But What a Thrill!
Devin listens to Casey, they break the ship, and the triangle dogs find a common ground that ties them together. AHEM.
Devin listens to Casey, they break the ship, and the triangle dogs find a common ground that ties them together. AHEM.
Hey hey let's have some uncomplicated smut because I love you. We haven't checked in with Casey and Dev since their appearance in "The Trouble With Coyotes," last year! Let's fix that :P You know what to expect~ enjoy, and go thank
Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.
"But What a Thrill!" by Rob Baird
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As a coyote, Devin had known for years that he would die young. He hadn't known that he would die stupidly--but then, as a coyote, perhaps that should've come with the territory, too. Stupidly, noisily, and rather unpleasantly. His right ear smarted from the most recent shower of sparks that rained down on it.
He couldn't blame the power conduit for sparking. Half of it weighed three hundred kilos and half of it weighed nothing, and which half was which changed on a second-by-second basis. Lost cause. He kicked the access hatch closed and tried to bypass the whole power line instead.
As if his boot had been the last straw, a new alarm started up. Temperature warning. Starboard coolant system failure. Check coolant levels. Not that it mattered, but he checked. And snarled. "Casey! We're losing the right wing!"
"I can see that!" The jackal shouted back over the alarms. "Can you reinforce the leading-edge structural integrity field?"
"Not enough! It's impossible!"
"Try to--"
****
"I said it's impossible. Do you not know what the word means?" Devin tipped his shotglass back, licked the last of the rum from it, and held it up to summon the bartender's attention.
"But they said that if anybody could, you could. They said you're one of the fastest ships in the sector." The cheetah talking to them had described himself as a 'businessman'; his ex-military vest wouldn't have passed muster in any boardroom and no reputable businessman would've been talking to Dev and Casey anyway.
As if that might still have been in doubt, Casey stole her copilot's rum as soon as the new glass was placed before him. "I do like you appealing to my vanity," she assured the cheetah, before downing the alcohol. "But Dev's right. It's a five day journey. We can get it down to ninety hours, but fifty's insane."
"If it's a question of money..."
"It's a question of the fundamental laws of the universe. If you had an older hyperdrive and unlimited power, maybe you could shove your way through that fast. And generate so much turbulence you'd be in Star Patrol impound for fuckin' up sector traffic before you could even hail for docking clearance."
"Nah," Casey said. "At those speeds, you couldn't even maintain a stable field."
"But... can you think about it? The offer's open until the end of the week."
The cheetah, who declined to give his real name but had a briefcase full of iridium chips to make up for the lack of formal introduction, needed a courier for a special assignment. He had a valuable chemical sample--he called it medicine, though Dev thought drugs were more likely--and it needed to get from Delta Carrolia to Winterhaven.
That wasn't surprising. Winterhaven refined most of Carrolia's industrial output. Freighters ran the route between the two all the time: a well-trodden, highly efficient course had long ago been plotted from one to the other. As scheduled, it was a five-day jaunt. Express ships did it in a little over four.
But the cheetah said that the sample would only last for fifty-odd hours after being removed from its support systems on Delta Carrolia, and the supporting machinery drew too much power for even the largest intersun ships to handle. Hence the request, which was stupid.
"You know it's stupid, right?" he asked Casey when they were back aboard their ship, hunkered down for the evening. Casey Carr couldn't always be trusted to display good judgment about things like that.
This time, though, she nodded. "Pretty dumb. I ran the numbers again. We could do eighty-four--with luck."
"My luck? Your luck?"
The jackal laughed. They'd been working together for about a year, long enough for Dev to learn most of her quirks and long enough for them to have started sharing a bunk. She flopped onto the coyote obligingly, and nipped his nose. "Wouldn't matter. I can see why it's tempting, though."
Acknowledging that something might be tempting without being tempted by it was a leap forward for the pilot. He understood temptation and craziness--he was a reckless trickster himself, after all. "Think he'll find anybody dumb enough?"
"Probably not." Casey raked her claws idly through the coyote's fur. "Carrolia's all corporate freighters and legitimate businessmen. They're gonna want to take the safe route. If it was just pirates or uncharted flux or somethin'..."
"But it's not. Some kind of subspace distortion, right?"
"The Melkown Rift, yep." Dev gave the jackal's butt a squeeze; the grope arched her back, but didn't distract her from further explanation. Gravitational anomalies in the Rift, almost directly between Carrolia and neighboring Winterhaven, turned five light years of linear distance into an eighteen light-year bypass.
Devin decided it would be better for him to focus on fondling the jackal. Her breath caught in her throat, and she pushed herself closer to him; he nibbled her nose to pay her back for earlier. "Well... good luck to him. We'll find something else."
"Mm-hm..." Casey straddled him, casually, tickling his legs with her waving tail. "Tomorrow."
There were better things to get up to right then. When her muzzle drifted closer to his again he traded nibbling for a kiss. He started to pull her jacket off; she lifted up to help him out. Hanging out with jackals did have advantages.
With her jacket and shirt gone, she stayed atop him. No matter--he was more than happy to let her drive. Her hips rolled, pushing herself warmly into his crotch. The coyote growled; she snickered and did it again, grinding against the bulge in his pants.
She stopped. Dev figured for a hopeful second it was to let him get his jeans off, but Casey's eyes had a funny look--the kind of look Devin learned very, very early on not to trust. "You know..."
He knew a few things. He knew that he was thirty percent tired and seventy percent horny, and a good fuck would tip the balance into something more appropriate for restful sleep. He knew that if Casey was getting distracted, the odds were he wasn't getting either. And he knew that under no circumstances was the glint in a trickster's eyes to be taken as an auspicious sign.
