FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Jak's Wild

A story commission by DoggyStyle57, for Bigchris369 Written February 2014

CH 1 :

He awoke in pain, though that pain was fading rapidly.

He remembered looking up at a rectangular, OD green parachute above him, and a cloudless blue sky that was tinged with green. His arms, clad in some sort of dark green camouflage uniform, reached above his head, and his strong, brown-furred hands grabbed control loops and pulled the cords this way and that, to guide the parafoil's descent. Then he was looking down to a green grass field below, at a neatly painted target on the grass, in the middle of a military base surrounded by a forest of broad-leafed trees. He had landed perfectly, his booted feet exactly touching the small cross in the center of the target, as a small group of furs in a similar uniform - mostly wolves and bears - approached him, applauding.

Too bad that wasn't a memory from today.

This landing certainly had not been the least bit perfect. He felt like somebody had kicked his sorry ass out of the aircraft _without_a parachute, and he had slammed into the ground with nothing to break his fall but branches, thorn bushes, and mud.

He was sprawled on his back, and his back was cold and wet. He was laying on a very uneven surface. Broken branches? Mud? He opened his eyes, and saw a hazy, ochre-colored patch of sky. He couldn't tell if it was a fairly uniform layer of dusty clouds, or if the sky really was that color. Broken branches framed the sky above him, attached to tall, unfamiliar looking trees.

Hell! He really _had_fallen to the ground through the trees!

Around him was a dense tropical jungle, and heavy undergrowth. Nothing that looked remotely familiar. He stretched an arm up, reaching towards the sky. But the arm that came into view was not at all like the arms he had seen in the memory. It was a strong, muscular arm, yes. But it was covered with dark blue scales. A thorn-covered vine was wrapped around his forearm, and he was bleeding from numerous small cuts and gashes. The arm was Reptilian. Not fur covered? But he was... What? He... he couldn't remember! With a shock he realized he couldn't remember anything at all, other than that one skydiving jump! Not his name, or where he was from, what he looked like, or even what he had eaten last!

"Damn! I _really_must have landed hard! Rattled my brains a good one!" he said loudly. As his deep, guttural voice shattered the silence, he heard a frantic flapping and scurrying as several bird-like creatures and who knew what else flapped or scuttled away from him. Heck, the sound had startled him almost as much as it had the local wildlife. Well, at least he could remember how to talk! Not that there was anyone nearby to talk to. And at least some smaller critters out there were afraid of him! But he hoped nothing bigger was lurking out there, and thought he sounded like prey. He reminded himself not to make too much noise. He didn't know who, or what, might be out there.

He rolled quickly to his feet. Thorny vines and broken branches entangled him, but thankfully none of the broken branches had impaled him anywhere. He disentangled himself and took stock of his situation.

He was damned near naked, but didn't seem to be too badly cut up. His belly scales were a blue-green color. He had muscular digitigrade legs, with feet that terminated in three large, vicious-looking claws. Those big feet and long claws could never have been crammed into the compact boots from the skydiving memory! His only clothing was a pair of black short pants, with an elasticized waist. He had a tail, which was thrust through a hole that had apparently been hastily ripped in the cloth of those shorts to accommodate his tail. Really, it was not much if a tail, compared the rest of him. It barely reached to his knees. More blue-green scales formed a thin line down the dorsal ridge of his tail, with short, pointed lines radiating out from the spine. Everything else he could see of himself was a solid blue, and scaly. He ran a hand over his scalp. Smooth as an egg. No hair or fur there. How tall was he? He had no way to guess. The plants were weird enough to give him no sense of scale. But if his deep voice was anything to go by, he was no pipsqueak. He took a quick peek inside the front of the shorts, and was somewhat pleased at the size of what he saw, but he muttered, "Hell, even that's blue!"

He looked himself over more carefully. He could see a single large digit tattooed in black on his right shoulder - the number three. It was almost as high as his palm was wide. Fat lot of help that was! The shorts had pockets, but the only thing in them was a small red device, not much bigger than his thumb, with a single button on the side, next to a hexagonal cluster of seven small holes in the plastic case. He shrugged, and pushed the button, and almost dropped it when a rather loud and frightened-sounding male voice came from the little box.

"Jack, I don't have much time. They want to destroy you. I have tried to hide you from them, but the only place I could send you is very dangerous. You have one thing that you must do. Survive! However you can, at any cost. If you can survive long enough, I will try to get you out of there. Trust no one! I managed to make sure they don't have a very good physical description of you, and the others don't know your name. Your name is Jack! But it is spelled 'J - A - K', with only three letters. No letter C. Remember that! But if anyone asks, you tell _them_it is spelled 'J - A - C - K', or give them some other name entirely. When I come for you, or send someone to help you, you will know we are the ones you can trust because only we will know how to really spell your name." The recording was interrupted by three gunshots, unintelligible shouting, and several other loud noises in the background, culminating in a roaring sound that got louder very fast, and then... silence. Then the device made a fizzling, static sound and suddenly became very hot to the touch. Jak cursed and dropped it, and watched it melt on the muddy ground.

"Well, isn't that_comforting? Almost everyone wants to kill me? And the only gods damned thing you can tell me is that my name is Jak?" he said to himself. "Dammit! Knowing _why they want to kill me would have been more useful then my damned name!" he shook his head sadly. "So I am Jak. Eh? Why not? I am JAK! But why don't I remember anything?"

A distant rumble drew his attention skyward again. The clouds were getting darker, and he could tell that rain was not far off. He would want to have shelter before the rain got too heavy. Without thinking much about it, he started to look for fallen branches, vines, large leaves; and for something sharp that he might be able to cut things with, or at least a big rock to use as a hammer; and for anything else that he might be able to use to make a shelter, or to eat as food. But he found fairly little that he could use without tools or a way to make fire. He picked a direction at random, away from the lightning flashes he could dimly make out through the thick trees.

