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Coyotes! One is a problem. Two is just, well, asking for it. Dr. Miguel Ribeiro ought to know that, but when an old friend shows up with a risky, coyoterrific proposition he has to think things over...

Let's kick off December with some coyote adventures! Xocoh Zonnie is a coyote treasure hunter. Miguel is her jaguar accomplice. It's set in the same Star Patrol universe as Madison May and "Tricks" so don't expect this to be all that serious. Thanks for Spudz for remodulating the coyote motivator to emit a coherent smut beam.

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

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Part One of The Trouble with Coyotes, by Rob Baird

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The instant he saw her slip in the door at the back of the room, it took every bit of Miguel's resolve not to just dismiss class and escape through the window. They were only on the second floor. He'd live. Probably.

Instead, he ignored her and did his best to keep his voice level. "-- Which would be important later, during the 6th Dynasty. Try working through simulations A through C in this section of the module, and be prepared to have an opinion on the emperor's strategy during the winter campaign for your discussion section."

The lecture was almost over. A hand went up in the front row and, stalling for time, the jaguar gestured to its owner. "Yes?" Maybe he'll have something interesting to ask about. Emperor Ufu is always interesting -- right?

"This isn't listed on the syllabus. Will it be part of the test?"

Miguel sighed, inwardly. "Yes. Even if it's not officially part of it, you'll want to be able to understand both Dr. Kala and Dr. Sharon's perspective on the succession crisis for the midterm."

He wanted to add something about how he wasn't out to waste their time, except that it would've been a lie -- he was. But there was nothing else to be done. He let them go. They couldn't be kept.

The rangy, too-ruddy canine lurking against the wall waited until the students had departed, and patently failed to depart with them. She picked her way forward, until she was at his desk, and clasped her paws in front of her, staring at him with a sharp-eyed grin.

Coyotes. Coyotes were always trouble. "Hey, Xocoh," he said.

"Well hey, doc," she drawled. "Long time no see, huh?"

"I've been keeping my nose clean."

"Yeah."

The jaguar blinked. "Yeah?"

"I'm here to see you about that. When are your office hours?"

"Er... now, actually."

Xocoh flashed her fangs at him mischievously. "They're tomorrow, doc. Your department has them posted outside. C'mon, you can't trick me. Let's get a drink."

"Xocoh..." Xocoh Zonnie was the coyote's legal name -- perhaps the only legal thing about her. "I've got a lot of work to take care of."

"No you don't." When he reached for his computer, the coyote took it from him, and held it on the far side of the desk where he couldn't reach. "Just want to catch up."

"No you don't," he tossed her words back at her. But since she had his computer, and he wasn't going to be getting out of it, the jaguar sighed. "But let's go, fine. There's a bar around the corner."

Xocoh took his satchel from him, too, slinging it over her shoulder and sliding his computer into it to hold them both hostage. She let him lead the way, but fell in close next to him. "How've classes been, anyway?"

"Fine. Mostly fine."

"Succession crisis, doc? Exciting."

"At the end of the 6th Dynasty, yes. We're about to get to the part where we cover the Winter Campaign and the full War of Twelve Summers."

"You seemed to hold their rapt interest."

He couldn't tell if the coyote was being honest. But really, who could? "It's an entry-level course, Xoc. They'll like playing with the simulations, though. At least, I hope so."

When he nudged the door open, she stepped through to the typically warm Sepin-Sirte evening outside and waited for him to join her. "Simulations, huh?" Oblivious to the heat, she was wearing the same snug ex-militia field jacket as always. He even recognized a few of the scorch marks in the worn fabric.

"Part of their study guides, yeah. Lets you see the movement of the armies and everything."

Xocoh glanced around at the still-bright sky. It rarely got completely dark, what with Sirte III dominating the space above them. Sepin-Sirte was tidally locked to the gas giant. "Sounds fun."

"The final battle was one of the largest in antiquity before mechanized forces and standing armies. At least it'll look interesting. Of course, a lot of it is extrapolation. We don't really know what their armor looked like; almost none of it has been preserved. Just paintings, but most of the color's faded..."

"Any burials?"

He raised an eyebrow and stared at the coyote until she grinned, pretending at innocence. "No. Paintings, and one statue that was stolen by one of the later conquerors -- the only thing that saved it from destruction. History's like that, Xoc: fragile."

The coyote nodded, and stayed quiet for half a minute while they walked, still wearing that suspicious smile. "You know, Sancho..."

"What?"

She shrugged, lightly and offhandedly. "If you ask me, Ufu's legacy isn't the sazimaras makeli unapec, it's his introduction of terraced agriculture to the Tarvid highlands."

Both the jaguar's paws bunched into tight, reflexive fists. "Damnit! Why are you doing this to me?"

Xoc looked over at his outburst, feigning total surprise, and tilted her head. "You don't disagree, do you, doc? Sharon and Vateni had an article out just last quarter on the impact of terracing on --"

"Erosion rates in Tarvi compared to Tar Emi, yes," he cut her off. "I read it. You read it?"

The coyote shrugged again. "I had a lot of time to read things in prison, doc. Hey -- this is the bar, right?" This time she held the door open for him. Scouting around for a free table, she picked one in a secluded corner and pointed him over to it.

He grabbed the spot while it was free and waited for Xoc to come back, a beer in each dextrous, straight-fingered paw. She dropped into her seat heavily, or as heavily as she could manage given her weight.

"So!"

"You know I didn't talk, right? They took a deposition and I said I didn't know anything."

Xocoh smiled; not for the first time, Miguel was reminded that coyotes weren't particularly good at it. They never seemed disarming. "That's why I only got six months. Trust me, Sancho, if I thought you said anything we wouldn't be talking."

"Alright."

"You wouldn't be talking, at least." Her smile widened, and she drew her tongue over her sharp canines. "Anyway! Dubash, as they say."

"Dubash," he echoed, clinking his glass off hers. Xocoh's pronunciation of ancient Tarvinian was disconcertingly flawless. Her taste in beer, though, hadn't changed much. "So should I ask when you got out, or should I ask what brought you to Sepin-Sirte?"

"Old friends."

"I thought you said coyotes didn't have friends, only accomplices."

"Old accomplices, then."

"Who?" Xocoh didn't answer. "Xoc." She stared at him, and buried her muzzle in her already-half-empty beer. Even still, he could see that she was grinning. "Xoc, damnit..."

"Will you hear me out?"

"No."

"You know about the Obohruca, right?"

"I said I wasn't listening." The Obohruca was, in any case, not in his field of interest -- a royal galleon belonging to the Azan, one of the first interstellar empires, extinct two thousand years. Rumors of the lost starship were endemic amongst a certain group of people.

Or coyotes, at least. "The Obohruca was a royal galleon belonging to the Azan, one of the first interstellar empires."

"Extinct two thousand years. I know. I said I wasn't listening."

"But you were. And you are. And it's been found."

He waited. And waited. And took a sip of his beer, watching her.

Nothing.

"Well?"

She shook her head. "Said you weren't listening. We can talk about something else. You know, on the ride down here they said Sepin-Sirte never gets under twenty degrees? Must be why they do --"

"Fine, you win. Who found it? I haven't seen anything."

"I haven't either," Xoc admitted. "At first just rumors, when I was locked up. I got a message from one of my old contacts saying they'd had an omelette made from a really big egg -- that was what Yashi always called the Obohruca. A big, golden egg. You could retire on that."

"So? So why are you telling me?"