"We know about the beaten path, sure... but if we were... hmm."
"Case." Devin modulated his growl carefully. He wanted to communicate stop what you're doing in a way that merely said because I want to get off and not because I don't trust you.
"I have an idea."
"Turn off the gravity and do it in zero-g?"
She grinned a sharp, dangerous grin and sat up. "No, but close. Back in a bit, 'yote." He already knew that further protests wouldn't accomplish anything and didn't bother, just watched her depart.
Casey did have a lot going for her. She was good at finding well-paying jobs, or at least she was good at being crazy enough to take the dangerous jobs nobody else would. He'd never met a better pilot. And in the in-between...
Nothing positive would come from trying to anticipate what madness she was up to, wherever the jackal had gone. Dev closed his eyes, kicked his jeans off himself, and pictured a better alternative. Casey coming back, having thought better of whatever odd thoughts gripped her. Padding over to join him on the bed. Straddling his knees to hold him down... bending forward...
Her soft, wet tongue bathing him until he was nice and hard and ready. Devin wrapped a paw around his cock and stroked himself slowly. Yeah, that's much better. Think about that. Think about her licking you clean with that goddamn fantastic tongue that jackal's got... the way she grins at you when you start panting...
And she'd slowly pull him in, drawing him tenderly inch by inch into her long, hot muzzle. She had this way about it--almost telepathic. A ripple of pleasure would run through the coyote and just as it started to ebb her tongue would drag over his tip and that hot, electric ecstasy would shoot back up and he'd be growling for her in seconds.
Dev pumped his paw faster and faster, imagining the jackal working over his length. Case looks so fuckin' good with a mouth full of coyote cock... lips bulging around its contours, tail wagging as she bobbed and suckled and he began to groan at the promise of sated tension. She's gotta know I'm gettin' close...
The coyote squeezed his fingers down, focusing on the tip of his twitching, pulsing shaft. Of course he'd be close, how could he not be? With that warm, silky, sucking warmth pulling at him, coaxing him to blow his load right then and there--just a few more seconds and he'd give it to her, every last drop of it...
Fuck. He could hear footsteps in the corridor outside. Casey would be understanding--probably--but he had enough dignity to want to avoid being caught right in the throes of painting his chestfur with coyote seed. Devin growled and pulled the blanket over his crotch.
"Coyote."
"Jackal?"
Casey leaned against the side of the hatch. "I've been doing some thinking."
"I'm not going to like this."
She folded her arms across her chest. "Because I'm a jackal? Don't be racist, Devvy."
"Tricksters aren't a protected class." He sat up, keeping the blanket in place. "Besides, it's just common sense. You're going to suggest something crazy, or dangerous, or maybe both. Probably both. Is it both?"
Casey laughed, baring teeth, and hopped into the cabin, taking a seat on her desk and crossing one leg demurely over the other. "It's both. I was thinking about the trajectories between here and Winterhaven. Remember I said they bypass the Melkown Rift?"
"Stop talking."
She started to grin, which was no less unsettling a way of showing off her teeth than the laugh had been. "If you look at the gravitational--"
He tossed the blanket at her. "Stop talking. Casey." Fortunately the jackal's mood when she reappeared had done wonders for suppressing his hard-on. It was tough to be horny when you knew you were about to be in fear for your life.
Casey took the blanket without flinching, then shrugged it off and to the floor. "The differentials are regular and predictable."
"We're not flying through the Rift, Case."
"We are. Look, 'yote. The engine room's your territory. The cockpit's mine--I know how it works. We'll get thrown out of hyperspace for a few minutes and accelerated past the worst of the gravitational turbulence. We should be able to generate a stable FTL field immediately."
"And if we don't, that's it. We're dead."
"Yes," she admitted. "But we'll make it. At least hear me out."
Devin groaned, pulled on a pair of shorts to replace his jeans, and followed the jackal to their freighter's astrogation console. She'd been hard at work plotting the currents and anomalies.
"See?"
"I see literally a dozen ways this could go wrong in the first millisecond, Casey. What if you don't stick the exit? What if we lose power? What if you need to replot the lightspeed trajectory on the fly? What if they don't have--"
"What if, what if, yes," she said, brushing all of the practical details away with a wave of her paw. "Yes, there's plenty of what if, coyote. But look at it this way: if we bypass the normal tradelanes, we can cut nearly six light-years off the hyperlight journey."
"Which would be enough to get the cheetah's cargo there on schedule," Devin said, making the conclusion obvious in case she was about to spell it out for him.
Casey's finger traced out the trajectory she wanted to take. "Think of the bragging rights, coyote. Nobody's been able to shave that much linear distance off this route."
"Nobody will be crazy enough to try a second time, either," he countered. "And I'm pretty sure nobody's going to hire us because of that. They don't pay fuel costs, they pay time."
And, he added when the jackal opened her muzzle to reply, they paid for their cargo getting to its destination without being shredded by horrifying gravitational distortions. Casey rolled her eyes. "They're not that horrifying."
"Star Patrol has the whole area marked as restricted for their survey vessels, so who really knows, hm?"
Casey sighed wearily, as though unable to come to terms with her copilot's self-preservation instincts. "We know well enough, Dev. You're smart. I can handle it. And the payout..."
For once they were in the black, though, and both of them knew it. "You don't need the money, jackal. You need the excitement, I get that. This is still a suicide run."
"And I couldn't think of a nicer coyote to enjoy it with."
"Couldn't think of one, or couldn't find one on short notice?"
