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Action! Adventure! Space things! Coyotes getting themselves involved in interstellar relations! It's some good-natured sci-fi smut, because hey, it's Friday :D

In this rough sequel to The Trouble With Coyotes, Madison May stumbles across new information related to the long-lost Hano Empire and their terrifying superweapon. What will it take to save the day? A whole damn lot of cooperation, that's what. Many thanks to Spudz for helping me to make this mostly work, and to all of your support in keeping me writing :)

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

_Tales of the Dark Horse _by ** Rob Baird** S3E3, "Prophecies, Part I"

---

Ayenni described the alien as belonging to one of the most aggressive trading empires in the sector. Given that she was a local herself, and they were quite far from the Terran Confederation, the crew of the Star Patrol cruiser Dark Horse were obliged to agree.

The alien, Pol, represented--by his own account, anyway--a large business concern, and had demonstrated a willingness to offer them the finest this region of space has to offer. Most of it was worthless trinkets, and Commander Maddy wasn't impressed by the wares.

This visibly irritated Pol, although he was not particularly imposing and the Terrans ignored him. A furless biped, looking something like a chimpanzee with subtler features, the alien lacked much in the way of musculature or fangs. His arms were crossed, and his clawless fingers drummed at the sleeves of his shirt. "I'm waiting," he reminded them.

"I'm going through the list of what you have to offer," Madison said, stalling for time. "But most of it won't be compatible with our systems. The attenuating crystals you were talking about, for instance... I'd love to use them, but we can't. Right, Dave?"

Lieutenant Commander Bradley nodded. "Right. But, maybe we're thinking about this the wrong way. Pol, you said your trading company has routes that begin three hundred light years from here. You must have star charts, right? Astronomical data, surveys..."

Pol kept his arms crossed. "Do you think just because it's information, instead of goods, that I'd give it to you any more cheaply? The Ikorial Trading Company didn't get where it was today by selling out the secret of our routes. If anything, it's more valuable than any old crystals."

"I wouldn't try to cheat you," Madison said; the akita felt fairly certain that the alien considered that privilege entirely his own, and she knew she'd be outmatched. "It's not about the routes. We're explorers. We want to seek out new life--find new stars and things like that. You could even remove the navigation data if you wanted."

"Right," Dave said a second time. "But the FTL plots are different than the ones we use, anyway." He was starting to get an idea: "When we met you at your ship, it looked like a cavitating design, right? Well, that takes a lot of maintenance... everybody knows that. We have nearly eight hundred liters of hypolytic solvent in our cargo bay--that'd be enough to overhaul a dozen freighters the size of the one you showed us."

Pol finally uncrossed his arms, and dropped a monocle over his right eye. The two Star Patrol crewmen could see light playing in the glass as the trader looked over something in his records. "Eight hundred liters of what purity?"

"Ninety-eight percent. It would be pretty easy to put it through a centrifuge."

"Seven hundred and eighty-four liters," Pol said, having performed the calculations immediately and in his head. "I find this amenable. You will handle the delivery, and--upon said delivery--I'll provide you with the charts. It's up to you to read them."

"I suppose we could manage. Dave, you think we could manage?"

"Shouldn't be too bad. Do we need to get Dr. Beltran to hammer out the little details? Maybe that would take too long." Pol hadn't met Felicia Beltran, their diplomat and the only one with legal training. It was simple avarice--and the possibility of a deal slipping away--that made him suggest they could get access to the data first, to make sure it was readable.

Rakili IV was a temperate planet whose neutrality was fiercely assured by a network of orbital weapons and patrol ships, so even if Pol thought they might try to avoid paying he had good reason to think they wouldn't be able to escape.

Consequently this left Felicia out of the conversation entirely. The leopardess had been on a mission of her own, trying to find a representative of the Ardzula: peaceful miners who ranged freely through the sector, and were almost always to be found at harbor bazaars. Even still, with all the activity it had taken her most of two hours to finally track one down. While May and Bradley haggled over the star map, she cautiously approached the alien sitting contemplatively at an empty table in the food market.

Dr. Beltran didn't expect her conversation with the gangly, long-necked creature to amount to anything significant. But as the ship's diplomatic officer, she was on her best behavior, and when the Ardzula-Zel bowed its head in greeting the leopardess did what she could to return the gesture in kind. "For you, Terran, I am never too busy to talk. Will you sit?"

Beltran nodded her thanks and took a seat. "Commander May sends her regards to your government," she said. "She will be able to talk later, in person, but if you must depart before then she wished that I be able to convey her appreciation for our relationship." A little white lie, common in diplomacy; the idea had been Beltran's, but when she proposed it the captain agreed enthusiastically. "I hope things are well?"

"Mostly," the alien answered; its feet drummed against the ground softly. The Dark Horse had visited the Ardzula's home system several months before, and negotiated a treaty between the two sentient races that inhabited it. "Domestic affairs certainly are. Work with the Ardzula-Mar continues. We think they might be able to attempt a hyperspace test within four of your months, thanks to the technology you provided."

"That seems like a positive development. I take it that this means none of the engineering obstacles proved to be insurmountable?"

"Not with some ingenuity, no. It's just a matter of fixing the little glitches and convincing them to leave the oceans for a live test. I hope they shall. It will be good to have company out here. The galaxy appears to be becoming more dangerous with every passing cycle."

"When you confined your positive answer to 'domestic affairs,' you meant..."

"Yes. The Wanesh are on the warpath."

He said it flatly, and the tonelessness only deepened the chill that coursed briefly through her. There was no one 'Wanesh'--rather there were dozens, even hundreds of packs, and the diplomat was left confused at the phrasing. It suggested direction, and she assumed she'd misheard. "Do you know which ones? Which packs?"

"There haven't been any survivors and the transmission we get are too confused to make sense of what's going on. No names, no demands... by the time we are able to get there, all that's left is debris."

Felicia tilted her head gently. "Most of the others that we have spoken to regard the Waneshans as a force of nature... something that, when it becomes more intense, you must simply endure. Has that changed?"

"Fifty ships. A dozen heavy mining rigs. Even if we could sustain the losses... and we cannot... even then, we're running out of crew willing to man them. Something has to change, or we'll have no choice but to abandon the entire rimward region." The Ardzula stopped, and his tentacles quavered weakly. "Perhaps it is destiny."

"What do you mean?"

"The leader of the Ardzula-Mar said she'd told your captain that the Mar might've had contact with them, long ago. We start to wonder if the 'Yanosha' of both our races' old myths might in fact be the Wanesh. If that's so... maybe they're coming back to punish us."

"For talking to us?"

"For uniting. Maybe they tried to set us against each other, and now that we are allies again after all these years they want to show the price of defying them."

"That seems harsh," she said, as politely as possible. The Ardzula--both species--were largely nonviolent in a galaxy that could punish the tendency severely when it wanted. Not much aggression would really be required to push them around, and certainly no centuries-old grudge.

All the same, Dr. Beltran filed the information away so that it could be brought to the attention of their captain. If pirate activity was increasing, that was at least something to know when they picked their next course.

She was not aware of the map that May had recently acquired. Neither was Mitch Alexander, computer specialist and sensor operator aboard the Dark Horse. By that point, Commander May had ordered Alexander to return to the ship; she took the shuttle back up with Eli Parnell, their helmsman--a wolf who was not any happier about being shanghaied into the job.

"At least you get to return," Mitch said.

"That doesn't really help," Eli shot back. "Why couldn't she have asked Rika to do this?"

"Doesn't Rika go into convulsions if she drops below low orbit?"

Eli gritted her teeth. "It's not that bad. I'm sure she could stand it for a little bit."

Ensign Chandrika Srivastava, their junior helmsman, had been born in space and refused to leave it without good reason. Eli was normally somewhat more understanding of this, and Mitch figured something else had to be going on. That didn't mean she was necessarily any more sympathetic. "Who were you making plans with?"

"Who says I was making plans with anyone?" Her muzzle clenched again, though, because as a canine her body consistently betrayed her emotions.

Even if Mitch couldn't see the wolf's raised hackles, the Abyssinian at least wanted to keep Eli from doing anything rash before they'd gotten the shuttlecraft back aboard. She patted her friend's shoulder. "Tell you what. Commander May won't want to leave until we get this device thingy figured out, right? I'll take my time."

That thought mollified Eli, as did a reminder that she'd be landing again at sunset, which was a good time for taking in the scenic Rakilian cliffs. In any event, Mitch already suspected that 'taking her time' wasn't going to be optional. In the science lab aboard the Dark Horse, she looked at the device she'd been given again.

It was a small, shiny piece of metal, warm in her clasped paw. Technical problems could be interesting, but the Abyssinian wasn't any happier than Parnell had been about giving up her shore leave. She consoled herself with the plate of Ruconish chocolate she'd acquired from the marketplace before leaving.

The universal translator called it 'chocolate,' in any case. Part of the nature of space exploration was that--cacao beans being far from a galactic constant--it might well have been something else entirely. Beetle larvae, say. This bothered some of the other crew, but Mitch hadn't joined the Star Patrol not to eat beetles now and then.

Adventure was something that counted for a lot. With the Dark Horse so far beyond the Terran Confederation's frontier, it was no longer possible to download new episodes of the comics she enjoyed, leaving the Abyssinian no choice but to make her own. For the moment it starred Ruconish chocolate, a chunk of multifaceted metal the size of a mango, and the difficulty of getting whatever it was to talk to their ship's computer.

Four hours later, the chocolate was gone and a glass of sweet whiskey had taken its place. When TJ Wallace poked his head in, the otter--her friend and a fellow native of the resort planet Clearwater--guessed what was going on almost immediately.

"Can't figure it out?" he asked.

Testing equipment lay scattered on the bench before the Abyssinian. "No. It needs power, but there has to be some kind of strange modulation. Or... something? Oh, shit--I missed dinner, didn't I? Sorry, dude."

TJ poured himself a small helping of Southern Comfort and joined her, looking over the cat's shoulder at the readouts she was analyzing. "No big deal. What's it supposed to be?"

Mitch shrugged. "The captain just told me it was 'important.' You know how it goes, right?" Madison May, accustomed to a universe where a situation report might boil down to I think you better see for yourself, preferred to let her subordinates figure out the details on their own.

"That was it?"

"Dave said I should let them know when I was able to decode it, so I guess it has to be some kinda storage device."

"Oh, right," TJ said; he'd also been asked to prepare their entire stock of expired laundry detergent for offloading, so it didn't really surprise him that something equally esoteric had been on the other side of the trade deal. "They didn't tell you anything?"

"I think the idea was I wouldn't be biased going in." Or, Mitch supposed, it was possible the courtesy had simply been forgotten.

TJ would never have thought of himself as a hacker, but he did have experience breaking into systems where he wasn't supposed to be--generally because the otter didn't feel like paying for some new holofilm or concert recording. He looked over what Mitch had been doing and tried to think about what he might've been seeing.

"Nah, dude, not quite," he said, when Mitch groused that 'nothing happens no matter what I do' and downed the rest of her SoCo. "There's an amplitude variation. Here, see?"

"Hmm." The whiskey was helping. Spaceman Alexander tried sending a few more pulses of information, and started changing what the logic analyzer was looking for. "You think this is significant? Yeah..." TJ had kindly recharged her glass, and she rewarded herself with a sip. "It's a bin... no, it's a quaternary signal, modulated in the sideband. Right? Did I do good, Teej?"

TJ grinned. "You did good."

"Guess I'll hit it with the universal translator and see what we get..." She reached out to bring up the command, and the otter put his paw on her wrist. "Eh?"

"Should do at least part of my job, dude. Start up a sandboxed instance."

"That'll take, like... ten minutes. And my shift ended two hours ago. C'mon..."

He shook his head firmly and called up the commands to create an isolated clone of the ship's computer. "Huh-uh. Not going to plug some random alien shit straight into the ship's computer--c'mon yourself."

As long as they had time to kill, there were other hobbies to fill it with. She pushed herself back from the chair, stood, stretched... and pinned the otter against the bulkhead behind him. There were plenty of limits to TJ's commitment to professionalism; Abyssinians in general could be counted on to ignore them completely.

He just barely managed to get his glass of whiskey back on the workbench before it was out of range; then his arms were around the cat, and his claws left divots in her wrinkled Star Patrol uniform when he pulled her against him. Mitch purred, and shared whatever was left of the Ruconish chocolate in the kiss that slipped her rough tongue past the otter's lips.

TJ wasn't as intrinsically devoted to excitement as his feline friend--he might've cared about the ingredients list--but in the moment all he could really tell was that she tasted sweet, and it had been a long time since they'd shared a good bit of downtime together.

By the time the computer announced that it had finished setting up the new security protocols, Mitch Alexander's purring was ragged, her jacket was partway open, and TJ had his paw through it to fondle her. Star Patrol training served them well--he could start the universal translator blindly, just like Mitch was able to start the relevant decryption subroutines.

They were, after all, among the best at their jobs.

Mitch had a long-running argument with Eli Parnell--a canine, which gave her whatever weird wiring meant that sex only counted if you ended up stuck for ten minutes after all the work had been done. The Abyssinian was willing to admit that knots had their own time and place...

But on the other hand, TJ being an otter meant that it was a lot easier to justify locking the lab door and everything that came after that. Most of the computer's analysis ran automatically. They still came to a useful conclusion.

In the staff meeting the next morning, Barry Schatz reported on the results and not on any of the process that had taken them to it--though, judging by Mitch Alexander's appearance when she gave him the translated files, it hadn't been too hard to guess.

Crew relationships weren't his responsibility. Science was; after fifteen minutes looking at the information he'd completely forgotten the claw holes in her jacket. Half an hour later, he'd dropped fully into the zone, and the hours before the morning meeting flew by.

As a Border Collie, his mind was in constant overdrive. Madison May had learned this, and grown accustomed to putting the brakes on his reports early despite his obvious excitement. As soon as he said "it's a map," she held up her paw to stop him.

"We know it's a map." The fact that she hadn't bothered to tell anyone this escaped her as irrelevant, though it was to some degree fortunate that Mitch hadn't decoded it as a novel, or a painting, or a weapons schematic. "Is it an accurate map?"

Dr. Schatz was now in the uncomfortable position of not knowing how much information the captain really wanted. "I believe so." That, since she kept staring at him, clearly hadn't been good enough. "Some assumptions imply that it is accurate. Correct."

"Assumptions?"

"The format appears to be a set of star charts and planetary information adapted for a spacefaring civilization using hyperdrives based on microcavitation, so I took the liberty of recalculating our existing astrometric data based on those decay principles. Of course, the Terran Confederation doesn't commonly use those stardrives, but it's a simple matter of extrapolating from the chromocline survey performed by the research group at Kifrea... then, if we process it with the appropriate shift, we can--"

The akita's paw had come back up. "We get it. Can we incorporate the data?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Anything look interesting?"

Barry gambled. "About twenty light years from here is a pulsar that used to be part of our navigational databanks before it disappeared. One of the more intriguing theories is that a passing black hole might have been involved, but none of our observatories were paying close enough attention. This new map might point us in the right direction..."

