FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Jak's Wild

A story commission by DoggyStyle57, for Bigchris369

Written August 2016

CH 4 :

A small star freighter appeared out of jump in the vast darkness of space, at one of the less-used jump points near a completely unremarkable star system in the Frontier worlds. It quickly moved away from the jump point, just far enough to be safe if any other ships came into the star system at those coordinates, and then decelerated to become nearly motionless as it drifted slowly away from the jump point in the direction of the lone inhabited planet in the star system. Once its engines cut out, it floated like a lifeless hulk, tumbling slowly in space and completely unlit, save for a dim blue glow from the two cockpit viewports.

From outward appearances, had there been anyone nearby to see its arrival, the ship would appear to have started its service as a freight hauler for one of the major interstellar cargo services, over 50 years ago. A third or so of the hull was still the same dusty brown that one of those companies still painted all their ships, and a close visual examination would locate a mismatched place on one of the brown hull panel areas where the easily recognizable shape of the original corporate logo had been sloppily painted over with not quite the same shade of brown paint. The rest of the ship's surface had apparently been cheaply repaired, many, many times. Most of the bow panels were white, as was the front third or so of the engine nacelles. The upper right side over the cockpit was black, and so were several random panels on the rest of the hull. The initial impression that you got was merely that the ship's hull had been repeatedly been repaired with whatever random hull panels could be found at a scrapyard and adapted to fit, without regard to the aesthetics of repainting it to a decent color scheme.

Yet a closer look revealed that there had been some carefully planned repainting done. The two viewports for the cockpit had black painting around the edges, which vaguely resembled the shape of feline eyes. There was also a curving line on the rear cargo hatch where the colors changed, and a few other painted details that were easy to miss at first. But what really gave the ship's owner's intent away were the pink feline nose and six pink whiskers that had been painted on the bow, below the cockpit. It took a bit of imagination to see it, but the ship had been painted to resemble a calico cat! The odd color pattern also made it rather hard to make out the exact shape or configuration of the unlit starship, against the blackness of space, and with only the light of the distant star of this system to illuminate the side of its hull that was mostly on the far side from the planet that it was drifting toward.

===

In the cockpit of the ship sat a naked and big breasted tiger girl with bright purple hair that fell to the nape of her neck in back, slightly longer on both sides, with bangs. She looked much too young to be a starship pilot, surely no more then eighteen. Yet life had clearly not been kind to her. 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. Her living eye was a bright sparkling blue, and despite the metal replacements that had been grafted to her body, she was actually rather cute. Without any clothing to hide her groin, it was also clear that she was a hermaphrodite. She was studying the ship's long range sensors quite carefully.

In the co-pilot's chair beside her sat a shirtless and muscular reptilian male - a Komodo dragon/crocodile hybrid of indeterminate age, but clearly an adult of his species. He had blue scales, shading to green on his belly, and no hair at all adorning his smooth skull. The number three was tattooed on his right shoulder, and he was wearing a simple pair of pants, with a hole in back for his relatively short tail. While his younger female companion seemed intensely busy with her tasks, the reptilian guy seemed quite content to not touch any of the controls, and to relax comfortably in his chair and allow her to do all the work.

Two other people were in the cockpit, strapped into jump seats which folded down from the rear bulkhead, close behind the first two. One was a male, dark-furred Siberian husky dog, in his early twenties. He had mostly black fur, with grey paws and facial fur, and was wearing dark blue jeans, a white tank top, and a black hoodie with a leather jacket over it. Both the jacket and the hoodie had rather loose sleeves, and there was some sort of metal cuff around his right wrist. He was holding the hand of the mixed-breed domestic feline girl beside him. She also appeared to be in her early 20's, her eyes were pale green, and her shoulder length hair was cream colored and in a layered shag cut, with rough bangs. She also was wearing a black hoodie, with black pants and shoes, and black leather gloves covering her hands. They both looked apprehensive.

"So far, so good," the tiger girl said, after several minutes of silence. "No ship transponders but ours anywhere in-system, and nothing I can see on long range scanners, other than a few navigation satellites that are right where they should be. I'll do a scan of the planet's surface before we land, but I think it's safe to go back and pick up our unexpected passengers' possessions."

"As long as those mercenaries didn't leave more of their men on that planet to secure it," said the reptilian guy casually. "If they did, you realize we have little choice now but to locate and kill all of the remaining mercenaries. We can't risk any of them reporting back to their HQ that we were here, but eluded their attempt to capture them. And they definitely won't take it well that you tricked one of their ships into jumping into the heart of a star, Elita."

"Well, how else was I supposed to fight back against an armed mercenary cruiser with my unarmed cargo ship? We have to hope that they fell for that trick, Jak," the tiger girl replied. "They were in a pretty big hurry to follow us through the jump, and if we were lucky, they didn't take the time to double-check the jump course data that I programmed into their little tracking gadget after we removed it from my hull. It flawlessly led them to us through five jumps, so they should trust its data, and not suspect that I manually coded the data in the last data module that it left for them, or that I omitted the offset from the star's core. I'll look for high-level energy signatures, since most of this world is pretty low-tech. But even then, a ground camp might not have anything big enough for me to tell apart from some farmer's power generator. Even if they have military vehicles, I wouldn't be able to detect them unless they were powered up and pretty darned close."

"Well,any powered vehicle should be suspect," the husky commented. "There are only two vehicles in our village that aren't animal powered, and one of them is down for repairs. The other one is most likely halfway between here and the nearest settlement, transporting supplies between the two towns."

"Thanks Felrasa," Elita said. "So, assuming that we don't end up in a firefight as soon as we land, how much effort do you two think it will take to collect your stuff so we can get out of here?"

