Adapted
I'm always surprised by how little avian content there is out there; I can't be the only one who finds anthro birds of prey sexy >_<. Anyway, enjoy the sequel and finale to 'Adaptation!' (http://sofurry.com/page/104686/)
// Log Begins //
I woke up that day the same way I had woken up for the last three weeks; with a cute young avian wrapped tight in my wings. He slept so quietly and so peacefully, but I could still feel his every shallow breath as if it was my own. Every once in a while he would stir slightly, pressing himself closer to me and holding my arms against his chest, our feathers rustling together under the soft bedding.
Last night had been busy for us. Goddamnit did the little twink love taking it under his tailfeathers! I could make him cum two or three times before I got off, and sometimes more than that. I hadn't known anyone like that since my staff sergeant back when I was a regular old marine. Dyed blonde, keen mind for logistics, no body hair 'cept for a sweet little treasure trail, and the guy could suck the paint off a starfighter in less than... sorry, sorry. I'm getting off track again, aren't I?
This morning we had woken up at the same time. Laias turned around, a smile on his sleepy face as he leaned forward and rubbed his beak against mine. I returned the gesture, before giving him a small, quick kiss. Not easy to do when you have a big beak and a small tongue, but we've had plenty of practice by now.
Laias kissed me back back, his short tongue rubbing gently against mine. I was struck once more by how much alike we looked, a result of the Adaptation process I had undergone. Of course, it wasn't exactly hard to tell us apart. Laias flew with supernal grace and celerity, while my wings carried me with all the elegance of a cruise missile. He could spot a turtle or bush of berries to eat from two kilometers away, and I could... eat what he shared with me. Laias was meek and deferential to the others, while I had already drawn the ire of the village elders for being so outspoken... and for my peculiar language...
Let's talk about 'fuck'. It really is a great expletive; probably one of my favorite words of all-time. When you are surrounded by a group of space marines ready to kick ass and crack skulls, you use the word fuck like other people might use the *pause*. It's an infinitely flexible word. For example, during my last day in the Milky Way I said the following things:
"Boys and girls, get ready for combat! We are going to fucking annihilate those Haktori! Railguns, tacnukes, and particle cannons only! If any of your fuckers have are holding a weapon that can't blow up a city, you are going to make me very fucking angry!"
"You see that new engineer on deck four?"
"Ho-ly shit! I can't wait to fuck that hot piece of ass!"
"Donovan! How the fuck are you, man? It's been forever! How the fuck are your kids?"
"Fucking great! Suzy just turned four!"
Q.E.D.
I say fuck a lot, and through the magic of memetics everyone in the village had begun to say it too. Thank god no one from First Contact would ever set foot on this planet; I think I knew how that conversation would go:
"Let me get this straight: you have been on this world for less than a month, and you have done the following: exterminated an entire native species with tactical nuclear weapons, disseminated technological and scientific information to your adapted culture in complete violation of human and alien laws, and taught the native peoples to say the word 'fuck'?"
Yeeeeah... that'd go over real well.
We kissed again, a little deeper this time. The bedding around us smelled powerfully of our dried seed.
When I first realized that I was stranded in the middle of a desert on a low-tech, hostile planet, I felt more than a little depressed. But its stuff like this that reminds you: the most important things in life are the simple ones. Food, water, shelter and a feisty lover... it really doesn't take much to live well, does it? Being able to fly- fly!- under my own wingpower was also a hell of a rush. There really is no feeling quite like the freedom of flight. You could just soar for hours if you weren't trying to gain too much height, the world laid bare beneath you. Swooping down on unsuspecting wildlife was also a hell of a rush; I wasn't entirely comfortable with having to find my own critters to eat at first but it actually kinda grows on you after a while. I still wasn't good enough at this point to feed myself, so I did rely on Laias a lot for food. He could make a hell of a turtle soup.
I mean, sure, I would have killed for some air conditioning, a computer and a pizza, but things really weren't all that bad for me. I could think of a lot worse places to end up after a doomsday-weapon fueled teleportation, like, say, the unfathomably empty void between the galaxies. Or inside a star. Of course, no one else in the small village we lived in- except for Laias- knew who I actually was. I still didn't have the foggiest fucking clue how I had ended up in another galaxy, especially given that what had happened violated every physical law that I knew of. I had been steadily feeding them bits and pieces of science and technology, mostly through intermediaries. Aliens or not, it's amazing what a difference a little fertilizer and crop rotation could do for your food supply, heh. Little hints, tiny pushes, a few 'idle' musings in front of the right people... it's easy to disseminate information in a friendly populace. Try doing hearts & minds work when the savages want to kill you; now *there* is a job!
"Commander?" Laias said, a pleasant interruption to my musings. "We should get up soon. The sun is rising."
Damn. He was right, but it wasn't going to be easy. It was so nice to just be able to lie there together, buried in blankets and each other, drifting lazily through the morning. I stroked the soft, fine feathers on my lover's head, and tried to will the sun back over the horizon. Unfortunately, it didn't work.
"Five... nah, ten more minutes?"
"No! Come on! Come on come on come on!" Laias said, trying to pull me up as he popped up from the bedding with a level of energy that was positively absurd. He took off from the yurt with a jump, and soared out towards the rising sun. He did a quick mid-air roll, playfully showing off.
