FSE

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Okay everybody, here's a new story series I'm going to start working on (slowly).

Please feel free to contribute ideas for the setting, characters, etc. Also, know that I am not and never have been part of the Marine Corps, so if I mess up the procedures or information, don't be mad - I'm doing my best to honor the Corps' traditions, but a) this story is set a few hundred years in the future, in space, and b) I'm a civilian :/ Please tell me if I screw something up, I'll be happy to change it.

Also, critique is very much encouraged, and all comments are welcome whether positive or not.

Enjoy! Sadly, there's no smut in this chapter, I put those tags there because other chapters in the story will most certainly contain them.

"2077 - The government-sponsored Genome Restructuring Project (GRP) succeeds in creating the first viable sentient hybrid life form, a female lapine-human hybrid named Eva. The project was intended to help in the creation of custom-engineered human sub-species to spearhead planetary colonization outside of the Sol System. In the same year, a wide-spread fissure occurs within human society between a growing population of religious extremists, radical atheists, and the United Earth Federation."

"Yo, Robo-Tail, whatcha listenin' to?"

Daryl 'Derry' Blake sighed as the fingernails-on-chalkboard chitter of a voice cut through his aural implant's soothing educational drone, shattering the reverie that had been distracting him from how terrified he was of space flight. Derry tapped a claw-tipped finger against the tiny computer clipped to his collar, pausing it to fix a withering blank-eyed stare on the speaker.

She just grinned back at him, in the unnerving way Ix'kat did, insectoid mandibles twitching out and upward as her antennae fixated on him. The facet-eyed grasshopper-like thing was strapped in, just like he and the twelve other brand-spanking-new Marines in their sardine-can transport, front to front with one another so close that the taller furs' knees were touching. She was flat-chested, body covered in ridged chitinous plates left uncovered by the special uniform her species was afforded that essentially covered just their shoulders and abdomen plate. The only reason he knew this one was female was that she could talk; the males were basically mindless killing machines.

"I'm educating myself. So shut up and let me listen. And stop fucking calling me that."

"Sure thing, Robo-Tail!"

Derry grunted in annoyance and closed his eyes again, hoping he'd get used to the weird tickling prickle sensation that ran up his spine as the servo-activated nerve-connected artificial tail, painted in woodland camo colors, attached to the base of his spine twitched in response to his jangled nerves.

Goddamnit. It's like they WANT me to remember I'm a cripple.

He winced, and tried to hide it from his squad-mates, as his tail flicked again. They hadn't even had the decency to give him the right species of tail, which annoyed the hell out of him when he thought about it. He was a wolf, for fuck's sake, and they'd given him a tiger's long thick whip of a butt-flag.

At least, he thought, his nightmares about the training accident had finally stopped. He'd nearly been given a Section 8 discharge for waking up screaming in the on-base hospital, trying to yell into a comm system that wasn't there that their training pilot had passed out and the orbital flyer was crashing. He found out later that the pilot had some kind of aneurism. What was supposed to be a five hour introduction to aerospace navigation turned into a six week recovery after the ensuing crash ripped his tail clean off with flying debris and killed six of the eight furs on board.

Derry knew he was lucky to have been given a new tail. He hadn't even finished Marine Boot Camp at the time. For the government to invest the twenty thousand or so creds on giving a proper cybernetic to a piece of trash inner-city high school dropout like him, even when they were sending him off to fight protecting their precious Navy, was a minor miracle.

As the tape kicked back in with a touch of his finger to the computer, the light transport bounced once, hard, and someone let loose the acrid stink of fear piss. Derry barely managed not to follow suit, clutching the five-point harness that was squishing his balls as his stomach did a few somersaults before the dinky little space-plane leveled out.

The intercom crackled, and he shut the education audio file off again with an annoyed and nervous scowl. That was when he noticed that his arm kept moving when he stopped exerting effort, and he struggled to perform the awkward motion he'd read about to prevent it banging into the bug girl next to him.

"Okay Marines, this is your transport captain speaking. We've just exited the orbital shields and upper atmosphere. That means zero gee, so if you don't know how to move around weightless, keep your asses in your seats and your harnesses fastened unless you want to break bones and bruise yourselves to hell before we even get to your first deployment. Small movements, people, even when moving your arms and legs. We'll be reaching the fleet in approximately four hours."

