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A Renegade Reborn

Pt 6 - By The Horns

by H. A. Kirsch

--

_I was back home in Lainsville. Right in the middle of town, where the gay district was, where The Pit was, standing on the street outside the club. I was looking down at it first, from my penthouse apartment, if you can call the top floor of a five story building 'a penthouse' really. Then I was standing in the street. _

_It felt like an old western. Town square, empty, dusty, golden light. I was even dressed like a cowboy. Fuck, I was dressed like a cowboy! My cowboy finest. It'd put that fucking bull to shame, for sure. Everything exactly the way I wanted it, leather everywhere, fancy and tooled, spurs, chaps, a long coat, a leather hat - with fox canine teeth in the hat band, like the one I used to have. Real fox teeth. Were they people fox teeth or little fluffy wild fox teeth? That's for you to decide. _

_The bull was even there. He was dead. He'd lost a duel. That town wasn't big enough for the both of us. He was in a puddle of blood from being shot by my really, excessively big, .454 hunting revolver. Carved wood and ivory grip. That's illegal. _

Oh, so was Carl. Carl the german shepherd. He sold the club to me. Well, Carl, this town isn't big enough for both of us. My shadow from the setting sun extended out past and over both of the bodies. Nipple-kink cock-pumping cocky-dicked sex-weed-farming dude-ranch-mismanaging piece of beef. Kinda fat dog in a trenchcoat with his private dungeon shit and his overdone Anubis jackal boytoy. That's right, I'm the wolf in town now.

The sun was setting behind me, and so I turned around. I could watch it without covering my eyes, because the sky was orange and hazy. It looked like that second Blade Runner movie, where you really get to see what it's like on Earth. It really looked like that, a lot, in real life, really for real. The closer it got to the horizon, the more it was just a pale disk instead of a fiery impressionistic painting sun. It started getting dark. The shadows were gone, because everything was in shadow.

_There wasn't anyone else around. Not like I'd killed them; there just wasn't anyone else around. They weren't scared to come out because of the big bad wolf holding a duel with his big, bullet-shooting metal cock in his hand. There just weren't people anywhere. _

_It kept getting darker. There weren't lights on in town, or rather, they went out. There weren't stars in the sky; you couldn't see them. No airplane lights, no searchlights, no city glow. Nothing. It got dark. Dark, and cold, and there wasn't anyone else around. I wandered around; nothing. No people. No animals. Silence. _

I woke up having a panic attack again. Shivering wildly, rigor convulsions. My first thought was fuck did I get the flu or something? My hands stung with numbness.

I managed to cuddle up into the blankets and felt better. "What the fuck is going on," I groaned. "Hey, apartment computer thing, what the fuck is going on?" Just as I yelled at it, I realized I could look at all of the computer settings through my crazy eyeball shit. The temperature was set as low as it could go, which was sixty degrees fahrenheit. I'm American; I don't care if the Galactic Bullshit is metric.

Oh but the big bad wolf is cold? He's covered in fur. Yeah, a summer coat, and the vent was blowing right on my face and feet. Also, the nightmare. Everything ended with me standing there, alone, on Earth.

What a bunch of bullshit. Also, apparently I set it to be cold because I was hot, and then fell asleep.

--

I got into work early. At first, I thought I was alone, although my augments helpfully indicated that Cara was in the computer room. I'd like to say it was some neatly organized server room, because we were five hundred years in the future and had faster than light travel and sex robots and I had chips bolted to my retinas. It wasn't. The hyena was crouched in front of a small portable terminal that looked way more like a retro-cool cyberpunk 'cyberdeck' than I thought necessary.

"Hey Hawk, can you come help me with something?"

I wasn't even changed into my work outfit yet. "What, did you get a thorn in your pussy and you need me to pull it out?"

She turned her head around and stared at me. "What the hell did you just say?"

I blanched, which thankfully isn't visible under my fur. "Uhh. You know, the thorn in the paw, the lion has the mouse come and help him and then eats him because he's a lion and that's what they do to mice? Except... it's... about sex..."

She cackled. "Do you think I want to fuck you in here?"

"I dunno, you fucked me on top of a waterfall."

"You fucked me on top of a waterfall, and no, I need you to get over there and reach into that open cabinet and push a button."

"You push it."

She growled at me and palmed her mohawk. "I need to do a bunch of shit here with both hands to hack into that system, while someone pushes the firmware reset sequence into the button. Or, I can spend the entire rest of the day taking everything apart and doing this the way you're supposed to, and I don't wanna do that."

"Oof, okay, fine, I never thought I'd meet the girly version of myself," I shrugged, and walked over. I crouched where she indicated. "I'm only doing this because I need to occupy myself. Fuckin' nightmares woke me up and then I couldn't sleep in."

"Aww, so you came to make us coffee when we come in! Don't worry, it's not high voltage in there. Just reach behind that thing sticking down with all the connectors at the bottom. There's a button up near the top. It's the only button so hopefully you can find it."

"Is this an allegory for fingering your clitoris or something?"

Once again with the room-filling cackling. "Do you think that's all I think about? It's all you feel like you think about."

I wanted to keep playfully arguing, however, she was right. I was the one assuming she wanted to have sex with me in a server room. "It's not my fault something's wrong with me. I spent my whole life having no fuckin' idea. Maybe they reprogrammed my DNA wrong before selling me as a slave." Aha. "Oooh, I found it."

"Okay, press it five times, and then hold it in for seven seconds and let go. It'll beep. Do it... right now."

I looked back over at Cara while I followed the directions. Despite me having my leatherclad ass shoved back and on display, she was intently prodding around and typing at her computer. Moments later, a whole bunch of beeps sounded, and all of the indicator lights on the equipment in the room flicked off and then back on like a wave. "Alright," she said. "That worked. Thanks."