I got up laboriously, stretching and doing a few quick jumping jacks to get myself limber before taking off after him. We were a few hundred feet up; wouldn't be a good idea to fuck up my takeoff. Flying came almost naturally to me after the change, but some of the trickier parts- like taking off without a good jumping point or doing a hard and fast landing- still eluded me. Laias was a pretty good teacher, though. Living with him was doing my survival skills a world of good, and having a lover of the (almost) same orientation was doing him a lot of good as well. There are only a thousand-odd birds in this village; poor guy didn't even know there were others like him. I'd bet money that there *were* more like him, but none of them had confidence to admit it. Laias was always deferential and soft-spoken, but honest and sincere almost to a fault. It was another thing about him I really loved. We didn't have many problems with the others.
Ah, there was this one time though. Some big bird with a small brain walked in on us and there was a bit of a fracas. Had the most disgusted look on his face when he saw us together. I asked him what his fuckin' problem was, and here's what he said:
"Males cannot love other males. That is a fact." He said, a scowl on his face.
What did I do? I'd like to say that I calmly and rationally dazzled him with my command of philosophy and made him see the inherent legitimacy and beauty of same-sex love. Actually, the first thing I did was give him a right hook to his beak.
And, uh, well... after that he beat the shit out of me. I mean, yeah, I had unarmed combat training, but I had *human* training. Besides, being 'unarmed' in powered armor meant being able to punch holes in nano-forged starsteel with millisecond reflexes, and required a very rigorous, unique and specialized type of education. Oh, by the way? Beaks are hard as hell; I think I hurt my arm more than I hurt him. Ugh... this is going to sound pretty fucking pathetic, but after leaving me a broken wreck on the dusty desert floor, the bastard actually helped me up. He said that if I was willing to fight for my love, then it must have been real after all. Motherfucker gave me a pat on the back.
The biggest flaw in type one species is what our scientists like to call 'self-perspective centrism'. This is a fancy way of saying 'Well, this is the way that *I* see it...'. Surely the sun orbits the planet; we can see it for ourselves! Surely our god(s) are the only ones that exist, that's what our holy book / priests / poetry / songs / psychotropic hallucinogens tell us! _We are the best of the , because we have the greenest scales / longest tentacles / massive cocks! _Boy do things like quantum mechanics and special relativity fuck with their minds! I mean, it's pretty funny to consider that some of these primitives discriminate based on something as stupid as sexual orientation, instead of something like intelligence- a form of discrimination which I *wholeheartedly* support. You do not want a stupid motherfucker watching your back when you're fighting ten to one in the dead void of space, trust me.
Fuck it. So I got my ass kicked by a burly alien; he recognized Laias and I as genuine lovers. As any soldier will tell you, winning the war is more important than fucking up your enemy- as satisfying as that might be. Christ though, some of these aliens! How could you get so hung up on something as simple as liking to bang men? I didn't even bother to explain that I was, in fact, a bisexual to him. I'd bet my fuckin' commission that at least half the guys & gals in the deep space fleet were the same way. It can get kinda lonely on those ships, if you know what I mean. And, I just really don't understand how anyone could fail to appreciate the sublime beauty of having a tight little cunt to thrust into while a hot, thick dick works over your p-spot, but fuck it. It's their loss!
I actually had eyes on some of those sleek, feathered women, but two things kept me from making any moves in that direction. First and foremost, contraceptive technology for the eagle-people hadn't progressed much beyond praying really hard. I knew that I had learned a lot about their culture since I had first arrived, but raising a *human* baby felt way beyond my parenting skills, let alone an alien one. Secondly, I was a taken man. Laias and I were in a pretty committed relationship, and gay or not the birds did not look kindly upon stepping outside those sorts of bonds. 'Sides, do you know how often I get the chance to have a committed relationship with someone? Last time I did I was in high school, for fuck's stake. I had practically memorized *The Talk* that I had to give before getting into bed. When Admiral so-and-so from the Special Operations command tells you to go save the space orphans, it doesn't matter if you're balls deep in smoking hot pussy or having a romantic, star-lit dinner, your ass is on the way to save those fuckin' orphans. No exceptions!
What did you say? Oh yeah; you want to know what happened! We'll, I guess I better get to it.
So there I was, eking out existence among these primitive, superstitious aliens. It wasn't a fucking fairytale scenario by any stretch of the imagination- do you have any idea how much work foraging and gathering takes? The birds couldn't support themselves with sand-choked crops alone- but you know what? I was pretty happy.
Then, one day, we had a little problem...
That day, aliens landed in the middle of our village. Aliens.
Aliens who noticed the supernova-scale energy pulse of my teleportation. Aliens who wanted to scour the planet for any technology they could scavenge. Space-faring, slime-covered vultures. Fucking Type Two aliens.
What? Yeah, I appreciate the irony of me- an alien- bitching about *other* aliens on this planet, but Type Two's are a nasty can of worms.
The only thing worse than a Type One civilization- i.e. ignorant savages- is a Type Two. Type Two's have developed just enough to be dangerous to themselves and others, but not enough to know how little they *actually* know about the universe- or control themselves. Controlled fusion and nanotech are the usual culprits; the type of technology that looks like magic to the unknowing. Most of them go off on an unholy spree of conquest and extermination, completely drunk on their own power... until they inevitably collide against someone bigger and badder than themselves (or, sometimes, kill each other off). Hell, we were guilty of a little of this ourselves, although by most objective measures humans had been better behaved than most. I guess we got most of the raping and pillaging out of our systems before we left old Sol.
