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The Dark Horse stops off at a new planet to do some exploring. And also some exploding. The letters are right next to one another.

The second episode for this season finally resolves some long-simmering tension and also sets up the long-form season finale that I will post when I, uh, finish editing it :P Also I ramble about linguistics for a bit. Thanks to y'all, for being such a lovely audience, and thanks to Spudz for his help as always in keeping me from going too far off the rails.

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** S3E2, "Two Birds" Stardate 66795

---

Captain's log, stardate 66795.2

While Lieutenant Commander Bradley spends some quality time on Beltran's World, we've been hard at work exploring the rest of this system. Our science officer didn't have reason to consider it anything special, but there's ample opportunity to settle other affairs while we have the chance.

Madison May would clarify the details in her personal log, some subtleties having been erased for political reasons. The system_wasn't_ anything special--an ordinary star, two rocky planets bearing life of one form or another, and a handful of unremarkable gas giants. Dr. Schatz had found interesting signals on one of the rocky planets, and she'd left the decision up to Felicia Beltran because first contact was her speciality.

Maddy assumed that Dr. Beltran wouldn't want to waste any time, but the leopardess had instead suggested that the planet warranted a closer investigation. Madison May wasn't bitter enough to reflect on any old, trite sayings about what happened when an akita_assumed_ something. She had to trust her crew, after all; maybe Felicia had found something. Or maybe not.

And by settling 'other affairs' she meant taking the opportunity afforded by Bradley's absence to test some upgrades they'd been making to the_Dark Horse_. Bradley saw himself as a pragmatist, and the concerns he voiced about their 'upgrades' became louder the more obvious it was that their chief engineer had a hand in the more dramatic ones. And it wasn't that he was wrong, no, May would admit that immediately.

But it was nice not to have to defend herself to anyone. "Spaceman Alexander, are you prepared to launch?"

The Abyssinian was always willing to be May's partner in crime. Technically, she was willing to be nearly anyone's partner in crime; May just afforded the greatest number of opportunities. Mitch Alexander checked the readouts on her station. "Ready, captain," she confirmed. "The course is programmed."

"Ensign Bader, go ahead."

Leon's finger had been resting over the 'fire' button for several minutes and was starting to ache. He tapped it firmly. "Firing. Probe is away. Spaceman, you should have the telemetry now."

"Yup," Mitch answered, having little reason for anything as formal as a_yes, sir_. "Everything looks normal. It'll be within range of the outer rings in about two hours, captain." The 'probe' looked an awful lot like a torpedo--which was why Leon's involvement had been needed.

Indeed, for the most part, it_was_ a torpedo, with its warhead removed and the guts of a standard Star Patrol probe fitted to it. Shannon Hazelton, the chief engineer, had also tweaked the propulsion system: the result was a sixfold improvement in speed over their other surveillance drones. David Bradley would've pointed out its wider diameter was, while still within tolerances, close to the limits of what would fit in a torpedo tube.

And Shannon would've dismissed the concern as paranoia. And she would've been correct: the probe was well on its way, behaving perfectly. They'd also had success with her improvements to the deflector shields, and to the targeting scanners.

All told, it hadn't been a bad few days.

***

First Officer's log, Stardate 66797.5

Dr. Beltran resists calling this planet 'Beltran's World,' but considering the expedition was her idea, I believe it's a fitting honor after all. In two days of operations, we've already more than justified her suggested detour.

David double-checked the surveying equipment to make sure it was recording properly. It was. They had five days worth of food, ten days worth of water... and, if patterns held, barely three days worth of storage space left on their portable computers. He'd already begun regularly transferring the information to the databanks on their shuttlepod, squeezing every bit of margin they could.

"The site continues to impress me," he said to Dr. Beltran. "In terms of scale, if nothing else."

No river had run through the valley in centuries, leaving it dry and mostly preserved. The team had needed to continue expanding their range as they discovered new artifacts. From two kilometers to five, to ten, to long enough that it wouldn't matter. "It's huge," the leopardess agreed. "We're barely scratching the surface."

As archaeology was far from her area of expertise, Felicia didn't want to speculate on what the site had been, but a farm of some kind seemed likely: the valley walls still showed evidence of their terracing. Preliminary dating suggested the whole complex had been abandoned at least a thousand years before.

Even though it was, obviously, one of the more interesting questions posed by the discovery, she didn't want to speculate about that, either, and the others were too busy for it. A team of six could hardly expect to draw any useful conclusions in the time they had--Felicia didn't even know if they could gather enough data for the Terran Confederation's scientists to come up with a plan for tackling it. It would take dozens of them--maybe hundreds--and the Confed's finest scholars were all at Sjel-Kassar, the great lost city that had been discovered only a year before. The valley on Beltran's World was at best a minor attraction.

But if the Confed's best minds were at Sjel-Kassar, their most distractible one was not. Barry Schatz ran his claws through his scalp, shaking his head at the latest download from the survey scanners. "Add at least another kilometer to the north--this isn't a normal rockfall, I think, if you look at the angle of the stone it's clearly an irrigation sluice... or... well, maybe it was meant to channel water from the hilltops, but... no, it... well. Hmm. Either way, it's artificial, commander."

The rocky object was at the limits of the scanner range; the image was so fuzzy that Dave was both impressed and mystified by the Border Collie's conclusion that it was artificial. He had to stare cross-eyed for half a minute until he saw the patterns and angles in the blurry scan that marked it as out-of-place. "I think you're right. Worth a look in person?"

"Perhaps, sir, but... there's the gate along the western wall to process, too, and..."

"And if you go that far north, perhaps you will only discover yet another extension of this site," Beltran pointed out. "It carries both risk and reward."

"What doesn't?" David asked. Unlike Maddy, he had started to gain an ability to decipher the leopardess's dry, sardonic humor: he knew she wasn't actually telling Schatz to stay put. "Why don't you and Sabel go investigate it in the morning? Don't take too long, but at least confirm what it looks like close up. You up to that, Sabel?"

Sabel had spent most of the meeting slowly warming a prepackaged dinner with his laser pistol on its very lowest setting and the impeccable aim granted by his cybernetics. He let go of the trigger and turned from his target to the golden retriever. "I am capable of the journey, yes."

"I do hope you're not bored," Dave said. They'd needed him as a pilot, but: "I know this isn't your field, really."

"True. As you'd say, I'm a soldier, not an anthropologist with specialized training for interpreting data generated by nondestructive archaeological methods. Notwithstanding, it has been very interesting."

"Do you have a proverb for that?"

The spitz shook his head. "There are relatively few common proverbs involving nondestructive computer-mediated archaeological surveillance."

"'Sometimes you have to bring the genetically engineered soldier to the excavation site'... you didn't know that one?"

Sabel was still slow to appreciate sarcasm--Beltran, for instance, was far beyond his grasp. Helpfully, Dave kept things obvious. "I believe you may have invented that just now, commander. But I'll add it to my records."

David grinned. "Do that. Do you mind if I ask what you find interesting?"

"No, sir."

An uncomfortable few seconds of silence followed. "What do you find interesting?"

"I find our ability to recover a sense of this place so long after it was abandoned... intriguing. Considering that I myself was abandoned to cryogenic stasis in your own distant past, the parallels don't escape me. And some of the archaeology itself is quite fascinating--based on listening to the conversations you've been having, and what I can gather. This is a unique settlement. As the saying goes: still waters run deep."

"You think it's hiding something?"

