FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

It is the nature of the freelance and general ne'er-do-well that he is sometimes obliged to undertake work that is, at best, against his principals. During times of peace and prosperity, rogues of all varieties find themselves forced to accept jobs that are perilously close to legitimate employment.

Levus found himself close to accepting just such a job.

"Look, really, it's a humanitarian mission. These people haven't had any way to protect themselves for generations. They've always relied, whether they remember it or not, on our security concern to assure their privacy. Now that arrangement is in jeopardy, and we need your assistance."

Levus pinched the bridge of his muzzle. He'd hired their latest recruit on the strengths of his skill with a gun and his tenacity in a bar-fight, not on the quality of his social network. If Levus had known that Fafnir's contacts were, in fact, every bit as extensive as the man had claimed, Levus never would have let him set foot on his ship. No decent sapient being knew this many people.

"If it's that important to you--or to them for that matter--why are you outsourcing this?" Levus asked.

"We're a small co-operative, not a mercenary company. We're entirely owner-operated and all participation is strictly voluntary. All of our assets are engaged elsewhere at this time."

"Bullshit."

The holographic projection across from Levus smiled. The person on the other end of line appeared to be a woman in a drab business robe, dark-skinned and with a soft, apparently permanent smile. That gentle curve now blossomed into an amused grin.

"Okay, you caught me. Truth is, people round here talk. Incessantly. I can't take a crap without it ending up on the trades. If I sent one of my own, they'd blab all over the Net about how one of their partners flaked on a job and they had to go clean up the mess."

"Bad for business, that."

"No shit." Her smile subsided to background levels. "The difference with you is that you've got no credibility in my circle, and nobody important would much care what you said. No offense."

"Oh, none taken. Fine, your reasons for coming to us are credibly selfish. But I have to ask, have you considered the possibility that your team didn't simply flake on the job, and instead ended up having to perform the task for which they were hired?"

"And lost, you mean?"

"That would be the logical conclusion to this train of thought, yes."

"Yes, we had considered that."

Levus blinked, repeatedly, awaiting a response. When none was forthcoming, he prompted, "And..."

"We dismissed it. Frankly, there's nothing of interest at all on that planet. It's owned by a private foundation to serve as a habitat for Primitive Revivalists to live out their nasty, brutish, and short lives. It's far from any border and not in line with any traffic routes or points of interest. The owners hired us to deter trespassers and enforce their claim to the planet. In _eighty years_of carrying out this contract, no one more sinister than a handful of tourists has ever challenged our security.

"The planet was boring when it was settled and it has only gotten progressively less interesting as time as gone on. All we want from you is to observe and evaluate, try to find out what happened to our contingent, and if at all possible try to check up discreetly on the locals."

Levus propped up his jaw with a hand, slowly stroking his jawline with his thumb.

"After all," the representative said, spreading her hands as if mildly embarrassed by this whole exchange, "if we were really worried about trouble, we'd send somebody who's actually armed."

Levus nodded. He'd being streaming a blind copy of this conversation to all the crew. He sent them all a short message. LEVUS: YEA OR NAY?

MARCUS: YEA

LUCKY: YEA

FAFNIR: YEA, OBVIOUSLY.

LEVUS: ALRIGHT, THE AYES HAVE IT.

"On behalf of me and my company, I accept," said Levus.

"Splendid!" She clapped her hands once. "I'll send you all the details." Her faint smile proved not so permanent after all as it was replaced by a look of faint concern. "In all seriousness, please be gentle with the natives. They haven't seen a spacecraft in four generations, and if they've stuck at all to their principals they'll have long forgotten what a spacecraft even is. Don't go buzzing anybody's hut, okay?"

* * *

The ship was named the Hedge Fund, although it had many other strong contenders. Runners-up had included FFF, 3F, the_Triple-F_, and various other permutations on that theme. All stood in one way or another for "fucking furry fools", a recognition of the social predilections (and general luck) of its crew. Two were of the canine persuasion (a source of much bickering between them), one was forever waffling but had lately adopted a simian morphology, and one was simply an alien (his resemblance to a huge cricket merely the result of convergent evolution).

The ship herself had been a reputable merchant vessel in days past. Sadly, her current owners had little regard for that noble heritage of short-range freighting, and had over the years much increased her capability and much reduced her honor. Blessed with the general shape (and sex appeal) of a garden trowel, her reputation as a cheap and easy hire had at last obliterated the final tattered shreds of her dignity.

Whenever her hull creaked with a pressure change or her spine flexed and groaned with a sharp maneuver, you could be forgiven for thinking, just for a moment, that you heard the faint sound of sobbing.