"We don't have much in our home that would matter," the mixed breed feline girl replied. "It's almost all pre-packed in a pair of large suitcases. One trip is all we'll need."

"I agree with Nekonya," the husky added. "But there's another reason for returning here. I'm certain that Ace finished preparing your forged identity papers before those mercenaries caught him and used our meet-up as a trap to catch you and Jak. If we can determine where he hid them, and if the mercenaries or local authorities didn't find them first, you can still have the new identities that you paid him to make for you."

"That would certainly be nice," Elita agreed. "But I thought you said that you didn't know where Ace lived, even though you both worked for him?"

"We don't," Felrasa replied. "But they killed him when he tried to warn us of the trap that they caught us in. They probably weren't subtle about doing it. No more so than they were in fighting us on the ground, when we tried to escape. With luck, the local authorities will have started to poke around, and that may give us a clue where to look for Ace's hideout."

"But we can't stay for too long," Nekonya said. "Remember, while the rest of you were knocked out, I overheard them stating that their commander was coming to question us personally. If he isn't there already, he won't be long in coming."

"True. I haven't forgotten about that," Elita said. "But it would take several weeks for any recorded messages to their HQ to leave this world by courier ship and reach their commander, and several weeks more for him to come here. I saw no sign of any installations large enough to be a mercenary base anywhere along the five jump path that got us here. And so far, the only ship I have detected in this system was the one that I tricked into jumping into a star. Unless their commander is waiting in the void for his lackey's to catch us, or unless he was already on this world, but at some other location on the planet and now stranded with no fast way to get to your village, he's most likely at least three jumps from here, in the nearest populated star system. Everyone stand down and get some rest. It will take two days for us to get from the jump point to the planet's surface, and I plan to take an additional day to stop at the system's gas giant first and refuel."

===

Three days later, Elita guided her ship to a landing in a small clearing not far from the village that Felrasa and Nekonya had lived in, off the road and to the east of the town.

"Are you sure you don't want us to come with you?" Jak asked, as the couple prepared to leave the ship.

"We're known to the locals. It won't alarm anyone if we're seen going in and out of our own home," Felrasa said. "You, on the other hand, are strangers here. They may well associate you with the dead bodies that you left in our wake when we escaped from the mercenaries. Elita gave us a pair of ship's communicators. We'll let you know if we need help."

===

The husky and his android mate kept to the edges of the forest that surrounded the town, just to be safe. As they passed the central part of the small settlement, they could see that one building on a side-road, just off the main road through town, had recently burned almost completely to the ground. It was marked off as a crime scene with yellow ribbons. There was no sign of any police presence though. The village only had one sheriff and his deputy, and doubtless they couldn't waste the manpower to guard a burned out wreck of a building.

"Do you think that was where Ace was?" Nekonya asked quietly.

"Likely enough. If I remember correctly, he used that building once or twice when I first met him. It had a basement entrance, accessed via the side alley. But he's avoided using it in the last six months. If he had access to the basement of that building, but no longer _appears_to use it, that would be a good place to start looking for where he actually slept and lived." Felrasa replied.

They got to their tiny cabin without being seen. It was an even more modest little hovel than the two-room cabin they had been caught in when the mercenaries had trapped them. Just a one-room shack, with a raised and covered porch on three sides, and only one door, on the side away from the woods and closest to the road through town. The fourth wall, facing the woods, had two small windows and the field stone chimney of their fireplace.

"Wait here," Felrasa said. He slipped up to the back windows and peeked in. Satisfied that no one was in the open room, he climbed over the porch railing on the most shaded side of the shack, and cautiously worked his way to the front door, checking the windows as he went.

All seemed relatively normal inside, from what he could tell through the windows, but he could also tell some things had been moved since they left their home. A chair at the kitchen table had been re-positioned, and the large locked suitcase at the foot of their bed had been moved as well, though from this distance it looked like it remained locked. When he got to the door, he found it was tied shut with a police crime scene ribbon, and sealed with the sheriff's mark on a wax seal. A handcrafted note from the sheriff was tacked to the door, addressed to Felrasa and Nekonya, as well as to any neighbors that might read it. It stated that Felrassa and Nekonya had been reported as missing, and while they were not wanted for any crimes, the sheriff was 'concerned about their disappearance', and that if they returned, he did want to talk to them about the recent 'disturbances' in the village. He left the seal and note untouched, and returned to his mate. He was glad now that he had established a pattern of his going hunting on irregular intervals, to provide meat for his own table as well as to sell to others in town. His alibi for where they had been could be that he and Nekonya had been hunting again.

"Looks like we're 'missing persons', and 'persons of interest' in Ace's murder and probably our own kidnapping," he told her. "No great surprise there. Sheriff Hawkins wants to know where we have been, if we return, and have a 'polite chat' with us. No indication of a reward or any charges against us, so hopefully they only fear we might have been victims of foul play. But they also might consider us suspects in Ace's murder or the death of those mercs that tried to kidnap us. I am certain they did a quick search of our home, and the door has been sealed by the sheriff. Fortunately, that isn't our only way to get in and out." Together they went a little deeper into the woods, and he lifted up a sawed-off stump that acted as a concealed trap door. It smoothly and silently rotated out of the way on well-greased hinges, revealing a ladder into the 'escape tunnel' that they had completed three months earlier.