"After I got out, I tracked one of Yashi's gang down and managed to get an audience with him. And he gave me this, to make up for doin' time for him." She unzipped her jacket to reach for an inside pocket and pulled out a bundle of cloth that she unfolded carefully until the contents tumbled free. "I'll give you a minute to look it over."

While Xocoh returned to the bar for another drink, he picked up what she'd left behind. The little gold disc bore the unmistakable image of an Azanese sovereign. He wasn't familiar enough to recognize the profile.

Then again, he didn't have to be. He spread his fingers to activate the electronics embedded in his wrist, and waited for the display to come to life. Out on the frontier, their connection to the META network was too slow for fancy multi-D holo entertainment, but academic archives worked just fine.

Most of the Azanese royal line was known. They carved their four horns distinctively, almost like old Terran scrimshaw, which made it easy to identify the era of any particular coin. None of the reconstructions he found, though, seemed to be exact matches.

"Well?" Xocoh sat back down, and took a drink of her fresh beer while she waited for his answer.

"It could be Geonat, I suppose, but the bend in the third horn isn't right... horn-bending was associated mostly with later rulers, anyway."

"Look at Upireo IX."

"I thought of that, too, but there's detail on the second horn of this coin that doesn't match the currency of that period." Xocoh stared at him, and slurped her beer noisily. "I'm missing something, aren't I? What?"

"Look at the details of the reconstruction in that databank."

Miguel took a moment to look for where it had come from. Everything checked out -- the source coin had been recovered during an expedition by a reputable university. They'd done the standard high-resolution laser scan of the coin to pick up the detail of the horn carvings.

The coin itself was...

"Incomplete," Miguel muttered. "The coin was damaged." What looked like a blank spot on the reconstructed sovereign's horn corresponded to a visible scratch on the surface of the older artifact.

What Xocoh had given him, on the other hand, was flawless. It was, indeed, the highest quality Azan coin he'd ever seen. He could draw the obvious conclusion by himself, but the coyote added it either out of doubt or a desire for exposition. "Upireo IX was in power when the Obohruca was lost."

"You think it's from the ship?"

"I do."

This was, in part, one of the worst things about the coyote. She was brilliant, and scarily quick in her deductions. But her priorities were warped. He tried anyway: "This is a priceless find. Even if it's not from the galleon, any researcher would give his teeth for something in this condition."

Xocoh was not a researcher. "There's more."

"A university could --"

"They won't. Yashi works for one of the New Families. That ship's already been nearly stripped -- track the parts down on the antiquities market, if you want."

"I don't." After a moment, he thought of something else. "You don't, either. Why do you care? You don't do starships. I don't even do starships, so if you were expecting me to help you clean something up..."

Which he'd done before, on occasion. Even if Sepin-Sirte wasn't the most prestigious place in the universe, he was a qualified professor and his certification was enough to bless a decent forgery for most collectors. Miguel justified it on the grounds that it was better than graverobbing for the genuine article.

Xocoh, as a coyote, had no such qualms; she enlisted his help because it was an easy way to make a quick buck. But he had the sense that she had something else in mind.

"I said there's more."

She was baiting him again. "What is it?"

"Yashi gave me the coin as a favor." She took it back from him, wrapped it up carefully, and returned the bundle to her pocket. "He had some other stuff. He told me it was junk; asked me to help him launder it. Which I did -- not through you, mister clean-nose. I kept a bit of trash as a souvenir."

"Souvenir," he said, making no effort to hide his dubiousness.

Xoc had kept her paw inside her jacket; it came out again with what looked like a necklace, joined to a silver locket. She undid the clasp, and the locket opened.

Inside was a small blue gem, almost perfectly square. Its beveled edges were the only irregularity. "Sapphire?" he asked her.

She upended the locket, tapping the gem into his paw. "Yashi said it was synthetic junk. I didn't bother to disabuse him of that notion. It is synthetic, in case you're wondering."

"Sure. It's flawless." And a deep, dark blue, darker than would've been expected from the jewel's thinness. "Must've been manufactured."

Those were, indeed, worthless. "Yashi was of the opinion that it might've been a lens, or a protective cover for something. Now, me... you want to know what I think?"

Cautiously, he held the sapphire to the light. There was nothing particularly special about it that he could tell. Cheap and difficult to scratch, such things did indeed make useful protective covers. "You're going to tell me anyway."

"I think it looks a lot like something you and I used to talk about."

That was the kind of line perfectly calculated to make him freeze, and before he could prevent himself he did just that. Too late for him to play it cool, he settled on denial instead. "No it doesn't."

"Yes. Yes it does. And you see my problem, don't you?"

Sjel-Kessar. The Lost City. Not merely a lost city -- Sjel-Kessar had once been the capital of the Hano. The Hano shared DNA with the Azan, and the Tarvinians, and two dozen other races in the sector.

Their presence had faded into legend long before Xocoh and Miguel. The height of Hanotic power lay ten thousand years before Upireo IX, and thirty thousand years before the Pyramids. Sjel-Kessar had been a grand galactic myth longer than Terran civilization had even existed.

Some said it had been destroyed. Some said it was underground. Some -- most -- said it never existed in the first place. But the Hano certainly had. "You can't read this," Miguel said.

"But you could."

The Hano were something any mildly curious archaeologist studied, because they were so important to the rise of the first great galactic empires. Nearly forty millennia later, their influence was still being felt.

Most of it came from extrapolation; finding patterns in the influence they'd exerted on their client states. Hanotic tablets formed some of the only direct evidence. Miguel recalled from his history classes that a few dozen were known, most of them mere fragments.

Trash, Yashi said of the sapphire -- but more than one Azan ruler had made the merest cracked chip of a Hanotic tablet part of their crown. "I could, yes. If it's what you think it is."

"Would you take the risk that it isn't? C'mon, Sancho -- would you?"

That old name. A complicated joke. First she had called Miguel the man of las manchas, teasing the jaguar for his spots. Through Cervantes it became 'Sancho Panza,' instead: Don Quixote's faithful, hapless companion.

Xocoh's brain worked that way, razor-sharp and full of mischief. "I haven't told you the best part yet. Yashi decided the gem was trash because it was in a gold frame when he found it."

"That's why you hire an archaeologist," Miguel said. By the 29th century, gold had long been an industrial commodity. Not so for the Azan. A common thief wouldn't have known that.

The coyote, though, was not a common thief. "A tablet in a golden frame, aboard a royal galleon? Someone thought this was important."

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know about this."

Xocoh finished her drink and slipped around to his side of the table. Sitting next to him, turning so that her piercing eyes were mere centimeters away, she lowered her voice. "Yes, you do."

"Do I?"

"You asked why I came to Sepin-Sirte. I came 'cause you were here, doc. You came for the same reason I would've. Low-sec world; not many eyes watching you. Sancho, don't give me this bullshit about keeping your nose clean."

Coyotes could never be trusted as a good influence. That wasn't to say she was wrong. "I guess it wouldn't hurt to look. Just as an experiment. Right?"

"Right." Her dark eyes had the same hard, promising glint as the little sapphire. Her paw wrapped around his, and he felt her finger drawing the gem back into her grasp. "Now, one other... practical concern."

"You need a place to stay?" he guessed.

She nodded, and discreetly replaced the tablet in its locket before sliding both back into her jacket. "I'd ask if you had a room, but I don't reckon your girl would like that. Folks tend to think us coyotes aren't up to any good."

"You're not."

Xocoh thought over the accusation for a moment before copping to it with a shrug. "No, that's true. You'd be right not to trust us."

"I don't. But, as it happens, there's no girl, Xoc. Don't have anybody around to get suspicious."

