Old Flames
In which some old relationships are reexamined.
In which some old relationships are reexamined.
I said last time that the next episode would not be a clean one. The one after this is not a clean one, either :P but I figured it would be good to spend some time with the new folks, right? And add a bit of political intrigue, because if you're not here for the one I assume you're here for the other~ Patreon subscribers, this should also be live for you with notes and maps and stuff.
Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute--as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.
Tales of the Dark Horse, by Rob Baird.
S8E2, “Old Flames"
Stardate 68049
Out of all the empty tables in the mess hall—even with a dozen newcomers, TCS Dark Horse was still under-crewed by an order of magnitude—Jamie Meyer chose the one at which Mike Cooper was sitting.
Mike focused on his breakfast. Besides Hasan Saleh, who had reported aboard as ship’s cook and was observing the pair with detached interest from the kitchen, they were alone.
Jamie watched as the panther meticulously sectioned off bits of artificial sausage, added in a bit of potato, and took each bite with the same degree of exacting precision. She was, for the moment, ignoring her own breakfast.
Nor was she interested in the other cat’s food, per se. It was, though, much more carefulness than she was accustomed to from him. Finally—the mountain lion’s tail had started to twitch, and she could feel some kind of conversation becoming inevitable, anyway—she spoke:
“It wasn’t on purpose.”
Cooper lifted his head to look at her. And, also, on her tail—though his attempt to avoid focusing on it was mostly successful. “I know.”
“All I knew about this assignment was they wanted a CCI person interested in… ‘new challenges,’ I think that’s how they put it. Yeah.”
“I didn’t say anything different,” he said.
“You didn’t say anything at all,” Jamie countered at once, which was the more meaningful assessment. “Do you know I didn’t do it on purpose, or do you believe it?”
“Both.”
The terseness, like the surgical attention to detail he paid to breakfast, was new. “So we’ll stay out of each other’s way, then?”
“We’re in different departments,” Mike pointed out. “But it’s a small ship, too. You tell Star Patrol your backstory?”
“A little. I don’t know what they have in my record.” She hadn’t volunteered any further details, and when she’d enlisted the Star Patrol was already keenly aware of their need for manpower. “Just my training, as far as I know. It hasn’t come up before.”
The panther considered that, since he was on safer ground when pondering those implications than on pondering the feline’s erratically twitching tail. Finally he nodded. “If anything, then, it’s less likely that it would come up here. They don’t generally need CCI on away missions. So we won’t see each other then, either.”
“You go on away missions?”
“Sure, yes, sometimes. All depends on what the captain wants, but they need a computer person on the ground more often than—” His fork slipped. Brow furrowed, Mike repositioned the last of his potatoes and sausage on it, and took a bite. “Yes. Sometimes.”
“Could be fun,” Jamie said.
“It’s alright.” He got up, fed his tray into the organic materials recycler, and was turning to leave when he decided doing so silently would’ve been—marginally—more awkward than giving some answer. “I should head to engineering. Welcome aboard.”
Jamie ate her own meal quickly, and followed the panther’s lead in recycling the tray. The cook watched that, too; his eyes had the same expectant curiosity with which Jamie had regarded Mike Cooper.
Except that he was a jackal—Jamie had guessed that, or guessed something very-much-like-jackal, and she wasn’t certain the curiosity had purely academic aims. At least, she thought, his voice didn’t sound too suspicious.
Sincere concern, even, soothed the words: “Everything alright?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh. Right.” He placed his paw over his rank insignia to hide it. “I’m just the cook. Seriously, I hate the ‘sir’ thing. And the saluting—I was promised no saluting when I took this job.”
“Sorry. Everything’s alright. Yeah.”
“Co-conspirator?”
She shook her head. “Worse.” Finally, and with a rueful snort, she held up her left paw, spreading fingers to indicate where a ring could plausibly have gone, and gesturing to call attention to its absence.
“Shit,” he said. “You or him?”
“It was mutual. Damage control for young, irresponsible decisions.” Why she chose to disclose this to someone she had just met, and a jackal at that, escaped her. We’ll be on the same ship for God-knows how long, though. Might as well get it off my chest. “We met when he was in the Patrol and I was working off-base.”
“As a hacker,” the jackal guessed; their conversation, short as it was, hinted at a less than seemly background.
Jamie understood that, too. “Part-time. I was… security consulting. Kept doing it. Kept doing it even after we called it off,” she added. “Eventually I thought maybe I’d join the Star Patrol, straighten out a little. I saw Mike on a starbase—year or so ago? It was a bit awkward.”
Hasan’s long muzzle turned slowly to the table they’d abandoned. “Awkward, really? That’s so hard to imagine.”
She snorted again. “The important thing is, I didn’t know he was here. It’s not going to be a problem. We’ll just keep to ourselves, I’m sure. And why do you care, anyway?”
“Sometimes, dinner comes with knives. I’d like to know when to put out the blunt ones.”
***
Captain’s log, stardate 68055.2
We are nearing Garakhav, homeworld of our Dominion allies, at a time that feels particularly tense. The Pictor have been too quiet—even the occasional attack on a convoy doesn’t change that assessment. If this is the calm before the storm, I don’t think any of us are ready for it.
“We’ve arrived, captain.”
“I’ll be there in a moment. Drop out of hyperspace and take us into orbit.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She nodded to Mei, who was watching her expectantly; the clouded leopard cut power to the drive, and the Dark Horse slipped without a fuss back amongst the stars. “Eighty thousand kilometers or so?”
“Looks like it, yeah. You try to get closer?”
“Closer than you do in a freighter. But, like… it’s a planet, y’know?” Eli shrugged. “We can try to optimize the re-entry vectors next time—for practice, I guess. It doesn’t matter. The planet isn’t going anywhere.”
“I just didn’t want to run into it.” Mei grinned at the way Eli, who had joined nearly every single one of the new helmsman’s shifts, still flinched at a suggestion like that. “Are there any speed limits I should be aware of?”
“The Uxzu don’t really care about formalities. The only danger is, if you come in too hot, they might want to challenge you to a race or something. Keep us at half power, maybe?”
Even at half power, it was only going to take the Dark Horse a few hours to enter orbit around Garakhav. Elissa, who suspected she would be needed to shuttle a diplomatic party down to the surface, let Mei handle the rest of the work in favor of a nap, brief as it might prove to be. She had come to trust the clouded leopard, in spite of her sense of humor, and sleep was more important.
Without the wolf looking over her shoulder, Mei took her time with the course plot, and then took even more time with aligning the cruiser onto it. As Parnell said, this was a low-stakes maneuver—a good opportunity to familiarize herself with the ship. She’d already been thrown into the deep end once.
Jamie Meyer, too, had been left to her own devices at the CCI station. Unlike Parizeau, Jamie felt as though she was more or less permanently floundering in the deep end. This—though she was not about to tell anyone—formed the crux of her disquiet with Mike Cooper’s presence.
She didn’t know what he might’ve told anyone, although she was certain it could not have been kind. But he’d had more than a year to make his acquaintance of the crew, and to prove himself. The cougar would be starting on the back foot.
By the time she learned the truth—that he had told his crew nothing about her—the situation would have changed, and she would not be inclined to find that quite so reassuring. That, however, was still in the future. In the present, she found herself staring at a growing list of signals on her console. None of them were familiar.
“Sir.” She raised her voice to get Barry’s attention. The Border Collie looked over, tilting his head. “We’re picking up, uh. A lot of traffic. Would you mind taking a look?”
Dr. Schatz endeavored to be helpful, wherever possible. In any case, he wouldn’t have been grievously insulted had he known that Jamie asked him not because of his helpfulness but because his distractibility meant he was unlikely to remember that she’d needed his assistance.
She stepped back from the console to make room for him. “It’s a bunch of mixed signals. All across the spectrum, and none of it’s in the database.”
“Not in the Star Patrol database,” he agreed. “Some of it’s in the ship’s library. We keep sending updates back, but then they don’t always include those in the compiled versions we get—kind of a strange process. I wish we processed new information like they do at the University of Obu. In the Daru System. You know it?”
“Uh. No, sir.”
Barry had been working on sorting the signals while he rambled. Done with a first pass, he realized that he had been rambling. “Sorry. Here, though. See? It’s mostly in our internal banks.”
“We’re supposed to use the official ones first, I thought. Right?”