Most of the Marines refused to acknowledge fear. If anyone but an officer had said such a thing, it would have been taken as a dare and they'd be un-dogging their harnesses right then and there, bouncing around the cabin like a bunch of mostly-furry ping pong balls with a bruise fetish. As it was, those near port holes twisted and struggled to get a view of the receding planet without unclipping their harnesses.

Derry looked up finally, and forced himself to unclench his paws from the 'oh-shit' handles he'd unconsciously clung to. Across the paper-thin aisle between him and the fellow wolf across from him, he could see through a port-hole and into the vast blackness of his new least favorite place: the void of space. It made his mouth go dry, thinking of just how many ways there were to die in their crappy little tin-can of a spacecraft. Then he clamped down on his internal monologue, reminding himself just how many ways to die there had been in the gang filled hab dome hive he'd joined the Marines to escape.

The wolf he'd been staring past coughed once, and poked him in the shin with her standard-issue Mark 3 mag boot.

"Hey Tail, you okay? Lookin' a little green, buddy."

The urge to growl at her was strong, but he fought it down, meeting her smiling crystal-blue eyes with an anemic grin of his own.

"N-nah, Niece, just my tail's bothering me."

She laughed, in that musical way she had, and poked him with her Mk. 3 again. The wolfess was positively bouncing in her seat, excited to be in space again. They called her Niece because her uncle was head foreman of the Astral Endeavor, the oldest largest and most wealthy space station in their solar system. At first, it had been an insult - Trying to say she only got into the Marines because of family connections rather than dedication and skill - but later it had become an endearment as they all struggled through months of Boot together.

'They all' was now him and her alone. She was the other survivor from the little incident with his tail, and had walked away from it with some broken bones, carrying his unconscious ass out of the forest their crash had set fire to for pickup. Both of them had taken about double the time normally used to get through Boot, and consequently they barely knew the class they graduated with.

"Bullshit, you're scared of space-flight."

He glared at her, which couldn't possibly hold. When she laughed at him and stuck out her tongue, Derry couldn't keep a straight muzzle, and snorted at her with a grudging grin.

"Marines aren't afraid of anything!"

Down the aisle, "huah" echoed out, and seemed to cut the tension like a knife. The ancient Marine noise, from way back in the days of Old Earth, still had the cache necessary to get Marines focused As the echoed ancestral call faded, the Marines were talking again, their terrified silence of what was the first time in space for most of them gone like a bad memory.

At the front of their sardine-tin transport bay, Corporal Martin Kerr looked up from his copy of Moby Dick as Marines went straight from being terrified and silently waiting for death by decompression to boisterous joking and jostling about in their harnesses. Though he was only in his late 20's, the veteran Marine commanded respect, and when he cleared his throat and spoke, nobody remembered that he was shorter than most of them by a head and human besides.

"Okay Marines, have your fun but stay in your seats unless you've got to use the head. We'll be meeting our Sar'nt aboard ship for zero-gee training. Any questions, you pass them by me, huah?"

"Huah Corporal!" came the return call. After that, things quickly quieted, and Kerr was back to reading his ancient, dog-eared paperback, a precious artifact, just like his rare genome.

"Shit," whispered Niece in her musical alto, "I'm surprised they let guys like him out of the labs."

Derry shrugged and pulled the computer off his collar, flipping the thing over to check its battery. They'd been in the shuttle four hours already, but it was only down 10% of its life. He brought it to his lips and kissed the little thing, his lifeline in a world filled with stupidity, and re-clipped it to the spot on his collar designated for the thing, linking it back into the network of nano-transmission wires running through his uniform.

"They have to, if he asks. It's part of the Accord. Critical to preventing genetic decay or not, humans are free to come and go as they like. Most of them stay there, though. Pays better and they get whatever they want."

The wolf girl knitted her brows together and crossed her arms under her breasts.

"Lucky bastards."

"Look who's talking, rich chick."

"Look who's not getting laid by being an asshole."

"Oh pff, right, because you love the dick, rug-munch."

That got her bright pink tongue stuck out for him again, and a sharper, calculated kick of her Mk. 3 against his shin.

"Ow shit, cut that out, you keep hitting the same fucking spot over and over it's gonna bruise!"

