FURMANKIND

by

Ted R. Blasingame

Copyright

FURMANKIND
Revised Edition ©November 2020 Ted R. Blasingame
All rights reserved.

A collection containing the following books 

SUNSET OF FURMANKIND ©2011
LOST IN THE WILDERNESS ©2011
SECOND CHANCE ©2014
A WILDER WEST ©2014 

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet, email or any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is greatly appreciated. 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Commissioned artwork by Elizabeth Jackson.
Used by permission. 

Dedication

To Eileen Blasingame 

My wife-mate and best friend. 

Always and Forever. 

To James R. Lane 

Thanks for all your help, your friendship, 

Inspiration and good humor.

Book 1

SUNSET OF FURMANKIND

©2011 by Ted R. Blasingame

Chapter 1

Crime of Passion

The first of two gunshots failed to attract the attention of a nearby crowd, largely due to the noise of revelry and celebration of the New Year. Couples danced, drinkers toasted the night with exuberant enthusiasm, and cheering crowds lifted their voices for the occasion as youngsters set off confetti poppers to coincide with the fireworks bursting overhead.

The second shot rang out in a random lull in the festivities, and had a dancer in the throng not jerked upright and then fallen to his face in the midst of the crowd, it might have also gone unnoticed. The lithe, dark-haired angel the man had been dancing with felt her partner’s sudden shift of weight a second before his knees buckled, but it was another female reveler who screamed first when a froth of blood sprayed her white party dress.

Had the shooter been prudent, he would have departed the vicinity as soon as he was sure his target was down, but instead he rushed into the crowd of shouting men and screaming women to grasp the wrist of the victim’s partner.

For those first moments, the dark-haired woman stood frozen in her tracks at the sight of her dancing partner at her feet in a growing red pool, a silent shriek caught deep in her throat. However, when a large hand roughly seized her wrist and jerked her away from the carnage, she looked up into a man’s wild tanned face in immediate surprise; recognition loosed the scream from her lips.

Accompanied with shrieks of terror, the woman flailed at her abductor with her free fist, kicked hard at his shins with pointed-toe dancing shoes and even butted at his square jaw with the top of her head. Combined with the pressing throng of the crowd and the resistance of his captive, the shooter was unable to withdraw as quickly or quietly as intended. Several men from the multitude realized that an abduction was taking place right under their noses and moved quickly to subdue the woman’s attacker.

In order to grab the woman, the shooter had pocketed the revolver within his coat and had nothing in hand to warn off the men who interfered with his plans. He struck out blindly, but the woman was wrenched from his grasp and four saviors wrestled him to the ground. He received three blows to the jaw before he was unceremoniously turned over and pinned to the ground with a weighty knee in the small of his back.

Despite the success of his capture, others in the crowd were oblivious to the struggle as the throng simultaneously moved in closer to the victim and pulled back away at the sight of so much blood. Someone knelt down next to the man to check on his condition, but another yanked him away before he could touch him.

From somewhere nearby, two police officers pushed their way through the throng, ordering gawkers to let them through to the victim. One crouched by the man’s side, attempting to avoid kneeling in the pool of blood while his partner pushed the crowd back to give them room and air. The first officer reached out toward the fallen man’s neck to feel for a pulse, but when he saw what was before him, he hesitated with an almost unconscious curl to his lip.

Steeling himself, the cop buried his fingers in the thick hide of the victim’s neck, and although it was difficult to find, he located a weak pulse in the carotid artery. “He’s still alive!” the officer shouted above the noise to his partner, pulling his radio from a belt holster to call for an ambulance.

“Quiet down!” ordered the second cop to the gathered crowd. It took several commands before the immediate throng silenced enough that conversations were reduced to mumbles. At the announcement that the victim still lived, the dark-haired woman pushed her way past the standing cop and dropped to her knees in the blood to sob while clutching at her lover.

“Ma’am, please get back,” said the cop, putting his hands on her shoulders to pull her away. “An ambulance is on the way.” When she only looked at him with tear-streaked eyes and did not move, the officer sighed.  “What happened?” he asked.

Suddenly invigorated with anger, the woman spat out, “It was my Ex! He shot him!”

At those words, someone from the crowd said, “They’ve got him over here!”

The second cop moved quickly toward the voice and the crowd parted to let him see a wide-shouldered man with short rusty-red hair pinned face down to the ground by several other men. The officer gave the four a nod of acknowledgment and then knelt beside the prisoner. Without preamble, he reached into the man’s back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

He read the man’s name aloud from the identification and said, “You are under arrest on suspicion of attempted murder.”  The shooter ceased struggling against his captors while the officer read him his rights.

Despite the continued revelry of the occasion some distance away, the crowd in the immediate vicinity had fallen silent at the arrival of a medical team that had been stationed in a nearby tent set up in preparation for the downtown New Year’s crowd.

Just as a medic reached out gently to the victim’s shoulder, the injured man coughed once into the concrete street beneath him and then let out a final breath. The dark-haired woman clung to the cop beside her with agonizing sobs as the medic turned the dead man’s body over onto his back.

A collective gasp escaped several in the gathered crowd, apparently unaware of the victim’s identity. Dressed in strange sandals, loose-fitting blue jeans, plaid flannel shirt and a light jacket was something that only some of them had heard about. The figure looked human in apparent shape, but the feline face, clawed hands and a long, thick rope of a tail that had been previously hidden by the coat were all covered in tawny brown fur. Although genetically engineered anthro humans were becoming more of a common sight in society, they were still rare enough that most people who saw them for the first time were either drawn to them or repulsed in disgust or fear.

Although humanoid, the victim’s face belonged to that of a mountain lion, a painful expression frozen in death. Despite the blood and the apparent revulsion of some in the crowd, the dark-haired woman flung herself upon her furman lover and wept bitterly.

Chapter 2

A Brief History Lesson

“Strong is the need for humans to expand outward and to change themselves and the world around them. The human race, in all its self-manipulated forms, will never be content to live with everything around them. Things must change, and they must always strive for progress.” — Ásmundr Gustavsson

“Late in the mid twenty-first century after decades of research, scientists made a chance breakthrough discovery that allowed faster-than-light travel using tachyon particles that slip through space, bypassing the speed of light limitations. This slip-drive allowed mankind to begin earnest exploration out into deep space to nearby stars believed to have planets. Instead of interstellar travel taking centuries to reach other stars, a trip could be condensed into months.

“Automated probes went first and manned expeditions later followed. There were many dangers and several Slipships were lost in the endeavor, but exploration continued as need for new lands for an overcrowded Earth grew.

“Several new planets were discovered habitable, but initial colonies to each suffered high mortality rates due to accidents and sometimes harsh living conditions. While humans are highly adaptable, they were just not physically hardy enough to endure some of the conditions they faced.

“Then a breakthrough happened in an unrelated field of research that would forever change humanity. Genetic scientists working on a cure for cancer could take a single damaged cell from a patient and correct the aberrations in its DNA through RNA manipulation, but the trick was getting the healthy cell to replicate its new code in through the millions of other cells in the body. They believed they found a way to eradicate the cancer, but they needed a way to force the new cell to over-write the natural coded sequences to make changes at the cellular level.

“Professor Oliver McEwen of the University of Edinburgh worked relentlessly on the dilemma for years before a chance experiment using goetazine unlocked the first of several steps that led to his success. As with all new medical breakthroughs, extensive testing had to be done before it was determined safe to use on humans, but the end result was nothing short of miraculous. Cancer still cannot be prevented to this day, but the cure for its attack has been successful.

“Years later, genetic scientists from the Terran Colonization Coalition soon began tinkering with condemned prisoners in secret and used the McEwen process to combine human DNA sequences with other Terran life forms, primarily canine, feline, ursine and vulpine — dogs, cats, bears and foxes, respectfully. It was their hope to improve humanity in such a way to give settling colonists an edge on their survival.

“The genetic mutations were successful and brought about the development of four new races, the Canis, the Felis, the Ursis, and the Vulps. These new races were able to stand upright as bipeds due to enlarged back leg muscles and bone structure combined with digitigrade feet. The forepaws had fingers and opposable thumbs for using tools, yet were padded for running on all-fours. The tongues and vocal cords were altered for human-type speech and they retained their human intelligence while also maintaining animal instincts specific to each species.

“Due to natural fur and fat insulation, these new individuals would not require clothing for anything more than genital modesty and hygiene, but since these people were formerly human, there were some with a perceived need for fashion elements designed specifically for their new bodies; a cutout in the back with a strap over the top of a tail was a must for any shorts or pants.

“During their forced genetic mutations, delicate brain surgery was performed on the test subjects to wipe out past memories of their criminal lives, and then they were reeducated with specialized skills necessary for standard colonization teams.

“With the success of genetic manipulation, the Anthro Human Colonization Program was formed, and these new races were sent to the untamed colonies of Earth in an effort to see if the changes would give them an edge on survival in the wild environments. If the test subjects failed, the condemned would be considered an acceptable loss, but if they succeeded in surviving, it would provide new avenues for the overgrowing human population to spread out into the stars, even if no longer completely human.

“The test was a success. While the pure human colonists had a tough time surviving the alien environments, the engineered anthro-human colonists, now called either furmankind or simply Furs, did well in their new elements.

“Word spread across the Earth, and although the experimentation on those with past criminal history of the Furs was kept a secret until just recently, a call went out for legitimate volunteers for anthro-human starter colonies now under the direction of Ásmundr Gustavsson. There was little response at first, as there were great fears that alteration into a Fur would classify them as sub-citizens, so before the practice became widespread, there were lobbies and eventually legislation granting Furs full human rights. Only after years of negotiation and reassurances that the sciences involved were safe did the public finally embrace the notion.

“It began as a trickle of volunteers. Some were individuals who had wanted to join the colonization program before, but were afraid due to the high mortality rate of the settlers. Others who volunteered were tired of life on Earth and yearned for new horizons, while some of the infirmed hoped the change would give them new strength and health. Then there were simply down-and-out people looking for a different life. There were even a few who volunteered simply because they liked animals, but the administration tried to discourage those without skills since the purpose of the Furs was to colonize other worlds.

“The genetic process was irreversible and education for colonization specialties was mandatory. The only Furs who would actually remain on Earth would be a select few to help new Furs prepare for their altered lives.  Once the willing signature was on record, the nine-month process would begin immediately, accompanied by psychological counseling and physical therapy to help the new Furs get used to their altered forms. When certified ready, re-education would take place over approximately one or two years before they would be assigned a place in one of the colonies.

“Once the program was officially underway, four Institutes were formed at locations around the world. The first one completed and put into operation was in Stockholm, Sweden. The next was in the Adirondacks of New York. Following them were locations in Buenos Aires, Argentina and in Toyohashi of the Aichi Prefecture in Japan.

“This was twenty-five years ago, class. Furs have become somewhat commonplace and the starter colonies are now thriving due to the success of the program. Once their numbers grow, a successful colony will have the variety of genetic material necessary to sustain themselves without further seeding from additional Furs. There have been Furs who have mated within their species and produced natural offspring. The children — as cubs, pups, kits or kittens — are the first real members of their races whose lives were not altered by genetics at a period in their lives.

“However, as will happen, there has become a movement on Earth promoting ‘pure’ humans as the dominant race, but the legislation that was passed at the start of the project continues to protect the rights of all Furs when possible.   Despite this, some countries on Earth have outlawed Furs altogether.”

The instructor looked around her room of students and spied a young woman with a raised hand. “Yes?  You have a question?”

“Yes, Professor. Why did they choose those particular species? Why not select raccoons, mountain goats, deer and etcetera?”

“That’s a good question. In order to survive, predatory species were chosen as the hardiest choices. Prey species were likely to be just that – prey – to any indigenous predators on the colony worlds. The plan was to survive, and this idea seems to have worked.”

“What about cross-species mating?” asked another student.

“Although you may never find a natural cross between a bobcat and a cheetah here on earth, such a blending is possible between the feline-based Furs, primarily possible due to the common human ancestry. However, the divergent differences between feline Furs and canine Furs will never have the genetic coding necessary for such a union to produce offspring. The same rules apply to the vulpine and ursine Furs as well.”

“Have you ever met a Fur, Professor Flynn?” someone else asked.

The instructor smiled with a casual nod. “Yes, I have. You see, before I became a professor at this university, I worked for an administrator of the North American Anthro Human Colonization Program. It’s been a decade since I left the program, but I still have some contact with a few of the Furs who became my friends in the process.”

“What can you tell us about your personal experiences with furmankind?”

The Professor smiled and leaned upon the podium before her. “Let me tell you about one particular Fur who comes to mind. I suppose I knew him as well as any other, but his specific case deserves recognition.”

Chapter 3

The Only Alternative

“Barrett. You have a visitor.”

Dressed in a set of bright orange coveralls, Brian Delano Barrett lay on the dirty floor face down beside his bunk, coming to rest following a set of rigorous pushups. He looked up and focused his deep brown eyes upon the man standing on the other side of a door made of sturdy iron bars. The guard could have been a linebacker, and the manacles he held were nearly lost in his beefy hands.

“Crane, you can tell whoever it is to come back later. I’m busy.”

“Get to your feet, Barrett,” said the guard. “You can exercise later.”

Barrett gave the man a sardonic grin, but stood up anyway, pulling a ragged hand towel off the frame of his small bed. He wiped off his face and neck, deliberately making the guard wait until he draped the towel back over the frame. He ran a hand through his short, rusty red hair and then brushed off the front of his coveralls.

When he approached the meal slot of the door, he saw two other armed guards standing nearby, their shotguns held ready toward him; both of them looked as if they could be on the same football team as the first guy. Barrett slipped his hands through the opening without taking his eyes off the weapons, and allowed Crane to clasp the manacles about his wrists. He withdrew his arms back into the cell and then the door was opened for him.

“Who’s come to see me?” he asked casually as he followed the beefy guard along the dimly lit central aisle, the others falling into step behind him. “A fan?”

Crane did not bother turning around to answer. “William Harper,” he replied.

“Hasn’t that shyster done enough for me already?” Barrett grumbled aloud, glancing sideways at another inmate making a rude gesture at him through old bars of iron. He ignored him and followed his guard past a set of sliding doors into another room. They turned the corner and then emerged into a brighter corridor lined with large black and white checkered floor tiles.

Up next to the football squad that made up his entourage, Brian Barrett did not appear to be anyone of great size, but his wide shoulders, thick arms and six foot height were noticeable to the scrawny clerk who sat behind an old oak desk beside another door.

“Prisoner 374937 is here to meet his visitor,” reported Crane.

The clerk looked through thick glasses at a clipboard and then nodded. “Cubicle twelve,” he stated, turning to put a thumb against a pad beside the door. He punched a code onto an adjacent screen and then the door slide aside quietly.

Barrett was taken along a long row of thick transparent cubicles, each containing a pair of cheap plastic chairs that faced one another through a glassteel panel, with a simple communication handset on each side of the partition. Only three of the fifteen cubicles were in use.

The meticulously dressed man on the other side of number twelve was slight of build with a complexion that looked somewhat unhealthy with thinning grey hair to match. He had an intense air and licked his lips often. He stood up when Barrett approached, fingering the handle of an attaché case in his hands, and then the two of them sat down together. The guards retreated to a monitoring desk some distance away and then the two men picked up their respective phones.

“Hello, Harper,” Barrett said, leaning casually on the small counter before the partition so that his heavy manacles would not chafe. His feet bumped against a large iron ring embedded in the floor beneath the counter, but fortunately he did not need to be shackled to it as some inmates had.

“Hello, Mr. Barrett,” his lawyer responded. “How are you today?”

“I’m still alive, but I can guess you have come to tell me how much longer that’s going to be.”

William Harper looked at him quietly for a moment before finally giving the prisoner a single nod. “You are scheduled for termination at two o’clock on the afternoon of October twenty-second,” he replied.

“That was quick.”

“Yes, Mr. Barrett, but convicted killers are not kept waiting for years as they used to be.”

“Harper, this is ludicrous,” Barrett retorted. “I’m on Death Row for killing an animal! How could you let this happen to me? We need to appeal!”

“Barrett, you shot Mr. Parker a few minutes after midnight on New Year’s Day in front of a crowd of witnesses. You boldly admitted it to a jury of your peers, and you didn’t even try to get away after you murdered the poor man.”

“That wasn’t murder,” Barrett scoffed. “Murder is when a human kills another human. That thing you call Parker wasn’t a man. It was an animal. Nothing more.”

“Nothing more?  That thing, as you call him, was dating your ex-fiancé.”

“She left me for that thing and was sleeping with it! That’s bestiality!”

“The courts don’t agree with you, Barrett. There were witnesses to your crime, and it is indisputable against the laws enacted when they began taking volunteers for the furmankind process. The Furs are protected by the same laws that protect the rest of us. What you did was murder.”

“Those laws were only created to pacify those who wanted to become abominations of nature, and you know it. Furs shouldn’t have any more human rights than a household cat! If one of them kills another, you can call it murder if you wish, but I did not kill a man. I shot a dangerous animal.”

Lawyer William Harper looked at his client with a frown. This was the same argument he had gotten time and again since he had been assigned to this case, and no matter how he put it, Brian Barrett would see it no other way.  He looked across at the Death Row inmate a moment longer and then reached for his attaché case.

“If you had agreed to plead temporary insanity, perhaps I could have gotten you a life sentence,” he told the man, “but you showed no remorse to those in judgment over you and willingly boasted of your accomplishment. For that, you will be executed three months from today, and then your body is to be cremated. Your ashes will likely be dumped into a rusty barrel in the basement of the facility.”

“Hmph, nice. You put me to sleep and I just never wake up again. Quick and easy like everything else these days.”

Harper stared at him intently for a moment before shaking his head. “Brian… the punishment for the murder of a Fur is death by a Fur, likely by one who is known for violent tendencies just kept handy for such occasions. I understand that sometimes the Fur used for this is not fed the night before, and there’s not much left over to cremate afterward.”

For the first time since the lawyer had joined him in the cubicle where the two of them could talk, fear crept into Barrett’s eyes. He had faced dangers in his thirty-five years, but a violent death terrified him utterly.

“Harper, this is insane! Can’t you do something?”

“There is an option, but I do not think you will like it,” the lawyer replied.

Barrett leaned closer to the partition. “If it’s an alternative to a death like that, I like it already!”

Harper stared at him for a long moment and then opened his attaché case. He pulled out a thin, multipage pamphlet and then held it up to the glassteel partition. Barrett furrowed his eyebrows when he read the reflective words across the front of the pamphlet. 

Is the AHCP for You? 

“What is this?” Barrett asked with a dangerous edge in his voice, partially rising from his chair. The nearby guards came alive and moved forward as one.

“Take your seat, Barrett,” growled Crane, “and stay there!”

The prisoner favored the guard with a dark glare, but he dropped back into his seat and then transferred the glare toward his lawyer. The guards returned to their station, but kept watchful eyes upon him.

William Harper set the pamphlet on the top of his briefcase and then looked back at his client, his lips pressed together in a thin line.

“Mr. Barrett, it has taken me a week of coaxing for the judge to agree to this, but in lieu of the capital punishment you would face, you may serve out a life sentence with the AHCP.”

Veins pulsated visibly in Barrett’s neck and he ground his teeth together. He let forth a string of profanity, but somehow managed to keep his seat.

“I take it that you already know what the AHCP is,” Harper said dryly.

It was all Barrett could do to keep from ramming a fist into the glassteel partition, despite the knowledge that it would simply break most of the bones in his hand. Instead, he gripped the phone handset tightly, almost willing it to crumple in his grip.

“Yes,” he hissed, “I know what the cursed Anthro Human Colonization Program is, and for your own safety, you’d better not be suggesting what I think you are.”

“Threatening me will do you no good,” Harper said with calm, having expected this reaction. “You have only two choices, Mr. Barrett. Undergo the McEwen furmankind process as a participant in the AHCP or face a violent death as sentenced.”

“NO!” Barrett shouted angrily. He stood up and slammed the phone handset against the glassteel partition, but the next thing he experienced was the searing effect of a guard’s stunner. He fell to the floor convulsing as the nerve endings in the back of his neck crackled with energy.

When the current ceased coursing through his body, the guards picked up the subdued prisoner and began to drag him back to his secure cell on Death Row. Lawyer Harper stood up and knocked on the glass.

“Wait, please!” he called. His voice barely penetrated the glassteel partition, but Crane looked back at him as if he were insane. Checking to make sure that Barrett was still restrained, he walked to the cubicle’s phone and picked up the dangling handset.

“What did you want?” he asked gruffly.

“Put him back in his seat,” requested the lawyer. “I’m not finished with him yet, but you may need to zap him again if he doesn’t sit still long enough to listen to me.”

“Suit yourself.” He motioned for the other two guards and then checked to make sure his stunner had sufficiently recharged. Barrett was roughly placed back in his chair, gasping for breath from the electrical attack on his nervous system. He leaned forward and placed his head on his manacled arms atop the small counter before the partition.

Harper tapped on the glass with his phone and Barrett looked up at him with smoldering eyes. Reluctantly, he picked up his own handset and put it up to his face. “Leave me alone,” he muttered weakly.

“Not until you listen to what I have to say,” the lawyer replied.

The prisoner straightened up. “Listen… William,” he said in a quiet tone, using the lawyer’s first name, “I understand what you are trying to do for me, but that is an avenue I will never consider.”

“Mr. Barrett, you told me not minutes ago that if you had an alternative to a violent death that you were already in agreement with it.”

“You want to strip away my humanity and turn me into one of the very beasts that I despise,” Barrett continued, deliberately speaking in normal conversational tones. “I’ve done my own research into the AHCP and I know how they torture their patients through a painful and unnecessary transformation into mindless beasts.”

“They are not mindless,” Harper said. “You would not lose any—”

“Those people lose their souls and I’ve heard some of them go crazy, unable to cope with the changes! That’s probably what happened to the animal they are keeping around to execute people like me.”  Barrett swallowed, trying to keep his temper in check; the pain from the stunner was still fresh. “I understand the basic reasoning why the Terran Colonization Coalition considered this inhuman approach to space exploration, but Man himself is more adaptable than they remembered. There is no reason to put people through torment to change them into beasts of burden when technologies exist that would help colonies survive the environments of new worlds.”

“Mr. Barrett, I’m not here to discuss the purpose of the furman existence,” Harper said patiently. “We are talking about your existence. One way or another, Barrett, your life as a human is finished. You want to live, but the justice system wants your blood. The only way you are going to be allowed to live is to become one of furmankind. Once the process is completed, you will be given an education for skills you will need as part of a colony settlement. You will have a guaranteed home, education, a steady job, and you will be among others of your kind, free to live out the rest of your life.”

Barrett snorted. “I want to appeal,” he said curtly.

“No chance, Mr. Barrett, and before you ask for another lawyer, there’s no one else who would take up your case at this point.”

Barrett stared at the other man for a long minute and then let out an audible sigh. “Thank you for all your help, Mr. Harper. You are right, you see. I have no remorse for killing that animal, but I will not take its place as another one.  I don’t want to die by the claws and fangs of a killer animal that should have already been put down, so I may have to find an alternative on my own before that happens. Goodbye, William.”

“Barrett!”

Before Harper could say anything more, Barrett calmly hung up the phone and turned away from the window. He gestured toward the guards and said in a casual tone, “Okay, we’re finished here.”

William Harper placed his phone handset back in its cradle in shock as Barrett was led back to his cell. The lawyer looked down at the colorful AHCP pamphlet on top of his attaché case and picked it up. Frustrated at his failure, he flipped through its pages and then placed it back inside the attaché before standing up to leave.

Chapter 4

All God’s Creatures

To Brian Barrett, the days leading up to his execution came and went without distinction. He had no calendar in his cell and he no longer asked the date from his guards. He did not sit idle, however. Determined not to make himself the victim of a deranged animal, Barrett began picking fights with the most dangerous men that he could find within the prison population.

Within the first week of Harper’s visit, Barrett had assaulted seven men, but his plans did not go as well as he had hoped. He had sustained injuries for his efforts, but none was life-threatening. His wounds were easily treatable with modern medical techniques, so he determined to put more effort into each brawl he began.

A month closer to his execution date, Barrett was in solitary confinement on suicide watch. He had not yet been confined to wearing a straight-jacket, but his high ceiling room was well padded and well lit. When he was not sleeping, he simply stared up at the monitoring camera well out of reach and waited for his meals. The hours and days flowed into one another, his once-sharp mind becoming numb from boredom and fatigue.

Then, a week away from the end of his existence, he was called out of his solitary cell in the basement of the prison complex, bound by chains with manacles upon his arms and legs and escorted through the halls of Death Row between a team of eight armed guards. An inmate with a low forehead and cauliflower ears jeered through the bars of his cell, making violent threats toward him. His words were mumbled through the bandages wrapped around the lower half of his face, the result of Barrett’s previous attempt to entice the man into a fight.

Barrett pretended to stumble on his ankle chains and purposely maneuvered himself near the man’s cell with his head down. In a flash, a thick arm flashed out between the iron bars and wrapped itself around Barrett’s throat. The guards sprang into action to beat off the man with shouts and the butts of their rifles, but the arm held fast in an effort to crush the windpipe within its clutches. Before any permanent damage could be done, however, the guard struck the inmate’s injured jaw; the man howled in agony and released the struggling Barrett, who collapsed to the floor, his lungs heaving to replenish their air supply.

Two of the guards hoisted Barrett up to his feet, and Crane leaned in close to the gasping man while the inmate with the cauliflower ears stumbled back to his bunk.

“Nice try, Barrett,” the man sneered, “but you’ll not get off that easy! If you want to die so badly, just wait for your turn. You only have another six days until your execution.” Barrett swallowed with difficulty and then gathered enough spit to put into the guard’s face as his reply. The man cursed, wiping off the spittle, but he only brushed it off onto Barrett’s orange coveralls.

“C’mon,” Crane growled. “You don’t deserve this visit, but I have my orders.”

“Who is it?” Barrett asked in a raspy voice. “Harper?”

“No, you’re going to see the preacher, courtesy of the Warden.”

“Back to m’cell,” Barrett gasped after a hard swallow. “Don’t want a preacher.”

The guards continued to drag him along the corridor. “You don’t have a say in the matter,” another guard told him. “You’ll go back to your padded room after he’s done saving your soul.”

Barrett growled as well as his constricted throat would allow, but said nothing more. His entire entourage passed through a set of sliding doors into the next room and then turned a corner into the brighter corridor lined with black and white floor tiles.

“Prisoner 374937 is here to meet his visitor,” said one of the lead guards.

The clerk looked up through thick glasses at a clipboard and then nodded. “Cubicle seven,” he stated in monotone, turning to thumb his print against the pad beside the door.

Barrett was taken along the familiar long row of thick transparent cubicles. Due to his recent violent tendencies toward other inmates, the room was currently unoccupied save for one plastic chair. As the prisoner was taken to his seat, a well-dressed man in a dark brown suit and an amber set of ties in the latest fashion stood up to greet him from the opposite side of the glassteel partition.

Several guards stood by with their firearms aimed at Barrett’s head while another knelt down to lock his leg chains to an iron ring embedded in the floor beneath the small tabletop. Barrett waited until the guard had retreated before he sat down hard in the plastic chair beneath him. Satisfied that the prisoner remained peaceful, the armed entourage left him alone with his visitor.

Barrett put his arms up on the counter ledge and put his head down upon them.  The visitor tapped on the glass and Barrett looked up at him through bleary eyes. “Whatdya want?” he mumbled. Although they could not hear one another, the other man read his lips well enough to point toward the communication handset.

Barrett hesitated, but then sighed as he lifted his handset from its cradle. “Yeah?” he grumbled into the mouthpiece.

The visitor sat down and gave him a courteous smile through the glass. “Hello, Mister Barrett,” he said in a rich baritone voice, “My name is Lloyd Gibson.” Barrett raised an eyebrow at the man, amazed that such a voice belonged to the individual before him. Gibson was fully as tall as himself, having thick arms beneath shoulders so wide that a linebacker would be proud to possess. His dark hair was trimmed short, but long sideburns traced down his cheeks and connected across his upper lip in a thick mustache. His face and hands were weathered and tanned, and he was as solid as any fighter that Barrett had ever seen. The man looked out of place in a suit and ties.

“You don’t look like a priest,” Barrett mumbled.

“No sir, I am not a priest,” Gibson replied. “Up until recently, I was a deep sea fisherman by trade, but saved from sin by the grace of God.  I was told you had a lot of free time on your hands and thought this might be a good opportunity to visit with you.”

Barrett rubbed his throat, the wrist manacle clanking against the counter top. He swallowed to get some feeling back in his vocal cords and then he sat up in his chair. “Can’t talk much,” he said in a raspy voice. “Someone jus’ tried to throttle me.”

Gibson frowned, but nodded. “In that case, I’ll try to do enough talking for us both.”

“Go ahead, I have nowhere to go.”

“Mr. Barrett, I know about your crime and conviction, as well as your refusal to an offer by the court for an alternative to execution.” Barrett merely stared back at him impassively, neither confirming nor denying his words. “I know that many people share your attitudes toward Furs, but whether or not they have fur or bare skin, they are men. We have come a long way in the past century to put our prejudices behind us, so I fail to understand this attitude.”

Barrett swallowed and rubbed his throat again. “Did you know that all dogs are descendant from wolves?” he asked.

Gibson blinked at the non-sequitur, but nodded. “I have heard this theory, yes.”

“Although they began as wolves, there are now many kinds of dogs, all shaped over the ages to the whim of their breeders, but they are all still variations of wolves, just as all various races of men are still men. Dogs can only mate and make more puppies, just as men and women can only mate and make babies.” He paused to clear his throat; he was talking more than he had anticipated. “A dog humping a woman is not going to produce a baby… or a puppy, so tell me, what is a Fur?  It is neither natural nor native to the world, yet you are trying to make them a part of us, even trying to give them the same rights. Not even our dogs and cats have our rights, Mr. Gibson.”

“Furs may seem unnatural and an abomination to you, but they are still God’s creations.”

“No, they are not. They are man’s creations; God had no hand in bringing them about. Mr. Gibson, I may not be a Christian, but I do believe in God. I cannot see man’s tampering with His creation to merge humans and animals as being something blessed. Man was always meant to rule over animals, but merging the animals with man does not raise their status. It only lowers the men who allowed themselves to be ruined.”

Gibson gave the prisoner a momentary frown. “Even if you place the Furs down on a level with common critters,” he said, “God has long used animals for His purposes, some of them even talking with men.”

“I don’t remember any talking animals mentioned in the Bible,” Barrett huffed.

“The serpent in the Garden of Eden spoke with Eve,” Gibson replied. “Although the snake was later cursed, its speaking did not surprise her, so it is conceivable that the other animals regularly spoke to she and Adam as well. It was only after the Fall of Man that talking animals were then only heard when used by God for specific purposes. For example, Balaam’s own donkey turned and spoke to him, warning the man of an angel of the Lord who was waiting to kill him if he did not change his ways.”

“You made that up.”

“Numbers 22, verses 21 through 34,” Gibson replied from memory. “I can make sure you are supplied with a Bible if you wish to look it up.”

Barrett sighed and rubbed his throat again, wishing he had something to drink. “I had one of those free Gideon Bibles before I got myself thrown into solitary,” he replied.  “I read through it some, but they’re only just stories.”

Gibson smiled at him. “I don’t agree with you, but let me tell you a story,” he said, resting his arms upon the counter on his side of the partition. “Five years ago, I was just a king crab fisherman on the SS Juzo Okita near the Dutch Harbor of Alaska. It was a hard and rugged life, but I have always enjoyed the sea and hard work. When we put into port to unload our catch, the captain informed us that we would be taking on a new mate for training and experience in preparation for colonization on a newly discovered world that was ninety-percent seawater. We had a high turnover rate on the crew, so we thought nothing about it until the new person reported for duty.

“Our new crewmate was an Ursis furman, a grizzly bear. Rudolph Hutton had just finished the training that follows the transformation process and he needed the experience that we could give him. There was a fair amount of prejudice on the ship, and I am sure the captain received numerous complaints about the fuzzy greenhorn’s presence, but over time, Rudy proved himself a capable member of the crew.  He had expected the treatment he got from the crew, and although we did not make it easy for him at times, he took it all with grace.

“During his second month with us, a worn crane cable on the working deck snapped and a seven-hundred-pound trap pot swung free in the ocean swells and slammed into me. Fortunately, it was only a glancing blow, but it broke my left leg in two places. Rudy got me below deck and tended to me as well as any other man on board. We were on our second day out and the captain refused to take me back to port, so I was confined to my bunk for the duration of that voyage. During his time off shift, Rudy kept me company and we became friends.”

Barrett snorted. “Do I really need to hear how you trained a bear to catch king crabs in Alaska and then made him your pet?” Gibson frowned at the interruption, but then continued as if Barrett had not spoken.

“I was out of commission for that trip out, and although we had medical insurance benefits, I did not earn my part of the haul since I was doing no actual work. I was in a surly mood, and even though I had berated Rudy with the rest of the crew at first, it took some time before I realized that he was no different from the rest of us. Although he now wore a permanent fur coat and had different hands than mine, he still possessed the mind and soul of the man he had always been.”  Barrett opened his mouth for a sarcastic remark, but Gibson continued, not giving him the chance to interject.

“Rudy and I became friends, and after a while he started telling me about his beliefs.  Rudy had been a Christian for several years and wanted to share his experiences with me.  I was reluctant to hear what he had to say, but I was a captive audience and eventually began to listen to what he had to say.”

“Are you trying to convert me?” Barrett growled.

“Believe it or not, that was not my purpose for telling this story,” Gibson replied patiently.

“Okay, so what is your purpose of this? I’m not really interested.”

“My intention was to show you that whether they are called human or furman, they are still the men and women that God created. Yes, the furmankind process changed their outward appearances, but that can be considered nothing more than the reconstructive and replacement surgeries we have been doing over the past century. Keeping it in that perspective, Mr. Barrett, it can help you reconsider your refusal to undergo the transformation.”

Barrett sat back in his plastic chair and crossed his manacled arms across his chest as much as they would reach. “You just don’t get it, do you?” he asked darkly.  “My fiancé… the woman whom I thought loved me — who had been happily planning our wedding — was secretly bedding down with that… abomination!  And you think that by becoming one of those things will make it all better?”

Gibson drew himself up and for once looked as imposing as he appeared. “Mr. Barrett — whether or not Henry Parker was human or furman is not the issue.  You confessed to murder, and that is the crime for which you have been convicted with a sentence to die. The death penalty in this state is carried out by lethal injection in a process that hasn’t changed much in decades, but in cases where Furs are involved, then the penalty for death of a Fur is death by a Fur. The option to join the AHCP as an alternative to this fate was enacted only a few years ago, and it is the only redemptive option open to you aside of death.”  Barrett’s brow furrowed, but he said nothing.

Gibson’s stance softened and he added, “Mr. Barrett, you claim to believe in God, but with your refusal of redemption in any form, you will be meeting Him very soon.  Sir, even if you and I never meet again, I implore you to reconsider. One of the benefits of the furmankind transformation is that although the DNA of a terrestrial animal is combined with that of a human, your lifespan is one of the strengths carried over into the new form. According to your records, you would turn thirty-six years old at your next birthday. As a Fur, you would have the likelihood of living another thirty-six years or more, but as you are now, you have just six days left.”

Lloyd Gibson moved the handset to his other ear, resting his free hand upon the small counter top, and watched the Death Row inmate quietly. Several emotions played across Brian Barrett’s face, but the one that ended up in the eyes of the prisoner was one of resignation.

He looked through the glassteel partition and gave the man a nod. Gibson began to smile, but when Barrett spoke again, his assumption was shattered.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Gibson,” Barrett said in a calm voice. “I will put in a good word for your efforts when I go meet God.” He then hung up the communication handset without looking at the other man’s shocked expression.

Chapter 5

Execution

Although there had been no description of the event given to him, Brian Barrett had assumed that his execution would take place in a gladiator-type arena, nationally broadcast due to his high-profile case. However, when his guards escorted him to the chamber where the sentencing was to take place, he was surprised to see nothing but an empty fifteen-by-fifteen room with grey cinder block walls, concrete floor and a solitary iron door. Light was supplied by a single glowing panel recessed into the ceiling. Brown splatters on the floor, ceiling and all four walls could be nothing more than dried blood from previous executions. There were no cameras in view, so it appeared as if they would shut him in the room with his slayer and simply let the monster slaughter him.

Barrett had long feared this moment and he began to perspire heavily, knowing full well that whatever abomination they put in there with him would be incensed by his fear-smell. His throat tightened and his tongue felt as if it were three times normal size. He tried to swallow, but the knot was too big to get down.

One of the guards removed his leg manacles completely, but when he unlocked one of his wrists, he quickly pulled both hands behind the prisoner and relocked them together instead of taking the manacles off. Barrett looked back at him in horror. He was not going to be allowed even to use his hands to ward off the attack! Was he to be nothing more than a sack of fresh meat for whatever demon they fed him to?

The prisoner felt hot, nauseated and was just a hair trigger away from heaving up his Last Meal.

When the guard finished with the manacles, he simply pushed Barrett into the room and shut the door behind him with a loud bang.

No last words? Barrett thought to himself, amazed that his brain was still functioning through the terror. No final ceremony, reading of the sentencing, or even a last minute reprieve by the Governor. He was simply shoved into the death chamber and now it was probably just a matter of moments before something came through that door to finish him off.

Barrett struggled with his manacles, trying to find a way to either get them off or slip them around his legs to get his hands in front of him, but the chains were too short and drawn up too close to his body to effect such a contortionist act. His movements were getting frantic, his breath was coming in quick, short gasps and his shirt was now completely soaked with sweat.

Then, he froze. A horrendous shriek howled through the thick iron door that set his teeth on edge, and then something huge thumped hard against the panel. He could hear muffled shouts and screams and he suddenly bolted to a far corner of the tiny room, his face pressed up against the cinder block wall.

There were several gunshots and then that something gave out another shriek that penetrated the walls just before the door jumped inward, snapping one hinge into mangled pieces. The light in the small room went out, leaving the chamber in darkness but for dim illumination from the outside hallway. A tremendous silhouette filled the doorway and all Barrett could see were enraged, bloodshot eyes peering in at him over red-stained teeth with gums drawn up into a snarl.

The smell of fresh blood from the corridor told the prisoner that one or more of the guards had met the same fate that he was about to experience. Even from across the room, Barrett could smell the hot, fetid breath of the monstrosity as it growled, and the small part of his brain that could still think could only whimper in hope that his death was swift.

Then the creature pounced in one great leap across the room, its foot-long, serrated claws shredding flesh from his limbs in intense agony while its fangs ripped into his neck, spraying hot blood out across the room. He had expected to lose consciousness immediately, but he retained full awareness as the monster began to devour him alive.

Barrett shrieked and tried to flail his manacled arms, bouncing off a wall as he struggled with the creature, but then it released him, where he plopped broken to the concrete floor. Was it going to leave him half eaten on the ground, or was it simply swallowing bits of him before tearing off another bite? He forced his eyes open through the excruciating pain and the sudden disorientation tipped the tumultuous balance. He simultaneously emptied his stomach and bowels, falling over onto his side in a pool of his own filth, and he heaved time and again even when there was nothing left to expel.

The terror of the attack did not fade instantly and Brian Barrett blubbered into the soft padded floor of his cell, strong sobs wracking his body. It took several moments before reasoning kicked in with the realization that the experience was nothing more than an intense lucid nightmare.

“Oh God!” he croaked hoarsely, burying his face into hands that were surprisingly still attached to his arms. “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”

A moment later, the door opened and a guard drawn by his screams stuck his head inside, only to recoil from the foul stench that assaulted his senses.

***

Three hours later, Brian Barrett was freshly showered, dressed in clean orange coveralls, and humbled by his mental breakdown. He walked with downcast eyes, seeing nothing more than his own feet while his entourage led him to the visiting room. Although his guards were on the alert, he ignored the other inmates’ jeers and rude comments as he passed their cells, and he made no attempt to instigate a fight with any of them.

It was not until his chains were shackled to the iron ring in the floor that he looked up from the plastic chair where he was placed. He lifted his eyes and peered through the glassteel partition at his attorney, William Harper, who merely watched him passively. Barrett reached for the communication handset, an action matched by the lawyer.  Harper was dressed to sartorial perfection in a dark grey suit with a pair of muted scarlet ties. His thin leather attaché lay upon the small counter, its latches as yet untouched.

“Hello, Mr. Barrett. I understand it was urgent that I see you,” the lawyer said into the handset. “I was preparing for a flight to the west coast to research the background on my next client.”

Barrett looked at him incredulously. “My execution is in less than two days — and you were leaving town?”

Harper gave him a simple nod. “With your refusal to consider an alternative, my work with you was done, Mr. Barrett. Have you changed your mind?”

The condemned prisoner leaned forward and put his forehead down upon the counter, keeping the handset beside his face. He hesitated for several heartbeats before he mumbled his reply in a dejected tone.

“Yes.”

Lawyer Harper studied the back of the man’s head for a moment, licking his lips before speaking. “All right, Mr. Barrett,” he said calmly, “but you almost waited too long. I will not ask what occurred to make you reconsider, but time is short and there is much to be done. I will need to make several calls and start the necessary datawork immediately.”

“What do I need to do?” Barrett mumbled, his face still down upon the counter.

“Speak of this to no one,” Harper cautioned. “Due to the publicity of your case and the potential backlash that would occur if it became known that you had escaped your death sentence, we will have to arrange for an execution to take place as planned.”

Barrett’s head came up quickly. “What?” he exclaimed into the handset.

Harper waved his free hand from side to side. “Don’t worry, Mr. Barrett. You will not be on the premises when the time comes. For the sake of Mr. Parker’s grieving family, as well as the general public, an announcement will be made shortly after the scheduled time of execution that the sentence has been carried out. Due to the, uh… grisly nature to the method of your execution, there was to be no witnesses to the act itself, neither in person nor video broadcast.”

Barrett paled at the memory of his nightmare and he swallowed automatically. “H-how was it to be done?” he asked.

Harper opened his mouth to reply, but then thought better of what he had intended to say. “That is no longer important,” he answered instead. “I will arrange to have you transported off the grounds before the media arrives, and while you are on your way, I will have a statement prepared to convince all concerned that your sentence was carried out and justice served.”

Barrett sat back in his chair, the plastic creaking beneath his weight. “Mr. Harper,” he said quietly into the handset, “I want you to know that my decision was not made lightly. To avoid being torn apart by an abomination, I must now become an abomination. That scares me almost as much as a violent death and I’m not sure how I am to survive such torture.”

The lawyer rubbed his eyes and licked his lips before offering a response. Rather than trying to debate the issue one way or another, he simply decided to continue his instructions as if there had been no interruption.

“As a section of the Witness Relocation Program, you will be given a new identity to separate you from your past history,” he said. “For those who choose the furmankind process willingly, a new identity is an option they may take, but for condemned prisoners such as yourself who accept the transformation as their sentence, the new identity is mandatory. Unfortunately, it will take several days to set up a new name and background for you, and it is unlikely to be ready by the time you are moved. When you get to the Furmankind Institute, you are to give only your first name to anyone you may encounter. The director of the Institute will know your history, of course, but it would be unwise to admit your identity to anyone else there.”

Barrett nodded. “It’s just as well,” he replied tonelessly. “I won’t be Brian Barrett anymore, so I may as well have a new name. Where is this institution where the torture will take place?”

“It’s located in a secluded area amidst the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York,” the lawyer answered. “The process and subsequent training can take anywhere from one to two years. The first nine months will be the actual transformation, with counseling sessions throughout for psychological adjustment.”

“Nine months, eh? Kinda like a pregnancy,” Barrett observed in an uncharacteristic moment of levity.  “Am I going to have to crawl out of some critter’s womb?”

Harper fixed him with an icy stare and then continued after clearing his throat. “The remaining months after the transformation will entail formal education of new skills that will prepare you for the Anthro Human Colonization Project prior to your assignment and subsequent space flight.”

Barrett doubted he would have enough intelligence for a formal education after being transformed into a beast, but the idea had merit. He held several degrees already, and although it was unlikely he would get to keep them under a new identity, he had always enjoyed academic study.

“Since you waited until practically the last minute to agree to this alternative,” Harper said, “I must leave now to begin the necessary measures. I may or may not be in touch with you as needed, but before I go, do you have any further questions?”

“Just one. Do I have a choice of which abomination I will become?”

“No,” Harper replied with tight lips. “Due to the nature of your crime, your sentencing specifies that you will become one of the very species that you murdered.”

“You’re going to turn me into a mountain lion!”

“Mr. Barrett, depending upon the nature of the crime, condemned prisoners undergoing the change in exchange for their lives such as yourself are often given a delicate surgery to sever certain nerves in the brain; this effectively wipes out all knowledge of their criminal past and renders them malleable for retraining in order to join anthro society. However, in your case, the judge ordered that if you were to take this alternative, you were to be forced to remember your crime while living as the very creature you destroyed. Despite this, congratulations are in order, I think. You have just escaped death and now have a new chance at life. Good day, Mr. Barrett.”

Chapter 6

Flight of the Osprey

Brian Barrett paced back and forth in the special holding cell for Death Row inmates awaiting that final walk to execution. He had just finished his Last Meal consisting of chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes with country cream gravy, sweet corn on the cob, buttered rolls, iced tea, and a large piece of Key Lime pie. His taste buds and his stomach were satisfied, but his mind was racing in fear.  He was not a man normally besieged by a fear of life, but it was not life that was facing him.  It was a violent death.

He looked up at the large numerals displaying the time within the wall outside his cell and then swallowed in apprehension. Barrett had received no further word from lawyer Harper since that meeting two days earlier where he had swallowed his pride and agreed to accept transformation into a mindless beast in exchange for avoiding a violent slaughter. He had expected to be transported away from the prison long before now, but the date of his execution had arrived and now he was only two hours away from facing the abomination that would end his life.

At his jailer’s instruction, he had showered, shaved and donned a fresh set of orange coveralls, and then was led to the holding cell for his last meal. His appetite now sated, he had nothing but time on his hands as the clock silently took him ever closer to eternity. He had neither the news nor magazine display to occupy his mind, so he paced his cell muttering obscenities beneath his breath that were directed at the lousy lawyer who had abandoned him.

Through the walls of the compound, he had heard the deep thrup thrup thrup heralding the arrival of a helicopter moments earlier, no doubt a media team to cover the end of his story.

The night after the meeting with Harper, he had slept peacefully, the first time in weeks, but when no word had come all through the next day, he began to get worried. The same dream of facing the abomination haunted him again, to the same result at waking up.  Now so close to the real execution, Barrett was amazed that he even had an appetite to eat his meal and keep it down.

Guards and administrators had been traversing the corridor outside his holding cell all morning, so he barely even noticed when two security guards appeared at his door. The electronic lock disengaged with a loud clunk, and the condemned prisoner looked up in alarm. Was it time already?

“Brian Delano Barrett,” said one of the men, “come with me.” In the months that he had been held in this prison, Barrett thought he knew every guard by sight. He recognized the one who had just opened his cell, but he had never seen the other who had spoken his name. The common uniform of the prison complex was slate grey, but this man’s outfit was solid black without a spot of color or insignia to offset his garments. His hair, and even his eyes, appeared to be jet black as well. Perhaps this was the look of the final executioner.

Barrett stepped out of the cell as directed and followed the man in black, amazed that he was not shackled immediately. The other guard did not accompany them, but instead stayed behind to attend some other task.

For a guard, Barrett thought the newcomer was rather small to handle a prisoner like himself, especially if he decided to rebel at the last minute, but there was confidence in his eyes that quietly assured that he could take care of himself. Barrett followed him mutely along the corridor, wondering if they had moved up the hour of his execution or if the time displayed outside his cell was wrong. Whatever the reason, it was time to die.

Barrett looked around curiously. The man in black was his only guardian. Others in the corridor had strangely vanished from sight, as if purposely abandoning him on his way to the death chamber; even the other nearby cells seemed to have been evacuated of their tenants. The prisoner frowned and pressed his lips together tightly.

After several moments, the black guardian opened up a door marked as a custodial closet. “Inside,” he said calmly. Barrett looked at him as if he were mad, but did as he was told. The dark room, however, was larger than he expected. The man followed him inside and closed the door behind him. He flipped a switch and Barrett saw a long, dimly lit corridor with large water pipes and smaller electrical conduits lining both walls and the ceiling, accompanied by the smell of dust and years of mildew.

“This way, Mr. Barrett,” his companion said, heading up the passageway.

A few moments went by before Barrett’s curiosity got the best of him. “Is this where you keep the beast that’s going to kill me?” he asked quietly. “I figured it would be up in an auditorium where the sadistic cretins of the media could watch.”

The man in the black uniform stopped and looked up at him. “Excuse me, but were you under the impression you are on the way to your execution?”

That took Barrett by surprise. “Uh, yeah,” he replied. “Today’s the day I’m supposed to die, isn’t it?”

The guard looked at him oddly. “Yes, today is the day of your scheduled execution, but I thought you were aware of the plan to remove you from the premises beforehand.”

“You… you mean that lawyer Harper is behind this?”

“I am not familiar with your attorney, Mr. Barrett, but I have orders to transport you to upstate New York. Your transfer was granted by the judge and cosigned by the warden.”

It took a moment for the man’s words to sink in, and when it did, Barrett suddenly felt light-headed. He backed up against a set of chilled water pipes and then lowered his head.

“Are you all right, Mr. Barrett?” his companion asked in concern, placing his hand on the prisoner’s shoulder.

Barrett nodded and then looked up at the man in black with new eyes. “Yes, I’m fine,” he replied after clearing his throat. “It just took me by surprise, that’s all.”

“Didn’t you agree to this?” the guard asked.

Barrett straightened up and thrust his hands into his pockets.  “Well, yes,” he said, “but that was two days ago. I’ve not heard anything from my lawyer since, so I assumed it was denied by someone higher up. I was convinced today was my last day on earth.”

“I’m sorry you anguished needlessly,” said the other man. “You should have been informed beforehand. If we can continue, we’ll get you out of this place before the media arrives.”

“I think they’re already here. I heard them land earlier,” Barrett said when they resumed walking along the dim passage.

“That was me,” his companion explained. “We have a long way to go and it was decided to avoid the roadways, so you’re to be airlifted off the premises.”

“Wow,” Barrett said with a genuine smile.

“I am told that the media will be given a statement that you were executed at the hands of a deranged Fur, with your remains then cremated. As far as the public is concerned, Mr. Barrett, justice was served at the time you were executed as planned.”

“What about the deranged monster?”

“I’m sure they’ll arrange to feed it something large and tasty as a consolation to your absence. Don’t worry about it — it’s no longer your concern.”

“Just one more question. How come I’m not in manacles?”

“Again, it’s because you agreed to this. I have no need to keep you in chains if you’re no longer to be a prisoner here, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose that’s right. Thanks, friend.” They approached a common metal door at the end of the corridor, but before the guard opened it, Barrett asked him, “Listen, I appreciate this. What’s your name?”

The shorter man looked up and replied, “Tom Williams, aviator for the AHCP.”

“Thank you, Tom, please call me Brian. I am very pleased to see you today.”

Williams opened the door and gestured Barrett inside. They entered what looked like a maintenance garage and the guard pulled the door closed behind them. A long work bench with tools hanging from pegs on the wall above it occupied one side of the room. Lockers with garden tools, metal cables, locks, manacles, and other oddments were on the other, and Tom led him around several riding mowers parked in the middle.

Beside a door with a small square window that let in the outside sunlight was a soft-sided suitcase. Tom stopped beside it and nudged it with a toe. “There’s a change of clothing for you in here, all in your sizes,” he said. “There’s no need to take your coveralls with you.”

Barrett chuckled. “Thanks,” he said. “Orange isn’t my color, anyway. I’ve been told it clashes with my hair.”

Tom walked to the door and said, “I will be back for you in just a moment.” He stepped out through the door, giving Barrett a few moments of privacy to change.

Barrett found a white undershirt, a long-sleeved, dark green cotton collar shirt and a pair of denim jeans. There was even a change of underwear, belt, socks, and a pair of western style boots. Anxious to leave before someone changed his mind, he changed clothes, shoving the old prison garments into the now-empty clothing bag.

He decided not to wait for Tom to come back for him, so he opened the door and stepped out into the sunshine, rolling the sleeves of his new shirt up to the elbows. The cool autumn breeze was lightly tainted by the smell of a nearby garbage dumpster, but the outside air had never tasted so sweet as to the man who had been convinced that he had been about to die. He could see white-topped mountains in the distance to the west over the prison walls and guard towers, and as he looked up, there were only high cirrus clouds overhead.

“Are you ready to go?” Tom’s voice asked from his right.

“Am I ever!” the prisoner replied.

Tom handed him a black knit cap. “Here, cover up your head in case someone sees you.” Barrett took the cap without a word and put it on, tucking his red locks beneath it. He followed the man in black around a panel truck, and it was then that Barrett saw the vehicle of his escape. The flying machine had the appearance of an airplane, but its engine fan blades were above the wings facing the sky, resembling thick helicopter rotors. “Is that an Osprey?” he asked in awe. He had seen photos of the antique, tilt-rotor aircraft, but never one with his own eyes.

The craft was an archaic design from an age before anti-gravity repulsors, but that kind of technology required a lot of power and was expensive to operate, the principle reason why air-cars and other floating vehicles of the proverbial future had never really caught on. Despite the advances in levitation technology, it was simply too cost prohibitive for anyone but the super-rich. Although exponentially more efficient than their early predecessors, mechanical vehicles such as cars, trucks, buses and airplanes were still in use.

“Yes, Brian. That’s our ride,” Tom replied. “It’s old, but it’s been refurbished with more modern systems and is still reliable for our uses.”

Tom led him up to the aircraft and showed him the way up inside to the troop compartment. Barrett blinked when he saw the comfortable interior of the modified craft. In place of the standard fold-down seats that were common in military aircraft of this nature, the compartment resembled the First Class section of a commercial airliner, containing six rows of comfortable looking seats in sets of four. The ceiling left little room for Barrett’s height, but he was able to move around without having to bend over.

“Do you need to use the restroom before we leave?” Tom asked, pointing to the door of the facilities at the rear of the compartment.

“No, I’m good.”

“Okay, then. Have a seat and fasten your safety harness,” Tom instructed. “We will be lifting off in a moment.”

“Are you flying this bird?”

Tom smiled. “I’m the copilot. Once we’re in the air and cruising, I will be back to check in on you.”

“How long will this flight take?”

“Altogether, almost seven hours, with dinner and a refueling stop in Chicago.  There’s a pocket on the side of the first seat that has today’s paper if you wish to see it. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get up front.”

“Okay, Tom, see you in the air.”

The copilot disappeared through the front pressure door, leaving Barrett to himself. He sat down in the first seat, buckling himself in, and then pulled off the cap. He dropped it on the seat beside him and then smoothed down his hair with a hand. Almost immediately, he could feel the compartment pressurizing, so he closed his eyes and awaited the craft to begin moving while wishing he had some chewing gum.

A moment later, the engines started up and there was a vibration throughout the compartment. He heard the rotors spin up faster and faster, and then without warning, he felt the craft leave the ground.  Since the prison was not equipped with an air strip, the Osprey took off vertically, but once it had gained sufficient altitude, the engines rotated and horizontal flight engaged. Fortunately for Barrett, the passenger compartment was well insulated against the sound of the engines, but a constant rumble was ever present in the background. There were no windows for him to look out, but he had no desire to look back upon the prison grounds anyway.

With nothing else to do but wait, he unfolded the local newspaper that had been provided for him. The primary headlines concerned a major earthquake that had rocked central Japan, but he frowned at a secondary headline topping a set of columns on the right hand side of the page.  “Convicted Furman Killer to Die Today.” Accompanying the article was a photo of him in profile, taken during his trial.

Twenty minutes later, Tom opened the pressure door and came in, now wearing standard military flight coveralls over his uniform. He held a canvas satchel in one hand and handed it to Barrett before taking a nearby seat.

“How are you doing?” he asked while he buckled his belt.

“I’m feeling… relieved,” Barrett answered truthfully. “When you came for me wearing all black, I saw you as nothing more than the Death Angel!”

Tom chuckled. “Sorry about that — it’s my official uniform with the organization. It’s new, but I haven’t had time to get my name and AHCP logo patches sewn on.”

Barrett tried to hand the satchel back over to him, but Tom waved it away. “That’s for you, Brian.”

“What is it?”

“Information about the Institute you will need,” he replied. “There’s orientation material, a map of the estate grounds and some personal information concerning your situation. I was to give it to you when we were on our way and answer any questions you may have.”

“Oh.”

Up until that moment from when the man in black had arrived, Barrett had not given further thought to the rest of his sentencing. He may have just missed an execution, but now he had to face transformation into one of the beasts he loathed – a creature neither human nor animal, but something stuck somewhere in between. If he had a mind left after the process was completed, he was sure that every time he looked into the mirror, he would see only the face of his ex-fiancé’s lover staring back at him; he wondered how long it would take him to go insane from such daily psychological torture.

Chapter 7

Institutionalized

Brian Barrett could rarely sleep sitting upright, but the dissipation of worry and apprehension from the past couple days combined with the constant drone of the Osprey’s engines had acted as a sedative to the former Death Row inmate.

He awoke with a start when the compartment’s intercom system emitted a sharp whistle. Immediately following was the copilot’s calm voice. “Please fasten your seat belt, Mr. Barrett. We are now descending and should be at our destination in ten minutes. You should also secure any items you may have taken out during the flight.”

Barrett wiped a hand across his face and then smoothed down his hair. It was the color of iron that had oxidized into rust, but despite how course it appeared, it was actually fine textured. As a result, his hair was susceptible to static electricity in the air, windy days, or rubbing against the cloth of a seat back, and it was sticking up in all directions.

Earlier during their refueling stop in Chicago, a bottle of water had been provided for him with his quick-heated supper, so he picked it up from the seat beside him and splashed a little of it in his hands. He wiped it over his hair and then realized that he had no comb in which to smooth it out. There were pockets in his garments, but he had been given nothing to go in them. He worked with his hair as well as he could with his fingers and soon had it looking somewhat presentable, though he had been tempted to pull the knit cap back over it all.

The Osprey hit a small pocket of turbulence, so he capped the bottle and then picked up the items on the floor at his feet. He folded the newspaper, shoved it into the seat’s side pocket, and then retrieved the satchel of material that Tom had given him at the start of their journey. He had browsed the information with a cursory glance at first, but found it dry and boring, so had put it away to read more thoroughly at a later time. He stowed the satchel beneath his seat and then refastened his seat belt.

He had flown on airliners many times, but this was his first time in something capable of vertical take offs and landings. When the old craft neared its destination, it slowed almost abruptly, and then the outside roar increased. Barrett suspected the engines had rotated above the wings, because the flooring seemed to drop beneath his seat for a surprised moment. After several long minutes, the wheels touched down and the engine roar subsided quickly.

Unfamiliar with the operations of the antiquated Osprey, he decided to keep to his seat until told he could move. Not for the first time since the flight had begun, Barrett wished his compartment had been equipped with windows. There had been no desire to watch the departure from the prison, but during the hours in the air, he had grown bored with the interior scenery. He had not been allowed out of the compartment while down in Chicago, so he had been cooped up inside for nearly seven and a half hours.

Ten minutes passed before Tom and another short man in a flight suit emerged through the forward door. “Nice flight,” Barrett said with a smile when they approached him. “My compliments to the flight crew.”

“Brian, this is Wayne Mooreland, our pilot,” Tom replied. “We will be resting up overnight before we depart for our next assignment, but this is your stop. If you will follow us, you can sign in with Dr. Delgado.”

Barrett unbuckled his seat belt, grabbed the satchel, and then got to his feet. “Delgado?” he asked, following the two pilots to the exit.

“The administrator of the Institute,” Tom explained, picking up an overnight bag stowed in a locker beside the hatch. “You should have read something about him in the information I gave you.”

“Ah, well, I fell asleep before I could read it all,” Barrett admitted. Wayne cycled open the hatch and then opened it up to let in the cool fresh air. When Barrett stepped down to the concrete pad they had landed upon, he had his first sight of his new home.

Located in a heavily wooded region of the Adirondack Mountains, the place was surrounded by a forest in full autumn colors. The landing pad was situated away from the buildings next to a small lake fed by a natural spring, and an electric cart with three bench seats waited nearby for them. Tom and Wayne put their bags on the back of the cart and then took the front seat. Barrett climbed into the remaining seat and continued looking around when Wayne guided the vehicle along a pathway of bare ruts in the grass toward the buildings.

Although he had read some of the material and saw the photos in a pamphlet, the place was all new to him. He knew that the compound was comprised of a series of smaller complexes. An administrative core was surrounded by five other complexes made up of labs and wings for each of the four furman races, with education facilities encompassing ten other buildings. Although it was hidden away in the woods, the place resembled a community college. Some of the buildings appeared to have been erected within the past twenty years, but the older structures looked to have been there for over a century. The only vehicles he saw on the grounds were electric carts such as the one he and the pilots occupied, none of them equipped with levitation repulsors.

Although it was late in the afternoon, he saw quite a number of individuals walking here and there between the buildings along sidewalks through manicured lawns, and it was only after he saw one of them nearby that he remembered why he was there. What looked like a bipedal red wolf stepped out of a small shed, wearing only a green pocketed vest and matching shorts. Barrett thought it was probably a male, but he could not be sure, and when the stranger saw them, his mouth spread wide in a distinctive canine smile. He waved toward those in the cart and then continued on his way.

Barrett swallowed the lump in his throat and quickly tried to bury the resentment that had forced its way to the forefront of his mind. Upon closer examination of those who walked between the buildings – he was reluctant to call them people – he saw many more anthro humans on the grounds. Some wore shorts and a vest, others had on a short-sleeved, Asian-style garment that hung to the knees and had a split up the back for their tails, and there were even a few clad only in their fur and a pair of shorts with a strap over an opening in the waistband to close across the base of their tails. It was still warm enough in the season that most were barefooted, but there were some shod in oddly-shaped sandals designed for the toes of their digitigrade feet.

Wayne stopped the cart at a small building near the largest structure in the center of the complex. Barrett followed his companions to a wooden door protected by a weathered canvas awning, the pilots leaving their bags in the cart. Beside the door was a simple brass plate that proclaimed, North American Division of the Furmankind Institute, Administrator’s Office.

Without bothering to knock, Tom opened the door and the aviators went inside. Barrett followed them in, stepping into a casual reception area with hardwood floors covered by worn rugs of indeterminate origin. Several chairs lined one wall, each of them designed with a curious, horizontal slotted opening in the seat back. Above the chairs on a tan wall hung a large framed oil painting depicting the compound at an earlier age. The only structures in the image were the older stone buildings.

Barrett sniffed the air and idly wondered if there was an office cat in the place.

Tom stepped up to a counter and tapped a bell to signal their arrival. The small hairs on the back of Barrett’s neck stood up when something came out of a doorway behind the counter and gave them all a pleasant smile.

Although human-sized, the creature resembled an orange-striped, domestic cat standing upright on its back legs. Unlike the wolf outside, Barrett was certain this feline was a female. She wore a lightweight peach-colored garment like some of the others outside seemed to be wearing, with several bangles around her left wrist, but her hips were wider and there were soft curves to her body that could only belong to a woman. Her large green eyes had vertical black slits for pupils, and she looked pleased to see them.

“Hello, gentlemen,” she said. The words were in English, but there was a definite thrum underlying her voice. Although Barrett was appalled at the sight of her, he had to admit to himself that her voice was somewhat pleasant to the ears. There was not so much an accent as it was the timbre of her words. “It is good to see you again,” she added.

“Hello, Sissy,” Wayne replied in a quiet voice. “I believe the project director is expecting Mr. Barrett.” He gestured toward the third man of his party, and it was then that the feline turned her eyes upon the wide-shouldered, red-headed man.

“Certainly,” she said with a slow blink of her eyes. “I will page him at once.”

Before she could do just that, however, the outside door opened and a short, swarthy man with a head of neatly groomed black hair walked in. He was dressed in dark slacks and a matching jacket over a white shirt. A set of untied blue neckties hung from his collar, and he looked somewhat embarrassed to have been caught looking so casual. His eyes were small and dark, but the smile over his Van Dyke beard was genuine. The stem of a billiard pipe was clenched between his teeth, but it was unlit and he quickly pocketed it to free up his mouth and his hands.

“Hello, Wayne,” he said in a strong voice. “How was your flight?” He shook hands with the pilot after retying his ties, and then did likewise with the other man. “Hello, Tom.”

“We had good weather almost the entire trip,” Wayne replied. “Nothing for concern. Mr. Barrett was so bored with my flying that he even fell asleep in the back.”

The project director turned and extended a hand toward the newcomer. “You fell asleep in that old rattletrap they fly?” he asked good-naturedly. “You must have had a smooth ride. Hello, I am Doctor Marcelo Delgado.”

Barrett took his hand cautiously, thinking that no matter how much of a front this man might put on for his guests, he was still the leader of an organization that turned good people into monstrosities. Unfortunately, Barrett had no choice in the matter, so he swallowed his thoughts and merely gave him a courteous nod over the handshake.

“Brian Barrett,” he said in way of introducing himself.

“This is Sissy,” Delgado continued, moving to the counter, “my indispensable assistant.”

“Hello, Brian,” said the feline woman. Barrett gave her a courteous nod, but could not bring himself to talk to the creature. This explains the smell of cat, he thought to himself.

“We brought the supplies you ordered,” Tom told the doctor, “but if you don’t mind, we’re going to head to our quarters and rest up a bit before we unload them.”

“Nothing’s perishable, so it can all keep until you can get to them,” the director agreed. “Brian and I will retreat to my office so we can get him checked in. See you two later.”

“Bye,” Sissy said to the pilots.

After they had gone, Delgado turned to the feline and said, “Please see to it that we are not disturbed for the next hour. The bus with the others should be here by then, but Brian and I have a lot to discuss.”

“Yes, sir,” Sissy replied. Without another word, she took a seat in front of a computer tablet behind the counter and busied herself with some task that needed her attention. Delgado turned to the newcomer and gave him a nod.

“This way, Brian.”

Barrett followed him past the counter to a back room, automatically closing the door behind him. Delgado’s office was small and cozy with dark paneled walls adorned with framed certificates. A moderate sized desk contained a double-screened computer tablet, but nothing else. There was a cabinet with a potted fern on top in one corner, and a bookshelf full of neatly arranged printed volumes in another. Delgado tapped open a folder on one screen of his tablet as he gestured Barrett to a pair of vinyl-covered chairs with slotted seat backs beside a curtained window. The doctor dropped lightly into his desk chair, and as his visitor sat down, the administrator folded his hands beside the tablet and faced him.

With the door closed for a private conversation, Marcelo Delgado’s demeanor changed. “Mr. Barrett,” he began in a tone that had lost all its joviality, “your presence here is going to complicate matters over the next year or two.” Barrett crossed his legs and gifted the man with a look of resignation; he had known this conversation was forthcoming. He said nothing, allowing the doctor to continue.

“I am the only person at this complex who has full knowledge of your situation,” Delgado said quietly, “and I have to admit that I was not pleased when I was contacted with the details of your enrollment here for Class Sixteen.”

“My enrollment? That’s a quaint way of describing it,” Barrett retorted, aware that this was not to be a cordial conversation.

“The analogy will do for now,” Delgado told him. “The fact remains that you are a confessed hater of furmankind, as well as a convicted murderer of a man who went through the program at this very facility. I knew Henry Parker, you see, and I don’t welcome your presence.”

“Well, Doc, I can’t say I’m too happy to be here either,” Barrett replied darkly. “All I did was exchange one prison for another, although in this one I don’t get orange coveralls, but a permanent fur coat. For killing a bothersome animal, my freedom is taken away along with my humanity, mind and soul.”

Delgado opened his mouth angrily, but then changed his mind and simply stared at the other man for a long moment. Then, with a more controlled effort, he said, “Normally, a criminal such as yourself going through the process would undergo a surgical memory wipe, Mr. Barrett. You would then be reeducated to live in anthro society without taking along the baggage you carry. Why the judge ordered you to retain your memories is beyond me. Having a Fur-hater living amongst others becoming Furs is a potentially explosive situation.”

“I’m going to be losing my mind anyway, so why don’t you just wipe my memories and claim you lost the judge’s orders?” Barrett hissed. “Happens all the time in the real world.”

Delgado raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You want a memory wipe?” he asked incredulously.

“What do you think?” Barrett growled. “No, I don’t want a mind wipe, but perhaps it would be better going through life as a brainless vegetable than to suffer the painful torture you plan to put me through!”

The director was completely human, but the malicious look he gave the prisoner was almost feral. “Nothing would please me more than to have you tortured for what you did to Henry Parker, Mr. Barrett. Unfortunately, I do not have that luxury. I cannot relieve you of your memories either. By law and by the judicial orders I have already signed in agreement, I must accept you as a typical volunteer for the program.” He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Both men sat quietly for several long moments, but it was Barrett who finally spoke.

“My life is over, and although I chose this option over a violent death, I’m not so sure that it will be any less painful with your procedures.”

Delgado looked over at him and leaned forward upon his desk once again. “Yes, there will be pain involved with the process as the bodily structure is reconfigured,” he admitted, “but it’s tolerable to just about everyone who goes through it.”

“Just about everyone? What about those who don’t find it tolerable?”

The doctor frowned. “We provide medical and psychological care throughout the process, but there have been times when a volunteer’s psyche is incapable of dealing with the changes taking place.”

Barrett folded his hands across his stomach. “I understand that the McEwen process is irreversible once it has begun.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“For those who can’t cope with becoming a monster, how do you issue a refund for something that can’t be returned? That psychological instability will be with them the rest of their wretched lives!”

Delgado fixed him with a hard glare, but then his expression softened and he let out a soft sigh. No matter how much he resented Barrett, this was no way to begin a two-year association with which someone that the legal system had stuck him. There were three other furmankind facilities across the world, and although they had each processed a few criminals through their ranks at times, it was always done with the surgical memory erasure to keep the peace while educating the individual for the colonization program. Barrett was a unique case in that the judge had ordered him to undergo the process with the memories of his deeds intact, and this made the situation volatile.

“Mr. Barrett… Let me apologize for getting started on the wrong foot,” he said in a calmer tone. “My reaction to your situation was unprofessional, and since neither of us has a choice concerning your presence at this facility, perhaps we should begin again. I was already aware of your attitudes toward furmankind, but you agreed to the process and you should therefore be treated as any other volunteer to the program. Shall we call a truce?”

Barrett fixed him with a long, hard stare, but eventually he nodded.

“In answer to your question, Mr. Barrett, yes, there are those who cannot cope with the changes their bodies must go through, and it is in those instances that we must work with them personally and delicately. Each case is different, so there are no standards to follow, but it is rare that this happens. The human mind is extremely adaptable, even under the duress of pain. We take every step necessary to make the transition as easy as possible. Usually, the ones who have the greatest problem are those who endure the process who are unsure or un…willing.” Delgado stopped and stared at Barrett in sudden realization of what he had just said. Barrett crossed his arms and said nothing.

Delgado cleared his throat and realized a headache was coming on from this discussion. Then he raised an eyebrow as his confidence returned. “From what I understand about you, Mr. Barrett, you have a strong will and fully-rounded character. I’m sure you can handle the process without any mental breakdowns.”

“I have a question for you, Doc,” Barrett said.

“Yes?”

“If you are so assured of the McEwen process, why haven’t you gone through it yourself? It occurs to me that the director of such a project should be someone who has firsthand knowledge on what his patients must undergo.”

Delgado frowned deeply. “Those who go through the transformation,” the man said slowly, “are destined to colonize other worlds. That is not the career I have chosen for myself.”

“You agree with the plan to colonize planets, yet you don’t have the guts to support what you create here, is that it?”

“I am doing my part to support that colonization,” Delgado replied. “Aside from those such as yourself, every other person who goes through our program is a volunteer. This is the life they have chosen. We take that responsibility very seriously, Mr. Barrett, and even though you don’t agree with us, you have also chosen this life, even if it was ultimately as a means to avoid a violent death. Despite my personal feelings, we intend to see you safely through every aspect of the process as we would with any other.”

Barrett knew the director was right. Even if he did not agree or approve of the very existence of the Institute, he was there because of the decision he had made. He ran the fingers of a hand through his hair and visibly relaxed.

“Okay, Doc,” he said, “we’ve established that I will be a prisoner here just as much as I was in a Colorado prison. I honestly don’t believe my mind will be intact by the time you are through with me, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. As far as I’m concerned, it will be a slow death, but at least I will get a couple more years of life than I was to have as of this morning.”

“Are you saying that you will cause us no trouble?”

Barrett nodded. “I will deal with what’s to happen to me as it comes. I can only hope that my psyche is as strong as you believe it is.”

“We have trained psychologists on the grounds that are available twenty-four seven. If you ever feel you have a need for their services, they are discreet and will work with you on a personal level.”

“Okay.”

“We also have a chaplain’s office with a staff representing various faiths if you should feel the need to talk to any of them. As with our counselors, the chaplain is on-call around the clock and the chapel is available at all times.”

Barrett suddenly recalled the face of Lloyd Gibson, the minister who had visited him in prison. It had been a long time since he had last prayed, but with the daunting life ahead of him, he would not rule out the extra bit of faith it might take to get him through it.

“Uhm, okay.”

“Now then, Mr. Barrett, shall we proceed?”

“Go ahead, Doc. I’m your captive audience… literally.” Barrett said this last with a smirk, signaling to the director that they understood one another.

Delgado allowed himself to smile at his humor. “Since your decision to accept the process in exchange for your original sentencing was done at such a late hour, there was no time for a new background and identification to be set up prior to your arrival here. However, taking on a new identity is an option when any volunteer signs a contract with the AHCP, so it is not unheard of for the datawork to take a little time. For now, until such time as your new identification is set up, I would advise you to introduce yourself solely by your first name when meeting others. First name introductions are common here anyway.”

“Sounds simple enough. What was this place before you guys took it over and set up shop?”

“That was in the material that should have been provided for you to look over on the flight here,” Delgado replied. “Was it not given to you?”

“Yeah, it was, but I fell asleep on the way here. I didn’t get to read it all.”

“Where is the satchel now?”

Barrett searched his memory and then suddenly looked annoyed at himself. “I left it on the seat of that cart the pilots drove over here. It must still be there, if it hasn’t fallen off in the grass somewhere.”

The administrator nodded. “Okay, that can be retrieved later. In answer to your question, this location and the original buildings were formerly part of an institution in the nineteen-thirties and forties to rehabilitate and reeducate criminals that were caught outside the law. Although the unorthodox procedures they used were moderately successful, the place was shut down when news of its existence and methods got out to the public.” He gave Barrett a smirk of his own and added, “It’s rather fitting that you came here to this place, considering its history.”

Chapter 8

The Cat House

Marcelo Delgado glanced at his techwatch. “I always set aside a few moments for a short one-on-one greeting with each new person who comes here to undergo the process. Usually it only takes me about ten or fifteen minutes, but yours took a little longer. However, I think we still have a little time before the next group of volunteers arrives,” he said, getting to his feet and rolling up his sleeves.

“We have a little time for what?” Barrett asked suspiciously, keeping his seat. “I don’t think it would be in our best interest to get into a fistfight right before the next batch of suckers get here.”

Delgado heaved an audible sigh of frustration. He fixed the other man with a pointed stare and said with a growl, “I meant to say there’s still time for me to show you to your quarters, Mr. Barrett. Must every single thing we say to one another have to be the precursor to an argument?”

Barrett blinked and suddenly felt foolish. He was still on his guard and the words had jumped out before he had even really thought about them. He got to his feet and then stuck his hands into his pockets. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I forgot we had called a truce.”

Delgado raised an eyebrow and then nodded. “Apology accepted,” he said more calmly, rolling his sleeves back down, only then realizing how that must have looked. “Now, let me show you to the place where you will be living. One of your housemates arrived just before you did; I can introduce you to her before the others arrive.”

“Her?” Barrett asked.

“Yes, there are typically sixteen volunteers per class session, four to a group for each of the four Fur races. Our groups are coed and you’ll have two more people joining you before the day is out.”

“I see. How many classes have you had here?”

“Each class is initially nine months long for the transformation and up to another year for education afterward, with concurrent sessions overlapping approximately every ten months. Your class is the sixteenth at this particular institution.”

“Ah, okay. Lead the way, Doc. I’m right with you.”

The orange-furred assistant looked up at them from her desk terminal when they walked out into the front room. “Sissy, I’m going to take Brian over to the Felis Wing to meet Kristen. Please page my cell if the bus arrives before I get back.”

“The Felis Wing?” she asked with great interest, her green eyes locked upon Barrett as he passed her counter. “Did he choose to become a domestic cat like myself?”

“Cougar,” Delgado responded automatically, “A mountain lion.”

“Such graceful and powerful creatures,” Sissy remarked. “I like the choice.”

The director knew that although she had not actually acknowledged his instructions, his administrative assistant would contact him at the appropriate time. He led Barrett out through the door into the cool autumn afternoon, turning toward one of the older stone buildings along a concrete sidewalk.

“I am curious about something, Doc,” Barrett said with a look of mischief on his face. The administrator looked at him sideways, unsure he wanted to hear what the other man wanted to know. Without waiting for a confirmation, Barrett gestured broadly across the compound with one hand. “You just said that you had greeted a woman, a housemate of mine, just before I arrived. Since your ties were undone, it makes me wonder how you greeted her.”

Delgado looked annoyed at the implied accusation and sputtered. “I stopped by the cafeteria on the way back from taking her to your Wing,” he huffed, pointing a finger at the largest building of the complex. “I ran into someone in line – literally – and was splashed with coffee. I was in my cabin changing clothes when I heard the Osprey arrive. That’s why my ties were untied!”

Barrett grinned at him openly. “Uh huh…”

Delgado sighed, but continued walking. “Brian, you’re going to give me an ulcer. Truce, remember?”

Barrett chuckled. “This has nothing to do with Furs or my personal feelings on this place, Doc, so isn’t covered by our truce.”

The administrator glanced aside at his companion and then let a wry smile cross his lips. “Right,” he muttered, visibly relaxing.

Barrett frowned. “I apologize, Doc. I almost met the death angel this morning. Levity is just my way of dealing with such a life-altering experience.”

“Right. I’ll try to remember that.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“Listen,” Delgado said after a few steps, “remember what I said about going by first names here? Please, Brian, stop calling me Doc. My name is Marcelo.”

Barrett shrugged his shoulders. “Marcelo – sure, I can do that. I noticed you’ve already started calling me Brian, but don’t get too used to it,” he reminded him with a somber expression. “I should have a new name soon. It may take me a while to get used to it, though; I’ve spent thirty-five years with my old one.”

“Brian! Marcelo! Wait up!”

Barrett and Marcelo stopped and looked back at the person who had called to them. Approaching from a set of modern cabins off to the side was the Osprey copilot. He was now dressed in a pair of denim blue jeans and a matching shirt, looking relaxed after the long flight. In his hands was Barrett’s satchel and the newspaper provided for him on the flight.

“I thought you might want these,” he said with a grin, “It’s the information on this place that you didn’t read because you slept through it, and a souvenir of what you missed this morning!”

Barrett took the items with a smile. “Thanks, Tom. I was planning to come looking for them as soon as I got settled in.”

“Once Wayne and I have had our supper, we have supplies to unload from the Osprey, thirsty gas tanks to refill, and then we’ll be taking off bright and early tomorrow morning.”

Barrett held out his hand. “If I don’t see you before you leave, thanks for getting me out of Colorado. I hope you guys have a good flight to wherever you’re headed next!”

Tom shook his hand. “You’re welcome, and thanks!” he replied. He nodded to Marcelo and then retreated back to his cabin at a relaxed gait.

Barrett and Marcelo resumed walking. Within a few moments, they approached one of the smaller stone buildings, but smaller was a relative description. It was not as large as the early Twentieth Century three-story structure occupying the center of the compound, but its floor plan occupied a footprint similar to that of a High School gymnasium. The building was square, with several high windows along two of the sides that Barrett could see. The stone used to construct it was mostly rose granite with a lighter beige rock at the corners and borders around the doors and windows.

The sidewalk took them to the main entrance of the structure. Three wide steps led up to a landing that was covered over by a burgundy canvas awning. Two large oak doors were designed to open in opposite directions for convenience, and the one on the right had a small brass nameplate affixed near the middle of the solid panel that Barrett read with raised eyebrows.

“The Felis Wing — really?” he asked in amusement. “Since cats don’t have wings, perhaps you should have just called it the Cat House.” Marcelo simply rolled his eyes without comment, pushing open the door for him and his red-headed companion.

Just inside the door was an all-weather rug on a wood floor and a tall round canister containing several wide-brim umbrellas was in the corner immediately on their left. Glowing panels illuminated a high-ceiling corridor with a soft light, but a larger room at the other end seemed lit up by sunlight. Framed before-and-after photographs of past tenants of the Felis Wing were hung on wheat-colored walls, and their footsteps echoed on the concrete floor. Barrett gave the portraits only a cursory glance, certain that he could ignore them at his convenience in the months to come; photos of Furs certainly held little interest for him now.

When they reached the end of the long hallway, the flooring changed over to padded carpeting in a large rectangular room. Several doors lined three of the walls, with usable counter tops and cabinets interspersed between. A large skylight overhead provided ample illumination with natural sunlight, the indirect glow panels around the perimeter of the ceiling currently off and unneeded.

Occupying a space on the wall adjacent to the main entrance hallway was a large video screen that was currently switched off. Several more slot-back chairs were arranged casually in front of it, with lamp tables between each of them. There were no lamps upon the small tables, however, but scented candles or bowls of potpourri instead. A small library of leather-bound volumes framed the video screen on both sides, likely for nothing more than decoration since every book ever written was likely accessible for common reader devices.

To the right was an outside wall to the building, unbroken but for a large stone fireplace with a thick wooden mantle above the raised hearth. The ashes from some past fire lightly covered the bottom of the fireplace beneath a soot-covered iron grate, but at present, there were no kindling or logs. A set of iron utensils stood nearby in an upright frame, and a simple pendulum clock occupied a spot above the empty mantle.

At the center of the room was a sunken circular area, a gathering place reached by three sets of two steps around its perimeter. Comfortable couches matched the curvature of the pit, all accented by throw pillows, and a round wooden table sat right in the middle. There were four chairs with slotted seat backs around the table, and a delicate floral arrangement on top.

Seated on one of the couches was a young woman with two travel bags at her feet. Marcelo led Barrett down the steps as she stood up to greet them.

“Brian, I would like to introduce you to Kristen, one of your housemates. Kristen, I am sorry we kept you waiting, but this is Brian. He has just joined us.”

“Hello, Kristen,” Barrett said with a friendly smile. “It is good to meet you.” He set his satchel and newspaper on the table and then held out his hand in greeting. Although Barrett was fully six feet in height, Kristen was ten inches shorter and she looked up at him with deep brown eyes that were rich and warm. She had long black hair that hung to the middle of her back and bangs cut straight across her forehead just above thin eyebrows. She was slightly plump, though not fat, and wore a powder blue blouse over a pair of tan slacks. Although she returned Barrett’s smile easily, she appeared somewhat shy with a spot of color appearing on her pale cheeks.

“Hello, Brian,” she replied in a quiet voice, taking his hand delicately. “I am pleased to meet you, too.”

Marcelo was relieved that his companion presented a charming face to the young lady, rather than the sarcastic one that had been directed toward himself earlier. “Kristen has volunteered for the program as a transterrestrial botanist for the colony.”

“I assume that means you will be the one who determines if the local plant life is edible or poisonous to us,” Barrett remarked, still holding onto her hand. “I automatically want to be your friend.”

Kristen’s smile widened, but then she gently retrieved her fingers. “Going to another world, it is always a good thing to take friends with you,” she said. “What position will you be fulfilling when the time comes to go?”

Barrett looked over at Marcelo and frowned. His inclusion in a future life on another world had not been discussed beyond the furman transformation itself. “Well, I’m afraid they are still trying to find a place to put me,” he said as explanation. “I have several business-related degrees, but nothing in the field of sciences. More than likely, I will be low-ranked on the team and wind up digging latrines or building shelters.”

Marcelo smiled at the man’s response to Kristen’s query. “Don’t let him fool you,” he told the woman. “Brian has talents of his own. Business and administrative experience will always be an asset, even on an alien world that might be opened for settlement.” He was about to say something more, but his pocket phone chirped for attention. He took a look at the message and then put it away.

“The bus with the others has arrived and I must attend to it,” Marcelo told them. “I will return in a bit.”

“Others? How many more?” Barrett asked out of curiosity.

Marcelo stroked his Van Dyke beard absently. “The timing of your arrival was spot-on; there’s a new class of volunteers arriving at the Institute today. Typically, there are four processed at a time for each of the furman races, so there should be fourteen on that bus unless someone missed the ride. They don’t always all come in on one load, but I prefer to meet with all new volunteers when they arrive and you two were the first to arrive for Class Sixteen since you traveled separate from the others. I may be a while before I can bring in your other housemates, so make yourself comfortable. If possible, I will arrange to have your attendants come by as soon as they can.”

“We’ll have attendants?” Kristen asked in amazement, suddenly visualizing a staff waiting on them hand and foot — or paw, as the case may be.

Marcelo smiled, instantly realizing her train of thought. “There is a doctor and a nurse assigned to each of the four wings, and it is they who will initiate and be with you through every step of the process. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go meet the others.” Marcelo gave them a smile and then retraced his steps back along the corridor.

Barrett and Kristen stood there for a moment longer before the woman returned to her seat on the couch. She looked up at him and brushed a few strands of hair behind one ear. “I’ve long had an interest in getting out so I can see the new forms of plant life that have developed on other worlds,” she said in casual conversation. “I was unsure if I could accept the furman requirement to go out there, but then I decided it was a price I was willing to pay. Although completely separate ecosystems, I understand there are amazing similarities on the habitable worlds they’ve found, to what we have here on Earth. Since you have no science background, Brian, what was it that interested you in the program?”

Barrett frowned at the question and his mind raced to come up with a suitable fabrication. He had not yet received his new identity and he had not discussed a plausible background with Marcelo. “Well…” he started off slowly, “life often throws obstacles your way and sometimes you have to swerve around them in order to survive or meet some goal. My life’s road has had a lot of twists and turns, and it just happened to have brought me here, so I plan to make the best of it.”

Kristen looked at him blankly. “You… didn’t choose to be here?” she asked.

Barrett gave her another of his charming smiles, reminded of Marcelo’s earlier words about the choice he had made to stay alive. “There were factors involved,” he told her, placing his hands into the pockets of his denim jeans, “but ultimately the choice was mine alone to make. I am where I have chosen to be.” His smile was infectious and the young woman returned it automatically.

Barrett glanced around the large room and then quietly walked up the steps out of the pit. “Have you looked around the place yet?” he asked her.

“I poked my head into a couple of the rooms while waiting for Dr. Delgado to come back,” Kristen replied, “but I didn’t know if we were allowed to see what was there before being shown.”

Barrett looked down at her. “Why would that matter?” he asked. “This is our new home.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Although I know the basics behind the McEwen process, it’s still a mystery to me how they turn ordinary people like you and I into half-human, half-animal hybrids. I didn’t want to mess with anything inadvertently.”

Barrett nodded. “It never hurts to be cautious,” he agreed. “What did you find during your peek?”

“Four bedrooms, a kitchen and a laboratory,” she replied. “Once I saw the lab, I stopped snooping.”

“Marcelo did not give us any restrictions when he left, so I think I’m going to look around,” Barrett said. “Want to join me to see the rest?”

Kristen suddenly seemed to realize that she was alone with a complete stranger who had only given her only a vague response about his purpose here. According to the director, this man Brian was to be one of her housemates, but until she got to know him better, it might be prudent to refrain from putting herself into any potential situations that could be compromised.

“Thank you,” she answered, “but I think I’ll relax for now. I drove for nearly seven hours today to get here.”

“I had a long flight myself,” Barrett replied, “but I’m tired of sitting. Besides that, I need to find out where they’ve hidden the restroom.” Leaving her alone with her thoughts, Barrett walked to the first door at random. Inside were quarters that resembled a typical hotel room, though without a private bathroom. The bed was king sized, at least, and the recliner in the corner looked as if it were large enough for a bear to relax into well enough to sleep. Barrett frowned at the thought and then shook his head to drop the visual image. As if I didn’t need another reminder, he thought to himself.

There was a small table on each side of the bed, each occupied by a generic lamp; a cheap digital alarm clock rested beside one of them. Across from the bed was a six-drawer dresser with a large mirror and one of the curious slot-back chairs that were common here; mounted on the wall beside it was a typical video panel. A floor lamp occupied another corner near a tiny walk-in closet, but there were no windows to break the monotony of the back wall, giving the place a slightly claustrophobic air. This puzzled Barrett, since he had seen windows on the outside of the building. When he looked into three more adjacent doors, he found hotel-style rooms identical to the first, all waiting to be individualized by new tenants. None of them had windows to grace their walls either.

Through another door, he walked into the kitchen. It was a little larger than a home kitchen, but it did not include a dining area. A large stove with two ovens occupied one wall, several appliances on a wide counter, a pantry and three cabinets, one of which contained several sizes of pots and pans; eating utensils of various kinds lay in a drawer in separated bins beneath the single counter. The only items currently in the refrigerator were several chilled bottles of water. No doubt, the contents would be provided once it was known what dietary needs were required by the tenants.

The next door over provided entrance to the laboratory that Kristen had seen, through a set of double panels that looked as if they could be sealed around the edges with an inflatable set of rubber bumpers. Brighter than the other rooms he had been in, the lab sparkled and shined, light glinting off numerous chrome instruments and scientific devices that Barrett would not even hazard to guess their functions. Knowing what he was to face in the coming months, the sight of the gleaming medical instruments was chilling.

Two oddly shaped beds occupied the center of the room and looked as if they could rotate on multiple axes. One end had an adjustable cutout that Barrett suspected was for a patient’s face while lying on his or her stomach, much like those in a chiropractor’s office he had once visited. He decided not to try to guess the purpose of it in this setting.

There were several doors further in, but he was reluctant to enter the room that had apparently been sterilized prior to their arrival. No need to contaminate it beyond just opening the door, he understood why Kristen had not wanted to investigate further, so he switched off the lights and closed the door.

He still needed to find a toilet, so he moved to the next door he found. Inside was small office occupied by two military-surplus desks facing one another, each occupied by a double-screened computer tablet and several file clips. Two signs were affixed to the wall about the desks, one that spelled out ‘CRISPR’ and the other ‘CAS9’. Barrett did not understand the references and figured it was some genetic jargon.

Moving to the next door, Barrett found nothing more than heating and air handling units for the facility, and a walk-in linen closet occupied the next.

He was delighted when the next he looked into housed an exercise room. It was small, but contained three cardio machines – a treadmill, an elliptical trainer and a stationary bike. There was a folded exercise mat up against one wall, next to a fully-supplied weight bench and a frame of free weights. Barrett preferred to work out every morning before going to work, a practice he had continued even in prison, so he was glad to have discovered this room.

The remaining door next to one of the bookcases beside the video panel led into a large restroom with beige tile walls and red brick tiles on the floor. There were five toilet stalls along one wall, the same amount of sinks in a long counter beneath a large mirror, and a long wooden bench mounted to the floor in the middle of the room, similar to those that might be found in a sports locker room.

The wall opposite the toilets housed five water-shower stalls with generic shower curtains so new that he could smell the vinyl as soon as he entered the room. On a wall near the sinks was remnant mounting brackets for some large piece of machinery that appeared to have been only recently removed.

Barrett stepped back out and looked at the door panel, but there was nothing to indicate whether the room was for men or women. It was at least designed with humans in mind, he decided with a personal smile, as there were no litter boxes in sight. He had not seen any other restrooms in the facility, so the place must be co-ed. Perhaps it had never been designed specifically for one gender or the other. From all signs, it looked similar to restrooms in some of the cabins he had stayed in for a summer church camp when he was a kid.

It was then he remembered what Marcelo had told him, that the place had once been an institution for rehabilitating criminals. There were four buildings altogether such as this one on the grounds. Perhaps two had been for women and two for men, but now they were being used to separate not genders, but anthro races.

Without any other options, he secluded himself inside one of the toilet stalls to take care of his need. The last time he had been to the toilet was on the Osprey during the refueling stop in Chicago. At least this place had modern American-style commodes with built-in bidets, although the stool itself was more of a pedestal separated from the tank that he assumed was to allow for users with tails. The internal design and operation of the waste-collection device may have changed over the decades, but the function was the same.

When Barrett returned to the front room, the catgirl Sissy had just arrived with another man. He assumed it was the doctor that Marcelo had mentioned, but when he approached them, Sissy was presenting the man to Kristen as a new housemate.

“The name’s Dante,” said the newcomer, shaking the woman’s hand. Kristen gave him a courteous smile, but even Barrett could tell she was uncomfortable. She retrieved her fingers and then unconsciously wiped them on her slacks as if there had been something on them.

Dante was an average-looking man in his late twenties with brown hair, dark blue eyes and a mustache so thin that it was barely there. He was taller than both Kristen and Sissy, but did not reach Barrett’s height. He was dressed in dark denim jeans, with a long-sleeved brown flannel shirt that was open to reveal a gold chain resting in sparse chest hair. He was currently chewing gum and unconsciously snapping it. Although he looked clean, there was something about his manner toward Kristen that Barrett immediately registered as oily.

“Hi, Brian,” Sissy said when the man appeared at the top of the sunken area and stopped beside a pair of suitcases. “Dante is another of your housemates, having just arrived. He was the first into the project director’s office off the bus, so it did not take long before they finished and I could bring him out to you. Dante, this is Brian.”

Dante simply looked up at the man, but when Barrett walked down the short steps into the pit and proffered his out of habit, the newcomer took it with a brief hesitation. “Hey, Brian,” he said. “So you’re gonna be another cat like the two of us.” He said the last while sidling up next to Kristen and putting his arm around her shoulders in feigned familiarity.

The woman did not let him linger, instead moving out of his grasp when she felt his eyes travel down the neckline of her blouse. To put space between them, she took up a position between Sissy and Barrett. It was apparent her impression of Dante matched Barrett’s assessment of him.

Barrett ignored the incident and simply nodded to the other man. “Yes, this is the Cat House, after all,” he answered.

“If you will excuse me,” Sissy said to the trio, “Marcelo will have others in his office.” Without waiting for acknowledgment, she retreated back up the corridor, almost at a jog. The main office was busier than usual and it was getting on into the early evening.

Before the administrator’s assistant was out the door, however, another couple walked in and gave her a quick greeting. Sissy spoke with them for just a moment before she left and the pair approached those in the main room. Barrett returned to the upper level and Kristen followed him quickly, unwilling to be left below with Dante.

“Welcome to the Felis Wing,” said the female newcomer. Although she looked to be in her late forties, she carried herself well with a confidence that put the others at ease almost instantly. She was nearly as tall as Barrett, and her green eyes contrasted well with her shoulder length, platinum blonde hair. She still retained a noticeable figure at an age when most women would be more relaxed in the way they appeared. “I am Marcy Lagrange and I will be your attendant nurse for the next nine months. This is Donald Renwick, your doctor.”

Renwick acknowledged each of them with a nod of his firm jaw. His short copper hair was lighter than his tanned skin of bronze, looking as if he had spent his summer vacation somewhere in the tropics, and his eyes almost matched the color of his hair. Both wore medical scrubs beneath lightweight lab coats, him in dark blue scrubs, and her in lavender.

“Good evening,” the thirty-something doctor told them with a casual smile. He had his hands in the pockets of his smock, but he pulled out a dual-screen compact computer and peered at an open note page within. “If you are in the right place, you two gentlemen must be Brian and Dante,” he said. Then he looked over at the short, dark-haired woman and asked, “Are you Jenni or Kristen?”

“I’m Kristen,” she replied. “We haven’t met anyone named Jenni.”

“Sweet!” Dante said with a smile at Nurse Marcy. “The animals are being gathered girl and boy, two by two.”

“We have a short orientation for all of you,” Renwick said, “but we would prefer everyone be present. If you would, just relax in here until your last housemate arrives, and then we can get started with proper introductions and a brief discussion of our procedures here at the Institute.”

“Excuse me,” Barrett said with an upraised finger, “but for some of us who have traveled a ways to get here — what time are we allowed something to eat?”

“Yeah,” Dante added, “do we get our food in here, or is there a cafeteria somewhere?”

“There will be times that you will eat here,” Renwick replied, “but until we know your specific dietary needs, our house kitchen is not yet stocked. There is a cafeteria on the bottom floor of the Clark Savage building, the large stone building next door if you wish to get a bite for now.”

“What kind of prices do they have there?” Dante asked.

Marcy shook her head. “There’s no charge for your meals,” she told him. “That expense is covered by your stay here.”

Dante rubbed his hands together with a smile. “Good, because I do love to eat! How late are they open?”

“Due to the nature of the clientele here,” Renwick replied, “it is open around the clock.”

“The nature of the clientele?” Barrett repeated.

“Some of the furman races can be nocturnal,” the doctor explained, “so appetites don’t always depend upon a clock’s time schedule.”

“That makes sense,” Kristen said.

Renwick looked at his wrist watch. “It is currently five of six o’clock. If you can be back here in the saloon by six forty-five, the director should have ample time to visit with your remaining housemate and release her to us.”

“Saloon?” Dante repeated, looking around. “Where’s the piano and the swinging doors?”

Renwick looked at him in puzzlement, but Barrett chuckled, shaking his head. “A saloon is a large room used as a gathering place, Dante,” he explained. “The term does not always mean there are cowboys, dancing showgirls and western shoot-outs.”

Kristen snickered and Marcy looked amused. Dante simply looked up at Barrett. “Oh,” he said quietly. “I’ve never heard it used for anything else.”

“Come on, let’s get something to eat,” Barrett said to his housemates, moving toward the entrance corridor. “We’ll be back shortly,” he told the attendants. Nurse Marcy gave them a smile, but the doctor was already walking toward his office.

As the trio headed out the front door, Barrett could not scratch the uncomfortable feeling when he considered their new doctor in that room of gleaming medical instruments. It was like an itch between the shoulder blades that he could not reach. Renwick had done nothing to present himself as a mad genetic scientist tinkering with the lives of innocents, but he had not exactly appeared to be a warm individual at their initial meeting. First impressions often served as important indicators to Barrett, and he hoped his feelings were wrong.

Chapter 9

Orientation

Barrett, Kristen and Dante had stepped outside the doors of the Felis Wing under a darkening sky, were down the steps and had traversed several yards along the concrete sidewalk before any of them noticed the approaching cart. The orange feline secretary was behind the controls with a human passenger beside her. She pulled up alongside the sidewalk and stopped beside the trio.

“Hi again,” Sissy said cheerily. “I’ve brought you a present!”

“A present?” Dante responded with a grin, “For little ol’ me?”

Sissy’s eyes narrowed in amusement, and then she turned to the woman sitting quietly beside her. “This is your final housemate, Jenni,” she said in a rush. “Jenni, this is Brian, Kristen and Dante.” She pointed to each in turn.

“Hello,” Jenni said courteously, stepping out of the vehicle onto the grass. The newcomer was slender, shapely, and in her late twenties. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and a set of powder blue eyes that were mesmerizing even in the waning light. Her makeup was subtle as was her outfit. She wore a long-sleeved white blouse with the top button undone over a moderate sized chest, a tan skirt that fell below her knees, and a pair of matching flats. There was a delicate silver chain around her left ankle matching a pair of small silver earrings and they glittered when park lights over the sidewalk suddenly came on with the darkness. Dante’s eyes seemed to be glued to the curve of her calf and a lopsided smirk appeared across his lips.

Kristen was glad to have another female in the house, but she felt she knew what she must look like when compared to someone as pretty as the new girl. Kristen had never considered herself ugly by any means, but she was fully aware that she had a few extra pounds on her that she had never been able to shed with diet and exercise. However, it was something she was long used to, so her momentary melancholy evaporated just knowing that Dante would be fawning over the newcomer instead of herself.

“Nice to meet you,” she told Jenni with a smile, her words echoed simultaneously by Barrett. She then looked over at Sissy and added, “I thought the director would be a while getting through the crowd of newcomers.”

“The director has never had to deal with this many volunteers at once,” Sissy explained, “so he released everyone to their wings for now and will meet with each one personally in turn tomorrow. Since the Felis Wing was only short one member, I brought Jenni out to meet you.”

“Thank you, Sissy,” Jenni said, lightly touching the feline’s hand with a fingertip. She turned to a back seat to retrieve her luggage and Dante rushed forward to help her.

“Here, let me get those for you,” he said. When the woman stepped back to let him take her bags, Dante’s eyes widened at the weight of the first suitcase. He managed to get it out onto the grass beside him without mashing his toes.

“We were heading to the cafeteria for a bite to eat,” Barrett told the newcomer. “You’re welcome to join us.”

“Yes, thank you. It’s been a while since the bus stopped for lunch,” Jenni replied gratefully.

“Why don’t you four go on to eat?” Sissy suggested. “I can put the bags inside for you.”

“Are you sure?” Jenni asked.

“Are you sure?” echoed Dante, who had just managed to get both weighty bags out of the cart. He looked at Sissy’s slender feline build and had his doubts that she could handle them.

“Yes, I’m sure,” the Institute’s administrative assistant assured them. “If you will put the bags back in the cart for me, I will take care of them at your Wing.”

Dante frowned, looking back down at the luggage, but Barrett walked over and grabbed the handle of each one to load them up onto the back seat for him. The younger man looked surprised at how easily Barrett handled them and grunted beneath his breath when he stepped out of the way.

“Thank you, guys,” Jenni said with a smile. Sissy gave them all a lighthearted finger wave and then drove the cart to the entrance of their Wing.

Barrett gestured toward the larger building next to theirs. “It’s that way,” he said. Jenni gave him a pleasant smile and then she stepped up to Kristen’s side. The women immediately began chatting with one another in introduction.

Barrett held back to let Dante follow the women and then he tagged along behind. He looked up through the numerous trees on the grounds at the slowly emerging stars and a smile spread across his face. He had been on Death Row and in confinement for so long that it felt like it had been ages since he had last seen the stars at night. A light autumn breeze wafted through the complex and he took a deep breath to enjoy the scents of the surrounding forest.

He outstretched his arms as he walked, for once feeling really free. He tried not to think about the reason for his presence there, only to enjoy the moment. Unfortunately, the mood was shattered when they neared the large structure and he saw a lupine Fur reach the door just ahead of them. The wolfman was dressed in a short-sleeved, dark green robe that hung to his knees, with his full tail wagging gently through a split in the back. The Canis Fur saw the approaching foursome and stopped to hold open the door for them.

“Thank you,” Kristen told him gratefully.

“Yes, thank you,” Jenni added.

“You are welcome,” the wolf replied in a low, throaty voice. “I take it you are all from the bus that arrived tonight?”

“That’s right,” Dante said as he moved past him. “We’re the newest Guinea pigs.”

Kristen reached out a tentative hand to the wolf’s arm. “May I?” she asked.

The wolfman gave her a look of amusement. “Sure, go ahead,” he replied. Kristen placed her fingertips in the Canis male’s reddish fur and lightly stroked it from elbow to wrist. She gave the wolf a smile and continued to pet his arm several times.

“Your fur is coarse,” she said, “but also soft. How can that be?”

“It’s autumn, but winter’s coming soon,” he explained patiently. “The coarse fur is my regular guard hairs, but I’m growing in a softer undercoat as insulation against the cold.”

“Wow,” Kristen replied. She realized she was still petting his arm, so she pulled her fingers back with an embarrassed grin. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” the red wolf replied. Kristen turned and followed Jenni and Dante inside.

Barrett stopped before he passed the wolf and quietly put a hand up on the door, unwilling to let a Fur hold it for him. The wolfman mistook his gesture as courtesy to hold the door for him, so he nodded to the red-haired man and went on inside.

Barrett swallowed and hesitated for a moment more before he went into the building. Inside was a short corridor lined with grey tile, pale yellow walls broken by several doors and bright overhead lights. A set of stairs to another floor was to his right. The sound coming from the end of the hall was a cacophony of voices amidst the tinkling of silverware and glasses with the clatter of plates and serving trays. When the small group reached the cafeteria, Barrett stopped at the entrance as his companions continued toward the serving line.

There seemed to be an even mix of races in the moderate sized room. Humans, Felis, Canis, Ursis and Vulps were all mingled together. Although the busload of volunteers that had arrived would make up the patients for the next nine months, there were numerous others that were all fully transformed into furmankind. Part of the information that he had managed to read before drifting to sleep on the flight mentioned that even after the process was completed, each patient would stay on the grounds for a little over another year in formal education for their ultimate destination, some starter colony across space on another world. Although there were four worlds already resident with furmankind’s small populations, other new planets opened for settlement would first be tamed by the likes of what Barrett saw in that room.

He knew that he would have to get used to the sight of Furs on a daily basis, but that did not mean he would have to like it. Grudgingly, he made his feet move forward as he walked a path bordered with the fewest amount of Furs that he could get by. He tried to keep the disgust from showing on his face, keeping it purposely neutral. The last thing he wanted was for some fuzzy idiot to stop him to see if he was feeling okay, despite the revulsion he felt.

He was tempted to return to the Felis Wing without eating, but it was no use. No matter how he felt toward those who were no longer fully human, the fact remained that he had not eaten since Chicago and his stomach grumbled at its emptiness. Despite his physical fitness habits, he had never had the will for fasting and he never missed a meal if he could help it. Quelling an internal sigh, Barrett fell in behind his companions at the serving line and picked up a plastic tray for his selections. Fortunately for his peace of mind, the kitchen workers on the other side of the counter were all human.

Once the four of them had their selections, they retreated to an empty table in a corner of the room. Barrett surreptitiously maneuvered himself in the small group so that when they reached the table, the seat he claimed was facing the back wall. The others did not realize that he had purposely chosen a chair that would put his back to the rest of the cafeteria so he would not have to look at any of the Furs while he ate.

Dante took the seat across from him and closest to the corner, so Kristen immediately sat down next to Barrett. She did not feel any particular attraction to him, but she had already decided that she did not want to sit next to Dante. Jenni set her tray on the table at the remaining chair next to the younger man and gave them all a pleasant smile as she sat down. Kristen watched Dante’s gaze rove over Jenni’s blouse momentarily before he turned his attention to his meal.

The table remained in awkward silence while each of them started in on their food. Although the four were to be housemates for the better part of the next year, this was their first real gathering together and no one appeared to know how to begin the relationship. Oddly enough, it was Dante who broke the silence.

“I wonder if our sense of taste will change,” he muttered around a mouthful of lasagna. “I love pasta and it would be a crime if I suddenly didn’t like the taste anymore.”

“I’m sure there will be some changes,” Jenni replied after swallowing a bit of the chef’s salad she had chosen. “After all, we will be taking on some of the attributes of the creatures we will be merged with.”

“As predators, I suppose our appetite for meat will increase,” Kristen added. “I haven’t seen a listing of what will be available to us yet, but I think most of the felines are of the larger cat variety.”

“What about that catgirl, Sissy?” Dante asked with a smirk. “Isn’t she a domestic cat? If she doesn’t eat large quantities of meat like a lion or tiger, what would she eat instead? Kitty Vittles?”

“Tender Moisties?” Jenni suggested with a snicker. “It’s tender! It’s moisty! Me-ow! Me-ow! Me-ow!”

Kristen grinned over her enchilada dinner. “Thanks, now I’m going to have that commercial jingle in my head all night!”

“You’ll be craving Tender Moisties during the night,” Dante warned. “Better keep a packet under your pillow!” Despite her initial mistrust of the younger man, Kristen found herself smiling from Dante’s topical banter.

Jenni was smiling, too, but then she noticed that Barrett was quietly eating his Swiss steak and baked potato without taking part in the conversation. She reached across the table and tapped a finger beside his plate. He glanced up at her and took a sip of iced water.

“Are you feeling okay?” she asked with a concerned expression. “I’m a Registered Nurse.”

“Helloooo, Nurse!” Dante quoted with a grin.

Barrett swallowed his drink and looked at Jenni for a moment before he shook his head. “No, I’m fine,” he said quietly, “I’m just…” When all three looked at him to finish his explanation, he shrugged his shoulders and gave them all a tired smile. “It’s been a long day for me,” he told them, “and I guess I’m still trying to keep everything in perspective.”

“What do you mean?” Kristen asked, setting down her fork.

Barrett gestured out in the direction of the other diners in the cafeteria without actually looking over his shoulder. “Making the decision to give up my humanity was not an easy one for me,” he admitted. “I thought that once I arrived at the Institute, I would settle in and get used to the idea, but I keep remembering that once it’s done, there’s no going back.”

“Yeah, that’s something to remember, all right,” Dante added soberly. “Even after the process is done, we’ll be giving up the Earth as well as our humanity.”

“Right,” Barrett said. “Out there on whatever wild planet they stick us on, we will be on our own. We will have to grow or kill our own food, completely living off the land after whatever groceries we take with us runs out, and if there are any emergencies, we will have to deal with them ourselves. It takes months for a transport from Earth to reach some of those worlds, so calling for help or supplies won’t be an option for most of those places.”

Deadpan, Kristen quoted, “No phones, no lights, no motor cars…”

“Not a single luxureeeee…” Dante finished in song.

Despite his mood, Barrett chuckled at their grinning faces staring back at him. Jenni reached out again and lightly set a finger on the back of his hand that was wrapped around his glass.

“You’ve only just arrived,” she reminded him with a gentle smile. “That’s not enough time to get used to anything, especially something as life-altering as what we are about to do.” She glanced quickly at each of their companions and added, “We may have only just met, but we’re all going to be there to help one another through everything we face. We’ll be there for you if you have a rough time of it.”

Barrett gave her a grateful nod. “Thanks,” he said with genuine appreciation. There was no backing out of this for himself, but having others go through the process with him would give him someone close by who could relate.

Dante did not respond to Jenni’s vow of solidarity, but Kristen gave Barrett a subtle nod to add her confirmation. Barrett gave both of them a smile and then picked up his glass. He raised it in casual salute and then took a sip.

The conversation dropped off as each of them resumed eating, but then Barrett caught Jenni studying him again. “Yes?” he asked over the surrounding conversations.

“Sorry, I’m just trying to remember your names,” the blonde woman replied. “Sissy introduced the three of you so fast that I’m not sure I got them all.”

Dante held up a fork with a noodle skewered on the end. “I’m Dante, that’s Kristen and this is Brain,” he mumbled around a bite of food.

“Brian,” Barrett corrected; Dante simply looked back at him with a smirk.

“Dante, Kristen and… Brian,” Jenni repeated with a smile. “Thanks, I think I can remember them now.”

“Sorry, but mine is going to change soon,” Barrett told her. All three of his companions gave him puzzled looks. “I accepted the offer of a new identity,” he explained, “only the decision was made too late to have it in place before I got here. I should have a new name in the next day or three.”

Dante dropped his head and looked at the older man suspiciously. “Are you on the run?” he asked.

Barrett decided to make light of his situation to throw them off the real story, so he told a half-lie with a straight face. “From my ex, perhaps,” he said, “but really I just wanted a change to go with the new face.”

“Ex-wife?” Kristen asked.

“Ex-fiancé,” Barrett corrected. “I caught her cheating on me, so I decided it was time for a change of lifestyle.”

“You should tell people you’re on the run,” Dante mused, returning to his supper. “It sounds more exciting.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Barrett replied in personal amusement.

“So what’s your new name going to be?” Jenni asked.

“Brain,” supplied Dante again.

Barrett ignored him and shook his head. “I don’t know yet. The management is setting it up for me, so I’m just as curious about my new name as you are.”

“Bo-ring,” Dante muttered.

Daunted by Dante’s lack of enthusiasm for the discussion, the conversation died for a bit, but after a time, Kristen looked over at the blonde woman. “You said you were a Registered Nurse. Are you going to be part of the group that oversees our transformation?”

“No, the Institute has its own physicians for that,” Jenni replied. “I have no doubt that I’ll continue my profession once they assign us to a colony, but I am going to need reeducation for the different furman physiologies I may need to treat.”

“They’re going to have to retrain you as a veterinarian,” Dante quipped with a smirk.

“That’s probably closer to the truth than you know,” Kristen told him.

Jenni wiped a bit of salad dressing from her lips with a napkin. “We’ll still be part human,” she reminded them, “so human medical experience will be as much a necessity as furman medical knowledge.”

“So, what will be your job in the colony?” Kristen asked Dante, pushing away her finished plate. “Jenni’s a nurse, I’m a botanist, and Brian is a business administrator.”

“I’m a Dante-of-all-trades,” the man replied, looking at Barrett, “but why are we going to need a pencil pusher out on another world?” he asked.

Barrett gave him a shrewd smile. “It will be my job to keep track of troublemakers and report them back to Earth.”

Dante’s eyes grew wide. “Really?”

Barrett chuckled. “Actually, I have no idea what I will be doing for the colony,” he admitted to them all. “I would imagine they will train me in whatever skills they will think I’m suited for. I’m specialized in no talents that would be useful in taming another planet.” He ate the last bite of his meal, washed it down with some water and then sat back in his chair. “Maybe they’ll make me the Administrator of the colony and I’ll be over all of you!”

Dante choked on the last of his pasta, but when he saw the roguish look in Barrett’s eyes, he knew the other man was not serious. He grabbed his napkin and wiped his mouth while Jenni and Kristen laughed. Although they were all virtual strangers to one another, they were amused that Barrett’s melancholy mood had momentarily lifted.

Barrett glanced at his watch. “Doc Renwick said to be back by six forty-five. That gives us ten minutes to finish up and get back to the Cat House.”

“The Cat House?” Jenni asked curiously.

“He means the Felis Wing,” Kristen explained with a grin, “our new place of residence.”

The blonde woman looked at Barrett with wide eyes. “Calling it the Cat House makes it sound like a brothel!”

“I doubt I’m the first to call it that,” Barrett retorted with a lopsided smile.

“Perhaps not, but that doesn’t mean you have to,” Kristen scolded.

“Well, I’m done,” Dante announced to his housemates to interrupt the conversation. “It may have been cafeteria food, but it wasn’t bad.”

The others indicated they had all finished with their meals as well, so they stood up with their trays and sought out the refuse bins. Kristen and Jenni tried not to stare, but they were both fascinated at the sight of the Furs that occupied tables throughout the cafeteria. The common chairs with the horizontal slots in the seat backs near the bottom cushion now made sense to them, as it allowed the furman patrons to occupy a chair without having to sit on their own tails, but to let them dangle behind them.

Dante did not share Barrett’s revulsion of the Furs, especially the females. He openly gawked at a table occupied by a fennec vixen, a lynx and two canine females. They were all chatting animatedly between themselves and did not see him, but Dante’s eyes were nearly bulging when he realized that all were dressed in shorts and none of them were wearing anything more than their fur on top. The fur was thick enough that each of them was sufficiently covered up, but the human male’s imagination filled in the details without effort.

Barrett noticed him staring and grabbed the younger man by his flannel collar. It was this action that got the attention of the table of females, and it started them in a round of giggling. Dante grinned foolishly and waved at the women as Barrett pulled him toward the exit.

Once they were outside, Barrett released him with a look of long-suffering. Dante merely grinned back at him, but Kristen and Jenni were puzzled by their behavior, having not witnessed the display.

“What’s going on?” Jenni asked.

“Dante was just doing the same thing you were,” Barrett replied, leading the others back toward the Felis Wing.

“What was that?” Kristen wanted to know, exchanging looks with the other woman.

“Dante was ogling the females,” Barrett replied, “while you two were drooling over the males at another table. The only difference is that I had to drag him out.”

“We weren’t drooling!” the dark-haired botanist complained.

Barrett waggled an impish finger at them all. “There’s no use in denying it,” he said with an uncharacteristic look of mischief.

Jenni smiled back at him and shrugged her shoulders. “Well, there was a cute black bear in there,” she admitted.

Kristen turned to look at her. “You mean the one who looked like a Teddy Bear?”

“That’s the one,” Jenni said with a chuckle. “He was looking at us with wide, blank-looking eyes, as if he were a stuffed animal.”

“He probably was stuffed,” Dante suggested, “with his supper, that is!”

Barrett glanced back up at the sky as he had on the way out, but wispy clouds had begun to gather overhead and only a few stars were still peeking through.

Jenni quickened her pace so that she could walk next to the taller man. “So, what’s our place like,” she asked. “I haven’t had a chance to see it yet.”

“There’s a room for each of us,” Barrett told her. “They’re all identical, laid out like a typical hotel room. There’s a kitchen, laundry room and the Doc’s office, as well as a small exercise room, a coed restroom and a common room type saloon.”

“Coed restroom?” Dante repeated in sudden interest.

“There are separate toilet and shower stalls,” Barrett explained briefly, “but there’s no separation between men and women facilities.”

“I’m not sure I like that,” Kristen remarked.

“The director told me the place used to be an establishment for rehabilitating criminals back in the early twentieth century, so I doubt it was designed to give privacy to the inmates.”

“We’re staying in a prison?” Dante gasped.

“Hardly,” Barrett replied with a shake of his head, having had firsthand experience with the look and feel of a prison. “It reminds me more of a summer camp cabin, probably originally designed for only one gender at a time.”

The foursome approached the Felis Wing entrance and Barrett held open the door for his companions. Dante looked around and was amazed that Jenni’s heavy luggage had not been left just inside the door by that skinny orange catgirl, Sissy. When they walked up the corridor, he tapped on the long unbroken wall to their left and asked, “What’s on the other side of this?”

“That’s the restroom I was telling you about,” Barrett answered. “The door to it is just off the saloon.”

“Good, because I need to make a visit!”

“You did say there were separate stalls inside, right?” Kristen asked hopefully.

“Yes,” Barrett replied. At the end of the corridor, they discovered that the main room was empty. Since the sun had set outside, the interior lights were now on and the skylight was dark. Barrett pointed toward the restroom door and all three of his companions headed there together. There was some brief hesitation when they reached the entrance, as none of them was used to going into a restroom facility along with someone of the opposite sex. Jenni finally shrugged and went in first, followed by Dante and then a reluctant Kristen.

Barrett walked to the sunken gathering area and sat down on the soft cushions of a couch to wait. Before the others returned, the Wing’s nurse stepped out of the office door and gave him a smile.

“Welcome back,” she said, crossing the room toward him. She held a wrapped bundle in the crook of one elbow and an office binder in her other hand. “Where are the others?”

“Using the facilities,” Barrett replied.

The nurse glanced back toward the restroom entrance. “I’m surprised they were comfortable right off to use the coed facilities without an explanation,” she mused aloud.

“I think the need was greater than the embarrassment,” Barrett remarked. “I told them about the arrangement on the walk over here from the cafeteria.”

“How was your supper?”

“Filling.” Barrett glanced around and saw the combined sets of luggage belonging to his housemates. “Nurse… uh…”

“You may call me Marcy,” the older woman told him, stepping down into the central pit. “Just about everyone on the compound goes on a first-name basis.”

“Almost everyone?”

The nurse glanced back at the office door she had just come through. “Doctor Renwick prefers to go by title.”

“Ah, okay.”

“Did you have a question, Brian?”

“Yes, I don’t know if the director gave you any information about my situation, but I left rather abruptly this morning and didn’t bring any luggage like my housemates did,” he said. “Is there somewhere around here I can buy another set of clothes? All I have is what I have on.”

The nurse gave him an odd look. “I don’t know anything about your personal situation, but a friend of yours named Tom brought in your overnight bag while you were at the cafeteria.”

“My… overnight bag?” Barrett looked around and saw a nondescript black bag sitting next to the suitcases he recognized as belonging to Jenni. He walked up the steps to it and unclipped the buckle holding it closed. A small toiletry kit sat on top a bundle of garments that he could inventory later. He was not sure who was responsible, but at his first opportunity, he felt he should send a thank you to his lawyer William Harper.

“You seem puzzled,” Marcy told him, setting her office binder on the central table. “Is that the wrong bag?”

Barrett smiled up at her and shook his head. “No, it’s mine,” he replied, “but I thought it had been left behind.”

“If you need anything more, there is a Shoppette on the grounds. It’s not terribly large, but they do tend to carry more things than you might think.”

Several voices drew their attention when the other housemates emerged from the restroom. As they approached, Kristen looked at Barrett and said, “That was surreal.”

“Surreal?” asked Marcy.

“Using the toilet with a guy sitting in the next stall,” the botanist replied.

“Hey, I couldn’t help it!” Dante complained. “You would have too if you had—”

“Stop!” Barrett ordered, waving his hands back and forth in front of him. “We don’t need to know any details.” Dante looked as if he was going to continue, but then closed his mouth at the larger man’s stern look.

Once he was sure the subject was closed, Barrett turned to Jenni and then gestured to the nurse standing quietly beside them. “Jenni, this is Marcy, our attendant nurse for the duration of our stay.”

“Welcome to the Felis Wing, Jenni,” Nurse Lagrange said to the latecomer.

“Thank you, Marcy.”

“Doctor Renwick will be out in a moment to give you all the initial orientation,” the nurse told the small group. “Are there any questions you have that I may answer in the meantime?”

“Why is there only one restroom?” Kristen asked.

“That is just a matter of convenience,” said a new voice. Everyone looked up at the approaching doctor. The overhead lights glinted off highlights in his short copper hair, making the bronze of his tan look even darker than it had to Barrett earlier. His golden-brown eyes studied each of them, and then he approached the blonde woman. “Jenni Watson, I presume. I am Doctor Renwick. I will be your attendant physician.”

“Yes, doctor, I am Jenni,” she confirmed.

Satisfied that everyone was present, the doctor gestured toward the end of the room to a row of seats facing a video screen. As the group settled in, Renwick continued with his earlier explanation.

“The restroom arrangement is merely for convenience,” he said again, taking up a position in front of the dark screen. “Every class session is performed with no more than four patients per Wing at a time. With the four of you, we currently have an even number of males and females in the Felis Wing this time, but this is not always the case. It could have been any mix of gender, but this facility is not large enough for separate lavatories.”

“I understand,” Kristen said with her arms crossed, “but I don’t know that I’m comfortable without some kind of privacy.”

“Along with the physical changes of the process, you will also develop species-related behavioral adaptations. Felines are social animals that often eat and sleep together in groups and privacy is usually of little concern. Once these tendencies begin to take over, the arrangement of this Wing will be more practical.”

“What?” Barrett asked in surprise. “No one told me there would be behavioral modification along with the transformation. You are going to tamper with our heads and brainwash us?”

For a brief moment, a dark expression crossed the doctor’s features, but he recovered almost instantly and shook his head. “Please calm down. What I am referring to is a natural species adaptation, not behavioral modification. The DNA merge will give you physical characteristics of the feline of your choice in addition to retaining your human characteristics. For example, your eyes will change, grow larger to let in more light, and the irises will reconfigure for this. You will see greater detail in a dark room than you have ever seen before and your body is going to adapt to this. This is not the same as an organ transplant, where there is the possibility of a rejection of the tissue.”

“I understand that,” Barrett countered, “but you said tendencies would take over. That’s behavioral, not physical.”

“Okay,” Renwick conceded, “it was a poor choice of words. The species related tendencies will not be taking over your mind, Brian, but will be more like a natural conditioning due to your surroundings that complement the feline nature of your transformation. Whereas someone might be a loner now, later on in the process that person will discover that he or she now prefers the company of others. This is a feline attribute and was only used as an example in explaining the social arrangement of this facility. The extra tendencies you will develop are all natural. We have added nothing to the formula that will make your minds malleable for brainwashing.”

Barrett crossed his arms and continued to frown, but after thinking over the doctor’s explanation, he calmed down and finally gave the man a nod. “Okay, I think I understand now.”

“Very good,” Renwick said. Then he looked at Kristen. “Although you will be sharing the same facilities as the men, there are separate stalls for the toilets and the showers. It may be only a modicum of privacy, but once you are farther along in your transformation, I doubt even that will be much of a concern to you.”

Kristen looked over at Dante and Barrett collectively and leveled a finger at them. “No peeking!” she told them seriously. The doctor’s explanation had not really appeased her; Kristen did not consider herself a prude, but she was self-conscious about her size and weight, and was concerned for her privacy over that matter more than anything else was.

Dante merely grinned back at her statement, but Barrett made an obvious show of placing a hand over his eyes. Jenni snickered at them all. She was confident enough with her own appearance that she had not found the coed restroom to be anything of significance.

Renwick smoothed out the front of his smock and then put his hands behind his back. “If you will indulge me, please let me begin fresh,” he said to his audience. “I am Doctor Donald Renwick, and this is Nurse Marcy Lagrange. Welcome to the Felis Wing, your home for the next nine months.” He gestured to each of his charges. “Kristen Eisenberg, Brian Barrett, Dante Capanari, and Jenni Watson.” Barrett winced at the use of his full name. It had been plastered all over the national news in recent days and he had no assumptions that those around him would have forgotten it.

The doctor continued without a pause. “Each one of you has volunteered to join the Anthro Human Colonization Program and you have chosen to have the DNA of a feline race merged with your own through the McEwen Process. You have already had legal guidance prior to signing your contracts, but there is an escape clause in the event you decide not to go through with it. The four of you will be living together here in this Wing several days for orientation and comprehensive physical examinations before the actual process begins. You will have the next three days to consider your reasons for doing this, and then you will make your final decision to go through with it or return to your old lives. Once initiated, the process is irreversible, so once you sign that final document, you are bound to the furman lifestyle for the rest of your lives.”

Barrett had trouble swallowing. Despite the easy banter with his housemates earlier that had put him somewhat at ease, the doctor’s speech brought back everything to the forefront. He had received no legal counsel other than the final conversation with his lawyer where he had practically begged him to be allowed to join the AHCP to save his skin. He had signed no legal documents beforehand and there was no ‘escape clause’ that he could claim. He was just as trapped as he had been while in prison.

Dante held up a tentative hand. “I have no intention of backing out,” he said, “but have you ever had anyone take the escape clause?”

“Yes,” Renwick admitted, “but the benefits of becoming a Fur usually outweighs most fears about the process. There have been those who opt out, but this has not happened in the Felis Wing in years.” Barrett wondered what those benefits might be, but instead of asking, he kept his mouth shut. The doctor gestured to his nurse and then took a step back against the video screen.

“As you know,” Marcy began with a smile, holding her wrapped bundle up against her chest with both arms, “your bodies will be slowly changing configuration over the next nine months. Typical human clothing is going to become restrictive and uncomfortable to you rather fast, so until the process is complete, you will all start wearing a different style of garment.”

She unfolded the first item in her hands and then held up one of the garments that the newcomers had seen some of the Furs in the cafeteria wear. It was a lightweight, Asian-style robe with short sleeves and a hem that would hang to a person’s knees. There was a split in the back that they all knew was for a furman’s tail, and a matching belt sash to keep the garment closed. There was a deep pocket on each side, but instead of set perpendicular to the ground, they were each at a forty-five-degree angle toward the back. The beige material looked like it might be made of lightweight cotton. She transferred the robe to one hand, and then held up a smaller cloth item in her other hand. It was a pair of matching shorts with wide legs and an adjustable strap over an opening in the back of the waistband to close across the base of a tail.

“We have these in a number of colors and patterns, as well as sizes to fit you all at your current sizes and that which you will become,” Marcy continued, transferring the shorts to her other hand. She held up the remaining item and said, “For those who don’t want to wear the robes in warmer weather, there is a simple pocketed vest available to wear with the shorts. Now, I don’t have any with me at the moment, but your feet will also undergo changes and we have specially designed sandals to fit the various feet types you all will develop. The robes and vests are similar to the hospital scrubs that I am wearing, but the cloth is a loose, open weave so that your fur won’t feel so stuffy beneath it.”

“Why wear clothing over fur?” Dante asked. “We saw several Furs in the cafeteria that weren’t wearing anything but shorts. I assume the shorts were for modesty, but otherwise wouldn’t fur be sufficient to cover them up completely?”

The nurse smiled with a nod. “That’s a very good question, but the Furs you saw were fully formed. Although the development of fur all over your bodies will be one of the first changes you will experience, it will be months before it is thick enough to be much cover for you. Even then you will need to wear the shorts, no matter how long or thick your fur will be.”

“Why?” asked Kristen.

Marcy smiled. “Primarily for hygienic reasons. Even if your genital region is sufficiently covered over by fur, there’s still enough, uh, residue that can get on public seats where others may also sit.”

“Leaving skid-marks!” Dante exclaimed with a sudden smirk.

Marcy chuckled. “In a manner of speaking, that is essentially correct,” she replied.

“Will we have underwear on beneath them?” Kristen asked.

“Only until your fur comes in. After that, you will find the material of undergarments too thick and confining and likely wear only the outer garments.”

Dante grinned widely. “That means your outer wear will also be your underwear! Change out your shorts daily, boys and girls!”

Kristen looked affronted at his statement, but Marcy continued as if she had not heard him. “However,” she said, “no matter which items you choose to wear, most Furs agree that in the transitional stage, you will feel better about yourself by having some kind of garment covering you.”

“Why’s that?” Dante asked.

Barrett leaned over and gave the man a smirk. “During that transitional stage, your whole body is going to be ugly for a while.”

Kristen put her hands up her mouth and Jenni blinked in sudden surprise. This was something neither of them had considered. Nurse Lagrange looked taken aback at the man’s frank comment, but she took a few steps toward the group and cleared her throat.

“I would not have described it so eloquently, Brian, but that is essentially correct. There’s nothing you can do about the way you look at certain times, but just like puberty, it’s something you will get through just fine.”

Chapter 10

Secret Identity

Doctor Renwick produced a remote from a pocket of his medical smock and thumbed one of its buttons. The video screen behind him came to life with a sharp aerial image of the Furmankind Institute complex. Surrounded by a healthy forest preserve in the Adirondack Mountains, it was some distance away from the nearest town, secluded even from the nearest state highway. There was only one paved road into the region to the Institute, where it ended at a gravel parking lot in front of tall iron gates that connected a similar fencing completely around several hundred acres. The original complex of stone structures was the centerpiece of the compound that now housed numerous buildings built in secret away from public scrutiny.

As the images focused on different areas of the complex, the doctor explained that although the grounds were surrounded by a tall iron fence, there was plenty of room so that when animal instincts began to surface, the patients would be allowed to roam the region as desired.

When one of the images showed the compound covered in a blanket of snow from a past winter, Dante held up a hand to interrupt the doctor.

“Yes?”

The dark-haired man first gestured toward the paused image on the screen, and then he did the same toward Nurse Lagrange standing to the side with the furman garments still draped across her arms. “Are those the only clothes we’re going to have to wear around here while we wait for our fur to grow thick enough for insulation?” he asked. “It’s almost November and the night air is getting chilly out there already.”

“How do you feel at the moment?” Renwick responded with a question of his own.

Dante shrugged his shoulders. “In here, I’m fine,” he replied, “but on our way back from the cafeteria, I got a little chill.”

“In answer to your question, you will be spending most of your time indoors when winter comes,” Renwick explained patiently. “This Wing is well insulated so that your common furman robes will be sufficient as long as you are in here.”

“What about when we go to the cafeteria to eat?” Kristen asked, raising a hand.

“That won’t be necessary,” Marcy Lagrange answered for her. “The pantries in our kitchen here will be well-stocked by that time and we will be able to prepare our meals here.”

“Who’s doing the cooking?” Dante wanted to know.

“We all will,” Marcy replied. “Once the weather turns bad, we will have a rotation of kitchen duties, myself and Doctor Renwick included.”

“All of us?” Dante asked, looking surprised. “I don’t mind helping when I’m needed, but I didn’t want to be assigned to do it all.”

Marcy smiled. “All of us. After the process begins, we don’t intend for you to simply wait around for the changes to take place, so to help pass that time, you will all begin your studies into the various career fields you will follow into your colony settlement. A cooking rotation will be required in the colony, so you will be getting used to it now. However, with the six of us living here together, we will all maintain cleanup duties for the Wing as well.”

“When I was looking around earlier,” Barrett interrupted, “I only saw four bedrooms. If you and Doctor Renwick are living here too, where do you sleep?”

“Marcy and I have our own apartments through the lab into another set of rooms set up just for us,” Renwick answered. “Although separated from the four of you, we are still living in the same Wing together, so therefore we will share some of the duties with you.”

“That seems fair,” Jenni remarked with a nod.

“In answer to Kristen and Dante’s questions,” Marcy continued, “if there is a need for you to go out onto the grounds when the weather gets colder, we do have thick Turkish robes you can wear, but they were not made with Fur physiologies in mind. Since your feet will be in transition by this winter, there are no perfected winter boots available either. All your needs will be provided for you right here, so you will have little reason to leave the Wing during the winter.”

“In other words, we’ll be confined within these walls,” Barrett remarked, visualizing bars over the skylight and doors. “I hope you have medication to prevent cabin fever.”

“Between dealing with the transformation effects, housekeeping and your studies, there should be plenty to keep you occupied, Brian,” Marcy told him. “You will have periods to do with as you wish, but for the most part, your primary purpose will be to prepare yourself for colony settlement on an untamed alien world.”

“They don’t have snow on other worlds?” Dante asked sarcastically. “How are we going to prepare for harsh weather like that if we avoid it here?”

“You are going to be at the Institute for the greater part of two years,” Renwick explained, ignoring the younger man’s tone. “Your bodies won’t have changed enough to endure this year’s Adirondack winter on their own, but enough transformation will have taken place where human winter garments won’t work on you anymore. Sit out the cold weather this season, and then you will get your correct weather training next year when you will be fully capable of dealing with it. Species-specific furman garments for the winter are available, but only for those finished with the transition.”

Kristen held up a hand.

“Yes?” the doctor responded.

“I drove up here from Philadelphia in my car. It’s just outside the gate in the parking lot, but I was wondering… During our two-year stay here, will we be getting any vacation time to go visit family and friends?”

“No, Kristen, I am afraid not,” was the reply. “During your transition, your bodies will not be in any condition to drive a car, and by the time you have completed the transformation, your new bodies will be unsuited to the controls of vehicles designed for human hands and feet.”

“What am I supposed to do about my car then?” the botanist asked.

“If you decide to go through with the contract, you will need to arrange for a friend or family member to come up to get your car and take it back for you. What you do with the car will be up to you, whether you wish to sell it or let someone you know have it, but you will be physically unable to drive it anymore once we begin.”

Kristen crossed her arms and pushed out her lower lip. “It’s a restored classic Oberon and I only bought it last year,” she complained. “I like my car…”

“You’re cute when you pout,” Dante whispered with a grin, scooting closer to her.

The plump woman raised an eyebrow and moved away from him as far as her seat would allow. She bumped against Jenni on her other side and then hunkered down in her chair with her arms crossed, the bottom lip still protruding.

“I like my car…” she repeated in a small voice.

“Doctor Renwick,” Dante asked when the conversation waned, “may I ask you a question about the McEwen process you use here?”

“Certainly. What is it you wish to know?”

“If you had two individuals who happened to choose the same animal… a tiger, for example, would you be using genetic material from the same donor for both people?”

“That is a possibility,” the doctor replied with a nod, “but we have multiple donors for each species we offer to keep a relatively fresh bloodline between our volunteers.”

“Using the same example,” Barrett said with sudden interest, “what would happen if you used the same DNA for both volunteers? Would they look like twins afterward, having the same face and same fur patterns?”

Renwick actually smiled. “No, the similarities would only be species-specific,” he replied. “The animal DNA is only part of the equation. The differences in each human’s DNA will continue to make each Fur unique in his or her own way. For example, both you and Dante are human, but aside of your commonalities due to being human, you two look nothing alike. The same would be true if both of you decided on being half tiger, even using genetic material from the same tiger donor.”

Barrett felt an internal sense of relief at this explanation. He had almost been certain that after the transformation that he would look into a mirror and have Henry Parker’s exact face looking back at him if they used his original donor material on him.

“Doctor Renwick, will there be a lot of pain involved in the change?” Kristen asked hesitantly. “I’ve only heard rumors and the material we were given didn’t cover that, but I have to assume there will be some.”

The physician turned off the screen with his remote and then put both hands into the pockets of his smock. The look on his face confirmed the botanist’s words before he spoke. “Yes, I’m sorry to say that you will have to endure a bit of pain to go through the transformation,” he answered quietly. “If you were only going to grow claws and fur, you wouldn’t have much to be concerned about, but when your body goes through these kinds of changes, everything from muscle tissue, blood vessels and even bone material will reform to the hybrid design. That is not going to happen overnight, but you will not feel all the changes. Most of it will be mild discomfort, but I’m afraid that some of it will be painful.”

“We are authorized to dispense some pain reducers to ease the worst of it,” Marcy added, “but standard painkillers actually interfere with the McEwen process. The meds we use were specifically engineered for our use, but they are not terribly strong. All they can do is lessen the pain to make it more tolerable.”

“I knew there was torture involved,” Barrett grumbled beneath his breath. The doctor looked at him with a brief look of irritation.

“This is one of the reasons you are given a last opportunity to enact the escape clause before the process begins,” Renwick told them. “Each of you must consider what you will go through in order to make the transformation. The prize money will be rewarded only to those who fulfill their contracts.”

Prize money? This was the first that Barrett had heard of such a thing. He opened his mouth to inquire, but then closed it again when he realized that each volunteer who had signed a contract must already know of this reward. This was something he would have to ask the director in private or he might tip his hand to the others about his true identity. None of them had reacted to his real name when Renwick had named each of them aloud, so his secret appeared to be safe from his housemates for the time being. If at all possible, he wanted to keep it that way.

“Is the pain of transformation worth it to you?” Renwick continued. “You already know that by volunteering, you have decided to leave Earth to take part in the adventure of taming a new world so that others may one day emigrate there. It is possible that you may never set foot upon the Earth again in your lifetime, and the remainder of that lifetime will be spent as furmankind. If you agree to sign the final document without claiming the escape, life as you know it will change forever. You must be sure.”

“That sounds like you are trying to scare us away, Doctor,” Dante mused aloud.

“If you can be scared away,” Jenni interrupted, “then you never had what it takes to be an explorer.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” the dark-haired man agreed without hesitation, “but I am an explorer. I have been a caver for most of my adult life and have explored places underground that very few humans have ever been. I don’t intend to escape. I’ll sign that last document right now.”

Renwick shook his head, but gave him a crooked smile. “Dante, you may be eager to finalize it now, but you must wait with the rest of your housemates before that option is available to you. This is a permanent change, so give it some thought. We’ve had some who believed all this would be nothing more than an exotic vacation, so we want everyone to be absolutely sure you know what you’re getting into.”

Although Kristen had been confident about her decision before, she now looked uncertain. Despite this, she did not add any further comments. On the other hand, Brian Barrett’s mental capacity for rational thought was growing numb. He did not want to be a Fur. He was not there voluntarily, he had not signed a contract, and he knew nothing of a prize reward for becoming some abomination of nature. What made it worse was the knowledge that even if he did have an escape clause and took it, they would certainly send him back to prison to face his original executioner.

The only other alternative was to make an escape clause of his own doing. He briefly considered trying to escape the Institute sometime in the night during the three days they had to make up their minds before signing, but if he did that, Barrett knew he would be on the run for the rest of his life, and it was likely to be a short lifespan at that. As far as the public was concerned, he had been executed in Colorado that morning, so if he went on the run, the authorities could shoot him on sight without bothering to take him in alive.

No, he thought to himself angrily in final realization, If I want to live, it’s going to have to be as a cursed Fur!

Barrett had to work hard to quell the sudden anger that had risen within him. The others continued the conversation in quiet voices, and by the time he had control over himself, he looked up at Doctor Renwick with a calm expression.

“You said the process was irreversible, yes?” he asked.

“That’s right. Once human DNA has been combined with animal DNA, the longer strand of new genetic code cannot be separated,” Renwick replied.

“Once the process begins, there’s no turning back,” Dante remarked.

“Have you ever tried to reverse it?” Barrett asked.

“Tried and failed,” the doctor replied without hesitation.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Barrett said, “but wasn’t Professor McEwen’s discovery originally intended as a cure for cancer? It theoretically works by repairing each cell’s genetic code, overwriting all cells in the body with the code from an undamaged cell.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“What if the process was used on a Fur, using the genetic code from a cell collected from that person before he became a Fur in the first place?” Barrett asked. “Wouldn’t the new code overwrite the mixed code and return it to its original pattern?”

Doctor Renwick shook his head. “That was the theory and that very thing was attempted about three years ago on a Canis Fur at the Buenos Aires Institute who willingly volunteered to be the test subject.”

“What happened?” Jenni asked, leaning forward to rest her arms on her knees.

“The process went well for the first four months, but then traces of goetazine still in her cellular system from the previous transformation reacted against the new infusion of coded goetazine. It became a fierce battle on the genetic level over which code would be dominant. The internal stresses became too much and she did not survive the chemical imbalance.” Renwick paused and looked down at his shoes for a moment. “I didn’t know her personally,” he added in a quieter voice, “but I understand she had a brilliant mind and a pleasant personality. It was a devastating loss. It has not been tried since.”

Barrett sat stricken in his seat. He had not really expected to hear of such a loss and it only reinforced his belief that he would lose his mind along with his humanity. He tried not to let it show, but he was more afraid of the transformation now than he had been before.

The room fell quiet for several moments before Doctor Renwick shook his head as if to rid his thoughts of cobwebs. He removed his hands from the pockets of his medical smock and then gestured toward the other end of the room.

“There are four bedrooms down there for you,” he said in a stronger voice. “All of them are identical to one another, with the same furnishings and layout. You may decide between yourselves so that each of you may claim a room as your own. This Wing will be your home for the next nine months, so feel free to personalize it as you wish. Due to potential medical emergencies arising from the transformation, none of the doors have locks, but you may close them as needed for privacy.

The doctor gestured toward the large video screen behind him. “On local channel one-seventy-six, you will find a continually running program that documents the transformation process from start to finish, should you wish to watch it before signing the contract. I will warn you that it can get graphic in places, but you may watch it at your discretion.”

“There you go, trying to scare us away again,” murmured Dante.

Marcy refolded the furman garment in her arms and said, “There is a folder on the central table over there that contains information and images for each of the feline species that we have available for you to choose between. If you have not already chosen your intended form, perhaps the material will help you decide. The images show the original genetic donor animals, as well as pictures of past volunteers who have chosen those forms. This will give you an idea what you may look like when the change is complete. For those who elect to go through with it and sign the final contract, you will need to have chosen your feline by then so the proper formula can be prepared for you.”

Renwick looked at his techwatch. “It’s getting late, but as with the cafeteria, the very nature of furmankind volunteers prevents us from setting a curfew. You are free to set your own hours and stay up as late as you wish for now, but once the process begins, we will try to maintain a regular schedule for your evaluations and training to maintain a sense of normalcy.” He took the video remote from his pocket and set it on one of the bookshelves near the screen. “We have all channels available here, local and national, which are also available on the screens in each of your rooms. We have book readers you may use, as well as online courses for your study. Marcy and I have already put in a long day preparing for your arrival, so we will bid you good night and retire to our own rooms.”

Marcy gave them all a pleasant smile as Doctor Renwick headed off toward the lab doors. “Although you still have several days to make your decisions,” the nurse told them, “we will begin with physical examinations tomorrow. Until you are called or needed for these, we suggest that the four of you take the time to get to know one another. Do not be strangers to your housemates. Good night, everyone.”

“Good night, Marcy,” Jenni said.

“Nite-nite,” added Kristen. Dante gave the nurse a little wave, and Barrett simply nodded toward her before she turned to go.

Once Marcy had disappeared through the lab doors, Dante stood up and stretched his arms. He sauntered over to the central pit to stand beside his small suitcase. He saw a newspaper sitting on the round table and hopped down the steps to retrieve it. The others quietly walked over to the pit, each one moving toward their belongings.

“So, how do we go about choosing our rooms?” Dante asked, giving both of the females a slow once-over that he did not bother to conceal from them. Kristen frowned and crossed her arms across her chest.

“Why don’t we let the ladies choose first,” Barrett suggested. Although he might be against the program itself, they were all still human and he could be courteous when he chose to be.

“Okay, good idea,” Dante agreed. “Take your pick, girls!”

Jenni and Kristen exchanged glances and then the botanist gave the blonde a casual gesture. “Go ahead,” Kristen told her.

Jenni walked over to one room at random and went inside to see what it looked like. She browsed around casually, quickly coming to the same conclusions that Barrett had about the likeness to a hotel room. She walked into another room and saw that it was identical. Since there were no differences inside to help with a decision, she simply stopped beside the left middle door.

“This one,” she announced.

“You’re next,” Dante said with a grin at Kristen.

Although she had gotten along around him all right for the past hour, the botanist suddenly felt his oily gaze upon her again. “You go ahead and choose,” she told Dante quietly.

The younger man shrugged and simply pointed toward the room to the left of where Jenni stood. “I’ll take one on the end closest to the kitchen,” he said. “That will make it convenient when a late-night snack attack hits me!”

Kristen looked back at Barrett, who only stared back at her impassively. “Okay, then,” she said quietly, “I’ll take the one on the other end.”

Barrett did not have to be a detective to deduce that she had purposely chosen the room farthest from Dante. “That leaves me with the other middle room,” he remarked calmly.

“Boy, girl, boy, girl,” Dante chuckled. “Maybe I should have picked that one. You’re going to be sandwiched between two women!” He tucked the newspaper beneath an arm and then grabbed the handle of his suitcase with a self-satisfied grin, oblivious to Kristen’s scowl at his remark. “I’m going to unpack!” He hefted it up and then headed toward his quarters.

Kristen walked down into the pit to retrieve her travel bags; Barrett picked up his satchel and the black bag that Tom had brought over for him. The two of them wandered over to their rooms, passing Jenni on the way back to get her own.

Inside his room, Barrett tossed the satchel up against a pillow and then set the overnight bag on the foot of the bed. He unbuckled its clasp, pulled out the toiletry kit and opened it. Inside were a couple of cheap bladed razors, a bottle of after-shave lotion, a can of shaving cream, a comb, a bar of unscented soap, deodorant, mint toothpaste and a toothbrush. It was just the basics, but he frowned when he realized there was no shampoo or conditioner in the bag. He might have to visit the Shoppette that Marcy had mentioned to get some. He gathered up everything, put them on the dresser in front of the mirror, and then turned back to the overnight bag.

He pulled out the small stack of clothing and set them out onto the tan bedspread. All in his sizes, he found another pair of denim blue jeans, a pair of navy blue athletic shorts, two white undershirts, and two button-up shirts, one a dark blue shirt with long sleeves and the other burgundy with short sleeves. He had been given an unopened package of boxer shorts and a package of white socks. Also included was a grey sweatshirt with a matching pair of sweatpants. Again, it was all just the basics, but it was more than he had owned earlier that morning.

He had just put everything away inside the dresser when there was a quiet knock on the frame of his open door. He looked up and saw Jenni standing there, an apologetic expression on her face.

“Hi,” he said, closing a drawer.

“Could you help me with my luggage again,” she asked. “Please?”

“Sure,” the man replied with a smile.

“It looks like one of the wheels on the big suitcase has broken, and I’m afraid the bag is too heavy for me to drag across this carpet to my room.”

Barrett followed her out to the remaining suitcase by the pit, and Kristen came out of her room, watching idly from her doorway. He grabbed the handle of the case and hefted it up off the floor. It was weighty, but he managed to maneuver it back to the blonde woman’s room without too much difficulty. It was no heavier than some of the weights he often worked out with in his exercises.

Before he got the bag inside her door, however, Dante walked out of his room, his nose buried in the newspaper he had picked up. He looked up with an odd expression on his face and Jenni saw him swallow hard. Barrett looked over at him just as he reached the door and stopped to set down the case.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Uhm, you said your name was Brian, right?” he asked the red-haired man. He licked his lips nervously and Barrett was suddenly reminded of his lawyer, William Harper.

“That’s right.”

“Brian… Barrett? Isn’t that what Doctor Renwick called you?”

The older man frowned, a chill tickling the small hairs on the back of his neck. “Yes,” he replied, “but remember, my name will change sometime in the next few days.”

Dante looked first to Jenni, then at Kristen behind her, and then back to the newspaper in his hands. “I think I just found out the reason why you chose to take on a new identity,” he said quietly. At Barrett’s look of disbelief, Dante held up the newspaper so they could all see the headlines. Large text reported a major earthquake that had devastated a portion of central Japan, but it was a secondary column header he indicated with a finger.

The words, “Convicted Furman Killer to Die Today” were accompanied by a color photograph of the murderer. To the women standing near him, there was no mistaking the photo to be anyone but the person standing in their midst.

Jenni grabbed the paper and began reading the article aloud. “Brian D. Barrett, the convicted killer of furman Henry Parker is set to die today at two o’clock, Mountain Standard Time. Due to furmanitarian laws to protect the genetically altered citizens known as furman, or Furs, Barrett’s sentencing for the death of a Fur is to be carried out as Death By a Fur. In a solitary room beneath the foundation of the Corwin Prison in eastern Colorado, Barrett will face his execution at the hands of Ross Forrester, an unstable Ursis furman rejected by the Anthro Human Colonization Program due to a bloodthirsty history of violence.”

She looked up over the paper at the man helping her with her luggage, her face pale and her eyes wide.

“That… that’s you?” Kristen asked in shock, slowly backing into her room to put distance away from him.

Barrett sighed, but nodded at the newspaper. “Yes, that’s me,” he admitted.

Dante snatched the paper back from Jenni and held it up as if it were a barrier between them. “It says here that you are to be executed at the hands of a Fur because you killed a Fur!” Dante repeated hoarsely. “Are they going to do the execution here? Tonight?”

“No,” Barrett replied in a voice that was calmer than the adrenaline that was currently coursing through his body. “I was offered furmankind transformation in exchange for a violent death penalty. I was told that the official record of the execution taking place would be for the benefit of the families of the victims.”

“Victims!” Jenni cried, stressing the plural as she backed away. “Just how many people did you kill?”

“I killed a stray tomcat for sleeping with my fiancé,” Barrett answered with a growl. “The other victim they mentioned is probably Rebecca Collins, my ex. I did not harm her, but she did lose her pet.”

“Her… pet…” Dante repeated, his throat going dry.

“I was sentenced to die for my crime of passion,” Barrett continued, “but I was given two choices for my method of execution. For killing a Fur, I could die under the claws of a Fur — or I could die by becoming a Fur.”

“No one’s ever died by becoming a Fur,” Kristen’s voice called from her room. “I did a lot of research into the process before I decided to sign up for the program. They have a good record!”

Barrett fought to control his anger. “I will cease to be ME at the moment they inject me with that cursed formula. It will be same as dying.”

“H-how?” Jenni asked, suddenly remembering in fear that the doctor had mentioned that their rooms had no locks on their doors.

“My new death sentence is to become the same kind of Fur as the one I killed and spend the rest of my life as a living reminder of what I did,” Barrett said in a calmer voice. He leaned back against the wall and rubbed his eyes. “When I’ve been turned into a mountain lion and trained with some new tricks, I’m to be banished from the Earth to an untamed world that will probably try to kill me anyway.”

“You… killed… a Fur, so they sent you to the very place that has the highest population of them in this country!” Dante croaked. “We’re about to become Furs also — are you going to try to kill us too?”

Barrett looked over at him wearily. “Dante… I never hated Furs until I caught one of them rutting with the woman I was about to marry. That is when I realized he was an abomination of creation… Like most people, I only thought of furmen as a curiosity, having never seen one in person. In hindsight, I suppose I should have just let the cat have her, if she was going to throw me over to shack up with an animal. What she did was nothing more than bestiality!” He looked around and saw that each of his housemates was practically cowering in their doorways.

“You guys can relax,” he told them after an audible sigh. “I promised my lawyer that I would behave and become a good little furman if they spared my life.”

“Why would they even offer you such a deal?” Kristen asked. “You might be tempted to kill more Furs if someone else makes you mad!”

“I think that sadistic judge wanted to torture me. If I died at the hands of a mad Fur, it would have been violent, but I would not have suffered long. Being forced through the painful torment of the transformation process, the judge is seeing to it that I suffer over a long period of time before I die on some desolate planet out in space!”

“Do Renwick and Marcy know about this?” Dante asked, trying to reclaim some kind of emotional stability. He had never been in the presence of a killer before.

“Aside from the three of you — who should have never found out — the director is the only one on the grounds who knows my background.” He walked over, pulled the newspaper from Dante’s grasp and folded it neatly beneath an arm. “This was a souvenir given to me as a reminder of the violent death I almost met this morning. I see now that it was a mistake to keep it.”

“How could you kill someone?” Jenni asked in a quiet voice. “Were you an assassin in the military?”

Barrett shook his head. “I was never in the military, but I grew up as a hunter in a family of hunters. I have only killed animals and birds.”

“And one furman,” Kristen’s voice added.

Barrett looked at Jenni for a moment, and then at Dante. “Have any of you been married or engaged?” None of them responded. “In love? Honestly — in love?” Jenni started to nod, but then changed her mind and averted her eyes. There was a murmured sound from Kristen’s room, but no real response. “Rebecca was the only woman I ever truly loved. I felt differently about her than I ever have toward anyone else in my life and I fell hard for her, head over heels in love. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she resembled a popular pin-up girl from the last century; most people wouldn’t have recognized her as such, but I’d known about that particular icon. We dated three years before I worked up the nerve to propose, but she didn’t hesitate to accept. Both of us being romantics, we set Valentine’s Day as our wedding date and we were both deeply involved in the planning for it.”

Barrett leaned back against the wall again and rubbed a hand across his face. “She told me that she was just as much in love with me as I was with her – and I believed her. Then one day, I got off work early to surprise her with a pre-wedding gift I’d picked up for her. I let myself into her condominium with my key as I had many times before, but then I heard noises coming from the bedroom. She and this… this… mountain lion were all over the same bed that we had shared.”

“You mean, they were — ?”

“Yes — they were,” Barrett replied gruffly. “Quite passionately.”

“Is that when you killed him?” Dante asked in a whisper.

“No, they never even knew I was there, so I ran away,” Barrett confessed. “When I saw her later, she acted as if I was still the most important person in her world. I pretended that I had not witnessed her little rendezvous, but she could tell my reactions to her were cooler than usual. I played along for a while, pretending to myself that I must have just dreamed what I saw, until I actually convinced myself that she was faithful and I had been mistaken.”

“How could you mistake being a witness to infidelity?” Jenni asked, suddenly feeling anger herself.

“I was in denial,” Barrett replied. “I had never met a Fur in person before, so I had no experience in what kind of draw this guy might have had to her. Perhaps she did not consider bedding a Fur as cheating on me. I don’t know, but I walked in on them again about a month later – at the very place and time I was supposed to meet with her to go shopping for wedding invitations. I guess she thought the two of them could finish before I got there, but I have always prided myself on being prompt to my schedule. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since the place stunk of cat and I would have known he was there. I refused to turn a blind eye this time and confronted them openly.”

“Is that when you killed him?” Dante asked again.

“No, but I did slug him hard,” Barrett replied, holding up his right fist. “The solid reality of my knuckles on his jaw convinced me that it had been no dream nor hallucination. I grabbed Rebecca’s hand and held it up so the mountain lion could see my diamond engagement ring on her finger, telling him that she was marked as mine, and that I would fight to protect my fiancé from his bewitching black magic. He backed down without a fight and left with his clothes in his arms, but when I let go of Rebecca’s hand, she stripped off the ring and shoved it into my hand without a word. She stormed off after him in a robe, leaving me alone in her living room.”

Barrett forced himself to relax his fist, dropping it to his side. “I tried to call her the next day, but she wouldn’t talk to me. Instead, she told all our friends and relatives that she had discovered how unreasonable I was, that I had a violent temper, and she was calling off the wedding.” He looked over at Dante and raised his fist again. “I have never struck another person in my life that wasn’t related to a sporting event, and I had only hit this guy once. When I get angry, I get quiet. I don’t throw tantrums, I don’t attack other people and I don’t throw objects. She knew me long enough to know this, yet she called me unreasonable and violent. What’s worse is that all our mutual friends who should have known me well enough believed her. Naturally, she never mentioned her furry lover.”

Barrett began pacing along the wall with nervous energy. “The betrayal felt like she had skinned me alive and poured rubbing alcohol over raw nerves. I tried to get her to talk to me, but she would have nothing more to do with me. This was the woman who had stolen my heart, the one I had intended to spend the rest of my life with… Till death do us part.”

“And that’s when you killed him?” Dante asked.

“No,” Barrett replied irritably. “I entreated our friends to listen to me, but everyone shut me out. Even my own family wouldn’t listen to my side of the story. Rebecca Collins was everybody’s dark-haired angel and I became a pariah.”

“So what happened?” Jenni asked quietly.

“I moped around, got moody and I let myself go. Nobody wanted to be around me after Rebecca poisoned their minds against me, and they really didn’t want to be around me once I stopped taking care of myself.” Barrett stopped pacing for a moment and looked back at Kristen, who was now peering at him from the doorway of her room. “Because of this I eventually lost my well-paying job, and then one of my so-called friends came around and tried to get me to move on. He wanted me to go out with some girls he knew to get Rebecca off my mind, but by then I was soured on relationships and had no desire for companionship. However, he finally convinced me to get out of the house on New Year’s Eve. He said a group of our old friends were going to gather at the downtown outside celebration that is held in our town every year, and we could all get drunk together.”

Barrett looked at Jenni and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not a drinker,” he said. “I’ve never gotten past the initial taste of alcohol, but I agreed to go only because I was lonely and needed something else to think about. I volunteered to be the designated driver and went along. Before we arrived, however, my friend confessed that Rebecca was going to be there with a new friend of hers, some Fur she had met that she wanted to show off to everyone. He thought I would find amusement in it, but I reminded him that I had tried to tell everyone about her pet Fur months ago. He tried to wave it off as if I had made it all up, but when I told him what I thought of his idea and turned the car around, I drove back home with him yelling at me all the way. Back at my place, my friend cursed me out and then drove off to join the others.”

“You went back on your own, didn’t you?” Jenni asked, biting her bottom lip.

“With a gun,” Barrett admitted in a low voice. He looked over at the dark-haired man and then nodded. “That is when I killed him, Dante. Like a hunter, I stalked him through the crowd until I saw them together. I didn’t put two bullets into him because he was a Fur — I did it because he stole my mate and destroyed my life!”

“If you didn’t kill him because he was a Fur,” Kristen remarked, tentatively stepping out of her room, “why are you so adamantly against them now?”

He looked back at her darkly. “During the months of seething when everyone was avoiding me, I began studying declassified reports on how Professor McEwen’s original formula for treating cancer was perverted into a deadly process for torturing condemned criminals. It was all done in secret, you know. They knew what they were doing was wrong or they would not have experimented on lost souls out of the public’s eye… Not unlike what’s being done here in this out-of-the way location, I might add.”

“Brian, the Furs are now all volunteers,” Jenni told him. “The formula is perfected and there is a purpose for furmankind. Earth is overcrowded and other habitable worlds are needed to ease the strain. There are only benefits now.”

“The McEwen process was meant to be a cure for cancer victims,” he replied with a scowl. “That was a perfected formula, and that was a worthwhile endeavor that benefited mankind. There was no need to go any further with it beyond its medical purpose. It took someone else’s warped mind to think of using it to experiment on people and animals together. Although those initial test subjects were men who were going to die anyway, experimenting on them was inhuman! They robbed men of their souls and cursed them to a life without humanity. They became neither man nor animal, but some abomination stuck somewhere in between. Now they give you a song and dance to reel you in, promising some prize reward and the chance to explore new worlds in exchange for reducing the world of its human population a little at a time.”

“If you’re so against it, why don’t you take the escape clause the doctor was telling us about?” Dante asked in a huff. “Just get out and leave us to our own dreams!”

Barrett raised his arms in exasperation. “I don’t have an escape clause, you idiot! I’m just another condemned prisoner for them to experiment on just like in the early days. I didn’t sign any legal documents and I don’t have some prize awaiting me! This is a life-sentence. I don’t have a choice. You three do – escape while you can and keep your humanity! This is my future. It doesn’t have to be yours.”

Stinging from being called an idiot, Dante crossed his arms and gave Barrett a sneer. “You know, you are going to be awfully lonely for the rest of your life.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“If what you say is true, you don’t have a choice. You are going to become a Fur and then you will be shipped from the Earth. No matter where you go from now on, your only companions will be other Furs. If you hang onto your hatred even while you’re surrounded by them, no one is going to have anything to do with you. Although feline, you’ll be the equivalent of a lone wolf. Lone wolves don’t have a high survival rate!”

Barrett gifted Dante with a hard glare, but when the other man did not back down, he simply lifted a hand and gestured casually in the air. “You’re probably right,” he said in a calmer voice. “I don’t want to be here, but I have no choice. It’s not your fault what life has dumped on me, but what you do with your own lives is your choice.”

He rubbed his eyes again and looked at each of the women in turn. “Yes, I jumped at the chance to save my skin by accepting the transformation in place of being torn limb from limb by a mad Fur in the basement of the prison. Soon I will have a new identity, and when the transformation begins, the last remnants of Brian D. Barrett will have been swept away. Whoever or whatever I become will be the new me, and if there’s anything left of my mind by the time we get to a new world, I will have to do my best to forget this old life. At the end of a conversation much like this one, I promised the director that I would behave. I’m sorry you had to find out who I really am, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. I will give you all the same promise if you can promise me in return to give me a chance. I am not a violent person. What I did was done in the heat of the moment and I will be paying for it the rest of my life.”

When none of his companions ventured forth a reply, Barrett nodded in resignation and then quietly walked back to his room, leaving Jenni’s suitcase where he had stopped with it. He shut the door behind him and then cleared the last of his meager belongings from the bed. A small trash can beside the desk became the recipient of his souvenir newspaper and then he sat down on the edge of his bed. The mattress was firm, though felt as if it might have a pillow-top layer. He was tempted to shut out the light and go on to bed, but although he was tired, he did not feel sleepy.

He considered turning on his room video screen, but knew the likelihood of seeing a newscast about his supposed execution was high. He looked around at his private hotel room and momentarily felt claustrophobic. It was not a feeling of being closed in a small room, but it was life itself that pressed in on him.

The conversation had left him feeling dirty. He could almost imagine each of his housemates going to Marcelo to demand that their murderous housemate be removed from the Felis Wing. Perhaps the director would do just that, confining him to some small shack on the back side of the compound to undergo his transformation in solitary confinement. He knew that Marcelo would likely have to bribe each of them to remain quiet concerning his presence, lest a riot break out if word of him got out to the rest of the Institute.

Barrett stood up and removed his shirt. He kicked off his boots, slid out of his socks and then took off his pants. He folded up his clothes neatly, set them on top of the dresser, and then opened a drawer to pull out the athletic shorts.

Since he was not yet ready to sleep, he would go the exercise room to work off his frustrations and then shower off all the uncleanness of the day. Clad only in his new shorts, Barrett opened the door and walked out into the saloon. His housemates had apparently retreated to their own rooms, so he walked barefoot across the central room to where he had seen the linen closet earlier. From a shelf full of towels, he selected one, unfolded it and draped it around his neck.

Three sets of eyes watched him enter the exercise room, and there were active thoughts behind each of them.

Chapter 11

Decisions, Decisions

The small digital clock on the nightstand beside Kristen’s bed woke her up with a start. She reached out into the darkness and fumbled around for several buzzing moments before her fingers closed around the clock and she managed to silence the alarm.

Too early, the botanist thought to herself lethargically. It took her a moment to remember where she was, and when the information floated up to her consciousness, she groaned aloud. Due to the conversation of the night before, Kristen had not slept well, but she wanted to get up and use the coed shower before either of the men awoke. Before Barrett’s shocking revelation, the shared restroom was the only thing about coming to the Institute that had bothered her. Now she had something new for concern. However, if she could get showered and dressed before either of the guys was awake, she felt that she could get used to an earlier wakeup.

She turned on a lamp, slipped out of her nightgown and put on a thin pale yellow cotton robe. Tying the belt as she slid her feet into a pair of matching slippers, Kristen looked into the large mirror and almost chuckled at the reflection of her hair fluffed all around her head like the mane of a male lion. She opened the top drawer of her dresser and pulled out her shower kit. From the small bag she plucked out a brush and began grooming her fur.

Grooming my fur? She blinked in amusement. Did I really just think that?

She laughed aloud and felt good for doing it. The previous day had been a strange first day at the Institute, so she hoped the second would be better. Marcy had told them that today they would have physical examinations, so perhaps that would give them something else to occupy their minds.

Although she hoped she would see no one else on the way to the shower, she felt more presentable with her long black hair brushed into a better semblance of order. Giving herself a brief smile in the mirror, she picked up her shower kit and turned to leave the room. The smile disappeared instantly when she remembered the large chair she had scooted up against the door in lieu of not having a lock during the night.

She sighed in frustration and wondered if she would have to do this every night. She rolled up the sleeves of her robe and then put her back into moving the seat aside so she could get out. The chair was made of solid material and was heavy, but she managed to slide it out of the way back to its original place beside one of the nightstands.

There was no one out in the saloon area, which was still dark except for a couple of dim orange night lights along the walls. The skylight overhead showed no glow of the morning sun, as it was too early even for old Sol to be awake.

With her shower kit in hand, Kristen padded across the carpet toward the linen closet. She selected a soft towel and a wash cloth, and then headed for the restroom. Just as she reached the door, Jenni came out, nearly running into her in the darkness of the saloon.

“Oh!” Kristen exclaimed, startled. “Good morning, Jenni.”

“Hi, Kristen,” Jenni replied, running a comb through her wet hair. Without preamble, she leaned in close to the dark-haired woman’s ear and said in a low voice, “Watch yourself in there,” she warned.

Kristen’s eyes narrowed. “Is it Brian?” she asked.

Jenni shook her head. “No one is in there now,” she replied, “but earlier when I was in the shower, Dante slid the shower curtain aside and took my picture! He was gone by the time I finished and got dressed.”

“Probably in his room doing unspeakable things while looking at your picture,” Kristen remarked with a scowl. Jenni’s expression was one of amusement, and that puzzled her. “Did you scream at him?” the botanist asked.

“I didn’t scream,” Jenni replied with a chuckle. “He did surprise me, but I don’t mind that he saw me.”

“You… don’t mind?” Kristen repeated.

“No, so long as they don’t touch, I don’t mind if the guys see me. I just warned you because I thought it might upset you.”

“Thanks, it would. What are you, anyway, an exhibitionist?” Kristen asked before thinking.

Jenni laughed. “Not consciously,” she answered, “but I grew up in an open-minded family that sometimes spent its summers on clothing-optional beaches.”

Kristen drew back in wide eyed surprise. “You were a nudist?” she gasped. “I could never do that!”

Jenni shrugged, something that Kristen could barely see in the light coming from the open restroom door. “I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, so it feels natural to me,” she admitted. “I know it’s not something everyone’s comfortable with, but you should try it sometime. It’s such a sense of freedom.”

Kristen hung her head and gnawed on her lower lip. “Not for someone who looks like me,” she mumbled. “That’s for people who are confident in how they look.”

Jenni put a hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “That’s not true,” she told her quietly. “People of all shapes, sizes, colors and backgrounds can be found on clothing-optional beaches. They’re just regular people, and because everyone is either wearing little or nothing at all, no one really even cares what anyone else looks like. Once you get used to it, it feels natural and doesn’t feel naughty.”

Kristen shook her head. “We aren’t at a nudist camp,” she countered, “so I have no intention of baring myself to anyone but my reflection in a mirror!”

Jenni smiled in the darkness. “That’s okay, you don’t have to,” she answered. “There’s no one else in the restroom right now, so if you need to go, now’s your chance.”

“Thanks, I will.”

Without another comment, Jenni patted her on the shoulder and then disappeared into the darkness. Kristen sighed quietly and then went in through the door. Only one of the ceiling lights was switched on, so she did not have to worry about her eyes adjusting much to the brightness.

She walked to the shower farthest from the door and then slid aside the vinyl curtain. There was plenty of room inside the cubicle, with a wooden seat across a back corner and a similar shelf higher up across another corner. She opened her bag, pulled out a pair of unopened shampoo and conditioner bottles, a container of scented soap and a razor, setting them all on the shelf, but leaving the other items in the bag. She set the bag on the bench seat in the middle of the restroom and then looked around briefly to make sure no one else was around. She pushed off the slippers with her toes under the bench and then slid off her undergarments, stuffing them into the pocket of her robe. She stepped back into the shower stall, removed the robe and then hung both it and her towel on a hook just outside the curtain.

When the warm spray came out of the shower head, she was pleased to discover steady water pressure and soon she was lost in thought as she cleaned up and shaved her legs.

By the time she was finished, she was smiling and ready to face the day. However, when she extended a hand out of the curtain to retrieve her towel, she heard a noise that made her freeze. Water was running elsewhere in the restroom.

Jenni had already showered, so she hoped it was Marcy. Kristen quietly pulled the towel inside the stall and quickly dried off, keeping an eye on the curtain. When she had dried sufficiently, she wrapped the towel around her hair and then retrieved her robe from the outside hook. She heard someone shuffle, so she picked up her conditioner bottle, holding it over her head in readiness.

Just as quietly as she could, she pulled the curtain back, but there was no one there with a camera in her face. The sound of water came from her right, so she eased around the corner and saw what she had dreaded, a bare-chested male form wearing only athletic shorts. A small groan escaped her throat and the man began to turn in her direction at the sound.

The feeling of terror washed over her so quickly that she had flung the weighty bottle before she had even realized it had left her hand. Despite that it was merely a gut reaction, her aim was true in the dim light. The flat bottom end of the plastic bottle hit the man in the temple and the force of the blow knocked him back against the sink. His fingers were wet with hand soap and he lost his grip on the counter, dropping to his knees.

A mumbled curse escaped his lips as soon as the man’s dazed brain could function again, and when he looked up at the short woman standing near the showers, his eyes were wide in bewilderment.

“I know you hate me,” Barrett managed to say, “but a sneak attack wasn’t very sporting.”

Kristen opened and closed her mouth rapidly, and then put her hands up to her chest to hold her robe closed. “I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed. “I thought it was Dante!”

Barrett scowled back at her and reached up to grab a handful of his rust-colored hair. “Does this look like Dante’s head to you?” he complained loudly.

“I’m sorry, Brian!” she repeated. “I really am!” She wanted to run over to make sure he was okay, but her state of undress kept her rooted to the spot.

Barrett grumbled something beneath his breath and he struggled to get back up to his feet. He was still somewhat dazed from the impact of the large, economy sized bottle that had struck him.

“What… what are you doing in here?” Kristen asked with a gulp.

The broad-shouldered man put his hands under the running water in the sink for a moment to wash off the soap. When he had rubbed them clean, he let his palms fill up before splashing the cool liquid on his face. He reached over to a hand towel nearby on the counter, and it was not until after he had patted his face dry that he finally looked back over at her.

“I start and end each day with exercise,” he explained in a calmer voice. “I had to adjust the elliptical trainer and got grease on my fingers, so I came in here to wash it off.”

“Oh…” the woman replied.

“Do you want to explain why you thought I was Dante and hit me with this brick?” Barrett asked, bending over to pick up the bottle of conditioner. Not wanting to approach her, he merely set it on the counter.

“I ran into Jenni on the way in here,” Kristen replied in a small voice. “She said that Dante had taken her picture while she was in the shower and wanted to warn me in case he did the same to me.”

Barrett felt his abused temple gingerly and blinked rapidly several times. “Somehow I can’t say I am surprised that he would do that,” he remarked.

“Didn’t you hear me in the shower?” she asked.

“Yes, and you have a lovely singing voice,” Barrett answered. “I wasn’t going to bother you. All I needed was to wash off my hands, but since our sole restroom was closer than the kitchen sink, I didn’t think anything of it.”

Kristen approached him tentatively, still clutching her robe together with one hand. With the other, she reached out toward his temple. “I’m really sorry I hit you,” she apologized again. “Does it hurt?”

The man raised an eyebrow at her, but even that action was tender. “Enough to put me on my guard every time I’m in here from now on,” he replied in a lighter tone. Her fingers gently brushed his hair back into place and she gave him a wan smile.

“I don’t really hate you,” she said quietly. “I don’t approve of what you did, but I think I can also understand you a little. You made a mistake and will now be paying the price for it the rest of your life. You don’t need me beating up on you too.”

Barrett looked down at her and chuckled in spite of himself. “I’ve heard that the small ones put up the biggest fights,” he said. “Now I have firsthand experience.” A bit of color crept into Kristen’s cheeks, but Barrett didn’t give her much time to be further embarrassed. “I didn’t finish my usual exercise routine, but I think I’m done for now. I’m hot and sweaty and am in need of my shower. I’m going back to my room to get my soap and razor, so that should give you enough time to get dressed where you won’t have to worry about me watching.”

“Thank you,” the woman said quietly, suddenly unable to meet his eyes.

“May I use your shampoo and conditioner?” Barrett asked before he turned to go. “My lawyer provided me with a few clothes when I was taken from the prison, but I didn’t get anything like shower supplies beyond a bar of soap when I left.”

“Sure, if you don’t mind smelling like wild strawberries. I will leave them here on the counter for you.”

“I appreciate it.” Without waiting for further conversation, he slipped past her and then out the door.

By the time Barrett had showered, shaved and was dressed, the saloon was illuminated in the soft glow of morning sun through the skylight overhead. The rich aroma of coffee filled the air and all three of his roommates were sitting at the round table at the center of the pit.

Although Kristen had shown him a small amount of kindness concerning his situation earlier, he did not expect it from the others, so he left his room dressed in jeans, boots and a white tee shirt and walked to the kitchen without acknowledging any of them. He found fresh coffee on the warmer and a clean cup in the cabinet, so he helped himself to the aromatic brew and flavored it with a spoonful of sugar. He also found a bowl of fresh fruit that had not been there the night before, so he snagged a banana on the way out the door and then headed for the exit to take in some morning air.

“Feeling stuck up now that you’ve had some sleep?” Dante called across the room.

Barrett stopped in front of the video screen and turned to look back at the other man. “Stuck up?” he repeated incredulously. “I figured you would have a better start to your day if you didn’t have to bother with me first thing in the morning.”

“Come on over and join us, big guy,” Dante replied.

“Really…” Barrett remarked with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, really.”

The red-haired man shook his head in genuine surprise and took his breakfast down into the pit. He sat in the remaining chair between Dante and Kristen and then took a quiet sip from his cup. Dante scratched his pencil-thin mustache and gave the older man a crooked smile. He was wearing the same pants from the night before, but clad in a fresh blue shirt. When Barrett looked across the table at Jenni, she gave him an uneasy smile and brushed imaginary crumbs from her lavender blouse, but at least Kristen’s expression was openly friendly. A little color flushed her cheeks at the memory of what she had done to him earlier. She was dressed in a pale yellow blouse and a matching set of slacks.

“I hear that you’ve had an exciting morning already,” Dante remarked with a grin, glancing briefly at Kristen.

“I think we all have,” Barrett responded in amusement, pulling on one sleeve of his tee shirt. It felt as if it was a size smaller than he normally wore, and it was fitting like a second skin.

“What do you mean?” Jenni asked quietly.

“From what I heard, he caught you in the shower with his camera, and then Kristen clocked me in the head with a bottle while I was washing my hands, thinking it was him in there to do the same to her.” Dante looked surprised, but Jenni suddenly chuckled as Kristen took a quick sip from her own cup of coffee averting her eyes.

“You know about that?” Dante croaked.

In reply, Barrett simply asked, “How did the picture come out?”

Dante swallowed and gave Jenni a lopsided smirk. “Well, to tell the truth, the battery in my prepaid cell ran out on the bus yesterday and I don’t have a charger. I only pretended to take her picture to see what she would do!”

“Sneak!” Jenni replied. “You just wanted to see me naked in the shower!”

“Well, yeah,” Dante admitted with a sly grin. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Listen, you,” the blonde woman said, pointing a finger at him, “With a shared restroom, I know you’re going to see me occasionally, but you’d better keep those long fingers of yours to yourself!”

“Don’t even try to sneak a peek at me!” Kristen warned him. “You’ll get what he got this morning!” She looked over at Barrett and gave him another embarrassed smile.

Dante held up his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, I’ll behave myself,” he said with little conviction, though it was clear that no one believed him. He cocked an eyebrow at Kristen and pursed his lips. “You hit him in the head with a bottle?” he asked.

“A full bottle of conditioner, economy size,” Jon replied, tapping his temple where it had struck him.

“Ouch.”

“What was everyone doing up so early this morning anyway?” Kristen asked, peering into the depths of her coffee. “I just wanted to take a shower before everyone else was up and about, but it seems like I was the last one awake.”

“I couldn’t get comfortable,” Dante answered. “New place, new bed and all that, y’know.”

“Due to the hospital shifts I usually had to pull, I’ve always been an early riser,” Jenni replied. “My body hasn’t adjusted to my new schedule yet.”

“What about you?” Dante asked the older man. “Why were you up before the sun came up, plotting your escape?”

Barrett peeled his banana quietly. Instead of answering the question, he looked askance at the other man. “I appreciate you inviting me to sit in with you,” he said in a calm voice, “but after last night, I’m surprised you’re letting me near you.”

“We talked about it while you were in the shower,” Dante admitted. “None of us were really comfortable last night knowing there was a killer in the house, so I had intended to go see the director first this morning to see about getting you moved out.”

“What changed your mind?” Barrett asked just before biting into his breakfast. He pointedly did not look at any of them, simply sitting there with his ears on the conversation.

“Jenni reminded us that you’re the one who is here to stay. If any of us wish to leave, we can, but you can’t,” Dante informed him.

“Yes, I suppose that’s true,” Barrett replied after swallowing; he’d said as much to them last night. He peeled the banana a little more, but still did not meet anyone’s eyes.

“None of us want to leave,” Kristen added, “so we all decided to try to make this work.”

Barrett looked over at her. “Really.”

“Yeah, really,” Dante confirmed.

Barrett turned his attention to the blonde nurse, who had not spoken since the conversation had turned serious. “You’re going to give me a chance?” he asked her.

Her powder blue eyes met his for only a moment before she looked away. “We don’t have much of a choice,” she said quietly. “You said that you would give us the same promise you gave to Marcelo if we gave you a chance in return. Did you mean what you said?”

“Look at me,” Barrett said. “All of you.” When each of them returned his gaze one at a time, he nodded. “I swear that you will have no trouble from me as a result of my crime. I have nothing left but what’s ahead of me, and there’s nothing you can say or do that will ever equal what Parker did to me. All I ask is that you give me the opportunity to be just another volunteer going through the program just as you are.”

“What about your attitude against Furs?” Jenni asked soberly.

“What of it? You know where I stand and how I believe,” Barrett replied in an even tone. “I think I made that perfectly clear last night. You may hear me grumble about it from time to time, but no one at this institution is in potential danger from me because of it.”

“You still think you’re going to be mindless when this is all over?” Dante asked.

“More than ever.”

“What happens when we get to the end and you’re still you?”

“If that should be the case, then I would be greatly pleased to have been proven wrong,” Barrett replied truthfully. “It would be more than I could hope for. However, I seriously doubt it will turn out that way.”

“Brian,” Kristen asked tentatively, “may I ask you a personal question?”

The broad-shouldered man tugged at another tight sleeve. “What is it?”

“Why do you have such a dim view on life?” she asked. “You have killed, were caught and sentenced to die, but yet you were given another chance at life. Shouldn’t you be happy that you’re still here — even here?”

Without pausing to consider his response, Barrett picked up his coffee cup and replied, “I’ll get back to you on that after we’ve started the process.”

The dark-haired woman shook her head. “When we first met yesterday, you told me that you wanted to be my friend since I would be the transterrestrial botanist in the colony who would determine if the local plant life was poisonous or edible.”

“I was being flippant, but I also felt it was a good idea to start making friends, especially those who might have a direct impact on my life.”

“Fair enough, but ever since we found out who you really are, you seem to be trying to avoid forming any further relationships. Is that such a good idea?” Kristen asked.

“The three of you looked like you were going to lynch me last night,” Barrett replied dryly. “Relationships between a lynch mob and the condemned don’t usually last long.”

“I think Brian’s just trying to get a jump on us and start thinking like a feline,” Dante quipped with a grin.

“What do you mean by that?” Jenni asked. Barrett looked over at him with a raised eyebrow.

Dante chuckled and said, “Cats, as we shall all become, do not tend to form lifelong relationships. They might congregate around others, but they’re independent and are often aloof. I’ve already adopted some feline attributes myself.”

Thankfully moving the conversation away from Barrett’s situation, Jenni gave Dante a mischievous look. “…and what attributes have you adopted?” she asked.

Dante’s smile widened. “Cats aren’t necessarily governed by the same mating rituals that humans follow,” he said in a mock whisper. “The males can and will mate indiscriminately with any willing female.” He punctuated his remark by waggling his eyebrows at both Jenni and Kristen, adding a leering grin for emphasis.

Jenni merely smiled back at him, certain that he was nothing more than a lot of hot wind, but Kristen shuddered and shrunk into her seat, crossing her arms across her chest. She had read stories about men with attitudes such as what Dante professed and she was concerned that he might try to force himself upon her some night. Of course, she had no real evidence that she could voice on this, but he made her feel dirty anytime he leered at her. She had not felt comfortable around him since their first meeting the night before.

Barrett merely shook his head in amazement at Dante’s verbal dalliance. “You all know that I’m destined to take on the form of a mountain lion,” Barrett said, breaking the mood, “but none of you have mentioned what you have chosen for yourselves.”

Anxious to change the topic again, Kristen sat up straight in her seat, but Dante jumped into the conversation ahead of her.

“I want one of the Great Cats,” the dark-haired man responded quickly, “possibly a tiger or a lion, but I haven’t made up my mind.”

Barrett looked over at him. “I thought you had to choose before you even signed up,” he remarked.

Jenni shook her head. “You only have to let them know which of the four races you want to be,” she explained, “Felis, Canis, Ursis or Vulps.” On the table was the folder than Marcy had left for them; Jenni tapped its cover. “Since we’re all in the Felis Wing, we all have obviously chosen feline, but we still have to choose between the cats that are available to us.”

“What if you wanted to bring your own animal DNA,” Dante asked, “like that of your favorite housecat?”

“Not allowed,” Jenni replied. “That was covered in the information you were given to read. It’s because the material they use here has been thoroughly checked out against disease or abnormalities.”

“So what do you think you will choose?” he asked her in interest.

The blonde nurse opened the folder and flipped through the pages idly. “Spotted leopard,” she announced after a moment, stopping at a related photograph. “I’ve always thought they were beautiful creatures. I also considered a snow leopard, but I think a standard leopard will camouflage better on wild terrains.”

“What about you?” Barrett asked Kristen, looking over at her in simple curiosity.

“Well,” she replied hesitantly, “since I’m not very tall, I thought I would go with a smaller feline, something like a lynx, bobcat or ocelot, if they are available. I haven’t decided yet.”

“There was a lynx in the cafeteria,” Dante reminded her.

“Oh? I hadn’t noticed,” Kristen replied.

“That’s because you were too busy ogling the males,” Barrett teased.

“I was not!” she responded defensively, but her reply was diluted when she exchanged guilty looks with Jenni.

Dante pulled the folder toward him and began flipping through the samples. Each page contained an image of each of the felines available with another photo alongside of past volunteers who made the transition to show a sample of what the result might look like. All three of his housemates looked on curiously as he turned the pages, but finally he stopped at one and stared at it for a long moment.

“Bengal tiger, a white one,” Dante announced with a finger on the photograph before him. “That’s it — that’s what I want to be when I grow up.”

“Well,” Jenni said with a mischievous glint in her eyes, “if you don’t make it to the colony, you can always join an act in Las Vegas.” The dark-haired man grinned at her and raised both hands in the air, fingers curled down like claws.

Kristen pulled the folder over to her side of the round table and took a quiet sip of her coffee while browsing the pages. “I’m still undecided,” she murmured.

“Just a reminder of what the Doc told us last night,” Barrett said aloud, “the process is irreversible. Once it’s started, none of you will ever be human again, so you had better be sure before you take that injection of modified DNA.”

“That’s true,” Kristen remarked, still looking through the photographs, “but I still have a couple days before I have to make up my mind.” After several minutes, she pushed away the folder and then peered into her coffee cup. “I need a refill,” she said, standing up. “Anyone else?”

“I’ve had enough,” Dante replied. “I get too jittery if I get too much caffeine at one sitting.”

“No thanks, I’m still nursing this one,” Jenni said. She stretched languidly, fully aware of Dante’s eyes on her form as she did so.

Barrett stood up and looked over at Kristen. “I could use a refill, but I need to doctor it up.” He gestured toward the kitchen and then followed the shorter woman up out of the pit. As they walked, Kristen looked aside at him.

“Brian…” she started. When he returned her gaze, she closed her mouth and looked down at her feet.

“Yes?”

It was not until they had crossed the room and entered the kitchen before she looked up again. Barrett gave her the time she needed, so he took the cup from her hand and placed it beside his on the counter. He picked up the coffee pot, refilled both cups, and then returned the near-empty glass container to the warmer.

“Did you want to ask me something?” he queried, reaching for a spoon on the counter beside the sugar bowl. He dipped a spoonful of sugar into the cup and then began stirring it lightly.

“You said you would be getting a new identity soon,” she said quietly, taking her cup to the refrigerator to add a splash of milk.

“That’s right. For volunteers, it’s an option, but for a criminal sentencing, it is mandatory,” Barrett replied with a nod. “I believe the anonymity is to protect me from further retaliation from the victim’s family and friends. Of course, that’s the standard rule for someone sentenced to become a Fur. Neither Rebecca nor hers and Parker’s families know I’m still alive, so if by some chance I ever do meet up with any of them again in my altered form, the new identity will protect me.”

“Do you know what your new name will be?” Kristen asked, leaning back against the counter opposite of him.

“Not yet,” Barrett replied. “I assume I was supposed to have the new identity given to me before I got here, but I made the decision to accept this fate only the day before my execution and I was whisked away too quickly to get the information set up first.”

“Will you keep your first name, or will they change it all?”

“Since the Institute works with the Witness Relocation Program, I assume everything will change – first name, last name, background information, education and all that. I’ll probably have to memorize my new personal history in case I get into a conversation with anyone and they ask me about my childhood or something.”

“I’m surprised they allow you to tell us about it,” Kristen mused. “I thought the purpose of a new identity was to hide you from anyone who knew you by the old one.”

“You weren’t ever supposed to know, but I don’t guess it matters here at this point,” he responded with a shrug. “Whether my name is Brian or Mephibosheth, I’m never going to be allowed to rejoin human society, so whatever they call me will only have an impact on those I’ll be living with from now on.”

Kristen studied the interior of her coffee cup so she would not have to look at him. “I hope you don’t think me petty,” she said quietly, “but I hope they do change your first name.”

Barrett looked at her with a raised eyebrow that she did not see. “Any specific reason?”

“Yes,” the botanist replied in a voice barely above a whisper. “Brian was the name of my Ex, and he is one of the reasons why I’m here.”

“Ex-husband?”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Kristen clarified, still studying the swirls of milk in her untouched coffee.

Barrett did not respond right away. “Do you need to talk about it?” he asked quietly.

“No, but thanks for asking,” Kristen answered, looking up at him with moist eyes. “Like you, I have people to leave behind. My life as a Fur is the best chance I have for a new beginning.”

Barrett nodded quietly. “If it will help, you are welcome to call me Del until my new name is ready.”

“Del?” Kristen grabbed a nearby paper napkin and dabbed at her eyes.

“My middle name is Delano,” he explained with casual smile.

“Your folks didn’t like you very much, did they?” Dante asked from the doorway. Kristen jerked her head up and Barrett suddenly looked annoyed. Standing behind the other man was Jenni, who looked embarrassed at having been caught eavesdropping.

“How much did you hear?” Kristen demanded.

Dante shrugged his shoulders. “Everything after Delano here poured coffee into your cups,” he admitted. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear us walking across the room behind you.”

“The floor’s carpeted…” Kristen reminded him.

Dante only smiled back at her, but before she could say anything more, he looked at Barrett and asked, “Mephibosheth?”

“He was a fugitive from King David in Old Testament Biblical times,” Barrett explained. “I just pulled the name out of memory to make a point.”

“That’s not a name I would have just pulled out of the air,” Dante remarked.

Kristen set her coffee down on the counter and crossed her arms. “Now that you know why both Brian and myself are here,” she said grumpily, “why did you two join the program?”

“New worlds are being opened up for settlement and only Furs are allowed to tame the new lands,” Dante answered in sudden animation. “Volunteers are rewarded a payment of one million dollars after serving five years starting up a new colony! The money is to be awarded at the end of that time, and then those veterans are given the option of staying with the colony they helped start or immigrating to one of the other Fur colonies of their choice!”

Kristen shook her head and muttered something about his greed, but then looked past him at Jenni. “What about you?” she asked. “You’re so beautiful! Why would you want to trade that for a permanent fur coat?”

Jenni smiled at the compliment. “I have always gotten along well with animals, but I also like the Great Outdoors,” she replied. “A colony will always need doctors and nurses, but I’m also a survivalist and a naturalist, and the chance to explore a new world was just as inviting as the bonus.”

“A naturalist?” Barrett asked.

Jenni spread open the top of her blouse so they could all see that she had no tan lines beneath her bra straps. “I’m outdoors a lot, as you can see.”

Without asking for permission, Dante leaned in close and peered down into her blouse top, pulling the bra strap a little further out with a finger. When Jenni did nothing but smile back at him, he brazenly gazed down into her cleavage.

“Did you say you were a naturalist or a naturist?” he asked in awe.

“What’s the difference?” Kristen asked, holding her arms close across her own chest.

Dante laughed again, stepping back from the blonde nurse. “A naturalist is outdoors a lot,” he told her. “A naturist is a nudist!”

Already knowing that Jenni had spent her youth on clothing-optional beaches, Kristen just rolled her eyes at Dante’s exclamation. Barrett simply shook his head and watched the interplay quietly.

Jenni chuckled and grinned at them all. “You can say I’m a bit of both.”

Dante looked surprised at her revelation, but then he leaned in close and waggled his eyebrows at her. “I’ll have to watch you more closely.”

“Here, I have something for you,” she told the dark-haired man. She stepped back and then pulled both arms through the sleeves of her blouse until they were fully inside the garment. She writhed around for a moment and then triumphantly pushed her arms back out through the sleeves. In one hand, she held out her bra and then she tossed it at Dante. Without missing a beat, the young man snared the undergarment from the air and then tucked it inside his shirt with a smirk.

Chapter 12

Sunset of Humankind

“Everyone is gathered in the kitchen at the coffee pot this morning,” said a voice. “That must be some good java.” All four of the housemates looked back toward the door. Standing just behind Jenni was their attendant nurse. She was dressed in a matching set of powder blue scrubs, a computer tablet with its pink metallic case closed beneath one arm and a stethoscope draped around her neck. She looked fresh and cheerful, her shoulder-length platinum blonde hair nicely brushed and curled, and there was a hint of vanilla perfume in the air.

“Good morning,” Jenni told her with a nervous chuckle at Marcy’s sudden appearance.

“Good morning,” the older nurse replied. “I will be starting your physical examinations shortly, but I need to know if any of you have taken any medication today.”

“I’ve had caffeine and potassium,” Barrett answered, indicating his coffee cup and a banana peel, “but no other meds.” The others responded with similar replies, but none of had taken anything pharmaceutical that morning.

“That’s fine,” said the nurse. “The director has asked to see Brian, Jenni and Dante in his office first thing this morning, so Kristen, I will start with your physical as soon as you are ready, dear.”

“Why does the director want to see us?” Dante asked, picking up an orange from the fruit bowl on the counter.

Marcy smiled. “Marcelo likes to visit with each new volunteer when they arrive,” she answered, “but there was not enough time last night to get to everyone. He has named you three as the first on today’s agenda.”

“He and I have already had our first discussion,” Barrett mused. “Why does he want to see me again?”

Marcy shook her head. “I’ve no idea, Brian. Nevertheless, he asked for you by name.”

Barrett shrugged his wide shoulders. “Sure, okay.” He looked over at Dante and Jenni. “The sooner we go, the quicker we can get to something more substantial for breakfast,” he told them.

“Sounds good to me,” Dante replied, dropping his untouched orange back in the bowl. He then guided Jenni out of the kitchen in front of him, his hands on her hips. As soon as they were out into the saloon, Jenni slapped his hands away playfully. Barrett and Kristen traded looks of longsuffering and then the pair of them left the room together. The dark-haired botanist followed Marcy toward the door to the lab, while Barrett took his time trailing behind his other two housemates.

Once outside, Barrett felt a slight chill in the autumn morning air. The skies were cloudless, but a faint breeze stirred the leaves of the nearby forest as the sun warmed the air. As they walked along the sidewalk to the main office, they watched several fully formed Furs jogging in sync with one another across the adjacent grassy field. All were dressed in athletic shorts with an adjustable strap over the base of their tails, but none of them, male or female, wore any garments on top.

Their fur coats were sufficient to cover up their owners and keep them warm, the pelts beginning to thicken with the cooler climate. None of the joggers wore footgear and all of them looked as if they could either run upright as they were doing now or get down on all fours just as easily.

Dante and Jenni watched them in interest, but Barrett’s attention was diverted by the slow buildup of aircraft rotors. The antique Osprey on its helicopter pad was facing away from them, but he knew that Tom and Wayne were in the cockpit preparing to lift off for whatever mission was on their schedule today. He silently wished them well and then felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Is that a Bell Boeing Osprey?” Dante asked in excitement. “I didn’t see it sitting there in the dark last night.”

“That was my ride yesterday,” Barrett told his companions. Before he could say more, the engines sped up their tilted rotors with a roar and continued to increase until the aircraft left the ground in a cloud of grass, leaves and dust. Spectators from all over the compound watched the Osprey lift straight up into the sky, and when it had sufficient altitude, it began moving forward as the engine pods rotated. It was lost over the tops of the trees within a moment, although they could continue to hear it for a few minutes more. Activity resumed on the compound once it had gone.

“You came in that?” Jenni asked, clearly impressed.

“Yeah, it was the fastest way for them to get me here from Colorado,” Barrett replied in a quiet voice. Although he had specifically refrained from mentioning the prison, he wanted no one with better hearing nearby to pick up their conversation.

“I didn’t know any were still flying,” Dante remarked. He was the first to arrive at the office building and went inside without knocking. Jenni followed him in with Barrett bringing up the rear. He closed the door and frowned when he saw that Dante was already flirting with the orange feline behind the counter.

Sissy laughed at something the other man said and then looked up at Barrett. “Good morning,” she said cheerfully, including them all in the greeting. “The director would like to see you first, Brian.” The man did nothing more than give her a simple nod of acknowledgment and then he walked to the administrator’s door. He tapped on it a couple times and then let himself in without waiting for a response. Dante and Jenni sat down in the waiting area for their turns.

Marcelo Delgado looked up from his double-screened computer tablet when Barrett walked in and closed the door behind him.

“Hello, Brian,” he said courteously.

“Good Morning,” Barrett told him. He did not await an invitation and immediately took a seat in front of the desk, crossing one leg up over the other and putting his elbows up on the arms of the chair. “I was told you wanted to see me first thing today.”

“That’s right,” Marcelo confirmed, absently scratching his chin beneath the black Van Dyke beard. He reached for a fat plastic envelope sitting on the desk beside his computer tablet. He scooted this across the desk toward the other man. “I received this information from Washington by special courier early this morning.”

“From Washington?” Barrett repeated, opening the package.

“It’s from the US Marshals Service,” Marcelo explained. “It’s your new identity.”

“Ah, right.” Barrett pulled out a sheaf of papers that included a small envelope on top of the others. He set the papers on the desk and then lifted the flap of the envelope. Inside was a New York state identification card that used an image taken of him just before his arrest. Also included was a credicard drawn to a New York bank with a paper financial register made out to a name that Barrett did not recognize —Jonathan Sunset.

“Sunset? Is this a joke?” he asked, looking across the desk at the director.

“No, the name was randomly generated so there would be no ties to your old identity.”

“Yeah, I know that, but a human name?”

“What did you expect? You’ll still be part human.”

Barrett scowled at Marcelo. “What I’ll be is an abomination of nature; I was expecting something more alien, animal-like.”

“The man you killed had a human name,” the director replied, unperturbed.

“Since it wasn’t a man, I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I guess I assumed my fiancé had given the name to her pet cat.”

“Your name has been chosen for you, Mr. Sunset.” Marcelo said, stressing the man’s new appellation. “Your worldwide personnel records have already been updated to reflect your new identity, so there will be no appeal to the selection of your name.”

The other man gifted him with a lopsided smile. “Relax. I don’t have a problem with the name. I was just surprised. Do I have a middle name too?”

“It wasn’t deemed necessary. Did you want one?”

“No, not really. That’s just one less thing to have to remember.” He looked back at the identification and repeated to himself. “Jonathan Sunset… Jon Sunset. Yeah, I could get used to it, although it’s a far cry from my birth name.”

“That’s the idea. You will need to read through the rest of the information and memorize it as best as you can. It’s your new personal background.”

Jon glanced once more at the credicard. He flipped open the financial register and raised an eyebrow at the twenty-five-hundred-dollar balance. “I have money?” he asked in amazement.

Marcelo leaned upon his desktop. “All your immediate needs for the next two years will be provided by the Institute,” he explained, “but all volunteers who opt for a new identity to go with their new lives are awarded a small sum so that you may purchase some personal items beyond the necessities from the Shoppette we have here on the grounds.” Then as an afterthought, he added, “I would advise against telling your housemates of the monetary account. They might get jealous of the financial bonus.”

“Right,” Jon whispered, clearly surprised. He put the identification and accounting items back in the small envelope and then reached for the stack of papers that he assumed would also be available to him electronically. He fell silent as he read over the first page and Marcelo allowed him the time to look at it without distraction. Although hosting a criminal was a rare occasion at the Institute, submitting new identification to a volunteer who had chosen a new background was practically a routine for the director.

“According to my new birthday, I’m now seven months older than I used to be,” Jon murmured quietly. “I was born and grew up in Granite, Oklahoma, lived a while in Norcross, Georgia, and my most recent address was in Poughkeepsie, New York.” He looked up at Marcelo with an amused expression. “Oklahoma?” he asked.

The director merely shrugged with a smile. “I’m not the one who made it up.”

Jon shuffled through the rest of the papers and found paragraphs of biographical history of the man known as Jonathan Sunset. Both of his faux parents had died in an automobile accident not long ago. He had once had a younger brother born late in life to his parents, but the boy had died in a lake accident at a young age. Neither of his folks had any living relatives, so Jonathan Sunset was on his own in the world. There was a list of small community colleges that he had attended and he had no doubt that the Witness Relocation Program of the US Marshals Service had already tapped in and changed the electronic records of those places to add in his existence during those dates. He also saw a list of undistinguished jobs that he had held, likely with businesses that were no longer in existence or had probably never existed in the first place. He flipped through numerous pages of related information, but he would not bother to read through them right now.

At last, he returned all of the material to the nondescript plastic envelope and tucked the flap into place. He looked up at Marcelo with a casual smile. “It looks like they thought of everything,” he said. “I will go over it tonight and start committing it to memory.”

Marcelo sat back in his old comfortable chair and folded his fingers together across his middle. He was pleased that Barrett had not given him any further grief over the matter. In fact, the man now known as Jonathan Sunset seemed content with his new personality.

“How was your first night with your housemates?” he asked in relaxed conversation.

Almost at once, Jon’s expression grew troubled. “Everything went well until they found the Colorado newspaper that the Osprey pilot gave me as a souvenir.” Marcelo raised an eyebrow, but remained silent. “My picture was plastered on the front page, along with an article rich in detail about my execution. I thought they were going to lynch me when they found out what I had done.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Marcelo said, trying to keep a smirk from creeping upon his face; he was successful keeping his expression neutral for the other man. “Since you seem to be relatively unharmed, I assume you were able to keep them at bay. Do I need to step in and take care of it?”

Jon shook his head. “No, we had some tense moments while I gave them my side of the story, and I think they were all afraid of me through the night, but this morning they gathered together and let me know they were going to try to accept me as just another volunteer.”

“Really?” the director asked in quiet amazement. “That was awfully sporting of them.”

Jon smiled. “None of them wanted to leave, even though they knew that I couldn’t, so we’re working it out between the four of us.”

“Remarkable. What about your medical staff?”

“Unless you’ve told them, I don’t think they know anything beyond the fact that I’m just another volunteer for the Anthro Human Colonization Program. They both know I’m getting a new identity, but beyond that, neither of them was in on our conversations last night or this morning.”

“I see.”

Jon leaned forward in his chair and held up the plastic envelope. “With this change of identity, Brian Delano Barrett is now essentially dead to everyone involved. You know of Barrett’s background, but he was executed yesterday morning in the basement of a Colorado prison. As of now, I only know of Barrett from what I’ve seen on the news, so I think I should be treated as just another volunteer going through your program.”

“Yes, I suppose that would be fair,” Marcelo replied, stroking his beard. “What of your attitude toward the Furs you hate so much?”

“As I’ve been reminded by you and all three of my housemates, I’m going to be turned into one of them and I will be surrounded by them for the rest of my life. I promised you that I would behave, and I’ve given them the same promise in exchange for being given a chance,” Jon told him. “It’s been… difficult being around Furs in just the hours that I have been here, and I’ve had to keep my mouth closed tight from ranting in public — but if I’m going to be forced to join furmankind, I’ve got to leave humankind behind me.”

“So, you’re making yourself comfortable?”

Jon shook his head. “Far from it, Marcelo, but I’ll be working on it.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re going to make an effort,” Marcelo replied. He glanced at the time on his tablet. “Is there anything else for now?” he asked. “I still have fourteen new volunteers to visit with today.”

“Actually, there is, if you can give me a few more minutes.”

“Okay, what else can I help you with, Jon?”

“It was probably intended that I was not to be made aware of the prize money to be awarded to the volunteers who survive five years in a new colony,” Jon said quietly, “but I found out about it this morning. Not only did I slip up in letting my housemates know who I was, Dante let slip that that the prize was his reason for signing up.”

Marcelo’s expression froze upon his face. “Okay…” he simply responded.

“Since Brian Barrett is dead, executed for his crime, wouldn’t it be a little suspicious if I’m not given the same contract to sign as the other volunteers?”

“I’m not sure that’s an option available to you.”

Jon nodded with a frown. “Yeah, I figured that would be the case. Listen… my alternate sentencing was that I undergo the transformation and become a Fur similar to the one who stole my fiancé and ruined my life. Once the transformation is complete, my sentencing will be complete as well. The legal sentence does not include my life afterward, only that I spend the rest of my life as a Fur. Going off to start a colony on another world is not part of the sentence; that is the contract that all Furs are bound to, so that is what my job will be in my new life. Shouldn’t I be given the same promise of reward as the others?”

Marcelo was silent for a long moment, his fingers still clasped across his middle and his small dark eyes locked upon Jon’s. The expression on his face clearly displayed the internal struggle within him, but after several more moments of quiet, he nodded reluctantly.

“I will discuss the legalities of what you request with your lawyer, Mr. Harper,” he stated at last.

Jon knew he would get no further confirmation, but he felt as if he had won a small battle to get the director to think about it. He stood up and extended a hand across the desk. “Thank you,” he said with a nod. “I appreciate it.”

Marcelo hesitated a bare moment before he grasped the man’s hand and shook it once. “Welcome to the Furmankind Institute, Mr. Sunset.”

Jon gave him a smile and then picked up his envelope to go, but before he could turn to leave, the director pulled another envelope from his desk drawer. There was no label upon it and it was not thick enough to have held more than a couple sheets of paper, but it was sealed. “Would you give this to Doctor Renwick, please?” Marcelo asked him. At Jon’s raised eyebrow, he explained, “It’s an official record for his files on the arrival of Jonathan Sunset, to replace the one for Brian Barrett. He will be expecting it.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Would you send in Ms. Watson next, please?”

Jon Sunset gave the administrator a final nod and then left the room. Sissy, Dante and Jenni looked up at him when he emerged and he gave them all a casual smile. “The director will see you now, Jenni,” he said.

The blonde nurse stood up, but did not move toward the door. Instead, she looked up at him with a look of concern. “Is everything all right?” she asked. “You said he had already greeted you yesterday.”

“Everything’s fine,” he told his housemates. He held up the thick plastic envelope and replied, “Information on my new identity came in and he needed to give me a brief run-down.”

“Ah, so who’s the new guy?” Dante asked with a glint of mischief in his eyes.

“My name is now Jonathan Sunset,” he told them, “but I’ll probably just go by the shortened Jon, if you don’t mind.”

“Sunset?” Dante repeated with a wide grin, the cogs in his mind already turning with new ways to tease the larger man. “That sounds appropriate.”

“Appropriate?” Jenni asked.

“It is, now that our friend here is at the sunset of his existence as a human!”

Jon raised an eyebrow with a frown and then shook his head in mental surrender. He had expected some crack about his name right off the bat and the oily younger man did not disappoint.

Jenni reached out and put a hand on his arm. “Jonathan… Jon…” she repeated. “It’s a good name,” she told him with a smile. “I’ve only known you a day, but forgive me if I slip up and call you Brian until I get used to the new name.”

“I’ll have to get used to the new name myself,” Jon responded with his own smile. “However, you’d better go on in now. The director’s waiting on you.”

“Ah yes,” she replied. “See you gents later.”

“Don’t have too much fun in there,” Dante told her with a smile. Jenni gave the men a casual wave and then lightly knocked on the door. Marcelo’s muffled voice authorized her to enter his office, and then she disappeared inside.

Dante gave Jon another grin, but returned to his seat without another word. The older man was free to return to the Felis Wing, but Jon wanted to try something before he left. He turned to the admin assistant’s counter and Sissy looked up at him with a delighted smile.

“I like your new name,” she told him, a pleasant thrum underlying her voice.

“Thank you,” he said to her with a tight throat. It was the first time he had actually spoken directly to her, or any other Fur besides Parker for that matter. “May I ask you a personal question?”

Sissy’s eyes narrowed in amusement. “I don’t have a phone in my quarters, but you may call on me here if you want to take me out sometime.”

Dante suddenly coughed and Jon blinked, both taken off guard by the feline’s reply. “Uh, thanks,” Jon said slowly, “but actually I was wondering if you had a photo of yourself before the transformation that I could look at.”

Sissy giggled at his reaction. She had already noticed that the man had not spoken to her since his arrival, and although she knew nothing of his background, he was not the first new arrival with a hesitation to speak to a Fur for the first time. Her response had been nothing more than a practiced quip to catch a newcomer off guard.

The orange-furred secretary pointed a claw to a photograph on the wall beside the counter. “That’s me, as I was,” she told him with a smile.

Jon leaned over to examine the portrait and Dante was suddenly at his side to look at it too. Sissy had been a young Irish girl with ginger hair brighter that Jon’s and her face had contained a generous smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her green eyes smiled back at the photographer as she flashed a “V” sign with her fingers.

Dante looked back at Sissy with raised eyebrows. “How long ago was this picture taken?” he asked.

“That was about three and a half years ago,” the admin assistant replied, “taken right before I joined up.”

“You look like a kid in this,” Dante mused aloud. “How old were you?”

Sissy giggled. “I had just turned eighteen, the legal minimum age that someone can volunteer for the Program.”

“Your parents approved of this at such a young age?” Jon asked.

“Both of them urged me to join, actually,” the feline replied. “I have two older brothers who went through it together and they’ve had all kinds of adventures on the world where they were sent to colonize. My folks couldn’t afford to send me through college, so they figured I could get a worthwhile education through the AHCP and do something with my life.”

Jon leaned upon the counter, looking down into her feline face. “Why are you still here? Did you get a waiver of some kind?” he asked. “I thought all Furs were to be shipped off to new worlds like your brothers were, as soon as the process and education were done.”

“No, no waiver,” Sissy replied in a quiet voice. “At the moment, there are no new worlds that are open for initial settlement, so those of us who have finished our transformation and education have jobs here at the Institute until the day comes when we get our orders to go.”

“No new worlds?” Dante asked in disappointment.

The feline shook her head. “None currently open for colonization. Each time a new Earth-like planet within reach is discovered, it is studied from orbit for at least a couple years to make sure there are no sapient inhabitants before the authorities declare it open for settlement. At the moment, there are none ready for the Furs to move in on.”

“Is sapience the same thing as sentience?” Dante asked, his mouth screwed up sideways.

“Close, but it’s not the same. Sentience is the ability to feel things emotionally and to perceive things around you. Most animals are sentient, but the ability to think, the capacity for intelligence or to acquire wisdom requires sapience.”

Dante raised an eyebrow at her. “You sound like a professor. How do you know that?”

Sissy laughed and patted the counter. “Doctor Ramirez drilled it into our heads often enough during our furman education that I have it memorized. Like you, I didn’t know it myself before I go here.”

“Have they ever discovered another sapient race on any of the worlds they’ve looked at?” Jon asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Sissy replied, “but that doesn’t mean there won’t be. They’ve found all sorts of plant and animal life, but none that have shown sapience as we know it.”

“As we know it,” Dante repeated. “What if there’s something out there that doesn’t resemble sapience as we know it?”

Sissy shrugged, but then she looked back at Jonathan. “It’s likely that one of the worlds may be open by the time you’ve finished the transformation and education yourselves, and if that’s the case, all of us felines may be on the same flight out.”

“Why didn’t they just send you out to one of the other settlements?” Jon wanted to know. “I’m sure any of them could use fresh help beyond just the few they originally sent.”

“We have often wondered that ourselves,” Sissy replied, resting her chin upon the edge of the counter in front of them.

“If you’ve already been a Fur for three years,” Dante said after a moment of thought, “and it takes us two years to be ready for a colony ourselves, you will have already reached your five years as a Fur by the time we’re done. Will they award you the one million at that time?”

Sissy sat back and shook her head. “No, that prize is awarded only to those who have served in a starter colony for five years. They don’t consider this Institute to be a colony settlement and it’s certainly not a starter.”

“How long have your brothers served in a colony?” Jon asked.

For the first time since they had seen her, Sissy’s cheerful demeanor vanished. “My eldest brother only needs another year to mark his fifth anniversary on the world of Monarch.”

“What about your other brother?” Dante asked. “I thought he went through the Program at the same time.”

“He — uhm…” Sissy’s eyes misted over. “He died during his second year on Monarch,” she replied with a choke. “That… that’s a possible danger when going to a new world…”

“What happened?” Jon asked in a whisper. “Can you tell us?”

“He was bitten by a local insect that he had no immunity against,” she replied after a quiet moment. “He was a fighter and could have held his own in a scrap against some ferocious beast, but instead he died from a bug bite! It wasn’t fair…”

“Colonizing alien worlds is not a fair game,” Jon said, his brow furrowed. “The humans of Earth consider furmankind to be expendable. That’s why they’re sent in first.”

“That’s no secret,” Dante retorted, looking over at him, “but Furs have a higher success rate of surviving conditions such as those in new environments. They can’t make us go until we willingly sign that contract, and it’s that million-dollar prize they use as bait.”

“They caught you with that cat-toy, didn’t they?” Jon replied drily.

“Yes, yes they did,” Dante had to admit.

Sissy dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and then looked up at Jon. “You didn’t sign up because of the prize money?” she asked in a puzzled tone.

Jon shook his head and lied to her with a straight face. “I signed up for the adventure of it all,” he told her. “Even Dante here is an experienced cave explorer, so that had to have appealed to him too.”

“Uh, yeah,” Dante agreed hastily. He had momentarily forgotten that it was unlikely that Sissy had any personal knowledge of Brian Barrett’s public background. “Adventure for some is just as much an incentive as a bundle of money. No matter how it was done, our big friend here was caught just like us!”

Jon shot him a dark look at the reference to his arrest. He was about to inquire further into Sissy’s experience with the Program, but the director’s door opened and Jenni walked out.

“Next!” said the blonde nurse with a smile at Dante.

“That didn’t take long,” the dark-haired man replied.

“Nope, just a few minutes of one-to-one discussion about our reasons to be here and an official welcome.”

“Ah, okay,” Dante remarked, heading for the door she had left open behind her. Once he was away inside, Jenni put her arms up on the counter beside her remaining male housemate.

“So, Jonathan, dear, are we going to wait for him?” she asked, placing emphasis on his new name.

“Once we get back to the Wing, they’re going to give us a full, comprehensive medical exam,” Jon reminded her. “Are you in a hurry for them to poke and prod every nook and cranny?”

Jenni grinned back at him. “That depends upon who’s doing the poking and prodding!” she replied. Sissy laughed aloud and then giggled.

Jon rolled his eyes and then took his envelope to a seat to await Dante’s return. Jenni remained at the counter and soon the two females were lost in a whispered conversation that Jon could not hear. He began reading through his new background history, but three young women all in their twenties came in through the door and introduced themselves to the admin assistant as sisters who had volunteered together and were reporting for their one-on-one discussions with the director. Although they had given a cursory nod to Jon and Jenni, there was no time for formal introductions before Dante emerged from Marcelo’s office.

Since the newcomers were waiting their turn, the trio from the Felis Wing all bid Sissy good-bye and then left the building. Jenni and Dante immediately began chatting animatedly about meeting the orange domestic cat, but Jon was lost in thought about the same experience. He had managed to remain civil and she had answered his questions in a friendly manner, but talking to the Fur had been one of the hardest things he had done since his arrival.

They had not been gone long enough for Kristen’s physical exam to be finished, so the three of them relaxed in front of the large screen and tuned in to an old classic movie already in progress to pass the time until it was their turn.

Several hours later, all four had experienced the most arduous, complete physical examinations that any of them had ever endured before. When they walked over to the cafeteria for lunch, Dante limped along, muttering beneath his breath at the indignity of it all. Although the opportunity was ripe for ribald humor, none of the others felt up to teasing him about it, having all gone through it themselves.

Kristen was interested in learning more about Jon’s new identity aside of his new name, but he had left the unread material in his room with plans to go over it thoroughly at a later time; there was not much that he could really tell her, so they chatted idly as they walked.

When they entered the cafeteria and headed for the serving line, Jon gave the room full of human and furman patrons barely a glance. He had not had much of a breakfast that morning and he was ready to see what sustenance the kitchen now had to offer.

The corner table where they had dined the night before was unavailable this time, so Jon led them to an empty one near the center of the room. As they set down their trays, several humans from a nearby table watched them with curious eyes: a young man, a young woman and an older couple.

“Welcome to the Institute!” one of them called out. Dante, Kristen, Jenni and Jon all looked up in unison as a young man with shoulder-length, wavy brown hair approached their table; he was dressed smartly in black slacks, a matching jacket, white shirt, western boots and a bolo tie. The expression on his face matched the sarcastic tone he had used to address them and he swaggered a bit before he stopped at Kristen’s elbow.

“Hello, darlin’,” he told the botanist with an exaggerated country accent that sounded as fake as he appeared. “Ah’m Travis Tyndall. What’s yer name?” He completely ignored her companions, squatting down beside her.

Kristen almost laughed in his face at his presentation, but Dante beat her to it with a loud snort. Travis turned to give him a look of disdain. “Pardon me, but I was talking to the lovely lady here.” He turned back to the object of his interest without waiting for a response. “Now, where were we, honey?”

Jon and Jenni exchanged amused looks and Dante looked indignant, but it was all Kristen could do to hide her amazement at this unexpected attention. “Hello, Mr. Tyndall,” she said grinning, “I’m Kristen. These are my friends, Jenni, Jon—”

“Ah’m charmed by your beauty, ma’am,” Travis interrupted, giving her blouse a brief glance and then making his eyebrows jump with a quick waggle. “I would welcome the opportunity to get to know you better, if’n ya know what I mean.”

“Are you one of the new volunteers,” Jenni asked him, “or do you work here?”

Travis looked back at her with a frown. “Do you mind?” he retorted, completely without his accent. “I was talking to this delicious lady.” Then, without skipping a beat, he turned back with a smile to a surprised Kristen, not seeing the look of astonishment in Jenni’s eyes. “How’s about you and me going back to my quarters for a little more intimate… lunch? You can have all you want, darlin’…”

Kristen had sudden mixed emotions about this guy. She was flattered to be on the receiving end of such attention from a good-looking guy when it was usually girls who looked like Jenni they ogled. However, his rudeness toward her housemates was uncalled for and unnecessary. Had she been there on her own, she might have been tempted by his silver tongue, but his comments were borderline lewd in front of friends.

“I appreciate the invitation,” she said quietly, “but perhaps some other time?”

“But I’m hungry for you now, sweetheart,” Travis replied with a mock whine. With just his eyes, he indicated that she should look down, and when she did, she saw his fingers lightly caressing his crotch. Kristen swallowed and shook her head.

“No, but thanks,” she said.

“Listen, beautiful…”

“I believe she said No to your advances,” Jenni told him with an edge to her voice.

Travis turned toward her with a sneer. “Why, were you hoping that I would go after you instead?” he retorted. “I prefer someone with meat on her bones, not some skinny silicone honey the likes of you! You aren’t as appetizing as she is.”

Jenni sputtered indignantly, but when Travis turned back to Kristen, the reception he received was cold indifference. Her eyes were narrowed beneath a furrowed brow and her lips were pressed together tight.

“Why don’t you just bugger off,” Dante growled over his uneaten lunch. “She doesn’t want you.”

Jenni stood up and faced the newcomer across the table. “Silicone!” she hissed, fists clenched. “The AHCP does not accept volunteers with enhancements, mister! There’s no silicone in me and I am not some honey to be attracted to you!”

Travis gave her chest a focused look and then he laughed. “Yeah, right!” He turned back to Kristen and said in a carrying whisper, “Look how riled up she is! She’s jealous that she can’t measure up to you, darlin’.”

The botanist fixed the man with look of pure disbelief. “Please, just leave,” she said with a shake of her head. “You’re not—”

“Please?” he asked, hoping the universal magic word would appeal to her. “I won’t bite… much.”

“No thank you,” she responded in a stronger tone, trying to shrink away from his closing distance. “You aren’t—”

“Come with me,” Travis interrupted again in a louder voice, all finesse gone. “I insist!” He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and started to pull her up.

The cafeteria grew quiet at his outburst and all eyes were fixed upon the Felis table.

“No… please!” Kristen tried again. “Let me go!” Travis ignored her resistance and heaved harder on her arm, pulling her up from her seat and eliciting a small cry of pain from the woman. Her chair fell over with a clatter.

Jonathan got to his feet and placed a firm grip on the man’s shoulder. “She does not want your attention,” he said in a low voice, “and you are hurting her.”

Travis glanced first at Jon’s hand and then up into his face with a sneer. “Get yer stinkin’ Irish fingers off me, you big toad!”

“Get yours off Kristen!” Dante retorted.

Travis jerked at his shoulder, but instead of complying, Jon swiftly turned the man to face him and then took hold of the other hand still gripping Kristen’s wrist. Without breaking eye contact, Jon pried Travis’ fingers from the short woman’s arm, squeezing them firmly.

Travis wrenched his aching fingers from Jon’s hand, his face purple with rage, and then he slammed his free fist into Jon’s middle for his interference; the larger man had expected something of the sort and had tightened up his stomach muscles just before the blow. His body swayed from the strike, but his feet were firmly planted. Without waiting for another blow, Jon slammed the flat of his palm hard against the other man’s sternum in a move so quick that Travis had not been able to anticipate.

Travis reeled backward and fell hard against an unoccupied chair. Both he and the chair sprawled out onto the tile floor, tumbling ungracefully beneath another table. Tyndall groaned and rolled over onto his back with both hands up to his chest, but did not get up immediately. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and it came away with a trail of blood from a split lip when he had hit the floor. Incensed, he tried to launch himself back upward, but hit the bottom of the table hard and collapsed again amidst a shower of sparks exploding within his cranium.

The older man who had been sitting at Travis’ table jumped up to help him, but no one else seemed interested in getting into the fray. Like those in the Felis Wing, these people were all new acquaintances in whichever Wing they belonged to, but there were none who knew Travis well enough to defend him against his own actions.

When Jon was certain that Tyndall was going to stay down for a moment, he turned to Kristen with a frown. “Are you okay?” he asked, noticing that she rubbed her wrist where Travis had gripped her. She looked up at him with wide, moist eyes and nodded in quiet surprise. He looked over at Jenni and Dante; they were both standing back away from the table.

“I’m going to take her back to the Wing,” he told them quietly. “We’ll get something to eat later.” Dante nodded in silent astonishment and Jenni mimicked his action without realizing it. “Come on, let’s go,” Jon whispered to Kristen. Without resisting, she took the hand that he offered to her and allowed herself to be led from the cafeteria amidst the clucking conversations surrounding them.

Chapter 13

A Cry in the Night

“Are you sure you don’t want a cold compress?” Marcy asked the dark-haired botanist. She stood at the top of the steps that led down into the pit where Kristen and Jon were sitting at each end of a curved couch, just out of the sun beam that streamed in from the overhead skylight.

Kristen looked up at her with a self-conscious smile. “No, I’m fine, but I find myself already wishing we had a stocked kitchen so I won’t have to go back to that cafeteria,” she replied.

“That won’t be until tomorrow, I’m afraid,” the attendant nurse told her. “Doctor Renwick and I are processing the results of your examinations today, so we won’t be able to work on the kitchen supplies until tomorrow morning. The information you all gave us on your current dietary needs will help me make up a shopping list.”

“When you go shopping, may I go with you?” Kristen asked hopefully.

Marcy gave her a patient smile. “I think that can be arranged. Now, if you don’t need anything more, I need to return to the lab.” Neither Kristen nor Jon could think of anything, so the older woman walked quietly across the room.

“Are you afraid Tyndall is going to harass you again,” Jon asked quietly, “or do you think you might take him up on his offer if we aren’t with you?”

Kristen looked down at her hands folded together in her lap. “I confess I was flattered to have his attention since I don’t get noticed much,” she admitted quietly, “but I think he’s proven himself to be quite the jerk. I really don’t want to see him again.”

“We’ll wait a bit and try the cafeteria again later,” Jon replied. “Everyone there at the time should be gone by then.”

Both of them looked up at a sound from the building’s entrance at the far end. They expected the return of their housemates at any time, but it was neither of them who rounded the corner and walked across the carpet toward them.

The expression on Marcelo Delgado’s swarthy face was as tight as the grip on the computer tablet he held in one hand. His small, dark eyes were smoldering.

“Good afternoon, Director,” Kristen said in hesitation.

“Is it?” Marcelo responded in an agitated voice. He stepped down into the sunken area, grabbed a chair from the table, and spun it around to face them. He sat down, a dark expression on his face, and briefly scratched at his Van Dyke beard.

“I have just come from the cafeteria,” he said in clipped tones, “where I understand you started a fight with another volunteer.”

“Ended a fight,” Jon calmly corrected. He and Kristen had expected to be interviewed over the incident and they had agreed they would simply tell the truth, embellishing nothing.

“Is that so? Mr. Tyndall claims that you provoked him needlessly.”

“He needs to get his story straight,” Jon growled, “or are you immediately taking his word for it due to Barrett’s criminal background?”

“Director,” Kristen interrupted, “it was Mr. Tyndall who started the incident. He threw the first punch because my housemates were defending me against his unwanted advances.” She held up her bare arm and offered up the finger-shaped bruises around her wrist as evidence. “He wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer and yanked me up out of my chair when I wouldn’t willingly go with him.”

Marcelo examined her wrist and pursed his lips for a moment, giving Jon a sidelong look. “Tyndall claims you were jealous and punched him in the chest because he was being friendly to Ms. Eisenberg.”

“Didn’t you talk to anyone else?” Jon challenged. “There was a crowd of people in the cafeteria. What about our housemates?”

“Your housemates were not present in the cafeteria while I was there,” Marcelo admitted. “Neither was anyone from Tyndall’s Wing.”

“They must have all jumped ship right after we did,” Jon mused, disgusted. “I doubt any of them wanted to hang around Tyndall once his marbles stopped spinning around his skull.”

“Since I’m the one at the center of this, let me tell you what happened,” Kristen stated in a stern tone. Marcelo gave her his full attention and Jon sat back to let her speak without interruption. She explained the incident in detail while Marcelo took notes on his tablet, his expression neutral.

At last, she ended by saying, “If Jon had not intervened, you might have had a different incident filed on your hands.” She held up her bruises once again as a reminder. “He refused to accept my rejection to his advances and was trying to force me to go with him. Is rape something you condone here at your Institute?”

Marcelo sat back in his chair, unconsciously defensive. “No, we do not allow this kind of behavior,” his voice now non-confrontational. He looked quickly from one to another and then offered, “Will both of you sign statements swearing that what you have told me is true?”

“Absolutely,” Jon answered, his arms still folded defensively across this broad chest.

Kristen nodded. “I will swear to it,” she said. “Travis Tyndall provoked the incident and it was his own fault as to how it ended. He could have easily walked away as I asked him to.”

The director pulled a thin camera from a shirt pocket. He gestured to Kristen to show the bruises and then he took several shots for his records. Marcelo put the camera away, got to his feet and shook his head in obvious frustration. “Thank you both,” he said. “I will see to it that he is reprimanded and that this goes into his permanent record.”

Jon looked at him, astonished. “You mean – he’s going to stay? Wouldn’t something like this get him kicked off the premises?”

The director gazed at him coldly. “You of all people, Mr. Sunset, should remember that we give second chances here. Mr. Tyndall will be given the opportunity to behave, just as it has been given to you.”

Kristen stood up and approached Marcelo. “I will sign the statement and will swear by it,” she said, her voice firm, “but I want a copy of the statement to put on file with my lawyer for public record against Tyndall.”

“That is your prerogative,” Marcelo replied.

“If Tyndall is given the opportunity to sign a contract with the AHCP, that means he may one day be assigned to a colony where he could do the same with someone else,” Kristen told him with a hard expression. “Do you really want that kind of strife in a new settlement before it has a chance to begin?”

“Ms. Eisenberg,” the director lectured, “it is my job to maintain order at this facility while you and others undergo the transformation and are given the proper education to survive somewhere out there on a new world. Once he leaves this place, he is no longer under my authority, or responsibility. However, you are free to file the incident with AHCP headquarters in Stockholm as you wish.”

“Can you block him from signing his contract?” Jon asked.

“I could, but I won’t,” Marcelo answered firmly. “I have far more reason to block yours, but I’m not going to do that either. With this incident, Tyndall has broken no rules beyond a juvenile disturbance with another volunteer.” Kristen started to object, but he held up a hand to silence her. “Yes, his intentions might have been blatant, Ms. Eisenberg, but Mr. Sunset managed to stop it before any actual crime was committed. Until such things do happen, I don’t have a legal leg to stand on in ousting Mr. Tyndall.”

“All that means is that you aren’t going to do anything to prevent a repeat occurrence,” Jon remarked. “So much for the safe atmosphere of the revered Furmankind Institute.” Before Marcelo could make an indignant reply, he turned to Kristen and said, “It looks like we may have to travel in pairs, or even a full pack, if we leave the Cat House.”

Kristen nodded and gave Marcelo a stony stare, lifting her chin slightly. “It appears so, since the administration won’t do anything to maintain order.” When Marcelo did not respond, she added, “All right, Director, you can prepare my statement and I will sign it. I just hope for the sake of others like me that people like Tyndall will behave after a mere slap on the wrist.” With that, she turned on her heel, stepped up out of the pit, and then headed for her bedroom without looking back.

Jon got to his feet and put his hands casually into the pockets of his jeans. “Have a good day, sir,” he said in dismissal with a deceptively pleasant smile.

The director narrowed his eyes at him for a moment, but then only said, “Mr. Sunset.” Without further conversation, Marcelo turned and made his way back across the room to the exit.

Jon watched him go until the man was lost to sight and then headed for his own quarters. As he reached the door, Kristen looked out at him from her room.

“Brian, I’m sorry you had to get involved,” she said quietly.

He gave her a good-natured smile. “It’s now Jon,” he reminded her. “I’m no longer Brian. As for the incident, think nothing of it. I was getting tired of Tyndall’s endless chatter.”

“Jon, are you saying you didn’t do it for me?” Kristen asked with a frown.

“I didn’t say that,” he responded with a shrug. “We’ve only just met, but I believe you’re a good person. Good people shouldn’t have to put up with yahoos like him, especially when they hurt others.”

The botanist reached out and put her fingers lightly on his arm. “Although you got involved in a fight, I think I am finding it difficult to imagine you as a criminal,” she said quietly. “I think you are a good man, Jon. Thank you for standing up for me.”

“I meant what I said earlier,” he said, gently brushing off her praise. “If you have a need to go out on the grounds anywhere, take me, Dante or even Jenni with you. There’s no need to tempt mister slapped-on-the-wrist if he has his sights set on you.”

“Do you really think he will try again?” she asked.

“All this will likely do is whet his appetite for challenge, either to get you or to get back at me. We’ll see.”

Kristen wrapped her arms around herself and looked down at her toes. “Perhaps the simplest solution would be to just let him have me so he can have his conquest and move on,” she muttered. “Guys like him don’t form relationships, but can be single-minded to get what they’ve been told they can’t have.”

Her comment surprised Jon and he tilted her chin up toward him gently with a fingertip. “Please don’t compromise,” he told her in concern. “If you give in to him, he’ll hold that over you from now on. If he can’t get you alone, he’ll eventually lose interest.”

“Hey, is anybody hungry?” called out a male voice. Jon and Kristen looked out across the saloon and saw Dante and Jenni walking toward them, each with a large plastic tray laden with food. Kristen grinned at Jon and then hurried down to the table in the pit.

“I sure am!” the botanist exclaimed to the pair. “Thank you!”

“We assumed you wouldn’t want to return to the cafeteria right away,” Jenni said, putting her tray on the table next to Dante’s, “so we brought you back a little of everything to choose from.”

Jon joined the group and felt his stomach rumble at the sight of it all; they had brought plenty of food. One tray included plates, dinnerware and several bottles of soda, both diet and fully leaded. “All this is for us?” he asked.

“All yours, killer!” Dante quipped. Jon gifted him with an evil eye, but the other man backed up with both hands raised, pleading. “Just kidding! Go ahead and eat all you want. We’ve already stuffed ourselves.”

The four of them took seats at the table. Jenni opened up soda bottles for each of them while Kristen and Jon filled up their plates.

“We just got a visit from the director,” Jon told them, buttering a roll.

“Yeah, he stopped us on the way in,” Dante replied. “He sounded like he wanted to interrogate us, but since our arms were full he let us go after only a few questions.”

“He did interrogate us,” Kristen retorted before lifting a fork of salad up to her mouth.

“Tyndall told him that I started the fight,” Jon added, “but we set the record straight.”

“That’s good,” Jenni said, sitting back in her chair with a drink. “We left right after you did, thinking it was better to vacate the premises before someone called Security.”

“So where did you go?” Kristen asked.

“We just took a stroll around the grounds, watching the Furs still out and about,” Jenni answered. “After a while we went back and peeked into the cafeteria, but by then there wasn’t many people still inside. Either they all bailed like we did or they just finished up their meals and left.”

“We appreciate you bringing all this back for us,” Kristen said with a smile after a sip of diet soda. Jon grunted in appreciation around a mouthful of food.  Dante grinned at Jon’s response, getting personal satisfaction out of the larger man’s guttural reply.

The group fell quiet while the pair ate, but after several moments Kristen looked over at Jenni in curiosity.

“May I ask you a personal question?” she asked quietly.

“What is it you want to know?”

“It’s not that I doubt you,” Kristen said slowly with a brief look at the males sitting with them, “but was what you said about the AHCP not accepting volunteers with enhancements true?”

Jenni raised a thin eyebrow and she gave a short chuckle. “I guess I’m the only one who read all the material on the Anthro Human Colonization Program,” she said in amusement. “Yes, it’s true. Implants, artificial limbs, organs and other modifications that include foreign substances are not affected by the transformation formula and can actually cause problems in the process. During the transformation, muscle tissue, bone structure, blood vessels, nerves and so on are not only being reconfigured with the longer DNA strand codes, some are also moving into new places. Artificial material in the body might inhibit any of these changes.”

“How do you mean?” Dante asked, curious.

Jenni boldly grasped her left breast through her blouse. “What do you think would happen if I’d actually had an implant in here and it wound up embedded halfway into my heart or a lung during the reconfiguration?”

Kristen’s face reddened in embarrassment and Jon suddenly shifted his gaze. Dante’s eyes, however, were glued to the breast she held in one hand. “Oh,” he finally murmured after a moment of staring, color creeping into his cheeks. “I hadn’t thought of that…”

Jenni laughed, put both hands upon the table and looked over at Kristen. “The same goes with people who have artificial limbs or organs. A replacement knee or shoulder joint, even a heart valve, is just as unaffected by the McEwen process as silicone implants. I have also heard that if you wear glasses beforehand, you won’t need them after the transformation, but a glass eye or cornea implant will keep you out of the program.”

Jon thought about this as he finished up the last of his meal. “What about dental work?”

“Same thing,” Jenni replied, “only you can’t be rejected for having dental fillings and crowns. From what I read in the material, those simply fall out when the dental reconfiguration takes place. The only danger there is if you sleep on your back and a filling drops down your throat.”

Dante gripped his throat with both hands and pantomimed gagging and coughing. Kristen and Jenni both laughed at his antics and even Jon chuckled at the sight. He had to admit that after the events of that afternoon it felt good to have some amusement.

From that point on the conversations turned light, each of them content to discuss things that had nothing to do with the events of that day. The encounter with Tyndall was stressful enough, but almost worse had been the arduous physical exams they had endured that morning that included time on the exercise equipment. Jon was clearly the most physically fit of the housemates, but even he was put through steps that taxed his endurance.

Doctor Renwick had explained that these tests would be used as a benchmark for comparison with the same set of examinations that would take place after the transformation was complete. Dante had wondered why the exams were beginning now, since none of them had signed final contracts, but Nurse Marcy informed them that it would be necessary to have the information before the process began. If any of them opted out with the escape clause, the data would be discarded, but once the contracts were signed, the process would begin immediately and the information would be needed at that time.

The thing that worried each of them was there would be one final examination just before the initial injection of the formula, and none of them could imagine what else there might be left to examine. “They looked at me inside and out!” Dante complained. “I wasn’t even offered a cigarette afterwards.”

They were free to do what they wanted the rest of the day, so in time each of them went their separate ways. Jenni retired to her room to read a book she found in the Felis Wing library, Kristen took a nap, and Dante watched another movie on the saloon’s big screen.

Confident he could handle himself if he met up with Tyndall again, Jon left the building and took a personal tour of the grounds. Despite what he had said in the conversations he had held with Marcelo and his housemates, and that he had mustered up the inclination to talk to Sissy as if she were still human, Jon Sunset still harbored a personal resentment against Furs. It had only been a day and a half since he had escaped death, so it was going to take more time before he actually felt comfortable around them.

He watched small groups of them doing things outdoors that looked remarkably ordinary. They did grounds keeping, studied beneath trees, played sports, sat on benches, chatted together over snacks and exercised in the cool evening air. There was even a small group congregated in a clearing in the trees, constructing a geodesic modular structure that he assumed was practice for setting up a colony building.

Despite the freedom he seemed to have at the Institute, he could not keep from comparing it to the prison. He could not leave whenever he wished and a fence still surrounded the grounds where he was kept. His walk had taken him out along a road that was blocked by tall iron gates flanked by a pair of sturdy stone guard shacks. Outside the gates was a moderate-sized gravel parking lot bordered on three sides by thick woodlands, and a two-lane asphalt road disappeared in a winding avenue out through the forest. Several of the small carts were parked inside the gate to ferry visitors to and from the central complex of buildings. Personally-owned vehicles were not permitted on the grounds and only the rare supply truck or passenger bus was waved through as needed.

Jon watched the guards covertly from the cover of forestation, silently wondering about the need for such security. Was the high fence and gates designed to keep intruders out or was it intended to keep the anthro-human hybrids inside?

With such thoughts whirling around within his mind, Jon returned to the Felis Wing where the others had gathered again at the central pit, discussing ideas on how to get their next meal without running into Tyndall. It was finally decided that Jenni and Dante would get Jon and Kristen supper as before, but that the pair would have to go back out into the open come morning.

***  

Later that night, Jon awoke from a dream-filled sleep troubled by mental images of the days to come. Bleary-eyed, he glanced over at the clock marking time beside his bed; it was two-fourteen. He closed his eyes again and turned over onto his back, but now that he was awake, his bladder signaled its need for attention.

As he sat up on the edge of the bed, he snared a white tee shirt from the back of the desk chair and slipped it over his broad shoulders. He pulled at the back of the boxers he had slept in and then walked out of his bedroom. The saloon was calm with the absence of his housemates, the skylight dark and only the soft glow of dim nightlights to guide his way to the restroom.

Moments later, his need was sated and he walked quietly back across the saloon toward his quarters, his feet padding gently on the soft carpeting. Just as he approached his door, he paused to listen. The large open room was as silent as a museum, except for a faint sound to his right.

Tilting an ear to identify and locate the sound, Jon stepped lightly toward the next room. He stopped beside the door and noted that it was slightly ajar. Unless he was mistaken, he was sure what he heard was the sound of soft crying.

He did not want to wake the others by knocking, so he pushed the panel open a little more and called out in a whisper. “Kristen?”

There was a brief sob, half choked off at the sound of her name, but then the darkened room fell silent. “Kristen,” he whispered again, “are you okay?”

There was a muffled response. Jon could not tell if she had invited him in or had asked him to leave. Tentatively, he pushed the panel open further, but only to speak again. “I will leave you alone,” he whispered, “but my door is open if you need to talk to someone.”

He began to close the panel behind him, but then he heard her response in a clearer voice. “Please, don’t leave me,” she said in a plaintive whisper.

Jon let himself into the room, unconsciously closing the door behind him. In the soft glow of a clock with large blue numbers, he could see her huddled beneath the covers on the far side of the bed, so he made his way around the furniture and then knelt down on the carpeting beside her.

He stretched out a tentative hand to her shoulder to gently let her know he was beside her. Kristen reached up and closed her fingers around his wrist, a little tighter than he was expecting.

“Kris, what is it?” he asked gently.

“I… I’m afraid…” she replied into the darkness. She tugged on his hand and pulled it away from her shoulder, only to pull it closer to her face. He caressed her cheek lightly with his fingers and felt the wetness of her tears.

Jon leaned in until his chin was near her pillow. “Don’t worry about that scumbag,” he whispered confidently. “We won’t let Tyndall near you again.”

“N-no,” she stammered, sliding her hand up around the back of his neck to pull him closer. Jon suddenly had the impression that she was about to kiss him, but instead, she clung to him and cried on his shoulder.

He swallowed in discomfort from the angle that he knelt over her bed, so he shifted his weight until it rested against the edge of the mattress. “I don’t understand,” he whispered.

“It’s n-not him,” she managed to reply. “It’s m-me… I… I don’t know if I c-can…”

Jon frowned. She was not making any sense, so he pushed himself upward. She continued to cling to him, so he gently pulled her upright and then slid onto her bed to sit beside her more comfortably.

“Calm down, Kris,” he whispered into her ear, feeling awkward sliding an arm behind her to lend some kind of support. She buried her head up against his chest and let a few tears stain his shirt. “What’s the matter, if it isn’t him?”

Kristen swallowed and managed to quell the waterworks after a moment. His strong arm felt comforting across the back of her nightgown, and it seemed to give her the encouragement she needed. “Bria—uh, Jon,” she said weakly, “I don’t know if I can go through with it.”

Jon blinked in sudden understanding. “Having second thoughts about the transformation?” he asked. When she only nodded, he held her closer with one arm and then gently brushed her dark hair from her face with the other. “I can understand that,” he whispered. “I’ve had a few nightmares of my own about it, even tonight.”

The botanist stirred and lifted her head to look at him. The numbers of the clock cast a pallid glow upon her features, reflecting in the moisture rimming her eyes. “It was not a nightmare,” she explained quietly, her whispers a little stronger than they had been. “I kept thinking about what Doctor Renwick told us. It’s going to be painful.”

“Yes,” Jon whispered back, “but he didn’t act as if it would be all that big a deal.”

“How can it be anything but painful?” she asked. “Our entire bodies will be mutating. Everything about us will be stretching, compressing and remolding into a new form, even as our DNA will be changing at the molecular level with our chemical makeup in flux. That’s got to hurt, Jon! Surely he’s watched others go through that kind of agony!”

He nodded quietly. “I guess Renwick didn’t want to frighten us needlessly,” he replied, “but I think, deep inside, we all felt he was sugar-coating the truth.”

“I don’t know what I should do,” she whispered, still looking up at him. “What do you think I should do?”

Jon frowned. “You already know what I think,” he replied. “Get out while you can. Take that escape clause and keep your humanity. You don’t have to endure that kind of pain.”

Fresh tears welled up her eyes. “I should,” she answered, “but I don’t know if I can go back to my old life.” She closed her eyes and then laid her cheek against his chest. “I… I’ve already burned bridges to get here.”

“Bridges can always be rebuilt,” he whispered, gently stroking her hair, “or you can find other ways to cross those rivers.”

“What about you?” she asked. “Could you do that if you had the chance?”

“No,” was her companion’s immediate response. “My last burned bridge took a life with it. There’s no going around this for me and no escape clause. I’ve got to go through the pain and torture, but you, Kris, you do have the choice to avoid it.”

“I have no money,” her voice choked up, “I have no home, no job and no friends left. I have nowhere to go.”

“But you won’t have the pain.”

“There will always be pain,” Kristen told him with a swallow, “just different kinds.” She looked up at him again with fresh tears. “In truth, I really don’t have an escape clause any more than you do. I really can’t leave, even though I want to.”

“Huh? Why?”

“The clause is in my contract,” she stated, “but I can’t claim it.”

Jon raised an eyebrow at her. “Okay, you’ve lost me.”

She lowered her head again, sighing deeply. “I was — unwise with my finances, and I had a swarm of creditors continually banging on my door. That car of mine sitting out in the parking lot is the cause of one of them. To avoid bankruptcy, I asked my boyfriend for some help; I thought he could loan me some money, but instead he put me in touch with some people he knew.”

“Uh oh…” Jon breathed.

“Yeah,” Kristen admitted. “They got the collection agencies off my back, but some people got hurt and it resulted in a situation worse than the one I had before with the money I now owe to them.”

“So what did you do?”

“I ran,” she replied with a sob. “They almost caught up to me a few times, so I did the only thing left to me. I signed up with the AHCP!”

“For a new identity?” Jon asked.

“I hadn’t thought of it for that. No, it was for the money,” Kristen answered. “If I can make it five years and get the reward, I can settle my debt with them.”

“You won’t ever be coming back to Earth,” he reminded her. “Why worry about paying them back now?” She only shook her head as fresh tears soaked through his tee shirt. “Even if you pay them back everything plus interest,” he mused quietly, “you’ll still be stuck in a Fur body. That’s not something you will ever get out of.”

“I know… I know… but it was the only thing I could think of,” she confessed. “By then, I’ll be used to it and maybe I’ll just stay with the colony or transfer to another. I… I just don’t know if I can go through the pain to get it.”

“I don’t know anything about the kind of people you dealt with, other than what I’ve seen in movies,” Jon told her, “but if there are any similarities, I can certainly see you’re in danger staying human. Listen, Kris… although you and I have different reasons for being here, it looks like neither one of us has a choice. We are going to go through this together. When the pain gets too much for either of us to bear, we’ll be here to help each other through it all.”

She looked up at him. “Promise?”

Jon made a small crossing motion over his heart and held up a hand, palm facing outward. “I promise,” he said.

Her heart warmed at the small childish gesture and she smiled up at him, wiping her eyes with the back of a hand. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Jon gave her a gentle smile of his own and then started to get up. “Are you going to be okay now?” he asked.

The botanist suddenly clung to him with renewed strength. “Yes, but don’t go,” she replied in sudden alarm.

Jon raised an eyebrow. “Uhm…” he started to say.

“Please stay here,” she asked in a small whisper. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

“Kris, I don’t…”

The woman shook her head. “Just hold me,” she pleaded sadly. “Nothing more. Just sleep beside me, please.”

It was Jon’s turn to swallow. He was not sure this was such a good idea, but it was difficult to turn down that pair of imploring dark eyes in the dim light of the clock. Silently promising himself that he would do nothing more than provide the comfort of a companion, he gave her a quiet nod.

Kristen made room for him in the bed and then he slid in beside her. Once he was situated on his back with his head upon one of her pillows, she cuddled up beside him, her head on his shoulder and one arm stretched across his chest. He wrapped an arm around her and gently stroked her hair, closing his eyes.

After several long moments she sighed contentedly, and then in a relaxed voice told him, “I like it when you call me Kris.”

Chapter 14

No Escape

Jon had no more nightmares that night, had not dreamed at all for that matter, but when he moved toward consciousness two things immediately surfaced in his mind. The first was a growing pressure that needed attention and the second was the numbness of his right arm.

He opened his eyes slowly in the darkness of the room, groggily wondering why the security lights were off outside his cell. They were never extinguished, even in the event of a power failure. The prison complex was equipped with a robust bank of backup generators that precluded a total blackout.

It was only when his eyes focused on a set of blue numbers beside the bed that he began to doubt his presence in his old prison cell, and cognizance finally penetrated his sleep-fogged mind.

“Right,” he mumbled hoarsely, remembering the Furmankind Institute. Feeling the need to empty his bladder, Jon started to get up, but something immobilized him. His right arm seemed to be pinned down and he tugged at it in sudden agitation, but when he heard a muffled groan, he stopped suddenly. Only then did he remember where he had spent the night.

Although he and Kristen had done nothing more than merely sleep beside one another, it had been over a year since he had last shared a bed with anyone. The thought put an instant scowl upon his face when he remembered that the last person had been Rebecca.

Gently this time so he would not disturb the dark-haired woman who slept peacefully beside him, Jon managed to slide his arm out from beneath her. Once free, he sat up slowly and then slipped out of the bed, rubbing his arm and flexing his fingers. He glanced over at the clock and frowned at the hour.

It was nearly seven o’clock, but it was his usual habit to get up at five every morning to begin the exercise routine that he had followed for years, even while in prison. None of the Felis Wing bedrooms was equipped with windows or skylights to the outside, so the room was still as dark as it had been in the early hours of the morning. He could imagine that his alarm had beeped at the proper time in his own room even though he had not been there to hear it.

Using only the light from the numbers of Kristen’s clock, he felt his way along the bed toward the door. When he opened the panel and stepped out into the saloon, his eyes were bombarded with bright morning sunshine illuminating the room from the overhead skylight. It took a moment for his vision to adjust, and when it did, Dante was looking up at him in surprise from the table in the sunken area of the room. The younger man set down a coffee cup beside the folder of photographs he had been looking through and gave him a sudden smirk.

“Couldn’t find the way to your own room last night, I see,” he said as Jon began to make his way toward the restroom. “That didn’t take long, did it?”

Jon stopped beside the pit and scowled down at him. “What are you implying?” he growled, his voice still hoarse from nighttime snoring.

“C’mon now. It sure didn’t take you long to move in on Kristen after saving her from the big, bad Travis yesterday!” Dante cackled with waggling eyebrows. Then, in a lower, conspiratorial voice, he asked, “How well did she reward you last night?”

Jon’s eyes grew dark. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dante shrugged and brushed toast crumbs from the front of his green button-up shirt. “No, I suppose seeing you exit the room of one of your female housemates in your underwear means nothing at all.”

Jon looked down and suddenly realized that he was not in his athletic workout shorts, but was indeed clad only in a tee shirt and a pair of blue cotton boxer shorts. Jon did not embarrass easily, but when he looked back at Dante, he could feel his cheeks redden. This only served to make the other man laugh out loud.

Knowing there was nothing he could say that would change Dante’s perception, Jon simply shook his head. “Nothing happened,” he said truthfully.

“Uh huh, I believe you,” Dante replied with an innocent expression, idly scratching at his pencil-thin mustache with a fingertip.

Jon had been prepared to just walk away and let the younger man think what he wanted, but that final reply of sarcasm got to him. He stepped down into the pit and then leaned across the table, leveling a fist at Dante. “Let’s see if I can rearrange that face for you without the furmankind process.”

Dante’s eyes lit up in personal satisfaction for getting the red-haired man’s ire, but he raised both hands in submission. “Sorry, old man,” he said hastily. “I surrender.”

Jon glared at him for a moment longer before he snorted and departed the pit. He still needed to use the toilet, but decided it would be more prudent if he were not parading around in his boxers. He returned to his bedroom, turned off his still-beeping alarm clock, switched out the underwear for his athletic shorts and then headed back for the restroom. If the past couple of days were any indication of their routine, he should still have time to get in a workout and shower before they would be needed for anything.

An hour later, Jon emerged from the restroom freshly showered, shaved and fully dressed. Kristen and Jenni had both showered while he had been working out, so there had been no awkward moments in the restroom this time. The two women occupied seats at the table, quietly eating a light breakfast.

As Jon descended into the pit, he and Kristen exchanged a private smile that did not go unnoticed by Jenni. The blonde nibbled on a bagel and watched the two of them covertly. She cast a quick glance toward Dante, but the man was immersed in an article loaded on a magazine reader at one end of a curved couch.

“Good morning, everyone,” said a voice. All four of them looked toward the laboratory and saw Doctor Renwick approaching with several printed documents in one hand and a tablet in the other. He was dressed in a pair of black slacks, white shirt and thin black tie beneath a white lab coat, and his copper hair glinted under the illumination from the skylight.

Each of the housemates responded with similar greetings, all curious about his presence. Over the few days they had been there, the doctor rarely made appearances unless there was something specific that was involved with the upcoming transformation, leaving the more personal duties to his associate. Marcy stepped out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee and a bagel of her own, her ever-present, pink computer tablet tucked beneath one elbow. She wore a simple set of scrubs that matched the color of her tablet case, and soft-soled slippers.

“What’s up, Doc?” Dante asked with a silly grin, setting his magazine aside. The corner of Renwick’s mouth quivered at the old joke, having long been accustomed to it during his years as a scientist and a physician.

“I hope each of you have had time to think on your individual reasons for being here,” he said, stepping down into the pit. He set his tablet on the table next to the folder between Kristen and Jenni. He handed sheets of paper around to each of the volunteers.

“Here is a hardcopy of your contracts, ladies and gents. Each is a copy of the standard AHCP contract each of you initially signed before coming to the Institute.” He opened up a clamshell cover of his computer tablet and pointed to one of its two screens. “There are four tabs on this biometric screen, one labeled for each of you. After you’ve read over the printed copy, come up here and open your folder. There are two boxes on the last page of your contract awaiting your thumbprint. You will sign only one and leave the other blank; both are labeled clearly. Which line you mark with a thumbprint will depend upon your decision, whether to continue with the process to become furmankind, or to claim the escape clause and remain fully human.” He handed out identical printouts to Dante, Jenni and Kristen, but to Jon he gave one that had extra instructions handwritten in red ink.

“If you choose to escape, there will be no disgrace or penalty of any kind. You will receive free transportation back to your place of residence and then you may return to your former lives. However, by choosing the escape clause, you will be prohibited from signing up again for two years.”

The doctor put his hands into the pockets of his coat and added, “For those of you who choose to go through with it, your lives will be bound to the Anthro Human Colony Program for the rest of your existence. As a fully-transformed Fur, you may be called upon at any time with orders to join a colony on another world as needed, whether one just starting out or one already established. Upon reaching the end of a five-year service at a colony, each of you will receive a prize reward of one million dollars that will be deposited into an interstellar account, where you may draw upon the funds as Credits.”

“Credits?” Kristen asked. “Is that an actual currency?”

The doctor looked at her patiently. “As the term suggests, the currency is nothing more than a credit account, although it is actually closer to a debit account. Instead of trading in physical money, the established Terran colonies use Credits instead of the various currencies of Earth.”

