FSE

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Whew, this chapter mostly wrote itself yesterday, but needed a few minutes of editing before it could go out. Let me know what you think!

Also, beware! Thar be M/F sex and violence in them thar hills!

Chapter 30

"Blood loss and internal hermorrhage..."

Beep-weep.

_ _

"...broke his paws?"

Beep-weep. Kerchunk. Vrrrr...

_ _

"...amnit, hold him steady til I strap him down!"

VrrrrRRRrrrrRRmble...Beepbeepbeepbeep!

_ _

"Taking fire, brace for maneuver!"

Derrystruggled upward, against the tide of black that sucked at him like tar-soaked quicksand. His paws hurt less here, he muzzily realized, in the place of sticky cool blackness. In fact, the less he struggled the less things burned and ached and shrieked at him. He wanted to lay back and sink into gentle oblivion, but something niggling and insistent and stubborn as all hell refused to let him do so. Every time he gave up and sank back into the cool, soothing darkness, the gods-awful roaring bellow of Gunnery Sergeant Rickle from back in Boot blew through his eardrums, searing his pride with imprecations.

"Is that all you've got?! You'll never be a Marine if you can't fight past this shit! Get up you fucking maggot! Marines! Don't! Die! Not till their commanding officer gives them permission!"

_ _

The snarling, bellowing Gunny had kicked his ass up and down Boot for what had felt like months, pushing his whole unit through obstacle course after running course after shooting range and up-downs. He'd bawled them out leatherneck-style, driving them hard until they nearly broke, never letting up, never pushing quite far enough to shatter their spirit.

He'd forged them in fire, beaten them into shape on the anvil of Basic Training, instilled in him a determination to survive and excel at whatever he chose to do. As much as he'd groaned and bitched with other members of his training battalion, the lessons had sunk in all the same. That old Marine had saved his life more times than his muddled mind could recall.

So, as he'd done on that first torturous day on the running course, he put one foot in front of the other. Or, more properly, forced himself to take a painful, burning breath, then another, grabbing command of what little of his body would still respond.

Derryforced his eyes to open, though the disobedient flesh one was blurry and left everything indistinct, like a water-color painting done by a five year old. His right eye began to reboot, scrawling with text that made him suddenly register just how much his head hurt, pounding and aching like the first time he'd been choked out multiplied about a million times over.

The ocular cybernetic snapped into focus, onto a sea of golden brown fur, resolution impossibly high for something so close to his face. He could see the fur bend, where it touched the surface of his artificial eye, so close he could see the scale-like formation of the strands' surface. Then he felt the world jerk, rolling left at a sickening angle and G-force.

All at once, every bruised and broken part of his body shrieked at him, roaring in agony that made him try to curl, only to be held back by restraints and the massive body that was draped over his own. His heart leapt into his chest, the black wolf recalling how consciousness had faded, the golden eyes staring down into his with mixed hatred and surprise as he'd pulled the suicide grenade's pin.

Then a voice cut through his panicked half-conscious haze, a voice as familiar as bells to Pavlov's dogs. The calm was near-instant, adrenaline draining away to leave him feeling dopey and passive even through all the pain.

"You did well, boy. Thank you for coming to rescue us."

Praise, from the old mountain, was rare as hag's teeth. More often, a simple nod was allDerryhad needed, as a boy, to feel on top of the world. A sensation blossomed in his bruised and battered chest, a pleasant buoyancy, as if he were going to laugh but hadn't the strength. A huge, gentle paw touched his face, palmed his whole cheek, and the black wolf closed his eyes, settling into the comforting touch.

"Your transport pilot is extremely skilled, to have flown so quickly through the ventilation shafts. Even with directions, it should have taken three times as long. We are currently on the surface, evading enemy fighters."

The torrent of thoughts inDerry's head, fragmented and fractal, seemed to be slowly coalescing. One question came to mind, first of all, serving as an anchor for the others to line up behind as if in formation.

"My squad..."

He didn't need to say the rest. Tenh understood how he thought, knew what he was worrying about, and the old lion chuckled. The noise was startling, somethingDerryhad never heard before from the dour old mountain.

"You are a good Marine, Darrell, to worry about your squad first, when you are wounded. All numbers are accounted for. Your Corpsman is functional, and agent Waters is walking wounded. Captain Tense and Corporal Kerr are uninjured and Black Jack undamaged. Private Gordon is in serious condition, as is your sister. Corpsman Derkin believes they will survive and I agree with his assessment."

Derrydigested all of that, struggling to force his bleary mind into an analytical framework. Nothing in his body seemed to work. His lungs felt heavy, as if something were pressing on them and his arms were immobilized, likely by the same straps that held him down. He was prone, he realized, when the transport banked hard to its left, and warning sirens let off their woop-woop howl a moment before the whole flier vibrated with the friction of rounds flying from its cannons.

All he seemed able to focus on was that Niece was badly hurt, and Trisha too. The mission had gone utterly belly-up, his unit cut off and trapped, wounded and lost, forced to let a member take suicidal action to save the others. How he had survived, he didn't know. Everything seemed so fuzzy and lost, a weight like lead dragging down in his chest, his eyes hot and itchy and wet with frustration and failure.

A large, smooth and furless paw gently gripped his upper arm, and a moment later Derkin's rumbling voice registered in his still-ringing ears. The furry warmth of his massive mentor had moved to make space.

"Hey, boss. Just wanted to...Say thank you, for saving all of our asses back there. I'd be dead twice now if you hadn't had my back."

As the big paw gave a squeeze, the tears inDerry's eyes started to slip. How the armadillo Corpsman could be thanking him, after everything he'd put the Dragonslayers through, he couldn't fathom. His own leadership had led them to their deaths, and only luck had saved them.

The thoughts stopped, in surprise, when a heavy, hard finger thumped against his forehead.

"Your mission succeeded and your squad survived with zero fatalities. Your kill rate against the enemy was very high, and your loss of equipment within acceptable limits. This mission was a success. I know it does not feel that way, but you have done extremely well. Dry those tears, Marine."