Since the day they moved into the shack, Felrassa had been working on having at least one safe means of getting in and out of the one room shack unseen, for when they needed to do work for Ace and have it appear they were still at home. At first he had simply cut a trap door in the shack's wooden floor, so he could get in and out via the crawl space under the floor and porch. There was a loose panel of lattice on one of the back edges of the porch decking that he could move out of the way, to slip off into the woods without being seen by anyone watching the front door. That panel was now well overgrown with ivy, and had been unused for months. His more elaborate plan had been to carefully and secretly dig a tunnel into the woods from the space under the trap door, shoving the dug up dirt into the corners of the crawlspace and under the floor boards of the patio, until the only open space remaining under the house was a path to the old lattice exit. The tunnel was roofed with corrugated metal and had a floor and sides of old wooden planks, and was high enough to run through while crouching, though only wide enough to run single file. It had taken months to build, but as far as he knew, no one other than he and his mate knew it existed.

They slipped down into the tunnel, closed the hatch behind them, and he lit a flashlight. Three feet into the tunnel he paused, to check a place where he had sprinkled flour over the floor boards. It had no sign of having been disturbed. Satisfied, they crept further down the tunnel, and stopped again to check a similar flour patch four feet from the shack's trap door. That too was undisturbed. At the base of the ladder was a locked, fireproof suitcase identical to the one in the shack, where he kept his weapons and most of their valuables, as well as any contraband items he didn't want to be caught holding. Both suitcases were made of very lightweight metal alloys, and designed to take a beating while being used as luggage on an interstellar trip. They also weren't very big - just long enough, wide enough and deep enough to carry perhaps four carbine-sized rifles and their ammunition, or one person's belongings for a trip.

The electronic lock was still fastened. He opened the suitcase. The lower half contained their valuables and a couple changes of clothing for each of them, while the top half contained his carbine-length hunting air rifle and a matching air pistol, with their interchangeable ammunition and compressed air capsules, and several kinds of knives, all neatly cradled in shaped foam hollows and covered with a mesh lid to hold them in place. He removed the small, air-powered handgun, and made sure it was loaded and had a full air charge. Satisfied that it was, he tucked it into the back of his pants, under his jacket and hoodie. It was only designed for self defense against unarmored opponents at fairly close range, but it was an almost silent weapon, and quite lethal at close range. The carbine, on the other hand, was a hunting weapon, using four air cartridges at once to propel the reusable, razor-edged, dart-like ammunition at speeds fast enough to be lethal at 100 yards or more. The rifle also had a lever that could be used to pump air back into the cartridges, to refill them, or to increase air pressure temporarily for a longer range shot. Both were mostly made of plastics, and wouldn't be detected by most non-visual security scanners. He pocketed two more compressed air capsules and five more clips of ammunition, made sure the rest of the things in the suitcase were undisturbed, and climbed the ladder into the shack.

"Wait there," he said to his mate. "I'll pass the other suitcase and a few other things down to you."

"Don't forget our picture on the fireplace mantle," Nekonya said. "I think that's the only thing I really care about that isn't in our suitcases."

The hatch inside the shack was concealed under one of the flagstones of the fireplace's wide hearth. The opening was wide enough for Nekonya or Felrasa to slither through without difficulty, but would be a tight fit for a larger person or for anyone in body armor or carrying a two-handed weapon. He left it open and went to check the other suitcase.

The suitcase by the bed had definitely been moved, but the electronic lock remained sealed. As far as he knew, Felrasa was the only person in town who could open a lock of this complexity without knowing the combination and without leaving any marks of it having been tampered with. Of course, the mercenaries might have someone of equal skill in their crew, but he doubted either they or the sheriff would have the subtlety to open the trunk and leave it looking like they hadn't done so. More than likely, the sheriff had entered their home to look for clues regarding their disappearance, but since they weren't wanted for criminal acts and might merely be out on a hunting trip, he had respected their privacy and done no damage to their property.

He took the picture his mate had mentioned, as well as a sealed pouch of meat jerky that they had made after their last hunting trip, and put them inside the second suitcase. After talking one last look around, he passed the locked suitcase down to his mate, and said, "Yeah, everything else we can replace later. Should I leave a note for Sheriff Hawkins, saying we aren't coming back? He's sure to notice that the suitcase has vanished, though I bet it will tweak his whiskers when he sees we managed to take it without disturbing his seal on the door."

"Don't risk it," Nekonya said. "The sheriff has been a decent enough guy, as have our neighbors. But the mercenaries might get their hands on it instead. Let's just get out of here."

Felrassa joined her, closed the hatch in the shack, and bolted it from below. Then they left he way they had came. Once they were in the woods, they pulled retractable shoulder straps out of the suitcases and strapped them on their backs like backpacks, and headed back to Elita's ship.

===

"So, that's what we saw," Felrasa concluded, after filling in Elita and Jak on the results of their brief expedition. "As far as I could tell, no one saw us, coming or going. Based on the sheriff's note on our door, we've been missed, but they may think we were the victims of foul play. I didn't see any wanted posters about you two at all. It's probably safe to go back to that burned out building and see if that's where Ace had your new identity documents. If the sheriff or the mercs haven't already found them, they're more than likely locked in a fireproof container like our suitcases. Ace was as cautious as we are, and would have kept most of what he cared about pre-packed for a quick get-away, and protected against a fire or other accident. They may still be buried in the rubble, if that was his hidden home."

"What about your neighbors? What if they see us?" Jak asked.

"We'll say we were off hunting, just got back, and have no idea what happened while we were gone. We could tell the sheriff you two hired us as guides for a hunting trip," Felrasa offered. "That would give all of us a reason to be carrying rifles, and for both of you to be with us."

"Plausible, I suppose. But the only rifles we have are military energy rifles that we took from the mercenaries.," Jak said. "Not something a civilian would be likely to go hunting with, to put food on their table."