I got up, leaned on the equipment rack to make sure the head rush didn't take me out - no coffee yet - and waited. After a long pause, she looked back over. "I don't need more button pushing."

"Well, I just wanted to make sure."

She actually straightened up from behind the computer. "If I'm not mistaken, you were really worried about having sex with a coworker because it would ruin our working relationship, or maybe I'd want to have sex all the time and you'd get sick of it-"

"Or the other way around, I mean, this is me we're talking about, mister sex-magnet Earth-Wolf."

"Well, we had sex, and I got a feel for what kind of person you are, and that's someone who'd never had sex with a woman before and isn't sure he liked it that much. How right am I?"

I winced, then looked up in thought. "I feel about ten percent stupid for admitting it but yeah that's about right. You're pretty cool. You're kinda hot in a general way. Do I want to have sex with you right now? Not really. I'm actually kinda shaken and I just wanna do something to occupy myself, like take something broken apart and put it back together fixed. That sounds like my job, doesn't it?"

She laughed, instead of cackling. Definitely, that sound wasn't laughing. Most hyenas back home never really did it, or they played it up. "Especially since Christyk broke his leg so it's just you today. He'll be back tomorrow with it braced up so you can listen to him complain then."

"Ouch," I said. "Back tomorrow, huh? That's putting us to the grindstone."

"The what? They set the bones and put in this recovery stimulator and a bunch of stem cell stuff, then put on a brace. You can get back to sports in just a week."

"Oh." Well aren't I stupid. Back on Earth, even when things got amazing, they still sucked. They just amazingly sucked. I went to go make some coffee, and then change, and then get to work.

I was most of the way through my coffee, and Cara was just starting one of hers while ogling her cyberdeck thingy, when I got a message. It was from Mike. ["Hey! Remember that robot thing from the other day? Wanna see it work?"]

["I dunno, what does work involve?"] "Hey, Cara, can you tell when I'm messaging someone with my government mind control brain interface stuff?"

She put her coffee down and snorted, then grabbed for something to wipe her snout with. "Uhhh, now that you mention it," she worryingly chuckled, "It's extremely embarrassingly obvious."

I gave her a middle finger and she made one back but with a pump-up smack to her forearm. Mike messaged back: ["Walking and talking. Uhh, I'm not sure I trust it to demonstrate anything more complicated. Are you thinking about the dildo attachment?"]

["No, but now I know you are. I could come by at lunch, sure."]

--

Working did, in fact, distract me from my nightmare. Plus, I even had something fun to do at lunch. Once my break time rolled around, I changed and Cara caught me on my way out. "Hey, where're you going all dressed up fancy?"

"I'm gonna meet a friend who wants to show me something."

"Oh yeah? Which body part?"

"Hmf."

"I'm kidding. Is it interesting though?"

"It's my friend Mike, from back home, and it's some robot shit he's working on. Not this kind, either. It's big and kinda looks scary but interesting."

She squinted a bit, and wagged her tail hard enough I could see it. "Mike, huh? Is this Mike a weirdly colored fox who can't sit still?"

I gawked at her. "What the fuck kind of small world is this, aren't there like a million people on this station?"

"I helped him with some robot salvage stuff a while back! He was from Earth! Or he said he was. You don't forget stuff like that. No one-"

"Comes from Earth, yeah yeah. Anyway, I'll be back later."

While on the tram over to Mike's 'apartment' - which seemed more like some sort of gray-market hideout - I decided to finally stick my fingers into the giant river of information that I generally avoided. I decided to look up this Xyrex guy. What a name. That's like when you bang on your keyboard to make a character name in a video game because you want something slightly more genteel than 'Shit' or 'Foreskin' or something.

First of all, there was a profile for him, in the same way I could pull up a profile for most people. Maybe the profile would have 'private information' on it - about a third of people walking around - or maybe it'd have varying levels of info, maybe professional stuff like job websites would have back home, maybe just a name and the fact that they lived in some sector.

Xyrex had a 'person of interest' profile. First off, a picture, and the instant explanation as to why people thought I looked like him. He was a tall, black-and-red-leathered dashing rogue of a person. A futuristic officer's coat, short in front and tailed in back, with flashy elbow-length gauntlet gloves, sailor-front pants, and knee-high boots. The coat was mostly red with black showing through underneath for whatever shirt and harness stuff peeked through. The gauntlets looked like the tacti-cool version of fantasy swordsman gloves. The pants were exactly identical to the ones I was wearing that very moment; I could have cut and pasted them onto myself without any funny pixels. The boots were similar to the gloves, an angular and futuristic pull-on pair that had some straps and harnesses and an interesting square-wedge toe, though they were over knee with the top folded down for that - and this had to be intentional - pirate swagger.

Unlike me, he wore a helmet. It wasn't just a mask or a fetish hood; it was a full-on helmet, going for the red and black colors again, with obvious 'ears' and a generally canine muzzle. While the color scheme suggested fox, there was absolutely zero foxy about him. Too big, and the color patterning said 'captain of the bounty' and not 'I can break glass when I orgasm'. His tail was also an absolute wolf tail, not a fox's floof.

For a moment, I had a disturbing sensation, a pit in my stomach. I perused more of the profile to see how tall he was. Six-foot-four estimated, due to the boot heels and helmet. Okay, so he wasn't Alzarre, who was a maned wolf and probably just about seven feet tall. The pit turned to a moment of grief, although I thought about Alzarre and his tales of having almost died or been 'turned into a voodoo zombie and resurrected' and figured that eventually, he'd actually just meet some stupid end. Like being frozen and not un-frozen.

