FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

*1.*

"That apple orchard," said Ty in terrible Chinese. "How much? I'm hungry."

The farmers gaped up at the thirty-five-foot foxtaur offering to buy their crop. Ty had gotten his friends to arrange a credit card that would work on the trip back from their last adventure, but the logistics of walking across much of Asia were still a nightmare. He was stuck at giant size and was lucky to only need ten times a sanely-sized foxtaur's food supply.

Ty waved the credit card down at them, pinched between two clawtips. He tried to shrink down to handle the thing better and be less intimidating, but still couldn't get down to normal size. One farmer snatched the card and looked at it while Ty tried to explain.

"You buy land?"

"Just apples," said Ty.

"Need new dam."

Ty sighed. He could be on this enforced vacation for years at this rate, getting pulled aside to pay for things with giant-size labor. Ty's run-in with former colonel Salt, a crazed basset hound scientist, had smashed much of a shopping mall. The Chinese government hadn't cared too much, but they'd been less than helpful about helping Ty get home. So, he hiked.

He chomped whole bushels of apples and bales of rice and when he was lucky, towers of pizza. And like today, sometimes he had to grow to a hundred feet tall and help rebuild a dam. Then there was the hike across the desert, an incident with some supposedly cursed martial arts training grounds, and a village beset by rampaging robots. After Ty helped overthrow a corrupt local administrator, the Chinese government decided to pay for supplies if Ty would stop having adventures and focus on hustling off of their continent. Then, finally, the Japanese offered to pay for a boat ride if he'd help with a few weeks of movie filming.

Eventually he lay cramped on the deck of a cargo ship, heading east from Japan. The ride exposed him to salt spray and gave him almost no room to move without capsizing the ship.

Tren called. Ty grabbed the makeshift phone headset from his car-size saddlebags. Tren, a lizard-turned dragon who'd been put through experiments similar to Ty's own, asked, "Are you still destroying Tokyo or whatever?"

"I'm at sea."

"Are you coming into a US port or a Free States one? Both governments want a word with you, but the US will probably demand custody of you for further study."

"We're headed for San Francisco."

Tren cursed. "Don't go there. Try Guadalajara."

"Oh, sure. I'll just disrupt an international cargo ship and two ports' schedules. Or should I dog-paddle?"

"Unless you want to get sent back to a lab. Find a way."

"How's Emily?"

"Safe. We need to talk when you arrive. It's about Salt's experiments."

Ty grumbled and looked around the ship's narrow deck. It wasn't carrying much but his multi-ton self, but it was no taxi. He called up the captain and spoke with him on deck about wanting to change destinations.

"Or what? You'll rock the boat?"

Ty didn't want to add piracy or terrorism to his record. "It sounds like I'm going to get seized if we reach San Francisco, by people who want to study me. They're going to want to ransack the ship too. You want to be stuck there while people look for scientific clues to how I change size?"

Reluctantly, the captain changed course. Nights later, the Mexican harbor loomed ahead as a haze of light. Like much of Mexico it'd been taken over by the Free States, giving the place a coldly orderly look layered atop old grime. Police robots whirred above the streets and kept back the growing crowd of people who'd spotted Ty.

He longed to stretch his legs. He had to wait for the crew to lash the ship down with many anchors for stability, and then he had to step off into the harbor. Ugh! Bad idea in hindsight. Ty grew to his maximum size of over a hundred feet, but still had to cough out filthy water. He didn't want to think about what was crunching under his feet as he waded ashore, holding his saddlebags high.

Reporters bellowed up at him with megaphones. Ty tried to take a step, but even shrinking down to his minimum wouldn't let him walk safely. He was tired, filthy and wet and the people wouldn't let him get inland.

Ty gave up. He retreated into the dirty water and started wading again, northward past way too many little docks and boats. He kept having to untangle anchors from his legs or weave past piers, going whole miles north until he reached a more rural area with safer footing. Even there he found roads and onlookers. Ty growled and rinsed himself off in the relatively clean seawater here. He had to learn how to shrink again!

At three in the morning, he sprawled exhausted in a scraggly grassland. A lone van rumbled closer and its headlights flashed in his face. Ty's forelegs twitched; he nearly swatted the thing like an alarm clock. "Go away!"

A shapely foxtaur hopped out, rapidly growing from five to twenty feet tall. "You look terrible!"

"Emily?" said Ty, lifting his head from his forepaws. "I tried to meet you in port."

Tren was there too, more subtle with his wings hidden under a trenchcoat. He hauled open the back of the van to reveal several big jugs of water, a stack of pizzas, and a basket of oranges. "Brought you dinner. Glad you arrived."

Ty shrank as much as he could, then hugged Emily. "Am I going to be stuck like this forever? I can't go _anywhere_ without making a scene."

Tren said, "That's the thing." He looked around. The gawkers had finally left Ty alone for now. "Didn't want to tell you by phone, but we've got an offer to help you control your size again -- if you let yourself get studied by the Free States. They've already set up a base for you."

Ty moaned. "How is that any better than before?"

"It's an offer, not a demand. Trouble is, if they really have a solution it'll involve our matter storage fields."

Emily added, "Which means they might get ideas about some kind of mass-changing bomb. We know something screwy's going on with your bone density and calorie use."

Ty consoled himself with pizza. He could be stuck tiptoeing around skyscrapers forever, and never have a roof overhead, if he didn't learn how to undo the size-locking Salt's gadgets had done to him.

Tren said, "The Agency probably already has a lead on that. And the Chinese. So, the Free States are especially eager to get a look at you to keep up. At all three of us, but you're the most interesting because you're the biggest size-shifter."

Letting another gang of scientists study him wasn't appealing, but neither was a life with this handicap. Ty said, "I'll go if we stick together. We'll have the best chance to get back out, that way."

The lab turned out to be a long walk away, for Ty, across much of Mexico. Emily and Tren kept him company at least. Lots of dry grassland and the scent of cows. At last they found a huge pit with a tarp over half of it, making it look like a concert hall for cavemen. Ty looked at the tiers of ramps that'd been hacked out of the ground and said, "An old quarry!"

Emily looked around, "Good visibility, with escape routes, but there's some radio interference. I'm sensing underground defenses. Remote-controlled mines or something."

But no fence. Ty looked grimly down to the trailers and tents in the pit. A science team had caught sight of him and was waving.

A ferret-taur climbed a long staircase toward Ty's group. "Hello! I'm Marcus, vice president for R&D. Glad you could join us." A pair of wolf security guards struggled upstairs after him.

