Open Water Certification, and now Sarah was going to compromise his academic standing. “How could she?” he thought.

“Oh, Sarah, please,” Nathaniel cut in. “We were going to visit Simon for the Break. Look, I promise you I will pass the exam tomorrow.”

“Nathaniel, do not interrupt me,” Sarah said with an icy calm. “I was saying that I’ll explain to Elizabeth that you have, ah, confused your priorities, that you were punished for it, and will write the quiz over the Break.”

“Sarah, if you want to punish me by taking away my vacation, then I’ll accept that. But I need a good recommendation from Elizabeth for the next round of applications to the ‘graphers. I don’t see how missing the exam is going to give her good material to write about!”

“Nathaniel, I am not going to take your Break away as punishment. You should know I wouldn’t do that, not ever. But you do know that violating a direct instruction that impacts your safety or health is going to have to be punished.”

“Look, Sarah,” Nathaniel said, changing topic and tactics, “I didn’t want to tell you this because I knew you wouldn’t be happy about my training in the Tank tonight. But…I made the time for the 1500 m! In under 30 minutes! And with time to spare! I can qualify for the Oceanographers!”

“Nathaniel, you aren’t listening to me, are you? Come over here.”

Nathaniel padded in his bare feet over were she was standing by the foot of his bed. She placed his tablet carefully back down on the desk.

“I know you were made familiar with the rules and regulations of Ocean before you shipped out here, so you know that we regard violating rules or procedures that threaten safety and health as grounds–as the only grounds–upon which the supervisory caretaker adults have the right to discipline minors.”

Nathaniel was somewhat familiar with the views of Ocean’s founders on the rights of children and minors. He completed a module on children’s rights on colony worlds back at Starfarer’s School before he shipped out. Nathaniel liked the idea: basically, kids can do whatever the hell they want, as long as they do not push their playmates into the Snark tank, go joy-riding in a supercavitating minisub without proper training, and so on. Since the only challenge–or fun, for that matter–on the whole planet was swimming with Snarks and flying supersonic submarines, kids had plenty of incentive to master the scientific and technical skills necessary to be certified for these activities. That was the “carrot”; making sure they did not hurt themselves or anyone else in the process was the only thing that required the “stick.”

“Sarah, I am sorry I skipped out and went to the Tank tonight, and it is going to cost me a good night’s sleep, but I really do not think that that constitutes a threat to my health or safety. I was fully supervised in the Tank. You can ask Abby, she was on lifeguard duty tonight.” Nathaniel tried to sound firm.

“Well, we view things differently here. Setting your schedule for academics, training, your chores, and so on takes into account models for optimal learning. But this is carefully tuned not to compromise your health, and getting an average 8.5 hours of sleep a night is part of it. You didn’t just skip out to the Tank tonight; you have been doing this for a while, if I’m not mistaken. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have been cheating on your sleep schedule every night this term. We talked about this before, and tonight it is going to stop.”

With that, she took Nathaniel’s wrists in her hands and started pulling him slowly toward her as she sat down on the end corner of the bed.

“I guess you know what the punishment is, Nat, and you have only yourself to blame for this.”

Actually, Nathaniel did not really know what the punishment was. He had overheard some of the younger kids in a lower class talk about a classmate who got “the paddle” for some infraction, and Nathaniel concluded that this was probably just another of those quaint traditions that typify so many remote colony worlds. His own classmates had been much too well behaved and mature to ever give him the opportunity to see how punishment was meddled out to adolescents his age.

“Uh, Sarah, please,” Nat look as earnestly into her eyes as he could. “What are you doing?”

With a jerk on his wrists, she had pulled him onto her lap, and her hand released him only momentary as her grip shifted to his waist, pulling him further forward. He began to pull back, but his strength was not match to Sarah’s muscles that were adapted to Ocean; she had spent a lifetime working against gravity that was forty percent stronger than he was used to. Nathaniel did not have a chance.

“I’m giving you a spanking.”

By this time, he was completely over her lap and was pushing up from the bedspread, but she was using the elbow of her left arm to force the spine between his should blades down. Her hands were still on his hips, pulling him further across her thighs.

“You have got to be kidding!”

“Nat, I though you’d have figured out how we punish kids here.”

“Yeah, but I’m 15 standard years!”

“Which is still a minor here, and you will remain a minor for another year and a half, local time.”

Nathaniel began in earnest to push away, not just to keep his face off the bed coverings, but to get up, get away. Sarah’s left arm locked down on his torso, while her right hand slid down his leg to the back of his right knee, gripping him tight and pulling his right leg in toward her. His knees slid up, onto the bed, but his bare feet dangled out into free space. The action of both her arms pulling in had the effect of forcing his backside up and over her thighs, and up high into the air. He suddenly felt very, very vulnerable.

“I’m going to get punished like, like a five year old, because I might need to say up for a few extra hours to finish an assignment? Come on! Please, just let me up!” Nathaniel implored.

“No, you are getting a spanking,” Sarah put an emphasis on the word, “a spanking for consistently neglecting to take your schedule, the schedule you designed and agreed to, seriously. You know, I’ve read Elizabeth’s progress report where she caught you sleeping through a lab orientation session.”

“Damn!” Nathaniel had not thought anyone had noticed when he nodded off during a lecture on lab equipment he was proficient at using since he was ten years old?

“And I personally recall you snoozing through the Founder’s Day ceremonies.”

“Ouch,” he thought.

“Sarah,” Nathaniel said with desperation in his voice and twist and squirm of his hips, “I am terribly sorry about that, I did not mean any disrespect to you or your world’s traditions.” Nathaniel was so glad he had memorized that “excuse all” phrase that was suggested in his Interactive Anthropology course. Could get yourself out of a lot of sticky situations with that one, his instructor advised. “Hope it works here…” Nathaniel thought.

“I could care less about that interminably boring ceremony, but you are threatening your own health by sneaking out on your schedule like this, and now you are going to be taught that this is unacceptable behavior.”

With that, Sarah brought her upper left arm down on Nathaniel’s shoulder blades so her forearm could run down his right side and grasp his upper thigh. This put her mouth only centimeters from his ear. Her voice dropped.

“For future reference, you should be aware that a boy your age usually gets a paddling, usually with a ruler if at school or with a slipper or hairbrush if at home. But, since you are Earth born ‘n raised, I’m going to assume this is your first time over someone’s knee, correct?”

“Huh?” Nat was frantically thinking about how to get away, but he realized the Sarah had him truly and well pinned. His strength was no match for her Ocean-adapted muscles. He did not want to humiliate himself further in struggle unless he was sure he had a chance of escape.

“You have never been spanked before, right?”

“No, of course not!” Nathaniel gasped. “I don’t even think this is legal on Earth!”

“Right. So, I am going to give you, well, a gradual education, like the rest of your phase-in period. I’m just going to use my hand, like we do for younger boys.”

“Oh, no, please…” Nathaniel could not believe what he was hearing. This could not be a common occurrence; it must be some initiation or practical joke, which he felt he could probably put up with in the spirit of some quaint, out-would rite-of-passage. Just this one time…

Sarah’s right arm let up on his right leg, but he did not think that regained freedom would gain him anything. Her left arm still had him pinned. She used the free hand to pull up his t-shirt above his hips, and then grabbed the waistband of his pajama bottoms, pulling them a few centimeters away from his back.

“Now, the other thing is these,” she emphasized with a tug on his waistband, “these usually come down,” Sarah was whispering now.

“Oh, god, no…”

“But, again, I’m going to go easy on you this time. Do not count on this courtesy again.”

But she did tug his waistband, not down, but up so that his pajamas rode up high and tight around his bottom, outlining the curve between his cheeks. Sarah righted herself, but kept her left arm locked into his right flank.

His face was buried in the bed covering by now, with his arms stretched out in front of him, dangling over the foot of the bed. He pulled his elbows in to his chest, which permitted him to twist his head around just enough to see her right arm raised high up in the air. She was completely fixated on his backside, which, as he twisted his head further, he could see raising above the bunched-up hem of his t-shirt. It looked as if she did not even know, or care, that he was looking right at her. He felt her lift her knees slightly, causing his bottom to rise almost imperceptibly higher into the air. Then, in a streak, her open-palmed, closed-fingered hand came down and connected with his bottom.

“Smack!” resonated through the small bedroom.

Nathaniel felt the force of the blow push him forward, which twisted his already twisted neck further. Deciding that was not a good position in which to take his first spanking, he snapped his head around to look straight ahead again. He then turned his attention to his bottom, wondering why he didn’t feel anything. “It doesn’t hurt!” Nathaniel thought triumphantly to himself, “I can ride this out.”

“Smack!”

“Oh!” Nathaniel felt the air exhale involuntarily form his lungs. Sarah altered her hold slightly, and he felt himself shift across her lap as a soft, warm glow started to register where her hand had landed. Seizing the moment, Nathaniel garbled through the bedspread, “Sarah, please…”

“Smack!” cut his plea off mid-syllable.

…and that one he felt. The warmth was growing. He pulled his elbows in even tighter and nuzzled his face down into the bed covering, which was becoming a furrowed disarray of fabric.

“Smack!”

Now, with his eyes closed and his arms cocooned in as tight as he could, Nathaniel could focus fully on his backside, which was really feeling warm now as Sarah shifted his position again. It was like a liquid warmth, slowly seeping down, toward his thighs and up, toward the small of his back, and also in toward the crevice between his cheeks. For a moment, the hyperawareness of the area between his checks made him flush with embarrassment…

“Smack!”

…but the next blow snapped his attention back to the merciful fact that his pajama bottoms were still on. The warmth was spreading in another direction, around his hips, into his loins.

“Smack!”

By now, he had figured out her pattern: two spanks to one cheek, followed by two spanks to the other. He could feel her shift her upper body after every other blow, apparently so that she could line up on the other cheek.

“Smack!”

“Oh,” Nathaniel murmured. The burn in each check centered right on the sit-spot, exactly where her palm was landing with every blow. It felt like stinging-hot needles poking at every pore of skin, and a dull, diffuse pain sinking in deeper from those individual points.

“Smack!”

The blows really hurt now, not at all like the first one. When her hand connected, it was like all the pain receptors fired off-scale, simultaneously, only to return to an ever-increasing baseline of burning pain.

“Smack!”

“Oh, god,” Nat moaned into the bed, while his thoughts crazed around the inside of his head wondering how much more of this he could take. His butt felt like it was ablaze, and the burn had spread up is back and down to his mid-thighs, into the recesses of the tender fold between his cheeks, and then around to his groin, into his member pressed into the folds between her thighs. He had to risk a look: he pushed his elbows down into the bed so that he could again twist his head around, just in time to catch…

“Smack!”

Nat was in awe of how Sarah’s hand literally bounced off his raised bottom, as if all the force of the blow as momentary stored in his compressed butt check, and then returned to her hand as it rebounded off.

“Smack!”

Nat involuntarily bucked his hips upward after that one, and started to roll onto his right leg as…

“Smack!” That one came fast, followed by…

“Smack!”

“Be still!” Sarah barked. It was the first thing she said since his spanking began. Her arm clamped down even tighter, like a vise. His hips bucked up again, even higher, and he felt himself lift off her lap. He could feel his pajamas stick to his groin as he lifted off; he was aware of a moist heat between himself and Sarah’s thighs.

“Smack!”

“Oh…” That one was hard. So hard it forced his hips back down onto her lap, so hard his pain receptors did not feel like they were going to reset. In a reflexive action, his right hand shot back in an instant and cupped his butt cheek, desperately trying to pull the ceaseless heat away.

“Nat!” Sarah said, as if truly shocked. She easily pulled his hand away and pinned it against his hip, where her left hand had been all along.

“Nathaniel, what are you doing? You only had one more to go!”

“What?” he blurted into the bed covers.

“That was 14. Only one more to go and you covered yourself!” Sarah sighed, signaling complete exasperation. “Now we are supposed to start over!”

“I’m sorry, but it hurts like…”

“Good!” she cut him off. “But you are not supposed to interfere with your own spanking! Now, well…”

Sarah cut herself off mid-sentence, and then…

“Smack! Smack!” came extraordinarily hard and fast, in quick secession. Nathaniel felt his eyes burn now, burn with tears welling up and over. He could feel the blows resound through his whole body, while his backside was a sea of continuous blaze. He resigned himself and fell completely limp over her lap.

“There,” Sarah said with a sense of finality, “Now you can rub yourself to your heart’s content.”

Nathaniel, who had again buried his head into the covers, hoping they would absorb the tears now trickling from the corner of his eyes and the fluid running from his nose, lifted his head. “What?”

“I’m done. That was your fifteen.” Sarah, for the first time broke her concentration on his bottom, and turned to face him as her grip relaxed.

“You really have no idea, do you?”

“About what?” Nathaniel said through tears and bubbles of mucous in his nose; he was now the one fully exasperated. How could she still be scolding him?

“About spankings! The number of spanks you get is equal to your age!”

Nathaniel, listening though the unabated glow of sting emanating from his posterior, was trying to register the fact that there were apparently rules, regulations, associated with the barbaric practice that he had just endured.

“But don’t ever put your hand in the way again! We are supposed to start over, start over at ‘one’ if you do that, or squirm out of position, or if ‘thou doth protest too much.’ Well, we’ll just pretend it didn’t happen this time,” Sarah said, as she waved her right hand in the air, as if to fan herself. Nathaniel could not believe the change in her attitude, now almost light and breezy.

“I can’t go on tonight,” she said and rubbed her palm. Nathaniel for the first time realized that her hand ought to be burning as bad as his bottom, governed by some kind of equal-and-opposite conservation of heat. “But the next time you find yourself in this position and I or whoever else is wielding a ruler or a slipper or a brush, you are not going to be so lucky. So don’t do it again!”

Nathaniel resolved to heed this instruction, whatever it meant; he was feeling as though he was an open vessel and anyone could pour whatever regulation into him that they chose. He pulled his knees in and propped himself up on elbows and then onto his hands. He was not in a state to question or protest anything. He looked down to see his pajamas glued with perspiration to his groin where he was held over her hips. She grabbed him under his armpits and lifted him back, so as he kneeled at the edge of the bed his bottom came down to rest on the soles of his upturned feet. The cool of his feet mingled with the burn of his backside. The chill felt good, but the pressure made the sharpness of the pain more acute. He shifted his weight on and off of his feet in the kneeling position, trying to find a minimum of discomfort. With the boy now off her lap, Sarah stood up and was straightening her jumpsuit and fixing her hair, between fits of again fanning her hand.