I tried to find more information on this guy, such as what his face looked like, and basically no one had ever seen his face. Even his voice was clearly digitally altered. That was one of the reasons he seemed to be the Galactic Network version of 'viral'. I also watched a few clips of his 'reports', where he would film himself having just interdicted a ship, with the identities of whoever else appeared in frame being blurred out as they were handcuffed and whatever. As far as I could tell, he went after particularly rotten but 'legal' people, stole their ships and/or stuff, and tended to send it to gray and black markets that served people who weren't being served by anyone else. Aww, isn't that sweet. A pirate with a heart of feeding the poor. And just in case I thought he was an okay person, I managed to dig up uncensored photos of people who had been shot, beheaded, hanged, or spaced because they chose to fight the wrong way.

So TL;DR, I dressed kind of like him, the same vibe, arguably more sinister and dark, while not at all anonymous. I could easily find news reports of myself, which included my face, my singular name, and worryingly, a picture of me in my masked leather getup scowling at who I thought was just some brat trying to take pictures of me for fun.

Thankfully there wasn't any indication what I liked to do in my spare time, just lots and lots of rambling and confusing conjecture as to the 'legacy Selnari problem' and the issue of where everyone else from my ship had gotten off to. I guess I lucked out, being sold off to Cal; it had been (several more?) weeks on the station and no one was able to really figure out where the other indent contracts went off to. The manager of that Numbers Station - Clara - was in serious, serious, already-imprisoned-pending-trial criminal trouble for doing basically everything wrong and trying to pocket the contract selloff fees without working with the Network authorities.

Okay, time to stop scrolling and time to go see Mike. Now that I knew where I was going, I stormed along, trying to avoid the stares and get into the utility accessway. I successfully navigated over the pit of awfulness, and didn't even have to code in to open the door this time.

I got a funny feeling when I walked into the 'workshop', which was really the cargo area of his sidelined ship. No one else was there. He didn't call out to me audibly, or through my implant comm stuff. I gave the unnamed robot a look, then inspected it up close. It was disabled. It actually didn't look any different than when I'd seen it the other night, although I was glad it was real and not a figment of me being monstrously stoned.

I heard someone move behind me and turned around. It was Marece, in his half-Hener-half-urban-adventure outfit. "Whew. It's about time you got here," he said. "I guess the trams were busy."

I shrugged. "What're you doing here? Do you know this weirdo fox, too? My coworker does. Or were you just following me around? Not smart for a bunny rabbit. Wolves eat bunnies." I didn't actually think anything was fishy - Marece tended to pop up in my life, and I put it down to whatever 'social services' stuff he did for a living.

Until he said, "Huh?"

"What do you mean, 'huh'?" I said, and then everything happened all at once.

Something started to come in on my implant comm, and I tried to hang up on it because I didn't recognize it, except it switched to ["Urgent - Emergency Comm Override"]:

["Hey, are you in my ship? The security system is all fucked up - it keeps telling me someone's there and someone isn't, except it's you, and someone-"]

Then I actually heard a squawk over the PA system. ["-stop-let me at the panel! HAWK SOMEONE'S IN THERE WITH YOU!"]

"Uhh, no shit?" I said up into the air, while Marece looked very concerned. Especially because the other voice was also Marece.

I could then hear fragments of things, which I later found out was what happened when someone tried really hard to talk through implant comms while running around in a blind panic.

Meanwhile, Marece pulled a gun on me. "It looks like your luck's run out," he said. I threw my arms up. He advanced. "Which is understandable, because did you really think you'd just get handed things because someone else screwed up? Two wrongs don't make a right, especially if you didn't even make one of them."

"Uhh, hey, you don't need to point a gun at me. If I've fucked up, you can just arrest me or whatever." I'd been mugged twice before. I don't know why - if I was mugging people, I wouldn't mug me if I saw me in an alley. I guess they were nuts and desperate. While it sounds like it'd be fun to turn on a mugger and beat them down, basically if they point a weapon at you, you do what they say.

A clamor started up in the hallway outside of the door I'd come in through, and Marece turned towards it. He moved towards the door, gun still on me, increasingly seeming frantic as the commotion was clearly running and yelling. "-outta the way, the door's open!" yelled... Marece, except not the one who was holding a gun to me.

Just as the gun-wielding hare was about to rush and shut the door with his arm up in front of his face, it exploded open and his forearm bashed his face. I watched spit and some blood arc through the air, and distinctly remember something looked really weird about it. The door hit him before it actually hit him. He hurtled backwards, letting go of his gun, which clattered on the floor. Marece v2 came through the door feet first - he'd jump-kicked it open - and did a save roll on the ground. He sprang up to an action crouch and pointed at me.

"YOU, take that gun NOW!"

I just about fell on my face to go grab it, while the face-smashed Marece and the other Marece started tussling on the floor. Something was very wrong about the one who'd gotten hit - he was bleeding, except the blood wasn't showing up on his face. It just dripped onto the floor from nowhere, and he even spat a tooth out. A canine tooth.

Not-Marece whipped a knife out and Real-Marece did a move that looked very self-defense-martial-arts to punch his wrist and whip the knife out of his hand. "No you don't! HAWK SHOOT HIS LEFT HIP!"

Now I was crouching there, holding a gun, watching two of the same person basically try to claw each other's eyes out. "His left or my left? And what if you're not the real-"

"LOOK AT HIS FACE! LISTEN TO ME! SHOOT HIS LEFT HIP!"

I looked down at the gun. ["EMERGENCY WEAPON ENTRAINMENT ACTIVE. LAW ENFORCEMENT OVERRIDE. AUTO-AIM INTEGRATION ACTIVE"] I both heard this in my head and saw it hover over the gun. That was familiar - I instantly thought back to the Prak station.