“I guess. But if it doesn’t work… I’m not sure what the last regulation we followed just because it was a regulation even might’ve been. You have to be adaptable. That’s my advice.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. Neither of them realized the broad leeway Barry—as, theoretically, a senior officer and department head, and thereby a voice of authority—had inadvertently given her. “So these are… wait, this is comms traffic? It’s very… leaky.”
“Welcome to the Dominion. They still use linear catalyzers for heat regulation in most of their high-energy circuits. ‘Leaky’ is a very kind word for it.”
Jamie understood the functioning of a linear catalyzer the way she understood how leeches might be used in medicine. The mountain lion felt her tail beginning to twitch, constructing a hypothetical of how a starship built in that fashion might even work. “They get into hyperspace just by sheer force of will?”
“Yeah, that sounds right.”
“What about their deflector shields?”
Barry, who had been spending a lot of his free time with Mitch Alexander, did his best impression of a weary feline glare. “What deflector shields? They don’t really have them, unless they can buy them from another source. But it doesn’t really matter.”
“How?”
“Because they’re armored to take a low-yield antimatter warhead and shrug it off. None of the rest of it matters. You should read through the technical documents we’ve put together, if you want to be… deeply scarred.”
“By their starship design?”
“By their everything design. Wait until you see them up close.”
Her opportunity to do this came sooner than either expected. Kenra Tellak had been informed of their imminent arrival, and the leader of the Kolash Pride met them in orbit, instead.
For Jamie, this entailed watching the deceptively agile movements of the Uxzu shuttle, which had no automated docking systems and matched their course in a flurry of intense thruster burns. She winced as they drew closer, and their successful landing was a pleasant surprise.
Kenra Tellak was joined by one of her tactical advisors, who stayed quiet, and by Misho, who had come to be the Kolash expert on Terran affairs and was more willing to speak his mind. After introductions—Shania Brouwer, who had joined them as a linguist, was also new to the Uxzu—Misho was the one to pivot towards the unspoken topic:
“We must discuss the war, I believe. And its end.”
“Would that it were closer,” Maddy said carefully.
Kenra took over. “It is. With your help. The cruiser you found preparing itself for battle with an Elaxi convoy was one of the survivors of a skirmish in the Menarav system. They will not show dare show their miserable faces there again. They will not dare to prey on the Elaxi again, either.”
Maddy had to be, at the very least, slightly skeptical: the cruiser hadn’t seemed like it was preparing to retreat, after all. She held her tongue. “Where is the Menarav system, might I ask?”
Kenra Tellak’s massive paws worked through the hologram with a remarkable deftness. The system she indicated was seventy light years from Garakhav, in the direction of Imperial territory. “It is here. We disabled the remainder of their invasion force.”
This, it transpired, cost the Dominion three destroyers, with all their crews, and nine smaller vessels in exchange for a Pictor carrier and one of their cruisers. The Uxzu matriarch went on to describe four more battles, which marked the outlines of a substantial Pictor incursion, in which two dreadnoughts and nearly sixty other ships had been lost, along with hundreds of various bombers and light attack vessels.
“Needless to say,” Kenra finished, “the Kolash Pride tires of countenancing their meddling. We mean to counterattack as soon as fitting-out is complete of our replacement warships.”
“How long would that be?”
“Several weeks. The crew must also be trained. You would be pleased, Madison May—the newest dreadnought will be a joint effort between ourselves and the Chal-Ulaha. The Dominion has not been so closely bound in generations.”
“You have not heard of this pride, I take it,” Misho added, when Maddy took too long to answer. “That is understandable. They are… reclusive.”
Kenra Tellak gave a thin smile. “True. We have called them worse, at times. You should meet them, I believe. If you might do the Kolash Pride—and, indeed, all those on Garakhav—a small honor…”
Admiral Mercure had, after all, told her to maintain their relationship with the Dominion. “Well, if you’re the one asking, Matriarch, it’s an honor I’d love to do for you. If you judge it to be within the abilities of my ship and crew.”
“Ah! Ah, there would be none better!”
She stood up, and reached behind her back, removing a heavy shield. More than most Dominion artifacts, it seemed ornate—jeweled, even, along the edge of an unfamiliar sigil. But the metal had still been abundantly damaged from use, and it had a typically Uxzu heft.
That heft announced itself when Kenra Tellak set the shield down on the table; she had not done so with any great force, but there was still the audible sound of splintering composite, and the hologram went blurry and disappeared. “This is the Shield of Taru. It belonged to the Chal-Ulaha, once. And it is absolutely forbidden for the Kolash to simply return such a trophy back to a defeated foe.”
“I see,” Maddy said. “But if you were to give it to us, its disposition would no longer be up to you.”
“I already have given it to you.” Kenra Tellak pointed to the shield, now framed by a spiderweb of glittering error messages from the table upon which it rested. “And, odd as they are, the Chal-Ulaha will know the meaning of such a gesture. I expect them to respond in kind, even if their wealth is measured more in knowledge than in the spoils of proper combat.”
“We’ll take it to them at once,” the Akita promised. Kenra Tellak bowed her great head slightly: the meeting was over. Maddy chose to escort their guests back to the shuttlebay, leaving the remainder of her crew to look at one another, and then the shield.
“Is it… always like this?” Shania Brouwer asked.
“Pretty much.” Dave nudged the shield carefully, and winced at the sound of the table’s surface grating against itself. “Dr. Beltran?”
“Sometimes, if we are aboard one of their vessels, they engage in more physical violence. But, yes, our conversations with them often proceed in this fashion.”
The mutt looked back over her notes—she’d taken down a number of snippets of conversation, and the universal translator had already begun to annotate them copiously. “And do we know anything about the Chal-Ulaha?”
“No.” Felicia had asked for an overview of the various factions before, and trusted Maddy’s assurances that such an overview had been, in turn, requested of the Dominion. Its absence, the leopardess concluded, was because the Uxzu themselves did not think of their politics in that way.
“But they don’t know they’re being volunteered for this new warship.”
Dr. Beltran had also, if separately, come to this conclusion. “I assume that is correct.”
“Kolash and Neviin formations have done the brunt of the fighting,” Lieutenant Vasquez added—context that Brouwer had not been aware of. “It doesn’t take too much to surmise those losses are unsustainable.”
“And yet they want to go on the offensive.”
“Unless that’s just bluster,” Dave pointed out. “Preparing a major offensive in only a few weeks—with brand-new ships and crews, at that… I don’t know. They’re rash, but I’m not sure they’re that rash.”
“They were being serious. Kenra’s dialect of Uxzu has a stipulative mood. You can see it in the way the initial vowel is raised in the modal hosik.” Brouwer intended to show her notes to everyone through the ready room’s hologram, but the state of the table made such a thing impossible. “Well. Anyway. It’s there.”
“Their dialect raises many initial vowels,” Dr. Beltran said.
“Yes, ma’am. But this one is consistent. It’s like the filial mood in Sevessi. They use it to mark concepts that are… understood to be true, even if they’re not true.”
“White lies?” Dave thought he was following, although he both wanted to confirm this, and to make sure everyone else was on the same page.
“Yes, exactly. The way they talk about this group, the Chal-Ulaha? An Uxzu would know they didn’t mean it literally. But they do mean the bit about the offensive. I’m pretty sure, at least.”
That wasn’t exactly out of character for the Dominion, either; they would have described themselves as scrupulously honest—but if everyone knew a polite fiction was being told, could even really be called a lie? “Well, I guess I should get the navigation plot started, then. Lieutenant Vasquez, can you get this moved to… some kind of storage?”
Vasquez looked at the shield, in full awareness that merely lifting it was not the entirety of what the retriever was asking. “Of course, sir,” he said, anyway, and let Commander Bradley leave assuming the situation was under control. Pancho intended his friendly demeanor to carry him, as usual. “Engineering. Can we get a repair team and an antigravity sled to the ready room?”
Shannon Hazelton was not, for once, on the other end of the line; instead he was greeted by a masculine voice that sounded more confused than liable to lapse into profanity. “Uh. Engineering here. What happened?”
“Somebody dropped an ancient artifact on the table and it’s no longer working. The table isn’t working, that is. The artifact is a big, solid metal shield. I’d say… 60 or 70 kilos? It seems to be fine. I can help you move it, but we need the table fixed, too.”
“Wait one.” There was silence for about a minute. Vasquez tried tapping on the table, and found the entire surface was no longer responsive. “I guess we’re sending a crew. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“Great. Thanks.”
With that taken care of, Dr. Beltran spoke up, turning their attention back to the just-concluded meeting. “How certain are you about the stipulative mood?”