Ty said, "Vice president? I thought you were government types."

"Defense contractors." Marcus grinned. He patted his long taur body and said, "I was one of the first to try out the Agency's transformation technology, and I saw right away that we need to catch up. We'll need you to sign non-disclosure forms..." He glared over his shoulders at the guards and made a hurry-up gesture. One of them handed him a computer tablet. "For you, Ty -- may I call you Ty? -- we'll do a voice signature."

Emily blinked at Marcus. "You went taur, why exactly?"

"Fun. But officially to study the effectiveness of the technology, and to use a matter-storage field like yours if we can figure it out. Now, if you'll step down we'll supply food and other facilities, and introduce you to the team."

Ty grabbed Emily and Tren and backed off for a private talk. "Seem all right to you?"

Emily said, "Best we can hope for, to help you." Tren nodded.

So, minutes later Ty was officially an employee of Mustelico, makers of fine missiles and robots. There was a tarp for rain and sun, open ground beyond the quarry where he could walk around, and enough food.

He stayed and worked patiently with the team. Tren and Emily got worked over by the scientists too, but Ty was the center of attention. They marked a height chart on the quarry wall as though he were a little kid, but had no luck squishing him much below thirty-five feet. He'd had plenty of chances to try, in China, and even training from a temple of perplexed Buddhist monks.

The breakthrough came a month later. Ty had gotten jabbed with too many needles, been peered at with too many strange science instruments, and had generally gotten annoyed, so he lost control and doubled in size without warning. Corporate men scattered away from his swelling paws and he had to swerve to avoid crushing an entire trailer with his butt. He sprawled against one wall of the quarry, calling out, "Sorry! Everyone okay? And quit poking me."

"Aha!" said Marcus. "The readings are just as predicted." The little taur bounded around hugging lab technicians.

One of them, understandably grumpy for having had to dodge Ty, shouted up at Ty to explain. "We've got a suppressor gadget that should imitate the changes in your field that appear when you're not controlling your size consciously."

Marcus dashed into a lab trailer and returned with a long metallic cord that looped on itself like a bracelet. "This thing. Once we configure it right, it'll keep you smaller."

Putting it on was a challenge. They had to make several copies of it in different sizes so he could wear the meter-wide one as a ring, then have a smaller version to put on as he shrunk more. Ty concentrated on the old size-changing reflex he'd first learned at the Agency and managed to drop to twenty feet tall, ten, and finally to five feet, around his old height. "Finally!" he said. He bounded over to Emily and hugged her.

Emily grinned and grew a little taller so she could reach down and ruffle his ears. "At last, you won't hog all the food."

Tren turned to Marcus, saying, "Does this mean you'll be able to restore my max height?" He'd been able to get up to credible dragon size before the China incident, but couldn't grow much anymore.

"I think so," said Marcus. "The implications of the 'bracelet' are... well, big."

Ty tugged worriedly at the cord around his arm. "Weaponry."

Marcus muttered something about medical applications.

It was inevitable that someone would find ways to abuse the technology. Ty tried not to let the thought spoil his mood, but the thought wouldn't go away entirely. He spent the rest of the week trying to be happy and helpful for the sake of Tren's abilities and anything the team could do for Emily.

Mustelico treated them well. Ty mastered using the bracelet to shrink down to reasonable size, but nothing worked to make that his default or to let him get nearly so small without it. The best he could do, after a week, was use just the bracelet instead of the bigger "ring" to get down from his standard -- about fifty feet with a max of a hundred -- to normal-for-taurs. Holding onto the device worked nearly as well as wearing it.

Marcus gasped as Ty shrank down. Ty said, "Is this about the nudity? Do I have to start wearing pants again?"

Marcus bounced around on four legs, stammering. "That's just it! Don't you see? The device shrank with you!"

Indeed it had, becoming comfortable enough to wear at his new size. Ty gingerly tried gaining a few feet in height with a matching growth of his arms, and the bracelet didn't get painfully tight. "Think it'd work with clothes too?"

"Let's find out!"

So began Ty's scientific fashion show. He walked around the quarry laboratory at normal size, doing chores to distract him or changing size on purpose while dressed in various outfits. After he burst out of his third pair of pants (provided by an ambitious taur-friendly clothier called Shiro) he figured out how to make his clothes change size along with his body. The electric tingle of the size-shifting effect, which he'd stopped noticing, came back and seemed to include whatever he had on. He bounced a little at having another part of his old life back. "All right!"

Tren said, "What if you held onto another size-changer when you did that?"

"I'd rather not risk blowing anybody up if something weird happens to the fields."

Emily tugged his tail, like she used to do when they were little in all senses. "Can I try the bracelet, though? It'd be nice to get clothing control like that."

"Is that worth the hassle of learning it?" asked Ty.

Emily said, "I'd like to have options beside becoming a giant naked vixentaur." She giggled at Ty's blushing. He'd technically seen her that way before, but fur covered everything and he'd learned to quit caring much about clothes, what with his own lower half.

After much work, Emily learned the clothing trick even without needing a similar gadget. Tren didn't much care, what with having wings and scales that made him strange-looking anyway, but the Mustelico engineers set him up with a device to get menacingly large again.

Ty began to train for a normal life, such as it was. He could go back to working in construction, alternating between electrical work inside buildings and lifting tons of bricks at a time outside them. The Mustelico team seemed to be humoring him as he practiced shifting their hardware around, and they were studying him the whole time.

"What do you want to do?" he asked Emily one night. They lay under the stars, on their backs.

"All I know how to do is secret-agent stuff."

"Be a security consultant, then. Help people design systems even you can't sneak through."

"No such thing!" she said. "It does sound fun, though." She turned to one side and hugged him, then stood up.

"Heading back already?"

"No. We're getting out of here tonight. You didn't think they'd let us just quit, did you?"

"But Tren --"

"He can take care of himself. He'll understand. Come on." She tugged his arm. "Their sensors won't be a problem, now that I know how the trackers hidden in the fancy bracelets work."

Ty was too startled to object. He owned almost nothing but the computer he had on, and he could always get spare clothes. He stood up and nodded.

Emily led them on a zigzag path across the dark plain, creeping away from the quarry at minimum size.

*2.*

They turned in letters of resignation the next day, after making sure they were seen in public. Marcus called, obviously trying not to hiss or let his ears lay back in view of his camera. "What are you thinking? You can't expect to walk out like that and get treated like ordinary job-seekers!"

Ty and Emily shared a screen to reply. Ty said, "Why not? We can still do relatively ordinary work."