Several hours later, if his sense of time was at all accurate, he heard something large moving recklessly through the undergrowth ahead of him. It was another reptilian creature that looked roughly similar to himself, but it had a two digit number tattooed on his shoulder. And the other was completely naked, definitely male, and almost twice his weight. It froze, opened its mouth, and scented the air with a long, forked tongue. Then it snapped it head around and glared at Jak!

As soon as it saw him, the reptilian creature snarled and savagely attacked Jak like a feral animal, trying to bite with its sharp triangular teeth, and to grapple with its arms and gut him with its foot claws. For a moment, as the bestial parody of himself caught Jak in a crushing bear hug and tried to tear his throat out with its teeth, Jak panicked. But suddenly a new memory surfaced, of a brawl in a crowded room. Jak slammed his forehead into the nose of his attacker. The creature released him and Jak gouged at its eyes with both of his thumbs, then he grabbed its wrist, spinning under its arm to lock its elbow, and slammed his fist against the locked joint with all his strength, breaking the arm in two places. Without stopping to think about what he was doing, Jak snapped a front kick with his foot claws to his opponent's exposed groin, then a side-kick to the knee, breaking the leg. As the creature doubled over, he grabbed its head, twisted around, dropped to the ground, and broke its neck.

He stood over the corpse, listening to the silence that had descended as every small creature nearby went to ground or fled in terror. Nothing else was moving. "Well, I may not be the biggest one here, but so far, I'm the baddest! One down, and only a whole planet left to go?" he said quietly.

He was sore, but had come out of the fight without a scratch. In fact, as he looked at his arms in amazement, the scratches and cuts he had received from the presumed fall were no longer there either! His smooth, scaly skin was unmarked. Thinking back on the fight, he could recall the fight from his memories that had overlaid the real one - the fight where he had used those unarmed combat moves before, and just as effectively. But in those memories, his fur had been red, with black paws!

He wondered if he was insane. Maybe that was why 'they' wanted him dead?

He had no intention of dying.

===

It began to rain, and he kept moving. Luck was with him, finally. He found a cluster of several abandoned buildings. He kicked open a locked door and took shelter in one, just as a monsoon rain started. Soon he couldn't see more than an arm's length past the open doorway through the dense rain, and the thunder was almost a continuous rumble, deafening in volume. The roof leaked, and half the windows were shattered, but at least he was out of the worst of the storm. And if the height of the door frame and counters was anything to go on, he was as tall, or possibly a bit taller, than the people this place had been built for. That was comforting. It meant he wouldn't be at a disadvantage from being smaller than most of what he encountered. He hoped.

He searched the buildings and found a box containing several jars, beakers and bowls. He set them out under roof leaks, to collect rainwater. But there was nothing to eat, and precious little he could use as a tool. Whoever had lived here had taken almost anything of value that wasn't nailed down.

He did manage to find several large, blade-like shards of broken window glass, which might serve as the blade for a crude knife. Scavenging some tough plastic and a canvas-like fabric that he ripped from the seat of a broken chair, he made a makeshift handle to hold a foot long triangle of glass, to use as a knife. He went to sleep clutching this makeshift weapon, with his back in a corner.

===

In the morning, the storm had passed. He drank some of his collected water, and set out in search of food.

Not far from the building, he came across the bloated and half-eaten corpse of an anthro wolf, many days dead, and brutally killed. From the way its throat had been torn out, it looked like the work of the creature Jak had killed yesterday. But unlike the reptilian creature, this dog had been wearing clothes. The clothing itself was too bloody and shredded to be of any real use. But Jak was able to salvage a small backpack with an internal water bladder and drinking tube, a belt, and a sharp knife with a sheath. Jak looked at the insignia on the shredded uniform the dog had been wearing, but it meant nothing to him. For a moment he considered if he was hungry enough to eat the corpse. He somehow knew that he could, even though the meat was starting to rot. But he wasn't quite that desperate yet. Besides, his instincts said he if he couldn't get cooked food, would prefer a fresh kill, still warm and bleeding.

===

On his first day exploring the area, Jak spent the morning tracking a large six-legged animal that would have been big enough for him to ride like a horse, if it wasn't so vicious that it would rather die trying to kill Jak before he could tame it. Jak wasn't quite ready to make his presence known to the best yet. He was stalking it patiently, to learn its habits, and hopefully its weaknesses, before crafting either a halter and reins to capture it, or a weapon to slay it with so he could eat it for food. He had already watched once as it attacked and devoured another animal that was as large as it was. It was a formidable creature, which seemed to fear no other animals.

But after trotting rapidly down one trail, the beast suddenly slowed its pace and edged very cautiously around the margins of an open clearing that it came to, as if it feared to cross the sunlit patch of ground. The only thing that grew in the clearing was a single plant, which littered the ground with large flat brown leaves and thick vines. Thick, blood-red vines converged at a central root cluster, right at the center of the clearing, while the flat brown leaves that covered much of the ground were attached to thinner brown creeper vines which also emanated from that central point. Each of the red vines was as thick as Jak's wrist, and had sharp thorns and blood red flesh.

The direction of the wind shifted. The beast turned its head as it caught Jak's scent, and it reflexively moved away from the reptilian stranger, several steps closer the center of the clearing. Then it screamed and fell to its side, as the thick red vines whipped upward and ensnared its body. The brown leaves had acted like some sort of trigger when stepped on, like a pressure sensitive mat. The plant was apparently some sort of animate constrictor, with a numbing neurotoxin that seeped from the surface of the vines. It paralyzed the beast in seconds, and then strangled it. Jak watched in fascination for nearly an hour as the vines slowly dragged the carcass to the center, wrapped it until it could hardly be seen, and then sank into the flesh of the creature, eating through its meat with a foul-smelling acid as it absorbed nutrients from its prey.

