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Ten years later... I was sitting in the command deck of my flagship, the Nautilus, crammed into what was possibly THE most uncomfortable command chair ever. It was an ugly thing; a frame of welded steel "padded" with a material resembling Styrofoam, but nearly as hard as rock. Its stiff backrest was third-degree murder on my back, and scrunched up my tail into a painful curl. Even my toughened body couldn't stand sitting in it for long periods of time. I'd asked Requisitions over and over for a more comfortable chair, something with better padding or at least a hole in the back, but they always seemed to be out of stock. Figures. Normally, I'd be squirming around in my seat, trying to cushion my rear with a wadded-up blanket, but I had more pressing matters at hand: on the Nautilus' main viewscreen, the Conglomerate navy was dying one ship at a time. For the crew, the sight was almost euphoric; after ten bloody years, the Connies were finally getting their just desserts. Every time the Nautilus scored a critical hit on a Connie ship, they cheered like football fans whose team just scored a touchdown. Already, they'd cheered at least four, no five times. Me, well, I wasn't really sure how I should feel. On one hand, the Conglomerate, an organization known for its greed, cruelty, and immorality, was getting its overdue comeuppance; a misbehaving child finally given a good spanking. On the other hand, every time a ship was destroyed, at least 200 men and woman were killed along with it; two hundred innocent souls whose only crime had been working for the wrong side. Still, I guess it was better them than us. A sharp "beep" sounded from my chair's speakers. A green icon disappeared from the viewscreen; a text box identified it as the light cruiser Lemmy Atem. Apparently, a Connie destroyer had managed to put a magcannon round through her coolant tanks, causing a meltdown that turned the 100 meter-long craft into a cooling debris cloud. The crew ignored it. Tragic as her loss was, the Lemmy Atem was only one ship out of our 500-strong armada; the Conglomerate could destroy 20 more ships like her and they'd still be hopelessly outnumbered. Still, I didn't want to lose any more ships than I absolutely had to. I issued a command to all five of the combined fleets. The green icons on the viewscreen arranged themselves into two loose hemispheres, and engulfed the ragged Conglomerate fleet like a lymphocyte consuming a bacterium. Red icons began winking out of existence by the freighter load. "Yawwwwn..." A massive yawn escaped my mouth. I'd barely slept at all last nightshift; for the past few eight day-units I'd been running on syn-coffee and sheer willpower. Both of which had just ran out. The sight of the once-mighty Conglomerate navy/army being blasted to dust become strangely lulling. Like the lullabies Teacher would sometimes sing to me. My eyelids began to droop. The command deck grew blurry, then slowly faded away, as I drifted off into the netherworld of sleep. As I slumbered, my subconscious mind took over, sending me back to when all this had all begun, ten years ago... "SCHKUNK!" A docking umbilical attached itself to the freighter's main airlock. After a long, three week journey from the Station, Floyd's ship had finally arrived at the UCAB's Ceres base. From a distance, Ceres didn't look like much; just a pockmarked ball of rock. About as dull and uninteresting as you could get. As you got closer, however, you could make out a thin ring around the ball's equator: a docking ring allowing departing ships to use the asteroid's spin as a fuel-saving boost. From the ring, Ceres became a virtual city in space; Poking from its crust were structures of every kind: telescopes and radio towers, greenhouses and mass drivers. Below the desolate surface were huge, man-made caverns, hollowed out of Cere's icy mantle. Each cavern contained what were essentially small cities, each housing at least 90,000 workers; puny, compared to the twenty billion of the Inner planets, but pretty impressive for a ball of rock and ice. While Floyd talked to someone over his comm, a tendril of worry wormed its way into my heart: how would the UCAB would react to my appearance? My predatory appearance, coupled with the fact that I'd been designed as a living superweapon, weren't exactly assets when it came to making first impressions. Floyd had told me to relax: "The miners aren't really big on appearances." To them, it's more about what you can DO than what you ARE... and considering all the things YOU can do, they'll be more than happy to have you join." He'd said with a smile I hoped for both our sakes he was right. "SSSSSSSSSSS..." The freighter's airlock slowly slid inward... and a squad of ragtag soldiers burst out of the umbilical, lasers sights painted on my chest. "FREEZE!" * * * To this day, I don't know how the UCAB knew I was coming; maybe one of the crewmembers had informed them ahead of time. Maybe they'd pieced it together from intercepted transmissions. However they did it, it was obvious that Floyd had forgotten one important