“What is the exchange rate?” Jenni asked.

“It will be different in the countries of each of the AHCP locations, but in local exchange, it is currently two Credits to the dollar,” Renwick answered.

“Sweet!” Dante exclaimed, sitting on the edge of his couch cushion. “That makes our prize two million in Credits!” When the others looked at him in amusement, he shrugged. “I know it’s the same, but I like that it sounds like more.”

“Can the Credits be used to make purchases on Earth?” Kristen asked in curiosity.

“Yes, but like any other currency, you would need to go through a financial institution to convert them to the currency in whichever country you’re in. I’m sure you’ve heard that many of the world governments are considering going to Credits and completely doing away with printed or minted currency, but there are other nations who are steadfast against it. The off-world colonies, however, have been on this system for several years now.”

Jon remained quiet, knowing all this was a mere formality for himself. There would be no escape clause on his contract and there would be no million-dollar prize reward for simply surviving five years on a potentially hostile world. He assumed the contract on the tablet with his name on it was merely a prop for the sake of the doctor, the nurse and his housemates.

“Anyway, it’s now time for you to decide,” Renwick announced. “Look over the wording of the contract as closely as you wish, and then come put your thumbprint in the box that is appropriate to you. I can give you time to read through it thoroughly, and I can answer any questions you might have, but I will need your decisions no later than an hour from now.”

Kristen took the printout to the couch and sat down with it. Although this was only a sample without her name on it, she knew it mirrored the wording of the official electronic document. Jenni took her copy to another couch cushion to do the same, but Dante could not get up to the table quick enough, stumbling against an empty chair. Jon took a seat at the central table and settled in to see what kind of a contract had been drawn up specifically for him. Renwick moved back to the upper level and had a quiet conversation with Marcy in hushed tones as so not to disturb the others as they read.

Dante had only given a cursory glance at the paper copy before he slid the doctor’s tablet over to him and tapped the folder with his name on it. When the document came up on the screen, he flipped the image to the final page to a couple of side by side boxes. He applied his thumbprint to one of the boxes and then tapped Submit to record the selection. With a satisfied smile, he plopped back down on the couch merrily and picked up his magazine reader to resume where he had left off.

Kristen and Jenni both went over every word of the contract, even looking back over the section they had previously signed; neither wished to be tied down to anything against their knowledge if they signed up.

As Jon read through his contract, his eyebrows skirted up higher on his brow. Although he had not previously signed the document as the others had, there was a handwritten note in red from Marcelo beside a line on the second page that directed that he would need to thumb-sign there on the official document. Although the two of them knew he was not a volunteer, it was necessary that he continue to play the part for the doctor, the nurse and the Institute’s legal department.

Suspicious that the electronic copy might be different from his printout, he opened his file on the doctor’s tablet and did a cursory read through it as well. Not only did the official document appear to be the genuine contract, Jon discovered that even the prize reward was guaranteed to him upon the completion of five years as a Fur in a colony settlement!

Nothing in the document gave away his true background, and everything was made out to his new identity. Although he had no actual choice in the matter, even the escape clause was present on the final page. He re-read the contract to make sure he was not deceiving himself and by the time he had finished scrutinizing it thoroughly, Jon Sunset was satisfied that everything was in order.

He applied his thumbprint to the first box on the second page as instructed and then he flipped to the last page. At the bottom of the document were two boxes. The first on the left was clearly labeled to claim the escape clause, and a box on the right to accept the contract as written.

His thumb hovered over the left-hand box for just a moment, merely out of personal satisfaction that it was even there to begin with, but then he set his print to the biometric screen on the other box to sign at his new name, memories of the Colorado prison still fresh in his mind.

He slid the tablet away from him and then moved to one of the couches to wait. Almost simultaneously, both Jenni and Kristen got up and moved to thumb-sign their documents. After they had finished, Renwick stepped back down into the pit and retrieved his tablet, giving each of the housemates a brief look to acknowledge that all had finished. When he looked down at the screen, he flipped to the last page of each contract and showed them to his nurse. Marcy nodded with each one, syncing the documents with the other tablet she had brought with her.

When Renwick looked back down at the expectant faces, he gave each of them a rare warm smile. “Congratulations,” he said. “All four of you are now the newest members of the Felis Wing. None of you have chosen to take an escape.”

“How long until the process begins?” Dante asked.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Renwick replied. “Before that, however, Marcy will need some information from each of you while I discuss your contracts with the director. I will make sure you all receive copies after he has counter-signed.”

As the doctor walked away, the nurse moved down into the pit and then sat down upon the top step, setting a compact camera on the floor beside her and opening up her pink clamshell tablet across her lap. Marcy smiled at each of them and then gestured toward the folder on the table.

“Now that you have all legally confirmed your decisions to join furmankind, I need to know which of the felines each of you have chosen,” she said. “Once I have your choice, some of the blood we took from you during your physical exams will be used to produce a hybrid DNA strand that will immediately begin replicating itself once it is injected back into your body in a goetazine solution. Once there, the DNA code of every single cell in your body will be forcibly rewritten with the new code, and then your body will begin a months-long reconfiguration into the Fur that you have chosen.”

Jon remained in his seat on the couch, but Dante practically lurched forward past everyone else. Marcy smiled at him in amusement as he touched the screen of her tablet with a finger and said, “Bengal white tiger!” The nurse chuckled at his enthusiasm and entered his response beside his name with a thin stylus.

When she looked over at Jenni, the blonde woman returned her smile and said, “Put me down as a spotted leopard. I have always known this would be my fur coat of choice.” Marcy wrote down Jenni’s preference and then looked over at Kristen, but the dark-haired botanist was flipping through the folder again, apparently looking for something in particular. When she did not look up at her, the nurse turned her gaze to the remaining male.

Jon’s right eyebrow twitched for a moment, as he actually considered naming a feline other than the one he was sentenced to become, but he was fairly certain he would receive one specific type of DNA no matter which cat he chose.

“Mountain lion,” he said, fulfilling his sentence. “A cougar or a puma,” he added almost absently.

When Marcy marked down his response, everybody looked back over to Kristen, the last to give her choice. When she realized that everyone was staring at her expectantly, she looked up with a tinge of color to her cheeks.

“Kristen,” the nurse said gently, “it’s time to decide.”

“Uhm…” the botanist began. She swallowed and glanced briefly over at Jon before she finally worked up the courage to respond. “I’m going be a mountain lion, too,” she said quietly.

Jenni’s eyes widened in mild surprise, but Dante suddenly grinned and laughed aloud. “I should have seen that coming!” he exclaimed in delight. Almost as one, Jenni, Dante and Marcy looked over to see the look of abject disbelief on Jon’s face.

He cleared his throat and blinked before looking at the woman he had comforted the night before. “Kris, don’t you think you should go with something else?” he asked quietly. “I thought you were going to choose one of the smaller cats – a bobcat or a lynx, I believe you said.”

Kristen retained her look of embarrassment and nervously entwined her fingers within her long black hair. “Last night when I was scared,” she reminded him, “you promised to help see me through this. We both promised to help one another when we hit rough waters.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Jon replied, “but you don’t have to become the same —”

“The best way you and I can help one another is if we are both of the same anthro species,” she interrupted with a voice stronger in determination. She looked over at Marcy. “I stand by my decision. Mountain lion.”

“Mountain lion it is,” the nurse remarked. She looked around the small group and held up her pink computer tablet in one hand. “Any last minute changes?” she asked. Kristen avoided the imploring look that Jon gave her, but no one else spoke up. “Okay, then,” said the nurse. “One spotted leopard, one white tiger, and two mountain lions.”

Jon swallowed hard in disbelief. Kristen obviously did not realize what she had just done to him, but with Marcy and the doctor present, he could not say anything.

“Doctor Renwick and I will get started on your blood work as soon as he gets back,” Marcy continued. “The initial formula should be ready by tomorrow afternoon and then we will begin with you one at a time.”

“Tomorrow? You can combine DNA strands in a day?” Jon asked incredulously, forcing his attention back to the discussion.

“Nothing to it with the right technology,” Marcy replied.

“What should we do until then?” Jenni asked. “With nothing much to do over the past few days, I’m getting bored just waiting around.”

“Nice of you to ask,” Marcy responded with a raised eyebrow. “On your first night here, you were told that we would all be joining in together on housekeeping duties here in the Wing. This would be a good time for the four of you to get started. All of you have tracked in grass and dirt from your excursions outside, your restroom is already beginning to smell and a few dishes are starting to stack up in the kitchen sink. I would imagine that each of you might need to do some laundry as well. This would be a good time to get started.”

Dante sat down at the table. “May I ask a question?”

“Anything.”

“We’ve seen you and the doctor come and go through the lab, but never inside the restroom,” he said. “Do you have your own bathrooms in your quarters?”

Marcy smiled. “Yes, we both have a suite of rooms that includes a personal bathroom each,” she confirmed. “We also have doors to the outside.”

“Wow, why don’t we have those kinds of rooms?” Dante wanted to know.

The nurse leaned toward him. “Because you will be in these rooms for less than a year,” she explained, “while Doctor Renwick and I have permanent residence.”

“How long have the two of you been here?” Kristen asked.

“The doctor has been at this Institute for six years, and I’ve been here for the past four. I served my residency at the European Institute outside of Stockholm, Sweden before coming here.”

“You’re from Sweden?” Dante asked.

Marcy smiled. “No, I’m from Connecticut.”

“Have you always worked with the Felis or have you worked with the other Furs too?” Jenni wanted to know.

“Always the Felis,” Marcy replied. “Don and I both specialize in anthrofelis human physiology.” She picked up the compact camera beside her, stood up and then hopped up the steps to the upper level of the saloon.

“Now, if you will all follow me over to the fireplace, I want to take a picture of each of you.”

“Why?” Jenni asked curiously, getting to her feet.

Marcy smiled. “Before and after images,” she replied. “I’m going to hang your pictures in the entrance hall with the others who have come through here.”

The foursome followed her to the fireplace and she had each of them stand before it. The task took only a few minutes and soon they were all heading back to the central pit.

“Before I go,” Marcy told them, “I need each of you to give me an idea of the kinds of food you like to prepare for your meals. If you have any food allergies, I need to know before I go shopping.” They spent several minutes with her making a list on her tablet, but when she had enough to go on, she held up a hand.

“Thank you, all. Now, if you will excuse me, I need get started on your formulas. You can begin on your housework at any time. There’s a closet of cleaning supplies in the laundry room opposite the appliances.”

All four of them watched the nurse walk across the room, and it was not until she had disappeared through the double doors of the lab that any of them looked away. Dante moved to a couch and plopped down on the cushions with a smile that threatened to become a permanent fixture upon his face.

“Two milli-yon credits,” he said, rubbing his hands together greedily, “come to Papa!”

Jenni had other thoughts on her mind than money. She looked sideways, first at Kristen, and then at Jon. “Well…” she said in a sly tone, “it appears that two of our numbers have already paired up for the duration!”

“Yeah, that’s right!” Dante said in boisterous reply. He boldly looked at Kristen and gave her a toothy grin. “You’ve already chosen your mate! That makes it awfully convenient when you’re planning to start a colony somewhere – the Adam and Eve of mountain lions on a distant world!”

Jon made a choking sound deep in his throat and Kristen’s eyes widened in further embarrassment; Dante’s declaration took them both off guard. Before either of them could respond, Jenni plopped down on the couch beside the younger, dark-haired man.

“Since those two are paired up,” she said playfully, “that leaves you and me.”

Dante looked at her in immediate surprise, but then a feral grin practically crawled across his face. He swiveled on his cushion so that he could lie across the couch, and he laid his head back upon her chest to rub his cheek against her. “I accept,” he proclaimed loudly, “but I want to remind you that as a male cat, I have no plans for a lifetime pairing.”

Jenni smiled down at him and traced a fingertip along the pencil-thin mustache that decorated his upper lip. “Oh, I’m sure I’ll tire of you after a while myself,” she retorted with a mischievous wink, “but I don’t mind a little playtime for now.”

“I wonder what our kittens will look like,” Dante mused. “Will they be tigers with spots or leopards with stripes?”

Kristen sat open-mouthed at the sudden turn of events. She had never claimed a pairing with Jon, although her decision to make a lifetime commitment to the shape of a mountain lion sure made it seem that way. Granted, she had never really liked Dante, and she doubted the two of them would ever be close friends, but she had never once considered a pair mating with her other male housemate either.

While Jenni and Dante made increasingly suggestive comments to one another that were obviously meant for no other purpose than verbal banter, Kristen forced herself to look over at Jon. The look in his eyes as he tried to bore holes into the backs of Dante and Jenni’s heads with his gaze was anything but friendly or even simple embarrassment. She felt a lump well up in her throat, not at all sure how she thought she should feel right then.

As for Jonathan Sunset, the broad-shouldered man harbored thoughts that were anything but indecisive at that moment. After the early-morning conversation with his frightened housemate, he had felt as if she were a kindred spirit of sorts due to her own troubled background, but he had fostered no romantic desires for her. Following such a life-altering emotional disaster, Jon had been intimate with no one since Rebecca had betrayed him.

Little by little over the past three days, he had made an effort to think of the Furs surrounding them merely as furry people, but after Kristen dropped her bombshell, and then Jenni and Dante picked up the threads to run with them, Jon’s old hatreds resurfaced. They had all just willing signed away their humanity, and with what they were about to become, there was no way in Creation that he would ever take on a mate as one of them.

Chapter 15

Point of No Return

The old building vibrated in resonance with the low rumble of the thunderstorm that raged over the region of the Adirondack Mountains where the Furmankind Institute resided. Having no windows but the overhead skylight to see to the outside, Jon Sunset stood in the open door of the building’s solitary public exit, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

Although late in the morning, the skies over the forest were dark as night, save for the frequent lightning that illuminated the roiling clouds from within. Only the occasional electrical bolt would arc to a tree or mountain peak below, but most of the energy remained high overhead. Hard sheets of rain fell, drenching everything outside in a late season storm accompanied by a fierce cold wind.

The change in weather matched Jon’s mood. He had been sullen since the previous day, and although he had helped his housemates clean up the Wing, his responses to anything that was said to him were short and to the point. Neither Jenni nor Dante could figure out why his disposition had turned dark, but Kristen was certain that she was the cause. He had barely spoken a handful of words to her since announcing her choice to become a mountain lion like him.

She had accompanied Marcy to grocery supply to stock up their kitchen later in the day, and during a private conversation, the botanist had issued the request to change her choice. Marcy reminded her that she had already had several days to make her up her mind, but that it was now too late to change; the formula was already processing and it would be administered the next afternoon. The nurse was sorry that things had not worked out as well as Kristen had hoped, but as she had stated herself when the time had come to choose, the decision would stand.

When he was not needed for housekeeping chores or called to eat his meals, Jon stayed in his room or wandered the grounds alone. He spoke to no one any more than necessary, and even when Kristen had gone to his room to talk with him privately about her decision he had no interest in listening to her, feigning a headache with a request to be left alone.

Later that evening when he had gone to the exercise room for his nightly workout, she had followed him inside. She did not try to talk to him but merely watched him while he went through his routine, lost in her own thoughts. Eventually she left so he could shower afterward, and disappeared into her own room.

Conversely, Jenni and Dante were more boisterous than usual. With the new understanding between them, the younger man had taken to teasing her and chasing her about the saloon. Jenni seemed to enjoy the play, as it allowed her a distraction from the melancholy mood of her other housemates.

The nightmares had returned to Jon’s dreams during the night, so he had spent the majority of the early morning hours watching old classic movies on the screen in his room. Before the sun had risen, however, thunderstorms moved over the Adirondacks and it had been raining all morning. Sometime later that day the injection would take place, and then he would be past the point of no return, contract or not. The penalty for death OF a Fur was death BY a Fur, or in his case, death AS a Fur…

Now that the kitchen was stocked for their personal diets, none of them had a reason to leave the Wing in such weather for a meal, but Jon was bored and the climate had matched his mood. It was close to lunchtime, but he had no interest for preparing his own meal at this time.

Grabbing an umbrella from the canister by the door, Jon opened it beneath the awning and then stepped through the puddles across the walkway to head to the large stone building next door. The rain drove down upon the umbrella and wind whipped the raindrops at him from the sides, so by the time he arrived at the cafeteria, his jeans and the back of his shirt were all wet. The western boots had kept his feet dry, at least.

He shook off the umbrella, folded it down, and then left it in a large clay container just inside the door that held others that all looked alike. He stomped his feet a few times and then went to see what was available at the serving line.

There were only a handful of patrons in the place, all seated at a table on one side of the room. They were a mix of humans and Furs, and from what Jon could see from just an initial glance, they were all female. Several of them watched as he walked across the room, and by the time he had picked up a serving tray, they were all looking at him.

Jon grunted to himself quietly, aware of their eyes upon his back. A young man on the other side of the counter who looked as if this might be nothing more than a late seasonal job was the sole worker at the moment. When he had a good selection and a simple glass of water, Jon took his lunch across the room to the same table in the corner where he sat on his first evening there. Instead of putting his back to the room, however, he sat in the corner itself. This time he wanted to be aware of anyone who might try to approach him, especially if that person’s name rhymed with Travis Tyndall.

He ate quietly and tried to ignore those at the other table, but when he was almost finished with his meal one of the humans got up and approached him.

“A penny for your thoughts, cowboy,” she said with a friendly smile.

Jon looked up at her and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. The woman looked as if she might be as tall as he was. She had shoulder-length brown hair that was topped by a western straw hat accented with a blue-tipped white feather and she wore simple stud earrings in her small ears. Her soft curves were hugged by a pair of blue jeans tight enough that she probably did not need the leather belt with a shining silver oval buckle depicting a rider on a bucking horse. On top, she wore a black and white checkered flannel shirt that was open to a simple white tee shirt beneath. The outfit was complete with western boots that were a similar style to the ones he wore himself. She stood with most of her weight upon one leg and both hands clasped together behind her, quietly smiling at him with mesmerizing grey eyes.

“Good evening,” he responded with a courteous nod. “Do I know you?”

She shook her head, but held out a hand. “We’ve never been introduced,” she replied. “My name is Cheryl Dalton.”

“Jon Sunset,” he nodded, standing up to take her hand courteously. Her skin looked soft, but her hand felt rough, as if she were used to hard work, and her grip was firm. “Have a seat.” Cheryl cast a brief glance at the table she had vacated and then they sat down together, she across from him. “Is there something I can help you with?” he asked.

“No,” she confessed, “but my friends and I wanted you to know that you’ve made quite an impression on us all.”

Jon raised an eyebrow. “Really,” he remarked lightly. “I didn’t realize that eating my supper was all that impressive.”

She laughed at his dry wit and put both hands upon the table. “I was talking about the way you stood up for your lady friend yesterday.”

“I imagine that was only the first round,” Jon replied, listening to the thunder rumbling overhead. “The guy will likely try to pay me back for intruding upon his conquest.”

“You don’t sound too concerned.”

“Should I be?”

“Concerned?” she mused a moment. “Probably not concerned, but wary nonetheless.” She gestured back toward her table of friends and remarked, “Ever since he arrived, Travis has been after all of us, human and furman alike. So far, none of us has fallen for his smooth words, but that doesn’t keep him from trying. He’s relentless.”

When the man made no further comment she shifted forward to look at him, studying his features. It had been a while since she had last spoken with a guy who did not seem to be preoccupied by her appearance. “Where’s your lady friend tonight?” she asked after moment. “Is she your girlfriend?”

Jon sighed inwardly. “She’s just one of my housemates and I imagine she’s probably back at the Wing staying out of the weather.”

Cheryl suddenly looked interested. “Which Wing are you in?”

“The cat house,” he replied. At her look of amusement, he added, “The Felis Wing.”

She laughed at his secondary title for the place. “I’m the only single girl in the Canis Wing,” she told him, “the same dog house as that idiot Travis. However, three of my new friends over there are a family of sisters in the Vulps Wing. They have one skittish guy living over there with them, and even their attendant doctor and nurse are both women. If you need a buddy, I would think he would be grateful to have another guy to talk to. His name is Kevin.”

“How did three sisters wind up in the program at the same time?”

“Both of their parents died last year in a terrible accident, so they felt they had nothing left for them on Earth.”

“Triplets?”

“No, they’re all different ages.”

“Ah, okay.” He picked up his water glass and drained the last of it.

“Would you like to join us at our table?” Cheryl asked after a moment. “We’re all glad to know there’s someone here who’s chivalrous.”

“Thank you, but no. It sounds like the storm may be letting up and this would be a good time to return to my Wing.” What he neglected to explain was that he had no intention of joining a table where there were Furs present, female or not.

The woman looked disappointed. “What’s your hurry?” she asked, adjusting the hat on her head.

“We’re due for our injections today,” Jon explained with the simplest of excuses, “sometime right after lunch.”

Cheryl nodded. “We get ours later this evening.” She did not appear to be in a hurry for him to leave, and just as he was about to get up, she added, “What kind of Fur are you going to be?” she asked. He gave her a brief stony glare that she did not understand. “I know it’s a feline, but what kind?”

“Mountain lion,” he stated with a frown.

“Border collie, myself,” she offered. “I grew up on a ranch and my family has raised them all my life, so it only seemed natural when I looked through the pictures to see which one I might choose.”

Jon was beginning to get impatient with the topic on Furs and it seemed this woman was determined to talk. “What about Tyndall?” he asked. “What’s he going to be, a jackal?”

Cheryl laughed. “No, but that certainly would be appropriate,” she admitted. “He said he’s going to be a German shepherd.”

“And the others in your Wing?”

“Carl and Ellie Amaranth? They’re an older couple planning on becoming a mated pair of wolves.”

“Wolves?” Jon asked in surprise. “Are they that vicious?”

“No, silly – wolves have a rather strong sense of family values, something the Amaranths share themselves. Anyway, I don’t think the pair of them enjoy being associated with Travis either. However, we all signed our contracts last night, so we’re stuck in the same Wing with him.”

“Is your restroom coed like ours is?”

Cheryl nodded with a frown. “Yes, and Travis keeps trying to take advantage of that fact too. I was the first he started working on; I’m probably not the last one to slap his face either.”

Jon stood up. “This is all very interesting, but it sounds like the rain is slowing, so this would be a good time to go,” he said. “It was nice meeting you, Cheryl. Excuse me.”

The cowgirl got to her feet and then quickly moved around the table to face him directly. “May I walk with you?” she asked, putting the fingers of one hand lightly on his arm. “I would like to see your place.”

Jon was correct in his original assessment. She was just as tall as he was and could look at him eye to eye. Her floral perfume tickled his nose, but it was not unpleasant. Despite this, however, he did not understand her attentiveness. He was not ugly by any means, but he was not exactly handsome either, and he had given her no sign that he was interested in her. His internal warning bells were going off, though, and he could feel his personal barriers forming to protect him.

“Perhaps another time,” he said as courteously as he could muster. “The injections after lunch, remember?”

Cheryl looked disappointed, but gave him a smile anyway. “Sure, I understand, but if you would like the company of someone outside your Wing, please don’t hesitate to call on me.” She looked over her shoulder at the other table and then added, “For that matter, any one of my friends over there would love to make your acquaintance.”

Jon studied her for a moment, and even glanced briefly at the other table of women. “May I ask you a question?” he ventured cautiously.

“Anything.”

“Why the sudden interest in me?”

Cheryl chuckled and put her hand upon his. “We were all in here when you stood up for your friend, even if she wasn’t a girlfriend. Travis has hit on all of us, and it was nice to see someone put him in his place.”

Jon took her hand and held it for a moment. “Now I understand. You see me as a protector.”

“Initially, but I’m sure we could find other things of interest to discover about one another.” She curled her fingers around his hand and leaned closer.

Jon held her gaze for a moment and resisted the temptation to take up her offer. “My armor’s not very shiny,” he told her, “and I’m not the gallant knight you seem to think I am. How do you know I’m not a murderer in hiding?”

The woman gave him a smirk. “I know that cats and dogs are supposed to fight, but you, oh modest knight, can slay me anytime,” she whispered saucily. Then without warning, she wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss full on the lips, instantly causing a stir among her friends.

The action took him by surprise, but when the hoots and hollers from the other table suddenly hushed, he pulled back and looked around. He fully expected to see Tyndall standing nearby, but it was not him.

It was Kristen.

The dark-haired botanist stood just inside the entrance, a dripping umbrella in her hands, and she was staring at him and the lingering cowgirl in astonishment. Her expression fell to indifference as she found her feet and walked toward him.

Cheryl dropped her arms and took a step back when Kristen stopped beside them. “Doctor Renwick is ready for us,” she told her housemate in monotone. “Marcy sent me after you.”

Jon swallowed and then looked back at the woman beside him. “Time for my shot,” he told her.

“Good luck,” Cheryl told him in a soft voice. She and Kristen exchanged brief looks and then the cowgirl retreated quietly to her friends.

Jon looked down at his housemate and did his best to look composed. “Let’s go,” he said in a casual tone.

Kristen turned without a word and headed for the door, the red-haired man following two steps behind her. He looked back at the table of females and several of them waved to him. He inclined his chin in response, but then dropped it when he noticed his companion looking back at him, her expression deliberately neutral.

Jon raised an eyebrow at her and then stopped to retrieve an umbrella at the door; they all looked alike, so he did not think it mattered which one he took. Kristen moved out into the rain in silence without waiting for him and stepped around puddles on the way back to their Wing. The storm had indeed calmed down from its earlier state and the raindrops were now light without a driving wind. More thunder rumbled in the distance, but for now it was calmer than it had been.

They walked back in silence, and when they reached the door to their Wing, Jon reached for her umbrella out of courtesy. She moved it from his reach and opened the door without looking at him. Before he could get inside, there was a loud clunk of her umbrella tossed into the canister. She had already slipped out of her shoes and was peeling off her wet socks by the time he closed the door behind him. She turned toward the saloon and began walking at a brisk pace.

“Kris… wait.”

At the use of her shortened name she stopped, but did not turn around. Jon slipped out of his boots and then walked over to her. He stepped around until he could face her.

“Kris, I apologize for yesterday,” he said quietly. “After my last relationship, the comments about being a mated pair last night caught me off guard.”

“They were only joking,” she said icily, “and then you started avoiding me.”

“No, I don’t think they were joking. When you chose to become the same species that I have to be, I’m sure it looked like that to them too.”

“I explained my reasons,” she defended. “I thought you were my friend.”

“Kris… I want to be your friend. We will be going through this together as we agreed – but I’m not your mate. After Rebecca, I’m not looking for a mate.”

She looked up at him with a borderline sneer. “What about your new girlfriend in the cafeteria?”

“I’m not looking for a mate,” Jon repeated. “She’s had the same trouble with Travis that you had yesterday and was thanking me for standing up to him.”

“Uh huh… I really believe that,” Kristen replied, her voice dripping in sarcasm.

This was entirely the wrong thing to do.

Jon scowled and leaned in so that he was practically nose to nose with her. “You can believe this, Kristen. We’re going to be in close proximity to one another for the next year or two, but don’t expect any kind of a friendship if you’re going to get jealous of me over another woman. I don’t need it and I’m getting to the point where I don’t really care what others think of me. You know who I am and what I’ve done, so if I have to go through this abomination alone without any friends at all, it’ll probably be for the best anyway.”

Without waiting for a response, he turned and walked away. Kristen stared at him open-mouthed, but before he had taken half a dozen steps, she ran after him.

“Jon… wait!” she pleaded. The man stopped and turned to give her a dark look that halted her in her tracks a few paces away. She swallowed in hesitation and then moved forward to put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said earnestly. “Please forgive me.”

Jon stared at her for another moment before his expression softened. “Friends?” he asked her.

She wiped moisture from her eyes and nodded, “Friends,” she confirmed. Then she looked up at him in hesitation. “I know we’re only friends,” she said in a quieter voice, “but may I have a hug?”

A gentle smile crossed Jon’s face before he wrapped his muscular arms around her shoulders. She put her arms around his middle and then laid her head upon his chest. “Thank you,” she whispered, soaking up the closeness. “I may need these in the months ahead, so please don’t be offended if I ask for one.”

Jon sighed inwardly and tightened his embrace slightly. “I once had a friend who always needed hugs,” he admitted to her. “She and I were never more than good friends, but she always said that hugs were important.”

“Hugs are important,” Kristen agreed. She reluctantly released him when he pulled back, and then she tried to compose herself.

“Hey, there you are!” called Jenni’s voice. “It’s almost your turn, whichever one of you wants to go next.”

Both of them looked across the room and saw the blonde woman walking toward them, absently scratching the back of her neck. Instead of the clothing she had been wearing that morning, she was now dressed in a lavender pair of shorts and one of the matching furman robes.

“How do I look?” she asked, turning around so that they could see her outfit from all sides. She hiked up the back of the robe so they could also see a large hole beneath the waistband strap of her shorts, and although the opening was designed for a tail, it currently revealed a little more of her backside than Kristen was comfortable seeing.

Jon chuckled and covered over his eyes in mock embarrassment. “Hey, put that away!”

Jenni grinned widely and wiggled her hips. “What, you don’t like looking at my tail?” she asked playfully, dropping the hem of her robe back into place.

“You can proudly display your tail when you have one!” Kristen remarked.

“All I saw was a plumber’s crack!” Jon laughed.

The blond whirled on him with a pointed finger. “You won’t find a plumber with a crack as nice as mine!” she challenged him in mock seriousness.

Jon and Kristen exchanged looks of amusement before they glanced back at her. “I can’t argue with that,” he remarked with a smirk.

Jenni laughed aloud, pleased that her two melancholy housemates appreciated the levity. She scratched the back of her neck and walked with them into the saloon.

“So, what was it like?” Kristen asked her. “Did they use a big needle for the shot?”

The blonde shook her head. “I never saw the needle,” she admitted, “and to tell the truth, I never felt it go in.”

“I’m going to get into some dry clothes,” Jon told them. “The rain was coming in sideways when I walked over to the cafeteria.”

“Don’t bother,” Jenni told him. “Once you’ve had the injection, they make you start wearing these things right away, so you may as well keep what you have on now so you won’t have extra laundry to wash later.”

Jon shook his head. “I’m going to get into my sweats anyway,” he said, leaving them for his room.

“My feet are cold and my socks are wet,” Kristen complained. “I need my slippers at least.” Jenni followed her to her room, though she kept looking down at the new outfit. “Why would they make you start wearing them now?” Kristen asked. “Do they expect your tail to sprout immediately?”

The blonde reached around to rub her fingers under the waistband strap and the opening beneath it. “They didn’t say,” she asked. “I don’t feel anything yet.”

Kristen laughed as she led the registered nurse into her room and then felt around beneath the bed with her toes. She found a pair of fuzzy blue slippers and slid her feet into them, relishing the instant warmth.

“So, are you feeling better now?” Jenni asked her in a quiet voice. “You two looked like you’d had a lover’s spat yesterday.”

The botanist gifted her with a look of frustration. “Jenni…” she said, shaking her head, “Jon and I are not lovers. We’re barely just friends.”

“But…” The blonde looked confused. “Dante said the two of you slept together the night before and that’s why you chose the same feline as Jon.”

“Dante has a big mouth,” Kristen muttered, “but he was only partially right.”

“Oh? Which part?”

The two of them sat on the edge of the bed together and then Kristen told her what happened that night. By the time Jon emerged from his room in his sweats, his female housemates had moved out to one of the curved couches in the pit, laughing together at some private joke.

“So, how long does it take?” he asked the blonde, taking a seat at the table.

“About twenty minutes,” she answered, scratching the back of her neck. “They take some measurements and then make you lie face down on a bench for the shot. Not much to it, really.”

“That sounds anticlimactic,” Kristen remarked.

“Did you expect a lab full of Tesla coils with giant arcs of electricity overhead?” Jon asked. Before Kristen could retort, a large rumble of thunder from the storm outside rattled the building.

“On a day like this,” she replied with a grin, “it would have been appropriate!”

“Urrrrrrrr…” moaned another voice from across the room. Everyone looked up and saw Dante approach the pit walking stiff-legged, his arms outstretched and a blank stare fixed on the distant wall. “Urrrrrrrr…” he moaned again.

“Ah, Doctor Renwickenstein’s monster walks!” Jenni laughed aloud. Dante rolled only his eyes to look down at her just before he burst out laughing.

Like Jenni, the dark-haired man now wore furman garments, his navy blue. He looked over at Jon and Kristen and stepped down into the pit. “The doctor is ready for you,” he said.

“Which one?” Kristen asked in sudden hesitation. “Me or him?” She had never liked needles, and until now she had tried not to think about what was coming.

Dante shrugged his shoulders and then scratched at the back of his neck. “He just said to send in the others.”

Jon looked over at Kristen and got to his feet. “I guess they’ll tell us which one they want first when we get there.”

“Beware of the black wall,” Dante murmured cryptically.

“Huh?” Kristen asked.

“Nothing…” Dante murmured beneath a smile.

Jon looked to Jenni for an explanation, but she tried her best to look innocent. Kristen was not exactly reassured by their manner, but then Jon tugged on her sleeve.

“C’mon,” he said.

The botanist accompanied him to the lab, and when they got to the double doors, he opened one of them to let her go in first.

Doctor Renwick and Nurse Marcy looked up in unison. “Good afternoon,” Renwick said after making a brief notation with a stylus on a black computer tablet.

“Hi, Doc,” Jon replied. “Which of us do you want first?”

Renwick stepped forward and gestured toward the two medical benches in the center of the room. The bright lights gleamed off numerous metal instruments, but remarkably none of them was near the benches. “Either or both,” he said with a smile. “Marcy told me that the two of you had chosen the same feline, so we thought we could do both of you together, but only if you consent.”

“Together?” Kristen repeated. She looked up at Jon with imploring eyes and he read her expression correctly; she had been dreading this moment and wished to draw on his strength.

“Sure, why not?” he answered for them. She smiled at him in gratitude.

“Okay, together then,” Marcy told them with an odd smirk. “Follow me.”

Jon looked at the benches as they passed them toward a door off the side of the room labeled with a small plaque that simply read, Imaging.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Before we begin the process,” Renwick said from behind them, “we need to take precise measurements of your bodies to use as a baseline for the transformation. Identical measurements will be taken halfway during the next nine months for comparison and then again at the end when the process has been completed.”

“Ah, okay.”

Marcy led them inside and then Renwick closed the door after joining them. The doctor indicated one wall of the room that was coated in an odd, black substance. A large conical device faced the wall from a swing arm attached to the ceiling. “We need each of you to stand spread-eagle up against that wall while the laser scanner takes measurements of you from the front, back and sides.”

“Sure,” Jon said, taking a step forward. He figured that if Kristen saw him do everything first, it would put her more at ease. However, Marcy waved them over toward a counter.

“Okay, please disrobe and put your clothes up here,” she instructed.

“Disrobe?” Kristen asked in disbelief, her eyes suddenly wide. Jon blinked in surprise.

“Completely,” the nurse instructed. “Both of you. The laser scanner is extremely precise and all foreign material will be misread. If you are wearing any watches, rings or other jewelry, you will need to remove them as well.”

Kristen pointedly refused to look at Jon while she removed her earrings, her face beet red in embarrassment. She had always been self-conscious about her body due to her slightly-overweight appearance, and now she was being made to undress, not just in front of a physician, but one of her male housemates as well.

“I changed my mind,” she squeaked. “Let’s do this separately.”

“Once again, you’ve decided too late,” Marcy told her with a shake of her head. “I promise you will not die of exposure.” The nurse looked over at Jon, who had already removed his sweatshirt and was peeling off the cotton sweat pants. He wore nothing underneath and he raised an eyebrow at her look of appraisal. She turned back to Kristen, but the botanist had her back turned to everyone in the room, grudgingly removing her clothes.

When Jon was completely bare, he stepped up to the black wall and looked over at Renwick. “How do you want me, Doc?”

“Forehead against the wall, standing spread-eagle with your arms all the way out away from your sides and with your fingers spread out, too. The laser scanner will do the rest. It will take about five minutes and then you will turn around for a scan of your other side.”

“Will I need goggles?”

“No, we need this scan without foreign material obscuring any part of your face. You only have to keep your eyes closed, but there’s no need to squint hard.”

The man did as he was instructed, seemingly indifferent to the two women in the room with him and his nudity.

“Face the wall directly,” Renwick told him while making an adjustment to the controls of the device, “and do not turn your head to the side.” Jon turned to the wall as instructed. “That’s perfect,” said the physician. “Close your eyes and hold that position until I tell you that you can move.”

“Got it,” Jon said into the wall. Immediately a bright blue, pencil-thin, floor-to-ceiling light issued out of the scanner just to the left of Jon’s outermost extremity. The equipment gave out a deep hum and then the laser began tracking toward the right.

Kristen stood near the wall beside the door to the room and watched as the blue light mapped across Jon’s naked backside. She appreciated the man’s physique from this angle, but knew that in just a few moments it would be her up there on display. She bit her bottom lip, unable to take her eyes off the spectacle, and she did not see the look of amusement on Marcy’s face when the nurse looked over at the botanist.

Five minutes can seem a long time when spread out like an insect in a specimen box, but Jon tried not to think about the time and instead concentrated on an old classic movie he had watched in his room during the night.

“Okay, you can drop your arms and relax for a moment,” Renwick’s voice said finally. “I will need to reset the scanner and then we will do your other side.”

Jon rubbed both arms to get some of the feeling back in them from being held in one position for so long. He momentarily forgot about his state of undress until he turned around and saw Kristen suddenly look away, clutching her clothes in front of her. Suddenly feeling self-conscious, he glanced over at Marcy, but she was focused on a monitor screen, quietly tapping in data on a small keyboard.

“Okay, Jon, once more, facing outward now,” the doctor instructed.

The first time around, Jon had not had a problem with being scanned, since it had been his backside exposed to the others in the room, but now that he would be facing everyone in nothing but his birthday suit, he could feel his face begin to flush. With two women watching him, one of them naked as well, it was imperative that he think of mundane things while spread out across the wall in front of them to prevent an unwanted reaction.

Putting himself in basically the same position as before, he closed his eyes and tried to recall the months of frustration after Rebecca had thrown him over for that mountain lion. Suddenly remembering the reason for his presence at the Furmankind Institute, he had no problem dispelling any sense of embarrassment relating to his complete exposure.

“Jon, please don’t make a fist,” Renwick told him. Following a few more instructions and forced relaxation, the scanning began again. After a first initial glance at Jon, Kristen turned to face the wall behind her, ashamed at herself for taking a peek.

Marcy looked up from her duties to examine the man, recalling the first time she had taken part in such a measurement scanning; it had been another man with red hair spread out in front of her. After the end of that first time, she was never sure who was the more embarrassed, the man or his nurse. Now several years later, she could look at her patients without even the faintest rise in blood pressure, even if she did appreciate what she saw.

“Now drop your arms straight against your side and turn so that your left shoulder is against the wall,” the doctor instructed. “Face directly in front of you. This won’t take as long, and then we’ll scan your other side.”

Jon did as directed, keeping his eyes closed, though acutely aware of the profile he must be presenting to the women. He kept his thoughts mundane as the scanner recorded him from both sides.

“Thank you, Jon. You can get dressed now,” Renwick announced a few moments later. “Kristen, you’re next as soon as I reset the scanner.” Marcy mentally shook herself from her musings and began tapping in data on the scans.

When Jon stepped away from the black wall he looked around for his sweats, but on the counter where he had put them was now a matching set of the furman garments in hunter green. He checked the tags and was not surprised to note that they were his sizes, but briefly wondered what they had done with his sweats. Without looking at his housemate, who deposited her clothes on the counter and turned quickly away from him, he swiftly donned the garments.

The opening for a tail he did not possess felt peculiar across the back of his waist. Fortunately, the robe covered the waistband oddity, but the shorts were so loose that they did not provide him with any real support, feeling more like boxer underwear than shorts to wear out in public.

The material was different as well. The air handling system for the Felis Wing had come on a few minutes earlier and he could feel a bit of the breeze through the material making up his new garments. He remembered Marcy telling them earlier that the lightweight material was made of an open weave so that it could be worn over fur, but yet allowed air to pass through so that fur beneath would not feel stuffy. Despite earlier reassurances, he did not think they would be warm enough through the coming winter months even inside the heated building. He would want the Turkish robes they offered.

He found a padded roller stool next to a counter, so he sat up on it and settled in to watch the proceedings. Kristen was facing the black wall as he had, but her legs were pulled together and her arms were barely extended out away from her.

“No, you need to stand spread-eagle,” Doctor Renwick was telling her. “Spread your feet out so that no part of your legs are touching one another and extend your arms and hands out flat against the wall.”

“Doctor, with my weight, my thighs are always touching,” she grumbled.

“Nevertheless, you will need to spread a little wider,” was his clinical reply.

“Is… is this really necessary?” the botanist asked, extending her arms as instructed. She was still reluctant to spread out her legs.

“Yes, Kristen,” the doctor said patiently, “it is absolutely necessary that we have precise measurements over the months for comparison to make sure your transformation is proceeding without a problem.”

“What kind of problems have you had?” she asked.

“Malformation. If there are problems, we want to know ahead of time so they can be corrected before anything gets out of hand. We can do this. Please spread out your feet.”

“Now you’re really scaring me, doctor,” Kristen said with a quaver in her voice.

“That’s not happened since the early days,” Renwick assured her, “but we will take no chances. Spread your feet, please.” Kristen rolled her eyes upward and finally did as she was told, feeling incredibly indecent. “Okay, close your eyes and put your forehead flat against the wall. No, don’t turn your head to the side. Yes, that’s good. Close your eyes and hold that position until I tell you to move.”

“Jon, are you looking?” she mumbled.

“No,” he lied with a grin. Marcy looked over at him and he merely smiled back at her. He had already suffered his indignity being on full display, so he felt no guilt as a spectator.

“I don’t believe you,” said Kristen.

“No more talking,” the doctor scolded. “You must not move or we will have to do this again.”

With a deep hum, the blue laser lit up beside the botanist and began scanning. Kristen kept her eyes shut, but she could tell when the laser was near her head. Her eyelids glowed blue on the inside, and although she felt nothing, she waited impatiently for the humiliation to end. Before it was finished with her backside, however, she remembered with dread that she still had to be scanned with her front exposed. Her embarrassment was nothing right now, compared to what it would be shortly. She groaned low in her throat, but was careful not to move.

At last, the first scan was over and the doctor told her that she could relax for a moment. Marcy went right to work on her data while Renwick reset the scanner. When Kristen opened her eyes and turned only her head, she felt Jon’s eyes upon her.

“Don’t be bashful,” he said when she pressed her face to the wall again. He may still be looking at her rear, but she had not yet turned around to reveal any more of herself than necessary.

“Doctor Renwick?” she said in a muffled voice.

“Hmm?” he responded distractedly from the controls of the scanner.

“Jon’s already had his scan. He can leave the room now, right?”

The physician looked up with a frown. “Sorry, no. We can’t allow any volunteers alone out in the main part of the lab with your solutions out on the table. Legalities, I’m afraid.”

Kristen grumbled to herself and Jon smiled at her frustrations. Then, before she was ready, Renwick said, “Okay, Kristen. Turn around and spread out up against the wall as you did before, only facing outward.”

“Do I hafta?”

“Yes, please turn around. The sooner you do this, the quicker it will be over. Just a few more minutes.”

When the short woman turned around, one arm covered her chest and the other was down in front of her crotch. She saw Jon’s eyes flicker briefly over her and she groaned aloud.

“Spread out, dear,” Marcy told her softly. “All three of your housemates have already done this.”

“Jon, close your eyes,” Kristen pleaded. The man gave her a brief grin and then made an exaggerated show of putting both hands over his eyes.

“Thank you,” she said at last. “Now keep them there.” Then, slowly and with great embarrassment, she spread out her arms and legs as instructed, keeping her eyes firmly upon Jon’s face to make sure he did not peek.

“Spread out a little wider,” said the doctor.

“Listen, I’m already fully exposed,” Kristen complained. “How much of an intimate look do you need?”

“Just spread your arms and legs out a little more, please,” Renwick told her impatiently. Kristen rolled her eyes in total embarrassment and did as she was told. “That’s good. Now hold that position.”

“Pictures of this better not wind up out on the network,” she warned with an almost animal-like growl. “I know people!” Jon snickered.

“Close your eyes,” Marcy reminded her. Kristen shut her eyes, but not before checking to make sure Jon still had his face covered.

Although she could not know for sure, she was certain that Jon peeked at her when the hum of the laser began. This was at a time when she could not open her eyes to check, nor could she say anything to him. She had almost considered the previous physical examination a violation, but now she felt absolutely obscene, completely spread out as she was.

That second scan was the longest five minutes she had ever experienced, but when she was finally given permission to open her eyes and relax, she looked over at Jon and found him flipping through a magazine from a stack on the counter beside him. Relieved that he had left her with the illusion of some dignity, she sighed and moved quickly to get her clothes.

“No, Kristen. We still have to scan you from both sides,” the doctor reminded her. “This won’t take as long.”

Groaning again, the woman returned to the black wall and followed Renwick’s instructions. After several minutes, he graciously allowed her to go for her clothing.

Marcy had already switched out the garments and Kristen found an outfit of pale yellow. Keeping an eye on Jon, she quickly dressed and then looked over at the physicians. The nurse was busy entering data into her terminal and Renwick was spraying down the wall with a cleansing solution in one hand and a clean wipe cloth in the other.

The doctor and the nurse finished their duties at nearly the same time. “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Marcy asked.

“Says you…” Kristen growled with animosity. “You didn’t have your privates precisely measured, examined and put on display!”

“True enough,” Marcy conceded with a smile. “Now, if the two of you will return with us to the lab, we’ll take care of the very thing that brought you to us.”

Jon set his magazine aside and stood up beside his housemate. She studied his face and was convinced that he had peeked during her final scan. She gave him a dark scowl and pointed a menacing finger at him. Marcy shooed them into the other room, and as before, Renwick brought up the rear.

“I will need each of you to lay face down upon one of the medical benches,” Renwick instructed. “Place your face in the opening and then let your arms relax beside you.”

“Do we have to get naked for this too?” Kristen asked grumpily.

Marcy actually laughed. “Not unless you want to,” she replied.

“Not on your life,” the botanist grumbled. Then she looked at Renwick and added, “Not on yours either.” The doctor merely gave her a look of patience and gestured to the benches.

Jon looked up and briefly studied the armature dangling from the ceiling on a large rotating axis between the benches. It could be maneuvered above either patient, and the instruments that gleamed in the lab light looked wicked. Although he had dreaded the scanning they had just endured, a sudden fear went through him and his initial assessment of the doctor came back to haunt him. One of the nightmares he had experienced the previous night had included a scenario where Marcelo had paid off the doctor to botch the injection when it was time, leaving him in a vegetable state so they could do whatever they wanted with him.

When Doctor Renwick saw the sudden panic in the man’s eyes, he gave him a practiced look of compassion. He had seen many strong men crumble at this point when it came time for the actual injection, so he stretched out a hand to the man.

“Don’t worry, Jon,” the doctor told him in a soothing voice. “I have sworn to see you safely through all this. Although the injection is the most important event of your stay here, the act itself is safe and precise. No harm will come to either of you, I promise.”

Jon hesitated, and then grasped the proffered hand as Kristen looked on with a worried expression that mirrored his own. Now down to the wire, both were scared. Jon swallowed as he shook Renwick’s hand. Would this be the execution he had escaped several days earlier? He was almost certain it was, but he was now at the point of no return. There was no appeal and his pride would not allow him to beg for mercy, so he finally nodded and gave the doctor a final weak smile.

“Okay,” he said in a voice that was steadier than the way he felt on the inside. “I’m ready.” He looked down at Kristen and suddenly wrapped his arms around her, giving her the hug he knew that she needed as much as he did.

“Come on,” Marcy prompted. “This won’t take long, and then you can rejoin your housemates. Jon, take the bench on the right. Kristen, the other one’s yours.”

Kristen and Jon climbed upon their respective benches and lay down with their faces cradled in the donut hole. The angle of the headrest was tilted downward so the back of the neck was stretched taut, but it was not as uncomfortable as it felt like it should be. Each tried to relax as they had been told, and as they awaited whatever, the botanist asked, “Where does the injection go in?”

“Probably the same place we get all our shots that aren’t in the arm,” Jon mumbled beside her.

Marcy chuckled as Renwick readied the instruments mounted above the benches. “No, this one doesn’t go into your buttocks,” she told them. “This injection will go in at the base of your brain.”

Jon was not sure he heard her right, but Kristen exclaimed, “What? You’re going to put a needle into our brains!”

“Hush,” Renwick said calmly. “There’s no need to get excited. The tiny needle is short and it will not actually penetrate your brain tissue. The small amount of solution with your modified DNA will be injected into the cerebra-spinal fluid only, where it will then be absorbed into the cerebral cortex.” Neither of the patients was really comforted by this explanation, but the doctor continued as he worked. “The position is exact and will be computer controlled for precision. A mild electric current will be applied to numb the area just before the needle is inserted, so you won’t even feel a thing. Just lay there and relax. You’ll be back up and on your feet in a few moments.”

Jon felt the doctor’s touch on the back of his neck and he closed his eyes tightly. This is it, he thought to himself. Time to die. As the doctor applied a small amount of pressure at the base of his skull, the convicted killer knew what it was that he had done wrong. No matter that Parker had destroyed his life, he should not have killed him. That had been his mistake. There were other things he could have done to exact his revenge, leaving the wretched cat alive, but he had acted upon impulse to rid Creation of the abomination. Now it was too late. Now he would be executed for his crime. He only took small comfort in the knowledge that at least he would not be eaten alive by a deranged monster in the basement of a prison.

Would dying hurt? he wondered. Would he see the fabled white lights or would it be all darkness and oblivion?

“Okay, Jon, you’re done,” Marcy’s voice said in a quiet voice beside his right ear. The convict opened his eyes in surprise.

“Done?” he asked in disbelief.

“All done,” she reassured him with a pat on his shoulder. “Just lay there for a moment while the doctor attends to Kristen, and then you can both go.”

The big man blinked back the tears that suddenly welled up in his eyes. Done and still alive? He reached around beneath the bench where his hands could get to his face, and he hurriedly wiped the moisture from his cheeks.

He was still alive!

Several moments later, the nurse helped him into a sitting position and she was puzzled by the look of euphoria upon his face when he looked back at her. She had seen expressions of relief on the faces of other volunteers, but not of this magnitude. She smiled back at him, and suddenly got the impression that if she did not move away quickly he was going to kiss her.

The thought made her blink, and hesitate, but before either of them could act, the doctor pushed instrumentation back up toward the ceiling and announced, “You may get up now, Kristen. You’re all done.”

“Done? Are you positive?” Kristen asked in surprise. “I didn’t feel anything.”

“Positive,” the doctor assured her. He gently pulled on her elbow, directing her to get up off the bench. Kristen pushed herself up with her hands and then looked over at Jon, whose face was split with a grin so big it was almost comical. What was up with him? she thought with a silly smile of her own.

Renwick helped her down off the bench, and when she turned to look up at him, she had a look of relief on her face. “Really? It’s done?”

The doctor chuckled. “Yes, the process has started,” he told her. “The modified DNA is now within your system and the McEwen process is already becoming active. Over the next nine months, your bodies will undergo an irreversible change, transforming into something more than human, something more suitable for taming new worlds that will benefit the planet Earth for generations to come. Congratulations, you two. You have just begun a journey that will last the rest of your lives.”

“Wow,” Kristen said in awe, now realizing the scope of what she had just done for the first time. Sure, she knew what it was all about, but now that it had begun, it was more real to her.

“What happens now?” Jon asked, his voice strangely tinged with emotion.

Marcy gestured toward the double doors of the lab, indicating that they could go. “You won’t feel different right away,” she told them, “but one of the first effects usually noted comes within forty-eight hours when your skin will begin to itch. It’s nothing to be concerned about – it’s just new follicles developing for the fur that will begin to sprout. Then you’ll get nothing more than a little fuzz at first.”

“That’s not so bad,” Kristen remarked.

“We have a good supply of anti-itch cream if you feel you need it,” Marcy informed them, “but since this fur will be sprouting all over your bodies, keeping it applied may become a hassle.” She opened the doors for them and they saw their housemates waiting for them in the pit.

A small spot on the back of Jon’s neck began to itch and he scratched at it absently, not realizing that it was the exact entry point of the injection needle. Nothing had hurt, he was still alive, and in full control of his faculties.

Perhaps he would survive this after all.

Chapter 16

PBJ

Dante stood up with an insufferable smirk when Jon and Kristen approached the central pit. “So, how did you like the black wall?” he cackled, spreading his arms and legs wide. He wiggled his hips back and forth, his eyes firmly upon Kristen’s reddening face. The botanist narrowed her eyes and then crossed her arms, suddenly looking anywhere but at her annoying housemate.

“I can assume you took the opportunity to enjoy being on display,” said Jon.

Dante grinned. “Nothing to it!” Then he frowned. “I tried to make Nurse Marcy blush with a reaction, but I guess I’m not the first one to try that with her. She didn’t even look interested!”

“Aw, poor baby,” Jenni said in mock sympathy. “Is that why you took more time than the rest of us?”

Dante sat on the couch beside her. “Doctor Renwick made me sit down on a cold metal stool until I could relax enough for the scans. He said he didn’t want any pornography breaking his scanner and threatened me with an injection if I didn’t calm down on my own.”

Jon laughed at the younger man, still lighthearted from surviving the injection, and Dante looked up at him in surprise. During their short association, he had never seen the red-haired man actually look happy.

“You may have enjoyed it all,” Kristen replied gloomily, “but that was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever experienced, and that includes the invasive exam we had the other day!”

Jenni looked up at her in amusement. “Honey, you should relax about your body,” she said with a smile. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Not everyone grows up in a family of nudists!” Kristen retorted, retaining her sour expression. “I’m not a prude, but I don’t like putting myself up on display.”

Dante looked over at the blonde next to him. “Your whole family was nudists?” he asked in interest. “Do you have any sisters I could meet?”

“I do have a sister,” Jenni replied, “but she is already engaged.”

“Does she look anything like you?” he asked with a grin. “It doesn’t matter if she’s engaged or not if she just enjoys running around naked! I would look at her!”

Jenni laughed. “Actually, she looks just like me,” she explained. “Jana and I are identical twins.”

“Ooh, double fantasy! Is she in the Program too?” Dante exclaimed, leaning in close to her.

“No, she and I are very close and have done practically everything together all our lives, but Jana is engaged to be married with a promising future of her own. Like me, she’s an RN, but she chose not to follow me into the AHCP, though she has given me lots of encouragement.”

Dante shrugged. “Well, I know you weren’t bothered by the scan, but I wish I’d been there to see it, just as Jon was there to see Kristen!”

With her arms folded across her chest, Kristen quietly walked away from the conversation toward her room, her face still flushed. Jon watched her go, but the others seemed to be oblivious to her departure. The discussion about their experiences against the black wall continued for several moments until they all looked up at a sound at the outer door of the building.

Jon’s brow furrowed when he saw a short swift fox wearing dark blue shorts and a matching pocketed vest walk inside with a moderate-sized pouch slung from one shoulder. He walked straight to the central pit and then stopped at its edge, his hazel eyes missing nothing in the middle of the room.

“I have a special delivery for the Felis Wing,” the newcomer announced with a smile.

“Welcome,” Jenni said politely, getting to her feet.

“Thanks,” said the Vulps newcomer as he stepped down into the pit. “I have a PBJ for each of you.”

“Thanks, but I’ve already eaten,” Dante replied with amusement. “I didn’t know they would give us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by special delivery.”

The fox grinned. “Same initials, different meaning. It’s really called a Personal Business Juxtapositioner,” the fox explained, pulling a metal notebook from his pouch, “but it’s just easier for everyone to call it a PBJ.” Aside from its color, the device looked identical to the computer tablets they had seen Marcy, Renwick and others on the grounds use. The Anthro Human Colony Program logo of a human hand clasping a furman hand in unity over a generic planet decorated the top of its smooth, red metal surface. He opened the clamshell item like a book and handed the two-screen device to the dark-haired man. “You will need these for your colony studies, note-taking, correspondence and messaging.”

“I used to have a cheap tablet, but this looks like a book,” Dante mused as he looked it over, marveling at the lightweight construction of the trade-paperback sized unit.

“It does, doesn’t it?” the swift fox replied with a grin. “The general public will never see one of these enhanced units on the market, but one is issued to each of you for your work and preparation as part of your contract with the AHCP.” He reached over to the one Dante held in his hands and tapped a removable stylus set flush with the casing on one internal edge. “You can write directly on the screen with this, or you may type it out on the touch screen keyboard here.”

He held up a furry finger and smiled. “In the event of losing the stylus, you can also use a claw tip or even a stick. The screen surface is extremely resistant to scratches, but is sensitive enough to write upon directly. A universal message address has been set up for each of you and these units have been programmed to process anything incoming or outgoing. You may set up a mail-grabber to pull messages from any other personal addresses directly into the PBJ, but eventually this is the only one you will need for the rest of your career with the AHCP. You should carry it everywhere you go.”

“What is a juxto, uh, um… juxtapositronic?

“Juxtaposition means something that is side by side with something else for comparison. It’s just the manufacturer’s fancy way of saying this thing has two side by side screens, I suppose.”

He pulled out three more units from his pouch and each of them was constructed of a different color. “The red one there is set up to be issued to Jenni W.,” he said, reading from a small card he had taken from a pocket.

“That’s me,” the blonde said with a smile, taking the first device from Dante. She immediately sat down with it at the table as the fox referred to his note card again.

“The blue one belongs to Dante C.”

The dark-haired man reached out with both hands. “Mine!” he said. “Are we assigned specific colors?”

“No, they were just chosen randomly when we pulled them out of the box and set them up for each of you,” the fox replied. “All we did was make sure that two of you in the same Wing didn’t get the same color.” Dante nodded and then opened his clamshell device to start playing with it.

The next unit was bright green, but the fox looked around him in puzzlement. When he looked up at the remaining man, he said, “You don’t look like a Kristen E. to me.”

“That’s Jon with an S,” Jenni replied absently while setting up her PBJ to pick up her personal mail. “Kristen was here a moment ago.”

“She went to her room,” Jon said, more to Jenni than to the fox who stood beside him. The vulpine delivery Fur set the green unit on the table and then pulled out the final PBJ, its casing a bright copper color.

“…and a shiny new penny for Jonathan S.,” he said with a smile, holding it up to the remaining person. Jon took it without a word while the swift fox dug into a wide pocket of his own furman robe; he pulled out another PBJ with a silver case, opened it up and then tapped a few commands on the left-hand screen with a claw tip.

“I will need each of you to sign for your units,” he informed them. Jon took the silver device and then applied his thumbprint to a box on the screen beside his name.

He passed the fox’s tablet over to Jenni and said, “I’ll get Kristen.” He stepped up out of the pit and walked to the botanist’s room. The door was closed, so he knocked on it gently.

“I’m not in the mood for more naked jokes right now!” shot back a reply from inside.

“Kris, you need to come out to sign for your PBJ,” he called through the panel. There was silence for a long moment before the door opened. Kristen looked up at him with puffy red eyes. She was wrapped up in a thick fuzzy robe, but Jon could see the collar of the furman garment beneath it.

“I have to sign for a sandwich?” she asked after clearing her throat.

“PBJ,” Jon replied. “It’s a glorified tablet we’re supposed to use in the Program. It stands for a Personal Business Juxtaposition tablet, I think. They were just delivered, one for each of us, and we have to sign for them.” He stepped aside to let her see the swift fox waiting for her in the central pit.

“Jon, could you do me a favor?” she asked in a whisper.

“What is it?”

“Bring him over to me,” she requested, wiping at her cheeks with the back of a hand. “I don’t want the others to see me like this.”

Jon frowned, but then nodded. “Sure.” When he returned to the fox, he steeled himself to talk to the animal. “This way,” he said, picking up the green unit from the table, leaving his own in its place. He led the swift fox up out of the pit and over to Kristen’s room, where she waited for them in the doorway.

“Kristen E,” Jon introduced her to the fox.

“Hello, I’ve brought you a present!” the visitor replied merrily with a gently wagging tail, thinking she might be sick and hoping to cheer her up a little. He handed her the green PBJ and then stepped back when she took it.

“What is it?” Kristen asked quietly. The swift fox gave her the same speech that he had given the rest of them, and after he had finished, he held up his own unit and asked her to sign for it. The botanist applied her thumbprint in the appropriate place and then handed it back to the fox. “Thank you,” she told him.

“You’re welcome,” he replied. “I hope you feel better soon.”

Kristen looked at him oddly, unaware that he thought she was ill. Instead of commenting on it, she asked, “What’s your name?”

“Michael Lynch, at your service,” he answered with a smile. “I would love to stay and get to know you folks better, but I have more to deliver to the other Wings.”

“Come back any time,” Kristen told him politely.

“Thank you, I will!” Lynch gave both of them a small hand wave and then headed back toward the entrance. Dante and Jenni were already setting up their PBJs so neither saw when he waved on his way out.

Kristen did not bother to open hers and just slipped it into the pocket of her fuzzy robe. She looked up at her housemate. “I’m sorry I’m such a stick in the mud,” she told him in a quiet voice, “but I really did not enjoy what they put me through today.”

“I understand,” he replied with a nod.

“Do you really?” she asked him crossly. “Have you ever been overweight, Jon? I’ve been fighting my weight for years with diets, exercises and miracle weight-loss supplements. I’ve tried to get in better shape, I really have, but it’s my metabolism that resists them all! I’ve been told that I have a cute face, but my body is an embarrassment to me!”

Her nostrils flared with her anger, but she managed to keep her voice down. “Sure, if I had a figure like Jenni’s, I would probably flaunt it as she does, but that scan today was sheer torture for someone like me! You three may joke about it, but if I had known about this before we had to sign our contracts, I would have gone home and taken my chances with my debts…” Jon opened his mouth to respond, but she cut him off before he could say anything. “What’s worse is that there will be more of those scans done to us throughout our development, so I get to look forward to it all over again!”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he replied. “You won’t have to worry about me being present next time.”

“Jon, Kristen!” Jenni’s voice called out to them. “There’s someone here to see us all!”

“I already have my PBJ!” Kristen called back with a scowl.

“We are not here to discuss your electronic toys,” said a new voice with amusement. Jon and his companion looked over at the pit and saw two women standing at the top of the steps with Doctor Renwick and Nurse Marcy, their housemates looking up at them. One was in her forties with long brown hair that was caught up in a long ponytail that hung to her waist. She was dressed in a chocolate brown skirt and jacket with a cream-colored blouse. The other newcomer was younger, closer to Jon’s age and hair color. She was dressed in simple black slacks and a tan, long-sleeve blouse with only the first two buttons near her collar open. She wore a delicate silver necklace with a matching chain about her left wrist.

Kristen frowned at the intrusion and pulled her fuzzy robe closer to her. Jon gave her a raised eyebrow and then left her standing at her door. He had only gone a few steps before the botanist sighed and followed him to meet the newcomers.

Doctor Renwick gestured to the women and said, “I would like to introduce you all to Sylvia Janes and Professor Angelina Flynn.” Then he motioned toward each of the Felis housemates. “Kristen, Jenni, Dante and Jonathan. Sylvia has been assigned as your primary instructor in preparation for the basics of colony life, and Professor Flynn is our project psychologist.”

“Hello, felines,” the brown-haired professor said with a smile.

“Psychologist?” Jon repeated with personal amusement. “I suspected we might all be crazy for doing this,” he said to her. “Are you here to confirm it?”

Professor Flynn gave him a disarming smile. “The stressful process of transformation can sometimes bother even the most stable personality,” she replied in a smooth, calm voice. “I am simply here to help volunteers ease into the changes you will all experience, both physical and mental. I would like to spend a few moments to speak with each of you in private later this evening so that we may establish a working relationship.”

“You can start with me,” Kristen volunteered, putting her hands into the deep pockets of her robe, one hand resting upon her new PBJ. “I could use a shrink already.” Professor Flynn raised both eyebrows and with the exception of Jon, her housemates looked surprised.

“Of course, dear,” the professor replied with a nod. “Doctor Renwick has offered up the Wing’s office for our use, so we may have a private conversation without interruption.”

“Thank you,” Kristen responded in a calmer voice. “May we start right now?”

Renwick gave the psychologist a quiet nod and then the professor reached out a slender hand to the short woman. “Come along, we can get an early start and take all the time you need.”

Kristen shook her hand and then followed her across the room toward the physicians’ office.

“What’s up with her?” Dante said to no one in particular after the two women had gone. “Is she crazy or just nuts?”

“That wasn’t very nice!” Jenni scolded. Then, in a quieter voice she said, “She’s probably having second thoughts, now that there’s no turning back.”

Jon cleared his throat. “She does not have a very good self-image of herself,” he remarked with pointed looks at the doctor and his nurse, “and she’s having real issues with the demeaning examinations and scans you’ve put her through. It was bad enough to have to expose herself to you two, but you are physicians. There was no need for me to remain in there once she voiced her concerns. She practically begged you to let me leave the room, but you wouldn’t have it.”

“I told you why,” Renwick said defensively. “For legal reasons, you couldn’t wait in the lab with your solutions out–”

Jon cut him off. “You could have easily escorted me out of the lab altogether. It would have taken less time than all the coaxing you had to do to get her up against the wall with me in there. Sure, I admit that I watched during her scans, but I didn’t even have to be in there at all.”

Marcy opened her mouth to reply, but Jon cut her off too. “I know you were following procedure and doing your jobs, but you really need to have a little more compassion for your patients. She’s overweight and she knows it, but she couldn’t have been more traumatized than if you had made her do that out here in front of everyone!”

Without waiting for a retort, he shifted his eyes to the newcomer who had remained quiet since her associate had left with the dark-haired botanist; he walked over to her with an outstretched hand. “Hello, Ms. Janes,” he said with a sudden change of face. He was not smiling, but his expression was no longer stern. “I’m sorry you had to arrive at such an occasion, but welcome to the Cat House.”

“The Cat House, Mr. Sunset?” Silvia repeated in amusement as she took his hand. “Odd, I thought I was in the Felis Wing.”

Jon returned her smile. “I’ve never seen Felis with wings,” he replied, “unless the good doctor slipped in some new code into my injection.” The woman chuckled, glancing over at the physician momentarily.

“If you’re our new schoolmarm,” Dante stated in an exaggerated southern drawl, “are you going to teach us how to be cats, ma’am?”

“She will instruct you in preparation for the basics of colony life,” Renwick repeated what he had said earlier, still feeling the sting of Jon’s rebuke. “Learning to be feline is something you will learn on your own as you transform.”

“Starting tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, the four of you will join the other twelve volunteers for three days in the main assembly hall in the Clark Savage building next door,” Silvia told them. “We will begin with the basics of colonial life as a group to cover an initial understanding of the typical conditions you are likely to face. The first session is four hours long, and then we will break for lunch, resuming afterward for another four hours. After three days, everyone will split up again with an instructor continuing sessions within each Wing that will be more personalized for your groups. I am the one assigned to your house and we will have our own sessions over there at the large video screen.”

“Do you know what planet we’ll be going to?” Jenni asked, setting her PBJ on the couch beside her.

Sylvia shook her head. “Currently there are none available,” she answered with a wistful look. “There are three under scrutiny right now, but I’m afraid that none of them will be approved for settlement anytime soon.”

“Why?”

“All three were discovered earlier this year and remote probes have been sent out to investigate from orbit, but it’s too soon to tell if any of them are as habitable as long-range sensors and telescopes have hinted. It may be two or three years before any are approved, but in the meantime, we still have to train you in the event that something comes up quickly.”

“What about the other colonies?” Dante ventured. “Even if a settlement has already begun elsewhere, surely they could use fresh blood to help expand their establishments.”

Sylvia nodded. “That is about the only other possibility right now,” she replied, moving to one of the chairs at the table. She pushed aside the PBJ cover pouches and made herself comfortable. “The prize money does not apply to established colonies, however. That is only for first-comers in a starter colony on a new world.”

“Have they ever set up multiple colonies on the same new planet?” Jon asked. “Like the Earth, I would image that other worlds have more than one climate across their surfaces. Other settlements would increase the chances of establishing a foothold upon a new planet.”

“This is true, but due to the small number of volunteers, there haven’t been enough to set up multiple colonies.”

Dante frowned. “From what I’ve been able to gather over the past few days wandering the grounds, you have a number of fully-formed and educated Furs just waiting for the opportunity to go. Since there are no open settlements right now, why not use them to start a new colony on one of the other worlds already being explored, only locate them on another continent as Jon suggested?”

Sylvia gestured with a finger at him. “That very thing was recently proposed to the AHCP, but it was tabled because it would have to be a mixed colony since there are not enough Furs of any single race. A starter colony is typically made up of all one furman type to provide a greater diversity for possible reproduction. There were some who’ve argued to try a mixed colony, but the idea hasn’t been met with much interest due to its logistics.”

She leaned forward upon her elbows on the table and shrugged. “I have heard no rumors of other worlds being opened up for new settlement anytime soon, but until we have some kind of orders for you volunteers, all we can do is continue to prepare you all for life out there on some distant land.”

She looked at her techwatch and then glanced back at the office door where her associate had disappeared with Kristen. “Professor Flynn and I were due to visit the Ursis Wing together next, but I don’t think she was prepared to take on a client right away.” She looked over at Renwick and Marcy, both of whom had made themselves comfortable on one of the unoccupied curved couches. “Since we have no way of knowing how much time they may need in there, I think I may go on without her.”

“I thought you were being assigned to this Wing,” Dante remarked. “Why do you need to visit with the others?”

Sylvia swept a lock of auburn hair behind one ear and gave him a patient smile. “During the sessions over the next three days, I will be one of the speakers addressing all sixteen of you, but I want to get out and meet everyone personally. You will have me to yourselves afterward, so there’s no need to be stingy.”

Dante grinned back at her. “Are the other instructors going to come by to see us too?” he asked.

“Possibly,” she replied, getting back up to her feet, “but I am not aware of their plans. Now, if you will excuse me, I will retrieve my soggy umbrella and be on my way. Dante, Jenni and Jonathan, it was nice to meet you. Please give your friend Kristen my apologies. I will try to meet with her tomorrow.”

Just as she turned to go, a ping signaled an incoming message from the PBJ on the couch beside Jenni. She picked it up and opened its cover while Sylvia spoke quietly with Renwick and Marcy.

The blonde’s eyes lit up with joy. “It’s from my sister, Jana!” she exclaimed.

Before anyone had a chance to respond, another ping sounded from Dante’s unit. He took a look and a smile crossed his features as well. “Well, that didn’t take him long,” he chuckled to himself. He looked over at Jenni with a smirk. “An old classmate wants to know all the dirty little details of my transformation. He’s thinking of doing it himself after I’m finished cooking.”

With his housemates involved with their mail, Jon picked up his copper PBJ and walked quietly to his room, fully aware that he would never receive any messages on his unit outside of the AHCP. With Brian Barrett dead to the world and to his family, there was no one beyond the Furmankind Institute who knew Jonathan Sunset.

Chapter 17

Hairless Apes

The assembly hall on the second floor of the Clark Savage building was not as large as the volunteers thought it would be, considering the size of the building itself. Arranged in the manner of typical university classrooms, there was a speaker’s podium before a large smart-screen video panel, and then bench seats with slotted backs set in stadium tiers before it with long curving tables for students. The total capacity of the room was less than one hundred and even then, it seemed overlarge with only sixteen volunteers and a smattering of faculty and visitors occupying the seats.

Jon looked around the room when they entered through the door and he immediately spotted Marcelo Delgado sitting near the upper back tier of the stadium seats, watching over everyone as they came in while absently stroking his Van Dyke beard. He and Jon locked eyes for a moment, but the red-haired man simply nodded to him and continued on to find seats with his housemates.

The others scattered around the room appeared to be mostly volunteers in their twenties and thirties, although he did see a few people older than he was in the crowd. It was easy to spot the volunteers. They were the only ones wearing the furman-style garments.

Dante led them to a spot near the middle of the room, an equal number of rows in front of and behind them. Seated nearby was another group of four. When Kristen saw who it was, she sat down next to Jon on the opposite side of the other group, effectively putting the bulk of the larger man between them. Jenni sat beside her, with Dante on the blonde’s other side.

Curious, Jon looked over and exchanged smiles with Cheryl Dalton, the cowgirl who had kissed him the previous day. Reclining lazily behind her was Travis Tyndall, whose eyes were not upon Jon, but on the dark-haired botanist beside him. Kristen pointedly did not look back at him, choosing instead to gaze around the room at the other volunteers, guests and faculty who filed into the room in twos and threes.

Travis got to his feet and scooted past the older couple seated beside Cheryl, but when he recognized Jon, he stopped suddenly, a hand unconsciously going to his sore breastbone where he had been struck during their previous encounter. Jon raised an eyebrow at him and suddenly Travis puffed up in renewed bravado, a smirk upon his face.

He stepped over several seats so that when he approached the Felis volunteers, he was right behind Kristen, standing away from her companion who watched him with narrowed eyes.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said smoothly, placing a hand gently upon her shoulder. Kristen flinched, but did not look at him or reply to his greeting, though a bit of color crept into her cheeks. “I apologize for my earlier conduct. I was heady from your beauty and I was not thinking straight. I’m sorry.”

Kristen turned to look at him with narrowed eyes. “Would you have been sorry after raping me if my friends had not been there to stop you?” she asked icily.

Travis blinked, taken aback by her response. He cleared his throat, shifted his eyes briefly to her companions seated beside her, and then lowered his head closer to her ear. “That… was never my intention,” he tried to assure her in a soothing voice. “I merely wished to woo you in private.”

“Woo me? You tried to force me to go with you,” she hissed. “I still have the bruises on my wrist!”

“I apologize, milady. I really do. I still find you beautiful.”

Kristen studied him over her shoulder for a moment. “I’m flattered that you think so,” she said in mock sweetness. Then in a menacing tone, she added, “I’m not interested. Now, please leave me alone.”

Travis held up one hand as if to show he was backing off, but at the same time, he put his other hand lightly on the back of her neck to stroke the skin beneath her dark cascade of hair. She shivered from his soft touch and then glared back at him with gritted teeth.

“Stop touching me!” Kristen exclaimed, loud enough to carry across the assembly hall.

Jon and Dante were both on their feet instantly and Travis quickly looked up at each, from one to the other with a scowl upon his face.

“Am I making your house lovers jealous?” he said into the woman’s ear, leaving his hand right where he had placed it.

Jon reached out and grabbed the other man’s wrist, forcefully pulling it from Kristen’s neck. Travis began struggling to free his arm, muttering obscenities at the other man. Every eye in the hall was drawn to the sudden commotion.

Marcelo Delgado had watched the proceedings silently from the back of the room, but when Kristen’s outburst prompted her housemates to their feet in her defense, the director jumped up as well, ready to intervene. However, when Jon released the younger man’s arm and Travis scrambled away, he waited to see what would happen.

Rubbing his arm and hurling more obscenities at Jon, Travis stormed away to his own housemates, all of whom appeared embarrassed to be associated with him after his public display.

Dante sat down again and Jon watched Travis a moment longer before he returned to his seat. Satisfied that further disaster had been temporarily averted, Marcelo sat down, his eyes never leaving the back of Tyndall’s head. The reassurances the man had given him after his last incident appeared to have been empty promises, so he would have to keep an eye out on this one.

Oddly enough, the one Marcelo thought he should be having difficulties with had done nothing but react to defend his housemate, this time backed up by another from the same Wing. Mr. Sunset had allowed Ms. Eisenberg the opportunity to accept or reject Tyndall’s advances, but once she had made it clear she was not interested, the ex-convict had stepped in to prevent further harassment. Marcelo had no illusions that the man would have remained passive had Tyndall persisted, but would Sunset have thrown the first punch this time?

So far, Sunset had only been reactionary on behalf of his housemate. Marcelo had watched the man’s facial expressions while Tyndall had hurled profanity in his face, but the larger man had not seemed outwardly concerned by the insults.

Most of the assembly had arrived and taken seats, so a movement below diverted his attention from his musings. Tyndall had seated himself beside Cheryl, the only single female in his wing, but she got up and left him in disgust, moving instead toward the Vulps group that was sitting behind and to the left of the Felis group. She spoke to the company of four and they indicated that she was welcome to join them. Cheryl sat down without a look back at her own group.

Conversations around the assembly hall hushed when a heavyset, silver-haired man in a charcoal grey suit stepped up to the podium and tapped lightly on his lapel microphone.

“Hello everyone, I am Professor Kenton Chesterfield, the personnel instructor of the Ursis Wing. Although you have been here several days and are now under contract with the Anthro Human Colonization Program, I bid you welcome to the Furmankind Institute. Over the course of the next three days, I and my associates will begin your instruction into the basics of colonial life. This will cover an initial understanding of the typical conditions you will all likely face when you are assigned to a new world, based upon those already discovered. Each session will be four hours long, broken up by a fifteen-minute break at two-hour intervals and a one-hour lunch period.”

He put his hands behind his back and looked around at the volunteers. “It is my honor to begin today, so if you will all focus your attention on the screen behind me, we can begin.”

He picked up a remote from a recess within the podium and thumbed a pad without looking at the controls. The screen came to life, displaying the AHCP logo upon a blue starfield. The logo disappeared and a bulky, cumbersome-appearing space freighter filled the screen upon the backdrop.

Built more for functionality than aesthetics, the ship resembled nothing more than a winged, fat cigar flattened on the bottom and narrower at the back around the interstellar slip-drive engines. While unneeded for space flight, its massive upper delta wings would be essential for descending into a planetary atmosphere, giving the vessel the appearance of a large airplane. Large cargo doors were flush with the curved sides of the vessel just forward of the engines. Its stubby nose was adorned with a single row of glassteel windows for the bridge flight deck and the overall external color scheme of the ship was dirty white with its name and registry number painted green in small block letters across its four huge retractable cargo doors.

“This is the Francisco Coronado, a Traveler-class Heavy Freighter,” Chesterfield explained. “This is one of three such vessels in use by the AHCP to ferry colonists and their supplies to each new world opened up for settlement. It is the sister ship of the Meriwether Lewis and the William Clark. There was a fourth ship, the Ferdinand Magellan, but it vanished without a trace as it approached its destination a decade ago. Now, this freighter and personnel carrier has a heavy payload capacity of….”

The instructor stopped and looked at the four men seated down near the front. One held up a hand in interruption. “Yes, Mr. Nicholas, you had a question?”

“When will we start to see the first effects of the transformation?” asked a young man from the Ursis group who looked as if he might have been a college linebacker.

Chesterfield looked confused. “I’m sorry, son, but that is not my area of expertise. I was about to give you the background of the stellar vehicle that will take you and your colony supplies out to the planet chosen for you to tame.” Another hand went up from the Canis group. “Yes, you have a question about this freighter, mister uh…?”

“Carl Amaranth, Professor. No, I was wondering if you could explain how a plantigrade foot will form into digitigrade without depleting tissue mass.”

“No, Mr. Amaranth, I cannot,” Chesterfield replied with tightly pressed lips, “but if you will all listen to what I have to say, you will learn the nature of my instruction.” Another hand went up and he sighed in impatience. “Ma’am, do you have a question about the Coronado?” The hand dropped and the youngest of the Vulps sisters shook her head quietly.

“Thank you,” the professor told her. “Now, a Traveler-class Heavy Freighter has a total payload capacity of…”

***

Jon felt a tap on his shoulder and he suddenly jolted awake. Kristen smiled at him in amusement and whispered in his ear, “You can wake up now. We get a fifteen-minute break before the next speaker begins.”

Jon hid a yawn behind a hand and then blinked in rapid succession. “Mm, sorry,” he mumbled. “I hope I wasn’t snoring.”

“You weren’t, but Dante was,” Jenni piped in with a chuckle, standing up to stretch. “I had to elbow him three times.”

“That was a lot of dry information,” the younger man grumbled.

Jon wiped his eyes and saw several other drowsy volunteers around the assembly hall. “How far did I make it through Chesterfield’s monotone presentation before I nodded off?”

“About forty-five minutes,” Kristen replied lightly. “C’mon, get up and walk around. Get a drink of water and go visit the little boys’ room.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jon said, forcing himself to his feet. He glanced down at the podium and watched the silver-haired professor put his tablet away into a briefcase, silently hoping the information he had covered would be shared to their PBJs. He doubted the lecture was given without a reason, and Jon still wanted to look it over despite its dryness. He had always enjoyed academic studies, but sometimes the speaker’s voice could drone on an on.

The next speaker was the mentor assigned to the Vulps Wing, a dark-skinned woman named Jean Dessau whose expertise was in transterrestrial botany. Her instruction would be discussing similarities between the plant-life on Earth to those they had found on the other worlds that had been discovered thus far. Kristen sat riveted in place through her presentation, and even though there were few others in the room with a background in botany, Ms. Dessau was an experienced speaker who knew how to hold the attention of her spectators. The settlers would be taking a great amount of food and seed with them, but eventually they would have to attempt growing Earth-type food plants in the alien soil or they would have to discover edible vegetation among the native plant life.

Before long, the class was over and a greater amount of the audience was still awake than had been with Chesterfield’s presentation. The assemblage was given an hour for lunch, and since the cafeteria was on the ground floor of the same building, the majority of the crowd congregated there for their noon meal.

Jenni led her group to a long set of tables near the middle of the cafeteria, and after the Felis group had taken their seats with their trays of food, it was apparent why the blonde nurse had chosen these tables. Behind them in the serving line were four women and one young man, and when they wandered out looking for a place to sit down, Jenni waved the whole group over to them.

Cheryl and three females sat on the end of the table beside her and Kristen, but a lone male stood with his tray in disappointment when there were no more seats among them. With a sigh, he moved to the opposite end and approached Jon and Dante.

“May I sit here, please?” he asked timidly. A long forelock of the young man’s sandy blonde hair fell into his grey eyes, but both hands held onto the tray leaving him without a way to brush it from his face. The dark blue furman garment he wore was almost too large for his lanky frame.

Dante merely nodded, but Jon looked up at him with a friendly smile. “Sure, have a seat. Your name is Kevin, right?”

The young man looked surprised and delighted. “That’s right,” he said as he set his tray on the table and then sat down. “Kevin Rockwell.”

“I’m Jon Sunset and this is Dante Capanari. We’re the male half of the Felis Wing.”

“I’m the only guy in the Vulps Wing,” the newcomer supplied with a frown, brushing the long bangs from his face. “Even my doctor and nurse are both women.”

“The black wall must have been a nightmare for you,” Dante muttered, blowing on a hot bit of food on the end of his fork.

“I was glad they made me close my eyes,” Kevin confessed.

Jon studied the young man for a moment. “Excuse me for being blunt, but are you old enough to be in the AHCP?” he asked.

Kevin hesitated before responding. “Barely,” he admitted with a frown, dropping his eyes. “I turned eighteen last month.”

There was something about the young man’s manner that bothered Jon. “Did you actually volunteer for this?” he asked in a voice so soft that Kevin almost did not hear him. The youth looked up and found no mocking amusement in the older man’s face. Finally, slowly, Kevin’s eyes dropped to his plate and he shook his head.

“My folks made me sign up for it. I’m their only kid and they want me to set them up for the rest of their lives with the prize money.”

“I hope they know that you have to survive on an alien world to get that prize,” Dante supplied from across the table. “What skills do you have?”

Kevin looked frightened. “None! I… I’ve never even had a job,” he confessed weakly. “I just graduated from high school four months ago!” He looked at his food in disgust, as if he had just lost his appetite. “I’ve never even been away from home longer than a week of summer camp before.”

Jon felt pity for the young man; here was someone else there against his wishes. Experienced as Brian Barrett, he had survival skills that might benefit him on another world, but this boy had none. He did not even look as if he had played many school sports.

“The Institute plans to train us all in skills we’ll need for the colonies,” he assured him, picking up a BLT sandwich from his plate. “They aren’t going to just ship us out and drop us off as we are now. I don’t think any of us would survive for long if they did that.”

“I would certainly hope not.”

“Listen, why don’t you come over to the Felis Wing and visit us whenever you feel like your vixens are putting too much estrogen in the air,” Jon invited.

Kevin blinked. “Vixens? Estrogen?”

Dante laughed at the boy’s naiveté. “A vixen is a female fox,” he told him. “Do you know what testosterone is?”

Kevin nodded. “That’s basically what makes a man a male.”

“Close enough,” Dante chuckled. “Estrogen is the same for a woman. It’s what makes them all fussy and girly at times, and when there’s too much of it in the air it usually makes most guys want to steer clear of them and hang out with other guys.”

Kevin grinned. “Yeah, I can understand that!” he replied.

“Come on over anytime you feel like it,” Jon said again.

“Thanks, Mr. Sunset!”

The older man laughed. “Please, first names only, remember? I’m Jon and that’s Dante.”

Kevin slunk down in his seat a little. “I tried being friends with Cheryl’s roommate, but that Travis guy only made fun of me for being a single guy in a house full of available women and that married couple only seems to look on me in pity.”

“Forget Travis,” Jon told him. “Listen, if you don’t mind spending time with a couple of older guys…”

“Older? Hey, I haven’t made it over the hill like you yet!” Dante complained. “I’m still in my twenties!”

“You’re still older than me,” Kevin countered with a grin, “but none of us are as old as the Amaranths!”

Jon laughed, shook his head, and then remembered some of the background that had been fabricated for him. “You know, you’re about the age my younger brother would have been.”

“Would have been?” Kevin asked. Dante looked up in curiosity.

Jon nodded and pretended to study his sandwich for a moment. “I lost my kid brother a few years ago to a lake accident. Now that I think about it, he would have been graduating this year.”

“What was his name?” Kevin asked somberly.

“Nathanial, but I always called him Nate.” Jon took another bite of his BLT and the others returned to their meals for several quiet moments. After a bit, Dante reached across the table and tapped the edge of Kevin’s plastic meal tray.

“What’re names of your cute housemates?” he asked with a sly grin. “They’re all sisters, aren’t they?”

Kevin raised an eyebrow, but shrugged and indicated each of the dark-haired women sitting with Cheryl on the other end of the table. “The oldest one with the long dark hair is Jasmine Fleur,” he whispered. “The one next to her with the short curly hair is Dahlia, and the youngest beside Cheryl with the short hair is Rose. They’re all in their twenties, just a few years apart between each of them.”

“What are they like?” Dante wanted to know.

“I dunno. They all tease me,” Kevin said bitterly, “so I spend most of my time in my room.”

“How do they tease you?”

Kevin’s brow furrowed. “They keep saying how cute I am, how lonely I look, or wonder how snuggly I might be,” he grumbled. “This morning, all three of them were waiting for me when I got out of the shower.”

“What’d they do?”

Kevin swallowed with difficulty. “They all dropped their towels at the same time.”

Dante’s eyes widened with his grin. “What did you do?”

“I ran to my room! But I—”

Dante cackled. “What I wouldn’t give to trade places with you!” he exclaimed, sitting back in his chair.

“I was halfway to my room before I realized they all had on peach-colored swimsuits beneath their towels.”

“Kevin, don’t let them bother you,” Jon told him, pushing away his finished plate. “That’s typical female behavior, and they only do it because they know it embarrasses you. If you stop showing shock and surprise, they’ll stop bugging you.”

“I don’t know if I can stop being surprised,” Kevin mumbled. “I didn’t grow up around sisters, and I didn’t date much in high school.”

“Virgin!” Dante cackled.

Kevin frowned, but nodded. “I am, but I’m in no hurry,” he retorted.

“Uh huh, right. What interests do they have?”

“All three are into martial arts, something else that makes me afraid of them.”

Jon shook his head. “We’ll have to find some things in common to help you pass your free time while we’re here,” Jon remarked. “What do you like to do?”

“Well,” the young man began, eager to chat with his newfound friends, “I like to read adventure books, watch football and hockey, go jogging, cycling and hiking…”

The guys visited for a little while longer until Kristen stood up from her seat and announced that it was time to head back up to the assembly hall. Despite the earlier awkward moments between her and Cheryl the day before, the two women seemed to have enough mutual interests that they had enjoyed their discussion over lunch.

Jon and Kevin brought up the rear as the entourage made its way to the stairs, and just before they left the cafeteria, Jon noticed Travis still sitting by himself in the far corner of the large room; not even his remaining housemates were sitting with him now. The other man glared at him with brooding eyes, but Jon did not give him more than a glance before disappearing up the stairs. Kevin followed Jon to a seat and was delighted when he was invited to sit with the Felis group.

The rest of the day went without incident, the time spent listening to the presentations given them, and they were directed to bring their PBJs with them upon the following day for taking notes and sharing information.

***

When Jenni opened her eyes the next morning, she knew right away that something was different. Her sleep-addled mind was not yet alert enough to realize what it was, only that something did not feel quite right.

Before she had a chance to open her eyes to look at the clock, there was a mild, itchy sensation all over her body. It was not unpleasant, just odd, like a subtle fizz all over. Heaving a sigh at having to get up, she struggled into a sitting position. She reached to the lamp beside the bed and tapped it on, but it was still a moment or two before she opened her eyes to the illumination.

She did so at the same moment that she pulled her covers back, and she immediately saw something under the sheets with her. She felt a brief instance of fear at the strands of a yellowish material before she realized what she was seeing.

In disbelief, the woman reached up to her head and put a hand upon her scalp. It was completely smooth and the naked skin felt mildly tingly beneath her fingers. Although she had known that the hair of the volunteers would be replaced by fur, it had never occurred to her that the hair would simply fall out.

She looked back down at her sheets and realized that there were more than just her blonde strands upon her pillow and beside her on the bed. She got up out of the bed and then whipped back the cover sheet and the fleece blanket. Puffs of other fine hair showered the air and then she stepped back.

Movement at the corner of her eye drew her attention to her reflection in the large mirror over the dresser and she approached it. Jenni had never been vain about her looks, but she had always taken care to make herself presentable. She leaned in close to examine her scalp, and it was while she was up next to the glass that she realized that her eyebrows were missing, as well as her long eyelashes!

All of her hair?

She furrowed her brow in sudden suspicion and then stripped off the cotton night clothes she had slept in. The shapely woman stared back at her bare image with her hands on her hips, lightly chewing on her bottom lip in thought. Her body was completely devoid of all hair.

Yes, all of it.

Perhaps her family’s free lifestyle had conditioned her, but after a moment of contemplation, Jenni shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the bed. She pulled off the top covers and shook them out over the carpet before depositing them in a corner beside the room’s recliner. She would have to vacuum later, but for now she wanted her former tresses off the bed. She pulled off the pillows and the bottom fitted sheet and did the same with them. Some of the smaller hairs would not seem to shake off, so she pulled out a set of the furman garments from the dresser and slid into them before leaving her room to get another set of linens from the saloon closet.

When she stepped outside of her door, the lights were already on out in the common area. Jenni smiled when Jon looked up at her on his way back across the room, his arms already laden with fresh sheets, pillow cases and a blanket for his bed. Like herself, she knew that the large man was just as hairless. His formerly full head of rusty-red hair was now a taut dome of skin and the expression on his face was almost comical without the thick eyebrows above his eyes.

“G’morning, Baldilocks,” he quipped, his gaze roving over her nude head.

“Good morning,” she replied, crossing her arms and then putting a finger up under her chin, her head slightly tilted to the side. “Have you ever considered a gold earring?” she asked with a smile.

Jon gave her a look of longsuffering for such a comment so early in the morning. “I have enough holes in my head without putting another in my earlobe,” he retorted with a wry smirk.

“He would look like the mascot of that old cleaning fluid commercial,” added Dante’s voice from behind her. Jenni whirled around and saw the younger bald man grinning at her, his face oddly plain without its pencil-thin mustache.

“That’s what I was thinking,” she agreed.

“Or we could paint his skin blue and he could be Aladdin’s genie,” Dante quipped. “Halloween’s coming up, y’know.”

“No, he would still need a pony-tail for that look.”

Jon grinned easily, taking the ribbing good-naturedly. “Well, at least we all have a sense of humor about losing our hair,” he told them, leaning up against the wall beside his room. “I always thought I would be like my grandfather and go to my grave with a full head of hair.”

“Now you’ll go with a full body of fur instead!” Dante did not see the sudden dark look the other man gave him. He had his head tilted upward and he was running a hand across his smooth chin. “At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ll never need a razor again.”

Jenni raised a naked eyebrow and then looked down at her legs. “Me either,” she supplied. “I suppose that’s a good thing.”

“I look like a shop window dummy in a department store,” Dante exclaimed.

Jon smiled at that, mentally noting that he got the dummy part right. “Actually, you look like a hairless ape, with the way your ears stick out on the sides of your head!”

Not to be daunted by the verbal exchange, Dante bent over and curled his hands up under his now-hairless armpits, grunting in a simian manner.

“I wonder why they didn’t make furman apes when they discovered the process,” Jenni wondered. “The DNA is close enough that I doubt there would have been many problems with the changes.”

“Yeah, Dante would have been a perfect specimen,” Jon said with a chuckle.

“I think it’s because the body mass of an ape is too heavy,” Dante mused aloud. When the other two looked at him, he shrugged. “I saw it on a nature show. Apes can’t swim because their muscle mass weighs too much, and this is why a lot of zoos put them on islands surrounded by water instead of behind cage bars.”

“That’s a good point,” Jenni agreed.

“Hey, do you guys have to have a nature conversation outside my door this early in the morning?” asked a groggy voice. All three of the housemates looked aside at their fourth. Kristen was standing just inside the doorway of her room, sleepy-eyed and yawning. “You woke me up.”

Dante grinned and motioned for the others to join him. All three stepped up to their companion and leaned in close, placing their bald heads side by side in front of her.

Kristen stepped back, suddenly suspicious of this action, but it only took her sleep-fogged mind a few heartbeats to realize that something was out of place. Then it hit her.

“You… you all shaved your heads!” she exclaimed with wide eyes.

Jenni shook her head, bumping her male bookends on both sides. “Guess again,” she said in a lilting voice.

Kristen furrowed her brow. “I don’t understand,” she replied. “What’s going on?”

Jon stepped forward and gently took the botanist’s hand. She watched mutely as he raised her fingers upward and then placed her hand on top of her own head. Her fingers froze upon the smooth flesh of her scalp and she blinked several times in rapid succession.

“You… you shaved me too!” she suddenly wailed, grasping her bare head in both hands. “Is this some kind of sick joke in the night? I can’t believe you would—”

“Kris!” Jon barked sharply. “Stop!” The short woman did as commanded, her eyes growing moist as they locked upon his face. “Kris, you haven’t been shaved, and neither have we. All our hair fell out during the night. It’s part of the furman process.”

“It fell out?” she squeaked. “All of it?”

Dante smirked and glanced down toward her shorts. “Every last little hair!”

Kristen looked at him in momentary confusion, but then the lecherous expression on his face registered. She coughed nervously into her hands and then suddenly darted back inside her room, slamming the door behind her.

“She hadn’t even noticed,” Dante quipped, looking back at his companions. He reached up and put both hands upon his smooth scalp. There was not even a hint of stubble across its surface. “I wonder how long before the peach-fuzz of our fur begins to come in.”

“A few days, I think,” Jenni answered. She lingered at the other woman’s door even as the guys turned away, wondering if she should go in and offer her support. She raised her hand up to knock, but the door panel suddenly opened.

Kristen stepped out of the opening, tears streaming down her cheeks, long strands of her former dark tresses spilling out from her hands. “It took me years to grow my hair out that long…” she whispered, looking up at her female housemate.

“Didn’t you know this would happen?” Jenni asked quietly. Jon had already taken his clean linens into his room and Dante was heading for the far side of the room to get his own from the closet. “Our bodies have to get rid of human hair follicles to prepare our hides for incoming fur.”

Kristen looked down at the hair in her hands. “I guess I didn’t really think about it at all,” she admitted with a hint of resignation upon her face. “Even with the injections we got with the modified DNA, I suppose it never really seemed real to me until now. Our bodies are going to change. It’s no longer something that’s going to happen. It’s started. We are becoming furmankind.”

Jenni placed her hands on top of Kristen’s, cupping the long black human hair between their palms. “This is who we were,” she said, giving her a confident look. “Now it’s time to be someone else that we have chosen to be. Don’t be afraid of the future, Kristen. Look forward to it!”

The once-dark-haired botanist sighed and then gave her companion a small smile. “With friends like you and Jon, I think I can,” she admitted finally.

Jenni tilted her bald head. “What about Dante?”

Kristen shook her head with a smirk. “You and Jon are becoming good friends. Dante’s like an annoying little brother.”

Jenni grinned. “You can choose your friends, but you’re stuck with your relatives,” she quoted from memory.

“Exactly!” Kristen looked down at the hair in her hands again and frowned. “I have a lot of hair in my bed. I’ll never get back to sleep with it in there now.”

“That’s what we thought when we came out here,” Jenni remarked. “We’d all gone to get fresh linens when we bumped into one another. C’mon, let’s get ours so we can get back to sleep. There’s still a few hours before we have to be up and back at the assembly.”

Kristen suddenly smiled. “There will be a bunch of bald heads in there this time. Travis is so taken by his own image, I hope he’s traumatized by this!”

“That’s the spirit!” Jenni said with a laugh.

Chapter 18

Rump Lump

Jon and Kevin jogged side by side around an outdoor track that circled the small lake on the back side of the Institute grounds, their feet crunching upon dried leaves that blew across the path. Despite the peach-fuzz layer of fur that each had developed body-wide over the past two weeks since their injections, the meager furman robes were not as well-insulated as they had hoped against the encroaching winter temperatures of November in the Adirondacks. The jogging helped keep them warm enough, but they would soon need something more if they were to continue their outside excursions. The daytime mercury had only risen into the low-fifties Fahrenheit with partly cloudy skies and light breezes through the treetops, but the nighttime temperatures struggled to reach the upper thirties.

As they jogged in synchronous steps, Jon reached up and absently scratched a spot beside his nose. Although there had yet to be any transformation in his actual bodily structure, colors and patterns had already surfaced in his fur. The tip of his nose was a muted pink, but his upper and lower lips, jaws and neck were snowy white. Atop his nose, the fur was sandy brown, with darker browns coloring his cheeks and pale patches over his eyes. The fur over his brow and the rest of his head was in various shades of tan and brown, but when in direct sunlight, some of Jon’s original red hair coloring could be seen as a tint to his pelt, a color not really uncommon among mountain lions, though perhaps a little brighter.

Although still small and human-shaped, the backs of his ears were dark rimmed, almost black, with a nebulous white area in the middle. Above his nose ran a darker brown stripe straight up his forehead that faded out at the top of his head; there were two dark vertical strips an inch long right above the inside corner of each eye too. So far, there had been no sign of whiskers, a fact that Dante bemoaned daily in anticipation.

The thin fur over the rest of Jon’s body was fairly uniform brown that faded into beige on his chest, belly, around his crotch and on the underside of his arms, and although there was no distinct border, the fur down the back of his neck and the middle along his spine tended to be a little darker than the rest of his fur.

Doctor Renwick had confirmed that an unrelated DNA donor had been used for Kristen, but her patterns were remarkably similar to Jon’s, while the central fur along her back was not as dark as his was and she did not have the reddish tint in the sunlight.

Despite the fur and the patterns, on a human Jon thought it all looked like nothing more than body paint or theatrical makeup from a short distance. Despite his revulsion to Furs, he merely felt silly when looking at his reflection in the mirror, almost as if he were examining his Halloween costume.

Jon glanced aside at his jogging companion and allowed himself a smile at the young man’s ears. None of the ears of those in the Felis Wing had begun to change besides growing the peach-fuzz over their outer surfaces, but Kevin’s ears were getting noticeably larger, although they were nowhere near the size they would get before the transformation was complete. The teenager had chosen a fennec fox as his ultimate furman form because they were generally smaller predators than most of the others and the diminutive animals had personalities that seemed to match his own timid bearing. It had not occurred to the guy that his own ears would become extremely large, even though he had often seen photographs of the tiny foxes. As a human that had only begun the process, his ears did not yet resemble those of a fennec, but they were larger than normal and were beginning to take on a definite elfin look.

Like the Felis housemates, Kevin’s thin fur had spread out all over his body, but actual patterns were not as distinguishable. His was a uniform tan the color of desert sand, with white on his throat, belly and hands. Aside of his ears, his most prominent new feature was the dark brown “cry lines” leading down from his nose at the inside corner of each eye that ended at the corners of his mouth. The end of his nose was devoid of fur, but the skin tone was darkening towards black.

Some of the volunteers might lose or gain mass over time due to their DNA donor material, but it was unlikely that Kevin would get much bigger, even as he moved into adulthood. Still, despite his current teenage lanky frame, he was able to keep pace with his older companion during their daily jogs.

Kevin looked over and saw Jon glancing at his ears and a goofy grin spread across his features. Although the older male sometimes teased him about certain things, he always knew when to stop before feelings were hurt — unlike his housemates; the Fleur sisters could be unrelenting in their teasing. They were not mean, they just did not seem to know the difference between enough and too much.

Neither Kevin nor Jon said a word as they exchanged amused looks. They were only halfway around the trail course and they continued their even pace around the track.

In the administration office on the other side of the complex, Kristen was inside and leaning upon the counter in front of the admin assistant’s desk. After she had suffered the indignities of the initial days surrounding the injection, the botanist had sought out the friendship of the orange-furred cat. The young furman woman had already been through the transformation and colony instruction, and although Kristen’s education had begun with her housemates in daily sessions with Sylvia Janes in the saloon of the Felis Wing, it was Sissy’s personal memories and positive outlook that encouraged her in the days since the changes began. They met on a daily basis for lunch, as well as other times that the admin assistant’s schedule allowed, and today they were speaking in soft whispers outside of Marcelo’s office discussing the potential sale of her car to someone driving up from Saranac Lake to see it later that morning.

Doctor Renwick and Nurse Marcy were both away from the Institute for the weekend, each having gone to visit their respective relatives. Marcy had joined her sister and brother for a quick getaway to New York City to see a hot new Broadway production, while Renwick had gone home to Boston to visit his mother.

With their housemates and caretakers off the premises for a time, Jenni and Dante had planned to spend some private time together, but things did not turn out quite the way they had intended. After the kitchen had been cleared of the breakfast makings that morning, Jenni’s legs began cramping up on the way to the shower. Dante teased her about needing potassium, suggestive that she needed to eat a banana, but the spasms became so intense that she collapsed to the floor at his feet. He was not strong enough to carry her in his arms, so he provided a shoulder for her to lean upon to limp back.

Dante used his elbow to operate the light switch when they entered her bedroom, and then they both stumbled just before they reached the corner of the bed. Jenni caught the edge of her dresser with a hand and managed to keep them both upright, but then Dante pulled her toward the bed. He rolled her over onto the mattress and then stretched out beside her. The woman wrapped her arms around a pillow and lay face down upon it.

“Are you going to be all right?” Dante asked quietly, turning on his side to face her.

“Probably,” she mumbled into the pillow, “but I have a mild headache, too – right behind my eyes.”

He reached out to her legs and massaged her calves. The slightly furred skin felt almost velvety beneath his hands and despite the situation, he enjoyed the feel upon his fingers. Like Jon and Kristen, the patterns in Jenni’s fur were already coming out in dark leopard spots with creamy beige in between; Dante’s own fur was coming in snowy white, making the man as pale as an albino, but his tiger stripes were so light grey so they could only be seen well in sunlight from certain angles; he secretly hoped they would darken with time. He did not wish to turn out looking like nothing more than a large white housecat when it was all over.

Jenni dug her fingers into the pillow as more spasms coursed through her legs. Dante could feel the twinges in her leg muscles beneath his fingers and he frowned empathetically. A soft cry of pain escaped her lips when an especially intense cramp quivered just below her right knee, causing her to splay out her toes rigidly.

“This would happen when our physicians are gone,” Dante grumbled quietly, doing his best to administer what aid he could. Then to her he said, “You’re a registered nurse, right? What would you prescribe for this?”

Jenni thought about it for a moment. “I need to get up on my feet,” she mumbled into her pillow, “and stretch the muscles with exercise.”

Dante frowned. “You could barely stand a moment ago,” he scoffed.

The former blonde turned and fixed him with a look of sufferance. “Then help me up,” she replied with a sigh. “What you’re doing is helping, but I need to stretch the muscles out more.” She saw his smirk and added, “Besides, your massaging is traveling farther north than where my cramps are, dear.”

She rolled over toward him and trapped his hands beneath her hindquarters, playfully slapping his shoulder as she did. Another spasm took the fun out of her statement, however, and she grimaced in pain. Dante started to pull his hands free to help her up, but his fingers trailed across her hips and he suddenly stopped.

“Hello, what’s this?” he asked in sudden interest. Jenni shifted her weight so she could sit up, but her companion kept his fingers on a spot just above her buttocks.

“Dante, let me up, please,” she said in sudden frustration.

The man did as he was told, releasing her so she could stand up. When she stumbled to the wall and began to stretch up against it, his eyes seemed to be glued to the back of her shorts. The hem of her furman robe was riding up a little high, and he could see a lump just beneath her modified waistband.

Jenni stood up on her toes and stretched the muscles in her calves, her hands splayed out against the wall in front of her, but she suddenly froze when Dante grabbed the waistband of her shorts and tugged them downward. He only pulled them a couple of inches, but it was not her slightly exposed cheeks that held his attention.

“Dante!” she giggled in surprise. “What are you—?”

Her companion reached out tentative fingers and lightly rubbed at the base of her spine. There was a lump beneath the fuzzy skin, the size and shape of half a chicken’s egg.

“You have a hard lump back here,” he told her in a serious tone. “It wasn’t there last night when we were all together in the weight room.”

Jenni looked over her shoulder at him, continuing to stretch her leg muscles by extending one leg out and then mashing her toes in the carpet. “Yeah, I felt it against the toilet seat this morning,” she admitted. “I was going to see if one of the physicians at another Wing would look at it for me today.”

“Does it hurt?” Dante asked, gently prodding it with a finger. “The skin beneath your fur is red.”

“Only when you do that, dear heart. It’s a little tender.”

“Oh, sorry. It doesn’t look like a bite, not that there are any bugs still around after this cold snap moved in, but something is sure swelling up.”

Jenni closed her eyes and rested her forehead up against the wall. The stretching exercises were helping, but her legs were still sore. “I wonder if I’m having a reaction to the formula,” she mused aloud. She heard a small gasp and she looked back at her companion.

Dante had one hand around behind him and the look on his face was of dread. “Oh no…” he whispered, “I’ve got one too!” He swallowed, looking up at her. “Mine’s not as large, but I can feel it beneath the skin.”

The cramps having subsided for the moment, Jenni turned around and gestured toward the bed. “Lie down and let me have a look.”

Dante pulled down his shorts a few inches and then lay face down upon her mattress. Jenni knelt on the bed next to him and lightly prodded a slight swelling beneath his white fuzzy skin. Dante flinched when her fingernail pricked the area and she drew away with a mumbled apology.

His tender lump was in same place as hers was. Without glancing at his partially exposed buttocks, she sat up beside him, searching her medical knowledge for some affliction that could cause this.

Dante closed his eyes and merely lay there beside her quietly, but after a few moments, he heard her chuckle. He opened one eye and looked over at her. “Are you laughing at my butt?” he asked lazily.

Jenni looked down at him with a look of amusement on her face. “Not at all,” she replied. “It just occurred to me what was causing our lumps.”

“…and you found this funny?”

“Yes, actually. Consider where the lumps are located, Dante. They’re at the base of the spine; it’s our tailbones!”

“What disease would make your tailbone swell up?” he asked, not comprehending.

“It’s our tail-bones, Dante – our tails are growing! For animals with a tail, it’s an extension of the spine!”

The man thought about it for a moment, but he looked doubtful. “Let me see yours again,” he said. Jenni turned around and presented her backside to him, but then a smirk crossed Dante’s face. He pulled her shorts all the way down beneath her cheeks in one swift motion.

“Dante!” she gasped in surprise. She had to scramble to get the furman shorts back up into place, falling over onto the bed in the process, and she had to slap his hands away from her exposed buttocks several times before she got them up.

Despite that he had surprised and embarrassed her, she was laughing as she scuttled away from his lecherous fingers. “Stay back, you!” she commanded with a giggle when he crawled across the bed toward her.

“Aw, c’mon, Jenni,” the man lamented in a mock whine, “I just wanted to examine your tail some more!”

The woman laughed. “Yes, I’m sure you do!” Dante gathered his legs beneath him and prepared to launch himself off the bed toward her, but Jenni snickered and ran out the door. Her companion followed in hot pursuit out into the saloon, but just as he passed through the doorway, he saw his prey stumble down into the central pit and drop out of sight with a yelp.

Dante vaulted over the curved couch blocking his way and landed on the lower floor beside her.

“Are you okay?” he asked in concern.

Jenni clutched at her right leg, curled up with her knee near her chin. “Cramp hit me while I was running,” she gasped between spasms of pain. “I wrenched my knee when I fell.”

Dante grabbed her leg gently and stretched it out across his lap so he could massage it for her again. “Even though you’ve already figured out what the mysterious lump is on your tailbone,” he said soberly, “I think you should still look up another Wing physician about these cramps of yours.”

Jenni looked up at him wearily. “Why aren’t you having leg cramps?” she asked. “We all got our shots on the same day.”

The man looked over at her and both eyebrows suddenly went up. “I dunno,” he said distractedly.

Jenni saw his expression. “What’s the matter?” she asked, reaching up to run a hand across her forehead. “Am I bleeding?”

“Uh, no,” he answered. “You aren’t bleeding.”

“Then why are you looking at me that way?”

“Your eyes… they’ve changed color in just the past few minutes…”

“Changed color?” she repeated in surprise.

“Your pupils look a little stretched, but your eyes were light blue… now they’re light green.”

“My eyes are blue, Dante. You’re just imagining it or the lights are making you see them in a different hue.”

“The lights are off, Jenni; we have sunlight coming through the skylight. I can see your eyes clearly. Your eyes have changed color!”

The woman put a hand up to her temple and rubbed it lightly. “That might explain why the room seems brighter than usual. I’ve had a slight headache behind my eyes today,” she muttered just as another spasm quivered through both of her legs. She looked up at her companion with her new green eyes.

“Would you send a message to the medical staff of another Wing?” she asked with a tight throat. “If one of them is available, I’ll need you to help me over there.”

“Sure thing,” Dante replied with a nod, “though it might be better to have one of them come over here instead so you won’t have to walk on your cramping legs to get over there.”

“Thanks.”

Wondering when the same painful changes that were affecting her would hit him, Dante ran to his room to get his PBJ. Until now, he had been looking forward to the transformation, but seeing the pain on Jenni’s face made him wonder if he had been too optimistic about the process.

He grabbed up his PBJ and connected to the Institute’s network. He located the contact point for the Canis medical staff and typed out a quick explanation and request. After sending the message, he tucked the tablet into one of the large pockets of his furman robe and then turned to leave his room. The PBJ pinged a response before he had traversed three steps. He took a peek and found a short message: “On my way.”

Satisfied, Dante returned to the common area in the saloon, jumping down into the pit as he had done before, bypassing the steps to the lower level. When he hit the ground, a sharp jolt of pain exploded in his left ankle and he fell hard against a leg of the table.

“Dante!” Jenni exclaimed, “Are you all right?”

The man groaned and sat up clutching his leg. “Ouch…” he murmured.

“What happened?”

“I think I landed too hard,” he replied. The ankle felt tender, but when he worked himself up onto his feet, the foot held his weight. He gave his housemate a sheepish look and then sat back down on the floor beside her.

“The last time I stumbled over my own feet was in a cave in New Mexico,” he added.

“Oh, was it Carlsbad?”

“Lechuguilla,” Dante replied. “I was part of a group with the National Speleological Society that had been granted special access to help out with the survey work in parts of the cavern the public doesn’t get to see.” He grimaced, holding his ankle, but continued to keep his mind off of it. “It’s the deepest cavern system under the United States with an underground maze of over a hundred miles of explored passageways, going down over sixteen hundred feet below sea level. Once you’re inside, it’s a visual wonderland of natural formations.” He sighed and then looked over at her with a crooked smile. “Lechuguilla is the reason why I’m here.”

Jenni raised an eyebrow and sat back against the couch, absently massaging the calf of her left leg. “Did you run into a Fur down there?” she asked with wide green eyes.

The man laughed aloud. “No, I’d never met one before coming here,” he replied with a grin. “It was while surveying a particularly intricate chamber deep in the cavern system that I felt like I exploring another world, and it was then I started toying with the idea of doing it for real. I mentioned it to one of my survey partners during a break and it was he who suggested the Anthro Human Colonization Program. After I got back home, I researched the program and got interested in what I read.”

“You didn’t join up because of the reward prize?”

“Not at first,” Dante admitted, “but that was sweet icing. I’d heard of furmen, having read about their purpose in a few trade journals, but had never seen one in person. My primary reason was to become an explorer. Although there are a few places on earth still not fully explored, I had always dreamed of going to a place that no one had ever seen before. If becoming a Fur was the price of that opportunity, I had decided it would be worth it. I look at the one million prize reward as compensation for this little detour in my humanity.”

“What about your family? How did they feel about it?”

Dante gave a little shrug. “Mom didn’t like the thought of me leaving the Earth forever, but my Dad was long used to me running off to explore caves around the country with my friends and I guess he already figured I’d probably disappear in one someday. He talked her into letting me go, but in the end, she eventually realized that I would go no matter what she thought. I’m pretty stubborn that way. She finally gave her blessing and made me promise to contact them as often as I could when I was gone.”

Both suddenly turned their heads in unison toward the entrance hall.

“Hello?” called out a concerned voice.

“We’re down here in the pit,” Dante responded.

A moment later, a tall thin man with a lean face approached the steps above them. He appeared too young to have the shock of silver hair he had upon his head, but his eyes and the lines of his face hinted at an older man. Whatever his age, this fellow had seen many life experiences.

“I am Dr. Gabriel Aristotle, the attendant physician of the Canis Wing,” he said with an accented voice, removing his winter coat. Underneath, he was dressed in dark casual slacks, a white shirt and a lab coat similar to the one Dr. Renwick always wore. “I understand you’re having a few issues.” He stepped down into the pit and knelt down in front of Jenni. The first thing he noticed was her eyes and he nodded quietly to himself in some confirmation.

“I’m Jenni and this is Dante,” said the woman. “You may want to look at his ankle too. He just twisted it coming down to help me. He was just telling me why he joined the AHCP while we waited.”

“I see,” murmured the physician as he gently stretched out Jenni’s legs to examine them. “There are many reasons for joining. What was yours, sir?”

“I was a surveyor in the Lechuguilla caverns,” Dante boasted, “and I decided I wanted to explore other worlds too.”

Aristotle looked up in interest. “You have been in Lechuguilla?” he asked with a sudden smile.

“Many times. It was during my last visit that I twisted my ankle like I did today, but fortunately the entrance is level and I was able to continue.”

Aristotle stopped what he was doing and looked at the other man in puzzlement. “What do you mean, the entrance is level?” he asked. “You have to go down over a hundred feet of rope and ladders before you’re even inside the actual entrance of the cave.”

“No, you’re thinking of Mammoth Cave,” Dante dismissed with a wave of his hand, trying to sound knowledgeable. “That’s nearby.”

Aristotle gave him a dark look and narrowed his eyes. “I do not believe you have ever been inside Lechuguilla,” he stated flatly. “I have been there twice as a guest of the Cave Research Foundation.” Dante’s face fell and despite his white fur, he seemed to pale even further. “Carlsbad Caverns is the commercial cavern in southern New Mexico,” the doctor scoffed, “and Mammoth Cave is in Kentucky! Lechuguilla is not open to the public, with access made available only to a few to survey and explore the system. The entrance is arduous and not easily forgotten. Now, do you want to start again?”

Dante looked over at Jenni’s look of disbelief and he hung his head in shame. “The doc is right,” he finally admitted after a long moment of silence. “I’ve never been to Lechuguilla. In fact, I’ve never even been to New Mexico… What I know about Lechuguilla is only what I’ve read online.”

Aristotle snorted his displeasure and returned his attention to the woman whose left leg he held in his hands. “If your friend has finished weaving lies to make an impression upon you, please tell me what you have experienced today.”

Jenni gave Dante a brief glance of disdain before she turned to the physician. “I’ve had a slight headache since I woke up this morning,” she told him, “and I started getting severe cramps in my legs just a little while ago. It doesn’t feel like a regular leg cramp, though. It feels deeper, more intense.”

“It is the transformation,” the doctor informed her. “Your skeletal structure is beginning to soften to allow the reconfiguration the ability to change your form. It is a slow process, but within a few weeks you may have trouble holding up your own bodily weight.”

“I landed wrong on my ankle just before you came in the door, but it might have been a cramp like hers,” Dante added, still feeling sheepish at being caught in a lie. “Is this what’s happening to me too?”

“Most likely,” Aristotle muttered, openly disappointed over the Lechuguilla matter. For just a moment, he had thought he had met someone with which to share experiences with over the great cavern system. “I can give you medication that will soften the cramps for now and soon you will be able to resume your activities, although I would caution you against doing anything strenuous for a while. Doctor Renwick should have informed you all of this phase of your transformation. Have any of you experienced anything else of note?”

“Yes,” Jenni replied, her cheeks coloring beneath her thin facial fur. “I have a lump… above my rump.”

“Up on your knees,” Aristotle commanded, extending a hand to help her up. The woman did as she was told and obediently turned around to present her backside to him. The doctor boldly raised the hem of her robe and then pulled down on the waistband of her furman shorts, studying the lump without touching it.

“It is your tailbone,” he announced. “Although the rest of your skeletal structure has yet to actually begin moving into its new pattern, the tail of your feline profile has already begun to grow. It is nothing to be alarmed with, my dear. It should not give you any real pain, though it may become uncomfortable to sit up against, especially as it begins to extrude, lengthening over time; this is why we have chairs with slots along the bottom of the uprights.”

“That’s what I thought it might be,” Jenni remarked.

“I have one too,” Dante supplied, “though not as big as hers.”

The physician eased Jenni’s shorts back into position and pulled her hem back down. He looked over at the pale young man. “Everyone develops at different speeds depending upon his or her metabolism, but just about all of the volunteers should be developing this tailbone extrusion at this time. It is one of the first physical manifestations that appear after the start of fur growth.”

Jenni remained on her knees, but slowly turned so that she could look at the doctor. When he glanced over at her, he raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “I am puzzled by your eye reformation, though,” he admitted. “This particular change usually doesn’t begin for another week or so.”

Jenni suddenly looked frightened. “Is that bad? Am I going to mal-form?”

Dr. Aristotle chuckled and shook his head. “No, all it means is that your eyes are changing before anyone else’s. It’s nothing to be concerned with, though you may find that colors become a little muted and that you can see better in the dark than before. Sunlight will seem a little brighter than you’re used to, so if you have any sunglasses, you may wish to use them for a while when outside. I am not as familiar with the Felis schedule of changes as I am with the Canis, but I don’t believe you have anything to be worry about. Show your new eyes to Dr. Renwick when he returns and he can inform you of anything more to expect. The headache you mentioned may continue until your pupils fully change, but if you feel you need something for it, common aspirin should suffice.”

“Thank you, Dr. Aristotle,” Jenni said gratefully. She grimaced suddenly and bit her bottom lip. “If you can prescribe something for the muscle cramps in my legs, I would appreciate it.”

The older man reached into a pocket of his lab coat and pulled out an amber pill bottle. He twisted off the cap and tapped out four pale green caplets. He handed two to Jenni and the remaining two to Dante.

“Take one now and the other just before you go to bed,” he instructed. “This should reduce the cramps until Dr. Renwick returns.”

“Thank you,” Jenni and Dante said in unison.

Aristotle recapped the bottle and returned it to his pocket. “Do either of you need help getting to your feet?” he asked, standing up beside them.

Dante shook his head. “No, I think we’re good for now,” he answered. “My ankle is sore, but I can stand on it okay. I’ll help her up on the couch and get some water for her pill.”

The older man nodded. “All right, I will leave you in each other’s care for now.” He looked over at Dante and pursed his lips for a moment. “I am curious. If you are not a caver, what was the real reason you joined the AHCP?”

Dante hung his head, refusing to meet the doctor’s eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he mumbled. “The cave story was more exciting.”

Aristotle nodded. “Well then, if you plan to use Lechuguilla in your tale for others, feel free to visit me anytime you like. I can give you the real lowdown on what it’s like to visit the place, from someone who has actually been there. It is a tale I never tire of telling and I have a good collection of movies and pictures.”

“Thanks,” Dante muttered. “I’m sorry for boasting about a place I’ve never been.”

“You’re forgiven, Mr. Dante,” said the physician. “Perhaps after your transformation is complete and you’re waiting for a planetary assignment, I can arrange to have you accompany me on a week-long trip to Lechuguilla so you may see it in person for real.”

Dante looked up in surprise. “I would like that very much,” he replied.

“Now, if either of you need me before your medical staff returns, please call. I am on-call around the clock.”

“Thank you, Dr. Aristotle,” Jenni told him gratefully. “Thanks for coming over.”

The older man gave her a pleasant smile and then retrieved his winter coat. He shrugged into it, fastened the buttons, and gave them both a nod before he ascended the steps and headed for the entrance.

After the outer door closed behind him a moment later, Jenni shuddered from another muscle spasm. Dante eased himself up to his feet and limped to the steps. “I’ll get your water,” he mumbled.

Jenni watched him shuffle across the room toward the kitchen, but she did not move until he had disappeared through the door. She crawled up the side of the couch and then stretched out lengthwise across the cushions.

Moments later, Dante returned and handed a chilled water bottle to her without a word. Frowning at her housemate’s sullen mood, she reached out and touched him lightly on the back of the hand after she had swallowed her medicine.

“Are you embarrassed that Dr. Aristotle called your bluff?” she asked gently.

“Yeah, partly,” Dante mumbled in reply.

“…and the other part?”

The pale-furred man sighed and then sat down on the floor below her, his ankle still sore but no longer a concern. “I made up the story of being an experienced caver so I wouldn’t have to tell anyone the real reason why I was here,” he confessed, leaning back to rest up against one of her legs.

“I’m sorry, Dante,” Jenni said quietly. “You don’t have to tell me, and I won’t let the others know you aren’t really a spelunker.”

“You may as well know,” he told her, drawing his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “I was a homeless beggar on the streets of Atlanta.” He closed his eyes and let out another audible sigh. “I’ve been on my own ever since my folks divorced. I was always getting into trouble, so neither of them wanted custody of me in the split. I overheard them arguing about me right before the divorce became final, so I ran away and have been living on the streets ever since.”

“Wow, that’s awful!”

“I haven’t been able to hold down a job and since I couldn’t afford my own place, I slept wherever I could find an empty park bench or a spot beneath someone’s hedges. I was beat up several times out on the street, but after a while they left me alone since they all knew I had nothing of value. My clothing and shoes were second and third-hand giveaways.” He indicated the gold chain he always wore around his neck. “Even this is only coated plastic, something I found in a park. I was often starved for food and found ways to steal just enough to keep myself fed. Neither of my parents bothered to report me as missing, so I lived on my own until I found a water damaged pamphlet about the AHCP. I had heard of Furs before, though had never seen one, but with an empty stomach and another cold winter approaching, I decided that becoming part animal was better than starving to death or freezing; at least then I would have a fur coat.”

Dante put his head down on his knees. “I had previously found a discarded pre-paid cell phone that still had a few minutes of time left on it and used it to call the number printed on the pamphlet. I offered to sign up on the spot, but I didn’t have any money for the bus ride. I was instructed to report to a soup kitchen in my area and that someone there would give me a small suitcase of fresh clothing and a temporary place to stay until transportation could be arranged for me. I didn’t know anything about the prize money until I was on the bus to New York City two weeks later and read through the material they gave me. I didn’t know, and still don’t know if I’ll be able to survive the five years on an alien world, but right now I have all the food I want and better living conditions than I’ve had for the past few years since my folks split.”

“No wonder you’re always eating,” Jenni said, sitting up. “Wait…You told us you were in your late twenties. How old were you when your folks divorced?”

There was silence for a long moment. She was about to repeat her question when Dante cleared his throat. “I lied about my age too,” he admitted. “My parents split when I was seventeen. That was five years ago.”

“You’re only twenty-two?” Jenni gasped.

“I’ve always looked older than what I am,” he told her.

The woman reached out and gently stroked the top of his fuzzy head, but then she grasped one of his ears and squeezed hard enough to hold onto him.

“You’re full of all kinds of lies, aren’t you?” she said in a miffed tone. “How much of what you’ve just told me is a lie, too?”

Dante grimaced from her tight ear hold. “Ow… it’s the truth!” he exclaimed. “No lying this time! I’m just a homeless wretch trying to stay alive!”

Jenni glared at the top of his head for a long moment, but then her expression softened and she rubbed his ear in apology. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I don’t enjoy being lied to, especially by someone I was growing fond of.”

“You were getting fond of me?” he asked in genuine surprise.

“I was, yes,” she answered. “Now, I’m not so sure I can trust you anymore.”

Dante rubbed his ear and pushed himself up onto his feet. “I don’t blame you,” he responded wearily. “I wouldn’t trust me either.”

Before Jenni could voice any further concerns, the pale young man ascended the steps out of the pit and limped to his room. He shut the door behind him and left the green-eyed woman to herself.

Chapter 19

Cats & Water

It was three days later when Jon felt the first effects of the changes in his musculature. The housemates of the Felis Wing had gotten up that mid-November morning to discover that a light snow had fallen during the night, and although it amounted to little more than a dusting, the afternoon temperatures rose into the mid-forties by midday, melting what had fallen. The Institute was surrounded by forest woods, but a steady breeze somehow found its way through the trees into the compound, keeping wind chill factors low enough to keep most everyone indoors.

Despite the cold, Sylvia Janes had bundled up snug in warm winter clothing and proceeded to give the feline volunteers several hours of instruction on the community structure of life in a colony. It was a required subject, but one that none of them had any interest discussing while stuck inside on a cold, windy day.

Jenni seemed to be the lead in changes due to the transformation, having experienced painful spasms as her bodily tissue seemed to be doing something internally, even if her outward appearance did not appear to change much. Her eyes had changed in color and form, the irises larger with a blend of yellow and green and the pupils stretched to vertical slits when not dilated in low-light conditions. She complained of constant low-grade headaches and she was unable to walk well, even though her leg muscles were no longer cramping. Whenever Doctor Renwick would check in on her and ask her how she felt, she would look at him wearily and for lack of a better description, she would simply tell him that she felt old.

Despite Dante’s ill-timed leap into the pit where he twisted his ankle, his legs did not start cramping up like hers until a couple of days later. He and Jenni had not spoken much since his private revelation and his irritating, carefree manner was subdued. Although they were unaware of the conversation that had transpired, Jon and Kristen both had noticed a difference in his attitude, but neither had inquired to find out if anything might have happened.

When Dante volunteered to help Kristen with kitchen cleanup after breakfast, an act that surprised the botanist, he later collapsed at her feet handing her a dried bowl to put away. Kristen tried to help him up, but spasms hit her at almost the same time and she sprawled out onto the tile floor beside him, crying out from the sudden intense pain.

Jon had come running at their calls for help and helped each of them to their rooms, but after Doctor Renwick’s later brief examination with dispensed meds to help with the pain, the physician’s focus turned upon the larger man.

Like Jenni before them, Kristen and Dante’s eyes had changed colors, hers a soft golden hue, and his, a mixture of brown and gold, but as yet their pupils remained human. Unlike his housemates, however, Jon’s eyes remained Irish green and he had yet to suffer any ill effect of the transformation. When he had a moment alone with the doctor, Jon quietly asked him if he had purposely injected him with a placebo instead of the actual formula, but Renwick seemed confused at such an accusation.

He assured Jon that modified DNA had been injected into his cerebral fluid just as had been done with the others. Why else would the fur of a mountain lion be growing from his epidermis? Even the tail nub growing out of his backside should be proof enough.

The physician theorized that the larger man’s physical fitness might be playing with the timetable of the changes, which could be why he had not yet succumbed to the same afflictions of his housemates.

The hypothesis placated Jon, since he maintained his twice-daily workouts no matter the weather outside, beginning each day and ending each night with a strenuous exercise routine. The others had each joined him a few times, but none of them had his dedication to such a schedule.

Although he was in better shape than his three housemates were, time caught up with him during one such exercise routine. On the third night after Jenni’s initial collapse, Jon was ending a particularly trying day with a vigorous workout in the exercise room away from the others. All three of his companions were grumpy and irritable due to their aches and pains, with no small amount of jealousy leveled at him simply because he was not suffering as they were. No matter what he said or tried to do to help around the Wing, he was met with short tempered derision, so he finally shut himself up in the exercise room to work out his frustrations.

In Jon’s case, however, the pain did not begin with his legs as had happened with the others. He had just put in a solid half hour at a steep incline on the treadmill and he was preparing to exercise his upper body with free weights. The first painful spasm put a hitch in his left side, just below his rib cage as he was picking up a ten-pound disc. He dropped the weight, narrowly missing his bare foot when a second severe cramp hit his right bicep.

The double-whammy rocked him so hard and fast that he lost his equilibrium and sat down heavily upon the seat of the bench press. He squeezed his eyelids shut and gripped his arm with the other hand until the sharp agony passed. The pain was deep within the muscle, and from the description the others had given, Jon knew that his transformations had begun with more than mere hair loss, fur growth and a tail.

Abandoning the workout, Jon forced himself to his feet and left the room while he could still walk, grabbing his previously discarded furman robe top on the way out. There was no way of knowing if the muscles in his legs would be next, so he made his way quickly to the door of the lab and pounded on it loud enough that the doctor would surely hear him from his suite of rooms behind the laboratory. Dante looked over at him from his place huddled in front of the fireplace that had only served as décor until the weather turned cold. The women were nowhere in sight, likely hidden away in their rooms.

The door opened after a few moments, but it was Marcy who peered out at him, dressed in a flannel nightgown. Her eyes were immediately drawn to his bare chest, but as soon as she looked up and saw the pain registered upon his face, she knew why he was there. She directed him inside the lab and had him lie down upon a gurney against a wall. The broad-shouldered man dropped his robe top on a counter and then lay down upon his back while the nurse examined the arm he protected against his side. He squirmed a moment, trying to find a slot in the gurney cushion for his tail nub.

“It looks like I lose the bet,” she said with a wry smile, her fingers not quite able to extend around his bicep as it gave forth another spasm.

“What?” Jon asked through gritted teeth.

“Dante started a pool on how long you would hold out before the muscle cramps got you,” Marcy explained, turning to a nearby cabinet. “I put down two dollars that it would be tomorrow morning.”

Jon closed his eyes and snorted, but otherwise did not reply. The nurse pulled out an amber pill bottle from a shelf and dumped out a pale green caplet onto her palm. She put this in Jon’s hand and closed his fingers over it.

“Take this for now,” she told him while removing a water bottle from a small refrigerator under the cabinet. She handed this to him and added, “It will give you some relief from the cramps for tonight, but you may need another in the morning with your breakfast.”

“Thanks,” he mumbled, washing down the pill with a small swallow of water, something not easy while lying on his back.

“Now, let me take a look at your eyes.”

Jon opened his eyelids and flinched when Marcy shined a bright penlight into them. “Right on schedule,” she said. “Your irises are now a nice golden brown.”

“Great,” he muttered.

Marcy raised an eyebrow and looked down at him. “What’s the matter now?” she asked.

“I’ll have a headache to look forward to when the pupils change.”

“Yes, that’s true, but it doesn’t usually last more than a day and it’s certainly not as severe as what you have now with your muscles. This pain will be your companion for a while, I’m afraid. The soreness in your eyes will only be a mild annoyance.” The nurse put away her penlight and then tugged on his arm.

“Okay, you can get up now,” she told him. “It will take about ten minutes for the medication to filter through your system to quell the cramps, so I would recommend an end to your exercise routine for tonight.”

“I’m heading for the shower and then to bed,” Jon informed her.

“That’s a good plan. Goodnight, Jon.”

“G’night, Marcy, and thanks.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” The nurse adjusted her nightgown about her and then shut the door behind him after he had gone.

***

When Jon awoke the next morning, he began his daily routine out of habit, but as he pulled his exercise shorts up to the nub of tail growing out of the base of his spine, the broad-shouldered man remembered the cramps of the night before. He sat down in the recliner in his room and leaned forward, resting his arms upon his knees. Should he go on into the exercise room to perform his habitual workout, chancing a cramp while lifting heavy weights? He had already been informed that his skeletal structure was softening and his body might be warning him not to risk a disaster; too much weight at the wrong time could cause irreparable damage or malformation.

Frowning to himself, he slid a hand across his bare knee, feeling the stiff bristles of new fur growth upon what used to be naked flesh. It caused a mild tingling sensation in his knee, but the feeling beneath his palm and fingers caused him to shiver.

Ever since the realization that the injection was real and his body was changing, Jonathan Sunset had tried not to think about the thing of which he was becoming. He must accept the changes as they occurred or he might go mad. Unfortunately, it was not so easy to keep a quiet mind every time he looked into the mirror now. His lifelong reflection no longer stared back at him with a full head of hair with morning beard stubble to be shaved away in the shower.

His face had not yet begun to change shape, but the fine layer of brown, tan and white fur grew over just about every outer surface of his body, excepting on the palms of his hands and the bottoms of his feet and over his genitals. Becoming something other than human was a realization that was difficult for his mind to wrap around, even as he tried to get used to seeing it in the mirror.

Rubbing his hand across his knee fur was not unpleasant, but just the thought of what he was doing sent a shiver of revulsion though his mind. He clenched his fist until his fingernails began to bite into his palm.

“Stop it!” he hissed to himself in the quiet of his room. He stood up quickly and shook the fingers of both hands vigorously.

He needed to take his mind off this train of thought, so he abandoned ideas of returning to the exercise room and dropped to the floor instead. Just as he had done for months in a Colorado prison, Jon fell to a series of exercises that did not require the use of weights or mechanical devices. He had to force himself not to work too energetically, to pace himself and clear his mind to focus upon what he was doing.

An hour later, Jon allowed himself to lay back flat upon the carpeted floor of his room, his ribcage barely heaving from the exertive paces he had just put himself through. He was tired, but felt wonderfully alive after such a workout. He only rested a moment before he forced himself up onto his feet, and it was only then that he realized that he was panting lightly. There was a thin coating of sweat beneath his thin fur, but the panting made him realize that soon he would use that primarily as a means to cool his body and the sweating would eventually stop. Most animals with fur did not expel heat from their bodies with perspiration; they did it through panting, although someone like Kevin Rockwell would dissipate his body heat through his large ears once the fennec fox DNA was more strongly in place.

Forcing that realization from his mind, Jon grabbed a clean set of furman garments from the dresser and then turned out the light as he left the room. There was no need to take along a shower kit to the restroom anymore. The wall cabinet there now housed all the soaps, shampoos and conditioners for feline fur that the Felis volunteers needed. He only needed to stop by the linen closet for a fresh towel to pat himself dry afterward.

Once the volunteers began growing fur, Kristen had wondered why the restroom was not equipped with warm-air dryers for furmen, since patting down fur with a towel took a long time to get a fur coat sufficiently dry after a shower. In a facility that had housed Furs for years, it seemed unusual that they would not be so equipped.

When asked, Doctor Renwick explained that the air intakes of the previous unit had gotten so clogged with fur that it had overheated and burned out its heating elements just before the last class had moved out of the building. However, a new warm-air dryer had already been ordered for the Felis Wing, though it had not yet been delivered. Until then, they would keep a copious supply of bath towels on hand for them.

When Jon entered the restroom, the sound of running water heralded the use of one shower, but when he rounded the corner, he saw Dante and Jenni standing on opposite sides of the central bench, each of them holding a fresh towel such as the one he carried. The younger man was holding out his arm and tracing his striped patterns with a finger.

“My tiger stripes are finally darkening,” Dante said to the nurse, “and it’s about time, too. I was worried they might have used an albino cat for my DNA mixture.”

“G’morning…” Jon said with a smile. “Did one of you leave your water running? It’s probably getting as cold as this floor.”

“Good morning, Jon,” Jenni replied. “That’s Kristen in there. She got in just before Dante arrived.”

Jon’s eyes shifted between Kristen’s stall, Jenni and Dante. He felt a sudden awkwardness, wondering which of the three of them would disrobe in front of the others first. In the time they had been at the Institute, they all seemed just to miss one another going to and from the showers, but this was the first time that all four had arrived at almost the same time.

Fidgeting to stall for time, Jon moved to the cabinet to pull out twin bottles of shampoo and conditioner for mountain lion fur, only to find that Kristen must have them in her stall.

“Y’know,” he said, turning to the sink to brush his teeth, “since we’re all becoming cats, how long do you think it will be before we all detest water and have to start licking ourselves clean?”

He heard Dante laugh and he shifted his gaze in the mirror to look at the younger man.

“Didn’t you know?” Dante responded with a grin. “Tigers love the water!” When Jon did nothing more than squeeze out a bit of green gel onto his toothbrush, Dante shrugged his shoulders. Then, out of simple curiosity, he raised an arm up to his mouth and tentatively licked the black and white fur there.

“Bleph!” he exclaimed with his tongue protruding past his lips. When Jon looked at him again, Dante stood there looking uncertain, small strands of fur sticking to his tongue. “Dat fels glose, an I don’ even haff a fandpapah tonn yet!”

Jenni laughed aloud at his predicament and turned away from him as he wiped his tongue onto his towel. Her laughter drew Jon’s attention just as she peeled off her furman top and then stepped out of the furman shorts and panties. Standing bare before her male housemates, she picked up her shampoo and conditioner bottles from the bench. Then, without a backward glance, she walked to an unoccupied shower stall, hung her towel on the hook beside the curtain and then disappeared inside.

Dante gulped and darted quickly into another shower stall, taking off his furman garments only after he was safe behind the curtain. Jon watched his hand reappear with the clothes and towel a moment later to drape across his stall’s hook.

Snorting at the younger man’s embarrassment over a little exposed flesh, Jon smiled inwardly and finished brushing his teeth. Moments later, he disrobed and entered the remaining stall, silently wondering what he was going to do for shampoo. With a body now covered in fur, it would take longer to wash using just a bar of soap, and even that would leave his fur feeling gummy.

“Kristen,” he called above the noise of three running showers, “please drop off our shampoo and conditioner at my stall when you’re done.”

“Which one are you in?” the botanist called back.

“Closest shower to the sinks.”

“Okay, I will!”

“Thanks!”

When Kristen finished rinsing off moments later, she peeked out through her shower curtain to make sure no one else was waiting outside. Satisfied that her housemates were busy within their own stalls, she pulled her towel from the hook outside and tried to dry off quickly.

It only took her a moment before she realized in disbelief that the towel she had snared on her way to the showers was nothing more than a dish towel. Grumbling to herself, she patted down her fur as much as she could with the small bit of cloth and then peeked out of the curtain again.

Feeling as if she were about to run a gauntlet, Kristen bit her bottom lip and stepped out of her stall. She pulled her shorts and robe from the hook, but her fur was still too wet to put them on. She held the small towel in front of her and then set two bottles on the floor at the first shower.

“Here’s the shampoo and conditioner, Jon,” she called out in a voice she hoped would reach the large man, but without alerting the others that she was out there. She was almost afraid that Jon would open the curtain to grab the bottles, but she was able to breathe freely when only his hand appeared below the curtain and picked up each bottle one at a time.

“Thanks!” he called back out to her.

Knowing the dish towel could not possibly cover even a part of her body, Kristen was struck with sudden inspiration. She grabbed Jon’s towel off the hook, mindful not to knock his robe and shorts onto the wet floor, and quickly moved to the bench seat. Once she was dried and clothed again, she would get another towel from the linen closet and bring it back to his shower hook.

Some plans do not always pan out, for just as she reached the bench, a hard cramp hit her left foot. She jerked the foot up off the floor in sudden pain and surprise, and promptly lost her balance on the wet tile. Her right foot slipped out from under her, and with a loud yelp she fell backward, tapping the back of her head on the floor.

At the sound of her yelp, Dante stuck his head out of his stall, but when he saw her sprawled out on the floor, he dashed out to help her. He knelt down beside her legs, grabbing her wrist in one hand and placing the other behind her neck to cradle her head.

Kristen’s eyes were unfocused for a moment, but after blinking several times in rapid succession, she suddenly saw a familiar white face framed in dark stripes. “D-Dante?” she asked hoarsely.

Dante nodded and helped her sit up beside the bench. “That’s right,” he said in concern. “It’s me. I think you must have slipped on the wet floor.”

Kristen put her head in her hands for a moment. “My foot cramped up,” she mumbled, gathering her thoughts, “and then I slipped. I think my head bounced off the floor twice.”

Her housemate got up on his knees to examine the back of her head, and it was at that moment when Kristen got a good look at the man’s nakedness right in front of her. Her breath caught in her throat, stifling the shriek of indignation that threatened to burst forth, but then she received a second shock when she realized that she was sitting on the floor beneath him in an identical state of undress.

She reached out to push him away, but her hands would have gone where she did not wish to touch him, so instead she turned over quickly and lay face down upon the floor to hide away as much of herself from him as she could. She wanted to scream out at the little lecher, but then she felt the warm cloth of a large towel draped over her.

Kristen chanced a look up at him, but it was a concerned expression that looked back at her. He did not appear lecherous or even interested in her naked exposure, just worried.

“Are you okay?” he asked, unmindful of his own nakedness, making sure the towel gave her plenty of coverage.

Kristen clutched the towel around her as she struggled to sit up again. He helped her with a hand upon her elbow, but when she got another look at him, she closed her eyes.

“I think I’ll be okay,” she said with a difficult swallow. “Would… would you cover yourself… please?”

“Yes, of course,” he replied. “Sorry.”

She listened to his steps upon the wet tile as he went to retrieve his own towel, and then back again to her side. She opened one eye to make sure he was decent, but when she saw a towel wrapped around his waist, she looked up at him with an embarrassed smile.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“Here, let’s get you up onto the bench.” Pulling her arm around his shoulders, Dante knelt down and then helped her up to her feet. He was not a strong guy and Kristen’s weight almost caused him to lose his own balance on the wet floor, but together they managed to get up to the wooden seat. As soon as he was sure she was stable upon the bench, he stood beside her and examined the back of her head closely to make sure she was okay.

“I don’t see any cuts beneath your fur,” he said, “but I’m sure you’ll have a bruise where you bumped the floor.”

Kristen closed her eyes momentarily, but when she opened them again, both Jon and Jenni were watching them. Jon was still partially hidden behind the shower curtain, but Jenni stood outside of her stall, quietly wrapping a towel around her waist.

“What happened?” she asked imploringly, unconcerned that she was topless in front of her housemates.

Kristen looked down at her hands, clearly embarrassed. “My foot cramped up and I slipped on the wet tile,” she explained again demurely. “I hit my head on the floor.”

“Are you sure you aren’t hurt?” Dante asked, sitting on the bench beside her. “I can see you to the Infirmary.”

Kristen gave him a gentle smile, but shook her head. “I think I’ll be all right for now, but thank you for helping me. I could have been hurt a lot worse, but I’m glad to know you were here for me.”

Dante ducked his head, uncharacteristically embarrassed by her praise. “You’re welcome,” he muttered, getting to his feet. “I’m glad you’re okay.” Before she could say anything more, he made his way back into his shower stall to dry off and gather up his things.

Both women were suddenly aware that when he passed her, Dante did not even seem to notice Jenni’s bare chest. When Jenni looked back at Jon, he merely raised an eyebrow at her, not even trying to hide the fact that he had openly ogled her. The nurse merely grinned back at him until Kristen cleared her throat.

“Uhm… would you mind putting those away?” the botanist asked plaintively.

Jenni laughed aloud, keeping her new feline eyes upon the other man. She opened the towel fully in front of him so she could readjust it up higher across her chest, but then she tucked the ends together so it would stay in place.

Jon swallowed with sudden difficulty and then retreated into his shower stall; the sound of water resumed immediately, just as Dante emerged from his stall dressed in damp furman garments. He gave Kristen a brief nod before he turned and left the restroom.

“Can I help you with anything?” Jenni asked, her mischievous manner evaporating now that both males were out of sight.

“I’ll be okay,” Kristen assured her, “but I still need to dry off and Jon might finish his shower at any moment. Besides, I took his towel…”

Jenni tilted her head in amusement. “You took his towel? Why, you’re just as sly as Dante.”

Kristen shook her head quickly, but immediately regretted it when the back of her head began to throb. “No,” she countered, “that wasn’t it at all. I grabbed a dish towel from the linen closet by mistake and didn’t realize it until I got out of the shower. I thought I could dry off and then get him another before he knew I’d taken his.”

The sound of water ceased and then Jon’s hand emerged from the curtain, grasping around for his towel. “Dante gave your towel to Kristen,” Jenni told him before he got the rest of his hanging clothes wet. “I’ll get you another.”

“Ah, okay,” said Jon’s voice. “Thanks.”

Jenni gave Kristen a wink and then left the restroom. After a moment, Jon asked in a quiet tone without looking out, “Are you sure you don’t want to have the doctor look at you? A hard bump on the head can cause later problems.”

“Thank you, Jon, but I’m all right now. I’m more embarrassed than anything else.”

“Here you are,” Jenni said merrily, reappearing through the door. The man’s hand emerged again and she draped the towel over his arm. He pulled it back inside and began to pat down his fur from head to foot.

Kristen got up to her feet slowly and found that she could stand up. She cast an eye towards Jon’s shower stall, repositioning her towel about her. She was still wet and needed to be dried off, but she would have patience and wait for the man to leave the room. For the moment, she moved to the large mirror over the sinks and studied her reflection while Jenni disappeared into a toilet stall.

A moment later, Jon emerged from his shower, looking around until he saw Kristen. She looked up at him in the mirror and he gave her a quiet wave before turning to go. She watched him leave and then waited another moment before she was certain he had gone.

The botanist heaved an audible sigh and then pulled off her damp towel to begin patting down her fur. When Jenni rejoined her a few moments later, Kristen did not seem to mind as Jenni shed her own towel to pat herself down. Both females worked quietly, and soon both were dry enough.

Jenni looked over at the other woman, but Kristen had her attention upon her reflection once again. “Drying off takes longer with fur than it did with just a head full of hair,” she remarked conversationally.

“True, but there’s no time spent curling and styling it anymore,” the botanist replied with a small smile. “I miss my long hair, but I think I’m finally getting used to seeing myself like this.” She stood up straight, studying her fur patterns from different angles, seemingly fascinated by her new look. No longer just peach fuzz, her pelt of cream and brown colors was slowly getting thicker and more distinct.

“My head may be covered in fur and spotted in patterns, but I still think I look bald,” the nurse mused, turning her head from side to side. “I suppose it will look better when my head is shaped more like a leopard’s than a human’s. When I examine myself in the mirror, it almost looks like I’ve indulged in full body paint!”

Kristen chuckled and turned around so she could see her backside in the mirror. Jenni glanced at her again. “Have you lost weight?” she asked.

Kristen looked at her and suddenly felt exposed, both of them standing nude in front of the mirror. With their fur colors and patterns covering up their pink skin, it had not really felt like she was totally naked. Clearing her throat, she returned to the bench to pick up her shorts.

She had only gone three steps when her housemate’s words registered. She stopped and looked back at Jenni. “What did you say?” she asked.

“Have you been losing weight?” Jenni repeated. “You’re looking a little slimmer.”

Kristen dropped her head as she slipped into her shorts, hiding the sudden moisture in her eyes. “I – I didn’t think anyone else had noticed,” she replied quietly. “I’ve gone down a size, but I’ve not changed out my shorts and robes yet.”

“Perhaps you should,” Jenni told her, moving toward her own garments. She picked up her shorts and slid into them. “I think the guys would notice if you did.”

Kristen belted the furman robe around her middle and then tied the sash into a feminine bow, saying nothing, but her expression looked thoughtful.

“Have you made changes to your diet?” Jenni asked, picking up her robe top.

The botanist pursed her lips for a moment in thought. “Not really, although I think I might be eating a little more meat than I used to,” she remarked.

“That could be part of the transformation. We are turning into predators.”

Kristen looked over at her and suddenly smiled. “That could be,” she replied, “and since I’ve never seen a fat mountain lion, perhaps I’m starting to slim down to match my new feline profile.”

Jenni chuckled at the sudden excitement in her friend’s eyes.

Both women now dressed, they gathered up their damp towels and walked toward the restroom door. After several steps, Kristen looked over at her companion, the previous cramp in her foot forgotten.

“Speaking of changes, have you noticed a change in Dante’s behavior lately?” she asked, idly rubbing the sore spot on the back of her head.

Jenni fought the urge to raise an eyebrow, choosing instead to maintain a neutral expression on her face. “I hadn’t noticed,” she lied. “How do you mean?”

“Well, he seemed genuinely concerned when I fell, and even though we were both naked, he didn’t leer at us once, and neither did he make any of his usual suggestive remarks.” Kristen shut off the light as they left the room and looked over at the nurse. “He knew I was naked, because he gave me a towel to cover up with, but I don’t think he even looked at me from the neck down. Do you think he might be learning some manners with his transformation?”

Jenni merely shrugged her shoulders, but did not offer an explanation. She and Dante had not spent much time together since she had learned of his deception. Unless Dante chose to tell the others himself, she did not feel it was up to her to divulge his real background.

Chapter 20

Sissy’s Daily News

Of life at the Furmankind Institute, there was one daily occurrence that every volunteer followed with almost religious attendance. Precisely at eight o’clock every morning, Sissy transmitted a small newsletter from the main office recapping events and incidents from the previous day, late-minute current news and tidbits on upcoming occasions. She included the various menus from the main cafeteria, sales on new items available in the Shoppette, as well as miscellaneous training sessions that could be attended by anyone at their convenience. Sometimes she included news from established furman colonies or rumors she had picked up concerning other stars where habitable planets may have been discovered.

Sissy kept the Institute informed of new developments at the complex, including reports on the progress of each Wing’s group. All PBJ units were tuned to receive her daily newsletters, and although there was no directive to do so, just about everyone picked up their PBJ around the same time to see what Sissy had sent them. Even director Marcelo Delgado read her daily transmissions, sometimes discovering news or rumors that he had not been aware of himself and often wondering what her sources were.

By late-November the leaves of all deciduous trees had dropped, but the abundant evergreens in the forest surrounding the Institute continued to provide a break against the increasingly cold mountain winds. There had been several days of snow, but for the most part the weather remained cold and grey with overcast skies.

Unrelated to the pain of transformation, other behavioral tendencies were surfacing among the Furs. The Ursis volunteers were lethargic in the cold weather, even though they would not require a seasonal hibernation like the bears from whose DNA was harvested, but the Canis volunteers, particularly the two becoming wolves, were enjoying the chilly temperatures. Likewise, the Vulps did not mind the winter weather, but the Felis preferred to stay indoors reclining near the fireplace.

For the first time since the transformations had begun, the volunteers experienced changes on a daily basis that were more than mere topical alterations. Their softened skeletal systems suffered increasing aches and pains from slowly elongating limbs of bone, tendons, blood vessels and muscles, and each person had to put out quite an effort just to get out of bed each morning. The temptation to remain in bed was great, but despite the weakness, the doctors made them all get up and walk around periodically to keep atrophy from settling in.

Over the past two weeks the pain had been barely tolerable at times and each day promised an increase. The attendant doctors and nurses provided what relief they could, but soon it would take more than pharmaceutical assistance to endure the ever-increasing pain.

With this situation, all volunteers had been released from attending instructional classes, so without something specific to occupy them, the days felt longer, even as the approach of the Winter Solstice shortened the amount of daylight filtering in through the overhead skylights of each Wing. Information on their classes could be found via link either through the PBJs or through each group’s terminal systems.

In the Felis Wing all of the back and bottom cushions from the pit’s couches had been removed and scattered on the floor in front of the saloon fireplace. Dr. Renwick had graciously provided the kindling and split logs, and Jon kept it fed so that the fire had been crackling nicely all morning. All four volunteers had parked themselves on the cushions with their PBJs, Jon and Jenni reading Sissy’s newsletter transmission, Kristen perusing a botanical report from the Fur-colonized world of Bastien and Dante simply browsing the Net in boredom.

Jon set aside his PBJ, closed his golden-brown feline eyes and then rubbed the bridge of his nose with a sigh. His nose had begun to broaden even as his whole lower face slowly lengthened and spread out into the muzzle of a mountain lion. Fortunately, his feline face would not stretch out in front of him as much as those of the other three Wings would, but in this transitional stage, his visage was misshapen and unsightly to behold. The Institute’s on-site dentist was likely to get a lot of calls all over the complex before the transformations had progressed much more. He fully expected fillings, caps and crowns to begin popping out of their mouths soon.

Although they had yet to begin moving up on their heads, the fleshy helix of their ears were already thinning out and reshaping into the ears of cats. This gave Dante something to tease Jon and Kristen about, since theirs were elongating a little more than his and Jenni’s were, almost giving them the appearance of fuzzy elves. The inner workings of the ears would be slowly creeping up their skulls with the softening of the bones, and they had already been warned of ear aches when this occurred. Despite this, they had already discovered that with the new formation of extra muscles beneath the skin, they could swivel and move their ears for automatic directional hearing. Without conscious thought, their ears would also move in tune with their emotions as an added outward expression of mood.

Jon opened his eyes and looked at his hands. Although there did not seem to be any difference in the length or form of his fingers, there were two marked changes that had developed in the past few days. Although they did not feel swollen, the palms of his hands were puffy, and when he rubbed his fingers across them, the surface skin felt thicker somehow. He had gone to Marcy out of concern when he had first noticed it, but she had only laughed, saying that he was developing pads upon his hands so that when his fingers later shortened and the configuration of his legs changed, he would have the capability of running on all fours, even though he would still be primarily a biped.

She also pointed out that another human attribute he would keep was his fingerprints. They would be slightly stretched, but virtually the same as what he had been born with, though he would have to be re-printed after the transformation was complete to update his thumbprint for future legal signatures.

It was an odd thing to be seeing so many small changes taking place across his body, and even though he knew this was happening to the others as well, it sometimes filled him with terror in the middle of the night if he thought on it too much. He had the head knowledge of the transformations, but to see it actually occurring filled him with dread and even some disbelief. Although he had put up a good front to his colleagues, Jonathan Sunset was still inwardly afraid of what he was becoming. The aches and pains that accompanied some of these changes only further strengthened his notion that he would completely lose his humanity one day. So far, he had been able to manage the pain, but his subconscious was another matter.

Jon balled his hands into fists and instantly regretted it. His fingernails were still in the process of converting to feline claws, becoming extensions of his finger bones, just as his tail was an extension of his spine. Unlike the great cat he was becoming, however, the human aspects of his genetic soup prevented his claws from retracting and making a fist usually led to tiny skin punctures in his palms. The geneticists who had designed his DNA mixture had planned for him to keep the dexterity of fingers and opposable thumbs for handling the tools they would need colonizing other worlds, so retracting his claws was not an option. He was reminded that as a half-feline, he would not have all of the physical traits of a full mountain lion, just some of them.

His feet, however, would be a different matter altogether. As he changed, he would be able to stand upright as a biped due to enlarged digitigrade back leg muscles and bone structure, and his feet would be changing to something less human than his hands. His toes had become a little bulbous on the ends and the bones within had already started redeveloping as retractable claws. As a fully-formed Fur, he would have the ability to extend his toe claws to aid in extra traction when running or climbing.

Jenni and Kristen had already made the best of the situation concerning their new claws, as it presented them with new extremities to decorate with nail polish. Jenni had covered hers with a subtle pink polish, while Kristen had used scarlet.

Of all the recent changes, however, the one that seemed to delight Dante the most was the growth of feline whiskers. Not only did he think they looked cool sprouting from both sides of his face, but he felt that the sensations they produced were almost intoxicating. Dr. Renwick had informed him that their purpose was to help him navigate in dark and narrow places. Dante thought he was pulling his leg, as he had never heard of that before, but when the physician pulled up a video on cat senses that profiled the whiskers, the younger man confessed that he had been ignorant of this part of a feline’s makeup; he had always thought the whiskers were merely cosmetic.

Be that as it may, Dante had developed a habit of stroking his whiskers just for the thrill of the sensation. Jon warned him that he could go blind playing with himself that way, pleased that he had something to tease him about for a change, and Jenni could not resist taking up the torch as well, slowly warming up to him again.

Almost simultaneously, all four PBJs issued a ping, signaling a late-breaking addition to Sissy’s newsletter. Kristen, Dante, Jenni and Jon picked up their tablets at the same time, each one tapping a claw tip on the screen to see what new morsel the Institute’s administrative assistant had to tell them.

Good morning, once again!

Tomorrow is the American holiday observance of Thanksgiving, a time to reflect upon the good things that life has brought to each and every one of us. There are many things we take for granted that will be left behind forever, so as you partake of the traditional meals that will be delivered to all personnel at the Furmankind Institute, please remember all the things you have to be thankful for – be it something in your past that led you to where you are now, or some goal in your future to look forward to.

In an unrelated matter, Project Director Marcelo Delgado has asked me to convey an announcement that he will be making rounds to each of the Wings tomorrow with a message of utmost importance for each volunteer of Class Sixteen. When asked why he did not simply pass on his news within this very venue, he responded saying that this was a new development he felt he must present in person.

No matter how much prompting and bribery offers of extra pumpkin pie I set upon him today, he has refused to give me even a tiny hint as to its meaning. I suspect it has something to do with an important call he received late last night, but beyond this, I have been unable to guess what this is about.

Be sure to watch for our Director tomorrow as he visits each of the Wings to make his announcement. You can rest assured that I will get no sleep myself tonight, wondering what development has arisen that requires a personal release of information.

Stay tuned, furry friends. I will keep you informed of any news that comes my way.

Sissy Quinn, Administrative Assistant of the Adirondack Furmankind Institute

Chapter 21

Split Lips & Microchips

Jon frowned at his cup of coffee. Sometime during the night, the fleshy part of his face below his nose had partially reformed into a fuzzy, bifurcated lip; his tongue had also thickened and lengthened somewhat. The combination of these two alterations, in addition to the lengthening of his canine teeth affected his speech so that he almost spoke with a lisp; worst of all, he could no longer form a seal upon the curvature of a common drinking cup. After several attempts, he had merely managed to dribble coffee down his chin onto his furman robe without swallowing so much as spoonful of his drink.

Jenni was having the same frustrations as he was and grumbling just as much, but Kristen had found a straw in a drawer of the kitchen. She had a similar problem trying to form a seal on the straw well enough to suck up her coffee, but she managed it after finding the correct angle. Unfortunately for her, drinking coffee through a straw left much to be desired.

Undaunted by the dilemma, Dante abandoned finesse and simply lapped up his coffee with his feline tongue. Whether it was the curl of the longer tongue or the papillae hairs that now coated its surface, the younger furman discovered that he was more successful “drinking” his coffee than the others were. It was a little noisy, but it got the job done.

Jenni and Jon exchanged looks of annoyance, but then the leopard decided to give it a try. She tilted her cup to the side and then gave the dark liquid within a tentative lap. To her surprise, her tongue scooped up a fair amount of coffee, but the taste made her pause. Not only had the configuration of her tongue changed during the night, so had her taste buds.

Jon had identical reactions to lapping up his coffee, and they looked up at one another in unison. Then, as if they both had the same idea, they turned together and looked at Dante, still lapping up his coffee to the bottom of the cup. They wondered how he could stand the difference in taste, until they both remembered that he always lumped heaps of sugar into his coffee. The sweetness must override the new bitterness of the coffee.

Jon shook his head and set his cup down, lamenting his loss of enthusiasm for the coffee he had enjoyed since he had been a teenager. He might have to switch to lapping up soda or merely water with his meals.

Kristen’s change of taste made it difficult to drink her coffee as well, but she attributed it to the straw rather than the liquid itself. However, with the change in her taste buds also came a heightened sense of taste and smell. The traditional American Thanksgiving meal provided for them seemed to taste better than the meal ever had before. She practically rolled her eyes at the flavors of smoked turkey breast and honey roasted ham. She was not totally carnivorous and she enjoyed the flavors of the vegetables served with the meal. She could not remember when food tasted so good in recent memory.

With the exception of the coffee, her furman companions likewise enjoyed their new taste sensations; even their altered sense of smell enhanced the food spread out on short-legged trays set between them at the fireplace.

Seated at the regular table in the pit, Don Renwick and Marcy Lagrange enjoyed their own Thanksgiving meal, and although neither of them had enhanced senses, the two of them were both pleased with the bounty that the Institute had provided.

Aside from the meal and the cleanup afterward, there was nothing on the agenda today for the human or furman residents of the Wing. Neither of the physicians was in uniform, a sure sign of the day of rest and relaxation. Don was in a loose pair of blue denim jeans and a comfortable sweatshirt bearing the logo of his alma mater. Marcy was relaxed in a matching pair of pink sweats adorned with daisies that hugged her figure nicely.

Jon dealt himself a sliver of pumpkin pie with a dollop of whipped cream and relaxed back against the couch cushions. He had to readjust his foot-long tail, but then settled in to eat his dessert. Just as he took the first bite, his PBJ issued a muted ping to alert him to an incoming message. He took his time to chew his morsel and swallow before he reached beside him to pick up the unit with a copper case. He flipped it open with one claw tip and then set it up in his lap.

He had a short and cryptic message from Kevin. ‘We’re off to outer space, leaving Mother Earth!’

Jon recognized the theme lyrics to an old popular science fiction television series he had seen in syndication years ago, but did not understand Kevin’s reference. The broad-shouldered furman shrugged and set his PBJ to the side to return to his pie. One of the Fleur sisters in his Wing must have spiked the kid’s juice with wine.

He gave the message no further thought. His belly was full, the fire was warm and he was cozy. He had always heard that tryptophan in turkey made one drowsy, but he was never sure if it was that ingredient or just being well-fed and inactive that always made him lethargic after a Thanksgiving meal.

His eyes were heavy and he was just letting them close, but a noise at the end of the entrance hall heralded visitors. Six pair of eyes focused upon two figures that approached them. The taller male was dressed in a heavy winter parka, while his companion wore nothing more than a thick Turkish robe over her orange striped fur.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” Sissy said cheerily when she and Marcelo Delgado approached the central pit.

“Yes, Happy Thanksgiving,” echoed the director.

Renwick took a sip from his coffee cup. “Yes, it’s been a good one, thank you,” he said.

“Indeed, thank you,” Marcy said with a smile. “The Institute’s provided quite a spread this year. They must have gotten an increase in funding!”

Sissy snickered and Marcelo nudged her gently with an elbow. “Yes, there has been an increase in funding for the new fiscal year,” he admitted. Before the conversation could continue, the director stepped up out of the pit and moved toward the Felis housemates reclining on their cushions by the fire.

“Happy Thanksgiving, felines. I see you have been enjoying yourselves,” he said, looking down at them with a smile. He pulled off his coat, set it aside on the floor, and then made his way around the edges of the cushions to the fireplace hearth. “Mmm, that feels nice,” he murmured with a smile. “I can see why you’ve parked yourselves here.”

“With a full belly and a warm fire in cold weather, it doesn’t get much better than this,” Dante mused lazily. “I hear you have some kind of news for us. Are you going to put us into cocoons so we can hibernate through the winter?”

Marcelo laughed and absently stroked his dark Van Dyke beard. “Nothing of that sort, but I’m sure it will be just as much of a surprise to you all.” He looked over at the pit and then gestured the physicians toward him. “Why don’t you join us over here by the fire?” he said to them. “This will affect you just as much as it will them.”

Renwick took his cup and followed Marcy up the stairs. Sissy tagged along beside them, her hands tucked into the pockets of her robe.

“What’s this about, Marcelo?” the doctor asked, taking up a position behind Jenni’s short tail. He glanced at it briefly to make sure he would not step on it. Her muscles needed to move the tail independently had not yet fully formed, so he had no fear of it sliding beneath his slippers. “Is it about the float tanks?”

Marcelo looked surprised. “As a matter of fact, Don, this does have something to do with the tanks, though not as you might expect. There’s been a change this year due to our funding.”

“How so?”

Kristen looked up in interest. “Float tanks?” she repeated in curiosity.

“I had hoped for a little more light conversation before getting to the announcement, but I guess this is as good a lead-in as I might get for it,” the director told them. He looked back at the doctor and said, “Dr. Renwick, would you explain the purpose of the float tanks to your companions here?”

The physician took a sip from his cup and nodded when all eyes focused on him. “Right about this time in your transformation, you’ve already become aware that your skeletal structures have softened somewhat and just about any real movement against gravity is associated with aches and pains.”

“Boy, does it ever,” Jon muttered, rubbing one shoulder with tired fingers. “Sometimes it’s just sore, but other times it can be downright agony.”

“Yes, well I’m afraid it’s going to get a lot worse for about the next two months,” he admitted, “so much that you won’t even be able to walk from your bed to the restroom without the danger of falling over and not having the ability to get back up again.”

“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” quipped Dante. His own aches and pains had been relatively light today, mostly because he had spent most of the day in front of the fire instead of actually doing anything. His housemates, however, did not share his flippancy. They all groaned in unison.

“During this time,” Renwick continued, “gravity is going to be your enemy, pulling down on your softened frames. This is where the float tanks come in. Sometime in the next week, each of you will be placed unconscious into a tank of comfortably warmed fluid with tubes and hoses hooked up to you for breathing, intravenous feeding and the removal of bodily wastes. This will provide your suspended bodies in an almost-weightless environment with the ability to go through the most painful and difficult time of the transformation without having gravity work against you.”

“Floating and unconscious, you say?” Jon repeated. “A kind of suspended animation?”

“We’ll be suspended and since we’ll be asleep, we won’t be very animated, will we?” Dante quipped with a grin. Jon gave him a mock snarl, showing his teeth, but there were no strong emotions behind it.

“How long will we be in the tanks?” Jenni asked. “Are you using water or an amniotic fluid?”

“It’s a viscous gelatin,” Marcy answered since the doctor was in mid-sip from his cup, “and you’ll be in there for nearly two months. This is the time when your bones will increase reformation into the shapes of your half-human, half-feline designs. When you come out of it, your bones will have re-hardened almost to the consistency where you were a week ago, but you won’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore. You will all have new faces and bodies.”

“I barely recognize myself every morning anymore,” Kristen murmured.

“The fluid also does wonders for animal fur,” Marcy added. “It will be nice and soft to the touch.”

“That all doesn’t sound so bad,” Jon said, sitting up on his cushion. “If I can go to sleep for a couple months and miss all the pain while my body is scrambled through its contortions, so much the better. Just remember to set the alarm clocks to wake us up again, please.”

“We have been using this method to great success for years,” Marcelo said, bending over to pick up a small piece of wood from the hearth. He tossed it onto the fire and then rubbed his hands over its warmth. “The only way to improve upon this method would be suspension in total lack of gravity.”

“If you’ve already been doing this for years,” Jenni asked, “why the hush-hush to make it sound like it’s a great new secret?”

Sissy snickered and Marcelo shot her a brief look of annoyance.

“The big announcement is this, my friends,” he said. “At noon tomorrow, all volunteers of Class Sixteen, along with their attendant medical staff, will be boarding a flight down to Jacksonville, Florida.”

“You’re putting them in tanks in Florida?” Marcy asked in surprise. “What’s wrong with the tanks we have here?”

Marcelo gave her a wide smile, having enjoyed the looks of confusion on all their faces. “No one will be going into float tanks this session. The Furmankind Institute will be sending the lot of you into orbit where you will spend seven weeks in a zero-gee environment.”

“What?” Renwick and Marcy exclaimed together. The others echoed their expression by only a second.

“You will all be going two hundred fourteen miles above the Earth to Space Station Sebra, where you will continue your colony education during the time your bodies will be going through the greatest changes in a gravity-free zone most beneficial to your formation.”

Jon sputtered and gripped the cushions on each side of him, puncturing them with his claws. “You want to keep us conscious through the worst of the pain?” he practically shouted. “Where’s the logic in that?”

“That’s insane!” Kristen added. Jenni swallowed with difficulty, her exclamation caught in her throat.

Dante, however, grinned widely. “That’s just sweet!” he said. “We’ll all be fur-bearin’ space cadets!”

Jon suddenly remembered Kevin’s cryptic message. Now it made sense. The director must have visited the Vulps Wing before bringing his announcement to the Felis group.

“Please calm down,” Marcelo requested. “If you will just let me explain…”

Jon crossed his arms and glared at the director, visually daring him to continue if he had more bad news. With the exception of Dante, his other housemates assumed similar attitudes.

“The original plan was to lift you all up to Sebra already unconscious for your full stay in orbit, but a change in AHCP plans has directed us to speed up the process a bit. We will need you all conscious to continue your colony education while you are going through your changes. Meds will be administered to dull most of the pain, but the zero-gravity environment will greatly reduce the need for them.”

“What kinds of changes were made for headquarters in Stockholm to warrant an accelerated program?” Renwick asked, just as flabbergasted as his patients.

“That is classified Top Secret for now, my friend,” Marcelo replied. “All I am allowed to tell you is that it is necessary. The Adirondack facility is the first of the four Institutes to send their volunteers into a pure no-gravity arena, simply because you are the first session to be ready at this time. The Stockholm facility is about two months behind your timetable with their volunteers, the Buenos Aires facility won’t be ready for another six months, and the facility in Toyohashi is currently under reconstruction in the wake of the earthquake without any volunteers in session. This is a great opportunity for you all!”

He looked around at all the sullen faces. “Now, listen. Yes, there will still be pain involved, but the weightless setting is what you need to help you through it. The meds and the environment will make it tolerable, but it is imperative that you continue your studies. Most of what you have learned so far has been general colony community information, but soon you will need to break off into individual studies for the skills you will need in the settlement where you will be assigned. Our usual education period has been shortened by the changes I cannot tell you about and I am under a directive that keeps me from revealing more about the reasons behind all this. Now, while in orbit, you will all be closely monitored by your physicians, who will be going with you. Low impact exercises will still be necessary during this time to prevent atrophy of your muscles, but this lack of gravity is necessary for your skeletal reformation.”

“How are we supposed to get up to the space station?” Kristen asked. “We can barely stand up now, and we’ve already been warned against doing anything strenuous for fear of damaging our soft bones. How are we going to survive the heavy gravities of a rocket launch?”

Marcelo smiled and gestured toward her with a finger. “I am so glad you asked that question. Ideally, the best way to get you into orbit would be by way of the Equatorial Space Elevator, but delays in its construction won’t make it available for our use for another three years. You are correct in that a standard rocket to orbit will be too hard on your systems at this stage, so instead you will board a large spaceplane that will launch from the runway at Cecil Field located just outside of Jacksonville.”

Jon shook his head and waved a few fingers in the air. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t a spaceplane still require rocket thrust to get up into orbit, even more so to get up to the altitude of the space station?”

“Correct on all accounts,” Marcelo replied, “but the Branson is a modified Rutan-class spaceplane that has been equipped with Slipship-grade inertial dampers to soften the gravitational stresses within its generated field during periods of rocket thrust. Everyone within the ship will experience no more than one and a half gees and even in your delicate states, your bodies will be able to handle this amount with no relative danger.”

Jon sat back upon his cushion, looking thoughtful. “Huh,” he muttered.

“I thought spaceplanes were only designed for suborbital operations,” Kristen remarked, “Altitudes of no more than sixty or seventy miles to the edge of space.”

“Most of them are,” the director informed her with a nod, “but the Rutan class of spaceplane was designed as an orbital vehicle, though not as bulky and non-powered as a space truck or the old shuttles. Like the suborbital spaceplanes in use today, the Branson is part of a fifty-fifty configuration, mounted beneath a large atmospheric carrier that will take it up to an altitude of fifty-two thousand feet. Once there, the vehicles will separate and the rocket plane will launch into orbit. The Branson’s powerful engines will push it past the edge of space all the way up to two hundred fourteen miles, where it will match velocity and altitude with Space Station Sebra. You will disembark through a pressurized airlock and then the plane will make a feathered reentry, a slow shuttlecock descent back to Florida, routinely returning station personnel back to Earth.”

“Will we need space suits?” Dante asked in simple curiosity.

Marcelo shook his head. “The Branson is pressure compartmentalized and will be docking with Sebra’s airlock, so you’ll travel all the way there in your regular clothes.” He pursed his lips a moment and then looked back out among the volunteers he faced.

“Unfortunately, pressurized space suits for the different Fur anatomies have yet to be successfully developed, primarily due to helmet configuration for creatures with snouts and different sizes of heads, not to mention tail pouches. Breathing and temperature regulation for creatures that dispel heat through panting instead of perspiration is also problematic for current space pressure suits.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Dante admitted. “What happens if there’s a puncture in the station? Everyone runs for their suits, but the Furs are left to gulp for air?”

“Not exactly,” the director replied with a frown. “For the furmen on the station or anyone else who needs one in a hurry, there are the emergency bubbles. They’re basically thick plastic balls about seven feet in diameter that someone can climb into, activate the control and then seal up its opening. Within seconds, an internal canister fills up and pressurizes the ball with a breathable oxygen mix. The control box is equipped with a homing beacon in case the ball is knocked out into free space, and a survival kit is included with food packets and first aid supplies. The inside is thermally coated to reflect your body heat and to help ward off radiation and the cold of space long enough for rescue.”

“How long does someone have of food and oxygen while waiting for that rescue?” Jenni asked.

“They are rated for ten hours,” Marcelo stated. “Because they are small, self-contained and need to be light enough for anyone to pick up and carry in a hurry, that was the limit of their construction. Before inflation, the whole thing is about the size of a school knapsack.” Unwilling to remain on such a dour subject, the director picked up another stick for the fire and gestured around at the volunteers with it.

“However, before you all load up on the Osprey to fly south tomorrow, your medical staff will need to give you a physical.”

Kristen’s face grew dark. This was not good news in her book. “A… physical?” she asked in a low voice.

“Nothing as intrusive as the earlier baseline prior to your transformation,” Marcy assured her. “This one will be a breeze, and it won’t even involve your favorite black wall.”

“That’s right, Kristen,” Renwick agreed quickly. “This will be a basic medical examination to record your current health status. We will also use this time to insert a tiny microchip just under the skin at the back of your neck, but it will be quick and just as painless as your initial injection.”

“Microchip!” Dante exclaimed in surprise.

“You never told us anything about getting chipped!” Kristen complained.

Jon bared his teeth. “You’re going to microchip us like a family pet?” he hissed.

Marcelo rapped his stick on the hearth. “Calm down,” he ordered with a dark look. “The chips were mentioned in the original orientation material you were all given before you signed your contracts. It’s standard-issue for all furmankind.” He tossed the stick onto the fire with a shower of sparks. “Over the course of the next month, your physical characteristics will be changing at a rapid rate and you will all need identification that you can take everywhere, including up to Sebra.”

“Considering we’re all turning into animals,” Jon groused, “you should just issue military type dog tags instead.”

“Good call, Jon. You’ll actually have those available for you when you go to a new world, but dog tags can be removed and lost.”

“What about a leather collar with jingling tags around our necks?” Dante quipped with a sudden lopsided grin. “I wouldn’t mind something like that.”

“I know you meant that as a joke,” Marcelo said, “but that very idea was presented a few years back.”

“What happened with that?” Kristen asked, still miffed about the upcoming physical.

“It was put to a vote, but was shot down unanimously with a total majority of the volunteers refusing to wear them.” The director shrugged his shoulders. “They claimed that although they looked like humanoid animals, they refused to wear a pet collar as demeaning.”

“I don’t blame them. Getting microchipped like a pet isn’t much better,” Jon grumbled.

Marcelo sighed. “Once inserted, the microchip will be just beneath the skin and completely out of sight under your fur. It won’t even be in a place of danger to cause problems when the major transformations start up in earnest. You’ll have no outward sign that you’re anybody’s pet, Jon, but should something happen to you in some dire situation, your information can be identified with any available PBJ scanner for quick help. It’s more than an ID number, your name and perhaps your date of transformation. The chip will contain medical data valuable in an emergency, such as blood type, drug allergies, and much more. A dog tag could not contain the amount of information on you that the chip will.”

He stood up straight and pulled a small plastic baggie from his shirt pocket. “As you can see, these chips are about the size of a grain of rice and they have already been prepared for each of you. The microchip is not an option subject to your approval. It’s part of your existence with the Anthro Human Colonization Program and will be with you the rest of your lives.”

Chapter 22

South Flight

“The Bell Boeing Osprey can hold a crew of four plus twenty-four troops. This one only has a crew of two, but with sixteen of us and the eight who make up the medical staff, the troop carrier will be full,” Dante informed his companions, reading from a pamphlet that had been included in their initial orientation material for the Furmankind Institute of the Adirondacks. “Luggage is limited to a small travel bag, no heavier than ten pounds’ weight.”

“I can barely lift ten pounds right now,” Kristen muttered from behind him, “and I think that’s all in my legs.” She shifted the travel bag at her feet several steps forward on the grass with its strap, lightly shivering beneath the Turkish robe she wore. She was so tired that she did not feel as if she even had the strength to scratch the itch at the back of her neck where her microchip had been inserted earlier that morning.

Jon saw the shiver and pulled her to him, lightly wrapping an arm around her for a little extra warmth. Jenni saw this and snuggled up to Dante in the same way, pulling one of his arms across her shoulders. He looked momentarily surprised, but then put the pamphlet away and wrapped both arms around her shoulders. A moment later, he pulled her nearer to Jon and Kristen so that the entire group stood closer together.

The Felis Wing personnel were the last ones in line to board the Osprey. Tom Williams was helping each slow-moving Fur mount the short steps up into the troop compartment in the back of the plane, each of them dropping their travel bags at his feet to be stowed in another compartment. Marcelo was wrapped up in his parka at the front of the craft watching idly as Wayne Mooreland began his pre-flight checks.

There had been a light frost that morning while all four Wings engaged in medical examinations, but the frost had evaporated by noontime, though the air was still chilly. The sky was overcast, but there was no threat of precipitation expected for the southbound flight from upper New York to Florida.

Just about all of the volunteers were moving slowly. Holding themselves upright for long periods of time was exhausting, and standing out in the cold did not help. There were only two or three like Dante who were chatting idly, but most of the group was quiet as they hoped to get on board before they were too cold and tired to reach a plane seat.

Just in front of the felines was the Vulps group. Kevin looked back at Jon enviously, wishing he had another warm body to snuggle up to for warmth, but despite all the flirtation of the past weeks, his housemates now ignored him. All three of the sisters were wearily grouped together, but the eldest Jasmine was the only one speaking, her weary voice irritated at Travis, who stood in line just ahead of her.

“We’re just fine without you,” she told him with a shake of her head.

“C’mon, Jazz,” the canine volunteer replied at her refusal, “We’re all cold out here and it just makes sense to snuggle up for warmth. I’m not asking you to bed, although that would be preferable, but just let me bundle up with you and your cute sisters.”

Jasmine Fleur fixed him with a set of narrowed vulpine eyes of orange with feline slits, a snarl curling up the end of her lips; the black whiskers against the white fur around her mouth were quivering in frustration. “Just turn around and look at the plane,” the vixen growled. “The line’s moved on in front of you.”

Instead of looking forward, he glanced behind the taller Vulps woman and gestured with just a rise of his chin. “Even the stinkin’ cats behind you are all huddled together, but you and your sisters have ousted all guys from your little circle. You’ve even left your little mascot out in the cold!”

Jasmine blinked and looked back at Kevin, who had his eyes almost closed, standing with his nose buried in the upper folds of his robe, his arms wrapped around his middle with small shivers running through him.

She exchanged a brief look with her sisters Dahlia and Rose, and then the three of them turned in unison toward Kevin. They quickly surrounded him and wrapped their arms around one another without a word. The young fox opened his eyes in surprise, but the compassionate look in Dahlia’s eyes informed him that this was not a tease or a joke; they would share their warmth with him.

Travis scowled at the lot of them and turned around, only then noticing that the line had moved ahead of them. He started to trot forward to close the gap, but his legs complained and threatened to buckle beneath him, so the German shepherd pulled the collar of his robe up around his canine ears and shuffled toward the plane with dark thoughts.

It took another twenty minutes to get everyone inside, seated and buckled in, Jon being the last one inside. Travis tried to trip him with an out-thrust foot when he shuffled by him in the aisle, but the larger man merely brushed it out of the way without a second thought.

After Jon sat down and got his tail arranged in a seat not designed for one, the medical teams moved around the compartment to make sure their charges were harnessed and settled. Marcy gave each of the Felis volunteers a travel blanket and a pillow and checked to see if there was anything else they might need. They were all so cold and worn out from the short trek from the Wing to the plane that each of them looked as if they could go right to sleep.

Doctor Renwick spoke quietly with Jenni, offering the leopard a sedative for the upcoming flight. Despite her numerous outdoor experiences, she had never liked flying or great heights and was dreading the four-hour journey.

When the medical staff finished up and then were seated and strapped in themselves, the copilot finished stowing the travel bags and motioned out through the door. Marcelo stepped up into the plane as the engines outside began to warm up.

“May I have your attention, please,” the man said, his dark eyes shining from the interior lights as he pulled off his parka hood. “Thank you. I just wanted to wish you all a safe journey. I would love to join you on Sebra, but as project director, there will still be a lot for me to do here while you are away. Although I know your time in orbit will not be all fun, I know you will be happier there than here as your bodies assume new shapes. Even once your skeletal structures are stable, there will still be many other internal changes taking place over the next months, but when you get back you will be in a better frame of mind to learn the skills we must teach you in order to survive on an alien world.

“Now, during your time away from the Institute, Dr. Aristotle of the Canis Wing will be your direct authority. If you have any problems, first go to your Wing’s attendant physicians, but should events escalate and need to be brought to a higher attention, you will then take your concerns to Dr. Aristotle. He will have the authority to deal with what comes up, but he will also provide me with daily reports of your progress and alert me to anything of express interest. Please give him your respect and cooperation.”

He looked aside at a signal from the Osprey’s copilot and then reached up to pull his hood back into place. “My time is up, so I must bid you all goodbye for now. I will see you in two months. Farewell!”

With that, he thumped down the steps and out of the aircraft, and then Tom shut and locked the hatch behind him. No one said a thing, either too weary or too nervous to begin any new conversations.

Jon could feel the familiar pressurizing of the compartment and he looked around him with a small private smile. The last time he was inside the Osprey had been the day of his salvation. He still felt like a prisoner undergoing a life sentence, but that other flight had saved him from a terrible death and for that he was grateful.

As he could hear the rotors powering up for liftoff, he put his travel pillow behind his head and spread out the blanket over him up to his neck. Jenni looked over with a tired smile and he gave her a subtle wink.

When the craft left the ground moments later, Kristen suddenly reached over and grabbed his hand. He did not resist her need for comfort, but when he looked at her face, her eyes were tightly closed. He glanced over at Dante, but the younger male was yawning and seemed not to give the flight a concerned thought.

Jon settled in and prepared to relax. It would be a long four hours, but he expected to spend most of it asleep as he had on the trip from Colorado. He closed his eyes and let his mind drift away.

***

When the Adirondack personnel disembarked from the Osprey, many of them had to shield their eyes from the sun beating down upon them from a cloudless sky. There was a forty-degree difference in temperature in Jacksonville from what it had been at the Institute, and many of the volunteers shed their thick Turkish robes to let the sunshine warm their bodies. Granted, the plane’s troop compartment had been heated, but it could not compare to the feeling of actual sunlight. Fortunately for the humans in the Cecil Field terminal, the volunteers still had on their typical furman garments beneath the heavier winter robes.

For many of the humans populating the Florida location, this was their first time seeing anthro-humans. Some were disappointed, since the volunteers had not yet transformed fully into their final furmankind shapes, and their disillusionment was evident in the unkind comments muttered beneath their breaths. Unknown to them, however, some of the new furmen already had a heightened sense of hearing and the comments of ugly freaks and monsters did not go unnoticed.

Despite his aches and pains at gravity’s whim, one individual left the ranks of his Ursis group and approached a blonde-haired guy in flight line coveralls who had made such remarks to his buddies. The dark-skinned man who was becoming a brown bear had been a large individual even before the changes had begun to transform him. A decade as an NFL linebacker confronting opponents across a scrimmage line had taught the imposing man the art of “controlled intimidation”. Norman Grey carefully measured his reach and then took a swipe at the human where his claws just missed the man’s nose. The flight line personnel around him scattered, but the technician who had just missed getting mauled stood rooted to his spot, frozen in fear with a sudden wetness growing low on the front of his coveralls.

“You can say what you want out of earshot,” he growled nose-to-nose at the man in a voice loud enough to carry to the surrounding crowd, “but some of us hear better than you think we can!” He held up his claw-tipped almost-paw again and added, “The next time I hear you making remarks like that against me or my friends, my reach just might be a little longer!”  He snorted for good measure and then turned to go, only to stop and turn back toward the crowd.

In a somewhat calmer voice, he said to them all, “You may not realize it, but what we’re doing here will help save us all by finding new worlds that you or your descendants can move to. We’re not freaks and we’re not outcasts. We—all of us—” he said with a sweep of a massive arm toward his furman companions, “are volunteers doing a job just as important as any other on this overcrowded planet. It would help if you remembered that.”

Norman finally turned away and shuffled back to his waiting group. It was hard to tell who was the more surprised, the Adirondack group or the humans that the Ursis furman had confronted.  Likely fearful of sensitive furry ears overhearing more comments, the crowd was completely silent while the furman group made their way across the tarmac to the air terminal.

Jon glanced back at Norman, and when their eyes met, he gave him a nod of approval. The two of them had never really met during their time at the Institute other than in passing, but Jon remembered him as a quiet, gentle mountain of a man - that nobody messed with - before his transformation. Norman had been a last-minute arrival, replacing a volunteer who had not shown up at the appointed time, and it had moved him up in the furmankind program by a year.

Once inside, the Adirondack group found themselves in a waiting room that was empty for all save themselves and the one man who had led them from the Osprey to the building. He was a short man in his mid-thirties with a thick head of dark brown hair and a matching mustache. He looked comfortable in a dark suit with a blue and silver set of silk ties, but his attitude was business casual. Waiting patiently until everyone was inside and the door was closed behind them, he studied the various beginnings of furmankind forms, clearly fascinated with what he saw.

He had already been briefed on the type of visitors he would be met with, but it was another thing to see their misshapen forms in person. The incident outside had the potential of disastrous repercussions, but the anthro bear had been wise to refrain from actually touching the man he had confronted. Worldwide public relations between the furmankind project and the rest of the human race was already a tenuous matter without such a conflicting episode to shatter the understanding of their importance.

“May I have your attention please?” the man said in a loud voice over the light conversations that had begun. Once the room quieted, he clasped his hands together in front of him.

“Good afternoon, folks,” he said with an easy smile. “My name is Barry Caldera, the Public Relations director for the Jacksonville Aviation Authority, and I will be your host during your stay with us. I know you are all tired from your flight so I will keep this short. We have rooms reserved for you at a local hotel that has been appraised of your situation, where you may rest and dine tonight. A bus will transport you to the hotel, where you will all have assigned rooms for the night. I am afraid that there are not enough rooms for each person have his or her own, so you will all be paired up together according to a list that Dr. Delgado has supplied to us.”

He looked at all the weary faces staring back at him quietly and he unconsciously rubbed his hands together. “I am in complete understanding of your needs, but due to the, uh, nature of your appearances, Dr. Delgado has instructed me to keep you separated from the local population as much as possible. As the incident outside just a moment ago proved, there are likely to be those in the area who are not sympathetic to your situation, and in your weakened states, it would be best if we could reduce the prospect of conflict as much as possible.” He had said this last with a sidelong glance at Norman Grey, who returned his gaze with a deep frown.

“While you are at the hotel, meals will be served to each of your rooms, and we ask that you not wander the halls if at all possible. A bus will be waiting for you at nine o’clock tomorrow morning to return you to Cecil Field, where you will then be prepped for your special flight. The Branson will take off at precisely ten-fifteen, so please don’t miss your bus.”

He turned to the tall, thin man with a shock of silver hair who stood at the front of the group. “I understand that Dr. Aristotle is in charge during your field trip, so if there is anything you need tonight or in the morning, you can take it to him, and in turn he will contact me for anything that may come up. For now, however, you are free to go.” He gestured to another door on the opposite side of the room where he came in. A young, red-headed woman dressed in a dark blue suit with a white blouse stood by the door with her hands clasped together in front of her.

“If you will follow Ms. Kane out through that door to the bus, she will help you get on board and then will take you to your hotel. Have a good evening.”

Caldera handed Dr. Aristotle an envelope as the crowd of furmen volunteers moved toward the woman driving their bus and then spoke with him quietly for a moment before departing out the door they had all come in. It seemed he had some damage control to perform outside with the flightline workers.

***

The old charter bus arrived at the local hotel after a short ride along a freeway where the passengers of passing vehicles gawked and stared at the travel-weary Furs through the windows. Reactions were not much different at the hotel, but the furmen visitors were now too tired to care. Even Norman Grey ignored the looks and whispered comments, primarily because he barely had the energy to walk upright from the bus into the building. Gravity was not his friend today.

Ms. Kane directed them into the lobby courteously and stood by the registration counter to get everyone signed in. She had chatted idly with Marcy on the bus ride from the air field, finding out a little more of those who were now in her custody. The hotel staff stood by silently, most in wonder and awe at the event that interrupted an otherwise mundane day at work.

“May I have your attention, please?” she asked pleasantly. “My name is Susan Kane, your chauffer and overseer for tonight. We already have your rooms reserved and I have a list of names of everyone who will be paired together. If you will hold up a hand when I call your names, we can hand out the access cards to your rooms and then you can go rest. Supper is currently in preparation and will be served to your rooms in an hour.”

While the names were called, Jon stood with his housemates near the wall next to the registration desk. After several moments, he felt someone’s eyes upon him. He turned toward the counter and saw a young, dark-skinned woman studying him, but as soon as she noticed that he was looking back at her, she dropped her eyes.

He stepped forward quietly and then motioned her toward him as the other registration clerk helped dole out room cards. The girl was hesitant, but swallowed deeply and approached him, reminding herself that no matter what he looked like, this was a customer.

“Do we frighten you?” he whispered just loud enough for her to hear, keeping his expression completely neutral.

She almost seemed surprised that he spoke English, though the whispered pronunciation of his words through an altered mouth gave him a strange bit of accent. She swallowed again and nodded hesitantly.

Jon gave her a gentle smile, remembering not to show his feline teeth. “Please don’t be,” he told her quietly. “If it helps, just think of us as a bunch of science fiction fans dressed up in cosplay for a convention. Have you ever been to one of those?” The girl nodded, the hint of a smile behind her eyes. “See?” he said with look of amusement. “There are always ways to look at people without being afraid of them. We aren’t dangerous and you won’t have any trouble out of any of us,” he promised.

“Thank you,” she whispered back to him. “May I ask a favor?” She looked hesitant, but Jon already figured he knew what she wanted. He gave her a quiet nod and she reached out a tentative hand toward him. “May I… touch you?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

The young woman gently touched the fur on the arm he rested upon the registration counter and lightly stroked it from elbow to wrist several times, petting him.

“Your fur is soft,” she whispered with a smile.

“I use a special shampoo and conditioner,” Jon replied, extending his hand toward her. “Take a sniff.”

The woman raised an eyebrow and then leaned forward. She sniffed in hesitation and then a larger smile spread across her face. “It smells like cinnamon,” she replied.

“Jonathan Sunset!”

Jon looked up at his called name straightened his shoulders. “That’s me,” he said aloud, both to Ms. Kane and to the young clerk behind the counter. He gave the girl a wink and then stepped toward his caretaker. “I’m Sunset,” he told her.

Ms. Kane nodded and handed him an access card. “You will share room 109 with Dante Capanari.”

“Thank you.” He took the card and gestured for Dante to follow him. The white tiger furman was weaving on his feet, so the larger man took him by the arm and guided him down the hall. As he walked away, the irony of his personal interaction with the woman occurred to him. Of all people in the group, it had been he who had calmed someone else’s fears about Furs. Not long ago, he would likely have grumbled beneath his breath at the sight of a Fur, and it might have been him confronted by someone like Norman Grey.

***

“How long are you going to stare at yourself in the mirror?” Dante asked from across the room. The younger furman was splayed out across the second bed in the hotel room he shared with Jon, his eyes barely open as he peered at him. “You’re allowed to collapse, y’know.”

Jon frowned and narrowed his eyes at his reflection. “Is it my imagination or is the fur on top of my head getting longer? To my knowledge, mountain lions don’t have human-type scalp hair.”

“You haven’t looked at the furman portraits hanging in our Wing, have you?” Dante muttered.

Jon looked at him. “I suppose I haven’t,” he admitted. “Parker’s picture is there, so I’ve had no desire to look at them.”

“Parker? Wasn’t that the guy you—?”

“Yeah.”

Dante paused, but then he continued. “Remember when we lost all our hair?”

“Yeah.”

“Then our fur started to come in all over our bodies.”

“Right. Your point?”

Dante sighed. “My point is that now that our fur has been established and is in place, our human hair follicles are coming back on our scalps. I did some reading up on my PBJ after our fur started coming in and found a report on the return of human scalp hair, a byproduct of our hybrid DNA.”

Jon looked back at his reflection and noted that the longer hair on top of his head did indeed have a rusty-red tint to it, although it was not yet prominent. “Huh,” he muttered. “What about the rest of our facial and body hair?”

“Nope, that’s all gone for good,” Dante replied, closing his eyes. “I looked at the portraits hanging in the entrance hall of our Wing and saw various hair styles and colors on the Furs who came through before us. Just think of it as getting part of your old look back.”

“I think a furred animal with human head hair is just silly, but at least the women will be happy.”

“The first Furs didn’t have human scalp hair at all, but later volunteers complained so much that the geneticists started including that feature in the coding. In my opinion, it makes about as much sense as a furred animal wearing clothing over its fur.”

Jon snorted, sitting down upon the edge of his bed. “Y’know, I’m awfully tired of these furman robes. I feel like I’m in hospital scrubs all the time. I’d give anything for a flannel shirt and a pair of denim jeans – if I could wear them over my fur, that is.”

“Just wait until we get to whatever world they’re going to strand us on,” Dante mumbled. “I understand most Furs eventually shed everything but the shorts once they’ve set up their colonies, and sometimes even those.”

“I doubt Kristen will ever go that far, but Jenni should be comfortable with that,” Jon said with a yawn, finally allowing himself to stretch out upon the mattress. Dante merely nodded without giving a verbal response. When neither one of them ventured further comment, it only took moments for them both to drift off to sleep.

***

Morning came too early for the Adirondack Furs. Doctor Renwick knocked hard on their door and it was only then that Jon and Dante realized that the room’s alarm clock had gone off without either one of them waking up to it. Renwick made sure they were up and showered in time for the continental breakfast that was delivered to their room, while Marcy did the same with Kristen and Jenni.

“Today’s the big day,” Renwick said with a smile, sitting in Jon and Dante’s room chair while they all ate their breakfast together. He sipped a cup of coffee, having had his own breakfast earlier.

“Why are you so cheery about getting shot into space?” Dante grumbled around a tough piece of sausage that even his feline teeth had trouble gnawing through. Seeing the normally officious physician with a smile was almost disconcerting.

“Space Station Sebra is a medical research station, among other things,” Renwick replied. “I have long hoped for the opportunity to join the orbital teams for research, but until now the chance has always eluded me.”

Jon frowned. “Are you going to abandon us to join the research team while we’re here in orbit?”

Renwick shook his head. “No, not exactly. I will still be your attendant physician, especially during this critical phase of your transformation, but during the times you are involved with your extended studies and I’m not needed, I will be in another part of the station as a temporary research partner.”

“Probably the part that has gravity,” Dante said after swallowing the tough-as-shoe-leather sausage.

“Part of the time, yes. The central core of the station is a rotational disc that provides one gee of gravity.”

“I hope you don’t run off too quickly,” Jon added. “I understand that with or without prior training that some folks can’t handle weightlessness too well. At least stick around until you know we aren’t going to add floating chunks to the air handling system up there.”

Again, the doctor shook his head. “There’s nothing to worry about, guys. I won’t be able to join their team for another week, but you’ll know well enough later today how well your systems will handle the zero-gee; we will check you over one at a time. We have meds to counter zero-gee sickness and it will be just as well you find out how you’ll deal with it now than later.”

“Why now?”

Renwick took another sip of his coffee before replying. “The large colony ships that take Furs out to the worlds for settlement do not have onboard gravity excepting only certain areas where it’s vital. The closest colony world can be reached by slip-drive in a matter of weeks, but wherever you may wind up going could be farther. At least by then, you will know how to handle life in zero-gee.”

“I thought everyone goes into a cold sleep on those voyages,” Dante mused. “Are we going to be awake instead?”

“No, you will sleep most of the trip in cryogenic freeze, but you will typically spend the last day or two of the journey awake.”

“Ah, okay.”

The doctor stood up, looking at his watch. “Okay, guys, if you will finish up with your breakfasts, you will need to get your personal things packed up in your travel bags and be out in the lobby in thirty minutes. The hotel will clean up after you, but try not to leave too big a mess behind. We’ll be boarding the bus and heading back to Cecil, and this is one flight you don’t want to miss.”

Chapter 23

Above the Windswept Heights

When the bus full of partially-formed anthro-Furs pulled in to the Jacksonville Aviation Authority terminal at Cecil Field, there was a noticeable absence of the miscellaneous personnel that had been present the day before. Mr. Caldera wished to prevent a repeat of the previous evening’s incident and had arranged to keep out all but the necessary workforce present for the day’s special launch.

The ride from the hotel only took twenty minutes, and since everyone had gotten a good night’s sleep, conversations were more animated on the ride back out. When they had all loaded up on to the bus, Jon maneuvered himself to sit next to Norman Grey, deciding it was time to get to know the bear. As with others, he had seen him around the Institute, but he had not actually interacted with him. Eventually, they would all likely be assigned out to separate colonies, but for now they were all part of the same class.

Jon introduced himself and Norman had seemed surprised, although pleased. Likewise, the ex-linebacker had seen Jon around the grounds, especially on the red-headed man’s excursions around the complex on his own. He had even followed him covertly one afternoon to see where he went, but Jon’s trails had only meandered back and forth along the outer perimeter, much like an animal trapped in a cage. He did not divulge this bit of clandestine tailing to his new acquaintance, feeling their association would work smoother without it.

They told one another of their respective housemates and Norman admitted that he thought Kristen was cute. On the other hand, however, one of Norman’s colleagues was having trouble dealing with the physical changes of his body. Whelan Nolan had been hesitant about signing up in the first place and he had almost taken the escape clause in the contract, but through the encouragement of the others in the Ursis Wing despite the reflections staring back at him every morning in the mirror, Whelan seemed to be coping with it all. Nolan was not a weak-willed individual by any stretch of the imagination, but losing some of his humanity had been a personal demon to contend with. It was he that was closest on Norman’s mind when he had confronted the airfield technician the previous evening.

When the long vehicle pulled up to a set of restricted gates at Cecil Field, conversations on the bus quieted to whispers while the driver showed her identification and a list of her passengers. Armed guards waved her through and the bus continued through a different section of the grounds than the volunteers had seen the previous evening.

Voices evaporated altogether when the bus pulled up to a huge white hangar building with stylized letters “VG” painted in white across what resembled the iris of a large blue eye. That in itself was not what held everyone’s attention, but the massive craft that rested on the tarmac just outside the hangar door.

“Is that it?” Kevin asked in an excited voice above the quiet. No one answered, as they were all fascinated by the special vehicle that would take them all into space.

Nearly one hundred fifty feet long with a wingspan fifty feet wider than its length, it was a sight to behold. Mothership was a matched pair of twin aircraft fuselages cojoined by a gigantic set of dihedral wings with a smaller craft mated below the apex of those massive central wings. The secondary vehicle was the Branson, the actual spaceplane that would take twenty-four passengers and a crew of two all the way up to the orbital station. Numerous round windows punctuated its curved sides in a random pattern, each ringed with painted blue stars.

The SS Branson was nearly one hundred twenty feet in length of its own right, with folded wings tucked up together at its sides that would be deployed only when the bullet-shaped vehicle returned to earth. The upper half of the spaceplane was white, but the lower section was covered in dark, heat-resistant tiles that would dissipate the tremendous buildup of friction heat upon reentry into the atmosphere.

It seemed impossible that this massive combined set of aerial vehicles could ever get off the ground together, but three gigantic engines were mounted beneath the outer wings on each end. It would take the craft almost the entire twelve-thousand-foot runway to get up enough speed to take off even with the assist of anti-gravity repulsors, but once the SS Mothership left the earth, it would proceed up to fifty-two thousand feet before the Branson would separate and drop beneath it to ignite its own engines for orbital insertion.

The bus followed a striped avenue marked on the tarmac that took it around to the central nose of the humongous craft combination, but no closer than a hundred feet to the vehicle. When it came to a stop, Ms. Kane unbuckled herself, stood up from the driver’s seat and gestured toward the door.

“Please watch your step when you exit the bus. I will be just outside to lend a hand to anyone who needs it. Mr. Caldera is waiting and will give you a few instructions before you board the Branson.”

She gave her passengers a smile and then disappeared down the steps to the tarmac outside. One by one, the volunteers and their medical attendants stood up to depart, but it would take time for everyone to get outside.

A few of the volunteers had somehow procured walking canes back at the hotel and were using them to stay upright against gravity’s incessant pull. When it became his turn, Norman stepped down first, and then turned to help Jon if needed. Fortunately, the feline furman was able to negotiate the steps without aid, but the person behind him stumbled. Cheryl might have landed face first on the tarmac, had Jon and Norman not reached out simultaneously, each snagging one of her arms to keep her upright. She smiled with embarrassment, but thanked each of them with a quick peck on the cheek.

Ten minutes later, the bus was empty and the small crowd stood together in the crisp morning sunlight. Barry Caldera stood in front of the group with a bright smile beneath his mustache, Doctor Aristotle standing just behind him.

“Good Morning, everyone,” Caldera said cheerily. “I hope you all had a chance to rest up last night, as you have a full and exciting day ahead of you.” He stepped back and indicated the vehicle behind him. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is the SS Branson. Spaceplanes have been in use for decades, but there have been none like this one. The largest of its kind, the Branson and its Mothership is often utilized to ferry personnel to and from Space Station Sebra, although it is rarely ever filled to capacity as it will be today. Captains Young and Fullerton will pilot the Mothership, the large twin-fuselage craft that will get you off the ground. Captains Crippen and Truly will pilot the Branson from high altitude up to Sebra, as well as its homecoming flight to earth with personnel returning from orbit. I assure you that you will all be in safe hands with these four dedicated pilots.”

Caldera pulled a small commercial tablet from an inner pocket of his suit coat. “As with your hotel rooms last night, you will all have assigned seats on board the Branson. Please don’t be upset if you don’t get to sit with someone you would like, since the selections have been made strictly due to weight distribution. Several of the women looked alarmed, realizing that their weights were public knowledge with a Florida airport and used to determine seating placement.

The seats are standard airline-style comparable to First Class accommodations, though fitted with specialized harnesses. Once everyone is seated, your medical staff will give each of you something to help you relax for the four-hour ride up to the station. For those who may be concerned with the gee-forces associated with the Branson’s acceleration for orbital insertion, you may be relieved to know that this special vessel has been equipped with the same inertial dampening system used on slip-drive ships that travel to other star systems. You will barely feel more acceleration than you would on a commercial airliner when the rocket engines light up!”

He checked his watch and then glanced toward the small travel bags that each of the volunteers carried with them. “One final thing and then we can get started. If you have any loose items in your pockets, necklaces or any other loose jewelry that you might be wearing, please place them all inside your travel bags now. There will be no gravity in orbit and all loose objects have the potential to turn into a hazard floating around unchecked. Also, for the duration of today’s flight, you will be unable to use your Personal Business Juxtapositioners, so please stow them in your travel bags as well. You will be able to use them again after you have arrived on station and connected to the Sebra network.” At once, everyone began digging into their pockets and putting everything they found into their bags.

A moment later, a tall man in mirrored sunglasses and blue flight coveralls approached the group from the massive ship. He stopped beside Caldera and nodded with a smile toward his soon-to-be passengers. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Robert Truly.”

“Good Morning, everyone,” the captain said in a smooth baritone voice. “If you will follow us to the Branson, your seats are ready. Once inside, Mr. Caldera will guide each of you to reserved seats according to name while Captain Crippen and I begin our pre-flight checklist in coordination with the flight crew of the Mothership. Welcome aboard!”

Dante was at the front of the group and was the first to follow after the two men. Voices were silent as they all approached the awe-inspiring vehicles. They walked past the nose of the Branson and beneath the overhead wings, right up to a moving handicap escalator ramp with hand rails that had been brought in specifically for the tottering furman volunteers who felt more like the infirmed with gravity’s uncaring attraction on their softened internal skeletons.

Dante was about to get on the moving steps first, but Travis Tyndall elbowed his way past him, following Caldera up toward the open hatch. The feline furman growled beneath his breath, but did not have the energy to do much more than that, so he simply followed him up.

Jon and Norman were directed to seats on opposite sides of the plane cabin to distribute their weight evenly. The compartment resembled nothing more than a commercial airliner, except there were no overhead luggage bays. He assumed their meager travel bags would be stowed elsewhere, as they had been directed to leave them on the floor just inside the hatch.

The curved walls and ceiling were all covered in beige padding and the softly carpeted floor was a neutral earth tone, though there were several plastic-covered rails on the walls and the ceiling running the length of the cabin. The airline style seats looked comfortable, but they were not specifically designed for passengers with tails. Without any slots for the tails to slide through, the furman volunteers were left to arrange their partially formed rear appendages beneath them as best as they could.

Jon struggled to find a comfortable way of sitting on his feline tail and bumped elbows with a lupine woman seated beside him. “Excuse me,” he mumbled, his attention still focused upon his dilemma.

“You’re excused,” his neighbor replied, adjusting the stiff flight harness that crisscrossed her chest, just as distracted as he was trying to figure out the non-standard seat belt.

Jon finally arranged his tail along the seat cushion and then back up beside his right leg. It would have to do for now. He looked up just as the seat buckle beside him clicked and the woman sighed in relief.

“I’ll be glad when we get our strength back,” she said, looking over at him with a weary canine smile. “Hello, Jon. I’m Ellie Amaranth.”

The large feline gave her a warm smile and held out his hand. “Hello, Ellie. I’m Jon Sunset, though you obviously already know that.”

The lupine woman shook his hand with a grin. “Two of my housemates can’t seem to stop talking about you,” she told him.

Jon searched his memory. “I’m assuming Cheryl is one,” he replied, “but the other would have to be either Travis or Carl. Since I’ve never actually met your husband, I would have to assume the one mouthing off about me is Travis.”

Ellie laughed, her eyes narrowed in amusement. “That’s deductive reasoning, Mr. Holmes, and correct on all accounts.”

Jon shook his head. “Cheryl and I first met the day we got our DNA injections,” he said, fumbling with his own seat harness; the buckle was oddly arranged. “I can’t seem to stop meeting Travis.”

Ellie stretched out a hand and tapped a part of the buckle downturned beneath his fingers. “Flip that up and the tongue will slide right in.”

Jon did as directed and was rewarded with an audible click beneath his fingers. “Ah, thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome, Jon, and I am pleased to meet you.”

Ellie Amaranth was older than he was by a decade and although her golden lupine eyes were warm with hospitality, it was easy to see that she had faced a great many of life experiences. Despite weakened by softened bones and gravity’s whim, she was in great physical shape and carried herself well.

“I’ve heard that you and Carl are explorers,” he said conversationally. “Is this why you signed up with the AHCP?”

She nodded, idly scratching at the fur on the side of her cheek. “We’ve been across so much of the surface of the earth, up in the skies, beneath the ground and beneath the seas, so we figured it was time to see what we could see on another world.”

“Wow, that must be expensive to do so much traveling.”

“Yes, it can be, but Carl made some wise investments when he was younger and the returns have paid for everything. We’re planning to transfer everything over to our AHCP account into Credits before we leave the Earth. It will be nice knowing the money’s there even if we’re no longer fully human and may never need it again living on some other world.”

“Do you have any children to share it with?”

“Nope, no family but ourselves,” she replied with a shrug.

“Yeah, it’s the same with me. Why choose wolves, if you don’t mind my curiosity?” Jon asked.

Ellie smiled over at him. “We’ve served as longtime volunteers with the Jim Dutcher Wolf Education and Research Center in Idaho and fell in love with the animals long ago. When we signed up with the AHCP, it was only natural that we would choose wolves. We know so much about them that it won’t be too hard to adopt their instincts as we grow to become more like them.”

Jon frowned. “Marcelo once told me that they tried to discourage those who wanted to join simply because they liked animals,” he said, “but you have many other skills that would make you two valuable to your colony.”

“Thank you, Jon,” Ellie replied. “What about yourself?”

He shrugged. “I am just a strong back looking for a new life on a new world,” he answered vaguely, “hoping that I can be of use to someone.”

“I’m sure you will be, Jon.”

Their conversation was cut short when Marcy approached Jon’s seat at the end of his row. She carried a small stack of paper cups in one hand, a large squeeze bottle in the other and had a beige cloth bag tied to her belt sash. She held out the cups toward Jon and Ellie.

“Take one,” she said with a friendly smile. Ellie pulled a cup from the end of the stack and Jon took the next. Each of them up-ended the cup and then Marcy carefully measured out a portion of pale brown liquid from her bottle. It had the look and aroma of apple spice tea.

“Drink up!” she instructed.

Jon lifted his cup to his nose and sniffed cautiously. “What happens if I don’t drink this?” he asked with an upraised eyebrow.

“Right now in your current condition,” Doctor Aristotle said from behind him, “I don’t think you could keep us from holding you down and simply pouring it down your throat.”

Jon and Ellie looked up over their shoulders at him in unison. Jon blinked and then gave the doctor a lopsided smirk. “That… wasn’t what I meant,” he replied, holding up his paper cup as if in salute.

Aristotle inclined his lean chin slightly and looked down his narrow nose at the feline, the lines in his face standing out in the artificial lighting of the plane cabin. Jon upended his cup and swallowed the spice tea in one gulp. His eyes widened for a moment and then he coughed once before looking back up at the doctor. Aristotle gave him a sardonic smile and walked away.

“See, not so bad,” Marcy told him. “If you would, Jon, please put your empty cup in the bag at my belt.”

Jon took his and Ellie’s now-empty cups and placed them in the bag. “Seriously,” he told her, “what would happen if I hadn’t taken it? What is that stuff for?”

The platinum-haired nurse simply gave him a satisfied expression. “It will make the trip up to the space station more pleasant for everyone.”

“Happy juice?” Ellie wondered aloud.

“Not quite. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have more to distribute.” Marcy gave them both a nod and then got the attention of the two Vulps sisters sitting on Ellie’s other side.

Jon settled into his chair a little more and said, “That was a little more cryptic than usual for her,” he whispered to the lupine woman beside him.

“Whatever it was,” Ellie replied, “at least it didn’t taste bad; a little warm going down, perhaps.”

Jon closed his eyes and gave his arms a languid stretch. “I always fall asleep on long flights,” he said. “I don’t suppose this one will be any different.”

Ellie chuckled. “I doubt you’ll be sleeping when that rocket engine lights up,” she told him with half-lidded eyes of her own. “Even with the Slipship inertia dampers, I’m sure that will give us all an adrenaline boost!”

“Perhaps, but I’m already feeling relaxed,” he mumbled with a long, satisfying yawn.

Ellie could not help herself and yawned back at him. She snickered, and then yawned again. She stretched out her legs beneath the seat in front of her and then readjusted her fluffy tail.

She looked over at Jon to ask him another question, but her companion looked as relaxed as she was feeling, the fast-acting medicine soothing the furman passengers quietly into unconsciousness. It only took a moment longer before both of them were breathing deeply.

Ten minutes later, the spaceplane cabin was silent. The Furs were all dozing quietly and their attendant doctors and nurses were buckling into their own seats. One of the pilots checked in on everyone once more before securing the hatch and then she disappeared through a pressure door into the cockpit to begin preparations for departure. The Branson was secure, but it would be another hour before its engines would be ignited. For now, even the spaceplane’s flight crew was nothing more than passengers.

A few minutes later, Doctor Renwick could see flight line attendants outside with bright orange glowing sticks making signals to the Mothership. Six huge Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines started up and shortly the triple-fuselage aerospace craft began to taxi out to the runway. It would need nearly the entire length of the strip to get off the ground, so it would still take some time to get to the starting point from the hangar.

Marcy leaned over to Renwick and whispered, “Perhaps I should have taken some of the spice tea myself.”

“Nervous?”

“Of course I am,” the nurse admitted. “I’ve never been in space before and this is also my first time in a rocket plane.”

“That makes two of us,” Renwick told her with a sigh. “Unfortunately, as the medical staff, we have to be awake for the whole trip to keep an eye on our patients.”

“You don’t sound too happy to be going.”

“Oh, I’m looking forward to the research up there,” Renwick whispered back, “but like you, I’m not so relaxed about the trip getting there. I can already feel the cabin pressurizing on my eardrums.”

“If you’ll pull out the last of the spice tea, I won’t tell if you won’t tell,” Marcy offered in jest.

“Maybe you won’t, but then I’ll have to tell,” Aristotle whispered from the row behind them.

Marcy coughed into her hands and then scrunched down into her seat, feeling embarrassed. Although she did not have the benefit of making the flight unconscious as the Furs, she closed her eyes and tried to think of pleasant things.

***

The takeoff and subsequent flight had been accomplished without a hitch, and after nearly an hour of steadily increasing altitude the Mothership leveled off at ten miles above the earth. The multitude of round windows at odd intervals around the curving walls of the cabin allowed the medical personnel to see the curvature of the earth, even though they knew it would be more pronounced the higher they went.

The rest of the passengers still slept, completely oblivious, a few of them snoring in their slumber.

Marcy craned her neck to see out one particular window. “I wonder how much longer…”

“This is Captain Crippen,” said a feminine voice over the cabin intercom. The voice spoke quietly, as if afraid to wake her living cargo. “The Branson will be dropping in precisely three minutes. Once clear of the Mothership, our engines will ignite and we will begin a steep ascent. It will not take long to enter orbit, but in all it will take three hours to reach the proper altitude and then catch up to and rendezvous with the space station. The inertia dampers will absorb most of the forces of launch, but you will still feel a sudden jolt when we take off. Please prepare yourselves accordingly.”

“I guess that answers my question,” Marcy muttered quietly. Although she was strapped in with a heavy-duty harness, the nurse pressed herself into the seat cushions and put a death grip upon the arm rests. She closed her eyes and awaited the launch with shallow breathing.

Before long, Crippen’s voice intoned over the intercom, “We will drop in five… four… three… two…” In place of the final number in her countdown were several muffled thumps of the explosive bolts, and then the bottom fell out. The Branson became a large, missile-shaped rock rapidly falling tail-first through the upper atmosphere that left Marcy wondering just how far they were going to drop.

“Ignition in five… four… three… two…”

There was a sudden roar as the engines ignited and the nurse suddenly felt the seat she was in try to lurch past her. The pressure eased off almost immediately as the inertial dampers activated, but the sudden cessation gave her a sudden case of vertigo. Fortunately, even that only lasted a moment.

Marcy glanced frantically out one window and suddenly wished she had not. The curve of the earth tilted crazily and she realized they were nosed up sharply toward space. The roar of the engines drowned out everything in the cabin and she looked nervously at the furman passengers seated in the row in front of her. Aside from a little jostling, they were all unmoving in their slumber.

The windows darkened quickly and the earth dropped farther below and behind them. Marcy swallowed with difficulty and closed her eyes. If this were to keep up for the next three hours, she felt like she might not make it.

An eternity later, the vibration eased off, although the roar of the engines continued on for some time. They had passed the boundary of space, but still needed to attain the altitude of the space station. In the early days of orbital space stations over the earth, it had taken a day or two for a craft to catch up to and reach such a station, but with modern technology the time was reduced to mere hours.

“Welcome to space, ladies and gentlemen. Our burn will continue for another six minutes and then you will be free to move around the cabin to check on your patients. If this is your first time, be advised that you will be in complete zero gravity. A gentle push off from the floor or ceiling may be all you need to shoot across the room, so gauge your movements carefully. Our current ETA to Sebra is… two hours, fifty-seven minutes.”

Ten minutes later, the doctors and their nurses floated out over the patients to check their individual vital signs. Marcy, however, first practiced zero-gee maneuvering by pushing herself toward a nearby window. She misjudged her launch velocity and hit the wall beside it hard with a thump. She shook her head as if to knock loose a few lodged marbles and then tried again. It took her three tries before she felt comfortable enough to push off the length of the cabin. When she landed, it was with a light touchdown upon the padded wall that did not bounce her off into another direction this time.

For several moments, she clung to a piece of the molding around a window so she could remain stationary long enough to peer out the window. From her position, the earth was above her, and although she had seen many satellite images in her lifetime, it could not compare with seeing the blue, green and brown world covered over with white swirls of clouds with her own eyes.

“Marcy.”

The nurse blinked and looked across the room at Doctor Renwick. “We have work to do,” he reminded her. “We will have plenty of time to sight-see once we get to Sebra.”

“Yessir,” she replied obediently. She looked out the window once more with a smile and then pushed off to look after the Furs.

***

Jon opened one eye groggily and had to force himself to focus on the face hovering in the air before him. “C’mon, Jonathan, wakey-wakey,” nurse Marcy said to him with a slight pat upon his furry cheek.

“Rrr we there yet, mommy?” he asked, closing his eye again.

“Almost, son. Now, open your eyes like a good little boy and wake up.”

Jon yawned, curling his tongue in over itself, and then forced his eyelids apart one at a time. He blinked several times and smacked his lips. When his eyes focused, he was looking straight into the top of her hospital scrubs, the light material bloused open in the absence of gravity. He admired her beige lacy bra for a moment before her finger touched the tip of his chin and guided his face up toward hers. She was grinning at him and gave him a gentle shake of her finger.

“Tsk, mind your manners, Jon,” she admonished with a light chuckle.

“Why are you shtanding on the sheiling?” he asked around a dry tongue. “That was potent spysh tee. Can I haf shom moah?”

“No more spice tea for you, mister.”

“Drat… da’s good stuph.” Jon stretched his arms, fingers and toes while Marcy maneuvered herself so that she was not straight above Ellie Amaranth to give her similar waking ministrations. He used his tongue to swish around the inside of his mouth, wishing for a sip of water.

“How long were we out?” he asked, finally feeling more cognizant of his surroundings. He watched several others floating around the cabin, tending to the volunteers, and then his eyes flicked to a nearby window. He saw only stars out that one and instantly surmised where they must be.

“C’mon, Ellie, time to wake up,” Marcy said, lightly patting the woman against a cheek. Without looking away from her, she answered, “You’ve been out about three and a half hours. We’re still forty-five minutes away from the space station.”

“May I get up now?”

“We will start letting a few of you out of your harnesses at a time to acclimate yourself to zero gravity,” Doctor Renwick said from somewhere behind him. Jon started in surprise, quietly wishing the physicians would stop sneaking up on him.

“Probably a good idea to get my space legs before we go careening around the space station, huh?”

“That’s the idea,” Renwick answered, “but you will have plenty of time on Sebra to learn how to get around. We also have fast-acting meds available if your stomach flutters in the absence of gravity.”

As if in response to his statement, another voice from across the room cried out in a panic. “Quick! In the bag!” There was a rustle of plastic and then the sickening sound of someone tossing up their breakfast. Renwick looked down at Jon in concern. The feline volunteer looked a little weak around the eyes.

“You need a bag?” the doctor whispered into his ear.

Jon shook his head and managed to keep his stomach contents where they were supposed to be. After a moment, he swallowed and looked back up at Renwick.

“It’s not the weightlessness,” he whispered after clearing his throat. “It was the sound of someone getting sick that almost got me started.”

He felt a hand of fingers suddenly grip his arm. He glanced over at Ellie, and she looked a little greener around the gills than he had a moment earlier. Mrs. Amaranth might have had more life experiences than most anyone else on board the spaceplane, but her first time without gravity was not kind to her.

She barely got the bag up to her mouth in time, and Jon suddenly felt as if he needed one himself. He was going to need the doctor’s offered meds.

Chapter 24

Space Station Sebra

Kristen was having trouble of her own, but it had nothing to do with an upset stomach. Although it was a strange sensation, the weightlessness did not bother her. The problem she had was named Travis.

Little by little, the volunteers had been allowed to leave their seats to get acclimated to the weightlessness, and now the passenger compartment of the spaceplane was congested with those who were no longer burdened by the stress of gravity upon their softened skeletal systems. For many of them, it was the first time in days that they had not felt the constant pain and strain of holding up their own bodies. It was a relief that lightened their moods and soothed their fears, and there were smiles and laughter all through the group.

The Branson was still a quarter hour away from the space station and Doctor Aristotle had realized his mistake at letting everyone up and about. The air was literally crowded with people and he was frustrated trying to get everyone back to their seats. The spaceplane had already begun braking, and that in itself was causing a bit of consternation with free floating passengers trying to walk on the walls, spin about in mid-air or pull themselves along the grab rails.

In the confusion of the crowd of volunteers attempting to get back to their assigned seats, Travis had detained Kristen near one of the windows on the opposite side of the cabin from where she needed to be. The canine male had snuggled up to her from behind, trying to steal a kiss, and when she politely refused his advances, he simply pushed off and then maneuvered himself in the air so that he was slightly below her, lightly gripping a handhold. It took only a moment for her to realize that he was blatantly peering up into her loose furman top, and since she no longer wore an uncomfortable bra over her fur-covered flesh, there was nothing to obstruct his view while her lightweight garment bloused open wide for anyone to see.

When she crossed her arms close to her chest to prevent his viewing and asked him to go away, he merely pushed himself lower so he could peer up into the ample leg openings of her shorts instead. He grinned at her triumphantly when she growled in frustration and tried to push him away with her bare toes. With his grip on the grab rail, all she managed to do was push herself up against the curving wall.

When they got inside the station, her first order of business would be to find someone in charge for an alternative to the furman garments. In a zero-gee environment, they provided no more privacy than if she had been floating about naked; Jenni might not care about such things, but she certainly did.

“We’re going to be floating around up here for two months, darlin’,” he told her, still grinning. “You aren’t going to be able to keep yourself covered the whole time we’re here, so you may as well relax and let me enjoy the view!”

“Please leave me alone, Travis,” she pleaded with him, crossing her legs. The motion had the effect of making her do a slow pirouette in midair.

Tyndall merely shook his head. “I don’t even have to touch you,” he said with a smirk, “but you can be sure I’ll be watching you.”

“We don’t need any stalkers here, Travis,” said a voice behind him. A hand grabbed the back of his robe collar and pulled him away from Kristen. The canine volunteer growled and swung around at the person behind him. He was sick and tired of Sunset sticking his nose where it did not belong, but when his fist connected with a human jaw, he realized his mistake with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Doctor Aristotle’s head rocked back from the blow, but he maintained his grip on the young rebel’s collar. Anger flashed in the physician’s eyes as he slid his tongue over a newly split lip, but he was not authorized to strike back at his patients. Instead, he tightened his grip on the fabric collar, lightly choking Travis as he pushed off from the wall and pulled the canine volunteer back to his seat where he would buckle him in personally. However, with all the confusion in the room, it was doubtful if more than one or two pair of eyes saw the exchange.

Kristen blinked in surprise at how quickly the altercation had transpired, but even though Travis was no longer peering up into her clothing, she was reluctant to uncross her arms or legs in fear of someone else seeing her. She closed her eyes and floated quietly by the wall until someone came near.

“Here, let me help you back to your seat,” said a familiar voice. She opened her eyes and saw Jenni beside her. She was neither laughing nor condescending, but merely concerned.

“Help me, please,” Kristen whispered.

Jenni allowed the other woman to cling to her as she floated back to where they had been seated together, taking a route near the floor of the cabin so no one else could peek up into the open garments.

Once finally in their seats and buckled in, Kristen leaned upon her housemate. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to anyone looking at me that way,” she whispered.

Jenni looked at her, suppressing a smile. “You may have to get used to it,” she whispered back with a neutral expression, “especially since you’ve been slimming down. Before long, you’ll have guys everywhere you go trying to sneak a peek at you. I suggest you try to enjoy it and take it for the compliment it is.”

“What about Travis? Doesn’t he creep you out, even just a little bit?”

The nurse shook her head. “He may go after you and the other women, but he doesn’t even look at me, dear, though I agree he does seem a bit of a stalker. I don’t think he’s going to get away with hitting his doctor, though.”

“You saw that, huh?”

“May I have your attention, please?” called a feminine voice over the din of conversation. Most of the Furs had finally been corralled back to their seats, but a Hispanic woman stood at the front of the cabin, floating effortlessly near the forward bulkhead. It was the attendant physician of the Vulps Wing, Doctor Maria Ramirez.

“It has come to our attention that certain… unforeseen difficulties… have been brought on by our weightlessness, so when we dock with Sebra, all of the men will disembark first.” There were several puzzled comments, but Doctor Ramirez held up a hand and called for quiet. “We’ve been told there is not much room just inside the hatch, so an attendant of the station will guide you all to a gathering chamber. Once inside this other compartment, the men will congregate together on the far side of the room, and the women will follow in shortly and gather together on the near side of the room. It is here we will receive the orientation for newcomers.”

“What happened?” the youngest of the Fleur sisters wanted to know. “Why are we being separated?”

“This will be covered once we have been oriented to the station, Rose.”

Before any further instructions could be given, Captain Crippen’s calm voice sounded over the intercom. “Ladies and gents, we are three minutes from docking. For the safety of all, please be seated and buckled in until the all-clear has been given. Thank you.”

“You heard the captain,” Ramirez told them. “Buckle up and stay put.” With that, she pushed off from the wall and did an easy somersault in the air before dropping into her own seat. Several of her spectators clapped and she gave them a sudden grin at their response.

Jon and several others craned their necks to look out the nearest window on the ship’s port side. They had all been so absorbed in their zero-gee gymnastics that none of them had bothered to watch their approach to the space station.

At this close proximity, all any of them could see was an extension arm guiding the craft toward its docking port. Then there was a soft thump indicating their cessation of motion, followed by several clunks as the retaining clamps engaged. With the cabin totally silent, they could all hear a high-pitched hissing sound just outside the main hatch as a pressure seal was being established against the side of the spaceplane.

“Docking maneuvers have been completed,” announced the captain’s voice. “Please remain in your seats until your medical crews have established egress protocols with the station personnel. On behalf of the crew of the SS Branson, thank you for joining us on today’s flawless flight. Welcome to Space Station Sebra.”

It was another ten minutes before the hatch was open and the men were allowed out of their seats; the women were still confused why they were to be separated when they had all been forced to live together under coed conditions in their Wings back at the Institute.

Jon got up from his seat gingerly, but the doctor’s meds had done well by his stomach. He still felt a little disoriented, especially if he was floating away from any handholds. He clung to the rails as if he was a new swimmer in a public pool staying close to the sides. As he followed the single-file of men out through the hatch and along a narrow, padded corridor, he discovered grab rails there for their use as well. Lighting in the pressurized tunnel was provided from recessed panels placed at what appeared to be a random pattern, so there did not appear to be any official direction of ‘up’ or ‘down’ here.

The tunnel from the station to the spaceplane was only about thirty feet long, and at the other end they passed through a heavy pressure airlock that was currently open for them. Beyond the hatch was a larger, spherical compartment where Doctor Aristotle was gathering the group of men at the far end. “Large” was a relative term, however, as the room was only slightly twice the size of than the cabin of the spaceplane they had just vacated.

Since ‘up’ was a concept lost in the physics of zero gravity, all of the walls, floors and ceilings in the vicinity seemed to be covered in short carpeting in earth tone hues. Jon hoped there was padding beneath that carpet, as he was sure he would be bumping into it a lot while learning to get around in such an environment.

A short, buxom young woman in blue coveralls wore her curly brown hair caught up in a bun on the back of her head; she was waiting patiently near one wall, with soft-sided booties equipped with tiny plastic hooks upon the soles to keep her in place against the carpet. Her eyes met with Jon’s briefly and he nodded to her with a nervous smile. Her brown eyes narrowed briefly in amusement and he ducked his head to keep from bumping it upon the ceiling, or the nearest wall, whichever the case may be here.

The female passengers of the plane floated in next, but Doctor Ramirez kept them gathered away from the males in mysterious segregation. There was the sound of a dull thump from inside the access tunnel and then Captains Crippen and Truly appeared just inside the airlock hatch.

“Good afternoon and welcome to Space Station Sebra,” said the woman that Jon had seen on his way in. She had a distinct Texas drawl that generated a few smiles among the group. “I am Commander Sami Holden, station manager for the zero-gee section of Sebra. I have experience working with the Furs of the Anthro Human Colonization Program, as this is the departing launch point for all colony ships. I have been fully briefed on the current conditions in your transformations and it is my duty to see that your stay with us is as trouble-free as possible.” She put her hands behind her back, but kept her feet firmly in place to keep her stationary.

“All visitors to Sebra typically have two weeks of training Earthside prior to arrival, but since none of you have had this luxury, your first day will be spent in orientation for everything from getting around, eating, drinking, sleeping, showering and going to the lavatory.”

“What kind of training do we need for going to the bathroom?” Travis asked with a smirk. Doctor Aristotle shot him a sudden glare, but the German shepherd ignored him.

Commander Holden was unfazed by the interruption. “Sir, when you go to pee, does your urine fall into the urinal?”

“Well, yeah – or wherever I happen to aim it,” Travis answered with a cackle. He looked around his peers expecting a few chuckles, but no one bothered to look at him and everyone remained silent, apparently hoping he would simply shut up.

Holden merely nodded and purposely walked up the wall to what was oriented as the ‘ceiling’ to the newcomers. She took a few extra steps and was then standing ‘upside down’ before them. Ellie Amaranth felt her throat constrict as the commander played with her sense of direction and she had to force her stomach not to follow suit.

“In the absence of gravity, your urine will not simply fall into a receptacle of water,” Holden said, pulling an ink pen from a pocket. She released it and the writing utensil hung stationary before her. “There is no down… no up. All liquids and solids simply hang in the air where they are released.” She blew gently on the pen, making it slowly tumble. “Air currents floating around the station will move these materials along with them, so anything you release into the air could wind up anywhere — on your clothes, in your bed, in the breath you inhale or even in the food you eat.”

“Eww…” said Dahlia Fleur, wrinkling her nose.

“Exactly,” continued Commander Holden, retrieving her pen. “A vacuum system for toilet containment is involved, and you may each have to get over a bit of personal embarrassment in order to use them, but due to the physical differences between men and women, there are very specific lavatories for each gender. What works for one will not necessarily work for the other, so there are no gender-neutral facilities here. Once you leave this compartment, that will be the first order of training for each of you.”

“How different can it be?” Travis asked with a smirk. It was now his intention to humiliate this stoic woman in front of everyone for singling him out.

Holden raised an eyebrow, instantly recognizing his tactic. “Sir, I do not intend to give you a demonstration,” she told him. “Your personal instructors will give you insight to the function of the facilities shortly.”

“But—” he started again. Aristotle leveled a finger at the man and Travis finally closed his mouth. He grumbled beneath his breath, but by this time all eyes had returned to the commander.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Holden said quietly. “Now then, I know you all have had a long day, but this basic training is a necessity you will each need before we can release you for a rest period. However, before we begin, let me tell you a little about this station. Space Station Sebra is a multinational effort primarily built as a scientific research station and a docking port for incoming and outgoing space vessels, as well as drop ships to and from the Earth’s surface and supply ships bound for Galilei Station on the moon. It can be likened to a train station or airline terminal, with surrounding hotels, convention centers, restaurants and entertainment, with the predominant personnel mostly all transitory.

“The station is divided up into two major sections, Z-Gee and E-Gee, or rather, zero gravity and earth gravity. The E-Gee Earth-normal section is located inside the perimeter of the large wheel rotating around the central axis that you may have seen as your plane approached the station. The centrifugal revolutions provide a one-gravity environment necessary for some operations here at the station. The main offices are located out around this section, as well as numerous labs, quarters for the station staff, convention halls and support facilities.

“Then, balanced within the interior of the wheel are compartments like this one where no gravity exists. Research laboratories, your sleeping quarters, the computer mainframe, exercise rooms and other facilities are located in these areas. Due to the very purpose of your visit, the E-Gee section of the station is off limits to all Furs for now. Everything you need for daily living will be provided for you, in addition to the instructional requirements of your continued education for colony settlement. Your AHCP Personal Business Juxtapositioner units have been designed to automatically interface with our onboard network, so you may continue to use them as necessary.

“Station stewards will periodically patrol the Z-Gee section to assist you with any necessity. We are sympathetic to your purpose and needs, but make no mistake, we will suffer no tomfoolery.” She said this last with a pointed gaze directly at Travis, who averted his eyes. “Each of your Wings will be under the same command structure as it was on Earth. You will go to your attendant medical staff first for all things, and then Doctor Aristotle will handle issues relating to your group as a whole, coordinating all your activities through the Institute on Earth. However, should the need arise to elevate any incident beyond his influence, he will come directly to me, and if necessary, I may take it to Commander Archibald Grant, the ultimate authority for this orbital facility. Once a situation reaches our attention for anything but supply requests, the Institute’s rules will no longer apply. You will then be under international law.”

Holden stopped for a moment to let this sink in and then she gave the group a warm smile. “However, so long as you try to behave and follow the rules set before you, there should be no trouble whatsoever. You are scheduled to reside here for seven weeks, and despite that your bodies are currently in a malleable state for genetic transformations, each of you will be required to perform daily low-impact exercises to keep your muscles from atrophying in the total absence of gravity. All Z-Gee section personnel are required to follow this routine, so please don’t feel that you’ve been singled out. As with everything else, you will receive basic training on the use of exercise equipment in a weightless environment. Then, one week before you are to return to earth, your skeletal structures will have hardened again well enough to begin re-acclimatizing, so the lot of you will be moved into the E-Gee section of the station into standard hotel rooms.”

Holden could see individuals in the group fidgeting, so she decided to wrap up her lengthy introduction. “Located a few compartments further in from where we are now is a chamber larger than this one. It is just outside the area where your sleeping quarters are located and can be used as a common gathering site for whatever purpose you may need it for. At times, it will be used for your instructional classes that the Institute has mandated, though there are smaller compartments available for the same purpose. It is understood, however, that you will all be undergoing hard physical changes at a rapid rate accompanied by transformation pain, so your class schedules will be fluid and may depend upon individual situations at all times.

“As you can see behind me, most of the walls in the Z-Gee section are padded and carpeted. Sticky booties like the ones I am wearing are available to you if you wish to wear them for a sense of stability, but I’m afraid that we have none to fit the digitigrade furman feet that you will all develop during your stay. There are several pair for each of you already stowed in your individual sleeping quarters. You are welcome to use them or not, as you wish. Any questions?”

Cheryl raised a hand. “I have a question,” she said. “Why were our men and women separated when we disembarked the Branson?”

Holden looked puzzled and shook her head. “I wasn’t aware of this,” she replied, looking aside to Dr. Aristotle for an explanation.

The middle-aged, white-haired physician smiled at the group around him. “It was discovered with some embarrassment to several of our ladies that typical furman clothing was not intended for use in space,” he said. “Designed to be worn loose over fur, it now provides no privacy to the wearers, flaring up wide and open in the absence of gravity.”

Several females suddenly crossed their arms over their chests, expressions of surprise across their features as most of them had not been aware of whom they might have exposed themselves to inadvertently. A good number of the men, on the other hand, suddenly looked with interest over at the women. Travis outright leered at them.

“Until we can work out a reasonable fix for this shortsightedness,” Aristotle added, “the sexes will be segregated for now.”

The commander smiled in understanding with a nod. “Okay, that’s all I have for now. Thank you for your attention. From the looks I recognize on some of your faces, this should be a good time to split you up into smaller groups for zero-gee lavatory instruction.” She gestured toward another hatch to the side where Doctor Aristotle quietly floated. “There will be several stewards in the next compartment who will begin your basic training. After they feel you have mastered the lavatory, you will all be directed to another compartment where you will learn zero-gravity dining. Believe it or not, there is a special technique to something so primal, but I’m sure you must all be hungry and ready after your long trip. After you’ve eaten, you will be shown to your quarters where you may rest until the next training session.” She looked over at Aristotle and nodded. “Doctor, if you and your people will follow me into the next compartment, we can begin.”

“After you, Commander,” Aristotle replied courteously.

***

Jon floated into the sleeping area that had been designated for the Adirondack Furs, as they were now being called by the station personnel. Merely by chance, he had been the first male selected to undergo training in the use of the zero gee toilets, and although he had been successful in its operation, the method was downright degrading. Fortunately, each small lavatory was a self-contained compartment so no one had to use the equipment in front of anyone else, but he could almost predict the fun that someone like Travis or Dante would have joking about the intimacy of the apparatus.

The toilet seat itself was comprised of a vacuum system to whisk away fluids and solids, but since it had been designed for a bare human posterior, there was some difficulty maintaining a good seal with a furry rear end and a tail instead. The effect was an embarrassing whistle caused by the suction against a surface that still allowed the passage of air through the hairs of fur. There was no way to hide this from someone in the next compartment over and his first use of the unit had garnered snickers from those outside the enclosed stall.

Since there were still nearly a dozen men to finish that training, Jon had a little bit of time to kill before they were shown how to eat without gravity. He had to admit that he had not kept up with modern space travel information, so his imagination was almost certain that everything they ate would be in little silver paste tubes like the ones used in the early moon missions nearly a century earlier.

To occupy his time, he decided to pay a visit to the sleeping area. He was not sure what he had expected to see, but when he entered the compartment, it almost surprised him. The closest description he could put to it was that the area strongly resembled a Japanese capsule hotel. One full wall of the room consisted of a honeycomb of approximately seventy hexagonal capsules. The door at the end of each consisted of nothing more than a fiberluminum shade that could be pulled down for privacy. One nearby was open, so he floated over to it and clung to the side of the aperture to peer inside.

The compartment was approximately four feet across and seven feet in length, just enough room for one adult to occupy. Five walls of the six-sided capsule were thickly padded, but one side was a fiberluminum wall with a flush-mounted light, a few storage drawers, and a pull-out shelf below a monitor screen with a keyboard, likely tied into the station’s computer system that could be used instead of an individual’s PBJ unit. A headset was clipped to the wall, no doubt available so the occupant of the capsule could keep from disturbing someone in the surrounding compartments. A personal cooling and heating system was also provided in case the station-wide climate was not enough for personal comfort.

He pulled himself up into the open capsule and peeked inside one of the larger storage drawers. He found what looked like a typical fleece blanket, but when he pulled it out and unrolled it, he was momentarily puzzled by its design. It resembled nothing more than a cloth tube with one open end. Then it dawned on him that for someone who floated free without a mattress, it was probably the only way to keep oneself covered on all sides. Grunting at the realization, he rolled it up and stuffed it back into the drawer. In another compartment, he found what appeared to be a small back pack, but when he read a multi-lingual label stitched into its side, he discovered that it to be one of the emergency inflatable balls he had heard about. Not wanting to disturb such a potentially important object, he put it back where he found it.

Pulling himself along with a couple of handles mounted to the single fiberluminum wall, he backed out of the capsule and then pushed off to the opposite wall, which was smooth and blank of nothing more than the typical padded carpeting of the station. Jon was not much of a home decorator himself, but even he thought the wall could have used some kind of woven pattern to keep it from looking uniformly bland.

When he glanced back at the capsules, he noticed that some of them had small, handwritten labels affixed to their closed shades. He pushed himself toward one to read the note and saw “Ursis, Gerard Nicholas” written upon it. He looked to a label on the next capsule over and read “Ursis, Norman Grey”. In all, there were six capsules grouped together with the labels, all for the Ursis Wing, but no others nearby. He glanced around and saw another group of six capsules up higher on the wall with labels on their shades.

Still curious, he pulled himself along the wall up to them and the first one he came to was labeled “Canis, Cheryl Dalton”. Quickly, he read the rest of the names and then he realized what had been done. With more capsules available than what was needed for the number of Furs and their medical attendants that would be living in them for just under two months, each Wing had been given six of the compartments grouped together, but in different parts of the room.

Determined to find his own capsule now, Jon pulled himself along the wall to the remaining two labeled groups. As luck would have it, the next name he read was his own, “Felis, Jonathan Sunset” located in a group near what he would normally assume to be “floor” level.

He was about to open the shade and pull himself inside when he heard voices approach from the direction of the open pressure door into the sleeping area. He looked back and saw the faces of Dante and Kevin peer in at him.

“There you are!” Dante exclaimed in amusement. “We’ve been looking for you.”

“They’re going to show us how to eat and I’m starving!” Kevin added. “That Continental breakfast I had at the hotel didn’t last long.”

“Wow, what room is this?” Dante asked after getting a good look at the wall of capsules.

“This? This is home,” Jon told him. “Come on, let’s go find out how to eat. I’ll tell you about our rooms over supper.”

Chapter 25

Slimmer

Kristen awoke with a start, opening her eyes in the darkness of her sleeping capsule, disoriented and confused for a moment before another jolt of pain shot through both lower legs. In the week since the Adirondack Furs had arrived on Space Station Sebra, the absence of gravity had allowed their shifting bodies to accelerate the transformation in some areas, even though they still had months of change ahead of them. No two Furs experienced identical painful skeletal alterations at the same time, so the whole group was mostly in some form of distress around the clock.

The botanist gritted her teeth, clutching at her ankles and trying to muffle the screams that wanted release. Although she had seen cat feet all her life, she had never really taken a close look at their design. When the reformation was complete, she would be walking on the equivalent of her toes with what was left of her heels rarely touching the ground. She had no doubt that she would be taller after it all, but the stretching and remolding of her bones and the surrounding tissue was accompanied by pain. Fortunately, it was not constant pain, but every time a bout hit her, she could practically feel the bones and muscles moving into place. For now within the station, she was thankful she did not have to currently walk on the unsightly digitigrade extremities that her feet were becoming.

Almost ten minutes of agony passed before she could relax again. She gasped and panted, her chest heaving from the exertion, and her toes were numb. She had long since kicked off the tubular blanket, but she could feel it floating beside her, so she snared it out of the air and wadded it up in her arms by her face to have something, anything to cling to.

She floated in the darkness for a long time, listening to the cries and whimpers of others who suffered similar distress in the night. After a while, she wiped her eyes with the blanket and then felt around for the one smooth wall of her six-sided capsule. She found that she had spun around in the night, facing an opposite wall, but she managed to get herself turned around to tap on the softly glowing light switch. The recessed lamp came on dimly at first, programmed to strengthen slowly in order to give sensitive night eyes a chance to adjust.

She opened a storage drawer, pulled out a box of tissues, and then blew her enlarged nose into it. She replaced the box, tucked the used tissue through a rubber slot in the wall into a trash receptacle, and then reached back into the drawer for her old wristwatch. She could no longer wear it, as the metal links pulled at the fur on her arm, but she was unable to make herself get rid of the antique timepiece. The space station’s time zone was set to Greenwich Mean Time and her synchronized watch read 03:27.

Tentatively she flexed her right foot, but there were no more pangs of agony. The muscles felt a little sore, but did not sharply hurt now. She sighed in relief, hoping this session was done for the night, and then she tried the other foot to the same effect. The absence of pain was almost an excuse to celebrate, but she decided to settle on a hot shower instead. Her body had not yet completely lost all functioning sweat glands, and her heightened olfactory senses already told her she was rather ripe after the night’s stress.

Kristen had not worn anything to sleep in, so she opened the drawer where she stored her clean clothes. The first item she grabbed was a pair of modified furman shorts that had elastic bands added to the leg openings to keep them closed in weightlessness. She sometimes felt the bands were a little binding, but she and the other women endured the quick fix to keep their privacy. The same could not be done to the furman robes they had all been used to wearing, but Commander Holden had understood the female Furs’ need and had appropriated several halter tops for each of them from the station’s commercial public stores in the E-Gee section — charged to the Institute, of course. While this tended to press down upon their fur, the edges of the garments fit snug enough to preserve decency; it would be a tradeoff for the duration of their stay in orbit.

Two days after their arrival, Kristen discovered that she needed to exchange the new garments that had been given to her. Not all changes to her anatomy were accompanied by pain, and the redistribution of body fat and muscle tissue had the effect of slimming her down to a smaller size of clothing. She had already seen some weight loss before they had left the Institute, but further changes with the absence of gravity turned out to be an added benefit. She did not know if being weightless had anything to do with it; the timing could just be a coincidence with the natural process of overwritten DNA. Whatever the reason, slimming down was doing wonders for Kristen’s self-esteem.

The botanist grabbed a towel and her bath kit, shut off the light in her compartment, and then turned toward the end of the capsule. She raised the shade quietly, pushed herself out into open air and closed it behind her.

There was no one else about at this hour, even though the sounds of personal pain continued to issue from some of the other capsules. She shook her head and tried not to listen, pushing herself toward the open pressure door.

Just outside the sleeping compartment was the large common room, and all but one of the lights in the chamber were turned off for simulated night. It was largely open space with only carpeted walls, random hand rails and recessed light panels. Without gravity, there was no need for furniture, and there was room enough that all four Wings could gather into separate groups at different areas of the space if needed.

Branching off from the common room were several more pressure doors leading in other directions. One door led to a cross corridor connecting the rest of the station to the external hatch where they had come in. The Branson was long gone, having rotated select station personnel back to Earth, and the hatch was double sealed against the outside vacuum.

Another corridor led off from the common room to the lavatories; the ones specifically designed for women on the left and the men on the right. A third door off the gathering area led to the showers. None of the self-contained shower pods were gender-specific, but there were six of them lined up in a row for anyone to use. Water was used sparingly in them along with special soaps and shampoos, since the water was recycled through a purifying reclamation system. The doors were programmed not to open until the vacuum system had completely drained the chamber of all free-floating liquids, so the pods were also equipped with full body dryers; however, they were designed for human bodies, so towels were still needed for the furmen whose pelts might retain water droplets within the hairs of their fur. There was an emergency door release, but to be used only in the event of an actual life-threatening situation. The outside of the panel was also equipped with a lighted ‘occupied’ indicator that automatically activated whenever the lock was engaged from the inside.

One door led to a zero-gee dining area, another to a laundry room, and the final one to a low-impact workout room. Kristen could hear voices from the exercise room, and to satisfy her curiosity, she floated up to the door of that chamber but did not go in. Instead, she clung to the door frame and just eased her nose around the corner to peek inside.

As she had expected, Jon was in there doing his customary exercises. Her wingmate was looking more like a hybrid mountain lion every day, though his head seemed misshapen in its partial formation. His legs had not yet gone through the same agonizing transformation into digitigrade limbs as hers were doing presently, but other aspects of his physique had him resembling a cougar more and more. He was still relatively broad across the back, but the configuration of his shoulder joints had changed in such a way that it would be easy to see him one day running either upright or down on all fours.

Despite his usual practice of starting and ending each day with exercises, his bones were just as soft and malleable as the other Furs, so he could not push himself to the same limits as he could down on Earth. Still, it was required for all of them to exercise each day as possible and Jon continued to make use of the facilities, even if at a lower impact.

At present the furman was jogging lightly upon what looked like a standard treadmill, only he was wearing a harness attached to straps mounted to the treadmill base to keep him firmly planted against the moving belt. The square room was not large; home for two treadmills on one wall, two exercise bikes on another, and a resistive exercise device mounted to another.

Jon was currently running up the wall from Kristen’s point of view, and although they had been on board for a week, scenes like this continued to amuse her sense of perspective. Her housemate was wearing nothing more than furman shorts as he jogged along, his eyes closed and tongue lolled out as he panted to keep cool. Although she knew he was not exercising very strenuously, it looked like he was just as physically engaged as he usually was back in the Felis Wing. She watched him for several minutes, admiring his physique, as well as his dedication to keeping himself fit. She might have been tempted to join him despite the painful episode she had just endured with her feet, but he was not alone in the small room.

Cheryl and Jasmine each occupied an exercise bike on what her mind said should be the floor, both wearing their modified shorts and halter tops. The Border collie and the eldest of the vixen sisters were chatting quietly as they pedaled up the miles on their stationary bicycles, and although Jon was not engaged in their conversation, Kristen could see his feline ears occasionally twitch and reorient toward them as he jogged.

When Kristen noticed that both women’s eyes were glued to the man’s tail and the wide leg openings of his shorts, she narrowed her eyes. If her claw nails had not already been permanently extended, they would have come out then; without realizing it, she left several scratches in the surface of the metal door frame. She also felt a growl forming deep in her throat, but she quickly swallowed it to remain quiet. She did not like the fact that two other women were paying attention to Jon’s backside. He was by no means a handsome man, and although she had no claim to him for herself, it rankled her sense of his belonging to her Wing. She did not feel it was right that they should be admiring him too.

Probably the most handsome males among the Adirondack Furs were Aaron Bleys and his cousin Gerard Nicholas, both of the Ursis Wing. Even in only the beginnings of their nine-month transformation both retained their charm, wit and a good measure of their looks despite the mid-stage reformation of their facial structures. Kristen had talked with them during meal time on occasion, and she had enjoyed their company, but right now, she wished that Cheryl and Jasmine would go ogle their physiques instead of Jon’s.

Fighting down a vocal outburst of ire, Kristen backed out of the doorway very quietly and then pushed herself toward the shower compartment. Without even looking, she could feel a raised ridge of fur along her back, but as she floated along, she willed herself to calm down, fearing the adrenaline might set off another wave of leg cramps.

For most of her adult life, Kristen had loathed mirrors, but when she entered the chamber that housed the shower pods she saw several of them mounted to the walls and paused in front of one. She stared at herself for several long moments, but then she looked around surreptitiously to make sure no one else was in the area; neither seeing nor hearing anyone else, the botanist quickly stripped off her garments. She held them in one hand with her towel and her shower kit with the other, and then allowed herself to do a small pirouette so that she could better examine her reflection.

It was the first time in a long while that she had taken a thorough look at her naked body, and she had to admit that she was pleased by what she saw. She was not as slim and well-built as either Cheryl or Jasmine, but compared to what she had been just a few weeks ago Kristen was amazed that she did not think she looked fat anymore. She still had some meat on her, but no more than many good-looking friends she had known in the past.

Kristen examined herself in a new light, seeing not just her weight, but a total picture of her new body. Her fur pelt was a uniform brown that faded into beige upon her chest, belly, around her crotch and on the underside of her arms. Where the different colors met, they merged gently into one another without a distinctive border. The fur down the back of her neck and the middle of her back tended to be a little darker than the rest of her fur, but the human style scalp-hair upon her head was slowly growing back in, just as black as it had been all her life. Even with the accelerated growth associated with the transformation, it would be some time before her hair might ever be as long as it had once been. She was not sure she would let it grow to that length again, perhaps just enough so that she could put it into a ponytail, but now it was barely an inch or two long. Still, it was nice to see it coming back. Despite that she had first grown mountain lion fur on top of her head, she and Jenni both thought they had looked bald without their human scalp hair.

Kristen looked back toward the door. She thought she had heard a sound, so she pushed off from the wall toward the nearest shower pod. She might be pleased with her newly slimmed figure, but she was still just as modest as she had always been. Once inside the pod, she clipped her towel and garments to a set of clamps on the back of the door and then let her shower kit simply float in place; she then went through printed steps on a sign affixed to one wall to begin the shower and recovery system.