Two days later, Jak checked the area again, and not even bones of the beast were there. The killer vine was awaiting new prey. Only once since then had Jak been careless enough to get close to one of those vines. A single, far-straying vine had whipped around one of his legs. But he managed to gnaw through the vine with his teeth before it could drag him closer, or get any other vines in reach of him. Its sap numbed his mouth for an hour, but the toxins that had completely paralyzed the six legged beast had done no more than numb his ankle. Still, Jak had no wish to get close to one of those plants again.

Jak continued to forage for food, and found a total if five of those killer vines within an hour's walk of his shelter. More than half the living creatures in this jungle seemed to think he looked tasty, and would attack on sight. He fought and killed at least twenty different kinds of predatory creatures, tracked and killed a dozen kinds of smaller animals, but found no other life that seemed able to talk, or that wore clothes. He ate whatever he killed, whether he had tracked it down, or it had tried to kill him. He found he was much stronger than most of the creatures he encountered, and faster and smarter than the few that were stronger than he was.

He ate some plants, and passed over others, knowing somehow that even for him, they would be poison. He made a spear of sturdy wood, and tipped it with plant poisons. After much searching, he found a flinty rock that he could strike with his knife to make sparks, and fire.

==============================

Several light years from where Jak was struggling to survive, a tall reptilian man in a long black trench coat entered a rather run down bar on the edge of the spaceport. He was accompanied by a young, busty tiger girl who kept herself wrapped in a hooded cloak that came to her knees, and which left her legs and feet bare. Her loose hood covered the right half of her face, but that part that was visible was rather cute, with a sparkling blue eye, and bright purple hair. A leash ran from her collar to the man's hand.

A jackal who was serving as the bar's bouncer glanced at the couple, and said, "Looking for a place to bounce yer Pet off the mattress? We got some small makeout rooms in the back. Ten credits an hour, and the bed's got fresh bedding on it. Two drink minimum from the bar."

The reptilian guy handed the jackal a credstick without comment, and took the keycard for the offered room. Then he stopped by the bar and purchased a whole bottle of cheap liquor and two glasses, and he took it with them as they sealed themselves into the tiny back room.

===

The bedding may have been fresh, but the room was barely large enough for the cot-sized bed, and the wastebasket by the back wall was half-full of crumpled tissues and reeked of stale sex. A fold-down shelf on the wall opposite the bed had a box of tissues on it. And the floor was sticky with substances that probably were better off left unidentified. It was the sort of by the hour room that the cheapest of whores used for entertaining their customers. The only thing in its favor was that it was very private. The kind of people that rented these rooms usually didn't want what they did in them to become known to others.

"Sorry to bring you to a place like this, Elita, and for allowing them to think you're my fucktoy," he said, taking the leash off her at once. "But they've been watching all of us at the lab since they found out about the incident, so I couldn't meet you in my home or my office. Both are bugged. I think they even bugged my flyer. They can't prove I was involved, or I wouldn't be alive right now, I'm sure. And as long as they have no proof, I'm much more valuable to them alive than dead."

"Hey, it's all right, doc! I owe you my life, remember?" the tigress said. She shrugged off the cape, revealing a legless and armless pilot's bodysuit, which identified her as an interplanetary shuttle pilot. The skintight outfit, designed for tropical worlds like this one, was designed to protect the body against extreme g-forces by applying compression to the torso area. It clung to her large breasts like it was painted on, and emphasized the large bulge in her crotch which marked her as a hermaphrodite. Both of her arms were cybernetic replacements, attached to the stubs of her upper arms halfway between her shoulders and her elbows. They were graceful and feminine in their design, yet no effort had been made to skin them over with a synthetic fur to make them look like living tissue. Her right eye was also obviously artificial - with a glowing red iris that had no pupil, surrounded by black for the rest of the eye's surface, and framed in a silver metal that had been used to reconstruct her eye socket.

She flexed one metal hand and said, "If it wasn't for you, I'd be blind in one eye and trying to survive with both my arms blown off. The blast that maimed me cauterized my wounds, but with no arms, my family dead, and me stuck in a war zone, the only way I could have survived would have been by selling my body to the mercenaries. That's not something an armless fourteen year old girl would have been likely to survive, for this last four years. You got me out of there and patched me up, and asked for nothing in return - not even to bed me. I can never repay you for that. Whatever you need, I'll do it for you. So, what was this 'incident' that has everyone so riled up, and what can I do for you?"

"I'm a doctor. The corporation that I work for is well known, publicly, for their advanced work in creating cybernetic arms, legs, eyes, and other body parts, and for their ground-breaking work in skill implantation that almost eliminates the need for physical therapy after a patient gets new limbs. By writing skills and memories directly to the brain, a patient can be up and functional as soon as they have healed from their operations, rather than going through years of physical therapy and re-learning how to walk, or how to write, or how to feed and dress themselves. I was proud to become a member of their team, and I've gotten extremely good at cybernetics design and grafting, and at using their mind-writing systems to give new skills to patients," he replied. "For ten years, I was incredibly proud of my work."

"And that's why you were on Harper's World in the middle of a war, and able to save me? You were risking your life to look for people to help? I still can't believe you were able to do all this for me, and that the corporation didn't charge me anything at all for fixing me up," Elita said, smiling.

