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Author's Intro (Adapted from my Patreon page)

Hi Everyone,

Every so often, I remember how when I first started out writing furry fiction in 2018, initially it was just for kicks and just because I wanted to. Those first few sketches with Todd somehow made me want to write more. When I actually decided to share it and found this site right here, that's really where this entire chapter in my life started - those first few people who found my stories, left likes and comments, and generally encouraged me to do more. I do still remember the one who essentially acted as a beta reader for my second draft of Chasing Colton's Tail, before I did the final version that became the published book.

Lately, I've felt like connecting to those early days again. Yes I'm about to publish my 11th self-published furry book on all the usual platforms in September, and sometimes I still can't believe this went as far as it did, but I haven't forgotten my beginnings here at SoFurry. I did post some of what became Destoyer of the Road on here, right after I added Hunter to the mix of Alex's story, and the feedback confirmed to me that I definitely needed his name in the series title just like I thought. This time though, I'm giving something short and brand new over for free, hence this is posted here without being behind the paywall, and the rest of this will be too. It's also going on SoFurry.

Let's set the scene: I used to write sci-fi under my real name (dormant for the last 8 years after the furry stuff took off) and I always did wonder what if I combined my old SF chops with the furry stuff somehow, and lately I've been playing Star Wars Outlaws and watching lots of SW on Disney+, and I've had a bunch of furry SF ideas knocking around in my head for at least a few years but not dared to get started because I just had enough projects...

...and then I took stock of how long all my recent projects have been, realised I had an idea on my mind that could be nice and short, even if it did form part of something bigger later on...and I realised I needed to make it my mission just to write a short project that possibly didn't take longer than a couple of months to complete, if that...

...so here we go! A little bit of what I've heard referred to in SF circles as 'Popcorn Pew-Pew' kind of sci-fi. Yes, this started with me imagining a dog in a stormtrooper suit, and it's hard not to feel like I'm writing Star Wars fanfiction, but the challenge to make this something of my own is ON, even if to begin with I'm just going to have to see past the part of me that says I'm half-copying everything. At least it will hopefully entertain people!

Let's put the 18+ Content Label on at this point - you WON'T see the kind of scenes I'm going to put into this in Star Wars or any of it's more PG13-rated knock-off kind of fiction. I think we all know deep down that if you get shot with a blaster that can fire actual power bolts, it's gonna make a mess if you get hit by that. Oh yeah, and my characters tend to fuck. In all sorts of wonderful, kinky kinds of ways. Not only that but the ideas I've had for this one have the potential to go to some quite edgy places.

Enjoy....and I promise I won't drag this one out for years! It's going to be just like old-times in 2018.

Oh yeah, and the reason for the double working-title is that I had both in mind, and they both sound a bit twee, but also they sound like so much fun that I couldn't resist either of them, and I feel like I maybe taking this all too seriously for the last 2-3 years has been part of my problem with hitting a slump more often than I used to. I'm just out to have a good time with this one, so what does a title matter? Besides, remember when Chasing Colton's Tail and Out on the Highway were called 'Todd's Senior Prom' and 'Todd's Coming Out?' on SoFurry? They're actually still up there like that, because on some level I can't bear to delete them.

* * *

Desh Devereux knew he was going to die as he scrambled to reach to the chamber holding the space combat suits, but at least he was going to do it with a view of space from outside of a ship. He was going to do it wearing an Elite suit. He’d never have gotten to be an officer even if this hadn’t been his last few minutes alive, but at least he could have one small taste of it. The resistance weren’t getting what they came here for, because Desh was holding onto it, and that meant he deserved that suit. There was nobody else from his unit left to claim it, let alone an officer.

They said the air you got from your first time in an Elite felt like the purest you’d ever breathe, because that’s when you’d really made it in the fleet. Desh knew they mostly said it to remind you you’d never breathe like that if you were an imperial trooper from ‘mutt origins’ and a runaway to boot. Desh was a golden labrador who had never been anyone’s golden boy, except for when it came to being able to hit a moving target from any angle while on the move himself. That was the only reason he was still breathing, let alone running along the corridors of a stealth imperial ship, which had lost anything stealthy about it as soon as the resistance had boarded it.