He almost choked, with the conflict those words raised within him. He knew Tenh would never praise him falsely, and the ancient lion's mind was far too sharp to see success in failure. His own instincts, though, were screaming to the wolf that he'd fucked up, and that Nivea was going to die from his failure.

The fact his mentor seemed able to read his mind came as no surprise. A sudden thought, that Tenh was likely speaking from experience near-identical to his own, made the swirl of depression and self-loathing slide to a stop. The lion's words were percolating through, and with a start,Derry's eyes were open again, though flinching from the far-too-bright lights over his head.

"C...Corpsman..."

Derkin leaned in, blocking out some of the eye-burning brilliance with his pale, filthy but grinning face.

"Yeah boss?"

"I want you to...Signal the fleet. Tell them we have...VIP's in our custody...And that the mission was successful."

The armadillo grinned and gave him a thumbs-up, before responding.

"You got it. Sar'nt, I'm going to up your painkiller dose. You're stable and your wrists splinted, so feel free to pass out, okay? We've got things from here."

Derrygave the slightest nod, all his head could really manage given everything, and closed his eyes as the warm tide of painkillers swept through him after a tiny prickle on his left arm. As he passed back into the warm darkness, now knowing it was safe to do so without fear of dereliction of duty via death, he heard a few parting sentences between Waters and the lion she clearly held in some degree of awe.

"Um...Sir, why did you have Kerrick blast the hospital after we lifted off?"

"It only seemed fair that, given your casualties, we assure your mission's success."

"But...We were sent to extract you, sir. You're our mission."

"Enigma told you that you were here for me, I imagine. He knew that Stalker would be on my trail. We collapsed the enemy-held part of the hospital to deny them that fortification, and to bury the Stalker until the planet is secure. Your real mission was to distract one of the Shadows, giving me the opportunity to neutralize him. You never would have accepted the mission, if he told you what you were truly there to do."

"Did he...D-did Enigma tell you to expect us?"

Tenh sighed, a sound of fatigueDerryhad never heard before from the creature he'd held in such awe as a child.

"No. Nor did he ask my permission. Now I am involved whether I like it or not."

The Fist of the Nascent Dawn reached an apogee in its arc, before descending fast, firing its many rail guns in a blistering barrage that shattered armor and blasted open compartments all along the Star of Aden's slow-turning rear. So close to the enemy, she could not be properly targeted by the Star of Aden's manual tracking gear, and without the use of their sabotaged computer system, it was obvious to all eyes aboard the Fist's bridge that their far larger opponent was doomed.

One of the Star of Aden's massive thrusters sputtered out and died, as it passed through the viewport forward of Captain Adriana Leith's seat on the bridge. Savaged by the Fist's fast-moving fighter-bombers and blasted with plasma streams, the engine began to vent un-directed kinetic energy and plasma debris, putting an uncontrolled spin to the great battleship's movements. Even through the silence of space, Adriana imagined she could hear the great vessels' groans as its superstructure absorbed the wrenching forces of its engines firing without coordination, pulling the ship in two different directions.

"Mr. Gunner, I want you to target their rear point defenses. Helm, keep us at our current position in relation to the Star of Aden, but maintain evasive maneuvering."

As defensive fire arced and missed, bouncing off the Fist's gravitic shields, Adriana stifled an entirely unprofessional desire to smirk. Her eyes were predatory, as was her posture, leaned forward in her command chair with both human hands clenched in claw-shapes on the arm rests.

Other officers would have described her as 'sweaty and exhausted,' much like the rest of her bridge crew. With life support systems still damaged, the bridge's many computer systems had baked Captain Leith and her bridge crew for over an hour now, as the boarding action stalled outside the Fist's command center. Instead of feeling tired and filthy, though, Adriana felt energized, her body filled with hot desire for victory that seemed to radiate from her very core. She would have laughed, if someone had pointed out that she looked horny as hell, and brushed it off as side-effects of adrenaline.

Commander Forza, her executive officer, had taken command of the Marines and Naval Security forces, and held his ground with all the tenacity she knew to expect from the big handsome warrior wolf. With the bridge's blast doors finally shut, she could no longer hear every shout and shot of battle outside. Still, she knew not to worry. Even outnumbered and outgunned, her people had the advantage of desperation and defensive fortification. With nowhere to retreat from this point, she knew her Marines and Seamen wouldn't break, even if the devil himself ripped open the bulkhead of dimensions and walked through to fight.

Swirling on a separate holographic monitor, a diagram of the overall fleet combat sat to her left. Rear Admiral Vernier's flagship, the mighty Sword of Sol, had retrieved its commander and led a brutal charge to support Sacred Song-Haven. With his whole fleet forming up in a wedge behind him, Rear Admiral Vernier had been in combat for the last two hours without rest, wielding the Hadrian-class super battleship like the great shillelagh of his Irish ancestors, with great ferocity and intense skill.

With the appearance of an entire Ix'kat hive fleet, not to mention their mobile home world, the United Galatea Federation's fleets were on the run, trying desperately to escape the massive gravity well created by a planet dropping out of FTL right in front of them. Until they could get clear, they couldn't risk activating their RT Drives. The whole star system's gravitic tides had been disrupted, rendering the computers used to calculate jumps utterly worthless until they could be recalibrated.

She laughed out loud as Sati Anwar's masterful dance of shield control deflected a heavy rail gun round like a ballerina swatting a fly, and felt a hot pulse in her groin as Mr. Gunner's weapons systems ejaculated another punishing fusillade of rail-accelerated iron cylinders into the Star of Aden's smoke-streaming wounded rear.

"Captain, we're receiving a hail from the Star of Aden, priority one!" Lt. Cross yelled out, the caracal's high melodic voice chipper and energetic despite the cat looking near heat exhaustion.

Adriana slapped the communication console on her chair's arm, not bothering to call out the command. On the screen that sat above her knees, a wounded warrior looked up toward her.