I looked up. Mike was hiding behind the door and doing a bad job of it, clearly trying to watch. The two hares were still fighting; it looked like Real Marece knew what he was doing and Fake Marece was inexperienced and crazed.

"STOP STARING AT ME YOU DUMB ANIMAL!"

I aimed the gun where directed and things got very weird. You've probably seen movies where time slows down for action stuff, right? You've played games where you mash the X button and use Super Mutant Aim Assist or whatever, unless you hate games or something. Imagine if that happened in real life, and you weren't expecting it. I aimed at Fake Marece's left hip as directed, and felt like I was moving my arm through sludge. However, everything else felt like it was frozen. A targeting reticle appeared and it locked onto something I literally couldn't see, and was extremely confident about it. So I pulled the trigger.

Bang, flash, and then a surprising impact on the hare's hip. Some object burst into pieces, instantly smoking and sparking, and then he wasn't a hare anymore. Instead, he was a coyote with a very clearly broken muzzle and missing canine teeth and a completely wild look on his face. The device explosion left a small patch of fur burnt on that side, and he gave up fighting to curl into a ball on the floor. His other side looked even worse; he was starting to grow fur back, but most of his right side looked like he'd been burned and scarred quite a while ago. That's awful familiar...

"Holy shit," I said, and looked down at my gun.

"Come over here and give that to me," Marece said, and held his hand out. "Or I'll remotely tetanize it out of your hand."

"Alright, alright," I walked over and found it very hard to let go of the gun, and then very hard to open my hand due to the shaking cramp.

Marece immediately stuck it against the coyote's temple. "Who are you?"

"I'm not - I'm not gonna tell you anything," he croaked, sounding half sobbing and half gritting his teeth, which seemed painful on account of his muzzle injury. His arm hadn't hit his face; the door had, and very hard.

"Holy shit, again, I fucking..."

"He, ruined, my, life," the coyote said, breathing raggedly. "He killed my family! They're GONE! THEY DON'T EXIST ANYMORE!" his voice rose and he started to get up.

"You're in the way of my sworn duty," Marece said, "If either of you don't want to see this, look away." Then, he pulled the trigger, and the coyote's head jerked to the side. I expected more gore than there was - it looked less like something exploded out one side of his head, than something just instantly cut a hole and sent blood and stuff out of it, albeit with a loud crack. The coyote had flinched and his face just stayed that way as he slumped onto the floor, while blood pooled out.

Mike stepped forward and staggered a bit, looked like he was going to throw up, backpedaled, and sat down on the floor while making a pitiful fox sound. Marece, on the other hand, stood up, and set the gun aside.

"No one come near this. No one move from where you are right now. Station security will be here in moments, they're going to scan the scene."

"Who... who are you, what happened? Who is that?! Why are you on my SHIP?" Mike squealed.

"My name is Marece. I'm a special operations agent for the Hener Consulate Tactics and Reconnaissance division. I'm following this wolf," he pointed to me, "in order to see just who he is and what he does."

"And you, you k-k-k-killed someone?!"

"I killed someone who was going to kill Hawk. Why, I don't really understand; he certainly seemed crazed. And, worse, Hawk seems to know him," and then Marece turned to me. I realized that he was recording everything, mostly because something appeared in my augment and told me that ["LAW ENFORCEMENT RECORDING IN PROGRESS"].

I did not budge. I didn't even move my tail. "I don't know him. I mean, I know he's... I don't... okay, so, is this like an official thing? Do I need a lawyer?"

"I'm not a police officer, however it's in your best interest to tell me what's going on before they show up, which will be in about... three minutes."

"He was in the same recovery room as me, raving about how I'd killed his family. And... I think I saw him on the, that Dominion Prime ship I was on. When I was going to get frozen, he was ahead of me, making a fuss. And before that, he was on the transport up from Earth, I think, making a fuss, but I couldn't hear what it was about."

"Why did he think you killed his family?"

"Uhh. So I paid my way onto that ship. I mean everyone paid to get on it, but they were all billionaires and multi-millionaires. Rich people. Rich people can do whatever they want, no matter how stupid or illegal it is, and people trip over themselves to help them do it. At least back on Earth. So when they thought things would go fucking south with Earth, they came up with this Dominion thing. A friend of mine told me he found some hacker or something who could get us onto there for a bunch of money but way less than it cost - it was invite only, we weren't invited. I guess, what he did, was swap us for people who were supposed to be on the ship. Which, you know, doesn't sound very good, but at the time I really didn't want to just sit on earth and bake as the sun exploded or whatever was gonna happen. I guess... I guess I must have bumped his family off, along with that friend, and I think one or two other people who were near me on the transport?"

Marece went from crazy-eye hare to thoughtful frown. "Hmm."

"When I got unfrozen, after they reconstituted my DNA or whatever, they put me in a recovery room with him and he was raving on and on about how I'm the one who killed his family. I wasn't there that long, because they sold me out to the indent stuff shortly afterwards."

"Hmm," Marece said again. "Well, whoever he is - which I'm currently processing through our records division - not only did he have a gun, which he's not allowed to have on this station, but he also had a personal cloaking device. It not only overlays himself through your augments, but it even projects an admittedly imperfect sort of hologram around his body if you don't have augments, so cameras will record him as someone else. Which is very expensive and hard to obtain, and especially not for people who are random folks like you and the fox."

"M-Mike," the fox mumbled. "I'm Mike Jasek, I'm from E-E-Earth too, like Hawk, just... not from his ship."

Marece spun to talk to him next. "Why were they here? For that matter, why do you have a ship? This is a restricted area, and so is the building next door where it seems you are living."

"Hey, ease up on him, he's just some guy," I said.