She gave his shoulder a gentle pat. "Whichever makes you happy, dear. Get the ship ready to depart. We've got some precious cargo to get to its destination."
Ordinarily Casey managed the preflight checks and Dev took care of the cargo loading. The jackal divined--accurately--that he would sabotage the contract if given the opportunity, and she didn't intend to give him the chance.
The Long Tall Sally was an older freighter, and wore her age with keen-eyed, sharp-toothed grace. She was no rusting hulk, no derelict bound for the scrapyard. Her raked lines and huge engines made her look like a hot rod--or a living fossil, perhaps, like a saber-toothed cat or a cave bear.
Her kind had stalked lesser freighters before the dawn of proper civilization. Her engines could deliver eighteen gees of acceleration with a full cargo load and Casey'd coaxed them even further than that. Devin was responsible for cleaning up the mess the jackal left behind, that was all.
They left Delta Carrolia at full power, with Casey shoving the sublight thrusters to their limits as soon as they were clear of the atmosphere. Once they were in hyperspace she locked her controls, kicked back in her chair, and gave her copilot an upside-down grin. "You still worried about this, Dev?"
"Of course I am."
"We'll be fine. We're gonna avoid the worst of it. I think..."
"You think," he reminded her, "because professional scientists aren't dumb enough to get close to the fucking thing."
"Maybe, maybe." The jackal straightened up and rose from the pilot's seat. "I talked him into another six hundred thousand credits. In case we need repairs afterwards... you think we'll need repairs afterwards?"
The coyote didn't know. Worryingly, he suspected that their options were purely binary. Either they survived, largely unscathed, or they disintegrated immediately. The Melkown Rift was only four light years away; he didn't have all that long to ponder. For the rest of that day, he tweaked the ship's systems to get them ready.
He was in the reactor room when the intercom pinged an alert, followed by the jackal's voice. "This is your captain speaking. We're expecting some light turbulence, so passengers are advised to take their seats and coyotes are advised to get their butts to the cockpit."
Dev sighed heavily and patted the engineering computer affixed to the railing that ringed their main reactor. "Be good to me, okay, big guy?" And he went forward to take his seat behind the cockpit, where alarms were already starting to go off.
"Glad you could make it. Strap in, we're about to drop back into normalspace."
"How long?"
"Not quite sure. I got some instabilities though. I mean the ship does, Dev, don't be smart. We're drifting, I gotta keep trimming her."
"Makes sense, based on these readings. Also, I've got a discontinuity warning reference left ten and level with us. Gravitational shear is increasing off to port."
"I see it." The jackal's ears had gone back, and her lip had taken the slightest curl. "That's expected. Picking up transition-rebound spikes, too, coyote?"
Devin checked the navigation sensors. "Yeah. Intermittent pulses. Ambient is pushing... that can't be right." Casey told him, without missing a beat, that it probably was right. That did nothing to settle his mood. Neither did learning she was correct. "It's at two hundred kilotals, Case."
"Sounds right."
The coyote eyed the reserve power banks warily. "That's like flying between twenty hydrogen bombs a second, jackal. Our sensors stop working at forty-eight hundred kilotals. Because we're supposed to be dead at that point."
"Good thing we upgraded the shields, isn't it?" He heard the sound of Casey's knuckles cracking. "I think we're going to lose field stability here in about a minute."
"Do you have a plan to deal with this?" Devin knew that she did not; the most charitable interpretation of their situation was that he was her plan, and calling that a 'plan' was only true under duress. How fortunate this is one of those times, eh, coyote?
Casey lifted her right paw, gave him a thumbs-up, and went back to flying. "Thirty seconds," she warned.
With about ten seconds to go the navigational sensors momentarily spiked at their radiation limits, flashed an alarm, and shut down. Before he could pass that information along the Long Tall Sally lurched precipitously and the hyperdrive cut out with a shuddering protest.
And then they had more than their share of alarms to go around. The freighter was being pulled in about a hundred directions and a few dozen dimensions all at once, and not happy about it.
"Shields are holding, jackal, but I don't trust 'em. Start the clock."
He figured he could give them five minutes before the emitters started to fail. Once that happened the structural integrity field would come next, probably too quickly for either of them to even notice before they got to experience their own private big bang.
Casey trusted in her luck and piloting skills, though one was an obvious dimension of the other and Devin wanted to be ready in case fate threw them a curveball.
It did. He wasn't. "Coyote, we're moving too slow. What's up?"
"What do you mean, 'too slow'?"
"I mean we're being pulled towards one of those singularities and the engines aren't delivering their rated power." Casey was managing to keep her cool, somehow. "By about forty percent."
Dev knew he was about to be distracted; he strapped in to the engineering console and pulled the harness tight before he could forget. "Let's see... the reactor's fine... the impulse motivators are fine... wait, hold on..."
"Can't afford to do much of that. You already started the clock."
This was your idea, he shot back--silently. "It's the diffuser plates. It's not like they're de-energized, it's like they're..."
"Like they're what, coyote?"
Devin swiped his paw over the console, skimming the diagnostic screens flashing past in the blink of an eye. "Like they don't know what to do with being inside a goddamned neutron star."
"Oh, it's not that bad. Yet. Yet."
"Diverting auxiliary power to the stabilizers... that'll help a little..."
It wouldn't help enough. He could hear the jackal's teeth grit even over the sound of the power circuits switching over. "It's gonna take us more time than I thought to clear this, 'yote. Keep us together."
"How much longer? Can we reverse course?"
"Nope."
"That's it? 'Nope'?"