His eyes were wide, with fear and anger she decided, his orange and black tiger-striped fur spiked up with blood and soaking sweat. His left ear appeared to have been torn away, hanging in ragged strips of bleeding flesh as smoke filled the chamber around him and partially obscured the staticky image.

As was proper, she greeted him crisply.

"Captain Adriana Leith of the Fist of the Nascent Dawn. Go ahead, Captain of the Star of Aden."

The tiger's voice came through scratchy and hoarse, signs of smoke inhalation if she was any judge.

"Captain of Fist of the Nascent Dawn, this is acting Captain Miller of the Star of Aden. We ask you to cease fire, and offer parlay. If you agree, please cease fire. We can meet in shuttles for the negotiation."

Adriana snorted, scrunching her button nose at the young tiger, as his eyes flickered to something behind his own comm. screen, and signaled to Mr. Gunner. The red-bone hound nodded sharply to her and fired another salvo of plasma lances, burning red-hot holes in the already-savaged rear armor of the Star of Aden's aft. A secondary explosion lit off, blasting a river of ejecta from the massive vessel and forcing it forward several hundred meters.

In the view-screen, her opponent rocked and lost his balance, hitting his face hard on the recording device and knocking it over with a splatter of blood across the lens. Knowing he still had audio, Adriana called out.

"Captain Miller, allow a more experienced ship commander to render some advice. Firstly, never offer a fool's parlay when your enemy is winning. Your vessel is as good as dead. You will surrender without condition and stand down or be destroyed. Secondly, you should never un-strap yourself in the middle of combat, even to look dignified when asking for mercy."

The bloodied tiger had managed to pull himself back into view, bleeding from his forehead now where it had struck the metal edge of his communications station. Holding his eye, the wobbling creature raised his bloody right paw, and yelled back at her, growling in furious terror.

"St-stand down?! This is a battleship, Captain! I can't just surrender unconditionally!"

"Maybe not, but can you live with dooming your entire crew for your pride, Captain Miller?"

She saw the doubt in his eyes, the stubbornness and pride of a young officer suddenly thrust to high post. The actual captain must have died or become incapacitated sometime during the length and brutal battle, she realized. Then, the real reason for his call became clear, as something scratched against the walls, shrieked, and the acting Captain flinched and grabbed at the transmitter device, shaking it as if it were an intransigent drunk in a bar-room argument.

"We surrender! Just call off the bugs!"

Chaos and combat lasted through the night on Centauri VII, while up above the swirling deadly dance of dances played out in grand form, ship blasting ship, fighter killing fighter, drone slicing Seaman, in a tornado of violence. Shortly before dawn, Randy Kerrick, called Solomon Sign, finally managed to clear the outer atmosphere on a course for the Fist of the Nascent Dawn.

Behind him, the ground war was nowhere near done. Landing ships were ferrying troops down to the planet's surface from massive, bloated and slow-moving interstellar transports that sat in high orbit, defended by swarming hordes of Ix'kat drones and First Fleet frigates. Beyond that formation and above his own transport, between him and the Fist, even the vast emptiness of space seemed crowded with the detritus of prolonged battle.

Solomon Sign pondered, as was his way, how this battle fared in terms of historic combats. So far as he knew, from what information his scanners could give him at this range, the naval battle would go down in history as the largest stellar combat to date. Hundreds of vessels swarmed out there, some still mopping up pockets of resistance, as others pursued individual UGF ships that had broken early enough in the fight to have some chance of escape.

He knew what the sensors were implying. Nobody was jumping out of system until computers could be reprogrammed with new gravimetric profiles to compensate for the gigantic Ix'kat mothership's sudden appearance. Though it would cripple First Fleet for a short time, the UGF was in far more dire straits. With their grand armada smashed, more than half their ships already destroyed or captured and the others trapped in a lethal game of cat and mouse against a vastly superior and tireless force, the Galatea Federation's strategic situation looked bad. Which was, he supposed, good for his own side in the so-far unnamed war.

Randy Kerrick snorted slightly, as Bill Verman, his boyfriend, Void Shadow, spoke to him for the first time in the five hours they had been separated.

"Hey! Solo! You missed out, man!"

"Void, are you alright?" the lizard calmly replied, his flicking tail-tip the only display of his well-concealed nerves. The wounded service people filling his hold still weren't out of the woods, and he knew Galatean fighters might still be lurking out there someplace in the endless black.

"Yeah, I'm peachy! Got 15 more confirmed kills. I'm like a million ahead of you now, hah!"

Randy snorted into the speaker, as his hyperactive partner jabbered happily.

"Oh bull. You're 18 ahead including the new kills, and I've been flying a transport for two days now."

"Blah excuses excuses. See you back on board the Fist?"

"Yeah. Love you, Void."

"You too, Solo."

As the line cut, a looming shadow filled Solomon Sign's cockpit, and the lizard felt his crest come up a bit, a holdover of old human reflexes still redolent in his engineered genome. The voice that spoke was deep enough he imagined feeling his gut vibrate.

"Kerrick. Your...Grandfather is Admiral Kerrick?"

"Great uncle, sir," the lizard replied, "on my father's side."

Tenh nodded slightly, and looked out at the stars, while leaning past Randy's slender shoulder to see all of the readouts. The lizard watched him calculate, virtually heard his mind extrapolating at speed. The male's presence was palpable, and Randy Kerrick felt more than a little intimidated by his sheer size and strange collectedness. When the lion spoke again, Randy was in the process of altering their coarse toward the Fist, where it hung in space directly over a ship that looked to be three or four times its size, swarming with Ix'kat drones and gracefully moving EVO-suited otter repair crews.

"This was all to the Admiral's plan. His mark is all over this operation."

Randy blinked once, a nictating memrane sliding back and forth over his eye, before risking a glance to the side. The lion was staring right at him, hard gold-grey eyes pinning him like a butterfly in a display.

"How would you...Er...Do you know him personally, sir?"

Tenh gave a half-shrug, and gripped the copilot seat's arm, turning it toward him as he twisted in the cockpit. Seating himself was a demonstration of flexibility, if nothing else, for a creature over seven feet tall that was trying to move about inside a shuttle made for furs more than a foot shorter.