“Whew!” she said, followed by a long blow through the lips. “Alright, you: To bed!”

She took two steps to the head of the bed and pulled back the covers, pointing to the pillow.

Nathaniel followed her instructions unthinkingly, crawling on all fours to the head of the bed, where he gently lowered himself down on his side.

She pulled the covers up and over him. He was thankful for the covering, not because he was cold; in fact, he licked a perspiration mustache off his upper lip and wiped sweat-streaked hair from his forehead. But he was thankful for the covers so he could bring his hand to his bottom and try again to rub away the heat without Sarah seeing. Of course, she would figure out what he was doing if she looked, but Sarah was busying herself with squaring away his study materials and turning out the desk light. As he saw her make for the door and reached for the main light panel, Nathaniel spoke for the first time since climbing off her lap.

“But what about the module?”

Her eyes fired back at him. She had instantly reverted to her pre-spanking sternness.

“Nathaniel, you really don’t want to take a second trip over my knee tonight, do you?”

“No! It’s just, that, well…” His eyes made to the clock. 22h11. Had it only been ten minutes since he stepped out of the shower? He felt like he had regressed ten years!

“It’s only just after 22h, and I could still get a lot of work done…”

“Nathaniel, you will not be doing any more studying tonight. You will be getting your full eight and a half hours of sleep. And tomorrow, we are going to go to Elizabeth and explain what happened, and explain why you will be writing the quiz over the Break. You may then resume your studies. Understand?”

“Yeah, uh, yes.” Nathaniel now wished that she would just turn off the damn light, so he could resume rubbing his tender bottom. But he looked down, away from Sarah’s dark brown, disapproving eyes.

“Anything else?”

“Well,” Nathaniel really wondered why he was pushing his luck, “Do we have to tell Elizabeth everything that happened? I mean, you know, about this?”

“She will be informed that you were punished for violating your schedule by cheating on your sleep. Trust me, she is well aware of what ‘punishment’ involves, as she will very likely have the opportunity to demonstrate to you in the near future.”

Sarah paused to let that sink in.

“One other thing: if you would really prefer not to have a repeat performance happen on an increasingly regular basis, I would suggest that you do not ever dispute any aspect of your punishment again, or else you will just guarantee yourself more of the same!”

With that, Sarah turned out the light and closed the door, all in one movement.

Nathaniel continued rubbing, back and forth between both cheeks, until resigning himself that it did absolutely no good. He rolled over onto his stomach and stretched out his legs as long as he could while pulling his arms in. He felt for a minute like he was going to break into tears again, so he buried his face into the pillow.

He really did not know what to think, other than to resign himself to a flood of humiliating emotions. But the thoughts were momentary and he always returned to his throbbing backside. As long as the material of his pajama bottoms did not rub against the flesh of his buttocks, he could almost convince himself that the pain was not there. But the warmth was always present, and it was still oozing round his hips and into his groin. In fact, he felt almost warmer there than he did in back. His pajamas still felt moist, stuck to his inner thighs. He figured he must have really worked up quite a sweat as he squirmed against her lap during his initial struggles and his final, desperate kicks to escape the hail of smacks her hand had rained down on his bottom.

He was thinking about being pressed deeper and deeper into her thighs as he drifted off into a very light sleep. He snapped back to full consciousness once or twice, and was tempted to think of the final lap time on the chronometer display in the Tank: 00:29:47. But instead he drifted back to the damp heat in his bottom, and then into a deeper sleep.

Ocean, Chapter 2: School (F/m-teen, Non-con, F/f Off-screen, SF, Novella)

Nathaniel’s chronometer chimed at 7h00 the next morning.

“Goddamn,” he said. “I’ve been asleep for almost nine hours!” Then his mind slowly replayed the events of the prior evening, and he felt his face flush with embarrassment. For a moment, he toyed with the idea that perhaps it was a bad dream–certainly the embarrassment of what happened was in the same vein as his recently reoccurring “Showing up to class, then realizing you’re naked” dream. But, as his hand reached around to massage his buttocks, the dull throb he felt was no hallucination.

Nathaniel quickly undressed and showered, then put on his usual school clothes: trousers and a tunic pulled over his undershirt. The style was not unlike he would have worn to class back on Earth, but the fabric was thin and made of a flax-like synthetic fiber. He assumed this was due to the ever-present humidity in the habs. The denizens of Ocean had no problem heating their habitats comfortably, but excess humidity would always be a problem. The thin, highly breathable fabric use for clothing was almost certainly concession to the fact that it was unlikely that the inherent dampness of living on an ocean world would ever be eliminated.

Sarah was already up and making breakfast as he came out of his room. He was dreading seeing her, fearing a continued lecture from the night before, or worse. Instead, she was polite but not particularly talkative. See was already showered and her dark hair, still damp, was pulled back from her ears. She seemed preoccupied with time as she served and then ate her breakfast.

After he commented on the good breakfast and made a few comments about the morning’s news vid, Sarah got up and started clearing the table.

“Look, Nat, I’ve got a lot of things to get done this morning, so I want to get going. We can catch Elizabeth before her first class.”

“Oh,” Nathaniel said awkwardly. “If you are really pressed for time, I can explain to Elizabeth why I can’t write the exam today.”

Sarah gave Nathaniel a cold look, and then removed his plate from in front of him, even though he was still picking at a few unfinished items.

“Get you things and let’s go,” Sarah said coolly.

Nathaniel went in the bathroom and ran the ultrasonic around the inside of his mouth, and then retrieved his tablet from his bedroom. Sarah was waiting at the door, with her own tablet in a stylish sling that was thrown over one shoulder. Nathaniel felt his stomach start to knot.

Sarah and Nathaniel walked hurriedly to the cable car terminus and did not exchange a word during the one-minute ride to the hab that housed the school. Nathaniel felt the knot in his stomach twist as they walked down the corridor to Elizabeth’s office. Two quick knocks and Sarah opened the door.

“Why, Sarah!” Elizabeth looked up from her tablet, which was resting on an easel on her desk. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked with a warm grin. Sarah walked in with Nathaniel in tow. Nathaniel met his teacher’s eye, and Elizabeth’s expression turned to curiosity.

Nathaniel liked his homeroom teacher, who also served as his academic counselor. Since he had already mastered much of the course work for the term back at Starfarer’s, he was fortunate to have such an enthusiastic instructor for Mathematical Ecology, which being predominately Ocean-based case studies, was his most challenging course. Her style was informal and conversational, and she always welcomed Nathaniel’s questions, even if filling in the gaping holes in his background resulted in extended deviations from her planned syllabus. She was probably Sarah’s age or at most a year or two older. Her long, blond hair usually spilled down over her shoulders, but this morning it was pulled back in an elastic. He had never been in her office before. He was surprised to see how messy her desk was, given her fastidious lecture style and meticulous notes.

“Hi Liz,” Sarah said in a business like tone. “I am really sorry to disturb your lecture prep, but I felt this should be dealt with in person, and this is the only time I have free today.”

“No problem. What’s up?”

“Well, I’m Nathaniel’s Super, I guess you know. He has been having difficulty keeping to his schedule, which I also guess you know, judging from your comments on his progress report. This issue came to a head last night when I discovered that he was not even halfway through a module he was to be tested on today. Apparently, he had been making a habit of this behavior, putting off his modules until the night before an exam.”

Elizabeth’s eyes, clearly showing her concern, turned to Nathaniel, then returned to Sarah.

“I had no idea he was having such difficulty with the material…”

“I don’t think it was the material, so much as his lack of discipline in sticking to his agreed schedule. He had been skipping out, without my permission, to the Tank to train for his Open Ocean Certification, then staying up late to finish his studies. His schedule had specified ‘lights-out’ at midnight…”

“I see,” Elizabeth said with a nod.

“Well, I have put a stop to this,” Sarah said firmly, with a glance to Nathaniel. “But as part of getting him back on track, Nathaniel was not permitted to say up past 22h00 last night. He will not be able to write the exam today.”

“I see indeed. I can imagine what the other part of his punishment included…” Elizabeth’s voice trailed off.

“Liz, I am really sorry about this, as I know putting together a make-up exam is a lot of work. Trust me, I know this; I work as a TA part time.”

“No, no problem at all. You were quite right to knock this nonsense off,” Elizabeth said. Inside, he fumed at being talked about in the third person, while he was standing right in front of them.

Nathaniel just stood, arms pressed to his side, trying to occupy as little space as possible.

“Ok, then, that’s it. I’ll see that he is ready to write the exam in a couple of days, hopefully before the Break. Again, sorry for the inconvenience.” Sarah stiffened, preparing to leave.

“No, no! Thanks for bringing this to my attention,” Elizabeth said, and then turned her attention to Nathaniel. He wilted under her gaze, and he turned awkwardly to see Sarah exiting the same door they had entered, only a moment earlier. Sarah had not said a word to him since they left their hab.

“Well now, Nathaniel,” Elizabeth said as if he had just walked in. She paused to collect her thoughts. He started to wither, his shoulders hunching in and his forehead lowering.

“Nathaniel, I’m not going to lecture you,” Elizabeth continued, as the door closed behind Sarah. “Breaking your schedule is a matter for your Supervisor, not me. I am confident Sarah has already reprimanded you sufficiently for this. I am just going to reiterate that we take students adhering to their agreed schedules as being central to your developing maturity. Schedules are designed with your health and well-being in mind, and infractions are not dealt with lightly, as I presume you have discovered.” Elizabeth paused to permit Nathaniel to reflect on what she said and then continued.

“What I am more concerned about is if you were having difficulty finishing a module and did not come to see me about it. You know I expect you to immediately speak to me as soon as you fall behind, for whatever reason.”

Nathaniel finally summoned the courage to speak. “Well, I really was not having any particular difficulty; I just needed to hunker down for a few hours and I could have finished it off. I could still write the exam this afternoon, if I could just have a few hours…”

“Nathaniel, I’m going to cut you off right there. Sarah said you were halfway through the module, and these modules are designed for approximately twenty hours of study for a student at your level. I cannot imagine what you have been putting yourself through to finish these things off in a single night, but it certainly does explain a lot of your other behavior lately! I seem to recall you nodding off during the Founder’s Day ceremony, which was the afternoon of our last exam, if I recall correctly…”

“Shit!” he thought, but instead replied with: “Ma’am, please, I can get this done!”

“Enough, Nathaniel, enough.” Elizabeth was growing impatient. “You are in no shape to sit for the exam this morning, or this afternoon for that matter.” Elizabeth said with finality. Nathaniel was not sure what she meant by “sit for the exam.” Could she have known what Sarah did to him last night? Sarah certainly did not say anything to imply the type of punishment Nathaniel received. Would Elizabeth know anyway? How could she?

“While your classmates are writing the exam, you can continue your study in the library. You will attend the rest of your classes as usual, and then this afternoon’s open period will also be spent in the library. I want you to report back to me at 16h30, and we will review your progress on the module. Clear?”

“Yes, sure,” Nathaniel said, looking down dejected. He could not believe he was going to miss the exam. He had never missed an exam in his ten years as a student.

“Ok. Good bye, Nathaniel,” Elizabeth said, clearly expecting the same in reply.

“Yeah, ah…” Nathaniel was unsure to press his point.

“Something to add?” Elizabeth said with a raised eyebrow.

“Well, I…just wanted to say…I am sorry,” Nathaniel stammered.

“Nat, you don’t have to apologize to me. When you are in trouble with me, you will know it…Trust me. Now, get out of here–I have a lecture to prepare.”

Nathaniel turned to go, and felt Elizabeth’s eyes still on him. “She knows,” Nathaniel thought to himself. “She knows everything. She knows Sarah spanked me like a little boy.” He quickly shuffled out the door and made his way to the school library.

Nathaniel stayed in the library while his classmates wrote the exam, as Elizabeth had instructed. He showed up to his next class, feeling conspicuous and avoiding eye contact with his classmates. Rebecca, a girl who had been particularly intrigued by him from his first day in school–probably more intrigued with him as a boy from Earth than as a boy–tried to flag his attention, but he pretended to focus on his tablet. Rebecca was cute, he had to admit, with hazel-green eyes and reddish brown hair that spilled down in seemingly uncontrollable coils from the clasp on the top of her head. She shared several classes with Nathaniel, and was a genuinely warm to him, but he had never engaged in more than just small talk between classes with her. He had entertained the idea of seeing her outside of school, but this morning he could not bear the thought of talking to any of his classmates, for fear they would discover just how much trouble he had gotten himself into.

After his morning classes were done, Nathaniel slipped into the corridor quickly, carefully avoiding Rebecca who still seemed anxious to talk to him, and reported for his physical training classes that the school gymnasium. They were covering a unit on swimming, and while the small pool the school operated could not do much to prepare him for his qualifications in the Open Water Simulation Tank, he treated the unit as a good chance to keep his muscle tone up. Especially, he concluded glumly, since it looked like he would not be getting much time in the Tank from now on.

He ducked into the Men’s locker room, relieved he had successfully eluded Rebecca. “What business do I have flirting with girls,” he thought, “when I’m getting spanked!” The thought sounded ridiculous, he knew, and vowed to banish it from his mind. He found his locker, quickly changed into this swimming suit, and reported poolside for class. The water was warm, unlike the Tank, but was maintained at the same salinity as Ocean. He greeted the brackish tang with a smile, as it evoked memories of last evening’s Tank session…before everything went so wrong.

After a 45-minute period of formal instruction on energy-conserving stroke techniques, the class was permitted 15 minutes of free time in the pool. Nathaniel resolved to keep working on his kick, which Abby had told him was the weakest part of his stroke. He considered doing laps, but instead decided to simply hold up in a corner and kick in place while he held onto the rail that surrounded the pool at water level. The other kids in his class were noisily splashing and shouting while starting up some game at which Nathaniel could only guess the rules. After a few minutes of kicking in place, the familiar burn in his thighs started again. He resolved to not slack his pace until the full 15 minutes had passed. At least the burn in his thighs had replaced the smoldering pain in his backside, he thought resentfully and biting his lower lip, but kept up his kicking just the same.