The Doctor sighed, and said, "I really wish they were such good Samaritans. Or that I was, back then, for that matter. But the truth isn't so pretty. Six years ago - that would be two years before I met you - they transferred me to the labs on this world, where they make what could best be called bio weapons, for anyone with the money to pay for their services or products. They alter existing people or creatures, or they create them from scratch, using biotechnology, cloning, cybernetics, or whatever other methods are necessary. To be fair, most of the _people_that we work on are active duty military with recent war injuries, or civilians like yourself who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and got severely injured, and who volunteered for the procedures. But more and more often recently, some of our 'patients' were not at all willing. Those were people who didn't volunteer, or were non-sentient creatures that were modified or created in the labs. They became berserkers. They got their minds wiped clean and got new skills, memories and entirely new personalities written to their brains, to make them obedient, and in most cases disposable, minions for the military units and private mercenary groups that buy them. A berserker has no will of their own, and if ordered to do so they will dive straight into situations that mean certain death for them, without hesitation. They told us that these unwilling 'conscripts' were all criminals who had been condemned to death, or were mere animals that were needed by the army to do tasks that might otherwise cost the lives of many soldiers. And I believed them, much to my shame. I was on Harper's World delivering our 'products' to the planetary government's army. My cargo was a dozen berserkers, and I was also returning four soldiers who had recovered from their augmentation operations and were fit to return to active duty, and I had been asked to do some 'fine tuning' for a weponized arm that I had grafted onto one of their generals four months earlier. If it hadn't been for that general's demand that I come out and service his arm, I never would have been on that mission. "

"Oh... Oh my!" Elita said, her eyes going wide, and stepping back until her back was flat against the door. "You... you helped make those monsters that tore my town apart? That killed my family? I can't believe that! I don't want to!"

"I didn't _like_working on military projects, but I had tried to tell myself that I wasn't responsible for how the armies and mercenaries used our products. A gun isn't evil, by itself. It can be used to kill, yes. But it can also be used to hunt for food, or to defend the innocent. I tried to rationalize what I was doing by saying that the mindless berserkers that I implanted weapons training and obedience into, and the soldiers that I equipped with weaponized arms and other cybernetics and gave higher skills in combat and in medical arts, could be used to shorten a war and reduce the overall casualties and collateral damage. One Berserker can complete a suicide mission that would take an entire squad of normal soldiers, without risking the lives of all those soldiers. But until I went to Harper's World, I had never seen our products used in the field. I was utterly appalled by the carnage. Unarmed, innocent people literally ripped to pieces by the berserkers. Civilians like yourself maimed or killed by plasma weapons or other advanced military equipment sold by our corporation. When I found you, I couldn't take it anymore. I smuggled you back to the lab and used their resources to repair what they had done to you. Your eye and arms were 'officially' requisitioned for a female soldier who was later killed in action in that war. I thought it was poetic justice - the army that maimed you and killed your family paid the bill for repairing you. I'm sorry that I couldn't confess to you at the time my own guilt in your tragedy. I didn't send that berserker into your town. I might not have even been involved in his mind programming. But I still am guilty of making such atrocities, and of not caring how they were used. I hope you can forgive me."

Elita stared at him, but didn't respond, other than to move a little closer and sit on the bed, watching him warily.

"While I was repairing your body, I also implanted your pilot skills and some weapons training and unarmed combat training, to give you an edge on survival. After I finished with you and got you to a safe place to get your official schooling and training finished, I started investigating my employer, to see just how bad the situation was, and what, if anything, I could do about it. I found out that when I found you, there had been another team from our corporation on Harper's World that was dealing with the rebel forces. We were selling weapons to both sides, in that war. I decided I had to do something to stop them. I couldn't just quit. They would simply hire another person with my skills and go on as if I had never been there. In fact, if I try to quit, it is likely they would try to kill me, to make sure I couldn't later expose what I know of their operations. The labs and worlds that they test their products on are strictly quarantined. They own small planets and several inhabitable moons where they test their products, and where any outside that tries to get too close is eliminated without mercy. There would be no way to confirm any information I might try to make public. They would kill me and probably many of my co-workers and destroy the evidence before any officials could investigate. So the only thing I could do would be to sabotage their operation, and try to destroy them from within."

"And that's what has them all in a tizzy? What did you do? Release a bunch of berserkers in their headquarters offices?" Elita asked. "Well, you've always done right by me, so I guess I can forgive you, and I'll still help you."

"Too much security for launching a massed attack, and they discovered my activities before I was ready to launch my plan. I picked one lab test subject, and altered his physical modifications and skills programming. I was going to use him against the top brass, like a well-trained assassin, but instead I had to release him on one of the test worlds before they could identify which one I had been altering, and destroy him. Jak is nothing like the mindless, muscle bound berserkers that the corporation has been creating for use as shock troops. He's small enough not to attract too much attention, but a lot stronger than almost anyone his size. He's as intelligent as you are, and has just as much free will. I covered my tracks well enough, I hope. Virtually all of the alterations to him were done using other scientist's authorization codes, and the records altered to indicate the changes were being made to a dozen other subjects. When they found out someone was tampering with the training and modification plans, I switched him with a berserker that was scheduled for live field testing. That got him off planet, but left him on a very hostile world, with no weapons or supplies - not even any clothes other than a pair of shorts. I need you to find him, and get him to a safer world. To someplace, anyplace, where they can't trace him back to the labs here."

He handed her a set of transit documents, and said, "Those papers will get you clearance to take a company shuttle through the jump gate, and to another world in the same star system, as a delivery run to obtain medical supplies for the lab, and to use the gate again to leave the system. He's on the planet two orbits closer to the star, and at the moment, their orbits have both planets on the same side of the star, so transit times between them should be less than a day, at max burn. But the inner planet is strictly quarantined - a corporate-owned world. If they catch you trying to land there without the current transponder codes, they will shoot you down without hesitation. And I don't have those codes. Your best bet will be to shadow a warship or a large freighter as it passes close to that inner world, and hope they don't detect you."