"There are some very large and fierce feral animals out in those woods. They usually stay clear of fires and lit areas, but occasionally we get big game hunters visiting here from off-world, seeking a thrill by hunting those beasts," Felrasa replied. "If you were after the beast the locals just call a 'Damnedthing', an energy rifle would be a wise choice. My carbine wouldn't scratch its armored hide. Of course, the locals would think you were more than a little bit crazy to try it, but some big game hunters would love the challenge, and wouldn't care about the risk level."

===

As cover for their intended story, Felrasa and Jak went deeper into the woods and bagged two large feral animals, and they brought the carcasses into town to sell to one of the innkeepers. While Felrasa and the innkeeper negotiated the price for the purchase of the animals' meat, the husky casually asked about the burned out building down the street. The innkeeper was only too happy to recount the only really memorable event that had happened in the sleepy town in the last several months. The whole town had talked of little else since it happened. He told them that the building had unexpectedly caught fire, and that a badly burned headless, legless and as-yet unidentified body had been found in the basement, clearly dead by violence. The bodies of two strangers in paramilitary gear were found in a home elsewhere in the town later that same night, nearly torn apart by some sort of vicious attack, with evidence in the home that four people had possibly been held captive there, probably by the dead mercenaries. A few other local people had been found dead in the streets or in their homes. The sheriff rounded up a posse, and a search of the area had found an abandoned campsite to the south of town, with marks where a spaceship had landed and taken off again, and traces where at least one grav sled had settled to the ground, but no suspects to arrest. Two other clearings, to the east and west of town, also showed signs that a spaceship had been there and left again.

"We held a town meeting and counted noses, and you and your girl were the only locals unaccounted for," the innkeeper said. "Glad to see you're both safe and sound, lad. Of course, the Sheriff would like a chat with both of you, to find out if you know anything about that mess." He glanced nervously at Jak, who had remained near the door with a large, military-style energy rifle over his shoulder and the hood of his sweatshirt covering his head and hiding much of his face, and then added quietly. "Between you and me, those paramilitary guys had no business being here, and if 'someone' did them in and set you free, well, I think everyone in town would call that self defense. We don't need their type causing trouble here. You two have been good members of our community. We appreciate the hunting you do and the vegetables she grows and sells at the market days. And we appreciate that whatever... other business... you might do here, you don't usually cause a fuss."

"Well! Sounds like we missed all the excitement!" Felrasa said. "Nekonya and I were deep in the woods with that couple we came in with, as their guides on a big game hunting party. We left the morning you say all that mess happened, and we only now returned. That crazy big guy over there still wants to bag a Damnedthing for a trophy on his wall, so we'll be heading deeper into the outback with him shortly. So, where's old sheriff Hawkins and his deputy to be found, eh? Don't have much we can tell him, but I wouldn't want to disappoint him."

"They're both still trying to find out who was in that campsite to the south," the innkeeper said, handing Felrasa a credstick for the purchase of the carcasses. "Last I heard, the sheriff and his deputy thought there might still be more mercenaries out there, and so they took a posse of a dozen or so of our menfolk and have been trying to pick up their trail. Difficult, because them mercs apparently had one or two grav sleds, and those things don't leave wheel tracks behind. Have to track 'em by the way they disturb the dust and loose debris that they glide over, I guess. I would imagine the sheriff and his crew will be back in a day or so. Thanks for bagging these critters and selling them to me. I can carve some fine steaks out of 'em. If you care to stay for diner, your steaks are on the house."

"We may just do that, thanks," Felrasa lied. "But first we need to get some more supplies for our next hunting trip. See you later."

===

After taking a somewhat indirect route to be sure no one seemed to be watching their movements, Felrasa led the others to the burned out building, on the edge of the business part of town. The sign on the front of the building said it was a tannery, and all the buildings close to it looked to be storage buildings. The walls of the building were still mostly standing, but the roof had caved in, and part of the floor had also caved in to drop the debris in the basement. It didn't look like anything of value above ground level had survived the fire. A bright orange warning tape encircled the building, marking it both as a hazardous area and a police crime scene. But there was no one guarding the area to prevent them from simply ducking under the tape and taking a look inside. From the tracks outside, several curious locals before them had probably done so already.

"It's been a while since Ace used this place to meet with anyone," he said. "The building was the shop of a leather worker, who lived in a cabin down the road. Leather tanning supplies stink something fierce, so all the nearby buildings are warehouses and the like. That all would have worked to Ace's advantage though, as tracking animals or sniffer drones would have a hard time making out an individual's traces near that place, few people would be nearby to see him, and he could come and go via the alley. So it could be that Ace holed up here for his actual base, to broadcast his holographic images to the other meeting places. Most of the locals didn't know he was still living in town. He stayed out of sight once he got set up, and had maybe five or six people, including the two of us, who met people for him and brought him what he needed."

On the alley side of the building, the debris from the fire had been cleared from the basement stairs, which fortunately had been made of metal and were still serviceable. At the base of the stairs was a small, windowless basement room with a desk, similar to the one under another building in the town where Jak had negotiated with Ace's holographic image. The basement level was pretty badly charred and burned, but there could be no mistaking the seared mark of an energy rifle blast on the wall behind the desk, or the splattered traces of blood and tissue from Ace's head that had been carefully marked by the sheriff or his deputy. The body had been removed, but Ace's overturned hoverchair, burned and useless, lay on its side beside the desk, and an exploded energy rifle's remains were scattered around the room. An empty safe was open in one corner, with laser torch holes in the door. It looked like perhaps something had set the rugs in this basement room on fire, and the fire had spread to the rest of the building, mostly climbing upwards.