"Devvy, you said it yourself. There's a lot of mass here. I need us to not explode. We'll be fine, but we can't explode. No explosions. Need maybe... ten, twelve minutes."
Devin bunched his paws into fists. "You had five. Fuck. Casey!" He'd given her five, which was a generous estimate, and he knew that as they got closer the stresses would only get worse. "I told you this was a bad idea!"
"So sue me! Dev, what can you get us?"
The coyote swore heavily, unbuckled his harness, and powered up the maglocks in his boots--in case the artificial gravity failed suddenly he didn't want to be thrown anywhere unpleasant. Such as, for example, the fire that had broken out in one of the regulator banks that was supposed to absorb surges from the power supply.
He grabbed an extinguisher from the wall and turned it on the regulator until things cooled down. The regulator was toast. The power supply also might've been toast; he couldn't make heads or tails of the diagnostic computer. Devin had a steel-trap mind and plenty of experience with the system, but the error codes were ones he'd never seen before. He had to look them up.
Err 92-2D: Control disagreement / input mismatch auxiliary airlock safeties
Err 56-09: Low waste recycling subsystem pressure
Err 60-0D: Reactor cooling failure, temp below 0K. #THIS DEBUG MESSAGE IS USED ONLY FOR UNIT TESTING
"No shit," the coyote grunted. The Long Tall Sally lurched to one side, and only the boots kept him in place. Casey wasn't maneuvering--the Rift's anomalies had simply decided that part of the ship, like a lapsed Catholic, no longer benefited from having mass.
He was able to fix the problem with a quick manual recalibration; it didn't do much for the power assembly, which by design couldn't be isolated from any of the subsystems and was taking the full brunt of living in a world of random, troublesome possibilities.
The ship plunged into complete blackness and Casey's yelp was loud enough to hear from twenty meters back. "What was that?"
"I don't know! We're taking a lot of interference and--"
"Increase power to the shields!"
The lights surged to life again, rather brightly; one of the bulbs overloaded and went dark for good. "It's bypassing them. The power grid's starting to come apart!"
"Bypassing?"
"The energy is fracturing the boundary between us and hyperspace. Some of the ship's in the future, some's in the past--why do you think they call it a goddamned 'rift,' jackal?"
"I don't know! I'm not a scientist! Can you stabilize it?" Casey had one paw on the control column and one on her navigational charts. The charts were fed by live sensor data; the image warped and swirled like melting taffy.
"I'm trying! But it's not going to get better, jackal." It was already starting to get worse; it looked like one of the main busses had disintegrated, and when he opened the panel to check what remained of the conduit exploded in a spray of sparking metal. "I'll do what I can to keep the engines running but--"
"Appreciate it, babe. Couple minutes. Just a couple."
She was lying, but Devin figured that if they made it out he'd have a chance to yell at her properly later. For now the coyote kicked the access panel closed, and his head jolted to the sound of a new problem starting. How the fuck is--oh, Christ. "Casey! We're losing the right wing!"
"I can see that!" The Long Tall Sally had taken on a rather worrying shudder as bits of it began to fall off or shift into friendlier dimensions. "Can you reinforce the leading-edge structural integrity field?"
"Not enough! It's impossible!"
"Try to--"
"It won't fucking help." The wing massed as much as a small asteroid. Strengthening the force fields that kept it attached wouldn't do anything useful. "We need..."
He wasn't sure. What did they need? A time machine, that would be a good start. Someone, anyone on the crew with proper-sized ears and a proper-sized survival instinct. Neither of those were handy.
On hand he had a ship full of alarms, a reactor being stressed to its limits, a fire extinguisher that might as well have worked by taunting and prayer, a half-melted power grid, a deflector shield whose only pleasure in life came from prolonging the inevitable...
All of it in the middle of God playing conkers with the universe. The Long Tall Sally rocked and groaned: the anomalies were warping her sublight thrusters; the right side was producing several times as much thrust as the left and Casey was having a hard time keeping up.
That wouldn't get better unless...
"Case! Shut down the engines!"
The jackal's ears splayed and she shot him a look over her shoulder. "Not giving up, Dev."
He abandoned the temperamental power console and sprinted forward to join the jackal in the freighter's cockpit, his feet tugging hard against the lagging electromagnets in his boots. "Shut down the engines! Listen to me!"
Casey pulled back on the throttle, staring at him expectantly. "Okay? Gonna cue up 'Nearer, My God to Thee' too, coyote?"
"The engines are fucked, Case. It's the way gravity's being screwed with. Their mass is going up--so the specific impulse is going up."
"So the thrust is going up. It's not enough. I get that."
"The structural integrity field can't handle it anyway, it's all I can do to keep in one piece as it is. So you're gonna ride this one out. Do just enough to steer us past a collision and--"
"And when we clear it, hit the power and hope we don't tear ourselves to pieces?"
"Sort of. I'll use the power from the impulse drive to keep the ship from coming apart on the approach. And I'm going to decouple the inertial dampeners from everything else and try to keep our compensated mass stable. We should stay the same as before, but the engines will have one hell of a kick."
Given a lifeline, Casey went back into full-on jackal. Her fingers were a blur on the navigational computer. "We can compensate to match our original trajectory, but it'll be close."
"That says 'milliseconds,'" Dev said. "A seventy-millisecond window?"
"Piece of cake." She licked her muzzle. "Just gotta keep from gettin' distracted."
"Seventy milliseconds," he said again. "You really think you can fly that thing?"
Without looking at him she reached out her paw to pat his side. "You really think you can do all that bullshit you just said? Leave it to me, babe. Got about... three minutes?"