"The Admiral chose to have children...How unusual."

The lizard felt sweat bead on his scalp, sensing something thunderous in the lion's calm, cool, creepily steady eyes. Tenh continued to speak after the pause of a few breaths' span.

"Shadow Six and Shadow Seven working together. Kerrick and Enigma. The Admiral and The Faceless."

Randy swallowed hard. His family's secret was now shared, at the very least with this other massive, lethal immortal. He half expected the revealed secret to be followed by violence. Instead, he was surprised to have a huge paw extended toward him, and more surprised to see the slightest hint of a smile on the behemoth's neanderthalic, ugly face.

He took the proferred paw, though just for a moment, and was given a very gentle squeeze.

"His secret is safe, young one. I trust Kerrick. I always have. It's Enigma I've never trusted half so far as I could fling him."

For Derkin and Olliver Tense, the next few days went by in a blur. As a medic and Corpsman, Derkin was assigned to sixteen hour shifts, seeing to wounded service furs at first from the vast fleet battle, then being ferried back into space from the ongoing land war. Olliver had stayed nearby, out of the way per regulations but close enough to assist in record-keeping duties a very relieved logistics officer had gladly handed over to the ascerbic but keen-eyed volunteer.

The first two days, he hadn't seen another member of the shadowy Dragonslayers, nor heard mention even in passing of their existence. He and Derkin had been put to work in the first of the Fist of the Nascent Dawn's two medical bays, primarily tasked with caring for moderate-priority cases passed off to the pocket battleship as dedicated hospital vessels were filled to overflowing with the wounded of both sides. Sgt. Blake and Pvt. Gordon had been sent off to the Fist's secondary medical bay, where he heard the two wolves had taken turns being immersed in surgical nanos and regenerative solutions, even as the repairs to their boarding-damaged capital ship were underway.

When the chance came to go see them, it was in the unsettling form of an Ix'kat queen in all of her massive-preying-mantis glory. The gemstone-colored carapace announced her presence, sending some of the more nervous and green medical staff scurryinga way from the hatch, as she slid nimbly inside and approached Derkin, chittering and waving her antennae in a way Olly sincerely hoped wasn't a prelude to a sudden and vicious savaging.

Derkin, to Olliver's relief and surprise, responded with a happy if exhausted laugh, before wrapping his huge, muscular arms around the bug queen's middle. It lowered its claw-tipped hands with the utmost care, and trailed the flat parts of its steel-cutting limbs across his back in an approximation of a returned hug.

"Squishies survived! This is good!" Olliver made out, forcing the otter to quirk a brow as he rolled his way over.

"Corpsman er...Who is this?"

"Well, her name is hell to pronounce, so we just call her Clicks."

The bug turned its faceted eyes toward him, and Olliver stubbornly refused to cringe back despite the chittering flesh-tearing mandibles that swooped in to inches in front of his face.

"I got a commendation!" she squealed out, and straightened, proudly patting a claw atop what looked to be a circular red patch of paint about a paw's breadth in size on her upper thorax.

"Seriously! Congrats, Clicks! Is that Ix'kat carapace tattooing? Wow!" Olliver flicked his small ears back in bemusement at the excited, fascinated tone coming from his big burly boyfriend, as the armadillo leaned in close, examining the red circle with rapt attention. With aggravated amusement, Olly noted the look was approximately the same gaze of fascinated excitement Derkin had given Little Olliver the previous night before slurping his balls dry.

She chattered in excitement as the two exchanged words Olliver could barely understand, some kind of Marine Corps to Navy Corpsman short-hand he was sure. Either that or they were telepathic, and just trading random noise to confuse the uninitiated. At about that point, two more insectoids entered. The drones stood about six feet tall but almost as wide, lumbering scarab-like beetle creatures that virtually radiated menace and aggression despite their careful avoidance of physical contact with the humans and furries filling the medical bay.

He only had a moment to watch them making their way to guard their queen before the big insect chirruped out another odd non-sequiter.

"We should go look atDerryand Niece in the nursery!"

Olly had to think a moment, to determine what she meant. There was no neonatal ward on the Fist of the Nascent Dawn or any naval vessel for that matter. Then it dawned on him that Ix'kat probably had no word for hospitals in their native language. If they were like most insects, seriously wounded combat drones would just be disassembled, their components re-used, since the things weren't really intelligent anyway.

The idea made him shiver a bit, inside, though he managed a wan smile.

"Yes, let's. Which way is it?"

A short time later, pushed through the bustling hive of activity that was the Fist of the Nascent Dawn's corridors by Derkin, Olliver and company arrived at the secondary hospital ward. On its main entrance door, currently dogged shut, a taped-up hand-written sign read "Recovery - Observe Noise Discipline, Please."

Derkin released Olliver's wheelchair handles and stepped around him, knocking twice before spinning the wheel-lock open. The doorway hissed softly as it opened, and the otter crinkled his snout at the sour scent of disinfectant that rolled out. A quick exchange of formalities occurred, in which Derkin signed all three into the infirmary. The moment it was proper to do so, Olly gripped his chair's wheels and pushed himself through the doorway, around the paper-signing medics, and began exploring the chamber full of beds and curtain partitions, looking for his friends. The bug queen stayed just behind and to his right, as if guarding him. He snorted aloud at the thought, and chalked it off to insectoid instinct.

Navigating the half-walls that surrounded each bed in monitors or curtains quickly became aggravating as the surly otter tried to push himself up higher in the wheelchair, even knowing his paralyzed abdominal muscles would never let him stretch up in such a way. When his wheels came up off the ground, he yelped in surprise, grabbing onto the arms of his chair in a moment of helpless terror, before realizing just how he'd gotten off the ground.

"Private Clicks! Set me down at once!" he yelped out, fear banging in his thundering heart as he held on for dear life. The alien creature tilted her head at him and snickered, a weird click-chattering noise in her throat.

"I thought you wanted to be taller! I'm not helping?"