"_That_safe would have been a decoy," Felrasa said. "Ace never would have left anything of value in a room so easily accessed from outside. He must have tried to sell one or more of the rifles, and the mercenaries found out and confronted him about where he got it. How they found him physically is anyone's guess. But there has to be more here than we're seeing, or than the sheriff found. A hidden room, or maybe a sub-basement level under this one. Search carefully."

===

"Hey! I think I found something!" Jak said, as he worked to shoulder aside a massive floor beam from the level above, which had pinned a storage shelf to the wall under the basement stairs. "This beam shoulda knocked those shelves over sideways when it struck them at that angle. But they're straight as can be. They must be secured to the wall. Maybe they cover a door?"

He pushed harder, and the extremely heavy beam crashed to the floor. Before the dust cleared, Jak grabbed the sides of the shelves and tried to pull them off the wall. Something in the wall snapped, and they pivoted on one side and opened like door. A sloping metal stairway led down to a lower level, and there was a track-like rail where the handrail should be.

"Hah! I was right! Has that chair of his got a gizmo on the side that might clamp to a railing like this one?" he asked.

Felrasa looked at the chair, and nodded. "Yeah, it looks like it does. Makes sense. Maneuvering a hoverchair up that narrow a stairway would be a bitch, but if he clamped it to that rail, the chair could ride the rail like a handicapped stair lift. That has to be what we're looking for. Be careful for booby traps, though. Ace loved to put in all sorts of traps to nail anyone who might come after him.

At the bottom of the stairs, they found proof of Felrasa's cautious statement. The crumpled body of a mercenary lay on the floor in a heap, with a razor-edged crossbow bolt through the throat.

Felrasa lit a small electric lantern, to illuminate the whole room better than their flashlights could. The room itself was a fairly compact bedroom, lined with metal on all sides, and virtually untouched by the fire that had raged above. Quite a good 'safe room' to hole up in, as long as no one found the hidden door to the sub-basement stairs. The far side of the room was a compact galley-style kitchen and cupboards. A toilet and a shower stall was in one corner. A bed was against the right side wall, farthest from the stairs they had just come down. There were three locked suitcases, similar to the ones Felrasa and Nekonya owned, stacked loosely on the bed, a few other pieces of furniture, and a large safe against one wall. The bullet-riddled corpses of two more mercenaries were on the floor in front of that safe. The safe door was barely open, and from the damage on the safe's door, the mercenaries must have burned several holes through the edges of the door with a laser torch, to defeat the lock's bolts. But apparently forcing open the safe had triggered two machine guns to cross-fire the area in front of the safe. Shattered holes in the side of a wardrobe cabinet near the bed and a in the door of a closed storage cupboard under the sink showed where the guns had been concealed, and fired through the thin wooden walls of their hiding places. It looked like the safe-cracker's laser torch had scorched a wild path across the wall and ceiling as he died, had pierced the ceiling, and probably had been what started the building fire on the floor above, by igniting the rugs on the basement level.

Felrasa looked at everything carefully, and said, "I'm guessing they left these three guys to try to break open the real safe right after they killed Ace. Probably Ace had it booby trapped so you had to unlock something else before you could open that safe without triggering the machine guns. The mercs died, and that one guy's death agony caused him to trigger his laser torch, which turned the building above into a funeral pyre for Ace."

"Is there anything in the safe?" Elita asked.

"Lots of stuff, yeah. They never had a chance to loot it. Hand me that carryall bag, and we'll dump all of it into the bag to examine later. Grab those three suitcases, too," Felrasa said, cautiously opening the safe and starting to unload it. "Whew! Jackpot! Ace old boy, you were holding out on us about how profitable your deals were! I don't know how much cash value is on the credsticks in here, but there's a bunch of them, and there's drugs, jewels and precious metals too. And I think this fat envelope is your ID packet! It has "For J & E" written on it!"

===

After they gathered as much as they could carry, they climbed cautiously back to the surface level.

"Let me check first, and make sure we don't have any trouble waiting for us," Jak said. He adjusted the shoulder straps holding one of Ace's suitcases to his back, held his energy rifle at the ready, climbed the last few steps, and went through the remains of the doorway, to look out of the alley entrance at the street in front of the burned out building.

"Stop right there!" a deep male voice shouted. "We don't take kindly to looters here, big fellah. I'm the law here. Set that rifle on the ground, keep your hands where I can see 'em, and walk over here, real slow. You're gonna kneel on the ground in front of me, while I place you under arrest."

Jak slowly and cautiously turned to his right while holding the rifle by the barrel in one hand at arm's length. At the intersection of the main road and the side street Jak had just entered, he saw that a large bear was aiming a hunting rifle at him. The bear was wearing a badge of some sort on his shirt, and what Jak assumed must be a local police uniform. "No need for that gun, officer," Jack said, walking slowly forward, gently setting down the energy rifle at the edge of the main road, standing and and raising his hands again, and then moving very slowly into the middle of the street where the bear was standing, while trying to judge how fast he could close the remaining distance between them with that damned suitcase strapped to his back, and whether or not the deputy's rifle could do enough serious damage to risk taking a bullet or two in the process. "See, I'm unarmed now, and doing just as you asked. Just a misunderstanding. I'm just back from some big game hunting, and collecting some of my own things that were stored in that building." Jak tensed his muscles, and got ready to leap.

"Don't kill him, Jak!" Felrasa shouted as he emerged from the alley, firing his air pistol at the sheriff's deputy. The small pistol made an almost silent coughing sound, and the bear slapped at his neck, twisted in place, and crumpled to the ground, without a word.