"Oh," the coyote said, and by the way she grinned Miguel realized she'd known that all along. "Well, that's convenient."

Convenient though it was, she was right about the congenital untrustworthiness of her species. She didn't protest when he suggested it would be best if she didn't accompany him to the university's laboratory.

She'd settled in when he returned, meaning mostly that the field jacket had come off. The cornflower tank-top she wore beneath it was deceptively demure -- like she'd just woken up and hadn't summoned the energy for anything more presentable.

"Did you get your luggage and stuff?" Miguel asked. Xoc was lounging on his sofa, staring lazily into a hologram floating between the splayed fingers of her right paw.

She flicked her wrist to close the display and sat up. "Don't have any. Did you get what you were looking for?"

Somehow, the jaguar wasn't particularly surprised at her lack of possessions. He didn't really know what she spent her money on -- even back when they'd worked together, her apartment was little more than a cot and a box full of self-heating prepackaged dinners.

Miguel wasn't much better, but at least he had a table, and at least it was clean. He set the case he'd been carrying down, and flipped the latches open. Xocoh padded up behind him. "Know how it works?"

"No," he said.

The coyote rested her muzzle on his shoulder, even though it meant she had to stretch up on her toes to stare down at the table's surface. "Not difficult, right?"

Objectively? No. "Just a laser. Or... lasers, plural." He sat down to be closer to the equipment, and to help steady his paws. It was simple enough. The emitter locked into a little stand. The stand had a sample holder.

Xoc had her muzzle back on his shoulder and one paw on the chair to brace herself. The other paw dangled her locket in front of his eyes.

He opened the locket and carefully slid the tablet -- he already thought of it that way, for some reason -- into the sample holder. "Moment of truth. Now, I understand the process is fairly complex. I guess for a first step what we'll need to do is --"

Giving up the locket had left Xocoh with a free paw. She turned the emitter on before he could stop her.

The laser beam hit its target square on, to no particular effect whatsoever. It passed unfazed through the crystal, leaving a bright green dot on the table. "Good work," the jaguar muttered.

"Wanted to skip the preamble." Her fingers slid from the power switch to the adjustment controls being likewise projected onto the table's surface, next to a readout of diagnostic data. "Here..."

The color of the dot changed abruptly to red, then began to shift slowly through the rest of the spectrum. Together they watched the diagnostic numbers, even though Miguel wasn't wholly certain what he was looking at.

"See that?" Xocoh asked.

"Yes," he said. They'd both caught the brief blip. "Some kind of distortion at 490." Perhaps it was only an imperfection in the crystal. Perhaps not. "If there's another one..."

"There!" At 464 nanometers, the light changed again. Xocoh tapped the controls to freeze the laser in place. "Sancho..."

Miguel could feel his pulse starting to race. Other civilizations were known to use crystalline storage. In general, though, it only took one laser to read them. Hanotic tablets relied on two, as well as the interference patterns they generated.

Two anomalies was a good sign. Xocoh was a schemer, and more or less a criminal besides: she expected the crystal to be fantastically important -- perhaps a collection of royal secrets, locked away for eons.

As a man of science, Miguel knew better. And he knew that it didn't matter. Even if the tablet was nothing more than a shopping list, it would be invaluable to any scholar of the Hano. "Don't get too excited," the jaguar said, unconvincingly. "Calibrating the lens on one..."

As the laser slowly changed its focus, the blue dot on his table spread out, growing fuzzy and dim. And then -- just when he thought it might all have been for nothing -- it locked in place. Swallowing heavily, he set the second laser to the appropriate frequency.

Its own dot sharpened to a pinprick, then started to expand. He caught a flicker, a momentary flash. Xocoh sucked her breath and held it with the same nervous anticipation. Another flash. Then the table went dark -- and the coyote yelped.

Before them stretched an expanse of razor-sharp glyphs, densely packed in neat vertical rows like the teeth of a fine comb. Miguel's muzzle gaped. He'd never seen a tablet being read in person. Only the simulations, and those were a pale, sorry imitation.

His heart pounded. Even despite the shock he felt a tight pang in his chest -- a snug, constricting pain. Like he was being suffocated. Like he couldn't breathe. Like -- "Xoc," he croaked. "Leggo."

She relaxed her embrace and the pressure vanished at once. "Sorry! But -- Sancho -- look."

He could do nothing else. "Amazing..."

"What does it say?"

"I don't know," he said.

"You studied the Hano. What does it say?"

Forcing his paw steady, Miguel manipulated the controls on the projector to focus on the top right corner of the tablet. The hieroglyphics were to be read in alternating lines, right-to-left and then left-to-right. "I don't recognize all these glyphs, not immediately."

"But," the coyote replied, her voice insistent. She pressed her finger to the jaguar's temple.

As a researcher, he had unrestricted access to the university's databanks. Miguel momentarily ignored the projection to focus on his connection to META, the galaxy-wide information network.

It was a raw stream of data, fed through a careful filter into the user's skull, and different people visualized it in different ways. Skilled hackers trained their brains to transform it into something logical -- the traffic patterns and layouts of a city's streets, for example.

Miguel wasn't skilled; META always looked to him like an open book, with a complicated table of contents. There was a chapter on the university of Sepin-Sirte. A subchapter on the department of Xenolinguistics. A section on the archives. A sentence about Ancient Hanotic. Transfer knowledge?

The hieroglyphics flickered as the jaguar's brain absorbed the information and the little computers in his retinas reprocessed them on the fly. "Not all of it makes sense," he said. "But it says... hm..."

Here, visitor, look upon the ??? ??? record of ???, 114th Lord of the ???. In his life ??? did many things, among them ??? and the ??? of the ??? tribes, who will never trouble civilization again...

That was all on the first half of the first line. "The information density here is tremendous, Xoc. This has to be a life tablet -- it would've been in the lord's tomb. It tells everything about his reign."

"Anything good?"

"It'll take work to find out. You like work, don't you?"

In total the tablet ran to nearly three hundred thousand words; he dutifully ran it through the translation matrix and left it as a file for Xocoh to study. For all her other faults, she got started at once -- by the time he went to bed an hour later, she was sprawled out on the sofa staring into an open hologram floating above her paw.

The next morning he found her passed out at last, her lean body limp and unstrung and her tongue lolling. He left her alone: Xoc slept rarely and intensely, and woe betide the man who roused her.

Miguel knew this, of course. You learned that sort of thing, running around with a coyote for a few wild years. When to wake them up and when to let them sleep. When to go along with their ridiculous plans and when to knock some sense into their erratic coyote skulls. When to let them sleep on the couch and when to pin them down on it and...

He shook his head. Only trouble lay down the road that began that way. Xoc would get what she wanted out of him -- or she already had -- and then she would be gone. Maybe she'll even be gone by the time I get back.

Through his lectures that day, he returned over and over to that thought, and wasn't able to decide whether he wanted it to be true or not. His relationship with the canid was fraught.

After his office hours wrapped up, he went back to his apartment and paused at the door. An odd smell was seeping from beneath it. It grew stronger -- overpowering, even -- when he opened the door all the way.

"Sancho!" Xoc uncoiled herself from the sofa and pounced towards him like a striking viper. "Hey, doc!"

"What's... what's that smell?"

She skidded to a halt just before him and closed one eye to think the question over. "Oh. Uh, I made some lunch. Just cooked some ground beef, that was all."

"'Cooked'?"

"Forgot about," she admitted. "I disconnected your fire alarm. And I ate the burgers, don't worry. That's not the important thing! The important thing... Sancho?"