"Sounds like a good enough place to start. Lay in a course, and let's see what's out there."

Two days after breaking orbit, they were well underway, back into routine and settled enough to be running only a skeletal crew. Captain Jack Ford was getting used to the late, lonely watches. If nothing else he was getting used to Lieutenant Elissa Parnell. The feeling was mutual for the senior helmsman--meeting him again had been a shock for Eli, who'd last seen the coyote at her board of inquiry.

Back then, he'd been silent. Now that they were past the frontier, and beyond the ability of the Star Patrol bureaucracy to inject politics into every damned interaction, Eli found that she believed the coyote when he said that he'd been specifically told to stay quiet. I knew it wasn't your fault. But they felt it would be easier if the minority report was kept suppressed.

And you let them? A pause. Sorry, sir.

Jack was willing to take the opprobrium, deserved as it was. In the months since that conversation, she'd loosened up around him. Increasingly she used his callsign when addressing him. And so it was nice to see the wolfess; he felt he'd been offered the ability to perform a sort of penance.

"Even with the AI. It can't be that easy to fly, can it?"

There being nothing else to do on the bridge, they had a schematic of the Type 7 Scout-Interceptor up on the forward viewscreen; he'd been talking about the artificial intelligence that came along with the starfighter. "No," Jack admitted. "But I don't think I could handle this ship, if that counts for anything. And I bet it took some getting used to, didn't it?"

"You're telling me." Eli's paw ran over the control for the Dark Horse's manual helm. The old cruiser had no artificial intelligence. It barely had a navigational projector. That meant an awful lot depended on the skill of the pilot, and Eli was slowly coming to accept that she was fairly skilled at it.

"How's Ensign Srivastava getting along?"

"Learning. Permission to speak freely, sir?

"Sure."

Eli gazed at the viewscreen for a few more seconds, then dismissed the image of the starfighter and returned the display to an overview of their hyperlight journey. "I think it takes more than just figuring out the switches and the control lag and whatever else. You have to learn how to be a different kind of sailor, too."

"More adaptive?"

"Or more open, or more excited about taking risks. I don't think the ship is just a place for people who don't fit in elsewhere... I think you have to fit in here, too. I think Rika has the right spirit for it... but she'll have to figure that out for herself, like I did."

"Let me know if there's anything I can do to help."

At least, it was his hope that he could do something to make the process a little easier. As a coyote, he wasn't the most pack-oriented person--but he was better at that than other things. Than, for example, hyperspace navigation. He'd already admitted to Parnell that he couldn't have flown the Dark Horse, and when a tremor started to build in the deck under his feet his diagnosis was lacking in specifics.

"That's not supposed to happen, is it?"

"No." Their monitoring equipment indicated some kind of instability developing, not in the cruiser but within hyperspace itself. Lieutenant Parnell adjusted their course by a fraction of a degree to compensate, but the shear worsened quickly. "It may be some kind of..."

"Are you about to say 'anomaly'? Remember, I'm a fighter jock at heart."

Eli had to change course again, and by the time the Dark Horse came onto its new heading that, too, wasn't enough. "It's definitely anomalous, sir. I'm not sure I can hold us on course."

Being a fighter pilot, Jack didn't know much of hyperspace propulsion--nothing he flew was capable of FTL travel. Even if he hadn't implicitly trusted the wolf, he had no better insight... and, in this case, he did implicitly trust her. "Do what you can. I'm taking us to State Gold until we know more."

The lights on the bridge dimmed and, distantly, Eli heard the automated announcement summoning the alert crew to their stations. More worrying than her worsening control over the ship's helm, the cruiser was also beginning to slow down. "The hyperdrive field is losing integrity. I don't know what's going on."

"Bring us back into normalspace, then." The door to the bridge opened and Madison May stepped through as the viewscreen flashed, revealing a field of clear, beautiful, distant stars.

May liked stars well enough, but seeing them meant something was wrong. "Report?"

Jack stood, yielding the captain's chair to the akita. "We ran into... I don't know how to describe it. Hyperspace turbulence, let's say--we lost the FTL field."

"Nothing I've seen before, captain," Parnell added. "It was like we were caught in some kind of undertow. The drive itself looks fine--no errors, no warnings, all the readings are within normal parameters."

May waited for Spaceman Alexander to arrive; the Abyssinian knew their sensors better than Maddy or the others. Mitch logged in to her console and looked over the last data they'd recorded. But nothing about it made any more sense to her. "I don't know. It might've been a natural phenomenon; it might not. We--wait. Captain--contact!"

"Shields!" A jolting impact offered sharp riposte. "What the hell was that?"

"A collision. Something just--a ship just hit us," Mitch clarified quickly, because there was no way the object on her scanners was natural. "Shuttlepod sized, unknown configuration. It appeared inside our shield radius."

"Can we target it?"

"No, ma'am. Internal alarms are going off--picking up biological contacts. Deck seven, aft of the flight bay."

"We're being boarded? Intruder alert," May barked, and turned to the closest likely solution to the problem. "Dave, fix this."

"On it," the retriever said, though--having been on the bridge for under a minute--he wasn't entirely up to speed on what was happening. But a boarding party demanded an immediate, fairly obvious response.

"I'll come with you," Jack offered.

May nodded curtly. "How many of them are there?"

"Five. Six--more are disembarking. Internal doors have sealed now, but I've got reports of weapons fire..." Mitch licked her muzzle nervously. "I can't quite localize it, but they're probably trying to get through the blast shield. Once they do..."

"We need to destroy that ship before any more get aboard. You're sure we can't shoot it?"

Ensign Bader would've liked to do nothing more, but the shepherd shook his head. "It's inside the point-defense radius. We need to dislodge it first."

"We could shake it free," Parnell suggested. "It would be rough, but..."

"Do it."

Eli cued the intercom. "Maneuvering alarm, all hands brace for uncompensated evasive maneuvers. Mitch, stand by to kill the inertial dampeners." She fired the maneuvering thrusters, throwing the Dark Horse into an increasing lateral spin--even with the dampeners engaged they could feel it. "Now!"

"Done." Mitch shut her eyes tightly and, like everyone else, prayed that her harness would do its job.

Parnell held in the 'restriction override' switch and fired the thrusters on the opposite side of the ship. Alarms went off immediately as the structural integrity field hit its limit, and the crew hit theirs--but the hostile ship was knocked free, and she fired the lateral thrusters to clear them from slamming into it again on the next rotation.

Leon reached out against the crushing force of acceleration to activate the point-defense grid. To its credit, it performed exactly as designed--spinning or no, the cannons made short work of whatever it was, shredding the ship into a cloud of expanding debris that spattered and sizzled against their deflector shields.

May called down to David to see where he'd gotten to with the more urgent part of the encounter--Mitch had lost the internal sensors, but she guessed there were ten aliens aboard. And while their disposition was officially "unknown," "presumed hostile" seemed likely: something was behind taking the sensors out.

"I'm at the forward armory. Captain Ford and I have suited up and we're ready to move aft."

"Internal sensors are down, so I'd love to tell you what's waiting, Dave, but we're in the dark. Chief Smith told us she was going to try to link up with Sabel, but then we lost the channel. Please advise? Dave?"

David didn't answer although, in fairness, he hadn't heard the request or anything else in his captain's reply--that system having also been abruptly compromised. And he was busy with other things, including recovering from the evasive maneuvers, which had nearly taken the two by surprise.

But they'd gotten secured before inertia broke anything important, and now they were armed. He checked the power reserve on his plasma rifle and flipped the holographic sight up and into position. The retriever was well-trained with the weapon; even still it looked more than a little strange in his soft-furred paws. So did the armored vest.

Jack, with a coyote's lanky, angular build, didn't pull the aesthetic off much better. Neither of them would find much work in recruiting posters. "How long until they get the internal sensors back on line, do you suppose?"

As if to mock them, the lights dropped out and all they could see was the false-color projection beamed right into their eyes--the thermal map conveniently indicating all the panels that had, until recently, been providing actual illumination. "Good question, eh?" He frowned, and raised his voice. "Good question. Is the radio down, too?"

"Local net only," came a crackling voice in his ear that he recognized as Léa Smith, their junior tactical officer.

"Great. Sitrep, Miss Smith? It's good to hear your voice."

"I'm with Sabel, we're holding at the portmost bulkhead at frame... one-two-six. There are eight hostiles. There were nine. We managed to force them back from frame one thirty, but they're holed up now. The inner hull is compromised. Pressure's down."

Dave snapped the rebreathing mask over his muzzle. It was uncomfortable, and it didn't do much for his ability to speak clearly, but it was better than vacuum. "Understood. Jack Ford and I are at frame one-ten. If I'm hearing you right, they should be pretty close?"

"Yeah. Sabel?"

Sabel's voice, unlike Léa's, sounded calm and quite clear. "Based on interpolated signals, there are two hostiles holding an improvised defensive position in the corridor behind Cold Storage F. Four are covering our approach from the stern. The remaining two seem to be attempting to gain access to the ship's critical systems. The most likely point is the port library archive and its computer banks."

Most of the conversations Dave had with the spitz involved his tendency for literal interpretation of Terran metaphor--he was the kind of dog who heard 'his bark is worse than his bite' and asked to see the scoring rubric. It was the sort of thing that happened when one was a genetically engineered soldier programmed and grown for only one task.

But so, too, was being able to accurately predict the tactical disposition of a boarding party based on reflected signals and intuition. Sabel was in his element. On the far side of the intruders, waiting with Léa Smith for Dave to reply, Sabel showed none of her apprehension.

"Do you think he has a plan?" the painted dog asked, her radio carrying only as far as Sabel Thorsen himself.

"I believe he will ask me for my opinion," the spitz answered. It was only logical, given that the scenario was--quite literally--one that he had been born for.

"And do you have a plan?"

"Of course." But he waited to hear back from Dave.

Madison May was also waiting, less patiently. The bridge of the Dark Horse had fallen into the same darkness as the rest of the ship; emergency power was enough to drive the consoles, but nothing else, and the light cast eerie shadows on the crew. "Progress on the internal sensors?"

Mitch shook her head. "I've gotten through to engineering, but they're not certain what's happening either--some kind of power drain that's affecting the control circuitry. The reactor is still online, and life support, but..."

"Hyperdrive? Thrusters? Weapons?"

"No. We're dead in the water, ma'am." And Spaceman Alexander had only managed to contact engineering thanks to TJ's fortuitous presence. He'd noticed the way she was turning her console on and off and correctly interpreted the intermittent drain as Morse code.

But it made for a very, very slow way of communicating. Complex answers, in particular, were evidently beyond TJ's ability to spare the time to formulate. Asking about, in turn, the FTL drive, thrusters, and their deflector shields all got the same curt 'no.'

And then came the explosion.

Sabel Thorsen looked like a spitz, and the rest of the crew though of him that way that he had gotten into the habit himself. More accurately, he was an Ulver Boarding Contingency Unit--designed by Star Patrol weapons engineers to be defrosted in the event that his ship was boarded and close-quarters combat would be necessary.

A combination of ethical concerns and operational failures led to the program being abandoned, and Sabel's cryo unit had been forgotten for more than two centuries. He didn't get to be in his element very often, but crouched in the ceiling, listening carefully to the movement in the deck plating beneath, was about as close to a perfect match as could be found.

His cybernetically enhanced memory contained a high-precision map of the Dark Horse, deck by deck and section by section. That, and a few thousand years of tactics distilled into analytical subroutines, gave him the confidence to know exactly how things were about to unfold.

He measured out the explosive charges down to the microgram, pressed them into precise shape, and placed them carefully on the plating. He'd set the timer for fifteen seconds, and spent none of them worrying that anything might go wrong. It didn't: there was simply a bright flash, and with its supports surgically severed at their weak points the plate dropped smoothly down onto the deck below it.

Not quite all the way; it landed on a pair of the intruders, and when Sabel jumped down on the wreckage he felt something crunch further under the weight of a few hundred kilograms of Boarding Contingency Unit and armor.

He got his first good look at their opponents when the two guarding the bulkhead Dave and Jack were hiding behind turned at the disturbance. Sabel's programming didn't include the word centaur. Instead he logged that they had four walking limbs, bent awkwardly to fit their bulk into the ship's corridor. Their curling horns were functional, but irrelevant; so were the long, curving claws.

High probability of multi-layered ceramic armor, specified the tactical readout; one thought later and the cannon mounted to his right arm cycled from frangible shells to plasma bolts. The first shot punched clean through armor and the creature's torso and half of the bulkhead behind it; the second, immediately recalibrated, took out the invader's partner and sputtered out neatly against the corridor wall.

All of this, from landing to analysis to firing solution to shot, took a little more than a second, and one of the four that had been keeping Léa Smith pinned down didn't even get the chance to realize their miscalculation before the spitz dropped them. His visor alerted him to an impending explosion and he stepped into cover just as the demolition charge blasted open Léa's hatch.

A burst of suppressing fire immediately followed from the painted dog. Sabel saw one of the silhouettes fall, then a second--the last came sprinting around the corner and the spitz's snap-shot blasted its still-unused weapon from the creature's grasp. On the other side was the inner hull, and Sabel didn't want to accidentally puncture it.

He charged, instead; his bulk slammed the thing heavily into the wall. Unlike Sabel it had neither anticipated this event, nor been designed from birth with the eventuality in mind. It was stunned, slow to react, and Sabel's left fist was more than enough to knock the rest of the resistance from it along with any semblance of consciousness.

"Clear," Sabel said.

On the far side of the forward bulkhead, Jack met Dave's eyes and found they shared the same startled expression. "That was it?" the coyote asked.

"It's his job," Dave answered, though the speed with which everything unfolded had taken him by genuine surprise. "Didn't he tell you that? Something like: 'my name is Sabel. I punch things'?"

"That and a weirdly tortured explanation of 'a stitch in time,' yes." Jack shook his head. "What do you think? Head in?"

Dave tried the short-range radio. "Sabel, it's Bradley. Can we open the hatch?"

"No." But, despite this, the heavy doors slid open. Two armored paws slid into the narrow crack and pushed them the rest of the way apart. "The ship's systems are still nonresponsive and the blast doors exceed the strength of your own muscles," Sabel explained. "But not mine."

"Thanks." Dave looked around at what, if nothing else, was a bit of a mess: a square-meter chunk of ceiling had been completely removed, their new guests were messily evaporating some kind of ichor into the vacuum, and stars drifted through a massive gash punched through both pressure hulls. "What now?"

Commander May, on the bridge, was still in the dark, but not for much longer. The lights came back on, strongly as if nothing at all had happened. "Did you do that, spaceman?"

"No," Mitch said. "I don't know what did."

They had felt two explosions before the ship's systems started flickering back to life one at a time. Madison May considered serendipity one of her strongest and most loyal allies, but even the akita knew explosions weren't part of anyone's troubleshooting checklist.