"You're celebrities! People look up to you. Literally. Haven't you been mobbed by reporters yet?"

Ty glanced back over his shoulders. They were in a corner of a pasta buffet, where the owner had taken one look at them and demanded double price. "We'll deal with that. We can also maybe check in with you, once in a while. But we're done."

Marcus fumed. "Fine. I can't stop you. But I predict you'll be back soon."

It felt strange to be normal. Ty and Emily moved into an apartment with money from Ty's new construction job, while Emily shopped for security work. Trouble was, Ty couldn't keep a low profile. After a few days of being normal-sized, he got a terrible full-body itch that wouldn't go away, and felt the bracing of his bones and muscles that meant a much bigger taur in a few moments. At the time, he was in a grocery store.

"Out of the way!" he shouted, dropping his shopping basket and barreling toward the exit. He saw the checkout aisles ahead and felt himself getting too wide for the automated counter, let alone squeezing past the raccoon mom with three kids. Ty skidded on the linoleum floor, hit the aisles sideways, knocked over dozens of sodas and some scandal magazines ("Celebrities Gone Taur!"), and scrambled on his belly to get out. He rolled over outside and landed with one giant paw getting banged repeatedly by the automatic doors and his face covered by a shopping cart. He'd been lucky it was a big box store.

#

He learned to grow for around an hour once a day, to keep from doing it accidentally. The size-restraint bracelet seemed only to delay things, not to keep him small. Ty could live with that so long as he wasn't having to apologize to shopkeepers.

The days went by and Emily slammed the door a bit harder each evening when she was still unemployed. "You're not going to run off on another secret mission, are you?" asked Ty.

Emily sprawled on a thrift-store couch, sighing. "Tempted! I wonder if Marcus got me blacklisted. We gave them what they wanted. They can build their bomb or whatever, with all that data."

Someone knocked on the door. Emily sat up with her forepaws draped over the couch's side. Ty sprang up and checked it. "Tren! Did you run off on them too?"

The dragon-man walked in and let Ty get him a drink. "Just visiting." His hands were unsteady when he sat and opened the soda can. "I think he broke out."

Emily cursed. "You mean Salt?" Her ears lay back flat, but Ty saw excitement in her eyes.

Tren said, "Yeah. The Chinese aren't saying much, but from what contacts I have, there's a manhunt in progress. You think Mustelico was angry about you walking out of _their_ facility?"

Ty said, "How'd he get out of prison? The Chinese must've known what he could do and they had the remains of his gadgets."

"From what I understand, Salt was half prisoner, half valued researcher. Like the German rocket scientists after the World Wars. You can escape the noose if you're useful enough."

Emily said, "Great. So how close is the world to a giant-bomb war?"

Ty faced his sister, surprised. "What's important is that he's probably after us! I'm not going to let him capture you again."

Emily's expression hardened. "I'm going to make it a lot tougher this round if he tries."

Tren made a time-out sign, saying, "Whoa. We don't know he's got plans like that. He might be satisfied with experimenting on himself, now that he's got the same kind of powers."

"Yet you came here," said Emily. "To warn us, right?"

Ty said, "I'm not looking to hop on a plane and hunt the man down if that's what either of you are thinking. We just need to keep an eye out. Or..." He sighed. "Make a deal with Mustelico for protection until we know what's going on."

Tren sheepishly turned and scratched his arm. "That was what Marcus wanted me to lead up to. I don't know whether it's a good idea. You do have Emily's skills for protection, but she can't always be on alert. That's no way to live."

"Well?" Ty asked Emily. "How about going back? We don't even know where to look for Salt if we wanted to."

Emily's tail bristled and she reared up to put both hands on Ty's shoulders. "You're happier than I've seen you in a long time. Better than you were when we were hanging out in the quarry. You have a real job as something better than a test subject. I'd rather have to take care of myself, than be stuck back there watching you be bored. Besides," she added with a smirk, "we already signed up for six months' rent on this place."

Tren said, "The company would pay for that to get you back. I told them about Salt probably escaping."

Ty hugged Emily, then paced. "If you're all right with staying here, then fine, we'll stay. You're probably itching to use your training anyway."

A week later, Ty found he couldn't enter the apartment without hopping past laser sensors and tapping the doormat twice. "What are we going to do when we order pizza?" he said, spotting the traps she'd described and wondering about others she hadn't.

Emily said, "Pick it up. You could use the exercise; you gained a lot of weight since we were kids."

"Along with extra limbs!" Besides, he'd found that lifting roofs and trailers gave him muscle that carried over between sizes. "Tomorrow we're starting work on the downtown stadium's interior."

"Good. I think I figured out how Salt escaped, by the way."

Ty's ears drooped. "I don't want to keep worrying about him."

"It matters. So long as he's out there and we don't know his plans, we're in danger. Weren't you on the verge of crawling back to Mustelico?"

"Only for you. It's been a while now, and there's been no mad science rampage. Maybe it's over."

"I'm trying to be ready if it isn't. What if they were locking him up at night, and he managed to treat any locks or chains like clothing, so they grew with him and that helped him break them?"

"I guess." Ty twitched his tail. "There are probably other applications of this stuff, but I'm not a scientist. Are you trying to keep up with the Mustelico studies?"

"I'm trying to surpass them."

#

Ty panted in the shade of a baseball stadium, taking a break from installing row after row of bleachers. This kind of work didn't lend itself to his powers, once he'd done the heavy lifting. He'd gotten good at rapid shifting to move a long metal bench at a time, set it down, then help with bolting it into place, but doing that made it tough to climb the bare concrete steps without hurting his bare paws. He'd tried steel-toed boots, but they were a hazard for everyone around him.

A crashing noise in the distance made his ears perk. The other construction workers looked toward the noise but couldn't see. "Ty, what's going on?"

Ty grabbed one of the men and grew until they could both see over the stadium wall. A cloud of dust stood where a section of raised highway should have been. "An explosion? A big crash?" Ty said.

The wolf hanging onto Ty's hands said, "No, something's moving!"

There was a roar. Car horns and sirens blared in the distance. Then a dark, shuffling shape emerged, hunched over in the smoke, towering over cars and the low nearby buildings. Dust caked its black fur and the thick light patch along its back. It rested both forepaws on the highway, and the nearest support pillar collapsed from the weight. It didn't seem to care.

Ty blinked a few times and set his co-worker down. "Do you want to say it?"

The wolf-man shouted to everyone else, "The city is under attack by a giant honey badger!"