"Wouldn't be my first smuggling run, Doc," the tigress said confidently. "I've been living an interesting life myself the last two years. But how am I supposed to find one naked guy on a whole planet, when I don't even know what he looks like?"

"He's a Komodo dragon/crocodile hybrid. Blue scales, green on the underbelly. He's six feet tall, 175 pounds, and muscular. Has the number three tattooed on his right shoulder," the Doctor said. "He should have been dropped on a relatively small island. The coordinates of the six drop points that the berserkers were supposed to be released at are in those documents, disguised as the coordinates for six medical supply depots on the outer world that you're supposed to be going to. If you find him, make sure you tell him you know his name is Jak, and that it's spelled with three letters - 'J - A - K'. If he managed to hear the message I left for him, he will know you are a friend from telling him that."

"And what if he doesn't believe me?" she asked.

"Ask him to think about how to make a sword. Then tell him that in the memory he just recalled, he had grey fur on his arms. That should convince him," he replied. "There's no record here of him getting that memory lesson. It's one I slipped in personally."

"I'll do my best, Doc. But what do I do after I find him? I can't bring him back here, right?" Elita asked.

"Run. Go as far away as you can," the doctor replied. "There is a monastery on Sirius 5, with a large black basalt Buddha. If I can escape with my life, I will leave a message with the monks there for how to find me. They will be told only to give it to a tigress matching your description, who says she thought their famous Buddha was made of white marble. Check there every year or two. If you hear nothing for ten years, assume I am dead, or that it is impossible for me to join you."

"Is it really that bad, doc?" Elita said. "You make it should like you don't think you're going to make it."

"The corporation values me, but if they find out I tried to destroy them with one of their own creations, they won't hesitate to have me killed," the Doctor said simply. "That I failed won't matter to them."

"Harsh. Is there anything else I should know about this Jak guy?" she asked.

"Well... part of the experimentation done on him involved testosterone boosting, to multiply his strength. It worked in that regard, but it also had... interesting side effects," the Doctor said with a grin. "He isn't a hermaphrodite, but if you ever try to mate with him, you'll find out he is even more unique than you are, Elita."

"I'm still a virgin, doc, but I'll keep that in mind. If he still wants anything to do with me after he finds out I'm a chick with a dick, maybe I'll find out just how unique he is," she replied.

===

When they left the private room, Elita's hair was mussed up, and they both reeked of alcohol. The staff at the bar didn't guess that the couple had merely poured some of the booze on their clothing, and poured the rest down the floor drain in the rented room. The jackal just grinned as the old corporate scientist left with his young fucktoy.

==============================

Back on the testing world...

Ten days after awakening on this hostile world, Jak sat in his shelter. He was considering if it would be worth the effort to break apart an already broken metal chair and try to beat the legs into some sort of metal spear points, to make a better weapon. One thing he had quickly learned was that is the jungle got quiet, something dangerous was prowling the area. As he reached for the chair, things outside suddenly got extremely quiet.

He paused and listened. At first there was nothing, and then he made out the thin screeching sound of some sort of aircraft approaching. He stepped to the window and saw two flyers streaking overhead. They circled the area and appeared to be coming in for a landing near where Jak was.

"Well, well," Jak said to himself. "Looks like whoever built this place is coming back. Time for me to make myself scarce."

===

Jak grabbed the few things he had found that were useful and got out of the buildings and into the jungle near them, doing his best to eliminate any signs of his having been there as he left. An hour later he got a glimpse of two military-style four-person grav skimmers moving through the area, and heard gunshots. The sound brought to mind images of the weapons and how they are used, but again showed the memories as if they had happened to someone else. The hands, arms and leg in these images had red and white fur, not scales. He hid when the skimmers passed too close to him, and was unable to get a very good look at the people in them. But he saw enough to count four uniformed figures in each skimmer, one of them manning a heavy gun of some sort mounted to the vehicle. The uniform was the same kind that the wolf that he had found dead in the jungle had been wearing, and the soldiers were all wolves.

A day later he saw the results of their patrol. He found two of the mindless, tattooed reptile men dead. Their bodies were riddled with bullet holes and burns from energy weapons, and their heads had been cut from their bodies. The heads were nowhere to be seen.

He watched the wolf soldier's camp and stayed out of sight. They lacked discipline, and acted like mercenaries. Every day they sent out patrols on the ground, and sent their ships into the sky. They ignored the buildings Jak had been living in, and stayed close to their ships, sleeping inside them, in the cargo bays that their skimmers had occupied.

Four days later he saw two aircraft fighting each other. He was almost directly under the combat, and the two aircraft had been low enough for him to clearly see the shape of their wings and fuselage - close enough that he could also see the pilot of the ship that lost the aerial dogfight eject just before their ship exploded. He started running in the direction of the descending parachute. Weather the pilot was a friend or an enemy didn't matter. What mattered was that another disjointed memory told him that the ship's ejection seat would have useful weapons and survival gear attached to it, and he wanted that gear!

As he loped through the underbrush he heard the other ship coming back. Just before the ejection seat reached the tree canopy, the surviving ship strafed the descending parachute with a plasma beam, setting it on fire. While the beam weapon missed the ejection seat, it caused the pilot's last thirty feet of descent to be much faster and much less controlled than it should have been. Jak cursed and ran faster, hoping the seat wouldn't be destroyed on impact.

