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Once again the Dark Horse meets some curious locals, Maddy learns the Value of Trust, and skittish wolf lady Eli Parnell makes a new, ottery friend. Mm, otters.

It's Star Patrol time! Back to smut, because I really wanted to write some of that :3 Thanks to Max Coyote and Spudz for their help in editing this. I can't honestly say I'm 100% thrilled with it but it has space stuff and otters so you know. Roll with it.

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

_Tales of the Dark Horse _by ** Rob Baird**

Episode 5: "Biological distinctiveness"

---

Madison May had decided that the Dark Horse's mission could best be described as "find and understand interesting stuff." The akita also had a tendency to crave novelty. Hyperspace failed to satisfy this urge. It was boring: featureless, colorless, and uniform.

So they'd left it. For nearly twenty hours, the ship had been in normalspace, while the crew carried out a survey of the stars around them to improve the navigation charts. It was an automated task, and Spaceman Mitch Alexander had fallen into the sort of trance that long watches tended to occasion.

It took her a moment to notice a new light flashing on her console. With a guilty quickness, she brought the message up. "Hey, lieutenant? We're getting a signal, I think."

Lieutenant Parnell was, besides the abyssinian, the only other person on the bridge of the cruiser. The lanky wolf stretched languor from her arms, and glanced over her shoulder to her friend at the CCI station. "Oh? What kind?"

The last signal they'd picked up was a distress call, and the result of their attempt to lend aid had been an ambush and the capture of their chief engineer. Neither of the pair were eager to repeat that. Unfortunately, Mitch quickly learned that she wasn't able to translate what she was seeing. "Beats me. Nothing that's in our database..."

Eli Parnell felt her shoulders droop. So far, all of her watches had been happily uneventful. She was still occasionally plagued by nervousness, and a new development like a mysterious transmission was just the right thing to give that nervousness a poke. It also wasn't the sort of thing she could be expected to handle on her own. With a sigh, Eli paged their commander. "Captain May?"

The delayed reply, and the obvious grogginess in Madison May's voice, made it abundantly clear that the akita had been asleep. "What?"

"Somebody's broadcasting some kind of message on subspace radio. We can't read it."

Another pause, like they were having to talk to the captain from several light seconds' remove. "Okay."

So, what do you want me to do about it? Eli thought. "Er... 'okay,' ma'am?"

May forgot to turn off her communicator until she was already halfway through her tired groan. Another four seconds passed -- Eli was counting them -- until she spoke again. "Fine, lieutenant. Go to Gold Alert. I'll be up there in... ugh. Soon."

Elissa hadn't ever had to sound an alert, not for real. It felt like a big responsibility. The wolf rubbed her paw over the edge of her chair, and hesitated before working up the nerve to turn on the intercom. "Action stations, action stations. Crew and consoles to State Gold."

Throughout the old star cruiser, 'essential' crew would be roused from whatever currently occupied them. It wasn't the highest alert possible, but it was a good precaution. Mitch and Eli were 'essential' personnel anyway, and their station was the bridge.

The first one to report was their tactical officer, Ensign Leon Bader. The German shepherd liked being at State Gold. He liked at least being at Gold; Red was better, because it was a good excuse to bring the weapons all the way online. This would have to do, though: "Weapons in active-standby and sensors ready, sir!"

Parnell's eyes were hidden from him, so she rolled them. Sir. Uh huh. Leon was a decent guy, in the wolf's opinion, and he had helped save their chief engineer when she was kidnapped. All the same, the shepherd had decided they were all in his flock, and hadn't bothered to ask the sheep first. "Sparks?"

Mitch smiled to herself at the nickname, which had been Parnell's idea and was now pretty common. "CCI is ready, lieutenant. All our sensors are operational, but..." But Computers, Communication, and Intelligence could really only go so far. They would need help to decipher what was going on.

Madison May and the first officer, Lieutenant Commander Bradley, arrived at the same time. Just in case nobody had noticed the sound of the door opening, Leon stiffened up straightly: "Captain on deck!"

The akita shared her helmsman's opinion of the shepherd: well-meaning, competent, and with a ramrod stuck straight up his martial ass. Besides, she was sleepy: "At ease, ensign; I've told you that a dozen times now."

"Yes, sir!"

"Just... just be at ease. Until I tell you otherwise. That's an order."

Leon caught the hint. "Yes, sir."

Letting the pair settle their differences, Lieutenant Commander Bradley took his seat and logged in to the first officer's station. "Report, lieutenant?"

"An unidentified signal, broadcast on subspace radio."

"Nothing coming from nearby, either," Mitch Alexander added. "This area's completely clean."

Immediately curious, May perked up her sharp ears. "Can we fix the position?"

Most of them had settled into established roles. May's role was to charge madly into unfamiliar situations. Bader's role was to provide covering fire. David felt that his role lay, for the most part, in gently nudging his captain in the proper direction when a course change was advisable. In this case, they needed more information. "Let's see what Dr. Beltran has to say..."

Felicia Beltran came onto the bridge as unsettled as May had been. In her case, it was not being disturbed from sleep; instead, the leopard had been meditating. She valued being mindful. Her role, though she would not admit it, was not just to be their diplomat but also to remind the crew that rules and regulations existed for a good reason.

Mitch stepped to the side, letting Dr. Beltran look at the data coming from the Dark Horse's sensors. They were the only two felines on the crew, and they were polar opposites. Mitch was easy-going, and somewhat of a slacker and a hedonist. She found Felicia's austerity and discipline as distasteful as the leopard found Mitch's slightly wrinkled uniform and the faint smell of 'incense' on her fur. "Anything, doc?"

Felicia was not in the Star Patrol, and wore no uniform, but her suit was impeccable. Doc. She resented the appellation, which was why nearly everyone used it. Everyone except David, her kindred spirit, and Leon -- who always referred to her, in full, as 'Dr. Beltran.' He'd taken another hint, which was that 'Dr. Beltran' was far preferable to 'Felicia, Marquesa del Xoxotec.'

Mindfulness, though. She couldn't afford to dwell. Ignoring the abyssinian, Felicia set to work on the signal. The ship's computers had been recording all of it; she could pick out where the message seemed to repeat. Then it was a matter of determining the type of data being sent, and breaking it down into pieces, and fitting those pieces together...

All of that took time. Not everyone was so willing to spend that time. May's voice broke into her concentration: "Well?"

"I don't know yet."

May knew that Felicia viewed her as an opponent, and probably believed that May felt the same way. In point of fact the belief was not entirely inaccurate -- though it was not true for the reasons the leopard assumed. Beltran assumed that May disliked her rigidity and formal demeanor in the same way Mitch Alexander did.

It was safe to guess this; May had never expressed any love of the phrase by the book. But that was only part of the story. The truth was mostly that May hated being out of her depth. She could sympathize with Eli, as a starship pilot, and with Mitch as a sensors operator -- these had been classes in the Academy. She had a complicated relationship with Shannon Hazelton, the chief engineer, but at least she knew what an engine was and roughly how it worked.

Sociology and political science, however, were outside of her comfort zone. She had no basis to judge them, and that meant taking the leopard on faith. May didn't like how this need irritated her, but irritate it did. "You don't know anything? Weren't you the... how did you put it when we met? 'The youngest ever PhD candidate in the Brown xenolinguistics program'? Tell me something, doc."

Mindfulness. "It is a little..." Felicia liked to choose her words carefully, but few were well-suited for what she was looking at. "Odd."

The answer was unsatisfactorily vague to Madison May, particularly for an answer that she could not verify. 'Odd' was not good; in her experience 'odd' things tended to become 'troubling' things and then 'dangerous' things. "What does that mean?"

Felicia paused to review the message one more time, double-checking what she thought of as important clues. "It is an audio-only message. They are not transmitting any kind of translation matrix, so I have to guess. Some of it is clearly directions. Many are numbers that I can guess from their use in the coordinates. The rest of it is irregular, and I do not recognize the language. However, a few of the words and phrases look rather familiar."

That got May's attention, and improved her mood. She liked undiscovered things, of course, but they were beyond the Terran Confederation's frontier and as a result 'familiar' languages were almost more mysterious than completely new ones. "Familiar words?"

"Yes, captain," Beltran confirmed. The message seemed to repeat, but it was very long and gave ample opportunities to pick examples. "Vellaha tagatlit-ubish, for one. It is so close to the phrase vellaha to_kat_lit-ubish in Yushirian that I find coincidence hard to believe. Saparekrek sovir is grammatically correct Bira, down to the reduplicative intensifier in the terminal phoneme of the first part."

David took the opportunity to celebrate some minor progress before May could try to jump the gun. "Not bad. Do you know what they mean?"

"Saparekrek is fuel. Specifically, it means starship-grade deuterium. In Yushirian, tokatlit-ubish are..." Felicia trailed off. Many people assumed she actually spoke some vast quantity of alien languages, which was absurd. Nobody could even manage the thousands of languages on Terra at once.

Instead, she knew how languages worked, and trusted the computer to do the rest. In this case, the Yushirian dictionary was incomplete. 'Katli' was a person; 'ubish' was a machine. 'To' was a prefix meaning 'in the form of' or 'looking like' or possibly 'looking up to'; the translator hadn't been clear. Some interpretation was required. Educated guessing. But they didn't have to know that...

"Tokatlit-ubish are automatons. Robots -- androids. Vellaha means 'to fix,' or 'to improve.'"

"Repair drones," Leon put it all together.

"They need them? A distress call?" David asked.

"No, sir." The two had been the ones on the bridge when they'd answered the last one of those, and it hadn't ended well. "At least, if they are requesting them in aid then it would seem they are requesting many other things in aid, as well. If I may suggest?"

May already some ideas of her own, but they had the leopard aboard for a reason. "Suggest."

"It would be most logical for the numbers to be prices. I think they're offering a trade."

Madison smiled, and gave herself an internal pat on the back for coming to the same conclusion. And they said she had no talent for diplomacy! "Sounds like a good opportunity to make some friends, in that case!"

"With some caution," David Bradley added. Not to put a damper on things, of course, but it wasn't as though the galaxy was universally friendly. "Our last first contact got Shannon kidnapped. The one before that involved threatening to obliterate Earth."

The akita smiled wider, a winning grin directed at her first officer. Dave was nice, and reliable: she knew that he thought of himself as her chaperone, and if she looked honestly at herself in the mirror she frequently agreed. It was up to her to take chances. "Number one, my people have a saying..."

This meant that the decision had already been made. The golden retriever knew this; he also knew that he was being set up for what would pass for a joke. "Do they, then..." At least, he thought, she seemed to be in a better mood, so it was not likely to be as colorful as some of the akita's proverbs.

"'Third time's a charm.' Have you heard that?"