For years, Ty had trained with the Agency with the idea that he'd fight villains, terrorists, really whoever the Agency pointed him at. His bosses there probably had been telling him a partial truth -- there really were people that needed a big beat-down -- with the problem that the Agency itself deserved it the most. Ty hadn't considered giant monster attacks, though. He looked way down at the foreman and said, "Uh, sir, can I take my lunch break now?"

The foreman just nodded at him, wide-eyed, and ran with the others to get a better view and/or place bets.

Ty grew as big as he could, climbed up the stadium's tiered walls, and leaped out of it and into the parking lot. He landed on churned-up mud and started picking his way toward the badger, realizing that he didn't have a plan. Cars squealed to a stop around him and more sirens blared in the distance. He considered getting a taxi to take him closer at convenient travel size, but no sane driver would agree. Ty compromised, shrinking to twenty feet or so to quicken his pace without smashing the city. The bracelet warmed on his arm as he shifted repeatedly to pick his way past obstacles.

The badger looked up at him, then went back to tearing into an office building. Townsfolk fled screaming and cars roared out of the way. A truck crashed into a sports car and blocked the road right in front of Ty. He leaned down and moved both as carefully as he could, setting them down on the sidewalk so others could get away.

The badger flung desks and chairs out of the building, then crunched a refrigerator in its mouth. A pile of cubicles hit Ty in the upper chest and made him stagger back, barely avoiding the Italian bistro across the street. "Hey!" he said. "Are you a person or just some big critter? Can you understand me?"

The badger pulled its head out of the building and growled at him. Ty edged to one side to get more dodging room. Animal control time. "You've already totaled that building, so stay right there until the cops arrive. Nice badger."

It leaped at him. Ty yelped and with practiced moves grabbed the beast by one foreleg. He whipped it around with its own momentum and slammed it face-first into the street. A massive set of claws hacked at his forelegs and made him stagger, feeling blood stain his fur. He reared up and stomped on the creature, twice, knocking the breath from it. He dodged its claws but fell backward into the poor Italian place, cracking bricks and shattering glass. He held up his arms over his face to ward off the debris, then kicked out at the badger's head with giant hindfeet.

By now, helicopters whipped the air overhead. Ty staggered to his feet and tackled the badger once more, punching it and slapping it into the pavement.

"You there! Step away. We will open fire!" An otter in a police chopper yelled down through a megaphone.

Ty backed carefully away from the downed badger, shouting, "All right, officer!" He hoped they understood who to shoot at. He'd hardly reached the back of the escaping traffic jam when a high-powered rifle cracked three times, piercing the badger in the head. The beast roared one more time, incredibly rising up as though it'd swat the copter out of the sky, then crashed with a thud into the remains of the office building. The remaining wall toppled and cracked the next building over, a six-story hotel.

Ty shouted. He took three wobbling steps to avoid cars and check on the hotel, in case it too was going to collapse. When the cracked wall held, Ty looked back up and saw a familiar kangaroo leaning out of the copter and holding the rifle. "Alyssa!"

She started to speak, but then raised her rifle again and fired. Ty flinched. The badger's raised paw collapsed and its body quivered once more before going still. Alyssa said, "Damn stubborn."

Ty kept a wary eye on it. "Yeah."

"I meant you. Ty, I didn't expect you to race into battle the moment something big showed up."

"You should have!"

She sighed, hovering there within Ty's reach. "Probably. We need to talk privately."

The reporters had other ideas. They'd swarmed in and had a helicopter of their own circling the scene. Two news vans had nearly collided with Ty's hindlegs. The pain in Ty's forelegs flared up, making him yelp and sit back on his haunches. The badger had gashed him deeply and he'd lost a gallon or so of blood, making him feel a little loopy. Were his blood cells giant right now? What did that do to the chemistry?

"Mister Vulpine!" said a reporter. "What do you know about the monster's origin? Were there casualties?"

Alyssa called down, "He needs medical attention. Back off, all of you." She turned to Ty and said, "Can you shrink safely while you're hurt?"

Ty winced. He could, but from past experience it wasn't fun. Only good way to get treated though. He willed himself to shrink back down, and cried out as bleeding wounds got exposed to the raw, jagged Science of his matter-storage field. He lay on the pavement at normal size at last, getting swarmed again by reporters. Ambulances were coming too for the people hurt in the smashed buildings. Ty had to wait for their second trip before the paramedics would tend to him.

In the meantime, the police landed in a nearby plaza. Alyssa bounded closer to keep the newsies at bay, and to help bandage Ty. "Play the wounded hero," she murmured. "Everybody's deciding whether to blame you, and no that doesn't make sense."

Ty spent an hour in the hospital getting cleaned and drugged for his wounds. Alyssa managed to get him alone by flashing her badge. She said, "Good work, I think. But the fact that this happened here is getting people to think there's a connection to you, and they're probably right. Have you gotten any threats lately from Salt, or Mustelico, or anyone?"

Ty didn't feel like moving right now, between the soft pillows and the painkillers. He'd had robots sewing him up and scanning him, complaining about his durable skin. "Not at all. Salt had wanted to experiment on me and Emily, and to test us..." Oh, no. "If this attack was done to see my reaction, then it really is my fault it happened here."

Alyssa leaned back on her tail, saying, "Can't blame you for having a nemesis. I'm assuming Salt's the one behind this, since we haven't exactly seen Islamic terrorists watching Godzilla movies for ideas. You know him better than anybody I work with; what the heck does he want?"

Ty thought about his encounters with the mad scientist, first at the Agency and then at his Chinese base. "Unless he's just got it in for me and Emily, he's been after power. He wanted to have his own little... well, big army with powers like ours. If he broke out of jail because doing science for the Chinese wasn't fun enough, then he's probably trying to rebuild a personal fortress and goon squad. So, there might be more giant critters or people getting empowered. He didn't manage to steal his whole lab when he ran away, did he?"

Alyssa sighed. "Pretty much. Being huge is useful, but being able to shift gives him more options for what he can carry and use. In fact, there's something I'd like you to try as soon as you're up for shifting size at all."

She wouldn't tell him what. It took a whole day before he was recovered enough to try, despite the improved healing that modern medicine and his own powers gave him. Alyssa came back to escort him out of the hospital and into an unwatched room in the police station. Then, she took off a holster with a pistol in it, and handed it over. "Ceiling's about fifteen feet. Can you grow as much as possible while wearing this?"

"A gun? I'd probably break that thing depending on how it interacts with my field."

