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A Renegade Reborn

Pt 2 - Space Grass

By H. A. Kirsch

--

I didn't dream. I didn't wake up. I didn't think. One moment, I was having some horrible fucking object pushed into my neck and down into my body. The next moment, I could see the top of the pod, lights, a few bubbles. I could hear things, people talking. I felt everything tilt and shift, a thump, another thump. I heard a loud glug and a rushing water sound, and the fluid suddenly drained away from my face.

"-aha! Bingo! This one's working alright! That's 1 for 20! A new record!" A male voice, unseen.

I looked around. I did not see the wall of pods or the part of the Dominion Prime ship I'd been in before. I did see a busy room that looked like a medical clinic.

"Okay, get the inductor out, I'll get a bandage," a female voice. I could see her now, a leopard hybrid. She had medical scrubs and gloves on, and held a large sticky bandage. I couldn't move. I could think, see, hear, I could taste a horrific foul taste. I couldn't breathe. Not that I couldn't get air, but I couldn't even move my diaphragm. I started to panic, which I couldn't express in any way.

Whatever had been inserted inside my neck was pulled out by the unseen other person, and it was just as awful as when it went inside. The leopard immediately slapped the bandage against me, which hurt even more. As soon as the Thing was removed, I gagged and inhaled and felt like I was drowning.

"Shit, Martin, fucking lean him up! Lean him up!" "Sorry! This thing's awkward, I gotta hit the transfer button and yank it out at the same time!"

They grabbed me and I felt limp and terrified. They tilted me forward and abruptly it felt like my body had been a sleeping limb that was now thrumming awake. I gasped again and yanked out of the opened restraints, then clawed over against the side of the pod. I stared down at the floor and the leopard booted a large bucket in front of me. I coughed and a few pints of foamy green-blue liquid gushed out of my mouth. Then nausea overtook me and I threw up, just more of that substance. I suddenly remembered we'd been allowed to eat before going into the pods - despite that, just more of the liquid. Twice, three times. I coughed and shakily wiped my muzzle on my wet arm. "What happened?" I managed to croak.

"Well, you were just in bio-stasis for a little while, and now you're coming out of it." The leopard continued to speak. I looked up at her. She had an electronic display badge that read "Clara Montiq" on it, with a picture, and a logo of a company I'd never heard of.

Now that I'd coughed up a lungful of muck and thrown up a stomach-ful, I had a desperate need to pee and take an urgent shit. I started to stand up and both of them grabbed me. "Whoa there."

"I gotta, I gotta, I gotta fucking shit eveywhere, I'm gonna shit! God damn this fucking sucks!" I cramped and convulsed trying to hold it all in.

"Let's get you to the shower and we can clean you up, and you can do whatever you need in there. It's just a little ways over there." Clara spoke and helped my right side along, while Martin - who was a doberman pinscher dog - helped my left side. There were other pods in the room, and only one of them had a recognizable person in it. One of them was very badly damaged and had several people taking it apart. That one did not have a recognizable person in it, just an unrecognizable one.

The shower area couldn't have been more than twenty feet away but I collapsed into it as soon as they let me go and cowered in the corner like I'd been forced to walk five hundred yards up hill in the snow. Then, I let go, and was horrified to see that I was pissing the same liquid out, while more of it ran out between my legs as I embarrassingly shat it out like someone with a stomach virus. The dog slid the curtain shut, and then stuck an arm in. "Here's the sprayer, here's some soap, just get yourself nice and cleaned off. You can flip a lever on the sprayer and it'll blow dry you." He patted around at the implements, then withdrew his arm.

I wondered if I also needed to ejaculate some of that stuff out, too, but I didn't really feel like trying. Having expunged a bunch of stasis-glop from all my other orifices, that urgent desperate panic was gone, and replaced by the fact that I felt like absolute shit. I washed off in the shower, which was only lukewarm, and thankfully the air dryer was much more toasty. Despite the drying, my fur looked pretty shabby instead of the wuff fluff I expected.

I shakily put the sprayer back and moved to stick my head out of the curtain to tell dog and leopard that I was done. The simple act of leaning forward felt like a herculean effort that I was not up for, and I clutched at the curtain. Not good enough; I fell forward and crashed into the back of what I thought was another attendant. They looked generically canine, and instead of toppling over with me, they simply crouched forward onto one knee while I draped over their back.

"I can't fucking walk!" I groaned, and tried to stand back up. I was extremely tired yet panicked again, and despite being unsettled inside, really hungry.

Clara and Martin rushed back over and helped me up; the dog held up a fabric scrub gown and Clara helped me into it. "It's okay," the leopard said. "I know you probably feel terrible, and that's completely normal. Honestly, you've had a really good time of this compared to most of the people on that ship. This part just sucks."

Martin chimed in. "You should see some of the other people we got out of those pods, I mean the live ones. You're in great shape. You need extensive genetic reconstruction, but what else is new? You were in a prototype stasis pod for five hundred years."

"Shit, don't just say stuff like that," Clara snarled.

They walked me out of the immediate area and through a few more hallways. It seemed like a hospital, but didn't look like any I'd been in back home. There were other rooms full of what looked like recovery beds, although none of the rooms themselves looked much the same as each other. The staff were busy, sometimes frantically so, and many of the beds had curtains around them to hide whomever was 'recovering'. Even some of the unhidden patients looked to be in extremely rough shape, and they were all animal hybrid humans like me.

It was hard enough just walking that I didn't bother trying to think much beyond observing. As soon as we stopped because I was panting, I looked over to the dog. "Hah, did you just say five hundred years?"

Clara visibly bristled and rolled her eyes. "This isn't a good time-"

"Yep! Your ship did a bad location point jump and ended up drifting in space in this system. You'd think we'd have found it sooner considering this outpost has been here for half a century but I mean, it was just a hunk of metal floating around in the asteroid belt, and it was dark, there wasn't really anything to find until some recon drones actually bumped into it."

"So... this is it? We're here?" I tried to remember where 'here' was supposed to be. Some other solar system. Probably orbiting a planet. I couldn't remember the name of the planet. I couldn't remember if they'd even told us. That made my stomach feel worse.

"Well, you're here, yeah, you're here on this outpost station. Are you where you're supposed to be? Well... Look, you're alive and in one piece, and that's a heck of a lot better than most of these 'Dominion Project' freeze-pops."

Clara cut in. "You'll have to excuse Martin. He doesn't know when to shut the hell up," and then she kicked him in the shin, prompting a loud bark and a whine. "The most important part is that yes, you've been in bio-stasis for a long time, and your body is basically very damaged. Even your brain, although I guess not too damaged or you wouldn't be talking. So, we're taking you to get some reconstruction therapy that'll make you feel a lot better." Then she looked over at Martin. "See? You can be professional." She sounded out all the syllables. I had initially thought she was nice - now I wasn't so sure.

I didn't think I could keep walking forward, but they helped me into a room which was full of curtained beds and a lot of ominous medical equipment. "Man, I sure wish I was the kind of pervert who liked this stuff," I said, as they helped me into one of the beds. "Are you gonna put any more of that green stuff in me? That wasn't fun."

"Nope! No green stuff unless you count food paste. However, I am going to tetanize you as part of the regular anesthetic induction. This also is not going to be very pleasant, I mean the reconstruction part, but trust me on feeling better when you wake up."

"Okay, but what is tetanizing? Like tetanus? When you step on a nail?"

"Huh?" Martin cocked his head.

While I was distracted by his confusion, Clara poked something against the side of my head and it felt like my brain tuned between old-fashioned radio stations.

Unlike being put into stasis, I was dimly aware of the next segment of time. I kept waking up into a state of delirium to be moved around in the bed, to receive food and water, to go to the bathroom. Clara was wrong that it was unpleasant, in that nothing was painful, but that was only because I was completely out of my mind the entire time. I kept having night terrors, though I couldn't understand what they were about; I'd just wake up terrified and confused and someone would come and jab me in the head with The Tetanizer, which snowed me out again.

I woke up like I had many times before, and aside from feeling groggy, the profound delirium was completely gone this time. I was in a different room, where I was the only patient and there was no more privacy curtain. I was plugged into not a regular arm IV but one that was jabbed into me just below my collarbone.

I also was no longer crushingly tired. I was the opposite. I felt like I was ready to attack the world. I hadn't felt that kind of exuberance since I'd been fresh out of high school and ready to blunder my way through early adulthood all by myself.

[Five hundred years.]

It wasn't exactly a voice in my head, just a thought, like how a song gets stuck and you hear it over and over.

[Five hundred years.]

I was just about to turn to step out of the bed to see if I could stand, when a humanoid walked in. It was another wolfy thing, like the one I'd fallen against however long ago, furless and wearing a medical staff uniform.

"You have awakened. How are you feeling?"

I shrugged. "Like I just had my genes reconstructed, I guess." I continued trying to stand up.

"Please do not attempt to walk. You are connected to nutrition and medication delivery systems." The wolf nurse thing stepped closer.

[Five hundred years]

I was hungry, though not in the desperate way before. In the 'I want breakfast' way, and in the cranky, 'I really want breakfast' way at that. I also needed to pee, and despite the IV thing going into my chest, I didn't have a catheter in. The IV tubing seemed to go into a port instead of right into my skin, so I grabbed it and pulled on it. It was taped in place with some sticky straps, which were no match for a big, bad wolf. I pulled it out and quickly regretted it. It felt like I was pulling something out of my bones. No alarms sounded, and the nurse thing just complained.

"Please do not attempt to remove your support umbilical. I will summon medical staff."

"Yeah, you do that," I said, and got to my feet. It felt profoundly weird, like I was still a bit weak, though the bulk of the feeling was the 'flowing through me' sensation of artificial gravity. "I'm gonna find some food while you're summoning whichever asshole feels like dealing with me."

I walked away from the bed, and found that the room had an attached bathroom. I decided to check myself out and make sure I still had all my parts, and that I wasn't spouting blood out of anywhere. The bathroom had a full-length dressing mirror, though was otherwise a completely utilitarian wet shower-toilet-sink arrangement.

Good news: I had all my body parts. Wolf ears, glaring yellow eyes, sharp teeth, black nose pad, tail, big black dick and balls, lanky arms and legs. The IV port wasn't very noticeable, and I grabbed some sterile towelette and wiped at it. No blood or anything else came out, and poking it didn't hurt much. My fur even looked much better than before the dubious 'reconstruction' treatment I knew nothing about.

Better news: I didn't really look like I'd just spent how long? in bio-stasis.

[Five hundred years]

Thanks, brain. I didn't look like that; I looked much better. My fur had no more grey in it, especially on my muzzle. I was back to my general panther-black wolf self. I didn't have the bit of gut that I couldn't avoid having been fifty-two. I didn't have the scraggly ear tuft hairs that I had to keep roto-trimming out. My big floppy dick didn't look any different at first, although on closer examination, it looked a bit more... plump? I basically looked like I felt, and more and more with each passing second, I felt a lot younger. I didn't think any differently, I just felt physically spry and virile. Enough that inspecting my dick gave me an erection, and I really had to think to get it to go down again.

I expected someone to show up, and they did not. The bathroom had a medical gown on a hanger and I put it back on - apparently I got to be treated naked? - and went back out. "Please wait for medical staff to arrive," the nurse said.

"I get it. You're a robot or something. Well, I'm not, and that means I need food," I said, and walked out into the hallway. I could smell food. I could smell breakfast food. Someone was eating breakfast - it was breakfast time, according to a computer panel. I was going to eat breakfast, and fuck anyone if they got in the way of a hungry wolf.

I found the source of the smell just down the hall and around the corner. A cafeteria type room, full of staff. Martin and Clara, dog and leopard, among a few others. No one noticed me at first as I stood in the doorway. They were too busy talking.

Martin: "Hey, aren't you gonna go check on the thing?"

Clara: "What thing?"

Martin: "You just got an alert."

Clara, eating: "Ehh, it's fine, a patient just woke up."

Martin: "Yeah but what if they're having a problem?"

Clara: "It didn't say they're having a problem, dog breath, it said they're awake. Those overgrown pocket calculators with ears and tails are verbose, if something was going on I'd-"

A fox next to Clara saw me, flipped his ears back, and smacked her in the left boob. "Oww, you son of a bitch!" she squalled. "What was that - Oh." Now everyone looked at me, and stopped eating.

"You all never seen a fuckin' wolf before?" No response. I opened the front of my gown. "Here, here's more for you." A couple of the staff looked like they were going to sputter. "That better be a 'ha ha this wolf guy is crazy' laugh and not a 'ha ha he's a puppy' laugh. I'll forgive either of those options if someone gets me some actual food. I think you've been injecting paste into one of my holes the last..."

"About two weeks," Martin said, and then winced as Clara surreptitiously kicked his leg.

"Ahem. You really shouldn't be just eating normal food so quickly, but, okay. We can get you some regular food." Clara did not sound like she was happy to humor me. She did seem extremely frazzled.

Martin jumped up. "Okay okay I'll do it," he said, as if anticipating being jabbed or kicked. He went over something that was like a refrigerator, took out a carton that looked like a ready-to-eat meal, and put it into an appliance that looked like a cross between a microwave oven and a toaster.

I pulled my gown closed and looked around for somewhere to sit. The only place I could sit was at the big table with everyone else. There was an empty seat at one corner. I sat down, and felt completely out of place. "I'm not insinuating I need special treatment or anything. I just, you know, I've had a rough time and I'd like something normal to eat."

"It's not really going to be good food," the dog warned. "I mean, you're probably used to really fancy stuff." After a few moments, the cooking device chimed and popped the carton back out the front. He carried it over, growling as some hot steam came out of a vent corner, and set it in front of me along with a packet with a plastic spoon, fork, and knife.

I opened it up. "What do you mean, I'm used to fancy stuff? I've been a wolf popsicle for what, five hundred... years?" Saying it out loud made my lip quiver. The contents of the carton made me forget about the emotional welt that made me feel like I should cry. "Chicken and waffles? For real?" Chicken, waffles, eggs, and a packet of syrup.

Maybe doctors thought I shouldn't have been eating, but I really appreciated the actual food. It was not 'good', though it was actually what it looked like in terms of taste, and about a good as any sort of random institutional-food-service food I'd ever had 'back home'. I made good on my species and hungrily ate it, and even licked the syrup out of the container.

I sat back and now felt a bit of why they had been reluctant. Despite how emotionally satisfied I was with some Real Fucking Food, my stomach felt overfull and a bit queasy. I took a few deep breaths and just told myself that I'd get over it. "So what, huh? Sorry to barge into your little doctors' lounge and ruin your breakfast or whatever. I just don't usually take life lying down in a hospital bed." Despite the queasiness, I felt amazing. I felt more than amazing. I could barely remember having felt like this before - it'd been decades. "What the fuck did you do to me, anyway? I felt like a warmed over piece of fuckin' shit and now everything's great. Steroids or somethin'?"

Everyone who wasn't Martin or Clara kept basically staring at me. Maybe it was the nude flashing for a moment. Maybe it was because I really was getting into their business inappropriately. Maybe it was because so far, of the very few people I'd heard speak, they spoke English with a completely inscrutable accent and I talked like a Brooklyn mafia thug.

"Clara, do you want to explain?" Martin said, ears back and muzzle down. "Cuz I'll be happy to do it if you don't but don't play around any more okay?"

The leopard rolled her eyes. "You were on bio-stasis on a ship called Dominion Prime. Your ship was supposed to translate to the Alleus cluster and, I forget the name of the system in there. It didn't work right, and ended up here. That's good, because we're here, as opposed to basically everywhere else it could have randomly gone to. We found your ship just recently. So we're trying to save everyone on the ship. At least everyone we can save. There's only been about fifty pods that are viable, and most of those people are in pretty bad shape. You're the last pod we pulled out that seems intact. The stasis stuff, I'm personally really really surprised it even worked. I mean it's primitive. If we need to put someone in stasis nowadays, they come out of it like they walked in. You, for example, your whole body was basically... what do you call it... freezer-burnt? Like when you leave something in the refrigerator too long? I mean everything, your organs, your skin, your bones, your brain. There's a genetic-driven reconstruction protocol we can use, and thankfully our medbots are capable of doing it, because we have exactly one doctor here-" She pointed to a male leopard, "And nowhere near the capacity of treating even five people for something at once, much less fifty of them with severe injuries requiring intensive care."

"Clara, make sure you don't overwhelm him," Doctor Meow said.

"He asked! I'm not going to lie," she groaned.

I started to get a bad gut feeling. I couldn't tell if it was an actual bad gut feeling or just a 'bad gut feeling', and stood up. "Sorry, I'm just making sure... lemme move around a bit." I paced around, then leaned on the chair. After some internal gurgling, I felt slightly better. I also felt incredibly antsy. I really needed to know everything there was to know about wherever I was. It was pretty obvious that "The Dominion Project" hadn't worked out according to plan. I can't say I assumed it would; I was just banking on 'leaving Earth before it blows up'. "Okay, well, thanks for breakfast. I'm gonna go see what kind of place this really is," I said, and then turned to leave.

I got out into the hallway before Clara rushed out, looking as frazzled as she had before. "Hey, you really shouldn't be walking around. You need a full exam from the doctor, especially after you pulled out your central line like that."