“Here, Earthie,” one of his classmates jabbed, “Try’n to move the whole hab?” That is indeed what it must look like, Nathaniel thought, but continued to his kicking and did not reply. Whoever was taunting him lost interest and returned to the game. The burn in his thighs was becoming unbearable, and his mind kept comparing it to the sensation of the burn he felt when he was over Sarah’s lap, beneath the smacks her palm was delivering to his backside. He closed his eyes and squeezed his eyelids hard, trying to shut out both the pain experienced and the pain remembered, and replace it with concentration on a perfectly executed flutter kick. He kept kicking.

At fifteen minutes, the chrono above the pool chimed, and Nathaniel could finally give into his aching muscles and stop. The team that had been winning let up a triumphant cheer, and everyone clambered out of the pool and headed back to the locker room. Nathaniel’s legs felt wobbly from the workout, but he made is way quickly through the showers and back to his locker, toweling off as he went.

As he was slipping off his suit, a group of three other boys rounded the corner and walked down the same isle of lockers. They were talking boisterously about different plays from their game in the pool. Nathaniel was not terribly found of these boys–they consistently kidded him about being an “Earthie” or a “Farer,” their abbreviated form for: “Graduate of the Starfarer School.” The joking was good-natured; it really could not have been malicious, since they only had experience with a real migr from Earth every five years or so, so there was no basis for real prejudice. Nathaniel took all their jesting in stride, but he did not go out of his way to spend time around them either.

“Hey, ‘Farer,” Soren said, turning the groups attention to Nathaniel, “I though you were in big shit, no?” All three of them starred up and down the length of his naked body.

“Ah, yeah,” Nathaniel said, huddling into his locked to retrieve his underpants and t-shirt.

“Yeah, where were you this morning?” Chaz asked with mock-concern in his voice. “We missed you at the quiz.”

“Well, as it happens, Sarah–ah, she’s my super–was not very happy about my progress on the module, so she arranged for Elizabeth to push my quiz back a few days so I could catch up. I wasn’t crazy about this, but Sarah…”

“Hey, we know all about Sarah, but what about your butt?” Soren pressed his inquiry like a prosecutor.

“What?” Nathaniel said over his shoulder as he quickly pulled his shorts up to his waist.

“Yeah, not so fast there, ‘Farer, let’s see your licks,” Chaz said. Gabriel just smiled, he was always willing to let Soren and Chaz do the provoking.

“His bum looks as lily-white as the day he left Earth,” Soren reported to this friends.

“So what gives? You exempt from ass-paddlings too, Earth-boy?” The “too” was a reference to the fact that Nathaniel had already tested out of two of their senior year mathematics and physics courses, which bought him a little extra time he desperately needed to catch up on mathematical ecology and the nuances of Ocean biology.

Nathaniel continued dressing, pretending to focus intently on arranging his tunic as he pulled it in place over his t-shirt.

“Come on, Nat, there is no point pretending you don’t know what were talking about here. If one of us blew-off studying a module until the night before an exam,” Soren said, pointing to his two friends, “our Supers would give us fifteen with the paddle, and if they didn’t, we’d get the same, or worse, from Elizabeth anyway. The next day, we’d be sport’n a pink and bruised backside. So, now, why aren’t you?”

Nathaniel said nothing and slipped on his shoes.

“Drop your shorts, I didn’t get to see,” Gabriel said, speaking for the first time.

“Look, guys,” Nathaniel closed his locker hard, not slamming, but loud enough to punctuate his point, “as a matter of fact I did get punished, by Sarah, because of this. Since this whole thing for me is very humiliating, bordering on illegal by Earth standards, I’d prefer to drop the topic, here, now.” Nathaniel no sooner finished his sentence before he started regretting every word of it. He had never, despite any other mistake he might have made since arriving on Ocean, adopted an “Earth-superior” attitude. That was the kind of thing that would look very, very unfavorable on his “Year Out” evaluation.

“Too good for a spank’n, are we, Earth-boy?” Soren leered, in a more confrontational tone than he usually took in their ribbing session.

“No, I got spanked,” Nathaniel replied honestly, looking Soren in the eyes, hoping his honesty would help make up for his earlier faux pas.

“So, do Earthers have a bruise-proof asses then or what?” Chaz gaffed.

“Well, I guess Sarah went ‘easy’ on me, or at least that’s what she said.” God, Nathaniel thought, I cannot believe I am talking about last night…this morning I could not even believe it really happened, wondering if it was all a dream.

“Like, what? She didn’t give you your full fifteen?” Soren pushed closer.

“No, I got fifteen, just….Look, guys, I have to go to class,” Nathaniel pleaded, but as Chaz crossed his arms, and Nathaniel could tell that he was not getting away without telling the whole thing.

“So, she used a slipper or something instead of the paddle?”

“Ok, look, she didn’t use anything but her hand, and she told me just this one time I could keep my pants, well, my pajamas, on.”

“Ohhh!” all three boys hooted together. “You got a lil’ boy spanking! Over your PJ’s? That’s all?” Soren asked between hoots. Gabriel almost bent over with laughter.

Nathaniel had had enough. He collected his bag and tablet and pushed past the three of them. Knowing the game was up they adopted a lighter tone. Chaz chimed in, “Kind of like breaking in a new pair of shoes, I guess, breaking in an Earther’s bum!”

Nathaniel ran out of the locker room and down the corridor to his next class, but wasn’t seeing where he was going at all. He just could not believe that how Sarah humiliated him last night was, apparently, not that uncommon a thing here. Even given that, he could not imagine anyone would be willing to talk, much less joke, about it. He assumed that anyone who was punished like he was would probably do everything he could to hide or deny the fact. But, if what Soren said was true, and the typical punishment for an adolescent left bruises, it would be difficult to cover up in the locker room the next day. As Nathaniel’s mind kept chewing over these facts, he came to another conclusion: if spanking really was a common form of punishment here, then Sarah’s promise of a “repeat performance” as not just an idle threat. No, what happened last night was not just some kind of bizarre, Out-World initiation, but something that apparently happened with regularity, and could be visited upon him with frequency as well! “Time to shape up, Nat,” he thought to himself, as he suddenly realized he had walked two doors past his afternoon classroom, and had to awkwardly backtrack. He came in and sat down, again avoiding Rebecca’s eyes.

After his classes had finished, Nathaniel spent the afternoon in the school library, which would not even pass as an annex to one of Starfarer’s smaller libraries, but that just made for fewer distractions from his module. The library was located at the top of the particular hab that housed the school, and the entire ceiling of the library was transparent dome material. The tumble of gray clouds being convected by Ocean’s continuous, high-velocity surface winds made for a dramatic display above the dome. The light diffusing through the clouds was sufficient, however, when combined with the internal illumination of the tablet he was using to work through the module.

Nathaniel was making steady progress without as much as a stray thought to interrupt him for nearly two hours. As he finished a particularly challenging exercise, he decided to tip back in his seat and pause. He was impressed with how far his proficiency level had advanced; at this rate, he could write the quiz tomorrow, or certainly the day after, without staying up past midnight. He started thinking about why he was so productive that afternoon, and wondered if Sarah was right about getting a good eight or nine hours of sleep every night. But, he knew that was not the explanation, at least not the entire explanation, since he had just as much difficulty concentrating during breaks and vacations, when he was able to sleep in and get a full nine or ten hours. No, he was just as prone to wander off into some obscure backwater of the terabytes of information stored in his tablet, exploring the arcane details of an asteroid belt surveyed decades ago and long forgotten, or the particular implications of a long-discarded theory of quantum gravatonics that might just permit time travel, or any of a hundred other abstruse subjects that pulled Nathaniel’s attention away from his prescribed lessons. His curiosity was forever drawing his concentration to topics that were definitely not advancing his career through Starfarers. Try as he might, he just could not corral his interest to what his particular study program stipulated. The fact that Nathaniel had still graduated at the top of his class from Starfarer’s School was merely witness to his ability to cram what he needed to know in long nights before his semester exams.

Today had been a different matter, however. Nathaniel was focused on the job he knew he had to get done, because otherwise he would have to face Sarah, and that could mean…well, that meant he had better get back to his module! Maybe that was it, he thought, his mind’s focal point turning to the tinge of tenderness he still felt where his bottom met the hard seat of the library chair. Perhaps his shameful session over Sarah’s knee last night had reduced him back to being the diligent schoolboy he had been years ago, before he had qualified to enter Starfarer’s. It was his high marks in his primary education years that he earned him entrance to the most exclusive of high school programs, the Starfarer School. Ironically, he thought, being treated like a child may be just the thing to get him back into the routine of doing solid scholastic work, which is what he would need to get through this term and, in turn, get a good evaluation for his Year Out.

At 16:30, he reported back to Elizabeth’s office. Her hair was up again–she must just take it down for class–and absorbed in her tablet. She did not mind the interruption, however, and appeared genuinely impressed with Nathaniel’s progress that afternoon.

“Ok,” she said, conveying her approval. “Same deal tomorrow.”

As Nathaniel turned to the door, she planted a smart pat to his backside. Nathaniel turned, surprised, but Elizabeth just shot him a sly look as she returned her attention to her tablet.

Nathaniel made his way back to his hab via the cable car. Not wanting to break his inertia, he settled into a chair at the kitchen table and resumed his work. After forty minutes, Sarah came through the door, totting sacks of groceries.

“No, no, that’s OK,” she said, waving Nathaniel back to his seat as he got up to help.

“You study,” she commanded, in mock-caveman talk. Which Nathaniel did, while she unpacked.

After she had supper started, she walked around the kitchen table and stood behind Nathaniel, looking down over his shoulder at his tablet. Nathaniel suspected she was inspecting the histogram in the lower left corner of the display, showing his progress and proficiency in the practice exercises of the module.

“Try increasing the coupling coefficient,” she said, catching Nathaniel off guard.

“I’m sorry?” Nathaniel wondered what she was talking about.

“This is the Kraken-Jonah predator-prey model, yes?”

“Uh, oh yeah,” Nathaniel said, not masking his astonishment that Sarah recognized what he was working on. “You know this stuff?” he asked incredulously.

“Don’t sound so stunned, kid. I was born ‘n raised here, you’ll recall.”

“Well, yeah, but…”

“You would be surprised how similar some of the mathematics of these models are to QG. We are borrowing solution techniques from the ecologists all the time.”

“Huh,” Nathaniel tried to convey how impressed he was by Sarah’s breadth of knowledge, as he followed her advice in changing the parameters of the simulation.

“You’re right! Population oscillations damped out completely in just a few cycles!”

Sarah chuckled softly as she moved her hands from the back of his chair to the back of his shoulders. She gave a long, hard squeeze.

“Stick with me, kid. I’ll teach you things.” Sarah began to slowly rub his shoulders, and Nathaniel felt the hours of tension building up in his neck begin to ebb away.

Her hands are strong, Nathaniel thought, and then recalled that he had already learned that fact the prior evening. Notwithstanding the connotation, it did feel good, and he tilted his head back and closed his eyes in order to soak in the sensation.

“Alright,” Sarah said, snapping her hands back. “What to you say you finish that exercise, then set the table for dinner?”

“Sure,” Nathaniel said, bearing down on his tablet again.

After dinner and cleaning off the table, both Sarah and Nathaniel retreated to opposite corners of the living room to settle in their favorite respective sofas. Both were completely absorbed in their tablets, and the only disturbance was Nathaniel’s occasional queries to Sarah regarding some mathematical detail of his exercises. Sarah always shot back with a succinct and informative answer, without ever looking up from the display of her own tablet.

At 22h, Sarah declared she was going to bed, as she had another busy agenda for the next day. Nathaniel nodded, and promised he would be turning in within the hour–a full hour ahead of what his schedule had specified. Sarah returned a nod of approval, and went into her room, closing the door behind her.

Nathaniel looked up from his tablet and focused on her bedroom door, thinking about what had transpired a mere 24 hours earlier. As he looked at her door, Nathaniel figured she probably did have his interests at heart; Sarah really was trying to help him get though his studies and balance his other responsibilities in an organized, disciplined way. He guessed the traditions and customs of Ocean forced such an unusual expression of that concern. That is putting it mildly, he thought, as again he replayed the scene of himself being slumped over her lap, squirming under the lock of her left arm as her right arm rose and fell, rose and fell, punctuated by the sounds of “smack, smack…” He gave an uncontrolled shudder, then shook the image from his mind.

Nathaniel decided he had better retire to his room, for fear he might fall asleep on the couch and have to explain himself to Sarah if he was discovered there after midnight. He changed into his pajamas, pausing to inspect his bare backside in the full-length mirror in his room. His buttocks certainly did not show any signs of damage, he concluded, although that certainly had not earned him any deference in the locker room.

Sliding his pajama bottoms up, he decided to stretch out on his bed and work with his tablet on the floor. As he settled into a comfortable position, belly down, he caught his reflection in the mirror, and could see is pajama-clad butt. He pulled his knees in and lifted his bottom into the air. “This is what I must have looked like to Sarah,” he thought, contemplating his butt jutting up from the bedspread. “I look ridiculous!”

Despite himself, Nathaniel brought his right hand up and gave his bottom a slow caress. He could not really say it was still hurting, but the touch brought back a rush of sensation, and he felt a strange excitement tumbling in his stomach.

He wondered what Sarah must have been thinking as she spanked him. Was she just completely disgusted with his conduct, disappointed with his sneaking out nights to train in the Tank, infuriated at having to expend the time and exertion to dole out his punishment? Or perhaps she felt like she was really doing something worthwhile, keeping him on the straight and narrow. More likely, he concluded glibly, she was probably just annoyed by him, just like every other adult is annoyed by every other teenager. That he was a good student working toward a bright future probably did not make any difference; he was just another bratty kid that needed to be dealt with as part of her own responsibilities as a Supervisor, just another unpleasant task along her path to fulfilling her advanced degree requirements. Nathaniel was strangely disappointed in his conclusion; he had for some reason entertained that she might have taken some pleasure in punishing him as she did.

“Well, I certainly did not enjoy receiving,” he mused. “Why should she enjoy giving?”