detail: the miners may have been tolerant, but they were still human. Despite living in an environment where cooperation and teamwork were as important as oxygen and water, the miners still judged individuals by their appearances. They couldn't help it; it was literally hardwired into their brains. When they realized that there was a furry Frankenstein heading towards their main base, all of their "tolerance" was thrown out the airlock. The soldiers were no exception; their makeshift armor suits gave off the distinct tang of nervous sweat. They pointed their weapons- stolen Conglomerate mag-rifles and modified cutting lasers-at me like spears, fingers perched precariously close to the firing studs. Floyd stepped out, holding his hands up in an appeasing manner. "Calm down! He's not going to hurt you!" The soldiers ignored him; one of them ran up to me and whipped out a shockstick, set to its near-lethal max setting. I made no attempt to resist as he brought the club-like weapon down on my head, sending a couple thousand amps coursing through my body. My fur shifted through all the colors of the rainbow as my nervous system went haywire; my limbs flailing as if they were trying to wrench themselves from my body. As I lay there, another soldier whipped out a can of glue spray and sprayed three times the recommended amount of the stuff onto me. By the time I finally regained control of my body, the gluey, sticky spray had stuck my arms and legs together like hardened syn-syrup. One of the soldiers had pressed a finger against his ear. "Intruder neutralized." I heard him say. I could make out a sound from his right ear. He listened to something for a few minutes. Roger sir, taking subject to containment My helpless body was placed in a large bag. I could feel a not-so-gentle lurch, then a harsh rocking motion as the troops carried me into the guts of the asteroid. "Containment" turned out to be a small storage closet with an improvised locking system. Pitch black, and hot as hell, the tiny closet was anything but comfortable. Sweat poured from my glands like a leaking water tank. It was times like this that made me wish the Conglomerate hadn't added the fur-growth genes to my genome. Escape was out of the question. While my Pem blades could easily cut through the closet's flimsy hatch, where could I go? All incoming traffic to and from Ceres was heavily monitored. It'd be all but impossible to sneak out undetected. True, given enough time, I could find a way to evade their defenses, but that brought up another problem: where would I go? Most of the Solar System was under Conglomerate control; the moment I set foot on a planet, I'd be thrown into the nearest Connie detention center .Hostile as it might be, the Belt was my only refuge. Hours passed. My throat dried quickly in the hot storage closet. With the possibility of a glass of water growing smaller by the minute, I tried diverting my attention to something else; namely, what the UCAB was going to do to me. I figured that at best, I'd be released from this stifling closet, given a decent meal and a sonic shower, then inducted into the UCAB armed forces. Wishful thinking. More likely, the Cabs would leave me in here until I died of thirst, then try to salvage the tech in my body. The quantum tap generator and the Pem panels were both very valuable technologies; even if the Cabbies couldn't find a way to reverse-engineer them, they would fetch a very hefty price on the black market. Hell, if they wanted to squeeze out a few more credits, they might also take my color-shifting pelt. With a little cutting and stitching, it'd make for a nice fur coat or a lovely scarf, perfect for any occasion. After what seemed like an eternity in the hadean supply closet, a security team finally let me out. By this time I was so dehydrated that I'd come VERY close to drinking a bottle of Kleen-All. One of the guards offered me his canteen; I snatched it from his hand and chugged it down like it was the nectar of the gods. My thirst slightly sated, the guards escorted me down the stony tunnel, stopping at a large, stainless steel hatch. At first, I thought that the Cabbies had decided to space me, and the drink the guard had given me was their equivalent of a last meal. The lead guard tapped something on his arm. The door hissed open. At first, all I saw was a blinding light- being trapped in total darkness for over four hours had made my eyes super- sensitive to light. The light faded as my eyes adjusted, revealing the most amazing thing I have ever seen. "Welcome to Ceres' City dog boy" ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Terrans have it lucky Earth has more water than it's inhabitants need. To them, real soap-and â€"water showers are a part of life. Hot summer days can be spent swimming in cool lakes, going to wasteful waterparks, or just squirting it at each other. It's a little different in the Belt. In space, water was the most valuable commodity imaginable, used in everything from hydroponics to Nano-manufacturing. The water you drank was either slightly bitter asteroidial water-ice, or flat, recycled graywater. A genuine