"NO!" he yelled, as she began to lift him higher. When he heard Derkin laughing, grouchy annoyance at the joke superceded his pulse-pounding terror of being dropped, and he glared down at the two, ducking his head slightly to the side in order to avoid touching ears to the ceiling.

Down below and to Clicks' right, behind a half-wall he'd not been able to see around moments before, the grinning face of a female timber wolf looked up at him, her head wrapped but for the ears in gauze.

Nivea's voice sounded hoarse, as she gave him a thumbs-up and spoke in joking tones.

"I thought you loved being that high up, Olly."

"Yes, in myWalker, you bint!"

She snickered raspily, as Derkin moved past the half-wall to take her paw and look into the next enclosure. Sergeant Blake was struggling with the bed's control panel, trying with two cast-enclosed paws to get it into a sitting-up position. The normally quiet, stuidously expressionless-faced wolf had his black brows furrowed together in annoyance, and seemed to be grumbling.

Something, some combined relief that they were both observably alive and sense of smug amusement thatDerrycouldn't operate so simple a piece of machinery, broke through Olly's annoyance. He snorted, finally, and rolled his eyes in surrender.

"Fine fine, set me down, you've had your fun."

Both wolves were in paper gowns, covered halfway with thin blankets made more for privacy than warmth in the climate-controlled chamber. Nivea had bandages on her head and chest, of the sort of wrap he was used to seeing for folk with broken ribs. By the hoarseness, he guessed the medics had her on a respirator until fairly recently, likely the result of the two-day coma she'd entered after finally losing consciousness during their extraction.

The fact that her bed's controls were covered in a piece of hard cardboard, taped into place, told him her condition was still somewhat delicate. The doctors wanted her pretty much completely immobile, until the nano-surgeons were entirely finished repairing whatever damage she had locked up in her skull.

Derkin shook his head and spoke in a half-amused and half-aggrieved tone while readingDerry's charts.

"Shit, looks like they're rationing the surgical nanos. You get to heal your broken wrists the old-fashioned way? Fucking bummer, Sarge."

"Yeah tell me about it," the wolf grumbled in exasperation, finally giving up and letting Derkin arrange the bed for him with a hum of mechanics. "These casts suck. I can't even scratch myself. They keeping you guys busy?"

Meanwhile, Clicks was patting Nivea's paw with her claw-tips, unable to hug the injured wolf for fear of further wounding her. Nivea was giggling ticklishly, wriggling her padded fingertips and sounded to Olly as if she were hopped up on enough pain medication to excuse her tittering as half-hallucinating ticklishness.

He sat back in the chair and slowly allowed himself to relax, watching the squad chat and catch up. Clicks regaled them all with a largely garbled and excitement-addled account of how she got her commendation storming the Star of Aden, which Olliver had already read in official file-speak the day before.

The news of Staff Sergeant Herrin's heroic act and death was met with somber companionate quiet, an unspoken agreement for a moment of silence. Though Olliver had never really known the lion, he nonetheless found himself quietly contemplating the heroic act leading to his death, while gazing about at the hospital walls. Without that heroic lion's sacrifice and Click's battle-savagery, the Fist of the Nascent Dawn would likely be a field of slowly-scattering space debris and frozen chunks of burnt and exploded corpses.

Finally, after an hour or so of catching up, quiet grief, and relaxed chattering, Olliver was pulled from the surprisingly mostly pleasant interplay by a beep of the communicator attached to his collar. He regretted the interruption - there weren't many furs in the galaxy he could consider calling friends, and these reprobates somehow had now occupied most of that count. When, exactly, that change had happened he wasn't sure.

The otter tapped his collar, activating the link, and spoke in a soft, level tone.

"Captain Tense here, go ahead."

"Captain Tense, this is Colonel Arnold Vespis, in theOpsCenter. Is Sar'nt Blake available? I can't seem to raise his communicator." Colonel Vespis' voice had an odd purring crispness to it, like a velvet glove atop an iron gauntlet.

"Affirmative, Colonel. Handing you over now."

"Thank you, Captain."

Olly detached the communications device, a tiny computer the size of his thumbnail that was clipped magnetically to his collar, and tossed the thing over toDerryalong with his around-the-ear audio piece. The wolf gave him an amused glower, as he tried to catch the tossed items and ended up bouncing them off his casts.

"Real good, Olly."

"No problem, Sergeant. Your new commanding officer, I think." The otter grinned, amused with the wolf's immobile paws and near-petulant attitude about them. By the time Derkin had helped slip the earbud into place and clipped the computer toDerry's hospital gown, the wolf's pouting had ended and he was sitting up as straight as the bed would let him.

"Sir, this is Sar'nt Blake. What may I do for you?"

Everyone listened intently, though the other side of the conversation was utterly inaudible to them. Derry's brows furrowed together a bit, and Olliver found his gut clenching, and his mind running to worry about what that expression could mean.

"Colonel, with due respect sir, this isn't the time to sideline us."

Olliver almost fell out of his chair. Derrywas too wounded to hold a pencil, nevermind a rifle, and Nivea wasn't even allowed to sit up straight, and this insane Marine was asking to be redeployed? He actually started laughing softly in his chair, shaking his head as Derkin made his way back around the beds and placed his heavy paws on the back of the seat. His fingers played along Olly's shoulders, hidden by his body, about the most affection the two had agreed seemed proper while on duty and in uniform.

After another five minutes of tense back and forth, mostly the Colonel speaking,Derrythanked Vespis for his time and disconnected the link, before sitting forward on the bed and banging himself in the face with a cast while trying to rub his snout. The impact rung a grunt out of him, and Derkin was at his side immediately, before being waved off.

"Just whapped myself, it's not even bruising, Derks."

Sitting back against the upright bed backing, with all eyes on him,Derryhad his closed for a few seconds, seeming to gather himself. Then he spoke words as if they were the thunder of a coming storm.