Deciding he had been ridiculous to reenact his posture from the spanking, Nathaniel clambered around to the head of the bed and turned the coverings back. He decided he had made enough progress on the module for one day; he would certainly finish his remaining exercises tomorrow and could hopefully write the exam the day after, the last day of class before Break. Sarah had not said anything about canceling their planned trip of flying down to the Shakelton to visit Simon. As he snuggled down into the sheets and yielded to sleep, he nestled his mind in thoughts of being on the research vessel, a tiny speck in an enormous sea. The ship dissolved to mist and his mind dissolved to unconsciousness.

The next morning, Nathaniel felt like he was back into the routine he had established before Sarah had come down on him. He participated in his morning classes, interacting with his classmates as usual. When Rebecca caught up with him in the corridor as he was heading to the library for a study period, he did not try to slip away. He greeted her with a grin, but it felt forced. She did not seem to notice, and launched right into a jabber of conversation. As Sarah kept asking if he was all right, they drifted into an alcove where they could enjoy some privacy. Nathaniel talked affectionately, even as the topic turned to why he missed the exam the day before.

“So, you must have got it pretty bad from Sarah, right?” Rebecca gently asked, when he explained how Sarah caught him skipping out to the Tank when he had not even finished half of his module.

“Well, yeah, it was not pretty.” Nathaniel could not lie to her big, blinking hazel-green eyes; he knew he would have to confide in someone, someone other than the boys in the locker room.

“I can imagine. If Gertie found out I hadn’t finished a module on the night before an exam, what she would do…” Rebecca’s voice trailed off for dramatic effect.

“Gertie” was Rebecca’s insolent nickname for her Supervisor, Gertrude. Gertrude was older than most Super’s, probably in her late 20’s, and a midlevel administrator on Ocean who was well on her way to a seat on the Executive Council in the next term. If half of Rebecca’s accounts were true, Nathaniel concluded, then Gertrude was indeed not someone with who you would want to be in trouble.

“Well, I wouldn’t be able to sit for a week!” Sarah resumed painting her bleak portrait of her Super. “She would work me over good.”

It took Nathaniel a moment to register what Sarah was referring to.

“Are you serious?”

“About what?” Rebecca’s forehead looked even cuter when wrinkled with puzzlement.

Nathaniel was afraid to ask the question, but unable to contain his curiosity, either.

“Here we go…” he thought, then asked: “Well, I mean, do you really get…”

“Spanked?” Sarah said as her frown disappeared and her eyebrows shot up.

Nathaniel blushed and nodded and exhaled a sigh of relief that he would not have to say the word.

“Damn right I do.” Sarah looked past Nathaniel, as if recalling something particularly unpleasant.

“Even now?” Nathaniel had to get some basic information, and here was his chance.

“You mean, like, today?” Sarah looked confused.

“No, I mean, you’re fifteen standard years, like me, right?”

“Nat, we all get spanked until we are seventeen. Well, not everyone, but most kids do, now and then.” Sarah spoke like she was explaining something as obvious as the direction gravity pulled.

“Well, when was the last time, I mean…”

“You want to know when I last got spanked? It was…” Her eyes rolled up in her head. “End of last term. After exams, my girlfriends and I went over to the University hab and I blew past my curfew by hours. Then when I got home, I didn’t do the half dozen chores that had pilled up while I had been studying for Finals. Next day, the girls came by and dragged me out of bed to go shopping, and when I got home that night, Gertie was fuming. I probably wouldn’t have got it for anyone of those things in particular, but she claims she caught me trying to deny the whole thing–which I wasn’t–and that blew up into a real row.”

Nathaniel could not help but smirk as Rebecca recounted her mischief.

“You laugh, buddy, but when you get in an argument with Gertie, it only ends one way. Her with her hairbrush, and me bare-assed and ass-end up!”

“And you accept this? I mean, you just go along…” Nathaniel had come to know that Rebecca would not settle for anything unless she was convinced it was right. He had seen her nearly push their analytical psychology teacher to tears of aggravation when she did not accept a particular line of his reasoning. Nathaniel could not conceive of her just giving into being spanked like a child.

“It’s not like I have a choice! If don’t take whatever punishment Gertie dishes out, she can sink my next evaluation on grounds of insubordination and I get sent to the remedial program. And that is the quickest shortcut to a career in scraping out the brine shrimp tanks in Zoo hab, or whatever menial job you care to think of, for the next thirty years. No thanks; I’ll take my licks.” Despite what she was saying, Rebecca’s frustration with the entire system was palpable.

“But, as long as you go along, you don’t get into any real trouble?”

“Well, I wouldn’t count on getting out of every mess you get yourself into by agreeing to a spanking from your Super. I mean, at some point, these things will get into your evaluation if you keep getting nailed. But as long as it looks like you ‘learned your lesson,’ most Supers will just chalk it up to experience, and forget about it.”

Nathaniel was secretly relieved by what Rebecca was telling him. He had feared that getting into trouble with Sarah over his schedule would stay with him like a poor mark on his academic transcript.

“Look, Nathaniel, if you haven’t figured this out, here it is.” Rebecca was lecturing now. “Every kid on Ocean gets spanked. It’s no big deal, so don’t worry about it. Just try to stay out of trouble.”

Rebecca looked thoughtful for a moment, and then gave an infuriated sigh.

“Gawd, I sound just like Gertie!” she moaned.

“Well, sounds like good advice to me. I’ve got to work on that…stay out of trouble. Speaking of which, I better get to the library; I still haven’t finished that damn module. See you in class this afternoon?”

“I’m there,” Rebecca said with her puckish smile as she turned to head back down the corridor.

Nathaniel played the conversation back in his mind several times in the library. He was not being as productive as the day before–“Maybe the effects of Sarah’s spanking are wearing off” he mused–but he had to mull over everything Rebecca had told him. Everything he pieced together formed a picture in which he was becoming more confident that Sarah’s warning of “repeat performance” was not a threat, but rather a statement of the most plausible outcome.

Nathaniel managed to finish off his module during the afternoon study period, and when he reported to Elizabeth at the appointed time, she agreed that he could write the make-up exam the next morning. Nathaniel rode the cable car back home, feeling buoyant for the first time in days.

That evening, as Nathaniel sat at the kitchen table working though practice exercises in preparation for his exam, Sarah came up behind him and gave him another squeeze to his shoulders. Nathaniel remained focus on his tablet this time, and was rewarded with a few minutes of gentle kneading to his shoulders. The tension in his back was slowly let go, but Nathaniel did not permit his body language to communicate how good her touch felt. In his mind’s eye, he imagined lulling his head back, to be enveloped by Sarah’s breasts, which were just centimeters from his head. He felt the stirring in his loins and determined not to permit himself to be aroused further.

“She is just giving me a study break…some encouragement. I should not read more into this than that…” Nathaniel reasoned. But his body had other ideas, and the swell against the tight fight of his pants became uncomfortable.

“Oh, god.” Nathaniel had to do something, or risk the humiliation of Sarah finding out. He decided to give an exaggerated shrug, and Sarah pulled her hands away.

“Did that hurt?” Sarah asked.

“No, it felt fine…good… I mean, it helped. I feel better.” Nathaniel stammered.

“Back when I was an undergraduate, we used to have an entire system of backrubs and neck massages set up amongst my study group–who owed who a back rub, for how long, and so on. I got to be quite good.”

“This was with your friends?” Nathaniel suddenly felt disenchanted. She did this for everyone?

“Well, yeah. I mean, the guys I did undergrad QG physics with. I’d give them backrubs, they give me a neck massage.” Sarah seemed momentarily lost in the reminiscence. Then she snapped back to the present.

“Well, I’m turning in early. Nat, you’re sure you are ready for the exam in the morning?”

“I just scored 88% on a practice exam,” Nathaniel replied.

“OK, let’s see if you can’t top that tomorrow.” Sarah pulled away from the back of his chair and went into her bedroom. “Good night,” she said without turning around as she pulled the door shut.

Nathaniel worked for another half an hour, went through some recent communiques that had collected on his tablet, and then decided to go to bed himself.

When we was alone in his room and changed into his pajamas, he again sprawled out along his bed, in the same position he had the night before, and inspected the image of his own, upturned backside in the mirror. He took his right hand and slowly raised and lowered his flattened palm over his buttocks a few times, just lightly tapping his own bottom. He imagined the same view from Sarah’s perspective. “Does she really just see me as a kid?” Nathaniel wondered. “A bad, little kid, at that?”

As with the night before, Nathaniel cursed himself for indulging in such illicit fantasy. He vowed to think about nothing else tonight, as he turned back his bedspread, but multiple-degree-of-freedom models of predator-prey ecological systems. He knew if he drifted off to sleep thinking about his material for the exam, his brain would get an extra eight hours to grind over the material as he slept.

He did not hold true to his pledge, however, for as Nathaniel drifted into sleep, he was thinking about the feel of Sarah’s strong hands on his neck, his shoulders, sliding down his spine, pushing on the small of his back, as they moved toward…

The next morning, Nathaniel awoke before his chronometer chimed. “That’s a first,” he thought to himself, amused.

He got up and showered, dressed, and used the extra time his early rise bought him for a last minute review of his module. He ate a very light breakfast–toast and juice. He was out the door before Sarah had a chance to reprimand him for his feeble breakfast. Usually Sarah was at the door, impatiently prodding him to, “Get moving!”

“Today, I’m gone before she is even dressed!” he thought. “Another first!”

He reported to Elizabeth’s office a full forty-five minutes before class, and asked if he could start the exam immediately. Elizabeth was willing to go along, and with a single hand motion over her own tablet, she unlock the exam on Nathaniel’s tablet, simultaneously locking his access to all reference materials, including his study module, for one hour.

“Ok, Nat. You have one hour. Get busy.” Elizabeth returned to her lecture preparation.

Nathaniel worked at a small desk in Elizabeth’s office, oblivious to her and the rest of his surroundings. The exam was tough; he knew Elizabeth would see to that. It probably served him right, after making her write a make-up exam. Of course, that was nothing compared to what he had put Sarah through, what Sarah put him through…

“Damn it! Focus!” he cursed under his breath, and decided to move onto the next problem.

After forty minutes, Elizabeth got up to head to her morning class–Nathaniel’s homeroom class. He had hoped to have finished the exam by now, so that he would not need to come in awkwardly late, but he now realized that the exam would take a full hour–he could have spent two hours on his exam!

“You’ve got 20 minutes. Come to class as soon as you’re done,” Elizabeth said, and left Nathaniel alone in her office.

Nathaniel bored down on his tablet and wringed his mind to concentrate on the final, most challenging problem on the exam. He was still working when, after 20 minutes, his tablet momentarily froze, then returned with full functions enabled. He knew the status of his exam at that instant had just been transferred to Elizabeth’s tablet.

“Oh well,” he said, not very happy with his performance, “it’s done.” He got up and walked briskly down the corridor to his class.

As he came though the door, he could tell he had not missed anything during the first fifteen minutes of class. The last day before Break, his classmates were in a raucous and unruly mood. He knew Elizabeth was not going to try to complete with that. In fact, she was hunched over her lectern, and appeared to be working on something on her tablet. Perhaps grading…

“Uh oh,” Nathaniel thought with a hard swallow. “That’s my exam,” he concluded with a rush of anxiety.

He took his usual seat, and made eye contact with Rebecca, who gave him the thumbs-up sign. She really could be the unrefined colony-world girl sometimes, he thought morosely. He had not seen anyone use that hackneyed gestures since, well, his parents. He felt a pang of guilt, and mentally chastised himself for being in such a spiteful disposition just because he was in a bad mood coming out of the exam. Rebecca could not help it that her world was twenty or third years behind contemporary culture. He gave her a weak smile and returned the “so-so” gesture he used to see his parents use.

His tablet softly pulsed, and he looked down to see a flagged communique had just arrived…from Elizabeth. He gulped, and opened the communique.

“Nat: 92%. Well done. Let’s try to get this done on time from now on, OK? –Elizabeth”

He let out a long, slow exhale, careful not to make eye contact with his teacher as she attempted to bring the class to order. “Just because tomorrow is Break….”

That afternoon, Rebecca caught up to Nathaniel as he came out of the men’s locker room.

“Hey Nat, how’d you do?” she was pinning him to the wall with her eyes.

“Ok. Elizabeth did not spare any expense on the make-up.”

“I can imagine. So what did you get?” Rebecca was insistent.

Nathaniel demurred, and instead tried to distract her.

“Whatever…. What are you doing during study period?” he asked.

“I want to finish of that biochem lab before Break. Wanna come?” Rebecca seemed a bit too enthusiastic, but Nathaniel could not refuse. He asked her what she was doing as a diversion, so now he had to play along.

“Sure, might as well,” he replied readily.

For the rest of the morning, Nathaniel regretted agreeing to Rebecca’s plan to work in the lab that afternoon. On the day before Break, he would rather be…”Well, anywhere but in school.” But, as planned, they met just after lunch outside the cafeteria.

Rebecca, with Nathaniel in tow, jogged the corridors back to the school’s biochem laboratory. Their bench-top apparatus for the unit they were covering–“Intro to Proteomics”–were already set-up. Rebecca, of course, had chosen the workspace immediately next to Nathaniel’s, so it was natural they would collaborate on their labs.

After a half an hour of steady effort to get their lab instruments tuned and the proper reagents into the correct concentrations, they could resume their work on the assignment.

“It’s gonna be great to get this lab done before Break,” Rebecca said, without looking up from the bench-top microscope. “When were back, we can start the next unit on protein folding, with should be really cool.”

The door to the lab opened noisily, and Carl, their biochem teacher came in. He did not pay much attention Nathaniel and Rebecca; students were allowed to come in and work in the lab during the afternoon open period. Nathaniel secretly hoped that coming in to work on the afternoon before Break would at least earn them some points, but Carl seem preoccupied with setting up a demo for an afternoon class. He left after a few minutes, without having acknowledged his two students.

“Well, he was in a friendly mood,” Nathaniel said after the door closed.

“Oh, Carl’s OK. He just cares about results, not how hard you had to work to get there.”

Rebecca never looked up from her work, but suddenly, her head popped up and snapped toward Nathaniel.

“Hey, what do you say we push this to the next level?” she said excitedly.

“Huh?” Nathaniel replied.