Shania hadn’t spent much time around Beltran—whom she respected tremendously, from a distance. She was not yet used to the doctor’s formal dialect, though, and uncertain if she was being judged. “I’m pretty sure, ma’am. My master’s thesis will be about the Uxzu language—specifically, the use of hyperbole in communication. Your dispatches have had a lot to say about that.”
“My dispatches are known at the Academy?”
“Sort of. Anyone who’s interested in xenolinguistics will find them, though. There are hundreds of thousands of linguists studying that across the TC. I’m sure I’m not the only one!”
Felicia nodded. “So, then, the existence of that mood was not a new conjecture for you.”
“No, ma’am. Not at all. I can show you my notes. I’d love to, actually! That part of their grammar has been very useful.” She was, secretly, thrilled to have stumbled across it, and to have found no sign in any of the other scanty publications about the Dominion—first contact had occurred too recently for much research. “Your feedback would be… I’d be very thankful, Dr. Beltran.”
She didn’t know what to make of the peppy young dog, whose combination of academic interest and wagging tail reminded her of Barry Schatz. Barry could be trying; the hero worship Brouwer evinced was something of a red flag. But if her conclusions were accurate… “Forward it to me. I will take a look at once.”
***
“Ms. Meyer,” Mike said, and cut a path around the mountain lion that had him nearly against the wall.
She gave him a curt nod. “Mr. Cooper.”
Mike looked at what had been set out for the midday meal; the computerized placard called it ‘poutine,’ which was not a word he recognized. It smelled good, though, and that would have to be enough: scrolling down the computer to see the ingredients list was never a good idea. “Can I get some—”
Jamie’s fork hit her plate slightly more loudly than the cougar had intended. TJ—she’d joined Teej and Mitch for lunch—tilted his head. “You okay?”
Her paw had slipped—that was all. Coming as it did after Mike’s arrival, though, she didn’t figure anyone would believe that. “Yes. Just realized I’m late for my shift.”
“You are?” Mitch asked. It was not impossible that she’d forgotten the schedule, but so far as she knew Siraj Ahmed was in charge of CCI for the next three hours.
He was. Jamie’s ear flicked. “Training. Asking Siraj some questions.”
“Oh.”
Mike had never finished the question he intended to direct at the ship’s cook. Like everyone else, his attention had been drawn to the cougar. “It’s fine. I can—”
“I was just leaving,” Meyer said. Her plate was, in any case, nearly finished. She slid it into the recycler and headed for the exit.
Sharing a meal would have been awkward. Acknowledging that he might have had something to do with that would’ve been even more awkward, the panther thought. “Uh. Can I get some coffee?”
Lieutenant Saleh had intended to get a plate ready. “You don’t want food?”
“I just stopped by for coffee. That’s all,” Mike assured him, even if his stomach was threatening to start growling. “I already ate.”
“Uh… okay.” He took his time filling the flask, so that the two petty officers would not run the risk of encountering one another in the corridor. “Good luck with your shift, Mr. Cooper.”
“Very normal,” was Mitch’s comment, after the panther’s tail had snaked through the closing doors to the mess hall. “They’re both very normal people. You think they’re fucking?”
“No. No way Mike keeps that one close, dude. You know, back a couple weeks ago, with that plant bullshit? Something almost happened between him and the diplomat and—”
“The diplomat?” Mitch had only really seen Dr. Beltran in action, on the bridge, and had no idea how anyone could’ve gotten within two meters of her without being frozen solid.
That was, of course, basically what had happened, although TJ was not privy to all the details. “I dunno! It was a strange couple days, dude, right? But he was so weird about it afterwards. If he and the new cat were in the sack already, I’d know.”
“Huh.” The engineering crew were all pretty tight-knit, it was true. “Gotta wonder what the fuck’s going on, then.”
“You know what I think it is? I think it’s the universal translator. I bet she’s from one of those weird colonies. Like, um. Banix? Barix? The sunken one.”
It was hard for others to know when either of the friends were recalling something that had actually happened, or something they had read in a comic book. What others did not guess was the extent to which the confusion was shared by the two themselves. “Sunken one?”
“Yeah. Early colony ship. The atmosphere was… toxic, maybe, or there wasn’t an ozone layer? Something. They just sunk the ship and used the disassemblers to turn it into an underwater habitat. So for, like… for like two hundred years they just lived below the surface.”
“Are you thinking of Glaziers?”
“Like that, but times a bunch,” TJ insisted. “All their metaphors are about water and algae and stuff. Probably if she’s back underwater she sounds normal.”
“She told me she was from Albruk. That’s about as normal as you can get.” Albruk III was, at least; Albruk II was a volcanic planet, and the native inhabitants had silicate scales and tongues that boiled water. Mitch assumed Jamie did not come from there. “It was both of them, too. You’re forgetting that.”
“Well, Cooper hasn’t mentioned anything. We just had a whole shift together, too, working on the transmitter.”
Mitch decided the gossip could be filed away until the next time she had a chance to talk with Jamie. “Oh, boy. How’s that coming?”
“Not so great. I mean, the closer we get to the front line, the more the chief’s going to have us tasked to maintaining tactical equipment. Fine by me. I just hope they didn’t sell the parole guys a bill of goods.”
Mitch made a face. “They probably did. What, you think you’re behind now?” Regular checkins had been, to her knowledge, one of the conditions of TJ’s release when he joined the Star Patrol.
The otter had never been good at scowling, but he tried one of his own on for size. “If they try to fucking screw me on that, Mitch…”
Nothing about their conversation had been conspiratorial, or especially private—even the speculation about their fellow crew. Hasan Saleh wasn’t certain he’d been forgotten, but he coughed politely anyway before posing his question. “Parole?”
“Teej stabbed a guy.”
He endeavored to deepen his scowl, glaring at the Abyssinian. “No. It was theft. Uh, of a ‘dangerous weapon’—also bullshit, by the way—”
“Oh. That’s true,” Mitch added, sincerely. “That part’s real. And absolutely ridiculous.”
TJ nodded sharply. “Fucking ridiculous,” he said. “So I got some time. After I turned 18 they let me knock it down if I did some Star Patrol stuff. Three years, right? But then any time my evals were shit they’d be like, ‘oh, that doesn’t count.’”
“Yeah,” Hasan agreed. “They do that.”
“Bullshit, is what. Anyway, somebody told me there’s a loophole: if they can’t get in touch with you, they can’t hassle you. So that’s why I’m here. They’re definitely hassling me if we start chatting again.”
“How long do you have left?”
“Couple months.” He twitched. “Fifty-seven days, to be precise. You better believe I log every shift just to watch that number go down.”
Mitch hadn’t kept track of it so religiously; the concrete timeframe stirred the memory of a party she’d thought about throwing for the otter. “Wasn’t it back in March, then?”
“Yeah, except we—” he glanced at Saleh and then concluded, as most of them had, that the ship was too small to keep a secret like that for any length of time. “We were stuck in an alternate universe for more than six months. For us it was just a couple days. So I had to adjust the clock.”
The personnel office had told Saleh the Dark Horse would be an ‘unusual’ assignment, without many more details. He was not a physicist. All the jackal knew was that TJ had explained it with precious little concern for how odd it sounded, and Spaceman Alexander had not objected. So it was probably true: “but it was supposed to be March?”
“Yep, while we were busy trying to find our way back.”
Other inconsistencies clicked in a way that perked the jackal’s ears. He pointed to Mitch questioningly. “The civilian woman who always wears the engineering vest with all the pockets. Somebody said ‘oh, don’t ask’—you’re not identical twins, are you?”
“No,” she told him.
“Alternate universe.”
“Yeah.”
He seemed to be taking it in stride, and TJ tried to soften any remaining blow by interjecting with an aside. “Good poutine, dude, by the way.”
Given what he knew of Clearwater cuisine, the jackal didn’t know if that should’ve been taken as a compliment or not. He decided there was no harm in accepting it. “Thanks.”
“This is a mission where a lot of wild things happen,” Mitch explained. “Just something to get used to, Hasan.”
“I guess. It doesn’t matter, though. If they said March, it’s March. Seriously—you’re free. Snap the monitor in half if you want.”
TJ had wanted to do that, basically every time he was compelled to interact with the damned thing. “Fuck, dude, I wish. I tried to tell it the date had changed. Didn’t matter. That would be sweet, though.”