Alyssa said, "Treat it as part of your clothes. However that works." He had on only a t-shirt at the moment.

Ty wasn't eager to get into any gunfights, but he slipped the leather holster around his upper waist. Then, he swelled up until his ears brushed the dirty concrete ceiling. "What's the point of this?"

Alyssa stared at the gun. Ty reluctantly drew it. The cold metal weighed lightly in his hands. "A Colt 1911? Didn't know you liked the classics. That's, what, .45 caliber?"

"Not right now."

It had grown with him, becoming a terrifying cannon from the kangaroo's perspective. Ty's hands shook as he examined the thing, finding giant cartridges inside. "I have no idea what'll happen if I use this. The bullets might shrink the moment they're away from me, and the noise... ow." His ears lay flat in anticipation.

Alyssa looked grim. "If Salt is out there pushing the limits of what mass-change technology can do, don't you think we should find out?"

#

Alyssa was officially with the Free States' security bureau these days, though Ty wasn't completely sure he believed that. Her friendship with KC, a man who'd fought alongside Ty and Tren, gave him reason to trust her. So, Ty and Emily both went with her to a ranch in the middle of nowhere. The dry heat of the evening helped Ty ignore the distant smell of many cows. "Are we out of earshot though?" he asked.

Alyssa looked at the briefcases she and her assistants carried. "Let's go another mile out." Everyone put on earmuffs.

Emily took to the guns quickly. "How did the Agency not think to try this?"

Ty said, "The technology was still new. They hadn't figured out clothes yet, remember." Plus they'd been busy doing other terrible things to her, like implanting actual armor under her skin by a process he didn't want to imagine.

Emily grew to her personal limit of around twenty-five feet, after all the meddling at Mustelico, making Ty grin at seeing her tower over him. She picked up a little pistol and handled it, set it down, then shrank and tried growing while carrying the gun. Emily drew the now-giant pistol, aimed at a bullseye perched on some hay, and fired. The noise boomed like a cannon.

A tiny bullethole appeared dead center. "Oh, come on!" she said. "I wanted to blast the thing with a giant .22."

"You're lucky it didn't explode," Ty muttered.

Alyssa, meanwhile, was glaring at Emily and holding a portable scanner. "You were supposed to wait and let me test the thing to make sure the metal wasn't deformed by growing."

"Fine, we'll do it the boring way."

The size changes seemed not to harm the guns at all. Unfortunately for Emily, the bullets only stayed huge for a tiny fraction of a second after firing, good enough only for short-range destruction she could accomplish more easily by stomping.

Alyssa opened another silver briefcase. "Let's try something different," she said, and pulled out a pair of short gleaming swords, slightly curved. "Diamond-coated titanium cutlasses."

Ty's eyes went wide. "May I?" he asked, tail wagging. Alyssa nodded and he snatched one, giving it a few swings like a pirate. Then, he grew to over a hundred feet tall and found himself holding a sword that looked as big as a bus. "Nice! Do we have any small, expendable buildings around?"

Emily tried the other sword. Though she could only reach a fraction of Ty's height, she had no problem hacking the bullseye and several hay bales in half with two blows. "Primitive, but effective. We need more testing." She snatched the empty suitcase and hurled it at Ty, saying, "Think fast!"

Ty chopped the flying metal thing in two. "Warn me next time!"

The halves landed by Alyssa's assistants' feet, making them hop back. Alyssa said, "Good reflexes, everyone. So guns are mostly out, but the enemy might still have weapons. I don't have authority to try grenades on strings or anything like that."

"Yo-yo," said Emily.

Alyssa startled. "Good idea." She sent one of her minions, a hare in a suit and dark glasses, to buy a yo-yo for secret government science purposes.

Ty had a more dangerous idea. "Bullets don't stay big, but if the noise is this bad" -- they'd heard frightened mooing even at this distance -- "then the gases are still magnified as they leave the barrel. Which means..."

Emily's tail wagged. "Rockets!"

Alyssa hopped in place, looking frazzled. "That's... big. I need to deliver that news right away. We're done testing for today." The foxtaurs gave a double "aww", and Alyssa said, "Keep the swords."

*3.*

Ty tried to keep helping the construction crew at the stadium, including filling in those giant pawprints someone left in the parking area. He got called in too to clear the rubble from his last fight. He came home one day to find reporters camped outside the apartment. It looked like a few had already been tasered or unceremoniously launched by springs into the bushes. At least Emily's traps worked.

"Mister Vulpine!" said one doggy reporter. "Isn't it true that the city is in danger as long as you're here drawing attention?"

A rabbit said, "Do you have any comment on whether your Agency connections will provoke war with the North? To them you're a traitor, after all."

Ty's ears flattened and he growled at the bunny. "Excuse me? The Agency killed my parents and lied to me about it!"

The reporter hopped away from him, but others held their ground, pressing more obnoxious questions on him. He couldn't even duck inside without giving away the trick to entering safely. He stomped away from there, growing in size with each step. When he got enough distance and calm to use his phone, he contacted Emily to ask if she was inside and warn her if she wasn't.

"Get to the quarry," she wrote. "Quick."

Ty took their cheap, taur-modified truck. When he got to the edge of the Mustelico facility he found security guards and a fence that hadn't been there on his last visit. Alyssa met him at the gate, saying, "I've told these guys about your last idea. Somebody did it." She jumped into the truck and ushered him through.

"Rocket weapons enlarged by mega-badgers?" said Ty with a grin.

Alyssa just peered at him.

Ty said, "What? Really?"

"I guess Salt figured that if he'd gotten his size-changing tech to work on one species, he might as well keep using them. That's how and why he just hijacked the Chiron-1 satellite's rocket."

Ty screeched to a stop near the quarry's edge and got out. "What happened, exactly?"

Down in the pit, Alyssa and Marcus had gathered people, Tren and Emily included, for a briefing. A video screen showed footage from the space launch complex, getting raided by five suddenly huge armored wolves and a similarly armored dog. The goons smashed their way past fences and guards, then rushed a tower where the rocket was minutes from launching. Two of them carried cages on their backs, and the rest had bulky backpacks.

Alyssa said, "Using the animals as a matter storage field, the attackers increased the rocket engines' mass in a way we're not sure of, and redirected launch control to a remote site. Then, the canine and two henchmen climbed aboard and replaced the cargo with whatever the team was carrying."

The attackers hustled half of their number out of their armor and into spacesuits. Ty groaned, recognizing Salt as the leader. "It's him. But why?"