I shrugged. "There's a lot of things I probably shouldn't be doing, however, the thing that's gonna make me feel the best is doing them anyway." I was intent on seeing just what was going on with this 'outpost' I'd ended up on.

Clara should have stopped me, and I know she didn't because she was scared of me. At least, that's what I said to myself, and probably just because she was three quarters my height. I saw the same medical rooms as before, and that wasn't nearly as interesting. "So are you a nurse or something? You said there's only one doctor."

"This isn't a big station. We just have a doctor for routine medical issues, nutrition, honestly probably liability too."

I walked out of the medical area and right into... more of the same rooms, except these were full of storage and work areas. It felt a bit like an industrial office. "You didn't answer my question."

"I'm chief of security, and that's why I'm following you around."

"Uh-huh," I said, while telling myself I didn't believe her. This newfound energy was a problem. I got into a lot of trouble when I was younger. I knew enough not to, and felt like it was the right thing to do. "I have no idea where I'm going. I wanna know what kind of fuckin' space station this is. If I washed up on the beach, you know, give me a little tour before you eat me."

Clara quickly got in front of me, turned, and stopped. She also looked immensely confused. "What?"

I cocked my head, just as confused. "Space. Show me space. I wanna look out the window. I wanna see what planet we're orbiting. Or are we just floating around in space? That'd suck. Space is big and cold." I started wondering if this is what mania felt like.

"Fine. There's an observation cupola. We're at a lagrange point between a small gas giant and one of its moons. It's just over here." Clara sighed, turned, and led me along. I saw a few other people, all wearing either casual clothing that was unfamiliar yet unsurprising, or work uniforms. All hybrids. All of them looked at me very strangely. Big wolf in a hospital gown being led around by the pinky by a cheetah... who was wearing a sidearm now that I looked more closely.

"If you're chief of security, why were you helping pry me out of the ice cube tray? Because I might freak out?" Aha, I started remembering where this attitude came from. I am a 'First' hybrid, IPC-1, which back on Earth meant that I was supposed to be more 'wild'. That was a bad thing to be, in human culture, even if everyone else was also a hybrid. I'd dealt with diffuse bigotry my entire life. Any time it reared its head, I jumped right on top and smacked it back down. "And what'd you go 'what' about back there? You know, beaches, desert islands, marooned from a shipwreck, some little backwards village of cannibals or whatever that're gonna eat you. It's..."

"I have no idea what the hell you're going on about. Wait, shipwrecks? Okay, I guess I get that. I've never even seen a beach. Most of us on this station haven't. We're all spacers. Here we go," she said, and showed me the observation cupola. The room had a slanted wall, and a dome array of windows peered out of it.

About a third of the view was dominated by an enormous planet, a swirling purple and cream soup that was immediately entrancing. The rest of the view was space. Black space. Black space peppered with stars. I could see no other planets. Then I realized, how could I see other planets? Space was enormous. If I was on the Earth's moon, Earth would have looked like this kiddie bouncy-ball. If I could even see Mars, it'd be a dot. That famous photograph of Earth from the edge of the solar system? It was a tiny little dot. Just a speck. Mars from Earth? Also, a speck, the size of a star.

"Five hundred years," I said, out loud this time.

Clara looked over, and said a few things, and I couldn't hear them. There was a strange noise coming from around her, and it stopped abruptly. "Okay sorry, what did you just say? I'm on a call."

"Five hundred years. It's been five hundred years. That's what you said, right? And I'm... where am I? I mean where am I, compared to Earth?"

"A completely different arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Sorry, Martin, what's going on?" The anti-sound started again and I couldn't hear her words any more. I could hear that she was talking, and it was less than gibberish. It was noise suppression, but out loud.

It hit me. Five Hundred Years. Everyone I ever knew who wasn't on that ship with me had been dead for over four hundred of those years. Another arm of the galaxy. That was light-years away. Hundreds, thousands? I walked back up to Clara.

Weird non-silence, then, "What? Is it important? Because this is," she gestured to her ear, where presumably she had some kind of earbud. I couldn't see it.

"Was there a guy named Alzarre on the ship with me? He was a maned wolf. That's like a red fox, but taller than me and basically all legs and arms. Real weird accent, but not like mine, kinda like-"

"Nope," she said.

"What do you mean nope, that was fast, you didn't even look."

Her eyes flicked up and around, then she looked at me. "I just looked. We only have names for people who came out of pods and survived enough to be able to talk. He's not in that list. He's not in the 'died after defrosting' list, by description. And anyone who was in a pod that wasn't even remotely viable? Who knows. It's a big pain in the ass to get info off the computers in that ship. That stuff's really old and it's not Tark standard gear like on this station. We don't have any real big computer hackers here. This isn't that kind of place. Martin, tell him I'll be there in a minute, I'm defusing a situation."

"What do you mean, defusing a situation? Me? I'm a situation? I'm fucking trapped on a space station, all alone, my only friend who was supposed to be on that ship is either dead or missing. That's what my fuckin' situation is." I am from Brooklyn, New York City. Everyone from Brooklyn acts like me, all the time, probably a lot less lecherously. "And you're the chief of security for some space station and you're letting me stand around with my cock flapping around under my hospital gown while I count stars? That seems a little suspicious. Maybe I'm still asleep in my little wolf-pop wrapper." I really liked the idea of being a frozen confection instead of in 'bio-stasis'.

"I wanted to get you away from people to see if you'd calm down," she shrugged, and tapped at her ear. There was really nothing in there; nothing except the stuff that's normally in your ear. Maybe she had gesture controls for a brain implant. "And you didn't. So, I'm going to have to take you back to your bed."

"Uh-uh. I want to stay right here and gawk at the terrible infinity of space and realize that my fucking life is upside down!"

She pulled her gun out and shot me before I even saw her reaching for the hilt. I knew it happened because time actually slowed down as soon as whatever she shot me with hit me. It wasn't a bullet, though it hurt. It was more like a taser, except instead of just hurting electrically, it scrambled my brain. Time slowed down, then sped up to a frantic slideshow, then swam again as I watched the wall slowly tilt.

The sensation lifted as fast as it'd started and I was back in the recovery room. I tried to move, and I couldn't. Unlike being in the stasis box at the start, I was unable to move because I was strapped to the bed. I looked down; despite five hundred mother-fucking years and however many light years, bed restraints were still basically Segufix. Heavy leather straps, attachment posts, multi-strap cuffs. I was stuck lying on my back, arms loosely at my side, feet spread shoulder width apart, upper body tilted to a comfortable bed-sitting angle. No hospital gown, but I did have underwear on, which I'd never seen before. Something not unlike spandex briefs. That gave me an immediate thrill, because they looked good, like something I might buy on my own for the fetishy cock-hugging profile and sensation. That, and being restrained by what looked and felt and even smelled like real leather - what a damn thrill. I felt like I shouldn't be enjoying it, and that made it an even bigger thrill. Time to show everyhow how big and bad of a wolf I was, wag, wag.

I wasn't alone, either. Someone else was now in the room, in another hospital bed, not restrained. They didn't need to be; half their body was undergoing what looked like treatment for a burn. A coyote. Male. He looked vaguely familiar, in a way that gave me bad deja-vu. I decided to talk.

"Shit, I musta made that cheetah cop lady real mad. She shot me with something and then put this stuff on me. Look how mad I am. I'm so mad I could fuck something, but I can't, because I'm-"

"Would you shut up? I can't believe they put me in a room with another person. I couldn't stand that guy's moaning in there, so what do they do? They put me in a room with a guy who's tied up and getting morning wood over it. 'He can talk, you can make friends.' I am..." Then he looked closer at me, squinting with his good eye.

Seeing his state of affairs got rid of most of my erection. "You are..." I followed on.

"You. You're that guy."

"Correction, Sir, I am a wolf popsicle."

"You're that guy who was seated about halfway back in the shuttle plane! You were seated where I was supposed to be. Where my family was supposed to be! I had to pitch a fit to get even put on the ship. Me! Do you have any idea? This isn't cocky, I had more right to be on that ship than anyone else."

Great. They put me in a room with another talkative asshole. "So?"

He looked so horrified at my response that the injured side of his face moved, even though he flinched in obvious pain. "What do you mean, 'so'? Are you an idiot? There were three ships. Ours is the only one that has any survivors. My family wasn't on it, because you are."

"I'm a single wolf. That sounds like someone really fucked up." I did not like where this was going.

"You, and that thing, that wretched loud maned wolf. And someone else, I don't remember, whoever sat next to you. You were all where my family was supposed to be. And now they're gone. Do you know what happened? Do you know what happened back on Earth?"

I had to answer him, because I was tied to a bed and if I just lay there and didn't say anything, he'd probably send for someone to come and take his complaint. "Something about a massive solar outburst cycle."

"There was a gravitational anomaly. It actually started on Earth, and when it was going to reach the sun, it was going to produce a likely series of enormous coronal mass ejections. Solar plasma was going to stream towards earth. Stream towards Earth no matter that it was orbiting the sun. It would destroy the ozone layer, and then destroy life on the planet. And did it?"

I shrugged into the leather restraints. "How the hell should I know? I've been frozen into a giant ice cube tray for half a millenium."

"No. It didn't. You won't believe what actually happened. I still don't. But they're adamant about it." The coyote had the voice of someone who was so angry he was manic. "I got them to tell me. The anomaly collapsed, and took everything with it. That Earth no longer exists. That universe doesn't exist. The Earth that does exist, is full of humans, and has really significantly diverged from what we ever had. I have nothing. I have no money. I have no family. I barely have an entire body thanks to whatever happened in there-"

"Freezer burn?"

"This is not funny!" His voice escalated into a feral yelp. Only seconds later, the strange nurse canid came back in.

"Do you require medical assistance?" The nurse had to be an android. It didn't sound or act like a regular person even if it spoke English.

"Get me out of here! I can't stand to lie here and stare at this wolf!"

To be honest, the coyote seemed kind of melodramatic. The Earth disappeared and was replaced by another one. No, the Earth and everything went with it... I struggled to make the connection at the time. So much novelty in such a short time; while the coyote argued with the medical robot and then several other hybrids including Clara, I flopped over to being exhausted. If I really was taking the place of his family, and Alzarre was too, then I was the only one of us left. It's not like I had any more than he did.

"This problem is solving itself," Clara announced, and then stormed out. I continued to be exhausted. The coyote tried to talk to me several times, and I ignored him, until he too seemed to just lie there in shock and exhaustion. Then he fell asleep and snored unpleasantly, along with occasionally stirring and making urgently upset sounds that awakened me when I managed to doze off.

I woke up to the nurse android removing my restraints. "Staff have provided clothing for you. Please put it on." As I sat up, naked and free from the Segufix, the canid pushed something towards me. It was a coverall-style uniform in dark gray, with my name emblazoned on it. Not my full name, my birth name, my Earth name - the one I gave myself. That one really stuck. I'd use that again. Just "Hawk". There were also shoes, in the form of rubberized utility clogs that looked like the mitten version of five-toe running gear, or perhaps tabi boots. I dressed, and felt strange as there was no underwear. The outfit was comfortably relaxed around the midsection, and that meant my cock bulge flopped around noticeably from one side to the other.

"Alright, it wouldn't be the space-race future if I didn't have some kind of uni-"

I couldn't complete the sentence before two staff members appeared and helped me stand up. I didn't feel like I needed the help, but they insisted. One of them had a device that looked like a collar, because it was one; they put it around my neck and attached it. "Alright, this is going to suck, but we need to test it."

"Test what?" It was less of an electric shock than having a mains-powered sex vibrator inserted into my brain stem. I gagged and collapsed forward; the nurse robot caught me just like the one when I'd gotten out of the shower. "What the hell is that?"

"Tetanizing collar. If you tamper with it, it'll stun you. If you try to escape the bounds of your indent geofence, it'll also stun you. The contract holder has control over it so they can stun you at will, although every instance of that is recorded in an audit log." Both staff members were pony-sized horses, one male, one female.

"My what what? Indent geofence? I don't like indents, I like using spaces when I type."

"Indentured service geofencing perimeter as specified in your contract. Which is agricultural processing support, class 2. That's for space station work, instead of planetary or ship-bound." Clara had showed up, and looked as flustered as she had the previous times I'd seen her.

Indentured service contract. "Excuse me? Did you just fuckin' say I'm a slave?"

"Two year contract, balloon payment on completion, network base equivalent housing and sustenance, network base work shift limit," She was reading from a tablet computer.

"Back up. I'm a slave? What the hell's going on?"

She stared at me. "This isn't a network station, this isn't an official medical facility. We're a salvage transfer waypoint. We can't have thousands of people from some derelict generation ship sitting around here. The waste reprocessing system is just about to lose it and no, we can't just dump it into space. You're recovered from your genetic reconstruction, so we've taken the liberty of sending you off on an indent contract. You'll get a nice balloon payment at the end, more than you'd get from network welfare stipends, and you'll still probably qualify for refugee processing. Plus, this particular contract, I think it'll work out well for someone like you."

"Someone like me?" Now the two staff members were starting to guide me towards the door. The coyote who'd been in the bed across from me, was nowhere to be seen. I put up some resistance, and my neck tingled. I put up more, and I got the television-snow-brain effect until I stopped fighting it.

Neither horse seemed to want to talk to me as they led me around the station. Away from the impromptu medical facilities, and through a bunch of areas that weren't recognizable except that people were in them and doing work. Some of them were full of immense amounts of what I'd call junk, equipment that didn't look to be set up to do anything properly, pipes and wires disconnected, warning placards in English and several other languages. I was finally led to a room described as "Docking Bay", which was manned by a bored-looking Malinois dog in a much more tactical uniform. There was no ship in the 'docking bay', just a reinforced hatch door and yet more warning signs about "DEPRESSURIZATION HAZARD" and instructions for what to do if lights started flashing. Someone had augmented the infographics with a cartoon of some generic hybrid person being sucked out of a hatch into space and blowing up like a balloon until they popped.

"I don't think that's what happens when you get spaced," I said, and pointed to the cartoon, to see what the dog would do.

He gave me a flat look. "I don't think you know what happens when you get spaced. You should try to stay that way." The horses tapped tablets with him, and the collar vibrated and chimed. "Alright, Mister Hawk. You're our last passenger. Come with me," he said, and keyed into the pressure door controls. The hatch opened, and it exposed a space that looked like a small cargo hold. He led me inside, through a door on the other side, and into a very cramped cubicle space. It was large enough to fit an extremely rugged seat with restraints, and that was it.

"What's this? Am I going to jail?"

"No, you're going to start your contract. That's an acceleration seat. The physical restraints also come in handy because every so often, those collars don't work on people. Sit."

I sat, and he buckled me in. The restraints were mostly focused on pinning me back to the seat, like the ones on the space plane I'd taken out of JFK.

"Alright. The seat will rotate based on the acceleration needs. This transport doesn't do reverse braking burns. There'll be audible warnings for when we're going to translate, and there'll be about four of them before you get to your destination. You're one of those Dominion ship guys, right? You probably've never done a translation while you were awake. Keep your eyes shut until the all clear the first few times. Don't be cocky about it unless you like really weird shit. I'm not reading from the rule book here, just trust me." Never did he sound anything other than professionally deadpan. "Docking and undocking will feel really, really rough. That's completely normal. We'll also lose artificial gravity before and after translations." He then fist-bumped the seat above and behind my shoulder, then left the cubicle and shut the door.

"Uh, what if I'm claustrophobic?" I yelled. "Hello?" I could hear him doing something on the other side of the door.

"The security report on you says you 'enjoy restraint'. So I'm assuming you're not claustrophobic. You'll enjoy your contract, too." His voice broadcast over a speaker. Then, silence. Or rather, I couldn't hear any more talking. There were plenty of noises, thumps and rolling rattles and loud thrumming noises. Maybe they were loading more gear onto the ship. Or people. There was no window, so who knew if I was really on a ship?

I didn't have a lot of time to contemplate my apparently enslaved navel before the ship PA blared into the cubicle.

[DOCKING RELEASE. PLEASE HOLD ON TO GRAB POINTS AND AFFIX ALL PASSENGER RESTRAINTS]

The floor dropped, scooted to one side by several feet, and the cubicle twisted hard. That sent my heart rate through the roof; it felt very wrong for anything to move like that. Being strapped down to a chair by the legs and arms as well as a harness and metal chest braces as well as a headband made me feel like I was experiencing karmic retribution for being a not so nice person in my previously Earthly life. I didn't always do things completely above board with other people while doing 'play'. Sex by checklist is fun if you're a sexual accountant, not a wolf with an attitude problem.

[ACCELERATION WARNING. PLEASE HOLD ON TO GRAB POINTS AND AFFIX ALL PASSENGER RESTRAINTS]

The chair rotated and then I was shoved back hard for what I assumed was about half an hour. Then, more rotation and hard shoves, before the first

[LOCATION POINT TRANSLATION COUNTDOWN]

After eight of the ten seconds, I closed my eyes like the dog suggested. That was smart, because the artificial gravity cut out and then a different sensation washed over me. There was a sound like everything rushed past me at once, and my entire existence felt like a heart palpitation.

[LOCATION POINT TRANSLATION COMPLETE]

The cycle of acceleration maneuvers and location point translations happened over and over. I didn't try to count, but probably ten times, despite what the dog had said. Interspersed were docking warnings and the horrible twist-and-shove sensations. They weren't just the ship moving; something weird happened with the artificial gravity each time. Maybe it had to be synced up with whatever we were docking into - no one came to talk to me and the PA system didn't explain it.