“I’m serious,” Hasan repeated. “The monitor’s just for your PO to check any inconsistencies. Read the last 8191-D they gave you when they extended your term. It’ll say ‘for eighteen months’ or something, sure. But at the end, it’s going to give you a Terran date, and a stardate. That’s the only thing that matters.”
“Would be sweet.” No matter how firmly Hasan might’ve said it, TJ felt no sense of elation; in the otter’s mind, they were just shooting the shit like he might’ve with his friends back home. He helped himself to another bite of poutine. “How do you know about 8191 forms, anyway? They get you, too?”
Hasan looked young for his age. Between that, and his species, it would not have been the first time a similarly uncharitable assumption had been made. “No. I’m a lawyer.”
TJ and Mitch both cocked their heads, at the same time and at nearly the same angle. “Really?” Alexander asked. “I thought you were a cook.”
“Well… yeah. I transferred from the JAG Corps. Junior advisor for contract and procurement, 8th Fleet, at your service.”
“They trying to punish you?” TJ asked, head still canted.
“Nah. Think about everything you know about the Star Patrol, right? All the bureaucracy and the forms and stuff? Imagine if that was your job. Nine hours a day sending contracts back for no good reason and getting called ‘sir’ for doing it. Hated that.”
There were two advantages to being aboard TCS Dark Horse, for Lieutenant Saleh, which the jackal had realized when the opportunity to transfer first appeared. The first was that nobody on the cruiser would ever ask him to look over a procurement form.
The second, and more important one, was that nobody on the cruiser would ever second-guess that decision. TJ returned to his poutine, curiosity sated for the moment. “That makes sense.”
“Why cook, though? Why’d you come here to cook?”
“I like people. It’s fun to talk to them, and everybody on this ship is a real character. And it’s just about a full-time job, but not too stressful that I don’t have time to put in some hours on other stuff.”
“Fun to talk to them,” Mitch repeated; her own inquisitiveness, unlike her friend’s, was harder to suppress. “That means you know what’s going on with Mike and Jamie.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you do.”
“I talk to them, same way I talk to you,” the jackal said, letting Mitch’s sharp-eyed expression wash over him. “You work together, anyway. She’ll tell you, I’m sure.”
Grumbling, Mitch sat back in her chair. “Does he know he’s the most powerful person on the ship, Teej?”
“I mean… you did ask why he took the job…”
***
For the second time in a week, the Star Patrol crew found themselves face-to-face with the Uxzu. This time, it was Kenama Jashun, the leader of the Chal-Ulaha, and two escorts. According to Dr. Beltran, their dialect was already compatible with the universal translator, and they had shown no hesitation in accepting the offered meeting.
Just in case, though, they kept the meeting small. Besides Beltran, who would have been interested to know what Shania Brouwer made of the conversation, Maddy asked only Dave Bradley to accompany her. “I hope we’ll make a good impression,” she said.
“You generally do,” he assured her. Captain May, in particular, proved to be simpatico with the members of the Dominion they encountered.
Matriarch Kenama was short, for one of her kind—not that much taller than Maddy. Her fur was a great deal redder than the others they’d met, and her paws were brown instead of deep black.
But the effortless way she picked up the shield revealed the 30 kilos of muscle she had in advantage over the Akita. “Ah,” she cried, her fangs showing in a wide grin. “So it is true! They have sent jen Reshor Taru back to us! Without even the courage to show themselves, of course.”
“They said tradition prevents them from giving up trophies to their original owners,” Maddy explained. “But I wasn’t the original owner, and it’s not my tradition…”
“Of course not. But they knew what you’d do.” Kenama set the shield down heavily, edge-on, with a solid clang that made the divot it left in the floor unsurprising. “They’re strange ones, you know? Odd ways of talking, to preserve their honor.”
“Matriarch Kenra Tellak is also… occupied with her war against the Pictor. The Kolash and Neviin prides have been—”
“Yes, yes,” Kenama scoffed. “It’s just like them to measure every accomplishment in spilled blood. Did they tell you they desired our secret knowledge, too? The lore we’ve collected for centuries?”
“That.. wasn’t actually entirely clear,” the Star Patrol captain admitted. “They told us about this shield thing, and I figured I would investigate for myself. We hadn’t heard anything about your pride.”
“Inconceivable.” An auburn ruff of untidy mane on the Uxzu’s neck bristled. “The truth they kept from you is that we are one of the great families. We control more territory than the Kolash, and steward it far more effectively.”
“How much territory?”
“Twenty-three worlds, and outposts on another seventy. To barbarians like the Kolash, we might as well be sniveling traders like the Lishek, carting the spoils of others from one space station to the next. Itinerants. Scavengers, producing nothing of value on their own—of course, now, what do the Kolash produce? Big words.”
“Please, ah… don’t take offense,” Maddy said, although that preamble was not the sort of thing to put one’s audience at ease. “But we weren’t told anything about you. Does that mean the Chal-Ulaha do produce things?”
“That is exactly what it means.”
Dr. Beltran took careful notes as Kenama explained further. Ulahar shipwrights had been responsible for the original design that other prides subsequently adapted into the standard Uxzu dreadnought—Beltran wrote ‘adapted,’ although Kenama had actually said ‘defiled.’
The Ulaha ran the most productive mines in the Dominion, too, according to the clan matriarch. Even prides that now manufactured their own ships and materiel agreed on the superlative quality of Ulahar metallurgy.
By contrast the Chal were farmers; Kenama described entire moons covered in greenhouses used for producing grain and raising cattle. Much of it went to other Dominion clans. The remainder was sold off-world. No, Felicia corrected in her notes. Bartered for strategic resources. They would never consent to being described as traders.
“I myself am Chal,” Kenama said, with a hint of pride. “We are one of the few prides for whom the matriarch is not lineal. It is customary to trade off. When I die, the best of the Ulaha will be nominated to take my place. Even though the Chal outnumber the Ulaha by a significant margin. It was always thus.”
“You’re not active hunters,” Dave suggested. “The way the Kolash are. But they seem—pardon my bluntness—eager to consider you allies.”
Kenama smiled slowly, her muzzle curling in a dangerous grin. “They need us. I understand that they have been warring with outsiders. Befriending outsiders, too,” she added, and let those words hang. “They have overextended themselves. Typical behavior. The Neviin are no better.”
“Have you heard of the Pictor?” Maddy asked. “Has Kenra Tellak said anything to you?”
“We’re aware of the conflict. Sor-im-Risu was a former client state of the Neviin. They began allying themselves to an empire called Biktar some 9.221 years ago, more or less. The Pictor are not native to our space.”
“They’re not native to ours, either. But they’ve launched several wars of aggression against my people. The…” Maddy almost said ‘The Dominion,’ but thought better of lumping all of them into one single polity. “Several Dominion prides allied themselves with us.”
“Indeed. And we see where it has gotten them.” Kenama lifted the shield up, turning it slowly and inspecting the damage it had sustained over its years of use. “Did they tell you to ask for our help?”
“Well… no. No, not in so many words.”
“So, then, how am I supposed to know that they’ve learned?” The Uxzu laughed, and once again showed fangs that did not seem likely to belong to a simple farmer. “Because you’re here at all, that’s how. And I will respond as they wished me to.”
“Which is?”
“Agreement. You may give them a token of our discussion here.” She reached into her robe and, rather than pulling out a weapon, came back with a small piece of computer hardware. This she set down as reverently as if it had been some sacred artifact. “They will understand.”
“What is it?”
“Perhaps you will understand, too,” Kenama said, rather obliquely in Maddy’s opinion. “You might benefit from the knowledge, if you so desire. It is one volume of our collected wisdom, which the Kolash have denied themselves for eons. If they wish us back into the fold, they will know what to do.”
“Er… thank you.” Maddy took the device and, for want of any pocket in which it could be stowed, held it in what she hoped was a respectful stance.
“They will act appropriately.” The Uxzu stood, and her silent companions followed suit. “Which means we have preparations to begin. The next time you come to our space, Captain May, feel free to do so without such… pretense. You deserve better.”
“I… um. I look forward to meeting you again.” May also got to her feet. “Commander Bradley and I will walk you back to the shuttlebay. I appreciate your willingness to come aboard my ship.”
“And I appreciate your willingness to share it with me. All the rumors we’re heard about your people seem to have been true. I can see why the others are so fond of you. When you come back…”
Felicia, who had not been invited, stayed behind and allowed their conversation to recede. Captain May would be able to handle herself, she figured. “Dr. Schatz, if you would be so kind as to join me in the science lab.”
“I’m actually already there. What’s up?”