soap-and-water shower was a luxury few could afford. To us, Water was worth more than anything, and Ceres was loaded with it; below her rocky crust was a mantle of solid water-ice. She might as well have been made of credit chits, and her city showed it. Ceres' City was a testament to her creator's wealth; a city of ice buried in Ceres' icy mantle. Light refracted from the cave's interior lights enveloped the city in a soft, rainbow hue. The buildings themselves were also incredible; palaces and mansions, castles and fortresses, all carved out of Ceres' icy flesh, shimmering like cut diamond. The town square hosted an extravagant ice fountain, studded with bits of rare wood the first colonists had brought with them. Despite all the ice, the cavern was surprisingly warm; I later learned that the ice was coated with a thin aerogel coat, allowing the miners to heat the city without reducing it to slush. The place was a virtual El Dorado. Unfortunately, the city's beautiful appearance was only skin-deep. Despite the colony's tremendous water wealth, she was as poor as dirt. Before the UCAB was formed, Ceres (and the rest of the Belt) had relied mostly on imports for her food supply; a deliberate tactic the Conglomerate had used to keep her in their pocket. Because of the current hostilities, all trade with the Belt had been cut off, leaving the miners dependent on what little food they could grow or steal. The few citizens I saw in the streets were dangerously thin, probably living on less than a thousand calories a day. They looked at me hungrily, probably calculating how much meat they could get off of me. A few day units later, I found myself standing in the middle of an intricately carved council chamber; its Coliseum-style benches packed with (surprisingly well fed) UCAB senators; standing on a raised podium, the UCAB president, a stocky Chinese-Afro man with thinning hair, tried to get the council to calm down. From the way the council members acted, it was clear the UCAB wasn't quite sure what to do with me. Some of the senators thought my little act of rebellion might be nothing more than an elaborate cover set up by the Conglomerate. If they let me out, I'd slowly destroy the UCAB from within. The rest thought that I might be a genuine defector; the data I'd stolen had been legitimate, and their spies HAD confirmed an explosion on the Conglomerate's Lunar Station. Maybe I was telling the truth. Arguments were exchanged like mag-gun fire. Every argument was peppered with profanity, ranging from run-of-the-mill insults to profanity that would shame a sailor. Some of the more fiery members actually exchanged a few punches with their opponents before being sedated by security. After a few units, the President had managed to restore some measure of order; the arguments weren't nearly as violent, and most of the firebrands had been expelled. To my delight, I was also given a defense attorney: Floyd Turns out Floyd, as well as being a competent artist, also made for a pretty good defense attorney (he'd read a lot of crime novels). For every argument my opponents hurled at him, he had a perfectly executed counterargument. After four hours of intense debate, he finally managed to convince the council that my intentions were friendly; furthermore, he managed to convince the president that I should inducted into the UCAB armed forces A guy couldn't ask for a better friend. _________________________________________________________________ My first mission was sheer suicide. The Conglomerate was trying to conduct mining operations in the Belt. Naturally, the UCAB couldn't allow their enemies to have access to their metal wealth, but their armed forces were so small that a frontal assault would be suicide. So, they came up with a less conventional plan: slip a saboteur past the Conglomerate defenses and have him plant a demo pack on the base's automated mining rig. The planners knew that the mission would be dangerous; the odds of the saboteur surviving were at least 1:700. Naturally, I volunteered. The plan was risky, to say the least; I was to be sealed into a hollowed out carbonaceous asteroid and, using a modified asteroid tug, push me towards the mining base. Not as a kamikaze pilot of course- The Conglomerate would destroy anything on a collision course with their base. No, once I got within 20,000 kilometers of the installation, I was to leap from the asteroid and use a cold-gas jet pod to slow myself down. My relatively small size, coupled with the masking effects of the jet-pod, should let me slip by the base's defenders without being detected. By the time I reached the base, the jet pod should have slowed me down to a relatively safe speed, allowing me to reach the mining rig without splattering against it. Because the UCAB was short on equipment, all I was issued, aside from the jet pod and demo pack, were a weeks' worth of water and food rations, a spacesuit modified for my canoid form, and a small multi-tool Because of the spacesuit, any attempt to use my Pem panels as blades would kill me in seconds, so I'd have to do without them. Also, because the mission was