Absolutely none of this was passing through Levus' mind as he slumped in the center seat of Hedge Fund's bridge. Their destination had been every bit as far off the beaten track as their contact had promised. It took the Fund the better part of three days to reach the planet. The ship's charts gave only an alphanumeric designator for the parent star, and the planet itself bore only the name Batari's World. What, if any, particular name the locals had for it was obviously unlisted.

The rest of the crew had slowly drifted to the bridge as their arrival time grew near, and was now fully assembled. Marcus and Fafnir occupied the stations immediately left and right of Levus in the ship's large semi-circular bridge, while a few of Lucky occupied various other seats scattered around. All of them were either watching the blue-white marble visible through the wall-to-wall forward portal, or making a studied effort not to watch it. The ship was crawling through the last hundred thousand kilometers, affording both a gradually expanding view of the planet and ample warning time.

"Looks quiet to me," said Marcus. He supported one furry cheek with his fist, it in turn supported by the console armrest.

"No anomalous high energy radiation detected. No thermal signatures detected. No visual contacts. No drive-fields or active p-sources detected. No comm signals detected," said Lucky.

"All quiet on the western front," offered Fafnir, not looking up from the book he had in his hand.

"Since the violent phase transition of this ship and its contents into gases arguably constitutes a group concern," said Levus, "it might be in our collective interest to make certain of that before we pronounce this the planet of rainbows and sunshine, aye?"

Fafnir shrugged, still absorbed in his reading material.

"We'll take up geostationary here, over the big continent." Levus began entering a string of commands into his console that would direct the ship toward an orbit roughly above the center of the largest continent. "Luck, launch the Lookeeloo and put it on station opposite us. We'll do a sweep of orbital space as we come in and take a closer look at LEO once we settle in. When that's done we'll do a detailed scan of the surface before we worry about the rest of the system. With a habitable planet right here they won't have gone far in an emergency. If they had to abandon ship, this is where they'll be."

A moment passed. "Lookeeloo is away and on course."

A couple of displays popped into existence on the big window. One showed a boxy craft powering away from the ship, spindly sensor booms trailing behind it, and another display showed the craft's orbital track and final destination, antipodal to the Hedge Fund. The Lookeeloo was a fully capable interstellar vehicle in its own right, jammed full of sensors and imaging equipment, and easily the single most expensive piece of kit on board. Levus always felt a twinge of worry every time he let it out of his sight; he had loudly declared on a number of occasions that he would gladly sacrifice the life of any one of his crew to insure the safe recovery of the probe.

With its high-power field engine, the probe was in position within minutes. Its boom-arms opened up, and on the bridge details of the far side blossomed on the holographic representation of the planet. The Fund was now in position above its designated hemisphere; the global view was lush with detail and nuance down to almost any scale you could ask, save for a thin meridian of fuzzy uncertainty halfway between the two craft. Later they would rotate their positions 90 degrees ahead and fill in the gaps before completing their survey with a few polar orbits.

Once data from Batari's World had started coming in, Marcus had straightened up in his seat and joined Lucky in doing actual work. While the insectile K'klyric designed and managed their search pattern, Marcus sifted through the results. "Still no active emissions detected. First scan shows nothing in LEO at ten meters resolution. Second scan at ten centimeters resolution should be ready in about ten minutes."

Levus sighed. If the security ship had been attacked and destroyed, the largest debris should have show up on the first pass. That narrowed the possibilities to desertion, landing, or total annihilation. The first would be difficult to prove, but the second should if true be only a matter of time, and Levus was fairly confident that, if the third were correct, they would prove it by example.

Minutes crawled by. "No objects detected at ten centimeters."

"The patrol ship was supposed to keep to low orbit," said Fafnir, apparently done with reading for the time being. "If they were ambushed, we'd have seen the mess. We should move on to the planet surface. It's pretty obvious they got bored and finally left, but hey, thoroughness, right?"

"Indeed," said Levus flatly. "Marcus, first impressions?"

"No high-energy sources of any kind on the surface. No infrared glows from anything that you'd call technological, but there's plenty of campfires and such on the nightside."

Levus turned away from the holograms and data displays and simply looked out the window. It was the middle of the night at their geostationary point; even at their height the sun was blocked by the planetary disc. Levus could barely make out the coast line of the irregular continent below. The land was painted in almost the same palette of blacks and midnight blues as the ocean, all beneath identical dark gray clouds. Only vague blotches of darker or lighter shades contrasted the land with the perfect sameness of the seas. The planet's single moon was in its new phase, and even on the dark bridge the stars failed to highlight the planet's liquid surfaces.