Now that the coyote had the opportunity to consider the odds of what he'd said working, three minutes seemed like plenty of time. More than enough, even. It would be thirty seconds of work and then a whole lot of waiting to die spectacularly.
The Long Tall Sally complained when he disconnected the inertial dampeners and put them on backup power. The dampeners were supposed to be mission-critical. Among other things, they regulated the artificial gravity. They were the only thing keeping Casey's maneuvering from turning the crew into paste.
So he understood why the safety interlocks didn't like what he was doing. He didn't like it either. Shutting off the alarm kept him from having to think about it. Even better, the exact same solution worked ably to deal with fire warnings and hull breaches.
There were plenty of those. He didn't think that any of them would be immediately critical, at least not in the near term. A quick back of the napkin calculation suggested that the thrust was going to be more of an issue. With the space-time continuum being uncooperative, the engines at full power would tear themselves right from the ship.
They would also do this at half power, and at ten percent. According to his notes, they'd need to be run at no more than six tenths of a percent. The indignity would stick in Casey's craw, so he didn't bother to tell her when he limited the throttle's maximum output.
"About a minute," the jackal said.
Devin found it was best to ignore the remaining system reports. For a moment, one of the engine pylons registered its mass at several teragrams--enough to set off every alarm they had--then just as quickly changed its mind about the laws of physics. Or its creative interpretation thereof.
"Forty-five seconds."
The spars holding the freighter's wings on had started to liquefy. Only force fields kept them together, and the field generators had a hard time keeping up with the spars' desire to change shape into something more fluid and less useful. He bypassed the reactor's power limiters without giving himself a chance to second-guess the decision.
That stabilized the wings. Contending with the rising temperatures was another matter entirely. The coyote heard Casey call out a thirty-second warning, but was too distracted between trying to figure out what was liable to kill them first, melting or disintegration. Disintegration would be faster, right?
On the other hand the reactor core seemed--before the thermocouple switched off--to indicate a reading of over ten million degrees. That was well into the range of proper stars; their fusion reactor was supposed to be more docile. Lots of things were supposed to be more docile.
Jackals, for example. Casey was in the zone, though, both paws on her controls and music starting up on the cockpit speakers. Piano drowned out the alarms. "Ten seconds!" You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain. Too much love drives a man insane.
Devin tightened his harness and told himself that if the inertial dampeners didn't hold, he wouldn't have a chance to notice. "Ready!"
Goodness, gracious! Casey sang out with the music, and the kick hit right on the second word. The Long Tall Sally swept between the strongest points of two gravity distortions at once. Physics tried to tell the freighter that her mass was a number with "23" in the exponent and an incredulous glare in the base.
The integrity field kept them in the range of the more serious asteroids, but she was an asteroid-sized ship with planet-sized engines and even with the throttle limited to a fraction of a percent of its output they shot forward like an implausible superhero origin story. Twenty thousand kilometers a second. Twenty-five. An amoeba-sized bit of hull sheared off, ignored the deflector shields, and slammed through the port engine pylon with the energy of a howitzer shell. The ship lurched--
"Great balls of fire," the jackal had finished. I laughed at love 'cause I thought it was funny. You came along and moved me, honey! At thirty thousand kilometers a second, to be precise.
"We need to jump, Casey." Fast as they were, the hull was giving out faster. "Like, right fuckin' now."
"Almost, Dev!"
"Right fucking now."
Space blurred, and a white glare flooded the cockpit, and immediately the more insistent alarms quieted. 'Great Balls of Fire' played out in the silence. And for once, Devin saw Casey look... relieved. The absence of tension on the jackal's face was perhaps the clearest sign of how close they'd come. Then she shook her head quickly, and it vanished. "We alive, Devvy?"
"We're alive."
"The cargo?"
It was safe. He told her that much; by even cursory examination of the ship's systems he didn't think they'd be breaking even on the job. He unfastened his harness, got to his feet, and found himself a little surprised at how much the fact of his own survival startled him.
Outwardly the Long Tall Sally was intact; the self-sealing hull plating kept their atmosphere from escaping. The main power relays on the starboard side were broken--gone, in many places--and needed replacing. The inertial dampening system had been badly distorted; in parts of the hull gravity pulled towards the walls or the ceiling instead of the floor.
The reactor was overcooked, the diffuser plating for the sublight thrusters had taken stresses three orders of magnitude over their design limits, and one deflector had exploded itself into component pieces. Devin would insist on every cubic centimeter of hull and structural support being thoroughly checked out before they went back out.
Before?
The coyote had one paw on the reactor control console, and the other on the railing that surrounded the engine. He stopped. 'Before' was a dumb thing to say. 'Before' suggested that he would go back out again, and that...
What the fuck are you even doing, Dev? You may be a coyote, but you're not that dumb. Walk. Tell her you're done as soon as you land. This is madness. He heard the door to the engine room slide open behind him, and the sound of Casey's boots on the deck plating.
"Want the good news?" she asked. He didn't answer, and she sidled up to him, patting the coyote on the back. "I just figure you're gonna be giving me bad news, is all."
"What's the good news, Case?"
"I was a little worried we might've gone fast enough to get some time dilation in, but nah. Not that bad. We'll make it to Winterhaven with time to spare. Pretty good, right? How's my ship."
"Broken. Did you think it was significant maybe when nobody was willing to insure us? Ever?"
"It looks okay," she countered. "No alarms or anything. Oh, c'mon, Dev. Sure, I cut it a bit close..."
"That's how you're writing this up?"
"But we made it." She leaned against the railing, one paw against it and the other on her hip. "You need to calm down, coyote."