His unit wiped out (so much for the reinforcements when you were the reinforcements), alone and his trooper suit plastered in resistance blood, Desh had one last thing to do to honour the oath he’d taken five years ago, his paw on the imperial code book, knowing how much his family would hate it that from then on he’d at least be called ‘Trooper.’ They’d told him he was never joining the empire. Then when they’d finally told him they never wanted to see him again, they simply didn’t think the empire would ever take him.

The purge-plague take them all, he’d become Trooper Desh Devereux. He’d put his paw on that book.

Fastest in the unit getting out of a trooper suit. He really had won that title, thinking it would probably never matter. What mattered was being the best shot when you were inside it. Until now.

He’d taken out whoever he could see, left, right, there wasn’t really direction anymore apart from ‘hit that’. Desh never missed. Target practice was the only thing he’d ever known he was good at besides keeping fit enough to sprint while doing it. Everyone else could score well standing still, but Desh, he could be the last one standing no matter what he was doing. Now he was the last one on this stricken ship for real.

He got the crippled commander with half his leg missing through doors before the tail end of the ship tore off and the repair bots zoomed in to plaster the breach with carbon-gel barriers. They’d sealed half of the commander on the pressurised side of the door as Desh tried to pull him through, and then Desh could only watch his other half rush away into space through the blue light of the barrier that had saved him. He might not get any thanks, nor be able to give any, but Desh had what he needed - the contents of the commander’s combat pockets. That would get him into the combat suit room. It might even be enough to get him a posthumous honour, if they ever found his body, complete with the datacards the resistance had tried to steal.

The resistance were still trying. They were here, on this side of the ship. Desh dived around a corner, taking cover from their blaster fire, knowing he’d brought the card straight to them if he didn’t make it to the suit room alive.

Except they didn’t look the resistance. They were too well equipped. Desh had seen that much before his suit took a glancing blow from a blaster shot that was powerful enough to knock the air out of him for a good ten seconds, right before he dived.

They must be syndicate. Except Desh knew syndicates when he saw them. You knew that when you grew up on Peldrengo and your family name carried weight even if yours didn’t. If this was a syndicate black operation then they were a level of dangerous that went beyond what Desh’s father knew how to keep tame so they could run their food supply business.

It didn’t matter - the three of their fighters who were still in here had all gone down, because Desh Deveraux was quicker on the draw and could still take someone’s head off shooting from the hip, and the last thing they’d expected him to do was dive back around that corner and face into them. The suits they had probably meant he’d inflicted a stun shot on them all at best, but it didn’t matter. They were getting blown apart or sucked into space when he used the commander’s card to blow the ship. Let’s see their suits outlast an Elite, if they even got out and then far enough away.

Desh saw the door that he knew was shaped differently because they always had to make these rooms look special - a round door that looked more like a safe vault. He flashed the commander’s chain-fob. The light went green. The door rolled open.

There they were - a row of ten Elite suits, gleaming metallic white, red and blue. Desh got to hear ‘the sound’ in the flesh, not just in a movie - the whirring, clicking and hissing as he swiped the card over one, not expecting it to work because they were a backup unit and his commander had never been stationed on this ship, but there it was: the sound of glory.

Desh was standing and not running, but still he scrambled. He’d saved the Surge vial in his trooper suit for now, knowing he’d need it for speed once it was time to get out of one suit and into another. He activated it. The tiny needles pierced the veins below his elbow pits; the surge kicked in and flashed to his brain in less than an eye blink. Detaching his gloves, his bare fingers were finding all the other catches and pressure points faster than he’d ever believed possible. If there was a record for doing this on surge, then goddamn it he was setting it right now.

‘Strip your clothes off, you drunk dog! Right down to your pants and let me see that great big bulge you’ve got for me.’

Desh had spent his entire time at the academy trying to forget Harley Costigan, the handsome rugged mutt who’d got himself and probably his entire family killed back on Peldrengo, but right then Desh was thankful for that day in the barn, the first time he’d ever taken everything off for a guy, and how he’d discovered he had no tolerance for gawa-fruit cider or potato Spotchka, especially not when tried on the same evening. That bulge in his pants had been more like a tent after Harley’s teasing, tickle-fighting and the way he always took hold of Desh’s ears and pulled them gently, knowing it induced a kind of shiver-thrill that went all through him. Near-naked in front of Harley, the very tip of Desh’s tent-bulge had been wet.