Sabel looked from one side of the valley to the other. "I can't say. The rock deposits along the old riverbed, however, suggest the water never exceeded a depth of three to four meters, and must've been quite swift."

Barry Schatz perked his ears. "That's an interesting point. They don't seem to have done much to control it, either. No sign of dams or diversion canals. No sign of waterwheels, either. I wonder if that implies their technology was fairly limited--maybe they didn't have the ability to utilize hydropower, or maybe the river was too unpredictable for it... we should add a geological layer to the surveying programs, commander, if you don't mind... I know we're short on memory."

"My own computer banks are compatible with yours. I suppose that's where your proverb about bringing a soldier to the excavation site comes from, Commander Bradley," Sabel said. "I believe Dr. Schatz may be correct about their technical aptitude. My programmers did not endow me with a strong facility for extrapolating, but the walls on the southern perimeter appear defensive in nature, and if so, they clearly predate explosives or heavy artillery."

"Just stone," Dave mused.

Felicia Beltran recalled the orbital survey they'd done. "A lot of stone." The roads leading to and from the valley were so wide and imposing that they'd thought them to be natural features at first. Some of the causeways were a hundred meters wide--they would've taken an incredible amount of labor to complete.

Schatz agreed with that, and the pieces started to come together. A civilization equivalent to Earth's bronze age, perhaps. Sedentary and agricultural, densely populated and productive enough to provide spare labor for building monuments and carving out the hills. That implied hierarchy, at least. Maybe spiritual beliefs? Did they have tombs? Writing?

This, Schatz thought, is what I joined the Star Patrol for.

***

"The excitement?"

"I was being a_little_ sarcastic," junior tactical officer Léa Smith said, because who the hell would enlist and journey beyond the frontier just to test a bunch of probes? "They're going to have us doing more tomorrow, I think."

Leon grinned sympathetically. "It can't all be space battles. At least you're not down on the planet, right?"

"Can they make you?" The question came not from Chief Petty Officer Smith or from Ensign Bader, but from Rika Srivastava. She was the only other crewman in the mess hall, and she'd been keeping to herself until the threat of an away mission emerged.

"I don't think so," Leon answered.

The dhole grabbed her tray of Two-Sig Pizza and joined the two tactical officers at their table. "You don't_think_ so, or you don't know so? I have a medical exemption, but, uh. But I heard--they said they needed a pilot and, uh, Spaceman Alexander looked at me really... mischievously."

"She's always mischievous." The German Shepherd found himself frequently at odds with Mitch Alexander's freewheeling ways; 'mischievous' was the polite way of describing it. He tried to console the junior helmsman further. "Probably just trying to get under your skin. She knows you're supposed to stay in space."

"Yeah, but..."

Rika picked at her pizza, which as two-sigma food analogue was guaranteed by Confederation food scientists to be 95% identical to pizza. It, like Sabel Thorsen, had been carefully programmed. And it attempted flavor the way Sabel attempted metaphor: bluntly, confusingly, and so inappropriately the better approach would have been to forego the whole experiment.

She worked a chewy piece of synthetic onion until it finally surrendered to her teeth and she could swallow. "I keep thinking that Commander May might, like... try to... you know, make me overcome my condition or something. Like she'd be doing me a favor?"

"That does kind of sound like something she might do," Bader admitted. "But in my experience, Commander May has a pretty good way of knowing when you can push someone and when you can't. So my advice is not to worry."

Ensign Srivastava took another halfhearted bite of pizza, shuddering. It was one thing to say that, and quite another to believe it. "There's a lot to worry about, though, out here. More than back on the other side of the border."

Bader could only shrug. "That's the life of the Star Patrol, though. Hostile aliens, deep-space radiological anomalies..."

"It's not safe back home, either." Léa Smith wasn't trying to_frighten_ the young dhole, far from it, but the wild dog had been in the Star Patrol for a good, long time. "My second ship was the CSS Nikola Tesla--heard of it? Maybe before your time. We were ambushed on the Castor tradelanes by a criminal syndicate. They weren't expecting us, and we weren't expecting them, but they got off the first shot. Critical reactor failure. There were only twenty survivors... the only ones who could abandon ship in time."

"May knows how to deal with that, too. Our deflector shields are practically invulnerable to energy weapons, and--well, believe me, we've been doing_lots_ of work on the point-defense grid. Our mean error is down by half. You don't have to worry about torpedoes, either."

"What? No." Rika shook her head quickly. "Not--who cares about torpedoes? Have you_seen_ what it's like down there? The sky is blue half the time, don't you get it? Half the time. Half of it, the sky is blue, it's actually blue, I mean who even heard of a--why would you--who would do that?"

"Most skies are blue?" Leon was a little confused.

"Until it's_not_. Until it's red or yellow or"--she cut herself off in a yelp. "I just... ugh."

"That's physics. It's how... it's how skies work. What else would it be?"

The dhole jerked her arm, pointing to the mess hall window. A nice, proper black canvas lay beyond it, dotted with the unsullied glimmer of distant stars. Just like it was_supposed_ to be, like it was in 99.999999999999999999996 percent of the universe. Blue--it was perverse. Awful. She gave up on the pizza and excused herself to meditate in the proper darkness of her quarters.

"She's--"

"A space native," Leon confirmed. "She has strong opinions."

"I like space, too, but... wow." The painted dog tried not to be too judgmental: her own quirks had gotten her posted to the_Dark Horse_, after all. But an excessive fondness for weapons and adventure could be channeled into something productive on a starship. Agoraphobia seemed like a different matter. "She's a good pilot, right?"

"I hear. She has good marks. It's better than I could do. I barely passed basic flight."

"Fifth to last, myself." And since the tactical officer advancement track didn't require requalification, both of them had long since forgotten how to manage even a shuttle competently. "But I guess we can't do everything."

"Sabel can. That's why they have him down there."

"Just the Vostok?"

"Nah. He's been working on the Type 4s, too. He says it's easy."

Léa hadn't interacted much with the spitz. "He's kinda something else, ain't he?"

"You're telling me." Leon hadn't yet misread the painted dog's intentions, although he was about to. "He's very unique."

"I'd like to get to know him better."

"Same. But he's... tough to get close to."

"Yeah? You two are close, though. You spend a lot of time together."

"Yeah, but I don't know if we're_close_. It can be pretty hard to read his feelings, so if you get confused, I... don't blame you, I do too. Maybe you'll have better luck. Maybe he'll be interested. I don't mind."

The painted dog walked through the last few sentences of their exchange, mildly confused. "I wasn't talking about feelings? I mean the work."

Leon's ears snapped back with the same automatic, defensive reflex as the ship's deflector shields. "Oh. Yeah. Well, sure. We work together. He's--yeah, the--the programming's very--it's quite thorough. Ground tactics. Lot of experience."

"I didn't mean to imply anything about you two as a couple or anything."

"We're not."

"I mean, it wouldn't be a problem."

"Sure," Leon said. "But we're not."

Léa fiddled with her pizza, musing on the structural integrity of the synthetic dough. "So. Shuttles, eh?"

***

"Can you read it?"

Painted by the wide beam of David's flashlight were sharp, clean glyphs etched directly in the stone wall of the cave. They'd discovered it almost by accident, following the remains of an eroded path up from the valley floor. It wasn't surprising, of course, that the writing wasn't in their universal translator. And if David couldn't read it, the other Star Patrol crew wouldn't have better luck.