"I don't need to calm down, jackal. I need to keep us from exploding--remember? Remember you told me to fucking keep us from exploding? Well you know what? I did! No thanks to you!"
"You know, you--"
"Fuck! 'Cut it a bit close'! Jesus Christ, Casey! I'm tired of you trying to kill yourself and taking me along for it! This isn't a goddamned game! You're fucking insane!"
"But I did it, didn't I? And like you have room to talk?" Her lip had curled. "You're not exactly clean. I know the shit you get up to when we're station-side. All your freelance hacking shit..."
"Which is legal. And I don't involve you." He left her glowering on the railing and walked to the other side, starting up a diagnostic routine on the maintenance computer. He could just barely see her around the reactor core.
"It's not legal. You're banned from META, Dev. You only have a clean avatar because of me. And that means it involves me because they'd arrest me too if you got caught."
"I don't."
She bared her teeth further. "And I don't make mistakes in the cockpit. So why don't you come over here and apologize?"
"Remember you said the engine room was my territory? Why don't you get the hell out and let me get back to work?"
"I'm not going anywhere." Her arms were crossed over her chest. "Apologize."
He put up with a lot from the jackal. No two ways about that. And if he was going to leave at Winterhaven... "Suit yourself." He tapped a command into the engineering console, and with a low thunk the magnetic deck plating switched on.
Casey had magnetic boots just like he did. He watched the muscles in her leg tense up. "Very funny, coyote." He snorted, shook his head, and strolled around the reactor core to join her, pulling something from his pocket. She only figured out what was going on when his paw grabbed her wrist and the click reached her ears. "Dev?"
"What?"
She wriggled her paw, now firmly secured to the railing. "What's this?"
"Cable tie. I have a bunch extra--repair work and all." She was staring at her locked paw, so he grabbed the other. She tried to pull her arm away, but she wasn't all that strong and he had the element of surprise. He got the other wrist clipped to the railing without much effort.
"Okay, wrench 'yote. Are you trying to make a point?"
"You're the one who said you weren't going anywhere." He ruffled the jackal between her pointy ears and stepped back to his work. "So you can see what I'm getting up to. Like this, you know? This coil needs recalibrating. It's one of eight. They're all supposed to be balanced. If they're not..."
He tweaked it, introducing an ominous rumble to the ship. Casey's ears twitched; her magnetic boots keeping her fixed to the deck were transmitting every shudder of the stressed hull. "That's not a point. Fix it."
"Oh, it's fine. The ship can handle worse. As I've learned."
"What do you want?"
"I want to get my work done. Without arguing. Like... this." She couldn't see what he was talking about; he swallowed his growl and gestured to the display. "You wanted me to install an auxiliary power system. You really wanted auxiliary power."
"It comes in handy!"
"It means a whole set of redundant interconnects. A third of those are... if they're not melted, I don't know how else to explain what I'm looking at. You don't have any auxiliary power until we replace 'em."
"So we do it."
"Just that simple? Why don't you be quiet, Case."
"Why don't you come over here and make me?"
He couldn't tell how upset the jackal really was; she wore her emotions on her sleeve the same way he did, but that either meant she never really got mad or it meant she still felt like teasing him. Devin set his toolkit down and walked over. "Make you?"
"Make me."
He slid behind the jackal, reached his paw forward, and held her muzzle shut. "Done." It put the coyote conveniently close to her. Her hips wiggled. "Yeah? You think that's how you're gonna make it up to me?"
Casey jerked, getting free of his paw. "I think we've had enough fights that I know how this ends, Devvy."
"Make-up sex, Case?"
She shook her head, her rump swaying as she did so. "Make-up sex and near-death-experience-adrenaline-rush sex, 'yote. Don't sell me short."
"Maybe that isn't good enough."
That only made her laugh. "Maybe you should at least try first."
Which, if he thought about it, they did often. Casey needed adrenaline, not the way junkies needed drugs but the way most people needed water and air. And when they were done--the alarms still blaring, their fur still singed--she burned up whatever was left on her copilot.
It was almost a routine. Crazy jackal idea, idiotic coyote agreement, escape, wild, fierce rutting until they were both dumb enough to try their luck again... rinse, repeat. The rinsing was especially important.
Maybe she had a point. Maybe he could turn that point into something more useful. "The problem," the coyote growled into her ear, "is that despite everything, I do kinda like you."
"Only kinda?" Casey pushed herself back, trapping the brush of her tail as a soft, wagging presence between their bodies. "Feels like more than 'kinda,' 'yote..."
There wasn't anything she could do to him anyway, so he didn't stop himself from the firm grind that worked the bulge in his crotch into the jackal. And from there it was nice and easy to undo her belt and open her pants, slipping his paw beneath the fabric and between her legs.
Casey's ears wavered and splayed, and a sigh left her muzzle as the coyote's fingers skipped her soft fur to glide over soft, bare flesh. He teased her until she started to squirm and the unsteadiness of her breath lent a huskiness to her voice. "Told... told you... feels like more'n... kinda..."
"There are some compelling parts." He bit down on her ear, and another growl purred right into it as he curled two fingers up and the slick pads guided the digits into the jackal's warm folds.
"And we make a good team." She turned, tugging her ear from his mouth and eyeing him hopefully. "So maybe--"
He added a third finger and pushed himself in up to the knuckle, with his palm resting on the jackal bitch's mound. "Maybe what, Case?" The next two times she tried to speak, his pumping fingers caught her off-guard and all she managed was a moan. "Case?"