In a way, it was nice being strapped down in a small room on a ship with no windows going to an unknown destination where supposedly I was going to do 'agricultural support' work. I'd been overwhelmed with all sorts of stuff, and here was a very confined experience. Also, I couldn't really imagine being a slave. It couldn't possibly be very bad, not for someone like me. I don't mean wealthy and privileged; I just mean someone who usually gets his way because he looks like he'll bite off some heads. I could be the guy who leads the slave rebellion, or at least the slave gang.

After one of the docking thuds, my door opened and the dog was standing there. "Alright, your stop's up." He came in and released my restraints, then I got up and out of the seat. I wobbled around a bit, but was able to follow him out into the hallway, cargo hold, and back hatch. Along the way, I noticed that the hallway was full on both sides of other cubicles like mine, all empty.

Outside the hatch, we headed down a ramp at one side of a much larger cargo hold than I'd seen in the previous station. In fact, I guessed that wherever I now was, the previous station area would have entirely fit in this room. There were a few enormous pieces of unidentifiable machinery, and a few that looked surprisingly like they were meant to drill into things. There was also an enormous hatch door, as well as a some internal jetway-style tubes that probably could meet up with whatever went in or out the hatch door.

Standing near a ramp was a large white and black Siberian tiger. He wore the lower half of the same tactical uniform the dog guard had, while his upper body was barely hugged by a sleeveless black leather motorcycle jacket that looked like the kind of thing I'd enjoy back on Earth. Like most big cats, he looked completely unhappy to see me, or the dog, or anything else.

"This our latest weirdo?" He said, in a booming and crass voice. No real accent, though that was because he sounded generically American instead of the unplaceable-yet-different accent of the other hybrids I'd seen. The dog nodded, and bumped tablets with him. My collar vibrated again. "Oh, harassing a fellow refugee with inappropriate tumescence. He's gonna fit in just fine."

"What? I wasn't doing anything to that guy. He was accusing me of destroying his life, I was just lying there. With an erection. That sometimes happens. They scrambled my DNA and when they put it back together, they made me as horny as a twenty year old again. That's not my fault, either. In fact, the only thing that's my fault in any of this is that I decided I wanted to get turned into a lupine freezer pop to escape certain fucking doom on Earth."

Pleading my case got a loud chuff from the tiger. I looked around; the dog was already heading back to the docking port.

"You don't care about what's my fault, do you." I squinted at the one-head-taller brute.

"Follow me. Or don't, if you like having your brain cells electrified." He turned and started to walk away. I quickly came after. "You have perfect timing. You're gonna be on Prak farming duty right away. One of the other guys had a minor injury on his shift an hour ago. You'll do just fine."

"Uh-huh."

"So, lemme ask you-"

"You came from C4X8 right?"

I shrugged. "What's that?"

"You had some cat named Clara there?"

I nodded.

He chuffed again. "My security contract doesn't stipulate answering questions. Technically, I don't know anything about what's going on back at that station, so technically, I don't have to tell you anything about it. I can tell you that I'm the same kind of security officer as that bitch, except I don't solve my problems by signing them off onto indent contracts. As for here, you're gonna work root slop or whatever else people make you do, and if you fuck up bad enough or try to start shit, you're gonna find out how I do solve problems."

Though I wanted to know, I did not want to find out. We had a long walk, and unlike the previous station, there were not a lot of other people. In fact, I saw none. Eventually, we reached a ring-like corridor that had access hatches every few yards on the outside edge.

"I know you said no questions, but uh, you wanna tell me what Prak is? I'm not from around here."

"You think I don't know that? It's not illegal. As for what it is, you'll figure it out. More importantly, when you go through this door, you're gonna think you're going crazy. Don't worry about it. Walk where you think you gotta walk going down to the catwalk, and one of the guys out there'll tell you what the fuck you should be doing. Have fun." He opened one of the hatches, and when I moved to step through it, he shoved me and slammed the door behind me.

I immediately lost my mind. I needed to navigate a compact staircase that went in entirely impossible directions, like an M.C. Escher painting. I was looking forward out at the stars through enormous curved windows, stars slowly moving by. The stairway led me towards that view, but then turned back on itself, except at a right angle. It looked like I had to step off into space, except when I moved my foot close enough, it felt completely normal.

"Just walk out, grab the rail and close your eyes if you have to," someone yelled. "You'll get used to it."

I did as directed and felt carefully with my foot, then walked a few steps. Something felt very strange for a second, like I was being pulled in different directions, though it stopped as soon as I kept moving. I opened my eyes and now I was walking at another weird angle. Another transition, and I was standing on a catwalk that ran along the wall a couple yards above 'fields' of some green and red plant. Each field was rectangular, and they disappeared into the short distance because they curved down, so that the horizon was outer space. I had walked out of a hatch that looked like a hole in a horizontal platform nearby.

Each of the field plots had a single person working near it, except where I was standing. The one behind me featured the person who had yelled, a coyote in a somewhat messy uniform and long rubber gloves and boots; the next one ahead was worked by a chestnut stallion who had no uniform and just the gloves and boots.

The coyote set the large rake down that he was using, and walked towards me. "Hey, I guess you're the new guy." He had the weird-but-understandable accent I'd heard from everyone except the angry roommate on the station and the hulking tiger security officer where I was now. "If you get working right away, maybe you'll avoid the boss's ire. Blake twisted his ankle and had to go to the medcent but you can fill in." Then he paused as he got closer. "Well. You can try to fill in. You'll need some protective gear unless you want to get pickled, this stuff grows in acidic mud." He walked past me and motioned for me to follow.

Part of the catwalk bulged out into some sort of utility and storage room. Among several racks of familiar and unfamiliar long-handled implements, there were several sets of extra coveralls, boots, and gloves. There was also a utility sink and a very crudely constructed device next to it that looked like a makeshift urinal, and definitely smelled like one. I put on the extra coverall suit and immediately regretted it due to the warmth and humidity. The boots and gloves, not so much. Bicep-length synthetic rubber gloves? Thigh-high boots of the same material? I always had a small but consistent interest in the 'sleaze farmer' and hazmat fetish scenes.

Back outside the storage shed, I doubly regretted the extra layer of clothing, because the sun had come around. Or rather, we were rotating past the sun. And not the sun, but a sun. When it came by, the ceiling panels clouded up to some extent, to prevent actually frying us. I figured that out on my own; the coyote wasn't very talkative. The most I got from him was that he was named Kale, spelled like the vegetable and pronounced like the herding dog. He didn't even tell me what to actually do: "Just watch Varius over there. He's a Prak coddling expert."

"Oh, I gotta coddle it, huh?" I said, standing down at the edge of the rectangular pool of muck, and when I looked back to get Kale's reaction, he'd gone back to tending his own plot. Alright, time to learn by example.

Varius, the horse, was using a device like a metal rake to shuffle whatever was growing in the plot. After a few shakes in place, it seemed to separate from the reddish roots and the greenish leafy top parts. He then scooted the roots over to one side, before returning to the other to take the next couple of feet.

It looked pretty easy. Maybe the kind of thing that had some little trick for being fast and efficient, but he was basically raking the leaves off the roots of some space plant. He was also doing it naked, save for the protective boots and gloves, which was both alluring - he was a horse - and concerning, because of the warning about 'pickling'. I didn't have any interest in pickling any part of myself. Varius didn't seem to be worried, casually wiping off any splatters that got on himself.

I started trying to copy what he was doing. Push the rake forward, then jerk it back. Forward, jerk back. Forward, jerk back. It looked like the motion would just snap the plants in half, though it took more of a jerk back than I was prepared for. As soon as I separated my first batch after about ten minutes, the red roots started to turn brown and curl up. That didn't happen to the horse's.

I tried another row, taking a moment to study the stallion's example. It was faster, though not easier, to separate the plants. And I ended up with the same result, rootlets curled up and withered in seconds. There's a reason I lived in the city and hired a landscape gardener when I didn't.

"Hey, horsey, I'm having a problem here. It's uh... this shit isn't coming apart right." I picked up some of the roots; they felt like slimy oversized spaghetti noodles.

He stuck the head of his rake down and leaned on the handle, and then spoke a tremendous stream of gibberish. Half of it sounded like a human trying to imitate bird song. Then, he looked embarrassed, and spoke again. "You cannot do it," he said.

"Oh yeah? Watch me." I stuck my rake down, and caught him shaking his head. "What?"

"You are not Selnari, it will not coddle."

"What the fuck's that supposed to mean? What's a Selnari?"

Varius looked past me; I turned to see Kale looking both our way, making eye contact with the horse. They exchanged a few weird words that weren't just in a strange accent but completely unintelligible. Kale's response, in normal English: "Shit. Well, not my problem."

"You are not Selnari. You replace the jackal who broke his ankle. He falls just there, not aware of his steps." Varius pointed with a gloved finger. "Where do you start?"

All but one of the hybrids I'd met so far had similar, vaguely Scandinavian accents. This horse had one that was inscrutable. Some of his words rolled and howled like he was used to making the sounds of whatever other language he spoke. I looked around the plot to answer his question. "Where do I start? Over there, is there some kinda thing I gotta-"

"Varius, I told you, practice English by talking to actual people not that stupid computer program. He means where are you from?" Kale sounded like he was very begrudgingly talking to me, or anyone.

"I'm from, what do you mean where I'm from? I got uh, contracted off some station that had some letters and numbers... C4 something. So I guess that really means I got sold into slavery. That's what this shit is, right?"

"You're from that Dominion ship. We heard a rumor on darkband about that. You're from the other Earth." Kale did not sound surprised at all. "So, you aren't Selnari, like us. I'm from Daleon station; Varius is from Selnar itself."

"What is that, Selnar, is that a planet?" I started feeling a pinch between my eyes. Too much information. I might have felt young and cocky again, but too much is too much. "So what you're like, settlers from Earth?"

"We start on Selnar, all of us, long blocks time ago," Varius said, while he continued successfully raking his crop in half.

"So you're... not Human? Like, at all?" This might be a bit confusing to some people; all of us animal hybrids like me, from Earth, are Human. Not all humans are animal hybrids. There was a war about that, and in my opinion, we settled the issue in the right direction because I'm more like a skinbag than I am a four-legged deer-eating raven-taunting wild wolf.

He shrugged.

I decided to change tactic. "So what's this stuff, anyway? Like if I'm a slave, this has to be some kind of drug. You wouldn't just be growing space lettuce with slaves. If you have space ships and stations and FTL shit and genetic reconstruction and tetanizing collars and all this crazy fucking shit, you'd have robots that grow plants."

Kale didn't seem to be interested in answering my question; he was back to working, and quite hard at that. Varius, on the other hand, paused as soon as I started talking. Without speaking again - I assumed because he struggled with English - he bent down and set his rake against the side of the plot, then picked up a handful of his very root-like roots.

He shook off one that was broken in half, wiped it on an upper part of his glove, then stuck it in his mouth and chewed. He pulled it out and spat with a sour face, then chewed on it again and stuck it in a lump between his cheek and teeth. Then, he leaned back against the sidewall, took one of his gloves off, and started to jerk off. No wonder he was naked.

He obviously wanted to show off, and the show was better than my failed attempt at doing whatever I was supposed to but unable to do. I leaned on my rake and watched as well. It helped that Varius was particularly attractive, with a long mane and forelock, not to mention a mottled black and pink hybrid equine shaft.

After about thirty seconds of garden-variety handjob, he inhaled and looked like someone who had just taken a huge whiff of a strange smell. He groaned and his jaw dropped slightly, his tongue flopped out, and with it came the chewed up pulp of the Prak root. He looked as if he was about to slide down the slightly angled sidewall and sit down in the mud, while his cock swung upwards and throbbed. Clear precum welled up out of the pisshole and immediately ran down the side of the thick head.

He rolled his head to the side, in my direction, and gave me a fundamentally stupefied look. Then, he grasped his balls in his hand like he was going to milk them downwards, and used them to swing his cock down and then up against his abdomen with a loud, meaty thwap. He did it again, and whinnied this time, stamping his booted feet in the mud. And again, with an added smack to his balls from his other hand that made my own gut lurch - there was a fetish I would never indulge in my own self no matter how much I whacked someone else until they cried or threw up.

"So uh, is this a typical thing or are you just playing it up 'cuz I'm new here?" I said to Varius, who didn't answer, and then looked over to Kale to see what he thought of it. Not only was he not watching, but he had finished his plot and had just climbed out of the mud when a loud alarm horn sounded and it startled him to fall into the muck ass first. A single, loud blat, followed by a heavy bang as someone hurled a hatch door open.

I got to watch someone else do what I'd confusingly done to get into this crazy farm in the first place. A person walked straight up out of the hatch on the stairs, then rotated on the stairs, then stepped onto the catwalk and approached with the confident strut of someone wearing both cowboy boots _and_spurs. And chaps. And a jockstrap, leather vest, gun belt with a gun and a bullwhip, roping bracers, tight gloves, and a big brown leather cowboy hat.

"Well shit! This just ain't y'all's lucky day. That dumb desert mutt busts his foot up puttin' one in front of th' other, my new slave-puppy shows up an' you throw him in here like he's gonna be able to do shit, an' what's our fallen prince horsey do about it? He starts in with his bad stall-habits bull shit." All of this spoken in the most 'I own a plantation' Southern accent you've heard, from a milk chocolate bull with a hot frown and a slight muscle gut. "Get your hand off your god-damn dick," he said, pulled his gun out, and shot Varius with it.

Whatever he shot was not at all a bullet, as it was very visible and simply stuck into the horse's shoulder. Varius' face wrinkled up and his jerking arm went slack, he let go of his cock, and then started to crumple to one side with the facial expression usually used when your leg's fallen asleep on the toilet and you just stood up.

"Go on, take it out, don't be a baby," the bull bellowed, and Varius weakly removed the device and tossed it aside. "Now get on up here. Kale, get your dickless ass up here and lash him to the hand-rail. You, slave-puppy, you go hold him down while Kale's doin' his part of the dirty work." Then, to ensure I got the point, he aimed the gun at me. It looked like a big hunting pistol, except extremely high-tech.

You're probably wondering what was going through my head. The answer was that I assumed this was all some sort of elaborate prank, because there's no way I actually had been sold to space slavers to farm sex weed. That did not happen to people. It especially didn't happen to people like me, not after the end of my glory days as pimp wolf of my little sleaze empire. I'd sown those oats and they'd been eaten already.

On the other hand, I didn't want to find out what that space taser felt like, so I did as directed. Surprisingly, Varius seemed to expect this reaction, and didn't fight either of us. Kale lashed his upper body to the rail, while Varius kneeled down and put his arms behind his back. I held his arms there. While we worked, the bull noisily paced back and forth, holstered his gun, and unfurled a bullwhip that he'd had on a belt hanger. It was braided leather and as low tech as his gun was high. He lashed it out with a fearsome crack that echoed in a rushing hiss down the farm donut, only for the sound to come back around from the other side.

It seemed like an odd position to whip someone, until I realized that since Varius was naked and hopelessly aroused, his cock stood out in front of him as he leaned chest-first against the handrail.

"Alright, slave-pup, you get to feel him flinch good. Dumb stud's been chewin' fresh product, ain't he? Well, as much as this ain't really gonna punish him, I'm obligated to make a scene so you know what happens to disobedient sacks of Prak mud. On account of you bein' green as that shit down there."

It was about that moment that I realized something very important: I was pretty sure I knew this bull guy. Knew of him. Recognized him. And even if I didn't, he talked like someone from where I was from, in the sense of "The United States of America", on Earth.

"Now get your head back, both of you, you ain't worth anythin' off-hours if your face is messed up," Cal said, and Varius about hit me in the chin rearing back. I did the same, and Cal lashed out with the whip like a whipmaster aiming for a cigarette in some female accomplice's mouth. Only the cigarette was Varius' dick.

The whip cracked, and Varius whinnied loud. Another crack, and the sweating stallion's chest heaved as his cock swung up, then drooped, then swung up, and this time fired off a gushing squirt of spunk that arced through the air and landed right down on the pile of failed and oozing Prak stuff I'd been struggling with. He moaned and struggled through the remainder of his orgasm, until his cock drooped down and dripped spunk like an ice cream machine after use.

"Alright, now it's your turn, slave-pup. I'm impatient so you're just gonna get outta that uniform enough. Go on. No reason t'be shy here, that exiled pony there's proof of that."

By this point, I expected there to be a crowd, as the bull was loud and his whipcracks echoed throughout the facility. I could see a few other people working in either direction, and none of them seemed to be interested in what was happening. That meant they either didn't care for their own reasons, or didn't care out of their own safety. I took the long gloves off and peeled down the work suit, then the undersuit given to me on the Numbers Station.

"Good, now just hold onto dickless there, back to me," the bull said, and made a twirling gesture with his gloved finger erect.

I looked at Kale, who had all the expression of someone being told to pick up a piece of litter. He held his arms up like he was defending in boxing, fists loosely clenched. "So uh, why's he-"

CRACK! I barked. "You see, I gotta be fair, and you both fucked up." CRACK! "I don't care if you ain't Selnari an' can't coddle Prak. That ain't your fault. However, I ain't about to give Varius two whacks an' the newbie jus' one."