“One moment.”
Kenama had mentioned dozens of proper nouns that Felicia wanted to investigate. Some of them she recognized: they had already known of the Risu, who still traded with allies of the Kolash Pride, and of their interactions with the Pictor.
Perhaps Brouwer would be able to provide some insight from the transcripts, and the recordings of the meeting. Until then… the leopardess shook her head, and headed to the science lab.
Barry had been working on reconciling some peculiar data from a Star Patrol astrometrics survey with their own probes. He cleared the sensor output, put his analytical subroutines on hold, and stood back from the computer when Dr. Beltran appeared. “Can I help you?”
“I would benefit from access to Qalamixi’s database. Have you made any improvements to the search functionality?”
“Sort of. It’s still a bit quirky. What are you looking for?”
“Dominion history.”
“Can you be more precise?”
“Let us start with this: what, exactly, does ‘Dominion’ mean?”
***
They found the first clues after only an hour of searching. Three more allowed Beltran to confirm her initial suspicion. Captain May was on the bridge, finishing up her shift.
The appearance of both Drs. Beltran and Schatz, at the same time and with the same look in their eyes, seemed unlikely to prove auspicious. Maddy kept her demeanor as optimistic as possible, nonetheless. “What brings you to the bridge at this hour?”
“Some things that Matriarch Kenama said… piqued my curiosity, captain. I asked Dr. Schatz for assistance in reading the encyclopedia we obtained from Qalamixi.”
“And you found something?”
“Indeed. Did you find it suspicious that the Chal-Ulaha have never been mentioned to us, captain?”
“Only at first, to be honest. If they’re farmers and miners, you know? We’d never heard about the Lishek before we met them, either. I don’t think the Kolash have much time for non-warriors.”
“True,” Beltran admitted. “But there is another reason.”
“They have bad blood,” the Akita guessed—the Kolash had, after all, obtained ‘trophies’ from the other pride. “They’ve fought before, obviously. It must’ve been acrimonious. I don’t know how often the Uxzu really fight on a clan level like that.”
“It is rare—now. The Dominion was, at one point, a more organized polity. The Chal-Ulaha were its leaders.”
“In what sense?”
“They’ve always been tribal,” Dr. Schatz explained. “If you hear them talk about it now, they make it sound like the prides are sort of vying, in a Darwinian sense, and that this is their strength. You know, if one pride is more or less equal, it’s directly related to their military prowess—or something else egalitarian.”
“Right…”
“The Chal-Ulaha were the first to organize the Dominion—every single pride, more or less—into one coherent nation. One very unequal nation. Wealth and power flowed from the other prides back to the Chal-Ulaha, and to their favored families.”
Maddy took that in, and tried to imagine what it would take to herd the Uxzu into anything coherent. “How long did that last?”
“Nearly fifteen hundred years. They gradually became more reliant on the border clans, who also used the opportunity to seize even more territory. That was also the period of their greatest extent. Then, in 670 BCE, by our calendar, there was a rebellion.”
“Led by the Kolash,” Maddy guessed.
“Yes, although it was a coalition of about a dozen prides, some of whom are now extinct. They fought the Chal-Ulaha to… something of a draw, from what we can see, by the 4th century BCE. Qalamixi’s records are a little unclear, and some of it is from folklore. Take it with a grain of salt. But there does seem to have been some kind of treaty. In the Aneshi Saga, it’s—”
“Perhaps,” Dr. Beltran interrupted, “we could be less… discursive.”
“Right. Sorry. The outcome was that, uh, the Dominion became federalized, and then more of a confederation, and then more of a… an idea. They fought pretty intensely for a while, but that only lasted a millennium or so. Now they keep themselves on speaking terms by appealing to the independence of each pride.”
“Their culture is built around that,” Felicia added, although she would explain the quirks of Uxzu grammar later. “They would never think of their prides as equals, but they are all sovereign.”
“But that’s not…” Maddy did not have the diplomat’s instincts, or her science officer’s knowledge of history. Instead, she had an uncanny degree of intuition—and a good memory. “But that’s not always true. We’ve known the Kolash Pride wants to centralize power for some time. They see the tribal rivalries as destructive. Even unsustainable, considering all the threats they’ve been under—like it’s a way of life they’ve outgrown.”
“Yes.” Felicia waited, to see if her captain would connect the rest of the dots.
“It’s not just exigent circumstances. They don’t just need manpower and resources,” Maddy concluded. “They want to restore the old Dominion.”
“Yes. Remember, captain: the Chal-Ulaha were not conquered. They agreed to an armistice. Under its terms, the pride has been demilitarized for three thousand years. They are permitted weapons of self-defense only.”
“I can’t imagine an Uxzu agreeing to that kind of humiliation...”
“The other prides have insisted on it. The Uxzu are vigilant on that point, and it would be impossible to conduct a military buildup of that scale in secret. So, as far as we know, they have not.”
“But the other prides also rely on their factories too much to antagonize them…” Maddy sighed heavily, and looked to the viewscreen, which was tracking their progress back towards Garakhav. “So they’ve been allowed to retain their power. You think they’d betray Kenra Tellak?”
“Guile seems to be difficult for the Uxzu, captain. I would not say they are inclined to betray the Kolash. I would only caution that the Kolash intend a reshaping of Dominion politics.”
“But that might be a good thing, too, right? Maybe this is their opportunity to finally come together. You heard Kenama—the way they select a new matriarch sounds pretty egalitarian, right?”
“In her telling, yes.”
“Then we need to figure out more, don’t we?”
***
TJ, working in main engineering as the next shift got underway, was insulated from all of these discussions. He would not have minded, either way, but the politics of the Rewa-Tahi sector were outside his ability to control.
Anomalies in the ship’s systems were another thing entirely. “Hey, Mike. Are you running any maintenance or anything?”
“No. Why?”
On a ship as old as the Dark Horse, TJ made a habit of following up on anything that looked out of the ordinary. “There’s a power and a temperature spike in one of the secondary cores. Science lab, looks like.”
Dr. Schatz treated the lab like his own office; that was often the reason for elevated processor usage. On the other hand, his uses were generally very intensive, and after the first few times he’d learned to warn the engineering team so they could anticipate it and make allowances. “There’s nothing scheduled,” Mike said, thoughtfully. “Barry was using it, but he should be done by now. Did somebody else check in?”
“I don’t have access to the security logs, dude. Boss?”
Shannon caught the last part of the conversation even before the otter summoned her. “What’s up. Access violation?”
“The lab,” Mike said, and checked his own computer to make sure he hadn’t missed a message from the Border Collie. “It’s probably nothing, but I better go check it out.”
Lieutenant Commander Hazelton sighed. “Ah, passeka. Have someone go with you—maybe the new girl? Hobbes? She looks like she can shoot. Stop by the midship armory first.”
“No, no. I mean it’s actually probably nothing. This looks like one core, maybe. Must’ve come out of hibernation for a patch cycle. I’ll make sure it shuts down cleanly.”
“If you’re certain.”
He was not particularly interested in discovering for himself whether or not their newest electrician could, in fact, handle a weapon. “I’m certain,” the panther said, and locked his console. “I’ll call you if I need help.”
If Mike were to rank the possibilities, ‘randomly came out of hibernation’ was at the top of the list. Their computers were often a little finicky, and they dated from a time period where the Star Patrol considered networking a security risk so they couldn’t all be managed remotely.
Dr. Schatz was also a likely culprit. They’d warned the Border Collie not to draw too much power without telling them, but Mike had learned that he was easily distractible. He could’ve been struck by a brilliant idea after finishing up his earlier work, or been asked to look into something by Captain May and mistakenly assumed the Akita would let the engineering staff know.
Less probable, he figured, was a systems failure. They were old, but robust. A serious problem—a stowaway, or a boarding party, or a hostile virus that had gained sentience—was even less likely. Still, he did a quick check of the room’s environmental systems.
When they registered a single occupant, but did not present any warning about unauthorized access, he decided it was Barry Schatz, after all. That would, indeed, be an easy solution to the problem. It might even present some exciting new opportunity, if Dr. Schatz needed help with something.
He opened the door. “Oh, what the fuck.”
Jamie Meyer, who’d turned at the sound of the door sliding open, said the exact same thing at the exact same time. “What are you doing here?”
They said that at the same time, too. “I’m responsible for the computers. Somebody decided to access the lab without telling me. That’s what I’m doing here. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“It’s not a restricted area,” Jamie shot back. “So what do you care?”