The botanist took her time, letting the hot water jets help relax her stressed muscles and mind. Perhaps it was because her senses were heightened as she neared her monthly cycle, but seeing the other two females watching Jon’s tail had generated a surge of jealousy she had not known was there. In her own favor, however, she had secret knowledge that because of his ex-fiancé, Jon was pointedly not intent on getting into another relationship. He might not be attracted to her, but she knew he was not interested in the other two either. At least she was part of his Wing and got to spend more time with him than anyone from another group.

Once Kristen was clean and rinsed she enjoyed the full body dryer, and then used the towel to pat down the rest of her fur afterward. Once the internal sensors detected that the shower pod was again dry of free-floating water droplets, she heard the tumblers of the lock click to allow her to get out.

She plucked her clothing from the door clamps, put them and the shower kit together in one hand, and then wrapped the towel over her arm while she pushed the door open. She pulled at the door frame to guide herself out into the shower room and was mostly out when she realized she was not alone.

Kristen’s eyes widened in surprise when she came face to face with Jon. He had just floated into the room following his exercise routine and happened to be oriented right-side up facing her. He was still in his shorts, but had his own towel and shower kit in hand. Neither of the other women was with him and she started to give him a friendly smile, until she saw his eyes flick over her body before suddenly averting his gaze. With a quickly sinking feeling, she realized that she had not covered up at all before exiting the shower.

Her first reaction was to tense up as she had done another time when she had stepped out of the shower and found him in the room with her, but this time she swallowed and forced herself to relax, quickly positioning her damp towel in front of her.

If it had been anyone else, she might have had her usual negative reaction, but the memory of her slimmer reflection reminded her of how she now felt better about herself. Jenni had often chided Kristen about her self-image, suggesting that she be more comfortable with her appearance around others, but until now it had been a concept she had never fully grasped. Willing herself to remain calm, she resisted the urge to flee and simply remained floating in place.

As soon as she emerged naked from the shower pod in front of him, Jon had fully expected a shriek and a violent response, but instead Kristen had done nothing more than simply position a damp towel in front of her. Perhaps she had finally become comfortable with herself with the changes of transformation. He had no way of knowing that the presence of the other women in the exercise room with him had also partially influenced her decision to stay put in front of him.

He finally remembered his manners, still keeping his eyes averted toward a nearby pod door. “Hi, Kris,” he mumbled quietly. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m just heading for a shower.”

He turned toward the nearest pod and the botanist eased away from her door frame with a gentle push. When he opened the shower door, Kristen reached out and touched him on the arm. He looked over at her, keeping his eyes decidedly above shoulder level.

“I can wash your back for you,” she offered in a voice just above a whisper; she casually moved the towel aside, discarding all efforts to cover up now. “I know it can be difficult to reach the fur back there.”

Jon swallowed again. It had been a long time since he had shared a shower with anyone and he was momentarily tempted to accept her unexpected offer. Since she was making no attempt to hide herself, he moved away from her just enough to look her over. Pleased that he was looking, she smiled and spun slowly in midair to allow him to view her from all sides. In a moment of uncharacteristic mischief, she flicked her tail at him so that its end brushed his belly, causing the muscles in his stomach to jump. While it still was not the full length of a typical cougar’s tail, it was plenty long enough to tease and his muscular flutter had amused her.

At first, Jon saw a graceful, female body freely offered to view in a private setting. With the exception of some misshapen areas due to the present stage of transformation, she was well proportioned and although fully nude, her chest fur had grown thick enough to modestly cover her breasts, leaving only the hint of nipples peeking through; likewise, the fur at her crotch was thicker than the rest and sufficiently hid everything beneath. Her hips were nicely rounded, and although her lower legs were enlarging in the process of becoming digitigrade there was a nice curvature to them.

But then Jon’s mind came back to life. Not long ago he had been sitting in a prison cell destined to die for the premeditated murder of a furman mountain lion like the one he was now becoming. He looked at Kristen again with a different perspective, but this time all he saw was an animal with a human female’s shape. She was months away from being fully transformed, her face and body a conglomeration of both human and animal features, and he suddenly felt repulsed by her appearance.

Jon had thought that being constantly surrounded by other Furs-in-the-making, he would eventually get used to being around them. For the most part he actually had done just that, but all his conditioning came crashing down around him in one grim moment. He could feel the curl of his lip beginning to pull up, but he forced it back down by feigning a cough into his hand. Despite the monstrosity she was becoming, Kristen was still his friend. He did not know how to decline her offer gracefully, so he finally swallowed once more and averted his eyes again to look only into the shower pod beside him

“Uhm, thanks, but no thank you…” he mumbled. Without waiting for a response, he pulled himself into the shower and closed the door behind him.

Kristen stared at the panel in shock and disbelief. She had finally overcome her modesty in front of the only man now in her life she would have allowed to see her like this, and she had even been so bold as to suggest an intimate shower with him. His reaction was a slap in the face.

She felt a sudden flash of anger, and although she wanted to shout a heated response through his shower door, she turned away instead feeling dazed and dejected, her eyes suddenly moist. She heard the water start up inside his pod as she heaved a great sigh, then she pushed off to float toward the exit. She had almost reached the corridor when she remembered her state of undress, so she put her shorts and halter top back on quickly in stiff motions.

Kristen saw no one else on the way back to her capsule and was glad of it. She pulled herself into her private sanctum, quietly stowing her shower kit in the drawer and stuffing the damp towel into the hamper. It was not until she had removed her clothes to slide into the tube blanket that the tears came. The station stewards had drilled it into them constantly about the dangers of free floating liquid drops, so she hastened to grab her tissues. Once she had a wad of them in each hand, she allowed herself to break down and cry.

***

Kristen awoke slowly to the sound of nearby voices. She opened her eyes in the darkness of her sleeping capsule, once again disoriented and confused, but then she remembered where she was. She yawned, flattening her feline ears against her skull, and her pink tongue curled up over itself as she stretched languidly. She remembered having bad dreams during the night, but at the moment could no longer remember what they had been about.

Her long whiskers informed her that she was floating up next to one of the padded walls. The tube blanket was bunched around her waist so she kicked it off. She clicked on the light and then rummaged in a drawer for a fresh pair of shorts and a halter. Before she got dressed, however, she bent over to examine her legs. Although she could not recollect her dreams, she did remember the painful episode of the night. She ran her hands over the soft fur of her legs starting at the knees, and marveled at the visible changes the transformation had made in them. Her feet had angled downward, elongated to nearly double their original length, and her ankles had moved up closer toward her knees.

If she were walking around the station instead of floating, she would now be walking primarily on her toes instead of the whole of her feet as she had done all her life. However, her toes were still mainly human extremities, though a little stubby due to the retractable claws that had grown within them as extensions of her toe bones. She had had this for a while, so she was puzzled why they had not progressed any farther compared to the other changes she had experienced; the enlarged bone structure and leg muscles just below her hips made putting on her modified shorts a little difficult, but the leg openings were wide enough to accommodate her new chassis. The best part was that her legs no longer hurt. They were still far from complete in their changes, but for now they felt, for lack of a better term, normal.

After slinking into her halter, Kristen reached behind her and snared her thick rope of a tail. She pulled it around and stretched it out, examining its length. Mountain lions in the wild had long tails that nearly equaled the length of their bodies, used primarily as a counterbalance in running, stalking and leaping after prey. It was the single most item of pride that she had toward her new body, and she checked its length daily. It still had nearly two feet to grow, if her calculations on its finished length were correct, but she could tell day by day that it was growing ever longer.

Satisfied that her development was going well so far, she hoped that this might be a pain-free day. Rather than hide herself away while her body went through painful contortions, she wanted to visit the space station’s zero-gee hydroponics greenhouse. As a botanist, she was curious how well certain plants could thrive in the absence of gravity, in addition to the gardeners’ watering methods in a section of the station where even a single drop of water floating free was cause for concern.

Smiling to herself, she checked the time; it was well after eight o’clock and a small rumble in her belly begged for breakfast. She put her watch away and then opened the end of her capsule.

Kevin floated outside the end of another capsule, his hands upon the edge of the opening, talking quietly with Rose Fleur in a low voice. The ginger-furred vixen lay on her belly looking out at him and chuckled lightly at something the young fennec fox had said. Neither of them noticed Kristen when she pulled herself out of her quarters and closed the shade behind her. She smiled briefly to herself and then did a quiet somersault in the air before pushing off toward the door.

Several of the Furs and their physicians were grouped together near the middle of the larger outer room, engaged in a lively early-morning conversation about something that she was not privy to, so she continued through the air toward the dining area. Mounted upon the walls of that chamber were standard tables with bench seats, all equipped with lap straps to go across patrons’ thighs as a means to stay in place while they ate their meals.

Jenni, Dante and Marcy sat together at an inverted table clinging to the ceiling. Kristen smiled at the sight and then proceeded to the serving station mounted at a wall that consisted of a counter top below several three-by-twelve-inch slots. She read the handwritten labels on each of them until she found a selection she liked. She punched a button beside the one she wanted and the thin opening to the slot unlocked and flipped out. A warm, pre-heated tray slid out into her hands and she took it amidst the fresh aroma of eggs, bacon, and potatoes. Each partition of the tray contained a paste-like substance that she knew equaled the foods she smelled. She did miss having toast with her breakfast, but assumed that something like tiny bread crumbs might get into the station’s systems if they floated out of the dining area.

At one end of the counter, she plucked a plastic spoon from an enclosed container, and then she opened one of two side by side cabinet doors. One contained chilled drinks in squeeze tubes with clipped end straws, and the other held drinks in similar bottles that were heated. She did not feel like having coffee through a straw, so she pulled out a chilled tube of orange juice instead.

Once she had all her selections, she pushed off from the carpeted floor with her toes and eased up to the table where her friends sat. “Good morning,” she said cheerily, flipping around so that she could sit upside down next to Marcy at the table. She set her food tray on a lightly magnetized tabletop and the tray snuggled up to the table where it would stay in place until she was finished and pulled it loose. Her hands free, she plucked the free ends of a lap strap and connected them across her thighs.

“G’morning,” Jenni answered politely.

Dante merely nodded beside her as he took a swig of his morning coffee and Marcy replied with a simple, “Morning, Kristen.”

“How are things today?” Kristen asked, putting her spoon into a pale yellow paste that she knew was the zero-gee space food equivalent of scrambled eggs. The paste was thick enough that it could be eaten without fear of pieces floating off through the room; although the consistency upon the palette was not as good as the real thing, the taste was a decent approximation, even if she felt it could use a little extra pepper for flavor. There were rumors that real food was available to those who resided in the E-Gee section of the station and the developing Furs harbored envy after those allowed to visit that area.

Jenni rested her head upon Dante’s shoulder with drowsy eyes. “I could use more sleep,” the furry nurse replied, “but I have cryogenics preparation training with the station’s chief medical officer in a little while.”

Dante took another sip of his coffee and shrugged his shoulders, making the female leopard’s head bob up and down. “After I shower, Doctor Renwick wants to check my ears,” he answered quietly. Kristen blinked and looked at the white tiger’s ears as if seeing them for the first time. They were higher up on his skull than they had been two days ago.

“Do they hurt?” she asked in concern.

“Not anymore,” he replied. “I had quite an ear ache all night, though. What about you? I thought I heard you crying out from your bed.”

Kristen frowned, swallowing a bit of paste that looked like play-dough with the taste of bacon. “It was my legs, moving and stretching. It was horrible — quite painful, but I’m feeling better now.”

Marcy looked concerned. “We should probably examine your legs too,” the human nurse suggested.

“I think I’m okay now. Besides, I have a tour of the greenhouse today, so I’ll be away for a while.”

“You know, the medical station is just up the corridor from the greenhouse,” Marcy reminded her. “I’d still like to look over your legs, just to be sure.”

Kristen nodded. “Okay, I’ll swing by after my tour.” She looked around the room at a few others sitting at the other tables. She saw Gerard sitting by himself, his head down in front of nothing more than a juice container, and Cheryl was chatting with Doctor Aristotle, though the older physician looked a little ill this morning. At the sight of the Border collie, Kristen narrowed her eyes. “Where’s Jon this morning?” she asked without taking her eyes off of the canine.

“He and Norman are out at that big observation window up the corridor that looks over the Earth,” Dante explained. “Whelan’s still having a difficult time dealing with the transformation and they’re trying to encourage him.”

Kristen nodded quietly, thinking it was ironic that someone with an attitude toward furmankind such as Jon should be giving someone else encouragement about becoming a Fur. Her eyes went back to the brown bear sitting alone. “Is Gerard okay?” she asked with a frown.

“He awoke this morning to find all his teeth floating around his sleep capsule,” Marcy answered, “so he’s on a liquid diet for a few days until his ursine teeth grow back in – thankfully at an accelerated rate.”

Kristen cringed and put a hand up to her jaw. “Ow, that’s gotta hurt,” she gasped.

“Fortunately, that doesn’t hurt much,” the nurse assured her, “though his gums will be a little sore for a while when the new teeth and nerves form.”

“Is that going to happen to all of us?” Dante asked.

“I’m afraid so, but like everything else, it will hit everyone at their own schedule.”

The botanist ate more of her breakfast in silence, but then she felt someone’s toes lightly brush her ankle. At first she thought it was just an incidental touch under the table in weightlessness, but the toe continued to stroke up and down her ankle, almost as if petting her leg fur. She closed her eyes for a moment, but then shook herself.

“Excuse me,” she said with a raised eyebrow at no one in particular. “That feels nice on my leg, but…”

“Oops…” Dante said with a sudden gulp as the touch left her leg. “Sorry, I thought that was Jenni.”

Jenni looked at him in amusement. “You were playing footsie with Kristen under the table?” she asked with a chuckle. She looked over at the botanist and gave her a smirk. “Do I need to be jealous that you got attention meant for me?”

Kristen sudden gave her a conspiratorial nod in return. “Maybe…” she replied. “It did feel good to have my leg fur petted; perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Marcy laughed aloud and pointed a finger at the tiger male. “Am I going to have to put a sexual suppressant in your food, mister?” she teased. Dante gave her such a look of horror that made all three women burst into laughter. Marcy was feeling especially mischievous that morning and narrowed her eyes at him. “Perhaps if you petted my leg instead, I’ll overlook your obvious flirtation with the other gals!”

Jenni leaned over the table, her eyes now bright with amusement. “Listen, girl, if your legs are as hairy as ours are to be petted, perhaps you should invest in a razor – something we don’t have to bother with anymore!”

Marcy opened her mouth in mock offense, but she could not keep from laughing at the expression on Dante’s face. The skin beneath his white fur was turning crimson and clearly visible through his pale facial hairs. To make matters worse, Jenni leaned against him and whispered something up into his ear that made him swallow hard.

He cleared his throat and tried to stand up quickly from the table; had his thighs not been under the straps, he might have shot across the room. He fumbled the strap loose and then gathered up his tray, spoon and squeeze tube. “That’s my cue for a shower,” he said hoarsely.

Jenni, Kristen and Marcy all laughed aloud as Dante pushed off from the seat and spun around to aim for the serving counter. They watched him push his drink tube into an enclosed receptacle built into the wall, and then slide his empty tray into a slot where it would later be cleaned by someone chosen for kitchen duty — likely Travis again, due to all the punishment that Aristotle had given him for hitting him on the day of their arrival.

Jenni and Marcy leaned toward one another over the table to giggle together at Dante’s embarrassment, but Kristen followed him with her eyes until he disappeared through the door. Seeing he and Jenni flirting with one another was no real surprise, now that the two of them seemed to have patched up whatever tiff had been between them back on Earth. She felt a little sense of longing, knowing there was no one here to flirt with her other than that cretin, Travis.

She smiled inwardly when she thought of the German shepherd. He had initially been attracted to her because she was overweight, but now that she had slimmed down, she wondered if he would even show interest anymore. Kristen was not bold enough to find out, though, since she still had a fear that he would stalk her anyway. Perhaps he was only after her because he knew he could not have her, but she did not want to take the chance. His eyes had followed her from the group in the common room he was with, but his expression had been unreadable.

The whole situation with Jenni and Dante was amusing, but then her thoughts turned to Jon. She had purposely refrained from thinking of him that morning, especially after the way he had snubbed her the night before, but now that he came forward in her mind, she sighed and took a long final drink from her squeeze tube.

Was his rejection because he was still resistant to another relationship following the disaster that had brought him there in first place, or was it her specifically that he had rejected? She had felt better about her physical reflection than she had ever been since becoming an adult, but she needed to know if last night’s ending had anything to do with her or not. She was not vain about her new looks, but surely he must find her appearance more attractive now.

She bit her bottom lip lightly, making a quick decision. She unfastened her lap strap and stood up from the table slowly, gathering her things. The other women looked up at her and she shrugged her shoulders.

“I need to get ready,” she told them, “so I’ll see you later.”

“Okay, see you,” Jenni replied.

“Don’t forget to stop by the Infirmary,” Marcy reminded her with a finger wave.

Kristen pushed off from the table and then disposed of her breakfast items before leaving the compartment. She had a plan to implement before she lost her nerve.

***

Dante never noticed his shadow on the way back to the sleeping quarters, even when he crawled into his capsule to retrieve a towel and his shower kit. Kristen followed after him as quickly as she could, ignoring the looks from others floating about the common room who wondered at the speed at which she launched herself through the compartment. Back inside her own sleep area, she grabbed a fresh towel and the shower kit, and then waited until the tiger departed toward the showers.

Kristen followed after him, but he did not go directly to the shower pods. When he stopped off at the men’s toilets, locking himself in an unoccupied stall, the botanist smiled at her good luck. Although she had never peeked inside one, she knew from talk she had heard that the men’s lavatories were a little more complex to operate than the women’s stalls, so she knew she had a few extra minutes to prepare her plan. She continued on to the showers feeling both nervous and anxious.

When Dante stepped out of the lavatory a short time later, he closed the door behind him and pulled himself up the corridor toward the showers along a grab rail mounted to the carpeted wall. Once in the room, he pushed off from the railing out into open air toward the shower pods, but had he been on solid ground he would have skidded to a stop.

Kristen was standing just outside a pod with a foot up against a door, preparing to go in for a shower of her own. She did not appear to see him, as she was digging for something inside the vinyl case of her shower kit, but Dante’s eyes threatened to pop out of his skull. Staring at her completely nude form, he did not see the wall beside him and he bumped into it noisily.

Kristen looked up in surprise at the noise, releasing her shower kit, and put a hand up to her bare chest as if to quell her heart from shock. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “You startled me, Dante!”

“Uh, uhm, uh….” was all the young man could say. He tried to avert his eyes from her body, but he didn’t seem to have the willpower to look away.

The botanist gave him a sweet smile intended to curl his toes and then she seemed to remember her shower kit. A few things had floated out of the open case, so she made a slow effort to pluck each of them out of the air. Her toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner and grooming brush had all spread out in opposite directions, so she had been forced to turn around this way and that to retrieve them, surreptitiously giving the male tiger the opportunity to view her current form from all angles. Once she had everything back in place, she faked a yawn and then made a languid stretch of all her limbs before she seemed to remember that he was there, still gawking at her nakedness.

The look on Dante’s face was lecherous, almost hungry, and Kristen suddenly wondered if she had made the right decision. Her smile faltered for an instant, but then she cleared her throat and gave him a wink, figuring that if he made a move, she might just go with it; she was feeling lonely and even a little adventurous today.

The tiger looked like he might push off the wall in her direction, but then he shook his head as if waking from a dream and clutched at the wall.

“Wow, Kristen,” he said with a silly smirk. “Forgive me for staring, but you… you’re looking great!”

“Why, thank you, Dante,” she replied with a heartwarming smile. “That’s awfully sweet of you!” She turned herself around fully in a pirouette, her tail trailing in a slow spiral around her as if it might be a ballerina’s gossamer ribbon. “I think weightlessness suits me.”

“That… that it does,” he replied, swallowing with difficulty. Then, he realized the effect her daring exhibition was having upon him, so he hastily grabbed the nearest unlocked shower door and opened it. “Uhm, excuse me,” he said with a last bold look at her exhibition just before he disappeared into the pod.

The door lock clicked into place and a satisfied grin spread across Kristen’s face. The young man had shown considerable restraint, even though he could not hide his growing interest in the view she had willingly presented to him. His reaction had given her the absolution she had sought from him, and she felt fully vindicated against Jon’s rejection the night before. The problem was his, not hers.

Chapter 26

Changes

“May we see you in private?” asked a whispered voice.

Marcy Lagrange looked up from her Personal Business Juxtapositioner. Although they were orbiting over two hundred miles above the Earth, the PBJ interface was still queued to relay Sissy’s daily news release from the Adirondack Furmankind Institute. The nurse was in the large common room, floating quietly with her legs crossed, letting the station’s lazy air currents take her where it would around the chamber while she read about proposed fashion changes for furman garments. Jenni, Kristen and Cheryl Dalton all looked a little anxious, so she closed the clamshell case of her PBJ and gave them her full attention.

“What can I help you girls with?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“Can we go someplace where we can’t be overheard?” Cheryl requested, looking around to make sure no one else was nearby.

“We can go to the Infirmary,” suggested the nurse. “Even if someone is there, the place is equipped with several private rooms where we can close the door.”

“Yes, please,” Kristen answered with a nod.

Marcy tucked her PBJ into the side pocket of her scrubs and then looked a little baffled. The four of them were several feet away from the nearest wall and none of them had anything to push off from.

“I’m afraid I’ve not yet gotten the hang of swimming out in the air without a handy wall or grab rail,” she muttered, “and I’m not close enough to use my sticky booties.”

Cheryl gave her a lopsided smile. “That’s why I started carrying a stick,” she told her, holding up the extendable walking cane she had picked up in Florida. She pushed a spring-loaded button on the side of the shaft and then extended it to its last hole. She held out the cane toward the closest wall and was able to push off hard with it. As she glided by Kristen, she tossed the cane to her so that the botanist could do the same. One by one, each of the women was able to get enough momentum to float across the room, tossing the ‘stick’ over to the next in line as they passed. Jenni brought up the rear, holding onto the cane while Marcy chuckled at the Border collie’s inventiveness.

Moments later, they were pulling themselves along rails in the corridor. They reached a closed door labeled “Z-Gee Infirmary” that Marcy opened for them. Once the three Furs had pulled themselves inside, the nurse closed the door behind her.

The Infirmary consisted of a solitary terminal desk equipped with a seat and lap straps. The curved walls of the compartment were liberally covered over by cabinets, each holding medical supplies or instruments strapped into place. Behind the desk was a door leading down a short passage to other rooms. Sitting at the desk was a male Fur that took everyone by surprise.

Instead of the typical feline, canine, vulpine or ursine hybrid, they saw a short red panda furman dressed in a white lab coat, quietly tapping away at the desk keypad.

“Uh, excuse me,” Marcy said to him, floating up to the desk. “I’m Nurse Lagrange. Who are you?”

The firecat looked up at her with a patient smile, his eyes narrowing in amusement. “Hello, Nurse Lagrange, I am Doctor Masanori Mochizuki,” he said with a distinct Asian accent, giving a slight bow from his seated position. “Please pardon. I am merely updating personnel files and will be out of the way momentarily.”

Marcy nodded quietly. “Of course, sir,” she replied, unconsciously giving him a short bow in return. She gestured toward the women to follow her in through the doorway behind him, and then into the first open room they came upon. Inside were three gurney platforms strapped to a wall, as well as a clean counter top beneath more storage cabinets. Instead of the earth tone carpeting throughout the rest of the Z-Gee section of the station, the Infirmary walls were all white linoleum that could be cleaned and sterilized. When all four of them were inside the room, she closed the door and then turned to face her companions.

“Okay, ladies, what can I help you with?” she asked. All three of the female furs looked from one to another briefly, each exchanging a silent nod. Then in unison, Jenni, Kristen and Cheryl reached up to the neck straps of their halter tops, pulled them over their heads, and then uncovered their chests for the nurse to see.

Marcy blinked at the unexpected baring of breasts and simply looked back at them. Despite the halters that had been provided for the female Furs, the absence of gravity had been a constant frustration to the women since their arrival. Without an actual bra to provide some form of support to hold them in place, the breasts regularly floated free beneath the thin cloth material.

The nurse took a moment to examine what had been bared, but she saw nothing out of the ordinary. At the moment, they did not even seem to bob in weightlessness. “What seems to be the problem?” she asked after regaining her composure. “I don’t see any malformations.”

Jenni was the first to speak. “You’ve examined me before, Marcy. Don’t you see it?”

The nurse disliked guessing games, wishing the leopard female would just come right out and tell her what she was supposed to be looking for. Uniform over the woman’s breasts was a fine coat of fur with genetically designed longer tufts that covered over the nipples so they were barely noticeable at all, even in the cool circulated air of the station. If she was supposed to be looking for lumps beneath the surface, she doubted she would find any with just her eyes.

“Okay, I give up, Jenni. What am I looking for?”

The woman snorted. “Look at theirs too,” she responded.

The nurse waved toward the others to come in closer. There was no way she could do this examination without it becoming doctor-patient intimate. Kristen swallowed and seemed embarrassed to have her chest examined so carefully, but Marcy leaned in close and looked over her breasts without finding anything abnormal. Before she was prompted, she turned to Cheryl. The canine woman was not part of her Wing, but apparently there was some distress that the other two women shared with her.

“Is this something I’m going to need to feel?” Marcy asked irritably, seeing nothing out of the ordinary with Cheryl’s chest either, other than the fact that her species’ fur was longer so that her breasts were practically hidden altogether even under the floatation of weightlessness.

Cheryl shook her head. “What Jenni’s not telling you, ma’am, is that our girls are getting smaller! It’s happening to all our women, not just the three of us, but no one else wants to talk about it. Look at us; we’re almost flat-chested!” It was true, their breasts were smaller, though far from being entirely flat.

Marcy raised both eyebrows, but then turned and gave Jenni a look of sufferance. “Why didn’t you just come out and tell me that?” Jenni looked affronted and opened her mouth to speak, but Marcy cut her off with a wave of her hand. “Listen, there’s nothing wrong with any of you. It’s a natural part of the transformation.”

“Why is this natural?” Kristen complained. “I’ve lost a bunch of weight, or at least have had a bunch of it redistributed, but why does it have to come from my chest? I was just starting to feel better about myself!”

The nurse shook her head. “I know that some of you have made friends with a few of the other fully-formed Furs at the Institute,” she told them. “Many of them go around topless now, because they have enough fur to cover their nipples and their breasts aren’t large enough to need much covering anymore. Hadn’t you noticed?”

Cheryl looked embarrassed. “I just thought they were all naturally flat-chested,” she admitted.

“Well, ladies, I hate to tell you this, but it’s happening to you too,” Marcy replied. “You are a hybrid of human and animal, so you will have attributes of both. Breasts on an animal are not prominent until they are needed with the birth of offspring, so right now the actual function of your breasts is not needed. Once you’re fully formed and part of a colony settlement, you can choose to mate and get pregnant; then your breasts will swell up full of milk for your children. Until then, they aren’t needed, and they would just get in the way if you had to get down and walk or run on all fours.” She crossed her arms, suddenly conscious of her own chest. “You can spread the word to the others if you want. There’s nothing to be alarmed about. This is normal and you’re in no danger.”

Kristen frowned, but nodded, accepting the explanation from the nurse. Cheryl shrugged her shoulders and pulled her halter top back into place, but Jenni looked down at her chest looking sorrowful.

“I’m gonna miss you, girls,” she said to her breasts in a quiet voice. Then a thought occurred to her and she looked up at the nurse with a sudden smirk. “If that part of us is going to mimic the critters we’re becoming, does this mean we’re also going to develop six nipples?” Kristen looked alarmed at the question, but Cheryl snickered.

Marcy grinned back at the spotted leopard woman and shook her head. “No, and that is part of your human heritage. You only get the two you have now.” Jenni made a mock whine, but then the nurse held up a hand to silence her. “I guess this would be a good time to tell you that although you are taking on characteristics of your respective animal species, you will all still have to endure your usual human monthly cycle.” All three Furs groaned aloud at this.

“Fortunately,” Marcy added, “the effects will not be as adverse as what you’re used to. At least you have that to look forward to.”

***

At that very moment, Jon entered the same Infirmary behind Doctor Renwick. The feline volunteer had grabbed the physician before he could head out to the E-Gee section of the station to join his research partners. Renwick had tried to send the furman to his nurse, but Jon had stressed the necessity to see him about an immediate medical need.

The copper-headed doctor gave a partial wave toward the red panda still sitting at the desk terminal and motioned a staring Jon to follow him into the doorway beyond. The door to the first room was closed and they could hear muffled voices behind the panel, but the next room on the opposite side of the small hallway was empty. Renwick pulled himself inside and touched on the light. When the door was closed, Jon hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

“What was that sitting out there at the desk, Doc?” he asked in surprise. “I thought all the Furs were supposed to be either cats, dogs, foxes or bears. Does a red panda count as a bear?”

“That’s Doctor Mochizuki, and a red panda isn’t actually a bear,” Renwick explained. “He’s the director of the Institute in Toyohashi of the Aichi Prefecture in Japan; he’s Doctor Delgado’s counterpart there.”

“But… a red panda?” Jon tried again.

Renwick gave the large furman a deep frown. “That… was a mistake,” he responded in a hushed voice. “Remember when you asked Marcelo why he had never gone through the transformation himself – that the director of such a project should be someone with firsthand knowledge of what his patients must go through?”

Jon’s jaw dropped. “How do you know that?” he asked in surprise. “You weren’t there when I asked him that!”

“Marcelo told me, as we were both aware of Dr. Mochizuki’s case.”

“Ah, okay,” Jon muttered.

“I believe Marcelo’s response was that those who are transformed are contracted to colonize other worlds, and that is something he had not chosen to do.”

“Yeah, that’s what he told me.”

“Unlike Marcelo, Dr. Mochizuki chose to undergo the transformation himself for the very reason you stated. He obtained authorization from the Furmankind Institute’s corporate committee in Stockholm, but he waived the bonus prize money in exchange for remaining on Earth to oversee his branch of the Institute.” Renwick hooked a foot on a small cabinet outcropping near the floor to keep himself in place and placed a hand on the counter. “He had planned on mixing his DNA with that of an Akita Inu, the doctor’s favorite dog breed. In fact, it was his own pet that was to provide the donor DNA material.”

“What happened?”

“Unlike Marcelo, whose doctorate is purely academic, Mochizuki was also a geneticist who frequently worked with the Japanese Preservation Society by sampling and preserving genetic material from the animals of the world for the GAGV.”

“GAGV?”

“Global Animal Genetic Vault. It’s an underground facility where collected genetic material from all animals, birds, reptiles, fish and insects are kept in the event of world cataclysm or the sudden extinction of a species. Cloning techniques can now be used to prevent a permanent extinction of any life form on the Earth as long as we have a sample. Of course, that’s the idea anyway. There are so many forms of life in multitudes and variations that it may take several lifetimes just to collect a fraction of what’s here on our blue world.” Renwick shrugged. “It’s a similar effort made by the World Seed Bank for preserving seeds and spores from Earth’s flora.”

“So what does this have to do with Doctor Suzuki, or whatever his name is?”

“When it came time to prepare Dr. Mochizuki’s formula for the McEwen process, a relatively new lab assistant chose the wrong vial from the freezer. Instead of the doctor’s prize dog’s genetic material, she picked up an unlabeled vial of Ailurus fulgens DNA.”

“I’m assuming that’s a red panda?”

“That’s right. The mistake was not discovered until the transformation was well under way and the doctor was looking nothing like his Akita. Of course, since the process is irreversible, Mochizuki had no choice but to go through with it. He suffered great mental anguish at the mistake, but over time came to terms with what he is, the only Fur of his kind on or off the Earth.”

Jon looked angry. “I hope the assistant was sacked for her mistake!”

At this statement, Dr. Renwick laughed aloud. “Actually, Dr. Mochizuki married her! They can never have children, but they do seem to be happy together.”

“What?” Jon clenched his fists, an old hatred surfacing. “A human and a furman! That’s…. that’s bestiality!”

Renwick snapped his fingers sharply, getting Jon’s attention. “Marcelo told me about your prejudices,” he informed him in clipped tones. “They have no place here, especially not from a volunteer going through transformation!” The furman crossed his arms, hunching his shoulders, but said nothing more. “Listen, Jon, I can’t say whether or not Dr. Mochizuki is having sex with his legal wife or not. That’s none of my… our business. What’s important is that they are happy together.”

“For her mistake, she should have volunteered to become a red panda too. At least then they could have been a mated pair,” Jon mumbled.

“She did,” Renwick informed him, “but he wouldn’t have it. Mochizuki didn’t feel like there was a need for both of them to suffer, so now she keeps his house, grooms him and he tends to her needs as well as he can. She continues to serve as his lab assistant, so she still has important work to do too.”

Jon snorted. “I guess they both should feel lucky she didn’t give him the DNA of a fly instead.”

“Indeed.”

“So, what’s he doing up here?” Jon asked. “Are the volunteers of his Institute coming up here to join us?”

“He’s here as a researcher on the same team as the one I have been invited to join, as a matter of fact,” Renwick answered. “I’m sure his people will eventually make it up here just as you all have done, but his facility is currently undergoing a complete renovation after the recent Nankai-Tokai earthquake and they have no volunteers in class session right now. Since the processes at his Institute are on hiatus, he has come up to Sebra to make good use of his time while his wife oversees his household in Toyohashi.”

“Huh…” Jon said at last. His anger had passed and now he was beginning to feel a little impressed by the red-furred Japanese geneticist. The man had undertaken the transformation so that he could better relate to the volunteers who came through his facility. That was something he doubted that Marcelo Delgado would ever do himself.

The mountain lion fell silent, lost in thought until his companion cleared his throat. He looked up and Renwick was studying him.

“Now…” the physician said at last, “what was so urgent that you needed to talk to me in private – something that you could not take to my nurse instead?”

Jon’s ears went back flat against his head and he suddenly felt like his tongue was three times thicker than usual. “Uhm, ah, that…” he mumbled. Renwick waited for him to continue, but the room went quiet. He watched Sunset fidget, as much as the guy could while floating off the floor near a medical storage cabinet. Impatient, the doctor pulled back his sleeve to look at his watch.

Sensing that Renwick was going to leave him if he did not say something quickly, Jon cleared his throat. “Listen, Doc…” he began. “I… uhm, something changed last night…”

“You are changing all of the time,” the physician remarked dryly. “What has you so flustered?”

Jon opened his mouth again, but then closed it just as quickly. He did not like what he was about to do, but instead of trying to find the words, he reached under his furman robe, unsnapped the strap, and grasped the waistband of his shorts. He pushed them to his ankles and then lifted up the knee-length robe so that the doctor could get a look at what had happened.

Both of Renwick’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead, but then he quickly regained his composure. “Ah,” was all he said.

Struggling to find his voice again, Jon finally managed to say, “I didn’t expect this when I woke up this morning. When all I found was a lump, I… I thought…” He swallowed in difficulty, knowing how silly it must sound to the doctor who had likely seen this before in his experience. “I thought it fell off.”

Renwick blinked. Fell off? Jon was watching him in fear of ridicule, so it took a mighty effort for the doctor to keep a straight face.

“…I even looked around my sleeping area to make sure…” Jon added, giving Renwick more reason to fight his natural reaction to such a revelation.

When the physician did not say anything for several long moments, Jon’s ears drooped along with his whiskers. Had they not been in the absence of gravity right then, even his tail would be hanging limp behind him.

Once Renwick figured he had himself composed again, he ran a hand across his face and then looked at his patient. “Jon,” he began, choosing his words, as well as his tone, carefully, “please remember that you are a hybrid of human and mountain lion. Parts of you will still be human, while others will take on the aspects of your feline half. We’ve said this from the start. However, perhaps I should have warned you ahead of time that you would become sheathed.”

“Yeah, but I guess I just assumed that this part of me would remain human.” Jon mumbled, releasing his robe and bending over to grab his shorts. In pulling them up, he released his hold on the counter beside him and began a slow tumble, suddenly giving his companion a flash of his furry backside. When he finally got his garments back in place and himself somewhat upright and stable again, he shrugged his shoulders.

Renwick shook his head. “Don’t worry, Jon, it’s all still functioning, just configured a little differently than what you’re used to.”

“You’re telling me,” Jon admitted with a heavy sigh. “I’ve been afraid to use the restroom until after I had a chance to talk to you. How am I supposed to do that?”

The doctor finally allowed himself to smile. “I’m sorry, Jon, but that’s something you will have to figure out for yourself. I’m fairly certain you may make a mess of things the first time or two until you determine how your altered equipment works, so prepare to shower afterwards.”

Jon snorted at the man’s amusement. “Maybe I should just bypass the toilet and go straight to the shower. At least then I can clean up immediately if I pee all over myself.”

Doctor Renwick wrinkled his nose. “I wouldn’t suggest it, but if you do, please make sure you clean down the shower pod thoroughly before you leave it.”

Chapter 27

A Taste of Death

Jon looked out through the large window and mused quietly as he stared down at the Earth below. He kept himself stationary in the weightlessness with a hand up on a grab rail just below the window, letting his mind get lost amongst the white swirl of clouds over the blue, green and brown world of his birth.

He had just spent a couple of hours in the company of all four furmen of the Ursis Wing. Not for the first time, Whelan Nolan had experienced traumatic nightmares about his transformation after an especially painful night, and his housemates were doing all they could to calm and soothe the black bear’s fears. Although the absence of gravity had helped to reduce some of the stress and pain of skeletal transformation, vistas such as the observation window had only served to remind him that soon he would leave the Earth behind forever.

Whelan had been coaxed into joining the AHCP by a sweetheart who claimed she had signed up herself, but when the bus had arrived to take him to the upstate New York location, she was nowhere to be found. Subsequent attempts to contact her had revealed a disconnected phone service and a vacant apartment with no forwarding address. Due to this, Nolan had planned to take the escape clause in the contract to go find her, but his housemates had convinced him to stay in, a decision he had since regretted.

Jon was in a unique position to sympathize somewhat with the younger male. Neither was entirely there of his own free will, and both had no love of becoming a creature that would soon be banished from his home. Even though he could not reveal his true background, Jon did what he could to encourage Whelan to make the best of his situation, to learn new skills and look forward to seeing new lands. They were to be explorers as well as settlers. Once they had established their colony, it would be up to them to investigate their new home and learn as much about it as possible.

These were the kinds of things he had also tried to convince himself to believe. It was too easy to get wrapped up in the educational sessions they had all been required to attend several hours a day. Jon loved learning new things and he relished discovering new knowledge just as much as he had back in his college days. Still, there was that bothersome thought in the back of his mind that once he left the Earth for someplace farther away than the orbit of a man-made satellite, he would never again return. He was contracted for at least five years, but it was extremely rare than any of the outbound Furs ever saw Earth again.

He, Norman Grey, Gerard Nicholas and Aaron Bleys did what they could to keep Whelan’s mind on his studies, encouraging him to move on and take life by the tail, but afterward, the whole thing kept haunting Jon for its similarities to his own situation.

These thoughts rolled over and over in his mind while his eyes became lost in the clouds below. Jon was not an explorer, and he would have never considered the life of a Fur to do so even if the whole mess with Rebecca and Henry had never happened. It was a strange twist of fate that was pushing him out toward the stars, and every time he listened to Whelan’s concerns, he could not stop thinking about his own situation.

“Hey, old man.”

Jon jumped, blinking rapidly. Had he not been holding onto the grab rail, he might have begun to tumble, so violent was his startled reaction.

“Whoa, hold on there, big guy,” Dante cackled in amusement when Jon stared back at him wide-eyed in surprise. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but I have to admit it was worth it!”

Jon gave him a deep frown, but then the white tiger’s bright-eyed grin finally elicited a chuckle out of him. “Okay, I admit it, you startled me. I was lost in thought.”

“Those must have been some deep thoughts,” Dante remarked, putting both hands on the rail and pressing his feline nose up to the clear pane. Despite the climate conditioning of the orbital station, the young furman had always felt a chill in front of this window. He could not wait until his monochrome fur was thick enough to keep him warm. Tigers loved lounging in water and playing in the snow, but Dante would need tougher skin and thicker fur before he would feel comfortable doing such things.

“Was there something you wanted?” Jon asked, looking up as the Amaranths floated by on their way back to the common room from wherever they had been. Ellie looked ill as her husband pulled her along; it seemed she still had issues being weightless.

“Nope, just hanging around,” Dante replied, his nose still pressed up against the cold window pane. His breath was making a foggy spot on the thick glass and he moved his head around, using the tip of his nose to write his name in it. “I just got out of Dr. Lacross’ lecture on colony cooking. I’ve worked at a few restaurants as a kitchen cook, so maybe this is something I can do once we get to where we’re going.” Jon pulled a cheap wristwatch from a pocket of his furman robe and looked at the time. “It also gave me the opportunity to admire the women; I was the only guy there!” Dante said the last with a smirk, pulling back from the window to look at his companion.

Jon gave him a sideways glance. “Was Cheryl there?” he asked.

Dante grinned. “Yup, how did you know?”

“Ever since she started going around topless, you haven’t been very subtle gawking at her whenever she’s near you.”

The tiger shrugged. “It’s not like I can see anything, y’know,” he retorted. “We’ve been growing fur for less than two months and already hers is longer than anyone else’s!”

“Most Border collies are long-hairs,” Jon reminded him.

“I can’t tell without a physical examination,” Dante added, groping the air with his fingers and a waggle of his eyebrows, “but I also think her chest has shrunk; if that’s so, her long fur hides her chest even more than it did before. Still, even if she’s all covered up, I think she’s hot and sexy parading around without a top!”

Jon shook his head with a smile. “What does Jenni think about you staring at another woman?”

The tiger tried to look innocent. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said in a quieter voice.

“Dante, you aren’t fooling anyone,” Jon informed him. “Either the two of you are fooling around or you’re doing some awfully heavy flirting with one another.”

The monochrome feline swallowed, but was unable to break eye contact with the larger male. “Uhm…” he mumbled. “It’s just flirting,” he admitted after a moment. Jon simply nodded and Dante suddenly felt the need to explain. He leaned his head in closer to the mountain lion and said in a whisper, “She’s nothing but a tease. She gets me all worked up but won’t put out, if you know what I mean.”

Jon merely looked back at him in amusement. “That must really torque your ego,” he replied with a look of satisfaction. He did not really dislike the younger feline, but Dante had been so self-assured of himself when they had all first arrived that Jon was enjoying the moment.

Dante seemed oblivious to the mountain lion’s pleasure and looked back out the window. “You ain’t woofing,” he said. Then with a snicker, he added, “or meowing, as the case may be with us!”

Jon snorted. “I’ve not felt the urge to meow at anyone once since we got the injections.” He looked again at his watch with a frown. “Listen, I don’t really want to go, but it’s about time for Aristotle’s lecture on the colony chain of command in the common room. You going?”

“No, I think I’ll skip that one and go take a nap. My lower back has been sore since my episode this morning.” Dante pushed off the grab rail and followed after his housemate. “I know cats are supposed to have limber spines, but mine felt like it was trying to tie itself into a knot!”

Jon felt a twinge in his knee and he winced from the sudden stab of pain. It was gone just as quickly as it came, so he continued into the corridor in the direction the anthro-wolves had gone.

“Although this weightlessness is supposed to help with the aches and pains,” Dante continued, “there are times I really miss having a soft mattress to squish into when I sleep.”

Jon couldn’t argue with that. “I miss wrapping my arms around a pillow,” he remarked. “I’ve always slept with two, one under my head and the other up next to my chest.”

They reached the open pressure door into the common room, but Dante pulled up alongside him and whispered into the cougar’s ear. “You could always wrap your arms around Kristen. I know she wouldn’t mind.”

Jon suddenly reached out and grabbed the front of Dante’s loose robe. Literally floating nose to nose with the tiger, he growled low in his throat. “Listen, I tolerate your chatter because you’re part of the Cat House,” he said just loud enough for him to hear, “but mind yourself when you’re talking to me. I like Kris, but not in that way – do you remember why?”

Dante swallowed, suddenly recalling that he was staring into the eyes of someone who had killed another. “Beeee-cause she’s a… a Fur?” he squeaked. He did not move or even try to struggle out of Jon’s grasp. He wanted to appear as non-threatening as he could to the angry mountain lion, so he lowered his ears and looked down at Jon’s chin instead of into his eyes.

“Ah, so you do remember,” the cougar replied. “I don’t care if she chose the same cat as me; you can stop trying to pair me up with her.”

“Yessir,” Dante replied automatically.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Sunset?”

Jon released Dante’s robe and gently pushed him away with a fingertip. “No, Dr. Aristotle. No problem whatsoever,” he replied, looking across the room at the group of Furs bobbing in the air in front of the Canis Wing’s physician.

“In that case, you may wish to join us. We are about to begin.”

“Coming,” Jon replied. Fortunately for Dante, the push had put him near a wall, so the tiger used the tips of his claws in the carpeted covering to pull himself to a grab rail. Aristotle glanced over at him when he passed the group and kept going toward the sleep chamber. By the time the physician had returned his attention to those gathered around, Jon had joined them.

Kristen gave him a smile when he lightly grasped her shoulder to keep from floating on across the room. “What was that about?” she whispered as Aristotle began his lecture in a louder voice.

“He hasn’t gotten on my nerves in a while and decided he was behind,” was Jon’s whispered response. He shifted his irritated gaze past her to the doctor and she merely shrugged. Ever since that night the botanist had given Dante an exhibition in the shower room, she had thought a little more fondly of the man she used to think of as oily.

Remembering that night also reminded her of Jon’s rejection of her willing offer. Kristen frowned and sighed inwardly, but then shook herself. Thinking perhaps he might accept contact that was not quite so intimate, she reached over and simply threaded an arm around one of his. Almost immediately, he extracted his arm without looking at her, keeping his attention on the start of the lecture.

“The chain of command in a colony probably does not sound like an important issue to you right now,” Aristotle was saying, “but even in a small group trying to survive out in the wild, it is necessary to know ahead of time who it is you can turn to in a crisis. Every settlement has its leader established before the colony ship ever sets out from Earth. This leader is appointed by Stockholm, so the position is not up for a vote by the colonists, but the leader is free to choose his or her own second-in-command. Now, in the event that the leader is incapacitated….”

***

The pain was intense, nerves throughout his body feeling like primer cord that had been set on fire. This agony was not centralized at any particular spot in his system, but was all over, through all places within that had nerve endings. Jon’s eyes were squeezed tight, but tears leaked out onto his cheek fur while he gnashed feline teeth. Even his hide seemed to be on fire, so that anything that touched a hair of his fur triggered waves of torment.

The mountain lion thrashed around, kicking the sides of his sleeping capsule with extended toe claws, shredding the padding material that expelled insulated fluff out into the weightless environment.

His throat constricted tightly, suddenly leaving precious little passage for air and he clawed at his neck frantically in some effort to get oxygen to his brain. He could not cry out for help, so he pounded on the wall of his capsule in a weakened attempt to draw someone’s attention.

Sparkles appeared before his eyes and some part of him knew that his brain was dying from lack of oxygen combined with the burning hellfire raging throughout his body. He wanted nothing more than a release from searing agony, but even as he died, the torment only intensified.

The muscles of his throat finally released their choke hold and he gulped in great gasps of air. His lungs full, he cried out shrilly in a voice that was far from human, a cougar’s scream rending the night as transforming tendons and blood vessels throughout his body were shredding in a tremendous eruption.

Something had gone wrong, and even as his spirit wanted only to die as an end to the suffering, he remained conscious of every excruciating burst of pain. The spine in his back tightened up and tried to curl in over itself, wrenching another feline scream from his throat, and it was only then that he felt hands upon his feet. He vaguely had the impression of being dragged from his capsule, but the Angel of Mercy finally pulled the plug on his tortured mind. The pain and agony stopped abruptly, all went black, and then Jonathan Sunset was no more.

***

“JON!”

A frantic hand patted his checks, the contact with his whiskers sending tiny jolts of feeling to his brain. He could hear several hushed voices around him and then something like a solid rod of alertness shot up both nostrils, causing him to inhale sharply. He opened his eyes wildly to a dimly lit room, his arms, legs and tail flailing about until hands grabbed each in an attempt to keep him immobile in the absence of gravity.

“What—?”

“Easy now, Jon. Just take it easy,” Doctor Renwick told him in a soothing voice. The doctor was in a pair of dark blue pajamas, quietly capping a small vial of ammonium carbonate smelling salts.

The cougar furman looked around and saw a number of concerned faces looking back at him. Dante, Norman, Aaron and Gerard each had a solid grasp on his limbs and even Kevin had a hold on his thick rope of a tail. Surrounding them seemed to be the rest of the Adirondack Furs and all but one of their faces looked worried. Travis was openly smiling at him from the fringe of the crowd that had gathered outside the mountain lion’s sleeping capsule.

“Whu… what happened?” Jon asked hoarsely.

“You were screaming in your sleep,” Jenni answered from behind him.

“Are you sure that was him?” Whelan asked a little unsteadily. “It didn’t sound human at all.”

“It was the scream of a mountain lion,” Carl remarked with a look at the black bear beside him. “I’ve heard them in the wild before, but Jon’s was different.”

“Were you having a nightmare,” Kristen asked, “or was it the transformation?”

Jon looked embarrassed as Dr. Renwick looked him over. His companions released his limbs one by one now that he was no longer thrashing about. “It must have been a little of both,” he muttered. “My whole body was on fire from the inside out and I couldn’t breathe.”

“Your lungs were working just fine,” Rose told him. “Your screams woke me from a deep sleep, setting my hackles on edge! Then all of a sudden, you just — stopped.”

Jon looked over at the vixen with a long face. “Rose, I — died…”

“You died?” whispered Dahlia, her hands up to her mouth.

“I felt myself die, but then you pulled me back,” Jon replied, looking at the doctor.

“Your mind likely just shut down,” Marcy explained. “You probably woke up from the nightmare and immediately passed out in a measure of self-preservation.”

“The big bad cat fainted from a bad dream…” Travis said with immense pleasure. “Oh, that’s rich! Hey, you’d better check to make sure you didn’t wet yourself!”

“I don’t think it was entirely a nightmare,” Renwick interjected before Jon could retort.

“You mean he really died?” Dahlia squeaked.

The physician studied Jon’s face. “I had a good look at you yesterday when you’d asked me about the courses that Sylvia will be teaching you when we get back. Looking at you now, I can see that the shape of your head has changed since then. It’s broader and a little longer, too.” He reached out and traced a finger across a bone at the top of Jon’s bare chest. “However, your clavicle looks thinner and your shoulders seem to be narrower. I’ve no doubt that several internal changes took place during the night and the resulting pain affected your dreams.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard any of us scream in pain like that,” Kevin said with a lump in his throat. “Are the rest of us going to go through that kind of agony?”

The Vulps physician had remained silent throughout the exchange, allowing the mountain lion’s personal doctor attend to him, but with the fennec’s question, Dr. Ramirez answered aloud.

“I’m afraid it’s possible, Kevin,” she told the short young male. “Every individual reacts to the transformation differently, some experiencing more stress and trauma than others.”

“I thought being weightless was supposed to prevent that kind of pain,” Cheryl Dalton remarked.

Ramirez shook her head. “Being weightless only reduces the stress of gravity upon your softened skeletal systems, that in itself a major effort, but when your bones are reforming, moving and reshaping muscles, tendons, blood vessels, glands and nerves, that’s something you’re going to feel. A few of you have already experienced some of these changes while others still have them to go through.”

“The worst of it will take place during the time we’re up here in orbit, and we’ll help you through it as we can,” Renwick added, “but by the time we return to the Institute, you will all still have another seven months of changes before the transformation is complete. I won’t lie to you – even after we get back down to Earth, there will still be some pain involved in your changes, but by then you’ll be able to handle what comes with those times.”

“I wish we were asleep in the float tanks instead,” Dante mumbled. “I don’t want to be conscious to feel the kind of pain that would make Jon scream!”

“The Institute believes you’ll handle it better here in zero gee,” Dr. Ramirez replied softly.

“I doubt those who run the Institute have ever gone through this kind of pain before,” Gerard said. “I’m with the tiger. If this is what we have to look forward to, I would rather have slept through it suspended in a tank of jelly. I think Stockholm should reconsider sending any other groups up here.”

Jon quietly massaged his shoulders while the conversation went on around him. He was embarrassed to have had such an episode at the center of attention, but he was also glad to be alive. He did not know whether or not everything he had experienced in the night was real or nightmare, but if that was only a taste of what was still to come, he silently wondered if he would survive the changes after all.

He had a brief exchange of worried glances with Whelan and wondered how this little episode would affect the bear’s thriving fears of transformation. Despite his best encouragement, Jon knew this may have unraveled Whelan’s resolve. Unfortunately for them all, there was no turning back.

Chapter 28

Christmas Kiss

Christmas was not a holiday observed by all residents of Space Station Sebra, but to those who did, it was a quiet time unlike any others they had experienced in the past. The only commercial stores on the station were located in the Entertainment wing of the E-Gee section that was currently unattainable by the Adirondack Furs, so gift-giving was not an option for most of them.

There were some, however, who were a little more creative. Jenni, Cheryl and Jasmine had taken it upon themselves to go to each male Fur, wrap their arms warmly around them, and present each surprised recipient with a long, deep kiss. The three women promised nothing more than a Christmas kiss, although the one exception to this plan was Carl, who was happily married to his wife Ellie. For him, they gave a tender peck on the cheek, all within sight of his chosen lifemate and with her prior blessing.

They were all aware that Jon and Kristen were not mates, but they had come to recognize that the botanist always showed blatant irritation whenever Jon spent any length of time in the presence of other women. When these three converged upon Jon, they had carefully timed it when Kristen would be away to her daily visit to the hydroponics greenhouse.

Since it was currently a free period without any instructive classes, they found Jon relaxing in the sleeping capsule he had been moved to after shredding the wall padding of the last one. Although he had gotten used to the weightless environment, he was a native son of gravity, so to provide himself a little stability he sat with his back against one wall of his room and his feet up against an opposite panel across the width of the capsule. This had the effect of wedging himself in place with his knees up in front of him, providing an ideal place to set his PBJ for reading; he only had to hold it in place with a finger.

The door to his capsule was open, so when the three women crowded up together at its end, he glanced over at them. Each wore a mischievous smile, so he could not help smiling back in return.

“Hello, ladies,” he said, bookmarking his place in the document he had been reading. He closed the clamshell case of the device and let it float beside him. “What can I do for you?”

Cheryl crooked a finger at him. “Come out here, please,” she replied with a grin. Jon looked at her, then at her companions, wondering what was going on. He put his PBJ into a wall drawer and then slowly pulled himself to the end of his capsule. Cheryl and the others moved out of the way to allow him to exit, but he did not come out to them. Jon remained just inside the opening, looking out at them warily.

“Okay,” he said, “you three are up to something.”

Jenni and Jasmine reached out together and took each of his arms in their hands, bracing their feet upon the wall, and then pulled him out of the safety of his capsule. Curious as the proverbial cat, Jon gave them no resistance and allowed himself to be taken from his room. With no perspective of up or down in the absence of gravity, the women simply surrounded him in the position he had come out in to the open. They moved in close to make sure he had no avenue of escape, but Jon had no plans to run away.

Cheryl slipped her arms up around his neck and then pulled her body up firmly against his, hooking a foot around his ankle. They began a slow pirouette and the Border collie looked deep into his eyes. “Merry Christmas…” she whispered.

Kissing with lips that were no longer quite human felt different to Jon, but no less pleasurable. Cheryl leaned into him for a long moment and although Jon had not been interested in a relationship, he had to admit to himself that he missed such closeness. When the canine woman finally pulled away, they were both nearly breathless. Cheryl gave him an impish smile and then disentangled herself from him.

They had barely separated when Jasmine slid into Cheryl’s place, wrapping her arms around the man’s neck. “Merry Christmas…” she whispered, licking her lips briefly before leaning into him. The vixen’s long kiss surprised him just as much as the canine’s, and even though her velvety lips felt different, he closed his eyes, put his arms around her and enjoyed the moment.

Jon lost track of time. So did Jasmine, apparently. Cheryl and Jenni exchanged amused looks and then playfully pulled the kissing couple apart. Jasmine blinked in rapid succession and released the mountain lion reluctantly. Jon swallowed with difficulty and then licked his lips with an expectant look at Jenni.

The spotted leopard giggled at his expression and then languidly wrapped her arms around his neck as she molded her body up against his. She looked at him with half-lidded eyes and then moved in for her turn. “Merry Christmas, Jon…” she whispered. Feline lips provided yet another sensation to enjoy, and Jon found that he took pleasure in them very much. Jenni kissed him long and hard, and after some time Jon felt her tail wrap around his leg.

Her companions were about to pull her away when she released him on her own. She gave him a bright-eyed smile and then pushed back in the air to float between her friends. Jon swallowed and then looked from one to another with a confused, yet glazed expression.

“Wow…” he said after a moment. “Merry Christmas, ladies!”

Cheryl, Jasmine and Jenni then gave him a wink in choreographed unison. He was the last of the Adirondack males, so they each blew him an additional kiss and then turned to float away toward the door.

“Good night,” Cheryl sing-songed over her shoulder to him.

The mountain lion clung to the opening of his capsule for a long moment, watching them go. It was not until they disappeared through the open pressure door that he finally turned back toward his quarters, a silly smirk across his features.

However, before he had a chance to pull himself inside, he heard someone call his name out low. Jon turned around in midair and looked back out into the room. There was no one by the door, but movement caught his eye from above. It was Kristen.

He had difficulty reading the look in her eyes as she pulled herself down the carpeted wall toward him with just the tips of her claws, but he nodded to her with what he hoped was an innocent expression.

“Hi, Kris,” he said to her.

“Hello, Jon,” she replied, settling in front of him. She reached out to touch him, but her fingers hesitated before actually making contact. “May I ask you a personal question?”

“Uh, sure,” he answered, suddenly guarded.

“What was that all about with the girls just now?”

Jon swallowed. “Uhm, they were spreading Christmas cheer,” he responded slowly. “You saw them?”

Kristen gestured above them, her eyes locked upon his. “I was up there, watching you. I came in right after they did and saw them gathered at your room.”

The male feline swished his tail behind him, evidence of his sudden agitation. He believed he knew how she felt about him and was suddenly wary against her jealousy.

“They called me out and then each of them wished me a Merry Christmas with a kiss,” he admitted in a quiet voice. “Nothing more.”

“Did you like it?”

Jon felt like he was under interrogation and laid his ears back. “I did,” he answered straightforward. He expected an explosion of anger or some remark to cut him down, but instead she surprised him.

The botanist reached out and wrapped her arms around his neck just as the others had done. “Merry Christmas, Jon…” she whispered, and then she pulled herself up close and boldly kissed him. Still dazed from his earlier encounters, Jon gave in and wrapped his arms around her, returning the kiss; as with each of the others, her feline lips felt different from theirs, but he found that he enjoyed them just the same.

Then, almost reluctantly, Kristen pulled away from him. Her cheeks felt warm beneath her fur, and she knew that if the skin of her face had not been covered she would be blushing bright red. She could not bring herself to meet his eyes, so she turned away and started toward her own capsule.

Jon caught her wrist lightly with his fingers, stopping her with a gentle touch. “Merry Christmas, Kris,” he whispered back to her.

She looked up at him and he gifted her with a wink and a smile. When she grinned in response, he released her hand and then pulled himself up into his capsule. He closed the shade behind him, and then Kristen felt a shudder go through her.

There were no promises of anything more than a holiday kiss, but it was the first time in a while that he had given her any kind of acknowledgment beyond indifference. Even if he treated her no differently afterward than he had in the past, she knew she would remember this moment.

For Jon, his reaction was different. He pulled himself up to the far end of his capsule, turned sideways and put his feet and back upon opposite walls to secure his place once again. He closed his eyes, pressed his chin down upon his chest and then rested his arms across his knees.

His mind and emotions were in conflict. He had sworn to himself that he would never feel affection for a Fur, yet he had just enjoyed kissing four of them. Although still a long way from full transformation, their appearances simultaneously repulsed and enthralled him. He could not enjoy this – simply could not enjoy it out of principle alone, but for the moments when they had all kissed him, he had enjoyed it.

Jon had gotten so used to seeing his associates as Furs a little at a time on a daily basis that there were moments that he forgot he was supposed to hate what they were becoming.

“You know, you are going to be awfully lonely for the rest of your life,” Dante had once told him. “If what you say is true, you don’t have a choice. You are going to become a Fur, and then you will be shipped from the Earth. No matter where you go from now on, your only companions will be other Furs. If you maintain your hatred of them even while you’re surrounded by them, no one is going to have anything to do with you. Although feline, you will be the equivalent of a lone wolf. Lone wolves don’t have a high survival rate!”

Eyes still closed, Jon nodded to himself. Dante was right, but old habits and old hatreds die hard. Did he hate Kristen? No. Did he hate Jenni, Jasmine or Cheryl? No, he did not. Did he hate what they were becoming? Yes, that was still there, but somehow it was easier to coexist with them than he had originally believed. Perhaps it would have been different if he had just been plunked down in the middle of a group of fully formed Furs, but the slow transformation was easing him into the life of furmankind.

Jon chuckled, suddenly remembering an old analogy. Toss a frog into a boiling pot of water and it would jump out immediately, but put it into a pot of cool water and slowly turn up the temperature, the frog would get used to the water and eventually boil to death. He still felt he would eventually boil to death, especially if the boiling was the equivalent of the painful alterations to his body, but over time he knew he would be getting used to the idea and his final demise would come when he least expected it.

Was he upset that four furry women had kissed him tonight? No… he smiled to himself. He had most definitely enjoyed it. Anthro-human lips were not necessarily designed for kissing, but it could still be done and found pleasurable.

Merry Christmas, indeed.

***

Twenty minutes later, Jon floated into the shower room, towel clutched in one hand and shower kit in the other. He was surprised to see that each of the pod doors was marked as Occupied. A large black bear floated near a wall, awaiting his turn for one.

When Whelan Nolan turned and saw him, Jon knew immediately that something was up. The ursine Fur was smiling.

“Hi, Jon,” he said with a nod.

“Whelan,” Jon responded with a raised eyebrow. “What’s going on in here?” He gestured toward the showers. “They’re all full?”

“Lots of cold showers, I suspect,” replied the bear with a smirk. Jon was not used to seeing this guy looking amused and it was almost unnerving.

“Cold showers?”

“Maybe they haven’t gotten to you yet,” Whelan explained, “but three of the women have been going around giving all the guys hot Christmas kisses!”

“Oh really?” Jon replied with a grin, playing innocent.

“Yeah,” said the younger male in a low voice, “I’ve never had anyone kiss me like that before, smooshing their bodies up against me like they did. Not even my ex-girlfriend!” Jon was afraid that mention of Whelan’s girlfriend would dampen the bear’s mood, but the guy simply kept grinning foolishly. “Best present I ever got!”

Jon gestured toward the occupied pods. “I think I’ll come back for my shower later when they’re not all in use,” he told his companion.

“Okay, see you later!”

The mountain lion pushed off toward the door, giving his friend a casual waver over his shoulder. After he had gone, the door to one of the pods opened. Whelan looked at it expectantly and kept to the side when Dr. Aristotle exited the pod in a light blue cotton robe. The doctor gave him a courteous nod and then pushed himself through the air toward the door. The man did not look especially joyful, and Whelan secretly thought that the Canis Wing’s physician could seriously benefit from the female trio’s Christmas cheer if they would only share it beyond just the Furs.

Whelan entered the shower, and just as the panel closed behind him and locked, another door opened. Travis floated out of his pod grooming his fur with a wide brush, a smug expression upon his face. Although he was not really liked among the women of the Adirondack Furs, he had not been left out of their special gift. The females figured that he could be forgiven for the sake of Christmas, although they would not allow him to take further liberties of the situation. He was not aware that they had given a similar gift to the other guys in the group, and their attention had unknowingly added fuel to his already flaming ego.

He headed for the doorway to return to his capsule to drop off his towel and shower kit before supper and passed a mixed couple on the way in. Jenni was pulling Dante along the corridor, a wide grin on her face and a look of curiosity on his.

Travis and Jenni exchanged a brief look, but then the German shepherd felt a lump in his throat. Where was she going with that feline idiot? He clung to the door frame as they continued inside, secretly daring the woman to kiss her companion in the same way she had kissed him.

Jenni looked around and then spied the shower pod that Travis had just exited. It was the only one not in use, so she opened the door. Rather than leave her housemate outside, she pulled Dante into the pod with her. Travis growled low in his throat when the door locked behind them and the indicator built into the panel changed to read Occupied.

The canine furman ground his teeth together and moved forward, going directly to the shower they had entered. He turned his head and put an ear up to the panel. He heard giggling and low voices, but he could not make out what was being said. He listened for several moments in an attempt to discern what was going on in there, but when the shower system started up, he pushed away from the door, muttering beneath his breath as he angrily shoved his brush into the shower kit.

The expression on his face was dark. He felt betrayed. Had Jenni kissed him earlier only to make fun of him? What of Cheryl and Jasmine? They had all seemed willing enough when they had approached him.

Of course, he had tried to make the best of the situation and managed to grope each of them as they were kissing him, but while they had kept him from doing more, he was neither berated nor slapped for it.

Travis was confused by it all, thinking they had sought him out because they were finally warming up to him. It seemed that ever since he had arrived at the Institute none of the women wanted to have anything to do with him. He had tried to be charming, even using a fake accent at first meetings to lull them in to a sense of familiarity with him, but nothing seemed to work. He had never had a problem getting dates back home, so perhaps it had something to do with the mindset of someone leaving their humanity behind to become a Fur.

Whatever it was, it did not set well with him and this latest incident infuriated him. If he had been on Earth under full gravity he would have stomped down the corridor in frustration, but zero gravity had a way of negating that kind of tantrum. Instead, he could only pull himself along the grip rails with a deep scowl.

He had lost his appetite so he decided to go back to his quarters and watch a movie on the monitor in his capsule. He needed to put away his towel and shower kit anyway.

When Travis floated into the common room, he saw several small groups of Furs gathered together here and there, all in a seemingly in good cheer, no doubt due to the holiday atmosphere. He pushed off from the door to give himself enough momentum to cross the large chamber, but when he noticed Sunset watching him from a spot near the wall he flipped his middle finger toward the large feline.

Jon raised an eyebrow, but merely laughed it off with an offhand remark to his companions. This reaction only made Travis hotter and he gave him the middle fingers of both hands in response.

“There goes the dog-faced boy, the star attraction of the Sebra Circus!” Sunset called out in a voice louder than necessary. His companions, the ursine cousins Aaron and Gerard, both laughed aloud at the remark, but the younger Kevin with them looked aghast that his friend would say such a thing where Travis could hear him.

The comment surprised Travis as well. For all the run-ins that he and Sunset had had with one another, this was the first time the other man had taunted him outright. The canine furman growled low in his throat, but he could do nothing until he crossed the room and reached another wall to stop his momentum.

“That face of yours ain’t too pretty either,” Travis called back. “You look like you’ve run head-on into a wall covered in cat fur!”

Jon laughed. He was feeling too good today to let the canine idiot get him with a comeback as lame as that one. “Hollywood can lay off all their makeup artists,” he returned. “We could both scare babies right now, but you would win an Academy Award for Worst Special-Effect in Werewolf makeup. Of course, a low-budget horror movie could hire you for the latest werewolf movie as someone stuck in a botched mid-transformation that has to remain ugly for the rest of his life!”

Travis reached the far wall and angrily pushed off with both legs toward Sunset. He had always been proud of his looks and Jon had touched upon a sore nerve. It was true that he was becoming a German shepherd, but his face was only partially altered and he had a tough time dealing with his own reflection on a daily basis.

As Jon watched the canine hurl himself toward him, Aaron, Kevin and Gerard backed away using the grip rails to give him room. The look on Travis’ face told the clear story that Jon might have gone a step too far.

Jon remained where he was, still grinning but preparing himself for whatever Travis might be planning. When the canine reached him, Travis swung a fist at his jaw, but Jon only had to move a little to avoid the contact. He turned and began a spin that turned him around just as the arm passed by harmlessly.

“You sonofa—oof!” Travis spat as he bounced off the carpeted side of the room. Jon braced one foot against the grip rail and using just a couple of fingers, upended the other man so that he lazily tumbled head over tail up toward a section of the spherical chamber where there were no others.

Travis sputtered indignantly and clutched at the carpeted wall when it came within reach during his tumble, but there was nothing for him to grab. Jon knew there was no real up or down in this place, so in his mind he reoriented the room, imagining the wall with the grip rail as the floor, and the ceiling where Travis floundered as the opposite wall.

Using just his toes, Jon pushed off from the grip rail and launched himself toward the German shepherd furman. He no longer grinned like a maniac, but a bit of the amusement was still evident upon his features. Yes, he had taunted the other man in a lighthearted moment of mischief, but it was Travis who had thrown the first punch, so he assured himself that he now had an excuse.

Travis twisted his body so that when the curved surface of the wall came at him, he landed lightly on his toes, using his canine tail as a counter-balance to keep himself ‘upright’. He looked back, saw Sunset floating toward him, and then a snarl crossed his features. He clenched both fists and pushed off the wall again without thinking. He launched himself out into the air a lot faster than he had intended and suddenly felt unstable as he shot toward Jon at a brisk rate.

Jon saw the canine rush toward him and readied his own fists. If he pummeled him just right, the other man would float right by and get the equivalent of a naval broadside.

The space between Jon and Tyndall closed fast and each furman was prepared to strike his opponent. Fists hurled at one another when they were close enough, but the effect surprised them both. When Travis’ knuckles connected with the side of Jon’s broad head, the action caused an opposite reaction that pushed him away almost as hard as he had hit, effectively robbing the punch of half its strength. Simultaneously, Jon struck out at the other furman’s breastbone. The blow landed square, but also pushed the mountain lion backward through the air; propelled by simultaneous blows, both men floated away from one another.

Jon scrambled to find purchase on anything that might stop his momentum, but he found himself floating out toward the center of the chamber while Travis bounced off a nearby wall. The German shepherd ricocheted slowly off the carpet, also going out into open air, but he suddenly found himself headed directly toward the Fleur sisters clustered near another wall surface.

When Travis plowed into them, he used the opportunity to press both hands upon Dahlia’s chest. She growled at him, her arms clutching a grip rail, and since her back was up against a wall, she used the weightlessness to put both of her feet up hard into his crotch.

Sharp pain shot through the canine’s genitals and his eyes rolled back up into their sockets, sparks obscuring his vision; while he was stunned, Dahlia shoved his fetal-curled body back out into the middle of the chamber. Although it was not planned, the action propelled Travis right back toward Jon, who was slowly tumbling end over end without any means of reaching a handy grip rail.

Jon saw Travis as he approached, but if he did nothing, the canine would simply float on past him. However, the mountain lion needed leverage, so he reached out and snagged one arm and an ankle of the stunned furman. Twisting his body, he used Travis’ momentum to swing around him in a slow arc. Jon did not want to fling the other guy away just yet, so he had to alter his sweep so the motion transferred to him instead.

Still immobilized by the pain in his groin, Travis could do nothing more than whimper from the agony and allow his adversary to use him as a counterweight. Jon glanced at him for a brief moment before he swung both of them around in a tight orbit in a motion similar to that of a binary star system.

When Jon figured he had enough momentum, he released his hold on Travis and flung himself toward a wall. He went one direction and the German shepherd hurled off in another.

The cougar looked up to see his destination, which appeared to be the open doorway into the sleeping chamber. When he neared the door frame, he reached out and grabbed it. His feet went past him, but his grip on the door slowed him so that his legs curled around and bumped into the wall inside. His bottom lip felt numb where Travis had hit him, and when he ran his tongue across it, he could taste the metallic flavor of blood. It was not a bad cut, however, just a split lip. He had suffered worse injuries as a kid in his back yard playing with the family dog.

When Travis got to the end of his flight, he was caught in a pair of sturdy arms. The canine looked up into the ursine face of Gerard Nicholas, who merely looked down at him in pity. Then another face came into view. Dr. Gabriel Aristotle never seemed pleased to see the German shepherd and he looked especially unhappy with the furman under his charge.

***

Travis Tyndall and Jonathan Sunset were seated side by side with straps across their knees in the office of the Z-Gee Station commander. Despite being located in the weightless section of the space station, the room resembled many other offices on Earth. A desk with a built-in monitor and keypad was mounted to one wall, giving the feel of being on a floor, with a chair behind and two chairs in front of the desk. They were all hard mounted on a light earth tone carpet and the other walls of the square compartment were carpeted in a darker brown. A few framed paintings of Terran landscapes decorated the walls to give the office a homey feel.

The two furmen were seated in front of the desk, but the commander stood beside the third chair, her booties keeping her in place. Dr. Renwick stood behind Jon and Dr. Aristotle stood behind Travis, both keeping themselves in place by holding onto the backs of the chairs.

Holden’s one-piece blue coveralls were neatly pressed and her dark brown hair was caught up in a short ponytail, and although she wore light makeup and had a nice figure, the expression on her face was far from friendly.

“You were all welcomed to Sebra with open arms,” she said to the seated furmen, “given the greatest hospitality and care due to your transitional medical conditions, and you were all expected to act the like the adults you are supposed to be.” She looked up at the two physicians for a moment and then returned her gaze to the two seated males. Jon did not return her gaze, choosing instead to simply stare at the wall behind her. Likewise, Travis refused to meet her eyes, keeping his attention on the short woman’s curves.

“Although I am not privy to your backgrounds,” she continued, “I have been made aware that the two of you have had altercations in the past. While here with us, you have been given a fair amount of freedom to do as you wish, your studies and schedules flexible with your physical needs, but the kind of foolishness the two of you displayed in front of your associates today will not be tolerated.”

She moved behind her desk chair, her sticky booties making small ripping noises in the carpet as she walked. “I want the two of you to look at me.” Jon and Travis complied, each of them meeting her brown eyes with their own. Both of them tried to look as innocent as he could muster, but her expression was dark. When she was sure she had their attention, Holden crossed her arms upon the back of her desk chair.

“You have barely begun the length of your stay on Sebra, but for the remainder of your visit, you two are not to interact with one another in any way. There will be no taunts, no insults and no fights. If you two find yourselves in the same compartment together, don’t even look at one another, just go to opposite sides of the room if you two must be there at the same time. This is your first and only warning, guys. If there is a repeat of today and you two are brought into my office again, each of you will be confined to separate chambers, to rest out the remainder of your time alone before you are returned to Earth. Although this is an international space station, we do have rules, regulations and laws here, and we also have holding cells for those who break them. Don’t make me introduce you to them.”

Jon gave her a silent nod, and when the commander looked over at Travis, he sighed and did the same, trying to look sufficiently penitent.

Holden’s expression softened. “Listen, guys,” she said in a quieter voice, her Texas accent coming through now that her throat was not taut, “I’m aware of how important the Anthro Human Colonization Program is to Earth’s future. You’re going through some painful alterations to your bodies that I’m not sure I would have the courage to face myself, so I’m fully aware that these changes have made you nervous and irritable. You will get no punishment for this incident, but please don’t place yourselves in a position for a repeat. I’m sympathetic, but I stand by my word. Do I have yours that you will behave yourselves?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jon replied with a nod.

The commander looked at Travis, who lowered his gaze. “Yes, ma’am,” he echoed.

Holden looked up at the doctors. “Doctor Aristotle, you and Doctor Renwick are witnesses to their agreement. Please see to it that the peace is kept.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the physicians responded in unison.

“Good day, then,” she told them.

Jon looked up at her once more and gave her a nod. Then he unstrapped himself and floated out of his chair toward the doorway without a glance back at Travis.

After the doctors and their Furs had left her office, Commander Holden let out a long sigh and closed her eyes. This was the first group of Furs to come to Space Station Sebra while in their transition stage. They were hurting, short-tempered and she was afraid that these two would not be the last to grace her office in this kind of altercation. There might not even be another incident with this group, but if this experiment to let the Furs spend part of their transformation here was a success, then other groups from Earth would soon follow.

She had agreed to the assignment when it was first brought to her attention, but after today she was a little wary of future groups. This incident had been minor, but these half human, half animal hybrids had the potential for a greater violence that she hoped she would never see.

Chapter 29

Reminiscence

“You look like a holiday parade balloon.”

Jon looked over at the ursine furman that floated up to the large observation window overlooking the Earth far below and gave a chuckle when his friend glanced down at the length of twine around his waist; the other end was tied to the grip rail beneath the window. The mountain lion sat cross-legged as he floated a couple of feet from the thick pane, where he had been in quiet contemplation while letting his eyes focus on the planet beneath them.

“I didn’t feel like bobbing around the room like a soap bubble like Marcy does,” he replied with a shrug.

“Where’d you get the string?

“From the hydroponics garden,” Jon answered. “They use it to tie up the plants to keep them from growing all over the place. So, how are you doing, Gerard?”

The brown bear pulled himself up to the grip rail and looked over at the feline. “Not too bad right now,” he admitted, “although breakfast was a nightmare.” He held up a massive hand paw and examined the large claws at the ends of his fingers. “I could swear all of my fingers were bending backward while I was trying to eat, and my thumbs felt like I had been hanging from them all night with my full weight in double gravities.”

“Ouch, that can’t have been fun,” Jon replied distractedly.

“Not at all.” Gerard flexed his fingers, grateful that they were no longer hurting, although the joints still felt sore. He wondered if that was what arthritis felt like and hoped it would feel better soon. He glanced over at his quiet friend with a frown.

“Are you okay?” he asked quietly.

Without taking his eyes off the Earth below, Jon answered, “Sorry, Gerard. Something happened to me on this date and I can’t seem to get my mind off of it.”

“Do you need to talk?”

The cougar looked over at his companion with a wan smile and shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but this is one I would rather keep to myself.”

“No problem, just thought I would lend an ear if you needed it,” said the bear. “You’ve listened to Whelan enough and the rest of us appreciate it.”

Jon returned his attention to the white cloud swirls below. “How is he?”

“He’s been in a better mood since the girls gave him his present back on Christmas day. Despite his own transformation pains, I haven’t heard him complain once about his situation all week.”

“That’s good.”

“Listen, a bunch of us will be getting together in here tonight to ring in the New Year. We’re on Greenwich Mean Time, so we’ll be the first ones to celebrate when the clock strikes midnight. Dr. Lacross agreed to supply us with some beer in zero-gee packs if we promised to keep the festivities from getting out of hand. We’ve gotten some dance music and the girls want to try some zero-gee dancing. You want to join us?”

On this occasion, Jon didn’t really want to party, but he also didn’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, so he looked over at the bear and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not a beer drinker, but I might put in an appearance to watch the dancing. Don’t hold me to it, though,” he told him.

Gerard gave him a big smile and patted him lightly on the shoulder. “I hope you can come, Jon. We’d all like to see you here with us.”

“Thanks,” the mountain lion replied with a sincere smile.

“Well, I need the spread the word around some more, so I’ll leave you alone with Mother Earth.”

“See you, Gerard.”

After the bear had gone, Jon sighed. A New Year’s Eve party was the cause of his very presence on the space station, and if he looked at the window glass just right, he could see Henry Parker’s feline face staring back at him in the reflection.

Two shots had rid the world of the furman who had taken Brian Barrett’s mate from him. Now Jonathan Sunset was serving a life sentence in repayment of the cougar’s death.

Jon held up a hand in front of him. His fingers were a little shorter than they used to be, there were now permanent claws extending from their ends, the palms had thick pads, and the musculature in his wrists and arms were sturdier. Fur grew uniformly over his body, though his red scalp hair was coming back in on top of his head, and there were patterns of different colors in his pelt. His ears had crept up higher on his skull, and he sometimes had a constant ringing and aches as the inner workings of his ears moved up too. His head was broader, his nose had widened and the whole lower half of his face had taken a new form below a pair of large golden eyes. The shape of his feet had changed, becoming more digitigrade by the day and his upper legs was bulking up to allow his new limbs to sustain the weight he would resume once he returned to the gravity of Earth. He now had a thick rope of a tail protruding from his backside, an extension of his spinal column, and although it was barely over half the length it would grow to be, he had already gotten used to its presence and knew how to use it as a counterbalance in movement.

He resembled a photographic morph of images that was not quite one or the other, and although he was getting used to the daily changes, his reflection in the mirror sometimes seemed alien in its strangeness. Inside, he still felt like Brian Barrett and he believed that his mind, will and emotions were still intact, but he often wondered if his soul was fading.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. No, it’s been too soon. It’s only been two months! At what point in the transformation would he lose his soul? Six months? Nine months?

Two gunshots had changed his life. Initially, he could probably claim that his life actually changed the moment he discovered Rebecca’s infidelity with that cursed furman, but up until he had fired those shots into Parker, he still had had choices over what he could have done with his life. With the irreversible incident on that fateful New Year’s Eve, Brian had lost all control over his future and his path narrowed to one lane.

He sometimes wondered if they would commemorate a New Year’s Day on whatever world he would wind up on, but he doubted it would ever be a time of celebration for him.

Jon resumed staring out over the Earth, idly wondering what Rebecca was doing now. He thought he had known her well, but he had been proven wrong. He snorted and heaved another sigh, feeling the full weight of all he had done even in weightlessness.

No more thoughts about her, he promised himself. Rebecca Collins was no longer in the equation of his life. He would never see her again and she would never know of his continued existence. It was best that she and everyone else he had known believed him dead.

After several moments with his eyes closed, he felt someone take hold of the grab rail beside him. He opened one eye and looked to his left. A short furman with large ears and sandy brown fur was floating beside him, staring down at the Earth.

“Hello, Kevin,” he said quietly. The young Fur turned to him with a smile.

“Hi, Jon,” he replied. “You looked like you were praying, so I didn’t want to disturb you.”

The cougar laughed. “Praying? No, I’ve not prayed in some time,” he admitted, “though I probably should. Just lost in thought, is all. How are you doing?”

Kevin shrugged, but retained a smile. “All things considered, I’m doing well.”

“All things considered?”

“You know, the changes and all. I was stuck in the toilet just about all day yesterday, and that was embarrassing.” Jon looked over at him, both eyebrows raised. Kevin shrugged, crossed both arms upon the grip rail, and then put his chin on top of them, gazing out the window. “Dr. Ramirez said my internal organs were probably moving around to make room for changes to my ribcage. It had a nasty side-effect.”

Jon shook his head. “That’s not something I’ve ever thought of,” he replied. “Were you sick to your stomach?

“Not really, but I’ll bet I have the cleanest colon on the station now.”

“Now there’s a happy thought.”

“I’m glad I had my PBJ with me,” Kevin remarked. “At least I had something to read.”

The mountain lion returned his gaze to the Earth below. “I haven’t even looked at mine for two days,” he admitted. “Was there any news worth repeating?”

“It’s not really news, but Sissy said she’s heard some rumors about one of the extrasolar planets Stockholm has been monitoring that may be opened up soon for colonization.”

“Oh really?” Jon remarked in interest. Although he was in no hurry to leave the Earth, he knew that a settlement on some distant world would be his eventual destination. He also knew that the long processes for opening up a world for colonization weeded out a lot of potential planets.

There were literally thousands of extrasolar planets that had been discovered out in the vast reaches of space, but the number of them with Earth-like conditions with just the right axial tilt and distance from their parent stars were rare. Once such a world was discovered in this Goldilocks zone, unmanned slip-drive probe ships were dispatched to deploy satellites to begin an orbital study of the planet. Several landers would be dropped to the surface of the new world in random locations to take air, water and soil samples for analysis, and sensor flobots would be dispatched to look for and examine the life forms that may have developed.

To the surprise of the scientists that studied the information sent back to Earth, such planets that matched the criteria for life on our own world tended to be similar in chemical makeup. The configuration of vegetation might be as diverse as the myriad of variances on Earth, but the similarities could not be ignored. Trees on a planet ten light years away were still recognizable as trees. Flowers were identifiable as flowers, and the life forms that flew through the air might still be called birds and insects. They had discovered mammals, reptiles, sea life and many other forms of life that were at least visually comparable to Terran life, but so far the only world where intelligent, sapient life seemed to exist was Earth herself. Intelligence and sapience might take on other forms on those distant worlds, but with the other similarities of life that were comparable to home, there had been expectations to see some signs of civilization, past or present. As yet, there had been none.

The automated two-year examination of a new Earth-like world could only scratch the surface of all the information to be found and explorations to be done, but if promising habitable conditions were found to exist, only then would a planet be considered for colonization.

That is when furmankind was sent in. Colonization was a misnomer for them, however. The Furs were sent in to establish a foot-hold on a new world, to ‘test the waters’ over a five-year period to make sure that Earth-based life could exist in a new ecosystem. Only when sufficient knowledge and experience of successful living on the new world was gathered would the real colonists be sent in to take over and take the Furs’ place as the new inhabitants.

The sheer numbers needed for a successful colony did not exist in furmankind, so the small groups that were sent ahead were little more than advance scouts a step above the automated probes, landers and flobots. For peaceful coexistence, only one of the furman races were sent at a time, typically thirty or forty to begin a five-year task of learning as much about the place as possible, if possible. Furmankind on a distant world was considered expendable, and every Fur knew this before signing a contract. The monetary prize enticed many, but for those who survived the five-year contract, there were more incentives to lure them into further endeavors.

Furmankind as a whole was still a young existence and the number of veteran Furs from previous successful settlements were yet few, so each new group that was sent out was typically made up entirely of inexperienced new recruits. Jon had never met a veteran, nor had he ever seen one in the movies. There had been several successful furman starter colonies, but none of the survivors ever came all the way back to Earth. Would any of those veterans be sent to this new world that Sissy spoke of, or would the entire group be new Furs such as himself?

“Did she have any information on the planet?” he asked his companion.

Kevin shook his head. “She didn’t give a name, but Sissy said there are whispers that it might be one of the original worlds where humans were sent to but didn’t survive.”

“That sounds morbid. Are they going to investigate the original settlement or start up a new one elsewhere on the same planet?”

Kevin frowned at all the questions. “She didn’t say. She admitted she didn’t have much evidence, just rumors, really, but she did mention that she thought the Ursis would be the next group sent out to begin a starter colony.”

“Well, I suppose that means we’ll have more time to prepare before getting shipped out.” Jon twitched his whiskers and then seemed annoyed by the action. “They haven’t even told us what jobs we’ll have when we get sent out.”

Kevin looked at him. “I thought we were supposed to decide ourselves what we were going to do for the colony,” he said with a frown. “If they choose for me, I might not get to do what I really want.”

“What do you want to do?”

The young fox looked back at the Earth and tapped the glass lightly with a claw. “I want to be a meteorologist, to study the weather patterns of the place we’re going.”

Jon smiled over at him. “You want to be a weatherman, er, weather furman?”

Kevin shook his head. “There’s more to it than that. I’ve always enjoyed weather shows, documentaries and broadcasts, but I’ve most admired those who do the work behind the scenes, compiling the data, modeling scenarios and making the predictions that can save lives or even crops. Where we’re going, the weather patterns may be unique on their own, and learning to recognize what’s coming could be one of the keys to surviving.”

The cougar nodded and looked back down at the Earth. “You have a point,” he said quietly, “and a better idea of what you want than I do. I don’t have any skills or education of importance to a colony, so the Institute’s going to have to teach me what they want me to know before they send me out there.” He reached over and patted his vulpine friend on the shoulder with a smirk. “We’ll be taking along our own livestock, so perhaps it will be my job to feed the chickens and scoop the cow manure over into Kristen’s gardens.”

The young fox grinned back at him. “I may be doing that too,” he said, “as I doubt that even as a weather-fur they would let me just sit around and study the sky all day.”

“I’m sure we’ll all have to have multiple talents,” Jon replied. “Those who have specialized careers and skills have an advantage over regular guys like us, Kevin, but we’ll make ourselves useful one way or another. Even the lowly pawns on a chess board have their importance.”

“I don’t mind being a pawn,” Kevin admitted, “just as long as I can be useful instead of just expendable.”

Jon gestured toward the blue and white planet below. “You keep studying the weather and learn how to predict it, no matter what else they want to teach you. I’m sure the foxy settlement you go to will value that talent. You never know when your people might have to run from a Martian tornado.”

The young fox laughed and pushed away from the grip rail when he saw several women pass through the compartment. “I just hope it’s not Mars where they send me – that place is desolate! Listen, I need to go, so I’ll see you later, Jon.”

“Sure, take care.”

Jon watched him push off toward the cluster of women and smiled when he noticed that his destination seemed to be Rose Fleur. He had seen the two young foxes frequently hanging around together since they had arrived on the station and suspected there might be an attraction there. While watching, Marcy Lagrange happened to look over his direction, so Jon waved and beckoned her to join him at the window. The nurse said something to the others and then pulled herself hand over hand toward him when she neared a grip rail. A moment later, she parked herself beside him, smiling at his tether that kept him near the window.

“Hi, Jon, what can I do for you?” Her green eyes were bright and alert, and the older woman seemed to be in high spirits. She wore a pair of the station booties and placed the sole of one foot up against the wall beneath the grip rail to park herself in place. She wore a lavender set of scrubs with a common tee-shirt beneath it for privacy, and she had her shoulder-length, platinum blonde hair tied up in a ponytail that floated lazily behind her. She also wore a light floral scent that tickled at Jon’s enhanced olfactory senses.

“Hi, Marcy,” he said quietly. “Whenever you have about twenty or thirty minutes to spare, could you meet me in a private room?”

The woman raised a thin eyebrow and gave him an impish smile. “Why Jon, are you coming onto your nurse?” she asked in a whisper.

The mountain lion suddenly swallowed. “Uh, sorry… no.”

Marcy giggled and lightly touched his furry arm with her fingers. “I’m teasing you, Jon,” she told him with delight in her eyes, “although I am curious.”

“Er, are you curious about what I need, or curious about playing with a Fur?”

Marcy narrowed her eyes at him and slid her tongue across her lips. “Take your pick,” she teased.

The feline male gave her a look of exasperation and privately wondered if she had sampled the fare with past volunteers.

“Perhaps I should ask someone else,” he muttered. This only served to make the woman giggle again. She shook her head and held up both hands in surrender. The cougar was beginning to think she had already gotten into the beer packets that Gerard had mentioned.

“I’m sorry,” she replied with an innocent expression. “I’ll behave.” Jon looked at her in doubt, but she sobered up and let out a little sigh. “Should I assume it’s something personal in nature that you can only tell your physician?”

“Something like that,” he answered. “It doesn’t really have anything to do with my transformation, but I was hoping I could ask you for a small favor.”

The nurse nodded. “Come with me to the Infirmary,” she told him. “We can use one of the private rooms there.”

“Thank you.”

Moments later, they entered into the empty medical compartment. The red panda who had been there once before was nowhere around. In fact, the lights were all out in the Infirmary, so they had the place to themselves. Marcy led her patient to the first available room, tapped on the light, and then shut the door behind him once they were both inside.

“Now, what may I help you with?” she asked, all business.

“Do you have a tape measure?”

Marcy blinked. She pushed herself up to a cabinet higher on the wall, unlatched it, and then reached inside. There was a small click and then she pulled out a cloth measuring tape rolled up in her hand.

“Okay, what am I supposed to measure?” she asked suspiciously, floating back down to him.

Jon smiled nervously and tugged at his garments. “Marcy, I’m tired of these furman robes you’ve given me. I’ve been giving it some thought and I want to special order some new clothes down on Earth and have them delivered to our Wing by the time we get back.”

The nurse tilted her head a little. “You want some new clothes?” she asked. “That’s what this is about?”

“Yeah, I need your help to take all my measurements. I know what I have in mind, but I will need my sizes when I put in the order.”

Marcy shrugged. “Sure, I can help. Why me?”

Jon looked embarrassed. “You’re a nurse and have seen me in the nude before,” he answered. “I need someone who can look at me clinically as a patient and simply take my measurements. We don’t have the Black Wall here, and I can’t do this by myself; there’s no one else I can ask.”

Marcy studied his face for a moment and finally gave him a nod. “Okay, I’ll give you a hand with your special project, although I’m sure there are plenty of others you could ask for help that would be more than willing to assist you.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Jon replied as he began peeling off his robe top. “I’m sure they would be a little too willing to give me a hand.”

The nurse watched him strip down with interest, and when he finally let his shorts float away, she had to force herself to meet his eyes. “Okay,” she said at last, “face the other way and spread out your arms.” Jon almost asked her why she needed him to turn around, but suddenly realized that she might actually be embarrassed by his request. It was all innocent, he reminded himself. Nothing to be concerned about.

Making herself focus on what she was doing, Marcy pulled her PBJ from the side pocket of her scrubs and opened up a note file to take down his measurements. Once set up, she let the unit float beside her.

“What kind of clothes did you want?” she asked, stretching out the tape from the apex of his left shoulder to the tip of his fingers. “You know you’ll have to allow room for the shape of your digitigrade legs to get into them; it would be my suggestion to end the pant legs just a little below the knees so they don’t interfere with your extended heels. Also, don’t forget a tail flap. You haven’t finished your transformation, so you’ll have to allow for some alterations.”

Jon smiled. “Yeah, I remember, but what I want made is a secret,” he replied. “If this works out as well as I hope it will, I’m going to have most of the guys envious, wanting to order some of their own.”

“In that case,” Marcy replied, recording the first measurement into her note file, “I want to be the first one to see you dressed in your new outfit.”

Jon looked down at her. “I think you’re entitled,” he said easily.

She glanced up to return his smile. “Thank you. If your new clothes prompt the other guys to make a run on the store, I sincerely hope you get a commission on their sales!”

Chapter 30

The Attraction of Gravity

Commander Holden led the Adirondack Furs along a corridor where most of them had never been. Having spent several weeks in weightlessness, they had all become so accustomed to maneuvering through the air that they were able to follow her in a double-file row without bumping into one another despite their various body sizes and shapes, along with the small luggage bags they carried with them. There were several junctions in the corridor along the way, but at the end was a chamber similar to the one they had first come through after disembarking from the space plane. Holden stopped beside a grey-haired man in green coveralls waiting beside a large pressure door and then turned an easy pirouette so that she could face her entourage with a smile.

“Well folks, I must say it has been an interesting six weeks having you as our guests, but other than a couple of bumps here and there, you have been a good group. I can only hope that those who come after you are as well-behaved.” When she said this, her eyes had flickered over each person in the group, her gaze pausing briefly on the faces of Jon and Travis.

“You still have another week with us on Sebra, but now you will be staying in the earth-normal E-Gee section of the station, which is just beyond this door. Since that area of Sebra was designed primarily as an orbiting convention center, research facility and a slip-drive transfer station, you will find a completely different look and feel to the place than what you’ve grown accustomed to here in my section. There are three hotel chains, restaurants, a digital theatre, convention halls and a shopping district. Your Institute funding has provided hotel rooms and meals for you just as you have had since you arrived, but if you wish to indulge in any of the other establishments I have just named, you will be required to pay for them out of your own personal accounts just as you would on any other trip you might take.”

The Furs and their medical staff were all silent, but the commander could see the look of interest in their eyes, especially the ladies when she had mentioned shopping. Smiling back at them, she continued.

“After the brief physicals your doctors and nurses gave to you all yesterday, Dr. Aristotle presented me with a progress report giving his approval to move all of you into the E-Gee section of the station. There you will live for the next six days, acclimating yourself to a simulated gravity that approximates what you will experience back down on Earth. If you have maintained the daily exercise routines that were recommended upon your arrival, it should only take you a few hours to adjust well enough to get around on your own without aid. However, if you have neglected the exercises, you may have suffered atrophy of muscle tissue and your recuperation time in full gravity will take longer.

“Dr. Aristotle’s report confirms that your bone structures are now stronger, and although there will still be ongoing changes, the danger of collapsing beneath your own weight has passed. As you embark through this door, you will be released from my charge and fall under the authority of Commander William Warren.” She turned to the man in green beside her and gave him a nod.

“Good morning to you,” the commander said to the group with a warm smile and a bit of an Irish accent. He appeared to be in his late forties or early fifties, and although he worked primarily in the full gravity section of Sebra, he appeared to have no trouble in the weightlessness floating before them.

“I am Commander Bill Warren, your host for the next week. Momentarily, we will pass through this door into an elevator that will only hold six or seven at a time. Although you are recently accustomed to living in an area where up and down no relative meanings to your perspective have, this will change as soon as you get into the elevator. At this level, there is no gravity in the car, but you will need to position yourselves inside at the grip rails near the floor. Once the car lowers into the influence of gravity, you will feel weight returning and will likely feel really heavy, and maybe even a bit nauseated. This is merely physical illusion since you have been weightless for so long, but you will get used to it within a few hours. However, Dr. Aristotle would like me to remind you all that your feet and legs have changed since you last walked on them, so there may be more than gravity to face once you get to the bottom.

“The E-Gee section of the station is located inside a revolving cylinder. The door behind me is fixed near the axle, so when the elevator descends along an outer wall of the cylinder out to where gravity is strongest, you may also feel like you are on a slow carnival ride until your inner ears adjust to the motion. Your physicians should already have fast-acting motion meds for you if you feel you may need them.”

There were several worried faces in the crowd, but Warren continued smiling with encouragement. “Once you depart the elevator car below, there will be attendants to help you to a waiting tour cart, where you may sit and wait for the rest of your group to join you. Walking canes have been requested for your initial use and will be available for you below. After your entire group has descended, you will be given a brief tram tour through the entertainment and shopping sections of the station and then you will be taken to your assigned rooms in one of our local hotels.”

The commander paused and put his hands inside the side pockets of his coveralls. His smile faded and his expression became serious. “Now, before we start taking groups down, I must warn you. Unlike your stay in the Z-Gee section, you will not be the primary occupants. Your group is just one of several that are currently visiting Sebra, but none of the others consist of Furs. This station is international, which means you will see folks from all walks of life around the world, but you should be aware that not all countries are sympathetic to the Anthro Human Colonization Program. It is likely you may face some prejudices, so please be on your best behavior. I probably should not have to tell you this, but I need to be frank. Not only are you Furs, but you are not yet fully formed, so your appearances may startle some of those you meet. We have an international police force up here that maintains a presence in all public areas around the clock, so if you run into any trouble, don’t hesitate to take it to one of them. They are already aware of your presence, appearance and condition.”

The smile returned to his face. “Now, are there any questions before we start boarding the elevator?” There were a few hesitant faces that looked back at him, but no one spoke up. “Right, then,” he said, turning to the pressure door behind him. He activated the controls and the door slid to the right on a set of horizontal tracks. A pair of standard vertically split elevator doors opened up to reveal a small compartment with a tile floor, stainless steel walls and a grip rail around the sides. Warren pulled himself into the elevator and stationed himself near the floor with a light hold on a railing.

The Felis were at the front of the crowd, so Jon was among the first ones inside the elevator. There was plenty of room for the six of them and Commander Warren, but he knew the car would be crowded when the Ursis Wing got in, since all four of those Furs were larger bears and bulkier than the felines.

“Watch your tail,” Marcy said to Kristen. The botanist pulled her tail in through the doors just before they closed together and she looked embarrassed at having to be reminded. She was used to all the primary doors in the Z-Gee section remaining open, and had never had a problem with the lavatory or shower pod doors since she usually turned around to close the door, automatically keeping her tail around behind her without having to think about it.

Once the elevator doors closed, there was an audible clunking just beyond the walls, and they could feel the car vibrating.

“What’s that?” Dante wanted to know.

“Our car is rotating on its axis to orient itself to the cog railway before we can descend,” Warren replied. “The massive cylinder is always moving, but the Z-Gee section we are leaving behind does not. We have to wait for certain sections of the wall to come around before we can connect to the system.”

“Is this the only elevator car between the two sections?” Jon asked.

“Actually, there are twelve, but they all meet here at the axle. Another car will be pulling into place within moments for the next group after we begin to descend.”

Jon tried to visualize the engineering arrangement for such a setup, but was having difficulty seeing it. Before he could ask another question, the car rattled and then there were two simultaneous clunks from the wall outside the door.

There was another rattle and then the elevator began moving. Jon had the sudden sensation that the car was moving diagonally-sideways, rather than straight down, and attributed it to the rotation of the cylinder housing the E-Gee section of the station. Apparently, he was not the only one, as Kristen suddenly wrapped her arms around his middle. He swallowed and held onto the grip rail beside him, supporting them both.

He had no way of knowing just how far the elevator would have to descend, but within a moment his toes touched the tile floor of the car. In his mind, he was not dropping to the floor, but it felt more like the floor was coming up to meet him. It pressed upon his feet and then tried to push him out of the way. The muscles in his legs complained, but began to compensate as if he were on a leg press in the exercise room. He could also feel various parts of his body slowly begin to feel weight. His tail hung straight from his butt to the floor and he could even feel his pectoral muscles pull downward ever so slightly. It was an odd feeling to have gravity again after a month and a half in weightlessness.

Jenni began gasping for air, as if her lungs did not want to function properly, and Dante looked at her in concern. He could barely stand up himself and the gravity grew heavier still. The white tiger’s knees felt as if they were about to buckle beneath him, and he suddenly found himself gripping the hand railing tightly with both hands to stay on his feet.

Dr. Renwick reached up to help tilt Jenni’s head back to clear her air passage. The copper-haired physician had made twice-daily visits into the E-Gee section of the station since he had arrived, so he was the only one besides Warren who was used to the elevator’s effects on the body. Jenni was able to breathe again, though her chin still wanted to fall forward onto her chest. Marcy was having a similar problem, but managed to keep her own head tilted toward the car’s ceiling; unlike her colleague, she had not visited the E-Gee section since their arrival.

The gravity grew stronger and the ride seemed eternal. Jon grunted and shifted his feet to redistribute his weight. From simply standing in place and forcing his body to remain upright, he felt like he was getting the equivalent of a fully-body workout. Dante, however, was sinking lower and lower to the floor into a squat, a look of pain across his face; he was certain the bones in his new legs would snap at any moment.

Kristen whimpered and clutched at Jon’s waist, but he could feel her slipping as well. He released the grip rail tentatively and discovered he could still stand on his own, so he slid both of his arms beneath Kristen’s to help keep her on her feet. Dr. Renwick wound up having to do the same for Jenni.

Then, mercifully, the elevator finally came to a stop. An indicator near the controls of the car showed that they were now at point-ninety-eight gravity. Warren touched a button to open the doors, and when the panels slid apart, Dante tumbled out.

Experienced station personnel were ready for him. Just outside the door were two men in dark green coveralls that matched Warren’s and they had already been prepared to catch whoever fell out of the elevator; there always seemed to be someone upon their first time returning to near Earth-normal gravity.

Dante collapsed into their arms and they lifted him and his travel bag easily from the ground between them. Due to his new leg configuration, the tiger was now several inches taller than both men, but they handled his bulk easily. They supported him a few steps to a cushioned bench seat in a tourist tram and set him down carefully, his bag at his feet. Dante clutched a metal railing in front of him and swallowed hard.

“Thank you,” he gasped.

One of the men, a blond-haired man with wide shoulders patted the feline gently on the arm. “You’re welcome, sir,” he said with a smile.

Dante wearily nodded, but then a thought occurred to him. Did that guy just pet my fur?

A moment later, Marcy sat down beside him, having managed to walk stiffly to the tram on her own. “I’ve never been so glad in my life to have the support of a bra as I do right now…” she muttered to herself. Dante looked over at her and the nurse blushed deeply in realization that he had heard her.

At the elevator car, Jenni stepped tentatively out onto what felt like artificial turf. She was thankful for the exercises she had performed daily, as she was able to stay upright, but walking on digitigrade feet was new. Her legs wobbled and she felt like she was stepping out on her toes rather than with her whole foot, but when she tried to put her heel down, the movement was limited. Her new foot was not designed to walk that way. She had never taken ballet lessons, but at that moment, she felt a kinship with girls everywhere who walked on their toes for the sake of their art. She forgot her travel bag in the elevator, but one of the attendants grabbed it for her.

Jon and Kristen experienced similar sensations when they walked out of the elevator together. Jon was supporting most of both their weights and he began to pant lightly from the effort. Walking in unison, the mountain lions managed the toe steps to the tram car without needing the assistance of the station personnel who stood ready to catch them if they fell. Jon helped Kristen up onto a bench seat in front of the others and then sat down beside her. Dr. Renwick stood off to the side, quietly talking with Commander Warren.

Empty now, the elevator closed its doors and the car began its ascent back up the track it occupied. It would be several moments before the next car connected into the elaborate system and deposited the next group of passengers, so Jon took the time to look around him.

They appeared to be in a side alcove of a modern, two-story shopping mall whose upper level touched the overhead ceiling, and he could see the upward curve of the floor going off in opposite directions. The place was well-lit, but the area was not the bright and sterilized atmosphere he had expected, having seen too many Hollywood movies of space stations over the years. The tenants had taken great care to present a place where the visitors from Earth would feel comfortable, and although he could not see many of them from the alcove, Jon knew that districts from all over the world would be represented. It was almost inconceivable that something like this had been built in orbit. The primary purpose of the station was business and research, but this area was nothing more than commercial. He knew there was more to the space station than this, but at the moment, this was all he was seeing.

As he peered out toward the mall, two men in suits walked into view. One of them looked over at the alcove, but then stopped in his tracks when he realized what he was seeing. He stopped his companion with a touch on the arm. After gawking for a moment, the two of them put their heads together and began talking in low voices. Jon could hear them speaking, though could not discern their words, but from the tone of their voices and the expressions on their faces, neither of them looked welcoming toward the Furs sitting in the tram car. Jon raised a hand and attempted to look friendly, but as soon as he did so, one of the men scowled, grabbed the other by the arm to pull him away and out of sight of the alcove entrance.

The expression on Jon’s face grew dark at the incident, insulted that they would react in such a manner. He snorted derisively and clenched his fists upon the metal bar on the tram car seat in front of him. If he had been able to move about in the gravity of the station, he might have been tempted to rush out there to confront them, much as Norman had done with the men in Florida.

Jon growled low in his throat and Kristen looked over at him wearily, not understanding his quick sullen mood. She followed his gaze out to the end of the alcove, but there was nothing there. She reached out to touch his arm but at her contact, he flinched just as two things occurred to him. He recalled Commander Warren’s warning that Furs were not globally accepted among all the countries of the Earth and that they might not be well-received. The second thing he remembered was himself. Before he had been sentenced to furmankind for his crime, Brian Barrett would have reacted with just as much disdain and vehemence toward a Fur as those men had.

With that realization, Jon relaxed his grip on the rail and looked over at Kristen with an apologetic smile. He did not feel that he could explain what had just happened, so he reached down and patted her on the leg.

“I’m okay,” he whispered. “Just a momentary lapse.”

“A lapse into what?” Dante whispered from behind him. “Are you a werewolf near his time of the month?”

Jon looked over his shoulder at the smirking tiger. His ire still fresh, the cougar narrowed his eyes at the other feline, baring an impressive set of feline teeth at him with a snarl and a low-throated growl. Dante sat back quickly in his seat, his eyes wide at the sudden ferocity in his housemate’s eyes; there was no mistaking that this was not a teasing, but was true rage. Then, just as suddenly, Jon blinked and raised a hand up to his face, rubbing his forehead.

“Sorry…” he mumbled at Dante. “I think the stress of this gravity is affecting more than my muscles.”

“I can understand that,” the other man replied in a submissive tone. “Just don’t bite me, please.”

Jon had a sudden visual image of white tiger fur stuck in his teeth and he grimaced. “You’re safe,” he muttered. Jenni leaned forward in her seat, putting both of her hands upon his shoulders and began to massage them gently.

“Take it easy, Jon,” she said in a quiet voice. “This is hard on us all.”

The mountain lion nodded and leaned into her ministrations, and it was only after a few minutes that he realized that he still had his hand upon Kristen’s leg. He looked down at his hand as if it was some foreign limb, and then up into Kristen’s face. She gave him a pleased smile and he discovered that his fingers were lightly stroking the fur of her leg just above the knee. He stopped and swallowed with difficulty, withdrawing his hand, but she took his hand and put it back right where it had been.

Jon stared back at her for a moment before he visibly relaxed and simply nodded, leaving his hand in place. Neither of their companions behind them had seen the exchange and both were oblivious, but Jenni’s fingers disappeared from his shoulders when there was a hiss and a rattle from the elevator shaft. The next car was arriving.

They all turned and watched. Two of the station attendants took their places in front of the elevator doors, one of them crouching slightly. When the panels split apart, Travis fell out into their arms, just as Dante had done. The look of surprise on the German shepherd’s face should have caused Jon to laugh aloud, but the cougar did nothing more than watch the proceedings with a frown, his mind floating back to his personal reaction to the men in the mall.

***

An hour later, the tram full of furmen and medical staff pulled up to a stop in front of a two-story hotel front. It looked similar to many others they might find on Earth, but the name of the establishment made just about every person pause when they saw the curved painted letters upon the large window pane.

“Bates Hotel?” Aaron Bleys read aloud. “Do we really want to stay here?”

“You’re thinking of the Bates Motel,” Cheryl corrected with a laugh.

“I may run if the proprietor’s name here is Norman,” added Gerard, casting a sidelong look at his housemate with a smirk.

“I keep Mother in the fruit cellar,” Norman Grey said in a fair imitation of the original actor’s voice despite his ursine mouth.

“I don’t understand,” Kevin complained.

Carl looked back at the young fennec fox with a smile. “They’re referring to an old movie classic,” he told him. “It was a creepy murder-mystery involving the proprietor of an old motel who had mother-issues with young women that came to stay at his place. The story has been remade a time or two over the years, but the original black and white show was the best.”

“The look on Norman’s face at the end of the movie still gives me chills whenever I see it,” Ellie added. There were several responses of agreement and Jon chuckled at the lighthearted exchange.

“I know what a hotel is,” Kevin remarked after a moment, still somewhat puzzled, “but what’s a mo-tel?”

“Motel is an archaic term meaning a motor hotel, but some places still use it,” Carl explained. “A hotel typically has more than one story and offers services such as food, laundry, meeting rooms and other amenities for their guests, while motels are usually a single level offering nothing but the room itself to visitors where you can park right outside your door.”

Kevin glanced at the establishment next to where they stood. “Oh, okay,” he murmured. “Does a hotel have a fruit cellar or is that just something in a motel?”

Several just stared at him, wondering what he was talking about, but then Norman Grey laughed aloud, remembering his earlier comment about Mother. “Neither of them do,” he told the young fox. “The motel manager in the movie lived in a creepy house on a hill behind the motel. The climax of the movie took place in the fruit cellar of the house, giving the vidgoers a sudden chill!”

From the looks around him, Kevin wasn’t sure he wanted to see the movie that everyone else seemed to have seen.

Doctor Renwick and Commander Warren were the only ones who had gotten out of the tram, but Jon was ready to get to his room so he grabbed the rail bar in front of him and hoisted himself to his feet. The tour of the station’s entertainment and shopping districts had been interesting despite the looks they had received from other visitors, but Jon was more than ready to find a place to relax. Even sitting down on the tram seat was a chore, and he had kept up his daily exercises while in weightlessness. It was apparent that some of the Adirondack Furs had not, as some of them had slumped in their seats since departing the elevator.

Jon stood up unsteadily, but even though he felt like he was walking on his toes, the design of his entire leg structure had changed so that he was supported as he should be. He stepped down out of the tram and tentatively released the rail bar. When the others saw that he stood up without holding onto the car, several started to get up too.

He held out a hand to Kristen, who took it with a frown. She was one who had not done the required zero gee exercises as often as she should have, and now she was paying the price. She scooted across the bench seat to the side of the car and then took Jon’s hand. He helped her to her feet and then hoisted her up beside him.

Commander Warren watched the proceedings for a moment, but when he noticed several staring at him from their places outside the tram, he waved an arm toward the double glass doors of the hotel.

“Right this way,” he directed. “You’ve already been checked in, so just give the attendant inside your names and each of you will be given a keycard to the room assigned to you. You will be paired up two to a room, but once you have your card you may go on to them.” He looked at the expensive techwatch upon his wrist and added, “Lunch will be delivered to your rooms in about two hours, so that should give you some time to rest a while.”

Kristen tried walking on her own, but her legs began wobbling so much that one of the station attendants rushed to her side before Jon could help her. “Just lean on me, ma’am,” said the blond-haired man with wide shoulders.

The botanist curled an arm around his middle and gave him a thankful smile. “Thank you,” she said in gratitude.

There was a crash behind them, and the attendant turned with her to look. Dr. Ramirez lay sprawled on the ground at the back of the tram, her feet tangled up in the straps of someone’s travel bag and one arm beneath her at an odd angle; she had hit the ground hard in the unfamiliar gravity. Another attendant rushed to her aid and helped her up into a sitting position. Dr. Renwick knelt beside her to examine her arm, but after a moment declared that it was undamaged. He helped the attendant get her up onto her feet and then he lent her an arm to help her into the hotel.

Inside the lobby, Kristen’s aid assisted her to the counter and then all three of her housemates joined her. Dante looked as if he was wobbling on his own feet, but had waved away any help offered to him, stubborn to make it the rest of the way to his room on his own with only a walking cane that had been provided for him.

The clerk behind the counter was a short woman with dark curly hair, equally dark eyes, and a professional smile that pretended her customers were anything but hybrid animals walking on their hind legs.

“May I have your last names, please?” she asked courteously, absently straightening a stack of keycards on the lower counter beside her keypad.

“Eisenberg, Watson, Capanari and Sunset,” Jon answered. The clerk examined her monitor and then plucked out several cards from the first of two stacks.

She held up one card. “Eisenberg?” she asked. The botanist held up a hand paw and the woman placed it across her palm without actually touching her. “Capanari?” The tiger held out his hand and received his card. “Watson,” and then “Sunset.” Jenni and Jon got their cards in turn and immediately looked at their assigned room numbers.

Almost in perfect unison, all four of them looked up in surprise and showed one another their assignments. They had assumed that they would be paired up by gender as they had in Florida, but that was not the case this time. Jenni and Dante were assigned to one room and Jon and Kristen were quartered together. Jon looked at the woman behind the counter and held up his card.

“Who made up the room assignments?” he asked her.

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know that,” she replied. “The assignments were submitted last night while I was off shift. Is there a problem?”

Jon glanced back at Kristen and noted her expression, so he simply shook his head. “No, I don’t suppose so. I was just curious.”

“Well then, I hope you have a good stay with us,” the woman told him with a smile. Jon thanked her and then turned to his housemates.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I think I’m about ready for a bed,” he said.

“Me too,” said Jenni, lightly panting. “We’ll have to get used to the gravity eventually, but it doesn’t have to be all at once. Just standing here feels like I’ve had a workout.”

Side by side in pairs, the felines trudged down a corridor on their new toes, following numbered signs to their rooms. Fortunately for them, they did not have to mount any stairs or use an elevator; their rooms were all on the ground floor and across the hall from one another.

Jon opened his door and then held it open for Kristen to tiptoe inside. She managed it without his help, which was fine with him. He still had both of their travel bags with him out in the hall. He hefted them inside and then closed the door behind him. When he turned and looked at the room, he stopped and stared. The place resembled any other typical hotel room on Earth, but it contained a single king-sized bed.

Kristen sat down on the edge of the mattress and looked back at him meekly. She had already expected the hesitant expression that was on his face and she put her hands together in her lap.

“Jon…” she started. He looked at her without a word. “Remember that night I was frightened and you slept beside me just to give me comfort?” He nodded quietly. “Just think of this as a similar situation and perhaps you’ll be able to sleep in the same bed with me beside you.” She knew he must have also recalled that day when she had offered to share a shower with him, but she hoped he would not bolt from her this time.

When he continued to stand there quietly, she gave him an impish smirk and said, “If you want, we can talk to Dante and Jenni and see if they’ll trade off. Then you can sleep in the same bed with Dante instead.”

The male cougar’s eyes narrowed at that thought, and he finally allowed a lopsided smile to creep across his lips. “When you put it that way,” he told her, setting the travel bags on top of the room’s six-drawer dresser, “I think I’d rather sleep next to you. Just try not to snore too loud, okay?”

Kristen laughed, her whole face smiling. “You’re the one who rattled the walls last time,” she countered, pleased that he had finally relaxed. “I almost needed ear plugs!”

Jon grinned at her and then stretched out on the bed beside her. He crawled up the soft mattress and wrapped his arms around a pillow. “In that case, you probably won’t get any sleep at all this week,” he mumbled. “I’m not wearing a muffler to bed.”

The botanist moved up the mattress, turned over onto her back with her head upon a pillow on the opposite side of the bed, and Jon looked at her with one eyeball. “I suppose once they get used to the gravity, we’ll be glad our housemates are across the hall instead of on the other side of the wall.”

Adjusting her tail beneath her, Kristen looked at him with an upraised eyebrow. “Why?”

Jon snorted into his pillow. “I heard that Jenni finally let Dante in to play,” he mumbled. “They shared a shower on Christmas and have probably been attached at the hip every chance they can find since.”

“Did Dante tell you that?”

“No, I heard the bears talking about it a few days ago.”

“Jenni told me that she shared a shower with him and that they’ve played around some, but she still won’t sleep with him.”

Jon closed his eyes. “She probably just doesn’t want to kiss and tell if they did,” he remarked. “Dante’s been after her ever since we all got to the Institute, so I suspect she finally gave in.”

Kristen shook her head. “Jenni was the one who told me about their shower,” she countered. “I didn’t even know about it, but she needed someone to confide in so she told me in case rumors got around. They haven’t gone as far as actually sleeping together, only a little playing around.”

Jon grunted. “I’m not sure I believe that, but they’ll be knocking on the walls of their room anyway now that they will be sleeping together.”

Against the gravity pulling her down, Kristen managed to get up on one arm and look over at him. “If a man and a woman sleep together in the same bed, does that automatically mean they should be having sex?”

Sensing a verbal trap from the look on her face, Jon decided not to take the bait. “I’m sure Dante assumes that,” he muttered. “I fully expect him to take full advantage of their shared bed.” Kristen stared at him a moment, fully aware he had skirted her question.

“I pity Cheryl,” she finally remarked. “Being married, Carl and Ellie will get their own room, leaving Cheryl to fight off Travis.”

Jon opened his eye again. “Wow, I hadn’t considered that. Do you want to invite her to stay in here with us? The bed’s probably large enough for the three of us.”

It was Kristen’s turn to snort. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Sandwiched between two women in bed!”

Jon gave her a wink when she looked over at him. “I’m just trying to be chivalrous. If you want, the two of you can have the bed and I’ll make a pallet on the floor. I’m so tired I could sleep anywhere.”

Kristen shook her head and then dropped back down on her pillow. “That’s nice of you, but I’d rather snuggle up to you in bed, even if all we do is sleep.”

“Then let Cheryl fight off Travis on her own,” Jon muttered drowsily. “Snuggle up if you want, but I think I’m going to take a nap. I’m worn out.”

Kristen looked over at him for several long moments, mulling over his invitation. He did not say another word, but after a few minutes his breathing slowed as he drifted off into slumber.

She knew that Jon had no intention of forming an intimate relationship with anyone – he had made that perfectly clear on numerous occasions, and after repeated rebuffs, she was not sure she wanted it anymore herself. However, the two of them were becoming cats, and cats often slept curled up together, so what could it hurt?

She pulled her pillow along with her and crawled across the large bed toward him. He was already asleep, but he faced toward her, his knees pulled up slightly and his arms wrapped around his pillow on his side. Kristen turned away from him and then scooted back against him in a spooned fashion. In the coolness of the hotel room, she could feel his warmth beneath the pillow, sighing audibly as she made herself comfortable. In moments, she was asleep beside him.

Chapter 31

Down to Earth

Jenni’s reaction had been building from the moment that the space plane had undocked from Space Station Sebra and began its return trip to Earth. The Adirondack group had said their goodbyes to those they had come to know over the seven weeks they had been in orbit, and once the cabin was full, each of the Furs sat in anticipation of getting the medics’ special blend of spice tea to sleep off the drop into the atmosphere.

However, their skeletal structures had sufficiently hardened so that it was not really necessary now; the Furs would have to endure the rigors of the flight fully conscious. Unlike the long initial voyage up, the flight would only take an hour and a half to reach the ground, with the landing site targeted for Las Cruces, New Mexico rather than back to Florida. The spaceport in New Mexico was the site of the corporate headquarters for the company that owned the space plane; Cecil Airfield in Jacksonville where they had departed was a secondary launch and landing facility.

When the Branson departed the space station and began its descent, Jenni knew it would get a little bumpy when they hit the atmosphere, but she had faith in the space plane’s heat shields to protect them while making a slow feathering atmospheric reentry. The material she had read in Jacksonville had explained that the rear half of the wings and the twin tail booms would fold upward to increase drag, keeping the ship stable during descent at a lower velocity than the old space trucks and even the early shuttles. What she did not count on was the round windows of the plane were not lined up in a row like a commercial aircraft, but were all around the tubular fuselage so that passengers could see out in all directions. This might seem like a trivial matter to anyone else, but Jenni was deathly afraid of heights.

The spotted leopard had been near the observation windows while on the space station, but she always maneuvered herself so that the vista was behind her each time. She knew that Sebra would not fall from the sky, but the phobia was so well engrained in her that she would take no chances for the sight to tie her stomach into knots. She had never given the return flight much thought during their stay, fully expecting to be drugged unconscious as they had on the way up.

When the Branson made its descent, there were several among the passengers who gripped their seat arm rests tightly due to the rush of scenery, distance and height. To some, it was a thrilling roller coaster ride from the heavens, but to others, it was a gut-wrenching experience that none of them would wish upon anyone but their enemies.

Rose Fleur spent most of the flight communing with a sick bag, and although Jenni kept one clutched in her hands, she managed to keep her last meal in her stomach all the way to Earth.

When the space plane finally touched down on the long runway at Las Cruces, the feline woman was the first one out the door when the hatch was finally opened for them, swiftly bypassing Marcy, whose task it was to pass out generic winter coats to each passenger before departing.

Jenni just managed to clear the ramp off to the side when her stomach heaved up its churning contents. She fell to her hands and knees onto the tarmac, completely oblivious of the chilly afternoon temperature.

Conversations among the passengers started up in earnest as they each took a long coat from Marcy on the way out the hatch. The space plane had landed farther out on the runway than where the retrieval bus had safely awaited their arrival, so it would be some minutes before the transport would be there to pick them up. Unlike a commercial airliner, the Branson would need to be towed back to a hangar, so taxiing back to the terminal was not an option here. An aircraft tug would be along later to retrieve the plane.

Dante and Kevin were too wrapped up in an animated discussion about how fun the roller coaster flight had been that neither of them seemed to notice Jenni on the ground at their feet as they departed the ramp. Kevin’s nose quivered at the scent of her sickness, but then Dante distracted him by grabbing him by the arm and gesturing up toward the sky where they had just been.

Jon knelt down beside the feline woman and gently pulled her human scalp hair back away from her face. He held out a travel packet with one end opened to expose the tip of a wet napkin. When she did not respond, he pulled it out for her and calmly wiped the sickness from her mouth and the fur of her chin. She closed her eyes while he worked and then leaned into him when he was done. Jon folded the napkin, stuffed it back inside its wrapper and then put it into the pocket of his coat as several pairs of feet gathered around them.

Dr. Renwick knelt down beside them and placed a small electronic thermometer into one of her ears. It beeped a moment later, but her temperature was in the normal range for her hybrid physique. He put a hand on her shoulder and she looked up at him with a sorrowful expression.

“Do you need anything more for your stomach?” he asked tentatively.

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think there’s anything left to come up,” she rasped, looking down at her hands.

Renwick nodded, but pulled out a small plastic case from his shirt pocket. He extracted two caplets and then placed them in one of her hands. He folded her fingers over them and said in a quiet voice, “Keep these with you, just in case. This ride is over and we’re back on the ground, so you may not need them now, but we’ll be in the air again soon; if you feel queasy, take these right away.”

Jenni nodded without looking at him. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“I’ll take care of her,” Jon told the physician when he placed a hand on the cougar’s shoulder. Renwick gave him a look of thanks and then stood up to see if there were any others who needed his assistance.

Jon slid an arm beneath hers and then gently helped her to her feet. “Can you walk, or do you need me to carry you?” he asked her. Kristen stepped in close and took one of the nurse’s hand in both of hers, looking at her in concern.

“The bus is coming,” she told them.

“Help me walk to the bus,” Jenni muttered, resting one hand on her stomach. “Just go slow.”

“May I have your attention, please?” Dr. Aristotle asked from the space plane’s open hatch. Since all but the pilots had disembarked, he stood at the top of the ramp so everyone could see him. Most of the group had already turned toward the approaching bus, but now they faced him quietly.

“This will be a full day of travel,” he reminded them, shielding his eyes from the morning sun, “We are currently at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico. The Institute’s Osprey is now waiting for us at the main terminal to take us all back to the Adirondacks. There will be a refueling stop in St. Louis, but we should not be on the ground there more than about twenty minutes.” He put his hands into the pockets of his coat in the chilly air and looked down at all the anthro-human faces that stared back up at him. “It’s going to be a long day, so if you can sleep on a plane, I would advise you to do so as much as possible. It’s going to take us about eight and a half hours to get back home from here.”

A brown bear raised his hand and Aristotle’s eyes focused upon him. “Yes, Aaron?”

“Is there any chance you can get us some knockout tea for the flights before we leave?” he asked hopefully.

“I am sorry, but we weren’t supplied with any of it this time. We do have Dramamine for those who may need it to counteract motion sickness for our remaining flights, but otherwise you will have to sleep on your own along the way.”

The doctor felt the presence of the pilots behind him, so he waved a hand toward the bus that now awaited passengers. “You may begin boarding the bus,” he told the group before turning to the pilots to thank them for a flawless flight.

***

The trip to St. Louis was uneventful. The skies had remained clear for most of the journey and the flight was smooth until they were over mid-Missouri, where they skirted away from the edges of nimbostratus clouds casting rain and snow upon the landscape below. The winter weather band was not forecast to move as far north as St. Louis, so the Osprey traveled in a wide arc to avoid the dangers of icy atmospheric conditions.

Since refueling the tanks would take no more than twenty minutes, none of the passengers were allowed off the plane. They could get out of their seats and stretch if they wished, but with so many of them on the small aircraft, only a few could get up at a time.

Jenni was smiling and joking with her housemates, having slept most of the flight from La Cruces. She was fine as long as she did not have to look outside the windows while they were in the air.

As soon as the plane had stopped on the tarmac and the overhead seatbelt sign shut off, Cheryl, Ellie and all three of the Fleur sisters got up to visit the lavatory at the back of the plane. Several of the guys wanted to use the facilities as well, but knew the futility of getting in anytime soon when they saw the women lined up for it.

Travis unbuckled his seatbelt and fought his way through those standing up to stretch along the outer aisle and approached the black-uniformed copilot, who was opening the main hatch to allow food trays to be loaded onto the plane for the next leg of its flight. The canine tried to push his way past him to the catering pod that was lining up with the hatch, but Tom Williams barred his way immediately.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the dark-haired man said to the canine, “but you will need to return to your seat.”

“I need out to pee!” Travis complained loudly, gesturing toward those gathered the lavatory. “We’ll be in the air again before that line’s done!”

Dr. Ramirez looked up from her seat at the back of the cabin and put down her magazine.

“I’m sorry sir,” Williams repeated, “You will have to wait your turn. You are not allowed off the plane until we reach the Institute. This is only a pod to deliver food and beverages while we’re being refueled.”

The pod docked, but there was a six-inch gap around the sides of its opening. It was not wide enough to allow egress from the plane, but Travis jumped up to the gap and suddenly reached for his shorts, intending to release his bladder through the opening right then and there.

The copilot grabbed one of Travis’ arms and forcibly yanked it up behind the canine. The swiftness of his movements and the determination on his face proved that he was no stranger to unruly passengers, even one blended with the attributes of an animal. The man had him turned around and facing back into the cabin before he had a chance to relieve himself.

The copilot shoved him hard against the wall beside the hatch. He leaned forward to put his mouth near one of Travis’ erect black ears and spoke to him in a voice meant only for him to hear, now that there were several in the cabin staring at them.

“Sir, you will return to your seat or stand in line with the others awaiting their turn to use the lavatory. You may have the appearance of a dog, but you will not hike your leg inside my plane at a whim!”

Dr. Ramirez stood up and approached the males just as Travis gave Williams an odd smirk. “So you say,” he responded with a sneer.

The Hispanic physician reached in past the copilot and grabbed the collar of the canine’s robe with both hands, looking him right in the eye. “If you piss yourself out of spite and stink up this plane,” she snarled at him angrily, “I will toss you outside myself and let you walk back to New York from here — and looking like you do, how far do you think you would get before some local rancher took a shot at you?”

Dr. Ramirez was not his Wing’s physician, but from the look in her eyes, Travis had little doubt that she would exact punishment upon him if he dared what he had been about to do. He averted his eyes from her and looked at the copilot.

“Let me go,” he said defiantly.

“What was that?”

“Let me go… please,” Travis grumbled.

Williams stared at him for two heartbeats and then backed off, releasing the canine. “Either return to your seat or take your place in line for the lavatory,” he said in an even voice. Keeping eye contact with the copilot, Travis was tempted to rush for the door again, but the man in black took a side step, barring his way.

“Back to your seat,” Williams said again.

“Sit!” Dr. Ramirez ordered. Gerard looked up from his nearby seat and snickered at the physician’s obedience command to the canine. Travis gave him a dirty look, and then stormed around the aisles to get at the back of the line to the lavatory. Even if his bladder had not been quivering, he had no intention of sitting down simply because he was told to do so. Williams and Ramirez exchanged exasperated looks and then the copilot returned to his job with the cargo pod at the hatch.

***

The Adirondacks were buried in snow. The Osprey had descended through low clouds purely on instrumentation, and when its wheels finally touched down upon the Furmankind Institute’s landing pad near the small natural lake, the flight crew immediately began shutting down their systems. It would take some moments for the snow kicked up by the rotor wash to settle down outside before an Institute bus could get close to the isolated landing area to get the passengers.

Wayne Mooreland lifted up his hands in front of him and watched them shake for a moment. “Look at me, Tom,” the man said to his companion. “That last fifty miles was nerve-wracking, and I’m an experienced pilot. I can only imagine how those in the back did on this flight.”

“It’s a good thing we didn’t have to go any farther,” the copilot replied, ticking off a checklist on a clipboard. “The ice buildup on the wings is getting dangerous. I don’t think we’re going to be able to fly back to headquarters tomorrow as planned; this place doesn’t have a hangar to put our bird in for the night.”

Wayne peered out the forward windows at the wintry landscape outside. The region was covered by a blanket of snow a couple of feet deep in most places, but drifted higher in others. The sky was overcast, and although there was no precipitation at the moment, it looked like the snow could resume at any time. The local weather forecast broadcast to their instruments did not paint a favorable picture for air travel either.

Someone had used a small thermal dozer to clear off the landing pad, as well as an avenue through the snow back to the central part of the complex. The pilot could see the headlights of an old charter bus moving slowly along the cleared path toward them, but it was still some distance away. He could not tell if the driver was taking his time or if the aged vehicle was having trouble in the frigid environment; the hydrogen-powered bus had to be over thirty years old.

“We’ll need to tether the plane to the landing pad rings before the wind picks back up,” the pilot muttered. “We may be here a while.”

Tom handed the clipboard to his partner and then unbuckled his harness. “Yeah, we’ll deal with that shortly. Time to deal with our passengers,” he said, standing up to stretch. “Wish me luck.”

“Luck,” Wayne replied with a wave of his hand. “I’ll contact headquarters and let them know we’re going to be socked in for a day or three before we can make it back to LaGuardia.”

Tom grabbed his coat, moved to the back of the cockpit and unlatched the insulated door of the troop compartment. As soon as the panel opened, he was nearly deafened by the multitude of simultaneous conversations from twenty-four individuals, each trying to be heard over everyone else. At first he thought it was pandemonium, but when he saw the excited expressions on their faces, he knew they were simply glad to be home. Despite that they had all been cooped up inside the plane all day, no one seemed to be in a hurry to get out into the cold weather. He could not blame them. He was not looking forward to getting out in it himself to prep the Osprey for its wintry stay.

He shrugged into his parka and approached the outside hatch. When he peered out through the port glass, he saw three bundled figures step out of the bus, arms laden with thick parcels. A larger, fourth figure got off the bus behind them, his thick arms grasping two large plastic tubs stacked on top of one another. When the small party reached the hatch, Tom cycled the locking mechanism and opened the door. A blast of cold air swept through the troop compartment and Furs suddenly huddled up together in the sudden chill. They might all have their own built-in fur coats now, but none of them had been in a cold environment long enough to have grown a thicker winter pelt.

The four figures trudged inside with their burdens and then Tom closed the door again with a sudden case of the shivers. Every eye in the compartment was watching them as each newcomer set down their bundles and pulled back a thick winter hood. Director Marcelo Delgado unzipped his coat and then looked out at his audience with a wide smile; just behind him was Sissy Quinn, the orange cat looking equally delighted to see the return of the Adirondack Furs. The third figure was the swift fox, Michael Lynch, and the large grizzly bear who brought up the rear was Hiamovi Avonaco. Like Sissy and Michael, ‘Avon’ was a Fur from the previous Class Fifteen that had not yet been assigned to a colony; he was easily the largest Fur any of them had ever seen, but he appeared friendly enough.

“Welcome home,” Marcelo said cheerily to the returning Furs and medical staff, “and welcome back!” Numerous voices raised in return greetings, and he grinned widely at the response. Dr. Aristotle made his way through the crowd to the director, and for many of them, it was the first time they had seen the gruff physician looking pleased. He and Marcelo clasped hands and put their heads together briefly before the director turned back to the crowd, most of whom had retaken their seats merely out of convenience. Behind them, Tom began pulling out travel bags from a set of lockers mounted to the forward bulkhead and was lining them up by the hatch.

Marcelo rubbed his hands together and then looked around the room. Many changes had taken place in the physical appearance of these volunteers since he had last seen them at Thanksgiving. No one looked distressed, and although their faces were tired from their long day in on the plane, it was refreshing to see them again.

“Now, my friends,” he said in a carrying voice, “I know you’re all tired and would like to get back to your Wings, so we’ll get this over with as soon as we can.” He turned to Sissy, who handed him one of the bundles she had carried in. He shook out the garment and held it up for all to see. It was made of a thick, dark green material and was just as tall as he was. It looked similar to a Turkish robe, but included a large hood and split up the back for furry tails.

“We have one of these coats for each of you, and we have different sizes due to your various physiologies.” Then he turned toward Avon, who opened the lid of the top tub he had brought in. The bear pulled out a large pair of oddly shaped, soft-sided boots. “We also have boots for your new digitigrade feet so you won’t have to walk barefooted though the snow. They probably won’t fit exact, but they will be better than bare feet. You will also find new furman garments for you back at each of your Wings.”

The director tugged at his sleeve to look at his techwatch. “It’s going on eleven o’clock, though you probably feel like it’s earlier since you’ve traveled across two time zones on your way here from New Mexico. For the rest of us, however, it’s late. As each of you get up to leave the plane, come by to get a coat and some boots, and then you can retrieve your travel bags by the door. You’re free to go back to your Wings, or if you would prefer a late meal after your journey, the cafeteria is available.”

Gerard Nicholas was the first to stand, being nearest the door, and then all three of the Fleur sisters stood in unison. Jon was on the far side of the troop compartment, so he settled back into his seat and prepared to wait. However, instead of standing by for everyone to come to them, Sissy and Michael began passing out the robes to those still seated to help speed up the process.

Avon approached Carl and asked the wolf to hold up a foot. The large bear put a measure stick up to the lupine man’s digitigrade foot and then turned back to one of the tubs he had brought in. he selected a pair of boots marked ‘canine’ and then handed them to him. Carl thanked him and then looked at the oddly shaped footwear with a lopsided smirk. When Ellie inquired, the male wolf pointed out the irony of someone covered in fur wearing boots that were fur-lined for insulation. Ellie was still smiling when Avon asked to measure her foot too.

By the time Jon had on boots, a warm coat and had his travel bag in hand, he stepped out of the plane and saw a full-scale snowball fight in progress. He had no way of knowing who started it, but it was clear that despite the late hour, the greater part of the Adirondack Furs was feeling frisky in the snow. Before he had a moment to take it all in, a snowball pelted his left shoulder, surprising him.

Jon tried to see who had thrown it, but white spheres were flying to and from every direction, so he merely dropped his travel bag on top of others at the bottom of the ramp and bent low to scoop up a handful of snow. There was just enough moisture in the consistency of the snow to make it perfect for forming into a compact ball.

Movement from the corner of his eye heralded an incoming snowball and he ducked instinctively. It passed harmlessly between his ears, but he spied who had thrown the frozen missile this time; Aaron grinned widely at him, packing another in his large hand paws. With a smirk of his own, Jon lobbed his at the bear, hitting the furman square in the chest. Jon frowned; he had aimed between the brown bear’s eyes, but the shortened fingers and permanently extended claws at their tips had thrown off his aim. He scooped up another handful of snow and ran out into the melee, just as another snowball from a different direction smacked into his thigh.

He ran out into the melee, catching glimpses of wide-eyed delight as everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. All three vixen sisters were ganged up together, attempting to hurl numerous snowballs at Dante, but for all his bulk as a white tiger hybrid, the guy was fast. He had apparently learned that he could get down on all fours with his newly designed legs, but even though he was slightly hampered by the long coat, he managed to outrun each missile the girls threw at him. Dante laughed and cackled as each one missed its intended target.

Kevin and Kristen were exchanging volleys, both looking as if they were having the time of their lives. Jenni was running here and there, trying to get the best of Norman and Gerard, while Cheryl was clinging high up on Whelan’s back, cheerfully trying to bring the laughing bear down into a snow drift. Carl and Ellie were the only ones who had not joined in the reindeer games, choosing instead to watch the proceedings from the safety of the bus with most of the medical staff.

Even Travis was successful at hitting just about everyone with snowballs at random. To his credit, he was not trying to hurt anyone and was simply caught up in the moment as the rest of them were. Jon saw the German shepherd’s eyes lock upon him, so he altered his course to engage him in snowy combat. Jon and Travis hurled snowballs at one another at the same time, and both frozen orbs hit their marks simultaneously. Jon’s snowball struck Travis’ left cheek and the canine’s snowball impacted upon the cougar’s forehead.

Both of them staggered, but once each realized he was okay, scooped up more snow for return fire. Jon laughed, enjoying himself, but discovered he did not have the best of traction with the new boots combined with his height and weight; he slipped in the snow several times, giving Travis an advantage in getting nearer to the large feline. When he got in too close, Jon lunged sideways and tackled the canine into a drift.

Others nearby saw the two of them go down and it was instantly assumed that the two were fighting. They wrestled in the snow, churning up the white powder, with Jon trying to pin down his opponent using his greater weight and the wiry Travis retaliating as best he could.

Finally, the canine managed to scoop handfuls of snow down the back of Jon’s shirt, and although the feline had on a coat of fur beneath the robes, it was not yet thick enough to insulate against such a frozen onslaught. Jon released Travis and rolled away with a yeowl, getting to his feet to shake the snow from his shirt.

Travis got up on his knees, laughing hard at the sight of the cougar dancing around, and suddenly there were others gathering around, laughing with him at Jon’s plight. When he had managed to dislodge most of the snow from his garment, the mountain lion slowly realized that the battle around him had ceased so that everyone could watch his frigid gyrations.

Worn out from nearly twenty minutes of play, Jon sank to his knees in the snow, just a few feet from Travis. He looked over at the canine and simply gave him a panting grin. When Travis realized that the other Fur was not angry at him, he grinned back, his tail wagging a little behind him. While he was distracted, however, Cheryl snuck up behind him and grabbed his collar.

He looked up just in time to see Jenni smile mischievously and dump two handfuls of snow into the back of his shirt that Cheryl held open. It was Travis’ turn to dance and gyrate around to dislodge the freezing cold that suddenly assaulted his back. Laughter broke out in the crowd and Jon felt a hand grasp his to help him to his feet. It was the orange cat, Sissy. He grinned up at her and got to his feet as the crowd finally began to disperse amidst chuckles and animated conversations.

Gerard helped Travis up to his feet and even assisted him in getting the last of the snow out of his shirt. The canine gave the bear a look of surprise, but then thanked him with a smile.

Jon spied the blue bit of cloth he had tied around the handle of his travel bag for identification and picked it up. Sissy wrapped her winter coat around her tighter for warmth and stood next to him.

“Welcome back,” she said to him with bright eyes. “A package came for you a few days ago, so I put it on the dresser in your room.”

Jon looked confused, wondering who would have sent him anything. “Was it addressed to me or to Brian Barrett?” he whispered into one of her ears.

Sissy blinked. She had almost forgotten that he had arrived at the Institute under a different name. “It was addressed to Jonathan Sunset,” she answered. “I didn’t notice who it was from, though.”

The mountain lion nodded, but then his eyes lit up. “I think I know what it is. Thanks for taking it for me.”

The orange cat smiled up at him. “You’re welcome, but you do have me curious! It’s not really heavy, but it did come in a large box.”

“If it’s what I think it is, you’ll see it soon enough.”

“Can I watch you open it?” Sissy begged. “Pleeeeeeease?”

The Felis Wing was the closest building to the landing pad, so Jenni, Kristen and Dante hefted their bags and decided to walk back while the rest of the Furs boarded the old charter bus. Jon saw that his housemates had already gone on ahead of him, the two females walking arm in arm with the male tiger. Still feeling the thrill of the play, Jon stuck out the crook of his arm toward her. “Sure, come along and we’ll see what I got.”

“Yay!” Sissy squealed, taking his arm. They walked together with the snow crunching under foot toward the building. “I’m glad you’re all back,” she said with emotion. “You all look differently than you did when you left, but I recognized each of you as soon as I saw you on the plane.”

“Yeah, we all had two months to bake while we were away,” Jon quipped. He reached up and lightly pinched at his fuller cheeks. “The dough has risen since we were last here!”

Sissy laughed at his antics and held on tight to his arm. They chatted lightly as they trudged through the snow, and soon they arrived at the building. Both stamped their feet at the bottom step under the awning at the Felis Wing, knocking snow from their boots.

When they got inside, they did not see the others, though there were wet spots on the all-weather rug in the entrance hall. Jon supposed his housemates had either gone to their rooms or to the restroom after a long flight. He felt the need to visit the lavatory himself, so he excused himself from the orange feline to relieve his bladder.

He was back out a few moments later and saw Sissy waiting for him next to the warm fireplace, feeding a few twigs to the flames. She had shed her coat at the recreation pit, but was still in one of the new thicker furman robes she had worn beneath it. Her physique was not suited to the colder climate, so she enjoyed the warmth of the fire.

She looked up as he crossed the room and then joined him at his quarters. Jon opened the door to let her inside and then she moved in to sit quietly in one of his guest chairs. There, just as she had promised, was a large box sitting on top of his dresser. Since he no longer carried a pocket knife, he used one of his claws to slice through the shipping tape keeping the box together and then opened the flaps of the lid.

Sissy watched in interest as he withdrew several bundles wrapped up in powder blue tissue paper and set each one aside. After the box was emptied, he set it on the floor and then reached for one of the bundles. He pulled off the tissue paper and then lifted up a folded bundle of cotton denim.

“That looks like a pair of blue jeans,” Sissy remarked, tilting her head to the side.

Jon shook out the bundle and held up the garment. “It is,” he said proudly. “I put in a special order to have some new clothes altered while I was up in orbit.”

“Wow. Why?”

The cougar looked at him with a lopsided grin. “I’m tired of our furman robes, Sissy,” he explained. “I know why we wear them while our bodies are changing, but I’m tired of looking like I belong to some robed cult. I want real clothes again!”

The leggings of the denim jeans were much wider than normal to allow his digitigrade feet and legs room to get into them. There was also a large round hole in the back for his tail and a button flap above it to keep the waistband together.

“This looks familiar,” Sissy muttered, “but I can’t place where I’ve seen something like this before. Are you sure they’ll fit you?”

“Marcy helped take my measurements, so I’m hoping they fit.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Sissy suggested. The cougar looked at her for a moment and saw the impish look in her green eyes. Her slit pupils were open and a little rounded in the dim light of the room.

Jon suddenly remembered Marcy’s request to let her be the first to see him in his new outfit, but she had not yet returned to the Wing. Feeling it was not important, he dropped the jeans upon the bed. “Okay, let’s find out,” he said with a shrug.

Turning his tail to her, he undressed quietly, pulling off the furman robe first and then the shorts. He looked over his shoulder at her and caught her boldly staring at his furry rear. He flicked his tail at her and she jumped, caught off guard. She chuckled nervously and wrung her hands together in her lap; she seemed embarrassed, but made no move to look away.

Jon gave her a smirk and picked up the jeans. He unbuttoned both the fly and the tail flap and then slid one foot down into a leg opening. He had no trouble getting his newly shaped limb all the way through, so he added the second and then pulled them up into place. He had to work to get the tail through its opening properly, having never done anything like this before. Getting the tail flap re-buttoned took a little extra dexterity with clawed fingertips, but he finally got them on and fastened. Since he had fur all over, he had requested the fly be button-up instead of zippered and was thankful the clothing manufacturer had done so.

He held up his arms and did a slow turn so the orange feline could examine him from all sides. She grinned up at him when he turned back to face her. “It’s times like these when I miss my human lips,” Sissy told him with half-lidded eyes. “I can’t do it anymore, but I’d give you a wolf-whistle if I could!”

Jon grinned at her and then examined himself in the mirror. “They feel good, standing up at least.” He grabbed hold of the dresser and then squatted down beside it. “Hmm, it binds a little in the knees when I do this, however,” he muttered. “They need to be a little looser in front of the knees, I think.”

“You have a nice butt, my friend,” Sissy said quietly. “I think those jeans accent it nicely.” Jon gave his rear a little waggle, which made the orange cat giggle. Then he returned to the other bundles. He set aside two more pair of jeans that he would try on later and reached for a different package. He unfolded the tissue wrapping to reveal a long-sleeved flannel shirt made of large red and black squares. He slid his arms into the oversized openings and then pulled it around him. There was plenty of room for his fur, and despite that it fit over him as another layer, it was not uncomfortable. He buttoned it up and then tucked the shirt into his jeans.

“Wow, I do wish I could whistle!” Sissy remarked in obvious delight when he turned all the way around again so she could look at him. “You look great, Jon!”

“Thanks!” the cougar said, pleased with her reaction. This was similar to the type of clothes he used to wear in the winter on a regular basis when he had lived in Colorado. All he needed were lace up boots and he would feel right at home, although he knew getting those for his new feet would be next to impossible.

He turned to the full-length mirror to take a look at himself, and suddenly he froze. His tail dropped straight to the floor, his ears went back flat against his head and his jaw dropped open. Sissy looked up at him in concern and had the feeling that if his back had not been covered, there would be a raised ridge along his spine. She could smell the sudden change of emotion from the mountain lion and to her it meant sudden shock.

When Jon looked at his reflection in the mirror, it was the image of Henry Parker who looked back at him. Blue denim jeans, plaid flannel shirt of red and black squares… Parker had worn almost the same outfit on the night that Barrett had shot him. It was no wonder that Sissy had thought the denim jeans on a cougar looked familiar. She had probably seen Parker wearing them before he had left on his trip, likely special-made just as his own.

Jon turned his head away with an outthrust hand toward the mirror and stumbled over his feet. He fell to the floor, missing the cushioned mattress of the bed, and Sissy jumped up in astonishment.

“Jon!” She rushed to his side and gripped his arm to roll him over, but he surprised her by pushing her away.

“Leave me alone…” he pleaded in a tone unlike any that Sissy had ever heard come from him. His voice cracked and there was a sense of despair in it.

“Jon,” she whispered, resisting the urge to put a hand on his arm again. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

He was unable to answer. She had no knowledge of his criminal past and he could not tell her that he now resembled the Fur he had murdered in cold blood. Seeing the man’s face in his daily reflection was bad enough, but the clothing completed the picture. His throat constricted and he fought back the terror that welled up inside of him.

Despite his command to leave him alone, Sissy could not stand it any longer and put both of her hands on his arm. “Please, Jon,” she whispered in a frightened voice, “Tell me what’s wrong! Are you sick? Hurt? Is it the changes?” When he still did not reply, she got up to her feet. “I’ll go get your doctor!” she told him.

Jon finally responded by gently grabbing her wrist. “No,” he said at last. He released her and then rolled over onto his back, pinching the base of his tail. “I don’t need the Doc. I’m not hurt.”

The orange feline was about to inquire again when he rotated onto his hands and knees and then got to his feet. She flinched when he stripped off the flannel shirt with such ferocity that buttons popped off all across the room, and she remained mute when he then pulled off the jeans in fury and threw them against a wall. He did not seem to care that he had just stripped naked in front of her; although his genitals were partially covered by his sheath and fur, Sissy quietly felt embarrassed that she had looked at him.

With a growl deep in his throat, Jon snatched up his previously discarded furman garments and slipped into them without looking at his companion. It was only after he was dressed again that he grabbed up the new jeans and flannel shirt; he crammed them back into the shipping box with others that were still neatly folded on the dresser. He cross-folded the flaps of the cardboard box and finally looked at Sissy.

“Please take these to the incinerator behind the Shoppette,” he said in a hoarse voice, setting the package on the mattress beside her. “Burn them!”

She looked at the box in confusion and then back up into his face. “But… why?” she asked. “What happened?”

Jon stared at her for a long moment. She began to fidget and dropped her gaze to her lap, preparing to stand up and go. Then, Jon reached out and touched her shoulder very gently with only his claw tips.

“I’m sorry I frightened you,” he answered quietly, “but seeing myself in the mirror with those clothes on brought back a terrible, terrible memory that I had thought was forgotten. I can’t… I just can’t wear them now…”

Sissy took his hand in both of hers, looking up at him with tears at the corners of her eyes. “I don’t know what you remembered, but maybe it would help if you talked about it,” she whispered. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

Jon shook his head. “No… I appreciate the offer, but it’s best if I just try to forget it again. Please… get rid of these for me. I don’t even care about the money I spent to have them made. I just want them out of my sight.”

Sissy stood up and suddenly clung to him in a fierce hug. She buried her face in his chest and simply held him for a long moment. When he did not return the embrace, she wiped the moisture from her eyes and then picked up the large box.

“I will keep them for you,” she said quietly, “in case you should change your mind.” Then, without another word, she turned and walked out of his room.

Jon closed the door behind her quietly and then faced the mirror again. “Not bloody likely,” he told his reflection.

Chapter 32

Intimate Affairs

Jon looked across the compound and let a smile spread across his feline face. Even after four and a half months since they had returned to Earth from their stay on the orbital space station, Dante was still wearing the large dog collar he had purchased from one of the shops in Sebra’s commercial district. Although Dante was not canine, it was the only one he could find that was large enough to fit him and still be loose. From its size, it was assumed to be for one of the large breeds like a Malamute or a Great Pyrenees. No one knew why a pet-free environment like a space station would have a shop with a section that sold pet-related items, but Dante had picked it up on a whim, citing that he missed the gold plastic chain he used to wear around his neck until it began to snag on his fur. Jenni had later presented him with a shining chrome tag with his name on it that she had made locally. Marcy reminded them that they would be issued actual military-style dog tags when they were finally assigned to a colony, but now it was merely a novelty.

Other Furs teased him about the collar, but the primary purpose for getting it was to be noticed, so he seemed pleased anytime someone brought it up. It was that tag that had caught Jon’s attention, reflecting the early summer sun shining down through the overhead treetops.

At the moment, Dante was working with a Fur from the previous Class Fifteen, learning to tend sheep in a makeshift pen without spooking the poor critters by someone who resembled a large predator. Arne Kohler was a Fur who had finished his transformation into a male African lion the previous year, one of those who waited for the opportunity to join a starter colony. Despite his fearsome, broad-shouldered physique, the man seemed to do well with the farm animals they would eventually take with them out into the stars, so it had fallen to him to help teach the newcomers.

There were many such activities taking place outside on the grounds on that late summer morning. Some tended animals like Arne and Dante, others were down on their knees in the dirt tending to gardens of food plants, and even a couple was learning to dig a latrine, for even that would be necessary in a colony. Several were working to set up solar arrays that would be taken along for power generation, although most of the items that they took with them would be manually operated without dependence upon power.

The life they would live on some distant world would be closer to nature than modern man on Earth. They had been taught that a simpler, more primitive setting would be their home and they were to try not to depend too much upon generated power for more than a few luxuries. Some equipment was deemed a necessity, however, especially for the communication and medical huts. A connection with the Earth through a geosynchronous relay satellite in orbit above their world would keep them in touch with Stockholm on their progress.

Although the volunteers continued to go through a continual state of change through the transformations, they were all now taking more classes for duty specialization for skills that would be needed to survive. Instruction on medicine, geology, botany, animal husbandry, gardening, cartography, tool-making and many others were available and strongly encouraged. No specific duties had been assigned for their roles in the starter colony, but the more wide-spread the knowledge amongst them all could be, the group would be better prepared should anything happen to someone else.

The youngest Fur among them, Kevin had taken a strong interest in meteorology, and although there were no instructors at the Institute for this particular career field, the young fennec fox had taken it upon himself to enroll in online classes that he focused on when other duties allowed him the free time. He had even implored the director to allow him some time away from the Institute to visit the National Severe Storms Laboratory headquarters in Oklahoma for hands-on training for weather studies. Marcelo was impressed by the young man’s enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge, but the transformation progression was only halfway through the process. Granted, most of the changes yet to occur were mostly internal, but until such time as when he was past all potential dangers, he would have to remain at the Institute.

Although meteorology had never been a required skill out in the starter colonies, it was one that Marcelo agreed could be a great asset in survival. Kevin was understandably disappointed to have his request denied, but unknown to him, the director had already contacted the NSSL headquarters to inquire about having someone come out to the Institute instead to tutor the young Fur. He had yet to get an official response, but he had hopes that it could be arranged.

As Jon looked around the activities of the compound, he spied the young Fur beneath a tree, taking a break from his chore to lap up water from a shallow cup. The youngest of the vixens was sneaking up on him from behind, and as the cougar watched, she slipped around Kevin’s face to give the fennec a quick kiss on the cheek.

Jon smiled. The two young foxes had become something of an item among the colonists recently, and although Rose was older than Kevin by a few years, they seemed to get along quite well. Kevin had only dated sparingly in high school, but had never had a steady girlfriend before. Although she was his first real sweetheart, he was taking a mature stance about the relationship and treated her like gold.

The mountain lion smiled inwardly and turned back to his work, but then something else caught his eye off in the distance. Out beyond the lake, he recognized the large hulking form of Whelan Nolan out near one of the perimeter fences. The black bear Fur approached the tall iron bars of the enclosure and only then did Jon notice someone else standing on the other side of the barrier. He did not know who the woman with the long, red hair might be, but even from this distance Jon could tell she looked upset.

Whelan spoke with her for several long moments before the woman finally reached into a purse hanging from her shoulder and pulled out a manila envelope. She hesitated before handing it to him through the bars and then leaned forward to kiss the bear on the side of the nose when she did. She reached out to stroke the fur of his face before turning away. Whelan watched her walk back across the gravel parking lot. She got in her car, but did not start it up right away. Jon thought he could see her head down upon the steering wheel, but after several minutes, she wiped her face and then put the car in gear. Whelan continued standing in place until her car disappeared around a bend in the road that led away from the Institute through the forest.

Jon saw the black bear tuck the envelope inside his robe and then slowly make his way back to the walking trail that surrounded the lake; he briefly wondered if he should go talk to him and lend him an ear.

“Hey, big guy, are you going to daydream all day?” Jenni’s voice broke him out of his musing. “Give me a hand with this panel, please?”

Jon blinked and looked over at her, still wondering about the mysterious woman at the fence. Was it the girlfriend that was supposed to have joined Whelan becoming a Fur, but who had instead abandoned him at the last minute, or was she a sister or cousin?

Jenni held up a dark green, fiberluminum panel in her hands and Jon dismissed his thoughts to return his attention to his task. Under the direction of their instructor Sylvia Janes, the two of them were assisting Carl and Ellie in assembling a modular geodesic building of the type they would be using at a colony. The lightweight insulated panels were triangular and designed to fit together across a frame with a minimum of fasteners, but would be sealed between each seam with an insulated foam strip so they would be resistant to outside environment. Being modular, they could be refitted into several shapes and sizes, but the default design they were constructing was a dome approximately twenty-five feet in diameter with a triangular door panel on one side. The specific type of fiberluminum used in its construction was of a kind that would insulate well against extreme hot or cold weather conditions despite its relatively slender thickness.

Larger versions would be taken along for various purposes, but the smaller domes would be their living quarters on the new world. The panels were made in various shades of dark green, in hopes that the structures might blend in better with its intended environment, but four overhead panels were translucent to let in natural light from the outside. Transparent panels could also be substituted within any frame around the curved walls for a non-opening window if desired, but there would be no curtains or shades for privacy when used.

Jon reached into a pocket of the vest he wore in addition to his shorts in the warm weather and pulled out several of the fasteners needed to secure Jenni’s panel to the dome frame. It only required a simple tool to install the mushroom-shaped clips, which Jon also produced from the vest. He lined up the holes while his companion held the panel in place. He popped in two of them and then Jenni was able to retract her shortened fingers from beneath the seam. She continued to press the triangle up to the frame so he could fish out more fasteners.

The leopard female looked up at him for a moment, and then in a whisper asked him, “How are things going between you and Kristen?”

Jon moved only his eyes to look down at her. “No problems, really. We’ve not had an argument in weeks,” he replied.

Jenni gave him an impish smile. “You know what I mean,” she whispered. “I’ve seen her slip into your room some nights when we all turn in.”

The mountain lion snorted. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you. We sleep, and that’s all.”

“Yeah, right,” Jenni snickered.

“You asked.”

The woman took another approach, looking up at him with imploring eyes of gold. “C’mon, Jon… Everyone already thinks you two make a great couple. Why keep your relationship with her covert?”

“Y’know, I wish everyone would stop trying to play matchmaker for us,” Jon muttered. “Really, Jen – Kris and I are only sleeping in the same bed together. We both get lonely sometimes, so we sleep beside one another for the comfort. Nothing else goes on.”

Jenni gave him a sly, half-lidded smile. “So how much sleeping do you actually do together?”

“Jen, stop.”

“I have to admit that I’ve listened at your door, but you two must be awfully qui—”

The cougar leaned in close and put his broad feline nose up against hers. “How many times do I have to say this?” he growled, interrupting her. “I have no intention of getting intimate with a Fur – and you already know why, so drop it.”

Jenni frowned and backed away, stung by his rebuke. “Are you telling me that you and she haven’t done anything?”

“I’m telling you just that,” Jon told her. “We sleep. That’s all.”

“Do you put your arms around her?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted.

“Does she snuggle up to you?”

Jon’s frown deepened. “Yes,” he confessed.

“…and do you kiss one another good-night?”

“No-we-don’t!” the cougar responded in agitation. “Quit interrogating me, Jen!”

“I find it hard to believe that two consenting adults sleep together and do nothing more than sleep. C’mon, Jon – give in!”

“Not… with… a Fur!” he growled, glaring at her.

Jenni furrowed her brow and crossed her arms at him. “That’s what you keep saying. What if she were fully human?” she asked him. “Hypothetically speaking, if Kristen was a human woman right now – would you even consider getting intimate with her?”

Knowing the furmankind process could never be reversed, he nodded. “I might,” he answered truthfully, “but that’s not the point.”

“Don’t you see it, Jon – that is the point!”

“What are you blathering about?”

She leaned forward and pressed a finger against his chest fur. “Let me remind you that you are no longer purely human. If you were to bed a human woman now, then you would be guilty of the same bestiality you accused your ex-fiancée of having with that cougar that you killed! I dare you to tell me it’s different!”

Jon was stunned; his tongue was suddenly dry and could do nothing more than stare back at the leopard. Jenni glared at him for a long moment and when he didn’t respond, she sneered. “I guess you never thought of it that way before, have you? You won’t get closer to Kristen because she’s a Fur, but because of your deep-seated hatred of a mixed relationship, you can no longer get intimate with a full-blooded human! Jon, whether or not you’re here by choice, you are now a Fur! That means that because of your convictions, the only relationship you can ever have from now on is with a Fur!”

“Jon, Jenni,” Sylvia’s voice called out from the other side of the dome. “You’re falling behind on your panels.”

Jenni stared at her companion for another heartbeat and then she turned to grab another triangular panel from the stack behind them. Jon fished out several more fasteners from his vest and then started popping them into the remaining holes for the panel they had just set up. He worked in silence for several moments, refusing to look at her.

When it came time for her to put the next triangle into place, he leaned in close to her ear as he lined up the first fastener hole. “Just why are you so adamant about getting me to sleep with Kristen?” he asked in a whisper. “She and I have a good relationship as it is now.”

“I’m sure that’s the way you think it is, but Jon, she’s more than just lonely,” Jenni replied in a quiet voice. “You two get along well these days, and anyone can see that she enjoys your company, but she always seems so sad when she’s by herself.”

“Why me?” Jon asked, rolling his eyes heavenward. “There are other single guys on the compound, some of them even from the previous class. If all she wants is a physical relationship, I’m sure she could find a willing guy.”

“Oh, you mean like Travis?” Jenni countered with a dark look. “I thought you saved her from him.”

Jon huffed. “He hasn’t bothered her in weeks,” he muttered.

“I’m sure it’s because he thinks you two are mated! You stand up for her, you and Kristen attend classes together, eat together for lunch, you’ve taken nighttime walks around the lake together and you sleep in the same bed together. Jon… everyone takes it for granted the two of you are a couple. It’s only natural since you’re both mountain lions and I’ve heard them talking about you being a good match. I’m sure she’s overheard the comments too.”

“Perhaps I should spend less time with her,” Jon grumbled, putting more fasteners in place.

“Jon, all that’s going to do is make her feel worse. Is that fair to her?”

“Is what you’re doing fair to me?” Jon complained. “She and I are already good friends and I like it that way. I don’t see a need to change a thing.”

It was Jenni’s turn to growl. “Typical male,” she said beneath her breath, “and typically blind to women.”

“Jenni, I’m not looking for a relationship beyond friendship.”

“Right, you’ve made that perfectly clear since day one, but she needs a relationship. Like your friend Whelan, she’s here because of a former lover and now she needs to know she’s worth something to someone. She loves your company and would love to have you as more than just a friend.”

Jon challenged her. “You’re just making assumptions that she wants what you think she should want!”

“Assumptions?” she repeated in a very gentle whisper. “I know it as fact because she’s told me. She wants you, Jon. Not some other guy in the institute, and not even one of the other felines. You.”

“Don’t say another word!” the cougar hissed at Jenni. “I don’t need a manipulative woman trying to force me into something I don’t want. I don’t care if you think you’re doing the right thing. Kristen is my friend, not my lover. Got that?”

Jenni glared back at him, her bottom lip protruding slightly. “No, Jon. I don’t get you at all!”

The mountain lion snarled at her, stripped the vest with the pockets full of fasteners from his shoulders and then dropped it to the ground. Without another word, he turned his back on her and stormed off across the compound.

Jenni let out a little shriek of frustration and angrily stomped on the vest he had discarded. Sylvia, Ellie and Carl rushed over to her in concern.

“What was that all about?” Sylvia asked. “Is he alright?”

Jenni scowled and had to fight back the tirade she wanted to fill the air with; instead, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “Personal disagreement,” she replied with a sigh.

“Disagreement?” repeated Carl. “That looked like a temper tantrum to me!”

The feline woman looked at the wolf and affixed him with a look of irritation. “Yes, Carl, that’s exactly what it was. Let the big baby go pout. I’m through with him!” The wolf raised an eyebrow at her answer; Jon had not been the only one to throw a tantrum.

“But… what happened?” Ellie wanted to know.

Jenni swallowed the unkind retort that welled up in her throat. “Forget it…” she muttered. “C’mon, let’s get this stupid dome finished.”

Chapter 33

Coming Up for Air

After Jon stormed away from his argument with Jenni, he did not go back to their Wing, but instead headed out toward the grounds at the back of the complex. He bypassed other activities going on around him in the late morning sun, completely ignoring the curious gazes of onlookers, some of them wondering about the dark expression upon his face. Without even realizing where he was going, the mountain lion followed the walking trail around the lake toward the five-acre clearing on the back of the compound, but when he was on the other side, he stopped and looked around. A gentle breeze made soft waves upon the water of the lake, lapping at the shore and the sides of the floating diving platform anchored out near the middle.

He could hear voices and the sounds of tools used upon whatever tasks they were set upon, but that was back toward the compound. Out here at the lake, the breeze tousled the branches of the surrounding forest. Limbs rubbed upon one another, boughs creaked, and the chirps and tweets of birdsong were all around him in a setting that should have been peaceful.

Jon closed his eyes and tilted his head back, breathing in snorts through flared nostrils in an effort to calm down. He seethed in anger, mad at Jenni and mad at himself. He had become complacent about the changes going on within his body over time, but it seemed that someone always managed to bring that crashing back down around his fuzzy ears. He was trying to get used to being Fur, he really was, but his colleagues would not leave him alone.

What was wrong with them? Jenni knew who he was, why he was there, and she was more than familiar with his feelings on the matter. How was he supposed to live the new life of Jonathan Sunset if she or his housemates continued to hurl the old Brian Barrett back into his face at every opportunity?

Jon opened his eyes and looked at the sunlight reflecting upon the ripples of the water. It looked inviting and he made a quick decision. He took three great strides and then dove into the lake without removing his shorts. He knew that the depth dropped off sharply on this end, but he had no intention of diving deep. He had always loved swimming, was well experienced and he intended to see how quickly he could make it across the lake and back, simply for the purpose of working off the stress of anger.

However, this was the first time he had swam since his arrival at the institution, and he immediately realized that the changes in his body over the past months had altered the way he moved when swimming. The size and shape of his lower limbs operated differently in the water, and his thick rope of a tail created drag where there had been none before. He treaded water for several moments before he figured out just how to adapt to his new configuration. Although he was now partially feline, he had no intention of using a dog-paddle simply on principle. He experimented with short swims back and forth until he felt he found a technique that worked for him.

The distraction had served to calm him a bit, giving him something else to think about, but once he began swimming out across the middle of the lake in powerful strokes, his mind returned to the reason he was out there in the water.

Over the months they had lived together at the Furmankind Institute, Jon had grown closer to his housemates. Dante could still be annoying at times, but the pain of transformation had mellowed him somewhat, making him more bearable to be around. Jenni seemed to be more caring and protective of everyone around her, but that could simply be due to her compassion as a formerly registered nurse. Although he had initially resisted Kristen, she had become a good friend. She seemed to have a curiosity in the things that interested him and the two of them often had lengthy and somewhat animated conversations. It was true that he spent a great deal of time with her, and although he had developed a great fondness for the intelligent woman, it had nothing to do with the fact that she shared his furman species.

In fact, Jon had thought nothing more of their friendship beyond the friendship in itself. He knew she had once had an infatuation with him that undoubtedly had stemmed from that first time that he had warded off Travis’ attempt to drag her off against her will. However, that was almost six months ago – that was plenty of time for such an infatuation born of trauma to fade away, right?

He had grown fond of her, but he had been truthful when he told Jenni that he had harbored no desires for Kristen beyond that of a friend. Over the course of his stay at the Institute, Jon had never considered himself to be anything more than human, no matter what the mirror reflected back at him each morning, so his feelings toward a relationship with a Fur had never changed.

However, Jenni had surprised and shocked him with her argument. Although he still felt like the man he had always been inside, he could not deny that he was now indeed a Fur. He had either become oblivious to this fact over the months since the injection or he had simply suppressed it from the forefront of his consciousness. True, he had known all along that his body was changing, especially with the very real, painful reconfiguration of his limbs, internal organs and everything else about him, but since his mind was unaltered, his sense of self had never truly accepted the fact that he was no longer fully human.

No matter how much he hated this fact about himself, he could no longer have a normal relationship with a woman – a human woman – ever again. If he tried, he would be no better than Henry Parker.

Jon swallowed hard at that thought. Is this the way Parker had felt about himself? Apparently he had had no qualms of an intimate relationship with a human woman, so it was possible that just like himself, Parker had not actually thought of himself as an animal regardless of the transformation he had gone through.

Despite that the late cougar had stolen his fiancé, Jon thought he now understood the guy’s motivation; Rebecca had been an attractive dark-haired beauty. Human or otherwise, though, this did not excuse the fact that Parker had ruined his life by messing around with another man’s woman.

He mused a bit and came to the conclusion that he could no longer use Kristen’s existence as a Fur for his reason to remain friends-only with her. When it came down to it, it was not prejudice that kept him from getting intimate with her – he was simply not interested in a relationship. Perhaps that part of his psyche was burned out after the incident with Rebecca. Whatever the cause, he preferred her as a close friend, but nothing more.

His mind still on these thoughts, Jon reached the opposite end of the lake and immediately pushed off an outcropping of rock back toward the way he had come without consciously thinking of his swimming. He was moving purely on automatic while his mind focused on his dilemma.

If Rebecca had only been friends with Parker and had introduced him to Brian simply as a new acquaintance, he might have become friends with him himself. Instead, Barrett’s first encounter with a Fur had been to catch one in bed with the woman he was about to marry. Had Parker been just another man, he would have faced a jealous fiancé just as countless others had throughout time itself, but since he was a Fur, the horror and hatred escalated for the man whose mate had been taken from him, growing and mutating into a tremendous prejudice against the creations of genetic tinkering.

Jon suddenly bumped into the floating dive platform; he had not realized that he was already halfway back across the lake. He began to haul himself up onto the wooden planks, but paused when he noticed the amount of fresh water already upon it. When he looked up, he was staring into the face of a grizzly bear. Primal fear of suddenly facing a wild animal flashed through Jon’s mind and he swallowed instinctively, but when the bear gave him a wide, human-like grin, the sudden rush of adrenaline began to fade in the cold water.

“Need a hand up?” the wet Fur asked with a massive outstretched hand paw. The bear wore only a pair of black furman shorts like himself. Rather than crawling out, Jon relaxed against the platform with crossed arms upon its edge, but lightly shook his head with a smile.

“Thanks, but I think I’ll stay in the water a little longer,” he said to his new companion.

The grizzly nodded, rolled off his knees, and then sat down near the middle of the small floating platform, letting the water drip from his golden-brown fur. “It’s a good day for a swim, isn’t it?” he said in idle conversation. There was a rumble beneath the low-pitched voice, but it was not threatening.

“Yeah, the water feels good,” the cougar agreed, willing himself to relax. “I don’t think we’ve met before. My name’s Jon Sunset.”

The bear looked over at him. “I am Hiamovi Avonaco. I was in Class Fifteen.”

“Haya... movie?”

The grizzly laughed. “Hee-ya-moe-vee Aay-von-ah-ko…” he pronounced. “I was originally Cheyenne before I became Ursis. If it helps, you may call me Avon like everyone else does.”

Jon could not help but grin. “Avon, eh? Are you about to give me your door-to-door sales pitch?”

The bear snickered and shook his head, used to a lifetime of jokes along those lines. “Not unless your fur needs a floral scent.”

Jon chuckled and put his chin down upon his arms before him. “Thanks, but no,” he replied.

“I’ve seen you around, but this is the first chance I’ve had to talk with you. Do you mind if I ask you something?”

Jon looked up at him, moving only his eyes. “Feel free to ask,” he responded, “but I’m not in the best of moods right now. I don’t guarantee an answer.”

“Fair enough. I wouldn’t expect you to spill all your secrets upon a first meeting anyway.”

“Okay, what is it you wish to know?”

Avon sat cross-legged and put his hands upon each knee before looking down at the feline. “I don’t know if your class has covered the colonial hierarchies yet,” he began, “but every time the AHCP prepares to send out another starter colony, a committee establishes the leader of that group long before its ship ever sets out from Earth. That leader is appointed by the committee, so that job is not up for a vote by the other colonists. Months before the ship goes out, that selectee is given extra training needed for leading his or her people through five years of survival. No matter what happens, that leader is to remain impartial without playing favorites, keeping the colony’s best interests in the foreground at all times, and making sure everyone stays healthy as long as possible.”

“Yeah, one of our instructors covered that,” Jon confirmed. “That’s got to be quite a task for whoever is chosen.”

Avon nodded. “Exactly. Although we still have no assignment, the director has confirmed that the next group to go out will be made up of Ursis volunteers taken from all four Furmankind Institutes.”

“Are you going to be their leader?” Jon asked lazily, beginning to feel calm from both the hard swim and the sun warming the fur of his back.

The grizzly chuckled. “As a matter of fact, I am. I have already begun my administrative training and the current Ursis volunteers around the world already know it will be me.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. As you said, this is going to be a tremendous task with a lot of responsibilities. It also takes the cooperation of the rest of the group to make it work.”

“Don’t I know it,” Jon replied drowsily. “I’ve been an administrator, myself. It takes a lot of skill, leadership and a great deal of luck to corral a group of dissimilar people into a team, especially if you’re going to be saddled with Furs transformed at other locations around the world that you won’t know very well – if at all. I wish you all the luck.”

Avon smiled. “That’s all true and this is why I wanted to talk to you. I would like to recommend you as the leader of the Felis group when it finally gets its assignment.”

Jon looked up at him in surprise, now fully alert, but then he began to laugh. To suggest that a convicted killer and a confessed hater of Furs be put in charge of a group of them would never be accepted by Stockholm.

“Why are you laughing?” the bear asked with a puzzled look. “Is the idea so preposterous?”

Jon shook his head and then dipped one hand into the water. He splashed some of it into the fur of his face and upon the back of his neck before he responded. “Yeah, I think it would be,” he told him.

“Why?”

“Let’s just say that the others would never accept me as their leader. I get along with them okay most of the time, but there’s friction to be sure. I just had a heated argument with one of my housemates, which is why I’m out here instead of back there building a dome. I needed a time-out to cool down.”

Avon looked back at him in amusement. Jon didn’t understand the look and it showed on his face. “Jon,” the grizzly said, “I don’t mean to make light of your situation, but I’ve heard good things about you from others in your class that suggests that you might be the right one for the job.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes, really. You’ve stood up for a housemate when she needed it, prevented a rape, you’ve befriended the whole Ursis Wing of your class and have been instrumental in helping one of them who’s had a tough time with his transformation. A young fox away from home for the first time was frightened of a Wing full of females when he got here and you invited him to join you in your activities. You’re courteous to anyone you speak to and you never refuse help to anyone who asks.” Avon gave him another smile. “Jon, those are all the qualities of someone that others look up to, and that’s the kind of things Stockholm looks for in their leaders.”

The mountain lion ducked his head beneath the water momentarily and then resurfaced, snorting water from his nostrils. “There must be a lot of wagging tongues since you seem to be well informed, but are you also aware of how many times I’ve gotten into trouble with management and one of the other volunteers? I can’t seem to stay out of trouble down here or even while I was up on the space station, and I’ve been anything but impartial. My record here is far from spotless, Mr. Avonaco, and neither is my past life as a human.”

Avon waved a hand idly through the air. “Trouble follows even the good people, Jon. No one is expected to be perfect, not you and certainly not me.”

“I have dark shadows in my past that the AHCP knows about,” Jon mumbled. “That alone would keep me out of the driver’s seat you want to put me in. It’s probably for the best, though.”

“For the best?” Avon would not give up. “Come on, Jon. It’s not like you’ve killed anyone now, is it?”

Jon ducked his head beneath the water again so his companion wouldn’t see the expression on his face for that comment. He resurfaced after a long moment, again snorting water from his nose and then wiped a hand across his face fur. He looked up at the grizzly and shook his head. “Thanks, my friend, but it’s not going to happen.”

Avon finally sighed. “You’re really adamant about not wanting to lead your group,” he said. “Was today’s argument with your housemate really that bad?”

Jon looked up at the sky over the lake. The breezes down at the ground level were slight, but up higher in the canopy the winds were causing the treetops to sway. He listened to the rustle of limbs for a moment so that when he answered a moment later, he was more relaxed.

“Just because one of my housemates is of the same species of feline that I am, everyone’s trying to play matchmaker,” he explained. “It’s not enough that the two of us are good friends, but everyone else wants us mated, and I do mean that in a physical sense. My argument was with my other female housemate, who is just as adamant about getting us together as I am to keep things as they are.”

“What does Kristen think of this?” Avon asked curiously, showing that he knew more details that he had let on. Jon let it slide and just put his chin down on the wooden platform.

“From what I’ve been told, she’s all for it.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

Jon gave him a look of frustration. “Did Jenni put you up to this so you could lean on me too?”

The grizzly looked affronted at the accusation. “No, she didn’t,” Avon retorted. “I’m just curious.”

“I thought curiosity was a feline trait,” Jon responded with a smirk. “Usually fatal.”

Avon shook his head. “We’re going to be explorers of an alien world, Jon. We’ve all got to be curious.”

“Right.”

“So, what is the problem you have with Ms. Kristen? I was under the impression that the two of you were already a couple, just as the Amaranths are a mated pair.”

Jon sighed. “You noted that I had stopped someone from pulling Kristen away against her will, possibly preventing a rape. It was because of that incident that she ultimately chose to take on the same feline form that I was taking. It wasn’t something I’d agreed upon, and we are not a mated pair; I even tried to talk her out of if before she got her injection. She’s the one who thinks we should be more than just friends, and with you it seems like she’s got the whole institution on her side.”

“You’re lucky,” Avon commented. “Even combined, the Ursis classes are lopsided. We have more males than females, so that when we finally get out there somewhere to set up a starter colony, we’re going to have tension right off the bat. One of our girls here isn’t too picky about whom she cuddles up to, but the other is just as resistant to the males as you are with your female.”

“She’s not my female!” Jon complained.

“You know, for someone who claims to have no interest in a relationship, you do spend a great deal of time in her company. You two are always seen together around the complex.”

“We’re just friends!” Jon complained again.

“But she wants more, is that right?”

“Right… that’s right.”

Avon shook his head. “Are you afraid of a pregnancy?” he asked in a lowered voice. “Your doctor should be able to provide you with —”

The cougar held up a hand, stopping the bear’s comments in their tracks. He knew he could not reveal his longstanding prejudice against Furs to Avon, and he certainly could not tell him about his true background, so he had to think fast to come up with a plausible explanation.

The face of Lloyd Gibson suddenly sprang to mind. He blinked at the unexpected memory of the minister who had visited him in prison and grasped at the lifeline presented to him. It would be an outright lie, but it should serve his purpose.

“Mr. Avon,” he said tentatively, “it’s simply a matter of personal upbringing. I like Kristen a lot, but I’m old fashioned and my religious beliefs prevent me from engaging in premarital sex. She and I may have chosen the same Felis species and have grown to be close friends, but despite everyone’s attempts at matchmaking, I’m not willing to push our friendship to that level.”

Avon nodded with a new light of understanding. “Such family values are indeed rare these days, Jon, but I understand and even admire you for them.”

“Finally, someone sides with me!” Jon muttered. “Now, can you spread the word so everyone will stop trying to get us together? We aren’t married, but I’m not ready to make that kind of a commitment, to her or anyone else. I simply wish we could be left alone to be friends.”

The grizzly bear nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” he promised, “but that aside, I do wish you would reconsider letting me recommend you as leadership material to Stockholm.”

Jon gifted him with an easy smile. “I really appreciate the honor you want to bestow upon me, but for now all I want to be is just another Fur. I’ve had painful difficulties with the transformation, both physical and mental, but I’m trying to come to grips with the changes without having additional responsibilities thrust upon me. I don’t mind having duties, but I have no aspirations for herding cats as their leader.”

“Ah well, at least I had to try,” Avon acquiesced, looking around. “It looks like the groups have let out for lunch, so I’m going to head back in. You coming?”

“No, not just yet.”

“Well, good luck with your housemates, Jon.”

“Thanks, I’ll need it.”

The large Ursis gave him a nod and then slipped off into the water to begin his swim back to shore. Jon watched him idly until he got to the bank and then pulled himself up onto the diving platform. He heard a few nearby voices, but he paid them no mind. He rolled over onto his back and closed his eyes, letting the sun warm his fur.

The voices erupted into laughter and then he heard several splashes in the lake. Jon was relaxed and kept his eyes closed, but after several minutes, he felt the platform sway in the water beneath him. There were giggling whispers all around and even with his eyes closed, the mountain lion knew he was surrounded, and from their scents, who they were. Remembering the big snowball fight back in the winter, a water battle seemed imminent.

Chapter 34

Nothing but an Animal

Jon walked into the Felis Wing, his fur damp and his jaw rigid and firm. Marcy looked up from her seat in front of the large video screen where she was reading her PBJ and both eyebrows raised high on her forehead when she realized he wore nothing but his coat of fur. He pointedly did not look at the woman when he walked past her to the linen closet. He grabbed a large towel from the top shelf and then disappeared into the restroom.

Several minutes later, the nurse looked up again when Jenni and Kristen trotted into the Wing, laughing and chatting animatedly between themselves. Like Jon, their fur was damp, but rather than moving with slow deliberate steps, they were rushing to get to the closet towels before they dripped too much water on the carpet. Unlike Jon, however, both were still in their furman garments, though the shorts and tops were soaked.

“Ladies!” Marcy called above their chatter. “What on earth is going on?”

Standing upon a large towel that Kristen had put down for them on the carpet, Jenni gave the nurse a large smirk. “Jon was being a hothead today, so we dunked him in the lake!”

Marcy put a hand up to her mouth, unsuccessfully trying to hide her smile. “He marched through here a moment ago, naked as the day we put you up against the black wall. I could almost see steam coming out of his ears!”

Kristen grinned at the woman and laughed. “Cheryl got his shorts,” she reported with a smug smile. “She’s treating them as a trophy!”

“She was there too?”

Both women wrapped themselves up in towels and then shimmied out of their wet garments, letting them fall to the floor towels at their feet. “Marcy,” Jenni said through a continuous wide grin, “I think all the Furs on the compound were there!”

“Okay, this is a story I’ve got to hear,” Marcy said with a chuckle, setting her PBJ on the small table beside her.

“Jon had taken a swim and was lying on his back on the platform in the middle of the lake,” Kristen said, patting her fur with her towel. “Jenni said that he’d blown up at her earlier and had gone out to the lake to sulk.”

“What was the issue?”

Kristen shook her head, looking askance at the female leopard. “She wouldn’t tell me.”

“That’s not important now,” Jenni remarked.

“Anyway,” Kristen continued, “our instructors released us for the afternoon, saying it was getting too humid to do much outside, and when we realized that Jon was out at the lake, several of us agreed that it was a good way to cool off. Jenni, Cheryl, Jasmine, Dahlia and I gathered in the water and decided to gang up on him.”

“Whose idea was that?” Marcy asked with a smile.

Jenni held up a hand with a guilty expression. “Mine. I thought the hothead could use some cooling off, so me and the girls snuck up on him. Cheryl crawled up onto the platform with him to allay his suspicions while the rest of us made our plans.”

“While she kept him engaged in idle conversation,” Kristen supplied, “I innocently crawled up beside her, and then the two of us pounced on him! We grabbed him at the same time, but I think he suspected what we were trying to do. We tried to pull him over the edge, but he resisted until we simply dropped and let our combined weight overbalance him. We all fell off into the water and then Jenni, Jasmine and Dahlia pounced too. “

“The five of us wrestled with him in the water until Jon finally gave in and fought back, trying to dunk each of us.”

“Was he mad?”

Kristen shook her head. “Not really; he seemed relieved to have a distraction, actually. By this time, others saw us playing in the water and then it looked like a swarm of Furs descending upon the lake as if it was a mass migration!”

“You should have seen it, Marcy!” Jenni laughed. “It was a free-for-all with Furs from both classes! I think just about everybody was there, all splashing, swimming and dunking one another.”

“Wow, I don’t think we’ve ever had that many in the lake all at once before,” Marcy remarked with a smile. “It must have been some sight!”

“I think Sissy took pictures, so it might show up on her daily report,” Kristen said, squatting down to wrap up her wet clothes in the floor towel; Jenni did the same.

“So… how did Jon lose his shorts to Cheryl?”

Jenni smirked impishly. “She stalked him across the lake like a shark on a hunt. He almost got away from her, but she snagged his shorts by the tail strap and he slipped out of them trying to get away. When he tried to get them back, we all took turns tossing them to one another.”

“Is that when he got mad? He didn’t look too happy when he came in.”

“Yeah, none of us would give them back to him, so he finally swam to shore and stalked off across the grounds grumbling to himself in nothing but his fur!”

“He walked bare all the way from the lake to the Felis Wing?” Marcy asked in awe. “Brave man.”

“With his fur soaked with water, there was nothing fluffed up to hide anything from onlookers!” Jenni cackled. “He didn’t even try to cover himself up with his hands – he just stormed away as if he didn’t care who saw him!”

“Did he go to his room?” Kristen asked. “We need to apologize to him.”

“He grabbed a towel and headed for the showers just a moment ago.”

“Same as us,” Jenni replied. She gestured toward the restroom with a tilt of her head, and then Kristen followed her. Marcy gave them a casual wave and then shook her head with a smile as she retrieved her PBJ. She opened its clamshell case and returned to her reading, but then she heard the outer door of the Wing open again. Dante sauntered in leisurely, his hands in the pockets of his wet furman shorts.

“Hey, Marcy,” he said casually.

“Dante! You’re getting the carpet wet!”

The white tiger looked down at the damp flooring beneath his feet. “Oops,” he replied with a smile. He picked up his pace and headed straight for the restroom with his collar tag jingling, clearly forgetting to grab a towel. Marcy shook her head again, but this time with a sigh of frustration at the wet carpeting.

She closed her PBJ, set it aside once more, and then walked over to the linen closet. She grabbed up several towels and then got down on her knees on the carpet to daub up water from the carpet before it had a chance to start mildewing in the humid weather.

***

Wandering through the forest on the back side of the Furmankind Institute’s grounds during the evening gave Jon the opportunity to leave the others behind at times when he needed the quiet solitude to deal with his thoughts and emotions.

Avon was right in that he had spent a good deal of his time helping others, but that was the way he had been brought up. Despite this, the grizzly bear’s intentions had been groundless, as Stockholm would never allow someone like himself to lead others in a faraway colony; he was here to be punished.

He felt there was little need for Avon to start promoting him anyway; planets approved for starter colonies were few and far between, and it had already been announced that the next world opened for them would be for an Ursis group. It might be several years before other habitable planets were available and there was no guarantee the Felis would be sent to the next one to tame. In all likelihood, Jon would probably be sent to other places across the Earth for further training for that one day when he might be banished out among the stars. Of course, he thought wryly, if he ran up against others out there with the same opinion of Furs as himself, he might never see the stars at all.

Jon walked until he could no longer hear noises from the compound, and as the evening sky grew darker, his enhanced hearing began to pick up sounds of nocturnal critters coming alive in the forest to begin their nightly tasks. He could also detect the gentle gurgle of a stream or brook somewhere close.

The mountain lion crept forward for several moments before he stopped and crouched near a large evergreen tree. Although he had not been consciously aware of it, Jon’s digitigrade leg structure had allowed him to get down upon all fours beside the tree and the padding that had developed on the palms of his short-fingered hands protected him from the natural debris of the forest floor.

Looking over a slight drop in the ground level, he peered out over a small brook. He became perfectly still, only his nostrils flaring as he took in the scents around him. The waning sunlight provided his night vision with ample illumination to see a reddish-brown muskrat at the water’s edge, its small front feet digging at cattail roots in the soft mud near the bank. The movement held his rapt attention and he caught himself wondering what muskrat would taste like to his new palate.

Taut muscles rippling along his back, Jon crept forward ever so slightly, not making even the barest of sounds, his neck craned forward, feline ears erect and whiskers quivering. The muskrat was unsuspecting for several long moments, but then the gentle breeze wafting through the trees changed direction and the furman’s strange scent stopped its movements. The scent was an unfamiliar mix that it was not sure it recognized, but caution was so ingrained that it began to move into the water where it would be safer.

Jon’s leg muscles sprang into action, propelling him quickly down the short embankment toward the brook. He hit the water with a mighty splash, his head down and his long, thick tail out behind him for balance. He darted quickly with his hand paws, but it was his teeth that caught the furred flesh of the muskrat between his fangs. The small creature shrieked and wriggled to get loose, but powerful feline jaw muscles clamped down and ended its struggles with a crunch.

Exhilarated and triumphant, Jon backed out of the water and took his prize back up the embankment. He lay down on a bed of leaves and pine needles and began to eat all three pounds of the aquatic animal. The taste of fresh blood and raw meat on his tongue was like nothing he had ever eaten before and he discovered that he liked it very much. The evening meal settled into his stomach and he wondered why he did not feel full.

What he did feel, however, was curious warmth in his gut that radiated quickly throughout his entire body. He wondered at the sensation, but almost immediately began to grow concerned, for the warmth heated up too rapidly and it did not take long before he felt like his entire nervous system was burning. Fire shot through his limbs and across the surface of his skin beneath his fur.

The sudden intense pain took him by surprise and robbed him of his breath. He began to pant heavily and tried to get up to his feet, but even his extremities were burning with so much agony that he looked down at his fingers and toes, sure that flames must be engulfing them. The darkness of the night was growing blacker, though sparks were beginning to ping off the internal nerves of his eyeballs as well.

He wanted to scream out in terror, but the muscles in his throat constricted so that the only sound that escaped him was a feline shriek that tore through the night air. He tried again, but the unearthly sound that issued from his mouth set even his own teeth on edge.

The burning intensified and every hair in his pelt felt as if each should be curling up and smoking from the fires within. His muscles quivered in spasms that shook his whole body, and when he looked through the sparks at his right hand, he saw the fingers shriveling up before his eyes as the hand itself deformed into something no longer human.

Despite the fire and agonizing pain, a thought somehow crossed his mind that something had gone terribly wrong with the furmankind process. Over the past six months, the transformation had reconfigured his body into a hybrid of human and feline DNA, but something had triggered an acceleration of mutation and he did not believe that eating the muskrat could have done it.

He screamed again as his body contorted to the reshaping of his entire structure, the agony of reformed flesh, bone and fur reminiscent of what the werewolves of legend must have endured. The difference was that he had already been a cross between man and animal, but now he was beyond that. He was going all the way, transforming completely into a mountain lion!

He thrashed around on the ground in mindless terror. He could feel his humanity slipping away as feline instincts took over and his sense of self faded rapidly into the darkness. He tried to cry out for help, hoping someone would hear him and bring an antidote to quench the fires within, but the only thing his voice could produce was the feline scream of a terrified cougar.

Tears flowed freely from his eyes, born of both pain and despair. He had long feared that he would lose his humanity with the furman transformation and now those fears were realized in the most painful way imaginable.

Moments passed and then the agony had grown too much for his fading cognizance to endure. The cougar’s large golden eyes rolled up into his head and then he collapsed against a rotting log. The writhing body became still and the panting wheezes subsided to little more than shallow breaths.

The forest fell quiet in the sudden absence of the commotion. The turmoil brought on by the large cat’s pain and anguish had silenced the night sounds utterly, so that only the faint rustle of leaves in the breeze was the only thing to be heard.

Then after many long moments of quiet, nocturnal creatures and insects resumed their nightly endeavors. A flying squirrel landed effortlessly on the branch of a tree above the unmoving cougar, studying the great cat with suspicion, but it seemed that whatever danger it might have presented was no longer a concern. The squirrel launched itself out toward another tree, going about its business.

The night pressed on, unmindful of human clocks designed to mark the passage of time, and soon the mountain lion began to draw in gasping gulps of air into its lungs. The animal opened its eyes and blinked rapidly in disorientation. It chuffed several times to clear its throat and then it got up onto its four feet. The tawny cat looked around and raised its broad head to sniff at the breeze. Instinct and the smell of blood reminded it had eaten recently, so there was no need to hunt, but there was another, new scent upon the air that it did not recognize.

Leaving the brook behind, the mountain lion set out to search for the source of an intruder into the forest. Although the ground was covered in old leaves and pine needles, the great cat moved quietly through the trees and underbrush, its padded feet effortlessly finding silent avenues in the darkness of night.

The cougar stopped to listen. The snap of a stick reached its ears, its origin up a rocky rise to the left. It sniffed the air and the odd scent seemed to emanate from that direction. The cat proceeded up the slope, its movement slower but precise.

Another sound, something scraped against rock. The mountain lion crept forward, its body closer to the ground, until its nose topped the rise. Twenty yards ahead was a silhouette outlined against the sky above. The feline did not recognize this tall, bipedal shape, but apparently the creature was not yet aware of the cougar’s presence.

Then a sudden illumination from the intruder’s upper limbs momentarily blinded the cat and it recoiled in sudden surprise. The silhouette looked up at the sound and raised the cigarette lighter in his hands. The circle of light revealed the cougar’s face peering at him over the rise of the hill and the man in camouflaged clothing scrambled to pull something off his shoulder.

When the mountain lion saw the hunter level a long black stick toward it, something buried in the feline’s memory said ‘danger! Run!’ The cougar stood up to get away quickly, but a sudden boom louder than any crack of thunder or lightning flashed bright light in the darkness. Then something slammed hard into his right shoulder.

The mountain lion screamed in the darkness as another boom came accompanied by searing pain. The cat tried to run away, but something was wrong with its legs. It stumbled down the hill and then fell headlong into a hard rocky surface.

The tawny cat bounced off the immovable object and he quickly cradled his head with both hands, both eyes squeezed tightly shut. Tears escaped into his cheek fur and it was moments before he could raise his head again. When he did, Jon opened his eyes and saw the illuminated numbers of the clock beside his bed. It was just a few minutes past one o’clock in the morning and he was on the floor beside his dresser.

Disoriented and confused, he raised a hand up in front of his eyes and even in the dim illumination coming from under the bottom edge of his room’s door he could tell that the limb before him was that of a Fur, not a fully formed cougar.

Jon swallowed with difficulty and pulled himself up onto the edge of his mattress. His throat was sore and dry, so he reached for the bottle of water he normally kept on the lamp table beside the clock. The bottle was empty and he dropped it to the floor in frustration.

He looked across the bed, expecting to see Kristen’s sleeping form in the darkness, but he was alone in the small room. He gathered up his wits and his courage and then stumbled to the door. When he opened the panel, he saw all three of his housemates at the far end of the saloon, each occupying seats in front of the large screen where they watched a recently made movie into the early hours of the night. He vaguely remembered being invited to join them, but he had begged off, citing the stresses of the day having left him exhausted.

One foot was tingling, the only part of him actually asleep at that moment, and he stomped it on the floor as he walked around the common area pit and across the large room. The stomping drew the attention of his housemates and Dante paused the movie to look back at him.

“Hey, old man,” the white tiger said over his shoulder, raising the remote in greeting. “You come to join us after all? It’s almost over now.”

Jon rubbed a hand across his face and shook his head. “I’ve gotta go back,” he murmured, brushing aside the long red bangs of his human scalp hair.

“You’re going where?” Jenni asked, looking at him over the back of her chair. When she saw his disheveled appearance, she frowned deeply. “Wow, Jon, what happened to you?”

“I’ve gotta go back,” Jon mumbled again. He stomped the foot that had fallen asleep, but didn’t stop beside his housemates. Instead, he made his way to the double doors of the Felis Wing lab. When he got to the door, he raised a fist and pounded on the panel.

“I’ve gotta go back!” he yelled at it.

“Go back where?” Kristen inquired, suddenly concerned for her friend.

“I can’t take this anymore!” Jon shouted as he pounded on the door again. “I don’t want to be a stinkin’ cat! I want to be human again!”

Dante shook his head. “Sorry, guy. You know what the Doc told us. This is a one-way trip, Jon. There’s no going back.”

“I don’t want this!” Jon shouted. “I want to be human again!”

Impatient to get back to his movie, Dante growled in frustration. “Hey, just remember that you’re here because you wanted to escape a death sentence! You may be part cat, but at least you’re still alive!”

Jon ignored him and pounded again on the lab door, but this time it opened and Don Renwick groggily looked out at him in irritation.

“What’s the matter, Jon?” he asked, gathering a thin cotton robe around him. “I heard you shouting something about going back. Back where?”

The cougar furman pushed his way into the lab, leaving the others behind. Renwick looked in at him in surprise and waved a hand toward him. “Jon, stop! You aren’t allowed in here.”

“I’ve got to go back, Doc,” the feline’s voice cracked as he paced back and forth across the room. “I can’t do this anymore. Tell Marcelo that I want to try the reverse formula — it didn’t work for that canine woman, but it might for me!”

The physician put his hands into the pockets of his robe. “We can’t do that,” he replied patiently. “Stockholm won’t authorize it again.” Then after studying his companion’s distraught expression, he asked, “Jon, what’s happened? I thought you’d come to terms with what you’re becoming.”

The feline furman rubbed his face. “Nightmares, Doc; lucid like the ones I had on the space station. I’ve been having a lot of them lately and they’re getting more intense. Tonight was the worst yet, where I dreamed the process didn’t stop with me going halfway between human and animal. I became a mindless creature in the woods, with no thread of my humanity left to me.” He shook his head violently from side to side. “I’m afraid that’s what will really happen to me!”

Doctor Renwick nodded as if realization dawned on him. “Jon, this is a time in your development where the chemical generators in your brain are in flux. For months, you’ve experienced numerous physical changes, but now your brain itself is undergoing chemical alterations. It’s a natural part of the process. A byproduct of this action is increased dreaming.”

“No, I don’t think it was a dream, it was a premonition! This is where I lose my humanity, isn’t it?”

“Jon, you will never lose your humanity, but you will gain more elements of the feline. The chemical imbalance may put you all on edge for a while, and is likely the cause of your recent nightmares, but you will come through it just fine — just as have all the others before you.”

“You’re lying! This is what I’ve been afraid of all along — I’m losing myself!”

“Jon, stop! You’re okay — really!”

“I don’t believe you!” He looked up with a wild glint in his eyes and then grabbed the doctor by the shoulders. “Before it gets worse — if you can’t change me back, you’ve got to kill me!”

“Jon, that’s not —”

“Please! I don’t want to be a mindless animal!”

“Jon, you’re not —”

“I should have been executed anyway!”

Renwick cleared his throat. “Jon, it’s long been too late for that. Too much time and money has been invested in saving you and implementing your transformation. There will be no executions here.”

The mountain lion looked at him sharply. “You knew?” he asked incredulously. “You’ve known all along who I am, who I was?”

The doctor nodded. “Marcelo thought it best if I was aware of your past and just what it would mean to you while going through the program.”

A look of rage flashed across Jon’s face. He rushed forward and towered over the physician. “I should kill you right now,” he said with bared teeth.

Undaunted, Renwick merely raised an eyebrow. “What purpose would that serve? I’m the one keeping you alive.”

“Kill me,” Jon said.

“That’s not an option.”

“Kill me,” Jon repeated with anguish. “Please!”

“No.”

The cougar reached out and grabbed the doctor by the throat with a swift hand, putting his claw tips just over the man’s jugular vein. “I’ve heard the suicide by cop scenario is effective,” Jon growled. “If you won’t kill me, then I’ll have to kill you. The authorities will have no choice but to shoot me dead!”

Despite the fact that a hybrid of human and mountain lion had him by the throat in a tight grip, Renwick was used to such mood swings by volunteers he had worked with in the past. He knew the potential for danger was there, but he looked into Jon’s eyes with a piercing directness of his own.

“Even if you murder me, you won’t get your way,” he wheezed through the fingers clutching his throat, making it hard to speak. “You would be sedated, but not destroyed. Surgery to your brain would wipe your memories, Jon, to make you a simpleton to be retrained as the Institute sees fit.”

Jon relaxed his grip slightly, his eyes growing wide.

“This is typical of convicted Death Row inmates who undergo the process such as you,” Renwick added hoarsely, “and this would have already been done to you had the judge not granted you mercy and left your memories intact. Kill me and I would be dead, but that would not change your future.”

Jon stared at him in disbelief. He literally held the doctor’s life in his hands and he could easily snap the human’s neck or rip out his throat, yet Renwick betrayed no fear of him. Instead, he coldly gave him the facts on what he could expect, and with the realization that he could be turned into a mindless animal anyway, a chill coursed its way up and down his spine.

Jon released the doctor and stumbled away. He found a roller stool near the wall, sat down on it hard and then buried his face in his hands. It took every bit of the strength he had left to keep from shaking in despair, and that in itself made him feel weak.

A moment later, he felt a gentle hand upon his shoulder. When he peered up through moist eyes, Renwick looked back at him with such compassion that Jon had never seen from the doctor before.

“Jon,” he said quietly in a raspy voice, rubbing his throat, “you have no reason to be afraid. Your past is behind you and you have a long future ahead of you. I have sworn to make sure that the transformation goes as planned and that you are strong and healthy when the process has finished. Yes, you’ve experienced more pain and agony in the last six months than most people ever will in their entire lifetimes, and I can’t disguise that there will be more before it’s over, but I promise you that we will all help you become the furman you are destined to be. Your memories, your mind, will and emotions will all be intact — your humanity will be intact. You won’t lose yourself to the animal, but you will have to embrace him in order to survive.”

He squatted down in front of the feline and patted his furry knee. “Don’t be afraid, Jon. The nightmares may be intense and you are likely to have more of them, but remember that’s all they are, bad dreams and nothing else. Your subconscious is feeding on the fears you’ve harbored ever since you got here, but know in your heart and in your mind that you’re going to be okay. We’ve been doing this process for many years and we haven’t lost anyone in a long, long time.”

Jon swallowed and cleared his throat. He wanted to believe the doctor’s words were true — he really wanted to believe, but it would take an incredible strength to convince himself of this. He searched the physician’s eyes for any sign of deception, but could find none. Finally, he nodded and sat up straighter on the stool.

“I’ve never really believed in shrinks,” he said in a quiet voice, “but I think after this, I’m going to need a session with Professor Flynn.”

“That’s what she’s here for, Jon. She may not have all your answers, but sometimes all it takes is for someone to listen when you need to get things off your chest.”

“I have just one question.”

“Yes?”

“My housemates know of my past, but it was an accident that they found out. Marcelo knows everything, and you apparently know some of it yourself. Does Professor Flynn know too?”

Renwick stood up, moved to a wall mirror and rubbed his sore throat again. There were tiny pinpricks in the skin where the claws had rested, but there would be no lasting damage. “Honestly, I don’t know, Jon. It wouldn’t surprise me if she did, but if Marcelo has told her, I’m not aware of it. Even if I hadn’t been informed of your background, I sincerely doubt I would have ever known it from her. Angelina is completely trustworthy, I assure you. Do you want me to set up a time with her for you?”

Jon let out a long sigh and finally nodded. “I think it’s time I got to know her,” he said at last, “but there’s no need to bother her tonight. I’ll look her up myself tomorrow. For now, I think I need to go back to bed and see if I can make it through the rest of the night without another panic attack.”

“Do you want something to help you sleep?”

He shook his head. “No, I think I’ve stressed myself so much today that exhaustion is about to kick in. I’ll be surprised if I even dream at all now. I’m about ready to collapse.”

“Okay, then. Why don’t you get yourself a cool drink of water and then go back to your bed? We’ll talk again in the morning and you can let me know if you’ve had any more trouble.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Jon said with genuine emotion. “I really appreciate what you did for me tonight, and I’m sorry for choking you. Sometimes it takes a hard reminder to get through this thick skull of mine. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome and forgiven. Now, get some rest. You need it.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Jon replied with a weary smile. “Good night.”

Renwick gestured toward the door and the mountain lion took the direction. The doctor shut the lab doors behind him and then Jon walked quietly toward his housemates, feeling guilty about the scene he had caused, especially with the doctor. The movie was just ending and it was several moments before any of them realized that he had joined them.

“Well, if it isn’t the mad cat,” Dante taunted with an eye on an escape route across the room in case the cougar came after him.

After what Jon had just gone through, the large cougar was instantly irritated by Dante’s ribbing. He took three steps toward him and the white tiger made a hasty retreat toward the front door of the building. He stopped at the hall lined with past furman portraits and peered back at Jon from the corner wall, but there was no amusement in his eyes now.

The mountain lion stopped and dropped into Dante’s vacated chair, feeling weary. Jenni remained in her seat, her hands together in her lap, but Kristen immediately took up a position behind him to give his shoulders a tentative rub.

“Are you okay?” she asked quietly.

Jon looked back at her and nodded. “I will be,” he replied. “I had a nightmare, a panic attack, and the good doctor gave me a stern talking-to.”

“You looked like you were pretty frantic,” Jenni ventured.

He gave her a weary smile and got back up to his feet. “I was frantic, but I think I’m better now. All I need is some rest.”

The mountain lioness stepped around him tentatively, but when he merely looked down at her, she stretched out her arms and then wrapped them around his middle. “You look like you could use a hug,” she told him, resting her head on his shoulder.

The large furman slipped his arms around her in agreement. “Yes, after today, I definitely need a hug. Thanks, Kris.”

“Well, isn’t that special!” Dante commented with a cackle. He had snuck back toward the group, and the pair of cougars looked back just in time to see he and Jenni hug one another comically with wide flailing arms and exaggerated grins.

“D’awwwwww…” Jenni remarked in a childish voice. “He wuvs me!”

The levity broke Jon’s irritation at the other male. He looked down at Kristen and the two of them chuckled together. He waved a hand casually in the air and shook his head. “All right, you yahoos. I’m going back to bed.”

When he turned to go, Kristen turned with him. He looked down at her and suddenly looked solemn. “If you don’t mind,” he said gently, “I think I need to sleep alone tonight.”

The short botanist looked hurt. “Are you sure?” she whispered as they walked across the saloon. “You really look like you need the comfort of someone beside you after your panic attack.”

“Thanks, Kris, but I’ve got some thinking to do before I drift back off to sleep and I don’t need the distraction. Doctor Renwick gave me something serious to mull over.”

“Perhaps you should see the counselor. She helped me through a rough time a few months back, and I’ve seen her a few times since.”

“Believe it or not, that’s one of the things Doc suggested. Now I need to figure out just how much of my background she needs to know when I talk to her.”

“Does Doctor Renwick know?”

“Yeah, he told me Marcelo gave him the details when I first arrived, but I’m not sure about Professor Flynn.”

“I won’t distract you,” Kristen tried again.

Jon shook his head and touched her gently on the arm. “Not this time, Kris. I appreciate the offer, but this is an occasion I really need some alone time.”

She didn’t look convinced, but she finally nodded. “Okay,” she whispered, “but if you have another nightmare, don’t hesitate to crawl in beside me in my room. I’ll behave.”

“Thanks. Good night, Kris.”

She looked up at him with a smile. “Good night, Jon-boy. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Chapter 35

A Shot in the Dark

Dante wiped his eyes and reached out for the coffee pot on the kitchen counter. Despite all the changes he had endured over the past months, he was glad that he had never lost his taste for coffee. So many things were different now, but he needed his wake-up vice in the morning, especially after a restless night.

He poured the dark liquid into a white cup decorated with a smiling black kitty, and when the aroma caressed his feline nose, his expression quickly mirrored the one on the cup. His appearance may have altered, but he still enjoyed his coffee. All it needed was a touch of cream and it would be perfect.

He no longer resembled the ‘before’ photograph of himself hanging in the entry hall of the Wing, but that did not bother him. He had always known that no matter what he went through, he was going to enjoy being a Fur. Although he had originally joined the AHCP as a desperate attempt at life when things were bleak, he had grasped the concept of a Fur wholeheartedly. He had regular meals, a place to stay, new friends, a job for life and a future. The changes had given him robust stamina like he had never had in his life, he was taller due to digitigrade legs and feet, his sight and hearing were many times more sensitive than any human’s, and despite even the worst of the pain from the transformations, he was a good sight healthier than he had ever been too.

Dante Capanari liked being a Fur, and although he knew that he would ultimately be going out into deep space to some strange new world, he planned to make the most of his life. The white tiger that stared back at him in the mirror each morning was a welcome friend.

In recent weeks, he and his housemates had been taking regular sessions with Professor Angelina Flynn, the Furmankind Institute’s resident psychologist, but he never felt he had any real issues to work out with her. He spent most of his time praising the people and methods of the place, always looking forward to learning new things that would be helpful in starting up a new colony.

He had to admit that some of his nights were not exactly peaceful, though. He could never recall any details the next morning, but his sleep was often disturbed by terrible, nightmarish dreams, much like the one he had last night. Professor Flynn always pressed him gently for details of the nightmares, but he could never recall them. She was afraid that he was purposefully repressing them, but Dante simply could not remember what they were.

What did it matter? he often thought to himself. His waking life was full of wonder and discovery, and Dr. Renwick had already explained that the chemical imbalances in flux in their brains were the cause of the bad night visions. Dante had taken his word at face value, knowing the physician was long familiar with the furmankind process. He did not feel threatened by them, so merely brushed them off each time.

“There he is again,” said a smooth voice behind him, “hogging all the coffee.”

He turned around and looked into the smiling face of a mountain lioness. “I’m not hogging it,” he replied, cradling his precious cup to his chest, “I’m protecting it from consumption by heathens such as yourself who don’t appreciate good java as much as I do.”

“Put the cup down, back away from the coffee pot and no one gets hurt,” Kristen told him with a grin. “I have great appreciation for magical morning elixir. I need it to get my motor purring.”

Dante smiled and gave her a short bow as he stepped away with his cup, granting her access to the pot of coffee. A moment later, Jenni stuck her head into the doorway, her blonde human bangs falling into her eyes. She brushed them aside and then tapped on the wall.

“Hey guys,” she said with a guarded look on her face.

“G’morning,” Dante replied.

Kristen noticed the leopard woman’s expression. “Hi, is anything wrong?” she asked.

Jenni looked as if she wanted to bite her bottom lip, but just managed to avoid that mistake. “Uhm, how are you feeling about yourself today?”

Kristen raised an eyebrow. “Now that I have my coffee, I’m good.”

“Same with me,” added the tiger. “Why?”

Jenni swallowed. “Marcy just informed me that it’s time for our next appointment with the black wall.”

Dante frowned at his companion, but the cougar merely took a sip from her cup and asked, “What time do we begin?”

Jenni looked puzzled; Kristen’s dislike for the digital measuring process was legendary across the compound. “Jon’s just started his session. I volunteered to go next.”

“Jon’s already started?” the mountain lion asked in obvious disappointment. “Oh-kay, I’ll go after you then.”

Dante reached out and put a hand on Kristen’s fur-covered forehead. With a solemn expression, he looked over at Jenni and shook his head. “I don’t feel a fever,” he said. “Perhaps she’s a doppelganger sent to infiltrate our numbers.”

“All right, who are you and what have you done with the real Kristen?” Jenni demanded in mock seriousness.

The cougar laughed aloud and took a sip of her coffee. “Okay, I confess. I am the real Kristen Eisenberg, but I’ve been sent back from the future with a message for the Kristen of this time,” she replied with bright golden eyes.

Dante snickered. “What is the message? We’ll get it to her so you can skedaddle before she sees you and causes a universe-imploding paradox.”

The feline woman grinned at her friends. “Tell her the black wall is nothing to be afraid of. She’s been feeling better about her self-image, and since she’s now fully covered in fur, it’s not like she’ll be up there naked this time.”

Jenni giggled and clapped for Kristen’s performance. “That wasn’t Oscar material,” she laughed, “but convincing enough. If you want, you can go next.”

The botanist affected a short bow. “Thanks, I think I will. Maybe I can talk Jon into staying behind.”

“Still trying to get him interested?” Dante mused aloud.

Kristen shrugged. “I’m still hopeful.”

“I think he made up that story that’s been circulated about his beliefs being the reason he’s not sleeping with you,” the tiger snorted. “That may work for everyone else, but I still think he’s got Fur-issues.”

“He won’t admit it anymore,” Jenni added, “but I think you’re right.” She looked over at the cougar. “He never joins us in a cozy feline nap pile in the pit, but are you two still sleeping in the same bed?”

Kristen shook her head. “No, he makes up excuses whenever I suggest it, so I think I’m about ready to give it up.” She sighed and looked down at her robed body. “I’m not a stick-figure like some of the females here… I mean, I’m no longer overweight like I was, but I’m still a little meaty. Maybe that’s why he…”

Dante interrupted her with a wave of his hands. “It has nothing to do with your figure, sweetheart. Believe me when I say that from a guy’s perspective, you’ve become a knockout! Remember, I’ve already seen you naked. If I wasn’t already involved with Jenni, I might go after you myself!”

Jenni gave him a smirk and reached out to lightly pinch his cheek. “I feel flattered you’ve singled me out, but I thought you weren’t planning to limit yourself to a single female, oh roaming male cat!”

Dante grinned openly. “Are you suggesting that I go after both of you?” He looked over each female and waggled his eyebrows meaningfully. “It’s an intriguing idea…”

Kristen laughed aloud and took a step back away from both of them. “Thanks, but no thanks. I appreciate the flattery, but Jon’s the one I’m interested in. Despite his past, I think I’ve always been attracted to him.”

“She has a thing for muscle-bound redheads,” Dante quipped.

Jenni crossed her arms and shook her head. “I think it’s time to cut your losses, dear. There are plenty of other single males on the grounds who are watching your new figure with interest. If you give one a chance, I don’t think you’ll be alone for long.”

“Yeah, I know…” Kristen replied. “He hasn’t bothered me in a while, but Travis still watches me. I don’t think he knows I see him, but he’s been there.”

“I didn’t mean him,” Jenni scoffed.

“Want me to introduce you around to some of the guys from Class Fifteen?” Dante offered. “They may not be the same species, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get some enjoyment out of knowing them.”

Kristen shook her head. “Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but I think I’ll keep trying with Jon for a while longer. Sooner or later, he’ll come around to my way of thinking.”

“I don’t know,” Dante said somberly. “He’s been on edge like the rest of us have been, but I think it’s hit him harder than anyone else. He probably won’t be any more receptive than he already has… probably less so.”

Kristen closed her eyes for a moment. “Maybe, but surely he’s as lonely as I am.”

“Do you think he might prefer guys?” Jenni wondered aloud.

Dante shook his head. “No, the big lunk likes women all right. I think he’s still hung up on that girl he was supposed to marry.”

“I don’t know about that,” Kristen replied. “I see anger in his eyes anytime she’s mentioned.”

“Yeah, but he’s the one who keeps mentioning her,” Dante retorted.

“Well, then, Kristen,” Jenni said, “I wish you all the luck.” She looked up at the kitchen clock and gestured toward it. “He should be done shortly, so if you want to be next, you should probably finish your coffee and get over to the lab.”

Dante slipped in beside the botanist and surprised her by sliding an arm around her waist. “If you don’t have any more luck with him, you know where to find me,” he said with a sly expression. “Jenni just gave me permission to play around if you want it.”

Kristen patted him lightly on the cheek and gave him a wink. “Thanks, I’ll keep your number on file.” They all knew she was only kidding, but Dante slid his hand down her back toward her tail. Before he could reach it, however, she slipped out of his grasp and headed for the door with a giggle. She was pleased with the flattery, but she still felt left out with Jon’s refusal to get close. She had thought they had become good friends, but if anything, he seemed a little more distant now with each day. Perhaps it was the chemical imbalance that the doctor had told them about, but just possibly it was her.

She did not see Jon on her way to the lab, so he might still be in the back room. She found a cool spot on the wall beside the double doors and parked herself to await her turn. Several long moments went by and idle thoughts returned to the conversation with Dante and Jenni.

What if they were right? Maybe it was not her after all, but Jon’s original feelings toward Furs that kept him from accepting her? She doubted that anyone but he could ever change that, so her hopes may be groundless.

Perhaps Jenni and Dante were right. Maybe she should give up on Jon and look to one of the other males for company. It was anybody’s guess how long it might be before any of them were called to serve on another world, and since she was lonely now, it might be time to look around.

She began to picture the other males in her mind and the first ones she thought of were the cousins, Aaron and Gerard. They might be brown bears, but both were charming and had always been nice to her. She smiled to herself and shook her head. Aside from Kevin and Rose, Kristen was one of the shortest volunteers and the thought of her up next to someone as large as those two made her chuckle inwardly; it would be like cuddling up to a massive stuffed teddy bear won at a county fair.

Ideally, she should probably make friends with the two feline males from Class Fifteen, a lion and a cheetah. She had only met them in passing and subsequently could not even remember their names. Likewise, there were several male foxes in Class Fifteen that she thought were handsome in their vulpine way, but she was sure that Jasmine and Dahlia had already singled them out in private. There was a red wolf and two other canines she could also consider. She did not know any of them as well, but had spoken with them all only briefly during the last few months; each of them seemed nice at the least.

Before she could stop herself, even the face of Travis sprang to mind. She had no doubt that he would accept her with just a single kind word. Perhaps now that he was no longer actively trying to take her by force, should she give him a chance? No, the answer jumped up immediately. He had been working just as hard on some of the other females lately and had not exactly enamored himself to any of them. He was not looking for a relationship, only a conquest. No — no matter how lonely she got, Travis was not an option.

Kristen sighed aloud and rubbed her eyes. She was a cat, and while cats can be solitary creatures, they also tended to congregate for company and even napped together in piles. Jon seemed to be one of those who would be solitary no matter which species he might have been. Was he repulsed by the outer furmankind ugliness he saw in them all, or was it she herself that he did not want to get close to?

The door to the lab finally opened and Jon walked out. He glanced over at her with a solemn expression and merely gestured with a thumb over his shoulder that it was her turn. Aside from that, he did not speak or otherwise acknowledge her. He merely left her beside the door and headed across the saloon toward the exit.

“Good morning, Jon,” she said quietly. Without looking back at her, he lifted a hand and waved over his shoulder. She watched him with a frown until he disappeared around the corner into the entry hall and then she turned toward the lab. Facing the black wall would be nothing compared to the cold shoulder she had just received.

She heaved a heavy sigh and pushed through the door. After Marcy and Dr. Renwick were through with her, she thought it might be time to set up another unscheduled session with Professor Flynn.

***

Jon stepped outside and stopped beneath the awning. He waited until the door shut behind him and then he looked back at it with a sigh. He did not like treating Kristen so frostily, but it was the only thing he could think of that might derail her pursuit of his affections. He was actually rather fond of her, but as he had told Avon, he simply did not feel attracted to her as anything more than a close friend. If that was not enough for her, then he had no choice but to ignore her as much as he could. He had had no plans to give her a complete silent treatment, but just after being made to stand spread-eagle up against the wall and exposing himself for the doctor’s measurements, he had not felt like chatting – especially since he was well aware of her thoughts concerning that black wall.

He did not feel like hanging around the Wing for breakfast, so he headed across the grass toward the cafeteria. On his way over, he spied Kevin Rockwell and Michael Lynch sitting beneath a nearby tree with both of their PBJs open in front of them. They seemed to be engaged in an animated conversation, though neither of them seemed angry. Curious, he felt breakfast could wait, so he turned toward them to see what was going on.

“Hey, guys,” he said when he stopped beside their tree. Both foxes looked up at him with friendly expressions.

“G’morning,” the Swift fox replied to him.

“Hi, Jon,” said the fennec.

“You two look like you’ve discovered a secret of the universe,” the feline said with a smile, kneeling down beside them.

Michael chuckled and tapped the screen of the Personal Business Juxtapositioner in front of him. “Kevin was giving me an example of the things he’d learned from an online meteorology course he’s been taking. Although he’s had no formal hands-on training, he’s been learning weather prediction using radar and satellite imagery and nationwide reporting stations, and he was giving me his personal predictions for the next couple of days.”

“Yeah, that sounds cool,” Jon said, nodding toward the smaller fox with the large ears. “Those skills will come in handy out there on some remote planet, and I’ll bet you’ll be top notch with the enthusiasm you’ve had learning about it.”

Kevin looked as if he really wanted to enjoy the praise from the large feline, but he also looked embarrassed, as if he had been caught passing notes in school. Jon noticed and tilted his head slightly.

“Yeah, I thought so too, until Mike pointed out something that I hadn’t thought of,” the fennec replied. Michael snickered, but patted his friend as if in consolation.

“What was that?” Jon asked.

“When I’m on some other planet where my group makes up the entire sapient population of that world, I won’t have access to radar equipment or weather satellites and there won’t be any nationwide reporting stations as are common here.” Kevin looked pained and then put his hands together in his lap. “I’ve been learning the wrong things; I need to know weather forecasting without remote instruments.”

Jon twitched an ear and matched it with an unconscious swish of the thick rope of a tail behind him. “I can see where that might be a problem,” he mused aloud.

Michael pulled up a few blades of grass in the morning sun and held them up. “You’ll need to go back to primitive methods,” he said. “If the grass is wet, it’s been raining, or if your weather beetle is upside down in its box, it might be too hot!”

Kevin gave his friend an evil eye, but then snickered. Jon smiled, but then looked up at the sky where lazy clouds floated overhead. The summer day was starting out nice today, where it had been hot and humid for the past week. He silently wondered if the young fox’s predictions included a cool front.

He looked back down at Kevin and said, “The folks here at the Institute keep saying how much they’re going to take care of us, to make sure we have the training and supplies we need to survive on another world. I don’t know if it’s already on their manifest, but I’m sure Stockholm would be willing to send along some local weather sensing equipment.” Kevin and Michael both looked at him in interest. “I know from our instruction classes that technology at a colony site will be limited and powered equipment might not be available; it was planned that way so we wouldn’t be dependent upon devices we could never replace or rebuild if something happened to them. However, you may be allowed the equivalent of a home weather station with a dry-bulb thermometer, which is standard for actual air temperature, a wet-bulb thermometer for the evaporative or felt temperature, a barometer, an anemometer, wind vane, hygrometer and a rain gauge… possibly even a solar radiation sensor for evapotranspiration.”

“Evapo—what?” Michael asked with a raised eyebrow.

Jon smiled. “E-vap-o-tran-spi-ra-tion,” he enunciated. “It measures the potential for evaporation of moisture from the soil – a handy thing to have in a place where you plan to grow crops as a food source.”

“Did you used to be a weatherman?” Kevin asked in surprise, thinking over Jon’s list in his mind.

The cougar chuckled and shook his broad head. “No, but I used to have a home kit like that when I was in college. Of course, I didn’t take it all seriously, since I never figured I’d ever need the stuff with all those available weather satellites, radar and reporting stations you’ve been studying. It was just a passing interest one semester. By time the next semester came around, I’d already moved on to other interests.”

“What kind of interests?” Kevin asked out of curiosity.

Jon looked at the young fox and grinned, purposely showing all his teeth. “Girls,” he replied.

His companions laughed at his expression and then he stood up again. “Kevin, don’t get yourself down about what you’ve learned so far,” he said. “Even learning weather patterns and models through modern equipment, I’d wager you’ve already gained a lot of useful knowledge that can still help you out there on an uninhabited world. Go talk to the director and request a home weather kit like I had. They should be readily available and I doubt it would be much of an expense for the Institution to request of Stockholm. The director can probably also help you get the right kind of instruction for what you need, too, but if not, I can help you with the things that come in a kit.”

“Thanks, Jon,” the fennec fox said in appreciation. “I will.”

“I’ll see you guys later,” Jon told them. “I hear breakfast calling my name.”

“Actually, I think that’s Manny calling your name,” Michael said with a smile.

Jon looked up and realized that someone was calling his name. He looked around and saw an arctic fox approaching them from the direction of the Institute’s main offices. Jon had seen the older individual around the complex, but they had never actually spoken to one another before now.

The mountain lion waited until the other fox stopped before the little group. “Good morning,” the white Fur said with an accented voice. He nodded to all three of them, but looked up at the taller cougar.

“Might I have a word with you, Mr. Sunset?” he said, extending a hand. “I am Manny Frigh, Class Fifteen.”

Jon stepped around his friends. “Excuse me, guys,” he said, taking the white fox’s hand. “Jon Sunset, Class Sixteen. What can I do for you?”

“See you. Thanks again, Jon!” Kevin called while Michael cheerfully waved.

Jon followed Manny out across the lawn, but the fox did not say anything until they were out of earshot of the others. “I have just been to the director’s office and it was he who suggested I look you up.”

“Okay,” Jon replied. “What can I help you with?” Although his companion did not seem to be leading him anywhere in particular, the cougar gestured toward the Clark Savage building, still intending to get some breakfast. Manny followed his lead with a simple nod.

“As you know, one day we will all find ourselves on a strange, new world where very little is known about the place and the potential for hostile danger may lurk around every rock and tree.”

“Yeah, I don’t think some of our volunteers have fully grasped what we’ll be facing,” Jon agreed.

“It is this I am hoping to change,” said the fox. “The director has granted approval for me to hold a class instructing all our Furs in gunmanship. In addition to our teeth and claws, all starter colonies are equipped with a small armory of rifles, handguns and ammunition for protection, but putting such weapons into the hands of the inexperienced often increases the danger to everyone around them. I want everyone in our two classes to have some experience in handling the firearms we’ll be taking along. I wanted to make this mandatory, but Marcelo would only agree to let us hold it for anyone who might be interested.”

Jon nodded and opened the door to the building they had approached. “The class sounds like a good idea. I know I’d be more comfortable knowing that one of my colony mates wasn’t going to shoot me or his own foot by accident.”

Manny followed him into the building and across a busy room up to the serving line. The fox selected only a small cluster of grapes while Jon loaded up a tray with breakfast items. Their conversation paused until they found a small table to themselves. Humans and Furs alike were all in their own private discussions over their meals.

As Jon began to eat, Manny continued. “Marcelo tells me that you grew up around firearms and are a skilled hunter, Mr. Sunset. Since you have such experience, I would like to invite you to assist me instructing a shooting class to be held on the back side of the compound where a firing range can be set up at a natural embankment perfect for a backstop.”

The cougar looked up at him and swallowed his food. He took a sip of orange juice and then nodded. “Please, call me Jon,” he said. He held up a hand paw and flexed his shortened fingers. “I haven’t fired a weapon since my body changed, so I could probably use the practice myself. However, such a class sounds like it could be important to survival, so sure, count me in. I’ll help out as I can.”

Manny smiled, looked very pleased. “Thank you, Jon. Do you have any plans today? I would like to start this very afternoon beginning with gun safety.”

“If Marcelo is the one who sent you to me, I’m sure that alone will get me out of whatever tasks might have been set out for me today. I haven’t looked to see what the schedule is on my PBJ task list yet.”

Manny popped a grape into his mouth and savored the flavor after chewing on it a moment. He smiled and gave his companion a nod. “Thank you for your willingness to help. I had hoped you might assist me.”

“We should have Sissy include this bit of information in her daily news,” Jon suggested.

“Good idea, but she’s already sent out today’s morning edition. You and I will need to go around and individually spread the word if we’re to have anyone show up this afternoon. The director won’t make it mandatory that everyone attend, so we’ll have to convince everyone personally that it’s in their best interest to take our course.”

“Okay, give me some time to enjoy my breakfast and then we’ll case the compound for students.”

***

The day had gone well. The first session had consisted of eighteen students, and counting Manny and Jon as gun safety instructors, they included more than half the Fur volunteers on the compound. Most were from the previous class and it was the first time that Jon had met some of them personally.

All in all, there were two Canis, four Vulps, and six each of Felis and Ursis volunteers who were in attendance. Counting the instructors, there were twenty in all. Marcelo had entrusted Manny with a key to the armory and inside had been more than enough firearms and ammunition for the size of group attending.

Jon briefly wondered why such a place like the Furmankind Institute would even have an armory, but then he remembered the history of just how rocky things had been with early ‘volunteers’ for the transformation. That had been years ago, but the guns were to be used upon the Furs if things ever got out of hand again. A sobering thought.

They started out with basic gun safety, and then moved up to simple target practice using pellet air rifles. There were a good number of them who already knew how to fire a gun, but the instructors were patient with those who had little or no experience. Once Manny and Jon were satisfied with the safety and practice, they moved up to small caliber rifles. For the most part, everyone did well, though felines Sissy and Kim grew nervous handling anything more powerful than the pellet guns.

Kim flinched hard each time she fired her rifle, and Jon had his hands full keeping the lynx from tossing it to the ground after every shot. Sissy seemed just as nervous handling her rifle. The orange cat kept closing her eyes just before squeezing the trigger; her shots were almost never on target, but she had volunteered for the class and was determined to stick with it. Unfortunately, that did not improve her aim, but Manny encouraged her and Kim to keep practicing.

Before an hour had passed, though, the white fox put Sissy and Kim back on the pellet guns to practice their aim. There would be plenty of time to fine tune their accuracy with subsequent sessions, and everyone else seemed relieved when the two small females were no longer handling live rounds.

Of the rest, neither Dante, Kevin nor Ivan Dimitri had ever handled rifles before, but they all seem to pick up on it easily enough. None would be crack shots anytime soon, but each was comfortable with their firearms and seemed to enjoy learning to shoot.

All of the Ursis Furs had handled guns before, Avon, Alicia Kuiper, Hank Danagar, Whelan, Aaron and Gerard, but the one with the greatest accuracy turned out to be Whelan Nolan, followed closely by Alicia. A competition rose up between the two black bears, and although Whelan had previously only known Alicia in passing, he soon developed a great deal of respect for the ursine woman. However, she treated him merely as an obstacle to overcome, since his scores were continually one or two points better than hers.

This continued when the rifles were swapped out for handguns, but this time there was more competition, as there were others who seemed more skilled with pistols than rifles. Unfortunately, while Arne Kohler and Dahlia were fairly accurate with rifles, neither of them could hit their paper targets with a pistol. Carl and Ellie were both excellent shots, though Carl complained that his shortened fingers had difficulty with an easy squeeze of the trigger. It did not seem to bother his accuracy, though. He nudged Alicia and Whelan both out of the top spots, although not without competition from Raine Terrance and Ken Wilder, each proficient with the handguns they had been given.

Manny had to rein them in after a while. What was supposed to have been an instructional class to have everyone familiarized in gun handling had devolved into a shooting match. Those who were not as experienced were left behind in favor of those trying to show off their expertise.

After several hours on the shooting range, Manny called it a day and released everyone for the evening. He pulled aside those who were in actual need of his training and apologized to each one personally, promising to spend more time with them if they would come back for another session.

Once the crowd had dispersed, he and Jon began picking up the area, gathering up the ammunition, spent cartridge casings and the remnants of the paper targets they had been peppering with bullets all afternoon. Whelan stayed behind and gave them a hand with the cleanup, admitting that he had realized just how much he had stolen focus from the purpose of the training. He admitted to having a recent bout of depression but that he had simply enjoyed the target shooting and had let things get out of hand.

Manny accepted his apology with a smile and asked him to help take the firearms back to the armory. Making sure all the guns were unloaded properly and the safeties were on, the arctic fox took the rifles in his arms, allowing Whelan to carry the pistols while Jon carted the heavy box of ammunition back across the compound. Manny let slip that he planned to spend the rest of the evening giving each of the firearms a good cleaning, so Jon and Whelan both volunteered to give him a hand after they all had a good supper.

***

Jon padded quietly across the darkened saloon of the Felis Wing, skirting around the pit to his room. It had been a long time since he had last stayed up for hours simply chatting with other guys, and although he missed his usual evening session in the exercise room, he felt tired from the events of the day and wanted nothing more than to slide in between the sheets of his king-sized bed.

The room was dark, but even before he pulled back the covers he knew she was there. The deep breathing of her sleep reached his sensitive feline ears and he stopped before his fingers touched the bed covers. Frowning, he straightened up and turned back toward the door. If she was so adamant about sleeping in his bed tonight, he could simply go crawl into her bed in order to sleep alone.

The cougar listened to the breathing a moment longer before he padded quietly back out of his room to slip inside Kristen’s room. When he approached the bed, however, he paused. In the soft glow of a butterfly night light, he could see her form beneath the covers of her bed.

Jon rubbed his eyes, but she was still there. If Kristen was asleep in her own bed, who was in his?

Just as quietly as he could move, he returned to his room and stopped at the foot of his bed, listening to the sounds in the darkness. Aside of the quiet breeze of air from the vent, the room was silent, completely devoid of other sounds. Confused, he made his way over to the nearest nightstand and reached for the lamp. He hesitated for a moment but then clicked it on.

Jon’s bed was untouched. The covers were just as wrinkle-free as they had been since he had made it up the previous morning. He turned slowly to look behind him, but the recliner and the desk chair were both unoccupied. Had he imagined that someone had been in his room? He took the time to look in the closet and under the bed, just to satisfy his paranoia, but he was still alone in his own room.

“I’m more tired than I thought,” he muttered to himself. He pulled off the dark green vest he had worn all day and dropped it into the hamper he kept in the back corner of the room. He hesitated before pulling off the matching shorts, casting another quick glance back toward the bed, and then shook his head as if to clear out the cobwebs. He added the shorts to the hamper and then grabbed a pair of sleeping trunks from the dresser.

Ready for bed, he reached for the lamp, but hesitated. Once again doubting himself, he looked at the well-made bed. He outstretched a hand to the covers and spread his fingers out on the material, and then slid it back and forth over the top of the light blue blanket he usually slept beneath. There was nothing there but two pillows. There was no invisible body asleep on his bed, and he silently chided himself for imagining things.

“Chalk it up to my unbalanced mind,” he mumbled. He pulled back the covers, and satisfied there was nothing there but sheets, he finally slipped into the bed and turned out the light. Even though he had checked everything, he could not help but spread his limbs out from one corner of the large bed to another as a last measure to convince himself that he was indeed alone. Finally assured he had no roommate in the darkness, Jon closed his eyes and turned onto his side, wrapping a thick arm around his extra pillow.

***

CRACK!

Jon opened his eyes and blinked rapidly to focus his vision. When he could finally see, he was facing the illuminated numbers of his clock.

03:32. He had only been in bed for a little over an hour.

Yawning widely, he stretched and closed his eyes again. Something had awakened him from a deep sleep, but he was so drowsy that he could not even remember what it was. He fluffed up the pillow beneath his broad feline head and settled in, drifting off into dreamland within moments.

***

The clock shouted out its alarm, waking Jon immediately. Although he had not had as many hours of sleep as he normally got, he felt rested and ready to start the day. He crawled out of bed and quickly changed into his exercise shorts so he could begin his daily routine. He would make a quick visit to the toilet and then he would decide whether to spend his time in the exercise room or outside on a jog around the compound.

When he emerged from his room, however, he found all three of his housemates on the couches down in the pit, accompanied by Marcy and Dr. Renwick. It was odd to see all of them up together at five-thirty in the morning. He approached them and immediately noticed that Jenni and Kristen had been crying. Marcy looked down as well, but Dante appeared absolutely miserable. Dr. Renwick seemed just as unshakable as he normally did.

“Uh oh,” Jon said from the top of the pit. “What happened?” The two feline females swallowed in unison and wrapped their arms around one another on the couch to sob together. Dante looked up and opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Finally, the cougar looked up at the doctor.

“Whelan Nolan has died,” the physician said quietly.

“Whelan? How?”

Renwick looked at the sobbing females and sighed. “Suicide. He somehow got hold of a handgun and used it on himself out by the lake about two hours ago.”

Jon was stunned. He took two steps down into the pit and then sat down on its edge. “He helped me and Manny Frigh clean the firearms we’d used during our gun safety class last night,” he told them. “Manny locked up the armory right before we left, but Whelan must have slipped one of the guns beneath his vest beforehand when neither of us was looking.”

“You’d better go report that to the director,” Renwick told him, “although I’m sure Mr. Frigh has already talked to him.”

Jon swallowed and nodded. He stood up numbly and returned to his room to change clothes. A few moments later, he was out the door and running in the early morning darkness across the grass to the director’s office. The door was unlocked, but when he went inside there was no one there. He frowned, but realized that Marcelo must be over at the Ursis Wing.

He stepped back outside, but before he could head for the other building, he happened to glance out toward the lake and in the full moonlight saw several people gathered on the far side. That must be where Whelan… Jon shook the thought from his head and altered his destination.

Trotting across the grass, he recognized several faces among those gathered by the lake. Marcelo and Avon were there with Manny Frigh, in addition to Whelan’s housemates, Aaron, Gerard and Norman. The local sheriff and his dark-haired deputy were there too. He did not see Whelan, so someone must have taken him away already.

Marcelo looked up when the cougar stopped beside the lake on the far side. Jon was momentarily unsure if he should approach any closer, but the director waved him forward.

When the large mountain lion approached, the sheriff watched him warily, but Jon merely gave him a nod and walked right to the director. “Marcelo,” he said, with another nod toward Avon and Manny, “Am I allowed to be here?”

Marcelo seemed puzzled. “Of course you are,” he said quietly. “You were one of his friends. How much do you know?”

“Only that he must have swiped one of the guns we were cleaning last night and that he used it on himself a couple hours ago.”

“That’s what I told him,” Manny said morosely. “He must have taken one when I wasn’t looking. I thought I’d done a complete inventory of the firearms we’d checked out.”

“He could have taken it after you’d already accounted for it,” Jon said. “He was the one helping you with the inventory.”

Manny nodded, his pelt of white fur almost glowing in the full moonlight. “Yeah, that’s possible,” he replied. “I feel awful that I didn’t pay better attention.”

Marcelo cleared his throat. “Suicides usually tend to leave notes explaining why, but he didn’t leave one behind that anyone can find,” the director said. “None of the guys from his Wing were able to find anything in his room either.”

Aaron approached them and wiped at the fur around his eyes. “I can’t imagine why he did this,” the bear mumbled. “We all thought he’d finally gotten over his girl abandoning him to the AHCP. He seemed to really enjoy himself yesterday competing against Alicia in the target shoots.”

“There was no reason for him to take his own life,” Gerard grumbled from the darkness, “especially without even leaving anything saying why.”

Jon sighed and looked up at the moon. Like the others, he had thought Whelan was doing better in recent weeks. He had started to laugh and joke around with his friends, and had even taken an interest in their colony training. Jon had noticed that he seemed a little down over the past few days, but with his enthusiasm during the target shooting, he had thought nothing more about it.

The cougar suddenly looked over at the director. He pointed toward a nearby section of the tall iron fence that surrounded the compound and said, “I saw him meet a girl with red hair at the fence a few days ago. She handed him a manila envelope and kissed him on the cheek through the bars before she left.” Jon wrung his hands together with a deep frown.

“Was the envelope big enough to hold a gun?” Marcelo asked.

“No, it was flat and he took it from her using only his fingers. She was crying when she left and Whelan didn’t look any better. I was going to go talk to him, but then I got distracted by a disagreement with one of my housemates. I forgot all about it after that, until just now.”

Gerard stepped closer. “There must have been something in it that he didn’t like,” he said. “He barricaded himself in his room a couple nights ago, refusing to eat or talk to any of us, even Dr. Lacross. He came out the next morning, a little down in the dumps, but he wouldn’t say why.”

“We didn’t want to press him,” said Norman, “so we let him alone, only saying that we were there for him if he needed to talk.”

“Have you seen this envelope?” the sheriff asked, joining the group.

“No, but it may be in his room,” Aaron replied.

Before anyone else said a thing, Jon and all three of his housemates took off at a run back toward the Ursis Wing. He heard Marcelo shout something at their backsides, but he did not hear what it was as he raced across the lawn.

Despite their physical fitness, all four of them were panting by the time they got to the Wing. Jon followed the others inside and across the saloon to Whelan’s room. Although he had been there many times over the past months and the floor plan to the building was identical to the Felis Wing, some part of his mind had never noticed until now that Whelan’s room was in the same place as his was in his own building.

They all crowded together at the doorway of the room, but suddenly no one wanted to go inside. Norman finally steeled his nerves and pushed open the door, leaving Jon with his other housemates standing outside.

He turned on the light and began looking around the room, but it did not take long to find what he sought. A large manila envelope lay on one of the nightstands next to an empty tissue box. He picked it up, but before he could look inside, the sheriff stepped into the room and said, “I’ll take that, please.”

Norman looked up in surprise, but handed over the envelope without a word. He followed the grey-haired man outside and found that Marcelo, Avon and the sheriff’s deputy had joined them in the saloon.

The sheriff took the envelope down to the table and chairs in the pit and then opened it carefully. Inside was a newspaper clipping and a well-handled letter. Setting the envelope and the letter on the table, the sheriff held up the clipping and began reading. Everyone gathered around quietly, fidgeting and hoping there might be some clue there to explain why their friend had taken his life. After several moments, he handed the paper to Marcelo and then looked at the faces around him.

“This news article was posted in the New York Times a few days ago,” he said. “I remember reading it myself. It’s a report about a woman who had been missing for months being found in a shallow grave in Elkmont, Tennessee on the site of an old abandoned hotel. Forensics confirmed that she had been brutally tortured and then murdered.”

“Who was she?” Gerard asked. “Do you think he might have known her?”

“He may have been the one who killed her,” suggested the sheriff’s deputy. “Joining up with you critters might have been his method of hiding out from a manhunt for him.”

Gerard gave the young woman who had spoken an unkind glare. “Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “Whelan was no killer!”

“The woman’s name was Celia Sevier,” Marcelo read aloud from the article. Jon and all three of Ursis Wing bears gasped almost in unison. The director looked up at their response, as did the sheriff.

“That was his girlfriend,” Aaron answered, “the one who talked him into joining the AHCP with her.” He looked over at the sheriff’s interested expression and explained, “They were supposed to join together, but when the bus arrived to transport them up here to the Institute, she never showed up. After he got here, he contacted several mutual friends to see if they could find out why she didn’t show, but they found that her phone had been disconnected and her apartment vacant without a forwarding address.”

“The phone and apartment issues would not have been a surprise, since she would have done that prior to coming here anyway,” Gerard added. “He later assumed she’d found another boyfriend and convinced him to join the AHCP to get rid of him.” He looked at the director and the news clipping in his hands. “Do you think someone abducted her before she could meet him and that’s what happened to her?”

“Possibly,” Marcelo muttered, still poring over the article.

“What you’ve just told us about them and coincides with this,” the sheriff said, holding up the well-handled letter. “This is a letter from Ms. Sevier to Mr. Nolan, detailing her plans to settle her affairs with her job and family before the appointment to meet a bus from the Anthro Human Colonization Program.” He looked over at Jon. “Did you know this red-headed girl who gave him the envelope?” he asked.

The cougar shook his head. “I didn’t recognize her, but he often spoke of a younger sister. She might have seen the article in the paper and brought it to him.”

“No wonder he was so depressed,” mumbled Norman, sitting down heavily on one of the curved couches in the pit. “Since Celia never showed up as scheduled, I was called in to replace her to fill out the volunteer roster. Because of that, he’s not been quite as friendly to me as he has been to the others. They were supposed to go through this together.”

“It looks like with this news, he may not have felt like he had anything left to live for,” suggested Avon.

The room fell silent. Marcelo placed the newspaper clipping on the table next to the envelope and the sheriff picked it up to place it inside with the letter. He looked around at everyone present and cleared his throat.

“I’ll turn these over to the proper agents,” he said, “but before we go, we’ll need to get signed statements from each of you about what was just discussed. If the investigation concludes that this scenario is what happened, it could provide closure to the case.”

“Sure,” Marcelo replied for all of them. “We’ll cooperate in any manner that needs to be done.”

Jon wiped a hand across his face, swishing his tail behind him. “What happens next?” he asked quietly.

“Whelan’s family will have to be contacted,” Marcelo replied, “but I’m afraid his body cannot be released to them.”

“Huh? Why not?” asked Gerard. “He’s got to have a decent burial – he was a decent guy!”

Marcelo looked uncomfortable. “AHCP policy clearly states in the written contract that you all signed, that the body of any Fur who dies while still on Earth is to be cremated to destroy all genetic material.”

“Why?” Aaron asked with outstretched arms.

“You all became legal AHCP property when you willingly signed your contracts,” Marcelo explained. “I don’t know the reasons behind it, but I suppose they don’t want any of their genetic property out of their hands for others to research and reverse engineer.”

Gerard snorted loudly, startling the sheriff, but he did not look at him. Instead, the bear approached the director. “What about a memorial service?” he asked. “Surely his family will want to have one for him.”

“I’m certain they will.”

“Can we go?” Gerard asks. “With the transformation and intended future together out on some forsaken planet, we’d become his family too!”

Marcelo sighed. It was bad enough that Whelan had taken his own life, but the situation just got a lot more complex with this request. “We shall see,” he answered. “First and foremost, it will be up to his family whether or not you will be welcome to attend a memorial service with them. Although the concept of furmankind is a little more widely accepted now than it has been in the past, there’s still a lot of prejudice against Furs in general.” He looked straight at Jon when he said this last and the cougar swallowed with difficulty, turning away. “They may welcome you as his friends, but you must understand that they may feel that you are all partially responsible for his death simply by association with the kind of life that took him from them.”

“Marcelo,” Aaron said in a huff, “if Whelan had taken the escape clause and never accepted transformation, he still would have learned of Celia’s brutal death just as he did here. If not with a gun from our armory, he might have killed himself some other way. Being a Fur had nothing to do with his suicide!”

The director looked pained. “Yes, I know that, my friend, but it’s his family we’re talking about here. I will give them your request after they’ve had a few days to deal with the shock of their loss, but if they deny it there’s nothing I can do about that. You’ll be free to hold a memorial service for him here if you wish, and we’ll be sure to have Dr. Flynn available to any who might need counseling after this.”

“What if his family says yes?” Avon ventured.

“Then it becomes a session in logistics,” Marcelo replied. “We would have to arrange secure transportation and lodging for those here who wish to attend, since his next-of-kin information lists his family in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The nearest airport to Rehoboth for the Osprey to fly into is in Maryland; otherwise it would take about nine hours straight through by bus to get you there from here.”

“I still want to go,” Aaron muttered. There were other mumbles of agreement, but after a moment, the group fell silent.

The sheriff spoke quietly with his deputy, giving her instructions, and then he returned his attention to the group.

“Listen folks, I know this is a rough time for all of you, but if you’ll allow Deputy Loggia to take your statements, we can wrap this up as quickly as possible.”

Chapter 36

Truth

“Jon, thank you for being honest with me. We’ve met periodically over the past weeks, but this is the first time you’ve really opened up to me.”

The mountain lion looked over at Professor Angelina Flynn and gave her a solemn nod. Back during his first session with the brown-haired psychologist and speaking with her for just a few minutes, he had come to realize that she had no knowledge of his past life prior to his arrival at the Furmankind Institute. It had taken him a while to make the decision, but he felt it would be difficult to be open with her and hide his background where she would not sense him holding back, so he had finally decided to give her the details of Brian Barrett under the promise of confidence.

The woman’s office was small, yet it had a comfortable air designed in colors to soothe troubled minds. The customary couch was present for those who wished to use it, but Jon currently sat in an upholstered recliner with his tail wrapped around his waist and the end in his lap where he held it nervously in both hands.

Although a professional in her career, Angelina chose to dress comfortably so that her clients would not be faced with someone in a pressed suit or fashion dress. Instead, she wore a simple dark blue pleated skirt and a white, short-sleeved blouse with a simple collar. Her long hair was caught up in a ponytail that was draped casually over one shoulder.

“You understand why I can’t reveal my background to just anyone,” the mountain lion said. “I’m being honest when I tell you that I don’t feel as strongly against Furs as I once did, but I admit I still have some of the revulsions.”

“No one would expect you to conquer everything right away,” Angelina replied, “but you sound as if you have made a great deal of progress overcoming your fears since you arrived.”

Jon shook his head and looked down at his hand pads. “I wouldn’t say that,” he countered. “I still struggle with the turmoil on a daily basis, although I’ve been learning to keep my mouth shut about it in most cases. I’ve gotten more used to Furs, but the old attitude is still in there. I’ve tried to move past it, but there are times when it jumps out into the open before I even realize it. I’ve been lucky, keeping it hidden while around most everyone, but to my housemates who know who I really am, it gets loose too often.”

“Is there anything in particular that sets you off?”

“Yeah, one of my housemates.”

“The other male, Dante?”

Jon shook his head. “No, he’s irritating and annoying at times, but he isn’t the cause of my issues.”

“The other cougar then, Kristen?”

Jon looked up at her and nodded. “She’s been pursuing my affections since the beginning,” he answered. “She knows why I don’t want a relationship right now, but I suppose she thinks that I’ve had enough time to get over my ex-fiancé by now. Maybe I have, but maybe I haven’t. All I know is that I’m not interested. I like her as a close friend, but not as close as she wants – and she knows why.”

“Because she’s a Fur?”

“Because she’s a Fur,” he confirmed. “I know that I’ll never be able to have a relationship with a human woman ever again, but changing my tastes to chase a Fur isn’t happening. Maybe… in time… but not now. She’s fixated on me even though there are other guys on the premises.”

“Is there anything else bothering you?”

Jon was silent for a long moment, but his companion was in no hurry. After a time, the cougar pursed his lips and then nodded. “Yeah,” he said at last, “I can’t seem to get Whelan out of my head.”

“Are you having trouble with closure?”

“No, that’s not it. His family didn’t want any of his furman associates attending his funeral service. They saw us as nothing more than animals to be kept locked behind an iron fence while they paid tribute to his ashes.”

“Are you sure that’s why they denied the director’s request? Perhaps they were just so overcome with grief from the loss that they wanted to keep it to a small family service.”

“His transformation into a Fur was never mentioned in his obituary, and according to the article I found online, the reason for his death was simply listed as a suicide as a reaction to news of his girlfriend’s brutal murder. Yeah, that’s true, but the article had a photo from the service showing his portrait as a human next to his urn and there was a large turnout for the memorial. There were more than just family members there, Professor. They just didn’t want us there.”

“The director allowed you all to hold a memorial service for him here. I was present and thought it was a nice tribute.”

“Yes, I thought so too, but Whelan was a good egg and it would have done us all a world of good to meet his family and tell them what a great guy he was.”

“Can you think of any reason why they didn’t want you there? Relations between humankind and furmankind are still tenuous at best.”

Jon snorted. “They’re all a bunch of ignorant and prejudiced idiots. They might have felt better about his last days if they’d had a chance to meet us and discover that our minds are still human.”

Angelina smiled slightly, but the feline was not looking her way anymore. “Are you saying they’re prejudiced against Furs?” she asked.

“Yes!”

“Like you?”

Jon looked up sharply, his eyes narrowing as a scowl pulled his lips back to bare his teeth. The professor did not appear to feel threatened, but before Jon could spit out a retort, he realized why she’d said it. He deflated almost immediately.

“Yes,” he admitted in a quiet voice, “they’re prejudiced like me.”

“What do you think could have been done to persuade them otherwise, Jon?”

The cougar looked her right in the eyes. “If I knew the answer to that, Professor, then maybe I wouldn’t be so messed up right now.”

“Would you have killed Mr. Parker if he hadn’t been a Fur?”

“All I can assume is that I still might have done it. Probably,” he answered in truth. “He stole my fiancé!”

“Would you be so prejudiced against Furs if he hadn’t been one?”

“Probably not, Professor, but he was the catalyst. I had months to stew over what he’d done and now the hatred of furmankind is so ingrained in me that I’m fighting myself daily.”

“You said you had months to stew over what he’d done. You don’t think your fiancé was at fault?”

Jon cleared his throat and looked down at his hands. “He was the Siren that enticed her onto the rocks,” he said, purposely gender-twisting Greek mythology. Angelina raised an eyebrow at his analogy, but the cougar ignored it. “She always liked exotic animals, so I’m sure she was attracted to his… exoticness. She was very beautiful, so he probably turned on the charm when he met her and likely seduced her without bothering to check to see if she was already taken.”

“Probably? Likely? You don’t know for sure?”

Jon stood up, fists at his sides, and tail whipping back and forth in agitation behind him. “I caught them in the act, Professor – twice! I can’t get any surer than that!”

Angelina sat back in her seat. “Of course, forgive me,” she said. “Still, you feel like he’s the only one at fault?”

“It takes two to tango, yes, I know,” he grumbled. “It wouldn’t have bothered me if she’d only introduced him to me as a new friend, even a furry one, but we were only weeks away from our wedding when I caught them rutting like wild animals!”

The professor caught a brief glint in his eyes that was only there for a second, and suddenly she thought she understood something. Licking her lips, she leaned forward again.