There's two kinds of impact play you can do in BDSM stuff. The kind where you whack someone with a paddle or a nine-tails flogger or your hand or a fur brush or a long dildo or your own dick or random objects, for fun and profit. You work it up and down and gauge what's goin' on with them. You do it because you like hitting people and they like being hit and you all cum and everyone has a good cry and you wrap them in a warm towel and give them some tea or whatever and call it a day.

The other kind is where you hit people like you're punishing them for real. You cane them, or you use a single-tail bull whip. That makes them bleed. If you cane them, you have to make sure they don't go into shock. That way is how Cal whipped me. It felt like I had two lines of fire on my back, and worse, I felt shaky and my mouth went dry. "What, what about, he didn't stop me," I wheezed, and leaned harder and harder on Kale.

"Dickless there's already gone through enough punishment, and honestly, a lil' hazin' lets you know the lay of the land. You feelin' like you're gonna chuck up, slave-pup?"

I nodded, despite the cotton mouth. The collar shocked me and the sensation was enough to make me start to panic. Then it stopped. "What the fuck was that for?"

"Rev you up so you don't get brain-rot from shock. Now. You three go get cleaned up, you got short shifts. This Prak ain't goin' anywhere, you can finish up tomorrow. Dickless, you get him to the medcent and let that bot clean 'im up. An' see if that big kitty-cat wants to wire him up tonight or tomorrow."

"Wire me up?" I found it very hard to let go of Kale, who eventually twisted his arms out from under my fingers. "Wire me up like what?"

I turned to look and the bull was already spur-stomping back the way he came, which made my head hurt to watch. "He just means get your wrist comp and earbud," the coyote said. "Come on."

--

The worst part of being whipped wasn't being whipped in front of people I'd just met, for something I didn't know I shouldn't have done. It wasn't even the actual act of being hit. Honestly, I'd probably do it again if you said I was going to get whipped if I came within 30 seconds while doing some nasty sex scene. I would nut as fast as possible just to make sure it happened. I am generally a dominant wolf, but I'm not gonna pass up fifty percent of stuff you can do just because it means taking it instead of receiving it.

The worst part was the aftercare, because the medical android thing - similar but not identical to the one at the other station - was adamant that it needed to shave some of my back before putting on some sort of cream and bandages. The end result looked stupid in a mirror and felt terrible, like it was constantly tugging on the skin and the very edges of my unshaven fur.

Immediately after being shaved like I'd had a mistake at the grooming shop, I got a new uniform that looked much more like pants and a shirt, and had a trip to see that tiger. He had a small office that was jam-packed with electronics and, worryingly, weaponry.

"Touch anything that shoots, stabs, or blows up and you're gonna find out what it's like having it used on you," he said. Then, he handed me something akin to a gauntlet with a tablet phone sewn into it. It immediately came to life and the screen turned on, then displayed [BIOMETRIC SYNC IN PROGRESS]. "Hey, whaddaya know, they chipped you already. Makes my life easier. I do it by hand." He picked up something that looked like a large screwdriver with a round, serrated knife tip.

[BIOMETRIC SYNC COMPLETE. HELLO, HAWK.] "Hey, this thing fucking knows my name."

"Are you deaf, dumb, or both? I just said, they chipped you already. This shit's kind of industrial and old, but it works fine for us. Gotta make sure Cal can whisper sweet nothings in your ear while you're plunging out a toilet."

Cal. I squinted. "And who would this 'Cal' be?"

"Boss man. Bull guy. Talks like he jacks off his revolver at night."

"I think I ran into him," I said, and displayed my back.

"No shit," the tiger said, and leaned back in his work chair, then put his boots right onto my lap. No, right onto my dick. Back of the heel down, skidded to the side, onto my balls, and not like he meant to do it for fun. More like he meant to do it because if he tried not to, he'd fall out of his chair. He grabbed something else and handed it over. "I fucking know everything that goes on here. Watched the whole damn thing. You think I have any other shit to do besides polish my gauss rifle collection?"

I looked at it. The object looked like a self-contained earbud, though it was the size of a hearing aid, not something you plucked in and out. I stuck it into my ear only for it to start moving inwards, or doing something that felt like it. "Hey, hey, what's this thing doing? It's gonna go into my head or some shit!" I clawed at my ear.

"It's just got these little things that expand out so it doesn't fall out. Don't be a fucking baby about everything. Didn't you just get frozen and thawed back out? I wouldn't give a shit about anything after that happened to me. Not like I ever gave a shit."

I went to speak and the tiger interrupted me by yanking his foot off my groin and then making a gesture over his own arm computer. "You hear me?" He said, directly inside my head. "Perfect."

"So, I gotta ask, how come you and him and me, we all talk like we're from Earth, and-"

He stood up, towered over me, and pushed me right off the stool I'd sat down on. "No questions. Go eat something before you pass out. Your wristcomp says you've got low blood sugar. Probably from getting your hide tanned."

I slid off like a paperweight knocked off a table. Paperweights are a funny thing, because who had papers even back on Earth? I used to use buttplugs, for the conversation value. After falling down for the who knows how manyth time since being pulled out of wreckage, I went shoulders up and went to find my way around the station.

Of course, I had a "wristcomp" now which happily gave me a map, though I could also smell food. And people. And this Prak stuff, which had a distinct though not unpleasant vegetal smell. I found Kale and Varius with another group who I didn't recognize yet, a typical gaggle of apex-predator hybrids with the exception of the horse. Unlike me, who had his coveralls down around his waist and bandages all over his back, Varius' injury was hidden by pants. He and a cougar were having an animated discussion in that bizarre other language, and the cat was much better at making it sound like half of it was called out by a large songbird.

"If you want premades, they're in the big refrigerator there. If I were you, I'd stick to them for now. If you try and cook something and screw it up, who knows what Cal'll do to you next." Kale, once again, was both helping me and looking pained about doing it.

Cal. Cal Cal Cal. I started to feel extremely loopy, and began to pant. I took a look at this selection of 'premades' and found the refrigerator in question entirely stocked with them. I took out one whose picture promised something akin to a stir fry, then stuck it into a machine that looked a lot like the one back on Numbers Station. Thankfully, it started heating it or whatever it was doing, without any intervention.

"So, this is a farming operation, for something called Prak. Is that it? And what, you sell it for money? And you have to contract slaves for that?" I really wanted to know if Cal was the Cal I thought he was, and yet I opened my mouth about the stupid slavery thing again. I didn't direct my question at anyone other than whomever got close enough.

That ended up being the cougar, who got up from talking to get a drink in a squirt bottle. "You have to farm somewhere. Somewhere costs money. Or, you find a space station that some mining company apparently forgot about. Out of network, and they don't come after you. We really lucked out, it even has the grow-op stuff, I guess to support some mining colony operations in this system. They never got going, the company just gave up."

"Who fucking gives up on an entire space station?"

"This is small business, this thing. You're some Earth weirdo, right? From," oh no, he was going to say it, "Five hundred years ago or something? This is probably crazy to you. It's boring business to us."

"Yeah, just some Earth weirdo. Is Earth weird?"

"Earth isn't shit. There's a rumor you're from some other Earth, but that sounds crazy to me." He squirted whatever he was drinking into his mouth, like someone using a sports drink bottle to show off. "Whatever. We don't need more Humans."

I looked around the room. No one else was talking or eating, and they were all looking my way. It had been a long time since I got into a bad situation. I ran a sex club. A real business. I didn't want to be some sort of mafia boss or something, I just wanted to look and sound like it. I wanted to make the kind of place I wanted to have, and that other people wanted, too. I did not want bad situations. "I take it you're Selnari," was about all I could think to say. My food chimed.

"Eat that," the cougar growled, and pointed to my food. "You look like you're gonna pass out. We're all fucking Selnari. Okay, not Cal, or that big tiger guy, or you."

I took the tray out of its dispenser slot and went to sit down. Yes, it was basically a stir fry, in that it was a jumble of meat, vegetables, and something that looked like extremely long grains of rice or extremely short rounded spaghetti noodles. It didn't taste exactly like anything I'd eaten before, though it didn't taste alien, either. I had no frame of reference for alien food except that I knew what Earth food used to taste like. That felt like years earlier. I stayed quiet, only to look up and see the cougar still watching me. "Am I eating enough for you?" It didn't matter that I felt vulnerable on the inside; I sounded like I was indignant.

"I'm in charge of the actual Prak farming. Don't go near it. The only time you're gonna go near it is to haul things there or away. You don't have any arkanic ability, so you'll just ruin it. It's got a defense mechanism that fouls it when something disturbs the plant. I guess it's so foraging animals leave it alone. Selnari arkanic ability does something to it, and basically makes it at peace with getting the leaves ripped off the roots. It's kind of a mystery, supposedly, since it's a plant, and not an animal like us. And you're not one of us, so it won't work right. You got it?"

I legitimately could not tell if he was threatening me, or just being informative. "Yeah, alright. I mean, I'm gonna do what the boss tells me, like everyone else. That's how this works." I looked around. "Come on, what's the fuckin' deal? You're all staring at me."

One by one, they looked away, and went back to whatever they were doing, even the cougar. I barely finished my meal, and quickly left the cafeteria; the cougar followed me. "I'm in charge of operations. I guess that means I get to tell you what to do, too. I suggest you listen. You're not a prisoner here. You work your shifts in exchange for living space, food, and when you finish your contract, you get paid out. When you're off work, you're off work. This station is meant for a big mining support operation; we're a little skeleton crew. If you want to go carve out your own niche, fine. You'll have to build stuff out of salvage, though, unless you get permission from the boss to work extra for some cash. Otherwise, you get a room to yourself. Common bathroom and showers, but there are locking stalls and the shower stalls are individual and locking, too. We're all freaks here." The cat then gave me a whack to the arm and pulled me along.

The Prak operation took up the entire agriculture ring on the station, though just one of the sectors of the processing and residence areas. The rest of the station was accessible, though the settled area was clearly marked and there were signs indicating that you were swimming at your own risk elsewhere, and that the hull breach pressure door system was still active in case you did something really stupid.

Even though we were just in one sector, it still felt empty. The team seemed scrappy and genuinely interested in what they were doing, although they all treated me like I was the flying insect that just buzzed into their dinner party. Even the cougar - who was taking time out of his day to show me around the space equivalent of a biker gang's drug lab - just showed me a room in the bedroom block and walked away.

A keycard stuck out from the door latch - I removed it and the door opened, as well as a welcome chime and some multi-language text on a display panel that told me to scan the keycard with my wristcomp. I took a tired moment to really take in that despite being elsewhere in the galaxy, and [five hundred years] in the future, I basically had a fancy smartphone strapped to my arm. The room was generally akin to a hotel room, minus an attached bathroom. Full-size extra long bed, desk and chair, sitting chair, wardrobe, shelving. If I'd just been traveling around back home, I wouldn't have minded it. I'm only gonna go for the gilded bidet experience if it's with someone else and special.

The bathroom was at the end of the block hallway, and was in fact semi-private. Sinks were in a communal row, though they had divider panels. Toilet stalls took over one side of the room, and shower stalls on the other, each with a ventilation gap at the top and bottom that was too small for anyone to access the cubicle. It was perfectly acceptable.

According to my computer, I wasn't due for another work shift until the next morning. I retired to the room, lay down in bed, and experienced the first real moment of relaxation in at least a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks, or a few hundred years. Then I fell sound asleep.

--

I awoke early in the morning, because I'd gone to bed so early. No one had come looking for me, no one had disturbed me, and while I'm pretty sure I heard plenty of sex noises from elsewhere in the room block, they weren't loud enough to bother me. I just didn't know how to turn on any white noise sounds in my room.

I wasn't hungry, and no one else was awake. I looked at my wristcomp, which had an enormous amount of information to peruse, and found a list of work assignment tasks. No more 'Prak Farming'; lots of 'carry x to y' and 'return containers to x' and 'make sure y area is clean and organized'. Some of the items were 'locked out', which presumably meant I had to wait for something else or some other time to do them. I decided to start doing the available ones. It's not so much I wanted to be a 'good slave', but I didn't want to lie around bored and thinking about my predicament. I'd much rather push heavy things around while thinking about my predicament.

When I lived in Lainsville, I had two houses. One was in a luxury subdivision for rich people, a very modernist house that was full of squares and hardwood flooring and concrete bathrooms and three entirely different sex dungeons. The other was the penthouse apartment above "The Pit", which slightly misuses the idea of a penthouse as the building was only five stories, with its "criminal old money" classic vibe, and no sex dungeon at all - because that was the club below. Despite these two very high-value properties, and the fact that I wore a conspicuous and flashy leather outfit or two or three every single day, and the fact that I "owned a sex club"...

I never thought of myself as rich. Rich people make other people do things for them. I only did that in that I had employees because I ran a nightclub, and it was fun to order people around while fucking them. I always did stuff myself. I cleaned, I cooked, I tinkered. Okay, I hired a gardener.

And I paid a friend who paid a computer hacker to get me on a rich people's generation ship to escape Earth being roasted by the sun, only to end up on on a space station that grows sex weed, working as a janitor.

I thought all of the above while I was carting processed prak from the processing lab, over to the packaging room, using a device I'll describe as an antigravity pallet jack. I continued thinking when I took packaged prak from the packaging room to the cargo bay. I continued thinking when I went and cleaned up the processing room, which left me smell blind from the difficult to describe herbal-earthy scent of prak.

I felt like someone had rewound time, including me, back to the end of high school and few years afterwards, while I literally worked as a janitor at my high school and then community college, with a side of hanging out with the maintenance people. Only now I was a space janitor. I could remember everything I'd done in my life, and here, my purpose was to start right over.

I was right in the middle of one of these soul-rattling before-sunup thoughts, using my hover-sled to pull garbage to the garbage dispensary, when I realized where I was walking past. It looked like one of the residential room blocks, though it wasn't occupied like mine was and it wasn't long disused like several others. All of the rooms had their doors removed, and each one was loaded with very specific and jerry-rigged furniture. Sex furniture. A dungeon.

My dungeons had been BDSM two hundred percent. This dungeon was for sex two hundred percent. The overlap was that sex slings and bondage pommel horses and examination chairs were both intense roleplay items and completely useful for lining up Tab D with Slot A. Or slot M. Or Slot V, I guess; I was pretty gay and usually left that slot to other people.

I sniffed at the air, and still smelled mostly prak. That suddenly rankled me, enough that I snarled. I wanted to smell sex dungeon, god fucking dammnit. While my feral lupine brain cells lit up with fervor I honestly hadn't felt for years and sorely missed, I was oblivious to someone sneaking up on me.

I turned to continue moving on, and found Varius standing next to the cart. "Jesus fuck, what are you doin' here?" I barked, heart pounding in my chest. That only made my quivering mean excitement notch up one level.

The horse was wearing clothing, though just barely. A leather codpiece jockstrap, leather riding boots, a rather elaborate leather body harness that included shoulder pieces like garment-soft armor, and long gloves that reached just to his elbows. He flicked his half-taped tail at my reaction. "I follow," he said.

"This whole fucking morning?" I looked around, bristling further inside with self-deprecating ire as I had been so absorbed in my invigorated grouchy thoughts that I had missed a stallion as big as me following me around the station. I furrowed my brow as I thought about him sneaking and not just following in the open. The more I let myself wind up, the more Varius looked coyly gleeful. "Well, you found me. Did I do something wrong? Did I miss breakfast? Am I gonna be in trouble again? I bet the boss man bull would love to whip me across my dick just like he did you."

Varius reared his head back as if I had said something extremely surprised. A strange feeling welled up inside me, like I'd suddenly stepped in front of a heating radiator. It felt like I felt inside when I got a rush of sexual excitement, except it was coming from outside of me.

The horse had something in one of his hands, a plastic bag full of what looked like clothing. "I hear you awake, and see you go off, and thought you need a fresh uniform." He opened the package, and it was indeed a coverall-style uniform like the others wore on work shifts. He handed it over.

"Uhhh, yeah, alright, that's nice," I said, and made sure this was not a trap by sniffing around through the clothing. Aha, no more fucking prak smell! Instead, it smelled clean and slightly ionic, like it had been sanitized.

Varius might have reared back seconds earlier, but he just moved closer right now. "You are filthy. I will help you," he said, then grasped my wrist and started walking into the dungeon.

"Whoa, whoa, hang on, I'm busy working here!"

"It is early, no one cares," he shrugged, and continued leading me on. Past every one of the open sex rooms, to a room at the back. The bathroom. Just like my room block bathroom, it was multi-occupant with as much privacy as was barely safe and no more. He stopped part way in, then started to remove his harness, gloves, and boots. "You too," he said.

Despite my reservations I was extremely aroused, and felt abruptly ashamed of taking off my existing uniform. Me, ashamed of getting naked. Actually, I wasn't a big fan of being naked when I have sex. Nonetheless, when in someone else's house... I got out of the toe-boots and coveralls and had a sniff at them. Ungh, disgusting wolf smells. "Hah, you probably followed me here on my stink alone."

As if on command, the now naked horse slipped up to me and probed his muzzle under my armpit, and had a big sniff. "Just fine smell," he said, then crouched down and sniffed my cock. "Much better smell." Then, he got back up and went to the center of the room, and crouched back down over the floor drain. He put his hands behind his back, and settled like he was at sex-pet parade rest. He even lifted his head slightly.