Dave managed to smile back. He liked his captain, and even if she was sometimes a little rash even the most dedicated first officer had to learn when to pick his battles. "Lieutenant Parnell, how far away is it?"

"One point five light years, sir. There's a star with a small planetary system. Dr. Beltran's coordinates are pointing to an asteroid belt."

"Lay in a course, then..."

Eli did not have the responsibility of trying to keep May in line; even if she thought that the decision was a little hasty, there was nothing she could do to change it. So she set about calculating; anyway, she liked that part of her job. The Dark Horse was so old that the hyperdrive had no neural link to its pilot. The helm was all manual. It gave the ship a sort of personality, and the wolf had bonded with it. Nobody else knew how to fly the cruiser as well as she did. "Course laid in, sir."

May, who could see adventure animating the stars before them, clasped her paws cheerily. "Engage!"

Their shift ended normally, and although Eli was content to stay around May wanted them well-rested, so the wolf secured her console and headed below. CSS Dark Horse was designed for a crew of nearly a hundred and was operating with only a tenth of that. The corridors were almost always empty, and Eli often experienced a packless wolf's loneliness.

She paused, at the entrance to her quarters, but kept going. The mess hall was also empty. So was the arboretum, although the only people who spent much time in the gardens were Dr. Beltran and Barry Schatz, their science officer. Not as much fun to hang out with.

A soft sound caught the attention of her sensitive ears. It was coming from the open door of an engineering bay. Cocking her head, curious, she slipped inside. TJ Wallace was inside, bent over one of the workspaces. He had a pair of headphones on -- between his work and his music, the otter was oblivious to the world. He set down his tools so both paws could thump a drumbeat into the table.

"Tell ya ain't no girl from here to Khana'ahi gonna rock my world like --"

Smirking, Eli reached up and lifted up the right speaker. "Like?"

TJ jolted, and spun sharply to find the wolf facing him. And then he let out a relieved gasp. Things could've been worse: the song could've been more explicit; it could've been Shannon Hazelton or even the captain herself. "Oh. Hey, Eli."

"Hi." Elissa still didn't know TJ all that well. He was an old friend of Mitch's, which straightaway demonstrated his character because Eli was quite fond of the abyssinian. He'd done some time in prison, too, although she wasn't clear on all the details. "Having fun?"

Travis Wallace was just about equally clueless. Eli was supposed to be a good pilot, and despite her apparent nerves the she-wolf was pretty cute. Even just off-shift, wearing only the dark Star Patrol uniform that didn't much flatter her curves, she would've been worth a second look. The other thing he knew about Eli, though, was that Mitch had cryptically said she was 'really good with her tongue,' and the otter could read between those lines. He chose a political answer. "Yes, ma'am."

Eli didn't know that Mitch had said anything of the sort. Of course, if she had known that, embarrassment would've kept the conversation from happening at all. Certainly she wouldn't have been so light with her words. "Oh, c'mon. Eli's fine! Who was that?"

"Gavek Ressda. They're from Clearwater. Hey, yeah, you been there long?"

"No, I just... heard you singing outside, and..."

TJ thought about what verse he might've been on, and turned the still-running music player off just in case the wolf's ears were particularly keen. "Oh, uh... yeah, I guess. They're kinda, um... yeah, they're kinda mature."

"Well." Eli rolled her eyes, but she was already smiling at the otter's shyness. It was a little cute, that unexpected reservation -- he always looked so relaxed; so boyishly at-ease... "We're all adults here, right, TJ?"

Even still, he decided that meant she hadn't heard the verse about deep-throating. "Yeah, that's... that's true."

Okay, more than a little cute. His short ears even went back a bit, just like a canine! And his accent... such a classic Clearwater drawl. She wanted him to talk more. The wolf leaned closer, to see what he was working on, but the disassembled circuitry proved to be impenetrable. "What do you have here?"

TJ was confused. The wolf was close enough that he could smell a trace of her perfume, and she looked genuinely interested in the work. Had Mitch been fucking with him? He wouldn't put it past the abyssinian. "It's one of our spare input coprocessors. Yeah, it like... so, it kinda filters stuff? But this dude's, like, way old, right? Barry and I think we can make some improvements and shit. Stuff. Um. Improvements."

"How much?"

"Like..." Honestly, TJ wanted to brag. Barry wouldn't, because the distractible Border collie was already long since investigating the next project, but somebody needed to. "I think we can double the range... we can definitely add, like, half, but it's a bitchin' idea if I can figure out how to remove some of this noise..."

"Neat." Eli looked at the scattered pieces, none of which she recognized. "That should make Mitch happy."

TJ laughed. Mitch probably wouldn't care, at least not in any detectable fashion. "Yeah, I tried explaining it to her but she got bored. She really doesn't go for anything so, uh... low-voltage. And then Barry tried to explain, and she totally glazed over."

That was most people's experience with the dog, and Eli had to grin. "Can you blame her?"

Slowly, the otter was growing more comfortable, even though Eli had yet to give him any more distance. "Nah. But he's, like... he's actually pretty chill? He's kinda fun to hang with. If you let him run his mouth you learn about the weirdest shit." The previous day, bypassing one of the coprocessor's chips had somehow led into a digression about cloning, and a novel arch designed by a Lyran shipwright. "Mitch just doesn't feel like putting up with him, you know? She's kinda impatient if she wants something."

Eli thought about that, remembered more than a few of their encounters, and giggled. "She can be pretty aggressive about getting what she wants," the wolf agreed, about half a second before the reason for the giggling hit her and she flushed heavily beneath her fur.

And now the otter was confused again. The wolf's perky, caramel-fringed ears had gone back, but not enough to hide the blush reddening them. But, what with her so close and all, TJ had to admit he was no longer thinking about her tongue in purely academic terms. "Uh huh? You and her are friends, right?"

Biting her cheek, Eli nodded and silently cursed her genus. Canines made terrible poker players -- her ears were pinned, and she couldn't look straight at TJ, and her tail was twitching. "Yeah, we're... pretty close?" She reached for an escape, and clutched at it desperately. "You knew each other from Clearwater -- right? You're both from there?"

"Born and raised. Man, Mitch and I go way back. You been?"

Bullet dodged! On safer ground once more, Eli pricked her ears back up. "Huh-uh."

"Aw, man, you're totally missing out. The best beaches. Good surf. Gorgeous coral. Warm sun..." All the things they missed on a starship. Plus, the conversation gave him a reason to envision the wolfess in a swimsuit. "Next leave."

"Really?"

"If I'm out, I'll totally show you around."

And Eli liked the sound of that. Cute as the otter was when being demure, he would've been even better in his natural habitat. She just bet he was good at surfing; she was not, but it had to be worth learning. "That could be fun!" She smiled and, distracted by the mental image, subconsciously toyed with the mane of soft hair that curled about her shoulders.

TJ noticed, less because he was especially observant than because the gesture was about eight inches away from his nose. "Totally. I'll show you some pictures, sometime."

It was an offer she'd have to pursue. In the near term, however, TJ allowed that he needed to return to work, and Eli wanted to be completely rested for when they dropped out of hyperspace. Lying in her bunk, staring up at the ceiling, she wondered at length what else the otter might be able to teach her. It was a useful fantasy.

Tracking down the source of the signal proved to be much easier than bending otters to lupine whims; twelve hours later the Dark Horse was in normalspace, and Mitch Alexander was reporting the unmistakeable telltales of another starship in close proximity.

"Put it on the viewscreen."

The ship was half as long again as the Dark Horse, and looked several times as bulky. They could scarcely be more different. The other vessel was smooth, and broad, and organically curved. It had no fins or engine nacelles; only a gentle blue glow from the stern spoke to any propulsion whatsoever.

And where the Dark Horse was covered in blocky armor plate, painted in the stark lines of dazzle camouflage, May detected a curious fluidity in the starship before them. Its skin seemed to ripple and flex, with currents of soft white and green coursing in a steady pulse over its graceful hull. "Mr. Schatz, let me guess: you've never seen anything like it?"

"No, ma'am," the collie admitted. He was hard at work trying to digest what the sensors were telling him. "The hull plating seems to be non-rigid and non-uniform. Non-metallic... some sort of synthetic material, I suppose. And these microvariations have every appearance of being... scar tissue, captain, if it were alive."

"A self-healing hull?" May was impressed -- nobody in the Confederation worked with those. "Impressive."

Every scan the Border collie tried returned information that was even more fascinating. "Captain, this is crazy. I'm getting energy signals with dozens of unique characteristics. It's not just advanced technology, it's all different from each other."

May took that in. It wasn't too surprising, if the ship was a merchant vessel. "Open hailing frequencies."

"Channel open," Mitch reported. "Link confirmed..."

Felicia took over, walking through the steps of diplomatic protocol. "Transmitting our interlock matrix." The response was immediate, and startling. Felicia checked it again. "They have sent one of their own. It's... it is beyond complex, captain. There are translation protocols for millions of languages here."

As interesting as this was to the geeks, May had other things to do: "Can we talk to them?"

"Yes, ma'am. We should be active... now." Felicia switched the universal translator on, and crossed her fingers.

"Greetings," May told the ship. "I am Madison May, of the Star Patrol. My ship, the cruiser Dark Horse, is on a mission of peaceful exploration."

The vessel brightened, and soft emerald waves curved and danced on its hull.

"Your message indicated a willingness to trade..."

The emerald flickered into orange, and then luminescent purple. "Trade?" The voice booming over their sensors was soft, smooth, and reassuring. A slow bass tone, as fluid as the colors on the starship's skin. "You wish to trade?"

"Yes, depending on what you have and what you want. Or dialogue. A meeting, at least. Your ship is unknown to us."

Colors shifted and danced gaily. "Yours is unknown to me also. This craft is the wanderer Qalamixi. May I come aboard your ship?"

May turned, and closed her muzzle with her fingers to indicate that Felicia should mute their transmission. "Doc? Number one?"

"The message they transmitted was definitely an invitation for trade," the leopard confirmed. "I ran it through the translator again."

They were reliant on the alien captain's word, of course, and David didn't know how much they could trust that. May clearly wished to, though, and the retriever had also had his interest piqued. The appearance of the ship alone surprised him. "Third time's a charm, right Maddy?"

Even so, they all agreed to Leon's precautions. When the shuttle from the Qalamixi launched, the shepherd went to wake up Sabel Thorsen. The imposing spitz, with his penchant for heavy weaponry and a hell of a right hook, made for a first impression of strength.

Sabel appreciated being useful. He'd been engineered as a warrior and locked in a cryopod for quick defrosting in an emergency. But then he'd been forgotten about for two centuries, only to wake up on a cruiser repurposed for 'peaceful exploration.' Noble as it was, that was decidedly not his forte. Even after a few weeks to adjust, and some clothes that finally fit his stocky body, he felt out of place.