"Wah wah, poor baby wuffy gonna cry about it?"

He drove the toe of his boot into her leg in response, and she yelped, kicking him back hard enough that the corporal looked up from his book. He watched the two green Marines flailing kicks at each other's legs, hardly able to miss at their range, and counted out ten seconds before intervening with a bored, authoritative grumble.

"Can it, you two. Blake, get your implants back in that book. Gordon, find something to do that doesn't involve crippling our fastest runner."

"Yes corporal," both responded, ears pinned back and shoulders hunched at the reprimand.

"2079 - Dr. Balthazar Roth and Dr. L'shea Tika create the first faster-than-light drive, successfully using an induced singularity to bend space in a controlled fashion, effectively causing ships to 'fall' through an area of space in which the speed of light is artificially increased exponentially. This would quickly lead to an explosion of in-system colonization, as the Roth-Tika-Drive (commonly known as "RTD") made quick and thus economically feasible movement across the system possible."

Derry winced and looked out the porthole again. So far, their new duty assignment was only a vague shiny dot in the distance, virtually indistinguishable from the starlit background, except that his new ocular implant surrounded it with a slender circle of green designating it friendly. He was still getting used to the implant, and reached up to rub at his eye when he remembered it was there and thus caused it to start itching.

He wasn't looking forward to his first event horizon. His old mentor, Mr. Tenh, the very fur who had convinced him to join up, had told him that everyone's first experience with inter-system FTL travel was different. Something to do with passing outside of a star's outermost gravitational reach caused a sort of system shock that could create microscopic central nervous system damage. According to the old veteran, even with nanotech built to repair the micro-fissures the first few jumps crossing out of a system would cause, he'd still likely suffer some interesting neurological effects. They could manifest as anything from getting a boner that just wouldn't quit to going utterly bug-fuck crazy for a few hours to passing out entirely.

The ocular implant droned on, connected to his collar computer through the nano-wiring in his body armor. With his body slowly cooling down from his nervous high, the suit detected his change in temperature, and he felt the fabric slowly begin warming up to help keep him at a comfortable body heat.

"2091 - The First Corporate War begins, when the Avatar corporation's interstellar shipyards are sabotaged by protestors. Avatar corporation's private investigative squad responds to the attack, locating the perpetrators within the Antarctic Arcology. Lacking confidence in the United Earth Federation's willingness to intercede on their behalf, Avatar sends its private security forces to collect the saboteurs. During the raids, local police intervene believing a home-invasion is in progress. The resulting fire fight sparks a series of violent riots, precipitating a collapse of municipal control in the Antarctic Arcology. Within two months, the United Earth Federation and the megacorporations are at war over the authority to try and punish criminals."

Next to him, the Ix'kat chattered again, and spoke, her click-filled voice going right through his ocular's sedate computerized tone. Derry sighed, and felt the pinch of his headache coming back. Ix'kat voices always seemed to do that to him, vibrating his inner ear maybe.

"After that is when your people torpedoed one of our hive ships!"

That got a blink out of him, and he turned to stare at her for a second in curiosity. The bug's eyes didn't seem to be pointed anywhere in particular, but then again they were faceted. He supposed she could be looking everywhere at the same time.

"You can hear my...Aural thing? It's implanted into my ear...Uh..."

"No, silly cat-tail dog! Your computer is showing text on its screen."

Derry fiddled with the thing, and grunted, the awkward angle of his straps preventing him from getting a good look without craning his neck. Once he popped it off, the aural feed stopped, and he flipped it around to look. Sure enough...

"Goddamnit..."

"Yes! That is what the crazy human commander yelled when he Torpedo Run'd us."

"Torpedo...What?"

Niece glanced toward the Corporal to make sure he wasn't waiting to shout at her for talking again, then grinned and puffed up to pontificate. Derry knew the look, it's what she did whenever he asked a dumb question, because she was so proud to know the answer.

"Torpedo Run. When a ship comes out of RT drive, the singularity that's used to drag the ship past light speed is basically just released. It goes in a straight line from wherever the ship drops out of FTL and disintegrates pretty quick. But if something's too close...Like a couple thousand clicks? Skadoosh!"

"'Skadoosh?' Seriously? What are you, twelve?"