"Sensors are operational... mostly." In the area around the collision, decks six and seven seemed to have merged into one new deck and Mitch Alexander didn't know what to make of that. "Let's see if comms are--"

"Bridge, this is Commander Bradley."

"May here. Report."

"The boarding party's been defeated and we've taken one of the aliens prisoner. The rest are, uh, 'nonoperational,' in Sabel's words. It's safe for DC. We've got an outer hull breach of about five square meters and an inner hull breach of roughly half that area."

"No casualties on our side?"

"No. We're fine."

May was willing to count her blessings, in that case. She stopped counting them five minutes later, when their chief engineer provided a new assessment: the main computer was offline. With it went their advanced targeting systems, the autopilot, the deflector shield redundancy protocols... and the hyperdrive.

Mere vulnerability didn't account for May's unease. Space, after all, was rather large: in ordinary circumstances they could take as long as they wanted to make repairs. But obviously they hadn't been boarded randomly, and that meant someone knew where they were.

"How long until you can get basic functionality back?"

"We're offloading what we can onto the spare processing units, Mads. I can't say for certain until we're able to diagnose the fault in the computer, and the spare units can't handle everything. So what's your priority?"

"The hyperdrive. Get us moving again, Shannon. Bridge out." And then, while the damage control drones began what repairs they could, the akita called together a staff meeting. "Where did they come from? That's my first question."

"Not 'who are they'?" Jack Ford asked.

"Do you know who they are?" Nobody did. "See? We'll figure that out when our guest wakes up. Ayenni says there's no permanent damage. I can't say the same for our ship, so, again: where'd they come from, guys?"

Dave did what he could to channel her frustration into something more productive. "Let's start from basic assumptions. It can't have been a coincidence, right? Dr. Schatz, what are the odds you could plot an ambush that would pull us from lightspeed into a waiting ship?"

The Border Collie didn't bother trying to calculate the odds. He didn't even bother trying to calculate whether they were calculable. "It's impossible, sir, and even if it wasn't impossible, my understanding is that Captain Ford gave the order to drop out of hyperspace... a second earlier or later and we would've been hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. If I might add: elapsed time between shutting the drive down and the collision was only two minutes. That strongly limits the radius that they could've come from."

Madison growled and pulled up the logs so they could look at them, trying to find whatever she might've missed. "But they had to--right?"

"Pause?" Jack wanted to get a better look at the ship that had struck them, and May was replaying an animation of the moments before the collision. "It's twenty meters long. Gravitational displacement suggests it's... a hundred and eighty tons? Two hundred?"

Leon Bader, as their tactical specialist, had spent the brief time before the meeting trying to learn what he could from the same fragmentary data. In this case, the word was literal: "Ninety percent of its mass was contained in the highly armored nose section--that was the only surviving piece after the point-defense grid lit it up."

"Even with our most powerful thrusters in that weight class, we could get... what, maybe seven kilometers per second in that time?" Jack Ford lived and breathed scout ships, and he thought even that was extremely optimistic, but so what? "Hell, say they're incredibly advanced and better than that by an order of magnitude. We're talking about a radius of a few thousand kilometers, at most."

"So they were at lightspeed, too." May was given to agree with Captain Ford's conclusions but, agreement or not, it brought them into immediate contact with another problem. "Where from? There's no sign of a gateway. No tachyon signatures. Nothing."

"Some kind of cloaking device, then... Dr. Schatz, I'm sure you could come up with something theoretical to explain it."

"Many somethings," the Border Collie answered. "Though none of them are plausible."

Commander May watched the impact play out again, looping those few seconds as the sense of helpless frustration grew. "Okay. Here's what we do, then. Dr. Schatz, report to engineering and don't come back until we have a way of detecting those things. Ensign Bader, the good news is that we can destroy their ships, right?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Can we reconfigure the deflectors to decrease the gap between the outer hull and the shields? Keep them from being able to ram us again?"

"Yes. But not without compromising their strength against anything else."

May bit her tongue until the urge to snarl subsided. "We may have to take that risk. We're--"

The alarm, by that point, was all too familiar. "Action stations. We have incoming."

Fortunately the ready room was right next to the bridge; Lieutenant Parnell had just barely finished the announcement when the doors opened. "What kind of 'incoming'?" May demanded.

Spaceman Alexander, who'd been the first to pick it up, hadn't needed to guess: the signatures were painfully obvious. "Twenty-nine ships matching the details of Waneshan pirates we've run into before. They're corvette-sized ships, divided into two groups--both in conventional attack formation. Their weapons are active. They'll be in range in two minutes."

Dave took his seat and ran through the standard battle checklists, confirming that the internal hatches were closed and the damage control drones were ready. Or, considering the chunk taken out of their hull, as ready as they could hope to be. "Tactical, what's our status?"

"Shields are at seventy percent strength and our targeting array is significantly degraded, sir. The particle beams will be ineffective."

"Ready anti-gunship torpedoes and get us firing solutions. Anything that looks like they're trying to land more boarding parties?"

"No, sir."

May gritted her teeth. The Waneshans were a scourge, they'd tangled often, and she knew the Dark Horse was in no shape to take on nearly thirty of their raiding ships. "Goddamn vultures. Ensign, you're clear to engage at will. Helm, take us out of here. Flank speed."

Parnell brought the ship about quickly and opened the throttle wide. "Course laid in. Our range is now increasing. They're not as fast as we are."

"Captain, we're got additional signatures. Another twenty pirates just dropped out of hyperspace and--brace for impact!" Leon had switched to counter the new threat, but with their computer inoperative he didn't have a chance to do anything before the first missiles hit. "Forward shields at seventy percent."

The next salvo took them down to forty. "Are we returning fire?" May demanded.

"Trying to. The computer is"--one of Leon's consoles went abruptly, ominously dead. "Fire control is offline. Direct impact to the forward hull. Ventral deflector shields are buckling."

"Evasive maneuvers!"

Another two missiles struck in quick succession and Parnell took in the warning signs with the same highly trained reflex that pulled the throttle back. "Our main port thruster is venting drive plasma. We're losing power, captain."

"They're not trying to destroy us," Madison realized aloud. "We should prepare to be boarded again--what now?" A new alarm had begun demanding attention.

"Hyperdrive signatures. Right twenty degrees, up... uh..." Mitch shouldn't have been surprised by the failure of her sensor suite, but in the heat of the moment the Abyssinian hadn't taken the time to appreciate her good fortune up to that point. "I dunno. It was big. We've lost long-range scanners, captain."

"Put it on screen, then. Visual only."

The new vessels were big, angular, and pitch-black: hard shadows, blotting out the stars behind them. The flagship was a kite-shaped behemoth that seemed from its ragged edges to have been punched out of plate glass. Quick triangulation told them it was also six kilometers across.

The glare of harsh lights, rippling like flashbulbs, called attention to the ship's brutal outline. Rocket launches--a lot of rocket launches. May grabbed on to the armrests of her chair, waiting for the impact... but none came. "What's going on? Are they... fighting the Waneshans?"

"It's hard to follow without long-range sensors, but the new ships appear to be engaging the pirates, yes. Visual survey--oh. Oh, that wasn't pretty. Somebody's reactor just went up. That's two." And, when emergency power brought the sensors back, Mitch saw she'd been conservative. "I'm reading eleven pirate ships destroyed or disabled. The rest are withdrawing, commander."

"Who's our savior? Can you identify them?"

"Uh. Yes, ma'am. They're--well. You can see for yourself, if you want. We're being hailed."

"Put it through."

At once the final moments of the battle were replaced by a mouth full of teeth, their owner having misjudged or ignored the distance to the holographic imager. Teeth would've been a good hint; so was the wide grin, stretching from one side of the viewscreen to the other. "Well, hello! Madison May!"

"Ah... yes?"

"It is you, isn't it? We haven't saved the wrong person? You do look very small." The speaker leaned forward, as if to get a better look, and the screen gave the unsettling impression that the Dark Horse had wound up inside the alien's mouth.

"Yes. I'm Commander May, of the Star Patrol. It's always good to see... part of... an Uxzu."

Satisfied, the figure on the other side withdrew until the grin acquired proper context on its owners blunt, dappled grey muzzle. Pale, gleefully predatory eyes flashed. "Always good, you mean, to meet one's allies in battle! I am Kenra Tellak, matriarch of the Kolash Pride, and we must speak at once."

"As you said, we're allies--I welcome the chance. My ship is somewhat... damaged, or I'd invite you aboard."

Kenra laughed, raised one massive paw to give the Terran captain a friendly pat, and realized at the last second that she was too far away to do so. "Of course, tiny hunter. We were prepared for that."

And this was how the Dark Horse wound up drifting slowly towards the hangar deck of the dreadnought Kolashar, which utterly dwarfed the Star Patrol cruiser. Jack Ford, who had no experience with the aliens whatsoever, was the only one to raise any objection to their situation. "I'm assuming we can rely on these aliens--right?"

"We have encountered the Kolash Pride before. The Uxzu are a trustworthy, if aggressively martial, culture," Dr. Beltran explained. "And their personality demonstrates a number of points of compatibility with our captain."

"You mean the teeth?" It had been hard to get a sense of scale from the viewscreen, but there seemed to be a lot of teeth, and they seemed to be quite sharp. "You sure it's safe?"

Madison, who didn't bother reading between the sardonic lines of Felicia Beltran's summary, made sure her own grin was appropriately toothy. "If it's not, we're in trouble anyway. Considering the ship is inside their carrier, and we have no FTL drive. Tell you what: come with us. First contact is good for the soul. You've had diplomatic training, right?"

He had enough natural 'diplomacy' to spend a second considering his answer, which caught Dr. Beltran's attention--and concern. "Captain Ford? I was under the impression that passing the foreign affairs training course was mandatory for senior officers. Is it not?"

The coyote shrugged. "I was a naval aviator. Generally they just told me to keep my mouth shut and avoid causing trouble, and I got a deferment on the class. Crash course?"

Felicia maintained her notoriously level composure; serving with Madison May had been good at honing that particular diplomatic skill. "The Uxzu put a great deal of emphasis on honor and strength. You would do well to avoid boasting unless you can support it, in which case it may be taken as a token of friendship and respect. You should also expect some degree of physical contact."

"We'll patch you up," May added.

"Thanks," the coyote said, warily. "I'll be on my guard."

Careful maneuvering from both parties brought the Dark Horse close enough to be grappled into an open berth. A half-dozen figures were waiting at the foot of the gangplank when it lowered, and Jack was given his first sight of a complete Uxzu hunter.

Large, that was his first thought; terrifying played a small supporting role in the assessment. The shortest of them was still two and a half meters at the shoulder, and the slight forward hunch to their stature conveyed the implication that they were all getting ready to pounce. They were built something like hyenas: muscular, blunt-muzzled, and sharp-toothed.

The universal translator called Kenra Tellak 'matriarch,' though gender was difficult to discern--particularly for Jack, who thought in terms of Terran secondary sexual characteristics. They all wore the same uniform: a heavy kilt, held up with the same belt that also secured a short sword and a sidearm--each of them larger than a Star Patrol heavy plasma rifle. Their tunics had no rank insignia or anything else.

Jack pieced together the dimorphism through the darker fur and sharper ears of their leader, who straightened up, beaming. "Tiny hunter! We meet in person! You are smaller than I expected. I don't know how you manage it."

"Years of practice," Madison answered. "Not as many as you've had practice at being a warrior--your actions here speak clearly to that, though. This is a truly impressive ship, and an honorable commander."

"We could hardly leave you. Direct your appreciation to Overenforcer Xarek Tikhan, the ship's captain, and Subenforcer Kashik Sallus, commander of the wing."

"The wing?" Jack spoke out of turn. "Air wing?"

Kashik Sallus raised her arms, and Jack followed the gesture to the expansive deck behind her. And he found that, in an instant, he was no longer curious about what had removed half of her ear, or what a 'subenforcer' did, exactly. There were rows and rows of identical black starships to dwell on.

"You seem interested! Good, good. Kashik can introduce you. We must have words with the huntress May, and her... companion."

Felicia Beltran could well have stood up for herself: it would even have raised her esteem in the eyes of the Uxzu to do so. But the leopardess didn't feel like sparing the effort for such posturing; May was the critical figure, and Dr. Beltran followed along calmly as they were led from the hangar deck deeper into the bowels of the Uxzu flagship.

Kenra had prepared a light meal, some of the dishes of which had obliged them by dying beforehand and some of which had not. May helped herself to one of the scuttling roaches, breaking the carapace in half and devouring the contents. Next to her Beltran kept her paws folded in her lap; she certainly believed May when she said the roaches tasted like tapioca. It didn't mean she was interested in finding out for herself.

May licked her muzzle clean. "It should be clear, I hope, that we're indebted to you. I don't like to admit it, but I know we couldn't have held out against all those pirates."

"Oh, there's no shame in that honesty," Kenra replied. "Nor any need to speak of debt. You're part of our pride, tiny hunter. None deny that." The male sitting next to her cleared his throat, and--clutching a squirming bug in her left paw--she calmly backhanded him hard enough to send him sprawling onto the floor. The roach did not fare any better; she was obliged to lick her paw clean of its remains while she continued. "Some other prides might claim you as well, I suppose. But falsely."

"You've always been a good ally," May said, watching to see if the other Uxzu got back to his feet. At last he did, and settled back at the table without a word. "We hope to repay you."

"We hope you will. Even more than you did at Antuja, when you helped us retake our colony. This is serious--and I command the largest fleet the Kolash pride has raised in a generation to demonstrate that seriousness. Other prides are rallying, though I am happy we found you first..."

"How did you know to come looking for us, anyway?"

"One of our trading vessels heard a rumor that you'd been seen on Rakili IV, and we followed it up to learn of your exchange with Pol--a notorious Wanesh conspirator in this area."

"Former," Xarek Tikhan added, his smile as dark as it was genuine.

This correction wasn't one that warranted physical admonishment. "True. Former conspirator," Kenra said, and the Terrans didn't look too closely at her grin, either, in case they might detect traces of the merchant there. "From that point, time was of the essence--but it was a simple matter of monitoring the hyperspace conditions. When those pirates are laying a trap, the signs are quite familiar."

Madison May nodded thoughtfully. "That makes sense, for the most part. But I think it was coincidence. We're pretty sure the ship that first attacked us wasn't a raider. The strategy was different--no missile attacks or overwhelming numbers, for one. I don't know who was involved. We captured one of the boarding party, but they haven't regained consciousness yet."

"A horned hexapod with spindly limbs--a little less tall than I am? Yes. That's what they look like, under the armor. Normally they're more well protected, but a ship like the one that attacked you is... special. It's why we hurried to find you."

Felicia Beltran thought of what she'd been told back on Rakili: "Is this related to the increasing frequency of their raids on the Ardzula? I was told by an Ardzula-Zel miner that the Wanesh were becoming so bold that it threatened the mining industry in the sector."

"Indeed. Tiny hunter, your talkperson is perceptive despite her short claws. The Wanesh seem to have developed a new, more advanced hyperdrive--one they can cloak and use to strike at will. It's confined--for now--to much smaller boarding vessels, but we have reason to believe that they're trying to fit it to their standard corvettes. That would change the balance of power... substantially."