Standing next to the stately, slim Felicia Beltran, the contrast was even more pronounced. His carbine alone was the size of the leopard's arm, and the distance she tried to give him made it obvious how conscious she was of their different approaches to international relations. They hadn't talked much.

"Shuttlebay doors open," Eli Parnell's disembodied voice told the greeting party: May, Bradley, Dr. Beltran, Leon Bader and Sabel. "They're landing now..."

The five watched with keen, if distinct, interest. May immediately wanted to know more about the vessel's origins. Bradley noticed that the smaller craft had the same gentle, organic lines as the Qalamixi herself. Dr. Beltran wondered if the colors it flashed might have some linguistic relevance. Leon was pondering the odds of a peaceful first encounter, and Sabel was curious about whether the strange ship's occupant would be vulnerable to punching.

That, of course, was if the ship had an occupant at all. The shuttlepod touched down, gently, and they waited with bated breath until at last a ramp emerged from the ship's port side. Fortunately for the sake of convention, the ship did have a pilot. It proved to be a biped, too -- nobody was entirely certain why bipeds were so common in the galaxy, but at least it made for simpler chairs. The figure had wide, black eyes and cream-colored skin, covered in even, sharp scales. It appeared to be naked, which put the true distinctiveness to its appearance in stark relief.

Integrated technology was not uncommon, in the Star Patrol. All of them had neural implants, at least, and despite Sabel's innate distrust of robots the spitz had augments installed throughout his body. His visual acuity was sharpened through a computer-controlled lens that also let him see a spectrum four times as wide as any of the others. His ears, too, had electronic filters. Nanobots took the place of white blood cells in his immune system.

But even he paled in comparison to the pilot.

Its scales were threaded through with wires and biomechanical chips. What seemed at first to be a tiara turned out to be implanted directly into its skull, and a ring of tiny lights flickered when the creature looked them over. Three of its arms ended in normal, six-fingered hands; the fourth had been replaced by a robotic analog with two fewer fingers and many more visible servos.

Madison May had seen stranger -- at least, she knew enough not to gawk. The akita tried a gentle bow. "Welcome aboard the Star Patrol cruiser Dark Horse."

The pilot's mouth opened, and a high-pitched screech came out. The crew of the Dark Horse winced, ears flattening.

"Dr. Beltran?" May asked, rubbing her right ear tenderly.

Also now slightly deaf, Felicia forced herself to rally. "We do not understand this," she said, trying for calm. "Your language."

It screamed again.

The leopard pulled out her translating computer, which was drawing a blank. "Ah. Apologies," she began again. Were they expected to make that horrible noise back? The thought was extremely unappealing. "Over the radio, you spoke... in a language we could translate." She played a sentence back, by way of example, and the pilot's head tilted.

It held out its robotic claw. When Dr. Beltran offered it the computer, the tips of its fingers opened to reveal the metal of communications ports. It pressed them to the computer; a moment passed, and its eyes lit up from within. For two bizarre seconds, the black was replaced by an eerie red flicker. Then it released the translator. "The ap-p-pologies are m-mine."

May allowed herself a sigh of relief. "At least there's no miscommunication." There was strangeness, still, because the pilot didn't sound anything like the voice they'd heard on on the communications channel. This was higher-pitched, and with an awkward, stilted stutter. "You do sound... different."

"Yes, yes, yes," it hissed quickly. "I have on new ship not the t-t-ta -- the way to... to hear the light-whiskers, yes-yes? By itself, Iqem has some more of fuzzy-mouth."

Madison May, who had never been particularly good in her diplomacy classes, still knew that asking the first question that came to her mind would be impolite. So instead of what the fuck?, she looked to the leopard for assistance. "Do you know what's happening?"

No. She did not. What the fuck was not in Dr. Beltran's cultured vocabulary, although at times she wished that it was. "You're... Iqem? Is that your name?"

"Yes-yes. Iqem. Pilot of Qalamixi. C-come trade. Qalamixi have many things, see many p-p-p-places."

Felicia cast a worried glance at the translator computer's logs, to figure out just what was going wrong. A lot of the interspecies communication was artifice, after all. The translator, for example, also interfaced with their neural implants. In the same way as it could translate printed speech on the fly, it also subtly shifted their perception of an alien's features so that it appeared to be pronouncing the same words as they were hearing. Iqem's mouth moved appropriately, including the stutter, but the words were too bizarre to have come from an accurate interpretation. "You've traveled far, then?"

"Many far. Qalamixi wanderer. Go six-rivers, see fourteen hundred years. Run to good fountain; run to sunrise."

In this case, mindfulness meant taking a step back. It would do not good to become frustrated, because Madison May could handle that all on her own. So what was the translator trying to tell her? Just like the Qalamixi's technology, everything was jumbled. But then... that explained it, didn't it? Really, she should've guessed it from the start. "Captain. Iqem is not speaking one language. It's speaking about twelve. This must be a trading pidgin of some kind. The grammar is constant, if odd, but the words are all over the place. And the translator is having a hard time keeping up."

"Can you compensate for it?"

"It will take time. Iqem, please bear with us. We are very new to this region of space."

"New," Iqem repeated. "Not s-s-seen before. I new also, from three feast. Black-black here was, now... seeing, not so black."

Felicia searched the translated results word by word. "It's saying that the Qalamixi has been here for about two terran weeks. When they arrived, their maps were... blank? Empty? Now they have good ones."

This explanation helped everyone. It helped May, who would otherwise have been at her wit's end, but it also helped to refine the accuracy of the universal translator. Iqem's head bobbed excitedly; the communication difficulties were just as frustrating for the alien. "Yes-yes. Here w-was black, now light is, like home in King Liraxi's Orchard."

"Is that a metaphor?"

Felicia didn't think so, although David had made a fair guess with the suggestion. "A region of space, I believe."

"How far away?" Taking some initiative, on the grounds that at least he was less profane than Maddy May, the retriever turned and addressed his question directly to Iqem. "How far away is home for you?"

"Seven thousand parsec far. Left eight hundred year from home."

Impatient and indecorous as she was, May could still understand what had been said. The distance, though, was absolutely staggering. "That's halfway across the galaxy. You've been traveling for eight hundred years?"

"No. No-no. Traveling fourteen hundred years. But from home, left only eight. Exploring. Qalamixi is to... wandering. Wandered for hundred thousand parsecs. Two hundred. More. Will wander ten thousand years."

David's jaw dropped; Felicia's shock was more minor, but even she and the two soldiers understood why the retriever had been left speechless. Forget repair drones -- the map they must've collected along the way was alone more valuable than any ship in the Star Patrol. And Madison May now saw in Iqem a sort of equal, an equal on a clear mission she could sympathize with despite its ineffable scope. "We're explorers, too," she told the pilot. "You've seen a lot. And your ship is very impressive."

"Yours also? Strong?"

"Fairly strong, yes." May smiled; she supposed that, behind her, Leon was biting his tongue. "It used to be a warship, before its new mission."

"You're not strong," Iqem said. "All biologic."

"Yes..." May didn't bother to explain Sabel Thorsen, because she didn't completely understand the spitz herself. "It's a choice on our part."

"Mm. Weak, though." Iqem's tone and demeanor didn't make the alien seem as though it was judging them. Its species had evidently made the opposite choice; even its nonrobotic arms had visible circuits in the scales. Iqem raised one of these arms, and pointed at Felicia's translating computer. "This. If I had, could putting better use. I have?"

The suggestion was rather intriguing to May, who was always up for seeing something peculiar. "We have spares, right, doc?"

"Yes..."

"Give it to Iqem?"

The computer was too common for Felicia to be too upset with the cavalier way Madison was volunteering her equipment. She held it out to Iqem, and immediately the alien's robotic claw took hold. The fingers blurred; it was scanning the device, although the scan proved to be destructive. A few pieces fell away, and Iqem grabbed them in a free hand. At length, it grasped one of the components, wrenched it from the translator, and placed it against the intricate metalwork implanted on its skull. Glowing fibers sprung free to wrap around the chip, holding it in place. Iqem's eyes flashed. "Better."

"Better?" May asked carefully. The akita found it hard to dismiss the sense she had that Iqem had not just analyzed the translator but consumed it.

"More... efficient," the pilot said. The stutter and hesitation were gone. "It can interface directly with all the other parts of my circuitry. It's much cleaner than having to carry all kinds of different machines. You should try it."

"As I said, it's sort of a choice on our part. There are some more... augmentation-friendly races in the Confederation, but my crew is mostly organic. You've always done this?"

"Exploration means finding and learning about new things. This is how Qalamaxi and I have traveled so far. The best way to learn about things is to make them... part of you. That is also why trading is so very important."

The explanation sort of made sense -- at least, it was hard to argue with. Even granting her displeasure at the loss of her computer, Felicia admitted that having the translator affixed to its skull seemed to have helped Iqem's comprehension. For her part, May was happy to hear the word 'trade' mentioned again. "We could maybe come to some agreement?"

"Perhaps."

What followed was a tour of the ship, or at least its most noteworthy parts. Iqem looked everywhere with pronounced interest, although only Sabel was able to detect the way the alien's robotic parts were actively scanning everything they came across. The reactor; the engines. TJ Wallace's music player, which Iqem brightly noted could be integrated into its own circuitry. The alien's excitement generally varied depending on how difficult, in its judgment, adapting the technology in question to something implantable would be.

Except, to Leon's pleasure, the weapons. Iqem was suitably pleased by the particle cannons. "Strong ship," it said.

"Yes," the shepherd nodded. "We've made some changes to the assemblies. It's a big upgrade. The Dark Horse may be an old cruiser, but I'd take her up against nearly anything in the Star Patrol. We haven't really had to use them, yet." David Bradley glared sharply, and Leon -- taking yet another hint -- moderated his voice. "Which is a good thing."

"Mm. There is a lot here," Iqem declared. "I will go back now, and we can think about this? You're interested in... the maps, right?"

"Yes," David said with a nod, while the group began its walk back to the shuttlebay. "As the crew of an exploration ship, good maps would be very helpful. We'd love to discuss what we could trade, I'm sure, although... I know you're most interested in what you could adapt to your own biology..."

Iqem didn't seem bothered. "Not all. Some things are not even physical; they are experiences. I enjoyed the sound of the music you had. It was new. I would listen to it again. Your experiences are valuable. So is your crew pieces. Would you be interested in trading any of your crew?"

Madison May twitched. Had that been lost in translation? "My crew?"

It had not been a misunderstanding. "Yes. One could join me."

"That's not on the table," she growled.