"They skadoosh'd the Prime Queen's hive ship! It caused a very very big civil war, but not until we blew up the human skadoosh-boat."

"Goddamnit, not you too...It's a fucking singularity torpedo and all you two can come up with is 'skadoosh?'"

The bug waved off his linguistic concerns with a dismissive flick of her antennae, and made the chittering-clicking sound he was pretty sure meant she was laughing at him.

"The skadoosh-boat was destroyed, and then we got in a big war for six whole months! We were very impressed."

Derry shook his head at her and slipped the computer back into its protective pocket, disconnected.

"You weren't alive then. That was two hundred years ago."

Clicks tapped the side of her head with a long, chitinous, many-jointed finger, and made the trilling click sound that was a giggle.

"We remember. We all remember. Even if we weren't born."

"Creepy," Niece contributed, before twisting in her seat and pointing. "Hey, look! Wow, she's a big one!"

As Niece shouted out, all eyes on the transport but the corporal's went to the port-holes, two dozen sets of mostly-wolf orbs wide in amazement at the size and grandeur of the ship they were approaching.

She was a long spire of a vessel, angular and slender, giving the impression of an ancient arrowhead suspended in timeless space. At her center, a trio of graceful silvery rings spun even now as the stellar battleship lay stationary, attended by dozens of small, swarming vessels that were finishing her paint or repairing this and that, each of them going to and fro from the station that spun a graceful pirouette in the endless emptiness of the system's lagrange.

The battleship was smaller than most other capital vessels, Derry had read, but was a newer, faster type - In fact, this would be the maiden voyage for her entire class, once she was done loading Marines and supplies. All told, she would berth some 12,000 of the United Systems Federation's best and brightest. Under the grim, cynical façade his hard life had given him, even Derry felt a jolt of pride that his first station would be so prestigious.

Niece pressed her face to the porthole, obscuring several other Marines' view, to their half-shouted displeasure. Ignoring them, she squinted and stared at the distant but rapidly-approached vessel.

"Fist of the Nascent Dawn..." she whispered in awe, reading the lettering inscribed on the hull, just past the gravity-generating rings at its middle. As she said it, a dozen fighters rocketed free of a half-dozen portals in the ship's hull, three of them on fast approach to intercept their transport and escort it in.

Derry jostled about in his seat, trying to see past her fuzzy head, and aimed a kick at her shin that brought her away from the porthole. He leaned forward in time to see the great battleship test-firing her forward guns, spitting a pair of silvery flashes that darted faster than the eye could track more than an instant. Thousands of kilometers away, a pair of derelict decommissioned vessels twisted as they were struck amid-ships, twirling languidly in the inertia-less void before the shockwaves resonating through them from the rail-gun hits tore the two ships to so much debris.

"Holy shit."

"Holey ship!" chirruped Clicks, with that mandible-spread grin of hers.

"So what happened next exactly," Derry asked, with resignation in his tone. He knew she would continue whether he asked or not. Even having only known her for the last few weeks of Basic and week of liberty they'd all spent on base, the bug was transparent enough that he was pretty sure there weren't a lot of surprises left. At least not personality-wise

With that same savage, disturbing grin, she happily chattered in response.

"Human captain had gone crazy from terminus-shock, but we did not know that. All we know is that big silly-looking ship come out of nowhere and blow up our most important Queen! So, we wait for other ships to come, and tear them up. New Grand Queen decided to end the war when it was discovered that squishy pink larvae were in fact sentient. Six months of fighting, and maybe...Hm...Fifteen thousand dead humans, five dead Ix'Kat."

Niece spoke up, her voice sounding vaguely offended.

"Oh c'mon, even Navy doesn't suck THAT bad at fighting."

The young Ix'kat queen shrugged her upper shoulders, as her two lower, smaller arms delicately made a few signs Derry assumed meant she was conceding the point.

"We only count dead queens. Our...Um...Grunts? Warrior-drones. They do not count. They are just like your um...Androids? No! Robots!"

The corporal's voice rose then, and all the chatter went quiet in deference. Though he was only a corporal, he outranked every other Marine in the transport. On top of that, stories of his exploits, whether real or imagined, were the talk of the base. Experience was a sort of rank of its own.