Ayenni stared, and tried to piece the inscription together into something comprehensible. "No," the Yara concluded. "It doesn't look like anything I've seen before."

Barry Schatz held his computer up to the wall, trying to get a sense of the material. "Based on the chemical composition, the inscription is at least a thousand Terran years old. It could be older, but I think the most likely scenario is that it's the same age as everything else in the valley. To be certain, we'd need to do more detailed scanning."

Dave nodded. "It's just as abandoned, though. Have to wonder what this place was. A temple? A library? Dr. Beltran, how long would it take you to translate this?"

Felicia turned her own flashlight on and walked a few paces further in; the inscriptions went another six meters deeper into the cave but stopped when it curved to the right and even the dusky light from the overgrown entrance failed to penetrate. "That is not an easy question to answer. There's plenty of material, but without any context I wouldn't know where to begin, commander."

"It's so well-preserved. It would be a shame if we couldn't learn_anything_ from it..."

The leopardess glanced over at him, comfortable enough to smile. "I did not say, or imply, that we could learn nothing. There seem to be only twenty to forty distinct characters, depending on how generous we are with the matching algorithm. That implies either a very limited vocabulary--perhaps a calendar, or numeric calculations--or it implies an alphabetic writing system."

"But it's not purely numbers," Barry said.

"No," Felicia agreed. "That is not likely."

Had May been there, the akita would've brought a swift halt to the digression. David was curious. "How do you know?"

"If you have a large set of symbols like this, with no additional context, one of the first automatic tests you can perform is to see if there's a way to come up with meanings for them so they produce mathematical operations with valid answers. Like solving one of those number square puzzles--it's simple enough that a brute-force approach works for most plausible bases. Not all, of course. And--isn't it true that there's a problem with... Inner Daubarian, right, Dr. Beltran?"

The Border Collie's explanation had been mostly accurate, if also mostly irrelevant. "Yes. Daubarian in general is a difficult written language to interpret. However, in this case, there are other clues. Character frequency, for instance, follows a logarithmic distribution. There are also evident clustering patterns: these two glyphs are commonly paired in this order; conversely, many pairs do not exist at all in these inscriptions. This short vertical bar appears regularly, as if marking out discrete concepts."

"Sentences?" David asked.

"If that's true, the sentence length also follows Zipf's law." Barry found himself getting into the work--it suggested a highly interesting puzzle. "I think. Do you agree?"

"Dr. Schatz is working from an unstated but, I believe, correct assumption: this is an alphabetic language written from right to left and top to bottom. Reading it in a different order, or boustrophedon, produces an unlikely distribution of sentence length. We may also note that there are no characters above three and a half meters and none below two."

"So they must've been able to write and read comfortably at that height?" Commander Bradley laughed, impressed. "Not bad. Is it safe to say that even finding this says that they were visually oriented? Could they have read this by touch?"

Ayenni didn't need the flashlights to see by; her eyes were keen enough to know that the walls deeper inside were bare. "If they could, why would it all be so close to the cave entrance? It stops where the light does."

Beltran nodded. "Indeed. We can adopt that as a supposition, commander. With enough material, even without translation, we can make other educated guesses--about the number and structure of sounds in their language, for instance. As you see, commander, it is a_very_ intriguing find."

"So I can." He tapped his communicator. "Sabel, can you join us? I think you're going to be better at recording what we've found."

Five minutes later the spitz loped up from where he'd been studying the defensive walls to the valley's south. Committing the etching to memory was, indeed, an easy task for him--and like Ayenni, he could see in the dark. He could also see a bit of writing that they'd missed, hidden under roots at the entrance of the cave. They clung with a frustrating tightness, but the enhanced strength of a powered exo-suit was just one more reason to take a soldier to an archaeological dig.

The roots gave way at last with a crack, and a shower of dust. Behind them, in addition to the writing, they found more wood. This had been clearly worked: it was straight-hewn, and smooth, and very old. "A gate?" Dave wondered aloud. "Was there a door?"

Sabel followed the ruins from the floor upwards and then, just as they heard a groaning protest from the newly exposed beam, his head canted. "No. I believe it--" Taking up the pressure that had been borne by the rootwork, the beam splintered and collapsed. And before he could finish, the ceiling went with it.

***

Madison May rubbed her paws together. "Here's my bet. To make things exciting. When we launch the probe,I bet you can get a solution and bring us to the firing point before it's out of range. What do you say, Miss Smith?"

Léa considered all the variables carefully. If the probe did as well as their engineer claimed, the timing would be exceedingly tight. "Can I actually shoot, captain?"

"No. We need to recover the probe for analysis. Intact, I guess," May added, although she sympathized with the painted dog's idea. "But think about it as good training. It is, isn't it? Helm, you up for it?"

Rika's first thought was that both Smith and May were highly optimistic if they thought the maneuver was even possible. Then it occurred to the dhole that if they pulled it off, she'd be making a good argument that she needed to be kept on the bridge whenever possible. Certainly not in any shuttle. "We can try, ma'am. I'd like to try."

"Good! So would I! Spaceman Alexander, are we ready to launch?"

This, the final test of their new probes, was an unscheduled one--the unit had failed some integrity tests and Hazelton originally considered it scrap. Then the raccoon had decided testing the propulsion system didn't require the signal-processing AI to be unimpeachable and they could use it, after all.

It was as a consequence of this that Mitch was running into difficulty getting the launch software to consent. Picking up on the delay, Maddy asked again: "Ready?"

One final reboot did the job. "Seems that way."Gonna have some words with TJ, she thought to herself. The hardware failure was probably TJ Wallace's fault, and even if it wasn't she knew she could extort something good from the otter. "Launch, ready."

"Helm, as soon as I fire, start taking us about... five degrees starboard. I think that'll be close to the actual firing solution." Léa had also switched the targeting scanners active to shave another second or two off the time it would take to calculate an intercept course.

"You're cheating," May teased.

"I'm obtaining a tactical advantage, ma'am," the painted dog countered.

The akita's grin was understanding and friendly. "I'll allow it. This time. Fire, please."

The next sound was not Léa's acknowledgment but the high-pitched, shrieking pulse of an alarm. Four different errors had flashed onto her console at the same time. "Misfire. Looks like it went off the launch rail."

"Fire alarm," Mitch added. "Deck six. Inner hull breach forward of frame fifty."

The torpedo tubes were, naturally, located on the outer hull and this told May that something had gone quite dramatically wrong. "State Red and activate all DC procedures. Engineering." She'd opened the commlink by second nature. "We've got problems here."

In main engineering, Shannon Hazelton had the ship's master display open.Problems was obvious; the nature of the problem would take a little more effort. The Dark Horse's damage-control drones had already started work, the fire was being brought under control, and the hull breach... "On it, Mads. Backup systems are fine--nothing critical here. Give me a minute."

"Don't blow us up," May cautioned, and shut the channel.

"Was it the probe?" Hazelton demanded.

Madison joked that Hazelton and CWO Junya Sakata were hard to tell apart. But Sakata's tail was ringless, and although he shared Shannon's mask he didn't share the irrepressibly reckless glint in her eyes. The glint had been most assuredly repressed: Junya looked about as stressed as the tanuki felt. "No. The launch tube failed--probably old hardware, but we won't know until we can get access to the space."

"I don't think there was an explosion, then." The raccoon clicked her tongue, puffing out her cheeks with a sigh while she considered what to do next. 'No explosion' was good news, and substantial progress towards the assignment May had given her. What seemed to have happened was an unfortunate set of coincidences.