"Very well." Iqem bowed, in the same way May had done on their first meeting, and returned to its ship. "We will talk shortly."

"What is it with aliens?" May demanded, on its departure. She didn't think of herself as particularly xenophobic. It was hard to be xenophobic in the Star Patrol, because there were lots of non-terrans in the Confederation. They just tended to be the sort that didn't demand living sacrifices. "Why are they so interested in my damned crew?"

Dr. Beltran felt that it was important to be voice of reason. Open hostility was rare, in interspecies relations. Far more commonly, it all amounted to misunderstandings. "It is a cultural difference, ma'am. Remember: we are a curiosity to them. For someone like Iqem, maybe biology is as interesting as technology."

"Iqem certainly does like their technology. It was so strange. Kind of funny, actually. They've completely transformed their body with it."

Sabel spoke up. "It was recording, also. Its implants include many different kinds of scanners. It was collecting a fair amount of information, I presume." He added no recommendation that this be punished with physical violence because, although he rather liked punching things, nobody else on the crew appeared to be worried and Leon was trying to teach him how to be less aggressive. Sabel's programmers had never explained any proverbs about the blind leading the blind.

"How do you know this?"

The spitz looked over to his captain. "I know because my implants detected it. I'm also, you would say... transformed. It was part of the program."

Nothing about this was obvious: Sabel didn't go out of his way to appear like a cyborg. As a result, May took the explanation in stride. "Yes, you're different, I suppose." Her command of understatements was somewhat limited. "But you're not like that. For Iqem it was almost like... an end to itself, yeah?"

"An obsession, even," David added. Iqem had returned to its belief in the superiority of integrating men and machines repeatedly. At one point, looking over a collection of Shannon's engineering tools, it had mused aloud on the prospect of replacing one of its remaining arms with the diagnostic scanner. "I mean... the galaxy takes all kinds. They seemed friendly enough. At least they didn't try to steal one of us."

May laughed. It was true that this was a relief. Leaving Sabel to return to his bunk, she walked with David, Leon, and Dr. Beltran back to the bridge. On the viewscreen, Iqem was already on its way back to the Qalamixi. There were no visible doors on the other ship; when the shuttle approached, the hull simply parted around it, and closed without a trace. Its stripes turned a soft violet, then slowly shifted back to green.

"Captain, we're being hailed," Mitch Alexander soon reported.

"Answer it."

"Hello and greetings," the voice from the Qalamixi said. Once again it was smooth and fluid and peaceful. "You're interested in an exchange, that is true?"

May straightened herself, and tried to seem formal. She hoped that looking formal might, despite her invisibility, be carried somehow in her voice. "That's right. Is there anything you're interested in, particularly?" Other than crew, that was to say. "We can be very generous."

"Indeed," the voice answered, with remarkable warmth. "Thank you!" More rippling colors; purple again, then an iridescent rainbow before it settled back on its conventional emerald.

"Um. Captain?" Mitch didn't like what she was seeing; strange readings on her console were rarely good. "I'm picking up an energy surge from that ship. It's not the same as their main reactor..."

Madison was immediately on guard. "Iqem? What's going on? What's the meaning of this?"

No answer. "The channel's closed, captain."

'On guard' shifted immediately to defensive. "Shields!"

The shields came up two seconds before the first impact. Leon didn't even have time to thank god for his reflexes before he was startled by the message on the panel in front of him. "Sir, starboard deflectors are at thirty-two percent." The Qalamixi punched hard: already Leon was trying to find ways to reinforce their shields.

"God damn it!" May snarled, because the akita didn't really have a filter between her brain and her muzzle. What the hell was it with aliens? Why couldn't they have one damn good encounter? "Evasive maneuvers! Get them back on the line!"

"Channel open, but..."

The captain had abandoned formality in favor of purer anger. "What are you doing?" The ship rocked with another hit. "We are going to be forced to return fire if you don't --"

Stop, she meant to say, but they punctuated a refusal to do so with another salvo. Felicia Beltran was too bewildered for terror. There was nothing coming over the open communications channel; just in case, she muted it before May's cursing could make the situation worse.

What had they done wrong? The leopard racked her brain frantically for answers that didn't want to come. Had they given some offense? She heard Leon report that the imminent failure of their deflector screens: the Qalamixi was as advanced as it was inscrutable. On the viewscreen the graceful ship was glowing, flickering stripes of cerulean over its hull. None of it made sense!

None of it made sense to Leon, either. May had just asked him to return fire, although he had no idea what he might target. It seemed to have no visible weapons; no sensors to be blinded or engines to be disabled. "Good solution. Firing all forward tubes..." The Artemis missiles streaked forward -- and then immediately went haywire, spinning off in completely random directions. Jammed, he guessed, with no idea how.

"How long until we can jump?"

"Two minutes." Eli Parnell hated the answer but there was no way to speed it up. The main drive needed to come up to power, and it was slow charging with Leon needing so much for the shields -- hell of a gamble. She picked a handful of gods from her pantheon and offered them a prayer.

"Captain, we don't have two minutes. Our shields are gone, sir."

David admired many things about life in the Star Patrol; the ease with which it was possible to transition between safety and imminent death was not one of them. Space offered many of those opportunities. Trying to put the warning indicators on his computer out of his mind, the retriever took stock of their position. "The rocks," he suggested.

May didn't like retreat, especially sublight retreat, but it was better than oblivion. "Make it so."

"I have the conn," Lieutenant Commander Bradley declared. "Helm, right twenty, up ten."

"Positive ten, right twenty, aye, sir."

"Ahead flank." Chancy; everything was chancy. With the Qalamixi's substantial bulk, though, he had to hope that they'd be slower to maneuver -- and slower to follow. The other ship was now a curious pumpkin shade. Imminent weapons fire? Powered throttle? He didn't know, but sure enough they were coming about far slower than the Dark Horse could manage. "Tactical, shut down the forward deflectors and our particle beams." Nothing ahead of them mattered.

Much as it pained him, Leon knew this too. There was glory to be had by dying in battle -- his parents and grandparents had made that much clear to the shepherd -- but the battle had to be worthwhile. Theirs was a foolish one, and completely hopeless. He switched the weapons off. "Done, sir."

"I'm shutting down the FTL and giving our sublight engines everything we have," David warned Eli Parnell. "Lieutenant, you have the conn. Find us a hiding spot."

The wolf acknowledged him, and started planning. No more self-doubt; she was riding an adrenaline high, and the Dark Horse's helm felt alive in her paws. They were meant for each other, the star cruiser and the wolf -- nobody understood the ship like she did.

Actually, were it not for the hulking threat now giving chase behind them, the whole thing might've been... fun.

But first, the planning. The truth was that an asteroid belt, even one so dense as this, was mostly empty space. None of the closest ones looked promising. The only good news was that, at flank speed, they were slowly opening a lead on the Qalamixi. This would evaporate as soon as they needed to shift power into the hyperdrive, but for now...

There it was. "Sir; captain. There's an M-type asteroid about twenty kilometers in diameter, dead ahead." More or less, anyway; things were rarely dead ahead in space. "It should mask our signatures well enough."

"Do it."

More planning. Now that she was more comfortable, there were lots of things to find fun about starship piloting. Parnell liked the manual controls, of course -- who wouldn't like feeling a big starship following their every command? But the wolf also enjoyed the more cerebral parts: plotting a carefully organized course, and watching it unfold in clean, sharp precision.

The Qalamixi was well behind them, by the time they were on approach, but no so far behind that May thought their position safe. Clearly less than happy with the need for their retreat, she gave Parnell permission to go ahead...

And then it was time! As soon as they rounded the asteroid and its bulk hid them from their pursuer Parnell threw the ship around and braked with every last micronewton of thrust. The Dark Horse swung into a decaying orbit.

She came about again.

Next, a quick blast of the dorsal thrusters. Nothing from the main drive -- too conspicuous. A deep canyon cut through the rock -- less than twenty meters of clearance to the either side, at the bottom, but what was that for a good starship pilot? Could the Qalamixi do that? Could she have pulled it off in her old corvette? No way. Not a --

"Impact in twenty," Mitch warned, in case Eli had missed it. "We're coming in way hot. Uh. Hey, lieutenant? Ten seconds?"

"Brace," David called out.

Dark Horse slammed into the bottom of the canyon heavily. Well within the tolerances of her hull, but enough so that the impact overwhelmed the compensators and jarred her crew. Enough so that they half-buried themselves in disturbed rock; it settled over the ship, masking its form. Enough so that Eli added a cheeky, hidden grin when she announced the landing.

-- chance in hell.

"No damage." Mitch tried to hide her surprise. "We're secure..."

And no sign of the Qalamixi. Now that May had a chance to be safely furious, she called her senior staff together. The ready room was appropriately tense; the akita crossed her arms and glared, more at the universe than her crew. "Well?"

David's adrenaline had been replaced by a startling gratitude concerning his continued existence. "Let's try to think of a way out of this." 'Well?' had not been a question designed to get productive answers.

"Well?" May repeated it, anyway. The retriever was too calm -- he was always so fucking calm. Where the hell were his emotions? She was entitled to at least a bit of anger. "What the fuck happened, guys? Dave? Why can't we meet a single fucking alien who doesn't want us dead? Is it me? Am I a magnet for sociopaths?"

Dr. Beltran pretended to find the wall very interesting.

"Doc," May snapped. "Any ideas?"

The leopard had been turning things over, on their sprint to the asteroid. "It is complicated, ma'am. Would you like me to explain, or would you find such an explanation a distraction to your... vitriol?"

"Try."

"The Confederation has been at peace for many years, ma'am. It has had static borders and, for the most part, static alliances. For one, I think we have underestimated the strangeness of the universe beyond the frontier. For two, ma'am, we do not have the Star Patrol with us; we are only one ship, and perhaps that is a sign of weakness. Additionally, we may have been... rash."

"Rash," May echoed. She'd heard the word so often it no longer meant much. "How?"

The god's-honest-truth was that Dr. Beltran simply didn't know, and it bothered her as much as it bothered May. In school, the case studies always had clear answers and the aliens were always comprehensible. Had they done something to offend Iqem? Evidently -- but what? "As an example. We all think it was strange that Iqem even asked if we would be willing to offer some of our crew in trade. But perhaps in that culture this is an honorable request -- an exchange program, of sorts."

"It's fucked up," May said flatly. It was. There was no point in dabbling in such touchy-feely relativism.

Be mindful, Felicia, the leopard reminded herself. "Perhaps so. And perhaps, in Iqem's culture, there is an elaborate way to politely refuse that request. When the Foreign Affairs ministry sends a diplomat abroad, they are trained for months in the protocols and behavior of their host country. I know that you do not care much for the Diplomatic Protocol Codex, captain. Clearly," she was even willing to admit, "we do not have the time for such depth. But it is done by the ministry for a reason..."