===

Jak found the ejection seat easily enough. It had come down in a heavily tree covered area, and the burned and shredded parachute and its lines had snagged in the branches, slowing the descent at the last minute. It still looked like it had been quite a rough landing. The seat itself had reached the ground, but was a covered by a number of broken branches.

He approached cautiously, keeping a wary eye on the skies, in case that ship decided to make one more pass and be sure they killed the pilot, but the ship didn't return.

He pulled the broken branches out of the way, revealing that the ejection seat was enclosed in an armored pod with its own canopy and a sealed hatch behind the seat, where it had been joined to its ship. It was intact, and had managed to land right side up despite losing the 'chute. A brief flash of memory told him this pod had to have come from a military-style S1 one-man scout ship, which matched with the shape of the ship he had seen shot down. That class of ship was used by the military, or by mercenary companies, to do recon missions in hostile territory. In military service, the ship's single hardpoint typically mounted a pop-up turret with one beam weapon for offense and two launchers for chaff or decoy flares as a defense. If owned by a civilian, it was legally supposed to be equipped only with defensive armament like the chaff and flare launchers, and would be used primarily as a fast interplanetary courier. Smugglers liked them, however, because they were very fast, and it was easy to re-arm the hardpoint illegally with offensive missiles or beam weapons. Ships like the one this pod came from had no interstellar drive of their own, and could only travel between star systems that had established pairs of jump gates. Aside from the pilot, they only had room for two passengers or a very small amount of cargo, and only the pilot had the luxury of an ejection seat.

Jak shook his head and wondered where he had learned all that information about military spacecraft. Had he been a pilot for a ship like the one this pod had come from? He didn't think so, because he had no memory of how to fly one. Yet he could see the ship in his mind as clearly as if he had been aboard one several times.

Through the canopy he could see that the loss of the chute had triggered the pod's internal airbags. All he could see of the pilot was their head, enclosed in a flight helmet. From the neck down, the orange air bags covered them completely. Their visor was mirrored, and their face covered by a breathing mask, but they were not moving or reacting to Jak's presence. Yet there was no sign of blood or of damage to the pod beyond scratches and dents that could have been made by the fall through the trees, so odds were good the pilot survived, and was only unconscious.

Jak opened the hatch and cautiously reached around the seat and touched the pilot's neck. They still had a pulse, and were breathing slowly, but they didn't react to being touched. He opened the pilot's survival kit that was mounted behind the seat, and took out a backpack that should be loaded with survival gear, a gun belt and a med kit. He strapped the gun onto his waist and checked to make sure it was loaded and had a round in the chamber, and that the belt had extra magazines of ammo. Then he put on the survival backpack and hooked med kit to the back of his belt, before trying to get the pilot out of the pod.

He used his knife to puncture and deflate the air bags, and to cut the straps on the pilot's 5-point harness. Then he carried the tigress out and away from the seat. Her arms were obviously artificial, but the rest of what he could see of her was very nicely put together. She was definitely female, with big tits, a fine ass, and beautiful legs. He tossed her over his shoulder and with one hand on her butt and his other arm wrapped around her shapely legs, he found himself hoping she would turn out to be friendly... very friendly. But there was no time to examine her further. He could hear the whine of one of those four-man surface vehicles approaching, and he wasn't inclined to share his 'salvage' with whoever it was. He ran off into the forest, with the unconscious pilot over his shoulder.

===

The last thing Elita remembered was failing to evade the corporate mercenaries as she tried to run their blockade and land, and getting shot down. She had ejected safely, but then her descending escape pod had been attacked again, and she had crashed to the ground.

She wasn't in the pod any more. She opened her eyes cautiously, and saw she was in a lean-to shelter, crudely constructed of leaves and branches and propped up against the trunk of a very large tree. She was facing the tree trunk, naked and lying on her side, with her arms tightly bound behind her at the elbows and wrists, and her legs tied at the knees and ankles. A rope went from her ankles to a noose around her neck, keeping her body arched backwards in a very helpless position. Her body was sore, but she didn't think she had been abused while she was unconscious. What she felt was more like she had been in a minor car wreck - something you could walk away from with only minor bruises.

"You're awake. Good," said a deep male voice behind her.

Elita squirmed around until she managed to roll over, and looked at the large reptilian male that was her captor. He was only wearing a gun belt and short pants, and matched the description of the man she had been sent to find. He even had the number three on his shoulder, as she had been told to expect. He was holding a gun and had it aimed at her.

"Did you enjoy taking off my clothes and trussing me up like this?" she asked him.

"It had its good points. And a few surprises," Jak admitted, glancing down at her crotch. "But mostly I had to make sure you didn't have any weapons hidden on you, and to check you for injuries. You can have your clothing back when, and if, I decide it is safe to untie you. You got shot down, and whoever did it tried to make sure you didn't survive, even after you ejected. Why?"

"I'm trespassing. This is a quarantined world, and I wasn't able to bluff my way past the mercenary patrols that enforce that quarantine. The corporation that owns this world doesn't want anyone to know what they do here, and they are quite willing to kill anyone who tries to find out," she said simply.

"Then why risk it?" Jak asked. "What was worth you risking your life to come here?"

The tigress grinned and replied, "Well, you may not believe it, but I was sent here to find you."

"Why? I don't know you. Why would you be sent here to find me?" he replied cautiously. "Can you even tell me my name?"

"Your name is Jak," she said.

"Wrong. It's Bill," Jak said, watching for her reaction.

The tigress shook her head and insisted, "No, I'm quite sure it's Jak, and that it is only spelled with three letters. J-A-K. My name is Elita, by the way. I was sent by the guy that left you here. He wants me to take you somewhere safer," she said, "which will be more than a little bit difficult, with my ship gone and with me tied up like this.'