"Maybe you let me go and we head back to our quarters and... and work out some of our, uh... our _diff_erences!" His fingers wiggled but the jackal was smart enough not to keep talking.
"Nah, this'll work fine."
"Just to tease me?"
"To get what I want from ya, at least, Case."
"It'd be easier if I wasn't tied up."
He shrugged, opening his jeans up and allowed himself the growl that came with the relaxed pressure on his shaft. "But less fun, you know?" He slipped out of his boxers, too, and stepped forward, pushing his cock against the jackal's thigh.
They were close enough together that it would be difficult to maneuver around her pants--they'd fallen down only as far as mid-thigh, and didn't seem inclined to go further. Not without letting her get at least one foot free. Casey jerked her right leg, hinting. "Good job, 'yote. Now what?"
Dev swatted her rear playfully. "Oh, don't worry. Yet."
"Yet?"
"You'll get what you want, jackal. Not just gonna toy with you." She looked unconvinced. He leaned into her back and dragged his paws up her front to cup her breasts through her jacket. His grip pulled her against him, and brought her ear to his muzzle. "You don't really want to wait 'til I'm done in the engine room, do ya, Case?"
"No..."
"Me either." The coyote's hips ground in hard, the stiff pressure of his cock obvious even through the fur of the other canid's back. "So I ain't gonna."
"Then a-at least let me get the fuckin' boot o-off."
"Can't. It's a safety thing. Remember, jackal? The engine room's my territory. I get to make the rules." She whined her frustration both when he humped against her rump a second time, and when he pulled away completely.
Occupational safety mandated boots. It said nothing about pants, and even less about using a precision laser to cut them open. Even at low power the fabric didn't bother to fight back--splitting cleanly down the seam into two legs that fell away into a useless puddle.
Their owner didn't fight back either. Her eyes closed and her muzzle quivered with the start of a whine when he touched her. It was so plaintive, so needy that Dev figured she'd learned something of a lesson. Maybe. Find out later. Right then he had better things. He pressed in smoothly, groaning out as the pressure of the jackal's pussy slowly enveloped him.
Casey whined again and tried to push back, but his paw kept her fixed and he took his sweet time working his cock into her. He'd always loved the feeling of that first thrust, sliding deep into her until their hips joined--Casey wasn't as inclined to take her time, but then it wasn't up to her, was it?
He bit her ear as he hilted at last. "See? All under control..."
"Good," she choked out. "Now fuck me, Dev, please."
The coyote's hips swiveled slowly, pulling his shaft free and then just as fluidly sinking it back inside. He hissed a commentary moan as his length filled her a second time, giving her a moment to think he might not have been capable of restraint--but then he held still.
And he stayed still until she whimpered and he felt her leg jolting, trying to pull herself out of her boots. A warning growl stopped her, she relaxed, and he rewarded her with another languid thrust. Dev counted to five in his head, it went without protest, and he began a slow rhythm.
One paw was all it took to hold her steady; he guided the other between her legs from the front. His fingers were soaked in an instant, and he started to tease her clit, rubbing the jackal gently as he slowly took her sodden cunt. He recognized the signs of her peak--the way her breathing faltered, and she whined, and her ears laid back...
And the way, when he let up with his paw and the pressure eased, she jerked hard and tried uselessly to squirm free. "Fuck! Dev!" He waited for the whining to become less desperate. "Devin..."
"What, Case?" She'd calmed enough that he felt another thrust was safe--this time shifting his hips back and forth when he was all the way in, dragging the slick, swelling girth of his cock along her insides. "What is it?"
"T-teasing... stop teasing..."
"You don't get to say that. No begging, jackal." His finger went back to work, circling, seeking out those little nudges that made her straighten up and shiver.
"Wh-what then?"
"Nothing." He slowed and Casey's shivering went all to her muzzle, where she was obviously trying to keep from making silly jackal threats. "Good... see? You don't get to do anything, Case."
"But..."
"Just shut up, jackal. You aren't in charge. You're mine, jackal. You get that?"
If she seriously considered any argument, it lasted no more than a few heartbeats. She relaxed, her muzzle unclenched, and she nodded her surrender.
He hilted and stayed there, rolling his hips firmly in time to his fingers. The jackal's legs locked in place, trembling. He didn't stop this time until the spasms built into a bucking, uncontrolled shudder. Casey squeaked, and outright lost the battle to stay quiet a second later. A bark, then a louder one, then a singing, keening, broken howl.
To her credit--perhaps to her pilot's reflexes--she kept her balance until her ears were no longer flat and she could speak straight again--mostly. "Dev... Devvy, babe, you... that's fine okay I... I get it you made your point you can be in charge sometimes if you want and oh god coyote I--"
Casey's inability to use punctuation made the conversation tough to follow. The coyote jerked his hips to remind her of where she was. She shut up even before he finished. The sound of his cock spreading her open overpowered even her weak canine whimper. "Try again."
"Untie me?"
"Not yet. I'm not finished." And there was no way he was leaving her untied, for that matter. Another buck drove the point home. "Now you beg."
Her muzzle fell open and her tongue lolled. "H--rrf. Dev."
"Beg," he repeated.
"Fuck me, 'yote!" He pulled back only to drive in sharply, slamming her hips forward with the strength of the lunging movement. She yelped, rallied, and found enough leverage to shove back when he rammed into her again. "Fuck your jackal bitch!"
"What's that?" He bucked deep, his cock plunging all the way with a pointed squelch. Growling, he leaned into her; his muzzle was at her neck and he bit her scruff firmly. "Whose?"