considered a suicide run, there would be no attempts to recover me. If I survived, I'd have to find my own way back. Consider it done I'd said. * * * The trip to the mining rig itself was largely uneventful. Sealed inside the pitch-black asteroid, I'd spent most of my time on my personal thinscreen, catching up on my writing and listening to classical music. Every once in a while, I'd take my lucky coin and give it a small, good luck kiss. Silly, yes, but if experience had taught me anything, it never hurt to trust in luck. After a week of being cramped inside the pitch-black asteroid, I finally reached my target point. Slipping my thinscreen into my equipment belt, I donned my spacesuit and straddled the jet pod, looking for all the solar system like a space suited Slim Pickins. I tapped a panel on my suit gauntlet; The asteroid cracked itself in two, and an explosive charge sent me on a one-way trip towards the Conglomerate base. The deceleration process was perhaps the most dangerous part of the mission. The jet pod had been taken from a decommissioned UCAB tug; even with the modifications the UCAB engineers had made, I had to be VERY careful when using it. One little slip up could send me and the pod shooting uncontrollably into space, putting quite a damper on my mission. Thankfully, the pod was relatively well behaved, responding to the jury-rigged controls like a tamed horse. My lucky coin must have been working After an hour of riding the jet pod cowboy style, the tear-drop shaped container was completely dry. Thankfully, by that time, I'd bled off enough speed to allow a safe, if jarring, contact with the mining rig. * * * To say the mining rig was huge was like calling the sun "warm": it was a two-kilometer long brick of titanium and steel, capable of refining ten tons of ore every hour. Its huge loading claws, each one the size of a small fighter, gave it the appearance of a Lovecraftian monster (if Lovecraft had had a degree in engineering). I activated the magnets on my boots. CLUNK! The miniature electromagnets stuck me to the metallic hull, while still allowing me enough freedom to move around. After a brisk, half kilometer "walk", I came to the rig's only weak spot, a thin section of hull directly over its primary coolant tank. The shaped charge demo pack would blow a hole right through the critical coolant tank, causing a meltdown in the rig's main reactor and destroying the rig from the inside. I took the shaped-charge demo pack off my back and stuck it to the hull. A few taps on its rudimentary control panel set its timer: five minutes, no more, no less. All that was left was to press the activation switch. I brought a gloved claw up to the switch, and gently pressed it. Nothing The arming indicator should have turned red, indicating the pack was armed. Yet it stayed an "unarmed" green. I pressed it again. Still nothing. A little worried, I pressed it yet again. Once again, nothing: the demo charge remained inert Puzzled, I detached the charge from the rig's hull for a closer look. "Belt workmanship at its finest" I growled. The demo pack's arming circuits had been installed incorrectly. When I'd pressed the arming switch, the pack's detonator had shorted out. The vital arming circuits had been reduced to charcoal. The demo pack was useless! * * * I stood there on the hull of the Conglomerate mining rig. Situation assessment: FUBAR "Terrific" I said to myself "Here I am, stuck in the middle of Conglomerate territory. No weapons, no food, no water and no chance of a recovery mission." "..and to top it all off, I CAN'T EVEN COMPLETE MY MISSION BECAUSE SOME VAC-BRAINED MORON SCREWED UP THE DETONATOR!!!" I slapped the side of my helmet. A soldier didn't bitch and moan whenever a problem came along. He tried to fix it. "C'mon dogboy, THINK!" "If the detonator is broken, find a new one" Ok, but where could I find a new detonator? I felt something tap me on the shoulder. I twirled around, arms automatically switching to combat positions. I looked around. The only thing I could see was an inactive missile pod; standard issue for all UCAB installations. That's it! I clomped over to the inactive pod and pried it open. Inside lay four fat missiles, looking for all the solar system like four synthetic bratwursts. To an outside observer, it looked as though I intended to use the missiles as makeshift demo charges. That would have been a complete waste of time: to prevent an accidental detonation, each missile was kept inert until the human operator entered a 10-digit security code. The code triggered a circuit breaker, completing a circuit and arming the missile's warhead. Without the code, the missiles were nothing more than oversized synthetic sausages. I had another idea. I popped one of the missiles from its mounting. Screwing off the torpedo-like warhead, I gently extracted a small module about the size of my hand: the missile's arming module. My plan was to cut open the module and remove the circuit breaker; once it was out of the way, the arming module SHOULD be compatible with the demo charge. Hey, it was worth a shot. I grabbed the multi tool from my