The Weapon - Passion - part 9
By Diana the Valkyrie
Two men and a tin of pineapple


I passed the wine over to George; as the younger man, it was his duty to open
and pour. "Corkscrew?" he said. "Damn," I said. "Anyone got a Swiss Army
Knife?" asked George. "Uh." Milly looked exasperated. "Give it here," she
said, and bit off the neck of the bottle. George and I stared at each other,
horrified. I'm not sure what was going through his mind, but I suspect it was
the same as the thought I had - I couldn't help thinking of something else
she'd had in her mouth, of a similar size and shape, and what bad news it
would have been if she'd bitten that off. Sure, I know she wouldn't do a thing
like that. But thoughts like these spring unwanted into the old noggin, you
know what I mean?

By the time we'd eaten, George and I were slightly tipsy, and although I knew
academically that there was no way the girls could get drunk, they were
certainly going a decent imitation of amorously inebriated females with
wandering hands. But before we could do anything about it, George produced his
coup de grace from the picnic basket. A tin of pineapple.

Have you ever noticed how, alone among the fruits, tinned pineapple is so much
nicer than the fresh variety? For a start, fresh pineapple is deuced difficult
to eat, what with the armour-plated exterior. Also, it has a tendency to be
woody, whereas tinned never is. And finally, there's the juice. Fresh
pineapple doesn't have juice; tinned always does. And I suspect they add sugar
to it, too.

It was a large tin, a generous tin, a king sized tin. A tin suitable for four,
even eight hungry people. We looked at the picture of pineapple on the label,
we thought about the juice. We salivated; I may have even drooled a little.
"Did you bring a can opener?" asked George.

Yeah, right. I hadn't even brought a corkscrew. "Hey, you brought the can, you
should have brought a can opener," I told him. "Huh." We gazed at the can, and
thought about the contents. "Maybe I can use an empty wine bottle," said
George. He held the can between his knees, and brought the neck of the bottle
down onto the top of the can. It made a small but encouraging dent. "Try the
side," I suggested, remembering that the metal is thinner there. He turned the
can sideways, holding the flat parts between his knees, and rammed the empty
bottle down on the can's side. The resulting dent was a lot larger. "Let me
try," I said. I held the neck of the bottle, and brought the bottle down like
a hammer on the side of the can. I tried turning the can a bit, and hammering
at it that way. I bashed and hammered until it was almost square, but I didn't
get it open. "Give it here," said George, and he had a go, a frenzied attack
on the can which left it looking like it had been folded in half. "No, George,
that isn't working, you aren't getting enough leverage. Maybe if you hold it,
and I batter it ..."

George held the can, gripped tightly between his knees, one hand supporting it
underneath. He held one of the bottles against the topside of the can, neck
pressed to the can, bottom up; the idea was that it would act as a chisel. I
held the other bottle like a hammer, swung it behind me and with an overarm
action like a cricketer at the Oval, I brought it down as hard as I could to
strike the top of the bottle that George was holding, in order to drive the
neck of that bottle into the can, punching a neat circular hole that we'd be
able to enlarge. It was a good plan. I know that, because I'd thought of it
myself. It should have worked.

It was Milly who saved George's life that night.

The bottle, which in my wine-soaked inaccuracy had been heading straight for
George's skull, was intercepted by her forearm. It shattered into a thousand
shards, and there was a silence. "Now what?" said George. "George," I said,
"This was not meant to be. To some people pineapple is given, to some it is
taken away. There will be other days, other pineapples. But not this one, not
to us, not today. Urp." I burped.

Wendy took the can from me and opened it by running her fingernail round the
rim, she poured the chunks into paper cups for us.

After the picnic, Milly took George home, but Wendy and I stayed where we
were. It was nice and peaceful up there, and with Wendy's cape wrapped round
us both, it was cosy and warm. We lay in each others arms, looking up at the
moon and stars. "I'll have to take you up there one day," she said. I think
she meant the moon. It's four years to the nearest star, although, come to
think of it, if Wendy can get up to relativistic speeds, it wouldn't be four
years of our time. No, I'm almost sure she meant the moon.