By coincidence, 'balance of power' was also at the top of Jack Ford's mind in his meeting with the Uxzu wing commander. The alien facing him was built like a shaggy-furred tank, didn't seem to weigh much less, and wasn't any more personable. "Subenforcer Kachik. Introduce yourself."

"Jack Ford. Captain Ford, but 'Jack' is fine."

"Are you another talkperson?"

"A diplomat? No. Jesus Christ, no. Ignore me on everything that doesn't have to do with starfighters. I don't want to make a bad impression. I haven't taken diplomatic training."

Kachik Sallus rumbled deep laughter. "Starfighters? You fight, little one?"

"I do," the coyote said. "I fight better than I talk, okay? Our tactical officer said you used fighters, but I didn't realize how serious he was until we came for a landing. How many ships do you even have here?"

"In this bay, four hundred. Another four hundred on the other side."

He allowed himself an impressed, appreciative sigh, trusting the universal translator to convey his sincerity. "That's what I'm talking about. My last command was only fifty. Don't get me wrong, I loved 'em. And don't get me wrong, okay, your whole ship is impressive. Obviously. Goddamn huge--you jumping out of hyperspace to save our butts was a sight for sore eyes, trust me. But I always thought the real excitement was... smaller. You know?"

Kachik rubbed one of her claws down the bridge of the coyote's muzzle. "It does not surprise me you would be interested in smaller things, little one."

"I mean. On my planet we have a saying: size doesn't matter."

Kachik stared. Jack didn't know if she'd misunderstood or was simply confused by the implication. 'Contemptuous' proved to be closer, because the next thing he knew the coyote was aloft, and he registered the grasp of the Uxzu's paw hauling him aloft somewhere near the top of his ballistic arc. He landed on his left arm, using it to absorb the impact and rolling back to his feet.

"The hell? What was that for?"

"Fun--what else would it be? Nice landing, little one. Now you try." She crossed her arms and waited.

"Cute," he muttered. "Size isn't everything when it comes to starships. How's that?"

"Maybe." Kachik lunged towards him, and he braced himself and flashed his teeth. "Oh? You'd bite me? With those?" The Uxzu laughed--the sound reverberated all through the massive deck--but brought herself to a halt. "I see why our matriarch finds you Terrans so amusing."

"I like to think we're more than just amusing. To hear tell of it, you've been on the other side of this situation before, you know."

"Not me. Other Kolash, perhaps." But the whole affair seemed, in the end, to have been nothing so much as an extended introduction. Her tone became less belligerent. "What are your ships?"

"On the Aggie, two squadrons of Type 7 scout-interdictors and a mixed auxiliary squadron. For the most part, those are just transports. What about you?"

Kachik patted the underside of the nearest vessel, rather heavily and with the sort of fondness that the coyote immediately found himself sympathetic to. "Two identical forces. Each has three wings of Sardaghi-class fighters and two wings of Xakat-class bombers, like this one."

The ship she was patting looked like somebody had tried whittling a cross out of driftwood and given up before getting too far into the process: a stout body topped with a glazed cockpit and two short low-mounted wings far too small to be useful for anything. The wings were a third of the way back, and immediately behind each one a huge box, awkwardly glued to the hull, bristled with rocket nosecones before ending in half-heartedly-faired thruster pods.

The cockpit, like most of the ship, was slightly and jarringly asymmetric--off the centerline and to the port side of the body. None of the blisters and protrusions matched, the tails that dropped below the engine pods appeared to have been added only because someone thought flying vehicles needed tails, the black paint job covered obvious rivets, and when Kachik said "he's beautiful, isn't he?" Jack wasn't about to argue.

"Where does the name come from?"

"Xakat is a small bug on our homeworld. They get into the crops. You can't step on them; you can't even crush them with a hammer. They have to be set on fire. They are not good eating," Kachik added, and her paw struck the underside of the bomber a second time.

The coyote figured that 'small' was relative for an Uxzu; the bomber was a very solid thirty meters in length and four high at the nose. He started walking around it, canting his head to investigate every sensor array and panel, with Kachik close behind him. At the missile bay he stopped, looking over it quickly. "Twenty-eight on either side?"

"Yes. And it can reload and fire that salvo in less than a second."

"Antiship loadout?"

The Waneshans, also, were given to missiles rather than beam weapons--he wondered who had settled on that first, and why. More than that, when Kachik went through the litany of different warheads that could be fitted to the rockets, he wondered if his first impression might not have been accurate, after all.

"You use these offensively, don't you? The Dominion has a starfighter doctrine..."

"Of course!"

The doctrine--unsurprising based on her culture--rested on the application of overwhelming force. Uxzu hyperdrives and inertial dampeners were relatively primitive; they couldn't build warships even as small as the Dark Horse. It put them at a disadvantage when fighting an opponent like the Wanesh, who could outmaneuver a lumbering capital ship.

"The Kolashar can launch all eight hundred fighters in twenty minutes, if we're prepared for it," Kachik went on, and Jack ran the numbers in his head: an opening salvo of twenty thousand missiles from the support wing of a single superdreadnought.

Quantity, as the Terran saying went, has a quality all its own. "Is that common in this area? What about interception? How do your opponents fight?"

"The pirates rely on their defensive guns, and on drones--they like drones--but they're not very good at either one. Our fighters are more than capable of handling those." And they provided an additional defensive screen for the Kolashar, Jack intuited. "Yes. You seem rather confused, little one. I thought you said you were a fighter pilot yourself!"

"I am. Things are just... different. For one, we don't have as many enemies to fight."

"The matriarch said that, yes. It must be disappointing for you--is that why you came out here? To find new ones?"

"Something like that." He was proud of the Type 7, a scout-interdictor that represented some of the newest technology in the Terran Confederation. And, remembering what Beltran told him, he defended it in detail to Kachik. A Riverjack could sustain 24 gees of acceleration, and rotate in three full circles a second, and follow seventeen thousand tracks to within ten centimeters.

"And its weapons?"

"A pair of railguns and an internal bay with space for six missiles." It wasn't much of a finish, and he knew it.

"That's it? Why? How? That's nothing." Kachik seemed a little confused. "What do you do when you face opponents with real teeth?"

"Generally speaking... we don't. But Star Patrol doctrine says that light vessels should be used as scouts. The focus is on providing more data back to the mothership for guidance and targeting. They want the Riverjack to be able to evade enemy weapons fire and survive, but... it don't have to fight back, you know?"

"Bizarre." Kachik looked up at the bomber, and its big missile pods. "Such a waste. Come, then, little one. I'll show you how this is supposed to work." She jumped up onto the stubby port wing, and struck the fuselage with her paw to open a hatch that led inside.

She wasn't the largest example of their species, and so the interior wasn't particularly cramped for her. It was positively spacious for Jack--nearly as comfortable as the Dark Horse and far more so than a Type 7. Kachik clambered up, into the cockpit, and took the pilot's seat. There was a second seat, slightly behind, below, and to the right.

Clear windows looked out to port, the side on which the cockpit was offset. The right side was made up of banks of computer screens, momentarily dead. Kachik held in a button, and they flickered one at a time to life, giving the impression they could see through the wall of the fighter. A moment later, markers began to appear superimposed on the other ships in the hangar.

"Targeting information?" Jack guessed. He couldn't read Uxzu iconography.

"Exactly. The second pilot can provide a different target to every missile, if she wants."

Jack settled into the chair, which faced the rear bulkhead of the cockpit. How does that work, then? They must have some kind of visor? Virtual reality? But the control panel closest to him was a messy, dizzying array of physical switches and dials, and that seemed vaguely unlikely. "How do they track them?"

Kachik looked over her shoulder at him. Her eyes narrowed. Then she laughed, turned away, and searched for something on her own panels. Presently his seat swiveled, and he found himself confronted with the screens themselves. "It is supposed to happen automatically, little one. The chair didn't detect your weight."

Of course not. "Right. Sorry."

"You can't help your weakness. Here--this is our last encounter." Suddenly they were in space, three AUs from a binary star system. "Geghek, home of the Kolash Pride's main shipyards. Before the Dominion became spacefaring, the Kolash were noted weapon-smiths. Some of the other prides make their own hulls, but nearly all come to us to be fitted out. With good reason."

"It was attacked, though? Is that what I'm getting?"

"Three weeks ago. We had just finished construction of a prototype beam weapon--able to defeat those scavenging pirates before they can fire their missiles. Nobody expects us to be able to build something of that magnitude--it is their mistake."

"Obviously they realized that, if they attacked you with the aim to disable it."

"That is also their mistake. This is a Wanesh Jenmir-class battlecruiser, the same type you fought at Antuja--always the biggest, most important vessel in a Waneshan pack. This is another. And a third."

The image on the screen was becoming a little disorienting. The camera view had shifted to keep all three cruisers within his field of view, but they seemed oddly distorted and when he turned to look closer at one, the display magnified its appearance. Must get used to it, Jack thought. Or I'm just 'too small' for that. "Three packs?"

"At least! And seventy Uwanej-class attack corvettes." That was the Uxzu word for 'Wanesh,' and it probably said something about the two cultures' histories that the word was also used for their most ubiquitous warship. "Have you seen this before? Classic."

Kachik had leaned well out of the pilot's seat, and her huge muzzle was right next to Jack's ear. She pointed at the screen, and an amorphous cluster of corvettes. "No? What am I looking at?"

"They know we can shoot down their missiles at range. Their tactic is to get in close. They split up into different groups, probing for a weak point and trying to force it open. Then they can put their greater maneuverability to good use, evading our return fire... but... look!"

Jack looked. At least he was a fighter pilot, with his motion sickness long suppressed--or the camera's sudden swooping would've caused real problems. And, as a fighter pilot, he was suddenly captivated. "You get the fighter squadrons ahead of your main fleet and they don't get the chance... but you're... you're well out of support range, they can't back you up with suppressing fire or jamming or..."

"We're hunters! See how Korbashi Gamin is in place to counter the missile barrage from their battlecruisers? None of them got through--not one!"

"For a cost of four fighters, though."

"Nothing is free. We assume ten percent losses for an important mission. If it's important enough to get into the cockpit for, it must be important enough to die for," she added, though with her muzzle still close he could feel the way she grinned at the word 'die.' "A long campaign might lead to a hundred and fifty percent losses."

"Both wings and... another wing?" Star Patrol would have abandoned any sort of effort before things got a quarter that dramatic; he was startled enough to turn to look at her.

It put him face to face with her grin, and a predatory lick to her sharp canine teeth. "We offer many opportunities to die gloriously, little one. The Kolashar can fabricate new vehicles, and we have training facilities aboard... and many volunteers. No great surprise!"

The battle's replay continued; with a breathtaking leap the camera swerved into the thick of an attack run on one of the battlecruisers. Precisely what Jack expected: in the blink of an eye, they salvoed four thousand missiles at the Wanesh; sheer force of numbers outweighed anything more tactical.

"Glorious," Kachik sighed. "I look forward to doing it again. I don't trust the beam operators. Too far away--we can't even see that far! You have to be in the thick of it!"

"Which one is your ship?"

The one in front of the attack run, of course. "Our losses were not all that bad. Thirty fighters and thirty-seven bombers, but no damage to the shipyards... and a lesson to the Wanesh about dismissing us. Mm..." She took a deep breath, plainly if unsettlingly giddy. "You haven't really lived until you've seen a cruiser like that in your sights and known it was prey. Have you done that?"

"Not yet. But I guess it's coming."

"What was your last battle?"

"Well..."

Jack didn't feel the Garibaldi sliding from hyperspace as if rousing itself from slumber. That part was gentle, but Launch Control was shouting in his ear already and six seconds later he was out in the stars. They looked like they had in the brief, at least; on instinct he slewed the Type 7 over and sent the order to form up.

Kachik tilted her head. "But... drugs?"

"The is neutral space, so we don't patrol there--gangs take over. We let it get out of hand. At that point the lab was making the precursors for half the glin being used in two dozen systems that were on our side of the line. We had to act."

"They only take drugs because they don't have good battles to fight," Kachik suggested. "And if you had good battles to fight, you wouldn't need to be wasting your time attacking asteroids."

He double-checked the deflectors and took a second to confirm the other scouts had done the same. Ten thousand kilometers out and they'd already been detected--the missile warning system called out the incoming projectiles. More instinct: a careful nudge of the control stick, a reflexive pull on the trigger--the missiles were gone and by that point the ship's AI was finished doing its work.

The asteroid's own shielding was too powerful to overcome with conventional weaponry and that meant it was too powerful to turn on and off at will; the AI had found the gap in the armor through which the Syndicate moved its cargo ships. Not enough room for a carrier like the Garibaldi but plenty for six Type 7 scout-interceptors.

"Lasers?" Kachik asked.

"I didn't interrupt your story, did I? But yeah. Once we slipped inside the shields the inner ring of defenses lit us up. I evaded the first salvo; caught one burst in the second before I could pull away that knocked my deflectors down to almost half strength. We couldn't see the power regulator we'd been told about, either. We had to get close."

Star Patrol doctrine said the Type 7's optimum engagement range was a thousand kilometers and trying to get under ten was strictly prohibited. "This is Shrike leader, follow me in," he'd said--and they did. Nobody questioned it. Nobody questioned the wisdom of flying a Riverjack at six hundred meters a second, twenty meters over the craggy, misshapen surface of an irregular asteroid.

At that speed there was no way for the defensive gunners to engage them. And at that speed, even without relativity, time moved slower. The coyote's vision was a narrow tunnel, the regular update of his cockpit AI, and the universe ticking by at a crawl. "Shrike Four, tally," one of his wingmen called out. The unmistakable signature of a massive power regulator, hidden on three sides by mountains and guarded by three dozen turrets of varying caliber.

He saw the course as if it had been presented by a mystical prophecy. With only one way to be guaranteed a shot, every last gunner would be trained on his approach. Jack ordered all but one of the other scouts to break off the attack. He pushed the throttle faster, hugging every hill and crater he could at four thousand kilometers an hour.

Which meant it took only thirty seconds in the end and he could've written an essay about every one of them. Just the realization that his targeting computer wouldn't have time to lock on was a novel in itself.

"Came over the last ridge and saw it with my own eyes. Jumble of machinery, conduits and stuff--I didn't even realize I'd pulled the trigger until I was egressing. My wingman did the same. Between us we got it."

"You hit a target with unguided rockets and a firing window of... fifty milliseconds?"

"At four thousand kilometers an hour. If they'd thought it was doable, they wouldn't have left it so exposed."

This bit of dismissive derision, playing off the attack, got a laugh from Kachik. "You could do it again?"

"They told me not to. But I would, yeah. If it came down to it."

The alien grinned ferally. "We'll get our chance. Battle, little one--is there anything better in life? Do you know what I think? Our marines think they have all the fun--nonsense."

"I'm looking forward to flying with you, I'll tell you that much. I want to see what one of those attack runs looks like close up."