He clicked the front door shut and went to look at his kitchen, where a frying pan stood in mute, sorrowful testimonial to what had happened. "This pan is ruined..."

"Call it modern art. Anyway, I looked through the tablet. There's some interesting things I want to pursue. Look at section -- Sancho. Pay attention to me!"

He had still been staring at the pan. "Xoc. Good lord. Okay, what is it?"

"Section 56 begins in the 300th year of the lord's rule. Now look." She twisted her paw to face upright, and snapped her fingers to bring a hologram to life. "It says that there was a battle between the Hano and an upstart republic -- an unknown name and it's not translated but the war had gone on for more than a century by that time, and of course -- well -- a Hano year, I had to look that up, but a Hano year is about two Terran months so what we're --"

"Are you on drugs?"

"No. That's not the point. I mean -- yes, but that's not the point. The --"

"What drugs?"

Xoc scowled and folded her paw closed to quiet the hologram. "Beta toralazine. And caffeine. And glin."

"Isn't glin illegal in this sector?"

Xocoh's shrug betrayed not just ignorance but utter disregard for the very concept. "It potentiates the acid. I'm microdosing. Anyway, are we done interrogating me on my bad habits? Did you want some?"

He slid around her to leave the kitchen. In the living room, her place on the sofa was surrounded by a protective honor guard of single-serve coffee cups. Half of them were empty. "Not right now. Okay, so you're wired, is what you're telling me?"

"Not in any way you'd notice. Anyway, after the last battle of the war when the Hano forced their enemies to surrender it says that they... well the verb is missing but from context you can tell it means they carried off the treasure and it was supposed to be entombed, or buried with, or maybe destroyed with the warlord who led the campaign. Now I just glossed over that, but then I wound up cross-referencing it later when it gets to this part in section 62 about a memorial being created for the same person, at least I think it's the same person as they use the same series of glyphs but..."

She went on for another half-minute before having to pause for breath. "Did you write any of this down, Xoc?"

Although she said the answer was 'yes,' her notes appeared to have been dumped straight from her brain. They made no sense, and he lacked whatever aphasia it took to read a coyote's thoughts.

She crashed hard when the toralazine wore off, and he had to wait until she'd sobered up that evening. "Guh," she said.

"You live dangerously."

"I live effectively."

As proof, she immediately began recounting what she'd found. Whoever the lord had been, his reign was aggressive and bloody: Xocoh listed a dozen accounts of spoils so numerous that they could scarcely be tallied.

Any of them, the coyote insisted, would be a tremendous find if they could be uncovered. Figuring that out was going to be the problem. "There are a few weird notes. It'll say something like... 'the third voice shows where the honored general is buried.'"

"Third voice, huh?" Offhand, Miguel suspected a religious metaphor, or something of mystical significance, but nothing like that came immediately to mind and a search of the records on META found no other references.

Laying on her stomach, poring over the glyphs, Xocoh kept at it until at last she growled out her frustration and tossed a pillow at the jaguar. "Sancho. Why is this so tough?"

"You mean, why can't they make it easy for you to steal their precious, sacred artifacts? I don't know, Xoc. Science is hard."

"It doesn't help that a quarter of the symbols aren't even being translated. Do you scholars really not know that much of the language?"

Truthfully, that part had been bothering him, too. "We should, actually. I'm starting to think it's probably a bad forgery. The language processors should be able to compensate for missing symbols, but old tongues are pretty brittle."

"What do you mean?"

"Think about slang, coyote. You can say one sentence, like, a thousand different ways depending on your dialect, your accent, stuff like that. The Hano would've been the same way, but without examples of all those variants the translator kinda gives up."

"The computer translator, maybe. What about you?"

"I don't know enough Hanotic. I think I can write my name, maybe, that's it."

She rolled onto her back, pondering -- or scheming, as coyotes would've put it. "Who could? Who'd know it better?"

Ancient xenolinguistics was a very niche field of study. Fortunately the Terran Confederation had plenty of people to fill those niches, and Miguel had a decent idea of who to ask. "Dean."

"Kruger? School buddy of yours, right?"

"Yeah. He's at the Free University of Leporia, now. Core world, the lucky bastard."

"Ah, you're happier here. Can you ask him?"

"I could."

"Will you do that, maybe? For me?"

"For you?"

The coyote stuck out her tongue. "For your own curiosity, then."

"Sure. Get, uh... get off the sofa, though. I don't think Dean liked you much; it might be best if he couldn't see you. The hologram covers everything from my desk to the far wall."

"I'll stay hidden," she promised, tumbling from the sofa and making her way over to the side of the desk, out of view.

Miguel did a quick check to make sure that the area behind him looked presentable despite signs of recent coyote habitation, then sat down and brought up the galactic interlink menu. It was early in the evening, where Dr. Kruger lived; he hoped their old friendship would keep it from seeming too much of an imposition.

Sure enough, he took the call even without advanced notice. The caracal had aged quite well, which was to say he hadn't aged much at all. Dean Kruger would always look no more than thirty. "Why if it isn't Dr. Ribeiro! How've you been, Mike?"

"Not bad, not bad. How about you?"

Kruger took a few steps back and bent down; when he lifted his arms again a red-furred cub had joined him in the hologram. "Say 'hi' to Miguel, why don't you?"

The cub blinked at what must've been Miguel's apparition on the far side of the connection. She raised a tentative, curious paw, and stuck it out to touch his ephemeral face.

Dean grinned, and set the cub down. "She's not much for talking, yet. Soon, though. Anyway, what's up?"

"Got a moment?"

"For you? Sure."

"One of my students said they found some glyphs on META -- one of those communities where they trade old historical conspiracy theories, ancient astronauts and all that. I hadn't seen them before, and they aren't in the database that I can see."

Dean nodded. "Probably a fake, then. Those kinda kooks are always faking things. What script?"

"Bad Hanotic, I think. A lot of it isn't in my translation matrix. But I figured you might know better -- you are the expert, after all."

The caracal's modest grin belied his abundant history in the matter. "Just a hobbyist. With a job. Can you send it over?"

Miguel used his claw to carve off the first few lines from the tablet and, with a wave of his paw, sent the hieroglyphs streaking over the interlink to Dean's home on Leporia. "Stuff like this, basically."

Xocoh was watching him from the side of the desk, where Dean couldn't see her, and she could only see the back of his head. She didn't see the caracal's eyes widen in surprise, then narrow, then widen again. But she saw Miguel's expression. Good news? she mouthed.

"What's up, Dean?"

"You were translating this as High Hanotic?"

"Whatever we learned in school, yeah."

Dr. Kruger rubbed the back of his neck. "Where did you say you found this?"

"Student turned it in to me. He said he wanted to write about it for extra credit. I told him we don't do extra credit, normally..."

"It's not High Hanotic. It's older. Proto-Eigic, I think, no later than the Column-Builder Era." His eyes were running along the glyphs over and over again. "You know your history, right?"

Miguel thought he did, although for Xocoh's benefit he tried an explanation. "The Eigic civilization immediately predates the Hano. They were early spacefarers; limited FTL." Known for the monuments they left on the planets they found: dense collections of tall, straight silver-plated columns.

"Proto-Eigic is only known from a few dozen columns. Where the silver wasn't stripped by scavengers like that coyote you used to hang out with..." Xocoh rolled her eyes.

"People don't have any respect," Miguel agreed, and managed not to react when she flipped him off. "Is it from one of those columns?"

Dean was still distracted. "No. Ironically we probably have a better understanding of Eigic syntax than we do the Hano. Yes, yes -- definitely Eigic, written in the formal register. It says that it came from a tomb. But that's odd."