These aliens would be considered beneath the notice of most Type Three civilizations, a bunch of petulant and unruly children to be shepherded or disciplined until they stopped acting up. The technological gulf between a Type Two and a Type Three is almost unthinkably big. No superluminal flight, no knowledge of subquark matter, no gravity manipulation technology, to name a few things. But to a Type One, like the eagles? They looked like gods.
I remember when they first landed. Oh yeah, no joking. No transporters, they actually had to *land* on the surface. That was my first clue we were dealing with pretentious intergalactic hicks. The first motherfucker to land on the planet took the tack that I adamantly refused to and declared himself (Itself? Herself? They had like five genders, I don't know) a god.
I hear the alien clear his throat through the speakers on his suit, and he began speaking. "My subjects, it is I! The anointed savior!" To emphasize his point, he picked up a nearby boulder and crushed it.
Everyone around Laias and I erupted in cheers. We did not.
This was bad fuckin' business. If they could speak the language and they knew the religion but we hadn't heard or seen from anyone who had met them... that meant they had probably taken a few of our people onto their ships and made them talk in a very not-nice manner.
"He is no god, no prophet. He just has a suit of armor, like yours..." Laias whispered to me, looking very unhappy. Laias had seen me operate my battlesuit, and while doubtlessly an impressive sight it wasn't the work of any sort of god.
"No! Not like mine!" I growled back, pissed off. "That motherfucker is wearing a piece of shit antique compared to my battlesuit."
"But it is functional." 'And therein lies the rub' was left unsaid.
The alien started speaking again, gently but firmly pushing away the people who tried to hug him or rub his feet. "I have come to you, my chosen people! I come to seek your aid! I have lost an artifact of great importance! It is somewhere to the south, near where I had slain the terrible anathema-dragons."
Have you ever been so angry you feel like you're giving yourself a brain aneurism? Until that moment, I sure hadn't. I clenched my beak together and felt my anger boil with the fury of a thousand dying stars. If I could have torn the smug bastard apart with my bare hands, I would have done it right then and there. This motherfucker not only had the chutzpa to claim he had killed the things *I* did, he was going to steal my motherfucking armor! And there wasn't a goddamn thing I could do about it!
Don't worry, it gets worse.
Laias was trying to keep me from flying into an impotent rage when the village chief / priest approached the alien.
"If you truly are the anointed savior and not a demon, then you must carry with you the spear of light. Show this and your true nature will be proven." The chief said, stoic. "And... why would you destroy the promised land? Why?"
I saw the alien look confused for a second, and then mumble out a response about it not being the 'true' promised land. Not a bad save, I guess. The real reason the wellspring of life that the eagles called 'the promised land' was now a scorched, lifeless crater was because I detonated about fifty kilotons of explosives inside it, of course. Those monsters were really goddamn tough; you can make a hell of a big skeletal structure when you're operating in a low gravity environment...
"As for the spear of light," it laughed, drunk with its own power, "behold!"
The sky above us lit up with a column of coherent, iridescent light. A energy beam sliced its way through the dusty sky and carved through a hill a few klicks distant. There was no way this alien's shitsuit was generating that sort of energy; it had to be coming from his/her/its ship.
After that the whole goddamn village went throwing themselves on the ground to worship the fuckin' thing. The most humiliating part was having to join them on the ground, lest the alien grow suspicious. After that the smug bastard got cocky. A few dozen of his comrades came out of the ship and gave him short bows, then they all started talking in their native tongue.
I had kept my communicator. It was the only thing I had on me that had its own power supply; even now it was only down about a third its maximum charge. A standard field communicator was part of everyone's emergency kit; a lightweight silvery square that fit easily onto a necklace next to your dogtags and ration pills. It blended in pretty well with the native's jewelry, too; as long as I was careful the slugs wouldn't notice that I was listening to their words with more than just idle curiosity. But, ugh, that language of theirs was fucking awful. It was like someone made an accordion out of a bag of lard and peanut butter, and then hit it over and over again with baseball bats. Squish squish glorp thpthhhh... oh you don't say?
The first thing it translated? Well, to be honest, they were discussing lunch or someshit, but the first *interesting thing* it translated?
Here is what it translated from their slobbering, mud-vagina tongue: "Find the artifact. Get one hundred specimens for the collection, then kill the rest." And then something about the glory of their hegemony, the emperor was counting on them, blah blah blah, not exactly data-rich. The point was this: my adopted species and I were utterly, thoroughly fucked. And not in the good way.
There's an ancient bit of macabre human wisdom that comes to mind in times like these: 'the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must'. Being a member of the latter group wasn't very fun.
What? Are you wondering why I didn't try and fight the slugs? Jesus fuckin' christ, be reasonable. I'm a soldier, not a superhero. Yes, true, odds were good my railgun was still functional. Odds were also good that trying to fire it without a suit of powered armor equipped with gravitic stabilizers would probably turn me into a cloud of bloody feathers. I was out of tacnukes and even if I had any left, they had a minimum safe distance measured in kilometers without shielding.