"Exhilarating," she answered. "Your matriarch better put us on the trail quickly--crushing those pirates will be a delicious end to this tour. Mmf."

Jack wasn't sure how to respond to the degree of her excitement. He hadn't been lying, not even telling a coyote-half-truth: he wanted to see a proper fighter-led attack run, because the Star Patrol disdained such things. On the other hand, the little growls she made left the coyote wondering what would happen if May took too long in 'putting them on the trail.' And the emphatic 'mmf' left him wondering whether or not 'delicious' might have been meant literally.

"If only I'd been at Antuja," Kachik continued. "You weren't, either. We missed out! But we'll be there for the next one. You'll be at my side, won't you?"

"Of course."

Kachik laughed, then stood. Jack's chair swung around to let him leave, too, but before he could do so the Uxzu had cut him off. Her paws--Kachik's arms had the diameter and build of a good-sized hydraulic press--were at either side of his head. "But we must wait."

"Uh. Yes..."

"For her meeting with Matriarch Kenra. Kenra is wordy. I'm impatient. Are you?"

"Maybe? A little--I trust Commander May."

"Yes," Kachik muttered. "I'm told we're good allies. I hope it's not the only thing you prove to be good for."

The coyote found that Kachik's muzzle did not grow any less wicked close up. And now it was very, very close--her broad nose was almost touching his, her growling washed his whiskers in warm breath, and her eyes searched his face appraisingly. "I don't really know how to read this," he admitted.

"No?" Leaning forward, she joined him on the seat, pinning the canine. Most of her weight stayed supported on her knees, which kept him from being crushed, but even so he wondered how many unfortunate victims in Uxzu prehistory had wound up in exactly his position, just after making a miscalculation and just before becoming lunch.

"I'm not a diplomat," he reminded her.

"Good. They talk too much." The growl was so low and rumbly that he couldn't even tell where it came from. Kachik stabbed the coyote's chest with a claw, poking at his jacket. "Off." She was not, herself, encumbered; the utilitarian, loose-fitting kilt they wore for a uniform had already ridden up her muscular thighs and Jack didn't have a reason to believe there was anything under it.

He also didn't have a reason to believe questioning her would do anything but lead to more direct measures being taken. He unbuttoned his jacket, and when Kachik glowered at the tunic under it he skipped the rest of the preamble to open his belt and slacks.

Even that took too long; Kachik helped herself to his underwear, snagging them in her claw and defeating the fabric in one jerk of her wrist. "You don't react like prey," she said, and ran her fingers up his stiff shaft, giggling darkly as he twitched at the touch of her fur.

"That's because--"

"We'll see," she cut him off, and straddled him.

Jack had barely a moment to register the touch of deceptively soft warmth about the tip of his cock before the Uxzu dropped herself heavily onto him and her wet, strikingly hot folds took him in to the hilt. He groaned at the shock, but if Kachik's low, possessive growl was any indication of her own response the alien didn't give either of them time to dwell on it.

Her strong hips rocked again, faster, and she started to pump herself swiftly on the coyote--slamming him hard into the seat. It wasn't--quite--painful but the eagerness and energy of it didn't give Jack much time to think about anything other than the next stroke. And the one after that, rough and sharp and commanding.

Fortunately that was all too easy to think about. There wasn't much alien in the familiar slick softness of her pussy. He wasn't a particularly snug fit--she was almost a meter taller than him, after all--but on the other hand she could take all of him without protest and the coyote's length had gotten him into trouble once or twice before. Not this time. This time that gratifying wet heat slid down and onto every last centimeter.

He groaned again, unable to help himself, though the sound was in any case quieter than Kachik's huffing pants, and the thump of her boots as her rhythm knocked them against the walls of the confined space. She rode him with a singleminded, intense purpose, growling as his cock stroked quickly along her sodden walls.

How am I going to explain this to Denise? he found himself wondering. She was going to want details; she was going to ask mischievous, teasing, grinning questions about what he'd done. Truthfully Jack felt that he hadn't really done anything--wasn't an activate participant in their feral mating. Kachik was doing all the work, bucking on the coyote's cock with a moan that signaled her growing awareness of the thickness slipping inside in a messy, uneven squelch.

"What's--that?"

"Knot?" he managed--voice rather startlingly hoarse and strained. "It's--"

She ground herself firmly into his crotch and her broad muzzle snapped shut as a tense shudder ran through her. "Good," she hissed to him, rolling her hips against the coyote to tease herself with his steadily growing knot. "Oh, that's good... oh, my pointy-eared little prey that's so--very--"

Her paws, braced on either shoulder, made him suddenly aware of their presence in a tight grip that startled him back from his rising pleasure. Clutching him, Kachik pushed down into a few more shaky thrusts, her snarls becoming thick and harsh with her strained breathing. The last one all but deafened him--his ears went reflexively back though it didn't do anything to protect him.

Nothing did. The Uxzu grunted, jolting against the coyote and squirming greedily on his knot. He felt the fluttering, spasming pulses around him but mostly it was the crushing pressure of her paws that caught his attention, and the fierceness of her snarl, and the bared, dripping teeth clenched close right against his head, so that he couldn't help worrying what might've happened had they been a couple centimeters further over.

"'Knot,' hm?" she asked, the sound a guttural rumble. "Mm. You sure our species haven't met before?" Her warm, shaggy-furred body arched as she worked herself in a slow, grinding circle onto his cock. "You were made for us."

"Think it's, ah--ah, older than... first contact, yeah."

She lifted herself up until his knot popped reluctantly free, then pushed downward, groaning appreciatively at the spreading girth until it slid heavily back inside. "Such a shame. Did you finish, prey? I didn't hear you."

"First of--no, no I--didn't. Sec--second," he managed to assemble more or less complete thoughts despite her continued teasing. "Second, I'm not prey. We went over that."

Kachik laughed, a purring, booming chuckle. "Mm, no? A warrior, mm? Sh... show me how much of a fighter you are, my little--" He thrust, hard, and she moaned approvingly as their bodies clashed and clung together. The coyote jerked back, tugging his shaft from her, and drove his hips upward until the momentary pressure yielded and he hilted again.

That proved to be a tantalizing novelty, the effort of working the girthy, smooth bulk of the near fully-formed knot into Kachik's cunt. A nice, lewd squish as his sharp bucking sank him into her, and a dangerous growl when he got himself free. Not the kind of sensation he could endure for very long. He was fucking her in a quick, tellingly uneven tempo. He grasped her rear, fingers pushing into her thick, coarse pelt to hold the massive alien steady.

Or to try. Jack couldn't stop her from reflexively meeting his desperate pounding. "That's it, yes, my fierce little warrior! Take me," she demanded. He couldn't tell if it was mocking. Really he no longer cared. The need was rising in him, evident in each of the last, short thrusts that slammed him home. The heat of her body, the smooth silky wetness coaxing it from him as he rutted into her, pulled him over the edge before he even knew it was happening.

His paws seized her spotted hips and he pushed in as hard as he could. Pleasure raced up the coyote's cock, and he snarled with the first ribbon of warm canine seed that jetted from him to coat her folds from within. His claws dug in and he held her against him, another growl breaking free as he pumped his load into her.

Kachik moaned giddily, her muscular hips trembling under his fingers. He felt her jerk, suddenly, and then begin to quake--and this time there was nothing about prey. The Uxzu warrior clenched down helplessly on the buried shaft whose steady throbbing filled her, its claim less and less deniable as the sticky heat of alien cum spread deeper inside. She could only manage husky gasps, and his knot kept him hilted as she humped frantically through her peak.

And then the coyote found he wasn't up for much than gasping, himself. In this case it was because Kachik had fallen against him, and the chair didn't yield enough to let him breathe under her weight. Not that it would've been the worst way to die, but he was still grateful when she let him up. "So, I--I'm not not prey, right?"

"Not," she agreed.

"Equal?"

"Useful," Kachik corrected. "Now it's only a matter of learning how useful, I think."

"You mean in battle, right?"

"So you think of it that way, too? Wonderful..."

***

When May asked for a status update, Captain Ford averred that he was still consulting with the dreadnought's wing commander. She trusted that the coyote could find his way back to the Dark Horse, and left him to work: Kenra wanted to see their prisoner, and Commander May was in the mood for immediate answers herself.

Ayenni was standing watch over the creature when the party arrived: Dr. Beltran, Kenra Tellak, Dave Bradley and, for good measure, Sabel Thorsen. All of them were curious, to varying degrees, about the slumbering--and well-restrained--creature.

"Can you wake it up?"

"Yes," Ayenni said. The Yara hadn't been around long enough to have earned any real sense of possession of the Dark Horse's sickbay, or she might've protested the crowd that had gathered. Besides, though she thought of herself as a pacifist, there was something comforting in having Sabel and the big Uxzu matriarch standing guard.

"Do it, then," Madison said. She, like Sabel, had a sidearm holstered, and she kept her paw on the weapon as Ayenni adjusted the machines at the captive's bedside. She hoped the restraints would hold; outside of its armor the Waneshan looked fairly spindly. Around its joints were rings of metal and machinery--Ayenni didn't think they could be removed safely, and had to trust that whatever augmentation they provided wouldn't be enough to break free.

It stirred, groggily, and eyes that glowed in the soft light of the sickbay flicked from one figure to the other. "Esothat, kopest..."

"Speak Uxzu," Kenra demanded. "Not your damned barbarian language."

The Waneshan hissed. "Go fuck yourself, beast."

Dr. Beltran checked the translator to confirm her immediate suspicion. "That is, ah, not Uxzu, captain. It is speaking English. Rather colloquial English, at that."

"You can go fuck yourself, too."

Commander May didn't want to have to summon any patience, but she knew Kenra wasn't likely to be the adult in the room--already the Uxzu had taken a step forward and bared her fangs. "Let's have introductions. I'm Commander Madison May, of the Star Patrol. This is Kenra Tellak, matriarch of the--"

"Of the dying, feeble Kolash pride. Your allies in imminent extinction."

"That's quite boastful, mister..."

"Deyoo'tsa. Not that it matters. None of this matters. Oh, keep coming, war-dog," he hissed at Kenra, who was now half of a good lunge from his bedside. "Growl at me like you mean it."

Kenra brought her arm down in a chopping arc that sank her claws through the bed, missing the Waneshan's side by a hair's breadth. "Your posturing doesn't help you now, does it? Pirate! Brigand--scum! Say that again and I won't miss."

"Maybe we can wait until we move him somewhere easier to mop up," Madison suggested cautiously. "Deyoo'tsa, I know our people have fought before--extensively, even. I'm not saying we can make peace, but I'm asking if conflict has to be the only way."

"Of course. There is no other way."

The akita tried again, looking for common ground. "We did ally with the Uxzu against you, in retaking Antuja. I can see how this could be interpreted as aggression."

Deyoo'tsa laughed in a strange, chattering rattle. "You think that's what this is about? You think that I attacked your ship in... what, revenge? Revenge for those squabbling followers of Lord Mennic? His pack has never been worth a damn--how he managed to assemble so many for that foolish operation continues to escape me. The Uxzu can keep Antuja, for all I care... at least until it no longer matters."

"Why would it no longer matter--no, wait. Better question: why did you attack us, then? Just to show that you could? Show that you could bully me the way you did all those Ardzula-Zel mining rigs--what was your goal?"

"What kind of soldier would I be if I revealed my plans to you? Or to her," Deyoo'tsa added, nodding in Kenra's direction. "Not that she would understand them."

Kenra snarled and struck again--this time she either didn't miss, or hit the Wanesh intentionally. Her claws slashed three deep furrows through his side, and blood spilled in violet ribbons that had Ayenni pushing forward to patch it up as best she could.

Deyoo'tsa hadn't even flinched. He laughed again. "I'll reveal them to you because, as I said before, it doesn't matter. The unfolding of this story is already set by the time you hear it, Commander May. The Wanesh are retaking their place in the galaxy. Lord Jester is bringing us to it. Bringing us back. You--Yara."

Ayenni paused, her paw pressing gauze against the deep wounds. "Yes?"

"Edesh-kiin-yanokai. It comes. Soon."

She had mentioned the phrase to the others before, but for Kenra's benefit--and a bit unsteadily--she explained again. "He refers to a concept in our mythology, derived from our name for the Wanesh. The end of the universe, when our entire planet is consumed and our star is darkened. Commander... we need to speak in private."

The pirate's laugh built into an ugly cackle. "Exactly. I came for your ship because of the map you stole. The ancient knowledge. We'll get it back. You can kill me and a million after me, and five million more will flock to Lord Jester. We'll get it back."

"The... the star map?" May shook her head. "We analyzed that. It's--"

"Not that useful idiot Pol's map, fool. That was just a convenient way of putting a tracking device on your ship. You don't even know, and that... ah, that's the greatest joke of all of this. You hold the key to our return, and you don't even know it. Madison May, I admit that the one regret of my impending death is that it means I have to miss yours."

"Even if we've had disagreements, we can come to an understanding. The Terran Confederation--"

His cackle sharpened. "No," he said. He stared straight at the akita, still laughing, grinning a mad grin. Until it worked enough disquiet into her thoughts that her ears drooped--and then, immediately, he stopped. "Soon."

The rings around his limbs flashed, and with a crunching squelch they vanished--the pirate shuddered and went limp. One glance at the monitors told Ayenni all she needed to know. "He's dead." The machinery had constricted, down to bone; internal counterparts had also stopped the pirate's heart, and the only movement from his grinning corpse was the slow, oozing trickle of leaking blood.

"Good riddance," Kenra muttered. "You should burn it. They're not edible--it's the machines in their blood."

Madison managed to recover, though slowly. "Do you know about that pack? Jester?"

"No. His markings are also unfamiliar. But as we don't maintain diplomatic relations with them or any other vermin, who can say for sure? Maybe it was just a silly boast, to make up for his failure to capture your ship."

"It's more than that, Kenra. But I don't understand it. What could they be looking for? Something from Terra? They know our language... how did that happen? They said it was a map, but..."

Dave Bradley was trying to come to useful conclusions, despite the ample distractions. "The database we obtained from Qalamixi. It has to be that."

Kenra drummed her claws loudly against one another. "Speak, little one."

He did not share all of the 'points of compatibility' that his captain did with the Uxzu; he found Kenra's teeth alarming and the razor sharpness of her claws a threatening distraction. But the retriever forced himself not to pay attention. "We encountered a living starship called Qalamixi some time ago, soon after we arrived in the sector."

"That thing," Kenra snorted, huffing an irritated growl into the table. "We've never been able to capture the Qalmegh. Years of pursuit! And nothing, nothing except a trail of battered starships. How did you defeat it?"

"We didn't. We befriended it." Kenra looked utterly baffled; her huge, shaggy head canted hard to the side. "It's sort of like being an ally, except it's not about killing anything else. Anyway, Qalamixi gave us an encyclopedia--the data it's been collecting as it travels. There's so much information that we can barely skim the surface."