"Odd?"

"Well. 'Visitor, learn of the glorious and majestic story of Mayyus, 114th Lord of Eig-a-Mar. In his life Mayyus was the doer of many things, among them the defeat and extinction of the Kovu tribes, cleansing civilization of their filth.' It's all clear. This looks like the opening of a Hanotic life history, but the Column-Builders didn't have those."

"Do you know of the ruler?"

The caracal shook his head. "No, and I just checked our lineage records. He doesn't show up there. The glyph has some attributes of a few different royal families, but I don't know for certain. I really don't. That far back, our knowledge is very fragmentary."

"So it must just be a forgery," Miguel suggested. "I don't know where it came from, but you would've heard about it if it was real."

To his mild surprise, Dr. Kruger simply shrugged. "Probably, but not definitely. One of those grave-robbers might've turned it up somewhere on the black market. You don't still talk to that 'yote, do you?"

"No." Hearing his denial, Xocoh crossed her arms and looked at him drily. "I don't."

"I'd love to say 'good riddance.' Well, heck. I'll say it."

"Good riddance, yes." The coyote's eyes, he saw, had narrowed into slits. "Why do you ask, though?"

"She might know if somebody had found a new site with columns. Maybe they got records before they melted them down or shipped them them off to private collectors."

"I don't know where she is these days." Xoc huffed a dramatic sigh -- and then dropped out of his sight. "It's not my scene anymore. She was in prison, last I heard."

"Where she belongs." Dean seemed satisfied; Xocoh always had been a point of contention between them. The coyote took her revenge by rapping her bony fingers against his knee, leaving him jerking with the reflex. "You alright?"

"Sorry, yeah. Got a kink. So you think it's nothing, Dean?" The sharp pain at his shin felt a lot like coyote teeth. He just barely managed to avoid reacting.

"Do you have any more text?"

Miguel selected a few more paragraphs and beamed them over. Dean studied them silently. And, since Xoc couldn't hear any more conversation, she distracted herself by biting him again. He tried to kick her as subtly as he could.

"Huh," Dean finally said.

"What is it?"

"Do you know anything of the provenance, Mike?"

"No. The student said he..." The teeth had gone. Xoc's fingers were back, though -- right at his crotch. A tugging pressure told him his zipper was under attack. The jaguar swallowed. "Found it in a discussion about the Hano influence on the Tarvinians."

"Influence, huh?"

The pressure relaxed as his pants opened. Xocoh took the form of a soft, too-warm wraith, sliding between his legs. If he paid attention, and it was awfully hard not to, he could feel her breath on his belly, through the fabric of his shirt. "Well, uh. You know..."

"A little. The early Tarvinian hill colonies were founded with Hano technology, right?" Miguel tried to concentrate, although all he could feel was coyote. Her finger curled into his briefs and lazily pulled them off while Dean kept talking. "Something like that?"

"Right. Specifically, that they couldn't have leveled the hills without help!" The last word didn't quite come out right -- Xoc nudged her muzzle roughly against him, nosing right above his sheath where he could feel the warm friction rubbing him against her fur.

"Mike?"

"Must be the connection," the jaguar stammered. Xocoh nuzzled him with a teasing, slow firmness. No longer just fur-on-fur. Now he could feel her right against the bare flesh of a swelling erection he was helpless to still. "I told them it was all, uh, all nonsense."

"Well, it was. Hey, can you wait up a sec, Mike?" Miguel nodded and the hologram froze in place. ON HOLD, floating letters declared.

Xocoh was not. She tilted her muzzle to run her lips over him, followed by a hint of coyote tongue -- soft, liquid heat leaving a warm, shiveringly pleasurable trail in his nerves.

"Xoc," he hissed. "Stop that."

"Who's Xoc?" The coyote's voice was muffled and distorted by the desk and the jaguar cock she kept close to her lips. "Me?"

"Yes, you."

"You don't know where I am, Sancho," she reminded him. "Why, I'm probably still in prison."

"I'm trying to have a conversation," he said.

When he looked down, under the desk, Xocoh's pale green eyes met him without a single trace of guilt or irony. She smiled mockingly up at the jaguar. "I'm not stopping you."

He opened his mouth. But then, so did she, and before he could say anything she pushed her head forward. He slid smoothly into her muzzle -- hot, slippery-wet, and irresistibly soft. For all her angular, bony frame the coyote had a mouth like no other.

Xoc took him deep, nosing her long snout back into his crotch so they both knew every inch of the jaguar was buried in her muzzle. She suckled on him comfortably, like there wasn't anything odd about it, and growled happily when he shuddered in his pleasure.

"C... c'mon," he pleaded. "Dean's going to come back, Xoc. He's gonna -- oh, god!" It had been a few years. He'd forgotten how she felt -- how snug and tight everything went when she sucked hard on him and slowly pulled him free until just the tip was still between her skilled lips.

She growled again, and rocked her muzzle in one full, fluid stroke to take him all the way in again. Her tongue curled, flicking against the subtle barbs studding his shaft, like she needed to acquaint herself with every last one.

If he wasn't careful he was going to start purring. It was that or shallow gasping, and he went with that in the hope that Dean might not notice. Just meant he had to speak quickly. "If y-you -- if you want to do this --" Ignoring him, she gave two quick, bobbing strokes to cut him off. He rallied, even as the warm, wet pleasure of her mouth started to soak his thoughts. "You can wait until a-afterwards."

That, at last, was enough to get a reaction. She slurped her way back to his throbbing, pointed tip and worked it teasingly with the broad edge of her tongue. "I know," she told him. "But where's the fun in that?"

Miguel clamped his paw on the edge of his desk and gripped it hard, hoping it would be enough. Dean's image sprang back to life, and his friend smiled. "Hey! Sorry about that."

"No..." He knew as he said it what was coming. Xocoh thumped her brushy tail, and went down on him again, trusting his voice to break. Experience at least let him prepare for that -- he set his jaw, waited for the first shock of hot, rippling pleasure to pass, and finished. "Problem."

It almost sounded normal. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the coyote hold up her paw from beneath the desk, giving him an approving thumbs-up.

"I wanted to check on something," the oblivious caracal went on. "Do you know anything at all about Proto-Eigic?"

Xocoh worked her muzzle in slow, circling pumps that rocked the jaguar's shaft against her tongue. He was gaining an appreciation for yes-or-no questions; they could be answered with a shake of the head.

Dean decided to explain, rambling on while Miguel's cock began to twitch with the rising, pulsing pleasure. "It's divided into a few families. This one is Tapestral -- the first researcher thought they had originally been on a tapestry. It's probably a little older, a little more esoteric."

He couldn't keep his breath steady anymore. "Okay," he said, trying not to groan. Xocoh lifted her paw again, and wiggled it. So-so. Not like she was making it any easier -- bobbing in quicker strokes, letting her saliva and his precum do their work before spilling messily from her soft lips.

"Here's where it gets odd. Carlene Scott out of UJZ wrote the only grammar of Tapestral Proto-Eigic. The sample she was working with had an idiosyncratic use of the fourth-category verb 'to make.' That mistranslation is in every published paper on TPE stelae."

Miguel was, charitably, picking up only third or fourth word. His world was starting to shrink into a dense ball centered right on the coyote between his tensing, trembling thighs. "Uh -- uh-huh," he nodded quickly. "Sure."

There was an aching pressure, demanding to be released -- over soon, he managed to think, it'll be over soon. His cock quivered, twitching faster. His sack tightened and pulled up. Over soon --

But. Xocoh could feel it, too, and she was nothing if not observant. She slowed down and pulled herself back, leaving her tongue twirling and lapping over his spurting tip to keep him right at the very edge. He shot her a look, and she paused to smile at him, and mouth: pay attention.