"We've got a month of R&R coming, as soon as the Fist reaches its new duty posting. While First Fleet and the Ix'kat were here ripping the UGF Navy a new asshole, the Galateans managed to take Earth and the shipyards on Titan. In other words, they now control the Sol system and 90% of the human genetic reserve. If First Fleet can't retake Earth before the UGF do something crazy, society as we know it will collapse in the next ten generations, as uncontrolled genetic drift goes crazy in our modified genome."

The reaction was universal, though not to the orders of R&R. Nivea growled throatily, Derkin scowled and glared away at a wall, as if he somehow knew where Earth was in relation to them across the vast gulf of space. Clicks' armor plates rattled against each other in a way that sent chills down what parts of Olly's spine he could feel. The otter himself growled reedily and clenched his jaw, staring intoDerry's deep brown-grey eyes.

"The UGF's naval forces are crippled, reduced by almost half, but we need to take Earth and Titan without bombing them to bits. So naturally, the Marine Corps and Army are going to be doing the real work this time around. Our unit is...In the process of being made a permanent special forces unit..."

Though Olly sensed a rush of pride at the announcement, the wolf sounded odd to Olliver's ears. His confidence had been shaken by his near-brush with death. His eyes looked momentarily distant, perhaps even a bit haunted, before the big black wolf shook himself once, sharply, and spoke in a more confident tone.

"Our orders are to regroup on Atria Prime, rest and recouperate for one month while Fleet secures a number of critical star systems, and then ride with Fleet straight back into the shit. Our exact first targets aren't yet decided, but we'll be acting as reconnaissance and forward battlefield intelligence for the ground-pounders. We'll be first in and last out for the foreseeable future."

"Am I coming with you?" the Ix'kat queen chirruped, her antennae leaning forward as if seeking to touchDerry's words. The wolf gave her a nod, and she chirped in what Olly assumed was approval and pleasure.

"Kerr and Waters are already en route to Atria, to set things up for us. Verman and Kerrick will fly us there on a cargo ship that's being retrofit as a fast transport. Apparently once this all gets started, though, we'll be riding the Fist just like we have been. Thank the gods for that."

Derkin grinned and thumped the deck plate with his heavy boot, giving it a nice tolling sound that lasted a few seconds before speaking.

"Great, good to hear. I love the Vicious Miss, and she loves kicking ass. It works out good for both sides."

Derrymanaged a grin, finally, though he looked exhausted all over again. Nivea managed to grab her cup, after a few aborted tries, and flung the empty thing over the barrier between them, neatly bouncing it off her sar'nt's face.

"Lighten up, Sar'nt! You sound like you got another shoe to drop."

"We've got a new C.O."

"Eh? What, did we get that incompetent idiot Kelvin or something?"

"Hah, no. They're re-instating old man Tenh. He's going to be giving us our orders from now on."

"No bloody shit," spilled, disbelieving, from Olliver's mouth, his eyes going wide at the thought.

"Yeah,"Derryresponded, sounding like he wasn't sure what to think, "Full Bird Colonel Kandal, C.O. of the Dragonslayers. Colonel Vespis sounded like Tenh wasn't happy about being made rear echelon either. I've...Never heard of Tenh taking orders from anyone, but apparently Admiral Kerrick argued him into accepting."

"Haha, goddamn," muttered Niece. "Iron-eyes Kerrick bossed a fucking immortal killing machine. How rad is that?"

Captain Leith felt her heart sinking even farther, as she exited the briefing room, Grand Admiral Kerrick's debrief having ended on a note she found surprisingly sour. To her side, the new-minted Captain Galen Forza's expression was studiously neutral above his Commander's tabs, the promotion literally minutes old now. They didn't speak a word to each other, while being escorted toward the officer's quarters. Only when the guards finally broke off to man their posts as Adriana and Galen slipped into her personal quarters did she finally break the ominous silence between them.

"Fuck! ...I need you HERE, not on board the fucking Star of Aden!" she raged, the placid dignity of her Captaincy breaking like a glass pane thrown off a cliff onto jagged rocks. She ripped the communicator off her collar and threw it at her port hole, bouncing the thing across the room.

"That goddamn piece of scrap is going to be out of order for months! They need a fucking dry dock, not a new captain and a fresh slap of fucking paint and duct tape!"

Galen folded his arms over his chest and held up a corner of the wall, listening intently, his face an unusually serious mask of silent intensity. His big, deep eyes watched her move, as the fiery Captain Leith stalked around her quarters, pacing, running her hands through her short blonde hair after tossing her uniform cap aside.

When she finally stopped, and glared at him, the burly timber wolf rolled his shoulders and flexed his paws against his chest, letting the ache go out of them as he waited for his moment.

"You could have refused...!"

The look he gave her, knowing, mature, calm, seemed to pull the bluster out of her eyes. Her shoulders slouched, and Adriana shook her head, before straightening up and rubbing a hand over her face.

"Sorry, Galen. You were right to accept, I just...I don't want to lose you."

"You aren't losing me, Adri. We'll be flying alongside each other for the foreseeable future one way or the other, you know."

"I...Know that."

His former commander strode to her desk, where he'd sat for countless nights in their journey together, advising and assisting, talking and laughing, and poured herself a glass of expensive scotch. Then, before drinking it, she paused and poured a second, offering it toward Galen. While her back was turned, his eyes finally fixed on her.

"Have a drink, Captain. And congratul-mmf!"

He was across the room before she could do more than widen her eyes and drop the glass to the floor. His paws grabbed her by the hips, massive muscles turning the lithe little human woman to mash her back up against the bulkhead, her instinctive noise of protest cut off as his muzzle mashed into her silk-soft lips, his magma-hot tongue prying her mouth open and flying inside to suck at hers with the passion of a burning star.

Her moment of hesitation was entirely instinct, a lifetime of combat training telling her to fight back. Galen felt the tension run through her wiry frame, as her muscles clenched up in preparation to strike. Then, as instinct gave way to thought and then back to instinct again, she was trying to eat his lips, wrapping long powerful legs around his waist and balling her delicate fingers into the coarse fur on the back of his neck in some vestigial attempt to regain control of the heated grapple.