"I'd like to believe you. I really would," Jak said. "But I have no idea why I am here, and ever since I woke up on this damned world, every living thing I've encountered that's bigger than my foot has been trying to kill me, and I don't even know why. Can you explain that to me?"

"The corporation that owns this planet makes military stuff, and they sell it to anyone with the money to pay for it. They make cybernetics with illegal weapon modifications, bio-genetically enhanced mercenaries and shock troops, and other stuff that shouldn't be sold to just anyone. You were a 'test subject' in one of their labs. A scientist that worked there got fed up with what the corp was doing, and wanted to use you to destroy them from the inside. He changed what they fed into your mind, and he hoped he could convince you to turn against the corporation. Have you seen a berzerker yet? Looks a lot like you, with a tattooed number on one shoulder. But they would be bigger than you, and nearly mindless, like an animal. Vicious killers. I gather they can understand orders, as long as it's simple stuff like 'go there and kill everyone'."

"Yeah, I've already killed one of those, when it attacked me," Jak said. "You mean to tell me that it used to have a mind like a person?"

"I guess so. Doc didn't give me a lot of details. But they feed information into their brains, and I guess some of what they do makes them mindlessly obedient," Elita said. "The guy that sent me, he prevented them from turning _you_into one of those mindless killers. I guess they had already done stuff to make you stronger, and they gave you memories that would help you to fight better. But then someone noticed you were being tampered with, and he had to hide you here to prevent them from destroying you. He didn't have any real choice when he sent you here. The ship coming here to drop off other test subjects for 'evaluation' was the only one leaving the labs in time."

"Hummm. That would explain a lot, I suppose," Jak said. "But I'm still not convinced."

"Okay, there's one more thing I can tell you. Something only the guy that screwed around with your memories would know, other than you. Think about how to make a sword. Do that, and I'll tell you something you should see when you think about that skill," she said.

"But I don't know how to make a sword! I don't even know where I lived before I woke up here!" Jak said in frustration.

"Just _try_to think about the process of making a sword. The Doctor said it was a skill that he gave you - something that wasn't scheduled to be in your training," Elita insisted. "If you try to figure out how to do it, that should trigger a memory of making one."

Jak didn't believe her, but he tried anyway. And sure enough, just as when he needed to know how to fight bare-handed, a memory came to him of making a sword. Every last detail was clear and understandable. "Okay, you're right. I do have a memory of how to do that stuff. So now what?"

"In that memory, you didn't have scaly arms. Your arms and hands had grey fur," Elita said. "The only person that would know that is the Doctor. He didn't make any record of giving you that skill. Now do you believe me?"

Jak holstered his gun and untied her, then gave her back her clothing. "I guess that will do. And I think I can get us a ship, if you can fly the damned thing. I know where some of the mercenaries are camped, and I've seen small spacecraft landing and leaving from there, dropping off supplies and moving mercs around. I can't fly a ship, and even if I could, I don't know where I am, so I haven't bothered to try to steal one. But if we can get one of their ships, do you think you could get us off this rock without them blowing us to bits?"

"Yeah, I think I could," Elita said.

===

The next morning, Jak and Elita hid in the underbrush and watched the mercenary's base camp. They had one small spacecraft on the ground near the camp, and they could see six mercenaries eating together near the ship.

"I've counted a total of eight mercenaries in that camp, all heavily armed," Jak said. "They arrived here four days ago, with two of those ships. They usually only have one ship on the ground, two people guarding that ship and two in the ship in the air. The other four hunt for what you called 'berserkers' in the area. The best time to try to steal a ship will be while there are only two of them in camp, and the others are away. If we're lucky, they should go hunting after they eat."

"One of those ships is what shot me down," Elita said quietly. "They're pretty similar to what I was flying, but a little bigger and better armed. They have two hardpoints, each with a beam weapon and two missile racks. They probably can carry six people, max, and then only if four of them ride in the ground skimmer that docks in the cargo bay. There are eight 'test sites' like this one on this world, and each of them might have a patrol team like this one. Or these may be all there are, and they move from site to site. I only encountered one ship coming up from the planet when I came here from one of the other planets in this system. That was enough. They spotted me as soon as I got close to the planet. They may have some sort of sensor satellites watching for any ships that don't have the right transponder codes."

As Jak and Elita watched, two of the mercenaries went into the ship, and it soon opened its rear cargo hatch, and a four-person ground skimmer emerged, driven by one of them. Three of the mercs got in the skimmer with its driver and went out on patrol.

"Good. If they follow the same pattern as the last four days, those four mercs won't be back for at least six hours, and more likely eight," Jak said quietly. "I've watched them on those patrols. The only things they seek to kill, other than whatever attacks them first, are the berserkers. But when they kill one of those, they chop off the heads and bring just the heads back. Any ideas why?"

"Maybe they get a bounty for each one they can prove they killed?" Elita suggested. "I agree that this will be our best chance. There's just one of them on the ground by the campfire, and one inside the ship. We need to get the guy in the ship out and onto the ground, though. If we attack the one we can see, the one in the ship can light up the ship's weapons and we wouldn't stand a chance."

"Well, we can't just walk up to them and ask them to come out and play," Jak said facetiously.

"Maybe we can... Stay here and cover me. But don't shoot until they are both out in the open. Trust me, I've dealt with scum like this, and I know how they react to... some things," Elita growled. Before Jak could reply, the tigress silently moved through the underbrush until she could come into the clearing form a position well away from Jak.

Jak held the hand gun that was the only weapon they had between them, and wondered how the girl expected to pull this off.

He got his answer a few minutes later, when Elita came running into the clearing as if something huge and carnivorous was chasing her, and with the top of her body suit pulled down almost to her hips and arranged in a way that made it look like her minimal clothes had been halfway ripped from her body. The shoved-down cloth was also bunched up in a way that made the bulge in her crotch a lot less obvious.