"So you have no idea why the Waneshans think it's worth a million of their own? Not that a million of their own are worth much," Kenra added dismissively. "But you see what I mean."

"We don't have any idea, no. We can investigate, but we don't even have a good way of searching the codex... we don't understand it well enough. Is it possible the Dominion understands that kind of technology?"

But, according to Kenra, the Dominion used nothing nearly so advanced to store information--many of their records were still physical in nature. And nothing in their archives gave any insight into what the Wanesh were after. May ordered Dr. Schatz to see what he could do in interpreting the codex, doing her level best to impress upon him the need for quick, accurate results.

When he was alone--and not being badgered by his captain--Barry Schatz hooked the data crystal up to the computer he had designed to make sense of it. Everything after that point entailed a brute force search. The Border Collie crossed his arms and tried to think of where to begin. The Uxzu? Qalamixi knew plenty about the Dominion--from its early years to its explosive growth to its steady decay as they realized that empires were a lot of work and not a lot of hunting.

Most of the planets that became part of the Uxzu Dominion were pre-FTL when they'd been incorporated, and the hands-off nature of Dominion rule meant the course of their evolution had been untouched. Where Qalamixi encountered them, the living starship had been able to gain plenty of information about their history.

Barry went through them one at a time, searching for clues. Looking for any hint of a 'map' that Qalamixi might have acquired. Perhaps the ship hadn't even known? 'Map,' after all--that was a broad term. Not all maps were geographical. Not all maps were even physical: the Zaillians referred to their calendar as a map, and who was to say they were wrong? Maps just organized information into something useful, so--

There was a beep at the door, and the ship's doctor entered. She gave him a careful wave. "Am I bothering you, Dr. Schatz?"

"No. I don't think you are, why?"

"Commander May wanted me to check on you. You've been in here for nine hours. And your life signs are slightly erratic."

"A lot of me is erratic," the Border Collie pointed out; he'd been told it often enough, anyway. And he could appreciate that, somehow, nine hours had vanished into nothingness. "I didn't mean to worry anyone, I just got caught up in this."

"Your research, you mean?" Ayenni pointed to the crystal, suspended in the scanning equipment that converted it into something comprehensible for Border Collies and other creatures with the disadvantage of not being a living spaceship. "How is it going?"

"If I had answers, I wouldn't be here." That wasn't quite true; Barry was fond of perusing the databank for fun, as well. But they both knew what he meant. "I don't even know where to begin. Think about it--they want me to know what the Wanesh want from us. I don't even think I know every word for the Wanesh. Uwanej, Wanokesh, Iyanush... three words just from the Dominion's holdings."

"Yanokal."

Barry tossed up his paws. "That's another thing! This isn't a semantic database... I don't even know how to treat it like one. You--you--you said... you said, uh, sorry. Simim Yara?"

"What? Did you just..."

"I was curious." Barry held his paw against the biometric sensor embedded in the table and the room lights flickered, shifting colors as he spoke. "Kurai reb enesh. Yiin. Yanokai."

Ayenni blinked rapidly. "Uh. I... are you speaking... why are you speaking Yara? How do you even..." She didn't know if she was merely puzzled or also highly impressed--unlike a native, he couldn't change the color of his fur, but the reflection of the room lights on his pelt were almost close enough to be grammatically correct. "Why?"

"Don't you see?" Barry brought the lights back up and switched into his own tongue. "The database isn't semantic, so when you use your language, with the colors and all, that to be translated in some way. Now... now, you said a while back that your phrase 'enesh-yiin-yanokai' comes from the Yanokal--what if there's something like that for the Uxzu? Some... derivative word I can't even guess at--or from a species like yours where it's not even entirely verbal."

"I can see how it would be frustrating," she said. Rather obviously, she could see how it was frustrating him; he was obviously tense, and the readouts from the life support computer made more sense when she understood what he'd been getting up to in the archives. "Maybe sleep would help?"

"If I hadn't been told by the captain--through you--that the end of the universe was at stake, sure." He had not bothered to question that supposition; experience taught him that May had a good sense of dramatic intuition. "I mean..." He sighed, and fed 'enesh-yiin-yanokai' into the database just to see what came back. Nothing. Just that the Yara believed that the Yanokal would one day destroy them--not where they'd gotten that idea. An ancient myth.

That was a completely different problem, the Border Collie mused--or said, because he was too caught up in the train of thought to notice, or to catch Ayenni's widening, increasingly baffled stare as he rambled. Half the time he'd find some possibly-intriguing note on the Wanesh and follow it to some primary source that turned out to be rumor, or a polite word for rumor...

Because they'd been around for quite some time, actually, popping up now and then for millennia. So if you wanted a complete picture of the Waneshan threat to the galaxy, you needed to look past the Uxzu and their ancestral states; Qalamixi's records went back for tens of thousands of years and there were at least recorded Waneshan attacks twenty millennia ago, so perhaps the Border Collie hadn't been looking far enough in history, especially since their prisoner said they were specifically after ancient knowledge and...

"Oh, my God."

"Dr. Schatz?"

Hyperventilation and exhaustion caught up with him; the Border Collie stumbled and went down. And Ayenni reached out to catch him, and as her paw brushed his arm and she felt his thoughts, she went down with him.

***

Captain's personal log, stardate 67700.6

My science officer has been restricted to his quarters on our doctor's advice--and she said we need to speak with him immediately. How are you supposed to react to that? "I think you better come down here"? Where do they teach people not to give a straight answer?

The lights in Barry's quarters had been dimmed; Ayenni sat on a table in the corner and watched his still form in the bed. She was sitting on the table because it was the only available space; the chairs had been repurposed to hold stacks of computers and samples that she didn't even recognize.

"How are you feeling?" she prompted quietly.

"I'm fine," he said. It was the fourth time he'd said that, and he was frustrated that she didn't believe it the fourth time any more than the ones before it. True, he'd passed out on the floor of the lab. But who could blame him?

"I'm coming over there," Ayenni said, and slid herself from the table to the untidy floor. Steeling herself, the alien pressed the back of her paw to the Border Collie's forehead.

That hadn't gotten any better either, not for either of them. Ayenni thought of herself as an experienced telepath, but nothing had armed her to deal with the unordered chaos of the dog's thoughts, and for his part the shock of a sudden intruder didn't exactly do wonders for his mental state. He blocked it out until she drew her paw back.

"I guess you're not panicking anymore... that's progress." It was about the most she was able to conclude--trying to read his mind was an exercise in absurdity. "The captain said she'll be down in a few minutes. Are you ready to talk?"

He assured her that he was--not that she really believed him, and sat up. Presently the captain arrived, with Lieutenant Commander Bradley and Felicia Beltran in tow. "Can we turn on the lights?" May asked.

"I'd like to keep them dimmed," Ayenni said. "So we can try to keep things calm."

Barry hopped up from the bed, immediately rendering the statement moot. "I know what's going on," he said. "I think. I think I know what's going on. It comes from--well, actually--actually, Ayenni here gave me the final clue. Captain, look."

He started fiddling with one of his computers, and one wall of his cabin lit up with alien hieroglyphics. May shook her head--she couldn't read it, for sure, and none of the symbols looked like icons for recognizable objects. "What is this?"

"The writing we found in the cave on that planet, several weeks ago," Dr. Beltran explained. They hadn't been able to translate it at the time, and the intervening time left all of them too busy to return to the project. Whatever it had said was still a mystery. "We do not know what it means."

"We don't," Barry agreed. "I ran it through our standard library, and nothing. I also cross-referenced it from the xenolinguistics database we negotiated from the Ardzula. Also nothing. Now let's add in the archaeological survey library--we don't have it in the ship's computer, but I happen to have a recent copy..."

The writing shimmered, and rearranged itself into words: In 4 years of spring, we turned into plants, the prince Um-Ker-Kali ordered us to lie down in the field. We sprouted 9,000 seeds gladly more than in three years.

"See?"

"It's... gibberish," May said. She was still a little off-balance, with the report from the ship's doctor implying their scientist's incapacitation and repairs still underway on the Dark Horse. It kept her from picking up on the most critical implication.

Dr. Beltran did, though, and it had nothing to do with agriculture: the language was readable. She could even see where the machine translator had made errors--working from an incomplete dictionary and an idiosyncratic grammar. "'We completed the new cornfields in the spring of year 4, under the orders of Prince Um-Ker-Kali. That year, fortunately, we harvested 9,000 more plants than in the three previous years.' Is this... let me see the computer?"

Barry stepped aside and let the leopardess work. He knew what she'd find. "It's a bit difficult to understand, but the language is clearly related to late Tarvinic. It's a ninety percent match to Tar Panian, from the middle Tarvid era. And that--yes! Yes, see?" He pointed excitedly to David, who's face had abruptly fallen. "You understand it!"

"The Tarvinians were an ancient race in the Nekal sector--plenty of archaeological work has been done on Tarvinian ruins. We don't have a reason to think they were spacefaring." David took a deep breath, and kept going before Barry decided it was his place. "But they're likely descendants of the Hano, who were spacefarers."

May tilted her head. "The Hano, who we've been told to keep an eye out for? Some ancient weapon... right? Some ancient--"

"We should've known at the time," Dr. Schatz cut in. "At the site we found--the terraced agriculture and the massive roads--those are classic Tarvid characteristics. But I didn't think about looking in the archaeological database until after--enesh-yiin-yanokai, captain. Ayenni's proverb. The Wanesh are related to the Hano. They have to be their descendants, or... or at least a client state."

"Then they're not attacking us randomly. Do you think it's related to the warning we received from the Admiralty?" A warning, specifically, about said ancient weapon--and the need to be on the lookout for any information about its possible rediscovery.

Barry said he couldn't be sure, but that left Madison May unsettled. She ordered him to keep looking, and asked the engineering crew to get a hyperspace communications link online back to Star Patrol headquarters on Terra.

This was easier said than done--they were many, many light years beyond the closest operational Star Patrol relay. TJ Wallace finally managed it, with some lucky guesswork and a few bad electrical shocks; even then, when the channel was finally open, the image on the other side flickered erratically. But she got through to Gill Mercure, her Star Patrol benefactor, and that was what mattered.

"Commander May," the lion said. "I'm surprised to see you--my aid told me that, based on the part loss in the signal, you have to be at least forty parsecs from the border. This must be important."

"Yes, sir. Admiral, I was briefed by Captain Hatfield on a classified Star Patrol document, code-named 'Artemis.'"

Rear Admiral Mercure startled to a halt so fast May thought the link might've malfunctioned. He got up, leaving her screen; she heard his voice ordering others from the room. When he sat back down, he folded his paws and stared intensely. "This link is secure?"

"Yes, sir. I'm alone. I've not told anyone about that briefing other than a limited group of my direct reports."

He nodded. "What did you find?"

"The Dark Horse was attacked by alien pirates: a regular presence in this sector, a race known as the Waneshans. I mentioned them in my first brief... we've tangled before. Our diplomat was told that the Wanesh have been increasing their attacks and using new technology. My ship was the victim of one of those attacks: they have some kind of cloaked hyperdrive. We were boarded."

"Damage?"

"We repelled the intruders and took one prisoner, who claimed that the Wanesh will return to take over the galaxy. Our science officer has presented credible evidence that the Wanesh are descended from the Hano. I know I've been accused of jumping to conclusions, sir, but I can't discount the possibility that their increased aggression and the encounter you related are... linked."

The lion had been one of her most dependable allies in the Star Patrol, even after the last time she'd jumped to conclusions and opened fire on a pleasure barge. He was the one who spoke up for her, who pointed out that they had been crossing into restricted space; that she'd disabled the ship without casualties; that her intuition was valuable. "What kind of evidence?"

"The Wanesh have been known here for tens of thousands of years. Some of the older terms for them--'Yanokal,' for example--are linguistically close. Ayenni--sorry, uh--our..."

"Your alien telepath," Mercure said.

"You've been reading my reports!" The akita didn't hide her pleased smile. "The Waneshans mostly communicate in the sector's trading pidgin, when they're demanding surrender... but Ayenni said our prisoner's thoughts seemed to be syntactically related to the language we found at an archaeological site several weeks ago. It was a farming village, with inscriptions in a language that's apparently descended from Tarvinian."

"Wait." Mercure stood again, and left the screen, but she could occasionally see the hint of his lashing tail. He must've been standing just out of view, staring out the window of the Admiralty complex back on Earth. "May," he called, over his shoulder.

"Admiral Mercure?"

"What are you going to do?"

"Get to the bottom of this. With your permission, I'd like to reveal the information we know to our friends in the Uxzu Dominion. They'll help, but I can't let them go in blind. We're on good terms with several of their prides, and they have reason to oppose the Wanesh anyway."

Mercure sat back down and shook his head, his gentle smile almost imperceptible through the low-quality transmission. "I'll have to tell the Admiralty. They're not going to like it."

"Perhaps not, sir."

"So here's what's going to happen instead, Commander. Do what you're able to in assisting the Dominion and finding out the truth about these pirates. You'll need help--I'll pull some strings and get reinforcements sent to you as quickly as I can. As soon as they've departed, I'll ask the Admiralty for advice. If they disagree, I'm warning you that I... might not be able to re-establish the communications link."

"It is very unstable."

His grin widened. "It is. I know I can count on you. How's your ship, commander?"

"Holding up. We took extensive damage in the last battle, but the Dominion have been helping us to repair it. I expect us to be combat-operational within seventy-two hours and at full strength in a week."

"Good. Send my regards to your crew, Commander May."

When she explained the gravity of the situation to Kenra Tellak, the matriarch understood immediately. She left, along with most of the Kolash fleet, to pass the word along to the rest of the Dominion. A single ship, the Kedagh, remained for the next few days to watch over the last repairs being made to the Dark Horse.

Its commander was anxious to rejoin her comrades; May couldn't blame her. She wanted to be on the move, too, and the ship was nearly completely operational. The last thing they needed was another setback. Fortunately, nobody had ever been cheeky enough to write about the best-laid plans of akitas; nobody was surprised when fate derailed them.

"Captain, please report to the bridge." May reached for her communicator to acknowledge Spaceman Alexander's voice and ask for clarification when she heard the Abyssinian continue on the intercom. "Action stations, action stations. Crew to State Gold. We have unidentified incoming."

Just my luck. "On my way," she growled, then got dressed, and made her way to the bridge. Dave Bradley met her in the hallway, and shrugged at her questioning look. Lieutenant Parnell had been standing watch, with Alexander at sensors; Léa Smith was at the tactical console. "Report."

"We have one bogey at sixty thousand kilometers and closing, bearing one-one-two. I don't recognize the configuration. It's a small ship, though. Fast-moving."

"Raiders?"

"No," Mitch said. Her sensors were being slow to interpolate the data into something sensible, but whatever it was didn't look like the ship that had boarded them. And, while it was getting closer, it also wasn't on a collision course. "At its present trajectory, it will pass within thirty thousand kilometers."

"But you don't just drop out of hyperspace randomly," Bradley pointed out. Space was too large for coincidences like that. "Are we in contact with the Kedagh?"