Galen outweighed her by almost double, with a foot of height and the thicker skin of a furry. In a real fight to the death, her only real hope, despite her long-practiced martial arts skills, would have been to draw her pistol and blow him away before he got this close. As it was, their battle was now a combat of passion and lust, in which he had the initiative.

Grinding the hard tent of his uniform pants' crotch against her groin made Adriana stiffen and gasp out, her pale face flushed bright red on the cheeks as her eyes flew open and then closed again in concentration. Their tongues and lips did battle, as Galen used his body to pin her there, before slipping his paws free to grab her hands. She resisted, though never trying to break the lung-sucking kiss, struggling against his vastly superior strength for a few seconds before he pinned her arms to the wall, over her head, and grabbed both of her wrists in one paw.

He gave another thrust, pushing the head of his iron-bar cock inside his pants against her sweet soft opening within her own, and she gasped as the move put pressure right where he'd wanted it. Her muscles tensed, and went slack, dazzled by the throbbing from her drooling entrance, as she tilted her head in acknowledged defeat. Not missing a beat, he released her luscious swollen lips, and clamped his thin black own over her throat, pricking her with the very tips of his very lethal fangs as the ever-competitive, brusque, ingenious, dominant Captain writhed helplessly in his grip.

The wolf growled, licking at the pink marks he'd left, then tilted his head forward so his long muzzle was against her ear, teasing and nipping at it as he spoke in heated, pant-truncated words.

"You've always been my commander, Adri, and a good one..." he huffed, taking breath between words. "But tonight, I'm in charge."

If she'd told him to stop, he later thought, he certainly would have. Instead, she just made a soft gasping noise, a tiny 'eep' of helpless arousal and lust and submission, and stared at him with her big blue eyes thrown wide open. She was terrified to let go of control, he suddenly realized, but thrilled by the fear, driven to heights of anticipated ecstacy by the sudden dominance she hadn't at all expected. Her submission was an utter surprise to the both of them.

With a powerful coiling and uncoiling of steely muscle, Galen turned and landed on the bed with her much smaller body beneath him, bouncing them both a little as she coughed out a forced breath. Before she could even consider recovering, he'd pressed her hands to the bed over her head, grabbed at a bit of knot-practice sailing rope that sat on her counter, and tied the two fleshy palms together and to the bed frame. With that done, he sat up, her toned, delicious ass resting in his lap, unable to close her legs thanks to his beefy torso's presence in the way, and looked the tight little package of a human over.

She was beautiful, to his eyes, blonde and smooth-skinned. For all that she was in her forties, great physical fitness and advanced medicine left her looking like a college girl, all blonde hair and blushes and barely-visible freckles on an un-lined youthful face. Her eyes were wide, slightly almond-shaped and blue like the tropical ocean, shivering with lust and emotion as his paws descended, unbuttoning her uniform jacket to toss it aside. She gave a delicious 'eep' of surprise again, making his cock throb against her, when he managed to get her white shirt unbuttoned and did away with her bra by the simple expedient of tearing it off with his teeth.

Her nipples were small, pink, but as erect as his throbbing shaft. Galen's mouth watered, as his muzzle clamped down on first one, then the other, gently savaging the pink mounds as his paws toyed with whichever nipple was being deprived. By Adriana's soft squeaks and gasps, and wriggles and pressings of her hips and pelvis, she liked what he was doing to them, even if it would leave little welts in the morning. The wolf growled and chuckled, using his long tongue to bath the shivering things, before sitting back to marvel at how soft and supple her breasts were, just barely filling his paws with their obsession-worthy firm, round perkiness. Her face was well and truly red now, and beading with sweat, as her lips tried incoherently to whisper breathless words.

"Muh...Nnnuhh..."

Her belt was off and flying across the room, soon joined by his own. He'd shimmied out of his pants, using one paw to hold her heaving belly down, by the time she was able to catch command of her still-heavy breathing and get her eyes open again. Her own pants took a few seconds to take off, since Adriana's legs didn't seem to be cooperating. The second her simple white panties were exposed, he was hit in the face with a wave of arousal that steamed from her sopping crotch, blossomed delectably across his tongue when he licked the transparent-wet patch just over her pussy.

She gasped, and hit an ankle against his side trying to get the thing over his back. Galen, meanwhile, tore the panties open at the crotch with his teeth, and buried his muzzle in between her hairless lips, storming the gates with his tongue as she yelped in pleasure again up above him, and jangled the bars of her bed with her clenching, tugging fists. The pad of his nose was rubbing right into her clit, coaxing the thing hard enough thatLeithwent incoherent again, shuddering and coughing out as her passage throbbed and sucked at his long canine tongue.

Once he'd tasted every inch of her insides he could reach, Galen slid smoothly up her body again, kissing at her gasping lips while the hard pointed tip of his cock nestled into Adriana's folds, lining himself up as her sopping heat suffused his shaft. His whispered words went straight into her mouth the first time, as she surprised him by thrusting her lips against his teeth and wrestling his tongue with hers. He'd managed to pull back enough to be heard the second time.

"If you're going to stop me, do it now."

"F...Fuck me, Galen..."

"Are you safe?" he murmured, slavering his cunt-juiced tongue over her face, tracing gently over her closed eyelids.

"Y...Yes...Do it...T-tie me."

"I'm in charge, remember..." he growled into her ear, biting it again just hard enough to make her gasp and arch.

"Tie me...Please?"

"Better," the handsome wolf growled into her ear, with an Olympic-class grin.

Thrusting into her was harder than he'd expected. She was lubed like an oil well by her own juices, coaxed by his tongue and mixed with his own saliva. Still, she was just over five feet tall and not much over a hundred pounds, and his cock would have looked good on an antique furry porn model. Spreading her open had her vulva stretched near to its limit, wrapped around the first inch of his pulsating bright red meat in a vice-tight grip.