"Answer me, not him," Marece said, and stared Mike down so hard that he started outright bawling. After a few moments, Marece sighed and stepped a few feet away, grabbed a completely random work rag, and brought it over.

"My husband used to run a shipping company that really did gray-market s-salvage and, and, and we'd go all over the place in this ship to pick stuff up, and then he died and left it to me and I didn't know what to do so I just left it parked here and the permits lapsed so I p-paid someone off to mark it as restricted station space so no one would come bother me, and I just lately started doing... robot stuff again... and I was showing Hawk this ship the other day..."

Marece didn't really let up, despite having provided a cry rag. "Why's the wolf here now?"

"I don't know," Mike whimpered. I stared at him and gestured. "I don't know! We were here the other day, I was showing him Tally," he gestured aimlessly towards the deactivated wolf-bot.

Now I felt fishy again. "What do you mean, you don't know? You told me to come over and check it out, you got it working and stuff. This morning. I was having my fuckin' coffee at work."

"No I didn't! I didn't do anything! I woke up like ten minutes before all this shit happened because this hare guy was banging on my door! He said there was some sort of security disturbance, and my a-a-alarm system wasn't working right in here."

"Hawk, I'm going to access your personal area computer," Marece said, and then... just did that. I watched what he was doing; he pulled up the message. Mike must have seen it too, because he sat up.

"I never sent that! What the hell?"

"You too," Marece said, and then looked towards the fox. He held his hand out towards each of us; he might as well have been using magic, though I suppose it was just some way to make sure he didn't hack into random people.

"See? There's no outgoing message! And it says I was asleep!"

"That message didn't come from you. It was spoofed. And I can't get into the coyote's equipment at all," the hare said. At that moment, three station officers - all of them wolves - rushed through the door.

"Everyone, stay where you are. Do not move," the lead one said. He then turned to Marece like he knew him. "Especially you."

"I've already gotten my statements from them," the hare shrugged.

The officers didn't arrest us, but they did prowl around the room using some sort of devices that looked an awful lot like pretty old-school digital video cameras with rig cages. One of them went out the hallway. Another went over to the ship computer panel on the wall and interacted with it. "Hmm, most of the security footage is corrupted. We can barely see that wolf arriving, and it's completely corrupted until the coyote falls to the ground. Looks like Class 1 Obfuscation. Whew," the wolf said. "Who'd you get mixed up with this time?" He said to Marece.

"I could have told you that," the hare sniffed, and looked away. "It's not who I got mixed up with, it's who he got mixed up with," and he pointed at me. "I'm corroborating his story with anything I can find through the CO. It seems like did something which is probably a crime but was probably done back on Earth, and the coyote decided to kill him for it."

"Did you say back on Earth?"

"Who do you think this is?" Marece gestured at me, like I was a valuable cultural artifact. "He's that wolf from the C4X8 incident. I'm tracking him because not only is he legacy Selnari, but... there seems to be... well, you can just tell."

The wolf looked at me, sniffed, and recoiled slightly.

"What, do I stink or somethin'? Maybe that's him, I bet he shit himself when bunny-cop here blew his brains out the side of his head." When I said that, Mike started sobbing again. "Kind of hard to get a statement from someone when you kill them, you know."

"Anyone who directly interferes in my investigation or threatens your life can be dealt with in equal measure," Marece said.

"So what, I'm a criminal but he's a worse one? Great. Look, I didn't mean to get his family bumped off that ship. That's just computer bullshit. I mean, their dimension... stopped existing, or whatever, but that's not anything to do with me. I didn't know what the hell was going to happen. No one really did. I bet you all don't even really think I'm from Earth! You just called me a Legacy Selnari. Right? That's why you're following me around. I'm something or someone who isn't supposed to be here. All I wanted to do is not fuckin' die in some stupid apocalypse and now I'm causing some fucking Space Incident."

The wolf looked like he was getting a headache. "What?"

"I don't fucking know! Everyone keeps explaining stuff to me and it sounds fucking insane. I'm not Selnari, I was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York State, The United States of America, Fucking Earth, 2045 A.D which is Anno Domini which is After Christ because Earth was full of religious jackasses. Now, I'm on a space station full of sex-happy furry freaks just like me, yelling at a cop, which is a stupid idea but no one's doing anything about it so obviously this really isn't anything like where I came from." I have a big mouth.

Lead Wolf and Marece looked at each other for a moment, before the hare spoke. "Look. This is my issue. I killed this coyote in the line of duty, and your superiors and my superiors can deal with that. That coyote was coming after this wolf, and as for what seems to be the reasoning, it's in my jurisdiction. We'll all find out everything we can about the deceased, and otherwise, we need to clean up in here. This is private property. So, please help with that, or leave."

The wolf growled. "Fine. You HC guys are always so stuck up. You might as well be Tark. Alright, Zak, you get the bio samples and then put down some congealer. Any of you injured?"

All three of us shook our heads.

The wolf cops worked for a few more minutes, and then a few after, two more arrived with an anti-grav dolly and a bodybag to take the coyote away. Then they left, and it was only fox, wolf, hare, and a big dark splotch on the floor that promised to dry out and be sweepable in half an hour.

"Fuck, the last time I dealt with Earth cops was a huge fucking disaster. These guys just swoop in, take pictures, and scoop up the trash," I grunted. I saw Mike start to lose it again. I went over to him. "Hey, hey, look. It's okay. They left, and we're not arrested or anything." I looked over at Marece. "Right?"

"Well, personally, I'd like to interrogate you all for hours, but officially, we're done."

I completely forgot about work until Cara called me. ["Uh, I ran into a problem," I said.]

["What kind of problem?"]

["I'm not really sure I should tell you about it, but uh, I think I'm gonna take the rest of the day off. Trust me on that one."] Then I disconnected.