"-- from a new expedition sponsored by the Academy. The paper hasn't been published yet, but it clearly identifies the missing glyph that Dr. Scott interpolated. Do you see where I'm going with this?"

He saw nothing. He was right at the edge. His toes were curling; his claws raked the desk. So close -- just a little more... But the coyote refused to give it to him. He tried to lift his hips, thrusting into her muzzle, but she shoved him down roughly.

"You sure you're okay, Mike?"

"Distracted! Ah -- okay -- missing glyph."

"It's in this text." Xocoh heard that: he felt her straighten up curiously. "So either the person who forged this had access to the unpublished paper, or it's genuine."

"Who -- who had a-access? To the paper?"

"Let me look." Xocoh took the pause in patient stride, working her tongue in lazy, languid twirls. The heat was an aching, exquisite torture -- every time the peak rose she slowed down, letting it fade, letting him shudder and twitch uselessly. "Mostly Academy researchers. They're clean."

"You think -- it's -- it's real?"

"Might be! You seem awfully excited. Maybe it's worth giving out that extra credit."

"Well. Uh. Mm. I dunno."

"Oh, have some fun with it, Mike. You never have any fun."

No I don't, do I Xoc? Do I? Xoc fucking stop it just let me finish please fucking please_, coyote I -- I_ -- "I guess. Ca -- can you send the -- the translation file over to -- to me?"

"Sure thing, yeah. Here you go."

Xocoh froze. Waiting. He knew what she was waiting for and it didn't matter anymore. "Got it," he gasped, and slippery, tight, oh-so-warm coyote suddenly enveloped him.

He slid in effortlessly and just as she started to suck on him it hit. Thudding ecstasy, subtle as a supernova and nearly as hot, slammed through him. It gathered in a bubbling current, racing up his pulsing cock to jet free in hot, thick, spurting gushes.

"Fuck!" He groaned it in a helpless snarl as orgasm turned the aching tension into jolting ribbons of bliss. His barbs flared and Xocoh suckled harder as they dug into her tongue. He felt her swallow, taking every mouthful of the pent-up jaguar's sticky load.

His head lowered -- he was almost on the desk by the time he could see straight again; Dean was eyeing him with concern. "Uh..."

"S-s-sorry," Miguel answered in huffing, gasping pants as Xocoh slurped the last few trickles of cum from him. "Th-this, uh -- these -- uh, these migraines are, uh --"

"Oh." Dean, by his abruptly sympathetic nod, had clearly been thinking of something else. "You should rest, then, right?"

"Y... yeah. I should. I'm -- um. I'm sorry for the, uh -- for the outburst. Uh. Um. Thanks for the help."

"Of course, Mike." Dean smiled, trying to be comforting. "Let me know how it goes with your student, okay?"

Miguel flailed for the button to close the connection. As soon as the caracal's face disappeared he slumped, panting hard for breath and glaring down at the coyote under his desk. "You."

Her muzzle was still wrapped around his cock, and her eyes did the smiling for her. Xoc's ears perked, like she was posing an innocent question.

"Xoc..." He groaned it in a relieved sigh -- so drained it almost hurt. "Xoc, you bitch."

She straightened, smiling wider, and slowly let his softening length slip free. "Me?" she asked. That tried to be innocent, too, but even if she hadn't been a coyote, her voice was thick, and the act of speaking bubbled a lewd trail of cum from her stained lips. She licked it from where it spilled in the golden fur of his crotch, swallowed heavily, and showed off her fangs with a grin. "What'd I do?"

"Don't even start." At least, he didn't add, not without finishing again. Slowly, and a bit reluctantly, he fastened his pants back up again.

Xocoh slid herself back from underneath the desk and got to her feet. "Teach ya not to badmouth me, huh, doc? Anyway, let's see what we've got here, right?"

"I can't even stand up right now, Xoc."

"Then stay seated. Like I care?" The coyote thumped the back of her paw on his desk and the holographic display returned. She called up the text of the Hanotic tablet. "Run this with the new translations?"

Groaning, Miguel weakly brushed his fingers over the tabletop to do as he had been asked. The hieroglyphs shifted and resolved into legible English. "Lot easier to read."

"Ain't it just? Let's see. 'In 16772, a great wall was constructed around the city of Rayyin Texal. 40,000 conscripted workers were brought from the war's conquest and gave their lives willingly to this project.' I have my doubts."

Miguel focused on the word 'conscripted workers'; with the new dictionary to work from, the translation matrix suggested 'slaves' as a better replacement. That didn't seem inaccurate. "Okay. So what was it you had questions about? The third voice?"

"Yeah. Bring up section 405. Yeah, there we go."

The new monument to Lasul was completed in Sjel-Kassar, and it was of true magnificence unseen in all of history. It is recorded in the third level, for you to marvel at what we wrought in this great city.

"Third level?"

Miguel pondered aloud. "Maybe on the third floor of the temple complex? Lasul was one of the constellation deities worshipped by the early Hano, before they started to view themselves as gods instead."

"If you were already in the temple, why would you need an inscription? You could just see it, couldn't you?"

"It doesn't say what the monument was. Maybe it was a painting, or a song. Or... oh, god. Xoc! Oh, fuck!"

"Again? I'm not even sucking you off right now, Sancho."

"No!" He stared at the glyph until it suggested alternate translations. Voice. Register. Text layer [NOTE 1]. 'Note 1' was a footnote from an Academy researcher describing Column-Builder stelae as palimpsests. "Get me the tablet."

Palimpsests were an artifact from the days when writing material was precious, and scribes would simply erase an old surface before writing something new on it. Clever researchers could sometimes recover a little of what remained.

Xoc returned with the tablet, and the reading device. "Cross your fingers," Miguel said.

"Crossed. What's up?"

"You read these tablets with blue lasers. Right? Two lasers. One at about 490 nanometers, one at about 460. Combine them and you can read the text. It's pretty simple."

"We did that."

"I know. It's how the Hano recorded information."

"So?"

"So what about this?"

Xocoh slipped around behind him, leaning on the jaguar's back to look at the readout. "That's not visible, though."

"Not to us." Coyotes and jaguars couldn't see ultraviolet light, but who knew about the Hano? The record, inscribed to be viewed at just under three hundred nanometers, was unmistakable and regular. "The next question is what it is."

"A hologram." Xocoh rarely betrayed any nerves, but she was so close that he could feel her swallow apprehensively. "The line in the text said we could marvel at a monument. Can you reconstruct it?"

"Sure. I think. Maybe." Holography was table stakes. They didn't even need the expensive scientific equipment for it -- his desk would be able to handle it, probably, if it could read wavelengths that short.

"There." Xocoh pointed. "It's downloading something."

They both leaned forward, waiting for the computer to finish processing whatever was stored on the tablet. The lights blinked twice, and the pair found themselves staring at a building.

At first the image provided no clear sense of scale. Then Miguel realized that the tiny indentations were intended to be doors. Archaeological records suggested the Hano had stood around three meters tall.

"Pretty magnificent, indeed," he said. "These two pyramids are almost a kilometer tall. And look at that statue!" The statue showed a horned beast, its huge arms grasping a sturdy trident. "I wonder if that's Lasul."

"The resolution is incredible. You can see almost everything." Xocoh used her paws to zoom in on the statue's weapon, slowly circling around to examine it from every angle. "I wonder what they made it out of. What do you suppose?"