When he made his first harder move, he had to grip her hips with both paws to avoid just forcing her tight insides away from him with his cock tip as a ramrod. Even so, he worried she was going to have bruises in the shapes of his ten fingers, especially when her mouth flew open and let out a gasp of mixed pain and ecstacy when the resistance gave way briefly, allowing him to sink three more inches into her clutching, spasming depths.

Panting now himself, the big wolf shifted his hips side to side, letting his cock swim in her juices and allowing her body time to adjust. He knew just by the pressure that she hadn't fucked anyone on this trip, as befit proper behavior expected of a commanding officer. It was against the military's rules to fraternize with servicemen of lesser rank, and whileLeithcould be fiery and ascerbic at times, she was not the kind to disobey an inconvenient rule when it was very, very important to observe.

Such sophisticated thoughts fled on his second thrust, as he sank to the half-way point and just beyond, then found himself utterly unable to go on as the little woman beneath him yelled out and came, hard, her insides exploding all over his twitching, dripping wolf cock. Adriana was a yeller, he now knew, his ears pinned back and face suffused with a feral grin as he watched her eyes roll shut with the intensity, saw her supple breasts shaking and quivering helplessly as orgasmic muscle contractions convulsed her face.

The last few inches sank in before her orgasm was done, in the weakening spasms towards its end, and he gloried in the wet, sucking heat that gripped him, as his mostly-swollen knot somehow managed to stretch her already gaping lips open just that slightest bit more that was needed to let himself fully inside. His own eyes shot wide as she clenched down again, her vulva seizing from the sheer size of what was now stuffed, crammed inside her steaming hole.

Galen had never tied someone on the first full thrust before. Then again, he realized, he'd never fucked a human girl before either. Lupine women were designed for this feature of their male counterparts, built with bodies that could handle a greater stretching at the nether lips. So were most canine furries, come to think of it. Adriana, meanwhile, was biting her lip, hard enough to draw the slightest bit of blood, from the concentration it had taken just to stay conscious after her orgasm, and now his knot's swollen entry had pushed her to the very limit, as her former XO ground himself at her deepest depths.

He could feel her cervix just barely scraped with his pointed tip, that hard-clenched ring tickling his cock in a way no more delicious for him than it was for her, if the shocked and lustful look on her face was any indicator. Her sweaty palms, clasped together over her head, had their fingers wrapped white-knuckled around each other as he ground again, pressing weighty pendulous balls to her ass. Leith's legs were now off to either side of him, having lost the control necessary to stay locked behind his hips.

"I'm...Hnf...Tied now...Won't last long..."

"Unghk..." was all she managed, throwing her head back to expose her already-marked throat a second time.

He clamped his teeth into her throat again, locking his lips against her, and gave another hard grinding thrust that had his cocktip mashed into her innermost barrier, his knot punishing the nerve-rich part of her vagina, the fur of his belly tickling her clit and balls banging against her ass. This time, Adriana didn't yell when she came. When pleasure detonated like a nuclear weapon in her crotch, she just let out a clenched, hard breath, right into his ear, and lost all motor control as her pulsating tunnel spasmed and seized down over every inch of his ready spike, and most importantly along and behind the knobs of his heavy-dut knot.

Galen howled, muffled by the delicate skin of her tender throat, and humped against her roughly once, twice, a third time, and then exploded, his heavy balls pulling up alongside his shaft as glorious pleasure spiked and tickled its way down from his cocktip to his balls to his asshole, then back up the way it'd come accompanied by a truly prodigious torrent of cum.

His tail flagging up and down with every emptying gush, he sprayed himself deep inside her body, drenching her battered cervix and filling her steamy-hot depths with the creamy seed he'd pent up for weeks. Half a dozen spurts surged hard enough for her to feel the impact, sending her into grunting, hoarse-sounding mini-orgasms that had her sucking desperately for air and clawing at the bed's headboard. The second half-dozen ejaculations merely filled her to overflowing, until she was leaking hot cum from her stretched and plugged opening, forced by pressure out around his tie.

They didn't talk for a while, lying there on the Captain's narrow bed. His fur kept her naked body warm, despite the cool air conditioned atmosphere and sweaty skin. Finally, he found enough strength to trace his lips over hers, and she found enough to welcome the kiss, more chaste this time, more exploratory and relaxed as they delicately and gently made love with their lips in delicate counterpoint to the rough fucking of cock and pussy they'd just shared.

Adriana broke the panting silence with words, finally, as she shifted and wriggled, trying to get used to the sensation of a huge ball of hard flesh stuffed into her, almost the size of a tennis ball.

"I...I've wanted to jump you s-since..."

"I've wanted to fuck you since we met in cadet training," Galen said, washing away her statement with another kiss, and a grin, and a wagging tail that made her giggle when she had breath again.

Her hands still bound, Adriana wriggled again, and Galen grunted as her body involuntarily squeezed, blowing another jet of cum into her depths that had Adri sucking for breath and twitching.

"Oh f-fuck...Galen...I can't s-stop..."

"Shh," he soothed, licking at the sweet saltiness of her sweaty cheek, "just relax."

They lay in silence a little longer, as the two became accustomed to the state of not-orgasming again. Finally Adriana broke the silence anew.

"I'm sorry I yelled earlier. I...Think I lo...er...Galen, I don't want to be away from you. This is for the best, though. Kerrick must have...Figure it out somehow...Taking proactive action for the sake of propriety...Or else just realized you were the best officer in the fleet for the job."

He chuckled, his smooth voice and smoother charm finally coming back.

"Either that or he wanted to reward us both. I get command of one of his biggest battleships, and you get to ride my doggy bone every time I win a bet."

She blinked in the dim lighting, and fixed him with a laughing stare.

"Seriously? This is about the bet we made on the bridge?"

He squirmed his hips and thrust again, still hard though his knot was shrinking, and she made a startled, pleased gasp.

"Yep. Well, that and I'm pretty sure I love you."

Adriana's eyes filled with tears as she laughed and squirmed and tried to force her muscles to clench down, finding them too spread open by the knot to quite remember how.

"I love you too, Galen Forza. We've got to live through this war, though, to make anything out of it."