--

Unlike the station security cops, Marece didn't have any intention of actually leaving me or Mike alone. Me, because he was pulling my leash shorter. Mike, because the fox was really taking the situation badly. Maybe I was taking it badly by not taking it badly, but Mike was the one sputtering and breaking into tears every few minutes.

"M-maybe I just need, ahh, to eat something, I just woke up, I haven't eaten since evening," he blubbered.

"Alright, food time," I said, and then just headed right out of the ship. Mike followed cautiously, and Marece hurried to get side to side. "What, do I need to check with you on stuff? You're tracking me, so track me to the fucking food court."

"This part of the station is probably one of the worst areas, so you ought to have me around anyway," he sniffed.

"It's not that bad," Mike said. "I've never had any problems."

"Which is surprising, considering you have an entire ship stashed away next to a building you're hiding in, while you do gray market robot salvage. Honestly, though, I applaud that sort of thing," the hare said. "I'd like to point out that while the Hener Consulate is part of the Galactic Network, it is not the Galactic Network."

I shrugged. I had intended to get food from that Grix guy's place, though it wasn't open. I guess it was dinner and late night only. We ended up having the [five hundred years] future version of burgers and fries. I had a strange compulsion to order one of those Hooly things, despite knowing exactly what would happen within fifteen minutes. They were actually really delicious.

Marece seemed to be right about the area of the station. A lot of the people looked much more rough than anywhere else I'd been. Working class and actively working at best, and unkempt or intentionally punk-ragged at worst. There were also a small but obvious number of people who I would have put into the 'mentally ill homeless' bucket back home, although I don't think the station allowed people to be homeless per se. They were definitely not well, and both Marece and Mike naturally seemed to avoid them.

I tried to find somewhere to sit that wasn't full of other people, and the only area seemed to be way in the back, in a spot with some observation windows. They looked into what I thought was a docking bay, and then realized was more like the window in a car repair garage where you can watch them working on your car. Just in case you think they're gonna do something like screw you out of a repair or whatever. The nearest ship was in pretty bad repair - the cockpit end was seriously damaged, and looked like something had exploded inside of it.

Two people were at a table. I recognized both of them immediately. A hulking, displeased, white tiger in very classic-looking biker leathers; and a smaller chestnut horse wearing the iconic black leather harness gloves and boots of the Hener Order.

Strake looked my way and his face lit up with a surprisingly pleading look. "Hey, you, come over here and save me from this fucking horse, he's following me around like I'm gonna stick a carrot up his dick or something." To which Varius replied, in TIL, something incomprehensible although his body language said he was probably smugly agreeing.

"Do you know these people?" Marece said, partly getting in the way of me. I nudged him aside.

"I know about two days of them, give or take a few dead mercenaries and another dead coyote," I grunted, and went over. "What the hell are you two doing here?"

Strake turned his back on Varius and pointed to the ship. "Someone fucked me and my ship up. I'm sitting here being sad about it, and I ate one of those stupid burritos so I'm waiting to take a big shit." He looked over his shoulder. "Do you like that? Do you like shit?"

I turned to the horse, who answered without being asked again. "I am bored, living in hostels, don't know what I do now."

"Fucking exiles are worthless, they sit around like lumps until someone sticks a collar on them," Strake growled.

Mike demurely sat down at a table and started eating - he looked nauseated at first, and yet soon had eaten his entire 'burger' and went from looking like he was about to cry, to a wilted plant that had just been watered. Marece went to look out the repair observation window. I followed him, and decided to eat my 'burger' standing up.

"That ship is salvage," the hare said, and frowned, with his arms crossed. "It's salvage registered. It was brought in four days ago. The only occupant, presumed to be the owner-operator by the mono-name, 'Strake', was declared deceased due to remains."

I don't think Strake could smile normally. He lifted his eyebrows and curled his lips back and looked like at any second, he was going to unhinge his jaws and eat one of our heads off our necks. "Yeah, that's why I'm sad. I don't have any fucking money left after they sucked it out of my account."

"What sort of fraud is this?"

"Are you a cop?"

"He's worse than a cop," I said, and Marece made an even harder frown.

Strake shrugged. "It's not fraud. I picked up this hitchhiker guy on my way back from the first part of a simple contract run. He put a bomb under my seat. It blew up when I popped out of the LP and started the braking run into the station." He made a gloved 'pew!' gesture with his hands. "He snuck off when the space traffic control cops went to pull it in for salvage. They found me, declared me dead, and shipped me off to the morgue."

Marece squinted. "I'm sorry, this story seems to have a flaw in it, which makes me continue to think it's fraud. For one, the person you are describing was attempting to find him," and pointed to me, "and just ran into me, and unfortunately I had to kill him under orders. For two, the owner-operator of this ship is Dead, as I just said."

Strake stood up from where he was man-spreading on his food court chair. He immediately towered over us. My late leggy friend Alzarre might have been just about seven feet tall; Strake was probably seven and a half, and about twice as wide as the guara had been. When Strake stood, Marece stepped back, and Mike stopped eating. Varius, on the other hand, looked about as gleeful as anyone could manage. The tiger stepped up to Marece. "Are you saying I'm lying, TARE-hare? I'm not stupid. I have black-market implants that tell me who you work for."

Marece did not have a gun at the moment as he's left it in Mike's ship, and patted himself, then put his ears back as if realizing he'd left the one the coyote had brought back on the ship. "Well, I suppose you could have falsified the coroner records, however, I am looking at the photographs, and not only are they putting me off food for the rest of the day, but I don't see how you could... unless you're a twin..."