May was silent; the leopard did have something of a point. If aliens could be strange, and quick to anger, that made at least a good case for knowing why they did so. "You think we pissed Iqem off by not sending somebody?"

The leopard could only shrug. "I cannot be certain."

"But it's possible." David sighed. First contact had been strange, but mostly cordial -- after the initial misunderstanding. "Can we make it up to them?"

"I cannot, unfortunately, be certain of that, either. By our standards, their behavior has been unpredictable. Irrational." Not in a good, Madison May-like way, either. This was far more capricious.

"Untrustworthy, too. Ten thousand years of exploration?"

"Poetic license, perhaps."

May didn't buy it. "Right. So we can't trust them, and fighting isn't an option."

'Fighting' was Leon's cue to prick his big ears up. "We are decidedly outclassed, sir. I don't know if or how our particle beams would hit them, but I don't think we'll have a chance to find out. Whatever that ship is armed with, it completely shreds our shields."

It was not a popular answer. May, in particular, didn't like hearing things like that. "Would it be possible to reconfigure the shields somehow? Optimize against what they're using?"

Their science officer, Barry Schatz, had discovered in his captain a rather curious tendency. She seemed to believe, with almost religious fervor, that the application of words like 'optimize' or 'remodulate' could work a strange sort of magic. In this case, the laws of physics were simply against them: "No, ma'am. With the quantities of energy Ensign Bader is talking about, there isn't anything we can do that easily. Now, if we had more time, that would be interesting." Right? The Qalamixi's weaponry would need to be carefully analyzed, but even at the most basic level... "There was an intriguing paper in the Orion Technical Journal two quarters ago. It was mostly about countering the formation of vortices on Highfield vanes, but in passing Dr. --"

"We can't?" David tried to confirm this basic fact before the digression went too far.

"Er. No."

Nobody else seemed to be as interested as May in venting. An unfortunately staid tendency, that, but one she'd learned to accept. Collecting herself, she ran her fingers through her hair, and sighed. "Running, then. Can we jump from inside the asteroid? Lieutenant Parnell?"

"No." Crazy as landing in the asteroid had been, trying a hyperspace jump would amount to suicide. Of course, if she failed to be sufficiently clear the wolf knew Madison might try it anyway, so she tried again. "Absolutely zero chance of success, sir."

"What if we remodulated the jumpdrive?"

The wolf's ears drooped. "Zero chance, ma'am. It cannot be done."

"We'll need a bit of luck, in that case." David Bradley brought up a map of the system so they could try to guess how lucky they'd need to be. Luck would come from the Qalamixi being far enough away that it could not catch or engage them before they could make the jump to hyperspace.

"Also, we need to hope that they can't disrupt the formation of a hyperspace aperture."

David shot Barry a look. "Thanks," the retriever muttered. The possibility hadn't even crossed his mind.

The biggest problem any of them could see was that the mere act of powering up their main engines would give away their position in the canyon. If Iqem had any intuition at all, the Qalamixi would be waiting fairly nearby. There were not so many places, after all, that a star cruiser could hide.

The asteroid's slow rotation put a safe jump trajectory in front of them in less than half an hour. It wasn't much time to get ready. Leon and Barry volunteered to see what could be done about the shields, although neither were optimistic. Eli Parnell wondered aloud if there might be some way to speed up the jump sequence, in an emergency. "TJ might know?"

May didn't ask questions about that.

The otter smiled, when she went down to the engine room to ask him, but agreed that it was possible. They returned to the bridge, and as she walked through every step of the launch procedure he pointed out ways where they might save a second or two. Not safely -- all the checklist was designed for their safety -- but if there were no other options...

Eli found his presence comforting. Even now, with the threat of their destruction on the line, the otter managed to joke about it. "Yeah, like... probably a sixty percent chance of that regulator blowing if we don't give it time to warm up. But it's just, like, an explosion. Moderator fluid everywhere. Pretty gnarly."

"Damage?"

"Naw. Stuff just smells like ass, that's all. And if you want to bypass it, you get to clean it up." TJ figured that either she was kind of into him, or they'd be dead in half an hour anyway. Who cared? He nudged her shoulder playfully, and grinned. "By yourself."

She bypassed it. "I can pull rank, you know..." Or, he could help her shower. That was a possibility.

"Sure, ma'am."

May watched the pair with half-detached interest. It was a high-stress situation; it was bound to bring out some odd coping mechanisms. It probably explained the joking. It didn't completely explain the impulsive hug her helmsman gave the otter, before he departed, though. That part, she filed away for later review. Rash, maybe, but the akita wasn't stupid.

"Ready as we're going to be," Dave told her. The clock was ticking.

"Start it up."

TJ and Eli had got the jump sequence down to under a minute from the time they cleared the edge of the canyon. David Bradley scanned his systems display, watching each one come on in turn. Shields. Engines. The particle beams, which Leon had lobbied for. They only had enough in the capacitors for one salvo. "Helm. Engage," he ordered.

Elissa decided on the spot that she was going to make it. In her log, she would write couldn't die without saying goodbye to parents, in case anyone ever looked at those dumb things. Of course, she actually meant couldn't die without making use of my otter privilege. The way he'd hugged her back, when he left, was subtle but unmistakeable. A good omen. She throttled the Dark Horse up and pointed its prow to space.

They were clear of the canyon for less than five seconds before the Qalamixi pounced. The barrage very nearly slammed them right back into the surface of the asteroid.

"Ventral shields, twenty percent!"

"Son of a -- fucking -- helm, evasive maneuvers."

Eli had to be careful following May's orders. They couldn't deviate from their course too much without screwing up all their careful FTL calculations. But they couldn't stay on course too much without taking -- more --

"Port shields have failed. Helm, can you roll us to the other side?"

Turn the other cheek? Eli complied. "Forty seconds to lightspeed."

David called up an image on the viewscreen. The Qalamixi was awash in rippling shades of green and red. None of it made sense -- no color change, no sudden brightness before the next salvo connected. The retriever tightened his safety harness; at least whichever investigators found the wreck could appreciate his foresight.

"Forward shields at fifteen percent." Leon announced their steady march to death with dutiful precision.

Their captain could read between the lines well enough to know there was no way they could make it in time. "Fire all weapons," she barked; at least it might buy them time. "Attack pattern Alfa."

"Framing maneuver in five seconds, five on primary." Parnell made the report by instinct. The evasive maneuvers were taking all her concentration.

The Qalamixi filled their forward viewscreen. A huge, cetacean thing -- taunting them with its flawless, pristine bulk. They only had one shot; Leon overcharged the particle cannons as much as he dared, and pulled the trigger. Direct hits -- he could see them scoring their foe, burning dark lines into its hull --

It flashed a brilliant violet.

And that was all. Nothing else. It fired again -- a concussive, brutal hammer-blow. "Forward shields have failed, captain."

"Fucking nothing?"

"No. No effect," Leon swallowed.

The Dark Horse rocked again, taking the full force of their enemy's salvo on her armor. "Captain, inner hull breach across four decks. Fire in the auxiliary sensor room." Mitch guessed, correctly, that May would understand the sudden lack of atmosphere was the only reason there were not more fires.

"Away DC package one and two." The repair robots were old, and unsophisticated, and David knew the gesture was futile anyway... but... "Helm, twenty degrees clockwise."

It presented what remained of their deflector screen. It also meant that the next burst savaged the whole of their port side. Mitch felt her stomach drop out, even more than she felt the shudder of the impact. "Jumpdrive's offline." Start with the bad news, end with the good: "Port engine's at half-power and we've got a major fuel leak. Pressure dropping throughout the system."

"Forward cannons are down," Leon added, not that they had power to run them. Another hit plunged them into a half-second of darkness before the emergency power came back online. "Shield generators are failing."

"Options." There was no anger in May's voice. Flat acceptance, mostly. What could they do?

The next solid impact would end them. Leon could only hope that someone would learn what had happened: "They know how to jam our missiles. An unguided spread might work."

When nothing else had?

Mindfully, Felicia Beltran considered her decease. Despite her faith in diplomatic protocol she knew that aliens were sometimes hostile -- that ambassadors sometimes never came back. It was just so... pointless. Like she'd told May. It had all seemed completely irrational. Sometimes the alien had seemed happy. When they'd met; when they'd welcomed the shuttle aboard. When they'd agreed to trade. When...

"Fine, ready torpedoes," May gritted her teeth. "Fire at will."

Felicia's tail jerked. The leopard hissed in uncharacteristic, and unplanned, shock -- the growl at her lips before she could stop it. The answer had come to her in a rush. "Captain. Captain! Drop our shields and cut all power."

The audacity of the idea bought enough delay for May to answer with a question, instead of profanity. "What?"

"All of it -- shut it all down. Engines -- weapons -- kill the reactor."

"Why?"

Felicia, for the briefest of moments, knew exactly how Barry Schatz felt. "Captain, please, trust me."

The akita did not. At least, she did not want to; faith was a difficult ask for something so completely bizarre to her. Consciously she quailed at the thought. But. But they were dead anyway, and her intuition had kept her from immediately telling the doctor to shut up. She never understood her intuition, really, but it had served the canine well. "Do it. Leon, stand down. Kill the reactor."

The Dark Horse went quiet as a tomb.

They waited.

And waited.

A gentle thump shuddered through the cruiser. "That was an energy weapon," Leon confirmed. "But... not enough to breach the hull?"

"We should hail them, captain." Felicia made the suggestion softly. It still seemed a stretch to her, but the pieces were all coming together.

"To surrender?" The akita took a deep breath. The very notion was anathema. On the other hand... well, at least they were alive. Did that mean the doctor had been on to something? She sighed, letting her breath out like it had been a slow drag on a cigarette. "Alright. Fine."

"Why did you stop?" The voice over the communications link seemed to be genuinely puzzled.

Madison May waved to indicate that the microphone should be muted. "Stop what?" Now the akita, too, was puzzled. Had it not expected their surrender? Did Iqem believe that a fight to the death was more preferable? He wouldn't have been the only one: Leon, too, wanted to go out with guns blazing. Was there no honor in killing a helpless foe? "Stop fighting?"

"It wasn't fighting."

"Sure looked like it, doc."

Felicia shook her head. "It was playing with us. Captain, may I speak with it?"

Bemusement forced the akita's hand. "I suppose?"

"Qalamixi," Felicia addressed it directly, when Mitch reopened the channel; at the sound of its name, the ship flickered the colors of its stripes faintly. "We stopped because we had no choice in the matter. You were very strong."

"It was not fun for you, this game?"