“Jon,” she began tentatively, “if you and a Fur were to sleep together, is rutting like wild animals how you see it?”

He glared at her furiously, but then he deflated once more, collapsing back into his chair with his face in his hands. “That’s exactly how I see it,” he admitted after several moments. “My head knows I’m still human inside, but the mirror is trying to convince me otherwise. I’ve tried and tried to just let it happen, but part of me won’t give in.”

“For someone who is battling his dual nature, you seem to have a good head on your shoulders, Jon.” Angelina set her notepad aside and gave him a compassionate smile. “You know what your problem is and you’ve tried to overcome it. I think all you need is more time. Just remember that when you leave the Earth, it’s likely you’ll never see another human again in your lifetime. Your only companions from then out will be Furs.”

The cougar sighed heavily. Just how many times was he going to hear that?

***

Jenni was stretched out face down across the top of the large floor pillows in the middle of the pit. She and Dante had moved the dining table and chairs up and out of the circular recessed area so they could spread out the pillows on the floor in their place. The afternoon sun streamed in through the overhead skylight and warmed the pillows, making it the perfect place for a feline to relax.

Dante was sitting up on top of her legs just beneath her tail, which was draped across his lap. He was leaning forward, slowly massaging the leopard woman’s back, his fingers working out kinks in her lower back muscles earned while mopping up the restroom floor during a weekly house cleanup. Jenni had her head turned to the side, her eyes closed and a contented smile upon her lips.

Marcy came out of the exercise room in shorts and tank top, a towel draped around her shoulders and her platinum hair up in a ponytail. She did not see anyone in the room, but heard whispers and an occasional moan. She walked quietly across the carpeted floor, wiping her face with the towel, her brow furrowed at the sounds she heard.

When she approached the pit, she looked down and saw the spotted leopard and white tiger. From her vantage point, it looked like Dante was doing something a little more intimate than just a massage. She cleared her throat and the white tiger flinched, freezing in place with his hands on Jenni’s hips.

Both felines looked up at the nurse, and even though their actions were innocent, they both instantly realized what it must look like. Dante quickly crawled off of Jenni’s backside and sat down beside her on the pillows.

“Hi, Marcy,” Dante said with a cheesy grin. Jenni looked embarrassed, but gave their nurse a smile too.

“Hello,” Marcy replied. Then, after looking about to make sure no one else was around, she squatted down at the edge of the pit and shook her head. “I haven’t said anything to Doctor Renwick,” she said, “but I’ve been noticing just how chummy you two have become.”

“It’s all just play,” Dante explained quickly. “We’re not a couple.”

“That’s what you’ve told me before,” said the human woman, “but I’m not as blind as you may think I am.” The felines stared back up at her without responding, both trying look innocent.

“Let me caution you again about getting too familiar with one another,” Marcy said quietly. “With the constant changes at the genetic level in both of your bodies, an accidental pregnancy could be disastrous, both for the fetus and for the mother.”

Dante swallowed and exchanged quick looks with Jenni. “Isn’t feline fertility limited only to certain times of the year?” he asked. The nurse raised an eyebrow and then sat down on the edge of the pit.

“That would be true if you were fully feline,” she informed them, “but you’re not. Due to the retained human genetics in your new DNA makeup, you are not necessarily bound by the limits of rut and estrus. Due to heightened senses and pheromones, new Furs sometimes have trouble controlling their mating instincts, so unless you wish Doctor Renwick to administer a sexual suppressant in your food or medication, I suggest the two of you cool your jets a little.”

“We’re cool…” Dante said unconvincingly.

Marcy wiped her face with the towel again, ready for her shower. “As I said, I’m not blind, and neither is your doctor. I just happen to interact with you all more than he does. I’d like to think that I’m your friend, but no matter what kind of relationship you may have, you’d better be on good behavior if you don’t want to be medicated. We aren’t prudes, but it’s your safety at risk here. Are we clear on this?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dante and Jenni answered in unison.

The nurse got to her feet and looked back down at them with a smile. “Good, I’m off my soapbox now. Enjoy your back rub.”

***

“After them!”

“You don’t have the authority to give that order!”

“The captain is down and the first officer isn’t present – our prey is getting away!”

“They’re already gone. By the time we can get a fix on their new position —”

“Let them go…”

“Captain? You’re okay!”

“I’m dazed, but still here. Someone silence that alarm.”

“Aye, sir.”

“You’re just going to let them go? What kind of pirate are you?”

[smack!] “I am captain of this ship! Your insubordination will not be tolerated!”

Dante’s attention was riveted to the scene on the large screen of the movie they were watching later that night. The pillows that had been piled up earlier in the pit were now on the floor in front of the screen. Jon had initially resisted, choosing instead to sit in a chair as the rest of his housemates reclined on the pillows, but after some time he had to admit it looked comfortable and joined them on the floor, relaxing between the two females. Kristen happily scooted next to him, but maintained a small boundary so he would not feel too crowded. She and Jenni both swished their tails back and forth, alternating one to another lightly tapping the guys’ legs. After a while of watching the show, Jon did not notice this light interaction anymore, even though they kept it up all through the movie.

Later on, Kristen was feeling calm and relaxed, even though an action-oriented scene in the movie filled the room with its bombastic musical score. She looked over at Jon and was amused at the intent expression on his face as he watched the show. She reached out and gently took his hand, but he closed his fingers into a loose fist and pulled it back without looking at her. Undaunted, she waited another moment more before sliding one of her feet up and over one of his legs. She saw his brow furrow briefly without taking his eyes from the screen and then he pulled his leg out from beneath her foot.

Kristen frowned inwardly, but was determined to have some contact with him, so she simply scooted up against him to watch the rest of the movie. Jon sighed audibly, but allowed her to lie beside him like that for a while longer. When a slow moment came to the movie, Dante picked up the remote and paused the video.

“This commercial interruption is brought to you by all the soda I had with my supper,” the white tiger said with a grin. “Let’s take a break and then continue the movie in a few minutes.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jenni remarked, sitting up to pull at the fabric at the back of her waistband. “My tail strap is binding; I need to go put on a looser pair of shorts!”

“A break is a good idea,” Jon agreed. “I’m feeling snackish, myself.” He got up to his feet and walked to the kitchen while the others headed for opposite ends of the room. It was not until he turned on the light and entered the room that he realized that Kristen had followed him.

He reached for a bowl of fruit, picked out a fresh banana and held it out to her. “Want one?” he asked casually.

“Thank you.” The botanist took it and quickly looked around to see if either of the others was nearby. Satisfied that they were alone, she set the banana on the counter beside her and then stepped up close to the taller cougar.

“Jon” she asked quietly, “have I done something to offend you?”

“No,” he answered almost too quickly, “we’re fine.” He rubbed the skin of a green apple across the front of his furman robe and then lifted it to his mouth. Kristen stopped him with a touch on the arm. His immediate reaction was to pull away, but she closed her fingers gently around his wrist. There was no strength in the grip, but her expression was enough to stop him.

“I thought we were good friends, but lately you’ve been shutting me out,” she said quietly. “What happened? What did I do?” Before he could reply, she shook her head. “You used to let me sleep by your side. I didn’t do anything to take advantage of the situation; I just wanted to share your company. Now you won’t even let me touch you anymore.”

Jon frowned and set the apple back in the wicker fruit bowl. “I’m sorry, Kris,” he said. “I know I’ve been distant lately, but it’s not because of anything you’ve done. I’ve been having a lot of nightmares that the Doc says is because of changes in my brain. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve awakened in the night thrashing around in bed. I’ve even slashed a few sheets with my claws. It’s for your own safety that I sleep alone right now.”

The botanist looked up at him with a frown and released his arm. “I might have believed that if you didn’t also avoid me when you’re awake,” she said dryly. Jon looked at her and felt stung by her tone.

“Kris…” he began. He paused and sighed, trying to choose his words carefully. “I know you are looking for a relationship—” she raised an eyebrow at him “—but you’ve known for a long time that I am not.”

“Have I pushed you into anything more than friendship?” she asked bitterly. “Jon, I’ve always been the kind of person who likes physical contact, but you won’t even touch me as a casual friend anymore. Yes, I freely admit I would like something more, but I’ve never pushed. If all I get from you is a warm arm around me at night or a friendly touch during a movie, I’ll take it, but I don’t even get that from you anymore. We used to take walks together and had good, intelligent conversations. You rarely have lunch with me now, and seem annoyed all the time if I stand too close. You just stopped spending any more time with me than necessary. What did I do?”

“Nothing,” Jon answered, beginning to feel agitated by her emotional attack. “You’ve done nothing.”

“What then? What turned you against me? You owe me some kind of explanation! I’m tired of being shut out!”

Her attitude and demands had backed him up against a wall, so Jon snarled at her. “Enough already! You aren’t going to like it, but here’s what you wanted to know!” His eyes narrowed, he leaned against the counter behind him. “You already knew my background and why I was forced to come here, all before you signed your contract. You already knew that as a mountain lion, I was sentenced to wear the face of the guy I murdered and look at it in the mirror for the rest of my wretched life — and even then you chose to wear the same face! Kris, I like you – I like you a lot. You could have become any other cat and we probably would have gotten along better. I’ve had to work through a lot of my issues toward Furs and I might have accepted you otherwise, but no — you had to choose the one I’m stuck with!”

Moisture appeared at the rims of the botanist’s large golden eyes, but Jon leaned forward so that he was almost touching noses with her. Months of bottled-up emotions caused his voice to break. “I killed a guy for taking my mate, and you want to give me a constant reminder of it? My problem with you is not because you’re a Fur, Kris. Despite what I’ve let everyone think, it never was. I look at you and see another version of him, and I’ve been looking at him for months in my own mirror!” He stood up straight and flung his arms wide for emphasis. “Did you ever stop to think that what you did to me was cruel?”

A cry of despair escaped Kristen’s lips and she suddenly bolted away from him, hiding her face in her hands. She ran out of the kitchen and dashed across the saloon to her room, slamming the door behind her and startling Jenni who had just emerged from hers.

Jon swallowed the lump in his throat and wiped a hand across his face, instantly regretting that he had spat out words that he could never take back. Sometimes telling the honest truth could be more damaging than a heartless lie, but she had cornered him and he had slipped up.

Hearing her small cry of anguish had broken him. He took a tentative step out of the kitchen toward her room, but knew that she would never listen to him now. He clenched his fists so hard that his claws drew small beads of blood from the thick pads of his palms.

He closed his eyes and let a feline shriek of frustration escape his throat, and then he stormed off to the building’s exit. When he got outside, he chose a direction at random and began running just as fast as he could to burn off the excess energy coursing through him. He leaned forward in his run, his tail out behind him for balance, and then without thinking about it, Jon dropped to all fours and continued running.

Inside the Felis Wing, Jenni and Dante stood at opposite ends of the saloon mutely looking at one another, both of them having witnessed a breakup of their housemates without even knowing why.

Book 2

LOST IN THE WILDERNESS

©2011 by Ted R. Blasingame

Chapter 1

Abandoned Pets

The instructional session on transterrestrial botany the next afternoon was quieter than usual. Jean Dessau usually enjoyed having the mountain lions from the Felis Wing in her class, since both of them tended to ask the right questions, but this time Kristen was absent and Jon was brooding without participating any more than necessary. The dark-skinned woman worried that something had happened in the week since her last class, but since there were eight others attending, she did not have the time to focus on her concerns.

“When you set out to your new world,” she told her group, “you will be taking a supply of food and seeds enough to last up to a local year, but your starter colony will be there no less than five years. Almost as soon as you get your camp set up, you will either have to attempt growing Earth-type food plants in the alien soil, or you will need to discover which vegetation among the native plant life can be edible with nourishment before you’ve used up your reserve.”

There was a light summer breeze blowing at the edge of the backwoods where Jean had taken her class for the day. She led them from the freshly-mowed grounds a short distance into the wilderness portion of the forest, through light underbrush to a small clearing.

“Although it is impossible to plan for a specific planet’s ecosystem this far in advance,” she continued, “we’ve been fortunate on the other worlds where we have sent groups thus far. Despite that those distant worlds are light-years away, the Earth-type planets we’ve discovered have had flora similar to what we have right here on mother Terra.”

The instructor squatted down to look at a bit of green at her feet. She did not pull any of it loose, but she put her fingers beneath the slender blades and said, “Grass can be identifiable as grass, whether you’re on Earth, Javan, Kantus or Monarch. The characteristics and chemical makeup may be obviously different, but if you saw a field of something similar to this on Monarch, your first thought would be that it looks like grass, no matter if the plant is green, blue, red or purple. It’s the same with trees, flowers, reeds, bushes, ferns and so on. They aren’t physically related, but the ecosystems are so similar that it’s often been speculated that frozen spores traveling through space may have seeded numerous worlds despite interstellar distances.”

“Are you saying that there will be oak and maple trees on every world we find?” Dahlia Fleur asked.

Jean smiled but shook her head. “No, you will only find oak and maple trees on Earth, and then only in certain regions. However, you may find trees out there that are similar even if they aren’t actually related. There is a flying creature on Diamanta with a plumage we identify with feathers that has four wings, a long tail and hollow bones. It can’t be compared to anything identical with anything we have on Earth, but for all practical purposes, the colonists there call them birds. Is it a bird? It’s not from our homeworld and doesn’t even have similar genetics, but it’s identifiable to us as a bird. The same goes with the plants we’ve found. It’s all a matter of perception. Grass is grass, trees are trees, and flowers are flowers, no matter their origin.”

The woman stood up and gestured to several bushes surrounding the small group. “To our great relief, our distant colonies have discovered that not only have they found things that look similar to what we have here, many of the plants and animals are compatible with our physiologies.”

“What do you mean by compatible?” Gerard asked curiously, swatting at gnats that had discovered his small round ears.

Jean smiled. “Compatible, meaning that your digestive system can handle some of them as a nourishing food source. As it is right here, you won’t be able to eat just anything you find, so you’ll need to learn how to determine if the berries you find are edible. It may turn out that you can’t eat the berries, but you can the flowers, the leaves or even the stalk, so you’ll want to check out everything before you arbitrarily pick something and put it in your mouth.”

“That includes picking a blade of grass and chewing on it,” Carl remarked, slapping the short fennec fox beside him on the shoulder. Kevin looked down at the slender stalk of grass he had plucked from the ground that was currently stuck between his teeth. It was a habit he had picked up at home, and he had not even realized that he had done it. With everyone now looking at him, he tossed the partially chewed grass to the ground amidst a few chuckles and snickers.

Jean nodded in agreement. “That’s exactly right. The grass you find could be poisonous to ingest, so you may want start paying attention to such things now.” She gave Kevin a smile to let him know she wasn’t just singling him out, and then looked around the small clearing.

“Now, a chemical analysis is the best way to know for sure, but you may not always have a chemkit with you at all times. Using your furman senses and the selection we have here locally, let’s look at what you can do with similar type vegetation to identify what may or may not be healthy for you. In your new hybrid form, you’ll be surprised to know what you can discover with just your nose when it comes to edible plants.”

***

Kristen stood in front of the new fur dryer in the Felis Wing restroom, holding up a large towel with both hands to catch the blowing air around her. Instead of attending instructional classes throughout the day, she had chosen to stay in the Wing and do a hard cleanup to work off the frustrated energy she had built up inside due to her last conversation with Jon. It did not matter that the Wing had received a good cleaning only recently, but it was the only thing she could think of. Now at the end of the day, all of the common areas of the building were spotless, including the exercise and laundry rooms, and having just stepped out of the shower, she was clean too.

She had cried herself to sleep after Jon had flamed her, and even though Jenni had tried to console her, she had wanted nothing more than to be left alone. Jon had shocked her with his revelation and she was heartbroken, even if she finally realized just how rash her decision had been to take on the form of a mountain lion – something that would now be with her the rest of her life.

Just as Jon had done several days earlier, Kristen had begged Dr. Renwick to change her back, even at the risk of death by a process that had never seen success. The physician had listened to her patiently, but her request fell on deaf ears. Her health was not in danger and she was bound by her contract with the AHCP to see it through, especially since she was now in her seventh month of a nine-month transformation process.

Just as Jon would have to live with the result of his actions for the rest of his life, she was locked into the same fate. Both were now wearing faces of a creature neither of them wanted to be.

When she had awakened the next morning, Kristen had gotten out of bed and prepared for her day just like any other, except that she refused to look in a mirror. She had only her shoulder length, human-style scalp hair to style and she could do that with her eyes shut as simple as she wore it these days. The rest of her fur was short enough that grooming was a simple act of washing and drying it. Fortunately, due to her new eyes only the irises showed, but she was sure the hidden whites were likely bloodshot that morning.

She finished up with the fur dryer undisturbed and then wrapped the large towel around her middle. The botanist had grown so accustomed to her new fur-covered body that she was generally unconcerned if someone saw her without her robe top, but she was now self-conscious about her appearance again that she preferred the towel today.

When she eased out the door of the restroom, she peered across the saloon, but Jon was not in sight. Dante was watching a show on the large video screen and Jenni was in the pit tapping away at her PBJ. She glanced over at the simple pendulum clock over the fireplace mantle and noted that it was almost midnight. The other mountain lion would be in the exercise room, and now that the thought had occurred to her, she could hear motion behind the closed door to that room. Grateful she did not have to face him, Kristen padded quietly across the large room and then disappeared into her room without bothering her other housemates.

She shed the towel once closed inside and tossed it into a laundry hamper. She sat down on the edge of the bed and used a large brush to groom her fur merely for the peaceful feeling the action gave her. When she was done some time later, she slipped into a lightweight sleeping gown and then crawled beneath the covers of her bed. The feline woman contemplated sitting up to read for a while, but when she yawned, her ears flat against her head, she decided to call it a night. She turned off the lamp beside her bed and then settled in against her pillow.

Two minutes later, someone knocked on her door. She heaved a frustrated sigh, but did not open her eyes in the darkness. “I’ve already gone to bed,” she called out toward the door.

Someone turned the knob and opened the panel a few inches. “Kristen,” said Marcy’s voice, “the Director needs everyone fully dressed and outside in ten minutes.”

“What’s going on?” the cougar groaned.

“I don’t know,” replied the nurse, “but he’s doing this with all the Furs on the compound, not just your class.”

“Okay, I’ll be out in five.”

Her Felis Wing housemates were already dressed and outside by the time she strode down the hall toward the exit. She stepped out into a warm night and saw the director watching for her impatiently from the front seat of a six passenger electric cart. He gestured her toward the small group surrounding him and she completely ignored the other mountain lion to stand beside Jenni.

Marcelo wrung his hands together and looked agitated. “Okay, folks, I need all of you to climb in so I can take you to the main gate. Once we get there, you will board a bus that’s waiting for you.”

“Where are we going?” Dante asked curiously.

“On a field trip,” the director replied.

“At midnight?” Jon remarked.

“There’s no time for questions. Please get in the cart.”

“You’re scaring me, Marcelo,” Jenni remarked as she and Kristen climbed upon a sideways-facing bench seat. The director didn’t respond, and once the Furs were on board, he drove off across the grass in the darkness toward the large wrought iron gate at the perimeter of the complex. Marcy and Dr. Renwick both watched them go for a moment before going back inside the Wing.

Aside from the weekly delivery of supplies, the main gates were rarely opened otherwise, so it seemed odd to the Furs that they were wide open. The Institute’s old hydrogen-powered bus was parked right between the gates, mostly filled with other Furs from the complex. Marcelo pulled up near the vehicle’s door and shut off the electric cart.

“All right, get on the bus. We’ll be leaving in just a few minutes.”

“Where are we going?” Dante tried again. The director simply ignored him this time, leaving the felines by the cart to talk to someone standing in the headlights of the bus.

“This is too peculiar,” Jon mumbled. “Is there a danger in the Institute?”

“If that was the case, Marcy and the doctor would have come with us,” Jenni suggested. “They didn’t even look bothered.”

Kristen walked deliberately to the bus and mounted the steps. Once at the top, she looked around and saw Furs from both Classes Fifteen and Sixteen. Cheryl waved and beckoned her toward the back where she had an empty spot beside her. Despite the late hour, the Border collie had grabbed her cowgirl hat and was wearing it on top of her head. Due to her higher floppy ears, it did not fit as well as it had when she was a human, but she had refused to part with it. Kristen side-stepped past others, but halted when Travis looked up at her from the seat in front of Cheryl’s. He too had an empty seat beside him; he patted it suggestively when she noticed.

“You can sit here, Kristen,” he said with a tired smile. The day had been long for everyone, and it appeared she was not the only one who had been roused out of bed. After the way that Jon had treated her the night before, she briefly considered giving the canine a chance, but then he waggled his eyebrows and made a groping motion with his hand resting on the seat beside him.

She shook her head with a sigh and then took the empty spot beside the Border collie behind him. “Thanks,” she told him, “but I think I’ll be better off back here.” The German shepherd shrugged his shoulders, put his hands in his lap and stared out the side window.

Jenni took a seat beside Gerard and Dante looked disappointed, but there were no more fully vacant seats for them to sit together. Nearby was an empty spot beside a cute fennec fox from the previous class. He had seen her around, but had never actually talked to her before, so once he had his tail situated and out of danger from getting stepped on in the aisle, he turned to her to introduce himself.

“Hello,” he said quietly. “I’m Dante Capanari.”

The woman held out a small hand with a smile. “Hi, Dante. I’m Erin Sealock. I’m pleased to share my seat with such a gorgeous striped cat.”

The white tiger smiled. He liked her instantly. “You’re pretty cute, yourself,” he told her. He glanced up at her enormous ears and then back down at her smiling face. “If you don’t mind me asking, why aren’t you and Kevin sitting together, both being desert foxes?”

Erin laughed and her voice reminded Dante of a popular cartoon pixie. “I’m sure others have wondered the same,” she replied in amusement, “but he already has a vixen that occupies his attention.”

Dante looked up toward the front of the charter bus and spied the young male fennec with his arm around Rose Fleur, who had her sleepy head upon his shoulder. “Ah yes,” he said. “They’re both close in age so they probably have a lot in common.”

“No doubt,” she said in polite conversation. “I understand he’s studying to become a furman meteorologist. That’s a good career choice. What are you planning for your colony?”

The tiger put a hand up to his chest and gave her an abbreviated bow from his seat. “Nothing special, just a humble cook.”

“There’s nothing wrong with cooking for others,” Erin told him, placing a light hand on his arm. “Everybody needs to eat!”

“It also helps that I enjoy cooking. What about you?”

Erin laughed again. “I have several talents, but my primary function will be a counselor,” she said grabbing both of her ears. “Who better to listen to you than someone with big ears, eh?”

Dante chuckled. “I can’t argue with that.”

Up near the front of the bus, Jon sat down beside a drowsy Sissy in the seat behind Kevin and Rose, striking up a low conversation with Hiamovi Avonaco.

“Any idea what’s going on?” he asked the grizzly. Avon barely fit in the seat across the aisle by himself, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“No clue whatsoever,” the bear replied. “Neither Ray nor Holly would answer my questions; no one else seems to know either. It’s a mystery to me what we’re doing out here on a bus in the middle of the night.”

“Ray? Holly?” Jon mused. “I don’t know those names.”

“That’s the medical staff of the Ursis Wing, Dr. Raymond Lacross and Nurse Holly Spiro.”

“Ah.”

A moment later, Marcelo stepped inside and closed the door. Thirty-one furry faces looked up at him, but instead of giving them any kind of explanation, he sat down in the driver’s seat and buckled himself in. He made a hand signal to someone standing outside in the darkness and then started the engine.

The short, swarthy director put the bus into gear, guided the vehicle out of the gates, and then out along the winding road through the Adirondack forest. Voices mumbled and grumbled, and then over the din came Dante’s plaintive query.

“Hey, where are we going?”

As with before, the director remained quiet, though the instrument panel lights reflected his eyes looking back at his living cargo from the internal mirror. Others piped up with similar questions, but Marcelo remained tight-lipped about their queries. Low-voiced conversations conjectured as to their destination, but after a solid half hour of driving along twisting and winding roads through the darkness with a charter bus full of Furs typically up later than they were used to, the discussions died down until most of them had eventually drifted off to sleep in their seats.

Despite the full day they had, both of the lupine Amaranths were oddly alert and kept a watch on Marcelo in the driver’s seat. The density of the forest canopy above them and the absence of street lights made the night so black that even starlight had trouble filtering to the road below, revealing no landmarks to keep track of. No one on the bus had an inkling of an idea on what was going on; even Sissy, who seemed to know as much or more about the goings-on of the Institute grounds as the director had not even heard a rumor on what they were doing.

Marcelo drove on into the night, taking the winding roads carefully with some specific destination in mind. Then, when they had been on the road for an hour, the bus slowed and turned off of the main road onto an unmarked, gravel-covered avenue cut through the trees. The director drove slowly and the uneven ground beneath the tires rocked the vehicle enough to wake some of the sleeping Furs. As before, there were queries to their destination, but Marcelo remained silent.

On and on he drove through the woods, sometimes having to slow almost to a stop to ease the large bus through overhanging branches. Twice the trail branched off where Marcelo would have to think for a moment as if trying to remember his way.

Most of the Furs drifted back off to sleep again despite the unpaved road that was now little more than worn ruts through forest grass. Although not quite asleep, even Ellie Amaranth had put her head on her husband’s shoulder. For a time, Carl was the only passenger still awake and somewhat alert.

The wooded lane then opened up into a large elliptical clearing and Marcelo guided the bus around the perimeter of the glade until he was facing back the way they had come. At last, he pulled to a stop and set the parking brake, though he did not shut off the engine.

“Okay, everyone, wake up,” he announced in a loud voice while pounding on the dash of the vehicle. “I need everyone outside right now.”

A few at a time roused groggily and got to their feet, ambling along the aisle to the steps to exit as directed. It took some minutes to get everyone awake and off the bus, standing in a dark clearing somewhere in the middle of the night. Moths and other insects began to gather around the headlights, and when Marcelo was certain that the bus was empty, he reached down beside the driver seat and picked up a small package.

Down the stairs and outside the vehicle, he looked around in the dim light for the tallest silhouette and then approached Avon. He quietly handed something to the puzzled bear and then turned back to the bus.

Everyone watched mutely as Marcelo climbed the steps up into the vehicle and then closed the door behind him. He buckled himself into the driver seat and then put the bus into gear.

Astonished, the unbelieving crowd of Furs watched as the bus ambled back up the wooded trail it had driven in on, leaving them behind in the darkness without explanation or even so much as a flashlight.

“Hey!” Aaron yelled after the bus. “Come back!” The red tail lights continued to recede, and although the bear and several others ran after it, they had all waited too long in stunned disbelief before taking out after it. Within moments, even the sound of the bus was gone.

“Ohmigosh, he just left us behind!” Dahlia exclaimed unnecessarily. “He left us!”

“What does this mean?” Jenni asked from somewhere in the crowd. “Is he coming back or did he just abandon us like unwanted pets?”

“He gave something to Avon before he left. What was it?” asked someone else’s voice. Jon’s ears swiveled and he tilted his head before it registered who had spoken. It was Wendy Miller, a Golden Retriever from Class Fifteen. Sudden remembrance of the item caused numerous questions to pop up all at once, until the grizzle bear himself called for quiet.

There were several approaching footsteps in the darkness and the group turned en masse toward the sound of heavy breathing. Sissy took hold of someone’s arm beside her in sudden trepidation, without even caring who it was she had grabbed. Whoever it was, the furman’s scent smelled just as frightened as she was.

“We... couldn’t catch... him...” gasped Aaron’s voice from the darkness.

“How’d you find your way back to us?” asked Dante. “It’s nearly pitch black!”

“All your panicked voices,” Aaron replied dryly. “You guys are loud.”

“Yeah, we couldn’t hear anything else in the forest,” Travis added. “Just a noisy bunch of idiots.”

“That was real helpful, Tyndall,” someone else shot back.

“Once your eyes adjust to the darkness,” Aaron added, “there’s enough light to see to get around.”

“What are we going to do?” Sissy asked, her feline voice almost breaking.

For several heartbeats, the entire crowd fell silent. Night sounds from the forest began to pick up again after their momentary silence due to the frightened intruders to the dark wooded domain. Insects resumed their nightly clicks, chitters and chirps, and then something large could be heard moving through the trees a short distance away. Unconsciously, most of the Furs crowded in together for protection. Several resumed talking again, but this time in low whispers as if to keep from disturbing whatever was out there.

“What did Marcelo give to Avon?” Wendy finally asked again. Discussions began to quiet down again as everyone gathered near the canine’s voice. No one had been prepared for a nighttime excursion, so there were no flashlights, matches or even a cyalume light stick among them.

“It’s a small vinyl case,” Avon said to the crowd, running his fingers over the item in his hands.

“What’s in it?” asked Norman.

“Give me a moment, I’m opening it.” There a pregnant pause when the grizzly mumbled something that no one else caught. Norman was just about to repeat himself when there was a small click in the darkness and then a greenish glow emitted from his large hand.

“C’mon, man, what is it?” Norman complained.

“It’s a GPS receiver,” answered the grizzly.

“What’s that do?” asked Sissy.

“It picks up signals from geosynchronous satellites orbiting the earth and uses them to triangulate your position to tell you where you are,” Gerard explained.

“My phone can do that.”

“Do you have your phone with you?”

“No…”

“So you can tell us where we are?” Jasmine wanted to know.

“Yes and no,” said Avon. “Right now, the overhead tree limbs are too thick to get a reading from the satellite signals for a good fix. It’s picked up a couple because we’re in a clearing, but it’s having difficulty getting a lock on others to give a true location.”

“Can you give us any idea where we are?” someone asked.

Avon thumbed through the menus on the handheld device for a moment as others tried to crowd around to see the screen. It had been a few years since he had used one during a summer of geocaching with a friend, but the menu selections were simple.

“There’s only a single waymark recorded on it that I’m assuming is the Institute. We’re still only getting partial satellite signals, but if the location arrow is anywhere near where we’re at, I’d say we’re about twelve miles to the northeast of the Institute.”

“Are we supposed to find our way back, or abandon all hope and scatter?” Jenni asked. “What happened back at the Institute that made them drop us all off like this?”

“Maybe they heard there’s going to be a raid on the place and they wanted to get us out of there beforehand,” Dante suggested.

“Why would they raid us?” asked Aaron. “The AHCP is a worldwide legal operation.”

“I don’t know,” Dante grumbled. “I’m just guessing like everyone else is.”

“Avon, did Marcelo tell you what we’re supposed to do?” Jon asked amidst other questions and conversations building up.

“Nothing,” answered the bear. “He didn’t say a bloody word.” He turned off the GPS receiver to conserve the batteries and put it back inside its case. “Listen, did anyone bring a PBJ with them?”

“I have mine,” replied Sissy. “I take it everywhere, but until now I forgot I had it!” The domestic feline scrambled for the pocket of her furman robe and pulled out her clamshell device. She popped it open and tapped the power button. The device’s double screens came to life and she giggled when the smiling face of a cartoon kitty filled up one screen in greeting. There were several snickers over her shoulder. Rather than risk losing the PBJ’s stylus in the dark, Sissy used a claw tip on the screen to maneuver through her personal message center. After a moment, she sighed.

“I can’t get a lock on the network,” she complained.

“Are we too far from the Institute?” Kevin wanted to know.

“That wouldn’t matter,” Manny replied from nearby. “The PBJs get their signals from satellites rather than a broadcast tower.”

“Like the GPS?” Erin asked.

“The trees have never kept my PBJ from connecting before back at the Institute,” Sissy complained.

“Maybe it’s being blocked by the Director,” suggested Carl. It was the first time he had spoken since they had been unceremoniously dropped off in the woods.

“What do you mean, blocked?” asked Yuki Tanaka, an Akita from Class Fifteen. She and her lynx sister Kim had been holding onto one another in the darkness, simply listening to the discussion in hopes someone knew what was going on.

Carl cleared his lupine throat. “We’re pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, put on a bus and then dropped off out in the middle of the forest without provision or instruction with only a GPS and a single waymark to point our way back to the Institute, if that’s actually the Institute. It’s possible this might be part of our survival training, to put to use what they’ve been trying to teach all of us since we got here.”

“So why would they block my PBJ?” Sissy asked.

“To force us to use our wits instead of technology,” Jasmine supplied. “They didn’t even give us flashlights.”

“I don’t like this,” Rose muttered.

“We won’t have much technology to rely on whenever we’re stranded on a distant planet,” Jon reminded her. “We’ll be better off learning to get around in unfamiliar territory now before we get shipped out. There’s only so much you can learn in a classroom environment.”

“Have you done this before, Jon?” Dante asked.

“Not this exactly, but my dad was a hunter and he often took my brother and I out with him on weekend excursions.”

“I’ve done some cross-country hikes myself,” Avon admitted in the soft glow of Sissy’s PBJ, “but I’ve always had necessary supplies with me.”

“That’s the same with Ellie and me,” said Carl.

“And me,” added Alicia from the fringes of the crowd.

“Some of us have never been dropped off out in the woods at night before,” said the scratchy voice of Ivan Dimitri, a red fox tod from Class Fifteen.

“They didn’t do this when your class was in training?” Dahlia asked. “I assumed this might have been something they did with each new group.”

“Nope, they didn’t,” Ivan replied. “We went on a few field trips, but nothing like this.”

“So what do we do now?” Aaron asked. “Are we going to find our way back blind in the dark?

“No,” Avon said with authority. “We don’t know the topography of the terrain and it would be too dangerous trying to find our way even without stumbling over fallen trees or into ravines — especially since with both classes combined there’s thirty-one of us to keep track of. One or two of us should keep watch in two hour shifts while the rest sleeps. From what I saw in the bus headlights, we’re in a large clearing of grass and wildflowers. We don’t have any bedding, but it should be warm enough, so it’s best if everyone just finds a patch of ground and gets some rest. I suspect we will have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

“What about food and water?” Kevin asked.

“We’ll search the area once we have daylight, but for now, get some rest and try not to worry over our situation. Does anyone have a watch on them?”

“It’s a quarter after two o’clock,” Carl supplied.

“Sunrise yesterday was around a quarter of six,” Avon remarked, “so that will give us about four hours until we have enough daylight to do anything.”

“Who’s going to stand watch over us?” Jenni asked.

“I’ll take the first shift,” Avon answered. “I need a volunteer to stand with me.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Thanks, Jon.”

“Wake me when you need a relief,” Gerard added.

“I’ll take a watch,” Norman volunteered.

“Me too,” said Alicia.

“Thanks, all of you. Okay, folks, pull up a patch of grass and get some rest. We’ll decide the best course of action once we can see where we are.”

There were mumbles and grumbles as the large group of Furs tried to settle down on the ground. No one really wanted to be separated far from the others, so bodies were only a foot or two apart when everyone started to lie down in the grassy clearing.

When Kristen crouched down on all fours, she sighed to herself. She and Jon were still not talking, but at the moment she was really wishing that she could lay beside him for comfort. On impulse she stretched out a hand to the nearest body and felt a furry elbow.

“Excuse me,” she whispered. “May I sleep next to you? I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

“Why sure, darlin’. Snuggle on up to me and let me keep you safe during the night.”

Kristen paused with a shiver down her spine. Out of thirty other Furs in the group, she had to have chosen the one person she had absolutely no desire to sleep beside. Before she could say anything, Travis slipped an arm around her waist and drew her down onto the grass beside him. She turned away from him, but then he spooned up behind her with his arm across her middle. The German shepherd put his nose up onto her neck and then snuggled up close.

The mountain lioness lay on her side stiffly for several long moments, but when Travis did nothing more than lay up next to her, she began to relax; she appreciated the fact that Travis was behaving himself. She was tired and frightened, but she had to admit that it felt nice to have a warm body beside her so she closed her eyes to get some rest.

Just as she was drifting off to sleep, something else began drifting. Travis moved his arm ever so gently that Kristen almost did not notice it, but when his hand slid over onto her chest, her eyes snapped open.

“If you don’t move your hand off my breast,” she whispered, “I’m going to sink my teeth into it all the way to the bone.”

He pulled his hand away immediately, but then moved it to the base of her tail, which was right between them. A growl began in her throat, so he moved his arm to his side, puffing up the fur of her neck with a snort of annoyance.

“Listen,” Kristen whispered quietly, “you can put your arm around me if you want, but only if you can respect my wishes. I’m not giving you permission to fool around, only to sleep beside me.”

“Hey, sweetness, you’re the one who wanted to sleep with me,” he whispered back.

“The operative word is sleep, Travis. If you can’t honor that, I’ll sleep alone after all.”

The canine was silent for a moment, but then he put his arm around her again, resting his hand lightly on her stomach.

“There, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?” she asked.

“Harder than you think,” he replied. Kristen caught the double entendre, suddenly very aware of certain parts of his anatomy up next to hers.

“Just behave and get some rest, please.”

The German shepherd sighed and relaxed against her. Suspicion kept Kristen awake for a while longer, but when his breathing deepened in slumber, she finally relaxed.

What would happen to them? She wondered. Was the mark on the GPS home or some other destination? Without supplies or provisions of any kind, they would have to rely upon one another on the hike to that location. Sufficient food and water might not be so easy to find, but as a botanist, she knew she would do her duty as part of the team.

Chapter 2

March of the Furs

Jonathan Sunset stood out in the dark clearing a short distance from where the other Furs had settled in for the night and suppressed a yawn. He remained absolutely still, crouching down in the tall grass and straining all his senses to listen to the forest around them. It had been years since he had done any hunting, but now his senses were sharper. His feline eyes had adjusted to the darkness and the faint starlight over the clearing illuminated his surroundings in ways he had never imagined. Not as color blind as a true cougar, colors were muted compared to what he used to know, but his night sight was brighter, sharper, making it a decent trade-off.

Without consciously thinking about them, his ears swiveled back and forth to zero in on the night sounds around them. There were several incidents where he could hear something large walking over leaves and pine needles through the surrounding brush, but the scents his nose picked up were unfamiliar to him. He guessed it might be a moose, as they were supposed to be in the area. Despite that the Furmankind Institute was located in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, all the scents of the complex had masked anything else from the surrounding forest. Now that he was out in the wilderness, he was enjoying the new scents and sounds so much that he had momentarily forgotten their predicament.

He could smell water somewhere nearby, and he suddenly realized that he could also pick up the faint smell of blood. He began to get alarmed, but once he sifted the scents more carefully, his brain associated the smell with another. He wrinkled his nose in the dark when he realized that one of the females in the group must be menstruating. He did his best to push that scent from his mind, afraid that if he concentrated on it more he could probably have picked out who it belonged to, and he was not that curious.

Sorting carefully through other aromas in the dark, he picked up the scent of something on the light night breeze that made his taste buds tingle, even though he had no idea what it was that he smelled. If it had not been for his sense of duty in keeping watch over his sleeping companions, he might have been tempted to run out after whatever it was that smelled so good to him. One such critter suddenly came into his view. Had his night vision not been so sensitive he might have missed it, but movement at the far edge of the clearing stirred the summer grass in a direction against the occasional breeze. His dilated feline eyes locked on the movement and he recognized a small pair of fuzzy ears barely sticking up above the grass.

Jon caught himself licking his lips. No, he thought to himself, I am not a wild animal to be enticed by a rabbit! Despite this, however, he had to swallow the saliva that was forming in his mouth. The breeze shifted and he suddenly realized that this was the aroma he had picked up before that smelled so nice. He had never lied when he had told someone he was a hunter from a family of hunters. That was not a part of his made-up identity, but was an actual fact of his family history. During his youth, Jon had often hunted rabbits with his father, uncles and cousins, but he had never eaten one raw; neither had he ever actually noticed a scent like this.

For all his arguing and grumbling, this furman experienced a thrill using these newly realized senses — and he understood. It took a trip into the wilderness for him to comprehend part of the reasons for sending Furs out to newly discovered worlds. Such senses could be a benefit to someone trying to learn a new land, and although this is one of the things their instructors had tried to explain to them, it had never sunk in until now.

Go ahead and give in to the animal, he told himself. I’m part cat, but I’m still a man. I can use this. He remained perfectly still, his eyes riveted to the rabbit slowly making its way to a choice patch of clover, but he wanted to run out there and chase it down. Is this a part of the feline instincts, or is it simply because I’m finally starting to accept what I am?

He could not remember how long he had been on watch, but a hunger in his stomach reminded him that they would need to find food soon. The rabbit was a distraction. He needed to be on the watch for any danger that might approach the Furs while they slept, but he also knew that if danger were nearby, the rabbit would have either disappeared already or its motions would be frozen in stillness.

Jon swallowed. He wanted that rabbit. The quivering of its ears in the grass enticed him and he swallowed again. He leaned forward in his crouch ever so slightly until both hands touched the ground without stirring a dry leaf. His movement did not stop there, however. He got down on all fours in the grass, his eyes never leaving his prey. His breathing became shallow as he drew in the rabbit’s scent and the very tip of his long rope tail began to twitch. The muscles in his legs bunched up as he prepared to launch himself out across the clearing. He was going to enjoy this.

“Jon!” someone called out in a quiet voice.

Queued up for the pounce, the feline furman nearly jumped out of his skin, and he did jump forward about two yards only to stumble over his own feet. He hit the ground ungracefully and fell over onto his side. He could feel a ridge of fur standing up along his back and he growled lowly in frustration and embarrassment.

“Over here, Norman,” he grumbled, struggling to get to his feet. He cast a disappointed look back toward the rabbit, but he needn’t have bothered; it was gone.

“There you are,” said his ursine friend. “Go get a couple hours of sleep. I’ll take over the watch for you.”

Jon doubted that the adrenaline now coursing through his body would allow him to relax enough to sleep for a while, but he stood up and found the bear in the darkness by starlight. “Thanks,” he muttered.

Norman did not recognize the annoyance in the cougar’s voice, instead taking the tone as being tired and in need of rest. “Don’t mention it,” he said quietly.

Jon left without another word and made his way over to the slumbering crowd. He did not have a destination in mind, so he merely found a spot on the outer fringes of the group and stretched out on the grass.

He did not go to sleep right away. There was too much pent up energy within him, so he began a series of quiet exercises in the dark, beginning with push-ups in the grass. This act was so habitual to him that he did it without conscious thought while his mind returned to the new sensations he had experienced.

***

When Jon awoke to the smell of smoke, he discovered that he was only one of a few that still slept. The glow of dawn was still mostly down behind the trees, but birdsong in the trees was already active. He rubbed his eyes and started to get up, but discovered that Rose had snuggled up next to him during the night and had his left arm pinned to the ground. He lifted the young vixen’s shoulder gently and extracted his arm, and then she turned over onto her other side without waking up.

Voices mumbled together in conversation from several small groups scattered about the clearing, but the number there did not account for nearly half of the Furs. He yawned, stretched and then got up to his feet. Bits of grass, leaves and pine needles clung to his furman garments, as well as a small bit of dew. He brushed himself off and then walked over to the nearest group.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Cheryl said to him with a smile, looking out at him from under the brim of her cowgirl hat. She sat with Jenni, Jasmine, Dahlia and Erin, all gathered around a small burning fire contained in an old bowl of earth and ringed with moderate-sized, scorched stones; this was not the first time that someone had camped out in the clearing. Lying up against the rocks were a few thick sticks that were blackened on one end.

“Good morning, ladies,” Jon returned, giving them all a partial smile over a puzzled expression. “What’s going on?”

“Breakfast!” Erin said brightly. “The bears are all down at the creek they found this morning, fishing bare-handed.” She giggled at the implied pun, grinning.

“Bare-handed, bare-chested, and in their wet shorts, almost bare bears,” Jasmine added with a grin. Erin giggled again and the two of them exchanged looks of amusement when Jon rolled his eyes at the banter.

Dahlia shook her head with a hopeless expression at her sister and then she looked up at the mountain lion. “No one brought a knife, so we’ve had to use teeth and claws,” she told him. “I wasn’t sure I could eat a fish that wasn’t previously prepared, but once I got past the ick factor it wasn’t so bad when roasted over a fire.”

“Who’s the Scout who rubbed sticks together for your campfire?” the cougar asked, squatting down between Cheryl and Jenni.

“Aaron used to smoke cigars until his transformation changed the way they tasted,” Jenni answered, poking the fire with one of the sticks, “but he still carries his lighter everywhere he goes – says it’s a good luck charm.”

“I forgot he had that,” Jon mused. “Did it have a four-leaf clover painted on each side?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“Why didn’t he use it last night when we were all in the dark?”

“He said he didn’t want to waste its fuel, but it didn’t take much to get a couple fires going once we’d prepared the ground like this with dry wood.”

Jon nodded in approval. “Sounds like someone’s on top of things this morning.”

“It’s Avon,” Jasmine told him. “He’s a good planner and took charge right away.”

“Does anyone have a problem with him in charge?”

“Travis grumbled about it, but everyone else thinks Avon is the right one for the job.”

“It makes sense,” Jon replied. “Avon’s being trained to be a colony captain when they send out the next Ursis group.” He looked around and then up at the brightening sky. “Why didn’t anyone wake me when everyone else got up?”

Cheryl snickered. “We tried, but neither you nor Rose would get up.”

“I had to make sure you weren’t taking advantage of our little sister,” Jasmine remarked with a sly smile, “but you were a gentleman even in your sleep. I think Kevin may have been jealous, though.”

“Great. Thanks, but you could have gotten me up,” Jon replied, remembering waking up with the youngest of the Fleur sisters snuggled up to him.

“Since you stood first watch last night, we thought you could use the extra sleep.”

Jon frowned. “I assumed we’d be on the move by now, trying to get back to the Institute.”

“Avon figured we’d be better off if we’d had something to eat and gathered up a few supplies first. Several are still fishing if you want breakfast, others are out with Kristen gathering edible berries, and Avon’s got a few scouting around for something to carry water in.”

“That last one’s not going to be easy,” Jon remarked. “It’ll be interesting to see if someone can come up with something. If no one has a knife, it won’t be possible to carve out a wooden container and would take too long with claws.” He picked up one of the charred sticks and got to his feet. “Which way to the fish?”

Cheryl pointed across the clearing to the border of trees nearest to them. “You could just follow your nose to the water,” she teased, “but if you go between those two large pine trees, you’ll find an animal path down a hill to the creek.”

“Thanks, ladies. I’ll be back shortly.”

***

Kristen knelt beside a cluster of purple flowers on twining stems and smiled. She knew things would not be quite this easy when they reached another planet, but she recognized what she had found here, an abundance of amphicarpaea bracteata, more commonly known as hog peanuts. Both the roots and the seeds of the plant were edible, but despite their nickname, they typically had a taste resembling chestnuts rather than peanuts. To the uninitiated, the plant’s triple leaves might resemble poison ivy and warn off the casual hiker, but Kristen knew the difference and began digging at the soil to get at the roots and buried seed nuts.

She already had a small variety of other edible plants she had discovered just inside the edge of the forest near the clearing where they had spent the night, and both pockets of her furman robe top were getting full. The berries, nuts and edible flowers would not feed a group as large as theirs for long, but it would help mute the hunger that would likely set in on their trek back to the Institute.

In spite of the panic of abandonment the night before, most of the Furs were in good spirits. Avon encouraged each and every one of them he spoke to and prompted everyone to work together as a team. Due to her expertise in botany, Kristen had been put in charge of a small group to forage for edible plants they could carry with them.

Michael Lynch approached to see what she was digging up, and when she held one up for him to see, he grinned and got down on his knees beside her.

“You have fuzz all over you,” she teased. The swift fox shrugged and pulled at a hog peanut stem.

“I found some cattails growing down at the creek,” he explained. “I tried to stuff a few stalks in my pockets, but the seeds got everywhere.”

“The cattail plants will appreciate your willingness to spread their seeds across the countryside,” she replied with a nod. “I’ve never actually eaten cattail, but I know the whole plant is edible, the best part being the stalk, so it’ll be good to have along.”

“Hey, can we eat this one?” called out another voice.

Kristen looked up in annoyance, but pasted an indifferent expression on her face. She put a hand on Michael’s arm and indicated that he should continue with the peanuts, and then got to her feet to see what Travis had found.

The German shepherd stood beside a flowering plant on a smooth green stem with red streaks. The triangular leaves were lacy and finely divided with small umbel-clustered white flowers. Travis had crushed several of the leaves in one hand and an unpleasant aroma surrounded him. In his other hand were several dried seed pods that he had lifted toward his lips.

Kristen’s eyes widened and she suddenly swallowed. “No, Travis, those are poisonous!” She tapped his wrists until he dropped the contents from both hands, and then pointed to a small brook they had crossed earlier. “You’d better go wash your hands; that’s hemlock you’ve found there!”

Travis let out a yelp and ran to the brook to clean off his hands. He had never actually seen the plant before, but he had retained enough of his schooling to remember that the philosopher Socrates had committed suicide from drinking a mixture containing poison hemlock. He did not know if it could get into his bloodstream simply by handling it, but he certainly did not want any of it on his hands when he ate something later.

Kristen watched him scrub his hands vigorously with river mud and pebbles, wishing they had some kind of hand sanitizer along. A wave of movement caught her attention nearby and she looked up to see Yuki Tanaka trying to get her attention. The mountain lioness walked around several of the hemlock plants to a tree near the brook.

The Canis Akita stood beside a tree with long pointed leaves with serrated margins decorated by a large purple crop of small, round berries.

“What about these?” Yuki asked in a quiet voice, hoping she had not found something in a repeat of what Travis had just discovered.

The ground beneath the tree was scattered with the berries that had dried and fallen off. Kristen knelt down to examine them for a moment and then her eyes lit up in recognition. She had never actually seen any before, but she knew enough about them from her studies.

“These are hackberries,” she told Yuki with a nod. “They’re like a cross between nuts and berries, and they are safely edible.” Using the hem of her robe top, she brushed off one of the dried and ripened berries before placing it in her mouth; she chewed on it cautiously, hoping her memory was correct, but when the sweet juices spread across her taste buds, she smiled at the canine. “These are good,” she told her. “Gather up all the dried ones you can find, but leave the rest.”

“Why only the dried ones?” the Akita asked, instead eying a plump purple berry on the tree. “There are lots more on the tree.”

“You can eat those, but they’ll be bitter. The sweet ones are those that have matured and dried.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Good job, Yuki,” Kristen told her with a smile. She left the Akita to her task and then walked through the brush to check on Sissy Quinn. The domestic cat looked up at her from the ground where she knelt and held up several thick taproots the color of her fur.

“I found wild carrots!” Sissy exclaimed triumphantly. “I used to grow these in a window box at home and recognized the tops!”

Kristen grinned in return and got down on her knees. “Very good! Here, let me help you dig up more.”

They began to chat as they dug in the forest soil with their claws, and after a moment, Travis knelt down behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened immediately, and he put his nose up beside one of her ears.

“Thank you for saving me back there,” he said with genuine appreciation. “I could have died if you hadn’t stopped me from tasting the seeds.”

Kristen looked over her shoulder at him and nodded. “You’re welcome,” she replied. “This is the kind of thing we’ll all be facing when they send us to other worlds, only we won’t have any kind of experience or knowledge about the local plant life there. The Director may be forcing us on survival training now, but we’re fortunate now in that we know some plants here we can eat. They won’t fill us up, but could keep an edge off our hunger on the way back.”

Travis slipped a hand down to her waist and slid his arm around her. “Thank you,” he said again, whispering right into her ear. “How may I show you my gratitude?”

Kristen knew exactly where his fingers were heading and she cleared her throat. “You’re welcome. Go help Michael dig up peanuts and we’ll call it even.” The canine’s hands crept up farther and she suddenly clamped her arm down hard on his wrist. “Please,” she added.

The German shepherd snorted and withdrew his hand. Before he backed away, however, he whispered, “I’ve noticed that you and Sun-downer aren’t chummy anymore. If you need someone to snuggle up to again tonight, you’re welcome to my warm arms… or more.”

Kristen cleared her throat again and shook her head. “Thanks, but no thanks,” she told him. “Now, the sooner we get back with these edible plants, the quicker we can get started on the way back.”

Travis smiled and gave her ear a quick lick before he stood up and moved back out of reach. Sissy looked at her with wide eyes. She had heard them whispering, but had not been able to tell what the canine had said to the cougar.

“What was that about?” she asked quietly, still looking up at Kristen’s ear.

The botanist rubbed a hand across her ear and then wiped it on the leaves and pine needles covering the forest floor. “That… was him getting on my nerves again,” she muttered, peering down at her claws. “I am trying to be civil, but I was about to let my cat hiss at him. C’mon, let’s get as many carrots as we can find and then get back to the clearing.”

***

“We’ll have to use the GPS sparingly,” Avon announced to the group of Furs gathered around him. “We only have the one set of batteries that were in it and I’ve noticed even those aren’t fully charged. I don’t know how long it will take us to get back to the Institute, so we’ll only turn it on as needed to get our bearings. Fortunately, it’s loaded with topographical maps that should help us make our way around the roughest terrain if we find we have to leave the road.”

The cinnamon-furred grizzly looked around at the thirty sets of eyes looking back at him, the morning sun filtering through the overhead branches upon his shoulders. Despite the accepting attitude they had all adopted earlier, some now looked frightened as they were about to set off. Avon felt their sense of uncertainty, but he did not share that sense of helplessness. This was likely just a mere test, and although there were not many among them familiar with life in a forest, they were still on Earth and everything around them shared the same world history. One day they might be in a similar situation, but it would be upon an alien world where everything around them was unknown. For now, they were still upon home soil.

“I’ve talked it over with some of you and it seems the best course of action would be to follow the road out that Marcelo brought us in on,” he told them. “The roads meander around the mountains through the forest and it may take us longer to get back that way, but the terrain will be level and free of the underbrush we’d have to go through otherwise.

“Since we were left without supplies of any kind, we don’t have so much as a knife to carve out anything that could hold any amount of water to carry along, but the Adirondacks are plentiful in lakes, rivers and streams and we’ve discovered that our hybrid noses can sniff out water. Although we’ve had to eat in ways we’ve never had to before, I hope all of you had the chance to fill your bellies this morning. We’ll likely have to hunt, fish and chew on edible plants along the route, so you may as well get used to thinking that way.

“I’ve overheard some of you talking about our situation and I’ve realized something. Most of us are still thinking like humans.” He held up a massive hand paw and extended it palm outward with his claws fully extended. “We aren’t human anymore. We’re better!” There were several expressions of surprise, as if the thought really had not occurred to them. “We’re more suited to what we’re facing now than any of us have ever been. This is why we’re here, folks. We’re faster, we’re stronger, our senses are sharper and our bodies are more resilient. While we still tend to eat what we’re familiar with, our digestive systems are hardier as well. As long as we can find water that’s flowing, we won’t have to worry about purifying what we find before we drink it. Stay away from stagnant pools and we should be fine. You’ve already discovered that you can eat raw fish with no ill effects, although Kevin’s comparison of it to sashimi wasn’t too far off the mark. You have to get past the human mindset, the old way of thinking.”

He was encouraged by the thoughtful looks he saw throughout the crowd. “Some of you have already discovered that you can walk and run on all fours just as easily as you can by staying upright. That’s the way our new bodies were designed, and although I’ve heard some of you mention that our furman clothes make us look like a cult, they were also designed with the purpose of allowing us the freedom to move whether we’re on two feet or down on all fours.” He looked down at the dark blue robe top he wore and tapped at one side. “I’d always wondered why the deep pockets on these things had the opening at an angle instead of perpendicular to the ground, but now I know. Even if you’re down on four feet, er, hands and feet, things will still stay in your pockets.”

The red wolf near the back held up a hand. Avon pointed to him and said, “You have a question, Ken?”

“Does anyone know what we can expect from the weather on the hike back?” the lupine doctor asked. Like Jenni, Ken Wilder had a medical license he had intended for use in a starter colony somewhere.

It was Sissy who spoke up from the midst of the crowd. “I still can’t get anything on my PBJ out here,” she said, “but I always check the forecast before going to bed every night. We’re due for clear skies and high temperatures in the mid-eighties for the next three days and then there’s a chance for rain and cooler temperatures.”

“Can we make it back before we get rained on?” Dahlia asked.

“We could probably make it in two days if we went the direct route,” Gerard answered, “but going by the road is going to take us longer because it winds around the hills and trees. If we dawdle, we might see some of that rain, so we’ll have to make good time.”

“Maybe we’ll even get lucky and a truck will come by that we can hitch a ride on,” Erin said hopefully.

“Fat chance of that!” Travis replied, crossing his arms. “I doubt the people who live in this area would be happy to pick up a bunch of freaks like us. They’d be more likely to grab a rifle from the gun rack in the back windows of their pickups.”

“What an awful thing to say!” Erin returned with a frown.

“Think about it – it could happen,” the German shepherd shot back. “There’s still a lot of jerks out there who hate Furs.” Kristen peered across the group straight at Jon at those words, but the larger feline did not look back.

“In that case,” Gerard retorted, “you can be the one to approach any oncoming vehicles, since you’re man’s best friend, doggy.”

“Not me,” growled Travis. “Have Cheryl stand out by the road and wiggle her tail at passing motorists. If she took off her clothes and got down on all fours, she’d almost look like a local farm dog!”

“Hey!” Cheryl exclaimed. “Leave me and my tail out of this!”

“Aw, but it’s such a cute tail, darlin’,” Travis countered with a lecherous grin.

“When we get back,” Aaron grumbled aloud, “I’m going to have a little talk with the Director for dumping us out here like this.” He batted a fist into his other palm for effect.

“Not until we find out why,” Avon countered. “This isn’t typical of the usual schedule; he didn’t do this with our class or the previous one, so maybe there’s a reason for it other than just a survival march.”

“It would have been nice of him to have given us some kind of explanation,” Wendy complained. “We had a long enough drive to get out here that he had plenty of time to fill us in.”

“We’ll have more basic supplies with us on another world than what he left us with here,” Michael Lynch remarked.

“Folks, this is not an ideal situation,” Avon said, raising his voice above the sudden conversations, “but you must consider that we may be faced with similar circumstances someday. We have a far better chance of surviving a few days out here than we might on another planet, so we may as well consider this practice for now.”

“You seem too confident about all this,” Arne Kohler said. “What did Marcel tell you?” The African lion crossed his thick arms in a challenging look at the grizzly. “What are you keeping from us?”

“Nothing,” Avon answered without hesitation. “I’m just as in the dark about this venture as the rest of you are, but I’m trying to make the best of the situation.” He looked up at the brightening sky over the clearing. “Listen, no matter what the reason was that the Director had for dropping us off here in the middle of the night, we’re wasting too much time just standing around worrying what’s going to happen to us. I don’t think Marcelo’s going to send the bus back for us, so we need to take this into our own hands and get started.”

“Lead the way, Avon. I’ll bring up the rear to make sure we don’t leave anyone behind.”

“Thank you, Jon.” The grizzly looked around the group. “This is the plan we’ve come up with. If anyone has a better idea, speak up now.” There were no responses, not even from the grousers, so he nodded and pointed toward the trail that led off into the trees in the direction that the bus had taken only a few hours ago. “Let’s go.”

Several of the Ursis Furs moved forward immediately, but the rest of the crowd was sluggish to get going. Within moments, however, thirty-one anthro-human hybrids headed out of the clearing along a road that amounted to little more than ruts in the grass. Despite earlier uncertainty, spirits picked up again now that they were on the move.

Jon added up noses to make sure everyone was accounted for before he followed the last of them out of the clearing. At the back of the group, Sissy was talking quietly with Carl and Ellie, both of whom had remained quiet during the recent discussion, but she glanced over her shoulder at Jon and gave him a smile. When he looked back at her in amusement, her eyes crinkled and then she said something to Ellie before she slowed her pace to allow Jon to catch up to her.

“How are you holding up?” he asked the short feline quietly.

“I was frightened at first,” she admitted, “but now I think we’ll be okay.”

“What made you change your mind?”

Sissy smiled and hooked arms with him. “People like you, Avon, Carl, Ellie and others. You’ve taken something that could be traumatic to some and turned it into nothing more than a hike back along established roads.” She made a wide sweep with her free hand toward the trees on both sides of them. “It might be different if we had to go cross country through the woods and find our own way back through these mountains, but even if it takes us several days, walking along a road isn’t very frightening.”

Jon twitched an ear and nodded. “That’s a very good perspective,” he told her.

“Neither Kim nor Yuki agree with me, though,” Sissy remarked with a pout. “They think we’re all doomed.”

“Doomed? What do the Tanaka sisters think is going to happen to us?”

“They think Marcelo dropped us off for a reason, and that something bad will happen to us if we return.”

“Do they think he’s going to shoot us like wild animals if we come back?”

Sissy shrugged. “I dunno, but Kim thinks Avon should have us set up our own colony out here somewhere – maybe even right back there in the clearing. On the other hand, Yuki thinks we should just scatter in the woods and live on our own in separate groups according to our species.”

“What would be the purpose in that?”

“She’s assuming that the AHCP lost their license or something like that, and that Marcelo dropped us out her to save us from being destroyed like unwanted pets. If we separate off into our Wings, we can survive out here in the wild and breed to keep the groups going.” With her last comment, Jon looked down at the orange cat and suddenly felt conscious of their interlocked arms.

“Uhm, I wouldn’t agree with that assumption,” he replied. “Something may have happened back at the Institute that required getting us away quickly, but I don’t think Marcelo would have been as tight-lipped as he was about it if he knew we were in danger. No, I agree with Avon that this is most likely a survival test. We’re going to live off the land, work together as a team and make our way back. Otherwise, why would he have left us with a GPS receiver with the Institute as the only waymark recorded on it?”

Sissy squeezed his arm. “That’s one of the things I like about you, Jon,” she said with a smile. “You think things through to see the logic in it.”

Up ahead in the crowd following Avon under the over-hanging trees, Kristen paused in her conversation with Jasmine and looked around at the crowd. When she peered back behind them, she saw Sissy merrily hanging onto Jon’s arm, saying something that obviously made the male cougar look embarrassed. She snorted in disdain and then turned back to her companion.

“What’s wrong?” the vixen asked, raising both eyebrows.

“Nothing,” Kristen answered. “Why?”

“Because you just laid your ears back.”

“You’re also smacking me with the end of your tail,” added the polar bear behind her.

Kristen looked back at Dara Turner with an embarrassed smile. “Sorry,” she said, snagging her active tail and pulling it up to her chest.

The large, white-furred woman waved it off and went back to the conversation she was having with Norman Grey, the brown bear who had come into the Ursis Wing as a last-minute replacement when Whelan’s girlfriend had not shown up as a scheduled volunteer. Although Dara was an outrageous flirt with all the male bears, she had become good friends with him over the course of the former NFL football player’s transformation. Norman’s family had been farmers and Dara knew the experience of his upbringing would be a valuable asset when the Ursis colony finally set down on alien soil.

When Kristen returned her attention to the hike, Jasmine leaned in close to whisper, “You look as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. What’s up, cat?”

The mountain lioness smirked at the analogy and waggled the end of her tail in her hand at her friend. “Never you mind,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

Several steps behind her in the group, Travis had noted the incident and then surreptitiously looked over his shoulder to see if he could figure out what it was that had agitated Kristen. He saw nothing but other bodies behind him, though when Carl pulled his wife to the sidelines to point out something to her in the trees, his view became unobstructed. Jon followed a short distance behind the crowd of Furs with the director’s secretary hanging off his arm.

A smile spread across the German shepherd’s features. Witnessing her miffed expression at seeing another feline on Sunset’s arm, Travis was greatly pleased.

He increased his pace just enough that he could move up in the group without attracting too much attention, and soon he had bypassed Dara and Norman so that he had positioned himself right behind Kristen.

He played it cool and simply walked with the crowd, idly listening to the conversations around him. He had just entertained some thoughts that might work out in his favor if he was patient.

Chapter 3

Splits

Aldo Banner lifted his broad nose toward the sky and sorted out the scents that his sensitive canine olfactory senses picked up. There was something new on the air.

The canine furman had often endured a bit of ribbing for his species choice, but Aldo had grown up on his family’s acreage in the Midwest and their St. Hubert bloodhounds had always been his favorite dogs. He had had several of them as companions over the years and counted them among his best friends. Although a survivor following the North American Heartland’s deadliest tornado outbreak in the past century, Aldo had lost everything. His family, pets and livestock had all perished, the barn blown away and the house swept from its foundation by wind speeds that had topped three hundred eighteen miles per hour.

The young man himself had lived through the disaster by ducking into a drainage ditch a quarter mile from his home, miraculously sustaining little more than cuts and bruises from flying debris. His family had made a modest income, but after the funeral services and the estate debts were settled, Aldo Banner had not been left with much to live on. It was while reading through the classified ads of a local paper on his tablet when he had found an advertisement promoting the Anthro Human Colonization Program. He had never been interested in fanciful tales of exploring the stars, but the economy had not presented him with many job offers and he had ultimately been left with the choice of joining military service or the colonization program.

No matter how well folks got along these days, there would probably always be wars and conflicts across the Earth due to overcrowding and food shortages, but Aldo wanted to do something that would make a difference as well as put food on his table. He had always admired and respected those who volunteered to serve their country, but he had never seen himself as a soldier.

Although he would have to give up his birthright as a human, Aldo knew that helping to find a new world where humankind could spread out to ease the overcrowding would be more rewarding to him. When he signed up to join the AHCP, he had no idea what type of critter he would have to become, but he was later delighted to discover that he did have a choice. A bloodhound was not a popular or even common selection for Canis volunteers, but as soon as he had seen it among the available species, he had chosen it instantly.

Aldo Banner had not been a handsome young man as a human in his late twenties, and neither was he very stately as a human-canine hybrid, but he was proud of what he had become and content with the decisions he had made.

Despite this, he was not an outspoken person and usually kept to himself, but out here in the wilderness for the first time, his extra sensitive nose was picking up new scents. Most intrigued him, but there were some unfamiliar that privately raised the hackles along his back. One such aroma he picked up was new, or at least it was the first time he had detected it since they had been dropped off in this place.

The bloodhound moved with the group on the outskirts of the crowd; he was down on all fours and taking in the scents as he walked. Most of the Furs were still upright as they made their way along the grassy road, but some like him had dropped to hands and feet for more comfortable travel.

He looked up quickly when he thought he saw something out a small distance among the shadows, but when he took a few steps in that direction for a closer look, he stopped abruptly and swallowed with a surprised frown. It was one of the female canines of his class relieving herself behind a bush. Yuki looked up and saw him watching her. She scowled back at him and gestured with a hard wave of her hand for him to look away. Embarrassed, Aldo ducked his head and continued walking with the group.

The bloodhound stood upright and forgot about the scents he had picked up. He had always had a small bit of crush on the pair of cute Japanese-American sisters who had gone through the transformation with Class Fifteen, and although one became Canis and the other Felis, he still harbored doubt either would ever see him as anything more than a nuisance. Dejected, the canine male stuck his hands into the pockets of his shorts and lost himself in the crowd.

Nearby, Kevin had seen the quiet bloodhound and noticed that he seemed down, but he had troubles of his own. He was miffed at his girlfriend, Rose. They had settled down together the previous night, their arms wrapped around one another for comfort and security in the face of a fearful night, but when he had awoken the next morning, she was snuggled up to Jon instead.

It had taken him by surprise at first, but when he tried to wake her, she pushed him away with a sleepy hand to leave her alone and then she cuddled up closer to the large cougar. Later, she denied any knowledge of the incident, but there were several witnesses who had seen the mountain lion’s arms around her as they slept together. When Rose had sought out Jon for his help, he could only confirm that he had awakened with her right up next to him that morning.

The young vixen had apologized to Kevin, claiming ignorance about whom she had cuddled up to while asleep, but the tan fennec was in no mood to forgive her just yet. Not only was he miffed at Rose, he was also bothered that one of his good friends at the Institute had taken his girlfriend from him during the night. He was not thinking very fondly of Jon at the moment either. Instead of getting the cougar’s side of the story, however, Kevin chose to ignore him for now.

The Furs walked along the ruts in the grass for an hour. Conversations had kept most of them occupied during the hike, but when Avon held up both hands to halt the group, it was the first many of them had really noticed the passage of time.

“Why’d we stop?” Hank Danagar called out from the back of the group. The black bear was taller than most and could look over the heads in front of him, but he still could not see what might be on the ground in front of the mob.

“Our road splits in two directions,” Avon explained. “We’re going to have to determine which one Marcelo took.”

Carl pushed his way through the crowd and walked up to the middle of the intersection. The wolf got down on all fours and began examining the ground. He sniffed at the scents on the ground while he looked, but it was his eyes that did most of the work. The ground was packed in the intersection, but forest grass had been growing unchecked for so long that it covered over everything. It also had the resiliency to spring back into place after being stepped on, so it did not yield much in the way of revealing tire tracks.

Gerard walked out to help Carl look, but the wolf waved him back, afraid the bear would accidentally walk over some sign they needed. Avon stood off to the side, his arms crossed as he allowed the lupine furman the opportunity to provide his expertise. Carl and his wife Ellie had been explorers and adventurers, and it was unlikely there was anyone else in the group with as many life experiences as they had.

Ellie followed her husband out into the intersection, but she knew well enough to watch her steps to keep from walking over some sign they needed. She and Carl examined the separate roads carefully while the others watched quietly.

After about ten minutes, Carl looked up and over at Avon. He pointed along one of the paths into the woods and nodded. “The bus went that way,” he announced.

Raine Terrance rushed forward to see what evidence the wolf had discovered, and without saying a word, Carl simply pointed down to a small patch of dirt in the grass that had retained the recent tire tread of the passing vehicle.

“Bingo!” the cheetah said with a wide grin. He looked back at the approaching grizzly and gestured toward the patch of dirt. “He found a tire print!”

Avon knelt down to examine the evidence as the furman crowd gathered around. Looking back up at the wolf, he smiled and repeated Raine’s sentiments. “Good work, Carl,” he said, getting to his feet. He looked at the group around him and nodded. “All right, let’s continue,” he said.

Small conversations started up again as the Furs resumed their trek along the road. Although it was taking a while with such a large group moving at a leisurely pace, the weather was good and the going was easy and uneventful. Spirits were high and most had come to think of the situation as nothing more than an outing.

When the trail came to another split an hour later, everyone looked to Carl to show them the way. Once again, Ellie joined him in examining both trails that led off through the woods, and this time she spotted a fresh tire track in a spare bit of dirt. She stood up to announce her find, but her husband spoke first.

“I have tire tracks here,” he announced.

Before the crowd surged toward him, she raised her voice and added, “I have them over here too!” Everybody stopped and looked at her.

“Are you sure?” Jasmine asked aloud in a scoffing manner.

Ellie merely pointed to the ground at her feet. “Come and see for yourself,” she retorted, stung by the vixen’s tone.

Jasmine, Gerard, and others walked over to the female wolf to take a look, while Avon and more gathered around Carl. After a moment on all fours, Gerard held a hand up above the crowd.

“There’s no doubt about this one,” he announced. “The bus came this way. The track is fairly fresh!”

“Likewise on this one,” Norman Grey called back. “It looks like the bus was on both roads!”

“How can Marcelo have driven on both of them?” Dante asked aloud. “There was only one bus.”

There were several moments where conversations started up throughout the crowd, but after a couple of minutes, Avon let out a shrill whistle, something not easy to do with a bifurcated upper lip.

“Marcelo must have known we’d follow his tracks,” he said in a voice to carry over others still talking. “He must have driven up one of the roads a little to put down tracks for us to find just to throw us off, and then back up the other one.”

“Either that or he went up one, realized it was the wrong route and then came back,” suggested Gerard.

“What do we do now?” Cheryl asked.

“We may have to split up into two groups, one for each road,” Alicia suggested.

“No!” Avon growled loudly. “We’re not going to split up — that would assure that one group would get lost out here.”

“How can we get lost if we stay on the road?” the polar bear shot back. “Even if one group makes it back, they can always send the bus back to get the others.”

“We’d be doubling our chances for trouble by splitting up,” Avon replied. “Listen, we all need to stay together. That’s the only way to make sure everyone stays safe, and if any kind of situation does come up, we’ll be more likely to counter it if we’re all together.”

“How do we choose which way to go?” Arne Kohler asked, the African lion waving his thick arms each in the direction of a road.

Avon reached into the pocket of his garment and pulled out the GPS unit. He pulled it from the case and touched the power button. “We’ll get our bearings and see which road heads off in the direction of the Institute,” he responded.

“That’s a good idea,” Jasmine said. She had said it quietly, but the group had fallen silent and her words carried. There were several mutters of agreement, so all eyes went to Avon.

After several moments, however, the grizzly frowned and then looked up at the branches overhead. “The density of the trees is still too thick,” he said. “I can’t get a good lock on the satellites to get a fix on our location.”

“What good is that thing then?” Travis grumbled. “We’ve been under tree cover since we left the clearing.”

Jasmine moved through the crowd toward the grizzly. “Let me have it,” she requested, holding out a hand. “I’ll climb a tree and get it high enough to get a signal.”

Avon gave the vixen a smile and handed it to her. “Thank you, Jasmine,” he said. “That’s a good idea.”

She grinned up at his praise, but then looked sheepish. “Uhm, you’ll need to show me how to work it, though. I’ve never used one before.”

Avon nodded and took a few minutes to instruct her how to get a signal lock and then what to do to record a waypoint. While he did that, Jon looked up at the trees around them, his eyes picking out pathways overhead. By the time Jasmine was sure she could remember how to operate the handheld unit and put it inside one of her deep pockets, Jon had made his way forward. He put a hand upon the vixen’s shoulder and then pointed toward a nearby tree off to the side of the road.

“I think that one will be your best chance of getting up above the canopy,” the mountain lion told her. “It has a thick trunk and enough branches to use as hand and foot holds.”

Jasmine smiled at him and held up a clawed hand paw. “I know foxes aren’t known to climb trees very well, but I do have these to help me get up there,” she said. Jon nodded and then gestured toward her tree.

“Good luck, Jasmine!” Sissy called out to her.

The vixen looked around at all the faces peering back at her. Some were amused, others seemed deadly serious, but there were some who looked hopeful; it was these who gave her the proper encouragement. At the base of the tree that Jon had picked out, she kicked off her sandals. While the claws at the ends of her fingers were non-retractable, the ones in her toes were, and it only took a practiced flex of certain muscles to extend them. She put a hand on her side pocket to make sure the GPS was secure, and then she leapt up onto the trunk of the tree.

Jasmine Fleur had always been a physical type, but it had been a long time since she had last climbed a tree, though she had scaled many as a child. She was amazed at the strength and stamina of her new body and discovered that her limbs could hold her weight with ease. The nail polish on her claws would have to be reapplied later, for they flaked off quickly as she dug them into the rough bark of the tree she climbed.

She reached the lower branches and used them as a step ladder on her ascent. She had never suffered acrophobia before, but she was not taking any chances by looking down below her. Step by step, handhold by handhold, she ascended. Without checking the ground, she knew that she was already getting high in the tree, and as she passed up through the leaves of the overhead branches, she guessed that she may already be lost to sight from those below.

Concentrating on doing nothing more than getting as close to the top of the trees as she could, Jasmine continued climbing. She was barely winded when her head finally broke through the canopy and she was glad to know that the thickness of the trunk was still sturdy enough to sustain her weight, largely due to something she noticed right away. This particular tree had once been taller, but the top had been blown off by lightning at some time in the past, leaving a shattered top to the tree. New growth was already emerging out from the destruction, so she knew this was no recent event.

The vulpine Fur wrapped one leg around the trunk of the tree, resting that foot on a convenient branch, and steadied herself by planting the other foot firmly on another large branch with her tail out behind her as counterbalance. Once she was sure that she would not go toppling back down to earth, she put a hand on the trunk and then paused long enough to take in her surroundings.

The Adirondack forest undulated across the elevations of the surrounding mountains and looked as lush as a dark green carpet. The trees that stretched off in every direction seemed uniform, the terrain broken only by an occasional lake that stood out in deep contrast. She could see several shining bodies of water from her vantage point, as she seemed to be at an elevation above a great deal of the surrounding area, but nowhere near the highest point of the region.

The sun shone brightly overhead in a mostly cloudless sky and she could see birds riding thermals above the forest. There was only a mild breeze that stirred the leaves around her, and it was several moments before she remembered why she was there. She knew the others were awaiting her return, so she pulled the handheld GPS receiver from its pocket and held it horizontally at chest level. She thumbed it on and studied its screen, hoping it would not take long in such a location without anything to obstruct the geosynchronous satellite signals overhead. After only a moment, a wedge-shaped arrow appeared in the middle of the display and a tight circle appeared around it indicating a solid location fix.

Jasmine studied the topographical map displayed and noted the location of the Institute that Marcelo had marked for them. If she read the scale correctly, they were still some ten miles or so from home. Remembering Avon’s instructions, she thumbed through the menu selections using a set of rubberized buttons below the display. Once she was at the correct page, she held the unit steadily in place and set it to begin taking multiple sets of coordinates.

She watched the numbers flick and change, but soon realized that it was the same sets of numbers over and over; the changes became fewer while a number in the corner of the screen counted up from zero.

She closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of the sun over her fur, and she was sorely tempted to discard her furman robe top. When she opened her eyes a moment later, the counter had reached one hundred, the number she had been told to watch for.

She tapped a button and the unit stopped recording coordinates, which it then took a hundred sets of numbers and averaged them together. It only took a moment before Jasmine had accurate coordinates to her location. She set a waymark as she had been instructed and then shut off the unit. She pocketed it and then took a last look around at the vista. Living on the grounds of the Institute beneath the tree cover, she had never really seen the beauty of the Adirondack Mountains, but she was glad for this occasion that allowed her to experience it with her own eyes.

She took in a long lungful of the fresh air, enjoying the scents of the forest, and then began making her way back down toward the ground. Her descent took more time than the climb up, but she was not as sure of her footholds as before. She used the claws of her hands and feet, and more than once was glad to have had them to keep her from slipping.

After several long minutes, she heard the voices below rise up when someone noticed her return, and soon she was back on the ground. Cheryl, Jenni, Kevin and Kristen surged forward to greet her and then the vixen smiled up at the grizzly that approached them.

“Mission accomplished, Captain Sir,” she told him, handing over the GPS.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Avon replied with a smirk. He thumbed on the unit and waited for the screen to display its information. As before, it could not get a signal lock on the orbital satellites from the forest floor, but the marked waypoints came right up, as did the electronic compass. He studied it for a moment and then looked up at the furman crowd around him.

“We are approximately nine and a half miles from the Institute,” he announced with a glance back at the hand unit. “There’s a large mountain with a broad base between us and the compound; the Institute is in a valley on the other side.”

“Which road will take us in that direction?” Ivan Dimitri asked.

Avon looked over at the male fox and then gestured toward the grassy ruts where Carl had found his patch of tire tracks. “I can’t guarantee that it’s the right road because they often meander around the terrain,” he replied, “but that one currently goes in the general direction of the Institute.”

“Then we should take that one,” Aaron suggested.

“That would be the most likely,” Hank added.

“If no one has any objections, I suggest we continue on our way,” Avon said. “We still have a long walk ahead of us, so we should make as much time as we can.” He stood up to his full height and gestured toward the grassy road. “Okay, let’s go.”

***

The troop of Furs had rested twice over the four hours they had been walking, but Avon felt they had made good time despite how slowly such a crowd moved together. The day had been uneventful, broken only by some grumbling over finding food. Kristen and her crew had dispensed the edibles they had collected, but spread out over a large group, their pockets would soon be quickly depleted. Still, the plants had taken the edge off their hunger, but they would have to hunt for real food soon. There was the scent of water somewhere near, but the grizzly had been reluctant to deviate from the road to go looking for it, although the time might be near to stop for supper. They still had plenty of daylight left, but despite their bodies’ greater endurance, he was seeing fatigue in some of their faces.

Avon was the unofficial leader of this group, simply because he had been currently undergoing leadership training for the Ursis starter colony that he hoped would get its assignment soon. He had heard rumors of what might be planned, but there was secrecy involved that had kept a lid over anything official. Despite being in charge, he had begun to lag somewhat in his physical place in the crowd so that he was no longer leading them along the grassy road. The lag had to do with casual conversations he had struck up with individuals as they walked, using the time to get to know everyone.

There was a sudden commotion as something went tearing through the woods parallel to them. Avon looked up with anxiety, but instead of the Furs reacting in alarm, some were laughing and others were talking excitedly among themselves.

The grizzly eased up behind the gathered group to see what was going on. Something was zigzagging through the underbrush, not at all concealing its progress, and it was a moment before it came back into view. Avon recognized Dante’s monochromatic form and he could not help but chuckle at the sight of the big cat chasing down a frantic red squirrel common to the area. The little tree rat was fast, but it only took another moment for the claws of the tiger’s hand paw to snag it and forcefully pin it to the pine-needle strewn ground. Dante’s broad head bent down quickly and he took the critter in his jaws. He shook the squirrel back and forth with a growl and then there was sudden applause.

Dante looked up at the furman crowd, the limp squirrel hanging from his jaws as he panted around the red fur. Without releasing his prize, the white tiger grinned at his audience, but then he turned around so that they were behind him. He clamped down on his prey, breaking its skin and its body, and then without ceremony began to devour it raw.

Voices were animated, but Avon heard more than one comment regarding food. With a large group of predator-types, he knew that Kristen’s edible sticks, leaves, berries and bark would not satisfy growling bellies much longer, and although fish from a nearby stream would sustain them, it would take more than that to quell the appetites of this group.

He thought about it for several moments and he was about to act upon a decision when a small group approached him through the crowd. Carl, Ellie, Cheryl, Travis, Ken and Aldo – all canine Furs.

“May we have a moment?” Ellie asked him.

Avon continued walking with the crowd and the canines fell into step beside him. “What’s on your mind?” the large bear replied, already suspecting he knew what they wanted.

“We want to go out hunting,” Carl informed him. “We think we can work as a pack and take down something large enough to feed us all.”

“Yeah, and with this guy’s nose,” Travis added, hooking a thumb back at Aldo, “we should find something right off.”

“I’m not so sure breaking up the group is a good idea,” the grizzly replied, but before Travis could retort with the remark already on his lips, Avon added, “but you’re right. We need enough to feed us all. One small squirrel isn’t going to satisfy anyone’s bellies, even for one successful tiger. We’ve got to have more and a smaller hunting party should have better luck tracking down a deer or elk than the whole mob.”

“Then we have your permission?” Cheryl asked with a smile.

Avon nodded. “Let’s see if anyone else will join you,” he said.

Carl shook his lupine head. “If you want to send out another group, that’s fine, but I think we need to keep our pack as-is so that we can sneak up on our prey; a larger group will scare it off before we can get to it.”

“Where’s your other two Canis members, Wendy and Yuki?”

“They aren’t interested in going hunting,” Ken answered. “I don’t know what they plan to do once we get out to an untamed world; wait on the cafeteria, I suppose.”

The bear pursed his lips, but finally nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Go on and round us up some dinner. How will you let us know if you’ve made a kill?”

Ellie smiled a wolfish grin. “We’ll howl for you, of course.”

“Of course.”

Before the canine pack could depart, someone began calling out for Avon. He looked at those with him and then pushed his way through the crowd toward the front of the group. When he stepped out into the open, he saw Aaron and Gerard standing at the end of the path they had been following.

“What’s up, guys?” the grizzly asked.

“We’ve run out of road to the emerald city,” Aaron explained, making a reference to a beloved children’s tale. “The yellow bricks have vanished.”

Avon looked around. “Are you sure?”

“We ran out of tire ruts a long time ago,” Gerard told him, “so we’ve been following a path through the trees large enough for a bus to pass through.”

“The path just ended,” Aaron corroborated. “It didn’t turn to the left or right. It simply just doesn’t go anymore, except by way of some animal trails.”

“There’s forest underbrush on all sides,” Avon confirmed what they told him by looking around. “There’s not even enough room for a bus to turn around to go back.”

The entire group fell silent for a moment before Yuki finally exclaimed aloud, “We took the wrong road!”

“Maybe we bypassed another turn,” Jenni suggested.

Gerard shook his head. “No, we’ve been keeping an eye on both sides of the road. It hasn’t branched off since Jasmine took our last GPS reading. This is the same road we’ve been following.”

Avon looked around. “I think we should take another waypoint,” he said. “Jasmine, do you want to do the honors again?”

“I’ll take care of it,” the vixen replied from the far side of the group. She weaved her way through to his side and took the unit from the grizzly once again. “I’ll be back shortly,” she said, looking back at Jon for his help. The mountain lion was already examining the overhead avenues and simply pointed to the tree he thought she should climb. Jasmine pocketed the GPS receiver, leapt into the tree and began scaling it upward.

While they awaited her return, Avon gave the remaining Furs a brief explanation on what Carl’s group had suggested. The thought of fresh meat to a group of hungry predator types brought out hopeful smiles to many of them. There were a few who had yet to give in to their animal natures, but edible plants were just not that satisfying. Even Kristen salivated at the thought of meat. Incidentally, however, few of them actually considered whether or not the meat would be cooked over a fire as their morning fish had been. Either they were unconcerned or they simply had not thought of it yet.

With a nod from the grizzly, Carl gave Aldo a go-ahead sign and then the small canine pack followed the bloodhound out through the trees.

Arne Kohler walked up to Avon and smiled at him. “Can I put together a pack of cats to go out hunting too?” he asked.

The grizzly looked at the African lion and shrugged. “Sure, we could stand to have another hunting party out there. Let me know when you have a group of volunteers and then you can head out in another direction.”

“Volunteers?” the lion asked with raised eyebrows. “I thought you selected the group you wanted to go and then just told them.”

“No, the canines had already discussed it among themselves and came to me for permission. I didn’t appoint anyone.”

“Hmph... I probably won’t get many volunteers, then,” Arne grumbled.

“I’ll go with you,” Dante piped up. He had cleaned up by licking his muzzle and paws after his small snack, but the white fur near his lips was still lightly stained with red.

“Count me in too,” Jon added.

Raine Terrance stepped up beside Jon and gave the lion a nod. “And me,” he added.

Kristen, Jenni and Sissy were also standing nearby, but when Arne looked at them, Kristen glanced briefly at Jon and then shook her head. “You go on ahead. Jenni, Sissy and I will scout around for a few more edible plants as garnishment for the meat.”

“Not a bad idea,” Avon remarked.

“I’ll take a Caesar Salad with Bleu Cheese dressing,” Dante said with a smile.

“With bacon bits!” Raine added, licking his lips.

“You’ll have to provide the bacon yourself!” Jenni countered. “Go catch us a wild pig!”

Sissy grinned at them and simply waggled her fingers as she, Jenni and Kristen departed.

Arne looked at the felines that had gathered beside him. Feeling self-important to be leading such a group, he put his hands on his hips and looked them over. When his eyes rested on Jon, he frowned.

“You going to give me trouble?” he asked with a dark expression.

Jon looked back at him in puzzlement. “I wasn’t planning on it,” he replied in innocence. “Why?”

The lion narrowed his eyes at him. “Everyone sees you as a leader-type, but this is my hunting party!”

Jon raised an eyebrow and then gestured with an open hand. “Your party, you lead. I simply volunteered to join you – unless you’d rather I didn’t go along.”

Arne snorted and then shook his head. “Nah, come on then. We can use the help.” Jon simply nodded his acceptance of the other cat’s position, but he forced himself to keep his thoughts private. Jon had done nothing to gain his ire, but Arne seemed to be going out of his way to make sure everyone knew that he was in charge of this party. Jon had no problem with this, but the other male’s attitude was like a sour scent on the air.

The lion looked up at Avon and nodded. “We’ll let you know if we get anything,” he said. Then with an exaggerated wave of his hand, he said to the others, “Okay, let’s go.”

As the felines moved off through the forest underbrush on the opposite side of the road than where the canines went, Avon pursed his lips and shook his head. He had known Arne for two years and the male lion had never changed. He knew that Arne was hoping to be selected as the captain of a feline starter colony, but Marcelo had already told Avon in private that such a thing would never happen. He might have the necessary drive to lead others, but his personality was too abrasive. Although he had never done anything untrustworthy, there were few who would trust Arne to lead them, feline or not.

He stared off into the shadows where the Felis group had gone, although they were already lost to view. There was nothing more any of them could do but wait until either of the hunting parties reported back in, and he allowed a small smile to cross his feature when he wondered how the cats would alert them if they were successful. He doubted if any of them had the necessary vocal cords to howl if they made a kill.

A few of the remaining voices raised in alarm. He looked back toward the group saw several of them duck when a branch and a few broken sticks fell from the tree cover above, landing in their midst.

Several moments later, he could see Jasmine climbing back down the main trunk of the tree she had climbed. She looked a little dazed, but she managed to make her way back down to the ground. The vixen’s sisters gathered around with queries about her health, but once she had assured them she was okay, she made her way to the grizzly bear.

“Here’s the new waymark,” she told him, pulling the GPS unit from her pocket.

“What’s the matter?” Avon asked. “You look shaken.”

Jasmine put a hand up to her sternum and swallowed. “I put my full weight on a dead branch and almost came down a lot quicker than the climb up.” She held out her arms and sighed. “I did fall several feet, but I landed on several crisscrossing limbs that had grown together between two trees.” Avon looked at her proffered arms and noticed several red welts on the undersides of them both that were easily seen through her fur.

“Are you okay?” he asked in concern. “I’m afraid both of our physicians are away; Ken left with the Canis group to hunt down some fresh meat and Jenni is out with Kristen looking for more edible plants.”

“I’ll be okay,” she told him. “Neither of them brought a First Aid kit with them anyway. If there’s some water nearby, I should probably wash out the cuts, though.”

“I thought I could smell water a little while ago,” Dahlia said from her sister’s side. “If the others have gone out in search of food, we could probably do a search for the water, too.”

“Good idea,” Avon told her. “Try not to wander too far, though. I don’t like the idea of our group splitting up so much, but it’s all for good reasons. Take two or three with you, though. Don’t go alone.”

“I don’t think it was that far,” Dahlia told him. “We shouldn’t be gone long.” She, Rose, Erin and Kevin walked away with Jasmine back along the road that they had already traversed, each of them making sure the vixen was not hurt any more than she had admitted.

The rest of the Furs milled around the end of the road, some of them sitting down with their backs up against trees. Without anything else pressing at the moment, Avon thumbed on the GPS receiver to take a look at the waypoint that Jasmine had just marked.

After several moments of study, he frowned to himself. They had been traveling in the general direction of the Institute, but obviously the road they had chosen was not the one that Marcelo had taken on his return drive; this was likely an old logging road no longer in use. The GPS receiver had a topographical base map that only showed major highways, but unfortunately the road that the director had brought them in on was not marked on that map. Avon could only assume that the other path was the one they should have taken, but that was four hours of travel time ago.

He studied the elevations marked on the unit’s small screen and his frown deepened. There were valleys and the sides of mountains between them and the Institute. To go cross country would be foolish, but it seemed such a waste to simply turn around and walk another four hours back to the split in the road. No one would be happy with either decision, but he would put it to a vote once they all had food in their bellies so that none of them would have to worry about hunger along the way.

Chapter 4

Scents and Sensibilities

“First off, I’ll need to find tracks of a deer or an elk,” Aldo told his fellow canine types with a frown. “I’m picking up all kinds of scents out here, but until I know which ones are associated with what we want, we could chase after anything without it being the right critter.” He looked up at the grey wolf with soulful brown eyes and shrugged. “I’ve never gone after elk, but I’ve seen deer tracks on my family’s farm all my life, so I can identify them if I see them. Once I can associate a known track with a known scent, the hunt can begin.”

“With all the leaves and pine needles all over the place, it may be hard to find actual spoor,” Ken Wilder mused, sniffing at the ground on all fours. The red wolf looked back up at the pack leader, awaiting his assessment.

“Okay, everyone spread out and look for tracks,” Carl said quietly. He got down on all fours to put his nose to the ground, and the rest of his party did the same. Although she usually stayed close to her husband, Ellie wandered off in one direction as Carl went another.

Cheryl looked around and listened for anything that might be near, but with such a large party of Furs back at the road making so much noise in conversation, she doubted anything would have stayed close to that many predator types. Frowning, she tilted the cowgirl hat back on her head and then put her nose to the ground.

***

Arne looked back at his small hunting party and snorted in annoyance. Out of eight felines, his team only consisted of four. Not only did he want to see his group as a provider of food for the Furs, he also saw the situation as a challenge between the felines and the canines of the Institute. Like many cats he had known, Arne fully believed that the Felis were the superior out of all four races that the AHCP had chosen to create out of mankind. It was his intention to prove this to the other wings, but it would be difficult with only half of their numbers. As a representative of the king of beasts, Arne was determined to win.

“So what’s the plan?” Raine asked as their small group followed him through the forest underbrush; they were walking in the opposite direction that the canines had taken and came across a small clearing in the underbrush.

Arne waved his hand casually out in front of him. “We’ll split up and start looking for something to catch,” he said in a tone that suggested the cheetah should have already known that. “Give a shout if you find something we can eat.”

“That’s not much of a plan,” Dante mused. “It’s no different than what we were all doing as a large group.”

Arne’s brow furrowed, looking over his shoulder at the white tiger. “It’s a better plan because we don’t have a whole herd crashing through the woods to scare away the game.”

“You mean like what you’re doing now?” Dante retorted in a low voice. “You’re bellowing as if you’re still in a large group. There’s probably nothing left in the area to look for!”

“Yeah, give a shout if we find something?” Raine questioned quietly. “That’s sure to scare off anything we do find.”

The lion grumbled deep in his throat and he turned around to glare at Jon. “Well?” he challenged. “You gonna gripe too?”

“Nope, this is your show,” the mountain lion said in a light tone, putting both hands into the pockets of his shorts. “I’m merely here as part of the team.”

Arne’s expression darkened. He was sure Jon was making fun of him, but there was nothing in the wording of his response that could be taken that way. He grunted and gave the cougar a nod before gifting Raine and Dante each a glare of his own.

In a quieter tone, he gestured off to the right. “Listen guys, we’re out here to find food for the whole gang. Danny, you go off that way and look for something,” he said.

“It’s Dante,” the tiger corrected.

“Whatever. Don’t go too far, but holler if you find something.” He gestured off the left and said to the cheetah, “Raine, you do the same out that way.”

Dante and Raine exchanged hopeless expressions and then split up as directed without another word. Dried leaves crunched beneath their feet as they moved away on all fours, but Raine noticed and suddenly paid attention to where his pads were landing. With a little effort, he quickly found a footstep pattern where he was not making as much noise among the leaves and he smiled to himself in personal satisfaction.

Arne looked back at Jon. “I’m going to move ahead and see what I can see. You hang back around here in case we flush something out and it comes back this way.”

“You want me glued to this spot?”

The lion looked annoyed that Jon was being so literal. “You can move around, but stay in the area.”

“As you wish,” the cougar replied. He remained in place until Arne gave him another hard look before he turned to go. A moment later, the self-proclaimed leader of cats was lost in the shadows and underbrush, but Jon could hear his heavy footsteps crunching on sticks and leaves.

He waited until he could no longer hear the others and then he got down on all fours. He may not have the nose of a bloodhound, but his transformation had enhanced it with an olfactory sensitivity far above what he had possessed as a full-blooded human. There were scents in the air that he would have missed as the hunter he used to be, but there were many here in the forest. Although remembering that enticing rabbit scent back at the clearing, he had ignored most of everything else since they had been dropped off, but now that he concentrated on them, he found he could sift through and focus in on any one of them. Like Aldo in the other group, however, he was inexperienced and had no frame of association to match up which scents might belong to what animal in the forest.

Lightly and as quietly as he could be, Jon moved toward the animal trails he could see meandering through the woods that Arne had either missed or ignored. He brushed away dried leaves, twigs and pine needles in areas where there must have been traffic and looked for the tracks of heavy-footed deer or elk. It took him several moments, but when he brushed away at a particularly narrow part of the trail between two bushes, he found what he was looking for. Elk tracks.

His nose twitched as he associated the lingering scent with the track and then he allowed a smile to cross his features. The track was fresh and his instincts read it as not more than an hour or two old.

He looked out into the forest and mentally traced where he thought the large hoofed animal might go, and immediately spied a bit of brownish fur clinging to a briar beside the subtle path. Before he could start out after it, however, he stopped himself. His instincts as a hunter, both human and feline pressed him onward, but he knew that Arne would rant at him for disobeying an order to his direction to stay put.

He did not fear the African lion, an obviously uneducated bully who wanted nothing more than to prove himself a leader over others, but Jon had given him his word that he was merely a member of his team.

Jon was certain that he could probably track down and locate the elk that had passed this way, but he seriously doubted he would be able to bring down something so large by himself. He was smart enough to know that was a quick way to get hurt. It might also take him farther away from the others than was prudent when alone.

No, as much as he wanted to go after the elk, he would follow orders and wait in the vicinity for Arne and the others to return. Once they got back, he could tell them what he had found and then they could go after the animal, but he had no intention of simply yelling out for them.

Musing quietly to himself, Jon looked up into the trees until he found a horizontal branch large enough to hold his weight. He moved to the tree he had selected, kicked off his sandals and then climbed it quickly. Jon had always prided himself on his physical fitness, but now he marveled at his new upper body strength and the ability to hold his full weight using the claws of his feet and hands.

He made it to the high branch and then settled down lengthwise along the limb to await the return of his team mates, consciously aware of yet another facet of his transformation that could prove beneficial to his existence on another world.

***

Travis brushed a few leaves away from the ground and peered down at a spot he thought he had gotten a scent. He knew he had made no real friends since joining the Anthro Human Colonization Program, but he was determined to make his mark among the Furs somehow. He silently hoped it was he who discovered the elk or deer print that Aldo needed, simply for bragging rights. Better yet if he found the animal itself before even the bloodhound could track one down. Aldo may have the best nose around, but he was not the only one with enhanced olfactory senses now.

His nose did pick up an unfamiliar scent, but like the bloodhound, he had nothing to use as a basis for comparison for what it might be, so he sniffed at the dirt, leaves and pine needles and followed it out away from the others. So preoccupied, he was not paying attention to where he was going and soon found himself near a thicket of brush up against a stony incline. There was an opening between the rocks and the bushes, and he stopped suddenly when he neared it. Something in there had moved.

Licking his lips in anticipation, Travis prepared himself for a kill and lunged into the opening. Right away there was a sharp stabbing pain in his snout, and with a shrill yelp he backed out as quickly as he had darted in. A pair of dark eyes peered out at him from the brush, but it was not the animal’s gaze that bothered the German shepherd. There were two stiff quills stuck into the right side of his nose and they hurt!

The porcupine did not wait around for the canine to try again and it quickly shuffled off beneath the brush.

Travis’ eyes watered from the stinging pain, but when he tried to pull them from his snout, the barbs clung to him with additional fervor. He whined and turned back the way he had come, hoping the others were nearby. He needed help extracting the quills, but the damage to his pride would probably hurt more when he faced them.

***

Dante had found a place where sunshine filtered down through the trees and cast severe light and shadows over an area, thinking his black and white fur might blend in with the mixture to hide him from potential prey. Instead, the harsh light made the white tiger actually stand out among the shadows, his coloring unfavorable to camouflage in the wooded environment. It was something that had not really occurred to the young man when he had made his choice of felines. He had always liked white tigers, but now he realized that unless he was in a snowy region, he doubted he would ever be able to hide from game to be much of a hunter.

It was fortunate he had turned out to be such a good chef. He might have to leave the hunting on another world to the others and just be there to prepare whatever food they might bring in. It was not exactly a bad prospect since he enjoyed food preparation and did not have a problem with the task, but he had hoped to be worth more than a mere cook; most of the colonists would be expected to fulfill more than one duty as needed.

He scratched idly at the oversized dog collar he wore, causing the metal name tag to jingle against its ring, and with a frown he realized that this would also alert potential prey to his presence. Dante sighed and worked with his claws a moment, taking the metal tag from his collar, and then he dropped it into a pocket of the furman robe he wore.

The monochrome feline crouched down behind a large bush and let his mind wander. There were scents all around that were enticing, but he did not know what any of them might be. The aromas and smells of the forest completely overwhelmed his senses; even the leaves of the bush in front of his nose put out a scent that was all their own. He had never been a hunter, so he did not know what to look for beyond just seeing some critter that might just happen to come around. He knew that Jon had grown up in a hunting family and he wished that Arne had let him pair up with his housemate.

He had never watched hunting shows on television, and neither had he spent much time on movies that presented hunting characters. They had never really held much of an interest to him at the time, but now he wished that he had paid more attention. Until now, all the classes and instruction they had received at the Institute had seemed interesting, but now he realized just how much more he needed to know before being sent off to some wild place on another world. There was no Institute where they were going, no soft beds in a room out of the weather, no running water for showers and toilets, no cafeteria to go to for meals and no large screen videos for entertainment.

For the first time since joining the AHCP, he was beginning to realize just what they might be up against, and he had barely had any time out in the wild as experience for this. The weather had been good and they had been able to find food here and there, so this whole excursion had resembled nothing more than a camping and hiking trip with friends. How might things be on this trip if the weather was dark and stormy and they had been unable to find food in the rain to feed their bellies? He had experienced enough of that when he was homeless in Atlanta.

Dante sighed audibly and put his chin down on his paws on the forest floor. He had a lot to learn, and it did not help that he had also been nursing a headache for most of the day due to his latest round of unremembered nightmares. Would they even have access to aspirin in their colony? He wondered. The night dreams had been plaguing him more often in recent weeks and sometimes he woke up in the darkness with a fear of what might be lurking in his room. Even out here in the forest, he had kept close to Jenni at night, hoping her presence would help keep the dread of darkness at bay. He had never been afraid of the dark before, but lately it had been a mental strain.

He looked up at a flutter of movement and saw a raven land on the limb of a tree. Had it not been for the flapping of its wings, he might not have seen its dark plumage among the shadows. The medium sized bird looked down at him and tilted its head to the side as if trying to figure out what the big black and white creature below might be.

The tiger stared back into its dark eyes and then he began looking past the bird as the branch behind it suddenly came into focus. He twitched an ear and then took another gaze into the woods all around him to make sure he would not startle something that might have wandered nearby while he was distracted. Seeing nothing of consequence, Dante walked out from the behind his bush straight to the raven’s tree.

The bird watched him intently until the great feline stood at the base of the tree and looked back up at it. Suddenly sensing danger, the raven gave out a squawk and then flew off into the forest. Dante did not care, however. It was not the bird he was after.

Climbing the tree on instinct alone, the tiger made its way up the trunk and to the thick horizontal branch he had seen. Confident it would hold his weight, Dante stretched out along the branch and smiled. He could see the whole area below him and the high branch would keep his monochromatic hide out of direct sight. Anything that wandered through the area would see him only if it happened to look up into the overhead tree limbs.

***

Ellie crouched low beneath the branches of a blue spruce and waited for the signal. The Canis pack had been following the tracks and scent of three deer for the greater part of an hour and they knew they were closing in. It did not take their bloodhound’s extra-sensitive nose for the she-wolf to smell the strengthening scent of the does as they drew nearer.

So far, everyone had followed Carl’s leadership without question, including the ever-sarcastic German shepherd, despite his wounded nose. Perhaps in hunger he had realized that the alpha wolf’s world-wise experience was more beneficial than a simple free-for-all in the woods.

Carl utilized the tools available to him as needed, and once he had allowed Aldo to take the lead to find and follow the scents, the wolf had directed the others quietly with pre-selected signals so they could advance silently.

If Ellie read the signs correctly, they were slowly surrounding the area downwind of where the deer should be. Carl had planned out an attack scenario ahead of time and everything seemed to be going according to design.

Something in the air caught her attention and she swiveled her ears back and forth until she heard the noise once more. It was extremely faint, for the prey was nearly as silent as the pack, but there was no mistaking the sound of field grasses torn from the ground by the teeth and lips of several large animals.

Without revealing herself, Ellie looked through the intervening branches between her position and a small grassy clearing. As expected, three whitetail deer stood out in full view under the sunlight warming the field where they ate. None of them were especially large, but all were mature females with grey-brown coats; together they could feed the waiting Furs well enough that they would not have to hunt again for another day, maybe two. Even if they only brought down one of them, there would still be plenty of meat to go around. Ellie knew, however, that the tranquil looking creatures would not go down without a fight. They did not have the antlers of a male, but they could still jump high and kick hard with those hooves.

One of the does looked around in apprehension, as if unsure of a random scent that had wafted around the trees. Something across the clearing caught Ellie’s attention and she felt a sudden sense of dread when she realized it was sunlight shining on the light-colored straw hat that Cheryl wore. As she watched, however, the Border collie reached up and pulled it from her head, as if she had realized that she was still wearing it at the same moment that Ellie had seen it.

Another of the does looked back in the direction where the hat had just disappeared. Had the deer seen it? There were no other disturbances and after another moment of quiet, the does returned to their grazing. Several moments later, Carl gave the sign.

***

Frustrated and impatient, Arne had to admit he should have had a better plan. Splitting up should have increased their chances for finding something, but the biggest creature he had seen was a red squirrel that had sounded an alarm about his presence. After that, the African lion had not seen so much as a tiny finch in the bushes. He had heard nothing from any of his team, so he assumed none of them had had any luck either.

Sure that there was nothing left in the area to frighten away, he roared at the top of his lungs and shouted out instructions that his group should go back to where they had separated. Arne cleared his throat and then trudged back through the forest to meet the others.

It took him a little over twenty minutes to find his way back to the small clearing, and when he arrived, Raine and Dante both gifted him with sour looks.

“What?” the lion belted out in annoyance. “You didn’t find anything either, did ya?”

Raine stuck out his jaw indignantly. “I was sneaking up on a fat river otter beside a running stream and was just about to pounce on it when you scared it into the water with your roar. It wasn’t enough to feed the whole group, but two or three of them could have filled their stomachs with it!”

Arne bit back his sharp reply and snorted instead. “Oh, sorry,” he muttered. He glanced over at the white tiger. “What about you?”

“I fell asleep in a tree waiting for something to come by,” Dante admitted. “I almost fell off my branch when you shouted, but no, I didn’t see anything to hunt.”

“You fell asleep… You fell a-sleep!” Arne sneered. The tiger looked embarrassed, but didn’t say anything more. The lion glanced around and put his hands on his hips. “And where the blazes is that friggin’ cougar?” he grumbled loudly. “I told him to stay put, but he can’t even follow that simple order!”

“If you would stop shouting everything that comes out of your mouth,” said a quiet voice from the trees, “you might actually discover what’s around you.”

Arne whirled around, his eyes searching the shadows of the forest. “Sunset!” he grumbled. “Where are you?”

Raine and Dante exchanged glances and then looked around as well. Jon was nowhere to be seen. Remembering where he had spent the past hour, Dante looked up into the branches above and suddenly saw a pair of golden eyes peering down at him from an overhead branch. A wide grin spread across the tiger’s face, but Jon merely put a finger to his lips. Dante nodded and assumed a neutral expression just as Arne looked in his direction.

“Show yourself!” Arne bellowed. “This is no time to be playing games and I don’t like your attitude!”

“Oh be quiet already,” Jon’s voice said in a low tone. “Pretend you know what three dimensions are and just look above you.”

Arne jerked his head upward, but did not see Jon right away. Raine stepped up beside him and suddenly pointed up to a thick horizontal branch. Stretched along its length and nearly matched in color was the cougar. Jon flicked the end of his tail and merely stared back down at the African lion without another word.

“You lazy bum!” Arne exclaimed with a sudden stomp of a foot. “We’re out looking for food and you’re just lying around!”

“I was following your orders,” Jon reminded him quietly. “Your royal highness commanded me to stay in the area and keep a watch in case you guys flushed something back this way. That’s exactly what I was doing.”

Arne glared up at him and grumbled something uncomplimentary beneath his breath. Jon flicked an ear and narrowed his eyes back at him, his sensitive hearing having picked up what the lion had said about his ancestry.

“Just before you came hollering and crashing back here,” Jon added, “I was watching a rafter of fat turkeys make their way right beneath my tree. We could have offered them to the rest of the Furs as a tasty meal if you hadn’t frightened them away, but they’re long scattered by now.” Arne followed Jon’s gaze out into the trees and swallowed hard. This was not going well at all.

Dante, Raine and Arne watched Jon climb back down from the tree with quiet ease, and then drop lightly to the ground. The cougar slipped his feet back into the sandals he had kicked off earlier and then gestured with an arm.

“Right over there is a relatively fresh set of elk tracks I found in the dirt on an animal trail, and a bit of its fur on a bush,” he told them quietly. “From the depth of the tracks in the ground, I would guess its weight would have made it large enough to feed our whole gang back waiting for us.”

Arne suddenly looked excited. “Why didn’t you say so?” he exclaimed. “Let’s get going and try to catch it!”

Raine moved quickly to the place that Jon had indicated and began brushing aside leaves and pine needles on his knees.

Jon put his fingers lightly on the African lion’s arm. “With all the noise you were making, I doubt it’s anywhere near the area anymore,” he rebuked. “There’s no need trying to find it now.”

Arne sneered at him. “You’re loving this, aren’t you?” he growled. “We’re trying to find food and all you can do is undermine me in front of the others so you can get control of my team!”

Jon drew himself up to his full height, which was about four inches taller than the other feline, and looked down at him with an unblinking stare. “I don’t want your job, but your leadership stinks!” he retorted in a low voice. “If you can’t set a good example hunting for food, I doubt anyone else will ever follow you again.”

Arne raised his chin with fire in his eyes. “I don’t even believe you’ve seen anything,” he growled. “You’re just making it up to make yourself look good.”

“Here are the elk tracks!” Raine announced. He said it in a voice meant to be quiet, but still carry to his companions. Dante dropped to the forest floor beside him and the cheetah spread his hands out on the ground around one of the large tracks. “This guy must weight in around eight hundred pounds to sink a hoof into dry ground like this!”

Arne looked startled, but then pushed his way past Jon to look at the spoor. He knelt down beside Raine and grunted. He did not know anything about weight measurements, but even he could see how firm the track was in the dirt.

Standing up again, he glared at Jon, but after a long moment, he let out an audible sigh. “Do you want to lead us on a hunt?” he asked with an obvious internal struggle. When he said it, his voice had dropped to almost a whisper, a distinct difference from his earlier vocal volume.

“Does anyone have the time?” Jon asked without answering the lion’s query.

Raine looked down at the leather strap around his wrist and opened up a flap over the crystal of his inexpensive watch. “It’s getting close to six o’clock,” he reported and then looked up with a frown. “I didn’t realize it was getting so late.”

Jon looked up at the sky through the trees. There would yet be several hours of summer sunlight left, but that still limited how far they could go on a hunt. “We’d better be getting back,” he said at last. “Perhaps the others were more successful in finding something.”

Arne’s shoulders drooped, but he nodded. “Yeah, okay. Let’s get back to the others so you can tell everyone how I messed up.”

Jon exchanged looks with Raine and Dante and he gave them a subtle shake of his head. “Arne,” he said quietly, “we aren’t going to do that.”

The lion looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. “Why not?” he asked. “I just admitted it was my fault we didn’t get anything, didn’t I?”

“Listen, hunting for food out in the wild isn’t something that any of us have been trained to do,” Jon said to all of them. “This is probably what Marcelo was trying to show us by dropping us off out here. Up until now, all of our classes and training have been things we’ve needed, to be sure, but we all need practical experience in surviving out in an unfamiliar environment.”

“You’ve been a hunter before,” Dante mused aloud. “This is nothing new to you.”

“Yeah, and look at the size of you,” Raine added. “You could probably take down anything you went after!”

Jon shook his head. “This is nothing like what I used to do, guys. It’s true that I know how to look for the signs and tracks of prey, but I’ve never had to go out with nothing but the equivalent of teeth and fingernails before. I went out hunting with baits, bottled scents and calls, camouflaged gear and either a gun or a compound bow, usually accompanied by others as well-equipped as I was.”

He gestured toward the tracks and the animal trail leading off into the forest. “I found signs of an elk that passed by here, but without a rifle or bow I doubt I would have been able to take it down on my own. No matter what my own past experience might have been, I still would’ve had to rely on you guys to help me take down whatever we tracked. That’s why we need to work together as a team.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question,” Arne said, quietly subdued.

Jon looked at him, suddenly feeling pity for a guy who had held nothing but animosity for him earlier. “What good would it do?” he replied. Then, looking over at the others, he said, “Let’s be sensible here. We’re going back empty-handed, so when they ask us about our experience this evening, we’ll simply tell them we didn’t find anything. Even if we’d all been quiet as mice, we still might not have seen anything being so close to the noisy gathering of the rest of them.”

He looked up at the tree he had been in and nodded toward it. “While I was up there being still and quiet, I could hear their voices in the distance. You’d think they were having a block party back there without us.”

“Maybe they are,” Raine said with a frown. The cheetah looked at each of his companions and added, “Maybe the canines brought something back already.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jon replied. “They were going to give a howl if they caught something, but I’ve not heard—”

“You mean like that?” Dante interrupted. Jon fell silent and then they all heard it. Somewhere far in the distance was the unmistakable call of the wolf. Wild wolves were primarily nocturnal and it would be too early for them with as much daylight as was left presently. All four of them knew it must be their Canis pack that had gone off to hunt.

“Well, that tears it,” Arne grumbled. “We may as well go back now and welcome the victorious hunters back with the rest of the gang.”

Without waiting for a response, the African lion started making his way back toward the main Fur group. Raine and Dante exchanged excited looks. They might have had no luck at all bringing in game, but both of them knew that the canines would not have issued their call unless they had something worth bringing back. It would be time to eat soon.

Jon hung back and allowed the others to go ahead of him, silently noting in amusement that at least Arne was headed in the right direction to take them back to the others.

***

One of the deer looked around in apprehension, unsure that a random scent wafted around the trees represented danger or not. It was an odd mix of scents, even if it was just one scent of itself, as if the creature that emitted it was not sure what it wanted to be. The doe peered into the shadows around the small clearing, but the only movement it saw was a quick flash of brightness behind one bush that was likely just a bird diving for a choice bug.

Another of her sisters looked back in the same direction, but neither of them could discern anything to cause alarm. After several moments of quiet, both returned to grazing with their remaining sibling. The grasses in the clearing were tender and moist, and soon there were no thoughts on anything but filling their bellies.

None of the deer saw any of the predators that slowly encircled them. Most kept downwind, but soon even the upwind side of the clearing would be closed off to escape, though not until the leader of the canines had given a sign to his pack.

A she-wolf peered through the branches of a bush, her brown, grey and white fur blending in with the shadows that kept her hidden. She waited perfectly still, but then something tickled at the back of her mind and she shifted her gaze to the left ever so slightly. A hand paw much like hers rose above another grove of underbrush and silently made a subtle movement that corresponded with a prearranged signal. It was time.

Ellie shifted her eyes again and saw another movement beyond the sunlit grasses of the clearing. It was the red wolf closing the gap upwind just as the light breeze faded. One doe looked up again, her ears flipping around in search for the repeat of something she thought she heard. It was a single footstep, heavier than that of a squirrel or porcupine but not hooved like her own.

As her sisters continued to graze, the largest of the does stood unmoving of anything but her eyes and ears. She tested the scents on the air but was still unsure about what she smelled. Large predators usually did not come out this early in the evening, but that did not mean one would not alter its patterns once in a while. The doe did not think of this as conscious thought, but instinct and experience controlled her actions.

Then the light breeze picked up again and another scent touched her nostrils. The doe lifted her tail instantly and snorted to get the attention of her siblings. Danger!

All three deer began looking around frantically, trying to spot the threat, unconsciously moving together to the center of the clearing and away from the shadows. All three had their tails raised in alarm, and each shifted from hoof to hoof in agitation.

A large grey timber wolf slipped out of the shadows, its head down, tail up and its movements cautious as it advanced toward the deer. One of the does panicked and leaped toward the opposite side of the clearing, only to stop short as another wolf with auburn fur appeared to block her way. Although she could not know this, red wolves usually did not get as large as their grey wolf cousins, but this one was impossibly larger than average and possessed the intelligence and cunning of a human, one of Earth’s most successful predators.

The doe’s eyes were ringed in white with fear when the red wolf rose up on its hind legs and then raised both of its front legs high in the air. Frightened as she had never been of a predator, she leapt backward and landed up against one of her sisters, sending them both sprawling to the ground.

In the scrambling confusion, predators leapt out of the shadows on all sides. One of the does bleated in terror when three of them converged on her. Two of the wolves jumped for her neck from both sides at the same time that a large black and brown dog went for her back legs. The deer kicked out blindly, just missing the German shepherd’s gut; that incensed the canine to grapple with her back legs using its forelegs with a growl and then bite down hard with sharp teeth that tried to tear out hunks of flesh.

One of the wolves bit and clawed at the deer’s neck while the other did something the animal kingdom had never experienced before. The male grey wolf wrapped his forelegs around the doe’s neck and tried to twist it hard. The deer bleated again and bucked for all she was worth, nearly flinging the canine grappling her legs, but the dog held on tight and tore at the animal’s tendons with fervor.

The red wolf leapt upon another doe, and using a similar tactic as his alpha, he wrapped all four of his legs around the deer’s neck and immediately began to twist hard. The hooved animal bucked and thrashed, one of her back legs lightly connecting with the head of a black and white canine. The hardened hoof hit the back of the Border collie’s head only in a glancing blow, but it was enough to spin her around before she dropped to the forest floor.

Another canine jumped from his hold-back position in the trees and raced to the fallen dog’s side, frantic to pull her out of the way before one of the thrashing deer stomped at her on the ground. The bloodhound picked her up as quickly and gently as he could, and then trotted back to the safety of the shadows.

Aldo was no doctor, but he hoped that Cheryl was only dazed by the blow as he eased her to the forest floor. She looked up at him and blinked rapidly, but gave him a small smile as thanks for coming to her rescue. Once the bloodhound was sure she was out of danger, he turned back to the clearing to enter the fray. As a domestic canine, he did not have the teeth and ferocity of the wolves for killing like they did, and as such had been directed to wait on the sidelines, but with Cheryl temporarily out of commission, he did not think twice about going to Ken’s aid.

The red wolf was holding on tight to the doe’s neck, simultaneously trying to break her spine and bleed her out from multiple bite wounds, but the grass-eating deer was strong and thrashing around for her life. Ken’s arms were aching, and his and the doe’s heads had cracked together more than once, making the physician nauseated with all the leaping about.

Aldo did not know what he could do to help, but he leapt in without thinking and tried his best to hamstring the animal with what teeth and claws he had available to him.

The other deer under assault had tried to run for the cover of trees, instinctively knowing that if there was any chance at life, it would be away from the openness of the clearing. Unfortunately for her, the German shepherd had done considerable damage to her back legs despite that she had tried to kick him numerous times.

One of the wolves was still hanging onto her neck, twisting hard again and again, and the other wolf was tearing at her throat with teeth and claws. Despite the deer’s natural strength, she was weakening and none of her attackers were backing down. She made a last ditch effort to bolt for the trees, but when she turned her head to see where she was going, the male wolf twisted hard in the same direction to follow her movement and there was a satisfying crack beneath his arms. The doe’s neck broken, she collapsed instantly, taking the predators down with her.

As soon as he had heard the loud cervical snap, Carl had pushed off and rolled away to safety. Ellie dropped with their prey, but landed hard on top of the animal with a grunt. Travis was surprised by the sudden cessation in the deer’s struggles that he went down in a tangle amongst the doe’s legs. One of the hooves found his gut in a last kick that knocked his breath out of him, but otherwise caused no damage. He rolled away from the body and lay on his back, gasping for air.

Despite that he was tired and aching, Carl got up onto his feet and rushed for the other deer under siege. Ken and Aldo had their hands full with this one and it did not look like either of them had the upper hand.

“Ellie! Travis! Cheryl!” Carl called, “We need numbers!” Then without waiting for a response, he mustered his remaining strength and jumped up onto the deer’s back when it was cantered to the side, sending it off-balance from his weight. The doe stumbled, but maintained her footing. More predators were now coming at her and she tried to bolt for the woods, but her way was blocked by a black and white canine that seemed unsteady on her feet. She bleated in renewed terror when another canine body-slammed into her legs.

The doe went down and the predators swarmed over her, biting, clawing, kicking and pounding. The red wolf still struggled to break her neck, but his strength was waning, so the larger of the grey wolves pushed his arms to the side and sank his teeth into her throat while simultaneously pressing his knees up against her wind pipe. She let out a final weak bleat and then the deer became still, her breath gurgling in her throat as her lifeblood escaped from the rip in her throat.

The sounds of battle in the clearing were suddenly replaced with heavy panting by each of the Canis pack as they all fought to catch their breath.

Ellie rolled off of the deer’s back and lay on her side in the grass, while her husband sat back against the animal’s chest. Ken stumbled away from the doe and then lay spread-eagle on the ground facing up to the sky, his arms weak and shaking. Aldo merely sat down in the grass to get his wind back and Cheryl put her head down in her hands. Although winded and exhausted, Travis chuckled between gasps of air. The others looked over at him and he gave them all a triumphant grin.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. “What a rush!”

Carl sat up on his haunches and then looked around at everyone. “Is anyone hurt?” he asked.

“Cheryl got clocked in the head,” Aldo replied wearily.

Ken immediately got up on all fours and then padded over to the Border collie. He ached all over, but his bruises were nothing compared to what a cranial concussion could be. He looked her over and peered into her eyes, but despite the headache pounding between her ears, her sight looked clear and she gave him a tired smile.

“I think her hoof just grazed me,” she said rubbing the back of her head, “but I saw stars for a moment.”

Ken reached out to her and lightly pinched the end of one of her fingers. She flinched and the red wolf nodded in satisfaction. He did this to several other extremities to make sure she had proper feeling everywhere, and he finally brushed her brown scalp hair from her forehead with a gentle smile.

“You seem to be okay for the most part,” he told her. “I imagine the bells are still ringing upstairs, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything with me to combat the headache.”

The others gathered around and Cheryl looked up with an embarrassed grin. “I can live with the headache for now,” she replied.

“Anyone else?” Carl asked in concern.

“Bumps, bruises and tired muscles,” Ellie muttered, “but otherwise I’m okay.” The rest of the pack gave similar responses, so the alpha wolf grunted in satisfaction.

“We brought down two mature whitetail deer,” Carl told them with a smile. “The third probably ran away just as hard as she could, but we should get enough meat off these two to feed the whole bunch.”

“I do see a problem, though,” Aldo remarked. “None of us have knives to dress the kill before we take them back.”

Carl thought about it for a moment and then tilted his nose to the sky. In as loud a voice as he could muster, he gave up a howl to the sky that would make any lupine pack proud. Afterward, he cleared his throat and shrugged. “I’m hoping that will carry back to the others. Perhaps they can send someone out here to help us drag the carcasses back to the group. In the meantime, we can rest a bit, but then we’ll need to see if we can find anything in the woods to fashion a couple of travois for them.”

“We might also scout around to see if we can find a nearby stream to clean up before anyone arrives,” Ellie suggested, looking around at each in turn. “Most of us have blood all over our faces and hands.”

“Yeah, we might scare the townsfolk,” Travis remarked in amusement, “Wearing what’s left of his furman clothes, Carl looks like the classic werewolf who’s just eaten a villager!”

Chapter 5

As the Crow Flies

Jon looked across the clearing toward the campfire that had been made for the Furs to gather around and he let out a quiet belch. Avon had sent out a small search party to find the Canis group, following the occasional howls sent up by one of the wolves, and they had returned close to sundown with a bedraggled bunch of canines and two deer for supper.

In a surprise by everyone, including their ursine leader, Dante had taken charge of the fresh meat, giving orders to a few friends he knew would help him prepare a meal for the hungry mob. Kristen, Michael, Sissy and Yuki sorted through the edible plants they had gathered earlier to go with the meal. There were no knives among the group of wandering Furs, so Dante and others had had to rely on teeth and claws to rip chunks of meat from the deer carcasses so they could be cooked over the campfire skewered on sticks from the forest. Some cooked theirs longer than others, while some ate theirs rather rare; many on this trip had discovered just how resilient their new digestive systems had become through the changes and tastes had changed with them.

Despite that there were thirty-one Furs to feed, there was plenty of food to go around, and it was likely they would not have to mount another such hunt for a day or two, although they were hoping to be back at the Institute and in their own beds by then.

Avon chatted idly with the other Ursis Furs in quiet remembrance of their lost ursine brother. Despite that Whelan always seemed down and out while they had known him, he had been a good guy and was never judgmental of anyone else.

When the grizzly reclined against a pine tree during a lull of the conversation, he felt a lump at his side and remembered the GPS unit. He pulled out the case and frowned as if he had found something nasty in his pocket. The others talked on while he powered it up.

He was not surprised when it could not lock in on but one satellite signal, but he could still look over the topographical map that showed the region where the last waypoint had been marked by Jenni earlier that evening. He gazed at the terrain between that point and the Institute and silently wished that Marcelo’s road was marked upon it.

The life of the batteries in the unit was getting weaker, so he shut it down to save it for spot checks along the way. Why had the director not given them fully-charged batteries? Was this yet another part of the survival activities they all assumed they were going through, or had he even checked the power level beforehand? The small energy cells were more efficient than their early predecessors, but they still needed to be infused now and again to be useful. It was apparent these had not seen a charger in some time.

The grizzly looked around at the Furs gathered across the area and noticed that everyone within the light of the campfire had finished eating. A few of them looked drowsy, so he knew he had better make his announcement soon. Although there had been no formal decision, it was assumed they would camp for the night there at the end of their road, but Avon needed to discuss their next course of action before they bedded down for the night.

He was feeling just as relaxed with a full stomach as the rest of them, so with a quiet grumble to himself, the large grizzly forced himself up onto to his feet and took a few steps into the light of the fire.

“I need everyone’s attention, please,” he announced in a voice that was probably louder than necessary. He looked around at the faces peering back at him and did a silent nose count. Satisfied that everyone was present and waiting on his next words, Avon cleared his throat and held up the GPS receiver.

“Well, folks, we’re at the end of our road,” he began. “I’m not sure why this one even exists, as it doesn’t go anywhere, but apparently we chose the wrong one to follow, even if it was the one that seemed to go in the general direction of home.” There were murmurs of agreement. “It’s possible that Marcelo discovered the same thing we did and wound up going back to the crossroads. This might explain why we found bus tracks on both roads. Once we’ve had a good night’s rest, we’ll need to start back the way we came so we can get back to the intersection.”

“It took us four hours to get here from that crossroads,” Gerard complained. “That’s a long way to go to just start over, wasting eight hours round trip.”

“True, but unless you’ve found where this road picks up again, we don’t have a choice.”

“We could go cross country,” Manny suggested. “We could simply take the most direct route instead of meandering around on a winding forest road.”

“Yeah, I think I like that idea,” Gerard agreed. “It might save us a lot of hours getting back.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Yuki spoke up. “We might get lost!”

“Right,” Avon replied. “The problem with going cross country is that we can’t depend upon finding a safe way through the woods. We’re unfamiliar with the terrain and there’s no telling what we might fall into out there.”

“How is this different than being dropped in the middle of nowhere on another planet where there aren’t any roads at all?” Gerard asked. “We wouldn’t even have a handy GPS to use there, but we have one here to guide us through the forest.”

“Do you have fresh batteries in the pocket of your vest?” Avon retorted, holding up the receiver in his hand; Gerard merely looked back at him. “The ones in here were not even halfway charged when Marcelo gave it to me, and they’re getting weaker every time we use it. I wouldn’t want to rely on it getting us cross country where we’d have to check on it more often. The road may take longer, but it will eventually get us there.”

“Are we closer to the Institute now than when we were at the intersection?” Jasmine wanted to know.

“Yes, but going on from here is going to be a lot harder to traverse,” Avon replied. “The ground will be uneven, we’d have to step over fallen trees, rocks, go through briars and dense brush, not to mention climbing up and down the mountains and valleys in between.”

“May I say something?” Kim asked, standing up. The lynx wrapped her arms around herself, though she was not actually cold. She wasn’t used to speaking in front of a crowd, but her convictions were strong enough to move her.

“Of course; what’s on your mind?” Avon said to her.

“Yuki and I have been talking,” she said, “and we don’t think we were meant to go back to the Institute at all.”

“Oh, really?” Jenni said in exasperation. She’d heard the sisters’ discussion before and was tired of it already.

Avon, however, looked surprised. “What makes you think that?” he asked, raising his bushy eyebrows.

“The director dropped us off out in the middle of the woods without any explanations or instructions,” the feline explained. “He didn’t tell you that we were supposed to make our way back. He didn’t tell you anything.”

“The Institute is marked on the GPS,” Michael reminded her. “Why bother doing that or even give us a GPS at all if he didn’t mean for us to come back?”

“How do you know that spot’s the Institute?” Kim shot back. “It could very well be an exotic private zoo waiting to lock us up, for all we know!”

“A zoo? If that was true, why are we out here?” Dahlia asked. “Marcelo could have just taken us there directly.”

“To wear us down so that by the time we got there, we’d be too tired to resist,” Kim offered.

“That’s just silly,” Dante muttered loud enough for everyone to hear.

Kim crossed her arms in agitation. “It is not silly!” she exclaimed. “It makes as much sense as Mr. Avonaco’s survival training scenario!”

“We’re all in training to colonize another world,” Carl piped in. “A forced survival march fits in with the purpose of our transformations. What we’ve been through already is something we will need to know before we leave the Earth.”

“If we were meant to be abandoned,” Dara said from the shadows, where she had been sitting out of the glare of the fire, “what would you suggest we do? If we don’t try to make our way to the Institute, what are we supposed to do out here – hike to the nearest town and ask for jobs? Looking like we do, I’m sure we’d all get hired right away.”

Kim resented the polar bear’s sarcastic tone, but she took it as an opening to the idea she and her sister had discussed.

“Let’s go back to the clearing where we were dropped off and set up our own colony there!” she suggested brightly.

“Say what?” Norman exclaimed in surprise.

Yuki stood up next to her sister. “They clearly don’t want us anymore,” the canine Akita added. “Like Jenni said in the beginning, they dropped us off like abandoned pets! Why waste time traveling to some unknown point on a barely-working GPS when we can just set up our own place out here in the forest? This way we can survive without spending the rest of our time in a zoo or other cages!”

“Why would you even think that?” Norman asked with a snort. “You two are really reaching for that scenario!”

“If we didn’t try to make it back to the Institute,” Avon said, waving his hands in the air in front of him, “I’m sure the director would eventually send out search parties for us.”

“Why?” Kim asked in frustration. “He wouldn’t come after us if he wanted us out here!”

“Maybe he made a deal with the exotic zoo!” Yuki speculated with sudden intensity. “They’ll come hunting us with traps and guns if we don’t show up at the coordinates!”

“Oh brother…” Travis muttered from his spot by the fire where he had been poking the coals with a stick. “Can we just get back to the discussion over which way we’re going back home?”

“You want to be a freak in a zoo?” Yuki asked him incredulously.

“We’re already freaks, as far as the rest of the world goes,” the German shepherd replied dryly. “What I want is to get back to a hot shower after a day like today. We won’t have them on this proverbial world we’re going to someday, so I want to enjoy them for as long as I can!”

Avon cleared his throat. “I agree with Travis,” he said. “We need to return to the root of this discussion.”

Yuki turned around in a slow circle to look at everyone. “I know — let’s take a vote!” she said suddenly. “Okay everyone. Who agrees that we should form our own colony out here?” She held up her hand, as did Kim. Nobody else moved to join them and it got conspicuously quiet with nothing but the crackling of the fire to answer the sisters. “No one?” Yuki asked with an embarrassed frown. “C’mon, people – this is for our survival!”

“Sit down, darlin’,” Travis said with a sneer. “No one wants to listen to your crazy talk!”

“It’s not crazy…” Kim murmured. “It’s a valid concern.”

Yuki looked angrily at everyone around them. “Going back is not the thing to do!” she shouted. “They don’t want us there!” She turned back to Avon with an imploring look, but he merely gazed back at her across the fire, his expression carefully neutral. Seeing that she would get no backing from their leader, she grabbed her sister’s hand. “Come on, Kim.”

The Tanaka sisters both stormed out away from the campfire to sulk in the shadows. Before they had completely lost themselves, however, Travis tossed his stick onto the fire and then said in an exaggerated country drawl, “Nowa the crazies are gone, kin we git back to the pint of all dis?”

Avon sighed and looked around the campfire. “Once we’ve all had some rest,” he said at last, “we’ll start back up the road back to the intersection and—”

“Hey,” Norman interrupted, “since there’s voting going around, why don’t we vote on this issue?”

“What’s to vote on?” asked the grizzly.

“Personally, I don’t have a preference either way,” Norman said, “but let’s take a vote on whether we spend our time tomorrow going back the way we came or striking out through the woods on a more direct route.”

Avon frowned and heaved a heavy sigh, but presently he shrugged and looked around. “Okay, raise one hand if you prefer we take the road back out and find our way to the Institute on an established road.” The grizzly raised his hand and then counted out more in the air. “All right, that’s thirteen; you can drop your hands.”

“Now, who’s in favor of finding our way through unknown territory on a more direct route?” He looked around and counted raised hand paws. Neither Yuki nor Kim bothered to vote, both having gone off to pout. “Sixteen,” Avon remarked at last. Twenty-eight pairs of eyes looked back at him to see what he would do.

He shook his head and slid the GPS back into its case before putting it into his pocket. “I don’t think we’re doing the right thing,” he said in a resigned tone, “but we’ll go with the majority vote.” There were several comments of relief, as well as a few groans of frustration.

“I don’t want to have to fight my way through briars and brush!” Sissy complained.

Avon did not want to do that anymore than she did, but he shook it off and took control again. “Now – since we’ll be traversing more difficult terrain, I want everyone to help one another get through this. This is going to further resemble conditions on a wild and untamed planet, so we can’t afford to lose anyone now any more than we will then. We have no medical supplies, not even a First Aid kit, so let’s keep the cuts, scratches, bumps and bruises to a minimum. We don’t even have a canteen among us, so we’ll need to be on the lookout for running water. Watch your step, watch your head, and stay alert at all times. We can’t afford a casual and light journey anymore, so we all need to be vigilant. This is going to take more of an effort than we’ve had yet, so I suggest that if you’re finished eating for the night, you may want to settle down and get some rest before tomorrow.”

Effectively ending the discussion, quiet conversations started up all around the campfire. Avon felt exhausted and looked around for a soft patch of moss off the dead-end road to make his bed. When he stepped away from the fire, the grizzly saw Jon near the edge of the clearing doing chin-ups on the low branch of a tree.

“You were awfully quiet during tonight’s exchange,” Avon remarked in a tired voice.

The cougar looked at him without pausing in his routine. “I didn’t feel the need to give my input,” Jon replied in a quiet voice.

“You could have at least voted with me,” the bear said.

“Had I done that, the numbers would still have been stacked against us.”

“Maybe, but there are those in the group who might have voted with you.”

Jon paused with his chin up near the branch, holding his weight with just his hands. “You’re still convinced that I have more pull than I really do,” he said, slowly lowering himself to the ground. “I really don’t think the outcome would have been any different.”

“Why did you vote to go cross country?” Avon asked. “I would have thought you would be concerned about getting everyone back safely just as much as I am.”

The cougar looked amused and dusted off his hands. “That might be true if I was the leader of cats you want to make me into,” he said. “I already told you that I’m not the one for the job. I don’t want it.” Avon opened his mouth to reply, but Jon held up a hand and continued. “I’ll do my part when the time comes to shoot us out into space and drop us off on an alien world, but someone else will be in charge and make the decisions.”

“Who? Arne?”

Jon made a face. “Yeesh, I hope not! One day out with his decisions was enough.”

Avon tilted his head. “Oh? What happened out there?”

“Nothing to speak of,” Jon answered, mentally giving himself a smack for mentioning it. “As for my vote, I grew up making cross country hikes through woods like these, so I’m not concerned about the terrain. Sure, it won’t be all flat and free of things to go around, but I’ve no doubt this group can do it.”

“What about the smaller ones like Erin, Kevin and Sissy?”

“You’ve already covered that,” Jon reminded him, dropping to the ground to begin a series of push-ups. “Everyone helps everyone else on the journey. As long as the weather holds out, we should be okay,” he grunted. “Even if it rains on us, we’ll be better protected under the cover of trees than on a road anyway.”

At the mention of rain, Avon glanced up at the night sky that could be seen through the treetops over the road. He could see wisps of clouds occluding some of the stars, but this did not herald any bad weather as yet.

“Taking the wrong road was nobody’s fault,” Jon said, rolling over onto his back for sit-ups, “but we wasted the better part of a day. Providing Sissy’s forecast hasn’t changed since we’ve been out here,” he said between stomach crunches, “inclement weather may be coming… in a couple of days… and we’ll want to be… as close to home as we can… before it gets here…”

Talking while doing his nightly exercises was not easy, so he stretched out onto his side and put his head up on one hand to look at the grizzly.

“I think it’s in our best interests to go as the crow flies in as straight a line as we’re able to get back,” he said, “and as much as I hate to agree with Travis on anything, no one we come across on the road is going to help us. I overheard Marcelo once telling someone that they’ve tried to keep the real purpose of our Institute a secret from the surrounding residents, so we’d probably be shot on sight by uninformed locals thinking alien mutants have landed or something.”

Avon looked at him in the dim light of the campfire and frowned. He still did not like idea of leaving an established road, but he was beginning to think that Jon had good reasons for going cross country. The route would not be easy in places, but perhaps they could avoid disaster long enough to make up a lot of lost time.

“Well, we’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow,” he said after moments of quiet musing, “so we’d better get some rest.”

“Good idea,” Jon said with a nod. Avon settled down on the patch of moss he had found and Jon simply stretched out on a bed of leaves.

The cougar stared across the roadway toward the weakening campfire and let his mind relax in the flickering flames.

***

When the group of Furs started out early the next morning, the ursine cousins volunteered to blaze a trail through the woods for the others to follow. Although the grizzly was the one in charge, Avon granted Aaron and Gerard the opportunity to take the lead, privately in hopes that one of them would prove himself worthy to be assigned as his second-in-command when their assignment to a starter colony finally came about. The leader of a colony was appointed by Stockholm, but Avon’s officers would eventually be chosen by him.

If neither Aaron nor Gerard, he may have to consider a Fur from one of the other Institutes that will eventually be sent out with them at the same time. He had met the bears at the Argentina branch briefly and knew there could be some decent candidates there too. As yet, he had not met any of the volunteer Furs from the Stockholm branch, but he hoped that he would be allowed to go visit them before long to make acquaintances with those whom he would eventually lead. For now, however, he was looking closer to home for his officers.

Fortunately for their new resilient physiologies, none of the Furs needed to eat much for breakfast that morning, having sated their appetites the previous night with a feast of deer meat and edible plants. A few had roasted a bit of meat for breakfast, a portion of added protein before the next leg of their journey, but once the fire pit had been buried under a layer of smothering dirt, the end of the road had been left behind.

Aaron and Gerard, feeling self-important, led the Furs off through the underbrush, and most everyone seemed encouraged with the animal trail they followed in the general direction they needed to go. The underbrush was light and presented no real difficulty to get through.

As before, Jon stationed himself at the back of the crowd to make sure there were no stragglers who might get left behind. Several had speculated that the Tanaka sisters might have abandoned the group after their argument the night before, but once the Furs were on the move, both Kim and Yuki were among them. Neither seemed happy about it, but they were smart enough to know the foolishness of leaving the group on their own, especially without having provisions of any kind.

An hour into the journey the ground began to rise, becoming rockier, and forest growth grew thicker, closer together. Although only a few had been walking on all fours since they had departed the road, the rest of them switched to this mode of travel as it was easier with the incline.

Wendy panted in the heat as the day grew warm and humid. Gnats, flies and other bugs had discovered the golden retriever’s furry anatomy and swatting at them was no easy thing to do when all four of her limbs were on the ground for walking. She looked over at the white tiger near her and frowned at the sight of his oversized dog collar.

“Hey Dante,” she said, “does that collar of yours repel fleas and ticks?”

The feline glanced at her but shook his head. “No, it doesn’t,” he replied with a frown, “but right now, I really wish it did.”

“Be glad it doesn’t,” Hank muttered from behind him. “Every Fur here would try to take it from you if it did.”

“I’d outrun you all if it came down to that,” Dante responded with pride.

“All of us?” Raine Terrance quipped lightly. The cheetah gave Dante a wide, tooth-baring grin when he looked up at him.

The tiger chuckled. “Okay, you might give me a run for my money,” he said. “Unfortunately for us all, it’s just a collar to hold my name tag in case I forget who I am.”

Up ahead of the casual banter, Jasmine and Cheryl had their heads together as they walked, snickering and giggling at some private conversation. Although the hearing of every Fur present had been enhanced by the transformation, they spoke in whispers so low that even those near them could not discern what was said.

After several minutes of this, both females increased their pace a little to move forward toward the front of the entourage being led by the pair of brown bears. Gerard was in the forefront, picking out their route through the trees and underbrush and his cousin Aaron was right behind him making sure the others followed. Right behind them were Alicia and Dara, their black and white furs side by side contrasting starkly. Both looked annoyed when the vixen and Border collie pushed in between them to move up to the front of the group.

“I’ll bet they’re going to flirt with the guys,” the black bear complained quietly to her white-furred friend.

Dara’s expression brightened with a twinkle in her dark brown eyes. “What’s the matter? Are you jealous?” she whispered.

“You knew I had my sights set on Aaron,” Alicia grumbled. Sure enough, Jasmine and Cheryl positioned themselves right alongside each of the ursine cousins, both of them walking close to the males. Aaron looked amused at something Jasmine whispered into his small round ears and Alicia swiped at a nearby bush in annoyance.

Dara leaned in close with amusement. “We may have to compete for them,” she said quietly, “but in the end we’re the only ones who can have their cubs.”

Alicia looked embarrassed. “I’m not interested in having his cubs right now!” she whispered in exasperation. “I just want to be the center of his attention.”

The polar bear chuckled. She planned to make herself familiar to all the ursine males she knew, not just only one like her friend here. After all, there would be more males than females when they left the Earth, so she had her choice of guys to go through.

“Well, he looks like he’s enjoying the vixen’s attention, but she made the first move. You’re going to have to stop being a wallflower and be more assertive!”

Alicia sighed and shook her head. She was a crack shot with a gun, was energetically athletic and self-confident in everything she put her mind to, but when it came to relationships, she was woefully inadequate to deal with the nuances of pursuing someone she liked.

She had become friends with Dara when they had first been assigned to the same Wing for their transformation over a year earlier, but there were times when she could not stand to be around her. This was quickly becoming one of those times. The black bear looked behind and saw the arctic fox walking quietly with a bored look on his face. He was far enough back that he would not have been able to hear their conversation, so Alicia made a quick decision.

“I’m going to talk with Manny for a while,” she told her companion.

“Are you setting your sights on a fox tod?” Dara asked in surprise.

“Not at all… I just wanted to talk to him about the guns in the arsenal we’ll be taking with us.”

The polar bear suddenly frowned. “Ah, guy stuff. Okay, go talk to the gun guy – I’m going to keep my eyes on the guys in front. Great view from here.”

Alicia did not answer, but she hung back until Manny had passed her before she began walking again. Instead of turning to him, however, she simply fell silent and lost herself in her thoughts.

Dara watched her from the corner of her eye, but before she had the chance to worry about her friend anymore, Kristen moved closer to her.

“Is she okay?” the botanist asked quietly.

The polar bear gave the mountain lioness a sidelong glance through her blonde bangs of human scalp hair. The two of them had rarely spoken to one another, although there had been no specific reason other than simple opportunity. Always willing to chat, Dara turned to the feline with a smile.

“She’s love-sick,” she explained in a quiet whisper, “and a little jealous of your friend.”

Kristen followed the polar bear’s gaze forward and saw Jasmine walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Aaron. The difference in their sizes did not seem to matter as the couple grinned about some shared comment. The cougar frowned, knowing what it was like to be enamored with someone, but she felt like she was finally moving past her own feelings – at least as long as she did not think about them.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she replied. “I’m sure it bothers her.”

“So, what’s your spot in the colony you’ll be going to?” Dara asked, swiftly changing the subject. “Your name’s Kristen, right?”

The feline blinked at the non-sequitur, but then nodded at her companion. “Yes, that’s right. I’m a transterrestrial botanist and will likely fill out any other position they happen to put me in as needed.”

“Ah, you’re the one who’s been helping us find the plants we can eat.”

“Yes, that’s me. What about you?”

“You probably wouldn’t know it to look at me,” Dara answered, “but I’m a chemist and geologist.”

“Wow, that’s great!” Kristen responded with wide eyes. “I don’t think we have either of those career fields among the Felis classes, but those could certainly come in handy.”

“Just like yours, dear.”

They had to fall into single file to pass through a stand of tall pine trees and then around an outcropping of exposed rock, but when they were able to walk side by side again, Kristen looked over at Dara.

“So, what made you decide to become a bear?” she asked casually. “I’m afraid my choice was foolishly based upon a guy I knew.”

“Jon Sunset?”

Kristen looked at her, but didn’t answer. Dara nodded to herself and looked ahead. “I chose a bear because I’ve always been a big girl and a big animal just seemed right.”

“You were a big girl? So was I, before the transformation slimmed me down. I’m happy to say that I’m no longer as thick as I used to be.”

Dara smiled. “No, sorry, that’s not what I meant. I was big. I was tall, large-framed, broad-shouldered and what some people would call a bit mannish. I suppose I’ve always had more testosterone in my body than most women, but I’ve never had any aspirations of being a guy; I like pursuing them myself too much! However, due to my build, I’ve always taken part in sports and activities that many women wouldn’t bother with, though I never had an interest in body building.”

“Polar bears are the largest of all bears on the planet,” Kristen mused. “How come Avon’s bigger than you are?”

“Before the transformation, he was larger than I was to begin with,” the white-furred woman explained. “The genetic changes make us resemble our animal counterparts, but our human makeup is still in there too. I’ve bulked up due to my ursine nature, but I doubt I’ll ever be as big as our fearless leader.”

“Still, even as a hybrid bear, you don’t look mannish to me,” Kristen remarked with a critical eye at her companion. Dara grinned at her.

“Why thank you, dear! That was nice of you to say.”

“You’re welcome. What about your friend Alicia? Why’d she become a bear?”

Dara lost her smile. “Okay, she did have a weight problem when she first came to the Institute, but that was not her reason. She had spent a few summers working as a volunteer to a local zoo where she lived and had some experience working with the bears. She was never a handler herself, but she said she had always liked the animals.”

Kristen was intrigued. “It’s ironic that an animal lover would be such a good shot with a rifle.”

“Yeah, well you can blame her brothers for that. She was the only daughter in a large family of males and all the guys were target shooters. I think even her mom was too.”

“Were they hunters?”

“Maybe one or two of them, but she said they mostly only shot up beer cans, clay discs and paper targets on the back lot of their rural property.” Dara glanced behind her and noticed how miserable the female black bear looked. “Kristen, we’ll have to talk again soon,” she said, “but I think Alicia needs some cheering up.”

“Uh, sure,” said the botanist. “Nice meeting you, Dara.” The polar bear gave her a nod and then held back so she could join her friend.

Kristen sighed and looked down at her forepaws on the ground, becoming lost in her own thoughts. A moment later, she felt someone approach her. She looked up into the large golden eyes of a cheetah, and despite the sadness that always seemed to be on his face due to the cry-line markings of his facial fur, Raine gave her a cheerful smile.

“Hello,” he said pleasantly. “Mind if I join you?” Kristen’s face lit up immediately. She had talked to Raine Terrance a few times, but had never really gotten to know him.

“Sure, I could use the company,” she told him with a smile of her own. Talking to another guy would help keep her mind off the other mountain lion of the group. After a brief look around, however, she noticed Travis watching her from nearby. He had not annoyed her in some time, but for now she preferred to focus on the cheetah for casual conversation.

***

Aldo Banner walked quietly along with the rest of the Furs up a steepening incline through the forest, but he was holding toward the back of the group. His large floppy ears shook as his nose quivered near the ground, attempting to identify the scent of something he kept picking up in the air.

He raised his head after several moments and sniffed at the forest beside him. He was sure something was following them, but without a certain frame of reference, he had yet to say anything to Avon about it. He wanted to be sure before causing potential alarm, so he simply decided to remain vigilant and continue keeping track of the scents he had detected.

***

Three and a half hours into their wooded journey, most of the Furs had fallen into the routine of blindly walking along with everyone else. The forest surroundings were unbreaking, the incline was continual and conversations had flourished to keep themselves occupied. Avon silently wondered how they would hear anything they might come upon with so much noise coming from the group, but he saw no real reason to shush them. They still had a long way to go and the discussions would help keep up morale. The grizzly had planned to stop the group in another hour to take fresh reading from the GPS receiver. Aaron and Gerard had led them on such a meandering path across the mountainous terrain that he was no longer certain they were headed directly for the Institute.

Avon looked at the head of the group and saw the cousins flirting openly with the four females that were gathered just behind them. Dahlia, Erin and Jasmine all laughed at some joke that Aaron had quipped to them over his ursine shoulder while Gerard and Cheryl led the way through several dense bushes growing around a large, slate grey boulder.

As the grizzly watched, Gerard and Cheryl suddenly disappeared from view. Cheryl cried out and Aaron reached for her instinctively before even realizing what he was doing.

“Ohmigosh!” Erin exclaimed loudly and Dahlia suddenly clutched her sister’s arm.

Avon began pushing his way past a few others just as Aaron pulled Cheryl back into view. She clung to him with wide eyes, but the Border collie was looking down at something out of the grizzly’s sight.

“Gerard, are you okay?” Aaron called out frantically.

“What happened?” Avon demanded when he reached the boulder. The females moved back to let their leader through the brush and when he stepped up to Aaron’s side, he blinked in astonishment at what he saw.

They were standing in full sunshine at the rim of a precipice overlooking a sheer cut ravine with a small river below. Gerard had stepped over the edge out into open air and dropped a good fourteen or fifteen feet onto an outcropping of rock barely wider than himself. His foot had caught on a root clinging to the cliff above him and that had likely kept him from rolling right off into space. Had Aaron not caught her fluffy tail, Cheryl would have tumbled out right behind Gerard.

The brown bear below looked dazed, but was keenly aware of his predicament. He managed to extricate his foot from the root and then sat back against the cliff wall, pressing himself away from the edge as much as he could. He looked up over his shoulder when Aaron called down at him again.

“I’m okay,” he managed to say with a dry throat. “Just give me a moment.” He looked out at a dark shape riding the air currents over the ravine and recognized it as a large bald eagle. Had the situation not been grim, he might have felt inspired to have seen the rare majestic bird.

“Take all the time you need,” Avon told him. “Just don’t slip off.”

Gerard nodded, but after only a couple minutes he reached back and took hold of the roots above him. Once he was sure he had a firm grip and the vegetation would not pull away from the wall, he used it to help get himself up to his feet. Turning around to face away from the drop off, the brown bear stretched up as high as he could, but even with his ursine height, he could not reach the edge of the cliff above him.

Aaron dropped down onto his stomach and reached for him, but they could only just touch their claw tips together. There would be no way to get his cousin back up onto firm ground this way.

Avon turned back to the rest of the Furs waiting in the woods behind them. “Folks, listen up. Gerard has fallen off a cliff onto a ledge below—” there were several gasps of surprise “—but we’re unable to reach him to pull him back up. I need everyone to search around for strong vines or anything else he can use to climb up. He has the bulk of a grown bear, so it’s got to be something strong enough to hold his weight.” He turned back to the cliff, but out of the corner of his eye he saw most of the Furs were rooted to the spot.

“Go!” he commanded, “But watch your step. We don’t want anyone else going over another cliff!”

***

“What about these?” Ivan called out. Jon moved to his side and took a look at what the red fox held in his hands, a thick vine hanging beside the trunk of a tree.

“That’s a grape vine,” the mountain lion answered after a brief examination. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Huh? Why? It’s nearly two inches thick! That ought to hold any of us.”

Jon took the vine in his hands and put his weight against it. The vine pulled down out of the tree with little effort and snaked to the ground between the two of them. Before Ivan could comment, Jon picked up the vine and then traced it back to its root in the ground beside the tree. He heaved at it hard and the vine roots pulled free of the rich forest soil. Although it came away of its anchors in the ground and up in the tree, Jon proved how useless the vine was for their purposes when he wrapped it around the tree and then pulled hard on both ends of it together. The vine splintered like frail bark, coming apart in his hands.

Ivan looked at it with a frown. “I thought Tarzan swung from vines like this,” he muttered.

Jon smiled at him. “Edgar Rice Burroughs never tried swinging from a grape vine,” he replied, dusting off his hands. “The smaller vines are useful for weaving into baskets and wreaths, but not very practical for a rope. It was a good idea, but it wouldn’t hold the weight of a full grown brown bear if I can tear it apart with my hands.”

The fox looked at the remnants of the vine and shook his head. “Yes, I can see that,” he muttered.

“Besides, vines are rooted in the ground and climb up into the trees, not the other way around as they always seem to be shown in the movies. If Tarzan were to jump for one of these vines in the forest, the anchors would come loose above and then he’d be making a long dive into the dirt.”

No one else was having any better luck. Some tried long branches, but without the ability to bend over a ninety-degree angle from the Furs on top to Gerard down below, there was no way to pull him up with it. Hank suggested handing a long fallen tree trunk down to the bear so he could climb it, but the ledge he was standing on was not wide enough for it to remain stable enough for his weight.

“Can he climb down into the ravine and then meet us elsewhere on the other side?” Michael Lynch asked in suggestion.

“No,” came Gerard’s voice from over the edge. “The drop is too sharp and I’m not seeing any places I could use as hand and foot holds!”

The group fell silent for a long while as thoughts whirled around, but then Carl began looking around at everyone. Avon saw him and felt his curiosity piqued.

“You have an idea?”

The grey wolf nodded and held up the hem of his furman garment. “Tie our robe tops and vests together into a rope,” he suggested. “If we double them up, it might be strong enough to hold his weight, and there’s more than enough of us here to pull him up to us.”

“I think he’s got a good idea,” Jon remarked. “There are fourteen of us guys up here.”

The grizzly looked around at the Furs gathered in front of the boulder and did not see any signs of argument. “Okay, I need all the guys to remove their vests and robes so we can tie them together as a cloth rope. They may not be much use to us afterward, but we can always get more when we get back to base.”

“What about us?” Jenni called out from the back of the crowd.

“You can take your shirts off too!” suggested Travis with a lecherous grin.

Avon turned back to Jenni with a smile. “Keep your shirts on,” he quipped, slipping out of his own large robe top.

The leopard chuckled but shook her head. “Thanks, but I meant to ask if we can do anything else?” The male Furs were tossing their tops onto the boulder as they shed them. Carl and Ellie started grabbing them to tie together.

“You can help them tie the robes,” the grizzly replied distractedly. The robe top in his hand felt heavier than it should, so he reached into a pocket and retrieved the GPS inside its vinyl case. Sissy was close by, so he handed it to her. “Hold onto this for me?” he asked.

“Sure,” the orange feline said with a smile. “I’ll keep it with my PBJ.”

Erin looked over at her as Avon turned back to the Furs tying all their robes together end to end. “Have you tried your PBJ to see if you could get a signal yet?” she asked.

“No! I’d forgotten all about it!” Sissy put the GPS into one pocket and then pulled out her Personal Business Juxtapositioner. She opened its bright orange clamshell case and tapped the power button. The unit’s twin screens lit up and the smiling face of a classic cartoon kitty filled up the right-hand screen in greeting. A moment later, touch tabs appeared around the perimeter of the same screen and Sissy used a claw tip to tap through the menus to her personal message center.

Erin peered over the feline’s shoulder, her large fennec ears causing Sissy’s to twitch where they touched. “Aw,” the diminutive tan fox murmured. The device had a good battery charge, but whatever signal it was supposed to have picked up from overhead satellites still seemed to be blocked.

“That’s very odd,” Sissy remarked. “Even on another planet, there will be one geosynchronous satellite parked over the colony site for our PBJs to interface with for communication with the Earth.”

“With all the communication satellites orbiting the Earth, you’d think some kind of signal would bleed over for this thing to pick up,” Erin mused. “Are you sure it’s still tuned to the correct frequency?”

“It’s self-tuning,” Sissy informed her. Just to be sure, however, she navigated through the menu selections to the unit’s set-up. After looking at the settings, the feline shook her head. “Looks good,” she muttered, “but it is acting like the signal just isn’t there to pick up.”

“Maybe it’s not the signal,” Erin suggested. “Maybe your PBJ is faulty.”

“That’s possible. I’ve had it a while and take it with me everywhere I go.”

“There’s a dent in one side of it. Maybe that’s the problem.”

The orange cat frowned. “I don’t remember hitting it on anything, even in my pocket.”

“Maybe while you slept? You could have rolled over on it over a rock.”

“Perhaps.” Sissy rubbed a finger over the indention and sighed. Had she ruined their chances by breaking her PBJ? Everything else seemed to be functioning on it okay. Her eyes lit up for a moment, but then she frowned again.

“What is it?” Erin prompted.

“I knocked a potted plant off the window sill in my room a couple nights ago, but it fell onto my bed. I just remembered that my PBJ was on my bed too.”

“Do you think it might have landed on it?”

Sissy peered at the dent and nodded. “Probably. It was the same night Marcelo got us all up out of bed to get on the bus.”

“There, that should hold him,” Aaron’s voice announced.

Sissy and Erin looked over at the group by the boulder and saw the brown bear holding up a knotted length of multicolored fabric. He looked over at their leader and Avon nodded.

“Okay, we need the biggest and strongest Furs up here, please,” the grizzly said loudly. Naturally, most of the bears surged forward to get a place in line behind him and Aaron.

Aaron dropped one end of the robe-rope over the edge to his cousin. Gerard clutched at the lifeline with relief and noted that a loop had been formed on his end. He threaded an arm through it for extra leverage and then waited for those on top to begin pulling.

“Ready?” Avon called down to him.

“More than ready.”

“Okay then, everybody, heave!”

The makeshift rope went taut as strong arms pulled on it and Gerard felt himself being lifted from the narrow ledge. Almost immediately, however, several of the bears felt the fabric knots begin to pull apart beneath their fingers.

“Hold on!” Avon shouted, motioning with his head toward the ledge. “This isn’t going to work!” The bears eased off and Gerard’s feet touched back down on lichen-covered rock.

“What’s wrong?” he called back up to them.

“You’re too heavy, cousin,” Aaron answered.

“We doubled up on the robes and vests,” Hank muttered, “but this fabric still isn’t strong enough. It’s a loose weave so our fur can breathe, and that makes it weaker.”

“We only need get him up to the ledge and then we can just pull him up by his arms,” Alicia remarked.

Avon nodded, but with a deep frown. “Yes, but can we even get him that high?” he replied.

“Add another layer,” Jenni suggested from behind the line of bears. When the ursine furmen looked back at her, she and Cheryl stood before them with their own robes held out in their hands toward them. Although fur-covered, both females were now topless.

The grizzly felt his cheeks flush beneath his facial fur, but he knew they were right. Gerard’s only hope of rescue might depend upon the extra layer of furman robes.

“Okay,” he said after a moment, “we’ll need at least six or seven more donated robes to add another layer to our rope. Alicia gave Jenni a smirk and pulled her top off before she took the two they offered.

Sissy gave Erin a brief smile and took the GPS out of her pocket. She made sure the case of her PBJ was secure and then made sure the zipper around the vinyl case of the GPS receiver was closed. With both devices protected, she laid them both on the ground beneath a bush where they would not be stepped on. Sissy pulled off her robe top and then Erin pursed her lips a moment before she shrugged her shoulders.

“What the hey,” she quipped, taking off her short robe. She felt self-conscious about being topless in front of so many at once, but no one was really looking at her. However, before she handed her top away, she removed a small paper-wrapped bundle from the garment pocket and transferred it to the one in her shorts. Erin’s large ears went back against her head when Sissy recognized her menstruation supplies, but neither of them said a word.

Nearby, Yuki watched the proceedings with a frown, but when she saw Sissy put down the electronic devices, an interested look crossed her features.

Ellie, Jasmine, Kristen and Dahlia also donated their tops to the rope, but the remaining females were reluctant to follow suit, especially since Travis was leering at them all with rapt attention; none of them wanted to give him anything more to fantasize about unless it was completely necessary.

Kristen, however, simply did not care anymore. Despite her misgivings when she had first come to the Institute, she was more comfortable with herself now. She was still sufficiently covered up by fur, so she never felt completely bare anymore.

“Aren’t you going to give them yours too?” Kevin asked Rose. The vixen gave him a stony stare, still a little miffed at him.

“Why, so you can ogle my chest?” she retorted. She turned away from him and added, “I’m not baring myself to you unless Gerard’s life depends upon it!”

“What are you worried about anyway?” Kevin grumbled. “Your fur hides everything.”

Rose crossed her arms across her chest and turned her back on him, swishing her tail back and forth in agitation. “How would you know how covered up I am? Have you been peeking into my top?”

Kevin snorted in annoyance and fell silent. He had not intended to stir up more trouble between them, but it seemed that no matter what he said or did, she was going to stay upset with him. It was not fair… she was the one who had abandoned him that night and slept curled up to Jon instead.

While the extra garments were being tied into the rope, Jon, Dante, Ken and Michael joined the line with the bears. There was hardly room for them all to grab hold of the material, but they alternated on sides so they could all lend their strength to the effort.

“I appreciate the help, guys,” Gerard called up, “but can you hurry it up? This ledge is weathered and a little slick with the stuff growing on it. I don’t want to slide off before you get around to helping me up!”

“Just a moment,” Aaron responded. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Uh huh, right.”

“Almost done,” Alicia called down to him. She pulled hard on the final knot to cinch it into place and then spread out the rope to all the hands that would help pull on it. Aaron flipped the loop end down once again and Gerard readied himself as before.

“Okay, once more,” Avon told his troupe.

The makeshift rope went taut as numerous arms pulled on it. Gerard felt himself being lifted from the narrow ledge, but this time the fabric seemed to be holding.

“Holy cats, Gerard!” Michael exclaimed after a moment. “Just how much do you weigh anyway?”

“Two hundred ninety-five and gaining at the last time Dr. Lacross gave me a checkup.”

“Good grief, haven’t you ever heard of a diet?”

“For my kind,” Gerard grunted, “that’s normal.” He tried to walk up the wall as he was being lifted, but there was nothing to dig his toe claws into but bare roots that only held their places tenuously.

“I think my arms are stretching!” Dante gasped. “After this, I won’t have to bend over to walk on all fours!”

Little by little, inch by inch, the brown bear neared the top of the ledge, not daring to look down into the ravine below him. His heart was racing from the anticipation and he had to swallow several times to get down the lump that was lodged in his throat.

The brush surrounding the large boulder obscured the view from the rest of the Furs waiting in the forest. Kristen moved from one foot to the other in expectation and Sissy could not keep from chewing on her lower lip.

Gerard’s ears finally reached the level of the ledge and Aaron took a chance by letting go of the rope to drop to his knees. He reached out for his cousin’s arms as the others continued to pull and he managed to get his hands under Gerard’s armpits.

The Furs in line heaved harder to get him up over the edge, and just as he was almost up high enough, Avon could feel a knot in the robe beneath his hands start to slip.

“Quickly!” he exclaimed to the bears at his feet. “It’s coming loose again!”

Aaron got a better hold on Gerard’s arm and heaved back with him. His cousin finally came up all the way over the edge of the cliff and then scrambled to safety.

“All right!” Dante called out for the benefit of those out of sight. “He made it!” Sissy and Erin applauded, the pair of them jumping up and down as they did.

The rescuers backed out through the brush surrounding the boulder, and when Gerard finally came into view, Cheryl rushed forward to wrap her arms around his thick neck. Ken dropped the length of makeshift rope and approached the brown bear.

“Are you hurt?” the physician asked.

Gerard started to reply in the negative automatically, but stopped to consider it a moment. “I think I jammed my left wrist when I fell,” he answered truthfully, “but otherwise I believe I’m okay.”

“Here, let me take a look at it.”

Gerard extended his hand and Cheryl stepped back to give them room. Ken took the large hand paw gently, but turned it several directions while also feeling of the actions beneath the skin. Gerard winced when it turned a specific direction, but it was only a minor twitch.

“Doesn’t feel like it’s broken,” the doctor said at last, “but we may want to wrap it up with one of the robes to keep it from moving around too much.”

“Whatever you say, doc,” the bear replied.

Back through the brush surrounding the boulder, Jon crept forward on all fours until he was right at the edge. He lay down on his stomach and then peered past Gerard’s ledge over into the ravine. A moment later, Carl lay down beside him to do the same.

“What do you think?” asked the grey wolf. “I would guess it’s about two hundred feet down to the river and the sides are steep.”

Jon shook his head with a frown. “As Gerard said, there’s no way to climb down this cliff so we can climb up again on the other side; not with this group. We’re going to have to go around it upriver. That’s going to take time and throw us off course.” The cougar backed away from the edge and then stood up again on two feet. “It’s a good thing Avon has that GPS receiver, but he said the batteries are getting really low. He’ll have to turn it on sparingly until we can get back on a straight course.”

Carl stood up beside him, idly scratching his bare chest fur. “If I’d known we were going to be coming out here,” he said in a low, gruff voice, “I could have brought a compass from the stuff in my room. Even a cheap plastic one would have been useful on this trip.”

The pair of them turned back and pushed through the brush. On the other side, Ellie, Cheryl and Jenni were attempting to untie the rope.

“What’cha doing?” Jon asked, stopping between the leopard and the Border collie.

“Well,” Cheryl murmured as she tried to work her claw tips into a tight wad of material, “we thought we’d get these untied so we could put our tops back on.”

“Gerard’s weight really fixed up these knots tight,” Jenni added.

“Avon said a knot he held was slipping out,” Jon remarked. “Perhaps you should start there.”

“That’s the one I’ve got,” Ellie supplied, looking up at the mountain lion. “Without Gerard’s weight on it now, the knot’s secure. I’m sure it would hold even your weight now, Jon.”

“Here, let me have it,” Carl said to his wife. He took the rope of material from her and then draped it over the boulder. “Grab it from the other side, Jon.”

The cougar moved forward, picked up the rope, and then both males braced a foot up against the rock. At a nod from Carl, both of them pulled against one another. The rope held. Jenni stepped up behind Jon and added her strength to the pulling at the same time Ellie did behind her husband. What started out as an even-handed attempt to slip a knot turned into a game when Carl suddenly gave Jon a smirk and pulled harder. The cougar chuckled and wrenched back strongly on the rope, almost pulling the wolf onto the boulder.

The game of tug quickly escalated as each team tried to pull the other up to the rock and it attracted the attention of several others. No one else knew what was going on, but Manny and Ivan grabbed the rope behind the wolves as Dante and Michael joined Jon’s side.

Several others started to move in to help, but the game abruptly ended when a knot near Carl’s hands pulled free. Both teams tumbled backward in a crowd of laughter. Jon was on his back up against the bushes, but when he turned onto his side to get up, he planted his chin hard up against Jenni’s chest, knocking her backward into Dante. In turn, the monochrome feline bowled over the swift fox behind him and they all collapsed into a pile of chuckles.

“Wow,” murmured the tiger, “now I know what a domino feels like!”

Carl disentangled himself from the pile of bodies on his side of the boulder and sat up with a grin. In the thrill of the sudden game in tug, he had forgotten their original purpose. One of the knots had separated, freeing the ends of six rope tops, three doubled up on each end.

“Well, that’s a start!” Ellie remarked with a smile. Despite how hard it had been to separate this knot, the tug-of-war must have slipped up others in the process, for they were able to pull apart more knots with teeth and claw tips. Once the first robe top was free, Cheryl shook it out twice and then slipped it on. The material was stretched far beyond its original shape and although it was roughly the size of top that the canine originally wore, this one now hung loose, low and baggy on her.

“That’s a good look for you, Cher,” Travis observed aloud. “It’s a cross between cowgirl, tramp and homeless!” More than one pair of eyes glared back at him for that remark, so he held up his hands with a laugh and backed away into the shadows of the forest. Before he lost himself, however, he took a quick look around and was relieved to discover that Kristen was engaged in a conversation with the cheetah, Raine and was far enough away that she had not heard his remarks.

Despite the German shepherd’s comment that had meant to upset her, Cheryl could not help but agree with him. With a mere shrug, she pulled it off and tossed it on top of the boulder. “He’s right, y’know,” she said to the surprise of those around her. “The material’s so pulled out of shape that it covers up nothing. I think I’ll be better off with my own fur coat!” Of all the women in the group, her body fur was the longest and thickest. With a smile over her shoulder at the guys looking at her, she tipped her western-style hat and hiked up on the back of her shorts that were binding on her fluffy tail.

“Now that’s a good look for her!” Michael whispered aside to Jon.

Ellie held up another robe top she had loosened from the rope and she held it up in both hands with a frown. “I’m afraid she’s right,” the wolf remarked. “We might hang onto these for wraps if anyone gets scrapes or cuts out here, but as garments they’ve outlived their usefulness.”

Carl gave her an appraising look. “You don’t mind going without a top?” he asked.

Ellie smiled and shook her head. “I’m not so hung up on my looks to be embarrassed anymore,” she told him with a pat on the cheek. “This is just one more link to my human past that no longer means what it used to. Yes, I’m still part human, but my fur covers me well enough.”

Across the boulder, Jenni was grinning. Having been raised by a family of openness, she was no stranger to walking around at clothing-optional resorts. The only difference was that with a natural fur coat, she was now wearing more on top than she usually had on while growing up. The irony amused her and she tossed the fabric still in her hands up onto the rock.

“Well, I certainly don’t need to wear one of these baggy things,” Jon said with a shrug. “My fur keeps me warm enough at night.”

Avon had not witnessed the tug-of-war over the rock and was oblivious to the conversation afterward. Assured that Gerard would survive his near-death experience with only a sprained wrist, he looked through the crowd for a certain orange-striped cat. He found Sissy and Erin sitting on the ground discussing the day’s events so the feline could write it down later for her daily news. She would be unable to broadcast her report until they returned to the Institute, but the fennec fox had assured her friend that they would remember everything together.

“Hi,” Sissy said with a smile when the huge grizzly squatted down beside her. “Is Gerard okay?”

“He fell on his hand, but Ken says it’s just sprained,” Avon replied. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to go around that ravine, so I’m going to need the GPS to plot out a route for the next leg of our journey. May I have it, please?”

“Sure,” the cat responded with a smile. She reached for her pocket only to remember that she wasn’t even wearing a top anymore. With a snicker, she looked around and saw the nearby bush where she had stowed the electronic devices. She got up, walked over to it, and then squatted down to retrieve them. The GPS was lying on top of its vinyl case beside her PBJ and she scooped them all up in her hands, absently sliding the global positioning system back into its cover. She handed it to the bear before she sat down again beside Erin. Now that she had her personal unit, she could go ahead and type up all they had discussed.

Avon thanked her and then pulled it out of the case as he walked away. A cold shiver trickled down his spine when he looked at the GPS receiver’s screen, a claw tip poised above the power button that he had yet to touch.

The unit was already on, and presented across the small display was the message, “Low Battery – Recharge or Replace Now,” but then before he could do anything with it, the screen went dark. The grizzly swallowed hard and pressed the power button, but the display remained blank. He turned it over, opened the back of the unit, and then spilled out two batteries onto his other palm to make sure their ends were not oxidized. There was no corrosion, just a few grains of dirt, so he brushed them off and put them back inside one by one, hoping to get at least a little more juice out of them. However, when he tried the power button again, there was no response. The batteries were completely drained.

The last time he had used the GPS was a little over an hour before, but he was sure he had turned it off before putting it back into its case. Out of frustration, he shook the hand unit, even knowing this was nothing that would recharge its batteries.

Sighing heavily, he put the GPS receiver back into its case and zipped it up. He put it inside one of the pockets of his shorts and then stormed away, mad at himself.

Not far away, Kim and Yuki exchanged looks of satisfaction.

***

Fifteen minutes later, Avon brushed aside the discarded vests and robe tops that had been used for the rope and then climbed up on top of the boulder. He put his large hand paws together, and although the sound of his clapping was different than what he could previously do with human hands, it got everyone’s attention.

“Okay, folks, please gather around. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

All those who had scattered about in the woods in casual conversation drew closer to Avon’s rock. Once he was sure everyone was present and accounted for, the grizzly put his hands together and rubbed them against one another nervously.

“For those of you who haven’t taken a look at Gerard’s ravine, let me tell you that it’s too deep and the walls are too steep for us to climb them down to the bottom,” he informed them. “In order to proceed, we’re going to have to go around it, and the best way is to follow it upstream to a place where the river that formed it isn’t too deep. With a little luck, we’ll be able to cross it at a shallow spot and then find our way back to the Institute.”

“That’s not too bad,” Manny remarked with a shrug. “It’ll take us longer, but at least it’s a solid plan.”

Avon rubbed his hands together some more. “The bad news is that the batteries in the GPS receiver have given out completely,” he told them, purposely omitting the fact that he might have left it turned on himself. “Without the GPS, we’re going to be walking blind back to the Institute.” Several voices started up, but he held up a large hand and continued as if he had not paused.

“Once we find a place to cross the river, we’ll have to guess the direction we’ll be taking, but it won’t be certain and there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to walk straight back to the Institute. We can hope to get in the general vicinity and it’s possible we can look for the lights of home at night to lead us in the rest of the way, but for now our primary plan is to get to the other side of the ravine where we can continue on.”

“Even on the other side,” Ivan wondered, “how are we going to know where to continue on from?”

“We’re going to hang up the scraps of some of the ruined robes on the ledge where Gerard went over. When we finally get to opposite side, we can use that as a line-of-sight flag as a spot to continue from.”

“What if we get lost just trying to find our way around the ravine?” Yuki asked. “We’ll be aimlessly wandering these woods and mountains forever!”

“We should have gone back to the clearing!” Kim added. “Why don’t we just retrace our steps back?”

“We aren’t going back, not even to find the road again,” Avon said in annoyance. “The majority voted for this course, so we’re moving forward.”

“Let’s take another vote on it!” Yuki called out with a hand in the air.

“No,” Avon said with an authoritarian boom in his voice. “We aren’t voting this time. It may take us longer to get back without a GPS, but we’ll get back. I’m sure of it.”

“You’re sure of that?” Kim mocked. “Have you been out here before?”

“I’m no more familiar with this place than you are,” Avon growled, “but I’m in charge and in the best interests of this group, we are going onward!”

The Tanaka sisters both looked taken aback at the forcefulness of his words. The large grizzly had always seemed like a pushover, but now he was taking his leadership seriously.

Feeling awkward in the midst of an argument, Sissy lifted a hand demurely. Avon shifted only his eyes to look at her, as if silently daring her to take up Kim and Yuki’s cause.

“Sissy?”

The orange striped feline hesitated under his piercing gaze, but she held out her personal electronic device to him. “I… I volunteer to donate my PBJ so you can power the GPS with its batteries,” she said in a small voice. Avon’s expression softened almost immediately.

“Thank you, Sissy,” he said in a gentler voice, “but the batteries of a PBJ are only made to come out by taking a panel of the case loose by removing several small screws. I’ve had to change out the one in mine before. Unfortunately, we don’t have any tools among us, and I doubt your PBJ’s internal rechargeable battery is the right kind anyway.”

“So what do we do now?” Dara wanted to know.

Avon gestured toward his left. “Upstream of the ravine is that way,” he said. “We still have a lot of daylight left of today, so we’ll continue walking upstream until we find our way across the river. That’s our only plan right now, so I suggest we get on our way. I’ll take the lead this time and will try to keep the ravine out from beneath my feet.”

No one had anything more to say, so the grizzly hopped down off the boulder and gave them all a reassuring smile before he started to make his way through the forest in the direction he had indicated.

Chapter 6

Night Stalkers

“Wild strawberries!”

Raine Terrance left Kristen’s side and rushed out into a small natural clearing. Shining in the sun beneath its leaves were several juicy-looking strawberries. They weren’t as large as those often found in a commercial market, but they could be just as delicious.

The cheetah knelt in the dirt and picked one. He glanced over at Kristen with a smile and then bit into it. The berry juice washed over his tongue and he rolled his eyes in mock ecstasy.

“Mmm, these are good,” he said, handing another to her.

The mountain lioness gave him a smile and bit into the strawberry. She closed her eyes briefly, enjoying the fruit flavor. After she had swallowed it, the botanist examined the wild plant.

“Good source of Vitamin C,” she recalled, fingering the small white flowers, “the leaves make a great tea, and combined with water, the juice can treat red eyes as well as sunburn. It’s also good for kidney and stomach trouble, and mashed into a paste, it can even soothe a toothache. It would be great if we could find a multipurpose plant like this on another world.”

“If anyone can find one there, I’d wager it would be you,” Raine told her with a smile.

“Thanks. Come on, let’s harvest a few for the walk and get back to the group before they pass us by altogether.” They worked quickly to pick a bunch, but neither of them had the pockets of a robe top anymore, so they could only take as much as they could hold in their hand paws.

“I wish I had a basket so we could take back enough for everyone,” Kristen murmured.

“Well, we don’t, so we’ll just have to enjoy them ourselves,” Raine replied grinning. Once they had enough to tide them over for a while, the felines made their way back to the passing group of Furs led by Hiamovi Avonaco. The underbrush in this place had gotten thicker and snagged on fur and fabric alike, and Cheryl seemed to have the worst of it having longer fur than anyone else.

After Kristen and Raine rejoined the troupe, the cougar felt a tentative tap on her shoulder.

“Hi,” Travis said quietly. She raised an eyebrow at him, instantly on her guard, but when he did not do or say anything offensive, she relaxed.

“Hello,” she replied.

“Hi,” said Raine. Travis glanced at him with an unreadable expression for only a heartbeat, but then he nodded courteously.

Kristen offered him a small fruit from her handful. “Have a strawberry,” she told him in an attempt to be pleasant.

The German shepherd had been nice to Kristen over the past few days, though she was still wary of him. Travis could tell by the look in her eyes that he would need to tread softly, so he averted his eyes and took the proffered berry.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. He ate the strawberry and enjoyed its rich flavor, but when he swallowed it, he continued to walk beside her.

The female cougar exchanged puzzled looks with the cheetah on her other side. Travis’ presence felt like an intrusion, but she gave Raine a look of apology and then turned to the canine with a neutral expression. “Is there something we can do for you?” she asked.

Travis looked down at his feet with both hands in the pockets of his shorts. He almost looked humble and it was not like him at all. “I’ve been thinking about the other day,” he said quietly. “I apologize for tagging along with you so much, but if you had not warned me about the hemlock, I might not be alive right now. I’m grateful.”

Kristen sighed inwardly. He had said as much to her already, so she was puzzled why he would bring it up again. Still, he seemed sincere.

“You’re welcome – again,” she said quietly.

The canine looked at the strawberries in her hand and gave her a small smile. He leaned his head toward her and spoke in a voice so quiet that she almost did not hear him. “May I help you again the next time you go out looking for your edible plants? I promise I’ll behave.”

“Okay,” Kristen said in a similarly quiet reply. “If you can honor your word to behave, I’d be glad to accept your assistance.”

Travis began to wag his tail and he probably was not even aware he was doing it. “Thank you,” he said with a smile.

“Have another strawberry,” she told him, extending her palm. He took one with thanks and popped it into his mouth. Then without prompting, he engaged her in trivial conversation, continuing in a low voice.

After several minutes, Raine began to feel awkward at the quiet talk between his companions. He had not known there was anything between Kristen and Travis, so he excused himself to offer some of his strawberries to a few others up in the line of Furs.

Kristen watched him go with a frown and sighed inwardly once again. She hoped that Travis had not completely ruined any chance she might have had of a good friendship with Raine. She was strongly tempted to go after him, but Travis stopped her with a light touch to the arm and pointed to a flowering bush at the base of a tree.

“Hey, is that anything we should be on the lookout for?”

***

Jon pulled his tail free of a clinging bush he passed with a grumble. Avon led them all along an animal trail that paralleled the ravine, but the way was narrow and the group was traversing it in single-file. It was bad enough that they had had to endure fleas, ticks and biting flies, but there were more than a few thorns within the underbrush they passed through and it seemed that no one had escaped their stings. Sissy walked just in front of him and he could relate to her occasional yelps and whimpers.

Avon stopped occasionally to push through the trees on their left to check their proximity to the ravine. The river at the bottom of the canyon was closer as the depth of the rift rose the further they trekked upstream and they could all hear the water as it coursed down the mountain. It was the grizzly’s hope that they could find a place where the river was shallow enough for them to cross. It was his fear, however, that the crevice would extend too high up on the side of the mountain before they could find a crossable area.

Jon grumbled again when another briar snagged the hem of his shorts. Not for the first time was he tempted to toss them aside altogether. He stopped, reached back to his hind limbs, pulled the fabric loose, and then followed after the orange feline.

Up ahead somewhere, he heard Kevin give out a half-hearted cheer for thinning underbrush. It’s about time, the mountain lion thought. Had they not been trying to parallel the ravine, there were likely other paths through the woods that avoided all the thorny plants they could have taken. He suspected the animal trail they followed now was created by smaller critters that could move between them without getting snagged. Some of the Furs had gotten up on their feet to move bipedal through this area. At least only their legs got stuck by brambles that way.

For himself, Jon had discovered that for long distances, walking on all fours was by far more comfortable due to the reconfiguration of his arms, legs, hip and pelvic area. He had gotten used to traveling thus over the past couple of days, and the irony of it amused him. As much as he had been against it from the beginning, Jon had discovered on numerous occasions that he was becoming accustomed to his new form. He still harbored his old psychological resistance, but the slow physical alterations over time had chipped away at that resolve and had made it easier to accept. Had the transformation been a quick process, he fully suspected that he would have broken down and gone mad long before now.

There were still times when sudden muscle cramps, spasms and shooting pains would hit him as further internal changes were made to his body, but they were only intermittent instances now. Although he did not have a date marked on a calendar, he suspected they were near the end of their third trimester in the transformation.

He heard several sighs of relief and he looked up to see that the dense underbrush had indeed thinned out. Scrub brush and trees became the norm and he could even see the moss and shade-loving forest grass on the ground again. Maybe now they could all get a respite from the briars for a while.

***

The scent was stronger. While the group of Furs had been walking parallel to the ravine, the shifting winds over the expanse blowing in through the trees had alerted Aldo’s sensitive nose. It was the same scent he had picked up earlier, but he still had no frame of reference on what it was he smelled. It was no tree or plant, not water from the nearby river or the soil, and neither was it anyone from their party of thirty-one Furs. Despite his ignorance, however, the bloodhound was certain that something was either following or stalking them. It seemed inconceivable that some animal in the forest would find a large group of predator types to be of interest, unless whatever it was tagging along was a two-legged hunter. In his present form, Aldo feared a human more than he did a wild animal at that moment.

Afraid of where his train of thought was going, he decided he could not keep his suspicions to himself any longer. He would feel relieved if mistaken, but he did not want to take the chance if he was not.

At the very back of the long line of Furs, Aldo could see Jon and Sissy in casual conversation, both on all fours as they made sure no one was left behind by bringing up the rear. Although the mountain lion was in no position of authority, Aldo had seen Avon talking earnestly with him on numerous occasions, so the bloodhound figured he could at least be of some assistance.

“I’m sorry I threw a fit about it at the time,” Jon was saying, “but I’m glad you kept them.”

“I’ll bring them over to you when we get back,” Sissy replied. “I think you look good in them.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“Jon?” the bloodhound asked, stopping aside to let the cougar and housecat catch up to him.

“Aldo,” the feline acknowledged. “What’s up?”

“We’re being followed… or stalked,” he remarked in a matter-of-fact tone. Both Jon and Sissy looked instantly alarmed.

“Are you sure?” asked the orange feline.

“I’ve smelled them for two days and nights. I can’t identify what they are, only that the scent isn’t coming from anyone in our group.” He walked with them, but was staring off into the shadows of the forest where the overhead sunshine was unable to penetrate the canopy of overhead tree cover.

“Them?” Sissy’s eyes grew wider. “There’s more than one?”

“Why didn’t you say something sooner?” Jon asked, following Aldo’s gaze out to the shadows but seeing nothing out of the ordinary.

“I wasn’t sure until now,” the bloodhound replied defensively. “This is not a scent I’m familiar with and it’s nothing I’ve ever smelled back at the Institute, but the air currents around the ravine have given me a better whiff of it today.” Had he been walking upright, he might have put his hands into the pockets of his shorts, so instead he proceeded with his head down. “I just thought someone should know.”

“You were right to tell someone,” Jon assured him. The cougar looked over at his companion. “I’m going to take him up to talk to Avon. Would you mind hanging back to make sure we don’t lose any stragglers?”

Sissy looked around behind her with a frown. “I don’t know…” she murmured. “If there’s something stalking us, I’m not sure I want to be back here by myself.”

“I’ll take the rear,” Gerard’s voice came from just in front of them. After his ordeal stepping off into the ravine, the ursine Fur was now taking it easy further back in the long line of travelers. “I heard what Aldo said and I agree that’s something that Avon should know about.”

Sissy looked up at the brown bear with gratitude. “Thank you,” she said earnestly.

Gerard gave her a friendly smile and took up a position behind her. “No problem,” he replied. “I can stay back here and keep an eye on your cute tail.”

The orange cat narrowed her eyes with a smirk. “It is a cute tail,” she acquiesced, swishing the appendage with a wiggle of her hips. “Just make sure no wild critter tries to bite it!”

Gerard laughed at her banter and gave her an exaggerated wink. “I will, ma’am!”

Jon and Aldo exchanged amused looks and then remembering their purpose, moved forward to catch up to their leader. Several Furs looked annoyed when the pair of them moved past them in line, but it only took a few moments to reach the grizzly at the front.

Jon moved up beside the bear. “May we talk to you for a minute?” he asked.

“Uhm, sure,” Avon muttered distractedly, looking off through the brush at his left toward the parallel ravine. The deep crevice was getting shallower and the sound of running water from the river was constant, but they still had some distance to travel before they might cross it.

“It’s important and we’ll need your undivided attention.”

Avon finally looked over at the pair of them as if only just now realizing they were there. “What’s important?” he asked, looking from one to another. “If it’s trivial, we really don’t have time to stop and chat about it.”

Jon’s eyebrows furrowed. “We’re being stalked,” he said simply. That got the grizzly’s attention. Before Avon could say anything, Jon prompted Aldo to repeat what he had told him earlier.

When he finished, the ursine leader nodded. “Well, I know you have a nose more sensitive than anyone else’s in the group,” Avon said as they walked, “and I believe you.”

“But?” Jon asked with a frown at the bear’s tone.

“But… I don’t think we really have anything to be concerned about,” Avon added. “It would be foolish for anything to try to attack such a loud, raucous group of mixed predator types like ours. Whatever it is may simply be curious, or maybe scavengers to pick up what food we leave behind, but I can’t imagine we’re in any danger.”

“I hate to sound like I agree with either Kim or Yuki,” Aldo said in a quiet voice, looking around to make sure neither of the sisters was within earshot, “but what if it’s a local hunter? We may have passed by someone’s hidden tree stand out here without ever seeing it. Someone with a gun would be a very real danger, especially if it’s someone who’s never heard of a Fur before.”

“Does your stalker smell like a human?” Avon asked.

The bloodhound paused. “Not really, but—”

“Then don’t worry about it.”

Jon cleared his throat. “Hunters have been known to wear animal scents to mask their own. I’ve used that trick myself.”

Avon nodded as he walked, mulling over what he had been told. After a few quiet moments, he finally looked over at Aldo. “Until we have a sure sign of danger, just stay on the alert; keep me posted if anything changes.”

The bloodhound nodded. He was not sure what he really expected the grizzly to do about his revelation, but at least he had done his duty and told someone in charge. It still did not make him feel any better about their situation, however.

Avon went back to monitoring his steps alongside the twenty-foot margin of brush between the animal trail he followed and the ravine drop off. Jon frowned at the bear’s preoccupation and then looked back at Aldo. He gestured with a tilt of his chin toward his tail.

“I’m going back to the rear of the group,” he told him quietly. “On my way, I’ll put out the word in a few ears so others can keep an eye out for trouble.”

The canine looked relieved. “Thanks, Jon. I appreciate it.”

***

Sunlight was fading behind a bank of clouds and the group of Furs still had not found a way across the river. The ravine was now an hour behind them, having passed the waterfall that had been etching the crevasse in the mountainside for eons, but the river water was still too wide, deep and swift for them to safely cross over to the other side. Night-sighted eyes would allow them to travel farther into dusk if they wanted, but Avon had recognized the fatigue in the expressions of his followers after a full day of travel on the small but steady incline.

The sound of rushing water made it difficult to speak aloud to the whole group as he announced his decision to stop for the night, but the grizzly stood up to his full height on the top of a jumble of boulders near the banks of the river so he could be seen by all. The underbrush beneath the forest here was light and there was plenty of room for everyone to stretch out and rest. They would continue on in the morning to look for a place to cross.

If anyone was hungry, there were plenty of fish in the river for the catching. With the length of their journey, there were only a few who felt they had the energy for nighttime fishing. Their resilient stamina had allowed them to travel farther without eating than any of them had thought possible, but there were some who wanted to eat simply because they were used to doing so on a regular schedule. Most, however, were more than willing to call it a night.

Aaron washed his hands in the river after satisfying his appetite with several raw fish he had caught in the shallows between rocks at the banks. When he stood and shook off his hands, he looked up at a commotion in the trees. Several vixens were all scrambling around to and fro at something on the ground, scattering leaves and pine needles amidst giggles and laughter.

It was not until Dahlia stood up in triumph with a fat mouse caught in her jaws that Aaron realized what was going on. Before anyone could try to take it from her, she put her head down and began to eat the rodent raw, chewing on it as if she were nothing more than a feral fox herself. The other foxes were still scrambling and Aaron realized that they must have stirred up a whole horde of rodents among the brush and rotting logs of the forest.

The brown bear chuckled at the sight of the vixens hunting the tiny furballs. He wiped his large hand paws on the fur of his legs and then walked upright among the rocks back toward the main group.

Although it was getting darker, there was still plenty of light left for them to gather firewood for the nightly campfire, so Aaron began looking around for Norman to help him gather up kindling. He walked around the Furs, but he did not see his friend anywhere.

He inquired with several small groups settled down to rest, but it was not until he approached Alicia sitting by herself with her back up against a tree trunk that found someone who knew.

The black bear’s expression brightened when he approached her and she invited him to sit down beside her. It was the first time that day that the object of her interest had been without the bothersome Border collie at his side and she was pleased to have him to herself, even if only for a few minutes.

Aaron returned her smile, but shook his head. “Thanks, Alicia, but I need to gather up some wood for the campfire. Have you seen Norman?”

The sow got up to her feet with an unreadable expression. She put a hand lightly on his arm and leaned in close. “He’s off in the woods taking a turn with Turner,” she whispered, “but I can help you gather firewood.”

Aaron’s brow furrowed. “Dara Turner has been taking a turn with all the Ursis males lately,” he grumbled.

“Have you?” Alicia asked tentatively. To her relief, the brown bear shook his head.

“No, I’m not interested in someone like her,” he muttered.

“Dara told me that she’s concerned that there are more males that females for an Ursis colony,” Alicia whispered, “so she wants to make sure she’s made herself familiar with you all before she settles down with any of you.”

“I suppose that would explain why she’s been so friendly.” Aaron looked over at her and gave her a look of amusement. “What are your plans in that respect?”

The black bear looked up at him with a suddenly impish smile. “Any guy who catches my eye will have to earn a spot in my bed,” she replied.

“Oh? What does a guy have to do to earn that coveted spot?”

Coveted? Alicia blinked twice at that and suddenly turned away. She looked at him over her shoulder with a smile and beckoned with a finger.

“C’mon,” she said in normal tones without answering his question. “Let’s go get that firewood.”

***

As with each night, Jon and Avon took the first watch together. Although their eyes were more sensitive to miniscule amounts of illumination in the darkness than they had been as humans, the skies were fully overcast and there was no starlight or moonlight, making the watch difficult. The glowing coals of the campfire provided the only light to see by. The sound of the river the Furs slept beside was constant and masked softer sounds, adding to the difficulty of the watch. Avon had found a few large rocks near the water’s edge to sit upon. Jon was stretched out upon a limb in a tree above the other side of the group.

Unfortunately, they were both as tired as everyone else and the continual white noise generated by the flow of water had a calming effect. The grizzly had trouble keeping his eyelids open after only an hour and he fought the drowsiness with a weakening resolve. Upon his limb in a tree, the mountain lion dozed lightly, having already drifted off.

***

Avon’s eyes snapped open when a shriek ripped through the quiet night air, his mind instantly alert. He jumped to his feet, looking across the glow of the campfire and saw a wild flailing of arms and legs as someone screamed for her life. He could not tell what was going on from his vantage point, but others awoke groggily and were quickly getting to their feet amidst the screams.

At the first shriek, Jon stood up on his limb and almost toppled off into the darkness. Regaining his stability using his tail as a counterbalance, his eyes quickly sought out the source of the screams and adrenaline surged through his body when he saw two wild coyotes trying to drag the diminutive Erin Sealock off into the darkness. One had its jaws on her left arm just above the elbow and the other had her by the right leg below the knees. The fennec vixen had been sleeping near the edge of the group and it appeared the coyotes had seen the small fox as easy prey.

Jon launched himself from the limb, landing on all fours a scant ten feet from the fray. Without a plan in mind, he jumped forward with a wild feline shriek, his claws slashing frantically at the nearest coyote. Almost right on his heels were Ellie and Dante.

Neither of the coyotes seemed willing to lose their meal despite the sudden presence of the three strange predators and both of them hung onto Erin with growls in their throats. Coyotes were typically scavengers and would usually back down from larger adversaries, but these two seemed unwilling to give up this food.

Erin screamed as one of them bit down harder and Jon threw himself bodily upon the coyote hanging onto her arm. He slashed first at the canine’s eyes with his claws and then wrapped both his arm and legs around the attacker in a fierce bear hug. Jon squeezed the coyote’s abdomen tight with his legs and wrapped his powerful arms around the animal’s neck and shoulders. Something popped inside the coyote and the beast let out a painful yelp, releasing Erin abruptly. It whined in sudden agony and despite Jon’s grip, the animal managed to wriggle out of his grasp and dash off into the woods.

The second coyote was just as tenacious as the first, refusing to give up its meal in the face of other dangerous creatures. Ellie darted in to bite the animal on the flank, and when it quickly backed away from those powerful jaws, Dante jumped in to swipe at it with sharp claws without getting too close.

It took several tries, but the white tiger finally got in near enough for his claws to connect, raking bloody furrows across the coyote’s face. The pain was too much for the wild animal and it finally released the fennec woman to run away. Ellie took off after it, unwilling to just let it go, and both were quickly lost in the darkness amidst yelps and fierce growls.

Jon curled his arms around Erin to pick her up, but she shied away from him to cradle her injured arm and pull her injured leg up as close as she could. Before he could try again, Jenni was there beside them. Erin clenched her eyes tightly until the feline nurse cooed into her ear to calm her. Ken showed up a moment later and talked to the small vixen in a quiet voice for a moment before Erin finally nodded.

“Jon,” the red wolf said, “please take her over by the campfire. We’ll need the light to examine her wounds.” The cougar nodded and gently slipped his arms beneath her, consciously avoiding her injuries. Before he could stand up with her, a sudden raucous canine fight out in the darkness roused up the hackles of those who heard it. The battle was vicious, but brief. One of the combatants shrieked in a brief shrill cry and then its voice abruptly silenced. The quiet in the forest was startling and Carl rushed out into the darkness.

Someone had stoked the fire, throwing fresh wood on the flames. Jon set the diminutive vixen on the ground beside the ring of stones around the campfire, but this time Erin did not want to let go of him. Jenni and Ken knelt down beside her and both had to speak reassuring words to let them examine her injuries. She had blood all over her arm and leg, and there was more blood further up on her leg.

When Ken tentatively felt for bite wounds up high on Erin’s inner thighs, the desert vixen suddenly grabbed his arm and pulled the wolf down to her.

“What is it?” the doctor asked in a quiet voice. “Did one of them bite you there?”

Erin shook her head and despite the pain in her arm and leg, she felt embarrassed. The blood at her crotch was not an injury, she explained in a bare whisper. Ken suddenly understood and cleared his throat, returning to the wounds on her leg.

Without even a First Aid kit, there was little they could do to treat her, but they knew the wounds needed to be cleaned out. Jenni leaned down to one of Erin’s large ears and told her that she would need to be moved again.

At the medics’ direction, Jon picked her up again and took her to the river. Michael grabbed up a burning stick from the fire and held it up as a torch, following them to the water.

Erin cried when they put her injured limbs into to the cold mountain river to clean out the injuries, but Jon held her securely while the physicians worked quickly.

Carl and Ellie returned from the shadows of the forest moments later. Avon went to them to check on her, but Ellie waved him off, saying the coyote never got a good hold on her. She might have a few claw scratches beneath her fur, but her double coat protected her from anything serious. When the grizzly inquired about the coyotes, she simply wiped blood from the fur around her muzzle and informed him that one of the animals was no longer a concern.

Sitting next to the campfire out of the way, Aldo Banner had his arms wrapped around his knees. It was the coyotes that he had smelled all along, but until now he had been unable to identify the danger. He shook from the tension of the event and put his head down on his knees.

A few minutes later, he felt a gentle hand upon his shoulder. The bloodhound looked up into the sorrowful eyes of his leader. Avon crouched down beside him and studied him in the firelight.

“Are you okay, my friend?” the bear asked him.

Aldo began to nod, but then stopped and shook his head. “No,” he answered weakly, “I’m not. I’m a nervous wreck.”

“That’s my fault,” Avon told him, the words coming out with difficulty. “You tried… tried to warn me, but I sincerely thought nothing would try anything against us. After all, we’re primarily predators ourselves. Aldo, I apologize for not listening to you. A… coyote attacked one of us, and they know that we’re predators. Some unknown creature on another world may not even see any of us as a dangerous adversary and we might not be so lucky if I ignore the talents of those in my group like I did tonight.”

The canine nodded, but did not say anything for a moment or two. “Is she going to be okay?”

Avon looked behind him toward the river and then returned his gaze to the flames burning beside them. “For the most part,” he muttered. “Jenni didn’t believe anything was broken, but Erin may need some minor surgery as soon as we get back. I’m glad we kept some of the robes we’d stretched out of shape. Ken is using them to wrap up Erin’s injuries, but we’ll all have to look after her the rest of the way back.”

The bloodhound rested his chin upon his knees. “Unfortunately, Erin is the one with a counseling background,” he mused, “so if she needs to talk to someone about the attack, there’s no one else more qualified among us until we get back.”

“She has plenty of friends in our group. Any one of them could simply listen.” Avon let the mesmerizing flames of the fire calm his mind, but after a moment he shook his head. “I just don’t understand why they tried to take her. She’s not a prey animal.”

“It was probably the smell of blood,” Aldo conjectured aloud. When Avon looked up at him with a puzzled expression, the canine looked down at his hands. “I’ve been smelling her ever since we were dropped off, but after a while I’ve tried to ignore her scent since it’s something I’ll have to get used to with all the females around.”

“I don’t understand,” the grizzly remarked. “What blood?”

Aldo looked at him in mild surprise. “She’s menstruating; she must have started just before Marcelo dragged us out here. Are you telling me that you can’t smell it?”

Avon frowned. “Now that you mention it, I think it’s been on the periphery of my senses, but I suppose I’ve just associated it with the occasional mouse, squirrel or bird those in the group have caught and eaten along the way. It’s not something I’ve consciously thought about.”

The bloodhound tapped the side of his sizeable nose. “I couldn’t miss it. I’ve ignored it for the most part, but I’m sure her scent is what attracted our guests.”

Avon sighed and bobbed his head in agreement. “If that’s the case, the coyotes probably thought she was a weak and injured animal that they could take in the night for their meal. I wouldn’t have believed them to be so bold, but they must have been awfully hungry to stalk her for days, even when we’ve left behind the remnants of our own meals they could have scavenged.”

The grizzly fell quiet for a moment, but then he finally nodded, patting Aldo lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t be upset over this,” he said. “The fault was mine and I take full blame. You did what you were supposed to do and I want you to keep me informed of any concerns you may have for the rest of our journey. With luck, we’ll be back in our beds within a day or two, but until then I need to rely on that nose of yours.”

Aldo Banner looked at him with a renewed look of serious determination. “You can count on it,” he said.

***

An hour later, Erin was lying on her side on a bed of leaves and grass beside the campfire, her arm and leg both wrapped up in torn remnants of their old robes. She was visibly shaken and upset, but several of the bears had volunteered to surround her for the remainder of the night so she could sleep without fear of a repeat attack. The diminutive vixen was thankful for their offer, but even though they had formed a circle around her up to the campfire stones, she was uneasy.

The rest of the Furs had begun to settle down, but Avon and Jon were extra vigilant now, both of them partly to blame for letting the coyotes get to her. They had grown so complacent during the past few nights that both had drifted off to sleep when they should have been keeping watch over everyone. Had they been attentive, they might have been able to drive off the coyotes before any harm had come to Erin.

Although he was sure that Aldo was correct in that the woman’s monthly cycle had attracted the night stalkers, Avon had respected her privacy and had mentioned it to no one else. It was generally accepted that she had been selected simply because she was among the smallest of the Furs and that she had slept on the outside perimeter of the group, making her an easy target. After all, there had been no threat of danger beforehand.

Erin lay staring into the depths of the campfire, the flames reflecting off the moisture in the fur around her eyes, small glistening streaks that seemed to follow the cry-line markings of her facial fur. She had always loved the aroma of a wood fire; the fire was calming, but her hopes that it would somehow help her relax were far reaching. She stayed that way for several long moments, but the memory of waking from a deep sleep into a living nightmare was too fresh.

Over the sound of the river, a lone coyote yipped in the darkness some distance away. She did not know if it was one of her attackers that had gotten away or yet another one out in the forest, but the sound sent shivers down her spine.

Most of the Furs had gone back to sleep, but there were some still talking in low voices. Kristen was one of them, quietly conversing with one of the bears surrounding the small vixen.

“Please, Gerard,” she whispered, “let him in so he can sleep beside her. She’ll be better off with someone there to comfort her, and he may be in danger himself.”

The brown bear shook his head. “Just because he’s another small desert fox doesn’t mean the coyotes will be after him too,” the tired ursine grumbled. His sprained wrist was sore from walking on it, and he wanted nothing more than to be left alone so he could sleep.

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid will happen,” Kristen retorted, pulling up on the loose hem of her shorts. “Kevin’s no larger than she is and they might try to take him just as they tried to take her.”

“Ellie killed one, so I doubt the other will have the courage to come back again to try on its own.”

“It might if it’s so hungry that it stalked our group in the first place.”

Gerard grumbled again, certain the feline would not let him sleep until she got her way. “Oh, all right,” he acquiesced. “He can get inside the circle, but no others.” He waved a hand paw toward his ursine companions. “We’re not wagons of the west to be circled around everyone for protection during the night.”

Kristen smiled at his analogy and put a hand gently upon his arm. “Thank you, Gerard,” she said. She turned and looked back at two forms huddled on the other side of the fire and gestured them to come to her. Kevin approached her sedately, followed by his girlfriend, Rose. Both moved together on all fours.

“I still don’t like it,” Rose whispered when Kevin knelt down in front of Kristen.

The young fennec fox was weary of the days-long argument the two of them had endured since their first night out. He turned to her, tired from their day of travel, and sighed audibly at her.

“Rose, calm down. I’m only going to be sleeping beside her, not sleeping with her,” he whispered. “Isn’t that what you told me that you did with him?”

“Yes, but we weren’t both the same species!” she hissed.

“I’m closer to you than he is, but you slept with him instead of me!”

“I slept beside him!” Rose bristled. “Besides, I was asleep – it’s not like I turned away from you on purpose. I don’t even remember doing it!”

“Calm down you two,” Kristen admonished them. She turned to Rose with a frown. “There are no ulterior motives here. This is simply a matter of safety.”

“Stay out of this,” Rose told her boldly. “If he’s afraid of the dark, my sisters and I can surround him in our own little circle of protection.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Gerard muttered wearily.

“Please…” said a new voice. Rose, Kristen and Kevin turned toward the fire and saw the diminutive fennec woman looking at them from her bed with moist eyes. Her pixyish voice had lost a lot of its character with that simple plea.

“Erin?” Kristen asked. “What do you need?”

The tan vixen wiped at her eyes with her good hand. “I don’t like being the subject of a couple’s argument,” she said quietly, “but I’m too shook up to sleep by myself. Please, Rose. Let him stay beside me tonight. You can have him back in the morning.”

The miffed red vixen glared at her for a long minute and then gifted Kevin with the same look. After a tense moment she stood up and looked down at them all. “Fine!” she spat unkindly. “You can have him. I’m done with him!” She turned on her toes and then stormed away into the darkness.

Kevin looked absolutely miserable, but he did not make a move to go after her. Instead, he cleared his throat quietly and then moved past Gerard into the protective circle. “Thank you,” he muttered quietly to him and Kristen together.

“I’m sorry,” Erin whispered when he knelt down behind her. “I really wasn’t trying to come between you.”

Kevin sat down crossed-legged, not an easy task with digitigrade feet. He looked over her side toward the fire, rather than directly at her. “It’s been like this since we got out here,” he muttered in a low voice. “It’s not your fault.”

“It’s going to be another long day tomorrow,” Gerard grumbled. “Can we all get some sleep now?”

Erin knew the bear was tired after a full day of uphill travel, but his words stung as if he had accused her of keeping everyone up on purpose. She sighed and sniffed at the moisture in the air, silently wishing her limbs would stop hurting.

“Good night,” she said quietly. Gerard mumbled a response and then became still.

Kevin unfolded his legs after a time, stretched out behind her and then curled up so that his tail draped across his nose, effectively hiding his face. Erin could feel his presence, so she shuffled backward slightly so that her back rested against his. He did not say anything so Erin closed her eyes and tried to get some rest.

***

When Erin awoke several hours later, the first thing she noticed was the throbbing in her arm and then a matching pain in her leg. She had curled up her good leg so that the knee was up against her stomach, but the injured limb was stretched out beneath her. The next thing she became aware of was an arm around her waist and a softly pointed nose resting upon her neck. Kevin’s fingers were lightly stroking her bare belly fur, but she could tell from the depth of his breathing that her companion was still asleep. The two fennec foxes were spooned together, with his body aligned up perfectly against her, and in the coolness of the damp morning, Erin was comforted by his presence.

There was no one stirring yet, but the coals of the campfire were lightly hissing from misty rain that fell gently from the dark sky. When she opened her eyes and looked beyond the fire stones, she could see Arne standing guard over the sleepers, his broad shoulders up against a thick maple tree behind him. The sun had not yet lightened the sky much, but there was enough illumination that she could see the intent expression on the lion’s face as he studied the shadows surrounding them.

For the first time since she had signed her contract with the Anthro Human Colonization Program, Erin was wondering if she had made the right choice by volunteering. There had never been a doubt in her mind until now, but the certainty of what she might face out there had been made all too real to her here.

For all intents and purposes, the Earth was tame. Mankind had thousands of years behind it to learn and shape its environs, but despite this, there would always be creatures that survived by killing and consuming others. The problem with the proverbial circle of life is that no matter where you were on the food chain, something else would always be coming up behind you. The cycle kept on turning, and last night Erin almost became a victim of that circle with a violent end.

It had been a little over two years since she had signed her contract and it was long too late for her to back out now. What would be waiting for them out among the stars? Would they find a whole world to tame for themselves, or would the colonists turn out to be nothing more than an exotic meal for whatever predators lived there? If she could be attacked by a common coyote here, what could she expect in a place where everything was unexpected?

Kevin mumbled something in his sleep, but otherwise did not move. Despite her injuries and self-reflection, Erin felt bad for the young fox. She was nearly a decade older that he was, but after the events of the night, she was reluctant to leave the safe feeling in his arms. Since most of the Furs still slept, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift back into slumber.

***

It did not take long for the rest of the Furs to awaken in the midst of the light rain that now fell upon the forest. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance and although traveling outdoors where lightning was a hazard was always dangerous prospect, Avon wanted to push on toward the Institute due to Erin’s injuries. They were all anxious to get back home, but most would have preferred to wait out the day under the cover of trees from the rain.

Kim and Yuki used the miserable conditions of the weather to make another bid to abandon their return trip; they should seek out caves or other shelter right away, but just about everyone else knew they needed to get the injured fennec woman to safety before infection set into her wounds.

Ivan had not partaken of the fish or mice the night before and complained of being hungry as they set out alongside the river. “Ellie should have brought back the coyote she killed for the rest of us to eat,” he grumbled. “After all, it was going to eat one of us!”

“I’m sorry you’re hungry,” Avon said as he picked his way around rocks and brush, “but we don’t have time to go stalking more game as we did before.”

The red fox tod looked behind him at the injured fennec; Erin rode upon the back of the grey wolf who had volunteered to carry her. She sat astride of him, her fingers clinging to his thick fur, her eyes closed as his natural gait swayed her gently from side to side. Abandoned by his own red vixen, Kevin walked beside Carl and Ellie with his head down.

“If you see any small game along the way you think you can take down quickly,” Avon continued, “go right ahead, but don’t wander off too far from the group.”

***

“We should be able to cross here,” Manny said with certainty. The arctic fox stood up on two feet, knee deep in the middle of the river. The waters here were slow moving, although the banks were wide apart. They had only been walking for an hour before the waters grew calmer. They were now in a grassy valley between mountains, but still high above the region. With luck, the Furs would soon be able to begin a downward journey toward their destination, although the constant slow rain would keep things miserable.

“Go all the way across,” Michael called to him. The foxes looked at one another for a moment, but then Manny shrugged and continued. The mountain water was cold and he was choosing his steps carefully, but so far he had not had trouble getting across. After several minutes, he stepped upon the banks of the other side and waved back.

“C’mon over!” he said with a grin. “There was nothing but a few minnows nibbling at the fur on my legs to worry about!”

“That’s good enough for me,” Dante remarked. The white tiger was the next one who ventured across, but instead of walking upright as Manny had, the monochrome feline went boldly on all fours. Water soaked his belly fur, but otherwise his footing was solid on the rounded river rock. He made it across to the other side in good time and the rest of the Furs began crossing over several at a time. Rather than ride upon Carl’s back in the water, Avon carried Erin upright on his shoulders far above the cold mountain river that might irritate her leg wounds.

As he had done for most of the journey, Jon brought up the rear, waiting until the last one was across before going himself. Bogged down in the water, even only knee deep, could prove hazardous if a predator chose that time to attack. The little valley was quiet in the rain, however, and they had all made it to the far side without incident.

Kristen shook off her feet as she looked around. There were signs that this side of the river had seen a forest fire sometime in the past. The area had recovered well with new growth, but there were barren dead trees and charred stumps everywhere in testimony of that event. Although she was no expert on forest fires, she conjectured from the size of the thriving plant life that it could not have been more than nine or ten years since it had occurred.

Travel should be easier without the dense underbrush they had gone through up the other side of the mountain. Now that they had finally circumvented the deep ravine, the faces of the Furs reflected a lighter attitude all through the group.

Encouraged by this, Avon waved a hand over his head for the journey to continue. This time they would be going predominantly downhill as they paralleled the river going in the opposite direction as they had come.

***

“I think I’ve lost more weight,” Kristen muttered, holding onto the waistband of her shorts when the tail strap would not stay fastened.

“You don’t sound too happy about it,” Travis remarked, idly rubbing his nose where the porcupine had stuck him. “Personally, I think you looked better with more meat on you, but I know you were never happy about it. You are still nice to look at.”

Kristen looked over at him with a raised eyebrow. After the coyote attack on Erin, it was too dangerous to go out alone, so the German shepherd had accompanied her away from the group to search for more edible plants on their new route. She would have preferred the company of her new friend Raine, but as annoying as he could sometimes be, Travis was actually being helpful and pleasant. Although he still seemed attracted to her, his sexual innuendos and blatant comments had ceased. Even the statement he had just made was said in idle conversation, rather than the precursor to another attempt to bed her. Perhaps the anthropomorphic changes they had all gone through over the past months as well as their cross country journey had given him better manners. Either that or the long day of rain had dampened his spirits along with his fur.

Whatever the cause for the changes in his attitude, she welcomed it. He was not the only one going through changes, however. She hiked up on her waistband with another sigh.

“Thank you, Travis. That was sweet. Whatever is causing my weight loss has made my clothes too loose and the snap won’t stay closed,” she said, leading him around a large clump of dense brush. “I almost feel like I’m wearing one of the stretched-out robes instead of my shorts!”

“Maybe it’s just the exercise,” the canine suggested idly, taking a moment to sniff at a flowering bush for anything that might be edible. “We’ve done a lot of walking and our diet has changed, so I’m sure we’ve all worked off some of our weight in the process.”

“Maybe so,” the botanist agreed, “but it is difficult walking through the forest with one hand clutched to my shorts to keep them up.”

A smile crossed Travis’ features, but he hid it from the feline. It had taken quite an effort to behave around her, so he did not want her to think she had to be on her guard around him again. He had even had to struggle to keep his tail from wagging on its own when she said something nice to him. The woman was more relaxed now during their foraging expeditions together than she had ever been since she had known him.

There was little underbrush, but there seemed to be several fallen trees in the area. Kristen wandered over to one such tree that looked as if it had been down for some time, likely from the earlier forest fire. Travis watched as she bent down beside it to peer beneath in its shadows, and then she abruptly stood up again in apparent excitement.

“Lycoperdon umbrinum!” she exclaimed in delight. She bent over the top of the horizontal tree trunk so she could reach something on the ground on the other side.

“Huh?” Travis replied absently as he stared at her backside.

“Puffball mushrooms!” she explained without looking back at him. She reached over the tree with both hands to harvest her find, but when she let go of her loose-fitting shorts, the cloth hem below her tail slipped free and the shorts drooped to her knees.

Travis blinked. The woman did not seem to realize that she had just bared her butt to him, and with her bent over the log and her tail up in excitement, the canine male suddenly got an unobstructed view of her feminine attributes.

Travis swallowed with restraint, but then a feral grin spread across his lips. He was only a few feet behind her and it only took one wide step to reach her. He grabbed her hips and abruptly thrust up behind her, trapping her against the tree.

Kristen yowled from the sudden physical contact, and although Travis had neglected to drop his own shorts in his rush to take her, she had no delusions on what he was trying to do to her. She shrieked and tried to push him away, but he grabbed the tree trunk on either side of her with both hands to keep her pinned in place, bent over in front of him.

Unable to push him back, and actually afraid of deepening the physical contact with him if she could, she twisted around frantically at the waist and raked her claws across the side of his neck. He yelped, but did not release his hold on her with one arm while trying to get his shorts down with the other.

Kristen drove her head back fast with her eyes closed, striking the canine’s forehead hard. Travis stumbled back a step in a shower of visual sparks and it was all she needed. Jon was not there to save her this time, but she had weapons of her own now.

The mountain lioness hissed and clawed at his face and arms, and when he thrust a hand at her in defense with a growl of surprise and frustration, she sank her teeth down hard upon his wrist.

Travis yelled out in pain and then Kristen slammed a knee hard into his crotch, instantly immobilizing him. The canine fell to the ground with his injured hand to his chest and the other between his legs in agony.

Finally released, Kristen turned to run, but the shorts around her knees dropped to her ankles and threatened to trip her, so she stepped out of them and ran away as quickly as she could back toward the rest of the Furs, leaving Travis where he lay writhing on the ground. She did not know how quickly he might recover, so she dropped to all fours and loped for the safety of the crowd.

The group was easy to find by the sound of their voices, but before she reached them, Aaron, Norman and Dara came running toward her through the underbrush, having heard her feline shriek and thinking the coyotes were on the attack again.

The cougar could barely see them through the moisture in her eyes and she launched herself for the first one she came to, wrapping her arms around him tightly.

“Whoa, Kristen!” Norman exclaimed. “What happened?”

“Yeah, and where’s your shorts?” Dara asked.

“It, it, it, it, it…” Kristen stammered, letting her tears soak into the bear’s chest fur. She gasped for breath and clutched him tightly.

“Calm down and tell us what happened,” Norman said in a soothing voice, stroking the fur on the back of her head. Avon, Carl, Jon and Dante joined them just as Kristen tried again.

“It… it was Travis!” she managed to say, her words muffled in the bear’s chest. “He tried... tried to rape me!”

“Travis!” Aaron exclaimed with a growl. “I’m gonna rip his head off!” He started toward the direction she had come from, but Avon grabbed his arm. He looked at Aaron first, and then to Norman.

“Go find him and bring him back, but don’t hurt him,” he ordered.

“No promises,” Aaron spat back defiantly. “I’m going to —”

“Jon, go with them,” Avon said in frustration. “Make sure they bring him back unharmed.”

Dara slipped in and took Norman’s place to let him go. Kristen did not care. She clung to the ursine woman and began to cry.

Jon gave the grizzly a dark look. “What makes you think I would want to do that?” he growled, casting his gaze toward his shaken and naked housemate.

“Because you’re going to do what’s right,” Avon growled back at him. “Listen, you have a responsible head. Use it.”

Jon glared up at the bear for another moment with his lips pressed together tightly, but then he nodded. “All right,” he muttered. Avon’s expression softened.

“Thank you, now go get him before he runs off somewhere,” he said. Norman and Aaron both glared at the larger Ursis, but he was their official leader and when Jon trotted off into the woods, they turned and followed him.

When Avon turned back toward Kristen, Dante was pulling out one of the stretched out robes that he had been carrying over his shoulders for the group. The garment was too big for her, likely once belonging to one of the bears, but the tiger tied its arms around his housemate’s hips so she could be covered up. He had graciously kept his gaze averted from her private region and Kristen gave him a grateful hug for his help; it was not the first time he had been there to cover her up when she was exposed. She wiped at the moisture on her cheeks and Dante kept his arms around her for support; the cougar seemed about to collapse on weak knees.

Avon knelt down on one knee to put himself lower to her level. “What happened?” he asked softly. “Are you hurt?”

Kristen swallowed nervously and looked around at the worried faces surrounding her. She felt dirty and exposed, and folded her arms across her chest.

“I-I’ve lost some weight and my shorts were loose on me,” she began in a voice barely above a whisper. “I-I bent over a log to get at some mushrooms I’d found and I-I guess my shorts dropped when I let go of them. That’s when… when… he attacked me… from behind…”

Dara swallowed. “Did he get… Did he manage to—?”

“No,” Kristen interrupted, looking down at her shaking hands. “I clawed his face and bit his arm before he could.”

“Are you hurt?” Avon asked again. “Physically?”

“Probably bruises beneath my fur,” the cougar replied quietly, “but otherwise I’m unhurt.”

The grizzly nodded and looked over at Dara and Dante. “Would you two take her to Jenni, please? I want her looked over, just in case.”

“Sure,” Dara replied. Dante simply nodded and turned Kristen away to go. Avon got to his feet and took a couple of the stretched robes from the tiger before they departed.

“Just in time,” Carl muttered. They all looked up to see Travis walking unsteadily through the trees toward them, both bears flanking him, each holding tightly to the canine’s arms, one of which had a bloodstained wrist. Jon followed a few steps behind and all of them looked angry.

The German shepherd was shoved down to his knees onto the ground in front of Avon. As soon as his arms were released, the canine held his injured wrist up to his bleeding face. Jon continued walking, but as he passed him, he growled lowly in a matter-of-fact voice, “Touch her again, Travis, and I will break your neck.”

Avon glared at the mountain lion, but Jon ignored him and went on to check on his housemate. The grizzly knelt down again and examined the bloody furrows on the German shepherd’s neck, face and arms. Kristen had raked him good, but Travis was fortunate one of her sharp claws had missed the carotid artery in his neck.

“Here, take this and press it against your wounds,” he said in a deceptively calm voice, handing over a scrap robe to the canine. Travis did not look up at him, keeping his gaze down at the ground, but did as commanded. The injuries hurt and there was nothing else on his mind at the moment except for the pain.

“What are we going to do with this… coyote?” Aaron asked, spitting out the last word as if it were a curse. “He’s just as bad as they are, preying on the women!”

“Why don’t we just shove him off into the ravine and be done with him?” Norman suggested with a growl. “If anyone ever finds his carcass, they’ll just think it was someone’s deformed dog or something.”

Avon studied the canine for a long moment, but Travis would not look up at any of them. “As tempting as that might be,” the grizzly said at last, “someone will have to watch him at all times so we can turn him over to Marcelo.”

“I’ll take the first watch,” Aaron volunteered. “If he tries to run, that’ll be all the excuse I need!”

They all liked Kristen and seeing what this cur before them had done to her made them all angry. Avon was no exception. Sometimes the responsibility that came with being the leader of a group could get in the way of personal feelings. He knew he had to keep the German shepherd safe until he could be turned over to a higher authority, but that did not mean he had to be nice to Travis.

Avon grabbed the canine roughly by an arm and Travis hissed in pain as the bear pulled him up to his feet. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Travis looked up from the hand causing his arm further agony and his dark eyes peered deeply into Avon’s. “She’ll have to watch over her shoulder from now on,” he spat out in a raspy voice. “One day I’m going to be there and she won’t have anyone around to run to for protection!”

Aaron stepped in and punched Travis in the kidney. The canine yelped in pain; his legs went out from under him and Avon had to hold him up to keep him from falling to the ground.

Avon shot Aaron a dirty look, but the smaller brown bear simply shrugged and said, “Let’s tie him to a tree and leave him for the coyotes.”

Travis was now unable to stand on his own, so Avon hoisted him up and draped him over a shoulder as if he were a large sack of potatoes. Travis gasped for air, undecided where he now hurt the most, but did not struggle.

“Let’s get him back to Ken so he can treat his wounds,” Avon said.

“Let’s not,” Norman growled. “I vote we let him bleed out.”

Avon sighed audibly. His companions were not making things easier, but he could not tell them that he felt the same way as they did. For now, he had the responsibility to take Travis back to Marcelo, where he would be dealt with there, but if they had been on another world, what would he have done then?

It was a thought that would be on his mind for a long time.

Chapter 7

Downhill All the Way

Tigers love the water, but after walking all day in constant cold rain, even Dante was in a miserable mood. Unlike the first leg of their journey up the mountain, the tree cover was thinner in the area where they now travelled due to the past fire. Smaller growth only a few feet high dominated the area, with taller trees as only ghostly sentinels in the rain, their trunks long ago blackened and dead. Without overhead branches and leaves, there was no protection from the rain.

The ravine was behind them and the Furs were now descending in a southwesterly direction toward what they hoped was the way back home. Without either a working GPS receiver, a Personal Business Juxtapositioner or even night stars, Avon could only guesstimate their route, taken line-of-sight from the ledge where Gerard had had his mishap across to their new location on the opposite side of the ravine.

Despite the rain and the wear on them following several days of walking, the group was making good time down the mountain with gravity on their side. There were plenty of passable animal trails, and every time they came across an open clearing with a view out over the Adirondacks, most of them were encouraged at how much closer they were to the lower valleys of the region.

Stomachs grumbled, but instead of allowing another large hunt that had fed them all before, Avon was adamant about pushing on to get Erin to proper medical attention. She was holding on as best she could, but spent most of her time sleeping while alternating riding on the backs of Carl and Ellie. They checked on her periodically, but thankfully she had not taken on a fever from her wounds. Either her new physiology was more resilient against infection or they had done a better job than they had hoped cleaning her injuries.

Avon had approved of individual requests to hunt along the way, but they would have to be quick about it. Everyone would be fending for themselves, more or less, but it could not be helped. Up until now, there had only been minor injuries on their journey back home, but now that there was a serious incident, they could waste no more time. Without the GPS receiver, they could not know for certain how much further they might have to go, but Avon was certain they could reach the Institute within another day – barring another deep ravine or other disasters.

With the focus on Erin’s injuries, Kristen felt lost in the shuffle. Her own emotions were in turmoil over Travis’ attack and she needed the services of a counselor more than ever; unfortunately, Erin was their resident counselor. A number of the women in the group had rallied to Kristen’s emotional defense, but none of them seemed to want to spend the time necessary with her to help her through it. None of them had ever been the victim of a rape attempt and the thought of it made them all uncomfortable.

The only one who seemed to show the most compassion toward her was the one other person in the group of Furs she had no desire to talk to, and he ranked only slightly higher than Travis himself. Jon had come to her following the apprehension of the offending canine, genuinely concerned for her well-being, but she was still harboring a grudge against him for their big fight, forever ago it seemed.

The mountain lioness worried her bottom lip, her emotional flux causing her to waffle back and forth about her feelings for the other cougar. His rejection and rebuke had hurt her deeply, so much that she did not even want to be around him anymore, but the concern in his eyes when he had come to check on her had been real. She had seen no aversion to her appearance due to the fact that she resembled the man he had killed. Still, she had pushed him away, unwilling to face him after so personal of an attack by the German shepherd.

Kristen wanted to cry, but she did not want to appear weak to any of her companions. She tried to keep a strong front, but with her ears back, her tail low and her head down, she was fooling no one in a group of animal hybrids that was learning to read body posture and scent as well as spoken words.

She wished she was home in bed – not her new home at the Institute, although that would be preferable to a long walk down a mountainside in the rain, but she missed her old life before things had taken a downward turn. She had not lied to Jon when she had privately confessed her reasons for volunteering to become a Fur, but now that it was far too late, she wondered if she should not have made an effort to deal with her situation instead of running away.

She sniffled a little and idly wondered if it was from her emotional turmoil or from the constant rain. As if to punctuate her thoughts, the sky rumbled deeply and the sound echoed around the valley below. She kept her head down and mutely followed Manny who trudged along in front of her, walking quietly around rocks and trees, ever downhill now.

Ahead of her in the line of Furs, Erin awoke at a touch upon her thigh. Her eyes snapped open in panic and she nearly fell off Carl’s back, but then a hand caught her good arm and kept her upright. Having a tail normally would have given her the exceptional balance to stay put, but she was so keyed up that even that had not helped. The diminutive fennec woman turned wild eyes upon her male counterpart and Kevin suddenly felt guilty for disturbing her sleep.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, dropping his ears. “I was just checking on you.”

It took a moment for his words to register through Erin’s terror-stricken brain and she began to pant heavily. Carl peered at her over his shoulder and Ellie watched them from the other side.

“What’s going on?” the male wolf asked. “Are you okay back there?”

Erin swallowed the lump in her throat and forced herself to extend a hand toward the young desert fox walking beside them.

“Kevin, please forgive me,” she managed to say somehow. “I… I was dreaming of coyotes… and your touch startled me.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled again. “I should have said something before touching you.”

Erin stretched forth her fingers and lightly stroked one of his large, wing-like ears. “It’s all right,” she assured him, ignoring the renewed throbbing of her injuries brought on by increased heart rate. “I’m okay now.” He looked up at her and she gave him a weary smile. “What was it you needed?” she asked a moment later.

Kevin still felt awful for frightening her, but her expression encouraged him. “I was going to see if there was anything you needed,” he replied. “Are you hungry or thirsty? I could hunt something for you.”

Erin smiled, fully appreciating his willingness to make sure she was cared for. “I am hungry,” she told him, “but I’m afraid I don’t have much of an appetite right now. It’s sweet of you to ask, but thanks anyway, Kevin.”

His ears drooped again. “Okay, but if you change your mind, I don’t mind.”

Erin leaned down and pulled him toward her. She gave him a small kiss on the cheek and then stroked his ear once more. “Thank you,” she said warmly.

Sounds were muted in the rain, but Travis had hearing good enough to hear the small foxes behind him. He wrinkled his nose and snorted in disgust at their sweet interaction, but the action caused the raked furrows across his muzzle to sting. With talents and skills similar to Kristen’s, Raine Terrance was a horticulturist and had made a quick salve out of local plants he found along the way to keep infection out of the cuts, but it had done nothing for the pain.

He turned slightly in his walk to look back toward Kristen, certain she could have found a plant more appropriate, but he knew there was no way she would help him after what he had tried to do to her.

“Eyes front,” Aaron growled, cuffing him on the shoulder none too gently. “Don’t look at her. Don’t even think about her.”

“You’re lucky she didn’t remove those eyes with her claws,” Norman added, “so keep them off of her.”

The German shepherd muttered something beneath his breath and Norman’s eyes widened. He gave the dog a feral grin and then punched him once right on the hip bone. Travis yelped and fell over, but Aaron pulled him back up to his feet and shoved him forward.

“What’s going on back there?” Avon asked over his shoulder.

“Attitude adjustment,” Aaron replied innocently. The grizzly gave the other bear a look of long-sufferance, but then turned back without another word.

“Hey, look!”

Avon slowed to a stop and looked back in the direction of Michael’s voice. The swift fox pointed into the dreary shadows of the forest through the rain. If he had not been looking directly at it, the old log cabin could have been easily missed. The grizzly saw it merely as an unwelcome distraction on their forced march, but others did not see it that way; a distraction from a weary journey was exactly what some of them needed.

Michael, Dante, Jasmine, Dahlia and Wendy rushed over to the small building with interest, followed a moment later by several others. They gathered beneath a small porch that had been fashioned over a door that was slightly ajar.

“Careful,” Jasmine said quietly, “someone might be inside.” Ignoring her advice, Wendy knocked on the door with a stick she had picked up from the ground; the wooden panel swayed inward. There were no sounds within the structure, so Michael pushed the door in slightly.

As one, he and Dante stuck their noses inside, but the single-room cabin was vacant. A portion of a back corner had collapsed in on itself and the interior was just as wet from the rain as it was outside the building. It had a wooden plank floor, a rusted potbelly stove in the center of the room with a stovepipe that went up through the roof; rain water leaked around it as well. There were no windows in the structure, but there was a wooden picnic table near the stove and a folding cot with rotting canvas beside a wall. Ivy grew up the wall beneath the collapsed section and the place smelled of mold and dust. It had been abandoned for some time.

Michael took a step inside, resisting the urge to shake the rain water from his fur. Dante moved past him and sat down tentatively at the table, instantly soaking the seat. When it held his weight, he turned to look at the others who had come just inside the door. “It’s not much, but for the first time today I don’t have water dripping on my head!”

Kim Tanaka crawled in beside him at the table and her sister sat down opposite of her. “I like it,” the lynx said with a weary smile. “Why don’t we stay here until the rain stops?”

Jasmine joined them at the table, but her eyes were on the ceiling above. “I wouldn’t mind stopping for a while,” she said, “but it isn’t big enough to get everybody inside.”

“We could gather up wood for the stove and Aaron could use his lighter to get a fire going,” Yuki suggested.

“I saw a small stack of firewood outside,” Michael said, “but it’s all wet.”

“That cot’s not any good for anything,” Wendy remarked with a look behind her. “We could break it up and burn that.”

Several more curious noses peered in through the door. “Well now, this is cozy,” Jon remarked, stepping inside. “Are you folks thinking of homesteading here?”

Kim looked at him with a smile. “That’s not a bad idea!”

Jasmine snorted. “You’re not on about that again, are you?”

The lynx frowned at her. “I was only joking just now,” she huffed in response, “but I still think we’re walking into a trap by going back.”

“At least here we wouldn’t have to start up with nothing,” Yuki added. “Shelter is always an important part of starting a colony and one has already been provided for us.”

Dante looked up at the leaks around the stovepipe. “It’s barely a shelter,” he commented, “but it’s definitely a fixer-upper!”

Kim leaned over onto his shoulder and flashed her feline eyes at him in a seductive manner. “Why not stay here with us and help us repopulate the forest with our kind?”

The tiger looked at her in amusement. “You have this all planned out, don’t you?”

“We’ve had nothing but time for thinking over the past few days,” Yuki answered. “Plenty of time to make plans, if any of you would listen to reason.”

“You’d have to talk to one of the canine guys to stay with you,” Dahlia pointed out to the Akita, “or your sister would be the only one populating your colony of three.”

“You can have Travis,” Jon offered in jest. “I’m sure he’d be more than willing to help you make some puppies.” Despite the sarcasm, Yuki actually looked as if she was considering his suggestion.

Avon stuck his head inside the door and glanced around at the room a moment. “Come on,” he groused. “We’ve got to keep moving!”

“Why?” Kim asked. “We’re out of the rain in here!”

“It’ll be drier in your own beds! We’re getting closer to the valley and if we stay on the move, we may actually be home by morning,” the grizzly replied.

“We’ll be put in cages and sold to a local zoo,” Yuki tried again, entreating the other Furs who had slipped inside the cabin. “You want to be in a cage sleeping out in the rain when you could be dry and free in here? We could fix up this place without too much trouble!”

Dante stood up and moved away from the table. “That’s my cue to leave,” he said with a look of exasperation toward his housemate. Jon merely arched an eyebrow and turned to go back out in the rain with him.

“Wait!” Kim called out to the tiger. “Stay with us here!”

“Nobody’s staying here,” Avon said darkly. “We’re wet, we’re tired and I’m cranky — you don’t want to be having an argument with me right now. Everyone, let’s go.”

Kim and Yuki grumbled in unison as the others moved toward the door. Avon stood just outside and waited for the sisters to emerge as well. They weren’t moving as quickly as the rest of them, but the grizzly made shooing motions until everyone had rejoined the rest of the Furs impatiently waiting for them in the rain.

Avon counted noses, and satisfied they were all present, he moved back to the front of the line to continue leading his charges down the mountain.

They had been walking for twenty minutes when Kim and Yuki stepped out of line and let the ones behind them go on ahead. When Jon brought up the rear, he looked over at them with a frown.

“Ladies,” he said quietly. “You’d best keep moving.”

Yuki bit her bottom lip and stood up on two feet, crossing her knees together. “I need to pee,” she whispered to him. “All this rain, y’know.”

“You should have gone to the bushes instead of playing house in the cabin,” Jon acquiesced. “Go, but don’t take too long.”

“I’m going with her,” Kim told him.

“You have to pee too?”

“No, but she’ll be vulnerable and I’ll keep a watch out in case that other coyote is still following us,” she explained.

Jon looked unconvinced, but when Yuki began dancing around with her hands at her crotch, he gestured toward the bushes with a tilt of his head. “Go on, but get back as soon as you can. Avon’s moving faster downhill now that the underbrush has thinned out.” He looked up at the grey clouds, raindrops pelting off his nose. “It’s hard to tell what the sky’s like with this weather, but I think it’ll be getting dark soon, so don’t take too long getting back.”

“Thanks, Jon!” Yuki said, dancing around with a grimace. She and her sister took off toward the bushes while the mountain lion quickened his pace to catch up to the line of Furs.

***

The sky grew darker within the hour, and although the rain had let up so that it was only misting now, Avon was reluctant to stop for the night. Dogs, cats, foxes and bears all complained at him, but the grizzly took up a position beside Erin on Ellie’s back and gave her a quick examination. Despite her own coat, the small vixen shivered, cuddling as close to the she-wolf’s fur as she could for warmth.

“Take a look,” Avon directed the group to look downhill from their current position. They were almost to the bottom of the mountain they had been on all day. “Most of you have been walking with your heads down most of the evening, but for the past fifteen minutes, I’ve been heading towards that!”

Just about every pair of eyes followed the direction where he pointed. They were only slightly above the tops of the trees in the valley between mountains, and two or so miles distant was a bright glow of lights. From the amount of illumination amongst the trees, the lights appeared spread out for something large enough that it could be a college campus.

“It’s the Institute!” Sissy cried out. “We made it!”

“Yes,” Avon assured her. “We’re almost home.”

“It’s so beautiful!” Rose exclaimed with glee. There were more collective remarks about the end of their journey, but not everyone was in agreement.

“How do we know that’s it?” the large African lion asked doubtfully. “Maybe it’s just a used car lot or a supermarket.”

“In the middle of the Adirondacks?” Manny retorted with a laugh. “C’mon, Arne, the Institute’s the only place that large out here among the mountains. That can’t be anything but our home sweet home!”

“Are we going to try to get there tonight?” Hank wanted to know. “Maybe we should stop for the night and go the rest of the way in the morning.”

“What?” Alicia exclaimed at the black bear. “Are you kidding? We’re this close and you want to stop?”

Hank looked annoyed that she was missing the obvious. “What little daylight we’ve had today is almost gone. What happens if we come across another ravine, or even just a rocky embankment in the dark? We’ll all go over like lemmings, following one right after the other. We’re all exhausted from days of traveling and you want us to go off blindly in the dark when we can barely keep from stumbling over our own feet!”

Avon listened to conversations around him, but he looked again at Erin and put a gentle hand upon her shoulder. Her slight frame shivered beneath his touch.

“I think that’s a valid concern and normally I would agree,” he said, “but for Erin’s sake, I think we should press on. We’ve got to get her to the hospital wing as soon as possible, so each of you will need to draw deep down inside for a last reserve of energy for our final stretch. I don’t think those lights are more than a couple miles away at most, so the sooner we go, the sooner you can all be warm, dry and comfortable in your beds.”

No one argued with him, not even Aaron or the Tanakas. Either they all agreed with him or they were simply too tired to talk back this time. Whatever the reason, he was thankful for a moment of peace.

“I need two volunteers to go ahead of the rest, to make sure we don’t stumble off Hank’s embankment in the darkness,” he said. “It’s potentially dangerous, but it’s important.”

“I’ve been looking at everybody’s butts for days,” Jon said from the growing darkness. “I think I’d like a change of scenery.” There were a few tired chuckles at his remark. “My night vision is better than it’s been all my life, and now that the clouds are starting to break up, the starlight should provide enough for me to see where we’re going.”

“Thank you, Jon,” Avon said. “Anyone else?”

There was silence for a moment, as there were few who trusted their own tired feet in the darkness, but then an unexpected voice spoke up.

“I’ll do it,” Kristen volunteered. “I need something to focus on to get me the rest of the way home.”

Jon looked over at her, but she did not return his glance. “Okay,” he said quietly, “I’ll take the lead.” Without further preamble, the larger of the two mountain lions took his bearings with another look at the distant lights and then began walking downhill to the valley floor toward them. The line of Furs fell into step behind Kristen, and each one was more than ready to be done with their march in one way or another.

***

Jon was the first one to step out from the cover of the forest onto the gravel road. He had not seen the break in the trees and underbrush until he was right upon it, and when he stepped onto flat ground while walking upright to see over the bushes, he stumbled in the darkness. They had been fortunate that no one had tripped up in the night on the rest of the way down the mountain, so he felt a little foolish doing so at the end.

Kristen almost took a tumble too, but caught herself by dropping to all fours. “Watch your step,” she called back to those who followed behind. “We’ve found the road and there’s a small drop down onto it.”

“It’s the road?” Dahlia repeated wearily. “It’s about time.”

The cougar looked back at her crossly. “You think we were holding back on the way down?” she asked.

The vixen shook her head in the starlight. “Not what I meant,” she muttered.

“What then?”

“I’ve been dreaming of my soft bed for the past two nights. I think I’ve been sleepwalking behind you, dreaming about it again.”

Kristen thought her friend’s explanation was weak, but she was too tired to argue so she just let it drop. “C’mon,” she replied. “We should be there soon.”

Jon rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands and watched the rest of the group file out of the trees onto the road. The sky was now clear above them, though more than starlight illuminated the area. He could tell that most of them were dragging their feet, but they were still moving. He had found the road while walking upright merely to see above the denser underbrush nearer the road, but everyone else was traveling on all fours. He could hear a few mumbled words as each of them stepped out onto the gravel road, but for the most part, the Furs were quiet.

Satisfied that everyone was getting down onto the road okay, he turned to the right and led them along the avenue cut through the Adirondacks. The curvy road to the Institute had never been designed for heavy traffic, but the glow of lights not more than a half mile distant was a clear beacon for the direction they needed to go.

As the group got closer, some of them seemed to have found an extra reserve of energy and padded on ahead of him. This close to home, Jon was not concerned if they did, but he was in no state to rush anywhere himself. Then, at long last, they rounded a turn in the road and the small gravel parking lot in front of the large iron gates of the Furmankind Institute lay before them.

Although happy at having arrived, a sudden disquiet moved through the furry crowd. The seeds of doubt spread by Kim and Yuki now caused them to hesitate. From across the parking lot, they could see a single guard sitting on a folding chair outside one of the guard shacks, enjoying a cigarette in the night air. They could tell he was bored, but he had not yet noticed the Furs. From his vantage point, they would all still be in shadow, blended in with the night.

“What do we do now?” Sissy whispered to Avon; she did not want to attract the guard’s attention just yet by speaking.

“Do we just go up and ask him to let us in?” Michael whispered from the grizzly’s other side. Everyone gathered close to their ursine leader, awaiting his decision.

Avon looked over at Carl and noticed the watch still on the wolf’s left wrist. “What time is it?” he asked quietly.

Carl glanced at the glowing hands of his timepiece. “It is twenty minutes past midnight,” he answered. “Will that make a difference?”

Avon shook his head. “No, I suppose not.” He turned and faced back toward the tall wrought iron gate surrounding the compound. He studied it for a moment and then without turning away he asked, “Do any of you think you have enough energy to climb over that fence?”

“Why would we do that?” Manny asked quietly. “If we need to subdue the guard and open it ourselves, we only have to walk right up to him. He’s standing outside the gate.”

“I don’t want to alert him needlessly,” the grizzly explained. “It’s after midnight and he might jump to the wrong conclusions if a large group of animals come after him from out of the darkness. He is armed, after all. No, I was hoping someone could sneak over the fence and then run to get Marcelo out of bed.”

“I’ll do it,” Sissy volunteered. “I’ve had to wake him from sleep before and I know how he reacts when startled.”

“Do you think you can crawl up those iron bars?” Dante wanted to know. “No offense, but you don’t have a very long reach.”

Sissy gave him a patient smile. “Silly, I don’t have to go over the top,” she answered. “I can slip between the bars!”

“Are you sure?” Jenni asked. “They’re pretty close together.”

The orange feline snickered. “I’m very flexible,” she said with a smirk, “and I’ve done it many times.”

“You have?” Avon asked in amusement.

“There’s a small, all-night country grocery store about three miles up the road that I like to go to sometimes. Our Shoppette here doesn’t carry some of the snacks I like, so sometimes I sneak out and trot down there in the middle of the night. The guy who works the graveyard shift likes cats and loves to pet my fur, so he’s never turned me in. The guards would freak if they knew I’d been out at night.”

“Sneaky kitty,” Michael said with a laugh. Sissy merely batted her eyes at him and then turned to look up at the grizzly.

“Your secret is safe with us,” Avon replied with a gesture toward the fence. “You seem to be our best hope to get back in quietly.”

“Once I’m in, it’ll take me a few minutes to get across the compound to Marcelo’s quarters,” Sissy told the gathered Furs, “so don’t be too impatient. Just wait here and we should be out to get you shortly.” Avon gave her a simple nod and then she turned away. Without further conversation, she padded off around the perimeter of the parking lot so she would not give herself away to the guard.

The Furs watched her until she reached the fence, and then without trouble, she slipped through the bars and was lost in the shadows.

“Take five, everybody,” Avon told his companions. Without further instruction, everyone retreated to the trees beside the road and then either sat down or lay down among the leaves and pine needles. None of them wanted to remain on the road in case a late-night delivery truck or car arrived, as unlikely as it may be.

***

Twenty-five minutes passed before a set of headlights from within the compound approached the gates and come to a stop. The security guard let himself through the gate and then walked up to the vehicle. Some of the Furs had drifted off to sleep while they waited, but Jon had kept his eyes and ears upon the compound. The guard only spoke with the driver of the vehicle for a moment before he moved to the gates to open them.

The cougar recognized the sound of the hydrogen engine of the same old charter bus they had all ridden in several nights ago. It passed through the gate the guard opened and traveled across the parking lot directly toward the place where they were all hidden in the trees.

It moved across the parking lot before it stopped just short of the road. The doors opened and then Sissy stepped out, waving a hand. Avon emerged from the woods by himself and cautiously approached the bus. Sitting in the driver’s seat was Marcelo Delgado, the director of the North American Furmankind Institute. The swarthy man was dressed in dark blue pajamas decorated by light blue squares, matching slippers and a light summer bathrobe. His hair was disheveled and his Van Dyke beard was flattened on one side, presumably the side he had been sleeping on when Sissy had awakened him.

“Hello, Hiamovi,” the director said in a quiet voice. “If you’ll get your people on the bus, we can all get some sleep tonight.”

Avon stared at him for a long moment, internally battling the desire to ask the man a flood of questions, foremost of all on why they had been abandoned out in the woods in the first place. He finally nodded and turned back toward the woods without saying a word to the man. He was simply too tired to argue.

“Come on,” he announced to the Furs in hiding. “Help one another get to the bus. Our journey’s over.”

From the director’s seat, Marcelo first saw numerous pairs of eyes shining in the trees staring back at him, and then cautiously at first, they all emerged to converge on the bus. They looked exhausted, some appeared frightened, while others smoldered in renewed anger. Marcelo could hot keep from taking a deep swallow, but then he steeled himself when Sissy led them up the steps and then to the seats.

Carl stood upright and carried the diminutive Erin in his arms up the steps, but he sat down with her in his lap in the first available seat.

“Marcelo,” he said in a grave voice, “we need to get her to the medical wing as soon as possible. She was attacked by wild coyotes who tried to drag her off to eat her. We bound her injuries as best we could, but now she needs real medical attention.”

The director looked astonished, but he nodded. “As soon as everyone is on the bus,” he stated quietly.

Most of the Furs gave him an intense look as they came up the steps, and after the first ten or so, he turned and stared out the forward windows so he would not have to look at them.

Jon was the last one on the bus, and as he passed the director, the mountain lion lightly patted him on the shoulder. “Good to see you again,” he said quietly.

Marcelo glanced up at him in surprise, but the cougar had already moved on along the crowded bus aisle. Jon found a seat near the back of the vehicle without even noticing that it was Travis he sat down beside. The German shepherd looked at him warily for a heartbeat, but when Jon did not do or say anything to him, the canine turned toward the window and closed his eyes.

With everyone on the bus, Marcelo closed the door and put the vehicle into motion. It lurched forward with a jerk and then for a brief moment, it appeared as if Marcelo was heading straight for the road. Several of the Furs thought he was going to take them back out to the clearing where he had dropped them off, but then more than a few let out a collective sigh of relief when he turned and circled the parking lot to point the vehicle back into the compound.

Everyone rode quietly as Marcelo passed through the gates and then the old vehicle rumbled along the ruts of road back to the center of the compound. He drove past the vacant helicopter pad, and then past the Felis Wing. Dante watched mutely as his home receded behind him, but the tiger was too exhausted to complain.

After several minutes, the bus came to a stop in front of a two-story building. Avon got up, opened the door himself and then looked back at Carl, who stood up beside his wife to take Erin into the hospital wing. The rest of the Furs watched quietly, but Marcelo did not follow the others outside the bus.

“Erin will get the care she needs now,” the director told them, “but for now I will take you back to your Wings.”

“What happened?” Jasmine piped up at last. “Why did you do this to us?” Tired voices raised together with similar questions, mixed in with a few uncomplimentary remarks about the director’s heritage.

Marcelo held up a hand and called for quiet. “Go to bed. Get some rest, sleep in, have a good breakfast or lunch, and then we’ll gather in the assembly hall in the afternoon. I will explain everything to you then.”

“Why not now?” Gerard grumbled. “Can’t we get just a simple explanation?”

“There is no simplified version. You’ll be more receptive when you’ve had rest and I can explain fully.”

Voices rose in complaint again, but this time Marcelo returned to the driver’s seat and put the bus in gear without a further word. He pulled right up to the front door of each Wing to let out the Class Sixteen furmen, and then he took the remaining Class Fifteen Furs to their Educational Wing dormitories. He had avoided eye contact with everyone who got off the bus so he did not count the specific number of Furs that headed into the building toward their rooms.

Once the vehicle was empty, he returned it to the motor pool parking lot and then went back to his quarters on an electric cart.

***

The Felis Wing was dark. Jenni, Dante, Kristen and Jon walked in through the entrance hall in silence. There were no lights on in the saloon, but they had been walking in virtual darkness for the past several hours that none of them noticed or cared. There was no talk, no whispers and no cuddling. All four of them went straight to their rooms, each so quiet that it was doubtful that either Marcy or Dr. Renwick even knew they were there.

They were home.

Chapter 8

Black Thorn

Jon’s eyes flashed open. He was in total darkness and utterly alone. He did not move for several moments, fighting down the panic that surged through his brain, but soon his other senses slowly awakened and his situation did not seem as dire. How could things be wrong when there was the smell of bacon in the air? Then, for a heart-pounding moment, another thought occurred to his addled mind. Have they turned me into a pig?

The large furman’s nose twitched as he sorted through the scents he detected – bacon, fried potatoes, fried eggs, orange juice… dirt, leaves, pine needles, and the remnant odor of wet feline fur. He relaxed as the realizations of that last aroma assured him that he was still in the hybrid body of a human-cougar mix. Despite the months of anguish about the transformation, he felt comfortable in the knowledge of who and what he was now.

Jon uncurled his leonine body beneath the lightweight sheet on top of his king-sized bed and then stretched languidly in the darkness of his room. Not for the first time, he wished his room was equipped with a window to the outside to let in morning sunshine and fresh air.

He rolled over and looked toward the side of his bed to read the illuminated numbers of the clock. It was ten-oh-seven. Somewhere within the foggy memories of his brain, Jon remembered that they were all to meet in the assembly hall that afternoon to get an explanation from Marcelo, so he still had plenty of time to shower and eat a late breakfast.

The mountain lion yawned widely, curling his tongue in over itself and laying his ears flat against his broad head. He was sorely tempted to remain in bed and forego the rest of the day. He would be surprised if many of the other Furs were awake even now after the forced march they had been on for the past several days. Jon’s typical routine of exercising every morning never even entered his mind this time. He had had plenty of exercise lately. All he wanted to do now was go back to sleep.

He lay there several more minutes in a relaxed state before he made himself turn over and reach for his clock to set the alarm for noon.

Jon smiled to himself in the darkness and then stretched once more before curling up to his pillow. He was snoring softly within minutes.

***

Despite the number of people in the assembly hall, the room was fairly quiet when the director stepped up onto the stage and positioned himself behind the podium. Not only were the Furs present, but it seemed that every employee of the Institute was gathered in the room as well; everyone from the physicians, administrators and instructors down through the ranks to the custodians, supply clerks and kitchen help were all there.

Rather than sitting apart by their Wings as they had done in the past, the Furs were all seated together in the center of the assembly. No longer separated by species, the furmen volunteers were unified by their experiences and sat together in a group. All were now dressed in fresh furman garments, even though some of them had gotten used to wearing minimal covering over their fur for the past few days.

Despite the full gathering of personnel, there were a few absences. Erin was probably in a bed in the hospital, and perhaps Travis too for his injuries; the Tanaka sisters were likely sulking in their rooms, apparently having been proved wrong about their conjectures over the whole situation. Still, none of them knew what the purpose was behind it all, so many were hoping the director’s explanations would make their experiences worthwhile.

When Marcelo looked up at the anthro faces that peered back at him, he had already expected the numerous unkind expressions that he saw. He cleared his throat before the small boom microphone that extended toward him from the podium.

“Good afternoon,” he began, putting both hands upon the lectern. “I want to begin by informing you that Erin Sealock was in surgery for her injuries early this morning. There was no permanent damage and there were no complications during the operations. She is now in recovery, but she may require a few weeks of convalescence. I encourage all of her friends and associates to visit with her on the second floor of the medical facility in room two-oh-nine.”

He put one hand into a pocket of his trousers, keeping the other on the podium. “Likewise, Travis Tyndall was treated for his injuries with a few stitches just a bit ago” –Aaron booed from the midst of the Furs, but the director continued as if he had not noticed– “and is being held in a quiet room by himself.” Ivan started to make a crack too, but Marcelo held up a hand for silence, casting a brief glance toward Kristen. “Mr. Tyndall’s actions have been documented and he will receive disciplinary measures this afternoon appropriate for a Fur.”