"Yes, sir. The Kedagh's tactical officer also doesn't recognize the configuration. In fairness, our sensors are much more accurate, and we're closer." More than that: Mitch had needed to send the Dark Horse's sensor readouts wholesale to the Uxzu dreadnought, which wasn't up to the task of resolving anything a hundred thousand kilometers distant.

"Hail them." No answer. May wondered if they might've been a scout--sent by the Waneshan fleet to probe her ship's readiness. Or was she being paranoid again? "Captain Ford, how quickly can you launch?"

Jack was already waiting in the pilot's seat of his Type 7. "Three minutes, ma'am."

"An unknown ship dropped out of hyperspace, but our sensors are having trouble finding anything out about it. Mind taking a closer look?"

"Not at all." He closed the channel and looked over the side of his cockpit at the snow leopard waiting expectantly on the hangar deck. "Saddle up, commander. Took long enough."

Kamyshev grinned, for the second before his muzzle disappeared behind the helmet that unfolded about his head. He headed for his own starfighter; Jack waited until he'd gotten in, then activated his helmet, too, and dropped the canopy closed. "Hope you don't wind up disappointed, Shamrock," Konstantin Kamyshev said over the radio.

"You ain't lookin' forward to this or something?"

"Of course, sir," Kamyshev said with a laugh. "But not as much as you. Just saying, you've been eager for action ever since we met up with the Dominion. They must've riled you up."

"They know how to use fighters, that's all."

"Is it?" Jack imagined--correctly--the way Kamyshev's grin would have become barbed and teasing. "You think I didn't notice the clawmarks?"

"Hey, you know. Ain't we supposed to be, you know, boldly going where nobody has gone before?"

"Never seen that in our charter, boss," the snow leopard teased. "But I'll take your word for it."

"You do that." He flipped the last power switch on and all his displays came to life. "Hey babe. Start me up."

Good morning, Captain Ford, the fighter's AI answered pleasantly. I'm unlocking the reactor safeties. Please put your right paw on the engine start panel to authorize ignition. Thank you, captain. The main reactor is online. Control systems are online. The navigation computer is online. Stand by while I confirm uplink to the command net. Hm. I can't find a Star Patrol command ship.

"That's fine, Angie. Ignore the error. Put Commander Kamyshev on channel one and the Dark Horse on two." He waited for a chime from the Enhanced Awareness, Navigation and Guidance Intelligence Engine--which, despite appearances, Star Patrol protocol insisted should never be pronounced as if it was a name. "Bubbles, you ready?"

"Ready," Kamyshev confirmed.

"Dark Horse, Charger, ready for take off. Cycle bay doors." The hangar deck depressurized; the big doors opened up to the stars, and Jack took his fighter out and into the void. "Charger One, clear."

"Charger Two, clear," his wingman confirmed two seconds later.

Junior tactical officer Léa Smith took on the responsibility of pointing them in the right direction. "Charger, control. Vector niner six, mark negative twenty, range forty thousand, one contact."

"Tally," Jack said, and closed the distance until it was obvious they knew they'd been spotted--the ship's icon flashed to show it was emitting some kind of energy. "Talk to me, Angie."

Your contact is showing no indications of targeting scanners or active weapons. We are being tracked by a medium wavelength radar with no match in the tactical database, and probable low-frequency laser mapping.

The coyote decided that turnabout was fair play, and lit the other ship up with the LIDAR module on his fighter. Angie obliged him with a detailed wireframe. Their quarry was made of sleek curves: clearly not an Uxzu starfighter, and not much like the Wanesh ships in the database. If anything, Jack thought it looked like it came from the same design school that birthed the Type 7 scout-interceptor.

"Hey, Bubbles. I'm gonna get a closer look, okay? I got a feeling about this."

"Sure, boss. I got ya covered. Let me know if anything--uh. Wait. No joy."

The ship was gone from his sensors, too. Jack shook his head. "That's why there's two of us." The mysterious ship had gone silent--very silent, no doubt because they'd noticed the LIDAR sweep. That wasn't a problem: the Type 7s shared sensor data, and comparing the view from two angles was enough for Angie to pick up a faint ghost in the blackness.

"You have 'em again?"

"Yeah. Eight kilometers, dead ahead." Seven. Six. Their thrusters were off, and when he came under four kilometers Jack fired off a quick burst of tracers from the scout's railguns. They got the message from the meteor shower streaking past the bow: the thrusters stayed off. Then he was close enough to the dim shape to make out windows. And a cockpit. He activated his short-range auxiliary radio. "Why the hell is your IFF disabled?"

"We don't have one. Are you--sorry," the voice cut off as the speaker realized she was asking a dumb question. "Of course you're Patrol. Captain Ford?"

"Speaking. Who's this?"

"Lieutenant Munro, 71st Tactical, Starbase Ivan Grozny. Here on direct orders from Rear Admiral Mercure. I was told to disable our radios until we made contact with the Dark Horse."

"How did you expect to do that with no radio?"

"Uh. Well, sir. Uh. The admiral said that May would only shoot to disable."

"That's a big gamble."

"Yes, sir," Munro agreed. "I was the only one who took it."

Jack maintained substantial doubts about the logic involved, although it had worked out. "Dark Horse, this is Charger One. Your contact is a Star Patrol ship, reporting on orders from a Rear Admiral Mercure."

"The hell? Uh--bring 'em in."

"Yes, ma'am." Jack added Kamyshev to the radio net with the new vessel. "Charger Two, we're gonna bring the ship in. Lieutenant Munro, stay in formation until we're close enough for docking ops to take over."

"Acknowledged," Munro said immediately.

Kamyshev was more skeptical. "Hey, Shamrock. You sure about this?"

"Didn't you recognize it, Bubbles? C'mon. You had a copy of Shadow Eagles, didn't you?"

"I had more typical porn, sir," the snow leopard answered. More typical than the children's holobook, which claimed to present eager young coyotes with details on the next generation of advanced, classified starships. As an adult, Jack had decided it was science fiction: none of the ships had ever actually entered service. And yet...

The crew of the Dark Horse were just as mystified; Mitch Alexander picked up what appeared to be authentic Star Patrol telltales, but not enough to draw rational conclusions. "There's no IFF, and whatever it is, it's confusing our sensors like nobody's business, ma'am."

May sighed inwardly. The entire reason for having scout ships was that they dramatically enhanced the situational awareness of their mothership. "Do we not have any information from Captain Ford and his wingman?"

"We do." That wasn't really Mitch's problem. Her problem was that the Type 7s had become so hopelessly baffled that they reported a positive identification of the vessel--as a Tempest-class spy ship. That conclusion was rather like having an exterminator tell you that he'd positively identified what was eating your attic joists, then being told it was Bigfoot. "I'll go over the logs when they land and see if we can find the malfunction."

"We can't afford mistakes, spaceman," May reminded her; not with everything that was going on, and with what they were likely to be called upon to do. "What kind of malfunction, anyway?"

"Our recognition guide, I guess. First of all, it's calling it a Star Patrol ship. Second, it's calling it a Tempest-class heavy fighter. Which..."

"Shouldn't exist." The Tempest-class was nothing but a rumor, a fanciful craft for pop culture and model builders. Dave had studied Star Patrol history, and he loved starships; he felt comfortable with what he'd said. For a second, at least. "Though... if they don't exist, why are they in the recognition database?"

The retriever and the Abyssinian went through the same thought process, in the same order, at the same time. Some kind of test code? No, what are the odds it would match up like that? A joke, then. "It could be an easter egg," Mitch mused.

"But given a choice between thinking Star Patrol has a sense of humor and thinking we've encountered a flying urban legend hundreds of light years beyond the frontier... Ockham's razor says..."

Mitch opened a channel to Captain Ford. "Uh, Charger One, this is the Dark Horse. Our sensors are picking up the ship you're escorting as a, uh... Well. As--"

"It's the Tempest, Dark Horse. I'm looking forward to this as much as you are."

May, who had been irritated at a possible failure in their sensors only a minute earlier, had already forgotten all of that. Her ears perked up, because even the hints she was picking up on tantalized the akita. "What does that mean?"

"The Tempest Project was run out of the West Institute to create a high-speed, undetectable spy ship. It never reached the prototype stage, officially," David said--clearly somebody had made a mistake. "After the Mohish-Yukana Accords, the Institute abandoned research into the field."

"Wasn't that just a peace treaty? I'm missing some historical tidbit."

"The Yukana accused us of supply intel to the Mohish. They viewed our development of long-range reconnaissance ships as destabilizing, and... well. I always assumed we let them have that because the Tempest Project wasn't going anywhere."

But it had, clearly. And now it was requesting landing clearance. May leaned forward impulsively to get a better look at the ship on her viewscreen: a subtle, dark-grey shape with gracefully contoured wings and the profile of a flattened bell. Four engines curved sensuously from the wings, never truly breaking its silhouette. If it was not, in fact, actually a high-speed ship the Tempest clearly intended to bluff its way into the class.

May left the bridge in Lieutenant Commander Bradley's hands and went down to meet the ship in their hangar bay. Both Type 7s were also back aboard; Jack Ford was eyeing the spy ship with an even more intense curiosity. "I was told this didn't really exist?"

Jack nodded. "So was I. It looks exactly like the models in my old books--at the academy we joked about how gullible the artists must've been. I don't know how it got here. The pilot wanted to wait until she could speak to you in person."

"You don't think this is a trap, right? Do you?"

The coyote laughed. "If it winds up that way, I'd still say it was worth it to see this thing up close. It's like a solar catamaran got serious about doing its job. Boy, howdy..."

Part of the Tempest's hull melted away, and a set of stairs unfurled from just aft of the cockpit to the hangar deck. Maddy and Jack walked over to meet its commander: a vixen with Star Patrol rank insignia but a civilian-issue flight suit, who introduced herself in full as Lieutenant Ciara Munro and requested permission to come aboard.

"Granted. When do I get to ask what the heck is going on?"

Lieutenant Munro held out a small black box, and a data chip. "The locked box is for you, captain; the data contains encrypted messages for you and the senior staff."

"It explains things?"

"I guess, but I don't really know--and I'm hoping you can help? I'm a test pilot for the Muroc Center. Six days ago Rear Admiral Mercure showed up, transferred me to the 71st Tactical Reconnaissance Wing, ordered me to steal a ship I didn't know existed out of Long-Term Strategic Storage, and told me to cross the frontier as fast as I could."

"You're from LTSS? LTSS Europa or LTSS Cuma?" Jack asked.

"Cuma, sir."

"That's still almost four hundred light years. You traveled four hundred light years in... six days?"

Munro nodded and pointed to the Tempest. "I don't understand most of her tech, but the hyperdrive works a treat. There's not much space, but it was... enough for me and two passengers. I don't know what they're doing, either. It's a complete mystery."

As she said that, two new people emerged from the spy ship: a jaguar whose crisp suit made him look like the head of some important company, and a coyote in a battered field jacket that made her look like she'd been committing industrial sabotage against said company.

The jaguar was first down the ramp. "This is the CSS Dark Horse, then? Captain May?"

Madison nodded and held out her paw. "Madison May, yep. Captain Jack Ford, auxiliary group commander. And this is the Dark Horse, in all its glory." He shook each of their paws in turn.

"I'm Dr. Miguel Ribeiro, from the University of Sepin-Sirte. This is--"

"Beautiful ship," his companion said. "Museum piece. I could get at least two million if--"

"No. You're not stealing the ship," Miguel cut her off. "You couldn't fence it anyway."

The coyote scowled. "Okay, a: I won't steal it. B: I totally could. Killjoy. Hey, coyote," she added, having discovered kin in Jack Ford. His ears twitched, and thought about splaying; she picked up on that, and her grin showed fangs. Her handshake was a little too happy for his liking. "Xoc."

"Xocoh Zonnie," Miguel explained. "She's also an archaeologist. Kind of. We were told that you had discovered some Tarvinian ruins. I'm... well, modestly, I'm one of the Confed's leading experts on Tarvid culture--but Ms. Munro basically kidnapped Xoc and I, and they don't normally do that for every new monumental road they uncover."

"It's a little more complicated than that," Madison May said. "Lieutenant Munro, have you been briefed on Artemis?"

"No, ma'am. Greek thing, I think? Like the god of... bees, or something..."

"Do you mind staying in the dark a little longer?" Munro didn't have a choice in the matter, and agreed without protest. Madison asked Jack Ford to secure the Tempest and find the lieutenant some quarters aboard the Dark Horse; happy to put off unnecessary closeness to another coyote he also agreed without protest.

Madison called her staff together and led the two scientists along the corridors to her ready room. Miguel stayed relatively polite, explaining that he didn't know why they'd been called out but that it probably had something to do with a city called Sjel-Kassar--ancient, long-rumored capital of the Hano Empire.

It was no longer a rumor; they'd found it the year before, and Dr. Ribeiro was one of the leaders of the archaeological surveys making sense of what they unearthed. Even from his short summary, May believed the jaguar when he called Sjel-Kassar the find of the millennium. She didn't quite know why Admiral Mercure had sent the pair, but figured they'd explain later.

"Let's begin with introductions. This is Dr. Ribeiro, Dr. Zonnie. Doctors, this is--"

"Miguel Ribeiro?" Barry asked. The Border Collie's ears pricked up, and his eyes widened. "From Sirte? Oh, God, it's--I haven't been able to put your book down. I mean, literally I could, but--I've read it twice, now. I have so many questions!"

Madison looked between Barry and Miguel, and then over to her haplessly shrugging first officer. "I also have many questions. Uh. This is Dr. Barry Schatz, our science officer."

"I worked with Dr. Nica Astellin's team on a radiological analysis, not for that project, but... but for an older one? Some Tar Emi core dating, I was--the algorithms for estimating the layer compression were well out of date. Nica had the idea to compare it against the reference samples from the excavations in the wadi, and me and my team at, uh, well, it was Mahenra at the time, we liaised with them. But the Tar Emi work was our first proof of concept!"

"That... was part of my thesis, yes. I'll... give Dr. Astellin your regards..." The jaguar looked like he felt overwhelmed.

And Madison didn't blame him. "Okay. Um. Lieutenant Commander Dave Bradley, the XO; Felicia Beltran, our diplomat and xenolinguist. She helped with the translation for the archaeological work."

"The Tarvid stuff?" Xocoh asked. "So, hey, guys. Real talk: this isn't about the Tarvinians. This is about the Hano, isn't it?"

"How much do you know?"

The coyote shrugged. "Like he told you, Miguel and I found Sjel-Kassar--their old capital. I'm sure that's why we're here, because--well, first? I ain't a doctor, that's Sancho's job. I'm a treasure hunter. I don't run in good company, so for Star Patrol to be able to track me down and bring me out here, they called in a bunch of favors with the underworld."

Miguel turned and looked at his friend. "How come you didn't tell me this before, Xoc?"

"Didn't want you to worry. He's a worrier," she explained, for the benefit of the room. "How bad is it? They're talking about the shield? The 'Great Dark Shield'? Paghuk-Hån, does that ring any bells?"