The tube had failed in just the right place that inertia carried the probe partway through the open hatch, but at an odd angle. Nonetheless the probe's internal logic detected that it had reached vacuum and obligingly turned its thrusters on; these had burned through the inner hull in the quarter of a second before the probe could be completely shut down.

And now they had a modified torpedo stuck in the damaged tube, which would need to be removed before any repair work could take place. "Let's shove it out with the DC bots," Shannon proposed. "If it hasn't welded itself to the hull."

"It has," TJ Wallace reported. "Not, like... a lot? But kinda. We'll have to cut it out."

"Not a problem. Shouldn't set off the fuel and there's no warhead."

"Yeah, so..." TJ pivoted the master systems display to highlight the launch tube. "Here's the thing, though. That space is only big enough for one bot. 'Cause, uh, like, the crawlway's blocked by a rocket engine sticking through the bulkhead."

"Might as well get started," the raccoon agreed. It would take plenty of time, and while she had a well-deserved reputation, she wasn't about to rush the painstaking work of freeing a rather powerful rocket. They could sit and wait. "I'll tell Mads."

"Yeah. So," TJ said again, and coughed. "It probably won't take more than, like, eight or nine hours. But, uh, that's cool. What_isn't_ cool is the fuel assembly. Like, I mean, it is now, but--"

"Shit."

"Yeah."

Shannon took the time to double-check the data sheet, even though it made her swear again, and hailed the bridge. Why mince words? "We're gonna blow up, Mads. Uh. Probably."

***

"Is anybody hurt?" But nobody, in a stroke of luck, had been injured by the sudden failure of the wooden braces at the cave's entrance. Dave narrowed the beam of his flashlight on the rubble, which was just starting to become visible as the dust settled. Judging by what they'd been able to read before, but was now hidden, the cave had grown a meter shorter.

Sabel admitted both that he_could_ move the rocks, and that doing so strongly risked additional collapse. They didn't know enough of the strata to judge how risky it would be, and the geological survey data was at camp with their computers. Those proved to be unreachable, and Sabel pointed out the obvious there, too: if they couldn't talk to the camp, they wouldn't be able to raise the Dark Horse.

"They'll send a rescue party... they'll probably discover the disturbed earth..." Dave worked through the timelines in his head. "Maybe two or three days? We have enough air, at least. And enough water."

"What next, sir?"

Now that they faced, at most, only the prospect of momentary discomfort, Bradley wanted to corral the team's thoughts in productive ways. "Next, we think about other options to pass the time--like finding a different way out of here. What are the odds that the cave system leads somewhere else?"

"Well... I was thinking," Barry started. He was_always_ thinking; he began that way to give Lieutenant Commander Bradley the opportunity to shut him up. Bradley stayed quiet. "Well, the stonework I was examining earlier reminds me of an irrigation sluice. It shares the general plan of the irrigation system on Wicat V, actually--which seems unlikely, considering they were never spacefaring, but convergent evolution can be funny."

Bradley was, in general, more inclined to give the Border Collie leeway than their captain, but even this had limits. "What's your point?" the retriever prompted.

The difference was that May often assumed the science officer rambled for no reason whatsoever, and Bradley figured there'd been_something_ to spark the digression. And, indeed, Barry stopped thinking about the Wicatians. "It must've been fed by something--perhaps an underground river."

David checked his handheld scanner. The humidity in the cave looked slightly elevated, yes. But that could've been just their own breath--God knew, there'd been a fair amount of panicked breathing in the aftermath of the cave-in. "If that's true, maybe we could find it. Sabel, how well can you see in the dark?"

"Reasonably well. The level of illumination here is sufficient for my purposes."

Ayenni could see in the dark, too. She didn't have the spitz's engineered implants, but her species was possessed of excellent visual acuity. The faint glow from their computers cast just enough light that, when she strained, the alien could get by.

Sabel still took point, because his augmentation allowed him to "see" with the high-resolution infrared laser scanners in his powered armor. And because he was armed. Security protocols existed for a reason. The science team picked their way deeper underground. Sabel's head was on a swivel, committing every detail of the cavern walls to memory.

David kept an eye on the oxygen levels, which were stable, and the temperature--decreasing, but slowly. "What about pathogens?" he realized. It was the kind of question their science officer would feel qualified to answer, so he clarified. "Ayenni, are we in any danger from stirring up some old bacteria down here?"

"I doubt it. And the equipment in your sickbay should be able to take care of anything when we get back."Primitive as it is, I can at least do that much, the Yara didn't add. She'd learned to make do--it wasn't his fault that, scant centuries before, Terrans were still using scalpels and questing after bodily humours. "I don't think there's much alive down here anymore."

"Was there ever?"

Sabel could answer the lieutenant commander's question without words. He flicked his wrist and turned up the flashlight to highlight for the others what he was looking at: more inscriptions on the cave walls. These were written in the same language as the others, near the cave mouth.

"I guess it's not any more readable," the retriever said, leaving just enough hope that they might've made some kind of breakthrough while he wasn't looking.

"It is not," Beltran answered.

Barry focused his scanner on one of the inscriptions, and the wall next to it. "But the isotopic analysis does tell us that these predate the ones we saw earlier by at least a few centuries. That means the cave was_inhabited_ for at least a few centuries! That's exciting! I wonder if it was always used contemporaneously to the structures outside, in the valley. Dr. Beltran, what do you think?"

"I have no opinion," the leopard replied. She was not given to idle speculation; it wasn't in her job description.

"C'mon, though," Barry insisted. "We might as well try to solve some puzzles while we're here. We don't have anything else to do. Like... what if this was where they used to take shelter? The temperature would be stable, and they'd have protection from the elements... or--hey! Maybe it's a map?"

Beltran was too cultured to growl at the overeager Border Collie. David heard her stifled hiss, all the same, and spoke up to calm her down. "It's not a bad question, Dr. Beltran. What do you think?Could it be a map?"

The leopardess stopped in her tracks and unclipped her own flashlight from the utility vest the science away mission compelled her to wear. She held her paw up steadily, sweeping the light back and forth over the glyphs, all the while watching the data readout on the scanner in her other paw.

She didn't_want_ to indulge the collie. But, given the faith Lieutenant Commander Bradley put in her, she didn't want the retriever to think she was being intentionally difficult. Could it be a map? No, of course not. There were no new characters. Everything looked the same as the cave entrance, without diagrams or imagery. Just letters.

Given long enough, Bradley would try a command trick from Commander May's playbook and ask Felicia to 'use her intuition.' She tried to get there first. What would inscriptions mean, this far underground? Might they have spiritual significance? Some craftsman clearly put work into them.

The beam of her light worked over an unnatural arrangement of rocks. It seemed as though they'd been piled into steps, leading towards a branching tunnel halfway up the cavern wall. The glyphs were written next to the entrance.A label? A signpost? No stream flowed from the tunnel's mouth. "Dr. Schatz, do you believe that tunnel is natural?"

Barry stepped closer, though he managed to keep himself from climbing the steps all the way up to the entrance--for now. "I don't think so. It doesn't look like it was eroded. Signs of definite flaking... the stone was worked, I think? Polished..."

"Maybe it's a hallway?" David suggested.

"A tomb."

"Dr. Beltran?"