"What the fuck is this about?" I gestured over to him and the floor.

"You are wolf, I am territory."

I looked around, several times, with a hard squint to make sure I could really see properly that there weren't cameras filming the interaction. Who was I kidding; I was on a space station with artificial gravity, there were probably cameras that could crawl up my ass while I was asleep. "Are you fucking saying you want me to piss on you?"

He nodded, and only looked smug because his eyes were half lidded. Just my mention of it made his black and pink cock go from hanging down over his balls and almost touching the floor, to rising towards level. "And if I don't wanna piss on you?"

"You are mean, nasty wolf to be sold to Cal. I could be wrong, then I am disappointed."

I crossed my arms. "How about you answer one question, and if I like the answer, I'll piss all over you. God fucking knows I need to piss." That was true. I hadn't gone when I'd awakened.

Varius shrugged, then nodded.

"Don't worry, it's on topic. So there's a sex dungeon here - or a bunch of them - right out there. And you got whipped until you came all over the place. And you fucking walk around in that harness stuff. And Cal had that leather stuff on! What the fuck is the deal with this place?"

Varius squinted as I talked, frowned slightly, and lost a bit of his erection while. "I don't know, there is no deal, we are contracted."

I rolled my eyes, but at myself, so I looked to the side. "Fuck, I guess you don't really speak English well. Why is there so much sex stuff here?"

"Sex is fun," he answered plainly, though as I stared at him after the answer, he grew a smirk and brushed his forelocks about. "We are Hener in exile, except Cal, Strake - the tiger security - and now you."

"Okay, but what does that mean?"

He shook his head. "One question, one wolf marking." He shifted and shivered all over, resettling into the universal, "please pee on me" gesture adopted by watersports fanatics the world over. The galaxy over, apparently.

I shrugged and grabbed the base of my still very hard cock, and stepped forward. "I'm hard, so it's gonna be a fuss. I bet you want a fuss." I simultaneously needed to piss very badly, and was hard enough that being erect made me ache. I inhaled several times, gritted my teeth, growled, put my ears back, lifted my shoulders, put my tail into leg-lift position, and then actually stepped close enough to pick up a bare foot and step on his thigh. A dribble. "Say 'Please, Mister Wolf'," I gruffed through my teeth.

"Please, Mister Wolf," he said, and maybe it was just his endearingly awkward accent, but he really sounded like he meant it and wasn't just playing it up because he had six-foot-seven of looming yellow-eyed wolf glaring down at him.

That didn't actually help me pee any more, but it did feel good, and when it felt good, I felt that same weird hot feeling rush back right after my initial thought. I pushed a little more and broke the seal for good; golden yellow piss burst out of my cock and splashed Varius in the neck. He tilted his head further and I stepped back, getting another good squirt of it all over his chest. There was no noise where we were - only the vaguest purr of ventilation and a nearly inaudible thrum that pervaded the station I'd seen so far - so it really sounded like I was watering the plants good. It splashed his pecs and ran down between them, over his abdomen, and over the base of his cock, to drip off his balls and then run down the side of his thigh to the hard flooring.

The disgustingly base thrill of urinating on someone made me twist up into a smirk that I could feel crawling up one side of my muzzle more than the other, and there was that hot rush again. It seemed to affect Varius as well, since he let his knees sink further apart, his cock rose harder, and he felt over his wet neck with a hand. Then he dropped his chin, leaving his mouth open as if to moan loudly. He didn't. I took the message to mean I should piss into his mouth, so I inhaled hard again and sent another hard, rank jet gushing right in. Instead of swallowing, he let it puddle up inside with the loud and slightly hollow sound of pissing into a urinal's bowl trap, and then pushed his tongue forward so it overflowed over his lower lip and poured down off his chin. This time, the hot feeling happened first, and then I got the thrill of sexual escapade.

I also ran out of piss. I had less in me than I thought, and it was dark and rank, so maybe I needed some more water or something. Varius didn't seem to mind. Still wet, he reached out and beckoned me closer, and as soon as I moved a pace forward, he grasped around my rump and engulfed my cock in his mouth. He kissed the head, then sniffed at it again, then kissed it harder, tongue curling around my glans underneath the foreskin.

"Whoa, whoa," I said, and he immediately backed off. I immediately laughed, and he looked confused. "Oh, I just didn't, I wanted time to enjoy it, you know? And you're a horse, so I was saying 'whoa' so you slow down." He continued to look confused. "Oh shit, do you not even know... okay, whatever. Here's the thing I like." I took one of his arms and pulled down to his wrist, then guided his hand to my balls. "Tug down like this, and either just kiss around on the head, or go all the way down. Don't tug too much. Do it when you want me to cum. Got it?"

He nodded, and gently surrounded my balls in his big hand. Varius was not a huge horse, and was actually rather athletic, though he had big hands and feet and the general wideness of shoulders and hips that being equine came with. Still, he had a good grip, and I immediately lifted off my heels. As soon as I did, he eased up, and kissed my cockhead again.

I wanted to cum in his mouth right now, but that seemed awfully rude, and it felt too good. That hot feeling was different now, like it just bored into me, like my arousal was bouncing off a mirror and dazzling me back in the face. He slid his mouth further and further along, until I could feel the back of his throat bump my glans. I put a hand on his head, and he swallowed, and I sank right in. He gagged and swallowed again, silent now, before he pulled back abruptly and coughed. Then before I could get in a word, he did it again. I moved my other hand to his throat, and could feel exactly when my cockhead pushed down into it, and when he swallowed, and when he gagged instead.

I didn't want him to gag himself too much, because that could quickly go south, and yet he was earnest about doing it and that was an extreme turn-on. Plus, despite my best efforts, I just couldn't hold myself back. I groaned and gritted my muzzle shut, physically clenched up inside through the first squirt's worth, then let go right when he'd pulled back to gasp for air so my first double shot of wolf spunk would splash around on his tongue. He didn't try to push forward any more, lips just hugging around my shaft, teeth well up out of the way, tongue undulating underneath as the climax hit me like being kicked in the prostate. It felt like I had so much, and even when I crested and started winding down, if I clenched inside, I could feel the delightful burn of a few final spurts working out.

He didn't swallow, though he didn't try to pull off either, and I let him nurse around my cockhead through the overstimulation. Some guys scream when you do that, but me? I'm a rotten hedonist. Finally it was enough though, and I pulled out. Some spunk oozed down over his lip. "You're gonna be nasty, huh? Don't swallow. Spit it out over there," I pointed, "I wanna see how much wolf cum I had stored up."

He nodded, turned his head, leaned and spat a big blob of creamy spunk and saliva onto the floor. It wasn't really as much as it felt like - it never is, am I right? - but it was still a big load and I could tell he had more in his mouth he was working up to spit out.

Suddenly, I got the terrible black feeling of post-orgasm regret. What the fuck was I doing? I was supposed to be doing hard labor - fuck I was probably supposed to be asleep - and here I was using a horse guy as a urinal and making him spit my seed all over the bathroom floor! If I hadn't just ejaculated, I would have gotten even more wound up; instead I just felt wrong.

For about ten seconds.

Then, that feeling again, and it was like I hadn't even orgasmed at all. Minus the fact that my cock now dangled and dribbled spunk onto the floor instead of standing out. "Unrh, you look like you need to get off. Unless it's a custom to just satisfy some rough shithead and stay bottled up."

He looked a bit confused, pensive, and then like he understood enough to shake his head. "We trade." Then he stood up.

I moved around behind him, and scooped his arms up into a loose arm-lock. He sputtered and pranced in place, and flicked his tail against my thighs. The taped part of it made an audible dry thwap against my fur. My head felt frothy with all the possible things I could do to him. I hadn't felt that rush in years, not that way, not like an uncontrollable torrent. My VR-scene-programming was a calculated puttering hobby; this was the kind of feeling that made me drag strangers into buildings under construction and tie them up with whatever cabling wasn't stapled into place yet. Fuck, I'm really getting to start shit over, huh? "What gets you off, huh? What do you like? What makes you climax?"

"Pain," he said, without thinking for more than a single heartbeat.

"What a freak," I said, and worryingly got no reaction from him. I assumed it was the English problem. I faced him towards the sink mirrors, moved him back and forth until we could both see his groin, and then held around his chest with one of my arms. I reached down, hefted his straining erection, and felt from base to tip. "You really gagged on my cock. Do you understand that? Did you like it?"

"You are very long," he said. His cock throbbed under my grasp. That is true; there's no bragging about it, I have a ten-inch uncut dick. About seven when soft. I don't get much bigger or thicker hard, just a little longer, and hard. It sounds fun, but sometimes it's too big for people to get all of it in wherever I'm sticking it, I have to stand far back at the urinal, and it's a pain in the cock to fit it in my pants if I don't want it showing off. Yeah, fine, and it's awesome otherwise.

I let go of his cock and smacked it up from the underside of the mushroomed head. He jolted in my grasp, gasped and stamped one foot. His cock rebound-throbbed, and a big ooze of precum pushed out and started hanging from the head. "I asked you a question."

"Yes, I like it, I almost gag too much!" He said, and now he sounded desperate. Desperate and hot, so hot it radiated straight into my brain. He tensed his rump back against me; I hit his cock again, this time from the top, smacking the head hard and following through so it stretched him down and made it swing back up. He whinnied and grabbed for my restraining arm, just to hold onto it, even pulling it against his chest. I could feel his heartbeat through it.

I looked down at the slimy mess of his precum and piss and sweat-covered cockhead, and noticed that he still had very visible welts on his cock shaft from being whipped, along with faint marks alongside them which I assumed were from bandaging being pulled off soon after being applied. I traced my fingerpad and clawnail along one of them; Varius made a terrible sound like someone choking on their own yell, and his shaft throbbed again, black leathery balls drawing upwards in their sac as more precum spurted forth.

I pushed him forward, closer and closer to the sinks. He walked, although with just enough resistance that I had to push. "I'm a sadist. Are you sure you want to tell me you like pain? You don't know anything about me, except that I'm a wolf, or at least look like a wolf. I could be a real criminal. I could have killed people for fun. Dominion Prime could have been a prison ship." I didn't even know if there _were_prison ships. I spoke near one of his ears, which kept flicking around but never away. He smelled positively ripe, like wolf urine and a serious amount of sexual musk, clearly not having washed himself since the previous day's activities even though horses sweat much more than canines and felines.

I grasped his cock by the base, moved him close enough to the sink that not only would his cock reach it, but it would bump the backsplash if I hadn't been holding it up at an angle. Then, I used my base grip as leverage, and whipped it downwards, smacking the head and then rest of the underside against the top of the sink edge along the side. It made a very meaty smack, and Varius howled in a non-equine and very-humanoid way. I wobbled the shaft around again, then hit the sink with it from the side. Thump, thwap. He strained against me, and after four hits, stopped holding my arm to his chest and started trying to pry out of my grip. "No, you asked for it," I growled through my teeth. I was getting hard again, and I was drooling helplessly, arousal and vile need to _hurt_making my body confuse it for actual hunger.

I whipped his cock upwards, hard enough that the long shaft - it had to be about fourteen inches, equinely oversized and about as long as they ever got on hybrids I'd seen - hit him on the chest, then I swung it down and whacked it against the sink again. He yelled and whinnied and stamped in place, and his cock exploded all over the sink and mirror. He dumped out at least three times the spunk I had, enough that when I pointed it at the sink drain, it made a sloppy glug like when pouring drain cleaner down the hole.

As soon as his peak was past, I let go of his chest, and then quickly grabbed him as his knees buckled and he crumpled downwards. He turned to face me and held on tight, quivering in my grip, tears running down his cheeks. Then, with a spastic sniff, he wiped his face off and gave me an aggressive nuzzle around my chest and a hand up my back. "Thank you," he breathed. "Now, we clean."

Varius had every intention of scrubbing me in the shower, and I didn't mind. I could use some time to think, because of what had just happened. I got to indulge myself, twice; he got to indulge himself, twice; I had both dipped into the black hole of "you're a disgusting mess who uses people for pleasure" that I'd suffered with for years, and had just set that feeling up on a shelf only for it to fall down and hit me on the head.

In the shower, the surprising rush of hot water was relaxing and obnoxiously arousing. The stallion deftly cleaned my cock and balls, though it wasn't nearly enough stimulation to get me off. I returned the favor and he pressed back against the wall, horsey lips wrinkling a few times as it clearly stung. Thankfully, he wasn't bleeding. I don't think I could have handled that.

When it was my turn to scrub, I gave him a good working over. Aside from being slender fit, he was hard-muscled, the kind of hardness that comes from work and not just compulsive fitness routine. There didn't seem to be any issue with having a leisurely shower, even though water seemed like it would be a precious commodity in space. Several times, Varius spoke to instruct me or comment, and all but once it was in that strange language first followed by a 'Sorry', and then just a physical indication of what to do.

Out of the shower, we both used a vortex dryer - those seemed universal for animal hybrids or zoomorphs or whatever the word of the day for us critters was, as we had them back home [five hundred years] ago. I put on my new uniform, which fit a little looser and really made me realize how much of a stink I'd worked up previously. Varius showed me how the fabric collar could be unfurled upwards and tucked under the control collar. I wasn't sure if the collar would still work that way, but it felt more comfortable.

When we left the bathroom and I went to push my floaty-wagon of garbage, Varius stopped me from taking the handles. "Huh? What now?"

"You come," he said, and led me away from it. "Garbage will be fine."

I shrugged and followed him, as he led me back past the corridor that led to the prak farm ring, and back towards the residence block. Before I could enter the cafeteria or common lounge or the rooms, I had to go through the Boss Man.

"Weeeelllll when was th' last name anyone ever saw a HORSE bringin' back a WOLF, huh?" He was in just as much gay cowboy gunslinger getup as the previous day, though instead of chaps over a jockstrap, he had leather pants tucked into his boots, and a long brown leather coat. He looked absolutely like he was out of place on a space station. He stepped up to Varius and stroked his muzzle. "Good horsey. Go see that mountain cat for your treat." He then slapped Varius on the rump to encourage him to leave.

"Now then," Cal said, and lifted his arm and scooted his leather coat cuff back. He touched at his wristcomp and my neck exploded in electrical fire. I clutched at it and the sensation shot through my hands, but not between them, just between fingers in each one. I gripped it helplessly, then my brain snowed over and when I got my vision back, I was staring at the floor and hunkered down like I'd done a superhero landing. Cal's boots stepped into my vision, one after the other. "Hope you didn't think that lil' shirt collar trick was gonna save your puppy scruff from my Control," he boomed the word out like he was playing at it. "Go on. I'm in charge here, give my boot a lil' kiss. Save you th' hassle of askin' later."

I did not want my brain to scramble again, so I hunkered further, onto hands and knees, and kissed his boot. It was a glorious leather cowboy boot, heavy and fine leather, hand-stitched, smelled like classic tanning, stacked leather heel, and I could even smell the metal of his spur. Despite the collar shock, my dick throbbed in my coveralls. I am a sucker for cowboy shit.

"Good. Now, why did I send Varius after you? Well, I came down to have some breakfast with y'all workin' stiffs and my new favorite wolf was nowhere to be seen. And that jus' didn't seem right. So I checked with Mister Angry Puss over there an' he said you were workin', so I sent Varius after you. Figured you wouldn't mind a horse who jus' can't say no to anythin' fun. An' he managed to bring you back, eventually, after clearly gettin' frisky. You think I can't smell sex even after you showered?" He tapped my muzzle with his boot. "C'mon, get up, you ain't gonna roll around here."

I found it hard to stand after the jolt, and he had to help me up. He continued helping me, and led me along, not into the crew areas, but through a corridor I hadn't been through before as the door wouldn't respond when I walked near it. It responded to Cal.

I really, really needed to sit down. Sit down and eat, but sit down before I fell over. At the end of the corridor, another hatch door opened up into what was clearly a caretaker's apartment setup. It was a living and dining space up front, where he motioned for me to sit at the table. I plopped down and put my forearms on the table, hunkered forward, and held my face. Breath after breath, the terrible weakness subsided.

"Those collars are a real trip, huh? They can outright hurt you, I mean injure, but hell I'm not gonna use some bark-stopper bull-shit for that. If I wanna hurt someone, I got two hands, two boots, a fat dick an' a whip."

"And a gun," I added, then regretted it. No zap. No slap.

"That lil' taser? That's like bein' hit by a mosquito made outta nine-volt batteries." While he talked, Cal puttered around in the kitchen area off to one side, and returned with not one of the premade cartons but an actual plate of actual food. At least it looked and smelled like bacon, eggs, and hash browns. He put it in front of me, then returned to the counter, where he ate his own food while standing boots-crossed.

"They have nine-volt batteries in space?" I looked up, egg on my face, literally, because I hungrily stuffed some into my muzzle before my attitude got the best of me.

Cal laughed big, a deep sound that filled up the space. "They sure as hell do not. Well, I mean I don't know, shit, there have to be batteries all over the place. An' you're thinkin', this bull guy, what's he talkin' about Earth Stuff for, huh? And of course, you wanna know that, Strake told me you were askin' the bad questions, and I told him to shut the hell up an' stop being such a god-damn prick about everythin'. Well, I'm talkin' Earth Stuff because I'm from Earth. You know jus' where I'm from, an' I know jus' where you're from, an' that ain't nothin' to do with records or shit from that space icebox you were found inside. Hell, they can't get records off that thing, the computer systems were all shit except for the pod things, said that rotten-ass spotty-cat bitch."