I'm pretty sure that if my armor still had power and a functioning transporter I could killed them all, probably. Without gravitic shielding, a piece of metal going at relativistic speeds will ruin the shit of anything less dense than a neutron star, and nothing they threw at me was going to connect through my shields or telelocation field. Ah, now there was a fantasy to indulge in. Imagining all those aliens on the surface being vaporized, all those above it falling to a fiery, screaming death made me smile.
But as good as those fantasies were, they weren't exactly helping the situation... not that anything I did could. I did the only thing I could do, which was stall and wait for a miracle. I'm going to spare you all of the details of the week and a half that followed their landing, but the gist of it was that the aliens had everyone else so smitten about their 'returned savior' that they were doing most of the searching for them. Luckily, it turns out that I had parked my armor underneath a nice, rich natural uranium deposit; easy to look through if you have neutrino-based scanners or more sophisticated tech; not so easy for our less developed alien oppressors. Laias and I did our best to throw them off the track by volunteering to search that area ourselves. I told him everything I knew and everything I suspected about our visitors and the case was clear: once they got what they wanted, they were going to do something very bad. So we did our best to throw them off the scent of human technology and hoped for the best...
And then, one evening when the haze in the sky was light and the stars shone clear, we had our little miracle. My memory of this part is pretty vivid:
There was a meeting in the village's biggest building, the communal meal hall / temple. The aliens were in the middle of expressing their displeasure with our fruitless searching, when suddenly the sky above us starts to glow indigo, and we hear the crackle of frying ozone. My communicator was picking up all sorts of crazy traffic, but I didn't dare eavesdrop right in front of them. Something was lighting up the sky above us; it looked like the alien ship was unloading some serious firepower on an unseen target.
And then said ship abruptly disappeared in the white-red glow of liberated protons. Oh boy; our Type Two alien friends just picked a fight with someone packing positron cannons? Good night, motherfuckers!
I glanced down at the communicator while they were busy. What the...
It was picking up a friendly signal.
*New Contact(s) Identified!*
Contact [1 / 45] - Designation: Keter One
Signal Strength: Maximum
Distance: 1.1 M Kilometers
UENFS-D-85725 Vengeance-_Class - '_Charles Upham'.
Holy mother of god.
The Vengeance-_class dreadnaught, _Charles Upham. The flagship of the United Earth Naval Forces Second Fleet... which meant that the other 44 contacts were likely the Second Fleet itself. It had to be the task force assembled to fight the Haktori! But how in the name of sweet fuck had they followed me here!?
Well, the jig was up for the slugs. They might not have known it yet, but they were in way over their eyestalks on this one. There was a saying most aliens had about us humans: be careful of a species that developed nuclear weapons before space travel. Beneath the rhetoric about peace-and-understanding and the smiles-and-sunshine ambassadors and First Contact people, there were men like me... and ships like the _Charles Upham. _The Haktori had discovered to their eternal regret that human patience and kindness had very clear and definite limits to it.
The slugs on the ground were still staring up at the remains of their warship with a look of shock and horror that easily bridged the vast gulf between our species. I knew that look well; it was one of my favorite things to give to a recalcitrant bunch of barbarians. The time to act was right-fuckin'-now, before any of them came to their senses.
I opened a priority com channel. "This is Commander James M. Worthington of the UENF Special Operations Command, Fifth Company! Requesting immediate assistance!"
My communicator suddenly lit up with incoming data; a dispatcher's voice came from the other side. "Commander Worthington? I'm getting a non-standard readout from your biometrics. You're going to need to..."
"Fuck the procedure, we don't have time! I need armor on the ground immediately!"
The aliens on the ground were beginning to sweep their weapons over the assembled villagers with uncertainty. What were they thinking? When you are scared and angry and all you have are big guns, what do you do..? The eagles sensed something was very wrong with their false gods...
"Uh, Commander, we need to confirm your ID first since..."
"Do it! I have multiple hostiles about to attack a completely indefensible position full of civilians; I need a Special Forces team here now!"
"...you have a beak."
"And I'm going to use it to peck out your fucking eyes if I don't see a platoon before mine in fifteen seconds! Who the fuck are you!? Do the words 'direct order' mean a fucking thing to you, son?" By now I was screaming in my best 'my pay grade is twice yours' voice. It must have been quite a sight for the other villagers, watching me yell at a glowing piece of metal and glass at the top of my lungs in an alien language. A few of the invaders gave me quizzical looks, realization beginning to dawn on them...
Whatever they might have though, my yelling had gotten through to Command. A few seconds after the channel closed, the telltale shimmering of teleportation warped the air in front of me. Then, there was a harsh crack of displaced air announcing the arrival of the UENF's best. There is nothing in this universe more beautiful than a full Special Forces platoon, armor glowing with active shields and bristling with deadly weapons. As an added bonus, I even saw a few scattered units of Ereni armor among the human commandos. God bless those fuckin' mantis-wolf-people!
One of the slugs made the tragic mistake of trying to shoot at one of my armored comrades, and earned himself a barrage of metal slivers and charged-particle beams for his trouble. If it survived, it was only in the life-after-death religious sense. The backblast of my own team's railguns sent me flying back a good six or seven meters, despite my distance from the fight. I crouched as low as I could and folded my wings down to minimize my surface area, but even then it was like trying to take cover against a tornado. I lost about a fifth of my smaller feathers and one or two of the big flight-sustaining ones from the shockwaves.