The goons threw the original cargo down from the rocket, splattering an expensive satellite all over the concrete launchpad. Ty winced.

Alyssa was silent as the screen showed the rocket rippling and distorting, holding together despite suddenly carrying a much greater mass of fuel and bigger engines that tore it free from the launch gantry and raised it even taller. The rocket lifted off without any audible countdown, an eerie change to go with the thing's insane new shape and massive pillar of flame.

Alyssa said, "This was minutes ago. With the increased thrust added to the rocket, Salt and his men don't need to follow the standard flight path meant for the satellite launch."

Emily said, "Then where are they headed?"

"We don't yet know. The astrophysicists are all still rocking side to side and weeping."

Ty looked the assembled spies and scientists over. "Then what does the man want? Is he after one of the space stations, maybe?"

Tren nodded grimly. "Where else could he go? He'd need more fuel to reach the Moon or farther out. We've got what, a few dozen people in orbit total?"

Alyssa said, "Ten on the old ISS, eighteen on Challenger Station thanks to the inflated hab modules, and eight on the Chinese/Indian station. With no guns, if it comes to that. Nobody was expecting boarding parties."

Ty asked, "Emily, is there anything you know about him that I don't?" She'd seen more of him back at the Agency, and while captured by him.

The vixentaur growled, staring at the floor. "He had all kinds of crazy ideas and didn't care who he hurt. I wouldn't be surprised if he did want to build a moon base or something. Could he repeat the rocket trick?"

"Those poor badgers got fried," said Martin, letting his tail droop.

Ty said, "Sure, but if the hijackers have spacesuits and they can grow giant while wearing them, couldn't they grab satellites and use their fuel?"

"That's completely insane," said Alyssa. "It'd probably occur to him."

"What now?" asked Emily.

The roo studied the screen, then turned back to her and Ty. "I need to coordinate with a couple of space agencies. Whatever Salt is up to, I suspect they're going to want to fling you two into the sky to stop it."

Just in case, the Free States sent the foxtaurs to train in Houston. Engineers were running around panicked at the sudden instructions to design taur-friendly spacesuits compatible with matter storage fields and incorporating Ty's restraining bracelet. Then there was the matter of preparing a rocket launch in a hurry with a destination of "dunno".

Some extra motivation happened the next day, when Salt's men matched orbits with Challenger Station. The video footage was not pretty. It would've been too dangerous for the attackers to leave prisoners where they might have a chance to wreck something or retake control. Instead the crew got flung out in whatever direction the pirates seemed to want for a little extra thrust.

The news sites were enough of a briefing for Ty. The space station story leaked, followed by satellites getting swept out of orbit and brief sightings of large objects snatching them. The world took notice -- that is, people noticed worse cell phone coverage and weather reports, where they hadn't noticed the first atrocity -- and there was talk of blowing the space station out of the sky.

Ty sat on a couch, cuddling with Emily in one of their rare hours outside of training and sleep. "We can't save the people up there, at least the Challenger Station crew. Is it worth being in danger again over some satellites?"

"You don't want to go to space?" said Emily.

"I don't want _you_ there if there's a chance of not coming back."

"Salt and his buddies started this mess, and he's the only one who hasn't backed off. It's not going to end until we stop him. Doesn't mean we have to hunt him down... though that's a side benefit." Her forelegs tightened around his upper waist, making him feel the tension in them.

They'd avoided talking much about their parents, or about revenge. Ty didn't want to reopen that wound; his family was gone just like the space station's crew. "If we do this, then can we be done with him and the Agency for good? Not going after all his associates or anything like that?"

"Yeah," she said. "That'll be enough."

*4.*

Ty, Emily and Tren were the crew, with Tren as their pilot. The trouble was that by launch day, Salt's plans had advanced. The hijacked rocket and captured space station now ruled Earth orbit, snatching satellites from their orbits and using their fuel for size-shifting exploits that gave the growing station junkyard even more mass and maneuvering ability.

Ty felt horribly cramped. He lay on a custom taur couch, in a spacesuit, in a tiny capsule atop a giant pillar of explosives. One loss of his size control in a panic -- he'd done that in training -- and he'd burst out of the capsule. Emily had gotten a similar restraint bracelet to help her against the same problem.

"Liftoff!" The rocket launch crushed Ty into the couch and the noise seemed to go on forever. Then he floated, in deceptive peace.

Hours later, he was bored. "Have we matched orbits yet?"

Tren nudged a joystick to spin their capsule, the _Little Giant_. "Running low on the main maneuvering tank. You know what that means."

The enemy had spun out to a slightly higher orbit as a way to dodge, but didn't dare risk a collision. Ty checked his suit and grabbed the maneuvering jetpack behind his seat. "Yeah. Get out and push."

"Are you ready, if they start shooting at us?"

Ty nodded, and squeezed into the tiny airlock. Then, he was _outside_. He shuddered and clutched the outer handholds for dear life. He'd trained for this, but being in the dark with so many stars, with a view of the Sahara floating seemingly overhead, stunned him. His suit's air was dry and cold. And in the distance, Challenger Station stood out as a tiny, growing cluster of pipes. "Visual contact," he said, feeling it was an understatement. Half the universe was in view.

Something ahead grew. With a deep breath, Ty unclenched his hands from the capsule and floated within reach of it. Maybe Salt's team had figured out a way to fling giant bullets after all. No: instead of trying gunfire, they were sending a boarding party of their own! One of the wolves, now huge, was diving toward _Little Giant_ headfirst.

Ty grabbed the sword he'd brought on his spacesuit, and tethered it to his wrist. He pushed away from the capsule and slowly grew. It seemed like nothing was moving. Most of the things he saw dwarfed him at any size. Ty got between the wolf and _Giant_, sword outstretched.

The enemy had his own jetpack. He whipped past Ty, curling his tail to dodge Ty's blade, and slowed to come at him from behind.

Ty fired two brief spinning jets. "You can't change speeds like that for long!" Of course there was no way the guy would hear...

The wolf radioed back, "I'll swat you out of the sky!"

Ty kept steady. Nobody had much experience in microgravity combat, let alone hand-to-hand, but Ty had some theory backed by years of the Agency's general combat training. When the wolf came at him again, wasting fuel to go faster, Ty feinted with his sword, then caught the wolf's wild punch and whipped him around in a judo throw. Nothing to slam him into, though, except -- uh oh. The enemy was heading right for _Giant_ now! Ty jetted toward it, changed angles, and made an emergency lunge to slam the wolf sideways.