Cal talked as much as I tended to when I got going, except I hadn't gotten going yet, because I was too busy being whipped or coming. "Uh-huh."

"Your name is Hawk an' you're from Lainsville, New Yawk." He made sure to pronounce it wholly wrong. "An' I'm Cal Hopswith, an' I'm also from Lainsville, New Yawk, although 'course I spent most of my time down south 'fore I moved there in my thirties. Hence my lil' ol' axe-ent." He used his boot to knock open a dishwasher door and stuck his plate into it.

"This guy named Carl Bennick, he bought a 'gay dude ranch' from a bull named Cal Hopswith. He sold me The Pit so he could use the money to buy the ranch," I said.

"Bingo. We ain't never met but you sure as shit know who I am, an' what queer-ass weirdo faggot hasn't heard of The Pit and its moody wolf administrator. You an' your newspaper profiles an' shit." He sounded slightly jealous.

I got through half of my food before my hunger turned to indigestion and I had to stop. I sat back and drooled, then wiped my chin, grunted out a burp, and felt only slightly better. Cal quickly grabbed me a bottle of something and tossed it over. It was a squeeze-squirt bottle like I'd seen before. I had a swallow - whatever it was tasted fruity and not quite familiar, and immediately settled my stomach. "That's great and all, but..." I let the pause hang there, until Cal nodded his black horns as if goading me to talk further. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"What the hell are you doin' here? Course I know th'answer, you got your ass sold into an indentured service contract to work here for me, that's obvious, I wrote the damn contract an' you signed it."

I grimaced and thought for a few seconds, again waiting to see if Cal goaded me into speaking. He didn't. "Well, not really. I mean no, I didn't sign anything. I didn't even get to see it. I got this collar stuck on me, stuffed in some ship by a police doggy, and hauled here to go to naughty wolf jail. Except I didn't do anything wrong and this probably isn't jail."

"It sure as shit ain't jail. It's a Prak Farm! We farm Prak! We process it up an' sell it off an' to be frank I skip over all the regulatory bull-shit involved an' undercut network standard restricted pricing covenant an' sell it through kinda grey market channels if you understand. That's jus' to maximize yield an' profit. See, I'm tryin' to-"

I decided to see if I still had it. I stood up, and Cal immediately closed his mouth. While he was bigger than me, it wasn't anything like how Strake was bigger than me, and I was the one with a mouthful of sharp teeth. "Why the hell are you here, now, in fucking space, if you're from the same damn place I am? I just got defrosted off a ship, one of a handful of survivors vs the three whole ships of tens of thousands of people or what the fuck ever. Did you get defrosted off that same ship?"

"No, no I did not. I took the long way 'round. Been at this for about fifteen years." Cal crossed his arms in front of his chest and lowered his horns. A downturned muzzle like that on a carnivore meant submission; on a bull, it just meant horns out.

"You gonna tell me what the long way around is?" I cut back.

"Me an' Strake an' a few other Lainsville folk an' a bunch of other people from all over, we all had some idea that this Dominion thing was horseshit an' the real deal was somethin' to do with that Southwest Territory Exclusion Zone thing. So we all headed down there and if I tol' you what happened next you wouldn't believe it. But we ended up comin' out on Selnar - what's Selnar? Where the Selnari are from, dumb shit. Struggled our ways into stuff with no help from this Galactic Network you probably keep hearin' about. I got an idea that I could pick up with my lil' sexual kingdom deal somehow. I found out about Prak an' thought shit, I am gonna grow that shit an' sell that shit' an' take the money an' buy a whole damn planet an' make it into one big sex ranch."

Sexual kingdom. That felt weird to hear someone else say. "And you did all this shit fifteen years ago?"

Cal shrugged. "There's some kind of time thing I don't get. It kinda doesn't matter if you think about it, because I'm sure someone's tried to explain it to you by now, we're from a different Earth. And that one we're from is gone. It didn't blow up, it just doesn't exist. So here I am, farming Prak for money to start over."

He sounded an awful lot like he was trying to minimize the fact that he 'held indentured service contracts' which sounded an awful lot like slavery. Actual slavery, not sexy fun bedroom time slavery, like when he called me slave-pup. I even kind of liked that phrase, because I wasn't a real slave, and I wasn't a pup, and it gave me something to position myself against. I'm not cute, I'm not a puppy, I'm not a dog, and referring to me that way is a great way to find out how much of a submissive bottom you think you aren't.

"You gonna eat the rest of your food or just stare there with drool hangin' outta your bark hole? I didn't go to the trouble of getting actual food like this jus' to watch you slobber on it while it gets cold."

I did not want to eat the rest of my food. I did not want to tell Cal I did not want to eat the rest of my food. I did not want to get my neck shocked. I did not want to get whipped in public. I did feel trapped. "Tryin' to figure out what to fuckin' do."

"Bout what?"

We should have been equals. We should have been friendly competitors. My head hurt. My brain hurt. My mind hurt. My soul hurt, and I didn't even believe in souls. "So what're you gonna do to me after I fucked your little horsey?"

Cal looked down at his own wristcomp. "He says here you whacked his dick into a sink 'till he nutted."

"That's a kind of fucking."

"That's the kinda fucking Varius likes. An' while I don't know you, I feel like I know you a lil' more seein' as you indulged him like that. You get off doin' it?"

I shook my head. "He sucked me off after I pissed all over him. I can't go again that fast."

The bull pursed his lips into a thoughtful frown. "Well it's been long 'nuff after that. I ain't dumb, you look like that food ain't agreein' with you. You don't gotta eat it all. An' I know just how to distract you. C'mon." He turned and walked away from the kitchen area, towards a small set of steps, and out of the room.

I followed, and found him in a master suite bedroom. There was an ensuite bathroom, a big walk-in closet, and the bedroom itself. The bed had been rigged up similar to some of the ones in that 'red light district' where I'd shirked duties just a half hour earlier. Floor to ceiling posts, restraint connections, and this one already had a sling saddle in position.

Cal was busy getting something out of the closet. He turned and brought it towards me. Black leather. Straps, not clothing, except for an obvious pair of riding boots. "We had a problem wolf here jus' before you showed up. I had my whole complement of men to do my sexual bidding - nah, we'd just have fun if we wanted to an' the work was done for the day. This one wolf guy, he was kinda rough around the edges. I mean all these Hener guys, they're all rebels so to speak, renegades, rule-breakers, literally breakin' the Hener code stuff 'nuff to get excommunicated an' exiled. Kale's the only one who's really done somethin' actually bad, an' even then it ain't bad to you or me or any of us here. Well, that's what I thought, 'till I got a few reports about that wolf pushin' people around. In secret. Makin' deals with them not to talk. An' by pushin' them around I mean pushin' himself onto an' into them no matter what they said about it. You get what I'm sayin'?"

I nodded. "He was raping them."

Cal frowned. "I wanna make somethin' clear. Your contract does not say you gotta fuck or be fucked. Notice I whipped your back. That's cuz it hurts, an' that's what you do when you're a slaver an' a slave misbehaves. Also I had some vague memory of readin' a news-paper article where you said you were as much a masochist as a sadist. An' I thought well shit, let's see what happens. An' you took it an' didn't start a fight an' then went slappin' some horse meat sausage around."

I watched Cal lay out what he was holding. It was one of those harness-jock-boots-gloves getups like Varius had been wearing. While it was the same idea, it didn't actually look the same; different strap configuration, this one asymmetrical at the chest and shoulders like some types of armor. Gauntlet gloves instead of opera-style. The riding boots were surprisingly tough-looking, more like polished engineer boots, and each had harness straps at the ankle that were fashionably asymmetrical just like the shoulder piece. "What else do you know about me? All I know about you is you're a bull, you ran that sex ranch thing, that kinda stuff."

"You like wearin' leather. You always had leather stuff on in photos. Well, here's some leather you can wear. I told you 'bout that wolf just now, right? I was tryin' to tell you that he was forcin' people to do stuff. I don't force people to do stuff, not that stuff, an' it's even more wrong t'most Selnari. When I confronted him 'bout it, he went nuts. Strake could barely get a handle on him an' that cat could snap someone in half an' stuff them through a mail slot."

"So what happened?"

"Big stripes crammed him in an airlock an' spaced him. I bet if you felt like it, you could sit 'round with some computer binoculars or whatever an' spot him floatin' around out there. Dark wolf like you, probably hard to spot. Maybe th' solar radiation shit'll have rotted him up. Not sure if he's froze or baked. Get outta that uniform. I'm gonna get a lil' changed up, too. I'd love for you t'indulge me a bit an' then I'll indulge your ass, if you're game." He went back into the closet and started to strip out of his gunslinger garb.

I pondered what he'd just said, the story about some unrepentant wolf abusing his privilege. I thought about how I used to abuse my privilege. I thought I was doing it while playing with Varius, which felt wrong, and also was really exciting. Turns out I wasn't; Varius is just horny and perverted. I didn't want to be that wolf, and I wasn't sure if I would be abusing my privilege by saying no or that Cal wasn't abusing his by asking if I wanted to indulge him.

I stripped out of the uniform, and immediately felt stupid standing around naked. Not so much like I hated my body; I just would much rather be wearing clothing. Especially leather clothing, or at least some sort of fetish costume sort of thing. It was baked into my brain by this point and all the DNA reconstructive de-aging sci-fi shit in the world couldn't undo it. Hell, that made it stronger.

And what did we have here, but some leather clothing that looked roughly sized to fit me? The harness was adjustable via buckles, and it was made to be easily put on by one person. The codpiece part of the jock was designed with a cockring plate so it could be worn without balls getting shoved back into the body, which also made it a bit easier to get hard. It didn't have nearly the squeeze as a real cockring; this was meant for wear, not just a scene's worth of play. The pouch snapped on and off and I put the harness part on first, then had a few sniffs at the pouch. It stank of cock. Not immediate filth, just weeks and months and maybe years of having an uncut cock ground against it.

The boots were a little bit too big, which was weird, since I had big feet and had trouble finding anything ready to wear. I could still put them on and walk around without kaiju-stomping. The gloves were a little too small, which was actually preferable to me. Tight leather gloves are better than floppy loose ones. Just ask that guy who played Robin in the old Batman TV series; he spent the whole series constantly fondling his gloves because they didn't fit right. Uh-huh. I constantly fondled myself watching him do it.

I took a look in the mirror, which was a big floor to ceiling extra wide one cobbled together from three narrower mirrors, probably from other rooms. A little bit fantasy-super-hero, a little bit fantasy-rogue, bottomish only because my ass was open. The outfit would have benefitted from a cape or cloak or mantle. My cock immediately filled up all available space in Somebody Else's codpiece.

"I figure you also oughta try out this Prak stuff for yourself," Cal said, still fussing about in the closet. "You ever remember somethin' called Eros? This nasal spray stuff you'd sniff up an' it'd make you horny? Prak's jus' like that. Maybe cleaner. Never had a great feelin' about that stuff, had that poppers vibe without the headache, smelled like chemical flower air freshener."

I thought about Eros. I did in fact remember it. I remembered buying it from a weird guy who was ostensibly a fox, and using it to screw around with some headcase skinbag before we both turned him into a deer. That was one of those things I probably shouldn't have done. Abusing my privilege, and all. "Yeah, I've heard of it."

Cal came back out. He had his cowboy boots on over his chaps again, complete with jingle-bobbed spurs. No codpiece or thong at all; uncut fat dick, brown leathery balls, and a metal ball-stretcher that pulled them down an extra inch or so. A leather vest, the tit-access kind that could close a bit over the abdomen but the lapels were wide and narrow to give as much pec and nipple access as possible. You could totally tell that the human brain was designed to find boobs attractive even if you're a gay man. He had leather roping bracers and short cowboy gloves on, along with a bandana point-down around his neck, and his leather cowboy hat. "Looks like you got the idea without me even sayin' to put that stuff on."

"This is that wolf guy's stuff, isn't it?"

"Sure is. Feels kinda naughty, huh? Figured you'd look good in it. He was a bit of a looker, jus' had a bad attitude."

"I don't have a good attitude."

"You ain't threatenin' to kill me or my workers, slave-pup. Now. You ever seen one of these?" He held up a contraption that was a pistol grip air vacuum pump, a hose that led into a T and then one of the sides into a T again, with one big clear cylinder and two much smaller ones. Each had a clear gasket of some plasticky and squishy material at the opening.

"That's a dick pump. And tit suckers." Cal handed it over to me as I answered. "Hey, I even recognize the fuckin' brand name."

"Brought that with me. Same as this cowboy stuff. You know how hard it is to find cowboy stuff out here? Ain't no one knows what a cowboy is. There ain't no cowboys on Selnar. They ain't got cows! Well, that ain't Selnari, at least. They got these pterodactyl bird things like less-smart Arostark, and these lizard kinda things. Now. I'm gonna sit back an' you're gonna pump my dick an' tits while I watch you fawnin' all over my leather stuff. Then, when I feel all ready, we'll have a lil' Prak an' I'll fuck you 'till you cough up my nut."

"Who says I get fucked?"

"Your ass hangin' out says you get fucked." Cal took his spot on a sitting chair, reached over to the table next to it, and gave me a squirt bottle. It looked like the kind that carried drinks, except the contents looked like semen. "You see that lil' gauge there? Jus' keep the needle 'round three o'clock. Those lil' T things have a lil' valve bit, you can control which end is gettin' what, I'm sure you'll figure it out."

I used to run a sex club. I know all about cock pumping. This bull guy was putting the safety of his dick and nips in the hands of someone who had to be put into a shock collar to keep them from running away. I knew this, and presumably he knew this, being the guy who had the zap button.

I grabbed the bottle, squirted some around the cock cylinder's big gasket, and then held it up to his cockhead. He was half hard and thick, thicker than me, probably thick because of this kind of play. I gave the pump handle a few squeezes and the suction pulled his cockhead into the gasket. He grabbed at his cock base and pulled back out. Then, he pushed his foreskin forward over his glans and beckoned again. Another few pumps and his shaft was back into the cylinder, this time hooded up. I kept pumping and for the next few squeezes, the gauge didn't move up much but his whole shaft down to the base slid into the cylinder.

As soon as he was wholly inside the pump tube, each squeeze made his cock swell harder, and sent the needle closer to where he said to stop it. A little more dark brown flesh pulled into the tube; a little fog appeared right next to his cockhead, and he looked a lot harder. Bigger? Maybe. Veined and about to cum? He sure looked it. His face looked manly-grimaced, and right when I got a final squeeze, he flared his nostrils for a bull snort and licked up to nudge the ever-present septum ring that bulls seemed required to wear for fashion purposes. I drew my own lines at earrings and nipple rings.

I finagled the first T valve like he suggested, then he took the nipple cups up to his own chest and held them in place after spitting crudely into each one. "It's gon' go fast on those, so don't jus' crank it." Each cup was shaped somewhat like the top of a drink shaker, quite a bit bigger than his actual nipples at the moment and just a little wider than his black areolas. I gave one squeeze and the needle swung right up halfway to its target. Cal moaned like a grazing cow who'd just farted. Another squeeze, and his nips were not just stiff and erect but bigger. The needle dropped a bit and even though it was more than he asked for, I gave it another and he moaned again.

"Alright, you don't gotta play with that constantly," he said, and tugged on the hoses, then took the pump back. "Go down there an' see what you think of my boots." He then pulled a knee up and to the side, and used one of his spurs to whack one of my ears flat against my head.

I did not go down there and just grabbed the offending leg. "They're alright," I said, staring at the one in my grasp.

"That's bull-shit an' I know bull-shit real well," Cal grunted, and continued making his hot-and-pissed-off face at me.

"Yeah, well, you're right, you have really awesome boots." That was not bullshit. His boots weren't just cowboy boots. They weren't just fashionable pointed toe ones, they weren't just square-toe walking-heel roper boots that dumb idiots wear around with no shirt on and a chew can in their back pocket. These were knee-high flat-top riding-heel gunslinger cowboy boots. The spur straps were heavy and fancy with brass conchos in the front, and the spurs themselves were equally heavy and brass. The leather was high quality and nowhere near new, well-cared for, more oiled than polished. "I'd wear these boots. If I had one outfit I had to pick out forever and ever, it'd be a fucking cowboy gunslinger."

"Uh-huh," was the biggest reaction I got aside from Cal clenching and flexing so the cylinder holding his cock bobbed up instead of standing out. He adjusted the T valves and added another pump and a half, then groaned and leaned back again. "Y'all wolves like smellin' an' lickin' stuff, don't you?"

I sniffed at his boot. It smelled like leather. He wrested it out of my grasp and propped it on my shoulder, then shoved the other one in my face. This one's foot and ankle and even the front of the shaft smelled like leather, along with long-ground-in male scents. "You're right-handed, huh? You make guys hump your leg."

"I don't _make_guys hump anythin'. I enjoy guys humpin' my boot. If they nut on it, they jus' gotta lick it up an' give it a nice lil' shine." He then leaned forward, pursed his frown up even more, then spat onto his boot. A nice, wet blob. I envied it. Wolves can't spit. We just drool.