And then there was some return fire from the other aliens, and things got a little dicey. They fired some sort of energy weapon I didn't recognize at one of my comrades and the reflective shielding on their battlesuit made it ricochet right on top of my position. The explosion was deafening, and flash-fried most of my backfeathers. The shock of it was incredible; I mean, it wasn't even that big of an explosion, but there is a really big difference between fighting and being a helpless, unarmored passive observer in a fight. I almost wanted to laugh; I had always been the rescuer- never the rescued- before.
My head cleared a bit from the explosion-induced disorientation, and I was struck by a huge surge of pain from my right arm.
Then I noticed that my arm was missing.
There was a blood-dampened hole in the ground where it used to be. Huge gouts of bright-blood were flowing freely from the stump, matting down my feathers and darkening the sand beneath. I hadn't even fucking noticed! I didn't even have time to get angry or yell something incoherent before passing out from the blood loss.
When I woke up, it was inside a UENF field hospital set up on the ground. The sweet, delicious smell of processed air and the comforting hum of electricity, the pale glow of holographic monitors and the sterile, antiseptic smell of hospital greeted me like old friends. Processed air is a lot like good, clean water: when you are really thirsty it has a mildly sweet taste to it, y'know? I don't know if it's cause I grew up in an orbital that had nothing but processed air or because I was used to breathing the dusty, sand-clogged air of this planet, but breathing that stuff in again was just heavenly.
I had been the only friendly casualty of the entire fight. Not that anyone who visited me was so uncouth to point this fact out to me, but since I was the only one in the med bay it was readily apparent. I could feel my new arm had already grown back in through the cast. A few of the doctors came over to warn me about 'overexertion' or something stupid, but I waved them off and got out of bed. Or rather, tried to. I fell flat on my face, giving myself a bloody nose. For some reason, my tailfeathers weren't working right. Had they been injured too?
I blinked a few times, and noticed that there was no longer a beak in my field of view, just an ordinary nose. More to the point, I noticed that I no longer had any wings or feathers of any kind, nor talons or claws. I couldn't even feel the heightened reflexes or mental celerity of my old special ops bodyware. The doctors had reverted me back to bog-standard human. For some reason, being 'normal' was one of the weirdest feelings I'd ever experienced.
Captain- sorry, Vice-Admiral Ekerton came to visit me first, along with a small squad of hanger-ons and guards. Turns out, he had been the captain in charge of the Wrathbringer when it began its seemingly ill-fated mission. Dr. Hartman was with him, along with a few of the Ereni delegation. They stood back from me nervously, as if looking at a ghost.
Dr. Hartman gave me a warm hug, her perky and perfect breasts rubbing against my chin stubble ever-so slightly. Not a bad way to be reintroduced to civilization.
"I didn't expect to see you again, marine!" She said, patting me on the shoulder.
"Your bomb didn't kill me; I expected more from you, doctor!" I said to her, laughing. "What the fuck happened?"
"The graviton cascade bomb... it, uh... well, we don't know yet, to be honest. We are still trying to figure out what it did or might not have done. Most of the physics models we use sort of break down when you create objects that have, uh, negative mass. The long and the short of it is that we accidentally tore a hole in the continuity of the universe. We sent some probes through and they all came back just fine, so the bigwigs on Earth decided to send an expeditionary force though and see what the other side was like. But this... this is amazing! An entirely new galaxy!" Dr. Hartman said, after a burst of nearly-mad laughter.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone as excited as Chelsea Hartman gets when she was has a sciencegasm. Seriously! I had rocked her like a fuckin' hurricane when we were onboard the Wrathbringer together, and even mid-coitus I hadn't seen her this aroused. She started to say something about anti-virtual-Higgs bosons and the Ereni started arguing with her vociferously about their own theories. The only thing I could understand about the entire conversation was that nobody agreed.
The Ereni were probably our closest allies in the clusterfuck we call intra-galactic politics. Best description I could give you would be a big furry praying mantis with a hooked three-piece beak and a prehensile tail. Nice people, by and large; they sometimes treated us like their kid brother, but it's understandable given that they've been in space since before we put a flag on our moon. Most of the pseudo-AI's in common use by our military and civilian sectors are Ereni in design, as are most of our hyperspace drives and terraformers. In return, we trade them human media, biotech and weapons. It made a whole lot of sense for Earth to request their assistance with exploring the tear in the universe we accidentally made. I would have given anything to have been at that meeting. I could just imagine a bunch of shocked Ereni looking upon a sheepish human ambassador going: 'you did *what* now!?'
By the look of it, they were going to be arguing with Dr. Hartman for a while.
Admiral Ekerton approached me, neatly stepping between the arguing scientists. "Well?" The Admiral said, plainly. He was a very unassuming man for such a right-clever badass. His uniform looked like he had taken a sand-bath from the harsh planetary atmosphere, but unlike most brass I'd met he didn't look like he cared one bit.
"Uh... Commander James M. Worthington, reporting for duty sir!" I said to him. It felt good to finally talk to another soldier.
The Admiral gave me a dry smile. "Nice work you and I did back on Haktor."