They came withing a long arm's reach of hitting the spaceship and went sailing into the black. The wolf flailed at him with four limbs, trying to grab Ty's six and tear his spacesuit, but Ty was the one with the blade. He struggled with the wolf's legs, kicked back against his arms, and slashed a foot-long hole in the wolf's suit. Air hissed out and sent them both tumbling. Ty imagined he could hear the suit's alarms. The sword floated loose from Ty's hand and he yanked it back with its cord.

The wolf tried to pry himself loose to patch his suit. Ty breathed hard and kept his forelegs tangled around the enemy's legs. Just as the wolf grabbed an emergency patch, Ty slashed at him again, catching his arm. Air hissed and the wolf screamed in frustration and rage. Ty let go, stabbing and kicking away in one movement. The blade pierced the wolf's suit and went deeper this time, doubling him over. Ty let himself drift backwards, watching his foe's air and blood drive the wolf farther away, toward a scattering of his ashes in the atmosphere.

Ty tried not to think too hard about having killed him. He shuddered and turned to find _Little Giant_, then radioed in. "I... I've gotten rid of that one."

Tren said, "It's what you trained for, Ty. He would've killed us."

Ty maneuvered to get back to the capsule's hull so they could close in on the captured station. On a different frequency he said, "I doubt Salt brought a superweapon aboard. We're just defending what's left of the satellites now."

Emily said, "He's a murderer, and whatever he's doing will kill more people. Let's stop it."

Tren kept aboard the capsule as pilot, while Emily joined Ty in space. Her suit made her look even more powerful, with her sword and several gadgets. "Two of us versus Salt and one goon," she said. "We've got this."

Ty and Emily returned to normal size. Challenger Station loomed ahead, a mass of inflated bubble-habitats and titanium tunnels fringed with solar panels. The foxtaurs made for the main airlock. Ty slapped a specialized transmitter onto the control panel and radioed, "We're ready, Tren."

Tren set off a remote hack from the ground crew to take over the airlock and if possible, the rest of the station. The panel's lights flickered, going through multiple resets. Then, the outer door hissed open. Ty called out, "You want to make this difficult, Salt? We have room to carry you down as a prisoner. If we can't retake the station intact, we can depressurize it."

Tren said, "Didn't get control of all systems, Ty."

"Ssh."

Emily said, "No traps detected in there, but you never know. Ready?"

Ty nodded, and they entered the airlock. Just then, something yanked Ty backward and slammed his suit's arm, setting off sirens in his ears. He yelped, looking around in his confining helmet. A flash of another suit. The other wolf!

Emily cried out and slashed, but the wolf jetted away with a grin visible through his visor.

Ty felt his muzzle press painfully up against his helmet as he hurried to patch the damage along his arm. He was at an awkward angle... no, he was growing. The restraint bracelet was damaged! It was all Ty could do to slap a patch on, and force the suit to act as part of his clothes so he wouldn't burst out of it. He lost full control and had to scramble out of the airlock, turning ten feet tall and rising. "I can't stop it!" he shouted to Emily.

Salt's voice crackled on the radio. "Having a wardrobe malfunction?"

Emily had flown off toward the second wolf, who was barely visible against the stars. An optic camo spacesuit? She said, "You murderer! I don't care if I have to snap this station in half to get you. Come out in one piece or I'll do the same to you!"

Salt said, "I'd actually like to hire you three. We're taking a trip to a near-Earth asteroid using the thrust from some magnified satellites."

Ty raced to help Emily, dodging the thin blades of solar arrays. The wolf's adaptive camo still made him nearly invisible, but he caught flickers of the suit against the background of habitat modules and tethered satellites. "What nonsense are you talking now?" said Ty.

"You're not going home in your tiny capsule, fox. And you're not going inside the nice, warm space station. You don't even have a properly sized valve that can attach to a normal-size life support system. How much air have you got?"

Ty froze, then jetted to swing past a bus-sized telescope. The others heard that too. He had to stop Salt, but then what? The bracelet was his only ticket home, and the damaged cord didn't look easy to repair. Not good. "You must have some other option, if you want my help."

"I do! I'm also prepared to destroy it."

Ty's radio beeped, hurting his ears. Emily's voice came to him, sounding tinny. "Got another layer of encryption set up. The wolf is hiding... let's say above you, and thinks I don't see him. Don't turn your head. I think he's about to attack _Little Giant_ so we'll have no ride home at all."

Ty felt the enemy looming overhead. No way home. Ty's breaths were draining air too quickly. "What do we do?"

Emily sent a set of numbers to flash across Ty's visor. "Fire your jets at this angle, then get as big as you can to slam into him."

"If you say so." Ty flew back at high speed, seeing the station flash by and come dangerously close. Then he was huge, body-slamming into somebody he couldn't see. Ty felt the impact against his whole spine. He spun and used his sword again, grappling and slashing with all his limbs. The enemy wolf's face looked panicked. Ty shouted at him, "Is this how your boss repays you? Using you as an expendable minion? You're going to die out here, get it?"

"You don't understand!" the wolf said. Ty had a sword poised by his throat. "The General is --"

"General? Says who?"

"Salt, all right? Even if you beat me, he'll make it to the asteroid, and he can make any demands he wants from Earth."

"That was your plan? Get some kind of ransom, then help run a space fortress? Your boss is already recruiting your replacement."

Emily radioed, "What are you doing, Ty? Gut him already!"

Salt chimed in too. "Victor, you idiot! The torch!"

Victor the wolf's right arm twitched. Ty glanced down and saw a welding tool in the enemy's leg pouch. Ty slapped at the wolf's arm with one of his forelegs, saying, "We both live, or you die! What's it going to be?"

Victor looked anguished, one move away from either grabbing the torch and blasting Ty with it, or getting his suit sliced wide open first. "We were counting on disabling your ship... But you're still stuck up here. You can't win."

"Emily and my pilot can. Now surrender!"

The wolf gave a mournful whimper, and raised his hands. Ty flicked the welding torch away, letting it drift into space for lack of free thumbs. "Great," said Ty. "Emily: it's just Salt left."

Emily said on their encrypted channel, "That was too dangerous, Ty! They're all murderers."

"I need a way to get down. It'll be easier if somebody else is alive to help and I don't think Salt's going to make it. Now what do we do?"

Ty listened to Emily's answer, nodded, then told the wolf, "Play your cards right and you get the fourth seat on our ship. All I need you to do is block the main airlock."

Victor drifted warily away and made for the airlock.

"I see," said Salt. "I have to spend fuel to get fuel."

Emily said, "Ty! The satellites!"