"Okay Marines, listen up and listen good. Our sar'nt is going to meet us on board the Fist of the Nascent Dawn. I don't need to remind you that on-ship discipline is far more strict than it is on base, so show him all due deference."

He stood as he spoke, while the Fist loomed larger and larger in the starboard portholes, filling the forever night-time sky of space with its looming, glittering silvery bulk.

"The total ship's complement is going to be around twelve thousand. Of that, there are one thousand Marines, like yourselves. Your class and one other are the only rookie Marines on board. But we have one big advantage. We're the 17th!"

That got some "oorah" out of the Marines, though it was subdued, as not to interrupt their corporal.

"This is the Fist's maiden voyage, and she's the newest, most high-tech ship in the fleet. I've got it on good authority that we're headed on a sort of stellar sight-seeing tour through settled systems, so I doubt we'll see much action. Nonetheless, it's your job to stay sharp. Space is a dangerous place, and everyone's eyes and ears are critical. You see something wrong, out of place, or strange, you tell me immediately. If I'm not around, you tell PFC Blake," he pointed at Derry, "or the sar'nt if he's around. You do NOT report to Navy staff unless all of the above are unavailable, understand? On a ship, chain of command is even more important than it was on ground. Hoo?"

"Hoo, Corporal!"

"Good." He sat back down, and clipped in. "First trip will be to our bunks. Then, the following morning, we'll be doing medical and then we're headed to the on-board armory. The Navy sprung for new rifles for you rookie green-horns, so we'll be training on the new AR-225 Pulse Carbine. Armory Sar'nt will brief you on those when we get there. It's a hell of a gun."

Yeah, though Derry, and completely untested, just like our new class of pocket battleship...

Captain Adriana Leith felt her ears pop as the airlock finished cycling, and spoke in a crisp, calm voice to the crisply-uniformed bear behind her as he winced at the sensation and scribbled on his notepad.

"Chief, please let engineering know they have a malfunction in airlock six. Depressurization is three seconds too fast."

"Aye, sir."

The remainder of her inspection team were walking quickly down the halls of her new vessel as they worked toward the bridge. Though she had been aboard during its construction, this was her first time aboard the Fist since the completion of her internal structures. The first time, in fact, that she hadn't needed to wear an EVO suit.

As the screw locked hatch to the bridge opened cold air blasted back, blustering through short-cut sandy-blonde hair. She suppressed a shiver, the dress uniform she wore unable to prevent the over-ticked climate control from forcing her smooth skin to prickle in the chill. As one of the few humans on board, she had no fur coat to help keep her warm, and thus had to suffer for the comfort of the 99% furry majority. Despite that, she was used to the cold, having served for many years in her beloved Navy.

Descending from her perch at the heavy bulkhead door, Adriana swept the bridge - Her bridge - with a nod of satisfaction. It was clean, open, every duty station clearly defined by etched plaques set into the floor behind each securely-bolted chair. Fifteen paces took her from the entry, past the armored security wall that would serve as the last fallback for Marines protecting the bridge during a boarding battle, and to the balcony that hung over the two dozen duty stations below.

So far, only half a dozen Naval officers were on duty, and a quick scan of the plaques told her that those half dozen were her Communications, Combat Air Patrol, Engine and Reactor Room, Life Support and Systems, Navigation, and Marine officers. Missing were her Weapons, Gravity Control, Crew, and Damage Control officers, among a few other command staff that were still planet-side or en route.

To her left and below, the Marine officer stood, and saluted. He was a tall, sleek otter, who snapped a fast paw to his graying temples and barked out in his best Leatherneck voice.

"Captain on the Bridge!"

The other officers stood from their duty stations, executing well-practiced turns, and saluted her. Captain Adriana Leith swelled with pride, and saluted them crisply in return, from her spot watching over their activities.

"As you were, gentlemen. Communications, please let my Crew chief know I need to see him."

"Aye sir," came the response from her Communications officer, whose uniform gave her name as Lieutenant Cross. Captain Leith watched the young caracal as she lithely spun and sat, before engaging private intercoms. Inwardly, she made note that the youthful officer was new to combat operations by the lack of ornamentation on her dress uniform, and made a note to read the dossiers of her flag staff intently before the next sleep cycle.