Little in the feline's upbringing had prepared her for this -- her schooling had trained her on the level of species, not of individuals. Would it prefer deference? Cheek? "It was very fun," she lied. "But if we kept playing, we would have been destroyed."

"You are hurt now," it observed.

"Yes. Quite badly."

"Are you too young to be out doing this? You were older than the others. I hoped that we could play together! " On screen, the bridge crew watched as the glowing form drifted closer, filling their vision. The gashes their particle weapons had burned into it were already faded to near invisibility. "But... apparently not. I did not mean to hurt you."

Clearly, Felicia thought. Or we would've been dead at the first blow. "I know. Perhaps you do not have a true idea of your strength. I know that you have wandered very far, and seen many things... how many equals have you met?"

The other ship's stripes faded into deep, licorice red, and wavered. "None. Not since I left home. The others also did not want to play... or gave up too quickly. They did not like me. You do not like me..."

"It is more complicated than that." The leopard was trying her best.

If a ship could seem dejected, the one they were looking out now surely was. The rippling patterns on its hull had slowed, and darkened. "You have changed your voice," it observed. "Is this avatar the one you use when you are upset?"

This was an odd question; at first, Felicia assumed that it simply didn't understand the chain of command. Barry, who had been listening distractedly, figured it out immediately. "Qalamixi?" When he asked it, heads on the bridge turned to look at the Border collie. "Er -- can I, ma'am?"

"Well, Jesus, don't let me stop you," May grunted. Barry was easy to appreciate, for her, mostly in small doses.

"Qalamixi, Doc and Captain May and me and everyone that Iqem met aren't part of the ship. Our ship, the Dark Horse -- it's just a machine."

For a moment, the hull of the alien ship went completely frozen and still. "Clarify."

"We're her crew," the dog explained, and realized as he said it that the explanation probably wasn't going to be satisfactory. "We are all separate entities. We live and work on this starship, and it is our home."

"You do not need each other?"

"No. Well -- well, sort of," Barry amended. "Without us, the Dark Horse would not be able to function. And without the Dark Horse, we would perish. Do you remember when we told Iqem that we were completely biological?"

"Yes. It seemed very strange to me. Organic material is so fragile..."

Yes, the bridge crew thought mostly at once. We know. "It's how our race is. Every one of us is a being just like you are."

Qalamixi became more animated; its hull brightened up, and the colors started to return. A wash of violet coursed over it. "I perceive now a source of our misunderstanding. When I asked you if you would be willing to trade one of your biological components, you thought I was asking for one of your nontechnological sentiences to be taken aboard as a slave."

"That's right." May spoke up, now. The akita was gradually picking up on the thread. "We can't do that, obviously."

"Obviously. My Iqem is not like that."

It was a fairly strange concept to most of them, although Barry had heard of such things before. His girlfriend Moira had even written a play about it. Well -- most of a play; Moira was another collie, and just as distractible as Barry. "We don't have that kind of symbiosis in our culture. I guess you've been picking up bits and pieces of technology and biology for years, now..."

"Centuries," Qalamixi confirmed. "Iqem's ship played with me and disintegrated, but I salvaged its biological entity from the wreckage afterward. It was not closely connected to the technological sentience."

Or there had never been a technological sentience to begin with. Qalamixi, Barry and Felicia had both decided, was a child -- still feeling out the world, still unsure what to make of what it found. Even after centuries in space it was still learning. "Most of the people we've met have been like us, Qalamixi. They haven't been linked to their ships, they've been separate individuals. That might explain why they didn't quite understand you."

"I do not quite understand you," Qalamixi said in return. "I do not see how you could be so small and yet wish to explore the galaxy. You should I think be exploring one planet. Do you know these?" The surface of its white hull shifted into a sprawling painting, a shimmering image of what was either a willow or a passable alien version of one. "Iqem had many images of them in a very unreliable electrochemical storage bank inside its brain. It is called a 'tree.' You could explore a tree for many of your years. I would not have the opportunity to see the universe at such tiny scale were it not for my biological tools. Iqem believed that the tree went underneath the ground. That is strange. Was it fixed in place?"

With a memory that spanned eons and a home range the size of parsecs, Qalamixi had a wildly different view of the world. Barry was in awe -- how curious it must've been! "Trees are mostly fixed in place, yes. And most of our cultures stayed on their planets for millions of years before leaving. Now we want to explore, just like you do... though not by becoming a spaceship. It's actually considered rather odd to have such bonds..." Although even as the Border collie spoke his brain was spinning. "Although -- you know, there's actually a precedent in the pilot-mothers of the Janmazi Guild."

"Explain. I wish to know everything."

Madison May had the sinking feeling that Barry had discovered a kindred spirit. "Later," the akita cut the dog's reply off. "Qalamixi, do you see what's happened now? That this ship is not us, we're just living on it?"

"You are strange nontechnological sentiences," Qalamixi agreed. "I have not injured you, but I have injured your technological... contraption. I am very sorry. You will accept my apology?"

"Well..."

Qalamixi flashed gay whorls of color that spun down the graceful curves of its flanks. "I do not understand your way of life, but I do understand your technology. I can help you. Your craft is damaged."

"May I have a moment?" Considering where the promise came from, Madison was a little skeptical of the offer. Of course, there was no denying reality, either, which was that the ship was in poor shape. How poor? She muted the comms channel, and paged Lieutenant Hazelton. "Engineering, this is the bridge. Can I get a damage report?"

Hazelton's face appeared in a corner of the viewscreen. The hologram only showed her from the neck up, so they missed her raised hackles and the burn-marks on her jumpsuit. They did not, however, miss the snarl on the raccoon's muzzle. "How long do you have?"

"Give me the short version."

Shannon looked over her shoulder, at the crisis she'd been distracted from. With an irritated sigh, she brought up a diagnostic menu. The viewscreen switched to a three-dimensional view of the Dark Horse. It was expanded for easy visibility. In engineering terms, the image showed an 'exploded' diagram of the ship; of course, the ship was very nearly exploded in layman's terms, too. "Got it?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Jump motivator's misaligned and damaged. Two of the resonators are burnt out. We'll have to bypass."

"We can fix them." They heard TJ Wallace's shout, slightly muffled, but the otter was nowhere to be seen.

And Hazelton didn't trust the assessment. "We can maybe fix them. Port fuel cells are compromised. We've lost sixty percent of the fuel in those tanks. Pumps are shot, restrictors are blown -- actually, you know what? The whole port engine is just fucked. No response from the regulators on the secondary capacitor banks. Burnouts all through the deflector grid -- and if Ensign Bader even asks about weapons I'll shove him into a torpedo tube."

"You're saying it's in good shape."

"I'm saying I've seen used piñatas more spaceworthy."

Shannon was always prone to exaggeration, though, and May knew it. "Can you fix it?"

"The outer hull has seven holes blasted through the forward armor. The biggest one is four meters across and ten meters high. I don't even have enough patch for that. Inner hull breaches across six decks. All airtight hatches are sealed forward of frame two. Outboard compartments five and up ahead of frame six are vented to space. That includes the nav-gen assembly, so if you want to go anywhere faster than light, we'll need to suit up."

That revelation got a frown from even the phlegmatic Lieutenant Commander Bradley. "What about the DC bots?"

"Permission to speak freely?"

Oh dear, the retriever thought. "Go ahead..."

The raccoon bared her teeth. "Tactfully speaking," she started off, and then tapped something. A notification flashed under her hologram: 'universal translator disabled.' "Merci, nandesfer, mais fourrez vos 'DC-bots' sranijés dans la pizda! S'il vous plait." The words came as a spitting hiss, before she calmed and the notification disappeared. "They aren't worth a damn. Guys, we're going to need a spacedock."

David and May both chose to ignore what was almost certainly profanity. Neither of them thought it was worth it, considering how much time the engineer volunteered to spend next to dangerous and explosion-prone machinery. "You're sure?"

"Mads, if you're lucky I can get this patched up enough to limp back to Confed space. It'll be slow, but we can probably get close enough for a recovery ship to hear us."

In other words, it had all amounted to an extremely short mission. Madison May let out a heavy sigh, ordered Hazelton back to work, and brought Qalamixi back up on the screen. "I appreciate the offer," she said warily. "But we'll need a proper shipyard. Most of our systems seem to be compromised."

"That's funny."

For whom? The akita was not amused. "Funny?"

Qalamixi shimmered. "The damage doesn't look as bad from out here."

Easy for you to say, May grumbled to herself. "My ship doesn't have a self-healing hull, for one."

"I know," the alien agreed. "But it is not as serious as you think. I can repair what I have done easily enough. To your technology, at least... I believe I can not so easily fix the injuries I have done to your... to the psychological components of your nontechnological parts."

"It was a... a misunderstanding," the akita conceded. God only knew she'd had enough of those. "If you're offering to help, I suppose I... would appreciate that offer. How's that?"

"A trade, then?"

"What's the trade?"

Qalamixi waited, before answering, its colors brightening until finally it spoke. "I will correct your ship to the best of my abilities. I understand that you are interested in my maps, as well... I would like to learn more about you, however. The part of your ship that talked about trees and other cultures. Can you detach it?"

"Barry? You want to talk to Barry?" The akita's arched eyebrows did nothing to make her seem less skeptical about the request. "What do you say, Mr. Schatz?"

"Uh..." The Border collie was rather bewildered; fortunately, this meant that his mouth made the decision for him. "Sure. Yes! It would be -- a unique opportunity. I mean, I've heard that --"

"Deal, then." May shook her head. "We'll send him over." When the Border collie left, and the channel was closed, she turned in search of their diplomat. "You trust it?"

Felicia nodded. "I think so."

"How did you figure out it wasn't trying to kill us?"

The leopard did not want to admit it had been intuition any more than May wanted to admit that trusting her had been the same thing. Captains were not inclined to risk their ships on lucky guesses. "The colors. I had suspected that they were not random -- they had some linguistic value. The translator did not pick up on it at first, but I believe they reflect a particular... tone of voice? I noticed that every time Qalamixi turned purple it was when it was pleased -- that we agreed to a trade, or that Iqem was back aboard. It was always very good-natured, at those times. When we finally returned fire, that was the first time we saw purple after it started shooting."

"Like it was... laughing? Like you'd be roughhousing with your kid brother..."

"Exactly."

That would not have been May's first guess. It wouldn't even have been her tenth or twentieth guess. So. So maybe you need to start trusting her, after all. Even if she didn't understand diplomacy, or language, or any of the leopard's cultured ways. Finally, she dipped her muzzle respectfully. "Quick thinking. That was..." Well, hell, might as well go all the way. "That was good work, Dr. Beltran."

Felicia's tail curled in surprise. "Thank you. Ma'am."