“What do you mean by that?” Norman asked loudly. “Are you going to whack his nose with a rolled-up newspaper?” The brown bear had been serious and indignant, but the question garnered a few snickers from the audience of others than just the Furs.

“No, something a little more enduring,” Marcelo replied, struggling to keep from smiling at the bear’s remarks. “Of the others, Gerard Nicholas’ sprained wrist has been treated and is in a firm wrap,” –the bear raised his arm to let everyone see his soft splint– “and Cheryl Dalton has been checked for concussion. Both of them seem to be responding well.” The Border collie stood up, tipped her battered western hat toward the audience with a grin and then sat down again.

“I know at least two have requested an audience with Professor Flynn for counseling, and the rest of you have been looked over by your resident physicians. If any of you have further health-related issues resulting from your experiences, please see them first.”

The director fell silent for a moment before returning both hands to the podium. He nodded toward the expectant faces and cleared his throat again.

“Now, I know the question on every Fur’s mind right now is Why? – Why did I gather up everyone and drop you off in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night?”

“Yeah, why?” called Gerard.

“There are two reasons,” Marcelo replied, holding up a pair of fingers to the crowd. “The Anthro Human Colonization Program has initiated a new directive for all four Furmankind Institutes to implement a forced survival march with each of its Fur groups. The purpose is to give you practical experience by placing you into an unfamiliar territory with little or no provisions, instructions or preparation.” Carl crossed his lupine arms in satisfaction that his theory had been correct in that respect.

“The Buenos Aires Furmankind Institute in Argentina had the first group on a forced survival march during last January’s summer of the southern hemisphere, although the Furs there had temperate grasslands to cover instead of a mountain forest.” He gave his audience a wry smile and added, “I’m surprised none of you remembered it from Sissy’s daily news back then.”

“I didn’t even remember it until just now,” Sissy complained.

Marcelo smiled at her and shook his head. “The march of the Adirondack Furs was originally scheduled to take place in another three weeks anyway, but a situation arose that moved up the schedule.”

“What happened?” Jasmine asked.

The director pulled absently on his beard with one hand and then leaned forward upon the podium. “I don’t know if any of you are familiar with billionaire industrialist Alastair Blackthorne, but he’s been in the news over the past few months concerning a few advancements his research and development teams have made in interstellar slip-drive technologies. In addition to this, another of his many concerns focuses on genetic research, some of it parallel to those of Professor Oliver McEwen of the University of Edinburgh. Blackthorne’s research is primarily of medical applications, but he is not unaware of the Furs that have also benefitted from McEwen’s discoveries.”

“Is he interested in making Furs of his own now?” Michael asked.

“Stockholm suspects he might be,” Marcelo answered, “but Blackthorne himself denies it.”

“So what does this have to do with our survival march?” Aaron wanted to know.

“Blackthorne is married to a former centerfold model,” the director explained patiently, “and he wanted to buy a couple of you as body guards for his wife.” Comments and exclamations erupted after a moment of stunned silence, but Marcelo knocked on the wooden podium with his knuckles to regain order.

“Stockholm refused, of course,” he informed them. “The primary existence of Furs is for interstellar colonization, and even though the AHCP owns the patent on the process that created each of you, Furs are not slaves and you are not a retail commodity for sale. You have lifetime contracts with the company for the sole purpose of moving in as starter colonies on the various habitable worlds discovered orbiting other stars.”

The director had to knock on the lectern again as the crowd noise rose once more.

“However…” he nearly shouted, “Alastair Blackthorne was so adamant about having a couple of Furs that he did some research and discovered where Furs are made – meaning the Furmankind Institute. Although there are some small businesses we deal with for services and supplies, the exact location of all four Institutes has been closely guarded from the public. As you all are fully aware, acceptance of Furs in the general society is still tenuous at best in places, but Blackthorne has numerous sources to get what he wants.”

The director picked up a bottle of water from a shelf inside the podium and took a sip. “The AHCP has its own resources against industrial espionage and its intel discovered that Blackthorne was on his way here to this Institute backed up by a full bank account. It was his intention to buy out one or two of you to break contract, wanting you to abandon the purpose for which you were made to work for him.”

Nobody interrupted him now; they were all hanging onto his words. “It was AHCP headquarters that directed me to get all Furs off the premises before Blackthorne could arrive, and it was decided to move up the date of the survival march to ensure you would be out of pocket for several days.” He paused and rubbed a temple with his fingers.

“Without Blackthorne’s interference, you still would have gone on the survival march just as you did, with few provisions or instructions. Although the weather is something you will have to deal with on a new world, it hadn’t been our intention to send you out with rain in the forecast. You’re fortunate that you hadn’t been scheduled for it in the middle of winter.”

“What happened while we were gone?” Jon asked, strongly interested in the director’s explanations.

“Blackthorne’s private jet landed at Saranac Lake and then he came in on a helicopter, demanding that I let him take a look at our Furs.” Marcelo smiled at his audience. “I lied straight to his face, telling him that all our Furs had already left Earth for another planet that had just been opened for colonization. After all, that’s what the purpose of this place is for. I also told him that with the Furs gone, this location was about to begin renovation to the premises, so it might be another year or two before the next volunteers come in, and even then another nine months beyond that for their transformations. Despite that, the Furs would not be for sale, now or then.

“Blackthorne was quite put out by this, but not convinced that all the Furs were gone. He demanded a tour of the entire facilities to see for himself. I had to get special authorization from AHCP headquarters to allow him access and it took a couple of hours to get approval from the headquarters in Stockholm. We gave him the tour he wanted, denying him access only to certain classified labs we didn’t tell him about, and he was disgruntled afterward that he had seen no Furs other than the portraits in your Wings. There were only humans on the entire compound, so he finally got back in his helicopter and left.”

“Wow,” Dante mused aloud.

“That’s not the end of the story,” Marcelo continued. “The gate guards informed me that a van with darkened windows was in the parking lot for several days. When they knocked on the windows, no one would respond, but when we called to have it towed away, someone else had the call for towing cancelled. We figured out quickly that Blackthorne was having someone watch the place, but when there was no miraculous repopulation of Furs several days after Blackthorne’s visit, the van finally left – yesterday evening – just hours before you got back. That was good timing, though we’ve still been on the lookout for the return of the van or some other surveillance.”

“Y’know,” Gerard called out, “you could have saved us all the trouble we went through just by giving him Travis!”

Marcelo caught himself before a smile reached his face. The director steeled his expression and shook his head. “No Fur is for sale,” he reiterated. “Not even Travis.”

“Aw man…” Norman said in a mock whine.

“Travis wouldn’t make a good guard for a centerfold model anyway,” Jasmine quipped. “They’d have to have another guard just to guard him!”

Marcelo saw a courteous hand go up. “Yes, Jenni?”

“Why did you give us only partially charged batteries for the GPS?”

“That wasn’t intentional. When I got everyone up to get on the bus, I simply grabbed the first unit I reached from the supply cabinet. I didn’t know the batteries in it did not have a full charge.”

“What about the PBJ connection?” Wendy wanted to know. “Why would you block Sissy’s PBJ from getting a satellite signal? It could have come in handy while we were out there.”

“That wasn’t me, and we don’t have the means to block the satellite signal anyway. Sissy gave her PBJ to me this morning and from a dent in its side, we’ve determined that the unit’s transceiver was probably damaged by an unrelated incident in her own room earlier the same day you were taken away. I will make sure she gets a new PBJ from supply and all of her data transferred to it this afternoon.” The director frowned. “Keep in mind that when you start a new colony, you won’t have a set of satellites overhead for GPS triangulation, neither will you have an Internet connection. There will be a single geostationary satellite over your colony location to relay the occasional report back to Earth, but that will be it. Using a GPS receiver here is a luxury you won’t have out there.”

“If our survival march had taken place in three weeks as you’d originally planned,” Carl remarked, “would we have been given any supplies or provisions like we’d have on another world?”

Marcelo shook his head. “Things would have been little different, though your leader may have been given the briefest of instructions to find your way back and live off the land. We may also have made sure you had a full charge on the batteries, although using your instincts to get back over the past few days probably gave you better practical experience.”

“That’s a heck of a note,” Hank grumbled.

Marcelo cleared his throat again. “Don’t blame me and don’t shoot the messenger. My instructions came from Stockholm. However, despite a couple of near-losses, I’m glad you all made it back relatively safely, though I hope you brought back some experiences that will be helpful once you’ve gone out to tame another world. Now, are there any further questions?”

“I have one,” Jon called out. “Do you or our high and mighty AHCP masters have plans to send us on any more survival marches like this one?”

Marcel actually smiled. “I am not aware of any further plans for another march,” he assured them. “Any other questions?” No one spoke up. “Okay folks, if that’s all you have, that’s all I have. You are released from further classes and studies for the next two days, so feel free to relax, eat, sleep or visit among yourselves as you wish. Because of Blackthorne’s people, I would caution all of you to stay within the confines of the grounds.

He said this last directed at Sissy, as he was now aware of her late night sojourns for snacks. “He may be back at some point in a surprise visit or post more surveillance, but if we’re approached again, I’ll deal with it at that time. None of you are authorized to speak with him or his people without first coming through me. That’s it – you’re dismissed. Welcome back, Furs.”

***

When Jon walked out of the building, he stopped and closed his eyes, letting the afternoon sun warm the fur of his face. Despite their days of roughing it, he felt good about the whole ordeal. Although he might have wished to have been informed why they had been dropped off out in the woods beforehand, he agreed with the primary purpose of the excursion. Their instructors could try to teach them everything by the book in a class room setting, but there was no substitute for hands-on training – or in their case, paws-on training, he thought with a smile. They needed the experience they got out in the woods; they probably had not been out there long enough by any stretch of the imagination to get the experience they really needed, but if nothing else this would give them a foretaste of what might be ahead of them.

“I know that cats can fall asleep anywhere and in any position,” a teasing voice said from his side, “but I’ve never seen one go to sleep standing up on its hind legs before.”

Jon opened his eyes and smiled down at the orange striped cat. Sissy was dressed in their standard furman garments, but she had not bothered to tie the belt around the top, simply letting it drape loose from her shoulders to her knees. She had been topless out in the woods long enough that it never even occurred to her that she might be exposing herself to anyone. For a fully-developed Fur, however, this was a non-issue.

“I’m just enjoying the warmth on my face,” he told her, “and I was just contemplating going out by the lake and taking a nap in the sun, stretched out on the grass. After a day of soaking rain, I could use a solar recharge.”

“Mmm, that actually sounds good,” she said. “Before you do, would you come by my room for a minute? I have something to give you.”

Jon tilted his head. “Was that a proposition?” he asked with a smirk. Sissy laughed aloud, but shook her head.

She poked him in the stomach with a claw tip. “No, silly, but perhaps we can explore that another time. I still have the items we talked about up on the mountain.”

“Ah, yes,” he said with a nod. “I’d already forgotten about them.” He gestured toward the building where she lived and then followed her across the grounds. They talked idly as they walked, enjoying a bipedal stroll that did not involve stepping over fallen trees, around rocks or finding their way through dense brush. When they got to the Educational Wing dormitories, Jon followed Sissy up to the second floor, realizing that he had never been to her place before.

She opened the door for him and allowed him to go inside first. Jon stepped into the studio apartment and looked around quietly. The place was Spartan, having very little furniture or decorations. There were a couple of curio cabinets, each one occupying a corner and filled with feline-themed trinkets, and a small bookcase occupied by only a few plushies, most of which were of cats. Instead of chairs, a bed or a couch, there were several large pillows on the floor in front of a small wall-hanging video screen. A light blanket was folded up neatly against a wall near a small dining table with only two chairs. The kitchenette was separated from the rest of the room by a small countertop, and even it was sparsely decorated. There was a window on one wall, covered over by a dark blue curtain.

“Looks cozy,” he remarked.

“Thanks, it is.” Sissy smiled up at him and then moved toward a closet beside the kitchenette.

Jon leaned up against the wall beside her small bookcase and was startled when an orange striped cat meowed at him from the second shelf. He knelt down and peered at the cat, which merely looked back at him curiously. Despite that a much larger feline was staring at it, the cat did not appear to be alarmed by his presence. Jon scratched him beneath his chin with a smile and the kitty gave him a contented purr.

“Now here’s one for the history books,” he commented with a small shake of his head. “An orange striped Felis with a pet cat that looks just like her!”

Sissy chuckled. “That’s Jonesy,” she explained. “He took to me right after I got here and was with me all through my transformation.”

“Jonesy? Wasn’t that the name of the cat in that movie with the melon-headed alien?”

“Yup, another orange striped cat, but he was already wearing a name tag, though no one has ever claimed him. Orange tabbies have always been my favorites, and it’s one of the reasons why I chose to become one of them.”

Sissy backed out of the closet with a large rectangular box. She closed the door with a foot and then presented the cardboard container to him as if it were precious.

“Here they are,” she said with a grin. “I’m glad I held onto them for you.”

The mountain lion stood up and took the box humbly. “Thank you. I never thought I would ever want these again, but I have to know that I can get past the memories that made me give them up in the first place.”

Sissy watched warily as Jon set the box on the counter, open the flaps, and then pull out a bundle wrapped in light blue tissue.  He pulled off the thin paper and then lifted up the folded pair of cotton denim jeans. The pant legs were much wider than normal to allow digitigrade feet and legs room to get into them and stopped just few inches below the knees. There was also a large round hole in the back for a tail and a button flap above it to keep the waistband together.

“There’s only one way to find out,” Sissy suggested, repeating what she had told him once before. Jon looked at her for a moment and smiled at the look in her green eyes. Her slit pupils were open and a little rounded in the dim light of the room.

He gave her a grin and turned his tail to her. He undressed quietly, pulling off his furman vest first and then the shorts. He looked over his shoulder at her and as expected, caught her admiring his furry rear. He flicked his tail at her just as had done before and she reached out quickly, snaring it in her hand paws. She gave it a gentle tug with a giggle, but did not let it go.

Jon gave her a smirk and held out the jeans. He unbuttoned both the fly and the tail flap and then slid one foot down into a leg opening. He had no trouble getting his altered limb all the way through, so he added the second and then pulled them up into place.

He had to make Sissy release his tail to get it through its opening, and then getting the tail flap re-buttoned took a little extra dexterity. Fortunately, the front fly was button-up and he managed without getting anything caught in it.

Jon walked to her bathroom door and examined himself in the full-length mirror mounted on its inside panel. He turned back and forth to see how they fit on him. They were as comfortable as he remembered, though he recalled that the knees would be a little snug in front if he squatted down; he figured that he could have them adjusted by someone on the grounds. He had never tried them while down on all fours, so he dropped to the floor to see how they felt. As with squatting, the knees were a little binding, but after walking around the room a moment, he felt the jeans for furman anatomy might work out all right.

“I still think you have a nice butt,” Sissy told him. “Those jeans fit your hiney even better now.”

Jon grinned at her, stood up and then returned to the box.  He pulled off the tissue wrapping from a long-sleeved flannel shirt made of large red and black squares.

“I sewed some buttons back on for you,” Sissy commented quietly, “but I could not find an exact match for the ones you popped off.”

The cougar looked over at her with an embarrassed smile. “I’m sorry about my tantrum that night,” he told her. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He slid his arms into the oversized openings of the shirt and then pulled it around him.  There was plenty of room beneath it for his fur, and despite that it fit over him as another layer, it was not uncomfortable.  He buttoned it up and then tucked the shirt into his jeans before returning to the mirror.

“No doubt about it, Jon – you look great!”

“Thanks!” the mountain lion said, pleased with her reaction. He slipped the odd sandals back upon his feet and then turned back to the mirror to take a good look at his reflection. As had happened before, Jon looked at his image in the mirror and saw Henry Parker looking back at him. Blue denim jeans, plaid flannel shirt of red and black squares, Parker had worn almost the same outfit on the night that Barrett had shot him, the only difference was the addition of a lightweight jacket the cougar had worn that cold January morning in Colorado.

Jon stared down the other furman in the mirror while Sissy waited nervously for his reaction. You got what you deserved, he thought at Parker’s memory quietly, and I’m no longer afraid of you.

Jon studied his appearance for a moment longer; Parker looked back at him only briefly before Jon’s own reflection took over. He liked the image he presented to himself, but the flannel shirt was already getting warm. It was a cold weather garment and Jon knew he would probably have to save it for the winter. He unbuttoned it and pulled it back off without saying a word, but when he saw the worried look on Sissy’s face, he gave her a reassuring smile.

He folded the shirt carefully and took it back to the box with the others of different colors he had ordered, though he left the pants on. “Do they still carry tee-shirts at the Shoppette,” he asked his companion. “I ordered the flannel shirts back in the winter, but they’ll be too hot this time of year. An oversized tee-shirt might work for now, though.”

Sissy let out the breath she did not realize she had been holding. Jon had made no anguished outburst at seeing himself in the mirror this time, and she was relieved that he seemed okay with the garments now. Whatever the painful memories were that had surfaced before, he appeared more at ease with them.

“I think they stock them,” she answered. “See what your pants look like with the vest.”

Jon picked up his discarded furman vest and slipped it back on. He did not return to the mirror, but instead just spread out his arms and looked at her. “What do you think?”

“Not bad,” she told him. “I’m with you, though. It’s probably my human upbringing, but I think a tee-shirt would look better.” Jon simply nodded and then leaned up against the kitchenette counter.

“How are you feeling about this?” Sissy asked him timidly.

Jon knew exactly what she was referring to, and he was truthful in his response. “I think I’m okay now,” he told her. “I’ve worked through my issues in recent months with Angelina and I think maybe I’ll be fine.”

“I still wish you’d tell me what happened to you,” she remarked. “You scared me that time.”

“Maybe someday, if I survive until I’m old and have a grey muzzle, but not now.”

Sissy gave him a frown, but then her expression changed. She grabbed him by the arm and ushered him toward the door. “Come on,” she suggested. “Let’s go show off your new look!”

Jon hesitated before she could get the door open. “Wait, there’s something I need to do first.”

“What’s that?”

“Marcy originally helped take my measurements for these and I’d promised to let her be the first to see me in them. I failed that promise by letting you see me in them first those months ago, but perhaps I should let her think she’s the first.” The mountain lion looked embarrassed, but when he put his hand paws gently on her shoulders, he gave her a smile. “Will you help me?”

“Sure, how do we do this?”

“I’ll need to change back into my cult clothing and then head back to my Wing. I’ll find her and chat with her a few minutes, and then you could come in with the box for me, as if it had just arrived. Do you have shipping tape to seal it up again?”

“Yes, I do. Won’t she be suspicious that the box took months to get here?” Sissy asked with a smirk.

“Who knows how long tailors take to make their clothing?” Jon countered, unbuttoning the fly in front of her without thinking about it. “After all, they wouldn’t have had a usual human pattern to follow when making these things.”

The orange feline finally nodded as she watched him undress. “Okay, I’ll help you with your little deception for letting me be the one to see you in them first… and out of them too!”

Jon realized that she was boldly watching him, so he chuckled and turned his back to her before dropping the jeans around his ankles.

“Thanks, Sissy,” he said once he had his furman shorts back on. “After I’ve modeled these for Marcy, then you can accompany me out on the grounds.”

“Great! I’m certain you’ll get a few requests to order jeans for some of the others once they see you in them.”

Jon chuckled. “Marcy said just about the same thing when she took my measurements.”

***

Later that evening, Marcelo stormed across the grounds toward his office, his face clearly reflecting his anger. No one had seen either Kim or Yuki since the Furs had returned to the Institute early that morning and their rooms remained just as they had the night he had roused them out of bed for the bus ride. Avon had given him a full report on everything that had happened during the survival march, including the sisters’ attempts to have them abandon the return to base.

The director had quietly interviewed several in the group concerning them and had just come from the Felis Wing; Jon had informed him that the last anyone had seen of the sisters was just after they had left the small mountain cabin in the rain, supposedly to go pee behind a tree. With the rain, exhaustion and nightfall, he had not noticed if the sisters had returned or not.

No one could remember seeing either of them since getting back, but their whole demeanor had been so annoying on the trek that none had bothered looking for them once they were back home anyway.

Marcelo resisted the temptation to slam his office door on the way to his desk. He sat down heavily and opened a bottom drawer for the bottle of Jack Daniels Classic Tennessee Whiskey he kept for such occasions of frustration.

If the girls had stayed up on the mountain with the intention of setting up housekeeping on their own, they were in violation of the contract they had willingly signed that included desertion in its wording. However, such an occasion had never occurred before, so the director was not sure what he should do about the matter.

Once he had calmed down sufficiently, Marcelo would have to send a report to the AHCP headquarters in Stockholm requesting instruction. There were more mishaps and personality clashes on the outing than he had envisioned, and now he was beginning to wonder if this group would even survive the dangers of colonizing another world altogether.

Chapter 9

Felisastrophe

“Do you think you could find that cabin again?” Marcelo asked, shading his eyes against the morning sun. He and Avon were standing outside the iron gate of the Institute, both of them peering up the side of the mountain nearest the compound. The grizzly bear sat on his haunches on the gravel parking lot so he would not tower over the man beside him, while the director idly handled the Personal Business Juxtapositioner he held.

“I don’t know,” the Ursis answered with a grumble deep in his throat. “We came down the mountain in the dark, following only the light of the Institute to get back. We were all to the point of exhaustion that if we hadn’t had gravity on our side, I doubt we would have made it back in near as good a time as we did.” He shook his head and held up a massive hand paw. “I didn’t notice any landmarks in the dark, and during the final leg of the journey, I think all I saw were my feet in front of me, putting one in front of the other just to get back. It’s a real wonder that we didn’t all drop off into another ravine in the darkness. Jon and Kristen led the way those last few hours, so maybe they might know the way back up there.”

“It’s been two days since you returned,” Marcelo replied. “I hope they’re okay.”

“It’s too bad their microchips don’t have GPS transmitters in them,” the bear remarked.

The director looked over at him with a look of amusement. “That was actually discussed at one time,” he said, “but it never made it past research.”

“Why not?”

“They couldn’t come up with a viable power source that would last and still be safe for the host whose hide it would be under.”

“How about a tiny solar cell worn like an earring?” Avon remarked. Marcelo looked at him incredulously, until he saw the ursine leader’s smirk.

“Right,” the director retorted with a smile. “I suppose the whole unit could be contained in an ear tag.”

“Oh, that would go over real well,” Avon replied with a snort.

The shorter, swarthy man beside him stroked his Van Dyke beard absently. “Either Kim and Yuki were serious about staying away for good, or they’ve gotten lost trying to get back.” He looked over at his companion. “You know them better than I do; will they be okay out there?”

The grizzly cleared his throat with a rumble. “Personally, I don’t think either of them ever learned that much about surviving on their own,” he answered. “I’m sure their animal instincts will help them catch small game to live off of, but if they try to eat any of the local vegetation without knowing what to look for, they could poison themselves unknowingly.”

Marcelo sighed aloud. “Headquarters wants us to mount a search for them,” he confessed. “They are AHCP property and they’re afraid Blackthorne might find them first, if he hasn’t already.”

“Did you tell Blackthorne we’d lost two of our Furs?”

“No, but if he’d somehow bugged the Institute while he was here, he may know already. Headquarters doesn’t want to take the chance of his people getting their hands on them, whether for body guards, slaves or genetic samples of our work. I’m also afraid that a full-scale search effort might attract too much attention from those who don’t need to know about it.” He looked over at his companion and added, “I would like you to choose three or four Furs from the group to go back up the mountain to find them. You’ll have proper provisions and equipment this time – even a radio to report in.”

“I’d take Carl and Ellie, to be sure,” Avon mused aloud. “They have the most survival experience of anyone around. We’ll travel faster if we can carry our provisions in packs so we can move on all fours.”

“We have furman packs. Who else?”

“Alicia and Jon. Both had done cross-country hiking and hunting before they came to the Institute, just as I had.” He paused for a moment and then gave Marcelo a smile. “If we can’t find them, perhaps the sisters might come back out of sheer boredom,” he quipped. “There’s nothing to do up there besides hunt for food or firewood.”

Marcelo appreciated the grizzly’s candor and after talking with others about Avon’s actions during the past few days, he had no doubt that Hiamovi Avonaco would be a great colony captain someday.

The bear then frowned. “On the other hand, what if they still won’t come back with us? Do we tie them up and haul them down off the mountain?”

The human matched his frown. “Have Manny supply you with a tranq pistol. If they won’t come willingly, I’m giving you authorization to tranquilize them. Be sure to give them a choice before you shoot them with it, though.”

“Of course.” Avon replied with a smirk. “I would prefer that they came along willingly. They’d be quieter unconscious, but that means we’d have to carry them!”

“Just convince them that their fears were for nothing and that I won’t press disciplinary measures if they come back on their own. If you have to carry them down, they will both wake up to a surprise.”

“Director!”

Marcelo and Avon turned in unison toward the gate guard who approached them with a folded sheet of note paper. “I just got a call. You’re needed back at your office, sir! There’s been some kind of incident and headquarters needs you to contact them right away!”

The swarthy director took the note and read the guard’s scrawled handwriting, basically saying the same thing he had just told him without further explanation.

“Thanks, Stuart,” he murmured quietly. He looked up at Avon and waved him toward the electric cart they had ridden out on earlier. “Gather your team and get whatever provisions and equipment you need from supply, but see me before you leave.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Avon replied, getting onto the back of the director’s cart; the bumper of the lightweight vehicle dropped low to the ground from the grizzly’s bulk.

“I just hope Blackthorne hasn’t gone after the Furs at one of the other Institutes, but their directors have all been warned,” Marcelo muttered. They rode in comparative silence back into the compound and Marcelo dropped him off in front of the Ursis Wing before heading toward his office.

***

An hour and a half later, all personnel of the Institute were gathered for an assembly. No one knew the purpose of the meeting, but Avon presumed it must be related to the director’s emergency call. The grizzly and his small search party had been about to leave when the order was issued for all personnel to meet for an important announcement. Marcelo wanted him to wait until after the assemblage before heading out to look for the missing sisters.

As with the meeting two days earlier, nearly everyone on the compound was present. Erin was still in her hospital room, but Travis was there this time, sitting quietly off to the side of the room as far from his fellow Furs as he could get. His face was still bandaged from the stitches he had received for his facial injuries, but it was his tail that got the most attention now.

As a disciplinary measure for his actions against another Fur, the German shepherd’s tail had been completely shaved from its base all the way out to its tip. It was a simple thing, but it was his mark of shame, proclaiming his punishment to everyone he met. The fur would grow back, of course, but it might take six months before it had its normal covering again. While it was bare, however, he would have to keep it covered in sunscreen when out in the summer sun or the pale flesh could burn easily. Sitting by himself, Travis had his naked tail in his hands across his lap, awaiting the director’s announcement with the rest of the gathered crowd.

The congregation was not left sitting for long. Once satisfied that everyone who could be there was present, Marcelo took the stage and approached the podium. He placed a PBJ in front of him with the screens open and then leaned toward the small boom microphone.

“There has been an incident on the world of Bastien,” he began without preamble. “For the past four years, Bastien has been the home of thirty-two Felis and two Vulps. Earlier this morning, Stockholm received a relayed message reporting that with the exception of the two Vulps doctors that were assigned to a full group of Felis volunteers, all personnel on Bastien have died. From the doctors’ brief reports, a rather nasty sickness swept through their camp in a matter of hours.”

“Oh no!” Dahlia exclaimed, putting her hands up to her face, her red-orange eyes wide. “I knew someone in that colony!”

“It was determined that the sickness came from the secretions of a newly-discovered animal on Bastien that was tried as a food source. The reactive elements affected the feline nervous system within minutes, leaving the doctors with little time to treat those afflicted. It is still unknown how the sickness was transferred around the colony, since the new food was ingested by only a few, but that is something still under investigation. It is also unknown why only the felines were affected, but not the foxes.”

Jon held up a hand paw before Marcelo could continue. The director was mildly irritated at the interruption, but he nodded toward the cougar anyway. “Yes, Jon?”

“I thought a colony was supposed to be all of just one species at a time. How did two foxes wind up in a colony of cats?”

“Having at least one physician in the settlement is a requirement of the colony project,” Marcelo explained. “The launch window for Bastien was small and there were no feline doctors, nurses or even a medic whose transformation was sufficiently complete to be sent with the group going out. A mated pair of Vulps doctors volunteered for the assignment. They are now the sole survivors of the Bastien colony and they have had to bury every one of the friends they’d made there.”

He raised a hand before more questions or comments could arise. “Details are sketchy right now,” he said, “but I do know that Stockholm is debating whether to send a ship out to recall the doctors or send an all-Vulps colony back to Bastien since they seem to be immune.”

He looked straight at the eight foxes in the audience. “I have received no specific orders concerning this, but I want to warn all our Vulps volunteers that if the decision is made to send out replacements, you will all likely receive your assignments for Bastien within the next two or three months.”

“Why that long?” Ivan asked.

Marcelo leaned forward and rested his arms on the lectern. “It takes time and expense to prep, supply and send a colony ship. Even a recall ship just to bring back the two survivors would take a month to prepare, so headquarters is going to have to weigh in all the costs and logistics of each scenario. There is another colony ship already in preparation at this moment, but its destination has already been planned for months to a different star system.”

Despite news of the catastrophe, this last statement spread excitement through the volunteers. Sudden thoughts of the one million in prize money jumped into the forefront of their minds.

“Who’s going?”

“Where’s that one headed?”

“Have we gotten our assignment?”

Marcelo waited patiently until everyone realized that he was not responding to any of their queries. When order was resumed, the director casually put one hand into the pocket of his trousers and shook his head.

“The final orders have not yet come in,” he told them, “but you have known for months that the next approved starter colony would consist of Ursis volunteers and that all of our bears would on that next assignment along with the ursine members of the other three Institutes. Hiamovi Avonaco has been in training as the next colony captain, which is why he was in charge during your recent survival march.”

“Do we have a departure date?” Dara asked with a half-raised hand paw. Marcelo nodded to the polar bear.

“I have that information, but I have not yet been authorized to reveal either the date or the planetary location for the colony.” There were a few outbursts from the bears at this, but the director waved both of his hands in the air for their attention. “Listen, I have rules and directives to follow just as you do,” he said with an irritable edge in his voice. “Until Stockholm gives me the go-ahead to release that information, you will simply have to satisfy yourselves just knowing that you could be leaving sometime in the next two or three months; the final eight weeks of your stay on Earth will be in the company of the other Ursis all gathered together here so that you may all become acquainted before departure.”

Although the bears were excited with the prospect of being sent out soon, some of the foxes were not as optimistic. Kevin raised his hand tentatively, but the director saw him amongst the animated group of Furs.

“Yes, Kevin?”

“Uh, sir, if there’s a deadly sickness on Bastien, why would they want to send more of us out there? Isn’t the purpose of a starter colony to make the way for eventual human settlement? What if the Vulps aren’t affected, but humans are?”

“Those are good questions,” Marcelo replied. The conversations around the room quieted down at this. “In answer to your second question first, yes, the purpose of your colonies is to establish a foothold on a potentially habitable planet where mankind may one day spread out to ease the congestion of the Earth. Should headquarters decide to send foxes out to Bastien, simply surviving on another world will have an altered focus. With the Vulps unaffected by the sickness, further research into this animal’s secretions will be made. Is the poison harmful only through ingestion as a food source, or can simply handling the animal kill felines or others? Can an antidote be derived from it? Those questions will need to be answered long before humans can move in, so having an established colony on Bastien is still a good idea, even if it takes longer to root out all the possible dangers. If it ultimately turns out that certain Furs can live there, but humans cannot, the colony would still be considered a success.”

“How can such a catastrophe be considered a success?” Ken asked, trying to see it from a medical standpoint.

Marcelo frowned. “Before the Furs came into the picture, events like these might have wiped out whole colonies of humans before a solution could be found. Your starter groups typically only consist of thirty to fifty colonists that are considered an advance research team. For a human colony to survive, nearly five hundred men, women and even children are required to establish a permanent presence scratching out a living on some foreign world. I know it’s a sobering thought, but all of you have known from the start that Furs are considered expendable and there are very real potential dangers involved. This is why we ask for volunteers. We don’t want to lose any of you any more than we would anyone else, but for mankind to spread out among the stars, people like you are needed to go out and test the waters of the planets we find.”

The director cleared his throat and picked up a water bottle from inside the podium. He took a drink and the replaced the bottle while comments flitted back and forth all over the assembly hall. Even the other human employees of the Institute were discussing these events.

“Keep in mind,” he continued a moment later, “that the fate of Bastien is still in deliberation in Stockholm. This is only the beginning of what could be a long and involved decision-making process, but we wanted to let you know what had transpired before you heard anything from other sources.”

Doctor Aristotle walked into the room from a side door. He mounted two steps up onto the stage and then pulled Marcelo off to the side to whisper into his ear. The director pursed his lips and then nodded.

When the director moved back to the podium, the room had gone completely silent, everyone wondering what else might have transpired.

“That’s all I have for now,” he said. “You are all dismissed. If I have any further news concerning Bastien, I will have Sissy relay it in her daily news.” He looked around until he found the large grizzly bear to the side of the Furs. “Avon, would you join me, please?”

Alicia looked at Avon. “Should we go with you?” she asked, meaning the small search party that was planning to leave the compound as soon as the meeting was over.

“It’s probably just a last-minute instruction before we head out. Why don’t you, Jon and the Amaranths wait for me outside, please?”

“Sure.”

When Avon approached Marcelo and Aristotle at the side of the stage, the director looked up at the furman leader. “Kim and Yuki have been found,” he said in a quiet voice. “Sheriff Davis is bringing them in.”

“Where did he find them?” Avon asked with raised eyebrows.

Marcel almost smiled, but the bear caught a glimpse of it in the director’s eyes. “They were caught raiding the hen house of a nearby farm. More than that, I don’t know yet.”

Avon shook his head. “I’ll go tell my team the hunt is off,” he said. “We’ll put the provisions back into supply and I’ll check the tranq gun back in to Manny myself.”

The director nodded, but he put a hand on the grizzly’s furry arm. “It will take about a half hour for Davis to get here with them. Once you’re squared things away with your team, meet me back at my office, please. I’d like you there when I talk with them.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Avon replied.

***

Sheriff Davis shut the door behind him as he left Marcelo’s office. Inside the small room behind his desk was the director, standing to the side was Avon, and seated in the middle of the room were Kim and Yuki in a pair of wide-seat chairs, their tails hanging listlessly through the slotted seat backs. The sisters looked just as bedraggled as the other Furs had when they had first arrived back at the Institute, their demeanor subdued and the expressions on their faces were humble.

Yuki’s sesame-colored fur was matted with bits of grass, leaves, pine needles and dirt all in the Akita Inu’s hair. The dense outer coat would normally have shed most of the larger debris, but she had had nothing to groom it with for nearly a week and she looked filthy. There were also stains of dried blood in the fur around her muzzle.

Likewise, the Eurasian Lynx beside her was unkempt in appearance with similar forest rubbish all through her reddish-brown fur. Kim’s long whiskers drooped, the ruff beneath her chin was flat against her neck, and the tuft of fur at the top of her left ear was missing with raw red skin around it. Neither of them had donated their robe tops to Gerard’s rescue from the cliff, but the garments were dirty and even torn in places. They were both quite a mess.

Since they had tried to go against their contract in what amounted to desertion, Marcelo had little sympathy for them. He sat with his arms resting upon his desk and stared darkly at them both for a long moment before he spoke.

“If you had intended to abandon your contracts,” he said roughly, “you should have stayed up on the mountain – not that it would have done much good. We were about to send up a search party for you, and you should know that I had authorized having you shot with tranquilizers and brought back tied up once you were found.” Neither of the girls bothered a response, both of them with their heads down and eyes on the floor in front of them.

“I’ve been told that you supposed that you were going to be sold to a zoo. Right now, that sounds like a very good ending to this.” Both of the sisters looked up in alarm. “Fortunately for you both, I’m not the one who decides your fate. Stockholm still wants to shoot you two off into space to eke out a living on some celestial dirtball, so I still have to put up with you until that time ever comes along.”

“We’re s-sorry,” Kim stammered, her eyes still wide. “When we were d-dropped off like unwanted p-pets out in the woods without an explanation, it l-looked like you d-didn’t want us anymore!”

“What were we supposed to think?” Yuki added with a trembling that shook her ears.

“You were supposed to work together as a team,” Marcelo answered. “That’s what you’re going to have to do in a colony. Striking out on your own can get you killed very quickly!”

“Don’t we know it,” Yuki muttered in a soft voice, gesturing toward her sister’s ear.

“What do you mean by that?” Avon ventured to ask, uncrossing his thick arms.

“After we were sure the group had gone on without us,” the canine explained, “we went back to the cabin and slept. We spent the next day alone in the cabin, straightening up and trying to patch the hole in the roof with limbs we found around in the woods, eating the occasional rabbit and squirrel we could catch.”

“Then the hunters came,” Kim added.

Marcelo exchanged glances with Avon. “Hunters?” the grizzly repeated.

“Yeah, two guys out hunting apparently knew about the old cabin and were going to use it as their base camp. When they saw us,” Kim indicated her raw ear, “it scared them both, and one of them took a shot at me.”

“It didn’t seem to matter that we were both wearing clothes and standing upright on our hind legs,” Yuki remarked. “Maybe they thought we were aliens or mutant animals, but we ran and they chased us through the woods until it got too dark, playing cat and mouse with us all evening.”

“We had to r-run for our very lives!” Kim wailed, gingerly touching her injury. “I almost l-lost an ear!”

“There was no way she wasn’t going to get an infection,” Yuki continued, “so we knew we had to come back. We didn’t even have a First Aid kit to treat it.” She looked down at her hands and wrung them together. “We had no idea where the others went, so we just ran down the mountain as fast as we could go. The hunters almost caught up to us several times, but we finally lost them when it got too dark. We could see their flashlights behind us, but the dark slowed them down, although we still had enough light to see by.”

“I was so tired and hungry, r-running and hiding so much,” Kim said wearily, “but we had to keep going to lose those guys.”

Yuki licked her lips, looking over at the director’s water cooler in the corner and wishing she could have a drink. If Marcelo had noticed, he made no offer to her. She swallowed and let out a loud sigh.

“We finally stumbled upon a small farmhouse,” she went on. “We didn’t want to risk getting shot again, so we decided not to knock on the door to ask for help. We didn’t think they would miss one or two small chickens, so we crept into the hen house to help ourselves.” The canine looked up at Avon with a look of irony. “Their mangy farm dog ratted on us and got the chickens all stirred up with his barking before we could grab one.”

“I got tangled up in the chicken wire fence and we couldn’t get away before the farmer and his wife caught us,” Kim admitted. “He almost shot us on sight out of fear with that huge double-barrel shotgun he had, but we gave ourselves up.”

“We gave them a frantic explanation about what we were, but they’d never heard of the Institute, even though they knew there was some large organization out here. Finally, the wife called the sheriff and when he got there, he confirmed our story about the Institute to them.”

Yuki rubbed her eyes and little bits of dust dropped from her fur into her lap. “We simply told the sheriff that we’d gotten separated from the others during an outing. That’s when he called you.” Both sisters fell silent and neither the director nor the grizzly said anything more.

Marcelo folded his hands on top of his desk. “I will inform headquarters,” he said after several long moments. “They will need to send agents out to the farm to extend our apologies and they’ll likely have to pay them hush money to keep quiet about you two; we certainly don’t want word of this broadcast on the local news.”

He leaned back in his chair and absently tugged on his chin beard. “Seeing as how you tried to come back on your own,” he said after a moment of thought, “I won’t submit you two to disciplinary action. However, you’re both confined to the Educational Wing for a week; no trips to the Shoppette, the main cafeteria, out to the lake or anywhere else.”

“Yes sir. Thank you, sir,” Kim murmured quietly.

“Thank you,” echoed Yuki, relieved that they wouldn’t be punished for striking out on their own.

“Now go on,” Marcelo told them. “Clean up first and then go see your respective physicians. You’ll need to be treated for your injuries and they will also want to check you over after your experiences. I will come by later and give you a proper explanation of everything that’s happened since you’ve been gone, as well as the reason you were dropped off in the woods.”

Kim and Yuki nodded in unison and then stood up together. Avon moved to the door and opened it for them, but closed it behind them after they had gone.

“What do you think of their story?” the director asked him.

The grizzly eased himself into one of the wide chairs made specifically for Furs his size. “The wounds on Kim’s ear were real,” he replied crossing his arms with his chin down on his chest, “but I’m not so sure the whimpering and stuttering was.”

“That was my assessment as well,” Marcelo said with a nod. “You’ll need to watch those two, my friend. When you set up your colony, you’ll want to know where everyone stands ahead of time. You’ll be facing enough dangers from the world itself without having it rot from within.”

Chapter 10

Accusations

Travis Tyndall sat up against the firing range backstop out on the perimeter of the clearing near the back side of the Institute complex, the end of his shaved tail lying across his lap. The stitches across his face and neck had been removed earlier that evening, and although the scars still stung, he was glad to be rid of the bandages.

Ever since the Furs had returned to the Institute, he had refrained from interacting with his housemates – not that anyone wanted anything to do with him – although for the sake of harmony in the Wing, Ellie had at least attempted to be civil; despite this, he closed himself away even from her.

He was frustrated with everything and everyone, and most specifically with himself. He had worked so hard to gain Kristen’s trust and then he had ruined it all in one moment by letting his hormones loose at the first opportunity, which had never been his plan. His spontaneous reaction to her unintentional tail baring had surprised even him. He had reacted without conscious thought, as if his animal instincts had taken over completely in that instant.

He knew he would never get another chance with her – or with any other female here for that matter. His only hope for a companion now lay in the hopes that he could befriend someone in the next class to follow. From the director’s announcements, it looked like it might be quite some time before a Canis colony was approved, with the next two being Ursis and Vulps, so he would have to bide his time and hope there were a few women in the upcoming Class Seventeen he could befriend. Should that opportunity present itself, he would have to be on his best behavior, no matter what his hormones wanted him to do.

He sat in the dark, his legs crossed and his PBJ turned off at his side. He had let the sun disappear behind the mountains and now the stars were out with just the sliver of the waxing crescent moon. With mosquitoes buzzing around his ears, Travis knew he should probably head back inside to his room, so he gathered up his tablet and got to his hind feet.

Also out in the night air was Rose Fleur. Her confidence had been shaken ever since she had broken up with Kevin over an issue that should have been minor. Unfortunately, Rose had let her temper get the best of her and now her young ex-boyfriend had been spending his free time since their return sitting with the other fennec fox in the hospital wing. She did not fault Erin for getting injured, but she was still miffed that Kevin was spending so much time with her. Rose felt he should be trying to patch up his own relationship with herself instead.

The young vixen paced around the walking trail that circled the small lake on the grounds, and although there were no lights along the path, she could see well enough with the starlight and a sliver of moonlight.

When she recognized Travis walking toward her in the dark, her first reaction was a rush of adrenaline from a brief spike of fear, but then her mind took over and calmed her. Although the German shepherd could be rude and impulsive, she recognized him as someone who was probably just lonely and only wanted a companion. This was something she understood about herself, and instead of fearing Travis, she suddenly had pity for him. Perhaps they could help each other.

As they neared one another, the canine stepped off the path to put a little distance between her and himself, but otherwise he did not speak or acknowledge her. He did, however, pull his shaved tail out of sight to hide it beneath the hem of his furman robes. To his surprise, however, the vixen did not avoid him as everyone else typically did when around him.

“Hello, Travis,” she said courteously.

He paused in mid-step and looked over at her cautiously. “Hello, Rose,” he mumbled in return.

“How are you doing?” she asked in a pleasant voice. Travis was suddenly on his guard. No one who talked nice to him was just nice to be nice.

“I’m getting better,” he replied quietly. “Got my stitches out today.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Rose said. She stepped closer to him and he instinctively backed away. His sandal caught on a stone that bordered the path and he flung his arms out as he fell. Rose snared his wrist and pulled him back upright, but when she did not let go of him, the canine’s eyes locked with hers in the darkness.

“Uhm, thanks,” he murmured, unused to anyone coming to his aid.

“You’re welcome,” the vixen said quietly. She pulled his arm forward and then threaded hers around it. “Come on, we’ll walk together to make sure you’re stable.”

Travis was about to retort that he did not need any help, but as she began walking with him arm in arm, he swallowed the words and nodded. “Thank you,” he acknowledged again. “I’ve been a little unsteady lately.” He did not know what game she was playing at, since Rose had never shown even the slightest interest in him before, so he was on his guard against some kind of trap.

While they walked, the vixen looked over at him with a smile. Her eyes roved over his profile, and although it was marred by his injuries, his canine features were far from homely. His furman development had given him a prominent, angular nose, a thin face and good black and brown coloring in his facial fur. Even his wavy brown human scalp hair fit in nicely between a pair of upright triangular ears. She had always felt that he looked nice, even back when he was fully human, but his attitude had long distracted her from looking deeper.

Travis returned her gaze, his brownish-gold canine eyes peering into her reddish-orange vulpine eyes. He had always thought that a fox’s eyes resembled those of a cat more than a dog, and their color fascinated him even in the dark. Even though he enjoyed her attention, he was wary of her

“Rose…” he began quietly, “what are you doing?”

“What do you mean?” she replied innocently.

He raised their elbows together slightly as they walked. “This, and you’re being nice to me.”

“You don’t like me being nice to you?”

Travis blinked and shook his head. “Yes, I like it, but I’m not exactly everyone’s favorite Fur right now,” he replied. “It’s probably better if you kept your distance.”

The vixen shrugged her shoulders and she chuckled. “I think you’re okay,” she told him. “I’ve just never had an opportunity to get closer to you before now.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really,” Rose replied. “I think what happened with Kristen was a mistake, and I figured that you could probably use a friend about now.”

Travis raised an eyebrow. He really wanted to believe her. “Yes, I could use a friend,” he admitted. “Thank you.”

She chuckled and then playfully swatted his behind with her tail. The canine narrowed his eyes at her and tentatively pulled her closer with their interlocked arms. There was no resistance and she leaned into his shoulder with a smile.

Unknown to either of them, there was another silent shadow in the darkness that followed a short distance behind and downwind of them. Dahlia padded along the path on all fours, keeping her head down and her eyes locked upon her sister in the presence of the enemy of all women, be they human or furman. She could not hear their quiet conversation from her position behind them, but she suspected that Travis had somehow sweet-talked her sister into walking with him.

The trailing vixen scowled at the thought of the would-be rapist getting familiar with her sibling and she quickened her pace to get nearer.

Rose was privately surprised with herself. She was familiar with Travis’ reputation and knew about his recent trespass against her mountain lioness friend, yet he was being courteous and even receptive to her open flirting. In all her dreams, she would never have approached the canine this way, but her emotions were still a little raw from her breakup and despite his transgressions, the canine furman seemed a decent guy when he was not openly leering at someone.

“Travis,” she said quietly, “I’ve heard that you prefer plump women, but do you think I’m attractive?”

Travis gave her his best charming smile. “Since you’ve asked my opinion, yes, I do think you are attractive. Quite the fox, actually,” he answered. “Pun fully intended.”

Rose stopped and turned to look at him with an open smile, and was pleased when he leaned in to give her a brief kiss on the side of her muzzle. There was a momentary look of uncertainty on his face as though he thought she might slap him, but when she only grinned back at him, he became optimistic.

From Dahlia’s vantage point behind them where she could not hear the words of their conversation, it appeared as if Travis was coming onto her sister. She snarled quietly and snuck closer. It was apparent that neither of them had noticed her presence.

Encouraged by Rose’s expectant look, Travis pulled his arm free of their elbow lock and then slipped his hand up her shoulder, matching it with his other hand to gently pull her toward him. She willingly leaned closer with no resistance, so he kissed her again, this time right on the lips. Kissing this way was not as easily done as it would as a human, but was no less pleasurable.

Before Rose could really respond, however, there came a loud angry shriek from behind them. Both of them started in surprise, but Dahlia did not give either of them time to react. The older vixen pushed them apart and then slapped Travis hard across the face, right upon the tender scars of his nose and cheeks. The canine yelped in surprise and pain, and then Dahlia punched him hard in the stomach, all before Rose could stop her.

Travis doubled over, falling to his knees, and Dahlia grabbed her sibling by the arm; she pulled her away at nearly a run, trying to put distance between them before Travis could get up.

“Come on!” she commanded. “We’ve got to get away from him!”

“Stop!” Rose squeaked, but her sister was not listening to her. The younger vixen pulled against her, and although Dahlia felt the resistance, she picked up the pace.

Nearly unseen in the darkness, the vulpine sisters passed Norman. The bear had heard Dahlia’s shriek and had come running, arriving just in time to see the fox attack the German shepherd.

Growling beneath his breath and sure that the lecherous dog had just tried to assault yet another female Fur, he rushed forward to the lake path. Travis was on his knees with an arm across his middle, but when Norman reached his side, the bear hit the canine against the side of his head with a large fist. Travis bowled over in the grass toward the lake, having not even seen his new attacker; he came to rest against a large rock surrounded by cattails at the edge of the water.

Norman picked him up by the scruff of his neck and Travis struggled to get to his feet. The brown bear grabbed the dog’s robe top and then shoved their noses together.

“You have the nerve to attack another woman after what just happened to you?” he growled at the canine, meaning the embarrassment of Travis’ shaved tail.

“I didn’t!” the German shepherd bellowed. “I’m innocent!”

“Yeah, right!” Norman growled. He grabbed one of Travis’ arms in a vice-like grip and tugged him toward the director’s office. Travis kicked at him and yelled at him proclaiming his innocence, but the bear tuned him out all the way across the grounds to the administrator.

All the shouting and commotion from Travis had alerted Marcelo before they had even reached his office. The director had just been closing up for the night, but when he saw who it was that Norman was dragging to him, he scowled and held the door open for them. Travis continued to kick at the bear all the way inside, adding many choice insults with scathing profanity.

When Norman shoved the canine into one of the seats in front of the director’s desk, Marcelo picked up a sawed-off wooden axe handle from a spot behind the door. He shoved one end of it in Travis’ face and leaned forward angrily.

“What have you done now, Tyndall?” Marcelo asked with the wooden handle up against the canine’s nose.

“Nothing!” Travis shouted back at him. “Rose and I were having a quiet walk around the lake when—”

“Shut it!” Norman growled, shoving on the canine’s shoulder. “I saw Dahlia save her sister from your clutches!” He turned to Marcelo. “She slapped him and then stomach punched him to get Rose away from him!”

“Travis, is this true?”

The canine bared his teeth at the bear. “You’ve got it wrong!” he seethed. “Dahlia attacked me! I wasn’t doing anything wrong!”

“Why would she attack you if you’d done nothing wrong?” the director countered with a sneer.

“I dunno!” Travis shouted loudly. “Maybe she was jealous that I kissed her sister!”

“So you did go after Rose!” Norman interjected. “What did you try to do to her?”

The German shepherd was furious that the whole situation had been turned around against him. “She was being nice to me!” he yelled back. “She encouraged me to kiss her!”

“You’re so egotistical to think any female here would ever want to kiss you after what you did to Kristen!” Norman roared at him. He rushed forward again, but Marcelo put the blunt end of the axe handle against his chest.

“Norman, don’t,” he warned.

“I’ve done nothing wrong! I swear it!” Travis complained loudly. “Ask her! Just ask Rose!”

***

The youngest of the Fleur sibling sat on the couch in the pit of the Vulps Wing, her head down in her hands. Both Jasmine and Dahlia were simultaneously ranting at her for allowing herself to get that close to a rapist, but no matter how much Rose tried to defend Travis, neither of them would listen to what they knew were delusions.

She finally stood up and screamed at them both. “He! Did! Not! Attack! Me!” she yelled in clipped words. “I encouraged him!”

“No you didn’t!” Dahlia shot back. “I saw what he was about to do to you!”

“You saw nothing!” Rose exclaimed. “I wanted his attention!”

“Not him!” Jasmine said angrily. “Not Travis!”

“Yes! I! Did!”

When both Dahlia and Jasmine shouted back at her for insanity, Rose balled up her fists and yelled at them, “Stop it! Just stop it!” and then she jumped up out of the pit and ran for her room. She slammed the door behind her and lunged for her bed amidst the tears of anger and frustration.

Marcelo arrived a few minutes later; Jasmine and Dahlia set upon him immediately, but he brushed them off and went to Rose’s door.

“Rose,” he called out to her. “I need to speak to you about Travis Tyndall.”

“Go ‘way!” she screamed through the panel. “Everybody – just leave me alone!”

Marcelo turned away in frustration and saw both of the young vixen’s sisters standing nearby, both with their arms crossed in anger.

“What happened?” he asked Dahlia. “You were there.”

“I was!” she assured him. “Rose wanted to join us when we went to the cafeteria for a late snack, so I went out looking for her. She likes to walk the lake trail at night, so when I went out there to find her, I saw Travis trying to take advantage of her.”

“How? What did you see?”

“He was forcing her to walk with him, his arm locked in hers, and then he grabbed both her shoulders and forced a kiss on her!”

“Travis claims that she was being nice to him and encouraged him.”

“Yes, I’m sure he would say that!” Dahlia spat out. “If I hadn’t been there, you’d probably be filing another rape attack on him!”

“I need to talk to Rose,” the director said calmly.

“She’s too distraught,” Jasmine replied. “She won’t talk to anyone right now.”

Marcelo turned to Dahlia. “Will you sign a sworn statement as to what you just told me?”

“I’ll sign it right now! He’s guilty, I swear it!”

***

“Travis Tyndall,” Marcelo stated in the presence of Avon, Dr. Aristotle, Dr. Ramirez and Professor Flynn in a locked room of the hospital wing, “according to a sworn statement, you have been implicated in yet another rape attempt, this time upon Rose Fleur. This is only days since your transgression against Kristen Eisenberg and this kind of action will not be tolerated at this Institution. Have you anything to say for yourself?”

Travis bared his teeth at the lot of them. “She set me up,” he growled. “She convinced me that she felt sorry for me and that I should be given another chance, but she had her sister and that bear waiting for me to fall for her trap! I’m innocent – this time! I admit I screwed up with Kristen, but I did nothing wrong against Rose!” his voice rose in pitch as he shouted in rage, “I was set up!”

Marcelo merely rolled his eyes at what he thought were Travis’ theatrics and he turned to Professor Flynn.

“Angelina, I hate to do this to you, but I’m turning Mr. Tyndall over to you for sensitivity counseling,” he said calmly. “It will be mandatory daily until further notice.”

“I swear to you that I will get even with Rose and everyone else involved with this!” Travis shouted. “This wasn’t my fault! She led me on and you all believed her because of my record! I promise you that I’ll get even!”

The professor looked back at the canine’s face contorted with rage and then she crossed her arms. This was not going to be a pleasant assignment.

Chapter 11

Man V Cat

“After you’ve caught and eaten most of the fish, set aside several of the bones.” Jon placed ten thin rib bones on a flat rock in front of his small audience. It had been a week since the Furs’ return to the Institute and everyone had fallen back into daily routines. Anyone who had shown any kind of survival experience during the recent trek had since become instructors themselves. It did not matter if what they taught was considered major or minor, but the sharing of knowledge was sought after.

The mountain lion had become one such instructor, and although what he taught today was nothing that had been needed during their recent experience, the subject could be of use in the future.

Wearing only shorts, Jon stood waist deep in water near the banks of the lake and washed his hands of the slimy residue from the fish he had just cleaned. Closely watching from seated positions upon the grass were Kevin, Dante, Jenni, Sissy, Ivan and Dara, each eating the raw portions of Jon’s fish. Also in attendance just to see an instructor at work was the director, Marcelo.

Jon picked up a small hand towel draped across the flat rock he used as a table and dried his hands. Without looking at his audience, he picked up one of the fish bones.

“Since the bone is rounded, you’ll first want to flatten the broad end before you attempt to drill a hole in it or it will roll on you. You can use sandpaper or a file if you have one, or something like this rock should work too.” Using shortened fingers with permanently extended claws made handling the small bone a challenge, but after several false starts, he managed to hold down one end enough so that he began scraping it against the rock. “You will want to do this while the bone is still soft,” he added as he worked. “If you wait until it’s dried, it may become too brittle for this particular task.”

He held up the bone and examined the end that he had just sanded a flat spot on its curved surface. “It doesn’t have to be real flat, but you’ll want to do opposite sides. Once that’s done, you’ll need a small drill.” He held up the bone in one hand and a tiny drill bit in the other.

“Put the bone on your work surface and hold it steadily in one hand, and then roll the drill between your fingers to make a small hole in the place you just flattened. If you choose a bone that’s too small, you won’t be able to drill a hole big enough for your thread.”

The cougar worked with the drill bit for a few minutes, and as he worked, several in his audience scooted closer toward the water’s edge for a better look. When he finally broke through and worried the bit around to smooth the edges of the hole, Sissy applauded. Jon looked up with a smile, simultaneously surprised at how much closer she, Kevin and Dante had gotten to his work. The others behind them looked irritated at having to look over them to see. Jon merely gestured for them to get closer as well.

Once everyone could see well enough, Jon held up the fish-bone needle he had just made. The business end of the needle was tapered to a sharp point and the other now had a hole in it for thread or line to be used.

“Once it’s finished, just rinse it off,” he did this as he spoke, “and then set it aside to dry. Since this one is fresh out of its fish, I’d let the bone dry for several days before I would try to sew anything with your new needle. Lemon juice would help speed up the process and give you a clean, white bone, but you may not have lemons available wherever you’re going. You can make needles of various sizes for different purposes, and you don’t even have to use fish bone. We’ll be taking along our own cattle, sheep and other critters with us, and when one of them dies or is killed for food, bone is just one of the things you can harvest from them for other uses.”

He handed the finished needle to Sissy so she could look at it and then pass it around. Once it made its rounds, Jon gestured to several other flat rocks he had lined up near the water’s edge. “I won’t make you go fishing since I already have several good bones here, but if you’ll all come and get a bone and a drill bit, you can all make one of your own.”

Moments later, Marcelo approached the mountain lion while the others were busy working on their needles. He crouched beside Jon’s rock and nodded to him.

“It looks like things are going well,” he said in a quiet voice, “but do you really think making bone instruments is a skill you’ll need? We will equip you with a supply of them made of carbon steel, you know.”

Jon shrugged. “I’ve been told that once we set up camp out there, we’ll also be required to explore those new worlds,” he said. “You never know when an exploring party will be away from camp and may need something they forgot to bring along.”

“Do you think a rip in your robe or those special jeans of yours won’t wait until you get back to sew it up?”

Jon chuckled. “Probably not the clothes, but you might need to sew up a gash in someone’s arm or leg if there’s an injury.”

The director pursed his lips. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted, “but would you be more likely to have a needle or a drill bit with you on a hike?

Jon glanced at him sideways and twitched his whiskers. “Okay, I hadn’t thought of that either.”

Marcelo looked amused. “It’s probably still a good skill to have. What would you use for thread?”

The mountain lion gave him a big smile. “That’s next week’s lesson.”

“Jon, I need another drill,” Dara said from the other end of the line of students.

“Another?”

“Yeah, I dropped mine in the water. I have bigger fingers and claws, y’know?”

Jon rolled his eyes over to Marcelo, who merely smiled back at him. “Maybe you need an awl,” he said to the polar bear. “It has a handle you could hold onto.”

“Can I have one of those too?” Dante asked, just as his drill flipped out of his claws and plunked into the water in front of him. The tiger looked at his hand paw with a frown. It was shaking, so he made a fist and then plunged it into the cool water to search for his bit. He was thankful no one else had seen it, embarrassed that holding onto something as small as a drill had obviously made his hand cramp up.

“Maybe this part of the lesson should be done up on the path instead of next to the water,” Marcelo suggested.

“Good idea. Okay, class, let’s pull your rocks, bones and drill bits up to the pathway so you can practice. I’ll go grab more bits and a couple of awls and will be back in a few minutes.”

Despite the cold water, Dante was unable to keep his hand from shaking so he hid it inside of his robe top so no one else would notice. I’ve gotta cut down on my caffeine, he thought to himself.

***

Kristen closed her eyes and let out another soft sigh. She was curled up on one of the waiting benches of the Hospital Wing, her knees up to her chest. Everyone had treated her well enough in the week since they had returned from their trek, but it was her daily sessions with the Institute’s counselor that helped get her through the days. She still had difficulty looking anyone in the eyes, especially if it was a male, so to give her the opportunity to think of something else, she had been visiting Erin in the hospital, staying several hours at a time – or at least until Kevin came in to see his counterpart. He had already been in there today when she had arrived a bit ago, but she did not feel like going back to her room.

“Doctor Allcome to the ER!” blared an announcement across the hospital intercom system. “Code Cyan – I repeat, this is a Doctor Allcome emergency, Code Cyan!”

Kristen looked up curiously when three physicians appeared out of side doors on the second floor where she sat and they rushed down the hall to the stairs. A few more heads peered out of the doorways, but no one else went running. She dropped her head back to her chest. She had never heard of code cyan before in a hospital setting, but considering that most of the patients here would be furmankind, she supposed it was something relating to one of the hybrid physiologies.

Restless, she got up from the bench seat and padded over to Erin’s room on all fours. She peeked in through the door and saw Kevin sitting beside the fennec woman’s bed, reading Sissy’s Daily Mail to her from his PBJ. The walls of the room were the same pale aquamarine color that was used out in the hallway, but they seemed brighter and cleaner due to the sunlight streaming in through the second story window.

Erin turned her head toward the doorway, but Kristen backed out quickly. She did not want to disturb the couple, so she decided to come back later. She put her hands into the pockets of her furman robe and walked slowly toward the stairs at the far end of the hall. She had gotten used to wandering around only in her shorts when they were on their march, but ever since that canine had tried to take her in the woods, she was too afraid to go out with only her natural fur as a covering. Her hand bumped into the green PBJ in her pocket and she wrapped a hand around it absently.

When she neared the staircase, she looked up at the sound of hurried steps. Jon rounded the corner at the landing of the stairs halfway between the first and second floors and looked up at her with a harried expression on his face. He wore only shorts and the fur of his legs looked as if he might have been wading in water.

Kristen immediately wrapped both arms across her chest and moved to the wall farthest from him, but instead of moving past her, the male mountain lion stopped a few steps down from her.

“Kris!” he exclaimed with a tight voice, “They’ve just taken Dante to the ER!”

“What? Why?” she asked in surprise. She had not wanted to talk to him, but at his remark, she wanted to know what he knew. Jon gestured toward the stairs behind him and she quickly followed.

“He went into convulsions out by the lake during a training class,” the cougar told her in quick explanation.

“What happened?”

“We thought he might be having more transformation issues, but he’s delirious and acting as if he doesn’t know anyone. I think there’s more to it than genetic changes; it could be a stroke.”

“He’s too young…” Kristen whispered.

They stepped out onto the ground floor of the hospital and the relative quiet of the upper floor vanished in a cacophony of voices. Doctors, nurses, medics, orderlies and others all seemed to be trying to talk at the same time while moving en masse through a large set of double doors.

Standing by herself against a wall near the administrative counter was Jenni. She wore only a pair of furman shorts, but she had her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes were moist as they darted from one person to the next in hopes that someone would tell her what had happened. To anyone who knew the leopard, it was apparent that she had developed real feelings for the white tiger in the months they had all been together, despite all their talk of keeping their relationship casual and playful only for the duration of their stay at the Institute.

She looked around and saw her wing mates walking toward her. Jon looked worried and Kristen looked sorrowful, but when the mountain lions approached, Jenni jumped forward and hugged them both together.

“Have they said anything?” Kristen asked.

“Nothing,” Jenni responded, shaking her head. “I’ve been politely told to stay out of the way, and that’s it.”

“I’ll find Doc Renwick and he’ll give us some answers,” Jon grumbled.

“He’s the one who told me to stay out of the way,” Jenni told him.

“C’mon,” Jon said, leading her toward a row of unpadded seats. “They’ll tell us something when they can.”

***

Two days had passed since Dante was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of the Hospital Wing, and in that time little information had been passed on to those who called him friend.

Although they had not been officially released from their studies, none of the Felis Wing volunteers made an attempt to concentrate on them. Fortunately for them, their instructors were sympathetic so the three of them were either spending their time in the waiting room of the hospital or back in the saloon pit of their wing.

Doctor Renwick walked in through the front door of the Felis Wing and made his way to his patients. Jon looked up from a news site on his PBJ at one end of a curved couch, but neither Jenni nor Kristen appeared to notice him. Both were lying amongst several large pillows they had piled up in the middle of the pit after they had moved the table out.

“Dr. Renwick,” Jon acknowledged quietly. The women looked up at his words and both were suddenly attentive.

“I have news,” said the copper-haired physician. Everyone looked at him expectantly when he pursed his lips. “Things have been going well for all of you in the past months of your transformations,” he began, “but as you’ve suspected, something has gone wrong with Dante’s progress.”

“What… happened?” Jenni ventured, an icy feeling rising along the ridge of her back.

Likewise, Jon’s throat constricted at the doctor’s words. They had been given so many assurances of how safe and successful the process was that he had not been concerned for weeks now. “Who botched it?” he asked accusingly.

Renwick fixed him with a momentary icy glare but then shook off the intimidation. “Nothing was botched,” he responded defensively, “and the trouble has nothing to do with anything we’ve done to him.”

“What then?” Kristen asked, sitting up on her haunches.

Renwick put both hands into the pockets of his medical smock, a stance for him they were all familiar with. “You all know Dante. He’s admitted how much he really enjoys his new life as a Fur – relishing enhanced senses, greater agility and strength. Well, it seems that Dante’s subconscious has different ideas about it and is rejecting the species duality, and that has caused a chemical imbalance in his brain and nervous system.”

“What does that mean?” Jenni asked, swallowing with difficulty.

“Basically, there is an internal struggle between the human and the tiger, something that does sometimes happen to a few who undergo the process. It’s taken us this long to determine the cause of Dante’s current dilemma, but now that we know what’s taking place, we can try to treat him.”

“Try to treat him?” Jon echoed.

“We can try to bring the chemicals in his brain into balance, but because it is primarily psychological, his system is still producing them in irregular quantities.

“He will get better,” Jenni asked quietly. “Won’t he?”

Renwick began to nod, but then he stopped to consider his words. “That will depend upon Dante,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, giving her the truth. “If he cannot rein in both sides of his new nature, there will be a physiological breakdown as well as psychological.” He gave the leopard female a look of compassion and added, “However, if his subconscious has the strength to accept what he is, he will pull through this and be stronger for it.”

“Why did it have to be him?” Kristen asked bitterly, scowling directly at Jon. “After all, you’re the one who hates all Furs! You should be the one having an internal conflict for the thing you’re becoming. Dante doesn’t deserve this!”

Renwick expected Jon to blow up at the accusation and immediately prepared to counter the explosion, but instead the male cougar surprised them all by simply nodding.

“Yes,” Jon said calmly, “that should be me. Dante and I may have had our differences, but he doesn’t deserve this.” Jenni and Kristen were both somewhat startled by his remark, but Kristen recovered quickly.

“Doctor Renwick, why isn’t this happening to Jon?” she asked in frustration. “You know his past, why he’s here and what he thinks about Furs.”

The tall physician merely shook his head and looked at the male cougar. “I’m curious too. As much as Dante has accepted his duality, his subconscious should be supporting him. With all the dreams and nightmares you’ve had, Jon, why aren’t you in this state instead?”

Jon did not even have to think about his answer before he replied. “Professor Flynn has helped me through my fears,” he replied. “I haven’t had any anxieties or nightmares for at least two weeks and I think even my subconscious has realized that I am accepting what I am, Doc.”

“What about Dante?” Jenni asked, bringing the topic back to the one who was suffering.

“We can try to help him medically,” Renwick replied, “but ultimately it will be up to Dante to accept or reject his hybrid nature. As far as I know, he’s never sought out counseling since he’s been here, probably thinking he’s had no mental issues to work out – but there seems to be some internal demon he’s battling now. You are all so close to being at the end of your transformation periods, and there’s still to be some internal changes, but it will be up to each of you to reach that finish line on your own.”

He cleared his throat and looked at each of them in turn for a moment. “If any of you are so inclined, you may wish to pray for Dante or offer up whatever good luck you may.”

“When can we see him?” Kristen asked.

“You can see him now, if you wish,” the doctor replied, “but in his current mental state, he may not acknowledge or even recognize any of you. His mind is in a confused state, so whatever you say or do in his presence, please remain calm and don’t upset him if at all possible.”

He paused and then said, “You’ve known Dante as a human with animal tendencies added into the mix over time, but right now the Panthera tigris altaica – his Bengal white tiger – is dominant. It’s confused and frightened, and that also makes it dangerous. He injured an orderly when he was first brought in, so his hands and feet are currently wrapped up in Kevlar mitts to keep him from hurting anyone else. He’s also sedated, but we can’t knock him out completely since we have to allow his psyche the opportunity to work out its internal issues. Just be careful when you see him.”

“He’ll recognize me,” Jenni assured her companions, “and he’d never hurt me!”

“Then let’s go,” Jon said, closing up his PBJ. “Seeing you may help his troubled mind.”

***

When the trio reached the curtain of the ICU cubicle where Dante was being monitored, Jon and Kristen stopped by unspoken agreement to let Jenni go in first. The leopard female tentatively pulled back the edge of the screen and peered inside.

Flanked by softly beeping monitors on both sides of his wheeled bed, Dante lay on his back beneath a single white sheet. His legs and feet were spread out wide, his hand paws were curled up at his chest and his tail hung over one side of the bed. Feet and hands were both encased in grey mitts and all were moving independently in quiet agitation. The anthro male’s head was thrown back up against a thin pillow behind his neck, his brown scalp hair splayed out in disarray, and the great feline jaws were opening and closing in an unsettled motion. His large blue eyes refused to stay still, roving from one point in the room to another as if there were too many things to see at once.

Jenni choked back a sob, putting her hands up to her mouth to silence the cry that wanted out at the sight of her friend and lover. Without thinking about it, Jon moved forward and looked into the room over her head. He felt a lump in this throat. Although the form in the bed resembled his housemate, Jon almost did not recognize the guy. Kristen peered around them quietly and her reaction was jaw-dropping astonishment. She closed her mouth abruptly, causing her teeth inadvertently to clack together.

The sound attracted Dante’s attention and his roaming eyes suddenly stopped, locking onto the trio at the curtain screen around his room. His ears flattened against his skull and a growl began to form in his throat, but then his eyes opened so wide they could see their whites and his whole demeanor changed. He clutched at the sheet with his mittens and began to shriek in abject terror.

His friends could not know that when he saw their hybrid faces, the confused state of his mind saw only indistinct monsters as if he had never seen their like before. The horrible furred abominations staring at him with demonic eyes were there to eat him alive, to devour his bones with serrated teeth and rend his flesh with sharp claws.

Dante screamed in absolute horror and began thrashing around on his bed. He pulled the air tube from his nostrils and then knocked over the heart monitor near his pillow, causing its screen to crack when it hit the floor.

Jon rushed in to try to hold him down, but when the mountain lion grabbed his arms, Dante hissed and yowled at the other feline, striking at him furiously. Several orderlies pushed Jenni and Kristen aside abruptly, and then Jon was unceremoniously shoved out of the curtained room.

Doctor Renwick stepped past them, a syringe with a thick hypodermic needle in one hand. Four men were struggling to hold down the thrashing tiger’s limbs, while another avoided the feline’s powerful snarling jaws.

Renwick darted in and shoved the needle into Dante’s hip, but it took a moment for the injection to take effect. Jenni clung to Jon for support, her eyes riveted to the commotion and Kristen stood behind them with both hands pressed up to her chin.

Nurse Marcy was suddenly in front of them, quietly drawing the curtain closed. They looked at her all in shock and surprise, but she pressed a finger up to her lips. Without waiting for acknowledgement, she tugged at Jenni’s arm gently, drawing the three of them away toward the admin counter.

“Go back to the Wing,” she said in hushed tones. “Visitation is over for now.”

“But—” Jenni began.

The platinum-haired nurse shook her head. “Don’t argue. Dante’s state is too confused and frightened right now and apparently your presence is only agitating him. I’ll let you know when you can see him again.”

“Will he be okay?” Kristen whispered, swallowing with difficulty.

“I don’t know,” Marcy answered truthfully. “I can’t tell you any more than that.”

***

The walk across the grounds back to the Felis Wing was quiet. Neither Jenni nor Kristen was in any mood to talk and Jon’s memory was fixated on the look of terror that Dante had given him. Seeing his wing mate like that affected Jon more than he had thought it would. Kristen was right. That should have been him in there. Why was someone with such an easy-going personality as Dante’s be struggling with the changes that he had claimed for months was exactly what he needed in life? It just did not make sense.

Professor Flynn had helped Jon through his anxieties for weeks, admitting his fears and working through his prejudices. That the person who had stolen his fiancé was a transformed Fur no longer mattered. He had originally focused only on that aspect of Henry Parker, but in the end Jon knew that whether he was human or furman was not the issue. He still hated Parker for what he had done and the fact remained that he had been guilty of stealing Rebecca away from him.

Now that Jon was himself a Fur, he knew from personal experience that he did not feel any different than he had before. His name had changed before he had received the injection that altered his outward appearance and although now close to the end of the transformation period, he still felt like the man he had always been. He was not an animal, he had not lost his soul and he was not a monster. He was a man; a furman, perhaps, but still a man.

When they got back to the Felis Wing, all three went back to the saloon pit without a word between them. However, none of them felt like being alone, so they each curled up on the pillows under the sunlight that streamed down from the overhead skylight, taking quiet comfort in one another’s presence.

Chapter 12

Eyes of the Tiger

What had gone wrong?

Dante had been as healthy as anyone else Jon had known at the Institute, and as far as anybody knew, the guy had never had any internal demons to plague him. In an effort to burn off pent-up energy from his concerns, Jon was in the exercise room of the Felis Wing. He lay flat on his back beneath a set of barbell weights, but since his torso was now longer than it used to be, his hips were hanging a little off the foot of the bench; this allowed his tail to dangle to the floor without mashing it beneath him. His toes were flat on the carpeting for stability as he lifted and lowered the weights. It had taken him some weeks to get used to his shortened fingers after they had changed with the transformation, but he had worked out a system to get a good grip on the weight bar with his padded palms and stubby digits.

He could bench press more, but due to his distracted thoughts, he had only put on one hundred pounds of weight with which to work out. Distraction could be potentially risky while lifting weights, so he tried to focus his attention fully upon his task.

The door to the exercise room opened and closed quietly, but he did not bother looking to see who it might be. A moment later, a shapely figure stopped beside his bench with her hands behind her.

“Hi, Jon,” the spotted leopard said in a quiet voice.

He shifted only his eyes, keeping his breath measured as he lifted the weights, merely grunting a response. Jenni stood beside him but did not meet his gaze. He noticed right away that she was not wearing her furman robe top, but that was nothing unusual as she and the resident vixens habitually had gone without them in the days since they had returned from their woodland trek.

What he did not notice right away but soon came to realize was that she was not wearing the shorts either. Aside of her natural fur, Jenni wore nothing at all. Although the background color of her belly was light beige contrasting with the darker gold of the rest of her, clusters of spots covered her entirely.

When the realization of her uncovered fur sank into his consciousness, he almost forgot what he was doing. Before he might hurt himself, Jon set the barbell upon the bench uprights and then used the horizontal bar to pull himself up into a sitting position.

He twitched an ear and boldly looked her up and down. “Are you reverting to your old nudist ways?” he quipped, swishing his tail unconsciously behind him.

Jenni appeared puzzled until she looked down at herself. “Oh…” she mumbled distractedly. “I forgot my shorts…” She leaned back against the wall with her hands behind her, making no effort to cover herself. It was pointless anyway, as the fur over her breasts and crotch was genetically designed to be longer and thicker than the rest of her pelt so that she was more than covered against prying eyes. The only thing she might have to remember would be to keep her thick tail down if she walked on all fours. At the moment, however, she seemed greatly preoccupied, staring across the room at a colorful National Geographic art print of the Lechuguilla Caverns that Dr. Aristotle had given Dante months earlier.

“Are you okay?” Jon asked with a frown.

The leopard turned to look at him and her eyes were rimmed with moisture. “I’m worried about Dante,” she simply stated, not taking her eyes off the art print, remembering that day she found out he had never actually been in the cave he had boasted about.

“If anyone can pull through this,” Jon said in a quiet voice, “it’s him. He’s irritating sometimes, but Dante has such a relaxed and free mind that it shouldn’t take long for his psyche to patch things up between his dual natures.”

“They said he has an inner demon. What if it’s too strong?” she replied in a whisper.

Despite that she and Dante had been claiming their relationship was nothing more than purely physical, Jon knew the emotion behind Jenni’s words belied stronger feelings.

“He’ll be okay,” he tried to reassure her, not at all feeling as confident as he sounded. Turning a human into a genetically enhanced hybrid of man and animal had its share of dangers. Whether or not his nightmares of them were valid, Jon sincerely hoped they were blowing the situation out of proportion.

When Jenni looked at him with a haunted expression, he knew what he needed to do. He stood up and simply opened his arms. A soft cry escaped her lips as the leopard woman jumped into his embrace, the tears coming freely now.

***

Dante opened his eyes, his breathing calm and shallow. He was lying on his right side, facing a pale blue curtain of some sort. There was a soft beeping from somewhere behind him and the air smelled strongly of antiseptic. He lay there for several moments, simply staring at the curtain in wonder that someone had redecorated his room without asking; he would have chosen dark green.

He thought he should get up and go see if anyone had started breakfast yet, but the white tiger closed his eyes instead. Something felt out of place and it was not just the curtain, but he could not place what it might be. The soft beeping behind him lulled him gently back to sleep and he allowed himself to drift off without resistance.

***

When he opened his eyes again, Dante raised a hand to his face, but instead of fingers touching his forehead, he felt a rough cloth surface brush his nose. He strained his eyes trying to identify the grey covering over his hand, but he remained puzzled. Am I wearing mittens?

He had difficulty focusing his eyes and he could feel a headache coming on from the effort, so he exhaled hard in frustration and closed his eyes again. The ear he was not lying on twitched at the sound of movement roused from his breath and then there was someone at his side.

“C’mon, Dante, wakey-wakey.”

The tiger looked up into the smiling green eyes of Marcy and he grinned back at her even if she was not fully in focus. The woman’s platinum hair fell around her shoulders as she bent over him and studied his eyes for clarity.

“Hi Mom,” he said in a quiet whisper. “Do I really have to go to school today?”

Marcy grinned and put a hand on his cheek. “No son, you’re going to stay in bed today. No getting up to play either.” Dante smiled at the light banter and closed his eyes again. “How do you feel?” the nurse asked.

The feline thought about it for a moment. “M’mouth is dry,” he muttered. “Gotta headache too.”

“Anything else?”

“Feels like I have something stuck up my nose. My sides ache… vision is blurred. Did someone beat me up? I don’ remember.”

“You have an oxygen tube in your nose,” Marcy replied, holding the straw from a water bottle up to his mouth, “but no one beat you up.”

Dante took a couple of tentative sips, but he found that was all he wanted. “Thank you,” he said, his voice a little clearer. He looked at her again, though still having trouble focusing his eyes. “What happened to me?”

“You collapsed out by the lake two days ago.”

“Two days?” he echoed. “I’ve been out that long?”

Marcy frowned, wondering how much to tell him. “You’ve been… awake a lot of the time,” she replied after a moment, “but I don’t think you were the one who was seeing us.”

“Huh?”

“Professor Flynn thinks your tiger was trying to take control.”

Dante stared at her for a long minute. “My tiger…? I thought I was the tiger… or am I now sharing my skull with a tiger’s brain?”

Marcy shook her head and absently brushed the bangs across her forehead. “I was being philosophical. It’s nothing more than your feline instincts, but your subconscious is feeding on them.”

“They must be awfully tasty. What was my tiger doing while I was out of it, embezzling my bank account to buy stock in Tender Moisties? Those things are good, by the way.”

The nurse chuckled. “I don’t know about that, but Angelina believes there’s been an internal struggle between the human and the tiger inside your subconscious; it was causing a chemical imbalance in your brain and nervous system.”

Dante thought about that for a moment. “Does this happen to all Furs, or am I special?”

“It’s not common, but it’s happened before to those who haven’t fully accepted their new species duality.”

“But… I have accepted my tiger!” Dante croaked. “I like being a Fur!”

Marcy smiled. “Everybody knows that, and you don’t know how much it pleases the lot of us that you do, but…” —she tapped his forehead lightly— “something up here doesn’t fully agree with you.”

The feline humanoid fell silent, frowning deeply. He struggled to sit up and Marcy gave him a hand. She raised the head of the hospital bed and fluffed up his pillow for him. Dante settled back and then looked at her with sad blue eyes.

“It’s not fair,” he muttered. “Jon hates being a cat, but he’s not in here, is he?”

“No, he’s not in here, but he’s very worried about you.”

“Why?”

“He once told me you were like a little brother.”

“An annoying little brother,” Dante corrected with an amused snort, “but my question was why isn’t he in here instead of me? He hates all this.”

“He and Angelina both seem to believe that he’s finally accepted his fate. He’s adjusted well over the past months and seems stable.”

“Yet I’m the one in a hospital, a kitten wearing mittens.” He held up both hands, and then looked down at his feet where he saw a matching pair of curious socks. “What are these for anyway?”

“Your claws are formidable weapons when you’re angry,” Marcy told him dryly. “We thought it best to cover them up so you don’t hurt anyone else.”

“Anyone else?” Dante repeated with a lump in his throat. “I hope my tiger didn’t kill anyone!”

“No, but Jeff will have some scars to remember his Residency here at the Institute.”

“The next time you see him, will you give him my apologies?” the feline asked quietly. “I wasn’t in my right mind.”

“He knows that, but I will tell him. Now, do you feel up to talking with Angelina? The Professor wanted to speak with you when you were cognizant again.”

Dante ducked his head with a deep frown. “I… don’t like shrinks,” he replied.

Marcy tilted her head slightly. “Oh? What do you have against them?”

The tiger did not say anything for a long moment, but he finally sighed and closed his eyes. “I was quite a troublemaker as a kid,” he admitted, “and my folks thought I had a screw loose. They sent me to several shrinks over three years before they divorced. They… the shrinks… played mind games with me, Marcy, and I think I was messed up more afterward than I was before I went to them.” He looked at the nurse and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m probably still messed up – probably why my inner tiger is rebelling.”

He closed his eyes and put his covered hands up to his face. The nurse looked down at her tablet to give him a moment, thinking he might be shedding a few tears, but when she looked back at him, he grimaced as if in pain.

“Dante, are you okay?”

“No, I’m not,” the monochrome feline mumbled. “My headache is getting worse.”

“Let me get something for you. I’ll be right back.”

“Thank you.”

As soon as she had disappeared through the curtains surrounding his little domain, Dante found the controls to his bed and lowered the head so that it was level again. He turned over onto his left side so that he was no longer on top of his tail and heaved a heavy sigh.

A moment later, the curtain rustled and someone peered in at him. Dante sniffed the air, but did not turn toward his visitor.

“Hi, Erin,” he said without looking.

The diminutive vixen took that as an invitation and stepped all the way into the room. “Hi, Dante,” her pixie-like voice replied. “How are you feeling?”

“I have scrambled eggs for brains and I feel like I’ve been in a losing fight with myself. I’m also nursing a migraine. How about you?”

Erin limped around the side of the bed he was facing, using a metal cane to walk with. She gave him a smile and then sat down on a small folding visitor chair beside him.

“I’m getting around a little,” she told him. “I’m out on a mandatory walk I have to do three times a day and thought I would look in on you.”

Dante’s head was throbbing, but he gave her a small smile. “I’m glad you did. You’d better not let the Amaranths see you limping, though.”

The fennec vixen looked at him in puzzlement. “Why’s that?”

“The wolves might think you’re wounded prey and try to take you down for dinner.” Despite the headache, there was a sparkle in his eyes at his joke.

“I will remember that,” she remarked with a frown.

“Oops…” he muttered, suddenly remembering the coyotes that had tried to take her as their dinner. “Oh, I’m sorry, Erin! I forgot! I’m so sorry!”

“It’s okay,” she assured him with a crooked smile. “I got the joke.”

He nodded, closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again to peer over at her. He started panting, and while she was looking at him, his eyes grew wide and the pupils began to dilate to large black spots. Before she could say anything, he gripped the edge of the bed with a mitten-covered hand.

“Why is your face changing?” Dante asked in a strained voice.

Erin clutched her cane with one hand and immediately put the other up to her cheek. The fur felt normal and the skin beneath was warm, so she moved her fingers over her forehead. “What’s wrong?” she asked in confusion.

Dante stared at her with bulging eyes and he began to pant. “Why are you doing that?” he asked in growing agitation. “Why would you want to?”

Erin was growing alarmed. Her face felt no different to her, so she jumped up and limped out of the room to find a mirror. She passed Marcy going out, but did not speak to her.

When the nurse entered through the curtain with a small pill and plastic cup of water, she saw the tiger sitting up on his haunches though weaving back and forth, the tip of his tail twitching vigorously. He pawed at nothing with his right hand as if he was trying to bat something from the air and his mouth was open in chuffed panting. Marcy set her items on a nearby roller stool and then rushed to his side.

“Dante!” she said in a quiet but stern tone. The feline turned his head toward the sound of her voice, but there was no color in his eyes; the pupils were completely dilated.

“Help me,” he mewed in a kitten-like manner.

Marcy took his hands in her own in an effort to give him comfort, but his reaction was unexpected. He issued a feline hiss with all his teeth bared and he tried to take a swipe at her. The nurse stumbled back to get out of his reach, his gloved paw barely missing her nose. The force of his strike moved the air at her cheek, blowing her bangs up on her forehead. He lost his balance from the action and fell back on the bed with an indignant shriek. In fury, he latched onto one of the Kevlar mittens with his teeth, worrying fiercely at the ties that held them in place and for a moment it looked as if he might succeed.

“Emergency in C7!” Marcy screamed as loudly as she could. “Emergency in C7! I need help!”

Dante twisted his flexible torso, desperate to find something to hold onto. Unable to remove the mittens, he grasped the cushion of his bed with both hands and pulled himself over onto his side, his feral gaze never leaving the fear-stricken eyes of his prey.

Before he could pounce, two orderlies burst into the room followed by a third. The first two approached Dante cautiously, holding up a sturdy net between them. The third orderly pulled Marcy back out of the way to safety and then she stepped forward with a handheld tranquilizer gun.

Dante crouched on the bed, his head down and shoulders bunched up as he prepared to launch himself at those who had intruded upon him. He growled and hissed, causing the orderlies to hoist the net a little higher. It was doubtful either one of them would be able to hold up the Felis tiger’s weight if he pounced, but the woman with the pneumatic gun was not going to give him the chance.

Before Dante could leap, she fired at the tiger’s shoulder. The feline jerked from the sharp stab and he paused to swipe at a red-feathered dart protruding from his fur. He knocked it loose with a yowl, but when he turned back to his attackers, the Fur’s eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped hard on the bed from the fast-acting drug. The two men with the net rushed forward to toss it over him, but Dante toppled off the bed onto the tile floor with a heavy thud.

The men approached cautiously, but the tiger merely lay on the floor panting heavily. He opened his eyes again and they were still widely dilated, but he did not appear to see anyone this time.

One of the orderlies tentatively tapped him with the toe of his shoe, but there was no retaliation. The sedative had done its work well enough for them to handle him now. They set the net aside and then gathered around him, the woman with the tranq gun joining them.

“Okay, all together now,” she said. The orderlies all slipped their hands underneath the Fur and then they lifted him up off the ground. Fortunately for them, the feline was not as heavy as a full grown pure tiger. They side-walked him back to the bed and then stretched him out on the cushion. Once they got him situated, they worked quickly to strap Dante’s hands and feet to the bed. His hybrid physiology would throw off the effects of the drug before long and already he seemed to be struggling to clear his head, chuffing clipped snorts.

The orderlies finished just in time. The anthro tiger raised his head off the bed and he began thrashing against the straps. Felines are flexible, and despite the straps that held each of his limbs in individual restraints, he writhed around and managed to slip his broad head beneath his left arm with a maddened growl.

The men held the net ready again in case he broke free while the woman rushed out to the supply cabinet to load up her tranq gun with another round. She nearly knocked Marcy over in her rush to get it, and the nurse stumbled backward off balance.

Dr. Aristotle had just arrived behind her and caught Marcy before she could fall, but his catch was more instinct because his attention was not on her but on the scene through the curtains of the ICU cubicle.

Dante squirmed around more, trying desperately to get free, but he only managed to wedge his head and throat further beneath his strapped arm.

Across the nurse’s monitoring station out of the way, Erin clutched at the countertop before her and watched in horror as the enraged tiger began to choke beneath his own arm.

The orderly with the tranquilizer gun returned and took careful aim at the feline Fur.

***

Kristen sat in front of the large video screen in the Felis Wing, but the unit was dark. Instead of watching mindless network streams, she sat on the carpeted floor with her back to the screen, a book on her PBJ screen on her lap resting against upright knees. She had been staring at the same two screens for the past half hour without actually reading them, unable to focus on the botanical collection of flora found on the other worlds where furmankind had settled. Like her housemates, she could not seem to give her full attention to anything.

A sound to her left drew her attention. Jenni closed the door to the exercise room behind her and then rushed to her room on all fours. Kristen’s eyes narrowed, noting immediately that the leopard female was dressed only in her fur – and she knew that Jon had been in the exercise room for the past hour. It did not matter that Jenni was sobbing as she ran; Kristen could only focus on the thought that she had been virtually naked behind closed doors with the other mountain lion.

A moment later, Jon emerged from the room and turned immediately toward the linen closet. He grabbed a powder blue towel, shook it out and then draped it across his shoulders. When he turned around, he spotted Kristen’s sharp gaze upon him, her eyes reflecting the sunlight streaming in through the overhead skylight. The look she gave him was anything but cordial.

Sighing inwardly to himself, he turned toward the restroom to clean up. Whatever the other feline was thinking about him with such a glare, he had no wish to find out.

Kristen stared after him for a moment longer and then looked back down at her book. Realizing that she would accomplish nothing, she tapped the screen to set a bookmark and then closed the covers.

Marcy came in through the front door and up the entry hall just as the lioness got to her feet, and when the platinum haired nurse saw her, she walked toward her with a dour expression on her face.

“Kristen, do you know where Jon and Jenni are?” she asked. “I need to see you all together; it’s urgent.”

A cold chill went down the botanist’s spine at her tone. “Jenni’s in her room and Jon’s in the shower.”

“I’ll get Jenni,” the nurse replied, promptly heading for the bedrooms. “You get Jon, please.” Marcy did not hear the derisive snort in response.

The female cougar went unwilling into the restroom and then directly to the shower stall where water was running. Without preamble, she whipped the curtain back and Jon looked over his shoulder at her in astonishment. Without looking at anything but his eyes, Kristen snarled and told him, “Marcy wants to see all of us right now, at this moment.”

She then turned her back on him and left the room quickly, leaving Jon stunned at her attitude. With a deep frown, he rinsed off the shampoo he had just applied to his fur and then grabbed his towel from the hook outside the stall.

A moment later, he stepped out of the restroom with the towel around his waist. He had not had time to step into the full-body dryer and had done nothing more than pat down his fur, so he dripped on the carpet walking across the saloon to the pit where the others were gathered. Jenni sat on one of the curved couches, Kristen sat across from her on the other couch and Marcy stood beside the pile of pillows in the middle of the small arena, all three of them watching as the male approached.

“Sorry,” he said with a lopsided smile. “I was indisposed.”

“Have a seat, Jon,” Marcy said quietly. She frowned at the amount of water he trailed behind them, but she had wanted to see them all right away and she had been informed that he had been in the shower. She knew he would not actually sit on the furniture dripping wet even before he moved to a set of three steps leading down into the pit and sat down on the top step. Once she had everyone’s attention, she put her hands into the pockets of the light pink scrubs she wore.

“I don’t know how to tell you this in any other way but outright,” she began, “but we’ve lost Dante.”

“Lost?” Kristen echoed.

“Did he sneak out and escape?” Jon asked. “I can be dressed in a moment if you need us to help look for him.”

Marcy shook her head. “No, Jon. Dante… has died.”

Stunned silence. Then, “W-when… h-how?” from Jenni, her voice cracking with emotion.

“About thirty minutes ago,” the nurse replied quietly. “He seemed to have made it through the worst of the inbalance during the night and woke up cognizant this morning, but then he had a relapse while Erin visited with him. The feline instincts of his psyche took over again and didn’t let go this time. He became an enraged animal and had to be tranquilized before destroying the ICU.”

“Was it the tranquilizer?” Jon wanted to know, his voice hollow from shock and suspicion. He’d heard of animals dying from tranquilizer over-dosage before.

Marcy shook her head. “No, the tranq only subdued him for a couple minutes. He shook it off quicker than I’ve ever seen and it only made him madder. The orderlies were able to strap him to the bed before it wore off, though, but when it did, he struggled hard against the straps.”

She looked down at her feet, moisture reflecting from her eyes. “Trying to get out of the restraints, he got his neck underneath an arm and couldn’t get it out. He panicked when he started choking, and just as the orderly was about to shoot him with another dart, he…. Uhm, he…” She swallowed with difficulty and closed her eyes.

“What happened?” Kristen demanded with a squeak, not sure she really wanted to know.

“He broke his neck… struggling hard to get free.”

Like an animal in a hunter’s trap, Jon thought to himself sadly.

Jenni threw herself face down upon the couch, her shoulders shaking with sobs. Kristen crossed the pit quickly and put her arms across the leopard’s shoulders, tears of her own dampening her facial fur. Jon started to move forward too until he remembered how wet his fur was. Marcy looked over at him in sympathy and then joined the furry women. She was no stranger to seeing some of the Furs that came through her Wing going through difficulties, and yes, even the occasional death, but like everyone else, she had become fond of the white tiger furman. She could still hear the sharp snap of bone in her mind and it made her cringe just to remember it.

Unable to help, Jon got up and returned to the restroom. He would work on the wet carpet later, but a hot shower might help take the edge off the news they had just received. He stopped by the linen closet for another towel and then went back to his shower stall to start over.

As the water sputtered to life, Jon thrust the tawny fur of his head beneath the spray and held it there. Despite that he had often considered Dante to be a jerk, or at the least an annoyance, he had gotten used to his presence and the man’s death affected him more than he might have thought.

He opened his eyes and looked down at his digitigrade feet while the water continued to drench his fur. A man? Yes, a man. Although Dante had been genetically altered, Jon realized that he did not consider Dante a beast who was better off dead, but rather a man who did not deserve to die like that.

Is something like this going to happen to me too? Jon could not help but wonder. He knew it was a possibility. If it happened to one, it could happen to another.

His mind still on Dante’s untimely death, Jon reached for the fur shampoo to wash before he used up all the hot water in the building just standing there. He spent his shower lost in thought, and although it all began with the white tiger furman, his memories drifted back to a New Year’s Eve celebration burned into his mind.

Now that Jon had become a cougar furman himself and had mostly survived the process, his views of Parker had changed. Yes, he still hated the guy for taking Rebecca and ruining his life, but Henry was no longer just a freak cat-man to him; for the first time since the whole downward spiral had begun, Jon was having remorse for his actions. He had not killed an animal. He had murdered a man.

***

The rest of that day had been a long one for them all; not just those of the Felis Wing, but just about every other Fur at the Institute felt the effects of losing yet another of them. They had all been assured by their medical personnel that losing two Furs within a year’s time was not common and that they should not worry. Even though Whelan’s loss was self-inflicted, it was still enough to make everyone fully aware of their own mortality.

They all seemed mentally exhausted by the end of the day, and even Jon abandoned his nightly exercise routine to shut out the lights and crawl into his bed. He had shed no tears for Dante, but it still felt like he had lost a friend or a younger brother. He felt mentally sapped and wanted nothing more than a dreamless night.

An hour after laying his head down upon his pillow, Jon was still awake. His mind was too active despite all efforts to calm his thoughts. Since the changes to his body, his senses had become more sensitive than they had been as a full human, so now he heard every little sound when it was still and quiet. The old building creaked in the wind, still settling after decades, and he could hear the relays in the automatic air handling system in the darkness. He had heard Jenni’s numerous quiet crying spells and even Kristen pacing the floor out in the saloon.

When the door of his room opened gently, his eyes automatically went to the entrance. He was mildly surprised that Kristen would come to him for comfort after weeks of cold silence between them, but in this instance he would offer no resistance to lending his arms for her to sleep beside him; he could do with a little comfort himself. He quietly set aside the second pillow he had been holding up against his chest when he felt her crawl up onto his mattress.

Just as she crawled over to him, Jon’s eyes widened when he recognized her scent. It was not the other cougar who had just crawled into bed with him.

“Jenni?” he whispered.

“Please forgive me,” she replied in a hoarse whisper of her own, kneeling on the mattress beside him. “I can’t stand to be alone tonight.”

“I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” he responded with a swallow. He could not believe that she had crawled into his bed on the same day that Dante had died.

Jenni put a finger up to his lips. “Please?” she pleaded quietly. “I only want to sleep beside someone – just like you used to do with Kristen. I don’t want to be by myself.”

When it finally sunk in that she was not there to play, he willed his heart to calm down. “Okay,” he answered.

Jenni stretched out beside him and then they wrapped their arms around one another, her head resting against his chest.

She let out an exhausted sigh and then whispered, “Thank you.” Jon did not respond, but merely held her close and closed his eyes. Having someone to hold when emotions were raw was often a soothing balm for the soul and it was true even for him.

Comforted together, they were both asleep within minutes.

***

Kristen lay on her stomach across the pillows in the middle of the saloon pit, her Personal Business Juxtapositioner in her hands as she read Sissy’s morning daily news article. Although everyone on the compound already knew of Dante’s death, the orange kitty had included a clinical report about it with a note that a memorial service would be held for him in three days to give everyone a few days to deal with their grief, just as they had done for Whelan.

The feline botanist had not gotten much rest during the night. She had tossed and turned in her sleep, her emotions in turmoil not from just this, but the events of the past few months too. She had finally gotten up before the sun had risen, showered and plopped down in the pit to wait out the clock. Their training classes had been suspended until after the memorial. It might have been difficult to concentrate on their studies with such a pall looming over them, but Kristen disagreed, thinking it would have given her something else to focus on. Instead, she had nothing but time on her hands.

She looked up when she heard a door open and saw Jenni coming out of Jon’s room. The leopard wore only a pair of furman shorts and looked as if she had just woken up. Jon emerged behind her and then Jenni turned to give him a hug with a peck on the cheek.

“Well, that sure didn’t take you long!” Kristen said bitterly. Jon and Jenni looked over at her in surprise, but before either of them could respond, the botanist scowled and put down her PBJ. “Your lover hasn’t been gone a full twenty-four hours and you’ve already jumped into Jon’s bed at the first opportunity!”

“We didn’t —”

“Jenni, don’t give me that tripe!” Kristen spat hatefully, but then her eyes zeroed in on Jon’s face. “…and you… you’ve been claiming all along that you aren’t interested in anyone, but now that she’s free, you’ve shown your true colors! I didn’t sleep well last night, but I’m surprised I didn’t hear you two bumping the walls with your bed!”

“Kris!” Jon exclaimed darkly, “I no more had sex with her than I did with you! She didn’t want to sleep alone last night, and that’s just what we did – sleep!”

“Uh, huh, right…” the lioness growled at him. “You should have been the one to go nuts! You should have died instead of Dante! He didn’t deserve it, but you’re the one reaping the rewards!”

“Kristen!” Jenni shouted loudly, her ears getting hot and her temper at such accusations fueling her own anger. “You’re wrong and you know it! Nothing happened between me and Jon. He held me for comfort during the night. Nothing more!” She stormed over to the pit and glared down at the other female. “I once accused you and Jon of doing the same thing you’re accusing us of doing. Were you guilty, or did you do nothing more than sleep together all those times as we did last night?”

Kristen jumped up and grabbed one of the floor pillows in her hands. “How dare you compare yourself to me!” she hissed in fury. She hurled the pillow hard at Jon and then jumped up out of the pit, running for the front door on all fours without looking back.

Jon caught the pillow and watched her go, his mouth open in mute astonishment. After the door slammed behind the female cougar, Jenni turned back toward her companion, her chest heaving from angry panting. After a moment, she calmed down and hung her head.

“I’m sorry, Jon,” she offered. “I know things have been strained between you two and I shouldn’t have intruded. I won’t do it again.”

The male puma tossed the pillow back into the pit and then approached her. Without asking, he drew her into a warm embrace and put his chin on the top of her head.

“Don’t blame yourself,” he told her quietly. “Her problem with me is me. I accused her of being cruel by taking on the face of the man I murdered and she’s hated me ever since. It wouldn’t have mattered if it were you, Cheryl, Jasmine or anyone else who’d slept beside me. It’s not her in my bed, and that’s all that matters to her. This doesn’t even involve poor Dante.”

Jenni pulled back and looked up him with a haunted expression. “I still can’t believe he’s gone…” she murmured, wiping her eyes on the back of her hands. Then, with a hard swallow, she blinked several times and seemed to get stronger all of a sudden. “I’m not going to allow her to use him against me like that,” she said. “No matter how much her words hurt.”

She then looked up at the taller male and brushed the blonde bangs from her eyes, looking at him for a moment in interest. “Have Cheryl and Jasmine been in your bed too?”

Jon looked at her in surprise, but then he raised three fingers of his right hand beside him. “Scout’s Honor, I haven’t. I was just using them as an example, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Kris thought I had.”

Jenni nodded and then laid her head up against his chest again. “Please don’t think badly of me,” she told him, “but I liked sleeping in your arms last night. I’m not looking for another companion, despite what she thinks, but I felt safe from my sorrow and fears for just a little while. I caused you trouble this morning, but I hope you don’t mind that I needed you.”

Jon hugged her close. “We all need one another at times. Someone once told me that hugs are important, that they contain healing for the mind and soul. Let Kris get wrongfully jealous if she wants, but I want you to know you’re welcome in my arms at any time.”

Jenni was quiet for a long moment, but then she chuckled, something Jon was not prepared to hear. His curiosity was suddenly piqued, but before he suffered too much, the leopard female looked up at him and said, “I apologize in advance, because I never thought I would ever say this – especially to your face – but I feel safe in the arms of a killer.”

Jon frowned at her statement, but then he sighed. He could not deny his past, and even though he was beginning to feel remorse over what he had done, it was part of who he was.

Jenni instantly regretted voicing that thought, but then the cougar smiled and tapped the end of her broad nose with a finger. “You’re safe,” he assured her.

Chapter 13

Tooth and Claw

The memorial service for Dante Capanari had been planned to take place in the five acre clearing near the backwoods of the Institute property, but a change in the weather forced them to have it in the assembly hall to stay out of the summer thunderstorm.

It was unknown whether or not their associate’s body had yet been cremated as per AHCP policy, but there would be no actual casket to gather around; the service was really nothing more than a chance for those who knew him to stand up and share a few memories with the gathered group. A picture of Dante as a human was displayed on the projector screen behind the podium, side by side with a recent photo of him in his near-complete Bengal white tiger form. He was grinning in both.

Most of the comments were short and given without much conviction, similar to Whelan’s service months earlier. The general consensus was to have the service, but no one felt like saying much when it was their turn to state something about the Fur who had not made it through the program. Without much to be said, Marcelo finally closed out the service and shut off the projector.

“I know your feelings are muted right now,” the director said, “but I would like all the Furs to come back here in an hour after you’ve had time to prepare yourselves to move on with a new phase of your training.”

“Is it important?” Gerard called out from his seat.

Marcelo nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“Do you have to do something first?”

“No, I need no preparation.”

“Why wait an hour, then?” the bear asked. “We need something else to think about, so why don’t we have it now?”

“That sounds like a good idea to me,” added Arne from the back of the crowd. “There’s no need to go out in the rain and then come back in again.” Several other voices added their approval, and after the director looked around the room and noted the attentive faces, he shrugged his shoulders and put one hand up on the podium and the other in his pants pocket.

“I just wanted to give you all a small announcement on a change in your training while I have you all together,” he told them. “I know this might not seem appropriate coming right after Dante’s service, and I don’t want to seem insensitive, but you’ve had a few days to grieve and ponder upon life in general. However, it’s time we moved on, just as we did after the loss of Whelan Nolan.”

Marcelo could feel the eyes of all thirty remaining anthro-humans in his charge. “Stockholm has given me additional direction for your training that we will implement next week. So far, you’ve all taken part in general colony education, finding out what will be expected of you, learning skills and trades that will be helpful out there, as well as raising and caring for the types of livestock you’ll be taking along with you. A few of you have received specialized training in specific fields, but for the most part, the rest of you have only general colony knowledge.”

He gazed over the small crowd, knowing some were feeling impatient for him to get to the point. His preface over, he put both hands upon the podium. “Until now, both of your classes have lived in comfort in the rooms of the Wings and the dorms, but this is about to change. The rainy weather we’ve had the past few days is predicted to end on Saturday. This means the grounds will still be damp and muddy for a few more days afterward, but as of Monday morning, you are going to simulate a landing upon another world and you are going to set up structures to live in as if you were all alone and starting out right now.”

“How’s that going to help?” Ivan asked. “We already know how to set up the domes.” There were a few other mumbled comments between the Furs, but Marcelo continued on as if he had not heard them.

“Just as your survival trek taught you a few things about negotiating unknown territory, finding food and learning to work together as a team, this new exercise will replicate colony life itself. Before you even go out there among the stars, you need the simulated experience of living in the domes you’ve learned to build, set up for food, water and other resources you’ll need. You aren’t just going to build these structures for practice, but you’re going to start living in them instead of your dorm rooms.”

There was surprise on most of the faces, but a few actually saw this as merely another step in required learning and was not totally unexpected.

“Supply trucks with the items you’ll be given for a real colony will be delivered this weekend. Once the exercise begins, you will be forbidden to return to your Wings and dorms, the cafeteria or any other facility on the grounds. Your current medical staff will not be available to you, so you will depend upon the physicians going with you; for this scenario, Ken and Jenni will be your only medical personnel for all four races. You will check in all your PBJs and leave them with me, so the only communication you will have outside of your colony will be through a primary com set identical to the one you will have with you on another world.”

“How long will this exercise run?” Jon asked.

“Tentatively thirty days or more,” the director replied.

“Thirty days!” Sissy squeaked. “Who’s going to watch Jonesy for me for that long?”

“Jonesy?” Michael asked. “Who’s Jonesy?”

“Her cat,” Jon explained. “She has a kitty that looks just like her.”

Marcelo gave his administrative assistant a smile. “Sylvia can check in on him while you’re away, just as she did when you were out in the woods.”

Sissy gave him a relieved smile. “I didn’t know she’d done that for me. I’ll have to thank her the next time I see her.”

The director nodded and then continued as if he had not been interrupted. “As with a real, working colony, your leader will make regular reports to the AHCP, and the information in the progress reports received will determine the length of this simulation. If the reports are negative, you will stay there longer until those results improve.”

“Who’s our leader for this exercise?” Yuki wanted to know.

“Avon, of course.”

“He appointed himself as our leader when you abandoned us in the woods,” the canine complained. “How about someone else this time?”

Marcelo frowned and shook his head. “Avon is the only one among you who’s had official leadership training,” he said sternly. “He’s not just playing at being a leader, folks – he’s the real thing, so get used to the idea of him being in charge. If you have any official complaints, you may file them with me in private, but his selection was not by my hand; he was appointed by AHCP committee. He may choose a first officer as he likes, but Avon’s place in command is set in stone and there will be no more debate to the contrary.”

Discussions about this detail set several conversations in motion, so Marcelo reached into the recesses of the podium and pulled out an old wooden gavel. He rapped it several times on the edge of the lectern to get everyone’s attention back upon him.

“Before you begin this exercise,” he said loudly, “Dr. Aristotle has an announcement to make that may have an impact for those of you in Class Sixteen.”

“We don’t want to hear anything he has to say,” Travis grumbled from his place slightly separated from the rest. His denuded tail was across his lap in his hands, a familiar position of late.

“Shut it,” Aaron growled back at the German shepherd behind him. Travis merely glared at him in response.

Despite the canine’s wishes, the tall, thin physician of his Wing stepped up to the podium and took the director’s place, looking older than his age under the silver hair upon his head.

“For those of you in Class Sixteen,” he said in his accented voice, “you have all entered into the final stage of your transformation development. “You haven’t reported many aches and pains associated with your anthropomorphism in some time, but that is about to change. It is typical that your bodies will go through a sudden, final growth spurt around this time, so I want to warn you all that this may occur within the next week or two. Unfortunately, this will coincide with the colony simulation, so when this does occur, you must remember that you will not have your Wing physicians available to you. Any issues you have must be reported and treated as possible through your colony physicians. Your Class Fifteen associates have already been through this last stage of development, though not in a colony setting. This training exercise is new to the program, so you will have to deal with everything that happens as if you were on your own.”

The doctor brushed a few animal hairs from his medical smock and added, “Between now and the start of the simulation, your colony physicians will be briefed on all your medical records and they will be the only ones among you equipped with a PBJ to contain that information, though their ability to connect to the network will be disabled. Out on another world, you will have solar powered charging stations for the electronic devices deemed necessary, but for this exercise your medical staff will be issued units modified especially for this situation.”

Kevin looked at Erin beside him before he held up a hand; the doctor smiled at the young fennec fox’s courtesy. “Yes, you had a question?”

“Is this last growth spurt going to be as painful as before?” he asked with a worried expression.

Dr. Aristotle gave him a nod. “It can be,” he confirmed. “Every Fur is different and may experience diverse changes and levels of associated pain, but most of what you’ll feel will not be visually identifiable. Most of it will be internal, a final shifting of organs, muscle tissue, blood vessels, nerve endings and a final chemical rebalance. In simple terms, the hardware and software of your bodies has been upgraded, so now a reboot of sorts is required to reset everything into conjunction with one another.”

“How long will this series of final changes take?” Cheryl asked without raising a hand.

“Approximately one to two weeks,” Aristotle answered. “Some may experience more internal alterations than others and that can even take place within the various Furs of your own species. There’s no way to predict what will happen to whom, so we cannot give each of you a timeline on your own changes. I must also warn you that severe mood swings are likely to be associated with the chemical rebalancing. Since you will be cut off from the rest of the Institute, you will need to rely on one another to get through this, and you will also need to watch your tempers. Now, are there any further questions?” Many of them had numerous thoughts concerning what they had been told, but no one else spoke up. The doctor looked behind him and nodded to Marcelo. They swapped places at the podium and the director cleared his throat.

“Okay, that’s all I have,” he said. “If you have any questions prior to the start of the exercise on Monday, feel free to talk to me or send a message via your PBJ. Once the simulation begins, you will be on your own for the next month. I’m sorry for our loss of Dante’s presence, but it’s time to move on with the rest of your training. You’re all dismissed.”

***

Jenni and Jon walked side by side as they left the Clark building, neither of them saying much. Most of the crowd had filed out the doors before them, leaving only a few behind them. Just as they got outside and put up their umbrellas against the rain, Travis snickered in their wake.

“What a waste of time that memorial was,” the German shepherd cackled loudly to no one in particular. Jenni stiffened beside her housemate but Jon tried to ignore the canine. “Nobody had much of anything good to say about that cat, did they? That’s because nobody cared for him!”

Jenni reached out and grabbed Jon’s arm for stability and he could feel her arm shaking in fury. He was just as irritated at Travis’ attempts to get a rise out of those walking in the rain just in front of him.

“It’s just as well we’ll be on an exercise for the next month. He won’t be missed for long,” the canine continued as if he could not see how his words were affecting the leopard in front of him. “He was so unloved that his so-called lover wouldn’t even get up to say anything nice about him at his memorial service. I don’t suppose he was very memorable!”

Jenni spun around and hissed at him, her teeth bared and her ears flat against her head. “You know nothing!” she spat at him.

“Oh ho!” Travis responded in delight. “So there is a spark of life in the tiger’s wench!”

Jon turned around and punched him between the eyes so quickly that the German shepherd did not have a chance to avoid the blow. His head rocked backward and he fell onto his tail in the mud puddle he had just stepped around. It dazed him, but when he got back up to his feet, his bruised face was contorted in rage.

He launched himself at Jon with a deep growl and grasped him about the waist, using his weight and momentum to tackle the cougar to the wet ground. Jon wrestled with him, but Travis retained his hold around his middle, trying to use his enhanced canine strength to squeeze until something broke inside.

Jon pounded on the dog’s back, but he did not have a good enough angle on the ground to put much power behind it. Travis was making it difficult to inhale, so Jon tried to roll over onto his opponent. The cougar outweighed him by a good sixty pounds, but Travis had been a nimble wrestler in his past and used the feline’s own weight against him.

Someone was shouting at them, but somewhere in the back of his mind, Jon realized that Travis was fighting like a human. Instead of using teeth and claws, he was using manmade tactics, though very well it seemed. Jon had to do something quick; he tried to bite one of the dog’s triangular ears, but he missed by inches. In desperation, he raked his claws hard across the canine’s back. Travis yelped and loosened his hold around Jon’s middle for just a moment.

Freed enough to pull in a hard intake of breath, Jon coughed twice, but that gave Travis time to pummel at him with his fists, bellowing at the top of his lungs. Jon snared one of his wrists, but instead of trying to bat it away, he pulled forward on the arm and then clamped his jaws around it hard.

Travis shrieked, but unable to pull away, he punched frantically with his other fist. He connected with side of the cougar’s head, which only made Jon bite down harder. The mountain lion quickly kicked off his sandals and pulled his feet up between them, digging his hind claws into the canine’s middle.

Travis yelped, seeing the danger of being gutted, so he pushed away hard and rolled aside as quickly as he could, but Jon still had a firm bite on his arm; it was the same one that Kristen had previously injured, so the canine kicked him hard between the legs in frantic desperation.

Jon released him and curled up in pain, but he managed to scrape his fangs across Travis’ arm in the process, ripping bloody furrows into the flesh beneath his fur.

Not content to retreat despite all the pain, Travis kicked the mountain lion in the ribs while he was trying to recover. Jon grunted, but the dog’s soft and muddy bare toes did not have much impact. Despite the pain in his groin, Jon managed to snare Travis’ foot and yank him off balance. The canine fell to the wet ground with a muted splat.

Jon tried to get over to Travis on all fours, but there was a hard thump on the back of his head that drove his chin down onto the wet grass. He blinked rapidly, blearily thinking the shepherd had somehow gotten behind him, but then someone else thumped Travis on the back of the head too. Both were momentarily stunned and then the two of them were unceremoniously pulled farther apart from one another.

Jon felt rough arms up beneath his own pull him up to his feet, but whoever it was did not release him. Likewise, Travis was yanked up to his feet with his arms in a lock hold to keep him from getting loose.

Overhead lightning from the storm lit up the rainy scene and Jon saw Dara holding Travis struggling in her arms. Jon did not resist, but he looked over his shoulder and saw Avon’s brown eyes looking at him in disgust.

***

Back inside the Clark building, Jon and Travis were seated on metal folding chairs far apart from one another, several of the bears standing by as unofficial guards in case there was another incident. The physicians from each of their respective Wings treated their wounds while Marcelo ranted and bellowed at them both. The short, swarthy man paced back and forth between the two troublesome Furs, punctuating his words in the air with his hands. At last, he stopped to take a deep breath and faced them with both hands on his hips.

“There’s been friction between volunteers in the past,” Marcelo ground out between clenched teeth, “but you two are unbelievable! Every time I turn around, you are at one another’s throats! How are you two going to work together out in a colony if you can’t get along here? Once you leave the Earth for good, you’ll need to rely on one another, and that even means the two of you!”

Travis snorted, but did not look at the director.

“You find this amusing?” Marcelo bellowed.

“He’s a cat and I’m a dog; we won’t be going to the same colony other than the play-acting you’re making us do.”

The swarthy director gifted the canine with a dark glare and cleared his throat. “Don’t ever assume in absolutes,” he retorted cryptically. Jon looked up at him and thought he saw some unspoken thought in the man’s eyes, but Marcelo turned away with his hands behind his back to resume pacing.

“I don’t know whether to separate you two or have you shackled together so that you have to work together!”

“I wouldn’t recommend the latter,” Jon replied after giving Travis a dark look and then making a show of examining his extended claws.

Marcelo glared at the feline. “I’ve come to expect better of you in recent months,” he admitted with a huff, “but you’re trying my patience, Jon.” He then turned toward the canine and pointed a shaking finger at him. “You, however, have been nothing but a major thorn in everybody’s sides since you got here.”

“He hit me first!” Travis complained.

“Yes, he did, but I saw how you were acting and heard what you were saying, too,” the director replied tonelessly. “I was only a few steps behind you. I don’t condone what he did, but I might have slugged you myself for spouting off like that! You deliberately stepped on emotions already hurting and ground them into the gravel. You have nothing to carp about – you knew what you were doing and instigated the fight yourself!”

“Yeah, maybe I did,” Travis growled back at him defiantly. “I don’t owe anyone any favors, including you, high and mighty Director! You can’t fire me and you can’t jail me for anything I’ve done – all you can do is ship me off to another planet, which is what I’m contracted to do in the first place! I can do anything I want and the worst you can do is to give me a slap on the wrist! You think shaving the hair off my tail is going to embarrass me into acting like your good little doggie?” He spat on the floor at Marcelo’s feet and sneered up at the man.

“Can I hit him again?” Jon asked quietly, “or would you prefer to do that yourself?”

The director’s face was purple with rage at the canine’s words, but he knew Travis was right. “Maybe I can’t punish you in the usual ways,” he ground out between clenched teeth, “but I can make it harder for you to get your hands on the prize money even if you manage to survive five years in a colony – maybe I can even get it revoked entirely for all the time and trouble you’ve cost the company!”

“What?” Travis exclaimed with additional swearing in several languages. He was just hit in the only true vulnerable spot possible. “You can’t do that! That money’s in my contract!”

“Do you want to meet with the company lawyers to discuss the fine print of your contract? I can arrange that easily. You belong to the AHCP, Travis, and although we don’t treat you as slaves, you signed away your life when you willingly put your signature on that contract. Your insubordination will not be tolerated and that is also included in your contract! If you don’t start behaving in a civilized manner, I’m sure Stockholm can come up with other appropriate punishments by methods I’m sure I’m not even allowed to think about.”

Travis’ ears were flat against his head, growling beneath his breath, but he had nothing more he could say and he knew it.

Marcelo cleared his throat again and then tilted his head back to look up at the high ceiling after glancing over at the cougar sitting by quietly massaging his ribs. “Travis, since you’re in this for life, I need you and Jon cooperating right now, but so help me, the next time you two get into a brawl and have to be separated, I will banish each of you to desolate parts of this planet to learn what it’s like to live alone on another world by yourself. If that happens, it could be years before you’re even allowed onto a colony at all without being part of a team. Think about it – you could be stuck doing menial tasks for the AHCP right here on Earth for the rest of your life.”

He looked back down and gave each of them a look of impatience. “Now, I want both of you to stand up, shake hands and then get out of my sight.”

Jon stood up as ordered and grudgingly held out his hand to the canine. Travis kept his seat.

“Never,” the German shepherd growled.

“Stand up and shake his hand or so help me I’ll put you in solitary and let you go through your final transformation pains alone for the next month! Now go on and shake his hand!”

“I’d break contract and sell out to Blackthorne first!”

“As if he’d have you! Shake his hand like I told you.”

Travis stuck out his bottom lip, which was a disconcerting sight on the face of an irate Fur, but after glaring at the director for another moment, he stood up and purposely knocked over his chair before he shoved his hand into Jon’s.

At once, he tightened his grip as hard as he could, and Jon had no choice but to respond in kind, squeezing his larger hand in a fierce competition with the canine. As a physically fit human, Jon might have bested him right away, but as Furs, both had enhanced strength and stamina so the impromptu contest was evenly matched.

Both grimaced as each of them earnestly tried to squeeze hard enough to break the bones in the other’s hand. They grunted and gasped almost in unison and Marcelo traded looks of irritation with Avon and Dara.

Jon could hardly believe the strength in the smaller German shepherd’s grip, but he matched it pound for pound. “That’s a good grip you have there, Travis,” he grunted hoarsely. “I always hated a flabby handshake myself!”

The mad canine tried to retort, but the bite wounds on his arm were throbbing and it took everything he had to keep up his end of the competition.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Avon exclaimed. “Break it up or I’ll break both of your hands!”

Neither gave in, so the grizzly swung a huge hand paw and forcibly knocked their hands aside. Jon and Travis immediately let go of one another, each of them privately grateful that the bear had forced them apart.

Jon rubbed his mangled fingers with his other hand, trying to get the blood and feeling back into them, while Travis stumbled and sat down heavily in another nearby chair, tightly gripping the fresh blood soaking into his bandage.

“You two beat all I ever saw!” Marcelo said with a disgusted snort. “Now get out of here and go back to your Wings. You’ve both been warned – if you two are caught fighting again, I will keep my word! Now go!”

Holding his arm in pain, Travis scrambled out the door without even another sarcastic remark; Avon and Dara followed out behind him to make sure he did not double back. Jon was a little slower leaving, but Marcelo was suddenly at his side. The man motioned the cougar closer and Jon bent over his bruised ribs to turn an ear toward him.

“You’ve made great progress since you’ve been here, Jon,” the director told him quietly. “Angelina’s reports have given me hope for your rehabilitation, but you’ve got to keep your anger in check or it will destroy everything you’ve accomplished.” He sighed heavily, looking as if he had aged several years since Brian Barrett had first met him. Marcelo glanced back toward the door the others had departed through.

“Travis has become the troublemaker I expected you to be, Jon, but you’re not without guilt in these brawls either. Consider yourself punished and do us all a favor by straightening up your act or I may be forced to think up something for real.”

“You got it, boss,” Jon told him sincerely.

“Good to hear it. Now go back to your Wing and apologize to your housemates. They were both already emotionally tender and I’m sure you scared them both; right now they need to know you aren’t going to lose your head if they say anything that might upset you.”

The mountain lion frowned, but knew Marcelo was right. He had some personal damage control to perform.

Chapter 14

Leaper Colony

Rain dripped off Jon’s nose and ears as he trotted back across the wet grounds to the Felis Wing. His ribs felt bruised from his encounter with Travis and he was not moving as quickly as he might have otherwise, so by the time he stepped beneath the awning over the door steps, he was soaked to the skin beneath his fur.

He stepped inside the door and found several damp and muddy towels on the floor with a small stack of dry towels on a small table. They were accompanied by a handwritten note from Marcy. “Don’t drip on the carpet – dry off first.”

One of the disadvantages of having fur was the amount of time it took to dry off with a towel. Jon was thankful for the full-length air dryer in the restroom that had been installed while they were on the space station, but when it came time to pat down as he had to do now, it took several minutes and several towels. A laundry basket sat in the corner by the door, already overflowing with damp towels used by the others. He also recognized furman robes and shorts in the basket.

When he was satisfied that he would not be dripping on Marcy’s precious floor, he padded up the hall toward the saloon, his damp jeans, tee shirt and his towel added to the basket. The overhead lights were off, but there were several candles burning on the fireplace mantle to give the room a soft glow with just enough illumination to see his surroundings. Thunder continued to rumble and lightning still flashed through the skylight overhead, but the storm was not as intense as it had been earlier, a sign that it was moving on to other areas.

Jon’s first inclination was to head to the shower to wash and dry his fur properly, but he heard movement from the sunken recreational pit near the middle of the room. He walked around the table and chairs that had been relocated to the upper level and peered down at his housemates. Both of them were lying listless atop the large pillows scattered in front of the curved couches. Like himself, they were clad only in damp fur, unconcerned at being otherwise uncovered. Jenni and Kristen were both clutching pillows in their arms, but the two females were facing away from one another.

The male cougar stepped lightly down into the pit, all thoughts of his shower saved for later. He stretched out on his back across the pillows between his housemates. Jenni pushed her pillow aside and turned over, suddenly clinging to him with her nose up against the fur of his chest. He wrapped one arm around her and then turned his head toward Kristen. He lightly touched her shoulder, but instead of turning toward him too, the mountain lioness scooted away from him a few inches, just enough to let him know how she felt.

He frowned, knowing he deserved the cold shoulder she had given him, but there was nothing he could do for it so he turned away from her and relaxed beside Jenni. The leopard female looked up at him with large yellow eyes.

“What happened?” she asked quietly.

“The Director ranted at us both, that much I expected,” Jon replied, “but he came down harder on Travis than he did on me. Marcelo was right behind us when Travis said the things he did, so he couldn’t deny any of it. Travis and I have been ordered to stay far apart from one another, just as we were on the space station. If we get into another fight, Marcelo’s threatened to banish us separately to desolate places here on Earth to force us how to survive on our own without a team. He also told us Stockholm might even rescind the prize money from our contracts if we give them more grief.”

“Wow, that’s harsh.”

“Yeah. I’m not concerned about the money, but it hit Travis hard in the wallet.”

“What do you mean, you aren’t concerned?” Jenni whispered. “That’s a large bank account.”

Jon shook his head. “If we ever get out of here, we’re never going to see Earth again,” he answered frankly, “so what use is money going to be to us on a wild world where currency probably won’t be used for decades? Even if it was, do you think we’ll all live long enough to cash in on it? Look at Bastien — that whole feline colony was wiped out in a day, only a year away from meeting its five-year survival requirement.”

“The Vulps survived,” Jenni reminded him.

“Yes, but Marcelo told us that if Stockholm doesn’t send out a new batch of other foxes to fill out the colony with them, a retrieval ship might be dispatched to bring them back. For those two Vulps, that cuts their five years short and leaves them with probable reassignment elsewhere to start their service period all over. It costs money to equip a ship to go out to bring just two of them back, but it will be cheaper than sending another full colony. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bastien is simply written off as an undesirable planet, just as they’ve written off that other one that failed as soon as they landed.”

“Bonestell?”

“Yeah, I think that was the one. The tragedy on Bastien was terrible, but I’m sure there’s an accountant for the AHCP who’s happy they were saved a large payout to that colony next year.”

“Jon, that’s awful!”

“Yes, it is. That’s why I’m not concerned about money I’ll probably never see anyway.”

The mountain lion fell silent, closing his eyes. They lay together for several long moments before Jenni put her head against his chest again.

“Are they going to shave your tail?” she asked.

Jon chuckled, keeping his eyes closed. “Not for something like this. That takes something more serious than punching Travis in the face. I got scolded by the school principal, sent back to my homeroom class, and that’s the end of it unless I get into trouble again.”

Kristen let out a whimper and Jon looked over his shoulder at her. “What’s the matter – are you disappointed that I didn’t get a more severe punishment?” he asked dryly.

Kristen whimpered again, but shook her head. “No,” she gasped, her body shaking a little with her response. He arms were wrapped around her middle and her knees were pulled up to her stomach.

“Jon, she’s in pain,” Jenni explained in realization that Kristen was not just deriding their housemate.

The large cougar released her and then turned over toward his female counterpart. “Kris?” he whispered, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder.

She shook her head vigorously, her eyes clenched tightly. “Please,” she gasped, “just leave me alone.”

Jon frowned and looked back over at Jenni before he got up quietly and left the pit. Jenni watched him head toward the shower and then she turned back toward Kristen.

“Is there something I can do for you, or do you need me to get Dr. Renwick?” the feline nurse asked quietly. The lioness shook her head again, but otherwise did not say anything as another wave of internal pain took her breath away.

Jenni sighed quietly and rolled back over on the pillows, her thoughts returning to Dante.

***

Avon stood up at the front of the charter bus holding onto a small clipboard and looked back over the twenty-nine Furs under his command. “This bus represents our transport down to the surface of the planet,” he told them in a clear voice. “In a real situation, we will be riding in a Traveler-class heavy freighter colony ship, but simply for this exercise, eight semi-tractor trailers have already been moved into our simulation area containing our supplies. Realistically, our livestock will be in cryogenic stasis for the voyage to be awakened upon landing, but for this exercise, we will simply herd them in from the pens where we’ve already been raising them.”

“Will Cheryl be in charge of herding the animals?” Dara asked with a grin.

“Of course!” Gerard responded with a wave of his hand. “That’s what a Border collie’s for, isn’t it?”

Cheryl stood up and tipped her battered hat with a wide smile. “Hey, I know my job!” she admitted.

Avon smiled at the interplay, but he rapped on the roof of the bus above him with his knuckles to bring the attention back to himself. Cheryl sat down again and looked back at him innocently.

“In a real-world situation,” the grizzly continued after a glance at the list on his clipboard, “the transport would remain on the ground just a few days to give us time to build the animal pens, the domes and supply structures before its launch window back to Earth. We’re going to follow the same scenarios here, but instead of the freighter we’ll have this bus and the supply trailers for those first days. After that, the bus – aka the transport – will be removed from the grounds and we will all be forbidden beyond the temporary barrier that’s been erected to separate our planet from the rest of the Institute.

“You are not authorized to speak to anyone through the barrier, and if you still have them with you, I have a box up here at the front for your cell phones that will be taken back to the Director, to be returned to you with your PBJs only after the exercise is over. All communication with Earth will be done through a com unit that is identical to the one we’ll have in a real colony. I think we covered just about everything in our meeting last night, but are there any more questions before we begin?” Kevin’s hand went up and Avon nodded toward him.

“What if we forgot to bring something from our rooms?” the young fennec asked.

The grizzly shook his head. “If you’ve forgotten anything, you’ll have to do without it. As of right now, our planet is several light years away from Earth and there’s no going back for anything. Once we’ve landed, we’re there to stay and will have only what we take with us.”

“If everybody plays nice, do we get an ice cream cone with chocolate sprinkles when we’re all done?”

Avon gave Travis an irritated look. “Everybody will play nice regardless,” he answered with a quick glance also toward Jon. “I’ve been placed in charge for the duration of this exercise and I won’t brook any disturbances. We all know why we’re here, and although this is just a simulation, we’re playing for real.”

He shook off his irritation and gave everyone a lighter expression. “Now,” he said with a final look at the techwatch around his thick wrist, “this simulation will begin in two minutes. When it starts, put yourself in a frame of mind to think about this exercise as if it was real. We will no longer refer to the grounds outside the barrier as the Institute and I don’t want anyone to make any references to it. We’re on another planet and you can consider that barrier to be an impenetrable wall of rock, perhaps a mountain or a canyon wall.”

“Does this planet have a name?” Ivan asked. “You know, just for something we can have a reference to?”

Avon thought about it for a moment and then he nodded. “For the sake of the exercise, the planet is called Poledouris, supposedly named after whatever astronomer discovered it.”

“Where’d you get that name from?” Dahlia asked with interest. “Is that a real world that’s under consideration?”

The grizzly chuckled. “No, the late Chesley Poledouris wrote a series of novels I like. Nothing more.” He looked at his watch and said, “Okay, folks, the simulation begins now.” He turned and nodded to the driver of the bus, and then sat down in the front seat.

The driver had remained completely silent since everyone had boarded his vehicle, giving some of them an eerie reminder of that night Marcelo had abandoned them like unwanted pets out in the woods. He put the old hydrogen-powered bus in gear and drove across the grounds from the Clark Savage building where they had loaded up and headed toward a ten-foot-high, chain-link fence covered in black cloth that had been erected between the lake and the occupied areas of the Institute grounds. When they neared the fence, two guards opened the gate and let them pass through. Michael looked out the back window of the bus behind him and watched the guards close the gate before they secured it with a thick chain and a large padlock before pulling the black cloth over it.

The bus driver circled the lake toward the large clearing behind it and soon approached the ridge where the shooting range had once been held. Parked side by side in front of the embankment were eight semi-tractor trailers. The bus came to a stop with the door facing away from the trailers and the driver shut off the engine.

“Welcome to planet Polly Doris,” the man said with a smile. “We have landed.”

Avon looked at him and gestured to a PBJ on the dash in front of the driver. “Martin, give us a report, please,” he said.

“Ah yes…” Martin replied, picking up the device. He thumbed it on and held it up to read a script from its dual screens. “External sensors corroborating with known reports – localized air is composed of seventy-seven percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, point ninety-three percent argon, one percent water vapor and one point oh-seven percent of miscellaneous other trace gases. Current morning temperature is fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Humidity is seventy-two percent. South wind ten miles per hour. Barometric pressure is twenty-nine point eighty-eight inches and the dew point is forty-five percent. In other words, it’s going to shape up to be a nice day!”

At a nod from Avon, Martin opened the bus doors. “The airlock is open and we are now all breathing alien air.”

Avon stood up, adjusted the green vest and black shorts he wore, and then took two of the steps down toward the outside. He peered out of the door as if examining the terrain for the first time, and then took the final step out onto the ground. He took in a full breath of air and then let it out slowly. Without looking back, the grizzly took ten steps out into the clearing, pulled something out of his pocket, and then knelt down in the damp grass with his back to the transport.

“What’s he doing?” Wendy asked. “I can’t see.”

“It looks like he’s praying,” Manny replied.

“He is native American,” Sissy reminded them. “Perhaps he’s performing a ritual.”

Avon stood up again, brushed off his knees, and then turned back toward the bus. He returned to the door and stepped up inside. “My friends,” he said in a practiced speech that told everyone he was playing out his part, “We have come a long way. It is my hope that others will travel here from Earth someday to help ease the overcrowding burden of our planet. Today begins the mission we’ve been training for, so let’s get started.”

***

Kristen looked across the new colony and marveled at all the activity. They had all started out the day setting up the livestock pens and had begun construction of the living shelters. They would not have time to get them all put together for the entire population by the day’s end, so the largest dome had gone up first. By itself, the geodesic building could sleep all thirty of the Furs on its floors at once, although its primary purpose would be a common gathering place when the weather would not permit outdoor congregation. Smaller domes would serve as individual living quarters for everyone, though each of them was only little larger than a conventional pop-up camping trailer. Out of necessity, however, all of the ursine Furs would get bigger domes than the others due to their larger natural size.

Other domes would serve as kitchen, food pantries for the furmen and their livestock, communication hut, medical office, biological research, armory, supply storage and others. For a colony of thirty Furs, they were equipped with the frames, panels, flooring and other materials for up to fifty domes of varying sizes. It was unlikely they would ever need to build them all, but for a colony scheduled to exist with the materials they arrived with, replacements may be necessary for a stay of five years or more.

On a real colony of this type, they would be provided enough non-perishable food and medical supplies to last for a local year. By that time, they would need to have planted gardens either of Terran food plants or to have discovered which of the local fruit and vegetables was edible in order to survive. Typically, the launch window of a colony ship was to coincide with the duration of the voyage in order to drop the settlers on a new world in the equivalent of early spring in order to give them maximum time to establish themselves before the next winter arrived. There were sometimes deviations from this schedule, usually dependent upon the conditions upon the destination world, and then it would be up to the colonists to make preparations for whatever season they might have to face.

Despite a few minor personality clashes that did not amount to much, everyone seemed able to work together building their camp. Although this was only an exercise, it would give them all valuable experience in the endeavor and most of them saw this as a good thing.

There were always exceptions to this, of course. Travis worked by himself putting together one of the smaller individual domes. He neither offered to help anyone else, nor did anybody volunteer to give him a hand. Like them all, he had already had practice assembling the structures in recent months, but even he had to admit that the job really required no less than two people to do. He struggled with it as best as he could, and although the geodesic framework went up well enough, he was having some difficulty holding up the insulated triangular panels at the same time as affixing the seals and installing the fasteners. Mud and grass from the recent rains were smeared onto each of the panels he had managed to cobble together.

Kristen watched him for a moment, but she felt no pity for the canine’s troubles. She thought that she should probably be delighted with his struggles, but instead she felt nothing more than detached indifference. As long as he kept his distance, she would devote no more than a few random thoughts concerning his very existence.

Returning to her work, she slipped slotted rubber seals along all three edges of a dome panel and then handed it up to Jasmine, who was perched up near the apex of the one they constructed together. The naked framework swayed beneath the vixen’s slight weight, but thankfully the day was still without a wind to complicate her balance.

Jasmine reached into the pocket of the cloth tool apron she had tied around her waist and pulled out several fasteners to affix the panel to the frame. Automatically, Kristen picked up another panel and three more seals to get them ready for her partner to put in place. Although the job was time-consuming, it did not require a whole lot of thought, so the mountain lioness found her focus wandering again.

Her eyes roved over the activities until she saw Jon emerging from one of the semi-tractor trailers with an armload of more triangular panels. The large cougar was hard to miss, as he was the only Fur wearing jeans with a tee shirt displaying the logo of an NBA team. Jenni and Sissy stepped out with him, the leopard carrying a cardboard box of fasteners and the orange cat clutching an armload of the rubber seal strips. All three were laughing at some joke that Kristen wished she had been a part of hearing.

She locked her eyes upon the male and wished things had worked out better between them. When she had first decided to take on the same form as him, it had been out of gratitude to the compassion he had shown her, but it had never occurred to her at the time that this had been the worst possible slap in the face she could have done to him. Although she had turned a cold shoulder once he had confronted her with the truth, she knew in her heart that they were both victims of circumstance. Although she now tried to ignore him whenever he was around, she could not keep herself from stealing glances his way when she thought he was not looking.

The damage was done, however, and she doubted he would ever see her as anything more than just another member of the colony, even though he now seemed to be more at ease with his lot in life than he had ever been since his arrival.

Jasmine let out a sudden cry of pain and she lost her balance atop the geodesic frame, clutching her middle from an intense transformational twinge. One leg dropped through one of the panels she had already installed and she almost tumbled out onto the ground, but her ankle caught on the frame and stopped her abruptly. Kristen rushed to help her, momentarily forgetting her own troubles.

***

“What was that commotion earlier out by the lake?”

“Aaron and Gerard were arguing again.”

“What were the cousins going on about this time?”

“Same as always. Every time one of them gets chummy with one of the girls, the other suddenly decides he wants the same girl’s attention. They’re always competing with one another, and it’s all a bother if you ask me.”

“Hey Kevin, what’s in this case with your name on it?”

The short fennec fox looked up from a wooden crate he was going through and walked over to the semi-tractor trailer, peering up the ramp at Michael. The swift fox held up a large metal suitcase by its handle, pointing with a stubby finger at a plastic label beneath the words “Fragile” stuck to its side.

“I dunno,” Kevin replied. “I don’t think I ordered anything.”

Michael handed the suitcase down to him. “Maybe you’ve won a free vacation.”

“Yeah, straight off the Earth to another planet.” He set the case down on the ramp and then opened the latches. When he lifted the lid, his eyes lit up. “Wow!”

“What is it?”

Kevin turned the large case around so his friend could see the contents. There were several weather-related sensing devices carefully packed in molded foam. Lying on top was a folded sheet of paper. He opened and read it aloud.

“Kevin, my request that the AHCP requisition a weather kit for you has been approved. It had been my intention to hold onto it and then give it to you when you finally received your assignment, but with your real-time simulation, I felt it could serve you better now. I don’t know if you know how to use this equipment, but I’m sure you will enjoy figuring it out. Sincerely, Marcelo Delgado.”

“Nice!” Michael said. “Maybe you can predict when it’s going to rain again.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” Kevin replied, looking over each item with pride. Inside the large case were all the items needed for a home station, an anemometer, a hygrometer, a barometer, a wind vane, a rain gauge, a dry bulb thermometer, a wet-bulb thermometer, and a small set of data notebooks with several mechanical pencils.

“Excellent!” he said with a grin. “C’mon, help me get this stuff set up somewhere.”

“What about the stockroom?” Michael asked, gesturing toward the crate the smaller fox had been sorting through earlier. “Avon’s expecting us to get the dome stocked so someone can start preparing something for us to eat.”

Kevin merely shook his head, his eyes riveted to the wind vane he carefully pulled up out of its slotted place in the suitcase. “Later,” he murmured.

Michael frowned. “Fine. Go ahead and play with your new toys. I’ll have to find someone else to help me.” He went back up into the trailer to get his bottle of water, but just as he grabbed it, his eyes fell upon another box simply labeled “BIB”. He turned to call to the small fox to see if he knew what the acronym might stand for, but he stopped himself. If Kevin wanted to ignore him, fine.

The swift fox pulled the thick cardboard box out into the sunlight and used a claw tip to score the tape holding it closed. He pulled the flaps open and peered inside. Inside were bundles of cotton fabric in various colors and sizes. Curiosity getting the best of him, he picked up one and unfolded it carefully. When he held up the blue cloth item in the sun, he snickered. It was a garment that was a cross between a sleeveless shirt combined with a pair of pants, although the shirt section was really just a cloth panel in front and back with straps holding them together over the shoulder. The pant legs were much larger than usual and ended only a few inches just below the knees.

He checked the inside tag and was surprised to see the bib overalls he held was just his size. He took a look around and did not see anyone looking his way. Most of the activity of the colony was focused upon the construction of the domes. Confident that no one would likely notice him, Michael quickly pulled off his furman vest and stepped out of his shorts. He sat on the edge of another box and slid his foot down into the new garment. He understood immediately why the legs were wider than usual, to allow his digitigrade foot room to go into the pant legs without binding.

He pulled the pants up, tucking his tail plume through a wide opening in the back, and then slipped the straps over his shoulders. He had to adjust the clasps a little, but otherwise the overalls fit him well enough. He squatted down and discovered that even down on all fours, the garment fit him well enough to be practical.

There were several pockets across the front panel in addition to the typical pants pockets. If he wanted, he could wear a loose tee shirt like Jon’s beneath the shoulder straps, but on a warm summer day like this, Michael was content to wear only the overalls.

Grinning widely at his find, he looked back into the trailer and spied several more boxes that were labeled the same. He knew his popularity was likely to rise when he announced his discovery to the rest of the Furs. Jon’s tailored jeans had been a hit among the others, but due to their special construction, it would be a while yet before there would be more available to those who wanted them. Apparently someone else had thought among similar lines and had ordered the bib overalls in advance.

The furman robes they had all worn for the past nine months were comfortable, but Michael was more than ready for a change.

***

“Do you remember the first time we met?”

Jenni looked over at the red wolf and shook her head. They were stocking the dome that had been established as the colony medical hut. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she admitted. “All the Furs looked the same to me when I first got here and I think it was months before I actually got to meet with most of your Class.”

“You and your housemates had just arrived and were headed to the cafeteria for something to eat,” Ken told her with a smile. “I held the door open for you, and as you passed me, you asked if you could pet the fur on my arm.”

Jenni chuckled. “Do you remember what I looked like then?” she asked cryptically.

The lupine doctor flicked an ear as he examined her face, searching his memories. “I think you had long dark hair, and I believe you were a little heavier than you are now.”

“That was Kristen,” she corrected, putting a finger up to her scalp-hair and holding up light-colored bangs. “I’m a natural blonde and it was Kristen who petted your fur.” She gave his look of embarrassment a wide grin.

“Uh, uhm… sorry,” the furman physician apologized. “I guess my memory of you at that meeting is faulty too.”

The leopard female laughed aloud and handed him the leather case of a medical kit. Like her own house physician, Ken could be a little too serious at times and she decided right then that she would make it her mission to loosen up his lighter side whenever she could. Since they were Felis and Canis, they would have no future together at a real colony, but that did not mean they could not be associates. So soon after losing Dante, she was not looking for a relationship, but she could always use another friend.

***

Kristen sat on a rock beside the lake under the morning summer sun, tears rimming her eyes as another wave of pain pulsated through her chest. She held one hand up to her sternum and panted for breath until the agony passed, sincerely hoping the pain was a result of her final transformation effects rather than an actual heart attack.

Just as Cheryl had been placed in charge of setting up the livestock pens due to her experience growing up on a farm, Kristen had been set over the gardens they would plant for food. She had just staked out an area for a garden near the tall barrier separating them from the rest of the Institute, so that when the exercise was over she might continue to tend what had grown. With all the activity necessary to get the colony established, it might be several days before she actually began preparing the grounds, so she had not yet asked for assistance.

She had been thankful of the task to distract her from troublesome inner thoughts, but even that diversion had been unable to clear her mind completely. Just as she would in a real life situation on another world, the botanist had already planned to start with a garden of food plants for the colony, though due to its one-month limitation, she did not want to set out seeds for everything. For now, her plans were to include those that would mature the quickest to add to their meals. Anything more would have to wait until such time as when they might land upon a distant planet, although they had no assurances that seeds from Earth would find enough compatible nutrients in alien soil. Colonies that preceded them had reported only a thirty percent success rate establishing gardens of Terran food plants, so they would need to discover which native fruit and vegetables might sustain the settlers as soon as possible.

Kristen did not have time to reflect upon any of this, her mind focused only on the chest pains she was experiencing. She looked out over the activity surrounding the colony setup, trying to spot one of their physicians. With so much movement in the camp, she was not sure if either of them might even see her waving to get their attention anyway, but she did not want to give up until she had tried.

She did not know which of the domes had been designated as the Infirmary, but she was sure they would both be there, likely inside unpacking medical supplies. The pain increased and a small cry escaped her lips as she felt the fingers in her left hand paw contract tightly. She gasped, forcing herself to breathe when she saw small sparks in front of her eyes, and then she lost her vision altogether.

When the puma’s eyesight cleared again, she was lying on her face in the wet grass. She did not remember falling, but her chest no longer hurt and her breathing was not labored. She must have passed out completely. She swallowed and rolled over onto her side, staring idly up at the tree branches over the edge of the clearing. She lay there for several more moments to make sure she was indeed still alive, but then she could feel the dampness of the rain-soaked ground seeping into her furman garments.

Clearing her throat, Kristen got up on all fours and looked around. Apparently no one had noticed her collapse amidst the continual activity, but when she gazed across the grounds, she saw Jenni emerge from a dome with a plastic crate decorated with a large red cross that she had apparently just emptied.

Kristen took a step to go talk to her housemate, but stopped before she could take another. Jon approached Jenni with another crate designated with the cross label and said something that made the leopard female laugh aloud.

The lioness could feel her hackles rise along her back and she snorted in annoyance. As she turned away, she could feel her throat tightened in jealousy.

“What’s the use?” Kristen whispered to herself, turning to face the stakes and bright pink streamers she had placed to mark her garden area. The enthusiasm she once had for her task had completely evaporated, and so had her interest in the colony itself.

She wiped away the tears and looked over her shoulder at the sound of someone banging on the bottom of a metal pot with a spoon. Now that they were no longer afraid of being abandoned in the woods, Kim and Yuki had taken it upon themselves to put together a meal for the entire group and were calling in the Furs with smiles and gusto.

Both had learned the joys of cooking at a young age and had approached Avon at the first opportunity to take on the role of food preparation. Although they had alienated what few friends they once had with their rants on the survival trek, they were determined to earn their place in the colony by appealing to the various tastes of the settlers. Once upon a time, Dante had claimed that job for himself, but with his absence, the Tanaka sisters had stepped up to take on the daunting occupation.

Heaving a sigh, Kristen remained on all fours and made her way across the compound toward the largest dome. Folding tables and chairs had been set up inside; another smaller dome was equipped with simple kitchen appliances that could be operated with either minimal power or by burning local wood.

As she approached the assembling crowd, Kristen saw Jon and Jenni together once again. The larger mountain lion was relating some tale to her and Ken that had them both watching with rapt attention. Others looked on with interest when they gathered near them and Kristen let out another hard snort at seeing her two housemates together. Were they spending all their time together? She had seen nothing to indicate anything more than friendship existed between them, but it still irked her. That kind of friendship is what she and Jon used to share together.

The botanist looked away and glanced toward the acres of woods that occupied the backside of the Institute grounds beyond the clearing. Under the late afternoon sun, the shadows within the forest were dark and near impenetrable, so she let her eyes rove upward to the high tops of the eastern white pines she could see towering above.

Ignoring the call to eat and acting upon a sudden impulse, Kristen slipped away from the crowd and made her way across the clearing toward the trees. She did not bother to check to see if anyone had seen her go and she did not look back when she left the sunshine behind.

The scents of the forest still damp from days of rain were enticing, but they had nothing to do with the thoughts running through her mind. She moved around the underbrush, instinctively following animal trails. The Institute grounds covered several hundred acres, but she did not have to travel far to find what she wanted.

She stepped out into a moderate clearing surrounded by the tall pines, and after surveying the trunks for only a moment, she chose a thick tree and leapt up onto it. She dug in her claws and quickly scaled the pine. She did not look down until she knew she was a good distance above the ground, and then she stopped to rest upon a thick limb that stuck out over the clearing.

Disgusted with the way her life had turned out, Kristen peered down and wondered if breaking her neck from the fall would hurt for long. She envisioned hurtling herself toward the forest floor with her arms and legs tucked in close so she would land headfirst. She was afraid she might linger and suffer, so she wanted to make her suicide as quick and painless as she could.

She stepped farther out onto the limb, but then hesitated. What was she doing? Did she really intend to jump to her death … because of Jon? Was he really worth that?

Kristen’s throat tightened up again as she thought of her life before furmankind. Even without her contract and transformation, she could never have returned to those days. Jon had treated her with kindness and compassion, and his negative reaction to her choosing the form of a mountain lion had been her own fault. He had even tried being nice again to her, but she had lashed out at him every chance she got in retaliation for his rejection of what she had thought at the time was a generous reward. Becoming a cougar for him had caused her nothing but trouble, and it was a form she would be forced to live in for the rest of her life.

Not for long, he thought to herself. She wiped away the tears again and then closed her eyes. Without giving herself a chance to back out, she leapt off into open space and plummeted head-first toward the forest floor. She tried to pull her arms and legs in close to her body as she had planned, but instead she felt herself writhe and turn in the air. Fearful of what she might hit on the way down, causing more painful harm than she wanted, she opened her eyes just as the ground came up to meet her.

Instead of breaking her neck, however, feline instincts took over and twisted her body around just in time so that the coiled muscles of her arms and legs absorbed the shock of landing. She landed hard enough that she exhaled strongly, but otherwise she was unharmed.

She crouched down upon the ground for a moment, taking in what had just happened, and panted with the rush of adrenaline coursing through her body. Slowly, she turned her gaze upward to where she had leaped from the tree. The fall should have killed her, but the instinct of self-preservation had taken control. She had landed cat-like on all fours and her enhanced body had saved her – against her will.

Kristen snorted in frustration and gathered her strength for another climb up into the tree. She went up higher than she had before, but this time she chose to face away from the clearing. If the fall in open air had given her inner cougar time to twist and turn enough to land safely, she would foil it by jumping out into the rugged tree limbs instead. It was likely to hurt more on the fall, but she was certain enough cross branches would keep her instincts from letting her land on her feet, and there was also the possibility a random fork in the limbs could break her neck before she reached the ground anyway.

For a moment, she let a wry smile cross her face. She must be awfully disturbed if she could think of morbid plans in such a nonchalant manner. The seriousness of what she was trying to do, however, pulled her back down into melancholy. If she thought about it too much, she would probably talk herself out of it, and right now, that was not what she wanted.

Kristen took a deep breath, closed her eyes and then launched herself out into a thicket of tree branches, intent on letting gravity do its work. Pine needles and thin limbs smacked her in the face, stinging her ears, nose and lips, but before she fell more than a dozen feet, her hands and feet clawed at the branches seemingly of their own will. Her heart racing and her breath quickened, she grabbed frantically at the boughs until she had slowed her descent enough that she could drop down to the forest floor again with only a bare thump.

The lioness rolled over onto her side, her lungs heaving from exertion and stress, and when she had finally calmed down enough, she burst into tears and cried hard into the dirt, grass and leaves beneath her. Months of despair and frustration poured out of her in heart wracking sobs and she did not hold anything back, even letting feline shrieks rend the air. She did not care if anyone heard her heart breaking into pieces. She felt she was such a loser that she could not even commit suicide without botching the job!

After a long while, the tears ran out and exhaustion set in. She cried herself to sleep, but when she finally awoke, she discovered that only a short time had passed. It was doubtful she had been gone long enough even to be missed by the others.

Kristen wiped her face with the back of her furry arm and winced at the small cuts and scrapes across her muzzle from the small whip-like needles and twigs of the trees she had thrown herself through. She did not know what she would say to Ken about them when she went to him later for a salve for the cuts; she supposed she would think of something by the time she found him.

Disgusted with herself, Kristen did not feel like making a third attempt, so she left the small clearing behind to see what the Tanaka sisters had concocted to eat. She felt foolish and sickened by what she had tried to do, and it was unlikely she would do it again.

***

Nighttime had graciously fallen by the time Kristen had finished eating and she had visited Ken to treat her wounds. When the red wolf had inquired, she played embarrassment and merely told him that she had fallen out of a tree trying to reach a few choice seeds for her garden. It never occurred to the doctor that it was unlikely she would find anything in a tree for her garden, and had gently treated her cuts and scrapes regardless.

Outdoor torches had been placed between a few of the domes to illuminate the area, and there were several lanterns lit inside some of the smaller structures. The lioness was not sure where she was supposed to be sleeping for the night, as none of the domes had been assigned to specific individuals. She assumed they were first come, first served and she had likely missed out on grabbing one for herself that first night.

In all likelihood, she would probably wind up on a cot or pallet inside the Great Dome, as the largest had been dubbed. She did not really care, as she was awfully tired and lonely. Perhaps sleeping among others would be a good thing for her injured sense of self.

She was about to head toward the large structure to claim a spot on the floor when she saw Jon and Jenni in the shadows behind one of the smaller domes. They were talking quietly and then they embraced for just a moment. Kristen watched them impassively, not even having the energy to feel jealous anymore, but then her housemates stepped away from one another and went in opposite directions.

They had done nothing more than give each other a hug and bid one another good night. It was innocent, right? Despite that Kristen had seen Jon in the company of other females throughout the day, he was alone when he crawled into a nearby dome and turned out the lantern within.

Kristen was about to turn away when a thought occurred to her. She looked around to make sure no one nearby might be watching, and then she padded quietly to the entrance of his quarters. She dropped to all fours, but then settled down on the grass, listening to him moving around in the darkness. It only took moments before she knew he had undressed, settling down for the night, so she steeled her nerve and put her impromptu plan into motion.

The structure had not been built with a door that could be closed, although the hinged framing materials for them were available. The summer air was warm and Jon had likely felt an open door would be more comfortable for now.

On all fours, Kristen boldly walked right into the dome and stopped at the edge of the pallet Jon had set on the floor. There was enough light from a lamp across the camp that she could see his eyes peering up at her curiously. He was stretched out on top of a blanket-covered mat, half on his side and half on his stomach, one pillow beneath his head and his arms wrapped around another. He wore only shorts with his tail laying out behind him.

Before he could speak, the lioness moved forward and then stretched out beside him, not bothering to remove her garments. She buried her face into the pillow in his arms and waited for his reaction. She half expected him to blow up at her, but instead he reached out a hand and lightly brushed her coal black scalp hair away from her forehead.

Encouraged, Kristen took another bold step and quietly moved the pillow out from between them. Jon allowed her to take it, but instead of putting it beneath her head as he had likely expected, she set it aside and then scooted in closer to take its place next to him.

Cuddled up beside him as she used to do, it was only a moment before she felt him shift his weight onto his side so he could wrap his arms around her. It was the first close contact they had shared in weeks and she could almost feel herself melting into his embrace. Perhaps it was because they were becoming more feline with each passing day, but after her depression and failed suicide attempts, lying together like this was a blessed relief.

For fear of ruining the moment, Kristen dared not speak a word. She did not want to say the wrong thing, to frighten him away with assumptions that she was trying to seduce him, so she did nothing more than relax into his arms.

They lay like that for several long moments, but then Jon placed his lips near one of her ears.

“I am sorry, Kris,” he whispered in hesitation. “I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you, and I apologize for getting upset when you were only trying to show me gratitude.” He paused a moment, but she did not respond. Her eyes were open, though staring unfocused into his bare chest fur.

Jon swallowed. “I want to accept my new life,” he continued in a soft whisper. “I failed in my part of our promise. I wasn’t there to help you throughout the transformation when I should have been. All I could think about was my own pitiful excuse for existence, and I took it out on you because you and I both resemble the guy whose life I took. You didn’t know the full extent of my emotional baggage, but I never should have treated you the way I did.”

Kristen still did not reply, but Jon could see moisture in her eyes.

“Can you ever forgive me?” he asked quietly.

The anthro woman in his arms responded in a way that surprised him. Although she still did not speak a word, she began to purr, and the throaty vibration was infinitely comforting to both cougars. Kristen had found acceptance and Jon had found forgiveness. Neither thought beyond the moment at hand; there had been neither commitment nor promise made, but the tension between them melted away into the night.

Despite that they slept on a pallet on the floor of what amounted to no more than a geodesic igloo, that night provided the first truly peaceful sleep that either of them had had in a long while.

Chapter 15

The Telltale Paw Print

The morning began with a scream.

Jon looked up from his spot in the grass with alarm. He had been doing his morning exercises just outside of the dome he and Kristen had occupied during the night. The feline woman was still asleep inside, but Jon’s senses were alert and he jumped to his feet. Others around the camp who had already been up at sunrise were rushing toward the pens that had been set up to corral the sheep they had brought with them.

Arne was the first to arrive, having been the nearest, and although the African lion had not been particularly close to any of his housemates, Sissy saw him and immediately jumped into his arms with tears in her eyes.

“What’s the mat—?” he started to say. Then he looked past the small orange cat in his arms and saw the broken wooden fence with the German shepherd lying backward across it. The sheep were clustered together on the opposite side of the pen, just as far from the canine as possible.

Arne gently pushed Sissy away from him and approached the fence, but Avon’s voice boomed out from behind. “Don’t touch him!” the grizzly commanded.

The lion pulled his hand back and looked up at the bear. “I was just gonna see if he was still breathing,” he explained.

“I think we can all see that he’s not,” Jon said dryly. He was flanked on both sides by Aaron, Norman, Ken, Cheryl and Manny, and all were surprised at the scene they beheld.

Travis Tyndall’s head was sprawled on a loose neck at an angle that nature had never designed, even for genetic hybrid. An indistinct, muddy paw print decorated the light colored fur at his throat, a likely testament that his broken neck had been no accident. Whoever had struck him had done so with such force to knock him backward into the thin wooden fence, breaking the top two rungs. His knees were bent across the bottom of the fence while the rest of him was sprawled across the broken pieces in the muddy grass inside the pen. The canine’s eyes were wide open but unmoving, and his mouth was agape with his tongue up against his teeth. Blood stained both the tongue and the teeth scarlet.

Ken pushed Arne aside and approached Travis cautiously, putting a hand up to the German shepherd’s neck. The lupine doctor felt for a pulse, but after a moment he looked back at Avon and shook his head. “I know we’re supposed to play the part of a colony separated from the rest of humanity,” he said, “but I think you should send word out to the director about this. This is no simulation.”

“Who could have done such a thing?” Sissy asked, quietly clinging to one of Cheryl’s arms. Aaron and Norman immediately looked at Jon. Neither said anything, but Avon caught the gesture and cleared his throat.

“Yes, Marcelo should know about this,” he said, looking around at those around him. “For now, I don’t want anyone touching Travis, so please stay here and keep anyone else back. Leave him just as he is for the investigation.”

“Do I have to stay too?” Sissy squeaked.

“Were you the one who found him?”

“Y-yes.”

“Then I’ll need you to speak to the director.”

“Oh, okay,” the orange feline replied, worrying her bottom lip.

“Jon, why don’t you come with me too,” he suggested.

“Huh? Why?” the cougar asked.

“I’ll need you to support the details I give Marcelo, in case I forget something.”

“Uh, sure.”

Aaron and Norman exchanged glances when the three of them departed to get word to Marcelo. “What was that look for?” Cheryl asked when they were out of earshot.

“What look?” Norman asked, trying to appear innocent.

“Oh, come on!” she said in exasperation, tilting her cowgirl hat to keep the morning sun peeking through the trees out of her eyes. “You two think Jon did it, don’t you?”

“Now why would we think that?” Aaron said with dripping sarcasm. He swung an arm toward the deceased canine without looking at him. “He and Travis have been at one another’s throats since they both got here!”

“After Travis tried to rape Kristen, I heard Jon threaten to break his neck if he tried something like that again,” Norman added.

“Yeah, but from what I heard, you threatened to toss Travis into the ravine yourself!” Cheryl retorted. “Shouldn’t that make you a suspect too?” She turned and glared at Aaron. “Even you sucker punched him in the kidney a couple times on our trek back! None of you are guiltless!”

“The point is,” Ken said, stepping in between the Border collie and the bears, “Avon heard Jon threaten to break Travis’ neck too, and a broken neck is what’s happened here. I’m pretty sure that’s why he wanted Jon with him when they talk to the director.”

Manny knelt next to the downed canine, but refrained from touching him. “Is that a hand print or a foot print?” he muttered to himself, staring at the mud on Travis’ neck. It was while he examined it that he suddenly realized what he was seeing. The German shepherd’s neck was caved inward, his throat crushed from some terrific blow.

The arctic fox swallowed involuntarily, stood up and backed away.

***

It took over an hour for Sheriff Davis to reach the secluded area of the Institute; Deputy Loggia pulled into the parking lot minutes later with an ambulance behind her and they were all ushered in through the grounds to the sectioned off area of the colony. It would take some time for a crime scene investigation team to arrive, so the sheriff and his deputy would secure the area and begin taking statements from the Furs.

Jon had been suspicious when Avon requested his presence reporting the incident to the director, but counted it as yet another attempt by the grizzly to involve him in managerial actions; Avon had never given up trying to recruit the mountain lion to head up a Felis colony someday. However, after the Ursis leader had informed Marcelo of Travis’ death in a conversation at the barrier gate, and Sissy confirmed it with her witness account, the director immediately fixed Jon with a dark glare.

As the others had previously discussed, it was no secret that Jon and Travis had had it in for one another since they had both arrived. Marcelo also had private knowledge of Jon’s past, which only strengthened his suspicions, and when Avon revealed the nature of Jon’s threat upon the German shepherd’s life following the canine’s rape attempt, he was sure of the cougar’s guilt.

Knowing that Jon had killed before, but legally bound not to reveal the information to just anyone else under the laws of the Witness Protection policies that had given Brian Barrett a new identification, Marcelo had ordered Jonathan Sunset to be escorted to a room that could be locked from the outside for questioning.

It had surprised and angered the mountain lion that he was the prime suspect to be responsible for Travis’ demise, but allowed himself to be escorted without resistance. He did not want to do anything else that might convince anyone that he was guilty of the crime, especially as he had noticed the side looks given to him by those at the crime scene. He was sure they all believed in his guilt; after all, he had made serious threats against the canine and had meant them at the time.

Jon could not help but wonder if he was going to wind up back in the Colorado prison where he had been incarcerated. Was the deranged bear still held there awaiting the chance to finally get the meal he had been denied? The mountain lion sat down heavily on the folding metal chair in the room where he had been locked up and put his head in his hands.

***

“I did not kill Travis,” Jon repeated wearily. “Yes, I threatened to break his neck after he tried to rape Kristen, but no, I didn’t follow through on it.” He stared across the small folding table at CSI Agent Dorian, a tall, thin man possessing a face full of freckles, with his head and arms covered in thick hair that was brighter red than Jon’s had been as a human. The sheriff and his deputy were stationed behind the suspected furman with orders to subdue him with any means necessary should he become agitated, but to otherwise keep silent during the interview. Both had been supplied with fast-acting tranquilizer dart guns.

“Several strands of red and black fur not belonging to the victim were collected from the muddy paw print on Mr. Tyndall’s neck,” Dorian remarked tonelessly. “They will be tested for your DNA signature, of course, especially the red ones.”

“They’re probably your own…” Jon muttered beneath his breath.

“What was that?”

“Forget it. Listen – I wasn’t Travis’ only enemy,” Jon tried again. “He made a habit of ticking off just about everyone he met.”

“Yet you were the only one who openly threatened him in the exact manner of his death.” Dorian consulted his notes on the small steno pad in front of him. “Although the genetic transformation enhances the strength of all who go through the furmankind process, there are actually very few who possess the kind of strength in their hands to crush Mr. Tyndall’s throat in this manner.”

The thin man gave Jon’s broad shoulders and thick arms a brief glance. “I understand you maintain a regular exercise routine and have often displayed your physical fitness around your associates. It takes no real stretch of imagination to realize you possess the necessary strength for such an act. I believe you were even out exercising when the body was discovered.”

“I wasn’t even out on the grounds when it happened!” Jon exclaimed in frustration. “I was sleeping in my dome – and I wasn’t alone!” Dorian raised an eyebrow and Jon sighed audibly. “Kristen was sleeping beside me,” he added.

“It seems to be well-known among your associates that you and Ms. Eisenberg have not been on friendly terms in recent weeks,” Dorian said dryly. “It’s interesting that you would choose her as your alibi.”

“We reconciled our differences last night,” Jon said in a quiet voice.

“Is killing him for her what mended your fences?”

Jon sputtered. “You’re insane to think up something that preposterous! Ask her.”

Dorian nodded toward the officers behind Jon. “Ms. Eisenberg volunteered to the sheriff that you had indeed slept beside her last night, but as she claims she was asleep at the time of the murder, she cannot prove that you were still with her when it happened.”

The man put down his steno pad and leaned forward slightly over the table. “Did you get up during the night to relieve yourself and find Mr. Tyndall outside alone? Was there an argument, or did you simply attack him outright, making good on your threat at an opportune moment? You two did have an altercation just before this.”

“I did not kill Travis Tyndall,” Jon growled. “Use a polygraph test on me.”

Dorian smiled thinly. “I think you already know that polygraph tests do not work on Furs,” he remarked. “Something about your screwed up anatomy makes the readings show truth on everything you say – even outright lies.”

“I didn’t kill him!” Jon repeated.

“You had the motive and the means, Mr. Sunset, and no solid alibi.”

“And you have no witnesses!” Jon retorted hotly. “This is all purely circumstantial!”

“Perhaps, but until our investigation reveals anything else, you will be held on suspicion of murder. I understand that you Furs are governed by a slightly different laws in cases like this and the Furmankind Institute will provide you with an appropriate knowledgeable lawyer, but until further notice you are to be removed from this place and will occupy a cell in the sheriff’s jail pending the outcome of this investigation.”

Jon gnashed his teeth and the sheriff behind him prepared to fire his dart gun, but the mountain lion exhaled sharply and then put both of his hands upon the table, his wrists facing upward.

“Fine, cuff me and take me in,” he spat out, “but make sure you do an exemplary job on your investigation, Agent Dorian. I’m innocent until proven guilty, and I repeat that I did not kill Travis Tyndall. I had no knowledge of his death until Sissy screamed and was just as shocked as everyone else to find him that way.”

“You’re innocent until proven guilty,” Dorian agreed, “but you are the prime suspect – no, you’re the only suspect in this case, so you are to be locked up good and tight.”

Without allowing Jon further rebuttal, the agent looked up at the sheriff and gestured toward the door with his chin. “He’s all yours, Davis. Get him out of here.”

Chapter 16

Blowing Whistles

“The results of the DNA testing were performed and verified by two separate technicians in the crime lab in Albany,” Sheriff Davis told Marcelo Delgado over the telephone. “Despite the circumstances that point to him, neither samples of fur taken from the victim’s body has a match to Mr. Sunset. They’re not even the same species.”

“Could you identify the species?” the director asked. He could hear the tapping of a keyboard through the phone before the officer replied.

“The lab reports that all the fur samples are Vulpes vulpes, which I’m told means it’s from a red fox. This concludes nothing, however. With so much activity at your colony play site, the fur could have merely been in the mud that Sunset got on his hands or feet prior to attacking Tyndall. Have there been any new developments on the autopsy by your own people?”

“Nothing beyond what we already knew, I’m afraid. The cause of death was from violent blunt-force trauma to the throat, jaw and spine resulting in a severed spinal cord from a broken neck. The direction of the assault was in an upward direction and the force of the impact also drove splintered bone chips up into the skull. It is believed that he died instantly.”

“I see. Was there anything to suggest there was a struggle – any defensive wounds?”

“None that we could find, but there was more red fur stuck to his claws.”

“Sunset has red fur on his head,” the sheriff reminded him. “I’ve always thought it was strange for an animal to have fur on its head that looks like human hair, but I’m no geneticist and don’t know much about such things.”

Marcelo frowned at the man’s remark relating all his Furs to nothing more than non-sapient animals, but before he could explain the difference between hair and fur, there was a soft knock upon his door. He glanced toward the panel and saw a small envelope slide into the office beneath the bottom of the door.

Without speaking, the swarthy director quietly set the handset onto the desk, bent down and retrieved the missive. The envelope was sealed, but his name was written on the outside with a brief instruction to deliver it to him immediately; he opened it quickly and drew out a simple yellow sheet of paper. While the sheriff continued droning on about his lack of evidence to convict the cougar, Marcelo’s eyebrows raised at what he read.

“Excuse me, Sheriff,” he said suddenly, cutting off the officer’s comments, “but I have a matter that’s come up that I need to attend to. Please let me know if there’s anything new that crops up, and I’ll do the same for you.”

“Of course, Dr. Delgado. I know you’re a busy man out there. I will talk to you later.”

“Goodbye.” The director hung up the phone almost absently as he looked back down at the message scrawled on the yellow note.

“Jon Sunset did not kill Travis Tyndall, but I know who did. I can meet with you and discuss it only on the condition of anonymity for my own protection. If you agree to this, come alone to the colony gate right away and put one of the orange plastic flowers from your office waiting room on the padlock keeping the Furs separated from the Institute. If I see the flower, I will come out to the gate to talk to you. Until I see this sign signifying your agreement to my condition, I will remain silent.”

He did not recognize the handwriting, but Marcelo jumped to his feet and departed his office right away. On the way out the door, he stopped beside the bouquet of mixed plastic flowers on Sissy’s counter and pulled out one that resembled an orange daisy. He hurried outside and jumped into the electric cart parked there for his convenience. He passed by one of the guards walking back toward the fence, probably the man who had delivered the envelope.

When the director pulled up near the gate, another guard approached him with a frown. “Is there a problem, sir?” the man asked.

Marcelo shook his head, getting out of the cart. “No problem, Martin. I’m just feeling restless in my office with all this. I thought I’d peek through the fence at our Furs and see how they’re handling this.”

The man shrugged. “Nobody looks like they’re having much of a good time,” he remarked, turning to resume his rounds. “I doubt I would either with a fresh murder in the air.”

“That’s about what I expected, but I’m going to look in on them just the same.”

“As you wish, sir.”

Making sure the guard continued on his way without watching, Marcelo approached the gate and reached in through the chain link fence to place the plastic stem of the orange flower into the keyhole of the padlock.

He peered in through the three-inch-wide gap in the black curtain that covered the fence, but did not see any nearby activity. He saw a number of listless Furs milling around the storage trailers, but no one seemed in any hurry to unload them of their supplies and none were looking his direction.

“Thank you for coming,” a familiar soft voice whispered from the other side of the gate. The director started, having not seen anyone approach. He quickly deduced that she had already been waiting just on the other side.

“I agree to your condition,” Marcelo whispered. “What do you have for me?”

The Fur began speaking in a low voice, providing him with some surprising information. The director listened quietly without interruption until she was finished and only then did he ask a few questions for clarification.

When they were done, she handed the plastic flower back to him and he reaffirmed his acceptance on her condition of anonymity. With new thoughts to think about, Marcelo climbed back into the cart and sped across the grounds back to his office.

***

“Hey, lil’ fox, are you okay?” Wendy asked. She knelt down in the grass beside Kevin and looked at him in concern. The fennec fox sat on the ground with his back against one of the small domes, his knees up and his head down on them. He lifted his head only enough to peer back at the Golden Retriever. Moisture in his eyes glistened in the late morning sun.

“No, ‘m not okay,” he mumbled, dropping his forehead back onto his knees.

“Are you hurting?” she asked gently. “Are you having transformation pains?”

“No, but I wanna go home!” the teenager replied plaintively. “I don’t want to do this anymore!” Wendy stretched out a hand and put her fingers lightly on his shoulder. She could feel him shaking, but before she could inquire further, he volunteered the information on his own.

“Whelan killed himself, Dante died because he couldn’t take the changes, and now one of my best friends has murdered Travis in a fight! I’m… scared!” he blurted out. “What if I’m next to die?”

“Kevin…” Wendy began, not really knowing what to say, “I’m just as sorry as you are that all these things have happened, but you know you can’t go home ever again.” She gestured around at the simulated colony, even though he was not looking at her. “This setting is going to be the closest thing to a home that any of us will ever see again.”

“I’m too young to do this!” Kevin exclaimed into his knees. “I shouldn’t have come here!”

“You were adult enough to take responsibility for your own life,” Wendy reminded him. “You’re no boy, Kevin – you’re a man… even if you do have big ears and a fluffy tail. You can take it all as experience just as the rest of us have to do. You aren’t alone, and you don’t have to go through this alone. These events can frighten anybody!”

The young fox did not respond and she felt helpless. Her heart went out to him, but she was inexperienced at trying to lift anyone out of fear and depression. However, she did know someone who was.

Wendy moved her hand to his cheek and brushed it gently with a finger. “Come on,” she suggested quietly. “Let’s go see Erin. Perhaps she can lend a better ear than my own.”

“Whu-why?” Kevin asked with a hard swallow. He looked up at the canine through moist eyes. Ever since she had been attacked by wild coyotes out in the forest, Kevin had spent a good deal of time around Erin and was suddenly afraid that Wendy was trying to push him together with her to get his mind off his fears. He liked Erin a lot, but after his breakup with Rose, he was not really ready for another relationship.

“Because she’s our counselor,” Wendy reminded him without understanding his hesitation. “She can listen and help you through your fears. I’m… I’m not very good at this, but I care, Kevin. We all have to stick together through this, and no matter what happens, you will never be alone!”

The young fox lifted his head and then wiped his eyes with both hands. He felt foolish, but he was still afraid. If they were dying off one by one now, how were they to ever survive on another world?

Wendy held out a hand to him and he took it after a brief hesitation. She helped him to his feet and then walked with him toward the place she had last seen the other fennec fox.

***

Kristen was kneeling in the dirt in her garden, idly trying to force herself to concentrate on her work instead of moping around in fear of what had happened during the night. Just when she had finally patched things up with Jon, he had been taken from her. She did not want to believe that the male cougar had actually killed Travis, but due to his criminal past, she was ashamed to think that he might have killed the German shepherd. After all, he had previously admitted to killing another Fur – the reason for his very presence at the Institute was proof of that. That murder had come about because of a woman, and Kristen was almost afraid that this crime had also been done over a woman, namely herself.

She did not want to be the cause of anyone’s death, even Travis Tyndall’s. She had hated the canine for what he had tried to do to her, but she had never wished him dead – that was simply not the way she had been raised to believe – and she certainly did not feel vindicated about it. Jon had once taken a life. Had he now taken another?

The lioness choked back a sob and fought back the tears. It would have been better if she had just allowed Travis to have his conquest, as she had once thought. He might have been insufferable to live with afterward, but he would still be alive and no one would have had to defend her.

She looked up toward the overhead clouds without actually seeing them, but then something at the edge of her vision made her look back across the camp. There always seemed to be movement around the colony that she tried to ignore, but ever since her transformation, her feline eyes missed little around her. She did not always remember things until later, but her visual acuity was much sharper than it had ever been. Despite her preoccupation, something made her notice this particular movement across the settlement.

Marcelo, Sheriff Davis, Deputy Loggia and Agent Dorian entered through the colony gate, all bearing looks of determination. Martin locked the gate behind them and took up a position inside the fence to wait. Other Furs around the colony stopped what they were doing and watched as the small group made its way toward the Great Dome. Some of them wondered if the officials were there to conduct more interviews, but when Avon met them coming out of the large geodesic structure, he listened to the director for a moment and then leveled a large paw at one of the smaller domes nearby.

The large bear followed them to the place he had indicated and then a hush fell over the grounds. Kristen got up onto all fours and padded quietly out of the garden to get closer.

Avon looked into the open doorway of the dome and knocked on the side with his thick knuckles. “Jazz, can you come out here, please?” he called.

The eldest of the vixens appeared momentarily, pulling a strap of her cutoff overalls up onto her shoulder. She saw the sheriff and deputy before she looked at the director and suddenly she buried her face into her black-furred hands with a choked sob.

“You know why we’re here,” asked Marcelo, “don’t you?”

“Yes…” the fox croaked out in a raspy voice.

“Jasmine Fleur,” Sheriff Davis told her in a matter-of-fact tone, “you are under arrest on suspicion for the murder of Travis Tyndall. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be held against you in the court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you by the Furmankind Institute. Do you understand these rights as they have been given to you?”

Jasmine wiped the moisture from her eyes, dropped her hands and nodded with a forlorn look of resignation. “Yes.”

Deputy Loggia stepped forward with a pair of handcuffs and the vixen offered her hands behind her back to the woman. The cuffs were locked about her furry wrists and then the deputy led her back toward the gate. Marcelo whispered to Avon and then both of them followed behind Davis and Dorian. The grizzly was the only one who did not keep his eyes straight ahead. The leader of the Furs looked around at those gathered around, but shook his head silently. With just a look, his expression telegraphed that he would fill them in as soon as he knew more, but for now they should go about their tasks.

***

Three hours later, Jon Sunset looked up from his bunk in the cell he had been occupying in the sheriff’s jail. The standard orange coveralls he had been so used to wearing in the Colorado prison would not fit his altered form, so they had had allowed him to remain in the exercise shorts and tee shirt he had been wearing at the time. The thick door at the other end of the large room opened and the first person through the opening was a familiar vixen – in handcuffs. She was followed in by Deputy Loggia and the dark-haired woman took her to the cell adjacent to his.

“Jasmine?”

The red and black furred fox glanced at him sorrowfully while the handcuffs were removed, but then she turned away and quietly crawled up onto the bunk in her cell. In the silence of the jail, she curled up on the mattress with her face near the wall.

The deputy turned toward him and approached his cell. She unlocked his door and then opened it. “Come on,” she said when he simply looked back at her. “You’re being released.”

“Uhm… why?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

“All your questions will be answered by Dr. Delgado. This way, please.”

The cougar looked back at the vixen with a frown before he walked out of the cell. Loggia caught his look and simply nodded. That simple gesture told Jon volumes, even if he did not know the details.

He wanted to say something encouraging to Jasmine, but he did not know what to say. Finally, without a word, he turned and followed the deputy from the room. She led him down a wide corridor and let him into a small break room. Upon the table between two solitary chairs were a couple cups of fresh steaming coffee and a tray of typical java condiments.

“Have a seat, make yourself comfortable and have some coffee,” the deputy directed. Still somewhat puzzled by the sudden change of events, Jon sat down, reached for one of the cups and a spoon for the sugar. Marcelo entered the room a moment later and the deputy closed the door behind her on the way out.

“Hello, Jon,” the swarthy man said quietly, taking the other cup. “How are you?”

“I’m not sure I fully understand what’s happened, Marcelo. Did Jasmine….?”

The director sipped his coffee and then nodded. “Yes, she has confessed to killing Travis. If everything she told us is true, it may be a case of self-defense, but that’s not for us to decide. She will be taken to the Furmankind Institute headquarters in Stockholm for a hearing and evaluation.”

“Self-defense? How did you find out she did it? Surely she didn’t confess before you confronted her.”

“I can’t tell you who it was, but we had a whistle-blower in the colony that sent word to me that Jasmine was overheard telling her sisters what happened. Jasmine allowed herself to be taken away peacefully when we approached her.”

Jon pushed his drink cup away from him and then put both hands upon the edge of the table. “What did she tell you, or am I allowed to know?”

The director sat back and absently stroked his Van Dyke beard. “Jon,” he said after further hesitation, “I owe you a sincere apology. Because of the Henry Parker case, I readily jumped to conclusions and simply assumed that Brian Barrett had resurfaced to kill again.” He looked down into his coffee cup. “I’m sorry, Jon.”

The mountain lion appreciated the man’s sincere confession, but he was more interested in hearing what had transpired during the night. “Thanks, Marcelo. I accept your apology. While Travis and I were often at odds with one another, thoughts of actually killing him never entered my mind. Despite all he’s done, Brian Barrett is gone, Marcelo; for good, I think.”

The director looked up and sighed. “I’m glad to hear it, Jon.”

“So what happens now? Will Jasmine have to face execution by another Fur, or will she get a mind-wipe for her crime?”

Marcelo looked alarmed. He shook his head, took another sip from his cup, grimaced, and then placed it on the table beside Jon’s. “They don’t go to those extremes for self-defense cases. The hearing and evaluation will determine how she will be penalized.”

“So you do think it was self-defense,” Jon remarked.

The director nodded. “Travis had made more enemies among the Furs than just you and Kristen,” he told him. “I’ve received complaints about his actions toward the women for months, and not just from the Furs. He seemed determined to bed someone, but no one wanted to have anything to do with him. The more frustrated he got, the more aggressive he was, and he even attempted to force himself upon a couple of them. Whether or not he was successful remains to be seen, since no one has come forward about it, but cases like that sometimes never get reported.”

Jon nodded, surprised at none of this. Marcelo continued, putting both elbows upon the table and setting his chin upon his hands.

“One of those he tried to force himself onto was Jasmine’s youngest sister, Rose. Dahlia showed up and stopped him in time, but he swore vengeance on all three of the sisters, each of them having refused him at one time or another. When Jasmine got up during the night to use the bathroom in one of the colony latrines that Travis himself had dug and constructed, he was waiting for her. I doubt he knew which of the sisters would be out during the night, but she said when he saw her he came after her right away, catching her near the sheep pen.”

Marcelo frowned and glanced back toward the door. “I think we’ve all become familiar with Jasmine’s habit of going around in as little clothing as possible since her fur grew thick enough for cover. She said that when she got up to visit the latrine, she was not even wearing her shorts, thinking it would be dark enough in the middle of the night for a quick dash there and back. When Travis discovered her state of undress, he tried to rape her, just as he did with Kristen.” He shook his head and added, “We should have had him on sexual suppressants months ago.”

Jon laid his ears back, tightening his grip on the edge of the table, but he then had to make himself stop when he realized he was leaving permanent imprints in the pressed wood. Marcelo saw the reaction and swallowed nervously.

“You probably already know this since you’ve been around them more than I have, but before coming to the Institute Jasmine and her sisters were all martial arts students. When Travis tried to force himself on her, she shoved him back and then whirled around on him, intending to place a hard kick to his chest to knock him away. This was the first time since her transformation that she had tried this maneuver, but with longer digitigrade limbs, it altered her aim and she kicked him in the throat instead.”

Marcelo ran the fingers of one hand through his coal-black hair and then shook his head again. “Travis probably died instantly from the force of her kick, but she didn’t know it at the time. When he fell back hard and broke the fence, she saw it only as a chance to get away from him, so she ran. It wasn’t until the next morning that she found out with the rest of you that Travis was dead.”

Jon sat back in his seat until his tail pressed up against the chair’s metal back and pinched. He repositioned his hip and then pulled his tail up into his lap.

“So what happens now?” he asked in the sudden quiet of the room.

Marcelo looked at his techwatch and then nodded toward the cougar. “They should have your release documents filled out by now. Once I’ve put my thumbprint on them, we can get you back to the Institute and then I can tell your fellow Furs what I’ve just told you. I’m sorry it’s had to come down to this, but I think everyone should know that you’re innocent of the crime and that Jasmine was probably only defending herself.”

“Probably?” Jon repeated, twitching an ear.

Marcelo frowned. “What I’ve just told you of the situation is what she told Agent Dorian. As far as I’m concerned, she’s probably telling the truth, but as I mentioned earlier, it will be up to the hearing and evaluation by the Furmankind Institute to determine her case. We can all try to support her by believing her story, but until this has been resolved, it’s all supposition.”

The director stood up and motioned his companion to do the same. “Come on, Jon. Let’s go home.”

Chapter 17

Sunset of Furmankind

Jenni looked up wearily at the overcast, late night sky as she walked between the small sleeping domes of the simulated colony. In addition to caring for the medical well-being of the colonists, she and Ken had doubled up their duties as veterinarians to look after the health of their livestock too. Considering that the settlers were also part animal, it made sense that the medical staff be able care for them as well.

A majority of the Class Sixteen population had experienced the final, painful reboot of their physiologies during the second week of the assignment, but by the following week there were hardly any minor twinges felt by the personnel. Now in the fourth week of the colony, most of the medical staff’s time was focused primarily with the livestock.

This night had been no exception. One of Cheryl’s Arabian horses had inadvertently stepped on one of the chickens that freely roamed the grounds. The bird did not survive the encounter, but when the horse jumped back startled following the hen’s dying squawks, it backed into the wooden corral fence where a large splinter jutted out and stabbed the animal in its flank. It had taken most of the evening to quiet and treat the hurting horse and now Jenni was more than ready to rest.

When she approached the camping-trailer size dome that she had been sharing with Jon and Kristen, she pulled off the straps of her bib overalls and then slid out of the garment before entering through the open doorway. Although there were plenty of the green fiberluminum domes for each Fur to have one of his or her own, the felines of Class Sixteen had been sleeping curled up together in the same one.

The leopard dropped her overalls on the floor just inside the door and then stepped over to the sleeping bodies. She was about to add herself to the pile when she noted an extra body. Kristen slept beside Jon, who had an arm around her protectively, and Sissy was spooned up behind him. All three were breathing quietly and Jenni smiled at them all.

The nurse knelt down beside Sissy to stretch out beside her, but then the smaller orange cat turned over onto her other side, leaving a small gap between her and Jon. Jenni smirked tiredly and slipped in between them to spoon up to Jon as Sissy had been a moment earlier. She slipped an arm over his middle and then closed her eyes. It took only a moment or two before her breathing deepened into restful slumber.

***

Twenty-nine Furs were gathered just outside the Great Dome. Hiamovi Avonaco stood before them all and looked back over his colony with a smile.

“The reason I have called this meeting is to inform you that I’ve just received word over the com set that our daily reports to Stockholm have been exemplary. Although we’ve had a few bumps and hiccups along the way, the committee has counted our simulation with a mixed-Fur population over the past thirty-five days to be a success and we have been ordered to break camp, effective tomorrow.”

The group broke out into applause and Cheryl let out an exuberant whoop. Avon held up his hands with a grin. “I think we’ve all learned a lot over the past month,” he said. “I know I have. We’ve had to do without some things we’ve taken for granted all our lives and do other things a little differently to compensate, but at least we all now have invaluable experience on what it may be like when we finally get our assignments to go. Some of you have also made some very good recommendations and suggestions for changes that I’ve forwarded to headquarters. Of course, I’m sure you all realize that this has only simulated colony life in itself. Out there on a real world, we’ll also have to be cautious and on the lookout for potential dangers from the alien flora and fauna we find.”

“We won’t find any alien life,” Arne called out. “We will be the aliens there!”

“This is absolutely true, but a whole new world will be alien to us. Trees, rocks, birds and other creatures may appear similar, but they’ll all have developed in a separate environment than what we’re used to, so what may be harmless to the indigenous life there may be deadly to us. Likewise, something dangerous there may not be to us. We can never know until we get there, so don’t let our successful few weeks here delude you into thinking it won’t be any different on another world. We’ve done well, but this was only a practice session.”

“What happens now?” Raine wanted to know.

Avon nodded toward the cheetah and then spread his arms out wide. “First thing in the morning after breakfast, we will start dismantling our colony. The semi-tractor trailers will be moved back in and we will need to systematically pack up everything we took out of them at the beginning. It took us three days to build all the domes and fill them, and it’s likely to take almost as long to take everything down again. We want this area returned to its former state. Then – and only then – will we be allowed access to the rest of the Institute grounds again.”

There were murmurs throughout the group, their enthusiasm dampened by the promise of more hard work, so Avon waved his hands to quiet the crowd once more.

“For those of Class Sixteen,” he said, “you will need to report back to your Wing physicians for a final examination when we’ve finished here. Your transformations should be near to completion and your medical staffs will be preparing for your checkups. Congratulations, Class Sixteen. Once you’ve been given a clean bill of health, you will be certified as fully developed furmen.”

“Yay!” Kevin shouted on impulse, garnering chuckles from others around him.

“There are some of us who still have duties tonight, but for those who don’t, I encourage each of you to help them. If you so wish, you’re welcome to start taking things down tonight, but you won’t be obligated to do so until tomorrow morning. Any questions?”

“What about the garden?” Kristen asked with a raised hand. “Some of the vegetables my helpers and I have planted are only now becoming ripe enough to eat. Do we have to dig them all up in order to return the area to its original state? I had originally placed the gardens where they are so I could continue to tend to them after we’d finished here.”

The grizzly thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think the director would be against leaving it in place just as long as someone continues to maintain it, but I’ll ask him the next time I talk to him.”

“Thanks, I would appreciate it.”

Any further questions?” There were a few murmurs, but no one else spoke up. “Okay, that’s it for now.”

***

It took three days to set up the colony, but it only took two to break it down again. Although everyone knew that once they were on another world they would not be able to simply go back to their comfy beds provided by the Institute, but for now they could and they were all anxious to get back to their rooms.

Most of the consumable goods that had been provided to them for the exercise had been used up, which presented extra space in the storage trailers for items that just did not seem to go in as neatly as they had come out.

The livestock they had cared for had been transferred back to their original paddocks on the grounds by Institute personnel, with the pens and corrals disassembled by the Furs; when the last storage trailer door was closed, there was nothing more to do but have everyone pick up the trash and debris left scattered on the grounds. It was an odd sight to see well-worn trails in the grass that now only seemed to meander around haphazardly without obstacles to traverse.

Late into the second night, the Furs all gathered at the locked gate to be let out. Grinning like a court jester, Marcelo took his time walking to the gate from his office to unlock it for them. He could have easily taken his cart, but the exercise had been such a success that he was feeling mischievous. Even when he finally got to the padlock, he acted as if its key was lost among all those on his key ring. The Furs jeered at his time-taking and some even playfully called him names through the fence, but there were smiles throughout.

After several agonizing minutes for the Furs, the director found the right key and tripped the tumblers in the padlock. He pulled it from the gate and then swung it open to let the exuberant crowd through.

“Welcome back to Earth!” Marcelo called aloud over the animated voices.

Jon was just as anxious as the others to get out of the enclosure, but he hung toward the back of the group. When it was his turn to pass through the gate, he lightly patted Marcelo on the shoulder with a wide smile.

“Well,” he said as the director hung the padlock back on the fence, leaving the gate standing open, “do you think it all went well?”

“I do, and although Avon made his daily reports directly to the Stockholm dispatcher instead of to me, I’ve received a full report from headquarters. They’re all pleased with the results of a mixed-species colony and that information could be useful.”

“Oh? How so?”

Marcelo shrugged. “I think the disaster on Bastien really opened everyone’s eyes to what could happen to a single-species colony. They may revise future plans based upon what we’ve all learned from this exercise, but we’ll have to wait and see. It could still be years yet.” He looked over at the taller male and smiled. “At any rate, this shines a good light on our branch of the Furmankind Institute. Before this, the Toyohashi branch in Japan always took top honors, but their downtime to rebuild and the recent incident with their director has thrown them off track.”

“Incident? Did something else happen to Dr. Mochizuki’?”

Marcelo frowned. “Ah, I forgot you met him up on the space station. Forget I mentioned it,” he muttered. He looked up ahead at the furry backsides of the former colonists, which were all quickly leaving them behind. “What do you plan to do now?” he asked.

“I’m going to meet Kris and Jenni at the cafeteria and we each plan to order a nice, juicy steak!” Jon replied with a feral grin. “After that, I suppose Marcy and Dr. Renwick will drag us all up to the black wall for our final examinations.”

The director gestured forward with a hand with a smile. “You may have to wait for that steak,” he said. “Most of the crowd seems to be heading toward the cafeteria. For your sake, I hope the kitchen is well stocked with beef.”

“Ack!” Jon dropped to all fours and started running. “See ya!” he called back.

***

The black wall. Once upon a time, those words struck terror into the heart of one mountain lioness, but no more. Volunteering to be the first in front of the measuring lasers, Kristen dropped her bib overalls on the floor at the feet of both her housemates and boldly stepped up to the dark wall. Without argument or squabble, she spread out her arms and legs with a grin.

Marcy chuckled and her housemates looked on in wonder. The short cougar had changed over the months since they had begun their lifelong journey together, and not just in the physical sense. Kristen’s sense of self-worth had improved greatly, and although she still had her introspective and shy moments, she had determined that she had shed enough weight and her private bits were now comfortably covered with a luxurious fur coat that the wall was no longer something to be feared.

“Kristen,” Doctor Renwick said with only a mildly scolding tone, “face the wall. You know the drill – backside first.”

“Oh, sorry,” the feline botanist replied with a giggle. She turned around as directed and widely spread out her limbs and digits. She closed her eyes and waited for the laser to begin its clinical measurements of her body.

“Kristen,” Renwick said again, his easy irritation evident. “Stop wagging your tail. Let it drop straight to the floor.”

“Uh, right.”

“Okay, that’s perfect. Close your eyes and hold that pose until I say you can move.”

The bright blue, pencil-thin floor-to-ceiling laser issued out of the scanner just to the left of Kristen’s shortened fingers and then the beam began tracking right while the equipment hummed in deep resonance.

“The tip of your tail is twitching. Be still!”

Kristen snorted into the wall, but willed her tail to remain unmoving. There were times when the appendage responded to her thoughts or emotions without her consciously thinking about the movement, but to make it stop took extra effort.

While the blue light tracked from one side to the other, Jenni watched only in a detached manner, remembering how much Dante had actually enjoyed being up on display. He had not grown up in an open-minded family as she had, but he had seemed to have no hang-ups being on exhibition.

Jon, however, watched in fascination as the laser tracked over Kristen’s soft curves, through her fur and over her limbs. It had been a while since he had really looked at her, having had his anthro prejudices previously blinding him, but now he liked what he saw. Although she was considerably more slender than she had been in the beginning, she still possessed a little padding to her curves that he found pleasing; he had never really cared for the look of stick-figure super models that were in vogue again.

The blue light disappeared just past Kristen’s right fingertips. “Okay, you can drop your arms and relax for a moment,” Renwick told her. “Let me reset the scanner and then we will measure the side that you were so eager to show us.”

Kristen turned and looked at the physician over her shoulder, amused at the smile that was on his face as he went to work with his equipment. She rubbed her arms to let the blood flow back into them, and then she glanced back at her housemates. Jenni appeared lost in thought, but Jon gave her a big smile. She grinned in response, pleased to have him as a friend again.

“Okay, Kristen, back up against the wall, hands and legs spread out wide with your tail down and unmoving.”

The mountain lioness did as directed and soon the laser began to track once again. This time, she was successful in keeping every part of her still so that the doctor did not have to scold her again. It took a tremendous effort, especially knowing that Jon would be openly watching her, but she intended to do the same when it was his turn up against the wall. It took fully five minutes, but finally she was able to relax again.

Having done this a couple times already, she did not wait for the doctor’s instructions. She dropped her arms straight against her side and turned so that her left shoulder was against the wall. She looked directly ahead, though from the corner of her eye, she could see Marcy looking up at her with a smile.

When she had been scanned from all sides, Kristen was allowed to step down. She walked over to the counter to pick up her short-legged bib overalls, but she did not put them on right away, instead holding them draped over an arm as she approached her housemates.

“You’re next, Jon,” Marcy announced.

Jon and Jenni had already disrobed, having folded and stacked their clothing neatly on roller stools by the back wall. Unashamed of his furry physique in front of his companions, the male cougar stepped quietly up to the wall.

The feline nurse put a hand lightly on Kristen’s arm with a smile as the doctor prepared to begin the next round of measurements. “Congratulations,” Jenni told the botanist. “You look so comfortable with yourself that you’d make a great nudist now.”

Kristen’s eyes grew wide and she suddenly looked embarrassed. When she glanced across the room at Jon, he grinned and waggled his eyebrows at her comically before turning to face the wall. She laughed aloud and looked back at Jenni while suddenly stepping into her overalls.

“Thanks to everyone, I feel more comfortable with myself these days!”

Jenni leaned in close and whispered, “So, how are things between you and Jon?”

“Still just friends,” the lioness replied in a whisper of her own, “but I’m okay with that. Maybe someday it’ll be more, but for now I’m happy just to be in his good graces again.”

Both of them turned and boldly looked up at the male cougar at the wall. The blue laser light had begun at his fingertips and the feline females took time to admire his backside. Partly due to his new genetic code and partly due to his daily morning and evening workout routines, the muscles in his neck, shoulders, arms, legs and abdomen were clearly defined. His tail was thick and long enough so that the tip just touched the floor at his feet. His uniform, sandy brown fur darkened toward the middle of his back and stretched from the back of his neck down to the base of his tail.

The long appendage itself was slightly lighter, matching the fur color of his sides, arms and legs, though the tip darkened to black for the final three inches. Beneath his tail, the fur lightened to beige, and although he currently faced away from them, they had already seen that the lighter color fur covered his chest, belly, around his crotch and on the underside of his arms. The backs of his small round ears were dark rimmed to be almost black, with a nebulous white area in the middle of each. The scalp of his head was covered in rusty red hair rather than fur, and although it grew just as long and quickly as it did when he had been fully human, he had kept it trimmed short enough to be manageable, though he preferred to let his bangs grow longer so they covered his forehead.

They continued to watch him when it was time for him to face outward. He saw their eyes dart downward as soon as he had turned around, but both forced their eyes upward with embarrassed smiles at having been caught looking. Just as Kristen had felt sufficiently covered by her fur, he felt the same with his genital sheath, though he had never really had the same hang-ups that she once had about his appearance. There was no hiding the rest of him, but he was calm and relaxed enough to know he would not have to be concerned with an unwanted reaction in front of them, so he settled into his place at the wall with his eyes closed and head back.

The tip of his nose was muted pink, but his upper and lower lips, jaws and neck were snowy white. Atop his nose, the fur was sandy brown, with darker browns coloring his cheeks and pale patches over his eyes. The fur over his brow and the sides of his head were in various shades of tan and brown. Above his nose ran a darker brown stripe straight up his forehead with two dark vertical strips an inch long right above the inside corner of each eye.

His nose and muzzle were broader and extended out in front of the rest of his face, something that had taken him some time to get used to seeing in his range of vision, and although the shape of his head and the coloring of his fur were evenly proportioned to the rest of his new anatomy, he could hardly be called handsome by human standards. Still, in this finished state of the transformation, neither of his female companions could find fault in his features. As with each of them, Jon had a beauty of his own that someone as familiar with Furs as his nurse found appealing.

Marcy had also paused in her own tasks to admire the furman in all his raw glory. Despite the numerous opportunities she had had over the years, the woman had never allowed herself to dally with the men who had been transformed under her care, but that had never stopped her from admiring the product.

When Doctor Renwick informed Jon that he could move and get into position for a side view, the cougar opened his eyes and found three pair of female eyes staring back at him with smiles.

“Are you enjoying the show, ladies?” he quipped. Marcy suddenly averted her eyes, but Jenni and Kristen grinned back at him openly.

“Of course, we are!” the leopard replied. Kristen did nothing more than nod, but she made no effort look away.

“Let’s begin again,” Renwick said in an annoyed tone. Jon closed his eyes and became still again.

***

“Poke me, I’m done!” Jenni said with pride.

After all three Furs of the Felis Wing had been precisely measured at the black wall, they were taken into the main lab for full invasive physicals just as they had undergone at the start of their journey into furmankind. Bodily fluids were drawn and examined, and an hour after the last of the examinations, Marcy had come out to them in the saloon to give them the news. The active goetazine in their systems that had prompted and controlled their genetic transformations was now inert. There would be no further alterations to their systems.

All three were in top physical condition, probably healthier than any of them had ever been in their lives, and they were all filled with a sense of wonder as they all looked at themselves in the restroom mirrors. Jenni posed and looked at herself from all angles, she was pleased with what she saw. Kristen had her back to the mirror, looking over her shoulder at her hips, lightly swishing her tail back and forth in satisfaction.

Jon stood in front of the sink mirrors clad only in a pair of furman shorts, his hands on his hips as he gave his reflection a detailed examination of his own. It was the first time since the beginning that he had really looked at himself, and although he did resemble Henry Parker to some degree, there were enough differences that Jon no longer saw the dead cougar looking back at him.

Despite the anguish over the past nine months about how he had expected to lose his humanity and his soul, Jon now considered his future with a brighter outlook. Although he looked like an anthropomorphized puma, he had retained all his memories, his mind, his will and his emotions. He had not lost himself to the animal, and although he had no way of knowing if his soul was intact, he suspected that he was still all there.

Brian Barrett was truly dead. He had become Jonathan Sunset.

When the feline housemates all emerged back into the saloon, freshly showered, dried and dressed, Marcy was waiting for them in one of the chairs parked in front of the large video screen.

“Here, I have something for all of you,” she said with a smile. She handed each of them a large manila envelope. Jon was the first to open his, pulling out a thick sheet of parchment. It was a Certificate of Authenticity, declaring him a fully transformed furman citizen, signed by Ásmundr Gustavsson, president of the Institution of Furmankind and co-signed by Marcelo Delgado, director of the North American Division of the Furmankind Institute. Included in the envelope was a smaller sheet of plain white paper decorated with multicolored balloons, an invitation to what amounted to a graduation party for Class Sixteen later that evening.

“A party for us?” Kristen asked with a smile. “Nice!”

“Congratulations again,” the nurse said brightly.

“Hmm, what should I wear?” Jenni said in mock seriousness. “Should I go in standard furman shorts and robe, furman shorts and vest, furman bib overalls, or just my own luxurious fur coat?”

“At least wear shorts of some kind,” Marcy cautioned her as she headed back toward her quarters for a shower of her own. “It’s more hygienic, and it’s also the rule!”

Jenni laughed. “Yes, mother!” Marcy chuckled and waved, disappearing in through the lab doors a moment later.

“Jon, what’s the matter?” Kristen asked. Jenni looked back and saw the male cougar staring down at the invitation as if he had gotten some bad news.

“I really don’t think I want to go to a party,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.

“Why?” Jenni asked lightly.

Jon slid the certificate and invitation back into the envelope and looked at his housemates. “It was a party celebration where my troubles began,” he said. “Had I not gone out there that night, I might have moved on with my life. It might have taken me months to get over Rebecca, but instead I had to go to that blasted party. The price was a life sentence.”

Kristen took his free hand into her own. “You told us that your sentencing was to make you undergo the furmankind transformation.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Did the sentence specify that you were to continue transforming for the rest of your life?”

“No, but as a Fur, I am contracted to the AHCP for the rest of my life.”

“That’s true,” Jenni contributed to the conversation, “but that’s a condition for anyone who becomes a Fur. That has nothing to do with your sentence.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Jon replied, looking back and forth between both females.

“What we’re saying is that with that official certificate in your hands, your sentence to become a Fur is now over,” Kristen answered with a friendly smile. “With the completion of the transformation, justice for your crime has legally been served!”

“You may be contracted to the AHCP for the rest of your life like the rest of us,” Jenni added, “but you can now consider yourself a free man!”

Jon raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he admitted. Then, after another moment’s thought, a smile spread across his feline features, realizing that he really did have something to celebrate.

It was a free man named Jonathan Sunset of Furmankind that would attend the party with his housemates.

Chapter 18

Moving Day

“Playing sports as a Fur is a whole ‘nuther ballgame!” Norman said with a wide grin. The ex-NFL linebacker gripped a child’s foam football in his massive hand paws and peered across the others who were out on the open lawn between the buildings on a mild summer afternoon. This was a free day for them all; none of them had duties or classes to attend, so the friends were merely outside for some play time.

With Jon cleared of the crime he had been accused of for killing Travis several weeks earlier, the others were cordial around him again. There had been no further word on Jasmine’s fate, despite that her sisters had inquired of the director every day. There had been anger when everyone believed it had been Jon guilty of murder, but most of the Furs did not fault Jasmine for defending herself.

Travis may have only had one or two individuals at the Institute that could get along with him, but most felt he had brought about his own end. A memorial had not been held for the late German shepherd, as there was no one willing to attend one, so his remains had been quietly cremated and the ashes shipped to Stockholm for storage. He would likely be forgotten in time, a sad end for someone whose transformed life had had the potential for greater things.

Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of those on his impromptu team, the brown bear made a signal to Jon and then hurled the light football over the heads in front of him. Raine Terrance weaved in and out of the small crowd on all fours and then leapt up to intercept the ball before it could get to the mountain lion.

Jon blinked in surprise at the spotted form but then gave chase to the cheetah already knowing that he would probably never catch him. Running on all fours did present a problem, however; Raine had been forced to carry the ball in his mouth and Gerard took a swipe at it as he passed, nearly knocking it from the cat’s teeth. He did not lose it, but it did break his concentration and he plowed headlong into Kevin, the smallest one out on the field. The fennec fox rolled head over tail and came to rest up against Alicia’s feet. He opened his eyes and looked up at the black bear.

“Are you okay?” she asked in concern, reaching down to help him up. Surprising her, the young fox laughed and gifted her with a grin.

“A little dizzy, but yeah, I’m fine.” Despite his short stature, he had happily joined in the game and had even managed a few tricky maneuvers of his own.

Raine stopped to check on him, but had neglected to watch behind him. Still caught up in the chase, Jon launched himself at the cheetah and grabbed him around the middle, letting his weight and momentum assist in the tackle. Both cats tumbled away and so did the ball.

“Excuse me!” Alicia exclaimed with a laugh. She scooped up the fumbled football and ran for a white towel stretched out on the ground designating the other team’s end zone. She crossed the line with Arne right behind her and spiked the foam ball in the grass for her triumphant touchdown.

“That’s it!” she called out. “Final score – we win!”

Arne grabbed her by the shoulders with a smile. “Almost got ya,” he said cheerily. “For a big girl, you move awfully fast!”

“Aw, you say the sweetest things!” the bear replied with a smirk. She patted him on the cheek and added, “Better luck next time.”

Jon got to his feet and then gave Raine a hand up. “You okay?” he asked the cheetah.

The other feline gave him a wide grin in reply. “No problems, I’m a lot more flexible than I used to be.”

“Yes, and that’s a good thing.” Jon patted him on the shoulder and then gave a casual wave to the rest of the group. “Good game, all – I’m heading for the showers!”

“Yeah, me too,” echoed Norman.

With the light game over, the group broke up into twos and threes while Jon turned toward the Felis Wing, brushing dirt and grass from his bare chest fur.

“Mind if I walk with you?”

He looked aside at the short fennec fox who was idly scratching at one of his oversized ears.

“Sure, Kev. What’s on your mind?”

“I heard what you said to Raine about how being a Fur was a good thing.” Kevin looked up at him with a guarded expression; he looked as if he thought he might be treading on a touchy subject.

“I was referring to being so flexible,” the cougar corrected, “but yeah, being a Fur has its advantages.”

“Does that mean you’re okay with it now?”

Jon raised an eyebrow and looked down at him as they walked. Kevin had no knowledge of his true background, but it was common knowledge that he often had some tough mental moments dealing with the changes.

Jon gave him a friendly smile and tapped himself on the forehead with a claw tip. “It took some time for my human brain to come to grips with what I was becoming, but yeah, I’m okay now.”

Kevin looked relieved. “I’m glad. You seemed powerfully unhappy for a long while.”

“I was, but thanks to friends like you and Professor Flynn’s voodoo head-shrinking methods, I made it through.”

“I’m glad you count me as a friend,” the young fox said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t very friendly to you on our hike through the woods.”

Jon chuckled. “You had girl troubles and I inadvertently got into the mix. I wasn’t trying to take your girl and she wasn’t trying to trade you in for me.”

“Yeah, we both know that now.”

“You and Rose are friends again?”

Kevin nodded. “We aren’t dating anymore, but yeah, we’re friends. She’s been really worried about Jasmine, especially since neither she nor Dahlia has heard anything since she was taken away.” He looked up at the mountain lion and looked slightly embarrassed. “Although we aren’t a couple, she’s needed a lot of hugs lately.”

“It’s been said that hugs are important,” Jon told him. “I’m a firm believer in them myself.”

Kevin looked at him. “You don’t seem like the hugging type.”

That made Jon laugh out loud and then he raised his arms to flex his biceps. “You think I’m too manly for hugs?” he asked, eliciting a grin from his companion. “Just because I keep myself fit doesn’t mean I don’t like having a woman close to me. Listen, Kev – anytime a woman needs hugs, don’t be afraid to give them to her – whether she’s a close friend or not. I even need them myself at times.”

“Me too,” the fox admitted.

They approached the awning-covered doors to the Felis Wing and Jon gestured with a hand. “You coming in?”

The large ears shook back and forth. “Thanks, but I’m heading back to my Wing for a shower. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Jon patted him lightly on the shoulder. “Thanks for checking up on me. I think I’ll be fine now.”

“Glad to hear it!” Kevin gave him a nod and then turned to go. “I’ll see you later!”

“Bye.”

***

Soft music was playing when Jon reached the saloon. Both of his housemates were parked in the chairs in front of the large entertainment screen, and from the images he could see, Jon saw they were watching a romance movie.

“You look absolutely stunning, milady” the handsome male lead said to the attractive young woman.

The beauty smiled warmly. “Why, thank you, milord,” she said. She spun around slowly so the man could see her from all sides, and then stopped to face him again.  She lowered her chin, but looked up at him with half lidded eyes. The man caught his breath and moved closer to her.  He put his arms around her and then she tilted her head up to him expectantly. They shared a long kiss and then held each other for a long moment as the music swelled in crescendo over the crawl of the end credits.

“Aww,” Kristen cooed over the pillow she had her arms wrapped around. “I knew they’d get together!”

“Of course they would!” Jenni agreed. “You could tell all along by how much bickering they did throughout the movie!”

Jon shook his head with a smile and proceeded to the linen closet to grab a towel for his shower. He doubted if either of them even knew he was there.

By the time he was cleaned, dried and dressed in a pair of his special jeans and an oversized light blue tee shirt, the girls were relaxing on the couches in the pit. Jenni was composing a letter to her sister on her PBJ, but Kristen was merely lounging across the cushions in the sunbeam that fell through the overhead skylight, thankful in the knowledge there would be no more transformation pains.

Thinking she had the right idea, Jon stepped down into the pit and then stretched out on the pile of floor cushions that had also been sun-warmed by the skylight. It felt good to simply relax.

A little while later, Dr. Renwick appeared at the top of the pit and looked down at them all with his hands in the pockets of his medical smock. Nurse Marcy appeared a moment later, and although the doctor remained standing, she sat down on one of the top steps. In her hands were three wooden picture frames.

“Hey, Doc,” Jon said lazily. “Hi, Marcy. What’s up?” The female felines both gave the physicians a small hand wave.

“It is well-known that cats love to relax in the sun and you all look comfortable,” Renwick said lightly, “but I’m afraid it’s eviction time.”

“Huh?” all three felines said in unison.

Marcy brushed a hand through her shoulder-length platinum hair. “Now that your transformation is complete, it’s time for the three of you to pack up your personal possessions and move out.”

“Why?” Jenni asked. “We haven’t gotten an assignment to go anywhere yet – have we?”

“No, sorry,” the doctor replied, “but now you’re being transferred to the Educational Wing where you’ll take up residence in the dorms with the rest of the Furs. You’ll continue your education learning more skills you’ll need in a colony settlement on an accelerated schedule.”

“Accelerated?” Kristen echoed.

“You’ll have the same courses that Class Fifteen’s done, but Stockholm wants them on an amplified scale.”

“That’s odd. Did they say why?”

“No reason given.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier if we just stayed here in the Cat House while we attend our studies?” Jon asked.

“Easier for you, perhaps, but Marcy and I will need to clean and sterilize the Felis Wing so it can be prepared for the next group of volunteers that will be arriving soon.”

“Wow, is it that time already?” Kristen asked. “How long before the next group gets here?”

“Three weeks,” Marcy answered, “and it will take that long to get everything ready.”

“Okay, I don’t mind the move,” Jon remarked, “but I wouldn’t think it should take three weeks to clean up this place; we’ve tried to keep it in good shape.”

Renwick cleared his throat. “Most of the preparations will be in the lab, not to mention all the documentation,” he explained, “but we’ll need you out of the way in the meantime. Marcy and I will still be giving you periodic examinations to make sure there are no unexpected problems, but your bodies at this stage have made all the necessary adjustments into your new forms and really shouldn’t require our services unless you get hurt doing something. It’s now time for you to use your minds and learn more skills necessary for your vocation of taming new worlds.”

“Our documentation and cleanup will only take a week,” Marcy admitted, “but then we will each take a two-week vacation. We’ll be back a day or two before the next group of volunteers arrives.”

“You get a vacation?” Kristen asked.

“Of course,” said the nurse. “This is our job and we’re entitled to time away to relax before we do all this again.”

“Now that we’ve finished transforming,” Jenni added, “do we get vacation time off?”

“No, sorry,” Renwick answered. “You’re volunteers, not employees.”

“That’s hardly fair,” Jenni murmured. “We’ve been working hard too.”

Marcy gave them all a sympathetic look. “Sorry, we can’t help that,” she said. “Anyway, your classmates in the other Wings will be moving too, so we’ve secured one of the carts that you can use to move your things,” Marcy added. “I’ve also put empty boxes in each of your rooms.”

Kristen stretched lethargically in her sunbeam and yawned. “Do we have to move right now?” she asked. “What’s the rush?”

“Yes, you have to move this afternoon,” Renwick told them. “All of you have classes to begin in the morning. You should have already gotten your schedules sent to your PBJs, so you’ll want to already be in your new rooms before you turn in tonight.”

“I expect you’ll want to get everything unpacked and put away,” Marcy said, “although you shouldn’t have much more to move than your clothes and few personal items.”

Jon stretched again and then slowly got up onto all fours. “Okay, we get the picture. Like little birds that have grown up, we’re no longer cute and are being pushed out of the nest.”

“Something like that,” Renwick said dryly, stepping up out of the pit. Jon gave him a look of amusement.

“Speaking of getting the picture,” Marcy added, “I have the after portraits I took of you last night ready to hang on the wall if you’d like to see them.”

All three Furs gathered around the nurse and each examined the portraits she spread out on the table. Kristen and Jenni really liked the way theirs turned out, and Jon was amused at how little of his human features remained of his face beyond the rusty red scalp hair perched upon his head. He doubted even his own mother or father would recognize him now.

He wondered briefly how they were both doing, but then shook his head as if to shake off the memory. As much as he cared for them, their son was long gone now and under his new identity he no longer had any living parents; it was best not to think of them anymore.

He gave Marcy a nod and turned to go, but the nurse stopped him with a touch on the arm. “Just a minute,” she said. “We still have one more thing to do.”

“What’s that?” Jenni asked.

Marcy pulled her PBJ from a pocket, opened the tablet and flipped to a screen with three tabs. “Now that your bodies have fully developed, I need to record your new thumbprints into the system for future legal signatures. They’re virtually the same as you’ve always had, but will be slightly stretched, so they want new prints.”

She tapped the first tab and set the tablet on the table beside the portraits. “Kristen, yours first.” The botanist put her thumb up to the screen in the box that Marcy indicated and it only took a second for it to scan and register. “There you are,” said the nurse. “Your new signature has just been uploaded to the system. You’re legal again!”

Kristen chuckled and then the nurse tapped the next tab on the screen. “Next Jenni, then Jon.” The leopard and the mountain lion recorded their thumbprints respectfully, and then Marcy closed up her clamshell tablet and took it with her up out of the pit.

“You three can now scoot! We’re all done with you!”

“C’mon, girls,” Jon said with a mock pout. “We’re unloved, so we may as well start packing.” Marcy snickered and the other felines smiled up at her, but they followed their housemate up out of the pit and headed for their rooms.

“The house will seem so empty without the pitter-pat of feline feet,” the nurse remarked as she turned to go.

Renwick looked at her with a smile. “You’ll have another litter of kittens to fuss over shortly. Come on. Let’s take a drive into town for lunch. I’ll buy.”

Marcy’s face brightened. “Wow, it’s been a long time since you’ve treated me! Okay, you go hang these on their nails while I get my purse. We can take my car.”

***

Jon stopped in the entry hall and turned back to look over the saloon. The Felis Wing had been his home for the past nine months, and although he had arrived with a massive chip on his broad shoulders, he was a different man now. Literally.

Over time, he had changed both physically and mentally. He was now one of the creatures he had once despised, though he now enjoyed the benefits of having a hybrid body with a mind that was at peace with itself. He had served his sentence and was still alive and intact at the end of it all. He would miss this place, but it was time to move on.

Still holding one of the cardboard boxes that contained his meager belongings, he turned and faced the ‘before and after’ portraits that were lined up along both walls of the entrance hall. Due to his original hatred for all Furs, he had purposely refrained from ever looking at them whenever he passed in and out of the building, but now he focused his attention upon them directly.

Jon’s group of four volunteers was the sixteenth set to go through the program at this location to become Felis – the human and feline hybrids whose purpose from that point on would be to settle on other habitable worlds as the forerunner of human settlers that would come later.

There were sixty-four ‘before’ portraits on the walls, but due to mishap or misfortune, there were some in earlier classes that did not have an accompanying ‘after’ portrait. He assumed those few had not survived the transformation for one reason or another, probably due to incidents like the ones that took Dante, Whelan and Travis.

Beneath the original photos taken of them when they had first signed their contracts, the portraits of him, Kristen and Jenni were already up on the wall. He studied Dante’s human face for a moment and remembered that he had once thought of the younger man as oily, much as if the guy had been a used car salesman from a disreputable lot. Over time, however, Jon had gotten used to him, even enjoying the occasional banter they exchanged, and he was missed.

Moving along the rows of pictures to shift his inner thoughts elsewhere, he let his mind wander as he pondered where these other Furs were now. He rightly assumed that some of them had likely been at the Felis colony on Bastien that had perished, and while neither Marcy nor Dr. Renwick had said anything about it, he was sure it had been difficult for them to hear news that some of their previous clients had died. Granted, it was a foregone conclusion that there would be some losses among the Furs sent out to wild and untamed planets, but to lose that many at once had to have been painful to those who had known them.

Jon finally stopped in front of one face that would forever be burned into his memory. Henry Parker. The before portrait was no one that he had ever seen before, a man of Italian descent with a casual smile. Jon tried not to think of the first time he had seen the mountain lion’s face, but the image came back to him unbidden; he had been hovering above Rebecca as they writhed together on the same bed he had once occupied with her himself, and then later when he had confronted the mismatched lovers in the very act again.

He had not even seen Parker’s face when he had shot him in the back that fateful winter night, but his visage had haunted him long after the deed was done. He looked at the cougar’s portrait and saw similarities in the features with his own. Renwick may have been directed to use DNA from the same animal that Parker’s had come from, but there were other subtle differences in facial structure, fur pattern, and of course, the color of the scalp hair. With a wry smile, Jon supposed the two of them could have come from the same litter.

The amusement disappeared almost instantly. Now that Jon had grown comfortable with himself, he knew that Parker had been no mindless animal rutting with his fiancé. Parker had gotten mixed up with another man’s woman, and no matter what he might have been, he was fully responsible for his own actions. Now long after the fact, Jon felt remorse for killing him – for murdering him. He should have simply walked away, dumping Rebecca for the cheating woman she was.

Brian Barrett was not the first man to lose his woman to another lover and there were many throughout history who had walked away, but he had chosen to let anger and the sense of betrayal guide his actions.

Jon stared at the after portrait only a moment more and let out a sorrowful sigh. “Why did you have to go after her,” he whispered to the other cougar’s image. “I think we could have been friends otherwise and I would have never hated our kind.”

He considered the mountain lion a moment longer before a thought occurred to him. Would Parker have been one of the felines who would have gone to Bastien? If so, the man had been destined to die one way or the other. The thought did not comfort Jon at all, but it was certainly something to make him wonder if that might be his own fate to come. He had cheated death, but would the bony old skeleton come to reclaim his prize once Jon was on another world too?

***

Despite that they had all been living in the Felis Wing for the past nine months, it was true that none of them had many possessions. The three of them had been able to put everything within the two boxes each of them had been given, clothing, trinkets and all. As the boxes were not very large of themselves, they were able to load all six of them onto the cart with room for the three of them to ride on a single trip across the compound.

Jenni drove the cart with Kristen beside her and Jon sat on the back seat with his arms on the boxes to make sure none of them fell off on the route across the uneven grounds.

When they got to the Educational Wing, there were two other carts already parked at the multistory building, both still partially loaded with boxes of their own.

“We’re on the second floor with other Felis,” Kristen reported after a glance at her PBJ. “Jon’s in room 204, I’m in 205 and Jenni’s in 206.”

“That puts me next door to Sissy.” Jon stood up after the leopard had shut off the motor. He picked up the two boxes that contained his things and turned toward the building. The door opened at that moment and Carl stepped out into the afternoon sun.

“Hello,” the wolf said with a smile, holding the door open for them. “Where are they putting you kitties?”

“Thanks, we’re on the second floor,” Kristen replied with a smile. “Are you and Ellie in separate rooms or did you get one together?”

“We were each assigned a room on the third floor, but we’ll be sleeping in only one of them at a time.”

“Sounds like you got the best deal,” Jenni remarked with a smile. “At least if you get into an argument, you can each go to your own rooms!”

“I hope it doesn’t come down to that,” Carl replied with a smirk. “We’ve always gotten along rather well, probably because we were close friends for ten years before we decided it was time to make it official and get married.”

Despite that he had picked up his boxes first, Jon was the last through the door. “We don’t have much to haul up the stairs, but does this place have an elevator for heavier items?”

“The elevator is down the hall and to the right, beside the ice machine.”

“Thanks, Carl.”

When they got up to their floor, Sissy was there to greet them.

“Hello!” she said enthusiastically. “I’m so glad to have some new neighbors! I opened the windows to your rooms this morning to let them air out, but you may want to close them and turn on the air conditioning. It’s starting to get hot.”

“We have windows?” Jon asked brightly. That was something he had really missed having in the Felis Wing. Although they had a skylight to let sunshine into the saloon, he had often wished for a window in his room to open to let in night air while he slept.

“Yup!” the orange cat said with a grin. “I didn’t know who was getting which room, so I put generic linens on each of your beds. We have lots with different patterns and pictures, but I didn’t know if Jon wanted flowers or little rocket ships!”

The mountain lion gave her a mock snarl, but then grinned. “I’m in room 204.”

There were brass numbers on each wooden door, but Sissy gestured to one and proclaimed, “This is your suite, Sir!” She opened the door for him and then went to do the same for Kristen and Jenni.

Jon carried his boxes into the studio apartment and looked around. The floor plan was identical to the one Sissy lived in, though his had more furniture than hers did; she preferred a Spartan existence and had gotten rid of most of what had come with the room by default. He supposed she had put them in storage somewhere.

The dorm consisted of two rooms, a large rectangular room and a small private bathroom; the kitchenette was merely an extension of the main room, separated only by a small countertop, though it was equipped with a stove, oven and a small refrigerator. Dishes would have to be washed by hand in the single sink, but there seemed to be plenty of storage cabinets for such a small area. There was a door to a clothing closet between the bathroom and the kitchen, and it was currently open to air out. There were three drawers at the bottom of the closet since the dorm was not equipped with a separate dresser.

Jon peered into the small bathroom and frowned. There was a sink, a toilet and a shower. There was no space in the tiny room for a wall-mounted fur dryer, and he silently wondered how many hand dryers he would wear out during the rest of his stay here.

There was a full-sized bed at the far end of the room, with a small table in one corner beside it with a touch lamp. The other back corner was occupied with a diagonal shelf that could be used for trinkets, photos or other oddments. In the middle of the room was small dining table with two chairs. A small video screen occupied the wall beside the front door and an open window on the side wall was flanked by dark green curtains.

Jon set his boxes on the table and then walked to the window. Despite his preference for having a window to open at night, there was not much of a view. Twenty yards away was the wall of another building, but at least there were no garbage bins in the alley between them to smell. The summer afternoon air was warm and Jon decided to heed Sissy’s recommendation to close the window and turn on the air conditioning.

He closed the panel and then flipped the switch on the thermostat near the front door before he walked back out into the corridor. Sissy was in Jenni’s room, chatting away happily, so he stopped at Kristen’s door and tapped lightly on the frame.

“Come on in,” the botanist responded. “It’s a little bigger than what we had in the Felis Wing, isn’t it?”

“Not bad, but it’s a trade-off,” he replied, taking a seat at the small dining table. “We have our own little bathrooms and kitchens, but the bed is smaller and there’s no large common area to sit around and relax together.”

“Actually there is for that last one,” said another voice. The cougars looked toward the entrance and saw Raine leaning up against the door frame. “It’s down on the first floor, but since I believe you all came in through the side entrance, you probably didn’t see it.”

“Hi Raine,” Kristen said to him with a smile.

Jon inclined his chin in friendly greeting. “Are you the welcoming committee?” he asked.

The cheetah laughed and crossed his arms. “Sure, why not? Welcome to the big time.”

Kristen raised an eyebrow. “Big time?”

“You’re graduates of the Furmankind Institute and are fully-fledged Furs now!” He scratched idly at the cry-line beneath his left eye and then gave them a smirk. “Maybe we should arrange for a little hazing for you.”

“Don’t you dare!” Jenni scolded from behind him. She grabbed his tail and then smacked his rear with the end of it.

Raine held up both hands and then backed away from her grinning. “Okay, it was just a thought!”

“Un-think that thought, kitty,” the leopard female admonished, shaking a claw-tipped finger at him.

“Yes, ma’am! Anyway,” the cheetah added, looking back into the room, “we have a ninety-inch screen down there and we’re all planning to watch a movie at seven o’clock tonight. The cafeteria will be delivering soda and pizzas, and we’ll have the popcorn machine going too. You’re all invited.”

“That sounds like a great house-warming party,” Kristen said. “You can count me in!”

“Me too,” Jenni replied.

Sissy looked up at Jon when he did not respond. “What about you, oh lion of the mountain?”

The cougar blinked, having been lost in his thoughts, and then looked down at her. “Hmm? Why not? It sounds like a good way to start off our first night here with the locals. For now, however, I’m going to unpack, relax and scent-mark my new territory.”

When the others looked at him with various expressions of shock and horror, he laughed and said, “Just kidding!”

Chapter 19

Torches & Pitchforks

“Why do we have to study entomology anyway?” Aaron asked in frustration, setting his PBJ down on the desk in front of him. “The bugs on another world aren’t going to be like our bugs, so studying what we have here isn’t going to help us at all!”

“Because, Mr. Bleys,” replied the instructor from the front of the assembly hall, “across the known habitable worlds mankind have discovered, insects are similar enough so that a working knowledge of Terran bugs may very well help you on another planet. Development has never been exact, but the similarities have been staggering on each of the worlds we’ve visited. Some may turn out to be nothing more than a nuisance to you, but each insect has a role to play in its native environment. Some insects pollinate the flora, some eat other bugs, some aerate the soil, some make edible honey and honeycomb, and some may have venom or other secretion that may actually be beneficial to mankind.”

“Or furmankind,” Dara interjected.

“Or furmankind,” the dark-haired but balding instructor agreed. R. J. Johnston tapped a pencil on the podium beside him and then gestured back up to the video screen behind him at the enlarged image of a black carpenter ant most common across the North American continent.

“Now, while the Camponotus pennsylvanicus is an omnivorous insect, meaning it will eat just about anything, this ant does not eat wood; instead, it clears the wood out of the way for its galleries in the grains. It prefers to live in moist wood, and out in a forest this can be beneficial because it promotes decay of fallen leaves, trees and branches, giving further nutrients to the rest of the forest. However, due to this destructive activity, wooden houses with water damage and other structures are always in danger of infestation, which is one of the reasons why your colony domes are made of treated plastic, rubber and fiberluminum materials.”

Aaron gave the image from the screen that was duplicated on his PBJ a look of irritation and sighed. Jon sat beside the brown bear in the assembly hall and looked over at him in sympathy. He was no stranger to academic studies himself, but the accelerated courses that had been initiated for the Class Sixteen furmen were taxing even his mental capacities. However, he could not argue against Johnston’s case that this could be useful information in their future, should any of them ever get an assignment off the Earth.

***

After several days of fast-paced classes in areas most of them had never considered studying before, the Furs had been released for the weekend. They were still not allowed to leave the grounds, but Jon did not feel like spending all of his spare time in front of a computer or television as some of his fellow furmen were apt to do by habit, so he dressed down to just a pair of shorts and decided to take a jog around the perimeter of the complex. In order to keep his muscles toned, he planned to trot upright on two feet instead of down on all fours.

He shut the door to his apartment and then headed for the stairs. Jenni’s doorway was open to the hallway and as he passed it, she called out to him. Jon stopped and peered into her room with a smile.

“Good morning, Jen,” he said. “What’s up?”

The spotted leopard sat at her small dining table in a pair of denim overall shorts and a pale blue tee shirt, her finished breakfast dishes set to the side and her PBJ opened like an upright book in front of her. She held a coffee cup displaying a popular Japanese smiling kitty with an upraised paw.

“Good morning, Jon,” she replied. “When you passed by my door, it looked as if you were heading out in nothing but your fur!” The male cougar looked down at his shorts and laughed when he realized the tan pair he had randomly selected was close in color to his own fur.

“Unlike you,” he answered with a grin, “I obey the rules when it comes to keeping my drawers on out in public.”

Jenni grinned and took a sip from her cup. “Are you headed down to the exercise room?”

“No, I thought I’d take a leisurely jog around the outer fence for a change of scenery and a good stretch of the legs.”

“Would you mind having some company?” she asked quietly.

“Not at all; I’d love to have a jogging partner.”

“What about Kristen? Doesn’t she sometimes run with you?”

“She’s already up and out at the colony gardens. She told me last night that Kim and Yuki volunteered to help her pull some weeds before it got too hot. Those two have been doing a lot of volunteering with everyone lately – I think they’re trying to make up for their tantrums during our forest trek.”

The feline woman smiled and stood up, closing the clamshell case of her PBJ. She turned and headed to the bathroom, swishing her tail behind her. “Let me change. I’ll be just a moment.”

“Sure.”

She emerged from the bathroom a moment later still wearing the oversized tee shirt, but instead of the coveralls, she was now in a matching pair of powder blue shorts. She did not bother with her sandals, trusting the pads on the bottom of her feet to protect her soles.

She closed the door of her room, walked down the stairs and then quit the building with Jon. Once out in the comfortable morning air, Jon set an easy pace and they headed across the grounds toward the distant fence.

They passed several Furs already out in the morning air and they waved as they trotted by. Cheryl was breaking up hay in the cattle pen and Ivan was spreading corn on the ground for the chickens. Kevin was out by the lake checking the readings of his weather instruments with Erin looking on. The diminutive vulpine counselor no longer limped when walking, her injuries mostly healed, and she was getting out more as her schedule allowed.

The felines had not jogged far across the compound when both of them looked in unison toward the large gates of the entrance. Instead of the four or five vehicles typically parked outside the compound, the gravel parking lot was full and there seemed to be a crowd of people gathered just on the other side of the fence. The gathering was far from quiet, as they seemed to be chanting something, but it was not until Jon and Jenni got nearer that they could see that some held up signs and heard what they were shouting.

“Turning People Into Animals Is EVIL!” proclaimed one sign.

“Remember the Dead of Bastien!” read another.

“STOP MAKING FURS!!!!”

“The Furmankind Program Is Too Dangerous!”

“Say NO to the AHCP!!!!”

Jon slowed to a stop, Jenni halting a few steps beyond. Several of the Institute guards were lined up by the gates on the inside, watching the crowd tensely. None had yet drawn their weapons, but all were preparing themselves in case it turned ugly.

“I wonder what that’s all about,” Jenni mused. “Why would they be protesting us?”

Jon put his hands on his hips, staring across the grounds toward the fence. “There have been a few articles in the news lately about small groups petitioning the AHCP to stop sending Furs out into space to die, sparked by the loss on Bastien. There’s always someone protesting about something, so I haven’t given it much thought.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Blackthorne was behind the whole campaign,” Jenni grumbled, spotting a van with dark windows at the edge of the parking lot. “Since he couldn’t buy a Fur or two for his personal property, he probably started this out of spite! The general public didn’t even know we were out here, so he likely spread the news!”

Even though they were still a good distance away from the fence, Jon’s sensitive feline hearing could make out some of what was being shouted by the crowd. One comment in particular sounded awfully familiar.

“Converting good people into animals is an abomination!”

Jon frowned, mixed feelings suddenly making him uncomfortable. If he had walked away instead of killing Henry Parker, would he have become involved with such a crowd decrying the inhuman act of transforming humans into animals? He did not feel that way anymore, but knowing there were still those with these sentiments, he was not sure how to feel about these people. He could smell Jenni’s growing anger, but he was unable to mount such thoughts himself.

A cart raced across the grounds toward the gate, its driver only giving them a cursory look as he passed them. It was the director and his expression was rather intense.

“Here come more of us,” Jenni remarked. Jon looked back toward the buildings of the complex and saw other Furs coming to investigate the commotion.

“Come on,” he said quietly, tugging gently on her elbow. She followed him closer to the fence, but then several of the protestors seemed to notice them. The shouts and jeers increased in volume now that there were actual Furs present.

One man dropped his sign and bent down to the gravel parking lot to pick up several rocks. When he stood up, he got close to the bars of the fence and then began to hurl the stones toward the felines. The distance was too great for them to reach the Furs, but others followed his example and gathered up rocks of their own to throw.

“What’s going on?” Manny asked, hesitant about getting within range of the incoming stones. Without conscious realization that he was doing so, the arctic fox kept Jon between him and the crowd.

“It’s people like them who killed Henry,” Raine grumbled, coming to a stop beside Jenni. When she looked over at him with a strange look, he simply assumed she did not know about the cougar from an earlier session.

“Henry Parker was in the class before mine,” the cheetah explained with an eye on the incensed crowd, “a cougar like Jon, here. He ran into one of those Fur-haters out in Colorado who killed him just because he had been changed.”

“I remember Henry,” Manny remarked. “He was a good guy, too. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”

Jenni glanced back at Jon and was frightened by the scent she got from him. “No one deserves to die like he did,” Jon growled, “but he shouldn’t have been messing around with a woman with an engagement ring on her finger.”

Raine looked up at him with narrowed eyes. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Henry wouldn’t do anything like that!”

When Jon turned to look the cheetah in the eyes, the expression on his face made Raine take a step back. “The details of the trial were all in the papers and on the news,” the mountain lion replied tersely. “The woman who’d been sleeping with him was engaged to the guy who shot him.”

“I don’t remember hearing about that,” Manny replied, idly scratching his neck. “Why are you sticking up for his murderer anyway? He hated Furs like us and said so at his trial.”

Jon forced himself to relax and brushed a hand across his face. “I didn’t say I was sticking up for him,” he answered in a calmer tone, “but Henry might still be alive if he’d bothered to check that woman’s ring finger before crawling into her bed.”

“Uh oh,” Jenni muttered. Her companions looked back to the parking lot and the guy who had picked up the first rock was now climbing up on the fence. The tall iron bars did not provide much purchase, but he had kicked off his shoes and socks and was making his way up to the top. With all the noise and commotion from the crowd, neither Marcelo nor the guards had noticed him.

“Now that is one brave soul,” Carl remarked, having just arrived with Ellie, Cheryl and Wendy.

“Brave, but not very smart,” Manny answered.

Although the crowd was still noisy, the Furs all stood in mute silence as they watched the man reach the top of the fence. He looked back down at his associates with a grin and then began his descent on the inside.

“What’s he planning to do once he gets in here?” Cheryl wondered aloud.

“I guess he’s going to picket us up close,” Raine muttered.

They watched the man until he was about halfway down the fence, but then his toes lost their grip and he fell the rest of the distance to the ground. Without even thinking about it, Jon dropped to all fours and ran out to help the man, honestly hoping he was not injured.

The brave protestor looked up at renewed shouting by the crowd and felt the blood drain from his face at the sight of a large mountain lion rushing straight for him. He jumped up on a sprained ankle, screaming in sudden terror as he attempted to climb the fence again.

Marcelo saw the cougar out of the corner of his eye and was instantly afraid that the former convict was about to attack a man that had somehow gotten through the fence.

Jon had been focused primarily on getting to the man to render assistance, but when the guy jumped up shrieking in fear, the mountain lion drew up short and stopped in confusion. Then it hit him that the man must have seen him as a wild lion rushing out to eat him.

He rose up on two legs, barely panting from the exertion, feeling foolish. The crowd hushed when he stood up, and even the frantic man quieted as all waited to see what he was going to do. Unseen by the protesters, Marcelo and the guards approached the intruder. The officers apprehended him by the arms and started to lead the individual back to the gate. Stunned that the cougar had not killed him, the man allowed himself to be taken away without a struggle, relieved to be in the hands of humans instead of the claws of an animal. In hindsight, he was not really sure why he had climbed the fence in the first place, other than he had been caught up in the frenzy of the crowd.

Jon cleared his throat and walked calmly toward the fence where the protesters were still watching him warily.

“What’s it doing?” someone whispered.

He stopped a short distance from the fence and cleared his throat again. He remembered Norman’s speech to the crowd in Florida, and although he doubted it had done much good with that group, Jon felt he should give this one a similar try.

“Hello,” he said to them. Some started, actually surprised that he could speak. His voice held an odd timbre due to the structure of his mouth and vocal cords, but he enunciated his words clearly.

“I was like you once,” he said a little louder so everyone in the crowd could hear him. “I did not agree with the practice of turning good people into Furs. In fact, I was downright against the program altogether.”

“What made you change your mind?” a young woman with strawberry blonde hair asked quietly.

Jon put his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “My situation forced me to work with a group of Furs; I didn’t like it, but I had no choice in the matter,” he told them. “Being around them, I learned that although their bodies had been altered in order to provide a service to all of humanity, they were all still the same people they were beforehand.” He tapped a claw-tipped finger against his temple. “Nothing up here changed. The mind, will and emotions remained intact. Although their bodies were altered in processes that can be compared to many other reconstructive surgeries done daily all over the world, they were still the same individuals they were throughout their lives.”

“If you didn’t like ‘em,” another man sneered, “why did you sell out and become one of them?”

Jon nodded toward the guy. He could not really tell them the reality of his background, but what he did tell them was true. “It took some time, but when I started to realize they were all still people, I began to see what it was they were out to accomplish. The AHCP did not set out to create animals out of people just because they could do it. The Earth is overcrowded, we’re all running out of room, viable land and resources, and although it may take time to do all that needs to be done, other Earth-like worlds have been discovered that could one day ease these issues. Before this can happen, though, it will take the efforts of brave souls to risk exploring new lands to make sure they are safe before mankind can move to them. No one can be forced to take the risks to discover if a place is truly compatible with the people of Earth, so they ask only for volunteers to go in first. The changes,” – he put a hand up to his chest – “are done to help give men and women an advantage surviving in a new land.”

He gestured toward the Furs behind him with a casual hand. “We aren’t freaks and we’re not outcasts. We’re volunteers doing a job as important as any other on the Earth. Just because we no longer look fully human, we—”

One man in the crowd stepped up closer to the fence, pulled a pistol from his waistband and fired it. The bullet struck Jon in the left shoulder and he jerked backward from its impact, spinning him around before he dropped to the ground.

The crowd around the shooter bolted away from him with shouts of surprise, those closest to him trying to climb over those behind them in their attempt to vacate the area. This was only supposed to be a protest against the inhumane practices inside the fence, not an attempt to rid the world of them.

The crowd dropped their signs and scattered in a panic, leaving the gun wielder standing alone by the fence. He looked back and forth around him for support, but everyone else was already rushing back to their cars to escape before the local police could arrive. There were already sirens in the distance up the winding forest road, apparently alerted to their protest by those who ran the Institute.

The armed guards approached the shooter, who was now waving his weapon around him with a wild panic in his eyes. No one else wanted to get shot, but this guy was going nowhere. Five guns were aimed back at him with deadly determination as the last of the visiting cars left the parking lot in scattered gravel and dust.

“Lay your pistol on the ground and back away from the weapon!” called Martin from inside one of the small guard shacks at the fence. The other protester who had scaled the fence was resting on a short stool behind him, massaging a sprained ankle but watching the incident through the doorway.

The shooter swung his pistol toward the voice, but refrained from firing again.

“This isn’t going to end well if you don’t put down your weapon!” called another guard. The sirens drew closer and two vehicles rounded a bend in the road flashing red and blue lights. The shooter spun around to look at them, but then whirled back to the fence. The talking mountain lion he had shot was surrounded by more of the abominations, and suddenly they were all he could see. The gun had already chambered another round; he lifted it toward the cluster of Furs and suddenly the guards were all shouting at him at once.

The sheriff’s car slid to a stop in the gravel and Davis shoved his arm out the window with his pistol without opening the door. The man turned toward the sound, but froze when he saw how close the sheriff’s car was, as well as the barrel of the gun aimed directly at him. Deputy Loggia was squatting behind her armored door, aiming a scoped rifle at him too.

“Drop your weapon right now, mister!” Sheriff Davis called out. “You have the freedom to protest the Furs all you want to, but discharging a firearm is not allowed. Put your gun down and raise both hands high above your head!”

Suddenly realizing that there was now no way out of the mess that he had started, the man raised both hands beside his head, but he refused to give up the pistol. Davis narrowed his eyes and took careful aim.

“I said ‘drop your weapon’! Don’t make me repeat myself again.”

The wild look was still in the man’s eyes as he turned toward the sheriff fully. Then in silent determination, he tilted the gun toward his own head, placing the barrel up against his temple.

“No!” Loggia shouted.

There was a sudden shot and a cloud of blue smoke. The man’s hand jerked hard and the pistol he had been holding flew out of his fingers to land on the ground several feet behind him. The man howled in pain and sunk to his knees clutching the bleeding hand that the sheriff had just disabled with a single, well-placed shot.

The deputy rushed forward and knelt beside the man to attend to his wound before the sheriff could open his door and step out of his vehicle. The Institute guards all rushed to the gate to lend assistance in case the wounded protester caused any more trouble.

On the other side of the fence, Marcelo approached the cluster of Furs with a hard lump in his throat. He had to gently pull Manny and Wendy out of the way so he could kneel down next to the fallen feline.

Without a handy First Aid kit, Jenni had pulled off her top and was pressing the wadded tee shirt up against the wound in Jon’s shoulder in an effort to stop the bleeding. The cougar himself had his eyes clenched tight and was panting lightly, but Marcelo was thankful to see that Jon was still among the living.

“Can you tell how badly he’s injured,” the director asked the feline nurse beside him.

“I haven’t had a chance to examine him yet,” Jenni replied, “but at first glance there doesn’t seem to be a lot of external damage. He got it up in the shoulder, but I don’t think it really hit anything besides muscle.”

“It was small caliber round,” Manny said, “probably no larger than a twenty-two.” When Marcelo looked up at him, the fox added, “I didn’t get a really good look at his gun, but I think it was something like a Browning Buckmark twenty-two target pistol.”

“You have a good eye,” Sheriff Davis remarked, walking up to the small crowd. “That’s exactly what the guy used. The clip only had low-power, solid-point target rounds in it.”

“Good,” Jenni muttered.

“Good?” Raine repeated. “Jon just got shot, and you say that’s good?”

“It’s good that it was only a .22 target round,” the nurse explained patiently. “There will be minimal damage.”

“It sure hurts like the dickens, though,” Jon said dryly. “Feels like someone tried to drive a home run through my shoulder using a baseball bat with a nail in it.”

“Is he going to be okay?” Davis asked.

“I don’t think his life is in any danger,” the spotted leopard replied, “but he won’t be using this arm for a while.” She lifted the bloody tee shirt and peered beneath it. Most of the bleeding had slowed, though there was still some oozing from the wound. She sighed in relief that the bullet had not hit a major blood vessel. She slid one hand beneath him, but felt no exit wound.

“We’ll need to get him into surgery right away to remove the bullet,” she told the director.

Marcel nodded and stood up, pulling out his cell phone. He thumbed the quick dial for Dr. Renwick and got an immediate response. While he gave the Felis physician a brief explanation on what had happened, Davis knelt beside the cougar as Jenni used her claws and teeth to rip the tee shirt into strips so she could bind the wound with them.

Jon looked up at the sheriff and gave him a grimaced smile.

“I should have known I’d find you right in the middle of things again,” Davis remarked.

Jon tried to laugh despite the deep ache in his shoulder, but it only came out as a cough. “I didn’t have a catcher’s mitt, but you should have seen me catch his fastball.”

Davis chuckled. “Mr. Sunset, that enhanced body of yours may allow you to do things beyond that of mortal man, but you aren’t invulnerable. Try not to get yourself killed before some monster on another world has had its opportunity to try to eat you first!”

“What a horrible thing to say!” Wendy replied.

Raine snickered. “At least this time, Jon’s only crime was getting in the way of a bullet, and he’s made at least two baseball references to it!”

“What’s going to happen to that guy?” Ellie asked, putting a damper on the momentary levity.

Davis got up to his feet and looked back out through the fence where his deputy and the guards had things well under control. Loggia had wrapped the man’s injured hand while Martin and the other Institute guards held him down, and the shooter was now cradling his hand in the back seat of the sheriff’s car.

“He’ll be charged with discharging a weapon in a public place, and I’d wager he doesn’t have a conceal-and-carry license either. After his last stunt, we may have to put him on suicide watch too.” He turned back to Jon and watched Jenni bind up the wound with her cotton strips for a moment.

“He’d better have a good lawyer,” Cheryl muttered with a scowl, “since he’ll have attempted murder added to his list of crimes.”

“No,” Jon gasped when his nurse cinched up the final binding a little tight. He looked up at the sheriff with imploring gold eyes. “Don’t charge him with that.”

“Huh?” Raine asked. “Why not? It might have only been a small caliber, but if his aim had been better, that bullet could have gone right through your eye and up into your brain bucket!”

Davis studied the cougar. “That’s up to you,” he remarked, “but your friend has a point.”

“Maybe it was an accidental discharge,” Jon answered. “He’s still guilty of bringing that gun out here with him, but maybe he didn’t intend to shoot it at all, just wave it around to back up their protests. When he saw that he’d actually shot me, that’s when you had to keep him from shooting himself.”

“Jon, you know that’s not what happened!” Cheryl replied hotly. “He tried to kill you!”

The mountain lion grimaced in pain when Jenni and Carl helped him to his feet. Marcelo had gone to get his cart and pulled it up close so they could get him up onto its seat.

Jon ignored his friends and looked once more at the sheriff. “People like him are frightened by things that don’t fit the mold of normal life and he acted out of fear. He’s in enough trouble as it is without having attempted murder hanging over him.”

“A hanging is what he needs.”

“Raine, stop,” Marcelo commanded. The cheetah shut his mouth with a grumble, certain that Jon must be delusional from the pain and shock of being shot.

The sheriff studied the cougar’s face for a moment before he nodded. “If that’s what you want, then we’ll play it your way,” he said. “However, we’ll let his lawyer talk to him for a day or two before we let him know that’s what you want.”

“Why?” Jenni asked.

“I want to give Mr. Sunset some time to think about it some more in case he changes his mind.”

Jon opened his lips to argue, but his shoulder was really aching and he shut both his mouth and his eyes. He was helped onto the seat of the cart and then Jenni got up next to him to make sure he did not topple off on the ride. Marcelo climbed behind the wheel and looked back at the sheriff.

“Can you spare me long enough to get him to surgery?” he asked.

“Go ahead, but I’ll need you back as soon as you can to give me some details and issue a statement. In the meantime, I’ll talk to these fine Furs of yours and get their eye witness accounts.”

Marcelo nodded without a word and put the cart into motion. Jon grimaced when the lightweight vehicle rolled over uneven ground and Jenni held onto his good arm in concern.

“Well, this changes things,” the director grumbled as he guided the cart across the grounds toward the Felis Wing where Dr. Renwick would already be preparing for surgery. “Later this evening, I was going to tell Sissy that Stockholm had granted all Furs a small vacation off the grounds for several days so she could announce it in her next daily news, but with this event, I think that might be too dangerous.”

“Ah, no,” Jenni whined. “I could have gone to see my sister and her family!”

“Sorry about that…” Jon muttered.

“It wasn’t you,” Marcelo assured him. “It was that crowd out there. Even if none of them had brought a gun, that kind of public attitude isn’t going to bode well for the Institute. If Blackthorne or someone else is inciting a mob against us, there could be more. No, when I give my report to Stockholm tonight, I’m going to recommend against letting you all out amongst the public. We don’t want another incident like this one.”

Chapter 20

Dark-Haired Angel

Sissy’s tail swished back and forth in anticipation. A bus full of fifth-grade children from a local elementary school was due to arrive soon and she was excited about seeing them. It had been three weeks since Marcelo had cancelled an approved vacation for all the Furs due to the shooting incident at the gates, but when the Saranac Lake principal contacted the director requesting a start of the school year field trip for the children, it gave hope to some of the Furs that felt cut off from the rest of the world; Sissy was one of them.

She had always loved children, and had she not gone into the Anthro Human Colonization Program right out of high school, Sissy might have pursued a teaching career. With life on another planet, it had looked like she would have no more contact with children other than those who might be born to the colonists should they survive long enough to do so. The orange cat knew this might be her last contact with human children and was greatly anticipating the event.

The Furs had all been assembled several days earlier and were told of the field trip. Individually, they were given the opportunity to opt out of meeting the kids, but most seemed as agreeable as Sissy to have a small break in the routine to meet anyone without a pre-conceived notion on the evils of voluntary genetic transformation for the good of mankind.

Although the guards at the entrance would inform her directly when the bus arrived, the small feline woman could not seem to stay in her seat. Between tasks at her desk, she would get up and peek out the door out toward the gate, groan in disappointment when she did not see the bus, and then plop back down in the seat at her desk behind the counter.

“Sissy!” Marcelo bellowed out his open door at her, “Would you please sit down? Martin will call you when they get here! You’re driving me to distraction, rushing past my door every couple of minutes, and you know I have to get the documentation on our new volunteers done in the next couple of hours! There are too many things going on today!”

The orange striped cat peered into his office with her ears lowered, chastised by his scolding. “Yes sir…” she told him. She returned to her chair, unconsciously sliding her tail into the slot at the seat back and pretended to look at the computer screen on her desk. She had prepared all the necessary files for the director’s PBJ earlier that morning, but he still had to review all sixteen folders before he could put his signature to them.

Due to his conflicting workloads, Marcelo had asked Sissy to be the coordinator and welcoming committee for the school’s field trip, an assignment that she had accepted with great enthusiasm. Although it had been hot and humid the day before, a cool front had moved in over the Adirondacks and the day was pleasant, so she had arranged the Meet & Greet between the kids and the Furs to take place under canopies erected out near the lake.

The feline’s ears twitched when she thought she heard the low rumble of a bus, and without thinking she was up and at the door again. No bus yet, the sound she had heard was nothing more than a custodian pulling a garbage bin behind one of the ever-present carts.

“Sissy!”

She shut the door and peered over her shoulder toward the director’s office. Marcel was standing in the doorway looking cross and she felt her stomach twist. She knew that if she irritated him too much, he would never let her have another assignment like this. She started to slink back to her desk, but the man pointed at the front door with a scowl.

“Get out!” he growled. “Go check on your friends out by the lake or go pace at the front gate if you want. Just leave me in peace!”

Sissy’s eyes lit up, but with the director’s blood pressure up, she made herself nod quietly before she grabbed her PBJ and then let herself out. Before she had taken half a dozen steps, she heard the office door lock behind her.

***

The school bus arrived twenty minutes later. After conferring quickly with the driver and teacher, Sissy greeted each child as he or she stepped off the bus and was met with wide-eyed wonder and amazement at the giant smiling kitty cat. Just about every one of them wanted to pet her fur, and Sissy was more than happy to let them, even giving a low-throated purr for their amusement. Once she had a few minutes to answer some of their questions, she led twelve kids and their teacher in through the tall iron gates and then across the freshly trimmed grounds to the lake on several electric carts.