A bank of computer screens zipped around the Captain as she fnally sat, appearing from a slot in the wall, and suspended themselves by levitating platforms at just the right height for the five foot ten inch woman. With a few strategic taps, she called up a dozen different readouts, showing her that the engines were operational. Really they were just screens showing her what was already in front of her command staff, but in battle the displays could be invaluable if an officer was over-tasked or unable to respond for one reason or another.

Meanwhile, the crew that had escorted her to the bridge waited on the entry balcony for further commands. She stood again, the panels and screens whisking away.

"Our orders are to make best speed for the Atria system as soon as we're under way. I expect that to be no more than three days from now. Please make sure your subordinates are ready. When we arrive, we will be meeting with planetary officials and giving them a limited tour of the Hammer of the Nascent Dawn. I don't have to remind you all that there has been political friction lately in the Galactic Senate, and Atria has been a hotbed. So keep your people on their best behavior, we don't need reprimands coming down from Admiral Karrick on our first trip out, understood?"

"Aye sir," the calls echoed out. With that, she returned to her escort crew, nodding coolly to the young feline private that held the door for her. He blushed, meeting her steel-grey eyes, and for a moment kept her gaze with his own deep greens, before shifting to the Marine Stare she knew so well.

Good gods of the Navy...Half my crew are children.

"Chief, show me the way to the mess, then my cabin, if you would. I'd like a few hours to rest, that shuttle ride was hell."

"Aye sir."

Hours later, Derry and Captain Leith sat in their new homes on opposite ends of the ship, staring out of shielded, armored port holes, watching the glittering sea of stars and the antics of EVO-suited otters as they played over the hull, performing their final examinations and dodging one another in a beautiful ballet of graceful motion.

One cartwheeled in space, his dexterous body twisting and bunching to keep his motion how he wanted it. In doing so, he tossed a padding-wrapped spanner wrench at another otter who deftly caught it, her smiling face full of laughter as she stuck her tongue out and turned to begin wrenching a bolt while giving the tool's line a tug to pull the other otter toward her.

A third intercepted him, kicking off of a supply platform that was locked in place by one of the Fist's dozens of small graviton beams. Tackled, the two spiraled, wriggling in tandem so they wouldn't bounce off the hull with any real force.

Captain Leith snorted in amusement, crinkling her nose as she looked back to the pile of 'paperwork'; dossiers, technical files, readouts, manifests, and political briefings all laid out on her desk in magnetic-backed tablets. She almost missed the days, twenty years ago when she'd joined the Navy as a cadet, when actual plastic sheets of imitation paper would be stacked high on a desk. There was something infinitely more satisfying to her about signing her name to something by good old fashioned ink than by simply tapping a stylus and entering an authorization code.

Derry, meanwhile, sat on his bunk in the long skinny compartment afforded to his unit, his robotic tail slowly lashing about. The 17th were grunts, not the specialized Marine aviators or ship-boarding specialists of the 5th and 12th, respectively. Thus, they were close to the engines, and could feel its harmonic thrum through the deck beneath their feet.

He was watching the otters with a sense of vague jealousy. Their carefree ability to cavort around, even while on duty, made him feel that old rankling against authority he'd known since he was a pup. The extra-vehicular-operations (EVO) crews got away with a lot, primarily because few of their number wanted to give up their job to become officers, and also because other species' officers had a hard time keeping up with the agile little things, trained from near birth to deal with zero gravity in many cases.

That, and they were damn good at their jobs.

Corporal Kerr's staccato walking cadence pulled him from his reverie.

"Okay Marines, listen up."

Various furs, mostly wolves, turned about on their wall-mounted bunks. Some were already strapped in, as they were required to be during sleep in case of gravity loss. Others were sipping water, struggling for acclimation with the ship's dry on-board environment, designed as it was to prevent mold and mildew from growing.

"There's a few rules you need to observe here, in addition to the standard rules and regulations. Remember, we're aboard Fleet now, so the Navy's actually paying attention to us."

A few Marines chuckled at the tired ancient joke. The laughter was as traditional as the jest, Derry remembered old Mr. Tenh saying once, over drinks on a hot day in the hab-dome's dark service passages.