"If it is true that the gallery was built for a purpose. The inscription next to the entrance could only have been placed there with difficulty, given the narrow width of the ledge. Yet the lettering is impeccable, with a delicate precision far in excess of the other inscriptions. Great care has obviously been taken."

"An alien burial ground," Bradley murmured, somewhat impressed. "I believe the standard contract procedures say those shouldn't be disturbed, eh?"

"Correct."

So they kept walking. There were a few more of the excavated caverns--half a dozen in all, following a similar pattern that left Beltran more and more convinced of her hypothesis. That hypothesis, in turn, suggested others. Barry Schatz raised one, in particular.

Whoever the residents were,if it was true that they went through the trouble of building such mausoleums, it was also true that they cared about their dead. That meant they had resources to spare for crypts, and they'd spent enough time at the site to bury half a dozen special individuals.

Beltran agreed they were probably individuals and not common graves. But where, then, were the others? And where was_any_ sign of the work? Where were the piles of chipped stone, the discarded tools, the scaffolding? Combined with the dating, Barry suggested some sort of collapse. The tombs had been built, and maintained--and, then, abandoned.

"But when you think about it"--and Barry was_definitely_ thinking about it--"they might not have been ceremonial. No buried treasure in these tombs... because there's no sign of grave-robbers, either. No vandalism... doesn't look like anybody's been conducting their own excavations..."

"Maybe, whoever the survivors were, they retained enough respect for their ancestors to leave them undisturbed?" Ayenni merely speculated on that point: her own kind lived in single-generation families and when parents had children of their own, they promptly began a new, separate life. She'd never met her grandparents, and didn't even know their names or the date they'd been cremated and their ashes set adrift on the mountain winds of their home.

"Maybe they forgot they were here," Barry said.

"They knew not to trespass, because the deterrents that had been set were formidable enough to exceed the potential reward. As a purely economic decision, it would be entirely rational. The nature of old, erratic technology is such that it is not always possible to determine exactly how a trap will fire, even when it is deliberately triggered."

David blinked and looked over at Sabel Thorsen. He was happy the spitz had decided to participate in the idle banter, but the conclusion seemed quite dramatic. "Are you familiar with Ockham's Razor, Sabel?"

The spitz nodded. "In general, defer to the explanation that requires the fewer number of assumptions. It is one with sufficient tactical relevance."

"So..."

"The steps leading to each entrance are unstable. So are the rocks concealed by a false plaster wall directly above the entrance, placed at a critical angle so that only minor disturbance would be required to upset them. It seems logical to assume that, at one point, weight placed on the steps would trigger a slide... I can only speculate that a different trigger would fire the projectiles designed to impale an intruder at chest height."

"You could see all of this?"

"It will be part of my tactical report, sir," Sabel assured the retriever. "Age has rendered the traps inert, and they pose no threat to us now. It had no bearing on speculation about the purpose of the caverns, so I did not feel the need to speak out of turn. As an explanation for why the area remains undisturbed, however, I think it is elegant."

"You'll tell us if we're about to trigger one, though, I hope?"

"Of course. But as I said, commander, I believe that they're completely harmless now. Without the use of the ground-penetrating sonar in my suit, I might not even have detected the possible geological instability... though, since the event that trapped us here, I have begun 'keeping my eyes peeled,' as you would say. I do that literally, also," he clarified--just in case Dave might've been confused.

He wasn't; in fact, he was more unsettled by the revelation of the traps. "Let's take a break while we go over this," he said. "That's enough excitement for now. Sabel, please do stay on tactical alert. I'd like to avoid any surprises."

Sabel wanted to sympathize. He had enough familiarity with Terran customs to know it wouldn't help to point out that the spitz, for his part, hadn't been surprised whatsoever. It was his job to keep them safe.

Barry Schatz wanted to sympathize, too, but his mind was already wandering. Why had they used that style of trap? Did others remain untriggered? Millennia of inactivity meant that none of it mattered from a_risk_ point of view...

And Sabel was doing a good job of putting his sensors to use.What did he say he used? Ground-penetrating sonar? I guess his suit must have some kind of AI to process the data about the rock density.

The Border Collie's mind drifted to AI. He thought about neural networks, and then about neurons themselves: the complicated, beautiful synaptic patterns in their intricate connections. "Do you have any Shahid-Lloyd filter libraries?"

"Yes." Sabel didn't go through the rigamarole of asking who Barry might've been addressing--it was obvious, even though the Border Collie was staring off into space and nobody had spoken for ten minutes.

"For... stealth detection?"

The spitz called up his internal databanks, summarized the relevant section, and started talking in the blink of an eye. "For determining the disposition of hostiles out of my direct line of sight based on limited tactical intelligence."

Even better. "What if we triggered one of the traps?"

David interrupted before things could get out of hand. "Why would you do that?"

"Noise, sir," Barry said. "Between the echoes and the vibrations in the rock, we might be able to build a low-resolution map of the surrounding cavern."

"From the echoes? How would that tell you anything? Aren't there_countless_ different caverns that could produce the same echo?"

"Theoretically, sure! But we already have plenty of information--we've been building a map the whole way here, so any model has to match what we know to exist... what the rock is made of, the thermal gradients... if I take a handheld scanner and feed that data into what his suit is already collecting, the possible solutions should drop by a_lot_."

"Sabel? Is what he's talking about doable?"

"Perhaps. It is difficult to create an accurate hypothesis given the limited data available to me."

"Only one way to find out, then. Let's try it."

***

Madison May didn't like the countdown projected on the whiteboard in her briefing room. She didn't like that it said 6:04:32, she didn't like that it kept time down to the second, she didn't like that it only ran for six hours, and she_really_ didn't like that, when it ran out, the Dark Horse was going to explode.

The timer kept track of the remaining coolant in the fuel system of the probe now stuck firmly and annoyingly in the cruisers' torpedo tube. The probe had no warhead but, according to the chief engineer, the explosion of its thrusters would more than do the trick.

"Don't we have armor for things like that?" May groused. "We do, right?"

"Yes. But it's inside the armor plating, so that won't help. Nobody designed the armor to work from the inside."

Shannon Hazelton went on to explain that, while they had programmed a damage-control bot to cut the probe free, the limited working space meant it would take nine and a half hours to finish the job. Her crew had also explored the option of draining the fuel, but the access port was embedded in the starship's hull and inaccessible.

Her best option was limiting the damage. By evacuating the air from that side of the ship to prevent compression shockwaves and reconfiguring the structural integrity fields, the raccoon thought they could confine the destruction to the torpedo tubes themselves, the starboard sensor grid, the auxiliary shield emitters, and possibly the science lab.

"We're working from slightly different definitions of 'confine,' I think," the akita said. "How much of it can be repaired in the field?"

"Not much. With luck, we can keep the reactor from overloading and the hyperdrive stable long enough to make it back to drydock." Shannon was operating with a different definition of 'luck,' too.

In this she had an ally. Jack Ford, being a coyote, had gone through his share of close encounters, and enjoyed an adversarial relationship with the very concept of 'luck.'

But he also had an idea. "Let me make sure I'm following. You're cutting through the hull_around_ the probe, right? Because the plating is easier to get through than the engine casing?"

"Right. The thruster assembly is pretty much impervious--it has to be, to contain the drive plasma. The torch on a DC bot would take...days to make a dent."

"Sure. That's why they tell us to aim for less-armored parts of a ship when we're attacking. Anyway, you can't cut the probe free in time," the coyote said. "What if you_pulled_ it out--like a bad tooth?"