The mercenary by the campfire stared at the bare-breasted tigress as she burst out of the foliage. His gaze never made it down to her waist, let alone any lower.

"Oh! Thank the Maker! Please! You have to get me off of this world! I'll do anything, just don't leave me here! Everything on this world is trying to eat me!" she cried. "P-please? You do like girls, don't you? I'll do anything for you, and for all your friends. Just don't let those monsters out there eat me!"

The wolf mercenary tore his eyes away from her jiggling breasts to scan the undergrowth, moving his energy rifle to a ready position, leveled at the tree line, and not at her. "Is anything chasing you right now?" he asked, trying to listen for movement in the brush.

Elita panted heavily, taking in big breaths of air that did amazing things for her heaving chest, as she said, "I think... I think I outran it. Please say you'll protect me? I'm unarmed and alone, and it's horrid out there!"

"What the hell are you doing here?" the mercenary asked. His gaze returned to her chest and he licked his muzzle appreciatively. "This world's off limits to strangers."

"I didn't know that! I swear I didn't!" Elita replied, in a terrified voice. "Some guy at the starport said he would pay me a lot of money to do a survey for him here. All I had to do was to fly over a few islands here that he logged into my ship's computer, and return with the sensor data. He said he was looking for mineral deposits, and that his ship had been damaged. I took the job, but as soon as I got here, somebody blew me out of the sky without even giving me a warning!"

"Yeah? Well, this whole world is private property, babe," The wolf said. "We're supposed ta' kill anyone who comes here without permission from the company that owns this whole fucking world. But I suppose if ya' give us a little R and R, we might keep ya around to entertain us, instead." He clicked the mike on his radio and said, "Hey Frank? The pilot of that last ship we shot down survived, and she's a looker. Want to join me for a little fun with her?"

There was a mumbled reply, and the mercenary said, "Naw, she's damned near naked. She's unarmed." He laughed at his own unintentional joke, and added, "Looks like somebody chopped her up once - took her arms and an eye - but she's been patched up. Whazzat? Naw, her arms don't look like mil tech. Low cost replacements, I'd guess. They didn't even bother to cover the metal with fur. But her cuddly bits all look soft, warm and inviting."

Jak held his breath until the ship's hatch opened and a second wolf came out. He kept a rifle trained on the strange tigress, and said, "Give me one good reason why we shouldn't follow our orders and kill you, bitch!"

"Oh please! You must be lonely here? I'll be your sex slave! Anything! Just don't let those monsters out there eat me, please?" Elita pleaded. She kept both hands in plain sight, her breasts jiggling as she danced anxiously in place.

"Give Eddie here a good sucking off, bitch, and then do me," he ordered. "Then maybe we'll think about keeping you as our fuck toy. But I'm gonna keep you covered, so no funny stuff!"

Elita obediently knelt in front of Eddie, positioning herself so Frank was behind Eddie and a little to her left, where he could see she was complying, but not see her very well. She fumbled with the soldier's belt until he shouldered his own rifle and used both hands to unfasten his pants and expose his sheath. He jacked off for a moment, and then pointed his red shaft at her mouth. "Suck it, fuck toy," he ordered.

In the brush, Jak carefully aimed his pistol at Frank. If he could kill that one with one shot, he might be able to get a shot off at the second one before he could react.

But Jak didn't get a chance to shoot the wolf. A blindingly white plasma beam ripped out of Eddie's lower back and lanced right through Frank's head. Both wolves toppled to the ground. Frank was unquestionably dead, with half his head blown away, and Eddie had a hole through his gut that had almost certainly severed his spine just above the hips.

"What the fuck?" Jak shouted, as he broke cover and ran to Elita, who was still kneeling on the ground. His eyes searched the edges of the clearing behind the tigress franticly. "Who fired that shot?" he asked.

"Oh, I did," Elita said, calmly getting up and dusting herself off, and then shrugging back into her body suit, covering her breasts.

"With what?" Jak asked, "I could see both of their rifles, and neither of them had a sidearm. And you didn't have a weapon either."

"That's what _they_thought, too," she said, as Eddie groaned and rolled over, clutching his gut. The tigress calmly pointed her right arm at the soldier, and a small hatch opened in the upper side of her forearm. The barrel of a plasma pistol popped up from that concealed bay, and she blasted the wounded wolf right through the head with a searing energy beam. "That's how. I told you, the corporation that owns this world makes very illegal weaponized cybernetic limbs and stuff. The doctor that patched me up stole these arms from their labs. Now help me drag their bodies onto the shuttle. If we don't leave the bodies here to be found, it may take them longer to realize that they didn't take off in the shuttle on their own."

===

Several hours later, Elita and Jak were almost back to the jump gate in the stolen ship. They had jettisoned the bodies into space shortly after they left the atmosphere, and the satellites surrounding the corporate world accepted their ship's transponders and didn't raise an alarm as they left the quarantined world.

"Were you really going to have sex with them, if you couldn't kill them first?" Jak asked, after Elita had obtained permission to use the jump gate, paying for the passage with the credit account of the corporation that owned the shuttle. Their flight plan indicated she was transporting a cargo of medical supplies.

"Only as a last resort," Elita said. "I watched soldiers like those rape and abuse women from my village, when my world was at war. I knew the sort of actions that would please them. I'm very glad I didn't have to do it though. I'm still a virgin, and I've never touched a cock yet."

"I'll make it a point to remember never to try to rape you, then," Jak said warily, as they accelerated through the jump gate. The last thought he had before the jump was that he hadn't even asked where they were headed.