"Tomorrow, Wendy, I want you and Milly to organise this meeting. I want to
wrap this Ruthenia business up soon, I don't like all these nights with you
away." "But Milly ..." "Isn't you," I explained, "she's nice, of course, and I
know you have a comms link running all the time, and if I were George I'd be
delighted that she was there, and, well, I am delighted, she's a delighting
sort of a girl, but she isn't you. Now shut up and show me why I like having
you around."

I woke up the next morning in my bed, but Wendy was still with me. I kept very
still, hoping that she wouldn't realise I was awake. Laying there with my head
on her chest, I could feel something that felt like a heartbeat, but I
couldn't detect any breathing. I tried to stay motionless, but she must have
spotted some change in my breathing, because I felt her start to breathe. The
reason she hadn't been breathing was to avoid waking me up, so I could sleep
on top of her without being disturbed. Oh well, I thought, and I opened my
eyes. "Good morning, Duncan! It's seven o'clock and it's a lovely day!"
"Urghhh," I replied, not really being a morning sort of person. "And I have to
jet down to Ruthenia, to get things moving." "Unhhh. Bye, Wendy." "But I won't
just leave you lazing about in bed ... " Oh no. "Rise and shine" "Please Wendy
..."

I swear this is nothing to do with bodily hygene, it's just her way of
establishing dominance. She yanked me out of bed, tossed me over one shoulder,
and pushed me into the shower. On full. Cold. "NOOOOO!!!!" I screamed, as the
frigid liquid hit my warm skin, turning my blood to ice and my morning
erection to a shrivelled nubbin. She held me there for a minute, soaped me
down, rinsed me off, and rubbed me down with a hot towel, which at least
stopped my teeth from chattering. "Duncan, you're acting like you're cold,"
she remarked. "Gah," I replied. "I'll warm you up, love. Personally." Ah,
that's more like it.

Hand in hand, we went back to the bedroom. This time, I was underneath, and
she was on top. The loss of the morning erection was soon compensated for, and
very soon, a large powerful Weapon was pounding me into the mattress. She had
both of my wrists in one hand, her legs controlled mine, and the other hand
was free to wreak damage up and down my helpless body. It was a devastating
combination of sex and tickling, and I have no notion where she gets these
ideas from. "Miss Hardlash," she explained, "she said that if you get a man
completely helpless, then you can do a whole lot more with him." "But Wendy,
you always make me feel helpless." "Yes. Good, hmmm?" "Mmm."

She wore me down, and burned me up. She lifted me to heaven, and brought me
crashing back to earth. She bamboozled my brain and dazzled my dick until I
didn't know what day it was, or where my towel was. I fell asleep again after
she'd drained me dry, nestled in her powerful arms, and when I woke up again,
she'd gone.

I went downstairs to do some more work on Pretty Flamingo. I got the domain
name registered, started the process of registering the company, printed up
some business cards, made a list of pictures that I wanted to illustrate our
services, then got down to some serious number-crunching on pricing. By the
evening, I had the plan for the web site, an initial list of prices (100,000
ton ship from Amsterdam to Rio, that sort of thing). I'd drafted up a contract
that people would have to agree to, in which one key factor was that I had to
allow leeway in timing. If we were supposed to move a ship and some emergency
cropped up and Wendy was needed to deal with it, I didn't want to get sued
just because Wendy was going to save a thousand human lives instead of
transporting some goods. And if the ship broke while Wendy lifted it in the
cradle, we had to be covered. And I had to specify payment within 30 days. And
other stuff like that. You might think that a lawyer is needed to draft a
contract, but actually there's no way that a lawyer would be able to suggest
what was needed for such an unusual service offer. Sure, I'd get it translated
into incomprehensible legalese by a legal eagle, but the basic ideas had to
come from me.