Thanks, Harley. I might just die with a smile on my face AND a load in my pants. If I get this suit off and the Elite on before whoever’s trying to plasma-cut through that fucking door right now manages it. So much for the stun-shot that would have broken most necks anyway. Who are these people?

The blue light was flashing behind him. Naked apart from underpants and combat tags, Desh jumped into the chamber, pivoted and threw himself into the open suit. Something whirred, clicked, and the chamber filled with red light.

‘DNA not recognised. Fifteen seconds to vacate suit.’

No…NO! I’m dead? Not like this. Not when I can…

‘Over-ride sequence, code AVP, pass number oh-one, oh-one, oh-one.’

The chamber went green. The suit’s micro-layers folded over instantly, enveloping Desh in a tight cocoon. He flexed his fingers, then hands then arms, then leapt out of the chamber inside the Elite.

That worked? The fucking worked? How was he going to explain it?

He wasn’t. They weren’t coming for him in time. Sixty minutes of oxygen, but nobody in his sector to pick up his distress call. It didn’t matter. Just so long as the resistance didn’t get everything else he’d taken from the commander’s suit.

The door broke down. Desh’s hand snatched the suit’s combat pistol out of it’s hip-holster. The resistance, syndicate, whatever they were, they were quick, but Desh was quicker - the suit’s enhanced vision penetrating the smoke and picking up his target as a thermal image, instantly superimposed over his natural vision, and it was just as simple as the video games he’d grown up with: pew-pew-pew…pew-pew…_one shot was enough for each of them. No stun this time. Nobody’s suit was protecting them from _that badboy. Used outside of the suit, the recoil would have snapped the wrist off anyone clean in two like a twig.

The Surge still coursing through his blood, Desh ran. He’d always been a good sprinter, but this wasn’t mere sprinting - the corridors blurred and the doors flashed past him like he was riding a maglev train. For some reason, he thought of the first time he’d ever done that, on his enlistment day. The world had never seemed to fast that day, and it was nothing to do with the ride that took him to the imperial station. Now his final ride was to the flight deck, littered with the bodies of imperial officers and special troopers. Another uniform he’d never wear, but at least he got to see it one last time from inside the helmet of an Elite.

He scanned the commander’s fob at the control computer. ‘Initiate self-destruct sequence, authorisation code eight-nine-seven-nine-four-three.’

‘Voice recognition for Commander Harrington not accepted.’

Desh paused, realising for the first time how cool his body felt despite the ships heat regulation systems being shot. It really was true, a few deep breaths of Elite air were like nothing else. Desh took them, then he knew what he had to do.

‘Bypass security protocol. Code AVP, pass code oh-one-oh-one-oh-one. For Atlas.’

For a moment, the world stood still inside Desh Devereux’s head. He saw the feed barn where he’d first made naked, drunken love to Harley. He saw the wheat fields stretching to the horizon on the farms where he’d grown up. He heard his father’s voice saying ‘Look, just humour your brother, we all know he can’t do jack-shit, let me talk to the Costigans and get him on their farm most of the time instead…’ Then Desh saw the walls again, covered in jungle vines and plants left to take over, on the kind of planet he’d never been to or felt the climate of, except in those dreams. Sprayed on one of those endless crumbling ruins was the symbol from the dream again: a backwards capital D, with what looked like half a captial H melded onto the right side of it. The same thing he saw in every dream when he heard numbers, codes, the name of someone called Atlas.

Whatever the empire had put in his head, it was supposed to be there. He was never going to have time to find out why, but this was somehow what he was supposed to do, how he was supposed to die, and he knew it.

Not bad for the kid who once couldn’t do jack-shit. He’d been the fastest trooper out of a suit. He’d been the best damn simulation gamer the academy had seen in centuries, and that’s why he’d been awarded the neural plug that meant he could could one day get inside an Elite if he ever got promoted high enough. They’d only let him game and simulate in it, for two weeks, because that was part of his prize too, but he got to keep it afterwards, because once you had one you could never take it out without risk of scrambling your brain and nervous system, and the empire might waste a trooper but they wouldn’t waste good tech.

He’d sometimes dreamed of returning home with a status as elite as his suit, finding the people who had executed Harley Costigan, for doing what amounted to little more than trying to keep his family’s rent paid, and then they’d just see what happened. Then he’d look at his own family and still see if they still thought he still couldn’t do jack-shit now.