"Why? Because you wanted to kill him personally?" Jak asked. "I was only going to try to knock him out, you moron. What did he do to you? Make a pass at your girlfriend?"

"He_isn't_ dead. First round in each clip for my pistol is a tranq dart, for self defense. The rest are lethal," Felrasa said, as he and the others joined Jak on the street beside the fallen officer. "We have enough trouble without being wanted for killing a sheriff's deputy. And besides, Frank is a good man, and just doing his job. But a bear his size will shake off that sleep dart pretty quick, and he's gonna be royally pissed that I popped him. We gotta make a run for it!"

Unfortunately, several people down the main street to the west had heard the shouting and saw the bear fall to the ground. They shouted for others to come, and in what seemed like no time at all, a dozen armed men of several different species, led by the sheriff, were charging down the main street at them from the west end of town, with rifles in hand.

"Awwww crap!" Jak shouted. He turned and ran back to his energy rifle, dropped to one knee beside it, and as soon as he got his hands on it he shouldered the weapon and fired a searing blast in an arc across the street, between his group and the sheriff and his posse. Dead leaves and bark chips that were on the unpaved road burst into flames, and dirt flew up in a blinding cocks-comb as he fired a second curving salvo between them. "What the fuck are you three waiting for? RUN!" he shouted. As the dust cleared, several men in the posse fired inaccurately back at them with air rifles and gunpowder hunting rifles, making dirt fly from the road to either side of them, and shattering an oil lamp that hung above one shop's door.

Fortunately they were in one of the few parts of the town that was dense enough to have more than a single road with one row of buildings on either side. A tavern, several storage buildings, and a dozen or more business storefronts lined this part of the main street, and there were two parallel streets on either side of the main road, with cross streets and alleyways between the buildings that faced the roads, servicing the back doors of the buildings. Felrasa grabbed Nekonya's hand and dragged her out of the line of fire and into an alley on the north side of the road. Jak and Elita ran down a street to the south, and then eastward into a cross-alley to the next street, before trying to continue in a southerly direction and get onto the woods. If they could all get into the woods and head east, perhaps they could elude their pursuers and get back to Elita's ship.

For several tense minutes Jak and Elita played a deadly game of hide and seek with townsfolk and the sheriff, hiding behind trash barrels, breaking into buildings to cut through the block between a street and an alley, and exchanging gunfire while trying at least halfheartedly not to actually kill any of the townsfolk who seemed to quite seriously be trying to kill them.

"One more street to cross, and we'll be in the woods, with decent cover," Jak said, as he checked the charge on his energy rifle. "Damn! Not much charge left! How are you doing?"

Elita shrugged and said, "Better than you. I haven't fired very many shots. I've been too busy trying not to get hit! I should just give this to you when you run dry. You're a lot better shot than I'll ever be."

"What about that beam pistol in your arm?" Jak asked, as he kicked in a door and led her into the last building between them and the woods.

"Saving that for an emergency. I have no way to recharge it until we get back to my ship, and only four shots or so worth of charge in the power pack," she replied. "I'm a pilot, dammit, not a combat specialist!"

Jak's reply was cut off by the deep, thrumming sound of a heavy duty energy cannon being fired. It was much louder than any of the energy rifles that Jak and his companions had stolen from the mercenaries, and they heard screams from several dying townsfolk as the blast shook the walls of the building they were in, and the bakery three doors to the west exploded into a flaming inferno.

"What the fuck? Oh come on now! Really?" Jack growled. Between himself and the woods hovered a mercenary grav sled, with a three man crew. One merc stood at a post-mounted heavy energy weapon, firing almost indiscriminately at buildings and townsfolk, while another sat beside the driver and calmly fired at anyone who moved. "Crap! Nobody in this backwater has a chance against that thing! What are those assholes going to do? Kill the whole town?"

"We can't let them do that. We can't let those bastards win!" Elita shouted, leveling her energy rifle at the grav sled and firing a blast that shattered the window between herself and her target and narrowly missed the driver and rifleman. The guy on the big weapon glanced their way and started to turn his weapon to aim at the source of the beam rifle's fire.

"Okay,now you pissed them off. Happy?" Jak asked, firing a shot of his own that hit the door of the grav sled on the driver's side, but splashed harmlessly off the vehicle's armor. "Run! Back into the alley! We don't have good enough cover to take them head-on from here!"

As if to emphasize his point, the merc with the mounted weapon fired and obliterated the front wall of the shop in a single shot, as well as most of the sales counter and the first row of tables for merchandise. Burning debris flew everywhere as Jak and Elita fled back into the alley.

"Aim for their bodies, or for their weapons," Jak advised. "Even as powerful as these beam rifles are, they're worthless against the armor on that grav sled."

"Yeah, I saw that. The hidden plasma pistol in my arm would be just as ineffective against their vehicle," Elita said, "What do we do? Any advice from that soldier stuff they filled your head with?"

Jak glanced up and down the alley. The nearest side street was in the direction of the burning bakery, and the alley narrowed where the back wall of the bakery consisted largely of a very wide set of brick chimneys for the bakery's ovens. There was a large steel dumpster nearby that they could use for cover, if anything came at them from that side street. In the other direction the alley made a 'T' intersection with another alley, and he couldn't tell for sure where it went. "Yeah, I think I have a plan. Hide behind that dumpster, and when I get back, you shoot your energy rifle right where I do." Before she could reply, he sprinted out of the alley and onto that side street, an turned in the direction of the merc's grav sled.

As soon as the grav sled came into sight, he fired a shot at the mercs, and managed to injure the rifleman in the passenger seat. The grav sled raced toward Jak, and the gunner on the energy cannon blew the corner of the building away, narrowly missing Jak, who retreated as soon as he was sure they had seen him.