“Well, you’re almost done, right?”

“Yeah, give me twenty minutes.”

“OK. There is an additional section of the lab module that is to be used for graduate level courses covering the same material. But there is nothing stopping us from doing it, for fun. Maybe we can show Carl and get some extra credit.”

Nathaniel reached over and with his left hand–he was afraid to let go of the sample in his right–advanced his tablet to the appendix to the standard lab procedure that Rebecca had indicated.

“Well, we don’t have the proper reagents to do these assays.” Nathaniel seemed skeptical of the whole idea. He was tempted to say: “Damn girl, it’s the afternoon before Break, come on!” He did not want to dampen Rebecca’s keenness, though. When she got really focused, her brown wrinkled and her big, beautiful green eyes narrowed to slits. Somehow, it all made her that much cuter.

“I know where Carl keeps them in the storeroom–I’ll go get them.” Before Nathaniel could reply, Rebecca was off to the supply room, tablet displaying the required chemicals in hand.

Nathaniel hurried to finish off the requirements of the lab assignment, hoping to catch up with Rebecca before she got back.

Rebecca returned with several bottles balanced on her tablet, then carefully positioned them on the bench space between their stations.

“This is gonna be so cool–we’ll be doing real science on the cutting edge, just like the ‘graphers do.” Rebecca’s eyes narrowed and sparkled, simultaneously.

“Well, not really,” Nathaniel thought, “even the advance lab work had been done more than two centuries ago.” He continued to yield to Rebecca’s eagerness to try the advance section of the lab procedure, however, ignoring the nagging thought in the back of his head that told him this could lead to trouble.

After another half an hour, Nathaniel began eyeing his chronometer surreptitiously.

“We better wrap this up. We gotta be out of here in fifteen minutes, Carl’s going to…”

The door opened nosily again.

“Too late,” Nathaniel muttered under his breath.

Carl took a definite notice of Rebecca and Nathaniel this time, and marched straight to their station.

“You two must be really keen. The rest of the school is empty!” Carl’s eyes drifted to the bottles lined up between Nathaniel and Rebecca.

“Uh oh,” Nathaniel thought.

“Where did you get these?” Carl look puzzled.

When neither Rebecca nor Nathaniel answered, he pressed on, more annoyed.

“Why did you get these?” Carl locked his unnerving, unblinking eyes on Nathaniel.

Rebecca chimed in with a clear, strong voice. “Well, we were just going to do the next section of the lab procedure. We wanted to finish the module, completely.”

“Rebecca,” Carl turned, and Nathaniel was relieved to be out from under his gaze. “You know that section is only for use in advanced, university-level courses.”

“Well, I guess,” Rebecca’s volume was tapering off.

“Young woman, those,” Carl pointed to the bottles she had retrieved from his storeroom, “are some of the most toxic compounds in the storeroom. Hell, on the entire planet!”

Carl’s voice was gaining the volume that Rebecca had lost. His eyes scanned back and forth between Rebecca and Nathaniel.

“Now, would you please tell me who authorized you two to use these reagents?” he asked in a tone that conveyed he knew that he was the only one permitted to grant such permission.

“Sir, I’m sorry…We…I didn’t think it would do any harm–I was just hoping for some extra credit, going further in the assay than we were asked to.” The words came tumbling out; Rebecca was beseeching in that voice that Nathaniel found so hard to resist. He hoped their teacher found it equally beguiling.

“No, Rebecca, you certainly didn’t think,” Carl replied coolly. He stepped back from their bench and looked at the floor, then at the ceiling, and finally at his chronometer. When his eyes connected with their eyes again, Nathaniel knew he was ready to pass a verdict.

“You two are going to have to be punished for his, which I should probably tend to myself, even though I despise this sort of thing. But–lucky me–I’m on my way to a committee meeting right now, so I’m going to dispatch a communique to your counselors, and they will decide what to do with you.”

Both Nathaniel and Rebecca bowed their heads slightly and swallowed. They both knew what his would mean.

“You will report to your counselors immediately. My communique will be there by the time you arrive.”

Nathaniel followed Rebecca’s example and just kept staring at the countertop.

“Get going,” Carl said firmly, and Nathaniel and Rebecca started shuffling toward the door.

Their chemistry teacher was correct, the school did appear to be empty and Nathaniel and Rebecca ambled down the corridor is silence. When they reached Elizabeth’s office, he came to a halt.

“Well, I guess this is my stop,” Nathaniel said, trying to sound cheery.

“Oh, Nat,” Rebecca’s lips started to tremble. “I’m so sorry. Please, let me go in first and explain to Elizabeth that is was all my fault. I’ll go and tell Carl too.”

“No, Rebecca, no. I was doing the lab with you–we were partners, remember? We share the responsibility, like partners in any investigation.” Nathaniel knew he was saying what she wanted to hear. Was it also what he wanted, he wondered.

“Nat…” Rebecca was beginning to choke up and could not go on.

“Becca, you better go on to your counselor’s office. Let’s just get this over before the Break.”

Rebecca nodded, but couldn’t speak. Nathaniel, not knowing what else to do, turned and went into Elizabeth’s office. How different it felt than when he had walked out of the same door after writing the exam, about seven hours earlier.

“Nathaniel,” Elizabeth said, looking up from her tablet has he came though the door.

“Not an unexpected surprise, I’m afraid. I’m just reading a memo from Carl.”

“Yes, ma’am. I know.”

“Yes, I suspect you do. I also suspect you know what a serious offence it is to tamper with Class IV substances without authorization, don’t you?”

“Oh god,” Nathaniel thought, “she really knows how to make this look bad.”

“Well, I guess I should, but we didn’t think of it like that, I mean, we did not think we were tampering. We were just trying to get a little more out of a canned lab assignment.” Nathaniel regretted what he said the moment he stopped speaking.

“‘We’ meaning…you and Rebecca?” Elizabeth queried.

“Yes…ma’am.”

“Well, if you and you little friend did not think through the consequences of carrying out an unauthorized lab experiments, then I guess it is up to us to impress upon you the importance of doing so.” With that, Elizabeth pushed back from her desk and turned to face Nathaniel eye to eye.

“Come over here.”

“Elizabeth, ma’am, please. I am very sorry about what we did, but we were not hurting…” Nathaniel stopped as he saw Elizabeth hold up the back of her hand to her cheek, with palm outturned to Nathaniel.

When it was clear he was not going to say anymore, Elizabeth spoke. “Nathaniel, you exposed yourself and others to considerable risk by fooling around this afternoon. You are going to be punished for this. Now, get over here.”

Nathaniel walked toward her desk. She pointed to a spot on the floor at the far end of her desk.

“Stand right here,” she commanded, pointing to the floor.

Elizabeth pulled open the top right drawer on her desk and retrieved a rigid plastic ruler, just under half a meter long, several centimeters wide and half a centimeter thick. Grasping it in her right hand, she took two steps and stood beside Nathaniel.

“Now, bend over,” she said as she pushed his torso forward with her left hand between his shoulder blades. “And try not to further mess up my already messy desk, if you please.”

Nathaniel rested his elbow on clear spots amongst the scatter of her desk. His thighs just below the bend of his hips pressed against the corner of the desk. Her left hand was still on his back, but sliding along his spine until reaching the hem of his tunic. Like all adolescent boys of his generation on Ocean (or Earth, for that matter), Nathaniel would not be caught dead with the tails of his tunic tucked in. She gently pulled the tunic up, past the curve of his jutted-out bottom, and still grasping the hem, pressed down on his lumbar vertebrae. For a moment, his mind turned with concern back to what Sarah had warned him about the “luxury” of keeping his pajamas on, and he worried if his would apply to a spanking administered in school. Not that the thin, breathable textile used for garments on Ocean would offer him significant protection. Elizabeth, however, made no further adjustments to his clothing, instead focused on the alignment of the ruler in her right hand with his bottom. Nathaniel grew uncomfortable with his head craned upward, so he brought his chin down to rest on the palms of his hands. He felt ridiculous, like he was in prayer or something equally humiliating.

“Nathaniel,” Elizabeth said with more gravity than he had heard her use before, “you are going to be punished for unauthorized use of the Lab and in particular for violating Lab safety procedure. Is that clear?”

“Ah, yeah…yes, ma’am.”

And with that, he heard the sound of the ruler slicing through the air, followed by an explosive, “Whap!” He was knocked forward, and his chin slipped off his upturned palms. However, he did not register any pain from where he was hit, right across both his cheeks, just above the fold of his thighs. He succeeded in repositioning his chin when, “Whap!” and, coming even faster, “Whap!” both connecting in the exact same spot as the first blow.

“Oh, I guess Sarah explained about your age?” Elizabeth said, turning her attention to the back of Nathaniel’s head for the first time.

“Yeah,” he squeaked. During the pause, he could start to feel that same itch and tingle of burn start to spread out across his bottom.

“Good!” was punctuated with “Whap!” followed by “Whap!..swish…Whap!…swish…Whap!” all in exactly the same spot.

Nathaniel felt the corner of the desk cutting into the fronts of his thighs as he pushed forward, trying in vain to soften the impact of the blows. He also pulled his arms in and lowered his head down to the surface of the desk, his face smothered in the sheaves of paper scattered about. He felt he had to do something to stop the blaze in his bottom at the exact spot where Elizabeth was targeting.

“Whap!…swish…Whap!” He tried rolling to one side, not to escape the blows so much as to try and even out the pain.

“Be still!” Elizabeth barked, and she pressed down on the small of his back even harder.

“Swish…Whap!”

Until now, Nathaniel’s knees were slightly bent so he could rest on the balls of his toes. But, in desperation, he straightened and locked his knees, lifting his bottom a few additional centimeters into the air, at the same instant as, “Whap!” slashed across the tops of his thighs.

“Yeoch!” Nathaniel squealed; he could not believe that something could be more painful than what was being inflicted on his bottom, but the sting in his thighs was excruciating.

“Swish…Whap!”

The ruler again lacerated the top of his thighs. Reflexively, he kicked both his calves backward, probably his mind’s attempt to block further blows by using his feet. Without the support of his legs, his groin dropped to the corner of the desk as “Whap!” the ruler hit again, this time high, across the top of both cheeks.

He hung suspended, both legs off the ground, for a moment, then felt himself start to slide off the desk.

“Oh no, no you don’t,” Elizabeth said has she grabbed the waist of his trousers and pulled up. He felt his pants being pulled up into the crack between his cheeks, not a very pleasant sensation even when his backside was not ablaze, and she pulled him back up onto the corner of the desk. Without releasing the waist of his pants, she locked her forearm down along his spine. Elizabeth could no longer take a full swing across his backside from this vantage, so instead she positioned the ruler down is left cheek, pulled back, and then came down in a streak of “Swish…Crack!”

“Oh!” Nathaniel gasp, and his legs kicked out behind him. She lined up vertically on his other check, and came down even harder…

“Crack!”

“Yeeoch!”

With that, she released he grasp on his pants, and Nathaniel began to slide off the desk again, pulling papers with him, until he arrested his slide by bringing his feet down. Elizabeth was busy returning the ruler to its drawer as Nathaniel tried to stand on wobbly knees. He steadied himself against the desk, as he was fighting down two uncontrollable urges: one to grab his butt and try to rub the fire out, and the other to void his bladder. But he was determined not to further disgrace himself by doing either in front of Elizabeth.

“Nathaniel,” she said, turning to him for the first time since the paddling ended, “you have got to learn to hold still! As you found out, getting your thighs paddled hurts a lot worse than your backside. So, don’t squirm around and make me miss! Go it?”

“Yeah, sure, ma’am,” Nathaniel said, not believing he could make any such promise about how he would take a future spanking. It seemed to him that after the third or forth stroke, he was on autopilot.

“Now, when you get home, you are going to tell Sarah exactly what happened, correct?”

Nathaniel’s composure crumbled, and he felt tears well over his eyes and his throat gurgled as he tried to speak. He had figured the only thing good about taking his spanking from Elizabeth is that he would not have to live for the next several days–his vacation–under Sarah’s disapproving gaze.

“Oh, please, Elizabeth…ma’am…do I have to?” he managed to stammer out between blubbers.

“Well, she is going to find out anyway, like everything else on Ocean, so don’t you think it would be better if she heard it directly from you?” Elizabeth lectured, returning to her Socratic style of teaching that Nathaniel enjoyed so much under other circumstances.

“Will she…spank me again?” he said as he bowed his head, hiding the tears that started to run down his face.

“Well, I should hope not, provided that she thinks I did sufficient justice for your transgressions.”

“So, that’s it then? I’m done?”

“No. When the Break is over, you and your little friend Rebecca are going to report to Carl’s lab after class and clean-up and then sort and re-stock the supplies you used, under his supervision, of course.”

“Ok,” Nathaniel said, now with a clear voice, adding, “Ma’am,” almost as an afterthought.

“Well, you better get home, or Sarah will start wondering where you are.”

“Yes, ma’am. Ok, have a good Break,” Nathaniel said, not believing he could be so ingratiating to someone who just reduced him to a sniveling child with a paddling administered over the corner of her desk.

“Well, Nathaniel, you have a good Break, too. And do try to stay out of trouble,” she said in her purest sermon voice, finally cracking a smile at the end.

Nathaniel turned and walked stiffly to the door; he felt Elizabeth’s eyes still on him as he left. Blessedly, the corridor was empty and he could give into the overwhelming urge to rub his backside with both hands. He tried to pull the thin material of his pants and underwear away from his bottom–they were still riding high into his crack from when Elizabeth had lifted him up–but there was little he could do with the tight-fitting garments. He sufficed to tug down on his pant legs to un-wedge himself. Next, he turned to the need to empty his bladder. His mind raced to recall the closest boy’s room, and he decided to backtrack further into the school. He also figured that would be the best bet to find an empty boy’s room where he could spend a moment to recollect his composure.