"First off. There's a reason the heads here on ship have a suction tube. Yes, males, you're supposed to put your piece IN it before urinating. Its purpose is to save water on board the ship, so it can be recycled. What ends up on the floor plating when you messy bastards piss is harder to reclaim. Plus, I'll make you clean it up with your tongues. You females use the modified ones in the female's restroom. Same rule. You miss, first you're gonna have to explain to me how the fuck that happened. Second, you'll be cleaning it with your tongues."

Nodding heads now. This wasn't the time for laughing, it was now time to Listen and Shut Up. Derry never liked L&SU time, but he knew better than to mouth off. On the next bunk over, Niece was sitting up prim and proper like a good little Marine. Derry felt like barfing on her, just for spite.

"Rule number two. You see something wrong on the ship, you call me up immediately to report it. I don't give a shit if I'm in the head dropping the world's biggest deuce, you still call. Wake me up, interrupt my speeches, whatever. If the ship has a problem, it's instantly critical, and even things that look small can be signs of a big problem. I'll decide whether it needs reporting up the chain."

Derry grimaced slightly and looked at the port hole. It appeared solid enough; three inches thick of transparent metals infused with carbon nano-tubes, it would take something a lot stronger than a tank shell to punch through. Such a rupture would require something even more dangerous than high-velocity exploding shells, like some asshole forgetting to tighten a screw. If that porthole blew out, the whole of the 17th would be dead in seconds. Which made him wonder why a dedicated warship had port holes to begin with. It just seemed smarter to armor the whole thing in and say fuck it to aesthetics. Especially when their bunks rode on top of a reactor that could turn the entire vessel into atomic dust in moments.

"Rule number three. No procreative sex on board the ship. Pregnancies will be aborted by the ship's medic whether you've got 'moral objections' or not, and the responsible parties will be punished. Use protection. Also, a new rule just got passed by the gods in brass at fleet headquarters. In light of their new...Experimental protocol...Anyone not treated with the experimental protocol doesn't get to have sex within their own species. This is to avoid issues of on-ship pregnancy."

_Experimental what-now? _ Derry wondered, and gave Niece a glance. She'd done the same, and gave him a shrug, signaling she had no idea. Other Marines were grumbling, and one raised a paw to ask what the hell the Corporal meant by that.

"It means they've got some egg-heads on board in med bay who want to try some kind of temporary sterilization procedure or something. Fuck if I know. I'm just supposed to ask for volunteers."

The corporal held up a glowing tablet.

"So there it is. You want to fuck within your own species, and don't plan to be putting it in a tail hole or a muzzle, you sign up for this. Condoms evidently are out of fashion with high command."

Niece piped up, helpfully.

"Condoms don't handle the dehydrated low-gravity environment on board ships well, corporal. They tend to get brittle and crack."

Corporal Lerr glanced at her from the tablet, which he was reading over, and shrugged.

"Good to know they're not just bullshitting us around. Next time raise a paw and wait to be called on."

Then he paused, checking the tablet, on which the fleet's many rules were arrayed in a window separate from the one waiting for volunteers.

"Oh, right, lest I forget. Everyone here is due at Medical at 0500 tomorrow for medical check-in. For those of you who've never done one before, you'll get your genes put into the fleet's main file at HQ from here on the ship. In case you get turned to space-dust, your family can at least get that last kid out of you."

That got mixed results from the Marines. Nobody liked getting stuck in the arm or rectally thermometered or whatever the corpsmen needed to train on that day. Derry looked over at Niece as the Corporal walked back into the cramped closet-cum-office at the end of their bunk hall. He spoke one more time over his shoulder, knowing how to salve Marines' grumbling about mandatory medical visits.

"After you're done getting poked by the corpsmen, meet me at the Ship's Armory. AR-225's will be waiting for the lot of you."

Derry was unsurprised by the enthusiasm with which that proclamation was met, as the Corporal disappeared into his office.

"So uh..."

"Yeah...Do you think we should...?"

"Idunno, do you? Who knows what they're cooking up..."

Niece blushed and hunched her shoulders, shrugging.

"I'll do the experiment if you will, Derry?"

He stared at her for a second, then nodded once, slowly. He just hoped this wasn't some new "Marines are dangerous, let's dope em' up" game. Giving up the new relationship they'd developed after their lovely little flier crash wasn't something he planned on doing, though, and celibacy in general was right out.

"Yeah. Let's do it. Marines fear no needle."