Strake bent over and pulled a knife out of his left knee-high engineer boot. Marece went crazy-eyed. It was a big, serrated hunting knife. "I'm really gonna put you off your food then," the tiger said, put the knife in his mouth, and took his biker jacket off. Not only did he wear a leather biker jacket, but he wore a black denim one with torn-off sleeves atop it like a vest. He slung both on the chair he'd sat on.

"Oh no oh oh no I know where this is going," Mike said, and abruptly smacked his hands over his eyes, smearing 'mustard' onto his forehead.

"What is going on?" Marece squeaked.

Strake then took the knife in one hand, bent over the table and put his forearm down like he was going to arm-wrestle someone, and stabbed himself in the arm so hard that the knife went into his arm to the hilt and pinned it to the table with a bang. Varius whinnied and jumped back; Marece leaped back and splayed himself against the window, palms back against it, and Mike looked around, ears twitching.

"What'd he stab? Did he stab himself in the chest? If he stabbed himself in the chest, get out of the way."

"It's my arm, you backwards-colored faggot," Strake growled. "Fuck, I stuck it into the table."

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" Marece yelled.

"Shut the hell up, bunny boy," Strake snarled, as his demonstration went partly according to plan. What did I think about this? I was horrified to the point of staring. It wasn't a joke - there was already blood all over the table. The tiger pulled at the knife, swung a leg up and tried to kick it with his boot, pulled his arm and actually cut another few inches of his arm with a very sickening scrunch sound. He also roared. "Look at this fucking shit, you idiots don't know how to fucking take someone at their word." Finally, rocking it back and forth, he yanked the knife free and it slid out of his bloodied hand and clattered onto a nearby table.

I'd like to point out that there were some random onlookers, and they regarded this situation with the look that said, well at least it's not worse, just to give you an idea the kind of part of the station we were in.

Now that the knife was free, blood arced up out of the wound, and Strake staggered back. Blood ran down his arm and his fist and dripped noisily onto the floor. Marece stared and blubbered something, and Strake made a fist, producing an actual squirt with a gesture that said, yeah, that's right. He might have actually said it, too. I don't really remember.

Then, the bleeding stopped. Strake moved the messy fur on his arm, showing the gash. As we watched, it started to close up.

"Can I uncover my eyes?" Mike said, and then did it anyway. "Wow! He's dispossessed! That's awesome! And g-gross," he then swallowed.

"I'm from where those two fuckers are from." He pointed to Mike and I. "And unlike mister ice cube wolf, I came 'the long way around' like the faggot foxy did. And if you want to listen to some nasty stories, ask him what it was like. Some 'Other Selnari' wanted to turn me into a brainwashed slave, maybe they were gonna make me into a trembling little cheetah or something, I don't fucking have a clue. Shot me up with stuff and I thought I was gonna die. Threw up all this nasty black shit and convulsed all over, and then, nothing. I remembered everything. Boy, they got a surprise when I stopped playing dead."

"This... this... this...." Marece said, and legitimately looked crazy-eyed.

"Wait a minute, you know about this?" I turned to Mike.

He shrugged. "Yeah, it's a thing. I'm not sure if it ever really happened on our Earth. It seemed to happen enough on that Other Selnar though, that they had people who would uh, kind of, uh, I don't want to talk about what they'd do, it's gross."

"Throw you in a big blender kind of thing so you can't regenerate. I'm not a zombie or something, I just can't die easily. For example, they were kind enough to put my legs up against my body in the morgue, so they could reattach. I was gonna use one of them to beat the shit out of the tech but he promised to just let me go, and I guess I felt nice for about ten seconds and listened to him. I did steal his prepaid credit tap card, though. Those guys must be low-class. My clothes got fucking wrecked, so the few credits helped fix that." Marece continued to stare. "Come on, TARE-hare, you know about this."

"I've... I've never seen... I thought that was just a story..."

"You, you fucking Hener sex maniac, you thought it was just a story? You're the only people who fucking believe us when we talk about what happened otherwise!" He went up and grabbed Marece by the neck, and looked about ready to either lift him off his feet or push him through the glass.

"I think you should let him go," I said.

"Yeah? Why?"

"I dunno, he kinda didn't do anything, unlike the guy who blew you up, who definitely blew you up and tried to kill me even though I kind of deserve it a little."

Strake gave me a squint, and let go of Marece, who quickly sank partway to the floor before standing again. "Look. I gotta figure out what the fuck to do. I need to finish this contract, I'm out all my money, I'm out my ship, and I fucking got this pet horse now. It was bad enough when he was just hanging out on my ship." He proceeded to grab his jacket, bent down to pick up his knife, and gave a head flick to Varius. The stallion got up and followed him, though looked back at me and flicked his tail.

Marece looked like he was about to explode. "I'm going mad. I'm going absolutely mad. First they stick me following some foul-mouthed excessively-aroused wolf who claims to be from Earth, then it turns out he has some sort of bastard partial arkanic ability that's scaring everyone he walks past, then it turns out he's being stalked by some raving assassin, then it turns out his friends from Earth are a black-market salvager and an undead tiger monster?" Marece stared between all of us. "I don't know what I'm going to put in my report. Do I even make a report? Maybe I should just buy one of those cloaking things and skip the station." He then walked off, in the opposite direction Strake did.

I looked around, then sat down with Mike. "Hey."

"Wow. This is the most amount of badass I've seen since Earth!"

"You've got shit on your forehead," I said, and tossed him a napkin, then looked at my burger, which I'd squashed into unrecognizability since I'd held it the whole fucking time. "Just to make sure, he stabbed himself and it healed right up, right? That happened?"

Mike nodded. "Yeah. Weren't you listening? It's a thing." Then he let his ears sink. "Uhm. Hey. Can you... can you maybe not just run away like everyone else just did?"