He didn't answer.

"Sancho? Hey. Hey, doc?"

They could see the statue from every angle. "Xoc," Miguel said carefully. "Dog, you know I love you, right?"

"No you don't."

"You know I put up with you, right? Take a step back."

"Why?"

"Do it." She did. "Another one. Another. Sit down."

Xocoh crossed her arms over her chest. "What's up?"

He needed her further away, just in case. "Be a good dog for once and sit, Xoc."

She sat on the floor, eyes narrowing. "Sancho, you're plotting something. You don't plot as well as I do."

"I wanted you at a safe distance. Lasul was a sacred constellation to the Hano."

"Yeah?"

"You can see a lot here, Xoc."

"Yeah?"

Slowly and decisively, he pressed his paw to the hologram and spread his fingers to zoom in. The statue's trident framed a glimpse of the temple. But holograms were three dimensional. He panned the view up, past the horizon. "You can see stars, Xoc."

Her eyes widened, and the coyote's ears went straight up. They were sharp and pointy, just like the teeth in her suddenly open muzzle. Miguel had a few hundred milliseconds to realize he'd misjudged her jumping abilities, and most of them occurred as the squealing coyote was already tackling him straight from the chair to the floor below.

The jaguar awoke again staring at the ceiling of his bedroom.

Xocoh was sitting cross-legged next to him. "Oh, hey. Welcome back. Sorry about that. You need a softer floor."

"Or a softer coyote." He pushed himself upright carefully. "Fucking hell, my head. You couldn't even give me some of your drugs?"

"You would've yelled at me later," she said. "You need to be sober."

"What for?"

"I want you to come with me."

Miguel shut his eyes again, and lay back down. "Ugh."

He heard the coyote shuffling, and then felt the weight of her body atop him. Xocoh straddled him, and then fell forward to rest her light frame on the jaguar's chest. "More precisely..."

"Ugh?"

"You're going to come with me, and we both know that. But I want you to be sober when you admit it."

Miguel kept his eyes shut. "Do we both know that?"

"That map gets us to Sjel-Kassar. You may be stubborn, Sancho, but you'd give your spots to see that. I've already run the stars through the database. It took an hour. The tablet shows the night sky from somewhere around Collado-Strauss, an unsurveyed binary system."

"You're sure?" He'd taken a university course in celestial starship navigation but, like Xoc, knew only enough to be dangerous.

"It shows it from forty-three thousand years ago."

Miguel took a deep breath. "Well," he suggested, still keeping his eyes closed. "Let's do this. Let's report it to the university here, and to the Siriot Academy. They'll be able to organize a proper expedition."

"Or, let's not do anything of the sort."

"Ugh." That was a useful sound to keep on hand when dealing with coyotes. It was flexible.

"The Academy is going to take five years to do anything. By that point word will leak, and they'll be beat to the punch. And, you don't get the glory. You don't get anything. Neither do I and, let's face it Sancho, that's more important."

"Is it?"

Xocoh tapped him on the nose. "Are you sober?"

"I guess."

"Good. Then let's do this. You're going to try to say something really dumb, and I'm going to shut you up, and you're going to call in to the university and take the rest of the semester off. And then we're going to Sjel-Kassar."

"It's not that sim --"

She growled, and pressed her muzzle tightly to his. Miguel still had his mouth open, still insisting that it might not be that simple, after all. Her silky tongue slid between his parted lips, curling around his own for a moment.

Then she pulled back. She'd left something resting on his tongue; he swallowed. "Painkiller?"

"Yeah. You deserve it, anyway."

He gave the coyote a shove, and she toppled gamely from him, sprawling on her side to watch him sit back up. "You know this is a bad idea, right? You're a bad influence, Xoc."

"Oh, I know. I know, babe."

"I'm doing this under duress."

"Sure."

Miguel told himself that if he accompanied the coyote, there would at least be someone with archaeological training. They could try to learn something -- and it was an unparalleled opportunity.

Extra credit, even.

"How are we going to get there?" he asked. Xocoh was not much for planning: she'd tugged her field jacket on and was ready to go immediately. "You don't have a ship, I'm guessing."

"No."

"Do you know anyone with a ship?"

No. That, too, would need to be addressed on the fly.

On the other hand, she was right about Sepin-Sirte. The moon was a backwater, where nobody looked too closely at the records of a novice archaeology professor or a coyote ex-con.

The taxi driver wasn't willing to take them all the way to the spaceport on the outskirts of town -- the industrial docks, not the shabby cosmodrome that at least pretended to be civilized. Xocoh considered the cabbie's reluctance a good sign, even if it meant a bit of a walk.

"How do you know who to trust, anyway?" he asked her.

Xoc shrugged. "I don't."

"Don't know, or don't trust?" The coyote grinned darkly. "Great."

The sign labeled 'SERVICES' was old and broken, leaving letters that flickered in glum reluctance to admit what they were doing. Inside was little better: a few vending machines stocked with unreliable food, a sign listing the current prices for fuel, and a job board full of ominous postings.

"Discount freight," Miguel read aloud. "Shipper assumes risk."

"Polite way to say the captain doesn't have insurance. That's illegal, of course. But, hey, discounts..."

"You sure this is where you want to find somebody?"

She patted his side and wandered over to the bar, tended by a ratty-looking hare with one ear swiveled to the electric guitar playing over tinny speakers. The other ear turned when Xocoh spoke up. "I'm looking for a ship."

"Where'd you see it last?"

"Funny."

The bartender's expression didn't change much. "Place is full of ships, girl. I'm sure you can find one."

"I need a fast ship."

"Plenty of those."

"With a reckless, irresponsible pilot."

His ear twitched, and he raised his paw, pointing across the room to a booth occupied by two troublingly-sharp-eared dogs. Xocoh smiled her thanks, and dropped her paw on the bar, leaving behind a handful of credits. "You know who these belong to?"

"Not a clue," the hare said, pocketing the money. "Some drunk alien or somethin', probably."

A sinking feeling Miguel had started to pick up only got worse when they made their way over to the booth. At least one of them was a coyote, and probably both. The twitching wag of Xocoh's tail didn't make things any better. "Hello there," she chirped.

The one on the left -- the obvious coyote, down to the scheming grin -- turned to face them. "Hello?"

"I'm in need of a pilot."

"Hi, In Need of a Pilot. I'm --"

His companion kicked the coyote under the table. She looked like a more-presentable version of Xocoh, with a tailored, high-end jumpsuit at odds with her rangy fur and glinting eyes. "Not now. I'm a pilot. What are you looking for?"

"I asked the bartender for a fast ship and a fearless captain. He pointed to you."

"You said 'fearless'?" the pilot asked.

"Sort of." Miguel knew enough of coyotes to anticipate when they wouldn't bother taking offense, and if the pilot wasn't another 'yote she was trying hard to look like one. "Technically, 'reckless and irresponsible.'"

"Sounds about right," the other one said. "Who are we actually talking to?"

"I'm Xocoh Zonnie, and this is Dr. Miguel Ribeiro."

"Dev," the coyote answered, and pointed to his companion.

"Casey. You need something transported?"

"Yeah. The doc and me. But like I said, it would need to be a fast ship."

"Fast ship? You've never heard of the Long Tall Sally?"

"Should I have?"

Dev shook his head before Casey's pride got the better of her. "No, don't worry. She's a Sierra 254 with an original Luxodyne Electra. Not stock, either. Custom-calibrated boost collimators -- quad-coupled Howland intensifier on the plexing assembly."

"She's fast enough for you, is what he means," Casey added.