I licked it up, of course. It didn't matter that he was my 'slave master' or whatever; I'd have licked it up no matter what. It was hot. It was disgusting. It was hot and disgusting at the same time, enough that I wanted to make a rotten face because he clearly hadn't brushed his teeth after eating breakfast, and that I wanted him to crank my mouth open and do it right inside because that's important to wolves.

I looked back up past his boot to his face, and saw that Cal was busy with something. He had a container somewhat like a cigar box, though smaller, and was rummaging through it. "That's a drug box if I've ever fuckin' seen one," I said, and took the vacuum pump from him again. I don't think he was really thinking about my side of the situation at that exact second, because handing me the thing intimately connected to his dick and nipples?

"Since we got easy access to it, I prefer fresh cured Prak, not the processed kinda stuff you usually find. It ain't such a sledgehammer, least for me, an' I had a chaw thing when I was younger." He took something out of the box and closed it up, then showed it to me. It looked like a shorter and much fatter cannabis joint, except entirely made out of a shockingly pretty jade-green leafy material. It looked nothing at all like anything I prodded around in that mud pit the previous day. It smelled just like it, though. Without the mud, there was just this deep, vegetal musk, maybe like fresh cumin without the sour sweaty tinge.

Cal took the little sachet and put it into his mouth. "You jus' chew once, tuck it back in your cheek pocket there," he pointed to where there was now a little bulge in his lower cheek. "Normally, after 'bout two or three minutes, it'll hit you. Then you can do one more chew an' let it sit again, but that'll be it for something like this. However, I'm gon' let you have some of this, so you jus' do the second one. After two, it's all... nothin' more comes out of it. Open wide, slave-pup. Gonna feed my lil' birdy."

"That is the most disgusting thing anyone's ever said to me!" I laughed so hard that my rib hurt. And got a bit of a thrill. "Yeah fine, you can snowball me with that stuff. I oughta get back to my old shit since I'm feeling all wound up since my recovery." I opened my mouth and leaned forward and up, while Cal leaned forward. He didn't open his mouth, so I pushed up further and licked him right across the lips. He grunted and spit the wet sachet into my mouth and I greedily scooped it up with my tongue and chewed it.

Oh god. There was no flavor at first, none at all, not even the slightest. Then, when I bit, it burst out and flooded my mouth. Imagine how it tastes to, I dunno, lick a battery or put a penny in your mouth with some lemon juice or something. Imagine that, except it's green. It tasted green. The flavor was ferociously gross, however it also dissipated alarmingly fast, as if dissolving into my tongue. The sachet did not, though; it stayed bunched in my little jowl pocket.

Cal unhooked his boots from me, carefully as the hoses still connected his nipple suckers and cock sucker to my sucker pumper. He then put a foot down and scooted the trash can under his desk towards me. I spat the again-flavorless herbal lump out. He opened his mouth to talk, and I interrupted him by twisting both T valves open and giving him two more pumps of suction. About five minutes more on the pressure gauge clock face.

The bull reared back in his seat, arms swinging wide in surprise, gloved hands splayed out, then curling into fists. He looked surprised and tense and possibly overstimulated. "Now, now, don't you get greedy. See that sling setup there? I got that ready jus' in case I really lured you back here for some fun. Go on an' get up in there. I wanna make sure you really get it good, first time on this stuff."

I stood up and stretched from hunkering down, then climbed up into the sling. Going in face first is tough because you clamber against the leather and it just swings around underneath you. The trick is to lurch in and roll onto your back, then grab up for the back chains that hang by your head. I heaved in and swung my boots up to start trying to work them into the stirrup loops that would keep me from staying so tense and fuck-wide. Just as the leather was touching the leather, it felt like something tapped the inside of my brain.

Imagine the horniest you've ever felt, or the horniest thing you can think of. Really dig up that feeling and just savor it right now. Lick it off your fingers. Pretend you're filming yourself for a cam show. Do whatever it is that makes you feel that electric giddy rush of sex. Now imagine that instead of just feeling it inside you, it's like someone's pouring it into you. Like you're being inflated with it.

"Lemme help you with that," Cal said, and took the stirrup, held my boot, and slowly slipped the two into position. Then, he leaned forward, stroked the instep up to the upside-down toe of my boot and then kissed the sole. He did the same with the other one. He looked deliriously aroused. And as he did it, I felt deliriously aroused. It was actually sickening for the first few seconds, like the absolute pinnacle of doing whip-its at a sex party when things get real dirty at three in the morning. I thought I was going to orgasm instantly, and desperately did not want to spoil things like that. "Yeah, right about now, huh?"

He had been lubricating two of his gloved fingers off in the periphery, which I had ignored until he started to rub my very bare and exposed asshole. "Nnn... no, don't do that, I don't wanna fucking blow my wad right now, that's way too fast," I huffed, chest quivering and making my voice shake.

The bull laughed and put his hand down on my codpiece. His glove leather squeaked against the pouch as he kneaded my trapped cock like something stuffing a sausage. "You ain't gonna cum now, when it's that first big rush you can't get off, it's just a thing that happens. An' it ain't like poppers so jus' have a few big, deep breaths an' I won't push too hard."

He started to push inside me and I pulled on the chains, then grunted and let go of the head chains and hunched forward to pull on the leg chains. That worked better, as I could scoot closer to him and got the whole first joint of his fingers right inside. Then I let go and slumped back, stunned by the rush of prostatic pleasure.

"Uh-huh. I knew it. You ain't a tight-ass," he said, withdrew his fingers until he could stroke the very outside of my pucker, then pushed in again. Out, and then in a third time, this time curved up and directly into my prostate.

It felt like someone pushed me right up to the edge of orgasm and just sat me down right there. If he moved or I moved in any way, even just to breathe, a wave hit me like one of those absolute gut punch euphoric blasts.

Cal had gotten out of the nipple suckers already, his black nubs swollen and glistening with his own lubricating spit; while he slowly screwed my hole with his slippery fingers, his other hand pulled the cylinder off his cock while it was still depressurized. It made a few squeaky squelches, then a loud huff as he yanked out. His cock was hard and glistening with precum, and a complete battering ram of flesh. He squirted the lube all over it, then pulled his fingers out and replaced their touch with his thick, ridged glans. Then, he stepped forward slowly, spurs jangling and boot soles scraping the floor, with a clop of one heel.

"When you're ready you jus' loosen up," he said, grasped a towel, and cleaned his fingers off. Then he reached up and petted my face. "You don't gotta play doggy or anythin', I just figure you'd like this leathery shit. Most of these guys here, they just don't roll that way at all. You'd think with that Hener fuck-straps stuff like what you got on, they'd be all over it. By the way, you like wearin' a dead wolf's gear? He was a bad wolf. A real bad wolf. An' I hope you ain't gonna repeat that."

A dead wolf's gear. Intellectually, that was probably factual; emotionally, it was really unsettling; and erotically it had me clenching my jaw with one of those waves. It was wrong and that was extremely hot. I wanted to reply something, but I also chose that moment to relax after clenching. His cockhead dented me in, then pushed through. I clawed and pulled at the chains, writhing as the sensation hurt just shy of 'actual hurt'. I felt like I could push him away but if I pressed in that anal direction, I loosened up and he went in more, and seconds later his cockhead was crushing my prostate.

I whined and pinned my ears back and looked aghast down at my leathery bulge, not seeing but knowing that seed was oozing out. "Jesus fucking christ, take my dick out, please," I gruffed through my teeth.

Cal grabbed the edge of the codpiece and yanked it off. My cock sprang out, and yes, a huge drool of seed ran down the shaft like a horny snot. He squeezed and milked, drawing out another one, then milking my foreskin up and down to make a glistening mess out of it. "See? You ain't gonna cum yet. That was jus' my big ol' bull-dick takin' up all the room inside. If I smack my nuts on you, I bet you'll be able to taste it."

Again, a very succinct mental image of what that might actually entail, and that also felt wrong, and by now I was in absolute awe. There was no way a normal society could exist with this kind of drug in circulation. Eros had been a problem back on Earth, mostly because about a half a percent of people who used it were allergic and there hadn't been a good way to find out ahead of time. This resulted in a huge wave of hospitalizations and immediate medical restrictions when it hit the streets hard.

"Pull out and go back in again. I mean do that over and over. Fuck me like that. Wreck my hole like that. That's one hundred percent my thing. I ruin people's asses like that, do it to me." I wasn't trying to sound dirty; I needed Cal to do that and I needed him to know for sure.

He nodded and obliged, drawing completely out, then stepping forward and letting gravity help do the work of stuffing me back over his cock. It went in a little further each time he repeated, and meanwhile the sensation of his glans popping in and out and driving in along the walls made my leg twitch.

I came twice in a row. The first time was just a reflex, my muscles and his cock and just the right angle. A big splurt of seed shot out onto my stomach, and another, and then it stopped as he jabbed the same spot again, not exactly my prostate. "I'm not done, I'm not done!"

"Aww, shut th'hell up," he grunted, while screwing into me harder and harder. Eventually the long-dicking turned shallow and his balls slapped against me over and over, leather smacking leather, sweat dripping from his macho-frown bull muzzle. I let it drop on my lips and licked it up. I'm a dirty wolf; that's just what we do. I expected some kind of dramatic orgasm from him but his thrusting turned into a hard grind while he snorted and flared his nostrils, and I could feel his cock jerking upwards inside me. "C'mon, wolf, nut." He grabbed my cock in one hand and smacked it with the other.

That did me in for real, and the full rest of my load hit me in the face, and the orgasm was nearly blinding. It was the best stoned-out-of-my-mind orgasm ever. It was just about what Eros did back home. And after it hit and faded back, instead of that disgusting nasty black-hole pit of post-nut despair and clarity... I just felt tired.

"You see what we're doin' out here now? You'd pay good money for that, and I don't mean my dick." Cal pulled out and I wasn't expecting it. His big cockhead yanked about half of his load out and I heard it splat onto his thigh. He just grabbed a corner of the blanket that was on the bed under the sling, and wiped it off. "We gotta grow prak, coddle it up, cure it, pack it up, and ship it out. An' keep this place runnin'. You got right to workin' and that's good. You got fuckin' Varius, an' that aint' bad but don't you do that shit on shift again. I don't wanna be slippin' that Hener sex harness shit onto a third wolf."

"Yeah, yeah, I got it," I groaned, and shakily climbed out of the sling. I was on shift right now, I realized, and at the same time Cal was telling me to get fucked, so that was work. Right. Right?

"One more thing. That stuff you're wearin'? You wear that outside your coveralls. Go 'round here like that. Don't mind if those Selnari weirdos give you shit, this is my operation an' their little rules don't mean anything. Every single one of 'em's in exile anyway."

--

After that impromptu disciplinary fuck session, it was back to work, this time wearing a Hener harness outside my uniform just like Cal asked. The first half of my day was more shuttling material around; the second half of the day was a bit more interesting as I was tasked with doing maintenance on some of the waste stations. In other words, I had to clean toilets. That's not even the right word; more like replace some parts with freshly remanufactured parts from the foundry, which was more like an insane 3D printing device the size of a school bus. Filters, sanitary pieces, et cetera.

I was alone while doing it, because the station maintenance programming had me going around the entire sector we were occupying even though we only used about a quarter of the facilities. Apparently, keeping everything in working order was important, and the wristcomp systems would instruct you in absolute detail with what to do as soon as you put the thing on.

"I'm surprised you're not licking the urinal," someone said, while I was changing out a urinary deposit funnel at one of the hallway relief stations. It was Kale.

"I already had a problem this morning when that horsey guy showed up while I was hauling that stuff around, and we ended up making a big old mess. Then Cal got mad at me and fucked some sense into me. And he told me not to fuck anyone else. So don't get any ideas."

"You're not my type," Kale said. "I was just... out for a walk." He looked somewhat downcast, then kept on going.

A few minutes later, my little earpiece rang. "Howdy, Mister Wolf. You enjoyin' your duties?"

"Did I tell you I was a janitor for my school when I was in high school? I used to sneak into the maintenance area behind the pool locker room and spy on guys through a hole in the wall while I jerked off. This reminds me of that, except there's no one to spy on." I thought about mentioning Kale, and then wondered if the coyote would get the same treatment I did if he misbehaved. I decided to just keep my mouth shut about it. "Guess I'm starting over again."

I could hear Cal laughing. "Well that's jus-" then I could hear someone talking loudly near him. "Aww shit," he said, and ended the call. Not three seconds later, a horrendous alarm sounded, and red warning lights flashed on up and down the hall. The alarm alternated with [SECTOR LOCKDOWN. EMERGENCY EVACUATION PROTOCOL ACTIVE. PLEASE FOLLOW THE MARKED EVACUATION ROUTE]

I didn't have a very good idea what the station looked like from the outside, as I could only see other parts of it through windows from the inside. I'd come into the station through some big docking and cargo bay, which seemed reasonable enough. Right now, there was a small ship attached to part of the station, backed up against it, visible through the viewing window nearest me. I was pretty sure it hadn't been there when I started doing my shitter maintenance.

I could hear a lot of yelling, and then something like gunfire, but not actually any gunfire I'd ever heard. We're just legally farming a sex drug on a derelict space station, that's totally above board, nothing will happen. Sure. I decided to stay mostly hidden by the guts of the 'relief station', which swung out from the wall. I want to take a moment to express amazement that someone would combine a fresh water dispenser, snack dispenser, urinal, toilet, hand-sanitizing station, and emergency chemical wash into one unit. The best part at the moment was that I could hide behind it.

The sounds of ruckus increased with a loud bang and a crash, then the people sounds dropped down, though I could hear running. Boots, probably three people's worth. Strake burst around the corner of the corridor where I was hidden; I could see him through a gap between the machinery and the wall. He jolted and Cal appeared next to him, and so did Varius. All three of them had weapons which looked like short battle rifles. Don't be a dumbass, Hawk.

"I'm behind the fucking thing!" I called out, causing all but Strake to flinch. Then I stuck a hand up, waved it, and then ducked out into view.

They rushed over. "We gotta get th'hell outta here. You see anyone who looked para-military-like come through? Don't think too hard, trust me, you'd have known," Cal said, breathless and sweaty in his cowboy-slavemaster finest. Strake looked like a tactical biker thug. Varius just looked like a bondage man-whore holding a rifle.

"No, the only person I've seen for hours is Kale, he came by a few minutes ago looking like someone shit in his breakfast cereal. What the fuck's going on?"

"Shit, where'd he go?" Strake grunted. I pointed further down the corridor. "If we see him on our way out, we'll grab him. You know how to shoot a gun?"

"I've done it a few times," I told the truth, although I think he meant 'have you ever shot at a person', and the answer was, 'I only point guns at people to make them so scared they cum'. I didn't bother saying any of that stuff. The huge tiger drew a pistol from his side holster, walked up to me, bumped it against my wristcomp and did something I couldn't see fast enough on the screen. Both items chimed. [EMERGENCY WEAPON ENTRAINMENT ACTIVE.] Then he shoved the gun at my hand and I took it.

I looked it over. It was a handgun for sure, although the grip had a bottom piece somewhat like the power pack for a cordless hand tool. Strake grabbed my shoulder, then my face, hard enough to tear out a whisker. "Look at me. There's no safety. There's a holosight if you want to look down it. It's gonna feel weird in your hand when you go to shoot someone. Just deal with it. And if you see anyone who isn't us, I mean anyone, I mean including that babyfucker coyote piece of shit, shoot 'em in the heart or the face."

"C'mon Strake, if we see Kale, we haul his ass with us. Let's go!" Cal then turned and ran down the corridor. I ended up last in the group, because I was still grappling with being handed a weapon of unknown provenance, minutes after I'd been trying to figure out how to connect a piss pipe to a 3D printed funnel.

I'd gone about twenty feet when I heard a noise behind me and turned to look. Someone had just rounded the corner. They definitely were not one of the other workers; they wore intensive tactical body armor head to toe and carried a rifle that made the ones my little party had look like toys.

If I'd been told to shoot a random person off the street, I don't think I'd have been able to. Someone who looked like their job was to shoot people in any possible circumstance? That seemed easier to swallow. I two-handed the gun and swung it up to try and sight down the top of the barrel. A targeting hologram appeared over the gun, flickering but physically steady. I distinctly remember how time did that fuck-up when things get intense, and more than just that, my arm felt like I was moving it through mud. Fuck I'm not gonna be able to aim this thing what the fucking shit god damn I just didn't wanna get burnt to a crisp on Earth I don't wanna shoot people on a fucking space station! Despite the funny feeling, as soon as the gun was roughly pointed at the attacker's heart side of his chest, I pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled slightly and emitted a loud bang and a flash, though neither sounded or looked like a regular bullet. Especially because the flash continued through the air and hit the attacker in the chest. He was moving forward and stopped with a jerk, then tilted forward and fell flat on his face, unmoving.

A second attacker came around the corner, and this one tripped over the first guy's boot. As he staggered, he paused and looked at me. He was definitely either Selnari or a hybrid like me, not like I could visually tell the difference, and surprisingly not something militaristic like a dog. He had a half mask instead of a full helmet, with the slightly cat-like muzzle of a brown river otter. Despite our moment of eye contact, he started lifting his rifle towards me. So I aimed again, and this time had to swing the barrel across his face. Bang number two, which hit him in the eye, and I swear that for a split second I saw straight through him to the back of the corridor T-wall behind him. He crumpled down.