Nowhere was the soft darkness of the night marred by points of terrestrial light.

Levus pondered ways to speed the process up. "Our brief says that human settlement is limited to this continent," He gestured towards the window, at the continent they orbited above. "If they landed, they likely did so here. To get help, to screw with the locals, to set up their own empire and rule as god-kings; whatever the reason, it's most probable they landed near people, if they landed.

"Lucky, tell the probe to start scanning its sky for any sign of the patrol ship elsewhere in the system. Full active search. Have the ship start to search the planet, shallow-penetration active scan at first. They may have been obliged to perform a bit of lithobraking when they came, or they might have deliberately buried her."

"What if the ship hit the water and sank?" said Fafnir.

"Then we won't really need to find them in a hurry, will we?" That seemed to shut him up, at least for the moment.

"Lookeeloo acknowledges and is commencing autonomous search," said Lucky.

Lucky seldom lowered himself to the point of engaging in the petty bickering of the rest of the crew, instead saving himself for only the most important bickering. It was a fact that Levus deeply appreciated at times like this.

"Spiral-pattern ground probe starting," said Marcus, "beginning with the largest settlement and moving out--"

He was interrupted by a piercing shriek and a sudden lurching of the deck.

"The_Hedge Fund_ is under attack," intoned the ship's voice, "Automatic defenses have been triggered." New displays flashed into existence and the entire color palette of the bridge shifted from cool blues to battle reds.

"Shit!" was all Levus could offer.

When he had come aboard, Fafnir had taken it upon himself to nominate himself as tactical officer, on the logic that hurting people was his general function, and that being hired as muscle for back-alley brawls natural extended to operating kiloton starships in multi-dimensional combat.

"Multiple missile tracks, inbound from above. Intermittent laser contact. All seems to be from high orbit. Imitating random walk, maximum drive power!" With deceptive agility, the Fund abandoned her geostationary position and began erratically twisting and darting across the sky.

"I think we've thrown the laser locks, but those missiles are field driven, we'll never escape them!" Fafnir's voice was loud with excitement but normal in pitch; again it seemed his bragging was entirely justified.

"What do our shields look like?" said Levus.

"No drain, those lasers are low power and they're not getting any spot-dwell. But those missiles look big enough punch a hole right through us. We've got at least 15 incoming from several high orbits, first contact in 60 seconds. Boss, I think they mined this whole place." Independent anti-ship missiles, clad in stealth shrouds and dumped in orbit were a cheap and usually effective way to deny a planet. There was probably a virtual sphere of these things englobing the entire planet.

"Lucky, power up the FTL, we're getting out of here! Fafnir, do what you can with the missiles" The Fund had no weapons, but she did have a powerful ECM suite.

Fafnir nodded. It was far too late to lead the missiles astray, but he could probably pull off some terminal guidance spoofing. Enough to keep them alive through the first few intercepts, anyway.

The planet hologram was gone, replaced by a plot of the ship and the incoming missiles. Red tracks arced towards the blue dot of the ship, graceful curves of malice, all originating from an altitude high above them. They had passed by that mark nearly a half hour ago, completely oblivious to the little canisters of death that slept nearby.

The first red track found its mark. The window polarized in anticipation, reducing the nuclear explosion to a mere flashbulb burst and leaving the crew blinded for only an instant. There was no sense, no physical clue to indicate by what margin their lives had been spared. Death in space wasn't something you had a chance to experience; it just sort of happened, a discrete quantum transition from life to death.

Fafnir's spoofing had sent the missile off-target at the last second, sending it wide by several kilometers. As it was their shields soaked up a massive pulse of hard radiation and charged particles, instead of being torn from the ship completely.

"We can't take more than a couple of those!" shouted Fafnir.

"Lucky, where's the jump?" asked Levus.

"No-go on the FTL! They're propulsion-jamming us. I'm trying but I can't get a 'hole to open!"

Well, this is it, thought Levus. His big moment. Either he came up with a brilliant idea now, or they were all going to die here, very quickly.

"Twenty-five seconds to next impact!"

Nothing was coming to Levus.

"Screw the jump," said Marcus, "and take us down!"

"What?" all three cried, nearly in unison.

"Down! Let them chase us. When the next one blows, we microjump straight to the surface and hide in the clutter. Burn out the drive if we have to!"

"Do it!" yelled Levus. Dying later was better than dying now.

The_Hedge Fund_ made a wrenching turn and dove for the planet, a train of missiles in its wake.