"Thank you , sir!"
"We really taught them a lesson, didn't we?"
"Yes we did, sir!"
"And you survived that weapon."
"Appears I did, sir."
He gave another dry laugh. "What do you suppose the odds of that are?"
"Less than one fifth of one percent!" Dr. Hartman chimed in. One of the Ereni said it was more like 17.5% given my proximity to the weapon- then his colleague took issue with that assertion and said it was astronomically unlikely anything larger than a single of my molecules could have survived- and they all started arguing again.
"That was not necessary, Dr. Hartman." Admiral Ekerton said curtly. "Commander, if you're still interested in doing some work for the UENF, I think we can get you back to active duty..."
"Sir! Yes sir!"
"That's the spirit, soldier. It will be good to have you back on the..."
The Admiral was interrupted by a commotion from near the entrance to the hospital. God, whoever they were, they sure were agitated.
Ah, wait. It was Laias!
"Friend of yours?" The Admiral asked.
"Yes sir!" I said, hugging him as he jumped onto my bed.
"Commander!" Laias said, holding me so tightly against his chest-feathers I couldn't see. "You're okay! You're... fleshy again? Did they have to change you back to heal you? What medicine did they use? Is this what 'nano' medicine can do? Does it hurt?"
"Well, take some time with your goodbyes, Commander." The Admiral said, smiling at me. "You've got at least another two weeks of rest, on account of being declared KIA."
"Goodbyes?" Laias said, confused. "Are... are you leaving, Commander?"
Oh fuck. Suddenly I could feel the hoorah leaving me. "I might be. They need me..."
"I... I see... I understand. You need to get back to your own people; it is not right for you to be stranded with us... primitives... any longer..." He said, backing up slowly. He suddenly seemed to noticed the rest of the alien delegation in the room; he looked intimidated.
"Hey, wait; don't go!" I said to him. "I've really had a good time with you Laias, and..."
Laias darted off, crying.
At least it made Dr. Hartman and the Ereni stop arguing for a second.
The Admiral gave me a Look. It was awfully hard to tell what the man was thinking, but he frowned a little bit. I could see the glimmer of something in those distant, weary eyes.
"How long you been with the Navy, commander?"
"Marine Special Forces? Twenty-two, sir. Eight with the normal Marines before that, and three with the Army before that."
"Long time to be fighting."
"Yes, sir." I said, wearily. Funny. It hadn't felt that long, until I had a break from it.
"Fifty three here." Admiral Ekerton said, sighing. "Wears on you, doesn't it?"
"Yes sir."
"Do you like this planet, Commander?"
"Not really, sir."
"Well, do you like your companion?"
"Yes sir. Very much so."
"I'll tell you what, Commander. You've done some damn fine work; I'm going to see what I can do for you." His hand clasped my shoulder tightly.
He didn't say anything else after that; as you can gather the Admiral isn't a loquacious man. He told me to get some rest, and he'd take care of the rest.
Couple hours later after everyone else had visited and left, a man walks in to see me. He had a wispy white beard and a half-bald head; he was a little on the porky side and he was wearing a pair of faded jeans, a tie-dyed t-shirt, and a rebreather. Before I could so much as properly gawk at his appearance, he stuck out his hand and shook my left in a vigorous but friendly gesture.
"You are Commander Worthington, UENF Special Operation Command, correct?" He asked, a hint of reproach in his voice. His voice had this strange, folksy twang to it.
"Yeah, that's me. Pretty much." I said, unsure of how things were going to go. This guy might have on a million-watt smile but it was more than apparent he felt the same way about me.
"Michael Scarberg, First Contact; good to finally meet you! Feel free to call me Mike, by the by. Have time to talk?"
"Guess so." I said, reluctantly. Last time I tried to sneak out of my bed the doctor damn near tackled me. I was really beginning to miss having military grade medical implants...
"My staff and I are going to be working with the natives here as the UENF's liaison. Command wants to use this planet as a staging area for exploring the galaxy, and we'll be squaring things away with the natives while the logistics get settled. Any information you can give us on native culture or society would be extremely useful..."
"Well, I think after that little light show the fleet put on all we're all going to be in their good graces." I said, giving a short chuckle. "I'd be glad to help you out."
"Yes, of course." He said, smiling. Why was that smile so unsettling? "Just one little question before you brief me. Could you tell me why the village chief wished me a 'good fucking night' when I left our meeting?"
Ah, fuck.
Our talk actually didn't go all that badly, all things considered. I think my earlier prejudice against First Contact might have been misplaced; Scarberg was a one tough motherfucker. I wouldn't call him a 'psychopath', but only because the word fell too far short of describing the complexities of the man. We must have talked for hours, and my sense of awed horror only kept growing. He was telling me about the last planet he had visited, some horrible death world where the only naturally occurring weather was *volcanism*. Apparently they greeted ambassadors to their world by trying to kill them. If they survived, they were worthy of staying.
"...when I had tea with the king, my medical implants detected and neutralized fourteen different kinds of poisons, which of course told me how much they respected us. If they thought we weren't worth talking to, it would have only been two or three mild ones, not a wicked cocktail of cytotoxic chemicals. As soon as I got back to our embassy I had to throw up for four straight minutes!" He said. He smiled at me like a neighbor asking if I wanted some of his freshly baked pie.