So none of them would intimidate any of the children right off the bat, all the Furs awaited them seated on the ground, most of them sitting back on their haunches with their tails beside them. Each of the four species sat together with their own groups and conversations hushed when Sissy’s entourage approached.

Although the young students knew why they were there, they all hesitated when Sissy stopped to introduce the groups to one another. The orange feline waved a casual hand over the children and looked out over her associates.

“Good morning, everyone,” she said in a clear voice. “These fine young visitors are from the Saranac Lake Elementary School with their teacher, Mr. Meers, who has been telling them of the Anthro Human Colonization Program; they asked if they could all meet with our Furs today.”

“Welcome to the Furmankind Institute,” Avon said in a gentle voice. “We’re happy to see you all today and will gladly answer any questions you may have.”

Despite what they had been told in class, some of the children seemed startled when the largest of the furry people spoke to them. However, it was Cheryl who took the first step toward them. Knowing that most kids love doggies and kitties, the Border collie padded toward them on all fours, her old cowgirl hat perched between her floppy ears.

The children smiled when she sat down and wagged her tail for them. “Hi, kids,” she said with a bright canine smile.

“Hi,” said one boy right in front of her. Without any seeming fear, he stepped forward and began petting the fur of her shoulder with a big grin. She wore a slim halter top today, merely for modesty, but also because it showed off most of her fur patterns and she had wanted to put the children at ease.

“My name is Cheryl. What’s yours?” she asked pleasantly.

“Markle,” he answered. Other children seemed encouraged by the boy’s rapport with the big doggie and a number of them surged forward to pet her fur.

One by one, some of the other Furs came forward, but those who were larger and might appear more intimidating held back, letting the children come to them if they wished. One who stayed where he sat was Jon. Even after three weeks of recuperation and the removal of his stitches, the cougar’s arm was still in a sling primarily to keep him from using it and taxing the injured shoulder muscles. He was only now starting to exercise lightly with that arm, but the soreness was deep in the muscle and he was not able to do as much as he would like with it. His ability to support his upper body weight when walking on all fours was still weak, so he was thankful that his altered form could still walk upright when needed.

Despite his injury, Jon was not opposed to spending time around children, but he had not really had numerous opportunities to know many young kids during his life. That aside, he did not really think any of them would be enamored with a mountain lion like they would cats, dogs, foxes or even a large teddy bear. Erin and Kevin seemed to be a hit; the small foxes with the big ears were cute, even if their features were a blend with the human beings they used to be.

Without interaction with neither the children nor the adults, Jon was feeling drowsy in the shade of the tarpaulin canopy. He was tempted to stretch out in the grass and had come close to doing so when a voice roused him from his thoughts.

“Jon? I have a dark-haired angel who would like to meet you.”

The mountain lion started abruptly at Ellie’s sudden intrusion to his daydreams and her words caught him off guard.

“Rebecca!” he croaked hoarsely. Had she tracked him down to the Institute? Was his life over even as a Fur?

Ellie knew she had startled him, unaware that ‘dark-haired angel’ is what his friends had called his fiancé, but she was taken aback by the sudden smell of fear she got from him.

“Jon?” she asked tentatively.

“Is he hurt?”

The cougar’s ears twitched at the voice, but it was not the one he had expected. Standing beside the wolf was a young girl with feathered black hair swept back from her face like small wings. She wore denim shorts, sneakers and a white tee shirt adorned with a large sunflower, and she looked at him with deep brown eyes.

“Yes, he is,” Ellie answered, “I’m afraid we’ve startled him out of a nap, but he’s as gentle as any small kitty you may see.”

Relief spread across Jon’s face with a smile. “Hello there,” he said in a calm manner. “My name is Jon. What’s yours?”

“Hi,” the girl said with a smile at the thrum underlying his voice. “I’m Angel Lonergan.” Without prompting, she left Ellie’s side and approached the lion. “May I pet your fur?”

“Yes, I think I would like that,” the mountain lion answered sincerely.

She knelt down beside him in the grass and lightly stroked one of his ears, giving his arm sling a sudden frown. The petting felt nice and Jon’s eyes narrowed appreciatively as he gave her a low-throated purr for her kindness. This brought the smile back to her face and she leaned up against him to pet at the rust-colored hair on top of his head.

Although Jon had never really spent much time around children, he had never had anything against them. This one seemed to have taken to him because of his injury. He sighed contentedly. The petting really did have a calming effect on him. It was easy to see why pet cats loved it so much.

Angel smiled back at Ellie. “I wish I could take him to school with me,” she said, eliciting a chuckle from both of the Furs. When she looked back at Jon, she frowned again at his sling. “What happened to your arm?” she asked.

The cougar exchanged a quick glance with the wolf, but then shook his head lightly. “I was hurt by someone who did not like what I am,” he replied in a quiet tone. “He didn’t understand why I became a Fur and reacted out of fear.”

Angel mulled this over, remembering some of the things Mr. Meers had told them in class about the furmankind project. She reached out and lightly touched his injured arm without putting any pressure on it.

“I know why you became a Fur,” she said, “and I would never hurt someone like you.”

Jon smiled and took her hand into his own. She looked down at the oddly shaped hand and then smiled back at him. “I am glad to hear that,” he told her. “We are doing something very important for everyone on Earth, but there are those who don’t agree. I’m thankful that I could meet someone like you, Angel.”

The girl grinned widely. “I’m glad I could meet you too,” she said.

“So… is there anything I can show you? Anything I can do for you?” the feline asked.

Angel looked at their hands again and felt of the pads of his palm with her fingers. “I dunno,” she said. After thinking a moment, she settled down beside him in the grass. “What’s it like being a Fur?” she asked. “I mean, you weren’t always a Fur, were you? What’s it like now?”

Jon liked this girl immensely and appreciated her curiosity. “That’s right, I wasn’t always a Fur, and it’s not something I really thought I would ever become, but now that I’ve changed, there have been some really good times.”

Ellie smiled at the interaction between the student and the mountain lion. It seemed they had forgotten about her, so she withdrew quietly to see if there might be another she who needed to meet a Fur.

***

When it was time for the students to head back to their school, there were a few teary farewells. They had only been at the Institute for two hours, but some of the kids had already grown attached to the wonderful animal people. It was like being in a petting zoo where the animals could talk and play with them.

Near the end of the session, Sissy and Mr. Meers had gathered everybody together under the canopies by the lake for snacks and to talk about the reasons for furmankind. Some of it had already been covered in their classrooms, but the teacher had appreciated the hands-on experience for his students to help them understand more fully what the program was trying to do.

There had been no troublemakers among the students, although Mr. Meers had been initially hesitant to have three of the boys along. In actual proximity, however, the trio was just as awed by the Furs as the other children, so the overall experience had been a good one.

Goodbyes were finally said and the Furs accompanied the children on the walk back out to the school bus. Angel held hands with Jon until they reached the fence, and then he had to bend down so that she could hug his neck.

“Thank you,” she told him with moist eyes. “May I write to you?”

Jon gave her a nice smile. “Yes, I think I would like that,” he told her. “I will make sure your teacher gets my address.” Angel grinned and then gave him a small wave before she joined her classmates outside the gates.

The mountain lion was surrounded by other Furs as everyone watched their new friends board the bus and then depart moments later. They all waved to the kids, who waved energetically back at them out the windows. The bus disappeared around the bend in the road, leaving only a bit of dust in the air from the gravel parking lot.

He felt a hand upon his good arm and he looked down at Kristen. “That’s a bunch of good kids,” she said. “I almost hate to see them go.”

“Yeah, me too,” Jon replied. “It was nice to be in the company of someone who didn’t want to harm me.”

“How’s the shoulder?”

“It’s still sore, but it’s getting better,” he replied, pulling his arm free of the sling and sliding the thin cloth into a pocket.

The female feline patted him and then turned away. “I’ve been outside all day, so I think I’m going to head to the shower. Want to join me?” He gave her a tired look, but she only laughed at his expression. “I know, I know,” she quipped. “I’ll see you later.”

Kristen left with most of the Furs that turned back toward the Institute, but just as Jon turned to the few still milling around, Marcelo rode up on his cart and stopped beside them.

“How did it go?” he asked with a smile.

“Wonderful kids,” Manny said with his hands in the pockets of his shorts.

“Yeah, if they can keep that attitude toward us growing up,” Michael added, “you may be seeing some of them come through your gates in few years.”

“Either that, or at least you’ll have some supporters for the program,” Jon remarked. “It never hurts to have those who understand what we’re trying to do.”

Marcelo studied the cougar for a moment and then nodded. “This is true. I’m sorry to have missed it all, but I had to get ready for our next volunteers.”

“When are they supposed to get here?” Kevin asked.

Marcel gestured toward the parking lot. “Right now,” he said. Sure enough, a large chartered bus drove into view around the bend in the road. They must have passed the school kids just up the road on the way in by only a few minutes.

“Excuse me,” the director said. He put the cart into motion and drove out to meet the newcomers.

“Should we hang out and see who gets off the bus,” Michael asked, “or just wait until we see them out on the grounds?”

“Let’s hang around,” Kevin said with a smile. “It was nearly dark when my group came in so I didn’t get to see some of you until later.”

The four of them walked up to the fence and looked through the iron bars at the newcomers. Marcelo pulled up beside the sleek bus and then stepped inside when the doors opened for him. They could see him through the smoky glass of the vehicle; he appeared to be giving a small speech, probably a welcome to the Institute. The Furs all knew from experience that the director would meet with each of the new volunteers separately throughout the rest of the day.

The driver came out and opened up the luggage compartment low on the side of the bus. While Marcelo was inside giving his welcome, the driver began pulling out the riders’ suitcases.

After about ten minutes, Kevin sighed. “Is he ever going to let them off the bus?”

There was the sound of a hydrogen engine behind them and they all turned as one to see the old Institute bus pulling up to the gate.

“I’ll bet Marcelo was killing time until Martin got here,” Manny replied.

The director appeared outside the Greyhound chariot. Passengers began to disembark and the Furs watched as each one came into view.

The first individual was a tall, lanky man in his mid-twenties in jeans, a tee shirt and sneakers. He stretched and then turned to get his luggage.

The next person off the bus made the fur along the ridge of Jon’s back stand up beneath his shirt.

“Wow, would you look at those curves!” Manny exclaimed.

“Man, I’d like to get her number. She’s gorgeous!” Michael agreed.

“You don’t recognize her, do you?” Jon grumbled, swallowing with difficulty.

“Not personally,” Manny answered, “but she looks like Bettie Page – that’s good enough for me!”

“Who’s Bettie Page?” Kevin asked, his eyes locked upon the newcomer.

Manny looked at the young fox in amusement. “She was a dark-haired beauty way back in the nineteen-fifties that some called the Queen of the Pinups. She appeared in photos wearing anything from very little to nothing at all – which was scandalous for the time – but she had a distinctive look about her and the gorgeous creature that just got off the bus looks like she could be her sister! Her hair style is even the same, and I’d bet that was intentional.”

“Yes, she is beautiful,” Jon agreed, “but that’s not what I meant.”

“Okay then, who is she?” Michael asked, unable to keep his eyes off the woman’s curves. She wore form-fitting slacks and a white blouse but no jewelry beyond a couple of small diamond stud earrings that glittered in the afternoon sunlight. “Somebody famous?”

“That’s Rebecca Collins,” Jon explained with his ears back and tightness in his throat. The tip of his tail twitched in agitation and it was all he could do to keep from growling. “That’s the woman who got your friend Henry Parker killed.”

Chapter 21

Where It All Began

“That’s the woman who got your friend Henry Parker killed.”

“What?” Manny exclaimed. “You’re joking, right?”

“That’s her, all right. Her resemblance to Bettie Page is something the media brought up during the trial.”

“Bettie Page,” Manny mused. “Didn’t they make a movie about her a few years ago?”

“Yes, I think I remember that one.”

Her likeness to the Queen of the Pinups is what had attracted Jon to Rebecca in the first place when they had originally met at an office party, and the media had played up that little morsel in their reports. It was a shock seeing this dark-haired angel and it took a tremendous effort for the person born as Brian Barrett to stay in character as Jonathan Sunset.

“I can see why Henry went after her, that lucky lion,” Manny murmured with a smile.

“Yeah, he was very lucky,” Jon growled. “He paid for the tryst with her with his life.”

“True, but at least that means she’s not a Fur-hater like the dolt she was engaged to,” Michael remarked. “I wonder which Fur type she’s signing up for?”

“I hope it’s a fox,” Manny said optimistically. “She obviously has no problem sleeping around, so perhaps she could help us build up the Vulps population for Bastien!”

“That’s a thought,” Michael remarked.

“I thought the settlement on Bastien was a Felis colony,” Kevin mused, keeping his eyes on the individuals getting out of the bus.

“Not anymore!” Michael said with a grin. “Cats can’t live there but foxes can, so that world’s as good as ours – and they already have an established colony site that we could move right into!”

“You guys are all heart,” Jon muttered.

Michael looked at him. “Sorry, Jon, but a lot of time and effort was put into that colony. It was a terrible loss, and I’m sorry your kin couldn’t make it there, but we can still build upon what they established instead of starting again from scratch somewhere else.”

“Uh oh…” Kevin muttered quietly.

“What’s the mat—oh,” Manny gulped. Jon and Michael looked up to see what cut off the arctic fox’s question and then they all froze in place. The woman they had just discussed was striding directly to their section of fence.

Jon could feel the ridge along his back stand up again, and it was all he could do to keep from flattening his ears against his head. He swallowed with difficulty as she approached the fence.

“Hello, boys,” she said in a pleasant voice. Her tone was smooth and strong, as if she had been trained as a singer at some time in her life, and she gave them all a nice smile. “I’m glad you came out to see us arrive.”

“Uhm, welcome to the Furmankind Institute,” Kevin said in response. He was mesmerized by the woman’s blue-grey eyes, long lashes, full lips decorated with only a hint of burgundy lipstick and the perfect teeth in her smile. She looked at him and her eyes crinkled with delight, instantly drawn to the timbre of his voice through furman-altered vocal cords.

“Thank you,” she said to the fennec fox. “My name is Rebecca. What’s yours?”

“I, uh, I’m Kevin,” he answered with a hard swallow. He remembered his manners and gestured to the arctic fox beside him. “This is Manny,” he said. Then to the swift fox, “This is Michael,” he told her. He looked at the feline behind him over his shoulder. “This is Jon.”

Rebecca nodded toward each of them when introduced, committing their names to memory, but when she looked up at the cougar, her smile widened for him. “I am pleased to meet you all,” she said, drawn to Jon’s large golden eyes. “I’m looking forward to spending quality time with each of you.”

While her attention was on the mountain lion, Manny elbowed Michael covertly and they shared a conspiratorial grin regarding their earlier comments about her spending quality time with them.

“It’s nice to meet you, ma’am,” the white fox told her.

Michael stepped closer to the fence. “It sure is,” he agreed. “Everyone has a reason for becoming a Fur. Why did you decide to join us?”

Rebecca did not bother disguising her interest in the tall feline, and her eyes roved up and down his body, lingering only briefly upon his shorts. She put a light hand up to her collarbone, narrowing her eyes at him, and Jon had the sudden impression that she recognized him despite his transformation.

If she had, there would be serious repercussions to the Institute for harboring a confessed Fur-killer, especially with the deception on the media and general public concerning his ultimate fate. It would not matter if it was explained that his continued existence as a Fur was considered an imposed prison sentence by the judge that had doomed him to this life. All that Rebecca and the public would see is that he had never paid with his life for killing Henry Parker and the demand for his head would be high. The furmankind program might even be shut down altogether, affecting more lives than just his own.

Jon tried to swallow his panic and fight down the churning in his stomach. She could not have recognized him. He had to convince himself that she saw only a small group of Furs who had come out to see the new volunteers arrive. As long as she had no suspicions about him, Jon would have to be extra careful to give her no cause to tie him to Brian Barrett.

Rebecca stepped closer to the fence and wrapped the fingers of both hands around the bars as she felt her attention drawn back to the quiet feline’s amazing eyes. She thought he seemed a little sad, but she hoped she could help cheer him.

“I used to have a furman boyfriend like this one here,” she said quietly over a pleasant smile. “He told me all about furmankind and convinced me to volunteer for the program.” She glanced over at the expectant foxes and surreptitiously gave them a side profile of her figure, having recognized their interest. It was an old game she played, one that had helped her advance in just about everything she put her mind to where males were involved.

“I know it can be painful,” she confessed, “but it’s a worthy cause and I’m looking forward to having a permanent fur coat of my own.” She gave each of the male foxes a warm smile and made the pretense of looking each of them over just as she had done with the mountain lion, absently toying with the buttons of her blouse. She acted as if the top two had come undone without her noticing them, and although she did not have an enhanced sense of smell, she could practically taste the scent of their arousal.

She laughed with a broad smile at their sudden discomfort, the sound of her laughter pleasing to their ears, and then she shifted her eyes back to the cougar.

“Can this one talk?” she asked. “He hasn’t even said hello to me.”

“I think the cat got his tongue!” Michael said with a grin.

Rebecca gazed at him expectantly, still toying with the buttons of her blouse, and Jon was finding himself drawn back to the woman he had once loved. If Parker had never gone to Colorado, Brian and Rebecca could have been a happily married couple by now, possibly planning a family of their own.

“Hello,” he managed in a quiet voice. With the way she looked at him, he had to admit that it was highly unlikely she knew who it was she was talking with. There was no fear in her eyes, no animosity on her face, and as she unfastened another button, he knew she was flirting with him just as she had done with his vulpine companions. She did not recognize him, but he knew those eyes and those full lips intimately.

Jon dropped his shoulders and felt the tension start to melt away. He took a step toward the fence and gave her a tentative smile. Her expression brightened immediately and then neither of them remembered the foxes standing beside him.

“How was your trip out here?” he asked quietly. “It had to have been a long one coming out from Colorado Springs.”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. “How did you know I was from Colorado Springs?” she asked.

Jon’s tail twitched and he had to think fast. “We may be hybrid animals, Ms. Collins,” he answered quickly, “but we can all still read the news.” Beside him, Manny was shaking his head to warn him away from the subject of her notoriety.

“I… see,” Rebecca murmured, keeping her attention locked upon his face. “I suppose the media did make a circus of the event, so I shouldn’t be surprised that someone would recognize me.”

“It’s not only that,” Michael interjected, stepping closer to her at the fence, “but Henry Parker was our friend. This is where he went through his own transformation.”

Rebecca laughed, instantly relaxing. “Yes, I should have realized that the furman community would have an interest in the incident.” She reached through the bars and lightly brushed the soft fur of the swift fox’s cheek. “I still miss him, but I’m glad to be among his friends.”

Kevin moved forward a step, secretly hoping she would caress his cheek. “Are you going to be a fox too?” he asked hopefully.

Rebecca shook her head. “No, I’m sorry,” she apologized. She looked back up at Jon with a coy expression and explained, “I volunteered with the intention of becoming a mountain lion like Henry. I’m glad to see I won’t be alone with such a handsome fellow to help me with the hard parts.”

Michael and Manny exchanged looks of guarded envy at her double entendre, but Jon’s reaction was not what any of them expected. Coldness crept into his eyes and he stepped back away from the fence to put a little distance between them. Thinking to himself, he likened her to a female dog, but he was too much of a gentleman to call her that comparative term to her face.

“You would probably be happier in another form,” he suggested with a hard look. “You’d make a fine canine.”

“Or a vixen!” Kevin said enthusiastically.

Rebecca blinked at Jon’s sudden change of mood. She did not know what she might have said to offend him, but she could clearly see that he was displeased.

“Have I done something wrong?” she asked with uncertainty.

Jon’s cold look of indifference did not change, but instead of answering, he simply turned on his toes and walked away. He took only a half dozen steps before he dropped to all fours and picked up his pace, limping slightly on his injured arm.

“What just happened?” Michael mused, watching the feline pad away across the grounds.

“I don’t know,” the woman responded with a hurt expression.

Manny cleared his throat and gave Rebecca an embarrassed look. “There’s a mountain lioness here that’s been working hard for his affections; they’ve had a rocky relationship, but things have been going smoother lately,” the arctic fox explained in a low voice. “Perhaps he sees your intentions as a road bump.”

“Jon’s a good guy and just about everyone likes him well enough,” Michael said, “but sometimes I think he has issues.” He tapped the side of his head when she looked at him. “If you’re planning to rely on him helping you through your transformation, perhaps you should consider a different species – perhaps a fox.”

Rebecca frowned and looked back across the grounds at the retreating backside of the mountain lion she thought she had liked right off. He wasn’t like Henry at all.

“Ms. Collins!”

She turned toward the voice and saw everyone loading up on an old bus to give the new arrivals transportation to their quarters. Marcelo was looking at her in amusement, but it was clear that she was holding up things.

“I’ll see you boys later,” she told the trio of foxes. “I’ll think about what you’ve said.”

***

Jon was disgusted with himself for his reaction to Rebecca’s revelation. It had been a shock to see her here of all places, but he supposed that he should not have been surprised that she had chosen a mountain lion. For a few brief moments, he had not seen the woman who had left him to chase after the tail of an animal, but instead had seen her only as the gorgeous lady he had once fallen in love with. With the confession of her intentions, however, he was instantly reminded that she was the reason he had endured the painful and unwanted transformation into a creature he had despised.

After months of counseling where he had come to accept his fate with good grace, Rebecca’s arrival threatened to rip that all to shreds. He did not want to be here! He did not want to be a Fur! She may not recognize him, but she could still cause him untold grief. Would his punishment never end?

He muttered obscenities beneath his breath as he padded across the empty Osprey helipad, but then another thought struck him with a cold chill. If she was going to the Felis Wing, she would see the portrait that Marcy had taken of him when he had first arrived. Even if Rebecca did not recognize him now, she would definitely know that face in Jon’s before photograph!

The mountain lion altered his course and ran full-out toward his former home, for once thankful that he could run faster as a furman than he could as a human despite an injured limb. He had no intention of revealing himself to her accidentally, just as he had that first evening when Dante, Kristen and Jenni had found out they had a killer in their midst.

He stopped at the door of the Wing, got up onto two feet and then went inside. The interior lights were off, but the overhead skylight provided ample illumination.

“Doc!” he shouted loudly. “Doctor Renwick!”

Without waiting for the Felis physician, Jon began looking over the portraits hung in the entrance hall showing past classes as each of them had appeared before and after their transformations. It appeared that Marcy had rearranged them after they had moved out of the building, so he had to search for his own face among sixteen groups of volunteers who had come through the Wing.

“Hello, who is there?”

The doctor rounded the corner of the saloon to look down the entrance hall at him. When Renwick recognized the cougar, Jon’s face was a mask of panic.

“Jon? What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is someone hurt?”

The mountain lion approached him. “Where’s my before photograph?” he asked in a rush. “We’ve got to take it down!”

“Wait, what’s going on?”

“The picture Marcy took of me when I first arrived – where is it?”

Puzzled, Renwick turned to the opposite wall and gestured toward one near the end of the bottom row. There were seven portraits in that section and Jon was determined to make it six. He reached for the picture, but the doctor put a hand up over the frame.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he demanded.

“She’s here!” Jon explained in simple terms. “Rebecca’s here!”

“Rebecca… your ex-fiancé?”

“That’s her! She just arrived as one of the new volunteers — and she’s coming to the Felis Wing! She can’t see Brian Barrett’s picture!”

Doctor Renwick was one of only a few individuals at the Institute who knew the full connection between Sunset and Barrett. He suddenly understood the reason for the cougar’s panic and he removed the portrait from its wall hook himself.

“We can’t leave that spot empty for long,” the doctor told him. “We’ll have to put your picture back up eventually.”

“No! You can’t put it back up!” Jon exclaimed. “You can keep it inside your file cabinet or a box until she’s gone from the Institute, but it can’t go back up as long as she’s here! She would alert the media and probably a whole swarm of bloodthirsty lawyers. They’d probably shut this place down and have me executed for real!”

Dr. Renwick mulled over Jon’s words and had to agree with him on most respects. This could be a major disaster, but it could be diverted if done just right. He glanced back up at the portraits on the wall and made a quick decision.

There was only one photograph of Dante Capanari at the very end of the row, since the tiger had not completed his transformation before his untimely death, so Renwick plucked the man’s photograph from the wall and placed it on the hook above Jon’s ‘after’ portrait. Although the humans and their furman alter-egos always bore some resemblance to one another, the same could not be said for Dante’s portrait looking anything like it could transform into the way Jon looked now. The expression on Renwick’s face told Jon that he did not think it would fool anyone, but they both knew that it had to be better than simply leaving Brian Barrett’s face up on the wall.

“It will have to do,” he finally muttered.

“What will you tell Marcy?” Jon asked. “She doesn’t know my background. If she sees the pictures out of place, she may rearrange them and start looking for my original portrait to put back up there or have another print made.”

“Do you trust me?” Renwick asked, his eyes looking deep into Jon’s.

“Of course I do,” the cougar replied. “You could have purposely botched the job on me at any time, but I had to place my very life into your hands and you did right by me. I’m grateful for that, Doc.”

“Let me tell your story to Marcy — in private, of course. She knows you had your identity changed right after you got here, and even if she didn’t know your reasons, she’s had to wonder.”

Jon studied the doctor’s face for a moment, but then they could hear voices outside of the front door. They had run out of time; the Felis volunteers had arrived.

“I trust you,” Jon said, gently putting a hand upon the doctor’s shoulder. “Tell her my secret so we can keep it a secret from Rebecca. It’s not just for my sake, but for the Institute’s as well. I don’t want to see anything happen to this place.”

Renwick gave him a nod, but did not have time for anything else. The door opened and the platinum blonde nurse led three women and a man into the entrance hall.

“Why, hello, Jon!” Marcy said with a smile. “Ladies and gentleman, this is Jon Sunset. He was in the class that just went through the program.”

Jon nodded and gave a courteous smile to the newcomers, but when his eyes met Rebecca’s he had to force himself not to scowl. She noticed his hesitation, still mulling over what she must have said to get a cold shoulder from him.

Marcy gestured to each of the newcomers in turn. “Jon, this is Penny, Rebecca, Lizzie and Richie, our Class Seventeen volunteers.”

“Hello,” he responded politely.

The young woman with bright copper hair introduced as Penny stepped forward with a hand up in front of her. “May I touch your fur?” she asked quietly. “I’ve never met a Fur in real life before.”

With Rebecca in close proximity, he wanted to be anywhere else but here, but as a representative of his new race, he nodded quietly and held up his arm. Penny gave him a grateful smile and began to pet the fur of his arm. Without asking, Rebecca and Lizzie stepped forward to do the same, although the man named Richie simply looked on in amusement.

Jon almost flinched when his former fiancé touched his elbow, so he turned and looked at Lizzie instead. The older woman looked to be in her early forties, but appeared as if she might be as much of an exercise enthusiast as himself. She wore her brown hair in a short ponytail and her short-sleeved blouse displayed the well-toned muscles of her arms.

He felt a sudden pinch and looked to see Rebecca purposely pulling on several strands of his arm fur to get his attention. Her eyes bore into his, silently demanding that he not ignore her. Although she could not know it, he was more than familiar with that look. He felt another chill course its way up his spine and he finally stepped back away from the trio of women.

“If you will excuse me,” he said, dropping his arm, “I have some business to attend to. Welcome to the Institute.”

“See you around, Mr. Sunset,” Rebecca said in response.

“Yes, see you later,” Lizzie echoed. Penny grinned at him, and Richie merely nodded. It was the tall, lanky man who had been the first to get off the bus. Jon had nothing against him, but the man smelled unwashed to his sensitive nose. Perhaps it was from a long day of travel on a bus under a summer sun, but Jon was ready to be away from this nightmare.

“Good to see you again, Marcy,” he said with a smile. “Thank you, Doctor,” he directed at Renwick. “We can continue our discussion at a later time.”

“Of course, Jon.” Renwick kept the photograph frame in his hands so that the portrait faced his lab coat, and he would continue to hold it so until he could get back to his office to hide it away. He gave the new volunteers a warm smile and gestured toward the sunken pit in the middle of the saloon.

***

After Jon got outside, he headed directly for the Educational Wing. Up on his floor, he found Jenni’s door standing open as it often was. She was sitting sideways across a chair with her PBJ in her lap.

“Jenni,” Jon said when he stuck his head in her doorway. “I need to talk to you and Kris right away!” She started when he spoke, but she gave him a smile.

“Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Let’s get Kris first.” Before she could get up out of her chair, he had already gone to the botanist’s door. He knocked on it and called out Kristen’s name, but there was no response. The door was unlocked, so he let himself in. Jenni peered in a moment later and saw him open the door to the bathroom.

“Jon!” Kristen’s voice exclaimed. “You scared me!” She giggled and then said, “Did you change your mind about joining me? I just finished my shower, but we should still have plenty of hot—”

“Sorry, Kris,” Jon said with a frown, backing out of the bathroom, “but I need to talk to you and Jenni right away.”

“Uh, sure. Just let me get a towel on.”

Jenni did not know what this was about, but Jon did not get agitated like this unless it was important to him. She closed the door to the hallway for privacy and then sat down on one end of Kristen’s couch. Jon paced the floor until the mountain lioness had dried off her fur enough so that she would not be dripping all over the carpet.

She closed the door to the bathroom and then leaned upon it with a brush in her hand. She began grooming her fur as Jon seemed to be choosing how to begin.

The tall cougar finally realized that both women were waiting for him and he cleared his throat. “The new volunteers have just arrived,” he said quietly. “One of them is Rebecca!”

“Rebecca?” Jenni repeated, sitting upright in surprise. “Your ex?”

“Here?” Kristen exclaimed. “What’s she doing here?”

Jon looked from one to another. “Henry Parker apparently impressed her enough that she’s decided to become a Fur too!” he croaked. “She’s here! She’s…. here!”

“This is not good,” Kristen muttered. “Not good at all.”

“That’s not all…”

“Don’t tell me,” Jenni ventured. “She wants to be a cat – a Felis?”

“Not only Felis,” Jon confirmed, “but she wants to become a mountain lion… just like Parker — and she’s already set her sights of interest on me!”

“How do you know this?” Kristen asked, sitting down on one of the wooden chairs at her dining table. “Who told you?”

Jon put his head in his hands. “Several of us stayed behind at the fence to see the new volunteers who arrived right after the kids left,” he explained. “She saw us when she got off the bus and came over to the fence to talk to us. I almost had a stroke when I saw her!”

“She talked to you?” Jenni asked. “Did she recognize you?”

“She talked to me, Kevin, Michael and Manny, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off of me. I thought she might have recognized me too, but she didn’t act as if she did.”

“If she doesn’t know who you are, then you’re probably safe,” Jenni suggested. Kristen looked glum, and the leopard noticed. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

The lioness looked up at Jon. “I know we aren’t a couple,” she said quietly, “but I suppose now that she’s here, I don’t have a chance.”

Jon blinked in surprise. “Why would you think that?” he asked in a puzzled tone.

“Jon, you almost married her,” Kristen replied. “You told us yourself that you were head over heels in love with her. I can’t compete with that.”

The male cougar crossed the room and put his hands gently upon her shoulders. “Kris, there’s no competition here. She crushed whatever love I once had for her when she put me through the ringer in the weeks after I caught them in bed together that last time. She’s nothing but a bad memory for me, and now she’s come here to prolong my torture!”

He dropped his arms and sat down in the other dining room chair. He put his head down on the table and sighed heavily. “Under no circumstances can she ever find out who I am… who I used to be.”

“The portraits!” Jenni exclaimed. “Jon, your before and after portraits are—”

“Already taken care of,” Jon murmured into the tabletop. “I ran to the Felis Wing after I left her at the fence and had Doctor Renwick take down my picture, putting Dante’s ‘before’ portrait up in its place.”

“You don’t look anything like Dante in human form,” Kristen remarked. “You don’t have the same hair color and you’re taller than he was.”

“You can’t tell our heights by a head-and-shoulders bust shot,” Jon responded, “and if anyone asks, I was coloring my hair black before I first arrived.”

“Jon, who else besides us knows your background?” Jenni wanted to know.

“Marcelo, Dr. Renwick, Angelina and Marcy.”

“None of them will break confidentiality to let your true identity slip,” the leopard said. “They all know the seriousness of something like that, which is why none of the other Furs here know who you are – uh, were. You’re not the same man you were when you first got here. You are now Jonathan Sunset, legally and forever more. You said it yourself – Brian Barrett is dead, having paid the penalty for his crimes.”

Jon lifted his head up off the table and gave both of his companions an apologetic smile. “This is one of the reasons why I came straight to you gals,” he said gratefully. “You know who I am – was – and yet you’re still willing to defend me. Thank you.” He looked over at Kristen’s downcast eyes and tapped the table beside her lightly. She glanced over at him.

“I know we don’t have the relationship you’d like us to have, Kris, but you aren’t in competition with Rebecca. You’ve liked me since before I became a Fur, and with full knowledge of what I’d done. She’s only interested in me now because I resemble her dead lover.” Jon gave her a smile. “I have no intention of letting her get close to me. You mean a lot more to me that she ever will again, Kris.”

Kristen got up to her feet and then held out her arms without a word. Jon’s eyes widened, but he got up to draw her into his arms, holding her close.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “I think I needed to hear that.”

“Don’t be concerned about us,” Jon told her. “I may have to avoid her as much as possible, but there are no barriers between you and me.”

Kristen pulled back and looked up at him with a relieved smile. Then she got a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Does this mean I can shower with you after all?” she asked with a giggle, her tail twitching with a life of its own.

“You may as well,” Jenni said in amusement. “You dropped your towel at his feet when you stood up to get a hug!”

Chapter 22

Long Awaited News

At eight o’clock sharp, Jon’s PBJ issued a ping while he was poring over the rules, regulations and bylaws that had been put together years ago to govern a furman settlement. It was required reading for everyone who would be destined to live in a starter colony, and although it was mostly dry reading for most, Jon had always enjoyed academic studies and understood the need for such a document.

Although it was no longer on his background records under his new guise, the man formerly known as Brian Barrett was once a respected administrator for a successful Colorado organization. He had risen through the ranks on hard work and diligence, and had been one promotion away from becoming a corporate vice president at the time that Henry Parker had influenced matters in his life. His downward spiral had cost him everything, but although Sunset could no longer claim Barrett’s educational degrees with a resume of work experience, Jon still retained the knowledge and skills he had gained over the years.

Looking over the document on its screen, he clicked on a yellow highlighter tool with a claw tip and marked a paragraph for later research. He would want to look into this area closer for a better understanding on what its repercussions might be in a colony setting.

When the PBJ pinged at him again, he closed out the document and opened up his mail. Sissy’s daily news reports had continued like clockwork every day at the same time, so that everyone on the grounds could expect some morsel of information, rumor or announcement on a regular basis. Compared to her usual articles, however, this one was relatively short.

Good morning, Campers!

The volunteers of Class Seventeen are now on their way to becoming Furs. Contracts were signed late last night and only one individual from the Ursis Wing took the Escape Clause. A last minute replacement for him has already been contacted and she should arrive later today. The remaining fifteen volunteers will be getting their initial injections tomorrow and then their transformations will begin. Congratulations, Class Seventeen – we’re glad to have you among us!

I know this will shock you, but I have only one other message to make this morning. All Furs on the grounds are to report to the assembly hall in the Clark Savage building at nine o’clock for a very important announcement. No amount of pleading or cajoling has been able to weed out any clues to what information Marcelo has to tell us, so I’m just as much in the dark about what he will give us as the rest of you are. I’m sure it’s of great importance, so don’t be late and make sure everyone knows to be there on time. Attendance is mandatory.

See you there!

Sissy Quinn, Administrative Assistant

***

It had been four days since the newcomers of Class Seventeen arrived at the Institute and Jon had done his best to stay away from them, Rebecca most of all. Any lingering feelings of attraction Jon may have had from their former relationship had evaporated completely with repeated sightings of the woman, and she seemed to be going out of her way to run into him.

Despite his continued cold treatment toward her, she seemed determined to become friends with him, and although she had been strongly cautioned against it, Rebecca had ultimately signed her final contract with a mountain lion as her Fur of choice. Since all feline Furs would eventually be sent to the same colony, Jon felt that his future was doomed to suffer her presence for the rest of his life. Somehow, he suspected the sadistic judge who had sent him here had also arranged for Rebecca to be near him in similar form to prolong a lifetime of torture.

Since she was now contracted to the AHCP for the rest of her life as he was, there was no doubt that she would be present at the nine o’clock meeting, so Jon planned to make a late appearance to sit on the opposite side of the room from wherever she was for the assembly.

He soon discovered, however, that Rebecca had plans of her own.

Taking his time, Jon closed out all the files he had had open and then closed the case of his PBJ, setting it on the small kitchen counter. He turned to his closet and decided to change into a fresh set of clothes. He slipped out of the furman shorts he had been lounging around in and tossed them into a hamper, but he still had forty-five minutes before he had to be at the assembly, so he decided to take a shower. By the time he was washed and dried, he could be fashionably late to the gathering.

As he began the shower, letting the water run over his fingers until it reached the proper temperature, Jon thought he heard the door to his apartment open. He shut off the water and dried off his fingers on a towel.

“Kris, is that you?”

“No, it’s not Kris,” replied a familiar voice, “but if you were hoping to have a companion for your shower, I’m willing to join you.”

Jon whirled around, his claws nearly taking down the shower curtain, which made Rebecca laugh in amusement. He turned to face her and her eyes darted quickly to his nudity. He knew he was sufficiently covered up by his sheath and fur, but her interest only made him incensed.

“Get out!” Jon shouted at her.

Instead of cowering away from him, the dark-haired woman simply leaned upon the bathroom door frame and crossed her arms. She smiled at him for a moment, but his increasingly intense glare of anger dampened her mood.

“I said get out!” he repeated, flattening his ears back against his head.

“Why do you hate me?” she asked in a quiet voice. “I’ve tried to be friends with you since the day I got here, but nothing I’ve said or done will please you.”

“Get out! I don’t want to be your friend!” Jon spat out at her. He stood up to his full height and took a step toward her. The woman’s expression faltered at the imposing feline with anger in his eyes and she moved back out of the bathroom.

“Get out of my home and get out of my life!” he roared at her.

Rebecca stumbled against the end of the couch, losing her balance and she fell backward onto the sofa. “What have I done to make you mad?” she asked, showing him wide eyes in distress. “I’ve only wanted to get to know you.”

Jon advanced forward and roughly grabbed the back of the couch in one hand and the bottom cushion with the other, effectively trapping her in place. He shoved his face up close to hers just as his front door opened again, but without looking to see who had arrived, he bared his teeth at Rebecca and breathed heavily at her.

“You killed Henry Parker,” he snarled in her face, “and you killed your fiancé!”

“I didn’t!” Rebecca squealed in a fear-stricken voice, conscious of how close the cougar’s fangs were to her bare throat. “It was Brian’s fault!”

“YOU killed them both!” Jon shouted back at her. “It was your actions that caused it all! Two good people died because of you and I don’t want you around! Stop stalking me and leave – me – alone!”

Jon pushed himself back upright, shoving the couch hard up against the wall and Rebecca scrambled to get away from him. Her way to the front door was blocked, however, by another angry mountain lion.

Kristen was down on all fours, her lips curled back in a fearsome snarl, and ridge of fur was standing up along her back beneath her thin blouse. Seeing her this way surprised Jon, but it absolutely terrified Rebecca. She had been warned that there was something between the two resident mountain lions and now it looked as if she might pay for her meddling.

The dark-haired woman involuntarily whimpered in fear as the lioness took a step closer, but then another large figure appeared in the doorway. Arne stuck his head in through Jon’s open door.

“What’s with all the shouting?” asked the African lion. He then saw a cowering woman confronted by two angry cougars and blinked in surprise. “What’s going on?”

No one responded to his question, so he knocked on the door frame several times to get their attention. “I think everyone needs to calm down,” he said firmly. “Right now.”

Kristen looked back at him, the angry look still upon her face, but she did as she was told and sat back on her haunches. She turned her gaze back upon the woman and snorted loudly. Jon forced himself to relax his shoulders and he took a step back away from the couch.

“It was a mistake for you to come here,” he said to her with a soft growl beneath his voice. Rebecca did not know if he was referring to her coming unannounced into his apartment or to the Institute altogether, but she swallowed hard and nodded meekly.

“I… I will not bother you again,” she murmured.

“See that you don’t!” Kristen hissed.

Arne had no idea what had set off the volatile situation, but he knew he should try to smooth things out a little. “Jon,” he said in a calm tone, “if she’s going to become a feline like us, we’ll all be together at the same colony when our time comes. Don’t you think it would be best if —”

Crash!

Jon’s fist came down hard on the edge of his small round table and two legs snapped beneath the onslaught, but before those in the room could really register what had he had done, he swept the remains of the table hard to the side, where they smashed against the wall with another loud crash.

Arne, Kristen and Rebecca all looked up at him in shock and surprise, but Jon merely brushed splinters from his knuckles and looked back at them in a deceptively calm gaze.

He gave the African lion a look of indifference for a moment and then he returned his scrutiny to the woman. When he spoke, it was in a calm and collected voice, almost in a conversational tone.

“Go away and leave me alone,” he told her. “Don’t talk to me, don’t approach me and don’t even look at me.”

Rebecca got slowly to her feet and crossed her arms tightly across her chest, but the embarrassed expression on her face was becoming indignant. “Goodbye,” she said in a raspy voice. Then without looking anyone in the eyes, she walked around the broken table, past Kristen and toward the door. Arne stepped aside quietly to let her go, and when he was sure she had gone down the stairs and out of earshot, he turned back toward the cougars.

“Just what in blazes is going on here?” he demanded of Jon.

The mountain lion heaved a loud sigh and turned toward the table he had destroyed in his anger, which had all drained out of him now. “Let it go, Arne,” Jon said. “It’s not your concern.”

“No?” the lion snapped. “You and Kristen were about to harm one of the new volunteers. That makes it my concern!”

“She has been stalking me since she got here,” Jon explained impatiently, pulling a pair of shorts from the closet, “and she just came uninvited into my apartment wanting to get into the shower with me.” He slipped into the shorts and adjusted his tail in the back.

“Half the females here would like to get into your shower,” Arne retorted, “but you’ve never acted this way to any of them before.”

Kristen snorted. “Did you know Henry Parker?”

The lion looked at her, the non-sequitur catching him off guard. “Uh, yeah,” he answered. “He was in the class before mine. What’s that got to do with that woman?”

“She was the one right in the middle of the incident that got him killed,” Kristen informed him.

Arne’s jaw dropped open. “It can’t be!” he muttered.

“That’s her,” Jon confirmed, examining the broken sheetrock in the wall where the table had hit. “She got a taste for my kind with him and started after me the moment she got here. I’ve tried to ignore and avoid her, but it only made her stalk me all the more. When she cornered me in my own shower just now, it all came to a head and I blew up at her.”

Arne looked at Kristen. “What about you?” he asked. “Why were you in here about to pounce on her?”

Kristen looked down at her feet, suddenly feeling embarrassed. “I was coming to his defense,” she confessed. “Jon was standing over her without any clothes on and shouting at her to get out, so I thought she’d tried to rape him… just as Travis tried to do with me.”

Arne sighed and wiped a hand across his face. “All right,” he said after a moment. “I’ll back you up if she goes to Marcelo with this. I’m just glad it ended without anyone getting injured.” He frowned at Jon’s table and added. “You’ve either frightened her enough that she’ll never be on the same side of the Institute with you again, or you’ve just made a bitter enemy just as you did with Travis. I’d keep an eye out for her, if I were you.”

Without waiting for a response, Arne turned and walked out of the room. Jon frowned at the mess he had made and then dropped heavily onto the couch. He looked over at Kristen and gave her a weak smile.

“Thank you for coming to my aid,” he said quietly. “It’s good to know you’ve got my back.”

The lioness padded across the small room and sat down on the floor in front of him, curling her tail around her feet. She looked up with a sorrowful expression. “I was afraid you were going to give yourself away to her,” she whispered so that no one outside the open door might hear. “I was afraid for your life if she’d found out.”

Jon leaned forward and lightly touched his forehead to hers. “Thanks to you, I didn’t,” he replied. “You showed up at just the right time and helped me scare her silly.”

“I think you scared me silly too,” Kristen confessed. “You once told me that when you got angry, you got quiet, that you didn’t throw tantrums, attack other people, or throw objects.” She looked over at the demolished table and then back at him. “For a moment there, I thought she had pushed you over the edge.”

“I think she did,” Jon remarked, feeling a bruise on his knuckles from hitting the table. “All my pain and frustration must have been building up to that over the past year, but now that it’s been released, I think I can probably rest a little easier.”

“Do you think Arne’s right, that she’ll be a dangerous enemy?” Kristen asked after a moment of silence between them. “After she’s gone through her transformation and has an enhanced body like ours, she may be a bundle of trouble.”

“Then it will be two against one,” Jon said calmly. “I’m sure I can take care of myself, but with you by my side, she doesn’t stand a chance.”

***

Jon and Kristen walked into the assembly hall together. From the look on Marcelo’s face as he watched them get to seats, they were the last to arrive. Jon did not meet anyone else’s eyes, keeping his attention on the director at the podium. Kristen swept her gaze over the others in attendance but she could not find Rebecca anywhere in the room. Suspicious, she looked behind her, but there was no one else there. The assembly was mandatory, but it looked as if she had gone off somewhere to sulk. Satisfied that she had not just overlooked the woman, Kristen turned her attention to the front of the room.

On the video screen behind the director was a still photograph of the Earth. Jon blinked and looked at it again, realizing that the land masses and oceans beneath swirling clouds did not look quite right. There were also two small moons in orbit above the planet. It was similar, but it was not the Earth.

“Okay, now that we’re all here, we can begin,” Marcel said in a voice loud enough to carry to everyone present. He gestured up to the photograph behind him. “This is planet Bonestell,” he explained, pronouncing it as bahn estell. “It is slightly larger than the Earth with a diameter of approximately ninety-one hundred miles, but it has less land mass with over eighty-seven percent of its surface covered in water. With the exception of two more on the other side of the planet, most of this world’s continents are grouped closely together in the northern hemisphere.”

Marcelo turned back toward the audience. Most of them had already studied the various Earth-like planets that the Terran Colonization Coalition had discovered to be potentially habitable, so his introduction seemed like nothing more than a refresher.

“Ten years ago, a human colony tried to settle there,” he continued, “but something unknown happened and all contact with the settlers was lost just before they were to make their landing. The last known report from the colony ship was sent back to Earth on the day of their planned descent from orbit. Repeated attempts to reestablish contact were fruitless, and after three silent years, the colony was officially given up with all hands counted lost.”

The swarthy director absently stroked his goatee for a moment and then he put both hands upon the podium. “I received a special report from the Anthro Human Colonization Program headquarters in Stockholm late last night. The Terran Colonization Coalition has decided that Bonestell is going to be given another chance, but this time it will be a furman colony that will attempt to settle there.”

There were murmurs around the room as some immediately made the connection with the morning’s special assembly. Rather than let imaginations run rampant, Marcel continued as if there had been no interruption.

“There will be a difference this time, however,” he said. “Typically, a new starter colony is set up consisting of just one of the furman races at a time, but due to the catastrophe of the Bastien colony of Felis volunteers that killed all but a Vulps couple that had been assigned to the settlement, all of the volunteers from Classes Fifteen and Sixteen of the North American Furmankind Institute will combine for a mixed colony to ensure its survival in case there’s a repeat of something similar.”

That got everybody’s attention and conversations erupted all around. Marcelo had expected such a reaction, but he was far from finished. He rapped on the podium several times with his old wooden gavel, but was ignored for the most part until Avon stood up and filled his lungs with air.

“Quiet!” he bellowed. “He isn’t done yet!”

Voices hushed and everyone turned expectantly back toward the man at the podium.

“Thank you,” Marcelo said with a nod. “Now, this may be good news to all of you who have been waiting your turn to get out to a new world, but this is likely to become a volatile subject with the other three Institutes. Originally, the next starter colony was supposed to be an all-Ursis group made up from ursine volunteers from all four Institutes, so naturally this decision is going to be decried as unfair by the bears of the other Institutes left out of this new settlement. Our Institute was chosen because we currently have two classes of fully formed Furs that can be ready to go at a moment’s notice; the others do not. With a mixed species group, it was also determined that everyone would be more likely to get along if everyone already knew one another as you do.”

Marcelo picked up a small bottle of water from inside the lectern and took a sip before he continued. “Plans had already been in motion towards something similar when some of you were sent up to the space station, and it became a greater possibility when we learned of the Bastien catastrophe; this is why a lot of you have been undergoing accelerated studies. Headquarters has been weighing the pros and cons of such a mixed group for months and the decision to move forward was made two weeks ago. Budgets, plans and programs were all drawn up and a colony ship is now in preparation to be stocked and readied for an upcoming flight to Bonestell.”

Kevin let out a hurrah that caused others to laugh and giggle at him, but Marcel still had more to say. “If your mixed colony is deemed a success, other such groups could be sent out more quickly than previous transformation schedules could allow. The volunteers of the other Institutes will be asked to be patient since their own classes are several months behind your current availability. Another world is also under final investigation, and should it be as promising as it appears, a second mixed colony ship could be sent out within a year. However, your assignment will be to go in where the original human colony was supposed to set up on Bonestell and try to determine what happened to them. If you cannot find any survivors of the original landing, you are to proceed as if you are the only colony to have gone to the planet.”

Hank held up a hand to ask a question, but the director shook his head. “I will answer all queries after I have finished,” he told him. The black bear nodded and crossed his arms, but did not argue. Marcelo looked around those under his care and felt a little uncomfortable about his next topic. It was something that needed to be addressed, however.

“Although a mixed species settlement will give you a greater chance of survival against diseases like the one that hit Bastien, it will also put you at a disadvantage. Your assignment will be to establish a settlement that must last no less than five years, but you will have to do so with limited numbers of each Fur group. Instead of at least thirty of each furman group that would normally make up a new colony, there will only be seven of you for each species and some of you have mismatched gender ratios. Although there are no guidelines forcing any of you to reproduce your species, this is something that must be kept in mind for an extended stay. Five years could only be the beginning. Monogamous relationships among Furs are not a requirement, especially with small numbers, but you all still have free will to pick and choose, accept and refuse your partners. Above all, however, a mixed group such as yours will have to get along in order for such an endeavor to succeed.

“It is necessary to know ahead of time who it is you can turn to in a crisis, so every settlement has its leader established before the colony ship ever sets out from Earth. This leader is appointed by the AHCP, so the position is not up for a vote by any of you, but that leader is free to choose his or her own second-in-command. I’m sure this will be no surprise to you, but since he has already undergone the necessary leadership training, Stockholm has named Hiamovi Avonaco as the leader over the Bonestell starter colony.”

There was some light clapping and Avon raised his hand above his head to wave with a smile as if he was on a parade float, which garnered laughter and chuckles. No one was surprised at his appointment, and none really had a problem with his selection. Even Kim and Yuki were used to the idea now, even though they had argued against him during their survival hike.

“Okay,” Marcelo said with a smile. “We’ll be on a bit of a timeline from now until your departure, so your schedules are going to change. Sissy will send them to your PBJs as soon as they’ve been finalized. Preparations are already underway and one week from today, you will all be sent up to Space Station Sebra for five days of final orientation. The colony Slipship will dock with Sebra for boarding, and then you will be put into cryogenic capsules for an eight-week journey to Bonestell. All your supplies will already be on board, as well as your livestock, which will also be in cryogenic stasis for the voyage. Now… are there any questions?”

Several hands went up, but Marcelo pointed to the black bear first. “Yes, Hank?”

“I’m glad to see this come about,” he said, “but why is this happening so fast? I thought an exercise of this magnitude took lots of budget funding and planning.”

“Even before the loss on Bastien, a combined colony group was previously under consideration, so plans and budgeting had already undergone research. Bastien was simply the catalyst to dust off the plans and put it into motion. I’ve known about this for some time, but have been under strict orders not to breathe a word of it to anyone. It’s good to finally let it out and I’m glad to see you all excited about the mission.”

Sissy looked around until she spied Jon and Kristen sitting at the periphery of the group. She got up quietly and then sat on her knees in the seat in front of them, facing them. “I’m so excited!” she said in a low voice. “We all get to go to the same colony together! I’ve been afraid that our respective classes would be going to separate colonies.”

Jon reached out and touched her arm lightly. “I’m glad we get to stay together,” he told her. “Besides, I’m sure Avon can use a good administrative assistant like you to keep everyone in line.”

Sissy grinned at him and Kristen echoed Jon’s sentiment. “I would have missed you, Sissy,” she said. “It will be good to keep us together as a team.”

Marcelo answered a few more questions as they talked, but after several moments, the director knocked on the podium once again. “Since there seem to be no further questions, I have another important announcement to make.”

Conversations hushed and all eyes returned to him, wondering what else he could say to improve the day. He opened his mouth to speak, but Marcy stepped up onto the stage and handed the director an open PBJ. He studied one of its screens, but then he looked up at her in surprise and spoke to her quietly for several moments. He looked perplexed, but then he nodded and turned back to his podium.

He cleared his throat and handed the device back to the nurse. “Okay, I have two announcements to make,” he said. “I will give you the original one first.” He gestured toward the curtain at the side of the stage and motioned for someone to join him at the podium. “I’m sure you heard the Osprey arrive earlier. One of your associates has been returned to us just this morning, and she would like to speak to you for a moment.”

There were a few excited and surprised comments in the crowd when a Vulps vixen in a long, Asian style robe stepped out into view. Small cries escaped Dahlia and Rose’s lips, and it was all they could do to keep their seats. It was Jasmine Fleur.

The fox stepped up to the podium, but she kept one hand beneath her robe. “Hello again, everybody,” Jasmine said quietly. “It’s good to be back.”

The crowd erupted into applause, but then the Furs began to remember why she had been taken from them and the jubilation faltered. The vixen realized what was on their minds and she ducked her head a moment before she looked back out at them.

“I see some new faces in the crowd that were not here when I left, so you may not know what happened, but several weeks ago, I… killed a fellow Fur in self-defense when he tried to… to rape me.” The room grew so quiet that the normally silent air conditioning could be heard pumping cool air into the assembly hall. “I was taken from here to the AHCP headquarters in Stockholm and held there for a hearing on my actions.” She looked out at her sisters and felt her throat tighten up briefly. “Since Trav— uhm, the deceased — was considered a monetary investment by the AHCP, it was ultimately determined that the price of my crime was banishment from the Earth on the next group to leave, as well as forfeiture of my contracted prize money. It could have been to any of them, but since you are the ones chosen to begin the next colony, I will be going with you to Bonestell.”

Dahlia started to clap, but Rose saw that their sister was not finished and grabbed her hands to stop her. Jasmine nodded and then stepped around from behind the podium. She slowly untied the sash that wrapped around her robe and then dropped the garment to her feet. She was dressed underneath in the typical furman shorts and top, but then she turned sideways so that everyone could see her tail. Her once-luxurious fox tail had been completely shaved to the skin from her hip to the tip.

“This is my scarlet letter,” she said, making reference to a well-known classic story. “This is a symbol of my sin — a badge of shame — for all to see until the fur grows back on its own.” She turned back to face everyone and then put her hands together down in front of her with her head bowed.

“All I can ask is for you to be kind to me,” she said quietly, “but I am glad to be back here…among friends…at home.”

Without waiting for more, Dahlia jumped up out of her seat and rushed to the stage, closely followed by Rose. The trio of sisters clung together tightly, all three of them crying in sobs of joy and relief.

Doctor Maria Ramirez got up from her chair, led the sisters back to the side of the stage, and then they all disappeared behind the curtain.

Marcelo moved back to the lectern and cleared his throat once more. “I have only one further quick announcement before you’re free to go. Once Sissy sends out your schedules, you’ll need to begin preparing for your new mission.”

Everyone stared up at him, wondering what other news he could give to them after his last two bombshells. The director studied the podium once more and then looked back out at them.

“One of the new Felis volunteers who signed her contract last night has just requested to have that document voided before the injections could be administered this afternoon. Ms. Rebecca Collins has cited a personal hardship that I have been made aware of, and she has opted to take the Escape Clause and leave our company. Because I fully understand her reason, I have approved her request and she is currently preparing to depart with the Osprey to Albany within the hour. The next volunteer applicant will be contacted shortly to come in as a late-minute replacement to fill her spot in Class Seventeen.”

Jon could scarcely believe his ears. Rebecca had left of her own volition.

Chapter 23

Firecats

Good Morning, Friends!

Groundwork is now underway to prepare the Furs of Classes Fifteen and Sixteen for the upcoming departure, and I have been granted permission to present a contest open to everyone here at the North American Furmankind Institute. No longer separate classes, those of us going to Bonestell will need an actual name for the group as a whole. What should we twenty-nine Furs call ourselves now? The winner will receive a 24-hour pass to leave the compound, so put your thinking caps on and see what you can come up with.

Also related to the upcoming departure, all Furs are encouraged to invite friends and relatives to attend an Open House next Saturday and Sunday. This will be a good time to show off your new chassis under the setting of a family reunion, since this could be the last time any of us may see them. Lodging will be provided on the grounds for any of them who may wish to stay overnight, as well as complimentary meals and refreshments. Make this a good time to say Fare Well before it’s actually time to go.

I just have one further announcement and then we can get back to our preparations. Ken Wilder, Jon Sunset, Hiamovi Avonaco and Manny Frigh are to meet Director Marcelo in the Mayfair Room of the Clark Savage building as representatives of each furman race at nine o’clock this morning. I have no further information on what will be discussed, but I think we can all assume it has to do with the upcoming mission. Be there promptly, guys.

That’s all for now, folks. Have a great day!

Sissy Quinn, Administrative Assistant

***

Jon arrived at the designated place ten minutes early. Although he had passed the door to the Mayfair Room on numerous occasions, he had never been in it. The door was unlocked, but when he went inside, the lights were all off but for a small document lamp on the opposite end of the room that illuminated a portion of a podium. Thinking he was the first to arrive, he reached for a panel of switches on the wall near the door, but Marcelo’s voice stopped him.

“Please leave the lights off, Jon,” the director instructed, “but come on in, shut the door and have a seat at the table.”

The cougar closed the door behind him and made his way to a V-shaped conference table. The dim lamp gave his feline-predator eyes ample illumination to see his way to an empty chair, and it was then he realized that there were already others in attendance. He counted silhouettes and noted that he must have been the last to arrive, although he was there well before the appointed time.

Marcelo’s voice had come from a podium near the open end of the V-table, and once Jon was settled in his chair, a wall-sized video screen behind the director lit up with a photograph of a set of buildings in a forested setting much like the Adirondacks of Upstate New York.

“This is the Toyohashi Furmankind Institute of the Aichi Prefecture in Japan,” Marcelo explained with no further preamble. “It is one of three other facilities like our own, although it has been closed for the greater part of a year due to efforts to rebuild after the damages suffered from last year’s devastating Nankai-Tokai earthquake in central Japan. A great number of lives were lost, including some of the Furs in residence; those who survived were transferred to the Stockholm Institute.”

The picture changed to show a middle-aged Japanese man with a narrow waist in a sharp business suit standing up straight as if he were at attention. His eyes were sharp and his dark hair showed just a hint of grey at his temples, giving him a distinguished look.

“This is Doctor Masanori Mochizuki. For the past decade, he has been the director of the Toyohashi Institute and is also a respected geneticist with the Japanese Preservation Society and the Global Animal Genetic Vault.”

“So that’s what he looked like as a human,” Jon mused aloud.

“What do you mean, as a human?” Manny asked from the darkness. “Is he a Fur now?” Jon prepared to tell him what he had discovered during their time on Space Station Sebra, but Marcelo cleared his throat, interrupting his reply.

“I ask that further questions and comments be refrained until the proper time,” the director remarked. “I was coming to this in a moment, but yes, this is what Masanori looked like up until three years ago.”

The picture changed again and this time it was of a laboratory setting. Mochizuki was standing with three young assistants, a woman and two men, all dressed in white lab coats. “The Toyohashi Institute had the distinction of a perfect success record with its volunteers, even to the point of never having anyone take the Escape Clause in the AHCP contracts.”

The picture changed. Dr. Mochizuki appeared to be at home, looking relaxed in a blue and white cotton yukata at a short table on a tatami mat floor. Sitting up beside him was a beautiful canine with dense tan and white fur and a luxurious tail that curled over onto its back. The tip of the dog’s pink tongue stuck out between its lips, eliciting a few chuckles from those around the conference table, especially as the canine bore a strong resemblance to their furmate, Yuki.

“Although the accomplishments of his Institute were exemplary, Dr. Mochizuki had great empathy toward the intense agonies his volunteers had to endure, and in time he contacted the AHCP with a special request that would allow him a greater understanding of those he oversaw in the program; Dr. Mochizuki wanted to go through the transformation process himself. At first, Stockholm denied his request as unnecessary. A considerable amount of time, effort and finances are invested in every volunteer who signs the contract, and the ultimate goal of each Fur has always been to help settle habitable planets to make way for later human colonies. Dr. Mochizuki’s position as an Institute Director, as well as his genetic knowledge and experience with the Japanese Preservation Society were worth more to the AHCP to keep him here on Earth than to send him out into the stars. Unwilling to accept defeat, Dr. Mochizuki volunteered to waive the contracted bonus prize money in exchange for remaining on Earth to oversee his branch of the Institute as a sympathetic Fur. After some deliberation, his request was given authorization by Stockholm.”

The picture changed again, but it was a repeat of the photo of the man with his dog. “He had planned on mixing his DNA with that of an Akita Inu, the doctor’s favorite dog breed. In fact, it was his own pet that was authorized to provide the donor DNA material. When it came time to prepare Dr. Mochizuki’s formula for the McEwen process, a relatively new lab assistant chose the wrong vial from the freezer. Instead of the doctor’s prize dog’s genetic material, she picked up an unlabeled vial of Ailurus fulgens DNA.”

“Ailurus fulgens?” Ken repeated. “That sounds familiar, but I can’t place it at the moment.” Marcelo was annoyed at having been interrupted again, but he continued as if the vulpine physician hadn’t spoken. Jon already knew this story but stayed quiet, allowing the director to explain it himself.

“He did not discover the mistake until later when the transformations were not conforming to the body type of an Akita Inu. After extended DNA analysis, his Fur type was identified, but unable to reverse the process, Dr. Mochizuki was committed. The mistake caused him great mental anguish, but psychological counseling and time helped him finally come to terms with what he had become, the only furman of his kind — a red panda.”

“A red panda?” Avon asked, unable to contain his curiosity. “I don’t remember ever seeing that species as an option in the Ursis binder.”

“A red panda was never planned to be included in the furmankind project,” Marcelo explained in mild irritation. “The DNA sample taken by mistake had been intended for the Global Animal Genetic Vault that Dr. Mochizuki was also a part of, but it was his own hand that had placed the vial in the freezer unlabeled. Once his body type had been identified, rapid modifications had to be made with a risky second injection to compensate for the unaltered Ailurus fulgens DNA.”

“What happened?” Manny asked.

Marcelo advanced the projection and a photograph of Dr. Mochizuki came up on the screen, but this time it was a human-sized, red panda that stood in the laboratory in his familiar white coat, accompanied only by the young female woman of the previous picture.

“The lab assistant who had chosen the wrong vial was heartbroken over the mistake, but instead of having her dismissed, Dr. Mochizuki kept her with him at all times to help oversee his transformation. Feeling indentured to him for the incident, Chieko Ito stayed with him through every step of the process, helping him through even the roughest part of the pain. At the end of nine long months, Dr. Mochizuki was inspected and given a clean bill of health, although virtually nothing was known of his new Anthroailurus fulgens biology.”

“It was good of the woman to stay with him,” Ken murmured. “She must have been scared out of her wits when his changing shape didn’t match anything they’d had on record as a Fur.”

“By the time Dr. Mochizuki was ready to resume his duties as the director of his Institute, he surprised his assistant by asking her to marry him,” Marcelo continued. “They had grown close throughout his transformation and their relationship was foremost on the doctor’s mind. Such a thing had never been authorized before, but at his insistence Stockholm agreed… and so did she. For the first time since Furs had been created, a human and a furman were married. It took some doing to get local authorization to have a traditional Japanese wedding, but it was finally allowed and they legally became husband and wife in a private ceremony.”

“What a fairy tale!” Manny said with a laugh, smacking his paw on the conference tabletop. “I’ll have to tell that one to my brother so he can tell his grandkids when they’re old enough!”

“I am not finished,” Marcelo told him in obvious aggravation. “May I have permission to continue?” The fox sobered up immediately and leaned back in his seat without another word. “Thank you,” said the director.

“Since they could never have children due to his condition, Chieko volunteered to go through the same process herself, to become a hybrid red panda like her husband, but Dr. Mochizuki forbade it. He was unwilling to see her suffer through the bodily changes as he had. It would be enough for her to keep his house, groom him and continue to help him with their genetic research.”

The picture on the screen changed and this time the Toyohashi Furmankind Institute was in ruins. “The great Nankai-Tokai earthquake occurred three months later, and although Dr. Mochizuki and his wife survived the destruction, many there did not. It took months for the cleanup and rebuilding to begin, but eventually there came a time when the doctor and his wife had nothing to do until things could be put back into operation.”

The next photograph showed the red panda standing with two pilots in front of the SS Branson at Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico. “Using the downtime as opportunity for further genetic research with other scientists, Dr. Mochizuki was allowed a two-month visit to Space Station Sebra. Although Chieko was also a geneticist, she asked to stay behind to take care of their home and their dog.”

“That’s when I met him,” Jon said quietly, “while we were up at Sebra.”

“However,” Marcelo said in irritation at the interruption, “when the doctor returned to Earth after his extended stay in orbit, he discovered that Chieko had gone against his will and that of the AHCP. She’d convinced an associate physician at the Japanese institute into injecting her with the formula from another red panda that they had properly prepared this time. By the time Dr. Mochizuki returned, she was well into her transformation.”

“Wow,” Ken remarked, keeping it brief.

“He was furious with her disobedience, but he had no choice but to help her through it all as she had done with him, keeping word of it from Stockholm until most of her transformation had completed. However, once he made his report to headquarters, the incident was not taken lightly. Chieko’s earlier request to follow him through the transformation into a red panda had been denied, both by the doctor and by the AHCP, so in response to her blatant insubordination and misuse of AHCP facilities, she is being punished with no chance for appeal.”

“Okay, all this is leading up to something,” Jon grumbled. “Why are you telling us all of this?”

Marcelo changed the photograph once more to a portrait of Dr. Mochizuki and his wife Chieko, both in their red panda forms. This time, however, there was no annoyance in Marcelo’s voice when he answered the cougar’s question.

“The purpose of a Fur is for preemptive colonization of a potentially habitable world,” he reminded them. “As punishment for her disobedience, Chieko is being sent away from the Earth, and now that a mixed species group is going out, she is being included as a last-minute addition to your group.”

“She’s coming here?” Manny asked with a look of surprise. “She’s going out with us?”

“That is correct,” the director answered. “She’s not had the usual colony training, so she will depend upon all of you to help her find her own place within your settlement.”

“What about Dr. Mochizuki?” Jon asked, aware that Marcelo no longer seemed annoyed with their questions. “Did he put up a fight to keep her here?”

“He did, but it was to no avail. Stockholm refused to be swayed this time, standing on their final judgment. Although she had initially angered him with her disobedience, he was touched by her loyalty and determination to live as he lived for the rest of their lives together. As her legal husband he was within his rights to refuse to be separated from her, so he resigned his position as director of the Toyohashi Institute so that he could join her in banishment from the Earth.” Marcelo gestured toward the picture on the screen. “The AHCP did not take his resignation lightly, but Dr. Mochizuki will also be joining you as part of your group going to Bonestell.”

Avon sat upright in his seat. “Since he was the director of an Institute,” he said apprehensively, “is Dr. Mochizuki going to take my place as the leader of the colony?”

Marcelo shook his head. “No, my friend, that responsibility is still yours. You may tap into his knowledge and experience as needed, but Masanori Mochizuki and his wife Chieko will simply fill the role of biological and genetic scientists to help examine your new world. Also, because he had previously waived the prize money, that is no longer available to him as a colonist. None of this is a secret, so once you all leave here you are welcome to convey all I have told you to your associates.”

The room fell silent for several moments as the reality of what they had just been told began to sink in. Marcelo walked to the wall and touch a single light switch. Three overhead lamps slowly brightened to life. Marcelo tapped another control on the lectern and the video screen went dark.

Before anyone could think to say anything further, the director walked to another door on the end of the room near the podium. He tapped quietly on the panel twice and then opened the door.

“We are ready,” he said to someone in the next room. He stepped aside and then looked back at the Furs. “Gentlemen, I would like you to meet Dr. Masanori Mochizuki and his wife Chieko.”

Two red pandas entered through the door. They were both dressed in the typical Asian-style furman shorts and robes that were so familiar to the Adirondack Furs, and both of them walked in with their eyes down, looking at no one. They knew that the furman representatives in the conference room would have just been told of their story and both of them had adopted a humble Japanese demeanor.

Both of the new Furs were shorter than most of those at the North American Institute, but Jon doubted that either of them had been very tall to begin with before their transformations. The fur of their faces was deep red, though Cheiko’s coloring was a little lighter than her husband’s. Both had black human scalp hair on the top. The lower part of their faces looked like soft cream, as was the interior of their triangular ears, but the cheetah-like cry lines beneath their eyes were a darker red. Their arms and legs were smoky black, but the thick brush of a tail behind each alternated in red and cream stripes. His stripes went up the entire length of his tail, but Chieko’s stripes were only on the final half of hers.

As the appointed leader of the colonists bound for Bonestell, Avon approached the quiet couple and sat down in a chair in front of them so that he would not seem so imposing, towering above them upon their first meeting.

“Welcome,” he said quietly, his voice a deep rumble in the small wood-paneled conference room. “I am Hiamovi Avonaco, head of the colony we’ll be establishing. I am pleased to have you on my team. Please call me Avon.”

Dr. Mochizuki looked up and took the proffered hand paw with a small bow. “Thank you, Mr. Avon,” the doctor replied in a voice with a distinct Asian accent. “We know you have been made aware of the reason for our presence, so my wife and I hope to be of whatever assistance we can.”

Ken stepped forward with an outstretched hand and the red wolf gave the couple a pleasant smile sans teeth. “I am Doctor Ken Wilder, the colony physician. Your vast knowledge and experience will no doubt be invaluable to our efforts,” he said.

Manny stepped forward, introduced himself briefly, but then the arctic fox excused himself to find the restroom, uncomfortable with the newcomers’ presence. There was something about their scent that put him on edge, though it was nothing that he could put his finger on. It was unlikely their diverse skills would bring them in much contact with him even in a colonial setting, so he quickly figured that the less time he spent around them, the easier life would be overall.

When Jon approached the short red pandas he practically towered over them. He was not as tall as Avon, but instead of sitting down next to the grizzly, Jon gave them both a courteous bow.

“Hello,” he said quietly. “I am Jonathan Sunset, and I am well aware of how life can take roads that were unexpected. If you feel the need to talk to someone about it, you will always find a sympathetic listener with me.”

Chieko looked up at him with a sorrowful expression. It was the first time she had met anyone’s eyes since they had come into the room, and Jon was sure that she was feeling embarrassed at having her sins aired in front of a group of strangers.

“Are you the colony psychologist, Mr. Sunset?” she asked him in a demure voice.

Jon shook his head. “No, ma’am, I’m not. We do have one, but if you need a friend to talk to, sometimes that can be easier than unloading your troubles to a shrink.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sunset,” she replied.

“There’s no need to be formal,” he said with a friendly smile. “You may call me Jon.”

“Thank you... Jon.”

Masanori put a gentle hand upon her shoulder and gave the cougar a grateful smile. “I’m afraid we will both be in need of friends,” the geneticist told him. “We don’t fit in with any of the four furman races, so we are both feeling a little lost at this time.” He looked over at Marcelo briefly before turning back to the other two remaining Furs that had greeted them. “Although I have been director of my Institute for years, overseeing the transformation and education of many new Furs, I have never been through colony instruction myself. I fear my wife and I are unprepared for the life that awaits us on Bonestell.”

“Although our races and backgrounds are diverse,” Avon told him, “we have a good, solid group that will help you with anything you may need. Setting up a life on an untamed world is going to challenge all of us, so we’ll all need to help one another.”

“Thank you,” Masanori said gratefully. “Chieko and I will do whatever we can to add our usefulness to your efforts.”

Marcelo stepped forward and touched the geneticist on the arm. “If you will both follow me, I will get you set up with a place to stay and then we can finalize your documentation before Dr. Wilder begins your physical examinations for his records.”

“Of course, Dr. Delgado.”

Before they turned to go, the red pandas gave the furmen a short bow. Avon returned a simple hand wave, but Jon and Ken both returned the bow in unison out of courtesy. Masanori moved toward the side door they had come in through with the director, but Chieko hesitated a moment. She nodded quietly to each of the Furs, looking at Jon last, and she gifted him with a small smile that clearly implied that she appreciated his offer of friendship.

Friendship was more than she had expected from anyone who was cognizant of her disobedience — a disobedience that had resulted in banishment from the Earth for both she and her husband. Ironically, she was totally unaware just how much Jon’s own background made him a kindred spirit.

Chapter 24

Second Chance

Jon was weary of seeing the inside walls of the assembly hall. It seemed that for one reason or another, he and the rest of the Bonestell colonists were called to gather at least twice daily for some important news, announcement or special last-minute training session that was getting crammed into their remaining time on Earth. They all now realized that the accelerated training they had had in recent weeks had been in preparation for the pending assignment. Jon understood the need for it all, but he wished there was somewhere else large enough to hold them all for a change of scenery for these final few days. They had been called back into the assembly hall so many times that Sissy did not even bother announcing what each meeting was for anymore.

One thing of interest that Sissy did have to announce was the winning entry for the naming contest.  The first attempt at colonizing the distant world of Bonestell was an apparent failure shrouded in mystery, but there were high hopes that a second attempt to settle the planet would meet with greater success due to the genetically enhanced Furs that would be going this time. Once all the entries were in and presented to the group for selection, there was one submission most liked by the Furs who voted on them.

Once established, the colony site would be known as Second Chance. One person suggested they could call themselves the Second Chance Pack, modeled after a wolf pack, but Carl was argued down good-naturedly for promoting his own Fur race this way. The colony would no longer be made up of a single Fur type, but was a mixture of them all. The grey wolf backed down with grace and a smile.

A number of the Furs were envious of the winner, Hiamovi Avonaco, since the winning entry in the contest was awarded a twenty-four-hour pass to go off the compound. That was not enough time for an extended trip anywhere, so the grizzly was planning to take a bus from Saranac Lake down to Albany just to get away for a while. He had never been there before, but he was certain he could find good food and some entertainment.

He had already received several offers to buy or trade off his winning ticket, some even suggesting that as the colony captain he should stay at the Institute to coordinate the preparations, but he had felt the cabin fever just as much as any of them and refused to give it up.  He would be leaving late Saturday morning, the same day as the open house for friends and relatives to visit; he had no one who could come up with so little advanced warning, so the opportunity to get away came at a good time. In the meantime, however, he had to attend all the assemblies with everyone else.

In an effort to change up his routine a little, Jon had begun sitting with other Furs that he did not normally hang around with. This time, he sat with Dara and Alicia, and although they did not mind his presence, their chitchat about the male physique of the Ursis cousins did nothing to draw him into their conversation. He sat beside the polar bear with a hand unconsciously resting upon his injured shoulder, but the two females carried on their discussion as if he had not been there.  Jon sighed inwardly and began looking forward to the start of the meeting.

Sitting nearby, Masanori Mochizuki chatted quietly with Kim and Yuki Tanaka. With his wife by his side, the older red panda faced Yuki and held her Canis hands in his own. The Akita Inu was the Fur type the doctor had originally intended to become, and although he had not known ahead of time that one was resident at the North American branch of the Institute, he was pleased to see her here.

Chieko was not as pleased as her husband, however, and she sat by quietly with a sharp eye on the potential competition for her mate’s affection. To the humans who saw the female red panda, Chieko was thought of as cute, but the only one whose opinion mattered to her on that respect was Masanori. Their banishment from the Earth had come about due to her love for him, and she was not about to lose him to another female at any cost, whether the threat was real or merely implied.

She looked around the room for a moment and spied Jon sitting beside a couple of bears who were practically ignoring him. He looked uncomfortable, but she could not tell if it was because of his companions or the injury to his shoulder. She caught his eye with a simple gesture when he looked her direction and he gave her an immediate smile.  She looked at her husband with a brief glance and then looked back at the cougar with a shrug. The feline read her expression correctly and got up from his seat. The conversing bears did not even notice when he left them and made his way across the assembly to sit down in the empty seat beside the cute little red panda.

“Hello, Chieko,” he said quietly.

She gave him a warm smile and a partial bow from her seated position. “Good afternoon, Jon,” she replied courteously. “How is your shoulder today?”

“It’s still a little stiff and sore, but I can now get down on all fours for a while,” he answered. “I’ve tried to exercise it as much as it will allow, but the injury is healing on its own schedule and won’t let me do as much as I’d like.”

“The exercise will help the healing,” Chieko agreed, “but please do not task yourself too much. Your injury may not be fully healed by the time we go into cryogenic sleep for the long voyage to Bonestell, and since that slows down all bodily processes, you might wake up with it still in need of further healing.”

“Hmm, that’s a good thing to know,” Jon remarked with a frown. “I know it will take several weeks to get there, but I guess I just assumed the healing would continue while I’m asleep.”  He shrugged and immediately felt the soreness. “I thought I would wake up feeling like my old self again.”

“I have never experienced cryogenic sleep myself,” the red panda said with a smile, “but I’ve heard that it’s best to go into it as healthy as you can since that’s how you will come out of it on the other side.”

“I will keep that in mind when I exercise,” Jon replied. “What about yourself? You still have a little over two months left of your transformation, don’t you?”

Chieko looked down at her hands and held them together. The fur of her arms and hand paws was midnight black and had a thick texture that looked almost velvety. “I am still in constant pain somewhere,” she admitted quietly. “I knew my husband went through this very thing, but I did not realize how intense it could be at times.” She looked up at him with a sad expression. “It has been difficult to bear, and since we will all be going into cryogenic sleep soon, I will still have to deal with the changes even after we get to our new home.”

Jon reached out and put gentle fingers upon the back her hands. “Medicines can only help a little, but the worst of it is already behind you. All of us here have been through this already, so if you need anyone to lean on, don’t be shy about finding someone to help you through it.”

“Thank you.”

“How are you and Masanori getting along with the others here in the Adirondacks?”

Chieko cast a sidelong glance at her mate, who continued to chat with Kim and Yuki as if they were old friends.  The Tanaka sisters may have been of Japanese descent, but both had grown up in the United States since childhood and had only visited their native country once on an overseas vacation.

“My husband seems to have an easier time making new friends than I do,” she replied wistfully. “Although your associates have treated me well enough, I can’t help but feel their scorn when they look at me.”  She turned her paws over, wrapped her shortened fingers around Jon’s and held them warmly. “I am thankful for your friendship,” she added. “I just wish others would treat me as kindly.”

Jon gave her a warm smile and lightly squeezed her fingers. “I think you have more friends than you know,” he told her quietly. “I’ve heard others discussing you and your husband and there are those who are quite touched by what you and he have done for one another in your situation. If you wish, I can introduce you around a little more.” He leaned closer to her large triangular ears and added in a whisper. “There are more than a few who think you’re absolutely adorable, too.”

Chieko pulled back and studied him, sure he was teasing her, but when she saw the sincerity in his eyes, she gave him a wide smile. “I don’t think I’m all that,” she whispered back, “but thank you for telling me. It makes me feel a little more accepted.”

Her smile warmed Jon down to his toes. He was one of them who thought she was one of the cutest Furs he had ever seen, and with his original attitudes toward furmankind in general, that was saying something.  The two of them turned their topics to more mundane matters while they awaited the show to begin.

Conversations around the assembly hall continued even as Marcelo approached the lectern moments later. He and his guest had arrived later than he had planned, so he pulled his gavel out from within the podium and had to knock on the wooden top several times before anyone noticed his presence.

“Listen up, folks,” he called out over the conversations. “We have a special guest with us today and he has some information I’m sure you’d like to know.”  There were several grumbles in the crowd. The director had begun almost every session with similar words. Marcelo held up a hand for their attention.

“Visiting our Institute today is Dr. Adalberto Bohnestiel, an astronomer from the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon, Portugal who discovered three extrasolar planets orbiting yellow star εEri2 almost twenty years ago.” It was unlikely that more than a handful of the attendees paid attention to what was being said; most of the others were only half listening in the tedious boredom of endless meetings.  “Of these three worlds, Dr. Bohnestiel’s greatest discovery was the second planet, the only terrestrial biosphere in the system. It was this Earthlike world that he named Bonestell, your future home.”

There was a sudden interest as the last of his words sunk in and Avon requested that the director repeat his opening remarks. Marcelo looked frustrated, but complied with the request, satisfied that they were now paying attention.

“This is Dr. Adalberto Bohnestiel,” he began again, gesturing toward a man with greying hair in his mid-fifties to come up to join him at the podium. “Eighteen years ago, Dr. Bohnestiel discovered three extrasolar planets orbiting yellow star εEri2, which was categorically labeled as L792-4. One of these worlds was determined to be terrestrial in origin and possibly habitable by humans. Interstellar probes were launched and after several years of study, the decision was made to attempt colonization of the world that was named Bonestell.”

Marcelo looked out at the faces now looking on in interest. “As you all know, the Ferdinand Magellan was lost ten years ago with all hands sometime after its last transmission, a routine report from her captain sent the day of her scheduled landing on Bonestell. It is unknown whether or not the ship crashed upon landing, if some disaster befell the ship while still in orbit, or if it was lost on an emergency return trip to Earth.  All we know is there has been nothing but silence since that last report. It has been a mystery for the past decade.”

Marcelo turned to the well-dressed man beside him.  “Since a new expedition is now in preparation to go back there, Dr. Bohnestiel has requested the opportunity to speak to you all in person. Please welcome our favored guest.”

The round-faced astronomer gave the director a cordial smile amidst light applause. He put both hands upon the podium and cleared his throat in preparation to speak.  His eyes were sharply focused and the expression on his face was pleasant as he looked over the small group of Furs that would be going to his planet.

“Good afternoon,” he said in the strong voice of an orator, putting both hands upon the podium. There was only a hint of the Portuguese accent in his voice, and despite that he used no microphone, his words easily carried across the room.  “I am thankful to Dr. Delgado for his gracious invitation that I may speak to you today.”

He picked up a remote from inside the podium and thumbed it on as he turned toward the video screen behind him.  A high definition photograph of Bonestell appeared with both of its small moons visible in space around it, taken from an orbital satellite. It was a similar picture to the one that Marcelo had shown them days earlier, but the swirling clouds over its surface were thinner and covering less of the continental land masses grouped near one another. The planet and both satellite moons were all waning gibbous. The terminator into night crossed nothing but the bluish-green oceans.

“This is Bonestell,” the astronomer said proudly, turning to face his audience, “your new home. In the years since I first detected the planetary body, probes have studied this world from orbit and even a few landers have gone down to its surface. However much we have learned over the past eighteen years is but a pittance of knowledge on an entirely new ecosystem. You will be provided with material detailing everything that is known about the planet for your use before and after you get there. However, it will be the duty of every one of you to gather and report back to Earth everything you learn, so you will need to document everything, no matter how insignificant you may feel of the discoveries you make.  Anything you learn may have an important impact on the future of others who will follow behind you on eventual colonization.”

He tapped the remote and a light blue map grid overlaid the globe with a reference scale in a lower corner of the image.

“Bonestell has been measured at nine thousand, one hundred seventy-three miles in diameter. It is a little larger than our own Earth, but there is less overall land mass. Eighty-two percent of its surface is covered in saltwater, and as you can see from this image, most of its continents are grouped together in its northern hemisphere, each upon its own tectonic plate not unlike loose interlocking puzzle pieces. It is theorized that it was all part of the same mass as you can see matching and corresponding coastal lines between the six of them, but what caused its breakup is still unknown. As it is now, the channels of seawater separating each are only a few hundred miles in width, but one day the plates may drift farther apart much as the ancient super-continent of Pangaea split up to form the continents of the Earth as we know them today.”

Dr. Bohnestiel pulled out a laser pointer from a pocket and then aimed its ruby red beam at the screen. “There are two more small continents in the southern hemisphere on the far side of the planet from this view, as well as a smattering of scattered islands, but your Second Chance colony will be located here.” He pointed toward the southernmost land mass at an area to the north of a large coastal gulf. A long range of snow-topped mountains paralleled most of the continent’s western shoreline before curving inland, and from the reference scale, it looked as if it ended shy of the southern gulf by a hundred miles. At the tip of the mountain range was a forested area surrounded by prairie, but the distance up was too far to make out any details. The astronomer thumbed a control on the remote and the image zoomed in closer and closer until the top of the picture showed the end of the mountain range and a wooded region interspersed with lakes, fields and other geological features that the colonists would one day explore on their own. That seemed to be the limit of the satellite’s focal zoom, as the image did not move in any closer.

“The chosen site for your settlement is in a small, horseshoe-shaped valley near the southern tip of the mountain range. Fresh spring water from the mountains is in abundance, a vital asset for survival. The valley is a mixture of grassy fields and wooded forest, and there should be plenty of space for farming. Due to the density of trees, the colony ship will not be able to land much closer than about a mile from the site where you will set up your homes, so once your livestock and supplies are off-loaded, you will have to transport them there yourself.”

The image pulled back out to its original vista and then the astronomer pointed the laser dot toward the larger of the lunar satellites. “There are two natural satellites, Bonestell α and Bonestell β, but for simplicity we refer to them merely as Alpha and Beta. You will be at liberty to give them actual names if you wish once you have arrived. The rotation of Bonestell is slower than Earth and one day consists of almost exactly thirty-six standard hours. A full revolution of the larger Alpha moon consists of forty-five Bonestellan days. A full revolution of the smaller, more distant Beta moon is sixty-seven Bonestellan days. Neither of these satellites is tidal locked in a captured rotation, so you are likely to see different surface features depending upon their own specific rotations, rather than seeing the same lunarscape at all times as we do with our own Luna.”

Dr. Bohnestiel put away the laser pointer, pulled at the left sleeve of his shirt and looked at the techwatch on his arm. He smiled and held up the timepiece for all to see. “At thirty-six hour days, your Earth-made watches will no longer be of any use to you there,” he said, dropping his hands back down to the podium. “I have brought with me a case of special watches the AHCP has had made specifically for those going to Bonestell. These were made with a thirty-six-hour day in mind. Terrestrial clocks start over at twelve o’clock unless they are of the twenty-four-hour military variety, but Bonestellan timepieces will go farther and start over at eighteen o’clock for ante meridiem and post meridiem division. I know that thinking of time in this fashion will take some getting used to, but it will be necessary to change your way of thinking for the length of days there. Noon on Bonestell will be at eighteen o’clock, and if you have ever thought a day was long and dragging here, wait until you face your days and nights on Bonestell. That eighteen-hour half day will be equal to most of a full day here on Earth, so I’m sure your waking and sleep times will vary considerably.”

He pulled out an ordinary-looking watch from a pocket and held it up. It looked like a standard watch on a sturdy wristband designed to take a lot of abuse.

“Since watch batteries will be hard to come by on Bonestell, you will use watches powered by kinetic energy. This type of watch has been around for ages and I am sure some of you have had them in the past. The motion of simply moving your arms back and forth runs a tiny generator that charges a long-life capacitor, which in turn will run the thirty-six-hour quartz-timed digital display. You will be given more than enough of these to equip all of you in your group, but a single full charge of the capacitor will give you accurate time for months by itself, so unless you’re simply in the habit of breaking them, you should have plenty to last you the full five years of your initial stay there.” He smiled and added, “After a year or more, however, you should be used to the longer days well enough that you may not even need the watches anymore.”

He put away the timepiece and looked out over the small crowd. “At the chosen site for your colony, you will have the four basic seasons, each lasting about three and a half Bonestellan type months based upon Alpha’s forty-five day rotation. The good news is that the harshness of the winters and summers should be lesser than on Earth due to a lower axial tilt of the planet, which is approximately nineteen degrees. For comparison, the Earth’s tilt is approximately twenty-three point five degrees. Some of the other habitable terrestrial planets we’ve sent Furs to have had harsher climates, so it looks like Bonestell might be our lucky world.”

The astronomer smiled and put one hand upon the lectern and the other into the pocket of his slacks. “In many ways, I envy you,” he said. “You will be true explorers of new lands. While things may appear similar to Mother Earth, there will be differences all around, and you will be making discoveries on a daily basis. However…” he paused and took on a serious expression, “all traces of the Ferdinand Magellan were lost before there was any confirmation that she’d landed at the very spot where you will be going, and the satellite stationed in geosynchronous orbit there stopped transmitting shortly thereafter.”

There was a brief troubled look on his face. “Aside of the fact that I discovered the planet, I have a more personal stake in seeing you successfully colonize this world. I had a niece among the colonists who were lost and it is in her memory that I am here to speak to you today.”

The astronomer lifted his chin and looked out across his small audience, the moment of melancholy gone. “Upon landing, you must be very, very careful. Our knowledge of the actual flora and fauna is sparse and the dangers there are unknown, but let me tell you what I do know about the characteristics of the planet itself...”

***

Although there were no friends or family who could have responded to an Open House invitation, Jon had enjoyed the day visiting with those who had come to see his associates. He experienced a moment of déjà vu when Jenni introduced her twin sister Jana to him and Kristen. The woman looked just as Jenni had when she had first arrived at the Institute. Her mannerisms and the tonal quality of her original voice matched too. The pair of them standing side by side looked almost like the before and after pictures hanging in the Felis Wing entrance hall, and Marcy took advantage of the opportunity to take a photograph of them together for such a portrait.

“It’s too bad that Dante isn’t here to meet her,” Kristen whispered to Jon when they had a moment alone. “I think he would have been in heaven standing between Jenni and Jana.”

Jon returned her conspiratorial grin. “Somehow I don’t even think Jana’s engagement ring would have stopped him from flirting with her.”

“Jenni will miss her sister’s wedding next month with the timing of our departure, so it’s a good thing they get to see each another one last time. Jana seems like she’s accepted Jenni’s transformation well enough. I don’t think they’ve left one another’s side since they got together.”

“Did you have anyone come visit?” Jon asked her idly. “I still have family, but they all believe I am dead.” He frowned a moment but then shook it off. “I miss them, but after all the fuss I made about the way I hated Furs, I don’t think I could stand for them to see me this way. It’s probably better they think my ashes were dumped in a rusty old barrel beneath the prison. “

“I’m sorry about that,” Kristen said, placing the fingers of a hand on his arm. “I know how hard it is to give up your family. You know why I’m here and why I can’t contact my family either. Like you, it’s imperative none of them know where I really am.”

Jon glanced at her. “Do they think you’re dead?”

She shook her head. “No, as far as they know, I’ve been traveling the world, getting further into debt. I know a flight attendant who agreed to send postcards to my folks from the various places she went to. I wrote out a bunch of them in generic wording and then paid her a good sum to send them out periodically – not all the time, but just enough to keep the family informed that I was still around somewhere. Unfortunately, she should be running out of them soon, so eventually my folks will think I’ve disappeared.”

“Does your flight attendant friend know where you are?”

“No. I told her that I really would be doing some traveling, but didn’t want the family knowing where. She and I had gotten along well in college, so she agreed to do this for me when I gave her a financial incentive. That way, if my creditors ever caught up with her, she wouldn’t have anything real to tell them about my whereabouts.”

Jon looked at her sympathetically, but then he presented his elbow to her with a smile. “Well then — let’s go see if we can find someone else to introduce us to their folks. Perhaps they will regale us with embarrassing stories about them that we can use later for blackmail.”

Kristen chuckled and threaded her arm through his. “That sounds sneaky and fun. Who should we target first?”

They had only taken a handful of steps when Cheryl and Michael rounded the corner of the Clark Savage building at a full run; when they saw Jon and Kristen, they altered their course straight for them.

“Jon!” Cheryl exclaimed.

“What’s going on?”

“Aaron and Gerard are beating each other’s brains out!” Michael answered.

Jon gave Kris an exasperated look and gestured back the direction they had come from. “Take me to them,” he grumbled. “Any idea what it’s about?”

Both couples dropped to all fours for running speed and took off across the grounds. “I think they’re … fighting over one … of the bear sows,” the Swift fox replied between lopes.

“It was Dara,” Cheryl supplied. “Now that we’re … going to colony … she’s been playing them … against one another … in front of … their families!”

She and Michael led Jon and Kristen to the back side of the Educational Wing where their dorm rooms were located. The two brown bears were taking hard swipes at one another in a mixture of human and ursine fighting techniques. Aaron tried to punch his cousin in the face with a fist, but Gerard knocked his arm aside and then tried to rake his claws across Aaron’s middle. Both were roaring incoherently in words that sounded nothing like English and a small crowd was beginning to gather around them.

“Break it up!” Jon shouted. Neither paid him any attention, their focus completely upon one another in the rage of battle. “Knock it off, you lugs!”

Gerard landed a hard backhand aside Aaron’s snout and the receiving bear’s head rocked backward. It only dazed him for a second and he lunged back at his cousin. The two Ursis males grappled with one another, each trying to get the upper hand.

Jon knew he would probably regret it later since he was still healing on his own, but he took several steps back and then hurled himself forward, slamming his shoulder hard up against them both with his uninjured side. Each had his weight and leverage focused on his opponent, but the sudden onslaught of weight from another angle bowled them over onto the ground. At the moment they dropped to the grass, Jon put an elbow up hard against the back of Gerard’s head and then quickly smacked the flat of the palm with the same hand hard across Aaron’s temple, momentarily stunning both. He had done this in a flash with just one arm, but he could already feel the impact shock deep in his left shoulder where he had been shot through the muscle.

Carl and Arne rushed in to pull Gerard away from his cousin while he was dazed, and Norman and Hank did the same with Aaron; Hank and Arne each held them in wrestling holds that would not be easy to get out of.

Jon got back up to his feet holding his shoulder and took a moment to look back and forth between them, but when he saw Dara to the side looking smug, he stormed over to her and shoved his face up close to hers.

“Just what the devil are you playing at?” he growled at her. “We’re about to leave the Earth behind and you’re playing immature games with their hormones! We’ll be going into cryogenic sleep soon and if they have to go in with injuries, they’ll be coming out with them unhealed by the time we get to Bonestell, arriving with a handicap against whatever we find out there!”

Dara’s face registered surprise at being called out in front of the crowd, but she refused to be baited into defending herself. She looked around sheepishly and saw the cousins’ relatives staring back at her in the gathered crowd.

“Let me go and leave her alone!” Gerard said hotly. Instead of complying with the first order, the African lion behind him simply tightened his hold on the bear, making him grimace.

Jon whirled on him and gifted the brown Ursis with a glare of his own. “If you and Aaron can’t control yourselves, especially in the presence of your families, perhaps Ken should impose sexual suppressants upon you both! As the medical physician of Second Chance, he’d be well within his rights to keep the peace in the colony – whether we’ve gotten there yet or not!”

“Ow, ease up, will ya?” Aaron muttered to Hank. “I’m not gonna fight you.” The black bear looked first to Jon, who considered Aaron for a moment before nodding. Hank loosened his hold on the ursine furman hesitantly, but all Aaron did was massage his arms to get the blood flow back. When Jon looked back at Gerard, the other bear snorted in annoyance, but finally averted his eyes in submission. The cougar gave Arne a subtle nod and he also released his hold.

Gerard mumbled something beneath his breath, but then he slowly got to his feet and looked around at the mixture of human and furman spectators that had gathered around them. He saw his aunt and uncle whispering quietly with his own parents and suddenly felt foolish for making such a spectacle in front of them. He cleared his throat to get their attention, and when the four of them looked at him with expressions of disgust and disappointment, he sighed aloud.

“I’m sorry,” he said to them. “I shouldn’t have lost my cool.” He then turned to his cousin and held out a hand paw. “I apologize for throwing the first punch.”

Aaron looked at him warily and got to his own feet. He looked at Gerard’s proffered hand as if it contained something nasty, but after biting his lip for a moment he took it. “Apology accepted,” he replied. The tone of his voice belied his words, and Jon knew he said them only to placate the crowd. From the look of his relatives’ faces, they did not believe him either, but thankfully no one thought it would do any good to say anything.

Jon stepped forward when they released their handshake and rubbed his aching shoulder, looking from one to another. “Knock the grass and dirt out of your fur and go cool down with something to drink. This is supposed to be a time of reunion with your friends and families while we’re still here, so make the best of today instead of being at your worst.”

It took a few minutes for the crowd to disperse once the cousins headed back into the building. Jon leaned up against the stone wall beside Kristen and massaged his shoulder, wishing he would have thought of a different way to break up the brawl.

Jon gestured to Arne and Hank when both of them just happen to look his way. “Thanks for your help, guys,” he said.

“Sure, no problem,” Hank replied.

“You’re welcome,” said Arne. Jon nodded to both and the two of them left to return to their own families.

Cheryl approached the mountain lion and scratched the brown scalp hair beneath a brand-new cowgirl hat brought in by her visiting brother. The hat was accented with a fresh feather of a hawk. “Wow, I can’t believe I used to be attracted to those guys,” she said of the cousins. “Are you okay?”

“Jumping into the middle of them in my condition probably wasn’t the best thing I could have done,” Jon replied. “Why didn’t you run to Marcelo instead of me? He’s the one in charge.”

Cheryl exchanged glances with Kristen before looking back up at him with a crooked smile. “No one told you?” she asked. At his puzzled expression, she shrugged and said, “Avon’s our leader now and he spread the word to everyone to take any issues that came up to you while he was away. Besides, I don’t think Marcelo would have jumped in like you did to stop the fight. He would have just hollered at them until he was hoarse.”

“Once he hears about this, he’ll probably get his chance to do some hollering anyway,” Kristen said with a snicker. “You know how he is about public relations with the rest of humanity, relatives included.”

“Okay, I’ll accept that,” Jon conceded. “I just didn’t expect it.”

“You jumped in of your own accord,” Jasmine remarked from nearby. “You were probably the best one to break them up regardless.”

“Thanks,” Jon murmured, his eyes immediately drawn to the vixen’s shaved tail; there was a fine growth of peach-fuzz fur covering it in her original colors. He shifted his eyes back up to her face, giving her a weary look, and she returned his gaze with a frown. This was the first time that Jasmine had spoken to Jon since her return and she was suddenly feeling submissive. She approached him with her head down and her ears back but looking up at him, meekly holding her hands together in front of her.

“Jon,” she began, “I owe you a sincere apology. You went to jail in my place and I didn’t speak up for your innocence.” The cougar said nothing, silently rubbing his shoulder. The expression on his face was neutral, so Jasmine was unsure how well he was receiving her. She continued with her gaze down at her feet. “I’m sorry you were accused of my crime, and I hope that one day you can forgive me.”

Jon reached out and put his fingers lightly under her chin. She looked up with moist eyes, but the look on the feline’s face was compassionate. “You were scared,” Jon said quietly, “but it was my own words that were used against me when I was accused, so I don’t hold you responsible for that. From everyone else’s standpoint, I probably was the most likely culprit to carry through on the threats I had made against Travis.” He gave her a little smile and shrugged, immediately wincing from the action to his sore muscles. “It would have been nice if they hadn’t dragged me off to the sheriff’s dusty jail, but I forgive you, Jasmine.”

“Really?” she asked with a difficult swallow.

“Really.”

The vixen suddenly wrapped her arms around his middle and gave him a warm hug, burying her nose up against his chest. Jon returned the embrace and then she stepped back after a moment, wiping her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve felt just awful about this.”

“You’re welcome,” Jon replied. “Don’t worry, we’re still friends.” She smiled up at him, but he sighed aloud and grimaced, massaging his shoulder again as he turned back toward the building. “I think I’m going to need an ice pack on this shoulder for an hour or two.”

“I believe we’ll be taking solar-powered refrigerating units with us to Bonestell,” Kristen mused as she prepared to follow him inside. “Otherwise we might not have any ice for things like ice packs until the wintertime.”

“That’s a good point,” Cheryl mused. “Listen, you guys, I’m going back to the hall to visit with my family.”

Feeling better about herself with Jon’s forgiveness, Jasmine put both of her hands upon the Border collie’s arm. “Your brother has broad, strong shoulders,” she said. “Would you introduce me to him?”

Cheryl chuckled. “I’m sure he’d be delighted to meet you, Jazz,” she replied. “He’s already been checking you out since he got here!”

“Oh, he has, has he?” the vixen remarked in growing delight. “Let’s not waste any time, then!”

Jon watched the females go and then he looked down at the lioness beside him. “I’m going to get some ice and then I think I’ll lie down for a while.”

“Would you like some company?” Kristen asked quietly. “You know I don’t have anyone here to visit with myself, and I hate to say it, but I’m tired of trying to keep track of all the relatives’ names and faces.”

Jon offered his elbow to her again. “I’ll let you bag up the ice for me, and as your reward, you can relax beside me and listen to me snore.”

***

Avon eased his bulk out of the taxi cab the next afternoon, paid the driver with a tip and then thanked him for the ride. He hefted his overnight bag in one hand and turned toward the entrance of the Institute as the vehicle pulled away. Parked in front of the gates was Marcelo’s cart, though the director was not behind the wheel.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Jon said brightly. “How was your trip out into the world?”

The bear gave him a pained expression and sat on the back seat of the cart. The suspension dropped nearly to the ground, but somehow managed to hold the grizzly’s weight. “I would have been better off staying here,” he complained. “I haven’t had any sleep since I left.”

Jon twitched an ear as he put the cart into motion, heading back through the gates with a wave at Martin. “Odd,” he said, “I never pictured you as the kind to party all night long. You don’t look so good.”

“No parties,” Avon responded wearily. “I was harassed the whole time – on the ride down to Saranac Lake, on the bus to Albany, and constantly while in town. I couldn’t get a room for the night, even at Hotel Six-Six-Six, and I barely found any places willing to sell me food to eat. Someone even called the zoo on me and I had to show my AHCP ID to get out of that one, even though I was wearing clothes and speaking English! As soon as I get something in my stomach, I’m going to shower and then hibernate up until time we leave the Earth.”

He looked over at Jon and shook his head. “I saw nothing but the kind of people your class encountered down in Florida. Marcelo has high aspirations for human and furman relationships, but things are a long way from the kind of dreams he has. The only person who showed me any kind of kindness was that cab driver bringing me back and I think that was only because I had cash. I think I’ve lost a little of the conviction I originally had about our purpose, Jon. We’re going out there to find a new world that some of them may one day move out to, but now I don’t think I care. My purpose for going has changed. I don’t give a flip whether or not Bonestell is habitable for humans. I just want it habitable for us. I’m going out there to be an explorer. Once we leave this rock, I’m bidding the Earth good riddance!”

Jon frowned but said nothing. He did not want Avon to know he thought that if the leader of their colony had lost faith in their mission, how were any of them supposed to make it on another world? A leader was supposed to keep his followers inspired, to keep them believing what they did was worth the effort and loneliness of being separated from their friends and loved ones for the rest of their lives in order to pave the way for future generations.

It was unfortunate that Avon had been the one to win the contest. Anyone else would have griped and complained about the trip, simply counting it as nothing more than a bad memory, but this is the one person who would set the tone for those who followed him. Attitude was everything.

Chapter 25

Fare Thee Well

The final day on Earth had come at last for Second Chance. The livestock they had been raising on the grounds of the Institute had been shipped out two days before to join more being put into cryogenic sleep for the journey to Bonestell. The Furs, however, would not be joining them just yet. As standard practice with the Terran Colonization Coalition and the Anthro Human Colonization Program, they would be ferried up to Space Station Sebra to board the colony ship in orbit.

Wayne Mooreland and Tom Williams were back at the Institute, having brought their antiquated Osprey in to ferry the Furs on a short half-hour flight down to the Albany International Airport. However, with the classes combined, there were now more Furs than seats in their plane, so a second aircraft was on loan from the U.S. Navy to help take them all to Albany. Instead of flying them down to Jacksonville, Florida as they had done before, a commercial airliner had been reserved to take them in one load directly to Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico for their lift up to Sebra.

Unfortunately, as large as the SS Branson had been to take the Class Sixteen group up to the orbital space station in one load, the space plane was not big enough to take all thirty-one Furs at once. The plan was to send the Class Fifteen Furs up first. Once there, they would have a full day and a half to learn to maneuver in a zero-gee environment before the spatially-experienced Class Sixteen group joined them on another flight up. Once they were reunited, it would be another two days before the fully supplied colony ship lifted off from the Earth to dock with Sebra.

***

“It’s too bad you aren’t coming up to Sebra with us this time,” Jon said to Marcy as he gave the platinum blonde nurse a warm farewell hug. They were near the sunken pit in the middle of the Felis Wing saloon. “I’m going to miss you and your knockout spice tea on the flight up.”

“If we have any this time, distributing the spiked tea will be my job,” Jenni remarked from his side, screwing up her feline face in distaste. “I don’t handle flying very well and could use some of the sedative myself – only I wouldn’t be allowed to have any since Ken and I have to be conscious in case there’s any medical trouble on the flight!”

“You’ll be fine,” Marcy reassured her, taking her hands in her own. “Just don’t look out any of the windows until you get there.”

“That won’t be easy,” Jenni complained. “There are windows all around the perimeter of that thing; no matter which direction I look, there will be a window.”

“Thank you for taking such good care of us,” Kristen told Dr. Renwick, giving him a small lick on the cheek. “I don’t know how well I could have made it through the process without your compassion and understanding.”

“You’re welcome,” the doctor said with a smile. “Most of my clients don’t really see me as the caring type, but I’ve always cared for each of them. Whether they are human or furman doesn’t matter – I am a doctor and caring for others was my reason for getting into medicine.”

Jon turned to him and held out his hand paw. “I’m sorry for giving you so much grief,” he told the physician, “but I’m thankful you had immeasurable tolerance for this particular patient.”

Renwick took his hand and shook it warmly. “You aren’t the first one to give me trouble, Jon, and despite what you think, you haven’t been the most difficult, either. However, I know your circumstances were unique and I’m glad you made it through as well as you did.”

“Thanks to you both,” the mountain lion remarked with a slight bow of respect to the doctor and his nurse, something he’d picked up from the red pandas.

“Has anyone seen Sissy?” Kristen asked, looking around. “She was supposed to meet us here to say our goodbyes to you two.”

“I think she was trying to find someone to take her pet cat,” Jenni replied. “She wanted to bring him along, but Stockholm wouldn’t authorize it as a necessary addition to the livestock.”

“Just as well,” Jon said. “Some alien predator on Bonestell might have trouble eating us larger cats, but her little housecat would probably be a delicacy there.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say,” Sissy’s voice said from the hallway. She was struggling with a pet carrier, and the kitty inside did not look happy to be carted around inside of it. “I would have taken care of Jonesy.”

Marcy approached the smaller orange-striped Fur and held out her hands. “Give him to me, Sissy,” she said with a smile. “I’ll look after him; maybe make him the Wing mascot.”

The feline woman set the carrier down on the floor gently and then jumped into Marcy’s arms to hug her tightly, surprising the nurse.

“Oh, thank you!” Sissy exclaimed. “I know you’ll take good care of my Jonesy!”

Jon’s PBJ chirped at him and he pulled it from a pocket in surprise. He had never gotten mail through the device that did not originate from someone at the Institute. He opened its clamshell case, tapped the application for mail and then smiled when he saw who had sent him a message. It was from Angel Lonergan, the little girl from the visiting school group.

“Ah, there you are!” said another voice. Everyone looked back at the hallway and saw Marcelo walking toward them. The swarthy director had a pleasant expression upon his face and he approached them with a set of business envelopes in one hand. “I have something for each of you.” The top envelope had Jenni’s name on it; he handed this to her and then did the same with envelopes for Kristen, Jon and Sissy.

“What is this?” Jon asked curiously, putting away his PBJ; he would have to answer the little girl’s message later. “Should we open them now or save them until after we’ve gone?”

“That’s up to you,” the director answered. “It’s merely a personal letter from me to each of you. I’m hoping it’s something you can take with you to a new world to help remind you of your time with us. It’s unlikely we’ll ever see one another again, but you will never be forgotten.”

Jenni and Kristen both approached him and gifted him with a feline lick-kiss from each on the cheek. “We’ll never forget you either, Marcelo,” Kristen told him with misty eyes.

“Never, ever,” Jenni added.

Sissy approached the director and slipped her arms up over his shoulders and around the back of his neck. She hugged him warmly and then gave him a tender human-style kiss right on the lips. “You’ve always been good to me,” she told him quietly, “and I’ve enjoyed working with you.”

Marcelo smiled. “You’re going to be hard to replace,” he told her. “You’re the most efficient management assistant I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. I’ll probably never keep my calendar up to date without you.”

“One of the new girls in the Vulps Wing has experience along the same lines,” Sissy told him, wiping her eyes. “I’m sure you could make use of her talents. You should talk to her – her name’s Cora.”

“Perhaps I will. Well, it’s about time you all went to take your seats on the plane,” the director said, giving them all warm smiles. “You’ll be leaving soon and your personal belongings have already been loaded.”

“Good luck and Godspeed,” Dr. Renwick said to the Furs as they turned to look at him and Marcy one last time.

“All the best,” Marcy said, giving them all a small wave.

Jenni, Kristen and Sissy all returned the wave and then turned to go. Jon held back and Marcelo looked over at him curiously. “Is something the matter?” he asked in a whisper.

The cougar gestured toward the chairs in front of the large video screen and the director followed him off to the side, letting the others go on ahead. The Felis physician recognized that Jon wanted a word in private with the director, so he said something quietly to his nurse and then the two of them walked outside to watch their Furs board the Osprey.

“Marcelo,” the mountain lion began in a low voice, “I just wanted to say thank you for giving me the chance to see a different life as a Fur. Even before I had my troubles, I would have never considered such an existence, but now that I’ve made it through the transformation, through my own anger and the fears, I’m actually looking forward to the adventures ahead. I’ve always been more or less in control of my own life, and this whole experience has been something new to me, but considering the alternative I faced last year, I’m grateful for this opportunity to explore a new life.”

Marcelo opened his mouth to respond, but Jon held up a hand paw and continued before he lost his nerve to say what he needed; he had had a similar conversation earlier with Professor Flynn.

“I came to the Furmankind Institute with a huge chip on my shoulder, and I know you had a grudge against me for taking the life of another Fur you once knew. I’ve long regretted my actions, and although you’ve no doubt had plenty of opportunities to take your revenge upon me, I’m glad you gave me a chance.” He held out his hand toward the director and gave him a sincere smile. “I’m pleased to know that even though I’m part animal now, I’ve lost none of my humanity. Thank you, Marcelo.”

The director hesitated only briefly, mulling over the memory of their first meeting, but then he took Jon’s proffered hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

“Henry’s loss was a terrible blow to many of us here,” he said, “but I think even he would be proud of the furman you’ve become. It may be a long while before anything in your life can ever feel normal again, but I think you’ll adapt just fine. Even though there may be many unknown dangers where you’re going, Jon, I sincerely wish you well.”

Chapter 26

Avon’s Choice

Two hundred fourteen miles below, the blue-green jewel that was Earth turned slowly. Jon floated beside the large observation window that had become his favorite spot during his previous visit to Space Station Sebra and contemplated the home world of all humanity. This was likely the last time he would ever see Mother Earth, so he drank in the sight of her, soaking up a lifetime of memories to take with him out among the stars.

“Remember only the good, none of the bad,” he whispered to himself.

A moment later, a pair of hands with fur that matched his grabbed onto the railing mounted to the wall below the window. “A penny for your thoughts,” Kristen said quietly.

Jon looked over at the mountain lioness with a soft smile. “I’m just contemplating our departure,” he told her. “I don’t think some of our Furs really believe that we’ll be leaving Earth forever, but I know that this is likely to be the last time I’ll ever see her.”

“Our contract is only for five years. You don’t think we’ll be back – ever?”

“Five years is a long time to survive on an alien world where anything from a large predator down to a microbe could kill us,” he reminded her, “not to mention any number of natural disasters. Even for those of us who do happen to make it, I doubt the Earth will ever welcome us back as her children. Our class was the sixteenth they’ve transformed just at this location, which amounts to two hundred fifty-six Furs. Multiply that by four Institutes and that’s over a thousand Furs they’ve created so far. Yes, they’ve lost some along the way like those on Bastien, but out of all those people, none of them have come back to Earth that I know of. I’ve not heard where any of them have gone after their initial five years, but it hasn’t been back here. No, we’ll either stay there on Bonestell to help those who come after us get used to their new world or we’ll be sent to another planet to either start a new colony or replenish an existing one with fresh personnel.”

He reached up and brushed a stray strand of dark bangs from her forehead, giving her a wan smile. “When we depart tomorrow, planet Earth will become nothing more than a memory. Remember all the good things from your life, Kris, but none of the bad.”

“That’s good advice,” said a new voice. The newcomer grasped the hand rail in a desperate grip for stability with a nervous chuckle.

Jon turned to the grizzly and looked up at the floating bear. Hiamovi Avonaco was one of the Furs who had never experienced weightlessness before this trip and he seemed to have more trouble than the rest of his Class getting around in it, likely due to his greater bulk.

“Do you plan to follow that good advice?” Jon asked with a wry smile. “You need to forget about that trip to Albany.”

Avon gazed back at him with a dark look and gently bit his bottom lip. “Yeah, I suppose I should,” he mumbled. “There was nothing there I want to remember. The capitol city was nice and all, but I wasn’t treated well at all because I was a Fur.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy your trip,” Kristen said quietly. “As Jon said, try not to remember that experience, but always keep the good times you’ve had in your life and look forward to our big adventure instead.”

Avon gave her a nod. “I am looking forward to what’s ahead, more than ever.” He looked over at Jon and remembered why he was there. “Listen, do you have a free minute? I have something I need to discuss with you.”

“I have nothing but free minutes right now,” the cougar replied. “What can I help you with?”

“You hit the nail right on the head, Jon,” the bear told him. “It’s your help that I need.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

Avon glanced at Kristen. “Perhaps we should discuss this somewhere in private,” he said. The lioness looked back at him with a frown, but Jon shook his head. “Unless it’s something you think will embarrass Kris, we can discuss it here.”

Avon nodded. “My apologies, Kristen. You’re welcome to listen in.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“As you know, we’ll be boarding our flight tomorrow, but before we depart I need to turn in my decision for selection of my First Officer.”

“I thought you only needed to just choose someone and it was done,” Jon mused. “I have administrative experience, but Sissy could probably help you fill out your documentation better than I can. My understanding is that she is going to be the colony secretary and historian anyway.”

Avon smiled, but shook his head. “I’m not asking you to help me with the documents, Jon. I would like you to be my Second.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve told me that you’ve had past supervisory and managerial experience, which means you can lead others, and as you just reminded me, you also have administrative skills. The others look up to you and you don’t back down if you’re confronted. You’d be perfect for the job.”

Jon looked at him for a moment before a smile crept into his eyes. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” he quipped. “You’ve been trying for months to have me put in charge of a Felis colony.”

Kristen looked at him in surprise. “He has? You’ve never mentioned it.”

“That’s because he keeps turning me down,” Avon explained. “How about it, Jon? You didn’t want to be in charge, but that’s my job. You’ll be there to help manage the colony with me, someone for others to go to if I’m not available or to help delegate what needs to be done.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to choose Masanori as your Second?” Jon asked. “He’s more qualified, having the experience of running an entire branch of the Furmankind Institute.”

Avon looked around at others floating in areas of the big room, but none were close by. He cleared his throat, lowered his head toward Jon and Kristen, and then replied in a whisper.

“I don’t want him as my Second,” he admitted. “I don’t know him all that well, but Dr. Mochizuki’s used to running everything and I’m afraid that if he’s placed even in a secondary position, he’ll try to usurp my authority. Stockholm may have legally appointed me to my position over the colony, but once we’re on another planet that may not have much influence if he has any level of authority.” He shook his head. “No, I would prefer someone I already know serving with me, even if that person has been an occasional troublemaker.” He said this last with a smile, making Jon laugh aloud. Kristen simply stared back at the grizzly as if he’d lost his mind for saying such a thing.

Jon shook his head. “What about Carl? He’s not a troublemaker and has more life experiences than I do.”

Avon looked at him glumly. “You really don’t want the job, do you?” he asked. “Carl’s a good man… er, wolfman, but I still think you’re the most qualified. I’m begging you, Jon – I’d get down on my knees if we had a floor I could stay down on!”

Jon turned aside to Kristen and she saw his look of amusement. He gave her a wink that Avon could not see and then faced the grizzly again.

“Well, it looks like begging is the only way to get me involved in a leadership position of a colony,” Jon said with a grin. “Because I’d hate to see a grown bear cry, I’ll do it.”

Avon looked greatly relieved. He held out his massive hand paw and Jon shook it firmly. “Thanks, Jon,” he said. “I really appreciate this!” He looked over at Kristen and gave her an embarrassed look. “This is why I didn’t want to do this in front of you,” he admitted with an embellished sigh. “I knew he was going to make me beg!”

The lioness laughed and put a hand on his arm. “You’re lucky. I don’t think he really made you grovel all that much,” she told him with a grin. “You may regret it later, because I’m sure he has it in him to make you pay for putting this responsibility upon him.”

Avon looked back at Jon, who merely peered back at him with a mischievous smile. The bear knew he was being teased, but he swallowed hard anyway. Jon finally shook his head and gently tapped the grizzly’s arm with a finger.

“So what now?” he asked. “Do we find someone with a sword to appoint me into knighthood or something?”

“Now I go find Sissy to help me with the documentation,” Avon replied with a grin. “I don’t even need your thumb print, just your cooperation.”

“You’ve got it.”

“Thanks. Once I get this filed through official channels, I’ll have Sissy inform everyone with her Daily News message that you’ve been certified as my second-in-command, and then we can get together so I can start prepping you with all the rules, regulations, colony bylaws and even a few secret commandments that only you and I will know about.”

“That sounds covert,” Kristen whispered.

“Of course, you realize I’m only joking,” Avon said with a look of innocence. “There are no secret agendas.”

“Of course you aren’t!” the mountain lion quipped.

“Right… Thanks again, Jon. I’ll find you later so we can get started.”

“I can hardly wait,” the cougar replied with a smirk. Avon gave them both a nod and then pushed off from the railing, hoping he had given himself enough momentum to reach the other side of the room where Sissy was laughing with the Fleur trio.

After he had gone, Kristen looked at Jon and noted the expression on his face had changed. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

Keeping his voice down, he shrugged and told her, “I was just considering the irony of having someone with the attitude I used to have against Furs now partially in charge over a whole colony of them.”

“You don’t hate Furs anymore, right?”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

She gave him a warm smile. “Then there’s no problem, only the irony.”

“You and Jenni are the only ones in Second Chance aware of that irony, y’know.”

Kristen put a finger up to her lips and smiled. “It will be our little secret, something from your past you’ll never have to worry about again. That will be one of the bad memories we’ll leave behind on Earth.”

Chapter 27

Freeze Frame

Thirty-one Furs were crowded together at the large observation window to watch the colony ship approach the space station. As Slipships go, the Meriwether Lewis was not much to look at. Built more for functionality than aesthetics, it resembled nothing more than a fat, winged cigar flattened on the bottom and narrower at the back around the interstellar slip-drive engines. While unneeded for space flight, the massive upper delta wings essential for descending into Bonestell’s atmosphere gave the vessel the appearance of being the largest airplane any of them had ever seen.

Large cargo doors were flush with the curved sides of the vessel just forward of the engines. Its stubby nose was adorned with a single row of glassteel windows for the bridge flight deck. The overall external color scheme of the ship was dirty white, with its name and registry number painted red in small block letters across the cargo doors.

Unseen from the outside and aft of the bridge were several internal sections that rotated within the diameter of the ship around a central axis to simulate Earth normal gravity. The cryogenic capsules where the colonists would be spending the next eight weeks would rotate continually in a one-gravity environment so that bone and tissue mass did not diminish while they were sleeping.

Likewise, another rotating section near the cargo area contained larger cryogenic chambers for the sleeping livestock that had been loaded before the vessel had lifted off from the ground. Keeping the animals, birds, insects and the colonists all in frozen slumber would reduce the need for extra food and oxygen during the two-month voyage to Bonestell. The two conversely rotating sections were in synchronous calibration with large gyroscopes so the ship would not wobble in flight. Only the ship’s crew would be awake for the full journey. Their quarters were within one of the E-Gee rotating sections, while the bridge itself was completely free of gravity until the ship was within the influence of a planetary body.

“We’re going… in that,” Ivan muttered flatly.

“All the way to Bonestell,” Erin replied with a smile. “Don’t worry, you’ll be asleep for the trip.”

“It looks like she’s been in service for decades!” Michael added, pushing back on Aldo and Manny who were crowding him from behind.

“It’s not the years of service,” Gerard said, “but the mileage. It’s a colony ship. Just think of how many solar systems it’s been out to and back.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” the Swift fox replied. “I’m just hoping she has at least one more voyage in her, but she looks like a good solar wind would shake her apart.”

The large interstellar vessel fired an array of thrusters to slow its final approach to the station as it lined up with Sebra’s extended airlock arm. There was a dull thump throughout the station a few moments later.

Wendy Miller reached over and tugged at the hem of Jenni’s halter top. The leopard looked over at the canine woman. “Yes?”

“Are they really going to freeze us for the trip?” she asked quietly.

The nurse gave her a sympathetic look. “Yes, but it won’t be anything like putting your grocery steaks in the deep freeze,” she told her.

“Yeah, this way your meat doesn’t go bad,” Norman quipped, having overheard them. “I hate it when my meat goes bad, don’t you?” he asked, looking aside at Gerard. The other bear only snickered, but when Jenni and Wendy each gifted Norman with an incredulous look, he laughed aloud at their expressions.

Jenni shook her head. “Don’t mind him. If he doesn’t behave, I’ll make sure he’s frozen solid in a block of ice!” Norman laughed again, but put up his hands in surrender. The feline nurse gifted him with a smirk and then turned back to the Golden Retriever.

“The cold sleep we’ll go into is an electrochemical combination process that slows down all your body functions to the point where your cardiovascular, respiratory and other processes are in a type of suspended animation,” she explained. “You won’t be completely stopped in time as in a stasis, but everything will be so slow that by the time you’re awakened, it will only feel like you’ve just taken a nap.”

“Just a nap?”

Jenni put a reassuring hand on the canine’s shoulder. “You’ll be groggy and your muscles will ache a little when you first come out of it, but as with any long sleep, you’ll wake up just fine.”

Wendy nodded and smiled, feeling comforted when Jenni returned her smile. They both turned back to the window, but very little of the Meriwether Lewis could be seen now as most of its bulk was out of view.

Privately, Jenni did not feel as comforted as the canine woman. What she had told her was true, but as the nurse who would be assisting Dr. Ken in preparing everyone for cryogenic freeze, she was fully aware of the processes necessary to put them into cold sleep for the long voyage. It would actually frighten most sane people if they had known what was involved, so Jenni had done her best to keep a passive face with Wendy.

Although she had never given any of her housemates the details, Ken and Jenni had assisted in the actual preparation of a long voyage traveler during their previous visit to the space station. It was necessary hands-on familiarity, but the experience had shaken the leopard woman with the knowledge. She was not looking forward to undergoing the process herself, but she and the doctor would be the last ones to go under after prepping everyone else. Conversely, the pair of them would be the first ones to come out of it—she hoped—when they finally reached their destination, to awaken everyone else.

With firsthand knowledge of the preparations, Jenni was tempted to volunteer to stay awake for the full eight-week voyage to Bonestell to keep watch over everyone else.

***

Although Second Chance would be spending relatively little time on board the Meriwether Lewis while awake, the captain agreed to allow the Furs to have a floating tour of her vessel before they reported to medical for cryo preparations. Despite the size of the ship which was mostly devoted to the engines and cargo space, the interior felt small and confining, on a par with antique diesel-powered submarines. Some of the internal hatches were obviously not designed for the larger bulk of the Ursis Furs and all eight of them were tempted to forego the tour just to have room to turn around.

As with many commanders, Captain Katherine Adrienne was proud of her vessel, and although most of the Furs did not think too highly of the ship, they were all courteous enough not to mention this to the one they would depend upon to get them safely from Earth to Bonestell. The disappointment was that many of them had seen movies over the years where such vessels were portrayed as interstellar cruise ships, but in reality they closely resembled a cramped freighter and the Furs were to be nothing more than its cargo.

At last, the entourage of thirty-one visitors was taken through the zero-gee sections into one of the rotating internal drums that provided an Earth-normal gravity environment. The welcome feel of one’s feet on the floor returned to them all and then the captain led them a short distance through a wider corridor. The thirty-something-year-old woman wore a royal blue set of coveralls and had an old-fashioned nautical cap pinned to the top of her thick head of hair to keep it on her head in the weightlessness.

“Here’s where you’ll be spending the next eight weeks, folks. It’s not a four-star hotel, but you’ll be comfortable enough on the ride out to your new home,” Adrienne explained.

The room in which she directed them was barely large enough for all of them to gather at once, so she had them stand around her against three of the four walls. The middle of the room contained three large medical beds with an array of instrument arms hanging over each from the low ceiling, but the thing that caught instant interest was the fourth wall that opened up to the cryogenic capsules that each of them would soon sleep in.

Despite that there were some rather big Furs in the group, each of the capsules would be just large enough even for Avon to occupy. In some respects, looking into the open ends appeared similar to the sleeping capsules of the space station, but instead of a whole wall of them, there were only three in view on a massive cylinder behind the bulkhead. Once each was occupied, the capsules would rotate inside the wall to bring the next three in line with the room. To more than a few of the Furs, the setup reminded them of a giant vending machine that would dispense each of them in turn when they reached their destination. Smiling to himself at the analogy, Jon hoped they had brought enough coins to get them all out again.

The three in view were all empty, but the medical benches in the room were on tracks that would slide into each of them.

“I already feel claustrophobic sleeping in Sebra’s capsules,” Wendy muttered with a little panic in her voice, “and now we have to spend another two months inside more space tubes?”

“You won’t even notice,” Ken reminded her. “You’ll be asleep before you even go inside it.”

“Knocking me out is the only way you’re getting me into one of those!” Dara grumbled morosely, holding up her hand paws to look at her claws. “I’ve woken up every night in my sleep capsule since we got up here, ready to tear the walls off trying to get out!” She looked at the captain with a frown. “Can I volunteer to stay awake for the trip?” she asked.

Adrienne smiled but shook her head. “Sorry, ma’am, but we won’t have enough food, water and air for the four-month trip out there and back for more than just my crew.” She indicated the middle cryo chamber with a hand. “This is the only way that passengers get to travel with us, but don’t worry. As your doctor fox said, you’ll go to sleep out here in this spacious prep room and then you’ll wake up in the same place. You’ll have no awareness of cryo, the sleep tube or the passage of time whatsoever. You won’t even dream while you’re under and the process is a tried and true experience.”

Jenni was glad she was standing behind Jon and Avon where no one else could see the expressions of dread upon her face. The captain made the process seem as if it was no more than a simple anesthetic administered to knock them out. She did her best to swallow her fear and appear as if she were just another Fur along for the ride.

“How long until we go into them?” Michael wanted to know.

Captain Adrienne turned to Ken. “Just as soon as Dr. Wilder and Ms. Watson have checked in with my chief medical officer, they can begin the preparations. It will take some time to get all of you tucked into bed, so if you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to another chamber where you may relax until it is your turn.”

She motioned everyone back toward the doorway, but then she stopped and looked around at them. “It won’t matter if you’ve eaten anything or not before you go into cryo, but I would recommend that everyone visit the head before each of you go in. Waking up with the need to urinate after cryo is usually rather intense, so the fewer amounts of fluids in your system before you go in will be better for everyone. There’s so many of you that a rush on the facilities might be disastrous!”

There were chuckles and a number of side comments as everyone followed the captain out of the room. After a moment of negotiating the narrow corridor again, they finally entered a large galley with tables and chairs with enough room for everyone, even the bears.

Ken and Jenni waited by the door for the captain to show them to her medical officer, but the commander loitered a moment to answer a question put to her.

“Where is this planet we’re going to?” Ivan asked. “We’ve heard a lot about the world itself, but no one’s said where this place is.”

Adrienne smiled at the red fox. “Bonestell orbits star L792-4, a yellow sun in the southern sky three point nine parsecs, or approximately twelve point seven light years from Sol. Up until a mere twenty-five years ago, L792-4 was relatively unknown in our skies, hidden from our astronomical line of sight behind Epsilon Eridani, but pre-colony investigation satellites in orbit around εEri made the discovery which set about an investigation of its own. L792-4 was originally thought to be a variable star due to a thick cometary dust cloud surrounding its solar system, so it was designated as such before the oversight was discovered. In updated lists, it is now simply called εEri2.”

“Isn’t the Epsilon Eridani system where Bastien is located?” Ellie asked.

“That’s correct,” Captain Adrienne replied to the wolf.

Ellie nodded. “Are you going to stop and pick up the two foxes still living there?”

The woman seemed pleased with the wolf’s insight. “Yes, that is the plan, but it will be on the return voyage after your colony has been deposited on Bonestell.”

“Why not before, on the way out there?”

“I’m surprised the AHCP doesn’t want to transfer them over to our colony since we just happen to be going their way,” Jasmine remarked. “We wouldn’t mind having another couple of Vulps along, especially ones already experienced in setting up a new colony.”

Adrienne looked at the vixen and shook her head. “Due to the disaster on Bastien, the two survivors will be placed into quarantine to make sure what killed the rest of the colony isn’t brought back with them, and then a full investigation will be made into the incident. No one wants to introduce a foreign element into your Bonestellan environment – beyond what you’ll be taking there from Earth yourselves, that is. Those two will be going into a special quarantine module we have on board specifically for them so they won’t inadvertently infect my crew either. The foxes may be immune, but we may not be. Entrance to this module is attained only from an airlock on the outside of the ship and none of my crew will be allowed to disembark while we’re there to reduce the possibility of contamination. Further investigation of Bastien will be the responsibility of some other ship once determinations are made.

“As for why we aren’t stopping there first on the way out, that’s simply a matter of fuel consumption. Right now, the Meriwether Lewis is loaded to full capacity with your cargo, livestock, supplies and a local year’s worth of groceries for the pantry. Once we have off-loaded everything at your colony site, we’ll be lighter and thus use less fuel on the landing and subsequent takeoff from the Bastien surface to retrieve the poor foxes.”

“Since εEri2 is in direct line-of-sight with Sol,” Jon mused, “won’t we have to divert around the Epsilon Eridani system to get there?”

“Correct again,” Adrienne answered with a nod. “Ideally, we would skirt in close to the star to use its gravitational forces to give us extra boost on our way past it, but there are two asteroid belts orbiting Epsilon Eridani we would have to go through. Unlike what the entertainment industry likes to present in their movies, asteroids are relatively far apart and normally wouldn’t present that much of a problem to fly through, but at the speeds we’ll be traveling a single random rock could spell disaster. Circumventing the system altogether will take more time, but will be safer.”

“How long until we depart?” Carl asked.

The captain consulted her techwatch and frowned. “Hmm, I didn’t realize it was so late. We’re scheduled to separate from Sebra at zero-hours Greenwich Mean Time, which gives us about five hours.” She turned to Ken and Jenni. “I’d best introduce you two to Dr. Dee so you can begin preparations to get your people into cryo before we depart.”

“After you, Captain,” Ken said.

Adrienne turned back toward the gathered Furs and raised her voice above the conversations that had started up around them.

“Feel free to make yourselves comfortable here in the galley,” she said. “Your personal effects have already been stowed and your medics will call on each of you in turn when it’s time to go into cryo. It’s unlikely I’ll be back in before we launch, so I’ll see you all again once we’ve arrived at Bonestell in eight weeks. Welcome to the Meriwether Lewis, folks!”

***

When it was Jon’s turn to go into the Freezer, as it had been nicknamed by the Second Chance Furs, he found himself more than a little apprehensive. While bored and awaiting his name to be called, he had idly looked up the process of modern cryogenics on one of the ship’s public terminals.

There was more to it that simply putting him to sleep and then sliding him into a freezer box. The procedure was more akin to embalming the dead. The body’s entire blood supply was drained into a special holding tank specifically for that person and was replaced with a synthetic chemical that would slow down anatomical responses exponentially while still supplying oxygen to the system. This chemical would then react to electrical stimulus provided by a thin net of wires wrapped around the body to keep the nervous system functioning at a reduced rate while the temperatures of the capsule were dropped to freeze the body without danger of crystallization.

Then, when the months-long voyage reached its conclusion at their destination, each body would be recovered from its capsule and the procedure would be reversed, warming up the body and then replacing the chemicals with the owner’s original blood supply that had been kept within a storage stasis field to slow its degradation. In the event of an emergency, the sleepers could be revived with the chemical solution still within them, but they would be little more than automatons with sluggish interiors and little conscious thought.

This procedure had been used mostly without fail since interstellar space flight had become a reality, and although it seemed there was a lot involved, the entire process took little more than twenty minutes from the moment the patient was anaesthetized into sleep for an average-sized individual; the Ursis Furs would likely take longer due to their larger physiology.

The livestock going along for the ride would undergo a similar process, but the smaller insects and birds would go into a more mundane type of suspension stasis due to their more delicate physiologies. This process was also a tried and true method, but stasis generation required large amounts of power, which is why the larger animals and furmen went to sleep via chemical treatment instead.

Three human or furman bodies could be managed simultaneously in the Meriwether Lewis’ cryo room, but with thirty-one Furs to process, it would take nearly four hours to get them all safely into their tubes.

Jon swallowed with difficulty when he, Kristen and Sissy were called in for their turn. His two companions chatted merrily with one another as they made their way through the corridor back to the cryo room, oblivious to what was ahead, but Jon knew that if he had still been fully human that his palms would have been sweaty with anxiety. Even though he had made the suggested visit to the toilet, he still felt a nervous urge to go. He had to keep reminding himself that he had also initially feared the painful change of anthropomorphism and had safely lived through that process.

When they entered the room, Ken and Jenni awaited them with comforting smiles. If it was possible through her layer of spotted fur, the leopard female looked almost green, something Jon noticed immediately. He did not know how many Furs had already been processed before him, but his former housemate was trying to put on a brave front for her friends.

Before they had even approached the trio of beds, Jon spotted a row of canisters beneath each of them. He knew that the typical human body contained six quarts of blood and each of the canisters looked large enough to hold two gallons. Ken indicated which of the beds they would each occupy, and as the doctor was helping Sissy up onto hers, Jon focused on a label on one of the canisters beneath the middle bed; as he suspected, it had his name, blood type and date handwritten upon it. A lengthy chemical name was labeled on another beside it, probably his embalming fluid.

Jenni helped Kristen get situated on her bed and then she turned to him. The nurse saw the distress in his eyes and somehow knew that he might be fully aware of what was about to take place. She tried to give him a reassuring smile, but Jon was not buying it. He had seen a tiny splash of blood on the floor beneath his bed, which did not ease his mind at all, and if a Registered Nurse was squeamish about a particular procedure, how well did that bode for it?

With a desperate swallow, he slipped up onto the bed and found it not uncomfortable despite what was about to happen upon it. He was not squeamish at the sight of blood, but knowing what it represented made him squirm as he tried to get his tail settled beneath him.

Jenni turned to Kristen, who appeared just as comfortable as if she were laying back to take a nap. “I’m going to start with Jon, if you don’t mind,” she said.

Kristen shrugged. “Go ahead. I’m not going anywhere.”

The nurse turned back to the male cougar and lightly brushed the bangs back from his forehead.

“Just try to remain calm,” Jenni whispered to him, reaching up to a flexible face mask hanging from plastic tubing above his bed.

“I know what you’re going to do to me,” Jon whispered back, keeping his voice so low that even she had trouble hearing him. “I read up on the process. How can I be calm?”

She put a gentle hand upon his chest. The thumping beneath her fingers was quick and hard. “Think of good things, Jon, a warm fire, a comfortable blanket, a good friend beside you. I’m going to administer the anesthetic and then the next thing you’ll be aware of is waking up on the other side of our journey.”

“You promise that I will wake up?” he whispered.

She put her free hand over her heart and nodded. “I swear that my face will be the first thing you see when you reopen your eyes.”

Jon reached up and caressed her cheek with his fingertips. He gave her a resigned smile and replied, “I’ll hold you to that. If it’s Ken looking down on me, I might have to sock that red wolf’s nose.”

She chuckled, his levity momentarily calming her. She guided his hand back down to his side and then pulled the face mask down to his muzzle. It was designed to fit loosely on all snout shapes of Fur faces and once she had it in place around his mouth and nose, she said, “Close your eyes now and breathe normally. It will only seem like a few minutes before you will see me again.”

Jon did as he was told and was comforted that the aroma from the mask that tickled his nose had a slight cinnamon scent. He liked cinnamon.

***

The Meriwether Lewis eased away from Space Station Sebra right on schedule, small chemical thrusters pushing the colony ship to a safe distance before its orbital engines powered up. The vessel would make two revolutions around the Earth before it broke free on its new heading to another world, though the slip-drive would not be engaged until the ship was beyond lunar distance.

Asleep in their cryo-capsules, thirty-one furmankind colonists were completely oblivious to the universe around them and could not see the blue and white marbled planet one last time as they left their home world, possibly forever.

Chapter 28

Operation Cleanup

Jon felt a gentle pat — somewhere. He could not tell where. It tapped him three more times and there seemed to be some muffled sound with it, but through the hollowness in his consciousness it was hard to distinguish what it might be. He swallowed with some difficulty and wondered if he should open his eyes. Nope, he decided eons later. Sleep.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

What was that? Hmm? Go away. Sleep.

“Kmahndzonwecup.”

No, don’ wanna. Sleep.

“K’mahn, dzon. Wecup.”

Sleep.

“Come on, Jon. Wake up, please. Wake up. Wake up.”

Some kind of illumination lit up the far side of his eyelids. What was that?

He felt something else. What was it?

One of his eyelids was pulled back and a bright light was shone into his eyes.

What the—?

He blinked, closed his lids again tightly, and then some foreign sound rumbled from the depths of his throat. It might have been an animalistic growl.

“Come on, Jon. Look at me.”

The mountain lion rolled his eyes back and forth beneath the lids, but then he made an effort to open them. He did not want to do anything more than sleep, but the voice was so insistent that he decided to do it just so the annoying onslaught against his ears would stop.

He opened first the left eye and then the right, but could not seem to keep both open at the same time. There was nothing but a grey blur in front of either of them, so there was nothing to see anyway. He closed his eyes again, but that insistent, annoying pat on his cheeks resumed again. He finally sighed in irritation and opened them both at the same time. Something large and dark hovered above him for a moment before the bright light shone into his eyes again, forcing him to squint hard. That really made him want to close them again.

He put his lips together and tried to say something argumentative, but he was having difficulty making his mouth do what his brain tried to tell it.

“Gdthtltwddmfc…”

“That’s it, Jon. Come out of it. Your vital signs all look good. I just need you to look at me.”

“Getthatlightouttamahface,” he tried again in a raspy voice that he did not recognize. The light immediately shut off and the dark nebulous image hovered over him again.

“That’s better. Now focus please. Focus your eyes.”

Do what with my eyes?

“Focus on me, Jon.”

Focus? What did that word mean? Was it a foreign term? He thought for a moment, accessing his sluggish mental dictionary. Oh yeah, it means go back to sleep.

“Wake up and open your eyes, Jon,” that annoying voice insisted again.

Sigh. It took a tremendous force of will to make his eyes obey, but after a decade they finally widened and he began blinking rapidly without conscious control.

Stop it, he told himself. Pay attention to the dream.

He could not think of a reason to focus his eyes, but he suddenly became stubborn, deciding he was going to rebel and do it anyway.

The dark blob slowly sharpened into what he determined was a face, but it was unlike any face he could recall. He somehow remembered that he was going to another planet, so it seemed likely that the blob belonged to an alien that was probably going to probe all his orifices to see what made him tick. He felt sore all over, so perhaps the demon had already experimented on him.

Something waved in front of his eyes and he tried to track it with only marginal success.

“Keep trying, Jon,” the voice told him patiently.

He swallowed again and cleared his throat. “Gimmee minnit,” he croaked.

It took an extraordinary strong effort, but he struggled in an internal battle with his wavering eyeballs, and one of them finally started to respond to his will. He closed his eyes again tightly for a heartbeat and then reopened them. This time, a broad nose came into view, surrounded by some kind of blotchy, spotted skin. Was it diseased? No, it was leopard, not a leper, he decided. Two large green eyes were looking back at him, but they were still slightly blurry. Something about the face seemed familiar, but it only took another moment for him to recall who she was. The brain cells were finally coming back from vacation.

“Need ma glasses,” he murmured. “Yer fuzzy.”

There was a light chuckle. “You don’t wear glasses, Jon, but my fur is fuzzy. You just need to concentrate. Look at me; it’s time to wake up.”

He swallowed again and felt as if his throat was slowly loosening up. “Are we there yet, mommy?” he muttered. The fog seemed to be clearing from his mind too.

“Yes, son. We’re there yet.”

“Good. Can I go back to sleep now?”

“No, it’s time to get up and get ready for school.”

“The weekend’s never long enough,” he grumbled. “Haven’t done m’homework yet.” He looked up at the leopard’s face again and everything finally slid into focus. Jenni smiled down at him and she brushed stray locks of hair from his forehead.

“Welcome back,” she said. “It’s good to see you again. How do you feel?”

“Still groggy, but waking up.” He paused and took quick inventory of his fingers, toes and other extremities. “I seem to be all here, but I ache all over.”

“That’s normal, and it will pass. Let me get an arm beneath you and then I’ll help you sit up.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Fifty-eight days, just a hair over eight weeks.”

“It feels like I’ve had a long restless night. I think my tail’s asleep from lying on it for so long.”

“Maybe Kristen can massage it for you when we revive her,” Jenni suggested impishly. “We both know she’d like to get her hands on your backside anyway.”

“Cute,” he responded dryly, feeling her arm slide between his back and the bed beneath him. “Did we make it to Bahn… Bon-estell?”

“We’re a little over a day away,” she replied, helping him into a sitting position. “Dr. Dee wanted time to get everyone out of cryo to make sure we were all okay before we land, so Captain Adrienne dropped out of slipstream a little early.”

Jon rubbed the backs of his hands over his eyes and then looked over at the other two empty cryo beds. “Where’s Kris and Sissy?” he asked, remembering them going under at the same time as he did.

“They’re still asleep. It doesn’t matter which order you went into cryo, but protocol specified that the leaders of the colony were to be awakened next after the medical personnel. Avon is with Ken now at the chief medical officer’s desk and I’ve been instructed to take you there when I could get you up on your feet.”

Jon swung his legs over the side of the bed and put his toe pads on the cold tile. “I miss the carpet of the space station,” he grumbled. Jenni put her shoulder beneath his arm to lend support.

“Just take it slow,” she told him. “We have plenty of time, so there’s no need to be in a hurry.”

“Thanks.” He eased up onto his feet, feeling a little wobbly, so he kept his arm around her shoulders. He was silent for a moment, but then he looked down at her.

“Were you scared?” the cougar asked in a whisper. “Knowing you were going to be embalmed?”

Jenni remembered that Jon knew the details of the cryo process and she nodded. “Yes, I was. I think you, Ken and I are the only ones who know what goes into the preparations and I will admit only to you that I wasn’t at all confident I would wake up again.” She looked up at him with sad eyes and added, “I was afraid I was probably going to die.”

“Me too,” Jon admitted. “I think this is the third or fourth time in the past year that I really thought I was going to die. You’d think I would be used to it by now, but I’m not. It isn’t a good feeling.”

“No, I suppose not. Thankfully, we’re still among the living – or back among the living, as it feels like the case may be.”

“Yes, thankfully. We know this process has been used successfully for years, but even knowing this doesn’t take away the fear.”

“That’s the truth. Okay, now. Are you ready to try standing on your own? If not, we can wait a few more minutes.”

“Let me try,” Jon replied. “I’d like to discover that I can walk again because I really need to pee.”

***

It took more time to revive everyone than it did to put them under. As with Jon, it seemed to take an extraordinary amount of time to reverse the process and then get everyone awake and back up on their feet. Dr. Dee had confirmed that the extra time coming out of it was normal, so there was nothing to worry about. In the meantime, Avon and Jon were together discussing the role of the colony leaders. Most of it was straightforward, but there was one policy to be shared only between the two of them.

“None of the others can know about the Emergency Protocol,” the grizzly told him over cups of fresh coffee in a secluded room. “You already know that we’re contracted to the colony at least for five years, but what you’ve not been told is that we do have a way out if things get too rough. Although we’ve brought along enough food to get us through one full local year, we should try to establish our own gardens as soon as we can after establishing our base camp, whether from Terran seeds or by discovering what indigenous food we can safely eat that will provide proper nourishment to survive. By the end of that first year, we should know whether or not Bonestell will sustain us on its own. If not, then the Emergency Protocol will go into effect and we can request a recall ship to come and get us.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

Avon took a sip of his coffee without breaking eye contact with the mountain lion. “Here’s where it gets tricky. If a recall is requested before the end of our first year — and that’s a local year, which is longer than an Earth year — they will come to get us, but we will all forfeit the prize money guaranteed to us for a fulfilled contract due the expense of tying up another ship for the sheer distance involved. If we make it past the first year, that should determine we’re established well enough to make it for the next four years on our own.”

“What happens if we do okay the first year, but things go bad later on as they did on Bastien?” Jon asked.

“After the first year, we can signal for a recall at any time as a last resort. We won’t forfeit the prize, but our five-year contract may start over at another colony. Those two Vulps still on Bastien have been there a little over four years. After they’ve been quarantined and later face a full investigation, they could be sent to another established colony or they could be sent out with a new one like ours. Unfortunately, their service period will start over before they can claim their prize money.”

“Wow, that’s tough,” Jon mused. “Why wouldn’t their previous time count toward whatever new colony they’re posted to? That seems unfair.”

“A lot of Furs agree that it is unfair, but it was also fully disclosed in the contracts we all signed. I doubt any one of us read the fine print so completely, but it’s all there and we agreed to it with the signature of our thumbprints. It takes a lot of funding to send out just one ship, no matter how near or far it may be going, so if those expenses are considered wasted by a failed attempt, headquarters will be more tightfisted the next time.”

Jon sat back in his chair, frowning at the absence of a slot for his tail. “Why is this Emergency Protocol such a secret to be kept from the rest of the colony?” he asked, readjusting his tail into a more comfortable position.

“To keep it from being abused,” Avon answered. “As far as everyone else believes, there will be no recall available until we’ve either fulfilled five years or if over eighty percent of the colony personnel is lost — just as it happened on Bastien. If it became known that we had a quicker way out, there would be little incentive for the colony to survive through rough times. The decision to initiate a recall after the first year will be completely up to me, but that decision falls to you if something happens to me. If the others knew about it, some of them might try to pressure us into it if disaster strikes and everyone wants to go running back to Earth.”

“What about Masanori? He was director of his branch of the Institute, so I’m sure he’s aware of this protocol. I’ve only known him a few days and can’t see him being a troublemaker and doing so, but if things get bad, he could incite the others by letting them know about this rule.”

Avon shook his ursine head. “He doesn’t know about it and neither did Marcelo. The Institute directors aren’t on a need-to-know basis for everything.”

“Huh,” Jon grunted, toying with the shiny new military-style dog tags he wore on a chain around his neck. Jenni had presented them to him just before he had been released from the Freezer. They did not contain as much information as their pet microchips, but they had been deemed just as necessary to colony life for personal identification. Oddly enough, he liked wearing them, though he had never served in the military. Dante probably would have attached them to his doggy collar.

“We can probably expect some rough times before we get established, but we have to do our best to try to make this work before bailing out. If everyone believes we’ll break contract if we leave early, they will be more likely to stick it out. That is why we have to keep this between us. The Emergency Protocol is not written down anywhere in the material we’ve brought with us, nor is it contained on my PBJ. Just as I’m doing now with you, this was entrusted to me verbally by a visit from an AHCP representative once I had been formally selected to head a colony. I wasn’t even supposed to tell my Second about it until after we’d arrived on planet. I’m telling you now because we may not have any time for private conversations once we get down on the surface. If you had let me recommend you as leader of a Felis colony as I’d originally intended, you would have had a similar AHCP visitor if selected.”

“Hmm, okay. I know we joked about it earlier,” Jon said, “but are there any other hidden agendas or secret orders we have concerning Second Chance?”

“No, we’re pretty much left up to our own whims to handle the day to day operations and decisions, but there are some inflexible guidelines in a few areas you need to know about before we get down there. These aren’t secret, but you should be aware of them if you aren’t already.”

***

Jon looked over the large galley where the Furs were all relaxing with snacks and drinks after everyone had been revived and over their lethargy. The general mood was one of relief that they had all made it out of cryo alive and well. To most of them, it had simply been a deep sleep, while others had anxiety attacks before going in. Despite his fears of never waking up again, Jon felt he had handled the experience well enough without lingering psychological problems. With luck, he would never have to go through that process ever again.

Avon was currently forward in another compartment with the Logistics Officer concerning issues with their livestock and had asked him to make an announcement on behalf of the captain. The cougar had no issues with the request, as the news would hardly be a surprise after the time they had spent weightless on the space station over Earth.

“Okay, listen up, fuzz-butts!” he called out over the din of conversations. “I have an announcement to make!”

“Who are you calling a fuzz-butt, Fuzzy-Face?” Gerard called back just as loudly.

Jon pointed a stubby finger at the brown bear. “That would be you!” he retorted with a toothy grin. There were a few more good-natured catcalls and comments before the cougar finally waved both hands in the air.

“Okay, okay, quiet down now,” he said. “Captain Adrienne has a job for us to do. We have roughly a day before we make landfall and—”

“Is that a Terran day or the longer Bonestellan day?” Kevin interrupted.

“The ship’s clocks have stretched a bit due to Einsteinian slip, but they’re still on Greenwich Mean Time. Per ship’s time, we will drop from orbit at 14:15 tomorrow afternoon.” Jon looked at the fennec fox and nodded. “We won’t be on Bonestellan time until we actually land. Avon told me that one of the first things to be issued to us will be the new watches and they’ll all be synchronized automatically to the local area according to the satellite stationed geosynchronous over the colony site.”

“Can we see Bonestell yet?” Wendy asked. “If we’re only a day away, shouldn’t it be in view right now?”

“Since we’re heading directly toward the planet, it can only be seen from the bridge. It can’t be seen from any of the observation windows on the sides of the ship.”

“Have you seen it, Jon?” Kristen asked hopefully. “What’s it look like?”

“No, I’m not allowed on the bridge. Avon’s the only one among us with that privilege, but he couldn’t fit his bulk through the bridge door to see it. The captain told him that we’re coming into this solar system with the planet almost directly between us and its sun, so we’re coming in on its dark side anyway. We’re moving up on it quickly, but there’s wouldn’t be much to see from here even if we could get to a forward window.”

“That’s not very exciting,” Wendy mused.

“That’s exactly what I told Avon,” Jon remarked. “He reminded me that we’ve all seen photos of it during our training, so we can imagine it looks a lot like what we’ve already seen.

“So what’s this job the captain has for us?” Manny asked. “Are we going to swab the decks?”

“You’re not far off,” Jon replied with a smirk. “The rotational sections of the ship that provide us with the simulation of gravity will need to be shut down prior to dropping into the planet’s atmosphere. Once that happens, everything loose in those compartments is going to be floating free for a while, and this includes things like your drink cups, pillows, and blankets, grooming brushes, cracker crumbs, any fur you’ve shed and everything else. We are going to police every chamber in every section for cleanup detail. Containers for all ship’s material and refuse will be provided to us and then stowed into wall lockers, and each compartment is equipped with a vacuum system.”

Jon held up his copper-colored PBJ. “I’m going to appoint teams in pairs to help one another in this cleanup that will be assigned specific areas. Before the rotational sections are halted, Avon and I will inspect every compartment and once the Logistics Officer is satisfied with our results, he will inform the captain that landing preparations can begin. Now, I’m going to call the names for you and your partner, along with the section your pairs will begin cleaning. Once you’ve finished one area, consult the schedule I’ll share with your PBJs to see where you should work next.”

“What will you be doing while the rest of us are cleaning?” Alicia asked with her arms folded across her chest.

“You’ll find me and Avon listed on the roster too,” he told her, correctly guessing that she suspected the two colony leaders would be doing nothing more than supervising. He gave her a nod when she appeared satisfied with his reply.

“Is the ship’s crew going to help us clean?” Hank asked.

Jon shook his head, looking at the black bear. “While we’re cleaning, the Meriwether Lewis is going to cozy up to the geosynchronous relay satellite that’s been orbiting Bonestell over the original colony site for the past decade. It stopped transmitting around the same time the Magellan disappeared, but they’re hoping its memory logs can shed some light on the mystery. The crew is going to be busy bringing it on board and then replacing it with a new one built with better systems and extra backups.”

“We’re that close to Bonestell?” Jenni asked in awe.

“We’re almost there now, and by the time we’ve all finished cleaning up the ship, we’ll be in a desirable orbit preparing to drop into the atmosphere.” He looked at his PBJ screens again. “Now, we all need to get started. Hank, you and Ivan will begin with section one, compartment four. Aaron and Gerard will take section one, compartment six. Masanori and Chieko will do section two, compartment one…”

As he read off the names and assignments, Jon felt a sense of accomplishment. For the past year, he had often wondered what kind of role he might play in the colony, and with his past management experience, he finally felt like he had a real purpose.

Chapter 29

Home Soil

The bridge of the Meriwether Lewis was relatively quiet. The new geosynchronous satellite was in place and operating as designed, but the planet was still silent. There had been no answer to numerous hails on the standard and emergency frequencies, and even rotating to all other bands, the only response from Bonestell was the typical planetary static generated by its magnetosphere. If there had been any survivors from the Ferdinand Magellan, they were either unwilling or unable to respond. There seemed to be nothing remotely manmade on the planet indicating that anyone had survived the previous voyage.

Captain Katherine Adrienne pursed her lips and turned to the First Officer floating beside her. “Upon failure to generate a response from the previous vessel or the colony that was intended for the surface, we are to proceed as planned, Commander.”

“Aye, Captain,” replied the officer automatically in a heavily accented voice. He turned to a man belted in at the communications console and put a light hand on his shoulder. “Send a message burst to Earth, informing them of the time, our position, flight logs and operational status.”

“Aye, sir,” the com officer responded, his fingers already flying over his controls.

Commander Cairn looked back at the captain and leaned toward her to speak in a quiet voice. “We’re in a similar time-window as the Magellan was when she was last heard from,” he told her. “There was no sign of trouble from her last report and there’s been no time to try to extract any data from the old satellite as yet.”

She nodded, resting a hand on a counter to keep her position steady. “Everything appears routine,” she said in a voice intended to carry across the small bridge of the vessel, “but I want everyone vigilant during this landing. If any of you see, hear or detect anything even remotely out of the ordinary, I want it reported.”

“Message sent, sir,” the com officer announced.

“Very good, Mac,” the commander replied. “Please inform our passengers that we are beginning preparations to drop out of orbit. Everyone should already be secure, but you never know when a civilian thinks he can make it to the head and back right when he should be in his landing harness.”

“Aye, sir, right away.” There was a moment of quiet before Mac nodded to himself and spoke quietly into his tiny boom microphone. “Mr. Avonaco reports all his people are secure and ready.”

“Thank you,” the captain responded. She glanced at her wrist watch and then looked over at her navigator. “Time until orbital drop?” she asked.

“Six minutes, forty-seven seconds, ma’am.”

“Thank you.”

***

Jon looked over at Kristen seated next to him and saw the excited expression on her face. She was looking forward to cataloging an entire world of new botanical wonders – or at least those in the immediate vicinity of their colony. When he looked at Jenni in the row in front of them, he saw a different mood. The leopard nurse had never enjoyed flying, and although the small troop compartment where they were awaiting the landing had no windows to the outside, Jenni had her eyes tightly shut.

“You know that closing your eyes during landing only makes the sensations more intense,” Raine said from the seat beside her.

“No, it doesn’t,” Jenni retorted, keeping her eyes closed. “I don’t have to see the room jumping all around when we hit turbulence!”

“Suit yourself,” the cheetah replied. “Too bad we don’t have our spice tea for this trip, but one of the ship’s crew told me earlier that it won’t take us as long to drop from orbit here as it did from the space station.”

“Why?”

“There’s no air traffic to coordinate, so we can drop in on an optimal trajectory that will take us right where we need to go. It should only take around an hour.”

“That’s nice. Keep talking to me… I need the distraction.”

Raine smiled at her, even though she could not see it through closed lids. “Sure, Jen. What would you like to know?”

Without even thinking first, she asked, “Did you ever leave the Institute for anything after you became a Fur?”

“I’m assuming you aren’t including our trek through the woods or the trip down to New Mexico for our flight up to Sebra,” he replied dryly.

“Smart aleck,” she said with a smile, opening one green eye slightly to peer at him. “No, I don’t count those.”

He gave her a cheesy grin with a chuckle, but then shook his head. “Not counting those, I’ve been stuck at the Institute for my entire existence as a Fur. There were others who got to leave on good-will tours to help bolster human-furman relations, but I didn’t get to go.”

“Who did?” she asked, closing her eye again.

Raine mused a moment and said, “Avon, naturally, though he was only gone a couple weeks, but Henry was gone for almost a year.”

“Henry?”

“Henry Parker, a mountain lion from the class before mine. He didn’t come back from that tour either… got himself shot playing around with an engaged woman.” Jon growled low from the row behind them, but Raine did not appear to notice. “Still, he got to spend a good deal of time out away from the Institute interacting with people. I think he succeeded with his intent to foster good will about Furs.”

Although Raine seemed oblivious to the noises Jon was making behind them, Jenni knew he had overheard the cheetah’s remarks and was sure the cougar was having dark thoughts on how Henry went about spreading that good will. She was about to change the subject when the intercom crackled to life.

“Attention all hands – attention all hands – We have green lights across the board for descent into the Bonestellan atmosphere. We’ll be passing through rough weather approximately two hundred kilometers to the southwest of the target, but conditions over the landing site are fair. Prepare for deorbit. Touchdown should occur in approximately fifty-seven minutes.”

Jenni knew the roller coaster ride was about to begin and she suddenly dug into one of the pockets of her furman shorts, remembering the dimenhydrinate tablets she had stashed in there. She always had difficulty swallowing pills without something to drink, but she managed to swallow the motion-sickness medication in her attempt to get it down before the turbulence could begin, completely missing the small water bottle provided in the seat pouch in front of her.

She settled back and grabbed the arms of the wide troop seat she was in, closing her eyes tightly. She heard Raine chuckle softly beside her and then listened to snippets of excited or dreaded comments issued by the others in the small compartment.

Kristen looked over at Jon with a wide grin and slipped her hand over his on the seat arms between them. He glanced at her and then moved his hand out from under hers, but instead of withdrawing it completely, he wrapped his larger hand paw around hers and then held it up. “Ready?” he asked quietly.

“Ready,” she whispered back. Neither of them had anyone to go back to on Earth, so Bonestell was now to be their home; despite all they had experienced since joining the AHCP, they were both looking forward to this new life.

***

On the bridge of the Meriwether Lewis, Captain Adrienne pulled herself down into her command seat at the back of the small room and buckled herself into a heavy-duty harness. Commander Cairn was already in his and looking back at her expectantly.

“Deorbit to commence in forty seconds, ma’am,” he said.

“Execute at zero,” she responded.

“Aye, ma’am.”

Adrienne looked around at her small bridge crew and saw the professionalism in every action they made, every control they operated and ever indicator and readout they watched. They had made many planetary landings together, but this time the uncertainty of the disaster that had befallen a sister ship was clearly on all their minds. She had already reminded them once to be on the lookout for anything unusual and knew she would not have to repeat herself.

“Deorbit in twenty seconds.”

The captain looked out the forward windows at the blue and white marble turning quietly below them. From space, it was remarkably Earth-like, though the familiar pattern of continents was something else altogether. At the moment, there was nothing but clouds and seas in view beyond the terminator between night and day, but she had already familiarized herself with numerous orbital photos that had been provided to her. The new satellite they had deployed was in operation and would monitor the progress of the Lewis as it came into range near the targeted landing site. Should anything happen to the vessel on its decent, the satellite was programmed to transmit a report back to Earth with as much information on the incident as it was able to gather.

“Deorbit,” Cairn announced.

“Executing deorbit,” the helmsman replied. Without a perceptible feel of motion, the planet below hove closer into view through the windows. Little by little, swirling clouds over the blue seas grew nearer, but after only a few moments, the large vessel entered the upper atmosphere. This time there was a shudder all through the ship as the air outside thickened, and then the spatial shields surrounding the Lewis took on an orange hue in friction between the collision of atmosphere and the shields.

Commander Cairn polarized the glassteel windows as the orange brightened considerably toward blinding white. The room dimmed, but most eyes on the bridge were locked fully upon the readings of their stations.

A deafening roar permeated all through the vessel, making conversation impossible, and limbs felt heavier as the planet’s gravity counteracted the weightlessness of space.

***

The troop compartment bucked as the ship around them was buffeted by turbulence, moving rapidly through the thickening atmosphere. The inertial dampers absorbed most of the shock as the ship descended, but the ride was still rough by anyone’s standards.

Cheryl held onto the arms of her seat tightly, comparing the sensation to the mechanical bulls she had ridden in country bars back home. She would have to hold on for longer than the required eight seconds to best this bull ride.

The ship lurched forward through a pocket of dead air and then seemed to slam through more walls of atmosphere, eliciting yips, yelps and mews from a number of the passengers. This was a harder ride than any of them had experienced on the previous space planes, no doubt due to the much larger, winged colony ship they were in now.

The turmoil seemed to last forever, but then the calm came so suddenly that there were many who thought they had crossed over seamlessly into something beyond death. The roar disappeared, the flight of the giant plane smoothed out and the air pressure in the cabin changed ever so slightly.

Cheryl looked around with wide eyes, wondering if there was something else about to happen, but then she laughed aloud in relief at the realization that they had made it down through the upper atmosphere and were now on powered flight across an alien sky.

***

“Any sign of the original site marker beacon?” Captain Adrienne asked. “The signal could be weak after all this time.”

“Nothing, ma’am,” reported the communications officer. “There are no clicks, bleeps, sweeps or even the creeps,” he added, quoting from an old movie he favored.

“Oh, I’m getting the creeps alright,” muttered Cairn. “Even the multiple landing probes that examined the planet before the Magellan ever came out here should still be giving off some kind of signal.”

“Nothing, sir. The place is absolutely quiet, save but for natural planetary background static.”

“Are the flight recorders operational?” the captain asked.

“Aye, ma’am. All settings, readouts and conversations have been recorded since we entered standard orbit.”

“If there’s the slightest trouble, send the whole caboodle in a concentrated message burst to the geo satellite for immediate relay to Earth.”

“Already streaming now, ma’am.”

“Very good.” She looked out the forward windows, but could see only a blue sky with a tinge of green. “Change the angle of video panel to lower forward view. Let’s see what’s below.”

The same tiny circuitry embedded in the glassteel forward windows that had polarized them earlier switched over to video signals received from cameras mounted flush with the underside of the giant space plane. They were still several thousand feet above sea level and traveling at a high velocity, but the helmsman was burning off speed through a subtle zigzag pattern across the skies.

“Land ho…” Commander Cairn said quietly when the first continental coast slowly slipped into view beneath the clouds still below them. The far horizon appeared a little odd since the planet’s circumference was greater than the Earth’s, but it was a familiar enough sight that spirits were high.

“Any anomalies?” Adrienne asked.

“Nothing to report,” Cairn said after checking his console readings. “This is almost textbook.”

“Don’t be too complacent,” warned the captain. “I want everything closely monitored all the way to the ground.”

“Aye.”

The helmsman slowed their descent ever further as they passed over the coast, now flying over land. “Current altitude is thirty-seven thousand feet at nine hundred sixty-six kilometers per hour,” he reported.

“Time of arrival?”

“Forty-three minutes, ma’am.”

“Thank you.”

***

There were no windows in the troop compartment, neither was there a simple video screen for the Furs to watch as the vessel came in for a landing. They were simply locked up tight within a small room designed to hold no more than fifty colonists. Although the seats were wide enough even for Avon’s bulk, they were not the most comfortable that money could buy, intended only for temporary usage. The addition of planetary gravity with their descent also served to acknowledge just how thin the seat padding was beneath them and their tails.

“I am so ready to be on the ground,” Aaron grumbled. He looked over his shoulder at his snoring cousin and marveled at how Gerard could be asleep at a time like this. The brown bears were seated near the aft end of the compartment, and although they had been at odds with one another since departing Earth, they continued to hang around together out of familiar habit.

The ship shuddered momentarily in a minor updraft, causing Dara beside him to grasp for the arm of the seat. She clutched Aaron’s hand instead, but he merely gave her a smile, letting her feel the security she needed in the grip.

Up closer to the front, poor Jenni was panting from the motion sickness her medication was trying to fight off. It could only help just so much, but she was doing her best to maintain her equilibrium. Raine lightly fanned her with a magazine he had taken from the chief medical officer’s desk before they had made it to their seats.

For most of the Furs, the flight now felt little different than commercial air travel traveling across the country. The dull roar of wind outside the fuselage was constant and the turbulence seemed to have smoothed out. With the roller coaster atmospheric conditions behind them, some relaxed to wait out the flight as well as they could.

***

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Katherine Adrienne, your captain for this flight. On behalf of Meriwether Lewis Airlines, your official transportation of the Terran Colony Coalition and the Anthro Human Colonization Program, I’d like to thank you for joining us on this trip across our small section of the Milky Way galaxy. We are on final approach to the Second Chance landing site, but we request that you remain seated with your harness firmly fastened until we are safely upon the ground. Our estimated time of arrival is approximately ten minutes. Our thrusters will heat up the air around the ship upon landing, rendering the surface unsafe for approximately thirty minutes, so you may use that cool-down time to prepare yourselves to face an alien world under a new sun. We have timed our descent to land at exactly oh-seven-hundred hours, native local time. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Bonestell!”

Kristen grinned at Jon, hardly able to sit still in her seat, keeping her hand in his. After several long moments of waiting, they could all feel the ship slowing as the roar and whine of atmospheric engines reduced speed. Without windows or even a video screen to witness the actual landing, there were more than a few frustrated Furs, all impatient to see their new world.

This was what they had trained for. This was the reason they had allowed others to painfully shape and twist their bodies into something more than human. They were to be explorers and this was a new world that had waited for them. Although it had been examined scientifically via satellites and probes, this world would finally be touched by the hand of man. That hand may have been genetically modified to increase its survival in an alien environment, but it was still a representative of the human race from Earth. There were other such planets that had been touched thusly, but for the terrestrial sphere labeled Bonestell, this was its virgin moment.

The feeling of motion had slowed, but now that the vessel was closer to the ground the wind buffeted the ship with its passing. Even though they could not see the external terrain passing by, they could discern the movement as surely as if they had been riding in a car with only their eyes closed.

The ship turned and banked, throwing off more speed and more than a few guts were wrenched to the side. Despite modern medicine and her own will power, Jenni could take the motion no longer and quickly hefted the air sickness bag she had held in her hands up to her muzzle. She retched into the container and tried her best not to pass out in the process.

It was then that the ship ceased to function like a large airplane. The surface area of its massive wings had provided lift to coast down into the atmosphere over the world, but elements of its starship design took over and powerful thrusters slowed the vessel further to hold it aloft. Then the bottom fell out and the Meriwether Lewis dropped like an express elevator with a deafening roar.

Jon’s eyes flew open wide, mirroring the surprised expression of others in the compartment, and they all fully expected to hit the ground hard. The feeling was deceptive, however. The ship touched down upon the ground with only a soft bump and then the deafening roar of the thrusters vanished unexpectedly as if they had all gone suddenly deaf.

No one dared move or hardly even breathe for several moments, but then the captain’s cheery voice came across the intercom.

“Touchdown, ladies and gentlemen. We have safely arrived on Bonestell!”

Kevin looked over at the fennec fox seated beside him and he exchanged excited grins with Erin. As if on cue at having the same thought, both of them let out a loud cheer.

Others quickly added their voices to the raucous sentiment, but Jenni did nothing more than rest her head back upon the back of her seat with her eyes closed and her bag clenched shut in her hands.

“Thank You, God,” she murmured quietly.

Raine turned to her with a big smile, but when he saw her weakened state, he pulled out a bottle of water from the seat pocket in front of him and splashed a little of it onto his hands. He patted her furry face with a light touch and she opened her eyes to look at him.

“We made it!” he said exuberantly. “You won’t have to do any more flying for at least another five years! Isn’t that great?”

“Huzzah…” she whispered.

***

Promptly upon landing, a flagged message was relayed through the new satellite and sent back to Earth reporting on their successful landing. No sign of wreckage debris or a previous human presence from the Ferdinand Magellan had been detected, but there had been no trouble at all for the Meriwether Lewis during her decent.

Impatient Furs were now gathered in the forward cargo bay near the external airlock. The compartment was predominantly filled up by several large rectangular containers on wheels that were chained to the deck, but there was some room near the crew hatch for them all to stand in anticipation of disembarking.

The half hour of waiting for the ground and surrounding air to cool down seemed to last forever. They still had not seen the outside world and were ready to breathe fresh air again; the shipboard atmosphere was scrubbed, recycled and even a little stale after weeks of flight time.

Captain Adrienne, Commander Cairn and Hiamovi Avonaco stood near a monitor over the hatch controls, the rest of the Furs crowding up behind them trying in vain to see what they were looking at.

The captain and her first officer exchanged a few comments and then Adrienne looked up over her shoulder at Avon. “The heat in the air from the landing thrusters has dissipated,” she told the large grizzly bear. “External sensor readings are comparable with previous reports from lander probes. The atmosphere here is comprised of seventy-seven percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, point ninety-two percent argon, one percent water vapor and one point oh-six percent of other trace gases. Our current morning temperature is seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit with forty percent humidity. The barometric pressure is thirty-point-oh-two inches and there is a southwest wind breezing in at five miles per hour. Mr. Avonaco, I do believe this is your stop.”

Someone behind them cheered again, but the captain held up a white-gloved hand for silence. “Okay, folks, listen up,” she said in a voice to carry, “We have a little protocol to follow for a first landing. Mr. Avonaco will be the first to step out onto Bonestellan soil and he has a small ceremony to perform. Once done, I will join him on the surface to officiate his promotion. After the appropriate document has been signed by thumbprint by the two of us, everyone else will then be allowed outside.”

“Several light-years from Earth and we still have to bother with documentation!” Norman called out from somewhere near the back of the group. His frustrated comment garnered chuckles, causing the captain to give the grizzly an amused smile.

She turned to her first officer and nodded. “If you please, Commander.”

“Aye, ma’am,” he responded officiously. He turned to the control panel and tapped out the commands to cycle the pressurized airlock. It took another precious few moments before a green light lit up on the console, and then he depressed a large black plunger button. There was a soft hiss and then rubberized seals around the thick door deflated as a hard series of clunks could be heard within.

The airlock hatch then slid aside on well-lubricated tracks and a lamp flickered to life within the closet-sized room beyond. Cairn stepped inside the pressure chamber and then with a flourish, made a big production of pressing an identical plunger button on another console. Three clunks later, the small chamber was flooded with natural light. Although its origins were completely alien in nature, an aroma very much like spearmint wafted in through the opening.

Commander Cairn walked back inside and looked up at the grizzly. “Your turn, Mr. Avonaco,” he said with a smile.

Avon turned and looked at the expectant faces of the Furs behind them. He gave them a confident smile and then walked out through the airlock into the sun. Before stepping off the ramp that had extended down to the thruster-blackened ground below, he shielded his eyes for a moment to let them get used to the brightness, enjoying the feeling of warm sunlight upon his fur.

He glanced around and remembered words from their training. ‘Grass is grass, trees are trees, and flowers are flowers, no matter their origin.’ Indeed, the bulk of the Meriwether Lewis rested in a wide open field of what could be related to tall grass or some kind of prairie wheat that stirred in a light breeze, and not far away were tall trees reaching up to the sky. Behind the trees were rocky, snow-capped mountains. The scene could have been lifted directly from any number of places on the Earth.

The Ursis Fur smiled inwardly when he realized that he had stepped out onto the ramp holding his breath. He let it out slowly and then quietly filled his lungs with fresh new air. The minty aroma mixed with cooked grass were the first he detected, but then he closed his eyes and sifted through the scents his enhanced olfactory senses had pulled in. There were too many scents to register at the moment, but although there were some that were completely new to him, others seemed eerily familiar.

Someone cleared her throat behind him and he blinked several times as if coming out of a daze. He walked down the ramp and then hesitated only a moment before stepping out onto new earth. His heavy bulk only sank into the ground a fraction of an inch and he could feel the crispy grass and soil around his bare feet. Satisfied that it would hold his weight, he boldly walked out away from the ship and stopped just past the area where the landing thrusters had scorched the ground.

Without looking back at his companions, he pulled a small plastic box from a pocket of his dark green vest. Inside was a small amount of soil he had dug up from the rich earth of the Adirondacks on a world now far away. He knelt down among the grasses, and then with his claws, he pulled back some of the ground cover to expose dark native soil beneath. Something wriggled briefly in the sunlight but then disappeared swiftly into the roots and dirt before he could get a good look at it.

He opened his container and then reverently poured the soil from Earth into the hole. He pocketed the plastic box and then with his claws, Avon gently stirred the soils together and cleared his throat.

“The land of our old home mixes with the soil of the new in prosperity and harmony. May the seeds of life thrive in healthy abundance, and may this mother world welcome us with open arms for her new adopted children.”

From another pocket, he pulled out two items. The first was a solitary acorn that he pushed down into the mixed dirt of two worlds with a finger. He covered it over and then patted the ground gently before planting the second item beside it, a small streamer flag of bright orange to mark the spot.

Avon got back up onto his feet, and then turned to face the waiting crowd still within the ship with a wide grin. He retraced his steps back to the end of the ramp and held out a hand toward Captain Adrienne. The woman walked down toward him, impressed with his personal ceremony. She had officiated first day landings on several worlds and each colony captain had some sort of speech or gesture to make upon stepping out of the vessel.

She carried a PBJ in one hand and reached out to take Avon’s massive hand paw in her other as her boots stepped out onto the ground. “Mr. Avonaco,” she said in a loud, clear voice, “as an official representative of the Terran Colonization Coalition, I hereby bestow upon you to the rank of Captain. As of this date and time, you will assume all duties and responsibilities as the commander of Second Chance, a colony outpost of the planet Earth. Congratulations, Captain Avonaco.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” the large grizzly replied with emotion in his voice. “I assume command on behalf of the planet Bonestell.”

Adrienne released his hand and then held up her PBJ. She opened the clamshell device already displaying an official document. She pulled off one glove and then applied her thumbprint to a box on the biometric screen, and then handed it over to Avon to apply his unique furman print to another.

Once the thumbprint signatures were saved, she closed the Personal Business Juxtapositioner and looked up at the bear.

“It is now official, my friend,” she said. “We have landed about three quarters of a mile from your colony site, but this is now your post.”

“Thank you, Captain.” Avon turned back to the impatient Furs still awaiting their turn to disembark. “My friends,” he said in a confident voice, “we have journeyed far and have arrived safely. It is our hope that one day others will travel here from Earth to begin lives that will help ease the overcrowding burden of humanity. We have years ahead of us before this can happen and today begins our mission. Let’s get started. We have a lot to do on this, our First Day!”

Chapter 30

First Day

Nearly all of the Furs had disembarked from the Meriwether Lewis by the time Jon and Kristen stepped out into the sunlight together. What they saw made them both laugh aloud. A good many of the Furs were down on all fours, either ecstatically running back and forth and in circles out in the prairie wheat-grass, or had their noses to the ground investigating interesting scents. It seemed that the warm sun and fresh air after time spent on the space station and the colony ship had made them all playful.

“That actually looks like fun,” Kristen remarked with a grin. As a botanist, her first intention had been to examine the waist-high wheat-grass, but the antics of their friends had momentarily distracted her from such serious endeavors; there would be plenty of time for botany later.

“Doesn’t it?” Jon replied. Out farther across the field, they could see something running hard and fast through the grass, and although they could not see which Fur was doing the running, it was not difficult to guess that it was Raine, the cheetah.

“Wow, look at him go!” someone else called out.

Still standing on the ramp, Jon looked out elsewhere over the field and he suddenly chuckled. He leveled an arm off to the side and leaned in close to Kristen’s ear. “Take a look over there.”

The lioness followed his direction and saw the tops of the grass gently waving back and forth for a moment, but then her keen eyes suddenly spotted two tan heads with large, wing-like ears more-or-less facing each other. “Is that Kevin and Erin?” she asked. “What are they doing?”

“I think they’re having a little face-time,” Jon answered. “They probably think they’re hidden from everyone else.”

“Why that sly little couple,” Kristen laughed.

“I have an idea,” Jon said. “Are you up for a little stalking?”

“Who are we stalking?”

“A couple of unsuspecting desert foxes, of course.”

Kristen looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. “They’ve only just become a couple! You wouldn’t spoil their private moment, would you?”

Jon grinned. “I most certainly would. You don’t have to join me if you don’t want, but I’m going stalking.” The large mountain lion stepped off of the ramp and let his bare toes sink into the warm soil and grass for a moment before he dropped to all fours. His back was just a little lower than the tops of the prairie stalks and he dropped his head to further conceal himself. His buff-colored fur blended in well with the grass and Kristen had to keep her eyes on him or she would lose him – and then she realized that his tail was standing up like a flagpole. It blended in well enough with the color of the field, but the darker tip was a moving marker.

She muttered something to herself about Jon’s sudden sense of mischief, but then she dropped to all fours and followed him out into the grass. She caught up to him and then matched his pace.

“What are you going to do?” Kristen asked quietly. “Pounce on them?”

“No, nothing so drastic. I just want to startle them.”

“What if they’re doing more than just kissing?”

Jon stopped and looked at her. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he replied in a soft whisper. “If they are, we’ll just leave them be.”

“We’re only kissing,” Erin’s pixie-like voice said with a giggle.

Jon and Kristen looked at one another and then both of them laughed aloud. In a whisper just as soft as he had used before, Jon said, “I should have known those big ears were good for catching more than just wind.”

“We heard you several yards away,” Kevin piped up, “and we could also see your tail up in the air.”

“You really need to learn to keep it down if you’re going to stalk something,” Erin added. “You’ll also want to remember that if you decide to get down on all fours in public without your shorts!”

The cougars took a few more paces and then saw the vulpine couple looking back at them. Erin seemed genuinely amused, but Kevin looked embarrassed at having been caught.

“This spot is taken,” Erin said with another giggle. “You two can go find your own place in the grass for face-time.”

Jon cleared his throat, purposely not looking at Kristen beside him. Even without looking, he knew that she was grinning, either from the notion of them kissing or she was amused at his expression.

“Don’t you feel it?” Erin whispered conspiratorially.

“Feel what?” Kristen ventured to ask.

“We’re here light years from the Earth, alive and on another similar planet, and this weather is great! That’s why everyone’s running around acting goofy! Doesn’t that make you want to celebrate too?”

Kristen looked at Jon and agreed. “Yes, it does. C’mon, you, let’s go find a place to celebrate, just the two of us…. And then these two can get back to their own celebration.”

Jon and Kevin exchanged embarrassed looks of panic. The mountain lion cleared his throat and was about to turn away when there was sharp whistle in the air. Kevin popped up to his feet immediately, but the others remained crouching in the grass, their instincts to stay hidden.

Back by the large colony ship stood Avon and Captain Adrienne. The human woman put her fingers to her lips again and blew another shrill whistle.

“Okay, people!” Avon called out loudly, “you’ve had a few minutes to romp and run in the grass, but we still have a lot of work to do! Come on back and get your assignments!”

“Saved by the whistle…” Kevin murmured, still looking at Jon. Erin acted as if she was offended and draped her arms across his shoulders.

“What? You don’t like kissing me?” she asked with a playful pout. There were several years in age between them and she enjoyed watching the inexperienced younger male squirm.

He looked at her and swallowed. “Yeah, I like it a lot – just not when others know we’re doing it.”

Kristen chuckled and then shook a finger at him. “If you keep kissing her, you’ll eventually want to kiss her every time you have the opportunity, whether anyone’s around or not!”

“Come on,” Jon growled, getting up on two legs. “Let’s get back to the ship.”

“Not so fast, Jon-boy.”

Kristen stood up in front of him and tried to kiss him full on the lips. He turned his head before the moment of contact and she wound up kissing his cheek instead. She pulled back with a laugh, undaunted by his measure of self-preservation. Now that there was a better understanding between them and they were more relaxed together, she enjoyed teasing him whenever she had the chance. He did not look upset by it as he might have months ago, but he did appear uncomfortable.

“Looks like you two still need more practice,” Erin said with a laugh. She pulled Kevin to stand up beside her and then hooked arms with him. “Time to get back to work. We can practice more later.”

The four of them made their way back to the gathering Furs without further conversation. Kristen looked up at her counterpart with amusement, but Jon surprised her when he glanced down at her and then winked. She did not know how she was supposed to interpret the gesture; did he mean to let her know that he was not upset with her, or that they might practice later. It would definitely give her something to think about the rest of the day.

Avon patiently awaited everyone to gather back at the ship, and once he had counted the various furman noses and was satisfied everyone was present, he gave the group a smile. “It feels good being here, doesn’t it?” he said. “It feels like a dream – after all we’ve been through together in preparation for this moment, we’re finally here – truly here on Bonestell. However, we have a lot to do right now. The next optimum launch window for the Meriwether Lewis is in three Bonestellan days, so we have that long to unload our cargo and get our base camp established before she leaves.”

He looked at the captain beside him and continued. “Now, while the lot of us has been in cryogenic sleep for the past eight weeks, Captain Adrienne’s crew has not. This means they have been cooped up inside the ship for the past two months and are in need of fresh air and shore leave more than we are, so they are to be our guests until they depart. You are likely to see them out and about, but they are not required to help us in our work. Feel free to visit with them when the opportunity presents itself, but remember that we have a lot to do. Once the captain and her crew have gone, we’ll truly be on our own. Our cargo contains everything the AHCP believes we’ll need to get Second Chance up and running. We have enough food and basic supplies to last us a Bonestellan year, but remember that we’ll be here for at least five times that long. It isn’t necessary that we find local food sources right away, but that’s something we’ll look at before long.”

Avon swept a hand toward the forest beyond the field. “Until we know more about the local wildlife, don’t bother any of them. Something that looks cute or harmless may very well be a ferocious killer. Something that looks or smells tasty could be poisonous. For now, just leave them alone.”

“What if something thinks we look tasty and they attack first?” Gerard asked.

“Then by all means necessary, defend yourself! There’s a reason they made us predator types. Don’t allow yourselves to start out low on the Bonestellan food chain, but don’t go looking for trouble right off either. Our primary goal is to establish a toe-hold on this world first. We have plenty of food for now without trying to make a meal of anything that moves. We’ll determine what’s edible and what’s not in time.”

Avon held up his PBJ and glanced at its double screens for a moment. “Although the Bonestellan day is a third longer than what we’re used to, we still need to make the best use of our time before nightfall. Because of the wooded terrain between here and our actual colony site, this open field is the closest the ship could land. We’re still approximately three quarters of a mile from where we’ll establish our camp, so all of our cargo and livestock will need to be transported from here to there.”

“How are we supposed to move it?” Manny wanted to know.

Captain Adrienne looked at the arctic fox and nodded. “Everything was loaded into eight tractor trailers for convenience. We have only one truck on board, but plenty of power cells to get everything hauled to your colony site. The truck and trailers will be returning with us, so they will all need to be unloaded once they are on site.”

“The first trailer there will contain all the modular pieces of the domes we’ll be living in,” Avon said. “The ones designated for refrigerated supply storage will be the first ones we’ll need to put up, along with the Great Dome and the kitchen. The individual sleeping domes will have to wait until we’ve unloaded all the supplies into storage so the trailers can be stowed back on the ship.”

The grizzly looked over his people and held up his PBJ. “I’ve put together a roster of assignments so we can get started. I need Ken, Jenni, Cheryl and Raine to begin reviving the livestock we’ve brought with us. That process is likely to take longer that it did with us due to the various sizes and conditions of the cattle, sheep, horses, pigs, chickens and so on, but while they are doing that, we will also need to begin setting up their paddocks and pens to put them in as they are revived. This means that about half of the rest of you will be building domes as the others are putting up the pens for the animals.”

Avon swept his hand out over the ground toward the trees. “As you can see, there are no roads here, and since we don’t have trucks and trailers equipped with antigravity repulsors, we’re not even sure the truck will be able to pull the trailers over this ground without getting stuck. If that’s the case, we do have regular colony wagons that the horses or cattle can pull, but that will mean the trailers will have to be unloaded into the smaller wagons.” He looked over at Ken. “I would suggest reviving the horses first,” he said, “just in case it comes to that.”

“That was already our plan for that very reason,” the red wolf assured him.

“Good forward thinking,” Avon complimented him. “Once I give you your assignments, you’ll need to get started right away. Jon and I are going to walk out to the site to scope out the route and then determine where we’ll need to set up shop. Once the first trailer gets there, Jon will coordinate where everything goes based upon what he and I decide after looking the place over. While he and I are away, I am placing Arne in charge of coordinating efforts on this end.”

The African lion stood near the back of the group. He had been unaware of Avon’s decision beforehand and the announcement took him off guard. He felt proud to have been called upon for this duty and was instantly determined to do a good job. Ever since his hunting fiasco during the survival march, he had been made aware of his inability to relate to most people on a personal level and had been trying to change his manners. If the colony captain felt his leadership was useful to him for something like this, he might get more opportunities in the future. He gave Avon a casual salute in thanks.

The grizzly bear nodded back to him and then looked over the crowd. He stepped to the side and revealed a small plastic crate on the ramp behind him. “Okay, once I give each of you an assignment, come up and get your new watch. Each one has been specifically designed for the thirty-six hour Bonestellan day and they have already been calibrated and synchronized with the orbital satellite overhead for this region. The straps are adjustable for our different body sizes, but they’re all the same color and all look alike. I’m afraid they aren’t in designer styles, but they are intended to be worn over fur-covered wrists without binding.”

He plucked one from the box and took a look at it. “I know it will feel strange referring to hours we aren’t used to, but in time we’ll become accustomed to it. It is currently five minutes until eight o’clock in the morning. We’re used to taking a meal break every four hours, so for now we will continue this habit. The equivalent of Noon on this world is going to be at eighteen o’clock, which is what we would normally think of as six in the evening on the clocks back on Earth. It may take a while to get used to days that are much longer than we’ve known all our lives, so we will likely need to take two eight-hour sleep periods per day instead of one. The daylight hours will seem screwed up and our nights will be just as long, so until we get used to all this, our shifts are going to be erratic. We may later create off-set shifts so that we’ll have someone awake and active around the place at all times, but for now if you feel the need to stop and sleep to keep exhaustion from setting in, feel free to curl up somewhere to get your rest.”

He smiled and added, “What I just said does not give you permission to slack off and be lazy, folks, so I’m asking that everyone be reasonable. Although we have a lot to do, we’ll have daylight much longer than what we had on Earth. Once the kitchen and generators are up and in operation, Kim and Yuki will find the food stores and begin preparing something for us to eat.” He looked around and ended with, “Now, are there any questions?”

“We have to have the kitchen set up before we can prepare a full meal,” Kim announced from the other side of the crowd. “However, we’ll try to have sandwiches or something else available to eat in the meantime to temper the hunger. Any volunteers to help with this would be appreciated.”

Avon nodded his approval, but said nothing as he looked over the assembled Furs.

Sissy held up a hand when he looked her way. “If we don’t get all the domes built before nightfall, where are we going to sleep?”

“The Great Dome was designed to be large enough for all of us to sleep in together if the need arises. We’ll just push the tables and chairs aside and sleep on the floor together until we have enough domes put together for everyone. You’re free to double up if you want in the meantime, but that’s all up to you. Anything else?”

No one seemed to have any more questions, and Avon could see that many of them were fidgeting listening to his speeches.

“Okay, let’s get started then. I’ve already told some of you what you’ll be doing, but here are the rest of your assignments…”

***

Jon looked up at the sky while he walked, the first time he had really taken the time to look up since they had arrived. The blueness of that sky was tinged with a shade of green. He was no scientist to figure out on his own why it had such a tint, but the wispy clouds that floated up high looked just like those he had seen on Earth. Maybe Kevin would know more about the weather patterns and he could ask him later.

He and Avon were walking side by side on all fours toward the trees, leaving the ship and the prairie field behind. There had been no signs of wildlife of any kind on the ground or in the air since landing, but that was likely because of all the heat and noise the giant ship from the sky made coming down. Now that it had been over an hour and a half since that event, he began seeing some things flying amongst the nearby trees, starting to become active again. Unfortunately, he had not been able to see any of them directly, just fleeting movement as he and the grizzly got closer to the trees.

Insects buzzed, clicked and popped up as they walked, and although he knew they were of an origin alien to anything he knew, they tended to act as all insects did, going about their business in the background. None seemed interested in the two intruders and they were bothered by none of them. It was probably more than he could hope for, but now that he wore a pelt of fur, Jon was hoping there was nothing like fleas and ticks on this world.

There was a light breeze that brought in a multitude of scents, but there was nothing that alerted them to danger. Perhaps they would come to recognize what they were in time, but now they were just smells on the wind.

“I wonder what time of year this is,” Avon mused aloud. “Is this the spring or the summer?

“I thought they were always supposed to set down on new worlds in the springtime to let the colonists have time to grow gardens before harsher weather came in, but this feels more like late summer,” Jon replied. “It’s not that hot, but it’s still morning and could get warmer later on.”

“The difference might be that we had an accelerated launch window due to the ship’s need to stop off on Bastien on the way back,” Avon remarked. “The whole timing of this voyage has been different than typical missions, so this might actually be your late summer. We were fortunate to have landed on a good weather day. I read that the Vulps who went to Javan landed in the middle of a thunderstorm that lasted for days. Their colony ship missed two launch windows waiting on the weather to clear just enough to offload the Furs and their supplies, and then the foxes were miserable for weeks trying to establish a place to live in flooded and soggy conditions.”

Jon looked up at the sky again and listened to the breeze blowing through the leaves on the trees. “It’s nice here,” he said. “I hope that’s not deceptive.”

“Agreed. Dr. Bohnestiel did say the tilt of this planet would make the weather more temperate. I hope he’s right.”

They drew closer to the edge of the woods and stopped before going into the shade. Avon frowned, looking at his companion. “What do you think we should do? Should we just go directly to the site, or try to find a route that the truck and trailers can go?” The underbrush beneath the trees was not dense, but there did not seem to be a clear path that a big rig could drive through.

“Are you sure there is a way the trucks could get through?”

Avon nodded. “The captain said they spotted what looked like a decent avenue through the trees to get there from aerial images they took as they were circling to land. We may have to get to the site first and then backtrack to find that way.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” Jon agreed. “Let’s go find the place first, if you think you can get us there without a map.”

The bear lifted a paw and pointed over the tops of the trees at the mountains beyond. “Our little valley is at the end of that mountain range,” he said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

“It’s too bad we don’t have a bunch of satellites overhead for GPS signals,” Jon remarked. “What about a compass?”

Avon sat back on his haunches and dug into a vest pocket that held the radio to contact the landing site, but then switched to a different pocket. He held out a small hiking compass flat across his palm and watched the needle. It fluctuated somewhat, as if it couldn’t get a good fix, but still indicated the same general direction. “I don’t know if magnetic north is close to true north or not,” he muttered, “but it will be better than nothing, I suppose. According to this, we need to go to the northwest.”

“After you, then,” Jon told him.

The grizzly took the lead with the cougar following behind. They moved out of the sun into a perpetual shade. While Avon was preoccupied with finding a route through the woods to the colony site, Jon looked at their surroundings, feeling as if they were once again on a survival march trying to find their way back to the Institute. The look of the trees they passed seemed familiar, but instead of vertical patterns, the bark on the nearest trees seemed to have grown around the trunk in an upward spiral and its leaves were long, thin and diamond shaped. Ages of dried leaves covered the forest floor and the underbrush seemed twisted and thin with rounded leaves of their own.

Jon stopped a moment to look at one of the round-leaf bushes and saw numerous teal-colored berries in bunches near the main stalk of the plant. He sniffed them cautiously and detected a specific aroma, but he could not tell if it was poisonous or not. Applying Avon’s advice about the animals to the woods, Jon decided to just leave the bushes alone for now. He resumed walking, a little further behind the bear who had not noticed his stop.

Avon’s ears twisted from side to side as the sounds of life could now be heard from all around. Bird-like creatures chirped or cried out to one another, either going about their daily endeavors or warning others of the two intruders. Something small and light scampered across dry leaves, but neither Jon nor Avon saw what it was. It was too quick for inexperienced eyes to follow.

Jon was fully aware that anything they encountered could be dangerous, so he stayed on the alert as they wound their way through the woods in the general direction of the compass that Avon periodically checked. There were times when he could feel something’s eyes upon him, but he assumed that every critter in the woods was probably watching the strange new animals pass by.

They found a shallow creek running through the woods and its channel was relatively easy to traverse. Avon looked close and found a few squirmy things he did not recognize swimming around, but they could be investigated later. He supposed they could have just followed the water to the mountains, but instead they continued on through the woods.

Three quarters of a mile was not a far distance and it did not take them long before they stepped out of the trees into a large clearing in a small valley surrounded on three sides by the mountains. The two of them stopped and stared in unison. Short, pale green grass covered the level floor of the horseshoe-shaped valley, almost looking as if it had been tended by groundskeepers. Tiny blue flowers dotted the land amidst the grass and insects buzzed from one to another in an ancient dance of pollination that took place even here on a world light-years from Earth. They had brought their own bees and monarch butterflies along to release for that purpose and it was hoped they could coexist with the native insects.

There was a narrow river of water from the mountains that pooled in the apex of the horseshoe, making a smallish lake before the river continued on through the trees. This was probably the source of the creek they had crossed, though it was wider and deeper here. Above the lake in the mountainside was the wide mouth of a rather large cave whose depths disappeared into the rock in shadow. The valley floor between the woods and the water looked to be somewhat over five acres, leaving the relatively small amount of Furs plenty of room to spread out and grow.

There was an opening in the woods near the right-hand foot of the mountain that looked wide enough for two semi-tractor trucks to drive side by side, heading off in the general direction of the prairie field. The branches of trees joined together above it, creating the illusion of a shaded, growing tunnel through the small forest.

“There’s our road,” Avon remarked. As soon as he spoke, there was sudden movement out of the corner of his eye. He and Jon looked toward the edge of the woods they had traveled through and saw what resembled three very small deer in the nearby shade, the first real wildlife they had seen since landing. None were larger than a family dog and all possessed tan hair with darker tan vertical stripes. They had overlarge ears that flipped and flapped and a short white tail. Their legs were thin but their bodies appeared well fed on the grass and little blue flowers they were eating. One of them raised its head and looked back at them with dark eyes over prominent cheek ridges. Its tail vibrated briefly and then it resumed its meal, unconcerned by the newcomers as if there was no danger. None possessed anything like antlers but their skulls were somewhat triangular in shape with angular edges. They were alien life forms, but there was just enough familiarity to be comforting.

Jon and Avon watched them in wonder for a few moments, but when the little deer-like critters did not seem alarmed at their presence and did nothing out of the ordinary, the grizzly began walking across the clearing toward the lake. Jon followed beside him, his eyes moving to the higher elevations of the small mountain above them. He knew from the presentations they had watched that the mountain range stretched northward for several hundred miles and that they were at its southernmost end. There were taller peaks beyond, but for now he was interested only in the one that would stand sentinel over their homes; it was not tall enough for snow to cap its top, but vegetation seemed to thrive all the way to its apex.

His golden eyes searched the rocks and brush for movement, not really sure what he was looking for. Perhaps he was concerned that local predators might be watching them from above, wondering if the two strange creatures below were edible, but if they were there, their camouflage was well matched to the topography. Jon saw nothing of concern.

As they approached the clear lake, Avon peered beyond reed-like plants growing at the water’s edge. The ground was rocky near the lake and soon they were stepping across grey stone with sparkling crystal flecks. The grizzly stopped at the water’s edge and smiled when he saw silvery fish swimming in abundance among the reeds. From this distance, they resembled fish they knew from Earth, but they were sure to find major differences up close. Avon suddenly found himself salivating at the thought of fresh fish for supper, knowing it was likely his ursine instincts kicking in. He wanted nothing more right now than to get in the water and go after them, but he had to force himself to follow his own advice. Leave the fish alone for now and find out later whether or not they were actually edible by the creatures from Earth.

“Avon, look at this!”

The bear glanced around for Jon, who had wandered off across the clearing. The cougar was still on all fours, but he was leaning forward in close examination of what looked to be a rust-colored rock. When Avon got closer, he gasped with sudden recognition of what Jon had found.

It was a weathered metal pyramid about two feet tall, pitted and rusted over with age, but he recognized its shape immediately. The device had been dropped there from orbit over a decade earlier to lead the original colonists to their new home. Jon rubbed at a corroded metal plate below several clouded glass lenses and tried to read the imprinted words written in English that were barely legible.

“Site Marker Beacon XK101. Made in Bristol, United Kingdom for the Terran Colonization Coalition.”

“Well, at least we know we’re in the right place,” Avon muttered. “It looks like it’s been under water and might have washed up in a storm or flood. That would explain why it’s no longer working and why the Meriwether Lewis didn’t pick it up from orbit.”

“This place doesn’t look like the original colony was ever here,” Jon muttered, looking around. “It doesn’t look as if anyone has ever been here before.”

“This only deepens the mystery surrounding the Ferdinand Magellan,” Avon replied.

Jon looked back up to the large cave overlooking the valley. “I’d like to take a look in there,” he said. “Just to make sure there’s nothing living in there to give us concern.”

Avon followed his gaze. “Wait until some of the others get here. I don’t think it’s a good idea to explore something like that alone.”

“Too bad Dante isn’t here,” Jon mused. “He told us he was an experienced caver. He would have been the perfect choice to explore that place.”

“True enough, but even he would need others with him.”

“I’d like to take Dara, Aldo and Carl in with me. We won’t go far, just enough to make sure we’re safe.”

“Why those three?” the bear asked curiously.

Jon smiled. “Dara’s a geologist, Carl’s an experienced explorer and has been in some caverns around the world – of Earth, I mean – and Aldo for that super nose of his.”

The grizzly nodded. “Good choices.” He looked around and gestured back to the valley floor with the PBJ he removed from a pocket. “Well, let’s do what we came here for and make a diagram of where we want to put what for our colony.”

“It would be best of we put the latrines back in the woods, preferably downwind of everything and on the side of the field away from the water.”

Avon wrinkled his nose. “It’s also too bad we don’t have Travis here with us,” he said.

The cougar looked at him. “Why would you want him here?”

“Somebody will have to dig those latrines,” he replied with a deceptively innocent expression.

Jon grinned. “Okay, I give in to your wisdom on that. In all fairness, he did do a good job on the ones you made him dig back home as punishment. Listen, I’ll dig them myself so you won’t make anyone else feel like they’re being disciplined.”

“You? You’d volunteer for that?”

“I just did. As for why, my muscles have been aching and sore ever since they woke me out of cryo. I need some good exercise to get back into shape and work out the soreness so maybe digging in the dirt will help.”

“I heard Alicia complain about the same thing,” Avon told him. “Maybe I’ll put her to work on them with you so you two can work out your kinks together.”

“Sounds kinky.” Jon paused and then a look of amusement crossed his face. He scratched at the fur behind one ear and chuckled.

“What is it?

“When I first got to the Institute, I didn’t know if I would have any skills beneficial for a colony and I’d told Marcelo that I would probably wind up digging latrines. I just didn’t know that I would be the one giving the assignment to myself.”

Avon matched his grin, but then frowned and shook his head. “What about your shoulder? How’s that feeling?”

The lion thought about it for a moment and then he shrugged his shoulders. “Funny you should mention that,” he said. “I’ve not even noticed it since we woke up. I suppose the other sore muscles took my mind off of it. It’s not real noticeable now, but it might talk to me later after digging holes.”

“Well then, let’s get busy. The others may be here soon with the first truck and we’ll need to know where to tell them to get started.”

***

“This is a dry cave,” Carl remarked.

“Yeah, it’s dusty in here, but you make dry sound like a specific type of cave,” Aldo replied.

Jon’s small exploration party had just traversed an easy hike up the side of the mountain to the large opening of the cave that looked out over the small lake.

“In a way, I am,” the wolf replied. “A wet cave has loads of different formations created by dripping or streaming water that leave mineral deposits behind. A dry cave is just that; dry. There are no formations caused by running water, no stalagmites, stalactites, soda straws, calcite rafts, dolomite flowstone or other features. There’s been no geological activity here in a long, long time. Carlsbad Caverns in southern New Mexico is a classic example of a wet cave, while Mammoth Cave in south Kentucky is a dry cave like this one. Mammoth has huge passages, yet none of the colorful formations you’d find in Carlsbad. There’s not much in the way of breakdown blocks either, meaning that the ceiling in here appears to be stable.”

“What’s the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite?” Jon asked idly.

“An old park ranger at Carlsbad used to say it like this,” Carl replied with a smile. “A stalactite holds tight to the ceiling, whereas a stalagmite might one day reach that ceiling.”

“Clever,” Jon replied with a smirk. “How high would you say the ceiling is in here?” The cougar looked up into the darkness; the sunshine from outside did not penetrate far inside and made judging distances difficult.

“Thirty-five to forty feet, I’d guess,” Carl replied after giving it a critical eye.

“There’s a lot of room in here,” Dara added, tapping one foot on the ground. “Rocky floor with only a shallow layer of sand, it’s fairly level. You could fit a full baseball diamond in here. Without doing a chemical analysis, I’d guess this is similar to limestone.”

Jon turned to the bloodhound, who was wandering farther into the cave with his nose to the ground. “Do you smell something?” he asked, pulling a flashlight torch from the back pocket of his jeans. With the exception of Aldo, they were all upright on two legs so they could hold the lights.

The canine stopped and sniffed at an indistinct set of prints in the dust, his new dog tags dangling at his chin. “There’s been some kind of critter here,” Aldo reported, “but nothing smells recent; maybe weeks or even months.”

“What about the previous colonists?” Carl asked.

Aldo looked up over his shoulder. “People are notorious for leaving litter behind, but there’s nothing here, not even a cigarette butt. I don’t smell anything that I would associate with humans, aside of Dara’s lavender perfume.”

“You can smell that?” the polar bear asked in surprise. “The last time I used any of it was right before we left the Institute in New York!”

Aldo gave her a pleasant smile. “I think it suits you,” he remarked.

“If you can smell a lingering scent over two months old from a planet far away, I have no doubts about your nose, my friend,” Carl quipped.

“Thanks, but all the same, I don’t think anyone from Earth’s ever been in here before now, and I don’t even smell anything recent that might have a den in here.”

“Should we go back in there farther just to make sure?” Dara asked in distraction, scratching lightly at the stone wall with the edge of one of her dog tags.

“The breeze blowing out of this cave would bring any other scents to me,” Aldo replied, glancing back into the darkness. “What I smell definitely belongs to some creature, maybe a bunch of them, but the scents are all old, nothing fresh. I don’t think there’s anything living back there.”

“We’re in far enough right here that we’d be out of any weather that might come down outside,” Jon said. “I doubt if any other critter would need to go farther in either, but it wouldn’t hurt to check a little more just to be sure.”

The cougar’s group walked in silence deeper into the large cavern, but the scenery in their small flashlights was unchanging. From what they could see, this wide passage went in a straight line right into the heart of the mountain. The walls were natural and uneven, but the steady movement of air told them that there must be another opening somewhere at the other end. Perhaps sometime in the future they might send a party to explore its depths, but for now there was no reason to go on. The cavern appeared to be empty.

***

By the time they returned to the cave entrance and put away their flashlights, one of the tractor trailers was sitting on the valley floor near the lake, the truck nowhere to be seen. The explorers dropped to all fours and made their way down the mountainside to the water’s edge. They had to hop from rock to rock across the narrow waterway at the lake’s downriver end and then made their way toward the grizzly overseeing the efforts.

As they got closer to the trailer, they could see furrows dug into the soil where the wide tires had bogged down in soft earth. The doors were open and nearly all of the foxes were pulling out dome kits in preparation to setting them up.

“Avon,” Jon said as he and his followers approached the grizzly. The bear turned toward them and looked at him with a frown. “What happened here?”

“The truck and trailer did okay driving across the prairie and on the path through the forest, but once they got out here, they hit softer ground. The driver from the ship managed to get the trailer out here to drop it off and then get back out with the truck, but I don’t think it will be wise to pull the others out this far.” Avon waved a hand toward the surrounding forest. “I told him to park the other trailers along the outside of the clearing where the ground is harder. We’ll just have to use the horses and wagons to bring the supplies from the trailers out here once we have the storage domes set up.”

Jon watched the proceedings and looked around the valley with a critical eye, now seeing things he had missed earlier. A suggestion was forming in his mind, but Carl spoke up before he could.

“Take a look,” the wolf said. Avon, Jon and the others followed Carl’s gaze as he pointed around them. “I think this area has been flooded,” he told them. “You can see traces of higher water levels on all the trees that surround this little valley clearing.” Indeed, the trunks of the trees were darker and looked softer a couple of feet from the ground up. “Look there, at the rocks on the other side of the lake. You can see discoloration where water levels have been much higher. There’s a reason why the ground is so soft and the truck and trailer bogged down.”

“That’s not good,” the grizzly muttered.

“This area is beautiful,” Dara added, “but it may not be the best place to set up camp. The higher water may have only been from a recent rain or it might be a frequent occurrence. Do we really want to take that chance?”

Those ideas paralleled how Jon was thinking, and he already had an alternative in mind. He turned to Avon and saw the bear’s crestfallen expression.

“What should we do?” the grizzly asked, suddenly feeling lost. Up until now, he had followed the AHCP’s plan to the letter, but they had never considered this particular scenario. “Maybe we should chop down some of the trees and build platforms to put the domes up on, just in case there’s another flood.”

“I have a better idea,” Jon said. When all eyes were upon him, he gestured back toward the mountain. “The four of us looked over the cave. It’s dry, geologically stable and is large enough we could set up our entire camp in there.”

“Put the camp in there?” Avon repeated. It was an alternative he had not considered.

“I sniffed out the area,” Aldo added, “and there’s nothing actively using it as a den.”

“The floor is solid rock with only a thin layer of sand, it’s relatively level and the ceiling is secure,” Dara reported. “As Jon said, there’s more than enough room for all our domes. I believe we have plenty of cable so we could rig up lamps inside the camp with the solar collectors sitting outside the cave to generate our power needs.”

“It would keep us out of the worst weather,” Carl added, “yet we’d still have the valley for activities when things are good.” The wolf knelt down and dug his fingers into the ground, lifting a handful of rich soil and grass. “Besides, this might be the ideal place to plant the gardens with room enough for the animal pens too. If a heavy rain starts to fill up the lake beyond its banks, we could get down here and move the animals to higher ground, but it would be far more work to unload the domes and move them if floods hit this area again. I heard Kristen commenting that perhaps the gardens should go out there in a section of the prairie field where the ship landed since there wouldn’t be room for them here after the colony’s set up. That’s quite a way to go to tend to gardens, especially if we have to keep the local wildlife out of them.”

The colony captain considered all they were telling him and then he looked back up at the cave. “How difficult is it to get up there?” he asked Jon. “Walking or climbing is one thing, but if we have to haul everything we brought with us up there, how hard is that going to be?”

“There’s a natural trail from the cave down beside the lake,” the mountain lion answered, tracing the path to the right of the entrance with a pointing finger. “We might have to build a bridge over the river so we don’t have to keep jumping rocks every day, but I think with the help of the horses we could get everything up in the cave without too much trouble; the trail up there is wide enough, even for them. It means we’ll have to walk a little farther to the trees to get to the latrines, but overall it will be safer from floods and other inclement weather.”

“It also might make the camp more defendable in case any of the local wildlife takes exception to our presence,” Aldo added.

Avon peered up at the cave a moment more, and then seemed to study the small horseshoe valley below it. The thought of being flooded out was daunting, but at least there was an alternative available to them before they had even begun setting up the domes.

“Has anyone tested the water yet?” Aldo asked. “We’re going to need a water source and it might be good to know if the mountain spring that feeds the lake is good or not, whether our camp is down here or up in the cave.”

“That’s a good point,” Dara said. “Let me retrieve the chemkit from my things on the ship and I can test the water right away.”

“Go ahead,” Avon muttered. After she left, he snorted and made his decision. “Okay, we’ll put the camp up in the cave if you all think it is safe enough.”

“Remember the weathered condition of the site marker beacon we found?” Jon asked, gesturing across the grass toward the inactive metal pyramid. “In light of the signs of flooding down here in the valley, I think the cave is our best bet aside of scouting the area to find somewhere else to set up shop.”

“That would take an extraordinary amount of time,” Carl stated. “We’ll only have the use of the trucks and trailers until the ship takes off. If we have to haul everything we brought with us to another location altogether, we’ll have nothing but the horses, cattle and wagons then.”

Avon nodded. “Good points from all of you,” he said at last. He turned toward the group unloading the trailer and waved to get their attention. He spoke with them for several moments, gesturing toward the flood signs on the trees and rocks, and then pointing up to the cave. There were a few grumbles at having to move everything they had already unloaded again, but Jon and his party pitched in to begin taking the items they could carry to the path up to the cave.

Within a few minutes, they could see a bubble-nosed truck emerging through the trees. Avon trotted to the edge of the clearing so he could catch it before the driver pulled the trailer out into the valley. They would line up the trailers closer to the river by the path up to the cave to cut down how far they would have to take their contents.

***

Several hours later, the kitchen dome and the Great Dome were set up inside the cave on the far left and the kitchen equipment had already been hauled up by simple horse and cart. There had been some trouble getting the laden carts across the water and onto the rocky path, but once two of the large bears got behind and pushed, they managed to get it all up into the cave.

Michael and Manny had set up an array of efficient solar panels among the rocks to one side of the cave opening with cables running back to the two domes. It had taken a little while to develop a system with everyone working together, but spirits were high and the work progressed without too many dilemmas. Two other domes for the refrigeration storage units were already under construction.

Jon had secured Alicia’s help to dig the latrines just inside the woods away from the cave trail, and although it was not a glamorous job, they spent their time making jokes about it between the two of them. Despite all the advances in technology and genetics, mankind – and furmankind – still needed a place to rid their bodies of waste, so age-old latrines would be needed no matter what planet they might be on.

Gerard and Norman took some of the fasteners and crating materials left over from the cargo to build a makeshift bridge over the river between the foot of the mountain and the valley floor. Despite that it had been done without plans or that it had been a spur of the moment project, it turned out well enough that the two bears were lauded as being good carpenters.

While some of the Furs were busy putting up the domes inside the cave, others were down in the valley erecting pens for the animals. Due to the sheer amount of livestock they had brought with them, Ken, Jenni, Cheryl and Raine had been reviving them all day and had not had a chance to see the new colony site going up.

***

Later in the long day, the aroma of cooked food wafted on the breezes coming out of the cave and permeated the valley. When Kim and Yuki announced that the meal was ready, Avon called a stop to all activities so everyone could eat and relax from their endeavors for a while. Jon loped back through the woods to the Meriwether Lewis and invited Captain Adrienne and her crew to join them.

Ken and his group were more than ready to take a break from their duties and Jon walked back with them to the colony. He explained the changes they had implemented concerning the location of the camp and once he had given their reasons why, they all thought it had been a good idea to make use of the cave as their shelter. The name Second Chance may have been more prophetic than they had realized, Jenni had remarked.

Before the Furs and the crew of the ship had crossed the wooden bridge, they saw Sissy near the lake looking interested at something among the plentiful reed-like plants along the water’s edge.

“Hey, catgirl, what’ve you found?” Ken called out to her in a relaxed mood.

“Come see!” the orange feline called back. Captain Adrienne followed the Furs out across the pale green grass, but the rest of her crew continued on up the newly-worn pathway up to the cave for the meal.

Jon and Jenni stopped at both sides of the small feline and the others looked over their shoulders. Resting just in the water was a creature that looked like it could have been a relative to a common tortoise of Earth, though with a couple of surprising differences. It had top and bottom shells made of interlocking plates and there were four leathery clawed feet, but there seemed to be neither head nor tail protruding from the shell anywhere they could see. Sissy reached out to the creature despite cautionary warning from her companions. She picked up the pie-plate sized animal from the water and then peered beneath it. Other than openings for the legs, she could see nothing on the bottom, the top or along the sides for a head or tail.

“How does it see?” she asked, setting it back down on the grass at her feet. “How does it eat?” The animal turned itself on its claws and then slowly ambled back to the water’s edge, almost to the exact spot she had taken it from. That in itself, at the least, gave them an indication which end was its front.

“Maybe its eyes are flush with its shell,” Cheryl offered, her fingers toying absently with her dog tags. “I have no idea how it might eat, unless it’s by osmosis. We’ll have to look closer at one later.”

Sissy peered up with a smile at those gathered around her. “One of my jobs in the colony is to keep a record of all we do and preserve a list of the different creatures we discover. This will be the first thing I put on it.”

“What are you going to call it?” Jenni asked with a smile.

“It looks like an abbreviated tortoise,” Sissy remarked.

“Abbreviated?” Jon repeated in amusement.

“It’s almost a tortoise, but not quite. I think I’ll call it a Tort.”

“A tort!” Raine said with a grin. He snickered and said, “You could make it short for a turtle and call it a turt!”

Sissy looked at him crossly and put both hands on her hips. “It’s a tort,” she said flatly, “and you can keep your dirty jokes about what I call it to yourself!”

The cheetah held up both hands with a grin and said, “Okay, okay! You’re the discoverer, so you get to name it!”

“That’s right, I claim that right!”

At that moment, something let out a shriek from the woods that set everyone’s hackles up. It did not sound like it came from anything big, but whether or not it was a cry of pain was still up for conjecture.

“What the heck was that?” Captain Adrienne asked, looking back into the shadows of the woods.

There was a flurry of movement that none of them could see clearly, and then the shriek sounded again much closer. The human captain pulled a compact pistol from a holster at her waist and rested her thumb on its safety release. She and her furry companions gathered together and prepared to fight off some horrible alien creature, but after several long moments the only thing that came running out of the woods was Kristen.

Jon rushed forward immediately and caught her shoulders. “Was it you that screamed?” he asked in concern.

Kristen shook her head and gasped for air, panting quickly. “No, I don’t have the vocal cords to make that sound, but it was close, up in the trees,” she said. “I never saw what it was, but I think it followed me!”

Several Furs emerged from the cave and stood at the cliff edge looking down at the small group near the water.

“What was that?” Ivan called out.

“Dunno yet,” Raine called back.

“What were you doing out in the woods by yourself?” Jenni asked her former housemate. “We don’t know what dangers are around us yet.”

The lioness looked at her with a frown. “I was doing my job,” she replied defensively. “I wasn’t that far away, really just inside the edge of the wood examining the vegetation.” She looked up at Jon and suddenly looked excited. “Did you know that all of the trees here have double branches? Every branch, every limb, every twig all grow in pairs of two, no matter which species of tree that I looked at. This idiosyncrasy continues in the smaller plants as well!”

She suddenly dropped to the ground at their feet and took a close look at the grass and small blue flowers at their feet. “Ah-ha!” she exclaimed. “Even the blades of grass grow in pairs!”

The crying shriek sounded out again and Kristen was suddenly up onto her feet again.

“Should we run?” Raine asked, ready to put his particular talent to the test.

“Let’s slowly make our way across the bridge,” Ken suggested. “Don’t turn your back on it – whatever it is might consider that a weakness.”

A large shadow swiftly emerged from the tree limbs ahead and a great bird swooped down to land on the grass a short distance from the woods. It stood half as tall as Sissy on black avian-like legs and claws. Its long plumage was slate grey and tail feathers with a multitude of white splotches that stuck out behind it a good two feet. Its skull was vaguely shaped like a horizontal arrowhead and bore two overly large eyes that were coal black. Those dark orbs were surrounded by a vibrant blue ring pattern in its face feathers over bulging cheeks. Its sharply pointed beak was almost bleached white in stark contrast to its dark body, but it was hinged wrong. Instead of an upper and lower beak, this one was split vertically so that the beaks opened to the sides. To the Terran Furs, nature had not been kind to the ugly bird.

It took two hop-steps closer out into the clearing and then opened that strange beak to belt out a powerful, hackle-raising shriek. Everybody cringed at the sound that cleared up one mystery, though it was still unclear what the creature’s intentions might be. The small group continued to back step a little at a time toward the wooden bridge, but the great bird only peered back at them, tilting its head as if wondering what they might be. Then something caught its attention and it suddenly took several hop-steps toward the lake.

It spread out wide wings, shrieked again, and then took flight toward the reeds, where it swooped down at the water’s edge with its claws extended. There was a mighty splashing struggle in the water and then the bird beat its wings to gain altitude. Trapped in its sharp talons was something that looked remarkably like a thick, muddy-brown snake-lizard with six legs spaced out in equal distances along its seven-foot length. The reptile’s head was long and slender, but numerous thorny spikes stuck out at all angles from its cranium and it tried to use them on the bird that carried it aloft up toward higher reaches of the mountain. The bird shrieked again and then flew out of sight.

“Okay, I’m officially frightened,” Sissy whispered as soon as it was gone, “but I don’t know which I’m more afraid of…. A bird large enough to carry me off, or the fact that the big monster it did get was near the water where I was just nosing around!”

“I think it’s best if none of us goes poking around the lake or the woods alone by ourselves,” Jon muttered. “Like Kris’ trees and grass, we’d all be better off being together in pairs.”

“Yeah, good idea,” Jenni remarked.

“C’mon, let’s get up to the cave,” Ken suggested. “I’m hungry and ready to be around a big crowd of people after that.”

“It’s been a long day and I’m tired and hungry too,” Raine said. “According to my new watch, it’s eighteen-thirty, and that means it’s only a little after noon here – that’s six-thirty in the evening back home, but we still have another half of the day left!”

“Avon’s planning on a sleep session after we’ve eaten,” Jon told them as they made their way up the path to the cave.

“I hope he plans to set someone up to watch over us,” Kristen murmured. “I wouldn’t want one of those birds trying to fly away with the small ones like Erin or Kevin.”

“Or me!” added Sissy.

“You all have weapons, right?” Captain Adrienne asked, sliding her gun back into its holster.

“We do,” Jon replied, “but since we have a limited amount of ammunition with no means to reload them, Avon’s plans are to use them only in emergencies.”

The human gestured toward the trees. “I can only hope your emergencies are few,” she remarked.

When they got up to the camp, the place almost seemed like home, even though there were only four domes that had been fully erected so far. Thirty-one Furs and fifteen humans were all seated in groups either on the floor of the Great Dome or out on the floor of the cave since the tables and chairs had not yet been unpacked. Most had either eaten already or were still in the process of consuming their meals, but everyone seemed animated in discussion about the events of the day.

As Jon led his entourage toward the large dome, they could hear snippets of conversations. Kevin was excited about his observations on the weather. Although he had been busy most of the day moving supplies and building materials from the trailers up to the cave, he had also been keeping an eye on the weather climate of their new home site. It was his inexperienced opinion that they were in the beginnings of autumn and was trying to get up the nerve to approach Avon to suggest they start preparing for winter even now. Jon filed that information away in his mind and would later seek out the small fox to help him go talk to their captain.

Another topic of conversation that caught his interest in passing was of large creatures that had been spotted out in the prairie field not far from the ship. The animals seemed similar to an African warthog boar, though much, much larger and covered with dense, stringy hair. They had double tusks on each jaw, a longer snout though not as blunt, and looking at one through binoculars, it seemed to have a thick cartilage at the end of the snout that looked very tough and very hard. They had a forward-extending forehead bulge and slender pointed ears that stood up straight and also covered in stringy hair.

The animals were fully as large as North American bison, though some were even larger, almost elephantine. Although they appeared to be rooting around in the prairie wheat-grass and under the soil for things to eat, one of the human crew members had seen one go after a smaller dog-sized animal that had no hair, with a speed and ferocity that had alarmed him. It appeared that they were omnivores of some sort, eating anything from roots and grass to other creatures if they can catch them.

The boar-creatures seemed to have no fear of the big ship from the sky, but neither did they threaten those who continued to off-load the trailers and supplies. They did, however, seem to take interest in some of the animals that Cheryl and Raine had in a temporary corral, so hopefully the electric wire that had been strung up around the fence would keep them out, at least until something more substantial could be built.

What other creatures would they discover here? Jon mused to himself as they stepped up to the meal line. They had an entire world full of such denizens that would be new to them, and providing they lived long enough, they might be able to spread out and discover some of them during their time on Bonestell.

Chapter 31

Sunset

The end of a long day had come at last. The new sun, εEri2 was low in the west and yellow-orange highlights were kissing the clouds that floated high overheard. The extended daylight hours would take some getting used to and just about everyone was exhausted from a full day of work that was hours longer than anything they had ever experienced; most were now resting or asleep, simply worn out from the day’s events. Although there had been no apparent problems with the local wildlife so far, it was possible the night might bring out potential dangers from indigenous nocturnal lifeforms, so while the others slept, Jon was one of four volunteers who had elected to stand watch over the camp.

Seeing as how Norman, Arne and Manny were vigilant around the entrance of the cave that housed their new home, Jon took it upon himself to climb up the side of the mountain to a ledge he had seen from below. From there he would have a good view of the horseshoe valley and the lake, and could raise an alarm if he spotted anything coming. Remembering his failure to stay awake during their survival march that resulted in the coyote attack upon Erin, he was determined to let that never happen again.

Although the light was waning, the mountain lion had no difficulty on all fours traversing up through rocks and around brush, but before he had gotten halfway to his destination, his enhanced senses told him that he was being followed. A change in the breeze shifting scents up to him confirmed his suspicions; he smiled to himself, but he continued on as if he had been unaware.

It only took a few moments to reach his objective and he was pleased at the size of his new perch. It was a relatively flat slab of rock that had separated from the mountainside at some time in the distant past and had fallen over near the edge of the cliff. It was stable enough that when he stood up on two legs that it did not even shift beneath his redistributed weight.

He rubbed his shoulder a bit, and although the gunshot wound still had some healing to do, it was not bothering him as much as he thought it would – especially after a day of manual labor. He had neglected his exercise routines due to constant schedule interruptions in the time they had left the Institute, but he knew he needed to start them again just as soon as they had all gotten used to the new clocks.

There were many others in the group that weren’t used to as much physical labor as they had done that long, long day and were near collapsing when Avon had announced an end to their endeavors. There was more to setting up a real settlement than they had experienced in the simulated colony of the Institute, but at least enough of it was familiar to everyone that there were few surprises.

One of the newest members of the colony was still having a difficult time that encompassed more than just the physical toll of the hard work they had done. Chieko Mochizuki was experiencing the final painful effects of her transformation, and although she was nearing her completion, there were still things shifting around inside that hurt enough to keep her incapacitated at times.

Masanori had been exempted from the colony setup to tend to his wife. There were twenty-nine sympathetic Furs who understood what she was going through, but she would have the hardest time of them all. With Avon’s approval, the red panda had assembled one of the traveling camping tents from their supplies to set up a makeshift privacy shelter further back into the cave to be away from all the activity. Masanori came out periodically for fresh water, food or allowable painkillers, but there was no masking the woman’s occasional cries of pain that echoed from the bare walls of the cavern.

At the moment, however, there were no sounds emanating from Second Chance. With everyone asleep, including poor Chieko, the evening was peaceful. From his new perch, Jon could see the other three males pacing the entrance of the cave lip, so he took a few moments to close his eyes and stand still, stretching out his senses.

The sun was near the horizon and he could still feel the warmth of its diminished rays upon his eyelids. With nightfall fast approaching, he could hear new sounds coming up to him from the forest below that had not been present during the day. It was now time for nocturnal creatures to venture out for their nightly activities. Despite that the place was alien to everything he knew growing up on Earth, there were so many similarities that he felt calm and at peace.

Birds chirped and sang, insects buzzed, clicked and chirred as other living things issued forth their calls, some jarring enough to send shivers down Terran backs and others so melodious to calm even the most frazzled nerves. As the sun sank further toward the horizon, a nighttime breeze picked up around the crags of the mountain and the light wind brought the aromas of green growing things, of dust, and even the familiar decay of vegetation. He could smell the fresh water and although he did not recognize all the scents around him, he felt no danger.

Although Jon was the alien on this world, he knew it was likely to be his home from now on. Even if they survived the initial years of their contract, it would be decades before anything resembling civilization ever arose in this place.

This is the life that was originally meant for the man I murdered, Jon mused to himself. Henry Parker should have been the one standing upon this rock listening to the night sounds of a new world.

Jon regretted the actions he took on that fateful night, but he clung to the belief that if the cougar had been just another human, he still might have acted out of revenge for taking his fiancé and ruining his life. Of course, he realized that if things had happened that way, there would have been no alternative for him and Brian Barrett would have been executed for the murderous crime. As a Fur, Jonathan Sunset had a chance to live, even if it was in place of a life meant for someone else.

He let such thoughts float away on the wind. There was no Earth now. It was nothing more than a dreamland for his memories. Think of only the good, he remembered. Forget the bad. This was a fresh start on a new world, and there were plenty of adventures to be had.

He put his hands behind him in a relaxed manner, keeping his eyes closed as his follower finally reached his perch. It was only when she stood up beside him that he opened his eyes and gave her a smile.

Kristen returned his smile and then looked off to the west just as the sun began to touch the far horizon. Although Epsilon Eri 2 was an alien star, it resembled the old Sol that kept watch over the Earth where they had been born. The sunset was comforting in its familiarity.

The lioness looked back at her companion and saw the soft expression upon his face in the waning light.

“Are you okay?” she whispered.

In silent answer, he smiled and took her by the hand. His old life had been swept away and now there was only the new. Feeling the warmth of his hand in hers, she looked up at him expectantly, and with the last rays of the sunset reflecting in his eyes, he leaned forward and kissed her.

Book 3

SECOND CHANCE

©2014 by Ted R. Blasingame

Chapter 1

Hunter and Prey

Although the morning sunlight was barely more than a glow on the eastern horizon, there was more than enough illumination for the predator’s eyes to track its prey. Dew coated the spearmint-scented wheat-grass through which it stalked, and although the moisture shimmered in the dawn, there was not enough to obscure the creature’s keen vision.

Soundless paws moved ever forward and the creature passed through the tall amber grasses in ghostly silence. Unsuspecting prey was ahead, upwind in the gentle morning breeze. The prey had wandered away from others of its kind, providing its stalker with an ideal opportunity for a kill.

The unfamiliar life form ahead had been enticing the predator to sample its flesh for days, and after a week of patient observation the hunters were on the move.  Four more predators were scattered, hidden within the tall grasses of the field, ready to chase down the animal. It was larger than any of them individually, but in numbers they were confident they could overpower the strange prey.

The predator’s tawny hide blended in well with the wheat-grasses bleached in the summer sun, and the male drew nearer to its quarry. Ropy muscles coiled in tension, begging for release, but it remained patient until the perfect opportunity presented itself. Unblinking in the rising sun, its gaze remained fixed upon the animal.

The prey wandered closer, oblivious to its danger. There was a faint, unusual scent on the air that it did not recognize as a threat, but still it mused upon its strangeness.  Curious, it raised its head and studied its surroundings with heightened intensity.

Then within the tall, double stalks of the amber grass it noticed a pair of large golden eyes staring back at it with lethal intent. It was the color of those orbs that instilled a primal fear within the prey’s mind, for there were no eyes throughout the lands that bore any hue but shades of grey to black. These were alien and the unknown conveyed danger.

The prey let out a sudden bugle of alarm and then bolted away. Under other circumstances it might have stood its ground and confronted its stalker directly, but the unfamiliar scent and intense gaze of strange alien eyes reminded it that it was too far from the safety of its companions.

Coiled-spring tension in the predator’s body released in a powerful lunge, and with a shrill scream from its throat, outstretched claws quickly sought purchase in its victim. For its size, however, the prey was swift and the razor-sharp weapons just missed their mark.

The other predators rushed out from their hidden places on the prairie, joining the chase to bring down the potential meal, each emitting a shriek, howl or roar of its own. The beast bugled again as it tore off through the field, desperate for the safety of its herd.

The hunt was on!

The tawny predator, at that moment closer than any of his companions, propelled himself after his prey, and just when it seemed he was about to reach his quarry the larger animal cut swiftly to the right to avoid his clutches.

For all his grace and power, the cougar stumbled over his feet trying to turn quickly enough to follow and rolled nose over tail among the grasses. His disparate companions raced past him after the target and the mountain lion jumped up to launch himself back into the chase.

Although the large, buffalo-sized native animal was best described looking only remotely kin to a shaggy, long-haired African warthog, the ugly porker was extremely quick and agile due to hypermobile knee joints that had a wider range of motion in both directions, and it knew its terrain. Following on its toed hooves was a mismatched collection of predator types in a pack so disorganized that the genetically altered bears, felines, foxes and wolves from another world were constantly getting in one another’s way in the chase that was intended to bring in potential food for them all.

The male wolf of the group kept trying to direct where the other furmen should go, but only two or three of them paid him any attention. As a result, the hunt was more-or-less a free-for-all.

As a hybrid creation of man and feline, one Fur had the speed of a cheetah, but like his Terran cousins, he could only maintain it for short bursts, and even though he was able to get up alongside the big pig, he had neither the power nor ability to bring it down on his own. Gathering up his remaining strength as he ran, the spotted cat prepared to leap up onto the alien animal’s back in an effort to slow it down.

The large hog instinctively chose that moment to change course and when the cheetah leapt for it, he wound up tackling the African lion on the prey’s opposite rear flank instead. The furmen tumbled to the ground amidst the pig’s dust and both were nearly run over by a trio of bears that were gaining on the prey.

Of the predators chasing it, the hog feared its ursine pursuers the most, primarily due to their sizes. Nearly as large as itself and almost as fast, the three combined might have a chance of bringing it down. The creature edged out away from them only a little, but if it was unable to get away soon, it would not last much longer.

It cut again to the side, rotating in almost a ninety-degree angle on one three-toed hoof, barely outstripping the black bear that had just taken a swipe at its rear flank with a large, clawed paw. Its sudden turn, however, put it directly in front of another bear with cinnamon brown fur and the ursine hunter ran headlong into its beefy shoulder.

The pig stumbled, almost falling to its knees, but it recovered swiftly and propelled itself away from the bear before its powerful jaws could clamp down upon a leg. This brief mishap gave some of the smaller pursuers just seconds, but they swarmed toward it in anticipation. Two smaller orange and black creatures flanked it one on each side while another as white as winter snow jumped for the hog’s back. Its weight was slight, but the sharp-toothed jaws stung the back of the prey’s neck.

The huge pig swung its twin pair of double tusks back and forth at the other foxes trying to harry it from both sides, and even tried to buck the white one from its back. It connected with the red fox on its right and the smaller vulpine predator rolled away in the grass.

Almost as soon as that one was gone, a large grey wolf took its place, running alongside looking for the perfect moment to jump in at the pig’s throat. The hog was panting and wheezing as it zigzagged through the gauntlet of alien attackers, but its great strength was not yet played out.

The big pig was young and strong, and although its current assailants were much larger than what it had experienced in the past, this was not the first time it had fought and outrun something that intended to eat it, especially out here on the plains.

Something registered simultaneously in its hearing and olfactory senses and it changed course, driving straight through the tall grass to a specific destination. The predators charged after it, single-mindedly pursuing the potential meal, and only one member of the furmen suddenly surmised the hog’s intentions.

The grey wolf yelled out a command for the others to stop, but the adrenaline was too strong and the thirst for blood was hot.

The pig put on a sudden burst of speed as it drew nearer to sanctuary and it outdistanced its attackers for just a moment, but it was enough. More of its kind was standing in a row in the tall grass, side by side in a massive wall of hair and muscle with only a slim opening between two of the largest creatures, both of which were nearly the size of small elephants. It charged into the midst of its herd and disappeared just as the furmen rushed through the grass and saw the new danger.

The predators scattered at the last minute, the bears barely able to stop their headlong plunge into the foremost hogs standing their ground. None of the native pigs made a move against them except to close the gap between their ranks. One of them bugled loudly at the large tawny feline that got too close and stumbled to the ground at its feet.

The cougar looked up with wide golden eyes, his heart in his throat and his chest heaving. The giant hog’s snout was only inches from his face; it inhaled deeply, taking in his scent, and then snorted it back out at him in a strong blast of air. The pig stared down at him with fathomless black eyes and appeared to study him, but when it did nothing more, the feline Fur swallowed hard and backed away quickly, eyes wary upon the potentially lethal tusks. Packed together in solidarity, the hog had nothing to fear from such a mismatched pack of predators that would break off an attack so easily.

One by one, the predators disappeared through the tall grass, no longer a threat. Satisfied that the strange creatures were moving away and not doubling back, the largest of the huge pigs gave a final snort after a long moment and then turned its herd to go.

Chapter 2

Sunset of Second Chance

Despite the failure of the hunt, the golden mountain lion walked behind his companions with his head high through the tall grass, though he kept his senses alert toward the rear in case they were followed. The hunting party was a mixed group of species like none other on the entire planet. Few in number, each a blend of human and animal, they were all visitors from a far-away world trying to make a new life on this one.

Originally from Earth, the men and women now attempting to colonize the planet they called Bonestell had once been fully human, but genetic manipulation had given them all an edge up on survival by merging the macromolecular code of their bodies’ deoxyribonucleic acid with that of various native lifeforms from their home world.

Jonathan Sunset had once been against such DNA recombination, but the anthropuma concolor was now just as comfortable in his current form as he had been when purely human. Each Fur had his or her own reasons for joining up as a volunteer with the Anthro Human Colonization Program to devote their lives to the settlement of far-off worlds, but Jon had gone through the painful and lengthy process against his will and only as a means to escape a violent death that would have come to him through capital punishment.

Ages ago, it now seemed, his fiancé had left him for a furman lover just weeks before their wedding and the incidents surrounding that action had driven him to such a hatred of furmankind that he had stalked and killed the Fur in a public setting just a few minutes past midnight on New Year’s Day. He had made no attempt to escape after the deed was done and he had openly boasted the self-proclaimed justice of his actions during a highly publicized trial. His sentence for the death of a Fur was a vicious execution by a Fur, but just prior to his demise, he was given an alternative to the violent demise.

In acceptance of this escape, he would undergo the furmankind process to combine his DNA with that of a mountain lion to transform him into the same trans-species as the one he had murdered, forced to wear the similar face and body as ongoing punishment for his crime of passion for the rest of his existence. Contracted for life, furmankind’s sole purpose was to go in to Earth-like worlds newly opened up for settlement as starter colonies, there to pave the way for later human immigration.

Most earlier human settlers were unable to survive new biospheres well enough to establish initial footholds on the worlds they tried to tame, so it was hoped that survival instincts and abilities from a few of Earth’s predators recombined with mankind could provide the necessary edge to endure long enough to learn as much as possible about a new world prior to later mass settlement.

Jon Sunset had struggled with more than just the agonizing physical changes he had had to suffer through the transformation. Personal psychological demons frequently fought him every step of the way, and despite the fact that he had been surrounded by more of the Furs that he had despised, he had eventually learned to accept what he was becoming and later even enjoyed his new senses and abilities.

The biggest revelation he had experienced was that even though he was now partially feline, he had retained his human mind, will and emotions, and he even suspected that his soul was still intact. He had friends now, someone who loved him, and even a respected place in the colony.

They had arrived just weeks earlier and although this world was Earth-like in many ways, there were still many differences to remind them they were in an ecosystem alien to everything they knew. Even the tall, spearmint-scented plant life that dominated the fields was unlike the prairie grasses back home. The botanist amongst them suspected the double-stalks were actually a kind of wheat due to chaff and husks that permeated the soil beneath them, but she might not know for sure until the following spring when life renewed itself following a winter dormancy.

They had brought a year’s amount of food, supplies and livestock, and had only recently begun to test the flora and fauna in an effort to discover what may be available to help sustain them when the groceries ran out.

The massive pigs were the largest native lifeforms they had seen since their arrival, and although they had been of little concern up until now, winter was just a few months away and it was unknown how harsh the conditions might become. The hunt had been authorized by the colony captain, although the hybrid grizzly bear had not taken part in the exercise.

That the hunt had failed to bring in the prey was of little concern. The hunters would compare notes and could utilize the experience to develop proper strategies to use for the next time they might attempt to bring down one of the hogs.

***

“Did you see the way the big one stood its ground against Jon?” Manny asked the Border collie behind him with a chuckle. Although the hunt had been unsuccessful securing food, the hunting party was in good spirits on the way back to the colony.

“Why wouldn’t it?” Cheryl replied to the arctic fox. “You saw how big it was. Jon wouldn’t stand a chance against it alone.”

The cougar in discussion cleared his throat behind them. “I was alone, you mugs! You all scattered to the winds and left me there by myself!”

“We thought you might open negotiations with the natives,” Dahlia quipped with a smirk.

Jon snorted at the red vixen. “Since there was a whole wall of hairy hogs protecting its sibling, I’d say their stance on negotiating was solid. I’m just glad they didn’t try to retaliate against us for trying to eat one of them.”

“What we did was a mess out there,” Carl complained. “We had no organization and kept getting into one another’s way!”

“We don’t all hunt the same way you do, wolfman,” Arne retorted. “Maybe you should stay home next time so we don’t run over you!”

The grey wolf whirled back at the African lion behind him and growled. “We would have been more successful if we’d had some kind of plan first instead of a free-for-all!”

“We did all right,” Gerard countered. “We’d have had it if the other thunderpigs hadn’t been nearby. It was almost tuckered out.”

“Thunderpigs?”

“You know, for the thunderous sound of a giant piggy on the run!” the brown bear called back over his shoulder. “That’s what we should call them on the books.”

They were emerging from the wheat-grass in the field to the southeast of the horseshoe valley where they’d set up their colony. Ahead were the woods they would have to pass through to get home.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if we just called them pigs or hogs?” Raine asked.

“It’s my choice since no one else has bothered to give them an official name,” Gerard said defensively.

“Although not exactly the same, they look more like African warthogs than anything else, so maybe we should just call them Bonestellan warthogs,” the cheetah suggested.

“What about a buffalo pig?” Dahlia suggested.

“Some are larger than buffalo,” Raine reminded her. “The bigger ones are nearly as large a small elephant! A pachyderm-pig is a little harder to roll the tongue over, though.”

“What does it really matter?” Cheryl asked. “Dr. Mochizuki’s been classifying everything with typical Latin names anyway.”

“Sissy’s the one in charge of recording the names we give to everything and she wants to keep the naming conventions simple,” Raine reminded them. “Our scientist may put fancy binomial names to everything, but mere peasants like us need common names to keep our tongues untangled. Latin’s a dead language on Earth anyway. Why use it here?”

“He’s a scientist, and that’s the language scientists all still use,” Cheryl explained. “I wouldn’t exactly call the language dead.”

“Okay, okay,” Gerard conceded in annoyance, “we can just call them pigs or hogs, although I like thunderpigs better.”

“Pigs, hogs, buffalo pigs or thunderpigs, what’s the difference?” Hank asked. “Some animals back on Earth have more than one name for the same thing.”

“Yeah, take Jon, for instance,” Manny added. “Do we call him a cougar, a mountain lion, catamount, panther or a puma? It’s all the same critter, depending upon what part of the country you were from.”

“Hey, keep me out of this pork debate!” Jon complained.

“I like pork,” Arne muttered. “Although they look kinda like the wild pigs back home, I wonder if they taste like ‘em too. I had my heart set on barbeque pork ribs today. It would have been easier if Avon had just let us take the rifles. Isn’t that why we brought them?”

“The guns are for protection, not hunting,” Manny reminded him. “Although we brought quite a lot of ammunition, it’s still a limited amount. Once it’s used up, we won’t have supplies for reloading and we’ll be here at least five years, so it is best if we only use them for emergencies. We’ll start exploring our new world soon and we’ll need them for the protection.”

“We also have compound bows and arrows – why didn’t we use them?”

“If I remember right,” Gerard recalled, “someone suggested we try using the weapons that furmankind gave us, y’know – teeth and claws.”

“Uh, yeah, I did say that, didn’t I?”

“I wish we could start exploring already,” Jasmine said wearily. The red vixen had been quiet on the walk back, silently nursing the headache that began when the hog had knocked her aside with the flat of its tusks and the weight of its head behind them. She had been fortunate that was the only injury she had gotten from the experience. “I’m bored staying around camp.”

“Establishing our camp is necessary before we can start going off across the countryside,” Carl reminded her. He stepped around a fern-like growth with central nodules that resembled robin eggs. They had already been tested and discovered to be nothing more than large seed pods that were quite inedible.

Jasmine gifted the wolf with a tired look. “We’ve been here a month and we already have a routine – eat, sleep, water and weed the gardens, and feed the animals – rinse and repeat – everything done almost twice a day due to our thirty-six hour clock. I’m surprised Avon even authorized our little outing today.”

“He said we should probably start finding out what local wildlife we can eat if things get lean this winter,” Dara said, bringing up the rear.

“Why didn’t he have us go after those critters that look like little bitty deer?” Hank wanted to know. “They’re all over the place, as plentiful as pigeons. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to thin out that herd; they don’t have claws or even horns to fight back!”

“They could probably kick you in the head like the one on Earth did to me,” said Cheryl, stopping to adjust the straw cowgirl hat between her floppy canine ears, “but otherwise I think those things are as docile as our sheep. It doesn’t matter that we’re all predator types; none of the little deer have shown the slightest fear of any of us since we got here. They’ll walk right through a crowd if we’re standing in the valley, as if they belonged in our camp.”

“They do belong in our valley. They were here before we were,” Carl reminded her. “Has anyone else wondered why there are so many of them?” he asked, leading the mismatched group of hunters into the woods on an animal trail that was becoming familiar to them all. “The small deer are barely larger than family dogs, have no antlers and they don’t run from anything that’s threatening them. I’ve seen them run when they play, and they’re fast, but don’t they have any natural enemies?”

“Maybe they don’t taste good,” Jasmine offered.

“I’d like the chance to find out,” said Hank. “I like deer meat.”

“Just remember that like the pigs, they may only resemble deer,” Jon remarked. “It’s like they taught us back home, ‘Grass is grass, trees are trees and flowers are flowers, no matter their origin.’ They may look familiar, but be fundamentally different inside – taste included.”

“We’ll never know unless we catch one and eat one,” Hank replied.

“At least Kristen has already found a few native vegetables and herbs we can safely eat,” Dahlia reminded them. “Those star-shaped tubers don’t taste like any potato, carrot or anything else I’ve ever had before, but they have a flavor of their own that tastes good.”

“Is that what was in our stew last night?” Manny asked. “I thought something tasted different, but I couldn’t put a finger on what it was.”

“Did you like it?” Dahlia asked.

“Yeah, not bad – just different.”

“Kristen said it’s a good source of nutrients we need. We may not be from this place, but we’re finding some things we can eat without them killing us.”

“Unlike the hogs that might try to kill one of us before we can eat one of them!” Hank said.

“We’ve all see the hogs around the area, but they have never bothered us or our livestock,” Gerard reminded him. “They probably would have left us alone if we’d done the same for them.”

The black bear looked at him and squinted in the morning sunlight at him. “Are you suggesting we leave them alone — without even seeing if they can be a food source?”

“Not at all,” Gerard answered. “They’re probably just stupid animals that have already forgotten about us.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Jon spoke up. “It was only for a few seconds, but when that big one was staring down at me, there was meaning and intent in its eyes that I could read perfectly. It also got a sample of my scent and will probably never forget me.”

“Jon’s afraid of the big piggy!” Arne said in delight.

The mountain lion was undaunted. “I wouldn’t say I am afraid,” he said in a somber voice, “but I now have a healthy respect for an alien animal that may or may not act like the pigs we know from back home. It could have easily gored me with those tusks or stomped me into the grass. Instead, it gave me the opportunity to back down before it made any retaliation. That doesn’t sound like a stupid animal to me.”

“Maybe they’re just meek like the little deer,” Dara suggested, glancing up into the tree branches. She thought she had seen some dark movement overhead, but she did not get a good look at anything.

“Maybe,” Jon admitted, “but my gut tells me they aren’t.” He stopped beside the gently sloping bank of the small river that flowed out from the valley lake and bisected the woods meandering toward the south. The animal trail crossed over a shallow section of the water where tiny shimmering fish among the river pebbles caught his attention. Cheryl leaned over his shoulder and peered into the water with him, quietly reminiscing about an aquarium she had once had as a little girl.

“What was that?” Carl exclaimed from the front of the group. Everyone looked up at once; when on an alien world where anything could be a danger, these words prompted instant caution. The grey wolf was standing on all fours like the rest of them, but he was staring intently up into the overhead shadows, his amber eyes the only part of him moving. There was not much morning sunlight that filtered in beneath the trees at the moment, but there was little that the night-sighted Carl missed. Despite vision and other senses that were more sensitive than they had been when he was fully human, the lupine Fur was unable to identify what it was that he might have seen. Birds and insects were already active, but none of them accounted for the large but almost soundless shape he had almost seen.

“Was it one of the nightshades?” Raine whispered near the wolf’s ear.

“I don’t know,” Carl replied in an equally quiet voice. “Up until now, I wasn’t sure I believed her, but it fits what Erin told us.”

The cheetah swallowed and nodded, following the other male’s steady gaze up into the trees. Although destined to be an explorer of this new world, Raine disliked the unknown. The nightshades, as the diminutive fennec fox called them, seemed to be nothing more than silhouettes moving through the darkness of the night or in deep shadows. They were too quick to be seen and extremely quiet, but there were several in Second Chance who had also experienced them while moving through the woods. They always seemed to be just on the periphery of a Fur’s sight and hearing, mere glimpses that left the person wondering if they had seen anything at all. So far, these nightshades had caused no trouble, but just knowing there was something unseen out there made some of them nervous.

Having once been stalked and attacked by coyotes in the forest on Earth, Erin felt especially vulnerable knowing they might be watching and she had announced that she planned to never be caught outside alone by herself; she would always ask someone to accompany her if she needed to be out away from the colony, even if she had to sacrifice privacy for security when going to the latrine. No one could blame her, however; she still had the scars beneath her fur to serve as a reminder.

“Do you think it might be some intelligent sapient being watching us?” Cheryl asked nervously. “Maybe they want to be sure about us before coming out to make contact.”

“Either that, or they could be looking for our weaknesses before attacking,” Jasmine added.

Gerard snorted loudly, making several of them jump. “They could also be more stupid animals just curious about their new neighbors,” he scoffed. “They haven’t done anything more than stick to the shadows, so they’re probably mostly nocturnal.”

Raine looked back at the bear. “Maybe, maybe not — we should still be cautious, just in case.”

Carl rubbed a hand paw across his face and sighed. “I’d feel more comfortable knowing what it is, dangerous or not, sapient or not,” he said.

A sudden shriek pierced the quiet of the conversation and everybody jumped. The flap of great wings overhead belonged to a large bird with a sideways-hinged beak they had all seen and heard on occasion. Instinctively, the smaller foxes grouped together and kept their eyes upon the tree branches, lest the great hunter bird come for one of them.

“I hate those arrowheads,” Manny grumbled. The arctic fox sat back on his haunches and then put an arm around the waists of both Jasmine and Dahlia flanking his sides. The females clung to him tightly, looking up for the deceptively sick-looking bird with slate grey feathers, unsightly white splotches, large black eyes and an arrowhead-shaped skull with a beak that opened to the sides instead of up and down. Its piercing shriek had a similar effect on their nerves that fingernails on a chalkboard often did to others, and although they knew it to feed primarily upon the fish and snizard reptiles that lived in the lake below their camp, none of the smaller Furs had any doubts that it might try to grab one of them given the chance.

Fortunately for the foxes this time, however, the arrowhead passed them by and flew farther into the woods, giving another shrill cry with some other destination in mind. Almost as soon as it had gone, there was a sudden flurry of movement among the sticks and leaves of the forest floor.

Cheryl chuckled nervously, letting the small, tail-less mice they called furballs lighten the moment. If the tiny round rodents were on the move instead of silent and in hiding, local dangers once present must have gone. This also seemed to indicate that they did not consider the Furs a threat, despite that some of the mice had already been enjoyed as snacks by the Terran predators.

Jon cleared his throat and began walking again, letting the others in the hunting party follow him back to camp. He was not the leader of their hunt, but as he was the first one to shake off the eerie shudders of their conversation and head toward Second Chance, no one else wanted to stay behind.

On the move again, the hunters laughed and became the butt of their own jokes concerning their fears. They were predators and had just tried to chase down an animal larger than any of them, yet they had all trembled at unseen shadows and the cry of an ugly bird.

***

The hunting party emerged from the shadows of the woods and stepped out onto the lush green grass of the horseshoe shaped valley that had become home to the small colony. Now back in established territory, the group drifted apart and scattered to their whims.

Jon stopped for a moment and sat back on his haunches, looking out across the small valley sandwiched between the end of a long range of mountains and a forest. Second Chance is what they had named their new home. The place was originally to be the site of a human settlement a decade earlier, but they had never arrived at their destination, the interstellar colony ship having mysteriously disappeared without a trace sometime just after its descent from orbit. The planet had been quarantined for years afterward, but Bonestell was later given another opportunity for settlement, this time with a mixed group of genetically changed humans merged with predatory animals to grant them extra advantages for survival. So far, this second chance at colonization appeared to be successful at the start and the altered sons and daughters of Earth had managed to stake a claim to one small area of the new world.

Grey limestone and granite ringed the little valley on three sides, giving it a horseshoe shape with a small lake occupying the inner area of the toe of the horseshoe that was fed by a mountain spring. Above the lake was the opening to an unadorned, dry cavern system large enough to contain all of the modular geodesic domes of the entire colony. An array of solar collectors had been erected out on the western mountainside to power their limited amount of technology, primarily for the food refrigeration system, a few public lights within the cave and a communications unit for weekly reports back to Earth. There were other small devices they used, but power consumption for them was so meager as to be negligible.

A natural pathway from the cave to the floor of the valley was quickly becoming free of debris from the daily traffic of thirty-one sets of feet, and a wooden bridge built from left over packing crate material spanned the narrow river - though river might be too broad a term for the ribbon of water that exited the lake and meandered away through the forest. It was larger than a creek, though not as wide or deep as a running waterway that could be traveled by a canoe.

The valley floor was fully covered in short, pale green grass that was dotted here and there by tiny blue flowers. Although summer seemed to be waning with autumn just ahead, the flowers seemed to be continually tended by tiny flying insects. This in itself would not seem odd except that few of the alien flowers possessed either stamen or pistil for the production and reception of pollen as they did on Earth. In spite of this, the Terran bees that had been brought along to pollenate Terran vegetables seemed to do well for their tasks in conjunction with the native variety of bugs.

Fortunately for the Furs, however, none of the indigenous insects seemed interested in biting or stinging the alien settlers, possibly put off by strange blood or scents; there were some who wondered about this, but there were no complainers, especially since they had discovered nothing resembling fleas or ticks on this new world.