He stopped in the mouth of the alley, and fired another shot, which splashed off the vehicle's armor, then he raced back to join Elita.

Soon the grav sled turned to hover at the entrance to the alley, and slowly edged closer, as the driver and gunner sought a target to kill. The third merc had dropped his rifle and was clutching his seared right arm to his chest, doubled over and cursing in pain.

Jak peered between the dumpster and the wall, watching the shadow of the approaching grav sled. "Not yet. Wait for it... NOW!" He stood and fired his energy rifle. But his target wasn't the grav sled. It was the massive brick chimney of the bakery, right beside the mercenaries! The hot brick exploded like a fragmentation grenade, and coals from the lit ovens added to the mayhem. Elita stood and fired, and her shot struck the weakened pile of masonry, bringing hundreds of pounds of brick and burning coals down on the mercenaries' heads, crushing them to death.

"Let's hope that was the last of them," Jak said. "With luck, the others are already safe. Let's go."

===

Felrasa and Nekonya had exchanged fire a few times with locals, but when much louder weapons fire drew the locals away, they had quickly escaped into the woods and made their way to the ship. They were waiting in the brush near the ship when Jak and Elita arrived.

"Heard some pretty heavy firepower going off back there. You two all right?" Felrasa asked.

"Ran into more mercenaries, but we got the better of them," Jak said. "They had a base to the south, right? Let's get airborne and see if we can locate any survivors. We won't be safe unless we get all of them."

===

"I'm getting a homing beacon from over there. Wasn't there before we went into town. Looks like the mercs might have tried to call for reinforcements just before they attacked us. No heat signatures, though. That camp's abandoned," Elita said, as they approached a small clearing near the south side of town in her ship.

"Medical scanner confirms that," Nekonya added. "I've patched my scanner into the ship's scanners, to boost its range, and I'm not detecting any life signs from down there."

"Let's see what they left behind, and get that damned homer shut off," Jak said.

They landed and examined the area. All that was there was a homing beacon transmitter and a datapad. It didn't take them Nekonya very long to hack access to the device.

Three voice-only log files were recorded on the datapad. Nekonya played them for everyone to listen to.

"Mission is a disaster. Leaving this log for HQ in case of total failure, though we will of course try to fulfill our mission at all costs. Have confirmed that the two soldiers who failed to hold the target captives are definitely dead. The commander and his two man squad never returned from the forger's base after trying to recover intel and valuables. Looks like the building burned, maybe with them trapped in it. Have to assume they are dead or captured."

"No word from our ship yet, or from the commander and his squad. It has been several days. We have eluded the local patrols, but still haven't found the escaped targets. Suspect they escaped in the small merchant starship that we had been following, with our ship in pursuit. Jump course data for the course the two ships departed on is attached. Only three of us are left on-world. If we don't hear from our ship in three days, we will eliminate any local witnesses, torch the town, and try to make our way back to base."

"A ship has landed nearby. Same transponder as the target ship. Will lay an ambush and terminate with extreme prejudice. Will eliminate any local witnesses as well."

"Is that it?" Jak asked.

"Yes. The only things on it are the operating system and the voice recorder app, these three messages, and the attachment file with the false jump course data that Elita tricked them with. If there was anything else on it before, it was wiped before these logs were made," Nekonya replied.

"Erase the last message, and leave the datapad here with that homing beacon running," Jak said. "Then let's get the hell off this rock. If the mercs or the local sheriff ever find it with just those two messages, they may believe we all died from a misjump into that star, and that their last men got killed by the townsfolk.

===

Elita piloted her ship on a course away from the planet, and they examined the things they had recovered from Ace's safe as they made their way to the jump point.

Ace had done a truly marvelous job. A note with the ID papers indicated that Ace was worried that the energy rifles had most likely belonged to the "Red Tigers" Mercenary Corps, a powerful and vicious mercenary company, and that if he sold it to the wrong people, it could go very badly for all of them. As a precaution, he had also processed new ID papers for himself, Felrasa and Nekonya, and he had planned to leave this world and seek a new home, just in case. The note said that he was leaving it in his safe with all five sets of identity documents, just in case things went sour before they could leave, and he didn't make it. There was also a second, more formal letter, with enough legal stuff in it to serve as a will, of sorts, making it clear that if he died, Ace wanted to have his possessions given to Felrasa and Nekonya.

Jak's new ID said he was from a neutral world on the edges of the frontier, where saurians of many different types made up nearly a quarter of the population. His appearance would not be very unusual there, and he could be taken for a native. There were enough other species native to that world that Elita, Felrasa and Nekonya could also blend in well there. Ace had found someone that matched Jak's description, but who legally had gone missing a few months earlier. In reality, the missing saurian man had gotten another forger to make a new identity for him, because he did not want to inherit a mansion full of slaves from his grandfather. That saurian guy was the only living heir that the grandfather had. The new ID named Jak as "Dominic Jak Skrall", and the detailed dossier with the papers said that Dominic, who went by his middle name as 'Jak', had attended a military training academy in the Dominion since he was a child, and that no one on his home world had seen him since childhood. He had been sent off-world after his parents had died in a 'pirate raid' that sacked a space cruise liner they had been vacationing on. When he achieved his graduation at age 25, and was expected to return to his grandfather's estate, the other Jak had elected to disappear, because he detested the family practice of keeping slaves, even though it was quite legal on his homeworld.

"Sweet! I'll be some rich dude, with a harem of slave girls? I just have to act reluctant to be a slave owner, eh? I can do that," Jak said with a grin.