Except when Desh’s thoughts returned to where he was, he was the same dog he’d always been. The one who couldn’t seem to do even the simplest tasks without making them complicated, who during his Academy training once lost his locker key and then had to admit that his spare one was inside his locker. The one who’d stacked the harvesting machine from the family farm on its side in a flat field because he’d simply pressed the wrong button and sped up instead of slowing down, and the holes left by the thieving gophers that he should have known how to avoid did the rest. This was all him. Because his daydream had carried him through the computer saying ‘Self-destruct sequence initiated’ and the time he should have spent running to the airlock so he could eject out of it and use the suit to power himself far enough from the ship when it blew had simply ticked away.

Desh closed his eyes.

‘Being the best shot doesn’t always save you, huh’

That was Harley again. What he once said when Desh had almost completed one of their FPS games on the impossible setting, only to find he couldn’t beat the timer on the final mission.

His eyes still closed, Desh decided he wanted to think of Harley. The way he always knew he’d get cuffed around the head for cursing when he was a kid, even at a video game, and his response to nearly beating a level only to die at the last minute (including, often, getting taken out by Desh in a two-player contest) was always so adorably the same: ‘Aaaaaaaaw, you total poo-head!’ Everyone thought it was so funny that Harley ended up holding onto the phrase into their later life.

‘Quit hogging that bottle, poo-head!’ Every time they secretly drank Spotchka together as teenagers. The day of Desh’s funniest ever prank: ‘Uuuuurgh my fucking BRAIN…where did you get an ACTUAL dog-whistle? Why did you use it on ME, poo-head?’ T_he look on Harley’s face told Desh that all he wanted to be was tied up in the barn later so he couldn’t cover his ears and let Desh blow that silent whistle again and again, hurt-comforting him all the way to an explosive shot in his pants. Harley had a thing about watching a guy squirt in his pants, or being watched he did it in his own. _‘Good boy….who’s my good boy? Who likes getting their brain ripped to bits by my whistle, huh?’ Harley’s response to get more: ‘Fuck you, poo-head!’

Then there was the way Harley had once laughed at Desh’s secret ambitions when they were laying together catching their breath after an even better time than that, and said Oh please, you are NEVER joining the empire, poo-head! You with a REAL blaster? You’d blow your own head OFF and paint the walls brown! Besides, why d’you wanna join the empire? Don’t you wanna be free?

Desh opened his eyes. ‘Thanks, Harley. I wish I’d told you I loved you. I’m free now. Here I come.’

The hydrogen bomb went off in a brilliant flash of white, and the remaining half of The imperial stealth ship known as Shackler’s Revenge blew apart.

• * *

IO-Europa, the company behind Elite combat suits, later managed to boast of one near-miraculous achievement: every time they had tested their finest models with a dummy and a decommissioned ship they could blow up with the force of a hydro-bomb , the suits didn’t make it out of the blast intact enough to be able to certify that they had a chance of saving someone’s life in a self-destruct situation unless they got far enough from the ship by using one

However, with Trooper Desh Devereux inside one, the suit made it, and that dog was alive for three whole minutes afterwards, because even though the main oxygen supply that would have bought him one standard hour was rendered defective, the carefully positioned backup supply bought him his life.

The suit was totalled, and wouldn’t see another trip out with anyone in it, but it was the kind of totalled that just about kept Trooper Devereux protected enough from the vacuum and space’s insta-freeze temperature that his vital organs still worked even though little else did. Although, as the reports made a point of noting in unmissable terms, when he was picked up by the rescue vessel, he was able to take the suit off himself, once he’d gotten over how it picked up his struggling life-signs and injected him with a mega-burst of Surge-infused nanonic blood, and he’d only had badly bruised bones and not broken ones.

IO-Europa were set to make a killing from the new boost in their reputation, and all because of a trooper who was never supposed to wear one of their suits surviving the impossible in one. The only trouble was that the report detailing the incident was immediately made classified by the highest authorities in the imperial intelligence division.

Because just how did Trooper Desh Devereux, a runaway Peldrengon dog who only just managed to graduate from the Academy despite being one bullseye of a good shot, get it on in the first place?