At a little over five acres, the level valley had plenty of room on the west side for livestock pens for the various animals that had been brought along, as well as space plowed for the gardens on the east side, with large amounts of real estate left over still covered in the native carpet. The livestock seemed to really like the flavor of the grass, which made a good nutritious supplement to the Terran feed brought along for them.

Standing bipedal in the rich soil of the garden was a golden retriever, swift fox and grey wolf methodically watering infant Terran plants that had been responding well to their botanical efforts in the fertile soil. Wendy, Michael and Ellie all chatted quietly as they worked with plastic buckets they filled from the lake. A mountain lioness at the northern end of the garden was humming quietly to herself as she worked on her knees in the dirt, her expert eyes studying the young growth for any signs of abnormality.

So intent on her work, the feline botanist did not see Jon cross the fence wire and pad up behind her on all fours. When he drew up beside her, he purposely bumped shoulders with her, but before she could react, he leaned close and affectionately rubbed his cheek against hers.

Kristen looked over at him with a delighted smile and then rubbed noses with him. Actions like this still surprised her, as she was so used to him being staunchly against a relationship for the greater part of two years she had known him. He usually did not display much affection publicly since they had become a couple, but whenever they were together in private, he always gave her his full attention. She sometimes wondered if he had been this way with the woman he had once been engaged for marriage before that relationship tanked, or if this was an attribute of his new feline nature. Whatever the source, she enjoyed it.

“How did the hunt go?” she asked, giving his disheveled fur a quick glance. He was dusty and bits of pampas-colored grass still clung to his tawny pelt, but she could neither smell nor see signs of prey blood from the hunt.

Jon settled down in the dirt row beside her, careful not to damage any of the plants. “We all did a lot of running after the beast,” he told her with a wry smile, “but we never could take it down. Just when we thought we’d had a chance to wear it out, its herd showed up and spoiled the party.”

“What happened, did anyone get hurt?”

The male cougar shook his head and described what had taken place. He ended by brushing the debris from his fur and shrugging his shoulders. “We didn’t get fresh meat for today, but there were lessons learned for the next time. Anyway, how are things going here?”

“Did you ever play with worms when you were growing up?” Kristen asked, digging her fingers into the dark soil between the rows.

Jon smiled. “Of course I did — almost all boys love getting dirty and playing with things like that. Didn’t we bring some along for the gardens?”

“Take a look at this.” The lioness pulled up a double handful of dirt and then broke it apart lightly with her fingers. Revealed in the palms of her hands were three very large earthworms, each nearly as thick as her fingers and proportionately long.

“Wow, aside of their size, these look just like the worms I played with and used as fishing bait as a boy in Colorado,” Jon said in amazement.

Kristen chuckled. “Believe it or not, these are the ones we brought with us from Earth. They really like this Bonestellan soil!”

“Are you sure those are ours? They’re huge!”

The lioness wriggled her fingers a little more and rolled one of the large worms aside. Nestled in the soil beneath it was another worm-like creature that had very little resemblance to its Terran cousins. It was as long and slender as those Jon was used to, but there were alternating black and red bands along its length and miniscule nodules protruding from its slick skin near what would have been its head.

“That is a Bonestellan earthworm, Jon. They’re all over the place in the soil — I’ve found them out here in the garden, in the dirt of the forest, and even out under the field where the Meriwether Lewis landed. As far as I can tell, they perform the same basic functions as ours do, aerating the soil and fertilizing it with their droppings. The ones we brought have gotten larger just in the weeks since we established our garden!”

Jon picked up one of the fat Terran worms and held it up for closer inspection. “Have you told Dr. Mochizuki about this?” he asked.

“Yes, and he was excited about it until I showed him the native earthworm too, and that interested him even more. He took several of each to examine and was going to catalog the new one.” Kristen smiled, putting the dirt and worms back into the ground.

“That red panda’s a scientist through and through,” Jon remarked, “but if you show these to Avon, he’ll probably just grab a fishing pole and run for the lake instead of studying it.”

Chapter 3

Oh, Deer

“I miss root beer,” Kevin remarked after lapping up water he had poured from his canteen into the padded palm of his hand; with a bifurcated upper lip, he could no longer drink it straight from the container without getting it all over himself. “I miss the flavor – especially one with a touch of butterscotch I used to drink.”

“We’ve only been here a month,” Erin reminded him. “Haven’t you ever gone more than a month without root beer before?”

“Yes, but it’s knowing I’ll never have it again that makes me miss it.”

“Poor lil’ fox,” she teased in her pixie-like voice. “No more root beer means the end of the world – even if it’s another world!”

Kevin Rockwell turned his black vulpine nose toward his companion and stuck out his tongue at her. He tried to give her a Bronx cheer, but the tongue on his lower lip was unable form enough of a seal to issue the intended raspberries at her.

Erin Sealock took the canteen and snickered at his failed attempt, so Kevin turned away smiling, back to the tiny wooden shack they had erected to house his meteorological equipment. They had put it up on the side of the mountain above the cave entrance where it would be out of the way of the colony.

Strangely enough, the simple shack seemed to attract a small swarm of tiny four-winged birds that were oddly similar to hummingbirds, though the local variety did not possess the bright plumage of their Terran cousins. Their black and silver feathers buzzed and shimmered in the sunlight, making them resemble minnows in a stream as they hovered around the shack. Perhaps it was the aroma of the treated wood of the original supply crates that interested the little buzzers, but they were almost an annoyance to Kevin whenever he needed to check the instruments inside.

There was a breeze blowing and it tousled his sandy blonde scalp hair into his eyes, so Erin reached up and brushed it out of the way for him. They were an interesting pair, these two Vulps. They were nearly a decade apart in age, but both were naturally short in stature and they had each chosen to become fennec foxes through the furmankind process. Although they had not known one another at the time of their transformations, it seemed no stretch of the imagination that these two would get together on their own simply due to their physical similarities.

Since Erin was the elder of the two, she often teased him about his inexperiences in life, but she was also the colony’s psychologist and knew just how much to clown around without causing him to take offense. They both had a natural positive outlook on life and they got along well.

Kevin was not yet twenty years of age, having joined up with the Anthro Human Colonization Program at eighteen at the behest of his parents. Although transformation into a Fur was a lifelong contract with the AHCP, they would all be awarded a prize of one million dollars into an interstellar bank account as Credits once they had served a five-year stay as part of a starter colony on a new world. It was the prize money that Kevin’s parents anticipated getting after that five-year wait, assuming he would never need the funds himself out on another planet. They did not seem to realize, however, that although some alien worlds had been discovered to be Earth-like, they were often dangerous in their unfamiliarity; Kevin would have to survive the first five years in order to claim the prize for his parents.

Fortunately, Bonestell appeared idyllic and although they would be learning only a few of her secrets in the years ahead, life there seemed promising. He was young, but Kevin had someone who cared for him and a job in the colony as its meteorologist. The weather had been mild since they had arrived, but if the patterns were anything like they were on Earth, things could change in an instant and he wanted to be able to study and read the signs before any surprises caught them unaware.

“So,” Erin said quietly after he had recorded the readings of his instruments into a note file on his Personal Business Juxtapositioner, a two-screen, multi-purpose tablet each of the Furs possessed, “what’s the forecast?”

Kevin studied the figures a moment more and then closed the clamshell case of the PBJ. He looked up at the sky and sniffed the easterly breeze. There were cirrus clouds high in the blue-green sky like long streamers; if the weather conditions were similar here as they were on Earth, he remembered what they portended.

“I think rain is coming.”

Erin looked down at the colony below them. “I wonder what he wants.”

Kevin snickered and shook his head. “Not Raine, our cheetah, but rain from the sky.”

Erin looked up toward the clouds. “Cheetahs can fly?” she asked quizzically.

Kevin blinked and opened his mouth to try again, but then he saw the twinkle in her eye as she looked askance at him. She could not hold her composure for more than a moment and then laughed at him. He grinned in response and shook his head; she was still teasing him.

He reached up and clamped her nose and bottom lip shut with his fingers and then gave her a smirk, but that did nothing to stifle her giggles when he tried to give her a stern, scolding look. He finally just shook his head again and turned his back on her so she would not see his grin.

The fennec vixen slipped her arms around his chest from behind and planted a delicate lick across the back of one of his large ears. “It’s going to rain,” she remarked at last in a calm voice. “How soon?”

Kevin enjoyed their antics, but he was glad to return to the subject of his observations. “Not today, I think,” he said after giving her question a moment’s thought. “Tomorrow, maybe thunderstorms.”

“You should inform Avon so he can let everyone know. The large dome Hank and Norman have been assembling in the field for the barn should be done soon, but because we’ve had no rain since we got here, I don’t think they’ve been in much of a hurry.”

“Jon said he thought the valley must flood periodically,” Kevin remembered. “What do we do with the animals if that happens? That dome’s not going to float like an ark.”

“We’ll probably pull them all into the cave with us,” his companion replied. “There’s room enough for them all back inside our huge cavern, but I’m sure some of the livestock won’t like being underground, even to stay dry.”

“Won’t we need to build pens in there for them in case that happens?”

“I don’t know that we have the materials to do that, but it wouldn’t hurt to suggest it to Avon when you give him your weather report.”

“That’s a good idea,” Kevin said.

“Of course it is,” Erin replied with a smile. “All my ideas are good!”

***

Sissy sat in the soft grass near the middle of the field in the horseshoe valley beneath the nameless mountain. It was nearly five acres overall, but one acre of the valley out by the trees was now occupied by various animal pens set up to corral their livestock. The horses, cattle, sheep and goats loved the taste of the alien grass and seemed content to graze on it without having to use up any of the feed that had been brought for them. This was a good thing, as the supplies could be held back for lean times during the coming winter. Just in the short time they had been there, it was apparent that some of the animals were already getting a little fatter from this grazing.

Even the chickens and guineas were enjoying the local bugs as a supplement to their feed. None of them had gotten sick on the local insects, which was encouraging, but no one wanted to be too optimistic that their new home was just as serene as it seemed. Complacency had a bad habit of playing havoc with the starter colonies that had gone to other worlds. This was the twenty-ninth settlement since the AHCP had begun sending Furs out among the stars, and although some of them had been unable to survive even with genetic enhancements, Second Chance was showing signs of promise.

The orange domestic feline closed her eyes and let the easterly breeze blow through her fur, listening to the delicate tinkling of small wind chimes that someone had brought along and hung in a tree on the far edge of the clearing. She was wearing a simple set of overalls today; they were loose on her, but she liked the way they allowed air to circulate between the fabric and her fur, keeping her cool in the late summer sun. She had been tempted to shed them altogether and stretch out in the warm grass; her fur was thick enough that she was sufficiently covered for privacy, but she had things to do despite the relaxed setting.

Much had gone on during the weeks since they had arrived, but setting up the camp, animal pens and gardens had left her with little time to do more than jot down a few notes on their daily activities. As the colony historian, it was up to her to keep a complete record of everything that went on, as well as everyone’s observations and discoveries on everything new around them.

A soft sound roused her attention and she opened her eyes. Not far away was a herd of the small deer that seemed to be so plentiful in the area. They had wandered in from the woods to eat at the small blue flowers that grew sporadically throughout the field. They enjoyed the pale green grass too, but they seemed especially fond of the flowers.

Despite the penned animals and the activity surrounding their care, the deer-like creatures were unafraid and unconcerned with the Terran colony. They were little larger than medium-sized family dogs, had tan hair adorned with tan vertical stripes that were only slightly darker, and would probably blend in so well as to disappear out in the tall prairie wheat-grass field beyond the woods. Their oversized ears flapped about to drive away tiny flying insects, and the stubby bit of tail they had vibrated almost comically whenever two got close to one another. One of the little deer looked back at her with grey eyes above prominent cheek bones in a triangular-shaped skull, but there was nothing more than lazy curiosity in its gaze.

She watched them in idle fascination for some minutes before she remembered why she was there. Away from the hustle and bustle of the colony proper, she had separated herself from the others so she could sit and recall the details that went with her simple notes without interruption. Dismissing the deer at last, she opened her PBJ and began typing away on its tiny screen keyboard with just her claw tips.

***

Sissy looked up when a shadow fell across her and saw the colony’s male red panda standing beside her. He was not looking down at her, however, but at the small herd of tiny deer around her in the meadow.

“Hello, Dr. Mochizuki,” she said in friendly greeting.

“Good afternoon, Miss Quinn,” the older furman replied formally, giving her a small bow. Once a respectable Japanese man, he was now a slender Fur that the Furmankind Institute had never planned to create. He and his wife were the only ones of their kind due to an unfortunate series of incidents, but despite this, they both seemed happy enough in their new work. “My Chieko tells me that your little friends are here every day to eat the grass and the blue flowers.”

The orange feline looked around her at the little deer with a smile. “They don’t seem to mind sharing the field with us,” she said with a sweep of her arm, “and the little flowers seem to grow back quickly.”

“Have they shown any fear or uneasiness around our people?”

“None at all. Either they don’t see us as predators, or they simply don’t care.”

The red panda put a hand up to his chin in thought. “Has anyone tried to chase them?”

“A few have tried just to see what they would do, but the deer don’t run from anyone. If you rushed toward them, they would merely step to the side to let you pass by and then just stand there looking at you.”

One of the smaller fawns darted by just then, kicking up its hooves in play with another, completely ignoring the two Furs from Earth. It was a tiny thing and it made the feline smile.

“What have you decided to call them? I have heard that you are trying to put names to everything, so you and I will have to compare notes.”

Sissy shrugged. “Due to their size, I was going to call them ‘dog deer’, but everyone else just simply calls them ‘deer’, so I didn’t figure they really need a special name. If anything, I’ll just call them ‘lil-deer’ if we need something official on the books.”

“Lil-deer?”

“Little deer, as in lil’ bitty deer,” she explained with an exaggerated southern accent.

“Ah, I see,” the doctor remarked with a smile. “How close will they let you get?”

Sissy laughed. “You can walk right up to them, and if you offer them flowers, they’ll let you pet them. They have the cutest tail wag when you touch them.”

“Interesting. Have you tried to pick up one off the ground?”

“Yes, they’re completely docile. I’ve never seen such a passive animal before. Aaron said he saw one of the large pigs kill and eat one out in the wheat-grass field. The unfortunate little deer didn’t even try to get away, but it did cry out as it died, so I know it felt pain.”

“Were there any others around at that time?”

“Aaron said there were, but they didn’t seem frightened or alarmed, even though one of them had just been killed in their midst.”

“The thunderpigs, as your friend Mr. Nicholas has been campaigning to have them called, are omnivores,” the doctor mused. “They primarily eat plants and roots, but they will also take fresh meat on occasion. I suppose the, uh, lil-deer is an available food source to them where it doesn’t take any expenditure of energy to take.” He knelt down beside the orange cat and looked out at the herd. “It’s curious, though. Usually it’s the animals, fish, birds, reptiles and insects with a perfect defense that are mostly unafraid. Of defenses, I see none with these deer. The rules of Bonestellan life must be different for some.”

“I’ve seen none with anything resembling horns or antlers on either male or female. Do the deer interest you?” Sissy asked.

“Of course they do,” he answered with a nod. “I am a geneticist and a biologist. I have been examining and documenting all I can since we arrived, and there’s been so much that I’ve not had to go far from the colony to find interesting specimens.”

“Now you want to examine the deer?”

“I do. Have you seen any larger than these?”

“The biggest one I’ve seen is a male about the size of a German shepherd, but most aren’t that big. I don’t see him today, though. The fawns, like that ones that just ran by, are even tinier.”

Sissy picked several of the blue flowers near her and then held them out at arm’s length toward the closest deer about ten yards away, a small female. The animal’s black eyes saw her offering and walked calmly to her. Without hesitation, the doe pulled the plants from her fingers with soft lips and ate them contentedly.

“See?”

The doctor smiled. “Yes, I do.” He had noticed the deer’s small blunt teeth and watched it eat for a moment. He glanced over at Sissy, suddenly hesitant as he stood up again and put his hands into the pockets of his furman robe. “Miss Quinn…”

“Please call me Sissy,” she replied with a friendly smile.

The doctor gave her a brief bow of his head. “Sissy,” he began again, “would you mind if I took one of your little friends to examine in my research?”

“Not at all. Why would I mind?”

“Because I want to study its internal organs and Captain Avon has also asked me to determine if the deer can be considered a possible food source for our colony,” he said.

Sissy frowned. He intended to kill one of them in the name of science, and although that was one of the reasons they were there, she was not sure she liked the idea. She looked back across the field toward the animal pens and knew that this would be no different than some of the animals they had brought with them intended as a food source to feed them all. Thoughts of fried chicken or roasted lamb often made her drool, and she had been craving a hamburger for days. For all she knew, the lil-deer might one day make her drool at the thought of eating one of their steaks. They were certainly plentiful enough and in no danger of extinction.

She sighed, but then gestured out toward the herd of twenty or so deer. Sometimes more would come into the field to graze, but there were others scattered throughout the neighboring forest too.

“Go ahead,” she said at last. “We’ve got to eat and these might get us through the lean times if we can’t grow our own. It just seems a shame to kill them when they are so friendly.” The doe she had fed had come closer and was now eating the grass beside the seated feline’s feet. She reached out and scratched the little deer gently on the back of her neck and the short tail began vibrating in response.

“Thank you,” the doctor said graciously. “I will be humane and treat her with dignity.” He pulled a length of cord from his pocket and fashioned a loop at one end. He approached the deer beside Sissy and calmly drew the loop over her head. When he pulled gently on it, the deer followed him away as if she had always known what a leash was for.

Sissy watched Dr. Mochizuki lead the lil-deer back toward the cave and silently bid the animal goodbye. She picked up the PBJ at her side and then proceeded to document the incident in her daily log so they would have a record of what had transpired that day in the colony.

***

Inside the cavern within a dome that had been erected for biological research, Dr. Mochizuki was methodically removing each of the lil-deer’s organs and setting them out on a folding table set up with an array of shallow pans beneath a bright LED lamp.

Upon another table was the body of one of the long, muddy brown amphibious creatures that had until recently lived in the lake and along its shallow river. Called a ‘snizard’ by the colonists, it was a snake-like lizard, but instead of having ventral scales for motion, it possessed six webbed feet – two near the head, two near the back end and two in the middle. Its head was long and slender with numerous bony spikes stuck out at all angles from its cranium and they had been witnessed using them as defensive weapons against the arrowhead birds that often preyed upon them. Sometimes the defense was successful, but usually ineffective against their large aerial enemies. The snizards had largely ignored the Furs thus far, treating them as neither friend nor foe nor food.

Masanori Mochizuki’s wife Chieko was recording everything he dictated, noting them into her PBJ as he examined the lil-deer’s inner secrets. Without realizing that he was doing so, the doctor was speaking in his native Japanese for each new discovery or hypothesis.

Although not arranged in the abdomen entirely in a manner familiar to him, he was able to identify, or at least make an educated guess on the function of each organ. There was one major curiosity, however, that had him stumped.

All throughout the animal’s muscle tissue was a black, oily residue that defied his interpretation on function and substance. The stuff was unknown to his knowledge and would require further chemical analysis; although similar in texture to crude petroleum oil, a small amount exposed over the flame of a candle proved it was not flammable. He suspected it might be a disease of some kind, but the deer had appeared otherwise healthy.

The only way he might know for certain about diseased tissue would be to look at another specimen. He had no reservations against killing another deer for comparison, but he felt a little pang of guilt taking another without Sissy’s knowledge. They did not belong to her, and neither had she forbidden him from taking more, but he knew that in the short time they had been on Bonestell that she had taken a liking to the small animals.

He and his wife continued the analysis while he awaited an opportune time to get another, and in the meantime he determined that there was nothing in the deer’s anatomy that should be harmful for the furmen to ingest. Even the black, oily substance did not appear harmful, but he did not want to take a chance until he knew what it was. The thunderpigs had eaten one without apparent harm, but all that might mean is that its digestive system was naturally designed to process it.

***

Later in the evening, he wandered out into the field again, feigning interest in the sheep that Arne tended behind a woven wire fence, amazed that they were so calm around the African lion. The large Fur might look ferocious, but the animals he tended seemed to trust him implicitly to protect them. The notion brought to mind an old adage of a lion and a lamb lying down together in harmony.

When the doctor did not see Sissy anywhere in the vicinity, he walked purposely out to the few lil-deer still around and selected one of each gender to take back with him using a length of cord with loops on both ends. He slipped one of these over each of the deer and then held the line in the middle. Neither of the deer resisted when he walked calmly back toward the cave, following quietly in his footsteps. If either knew it was walking towards death, there seemed to be no concern.

Chapter 4

Steak Dance

Hiamovi Avonaco was the largest member of Second Chance. He was also its officially appointed captain, although he did not actually use that title himself. To everyone who knew him personally, he answered to Avon as readily as his more complex given name. Despite his size as a Kodiak grizzly bear, the former Native American Cheyenne had a gentle nature — that is until human bureaucracy intruded upon his peace of mind.

It was well known to every Fur that went through transformation in the Anthro Human Colonization Program that their primary purpose was to begin “starter colonies” on habitable planets so that the overcrowded masses could one day immigrate and relieve the pressure from Mother Earth.

When he had first joined the AHCP and signed away the rest of his life as a Fur, Avon had been full of optimism and enthusiasm for the adventure, but a last weekend on the town prior to leaving Earth thoroughly dimmed his opinion of humanity as a whole. Although retaining full human rights within the international legal system, Furs were viewed as little more than sub-humans by a great many societies across the Terran globe and he had been treated as such during a time when he should have been savoring his world prior to leaving it forever.

Although he knew the mission of Second Chance was to establish a foothold on the world of Bonestell and learn as much about it as possible before humanity could move in years later, he could now care less for the Earth and its people. Avon’s vision had so narrowed that it encompassed nothing more than the thirty lives he led. They would do their best to stake a claim upon a world with no sapient life forms beyond themselves and to learn to live with the land and life already there.

To Avon, this was home.

Typically, a starter colony was comprised of no less than thirty-two Furs all of the same species. He had originally been assigned as the captain to an upcoming all-ursine colony, but due to a recent disaster of disease on another world that completely decimated its feline colonial population, the mandate was changed so that the next group that went out was a mixed group of all four classes of Furs — Ursis, Felis, Canis and Vulps.

While this might help the colony survive if some affliction affected one or more of the types, it also severely hampered the members’ ability to reproduce if the relationships were right. Instead of thirty-two bears, each with his or her own genetic history for diversity, there were now only seven or eight of each Fur class, and the ratio of males to females in each of them was not exactly balanced.

Most of Second Chance had gone through transformation together and were familiar with one another, but Avon had been afraid from the moment the announcement of a mixed group had been given that such reduced numbers of potential mates would cause conflict in time.

Due to a few losses before they had even left the Earth, there were now only seven bears on this entire world, and only two of those were female. Likewise, there were only seven each of the canines and felines, and although the foxes had the full eight members, they were also the only class with an equal number of genders. The fact that the colony also possessed two red pandas was a fluke, a mistake, but in that case the pair of them was already a married couple.

Although they had all grown up in societies that frowned upon multiple partners for the sake of genetic diversity in reproduction, cold reality theorized that monogamy might not be a practical practice in such a mixed group. Granted, he saw nothing wrong if a feline female and a canine male — or any such mix — wanted to pair up, but there would be no chance for species reproduction even with their common human genetics. If the bears wanted to populate their world with more bears, however, there were limited choices available to them. It was likewise for the red pandas. Already married, they could breed and produce offspring, but the diverse genetic line would end there.

For some of them, it appeared that reproducing may not be an option at all, and that could cause chaos down the road. They were contracted to stay here for at least five years, but most of the starter colonies had lived on at their original locations even after later human immigrants moved in to other parts of their worlds. The best this mixed group could hope for would be to survive intact for the duration of their contract and then request additional Furs to build up and strengthen their numbers with new blood and genetic diversity.

Avon smiled to himself, looking up at the domed ceiling of his modular quarters from his pallet on the floor. This was a subject that would be best kept quiet. There would be no use in bringing it to anyone’s attention, even though he was sure that the issue had not likely gone unnoticed to others as well. The grizzly bear captain had no prospective relationship with either Alicia or Dara, the Ursis females, but he admitted to himself that it would be nice; they were both quite lovely for their species. It would be up to them, however, to decide if they would be willing to share themselves between multiple partners. No one else could make that decision for them, not even the captain of the colony.

His thoughts were interrupted by a muffled rumbling. Kevin had predicted the possibility of thunderstorms moving into the area and it might have been distant thunder he had heard. They had had relatively good weather since they had arrived, but a little rain could be welcomed for the gardens.

The bear looked at his special wrist watch. Although they had all been on Bonestell for a little over a month, Avon still had not gotten used to the thirty-six hour days. Eighteen hours of daylight and eighteen hours of night could be divided up equally into nine hour work shifts, which were only an hour longer than the typical eight hour shifts back home, but it severely messed with his internal sense of time.

There was no set schedule for when his people was awake or asleep, and if someone needed another to help out with something, more times than not you would find that person on a sleep cycle at any time of the day or night.

It was currently twenty-six o’clock. A bit of mental calculation informed him that it approximated to eight in the evening on Earth and yet he had just had a full night’s rest – even if it was not nighttime yet.

He decided to get up and see what might be available from the galley and slipped on his furman shorts and a loose pocketed vest before he stepped out into the cavern that housed the colony.

***

Although the sun itself could not be seen due to an overcast sky, there was enough morning light that filtered through to herald a new day at Second Chance. While it was just daybreak, some had been up for hours at their tasks.

Cheryl Dalton stood beside a palomino mare, brushing the blonde mane with a wide brush and talking to the horse in a quiet voice as she worked. The four Arabian horses that had been brought along with them had been raised at the Furmankind Institute and were so used to Furs that none of them were afraid of having these particular predators upon their backs or otherwise interacting with them. The horses were never intended as livestock to be eaten, but were purposed to pull the plows and carts or serve as pack animals for the furmen or their supplies when out exploring the countryside.

While the Border collie worked with the mare, Ivan Dimitri readied a western saddle for a dark grey stallion to take him out for a short ride. Long exploratory excursions had not yet been authorized, but taking the horses out away from their corral for a little bit helped give them exercise as well as strengthen the bond between the horse and rider.

The male red fox led the animal out through the gate and then latched it behind him. He put a foot in a stirrup and then swung up onto the saddle. A strap to the supply knapsack he wore on his back slid off one shoulder, so he adjusted it and then leaned forward over the saddle horn.

“Are you sure you won’t go with me?” he asked the canine. Cheryl looked up at him beneath the brim of her cowgirl hat and quietly shook her head.

“No, but thank you for asking. I’m feeling a little under the weather; I will help groom the horses, but I don’t feel up to riding today.”

“Okay, I understand,” said the fox with a frown. They were not supposed to go out away from the camp unless with a partner, but he was determined to go. He would just have to consider the horse as his partner. “I hope you feel better soon.”

“Thank you, Ivan.”

The fox tugged lightly on the reins and led his mount toward the natural wide avenue that the supply trucks had originally driven in through the forest from the colony ship. In honor of the ship that had brought them here, some were calling it Meriwether Lane. Before he disappeared under the canopy, he heard someone call out to him.

“Good morning, Ivan.”

He looked to the left toward the grey boulders of the mountain’s foot and saw another fox sitting atop a large rock, the remnants of her breakfast upon a cloth napkin beside her. The red-furred vixen smiled at him and he pulled his horse to a stop.

“Good morning, Rose,” he said politely, giving her a small tilt of his chin.

“Where are you headed?”

Ivan patted the stallion gently on the side of his neck. “I’m just taking Halley out for some exercise. We’re not going far, just out to the landing field and then back along the other trail.”

“Would you like some company?”

The male raised his eyebrows and twitched his whiskers. Despite being a male red fox, none of the vixens had ever shown interest in him before. Perhaps it was the secluded setting of a faraway world, but he was not going to question the good fortune of her attention.

He held out at hand toward her with a smile. “Yes, I would love your company; Halley can carry us both easily.”

Rose grinned and wrapped up the remnants of her meal in the napkin, stuffing the bundle into the overlarge pocket of her furman robe. She took his proffered hand and he lifted her up onto the horse in front of him. Once she had arranged her tail comfortably between them, he wrapped an arm lightly around her middle and then gave the reins a light tap. Halley snorted and then resumed walking along the now-familiar avenue through the woods.

They travelled for several moments in companionable silence. Ivan enjoyed having the female leaning back against him, and Rose was likewise comfortable having his arms around her. Neither of them wanted to break the silence, but after several minutes, something caught the vixen’s eye.

“Look at that,” she whispered.

Between the trunks of two trees with black, twisted bark was a huge translucent web suspended several feet above the ground. The designs and patterns were unlike anything the spiders of Earth ever weaved, but had their own beauty. There were several leaves, bits of windblown grass with tufts of fur and feathers stuck to the web in places, but no creatures that they could see. Either the forest life had avoided it thus far or the maker of the web had already dispatched its victims.

Ever since the arrival on Bonestell, the colonists had discovered that the local biting insects and parasites enjoyed the Terran animals just as they did their native wildlife, but they tended to leave the Furs alone. Although there was yet any conclusive proof, there were some who conjectured that the remnant of goetazine in their cells was probably distasteful to the alien pests. Whatever it was in the chemical agent that had been used to transform humans into hybrid furmen seemed an added blessing to the colony.

Despite the fact that some of the Furs thought they could practically play with the local insects without the worry of getting eaten, neither Ivan nor Rose wanted to test the theory on something that could weave such a web. They studied it for another moment and were about to resume their travel when a large four-winged insect fluttered into the web and became instantly mired in the sticky surface.

There was instant movement from an upper corner of the web, though the Furs almost did not see it at first. A creature with six multiple-jointed legs sported the same color as its web, and in spite of the tacky threads it moved across them quickly without sticking to it.

Ivan swallowed when he finally got a good look at the web maker. Its large swollen abdomen was attached to an ugly cephalothorax - the fused head and thorax of an Earthly spider that held the legs - and the front part seemed to be almost all mouth without any mandibles, instead containing what looked like several dozen tiny needle teeth stuck out in multiple directions. It had lidless eyes all around the core of its leathery body, no doubt giving it the ability to see in all directions at once, and it even appeared to be staring at the Furs even as it descended upon the luckless insect.

Ivan and Rose watched in stupefied horror as that grotesque mouth clamped down upon the exoskeleton of the hand-sized bug in its web with an audible crunch. Insects from Earth did not possess vocal cords, but this one had something analogous to them and it let out an agonized shriek as the Bonestellan spider systematically ripped its body to shreds before swiftly devouring it. Rose turned away as it made quick work of the insect, and when it had finished, it retreated to another corner, spun around twice upon the web and then became still, blending in perfectly with its environment.

The foxes had the distinct impression it was looking at them as a potential meal, so Ivan quickly nudged the horse with a toe so they could move away before it had a chance to come after them for a nibble. As they rode away, Ivan looked back with a shudder.

“I’m going to have nightmares of that for a week,” he muttered.

***

Practically the entire population of Second Chance had gathered within the Great Dome. Seated at a table in the middle of the large room was Jon Sunset, a plate, napkin, utensils and a cup of water before him. There were murmurs all around as everyone waited for the show, but things got quiet when a path opened up and Kim Tanaka stepped through with a small bowl and a pair of tongs.

She gave the mountain lion a smile and then used the tongs to pull out a foil wrapped object. She placed it on his plate and then reached into her apron pocket to retrieve a shaker each of salt and pepper. She set these next to his plate and then reached into the apron once more for a few small packets of real butter and sour cream similar to those found in restaurants everywhere in North America back on Earth.

Jon licked his lips as he carefully peeled open the foil and picked up a knife and a fork so he could prepare his imported Idaho baked potato. The familiar smell made several others swallow in anticipation as he split the tuber and doctored it up to taste. Kim retrieved the foil and carefully folded it so it could be cleaned and used again, and by the time Jon had finished preparing his spud, Kim’s sister Yuki stepped forward with another plate. Upon it was a six-ounce steak cooked to a steaming golden brown.

After Doctor Mochizuki had reported that he thought the meat from the lil-deer could be safely eaten, Jon had volunteered to become the first to try a steak from one. The red panda had told him and Avon about the unknown residue within the muscle tissue of the animals that he was still analyzing, but Jon was willing to try it anyway, thinking that the oily fluid might cook out of the meat under a good flame, despite that the stuff itself was not flammable.

He licked his lips when the Akita set the steak in front of him and his potato was momentarily forgotten. Before he could touch the meat with his utensils, Norman bumped him with an elbow.

Jon looked up at the black bear with a grin. “Are you sure you want to eat that?” Norman asked, his eyes glued to the food upon the plate. No one had tasted it yet, but the aroma that permeated the air in the room was mouthwatering. The mountain lion pushed his elbow away with his own, grinning and giving the bear a mock growl.

“My steak!” he exclaimed.

“Hurry up and take a bite!” Michael complained. “How does it taste?”

Anticipating the meal as much as any of them, Jon made a show of cutting into the steak with exaggerated movements. Black juice seeped out of the meat but the internal aroma escaped with the steam and caressed hungry noses. He sliced off three pieces and then mentally prepared himself.

The physicians were ready. Ken stood nearby with a bottle of ipecac syrup to induce him to throw up in case the cougar was inadvertently poisoned by the foreign food and Jenni watched him carefully from his other side.

Jon skewered a piece with his fork and then lifted it to his mouth. There was a collective breath-holding as he pulled it in with his teeth and began to chew. The crowd watched him intently. He rolled his eyes at first from the taste, but then he stopped chewing and looked down at the plate. He chewed a little more, stopped for a moment, chewed again, and stopped. He moved the meat around with his tongue and then he blinked twice in rapid succession.

“Uh oh,” Manny said. “That’s not a good sign.”

“Are you okay?” Kristen asked.

Jon nodded briefly and then chewed it some more. He finally swallowed it and then licked his lips before lapping up a long drink of water. Avon hovered to the side and looked at him seriously.

“What is it?” the grizzly asked.

Jon poked the remaining steak with the tines of the fork and a little more of the black juice seeped out. He cleared his throat and frowned.

“The meat itself is not bad,” he told them all, “but this black juice in it tastes a little like… like roofing tar… with the texture of petroleum jelly.”

“Eww,” Jasmine responded. Several others made faces, but the cougar shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s probably an acquired taste,” he said. He scooped up a bit of the baked potato with his fork and then skewered another piece of the meat with it. Without hesitation this time, he ate it all together under the watchful eyes of Second Chance.

Even with the familiar additional flavor of the potato, the taste of the meat and its juices did not change. With so many people watching, he cut off more pieces and ate them bit by bit, but instead of getting used to the flavor, the taste seemed to worsen with each bite.

He managed to get down approximately half of the small steak before he stuck out his tongue, pushed the plate away and shook his head. “That’s all I can do,” he confessed. “It’s not getting any better!”

“How do you feel?” Ken asked him.

Jon thought about it before answering, but he shrugged and looked up at the red wolf. “I feel fine,” he said, reaching for the remnants of his baked potato. “Aside from the foulness on my tongue, I’m okay.” He ate the rest of his potato in hopes the flavor of the butter and sour cream would overcome the deer meat.

“Do you feel queasy?” Jenni asked. Jon shook his head and swallowed the last bite.

“No ill effects,” he confirmed. “No buzz, no dizziness, no heavy feeling in my stomach – just a bad taste in my mouth.”

Hank stepped up to the table and eyed the remaining steak. “Do you mind if I try it?” he asked. “Not all people like the same things. Maybe this is just something that doesn’t appeal to your taste, but it might be okay to me.”

The cougar finished off his water, wiped his mouth and then stood up from the table. “Be my guest,” he said.

Hank grinned widely at the others around him. The chair squeaked a little beneath the black bear’s weight when he sat down, and he immediately picked up the knife and fork to slice off a few more squares. With relish and anticipation, he held up one piece to his nose and breathed in the aroma. If the juices had a smell, he could not detect one, so he put the meat into his mouth and began to chew. He stopped almost immediately and then looked up at Jon.

He forced himself to finish chewing and swallow it, but with everyone around him watching, he felt compelled to eat more or face ridicule. After that first piece hit his stomach, however, he was no longer enthusiastic, as if he had been a child eating vanilla ice cream only to discover the taste of a strong onion inside.

After forcing himself to eat four pieces, he grabbed Jon’s used napkin and began rubbing off his tongue vigorously. Many around him laughed at his plight, but Jon sympathized with the bear’s action. It took a moment before he felt like he could talk, and when he did, Hank looked around feeling embarrassed.

He pulled out a five dollar bill from the pocket of his overalls and tossed it upon the table. Worthless in this setting, it was a leftover relic from their lives on Earth, but it was something he had carried with him since their departure.

“Five bucks to anyone who actually likes this stuff,” he said with a grumble.

“I’ll try it,” Arne said. Everyone looked over at the African lion, but he held up a hand and peered over at Kim and Yuki. “Cook up another, medium well for me, but give it lots of seasoning if you have it.”

Kim looked back at him, the lynx’s eyes narrowed in amusement. “We have the seasoning and several more baked potatoes, if you like.”

“Sure, give me one of those too, fully loaded.”

***

Arne was now at the center of attention. Jon watched from the sidelines as the food was brought to the new victim and he had to suppress a shudder. Jenni and Kristen stood on each side of him and he had grown irritated at how many times the leopard had asked him how he was feeling. He knew she was just checking on him to make sure there were no side effects to eating the alien deer meat, but Jon was truthful when he said he was okay.

The African lion gave everyone around him a confident smile, bypassed the potato and went straight for the steak. He cut off one piece, examined the inside to make sure it had been cooked to his request, and then popped it into his mouth.

Everyone watched in rapt attention, but a good number of them were not surprised at the expected result. Arne chewed on it for only a moment before he spat it out onto the table.

“That’s disgusting, Arne!” Sissy exclaimed, backing away from the table.

The large feline pointed at the offending cut of meat with his fork. “That is what’s disgusting!” he snarled. He whirled around to Yuki and growled at her. “Did you feed me rotten meat?”

“No!” the Akita barked back at him, her ears flat against her head. “It was fresh and so was Jon’s!”

“At least Jon ate half his steak,” Dara called from the crowd. “All you did was taste it.”

Arne’s tail swished back and forth behind him in agitation. He gritted his teeth and cleared his throat noisily before picking up his knife and cutting off another piece, leaving the first bite sitting on the table.

Offended at being accused that he could not do what Jon had done, he was now determined to eat more than the mountain lion had. He tried what the other had done and scooped up baked potato, butter and sour cream on his fork and then skewered another piece of deer steak with it. He put it all in his mouth and he made an effort to try to ignore the oily taste of the juices.

He chewed quickly, not allowing the flavor to stay on his tongue any longer than it had to, and swallowed it with a gulp. He grabbed his water, downed half the glass without lapping, and then repeated the process. By the third bite, however, the taste was making him want to throw it back up.

“Did we bring any steak sauce with us from Earth?” he gasped.

“We did,” Yuki answered, pulling a handy bottle from her apron she had ready. She set it on the table beside him and he snatched it up right away. He opened the plastic bottle and applied a liberal amount to the meat.

“Hey, not so much!” Kim complained. “We have to make that last! They only sent us one case to last us the whole time we’re here!” Arne dismissed her with a wave of his hand and picked up his fork.

It did not help. In spite of the spiced flavors of the sauce, that fourth bite was as much as he could do. He did manage to swallow it down, but he slammed a hand flat upon the table and then pushed away the rest of it.

“Can’t do it…” he admitted. “Too rancid!”

There were chuckles from the crowd, but no one stepped forward to take his place at the table. After several moments, Avon stepped forward and looked down at the remaining steak upon the plate. He dipped a finger in the oily residue and then lifted it up to his tongue. After only the barest taste, he grimaced and wiped off his tongue onto the fur of his arm.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose it’s no wonder there are so many of the lil-deer; nothing else with good sense would eat one.” Looking back at Arne, he asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Just embarrassed,” the feline confessed. “I need a wire scrub brush to get the taste off my tongue, though.”

“How’s your stomach?” Ken asked.

“Still hungry, but otherwise okay,” the lion said, reaching for his neglected baked potato. “I think we should just throw out the rest of the deer meat and leave the wretched things alone.”

Alicia stepped around the pair of red pandas watching the proceedings quietly and moved up to the table. “One last time,” she said to Kim and Yuki. “Since becoming a Fur, I tend to prefer eating meat on the rare side like many of you do, but maybe this needs to be cooked well-done.” She picked up the plate with the remaining steak and handed it to the lynx. “Leave the sauce on it and cook this some more, and then bring it back to me with a side of those local tubers Kristen found. Maybe I can eat it that way.”

“What if you can’t?” Manny asked.

“Then we do as Arne recommends and just leave the dear little deer alone like everything else around here does. Maybe Sissy can make pets out of them since we won’t be able to count them as a food source.”

Thirty minutes later, Alicia threw the remains of her deer steak forcefully across the room, ending the great experiment.

***

Jenni had finally taken Jon at his word and stopped asking how he felt. If he was going to develop stomach trouble from eating the lil-deer steak, it was likely he would have felt its effects by now, but two hours after the meal, he was unharmed.

It was while he was helping Norman and several others work on the barn for the animals when it happened. At first, he began noisily passing gas. There was a foul odor to it and those in the building with him moved quickly outside with rude remarks, but after a short time, he could feel a familiar quivering of his insides.

Knowing what was about to transpire, Jon jumped out onto all fours and loped as fast as his insides could handle toward the latrines. There were four porta-potty type pods built over a series of pits he had helped dig on First Day. They were located on the opposite end of the horseshoe shaped valley from the lake, and just inside the forest.

He had just made it inside to the seat of the closest one before his insides descended in explosive diarrhea. He groaned from intestinal cramping and was unable to move from the seat for a long while, but before he thought he was finished, someone tried to yank the locked door from his pod. He was about to yell out at the person, but whomever it was hurriedly grabbed the next one.

From the sounds and smells that tried to override his own, Jon knew that Hank was afflicted with the same intestinal horror that besieged him. The bear groaned and moaned in his agony.

Near exhausted from repeated internal barrages, Jon leaned against the side of the latrine, panting for fresh air and getting nothing but the strong odor he and Hank had generated.

Several moments later, someone else tried to get in through his door and then just as frantically tried to get into Hank’s. The bear cursed the ancestry of whoever it was and then the door slammed shut on the third pod. Jon recognized Arne’s roars of pain and indignation, and he almost wished he had earmuffs to blot out the other sounds the African lion was making.

Yet another bout of cramps hit the cougar and he doubled over on his seat. There was a rapid set of knocks upon his door, but these were not frantic.

“Oc… occupied,” he stammered weakly.

“Jon!” said Ken’s lupine voice. “I saw three of you running for the latrines. Are you okay in there?”

Arne’s nether regions made a loud and rude noise before Jon wearily replied, “Not okay. My butt’s on fire…”

“Can you open the latch, please?” the lupine doctor said, barely suppressing a snicker despite the groans of agony all three were making. “I need a sample.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Jon gasped.

“I also have bottles of water and several loperamide hydrochloride tablets for each of you, but I must have a sample of what you’re expelling to examine for any toxins you may have ingested.”

The request might have been amusing if not for the painful cramping of further expulsion. Over the course of the past year, Jon had experienced several instances where he had believed he was actually dying, but nothing compared to the pain and stink of today.

“Do we have anyone trained as a chaplain?” Hank gasped out from the next pod. “I need someone to read Last Rites for me!”

Arne burst out laughing from another door, but then went suddenly quiet when the cramping robbed him of his breath. He knew how Hank felt and was suddenly visualizing being buried in an unmarked grave on this alien world; death would be a relief.

Unsure how he managed it, Jon unlatched the door and Ken’s red-furred hand reached in with a small box. Inside was a specimen container, a zipped baggie of little green pills and a plastic bottle of water with a built-in straw in its lid. The cougar fumbled with the pills and downed several with the water before he picked up the plastic container for his “sample”. This was not going to be fun – or very clean.

“How’s Alicia?” he asked weakly. “She ate that foul meat too.”

“She never made it this far,” the red wolf replied. “She ran off into the bushes and is probably still out there frightening away all the wildlife in the area. Jenni’s tending to her now. How are you feeling?”

“I’m going to have one of the four cleanest colons on Bonestell,” the cougar said, borrowing something Kevin had told him on the space station. He let out a grateful sigh when the current cramps eased up for a moment.

“Nice,” Ken responded as rude sounds continued from the other latrines. “Anything else?”

“Gimmee some of those pills,” Hank pleaded from his pod. In spite of his agony, he had apparently listened in on the conversation.

“Me too!” Arne cried out. “Although arsenic or cyanide would end my misery just as well, if you got ‘em!”

Ken went to each of the latrine pods and handed water bottles and pills to the other guys, nearly wanting to pass out himself due to the overwhelming stench coming from them all. This was such a time when having the sensitive olfactory senses of a Fur could be a curse.

“Here’s your sample,” Jon said weakly. “On the floor by the door. I need a bath now, and it’s not going to be a feline tongue bath.”

***

“I thought I’d find you up here.”

Jon opened his eyes, looked at Avon and shook his head. “I barely had the energy to crawl up here,” he answered, “but I figured it was the only place of privacy I had to get away from everyone.”

The mountain lion was stretched out on his belly, his head near the edge of a flat slab of rock that had separated from the mountainside at some time in the distant past and had fallen over near the edge of the cliff.

It had become his favorite lookout spot with a nice view of the lake, the valley and the forest beyond, all surrounded by the foothills of the mountain. He was above and to the side of the cavern entrance and could see those who were just outside in the evening shadows. The sun had been obscured all day behind the remnants of rain clouds that had passed over the mountains, though none of it had actually reached the little valley. With the clouds breaking up, there was still a soft glow of the sun on the horizon.

“I know you’re tired of hearing this,” the grizzly said, taking a seat on the rock beside him, “but how are you feeling?”

“Exhausted and wrung out,” the feline replied. “I’ve never had such a powerful laxative before, not even when I’ve had a colonoscopy.”

“Laxative is right,” Avon told him. “Ken and Masanori have been studying your stool samples and more of the residue in the deer meat, and the gas chromatograph has revealed that it’s high in magnesium citrate, a strong laxative. Apparently that’s the lil-deer’s defense against predators. Once something takes one down and eats it, the predator is likely to leave the rest of them alone from then on.”

“That’s why there are so many of the little darlings…”

“That’s why. We figure that the thunderpig we witnessed killing and eating one was either blocked and knew it needed a cleansing, or the native pigs have a digestive system that can process the laxative without an issue.”

“The thunderpigs apparently have no taste buds either,” Jon muttered. “That stuff is awful.”

“Fortunately for you all, there should be no other lasting effects from the alien meat, which is completely digestible in itself, but I doubt we’ll be making any ready meals out of the lil-deer due to your lax-adaisical discovery.”

Jon groaned at the pun and the grizzly smiled, patting his friend gently on the shoulder. “Due to your valiant sacrifice trying to establish an extra food source for Second Chance, I want you, Hank, Arne and Alicia to take a couple days off from colony activities. Let your insides settle and recuperate.”

“Thanks, boss, though I may never volunteer for anything ever again.”

Chapter 5

Here Be Dragons

Despite her night-sighted feline eyes, Sissy felt lost in the gloom of a supply dome that contained non-perishable supplies. An electric line from the solar generator system had been considered unnecessary to illuminate the equivalent of a supply closet, so a hand-generated LED torch flashlight had been left by the door for any who needed to be inside. The orange domestic cat turned the hand crank of the torch several times before she had sufficient illumination to see the labels on countless cardboard and plastic boxes.

The first container she looked in held several hundred small plastic compasses, the type usually found as prizes in breakfast cereals and toy vending machines. They were a little over an inch in diameter and were all in a bright variety of colors, but although not as specifically accurate as an expensive compass, they still worked surprisingly well for direction based upon magnetic north. Sissy wondered if they were a valid supply for the colony, or someone’s sense of humor back at AHCP headquarters. Still, she pocketed one, just in case it might come in handy later.

Going through the containers, she remembered their first few days when no one could find a can opener to get into any of the hundreds of food canisters that had been shipped with them. Whether it was meant as a practical joke or just an administrative error, the can openers had been found packed away with general supplies instead of with the kitchen utensils and equipment. It had become a running gag amongst them all that if you could not find something where it was supposed to be, it was suggested to look for it with the can openers.

Several minutes later, the orange feline still had not found what she was looking for within the contents of other containers, but a voice from the doorway startled her.

“What’cha looking for?”

Sissy jumped and whirled around so swiftly that she stumbled into a stack of boxes beside her. Her eyes were dilated from the dim light and the look of surprise on her face made the golden retriever laugh aloud.

“Wow, I knew the house cats were high-strung, but I think that’s the first time I’ve seen it so well-defined in a Fur!”

Sissy put a hand up to her chest and flashed a feline-fanged grin in embarrassment. Normally her hearing was quite sensitive, but she had been so fixated upon her search that she hadn’t heard the canine’s steps.

“Hi, Wendy,” she said after a moment. “Yes, I guess I was so focused that you surprised me!”

“May I help you find something?” the Canis asked, her tail wagging gently.

“Thank you. I’ve been having some trouble with my PBJ over the past couple days and I’m afraid it’s developed hardware problems.”

Wendy shook her head. “I don’t think we have any spares of those,” she said. “You’ve had problems with yours before, haven’t you?”

Sissy nodded. “Yeah, during our training survival march, but that was because I’d knocked a potted plant on it in my room just before the hike; the tech who looked at it said it was a cracked circuit board. I’ve been more careful with its replacement and haven’t hit it against anything.” She pulled it from the chest pocket of her overalls and looked it over. “There are no dents and the only scratches on the cover are from handling it with my claws.”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Even with it fully charged, the power is intermittent and there are times when I’ve recorded notes and the file won’t save.” She frowned, slid it back into her pocket and shrugged at the Retriever. “There has even been a file or two that saved okay, but I can only open them at odd times and not at all at others. I’m afraid I’m going to lose all I’ve recorded since we got here, so I was looking for a paper notebook that I could transcribe everything into while I still have access to it.”

“Wow, that’s tough,” Wendy murmured. “I’ve had a couple issues like that with mine, but I can never seem to remember to take it to the solar charging station when the power gets low and thought it was because of that. I hope they all don’t go out on us – it’s long distance to call tech support on Earth and I don’t think they make house calls.”

The canine turned to a stack of boxes on her left and reached for the one on top. She set it aside and did the same with two more before she got to one she wanted. Sissy waited patiently and then Wendy pulled out a thick book with green hardback covers. She flipped it open to pages that were blank except for ruled lines on both sides of each legal-size sheet.

“Will this work?” she asked. “It’s just stock Government Issue, nothing with picture covers.”

“That’s perfect,” Sissy told her with a smile. “Now I just need something to write with.”

“Gotcha covered on that too,” Wendy replied, turning to another box. “If you need help transcribing your notes, send me some of your files if you can, and I’ll grab another notebook to write them out in too.”

Sissy gave her a grateful smile. “I don’t know how long my PBJ may hold out, so if you could help me with this, I would appreciate it.”

“Consider it done.”

***

Avon stood at the bottom lip of the cave that overlooked the small lake and watched another trio of explorers heading out away from the camp as he toyed absently with his identification dog tags. With the colony site established and daily routines becoming mundane, he had been approached by several who wanted to begin exploring the countryside near their valley. The grizzly bear had resisted the requests at first, but finally relented and gave his approval that some of his people could strike out on short day trips.

He had decided to allow parties of two or more equipped with basic supplies, hand radios and weapons from the armory to leave in the morning with instructions to return before nightfall and to check in every two hours by radio. That would give them all approximately eighteen hours to go where they might, but he would authorize no one to stay out overnight. Not yet, anyway.

The guns would be used only for defense in the event they came upon something that took exception to their presence, but they were to kill nothing unless there was no other recourse. All day packs contained food and water, digital cameras, a compass or two, paper notebooks and writing utensils to record their findings. Specimen containers also went along at Dr. Mochizuki’s request for flowers, weeds, grasses, leaves and other plant life for him to study and catalog.

The first two who left went out on all fours with packs upon their backs were the ursine cousins, Aaron and Gerard. They only took a couple of small pistols for the packs, but said they would otherwise try to rely upon their own natural furman weapons and abilities for defense if they ran into trouble. Avon reminded them not to go looking for trouble, but both acted offended that he would think they would.

Although they had no map or satellite photographs of the vicinity, they could return by homing in a PBJ on the replacement pyramid site marker beacon that had been set up near the sapling growing from the acorn Avon had planted in the wheat-grass field when the Meriwether Lewis had landed. They planned to strike out to the northeast, following along the foothills of the mountain range.

Ivan and Rose left shortly after the bears, both small vulpines together on a single horseback. The foxes followed the trail through the woods, across the little river, out to the prairie grass field and then turned their horse to the east into the morning sun. They had no idea what they might find, but the couple was ready to explore.

Manny, Michael and Aldo took the remaining three horses and headed south. The two foxes and the canine were bored staying around camp and their primary goal was simply to get away for a while. Exploring would be secondary to them, although they were likely to see things that were not resident in their little valley.

The day was overcast and the temperature was a little cooler than it had been with southeasterly winds. The breezes were mostly mild but strong gusts around the end of the mountain range were becoming common. Kevin had been keeping a closer eye on his instruments; his earlier forecast of thunderstorms had been somewhat correct, though the storms missed the little valley altogether, so he was often occupied studying the weather prediction texts he had loaded onto his PBJ before they had departed Earth.

Although Erin had talked him through some of his self-esteem issues, the diminutive desert fox was clearly worried about his place in the colony. He knew that winter would be coming in a few months and the youngest of the volunteers felt a heavy responsibility of weather forecasting without the aid of satellite images and national sensing stations in this primitive setting.

“It can’t be easy,” Erin had teased, “trying to predict the weather using stone knives and dried beetles.”

Fortunately, the region was just entering the early stages of autumn, and since the seasons lasted longer on Bonestell than on Earth, Kevin hoped he would have more time to learn to read the local patterns in forecasting before harsh weather descended upon them.

After the foxes and the canine disappeared on their horses beneath the shadows of the woods, Avon’s gaze shifted to other activities in the valley. Kristen and Jasmine were working in the garden; Arne, Cheryl, Dahlia, Jon and Hank were all setting up animal pens inside the newly constructed barn and there were three sitting out in the grass among several lil-deer near the lake. Sissy had told the colony leader of her PBJ troubles and Wendy and Chieko had volunteered to help her transcribe her records into handwritten notebooks.

The red panda was in the final stage of her transformation, the result of a mistake that had affected both her and her husband, making them the only two Ailuris in the galaxy living among the Canis, Felis, Ursis and Vulps of furmankind. The aches and pains of Chieko’s changes were almost over and the cute woman’s personal outlook had improved daily. Her disobedience may have been the cause of her and her husband, once the director of the Japanese branch of the Furmankind Institute, to be banished from the Earth for the rest of their lives, but she seemed to have accepted her fate and even enjoyed her new ‘look’.

On the far side of the valley, Jenni had taken time out from the cavern to position herself high in a tree with a pair of binoculars. Although there were some birds that stood out in their memories like the noisy arrowheads, there were myriads more that inhabited the trees of their little forest and she enjoyed the bird watching. She was a fair artist and scribbled pencil sketches of those she could catch standing still long enough to draw. Dr. Mochizuki was none too fond of the leopard’s habit of walking around topless, despite that she was well-covered by her fur, but he knew her drawings would be invaluable to his research and cataloging of the life forms they encountered. He encouraged her artistic ability even as he kept his silence regarding her raiment.

Avon turned at a crash and a muttered curse behind him. Raine had tripped over an exposed tree root near the natural spring that flowed from the mountainside a short distance from the cavern entrance and had spilled both of the water buckets he had just filled. With breakfast over, it was the cheetah’s turn to wash the kitchen dishes. His assigned KP partner was their resident polar bear and Dara rushed to give him some assistance.

Disposable plates and utensils might have been easier to simply use and throw away, but they did not have the seemingly unlimited supplies they had on Earth and would have to reuse everything they could at all times. Washing plates, utensils, cups, pots and pans might seem to be a thankless chore, but everyone in the colony was on wash rotation to keep them clean and supplied with what they needed.

Likewise, they were to keep the trash at a minimum as much as possible. Things like aluminum foil could be cleaned, folded and used again several times before another sheet might be needed from the package. Even paper wrappers could be recycled for other things, provided they weren’t ripped and torn when initially opened.  The burning of trash was kept to bare minimum also, even if a large campfire area had been ringed with stones just at the cave entrance. Food scraps were never kept around and were buried in the garden as soon as possible.

The PBJ in the pocket of his vest emitted a solitary chirp, signaling a received message. He pulled it out, opened its clamshell case and briefly examined the missive. It was one of three he had received that day that amounted to nothing more than routine mail from one of his colonists for him to relay to someone back on Earth. This one was from Doctor Mochizuki that was to be directed to Stockholm, presumably another report on his biological findings.

Assured that he was not needed for anything pressing at the moment, Avon moved into the cavern toward the geodesic dome where he slept to retrieve the colony’s communication set. This was as good a time as any to transmit his weekly report. He would have to take the unit outside of the cave in order to transmit the messages up to the geosynchronous satellite parked overhead; it would then be relayed on to Earth via a series of booster satellites the Meriwether Lewis had deployed en route to Bonestell since there would be no line-of-sight transmissions with their homeworld.  Tachyon-burst communication would allow messages to cross the distance of nearly four parsecs in a little over forty hours, giving the AHCP headquarters in Stockholm his progress reports on Second Chance.

The grizzly bear surmised that there was someone in Sweden who monitored the communication traffic of all twenty-nine colonies that had been started since the Furmankind program began, redirecting personal mail into the worldwide message traffic and routinely submitting colony messages to some administrator in an office whose sole job was to read the mundane reports. There were only occasional messages of real importance like the one transmitted from Bastien on the decimation of its primarily feline population, leaving only its two Vulps doctors surviving the swift epidemic.

Avon figured that the report he made today would wind up as a printout in a desk tray that might be read in a week or two, but it was not like he had anything exciting to report anyway. However, one of the duties of the colony captain was to submit reports on their progress, especially on a group such as theirs that had only just begun exploring their new world; this was a chore he could not delegate to anyone else. If anything should ever happen to him, that duty would fall to Jon Sunset, his second-in-command, but for now it was his alone.

A mundane report primarily meant that everything was going according to plan, and although a dull chore, it also meant that everyone was safe and sound under his command. This was a good thing.

***

To the three who traveled it, the terrain to the south was uninspiring. As they moved away from the mountain range, the ground had become open and relatively flat, although there was a slight rise in elevation the farther they went. They rode their horses through an endless waving prairie of the same kind of thick, spearmint-scented wheat-grasses where they had hunted the thunderpigs, but after two hours they had seen no other living things aside of birds and insects, not even the plentiful lil-deer. Something off in the distance called out hoon, hoon, hoon, but they never saw what it might have been and it never seemed to get any closer.

The horses had carried them along with no specific destination and none of the equine mounts had shown the slightest unease during the journey. Manny and Michael had talked almost non-stop since they had left the colony, with Aldo joining in only occasionally with a comment or response to something asked him.

The bloodhound’s nose was by far the most sensitive of all the furmen on Bonestell, and although the scenery had grown uninteresting, there were abundant scents and aromas on the wind for his olfactory senses to sort and sift through. Unnoticed by his companions, he had slipped down to the ground and was walking beside his horse on all fours, his nose to the ground in the tall wheat-grass. His horse kept the easy pace with the others and Aldo maintained his position on the mare’s left side.

He stopped when he came upon the droppings of some large animal and compared its scent with his memory. It was old and dried, riddled with insect holes, but there were none present now. The weathered patty barely had a scent left to it, but the bloodhound’s memory association clicked and he realized that it had come from one of the thunderpigs. He wanted to break it apart and inspect it further to get a sample for the red panda, but there were no sticks out on this prairie and he was disinclined to do it with just his claws.

He looked up but could not see much through the wheat-grass and he suddenly realized that the others had gone on without noticing he was no longer with them. He lifted his head and then eased up on two feet so he could see above the thin double stalks that grew up to his shoulders. He spotted the horses standing together only a short distance ahead, but of his companions he saw nothing.

Aldo frowned deeply and moved quietly toward the horses. Had something happened to his friends or had they merely stopped to relieve themselves? He sniffed the steady breeze, but he was upwind and was unable to locate them by scent alone.

His mare looked back at him and snorted softly when he brushed a hand along the flat of her neck, gently running his fingers along her mane. Aldo grew still and listened. The winds rustled the grasses, but he could hear nothing more for several long minutes. Then something reached his ears and a thin smile crept across his face.

He grabbed the horn of the western saddle, put a foot into the stirrup and then swung himself easily up onto the back of the horse. Now with a higher vantage point, he could look out across the prairie and it only took a moment for him to recognize the white pelt of the arctic fox as Manny jumped and bounded through the grasses with the mix of grey and sand-colored fur of the swift fox close behind.

The Vulps were out stretching their legs and it almost looked as if they were playing tag in the grass very much as their vulpine cousins would do. He grinned and panted lightly, though not from exertion but from the lighthearted amusement he felt watching them.

The bloodhound reached into his pack for a bottle of water and poured a little into his palm to lap it up when the foxes finally got up onto two feet and walked casually back to the horses with satisfied grins. The sky was still predominantly overcast, but there was no scent of rain in the air, though the winds had picked up in a straight southeasterly direction. Looking out over the tops of the wheat-grass, Aldo could practically see the wind currents moving in waves with occasional abrupt directional shifts to whip the stalks around.

One such sudden change in wind direction washed over them in an instant, and with it was an intense scent that none of them had ever smelled before. Both foxes and the canine stopped suddenly as if frozen in time, but the three horses snorted and whinnied nervously, their ears back and eyes roving all around them as if searching for an unseen predator.

Manny swung himself up into saddle after a moment and Michael did the same, but only after grabbing a pistol from his pack first. The winds shifted again and then the scent was gone, but the memory of it was still strong in the nostrils of all six Terran creatures.

***

The grey lupine Fur had finished his assigned chores, had eaten and had cleaned up in the river in a shallow pool downstream of the camp that had been designated as a communal bath. With everyone covered in fur, there was less reason for modesty, so long as everyone remembered to keep their tails down while others were present. Outside the bath, the wearing of clothing on top was optional for males and females alike, but it was still prudent for all to wear the furman shorts provided for them for hygienic reasons. Many still wore the furman vests or overalls that had been provided for them, primarily for their pockets.

Carl Amaranth shook out his fur while standing on all fours, stood up to slip into his shorts and then walked quietly across the valley back toward the cavern. With a ceiling height of approximately thirty-five feet and a passage width of close to one hundred twenty feet, there was more than enough room for all the geodesic domes that made up the buildings of the colony. The largest dome was big enough to hold all thirty-one members of Second Chance at once if needed, and although they were originally designed to be constructed outside, the cavern had been an ideal location once they had discovered signs of flooding in the valley.

There were varying sizes of the domes, from several larger ones for a Bonestellan year of supplies to smaller ones equal in size to a good family camping tent intended to provide at least one to four full-sized Furs a place to sleep and call home. All were made of sealed, insulated panels designed to withstand arctic conditions on Earth, so they were more than equipped to handle the slight chill of the cavern and hopefully the coming winter.

It was one of the larger domes that the grey wolf made his way toward after he had gotten back up to the cavern. Electric LED lamps were placed strategically throughout the camp, powered by a sturdy set of solar collectors stationed outside the cavern entrance on the side of the mountain. Some of the domes were wired for overhead lamps if power was provided to them and fortunately for Carl, the one he entered was so equipped, unlike the smaller dome Sissy had visited earlier. The efficient light-emitting diodes used very little power and provided ample illumination wherever they were used. They were hardy and lasted longer than conventional bulbs, were easy to replace and the colony had been provided with large cases containing thousands of the tiny inexpensive lamps.

Before their departure from Earth, Carl had put in a request for a specific item without knowing whether or not the budget would allow for it or if it would fit within the weight restrictions of the freight. He had received neither confirmation nor denial of his request before they had boarded the colony ship, so he did not know if it would be amongst their supplies. He had actually forgotten about it until he had heard that Avon was authorizing exploration parties, so now he wanted to see if it had been included with their cargo.

Quietly and patiently, he searched through stacked crates of non-perishable supplies, reading the manifest labels affixed to the ends of each, but nothing seemed to be the right size or shape to contain what he had requested. It would have to be rather large to house, unless it would have to be assembled from several crates.

He was sure he had been denied after an hour of frustrated searching, wryly wondering if he should check to see if it had been packed away with the can openers, but just as he reached for the switch to turn out the overhead lamps, he spied the end of a long, narrow crate right by the door. He might have missed it if his eyes had not fallen upon his own name. There were several other boxes stacked upon it, so he took care to remove them to get to it. If he had not been searching for something specific, it was unlikely anyone else would have noticed what was in the crate for some time. Another large box beside it was similarly labeled, so he had to excavate it as well.

When he had the top cleared off, he grasped a rope handle affixed to one end and dragged the heavy crates out into the doorway. Excitement ruled his actions, but he possessed too much of a sense of responsibility than to get into them right away; he first needed to put the other boxes back in place so no one would inadvertently fall over them.

Once that task was done, he turned back to his presents with a gently wagging tail. It was Christmas time for Carl.

The seals across both boxes were unbroken, but since his name was on the shipping labels, the wolf had no reservations against slicing through them with a claw tip. He flipped the latches, set the lid aside on the longer of the two crates that was marked “1 of 2” and then examined the contents with a puzzled expression. If it was what he was expecting, some of the parts looked wrong. As he had surmised, the unit would have to be assembled, but he and Ellie had the necessary experience with this sort of thing, providing all the parts were there.

Lying on top of the packing material was a plain white envelope with his name scrawled across the front. It was not sealed, so the wolf pulled out the single sheet of paper to see a letter written to him.

Carl, the approval of your request for a hover fancraft came in too late to tell you about it personally, so this will likely be a surprise. In the history of the Anthro Human Colonization Program, no one has ever requested a fancraft as part of the equipment and supplies for a new colony, but since exploring your new world will be one of your duties, Stockholm agreed that it could be a beneficial asset to your endeavors. Unfortunately, cargo limitations on the colony ship restricted the size and weight of what we could send with you, so we’ve had to dust off an older technology and send an ultralight gyrocopter instead. I know this may come as a disappointment, but at this late hour, it was the best we could do for you.

Since fuel will be hard to come by on Bonestell, this version of the craft is equipped with a solar charge battery and a purely electrical system, so all you need is a good day of sunlight to power it. However, again due to cargo limitations, we could only send a one-person, open-air edition of this craft.

Considering that you and your wife Ellie are the only ones within Second Chance certified with a pilot’s license and past experience flying ultralight aircraft, the two of you will likely be the only ones performing aerial exploration for your camp. I would urge you to train one or two others in its use as backups, but this may be rather difficult since the machine can only support one person at a time. There is a small storage area beneath the seat, but there is only the one seat available, making training difficult. I know you will figure out something. Be careful in its use, but I hope it benefits your efforts.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Marcelo C. Delgado, Director of the North American Furmankind Institute.

***

Jon knelt beside the open crates and examined their contents while Carl and Ellie talked with Avon behind him. The grizzly bear seemed out of sorts finding that the gyrocopter had been included in their manifest without his knowledge and he was reluctant to listen to the wolves who entreated him to let them use it for exploration.

“Avon, Stockholm agreed with my request, thinking it was a good idea,” Carl said to his ursine leader. “I may not have gotten exactly what I requested, but it should still be of good service. One of the reasons we’re here is to explore. You’ve already agreed we should do this and you’ve allowed others to go out from the camp on exploratory excursions, so why not us?”

The grizzly held up Marcelo’s letter and shook it. “Because this thing will only hold one person, Carl,” he said in frustration. “Due to the unknown dangers of an unknown planet, you already know that I don’t want anyone to go out away from camp alone. Two or more together is the rule – you agreed it was a good idea when we all discussed it right after our arrival. We’re all relatively safe in the cave or out in our little valley, but once you cross over the mountain or go beyond the woods, it’s in pairs or nothing! Out exploring alone is not a good idea and is forbidden.”

“You’re the only one forbidding it,” Ellie grumbled, meeting his dark gaze with one of her own. “We can’t modify it to carry another person, and even if we could simply strap a dinner chair to it with duct tape and a seatbelt, the motor and rotors weren’t designed with the power to carry two.”

“I doubt it would carry your weight by itself,” Carl added. “The point is that headquarters approved it for us. If you remember, we were all told that our assignment was to go in where the original human colony was supposed to set up on Bonestell and try to determine what happened to them. If we cannot find any survivors of the original landing, we are to proceed as if we are the only colony to have come to this planet. Since we’ve found no signs of that original group in our immediate vicinity, using this gyrocopter would assist us in a wider aerial search for them!”

“Carl,” Avon said in frustration, “I’m not against your reasons for having this thing. Again… what I’m against is you going out with it alone! If you had the ability to take Ellie with you, I would okay it right now, but that’s not an option! We’ve not seen anything larger than the noisy arrowheads flying around here, but what happens if you tangle with something bigger than yourself in the air and get into trouble?”

“If that happened, we’d both be in trouble,” Ellie countered. “Being together or alone wouldn’t even matter in that situation.”

“Perhaps not that, but if it caused you to crash, perhaps one of you would survive well enough to assist the other or go for help. If you or Carl got into trouble, we’d never know what happened to you and couldn’t help. That’s the case with anyone who leaves camp to go explore.”

“Just let me take it up for a couple hours at time then,” the male wolf offered. “If I do develop trouble, I won’t be that far away and I’ll have a flare gun to signal my location. I’ll stay in radio range and make periodic reports on my position in case anything does happen, but it will give us a greater range to see what’s around us that’s quicker than going out on foot or on horseback. I have experience in cartography so I can even take aerial photographs to use in drawing a map of the vicinity.”

The mountain lion had remained quiet during the exchange, silently looking over the parts in the boxes. One crate held the motor in pre-formed padding while the longer box contained the disassembled frame, controls and other parts. He picked up what looked like the suspension of a wheel assembly and idly hefted it in his hands. He had been listening to the argument, but said nothing until Avon turned to him.

“Jon, help me out here, please,” Avon said.

The cougar looked up at the bear towering over them all. “You want my opinion?” he asked.

“I do – yours can be the voice of reason here.”

“Reason?” Ellie grumbled. “He’s your second-in-command and will just back up whatever you say!”

Jon swished his tail back and forth as he placed the mechanism back in its padding and then he stood up to face the three of them. He gestured toward the wolves while looking at the grizzly.

“I think an aerial reconnaissance of the surrounding area is a good idea,” he said to Avon’s surprise. “Not only will it be helpful looking for signs of the original landing party, Carl and Ellie might locate some natural resources we could use for food, medicine or other useful purposes. There may be other animals nearby that we might consider as a food source that doesn’t happen to wander into our little valley – hopefully something tastier than my deer steak.”

He shrugged his shoulders and added, “Personally, I don’t see a problem letting either one of them go out on short flights. It may be no more dangerous than going out on the prairie with thunderpigs around that could stampede at any moment.”

Avon stared at him in disbelief. Even though he had asked the cougar’s opinion, like the Amaranths, he had fully expected Jon to side with him in this argument. Feeling frustrated and outnumbered, the colony captain finally nodded.

“Okay,” he said at last, “I’m still reluctant to let you go out alone, but you two have my approval to assemble and fly your little gyrocopter to make short flights, no more than two hours at a time.” He looked at Carl and Ellie both and made a pointed nod with his chin. “Stick to the plan, take no unnecessary risks and report in as often as you can. When either of you are up in the air, I will carry one of the hand radios with me at all times for your reports.”

The wolves grinned in unison. “Thank you!” Carl said with renewed excitement.

“Thank you too, Jon!” Ellie added.

The bear sighed audibly and shook his head in resignation. “Sending you out alone still makes me nervous, but I sincerely hope you find something to make the flights worth the risks. Things may seem quiet these days, but there’s always the chance that danger of some sort is out there just waiting to show its ugly mug.”

***

“What was that?” Michael whispered to his companions, gripping his pistol in readiness. Their horses snorted and whinnied nervously, their eyes roving all across the endless field of wheat-grass as if searching for some unseen danger.

“I don’t know, but that scent ripped a shiver all the way up and down my spine,” Manny replied, his voice also hushed.

Aldo continued to sniff the air, but the wind was now blowing the ill scent away from him and it had nothing to do with the natural fragrance of spearmint the grasses gave off. The shifting gusts had brought it to them for only a moment, but it was enough to put them all on their guard. “It’s like nothing else I’ve ever smelled since my nose became more sensitive, either here or on Earth,” he whispered. “It doesn’t stink and it’s not foul; I don’t know why it makes me feel this way, but it sure gave me a reaction!”

“What do we do?” Michael asked. “I can’t tell where it came from – it could be anywhere!”

“It’s downwind, that’s why we can’t smell it now,” the bloodhound replied. All three of them looked toward the southeast with trepidation.

“Are we being stalked?” the swift fox asked hoarsely, his throat tight.

“Calm down, guys,” Manny said slowly. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it can probably smell us and it likely smells our fear. Just remember, we are predator types ourselves, high up on the food chain.”

“The food chain of Earth, you mean,” Michael remarked. “Who knows where on the chain we’re dangling from here?”

“Nevertheless, stay calm. We already figured we’d run into something scary sooner or later, but that may not even be the case here. Stay on the alert, but it’s likely we’ll find a dreadful little toad or something that emits that scent to warn off critters looking for a potential meal.”

Aldo looked at the arctic fox and frowned, not at all convinced with his conjecture. Something about that scent spooked them and their horses quite strongly. Holding the reins of his horse tight to keep her from running, he cleared his throat and gestured toward the small party’s accepted leader.

“Do you want me to track down that scent so we can see for sure?”

“Are you crazy?” Michael squeaked.

Manny thought about it for a moment and hefted his pistol, barrel to the air. “We may not have to go far to find it,” he said to the canine, “but I would rather be hunting it than have it hunting us. If we turned around and headed back to camp now, there’s the possibility we might lead whatever it is back to a buffet at Second Chance. Let’s find it and maybe we can put the Fear of Furs into it first so it will leave us alone.”

***

It took some coaxing to get their horses to move forward, but after fifteen minutes of southeasterly travel, they had experienced nothing further to threaten them. The tops of the wheat-grass continued to bow to the southeast in straight-line winds and the scent never came back to them. Despite this, they all kept their guard up with pistols ready, eyes and ears straining for any sign of danger.

The terrain was just as flat and open as it had been since they had departed the mountains, though constantly on a gentle rise in elevation. The winds never abated and the sound in their ears played tricks on their active imaginations. Although no threat had come for them, they all harbored private thoughts that the choice to go looking for the source of the frightful scent might be foolhardy.

Aldo had slipped down off his horse, although he was still up on two feet in order to lead his mare by the reins. Down closer to the ground where the four-foot high, double-stalked wheat-grasses blocked the winds somewhat, he hoped to get a better line on what he sought. As such, however, it also limited his sight distance to watch out for something that might be camouflaged with the terrain.

The bloodhound’s nose started to quiver. There was a hint of the original scent, though it was not as strong with the winds still taking it away from him. He moved forward cautiously, gripping his pistol in one hand at the ready, silently lamenting his wish to get down on all fours to seek out the source of the scent. He was glad to be armed, but if danger reared up and he had to run for it, he would need all of his paws to beat a hasty retreat. Was that not one of the reasons they had all become Furs in the first place?

“Whoa!” Manny’s voice exclaimed. The canine crouched down immediately, making himself a smaller target, but the arctic fox suddenly called out to him. “Aldo? Are you seeing this?”

Manny did not sound frightened, so Aldo stood up beside his horse and looked out over the grasses at him. “No,” he replied quietly, “what is it?”

“Get up on your horse and look,” suggested Michael.

The bloodhound grabbed the horn of his saddle, put a foot into the stirrup and then swung himself up onto the back of the mare. As soon as he did, he was looking out over a craggy expanse of weathered gullies, deep ravines and wind-eroded rock formations that were colored in striations of browns, tans and reds denoting eons and layers upon layers of geological activity.

There were dark shadows upon jutting walls here and there that looked like the mouths of caves and none of them looked inviting. The three Terran Furs upon their horses were all standing on a ridge overlooking a desolate region several miles across where nothing grew, not even scrubby weeds. The winds continued to whip around them, but updrafts from the gorge suddenly shifted their direction and the scent they had been seeking hit them just as strong and fully as it had before.

The horses all bucked in fear and tried to bolt away, and the Furs had to hold on frantically to stay in their saddles. It was all that the three travelers could do to rein them in, but each of them was more than willing to let their mounts take them away from there as quickly as they could.

Manny turned his horse to face the threat, the safety off of his semi-automatic firearm that was aimed and ready to fire. Encouraged by the arctic fox’s bravery, Michael and Aldo rode up beside him and quickly readied their own pistols.

They waited for several minutes, but nothing came over the ridge at them. Then, making the decision of his own volition, the bloodhound coaxed his horse back to the overlook. The others pulled up alongside a moment later and Aldo handed his reins over to Michael. The swift fox wrapped the end of the reins around his saddle horn in case the canine’s mount bolted again.

Aldo got down on all fours and eased up to the ridge. The shifting wind gusts at the edge of the desolate valley brought the strong scent back to his nose, but this time he held his ground. Nothing came after him and he had an unobstructed view of the whole region the scent came from. The only movement he saw was from the wind on the ridge and swirls of dust from the dry region below.

He stared and studied the vicinity closely for several long moments, but whatever issued that smell did not appear to be stalking them; it was definitely down in there somewhere, giving off a scent that frightened all the Terran explorers, be they canine, vulpine or equine. No matter if it lived there or was just passing through, Aldo was not sure he really wanted to know what it was. He had an active imagination and his mind formed numerous hulking monsters, but it was unlikely he could have conjured up its true reality.

Unable to stand the smell any longer and unwilling to extend the hunt further, he backed away from the ridge and returned to his nervous companions. Perhaps this might be an area to avoid, marking it on future maps with the age-old words, “Here be dragons.”

***

As the riders departed the canyon there was movement near the ridge where they had been. A pair of fathomless black eyes eased up from the shadows of a dry gully and watched the retreating figures shrink to dots through the grass in the distance. Had the travelers remained nearby, the denizen emitting the unsettling, overpowering smell would have guaranteed their hasty departure — or perhaps frozen them with fear.

Chapter 6

Explorers

The large brown bear looked up at the overcast sky and sniffed at the mild breezes flowing along the eastern edge of the mountains. There were some stronger gusts at times, but for the most part it was a steady light wind that brought a mixed bag of scents to Aaron and his cousin.

He and Gerard had been traveling northeast along the foothills of the mountain range for the past few hours; on their left were rocky peaks that stretched on before them as far north as their genetically-enhanced ursine eyes could see and on the right was a wide open prairie. Dark hills could be seen far in the distance that way, but their destination was not across the plain.

Without mounts, the Ursis explorers traveled on all fours under their own power, but they were well-equipped for endurance. Both were barefoot, relying solely upon their well-padded hands and feet, and the coastal brown bears were similarly dressed in simple shorts that matched their fur colors. From a distance, either might look like nothing more than another wild animal wandering the countryside except for the day packs they wore.

There had been nothing much of interest to report when they had made their first two-hour radio check-in with the colony captain, and there was little difference in the second report they had just made. Had they not known they were on another planet several parsecs from Earth, the cousins might have thought they were in the vicinity of the North American Rockies. Some of the high peaks were dusted with snow and scrubby trees grew sporadically up their sides. The southernmost mountain in the range housed their colony cavern, and while it was probably the smallest peak of them all, it was not tall enough for a frosty crown of its own.

Along their journey they had seen numerous types of birds and they had dutifully taken photos of those they could get close to. They had also come across small mixed-heritage creatures that looked as if they could have been related to rabbits, squirrels and prairie dogs within the same family reunion. These inhabited the nooks and crannies among the rocks, and although they could not catch any of them to take back as samples, they did manage to catch a few photos. Out of idle flippancy, Gerard named them squarie dabbits to the amusement of his cousin. Of no interest to the bears except as potential snacks, there had also been numerous furball mice scurrying practically beneath their footsteps; the tiny, tailless rodents seemed to be everywhere.

There had been thunderpigs out on the prairie and even some of the lil-deer romping through the wheat-grasses, but otherwise they had not seen much of anything new that had not previously been sighted near their home camp. Something across the prairie called out hoon, hoon, hoon, but whatever it was that made it never put in an appearance.

They had mostly picked their way through strewn boulders at the base of the mountains where they met the plains, but occasionally one of them would wander up the incline to pursue a random scent or flurry of movement.

One of the perks that came with the hybrid transformation they had all undergone for this mission was hearing that was more acute than it had even been when they were human. Due to this, even when separated by a little distance, the cousins did not have to shout or raise their voices much to be heard.

It was while Gerard was picking his way around the boulders at ground level that he looked up and twitched one of his small round ears. “You’re mumbling again, Aaron,” he said.

The other bear was a short distance up the side of the mountain, his nose to the ground as he sifted through the scents around him. They were nearing a pass between their colony mountain and the next in the range.

“I said I’m getting bored,” Aaron muttered only slightly louder than conversational tone. “Other than finding a few small critters and taking samples of flowers and weeds that look little different than what we might step on back home, I’ve seen nothing since we left to make me feel like an explorer on another world.”

“These weeds and flowers have never been seen on Earth,” his cousin reminded him.

“So? There are weeds and flowers on Earth that I’ve never seen before.” Aaron snorted and brushed the seeds of a willowy plant from his nose. “Are you sure we’re on another planet? I thought this place would be alien, but in reality it’s boringly mundane!”

“I’ve never seen thunderpigs, furballs or even those wretched arrowhead birds with sideways beaks in a documentary on a science channel,” Gerard said dryly.

“We’re probably somewhere in South America,” Aaron complained as he resumed meandering across the side of the mountain. “I think the ship left the space station when they stuck us in cryo and then just landed back on Earth to kick us out with some story of having traveled light-years to get here. It’s probably just another survival test.”

Gerard chuckled at the other bear and shook his head. “There are two moons in the sky, each day is thirty six long hours, and I highly doubt these are the Andes we’re walking beside, cousin.”

Without even looking up, Aaron replied, “Why do you have to be so practical? You just want to burst my fantasy bubble while I’m wishing I was back on Earth!”

“Better now than wait until you’ve already started looking for La Casera.”

“Thanks, now I’m thirsty for a soda pop. Maybe we should just go back.”

“Go back? We’ve only been out here a little over four hours. We don’t have to turn around for another five.”

“I don’t want to keep going for another five hours. I thought I wanted to get away from camp for a while and we have, but if we don’t fi—”

Gerard looked up when his companion’s voice trailed off. “Aaron?”

His cousin did not respond, but Gerard could see the other bear down on all fours sniffing around back and forth. “What did you find?”

“Animal trail,” Aaron finally answered. “It goes up diagonally across the mountain in almost a straight line, as much as the rocks and brush allow anyway.”

“That sounds like whatever’s using it has a specific destination with regular traffic.”

“I smell the hogs, as usual… and other things I can’t identify.”

The brown bear made his way up the uneven terrain until he reached his cousin’s side. At his feet was a well-worn trail across rocks, sand and gravel. It was wide enough to be unmistakable and hard to miss.

“Let’s see where it goes,” Aaron said with bright eyes, pleased to have something to do besides wander aimlessly across the hillside.

Both bears proceeded cautiously along the trail, but they had a good sight distance ahead of them except when forced to circumnavigate around a boulder too large to go over. The two of them fell quiet as they walked, slowly gaining altitude, and each of them listened intently for anything that might be in front of or behind them on the trail.

They slowed when they approached one such immense boulder that was up next to the side of the mountain, leaving only a narrow channel between them – a perfect place for an ambush.

Aaron was still on all fours in front, but Gerard stood up behind him and quickly fished a pistol from his travel pack. He chambered a round and then thumbed off the safety, holding its barrel up in preparation for trouble.

Aaron eased his nose around the boulder, but the only thing he saw was a dark opening into the mountain; it was just large enough that that two of them could have walked in together side-by-side and up on two feet. Aaron sniffed the air coming from inside, a moist, musty smell permeated with other scents. He moved forward slowly while Gerard hung back in case of trouble.

His eyes still used to the sunlight outside, the interior was very dark and Aaron had to stop once he was inside to let them adjust. When he did not move any further or cry out in alarm, Gerard crept in behind him, the handgun small in his paws with one claw on the trigger but held ready.

“The thunderpigs definitely know about this cave,” Gerard whispered as quietly as he could.

“No doubt about it from these scents. Maybe they use it to get out of bad weather; it smells like they have been using it for a long time.”

“Maybe they den here to have their piglets,” Gerard suggested. “My eyes are getting used to the dark and I can see hoof prints in the dirt.”

There was a slight shuffling sound from somewhere back in the Stygian darkness and the Ursis cousins froze. The sound was not repeated, but after several long moments, the bears backed out of the cave slowly in unspoken agreement.

Gerard slid out into the sunlight gratefully, but just before Aaron left the interior completely, he stopped. His nostrils quivered as a subtle but unexpected scent touched his sensitive olfactory senses. He reached out behind him without looking and latched onto his cousin’s arm. Gently, but insistently, he pulled Gerard back to his side.

“Do you smell that?” he whispered.

Gerard inhaled deeply and grimaced. “Dirty, smelly pigs,” he grunted.

“No, try again, softly, gently. It’s faint, barely there – something else.”

Once more, Gerard inhaled, but this time he took in the scents coming out of the cave and sifted the aromas in his mind. He was about to repeat his earlier assessment, but then he got it. His eyes widened and he looked aside at Aaron, who nodded.

Barely on the edge of the scents from the cave was a subtle floral scent, and if he was not imaging things, it almost smelled like lavender. He took in another sample but the scent was still there.

Finally convinced, Gerard backed out and this time Aaron joined him. They retreated a few steps away from the entrance out into the sun and faced one another.

Still in a quiet voice as if he was afraid something might hear them, Aaron said, “I can’t imagine flowers growing inside a cave in the dark, especially with all the pig stink in there.”

“This is a new world with its own rules,” Gerard reminded him. “Maybe it’s some flowery-smelling mushrooms or lichen.”

“Perhaps,” Aaron muttered. “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought Dara was in there. You know how she likes her lavender perfume; we could make more for her if we can get the cave plant that smells like that. Now I wish I could get a sample of it to take back to Doctor Mochizuki.”

Gerard gestured back toward the cave entrance. “Be my guest,” he said with a smirk. “We brought flashlights.”

Aaron pursed his lips, which his cousin thought looked odd on a bear, but he shook his head. “Not when the place is still occupied. Maybe later.”

“In that case, you take some pictures, I’ll take some notes and then we’ll move on before more of the porkers come home and discover we’ve disturbed their nest. You still want to go back to camp?”

Aaron shook his head. “No, let’s go on. We’re almost to the mountain pass between these peaks. We’ll take a look to see if there’s anything of interest there first.”

***

The comforting gait of the horse beneath him, Ivan felt a calm sense of peace as Halley the dark grey stallion picked his way across a seemingly unending sea of tall grass; Kristen had conjectured that it might actually be a form of wheat, but to Ivan it was just prairie grass that grew high. The rocky mountain range was behind them and a low range of hills was ahead in the distance.

The winds had picked up under an overcast sky and the double stalks of grass waved in the breezes, but the temperature was comfortable and the clouds helped to keep the sun off their backs. Rose’s black arms around the red reynard’s middle were warm and reassuring, but despite the unchanging terrain, she continued to study their surroundings looking for anything new.

The tall, tan-colored wheat-grass was the predominant plant occupying the plains that stretched on for miles, but was by no means the only thing growing. On the whole, the place seemed uniform, but there were many spots of oasis containing short flower stalks, broad-leafed trees only a foot tall, other kinds of green grasses that grew in thick clumps and myriads of wildflowers in all colors, shapes and sizes. Slow-moving insects flittered around these oases and tiny birds with large bills and odd muted patterns in their feathers flew around to pick them out of the air.

A half dozen of the lil-deer occupied one of these islands, quietly resting upon the ground and only one got up to its feet when the horse drew near. None of them seemed afraid, but the one was curious about the large horse and came over to sniff at his feet. The stallion gave it no more thought than it might of one of the colony sheep and continued his journey without coaxing by his riders.

The red fox vixen turned to look behind them as they left the deer behind, but Ivan yipped in frustration. She turned back to see him rubbing the base of his tail. The western saddle had never been designed with a rider possessing a tail and Ivan had to constantly pull it out from beneath him. Rose sat behind him, her rump upon the horse’s back, but had been fortunate that her tail remained un-pinched during the ride.

Saddlebags had been included in the colony supplies for the horses, but since this outing was only a day trip, they had chosen instead to take small backpacks. The saddlebags would also have limited Rose’s riding space behind the saddle.

“Would you like to change places?” she asked quietly. “I could sit up front so your poor tail can get a rest.”

“If you wish,” he replied, “but this means you will also have your tail pinched by the saddle.”

“Then we’ll have a matched set and can spend time rubbing them for one another later,” she said with a smile, resting her chin upon his shoulder over the small pack upon his back. “Really, I don’t mind trading off.”

“Okay, but let’s wait until the next oasis where we can stop to eat and rest, and then we can continue on with you up front.”

“That sounds like a good plan.” She tickled his ear with the tip of her nose and added, “Maybe we can make this an extended stop and get out of our clothes for a while.”

Ivan turned to look at her over his shoulder and raised a brow at the mischievous glint in her eyes. “You are too frisky for my own good,” he murmured with a smirk, “but I like the idea. In the meantime, leave those thoughts alone.”

Rose chuckled. “Spoilsport. Okay, what should we talk about?”

The fox tod shrugged his shoulders. “I dunno… tell me about your family.”

“My family? Yeah, that should kill the mood.”

“Rose…”

“Okay, okay,” she muttered, resting her cheek upon the fabric of his backpack. “My folks died in a boating accident just a few years ago, so Jasmine, Dahlia and I decided to join the AHCP and leave behind the family memories you want me to remember.”

“Oh, sorry,” Ivan replied, chagrined.

“It’s all right,” Rose said quietly. “My sisters and I are all in our twenties, each of us two years apart and I’m the youngest. Our folks wanted a boy, but after three girls they quit trying and had themselves sterilized. The three of us have always been close and we’ve often gone into things together like martial arts or playing instruments, but sometimes we can get on one another’s nerves.”

“That is true with all siblings,” the male fox remarked. “Like you, there were three of us. I have two brothers, one older and one younger.”

“The proverbial middle child,” Rose said in amusement. “Were you the one always getting into trouble?”

“No, that is my brother Anton. He is the youngest and always thinks he can get away with anything because of it. Unfortunately, it is mostly true with momma and poppa. Mikhail and I are the respectable ones.”

“Have you lost any of them?”

Ivan shook his head. “No, they are all still with us. Everybody has decent jobs and good homes. Anton has a little girl and I try to spoil her rotten whenever I see her.” He stopped and corrected himself, “…saw her.” He fell silent, remembering that he would likely never see them or Earth again.

“Mom and Dad were the only relatives we had,” Rose said quietly. “In a set of similar circumstances, both were born late in life to their parents and both were an only child, so by the time the three of us were born, just about all of the elder families had passed away.”

“I am sorry to hear this.”

Rose wrapped her arms around Ivan’s middle and gave him a thankful hug. “I appreciate that,” she said. “It’s just the three of us now and since the family line has essentially ended and none of us were married, we didn’t have a reason to remain on the Earth.”

“A family line is not necessarily dependent upon a male survivor,” Ivan told her. “In some cultures, perhaps the family name is lost, but you can still pass on your genes to your children.”

“I accept your offer to help pass on my genes,” Rose said impishly, brushing her short dark scalp hair out of her eyes. “I wonder what our children will look like.”

Ivan snorted in amusement. “Little red and black furballs we will have to clean their tails and house break, I would imagine.” Then, a moment later, “How is Jasmine’s tail?”

Rose frowned, remembering the reason why her eldest sister’s luxurious fox tail had been shaved to the skin from her rear to the tip. It was unfortunate that Jasmine had inadvertently caused the death of Travis Tyndall when the German shepherd had tried to rape her, but since a considerable amount of time and money had been invested in the male Fur’s development, her punishment for the crime was permanent banishment from the Earth and a shaved tail for all to see.

“The fur’s coming back in uniformly,” she answered, “but it will still take months before it looks normal again. The fur on it is only about a half inch thick now.”

“Yeah, I thought I saw her trailing a rope behind her a couple nights ago,” Ivan remarked. “It must have been her tail.”

“Hopefully it will be thick again by the time the cold of winter gets here.”

The horse stopped suddenly, his muscles tense beneath the foxes. His ears were up and he was staring intently ahead. Ivan leaned forward slowly and gently rubbed the side of Halley’s neck, his eyes peering out across the grass trying to see what the stallion had spotted.

He did not have to look for long. Trotting purposely through the tall grass toward them was one of the shaggy, long-haired warthog-like animals. This one did not look passive at all, and as it got closer, it snorted loudly and began to pick up speed.

The grey horse’s fight or flight instincts kicked in and he bolted away, taking the surprised foxes with him. Rose almost slid off his back, but she managed to keep her arms around Ivan’s middle as she held on tight.

The massive thunderpig charged after them and closed the distance more rapidly than they had thought possible. If these large native hogs were anything like their Terran porcine cousins, they could chase down and kill just about any creature unfortunate enough to get too close to one when it was mad or hungry. Although primarily root-eaters, they also had no qualms against hunting down live meat when they could get it and it looked as if this one had set its sights on sampling the Arabian horse.

Ivan held tight to the reins, but did not have to coax Halley forward as the horse was running as fast as it could through the wheat-grass with the two Vulps upon his back.  Its speed assisted by hypermobile knee joints, the pig was gaining on them; its large three-toed hooves thundered against the ground, so Ivan pulled on the left rein to veer away from the straight-line path the prey and predator had taken.  The horse shot off at a different angle and the hog had to compensate for the unexpected maneuver, but it gave them a few extra seconds.

Rose glanced behind them and saw that the gigantic pig was closing the distance again and she reflexively tightened her grip around Ivan’s ribcage. The fox tod gulped for breath with difficulty.

“Rose!” he gasped. The vixen loosened her hold on him only slightly, but it was enough to allow him to breathe.

The thunderpig was tight on the horse’s right flank and it was so close that Rose was sure she could feel its hot breath upon her leg. It tossed its head to the side, trying to wound its prey with a sharp tusk, and narrowly missed both the horse and the vixen.

Rose kicked out, but without a hardened heel of a shoe or boot, her bare footpads made no impact to counter the pig’s attack. She raked her foot claws across its face, but she did little more than give it superficial scratches across the tough hide of its nose. She wished she had a stick or something to poke into its eye and then she remembered the pistol in Ivan’s backpack.

Still trying to hold on as the male fox attempted another turn to gain time, the vixen had a hard time opening the pack with one hand, and then when she did get the zipper wide enough, she had to dig for the gun, grimacing at the stinging wheat-grass whipping across her legs.

She pulled it out and chambered a round, remembering to thumb the safety off, but when the horse beneath her suddenly veered to the right, she almost dropped the pistol. She had not attended Manny’s gun handling training back at the Furmankind Institute, but a past boyfriend had taken her to a firing range enough times that she had some familiarity. Shooting down a range was one thing, however, but trying to aim behind her while on the back of a frantically running horse was another.

She squeezed off a shot that completely missed her target, but the sudden report startled the thunderpig and it slowed momentarily. The horse, however, was spurred on by the shot and the gap between he and his pursuer widened. The giant hog regained its focus quickly and charged forward again.

Rose tried to aim again, and this time the shot struck the base of one of the thunderpig’s upper tusks. The hard bone splintered and the hog bugled in sudden pain, shock and surprise. Although only superficially injured, the huge creature stumbled in its confusion and rolled over through the wheat-grass by its momentum, knocking a large plume of dust and plants into the air.

Rose shouted out triumphantly, but Ivan coaxed the horse to keep running as fast as it could to put as much distance between them and the pig as possible.

Several moments passed before Halley slowed from a race pace to a canter, and then to an exhausted walk as he realized the danger was now far behind them. The horse snorted and panted from the most exertion it had had in quite some time, and the foxes upon its back were gasping for breath as well, though more from the adrenaline rush than from running.

“Did you kill it?” Ivan asked, looking around uncertainly. He had not seen the action behind him and could only guess from the way Rose had cheered in victory, but he could hear no further sounds of pursuit.

“I don’t think so,” the vixen replied, “but I did hit it. I just hope that made it decide to go away and leave us alone!”

“Well, Halley is tired and doesn’t seem spooked anymore, so maybe you’re right.” The male fox helped Rose down onto the ground and then he stepped out of the saddle too, giving the horse a break from having them upon his back. Before he dropped to the ground, however, Ivan peered around and spotted the hills they had been traveling toward, albeit they were much closer now.

His bearings corrected, Ivan began walking toward their original destination with Rose beside him and Halley following his lead by the reins. Rose kept a wary eye behind them in case the pig came back and she held the pistol ready with her thumb upon the safety.

***

They heard the sound before they even topped the rise — a mushy cross between a low throated bugle and a warble was the closest way it could be described. Both bears eased up together and peered over the rocky ridge of the ground in front of them, their noses quivering as they took in the new scent.

Twenty yards beyond a clump of blue-green bushes was a trio of dark brown creatures, two of which were drinking from the shallow pool of a mountain stream. The third was standing watch over them and was staring directly at the two bears. It was apparent that the creature had detected their scents as the breezes blew up and around through the mountain pass, but even through it knew they were there, neither of the cousins felt like exposing himself fully.

The biggest of the trio had a thick, hairy torso on top of long spindly legs, a broad but thick neck framed by enormous elephant-like ears, and a wide head topped with a large hammerhead-like antler ringed all around in over a dozen sharp tips. Oversized nostrils at the end of an expansive nose fairly vibrated when it opened a thin mouth and made its mushy vocalization at them again. Its large black eyes were locked upon the coastal brown bears and it took a step to the side to put itself between them and the smaller females behind it. Despite the long shaggy hair that naturally glistened in the afternoon sun, its underlying musculature gave it the appearance that this creature had stamina and strength to spare. It was also quite obviously male.

“I don’t even think I want to go up against that,” Aaron whispered. “Let’s just shoot it and leave.”

“Shoot it?” Gerard repeated in surprise without taking his eyes from the large bull whatever-it-was.

“With the camera, you dolt. You’re the one taking pictures of everything.”

“Right.” Gerard pulled off his pack and fished out the compact camera. It was small in his large hand paws, but he had been using it all day and was familiar handling it with his claws. The bull took a step closer to the bears and made its mushy, warbling bugle which they interpreted as a warning. Gerard took several pictures, both full frame and close up to get in all of its features, and had managed to snap several of the females before the bull stamped a massive three-toed hoof in irritation at their continued presence.

“Time to retreat, cousin,” Aaron said quietly. “Let’s back away slowly and give this moosh no more reason to feel threatened.” Without further conversation or argument, Gerard put away the camera and then the bears withdrew to a good distance out into the mountain pass. They could still see the bull watching them, but the animal appeared a little more relaxed as his females nuzzled him from both sides.

Once they had topped another small rise and could look down into the valley formed between the mountains, Gerard stopped to sit upon the ground to pull an errant twig from between his toes. He tilted his head at his cousin. “Moosh?” he asked with a grin. “You called that thing a moosh?”

“Well, it’s vaguely moose-like,” Aaron said, defending his impromptu naming of this new creature, “and its call was a bit mushy, like it had a mouth full of marbles.”

“I don’t think it looks like a moose at all - more like a mountain elk crossed with an elephant. We could call it a melk – a moose-slash-elk.”

“A moose-elephant-elk with a huge hammerhead antler… A hammer-moosh, a hamoosh, a hammer-melk or a melkaphant…”

“Now you’re just being sarcastic.”

“I want to call it a moosh.”

“And I like melk.”

“How about a mooshelk?”

“Mooshelk…”

“Yup.”

Gerard grunted, pulled a PBJ from his pack and tapped in a few commands with one of his claw tips. He had never mastered using the stylus since his hands had transformed into stubby fingers with permanently extended claws, so he had gotten used to using his own built-in stylus with the clamshell unit. He opened the file that he had been using for taking notes of their outing and put in a line describing the “mooshelk” they had just discovered and noted why. As an added comment, he put in that it might be a potential food source, but that a rifle or a well-aimed arrow might be necessary to take it down. Despite the power Gerard possessed in his genetically enhanced, hybrid ursine body, he doubted he could have taken down that bull on his own or even with his cousin’s help.

***

Ivan looked up at the hills that overlooked the plain with a wary eye, but there was nothing in the air that alerted him to any potential danger. The hills weren’t tall enough to be mountains, but it would take time and effort to cross them nonetheless. He and Rose had no time to explore them fully in the limit that Avon had given them, but as a prominent landmark near to their home, they had wanted to check them out anyway.

The wind coming in from the plain rustled the blocky leaves of the nearest trees, but there were so many different kinds of trees that these were just one type out of many. Rose coaxed their mount to follow a dried gully that past rains had furrowed into the ground, weaving their way around the trees across clearings and obvious animal trails through the region without having to duck under many overhead limbs.

“There are so many new shrubs, flowers, grasses and other plants here that it would take Kristen months to investigate them all!” Rose said, delightfully sniffing the air as she pulled lightly on the reins to bring Halley to a stop in the middle of a clearing ringed by the various trees.

Ivan yawned and stretched after he hopped off the back of the horse and walked around a little in a bowlegged manner after having straddled it for some time. He pulled out the radio from the pocket of his shorts to check in with Avon while Rose began taking pictures and samples to take back with them.

“Avon, this is Ivan. Are you there?” the male fox said into the radio. The device was a century more advanced than the radios of old and the batteries more efficient, but the principle of its operation was the same even if its range was much further. There was no response for a moment and the fox was about to try again when the colony captain’s familiar voice issued from its small speaker.

“I’m here, Ivan,” the grizzly bear responded in a breathy tone. “Your report is early, has something happened?”

“We got chased out on the plains by one of the thunderpigs that wanted to eat our horse a little while ago, but we’re safe now, no one hurt. We’ve just reached the edge of the hills you can see toward the east of our mountain. We’re in a clearing in the woods that cover these hills and Rose is gathering samples for Kristen and Masanori.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“We’re going to lunch here for a little bit to rest up from the ride and then I want to go to the top of one of these hills to see what’s beyond.”

“Don’t get too lost up in those woods,” the bear cautioned. “Without knowing where you are, we’d never be able to mount a rescue. Remember, you only have a few hours left before you have to return to camp and you’ll need time to get back.”

“It seems nice and quiet here, but we’ll be on the watch for trouble.”

“Just don’t go looking for it.”

“Right, boss.”

“Okay, you two enjoy your outing. I’ll be waiting for your check in at the usual time.”

“Is everything okay back there?” Ivan asked. “You sound winded.”

“Arne took the sheep out grazing in the landing field, but they got spooked on the trail from the valley through the woods and scattered. Everyone’s been rounding them back up, but fortunately a bunch of the sheep regrouped for safety in numbers which made them easier to gather up.”

“Any idea what spooked ‘em?”

“No, but Arne suspects it might be one of those unseen things that Erin calls nightshades. So far, whatever it is hasn’t actually attacked anyone, but everyone’s on edge when passing through these woods, including the animals. It didn’t help matters that Raine got tangled in a large web between two trees and a horrible looking creature tried to go for his eyes.”

“I know the one you’re talking about. Ugly spider-thing. We saw it earlier and gave it a wide margin. Is Raine okay?”

“The edge of one of his ears is a little ragged where it tried gnawing on him, but Manny beat it off with a stick and then nailed the thing to a tree with that long narrow blade of his he likes to carry. Took it ten minutes to die.”

“Nasty,” Ivan remarked with a shudder. “Okay, I’ll let you get back to sheep herding. Good thing you have Cheryl with you – Border collies are good at this sort of thing!”

Avon chuckled. “You should see her in action – down on all fours and yelling at the sheep in a voice that almost sounds like a bark! I think she’s enjoying this way too much, but her methods are effective! Talk to you later, Ivan.”

“Later, boss.”

The fox stretched again and looked around. There was unfamiliar birdsong throughout the trees, but it made the place seem peaceful. He would be worried if it went quiet all of a sudden, heralding the arrival of some predator, but for now this seemed like the perfect place for some alone-time with his vixen.

Rose was kneeling in the dark green grasses that covered the clearing, focusing the camera in close on a circular dark flower with fuzzy edges. When he stopped beside her, she motioned for him to kneel beside her.

“Are you familiar with a Mandelbrot set?” she asked.

Ivan looked at her sideways at the non-sequitur. “It’s a mathematical set of points whose boundary is a distinctive fractal shape, isn’t it?” he replied.

“Take a look at this.”

The male leaned in close and peered at the fuzzy flower only to discover that it was fuzzy due to a myriad of circular petals edged with smaller circular petals that were edged with even smaller circular petals in a continuity that got too small even for his enhanced eyes to distinguish.

“Our botanist is going to have fun with this one,” he said with a smile. “A photo isn’t going to be enough, you’ll have to take her a sample to examine.”

Ivan pulled a small set of plant snips from his pack and was about to cut off the head of the flower, but Rose stopped him with a touch.

“Get the larger container,” she suggested. “I’ll dig it out by the roots so she can have the whole plant.” Using her claws, the vixen dug down into the soil and felt along the buried roots until she had a ball of plant and dirt in her hands. She pulled it up from the ground with a little effort and Ivan placed a large plastic container under it. Once it was inside, Rose uncapped her canteen and poured a little water into the bottom around the roots. Ivan put the cover on the container and then placed the whole thing back into his pouch.

“Ow!” Rose yipped.

“What is it?”

“Something just bit me.”

Rose held up her dirty hands and gently brushed away some of the dirt. There was a tiny red welt on the skin of her right forefinger. Caught up in the dirt near it was some movement, so Ivan used the blade of a pocket knife to brush away soil to expose the possible culprit. They saw a small six-legged spider crawl over the dirt, its mandibles working back and forth. Due to tiny blue and white diagonal stripes across its body, its abdomen looked as if it might be covered in denim.

Ivan positioned the knife blade beneath it and was about to flick it off into grass, but Rose stopped him. “Get a specimen bottle,” she said quietly. “We’ll take it back to Dr. Mochizuki.”

“Forget the denim spider – it bit you, Rose – you need to take care of that finger!”

The vixen rolled her hand over so that the spider stayed on top. Since her companion was not doing as she had asked, she grabbed the pack from him with her free hand and dug around inside until she felt a small plastic bottle with a snap-on cap. She popped the top open and upended it over the spider, capturing it with a bit of the dirt still on her fingers. She recapped it and then dropped it into the pack.

She brushed her hands together, knocking dirt from them and then gave Ivan a patient smile as she cupped her hands. “A little water here, please?”

The fox tod grabbed his canteen and wet down her hands sufficiently that she could wash off the dirt. He grabbed their small First Aid kit with a frown when she wiped off her hands on her overall shorts.

“You don’t know how fast that spider venom might get into your system,” he muttered, taking out an antiseptic wipe. “You need to take such things as serious.”

“Why?” she asked flippantly. “None of the Bonestell bugs like our furry blood and no one who’s been bitten by one has had any ill effects other than a little bite mark.” She held up her hand as he daubed a bit of medicinal cream on it for her. “I felt this one bite me, but it doesn’t even hurt anymore. I feel fine, so there’s no need for you to fuss over me.”

Ivan looked up at her, moving only his eyes. “There are too few of us, Rose. I wouldn’t want to lose any of us, and that includes your life or even just the loss of a finger due to infection or alien venom.”

“Worry wart,” she teased, giving the end of his nose an affectionate lick.

He looked at her a moment more, wrapped a bandage around her abused digit and then put away the First Aid kit.

“C’mon,” he said with an audible sigh. “Let’s have lunch, and then we’ll see if we can get pictures and samples without sacrificing any more body parts in the process.”

***

“How much time do we have left?”

Gerard checked his colony watch and did some mental calculations. “We’ve been gone almost seven hours and we turn back at nine.”

“Let’s call it a day and go on back,” Aaron muttered. He was currently sitting upon a tilted slab of rock on the side of another unnamed mountain in the rocky range. He stared off into the distance but was not really seeing anything. He was tired, he was bored and it was only barely into the afternoon of a standard Bonestellan day. If they returned to the grass plain that bordered the mountains, they could probably make it back to Second Chance within six hours, providing they had no further distractions and maintained a good pace.

Gerard looked over at his cousin and nodded. He felt the same way, but was reluctant to go back over that much ground again. “Let’s find some shade and take a nap before we go,” he suggested. “I’m bushed and my foot pads are sore.”

“I could use a nap too. Call Avon and let him know what we’re going to do. He’ll be upset if we didn’t give him every little morsel of information about our journey, y’know.”

Gerard wearily pulled off his pack and dug out the hand radio. He did not like calling in since the colony captain seemed to feel it was necessary to interrogate him every time he did. It almost seemed as if Avon was trying to make them feel guilty for going in the first place, and both bears were starting to believe it themselves.

***

Ivan pushed aside the fronds of a large feathered fern and then stopped. Rose put her chin on his shoulder and followed his gaze out across miles and miles of continuous forested hills. They had spent the past two hours traversing back and forth up the side of another such hill through cool woods and because the overhead branches were just barely over the height of their horse’s ears, they had led him up the hill instead of riding him. Halley was now tethered to a short tree and he seemed to be content munching on the pale green grass growing at his feet.

“It reminds me of the Appalachians,” Rose said quietly, her eyes still upon the distant hills, many of them taller than the one they had climbed. It could probably be argued that they were mountains, but since Second Chance resided beneath taller rocky peaks, these seemed like nothing more than foothills. Still, the region had a beauty of its own and it looked inviting.

“I wouldn’t mind moving the colony out here,” Ivan remarked. “There’s plenty of lumber to be felled for homes, and then we could live in actual buildings in the sun instead of hiding in virtual igloos in a cave.”

“That does sound nice, doesn’t it?” Rose slipped her arm across the small of his back and leaned into him. “Take plenty of pictures to show everyone back at camp. Maybe we can convince them all to relocate here to… I know, we can claim discoverer’s rights and call this the Ivanrose Forest!”

The reynard fox chuckled in amusement. “I don’t think there’s anything in the rule books that says we have to stay put for the full period of our stay here. Avon could let HQ back on Earth know where we’ve moved to. We have an entire world in which to make our home and your Ivanrose Forest looks like a good place.”

Caught up in the what-if discussion, the vixen pointed down the opposite side of the hill to a large clearing in the trees bisected by a running stream they could see from their vantage point. “That area looks large enough for the whole colony,” she said, “only we’d have to call it a town once we started building log cabins.”

“Second Chance, population thirty-one, established in—”

“Better add several numbers to that population,” Rose said slyly, tickling his ear. “I think there are a few couples who are already planning to increase our numbers.”

“Yeah and you seem to be one of them.”

The overcast sky had grown darker with the windblown clouds, and although it did not feel like it might rain anytime soon, the gloom beneath the woods deepened as well. Ivan was about to remark further, but something in the shadows caught his eye.

“What’s that?” he asked quietly. He turned away from the scenic vista and walked back under the trees. He was not sure if it was a trick of the light or his tired eyes, but he wanted a better look.

Rose put a hand on his elbow as if to stop him, but then followed quietly along behind him. She pulled the pistol out of the pack upon his back and put her thumb on the safety, just in case.

Before he had taken three steps, however, the male fox fell flat on his face, driving his pointed nose into the dirt, grass and leaves. Rose pocketed the pistol, knelt down to help him up and brushed detritus from his face as he sputtered indignantly. He scowled back at his foot that had caught under a square-shaped tree root protruding above the ground and had some difficulty extracting it.

“I really hate these triproots!” he barked angrily. Rose helped him up and he heaved a heavy sigh. “We’ve got them back in our little forest by the valley too and I’m always tripping over them.”

The vixen beside him chuckled, seeing that he had suffered injury to nothing more than his dignity. “You’re not too sure-footed, are you?”

“It’s not that,” he complained. “Look at the root.”

Rose looked at the one that had detained her lover and watched in open mouth surprise as it slowly slid into the soil under its own power as if a rope drawn in by a subterranean mischief maker.

“What makes it do that?” she asked curiously.

“I don’t know,” huffed the male fox, glancing at the branches above him, “but those roots will be in the ground until I’m around, and then they’ll lift up and trip me every time! I don’t know if the trees themselves are carnivorous and are used to snaring smaller prey, but they sure seem interested in my feet!”

“Has any other part of the trees tried to get you?” Rose asked, feeling uneasy.

“No, but if I sat here long enough with my foot trapped, it would probably squeeze my foot right off and then drink the blood that seeped into the ground around the root!”

“That’s a cheerful thought,” Rose muttered, making sure none of the roots were hungry for her feet.

The fox got to his feet and pulled his vixen up beside him. He scowled at the root that was almost completely out of sight now, but then remembered why he had passed this way.

“C’mon,” he said in a hushed voice, ready to move on, “I saw something in the shadows that looked out of place.”

“Be careful,” Rose cautioned. “The next tree might have a nasty bark.” Ivan looked back at her and saw the twinkle in her eyes. He shook his head with a chuckle at her banter, grabbed her hand and continued into the shadows.

As they progressed, she could now see what had garnered his notice. In the darkness of the shadows there seemed to be a soft light emanating from behind a bed of flowers, only when they drew nearer it became apparent that the light was coming from the flowers.

Rose knelt down amongst leaves and pine-like needles and reached out for one of them.

“Careful, there may be another denim spider,” Ivan cautioned.

The vixen leaned forward and examined the plant, but saw no insects upon it. The flower, its leaves and the primary double stalk was of special interest, however. The entire plant looked translucent, as if it was made of glass or plastic, and there seemed to be a clear liquid inside it all that glowed with a greenish blue haze.

“Natural phosphorescence,” Ivan whispered. “This could come in handy if we could get it to grow inside the cavern.”

“What about lichen? Doesn’t that glow in the dark?”

“Some kinds do, but I’ve not seen any in our colony cave. Although no one’s really explored far back inside of it, I don’t think there’s anything growing in there. Too dry – probably too dry for these flowers too.”

“We’re running low on empty specimen containers,” Rose remarked, “but we’ve got to take one of these back with us.”

“No doubt about that. Listen, I want to try something.” The fox tod plucked a flower from one of the stalks and the internal liquid oozed out onto his hand, leaving a glowing trail across his fingers. He stood up and then retraced his steps back out into the sunlight. He held up the picked flower for a moment and then returned to the shadows of the forest. As expected, the flower and the trail across his fingers now glowed with a discernable increased brightness.

“Glow in the dark flowers!” Rose said with a grin.

Ivan smiled back at her, but then his eyes grew wide. “Yeow!” he yipped suddenly. He dropped the flower and then began wiping his fingers frantically on the grass at his feet to get the glowing liquid off of him.

“What is it?” Rose asked frantically. “Does it burn?”

“It’s a cold burn!” Ivan gasped, now holding one hand in the other. “It’s freezing!”

Rose pulled him back out into the sun and looked closely at his fingers. Where the liquid had been was an angry red line across his skin. “Is it still burning?”

“Not as much. I think I got it all off before it got me too bad. I had a chemical burn once back in college. I think it was like this.”

“Let’s clean it up and get that hand bandaged before we do anything else.”

As she worked on him, she looked up at him with a smirk. “The bugs are after me and the plants are mad at you. What a pair we make.”

“Trio,” Ivan corrected. “The bugs attack you, the plants burn me, and the local warthogs try to eat our horse!”

“We all need to be more careful.”

An alarm on Rose’s PBJ chose that moment to go off, making both of them jump. The vixen scrambled to get to the middle pocket of her overalls and then pulled it out. She opened its clamshell case and tapped the screen with a claw tip. The alarm hushed and she read its flagged message.

“Time to head home,” she said to Ivan with a frown. “It’s been nine hours.”

“Hmm, okay. Hopefully it won’t take that long to get back,” he replied. “Let’s find a way to get one of these glowing freezy-flowers in a container so we can get started.”

“We’ve been using our hands, but I think there’s a spade in the bottom of the pack. Perhaps we can use that.”

“That’s better than freeze-burning any more fingers. Perhaps we should have brought along some of the work gloves.” He looked back out across the scenery of the distant hills and sighed. “I would have liked to explore a little more, but now that we know this is here, perhaps Avon will let us come back another time.”

“Speaking of Avon, you’d better check in and let him know that we’ll be on our way back soon. We still need to get pictures of this place before we can leave too.”

Ivan nodded and dug in the pack again for the radio. He would only give a brief report for now, but he and Rose would have quite a lot to detail when they returned to home camp.

Chapter 7

Worries & Concerns

A brief streak of light arced across the midnight sky, leaving a momentary echo of the image impressed upon a pair of large amber eyes. Several more followed immediately behind it, cutting furrows across the stars, but then the short-lived meteor shower was over, ending just as quickly and unannounced as it had begun.

Jon blinked the streaks away and looked away to the side at the thin sliver of the alpha moon.  It was only a third the size of Luna, but the familiar crescent shape of the satellite was comforting.  He had watched it during its last full phase, marveling each night at features that were different from the previous evening due to its rotation. Unlike the moon of Earth, the two smaller satellites of Bonestell were not tidal-locked and did not keep the same face toward the parent planet at all times.

Norman had brought along a small telescope and was actively involved in studying the moons each night he did not have sentry duty, drawing rough sketches of what he saw. Jon had looked through it a few times, but he had neither the patience nor the artistic ability of the black bear.

Lying on his back upon the flat slab of rock that he had claimed as his own on the side of the mountain, Jon stared up at the night sky and marveled at its brilliance. The LED lamps from the camp below weren’t enough to blanket out the stars with light pollution and it had been years since he had seen the Milky Way so clearly. He had never been much of a stargazer on Earth, but he was familiar with some of the more easily recognizable constellations. He looked for some and saw one or two that looked a little distorted, but he was otherwise lost in the sky.  The slight distortion was due to their distance from Earth, looking at the sky from several parsecs away in a different part of the galaxy.

The cougar was not sure where the smaller, more distant beta moon was tonight so he figured it must be out of sight around the other side of the world. He gave it only a momentary thought, wondering if anyone had ever set foot upon either moon, human or otherwise.

After a while, he lost interest in the overhead stars and looked up at the mountain that watched over their new home. It was odd that although the Furs lived in a large cavern at the base of it, he had never really considered the mountain itself.  It was simply part of the terrain, and although he climbed the side of it just about every night to get to his favorite ledge, he had never given it much thought.  Looking up at it now, he could see the rocks and vegetation in the dim starlight, but its peak was hidden away from his current location.

Apparently no one else had devoted much thought about the giant wall that obscured part of the sky, for none had bothered to name the mountain they lived beneath since they had arrived on First Day. Come to think of it, he had not even heard anyone apply a name to the range of mountains either.

Had the mountains ever had a name? he wondered silently. Had there ever been a race on this world that named things as men from Earth did? What was the name of this world anyway?  Bonestell?  No, that was the moniker applied by the astronomer from Earth who had first discovered it from there.  What was its real name?

His thoughts were interrupted when the arm across his chest shifted; Kristen snuggled up closer to his side, having drifted off to sleep beside him after a full day of work in the garden.  The Terran plants were sprouting well in the alien soil – as were the local weeds that threatened to take them over. Keeping the garden free of native plants had been a full day’s work.

Jon looked down at her face and saw her slumbering smile of contentment. One of his arms was behind his head, but with his free hand, he gently brushed errant bangs across her forehead affectionately. They had come a long way together in more than just the distance from Earth.

The relationship had begun with a rocky start within mere days of their first meeting as green volunteers of the Anthro Human Colonization Program at the North American branch of the Furmankind Institute. He had saved her from the unwanted advances of another volunteer who had tried to force her to take personal time with him, and as a result Jon had become the subject of Kristen’s gratitude.

Knowing their future together would be tied through the terrors of a painful full-body transformation, she had chosen to become the same species of feline that Jon had been required to take on under the conditions of his sentencing, unaware that her decision would cause great psychological trauma to the man forced to live out the life meant for the one he had cold-bloodedly murdered in revenge.

Their fledgling friendship had turned sour over the months, genuine animosity creating great stress between them, but time itself finally healed their heartaches and brought them back together. It had been a great struggle for Jon to get past his prejudices and acknowledge her for the friend she was, but once he had accepted her completely, he now realized it was likely they had always been meant for one another, despite that he had never really believed in destiny or fate.

No one else had ever doubted the two of them would wind up together, but the pair of mountain lions had finally become a couple in almost every sense of the word and were nearly inseparable whenever together.  They each had things to teach the other with life experiences to share, and both of them were better for it.

There was one step in the relationship they had not yet taken, but each had learned to be patient for the right time when their union would be a natural progression. In a colony full of Furs that all possessed an enhanced sense of hearing, total privacy was difficult to attain. All the feline couple needed was the right opportunity under the right conditions.

Old fashioned in a sense, Jon often toyed with the notion of finding some local stone to use in the setting of a very special gift to his lady. Rings were a thing of the past due to their differently formed fingers, but there were other ways to present his message to the one he loved.

Kristen smiled in her sleep and Jon eased his arms around her protectively. There was a slight chill in the air, but their natural fur kept them warm enough through the night.

Before long, however, Kristen’s nose began to quiver and she opened her eyes a little. “Do you smell that?” she asked quietly.

Jon raised his nose to the sky and inhaled, testing the scents on the wind.  “I smell the campfire,” he replied with a shrug.  “Kim or Yuki must be cooking something.”  With the longer Bonestellan days, it was not uncommon that there were more than three meals per day.  Even after nearly two months, shifts and schedules were still erratic, although Avon and Jon had often discussed sitting down with everyone to set up a standard that everyone could live by; this had not yet taken place, however, so the cougar was not really surprised that a cooking fire was active.

Kristen sat up and then turned her nose toward the woods that bordered the colony on the side not protected by the mountain.  She sniffed the air again and then glanced down at the open lip of the cavern where the campfire pit lay darkened.

“There’s no fire tonight,” she said. “What I smell is farther away, although I smell more than just wood smoke.”

“Could be a forest fire or a grass fire,” Jon muttered, getting to his feet. He peered off into the distance searching for the familiar signs of a large scale event; there had been no lightning that he could recall, but it would not be the first time a forest fire started from some other means. He turned slowly, looking around in all directions, but all was dark that he could see.

He sniffed the air again and although the scents shifted on the breezes that wafted against the mountain, he thought he had pinpointed the direction the smoke originated.  It was not strong, but now that he was focused upon it, there was no ignoring the aroma.

“Look, there,” he said after a moment.  He took Kristen’s hand, and then wrapping one of his around it, pointed into the darkness.

She followed this direction and then she saw it, a flicker of yellow-orange light on the other side of the woods.  Someone had built a campfire out away from the colony valley.  It was unlikely to be seen through the trees from the cave, but Jon and Kristen were higher than the treetops on the side of the mountain.

“Should we sound an alarm?” Kristen asked quietly.  “In case it spreads toward the valley?”

Jon shook his head, his eyes still locked upon the flicker of fire. “No, not yet, but we should probably investigate anyway.”

Without further discussion, the pair of cougars traversed down the side of the mountain on all fours, quiet as the breeze that tinkled through delicate wind chimes in the valley. Over the months since their transformation, they had both learned the feline trait of traveling silently, their foot pads barely stirring leaves as they passed even when they walked quickly through the woods in the direction the flicker had been.

Three-quarters of a mile was not a far distance to walk to the wheat-grass field and they reached the vicinity of the fire in just over ten minutes. Standing still in the shadows of the woods, they silently watched Michael Lynch as he tended a small campfire that had been built in a claw-dug pit in the ground; he was several paces away from the nearest tree where there would be no danger of the flames spreading beyond the dead wood in the depression.

The swift fox had erected a makeshift spit over the fire using upright Y-shaped branches on each side and a fairly straight crosspiece which was skewered through a charred hunk of meat.  Jon swallowed, hoping the predominantly grey fox was not going to try eating one of the lil-deer, but the aroma was different. Kristen could not help but lick her lips; whatever it was sure smelled good to her.

She forced her eyes away from the meat and looked around at Michael’s feet. There was a mound of plucked feathers, and although she could not identify what bird they had come from in the darkness, she knew those were not from one of the lil-deer.

As they watched, Michael used the blade of a hunting knife to saw into the meat and managed to cut off a strip without burning his fingers or singeing the fur of his arm.  The fox blew on it a little, hesitating only briefly before putting it into his mouth.  He chewed on it for a moment and from their position, Jon and Kristen could see the roll of his eyes as if he was really enjoying the flavor.

After swallowing the morsel, he cut off another piece and ate it with enthusiasm.  Kristen could not help herself; she started to rush forward to join him, but Jon held her back.

He put his lips into her nearest ear and spoke very, very quietly. “Wait and watch,” he said.

“Don’t wanna wait,” she hissed. “Smells too good.”

“So did my deer steak.”

Kristen sighed and nodded quietly, remembering that the effects of the natural laxative did not hit right away.  If it turned out that the bird had the same substance in its body, it may be possible that all Bonestellan creatures had it. This would mean that the colonists would have to rely completely upon raising their own Terran animals for food without being able to use the local wildlife, and this meant making sure they kept their livestock surviving right alongside the colonists.

The implications of this were important. Despite how Earthlike this world was, future human settlers would likely never come here if they had to import all their food. It would defeat the purpose of leaving the overcrowding and food shortages of Earth; Bonestell would be considered a failure for colonization.

So, even though the aroma was enticing the cougars’ senses, they both simply waited in the shadows and watched to see if Michael suffered any ill effects from eating the alien bird meat.

After long minutes of silence, the swift fox chuckled and said in a conversational tone, “Would you two like to join me?”  He turned and looked into the shadows right at them with a smile.

Kristen grinned and gave her partner an elbow to the ribs before she got up and approached the fire. “How long have you known we were there?” she asked, taking a seat down in the grass opposite the fire from the fox.

“My hearing is very good,” he answered, tapping an ear with a finger. “I could hear your whispers clearly and your eye-shine gave you away too.”

“And you let us just sit out there watching you eat, you stinker!” Kristen retorted with a smirk.

“Are you okay?” Jon asked, taking a seat beside the lioness, gesturing toward the roasted bird.

“Never better,” Michael replied, cutting off another piece.  He handed this to Kristen and then smiled as she put it up to her mouth. She paused, however, still unsure of the alien meat.  “Go ahead,” he told her. “It’s perfectly safe to eat.”

“How do you know?” Jon asked, clearly unconvinced. “It might take a while before anything happens to you. It was nearly two hours before the deer meat got to me.”

“Relax, Jon. I’ve been eating this every other night for the past week.  I’m fine.”

“You have?” Kristen eyed the meat in her hands and held it up to her nose. She was practically salivating and decided she could wait no longer.  She put it in her mouth and rolled her tongue over it before finally chewing on it.  Her eyes widened and she looked over at Jon.  “It’s smoky and sweet,” she said after swallowing it.”

“Let me guess… it tastes like chicken.”

She snickered. “Actually, no. The flavor is a little different, but the closest I could compare it to is wild pheasant.”

Smiling triumphantly, Michael cut off a small piece, popped it in his mouth, and then cut off a larger piece for Jon. He handed it to the feline, who took it with continued hesitation.

Jon held it up to his mouth and gave it a tentative feline lick. The flavor seemed good and he licked it again, enjoying the taste. Finally taking the fox at his word, Jon ate the roasted bird meat slowly, and then with building enthusiasm, he smiled and shook his head.

“It’s good,” he admitted.  “Very good!  What is it?”

Michael laughed and cut off more pieces for all three of them. “It’s one of those loud, ugly and annoying arrowheads!” he answered.  After eating his morsel, he reached beside him and picked up a compound bow that was in the grass beside him. “I was out here one day last week, doing nothing more than shooting at tree trunks to practice my aim, when one of the arrowhead birds shrieked at me from the limbs of the tree I was shooting at.  The thing just sat there screaming and I decided I’d had enough of it, so I decided to frighten it away.  I was correct in that I needed practice — instead of hitting the tree trunk below I’d aimed at, I hit the bird; skewered it right through the chest.”

He put the bow down and returned to the roasting meat, both of his companions giving him hungry looks. Despite that they had eaten earlier, this was too good to pass up and Michael did not mind sharing while he had plenty for himself.

“At first, I was shocked at what I’d done on accident and was going to bury the bird, but at the time I was hungry and the thought crossed my mind to try eating it.  I knew it might make me sick, but eventually we’ve got to try to find alternatives to our own pigs, chickens, guineas, sheep and cows, so I decided to go for it.  I dug this pit so I wouldn’t catch the field on fire and made a campfire with dead wood I found.  After cooking it sufficiently, I tried a piece and then sat back to see what kind of effect it would have on me.”

He grinned. “I sat here for over an hour, having tasted that wonderful flavor and smelling it cook, and it took all I could to keep from gorging myself on more before I found out what it might do to me.”  He patted his stomach.  “The only thing that happened to me was a well-fed tummy!”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Jon asked, taking another piece offered to him.

Michael shrugged. “I guess I was afraid Avon would yell at me for being careless,” he confessed. “Maybe I was, but somebody had to try it.”

“That was either very brave or very foolish, Mike,” Kristen said quietly. “You could have died.”

The fox looked at her somberly. “Yes, I could have.”  He looked across the fire at Jon, the second-in-command of the colony. “Are you going to yell at me now?”

Jon shook his head and smiled. “Not if you keep feeding me.”

***

Dawn colored the morning sky with the earliest touches of light as Ellie wrapped her arms around her mate’s neck and licked his cheek affectionately.  She also gave him a human-style peck on his lupine lips for luck and then stepped back.  Carl gave her a loving smile and then turned toward the gyrocopter they had assembled the afternoon before. Despite the urge to launch it right away after completion, he had to let it sit out in the sun in the valley field throughout the rest of the long day to let its solar cells fully charge, but now at first light of the next morning, the wolf was about to take it up for its first reconnaissance flight.

The ultralight aircraft was a straightforward design, consisting of a simple aluminum tube frame with a red padded pilot seat mounted just forward of a vertical central mast. Behind the seat was the electric motor that drove a four-blade prop facing toward the back and at the top of the mast was a two-blade rotor.  Behind the rear-facing motor was a large black rudder fin with solar charging cells across the flat surface of both sides. A triangular set of small, solid rubber wheels was mounted below on an impact-resistant suspension, but the whole craft weighed less than two hundred fifty pounds so landings should be light. It was designed so that it could take off with only a twenty-foot run and it could land almost vertically.

Below the seat and between the bars of the frame was a small storage locker; it was not large, but would be handy to hold more items than the pilot could keep in his pockets.  Built inside the seat was an armored solar battery cell and a single control stick was located between the pilot’s legs.  There were two pedals to control the brake and the rudder, and a simple set of mechanical gauges above the feet to indicate battery charge, altitude and air speed.

The craft was an archaic design from an age before anti-gravity repulsors, but such technology required a lot of power and was expensive to operate, the principle reason why air-cars and other levitating vehicles of the proverbial future had never really caught on. Despite the advances in technology, it was simply too cost prohibitive. Although exponentially more efficient than their early predecessors, mechanical devices such as cars, trucks and airplanes were still in use on Earth and a simple gyrocopter could prove itself highly useful in the primitive setting of an interstellar colony. A fancraft would have been more ideal, but the wolf was just as happy to have any kind of aerial vehicle to aid in the discovery of their new world.

Although Avon had limited his initial flight to just two hours for safety concerns, Carl had loaded up its storage box with food, water, First Aid kit, a small tool pouch, a pistol with ammunition, and a standard survival pack that included a small Very pistol flare gun. He had a digital camera tucked into one of the pockets of his overalls in addition to a PBJ for notes, and a hand radio to file reports. Since standard human sunglasses would no longer fit his lupine face, he wore a pair of tinted goggles strapped around his head with an elastic band.

“All you need is a leather flight cap and a scarf and you could be either Snoopy the dog or Charles Lindbergh,” Ken teased him from the crowd that had gathered in the field to witness his take-off in the archaic contrivance.

“Snoopy, I know, but who’s Lindbergh?” the grey wolf asked curiously.

“Charles Lindbergh was an early aviator who explored the skies before they became common travel routes,” Ken explained. “I’ve read about him in the history books. As one aerial explorer to another, I think you would have liked him.”

“Sounds interesting,” Carl replied.

“Well then, wish me luck.”

“Luck!”

Carl smiled and gave the red wolf a snappy salute in response.

The gyrocopter’s overhead rotor was twenty-five feet in diameter, so the lupine pilot shooed the crowd backward before he stepped up to the seat.  “Everybody back,” he commanded. “I don’t want to take off any heads when I leave and you bears are taller than the rest!”

There were good-natured responses, but everyone moved away from the craft when he sat down and fastened a simple safety belt around his waist. He picked up an oversized transparent helmet from the ground beside him and gingerly fitted it over his head before cinching up the chin strap. It was not the most comfortable fit with his lupine ears flattened against his head, but it would serve its purpose to protect his skull should anything happen to him.

Making a final check of the system with an eye on the crowd to make sure he would not run over anyone upon takeoff, Carl thumbed the starter button and the prop behind him came to life. After the propeller had reached the desired speed, a small spinning wheel above moved into place to give the unpowered rotor a healthy nudge to set it rotating; Furs backed away even further when the rotor blade swished over their ears, spinning faster and faster.  The wolf disengaged the brake, rolled forward no more than a couple dozen feet and then the skeletal craft took to the air.

The high-pitched whine of the electric motor resembled the buzz of a large mosquito as he lifted up over the top of the horseshoe valley. He quickly encountered breeze winds coming around the mountain, but they were not too strong for him to compensate for.  He circled lazily around the valley to gain further altitude and several of the Furs below waved at him.

Kevin had given him a forecast of a good weather day. There would be some breezes close to the mountains, but wispy clouds were high overhead and should not cause a problem.  Likewise, the various exploring parties from the day before had all given him a brief rundown on what they had seen so he would not have to waste his precious two hours covering the same areas. His plans were to see what there might be to see toward the west and northwest for now. He had given Avon his general flight plan, so once he was sufficiently above the treetops and away from the mountain, he turned and headed in that direction.

On the ground in the middle of the valley field stood his wife. Ellie watched him go until he moved out of visual range over the trees and then heaved a small sigh at his departure.  She was just as qualified as he and would later get her own chance to fly, but this was the first flight and her mate would be out of touch with everyone but the colony captain. Although she had joined in the argument to talk Avon into letting them make this endeavor, she was now privately thankful that the first jaunt had been limited to only two hours.

***

The mountain lioness was on her belly in the dirt, peering intently at a row of autumn vegetable plants, her fingers itching to pull up one of the radishes to check its progress.  The above ground vegetables had been growing well in the local soil and even after only a few weeks their development was encouraging.  Some took longer to grow this late in the season, but the lettuce was practically ready to use now and the colony cooks had been eyeing them enviously. They had plenty of canned and freeze dried vegetables they had brought along with the supplies, but fresh veggies were more nutritious and it would be best if they could save the canned goods for hard times.

A shadow fell across the feline and she looked up to see Kim and Yuki standing between rows of carrots and sweet potatoes.

“I told you before,” Kristen said with a sigh, “they aren’t ready yet.”

Yuki sat on her haunches between the rows and the Akita smiled at her. “We aren’t here to bug you about your veggies,” she said to assure her. “We have a different request.”

“Yes, we need your help,” said the lynx that settled down in the row on her other side.

Kristen looked from one to another and narrowed her eyes. “What is it?” she asked suspiciously.

“We want to spruce up the meals with some local herbs,” Kim replied, “but we don’t know what to pick from the woods.”

“We were hoping you could go with us and help find something edible we can use like those star-shaped tubers you found a couple weeks ago,” Yuki explained. “Remember how you helped me pick out the hackberries on our survival hike back home?  I found something we could eat, but you kept that other guy from getting into poison hemlock.  We don’t want to get into the local version of hemlock by mistake and could really use your expertise.”

Kristen looked at her with interest. “I suppose I could help you with that,” she told them with a nod and laid a finger against her whiskers. “I won’t recognize anything here simply by looking at them as I did back then, but I’ve discovered that a Fur’s nose is a good tool for detecting things like that, even here.”

“So you’ll help us?” Kim asked.

The cougar got up onto her knees and then brushed the dirt off her fingers. “Sure, let me grab the botanical kit from my dome and then I’ll meet you over by the barn.  Pick up a couple of plastic buckets and some work gloves, and then we’ll be ready to go.”

Thanks, Kristen!” the sisters said in unison.

***

Thock!  Thock!  Thock!  Thock!

Two axes swung at the trunk of a fallen tree in alternating rhythm, carving out chunks of dead wood and sending splinters out into the surrounding underbrush.  The grizzly bear and the African lion were chopping up the thick trunk into firewood and its upper branches as kindling.  Although their young weather fox was a self-professed ‘low Fur on the colony totem pole’, Kevin had made a recommendation to the captain that they should begin gathering available firewood even though winter was still a few months away.  There was plenty of room in the back regions of the cavern where they could store it out of the elements.

Second Chance had seen an inordinate amount of good weather since they had arrived. Their landing on First Day set them down in late summer or early autumn when the temperatures had started cooling down, and now their nights and early mornings had grown chilly.  Clouds around the taller peak tops of the mountain range had added additional snow to their crowns, and although the weather was still temperate around the colony, there was no guarantee the warmer climate would last.

Kevin might be the youngest Fur among them, but he was currently more knowledgeable on weather forecasting than anyone else in the colony, and he had been diligent studying all he could with the subject matter loaded on his PBJ.

Avon listened to his counsel and had begun implementing firewood-gathering sessions throughout the population of his group.  So far, the efforts had been casual – everyone was to gather up any dead wood they might find and bring it with them back to the cavern – but when a fallen tree in the woods around the horseshoe valley was found during a recent search for lost lambs that had been scattered during an outing, Avon recognized the opportunity to harvest it for their stash.

He and Arne were chopping it into smaller, more manageable sections, while Raine, Hank and Alicia were loading them up into a horse-drawn cart and cutting up the thinner branches.  After a couple of hours in a stop-and-go process, they were just finishing up with the last of the tree trunk as the others were still gathering limbs.

Thock!  Thock!  Thock!  Thock!

“There, that’s got it,” Arne grunted in satisfaction when the last two segments parted in a spray of splintered wood. He was panting from the exertion and leaning on his axe handle, but he had enjoyed the physical activity.

Avon rolled one of the last pieces to the side and then upended it to use as a rough seat for a moment. He had to shave off a few pointed ends so they would not skewer his butt, but the wood of this particular tree was soft and easy to shape with the axe. Dressed only in his shorts, the grizzly bear picked up a water jug and fairly emptied it in one sitting.  He set it on the ground beside him after a moment and then closed his eyes as he caught up to his breath.

He sat there for a good long time, simply listening to the conversations of the others as they worked, but after several moments, he could feel himself start to drift off into an upright nap.  He shook himself awake, but when he opened his eyes, there was a worried-looking golden retriever staring back at him.

“Are you okay?” Wendy asked.

The captain gave her a weary smile. “I’m fine. A good physical workout combined with a warm sunny day makes for a drowsy bear.”  The canine wrung her hands together, looking nervous.  “Is there something you needed?” he asked politely.

“I know you’re busy,” she answered quietly, “but when you have a moment, may I speak to you privately?”

“There’s no better time like the present,” he answered, getting to his feet.  “Shall we take a walk in the woods?” Wendy nodded, but otherwise did not reply.  Avon waved to get the attention of the others.  “There’s something I need to attend to. I’ll be back shortly,” he told them.

“We’ll finish up here,” Hank replied, “if Raine will quit slacking off and keep up his end of the work!”

“I heard that!” the cheetah complained from his task.

“Well, quit listening in on other people’s conversations and get with it!”

Avon sighed at the irritating banter and then turned back to the canine. She looked up at him gratefully, but remained silent as he led her off into the woods further away from camp.  After they had walked for a few minutes and were alone beneath the trees, the grizzly stopped at another fallen tree to sit down.  He made a mental note for them to harvest this one for the firewood stash too, but for now he gave his attention to the young female.

“What can I do for you?” he asked quietly.

Wendy sat down a short distance from him on the horizontal tree trunk and wrung her hands together again.  She looked at him, then to her feet, back to him, and then to her hands. Now that she had his attention, she was not sure how to begin.

“Are you having issues with someone?” Avon ventured to guess.

The golden retriever shook her head and heaved a sigh.  “No,” she replied quietly. “I’m okay with everyone, though there are not many who really talk to me outside of colony duties.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“That’s not what’s bothering me, though.”  She looked back at the ground, but continued talking. “Every…. Everyone seems to be well-adjusted to being here,” she said in a voice so low that even Avon’s enhanced auditory senses had difficulty hearing her. “It’s nice and all, but I can’t shake the feeling that we shouldn’t be here.”

“What do you mean – here on Bonestell or here at this location?”

“On Bonestell,” she murmured. She looked at her hand paws and frowned. “We’re humans that have been changed into partial animals to help us survive, but that doesn’t make this place any more idyllic.”

Avon tilted his head. “I don’t understand,” he replied. “We’ve had no real issues since we got here. The weather’s been decent, the insects and animals have practically left us alone, there are no alien monsters and our livestock and gardens have been doing well. If that’s not a definition of idyllic, I don’t know what is.”

“It’s too quiet.”

“Huh?”

“It’s too quiet.  I’ve never been any place that’s this quiet before. Even the Institute, located miles from the nearest towns in the Adirondack Mountains always had some noise on the grounds and even sounds from distant cars or planes.  This place is silent.”

A bird cried out at some disturbance not far away and Avon raised an eyebrow at the canine.  Wendy shrugged and said, “Even the bird calls sound muted, as if they’re afraid of getting too loud – except for the arrowheads, but even they don’t screech out that often.”

“Has something happened?” Avon asked quietly, leaning forward. “What prompted this line of thought?”

Wendy’s shoulders slumped. “I was on watch a few nights ago before all the wind started up.  It was quiet, still and unnerving.  My hearing is a lot more sensitive than it was before my transformation, and even then I was hard-pressed to hear anything. There was none of the usual night noises and not even Dahlia’s wind chimes were tinkling. It’s like all the nocturnal sounds had hushed that night.”

The bear looked alarmed.  “That’s usually a sign that there’s a predator in the area,” he said. “We’re all predators here, but the local wildlife hasn’t seemed bothered by us since we’ve refrained from doing any hunting, so some other indigenous predator might have been in the area.”

“I don’t know,” Wendy murmured. “All I know is that Bonestell is beautiful and looks like a great vacation spot, but…”

“But?”

The canine looked up at him with moist eyes and swallowed.  ”I want to go home!” she cried out.  “I don’t want to be here anymore!”

“Wendy…”

“I miss the Earth!” she exclaimed, absently tugging on the dog tags around her neck. “I miss all the hustle and bustle, the shopping malls, restaurants, television, music, the crowds and the constant noise!  It was a mistake to come here – the silence is a warning that we aren’t supposed to be here! The disappearance of the Magellan is a sure sign of that too!”

“Wendy,” Avon tried again, “you’re being silly.  Long before modern civilization on Earth grew to be so noisy, it was quiet there too. Consider the explorers from Europe discovering the Americas for the first time.  They survived the silences then and so will we.  It’s nothing to be concerned about.” Wendy looked miserable and felt stung by his belittling words.  “Do you really miss the Earth,” he asked, “or do you miss being human?”

“I don’t mind being part canine,” she muttered, “but I do miss humanity – for all its problems and troubles, I miss it all!”

“I’m sorry you feel this way,” the grizzly said in a calm tone, “but remember that you are contracted to the AHCP for the rest of your life. You willingly signed a legal document in agreement that your body and purpose in life now belonged to the company and that you knew you would likely never see Earth again. It was explained to you before you signed, before you were transformed, at a time when you had every opportunity over several days to back out – after being informed exactly what was going to happen.  You were not pressured to sign and you did so of your own free will. You’re here because you wanted to be here.”

“It was a mistake!” she said, choked up. “I never imagined it would be this bad!”

“What’s so bad about it? Didn’t you attend the historical lectures that described just what the other starter colonies had to go through to establish themselves?  Second Chance has had it far easier than most of the colonies to date, human or furman!”

“We aren’t supposed to be here and I don’t want to be here either,” Wendy whispered with her head down.

Avon sat back with a deep frown.  He rubbed his massive hand paws together and then rubbed them on the fur of his legs.  He studied her for a moment, but she would not look at him now.

“Wendy,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice, “perhaps it’s time you took a session to talk with Erin.”

“Erin? Why would I want to talk to that big-eared pixie?  We don’t have anything in common.”

“Erin is our counselor. She’s better trained to listen to those who need someone to talk to than I am.”

“You just don’t want to order a ship to come back to get us,” Wendy grumbled. “That’s why you don’t want to talk to me anymore and are pushing me off onto someone else.”

Avon could not help himself. He growled at the golden canine and she looked up at him with suddenly wide eyes. The grizzly had to force himself to calm down, but when he spoke again, there was an edge to his voice.

“The AHCP will not send a ship to come get us,” he said sternly, “no matter what our reasons are.  Other colonies have had real reasons for a recall and their requests were ignored due to legal five-year contracts to stick it out! No one else wants to go home and even if we had a valid reason for a recall, they won’t go the expense to send a ship for one Fur.”

“They wouldn’t be coming for just one Fur,” Wendy countered, “but they could take us all back to Earth!”

“Why would they do that?” Avon growled. “Nobody but you wants to leave this place, and even if they did, you have a contract that will keep you from returning to Earth – they’d just send you to another — probably more inhospitable place — than here! As I said, they won’t send a ship for one Fur.”

He put his hands in his lap and clasped his fingers together, clacking his long claws in the process. “I’m sorry you don’t like it here, Wendy,” he said in a calmer tone, “but there’s no going back. You and I will be here for at least five years and even then it’s unlikely we’ll get to go back to Earth afterward. They will either keep us here to help future human colonies get set up or ship us off to another colony to help build up numbers elsewhere. We all need to make the best of our place in life here. Please… schedule some time to talk with Erin. She may help you find a solution to accept what you volunteered for.”

The golden retriever stood up on two feet and looked at the colony captain; her expression was anything but kind. Without wasting further breath, she turned on her toes and purposely stormed away from him.

Avon sighed and shook his head. He may have had leadership skills to make sure the colony operated properly, but he knew he was sadly lacking when it came to interpersonal discussions.  Instead of resolving the situation with Wendy, he was convinced he had probably done nothing more than alienate her at a time when she needed comfort and compassion.  What was worse is that she had not been the first to come to him with similar feelings of unease, though she was the only one who had voiced a desire to leave. Despite their peaceful existence here, there were some who felt they were sitting on a ticking time bomb, but there were none who could tell him precisely why they felt that way.

It was a mystery to the cinnamon-furred grizzly bear. For the first time in many years, he was genuinely happy with his life and he had no reason whatsoever to want to return to Earth.

***

Ken looked up from the lighted microscope on the small folding desk in the dome he and Jenni had set up as an infirmary. There was a gurney, a cabinet of medical supplies and various instruments and fairly decent room to move around in if needed. It had been quiet in that department, so the red wolf had been examining sample tissues taken from their livestock to make sure their development eating the native grasses and plants was not harmful.

He rubbed his eyes and relaxed for a moment. He had been hunched over the table for hours and he could feel a headache coming on to accompany tight shoulder muscles. He longed for a hot tub, but there were no natural hot springs anywhere in the area.  He would have to settle for a cold soak in the shallow pool near the south end of the lake where he would not have to worry about the fish nibbling on his fur. The sun-heated shower bags would probably feel better, but he was limited on how long he could stay under the water due to the smallish capacity of the bladder. The water that cascaded down the side of the mountain from the natural spring that fed the lake did not produce a waterfall large enough for anyone to get under either.

There was a quiet knock on the door frame of the geodesic dome and he looked up at the silhouette filling the space.

“Doctor Wilder?”

The wolf smiled and waggled a finger toward the red vixen. “How many times do I have to tell you that you don’t have to call me that,” he admonished with a smile. “You knew me simply as Ken back at the Institute. Why do you insist on being so formal with me out here?”

Rose shrugged her shoulders with a sheepish expression on her face.  “Back then, you were just another volunteer like me,” she replied, “but now you’re the colony doctor. It just seems proper to give you the respect of your official title.”

Ken gave her a smirk and shook his head, beckoning her forward. “Okay, I concede. You may respect me as you wish.  Now, what may I do for you?”

Rose held out her right hand toward him, palm upward, but only the forefinger extended. “A spider bit me when we were digging up a plant to bring back from our trip out to Ivanrose Forest. It doesn’t hurt, but it looks worse than it did.”

Ken frowned as he looked at the swollen bump between the first and second knuckle. The skin was deep purple, almost black, and it so dry it was almost flaky.  “Why didn’t you come to me as soon as you got back?” he asked, looking up into her orange eyes. She looked tired, but otherwise just gazed back at him.

“Honestly, I didn’t think about it,” she answered. “We put some first aid cream on it and wrapped it in a bandage, and then I forgot about it by the time we got back.  I was tired from riding all day and wanted only to go to my bed. Since it doesn’t hurt, I didn’t really think about it when I got up this morning, but it’s a little stiff and numb now.”

Ken led her toward the desk and had her sit on his roller stool while he picked out a few things from an old fashioned black medical bag on another table. He slid a pair of stubby-fingered, latex gloves over his lupine hands and then reached for her.

He held up her hand and then peered at the finger beneath a large circular magnifying glass attached to a swing-arm frame mounted to the table. He examined the swollen wound closely under the lens and then picked up a small bladed knife.

“You said it doesn’t hurt?” he asked.

“Not at all, but it looks pretty ugly.”

“There’s no telling what was in that spider venom,” the wolf muttered, putting the sharp tip of the blade up against her finger. “This might sting a bit.”

Rose turned her head when he lanced the wound, but she did not feel a thing. The skin was completely numb to pain, but blue-black pus oozed from the incision and both of them winced from the sudden rank smell.

Ken grabbed a small vial and captured a good amount of it for later examination.  He rolled her finger between his, squeezing out as much of it as he could get, though with an eye on her face in case he caused her pain.  She kept her gaze averted to the side, but did not seem distressed by what he was doing.

He cleaned out the wound with hydrogen peroxide and then daubed it dry with gauze.  When it did not leak any further, he shined a pen light into it and examined it closely beneath the large lens. The skin tissue around the area looked dead as if it had rotted, and he used the knife to cut away a small section. Rose never flinched and he knew that either the sensitivity of the area had been numbed by the venom or the nerves were damaged altogether.

The doctor bathed the region inside and out with an antiseptic and then wrapped it up with a clean bandage. He set his specimens beside the microscope, stripped off the gloves, dropped them into a biohazard bin for later sterilization and re-use, and then moved to the cabinet to retrieve a plastic amber bottle. He tapped out two antibiotic tablets and then handed them to her. He did not have any bottled water with him at the moment, so he handed her his coffee cup.

“Take these now,” he said, “and I’ll give you more this evening with one of your later meals.  Hopefully it will help drive off the infection until we can find out what the venom’s done to your finger.”

“Thank you,” the vixen said quietly. “None of the other bugs here like our blood, so this will be okay too, right?”

The doctor considered lying to her in order to set her at ease, but instead he shrugged his shoulders. “I hope so,” he said. “I just wish I had the spider itself to examine. A living creature might provide a clue to a treatment and—”

“I kept it!” Rose told him with a smile.  “I put it in a specimen bottle and gave it to Doctor Mochizuki with the other samples we collected for him.”

Ken looked pleased. “What did it look like?” he asked. “I’ll go see him about it as soon as I’ve examined the residue I got out of the wound.”

“Ivan and I were calling it a denim spider due to the tiny blue and white stripes across its abdomen. It looked like it was covered in blue jeans.”

Ken put a comforting hand upon her shoulder. “You can go now, but if your finger starts hurting or you feel any other ill effects, come back to me or Jenni at once.”

“Okay, thanks,” the vixen told him.  She gave him a look of gratitude and then headed off to the galley to see if she could find something to eat. She did not have much of an appetite, but her stomach was growling and she knew she had to eat something.

After she had gone, Ken turned toward the specimens with a frown. He had been afraid of something like this since the day they had landed.  Although they had found local vegetables and herbs they could all safely ingest in their food, he had never been as confident how their Terran biologies might react to bites, stings and potential poisons from this place.

He was sworn to treat and protect the thirty-one lives of Second Chance and he honestly wondered if his limited knowledge and experience would be up to the task.

Chapter 8

Winged Wolf

“Now, while you are down on all fours, put your nose to the ground and breathe in soft and slow. You will want to pick up on any subtle scents that may be in the area; some will be instantly recognizable, but some will be so faint that you could easily miss them.”

Chieko did as she was instructed, and although she felt silly doing so, she did not voice her thoughts. Her fellow colonists had all had training concerning life as a Fur, but since she had left the Earth before her transformation was complete, the red panda sow had never had that opportunity. Some lessons she had learned on her own just by the very nature of her species, but other knowledge could be obtained through the generosity of her associates.

She and Jenni had been out in the warm afternoon air clothed only in furman shorts and their sun-warmed fur for the past hour and today’s lesson had turned toward their noses. Standing on all fours was still a new experience for her, but for their current exercise, the stance was perfect for it and it was surprisingly comfortable.

When the Japanese woman slowly inhaled the scents in the grassy field of the horseshoe valley, there was a wealth of information that passed through her olfactory senses. There were many scents, some familiar, but most outside her experience to identify. She had been told that sifting scents was no different than sifting through voices in a crowded room. If she focused her attention, she could home in on a specific voice in order to hold a conversation. The same was true with odors, aromas and other scents.

She closed her eyes and sifted, breathing in deep and slow.

“Without looking,” Jenni said quietly, “tell me what you smell.”

“I smell burning wood from the camp, the horses, cows, pigs, chickens, guinea and sheep… and the latrines.”

“Those are all obvious. I think even a human nose could smell those. Focus on those not so obvious.”

“The grass almost smells like celery,” she answered after a quiet moment, “but I can also smell the soil beneath the grass. It’s rich, with flavors of its own.”

“Good. What else?”

“Are you wearing a floral perfume?”

“Very good, but in this case it’s not a manufactured scent; I rubbed one of the flowers from the forest behind my ears this morning after I bathed in the pool.”

“I don’t recognize it other than just a flower,” Chieko said, her eyes still closed and her nose still down. She moved her head from side to side and discovered a particular scent was stronger in one direction than another.

“What is it?” Jenni asked.

“I… I don’t know, but I think something went this way.”

“That’s right. Something did come by here earlier.”

“What was it? It almost smells like damp vinyl, like it might have spent time in the water.”

Jenni smiled, pleased with the way the red panda’s senses were developing. “It was a tort, one of the headless turtles. Raine and I saw it earlier heading out toward the woods while we were rolling around in the grass.”

Chieko opened one eye and looked aside at the leopard with a smile. “You and Raine?” she asked.

Jenni snickered. “You’re being nosey.” The red panda felt embarrassed and started to apologize, but then she raised her head and looked back at her companion with bright eyes.

She touched the side of her nose and asked, “Isn’t that why we’re out here, so you can teach me to be nosey?”

The leopard female laughed aloud, her eyes narrowed in amusement. “Yes, I suppose you’re right! Okay, for the sake of your argument, yes… me and Raine!”

The geneticist lowered her voice to barely a whisper and put her head close to Jenni’s. “You may both be Felis, but leopards and cheetahs cannot breed,” she remarked. “Well, not in the wild anyway, but you might be able to as Furs.” Jenni’s eyes grew wide in disbelief for only a moment. She chuckled and gently bumped foreheads with the red panda.

“You silly girl,” the nurse told her, “I never said we had any plans for kittens!”

“Then you two are not…?”

“I didn’t say were weren’t, Chieko — but a warm body to snuggle up to is better than sleeping alone, especially here in this place.”

The Japanese woman nodded. “Then I would wish you the best in your new relationship.”

“Thank you,” Jenni said with a smile. Then, as an afterthought, she gave her companion a mischievous smirk and added, “As Furs, we do have the ability to reproduce with others that are close on the genetic scale. They taught us back at the Institute that this was due to our human side of things. Felines and canines can’t reproduce together, but felines and other feline types can.”

“As a geneticist, I should have known this,” Chieko admitted honestly, “but I didn’t know that about Furs.”

“Regardless, I’m not making any plans right now to have any kittens, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I can’t speak for Kim’s plans, though.”

“Kim?”

Jenni gave her a wink. “Me and Raine. Kim and Raine,” she stated boldly.

Chieko’s jaw dropped and the leopard giggled. “Doesn’t… that bother you?” the Japanese Fur asked quietly.

Shaking her head, Jenni smiled. “No, and it doesn’t bother Kim to share him either.”

“That would explain why Raine has been in an exceptionally good mood lately.”

The feline nurse laughed aloud. “You’re probably right! Now, you nosey little firecat, back to your lessons!”

Chieko’s eyes crinkled in amusement, but before they could resume, they were interrupted by the quick approach of Dr. Mochizuki, who had been loping on all fours across the valley of pale green grass from the cavern. The expression on his face was stern and it seemed every muscle in his body was tense.

“Chieko!” he exclaimed, lightly panting. “You will not dishonor us by your shameless exhibition!”

Jenni looked surprised. “You don’t want her to learn to use her new nose for scents?” she asked incredulously.

Masanori grabbed up their furman robe tops where they had been neatly folded nearby and shook them out in front of them both. “I am referring to these!” he huffed. “Cover yourselves – it’s not proper to be so indecent out in public!”

Chieko took hers demurely and began dressing as ordered, but Jenni retrieved hers from the male panda and then held it up to him.

“We’re covered in fur and showing less of ourselves than if we were human and wearing clothes,” she said with a smile, gesturing toward his shorter mate.

Although covered over her back and the top of her head with the color of rust, Chieko’s fur from the neck down across the entire front side of her body was black and the curves of her small furman chest completely blended in with nothing showing through from beneath. Despite this, the elder doctor snorted in derision.

“No matter,” he said, “she is topless out in public, shamefully exposing herself while there are others present!”

Jenni looked at him as if he was the alien everyone had been dreading they might find. “What is it she is exposing to everyone? She’s only topless in your old-fashioned misogynist little mind,” she suddenly growled at the doctor. “As a human, she would be showing more skin in a one-piece swimsuit!”

“You have forgotten your place!” Masanori responded sternly. “You think because you are wearing shorts that you are still decent! We may be part animal now, but we are still human! Cover yourself!”

Jenni glared at him for only a moment before she deliberately stripped off her furman shorts and shoved them into his hands with her robe top. She had grown up in a family that frequented clothing-optional resorts and was no stranger to being completely bare or the attitudes of others, but this was different.

She spread out her arms and legs with her tail down behind her and stood before him. “Go ahead and inspect me, doctor!” she challenged. “Show me where I am exposed to the world! If we were back on Earth in a crowded shopping mall, I would still be covered up more than half the women there!”

Masanori cleared his throat in indignation. “You may have been free to roam the North American Institute in such decadence, but as the director of the Toyohashi Institute, I would have never allowed such a blatant display at my facility!”

“At our facility,” Jenni snapped, “many of the developed Furs were free to go topless, men and women alike — and I’m not the only one doing it here!”  She stepped forward so that she was almost nose to nose with the older geneticist and tapped his chest with a claw-tipped finger for emphasis.  “Furthermore, let me remind you that we are not on Earth and we are not at your old Institute; you are no longer in command of anyone and you have no authority to make me do anything!”

Masanori sputtered and harrumphed indignantly, dropping the garments at her feet and stepping back away from the incensed leopard. He turned to his wife, grabbed her arm and led her away.

“You will not associate with this woman,” he demanded of her without looking back at the nurse. “I forbid you from speaking to her in anything but a professional capacity due to her medical station. I will not have you—”

“You can’t forbid her from anything!” Jenni interrupted. “She is not your slave!”

Masanori turned back toward her and studied her with narrowed eyes. “Chieko is my wife,” he said in a surprisingly patient tone, “and she knows her place. I should not expect you to understand.”

Meekly, the red panda sow straightened the furman robe top she now wore and then quietly nodded, allowing her husband to lead her away on upright feet. She did not look back at Jenni, keeping her eyes submissively down at the ground, and said nothing in her own defense.

Jenni took a step forward to go after them, but a growing background sound distracted her. At first, it sounded as if a large mosquito was coming out from the nearby woods, but the increasing crescendo of its buzz was reflecting off the grey rock surrounding the cavern. Masanori and Chieko stopped and looked up into the sky over the valley at the same instant that she did, immediately spotting the gyrocopter as it rounded the perimeter of the mountain.

The helmeted wolf at its controls guided the small craft toward the large open area of the field, out away from the lake, the large domed barn, the gardens and the animal pens. Others came running from the cave and some from the woods to converge near the spot where he set down. Those in the immediate vicinity kept back out of range of the spinning rotor and others that arrived advanced no farther. Jenni, Chieko and Masanori momentarily forgot their argument and joined the crowd around the ultralight aircraft and its lupine pilot.

Ellie rushed forward and embraced him tightly after he unbuckled his harness, pulled off the transparent helmet and stepped up from his seat. She nearly bowled him over to chuckles from the crowd and she licked his muzzle in a decidedly canine manner.

Avon was not present, so Jon stepped forward and extended a hand. “Welcome back, flying wolf!” he said with a smile. “How was your little excursion?”

Carl gave him a canine grin, slipping one arm around his wife’s waist and shook the cougar’s proffered hand with the other. “Everything went according to plan,” he replied. “No problems, no issues, but there’s lots to tell. Where’s Avon?”

“Ken’s got him in the medical dome. C’mon, we can go make your report to him.”

“Aww, come on!” Michael called out from the crowd. “Are you just going to ignore us or are you going to tell us what you saw?”

The wolf’s grin widened. “I promise to tell you all a bedtime story as soon as I’ve had a chance to talk to our esteemed captain first,” he said to the crowd.

“That’s not fair!” Sissy whined. “He’s not here but we are – tell us first!”

Carl looked at Jon with a wilting expression. “A little help, please?” he asked quietly.

“Sorry, Sissy,” the mountain lion said while adjusting the shoulder strap of his overalls so it did not bind in his fur. “You know the rules as well as anyone – an explorer reports to the colony captain first. We’ll make sure Carl gets a chance to let everyone know what he saw, probably over lunch so we can let our other explorers tell their stories too.”

“Yeah, I’ve told parts of our trip to several people already,” Manny complained, “but I would rather tell everyone all at once instead of having to repeat myself over and over!”

“Can you give us just a tidbit, Carl?” Dahlia asked. “Something to tide us over?”

The wolf smiled again. “I flew up alongside the mountains, moved out over forest and plains, over a lake, saw new critters and birds and came back,” he said vaguely. “Tune in at eleven for the details!”

Sissy pushed out her bottom lip and gave the wolf a disgruntled glare. “Tease…” she said. Ellie poked her husband in the side and he jumped, but Jon patted him on the back.

“Come on,” he said. “The quicker you make your report, the sooner we can get all the children together so you can all tell your tall tales.”

Despite a few groans and remarks muttered beneath low breaths, the crowd began to disperse. Jon gestured toward the cave and the wolves followed him. Before they had traversed a few yards, however, they heard the electric starter of the gyrocopter turn over and the back prop spin up. Carl whirled around quickly and saw Kevin jump away from the aircraft’s pilot seat as the motor shut back down. The young fox looked embarrassed at having been caught and his eyes were wide when the wolf looked at him darkly.

“Unless you have any experience flying one of these,” Carl said to the small fox in a voice loud enough to carry across the crowd, “please don’t climb around on it and play ‘ground pilot’ by messing with the controls. It’s not a toy and you can get hurt!”

“Sorry…” Kevin squeaked in a small voice. The wolf nodded once and then turned back toward the cave.

“Maybe you should have locked the car and taken the keys,” Jon suggested.

“Unfortunately, the gyro doesn’t use a key, just a starter switch.” Carl looked up at the cougar and gestured toward the colony in the cavern. “Why’s Avon in Medical?” he asked. “Did something happen?”

Jon snickered. “All the bears decided to go swimming in the lake. They got out near the middle where it’s deepest and Avon ran into a little trouble.”

“What happened?”

“He met up with a swarm of little bitty water creatures that ganged up on him to see if he was tasty. They’re mostly harmless since they can’t even break the skin, but a number of them latched onto his fur around his nether regions and don’t want to let go even out of the water; Ken’s having to cut them out of his fur.”

“He should have kept his shorts on,” Carl remarked with a smirk. “What about the other bears?”

Ellie laughed and answered, “Avon seems to be the only one the little critters went after, so the others bailed out of the lake and left him to defend himself. He wasn’t too happy about that.”

They walked across the little wooden bridge across the stream and then up the trail into the cavern. The medical dome was further inside near one of the rock walls of the cave and when they got to the door, Jon stuck his head inside; he saw the red wolf still working on the grizzly’s damp fur between his legs. A shallow pan containing bits of fur and small silvery objects was on a folding table beside the large bear that almost did not fit upon the gurney on which he lay. Avon had a look of quiet resignation upon his face as he stared up at the overhead LED lamp, his legs wide apart in stirrups typically meant for the ladies.

“Hey boss,” the cougar said in amusement. “Our winged wolf is back from his flight.”

Ken looked up, but Avon visibly cringed without looking away from the lamp. “I’m way past embarrassment by now, but can it wait?”

“Sure, just look me up when you’re ready,” said Carl’s voice from outside the door. “It won’t be hard to find me. I’ll probably be surrounded by a curious crowd begging me for details.”

Avon bit his bottom lip, not from what the doctor was doing in a sensitive place, but in thought about the wolf’s report. “C’mon in and tell me now,” Avon grumbled. “I’d rather you told me what you found before you detail your exploits to the masses.”

“Are you sure?” the wolf queried, uncertain he and his wife should be there with their leader spread out as he was. Ellie stayed out of sight, trying to stifle a giggle.

Avon sighed aloud. “Come on in and give me your report,” the grizzly said with a deep frown, turning his head to look aside at the grey wolf.

Carl kept his gaze averted to the dome’s curved walls and leaned up against a cabinet. “First, I just want you to know that there were no issues with the gyrocopter,” he began. “It performed as it was supposed to. I started my flight to the northwest, moving along the edge of the mountains to see what life might flourish at the upper elevations, but wind shears kept me from spending too much time up there. Near the north side of our mountain here, I saw several of the mooshelk that Aaron and Gerard discovered, though I saw more numbers of them than they had seen. Before I went too far north, however, I swung out across gently rolling green hills to the west that merged into another large forest interspersed with some open plains. To the southwest was a large herd of thunderpigs, and in a low flyby, I saw a number of smaller young among them.”

With no other chairs besides the roller stool that Ken sat upon as he worked, Carl sat down on the floor on his haunches to make himself more comfortable. Ellie remained outside in the cavern to let Avon have a semblance of privacy.

“Seeing the young hogs got me thinking,” the grey wolf said. “We failed in our earlier attempt to hunt one of the larger pigs, but how about we mount another hunt and cull one of the young shoats from the herd instead? We’ll still have the adults to contend with, but maybe we can divide them and separate a smaller one away long enough to take it down.”

Avon glanced over at his second-in-command, the expression on his face one of consideration. “Jon, what do you think?” he asked.

“The idea has merit,” the mountain lion replied, idly zipping one of his dog tags up and down on its chain. “It still wouldn’t be an easy task, since even the small ones are probably as large as a full grown African warthog, and those things are formidable. However, we’d probably have better luck bringing down a younger, inexperienced one. We have our own livestock to be raised as food, but we’ve always known we need try to find indigenous things to eat in order to survive beyond what we brought with us. Thankfully, we’ve discovered local birds, herbs, fruit and vegetables we can eat safely, but we need a larger animal to sustain the appetites of a whole colony of predators. We’re omnivores, but primarily carnivores. We’re going to need lots of meat to survive. The thunderpigs are large enough to sustain us, but first we must find out whether or not they’re edible or if they’re bad like the lil-deer.”

“To reduce the danger on the hunt,” Carl added, “perhaps we can use the compound bows instead of just trying to take one down with nothing more than teeth and claws. I think even that would have made a difference last time with the adult.”

“I think that first hunt was more for some of us to try out our new bodies and it didn’t really matter if we brought in something or not,” Jon said, “but the purpose of the next hunt should be to bring in meat. I like the idea using the bows. There was a reason they blended us with animals to give us strength, stamina and other senses as a leg up on survival, but we’re also more than wild animals. We still have the cunning and intelligence of mankind with thousands of years of experience and we should take every advantage that opportunity gives us.”

Avon nodded. “I agree with all of this,” he said. “We’ll get together and make plans within the next few days.”

Carl was pleased that his idea was met with approval, so he continued with his report. “Also to the southwest is a large lake and there were whole herds of other animals in the fields near it.”

“What were they?” asked Ellie’s voice through the door.

“I don’t really know,” the wolf replied. “Other than being quadrupeds, they were unfamiliar to me from a distance and I couldn’t get close enough to them with the gyro to take any pictures. They scattered at the sound of my engine and dispersed in all directions, running for the cover of nearby trees and rocks.”

“Maybe they thought you were a large aerial predator,” Ken muttered as he worked. Removing the tiny critters from Avon’s fur was not that difficult, but the effort was time-consuming. He could work without giving too much thought to the task or the region where he was facing, and had been interested in the other wolf’s report.

“If they thought he was some large flying predator they’re familiar enough to panic over,” Jon mused, “what did they think he was? We’ve seen nothing in the air larger than the arrowheads, but those are only about the size of a turkey – if turkeys could fly.”

The small group fell silent for a moment, all entertaining similar thoughts about possible hidden dangers. After a spell of uncomfortable silence, Jon asked, “What about the lake? Was it a freshwater lake? I know there’s an ocean that direction from the satellite photographs Dr. Bohnestiel showed us back at the Institute, but I don’t recall how close it might be.”

“Freshwater lake, I would guess. I didn’t notice what fed into it as its source, but I also found what looked like salt flats about twenty miles to the west. I wanted to land and investigate, but with the time limit Avon gave me, I didn’t really have the luxury.”

“Why did you want to land there?” Ellie’s voice asked. “I probably would have wanted to land at the lake to look around.”

Carl shook his lupine head, an action she couldn’t see, but it was Avon who replied. “It’s the salt,” he guessed. “If that’s really sodium chloride that we could process, it would be a great local resource in preserving meat to last through the winter.”

“If it’s lil-deer meat you want to preserve,” Jon said with a grin, “forget it!”

“I wouldn’t want to preserve that either,” Carl responded with a chuckle, “but if the pigs turn out to be edible, we could use the cool back areas of the cavern to store enough for all of us. We might even take a shot at the mooshelk for possible food. Two hours didn’t really give me much time to explore, even from a distance by being up in the air,” he said. “With your permission, I would like to take another day to properly check out some of the things I saw and also expand my range.”

Avon looked over at him with a frown. “It sounds like you made good use of the gyrocopter, Carl, but my earlier concerns still exist. Sending along a single-seater was an oversight – despite how well a couple hours went, you would still be out there alone. If you could take someone with you, I wouldn’t be so hesitant, but I don’t think there’s any way to upgrade the motor to handle the weight of two people even if you could jury-rig another seat.”

“Avon,” Carl countered, “I’ve had survival training, I’ve taken solo hikes across the Grand Canyon, up into the Rockies, and I’ve even gone up into the dangerous Superstition Mountains in Arizona – all before I met Ellie. Since we’ve been married, we’ve taken wilderness vacations on the African savannah, into the Amazon rainforests, the mountains of Tibet, and across the Australian outback as well as other places just as rugged, but traveling alone by myself is nothing new to me.”

Moving only his eyes, the grizzly looked over at Jon. “If I ask your opinion, are you going to side with him against me again?”

The cougar crossed his arms. “Hypothetically speaking, if you were to ask my opinion,” he said, “I would remind you that we’re here to explore. I agree that traveling alone is risky, but if anyone has to go it alone, Carl is the best one for the job.” He looked over at the door and called out, “No offense, Ellie.”

“None taken. Carl is the best suited for solo exploring,” she replied. “I want the chance to see our new territory from the air myself, but as much as I don’t like to be separated from him for long, Carl’s your man, er, wolf for the job.”

Avon sighed audibly. “All right… Carl, you may leave at first light on our next good weather day. I’ll even give you the same time limit as I gave the others. You must be back in eighteen hours or less to do your exploring. You will report in to me by radio every two hours and let me know of any concerns you may have along the way. Just remember that in the event of an emergency or injury, you will have no one to help you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Carl answered with a smile. “I will stick to the rules and will be back within the allotted hours. I’m sure the time spent on this trip will yield important finds to make it worth the risks.”

Avon nodded. “I guess I can’t ask for more. You know more than most on what to pack for such a trip, so I’ll let you and Ellie make your plans. I just hope you don’t make me regret my decision to let you go.”

Chapter 9

Old Salt

When Carl awoke the next morning, the grey wolf could hear the wind howling outside the cave before he opened his eyes. His day pack lay beside the door ready to go, but he knew already that he would not be departing at first light as he had intended. It would not matter if he was given clearance to leave; he knew how dangerous flying a lightweight aircraft in such conditions could be. He sighed audibly, lightly stirring the fur at his wife’s neck with his breath, and snuggled up closer to her. He was warm enough, but his nose had already told him there was also a slight chill in the air.

He mentally kicked himself for not checking with Kevin to see if the young fennec fox had made any weather forecasts for today, but it was too late now. However, if he could not fly, he could start planning the pig hunt. If he entreated Avon well enough, perhaps the colony captain would put him in charge of the hunting party so there would be a plan instead of the free-for-all mess they had on the previous hunt.

***

“You’re back early,” Jon observed. Kristen walked into the small geodesic dome they shared and plopped down upon the mattress of the bed. He was sitting at a small folding table under the overhead LED lamp, looking over the aerial photographs that Carl had forwarded to his PBJ.

“I took Kim and Yuki out into the woods again to look for more local herbs they could use in their meals,” she told him. “It was pretty windy, but we found several that seem safe enough they want to try and we also discovered a new fruit tree in the center of a clearing.”

“Be careful,” Jon warned without looking up from the pictures, “you might have found the Tree of Knowledge and could curse us all.”

“Cute. Unfortunately, the fruit is all past its prime for the season, so we’ll have to wait until next spring to see what they’re like. I grabbed up a few samples to examine in the lab.”

Jon adjusted his tail through the slot in the back of the chair and then leaned back to look at her. He had not noticed it from hearing her voice, but there was a pungent fear smell in the room; when he studied her, she looked shaken. “What happened out there?” he asked quietly.

She looked up at him and wrapped her arms around herself. “We saw one of the nightshades while we were out in the forest,” she said.

“You saw one?”

“Not exactly, but there was a dark shape up in the trees. We could feel it watching us, but it made no sound and we couldn’t smell anything from it. I tried to get closer to see what it was, while Kim and Yuki both kept their distance, but when I did, whatever-it-was rushed away through the treetops; even then it was totally silent, almost as if it had been a ghost!” She tilted her head and touched one ear with a claw tip. “My hearing is loads more sensitive than it used to be, but I didn’t even hear it stir a branch or a single leaf. I’m almost starting to believe the shadows are alive here.”

“I don’t think anyone’s been able to actually see one,” Jon said, “but just about everyone here has experienced them while out in the woods. Even the sheep got spooked by them, so I don’t think it’s just our imaginations running away with us.”

“Have you ever not-seen one?”

“I think one was spying on me after I went to the latrine last night,” he admitted. “It made the fur stand up along the ridge of my back when I realized it was there. I quick-stepped back to the clearing, only to have an arrowhead’s wing smack against the back of my head when it darted out beside me and took off with one of our Golden Comet chickens – it was a good thing I’d already been to the latrine!”

They both fell silent for a moment, but after Jon’s gaze roved back over his Personal Business Juxtapositioner, he looked at her with a smile.

“How would you like to get out of town for a little while?” he asked.

“Huh?” She looked at him, puzzled.

“After all the explorers gave their stories last night over supper, Avon and I were discussing the salt flats that Carl saw from the air. He may seem like a stickler for the rules, but Avon has the colony’s best interests in mind. Winter’s coming in a few months and we don’t know how soon bad weather might make an appearance, so he wants us all to be preparing for it now. We’ve already started gathering firewood, but we will still need much more than what we’ve gotten so far. Storing up meat is also a good idea and the more we can preserve, the easier it will be for us during lean times. If that really is sodium that Carl saw, it would be beneficial to everyone.”

“That all sounds good,” Kristen remarked, “but what does that have to do with getting away from camp?”

Jon smiled. “I talked Avon into letting us take a trip out to see this salt plain,” he said. “I explained that this would be a good occasion to bring back samples to be tested to see if this really is what we can use.”

“You all make it seem very important that we get it, but I don’t understand what the salt does besides make food taste salty.”

“It is important,” Jon told her, getting comfortable in his chair. “I’ve told you before that I came from a family of hunters - me, my mom and pop, plus a bunch of aunts, uncles and cousins - I learned years ago that salt can be used to preserve meat to last longer.”

“How?”

“After you’ve sectioned up your kill, you wash the cuts of meat with lukewarm water and then trim off the sections you don’t want. Pat the meat dry with a towel, work in seasoning and herbs for a richer flavor, and then rub the coarse salt thoroughly into the meat, covering it completely.”

“Why, what does that do?”

“The salt eliminates bacteria that’s in the meat and prevents it from spreading. Once that’s done, you hang the meat in a cool place like the constant fifty-seven degree temperature of our cave and let it air-dry for about three weeks. Check it every other day to make sure it doesn’t start to smell bad. If it doesn’t, then the salt has preserved it well enough for storage without having to freeze any of it. As long as we keep it cool, it could help us make it through the winter when hunting for fresh meat may not be possible.”

Kristen nodded, following his explanation, but he continued. “When you’re ready to prepare some of the meat for a meal, you just wash off all the excess salt with running water and then pat it dry with a towel. Then it’s ready to cook as needed.”

“That almost sounds too simple.”

“Sometimes simplicity is best. If you don’t have a refrigerator or one that’s big enough, you do what you can and this cavern is a good environment for it. Diggina a deep hole in the cool ground to make a food locker will do the same. Meat has been preserved with salt this way on Earth for centuries, maybe longer.”

“Now I see why you all are so interested in finding out if that’s really sodium chloride we can use,” Kristen remarked. The lioness looked aside at him. “So, who all would be going on this excursion?”

“Just you and me, Kris. I also told Avon that you and I needed some private time alone.”

She raised both eyebrows. “Does this mean what I think it does?” she asked quietly, the salt suddenly forgotten. He looked embarrassed and gave her a shrug, so she grinned and then got up from the bed. She walked to him and then wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders. He buried his nose in the fur at her collar bone and returned the embrace.

“When do we leave?” she whispered. “If we have to be back in eighteen hours and left now, it will put us back here in the middle of the night.”

“Carl said the salt flats are about twenty miles to the west. If that’s as far as we go, we can take a casual pace on foot and still get there in about six hours, leaving us with plenty of time there before we have to head back. We’d even have time to swing a little to the southwest and check out the freshwater lake he saw.” He looked up at her and smiled. “Once we get there, it won’t take six hours to find out if those are salt deposits, so we’ll have to find something to do with our time.”

The lioness giggled and then pulled herself out of an embrace that had started to get a little frisky. She danced out of his reach and then dropped back down upon the bed. “Do you think we can find our way back to camp in the dark?”

“That doesn’t really matter,” Jon replied, tapping the screen of his PBJ to close out the picture files he had open. The device flickered several times and then shut off altogether, causing the cougar to frown. It had been acting up lately and it concerned him. Kristen’s question distracted him, however.

“I talked Avon into letting us stay out overnight if needed.”

She looked surprised. “How on Earth… er, Bonestell did you manage to do that? He’s been notorious for limiting time away from camp.”

Jon gifted her with a smile. “It helps that he wants me as his second-in-command,” he said. “I told him that if he couldn’t trust me being away over one night, he could ask Masanori to second for him instead.”

“Ooh, I bet he didn’t like that.”

“Not at all. I haven’t always agreed with his decisions when he’s asked my opinion, so he’s probably regretting having me as his first officer by now. In my favor, however, he doesn’t like the alternatives and he already knows I’m not out to get his job.”

“I told him that he would be sorry he wanted you,” Kristen laughed. “Now he’s stuck with you!”

“You got it, and in this case it works to our favor, especially as he thinks you and I should have gotten together months ago.”

“And whose fault is that?”

Jon gave her a smirk. “I fully admit that it was mine, but it’s nothing we can’t fix together now.” He tapped the dark screen of his PBJ and frowned again. “He wanted us to take a couple of horses, but I told him that we’d prefer to go on foot.”

“Why? We’d make better time on horseback and could spend more time there.”

“The horses may have been raised and trained by Furs and don’t mind the other predators of our group, but they don’t seem to like me. I don’t know if it’s my scent or me in particular, but they all get skittish whenever I’m around them. I don’t want to have to depend upon a mount that doesn’t really want me up on its back.”

“It must be you,” Kristen teased. “I’ve never had any issues with our animals and I’m the same type of predator that you are.”

“If you want to follow on horseback, I’ll leave that up to you, but I’ll be going on foot.”

“Traveling on four feet is fine. I have more stamina now than I used to.”

“I promised we would stay in touch with regular reports so he would know we were safe little kitties and he agreed that we would have a greater chance of getting back okay if we didn’t have to navigate in the dark. You and I both have great night-vision now, but we’re not familiar with the terrain. That’s how I convinced him into letting us stay out overnight. We’ll head back first thing in the morning once we have daylight.”

The errant PBJ turned back on by itself and Jon picked it up. He did not know whether or not he should take the faulty unit with him and he debated leaving it behind, but then he slid it into the wide side pocket of his shorts and stood up from his chair.

“Let’s go grab a couple of packs from storage, stock them with what we’ll need for the journey and get going. I don’t see a need to sit around until tomorrow.”

***

Arne leaned against the fabricated fence that kept their sheep penned and let his arms dangle from the top rung as the winds blew through his prodigious mane. Two of the sheep stared back at the large African lion as if trying to decide whether or not he was supposed to be feeding them an extra portion. Despite his bulk as a large predator, none of the sheep had ever shown the slightest fear of him and the feline actually seemed to enjoy tending them.

Despite that he faced the pen, the great cat did not even see his sheep. He had just learned that Carl was putting together an all-canine hunting pack authorized by the colony captain. It annoyed him to be left out of a hunt, one of his favorite things to do as a Fur.

At such times, he enjoyed letting his animal half to take over and he usually acted on pure instinct in the heat of the chase. While in nature it was the lionesses that did the hunting for their prides, Arne’s human psyche was more than willing to take up the cause and it rankled that he was not allowed to be a part of it.

He looked up at a sound coming from the cave and he saw the canine party preparing to leave. Naturally, Carl and his wife Ellie were there, as was Cheryl. The Border collie was again wearing her western cowgirl hat and the red wolf Ken was teasing her about keeping it on her head on such a windy day. Following behind as they made their way down the trail from the cavern was Aldo, quiet as always. The bloodhound was good at his job as a tracker and would be invaluable for a hunt, but he was a loner by nature and mostly kept to himself when not needed.

Arne did not see the other two canines of the colony, Wendy and Yuki. Neither of those two dogs seemed to have the heart for hunting, so they had both likely declined to offer to join the pack. Arne watched the group head off across the valley clearing to the southwest, the direction the grey wolf had seen the thunderpig herd.

Technically, a group of pigs was called a sounder, but since they were all roughly the size of buffalo or larger, everyone simply referred to them as a herd. Arne did not care what they were called. He just wanted to go and join the hunt. For a moment, he was tempted to sneak off and follow them, and while he could probably do that without being detected, he did not know what he would do if they actually got involved in a rousing hunt. He could not very well join them at that point and just sitting on the sidelines would be too difficult.

The African lion heaved a heavy sigh and then looked back at his sheep. More of them had quietly gathered near the fence in front him, looking up at him expectantly. He studied them idly for a few moments before he decided he needed to get out the shears and collect their wool. Both Jasmine and Dahlia enjoyed knitting and they had both expressed an interest in spinning the sheep wool into thread to make them all extra winter blankets. The vixens had taught themselves how to spin thread while at the Institute and had even brought along a simple device for the process.

When the canine pack passed by the large domed barn and the livestock pens, none of them paid any attention to the sullen lion and his flock. They were all gathered around Carl as he gave them instructions for the plan of attack he had in mind. Several were armed with compound bows and each of those had a quiver of arrows slung over his or her back.

It was anybody’s guess if there were many, if any, who could hit a moving target with an arrow on such a windy day, but most were at least marginally experienced using the weapon; in spite of this potential handicap, the wolf was determined to bring in one of the young pigs.

The plan was to cut up the body of the kill into sections that each of them could carry a portion back to camp, but in the event they did not have the opportunity to do so, they had also brought along a collapsible travois to drag the body back with them.

When Carl had seen the herd from the air, it was located a few hours’ walk to the southwest of Second Chance, so they were leaving early enough to have plenty of time to get there, find and stalk the thunderous pigs and then be on their way back with their prize.

Others had wished them well and good luck, and while the hunting pack was in good spirits, after their last hunting attempt they were sure they would need it. Carl, however, was confident of success with a little direction and planning this time.

***

Kristen looked up at the clouds overhead and idly wondered if the winds up there were just as strong as they were down at ground level. She and Jon had made their way through the woods surrounding the horseshoe valley on a heading slightly southwest and were now traveling over a relatively flat plain of short buffalo grass, wildflowers and scrub brush. Walking right into the wind, leaves and grass blew into their faces and they were forced to squint to keep it out of their eyes. Blowing grit, however, got past this defense and more than once each of them silently wondered if this had really been a good day to take a trip.

Although they had been traveling for several hours, they still had a little time to go to reach their first destination. So far, they had seen nothing of special interest other than finding new alien plant life for Kristen to examine and gather samples. There were some she suspected were potentially poisonous merely from instinct and those she handled with shears and metal tongs to get them into sample containers.

Despite the high winds, there were birds in the air, and although there were more shapes and designs of the avian flyers than they were familiar with back at the colony, the pair of feline wanderers had fallen to ignoring any that did not look especially outstanding.

To pass the time as they walked, conversations had gone far and wide, covering everything from daily activities, prospective couples among the colonists, discoveries that had been made and events that had happened back home on Earth they got through periodic news.

Although Jon had to guard his words around others in Second Chance, Kristen knew his real background and he could be open with his memories when with her. He could likewise be honest with Jenni, since she also knew his real personal history, but she had grown more distant once they had arrived on Bonestell. Perhaps it was due to her newfound responsibilities as nurse to make sure everyone remained healthy in the alien environment or the fact that she no longer had to try to push the two mountain lions together. She was still friendly enough and had shown no cause for issues, but she no longer spent much time with either of them.

“Did you have any siblings?” Kristen asked as they wound their way on all fours through the short buffalo grasses of the prairie they crossed. “For real, I mean.”

“What do you mean, for real?”

“Real, as in someone who wasn’t made up for the history of your new identity,” she explained. “When your name was still Brian, did he… did you have any brothers or sisters?”

Jon shook his head. “No, I was an only-child,” he answered. My mom and pop both had several siblings, so I had plenty of aunts, uncles and cousins, but no brothers or sisters of my own. Growing up, I’d always wondered what it would have been like to have a little brother or sister, but friends of mine who did told me I was lucky in that I didn’t have to share anything that way.” He smiled and looked aside at her. “What about you?”

“Older sister,” Kristen replied. “She was married and had two kids before I got out of high school. Due to her husband’s job, they moved around a lot, sometimes to other countries, and it was while they were living abroad that a train they were on derailed due to a stalled vehicle on the tracks.” She looked over at him with a frown. “Although over a century old, the train was still in use and the crash was terrific. Out of one hundred twenty-three passengers and crew, only six people survived, none of them from my family.”

“Wow, I’m sorry to hear that,” Jon said quietly.

Kristen shook her head. “Thanks, I’m sure my folks still miss her, but she and I were never close and she’s been gone a number of years now.”

“Do you miss your mom and dad?”

“Yeah, sometimes. I just hope they’re okay, that my debt collectors didn’t go after them when I disappeared off the map.”

“You probably should have taken a new identity too,” he told her.

“It doesn’t really matter,” the lioness countered with a smile. “We’re several light-years away from all that now.” She turned her head to avoid a large clump of blowing leaves from somewhere and had another thought.

“With our longer days, longer months and longer seasons, I wonder how we’ll be able to keep a calendar.”

“Does that really matter anymore?” Jon asked. “It’s not like we have to set schedules for business meetings or classes.”

“Perhaps not, but it would be nice to keep track of all our birthdays still.”

“Birthdays.”

“Yes, birthdays.”

Jon shook his head. “I’ve never really cared for birthdays,” he said. “They just remind me that I’m getting older and that I only have a finite number of years to live.”

“Well, I think of birthdays as a celebration of life,” Kristen said with an upturned nose, “not reminders of mortality. Mine is October twelve. When’s yours?”

“Brian Barrett’s birthdate was December sixteen. My new birthday – Jon Sunset’s birthday, is May fifth, but don’t bother trying to remember either of them. We don’t have Mays, Octobers or Decembers on Bonestell.”

“How do you know? We can still use the month names, even if the lengths of the months are not the same anymore.”

“You can bring it up at the next colony-wide meeting,” Jon said dryly.

“Maybe I will.”

The couple fell silent for a while, their list of topical discussions running low. After some time, however, Jon looked up in interest.

“We’re getting close,” he said. “I see trees up ahead.”

“There are trees around the salt flats?” Kristen asked, looking ahead.

“No, that would be barren flat land, but Carl said there were plenty of woods near the freshwater lake. We must have strayed off course.”

They continued walking without further conversation, but after a quarter hour Kristen suddenly remarked, “Avon may be performing a wedding soon.” Jon looked aside at her suspiciously, but when he did not otherwise respond, she chuckled and added, “Not that you would know about it, but Aaron and Alicia have become a couple and from what I hear are getting rather serious about the relationship.”

Jon frowned. “That doesn’t bode well,” he muttered.

“Huh? Why the sour note? I think they make a good couple.”

“Avon’s been concerned over the disproportionate ratio of Ursis males to females,” he explained. “Exclusive relationships among breedable pairs may not be very wise in this kind of setting.”

“Well, you might be right if we planned to be the only ones here beyond the first five years, but after that time, either more Furs will be joining us or we’ll be shipped off to another colony of Furs when the human immigrants start coming in. With only a few years, I don’t see why Avon’s so concerned by those who want to get married.”

“Probably because it means that five years is a long time for those who don’t have anyone,” Jon replied.

“There are other girls in camp the guys can form relationships with,” the lioness said. “They just won’t be making any babies together.”

Unwilling to prolong this particular conversation, Jon simply replied, “I suppose you’re right.”

Kristen only waited a moment before she looked over at him with half-lidded eyes and said, “So, when will it be our turn, hmm?”

Jon sighed. “All things in good time.”

“There are other couples forming too,” Kristen continued without missing a beat. “Erin and Kevin seem to be doing well together, and they can have kits if they want to. They don’t seem to be in hurry for their relationship to go any farther than it is for now, however.”

“Good for them,” Jon muttered. “Let them take their own time.”

***

The first trees near the lake they came across were tall, willowy and laden with a fruit that neither of them could reach. Beneath them, however, were plants on thin, double stalks topped by fuzzy heads that resembled rather large medical cotton swabs. The swab heads ran to colors in almost the whole visible rainbow spectrum, as if each had been dipped in a different Easter egg dye. These plants completely surrounded the tree several yards on all sides as if the trunk had grown up right through the middle of them.

Kristen reached out cautiously and ran the fingers of one hand over a purple swab and smiled back at Jon. Just as they looked, they felt like cotton swabs, only each head was fully the size of her hand. Where she touched them, tiny seeds came loose in the wind and were carried away to alight elsewhere to spread more. An unfamiliar scent came away with the seeds; it was not unpleasant, but unlike anything else that either of them could compare to aromas they were familiar with on Earth.

“Look at your fingers,” Jon suggested.

When she glanced down at the digits she had touched the swab with, Kristen saw that the skin and fur were stained the same color as the plant. She smiled and then brushed one that was orange with her other hand. Likewise, her fingers retained the color and they were both amazed that a different scent emanated from that one. The swab plants all seemed identical except for their individual hues, and now they both wondered if each color had its own unique aroma as well.

Jon reached out for a blue swab to test this theory, but before his fingertips made contact with the cottony head, the lioness gasped and curled up both hands into tightened fists.

“Kris, what’s wrong?” the cougar queried, suddenly concerned she might have inadvertently poisoned herself.

“My… my hands are numb… I can’t feel my fingers!”

Jon grasped her wrists, but avoided the powdery residue staining each set of digits. He leaned in close without touching the affected areas, though he could see nothing but the color itself. The skin and fur of her fingers and palms did not look burned, dry or otherwise out of the ordinary.

“Are you in pain?” he asked, releasing her hands and pulling off his pack to get at his canteen.

“No, no pain – just no feeling at all.”

“Cup your hands together,” Jon instructed, uncapping the canteen. He poured some of the fresh water over the stained areas of her hands and she rubbed them together to wash them off. He used more water than he probably should have, but he was certain they could find another spring to refill it. For now, he wanted to get her hands clear of the numbing powders.

With clean hands, Kristen turned to the side and shook off the remaining droplets. Jon studied her face, posture, eyes and even her scent to make sure she was not getting sick, but she looked back at him passively.

“How do you feel?” he asked in concern.

“The feeling’s starting to come back into my hands,” she said with a relieved expression. “Otherwise, I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “I don’t want you to put on a brave face just for me, Kris. How do you feel?”

The lioness looked annoyed at his words, but then shook her head. “The tips of my fingers are tingling as if they were asleep, but that’s fading. I’m fine.”

Jon looked at her skeptically, so she gave him a smile and then lightly licked the end of his broad nose. “I’m okay – really! I think the stuff is just topical.”

He leaned in close, really close, and sniffed her breath, the fur behind her ears, the ruff of her neck and down her arms to her hands. He had learned over months just how much information his new senses could tell him about the health of a person and she seemed to be telling the truth. There was no sickness about her, and she had washed her hands well enough that he did not even smell the odd aromas from the swabs on them anymore.

He finally pulled back and stood up with a crooked smile. “Maybe we shouldn’t handle the plants until we know what they might do to us,” he suggested calmly.

“It might be difficult to keep from brushing up against some,” she reminded him, “but yeah, it’s probably better if I don’t pet the plants arbitrarily.”

“Do we need to head back to Second Chance?” he asked.

Shaking her head, she snorted. “No, I’m fine!”

“Okay,” Jon replied quietly, “but promise me you’ll have Jenni check you over fully when we get back – just to be sure there’s no lingering side effects.”

“I promise,” Kristen told him, crossing her heart in an old childish gesture. “Now, do you believe me?”

The cougar finally nodded. “Yeah, I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

Satisfied he was not going to badger her about it further, she looked aside at the swab plants and then reached for her own pack, the feeling having resumed to her hands. “I definitely need to get samples to take back to be studied. She pulled out plastic sealable baggies, garden snips and a large pair of needle-nose pliers. Jon watched her closely as she collected the heads of each color and bagged them all without touching them with her fingers, using only the pliers to handle them.

When she had finished that task and had her samples safely tucked away into her pack, she looked up at the tree that overshadowed the swabs. “Have you noticed,” she asked, “that there are swab plants like these all beneath each of these fruit trees?”

Jon looked around the small grove and saw that he had been oblivious to this fact. “No, I hadn’t noticed. Does this mean something?”

The feline botanist studied their surroundings more closely, but shook her head. “Maybe, maybe not,” she remarked. “It could be a symbiotic relationship where the swab plants protect the tree’s fruit from creatures that might try to climb up to get them, or the swabs might be part of the tree’s root system itself growing out here to provide that protection.”

Jon peered up into the tree at the pale yellow, softball-sized globes that grew in clumps where large limbs branched off. “Do you think the fruit might be poisonous?”

Kristen shook her head and pulled out the camera to take a few pictures. “My first guess is that they probably aren’t, otherwise the tree wouldn’t need the swabs to protect them.”

“So how do we collect the swab-fruit for analysis without wading through the colorful swabbies to get at them? I don’t see any on the ground that have fallen from the tree.”

“Why don’t we leave that for another time,” the lioness suggested. Jon raised an eyebrow, but she was not looking at him. It was unlike her to give up the study of a new plant, something she had enjoyed doing with everything they found since their arrival. Perhaps the numbing experience had frightened her enough that she wanted to leave them alone for now.

Convinced this was probably the case, Jon put an arm around her shoulders after she put away the camera and said, “How about we find a nice place to picnic? It feels close enough to first-lunch and the stomach is rumbling.”

“Good idea,” she agreed, looking around. She saw several large deciduous trees nearby that had already turned golden in the cooler autumn nights they’d had of late. “There are other shade trees over there that don’t have swabs under them. That would be a good spot to relax for a bit and then we can check out the lake.”

***

The small freshwater lake looked like any other. The strong winds that had prevailed for days finally subsided to mere breezes that caused the water to lap gently at the various plants growing at its shores. Small birds with long legs and bills almost as long stepped slowly through the water weeds, darting occasionally to snatch up some aquatic morsel; other birds with long wings and short bodies glided over the top of the lake in an interwoven dance whose meaning was known only to them, but none of any species were as colorful as their Terran counterparts; it seemed as if the entirety of birdlife on Bonestell had been bleached of all vibrant hues. Some had only spots of color, like the thin blue rings around the eyes of the arrowheads, but no widespread coloration on any that had been seen.

The alien Furs presented no threat to the avian wildlife as they stood at the water’s edge simply looking about. The larger cougar was on all fours with his head down, peering at the marine life swimming about in the lake, and the smaller female stood up on her hind legs with one hand shielding her eyes against the long afternoon sun as she watched a bleached-white flat disc skip across the top of the water after flittering insects.

Upon closer inspection, the disc resembled the abdomen of a flattened crab, but instead of little legs and pincers, something like frog legs or grasshopper legs propelled it after bugs and the front of the armored shell hinged open to swallow its prey.

Kristen watched several more of the hopping discs go across the top of the water like skipped stones, and although the critters were alien, the task of food finding was familiar. There seemed to be abundant life all around.

Jon idly watched small, translucent fish swimming around sausage-like plants buoyant on thin, burgundy stringers. They had discovered the same plants growing in the colony lake that had proven to be safely edible and quite tasty when eaten raw. When cooked, however, they produced wild lucid nightmares that no one wanted to repeat, so that had been one lesson learned about the local cuisine. The stringers they grew on, however, were tough and difficult to cut even with a knife, but when dried out in the sun, they could be spun together into a soft cloth using Jasmine and Dahlia’s loom. Jon cut out several of the water sausages from their pods to keep in his pack as traveling snacks.

The cougars spent an hour casually walking the shore of the lake before they decided to continue on toward their destination, but before they departed, they had come across a dog-sized creature with no hair, leathery dry skin, small ridges over dark eyes and another set of ridges over gaping holes that served as ears in a bulbous head. It had no tail to speak of, and although it dashed about on four stubby legs, it was quick and instantly afraid of the two mountain lions.

They had been downwind of the thing, and before it noticed them, they had watched it dig at the roots of water weeds in shallow water and then come up with some kind of crustacean with multiple limbs. The unsightly critter ate the crunchy morsel shell and all with open smacking lips, but when it saw the cougars, it let out a grunting squeal, dropped the remains of its meal and then ran as fast as its stubby legs could carry it for the cover of trees.

Jon and Kristen watched it disappear into the shadows before either one of them thought to get the camera. Unless they came across another one, this is one creature they would have to simply describe to those back at camp.

***

With the freshwater lake an hour’s casual walk behind them, the feline pair approached an area where the ground was flat and devoid of either trees, hills or even the occasional large rock; grass growth was stunted or absent altogether over much of the region. The area also seemed brighter the closer they drew near and they both quietly wished for furman sun goggles.

The air felt dry and there was the hint of a briny scent on the breeze for some time before either saw the salt flats that Carl had seen from the air. It looked as if a river from the distant ocean had on occasion spilled into a shallow lake here that could not have been any more than two or three feet at its deepest, but at this time, however, the lake bed was completely dry. The sun had evaporated all moisture in the area, leaving behind stark white salt crystals that reflected the sunlight brilliantly.

The lake bed covered approximately a hundred acres and it was only after looking across its uniform flatness for moments before a couple of details focused in their eyes. The ground was not as smooth as they first imagined. There were small piles of salt here and there scattered all over the area, each approximately six inches high. There were hundreds of them, and both mountain lions wondered how they could have missed seeing them from the start.

The other detail they realized is that across the dry salty lake bed there were several shaggy thunderpigs. Most were calmly licking at the ground salt, though one the size of a small elephant stood still with its eyes trained right on the pair of felines. There was a good amount of distance between them, but neither party made any moves of aggression toward the other.

Jon cautioned his companion that they should keep their eyes upon them, but to maintain the distance and make no move to approach the massive warthog-like animals.

Remembering the purpose for their visit to the region, Jon removed his pack and dug out several plastic containers and a small metal spade. He walked out onto the flats a short distance, avoiding the curious little mounds, wondering what could have made them. He sat down on his haunches and then used the spade to dig down through the crisp layer of salt.

The tip of his spade came up damp, so there was still moisture lying in the soil beneath the surface. He scooped up several inches of salt into one container and then remembering something from his childhood, Jon dug down a little deeper. As expected, he hit something solid. He smiled at his memory and then worked a few moments digging up selenite crystals that had formed in the hydrous calcium sulfate beneath the surface.

One such crystal was six inches in length that featured an internal chocolate brown hourglass inclusion no doubt caused by the same iron oxide contamination that occurred on Earth. He had dug up similar crystals in a public salt lake while on vacation with his parents and the feeling of nostalgia was strong.

He dug up several to take back to Dara, the colony geologist, and smiled at the thought of handing them to her. She had been taking solo excursions back into the depths of the cavern, much to Avon’s displeasure, and she said she was merely looking at the rock strata exposed by the cave’s air currents; some suspected she might even be doing a little prospecting for minerals of value. Still, crystals of this sort had not been found in the vicinity of their little valley, so Jon was sure the polar bear would like having them.

When he looked over at his companion, Kristen was crouched beside several of the salt piles. Unwilling to risk her fingers again, she gently pushed the tip of her own spade into the mound and tapped something solid right away. She brushed the white crust away from the internal object and both cougars raised their eyebrows at what she uncovered. It resembled nothing more than a small blob of obsidian-black crystal about the size of her hand. She tapped the spade against it and there was a ping against the metal blade. From all appearances, it was a dark growth of crystal, nothing more.

“That’s odd,” Jon muttered. “The selenite crystals I dug up form from gypsum and saline solutions in a damp environment just a few inches beneath the ground. I’ve never heard of them growing above the ground encased in sodium chloride.”

“Maybe things are different here,” Kristen suggested. She scooped the blade into the soil beneath the black crystal and then picked it up. It was a little heavier than she expected, so she set it down on the salty ground a couple inches away and then tipped it over. The object rolled over and then they got another surprise.

Tucked away neatly on a relatively flat bottom surface were four triple-jointed legs that resembled bamboo. They were folded beneath it uniformly in addition to a pair of small arms tipped with pinchers on one end of the crystal and another pair of tiny arms with rudimentary digits analogous to fingers on the other end, making eight limbs altogether.

“Is it alive?” Kristen asked in a whisper. She touched one of the tiny hands gently with the tip of the spade but the trio of diminutive fingers remained immobile.

Jon went back to his pack and dug down deep to the bottom. He pulled out a pair of stubby-fingered, furman-designed gloves that he had forgotten he had brought along and slipped his hands into them. Crouching down beside the lioness, he picked up the new life form and turned it over in his hands, lightly brushing salt from it.

He held it up by its black crystal shell, but the arms and legs remained folded neatly in place. He sniffed it, getting only a salty aroma in return and then turned it this way and that as he examined it from all sides. Kristen had nosed up close to see as well, but whatever it was, it seemed to be quite dormant, or dead.

“I don’t see any eyes, ears or a mouth,” she whispered, almost as if afraid of waking it. “It reminds me of the torts that Sissy found back in our valley by the lake.” She looked around at the other salt piles and imagined them all covering over these things. “Maybe this is a burial ground?”

“Salt-torts that bury their dead?” Jon mused.

“Well, they do have little hands as well as a pair of pinchers. I suppose the live ones can use them to bury the others. Perhaps they put them in the salt to preserve them, like embalming.”

“Perhaps,” Jon murmured. “Get the camera, take a few pictures of this, the salt flats and the little burial mounds. Then we’ll box up this guy and take him back with us.”

“Grave robber!” Kristen teased with a smirk, idly smoothing out the salt that once covered the tort-like critter.

Jon merely snorted in response, but there was amusement in his eyes when she pulled out the camera and aimed it at him. She snapped several shots of the creature as he turned it over and then stood up to record the area too.

Jon placed the salt-tort in a plastic specimen box, and after the sample container was put away with the spade and gloves, he donned the pack and then got up on all fours.

“Well, we traveled all this way to scoop up some salt to take back,” he said with a yawn. “We’ve done that, so now we need to find someplace we can relax and camp for the night.”

He looked up at the partly-cloudy sky and swished his long rope of a tail behind him. He spotted a black dot way up high and he quietly wondered what it might be. It traveled in a straight line across the sky for some distance and he suddenly got the impression it was an aircraft – something that should not be in the sky over Bonestell. As he watched, however, it began making lazy circles in the air riding the thermals as it descended and even at this distance he could see the occasional flap of wings as it dropped lower.

He chuckled to himself for letting his imagination run away with him like that. There were things that people took for granted on Earth, but he was sure his heart might have skipped a beat if a contrail had issued behind the high-flying bird. When he looked back at his companion, she was looking out away from the salt plain toward a copse of trees a short distance away.

“Let’s see if we can find a good place to camp over there,” Kristen said with a smile when she noticed him looking at her.

***

“What’s that?” the lioness asked, looking over Jon’s shoulder at the things he removed from his day pack. The item in question was a grey plastic container an inch in diameter and almost twice that in length with a thin black cap on one end. There was no identifying label, but it was strapped to two other long and thin objects with a rubber band.

“This is an instant campfire maker,” Jon explained, picking them up. He pulled off the band and then peeled off the canister’s plastic cap. Inside was a cotton ball that was covered in petroleum jelly. “You dig a fire pit, put the appropriate dry wood, kindling, leaves or grass in it, and then put one of these cotton balls beneath it.” He held up the other objects and said, “This is a magnesium striker. You only need create a spark with it and the coated cotton ball will catch fire to get things started.”

“Wouldn’t a cigarette lighter be easier?” Kristen asked.

“Probably in most cases, but lighters can fail and the magnesium will always produce a spark that will catch the coated cotton ball. Magnesium also isn’t affected by water if the striker gets wet with rain or you drop it in a stream. I do have a lighter in my pack, but I always carry this on trips too, just in case.”

“Ah, that sounds handy,” she remarked. He capped the container and put it back on the blanket they had spread out beneath a large conical tree. Dusk was approaching, although there was still plenty of light available for eyes sensitive to nocturnal activities. When he set the lighter aside and reached for something else instead, she was puzzled.

“Aren’t we going to make a campfire?” she asked.

“We don’t really want to make a fire unless we need it,” he said. “While most of the animals we know are frightened by fire, that’s because they know what it can do. If a new animal here has never seen fire, it could attract them out of curiosity instead – and we’re not sure what we want to attract just yet.

“What about the big campfire back at the colony?” she asked. “It hasn’t attracted anything but bugs as far as I can tell.”

“It’s probably because our little valley is secluded. It’s surrounded on three sides by the foothills of the mountain and on the fourth by the woods. Anything out on the prairie probably wouldn’t even see a glow from our fire unless it was a big fire or the clouds were low some night for the light to reflect from.”

“What about Michael’s little campfire at the edge of the woods by the landing site where he cooked his arrowheads in private?”

Jon shook his head. “You got me there. Maybe he was just lucky and nothing was in that vicinity to see his fire light on those nights. For now, we’ll just eat the sandwiches we brought along so we won’t have to bother cooking anything.”

“What then?” she asked quietly, idly looking around the partially wooded vicinity a short distance from the salt plain, almost wishing for something to jump out of the shadows that they could chase down for a tastier supper.

Jon leaned in close and placed his lips right into one of her ears. He whispered something that made her eyes widen, and if she still had the ability to blush, she would have turned a deep red. She pulled back away from him just far enough to look into his golden eyes.

“Are you sure?” she asked. She had known that this trip had the potential for intimacy, but she had not wanted to hope against hope. The waning sunlight reflected in his eyes, but there was no mistaking the simple smiling nod he gave her.

“I’ve finally accepted who and what I am,” he assured her. “I can never go back. I’ll never be fully human again and neither will you. All we can do is move forward, if you’re willing.”

Kristen abruptly wrapped her arms around his neck and broad shoulders, embracing him tightly. Although kissing as a Fur was a different matter than it had been as a human, it was no less pleasurable. She kissed him deeply, pushing against him so that he almost fell over on top of the items he had removed from his pack to take inventory.

When she finally allowed him to have some air, there was moisture in her eyes when she pulled back to look at him again. “I have waited so long for you to fall for my charms,” she whispered impishly. “Yes, I am willing to go forward with you.”

Jon smiled at her, keeping his arms around her middle. “I fell for your charms some time ago,” he replied, “but I was too bull-headed to accept what that would mean for me. Forgive me?”

“Totally and completely!”

He leaned back toward her and she responded in kind, but instead of kissing her, Jon gave the side of her broad nose a long wet lick.

“Gah! Did you have to do that?” Kristen asked with a mock laugh, wiping the fur of her face with the back of her hand.

“Yes – yes I did,” the lion answered matter-of-factly. Before she could retaliate, he sat back quickly and turned toward his pack. “Now, about those sandwiches…”

“The sandwiches can wait,” Kristen informed him with a purr, sliding her hands around his shoulders.

***

Jon’s eyes opened to slits and he looked out into the chilly darkness.  He and Kristen were curled up around one another in concentric feline balls and his nose rested upon the fur of her bare shoulder. Her deep breathing told him she still slept, so he was not sure what it was that had woken him. He lay still, stretching out his senses for whatever might be in the area.  Small nocturnal furballs or other critters might be in the tree above them or it could be something out in the grass; perhaps it was even one of the mysterious nightshades.

He quickly willed himself awake when he heard a scratching noise from behind him that sounded very near. Unwilling to awaken his lover but mindful of possible danger, he gently pulled away from her and then got up onto four feet beside their pallet. Again, he became still, even to the point where his breathing was shallow and his ears swiveled back and forth trying to pinpoint what he had heard.

The scratching sounded again, but this time he zeroed in on its location. It was subtle at first, but the noise from his pack increased in rate and volume. He crouched beside the pack, opened it and then peered inside. The cloudless sky provided plenty of illumination from one of the two dim moons and the accompanying starlight for him to pull out one of the larger specimen containers.

It was the one with the black crystal thing he had taken. Although it had been immobile at the time they had found it, the tiny legs and little arms were all now scratching at the plastic container to get out.

“What’s that?” Kristen asked sleepily, raising her head to look at him.

“It’s the salt-tort we took,” Jon replied. “It’s awake and wants freedom.”

The lioness crept closer to see and the thing inside grew more frantic to get out. “It must be nocturnal. Maybe it was just sleeping and the salt pile was its day-blanket against the sunlight,” she murmured.

“Perhaps. If this thing is going to keep us awake all night, I don’t really feel like taking one back to Dr. Mochizuki.” Jon got up on two feet and took the container out a couple yards away from their blanket. He knelt down, twisted off the top of the container, and then dumped the black crystal critter out gently onto the grass.

“There you go,” he said. “Sorry about taking you from your bed.”

In response, the thing rose up onto its bamboo legs and then rushed at him. Jon jumped back, but not before the tiny pinchers nipped at his toes. He yelped and retreated, but the creature came after him again.

This time, Jon growled and reached out over it before it could get him again, and he grabbed it by the top of its crystal shell. The thing’s arms had no difficulty reaching him there and it pinched the fur and skin of his thumb to another feline yelp.

The cougar dropped it, though snatched it up again quickly, but this time he did not care how much he had wronged the thing and he lobbed it out into the darkness in the general direction of the salt plain. He heard it soft-land somewhere out in the grass, so he used the relative moment of quiet to examine his thumb.

“Are you hurt?” Kristen asked, getting to her feet.

“Not really. Just a pinch, but it didn’t even break the skin,” Jon answered, rubbing the offended digit with the palm of his other hand. “Sure hurt like the dickens, though.”

The lioness was about to say something more, but then both of them suddenly stopped still at the sound of the salt-tort rushing back toward them through the grass.

“Mind your toes,” Jon said. “That thing’s back for vengeance!”

In the moonlight, they could see the crystal salt creature’s movement through the grass. It was fast and was making a straight line back toward them. Not waiting for a repeat attack, Jon grabbed up the now-empty specimen container and rushed toward it headlong. When he reached it, the cougar plunged the plastic box over the top of the critter, and then slid the lid beneath it. Before it could get away, he twisted the lid in place, effectively trapping it. Jon then threw container and all back out into the shadows as hard as he could.

“We’ll put it back where we found it in the morning,” Jon said to Kristen, “but hopefully that will keep it away from our toes tonight.”

“Maybe…” the botanist replied distractedly. Jon noticed this and frowned.

“What is it?”

“Listen.”

Off in the distance toward the salt plain, Jon could now hear scraping, clicking and shuffling noises. It was almost indistinct among the other night sounds, but the more he focused upon it, he did not know how he could have missed hearing it.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Maybe the others are awake too,” Kristen suggested.

“Let’s pick up camp in case we have to run,” Jon said. “We don’t have enough containers for all of them.” The lioness looked at him with a deep frown for only a moment before she nodded. They picked up the few items they had taken out of their packs, slipped back into their clothing and then hastily folded up the thin blanket. Once their packs were in place upon their backs, Jon led the way stealthily toward the new sounds on all fours.

They came upon the one trapped inside the container and Jon picked it up out of spite to hurl it back out toward the trees, farther from its home. He put a spin on it, hoping to make the thing inside dizzy. Kristen looked at him in disapproval, but he only rubbed his pinched thumb and shook his head.

As they got nearer to the salt flats, they both realized that none of the sounds they heard were coming toward them. Curious, they both crouched low to the ground as they crept closer, and within a few minutes, they were looking through the short buffalo grass at an odd sight.

All the little mounds they had seen earlier were broken and scattered. Hundreds of the little obsidian-black critters were dancing around one another, the dim moonlight glinting off their crystalline shells. Their tiny hands and miniscule pinchers were waving all around, tapping others and twirling here and there across the salt plain.

“What are they doing?” Kristen whispered quietly.

“A mating ritual, perhaps,” Jon replied. “They could be preparing to fight a war with one another or maybe they’re just dancing to welcome autumn. Who knows?”

“Should we chance a better look?”

“You want to get closer to them?”

“No, but maybe we can see them better with a flashlight.”

Jon nodded and reached for the pack on her back. A wind-up torchlight was in a side pocket, so he plucked it out and quietly gave the handle a few turns to generate enough juice to light it. Crouching upon his haunches, he aimed it toward the nearest salt-torts and thumbed on the power. The array of tiny lamps in the lens put out a brilliant beam, and the result was instantaneous.

All of the creatures within the beam of the light froze instantly. Some still dancing that wandered into the light became suddenly still also. Curious, Jon waved the light to the side, and those who were frozen but now again in darkness resumed their motion.

Although long an adult and the first officer of an organized colony, there were times when Jon could be mischievous. Seeing the effect the light had on the dancing torts, the cougar waved the lamp back and forth across the whole of the salt flats as far as the beam could go. Obsidian-black globs on bamboo legs danced, stopped and started all over the place and Jon snickered to himself at the power he had over the creatures. That is, until they all stopped at once, whether the light was on them or not.

The plain became quiet and still; not even a light breeze was blowing across the flat lands.

Then, without warning, the salt-torts began scrambling toward the cougars en masse. Remembering how swift and tenacious just one of them was like, the mountain lions turned and ran for the woods just as fast as they could lope across the plain.

Kristen did not have time to be irritated by Jon’s juvenile display. Without knowing whether or not the pursuing horde was poisonous or even carnivorous, she tried to put as much distance between them and herself. Jon stayed with her, even though he could have probably outrun her, and although the felines were fast, they did not seem to be putting as much space behind them as they thought they should.

They reached the tree they had camped beneath, but the obsidian-shelled torts, crabs or whatever they might be called continued after them. Not waiting around, both cats quickly climbed up into the wide boughs of the tree, hoping the creatures they had stirred up could not follow.

This soon became evident quickly enough. Although a few of them actually tried, none of them could find enough purchase on the twisted bark of the tree to climb more than a few inches before falling back to the ground.

As they watched, Jon and Kristen saw several hundred glittering crystalline shells liberally cover the ground around the tree trunk, all moving around one another as if jockeying for a better position to grab one of the Furs if he or she lost their footing. Even if they thought they might be fast enough to get away, the felines would have had to jump out of the tree a great distance to be able to get to the ground without landing on any of those beneath them.

Without bothering to speak, Kristen tapped Jon on the shoulder and pointed skyward. Nodding, the cougar followed his mate higher into the tree, and then when the limbs became almost too small for their weight, they leapt from that tree into another and then another, leaving the vicinity in that manner. Some of the salt-torts followed along below, but after some time, Jon and Kristen could no longer hear them in pursuit.

***

Jon opened one eye and looked down at the ground beneath the tree that he and Kristen had slept in for the long chilly night. Both had stretched out along separate thick branches and despite the potential for rolling off during the night, their feline instincts had apparently kept them safely treed.

Although they had left the mass of crystal-shelled creatures behind beneath a tree now distant, he could see where several had managed to track them down and scratch at the bark of this tree too. Fortunately, there were none now in sight and Jon assumed they had all retreated back to the flat plain to cover up again with salt.

The sun was not yet up, but there was a glow on the horizon and the overhead stars were becoming muted. Kristen stirred and then raised her head. Her ears flattened against her head as she yawned, curling her tongue in over itself, and she flexed her claws against the bark of the branch she lay upon. She looked around until she saw her mate looking back at her and then gave him a friendly smile.

“Good morning,” she told him. “Some night, huh?”

Jon nodded. “Good morning. Yeah, we got more action than we’d anticipated.”

The lioness smiled contentedly, remembering how pleasant the evening action had begun, but then she shook her head with a frown. “Maybe you shouldn’t stir up the wildlife until we know what they might do to us,” she suggested calmly, mimicking what he had told her when she had gotten into the swab plants.

“Yeah, that wasn’t such a good idea,” Jon admitted. “I already knew how fast the one could run through the grass at me – I should have known the others might do the same, but I thought that first one was just mad because I stuck it in a box.”

Kristen arched her back, stretched languidly and then began cutting furrows in the limb with her claws. It took her only a moment to realize she was doing it and then she stopped, feeling embarrassed exhibiting such base feline characteristics.

“Do you think they’re still about?” she asked, noticing the missing bark from the bottom inches of their tree.

“I don’t think so – they’re probably all under their salty blankets again.”

“What about the one in the box? Should we go back and get it to take back with us?”

Jon shook his head. “No, Dr. Mochizuki will have to be satisfied with pictures. As far as I’m concerned, the thing can rot inside the box or it can depend upon its friends and relatives to break it out.”

“If they haven’t already,” Kristen mused. “So, what’s the plan now?”

“We’ve done all we planned to do on this trip,” Jon said with a sly smile at his mate, “so we may as well start back.”

“Are we in a hurry?”

“No, we have all day and that means eighteen hours of daylight. Is there someplace you want to revisit?”

“Not specifically,” Kristen replied, “but I’m hungry and I want something fresh. Let’s hunt something and use your magnesium kit to build a fire to cook it.”

“I hope you brought plenty of loperamide hydrochloride tablets in case the only thing we can find are the lil-deer,” Jon said in distaste.

“We’ve seen other things we can try,” the lioness countered. “Besides, I’ve not noticed any of the little darlings since we left the valley. Everything needs water and I would guess there’s more wildlife near the lake. We’ll just have to sniff them out.”

“Are you setting your sights on that little naked dog-thing we saw yesterday?”

“You never know,” Kristen said with a smile. “There have been ugly wildlife back on Earth that turned out tasty – it’s the same with fruits and vegetables. From the looks of some of them, it makes you wonder who the first brave soul to try eating one was. I mean, have you ever seen a kiwi fruit? It looks like a large bloated tick on the outside, but cut it open and it’s a sweet treasure inside.”

Jon made a face. “Thanks, if I ever get to see a kiwi fruit again, I probably won’t be able to get that visual image out of my head.”

The botanist stood up and retrieved her pack from an upper branch where she had hung it for the night. She slipped its straps over her shoulders and then fastened a belt around her middle, making it secure so she could travel on all fours without having to hold it upright on her back. Jon followed her example and soon they were both ready to go.

“Okay, let’s go find an ugly dog and see if it’s edible,” Jon said with a lopsided smile. Before they climbed down out of their tree, however, Kristen rubbed up next to the main trunk and looked at him with dreamy eyes.

“Thanks for last night, lover,” she said quietly.

“The first of many,” he promised with a smile.

Chapter 10

Tasteful Endeavors

Carl darted to his right, narrowly escaping the sharp tusks of the massive animal that harried him away from its young. The grey wolf growled more to himself than at the thundering hooves that kicked up dust beside him, and while his health could be in serious danger from the beast, he was counting on keeping its attention on him instead of the rest of his pack.

The giant shaggy-haired warthog began slowing to turn back, so Carl suddenly wheeled and faced the animal with his hackles raised, his teeth bared and a change of course directly across its path. Enraged that this strange canine would dare to confront it so openly, the thunderpig charged after him with a renewed burst of energy.

Behind them, Ken performed a similar tactic to draw another adult warthog away from the smaller pig the pack had chosen as its target, but this one was not as easily diverted away after the red wolf. Ken had to double back and bite at the thunderpig’s hamstrings to get its attention, all while trying to keep his nose from getting pounded by its hooves. The ploy worked and although the lupine physician did no serious damage to the pig, he had managed to get the animal’s full attention. Taunting it while weaving a zigzag pattern across the prairie of short buffalo grass, he was successful in leading the smaller pig’s guardian away, though just barely able to stay out of harm’s way in the process.

Cheryl and Aldo’s task was to drive the adolescent thunderpig away from the herd toward a predetermined place near a small copse of trees where Ellie waited with her bow. Proven to be the best archer among them, the grey wolf had been tracking the progress of the porcine herd and the ability of the canines to draw the younger warthog out away from the adults.

Although not as large as the mature pigs, the canine pack had determined they might have better luck with an adolescent merely the size of a buffalo instead of a younger shoat that had better protection from the larger, elephant-sized hogs of the herd. The boldness of the youth to travel just beyond the margin of safety of its kind was a hallmark of adolescent rebellion that seemed to transcend species as well as worlds.

Separated from the rest of the herd, however, this one was beginning to panic and it had been easier to drive him farther away. The Border collie at his flank was experienced with this kind of thing, even before she had been transformed into the furman hybrid. Cheryl had grown up on a ranch and had spent much of her youth on horseback corralling cattle, goats and sheep, and although she had no horse beneath her now, the canine used that experience to cull out and redirect this new critter. Old methods from another world seemed to work in this setting, and with Aldo’s assistance they were able to drive the boar right where they needed him.

Ellie took careful aim at the thundering moving target; it would not do to miss the pig and shoot down one of her own pack members. The adolescent warthog charged by, parallel to her unseen position and she let the compound bow’s powerful release do its work.

A sturdy, red-feathered graphite shaft appeared to magically materialize deep in the thunderpig’s right eye and the animal dropped in a cloud of dust and grass, its hooves and tail flipping over its head just once before landing hard.

Neither Carl nor Ken witnessed the success of the hunt, but Ellie’s howls of triumph were all they needed to get the news. Now each of the wolves had to find a way to ditch the other thundering pigs intent on stomping them into the prairie and ripping them open with their tusks.

***

Hank Danagar held up a fish and examined the strange thing with a frown, wondering if it was actually edible. It about as similar to a fish from Earth as the local dirt worms were to their Terran counterparts. The form and function were similar, but Bonestell’s Mother Nature had given them a different design. The eyes were small and located far forward on their heads, they possessed no scales over a thick, greenish-grey rubbery skin and no matter which species were caught and examined, they all seemed to have six rudimentary flippers that possibly could have been used as feet. No one had seen any of them actually walking out on land, but several surmised these fish had the capability to do so if needed. The gills located up on top of their backs just forward of three dorsal fins undulated for long moments after caught, strengthening the hypothesis that they could get their oxygen equally from the water if not partially from the air itself.

He and several others were gathered around the small colony lake with fishing rods and tackle that Alicia had discovered among the supplies. For bait, they used some of the local worms and insects they could catch, and although the fish did not go after all of them, the Furs were relatively successful in bringing in a variety for the red pandas to examine. More than a few were hoping desperately that the Japanese geneticists would find the fish safe to eat as a supplement to all their diets, but none more than the bears.

The seven-foot long snizards that also inhabited the lake were seen swimming beneath the water near the hooked bait meant to entice the fish, but none seemed interested in more than simple curiosity. This was all and well since the colonists did not want the snake-lizards anyway, though seeing the long amphibious reptiles caused more than a few primal shivers among them.

The black bear dropped the odd-looking fish into his catch basket and then turned back toward the cup of worms. He did not much care for the look of the Bonestellan earthworms either, but the fish sure seemed to go for them. He picked up one of the fat little things, threaded it on his hook with a greasy green oozing of its insides, and then cast his line back into the lake. Before he had started reeling it back in, he could already feel hits from hungry fish.

Hank knew that the fishing conditions on Earth often depended upon the right temperature, barometric pressure and other weather-related factors, so perhaps these lake fish were really enjoying the kind of cool and windy autumn days they were experiencing of late.

***

Carl collapsed beneath a thick fir tree with black twisted bark, his lupine lungs heaving from the strenuous efforts it had taken to ditch the maddened adult thunderpigs. Once the massive warthogs had discovered the death of one of their own, they had all become so further enraged that they charged any Furs they saw with murderous intent. This made it difficult for the hunters to get their kill away from the area to field-dress it, and although they had caught up to the herd only two miles from Second Chance, that short distance seemed to take ages to traverse.

Only by taking a route through a thicket of trees too dense for the giant pigs were they able to escape, but not before Aldo was injured by one jagged tusk into his side. He had suffered a cracked rib or two, as well as a nasty ragged gash from his hip to his armpit, but Cheryl had managed to stop the bleeding by ripping her robe top into strips with her teeth and binding up the injury; then with her on all fours and Aldo riding upright on her back, the Border collie helped the wounded bloodhound head for home while the other three dragged and pushed the dead hog toward camp on the travois beneath the dense trees and underbrush.

Considering how strong, fast and ferocious the thunderpigs could be, the hunters all felt fortunate that Aldo’s injuries were the only injuries beyond a few scrapes and bruises. He might be laid up for a while, but he had survived to live on to join in on future hunts.

The alpha wolf looked out from beneath his tree at the other two wolves and saw that they were just as winded as he was. This pig might have been an adolescent, but it was over a thousand pounds of dead weight on the flexible travois for the three of them to maneuver; without the enhanced strength of their transformed bodies, they would not have been able to perform such a feat. It would have been easier to section up the kill so that each person could carry his or her own share, but the other pigs had harried them at every turn and there had been no time.

They could still hear the sounds of enraged adult pigs bellowing and thrashing at the trees, trying to knock them down to get in at them. The Furs were safe for the moment, but knowing that the dense foliage would not protect them all the way home gave them pause to think up another plan.

“Cheryl,” Carl called lightly. The Border collie sought out his voice among the trees and padded to his side with her passenger, stopping beside the carcass of their kill.

“I’m here,” she said quietly, as if talking louder might give away their position to the enemy. “Aldo’s in a lot of pain, but you’d never know it to hear him talk.”

The bloodhound of topic groaned from atop her back, but did not otherwise speak or open his eyes. Carl nodded and panted for a moment before he caught enough breath to speak. “I need you to go on ahead. Take Aldo back to Jenni to attend him. Even injured, you’ll both make it back quicker than we will with our load. I’m going to contact Avon by radio and have him send the bears out to meet us. They can help haul our friend here back to camp, but they’ll need to come armed.” To accent his point, one of the thunderpigs behind them bellowed out in mad frustration and he could almost feel the trees above him quiver at just the sound alone.

“We may have to fight them every step of the way back home,” he continued with a frown. “Most animals would get frustrated and give up after a while, but not these things. They’ve taken the death of this one pretty seriously.”

“Will you be okay until the others get here?” Cheryl asked.

“We’ll have to move deeper in these trees if we can. It’ll make it harder to get back out, but perhaps it will keep the pigs out too.” Carl looked around at the brush surrounding them. “The travois is made of modern materials and makes hauling this guy back somewhat easier than simply dragging it on the ground, but maneuvering it through the woods is slowing us down.”

***

Chieko looked up from the microscope on the short table in front of her and rubbed her eyes. She and her husband had been examining samples of each variety of fish the anglers had brought in to make sure they were safe before someone tried to eat one. As far as the female geneticist could tell, there was nothing harmful in their composition, but without trying one herself, she could not give any recommendations on how they might taste.

She looked over at Masanori, who was bent over the readout of a portable gas chromatograph. While his eyes were on the display, he was scribbling notes in Japanese upon the scratch-resistant screen of his PBJ with a claw tip.

Chieko loved her husband dearly, but it seemed that the older furman had immersed himself completely into his labors since they had arrived upon this foreign world. When he was not trying to determine if the native flora and fauna were edible, he was busy cataloging everything that had been brought to them. There were things they found eerily familiar to life on Earth, but just as many elements that were totally alien to them. It was fascinating discovery.

The young woman often wished the attention Masanori gave his work was focused as much upon herself. When he did seem to notice her, his temper was short or he was simply disinterested. Now that her transformations were completed and she no longer wept during the night from agonizing pain, he did not see the need for them to be segregated away from everyone else anymore, so they had moved from further back in the cavern into one of the domes that had been constructed for them.

The new accommodations were more spacious but it seemed empty without the warmth of a home, so during the times when she was not needed in his work she had wandered around the edge of the forest with Sissy or Jasmine collecting an assortment of flowers to arrange in small containers for their dome.

Masanori grunted and sat back on his stool. “There are no traces of magnesium citrate in any of these fish,” he muttered, “so there should be no laxative issues this time. I have found no other elements of harmful composition either.” He turned to look at her and idly rubbed the back of his neck. “What of your findings?”

Chieko got up from her seat and moved behind him. She dug down into the thick fur at the back of his neck and began kneading tense muscles. “Just from visual analysis, I see no reason why these fish cannot be eaten. We have found no poisons or toxins that should be harmful to any of our furman physiologies.”

Masanori leaned back into her ministrations and heaved an audible sigh. “You have been working hard since we arrived,” she remarked quietly into one of his white-rimmed furry ears, “and have barely seen the outdoors. Take a walk with me through the nature around us and see its beauty.”

The doctor considered it for a moment, but shook his head gently. “No, I have too much to do,” he replied.

Chieko leaned forward and nuzzled his cheek with her own. “We will be here for years,” she told him quietly. “There will be plenty of time for work. Come walk with me as we used to do through the botanical garden in Non Hoi Park. I wish you to see what it is you study without having to analyze it all.”

Irritated, the red panda drew himself up to scold her for attempting to divert him from what was important, but the feel of her hands upon the back of his neck, her warm breath upon the side of his face and her pleasing scent soothed him. Finally, he looked around the interior of the dome lab and nodded.

“Yes, I need a break,” he agreed. Then he looked back at the smile upon his wife’s face and sighed again. “Let us inform the captain of our findings and then we will walk.”

“Thank you,” Chieko said gratefully, sliding her hand paw into one of his and guiding him up to his feet. “I think you will like what we see.”

When they found the large grizzly bear, Avon was standing on the makeshift wooden bridge that spanned the small river flowing from the lake. It was a simple thing; the bridge had been hastily constructed using discarded material from packing crates left over from their arrival in the small valley. Despite this, it had held up well under the constant traffic of thirty-one Furs and even now fully supported the weight of the largest one of them all. Avon’s body did not have the magnitude of most North American grizzlies, but his size was still impressive for a Fur.

The colony leader’s attention was upon something on the far side of the clearing, but neither red panda could see what it was he was focused on. Dr. Mochizuki cleared his throat when they neared the bridge and it was a moment before the bear looked aside at them. Avon immediately assumed they simply wished to cross the bridge, so he moved out of the way, stepping onto the farther bank.

“Excuse me,” he said courteously. “I was just watching them leave.”

“Them?” Masanori asked with raised eyebrows.

“The hunting party that went out was successful taking down one of the great warthogs, but it’s too large to bring back on their own so they’ve requested help.” Avon scratched his chin, glancing back toward the trees again. “The rest of the herd took a deeply personal offense at killing one of them and they’ve been trying to get at our Furs through a dense part of the forest. I just sent a group armed with rifles to help protect our hunting party and help bring back the kill.”

“Ah, I see,” said the geneticist. “My wife and I have finished our analysis of the lake fish.”

Avon looked back at them with interest. “Any good news?”

“Sir, yes,” Masanori replied. “We cannot vouch for the taste, but we have found nothing that should be harmful in any of the fish species. I believe they should all be completely safe to eat.”

“What about the stuff that was in the deer?”

“There are no traces of magnesium citrate as was in the defense system of the lil-deer,” Chieko told him.

“Jon will be happy to hear that,” the grizzly muttered. “When can we try eating them?”

Dr. Mochizuki gave the bear a slight smile. “Despite that we found nothing in our analysis, you may still wish to have the doctor close by as a precaution.”

Avon frowned. “Dr. Wilder is out with the hunting party,” he said. “However, I’m sure Jenni can stand beside me when I try it.”

The geneticist looked alarmed. “You are not planning to be the first to eat one,” he stated cautiously.

“I am planning just that. No need to put anyone else in potential harm like before.”

The red panda’s expression grew dark. “You are the leader of our colony,” he reminded him. “You should not be placing your own health at risk when others can do it.”

“You just told me the fish should be safe to eat. Are you now telling me there is a risk?”

“There are no dangers that we can find in our analysis,” Dr. Mochizuki replied quickly, “but there is always a risk your human physiology might not react well to such food as it has never had before.”

“So what difference does it make whether it’s me or someone else who eats it first?”

“You are the most important member of this colony. If anyone has to risk it first, let it be someone else who isn’t in a key position. If you are incapacitated—”

“—then Jon will take over my duties until I’m better,” Avon finished for him. “That’s what a first officer is for.”

“He was foolish enough to try that himself,” Masanori reminded him. “You two are the leaders of our group and should be above all others, yet both of you senselessly insist upon placing yourselves at risk. As director of my Institute, I would have never allowed either of you to take such tasks upon yourselves.”

“So what you’re saying is that everyone else is inferior and is expendable?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

Avon was annoyed at the doctor’s attitude and the discussion was making him irritable when he had been in a good mood before. He stared down at the short red panda and then drew himself up to his full height.

“All right, then,” he said in a low voice, “I will allow you be the first to try our fish.”

Masanori looked shocked and Chieko let out a small squeak in surprise. “I, uh, do not think that is a good idea either,” he mumbled.

“Why not?” Avon growled. “You aren’t in a key position and you just placed me and Jon above all others; that includes you.”

“My wife and I are doing the most important work of anyone in this colony! Putting either of us in jeopardy could hurt the work we were sent here to do!”

Avon could not believe what he was hearing. “What are you talking about? Everybody here is doing the work we were sent to do.”

Masanori stuck out his fuzzy chin. “Others will someday follow behind us to colonize this world and everything we find out about it ahead of time will pave the way for them. Tending livestock, growing vegetables and gathering up firewood can be done by anybody, but we are the only ones specialized in our fields. Our analysis and cataloging of everything we encounter are for reports to go back to Earth and should have top priority over every other activity.”

“Doctor Mochizuki,” Avon said slowly, “I wouldn’t set you above anyone else in this camp, no matter how self-important you think you are to this operation.” The doctor looked offended, but the grizzly continued. “We need your skills here, to be sure, but that goes for everyone else in Second Chance. I am thankful you think my administrative talents are so needed, but the fact is I’m no higher in status than anyone else on this planet.”

The older geneticist cleared his throat. “You should let me be your Second, Captain Avonaco. That way, I can take care of the important duties for you so you will not have to be burdened with them. That is where I have good experience.”

An angry grizzly bear, even a grizzly Fur, is not something most people would like to face, but the heat in the withering look in Avon’s eyes could have melted iron at that point. He had merely been irritated before, but the panda’s suggestion brought on sudden strong emotions. It took all of his leadership training at that moment to keep from raising his voice in an explosion. Instead of a detonation, however, he managed to keep it to a low growl deep within his throat as he shoved his snout into Masanori’s face.

“Keep your nose in your own work, doctor, and leave the duties of others to the others!”

Dr. Mochizuki’s eyes widened, but instead of responding with further objections, he turned on his heel and stormed back across the bridge, leaving his wife standing beside the angry bear.

Chieko looked up at Avon, but the captain’s gaze was only on the retreating male panda’s backside. Without a word, she heaved a silent sigh and quietly followed after her husband. There would be no peaceful walks together for now.

***

Cheryl pushed aside the final tree branches that allowed Michael and Aldo to step out of the forest into the little horseshoe valley. The swift fox had departed with the hunting party’s reinforcements, but when they had come across the Border collie and the injured bloodhound, he had volunteered to help her get Aldo back for medical attention by trading out with her periodically.

There were three of the lil-deer in the field near them, quietly munching on the pale green grass, and they calmly stepped aside when Cheryl and Michael walked through the middle of them. Again astride the collie’s back, Aldo was in a fair amount of pain from his injuries that he was close to passing out. The two-mile journey had been arduous and he had required frequent rest stops along the way.

Kevin saw them and rushed to give them assistance while Erin ran to get their nurse. By the time the small group crossed the meadow and neared the wooden bridge, Jenni had prepared a pallet on the floor of the medical dome and had Ken’s black bag ready and waiting. Avon helped get the bloodhound up into the cavern and then Cheryl retreated to her own bed to collapse for some rest.

***

The hunting party had not yet returned, but Avon received regular reports by radio on their progress. The thunderpig herd continued to harass and attack at them, and although the armed reinforcements had not killed any more of them, they had had to wound some to drive them away from those hauling the dead body of the adolescent by travois.

Jon and Kristen were still away from camp and were not expected to return until the next day, but Avon already regretted allowing them to go. He was not sure what the cougars could have contributed to the current crisis, but he was uneasy knowing they were out there alone without armed protection if the thunderpigs were on the offensive. The radio reports he had received from Jon were encouraging, but there was the strong possibility that the feline couple could run into porcine trouble on their journey back.

With Aldo now sleeping quietly under medicated assistance and nearly half of his colony out away from camp, there was little to do until they arrived. He was still miffed at the conversation with Masanori, but mulling it over in his mind took him back to thoughts of the fish. More fish had been caught than had been turned over to the red pandas for examination, and since the geneticist had assured him they were safe to eat, he nodded quietly to himself and then headed to the Great Dome to see if either Kim or Yuki were around.

Since the sisters were the primary cooks for the rest of the colony, kitchen duties were their sole responsibilities, which suited the two of them just fine. With so many mouths and various tastes, they were often preparing some kind of food around the clocks. When they weren’t, Avon afforded them the luxury of relaxing whenever they could.

He could find neither in the Great Dome or kitchen areas, so he decided to not to bother them and pan fry some fish on his own. The fish that had been caught were in the storage cooler, so he pulled out one type that he had caught personally and took it back to the kitchen. Thankful it had not been placed in the freezer, he would not have to thaw it out first.

Before he had pulled out a sharp knife to slice it open, Yuki stepped into the kitchen in the process of tying an apron around her middle. She stopped when she saw him at the counter and gave him a friendly canine smile, her curled tail gently wagging behind her.

“Is there something I can help you with?” the Akita asked, moving forward to stand beside him. She had to tilt her neck at an odd angle to peer up at him, but she did not seem bothered by it.

“Dr. Mochizuki said all the fish we caught should be safe to eat, so I thought I would give this one a try,” Avon replied with a smirk. “You know how bears like fish – well, I’m no different in that respect.”

Yuki chuckled at his smile and took the knife from his large hand. “Here, let me prepare that for you,” she said. “If you will grab a medium skillet from the wall hook, you can light a burner for me.”

By the time that the grizzly was later seated at a table in the Great Dome, word had spread through those still in camp and they had all gathered to see the new spectacle. Would there be a repeat of the lil-deer episode or would they have discovered some success in finding native food to eat?

When Yuki set a large plate in front of the colony captain, a pan fried fish fillet surrounded by other Bonestellan vegetables, there were some who realized that this was the first meal any of them had had that consisted totally of food native to the planet.  The local veggies had already made their way into other daily meals, including the raw sausage-like, tasty plants harvested from under the lake waters, and lately the Bonestellan vegetables always seemed to accompany other foods they had brought with them.

Avon looked around at the small crowd made up mostly of feline and vulpine spectators and gave them a confident smile. Neither of the red pandas was present, but he had not really wanted to see the male half of that couple anyway. Jenni looked on with a worried expression, so he nodded as if to acknowledge her attentiveness to what he was about to do.

He looked down at his plate and took in the aroma, liking what he smelled. It did not smell anything like Terran fish, having a unique aroma all of its own, but his mouth watered just the same. He picked up a fork and dug into the first bit. The tender yellow fillet cut easily with the edge of the fork so a knife was not necessary. The initial bite would be of the fish itself; if the flavor was decent enough, he would eat the rest of it with the vegetables.

He put the fish up to his lips and hesitated. Masanori’s warning came back to him, but Avon was resolved to do this himself rather than expect someone else to taste-test it for him like some royal dignitary.

There was a collective hush over the crowd as he placed it upon his tongue. He closed his eyes for a moment to savor the alien food, and although it had a taste like nothing else he had ever had before, he found that he actually enjoyed the flavor.

He chewed on it briefly and swallowed, sitting still for a moment to analyze his feelings over what he had just done. He did not take long, however, and picked up another piece of fish on the fork. He ate it quietly and then looked around.

“I like it,” he said with a contented expression. “It has a good flavor.”

There were several who exhaled, not even realizing that they had been holding their breaths, and a couple even gave a few claps. Encouraged, Avon skewered a few pieces of native tubers, some greenish-blue leaves and another piece of fish on his fork. He ate them all together and was surprised just how well the different flavors complimented one another.

The grizzly smiled at Yuki and raised his fork in a mock salute to the canine woman.

“Can we try some?” Kevin asked from the sidelines. “It smells wonderful!”

“I don’t see why not,” the bear replied, picking up another bit of food on his fork.

There was suddenly a flood of requests aimed at Yuki to make more for the rest of them, but Jenni stepped up to the table and knocked on it for everyone to quiet down.

“Let’s not be too hasty,” the blonde-haired leopard told the crowd. “Although the lil-deer meat didn’t really taste good to those who tried it, it wasn’t until later when the real effects became known. Let Avon eat his meal and I will monitor him afterward to make sure there are no later issues. If he suffers no ill effects, then we’ll know for sure that we’ve discovered something we can eat here that we didn’t bring with us.”

There were groans of disappointment, but there was no denying her words. The four who had ingested the deer meat had not had anything good to say about the experience since that day, and there were few who were ready to repeat such an ordeal. The nurse was right – they should wait and see how Avon fared before everyone jumped at another such meal.

Two hours later, Jenni gave the large grizzly bear a thorough physical accompanied by numerous questions on how he felt. Despite all caution and potential dangers, it seemed the only byproduct of eating the alien fish and vegetables was that the captain had satisfied his hunger.

Encouraged by her findings, Jenni announced that she would be next in line for a Bonestellan fish and veggie dinner. That was all it took for the rest of them. If a medical officer was convinced it was safe, then it was good enough for them. Kim joined her sister in the kitchen and they were soon fulfilling orders for all.

Even if the thunderpig that the hunters were still bringing in proved to be inedible, there would be new food on the menu with this aquatic discovery. While eating her portion of the new meal, the colony’s golden retriever had a sudden inspiration of creativity and she began forming plans to make fishing lures that resembled the insects that these fish frequently fed upon. Wendy’s father was a farmer, but he was also an avid fisherman who had often taken his daughter fishing with him. She had developed her own fishing and lure-making skills under his tutelage and was looking forward to being a provider for Second Chance. If she was going to be stuck here with no hope of going back to Earth, at least she could be a benefit to the colony.

***

The hunting party made it back to the colony later that afternoon. They had to fight off the thunderpig herd every time they emerged from the cover of dense forest and the vengeful hogs had finally given up less than a quarter mile from the small horseshoe valley. No one knew why they had stopped and gone away, but it was a great relief of which they were thankful.

There had been no further injuries to the hunting party, but they were all near exhaustion from either fighting or hauling the heavy carcass, all having switched out with one another several times on the journey.

There was great excitement at news of the lake fish. Not only was one kind edible, the others that had been caught had also proven to be great tasting sources of food and nutrition. It would take several hours to properly dress and roast the young thunderpig on a spit over the campfire, so the Tanaka sisters prepared a full fish dinner for the hungry hunters.

Later that evening, appetites were peckish again at the smell of roasting pig meat. It had a different aroma from Terran cooked pigs, but still enticed the senses. However, although fishing in the lake had been a success adding local food to the Furs’ menu, the failure of the lil-deer steaks was still fresh in memory – an event that seemed to be the benchmark for every new food that was tried. Everyone seemed to want to dine on thunderpig pork chops, but no one was eager to be the first.

Dr. Mochizuki had harvested the great pig’s organs and samples of meat from various parts of the animal, but he had found nothing to suggest a repeat of the deer-tasting fiasco. As with the fish, he had proclaimed it safe to eat, but advised caution before the colony devoured it all without proper field testing.

Arne volunteered to be the first. The African lion had suffered from the humiliation of the deer steaks, but he was practically salivating at the smell of roasted pig. All he asked was for a bucket at his side and a clear path to the latrines if the results of eating it were less than pleasant. Avon had argued with him for several moments in private, but in the end Arne had convinced the captain to let him try it first.

Dr. Ken stationed himself nearby with his black bag and a ready assortment of medicines and medical implements. It was not an encouraging prospect, but a necessary precaution that was becoming common every time a new potential food source was tried.

The large feline rubbed his hands together in anticipation when Kim set the plate in front of him. As had been done with the earlier fish meal, the cooks had prepared several Bonestellan vegetables to go with the entrée. Arne picked up a fork and knife and then cut into the meat with only a bare hesitation. There were good amounts of juices, but nothing like the black ooze from the deer steaks. That in itself was reassuring.

He picked it up on his fork and was about to put it in his mouth, but he stopped and looked around at the crowd with a smile. “I almost wish Jon could be here to see this,” he remarked. It was well-known that the two Felis had often been competitive, but since they had arrived on the planet, it had softened to a friendly rivalry. There were good-natured comments around the group, but then everyone waited expectantly.

Arne swallowed nervously and then put the meat in his mouth. He rolled it around on his tongue for a moment before chewing, his eyes closed until he had finally swallowed it. He looked down at the meat and seemed lost in thought.

“Well?” Norman asked impatiently. “How’s it taste?”

The lion looked over at the black bear, moving only his eyes. He considered the question and then cut off another piece of the meat. He held it up on the end of his fork and stared at it with a neutral expression.

“I do believe,” he said slowly, drawing out his response, “that I now have a new favorite food.”

“Yes!” Michael exclaimed aloud, startling poor Rose, who stood just in front of him. She was not feeling well and her balance was a little off, and she had to put a hand on his arm to steady herself; he only glanced at her at the touch, but he was too distracted at the excitement of the moment.

Arne popped the roasted meat in his mouth and then added a few bites of vegetables. He ate them all with such obvious relish that Ken had to suddenly shout to be heard above a chorus of voices demanding that Kim and Yuki start dishing out plates to everyone.

“Our feline friend here apparently likes what he’s eating,” the red wolf said in a loud voice, “but we still have to determine whether or not he’s safe eating it!” He turned to Avon and nodded.

“We’ll let Arne finish his meal,” the captain said, “and then check in on him in two hours.”

“Two hours?” Gerard protested.

Avon gestured toward the lion that continued with his meal and smiled. “If he’s still alive and kicking – and hasn’t made a mad dash to the latrines by then – he should be fine and we can have a feast.”

“And if he gets sick?” Erin asked.

“Then we treat him as well as we can and hope it’s something we can treat,” Ken answered soberly. “Jenni and I will be monitoring him closely.”

“While the rest of us go crazy smelling roasted pig!” Aaron complained.

“What about the deer meat?” Jasmine wanted to know. “We know the pigs have killed and eaten the deer without any ill effects that we know of – they probably have the digestive system to handle the black ooze anyway – but shouldn’t some of that still be in the pig’s system? What if Arne has ingested some of it unknowingly and gets sick from that?”

“I tried to eat that foul deer meat,” Arne reminded her after swallowing more of his meal, “and I’ll probably never forget the smell and taste of it. Believe me when I say that there was nothing of that wretched flavor in this meat.”

“Maybe the pigs can eat the deer and simply pass the nasty oily stuff without absorbing any of it into their system,” Alicia offered. “If that’s the case, we won’t have to worry about secondhand poisoning.”

“That may be,” Avon declared, “but even though the smell of Arne’s meal makes me hungry, we will wait and be sure.” There were grumbles all through the crowd, even as others agreed with the caution. “However, there is one thing we have learned from this. The thunderpigs don’t take lightly our killing one of their kin. If we can safely eat them and plan to use them as a food source, we will have to be extremely careful when we hunt. Aldo was injured, and although Ken says he will recover, next time someone else may not be so lucky. These giant pigs can be very violent when vengeful and they are very strong and tenacious. We were forced to pull out the firearms today to defend our hunters, but we can’t do this on a regular basis. The ammunition is limited, and we don’t have the resources to reload them, so we must conserve it for real emergencies. This means we’ll have to take extra planning on how to kill the pigs for food with only bows and arrows, teeth and claws without putting ourselves at extreme risk from the other pigs coming out after us. Maybe we can even devise a trap that will snare one without putting ourselves in jeopardy.”

Avon put a hand on Arne’s shoulder when the African lion picked up his empty plate and began licking up the remaining flavors. “Before we can begin such planning sessions,” he said, “we first have to know whether or not fighting the pigs will even be worth it. This guy has convinced me that they taste good, but we still have to determine if it’s safe. I know you’re tired of hearing me say that, but put your growling bellies on hold for now and let’s wait and see.”

***

Gasping and panting for breath in the middle of a sleeping dome so hot that it seemed that the great furnaces of summer had been stoked, Rose Fleur woke up from a fitful sleep and reached for the water bottle she kept near her pillow.

The red fox vixen gulped down only the last drops left over from a night of tremendous thirst and tossed the empty container aside in an idle gesture, wishing she had brought more. Of course, the only thing for this would be to get up and refill the bottle herself in the natural spring outside the cavern.

The chilly autumn night and the natural constant coolness of the cavern should have eased the vixen’s discomfort as she retrieved her bottle and stumbled outside of her sleeping dome, but there seemed to be no relief even in the temperature. She had slept unclothed on top of a single sheet on her bed, but had tossed and turned most of that sleeping period.