suit's equipment belt and tapped a colored square on its side. A small cutting blade, about the size of my index claw, popped out. I pressed the blade against the module's side. I had to be careful: a careless slip and the diamond-edged blade would slice through my suit like soft syn-butter. I gently traced the blade along the length of the module. Even the slightest pressure on the knife was more than enough to cut through the module's thin casing. After a few seconds, the module's casing was neatly cut in half, giving it the appearance of a mutated clam. I pulled the "shells" apart, revealing a tangle of nano-tube circuitry. Buried amongst the hair-like wires, a component resembling an ancient phonograph needle sat over a gap between two copper contacts: the security circuit breaker. I pinched the pea-sized component between two gloved claws and gently popped it out. "There we go, circuit breaker removed" I said, attaching the circuit board to my equipment belt. That's when another problem reared its metaphorical head "Now, what should I use to complete the circuit?" Even with the circuit breaker gone, the arming circuit was still incomplete. I needed something to complete the circuit "Think" I commanded myself. "What materials do I have to work with?" Well, there was the steel in my multitool "No, not conductive enough" The titanium of the mining rig? "Too tough." The nano-fiber of my suit? "Are you kidding?" I needed something that was malleable, yet conductive; something close at hand that I could fashion into a makeshift wire. A light panel went off in my head "That's it!" I clomped over to the dissected missile launcher, tearing off the launcher's if it followed standard Conglomerate design, it should have a small... "Yes!" I pulled out a small electric motor from the launcher's socket and pulled it apart. Inside was a coil of one of the most useful metals in the history of mankind Copper. * * *

Even in the space-borne society I was created, copper was still one of the best metals one could have. While some of its applications had been taken over by superconductors and broadcast power systems, it was still the preferred metal for transporting electricity over relatively short distances. It was perfect for my plans. Using my multitool's blade, I snipped off a two-inch piece of the copper from the tightly-wound coil. Bunching it up tightly, I pressed the shiny chunk of metal into the gap where the circuit breaker used to be; a few presses from my thumb made sure it stayed there. Satisfied with my modifications, I clomped back over to the demo charge and opened up its detonator. I reached inside the charge's detonator, ripping out the old circuit boards like the rubbish they were. A flick of my gloved fist sent them flying into the vacuum. Good riddance. The useless circuits gone, I slipped the improvised arming circuit into the detonator, making sure to align it with the old circuit's contact points. Now to solder them in place. I closed my eyes and concentrated. A small discolored spot appeared on my left arm gauntlet. The nano-fiber suit material slowly dissolved away, revealing a sickly green worm: a strand of Pem with a corrosive tip. The strand slowly snaked out of the hole into my gloved paw; a mental command turned it into a thin needle. Heat The artificial atoms in the Pem began to vibrate. The needle's tip began to glow a dull red, then a blinding white. What had been a strand of programmable matter was now a makeshift soldering gun! I pressed the needle's tip against one of the circuit's contact points. The metallic contact softened for a second, and then cooled, fusing it to the corresponding contact on the detonator. I honestly hadn't expected that to work. I quickly soldered the remaining contacts together. Thankfully, the Conglomerate ships were too far away to spot me. An unfamiliar figure repairing a demo charge on the hull of a high priority installation would have definitely attracted suspicion. Once the final contacts were soldered together, I slowly retracted the pem strand. The thin strand wormed its way back into my arm, sealing its entry hole behind it. I placed a claw on the detonator activation stud. The indicator light stayed green. My repairs hadn't worked. I slammed a fist against the hull, "WHYWON'TYOUWORK?!!" A stream of obscenities spewing from my mouth; did the universe have it in for me or something?! I'd replaced the scorching, rad-addled arming circuit, and the accursed pack still wouldn't arm!! "WHY WHY WHY WHYWH..." I stopped. The little LED had started flickering. For a brief second, the baleful green light had turned red. Could it be...? The light started flickering again, flashing green and red for a full ten seconds. "Please...Please" The flickering intensified, switching between green and red like an emergency beacon. "C'MON, C'MON!!!" The indicator light went dead... "No..." Then Red. Joyous, wonderful red. It worked! The pack was armed! I let out a triumphant howl. The pack was working! The mining rig was going to explode! I stopped in mid-howl. The mining rig was going to explode...with me on it! To be continued... * * *