"Yours," she answered, gasping at the shock of the bite, or the swift penetration that followed--rough thrusts stuffing her full of coyote cock with scant quarter-seconds between them. None of that sometimes bullshit was left in her. "That's it, Devin! Rut your bitch hard! Give it to her!"
He snarled and by a few seconds later, spearing himself into her over and over, he wasn't holding anything back. Just fucking the jackal, using her for his own release, pounding his cock swiftly into the dripping, tight heat of her body as the tingling pressure started to curl and build deep within him.
But the hammering strokes as he sated himself in her body had the jackal crying out suddenly, throwing her back and forcing his muzzle into the fur of her neck. She howled when he bit down. Pinned in two places at once--the pulsing, steely heat of his cock shoving into her and the possessive grip of sharp teeth--she could only squirm and thrash against her restraints as the wailing pleasure raced through her.
Dev forced his knot in and didn't even try pulling out. He worked his hips in a pointed, purposeful rhythm back and forth as his cock swelled, thicker and thicker. Then its size restricted even that--she had him held tight, gripping the bulge of canine meat just behind her lips. Squeezing him, her body begging him for his seed...
The clenching pulses of her warm cunt coaxed him over the edge. With a guttural, grunted growl the coyote gave in. His cock twitched in heavy throbs, pumping his cum deep. His arms locked around her midsection, a tight hug that held her fixed in place as he filled her.
And her howl, when he claimed her, only prolonged his release. Somewhere beneath the intense rush of pleasure he felt the spurting, sticky heat spreading over his tip, and his reflexive thrusts squishing his length into the potent load flooding the jackal. Consequences would follow later--for now he jerked into her heedlessly, his knot keeping every drop inside as he drained himself.
When he could breathe he found himself leaning on the jackal's back; her arms were out straight, braced to keep the pair standing. "Fuck," Devin muttered. "Fuck, jackal..."
She laughed, just as breathlessly. "Back in your good graces?"
That remained to be seen, but he did at least unwrap his paws from her to support his own weight on the railing. "Hadn't got off since Carrolia."
"Maybe I should try that more often."
"Yeah? You like being tied up, then?"
"You didn't even have to, you know."
"I know." He sighed, and nipped his jackal's ear. "But like I said: it was fun."
"Won't argue." Casey tested the restraints that bound her wrists, and her tail wagged a few times. "But you got off. I got off. We're done arguing. Gonna let me go now, 'yote?"
"I dunno. I might need a break later. There's still a lot of work to get done."
"Cute. But I've got a ship to fly."
"Not any time soon you don't. But hey, maybe you've earned it." He tapped the cable ties and the smart metal released itself, reverting into to neat, straight bars.
The jackal wriggled her fingers, and used the computer pad strapped to her forearm to disengage the magnets of her boots. She couldn't go that far--they were still knotted--but she leaned back and into the coyote, tilting her head up until their eyes met. "You know I'll get you back, right?"
"Big words, jackal."
She closed her eyes and relaxed, bracing herself on Devin instead of holding the railing. "Don't try me. How bad is our ship. For real, coyote?"
"She's flying, at least. Needs a full inspection in Winterhaven, in case I missed something."
"You didn't miss anything, I'm sure," the jackal said. "We should order ahead for spare parts... I know we gave up some hull plating... plus, I remember you said something about the power grid giving up the ghost."
"I've got a full list of parts."
Casey nodded. "What about for next time?"
He bit the jackal on the tip of her ear. "We're not doing this again." Goddamnit--he'd made it sound like he'd be around for an 'again,' either way. But it was too late to correct himself.
"Dev, c'mon. This is a record..."
He tried a second bite to see if it brought any more sense to her. "Saying you cleared the Melkown Rift in twelve light-years will get you a round of drinks in a shitty dive, jackal. If you're willing to go dutch."
"Hey, it's a start." She craned her head back to give a lopsided grin. "Most people are drunk when they hire us anyway. Do you think we look untrustworthy?"
"Right now, we sure as fuck do."
But it was true most of the time, he supposed. Casey tilted her head and shifted her hips a bit. Satisfied, she tugged with her hips until Dev's cock worked itself free. The effect--her pants neatly sliced in half and a generous helping of coyote spilling down to stain her fur--didn't do much to enhance their reputation.
"You 'got a ship to fly,' I take it."
"In a moment." She turned, leaning on the railing, and gave him a more serious look than he'd come to expect from the jackal. Or any jackal. "Coyote."
"What?"
"I know this job was kinda... risky."
"Stupid, you mean."
She smiled, but it was just a smile--not one of her grins, not like she was about to shove him or tell him to stop worrying. "But... question. We made it out. You think any other pilot coulda done that, Dev?"
"No."
Now she grinned. She pushed herself from the railing and stood at full height, for what that was worth. "I've been flying since I was nine, 'yote. I've done contract freight, corporate couriers with huge engineering divisions... was a race pilot for the best solar catamaran team in ten sectors. Some of those guys would make Howland West himself give up and take second place."
West had been an engine designer--his work was in full effect on the Long Tall Sally, whose thrusters delivered unparalleled power and only a faint probability of spontaneous explosion. He was, Devin didn't point out, also a coyote. "I get that you're good, Case. I know you're good."
"If it'd been anybody else... anybody from Rali-An-Mei to Edra and every fuckin' in between... anybody else, Devin Alonzo McGee, and I woulda told that cheetah to get stuffed. We did this, 'yote. She's your ship as much as mine."
"Does that mean you'll be less crazy in the future?"
Casey laughed. "I just called you a genius, coyote." She stretched up, kissed him right on the lips, and settled back down with a wink and a lashing wag of her tail. "Don't make me change my mind."