“I just told you: I’m responsible for the computers. What do you even have there?”
The cougar narrowed her eyes, and adjusted her stance to keep Mike from looking too closely at the module. “Nothing. Captain May wanted to know if we could get data off this… thing we got from the Dominion.”
Mike took a step around her, and found his path blocked. The science lab was not that large. “She asked you to do that?”
She scowled. “She didn’t say for anyone in particular to do it. She suggested I take it to engineering. But, since I keep hearing about how busy you all are, I figured I’d at least come with some preliminary work done. You should thank me.”
“For trying to hook alien technology up to our computer systems?”
“Oh, fuck you. I’m not stupid. It’s sandboxed. I know how this works.”
That was probably true, all things considered; he had no reason to expect she’d become inexplicably stupid since the last time the two had worked together. “That’s not the point. This is my job, not yours. Shut it down.”
“Or what, you’ll pull rank?”
Instead, rolling his eyes, he reached out to turn the computer all the way off. Jamie grabbed his wrist before he could do that. Mike’s tail lashed. He was stronger than the mountain lion, but her compact frame concentrated her strength, and she had the advantage of leverage. “You’re going to make me call security?”
“Why the fuck would you do that? I’m doing you a favor.”
“You’re—” he jerked his wrist free. This time, when she tried to stop him, Mike was ready. He caught her by the forearm, slid it behind her back, and checked the cougar’s body with his own, trapping her paw against the console. “Not doing me favors. You’re causing problems.”
“I’m causing problems?”
The new, specific problem was that his position put the control panel too far away for him to reach, and thereby to turn off the computer. A second, somewhat less acute problem was that, as she squirmed and tried to get free, he was compelled to put more effort into holding her in place. “Yes. Are you going to—god damn it—”
She stepped on his foot, and put as much of her weight as she could on the panther’s boot. “You are not the only one who knows these computers, Mike.”
He kneed her, and got his foot free. “If you wanted access, you could’ve—”
Jamie wrenched her arm from behind her back, briefly, and made a game attempt of escaping the rest of the way before Mike snagged both limbs, and pinned her. His slitted eyes were locked on hers, now. She bared her fangs. “I didn’t realize you were going to be such a child about it.”
***
“I wonder where the cat is,” Shannon said aloud. “He didn’t tell us anything was wrong. Unless I missed it. Spaceman Wallace?”
The otter shook his head. “If he did, I missed the message, too. It’s taking him long enough. No medical alarm?”
If anyone on her team was injured—that was a constant threat, considering the machinery they worked around and the exotic materials contained therein—the chief engineer was supposed to be notified immediately and automatically. “No. You think he got eaten by monsters?”
TJ held up his paw, and wiggled it back and forth. “50%. Let me check the power, though… hey, here. Core usage dropped back to nominal levels. Maybe it was a patch cycle, after all.”
“No, I bet… I bet it tried to wake up and connect to check for patches. But it can’t find them. Passeka computers—he should’ve disabled that feature.”
“Should’ve. You could page him, boss.”
Shannon did not like the implication that she didn’t trust her team, though. Mike would finish up in due time—as long as he hadn’t been atomized by some malicious intellect. And, despite the joking, that almost never happened. “What does the reporting say?”
Petty Officer Cornel Gallardo, who was one of their new mechanics, came over to see what the others were looking at. She had not yet figured out the intricacies of the crew’s various relationships, or how to judge the true level of Hazelton’s concern. “What’s going on? We need to rescue Petty Officer Cooper?”
TJ scooted over to make room for the arctic vixen. “Nah, just—well… I take that back. Maybe we do. Elevated heart rate and breathing…”
Cornel changed the display to look at the ship’s analytics on a space-by-space basis, instead. “Here’s the environmental data. Check the O2 and thermal regulation. There’s somebody else in the lab. Maybe they’re fighting.”
“That’s where your mind goes?” TJ asked. “Elevated heart rate and all?”
“The sensors are in your uniform, right? So his uniform must be on.”
“You can do a lot with your uniform still on.”
Shannon muttered quietly to herself, in additional spacer oaths that the universal translator wouldn’t pick up. Then she tapped her wristband computer. “Mr. Cooper, main engineering. How’s it going?”
There was a delay before the panther answered. “Fine. There was a… slight… disagreement over use of the computer lab. It’s resolved now.”
“Barry?” Shannon asked. Mike sounded tense, and while the Border Collie could—in her opinion—be a lot to deal with, it was not the kind of thing that usually got anyone that worked up.
“No. Petty Officer Meyer. CCI. Bridge. It’s fine.”
Given this reassurance, and that it was not a hostile boarding party, she was willing to take the panther at his word. “Understood. Let us know if you need help.”
“Hey, okay,” TJ said, when Shannon closed the channel. “I guess you were right, Cornel. They were fighting.”
“Told you. Meyer’s the mountain lion who came on when I did, right? Maybe he does need our help.”
Mike had been, in Shannon’s experience, relatively level-headed. Not above a bit of questionable behavior, but generally with good intentions—like TJ, with the wisdom of a few more years. “It’s a problem for personnel to deal with, or it’s a problem for sickbay to deal with. He can handle himself. I hope.”
***
Mike had, indeed, managed to retain the upper hand in spite of the distraction caused by the incoming message. In the relative calm that followed, he considered his options. They were both slightly out of breath, although Jamie was ready to try again, her pale eyes burning with unconcealed anger.
They were, however, accustomed to one another’s glares. So he ignored the one she was giving her, and looked at the readouts from the computer. “What is that, anyway? A logic analyzer?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think that’s going to give you? You have to start with the transmission protocol.”
She hissed, and kicked his foot again, even if it wasn’t going to make him release her. “It’s 6.14-gigahertz wideband. Multiplexed 8-phase signal. I did start with the protocol.”
“That was fast.” He leaned over her shoulder to get a look at the alien technology, which did not offer any immediate clues about its functioning. “First hardware scan must’ve picked up a—stay put,” he growled, when she started squirming again; even if he respected her intuition, trying to go around him had still been a problem. “First scan you did must’ve found an oscillator?”
“Yes. I know what a C-band transceiver looks like.” Some of the frontier worlds used ultrawideband protocols not unlike the one she was now trying to decipher. They both knew that. They’d learned to crack them working together. Although—
“Cryptographic module?” Mike had to assume there was one of those somewhere on the board.
She, too, assumed this was true. Irritatingly, the panther had a better sense of how they behaved than Jamie herself. “Probably,” she said. Her teeth were gritted against the notion that asking him for help would be the more practical next step.
Mike’s teeth were not, themselves, gritted—yet. But he narrowed his eyes at his own version of that notion, which was that he could let the mountain lion go, extract an apology for having gone outside the chain of command, and offer to help from the goodness of his own heart. “You don’t know,” he guessed, forestalling the need to make the choice. “Do you? Haven’t found it yet.”
He was very close to her, and with the heat of his breath came the memories of every other bit of alien tech they’d dismantled in the guise of her ‘consultancy.’ “I said ‘probably.’ I’ll figure it out.”
“Taking shortcuts again, you mean.”
Jamie hissed. “I thought we were staying out of each other’s way.”
His whiskers twitched at her sharp exhalation, and they both circled towards the same conclusion—that he was about to release her, and why—at the same time. Despite it he still asked, rhetorically: “you’re planning on getting out of mine?”
“Fuck you,” the cougar spat.
She lunged forward, and if she’d had more room for a windup the contact might’ve been too violent to last. As it was, only a centimeter or so separated them, and Mike had expected the movement from the way she tensed. And so, instead, their muzzles met, and stayed locked.
Jamie heard herself gasp, and could already foresee the heated sound being thrown back in her face. She launched a preemptive strike on that sort of teasing by leaning yet more heavily into the jet-furred feline, her head canted, kissing him deeply until she saw a telltale, distracted flicker in his eyes.
He was panting, the sound an unsteady growl, when they broke apart. About to make a series of the same highly questionable decisions he’d already become used to, he bought his better impulses the scantiest of fig leaves. “Fuck you,” he countered, and tried to sound sincere.
Jamie’s lips parted for him the instant she felt his rough, familiar texture. She let him sink into her maw: tasting him; hearing the growl deepen as their tongues let. They both became aware that he’d released her by the feeling of the mountain lion’s sharp claws, raking down his shoulders.