The boy’s room was indeed empty, and he raced to the urinal, unbuttoning his pants as he went. As the fluid poured out of him, he felt a great wave of ease pass over, and he slowly rolled his head from one shoulder to the other. As he continued to urinate, he notice a mirror on the wall immediately behind him, and he realized that if he lowered his pants and underwear a bit further and shrugged his shoulders to lift his tunic and undershirt up, he could just see…

Nathaniel gasp when he saw the angry red stripes that crossed his sit-spot. “Oh, my,” he murmured to no one, “the guys in the locker room won’t be disappointed with this.” Only then did Nathaniel recall that he was off on Break for ten days, and the evidence was likely to be gone when he got back. Oh, well. He just was concerned now about hiding his butt from Simon, if they would be sharing a berth on the research vessel, as he anticipated they would. If Sarah didn’t cancel the trip when she found out…

Finishing his business, Nathaniel gingerly pulled his pants back up and refastened them. He went to the sink and washed up, splashing water on his face, before going to the drying station.

When he left the boy’s room, the corridor was no longer empty. He could see the silhouette of a figure outlined against the Ocean-light the diffused down the hall from a view port at the far end. “Oh, oh this is great,” Nathaniel thought, as he recalled how he looked in the boy’s room mirror: eyes puffed and red, hair matted with perspiration, the skin on his face pale to translucent. But the silhouetted figure has seen him now, so there was no getting away.

As he tried to walk confidently down the hall, the figure resolved itself into a girl.

“Well, at least it’s not Chaz, Gabriel, or Soren,” he thought, thankfully.

Then the figure spoke, “Nat?”

“Rebecca?”

“Oh, gosh, what happened?” She ran to him, stopping two paces away.

“Well, what do you think? We got in trouble.”

“Yeah. So, I guess Elizabeth…”

“Yeah, Elizabeth wasn’t happy.”

“She paddled you?” Rebecca asked. Her big, wet eyes quivered.

Nathaniel had to choke down a sob, but he couldn’t stop the tears from welling up again.

“Oh, gosh, Nat. I’m so, so sorry.” She crossed another step to him and, awkwardly, put her hand on his shoulder. The gesture was almost cold, not comforting at all, but Nathaniel thought he was going to lean his head to her hand and sob just the same. Instead, he just bowed his chin to his chest.

“Nat, please don’t take it so bad, if anything, for my sake. I know you’re not use to this, but it happens to everyone here–every single student. You know that cute girl in Intro Quantum who always sets the curve on quizzes? I know for a fact that she got the paddle at home just last…” Rebecca cut herself off when she realized she was babbling.

“Well, what about you…you don’t look any worse for the wear,” Nathaniel said looking up, and immediately realizing how cruel that must have sounded.

“Just wait until I get home.” Now it was Rebecca’s turn to swallow hard as she pulled her hand away from his shoulder. Nathaniel mentally cursed his tactlessness.

“Your counselor didn’t punish you?”

“No, although I got the ‘talking-to’ of my life. He decided to let my Super take care of the rest…probably knows that I’ll get it worse at home than he could dish out.”

Not likely, Nat thought. What kind of a guy could beat up a girl, anyway, he brooded. He knew that quite a few girls did have male Supers…what happened there, he wondered. But he decided to give Rebecca the benefit of the doubt.

“Yeah, I bet Gertie is gonna give it to you good,” Nathaniel said, incredulous at himself for engaging in this type of locker-room banter, but figuring it was expected in a situation like this.

Rebecca crossed the final step and leaned her forehead against his shoulder. Again, the motion seemed awkward, and Nathaniel was unsure what he was supposed to do. He decided to put his hand on her shoulder and squeeze. Rebecca let out a sob.

“She is such a bitch sometimes. She has never cut me a…a micron of slack!” Rebecca was speaking without looking up.

“I mean, I guess this time we deserve it…I deserve it.” She let out a half laugh, half sob to make her point. “But everything I do is not good enough. I have so much respect for her and what she has done for the Colony, but she doesn’t help me to find a path to follow her. At least not an accessible path…one that has the occasional mistake and failure built in.”

They both stood silently for a moment, then Rebecca pulled back, and Nathaniel snapped his hand away, as if caught doing something he should not have.

“What I am saying?” Rebecca gazed at him steadily. “I mean, here you are: top-of-your-class Starfarer. You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? You’ve already made it!”

“Hey, Becca, now come on! I’ve screwed up countless times. I mean, this is not the first time I got my ass paddled, you know. In fact, I’m probably the most spanked kid on this planet for the last 72 hours!”

Becca started laughing, which softened his shame for what he was recounting.

“Look, you don’t know how many times I got called out on the carpet in ‘Farer’s School. There was a time in the ninth grade they talked about pulling me out of the main program after I made some cheeky remarks in my Sex Ed class.”

“Like?” Rebecca looked coy.

“Another time,” Nathaniel rolled his eyes. “Look, Rebecca, you’ve got a fantastic future ahead of you. We all do. We have an enormous volume of unexplored space around us: tens of cubic parsecs for each person on Ocean. No matter what happens, we are all going to play a huge role in figuring this place out. You’ll find your way, for sure. It may not be what the program is set up for or what Gertrude has in mind, but that is what will make it your own.”

She chewed it over for a moment, her lower lip trembling.

“In the meantime, we just have to play along with the rules, and that means, I guess, we take our licks sometimes. I can’t say this is how I would run things if appointed Planetary Administrator, but I can see the point: you grow up fast out here, so they have to make damn sure you grow up right.”

For a moment, Rebecca’s quivering lips made Nathaniel think she was going to come to him again, but instead she half-turned back down the corridor. “We better get home. It only gets worse the longer you wait. Trust me in that.”

Disappointed, Nathaniel took her lead and also headed down the corridor and out of the school sector. They did not speak again until the reached a cable terminus, where they had to part ways to their respective habs.

Rebecca turned quickly to Nat and said, “Have a great Break. You are going to have a blast on the Shakelton.”

“Yeah, you to,” Nathaniel replied, feeling guilty he never inquired what she was doing over break, being so caught up in his own preparations.

They stood, dumbly staring at each other for a moment, when suddenly Rebecca lunged at him and, without touching him with her hands, pecked his cheek with a kiss, then turned and raced to her cable-line.

He watched her, but she never turned back. “What a day,” Nathaniel sighed under his breath, and turned to climb into his waiting cable car.

-=-

Back in his hab, Sarah was waiting, pretending to work at her tablet, but Nathaniel could tell that she was not really concentrating. When she was really working, it was as if her consciousness had been projected through her eyes and hovered a few centimeters over the display of the tablet.

“You’re home,” Sarah said.

“I am,” Nathaniel replied definitively.

“I guess you had quite a day,” Sarah said, obviously anxious to get past the perfunctories.

“Just what I was thinking,” Nathaniel replied enthusiastically. He would prefer to play this game all night.

“You gonna tell me about it?”

“I’m gonna take a shower,” Nathaniel said, heading for the bathroom. Thinking back to his session over Elizabeth’s desk, he now wondered if he didn’t accidentally void his bladder. Just the thought made him feel so unclean that he really needed the shower; it was not just a tactic to avoid answering Sarah’s questions.

He closed the door and started stripping down, checking his underwear to make sure his worst nightmare really did not happen. Satisfied, he finished undressing and started for the sink.

“Wow!”

Nathaniel snapped his head around to see Sarah standing in the doorway. He did not lock the bathroom door–he never did–but he could not imagine she would ever come in on him.

“Hey! Do you mind?” Nathaniel did his best at righteous indignation.

“You have a ‘plus’ sign on each butt cheek, do you realize that?”

“What? Get out of here!” Nathaniel bellowed.

“Actually, with that stripe across your thighs, it looks like a ‘plus-or-minus’ sign on each cheek. How did you arrange that?” Sarah seemed genuinely curious about the red marks across his buttocks that he had only partially glimpsed in the men’s room mirror at school.

“Could I please have some privacy?” Nathaniel pleaded, trying a different tack as he quickly collected his soap, shampoo, and washcloth. “I’m naked!”

“And?”

“Well, I’m naked!” Nathaniel said, as if the obvious needed to be restated twice.

“If you keep up the mischief you’ve been up to this afternoon, I am going to have the opportunity to examine your bare backside from a much closer vantage point than this, young man,” Sarah was completely inside the bathroom now, and Nathaniel could not believe that the stern lecture, which he knew was coming, was going to be delivered while he was in the shower. He reached for the controls.

“Don’t you dare start that water!”

He pulled his hand back from the tap.

“Do you recall what I promised you last time?”

“Yeah, yes, sure.”

“It looks like Elizabeth did a pretty good job on you, which is good considering what you were apparently fooling around with in the lab this afternoon. But that is nothing compared with what you are gonna get if you keep on breaking safety directives. Clear?”

“Crystal,” Nathaniel said from behind the shower door.

Sarah left and only pulled the bathroom door halfway closed. Nathaniel was tempted to get out and close it completely, but decided instead to get on with his shower. He set the water controller to a shade below scalding, in the hopes that he could blister his entire epidermis to match the shade the stripes on his bottom must be. Maybe then his body will just distribute and then radiate away the burn uniformly. Whatever, the water felt wonderful as it poured down his body. After lathering up and shampooing, he stayed in the shower as long as he could bear, imagining the steam pouring out of the open bathroom door, hopefully fogging over Sarah’s tablet display. He chuckled at that thought wickedly, feeling emboldened by finding some way to strike back at the injustice of it all.

When he could not bear the shower anymore, he turned off the water and vigorously toweled down before leaving the stall. He crossed the bathroom and finally closed the door completely, so he could finish drying off in private. As he re-crossed the bathroom, he caught his reflection in the anti-fog mirrors and did a slow pirouette.

“Owh!” he said as he saw his bare backside, for the first time in its entirety. “I’ll be damned,” escaped his lips, “but she is right.” He could see a red swath about four centimeters wide cutting right across the sit-spot of both cheeks, crossed perpendicularly by a fainter, narrower mark running up and down each cheek. He then saw the mark across the top of his thighs that made the “minus” sign of Sarah’s “plus-or-minus” sign.

Involuntarily, he was replaying the entire paddling in his mind. The first ten or so blows landed in exactly the same spot, making the main strip. Then, he tried to stand up, and got whacked across the top of his thighs a couple of times. That make him squirm, and Elizabeth had to pull him up by his trousers while forcing his torso back down, leaving her no choice but to slash the ruler vertically down his backside, finishing the “plus” sign.

Rethinking the paddling was not nearly as humiliating as recalling how he lost his composure, first in Elizabeth’s and then in Rebecca’s presence. How could he face them when he got back from Break? But he had a more immediate confrontation to deal with, he thought, as he opened the bathroom door and headed for his bedroom, the towel wrapped tightly around his waist.

Sarah, he saw, was in the kitchen working on dinner. It already smelled wonderful. He decided not to say anything and headed into is bedroom. Knowing that he had zero probability of getting permission to go out for the rest of the night, he went ahead and put on his pajamas. But, just in case, he slipped on a pair of underwear first before putting on his pajama bottoms. “Couldn’t hurt,” he thought, on the hope that Sarah’s repeated threat to spank him bare bottom was empty. As usual, he left the pajama tops in the drawer and settled for a t-shirt instead.

He came back into the living room and plopped onto to couch, careful to use his hands to break the impact of his bottom against the cushion. It still hurt like hell, but he swallowed the wince.

“Did you get your score?” Sarah asked over the din of chopping vegetables and a boiling pot.

“Sorry?”

“Your score on the quiz?”

“Oh, yeah. 92 percent!” He had figured she already knew, like she seemed to know everything else.

“Good stuff!” Sarah said, satisfied. “You hungry for curry?”

“Yeah, sure,” he replied from the couch. “Bring it on,” he said, feeding off her change in mood.

That was how the rest of the evening played out. Sarah did not bring up the days’ events again, and instead they went over the logistics of the trip to the Shakelton, how much clothes to bring and so on. Then they went to their separate rooms to pack.

At around 22h00, Sarah came in to find Nathaniel sprawled out–belly down–on his bed, working with his tablet, two small pieces of luggage sealed and by the door. She politely implied that, as they were leaving early the next morning–4h00–it might be a good idea to turn in early, so they don’t show up on the Shakelton like zombies. Nathaniel knew he was entitled to say up to midnight, as his schedule specified, but he knew not to push it with Sarah tonight, and agreed to turn in.

As he lay in bed, again lying on his front, his thoughts turned to Rebecca. He knew she would not be enjoying the “clean slate” start to her Break that Sarah appeared to be granting him. He could imagine Gertrude’s unsympathetic lecture, maybe with Rebecca already laid out across her lap, with a paddle or similar instrument in hand. He imagined Rebecca’s cute, fleshy little butt squirming to escape from the merciless smacks of whatever implement her Super used, her lovely thighs scissoring back and forth under the rain of blows, just as Nathaniel had done on this very bed, three evenings prior. He could barely believe that was just three nights ago, so much has happened in between. By now, of course, Rebecca would have been sent off to bed, probably without supper. Well, she did convince him to do some unauthorized lab work, he figured, so she probably did deserve it, even if she did give him a kiss this afternoon. Well, a peck on the cheek, not really a kiss.

He mind wandered to speculate if he would ever see another kid get spanked first hand. Was it always done in private? For that matter, what prevented someone from walking in on Elizabeth and him during his session over her desk that afternoon? That would be about as embarrassing as it can get, he concluded, but he was strangely curious to know how other kids on Ocean took their punishment. Did they plead and writhe, as he was sure he did so shamefully today? Such thoughts chased round his mind as he drifted into sleep.

Ocean, Chapter 5: Decision (F/m-teen, Talk only, SF, Novella)

When he awoke the next morning, Nathaniel saw Simon sitting in the same chair the Captain had used, but now tilted back at an insane angle so that Simon could put his feet up on Nat’s night table while he worked off his tablet.

“What time is it?” Nathaniel asked.

“Oh! ‘The sleeper has awake!'” Simon hooted.

“Time?”

“10h45”

“Goddamn.”

“You know, you always say that when you wake up. Regardless of how early, or how late,” Simon reported, as if it were an abstract fact.

“What you are doing here?”

“Keeping an eye on you. I’m on the 9 to noon shift. Sarah took overnight. People are concerned about you, you know. They want to make sure our hero is going to look good for the vid’s,” Simon said with a wink and nod to the darkened video display screen in one corner.

“Come on, I’m fine. I probably burned ten thousand calories during two minutes in that water, that’s all. Damn, that water is cold!”

“Figured that out, huh?” Simon got up and walked over to his bedside. He looked down on Nathaniel with a strange detachment. Then he spoke, fierce and bitter.