"It_might_ work, but we don't have anything with that kind of power."

"A Riverjack would. Tether one to the probe and ramp the main engine up..."

According to the standard Star Patrol script, this was where Madison was supposed to say something like_are you out of your mind?_ The akita kept her muzzle shut, watching Shannon Hazelton's expression to see how it changed. The raccoon closed her eyes thoughtfully.

"Give me a sec, cap."

She kept her eyes shut, connecting via neural link to the ship's computer where she could focus on a set of numbers. One of them was the structural integrity of the_Dark Horse_'s outer hull; two more were the corresponding numbers for the converted torpedo and the Type 7 scout ship. One was the strength of a Riverjack's impulse drive. The fifth was the output from a virtual pair of dice, which she used for random numbers.

Maddy couldn't see any of this: just the raccoon, looking pensive, while the others in the briefing watched, and waited. "Lieutenant Hazelton?" she asked, finally. "What do you say?"

"Maybe."

"How 'maybe'?"

Hazelton rolled the dice. Then, deciding snake eyes was a poor omen, she rolled again. "I think it could work. We'll use the DC bot to keep cutting the hull for as long as we can. In six hours, it_should_ be weak enough that it'll buckle and tear. And with an auxiliary structural field generator connected to the probe, it should take a tow line without failing. And if Captain Ford doesn't make any sudden moves, the Type 7 should stay in one piece, too."

"Lot of 'shoulds' there," Madison said.

"But I think it's our best option, Mads. So here's another: we_should_ get started as soon as possible."

Hooking up a portable field generator and attaching the tow lines required an EVA. Their best candidate was Sabel Thorsen, but he wasn't available. Shannon averred a lingering phobia of EVA suits from her previous encounters with them, and Jack was needed to fly the Type 7 itself.

Konstantin Kamyshev was suit-qualified, as a fellow scout pilot. And as a fellow scout pilot, he was suitably reckless not to protest or suggest any skepticism whatsoever when Captain Ford suggested the mission. With two hours remaining on the countdown clock, the snow leopard found himself trudging gamely along the outer hull of the star cruiser, humming quietly to himself.

It was nice and peaceful, out in space. He had his radio turned down, and kept his breathing measured and slow. Nothing above him, behind him, or to either side but a limitless expanse of glorious stars. Nothing below him but the solid, reassuring bulk of a Star Patrol cruiser.

Granted, in_front_ of the snow leopard was the battered nosecone of a torpedo poking through a twisted hole immediately next to the closed--and irksomely intact--launch tube door. That part of the environment was a little less than serene.

But they had a way to fix it. The snow leopard turned his radio up. "Kamyshev here. I'm in position."

Shannon Hazelton was monitoring him from a safe distance, her affinity for explosions having, however briefly, found its limits. "How does the probe look, commander?"

"Broken."

"Can you get to the access panel on the nose?"

Konstantin stepped closer. The panel was visible; on the other hand, the metal around it had been warped by the impact, and when he pressed the switch to open it nothing happened. "Yes. But it's stuck."

"Hm."

He sized up the hatch like a fighter pilot--tactically, looking for the simplest, fastest solution to the problem. And then he hit the nosecone with the side of his gloved paw, right next to the switch. The door popped open. "It's not stuck anymore."

"How'd you do that?"

"I... applied fifty joules of instantaneous pressure to the device to induce an elastic response in the opening mechanism."

Shannon was silent for a second or two; he thought she might've closed the radio channel until he heard her cough. "Not bad. There's a standard interconnect on the right side of the panel. Connect the portable field generator to that."

The portable field generator, an unassuming box the size of Kamyshev's head, came with a matching cable. Even wearing gloves, it didn't take much work to follow the instructions. "Done. There's a light blinking on the generator."

"It should blink orange for five or ten seconds, then turn green."

It did not. "What about red?"

***

In main engineering, the news was not being received well. TJ Wallace called up the technical manual on one of his computers. "Maybe he's colorblind?" the otter suggested.

"Maybe, but I'm not sure we're going to be that lucky."

"You're not gonna like the other possibilities any more, dude," Wallace said; Shannon neither disputed the result nor questioned why Spaceman Wallace persisted in calling her 'dude.' "Some kind of error. Have him patch his commlink into the PFG's diagnostic module."

That the link worked meant the generator couldn't have been_completely_ broken. TJ managed to log in; Petty Officer Cooper, their software specialist, looked over the otter's shoulder at the output from the probe.

Mike Cooper had a master's degree in computer science. Unfortunately the panther's university hadn't offered any classes in archaeological programming and the PFG predated him by at least a hundred years. The technical manual listed a number of built-in self-tests, but their output was mystifying.

pmonas1: flags 0155 UNLOCK,LIMIT_6,PRESERVE_STABLE

pmonas2: flags 0153 UNLOCK,LIMIT_6,PRESERVE_TO_OEM

rules.conf version is 16.2.7!

sfm5 identified at /dev/msint0... OK

sfmio identified at /dev/ttys004... OK

sfm daemon responded with: status 7

Mike frowned. "Try power cycling the generator and see if that changes anything?"

It didn't. The lights still blinked, ending up on the wrong color. The built-in self-tests reported the exact same outcome. And TJ said that, while they had other PFGs in storage, they wouldn't be able to get one unpacked, set up, and delivered to Kamyshev before the countdown timer expired.

Shannon left Mike and TJ to figure out a solution while she walked Kamyshev through the other work that would need to be done anyway, like securing the tethers to the probe. This amounted to whistling past the proverbial graveyard: with an unenhanced structural integrity field, pulling on the probe was just going to snap it in half.

When the work was done, an hour and a half later, Mike narrowed the problem down to a connection failure between the PFG and the probe itself, which was supposed to send a signal to the generator and switch it on. For some reason, the signal wasn't arriving.

According to the technical manual, the error code meant:the remote host reported a connection failure. The panther could pretty well feel his black fur starting to turn grey. "How can it report a connection failure?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like imagine I sent you a message and you responded with, 'sorry, I can't get messages.' Obviously you_can_; you just did. Something else is going wrong."

TJ Wallace agreed, of course, but he didn't know what 'something else' might've been. "We need to figure it out, though, like... like, I looked at the protocol. When the PFG configures itself, there's all kinds of data we can't really emulate..."

***

Captain Ford checked out the canopy window to make sure the tethers were still in place. Five hundred meters of high-strength cable, made up of millions of nanotubes--an incredible feat of engineering, as far as rope was concerned.Enough to hang yourself with, as the saying went.

There were ten minutes left on the timer. He tried the radio. "Hey, Bubbles."

"Yo, boss."

"Are they... done?"

"Beats me. I think they've run into some trouble."

Jack called up the figures he'd been given before launching the Type 7. He only needed to drag the probe outside the_Dark Horse_'s shield bubble. That wasn't very far; the difficult part was getting it free in the first place. He guessed it would take thirty seconds of thrust to do the trick. Less power, and he wouldn't overcome the strength of the hull plating. More, and he'd rip the wings off his scout ship.

They still had_some_ leeway, then. But they were running out.

"You know, here's a thought."

"What's that, boss?"

"They're counting on me tugging this damn thing until the time's up, right? Like I'm betting y'all are thinking: 'oh, sixty seconds left, that's sixty seconds to get it free of the ship.' But, ya know... where do they figure_I'll_ be at that time?"

"Enjoying the fireworks?"

"Hmph."