May suggested that the leopard keep an open communications link to Barry, in case the dog went too far off the rails, and then retired to her ready room to go over the damage reports. Qalamixi dispatched Iqem in a shuttle with a half-dozen repair drones; it left again with the Border collie, who was already starting to bounce off the walls.

Six hours later, all the lights and most of the major systems were back online, in some form or another. They lacked helm control; the ship's thrusters needed to be recalibrated before the Dark Horse could be accurately piloted again. It was Eli's responsibility to run the tests from the bridge; as soon as they were done, she volunteered to take them down to the engineers personally.

TJ was on his back, stuffed halfway into an open access panel that periodically showered the otter with sparks. "Uh... hey?" Eli asked, trying to catch his attention as gently as possible.

"Hey," he answered, and scooted back out into the hallway. The power grid was still not playing nice -- he relished the chance to take a break from it, and the wolf was a better distraction than others. "What's up?"

"Not much. How are you?"

The otter shrugged, and got to his feet, brushing bits of insulation and burnt circuitry from his work uniform. "Well. I think we're alive..."

"Almost weren't." The wolf shook her head. "Anyway, um. I wanted to give you the diagnostics from the helm computer..."

TJ took the little card from her, and swiped his finger over it to glance at the readouts. "You know," he reminded her with a smirk. "You could've just transmitted the data."

"But I wanted to see what you'd do with it." Eli smiled; the little glint in the otter's eyes suggested he knew what she'd meant. "You're going to recalibrate the motivators, right? I think they got misaligned?"

"Everything got misaligned," TJ agreed. "You want to see? Ever been in the nacelles?"

"Hm-mm!" Her relation to the Dark Horse was mostly the way she was bonded to it through the control panels of the ship's helm; the machinery itself was rather mysterious. And ancient. And... that made it kind of cool, particularly with the right guide! The otter led her to one of the hatchways, which opened into what looked to be an elevator. It pretty much was, TJ explained -- a pressure vessel that bridged the vacuum of the cruiser's double hulls.

The journey only took a minute, and when the doors opened again they were looking at the massive sublight drive from the inside. Kilometers of pipes and cabling snaked along the ceiling; the grate of the floor was suspended over the soft blue glow of active power conduits. "This thing's so old the calibrators are manual," the otter said. "Along with almost everything else." It made for a fun challenge -- he would've liked it even if it hadn't been his only choice besides prison.

"That sounds familiar..."

Of course, Travis realized, she would know that. As far as the engines were concerned, the shy little wolf knew it better than maybe anyone else. "How is it to fly?"

"A lot different." Following TJ's lead, she hopped over a thick metal pipe that barred their way -- warning signs were stenciled on the pipe in a dozen languages. "It's much more responsive than the corvettes I used to fly."

"Rad. I bet it is..." The next step was a bit of a climb, and Eli was shorter than he, so he turned and took her paw to pull her onto the catwalk. The wolf flashed him a cute smile, and TJ had to force himself to return to thinking about engines. "Newer ships all use virtual constrictors and field generators. It's totally more efficient, just, like, not as fast to respond? But this old girl..." He pointed to one of the big actuators suspended above them, looking for all the world like a pair of monstrous jaws. "All gimbals and charged deflector plates like this dude here. When you move your controls, you've moving a couple tons of precision machinery."

Her tail wagged. "Nice!" She leaned close to him when he stopped at a computer station at the rear of the nacelle. Despite his breeziness, she could see the talent in the way he worked. A quick swipe of the card she gave him downloaded the new calibration data, and his nimble, subtly webbed fingers moved in a blur over the console. "You've done this before?"

"Pretty often," he admitted. "You're, like, pretty hard on the helm, you know?"

Eli flushed, and splayed her ears. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Just a couple of micrometers, usually, but it adds up..." He turned, and -- seeing that look in her eyes -- gave her a teasing nudge. "So be more careful."

Tradeoffs. Because if she was more careful, he wouldn't have a reason to do that again. Secretly, she resolved to fly every bit as aggressively as May had always asked. Outwardly, she only smiled. "Alright..."

Wasn't like it was much of a hardship; TJ had the job finished in under a minute, and they began the walk back to the elevator. Eli stayed closer, which made both of them happy. The doors slide shut; the car started moving --

And then slammed to a halt, tossing the pair against the wall. Eli thudded heavily into Travis, whose warm body absorbed most of the blow. "The heck?" she squeaked. "Why aren't we moving?"

TJ took a moment to recover from the impact, and then another moment to recover from having the she-wolf pushed up and against his chest. And then another moment after that, just in case he'd missed anything. Finally he switched his communicator on. "Hey, chief?"

Shannon answered quickly enough. "What?"

"Port access car just shut down..."

"I know. I'm cycling the control systems."

Travis sighed, and noticed that Eli had yet to really... move. "I'm in the port access car. Can you restore power?"

"Fifteen minutes, dude." The raccoon affected a Clearwater accent, to tease him, and then shut the channel.

Eli looked up to find the otter shaking his head. "Sorry," she said. All the same she was thinking: not so bad though and worse people to be here with and fifteen minutes. So was Travis. He lowered his head, catching the wolf's eyes. They searched each other's expression. Paused.

Made the same snap decision.

The she-wolf cocked her head just as the otter's muzzle found hers, bringing their lips into swift, tight contact. Her breath left her in a hot gasp -- he was everything she'd figured he would be, his touch strong and sure and warm, circling her body with those wiry arms... He was grasping her, feeling the warmth of her slender frame under his webbed paws. He was leaning forward, locking their muzzles together. He was twisting, guiding her, using the wall for leverage to hold her in place as their kiss deepened hungrily.

Impulsive, but they were moving by the same impulse. "Fifteen minutes," he grunted in a wash of hot breath against the wolf's sensitive whiskers.

"That's enough," she heard herself giggling, in the brief quarter-second before their muzzles clashed again, and with an urgent growl he pressed her to the wall while his paws groped for the pants of her uniform. Nice, crisp, professional-helmsman pants -- no match for the otter's eager fingers. Racing the clock. His tongue slipped between her lips and she suckled on it playfully, pulling him closer... deeper... feeling his breathing grow ragged... her fingers were feeling over his strong, sinewy body.

Fourteen minutes.

The wolf's pants were pooled around her ankles; she kicked one boot off so that she could tug her leg free of them. Travis tried to convey his appreciation but the sound lost itself as a throaty purr and he went for a more direct backup plan. He shoved her panties down roughly, and as soon as she'd gotten herself free of those too he grasped her pert little rump in both paws and hoisted her up to a more practical level. She moaned when he squeezed her, and if they'd had more time he would've done it again...

But they didn't have the time. Both of them knew it. Eli wrapped her legs around his waist to give him the use of his arm again, at least long enough to undo the fly of his jumpsuit. The heavier, coarser fabric wasn't nearly so fetching -- really they would've both been happier without any clothes at all -- but. But needs must. It wasn't quite how the wolfess had planned for things to happen. Fifteen minutes (fewer now!) in an elevator? On duty?

A little thrill ran through her at the naughtiness of it all, a giddy shudder of delight reinforced by the feeling of something warm and hard pushing into her pelt. He missed the first thrust -- throbbing, hot flesh slid slickly over her lips and into the soft fur of her crotch. The second rocking of his hips was better-aimed -- his tip found her, sinking just inside and -- and gods, the thought flashed into her lust-fuzzed mind. Gods, is he really that --

He was. The wolf cried out in a yelping gasp of surprise and shocked pleasure as he slid smoothly inside her. TJ's claws curled to hold on to her squirming rear until he could hilt himself, spreading her velvet-soft pussy around the heavy bulk of his girthy otter cock. He could've stayed there forever, buried in the wet, clasping, enveloping heat of the little she-wolf, but -- but they had a job to do and -- and Eli was grasping at his shoulders excitedly, and grinding against his crotch and he started to thrust.

Not even conscious of it. Fast. Hard. Shoving the canine into the wall with the rough, animalistic need they both felt. Eli's moans filled the otter's tiny ears and her slim legs locked around his body; she bucked with him and keened while he rutted into her desperately, riding his pent-up craving for her body. He filled her so well -- so completely that when he pulled away she whimpered and clawed at him until the next lunge stuffed her full of his thick otter meat for a glorious few breathless milliseconds.

He nuzzled into her shoulder; her neck. She lifted her head obligingly and he buried his muzzle in her neck, nipping and growling there, muffling his ragged hot pants in her fur and letting her scent fill him with every shuddering inhalation. Eight minutes? Nine? Travis was starting to lose control; they could both feel it. His jerking hips slammed his cock deep inside where thin, hot spurts of slick precum jetted into her and his hesitant withdrawals plunged it right back out -- spattering the floor of the elevator and her nice clean uniform pants and ensuring the little room would smell of them both for days.

TJ grunted, fighting himself back from the edge with every sloppy, squelching thrust. His ears were filled with the wet sounds of their feral coupling and the plaintive, giddy whimpers of a rather helpless she-wolf. They were coming quicker together now, her breathing all shallow and strained. Rising into a higher pitch. Bleeding together. Trembling, shaking hard, Eli tore her arm from around the otter's shoulders and bit down on her paw.

The otter's guttural laugh came out hissed and sibilant. "Huh -- huh-uh," he grunted to her. Rocked into her hard, pushing her back and into the wall and letting her sit for a delirious half-second, bearing her weight right on the rigid, veiny cock spearing into her. "Howl -- c-c'mon." A second time he drove into her, lingering, grinding his hips so they could both feel his quivering cock grating against her satin folds. "Howl for me -- wolfgirl, c'mon, howl..."

Eli let her paw fall away as he gave her another short, sharp thrust. Again. Gods he felt so good -- so warm, so solid and thick inside her. He was gasping with the effort of taking her. His cock throbbed -- every pulse of his racing heartbeat twitching next to her. Again. It was like a drumbeat, thudding into her -- a pounding, inevitable rhythm -- he tried to tug himself back and couldn't, just got a few centimeters before desire consumed him and he shoved himself back inside and --

She howled -- filling the little room with a lupine wail when pleasure seized her muscles and electrified her veins. The wolf thrashed in ecstasy, her sodden, warm walls convulsing on the otter's length. In the throes of it -- and quite deafened -- TJ snarled and let himself go. Heedless -- groaning with Eli while he flooded the wolf's snug insides with rope after thick, hot rope of otter seed.

Her howl faltered, and then collapsed down to a shaky whine. She quivered, jolting with every new pulse of cum as the otter pumped his load up into her, spreading a pleasant, sticky heat deep up inside her. His legs spasmed; his cock throbbed and slid in slowing thrusts through her well-slicked cunny. Even as he came to a shaking halt the otter's seed was beginning to drip wetly around his shaft to pool on the elevator floor.

Five minutes?