“That was the single stupidest motherfucking thing I have ever seen anyone, not just you, but anyone do!” Simon bit off each word as if tearing them off a printed page.

“Look, I know, I know, I know…the Captain came here and…”

“You know,” Simon interrupted, “I hope Sarah beat your ass good for that stunt. In fact, I hope she continues to beat your ass, like a daily ritual or something. And maybe she could beat some sense into your fucking skull while she is at it.”

Nathaniel knew when to be quiet, especially with Simon.

“Because, you do not ever, ever do anything that is not approved procedure when you are an Oceanographer. You get that? You don’t take a shit without first clearing a backup plan with redundant emergency abort procedures with your ops chief first.” Simon’s face was flushed and he was out of breath when he finished.

“Well, I guess I’m not fit to be an Oceanographer, then,” Nathaniel replied, after a long pause. He was having to learn to be good at this feigning-to-be-humble business with his newfound celebrity.

“Yeah, I bet that’s what you’re thinking. You want to know what you’re really thinking? I’ll tell you: You figure this is your ticket in. You reckon that the Captain owes you one, and that a recommendation letter from him is all this takes to get your freshly paddled and pink ass into the ‘graphers, isn’t it?” Simon’s eyes were bearing down on Nathaniel, but his arms were limp at his sides, still holding the tablet.

“No, no I don’t,” Nathaniel knew he didn’t sound convincing. “Look, I’m going back to the habs and complete my term of study. And then, back to Earth…”

“That’s your plan, is it?” Simon sputtered.

“Well, it’s not like I have a choice, is it? I mean, I can just see my Year Out evaluation, and it looks like a one-way ticket back to Earth to me.”

“So you’re resigned to give up trying out for the ‘graphers?”

“Yes. Of course. I mean…”

“That’s a shame,” Simon interrupted. “Because you’re gonna miss out.”

Simon let a heartbeat pass, then another.

“Because you’re in,” he said as he threw the tablet onto the bed.

“What?”

“I hope you don’t mind, I hacked your password. There wasn’t much else to do in here,” Simon said as he looked around the infirmary room with disdain.

“That’s my tablet? You hacked…” Nathaniel said, picking it up.

“Read it.”

Nathaniel skimmed the letter quickly, then again more slowly, and then once more, parsing every word to ensure it meant what he thought it meant. It was a letter from the Captain to the Oceanographer’s administrative office on the North habs, informing them that he had found a replacement for the missing Junior Investigator slot, and that while making such an appointment while on expedition was unusual, he felt extenuating circumstances more than justified.

“You recall I mentioned we lost another guy from my class due to illness in his family?” Simon said, with Nathaniel still focused fully on the tablet.

“Yeah, Sarah and I are sharing his berth.”

“Yeah, well, since we are down one, the Captain has authority to appoint a replacement, pretty much at his own discretion, within limits of course. And, well, you’re it,” Simon said. He slowly smiled.

“So, it is a temporary thing, like being appointed deputy in an old Western?”

“Uh, guess I missed that vid…but no. You’re bona fide Oceanographer, effective immediately. Assuming you accept the offer, of course.”

“But my study term…” Nathaniel murmured, looking over the letter again.

“Yeah, screw that. I haven’t completed any of those courses. And guess what? It doesn’t matter what the ecological coupling coefficient is when your flying through the ecosystem inside a supercavitation bubble!”

Nathaniel raised his eyebrows. Maybe it is my turn to give the lecture, he thought.

“Look, spare the polemics. You’re right. These things are important, and trust me, you’ll pick them up a lot faster out here, by osmosis, than you ever will sitting in a classroom. And no one is stopping you from continuing to work through your modules once you’re here. Just got to find the time.”

“Well, obviously, I have some things to think about. Look, I’m still pretty drained. When do I need to decide?”

“Well, your girl Sarah pushed to get a transport out this afternoon. Take your time, sure, but look, that witch is going to pull you out of here by the afternoon…”

“Don’t say that…” Nathaniel still didn’t look up.

“What?” Simon feigned innocence.

“About Sarah,” Nathaniel’s voice was barely audible. “She has done a lot for me.”

“Yeah, like kept your butt nice and rosy…and toasty. Look, Nat, you don’t get a chance like this again. I mean, not unless you think you can keep pulling of fucking-insane stunts like yesterday out of your hat!” Simon returned to his seat and sat down.

“Well, it’s just… You know, the Year Out is supposed to be about adapting to local culture, and so on. If I just walk out of my classes mid-term, I don’t think it is going to look good.”

“Who cares?” Simon was clearly incensed at Nathaniel.

“Well, I do.”

“Do you have something for Sarah? Maybe you like getting your ass paddled, is that it?”

Nathaniel did not say anything. He just rolled over on his side and continued to scroll though the other communiques that his tablet had accumulated in the past day.

“Alright, I’m out of here,” Simon resigned himself as he walked to the door.

Nathaniel could not resist provoking him: “I thought you were supposed to be taking care of me until noon,”

“I’ll get your nanny to come down and baby-sit you,” Simon said as he went out the door.

Nathaniel read over the letter from the captain one last time, then closed it to scan the rest of the communiques that had arrived over night. There were three from Rebecca; from their titles it was obvious she had seen the vid coverage of the accident with the scaph. He also had a message from Abby, who had help him train in the tank: “Glad to see all the hours we spent on free-diving technique paid off!”

Nathaniel could not bring himself to reply to their messages. He needed to think, think over the captain’s offer, and think over his future. He just did not feel like he had yet earned his place as a ‘grapher. He thought back to the time on the chronometer from his last training session in the Tank: 00:29:48.45. He had been thinking how great it would feel to post that time at the next try-outs for the ‘graphers. And he knew he could improve that time considerably by the end of the term if he kept training. He had set that time just six days earlier, Nathaniel remembered, recalling that had been the night Sarah caught him cheating on his schedule. The events that had transpired in those six days… He had been spanked three times by Sarah, first on his pajamas, then bare-bottomed in front of Simon, and finally getting it with the slipper while completely naked over Sarah’s knee. On the last one he had lost control… Not to mention the paddling he got over the corner of Elizabeth’s desk. If he returned to the habs, could he look forward to more of the same?

Nathaniel reached down, under the covers, to cup his butt cheek in his had. His bottom felt sore, raw, like a muscle that had be over exercised without proper warm up. “How can I even think of going back for more of his?” he wondered.

There was a light tap on the door, and then it opened to reveal Sarah, in a crisp jumpsuit, with her hair pulled back, tablet slug in a stylish satchel over her shoulder. Despite everything, Nathaniel felt his heart flutter, just as it did the first day he was introduced to her as his Supervisor. The day he knew he had a crush on her.

“How are you doing?” Sarah said, with genuine concern in her voice.

“Well, OK. Tired.” Nathaniel discreetly pulled his hand away from his bottom.

“We are going back to the habs.” Sarah said it as a matter of fact, like giving time or day of the week.

“I want to show you something, to discuss something with you.” Nathaniel pulled up the message from the captain on his tablet, and handed it to her. She spent a solid minute reading the letter. She then placed the tablet carefully on the corner of the bed, and looked Nathaniel in the eye, without a hint of condescension, adult to adult.

“Congratulations, Nathaniel. I knew this is something you wanted very bad, and were working very hard toward. I’m not going the let the circumstances under which it happened detract from that…I’m happy for you.”

“I haven’t decided to accept. Not yet, at least. I am thinking about going back and completing my term. I mean, I really don’t like to leave things half-finished.”

“I can see the advantage in that, too,” Sarah said.

“Well, will you take me back in? I mean, after what happened?”

“Take you back? I never gave you up in the first place, Nathaniel.” Sarah seemed hurt by his implication.

“Well, I mean, if I go back, is it going to be like before? I mean, I have been accepted into the ‘graphers now.” Nathaniel was not sure what he was probing for.

“Look, Nathaniel, I want to make this clear: if you come back, we still work under my rules. Not that they are ‘my rules’ anyway; there are guidelines laid out in the colony charter about the Supervisor-Student relation. You are not getting any special treatment just because you choose to come back voluntarily, right?” Sarah said with a raise of her eyebrows. “I think you know what I’m referring to.”

“You mean I’m still eligible for spankings,” Nathaniel said, more to himself. He slowly shook his head back and forth, not believing what he was considering subjecting, voluntarily subjecting, himself too.

“You still don’t get it, do you, kid?” Sarah walked to his bedside. A deep crease divided her brow. “When you are eligible to leave the supervision of your Super, that’s it. You’re free to go, no strings attached. But as long as you are under my supervision, then I am going to follow the guidelines laid out by my responsibilities as Supervisor. In a nutshell: To be damn tough on you. Because it is a harsh world. There are a dozen different ways your brilliant exploit yesterday could have ended with you dead: tangled up in a tether, knock your head and lost consciousness for a second or two, and that’s it, you’re gone! And it is not just on a research vessel, its everywhere on Ocean, even back in the habs. The walls and floors of those things are only a hundred micron thick polymer. They can rip open and you’ll fall through or get sucked out before you can take a breath. I’ve seen it happen.”

She paused to let these scenarios play out in Nathaniel’s mind.

“So, when you get punished, it is just to impart a little of the pain you were just lucky and missed out on. Yesterday, I was ready to beat you within a centimeter of your life. So you’d learn not to rely on luck, and maybe use a little more of your head next time.”

“And you’ll think I’ll learn that better back in the habs, rather than out here?”

“Yes.” She paused. “I do. I think if you complete your term and learn to respect the regs, then when you come out here, you’ll be taking reasonable, calculated risks in your work, not insane, blind ones. And you’ll actually know something about Ocean, unlike Simon.”

Nathaniel closed his eyes and said, “I have to think about this.”

“You have a lot to think about. I’ll let you get to it.” She got up slowly, as if wanting to keep eye contact with Nathaniel, then turned to leave. She crossed the doctor on her way out.

The doctor, the same chief medical officer who had quickly checked him over as he got out of the hypothermia tank the day before, gave him a brief once-over inspection, then focused on changing the bandages on the palms of his hands and his forehead. When he was done, he informed Nathaniel that he was free to get dressed and leave the infirmary and return to his cabin. Sarah had already left a standard-issue Shakelton jumpsuit laid out on the night table for him, along with a pair of his own underwear and t-shirt.

After the doctor left, he got up slowly, cringing as his bruised backside took his full weight as he sat up on the edge of the bed. He pulled the underwear up carefully, pulling the elastic waistband away from his bottom, slipped into the t-shirt and then the jumpsuit. Simon had provided the jumpsuit to Sarah and Nathaniel as mementos of their trip. Nathaniel was surprised Sarah had selected it for him to wear; it was certainly not what he would have picked out for himself that day. He looked at himself in the mirror and for a moment, marveled at how he looked in the uniform. Then, he felt a wave of self-hate wash over himself. He had made his decision.

He contacted Sarah through the ship’s AI and asked if he could make a small detour on his way back to his cabin. Sarah agreed, and Nathaniel made his way to the administrative sector of the ship. He had no idea how to ask to see the Captain, but after asking a few of the crew, he was directed to the cubby-hole office of a middle aged, motherly woman who served as the Captain’s personal assistant. Ms. Taley. She gave the impression of being fastidious, the name seemed to fit.

“I sorry but it is quite impossible to see him now, dear,” she said with sympathy and a kind smile.

“Well, ok. But can you give him a…”

“But he does want to see you, young man. Would you be interested in sitting at the Captain’s table for lunch?” A sly smile spread across her face, “Or standing? As you prefer.”

It took Nathaniel a few second to process what she said, and then he flushed red and looked to his feet.

Ms. Taley put a hand to his shoulder. “You’ve been through a lot these last days, haven’t you?” Her smile evaporated and was replaced by a look of concerned worry.

Nathaniel summoned up his courage and looked her in the eye.

“Yes, ma’am. Yes I have. Quite enough, actually. That’s what I wanted to tell the Captain. That I’m going home. I mean, back to the habs. I have to turn down his very generous offer.”

She tilted her head slightly, and smiled. “You’ll tell him yourself. At lunch.”

“Well, if it is all the same, I’d prefer just to, you know…” Nathaniel tapered off.

“No, he won’t be disappointed in you at all, Nathaniel. Rather, I think he’ll be quite proud. In fact, I think you just passed a test of sorts.”

“How so?”

“Hm. I’ll tell you when you come back, next season.”

Nathaniel got the impression that Ms. Taley could tell him a lot of things about what went on onboard the Shakelton. He agreed to meet the Captain for lunch, and then returned to his cabin to pack up his bags. He new the flight home would depart immediately after lunch.

-=-

Icy sleet blew across the deck as Nathaniel and Sarah dragged their bags toward the aero that would take them home. There were a few media people on deck, gets some shots of the scene where yesterday’s excitement played out. When they saw Nathaniel, the beckoned him to come over for a word. He just shook his head and pointed to the aero. But as he stowed his back in back and turned to the cabin, he knew the journalists were still watching him. He paused for a moment and had to bit down the temptation to give a glance in their direction. Sarah planted a sharp, underhand swat to his backside as he stalled climbing up the steep stairs to the aero.

“Hey!” Nathaniel said, not turning back. He could feel the eyes of the vid and holo recorders bearing down on them.

“Get up there, hero,” Sarah said impatiently. She motioned to swat again, but Nathaniel leapt through the hatch before she could connect. Safely inside, he peered back, to see the two technicians and the media-liaison officer operating the vid/holo recorders chuckling despite themselves.

“Sarah,” Nathaniel said with all the seriousness he could muster. “They are recording this. Since you won’t let me grant an interview after lunch, this is all they are going to have to beam out the local system.”

“‘Grant an interview’…who the hell do you think you are, kid?” Sarah rolled her eyes as she shook her head slowly.

“Well, come on, it is a story, you know. If this is the totality of my exposure, I prefer not be to be seen getting smacked by my Super, if you don’t mind,” Nathaniel fumed.

“Nat, everyone on Ocean is going to know that you got the whupp’n of your life for that stunt yesterday. I don’t think there is anything we can do you add or detract from what is now common knowledge…”

Nathaniel smoldered for a moment longer, as he settled into his favorite rear viewport couch. As he strapped into the five-point harness in preparation for takeoff, he privately marveling at how many different euphemisms for hitting someone’s backside the inhabitants Ocean had. “Whupp’n”…that was a new one. He started trying to list the others, as he wondered how many new words he would learn for “spanking” during his stay on Ocean…and how many he would learn the hard way, splayed out over Sarah’s lap.