Elita looked at the world's name, and brought up some data about it. "Not too far away. I could get us there in six jumps or so, if we have no other trouble along the way. Let's see what he provided for me."

Elita's ID was exactly what she had asked for, and more. She was apparently a registered member of the Merchant's Guild in the same quadrant as Jak's new homeworld, with her dues paid in full for the next five years. Her name remained unchanged, and she was supposedly a war orphan who had been adopted by and apprenticed to the merchant guild, serving an apprenticeship in return for them paying for her cyberware. The papers said that several people had been well-paid to 'remember' her childhood and training in the guild, and her exemplary service, which resulted in her being entrusted with a ship of her own at 16, just two years earlier.

"That's sweet, but holy shit! There's also a new registration ID for my ship in here! How the fuck did that ferret get all the data about my ship? I didn't even tell him I had one here!" she said, holding up the datachip that would allow her to reprogram a new 'legal' identity and history for her space ship. The new transponder code for her ship had it registered on a world three short Jumps from Jak's new homeworld, which was supposed to be one of her frequent trading stops. She still had the same payments to worry about for her ship, but now she was supposed to pay them to that merchant guild, who had quietly purchased the debt from the original people who loaned her the money for the ship. As a guild pilot, she also had to give preferential treatment to cargo requests submitted through that guild.

Felrasa and Nekonya's ID's had them as an engaged couple from Jak's homeworld, and Felrasa was apparently supposed to have been a classmate of Jak's at the military training school. Nothing out of the ordinary, other than that Nekonya was apparently a prototype android who a friend of his had built as an unauthorized lab experiment. Their packet indicated that Felrasa had legally purchased Nekonya from her maker.

"Looks like we're all well provided for," Elita said happily. "I'll leave it to the three of you to get those suitcases open and see what else we scored. But the cash and valuables in the safe alone, if we split it four ways, will more than make up for what I paid Ace. I got back what I paid him, with interest!"

===

As they traveled to Jak's new homeworld, Elita looked up as much information as she could find about the world and its culture. She read it off to Jak while they cruised between jump points and refueling stops.

"Your new homeworld has a warm climate, but not unbearable, and fairly mild seasonal changes. Its two major industries are resort tourism, with fancy hotel resorts; and slave-brothel prostitution, offering exotic species of all ages for almost any conceivable sex acts," she said.

"Makes sense, I suppose. And I'm supposed to be reluctant to become a slave owner, even though it's legal there?" Jak asked.

Elita nodded, and replied, "Yes, slavery is completely legal in that star system, but carefully regulated. You have to be certified by the government and a member of one of the two highest social castes to become a slave owner. There are strict guidelines on who may be enslaved and for what reasons, and on how slaves may be treated. One type of slavery is voluntary indenture for a fixed length of time, to pay off a debt; or to obtain a benefit that the slave couldn't pay for otherwise; or simply because the person likes being a slave. Non-violent convicted criminals are also much more often sentenced to slavery rather than being sent to a jail, for a fixed term or for life, depending on the severity of their offenses. Beyond that, slavers can capture non-citizens if they go into certain forbidden areas, or if they can catch them in non-protected areas. Tourists and visitors are safe at the starport area or at the established resorts, but not necessarily in the cities or countryside."

"You okay with that? Slaves and masters and all that? People owning people?" Jak asked.

"We all are more or less 'owned' by someone more powerful, if you think about it," Elita said with a shrug. "The people I owe money to for my ship may as well own me, if I default on my loan. People who work normal jobs are pretty much owned by the people they work for. Slave owners are just more blatant about how solidly they control the life of someone else. Sure, some slave owners are assholes and mistreat their slaves. But it doesn't have to be that way, does it? You're supposed to be reluctant about slavery. Make the most of that, and be a good slave owner, who treats his slaves well. Maybe it will catch on, and others will follow your example. You can even choose to set a slave free after a period of time, if they have been a slave for a long enough time and served faithfully."

"You said they have a caste system?" Jak asked.

"Yes, they have a fairly elaborate caste system of Citizens, Freemen, Residents, Slaves and everyone else," Elita replied. "You'll be one of the Elite, a full Citizen from an established local family. Felrasa is a Freeman, the next lower social class, and Nekonya is technically his property, and would have the same rights that he has, I guess. I'm an offworlder, but my membership in the merchants' guild gives me some protections there. We should all be safe enough if we stay with you. But the mercenaries that were chasing us, or the people from the Corporation that have been after you, and probably by now are after me too, would have a hard time getting close to us."

"Is that what you want? To stay close to me?" Jak asked with a grin. "Once you get me to that world, you've done what the Doctor asked you to do. Sounds like you could have a fine life as a local merchant, with a clean record. What do you want to do? Free choice, girl."

"I'd... like to stay with you, for a while, at least. I'm... Hey, I'm not asking to be your girlfriend or anything, okay? I mean, we haven't even gone on a date or shared a kiss! But... deep down, I still think you're a decent guy. And you've risked a lot to help all of us. I could do a lot worse than to hang around as your friend. And... maybe a bit more, if things work out?" she said, blushing as she made the last comment.

"Friends. Maybe with benefits? And you don't mind me having a harem of slave girls?" Jak said. "Yeah, I can deal with that. I do like you, Elita. And more important, I trust you. We'll see about the 'benefits' part once the dust settles. For now, it's good to know I have a loyal friend, even if I don't know who I really am."

"I know who you are," Elita replied. "What you were in the past doesn't matter any more. You're 'Dominic Jak Skrall' now, soon to be the Master of a sprawling estate on a frontier world, with a harem of slave girls. And I'm happy to say I'm your friend."