***

"Let's do a hard reset. Wipe everything."

"You think that'll help?"

"I think we're out of choices, Teej."

TJ was a self-taught genius when it came to old, unsophisticated hardware, and for his part Mike thought that he knew enough of programming to consider himself an expert in modern Star Patrol software.

But the field generator sat in an uncomfortable middle ground, neither archaic and simple enough for TJ's expertise nor in line with any of Mike's formal training. They only had intuition between them.

Spaceman Wallace respected Mike well enough--and they were close to being out of time. He sent the commands to reset the generator.

Shannon Hazelton paced in the background, checking the rest of the_Dark Horse_'s systems. "Cutting it close," the raccoon said darkly. "What are the odds this'll work, you two?"

Data reset in progress, the screen said. 0% complete. 2%. 5%. "Good?" TJ wasn't sure if it mattered.

Shannon shook her head. "Well, I'm trusting you." But not completely: she had those sections of the ship exposed to vacuum, the rest of the damage control bots stood by to be activated, and Junya Sakata was programming them with the most likely consequences of an explosion in the launch tube.

The data-reset counter ticked up to 10%, then blazed through the remaining 90 in the blink of an eye.Starting up... launching the first-time user experience wizard.

"The what?" Mike asked.

Welcome to your Integrated Digital Limited M650 portable multipurpose energy modulating and enhancement device. Let's get started! I wasn't able to connect to a time server. Why don't you go ahead and tell me the current date and time?

Mike didn't like the PFG's newfound smarmy tone. He liked what he saw next even less. "Wait. Why does it think we're in 1970? Did they even_have_ computers in 1970?"

"The battery ran out when it was in storage and we just powered it on," TJ said, and realized the implication aloud: "the clock must be fucked or something."

"Which is why it wasn't connecting to the probe." Mike groaned, and set the date according to the time on his communicator--four minutes before their destruction. He chose not to think about that aspect of things.

Thanks! To finish configuring the M650, please enter your details below to create a user account.

Birthdate is a required field.

Planet of residence is a required field.

Three minutes left.

Are you sure you want to leave your password blank? This is a security risk.

Reconfirm you don't want a password!

Alright! Thanks for setting up your user account, a a. Just a few more seconds, and you'll be ready to start using your new Integrated Digital Limited M650. I see you've connected a Toran Space Systems SMRA-H rocket. Let me just configure that... all done!

The SMRA-H has reported 16 system failures that might result in a negative user experience. Please correct these failures before starting your M650. If you choose to continue, Integrated Digital Limited cannot be held responsible for any damage and the warranty will be voided!

"IDL went out of business in 2750," TJ pointed out. "I think we're safe."

Let's go through a brief introduction of the--

"Kamyshev," the snow leopard called in on the radio. "You said the light was supposed to be green, right? Well, it's green."

Over the M650's protests, Mike Cooper skipped the tutorial and tried resending the signal to the probe. "Get ready..."

***

That was Konstantin's signal to get clear of the probe. Half a kilometer away, Jack's Type 7 fired up its thrusters, and the probe tethers went completely taut. The armor plating of the star cruiser bulged under the strain, twisting and starting to give way.

Thirty seconds went by and it gave up completely, bending along the gash cut into it by the damage-control robot. And the probe, along with a good chunk of hull, went hurtling off into space dragged by the main thrusters of a Type 7 scout ship.

Konstantin watched the last numbers ticking down in his helmet. Right on schedule, the probe disappeared in a blinding flash as its fuel went up.

The Type 7 disappeared, too. "Uh, Charger One, this is the_Dark Horse_. Come in, Charger One." Speaking was Mitch Alexander, the sensors operator; the Abyssinian sounded a little nervous.

She only grew more so as the seconds ticked by with no sign from the Riverjack--which had, after all, been extremely close to the probe's self-destruction.

"Bridge to Commander Kamyshev. Do you have any sign of Captain Ford, sir?"

The snow leopard looked at the empty space where the explosion had been. His sensors weren't picking anything up. Empty space, debris, and a lot of interference. "Negative, bridge. I'm headed inside."

"Wait, say again--you can't see anything, but you're coming back?"

"Not worried," he replied. Besides which, he couldn't do anything from inside an EVA suit. Jack could handle himself.

And he wasn't surprised when, most of the way to the reentry hatch, his suit's proximity alarm went off. Konstantin turned around; the Type 7 was floating behind him, upside-down, drifting forward steadied on little pulses of its RCS jets.

"Captain?"

"Hey, Bubbles. My electronics are bent." He waved from inside the cockpit, where most of the lights had gone dim. Jack was speaking over the short-range radio, not the transmitters in his scout ship. "Comms ain't working."

"Neither's your IFF," Konstantin pointed out. "Damage from the explosion?"

"That or the tether snapping. Fuck if I know. I'm flying manually." He paused, waiting for Kamyshev to congratulate him for managing the Riverjack's navigation and maneuvering without assistance. "Oh, c'mon..."

"You know I love you, captain. Need help getting back in? They're worried about ya."

"'They'?"

Konstantin flipped the opaque shield on his helmet up, so Jack could see the mirth in his eyes. "Well,I wasn't."

"Not even a little?"

"You wouldn't go somewhere you were gonna explode without me, boss. C'mon, let's get ya docked."

***

First Officer's log, stardate 66798.3

_Our science officer's intuition--and Sabel's help--paid off, and we've managed to free ourselves with plenty of time to spare. Sure enough, there was a second entrance to the cave system. All it took was a bit of walking. _

We've also gained some valuable insights into the material of the cave, which Dr. Schatz says may be useful in dating the artifacts at the site. He doesn't think the original inhabitants of this settlement ventured as far inside as we did... we might have been the first eyes ever to fall on those walls. Quite the experience. Fortunately we are all in good health, and eager to continue work.

Personal addendum:

I find that if I add 'proverbial,' as in 'killing two proverbial birds with one stone,' Sabel doesn't seem as confused. Consider it progress.

On the strictly archaeological front, 'progress' didn't last long. The team had been back at their camp for under an hour when Dave's transmitter lit up. The message was encrypted as a Star Patrol signal, and there weren't many sources for those. "Lieutenant Commander Bradley," he answered.

"This is the_Dark Horse_. We're entering orbit now. Commander May requests an update on your status."

"We've had a bit of an adventure," Dave said. "But we're all in good shape, and we're learning a lot down here. What about you? Did you finish the testing early?"

Madison's voice replaced Spaceman Alexander on the commlink. "We got bored of testing them. What do you say you finish up and head back to the ship?"

Sabel Thorsen pointed out the scarring as their shuttle approached: a hole had been blown in the hull near the starboard torpedo tubes. Bradley sighed and shook his head.Leave them alone for two days and see what happens?

"What do you think, Sabel?" the retriever prompted.

The spitz was more than capable of multitasking; he put his scanners to work, flying the shuttle into its docking pattern more or less on instinct. "It is not battle damage. The hull outer plating is deflected in such a way as to suggest it was pulled off from the outside... but I'm not sure why. Or how, for that matter."

Having no experience with anyone outside the_Dark Horse_ and its crew, Sabel had no reason to believe Commander May was any more or less mercurial than an ordinary starship captain. He did not, therefore, share Dave's belief that she required continued chaperoning.

But he did share the retriever's curiosity. And he knew who could be trusted to provide an answer. When they'd finished docking, he checked the crew schedule; Leon was off work and, therefore, probably in his cabin. The shepherd didn't get many visitors: he was surprised, if pleasantly so, to see the spitz. "Oh--welcome back! How was the mission? I hear there was a cave-in?"