They were already weightless by the time his thoughts returned to the present.

Ocean, Epilogue (F/m-teen, Talk only, SF, Novella)

Epilogue: Five Years Later…

In orbit above HHW-2403.1…

The meeting of two deep space survey vessels outside of dry-dock was a rarity, a once-in-a-decade even in the life of a Starfarer. The convergence of three survey ships in orbit about an un-colonized world was almost unheard of. But, making first contact with a pre-Bronze Age, but undeniably intelligent, tool-using, information trafficking alien civilization was completely unprecedented, so it more than justified the concentration of Starfarer resources in one place. The Sheffield’s discovery of intelligent bi-ped race on a previously uncharted world opened an enormous can of ethical, scientific, and simply logistical worms for the Starfarer’s Institute to try to untangle. While they waited own a verdict on this end of the hyperlink, the idea was to concentrate all the resources in the sector into a high orbit above the planet, and learn what they could via remote sensing. It also occasioned a chance for the crew of the three vessels to mingle, to congratulate the Sheffield’s crew, to celebrate and discuss their incredible find.

Nathaniel finished adjusting his dress blues and looked at himself in the mirror. He couldn’t help to wink at the holo of Rebecca in the corner of the mirror. He know what she’d say, “You look smashing,” she’d snort, effecting her best high-Earth accent. He turned and left his cabin, making his way to the dining hall, recently expanded to several times its usual size by removing the partitions that separated it from the recreational areas. Such sacrifices where necessary to accommodate a nearly tripling the personnel on board, as the crews of the Thorne and the Wheeler came onboard to join in the celebration. Nathaniel was disappointed that Sheffield had to host; he would have loved to visit Simon on the Thorne. Well, guess that is one of the prices you have to pay for hitting the jackpot, Nathaniel consoled himself. No doubt, the other crews were anxious to stand next to, to actually touch and be holo’ed, the instruments that made the monumental discovery. He knew there would be plenty of time to visit both the Thorne and the Wheeler later. None of the three ships were likely to break orbit for a long time.

The party was already underway when he arrived in the hall. Home-brewed beers from all three ships flowed from an extended manifold of taps hastily installed in the bar. The unparalleled meeting of three survey ships also mandated an unparalleled implementation of the traditional sharing of each ship’s home-brewed beverages. It took a minute to overcome the shock of seeing complete strangers mixed with a crew he had shared the same ship with for the last two and a half years. Not all strangers, however. As he scanned the crowd for Simon, he recognized faces he dimly recalled from the Starfarer’s School. No doubt, he would be doing a lot of catching up with old acquaintances tonight. But he really wanted to see Simon–they intentionally had not contacted each other in real time since the Thorne showed up in-system. They both were savoring the moment they would see each other in person.

As he moved through the crowd, he heard snippets of conversation:

“Sure, we want to play it conservative, but why such a damn high orbit? We can’t do science from up here!”

“But we don’t know how good their astronomers are…”

“If they have astronomers down there…”

“These issues should have been worked out years ago, nay, decades, before we ever started sending ships out here. I remember in graduate school writing a review paper on First Contact protocols, and that was more than fifteen years ago…”

“All abstract, until your staring at the real thing…”

Nathaniel licked his lips. These were just the kind of things he loved to argue as he took deep pulls off some other ship’s home-brew. He headed to the bar and indiscriminately took the first glass that was served.

“Hey, Snark-fart!” He had only a moment to brace before Simon’s backslap nearly splashed half his glass onto his dress blues.

“Watch it, Kraken-crap!” Nathaniel said, barely able to speak though his ear-to-ear grin.

“This is good shit–I don’t want to loose a drop before you Thorne-berries drain the Wheeler’s tanks dry,” he said with a nod to the glass in his hand.

“No worries, mate. We brought our own good shit,” Simon said, scanning the bar. His eyes noticeably widened when he saw the array of taps.

“Yeah, were already using it as de-greasing agent–work’n miracles for us,” Nathaniel prodded.

“So, have you sold your media rights to the ‘Story of the Century’ yet? How much’d you get?” Simon shot back.

“Look, if you School boys are done towel-snapping each other, we’d appreciate some introductions here,” said a distinguished looking man with a trim, silver beard and crest of gray hair, probably mid-fifties (unmodified) by Nathaniel’s best estimate. Another woman and a man, both between the distinguished man and Nathaniel and Simon’s age, flanked him.

“Of course, of course. Dr. Schell, this is my friend I was telling you about.” The next five minutes were consumed with elaborate introductions. Simon’s companions comprised the senior scientific staff from the Thorne. Simon brought them to the party in tow under the guarantee that he had “connections” on the Sheffield.

“Nathaniel, let me congratulate you, on behalf of all of us, on a truly remarkable discovery,” Schell said formally.

“Dr. Schell, really, it is ours, the discovery is all of ours,” Nathaniel replied, resisting the temptation to take a sip of his beer. “When we loose someone on a survey, we don’t eulogize by saying we lost him while measuring the opacity of the ionosphere of NHHW-2234.1. We say we lost someone as part of our expansion into the Universe, and celebrate his life, and death, as such. We should show the same magnanimity in our discoveries, our triumphs, as well.”

“Hmm…bright young man this is,” Schell said to his colleagues, with a nod toward Nathaniel. Nathaniel was thinking how fortunate he was to get a chance to use the Captain-proscribed “victory for all of us” shtick before it became the tired clich that it was sure to become before the night was out.

Schell continued: “Not to cast a pall on the moment, but I suspect you are going to spend the rest of you life lamenting that you made such a find so young. The capstone of a career is best made at the end, not the beginning.”

“Well, don’t feel sorry for ol’ Nat here. He has been making breakthroughs since before getting his seat Outbound.”

The woman, Dr. Lehrner, who had been silently staring at Nathaniel intently, too intently, for the last five minutes, finally spoke, “I knew it! I just knew I had seen you before. Well, not in person, but your holo appeared at the end of the article. The article where you reported finding the Kaa on Ocean…the electro-snakes. You looked so impossibly young!”

“That was you?” the other scientist, Dr. Bloche, asked incredulously. “I thought it was apocryphal that Kaa was discovered by a kid during his Year Out. Some myth they tell the cadets back in School, just to get them fired up.”

“Indeed, it was Nathaniel,” Simon was manifestly beaming with pride now. “Found the top the of Ocean food chain: the Snark-slayer….electric eels that generated their own incredibly high voltage field to manipulate the metal-salt-ionized water around them.”

“Well, then,” Dr. Schell said, again exuding the sense of the moment, “it is a doubly great honor to meet you. And I apologize for my earlier, now obviously patronizing, comments. And I’ll even forgive mixing the Kipling and the Carroll allusions. You are clearly no stranger to navigating through momentous discoveries.”

Nathaniel caught Simon roll his eyes, conveying: “Yes, he really is a pompous ass!”

“Nathaniel, if you don’t mind my asking,” Dr. Lehrner was pressing toward him. “Well, how did you do it? I mean, everyone had given up on finding another major species on Ocean, much less a new phylum.”

“Well, as it happened,” Nathaniel gave a knowing glace to Simon, “as part of my Year Out, I had to complete a term of study on local ecology. For my term project, I decided to look one more time at the Snarks: why were they so big, so fast, so damn smart? Tired questions that had been chewed on for years. My only contribution was just decoupling those question. They were fast, because they had to get away from something. They were big because, whatever they were trying to get away from was small, so if they did get caught, they had sheer mass on their side. They had to be smart, to know which strategy to pursue, to survive. Natural selection was pushing them in three, seemingly contrary directions at once. So, just from the available data on Snarks, I constructed a model for what must have been hunting them, killing them, selecting them. When I joined the Oceanographers for the second half of my Year Out, it was easy to tune the sensor arrays on the subs and scaphs to look for what I had in mind: something only a meter or so long, but fast, ultafast, almost as fast as the supercavitating submarines.”

“Fascinating,” Drs. Lehrner and Bloche said, almost simultaneously. Nathaniel glanced to Simon, grateful for that fact that his friend let him tell the story, which he had probably sat through dozens of times by now, without interrupting. Simon’s return look was just to acknowledge that the venerated doctors were not the most exciting companions for the bash.

For a moment, the doctors just nodded in appreciation for Nathaniel’s work.

“Funny thing was, ol’ Nat got a B- on that original term paper!” Simon chimed in.

Nathaniel felt his cheeks burn. Simon really had not changed a bit, he concluded. Dr. Schell dismissed Simon’s infantile behavior with a snort.

“But a discovery not without some danger, I recall,” she pressed on for more details.

“Well, yes, the Kaa’s could almost penetrate a supersub’s hull,” Simon explained quickly, trying to re-establish his participation on a sober note. “Which does make for some interesting stories, but ones best told over a full glass, and I see Nat’s is empty. If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’ll rectify the situation.”

As Simon left for the bar, Dr. Bloche pressed in closer to Nathaniel; the commotion of the party was really starting to pick up.

“Ocean,” Bloche said, clearly savoring the word. “I seem to recall some unusual local customs. Something about still believing in corporal punishment of children, if I’m not mistaken. A real outcast on the Universal Charter of Children’s Rights with that one, I can tell you, yes?”

Dr. Lehrner came to Nathaniel’s reprieve: “Oh, Gerald, please! No politics tonight!” Nathaniel scanned the bar for Simon, thankful to see he was still waiting far back in the queue. Hopefully, Nathaniel could steer the conversation to, well, anywhere away from here before Simon got back and started recounting their shared experiences.

“I really don’t think Nathaniel should have to defend some colony world’s local color and customs,” Dr. Lehrner said, continuing as his champion. “He was just there for his Year Out, after all.”

“Precisely. The point of the Year Out is to have to learn to adapt to local culture, develop an appreciation for all those little differences that make our little sector of the Galaxy such a ‘rich tapestry,’ yes?” Dr. Bloche looked down his long nose at Dr. Lehrner. “Just checking to see that the Institute got its money’s worth from his Year Out.”

“I think with a new phylum, we definitely go our money’s worth,” Dr. Schell interjected coolly.

“Well, I can tell you I definite got the full dose, the full treatment, of everything Ocean has to offer,” Nathaniel said knowingly as he was vague.

“And? Comments, assessments?” Dr. Bloche was pushing toward him so close Nathaniel was tempted to take a giant step backwards.

Nathaniel took a moment to collect his thoughts. That one glass was already starting to cast a haze over his thinking; he guessed he should have checked the alcohol content before he started pouring back untried home-brew.

“I would have to say…” Nathaniel said, glancing back and forth between Bloche and Lehrner. “The only thing I can say,” Nathaniel started again, “is that Ocean is not a bad place to spend your Year Out. In fact, there are probably a lot worse places.”

“Hmp,” Dr. Lehrner said as punctuation to Nathaniel’s assessment. “I’ll certainly consider that when my daughter graduates from Starfarer’s next spring and has to put in preferences for her Year. She could stand to have her attitude taken down a peg or two. A year on a rough ‘n tumble colony world should do that, I’d think.”

Nathaniel nodded, and took another pull from his empty glass. “Change the damn topic…” his mind screamed.

Despite Nathaniel’s best efforts, Dr. Bloche was hell-bent on Ocean-lore. He leaned in between Nathaniel’s and Dr. Lehrner’s ears as if to whisper, but instead said loudly, “Do you recall that story about the kid who was on Ocean for his Year Out, and ended up jumping in that damn frigid water after a sub that was dropped overboard off a research vessel or some such damn thing? Apparently, the story goes, even though he saved the sub and a ‘grapher’s life, he still got so much trouble that…”

A cold glass rubbed against Nathaniel’s right hand, which clasp by his left hand behind his back. He turned to see Simon delicately balancing four more glasses in his other hand, gesturing wildly with his eyes.

“What are we talking about?” he asked, passing the glasses out to his colleagues without spilling a drop. Nathaniel gave a quick glance, and thankfully everyone seemed too preoccupied with their drinks to answer.

“Just how good are their astronomers, down there?” Nathaniel said quickly while pointed to the floor, but referring of course to the planet they were orbiting. He knew he had scant moments to preempt all three of his esteemed guests as they chimed glasses into each other as a toast. “I mean, why are we confined to such a damn high orbit, anyway?”

-=-

Four hours and eight glasses later, Nathaniel returned to his cabin. He stripped off his dress blues, moist with perspiration and spilled beer, and leaned into his tiny closet-sized bathroom. For a moment, he though about leaning over the toilet and pouring out the entire night’s drink, or at least a good portion of it, back out through the same orifice he had ingested it with. He knew he would be thankful he did so in the morning. Instead, he just splashed a little cold water on his face, and looked at himself long and hard in the mirror. Five years since he left Earth, and twenty more to go in the career of a Starfarer. The things he would see…

He leaned out of the bathroom and plopped onto the ottoman at the foot of his bunk and, in the same motion, opened the cabinet below his bunk. He retrieved a bottle of twenty year porto and a small glass. “What the hell,” he thought. No matter what time the chronometer said when he woke up the next morning, he new the first word out of his mouth was going to be, “Goddamn!” So, what the hell, indeed!

He poured a glass and returned the bottle to the cabinet. He saw a rectangular box, whose surface was violet in color and a soft, crushed velvet. He seized the box impulsively, balancing it on his lap as carefully as he balanced the glass of port in his hand. The lid had a small inscription: “To My Starfarer…”

He lifted the cover way to reveal tissue paper inside. Although he had opened the box a few times before, the tissue paper was hardly wrinkled. A small card inside, a piece of thick vellum, was written in script. He picked up the card, and carefully pealed back the tissue to reveal a single, oversized, rubber-soled slipper, the kind worn in hospitals and medical centers. A tag attached to one shoelace was printed, in block letters, “BEHAVE !” He took a strong pull of porto, and let the warmth diffuse out, into his mouth, then down his throat and up, into his nasal passages and sinuses.

He returned his attention to the card. He turned it over and read the script: “Go Far, Go Fast, Be Good… Love, Sarah.”