"Son of a bitch stop standing there and git!" Cal hollered at me. So I got. We ran down corridor after corridor. After a few, and a lot of checks behind me to see if anyone was bursting out behind obstructions, I decided to open my mouth.

"What the fuck is going on?"

"Ain't got time for that, Mister Wolf," Cal said, in between heavy panting breaths. He sounded like he'd been running for a mile.

"This station has two utility docking ports. While you were fixing the plumbing back there, did you see a ship sticking out of the station? That wasn't supposed to be there," Strake said. "Contract Security, probably from Syneth Mining, considering they're the ones that own this station. Docked up there and a bunch of those guys came out and started shooting. Probably on a reclamation mission."

"And where are we going? Escape pods?" The evacuation instructions on the station walls seemed to indicate we were just about to enter the area for those. They rotated through English and several other languages and I didn't exactly want to stop and read.

"My ship, on the other utility dock. If we go out in pods, their other ship'll just come shoot us to bits."

"And they won't do that if we leave on your ship?" Strake had a ship?

"Nah, they only care about station property, and the pods are station property. Those guys are as good as brainwashed until they contract out-"

"Quit usin' your shit to explain shit, we gotta get our shit outta this shit we're fuckin' in!" Cal hollered.

We were in fact going past the escape pod corridor, because the electronic messaging grew extremely intense and easy to read. Climb into pod, shut door, stand back. Four per pod. I paused to read the message because all of the pod doors were open, except for one of them. "Hey," I said, and stopped.

"I said," Call started, then stopped as well.

Someone was in the pod. No, that wasn't right. The pod had been ejected, as the control panel flashed, along with all sorts of error messages. Someone was in the pod bay, whose exterior emergency airlock had closed again. I rushed up to the window, and saw Kale. He looked as dour as I'd seen him minutes earlier.

"Hey! What the hell are you doing!" I tried to tell the control panel to open the door, which it denied. I tried to manually open the door, though it felt like I was just pulling on a solid piece of metal when I tugged on the handle. "Kale! What're you doing in there? There's no pod in there! It says-"

"I know what it says, I launched the pod."

"It says emergency airlock operation!" I looked back at the other three; Varius looked visibly shaken, Cal looked pissed and concerned, and Strake lifted his rifle and aimed it at the door. The other two belatedly did that. "Whoa guys! Kale, what're you doing in there?"

"I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be anywhere. I really fucked my life up. I don't know why I agreed to sign on a contract. I thought I could do something useful." He reached for something I couldn't see.

You have to be fucking kidding me! "Kale don't do whatever you're gonna do which is I know what you're gonna do because-" I pounded on the window, which had no effect on the coyote beyond it. He pulled something, and the control panel facing me read: [EMERGENCY AIRLOCK ACTIVATION - STAND BACK AND BRACE]

The back hatch of the empty pod bay snapped open with a bang that came through the station wall. The hatch window immediately fogged and frosted over, though I could clearly see Kale knocked backwards, half-stumbling as the rush of escaping air hurled him out the hatch. I lost sight of him within seconds.

I feel like I stood there for an hour, but it was probably just seconds. I heard sounds behind me, voices, distant running. Someone grabbed my arm, pushed me, pulled me, and then everything rushed back. I was with the other three again, and we ran down another few corridors. Without them, I would have gotten instantly lost on the station. Wherever we were was different from the residence area or the farming area and was labyrinthine and so full of cryptic maintenance signage that it all looked the same.

We entered a dead-end hallway and Strake sprinted up to the door at the end. He coded into the panel next to it and the door slid open to the side. On the other side was not a hallway, but a jumble of crates and equipment.

"Get in now!" Strake yelled, then ducked in. Cal, Varius, and I rushed inside. I was last again, and as soon as I turned to shut the door, I could see someone entering the corridor. Another security officer. At the same time, the corridor lights flicked off. [POWER SYSTEMS FAILURE - EMERGENCY SYSTEMS OFFLINE - GENERAL SYSTEMS FAILURE] screamed out of the PA speakers. "Alright you shitheads, when that door closes, get your asses on my side of whatever crates and stuff! Gonna blow our ass off this station, they killed the power so I gotta hit the detonating bolts!" Strake bellowed.

"They're fucking coming!" I yelled. Two, no three of the 'contract security' guys were running towards the ship. They seemed more interested in getting to the door than trying to shoot at me.

"So shoot 'em!"

I lifted my gun again, and this time felt my arm shaking. The gun tried to stop it just like before, and I didn't get a chance to see if it would connect a shot anyway. Just at the moment the lead attacker had rifle-locked-and-trigger-pulled, a siren inside the ship hold sounded and the door in front of me slammed closed. A split second later there was a splatter of bangs and my view through the door window clouded with smoke and debris. I thought I saw the hole for the empty corridor with the attackers crumpled on the floor, though I'm not really sure because the ship lurched away hard enough that I bashed against the door wall. I spared my head by accident with my gun forearm; I swear I pulled the trigger inside the ship, but nothing happened with the gun, nor when I dropped it.

[EMERGENCY ACCELERATION - HOLD AND BRACE] yelled over the PA system, and the lurch that had knocked me to the side now felt like I was lying on the floor. Everything that wasn't held down in the hold slammed up against the wall. Varius was holding onto some emergency restraints, while Cal had been following instructions and was now curled and leaning against the side of a crate a few feet away. I could see out the door window that the ship's engines were at full blast, which made for a colorful blast that infringed on either side of the window. Meanwhile, more and more of the station's 'giant ripped-out-wart' appearance slowly came into view.

After a few more minutes, the PA yelled again. [ACCLERATION CUT - HOLD AND BRACE]. I didn't really pay it attention, and fell a couple feet to the floor.

"You all good back there?" Strake hollered, from the other end of the ship.

Cal got up and dusted himself off, then looked between myself and Varius. The horse seemed fine in his wall-mounted acceleration restraint, while I stood up and felt shaky as hell, but uninjured. "Yeah, looks it," the bull grunted, then picked up his knocked-off cowboy hat and fixed it back on his head.

"Good. I've got my comm shit looking out for stuff, and there's no interdiction warnings or nothin'. That ship for those guys's still on the station, too. Doubt they're coming after us. I know that line of work and they don't want us, they just wanna secure the station for their payout. Looks like we probably offed about six of 'em, I got one, Hawk got two, doubt those guys in the hallway made it after we blew ourselves off. That probably wrecked the pressure door. I bet there were about fifteen guys, based on that ship and how fast they took care of everyone else." Strake walked back into the hold area. "Looks like all this Prak shit survived. That's worth something. You guys look okay, too, I guess."

"Well thank you very much, you're so kind," Cal snorted.

The tiger shrugged his epaulets up towards his jaw. "You're the guy who owns all this Prak shit, and that's what's in here. Every time we go to set up for a ship out, I run some overage into my ship, and then swap it out the next time. I'm not letting money fly out the window if something happens."

"Technically that's breakin' all kinds of contract rules but I'll allow it," Cal grunted. "Alright. Since we got us four an' some of what Mister Wolf here likes to call 'Sex Weed', let's see, what's best..."

"Daleon," Strake shrugged again. "Kind of a crap-hole station, but it's Network and I contracted out through there a few times so they'll probably let me dock. Hopefully Syneth doesn't have some bounty out for us but I doubt they do. I've run into those fuckers before. They don't care one shit about guys like us. They can vacuum trillions of credits out of a single asteroid. They'll see our Prak shit and laugh and give their executives a sex orgy. It's about... four-T and maybe a day of travel total. There's a utility bunk room there," He waved his huge, half-gloved hand towards one part of the ship, "Lounge and food bar there," he waved to the other side of the hall, "shitter's up behind the cockpit." He waved towards the 'front' of the ship, then just lumbered off in that direction without saying anything else.

--

I managed to sleep through several 'translations', though after waking up from a fitful dream that I couldn't remember, I decided to wander around the small ship. I went to the bathroom, had a snack - something that resembled a protein bar and tasted indistinctly savory - and then went into the cockpit since there was nothing stopping me.

Strake was awake as well, though while sitting at the controls, he was watching something on a computer tablet. "Don't try anything," he said, without so much as turning an ear towards me.

"I'm just bored," I said.

"Go be bored somewhere else."

I tried to see what he was watching. I expected porn and was disappointed; it seemed to be a movie. "Kinda funny how I get punted..." my brain started to panic, "five hundred years into the future, and people still sit around watching videos on their phones."

"I don't like those eye things everyone has," he growled. "I guess you can watch the weird shit happen if you want. We're about to do the final translation before we hit the braking corridor for Daleon. Might as well sit down and strap in." Strake picked up a surprisingly anachronistic headset. "Alright, fuckers, wake up," he said, and his voice blared throughout the rest of the ship a split second after he spoke. "Get into an acceleration couch because we're gonna be braking into Daleon after we translate."

I sat down in the seat next to him, and moments later, both of our restraints activated. "When I was being shipped to whatever the name was of the place we were just at," as I spoke of it, I remembered what I'd dreamed, and that made me stop running my mouth mid-sentence. My dream had been seeing Kale through the window of the airlock pod, and he'd said something about how I'd destroyed his family like that coyote on the station where I'd been defrosted, and then he was all bloated and frozen and continuing to talk, telling me I was a mistake. "Uhh, anyway, when I was being transferred there, I was in this little cell kind of thing and when we translated or whatever, it felt fucking weird."

"It's even more fucking weird with your eyes open. Here we go." Strake keyed in something to the ship computer, and instead of blaring out over the ship PA, a small voice spoke only in the cockpit. [TRANSLATION IN THREE... TWO...ONE].

I turned my head and I got the same feeling I had before, like everything stopped and continued at the same time. Instead of one Strake, one other chair, one set of windows to the outside of the ship, one random starfield, I saw an infinite number of them in every direction. Remember when computers would crash and you'd move the error window around and there'd be a hundred copies of it making a trail around the screen? This was that, except instead of a little window on a computer screen, it was everything I could see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. The ambient hum of the ship was multiplied into a sound that took over the entirety of space and time. Every thought I had was similarly repeated and stretched, and it wasn't until the sensation stopped that I realized what had happened and started to panic.

"Shit shit shit shit," I wheezed, and tried to grab for the control console. It was simultaneously like and nothing like any airplane cockpit I'd seen, lots of stuff everywhere but nothing really meant to be pulled or twisted or grabbed except for a single control yoke in front of Strake.

"Hah! It's like drinking that worm shit from that spice sand movie, huh?"

"The fucking hell are you talking about," I continued to gasp. Having something to look at aside from blank walls had made my brain feel absolutely scrambled. Then I realized what I could see out of the window, which was another space station. This one was much more of a large cylinder, though it was a cylindrical shape that wasn't a single volume, with various smaller cylinders as pods throughout its length. It was steadily increasing in size; we were moving very fast towards it. I started to be able to pick out a few other objects around it, and I presumed they were ships because they were about the size of gnats. A few larger ones, say as big as a large dragonfly versus a gnat, had to be large transport ships or cargo freighters or something equally as big. "Ohhhh my fucking god."

"Ehh, Daleon's kind of a dump," Strake shrugged. "Working-class station, does a lot of cargo transfer for mining operations and general shipping, light industry, general space residence."

"That? That is a dump?" I pointed at the object. Strake prodded at the console and the PA yelled, this time to us and everyone. [DECELERATION IMMINENT. PLEASE ENGAGE RESTRAINT SYSTEMS]. Then, without a countdown for whatever reason, both of our seats rotated around and we were crushed back into into them with at least twice our weight's worth of acceleration.

"Yeah," Strake continued, with much more of a croak in his voice.

"We're really going fast, we're gonna hit that thing. Like space is big and if it was getting bigger, we're really going fast." I don't know what it was that made me absolutely paranoid about crashing into a space station.

"You wanted to fucking sit up here and watch daddy fly the ship," Strake growled, sounding meaner.

"Yeah well you know, how do I know you know how to fly this thing real well? You could be a bad fuckin' driver. All I know about you is you're a tiger, you're from where I'm from, and you might as well be the Hell's Angels version of one of those fuckers we... we shot at back there."

"You killed two guys, bam, just like that. Don't play stupid like you're a pussy faggot. I know what I'm doing. Plus, I don't even do much shit unless it's an emergency. It's all computer tracking." At that moment, something went 'ping'. "See that? That's the docking acceptance. I didn't even have to explain what we're fucking doing. That's a lie, I typed it." Now he sounded so irritable that I could feel a whack against my seat from his lashing tail, which he was energized enough to swing around even though it probably weighed three times the sand-filled firehose that it was thanks to the deceleration.

That deceleration was a pain in the ass, especially since we hadn't done nearly as much accelerating anywhere. Maybe this translation thing did weird shit. After a worrying ten minutes, the sensation cut off and my stomach lurched. The restraints let go as the seats rotated back around. We were Extremely Close to the station, and also obviously in line behind another small ship to enter into a docking slot. I got up and wobbled around back into the rest of the ship, where I found Cal and Varius milling about in the cargo area.

"So uh, what're we doing once we park, or dock, or whatever?" I asked, and grabbed onto a crate to disguise that my hand was shaking. Every time I blinked, I saw that death mask face of Kale's, even though I hadn't seen it in real life.

"Haulin' some of this stuff in there, an' sellin' it off. I dunno what to do 'bout your contracts, suppose I oughta term them with your balloon payout, hence all this Prak stuff. Don't have to worry 'bout settling accounts, in case some shit went wrong with that." The bull busied himself moving several crates onto a dolly device that didn't seem to have wheels. Once he adjusted the hold-down straps and punched a few things on a display on the handle, some soft cooling fans started up and it levitated up off the floor of the ship.

I was just letting go of a crate when the ship moved abruptly and I grabbed on again, stomach flopping about inside. There were several thumps throughout the ship, like when they start unloading or loading the luggage on a normal airplane. Strake walked back into the hold, then opened the back hatch door and we were staring out into a large docking bay. "C'mon, let's move," the tiger chuffed, and took control of another dolly. "Don't worry about the other ones, gotta appraise this shit anyway. We can come back."

Once we left the ship, I got to see what the docking bay for a "dump" of a space station looked like. There were ten platforms I could see, and half of them were occupied with small ships. There were two much larger ships at the other side of the bay, attached to an entirely different kind of mechanism more like a terrestrial jetway.

The docking section led to an enormous warehouse type of area which was full of people doing all manner of things. It looked like there was open repair work going on, both on smaller ships and some other hauling devices. There were rows of racks full of all kinds of storage crates and shrink-wrapped shipments, both out on the floor and stacked around the edges. The far end of the area, where we were going, looked like an airport terminal crossed with a sea pier. The space was enormous, and smelled indescribable, like every kind of metallic and plastic substance known to man all at once.

"And you're sure nothing bad is gonna happen 'cuz of what we've been doing?" I asked.

"Quit bein' so paranoid," Cal said. "You'd be surprised the kinda shit that goes on outside of regular Network space. I wouldn't say it's like th' wild wild west, but well, you ever do any real blue collar stuff back on Earth?"

"I worked for a powersports company fixing bike engines, and I'd go around junkyards and shit." I thought way back. "I'm pretty sure about a third of those places were chop shops."

"Well, choppin' shit is illegal, an' Prak aint. I'm tellin' you, the only thing we were doin' shady was squatting on that station. Even then, as long as Syleth doesn't press charges, we're golden. Their own fault for jus' abandonin' it there."

"Bull's got it right," Strake said plainly. Varius didn't seem interested in talking at all, though he also didn't seem to like speaking English much. While we headed towards the business frontage, we had to take a detour through an impromptu warehouse section to avoid some heavy maintenance equipment. Up close, the place was amazingly shabby. I ended up wandering around ahead, as I felt restless.

"You guys were right, this place is kind of a dump," I said, eyeballing some of the racks, which didn't look like they were built to be used for holding what they were holding. One of them in particular had damaged footings and seemed to have some heavier objects loaded up higher.

"Fuckin' told you," Strake said.

"Now when we get up to the place, y'all are gonna have to let 'em scan in your wristcomps. That's probably gonna be a pain," Cal said. "Those station ones are old-ass. Aww shit," he said, coinciding with a bang as he was too busy talking and had let his hovering dolly bang against something.

Strake, Varius and I kept walking ahead, then I absently looked back. To my horror, Cal had started following us and had no idea that the rack footing he'd bumped had buckled and the entire storage rack was tilting. It was halfway down when I saw it, and one of the large crates - the size of a small dumpster - slid right off and crashed down on him. One minute, Cal was standing there. The next, he wasn't. There wasn't even time for him or any of us or any other bystanders to yelp. The crash sound reverberated throughout the area, and within seconds, people had rushed up.

"Holy fuck," Strake coughed, and stared, eyes wide. Varius backed up against him, more visibly terrified. While we stared, disbelieving, blood oozed out from under one edge of the crate.

A siren sounded, and a PA announced, [EMERGENCY RESPONSE - PLEASE CLEAR A PATH] and then blared again in the oddball half-birdsong language that Varius sometimes spoke. Within less than a minute, despite how industrial-core the place seemed, medics and security staff had swarmed the area, and escorted our now-three party away.