"No." Madison didn't know if she felt better that no bells were rung, or worse that a new variable was being introduced. "The Rewa-Tahi and the one beyond this are constantly subjected to attacks by a culture of pirates known as the Wanesh. They're very old, and we think they're descended from the Hano. Our ship was boarded by a raiding party, and we took one of them prisoner. He said that the Wanesh were going to retake their rightful place. He claimed that they were being led by the Lord Jester."

"Someone you know?" Miguel asked.

"Nope. And we didn't get a chance to ask--at that point, he self-terminated. But I've been thinking: it's significant he expressed no concern that he was betraying information that might leave them or their lord vulnerable. They wanted us to know."

"Have there been attacks on planets? Any... well..." Miguel sighed heavily. "Have any planets been mysteriously destroyed? You would know that, right?"

"I'm pretty sure we'd know. We haven't heard anything like that. But Jester is uniting the different Wanesh packs into a stronger, newer alliance--they pose a real threat to our own allies. Plus, I don't like being boarded."

"It can't be Paghuk-Hån," Xocoh mused aloud. "So it isn't as bad as I feared. Maybe it's entirely conventional, Sancho, you think? They know the TC's trying to make friends and want to keep 'em weak for the eventual attack?"

Madison thought back to the sickbay and shook her head. "I don't think it's like that. They don't care about us. I asked if it was about encroachment in their space. He just... he just started cackling, like it was all a big joke. Then he stopped, gave us this horrible grin, said 'soon' and... imploded."

"Imploded?" Xocoh made a face.

Miguel was making a face, too, though the jaguar turned out to have been caught up on something else. "Stopped laughing? What language did the Waneshan use? What do they speak?"

"He spoke English. When they're attacking, they use trader pidgin or their victim's language through the translator. In this case, it was English. That's partly why I went to the admiralty, Dr. Ribeiro. I don't like that the Wanesh speak English."

Dave saw that the jaguar was still thinking; he tried to fill in more context for what his captain had said. "We know that isn't necessarily significant. The Star Patrol lost a ship out here before; it's not impossible they've had encounters with merchants or private explorers. We just don't know what's going on."

"No META link out here, I suppose," Miguel said, at last. He pulled a computer from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and rested it on the table to project an image the rest of them could see. "There: Lord. Royalty. Leader. What do you think, Xoc?"

"You're the linguist, Sancho," the coyote said. Her mood, though, had obviously darkened. "Yep."

Xocoh Zonnie seemed a prototypical coyote, and the trouble with coyotes was the chaos that followed them. Xocoh knew what was going on. Barry would figure it out in another few seconds. But at that moment, May had a university professor handy: she was cautiously optimistic about the exposition she was about to ask for. "Dr. Ribeiro, can you explain?"

"Paghuk-Hån was a planet-destroying weapon invented by the Hano Empire, and whose loss precipitated its collapse. It wasn't destroyed, it was hidden by one of their nobles--recorded only as the Laughing Prince. The Jester Lord, or Lord Jester, would be suitable translations for a Hano speaking English. At Sjel-Kassar, we found a tablet saying that when the Laughing Prince stopped laughing, Paghuk-Hån would be rediscovered."

Madison nodded carefully. "And you did. That was the thing you found--but according to the report, you lost it again."

"I was able to set it on a random course, but I don't understand their technology, so it isn't as if we can make guarantees."

"Because you didn't follow it? You don't know where it stopped?"

"It doesn't work like that," Xocoh spoke up. "It's not a hyperspace thing. The weapon uses an instantaneous jumpdrive. Just..." She snapped her fingers, as though something in the meaning of 'instantaneous' might've been lost. "Vanished."

"Or reappeared." That wrapped another mystery up for David. The Golden Retriever saw May looking at him expectantly. "The ship boarded us seemed to come from nowhere. We didn't detect a hyperdrive signature... which would make plenty of sense if there wasn't one. We know what to look for, now--Dr. Schatz, does it help any to know that you shouldn't be trying to match those signals against a hyperdrive?"

Meanwhile, in the hangar bay of the Dark Horse, Jack was boyishly excited. Staff meetings always bored him-this would've been no exception--even when he didn't have a top-secret more-hidden-than-hidden stealth ship to gawk at. The coyote couldn't contain his wagging tail.

And Munro, despite his superior rank, couldn't contain a smile at his attitude. "I need to shut it down properly. You want to see her from the inside?"

From the outside, the Tempest looked perfectly flawless. This was not entirely driven by aesthetic concerns: the cloaking system it used to hide in the visible spectrum covered the entire hull and demanded as few sharp corners and exposed surfaces as possible. Even the doors for the landing gear did not appear to have opened so much as they'd melted from the ship's skin.

This impression lasted only to the interior, which had been designed on the principle that nobody really expected prototypes to look clean on the inside. Exposed cabling ran along the ceiling and the electronics were a hodgepodge of manufacturers and eras. Some of it looked almost contemporary; some could've predated the Dark Horse.

Jack was still impressed, and he said nothing even mildly critical as Lieutenant Munro shut the screens down one at a time. "I still can't get over the fact that this actually exists."

"You and me both, sir." The vixen flipped the last main power switch, and the interior lights dimmed. "The crew at the Long-Term Strategic Storage must've brought it online pretty quickly... there were still plastic covers over some of the equipment. It's been asleep for a long time."

"But it still works."

"Still works," she said, nodding. "Uh. Can I ask a question, sir? I don't want to know about anything classified, but... from my perspective, none of this makes sense. I was reactivated from SPR, told to steal this ship... told to keep my radio off, so nobody could give me recall orders... now I'm here, and... what is this? This is a Sovremmeny-class beam cruiser, isn't it?"

"Yep. The Rocinante, Sovremmeny Mark Three, commissioned in 2577. I guess she was in LTSS at Gustav Holst and they forgot about her until two years ago when Commander May took over. Ever since she's been on a special assignment charting the Rewa-Tahi--direct orders from the Admiralty."

"Commander Madison May. She's the one who shot up a resort barge, right? I heard she ion-cannoned a resort barge at Alpha Centauri and nearly killed the prime minister's kid or something..."

Everyone had heard the story, in point of fact. That Sunshine-203 had noticed a civilian ship drifting into restricted military space, challenged them, and then disabled their engines when they refused to halt. The sort of thing that, technically, a patrol ship was supposed to do. "Just inconvenienced them... remember, Admiral Mercure thought she'd be a pretty good shot in knocking out the Tempest."

Munro laughed. "Good point. How'd you wind up here, then?"

"I volunteered. I was CAG on the Agamemnon, but, you know how coyotes are. It didn't work out, and when we met up to resupply the Dark Horse I put in for a transfer."

The vixen wasn't all that surprised. He may have been a coyote--but then, she was a test pilot, and they didn't have much room to talk. Munro immediately figured out the implication. "I guess if you ask to be reassigned from CAG to the frontier, it kind of tells the Admiralty all they need to know about you. Was it worth it?"

In his time as Commander, Auxiliary Group for the Agamemnon Jack Ford had been responsible for a handful of training exercises, two shows of force reminding wayward colonists that the Star Patrol could still make life difficult if they wanted to make a living smuggling, and one rescue of an agricultural installation--'rescue' meaning he'd had the reactors of his scout ships expropriated to make up a power shortfall.

On the Dark Horse things were different. He'd used a Type 7 to tug a damaged missile with an active warhead clear of the cruiser, led a combat sortie against a rogue Ortalisian defensive drone, landed on a comet to drive a scientific probe into its surface, met two dozen alien species, sampled about that many types of alien liquor, and woken up each time.

"It was worth it, yeah." Coming from a coyote, and a fighter jock, the answer was telling. "If you have a chance to spend some time here before heading back, I'll tell you more."

"Unless things get too exciting here, first."

She was joking, and didn't know how right she was. At that point, none of them did. It would take a little while longer, and the next few steps were boring ones--certainly by the standards of a pilot.

Away from the hangar, the two civilian scientists were being brought up to speed on the Dark Horse and her adventures, in the hopes that an outside perspective might find the right hidden clues.

But it wasn't producing meaningful results. Dr. Schatz reviewed their notes on the archaeological expedition on what they'd called Beltran's World, calling up the writing on the cave wall that had been his key to linking the Wanesh and the Hano. "There's nothing here," Miguel declared. "Your translation looks pretty accurate."

"Is there anything interesting in it at all?" Barry didn't expect there to be much, but they were at the point of grasping for even seemingly minor clues. The abandoned village on Beltran's World had been the first concrete evidence of Hano influence in the sector. "A hidden message? Like you said there was a hidden message in the sapphire tablet you found from the ghost ship Obohruca..."

"Yeah! Buried treasure?" Xocoh Zonnie, the coyote, had fiddled with the artificial gravity plating and was sitting cross-legged on the ceiling, watching Miguel and Barry at work. "Treasure out in the open?"

Miguel looked over his shoulder, caught her eye, and shook his head--ignoring her when she stuck out her tongue. "Nothing about the inscription. The site is pretty interesting. The terraced agriculture and the huge roads, especially... I've never been clear on the relationship between the Tarvinians and the Hano. We treat them as descendants. Maybe subjects..."

"Hm! A site this primitive almost kind of implies that at least some Hano took their vassals with them when they left their home region of space. But it didn't work out... for some reason, the planet was abandoned..."

"The Hano seem to have been fractious... plagued by infighting... to be honest, it doesn't surprise me at all they've kept going as pirates. Their culture was always very predatory--extractive, where their subjects were concerned. Without their superweapon, the ruling family had no way of keeping control. I bet there are villages like this throughout the sector."

"But," Xocoh added. "Nothing interesting, right?"

"Nothing you can sell, Xoc," he muttered.

Barry cleared away the inscriptions and the archaeology and switched to all the information they'd collected on the attempt to board them. "What about this ship? Does this look familiar--it doesn't look like Paghuk-Hån, does it?"

"No. Paghuk-Hån was massive. And it wasn't--"

"Sancho," the coyote above them cut him off. "Think."

"What?"

"Take a good look at that ship, spottycat."

"I am? At least I think I am. What do you want me to see?"

Xocoh sighed and jumped from the ceiling, tucking herself into a neat roll to meet normal gravity right on the other side of the science lab's table. A moment later her head appeared over the rim, and she rested her muzzle on it. "The stabilizing fins, for a start, doc. They look exactly like small versions of the ones on the Shield."

"Maybe? Much less refined."

Without moving her muzzle, she looked over at the jaguar, giving the impression she was rolling her eyes. "You mean like they forgot about how to build these ships for forty thousand years and they're still trying to perfect a lost art? What about this, huh?" She reached her arm up in an arcing curve, stabbing her claw at the table. "That's a boarding hatch. Looks kinda like the doors we saw on Sjel-Kassar, huh?"

"I guess you might be right..."

"So... it's Hano technology?" Barry asked. "What about the sensor readouts? Do they look familiar?"

"I'm a tomb-raider, not a physicist," the coyote said, and her head dropped back behind the rim of the table.

"Your words, not mine."

"No, they're yours." Judging by the acoustics, Xocoh was on her back and staring at the ceiling. "You just haven't said them today."

"Xoc, c'mon. I'm sorry if you're bored, but--" Miguel lurched, and Barry supposed he'd probably taken a coyote foot to the back of his leg.

"I'm not bored. Just waiting for you to figure out what's going on."

"Care to help?"

She sighed, heavily. Presently her muzzle was back on the rim of the table. "The retriever guy, he asked the doc if the sensor data made more sense if it was related to a jumprive. Doc said 'yes.' It does, right, Barry?"

"Yeah." It didn't give him any insights into how a Hano jumpdrive worked, though. Dave hadn't asked for that, and Barry hadn't had the time to pull up the academic literature on jumpdrive theory to see if any clues might be found there.

"You might be able to learn something from them. Maybe a little warning? Maybe a clue of where they're going?"

"In some interpretations, yes. I can't judge the veracity on their merits, but..."

Xoc sighed again, and stretched out so that she could rest her arms on the table, crossing them and laying her muzzle back down. "What's the most unique thing you have on this ship, doc?"

Barry had been called 'quirky' enough times to ignore the coyote's idiosyncrasies. He also ignored the smile, inappropriately coquettish as it was. Teasing. A lot of the Dark Horse was unique, in Star Patrol terms--the ship was ancient, after all. Sabel Thorsen was one of a kind. Their astrometrics data was expansive, and even larger now with the map from Rakili. So what did she mean by that?

"What do you mean, 'unique'?"

"What would I steal?"

The Border Collie blinked. He opened his muzzle. Closed it again. Opened it, just in time for his fingers to hit the comm-link. "Captain to the primary science bay. At once."

Xocoh grinned, and went sprawling again, leaning against the jaguar's leg. "I like this guy, Sancho. You have good friends."

"Care to tell me what's going on?"

She shook her head. "I don't want to spoil the surprise. It's his conclusion, anyway."

"You know we don't benefit from dramatic irony, right, Xoc? There's no flashback scene here or anything."

Xocoh tilted her head back and grinned up at the spotted feline. "When they make it into a story, though, there will be. Do you think they can get Mina Savage to play me? I think she has the right... spark. I always wanted to be an ocelot."

"There is no way you are anything but a coyote. Doc," Miguel asked. "Back me up."

"Well. She's... a coyote, yes? That's true?"

"Coyote-ocelot mix," Xocoh protested.

Barry, who was still distracted, didn't participate in the discussion. But, just like Miguel was right about the coyote's species, he was right about narrative structure--Madison May arrived without much of a delay, straight from her quarters.

"Do you have answers?"

"To a question, yes. I think." The science lab's doors cycled again, and David Bradley joined them. "Lieutenant Commander Bradley asked me to look into the sensor data from the ship that boarded us. I don't have any conclusions from that."

Dave wondered for a second if he'd missed any context, but felt the odds were against it; that was just how the Border Collie tended to work. "But you called the captain down here, and she called me. It must be important."

"Yeah. Assume there's--you knew when you asked, right? Assume there's some relationship between the jump, the... the jumpdrive's energy characteristics and its destination. Right? Something. If we knew that, we could narrow down the target."

"We could figure out where they're hiding," May guessed. "Maybe even ambush them."

"No. Or--yes. Of course, right, sure, but--no. No. Captain. According to you and Dr. Beltran, the Dominion say that their new propulsion only works on their smallest ships. There's a breakdown, somewhere--obviously. A threshold! Something--I mean... probably I... I think it must have to do with the exotic materials being stabilized but--"

"Stop," May begged him. "Please. Slow down. I was asleep ten minutes ago. You think you know what the problem is?"

"No! But if I had telemetry from known ships, if I had access to the jumpdrive characteristics of a larger starship, I might be able to extrapolate what was missing. That's why they want the database we got from Qalamixi, captain. Qalamixi has recorded everything in this area of space since the Wanesh arrived. That crystal has the information they might need to perfect their jumpdrives. And, perhaps, to make an educated guess about where their superweapon jumped to. That's why they attacked us."