I took a deep breath. "Yeah. Sure. I'm getting a weirder and weirder feeling. Like what, I'm supposed to go back to my little welfare apartment and go to my institutionally-provided job poking around in robot loader guts? Come on. I didn't displace that guy's family for blue collar life. I was on the billionaire ship."

The fox chuckled. "You can stay over at my place. Uh, you'll have to sleep on the couch."

--

I slept for about three hours that night. I didn't wake up from a nightmare - I just woke up. Mike was completely fast asleep, so I decided to go for a little walk.

A little walk that coincidentally had me going onto the ship. Whatever the coyote had done to it to let me in there hadn't been undone, and I could just walk in. I didn't have much frame of reference for spaceships. Maybe a tiny bit for yachts. I was never really a boating guy, but I went on a few yacht trips. Leather gear's expensive; a fair number of guys who frequented my old club were big money types. I'm not gonna say no to a chance to float around on a boat. Did you know if you set up a sex sling on a boat, you can let the waves make you fuck someone without either of you doing anything?

This ship was about as capacious as an owner-operator crewed motor yacht. Or maybe it was as big as a family-size apartment. There was a surprising amount of junk everywhere in it, though what I assumed was the captain's cabin was set up like it could have someone sleep in it right now. "Fuck your couch, I'm sleeping here."

I climbed in, laid back, crossed my boots, and put my gloved hands behind my head. And I looked at myself in the mirror pasted to the ceiling. No fancy computer tricks there - that was an old-fashioned fuck mirror. One corner had a collapsible sex sling in its 'bag of tent poles' configuration. There were some racks that were loaded with sex toys. There was even a quarter-full bottle of some kind of lubricant, the slimy kind used for fisting. I fiddled with it; it had a skin inside like pudding you made yesterday.

I also started hatching a plan. Let's see: Strake needed a ship to do whatever; Mike had a ship; Varius needed something to do; Marece had to follow me around; and I didn't feel like being a welfare refugee in the asshole of a space station. None of these people would have ever met each other again if it weren't for me.

About thirty seconds into my little territorial bed-squirming fantasy, and I heard the PA crackle. "Uhm. Uh, Hawk? Is that you in my ship? I can't see you, the cameras are still messed up."

"Nah, it's not me. It's.. uhh.. It's some other wolf."

"Really? Because I don't know any other wolves that have Brooklyn accents. What are you doing?"

"I couldn't fucking sleep. So I thought I'd see if I could sleep in here. You know, in a nice bed. Did you want me to crawl in with you? I don't think you need a guy like me cuddling you after all that shit. I'm your fucking problem. Why're you bugging me now?"

"The occupancy alarm woke me up."

"Aww, too bad. Anyway, sorry, I'm just..." I trailed off. I didn't hear anything, and realized that the PA had gone dead.

A few minutes later, and Mike walked in. He was just wearing his spandex shorts again. He looked... conflicted.

"I'm not a bastard lying in here, am I? You kinda blurted out that you'd been doing stuff with that guy and that guy was your husband and then that guy died and you got stuck with all this stuff and a broken heart."

"He's the one with the broken heart. That's... why he died. It broke." His muzzle twisted up like he was going to cry, and then sank back. "Uh, I mean, we did have sex in here, but I mean this was, it's okay. Why are you doing this?"

"Mike, does this thing still fly?"

"It doesn't really fly, it's 'operate', that's what everyone says. And... I don't see why not, there's nothing wrong with it. Maybe a little maintenance. And I'd have to clean up. Probably get some new bedding for in here... I mean... I just haven't... changed it in a while. It's probably musty."

I wiped a finger over the 'nightstand'; my leathered finger came away dusty. "Hrrh."

He opened his muzzle to start talking again, and his eyes went wide. "Are you going to steal my ship?"

"What? No, I'm not gonna steal your ship. You're gonna give it to me. Actually, you're gonna lend it to Strake, so he can do whatever he's gotta do. And you're gonna come along, since it's your ship. And Marece is gonna come along, because he has to follow me around like we're playing some role-reversal wolf and rabbit thing."

"I think he's a hare-"

"I know what the fuck he is, and how much he enjoys being mis-speciesed." I was starting to feel kind of aroused, not by Mike, or by thinking of Marece getting mad, but because I was generally feeling excited. "Look. That Cal guy who was running the Prak farm station, he wanted to buy a planet."

"What? You can't buy a planet. That's just a saying."

"I'm pretty sure he wanted to buy a planet and turn it into a giant sex whatever, because I'm pretty sure that's the only thing he knew how to do. And poor him, he got squashed flat and wasn't one of those things like Strake is. And look at me, I used to run a sex club myself. That was fun. I wouldn't mind doing that again. Do I want to do it here? That's too fucking easy. That Hener Shadows stuff sucks all the risk out of everything." I stood up and approached him. "I've got some money. Maybe it was from a legal settlement from the mishandling of my little wolf-cube tray. How many people can live on this thing?"

"Live? Uhh... it's not like, I mean it's kind of like an RV or something I guess, but I mean you'd have to dock up to places pretty often for fuel and to refresh the climate systems. That means empty the poop."

I wanted to grab him by the lapels but he didn't have any, again, so I grabbed him by his waistband. "How many people can live on this ship."

"Maybe four or five? What are... I mean, that Strake guy doesn't seem like he's gonna, I mean... do you even know how to contact him? And, I mean, hmm." Mike went through a series of emotions that corresponded to whether his tail curled, wagged, or went between his legs. He eventually just whined. "I think this is a really stupid idea." He then perked his ears. "Okay, let's do it anyway! I didn't watch thousands of hours of sci-fi TV and movies just to sit on my ass."

"Good foxy," I said, and let his waistband snap back.