"I killed over a hundred of their intelligence agents during my stay and they loved me for it. Weird species!" He slapped me on the knee as he laughed. "They even tried to attack my secretary! Had to strangle that assassin with my tie, no foolin'."
"That's... interesting." I said, forcing myself to smile.
"It was a tragic and regrettable loss of life, of course." He said, a genuine look of sadness immediately flashing upon his face. I did my best to emulate it. "Especially their defense minister. Poor soul; lord only knows how he survived all those cuts long enough to bleed out." He shook his head mournfully. Was that a tear on his cheek? Holy fuck.
"But really," he said, continuing. "The situation here is a hundred-percent different. These avian folk are friendly; they have been quite appreciative of our offer of medical assistance and terraforming for their world. Good people here, such wonderful people..."
"Oh yes; they are great, Mr. Scarberg! They have a lot of potential!" I agreed enthusiastically.
"Please, call me Mike. I can't wait to introduce you to the rest of my... oh! Where are my manners? Can I offer you some orange juice? Tea? Coke?" He asked, tie swinging back and forth as his eyes searched for the drink tray. His tie was a garishly bright affair that reminded me of my old high school guidance counselor, but I had a feeling that Mr. Abernathy didn't have monowire stitched into his neckpieces.
"Black coffee?" I asked.
Scarberg poured me a cup of coffee from his carafe. If there was one thing I missed living on this dusty rock, it was the bitter, acrid tang of navy-issue coffee. The carafe belonged to the First Contact man; it was a misshapen clay container decorated with child-like drawings of smiling cats. 'To Uncle Mike' was scrawled on the side in bright red letters. The cup curved in the style of a native piece, designed for easy use with a beak. Have to give it to the man, he was detail-oriented.
"But yes, the natives here are quite extraordinary! And you know so much about them! It's good to know that even a marine such as yourself has a keen mind for diplomacy and observation. It isn't easy, I know; you would be surprised how many issues come up in First Contact business. The folks here are still tryin' to come to terms with us funny-lookin' aliens even existing, on account of the fact they are Type Ones. So I was wondering- if it's not too much to ask- if you'd like to join my team. What's your take, Commander?"
"That is a swell idea, Mike!" I agreed. If Michael-fucking-Scarberg told me that the best way to build a starship was with balsa wood and cheese I would have agreed with him, but suddenly I understood what the Admiral had meant by 'take care of' me. He was going to give me a cushy on-world post so that I could stay with Laias?
My mouth felt dry and cottony; it was like a dream. I was finally going to get my hard-earned rest.
"But... there is one thing I need for you to do, Mike..." I started to say to him, conspiratorially. He eagerly leaned in to listen.
I walked my way back through the village, greeted like a returning hero by the eagles. My role in the battle had been making a phone call and then getting my arm blown off, but what the hell. Anyone who tells you an easy victory isn't satisfying has never been in combat before. I accepted their overdone praise with awkward thanks, but didn't stop for a second.
I made my way to the cliffside where Laias had his yurt. No transporters, no thrust jets, no gravitic manipulation; I had nothing but my own two hands to climb up with. Somehow, it felt like the right thing to do.
By the time I reached the top and had almost fallen twice I realized how incredibly idiotic I had just been, but what the hell. Love is a mysterious thing. I heaved myself over the top of the cliff and slowly crawled my way towards the yurt's entrance, collapsing inside. I was covered in sweat and my the clear casing of my rebreather was fogging up from my hot and heavy breathing, but I had done it.
"Commander?" Laias said, practically falling over himself to help me up.
"Hey." I said between deep breaths. "Was in the neighborhood. Wanted to say hi."
I looked up, my eyes meeting his. He had definitely been crying. "Oh... hi."
"And that I'm staying." I said, grinning.
"Commander!" He joyously shouted, burying me in his wings, giving me hot and hard beak-kisses. He was still crying, though. "Oh no, no, no! No, don't do this; it isn't right. You don't belong on this world; you belong in space with your people, and I belong down here with mine..."
"I don't fucking care. The rest of the UENF can save the space orphans for once; I want to be with you." I said, holding him close and stroking his downy chest feathers. "They are going to make me an ambassador. Can you believe that?"
"You? An ambassador?" Laias tried to suppress his laugh, but couldn't. Neither could I.
"Yeah, shut up, I know!" I said, playfully. We both knew that tact was not my strong suit. "But I'm going to be working with your leaders on all sorts of stuff, from cultural relations to terraforming..."
"Terra-forming? You told me of that earlier; they are going to make our planet better?" Laias said, excited.
"Only a few parts of it. We don't want to upset the natural ecology too much, but yes." I said. The eagles were living a subsistence lifestyle; they didn't know how important it would be to protect their environment. I mean, if we fucked it up you could always fix it with more technology, but that type of work is hard and expensive as hell. Do you have any idea how much time it takes to recreate extinct species?
"Well, I can't wait!" Laias said, stroking my back with his feathered arms. "Oh, Commander! I didn't want to lose you. I don't care if you are fleshy and wingless, I still love you."
"Who said I'm going to stay like this?" I said to him, tearing off my breathing mask and kissing his feathered neck softly. The outside was dusty, but the deeper my tongue probed through his feathers, the closer they go to his sweet and natural flavors. As I did so, I injected the Adaptive nanites that I had gotten from Scarberg into my thigh, letting them get to work.