"If you need to get somewhere in a hurry, Casey's your gal. Nobody knows how to run like a jackal. Why the rush, though?"

"She's a jackal?" Xocoh asked. "You're a coyote? Me, too."

"Oh." Dev leaned back in the booth, snorting. "I see where this is going. We may be reckless, but we're not stupid. Well. Okay, ignore that -- we may be reckless, but we've got limits. What's your story?"

"Spottycat here is an archaeologist. So am I. He handles the theory. I handle the, uh. Application. The practical side. I collect artifacts and find them good, profitable homes."

"You're a treasure hunter. A tomb raider."

"Applied archaeologist. You know about Sjel-Kassar?"

Dev and Casey looked at each other, and shook their heads.

"Capital city of the Hano, an empire that ruled this galaxy forty thousand years ago. It's been lost for forty thousand years, too. We have a map. We're going there."

"Forty thousand years, what's a few more weeks?"

Xocoh gestured to the booth bench on the far side of the pair. When neither objected she ushered Miguel in and then took her own seat, lowering her voice. "Maybe you don't know Sjel-Kassar, but you have to have heard of the Obohruca. The old ghost ship."

Miguel watched Dev's face carefully, appreciating the chance to see two coyotes trying to size each other up. Only a twitch of his whiskers betrayed him. "Rumor was they found it."

"They did."

Dev turned his muzzle towards Casey. "Heard whispers when we put in at Wolfram Station. Somebody was looking to connect with Sybil. Said they had stuff from, uh... Little Yashikura, I think."

"Isn't Yashi with one of the New Families? Obas or something."

"Obas," Xocoh confirmed. "I worked for Yashi when he was freelancing. The Family bankrolled the expedition and they split the profits. They stripped the ship -- Yashi let me have a couple trinkets 'cause he owes me. I did time for him."

It didn't surprise or fluster Dev. "So..."

"One of those 'trinkets' was a map. The map leads to Sjel-Kassar. They didn't know how valuable it was, but it's a big galaxy and somebody's going to find out sooner rather than later."

"Why?" Casey asked.

"It looks like a little piece of glass," Miguel answered. "Anybody who knows anything of the sector's history will realize it was actually a Hanotic tablet, a crystal they used to store information. It's the most complete one I've ever seen -- by itself, it would be worth millions of credits to the right buyer."

"So sell it now and get out good." For a coyote, Dev was making a remarkably practical suggestion. "Don't mess with the New Families."

Xocoh picked up the banner for her species. "Fuck that. The crystal's maybe a few million. Sjel-Kassar would be the biggest find in centuries. You could buy a fucking planet with it. I just need to be the first. But the clock's ticking, because Yashi isn't dumb. The Obas Family didn't take over half the sector by hiring dumb goons."

Casey listened carefully and, ignoring a warning glare from her coyote companion, folded her paws politely and smiled at Xocoh. "What are you proposing?"

"You get us to Sjel-Kassar and you help us collect enough information for Dr. Ribeiro to stake a salvage claim. You get twenty thousand credits now, eighty if we find the planet. And a two percent cut on whatever I make from it."

"Yeah," Dev said. "And a bounty from every cheap merc the Obas Family owns. I don't have to remind you they're allied with the Kai Syndicate, do I? Satari Kai already wants you dead. He doesn't need an excuse."

"Good point. Satari fucked my sister," Casey explained, offhandedly. "I got him back. He doesn't like me."

"This is scarier than that. He's small time compared to the New Families, jackal. You know their fleet, right? They lit up a convoy when Akiri Prime didn't pay their protection -- twenty ships gone, just like that. Their mercs have bigger guns than the fuckin' Star Patrol."

"Who would also be after you, I imagine. Unlicensed trafficking in antiquities is the kind of thing they like meddling in." Casey wasn't wrong to point it out -- one of those minor things Xocoh always glossed over. "Guess that's why your cat has to file the claim."

"Besides, Casey, that planet is a pipe dream. It probably doesn't even exist. I just checked META -- every respectable archaeologist says it's almost certainly legendary. You want us to chase a ghost you found on an artifact the New Families would already kill you for. Even for a coyote, that's rich."

"What's the catch?"

Dev blinked, and shot the jackal a startled look. "What do you mean? Were you listening to me? It's all catches. There's nothing for it to be a catch on."

"Hush." She held up a paw to quiet him, and kept looking at Xocoh. "What's the catch?"

"What he said." But unlike Dev, Xocoh was still grinning a coyote grin. "Angry mercs. Star Patrol. Uncertain odds the planet's real."

"Two percent each?" Casey asked.

"Well, I didn't think you were a couple. Even if you argue like one."

The pilot snickered. "Right. Two percent each. Plus expenses. Fuel, docking fees, wear and tear..."

"Sure."

Casey rubbed her paws together. "Alright. I'm gonna go get the ship ready. Lemme out, Dev." He sighed, and turned in the booth so that she could get by him. "Good boy. Settle up here and meet me back at the ship in an hour, okay? You -- new 'yote -- you need to pay me. Come along."

Xocoh got to her feet with the same kind of bouncy animation, leaving Miguel facing Dev across the scuffed table. "Coyotes," Miguel muttered.

"Hey, I'm a coyote," Dev protested, although his heart wasn't in it. "You don't really think that planet's real, do you?"

"Maybe. How'd you look that up so fast, anyway?"

Dev tapped his right temple. "Got a full-time link to the network. Used to be a runner."

"Then you thought better of it?"

"No, then they put a burn order on my avatar. Casey got me a new one. I still try to be a little risk-averse -- for a coyote."

If Miguel understood META right, burn orders were reserved for the most notorious, most dangerous hackers -- people who wore illegal sets that removed the protective filters between the network and their minds. It gave them incredible power. It also made it possible to scramble their brains, if they got caught.

Maybe you can't really scramble a coyote's brains, Miguel decided. But if Dev warranted a kill order, that was a fairly good sign about what kind of characters he was dealing with. "Casey has to make it up for both of us," the man went on. "Riskwise."

"Apparently. Satari Kai has it out for her?" the jaguar asked. The Syndicate had more influence in other systems, but even on the moons of Sirte the name 'Kai' carried some weight.

"Yeah. Kai had this classic Ferrari racing catamaran. It's literally priceless -- only one left in the galaxy. After all the work to restore the ship, he entered it into a race on Neshoba."

"And she stole it?"

"Yep. My first-ever time manning a defensive turret. Learn on the job, I guess." Dev chuckled: a dark, resigned, knowing chuckle. "Well, you wanted 'fast and irresponsible,' professor. She's the best pilot I've ever seen. And irresponsibility in spades -- she and your girl'll get along just fine."

"Who, Xocoh? Not my girl. But... the other part, yeah: they'll get along. I mean, she's like a bad-decision-making flowchart where every step is 'do it anyway.' And then she does. And... so do I, apparently. Coyotes," he repeated. "There's something about you guys."

"Sure. Who else solves the trolley problem with 'see who it hits and grab the wallets before anybody notices'?"

"Xoc would remember to check the trolley for valuables, too."

"Smart! Tell you what, professor, embrace your inner coyote and look on the bright side."

"The adventure? The excitement? The payout?"

Dev shook his head and pointed to an abandoned glass. "Casey left most of her beer. It's free for the taking."

There was an undeniable, if slightly perverse, logic to his way of thinking. The jaguar pulled the drink across the table and held it up. "To... uh..."

"Living fast and irresponsibly," Dev offered. "Wait, no. I can make that simpler. 'To coyotes.'"

Miguel didn't set his glass back down until there was nothing left.