"A mild one, yes. The away mission was intriguing--I believe that would be the best way to describe it. I am more interested in what transpired here."

"You mean with the, uh. With the explosion?"

"Indeed. What happened?"

Leon tried to think of an honest way to summarize the debacle. "Uh. We had a slight weapons malfunction, but, ah. Everything's perfectly alright now."

"Substantial damage to the outer hull suggests you're downplaying the severity of the incident."

"I'm not the one who almost got buried in a landslide."

Strictly considering equivalent threat levels, Sabel didn't see the relevance. "It would have been entirely survivable. My armor is rated for much more severe conditions than that."

"You and your armor," Leon muttered. "Sometimes I worry about you."

"Obviously, I feel the same way." They were kindred spirits aboard the_Dark Horse_, and although he didn't have a good preprogrammed explanation for the way he felt about the German Shepherd, Sabel could be reasonably sure that he wanted the other dog in one piece.

Obviously, though, was the word Leon got hung up on. He thought: how the hell long have we been serving together now? And what would happen if the next encounter didn't have such fortunate outcomes? He wouldn't have been able to forgive himself.

And so he decided to take action.

Leon sought and found his paw, feeling Sabel's thick, strong fingers intertwining with his own. The spitz didn't pull away, giving Leon a gratifying moment to wonder why he'd ever doubted himself. "I'm glad you're back," he said.

Sabel had been hard at work educating himself on the customs of his crewmates. The_Dark Horse_ had a well-stocked library; there were plenty of reference materials around. It meant that the ruddy dog knew what was on Leon's mind. And he knew what was happening when the shepherd pressed against him, and their muzzles drifted close.

He knew that it was supposed to be pleasurable, but not_why_, and when Leon kissed him his tactical programming momentarily short-circuited. There was just enough biology left to take over.

Leon gasped in surprise when Sabel leaned into the kiss, his lips a warm, gratifying pressure. And he dropped the spitz's paw, wrapping both his arms around the dog, who got the idea a second later and did the same.

He'd been engineered and programmed as a warrior, and his designers never told him what to expect. The heat of Leon's mouth caught him off-guard; so did the taste of the other dog's tongue, spearing forward and into his muzzle.

But beyond the neurochemicals firing, beyond the simple analysis of the moment, he was caught off-guard by how much he_wanted_ it. His growl was involuntary, a rare slip from a dog who wasn't given to those.

Leon growled back.Finally--finally something had worked out; the spitz in his arms felt exactly like he'd thought it would. He's so warm_, so damned handsome... does he even know how handsome he is?_ Sabel didn't, of course, but all the same he understood from the way Leon's paws ran giddily through the coarse, thick fur over his stocky frame.

And one of those paws kept going, sliding around Sabel's thigh and coming back up between his legs. He went tense as a soft, teasing warmth groped him. His creators taught him about hygiene, about the fundamentals of anatomy--nothing about what it would actually feel like to have the shepherd's paw cupping his crotch.

And nothing about the throbbing shock of anticipatory pleasure that ran through him, followed by a spreading warmth in his nerves as the dog's fingers stroked his sheath. It thickened, the flesh inside stiffening and swelling... and Leon kept going.

He kept going because the shepherd, too, was operating outside the bounds of his programming. He'd been thinking about Sabel since the spitz first woke up from cryosleep, practically. Now that the moment had arrived, now that he could taste the inside of Sabel's mouth and feel the warrior's arousal grow between his fingers, it was all fuzzy.

Leon pulled away from the kiss, panting. He slid to his knees, confronting himself with the jutting, twitching length of the spitz's erection. Nothing about_that_ was tactical. He looked like an ordinary dog, had the thick, heady scent of an ordinary dog. Clear precum wetted the tip of his cock like an ordinary dog.

The shepherd flicked his tongue out, and Sabel tasted like an ordinary dog, too. Later Sabel would process the other dog's pleased moan.Later. Right then, he let the liquid, silky ribbon of pleasure roll down his shaft and take hold at the base of his mind.

He wouldn't have been a good soldier if simple sensory overload was enough to distract him. He kept control of his faculties--but his enhanced mind was_gloriously_ aware of the way Leon's velvety tongue slipped and lapped playfully along every inch of bare canine prick.

And he was aware of the groan that escaped him when the tactical officer narrowed right in on his target of choice, suckling the tip and drawing Sabel deeper into his muzzle. His tongue worked in a wet, rippling dance, bathing Sabel's cock in slippery heat that fetched another groan from the spitz. And a third, when Leon started to work in earnest.

The fourth and fifth groans fell on the shepherd's increasingly deaf ears. He had them pinned: he was focused only on stuffing his muzzle with Sabel's length, letting its heat glide over his tongue and push against the roof of his mouth.

Everything about it was familiar and delightful and_gratifying_. Sabel throbbed, thin precum pulsing onto the shepherd's waiting tongue. His breath became shallower; his hips began to tremble and hitch. Oh, fuck, that knot. Leon felt a thrill run through him, and the shepherd's tail wagged. Later.

For now he bobbed his head quickly, sucking Sabel's cock for every obliging spurt of pre, every ragged and panting gasp, every restrained thrust the spitz took against the other man's lips.

The end would be a warm, quivering release of tension--the spitz knew that, even if his programmers inconveniently failed to explain it. But he could feel the pressure rising,knew that it was demanding an outlet. Leon's muzzle felt exquisite, coaxing fresh waves of pleasure on every stroke.

It was surging through the spitz, each crest a little further up like an incoming tide.Close. Whatever it was, it was close--and then there was another touch; the shepherd's paw squeezed around his knot.

Sabel was aware only that he_had_ a knot, and that it had a biological function in reproduction. His mind was full of other things, trivia about the velocity of a Pictor antipersonnel missile and the tensile strength of standard-issue body armor and--Leon squeezed again.

The spitz_bucked_, choking a muffled snarl back as that raw, primal ecstasy bubbled up and broke free. It was like nothing he'd ever planned for, ever imagined, just a rush of pleasure clenching at him, tightening his muscles. Racing up his cock, buried in Leon's mouth with the knot bumping at his lips...

Leon caught the snarl, and a heavy jolt that ran through Sabel's length. And then it jumped, and thick, liquid warmth jetted strongly against the roof of his mouth. The shepherd's ears came up. He tugged back, catching the next spurt on his tongue.

He swallowed quickly, sucking greedily on the spitz's flexing shaft as his load pumped into Leon's muzzle. He could feel every stage of the man's peak: when he locked up, braced against the pleasure slamming into him, and when he gasped and thrust back into the shepherd's warm, wet mouth as his seed spilled free, and when orgasm ebbed enough to leave his cock oversensitive, twitching to the soothing licks Leon visited on it.

The German Shepherd finally let the other man slip free, looking up at the stunned spitz with a grin and licking his muzzle clean while Sabel recovered. And when he had recovered enough of his breath he stood again, surprised at how shaky his legs were.

"You've been--desiring this for--for some time," Sabel managed.

"Maybe. Yes. Yes, fine, I have. There's an old saying that--"

For once Sabel Thorsen was no longer interested in hearing those. The kiss was deep, and eager, if unpracticed. That was fine--another chance to learn those curious Terran customs the crew were so enamored of.

Besides which, it seemed to be a lot of fun.