Even if he’d let her arms go, though, the panther still had her pinned. And this, it turned out, remained useful. Mike’s equivalent of his ex-partner’s too-willing gasp was how swiftly he felt himself stiffening and, like her, he skirted any objections by acting like he’d meant it all along—grinding heavily, savoring the fabric-shielded warmth of her body.
She half-supported herself on the console, and wrapped her leg around the panther to guide the constricted movement that followed into a thrust that forced the heavy bulk trapped by his uniform against her crotch. It was going to be very easy to do something very stupid. “We should—” stop, was how the sentence was intended to finish.
“—Get your clothes off,” is how Mike finished it instead.
“Yours too.”
“That’s the idea,” the panther said, as if he was up for much of any ideas whatsoever besides the obvious. He had his pants off before he remembered to lock the door of the computer lab, and congratulated himself for that much foresight.
He turned to the sight of Jamie, one tawny-furred leg still in her uniform slacks, which were bunched untidily, along with her panties, around the cougar’s ankle. She was partway through retaking her seat on the console, with her finger at the neck of her top. “And this?” she asked.
Mike did not really hear her. He perceived, instead, that her free leg was lifted slightly, just enough to reveal where dun, velvety fur gave way to softly inviting pink. And he perceived that the downward movement of her finger, opening up her shirt, gave a hint of cleavage that seemed purposefully teasing.
He crossed back over, drawing her paw down roughly to release the rest of the fasteners, and with them the cougar’s breasts. Jamie had meant the question genuinely, but as his paws slid up her sides to push her shirt open, and then groped her firmly, she went along with the outcome. “Apparently so.”
God, it had been too long. Not long enough to have forgotten the feeling of her breasts, and his fingers sinking through the dense fur that downed them, but enough to really appreciate it. And her purring. And the way she squirmed. And—she squirmed too far back, and computer chirped in protest. “Maybe…”
Jamie tilted her head. “Maybe we don’t fuck in the computer lab?”
The panther was not certain his pants would even go back on over his erection, though. “I mean, we don’t fuck on the computer.”
“No,” she said, glancing around with him for what the alternative might be and coming up empty.
“We’re not animals.”
“Of course—” The alternative, which was also the most expedient answer, was to grab the mountain lion, spin her around, and pounce the meter between the computer console and the wall behind it before anyone lost their nerve or their balance. “—Not,” Jamie finished.
The bulkhead was solid enough, anyway, and neither were up for waiting. She braced herself on it, so that he could keep her hoisted with only one paw, using the other to guide his pre-slick, obscenely stiff erection to her. As soon as he met wet warmth he straightened his legs, sinking into her with a pleased grunt.
She gasped as he slipped in. That first thrust was short and tentative—impulsive as it was both of them had expected slightly more resistance. But he slid in smoothly, and once he realized that he took her rear in both paws, held her steady, and drove himself in with one heavy, plunging buck.
The sudden feeling of stretching fullness—of her body snugly contoured around that hard, thick, all-too-familiar bulk, hot and pulsing inside her—had her crying out louder than she’d intended. The desperate arch to her spine, grinding her hips back to meet him when he claimed her, had also been involuntary.
So was the way her claws scored his upper back. It burned enough that Mike guessed she’d broken the skin. He nipped the side of her neck. “Fuckin’—behave,” he ordered. Jamie opened her muzzle, and he drove the question from her with a second deep, jarring thrust. “‘Cause I said so.”
“Make me.” She got it out before he could take her again, and was gratified when he made up for that by starting to fuck her properly. Or improperly—she couldn’t have really distinguished the finer senses of the word and didn’t care.
He was pounding her, that was what mattered. His hips, rough and urgent, rocked between her muscular thighs as she wrapped her legs around him to pull the male closer. Any hint of propriety had given way to the carnal need to be stuffed full of panther dick the instant he’d gotten it in her.
Later reflections would let Mike understand that as a compliment. For the moment his awareness, too, was centered on the sensation of wet warmth, sliding over his cock as she took every last centimeter. As each hilting shove ended only in the resistance of their hips clashing, and a mewling gasp from the cougar, and each instinctive grind drove home the exquisite, gratifying knowledge of how deep he was sunk in his mate.
She hadn’t used that word for him in years. She did recall, though, how he tended to get at the end—and Mike was already beginning to throb, the flex of his shaft leaving a telling added slickness that she could hear in the sound of their fierce rutting.
There was something to the power of it, and the urgency in his raw thrusts, but it was also distractingly uneven and single-minded and before he got there Jamie extremely needed to get off. That seemed like it would be eminently achievable.
With two fingers rubbing at her clit, though, trying to match his pace and feeling his pistoning shaft sliding back and forth just beneath her paw, eminently achievable proved to be an understatement. It was as though she understood the position she’d found herself in, as much as she understood the sensation of taking his cock.
Their argument. The warmth of his strong frame pinning her, and the smoldering light in his eyes. Stripping out of her uniform. Letting him—god, letting him rail her so goddamn good right—fuck, right there—in the—they were in the science lab of her new ship and her asshole of an ex-boyfriend was—fuck, that glorious prick of his was—
The next time Mike hilted she crammed her other paw in her muzzle because the alternative was yowling loud enough to set off the security alarms. Between her faltering hold and the abrupt, convulsive jerking of the mountain lion’s hips he gave up on moving for the moment.
Instead he pinned her hard to the wall, and Jamie rode out her peak caught between solid metal, and the solid frame of the big panther, and the solid spire of living heat he was keeping all the way in her, thick and twitching.
The twitching, in particular, had not slowed by the time she could think straight. Her thighs were noticeably damp with what had already leaked from her. She shoved at him so she could speak, between shallow panting. “You came? That all you got?”
Keeping himself from giving in all the way had taken a titanic act of will. He growled. “No. God, Jamie, don’t start being a bitch already.”
She got a paw back around him, and dug her claws in. “What was that?” He gave a short, sharp thrust when she did that. “What did you call me?”
And then another one, this time more purposeful, and while she was shivering his voice filled the cougar’s ear. “I called you a bitch,” he rasped, trying to gauge how many strokes he had left in him. Not many, not that he was actually in control of. A dozen, maybe. “Because—”
“Watch it,” she squeaked.
Eleven. That time, they both could feel his legs straining, forcing himself close, flush to her body. “Because you are.” Ten-nine-eight, one right after the other, driving her back and fractionally further up the wall with each one. Seven. Six. “And you’ll fucking—know—when I—fill you, bitch.”
The last thrusts bled together into something less and less measured. She gripped the panther as his pace came apart not to make him feel it but simply to hold on as he lost control. Saliva soaked her neck as he huffed and snarled.
Just before it happened the snarl cracked into a final word, which was not bitch but Jamie, although any sentimentality on her part was overwhelmed by the immediate feeling of teeth. Mike knew neither of having groaned her name nor of having taken her shoulder. He knew only the grip of ecstatic triumph; the sense of tension yielding to messy relief in the mountain lion’s cunt.
And she was, as he’d promised, extremely aware. She could not have said what was more shocking, the pain in her shoulder or the sticky eruption spattering her depths. Then he bit down harder, snarling his way through a jabbing thrust that called attention both to the flaring spines raking her from within and a second, stronger gush in counterpoint.
Then the more shocking sensation was how every reflexive squirm to which she surrendered brought her helplessly closer to coming again on him. His seed, spreading over the ache occasioned by his barbs, was briefly scalding—but that meant too she could feel herself being filled with virile, masculine heat. Claimed, like his fangs had done.
He kept their feral hold on her even as she squealed and spasmed around him again. Grunting, ears back, he emptied himself, hitching jerkily between her clasping thighs until the still-pleasurable throbs added nothing further to what he’d pumped into her.
At that point he tasted something salty and metallic, and let Jamie’s shoulder go. He was still too dazed to be properly apologetic, though, when she was thinking straight herself, and gradually becoming more aware. “Oh, what the fuck…”
“I mean…”
She twisted, trying to get a better view, and had to settle for feeling over the damp fur with her fingers. Most of the wetness was panther saliva, but the touch did still make her wince, and her fingers came back red. “You fucking asshole!”
Mike was saved from guilt as what had happened to his back started to make itself known through the haze of afterglow. “You started it!”
Jamie scowled, and tried to get her footing. Mike was, however, too tall for that to be done effectively. “You deserved it, is what. Probably. Pull out.”
He did so, albeit with a somewhat helpless grunt, and let the cougar stand on shaky legs. Touching his upper back confirmed that he had definitely not been left unscathed. Still, Jamie had gotten the worst of it. “You want to go to sickbay?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve been on the ship, what, a week? Definitely want to go to the doctor and explain how this happened.”