"What do you mean?" He said, before his sharp eyes spotted the med-injector I tried to hide back inside my pocket. "You are changing yourself back!?"
"Yep." I said to him pulling him into another deep kiss. The only thing I was going to really miss about being human was being able to wrap my lips around his beak and make his tongue dance. It was a small price to pay to be able to fly.
Say what you will about Scarberg, he kept his side of the deal. Feathers started to spread their way across my entire body with a rapidity that put my armor's Adaptation system to shame. Laias held me upright as my legs changed and talons burst from my feet, he nuzzled me as my wings and tailfeathers slowly regrew. When the change made its way up to my head, he pressed his hard beak against my mouth, and kissed me as it shifted into a hard, curved beak as well.
My wings folded back against me like old friends, and my tailfeathers and talons remembered exactly how to hold up my light but ornate body. Laias was still marveling at the transformation; I could hear his heart beating excitedly in his chest as he witnessed my change, and my sharp eyes could pick up the stirring in his loincloth-covered sheath.
"F-for me?" He asked, still trying to compose himself.
"For us." I said, stroking his shoulders affectionately. Laias tore off his loincloth like it was on fire, and then pulled me onto his- our- bedding with a great, happy laugh. We collapsed onto it together, nuzzling and caressing each other all over our sleek and feathered bodies.
"How is your arm?" He asked suddenly, remembering my injury. "You didn't even flinch when you lost it! Has that happened to you before?"
"Oh yeah. I've actually lost my right arm like four times. It tickles like you wouldn't believe when they grow a new one on you." I said, tickling him under his armpits playfully to emphasize my point.
"Stop, stop! That tickles!" He said, squirming in my arms playfully. He tickled me back under the wings, the one place on my body where I was still ticklish myself. Before long, he had me rolling on the floor, trying to escape from his fiendishly dexterous claws. When he had me where he wanted me, he leaned his face in closer, to again rub his beak against mine while his claws worked their way to my sheath. It only took him a few deft strokes of his claws to get me hard; the bird was a fucking master with those things.
He backed himself up in my arms, folding his wings tight against his chest and raising his tailfeathers. I could feel him press himself insistently against my hardening raptorhood, slick gobs of precum decorating his bottom as his tight hole searched for my cock. I wasn't in any mood to tease like I usually would; I held myself steady as he slid his tight tailhole down on my member. We worked together, talons and hips and arms and wings meeting together. From behind him, I could feel his every shuddering breath, every soft cry as I made sweet love to him. We sank deeper into the blankets, pillows and cloth-scraps that made up our bedding, letting them cover our bodies as we writhed together. His straight and strong tailfeathers teased my stomach as I grinded tightly against him, and he squeezed his trained anal muscles tightly around my cock, trying to milk my seed from it even faster.
My claw found its way around to his front, rubbing the tip of his pre-slickened member gently. The contact made him moan out softly and shudder beneath me, a feeling that resonated in my own body as I felt it. I drove my thrusts in quicker and held them longer, grinding my ridged member against his full prostate. As I filled his anal passage up with my preseed, our motions became quicker and easier but no less pleasurable.
I twisted Laias around, now beak-to-beak with him and I drove into his tight, feathered ass. There was a look of absolute, rapturous bliss on his avian face, the look of love on it so pure and welcome that I wondered what I did to deserve it. I moved down closer to him, carefully licking the tears from his face as he cried with happiness and whispering soft promises into his feather-covered ears. We rubbed our beaks together, and I could feel his climax start to build as his internal muscles started to shake around my hot, thick raptormeat. He suddenly cried out, clenching tightly around me as he came, a warm trickle of cum spreading out from our tightly hugging bodies and into our crotchfeathers. I couldn't possibly have held back, his scrunched eyes and moans practically begging me to seed him.
And I came. I came into him, my hot cum filling him up and dripping out around his tailfeathers. Laias cried and mewled and I shook with tears and laughter of my own, our happiness transcending the physical aspects of the moment.
We held each other together like that for a very long time, my member still buried inside him. We did nothing but whisper softly to each other and kiss.
"I love you, Commander." He said. His words were plain but utterly sincere.
I looked into his big, sharp, teary eyes and knew that I loved him, too.
// Log Ends //
Epilogue
1 Month Later...
FROM: Michael F. Scarberg, UENF First Contact
TO: Commander James M. Worthington, UENF Special Forces (Retired)
RE: Your Request...
MSG BODY:
Commander Worthington,
First of all, let me just say what a fine job you have been doing on the planet. If I knew that the natives would take so well to an ambassador with feathers, I would have changed some of my own boys and girls into birds before we even set foot on the planet! It has pleased me immeasurably to see how well they have taken to the unusual circumstances they faced with our arrival, circumstances they have adapted to with remarkable equanimity and indulgence.
I'm sad to say that I was unable to process your request to legally change your first name to 'Commander', however. It seems that attempting to do so would make the bureaucrats and computer systems that process personnel records throw a gasket or some such business. I'm afraid that until I can persuade them otherwise- and rest assured friend, I will!- you will have to settle on using it as an informal nickname.
Best regards,
Mike ;-)