A dozen captive telescopes, spy cameras, and other space gear snapped free of their moorings and came at the foxtaurs, firing their rockets. Each was a multi-ton cannonball, moving silently. Ty flipped backward to dodge one, but another slammed his lower belly and sent him tumbling, hearing more alarms to go with the air being knocked out of his lower lungs.

He'd barely steadied himself and confirmed his suit was intact, when he saw the weapons satellite and Salt. The hound had launched himself out the secondary airlock and expanded even faster than Ty could do. Salt said, "I couldn't get guns or lasers working at this scale," he said. "But have you heard of 'rods from God'?"

Emily said, "The Mjolnir satellite is real?"

Ty hadn't been briefed about it. "You're wrecking your own plan, Salt." He dodged another satellite's wasteful rocket burn. "They sent us up on short notice. You'll never park an asteroid in orbit by yourself and survive a counterattack."

The foxtaurs regrouped, keeping an eye on Salt's surviving minion and the weapons satellite. Mjolnir flew near Salt's huge hand like a drone, carrying tungsten spears the size of telephone poles. Salt kept adjusting the aim, forcing the taurs to waste fuel maneuvering. Salt said, "I don't have to. I just explain that the world's nations can do business with me, or I can drop these on their favorite cities. The explosive force is only tactical-nuke size, but the builders have an excellent aiming system."

Emily said, "Then why didn't you use it when we launched?"

Ty answered. "He wants _Little Giant_'s fuel."

"Indeed, boy. Especially now. So, will you die up here for lack of life support, or be a good tod and deliver that ship? Your size-magnification powers will make up for the momentum loss from our little tussle."

Emily radioed, "Ty, he's bluffing with the Mjolnir. It doesn't shoot so much as drop the rods. He really can attack cities, but he can't shoot us with it."

Ty nodded. "On three..."

He and Emily charged. Salt growled in frustration, and instead of firing Mjolnir, seized a rack of solar panels from Challenger Station and swung it like an axe. "Idiots! Fighting me accomplishes nothing."

"But it sure is satisfying," said Emily, and flung a billion-dollar telescope at his face. Salt dodged and found the foxes closing in. He grew even more until even Ty found him looming large and still wielding the panel array.

Ty darted closer, flipped past a swing of the panels, and bought Emily an opening to slash with her sword. Salt's weapon was more awkward, but in vacuum only the noise of their breath and thrusters gave them cues where to move. Emily dealt Salt a glancing blow on the wrist and called out for Ty.

Ty slammed forward, tumbled out of control, and hacked at Salt's leg. A howl sounded over the radio as air leaked out, but then his suit snapped shut around the cut, self-sealing. Ty cursed. He'd have to do better. For once Ty found that being smaller than the enemy was an advantage; it gave him more room. "Closer to the station!" he told Emily. Salt didn't dare break the space station he needed for his plan.

Salt growled and swung at them, trying to swat between the other solar panels and habitats. Ty kept up an attrition fight, stabbing wherever he could poke holes, giving Emily chances to score a killing blow. Every time, Salt reacted too quickly. Then, he managed to grab her. Emily shrieked, caught in a titanic fist.

Ty shouted, hurtling toward Ty's helmet for a mighty slash. Just then, Salt yipped in pain. Ty spotted the wolf Victor sailing past Salt's back, holding a jagged pipe that had torn a chunk of Salt's suit from his shoulder. Salt swung wildly, losing his grip on Emily. Ty kept going and cleaved a ten-foot-tall hole in Salt's visor, turning it into a light show of emergency strobes caught in escaping vapor.

Emily and Ty flew clear of Salt's flailing, watching him struggle to patch his suit's damage. The shoulder tear was bad enough to overcome the sealing system, but the helmet was too much to cover even manually. Salt's screams pained everyone over the radio, then grew quiet.

Ty panted, then noticed he was low on air himself. "We've got to -- I mean... Get to the ship, Emily. And you I guess, Victor. That's worth a pardon."

Emily said, "We need to hook you up to life support. Salt planned for this, so he must have a fix. Victor, get your tail in there and find it."

Victor whimpered and flew toward the station to obey. Emily scoured the station's exterior, saying, "Aha! Here's an external hookup. Sized for a normal suit of course. So, an adapter?"

Ty said, "What do I do?"

Tren radioed, "Keep still, Ty. Conserve air."

He tried not to think about the warning lights in his helmet or the imperfect seals on his suit's damaged spots. The struggle against Salt was finally over. The years under the Agency's control and afterward had taken a lot from him, but had brought him here, to get a view of the blue Earth. The sight of it made him feel tiny.

At last, Emily jetted back outside with a jury-rigged, stretchy adapter for Ty's life support system, letting him hook himself up to the station and replenish his air. Emily floated close and bumped her helmet against his, saying, "They had this and some other gear aboard so Salt could trap you here and keep you alive. Plenty of leftover food, too, considering the old crew's dead."

"So now I've got to wait for someone to send up a replacement restraint bracelet, or a way to build one."

Emily nodded, and hugged his helmet. "It's over." Her expression was hard to read through her gold-tilted visor.

"You should head out."

"No way. Someone's got to keep the station working," she said. "Besides, we stick together. No more mad science, okay?"

Ty smiled.

Ty leaned on his shovel and panted after a hard morning's construction work. Grey dust caked his clothes and his throat was dry. He'd been digging ditches, basically, and getting called a hero just because they were on the moon.

Rather than bring him directly home, the world's space agencies worked out a replacement gadget for him so he could control his size, getting back to his range of five-ish to over a hundred feet tall. Small enough to sustain in space, and big enough to use for heavy construction. So, Ty had carved out tunnels and domes for an elaborate moon base. Emily, at her smaller size, worked on checking and sealing the tunnels to make living room for hundreds. Rough living conditions for the two taurs, but the job paid well. Besides, the world needed encouragement to get back into space after losing so much orbital hardware. The next moon explorers would have a home waiting for them.

"About ready to head back?" asked Ty, gesturing toward the return vehicle. He'd been trying not to step on it. He shrank down to look Emily in the eye.

"Need another day to get the lights installed," Emily said. "Then one more to run around leaving spooky messages for the next crew, since it'll technically be an abandoned space colony. We're obligated."

After all these years, Emily could act like she was back on a playground. They'd return to Earth soon and be rich and famous, but here on the moon, there was time to play. Ty made sure his suit would hold up to any roughhousing in the tunnels, then tugged his sister's tail and ran off, saying, "Can't catch me!"