“How… how did this happen, actually?”
Tail swaying slowly, Jamie retraced the steps that had led them to that point. “You decided to interrupt my work.”
“You decided to do mine for me,” he countered. “You left that part out.”
“Wasn’t any of your business.”
“Oh, look. Cryptographic module.” He pointed to the summary that her logic analyzer had produced. “Who would’ve guessed?”
Jamie did not give him the satisfaction of reacting before she skimmed the summary. I guess try the standard protocols, she thought, although those had come from the Terran Confederation and it was unlikely in the extreme that they’d work on the first try. “Out of the way,” she muttered.
“Hmm?”
She nudged him with her foot, and when he failed to get the idea she did it again, harder. The kick left another, more generous trickle of seed running down her thigh, which she tried to ignore. At least Mike had moved. Her finger hovered over the console. “Fuck. Alright.”
“Alright?”
“You know what it is, and I don’t—are you happy? Whatever kind of module they’re using, I’m guessing you recognize it. Right?”
“Yes. We’ve traded data with the Dominion lots of times. I’d think our standard key would work, unless they locked it to some special recipient. You’ll figure it out,” he said, and patted her shoulder.
“We…” Jamie rolled her eyes, and sighed heavily. “We’re agreed that this”—here she gestured between the two of them, although at torso level to avoid calling any unnecessary attention to the puddle forming on the floor—“can’t happen again. Right?”
“It was a bad idea, yes.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It sort of is.” He let her glare at him until she gave up. “If we both agree that it was a bad idea, y’know? Sort of definitionally, we don’t know that we won’t make the same kind of bad decision again. Since we did once.”
“Some of us are capable of learning.” On the other hand, she had not expected to let him try to put a litter in her, and yet every time Jamie thought she might be finally empty, another sharp sigh or twitch was just enough movement to prove her wrong. “Are we agreed that we will pretend that we’re definitely not going to do it again?”
Like… today, or what? “Sure.”
“Good.” For the rest of the shift, at least. “Alright. Would you mind helping me out with this thing? Captain May asked me to take it to engineering. I should’ve gone to you first, but I figured I’d take a stab.”
“You should’ve gone to me first, yes.” His erection had gone down enough that he didn’t feel too ridiculous playing along. “But it looks like you made a good start. This is definitely the right protocol. There’s a cryptographic module on every Uxzu data chip, though.”
“Thank you,” she said, gritting her teeth. “Can you bypass it?”
“We probably won’t have to. We can emulate it in software and try the decryption keys they gave us. Do you know what might be on here?”
“No. Something from whatever tribe—clan? Pride, that’s it. Whatever one of those we met, it’s from them. Considering what everyone says about them, it’s probably some kind of tactical data.”
“Not a bad guess. Tell you what: I can finish up here and give you the results when they’re done.”
“Take credit for it, you mean? I’m sure main engineering already thinks I’m a bad influence. And a fraud, probably. Must’ve told them plenty.”
Mike raised an eyebrow, and took another wary step back—just in case. He still had an intuitive sense of how far Jamie’s claws could reach, and he could see they were unsheathed. “I didn’t tell them anything. Why would I have told them anything? We split up two years before I even transferred back to starships.”
This was unconvincing: “I can see how they look at us, Mike.”
“That’s probably because every time we’re in the same room we act like… you know. Two people pretending they didn’t used to be in a relationship.”
He left unsaid the important clarification: a relationship where they regularly put off work and fucked hard enough to draw blood, but don’t want to talk about that period in their life. Seen through that lens, the logic was a bit clearer. “We are pretty obvious, huh?”
“Also, keep in mind we had some alien plant pheromones make everyone a bit crazy a few weeks ago. There’s a high bar for the kind of awkwardness we’ve been putting on display.”
She used her claws to quote his words back to him: “A bit crazy?”
“The doctor asked me to help model statistical probabilities that any two people would experience complications from ‘intimate contact’ despite the medical implants. Allergic reactions, pregnancy—whatever. I told her you’d need a lot of pairings. The look I got was… haunted.”
“Huh.”
“So they probably figure we used to be, like… dating and war criminals. I didn’t tell ‘em anything, though. That’s for sure.”
Jamie considered everything she’d been told. “Fine. You win. I would appreciate your help with the data. I’ll even apologize for not asking you first. If,” she added quickly, holding up a paw to stop him from saying anything prematurely. “If you agree to deal with the rest of the mess here.”
She had left that as a passive construct. But he was, of course, aware it was largely his doing—even ignoring the cougar’s shoulder. “You should apologize anyway,” he said, although his heart wasn’t in it. “But fine, you’ve got a deal.”
“I’m sorry for… I dunno, going rogue. It won’t happen again.”
“I forgive you. I’ll, uh… I’m still technically on the clock. I’ll wrap this up before my shift ends, stop by your quarters—you can take it to Captain May yourself, if you want.”
“I’ll think about it. Gotta figure out this, first,” she mused, tilting her head towards the bite mark he’d left. “If that doesn’t take too long, I’ll… come back and help clean up. After I finish my uniform.”
It was designed to be waterproof, which meant that when she pulled her clothes back on, the awkwardness was kept entirely contained to her own awareness of the squishy feeling when she moved. That would, in itself, turn the walk back to her quarters into an ample opportunity for reflection on having made the decision in the first place.
Bad influence, she thought to herself. She did not make it all the way to the door of the lab before she thought again of everything she’d been told, and turned back around. “Wait a second. No, no. Wait just a second.”
Mike looked up from the work he’d started on the console. “What?”
“Your coworkers have never heard of me?”
“No.”
“You never told them you were engaged?”
“It didn’t come up.”
“Oh, you are definitely cleaning this by yourself.”
***
First officer’s log, stardate 68065.6
Our newest CCI specialist, Jamie Meyer, apparently shares Spaceman Alexander’s aptitude for odd electronics. She was able to give us a translation of the Chal-Ulaha’s ancient knowledge. Neither of us were sure this was worth waking Captain May up for.
According to Dr. Beltran, though, it’s more significant than it looks. So we’ve gone to the captain, after all.
With a cup of coffee in her, Maddy felt that she was up to the task of understanding whatever Uxzu peculiarities Dave and Felicia were about to throw at the Akita. “You said it was important?”
“I said it was possibly significant. Petty Officer Meyer was able to decode the data we were given.”
She took the computer Dave offered her. “Did you find it… edifying? Full of wisdom?”
“I didn’t. Dr. Beltran, however…”
“It is a recipe.”
“What?” Maddy switched the screen on, and read aloud. “Whenever I think about this traditional way of preparing roasted ankai dumplings, I’m reminded of a story the elders tell about the… Battle of Mokar. What? Uh…” She swiped through the text, skimming sections at random, her head tilting further to the side. “…Took with her 3,300 soldiers, the entirety of the 2nd Legion… in the afternoon, a counterattack was forced back in close-quarters combat… recently entered into service, and barrel overheating was only one of the problems, which would mostly be resolved by the winter of 1543…”
“It continues in that vein for approximately 27,000 words,” Dr. Beltran confirmed. “The recipe itself is in the final three pages.”
“I think if we were Uxzu we might get more out of the, uh, the preamble.” Dave, himself did not; he did not know what planet Mokar might be found on, nor whether the maps and diagrams were supposed to be interesting. “The implication is that this is the traditional meal that the Chal-Ulaha expect to be served at a meeting with the Kolash.”
“Would that be a problem?” Maddy had skipped ahead to the recipe, which seemed to be straightforward.
“No. The ingredients, however, come from across the Dominion. One single pride would be unlikely to have ready access to all of them. Someone of Kenra Tellak’s status could obtain them without difficulty, of course,” Dr. Beltran added, since she wasn’t certain that had been clear from her summary. “But it is a political statement, nonetheless.”
“Are we supposed to have the ingredients?”
“I doubt it.”
“Will this be insulting to Tellak?”
“I doubt that, as well. The Kolash pride would obtain the materiel and economic support of a sleeping giant. That would be a worthy trade, indeed, for the price of a traditional meal.”
“And for allowing their old foe to rearm,” Captain May pointed out—this was probably a step further than Admiral Mercure had intended. “Upsetting the balance of power.”
Dave, too, thought it might’ve been more than what Mercure wanted.“The question becomes, Maddy: how much do you trust Kenra Tellak’s judgment?”
“Or,” she suggested: “how much do you trust mine?”