Slowly, with every movement carefully planned and sending jolting aftershocks of pleasure through the pair's bodies, TJ relaxed his hold on her and guided the wolf's feet back to the floor. He tugged his cock free, followed by a small torrent of pearly otter cream. Well... that was what cleaning robots were for, wasn't it? "Ah... fuck, Eli..."

"What?" She was busily trying to catch her breath, and to avoid getting anything else on her uniform pants. "You -- you got that howl out of me..."

"N-next time, r-remind me it's, like... remind me to pick a bigger room..."

"Deaf?"

"It's okay." He waggled his paws. "I totally know sign language."

"You do?"

TJ waggled his left paw again, and used the right to grope the wolf's nude butt. "Yeah."

Before she could protest, the elevator started moving again. Eli tugged her uniform back on in a hurry. "Hey, so, uh -- you want to get dinner? With Mitch and me? Later?"

The otter grinned. "Sure. Just give me some time to, like... clean up, yeah?"

That was not a luxury Eli had; she was supposed to be back on the bridge. Was it that bad? Maybe not. She could just gamble that nobody would notice and, indeed, at least Felicia Beltran did not when she passed the leopard in the corridor.

David, on the other hand, noticed it right away. One had to get used to a lot of smells on a starship, it was true, but nothing in the environmental systems was generally that obvious. At the same time, what was the point in calling her out directly? They'd been having a rather stressful time, and he'd been known to stray once or twice himself. So he picked a more tactful approach: "You haven't had a chance to shower since the incident, have you?"

Of course Eli could read between the lines. The wolf's ears pinned. "Er... no..."

"Go do that," David said, with a shake of his head to remove any lingering doubt for the helmsman. "And maybe get a fresh uniform. I can wait."

He couldn't be too judgmental. While they were finishing everything up -- Dr. Beltran was going to consult with Barry again on a final round of negotiations with Qalamixi -- there wasn't much to do with the helm, anyway. He perused a few of the reports he'd been given, and waited for the she-wolf's reappearance. At least she'd had some fun?

In her own way, Madison May had also been having fun. With the ship secure and the crew safe, she was inclined to view the episode as a learning experience and an adventure. This was made easier by the smile her first officer gave her, when he reported as ordered to the akita's ready room, even if she didn't know what he was smiling about. "Hey, Maddy."

"Dave! Took you long enough, huh?"

He shrugged. "I needed Lieutenant Parnell to take care of something."

"Fine, fine. But that's it? Barry's back aboard?"

"Yes. I got a breathless recap of 'the most exciting conversation' he'd ever had, and then he went off with Dr. Beltran. The robots have already finished their work, just so you know. They're a lot better than what we had before."

"Better?"

"Fixing things our DC drones couldn't. Generally just making our systems cleaner and more efficient... Qalamixi said we can keep them. According to Barry, it feels sorry for us, not having enough technology aboard to keep us company. Either way, we can use the help." The new repair robots had a strange, almost organic appearance. They were slinky quadrupeds, capable of shifting their form to fit into tight corners and festooned with repair tools so advanced Shannon could only identify half of their functions.

"I got a report from engineering," May said, thinking about her chief engineer. "I haven't had time to go through it yet..."

Dave had -- at least, he'd skimmed it, and let Lieutenant Hazelton talk him through the rest. He brought up an image of the Dark Horse in the ready room table; the hologram was filled with new information and glowing bits and pieces of hull. "The armor's been completely patched. Shannon's report says the alloy is more than twenty percent stronger than what we had before. Next time we put in to stardock, she wants to replace the rest of our armor with the same stuff."

"Good plan..."

"I think so, too. Qalamixi also suggested some upgrades to the deflectors and the main reactor. With your permission, we'll do both."

"To what effect?" Madison spun the hologram around, looking into the picture as though she knew the first thing about starship construction and reactor design. In broad strokes, that was true -- but not enough to know what an upgrade might accomplish. "Major improvements?"

"Barry, Shannon, and Qalamixi say we could get twice as much out of the deflectors and a thirty percent boost to the reactor. It's linked to the..." The retriever faltered, and stared at the notes Barry had given him. Most of the notes were equations, and in Dave's memory the Border collie's explanation had been provided extremely quickly and without any allowance for those unable to follow along. "It's linked to the sublight burners, somehow. They said a slight loss in rotation rate against a gain in acceleration and a big increase in reactor output."

Faster acceleration mostly helped when you were running away, and of course she didn't plan to be doing much of that. Still, it was a good tradeoff -- they could use the power, and that would make Shannon happy. "Do it, then. What about the map?"

"That's a little less positive. We have a block of data -- seriously, it's a literal block of data." Some kind of heavy crystal; Barry claimed that he could read it without too much difficulty, and David believed him. It didn't matter; none of them were qualified to doubt him. "The problem is it's so huge we can't make any sense of it yet. Barry says he extracted a random planet with a three-meter surface survey. Composition, elevation, the whole deal. It's one of... hundreds of thousands. Millions, maybe. Schatz said he estimated Qalamixi's memory is a trillion times more expansive than the Confed Central Library."

"My god..."

"I know." The scale of it was hard for Dave to believe, too. Barry had expounded on Qalamixi's history and composition at length -- the Border collie was more starstruck than awed. "We can probably make use of the map eventually, but it's not the panacea we'd hoped. Barry said he learned more just talking. They're... kindred spirits, after a fashion."

Madison could only imagine. "He might've volunteered to join..."

"Maybe. He said he did learn something, in passing. Those pilgrims we met, the robots? They used to be a race called the Naltabik. They were a very religious civilization -- originally. Something went wrong; they died out, and the robots are all that's left. Qalamixi apparently finds that very distressing -- the absence of organic material in their culture."

"What did they want with us, if they're all robots?"

"They prey on passing starships. Capture their crew and consume their thoughts. Qalamixi was apparently drawn to them, at first, until realizing that the process is so destructive. It's some kind of a religious sacrifice. It also helps that they use the knowledge gained to take over the other vessel and strip it for parts, but..."

A close call, then. "Lovely..." May gritted her teeth, and growled quietly. "We'll watch out for them?"

"Most of the sector already does. They have a reputation. There are other people we should be giving a wide berth; I'm having Barry draw up a report. Don't worry, I'll edit it before you see it." It was easier to do this than to listen to Madison May grumble her way through a novel-length debriefing. "I'll make sure Parnell knows which paths to avoid, too."

Qalamixi, then, had turned out to be two steps forward and half a step back. At least, if they were lucky, the Dark Horse wouldn't be going in blind next time they met a strange new race. "Thanks." The akita closed her computer, and rolled it back up so she could tuck it into her pocket. "Speaking of Lieutenant Parnell. Did you have the impression that she and Spaceman Wallace were..."

Dave lifted his right ear. "Were?"

"Do you suppose they're fucking?"

"I believe so, yes." This would serve on its own, he reckoned. No reason to point out how incredibly obvious it had really been.

"Hm. She's close to Mitch Alexander, too, I think. They stand a lot of watches together..."

Dave couldn't help but chuckle -- the abyssinian didn't really seem like the flirting kind, but if she'd wanted something out of the wolf he had no doubt she'd gotten it. "Perhaps."

"What do we do about it?"

"By the books? Well, no, I guess you don't do 'by the books,'" the retriever corrected himself. "I don't see it causing problems yet, if that's what you mean. Maddy, they're young and they're on a deep-space cruise with no real outlet. What do you expect?"

May was slightly surprised. She'd expected Dave to serve as the voice of reason and protocol -- though in this case, she didn't disagree with him. "You're saying I should let it go?"

"I'm saying it'll happen anyway. I'll keep an eye on it, but to honest, unless it starts to cause problems it's not really any of our business..."

There. That was the practical, pragmatic retriever she knew. "You're a soft touch," she teased him.

"No. I just know when something's worth fighting, and when it's not."

Madison grinned, and took a seat on the edge of the desk, turning towards him. "What happened between you and that oversight officer, anyway?"

He twitched, because to that point he'd been able to keep the memory fairly well repressed. 'What happened' had involved too much alcohol, a married woman, and claw marks left on the wall of a starbase hotel. "We had a very good discussion," he suggested, trying for a tactful approach. "We came to agreement on many things. Including that it would be best if we didn't see each other again..."

The only thing May didn't know for certain was whether he'd planned the encounter all along. Probably not, she thought. But Dave has his own secrets... "Where does that leave you, then? Wild oats, and all..."

David Bradley saw himself settling down, one day. Tenured position at a school somewhere; house in the suburbs, robot-tended yard. Kids, sure. It had never seemed like a good idea to admit that to the eternally restless Madison May. "Oh, you know." He waved his golden paw in a wandering circle that encompassed the room, and the ship, and maybe bits of shore leave grabbed here and there. "I find my way. Shannon and I, you know, we have a bit of a thing..."

Bristling, the akita leaned forward and narrowed her dark eyes. "You stay away from Shannon," she grumbled. "That girl's trouble."

"Yeah, but she knows a trick or two..."

"Don't do it," May warned. "I'm serious."

May and Shannon Hazelton, the chief engineer, had a long and complicated history whose intricacies Dave had only glimpsed. The suggestion -- he didn't actually have any interest in the raccoon -- had served its purpose, though, which was deflecting the akita's question. "Fine, fine. Holovids and my own god-given paws, then. Happy? Besides, what about you?"

"I'm the captain." May was pleased with the rank, although not necessarily about all the implications. "I get counted out of everything."

"Find somebody who's not in the chain of command." Dave winked; the suggestion was mostly meant in jest. It was sort of a given that they were supposed to remain above such things -- even if he had desired the chief engineer, decorum would have kept the desire quite chaste. "Dr. Beltran's a civilian, you know."

"I don't really... lean that way..."

"Yet. What about Sabel? He never joined up. Has no rank."

May tried to make her gaze as withering as possible. Dave was right, but the warrior spitz hardly seemed a good match. "I don't even think he knows how that works," she grumped. "Probably wind up punching me..." Which was sort of a shame, because the first time they'd met Sabel had not been wearing any clothes, and it had been rather hard to miss the size of... well. It wasn't the kind of thought a captain in the Star Patrol should have. "You weren't being serious, right?"

"Not... really. But if you want a challenge..."

"Uh huh."

"We can't all connect by plugging computers into each other."

Madison laughed, and got back to her feet. She walked to the window, and soon enough she heard Dave's footsteps as the retriever joined her. Together they faced a gleaming field of stars -- light years distant, and yet every one as close as a thought, a dream; a challenge to the blank spaces on their maps. "I guess stranger things have happened. It's a hell of universe we've got, Dave."

"And we've just started..."

She nodded. "It's true. Only one question, then."

"Yeah?"

"Where next?"