That evening, Milly flew in, and this time, she used the cat-flap! She had
some great news. "We've persuaded them to sit round a table." "Great," I
enthused, "how did you manage that?" "Piece of cake," she replied, "we each
visited one of the headquarters, and told them that since they can't fight
now, they might as well talk. And if they didn't, then we'd just leave them to
hit each other with sticks and stones. Which would then move up to knives and
swords, and they'd be back to a gun war within a year. So, if they actually
did have any interest in ending the killing, now would be a good time." "And
they agreed? Just like that?" "Well, no. Not straight off. Some of them liked
the idea, some didn't. We had to do a bit of ... persuading. Intimidating, you
know? Like Miss Hardlash showed us." I knew that skill would come in handy.

"I had to sit on a couple of guys faces, and there's a couple of buildings
that got, er, demolished. And there were a few changes in the command
structure." "You mean you killed the officers who wouldn't attend the peace
talks?" "Certainly not, Dunc, what do you take me for? I just ripped their
clothes off, and explained to them that one of my hobbies was collecting men's
genitals, pickled in alcohol and formaldehyde and they decided to resign their
commissions. It was mostly the older ones that were a problem, they've been
hating for so long, they just can't imagine anything else. The younger ones,
though, they have wives, families, they want a decent place to live, a decent
job, and no-one shooting at them. And there were plenty of keen younger
officers ready and willing to take the place of the oldies."

"So when's this peace conference?" "Tomorrow afternoon, Dunc. So, I can give
you a good rogering tonight, then tomorrow morning you can put on your best
suit and tie, and I'll take you there in time for the meeting. Now, tell me
more about Pretty Flamingo, I'm really looking forward to that. Breaking stuff
gets a bit tedious after a while. Will we be flying all over the world?"

So I told her about some of the calculations I'd done. "If you curve your
force field under a ship, then you can lift it without breaking its back, like
a big baby basket with a handle on top. Then, you lift it up a couple of
hundred feet, they batten down the hatches, and you can pull it alone at a
couple of hundred miles per hour, you can do that, right?" "Sure," said Milly,
getting back into her Pretty Flamingo crimson. She stood up and twirled for
me. "How do I look? Do you think I should wear gloves with this?" "So, for
example, you could make the Amsterdam-New York run in 24 hours, and it usually
takes them six weeks. They save on fuel, on mariners wages, and on ship
utilisation. Instead of the voyage costing half a million dollars, we charge
them a hundred grand, and they save four hundred, a big win for the shipping
line. And we don't really have any costs, so that hundred grand goes straight
to our bottom line, you see?" "Mmm. Do you think I should wear knee high boots
with this, or just ballet slippers?" "Then there's short cuts. You have a ship
in the East Coast of the US, and you want to transport stuff to San Francisco.
But it's a few months if you go round the Horn, several week even if you go
via Panama. But we can fly the ship overland, just three thousand miles, get
there twelve hours later!" "Could I wear the same gold belt that Wendy wears
when she's The Weapon?" "You aren't listening, are you, Milly?" "Sure I am.
Overland. Can I carry a passenger, too?" "Passenger?" "It'll get kind of
lonely and boring, Dunc, flying a ship for 24 hours. I was thinking, it would
be nice if someone was with me on the journey."

I've really got to stop thinking about them as flying cranes and start
thinking of them as people. "Well, yes. Of course, Milly. You could take
George with you, and on the overwater flights you could let the ship down into
the sea now and then so that he can use the facilities there. Hot food, you
know? And suchlike." "Mmm. I do love a bit of suchlike. And maybe sometimes I
could take you?" "Uh, yes. Unless I'm with Wendy." I planned to be with Wendy
rather a lot. "Oh, Dunc. Stop thinking about Wendy all the time. I'm here and
she isn't," and she dumped herself on my lap and started snogging me. And
snogging turned into serious snogging, which became heavy petting. And we all
know what that leads to.

* * *