Even though the fish and the thunderpig meat had all ultimately proven delicious and safe to eat, she had had no hunger at the time of the following colonial banquet and had eaten none of it; the sickness that gripped her was not due to any of the new food sources.

The fox wavered on her feet and almost fell flat on her face in the dust of the cavern floor, but somehow she managed to remain upright on her knees. She clutched the empty water bottle in her left hand and rubbed her face with her right. Something did not feel right and she looked down at her hand in curiosity.

It did not hurt, but when she raised it up to her face, she saw that the fur all along her arm was dry and coarse, and the skin beneath was turning an angry purple that was almost black. The sight almost made her faint, not that she was far from such a reaction merely from the fever that burned within her. She knew she was having a reaction to the tiny spider bite, but up until now it had not been of much concern. Sometime during the night, though, things had escalated and it was time to get to the doctor fast.

She dropped the bottle beside her and got up onto all fours, but immediately discovered that her weakened right hand paw would not hold even her slight weight. She was also having difficulty keeping her eyelids open, but knew it was not far to the medical dome, so she closed her puffy eyes and limp-walked on three legs from memory.

The journey to the doctor seemed to take longer than she remembered, but she swallowed against a thick tongue and persevered. Only when the vixen’s long nose bumped into the solid wall of the cavern did she realize she was off course. Neither her dome nor the one for medical were near any of the rock perimeters of the cavern.

She cracked open an eye, but saw no lights to tell her where she was. That in itself was odd, as there was always someone up and about around the clock – even if the clock now had more hours on it. Panting from the excessive heat, the vixen leaned up close to the cool rock wall and stayed there for several long minutes, idly handling the dog tags that hung from her neck.

She was so hot that she did not want to leave her moment of respite, but her throat was dry and her tongue was so swollen she had to have water. Unwilling to reopen her eyes, she had no choice but to try to get back to her dome and hope someone would stop by to check in on her soon. Getting there, however, would take more work than she had the strength to muster.

It was getting harder to think clearly, but instinct compelled her to stay put against the cool rock. She swallowed with a thick, dry tongue and then settled down on the floor with only a modicum of relief. The vixen put her chin down upon her hand paws, heaved a deep sigh, and then became still.

Chapter 11

Second Chance First

Carl looked up at the blue-green sky and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. The strong winds of the previous day were now calm as the sun lit up the peak of the mountain that overshadowed the little horseshoe valley. There were no clouds in the sky, but heavy dew had fallen during the night that now rose as a thickening morning steam.

Unwilling to wait until there might be someone or something to delay his departure again, the grey wolf nodded to his wife and then began preparing the gyrocopter for a full day of aerial exploration. He had already been up for hours but had awaited the dawn before making his decision.

Ellie had checked his pack twice, making sure he had plenty of provisions, full charges on his PBJ and the hand radio he would use to check in with Avon. The grizzly bear was currently snoozing in his bed and could still be there for some time, but Carl did not want to wait until when he might awaken before leaving; he wanted to make the best use of the time allotted to him.

Certain that all was ready, the wolves embraced, nuzzled and then gave one another an affectionate lick. Carl promised to be careful and then squeezed his erect ears up into the transparent helmet. There were others up and about tending to chores, but since he had not made any specific announcement on the time of his departure, Ellie was the only one on hand to see him off.

The wolf crawled into the seat of the contrivance, buckled himself in, double-checked the power cell charge, and then started up the motor. Ellie removed herself to a safe distance before he engaged the upper rotor, and then he was off the ground after rolling only a couple dozen feet across the grass.

Ellie watched him until he disappeared over the trees to the northeast before she turned back toward the barn to help feed the animals. Before she had made it to the corral, Avon emerged from the cavern rubbing sleep from his eyes with a look of annoyance. He searched the sky for the gyrocopter, but seeing nothing, he looked around until he saw the she-wolf. She smiled and waved, but then returned her attention to the corral.

The grizzly bear ambled down the path to the valley floor and then approached her at the barn. “Did Carl just take off?” he demanded.

“Yes,” Ellie replied as if there was no edge to the bear’s tone. “He wanted to get an early start to his day so he could be back well within his time limit.”

“Why didn’t he check in with me before he left?”

The wolf looked up at the bear and twitched an ear. “You were asleep and we didn’t know when you’d be up,” she answered. “He just left, so I’m sure he’ll check in with you in a couple hours.”

“I wanted to talk to him before he left,” Avon grumbled.

“You had plenty of time to discuss anything you wanted last night,” Ellie reminded him, an edge of her own in her voice. “You were too busy fishing to talk to anyone, so it’s not his fault. You’d already given him permission to leave when the weather was good, so he didn’t feel the need to ask again. If you really need to give him extra instruction, I’m sure you can relay it to him over the radio.”

Avon looked at her and raised an eyebrow at the tone of her voice. Suddenly feeling there would be nothing gained by having an argument with her when he was still half asleep, the bear simply nodded.

“I will catch up with him later,” he acquiesced. Ellie’s expression softened and she gestured toward the interior of the domed barn.

“If there’s nothing else,” she said, “I need to feed the chickens. They’re starting their autumn molt and aren’t laying as many eggs, but we still need them healthy.”

“Of course,” he mumbled. Without further discussion, he turned toward the latrines to leave her to her chores, but before he had gone a handful of steps, someone was calling for him from the cavern.

***

Jon looked up at the blue-green sky over the thick morning fog that hugged the lowlands of the prairie, wondering if he would ever get used to the color. He and Kristen had been traveling since well before the dawn, trusting their instincts to take them back toward the range of mountains that could only be seen as darker silhouettes against the night sky. Now with the dawn lighting up the tops of the peaks ahead, they could see that they had been on the right course, though a little north of where they had intended to be.

Kristen, however, was looking back over her shoulder with her nose to the air and her nostrils quivering. She could sense a subtle difference in the air pressure, and although her eyes did not see anything to suggest rain, instinct told her that a change in the weather might be coming. Back on Earth, she had slowly gotten used to new furman senses, but with all the focus and attention on the Institute, their studies, and the aches and pains associated with the transformation, she had never had the clarity of instinct as she had since arriving on Bonestell.

She wondered if this was how Kevin perceived the weather or if he was still dependent upon his meteorological equipment. It was not that she doubted his abilities, but he was still young and learning, and some of his predictions had fallen short. She knew it frustrated the fennec fox, but instead of daunting him, he seemed to take each failure as a challenge to be more accurate the next time. He’ll get it, she thought to herself. No one else in Second Chance was trying to figure out the Bonestellan weather patterns, so it was up to him to meet those challenges.

“Do you hear that?” Jon whispered, staring off through the thick morning mists; the fog rose around fifteen feet above their heads, muting both sight and sound at ground level.

Kristen tilted her head and listened. She actually had heard the light sound, but it had been so subtle that she had not given more thought than a bit of morning background noise. What she heard was a delicate swishing against the damp buffalo grass of the prairie that could have been the wind if there had been any; the air was still.

“Yeah, what is it?” she whispered back. Without waiting for a reply to the rhetorical question, she moved forward on all fours. Jon followed only a step or two behind her. They moved together, instinctively stalking the sound on the padded hands and feet of a Fur with noses quivering.

They did not have to go far to find the origin of the sound. They both stopped quickly and Jon’s whiskers quivered as a ridge rose up in the fur along Kristen’s back. Moving across their path and ignoring the felines completely was what could only be described as a large ‘pack’ of big, hairy spiders, and that was in the literal sense.

Each was over three times the size of a Terran tarantula and their chocolate-colored bodies and legs were completely covered over by long stringy hair that trailed over the grasses they walked across, causing the swishing sound. Like the other local spiders, they only had six legs, but even these looked ominous. Their large bulbous eyes glittered in the morning light, and although none stopped or paused to face the cougars directly, both Furs somehow knew they had not gone unnoticed.

Whatever purpose or instinct drove the spiders to their unknown destination might never be known, but neither explorer even considered capturing one to take back for study. Jon and Kristen watched mutely as nearly forty or fifty of the things marched on through the mists, both thankful the creatures were not heading into the direction of their valley.

Shaking off a sense of unease from the spider migration they had just witnessed, Jon stood up on two feet and shook his hands vigorously. “I’m not generally afraid of spiders,” he said, “but that just gave me the willies.”

“I think I’m ready to go home now,” Kristen said quietly, still down on all fours.

“Home, meaning Second Chance, or Home as in all the way back to Earth?”

The lioness raised an eyebrow at him. “Second Chance is home now,” she clarified. “Earth is just a mythological place, y’know – a place of legend.”

“I can’t see very far in these mists, but we should be getting close to our forest.”

“How can you tell?” she asked. “The mist muffles sound as well as limits our sight. It’s too eerie.”

“I just know,” Jon replied. “I can feel it – maybe feline instinct. I dunno, but I think I can smell them.”

There was a low snort to the left, as if someone had heard his comment and was mocking his response. The cougars stopped and stared, wondering if they had come across a hunting party from camp.

“Who’s there?” Jon called out. “Is that you, Carl?” There was no specific reply but a repeat of the snort, only this time it was from their right and it did not sound like it might be from any of their associates.

“Jon…” Kristen whispered, catching a scent through the mists. “I think we’d better get out of here.”

The snort from the left sounded again, this time much closer and it was accompanied by the heavy footfall of a rather large animal. Jon dropped back onto all fours, bumping shoulders with the lioness.

“Go for the direction we’ve been heading,” he whispered. “Run as fast as you can for the trees, but don’t let the pigs run you down. Zigzag if you have to. If we get separated, we’ll regroup in the treetops.”

“I’m ready,” she replied, crouching down and preparing to put on a burst of speed.

“Go!”

Digging her back feet into the rich loam beneath the grasses, Kristen launched herself forward into the mists and heard the heavy breath, snorts and pounding hoof-steps tear out after her. She was still almost blind in the heavy fog, but she knew that one or two of the massive native warthogs were after her and it was imperative that she not let them get to her. While she had never seen nor heard of the thunderpigs chasing down a Fur since they had arrived, there were instances where the great pigs had gone after the lil-deer with a ferocity that she had hoped she would never have to face. It looked like some of them had decided to see how the Terran intruders might taste.

She did not know where Jon was, whether he was just behind her or if he had run off in a different direction to draw one or more of the hogs away. All she could hear besides her own panting was the thunder of hooves and heavy snorting just behind her tail, almost as if an enraged bull elephant was on the charge.

She tried weaving back and forth, and that seemed to confound the large beast for only a moment, but then she had to change her tactic and cut for a longer distance in one direction when it began to match her movements. It was clearly possible the pig could see through the foggy mists better than she could, and if this was the case, she needed to get to the trees as fast as she could if she intended to stay healthy.

The lioness came upon the forest faster than she had expected and had to dart to the right quickly to avoid running headlong into a large twist-oak tree that appeared almost out of nowhere. There was another just beyond it and she lost speed trying to avoid it too; from the sounds behind her, however, the giant shaggy-haired pig had not matched her dexterity and had at least side-swiped a tree or two.

She took a chance and launched herself off a thick trunk to the left and then used the extra momentum to jump up into the lower branches of another tree. She almost missed the bough, and it bent dangerously beneath her weight, but she scrambled upward to put distance between herself and the ground leaving clawed furrows in the bark.

The thunderpig warbled out in frustration and rammed the tree she was in, causing the limbs to vibrate so hard that she almost lost her footing and fell out. Her claws dug into the black bark and then she jumped into the adjacent tree.

She heard more crashing behind her and did not know if it was her pig or another that might still be chasing Jon through the woods. She hoped he had been able to get up off the ground to the relative safety of the trees.

She stopped for just a moment when the fog thinned and she saw the other mountain lion’s silhouette climb higher into a tree that was shaking from the roots up. Still for just a moment too long, she heard the thundering hooves only a second before the trunk of her own tree rocked hard. She was not out of danger yet and she had no delusions that the roots of the tree could withstand the onslaught of porcine muscles and determination.

The mists seemed to be getting thinner the farther they moved through the upper branches of the forest, and soon Kristen was able to see that three of the large thunderpigs were still attempting to get at the cougars that had thus far managed to escape their rage. Thankfully for the felines, the trees were closer together and it was only then that the botanist noticed that the tree she was in was of a different type than the twist-oaks they had been in before. She recognized the type and looked down at the ground to see the rocky terrain she had expected below. They were at the foot of the mountains already.

What’s gotten these things so stirred up? she wondered as she and Jon gained ground away from their pursuers. The large animals were so big that it was getting harder for them to follow through the trees so closely, and after moments more they finally stopped and bellowed their rage at the escaping Furs.

Unwilling to press their luck, Jon motioned Kristen on to put more distance behind them before they might stop to rest. Despite the increased endurance they had as Furs, Kristen could feel the toll this had on her limbs and she was panting hard with every leap to another tree.

After another ten minutes of tree-travel, Jon made his way closer to her and she could see several angry red scratches in his fur where the tree limbs had gotten him in his headlong rush through the treetops. Unnoticed before, she could feel several of them on her arms and shoulders too. They would heal, but it was a small price to pay to still be alive.

If she had been a human colonist, Kristen doubted she would have survived. Being a Fur already had certain advantages and she was thankful she had gone through the painful transformation to gain that extra stamina, speed and endurance that had saved her today.

“I think… we finally lost them,” Jon said between panting. He looked her over and with a gentle finger, traced one of her scrapes across her left ear. “Are you okay?” he asked in concern.

“I will survive,” she told him wearily, leaning into his hand and briefly closing her eyes.

The lion looked back the way they had come toward the sound of thrashing in the trees as the tenacious pigs continued to try to get through. Jon knew from experience in this part of the woods that the trees and brush grew too close together for something as large as or larger than a buffalo to get between. They were safe for the moment, but he did not want to tempt fate.

“We’re close to camp,” he said, “so we’d best go on before we let down our guard.”

Kristen would have preferred to rest just a moment or two more, but they were still too near to the pigs for comfort, so she nodded and followed him through the trees. After some time, the trees grew farther apart and she recognized some of the underbrush below where she had harvested some of the flavorful, star-shaped tubers they had all been eating lately. Jon led them to lower branches and then down to the forest floor again where the bed of leaves, pine needles and soft dirt beneath was easier on their foot pads.

They could no longer hear the angry pigs, so perhaps they had finally turned away, having lost their prey. It did not take long before the mated pair of cougars emerged from the woods and out onto the pale green grass of the Second Chance valley.

“Home, sweet home,” Jon intoned in a weary voice. “You can do what you want, but I think I’m going to take a swim in the lake to get the dust, dirt and leaves out of my fur and then I’m going to take a nap before reporting in to Avon.”

“That all sounds like a good idea to me,” she replied. “Count me in.”

They had walked halfway across the clearing toward the lake before either of them noticed the quiet. Looking around warily, Jon peered up at the cavern and Kristen focused her attention on the barn dome and the animal pens. The livestock were all calm, so there did not seem to be any great emergency, but no one else was in sight, either in the valley or what they could see up into the cavern.

“Where is everyone?” Kristen whispered, almost afraid that raising her voice might draw some hidden danger to them. After some of the things they had seen over the past day, the silence in the little valley was eerie.

Still down on all fours, the cougars crept along the vegetation growing around the perimeter of the lake, the large cavern looming above them. The only sound they could hear was a quiet hum of the refrigeration units inside, but otherwise the place was silent.

“What do you suppose happened?” Kristen asked in a subdued tone. She had not seen any bodies scattered about, but that did not mean there weren’t any. It would be unlike Avon to let everyone take off away from camp at the same time, so there had to be some explanation that neither of them would like.

Jon stopped and Kristen looked back at him. “What is it?” she whispered.

“I’m just remembering what happened on Bastien,” he said. “Whatever it was that hit them swept through the whole population within a day – and we’ve been gone long enough that something like that could have happened here.”

“Ohmigosh, I didn’t think of that! There’s still so much we don’t know about the ecology here that it could have been anything!” The lioness looked up toward the cavern, wondering if the place was filled with death. “Do you think we should stay away in case it might get us too?”

“What happened on Bastien only affected one type of Fur; that’s why this colony is the first mixed group they’ve sent out. However, if some disease has jumped species, we could already be in danger.” Jon looked back toward the pens and looked perplexed. “If that’s what happened here, I wonder why our livestock wasn’t affected.”

“Maybe it only infected our human elements,” Kristen suggested, the uneasiness growing in her voice. “If that’s the case, Earth will abandon this world for sure, especially since they lost a whole human colony here already.”

Jon shook his head. “That may be, but the original colony never made it here to get infected. No, something else happened to them, probably before they descended from orbit. A stray meteorite might have breached their hull, perhaps. I’ve seen a number of them streaking across the sky some nights.”

The lioness leaned against him. “Jon, I’m frightened. Maybe we should try the radio.”

“Kristen! Jon!”

The sudden voice made them both jump. When they turned in unison, they saw Sissy running at them on all fours from the direction of the woods toward the landing field. Emerging from the shadows behind her were the rest of the Furs, all walking slowly back toward the camp.

The orange domestic feline rushed to the pair of cougars and then launched herself into Jon’s arms, knocking him back on his haunches. She buried her face in his bare chest fur with her arms around his middle and began sobbing.

Kristen was too shocked to find everyone suddenly okay to feel anything but relief, but at Sissy’s muffled cries, she reached out and lightly stroked the back of the kitty’s head.

“What is it?” Jon asked, trying to pull her away from his chest to look into her face. “What happened here?”

“We… we just…” Sissy tried to speak, looking up at him with wet eyes. “We just buried Rose!” she finally gasped.

“Oh no!” Kristen exclaimed, both hands up to her mouth. “How? What happened?”

The orange striped feline felt weak, but the touches of comfort from her two friends were calming. “Remember when she and Ivan went off on their ride to the east?” she asked hoarsely. “She was bitten by a tiny spider while digging up a plant to bring back.”

“I remember that,” Kristen said. “It happened days ago.”

Sissy nodded, staying close within Jon’s arms around her for solace. “The infection from its venom got worse. Dara f-found her farther back in the cavern this morning than any of the domes and it looks like she d-died sometime during the night.”

Jon nodded, mostly to himself. As second-in-command of the colony, he had been aware that their geologist made frequent solo ventures back into the large dry cavern of a type that bore a resemblance to a large commercial cave in southern Kentucky. There were no stalactites or stalagmites, no flowstone formations of dolomite and no calcite ridges, but Dara was sure there might be some minerals or other resources farther away from the entrance that the colony might make use of, preferably another water source they could tap into if the natural spring they used now froze up during the winter. She had also stated that she was on the lookout for any side corridors that might be useful to pen the livestock during inclement weather; it was because she had found several they might use for that purpose that she was allowed to make such forays into the heart of their mountain.

During the first half of a long Bonestellan day, Dara assisted with the chores necessary to maintain the colony, but after a sleep period and several meals, she claimed the second half of the daytime hours as her own. Rather than hiking through the woods, climbing the mountain or taking part in some other outdoors activity, she chose instead to pursue her geological interests deeper into the cavern. For safety’s sake, Avon had entreated the polar bear to take a partner with her, but she always seemed to slip away on her own. It must have been coming back from such an excursion when she discovered the poor vixen.

“Rose was the first of us,” Sissy said with sniffle.

“What do you mean?” Kristen asked softly.

“She was Second Chance’s first casualty,” the orange striped cat explained. “Although some Fur colonies have been more successful than others, they’ve all lost someone in the first months of occupation.” She looked up into Jon’s face with an expression of great anguish. “One of my brothers died the same way she did — from an insect bite he had no immunity against!”

Kristen looked up when a shadow fell over them in the morning light; the grizzly bear casting it looked as if he had not slept in days. That appearance was deceptive, as the cause had more to do with the responsibilities of command in light of Rose’s death.

“Jon…. Kristen…” Avon said quietly, looking down at the orange feline. “I’m glad you two are back.”

The male cougar frowned. “Yeah, we have some stories to tell about our trip, but they can wait.”

Avon nodded thankfully. He really was not in the mood to listen to a trip report at the moment, so he gestured toward the others making their way back up to the cavern. “We just had a burial service for Rose out in the woods, as I’m sure Sissy has just told you.”

“She did,” Kristen replied solemnly.

“We put her next to one of the flowering bushes with blooms similar to blue roses,” Sissy told them. “We thought it was appropriate. We hung her dog tags on the bush.”

“I think she would have liked that,” Kristen said with a nod. The blooms of that particular plant smelled nothing like Terran roses, but they had a pleasant aroma of their own and Rose had been fond of them.

“I’m tired, my head hurts and I need to lie down before I put together the report to send back to Earth,” Avon mumbled. “If you want the details on Rose’s death, Ken can tell you what you’ll need to know.”

“Okay, we’ll leave you alone for now,” Jon said. “You can let us know later when you want our trip report.”

“That’s fine. Thanks.” The colony captain ambled away toward the cavern on all fours, his head down and movements slow. It was apparent he had taken the death of one under his supervision rather hard.

“I don’t want to be alone right now,” Sissy said quietly after he’d gone, “but I don’t want to hear the details of her death again.”

Kristen took the kitty’s hands in her own and gave them a gentle squeeze. “We’re going to rest a while after we talk to Ken. You’re welcome to join us if you wish.”

Jon embraced the small Felis warmly. “You can wait for us in our dome,” he added.

Sissy gave Kristen a look of gratitude, but for just an instant, she almost looked guilty. Before Kristen could inquire, however, Sissy looked up at Jon and then kissed him briefly on the mouth before running away at top speed on all fours.

Kristen blinked several times in surprise and then looked up at her mate, who seemed just as surprised as she was. “What was that for?” she asked, certain dark emotions suddenly welling up inside.

The mountain lion shook his head, unwilling to put his suspicion to voice. “Beats me,” he muttered. “C’mon, let’s go find Ken.”

***

“What happened?” Jon asked, watching as the colony physician examined Kristen’s hands where the colorful cotton swabs had briefly numbed her fingers. Jenni sat nearby on the medical gurney, still quiet after the burial ceremony.

Ken and Jenni both looked up at the mountain lion with morose expressions. “Rose said she was bitten by a spider on the outing she took with Ivan to the eastern hills they self-named the Ivanrose Forest,” the red wolf answered. “It got her on a finger when she was digging up a plant sample to bring back.”

“Didn’t she report it?” Kristen asked.

“She did,” Jenni confirmed, “but apparently it was already too late. The toxin got into her system and spread internally, while destroying all tissue in the immediate vicinity of the bite.”

Ken picked up a sealed plastic jar and held it up in the light of the medical dome. A tiny creature with six legs and blue and white body markings that resembled denim blue jeans lay unmoving on its back on the bottom of the container.

“Most spiders this small aren’t able to penetrate human skin tissue, but this one has a pair of exceptionally sharp and strong lancers despite its size. Typically, a spider bite itself is not serious, but it looks like this one’s venom caused bacterial infection in the deeper layers of the skin and tissues of her hand that spread quickly. It is likely she had a high fever as her body tried to fight off the infection, but the toxins in the venom may have been too much for her system. It’s my guess that it got in and affected her central nervous system in the areas that control heartbeat regulation and respiration.”

“Were you working on a treatment?” Jon asked; it was not an accusation, just a question of curiosity.

“I tried to extract its venom to see if I could come up with some kind of antidote for her,” Ken answered, “but such things take time and there were no miracles.”

Rose Fleur was the first victim to fall to the dangers of a new world, but it was something that could have happened anywhere. Earth had its own share of venomous insects and other creatures, but most of those already had available antidotes developed from years of research and experimentation. Something new on this world that has never been part of the Terran ecosystem could be either easy or astronomically difficult to produce a treatment.

Jon indicated the denim spider and said to Ken, “Do you still think you can create a vaccine from that thing, in case someone else gets bitten by one?”

“Probably, given time,” the wolf replied. “With Avon’s permission, I took some of Rose’s blood to analyze in hopes it will help us come up with something. We’re bound to get into more of these things, so I’d like to have a treatment of some kind.”

Kristen looked up when the doctor finished examining her hands, apparently satisfied that there seemed to be no lingering effects from the topical numbing agent of the swabs. “Forgive me for asking,” she said in hesitation, “but why did you bury Rose? I thought the AHCP required cremation when a Fur dies.”

Jenni stared at the lioness as if she had gone insane, but Ken shook his head. “The purpose of cremating a Fur,” he said, “was the AHCP’s way of making sure that no other genetic company on Earth could get its hands on the DNA coding sequences and reverse-engineer the goetazine formula the company uses to create critters like us.” He shrugged and said, “There’s no danger of that here, so Avon felt we could give Rose a proper burial.”

“That was an awful big decision for Avon to make on his own,” Kristen remarked.

The wolf put his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “Not really. It’s widely known that the felines of the Bastien tragedy were all buried by their surviving Vulps physicians. The AHCP didn’t make a fuss about them having been buried versus being cremated, and there was a greater reason to burn the bodies there than we have here.”

“Why’s that?”

“Cremating the bodies would have destroyed the affliction within them that swept through the place,” Ken supplied. “Since the Vulps handled the bodies and were unaffected, I’m sure the AHCP might have had them exhume one of them to take back with them to Earth for a greater autopsy inspection than what they could have done on-site.”

“That can’t have been very nice,” Jenni muttered. “Imagine having to bury your friend, only to have to dig her up again later. It’s one thing if you’re impartial and another if you actually knew her as a friend.”

***

Kristen returned to the dome she shared with Jon and found Sissy curled up in the middle of their bed. She frowned for a long moment before she crawled onto the mattress and sat down beside the orange feline. Sissy’s large green eyes opened before Kristen touched her, and when she saw that they were alone, there was a sudden expression of uncertainty upon her face. Kristen sniffed the air, immediately recognizing the fear scent from the smaller Felis, and she locked eyes with her.

Sissy swallowed and looked away, unable to maintain the gaze. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I… I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Do what?” Kristen replied. She knew exactly what was being discussed here, but she wanted her friend to say it aloud. Sissy knew it too and she fidgeted before answering.

“I’m sorry I kissed Jon in front of you,” she said quietly.

“Listen, I understood when you clung to him for support when you were upset about Rose,” the lioness said slowly, “but that had nothing to do with kissing him. He’s my mate and I don’t think I liked what you did.”

“I’m sorry…” Sissy squeaked. Then she stopped and looked back at her. “Your mate?” she repeated.

“That’s right,” Kristen said matter-of-factly, “and I’m sure you know what that means.”

Sissy dropped her gaze again and let out a long sigh. “I know you’ve been after him for a long time, so I shouldn’t be surprised. You two have seemed closer since we got here, but I don’t think anyone’s known for sure that you two were…. mated. All during his transformation, we all knew Jon was hung up on his ex-fiancé and that he never intended to have a physical relationship with anyone. If that’s changed between you two, does this mean you are getting married?”

It was Kristen’s turn to look uncertain. “I don’t know,” she admitted quietly. “Jon told me that he and Avon have been discussing conventional traditions of monogamy, whether or not it would work in a Fur society where there are disproportionate genders like ours and numbers are so small – primarily among the Ursis. This has never come up before since we’re the first experimental mixed colony. They’ve made no official policy, but I think others are already deciding this on their own.”

“There are more Felis females than males,” Sissy reminded her.

Kristen purposely did not look at the other cat. “Yes, but only barely.”

“Jenni and Kim are both mated to Raine, and they all seem to get along okay with the arrangement.”

“Yes, and that takes up the slack, leaving just you and Arne to get together.”

“I don’t like Arne,” the orange feline murmured. “Sure, he’s handsome enough, but he has an abrasive personality; very few people like him – of any Fur species – and he’s always rough with anyone he has personal dealings with. He’s not my type.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Sissy, but if you don’t hook up with him, your only option is to take up a friendship with a male from another species. You won’t have any children, but it would keep you from being lonely.”

“But I’ve always wanted children and hoped I’d meet a nice Felis in whichever colony I wound up in. I didn’t know that the AHCP would cheat and throw us into a mixed group like ours. It’s not fair!”

Kristen shook her head, fighting back a yawn; the morning’s escape from the thunderpigs had taken more out of her than she had thought and she had no real interest in this conversation anyway. “No, it’s not fair, Sissy, but Arne’s your only option,” she remarked, stretching out on the mattress beside her.

“I don’t like Arne,” the smaller cat repeated.

“Okay, so where are you going with this?” Kristen asked suspiciously.

Sissy could not meet her eyes, keeping her head down on the bed. “You are one of my best friends here,” she said quietly, “and I’ve always liked Jon. I, uhm… I was wondering if I could partner with you two.”

Kristen stared at her. “Sissy, how do I put this? I like you… but I’m not bi. I’m not sure a threesome is something that I could —”

“I’m not either,” the cat squeaked in surprise, her eyes wide, “but I was kinda hoping you might share Jon with me… like Kim and Jenni do with Raine.”

Kristen fell silent and Sissy was sure she was angry with her. “I’m… I’m sorry,” she muttered, looking down at the mattress beneath her. “Please forget I said anything.”

Kristen sighed aloud. “Sissy, as you’ve reminded me, I’ve been after Jon’s affections for a long time; he’s only just now accepted me as his mate. Now that I have him, I’m not really sure I want to share him with anyone else – especially right away.”

“I know,” Sissy replied with emotion. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

Kristen stretched out, covering her head with a pillow, and was quiet for several long minutes. When Sissy started to get up, the lioness put out a hand and stopped her with a touch.

“Sissy… Listen, I’m not saying yes… but I guess I won’t say no either. We’re going to be here for years. Let the two of us have time to be a couple first, and maybe – just maybe – I’ll be more open to the idea. Of course, it wouldn’t be my decision alone; Jon would have to agree to it too.” She looked at Sissy suspiciously from underneath the pillow, but the other cat was not looking at her. “Have you mentioned this to him?”

Sissy shook her head. “No, I knew I would have to convince you first, but I should have known better. I knew he was hung up on his ex-fiancé, but I also knew that you wanted him too.”

She sat up and wrapped her arms around herself, closing her eyes. “Being exclusive isn’t fair, but it’s how we were all brought up to believe. We don’t have thirty-one Felis of a regular colony to mix and match as we please – there are only seven of us.”

She looked at her hands again and her eyes misted over. “With Rose’s death, it reminded me that all of our numbers are limited, and even though we’re supposed to be here for at least five years, we could be here longer. I thought it made sense to start building up our numbers at the start, but with our old ways of thinking, I think children are going to be rare.”

Kristen crawled up beside her and put a gentle hand on Sissy’s shoulder. She enveloped her friend in her arms and held her in a warm embrace.

“Give us time,” she whispered. “That’s all I ask. This is all so new to me, so let me think it over and when I think I might be ready to share him, I’ll bring it up to Jon.”

Sissy shook her head, knowing it would never happen with such a jealous friend, and did her best to hold back the imminent tears.

***

“Carl to Avon – Carl to Avon. Are you there?”

The grizzly barely heard the radio receiver in the pocket of his shorts. Although he had been expecting a call from the grey wolf all morning, he had momentarily forgotten it.

“This is Avon,” he replied crossly. “Where’ve you been? I expected you to call in every two hours!”

“Have you ever tried herding cats?”

The non-sequitur caught the bear off guard. “Huh?”

The wolf laughed. "I’ve found a large herd of something that look like cats, but are wooly like sheep. They’re just about as random as you’d think cats would be like traveling in a pack, but they’ve somehow managed to stay together as they travel.”

The excitement in Carl’s voice made Avon forget he was upset with him. “What are they like?”

“They’re big, mostly the size of an African lion, but add about fifty or more pounds for what looks like a thick wool coat all over their bodies. There’s not much of a neck that I can tell – it’s either hidden beneath the wool or their flat heads attach right at the shoulder. Of course, my first thought was whether or not they were edible.”

“Spoken like a true predator,” Avon said with amusement, “but are you thinking of them as a cat or sheep to eat?”

“I suppose I was thinking of the sheep,” the wolf confessed. “I’ve never tried eating a cat before, but I know my lupine ancestors probably ate any they could catch.”

“A cat the size of a lion would probably be stalking you instead, Carl. We’ve not seen any large predators other than the pigs, but I wouldn’t try it until you see whether or not these can fight back!”

“Good point. I’ve seen numerous other animals from the air, but most scatter before I can get too close with my gyrocopter. Hoping the oily black deterrent is common only to the lil-deer, a lot of what I’ve seen today represents potential sources of food to sustain all of us. I’ve been taking lots of pictures and loads of notes so we can determine what we might try eating later.”

“Besides prospective food, have you seen anything else of interest?”

“Too many things to tell you about now, even in the short time I’ve been out here today. The horizon keeps throwing me off, though. The diameter of this world is larger than the Earth, so the horizon’s more distant and visually a little disorienting when flying. Despite that, I did see something remarkable in another good-sized lake to the north that butts up to the mountains. There’s something rather large swimming around under there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve not seen it surface, but the water’s clear and I could see something dark swimming for long distances.”

“The size of a shark, perhaps?”

“Bigger - much bigger. There were times when I could make out a shape and it made the fur along my back want to stand up.”

“What did you see?”

“My best guess was that it’s a something like a plesiosaur with either two heads or two long limbs stretched out in front of it as it swims. Body-wise, it reminds me of a creature like Champ or Nessie.”

Avon snorted. “Nice, we have our own local lake monster,” he said with a smile. “Don’t fly too low to the water or one of those heads might try to sample you as a new cuisine.”

“Yes, poppa bear. I will be a good wolf and remain a distant observer.”

***

When Jon got back to the dome he shared with Kristen, he found her and Sissy both dozing lightly on the bed. They were facing away from one another on opposite sides of the mattress, so Jon stretched out in the empty space between them, lying on his stomach with his face down upon his arms. Tired out from the events of the long morning, he wanted only to rest and did not notice that both females were actually awake.

Kristen turned over to face him and saw over his back that Sissy had done the same. The orange cat had a guilty expression, but the lioness mouthed silently to her, ‘It’s okay to snuggle.’

Sissy looked at her in disbelief, but Kristen was long accustomed to doing nothing but snuggling up to Jon at night, something she knew that he did not mind; she would not begrudge the kitty from doing the same.

Quietly, so as not to disturb him, both females cuddled up to his sides. When Sissy put a slender arm across his back, she found that Kristen’s was already there, but the lioness grasped her wrist lightly to make sure she did not pull it back. For now, they were still friends, and like the cats they were related to, napping together in a warm group was natural.

***

Avon grumbled beneath his breath at the PBJ in his hands. The screen had been faulty of late and he did not know if it was the power cell or the circuit board beneath the display. The dual screens had the capability to switch functions with one another, and changing the primary display from one to the other did not seem to help in this matter. He had been taking notes while Jon and Kristen gave him a report on the trip to the salt flats, but with the unit acting intermittently, he was getting nowhere with it.

“I’m sorry, you two,” the grizzly muttered to the pair of cougars before him. The three of them were sitting on the grass in the shade of a wide umbrella that Wendy had constructed out of scraps for use out in the little valley; the quiet golden retriever was resourceful in making things like this for their usage. He tapped the PBJ with the side of his palm and snorted. “This thing’s on the fritz.”

“Sissy’s been having trouble with hers,” Kristen remarked. “Jon’s too.”

The grizzly turned off the errant unit and set it on the grass beside him. He looked across at her and shrugged. “You may have to write up notes of your own and send them to me later.”

“Sure, I can do that,” said the botanist.

“Anyway,” Jon said, continuing his earlier narrative, “just as we got back to the forest at the foot of the mountains, thunderpigs charged after us. I couldn’t be sure if there were more due to the dense morning fog, but there were at least two that I knew of definitely.” He went on to describe the scene to the colony captain, with Kristen jumping in periodically to add some detail he missed.

“…but you know where the trees get closer together on the northwest side of the valley, that’s when we finally lost the pigs,” Jon finished. “We didn’t do anything to them, so I don’t know why they were so stirred up. Maybe they just go crazy when it’s foggy.”

Avon shook his head, smiling casually. “That’s our fault,” he explained. “While you were away, Carl’s hunting party managed to take down a young adolescent, but they had to fight for every step of the way to bring it back. Those pigs took it personal and were extremely upset that we’d killed one of them. We almost lost Aldo on the way back.”

“What happened to Aldo?” Kristen asked. “Is he okay?”

“He has a broken rib and got his side opened up by a tusk. Jenny got him cleaned up, sewed up and wrapped up, and he’s resting now, but he’ll be okay even if he’s out of commission for a while.”

“Wow,” Kristen replied. “Anyone else hurt?”

“A few scrapes and bruises, but they managed to get everyone else back in decent condition. Like you, they finally lost the attacking pigs in the dense tree line, but they almost didn’t get the travois with body of the adolescent through with them for the same reason.”

Jon was sitting with his legs out beside him. He would prefer to sit cross-legged, but that was something a little more difficult now that he had digitigrade feet. He reached behind him and repositioned his tail, but then he leaned forward, giving Avon his full attention.

“I don’t suppose you’ve tried eating it yet, with the situation with Rose,” he started, “but I would like —”

“If you want to try some, we have plenty left over from last night,” Avon interrupted with a smile. “No one’s who has eaten any of it – and that’s most of us – have had any issues. It’s really good, too.”

“Great!” Kristen said with a smile. “Who was the first to try it?”

“Arne volunteered.”

“Arne! After what happened with the lil-deer, I’m surprised he didn’t demand someone else to go first,” Jon said in amazement.

The grizzly was still smiling and he chuckled. “He’s still trying to prove his worth to the colony, I think, since he volunteers for everything. Fortunately for him, this time the gamble with new food was a success. There were a few other gambles while you were away, but they all paid off too.”

“Oh?” Jon and Kristen asked in unison.

“We’ve tried all the different fish in the lake we’ve been able to catch. All good, all safe.”

Jon licked his lips. “Too bad it’s too late in the season to grow our own potatoes. We could have fish and chips!”

“You have to plant Terran potatoes in the spring,” Kristen advised him, “but the Bonestellan tubers we’ve found so far seem to like the summer and autumn months. We have plenty of those we can try frying up.”

“Sounds like we have plenty of meat options,” Jon remarked. “There were several plants Kris found on our trip that could provide extra vegetable-like foods too, though we found one meat source that we’d just as soon ignore.”

“Oh?” the bear asked.

“It was an ugly tailless thing about the size of a bulldog, with a fat, round face, open holes for ears with ridges over them as well as its eyes,” Kristen supplied. “The naked thing was totally hairless. We thought we’d chase it down and see what it was like to eat. Despite four stubby legs it did its best to outrun us both.”

“So what happened?” Avon asked. “Did it have the black ooze?”

“No, not exactly,” Jon muttered. “Kristen took it down all right, but when we cut into it to prepare it to roast over a fire, the insides looked rotted and diseased.”

“Eh, nice.”

“Exactly. We only saw the one, so we don’t know if this was typical of its species or if that one specifically was sick, but we buried it and tried the local fish in the lake instead.” Jon scratched briefly behind his ear and said, “Like yours, the fish we tried were edible and quite tasty. Kris found a few local veggies to go with it, so our last meal out there was a good one.”

“That sounds like you had a decent trip altogether,” the grizzly conceded. “We’ll be studying the salt samples you brought back to see if we can use it for meat preservation, and if so, I’ll probably be sending a party back out there to collect a bunch.”

“Just leave the salt-torts alone,” Jon advised.

“Of course. Too bad you couldn’t bring one back, though. Dr. Mochizuki will probably want to get one to catalog it at some point.”

“He can go get one himself,” Jon grumbled. “Just make sure he gets there and back during the daylight hours. He’ll want to avoid the pigs too.”

“True, true. At least, we’ve determined the hogs are completely safe to eat, but whether or not they’ll be safe to hunt is another matter,” the bear remarked.

“It could be you took their leader, an alpha, perhaps,” Kristen suggested.

“Too young, I would think,” Avon replied. “There were plenty of other, more seasoned hogs in the herd. Carl seems to think they have a tight-knit family bond and reacted just as we would have if they had taken one of us.”

“Do you think they might be sapient?” Kristen asked.

Avon shook his head. “No, not really. They’re just beasts reacting instinctively. Like the buffalo of the old west, just one of them could feed a lot of us and we can probably use other parts of the animal for things as well. They’ve proven they’re dangerous, however, so we’ll have to keep an eye out for them.”

“You mean, like that one?” Jon asked quietly. Both of his companions followed his gaze to the edge of the clearing that occupied the majority of the little valley. A lone thunderpig was standing just under the shadows, peering out at them – almost directly at Avon, Kristen and Jon, it seemed.

“How long has it been standing there?” Kristen whispered.

“I just noticed it,” Jon answered. “I caught its scent and saw a little movement out of the corner of my eye.”

“Maybe we’d better make our way back up to the cave,” Avon suggested. “Slowly.”

The three of them stood up on two feet to make themselves look larger, but the pig did nothing other than watch them walk to the bridge over the river and then up the path to the cavern entrance. Even after the three of them split up to go their separate ways, Avon could see that the pig seemed content to do nothing more than look out at them from the woods.

Since it had come in the from the southern direction instead of the northwest where the cougars had been chased, he wondered if it was from a different herd or a lone pig on its own that was unaware of the previous conflicts.

The large animal made no threatening moves, not even toward the animal pens. All it did was stand and peer out across the valley toward the cave.

***

Back inside their dome, Jon pulled out one of the sample cases from the pack he had worn on their trip. “I’m going to take the selenite crystals I dug up to Dara,” he said. “I doubt they’ll be anything more than a curiosity to her, but maybe she’ll like to have them.”

“Jon…”

He looked back at Kristen and raised an eyebrow at the tone she used. She seemed hesitant.

“Hmm?” he responded.

“I have something I need to discuss with you,” she said quietly.

“I’ll only be gone a few minutes. I’ll be back and then we can take a walk in the woods for some privacy if you’d like.”

“Okay.”

The mountain lion left his mate sitting at the small round table, where she wrung her hands together. Her thoughts and emotions were all a jumble and she briefly considered dropping the discussion before it began. Instead of waiting for him, she could just go to the Great Dome and get something to eat, but by the time she wrestled with herself, wavering back and forth, Jon returned.

He approached the table and held out a hand to her. “C’mon,” he said, “let’s go take a walk.”

“Did Dara like the crystals?” Kristen asked, getting to her feet.

“I couldn’t find her, so I left them on her table with a note. She’ll see them later.”

The cougars walked together on all fours through the cavern. Ivan, Jasmine and Dahlia were all huddled together outside of Erin’s dome with the fennec fox speaking quietly to the trio. Of everyone in the colony, these three would have the hardest time dealing with Rose’s death, so their counselor had jumped in right away to talk with them. Reminded of their loss, Kristen’s thoughts turned inward and she walked beside Jon quietly without a word.

Jon looked over at her a few times on the way out, but allowed her quiet moments to sort out whatever was troubling her. When they got to the wooden bridge, he looked up and saw the thunderpig still standing where it had been earlier, silently staring right at them. He felt unnerved by those dark eyes, so he stopped and bumped shoulders with his mate.

“Let’s not go into the woods,” he suggested. “Let’s go up to my lookout point instead.”

Kristen noticed the pig and understood. She nodded quietly and then followed him on all fours up the side of the mountain, around boulders and through the trees along a path becoming travel worn. After a little time gaining altitude, they arrived at the flat slab of rock that overlooked the valley that Jon had come to claim as his own private sentry perch. Others knew he went up to it often, whether on watch or just to get away to do some thinking, but he was rarely bothered when there.

He made himself comfortable, but when he looked at her, she remained up on all fours with an unreadable expression upon her face. Although he knew she had been preoccupied, he did not know what it was about and a feeling in the pit of his stomach began to quiver.

“Okay, we’re alone,” he said quietly. “What’s on your mind?”

As the two of them had grown closer since their arrival to this world, she had been thankful that he had always given her his full attention whenever they were alone together, but this time she felt shaken by his direct gaze. She sat down upon her haunches and tried to will the tip of her tail to stop twitching.

“Do you remember telling me about your conversation with Avon about the relationships within the colony?”

He seemed puzzled by the question, but nodded. “‘Exclusive relationships may not be wise in this setting,’ I believe was the sentiment expressed concerning the uneven ratio of males to females in the Ursis group.”

“How do you feel about such polygamous relationships?”

He hesitated before responding. “I think under certain circumstances, it’s probably more practical than monogamy,” he said, “but that’s up to all parties involved. Are Gerard and Aaron fighting over the girls again?”

“No, there are no problems with the Ursis that I know of other than what you and I discussed on our trip.”

“Okay, you’ve lost me then. What’s going on?”

Kristen tried to steel her nerves and brushed the black bangs of her human hair from her forehead. “Are you aware that Jenni and Kim have formed a tri-bonding with Raine?”

“Yeah, he told me about it himself. It took him by surprise, but he’s never been shy with the ladies. Is there a problem with them that I need to break up?”

Kristen shook her head, wishing he would not make this more difficult than it had to be with his suppositions. “No, they’re all getting along just fine. The arrangement seems to suit all three of them.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Uhm… Sissy approached me about a similar setup a little while ago.”

“Sissy… approached you…?”

“Yeah… She was looking for my approval so she could pair up with you, Jon. She’s hoping the three of us could have an arrangement like the one Jenni, Kim and Raine all have.”

Jon stared at her without a word for a long minute.

“She… wants me?” he asked slowly, his brow furrowed. “Why—? If she’s worried about pairing up with another Felis, why doesn’t she go after Arne? He’s still available.”

Kristen shook her head. “She doesn’t like him,” she explained quietly, “but she’s had a thing for you since you first got to the Institute.”

Jon nodded. “Yeah, she often flirted with me back there, but I never gave her any indication I was interested.”

“She said she already knew you were hung up on your Ex, but that never kept her from liking you – kinda like me.”

Jon frowned deeply and rubbed a hand across his face. “You sound like you’ve already given her permission to pursue me,” he grumbled. “Are you tired of me already? Was I such a disappointment to you after the long wait?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” the lioness replied in alarm.

“What then?”

“Jon, I don’t want to share you – especially after what happened on our trip. I want you as mine and mine alone!”

“I’m glad to hear it!” Jon said in agitation, his own tail twitching behind him. “Why didn’t you just tell her that and end it before she puts too much hope into it?”

“I wanted to, but all I said is that I would think it over,” Kristen mumbled, her ears back against her head.

“My gut instinct is not to do it,” he grumbled. “I like Sissy and think she’s cute, but the Felis aren’t in danger of dying out due to mismatched numbers. Jenni, Kim and Raine took care of that problem themselves to even things out. If all she wants are kittens, Arne can help her with that whether they like one another or not.”

“Jon, I didn’t say I approved.”

“No, but saying you would think about it might give her some expectation that you were at least open to the idea. Does she think that your permission is all it takes? What if you’re agreeable, but I’m not willing to be someone’s stud animal? Listen, if the bears all want to swap out their lovers to keep their numbers up, that’s their business, but I was raised to believe in marriage to just one person at a time!”

Kristen looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “We aren’t married, Jon,” she reminded him softly. “We’re only mated, just like our animal cousins.”

The lion’s tail stopped twitching – stopped moving altogether – and then he slowly shook his head with his eyes closed. “Kris,” he said in a quieter tone, “I’ve only now just gotten to the point where I can have a physical relationship with you, and part of it is due to the fact that you know my real background. Sissy doesn’t know Brian Barrett and I would like to keep it that way. If I had an intimate relationship with her or anyone else, it would be on a false foundation based upon my new identity. I would never be able to be honest with her and I would have to be on my guard at all times. I don’t think I can do that.”

“Remember what you just said about Sissy and Arne,” Kristen said calmly. “That applies here, too; perpetuating the Felis on Bonestell doesn’t require truth or honesty, just the physical act.”

Jon snorted his frustration and sat up on his haunches. “Are you trying to talk me into letting Sissy into our relationship or not?” he asked gruffly. “You say you don’t approve of her request, but you’re also defending the principles behind that request!”

“Jon…” she started. She stopped, sighed aloud and then cleared her throat. “Jon, like you, my first reaction was that I didn’t want to share you with anyone, but I’ve thought about it and decided that if you were open to the idea, I would okay it, but only for Sissy. I’m not into other girls and she says she’s not either, but you would be the common share point in such a relationship. If you don’t want to do it, then that’s what I’ll tell her, but I wanted you to be aware of both sides and have an opinion.”

She looked up at him, feeling very small. “I love you, Jon, and I’m selfish. I don’t want to share you, but if it means giving the Felis an additional chance to survive, I would be willing if you were. ‘Exclusive relationships may not be wise in this setting,’ I believe you said. You either believe that or you don’t.”

Jon’s expression softened. “I love you too, Kris, but I don’t know that I could be comfortable being with someone else while still having a relationship with you. It would feel too much like cheating, and that is the very reason I’m a Fur now. I would still be human on Earth with a good-paying job and probably starting a family of my own with Rebecca if she hadn’t cheated on me with Parker.”

“It wouldn’t be cheating if I knew and approved of it,” Kristen replied. “That’s the difference.”

Jon shook his head. “I don’t want to do it,” he said at last. “I’m flattered that Sissy likes me that much, but while there are still relatively even numbers among us cats, I don’t see the need. I’m sure she’ll start to resent me once you tell her I don’t want her, but if she doesn’t even want to consider Arne, perhaps Raine might like to add another to his harem; he doesn’t seem to mind having multiple partners. By next spring, there could be kittens all over the place with his spots.”

***

Avon sat on the ground near the edge of the cavern shelf that overlooked the small lake and stared back at the thunderpig that had been standing on the other side of the valley clearing all afternoon. Some of the other Furs had become alarmed by its presence, and although it was causing no trouble, it was too near the latrines for comfort. The lil-deer eating the pale green grass paid it no mind, however, and it seemed to ignore them in return.

Manny had suggesting killing it for food since it did not seem to want to leave, but the colony captain did not like the idea. Even with thirty Furs in the camp, they had plenty of food for now and he was secretly afraid there would be more injuries trying to take it down.

He had just visited with Aldo, and although the bloodhound seemed in good spirits, the grizzly still felt responsible that someone under his charge had gotten hurt. Avon felt bad enough losing Rose and was concerned that Aldo could have been another casualty.

Why was the pig standing there? It had not moved more than a few steps from the very spot where it had first appeared all day, but it seemed intent on watching them all. Whenever someone was in view from the cavern opening, it was watching them. When someone was down in the animal pens taking care of their livestock, it was watching them.

No one was bold enough to try to approach the huge creature, especially after how nasty the others had become after killing the adolescent, but Avon was sure they would have to do something soon or its mere presence would be interrupting their daily routines. Perhaps it would leave at sunset, since none of the pigs were ever seen after dark, an attribute they did not share with their Terran counterparts.

The colony captain looked up when a pair of feet stopped behind him. His nose quivered and he knew by scent who it was before he turned around.

“Hello, Yuki,” he said, looking over at her. Even seated on the ground, his head was almost even with the Akita’s while she stood.

“Is that thing still out there watching us?” she asked rhetorically. “I don’t like it.”

“It’s not causing any problems,” Avon replied. “It’s not even bothering the lil-deer.”

“It probably doesn’t like their taste either,” Yuki remarked.

“Getting a breath of fresh air?” the grizzly asked after a quiet moment. “You and your sister are always in the kitchen and I’m surprised you even see the outside some days.”

She returned his teasing smile and shook her head in good nature. “That might seem true, but we do get out and take walks in the woods sometimes just to get out. Actually, I have some troubling news for you.”

“Oh? What’s the matter?”

“You know how some of our PBJs have been acting lately? Well, it’s happening to the freezers and some of the other electric kitchen appliances too.”

Avon blinked. That wasn’t good. “The freezers?” he repeated. “We’re not going to lose them, are we?”

“I don’t know,” the dog said with a frown, “but the system is only working intermittently at the moment. Kim and I have been trying not to open them any more than necessary to keep everything inside cold. What we have frozen is supposed to last us through the winter and beyond unless we can restock it with native meats and vegetables. But… if the freezer goes out, we’ll lose everything that we can’t eat up right away.”

Chapter 12

Parasites

The light orange and tan fur of the Swift Fox’s tail ruffled against the sides of the electrical panel opening of the colony’s large freezer unit and some of the hairs caught in the hinge of the door. There was a yip from inside the unit and a hand reached out to pull at the caught fur from the hinge a moment before disappearing again.

Michael Lynch had once been an electrical technician, so the fox had volunteered to look into the unit’s intermittent operation as soon as he had heard about it. The first thing he had checked was its storage battery and connections to the solar charging array located on an outside slope of the mountain, but there did not seem to be conductive issues with any of them.

To give herself something to do besides mope and mourn the loss of her sister, Dahlia assisted him, handing him tools and testers as needed from the tool kit. She sat back with her legs stretched out in front of her and peered into the interior of the open access, though she could see little more than his feet and tail.

There was a hard thump from inside and the male fox muttered beneath his breath before he began to shimmy backwards out of the opening. He handed her an electrical meter before his head appeared and she quietly placed it back inside its padded case.

Michael scooted backward and sat down abruptly once his noggin and the small headlamp strapped to it was clear of the opening. His aim unclear, he wound up sitting back onto Dahlia’s lap with a surprised yip out of both of them. The pair of foxes became a tangle of arms, legs and tails for a moment before they managed to sit apart, both looking embarrassed.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” the swift fox murmured. “I didn’t intend to crawl into your lap!”

Her cares momentarily forgotten, the vixen narrowed her orange eyes in a look of amusement and shook her head. “Are you sure about that?” she quipped. “Your butt had good aim and landed right on target!”

Michael laughed. “Well, you didn’t have to grope my tail pushing me off of you,” he countered.

“I didn’t grope your tail…”

“Hey, I felt your fingers linger between my back pockets.”

“I was just trying to get you out of my lap.”

“Yes, but you lingered…”

This banter went on for another minute before they heard someone clear his throat to get their attention. They both looked up into the entertained face of their colony captain.

“Hey boss,” Michael said with a snicker.

“Hello,” Dahlia said with muted amusement.

“Hi yourself, both of you,” the bear replied with a smirk. “Were you able to determine the problem or were you too busy fooling around to find out?”

Dahlia sat back against her tail, wrapping her hands around each of her ankles. “I promise I didn’t try to distract him… too much,” she said. Avon was glad to see some levity, considering she had just lost her sister, but distractions were probably what she needed.

Michael could feel his cheeks growing warm beneath his face fur, but he held up something for the grizzly to see. It was a block of clear plastic with a virtual road map of circuitry embedded within multiple layers. He held up a small lamp with an infrared array and instantly several dark spots peppered the circuit block.

“Here’s our problem,” the fox remarked.

“What happened to it?” Avon asked, squatting down for a closer look. He took both the block and the lamp and peered at the dark spots.

“Some of the circuit relays have burst, but I can’t say why without further testing. Unfortunately, we don’t have any spare circuit blocks for the freezers, unless they were omitted from the manifest.” Michael scratched an ear and sat back against Dahlia without looking at her. She snaked a slender, black-furred arm around his middle and rested her chin on his shoulder.

“You and Manny were the ones who assembled the refrigeration units,” Avon remembered. “I guess you would know if we had any spare parts. Do you have the necessary tools to repair it?”

The fox shook his head. “Not for a multilayered helix circuit,” he said. “The thing is, this kind of damage still allows the impulses to process, but only intermittently. It could keep working like that for days or give out as soon as I plug it back into the system, but either way it’s not going to last long.”

“Do we have any alternatives?” Avon asked, frowning deeply. “We have too much food to let it all go bad. We’re going to need it all through the winter.”

Michael looked up at him and shrugged. “We have two industrial-sized refrigerators and four freezers, but this is the only one that Kim said was on the blink. Let me check all the others to make sure the helix circuits are okay in those. If they are, we may have to rearrange a few items to put the more important frozen foods into the ones that work, but we’d have to move quickly so nothing thaws in the effort.”

“We may have to sacrifice some of the vegetables to keep the meat frozen,” Dahlia suggested. “We’re all omnivores, but carnivores primarily, so I would concentrate on making the meat our priority.”

Avon handed the circuit block back to Michael. “How long will the contents of this freezer be okay while you do further testing on this thing?”

“As long as no one opens the door, it can sit here for hours before it starts warming up. The walls are well insulated and with it inside the cavern, it’s not going to heat up sitting under the sun.”

“How long will it take you to run your tests on the circuit block?”

“Twenty minutes, tops.”

“Okay, see what you can figure out and then go ahead and plug it back in before you look at the other units. Even intermittent, it may do more good with than without it. See if you can figure out why it went bad, and then I have another job for you.”

Michael tilted his head, wiping his hands on the front of his vest. “Oh? What else is up?”

“Since we’re on the subject, maybe you can take a look at the helix circuits of my PBJ. It’s been acting up lately and I’ve heard others are having similar problems. If there’s something going on that’s affecting all our electronics, we need to know about it before everything breaks down completely. If we discover what’s causing it, perhaps we can do something to prevent it.”

“Sure, I’ll get on it right away after I’ve taken a look at the other freezers and fridges.”

“Thanks, Michael. Do you need me to assign you some help?”

“He has me,” Dahlia spoke up. “I may not be a certified electrician, but I did tinker around with electronics in a couple college courses I took. If nothing else, I can just hand him the tools he needs and read numbers on the display panels.”

Avon gave them a nod and then stood up. “Sounds like you’ve both got it covered,” he said. “Please let me know what you find out as soon as possible.”

“Yes sir,” Michael replied as Dahlia gave the bear a mock salute.

“Oh, and incidentally, try not to fool around too much,” he said with a smirk. “This is important.”

“Of course!” the male fox said with a deceptively innocent expression. The vixen raised an eyebrow and then smiled back at the grizzly without a word.

***

Cheryl kept an eye toward the edge of the clearing as she, Ivan and Arne approached the cattle pens. She was sure it was a different thunderpig staring back at them than had been there all day, but no one had seen the other leave if another had taken its place. She knew that everyone thought of the giant hogs as nothing more than stupid animals, but she had the vague sensation that the thunderpigs were now studying them.

The pig, or pigs if there really were more than the one, appeared interested in anything the colonists did out in the open, but if Avon came in to view, it always seemed specifically focused upon the grizzly. Perhaps it was because he was the largest of them all, but whatever the reason it was there, the animal appeared to be patient.

The Border collie was the one in charge of all their livestock, assigning duties to others as they were needed, and she had decided that the cattle needed fresh vegetation; she and the two foxes were going to herd them out away to the vast landing field and let them graze there for several hours. Although she had not been given any duties due to the events of the morning, Jasmine had volunteered to bring them food and drink later while they were out through the long afternoon. Ivan offered to go along to give himself something other than Rose to think about.

Cheryl straightened the cowgirl hat atop her head, and with one eye still upon the porcine sentry, reached out for the corral gate. Not watching what she was doing, her hand came in contact with the electric wire that stood out several inches from the modular fencing. She flinched when she realized that she had forgotten to shut off the power, but she was suddenly puzzled when there was no sharp bite from the current. She looked at the wire and touched it again without the expected electric jolt.

“Ivan,” she called out, “check the wire on your side.”

The red fox tentatively reached out to tap the strand on the opposite side of the corral, but it was inert with no active defense.

“Nothing,” he said with a frown. “Did someone turn it off?”

Arne walked to the switch box mounted just inside the barn door. He lifted the protective cover and peered inside. “It’s in the ON position,” he reported. “Stand back, I’ll cycle it again.” He thumbed the control to the OFF setting, then again to turn it on before reaching out for the wire surrounding the fence.

“Still nothing,” the African lion muttered after a light tap to the wire. He walked to the solar charging panel mounted to the outside of the dome, but everything looked intact, if not a little dusty. “The electronics must be faulty, but nothing looks out of place.”

Cheryl scratched the fur beneath her hat and frowned. “We’ll have to look at it when we get back,” she told her companions, looking into the corral at the animals milling around. “Let’s get our cattle out to the field and worry about it later.”

***

Ken sat back from the microscope and rubbed his eyes. The red wolf had been studying the salt that the cougars had brought back from their outing and as far as he could tell, it was nothing more than sodium chloride. He had tested it with the gas chromatograph, and in its raw form, it was more concentrated than normal table salt; with some refining it could be rendered safe for casual consumption. As for use in the preservation of meat, he did not see any reason why it could not be used for that purpose straight away.

He wanted to be sure, however, since the chromatograph seemed to be giving errant information every third or fourth time it processed data. Either the electronics in the unit were faulty or the salt crystals had a peculiar property that he had yet discovered. He did not want to suggest using the sodium chloride until he was certain the error was nothing more than equipment failure. Even if that was what it was, he would hate to lose the unit this early in the game.

The lupine physician got up from his stool and decided to go to the Great Dome for a cup of coffee and let his eyes refocus before getting back to his task.

***

Norman cast a fishing line out across the water of the lake and watched it settle beneath a simple red and white bobber. Avon sat beside him, relaxed and content to take part in his favorite activity. The leader of the colony had discovered that his people knew their jobs well enough that he had no reason to give them direction or hover behind them at all hours.

He and the black bear beside him planned to sit on the grassy bank and bring in a few fish to include in the day’s meals before going to help in the gardens later. The autumn vegetables were growing well in the native soil and they all had high hopes that the spring crops would later do as well.

The nights were getting a little cooler and some of the deciduous trees were already turning colors as fall settled in. The familiar brown, red and yellow hues were sneaking into the trees and Kristen was glad to see them as much as anyone. There were so many similarities between Bonestell and Earth that it was comforting. Terran-like worlds were not that common out among the thousands of planets discovered orbiting far stars, and not all of them were so familiar, so it was such a delight to find a terrestrial sphere that might one day be home to thousands of humans that would move here.

Of course, it had to be remembered that their little valley only represented a tiny spot on a world just a little larger than the Earth. Conditions might not be as pleasant or familiar in other areas and careful study had been done of the planet before the landing spot had been selected. Perhaps the environment here was selected for the very familiarity of it all. Could long range scans, orbital study and unmanned landing probes have discovered the garden spot of Bonestell?

Whatever the purpose made by a committee of scientists on another world far away, Avon was enjoying his time here. Although there were small personality conflicts here just as there would be back home, things were relatively peaceful now that they had all developed routines within the longer days and nights, and their familial knowledge expanded with each new discovery.

Despite the death of Rose, Avon’s only concern at the moment was the issue with colony electronics. Nothing had failed outright, but just about everything they used had helix circuits and most seemed to be suffering the same intermittent affliction of burst relays. Everyone had their own theory of what was happening, but Norman’s conjecture might be the more likely.

“I think I’ve got it narrowed down to two real possibilities,” the black bear said quietly as he settled back, his eyes casually upon the bobber attached to his fishing line. “Either there’s something in these mountains producing a strong electromagnetic field that’s affecting the circuits, or it might be solar flares from the local star.”

“You mean something like an EMP?” asked Avon.

“Yeah, an electromagnetic pulse can fry most electronics, but helix circuits are more shielded simply by the way they’re constructed. That might be why some relays have burst and others haven’t, causing only sporadic activity.”

“Do we have any way of detecting EMPs to find out?”

Norman nodded. “Our PBJs can do that. It’s a simple application we’ve been equipped with, though most of us never use half the capabilities the units are designed to do. I’ll check it with mine after we’re through here.”

“What about the solar flares you mentioned?”

“That may be a little more difficult to detect,” Normal remarked, watching the plastic sphere on his line bob up and down in the water. He could already feel little bumps on the line through the light rod in his hands, but he wanted to wait for the opportune time to set the hook. “Satellites over the Earth often kept tabs on the sun,” he continued, “but we don’t have that luxury here. The magnetic energy within the sun builds up to great amounts which are sometimes released in a fantastic explosion of radiation in a wave of high-energy subatomic particles. The Earth is mostly protected by its magnetosphere, but we don’t know what kind of a magnetosphere or ozone layer we have here surrounding Bonestell. If our local sun spits a flare out in our direction, can this planet protect us in the same way, or does more of the radiation and electromagnetic waves get through in higher doses?”

Just then, an explosion in the lake sent out flares of water as Norman reared back on the fishing rod to set the hook. There was an instant struggle as the fish on the end of his line flexed its aquatic muscles. The black bear had a little fight on his hands, but then he put his weight behind it and pulled his catch up out of the water. The strength in the effort launched the wet creature out onto the bank and both bears suddenly recoiled when they saw what it was.

It looked like a cross between a clump of slimy blue-green seaweed, a tentacled ctenophore whose bubble was stained by dirty water and a grotesque marbled eyeball in the middle of it that could not seem to stay still. This was something neither of them had ever seen in this landlocked lake before, or perhaps they just simply had not noticed. The panicked thing writhed and undulated, trying to get back to the water, but it was tangled up in the bear’s fishing line and seemed to be quickly suffocating out in the open air.

“Do we throw it back or keep it for the doctor?” Norman whispered to the grizzly at his side. Both were up on two feet, as if standing up would put them farther away from this critter. They had found many things with some similarity to what they knew on Earth, but this was as alien in appearance as anything they had seen.

“Better let Masanori have the thing or we’ll never heard the end of it for letting something go that he hadn’t studied first.” Avon crept closer to the thing, though keeping his distance in case it had a sudden burst of energy to spring at him. “He’s already out of sorts for missing out on some of the things Jon and Kristen failed to bring back to him. Digital photos don’t give him enough information, he says.”

“Okay, I’ll let you pick it up,” Norman said.

Avon glanced back at him and gave him a smirk. “You caught it, you should take it to him,” he said.

A brief look of horror crossed Norman’s face, but then he snorted and picked up a small plastic bucket he had intended to put any fish they caught into. He approached the thing he had pulled in and set the bucket on its side with the opening next to it. Using the butt end of his fishing rod, the black bear slid the surprisingly-light creature into the container. He half expected a struggle, but it appeared the thing was too weak out of the water and was dying.

Feeling pity for the thing, he took the bucket to the bank and lightly dipped the open end so that it filled up with lake water; he did not want it to revive and get away, so he made it quick. The fishing line was still wrapped around its body, so he carried both rod and bucket back toward the cavern, calling ahead for the red panda to come out to him.

Avon stared back out across the water of the lake and a shudder rippled through him. After seeing the whatsit creature, he was no longer in the mood to fish, so he gathered up his rod and their tackle. When he was on his way back toward the cavern, he spied Sissy and Erin relaxing on the wooden bridge, both of them dangling their bare feet in the cold river water that moved beneath them.

Both looked up as he approached the bridge. “What was Norman hollering about?” Erin asked in her pixie-like voice, her large ears quivering as she spoke.

“I thought he said something about a sea monster,” Sissy asked.

Avon chuckled at the analogy. “He caught something in the lake that almost defies description,” he told them. “It was an ugly thing that looked part jellyfish, part seaweed and one bloodshot eyeball.”

“Eww, that just gave me the shivers,” Sissy remarked.

“Is it dangerous?” Erin asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Avon told the diminutive fennec fox. “Norman’s giving it to Dr. Mochizuki to study.”

“Are there many in the lake?” Sissy asked, pulling her feet from the water that she just realized flowed from the lake.

“No idea. In the weeks we’ve been here, that’s first we’ve seen. Perhaps it lives deeper in the lake and Norman’s fishing hook just happened to snag it up from the bottom, or maybe it was flushed out of the spring that feeds the lake.” The grizzly shrugged. “We may never see another one, but it’s best to know what it is and whether or not it’s poisonous just in case more show up.”

Sissy shook off her feet and rubbed at the fur to push water from them. Avon remembered something and set his fishing equipment on the ground at his feet.

“Are you still transcribing all the notes from your PBJ into paper notebooks?” he asked her casually.

“No, I had several volunteers helping and we got them all done,” the orange cat answered. “I’m trying not to use my PBJ more than necessary now. I can type faster than I can hand print, but I’m making my daily notes in a paper notebook now.”

“I have a task I’d like you to do for me right away.”

“What’s up?” Sissy asked. Erin looked up in curiosity.

“Yours isn’t the only PBJ that has become unreliable lately,” he explained. “Electronics in the PBJs, the freezers, the security fence around the animals and other units are showing issues, so before we lose them altogether, I’d like you to gather up everybody else’s PBJs and then consolidate all data recorded since we’ve been here onto a data crystal.”

“Uh, sure – but why?”

“Once you have everything archived together, I want to transmit everything back to Earth in multiple message bursts. This way, we won’t lose all the information and photos we’ve recorded and it can be copied in redundancy in a library in Stockholm for safekeeping for everything we discover about Bonestell.”

Erin stood up and shook off her feet, but her attention was on the grizzly. “It’s possible the memory crystals in the PBJs are okay, with certain circuits within the units going bad, but I don’t want to take that chance,” Avon added. “Normally, we would have sent message bursts back to Earth with all our discoveries once we’d been here six local months anyway, but we may not have any working electronics in six months with the way things have been going.”

“I can help you collect all the PBJs,” the desert fox told the orange cat.

“Thanks!” Sissy looked up at the bear and nodded. “We’ll take care of it, though I’m sure Dr. Mochizuki’s going to have more than anyone else.”

“No doubt. Listen, I appreciate all the work you do,” Avon told her. “You too, Erin – especially after this morning.”

The fox lost her smile. “I have a feeling there will be more who need me to lend an oversized ear,” she said quietly. “Rose was well-liked and her death has made a lot of us feel our mortality. Our hybrid attributes will undoubtedly help us survive in the long run, but there are some things like a little spider bite that can get around them all too easily.”

***

“Yeah, Kristen roped me into weed-pulling detail,” Jon murmured as he dug his claws into the rich soil of the garden to extract an errant local weed, roots and all. He pulled up the twisted, double-stalked plant and tossed dirt and all into a plastic bucket beside him.

Kevin sat back on his haunches between rows and glanced back along the long aisle the cougar was working on. “Want me to take your place for you?” the young fox asked. “Avon wants to see you and I don’t have anything else to do at the moment.”

Jon looked aside at him. “You want to dig in the dirt?” he asked in amusement.

Kevin gave him a smile and held up a claw-tipped hand. “Desert foxes are diggers,” he replied. “I think I can handle it.”

“Well, then,” the cougar said, brushing off his hands together, “I’ll leave you to it, but don’t dig up any of Kristen’s vegetables by mistake or she’ll have your hide on Wendy’s tanning rack beside the thunderpig’s.”

The fox looked back out toward a different part of the valley floor and frowned. “Who knew that Wendy could prepare and tan a hide?” he remarked in awe of the golden retriever’s talents. “I don’t know how wise it is to work on it in full view of its cousin, though.”

Jon pursed his feline lips, twitching his whiskers. He had already forgotten the pig watching them all from the shade of the forest. It had done nothing but stand there all the long day and he had grown so used to its presence that he had completely forgotten about it when he had come out to the garden.

“Are you okay being out here alone?” he asked his young companion.

“I should be fine,” Kevin replied. “After all, we have an electric wire surrounding the gardens to keep things from eating what we’re growing.”

“An electric wire that only works part of the time,” Jon reminded him. “Even working, it wouldn’t stop a giant warthog on the run. It would only sting it for a second before getting trampled under hoof.”

“I’ll try not to make any sudden moves to alarm it,” Kevin answered. He seemed so unconcerned that Jon shrugged.

“Okay, have fun digging up weeds. Where am I supposed to meet Avon?”

“He was in the Great Dome with a glass of sun tea, complaining that we’d brought no lemons for it.”

“Aww, poor lil’ grizzly has no lemon for his tea,” Jon mock pouted. “If we don’t find a local equivalent, he won’t even have tea to drink after we use up our supply.” Jon got up onto all fours and hopped across several vegetable rows on his way out. “See you later, Kev,” he called back over his shoulder.

“See ya.”

The cougar padded quietly across the pale green grass, dodging a few lil-deer and enjoying the scents blowing across the valley on a light breeze. With autumn in swing, the scents of the forest had changed subtly and it was something he would have never noticed as a human. It may have been for dire reasons that he had become half-feline, but he had come to enjoy the new senses and abilities once he had fully accepted who and what he had become.

If he thought about it hard enough, this banishment from Earth could still be considered part of a prison sentence, but he had to admit that life was good and actual problems were few and far between. Even as second-in-command of the colony, he was rarely called upon to assert that authority and often forgot it was part of his duties. Avon took care of running the camp, making the real decisions that Jon did not have to think about. Weeding gardens, tending cattle, sheep and chickens and doing kitchen cleanup were daily routines and little by little everyone was even getting used to the longer hours of the day. Even though it was getting cooler thanks to the fall weather, the seasons were longer here and winter was still months away.

He made his way casually across the bridge and up the path to the cavern, saying hello or nodding to others along his way. Alicia was inside the Great Dome gathering up a few scattered dishes from the tables and he had to suppress a snicker when he noticed she was wearing nothing more than a rather large kitchen apron with the words “Dinner is ready when the smoke alarm sounds!” in print across the front.

She said something to the grizzly seated near the center of the room and both laughed before she moved toward the kitchen with her dish tub. Avon studied her bare tail as she walked away.

Jon approached him and sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the table, automatically sliding his tail through the slotted seat back. “You wanted to see me?” he asked.

Avon nodded and set his PBJ onto the table. “Do you think you can find the salt flats again?”

Jon raised an eyebrow. “We were there just yesterday,” he replied. “I don’t think Kris or I will have forgotten the way so soon.”

“Yes, of course. Listen, we’re having a rash of electronics failures all over camp and I’m concerned about the refrigeration units. If we lose those, we’re going to have a lot of food going bad - food that’s meant to get us through the winter.”

“Yeah, I heard Michael mention something about that, but what’s that got to do with the salt flats?”

Avon looked at him solemnly. “I want to start making a concerted push to begin hunting and storing meat, and we’ll need the salt to preserve what we kill. Ken has examined the samples you brought back and has confirmed it to be sodium chloride that we can use for this. I need you and three others to go back to the flats on the horses as quickly as you can and fill up all the saddlebags and other containers you can carry. The meat will have to be dried and preserved and we’ll also need to start canning all the vegetables that ripen in the gardens so we can store them up too.”

Jon nodded. “I’ll grab a few volunteers and we’ll get started right away. With luck, we can get there and back by nightfall with the horses.”

“Thanks, Jon. Try to avoid the thunderpigs if you can. From what you said about the one that chased you and Kristen, they’re still sore about us killing one of them. Now that we know there are numerous other animals out there we can hunt, we should try avoiding the pigs for a while.”

“We’ll do our best to keep our distance from any we see.”

“Great. If you see Manny on the way out, would you have him come see me, please?”

***

Michael and Raine followed Kristen into the barn and Cheryl looked up when they approached where she was bent over one of four western saddles resting on wooden stands. She had only recently returned from the cattle drive out at the wheat-grass field, having been relieved by Jasmine who did not want to go back to the camp only to sit around and think about her youngest sister’s absence.

“Have you seen Jon?” the lioness asked.

Cheryl pushed the brim of her cowgirl hat up out of her brown eyes and then gestured behind the trio. “He’s in that stall getting a few things. I can have all four horses ready to ride in about ten minutes; five if someone will help me.”

Jon walked out at the mention of his name, carrying an armload of canvas bags. “There you are,” he said to the small group. “It won’t take as long to ride out to the salt flats as it did to go on foot, but we’ll still need to keep any stops to a minimum if we’re to get back by nightfall.”

“Anything we can help with?” Raine asked.

“You can help me,” Cheryl answered, taking the cheetah by the elbow. “We’ll need to bridle each horse before bringing them out to saddle up.”

Jon looked at Michael as he draped his bags across a stall partition. “Grab some shovels and spades we’ll use to scoop up the salt. Kris and I can get the saddlebags.”

“Aye-aye, boss,” the fox replied with a nod.

By the time the cougars brought out the last of the saddlebags, the colony’s arctic fox was standing beside the saddle stands, arranging a set of compound bows and arrow quivers against the side of the stall.

“Avon said to make sure you were armed for your trip,” he said with a nod toward the felines. “Guns would be better, but he wants to conserve the ammo, so I brought the bows.”

“Thanks, Manny,” Jon said. “They’ll come in handy if the pigs are still out there waiting for us. We didn’t see them on the way out, but we got our exercise outrunning them when we came back.” He looked at Kristen and said, “I’ve got to run back up to the cave to get a radio to keep in contact.”

Jon dropped to all fours and then loped back toward the cave. Kristen turned to Manny and looked down at the bows. “I’m not very good with these,” she said.

“Better take one anyway, just in case,” the fox told her. “Even holding an arrow in your hand and jabbing a pig in the eye would be better than nothing.”

“If I can reach its eye by hand, it’ll be too close and too late for me to do anything. I just hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Manny turned and watched as Cheryl and Raine each led an Arabian horse out of other stalls toward them. “Avon wants to step up hunting to stock up a supply of meat for the winter, so I’m going to be holding hunting lessons starting tomorrow to those who need them. Join us when you get back and I’ll make an expert archer out of you!”

***

By the time Jon returned with the radio in the pocket of his shirt, all four horses were saddled up with everyone’s gear loaded. The arctic fox had gone, leaving Kristen, Cheryl, Michael and Raine standing in a little group chattering away.

When the cougar entered the barn, all four horses suddenly became skittish, each pulling on the reins that were still tied off on the hitching post.

“Whoa!” Michael said soothingly to one horse. He took its bridle in one hand and softly patted her neck with the other. The other horses were also trying to pull back as far from the male cougar as possible.

Jon stopped and frowned. “The horses have never liked me,” he muttered.

“Maybe it’s because you’re a larger predator than the rest of us,” Raine suggested. “They don’t seem to have any problems with me or Kristen.”

“The horses don’t mind the bears, though, although all of them are too large to ride them,” Cheryl said. “Jon’s the only one they do this with.”

“Maybe they don’t like your aftershave,” Michael said with a grin. Jon chuckled at the fox and shook his head. He had not had to shave since all his human hair had fallen out at the beginning of his transformation. Aftershave was a thing of the past for them all.

Still down on all fours, Jon slowly stood up on two feet in an attempt to look more human instead of a stalking lion, but despite his modified jeans and tee shirt it made no difference. The animals were still spooked by the big cat, and this was one of the reasons he had never helped care for the Arabians. Whatever it was, their issue was with him alone.

Jon looked at Kristen, who was soothing one of the other mares. The horse did not seem to have a problem with her being a large predator the same type as him, but she was a good head shorter and a number of pounds lighter than he was.

“It looks like you may need to take charge of the party and lead them back to the salt flats without me,” he remarked. “I don’t think any of the horses are going to let me ride them.”

The lioness nodded. “I remember the way,” she replied, “but we’ll still need to take the fourth horse with us to help bring back the salt.”

“Let me go in his place,” Cheryl suggested, looking back at Jon out of pity. “I can help them load up the salt.”

Jon nodded. “Be my guest. Just remember to try to be back before nightfall. None of us have done much traveling away from camp after dark, so we really don’t know what other dangers might be out there lurking where you can’t see them.”

“Like the salt-torts,” Kristen reminded.

“Or something larger we haven’t seen yet,” Jon added.

“Salt-tort?” Raine repeated. “What’s that?”

Kristen smiled with a look back at Jon. “I’ll tell you about them on the way.” He walked back to her mate and put her arms around his middle to give him a warm hug. “I’ll miss having you along,” she whispered, “but we’ll be back this evening.”

Jon returned the hug and then gave her a brief lick on the cheek. “Be safe, all of you,” he said. The horses were still struggling to get away from him, so he made a quick departure to allow the salt party to get mounted and be on their way.

***

Jenni had just finished sterilizing the last of the medical instruments that she and Ken had used that morning and was putting them away. She was still feeling solemn from the experience of losing the young vixen and had stayed away from social gatherings through the long day. Others had responsibilities that helped turn their minds away from her death, but Jenni was too emotional to let duties distract her too much, or at least that is what she thought.

There was a light tapping on the open door frame of the medical dome, but it took several repeats before the leopard heard it and looked back over her shoulder. Standing just inside was the female grey wolf that was holding one arm across her middle.

“Ellie,” the feline acknowledged. “What’s wrong?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” the wolf said quietly. “I’ve been feeling strange all morning and I’m hoping some Bonestellan bug hasn’t bitten me like the one that got poor Rose.”

Jenni pulled out the roller stool and gestured for the wolf to take a seat. “Symptoms?”

“I’ve been tired a lot lately, almost fatigued,” Ellie said, “and I’ve had stomach cramps today. I got nauseated when I smelled the kitchen and threw up outside this morning. I’ve had a constant headache for two days and I’ve been a little irritable. I’ve tried to wait it out, but after this morning, I decided it was time to see you or Ken.”

Jenni pulled out a penlight and shined it briefly in the wolf’s eyes. The pupils dilated quickly, but Ellie jerked as if she had been poked. Jenni grabbed a tongue depressor and looked down her throat.

“How’s your urination?” she asked.

“Frequent, as if I’ve been taking a diuretic, but all I’ve had to drink is water.”

“Could be a urinary tract infection,” Jenni remarked. She moved to a cabinet and pulled out a capped plastic cup. “I’ll need a sample, please.” She turned her back on the wolf and picked up a small scanner. She turned it on and waited for its self-calibration, hoping it was not going to give her trouble like her PBJ had been doing lately, but the unit seemed to be working just fine.

Ellie set the moderately filled cup of urine on the counter, and then reached for a dispenser of hand cleaner and a towelette. By the time she had cleaned up and disposed of the towel, the leopard at the counter had already added a dropper of urine into the machine.

Jenni thumbed a button and then turned back to the she-wolf. “The analyzer will take a few moments to process. While it’s doing that, I’ll give you something for the nausea and cramps. Due to your anthrocanis lupus physiology, this won’t make them go away, but the effects should be lessened anyway.”

Ellie panted lightly and she put her forehead down on the counter beside her roller stool.

“Here,” Jenni said lightly. The wolf looked up wearily and nodded, taking a couple of caplets and small cup of water from her. She downed them, but gagged on the last one, almost throwing them all back up again; she only just managed to keep them down.

The nurse took a cold compress from a drawer, popped the barrier between chemical compartments and the small bag frosted over almost right away. Due to the wolf’s thick double-coat of fur, she did not bother wrapping the compress in a towel and set it directly upon the back of her neck. Ellie let out a small whimper that was more from relief than from cramps or nausea.

The scanning analyzer gave out a small chirp and then went silent. Jenni walked over to it to check the readout and when she did, the tip of her tail twitched for just a moment. Keeping her face neutral, she turned back to her patient.

“You don’t have a urinary tract infection,” she said, “but there is something I want to double check.”

“Spider venom?”

“Uh, no,” Jenni assured her. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that.”

“Then what have you found?”

“Just a moment. Will you lie down on the bed, please?” Ellie nodded, thinking that lying down was an excellent idea. She was not sure she felt strong enough to stay upright without throwing up anyway.

The leopard went to a container the size of a small, overnight case and set it upon the counter. She pulled out something that looked like an oversized computer tablet and thumbed it on. She took it to the wolf that had her eyes closed, and then gently pulled open her robe top. She set the tablet low upon Ellie’s middle and then bent down to look close at its monitor screen.

She made a sound deep in her throat and the wolf opened her eyes to look at her. “What is it?” she asked. “Please tell me.”

The nurse turned off the tablet and set it aside. Turning back to Ellie, she took one of her hands in her own and gave her a solemn look. “I’ll give it to you straight because this is very important,” she said slowly. “You have a parasite growing within you — two actually.”

“Pa-parasites!” the wolf exclaimed, her eyes widening in fear. “H-how?”

“Relax, honey,” the leopard said calmly, letting amusement spread across her face. “That’s just my way of saying you’re pregnant.”

Ellie froze, her eyes wide, and then she swallowed deeply. “Please,” she whispered. “Say that again.”

Jenni squeezed her hand and gave her a radiant smile. “You are pregnant, Ellie – with twins! As for the how, I think you can probably blame your husband for that.”

“I’m gonna be a mother?”

“That’s right – you and Carl will be the first couple in Second Chance to become parents, and I dare say that your pups will be spoiled rotten by the rest of us!”

Tears welled up in the wolf’s amber eyes. “Carl and I were told that we’d never have children,” she confessed. “We wondered… hoped… that the transformation might change that, but we were never sure, especially due to our ages.”

Jenni nodded. “Although you are now part animal, most of which have a short gestation time, the human genetics for a Fur pregnancy is still around nine months – nine Earth months, that is. As long as there are no real complications, your children should be born in the springtime.”

Ellie wiped her eyes and chuckled. “That’s appropriate, I suppose,” she said. “Wolves usually have their pups in the spring, so I would say our timing is good.”

“You’ll also find that your chest size will increase,” said the nurse with a smile. “Female Furs don’t have large breasts by design, but when the birth of your children draws near, yours will start expanding and filling up with milk to feed them. It’ll make walking on all fours a bit of a bother, but your children will benefit.”

“I’m sure Carl will too,” the wolf said with a giggle.

Despite the joy of the moment, however, Ellie suddenly put a hand up to her mouth, feeling another wave of nausea trying to surface. Before she could become a proud mother, she still had months of pregnancy to endure.

***

It was an hour after sunset when Kristen led her tired party back into the horseshoe valley. They had seen neither hide nor shaggy hair of the thunderpigs, and even the one standing sentry all day had slipped away unnoticed. The journey there and back had been relatively uneventful in that they had run into no dangers; Michael had even brought back a salt-tort for Dr. Mochizuki to study. The thing was scrambling like mad to get out of its container now that the sun had gone down, but that was something the red panda would have to deal with on his own.

They had returned with a great amount of salt they had scooped up from the dried lake bed, but they simply deposited the bags in a vacant stall in the barn where it could all be retrieved later. Just about all of them were ready to grab some food and then sleep for a few hours, but Cheryl made them all help her unsaddle, clean and feed the horses first.

Jon and Avon met them when they came into the Great Dome for supper so they could get a report of their evening. Others gathered around to listen in. There really was not much to tell, but the four riders took turns giving details of where they went and what they saw. It was similar to what Jon and Kristen had told when they had gotten back, but since they had gone straight to the salt flats and straight back, there was not much for them to add.

“There is one thing,” Raine said after lapping up a good deal of water from his wide-mouth cup. “While we were riding, I saw an immense bird flying high in the air over the prairie. I wanted to take a picture of it, but it never descended close enough to get any real details. Even electronic binoculars didn’t show much of it. From what I could see, however, it almost looked like a flying wing with no head and no tail feathers.”

“Flying wing!” Avon exclaimed.

“It was huge – bigger than a thunderpig – and I watched it glide in a straight line for a long, long while before it finally banked back the other way. I tell you, it was eerie watching it go so long without flapping its wings.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a bird,” Gerard conjectured.

“What do you mean by that?” Alicia asked. “What else flies?”

The brown bear looked around at all the eyes now staring at him. “Maybe it was a plane…” he said. “Maybe even belonging to indigenous inhabitants of this planet we’ve not yet discovered.”

“Okay, now your imagination is running away with you,” Kristen said with a smile. “It was a really large bird – but just bird. I saw it too.”

“What about Carl’s copter?” Jon asked. “Could it have been him way up high?”

“At that altitude, probably not,” Raine answered, “and Carl’s copter doesn’t have wings.”

With the mention of the wolf’s flying machine, Avon looked back out through the door toward the cavern entrance. The valley out beyond the electric lamps was in darkness and he suddenly realized that Carl was supposed to have returned before sundown.

With a growl beneath his breath, Avon pushed himself up from the table and stalked off without bothering to tell anyone what was on his mind.

“Did I say something wrong?” Raine asked. He turned toward the bear at the table behind him and shook his head. “Maybe you scared him with talk of others on this world!”

“Hey!” Gerard complained, “Just because we haven’t found any sapient life in our tiny corner of this world doesn’t mean it’s not out there. They may not live out in the open like we do on Earth and it could be why we’ve not found any cities or buildings!”

“I think someone needs to erase the science fiction books from Gerard’s PBJ,” Michael suggested with a laugh.

“Speaking of others,” the bear remarked at a sudden thought, “what if it’s the survivors of the Magellan? Has anyone thought of that?”

“I’ve seen the old Magellan manifest,” Alicia said with a shake of her head. “They didn’t have any planes – not even an old autogyro like Carl’s.”

“Maybe they built one!”

“Gerard, you’re reaching,” Kristen said with a laugh. “It was just a large bird – we all saw it flap its wings after a while! What plane or copter would do that?”

Feeling there was nothing left to glean from riders and the current line of conjecture, Jon excused himself and went to find their captain. When he found him, the grizzly was standing outside the cavern on the lip that overlooked the small lake with the radio small in his large hand paw.

“Carl – answer me!” he said gruffly into the mouthpiece. “You were supposed to be back an hour or two ago!” There was only silence from the receiver.

“What’s up, boss?” Jon asked quietly. The bear turned to him and heaved a sigh of irritation.

“Carl hasn’t reported in several hours, but on top of that, he’d agreed to return before it got dark. He’s disobeyed orders – he’s probably camped out somewhere and I can’t raise him on the radio!”

“Do you think he might be injured?” Jon asked.

“Maybe,” Avon grumbled, “but more likely he probably let time get away from himself and flew too far away to make it back before dark. He should have kept a closer eye on his watch!” He tried again on the radio, but after several minutes his throat rumbled with a growl of frustration.

Looking first at Jon, he turned his gaze up to the overcast sky looking for any sign of the autogyro. “When he gets back, I’m grounding him from further flights until he can learn to follow orders! Will you back me up on this decision?”

The cougar nodded. “If he has gone off against orders, yes – you have my backing.”

“Thank you, Jon.” The bear’s expression softened and so did his voice. “For his sake, I hope that’s all it is and he’s somewhere safe. I think it would crush Ellie if we lost him before he even knew he was going to be a father.”

Chapter 13

An Eye for an Eye

The dawn broke with a whimper, the day grey, overcast and threatening to rain. The temperature had dropped and everyone in Second Chance was appreciative of their natural fur coats. Those who had abandoned the practice of wearing anything on their top halves were now fully clothed again in furman garments for a thin extra layer. The interior of the cavern itself would maintain a relative temperature of fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit year-round, so even if the mercury dropped outside, it would feel warmer in the cave. Unfortunately, the constant inward breeze throughout the passageways often pulled the colder air in around the domes closest to the large mouth of the cave and some were contemplating relocating their personal quarters further inside.

For the moment there was plenty of food in the pantries, and although some of the freezers continued intermittent operation days after issues had begun, there was no real reason to send out any hunting parties that day. The only ones who ventured out into the building cold wind were those who tended the animals, making sure all were safe and warm inside the barn. Kristen, Kim and Yuki went out to the gardens to pick anything that could be harvested, but most had already been collected over the past few days due to Kevin’s prior weather forecast. Despite his earlier misses, the young fennec fox’s prediction of an incoming cold front had been right on the mark and preparations had been made in the event he was right.

Avon had not assigned any requirements, so most everyone was left to their own whims to pass the long day. Some gathered together in the Great Dome to sit and visit over cups of warm coffee and snacks, and the trays of sandwiches between them prompted a discussion on the topic of bread. A great amount of grain and flour had been brought along, but as with all their foodstuffs it would eventually run out and a local replacement would have to be discovered, if possible. If not, they had plenty of seed to try growing their own, but the plan was to try to adapt to local foods.

Kristen had examined the tall, double-stalk grasses out in the prairie of the landing field early on and surmised that the chaff and seeds she had seen in the soil beneath them suggested that instead of grass, it might actually be a form of wheat, oats or some other grain that could be harvested in the late spring or early summer. Her botanical equipment was not terribly advanced, so once they had made it through the coming winter and she could actually see the stalks growing in the spring, she could make a better determination.

Sitting quietly off to the side, Wendy used her time to create a few more fishing lures that she had designed to resemble the look and movement of some of the bugs the fish seem to prefer. She had an open tackle box that contained her supplies and a few specimen containers with the bugs she was mimicking. She worked methodically at her skill, but she also kept an ear tuned to the conversations around her. Ever since they had determined the local fish were not only edible but nutritious, she was pleased she could contribute to the colony in this manner.

One of the conversations she overheard was between the brown bear cousins Aaron and Gerard. They were sitting apart from the main gathering as she was and were talking in low voices they probably thought no one else could hear. With the enhanced hearing the hybrid Furs all possessed, it was likely that everyone in the room could have heard them despite their covert attempts at a private discussion, but the main group was talking over them and did not seem to notice.

“You can’t claim Alicia as your own,” Gerard grumbled.

“Who says?” Aaron retorted. “She and I want to be married and start our own family!”

“There aren’t enough bears, and in spite of Dara’s willingness to mate with the whole lot of us, Alicia needs to be part of our collective group to keep the gene pool diverse!”

“It’s not our fault that the AHCP didn’t send more female Ursis!” Aaron hissed back hotly. “They decided at the last moment to make Second Chance a mixed group with barely enough couple-material for any of the other species. There was already an all-Ursis group being prepared for another world. They could have either saved the seven of us back for that group, sending only cats, dogs and foxes to this one, or they could have sent along some of the other Ursis females already gathering for that other group to boost our numbers!”

Gerard made fists of both his massive hand-paws and leaned over the table toward his cousin. “I agree with you, but that doesn’t give you the right to keep one of our females all to yourself! There aren’t enough of us to form family units, so monogamous relationships aren’t going to work! You’ve got to share her!”

“What’s the matter?” Aaron growled. “Are you tired of Dara already? You fought with me over her back at the Institute and now that you’ve had her, you want Alicia too?”

“Not just me, but all the bears,” Gerard answered. “We need her for diversity; I just told you that!”

“Alicia has chosen me,” Aaron said haughtily. “I’m her mate and I’ll defend her from anyone else, including you, cousin.”

“That will be up to our colony captain, and in case you’ve forgotten, he’s also a bear,” Gerard reminded him. “Do you really think that decision is going to go in your favor?”

It was taking all of Aaron’s resolve to keep from jumping over the table and pounding some sense into his cousin’s head. “If Alicia chooses me and me alone,” he growled, “there’s nothing you or Avon can do about it. If you force her, you’ll be guilty of rape – and I’m sure you remember how well that went for Travis!”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Are you threatening Alicia? If you are, I will defend her tooth and claw, and she’s not helpless herself!”

Wendy began packing away her supplies. If there was going to be a brawl, she did not want to be in the room. Perhaps it might be time to retreat to her dome and read for a while; the conversation made her sigh inwardly.

There was a similar situation with the Canis group as well. There were only two available male canines for three females, which meant that one of them was going to be left out of a relationship. She liked the red wolf, Ken, but had never really been attracted to him. The same could be said for Aldo, their keen-nosed bloodhound, and although Ken was outgoing and friendly, Aldo was quiet and tended to keep to himself. She supposed she would have to form something of a friendship with one or the other, but she would have to compete with Cheryl and Yuki for them.

The bear cousins’ argument was starting to attract the attention of others in the dome, so she decided it was time to make her exit. When she got up to her feet, however, she realized she was still at the beck and call of gravity and she had a sudden need to visit the latrines.

She returned her project supplies to her dome and then headed toward the entrance of the cavern. Just outside in the open air, Jon, Ivan, Erin and Dimitri were standing around the fire pit, feeding the flames a few bits of dry wood while they chatted idly on unimportant things.

Wendy walked up to fire and warmed her hands a moment before they realized she had joined them. Like Aldo, the golden retriever was not known for taking an active part in social discussions and she tended to keep to herself despite her earlier pleas to Avon in private.

“Hi Wendy,” Erin said with a friendly smile. “How are you today?”

The canine looked out across the valley and nodded toward the far side. “Is that warthog still out there?” she asked instead of answering the question.

Dimitri moved to her side, put a hand on her shoulder and then pointed out into the shadows. “Look where the wagons are parked beneath the trees. You can see her eyes shining behind them.”

“Whenever the sun’s up, they’re always watching us now,” Ivan remarked. “It’s spooky.”

Wendy wrapped her arms around her middle as if cold, but it was more than the weather that shivered through her thick canine fur. She looked across the fire to Erin and the diminutive vixen tilted her head at her expression.

“Would you accompany me to the latrine?” she asked in a quiet voice. She disliked the request, and she especially hated to ask when there were males present. “I don’t really want to run out there alone while that thing is near.”

The desert fox nodded and gestured toward the path down to the valley floor. “Sure, I wouldn’t mind a visit myself,” she said.

“Would you like someone else to go along too?” Jon asked.

“Why, do you think the pig will attack?” Wendy asked, her eyes widening.

Jon shook his head. “They’ve made no move to go after anyone,” he assured her. “I just offered as a courtesy.”

“Ah, okay. No, Erin and I should be fine.”

The guys around the fire watched the females walk down the rocky path to the bridge and kept an eye on them as they walked on all fours around the perimeter of the woods to the latrines. The thunderpig also watched them, but stayed at her sentry position just as she and others had done lately.

Wendy and Erin each took a booth and the desert fox soon engaged her canine companion in idle conversation through the walls while they took care of their business. When they finished and came out together, however, something was different.

The golden retriever grasped her companion’s arm with fear upon her face. “It’s gone!” she whispered. Both she and Erin began looking around suspiciously. The massive hog might have circled around behind them and neither of them was certain they would be able to outrun her if she came out after them.

Despite enhanced senses due to their transformations, neither of them could see, smell or hear the large animal nearby. How could something of that size move so stealthily?

Taking Wendy’s hand in her own, Erin began walking upright on two feet back toward the cavern. She led her out across the valley clearing instead of along the woods and once they could keep a good eye behind them, both dropped to all fours and picked up speed. Nothing followed them out of the trees, but when the sky suddenly rumbled, they raced across the bridge and back up to the cavern.

Jon, Ivan and Dimitri were still chatting when the two females arrived amidst a scatter of stones. The mountain lion looked over at them with an amused expression.

“Afraid of a little thunder?” he asked.

“It… wasn’t… that…” Wendy said between panting gasps.

“The pig… is gone,” Erin explained after catching her breath. All three males looked out across the valley.

“About time… So what’s the problem?” Dimitri asked.

“We didn’t know if it might have tried to sneak up behind us in the woods,” answered the desert vixen, her natural pixie voice strained with tension. “Neither of us saw it leave. It was there when we went into the latrines, but it was gone when we got out.”

Jon peered into the ambiguous shadows of the grey day, trying to sense any kind of movement that might belong to the colossal hog, but the only things he saw were birds and a few of the ever-present lil-deer. Of the thunderpig, there was no sign.

There was more thunder over the mountains and rain began to fall, the first they had seen in the valley since their arrival on this world. It was not a hard downpour, but a gentle soaker matching the mood of the grey clouds overhead that sent the deer bounding for the cover of the forest. At least it would be good for the gardens.

“I’m glad it’s gone,” the cougar muttered, “but I’m sure Avon will want to know about it.” He excused himself to seek out the leader of their camp. He was not in the Great Dome, where there seemed to be some sort of altercation between the bear cousins that everyone else was trying to break up. He did not see a need to step in with so many others already involved, so he padded away on four feet to the grizzly bear’s personal quarters.

He was not there either, so Jon employed his feline instincts and began sniffing the air to see if he could detect where the large Ursis might be. The scent trail seemed to be fairly stronger than he anticipated. It was laced with the smell of anger, one of the stronger emotions that issued a scent from its originator, and he was able to follow it to another dome. Due to such scents, he realized whose home it was before he even recognized where he was.

“I don’t care how experienced he is,” Avon’s voice growled from the interior of the geodesic hut, “but he hasn’t called in since yesterday afternoon and you already know how long our days and nights are!”

“He hasn’t contacted me either!” Ellie’s voice argued back. “I’m worried something has happened to him, Avon; he wouldn’t go so long without checking in with anyone if he was just investigating something!”

Jon stepped up to the open door and peered in at the grey female wolf that refused to back down from the larger grizzly. She had her arms crossed defiantly and was looking up into his face, her ears and tail up with feet planted wide apart.

“Maybe you’re right,” Avon growled, “but this only reinforces what I warned about in the first place! I didn’t want to let him fly off alone and I’ve made no secret of the fact that I thought it was too dangerous.”

“We need to go look for him!”

“Where, Ellie? Where would you have us look? If he’s crashed somewhere and unable to call in, we have no idea which direction he might be! He wouldn’t give me a flight plan, only saying that he would be going wherever on the compass the winds took him, but he promised to be back before nightfall.”

“If he didn’t come back when he promised,” Ellie retorted, “you can bet your favorite fishing rod that something’s happened to him! It might have even been one of the vengeful pigs!”

“I’ve not seen any of the thunderpigs with wings! Did they fly up to harass him?”

“Pigs may not fly,” Jon interrupted, “but they can do a great disappearing act.”

Ellie jumped at his unexpected voice, but Avon turned and glared at him for a comment that seemed to have no place in this argument. “What?” he asked gruffly.

“The pig watching us from across the valley has disappeared,” Jon reported. “No one saw it leave, but it’s gone. I thought you might want to know.”

Instead of looking relieved at the news, Avon appeared alarmed. “Put together two or three recon pairs and make sure they’re all armed. Send them out to the surrounding areas on all sides of the valley to make sure they aren’t just waiting for us to let down our guard by staying just out of sight.”

“You want to send them out into the rain?” Ellie asked as another rumble of thunder permeated into the cavern. “The pig probably just left in search of a good tree to stand under.”

The irritated grizzly looked at her and let out a loud snort, but directed his words to the mountain lion in the doorway. “That may be and I hope it’s the case, but I want to be sure they aren’t using the rain as a distraction. Everyone will get wet, but your fur will dry off well enough when you get back.”

“Right away,” Jon acknowledged his orders. The bear did not look as if he intended to give out any further instruction, so the cougar slipped away to find Manny to open up the armory. The argument inside the dome behind him resumed before he had even gone several steps.

Jon included himself in one of the recon groups, but after an hour of searching in the rain in every direction, none of the soaked Furs reported back with any sign of the pigs. There were deep tracks in the wet soil where the pigs had been watching from, but the detritus covering the forest floor hid any signs of where they might have gone. Apparently the animals were satisfied with whatever reason they had for watching the colony, perhaps confirming that the alien Furs had not killed and eaten more pigs. When the weather started looking grey, Wendy had even moved her tanning rack inside the cavern, pulling the thunderpig hide she had been curing out of sight, likely another reason for the hogs to depart.

Once everyone had returned to camp to dry off in front of the fire, Jon set three sentries on two-hour watch rotations to keep an eye out for a return of the pigs, but by morning the only activity they had seen during the wet night was the antics of several squarie dabbits, the same strange little mixed up creatures Aaron and Gerard had seen on their outing that could not decide whether they wanted to be rabbits, squirrels or prairie dogs. They seemed to be just as at home in the trees, the rocks of the mountain or in underground burrows and they seemed to be especially lively in the cold, rainy weather.

***

Chieko was standing just under the lip of the cave mouth, quietly contemplating a fine mist that rose from the floor of the valley. It had stopped raining an hour earlier and despite the cool season, a warm breeze eased in from the south. There was water standing in the small valley and the little red panda wondered how much flooding might have filled up the area if more rain had fallen. Fortunately for the massive geodesic barn, its deck was two feet higher than the valley floor and everything inside had remained dry.

Despite the warm breeze, a sudden chill ran up and down her spine when four of the massive warthogs emerged from the woods. They all peered up at her for a long moment, standing hoof deep in pools of rainwater. There was an odd intent in the body language she tried to read and the red panda suddenly felt the urge to report this to someone.

She had no more than turned her back to go when she heard a heavy crash below. Chieko looked over her shoulder and saw two of the thunderpigs had broken through the modular fencing that surrounded the cattle pen, the thin electric wire having done nothing to prevent it. The Texas Longhorn cows crowded the back side of the corral while the bull protectively stood its ground in front of them, bellowing its rage at the intruders.

The pigs did not attack the cattle, however, but dashed against the pens to gain further entrance into the large domed barn. The remaining two pigs moved quickly across the swollen river, heading directly toward the path that led up to the cave.

“Avon!” Chieko shrieked as loudly as she could. “Avon!”

Manny, Ivan and Arne had been nearby drawing diagrams in the cavern dust of a flood plain drainage plan they had come up with and all three rushed forward at her shout. The charging pigs reached the rocky pathway up from the valley and were moving fast. This was no casual investigation of the cavern – they were rushing headlong in a bearing for attack!

The African lion kicked off his furman sandals and jumped forward on all fours with a roar that reverberated across the dry cavern walls. There was no time to run back to the armory and he knew time was critical to keep the pigs from getting into camp. Since the advancing hogs were rushing up the path one right after the other, Arne targeted the first beast with claws and fangs bared. At best by himself, he could only hope to slow them enough so that others could get out the weapons to defend the colony.

He leapt with powerful legs, intending to vault over the large male pig’s lethal tusks to get to the neck, but the hog dipped his head down and then brought it up hard against the lion’s hip as he jumped.

Arne’s luck served him well in that although he was struck solidly against his hip joint, none of the tusks found its mark. He was thrown up into the air, but the claws of an outstretched hand paw caught in the hog’s long stringy hair, which altered his trajectory. He landed feet first on the animal’s side with extended claws that embedded deep into porcine muscle. Moving on instinct alone, the African lion began doing as much harm to the pig as he could, biting, digging in and slashing frantically to either stop it or slow it down.

The thunderpig beneath him bellowed in rage and pain while the second beast bugled its frustration that it could not get past the first to join the fray. Despite the blood coating Arne’s teeth and claws, he was simply not doing enough damage to deter the massive animal. The hog’s spine was exceedingly limber and it was rearing its head toward him farther back than he had thought possible. The deadly tusks gouged at him and pain shot through the lion’s injured limbs.

Although his fight with the pig had only lasted a moment, Arne succeeded in slowing the beast from its flight up toward the caverns while also blocking its companion. Other Furs were advancing quickly from the interior of the cavern and the lead thunderpig bugled a loud warning at them. Before they got too close, however, the first animal shook the injured lion loose onto the rocky ground, almost knocking him off into the lake below, and then retreated back down the narrow path with the other pig back to the valley floor.

The bleating of sheep, the neighing of horses and the squawking of chickens continued to issue from the barn, accompanied by added sounds of destruction as it appeared the other thunderpigs were trashing things inside. The one with superficial damage from Arne’s teeth and claws bugled out another call and then the two inside the barn came rushing out.

Before anyone from inside the cavern could brandish firearms, the four giant hogs had run off into the surrounding woods, having split up and each gone in all different directions.

Avon left Arne in the care of Ken and Jenni and then led an angry armed mob down to the soggy valley floor. Cheryl, Jon and Norman splashed through the demolished fencing into the barn while Kristen and Jasmine rushed to the gardens. Others followed the hogs as far as the edge of the wood, but none dared to enter the shadows.

Jon stood in center of the barn and looked around with his hands upon his hips. Just about every stall and pen was smashed open and most of the livestock was gathered close to the outer walls. Norman went through the entire structure, surveying the damage while Cheryl checked on the animals, but before they had seen much, all four of the spooked colony horses balked at Jon’s presence and ran out through the unobstructed barn door. They rushed off toward the forest with as much speed as they could muster and bridle-less, no one was able to catch them before they disappeared from sight.

After several tense moments, the Border collie approached Jon, who was picking through the remnants of a wrecked supply closet. He looked up at the young lamb draped across her shoulders that was voicing its opinion of recent events.

“How many did we lose?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“That’s the strange part, Jon. They didn’t kill any of them that I could see,” Cheryl replied just as Norman approached them. “Some of the cattle and a few of our own Terran pigs have run off through a break in the back wall, the horses just took off for parts unknown and the guineas and chickens have scattered all over the place, but as far as I can tell, we’ve still got all the sheep huddled up in what’s left of their pen. I’ve seen no evidence that any of them were killed.”

“It looks like they weren’t interesting in killing our livestock,” Norman confirmed, “but they sure did a number on the barn and the corrals. There’s major damage to every stall and pen in here where we had the animals in out of the rain, and even the spare panels for the modular fencing have been torn up.”

“I wonder why they didn’t harm the animals,” Jon mused, dropping a bent garden trowel. “They would have been easy meals.” No one had an answer, but the lamb on Cheryl’s shoulders was visibly shaking.

Norman was down on all fours, examining the tracks of the thunderpigs’ three-toed hooves. “Maybe they don’t see them as a threat,” he suggested, “only us and the things we’ve built.”

“That actually makes sense,” Cheryl agreed. She set the lamb down on the ground at her feet, but it refused to leave the protection of her legs. “We killed one of them and they have been watching us.”

“That sounds premeditated,” Jon remarked, standing up on two feet beside her.

“Doesn’t that mean they’re sapient?”

The cougar looked aside at her and shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but they are intelligent and shouldn’t be underestimated. I’ve thought that ever since my first face-to-snout encounter with one.”

Avon came up the ramp into the barn with Manny and Jasmine behind him. “What’s the score?” he asked glumly, looking over the wreckage of the interior.

“That depends,” Norman grumbled. “How’s Arne?”

“He’s bruised, winded and is getting a handful of new stitches, but Ken says he’ll live.”

“Then the score is Second Chance 1 – Thunderpigs 0,” the black bear replied. “One of them dead and eaten, one of us only injured.”

“What about our animals?” the captain asked, looking down at the frightened lamb.

“A few have escaped and scattered,” Jon answered, “but it doesn’t look like the thunderpigs harmed any of them. We can only guess they’re taking vengeance against us furmen directly.”

“The gardens are a total loss,” Kristen reported from the doorway. She and Jasmine held a few unripe vegetables in their hands and both had muddy fur. “There’s standing water all across the valley and the ground is spongy beneath our feet, but the pigs stormed all across the garden areas in the soft soil, trampling the plants and roots on every row as if it was planned.”

Jasmine held up several carrots, beets and broccoli while Kristen handled lettuce and spinach leaves. None were ripe enough to eat, but would have been in another handful of long days. “We had a good harvest a few days ago,” the red and black vixen muttered, “but everything else that would have matured by next week is gone.”

“What do we do now?” Norman asked.

Avon looked around at the destruction of the barn and began to notice something he had missed before. The barn, the stalls and the fencing were all modular and most of what had been broken apart had come apart at the weaker joints. This meant that they should be able to piece them back together again, much like a five-hundred piece puzzle that had been inadvertently knocked off a table and bits of the overall picture scattered.

“The damage looks bad,” he told them, “but we can put most of it back together. It’s best we get started now. I’ll assign half of the group to reassemble the barn and pens and the other half will try to gather up the livestock that have escaped. With luck, most of them won’t have gone too far, knowing this is where their food is, and with the potential for more rain in Kevin’s forecast, they’re going to want their dry beds.”

“I hope you’re right,” Cheryl said, squatting down to run a gentle hand across the frightened lamb at her feet. “I’ll get a party together to look for our wayward critters. It’s a good thing we still have the full flock of sheep, though. They mostly trust Arne as their shepherd, but with him out of commission, we’d have had a difficult time gathering them up.”

***

It was late in the long evening before the barn and pens resembled normalcy again. Most of the animals had been retrieved from their hiding places in the woods that surrounded the small valley, but of the horses there was no sign. No one had found any evidence that they had been injured or killed by the thunderpigs, but they apparently had not remained in the vicinity. They had not been given up, however, and Avon had instructed everyone to make any attempt possible to recapture them if they were found.

Three cows were unaccounted for, as well as one Terran pig, but no one had bothered to count the numerous Golden Comet chickens since they had arrived so it was unknown how many of them that might have fallen prey to other hunters. The Furs may not have encountered many predators on the ground or in the air, but that did not mean they weren’t out there to snag a stray hen when available. The arrowheads had taken some before, so any that were still loose would be vulnerable to them.

There were some stalls where the modular connections between panels were too damaged to fit together properly, but rope, straps, tape and the ingenuity of those working on them helped make them usable again. Although scattered about, they had lost little of the livestock feed in storage, but a number of hand tools were too damaged to be of use without major repair. It was a mystery why such items had been targeted for destruction.

All the while that the Furs were rebuilding the damaged sections of the barn, others stayed alert for the return of the giant hogs. The compound bows and arrows were distributed in case of another attack, but fortunately for them all, there were no more sightings.

An hour before sundown, Avon called an end to the activities and was coaxing everyone back up into the cave.

“Kim and Yuki have prepared a meal for everyone,” he called out as he watched over the groups milling around and surveying the results of their work. “Go eat and then rest up from the day’s efforts. You’ve all done a good job, so treat yourselves to a good night’s sleep.”

“Thanks, boss,” Alicia said to the grizzly, then she leaned in close to whisper in his ear. “I don’t know how you got everyone to chip in with the work – including Dr. Mochizuki and his wife.”

Avon frowned. “Chieko volunteered on her own readily enough,” he whispered back, “but I had to talk Masanori into lifting a paw to help.”

“Does he believe he’s too educated to help with manual labor?” the black-furred sow retorted. “I know he does a lot of the scientific research that needs to be done, but sometimes he acts like he’s above everyone else.”

“He’s used to being an administrator in charge who delegates work to others,” Avon agreed quietly, “but don’t be too harsh on them – especially his wife. Neither of them have had the survival training or the colony classes everyone else went through, but Chieko is more than willing to help out around camp. However, I know that Masanori keeps her on a short leash and prevents her from taking part in menial labor, so that’s why you may not see her much outside of a lab setting. I know she wants to help, but she won’t cross her husband and I’m not going to force her to do so.”

He shuffled his feet and put his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “Even though neither of them actually saw the pigs today, both were shook up afterward seeing the results of what was done and more than alarmed at the potential danger they could have been in if even one of the hogs got up into the cave. I convinced Masanori that we needed everyone’s help, that science could take a break for a day.”

There was a sudden shriek that got their attention and everyone looked aghast at the red-furred vixen down on all fours and running just as fast as she could toward the bridge over the river. Before anyone could wonder what had frightened Dahlia into flight, Sissy let out a cry of her own and did her best to copy the fox’s mad dash for the cavern.

“It’s the pigs!” she screamed as she splashed through rainwater puddles.

Without bothering to confirm whether or not the thunderpigs had returned, many of the Furs dropped down and began rushing for the safety of the cave. From the top of the path, Jon looked out and was alarmed to see six of the giant hogs splashing across the wet valley floor toward the Furs still near the barn.

“Run!” Avon bellowed. Although there had been armed sentries watching over the work that evening, everyone had become complacent after he had announced dinner and rest. Manny emerged from the interior of the barn with his bow as the rest of the Furs broke and ran. He had an arrow nocked and ready for just the right shot, but then the pigs surprised him.

Just as he was ready to let an arrow fly, the lead pig altered course and led his stampeding hoard in a wide U-turn that took them right back into the woods. The arctic fox watched their retreating backsides in astonishment and lowered his bow. He was now alone on the valley floor, but those who were rushing along the path up to the cavern were oblivious to the disappearance of their attackers.

Avon was the last to gain the top, having made sure there were no stragglers behind him, but when he joined the crowd, he saw everyone staring back toward the woods and gawking.

“What’s going on?” he asked, approaching Jon.

“The pigs turned around and ran back into the woods,” the cougar answered with a furrowed brow.

“But… why?” Erin asked, stepping between them. The bear and the mountain lion both dwarfed the diminutive counselor, but neither looked down at her, their attention on the lone arctic fox standing on the ramp to the barn.

“Surely it wasn’t because Manny pointed an arrow at them,” Jon muttered. “Unless he could put one into the eyes of each pig at the same time, he wouldn’t be much of a threat to that many of them. They could have easily just trampled him.”

Avon looked up over the trees and pursed his lips. “The sun’s going down,” he observed. “We’ve never seen them out past dark, possibly to poor nocturnal eyesight, so maybe they started an attack and then realized what time it was.”

Jon looked at him with a smirk. “Was the lead pig wearing a watch?”

“I think it had an hourglass mounted to its tusk,” the bear replied without missing a beat.

Erin was amused at their exchange, but then looked back when Manny waved. When he had their attention, he made an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders as if to convey that he was just as puzzled as they were. Avon beckoned him toward the cave and the arctic fox nodded.

“I don’t think it was the darkness that turned them away,” Dimitri interjected from behind them. “I think they’re playing with us.”

“For what purpose?” Avon asked, looking down at him.

“They’re trying to keep us on edge, a psychological ploy at intimidation.”

Erin looked thoughtful. “He may have a point,” she said.

“If they keep it up,” Jon muttered, “no one is going to want to leave the cave at all.”

“Maybe that’s what they want,” Dimitri suggested. “They may think they’ll starve us, but they don’t know how much food we have stored up in our cavern.”

“I’m just glad they didn’t rush up the path again,” Erin said, wrapping her arms around herself with a shudder. “There were more of them this time and probably could have done it.”

“Although our horses could come up side by side, the larger hogs would still have to get up the trail mostly single file,” Jon remarked. “They would have no problem pushing through any barricade of tables and chairs we might set up, however.”

“In addition to our nightly watch,” Avon instructed, “I want two archers positioned at the top of the path in case the thunderpigs try again.”

Thunder rumbled from somewhere over the mountain, making most that were still lingering just outside the cave mouth retreat back inside before more rain might fall.

***

The rest of the night passed without incident, and although it had been relatively quiet, few Furs got much rest during the long hours of darkness. When the sun finally began to rise, it was primarily hidden behind overcast skies that made a grey dawn. Cheryl was one of the first out of the cave at early light, routine setting in for her to check in on the livestock and gather any eggs the Golden Comets might have laid. The hens weren’t laying as much since it had turned cooler, but there were a few of their golden red and white hens that seemed determined to continue producing eggs.

She whistled the melody of a tune popular at the time they had left the Earth, her cowgirl hat perched atop her head between large floppy ears. She wore nothing more than a set of furman overalls and had abandoned her sandals, walking on her natural footpads across the soggy valley floor.

The Border collie looked out across the small valley when she got to the reassembled corral, but the only things she saw were a handful of the ever-present lil-deer and a number of birds chasing down insects that were flitting around in their typical morning dance, not yet encumbered by the seasonal chill. Several squarie dabbits were digging through the damp grass and leaves on the ground beneath the trees of the forests, gathering seeds and nuts, presumably for winter storage. Things seemed to be at peace, so the canine let herself in through the corral gate and headed for the ramp up into the barn.

When she came out a half hour later bearing a wicker basket full of fresh brown eggs, she could hear typical colony sounds from the cave, but there was an otherwise unnatural surrounding silence in the valley around her.

The deer, the birds and the squarie dabbits were all gone. Positioned just inside the shadows of the forest were six thunderpigs, all standing side by side. Several were looking up at the cave, but the rest were staring directly at her, causing a shiver to race up her spine. Her first inclination was to give a shrill whistle to warn those up in the cave, but that was a skill she had lost when her Canis transformation gave her a bifurcated upper lip.

“Look out!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Pigs!”

Her shouted warning seemed to spur the massive warthogs into motion. All six began running and their speed, assisted by hypermobile knee joints, increased as they all thundered toward the path up to the cavern. The Furs were ready this time, and no less than eight Furs lined up across the top of the path with arrows nocked in the cables of compound bows.

Manny let the first shaft fly when the lead pig, a massive boar, crossed the river and bounded up the path. The arrow struck in a glancing blow across the pig’s snout, creasing the tough hide just below his right eye with an angry red line. The pig jerked with the sudden sting, but his gait never faltered.

Other pigs crossed the river, one of them stopping to do major damage to the wooden bridge that had originally been constructed from the remnants of packing crates, but only a couple actually followed the boar up the path. The others halted at the base of the rocky avenue, awaiting the first to clear the way for the rest of them.

Furs released their arrows and several struck the lead pig about his neck and shoulders causing it to flinch, though none seeming to do any serious damage. Due to the angle of the path and the closeness of the mountain wall, none were able to get their arrows past that front pig to the other two behind him.

Blood trickled from numerous wounds but the giant hog almost made it up to the cavern entrance before he stumbled on loose rocks on the path. He stopped only a dozen feet from the archers and the other two pigs came to a halt behind him, bumping into each another in the process.

Jon drew back another arrow and took aim at the great beast’s eye, holding his breath before the release, but then the hog turned back to those behind him to bellow out a rasping call. Although jumbled together and too close to move quickly now, the thunderpigs retreated.

Before it moved away, however, the giant boar looked back at the archers and then past them into the cavern for a moment. It bugled out a different call and then turned back again to leave.

“Kill it!” Ivan shouted, loading another arrow into his bow. He let the shaft fly and it struck the pig in its left rear flank, causing the beast to jerk from its impact and bellow out its rage; Raine followed it with another targeted in the same vicinity. Jon kept his weapon aimed at the animal in case it decided to come back enraged, but the pigs hastened their retreat.

When the marauders all thundered back across the river, Avon could see the numerous wounds they had caused the lead pig, but he doubted any of them had critically injured it due to the tough and thick shaggy hide and hard, bony extrusions along the male’s large head. Unlike the adolescent that the hunters had taken down before, this one was tougher and more resilient, taking a number of their arrows with them.

Avon had the strong feeling that the final look the pig had given was specifically directed at him. Did he know the grizzly was the leader of the Furs, or was it just because he was the largest one among them?

The massive hogs grunted and squealed amongst themselves, but instead of causing repeat damage to the barn and corral, they crossed the valley and then lost themselves among the shadows beneath the trees.

“I’m getting tired of this harassment!” Michael grumbled, kneeling down and taking inventory of how many arrows he had left in the quiver at his feet. “We aren’t doing enough damage with bows and arrows.”

“We need to break out the guns and put a stop to this,” Hank suggested. “We should show them that we aren’t defenseless and can cause them serious harm if they continue to get into our fur! Kill a few more of them and they’ll stop coming by, and then we’ll have extra meat to store up for the winter!”

“A stick or two of dynamite would stop them for sure,” added Ivan.

Avon kept quiet, letting the others vent their anger and frustration, especially since he agreed with many of the remarks, but for several long moments he studied the path from the valley to the cave. It was the only way into camp and he was quite sure that if the pigs ever got in, there would be more things broken than modular domes and fencing.

When Jon walked over to the bear, Avon gestured toward the rocky avenue. “We need a gate or barrier of some kind on that path,” he muttered, “something they can’t break through. We can’t let them get this close again and I can’t risk sending anyone out into the woods to find out where they’re waiting.”

“I’ll get on the barrier right away,” the cougar replied. “I’m so full of adrenaline right now that I doubt I could get anything else accomplished today. Building up a line of defense will keep me busy and I have an idea how to do it.”

“Are you planning to build it by yourself?”

“Of course not,” Jon replied with a snort. “I’m in good shape, but I’m not crazy. I want all your bears to help me for what I have in mind. I’ll need their strength and stamina.”

***

Several hours later, Jon crawled into his bed to rest up for a while. His muscles were tired from an incredible workout, having toiled with the Ursis Furs hauling a number of good-sized granite rocks from the side of the mountain to build up four partial walls that alternated halfway across the path from each side like a wide set of zipper teeth.

At roughly five feet high and three feet thick, anyone walking to and from the cave would have to go around each wall. There was plenty of room in between that any of the larger bears could walk around them with a small cart or wheelbarrow, though the wagons would never fit again. These walls would not prevent the thunderpigs from getting up the pathway one at a time either, but they would not be able to charge up the slope with any kind of speed, giving the Furs time to block the upper section with additional barriers before any could get all the way to the top.

Jon had also wanted to rig up a cluster of large rocks and boulders that could be broken free in a small avalanche to block the path completely if the need ever arose, but hauling bowling ball sized rocks for the wall partitions had tasked even his stamina for one day.

Although it was not aesthetically pleasing to look at, Avon approved of the zigzag pathway they had built, agreeing that it would slow down the hogs or any other predator that might come through the valley. The colony had only been there a few months and may not have encountered other dangers that could show up later, so it was likely a good idea to have the extra protection anyway.

***

The large boar made another appearance an hour after the barrier walls were completed, but this time he was alone without the rest of his porcine backup. There were numerous patches of dried blood around the wounds caused by furman arrows, most of which were still embedded in his hide, and he limped a little on his back left leg where a broken graphite shaft protruded, but he appeared to be otherwise unhindered from his battle injuries as he calmly proceeded from the woods to the remnants of the damaged bridge at the river.

The great animal gazed at the wooden construct as several Furs appeared in the mouth of the cave, each armed this time with a high-powered rifle. They watched quietly when the pig stepped up onto the bridge and then crossed over the river in an unhurried pace, but then when he peered up at the new barricades, he seemed to study them as if working out their purpose.

The boar grunted after a moment and then heaved a heavy snort, but he simply stood there with his massive head slightly tilted as if listening. Another pig appeared from the shadows of the forest and followed its leader’s trail across the valley and the bridge, calmly taking up a position beside him.

Ellie thumbed the safety off of her rifle and took aim, weighing her chances of killing one of them before they could navigate the new path up to the cavern. She was under no orders to wait for a command to fire, but the grey wolf awaited the best opportunity.

Having the high ground over the hogs, she felt confident she could take one down before it could get up to them. It might take several shots to get through that tough flesh and bone, but she knew it was far from invulnerable. The thunderpig steaks in the freezer were proof of that. The younger pig had been killed with several arrows, but the hogs below had been coming at them directly, presenting their toughest angle with their hard bony heads. The eyes were their only real susceptible weak point, but their eyeballs were so small that hitting one while the animal was moving would be difficult.

Without warning, the large boar rushed for the narrow path between the stone barriers and began the zigzag up the hill, the pig behind it following suit after just a brief hesitation. The walls slowed its progress and when Ellie fired the first round, both pigs halted at the loud report. It was a sound unlike any the great animals had ever heard before.

The only thing that first bullet struck, however, was one of the rock walls. Although the purpose of the barrier was to slow down the attackers, it also inadvertently created something for them to hide behind. The grey wolf was above them, however, and had a better line of sight, but the chance shot had done nothing more than startle the big animals.

The lead pig warbled something and then continued up the path. Ellie took careful aim as other Furs did likewise. She squeezed off another shot and this time the slug just missed the pig’s skull and struck it high in its back ridge. The animal jerked in sudden inexperienced pain and stumbled against the second rock wall, making the one behind it cry out in surprise.

Encouraged, Manny, Raine and Michael fired their rifles, careful to make every shot count, and each found their mark; even if they could not kill them, they would cause them enough pain to drive them away.

The lead pig stumbled when one round penetrated its bony skull and it dropped to its knees, gasping in great heaves. The secondary animal was struck twice, but it was smaller and better protected behind the rock walls. It tried to turn around to retreat, but it got hung up in the rocks facing the mountain wall. Another high-velocity bullet pierced its heart and the great pig dropped in its tracks.

The thunderpigs waiting below began to bellow in rage at the death of their advance animals, but they all held their ground. Michael took aim at them and sent a bullet their way, striking one of them in the shoulder to great effect. The pigs scattered for a moment and it looked as if they were going to retreat, but then they regrouped and faced the cave again, bugling their rage at the Furs. The wounded pig tried licking at its injury, but could not reach it, so another took up the task for it.

Ken watched from inside the camp; he and Jenni were ready for any medical emergencies that might come up from this latest siege on the colony. He had seen the amount of damage the huge animals had done to the barn and was afraid of that kind of anger directed at the Furs themselves.

Although injured, Arne refused to lie quietly in his bed and limped slowly out of his dome to witness how the pigs reacted to gunfire. He saw other Furs creeping toward the cave opening as well, but when he looked back at a sudden crash behind him, he could feel the blood drain from his face.

The African lion had a moment of stupefaction, as if his brain did not want to acknowledge that the thunderpigs had somehow gotten past their defenses – but suddenly there were five of them charging out from within the cavern darkness!

There was a spark of cognizance as Arne realized there had to be another entrance into the vast cavern system the Furs did not know about.

Furs shouted, screamed and ran for cover as the warthogs charged freely into the midst of the domed homes. They purposely smashed into the structures and knocked over the stand lights when hooves dragged across the electrical lines to them from the solar collectors outside.

Those with rifles at the top of the path were momentarily confused at the noises coming in from behind them, and during their hesitation, two more pigs took advantage of their distraction to rush up into the pathway maze from below.

Avon shouted orders to those with rifles to shoot the pigs inside the cavern, hoping the bodies of the two dead pigs on the path might block the others below as natural barricades. He now surmised that the multiple frontal assaults had been a decoy action, allowing other pigs time to approach the colony from within the cavern system while everyone else was distracted by those trying to reach them from the valley floor.

The grizzly realized the thunderpigs had to be intelligent enough to recall old memories of the cavern to know that the passages went through the heart of the mountain and of a back door. Perhaps they recognized the constant breeze blowing the Furs’ scents out into the valley were due to winds that must come from elsewhere. Mounting a sneak attack like that had to be premeditated!

Thinking along the same lines, Aaron found Jon in the confusion and said, “They must have come through the pig-cave Gerard and I found on the other side of the mountain! It must go all the way through and the pigs knew it!”

***

When the shooting outside on the path began, Wendy had hidden herself away inside her personal dome. She disliked the noise and the constant harassment by the giant pigs had unnerved her, especially since she had eaten some of the delicious pork meat herself. She had had nightmares about the pigs overrunning the camp and she was afraid that it had been more of a premonition than a dream.

Hidden away, she was unaware that the warthogs had actually penetrated the colony defenses, but then her whole world was almost literally turned upside down when one of them slammed head-on into the side of her geodesic home and the entire structure tilted up crazily for an instant. The fasteners holding the insulated panels in place gave away and the wall burst inward. The weathered head of a huge warthog broke through the dome and Wendy screamed.

In the midst of the debris now littering the interior of the room, the great animal locked eyes with the frightened golden retriever for just a heartbeat and then reared up to bring its front hooves down hard, instantly silencing her shriek.

Parts of the shattered dome’s frame clung to the thunderpig’s head as it rushed back out into the camp, trailing fresh blood across the cavern floor as it charged after another panicked Fur.

***

Sissy gasped and panted, trying to pour on as much speed as she could down on all fours. One of the massive warthogs had just destroyed a nearby modular dome and although she did not know whose screams had come from inside, the orange cat knew someone was either dead or badly injured and now that beast was coming after her!

There were rifle shots echoing across the cavern, people screamed in terror while others shouted out instructions in the chaos. However, it was the sound of thundering hooves that filled her ears and she knew without looking that Death itself was closing the distance behind her. She could also hear its huffing breath and she could not help but turn to look behind her as she ran.

A massive misshapen and scarred head was gaining on her and she could smell the unmistakable scent of blood preceding it. A frightened cry escaped her lips with the knowledge she was to be the next to die, but suddenly a large shape occluded her vision with a loud and familiar roar. She was not looking were she was going and tripped over an electrical cable. In the action, she stumbled sideways and it was a good thing she did. The charging thunderpig rushed past her and would have stampeded right across her orange-furred body.

She looked up and saw Arne clinging to the hog’s back, his claws firmly embedded through the stringy hair into the pig’s flesh and his jaws clamped hard upon its neck trying to rip out as much meat as possible. As she watched, he used one large hand to scratch at the animal’s small eyes and the thundering animal was thrashing around trying to throw off the African lion.

Sissy did not know how Arne had the strength to fight with the warthog, as injured as he was from his first encounter with one of them, but the large feline had managed to leap up onto it and was attacking with such ferocity that she honestly did not know which of the enraged animals would come out victorious.

Other thunderpigs were taking out their vengeance in similar engagements across the camp and counterattacks were in full throes of violence, but Sissy’s attention was riveted solely upon Arne and the pig that had tried to kill her. There was no doubt that the injured African lion had saved her from certain death and now she feared for his life.

***

Across the cavern, Gerard raked his claws across the face of a large boar as it tried to ram him. For all his ursine bulk, the brown bear moved quickly, dodging the tusks and putting muscle behind the action, digging several furrows deep into the great animal’s flesh. One claw tip struck an eyeball and the giant hog bellowed out in pain and rage as the bear ripped it from its socket.

The pig thrashed around, and in the process struck Gerard’s head with the side of its snout. The bear saw stars as bone collided with bone and he was momentarily stunned. He fell to the ground but got no respite; in its thrashing around in personal agony, the thunderpig trampled over him and lost its balance when their feet got tangled together.

When a full ton of weight of the hog came down upon him, Gerard felt things break inside just before he blacked out from the sudden intense pain. He was mercifully unconscious when the pig got back up to its feet and tossed the bear’s limp body up against a cavern wall as if he had been a large rag doll.

***

Hidden away in an alcove higher on the rock wall, a twin pair of large wing-like ears stuck up from behind a natural weathered outcropping. Frightened eyes watched in horror as their home on this world was systematically attacked by vengeful natives that only resembled larger versions of animals they had known back on Earth.

Kevin stood up and shouted through cupped hands down at the spotted cheetah below them. “Raine! Run!”

The feline turned at the shout and saw one of the porcine intruders barreling down at him. He was boxed in between two of the kitchen freezer units, but if he was quick, he might be able to escape the pig. He hesitated just a moment in indecision on which direction to go and lost the chance he had had. Cornered, Raine hissed and bared his fangs, and the muscles in his back legs bunched up in preparation to leap at the hog’s face, but a maddened roar from his left rooted him to his spot.

Jon leapt onto the thunderpig and dug his claws deep into its neck, but he was not alone. Kristen raced in and the lioness attacked from the other side, slashing at its ears in an attempt to get up onto its head. The pig stumbled under their combined weight and went down upon its front knees. It slid to a stop right in front of Raine and looked up at him in fury, but he did not hesitate this time, slashing his claws across both its eyes. It jerked its head back from him, but he pressed his advantage and cut bloody furrows across its broad snout.

Realizing its disadvantage from injuries on three sides, the huge pig struggled back up to its feet to retreat. It brushed Kristen off against the side of a freezer unit but the lioness only dropped to the ground on all four pads and then leaped right back after it.

The mountain lion on its right side refused to let go, so the pig made a daring move and rushed toward the center of the cavern where another of its kind harassed one of the small Furs. The pig bugled out a staccato set of vocalizations and the other pig suddenly abandoned its prey to rush headlong to its aid.

Jon saw the oncoming porcine locomotive from one eye and sprang away from his attack just in time to miss getting a set of tusks through his ribcage. Kristen lost her grip momentarily and rolled away, which allowed both pigs to thunder away across the cavern.

Raine rushed to the lioness’ side and helped her up as Jon took off after the pigs. Kristen looked thankfully at him and then shook her head as if to dislodge a few marbles.

“This is nuts!” the cheetah chirped as he and Kristen caught their breath. Both looked out at the pandemonium and each silently wondered how this would end.

***

Several of the massive pigs were running here and there through the cavern, harassing the Furs and tearing up the camp, but there were two nearly the size of small elephants that seemed to have something specific in mind. They attacked no one, allowing the others to wreak their havoc as they trotted through the pandemonium. There were some of the small Furs bearing sticks that spat fire and caused pain, but so far none had come after the pair that had done nothing more than pace through the cavern looking around.

Their demeanor changed, though, when they found one Fur fighting to drive away another of the marauding pigs that came up from the valley floor and was crawling over the bodies of the dead hogs blocking the path.

The two previously docile-appearing pigs suddenly surged forward together, racing madly at the grizzly from behind. One hit him hard, goring the bear across his hip, but although suddenly injured and in pain, Avon swiftly turned with a roar and buried his fangs with powerful jaws into the neck of the huge pig that had attacked him. He fought with the razor-sharp claws of all four extremities that he had previously filed into hard points and used them to rip chunks of flesh and hair from his assailant’s side and legs.

Just as large as the first one, the second hog rushed in and knocked him hard away. The heavy bulk of the grizzly dropped to the floor beside the cavern wall, but the bear had no time to catch his breath to get back up. The pig surged forward again, slammed Avon in the chest with its bony head and pinned him hard to the stone wall behind him; something inside cracked audibly, forcing the air from the bear’s lungs.

The bear looked up through excruciating pain and the hog locked eyes with him in grim determination; then it pulled back just enough to pound him again hard against the rock. Avon felt his sternum and several upper ribs snap and his eyes bulged just before he collapsed across the hog’s snout, blood quickly frothing from his mouth and nose from punctured lungs.

The first thunderpig he had hurt bellowed long and loud, and suddenly all the hogs stopped what they were doing and withdrew quickly back into the unfathomable recesses of the deep cavern darkness. Some had been injured in the siege and the two on the path had fallen to gunfire, but all the remaining hogs thundered off into the darkness leaving the colonists in sudden confusion at the retreat. The other pigs still living on the pathway turned and fled back into the forest.

The attack was over just as quickly as it had begun.

***

Jon did not see Avon right away, but he found Kristen thankfully unharmed and asked her to help him check on everyone. Miraculously enough, the Great Dome was untouched by the attack, so they had each person they talked to gather there for now.

Manny, Ivan and Raine still had their rifles and Jon asked them to stand guard in case the thunderpigs returned. He could determine no reason why they had suddenly broken off their attack, but even those in the valley had gone. Only the bodies of the two pigs on the path remained and they had already been checked to make sure they were well and truly dead.

When the mountain lion looked through the debris of several personal domes that had been damaged, he found the crushed remains of Wendy Miller, the timid golden retriever who had created all of the artificial fishing lures they had been using in the lake. She had died beneath the hooves of one of the giant hogs, and her last terror-filled moment was frozen upon her features.

Jon had never been squeamish, but the sight of the canine’s trodden body turned his stomach and he had to force himself to turn away. Someone would have to take care of her at some point, but he was not sure if he would be the one up for it.

There was one duty he had to perform, however, and responsibility made him move. He knelt beside her and weakly picked up her identification dog tags. He removed them from the body and gently wiped the blood from them on a handkerchief on the floor; he then retreated as quickly as he could.

The mountain lion found Ken and Aaron tending to Gerard, and the brown bear drifted in and out of consciousness. There was blood trickling from his nose, mouth and ears and more had soaked his fur in innumerable places. His breathing was raspy and shallow, and it seemed that any movement caused him a great amount of pain; his cousin was trying to make him as comfortable as possible.

Jon drew the red wolf aside a short distance and looked at him in concern. “How is he?” he whispered.

The doctor heaved a heavy sigh and shook his head. “Without having him under the x-ray, I can only surmise that he’s all broken up inside,” he answered quietly. “I thought I could hear the fragments of bones all through his body moving against one another when we tried to stabilize him, and I’m afraid it almost sounds like a bag of gravel. I think at least one of his lungs has collapsed but there hasn’t been enough time for me to determine how many other internal injuries he may have.”

He pulled the cougar further away from the cousins and then said, “If we can find Jenni quickly, we can get him prepped for surgery, but I’m not really hopeful there’s much that I can do for him. I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, Jon, but from my initial examination, I don’t think there’s really much of anything I can do for him other than make him comfortable while he’s still with us. However, if you give the word, I’ll try to do anything I can for him.”

“Do it,” Jon said with a nod. “I’ve heard of others with injuries just as bad as what you’ve described that have pulled through, so maybe he’s got a chance to live.”

“Yes, but remember that those others have had the resources of a full hospital to help reconstruct such damage,” the wolf reminded him. “I may not even have enough jesadine to deaden the pain to get him through the surgery. He may not even survive that.”

The cougar sighed, but shook his head. “Do what you can, Ken. Please.”

The red wolf frowned, but nodded. “Yes sir,” he said at last. “We’ll have to operate right where he’s resting since it may be too dangerous to move him.”

“I’ll see if I can find Jenni and send her to you,” Jon said. “Give Aaron something to do – have him put up some kind of curtain or barrier to block you from view of the others.”

“I’ll start gathering what I’ll need,” the doctor remarked. “This is going to use up a lot of our anthroursine blood reserves too.”

“Can you use the numbing swabs we brought back to deaden his pain?”

“Possibly. I think it’s just a topical, but perhaps it can keep him from shock trauma long enough.”

When the mountain lion found the nurse, Jenni was replacing several stitches that Arne had ripped out fighting with the pigs. Sissy sat beside him and held one of his massive hands, simultaneously thanking him for saving her from certain death and apologizing for the fresh damage to his legs, arms and one side he had sustained in doing so.

Jon squatted down beside them and whispered in one of Jenni’s ears, quickly explaining how she was needed. Moisture filled her eyes and she wiped the back of an arm across them, but she shook her head.

“I’ll be there as soon as I’ve finished here,” she said in a strained voice.

“If you need to go,” Arne told her wearily, “I’m sure my injuries can wait for now. The jesadine shot you gave me has dulled the pain, so I’m good for a while.”

“I’ll stay with him and get him anything he needs,” Sissy said in a quiet voice. She looked over at Jon with deeply sad eyes and then looked again at Jenni. “I was about to die horribly, but he saved my life. I won’t leave him.”

The leopard nodded and then leaned in close to Arne’s side. Using her teeth, she bit the thread she was using and then deftly tied up the stitch with nimble claw tips. “I will be back to tend to you as soon as I can,” she promised the African lion. Arne nodded and some of his bangs fell into his eyes. Sissy reached out and tenderly brushed them from his forehead.

Jenni followed Jon across the cavern, and as they walked, the cougar asked her, “Have you seen Avon? We’re probably both bypassing one another checking on everyone.”

“No, I’ve not seen him,” she answered.

Aaron had already started putting up a makeshift surgery curtain using a blanket strung up between the tripods of two of the broken cavern lamps and Jenni quickly disappeared behind it to check on Gerard.

Jon continued his rounds, but he found no one else apart from the rest. He frowned at the amount of damage the pigs had done to their homes and equipment, quietly reluctant to know the final tally when it had all been accessed.

By the time he returned to the Great Dome, he could see the majority of the colony sitting inside, some talking together in a great animation of arms and head gestures while others were frightened and still shaking from the events.

He stood just inside the door and counted noses, but there was something wrong with the numbers. Wendy was dead, Gerard was in the care of Ken, Jenni and Aaron, Sissy was looking after Arne, and then Manny, Ivan and Raine were standing armed guard out in the cavern. Not counting himself or Carl, who was still out on his excursion, there should have been eighteen Furs sitting inside the Great Dome. He counted again, but still came up with only seventeen.

Mentally ticking off all their names as he looked over the group, it finally dawned on Jon that their captain was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he had gone to look in on the others he had already visited.

The cougar moved to the closest table and stopped beside Doctor Mochizuki and his wife. Both flinched when he knelt down between them, Chieko putting a sudden hand over her heart.

“I’m sorry to startle you,” Jon said apologetically, “but have you seen Avon?”

“Not since before the attack,” the larger red panda answered.

“Okay, thanks. How about yourselves? Are you two okay?”

The doctor nodded. “We are shaken, but unharmed.”

Jon moved next to Alicia and Dara, who sat across the table from Hank and Norman, the bears all clustered together. He repeated his query and Hank looked up sharply.

“You’re not going to find him,” the black bear growled.

“What do you mean?” Jon asked, puzzled by Hank’s reaction. “Where did he go?”

“The pigs took him!”

“Wait, they took him?”

“I saw it all, but I couldn’t get to him in time,” Hank admitted with a dark look. “I saw two of the cursed hogs moving through the cavern as if they were on a mission while the others caused all the trouble. I was trying to keep one of the smaller pigs away from the vixens, but when those two saw Avon, it looked to me like they’d singled him out. They went after him together and crushed him up hard against a wall; once they had him incapacitated, the big one signaled the others with a call and then they all left. You know how big Avon is — he was still draped across one’s nose when they carried him away. It was only after the one I was fighting ran off before I could get over to where he’d been.”

“There was a lot of blood – too much blood!” Alicia said in a raspy voice. She wiped her eyes hard and then slammed a large fist down on the table, making everyone around them jump.

Jon rushed back to the doorway and then peered hard back in to the darkness of the cavern. There was a lot of damaged equipment and debris scattered across the camp, but he could see nothing back in the gloom. Grinding his teeth together, he forced himself back into the Great Dome and returned to the bears.

“You said Avon was singled out,” he said with a tight throat. “How do you know that?”

“Didn’t you hear what Hank said?” Norman retorted in a loud voice. The former NFL linebacker planted his palms flat on the table and stood up to face the cougar. “They were looking for something, and when they saw Avon, they killed him and called a sudden retreat as they carried him off!”

“All the times they were harassing us outside,” Hank interjected, “they must have been buying time for those inside the cavern to get through the mountain at us. It was all a plan to kill our leader!”

Everyone else inside the Great Dome was now listening to the conversation, and from the sudden sounds that a few of them cried out, it was apparent some had been unaware of their captain’s demise.

“How could it have been a plan?” Michael demanded. “They’re stupid animals!”

“Does what they did sound stupid to you?” Alicia retorted hotly. “They’re intelligent! They’ve been bent upon revenge ever since we killed and ate one of them!”

“They didn’t take off with anyone else,” Cheryl reminded them. “How could they know that Avon was our leader?”

“They’ve been watching us!” Dahlia exclaimed. “They figured it out when everyone kept going to him for things – either that or they figured that since he was the largest among us, he must have been in charge!”

“How do you know they haven’t dragged off anyone else?” Dara spat toward Cheryl. “We’re still missing a few!”

Jon cleared his throat loudly and all eyes went to him. “Avon’s the only one we’re missing,” he told them. “I’ve visually accounted for everyone but him and Carl.”

“So where’s the rest?” Dara challenged.

“Ivan, Raine and Manny are outside standing guard with the rifles. Sissy is tending to Arne, who reopened his wounds. Ken and Jenni are doing emergency surgery on Gerard, and his cousin is with them. Carl is still away in his copter.”

“What happened to Gerard?” Michael asked.

“I think the pigs may have run over him,” Jon answered. “He’s pretty broken up inside, but Ken and Jenni are trying now to save him.”

Alicia jumped up from her seat with a small cry and rushed out of the dome, presumably to find Gerard.

“What about Wendy?” Erin asked timidly, looking around. “I haven’t seen her either.”

Jon heaved a heavy sigh, remembering the carnage in the golden retriever’s home. “Wendy is dead,” he said quietly. “I found her in her dome where one of the pigs smashed through it.”

“Where… is she now?” Erin asked sorrowfully.

“I couldn’t do anything for her,” Jon replied. “She’s still in her dome.”

“M-maybe she’s still alive!” Jasmine suggested. She started to get up from her seat, but Jon held out a hand and shook his head.

“Don’t,” he told her, pulling the golden retriever’s dog tags from a pocket. “It wasn’t a clean kill. The pigs evidently enjoy crushing their smaller enemies, and that’s in the literal sense.” Jasmine sat back down abruptly, the look of horror upon her face mirroring those of others as he set the tags on the table.

It was a long moment before someone spoke again.

“Do you think…?” Kevin asked before swallowing hard. “Do you think Avon could still be alive?”

“Why would you think he would be?” Hank asked gruffly.

“Maybe… perhaps he was just taken prisoner,” the diminutive desert fox muttered. “If they’re as intelligent as you say, isn’t it possible that—”

Hank snorted loudly. “I saw where he was attacked. There was too much blood!”

“Maybe… some of it was pig blood,” Kevin added hopefully.

Hank slammed his hand hard down on the table, again making everyone jump. “He’s dead, I tell you!” the black bear exclaimed hotly, making the younger fox cower at the intensity of his words. “The pigs killed him — purposely killed him!”

“Are they going to eat him?” Yuki wailed in sudden fear, “Like we ate one of them?”

“Who knows?” Hank growled. “Probably.”

Norman and Dara looked at one another and there seemed to be a wordless communication between them. Both of them had hard-set eyes and when Norman nodded, both of them stood up and quietly walked out of the dome without looking back at all the gazes that followed them.

“Jon,” Aldo asked in the momentarily quiet, “if the pigs are intelligent enough to plan such a sneak attack, do you think they might be… sapient?” Everyone looked at the bloodhound that was still bandaged from the earlier entanglement with the pigs. He seemed a little embarrassed by the public scrutiny, but he refocused his attention on the cougar and added, “They told us back at the Institute that sapient life on other worlds may not be in the same manner as we’ve had on Earth. We already know they’re intelligent, so is it possible these pigs are sapient – you know, tool-users and self-aware?”

Doctor Mochizuki slowly got to his feet and gestured across the room at the canine. “That is very possible,” he said with a look of interest in the concept. “Sapience does not necessarily mean they have the ability to create the tools of an advanced civilization. Their minds could have developed such intelligence to work out the things of the world around them, but without fingers, opposable thumbs or some other prehensile appendages, they would be unable to accomplish what we have been able to do ourselves.”

“A pack of wolves can organize and plan an attack on their prey,” Ellie said in response to his statement, “but they aren’t considered sapient. How do you test for sapience, doctor?”

Jon cleared his throat again. “Doctor, you can ponder on that question all you want later, but for now we all need to take a look at our colony and determine what our losses are beyond two of our friends. We’ll have to hold a proper burial ceremony for Wendy, of course, but we also need to see if anything was damaged that we can’t do without. This includes equipment, medicines, food, et cetera. We’ll also need to see if we can create some kind of defense against the pigs coming back from inside the cavern. Now that we know they can attack us from that direction, we’re not safe.”

He looked around at the faces staring back at him for guidance. “We’ve only been here a few months and we’ve gotten complacent about our place in this world. Things are so Earth-like that we’ve all fallen into routine, and since things have been relatively docile, we’ve not really given further thought to our safety. True, the thunderpigs can be said to resemble the warthogs back home, but these seem to possess a calculating mind intelligent enough to plan out what they did today.”

He gestured toward the cavern outside the dome. “We killed and ate one of them as food, and they’ve taken their revenge, ‘an eye for an eye’ as it goes. However, in the attack, we killed two more of them. Will they consider that as acceptable losses since those in the valley were obviously harassing us to keep our attention on them instead of our own cavern – or will they come back for revenge upon those as well?” There were sudden looks of fear at such a concept that it seemed had not occurred to anyone else.

“We need to be prepared,” Jon told them. “We have firearms, but as Avon kept reminding us, the ammo is limited. We don’t want to use it all up in our first few months, so we’ll need better defenses, and in turn, other weapons.”

“Like what?” Michael asked.

“I don’t know,” Jon answered honestly, “but we have nearly thirty minds between us; I’m sure we can think of something. I don’t care how primitive or stupid-sounding you may think an idea might be, let someone know if you have some inspiration. It’s possible the thought by itself may not work, but someone else could take your idea and add to it to make a viable weapon. That’s how invention is born.”

He walked toward the door and peered out. The three guards were alert, watching both the pathway as well as the internal darkness of the cavern, but no one seemed freshly alarmed. He looked back at those inside with resolution.

“For now, I need everyone up and working. Assess everything, but clean as you go. If you find any major damage to something, let me know immediately. Once we have a list to go by, then we can make a concerted effort to fix and repair what we can.”

***

Intense pain accompanied dim consciousness, but vision seemed to be absent altogether. It hurt to breathe and what little he had rattled and bubbled deep in his chest. Labored footsteps of the tremendously huge animal beneath him rocked broken bones within his chest and every second of continued existence was agony.

He had no strength left and he could do little more than lay limp across the giant warthog’s bony snout as it carried him deep into the darkness of the cavern. He would probably die from the injuries of his broken chest and ribcage before his captors could do much to him and the huffing of the pig’s nostrils beside his head made him wonder why they had even bothered to take him away.

He had never really believed that the thunderpigs were sapient, but he could not deny their intelligence. There had been a purpose to their plan of attack. Had it simply been a ploy to get him? Maybe they planned to eat him alive in retaliation for the adolescent pig the Furs had killed. Death of his injuries before that could happen would be preferable; he had no optimism that he could somehow survive.

One of the other warthogs grunted and he could feel a change in direction within the darkness. From the echoes that shifted off a closer wall, he understood they were turning into another passage, possibly back to their den.

Avon had no aspirations for being eaten while still alive, so he gathered up what strength might still be in reserve. He could still see nothing, whether his eyesight had failed altogether or it was just the Stygian blackness of the cavern, but if the pig’s nostrils were on his left, its eyes must be on his right.

With effort, he somehow managed to raise himself upon the great animal’s broad nose. The lightweight chain around his neck caught on a bony tusk beside him and snapped, flipping his dog tags out into the darkness. The pig’s footsteps hesitated at his movement, but the bear had no intention of prolonging things. Holding himself up with one hand, he swiped out toward the animal’s eyes with the claws of the other.

The thunderpig jerked its head and squealed out in sudden pain; Avon knew he had scored a hit, but the movement put him off balance and he slid off his precarious perch. He fell to the dusty ground hard and he blacked out from the pain. When consciousness returned, it was only for a moment before tons of porcine hooves reared up above his head.

***

Norman had never been in complete and total darkness before, but Dara had made herself familiar with the primary passageways of the cavern system in the months since their arrival and was confident she could follow them in the dark by smell alone. If the pigs could do it, so could she. They had taken torch flashlights along with pistols in their packs, but they did not want to use the lamps more than necessary in case the pigs ahead of them might see them following. In the entirety of all she had discovered, the floor had remained relatively flat, without ravines, wash outs or pitfalls they might encounter otherwise, so Dara felt confident the only danger might be from the pigs themselves.

The two bears had taken off on their own in an attempt to track the scent trail of blood, whether it was Avon’s or from one of the pigs. They knew that some of them had indeed been injured, so that was a possibility they could base some hope upon, however slim it might be.

Although they had been traveling for close to an hour, they had neither seen nor heard any sign of the thunderpigs aside from the trail of trickled blood that remained fresh enough for them to follow in the dark. Neither had spoken, and both had tried to keep their footsteps as quiet as possible in the light dust upon the cavern floor.

Norman stopped after a time, however, and hissed at Dara. She shuffled close to him and put her ear up next to his nose. “Light ahead,” he reported so softly that even she had trouble hearing him.

Up ahead, however, was the soft radiance of sunlight filtered down from overhead through some weathered crack in the mountain. It was not much more than a diffused glow, but their pupils were so dilated from an hour in total darkness that neither had difficulty seeing it.

They approached cautiously, continuing to extend all their senses to detect the pigs, but from all they could tell, they were utterly alone.

The passageway continued on through the mountain, but the light was at the junction of another corridor through the rock wall off to the right. Testing the air currents for recent scents, Norman studied the narrow walls and lower ceiling with an idea forming in his mind. He did not detect anything waiting for them in the darkness, so he stood watch with a drawn pistol while Dara moved forward on all fours and peered at marks in the dust.

Three-toed hoof prints of the thunderpigs led right into the side passage, but there was something else that caught her eye in the dim light. There was a glint of metal in the dust. She swallowed hard when she picked up each of Avon’s dog tags and then clutched them both in her fist, realizing the smell of the blood trail in the dust was fresher and much stronger. She handed the identification tags to her companion and moved on. Keeping her nose down almost to the ground, the polar bear followed the scent several yards into the passage and then she stopped abruptly.

A large splatter of blood was on the floor and both walls of the rocky path. She swallowed with difficulty, but then pressed on for another yard. Norman heard a small cry escape her throat, but he still could not detect any pigs in the general vicinity other than their stale scent from an earlier passing.

Dara pulled out her flashlight and chanced turning it on, first covered over by the palm of her large hand so she did not blind the both of them with a sudden blue-white LED beam. She slowly uncovered the lens and then shined it toward a spot before her that she had barely seen in the diffused sunlight.

There was something on the floor in the middle of a blood pool. There were several broken bits of bone scattered through the pool, but some type of matter clung to both sides of a larger object. She reached out a trembling hand paw and picked it up gingerly by several long strands of material.

When she pulled it directly into the light, both of them gasped. The object was a broken bit of curved bone several inches long and wide. Clinging to one side was a bloody bit of grey flesh, and from its other side was a mixture of cinnamon-colored animal fur and black hair that could only be human.

Norman and Dara both knew that the top of Avon’s head had contained the yellowish-brown fur of a Kodiak grizzly bear, as well as the jet-black hair of his Cheyenne ancestry. Dara choked back a sob and dropped the grisly object, but Norman caught it before it hit the ground and then cradled it respectfully in his hands.

He pulled out a baggie from his pack and quietly placed the bloody bit of skull bone into it with the dog tags to take back to camp. There was no doubt left in either of their minds that Hiamovi Avonaco was dead, but there was nothing more for them to find after a short search. The blood scent was strong over the pool, but it also continued into the darkness. Even crushed, they had taken what was left away with them. Neither of the bears felt there was any reason to track the pigs further. Norman was convinced the exit from the cavern system was probably through the pig den that the ursine cousins had found on the other side of the mountain during their exploratory trek.

The polar bear clung to him in a sudden fierce hug, but after several long moments, they both turned wordlessly back the way they had come. It was time to return to camp.

Chapter 14

Unspoken Agreement

The mountain lion stared out across the small horseshoe valley, his thoughts as dark as the thundering clouds overhead. Cold rain fell in hard sheets and the small lake below the mouth of the cavern churned beneath the onslaught. In his hands was a small metal equipment case, and although he stood under the protection of the cave roof, both he and the waterproof container were damp from wind shifts around the end of the mountain range.

The feline had used the communication unit to submit a priority report up to the orbital geosynchronous satellite to be redirected to their headquarters in Stockholm on Earth, and had just received a ping of confirmation that the message had been received and relayed. After Norman and Dara had brought him positive proof of Avon’s death the day before, and it had been confirmed by Ken’s DNA profile analysis, he had separated himself away from the cleanup and repair efforts to work up a report on his PBJ. It would take the tachyon-burst communiqué a little over forty hours to cross the interstellar distance, so he would be unlikely to get a response for a day or two, depending upon how quickly someone read his report and responded.

Although Jon had been Avon’s second-in-command, his responsibilities in that area had been relatively light since the grizzly usually took care of everything himself. The cougar had never held aspirations of being in charge of the colony, content merely to help the captain as needed, and he had fully expected the bear still to be in place at the end of their initial five-year stay on Bonestell.

Now within the span of only a few months, Avon was dead, as was Wendy, Rose and probably Gerard too. The brown bear’s internal injuries had been too extensive for Ken to repair, but the red wolf had done what he could for him and closed him up. Gerard had not regained consciousness, which was probably for the best, and his cousin Aaron had hardly left his side. The last conversation they had together was an argument that had come to blows right before the fatal thunderpig sneak attack and the memory of it left Aaron despondent.

Jon had tried to include as much detail as possible in his report, unsure of what information might be needed. He had described the events leading up to the final attack and even noted that Carl was still missing from his aerial exploration. There had been no report from the grey wolf on the radio and no one had seen any signal flares. It was unknown what might have happened to the seasoned explorer, and with two days of rain, he would be exposed to the elements in addition to whatever situation he might have encountered. Did he still live or would he soon be counted among the dead? Jon was reluctant to mark him off just yet, but he also knew that there were likely dangers on this world they had yet to discover and Carl may have found one too deadly to fight off. If the wolf did not turn up soon, they might never know what happened to him.

In spite of the cold rain and mountain runoff that was raising the level of the lake, the thunderpig scout had returned. As before, at least one was visible at all times just under the cover of trees, silently watching the cavern. Were the pigs planning another attack or were they making sure that the alien Furs weren’t going to come after them? The bodies of the two animals that had died on the pathway had already been laboriously cut up and stored in the colony freezers that were still working. The deed had been done beneath the cover of a tarp over the path barriers, partially to protect Kim and Yuki from the rain and also to keep their activities out of direct sight of the watching warthogs.

No further move had been made against them, but the Furs had no intention of letting ready meat, hide and other parts to go to waste with a cooler than expected autumn and the later winter months approaching. Armed guards had stood over them in case the porcine scouts took exception to this, but Jon had forbidden them from shooting the watchers as long as they did nothing to provoke a new attack. Likewise, rotating guards were placed back in the darkness of the cavern in case the pigs returned from that route as well. Several fires had been started farther back in the cave for the light, but the resulting smoke had only so many places to go along the air currents within.

Because of the hard rains and the thunderpigs, they were unable to give Wendy a proper burial, so her remains had been carefully wrapped up tight in plastic tarps and stored deep in the cool darkness of the cavern in hopes that her body would keep until she could be buried in the woods next to Rose.

Staring out into the rain served to relax the cougar now in command of the starter colony. It was not a job he really wanted, but without Avon the others would be coming to him for decisions and assignments.

He suppressed a heavy sigh and closed his eyes for a moment, scratching idly at the healing stripes on his arms gained when he and Kristen had taken to the trees to escape the pigs on their way back from the salt flats. A pair of slender arms slid around his middle, embracing him from behind. Despite his inner turmoil, he smiled and then looked over his shoulder at the lioness snuggled up against his back.

Without a word, she walked backward, pulling him with her out of the wind and rain, and he allowed himself to be towed. When they were in a relatively dry area, she released him and then took one of his hands. She led him to the campfire pit that was just under the lip of the cavern entrance so he could warm up and dry off, and he set the com unit on the ground at his feet. Despite that the fire was going, the two of them were momentarily alone.

He stretched out his hands toward the heat and stared into the flames, letting his eyes go unfocused. Although the pair was covered in fur, the autumn weather had turned cooler as arctic air moved south along the range of mountains. Kevin had assured them all that warmer weather would return with the sun, possibly as early as the next day. The cougar was dressed in his specially-made jeans and his favorite flannel shirt of red and black squares, but the lioness wore only a pair of furman overalls with nothing underneath and welcomed the warmth of the fire behind her as she faced back out toward the rain.

“Are you okay?” Kristen whispered without taking her eyes off the soaked valley.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Jon muttered. “It’s just the weight of sudden responsibility upon my shoulders.”

The lioness turned and reached up to run her shortened fingertips along his broad shoulders. She gave him a little smile. “I’m sure there’s plenty of room up there for all that needs to rest upon them,” she said.

The taller mountain lion raised an eyebrow and then gave her a tired smile. “Thanks,” he returned quietly. “I only wish things hadn’t escalated to such a conflict. We killed the pig and ate it like any other food animal we might raise, never considering how intelligent it might have been or how vengeful its siblings might be. I’m sure we’d have done the same if something here tried to kill and eat one of us – it’s what we still do back home.”

“Humans have always considered themselves to be at the top of the food chain on Earth,” Kristen replied, “with everything else thought of as food, pets, zoo exhibits or beasts of burden. Although we’re no longer fully human, we’re still predators and we’ve brought that same mentality here with us; none of us thought differently when the decision was made to try out the pigs for food.”

“We’ve found other animals we can safely hunt and eat,” Jon said. “At least, none of those have tried to eat us in return.” He pointed out toward the forest where one of the giant shaggy hogs stood under the needled equivalent of a pine tree. “They’re still watching us, but what happened was our fault, so it’s against my better judgment to retaliate on them after what they’ve done in response to what we’ve done,” he added with a glance behind him into the cavern. “I’ve got to make them understand that the pigs should be left alone as long as they leave us alone in return. There’s not many who agree with me, though.”

“You’re in charge now,” Kristen reminded him softly. “You don’t have to be a dictator, but you’re still the one who has final say on decisions made that affects the whole colony.”

“Maybe,” Jon muttered. His mate looked back at him with a frown, but he did not elaborate.

***

Doctor Masanori Mochizuki stepped into the Great Dome and looked around. There were only a few Furs seated inside, a skulk of Vulps chatting over cups of coffee. The large dome had captured a good amount of heat and it was warmer than the chilly cavern, but covered in a dense coat of black and ginger fur, a lab coat and furman garments, the red panda barely noticed; before his transformation, however, the Japanese scientist had been susceptible to slight climate changes.

Enjoying the scent of rich Columbian coffee in the air, Dr. Mochizuki walked quietly to a table near one of the outer curved walls and picked up a cup adorned with cherry blossom trees in full bloom. He filled it up from the pot of black liquid and then spooned in two heaps of sugar, silently reminding himself that they would eventually run out of both coffee and sugar in time. There would be no corner market to replenish their supply when it ran out and there seemed to be many coffee drinkers among the Furs.

On any other given day, the red panda would have filled his cup and then retreated back to the solitude of his lab or personal quarters, but after recent events, he had other things on his mind. Putting on a friendly air, he approached those at the table and listened in quietly to their conversation.

“…carried him away into the darkness,” Dahlia said. “I heard that Norman and Dara found his dog tags when they followed a trail of his blood into a side passage.”

“Do you suppose they were really going to eat him?” Michael asked quietly. “I mean, I’ve heard they found some of his bones.”

“What if those weren’t his?” Ivan suggested. “The bones could have been left over from a previous meal. He might still be alive — injured but alive and needing our help.”

“Are you suggesting a rescue party?” Manny asked after taking a sip from his cup. The arctic fox picked up a ginger snap from a small plate on the table and nibbled on it.

“Why not?” Ivan asked. “If they just wanted to kill him, they could have done it here like they did poor Wendy and tried to do with Gerard. Instead, they carried him away like a prisoner, so he might still be alive.”

“Do you think they’re going to interrogate him with grunts and pig squeals?” Manny scoffed.

The red fox scowled back at him. “How am I supposed to know what they planned to do with him? I’m just grasping at straws like everyone else.”

“Ken said the DNA of the blood and skull bone is Avon’s,” Dahlia reminded them all with a hushed voice.

Manny snorted. “Dead or alive, why did they take him? If he was dead, what purpose would it serve?”

“We ate one of them, maybe they were going to eat him in return,” Michael suggested again.

“Why him, specifically?” Jasmine asked. “Why Avon?”

Kevin raised a hand and everyone looked at him. “You’re not in school,” Michael said with a tired smile. “Just butt right in like everyone else; there’s no need to raise a hand for attention.”

The diminutive desert fox shrugged his shoulders feeling embarrassed, but he dropped his hand back to the table. “Maybe they chose him because he was our leader,” he suggested. When no one replied to his statement, he folded his hands together on the table and his ears drooped.

“It’s possible,” Erin replied. “They did watch us for several days. Using Canis terminology, they probably recognized he was our Alpha.”

Manny nodded. “In times of warfare, sometimes the quickest way to end a conflict is to take out the enemy’s leader. Maybe that rule applies on this world too.”

“Wouldn’t that mean the pigs can think and reason beyond animal instinct?” Dahlia asked. “They did plan this attack, using the ones out front to keep us busy while the main force came in from behind.”

“I really don’t care if the pigs are sapient or not,” Ivan grumbled. “We should wipe them all out – make them extinct!”

“How?” Jasmine wanted to know. “We can barely take down one of them, so how do you expect to kill a whole herd?”

“We’re part animal,” Ivan explained, “but we’re also still human and we have the experience of thousands of years of warfare behind us. If we don’t have enough ammunition to kill them all, we can probably develop a poison or something that will drop them in their tracks.”

“Poison would ruin the meat,” Michael countered. “We’d never be able to eat any we kill.”

Ivan put his hands over his head in the air in exasperation. “I don’t know!” he growled. “It was just a suggestion, but my point is that our human brains should be able to come up with something!”

“You’re talking all-out war,” Erin said quietly. “Is that what we came here for? I was under the impression it was to learn the dangers and benefits of a new ecosystem and find a way to coexist with it before future colonists came out to face what’s here.”

“Whose side are you on?” Ivan exclaimed. “They’ve killed some of us, one of which was our leader, and you want to find a way to get along with them?”

“You want vengeance because we killed a pig first and then they acted out of revenge!” Erin answered, standing up from her seat. “That’s childish, like running to your momma to complain that your brother had the audacity to hit you back after smacking him first!” She had a glaring match across the table with the reynard for a moment, but then she slowly released her breath and sat back down.

“Honestly,” she said in a quieter tone, “I don’t think Jon would approve of your desire to use up all our ammunition and resources to kill a herd of pigs that did nothing against us in the first place. They left us alone because we’d left them alone, but since we struck first, it’s understandable that they would want to hurt us in return — that’s what we would have done if our situations were reversed!”

“What does Jon’s opinion have to do with this?” Ivan huffed. “He’s not even here as part of our discussion.”

Jasmine cleared her throat and spoke in a calm voice. “Have you forgotten? With Avon gone, Jon is now in charge.”

“Yeah, well Jon’s never backed down from a fight either. What makes you think he’ll bow out now?”

“Because he now has the responsibility to keep the colony safe!” the red vixen answered. “I doubt that starting a war is what the AHCP had in mind when they sent us out here.”

“That’s just a matter of opinion,” Ivan groused.

“If Mr. Sunset will not approve of the actions you desire,” Doctor Mochizuki said quietly, choosing that moment to join the conversation, “perhaps someone else should be in charge.”

“We could put it to a vote!” Ivan said brightly. He looked appreciatively at the red panda. “You used to be in charge of Furs, Doctor. If I voted for you, would you approve it?”

The former Institute director nodded. “I would,” he answered without hesitation.

Jasmine knocked several times on the table. “Hello! Avon was appointed by committee and Jon was chosen and trained by Avon,” she reminded them with a side glare at the doctor. “There’s no voting on a leader unless something happened to both of them. You want to displace Jon just because he might veto your desire to kill all pigs! That smacks of entitlement issues about getting your own way without any rational thought on how this will affect us all!”

Ivan leaned across the table. “How this will affect us all,” he retorted, “is that it will save lives in the future. Not only will it keep the pigs from coming back at us again, we’ll be safeguarding future immigrants to this world. If we remove the threat now, it won’t be a problem later on!”

Dahlia sat forward in her seat. “Are you planning on a planet-wide extermination of all thunderpigs on Bonestell?” she asked, taking up her sister’s argument, “or are you only thinking of those in our small corner of the globe? There are only twenty-eight of us now, and I’m sure you realize that not everyone would help out in your worldwide pig hunt! I think your odds are rather underwhelming.”

Ivan crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. The scowl on his face was dark, but he had no rebuttal. He knew she was right – all of them who argued against him were – but he had no way of backing out well enough to save face.

When nothing more was said for several tense moments, Erin picked up her cup and headed for the coffee pot. “First, I think we need to see how Jon feels about all this,” her pixie voice said from across the room, “Right now, we have only two simple options – kill all the pigs or leave them alone. Maybe Jon has something else to suggest, but that’s his right as our leader.”

Several of the foxes at the table grumbled unhappily, but no one else had anything to add. His brief moment in the spotlight gone, Doctor Mochizuki frowned at the mood at the end of the conversation and quietly retreated from the discussion to his lab.

***

Ken retraced his steps down on all fours across the muddy floor of the valley through the rain, trying to avoid all the flippered fish using their rudimentary limbs to hunt along the grasses for morsels to eat stirred up by the rains; fortunately for him, the fish weren’t interested in furry toes.

It was times like this when the wolf missed the indoor plumbing of his home back on Earth. Running through inclement weather to the equivalent of an outhouse was likely to prove to be even more of a challenge when winter finally arrived.

Perhaps sometime in the future they could relocate so they would not have to stay inside the cavern, possibly to the forest to the east, and then they could build real homes from local wood. If they could find some kind of reed or other natural tubing to fashion into pipe, indoor plumbing could be included. It was a personal dream of his, but he doubted it would come true anytime soon, though it would also be nice if that forest was devoid of the dangerous pigs.

The red wolf jumped across the damaged wooden bridge over the swollen river and wove his way through the zigzag pathway up to the cavern. When he got inside, he moved near the cave wall and shook off the excess water from his fur without even thinking about how much he now resembled the Alaskan Malamutes his family had raised when he was growing up. Red wolves were smaller than their grey wolf cousins, but Ken’s human attributes gave him a size never seen in the wild.

He sneezed from a bit of water in his nostrils and then padded over to the medical dome so he could check in on Gerard’s condition. The bear still had not achieved consciousness after the surprise attack and the physician did not harbor any personal hope that he would recover, but he would do what he could to make sure he was as comfortable as he could be.

When he stood up on two legs and entered the medical dome, however, his heart sank. Jenni was pulling a sheet up over Gerard’s head and face. The leopard looked over at him when he approached the bed, the sadness reflecting in her green feline eyes.

“Did he ever awaken?” he asked quietly. Jenni shook her head and picked up her PBJ to record the official time of the brown bear’s death. She tapped in the report using only the tip of a claw, having lost the stylus weeks earlier.

Ken peeked at Gerard’s face beneath the sheet and then replaced it with a frown. He reverently stepped back and wrung his hands together. “I’ll go find Jon and give him the news,” he said in a solemn voice. “Do you want me to inform Aaron or would you like to tell him?”

The leopard sighed and looked down at her feet. “I know that’s one of my duties,” she murmured, “but it’s not one I’m looking forward to.”

The wolf put a hand on her shoulder and rubbed her fur through the fabric of her furman robe top with a finger. “I’ll take care of it,” he told her kindly. She looked up at him with gratitude and then suddenly jumped forward into his arms. He wrapped them around her as she buried her face in his chest, her quiet tears mingling with the rain water still in his fur that was exposed through the opening of his lab coat.

Ken held her close for a long moment before she finally pulled back a little, wiped her eyes and then nuzzled her cheek against the side of his snout. “You have always been good to me,” she whispered before giving him a light kiss on the lips. It was chaste due to their proximity to their silent friend on the medical bed, but when the wolf looked back at her, she could see more than just compassion in his expression.

***

When Aaron found Jon a little while later, the cougar was elbows-deep inside the panel of a refrigerator unit. They had conjectured that unfiltered solar flares had affected some but not all of the electronics, and although this particular refrigerator continued to work in spite of its faulty circuitry, it had suffered a direct head-on collision with the dense skull of a giant warthog twice the size of an adult buffalo. Jon was hoping that he might be able to make enough repairs to keep it going, but he was just about to give it up as a lost cause when the brown bear tapped on the sole of one of his feet.

The mountain lion looked back at Aaron. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked casually, reaching for a rag to wipe off his stubby fingers.

“Ken just told me that Gerard didn’t make it,” he said with an angry snort. “Those blasted pigs killed him after all!”

Jon sat up and shook his head. “I am sorry to hear that,” he said, “but we all knew he probably wouldn’t survive those kinds of injuries. As soon as the pig scouts leave the area, we’ll hold a burial and memorial service for Avon, Wendy and Gerard.”

“Why wait?” Aaron grumbled. “We should kill the scouts now and anymore of them that get too close to Second Chance!”

“Why?” Jon repeated with a frown. “You’ve already seen how they react when the pigs are vengeful – I don’t want a repeat of the attack and neither does anyone else. Since we don’t have a real defense against them, it would be suicide. They left when they did because they’d gotten what they wanted, not because we drove them away.”

“You’re not going to do anything?” the bear asked incredulously. “Three of us are dead!”

“…and three of them are dead,” Jon reminded him. “I think we’re safe in assuming these intelligent pigs may know how to count, and as long as they have no reason to retaliate again, we don’t need to antagonize them further.”

Aaron waved an arm furiously in the general direction of the Great Dome. “Jon, I’m not the only one who feels this way! Others want to exterminate all the pigs for what they’ve done to us and I’m in favor of it!”

Jon got up to his feet. Although the bear was a large animal, they both had some of their original human attributes and the new leader of the colony was still a taller individual. He stood up to his full height, grease rag still in his hands and looked down at the other furman.

“Aaron, if you are looking for my permission to go after the pigs,” he said darkly, “your request is denied. I will hold an assembly later this afternoon and explain this to everyone, and if anyone goes against my decision and goes after them on their own, the result could be more deaths among our people. Who do you want to die next, Aaron? It would probably be me and I really don’t want to die for your mistake!”

“Gerard was my cousin and Avon was my friend,” the bear said, refusing to back down from the taller feline. “This isn’t over.”

“The purpose of our presence on Bonestell is survival, Aaron. Mounting a war with the natives is not going to bring back those of us who’ve died.”

“It might not bring them back, but it will teach those wretched hogs they shouldn’t be messing with us!”

Jon shook his head, clearing his throat. “I think they’ve already shown that we shouldn’t be messing with them, and as for who’s at the top of the Bonestellan food chain, right now I would say it’s the thunderpigs. We should be thankful if they leave us alone now.”

Avon had often displayed indecision when issues were brought to him and he could sometimes be swayed, but Jon was different. Aaron snorted his disgust and stormed away, knowing that that arguing with the stubborn cougar further would be a futile gesture.

***

In the darkness of the huge cavern passageway, Norman and Dara crept silently, using their noses and only an occasional light to retrace their previous steps. The polar bear had food, water and other supplies in her backpack, but the black bear carried a far more important cargo in his.

Before they had left the colony behind, Norman had secretly talked Manny into giving him several sticks of plastic dynamite from the armory, as well as a few military grenades. The plastic explosives were safer to handle than the touchy clay and nitroglycerin sticks of old, but just as deadly.

It was their goal to sneak back into the interior of the mountain in hopes they could make it back to the narrow side passage they had discovered earlier without meeting up with the hogs. It was risky, for if the pigs were still watching them from outside the cave, they could also be doing the same on the inside. Unlike a number of angry Furs they had left behind, these two hoped they would not find any of the oversized warthogs.

At every branching corridor, Dara carefully checked tracks in the dusty floor with her flashlight to make sure none of the pigs had gone off into other areas, but all signs showed the giant hogs’ distinctive hoof prints had all returned the way they came.

In time, they finally approached the narrow passageway where they had found Avon’s dog tags and grisly remains. There had not been much to find, but it was conclusive enough for them to know there was no hope of rescuing their captain. The previous pool of blood had since soaked into the sand covering the floor, leaving only a shadow of its existence. Both bears took care not to step into the place where their friend and leader had ultimately died.

“There’s no way they could have gone anywhere else without leaving tracks,” Dara whispered into her companion’s ear and gestured toward the small corridor with the beam of her lamp. “They all went through there, but haven’t come out.”

“I’d bet my entire five-year prize purse this goes to the pig den Aaron and Gerard found on the other side of the mountain,” Norman replied just as quietly, feeling a constant pull of air into the passage. “Gerard said he could smell your lavender perfume when he stuck his nose inside.”

“If that’s true, they can probably already smell us just standing here,” Dara said with a frown.

“Let’s go in as far as we can and lob our grenades at them,” Norman suggested.

“Too risky. Let’s stick to the original plan.”

“You’re no fun,” the black bear muttered.

Dara grinned at him. “I’m lots of fun, or have you forgotten me already?”

Norman opened his mouth and then shut it again without a follow-up retort, making her chuckle. She lightly kissed the side of his nose. “Come on, let’s get this over with and then we can celebrate in some dark alcove on the way back.”

Norman gave her an appreciative growl and then loosened the straps of his pack to remove it from his broad back. They took their time and placed the plastic dynamite sticks about twenty yards inside the side passage at strategic load-bearing places on the walls. Two of them were placed high by Norman standing on Dara’s shoulders since she was the larger of the two, and then by wedging them into fractured cracks in the stone.

Instead of wicks to light, these were all connected to an electric igniter with a wire nearly as thin as human hair. Once they were all in place, the bears moved around a corner out of what was soon to be the blast zone.

Neither had earplugs that would fill their ursine ear canals, so both shoved their fingers in their ears and closed their eyes as Norman used a toe claw to press the activation toggle.

***

Whoom—rummmmble

“What was that?”

Ellie looked over at Chieko and the two of them felt a chill ripple through their fur that had nothing to do with the temperature at the mouth of the cave. The two females were tending to the fire in the ringed place just under the edge of the overhanging rock where rain would not drown it but the smoke could escape to the outside. Although it was never the plan to keep the fire going at all hours every day, many felt more comforted with it during the recent cold snap.

“Maybe the rain is strengthening into a thunderstorm,” Chieko ventured to guess, “At first, I thought it might be an earthquake, but it did not feel the same as quakes I’ve experienced.”

“Maybe part of the cavern collapsed,” said the wolf. “This is probably the most stable cave I’ve ever been in, but I suppose even those can break down with time.”

The red panda looked overhead at the stone ceiling with a frown. “I hope it does not come down out here,” she replied with a shudder.

All through the colony, others were making similar remarks and there were more than a few concerned looks up toward the stone roof over their heads.

***

Late in the long day found Jon standing at the bottom of the slope leading between the cave and the valley, one hand resting upon a corner post of the broken wooden bridge now only partially spanning the river, the black tip of his tail twitching in response to his thoughts. The rains had stopped and the clouds moving overhead were breaking up to reveal a red evening sky that had not yet given way to night stars. Standing water was everywhere and ripples reflected in glistening sparkles. There was a gentle cool breeze coming around the end of the mountain range that made Dahlia’s wind chimes out in the valley jingle lightly.

The large thunderpig that had been watching the cavern in the rain today was staring back at him as the two watched one another for several long moments. Through her shaggy fur, scars from the recent battle across the animal’s massive head were already scabbing over her thick hide and there were more healing claw marks on her neck and legs. He was not sure, but Jon suspected this elephant-sized animal was the same one that he had once come face-to-snout with, now ages ago it seemed.

They simply watched one another in silence for a while, but then in a surprise to the mountain lion, the giant hog finally turned and walked away into the shadows of the forest.

Without a second thought, Jon slipped off his sandals, dropped to all fours and then followed the large creature at a discrete distance. He knew he could be placing himself in unnecessary danger, but the feline wanted to make sure the porcine native went farther than just a few steps away.

It was obvious to Jon that the pig knew she was being followed from the orientation of her ears as she walked and the occasional side glance she made in his direction, but she seemed unconcerned and unhurried; although obviously a predator, this single alien Fur presented no danger to her.

Walking through the damp forest, she crossed a shallow part of the river toward Meriwether Lane, the large avenue the supply trucks had originally taken and that they all used as a primary boulevard out to the plains. Jon remained beneath the cover of trees, for if the pig decided to double back at him, he wanted some protection. The large sow, however, continued on her way.

When they came to the edge of the wood three-quarters of a mile from the little horseshoe valley, the pig stopped and turned around to look back. The cougar gazed back at her through a stand of closely growing trees, but he had no doubt that she was staring right at him. He held his ground, making no move to either approach or retreat.

The hog made a noise not unlike that of a low bassoon and followed it with a short series of snorts. When Jon did nothing but stare back at her, she repeated the sounds, adding a staccato set of harrumphs. This time, Jon stepped around the trees and then sat down on his haunches in plain view. He wrapped his tail around his feet in hopes that he was indicating that he did not intend to come after her. In response, she dipped her head with a snuffle and then turned her unprotected backside toward him.

Without another glance or sound, the great pig walked away from the forest out into the damp field of wheat-grasses and was soon lost to sight. The mountain lion mused upon her obvious attempt at communication. He had been no linguist back on Earth and could not even begin to decipher the specifics of what she might have said to him here, but he had a distinct feeling that she knew he understood the intent. Indeed, he felt privately confident she would present no further danger on his return to the valley; there was no logical reason to think so after what had happened, being nothing more than gut instinct.

Feeling better than he had in hours, Jon turned back to the wood and casually made his way back. He did not take a traveled trail this time, but simply meandered through the damp underbrush. Before he had traversed a half mile, he suddenly stopped and stared intently up into the shadows over the overhead branches of an evergreen.

Something was up there, staring down at him, but even with his enhanced sight, he was unable to determine what it was; he could see no reflections from its eyes, if it had eyes. The constant little movements of birds and insects all around had not abated, so apparently none of them felt that whatever it was staring back at him was a threat. Still, the cougar could feel the ridge of fur along his back rising in response to his agitation. What was that thing?

Perhaps it was an instinct of his feline makeup, but Jon felt the overwhelming urge to find out exactly what it was that had instilled an edge of fear in his people whenever one of the nightshades almost appeared. Crouched with his head down, his eyes never leaving the spot where a deeper shadow hugged a part of the limbs overhead, he slowly began to approach the tree trunk. If he put on a sudden burst of speed, he might be able to reach the thing’s branch in time to see what it was. He did not expect he would be able to catch it, but a visual identification would be acceptable.

At the base of the tree, he could still feel the thing’s gaze upon him and that occlusion in the shadows lingered. When he reached up slowly and quietly embedded the claws of one hand paw into its black bark, he saw something shift a little. He could not tell if it was black fur, feathers, scales or skin, but something up there had definitely moved.

Knowing he might never get another opportunity such as this, Jon launched himself up the tree, scaling the trunk faster than he had ever done before. Within seconds, he reached the limb where he knew the nightshade had just been, but there was nothing there. It was gone.

The feline searched the surrounding tree limbs all around and above, but of the unseen creature, there was nothing – not even its gaze.

Panting lightly in disappointment, he was otherwise motionless on the thin branch, all his senses alert to detect anything around him, but his climbing rush had stirred up all the birds and other critters too; their sounds and calls now in alarm of the predator in their midst. It would be near improbable to track the nightshade when it was calm and quiet, but in this din, he knew it was hopeless altogether.

He put his nose to the tree and the branch where the dark thing had been. There was a faint scent there, but even though it was recent, it was almost too subtle, barely even discernable.

What kind of creature was hard to see, completely silent and had almost no scent for the enhanced nose of a Fur to detect? Jon still was not assured that it presented no danger, but in the months since their arrival, it had never once shown itself or bothered anyone. He was almost ready to simply declare nightshades to be nothing more than phantom fears on behalf of the colonists, himself included.

When he was back down on the forest floor, he looked back up to the branch he had vacated, but this time the darker shadow against the tree trunk was absent. Had there really been anything there?

Jon chuckled aloud, amused at his own reaction jumping at shadows, and then headed back toward the valley. He neither saw nor felt the presence again, and by the time he got back to the soggy clearing, he had almost forgotten the incident altogether.

At the top of the path to the cave, however, Norman was waiting for him. Jon raised an eyebrow at the black bear’s smug expression.

“Okay, you’ve been up to something,” he said with a crooked smile. “What’ve you done?”

Norman grinned and put a huge paw on Jon’s shoulder. “The thunderpigs will never be able to attack us from the rear the same way again. Dara and I have made sure of that.”

A sudden chill went up Jon’s spine. If they had killed more pigs, it would undermine the unspoken agreement he had just had with the one he had followed out to the field.

“What have you done?” he growled in sudden annoyance.

Norman was taken aback at the cougar’s reaction and retrieved his hand. “Uhm, Dara and I went back to the side tunnel where we uhm… found Avon…” he explained in hesitation. “Using explosives we got from Manny, we filled in that side passage with tons of rock and rubble.”

Jon could feel the skin of his neck and face getting hot beneath his fur, but then he had to force himself to calm down. He was not upset so much at what they had done, as it was that they had done something so dangerous without telling him first.

Swallowing back the tirade that had tried to force itself past his lips, Jon heaved a long sigh and then shook his head. “Are you okay, you and Dara?”

“Yeah, we’re fine. We stayed far enough away from the blast, but then double-checked afterward to make sure it was completely blocked off. After we were certain that not even one of the little furball mice could get through, we trucked it back home.”

Jon nodded, feeling better knowing that the bears had suffered no injuries. He had never handled explosives himself, but knowing they had taken some without permission still concerned him.

Imitating Norman’s initial gesture, he put a hand up on the bear’s shoulder and nodded. “I wish you would have informed me beforehand, but this time I’ll just say ‘thanks and Well Done’ for what you’ve done to insure our safety.”

“Sorry we didn’t tell you first,” the bear said, “but we didn’t think you’d let us if you knew.”

Jon stared at him for a moment. “I think you should let me be the judge of anything like that from now on. You never know what I might allow if you don’t ask, but if you keep circumventing my authority, I might take exception to anything else you might want my approval for.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Norman agreed with a penitent nod. “Sorry, boss.”

Jon gave him a leisurely smile. “Good, now you can tell me about it. Gimmee all the details.”

Chapter 15

Name of the Mountain

Aldo Banner found it difficult to rest up from his injuries. He had still been laid up from his encounter with the thunderpigs following the initial hunt when the attack on the cavern had taken place, and although he had seen none of it, he had heard the screams, roars and gunfire amidst the destruction of the colony, and had taken part in the gathered conversation afterward. Now that things had calmed down and a repeat attack had not come as expected, the sounds of rebuilding and cleanup were keeping him up the long night.

The bloodhound would be out of commission for some weeks due to two cracked ribs and a nasty gash from his hip to his armpit. The gash was healing well due to a liberal application of purple stitchgloo, a biodegradable, painkilling medical adhesive commonly used in surgery that bonded the edges of skin and muscle tissue so that natural healing could take place beneath it. He had also had to be immobilized with a spray-on body cast over cheesecloth in the area to keep him from pulling it back apart, and this also doubled as a splint for his poor ribs.

Having been raised on a farm in the North American Heartland, the quiet Canis was used to being active during waking hours. Being idle and immobile for long stretches of time was getting on his nerves, and it had only been a few days since his injury. In the months they had been on Bonestell, he had already read all the books he brought with him loaded onto his PBJ and now he was bored. Sissy had queried others in the camp and several had generously transferred other books they had brought to his unit, but he was finding that their tastes in reading material differed greatly from his own.

In time, he had switched over to reading the tech manuals sent along for reference material in running a starter colony. He had learned a few things reading them, but found the material dry. According to his Bonestellan watch, it was several hours past sundown, not that he had known it from the perpetual ambient light inside the cavern in the vicinity of his quarters.

Something large bumped into the side of his personal geodesic dome and he saw the walls flex for a moment. A curvy silhouette suddenly filled the doorway outside the smoky grey plastic curtain that served as a door partition.

“Are you okay in there?” a familiar voice asked.

Aldo cleared his throat and replied. “I’m alright,” he said quietly, “but did a big pig just run into my house?”

There was a chuckle and then a light knock on the fiberluminum door frame. “No, I am not a big pig. May I come in?”

“C’mon in.”

A worn western hat was the first to emerge through the split in the curtain that covered his doorway, followed by the floppy ears and nose of a Border collie. Cheryl glanced across his tidy room and spied him on his bed, gifting him with a warm smile.

“Sorry about the little earthquake,” she said. “I was carrying a couple sacks of rice to the new supply dome and I’m afraid I got overbalanced. That was me that fell up against your wall.”

Aldo raised an eyebrow and could not help but smile. “Are you okay?” he asked. He had always liked Cheryl, another who had grown up on a farm and was used to hard work. That she wore nothing but a pair of overalls and a cowgirl hat helped complete the country picture.

“Yup, I’m fine and thankful the bags didn’t split!” She approached his bed and pulled up a slotted-back chair from his table. She sat down and then leaned toward him with her elbows resting upon her knees.

“How’s your side today?” she asked politely. She had been the one who had field-dressed his injuries on the spot and helped him limp back to the valley while everyone else fought off the pigs to bring their kill back to camp.

“The pain meds help,” he answered quietly, “but I’m bored just lying around in here. I wish I could help with the cleanup.”

Cheryl reached forward and gently brushed the bloodhound’s light brown bangs from his forehead. “You’ve always been a big help, Aldo,” she said quietly. “You’ve been dependable, but now it’s time for others to do the work so you can heal properly. If you like, I can come by and keep you company in my free time.”

The bloodhound looked up at her with deep brown eyes and swallowed. “Yes,” he said in a hoarse voice. “I think I would like that.”

Cheryl gave him a big smile. “You can count on it. I need to get back to my work now, but I will see you later.” She stood up, looked over her shoulder at him, swished her tail a couple of times, and then disappeared out the door.

Aldo rubbed his sore side, but shook his head silently as he stared at the curtain she had passed through. This was a pleasant, if unexpected, development and he discovered that his extra-sensitive nose enjoyed her female scent, too.

***

“I believe I’ve ascertained the cause of our electronic failures,” Norman reported. The black bear found Jon where Avon had fallen, cleaning up the grisly stains on the stone wall and floor with a mop and a bucket. Everyone else had avoided the place so the cougar had taken it upon himself to handle the solemn task.

Jon looked over at him with interest, grateful for the momentary distraction. “What have you… ascertained?” he asked with a smirk at the bear’s uncommon word choice, setting the mop aside up against the wall.

Norman held up his own Personal Business Juxtapositioner, which appeared tiny in his large hand-paws. The former NFL linebacker had learned dexterity with his claws since his transformation and had no difficulty opening the clamshell device and activating one of its applications. He turned his back to the spot where their former leader and friend had probably breathed his last and tried to ignore the scent of blood and bleach.

“Avon … and I had discussed several possibilities on why our electronics were failing. Did he say anything to you about our conversation?”

Jon shook his head. “No, nothing.”

“We’d narrowed it down to two causes that we could think of,” Norman explained. “We figured there was either something in this mountain producing a strong electromagnetic field that was affecting the circuits, or it was possible our local star might be sending out EMP bursts with solar flares.”

Jon nodded. “I’ve heard that solar flares from Sol often played havoc with sensitive circuits, but that the Earth’s magnetosphere usually shielded everything from all but the strongest of them.”

“Exactly,” Norman stated with a nod. “We were both leaning toward that cause, so he asked me to look into it. My PBJ has a relevant application for detecting electromagnetic activity, but due to the recent issues with the pigs, I hadn’t had time to check it out.”

“Until now,” Jon guessed.

“Until now. There’s been nothing to suggest there’s anything in this mountain that would play funny with our stuff, but I have recorded a number of solar CMEs impacting our area. The mountain shields us for the most part, but the surrounding rock likely reflects some of it inside the cavern. This could be why only some of the electronics have been affected but not all.”

Jon frowned. “I understood most of that, but I’m not familiar with a CME.”

Norman smiled. “A CME is a colossal coronal mass ejection of electrons, ions and atoms by a star into space, and it appears that they might generate electromagnetic pulses when they hit Bonestell’s magnetosphere. It’s the EMP bursts that are hitting our electronics. The helix circuits are taking the brunt of it, and they’re among the most well-protected of common electronics, but something with military-grade shielding would probably handle it okay.”

“What about radiation?” Jon asked. “Is that a concern?”

The black bear scratched his head and shrugged. “I dunno. Honestly, I’m no expert in this field. Most of what I’ve just told you comes from general high school knowledge and a little reading on my PBJ application. I would guess the radiation levels would depend upon how well the planet’s magnetosphere shields us, but I haven’t tried using the colony Geiger counter yet.”

He waved a hand out toward the valley where Kristen and a few others were examining new flowering buds that appeared all over the branches of the trees with the black, twisted trunks that made up the majority of the little forest that surrounded the colony. It appeared to be a byproduct of the recent rains and cooler temperatures.

“We’ve found abundant life in our tiny little corner of this world,” he said, “from hardy creatures down to delicate microbes. Any regular bursts of radiation haven’t seemed to have affected them harshly, but who knows how our different physiologies might handle it. It’s my guess that we’re in no physical danger from the solar flares, but our electronics may get the brunt of it. The question is, ‘Are the flares a common recurrence or is there a solar cycle where this only happens once every few years or so?’ Who’s to say?”

Jon mused on the bear’s words for a moment. “Well,” he said with a shrug of his own, “if what you’re guessing at is true, and I have no reason to doubt your research, I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to protect our electronics if it’s an ongoing phenomenon.”

“I may be able to put together a Faraday cage further back in the cave to house our smaller electronics when they’re not in use, but I can’t guarantee how well they’ll be protected.”

Jon nodded. “Good, let me know if you need anyone’s help constructing it. Ultimately, if that doesn’t work, we’ve already had training back on Earth on how to survive using more primitive means and we may have to fall back on them – like we’ve already started to do using the salt to preserve our meat in the cool cavern as an alternate means of using these freezers.”

He looked up toward the ceiling of the cave as if peering up into the sky. “Y’know, it all makes sense, somehow. The satellite left in orbit from the original colony was out of commission when we got here. If solar CMEs such as the ones you described are common occurrences, it may be no wonder the satellite had to be replaced when we arrived.”

“It makes me ponder how long we’ll have this one in operation,” Norman remarked. “Even if nothing happened to us, Earth might think they’d lost us like the first colony if they lose contact with Second Chance.” The bear looked as if he had a sudden clarity of thought and added, “You know, that could explain what happened to the Ferdinand Magellan. An EMP at the wrong time could have knocked out all their communications with Earth. Maybe they landed as planned, but just couldn’t call back home!”

Jon blinked. “An interesting conjecture,” he mused aloud, “but there’s a couple things wrong with that scenario. If they’d landed as planned, we would have found signs of the colony right here in our little valley, which was to be their home site too. Like the Meriwether Lewis that brought us here, the ship was only supposed to land long enough to deposit the colonists and their goods and then it was to return to Earth. That never happened, bad communications or not.”

“Ah well, it was just a thought.”

“Nevertheless, I should probably forward your hypotheses to Stockholm, just in case our satellite is taken out by a solar EMP, so they’ll know that it doesn’t necessarily mean something’s happened to us and not to abandon all hope for Bonestell if the com goes quiet.”

Norman closed his clamshell device and tucked it under an arm. “You know, it might come to that anyway,” he said. “We’re supposed to be here as an advance presence to pave the way for a portion of humanity to later move away from Earth. If mankind can’t use their precious electronics on this world, they may not wish to come here.”

“Well, look at it this way,” the cougar remarked with a wry expression, “we wouldn’t have to worry about this planet becoming overcrowded. Perhaps it will appeal to the pioneer types who prefer a low technological life.”

“Either that or it could become a dumping ground for Furs that couldn’t make it anywhere else in the AHCP’s grand scheme of things,” Norman mused.

***

Despite his personal feelings that the pigs would probably leave them alone now, Jon was still reluctant to leave the cavern unguarded, but he wanted all twenty-six remaining colonists present at the town hall meeting he had called for all personnel. Originally, he had intended to hold it inside the Great Dome, but if the pigs did choose to attack again at that time, he did not want everyone trapped inside. Instead, he had everyone set up their chairs out in the open cavern so that if anything did come at them, they would have the ability to scatter to some kind of safety. Along those lines of thought, he had had Manny arm several of the Furs around the perimeter of the group just in case.

Idle conversations faded when he stood up and faced everyone and after a moment, everybody was looking at him expectantly. Everyone was there, including those who were injured. He glanced aside at Kristen, who merely gave him a silent nod, and then he cleared his throat.

“We have some things to discuss,” he said with a brief look at the small paper notebook in his hands, “and I would like to begin with reports on our current operating status.”

Manny raised a hand and Jon nodded to the arctic fox.

“Although we’ve tried to conserve our ammunition since our arrival,” the fox began with a sour expression, “one of the domes the pigs destroyed was one we were using as our armory.” There were sudden grumbles and remarks, but Jon raised his hands for quiet. This was distressing news, something he had been unaware of until just now.

“The guns that were in use during the attack are the only ones that survived,” Manny continued when he could speak over the other voices. “Tons of pig weight not only knocked over the remaining firearms, but stomped them through the decking of the dome and into the stone floor of the cave. Most of them were trampled, broken or bent all beyond my ability to repair, even though I’ve tried to cannibalize undamaged parts of one to attempt to fix another.” His frown deepened amidst a resurgence of conversation, but he continued.

“However…” he said, “most of the ammunition escaped damage. A bunch of it was scattered, but I’ve been able to gather it all up and I’ve been sorting them apart by caliber. Some of the cartridges were broken apart, but we still have the majority of what we had. We’re down to six rifles, three shotguns, four pistols and one flare gun, but we have plenty of ammo for all of them. We lost only two of the compound bows and none of the arrows. Fortunately for them, they’d been stowed haphazardly behind some boxes instead of put away in the racks where they should have gone, but I’m not complaining this time since the rack was also destroyed.”

“What about the explosives?” Norman asked. Several of the Furs looked alarmed, unaware that they even had explosives among their manifest.

“Did you hear anything blow up during the attack?” Manny asked with a smirk directed at the bear. “Thankfully, the grenades and plastic explosives were undamaged. Had one of them gone off, we’d have probably lost the whole cavern!”

“We have that many explosives?” Jasmine exclaimed, her ears laid back with a wild look in her eyes.

Manny simply smiled back at her. “Probably not as much as you’re imagining, but if any of them had set off in the midst of our ammunition, yeah, there would have been quite an event!”

The vixen’s sister looked back at Jon in shock. “Why are we even storing that anywhere near our homes?” Dahlia asked.

Jon frowned, wondering the same thing himself. Without answering the vixen, he looked back at Manny. “Perhaps the armory should be moved further back inside the cavern,” he suggested.

“Sure,” said the arctic fox. “It’ll take time and I’ll need some help, but it will also make it farther to go to if we need to run for the guns in a hurry.”

“We can keep the guns and some of the ammo handy,” Jon remarked, “but it’s probably best the bulk of it goes back into the cavern until it’s needed – at least the explosives anyway. With luck, we won’t need them again anytime soon.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

The mountain lion looked around the group. There were some looks of relief, others seemed genuinely surprised, but there were also a few dark expressions looking back at him. One of those belonged to Ivan. As soon as their eyes met, the fox cleared his throat.

“What do you mean, we won’t need the guns again anytime soon?” Ivan demanded. “We’re going after the pigs, aren’t we?”

“No, we’re not,” Jon said firmly. “I know all about the conversation a bunch of you had concerning your plans for revenge against the pigs, Ivan, and for the very reasons that were brought up then, you can drop that idea.”

The fox jumped to his feet and leveled a finger at the cougar. “See?” he said furiously to the crowd. “Just as we expected, he’s too afraid to retaliate!” Voices erupted in support on both sides of the argument, some of them starting up their own arguments with one another.

The cougar waved his notebook in the air to get everyone’s attention, but before all the voices died down he was already talking.

“The thunderpigs did not start the conflict — we did!” he said loudly. “We’ve killed an equal number of one another and it seems the pigs are satisfied with that. I’m no happier than you are that our friends have died in a conflict that could probably have been prevented, but the Furs of Earth are not going to mount a war against the native life forms!”

“We’ve got to eat!” Michael called out. “Are you forbidding us from killing anything to keep us fed? Our own livestock is going to run out pretty quick since we’re all carnivores!”

“No,” Jon answered, “but we have to be more discerning before we indiscriminately kill off something. Some of us – Avon included – had already suspected the hogs here were far more intelligent than their cousins back home, and after the way they coordinated their delaying and diversionary tactics with the ultimate attack, I believe it! Something dies so something else can live – that’s a part of life anywhere - but that doesn’t give us the right to eat anything we choose. We’ve found other animals we can safely eat that haven’t acted as if we’ve personally assaulted their family trees.”

He looked around at the intense faces before him, keeping his own expression stern. “I know some of you want vengeance but as your captain, I’m forbidding it. We have neither the manpower nor the resources to mount any kind of a successful campaign. What we are going to do is continue to pick up the pieces to get our lives back in order.”

Others started grumbling again, but he continued as if he had not heard some of their comments. “From now on, the thunderpigs are off limits. Leave them alone and I’m fairly sure they’ll leave us alone in return. If any of you still feel like arguing about it, see me in private, but I can assure you that I won’t budge on this issue.” With a twinkle that touched only his eyes, he added, “Some of you already know how stubborn I can be.”

His face grew serious again when he looked around the crowd, but he refrained from looking at any one person for any length of time. “For those of you I know of who think you can vote me out of my position, think again.” There were a few surprised looks at his knowledge of that discussion and Doctor Mochizuki suddenly looked uncomfortable.

“I can provide your PBJ with a copy of the bylaws and regulations set down by the Anthro Human Colonization Program and show you the legality of my appointment which is recorded in Stockholm. We’re a long way from AHCP headquarters, but that doesn’t lessen my authority any.”

The grumblings had subsided, but Jon knew it would take more than a few words to quell the need for retaliation for the loss of their friends. Deep down inside, he would like nothing more than to strike back himself. That was human nature, but he would have to make sure his new responsibilities to the safety of the colony were stronger.

Unwilling to let the current topic dominate the town hall discussion, he waved a casual arm and said, “Now, let’s move on. I need your reports on our current operating status.”

Also ready to get away from the hot topic, the Border collie adjusted the hat between her floppy ears and raised her hand for attention. Jon nodded. “Cheryl?”

“We’ve recovered most of the livestock,” she said. “The remaining cattle, sheep, pigs, guineas and chickens are penned up again, though we’ll need to make better than jury-rigged repairs to the paddocks when we can. There’s been no sign of the horses, though. No one knows if they are still alive and roaming free on the prairie or if they’ve been killed and eaten by the pigs. They’ve been gone long enough they should have returned on their own for food and shelter, but they haven’t.”

“We can live with the loss of a pig, chicken or a couple of sheep,” Jon said with a frown, “but losing the horses may present a bit of a hardship when we’ll need them in the spring to plow the gardens.”

“We can use some of the cattle for that,” Cheryl assured him, “and they can pull our carts as needed, but we won’t be able to ride any of them as mounts when we need them for travel.”

Another hand was raised and Jon gestured with his notebook. “Kris?”

“The entire garden area was already over-saturated with flood waters from the rain,” the lioness reported, “but after the pigs stormed through the middle of them, I would have to say it’s a complete loss. On the plus side, we had a good harvest a few days before the rain began and just about everything that could be picked has already been canned and is in the pantry or packed away in the freezers. We won’t have any starter plants from the ruined gardens, but we’ve saved back plenty of seeds to plant more.”

“The fall growing season is longer here,” Kevin reminded everyone, “and although we’ve had colder weather lately, I believe that we’re still a few months away from actual winter conditions. As with the autumns back home, the weather and temperatures will go up and down at times before it starts cooling down toward the end of the season, so although it’s rainy and chilly now, we may still get more out of the gardens once we get everything replanted.”

“That’s good to know,” Alicia remarked with a smile toward the diminutive desert fox sitting near the middle of the seated Furs. “I was beginning to wonder if it was almost time for us bears to go into hibernation.” There were a few lighthearted chuckles at her words and Jon was glad to hear them. Although the Ursis Furs shared part of their DNA makeup with Terran bears, they had no need to hibernate through the winter, although some of them thought that would be the perfect way to make it through the coldest months. Why suffer through trying to stay warm when one could sleep right through it all?

“Speaking of putting food in the freezers,” Norman said, “we’ve been able to keep them all going despite that something has disabled some of our electronics. We may have to keep an eye on them to be sure, though. In the meantime, I’m in the process of gathering material like the galvanized trash cans and other scrap metal to build a Faraday cage further back in the cavern to keep our electronics in,” the black bear told them.

“There, we can shield our PBJs and other devices until they’re needed – you know, to look up data on how to repair the stove, find medical procedures and the like, and then we should use them only long enough to get what we need from them. The helix circuits in the kitchen appliances, the solar power station and our other high-tech devices that are too large to shield will just have to take their chances. With luck, the solid rock of the mountain and the metal cage will help protect further damage to everything else.”

“Until we’re sure of the cause of the problems,” Jon added, “Sissy has recommended that we use the supply of paper notebooks to record your notes on the things we discover here on Bonestell.” He held up the pad in his hands and said, “I know this is an old-fashioned way of doing things, but right now it’s the only way to be sure we won’t lose the knowledge we gain here. You can still use your PBJs for other things as long as they remain in operation, but don’t trust them to keep permanent information.”

“What about the letters and videos we send back to Earth?” Erin asked.

“As long as the equipment works, I see no reason to stop,” Jon said. “I’ll be making periodic reports back to Earth and can still relay your data and personal messages when I do. Now, we’ve already started working up alternatives to some of our equipment should they fail. Storing meat back in the cave that’s protected by the cool temperatures and a covering of salt to keep bacteria out is one such alternative to a nonworking freezer. We’ll need other options like this as a contingency should we lose something else. If the solar power collector goes out, we’ll need a substitute for the lamps in the cavern and maybe even an alternative fuel for the stoves. We have lots of data to look over stored on the PBJs as long as they work for us, but you all have brains to retain information too. We may have to revert to more primitive methods as a backup plan, so keep that at the back of your mind.

“We’re already using primitive toilet outhouses,” Hank remarked with a snicker. “Do we have a backup plan in case those stop operating?”

“Then you can answer the mystery that’s plagued mankind for centuries,” Michael said, “about bears going in the woods!”

Jon chuckled along with everyone else, but he waved his notebook again. “Any other reports?”

Kristen looked across the crowd at Jasmine, who had given her a great amount of help with what they had done since their arrival. “I might recommend putting the new garden area further away from the lake, so we won’t have such a big issue with flooding,” she said.

“I think that’s a good idea,” the red vixen agreed. “Perhaps over to the southwest part of the valley nearer the forest.”

Jon nodded. Even if the pigs had never attacked, losing the gardens to periodic flooding would have prompted such a change anyway. Perhaps there might even be a way to build up the shores of the lake so that runoff would follow the little river instead of spreading out over the valley floor. It would be a lot of work, but would give them all something to do once they started something of that nature. He would have to discuss it with others with more of a mind to engineering.

“Anyone else?” No one else spoke up, so after a moment the cougar nodded. “Okay, now that we’ve covered the priorities, I need to bring our attention back to the reason for all this. Despite our difference in opinions about how things should be handled with the pigs, we still have a few fallen friends to pay our respects to. Now that the rains have stopped and the clouds are breaking up, we’ll take time out of our activities an hour after sunup tomorrow morning to bury Wendy and Gerard and then have a memorial service for them and Avon.”

The crowd became totally quiet and he looked around at them all. “I’m no expert in such matters, so the service will be informal. I’ll say a few words over each of them and then anyone who wishes may also say something in their honor. Afterward, we’ll need to return to work to continue getting the colony back in order. In addition to the gardens and the corrals, we’ll also need to rebuild the bridge across the river. We’ll need everyone’s help, so if I or someone else asks for your assistance, please give it to them.”

***

“Jon, come with me and look at what’s happened during the night.”

The cougar rubbed the crust from his sleepy eyes and sat up on the side of the bed he shared with Kristen. The lioness was already up and dressed, and the expression on her face was one of excitement. He had felt a sudden sense of dread at her words wondering what had happened, but the delight in her eyes softened the feeling. He slipped into a pair of dark green furman shorts and a white tee shirt, and then allowed her to lead him by the hand to the mouth of the cavern.

They stopped beside Chieko at the smoldering fire ring and the red panda pointed out toward the forest that surrounded the valley with a grin. There in the midst of the red, yellows and browns of the autumn hues on the local deciduous trees, there was a color that seemed decidedly out of place. Although the forest contained a great many different types of trees and shrubs, nearly half of the forest was made up of trees with black, twisted trunks, and now each of them were suddenly abloom with hand-sized, cornflower-blue flowers. Some had white centers and others had bright yellow centers. They seemed to be everywhere and the little forest had virtually erupted in their blueness all around.

This in itself was something to instill delight in his botanist mate, but that was not the only new thing to grace their little valley. Moving with heavy footsteps were several large deer-like creatures they had never seen before. Most were grazing upon the new blue flowers, but others were wading out into the lake to feed on underwater plants.

Standing at nearly seven feet tall at the shoulder, the new creatures had large, elongated heads with long droopy ears. Prominent nose flaps clamped tight over the nostrils of those in the lake when they dipped their heads completely under the water. The males and females were distinctive in size and genitalia, though they all possessed a single long horn that grew straight out of their heads in line with their spines. It was a solitary antler of sorts, splitting off into a few small jutting spikes only at their tips. There were no young among them; the herd consisted of almost thirty mature animals that Jon could see.

Their tails were nothing more than a nub and the legs were long and spindly. They had hair so black that it almost had a blue sheen, but when the morning sunlight hit some of them just right, they could see dark and light vertical stripes. Several looked up at the interested Furs that were gathering in the mouth of the cavern, but they showed no fear of the Terran predators.

The mountain lion felt a gentle touch at his arm and he looked down into the dark eyes of the red panda.

“Jon,” she said quietly with hesitation, “I was the first to see these animals this morning. May I name them?”

“Of course,” he said with a smile. “Do you have something in mind?”

She looked back down at the ones in the lake and nodded. “Yes, I would like to call them ‘kirin deer’ based upon similar creatures in Japanese folklore. It is not the same creature, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw them.”

“I think it’s a good choice,” Kristen said from Jon’s other side. “Do you think they’re migrating south to warmer temperatures?”

“That would be my guess,” the panda replied. She gestured toward those in the forest. “We have not seen these creatures before now, but it seems their arrival has coincided with the blooming of the blue flowers. This may not necessarily be a coincidence.”

“Take note of the date and we’ll see if they do this again next year,” Jon suggested.

Kristen looked up at him with a smirk. “I thought you said we didn’t need calendars here,” she reminded him.

“Okay, that’s your job now,” he said without hesitation at her jibe. “You can figure out a calendar based upon our new days and months. Just be sure to mark First Day and this event too.”

The lioness chuckled. “As the colony historian, Sissy has already created one! I’ll let her tell you about it later.”

As they watched, Cheryl emerged from the barn dome and then she stopped and stared as one of the kirin deer approached the corral fence. Only a few feet away, it gazed back at her for a moment in indifference. The large male sniffed the frame of the fencing, gave it a tentative lick with a huge black tongue, and then turned quietly back toward the forest to harvest a few more tree blooms. The Border collie scratched the brown hair beneath her hat and watched the animal go.

“Do you think we’ll be okay having the burial service out in the woods with those things around?” Kristen asked in a whisper.

Jon shook his head. “I don’t see why not. That one didn’t appear to be threatened by Cheryl’s presence, so I’m hoping as long as we don’t get them stirred up, they’ll go about their business eating all the new tree blooms.”

***

Twenty-six Furs stood before four wooden markers that Alicia had made from bits of split wood from the ruined river bridge. The names of each had been painstakingly burned into the wood and were tapped into the ground at the head of each grave. Wendy and Gerard were wrapped up in the blankets each had slept in upon their beds and had been reverently laid to rest beneath the forest floor beside Rose’s grave. Since they had been unable to retrieve Avon’s body, a small box containing the remains they had found was also buried beneath a marker erected for him. Hanging upon each marker was their identification dog tags.

When it came time to speak a few words of honor, there were only a few who had the strength in them to say anything. When all had become quiet, Jon knelt down at the head of Avon’s marker and appeared to be in prayer for a moment before he looked up at the others gathered around.

Several of the kirin deer were nearby, munching contentedly on the twist-oak flowers, totally ignoring the mismatched pack of predators that had made no move to hunt any of them since their arrival.

“Every colony sent to a new world goes with the knowledge that dangers may exist,” Jon said quietly. “In spite of this knowledge, it’s never easy when friends are lost, no matter the cause. Rose, Wendy, Gerard and Avon all had hopes and dreams of a new life upon this particular world and each of them did their part to pave the way for others who may come at a later time. Since Second Chance is the first colony of mixed species, the losses are especially poignant, as there are fewer of each kind of us.”

The cougar stood up, putting his hands behind him, and although he had never served in a military service, it felt natural to stand in a parade-rest stance. “However,” he continued after a moment of reflection, “the rest of us still live and we will do all we can to make this venture a success. We may have changes to make in order to ensure the survival of the colony, but we’re flexible and can do them as needed. In the meantime, we will honor our fallen friends, but I want to make a suggestion regarding our captain, Hiamovi Avonaco.

“Avon was gentle by nature, but he could be gruff and stand tall and immovable when he needed to be. He stood over us and every decision he made was for the good of his people. He may have been Ursis, but he never played favorites between our four species, seeing all of us as one family. At this time, I would like to set above us a symbol of the man who was not only our leader, but was the largest of us all. His big heart and big shadow are reflected in the mountain that has been sheltering us all since our arrival.”

Although they were under the trees of the forest, they could still see the silhouette of the mountain through the treetops that had already started losing their leaves in the season of fall. Jon looked up at the smallest peak at the end of the range of mountains that rose up above this land.

“I would like to honor our captain’s memory by designating our cavern home in the Hiamovi Mountain Range on the maps as Avonaco Mountain for as long as Terrans are present upon Bonestell.”

There were no objections at all to either suggestion, so Sissy made note of the new geological names in the colony history.

***

The walk back out of the forest to the valley clearing was quiet and somber. Each Fur was left to his or her own thoughts and walking was more out of habit than cognizant thought. Without conscious decision on anyone’s part, the whole group was down on all fours, padding quietly through the detritus covering the ground.

When they left the cover of trees, the morning sunlight was streaming down into the valley and the air was warmer than it had been in days. The lil-deer had spread out over the soft grasses that had somehow retained its greenness in the recent cold weather, some intermingled among the legs of the larger kirin deer.

Someone suddenly stopped in front of Jon and he bumped into her tail. When he looked up, someone else said, “Whoa, what’s that?”

Jon looked up facing the cavern and saw there was some kind of creature standing alone just inside the shadows. Everyone from the colony was with him, so a sudden chill went up his spine and the tip of his tail began to lash behind him.

What new critter had found their cavern home? With the morning sunlight in their eyes, the creature was little more than a four-footed silhouette, but then there was a soft cry from behind him and sudden rush as someone ran full out toward the trail up to the cave.

It was only then that Jon guessed who the mystery figure must be. The gyrocopter was nowhere in sight, but Carl had returned.

Chapter 16

First Chance

The entire colony crowded around the prodigal wolf. There was no way that Ellie could have her husband to herself right now, despite the news she so desperately wanted to break to him in private. Resigned to sitting beside him with her head upon his shoulder in a chair beside the fire pit, she watched quietly while Jenni wrapped up Carl’s left ankle and everyone else waited impatiently to hear his story.

Normal procedure when someone returned from an exploratory trip was for the captain to speak with them in private in case there might be something they may want to hold back from public ears. After recent events, however, Jon did not care. He was just as eager as everyone else to hear the wolf’s story and if he told it just once now, he would not have to repeat it multiple times.

Before he began, however, the grey wolf looked around and realized there were missing faces. “Where is everybody?” Carl asked with a hoarse voice after lapping from a welcomed coffee cup. “Where’s Avon? Shouldn’t I report to him first?”

“There’s no easy way to say this, Carl, but Avon’s dead,” Jon told him somberly. He knelt beside him and gestured out toward the forest. “We’ve just had a memorial service for him. We lost Wendy and Gerard, too.”

The wolf looked stricken and glanced over at his wife. Ellie nodded quietly and he could see the moisture in the fur beneath her eyes.

“What…. what happened to them all?” he asked quietly. “Was it another virus?”

“It was the thunderpigs,” Jon answered. “They attacked us inside our own cavern.”

Several Furs began talking at once, but Ellie stood up suddenly and angrily waved her arms in the air with a pointed look at each one of them until they all fell silent again. She had not said a word, but she had gotten her meaning across.

Jon sighed inwardly and looked back at the wolf. “The short version,” he said, “is that because we killed and ate one of their young thunderpigs, they took offense and retaliated against us with an unexpectedly intelligent plan of attack. We killed two more of them in the conflict and they did the same to us; Avon was one of them.” Jon looked around at the mixture of expressions looking back at him. “We can fill you in on the details later.”

“Jon is now in charge,” Ellie said quietly. “He’s our captain.”

Carl nodded solemnly. “Should I give you my report in private?” he asked, mindful of the crowd around him.

The cougar shook his head. “No, go ahead and tell us what happened. With everything that’s happened, we could all use a good story right now.”

The wolf looked up and around at the crowd. “All right,” he agreed to expressions of relief, “as you did with me, I’ll give you the short version for now.” Everyone settled down around him, most comfortable on their haunches or relaxing in chairs that were still out in the open. Jenni finished wrapping up the ankle Carl had been limping on and then sat down a few steps away.

“Thank you,” Carl said to the leopard. He marveled that she was wearing only a pair of furman shorts and nothing else, totally unaware she had been dressing down like that ever since an earlier argument with the red panda simply to needle him. Very few males in the colony seemed to mind her state of undress, but even he could see she was sufficiently covered by fur so that she was not too much of a distraction. Mindful of his wife beside him, Carl cleared his throat and moved his eyes back over the crowd.

“When I left three days ago to go exploring,” the grey wolf began, “I had fully intended to return before dark that same day. Eighteen hours should have been plenty of time to make an aerial circuit of the surrounding area. I saw lots to report and took a bunch of notes and pictures, but I realized I had gone a little farther north than I had intended so I started on my way back.”

He glanced over at Jon with a small look of embarrassment, remembering Avon’s safety lectures. “During the return flight, I... well, I crashed against the rocky side of a mountain. The rough landing damaged the rudder and upper rotor of the gyrocopter, I banged up my ankle and I lost the radio; as such, I was out of commission and unable to contact anyone. Due to the damage to the copter, I couldn’t fly - and with a sprained ankle, I couldn’t walk very well either - so I wrapped up my foot as best I could and hobbled down on my remaining threes to a nearby large tree growing up on the side of the mountain.”

No one said a word. Everyone’s attention was on him and he squirmed a bit under the intense scrutiny. “I spent the next couple of days beneath the tree trying to stay dry in the rains that followed. As I was able to, I tried to cannibalize some parts of the gyrocopter’s structure to get it back in operation and effect makeshift repairs to the rudder, but the upper rotor was damaged beyond my meager attempts to fix it. In spite of my bum ankle, I managed to roll the gyrocopter down to the plains. Miraculously, the landing gear had survived the rough landing, and since the motor and rear fan were both undamaged, I was able to use it to drive the craft along the ground on its wheels like an airboat across the grass plains. I was unable to fly over anything in my path, so I had to take extra time to go around whatever might be in my way.” He smiled and added, “For all intents, I left in an aircraft and returned almost all the way in a car.” There were a few chuckles.

“What do you mean you returned almost all the way?” Arne asked. Sissy stood behind the injured feline with both of her arms around his neck and shoulders. Kristen smiled, privately remembering the orange cat’s earlier laments of how much she did not like the male she was now clinging to; a life-debt could often change a person’s perspectives.

Carl nodded at the African lion’s question. “It took me a long time to get back here from where I’d gone down and I was losing daylight, so I was going a little faster than I probably should have. You know how tall the wheat-grass is out there on the plains,” he said. “I plowed right into a flock of flightless, horned birds about the size of ostriches that were probably bedding down for the night. Before I could either slow down or go around ‘em, I crashed hard into one.”

“What happened?” Kevin asked, prompting the wolf to continue.

“For a bird, it was awfully solid, like hitting a tree with a car. I think I broke both its legs, and it bleated and thrashed around all over the gyro while the others scattered. I managed to get out without getting brained and limped away into the growing darkness. Since night was coming, I couldn’t travel much farther even with the copter on wheels, so I headed for a solitary tree I could see a short distance away. I suppose I could have run into that just as easily as the hornbird.”

He looked around and then shivered. “I thought I might go back to the bird and kill it for fresh meat if it hadn’t already died on its own, but then I heard something making a call I’ve not heard before.” He stopped, massaged his throat for a moment and then mimicked what he’d heard.

“Hoon, hoon, hoon!”

“Hey, we heard that same call out on the prairie too,” Michael said.

“Gerard and I heard it too,” Aaron added.

Carl nodded. “I never saw what it was, but I surmised that there was another predator out there on the plains besides myself and as its calls got closer, I knew it was going after the injured hornbird. I could hear the bird’s bleats of terror and then this hooning-thing began sounding like a cross between a wildcat and a feral dog when it attacked. I scrambled up the tree as quick as I could before it might come after me, another injured animal.”

He looked around with a bemused expression. “Despite a sprained ankle, fear helps a lot when you need to get up into a tree fast – even for a wolf! I was still wearing my pack and used the short rope I’d had in it to tie myself into the crook of the tree as high as I could go so I wouldn’t fall out during the night. I’d also taken a pistol with me and held it ready, but thankfully I didn’t have to use it.”

He coughed and rubbed a shoulder. “I don’t know how long it took me to fall asleep, but the smell of fresh blood in the air kept me awake for hours. I finally woke up later still in the tree, but our nights are so long that I decided I didn’t want to chance making my way back in the dark and just stayed up there. I found my forgotten PBJ in the pack, but I couldn’t get it to come on to send a message to anyone. I guess I’d either damaged it when I crashed into the mountain or when I smashed into the hornbird, but it was useless. I’d had plenty of sleep already, so I just sat up in the tree and listened to the night sounds.”

He looked around at the faces listening to his tale. “I’ve spent many nights since we got here, simply sitting up and listening to the night around our little valley, but out there on the plains, I heard things I’ve never heard before, and not all of them inviting. I never saw what made any of those noises, not even the hoon, but with an injured foot in unfamiliar territory I had no desire to investigate on my own.” He looked around until he found Dr. Mochizuki. “If my PBJ had been working, I could have recorded the sounds for you. I’m sorry.”

The red panda nodded. “That’s quite understandable,” he said in an uncharacteristic gentle tone. Chieko looked up at him curiously.

“I didn’t leave the tree until the sun came up and then I went back to the copter to see if I could get it started; unfortunately, the bird strike had damaged the motor and it wouldn’t start. I salvaged what I thought might be useful and then left the rest behind; maybe it could have been repaired, but not with anything I had with me.

“I found evidence of the kill nearby, but there was precious little left to identify. The killer either ate just about everything or carried off the remains. The bird must have weighed a few hundred pounds, so the predator must have been rather strong or there was more than one of them. There was a lot of blood all over the grass, so I left the area as quickly as I could before the scent attracted something else I didn’t want to face while injured. Tiny little twin-tail lizards had already started converging to eat up the remaining morsels. I didn’t know we had such little scavengers, but it made sense they were around.

“Since I know that wolf calls can travel for miles, I thought about howling to let Ellie know I was close and on my way home, but since I was injured and wolf howls are unknown here, I really didn’t want to lead one of the night predators to my location.”

“What about your flare gun?”

Carl’s ears went back on his head. “That fell out of my pocket when I was flying over a lake,” he confessed.

Manny looked over at Jon. “That leaves us with just one flare gun in the armory,” he muttered. Carl frowned at that, but at a quiet gesture from the cougar, he continued.

“Walking with three good feet and one bad one is easier than walking upright on one good foot and limping on the other. Although I had a sprained ankle, I was really glad that I could get down on all fours and travel that way. As a human, I would have been stuck. It took me two hours to make it the rest of the way home, though I almost didn’t recognize the place when I got here. The bridge across the river looks busted up and there are now… walls… across the path up here to the cave. What’s up with those?”

“We built them to slow down the pigs,” Hank offered in answer. “They kept rushing up at us and then would run away, doing that several times to keep our attention while the rest of them came at us from inside the cave!”

Carl blinked and looked back at Jon. “Huh?” he asked in puzzlement.

“You want the details now or later?” the cougar replied.

Carl thought about it for a moment and then put his head down in his hands. “Later, I suppose,” he said in a weary tone. “Right now, I would really like to rest up a bit in my own bed if you don’t mind.”

Jon stood up and put a hand on the wolf’s shoulder. “Yeah, you look like you could use the rest. Ellie, put him to bed and then I’ll come by to see him later. We can have an exchange of information when he’s ready.”

“Exchange?” Dara repeated.

“We can tell each other the long versions of our stories — I’ll tell him what happened since he’s been away,” Jon answered, “and he can tell me about the things he saw during his excursion.”

“I’d like to hear about what he found too,” Raine said hopefully.

Carl shook his weary head. “Sorry, I’m too tired right now. Later, please.”

The cheetah did not want to wait, but he could see the fatigue in the wolf’s golden eyes. “Sure,” he said after a moment.

“Thank you.”

***

The dome that Ellie shared with her husband was a little larger that most due to their dual occupancy, but she had made it into a cozy home that was personalized and comfortable. Once she got Carl fully undressed and on his stomach upon their bed, she sat beside him and lovingly groomed his fur with her favorite brush.

He smiled back up at her, but she could see the ordeal he had gone through had sapped his strength. Aside of a few bumps and bruises from the crash and the sprained ankle, he was in relatively good health, but he was as tired as anyone would be and the grooming was relaxing.

Despite that she needed to let him rest a while, there was an internal struggle warring within her. She was emotional and Carl had known her long enough to know that there was something on her mind.

“Okay,” he said in a gentle voice, rolling over to pull both of her hands to him. He set her brush aside and then covered her hands with his own. “Spill it,” he said.

Ellie raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?” she asked unconvincingly.

Carl chuckled and gave her a lupine grin with narrowed eyes. “You’re putting out a scent of anxiety, and you can never keep your tail still when you’re agitated,” he said. “It’s thumping up a storm behind you. You either have something you want to tell me, or there’s something you want to keep from me.”

The female wolf laughed aloud and then leaned forward to give the side of his muzzle yet another affectionate lick. “You know me so well,” she whispered. “Yes, I have something I want to tell you, but was debating whether or not to let you rest first.”

“Tell me now,” Carl replied with a canine grin. “I suspect you’ll explode if I make you wait any longer and I really don’t want to clean up that mess.”

She smiled, and in response, took one of his hands to move it so that it rested upon her middle. Her smile widened into a grin, but she did not say a word. He was puzzled by the gesture for a moment, but then a look of understanding slowly spread across his face as if his wife had just sent him a telepathic message.

“Oh!” he responded with a silly grin. “Really?”

“Really, silly, and there are two!”

Carl swallowed with difficulty. When he could finally speak, it was just one word with emotion.

“Finally!”

“Yes!” Ellie exclaimed in glee. “Finally!”

The deeply delighted sentiment in her husband’s eyes said it all and Ellie freely let the tears fall. She clung to him with her head upon his chest and cried her happiness. Both in their mid-fifties, she and her mate were the eldest members of the colony, and although they had been married for over two decades, they had never been able to have any children as humans even with modern fertility treatments. It seemed that their furman transformations had given them more than just fur, fangs and a tail.

***

Jon knocked on the fiberluminum frame of the wolf’s den. He looked back at Kristen with a smile and heard permission to enter the dwelling. Both cougars pushed through the split blue and white noren curtain that covered the doorway. Ellie stood up from the chair where she had been resting and Carl was sitting up on the edge of the bed, his bandaged ankle hanging off the mattress.

“Jon, Kristen, please come in and have a seat,” the female wolf invited. She positioned two chairs facing the bed and then crawled up on the other side of her husband to make her herself comfortable.

“Thank you,” Jon said.

“How are you feeling?” Kristen asked Carl politely.

The wolf smiled and twitched his whiskers. “Much better now that I’ve had a few hours of rest,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Has… Ellie said anything of interest to you?” Jon asked in hesitation.

Carl laughed aloud and nodded. “She spilled the beans as soon as we got in here. I don’t know if you knew, but we’d been unable to have children back home, but now look at us – we’ll be the first ones with offspring on Bonestell!”

“Congratulations,” the cougars said in unison.

“Thank you,” returned the wolves, also in unison.

Jon smiled. “So, are you ready for us to play catch-up?”

“I am,” said the wolf. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to go first. Before I get into what I found on my journey, I’d like to know what happened here.”

The mountain lion nodded and began by asking, “Remember the difficulty you had transporting the thunderpig your group killed in the hunt back here?” Carl nodded. “Apparently the pigs are more than just mindless beasts and they took great exception to the murder of one of their siblings – at least that’s the way they acted.” Jon then went on to describe in length everything that happened, with Kristen and Ellie both filling in details here and there.

By the time they brought him up to the present, the greater part of an hour had passed and the wolf sat back against his wife shaking his head. “Wow,” he said in a quiet tone. “We had no idea what we were doing.”

Jon’s tail was twitching behind him, evident of the feelings that had surfaced in the retelling of events. “I have since directed that the thunderpigs are off-limits, in an understanding to prevent another such conflict. This is a mistake we paid for with our own blood.”

The wolf nodded. “I can see how others want revenge, but I agree with your reasoning. I think I would have interpreted the actions of the pig you followed out to the prairie in the same way you did, Jon. As long as we leave them alone, I should think they’ll leave us alone in return.”

“Anytime we see them out on the plains,” Ellie added, “we should remain cautious and give them a wide berth.”

“This is an unpopular decision right now,” Kristen said, adjusting one of the straps of her overalls. “Some of them want to make the pigs extinct from this world for killing Avon, Wendy and Gerard.”

“I wouldn’t want to be a part of something that needless,” Carl muttered with a dark expression.

The four of them fell silent for several minutes as they all mused upon the events, but then Carl clapped his hands together once and looked up with a smile.

“My turn,” he said cheerily, trying to break the mood. “I’ve told Ellie some of what I’m about to tell you, but not all of it.”

His wife thumped him on the side of the head with a finger. “You’ve been holding out on me?”

“I have indeed, Honeywoof, but if you’ll behave and stop thumping my head, I may let you stay to hear what I tell our guests!”

“Honeywoof?” Kristen repeated with a grin. She turned to Jon and asked in a deceptively sweet voice, “Now that we’re mated, why don’t you call me pet names like that?”

Instead of answering the question, Jon gave Carl a look of long suffering. “See what you did?”

“Wait…” the wolf muttered. “You’re mated? Are you two… have you… uh, y’know?”

Kristen grinned and leaned forward. “Yes, we are and yes, we have,” she said with a giggle.

“Well then,” Carl said with a sly look at the male lion, “maybe we’ll have kittens to befriend our puppies soon…”

“Don’t be too hasty,” Jon said with a difficult swallow. “We’re in no hurry.”

“Sez you!” Kristen teased.

Ellie had already known about the cougars, of course, so she wrapped her arms around her mate’s shoulders and nuzzled his cheek, her eyes on Jon. “I like the little pet names we use for one another,” she said in a sing-song voice, “but you should hear what we use when we disagree…”

“Okay, I’m getting mixed signals here,” Carl said impishly. “You nuzzle me affectionately, but then you tell these two that it’s not all bliss and we don’t always agree. I don’t think you want to hear my tales.” He pushed her away from him in mock indifference. “Go outside and chase some lil-deer or something.”

The female wolf wrapped her arms around him again and held him tighter. “Nope,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’m a-stayin’ now!”

Kristen laughed at the wolves’ playful banter, but Jon just sighed inwardly. “May I hear your story?” he said in exaggerated seriousness.

Carl winked at Kristen and then composed himself as if he were about to speak in front of a large audience.

“Once upon a time…” he began. Jon finally laughed and shook his head. After the events of the past few days, he knew he should simply enjoy the friendly banter with the wolves. They weren’t normally this playful in public, but he suspected it had everything to do with Ellie’s pregnancy.

“Okay,” Carl said at last in more conversational tones, “most of what I found are just curiosities and remember that what I saw was from the air. I did land a time or two for a closer look at some things and to get samples, but most of the time it was just from a distance. I took a lot of notes and a bunch of pictures of what I saw.”

“So, what did you see?” Kristen asked in barely suppressed curiosity.

“Do you know what a fairy ring is?” the wolf asked.

“Isn’t that a cluster of mushrooms or something that grow in a circle?” the botanist asked.

Ellie nodded. “Legend has it that if you come across a clump of mushrooms growing in a large ring to beware because it’s where fairies dance and do magic rituals. I think that’s a European medieval legend, but ‘shrooms growing in a circle is actually rather common.”

“All correct,” Carl said. “From the air, I could see a number of circular rings that reminded me of fairy rings, so I landed to get a few of the local mushrooms as a sample to bring back. What I found, however, wasn’t a plant of any kind.”

He picked up a camera from the nightstand beside him and queued up a picture on its large preview screen. He handed this to Kristen, who held it in her lap so Jon could see. There was a large circle of bleached pale objects, each looking very much like a white blob of crystal with four three-jointed legs resembling bamboo protruding from its underside.

Jon looked startled and exchanged looks with the lioness beside him. “You were already gone on your flight by the time we got back from our overnight trip to the salt flats,” he said to Carl, “but these look very similar to what we found out there.”

“We called them salt-torts,” Kristen explained, “since they reminded us of the torts that Sissy named when we first got here, but ours were obsidian-black and they were unmoving during the daylight. They covered themselves in a layer of salt and wouldn’t even twitch until night had fallen.”

“Yours are white and look like they were crawling when you took this picture,” Jon added.

“There were about thirty of them spaced around a circle about ten feet across, all walking together in that ring formation through the grass,” Carl remarked. “Every time I saw them, they were heading due south by my cheap plastic compass, so I’m guessing it was a winter migration, though I don’t understand why they were moving as a ring.”

“What did you call them?” Kristen asked.

The wolf shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing fancy,” he said. “I think in my notes I simply called them walking fairy rings, but that was only because of what they looked like. I’m not too particular on what they finally get named on the official books.”

“What else did you see?” Jon prompted.

“Let’s see… I saw rolling beetles—”

“What, like a dung beetle?”

“No, they were literally rolling, head over tail, end over end like a wheel. I don’t know how they kept from getting dizzy, but those I saw up on the side of the mountain among the rocks. I also saw a meteor crater far to the west half filled with water; I’d say it was recent, probably made within the past few decades.”

“I hope that’s not a common lake-making occurrence,” Ellie stated with a frown.

“Speaking of lakes, did Avon tell you about anything I’d reported to him over the radio?”

Jon shook his head. “No, not really. He told me you’d seen a bunch of other animals that we don’t have here in our little valley that we might check out as possible food sources, but that was about it.”

“I found another lake to the north that was nestled up against the mountains, a big one many miles long and across. That’s where I lost my flare gun. Flying over the water just to see what I could see, I noticed a huge shape swimming beneath the lake that reminded me of the old fuzzy pictures and drawings of the Loch Ness Monster, only this plesiosaur had two long limbs stretched out in front of it that could have been arms or two heads on thick necks. The flare gun slipped out of its holster beside my chair as I was banking around to see this thing.”

“Bonestell has a lake monster!” Kristen quipped with a smile.

Carl laughed. “That’s almost the same thing that Avon said and he cautioned me to stay away from it or it might jump out at me like a bass going after a mosquito. I never did see the thing surface, but its size and shape were enough to keep me from taking a closer look.”

“That was probably wise,” Jon replied.

“As Avon told you,” the wolf continued, “I saw other animals. Most were ruminant mammals, all somewhat deer, caribou or moose-like, and then there was that flock of horned birds I ran into.”

“Were they horned like the kirin deer that’s here in the valley?” Kristen asked.

“I haven’t seen the kirin deer to know your reference,” Carl replied, “but these birds were about the size of an ostrich, had back-folding knees and a head on a long flexible neck like an ostrich, but each of these birds had a sharp boney ridge that started from the base of its skull and came up over the top of its head, kinda like a dorsal fin. I assume it’s for defense or mating challenges. I only got to see the one I plowed into briefly, but I’d already seen others out on the plains earlier from the air. Besides those, there was something else I found out on the prairie that I could have easily run into besides the birds, thunderpigs or anything else out there.”

“What was that?” Kristen prompted.

“Transparent trees. They grew together in clumps, and from a distance they were hard to see.”

“Transparent trees…” Kristen repeated with great interest. “Did they glow in the dark like Rose’s phosphorescent shrubs?”

“Not that I know of. They were just… transparent.”

“I hope you brought back a sample or something for me to look at.”

Carl smiled, picking up his pack from the floor beside the bed. “As a matter of fact, I did. I knew our resident botanist would want to see something like this.” He pulled out a long container and untwisted its cap. He reached into the canister and then pulled his hand out, but Kristen saw nothing in his grasp. He held out his hand to her and she looked at it curiously.

“There’s nothing there,” she said with a frown. “Are you making it up?”

“It’s transparent, remember? Here, take it.”

The lioness reached out to his hand, but his palm was the only thing she felt. Her brow furrowed when she looked back at him.

The wolf laughed and peered back at her with a toothy lupine grin. “Gotcha!” he said merrily, grasping her hand with his fingers.

Instead of smiling back, Kristen stuck out her bottom lip. “You had me going,” she said with a pout, retrieving her hand. “I really thought you had found a transparent tree…”

Ellie thumped her mate again. “Carl, don’t tease her like that!”

“Okay, okay,” said the wolf, smarting from the latest thump in the same place. “Kristen, turn around.”

The lioness crossed her arms, refusing to turn only to be at the butt of another joke, so Jon looked for her. Standing in a short pot near the door, was something like clear plastic. The look of surprise on his face out of the corner of her eye made Kristen begin to wonder. Since she still did not turn around, Jon got up out of his seat, retrieved the pot from the other side of the room and then set it on top of the round table behind the botanist’s chair. If she wanted to see it, she would have to turn around.

“Take a look at this,” Jon said.

Kristen turned only halfway, still sure she was being a fool, but then the overhead lamp reflected off something in a pot on the table. She turned finally and stared dumbfounded at a small clear sapling only a foot tall. It looked like a glass or plastic recreation of a tiny tree with long, slender leaves, all of which was transparent.

She stuck her nose up next to it, and by examining it closely, she could actually see some internal details within the trunk and limbs through its bark. “This is amazing!” she gasped. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”

Carl laughed again. “I only brought a small one since it could fit in my pack and it’s extremely lightweight, but the mature trees like this grew only about six or seven feet tall.”

Kristen looked back at her mate and grinned foolishly. “I have to go back out there to see them!” she said.

“All in good time,” Jon replied with a nod.

Carl lapped up some water from a nearby cup and then appeared lost in thought for a moment as if trying to think of other curiosities he had seen. “There is one thing I found that’s a bit of a mystery,” he said after a moment. “After I’d crashed on the side of the mountain, but before the rains began, I saw a curious glow on the eastern horizon after the sun went down. It wasn’t bright and didn’t reflect much on the overhead clouds, but it was noticeable enough that at first I thought it was the glow of city lights.”

“City lights!” Jon gasped. “Are you sure? This place is supposed to be uninhabited according to two years of orbital satellite observations.”

“No, I’m not sure, Jon. I’m just telling you that was the first thing I thought of when I saw it. Later when I was down on the prairie on my way back, I couldn’t see it, so it was either something I could only see from a higher elevation or it wasn’t glowing anymore. I don’t know what it was, but it got my attention.”

“Hmm, we may have to send someone to check it out at some time in the future,” the mountain lion mused aloud. “Headquarters would want to know and I know that I’m certainly curious.”

“Unfortunately, we won’t be able to fly out there to investigate unless we can go back for the gyro where I left it and find a way to repair the damage.” Carl looked at Ellie and said, “I’m all for going back for it. Just having it for a few days helped make a major discovery and I’d like to have it back to make more.”

“Those are some good discoveries,” Kristen said, still examining her little tree, “I don’t mean to offend, but I wouldn’t call any of them major, and that’s including this wonderful thing.”

The wolf smiled. “No, I wouldn’t call any of those major either, but I haven’t gotten to everything yet.”

“I think this is where I was left out,” Ellie said with another thump to the side of her mate’s head. Carl poked her in the ribs and she danced out away from his fingers. He gave her a look of irritation with narrowed eyes and then took another sip of water.

“Now,” Carl said in lowered tones as if he was afraid someone might overhear, “remember when I told everyone that I had crashed on the side of a mountain? I don’t think anyone noticed that I didn’t say why I crashed. If someone had asked, the conversation would have taken a dramatic turn.”

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere interesting,” Jon said.

“While I was flying up the slope of one of the largest mountains I’ve seen in this range, I ran into wind shears that forced me to a lower elevation. On my way down I spotted a really deep, dark canyon as if the mountain itself had been cleaved nearly in two at that place. The canyon was so abysmal and its sides were so sheer that it was in perpetual gloom, but right at the edge of it were deep grooves gouged into the rock – grooves that looked as if they might also have been tremendously scorched at some time in the past. I’m no geologist, but I’ve done enough mountain climbing, cave exploring and hiking across places like the Grand Canyon that they looked immediately out of place. The gouges were weather-worn, but the scorch marks were still there.”

“What caused them?” Kristen asked, her attention back upon the storytelling wolf.

“I landed to investigate that very thing,” Carl explained, “and you’ll be surprised at what I found.” Looking at both cougars, he asked cryptically, “Do you remember why our colony is called Second Chance?”

Jon frowned at the apparent non-sequitur. “Avon suggested it because this is the second attempt at colonization on Bonestell.”

“That’s right,” Carl said with a nod. He went back to his pack and Ellie watched curiously over his shoulder. He pulled out something thin and flat with a bit of a curve. It was about ten inches long and six inches wide. The wolf passed it to Jon, who took it with a strange feeling of excitement.

“Here’s a look at what was to be the First Chance,” the wolf said. Across one side of the weathered piece of metal in the mountain lion’s hand paws were written words in English engraved into its surface.

“Oh my goodness!” Kristen gasped.

“You found it!” Jon whispered, unable to take his eyes off the words, ‘SS Ferdinand Magellan’.

Carl nodded. “I pried that hatch nameplate off the side of the missing colony ship. The wreckage is wedged tight into that canyon spanning its width. Each end of the ship is resting upon the mountain, but there’s a bottomless crevasse directly beneath its middle and a large overhang of rock above it.”

“But… what happened to it?” Kristen asked. “Why is it there?”

“I found no clues why it was miles off course to the north of this place,” Carl said, “but something drove it down into the mountain. Both of its wings were sheared off, the fuselage is lying over mostly on its starboard side, and the front quarter of the vessel was smashed in. I’m sure the bridge was pulverized upon impact. The large cargo hatches of the ship were suspended above the open maw below it, but I managed to find an open service airlock aft near the engines. I crawled inside and looked around with my flashlight torch, but it looks as if a fire had spread all through the insides, probably due to the pressurized, oxygen-rich shipboard atmosphere igniting. I found very little of anything remotely salvageable, so I pried off the nameplate to bring back as proof.”

“What about… the passengers?” Ellie asked in hushed voice.

Carl shook his head. “I found no bodies,” he said, “not even burned bones. It’s been ten years since the crash, so I’m sure local scavengers like the little twin-tail lizards must have disposed of any remains.”

“What about the cargo,” Jon asked, “or the cryogenic capsules for the stockyard animals they were bringing with them? We didn’t revive ours until we’d landed.”

Carl frowned. “The cargo bay doors were all split open above the crevasse, so I’m sure anything not tied down fell into its depths, and the crash impact probably broke any tie-down straps in the cargo bay. I didn’t find the cryo-chamber, but from how intense the fire was that spread through the ship, anything in them probably cooked in their sleep.” He frowned at Jon. “Some of the internal bulkheads looked warped, though not from the crash. I suspect a fire ignited upon impact burned hot enough to soften the metal, but something must have extinguished it or the whole ship would have burned up and fallen apart into the canyon.”

“Fire suppression system must have kicked in,” Jon supposed aloud, “but not before it could do much good. I’m sure the ship’s systems were all out of whack from the crash.”

“That’s possible.” Carl was thoughtful for a moment, but then looked back down into his pack. “Here, Jon. I brought something back for Avon, but you can have it now.”

It was a darkly scorched coffee cup, but the cougar could still see the Magellan’s name and ship’s logo engraved into its sides. He turned it over, looking it over inside and out, and despite what it had probably gone through, it was in better condition than he would have thought.

“Thanks, with some spit and polish, I can probably use this for my drink cup,” Jon said with some amusement. “After the crash and fire, how did this survive?”

“I actually found it outside on the ground near the wreckage. I guess it tumbled out from one of the many splits in the sides of the ship. There was little else inside that I could find in the time I was there. I spent two hours going through what I could of the ship, but I knew something of this importance was too big to keep to myself, so I decided to head back with the news and forget further exploring for the day.”

“Wait,” Jon said with a raised eyebrow, “you said you landed when you found the Magellan. I thought you crashed there.”

The wolf shook his head. “No, you’re getting ahead of my story.”

“Then why didn’t you call back with the news? I know you were making periodic reports back to Avon on your radio.”

“I lost the radio,” Carl confessed, “but not like the flare gun. Before I found the aft airlock, I was on top of the ship trying to get to another open hatch I’d seen, but the surface was slick with the growth of some kind of lichen and I slipped. I caught myself by clinging to a pitot tube sticking out from the hull, but the radio I was carrying fell out of my belt holster into the depths of the canyon. I crawled my way back aft and that’s when I discovered the open airlock I’d missed seeing before.”

“You’re going to have to put everything you carry on lanyards so you won’t lose anything else on your next outing,” Jon said with a smirk.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Ellie remarked, but Carl just grunted.

“Okay, go on,” Jon prompted.

“When I’d decided it was time to leave,” Carl continued, “I tried to take off, but when I was only a few yards up, an immense bird swooped up out of the depths of the dark canyon and broadsided my gyrocopter.”

“A bird?” Kristen said with a tilt to her head.

“The rotor blades injured it somewhat,” the wolf said with a nod, “but it flew off and didn’t return right away. My copter was damaged from the collision and I lost altitude quickly, crashing onto the mountainside farther below.”

“What did this bird look like?” Jon asked, leaning forward with the nameplate still in his hands.

Carl gestured toward the camera that Kristen had set on the table behind her when she examined her little transparent tree. “There’s a picture of it on the memory card,” he said. “The best I can describe is that it looked like a black flying wing.”

Jon blinked, remembering the large bird that had been seen flying high up in the atmosphere only a few days ago. Kristen picked up the camera and thumbed on its preview screen again while Jon looked on. Ellie left the bed to get close enough to see the photos too. The lioness flipped past a number of aerial pictures of landscapes and animals, interior and exterior shots of the Magellan, and then she came to a couple shots of the giant bird. From the photos, it looked as if the avian had no tail feathers and virtually no neck so that its head blended in with its body. It almost looked headless, being all wing, and that wingspan looked like it could have been over thirty-feet. Adding to its strange appearance were stereoscopic eyes that were huge in relation to the size of its head, almost looking like large round windows.

“It first flew by and hit me so fast that I didn’t get a good look at it; I had to fight the controls to keep from going down into the canyon, but I later saw the bird back swooping in and out of the crevasse. I’m guessing it must have a nest down in there.”

Jon studied the weathered nameplate. “You’ve discovered the missing colony ship, clearing up at least one mystery.” He sat back in his chair. “This will make for an interesting report back to Earth. Is there anything more you saw to add to the account?”

Carl shook his head. “No, that’s pretty much all of it. Limping back home the rest of the way was uneventful. You’re welcome to my notebook and the camera’s memory if you want to include any of it in your report. You may find a few notes for things like insects and plants I saw, but I’m sure it will all be ignored once they read about the Magellan.”

Jon stood up and stretched. “Well, Carl, I think you deserve to take all the rest you need for your ankle to heal. I’m sure you’ll be a popular wolfman with the rest of the colony once news gets around on your major find. Be prepared to tell your story over and over,” he added with a smile.

“Oh, I’ve been expecting it ever since I started on my way back,” Carl told him. “You’d better go make your report to headquarters while everything I’ve told you is fresh in your mind.”

“Good idea. Kris and I will leave you two alone now. Good job with all this, Carl. Welcome back.”

***

The communications unit that Jon and Avon used to upload messages to the overhead satellite for tachyon-burst relay to Earth had the ability to send all types of messages. Avon had usually typed up his reports and sent simple text messages, but for this special report, Jon wanted to send a video dispatch. For this, however, he would need a relatively quiet and private spot in which to record it before attaching copies of Carl’s notes and digital photographs, and he knew the perfect place.

He reached his favorite perch up on the side of Avonaco Mountain after a good walk up the trail. Since he carried the com unit, he unable to go up on four feet, but the well-worn path from the mouth of the cavern up to the horizontal flat slab of rock was still easily hiked. He could hear muted conversations below, but they were faint enough that he doubted the simple recorder microphone would pick up on them.

He set up the unit with its three-dimensional lenses facing him and then thought about what he was going to say. He had the nameplate with him and he intended to start the report holding it up in front of him.

Jon tapped the remote control and began recording. Before he had even provided the typical identification and call sign for their Bonestellan location, he smiled and said, “Guess what we found?”

***

Two minutes after hitting the Submit control to send his video message to Earth, the unit emitted a ping to indicate confirmation that the overhead geosynchronous satellite had relayed the signal, which was immediately followed by a different chirp.

Jon raised an eyebrow. He had not even had time to shut off the com unit before an incoming message was relayed down to him. He sat down on the perch, letting his feet dangle toward the valley below and opened the new missive.

It was a response to his first message, acknowledging his report with condolences to the loss of life in the conflict with promises to contact the families of those who had died on Bonestell. Also included was his official promotion to captain of the colony that included several “Eyes Only” files meant only for said captain.

He decided he would look over the secure files at another time. He could have read them here on his perch in privacy, but he was not in the mood. Later, he thought to himself.

***

A response to his report on the Magellan came four days later. With the weather warming back up a little and the skies only partly cloudy, he took the com unit back up to his perch to view it.

The news had generated a great deal of excitement on Earth, and some of the photos and videos that Carl had provided were being circulated in news reports all across the world. The mystery had deepened, since the cause of the crash could only be speculated upon, but the big wheels within the Anthro Human Colonization Program and the Terran Colonization Coalition were eager to have more information, video and photographs.

Stockholm’s first knee-jerk reaction was to send a ship out for a full investigation and salvage of the wreckage, but it was determined that the cost would be too high for such a major endeavor. Funds were already tied up preparing another colony ship to go out in a different direction, so the message Jon read contained a heartfelt request for the Second Chance colonists to conduct a full-scale investigation of their own. They were to do everything possible to retrieve the Ferdinand Magellan’s nigh-indestructible black box so its contents could be transmitted back to Earth. A full set of schematics of the vessel were attached to the dispatch to use as a map so they would know where to look for it.

Jon closed out the message that ended with congratulations and other pleasantries. He set the unit aside and then rolled over onto his back on the slab of sun-warmed rock. He stared up into the floating clouds without actually seeing anything specific, visualizing the enormous undertaking they had been requested to perform.

As he mused over these thoughts, the dried leaf of a deciduous tree floated on the gentle wind in front of him. He reached out, snared it with a hand paw and then held it up in front of his eyes. It was a subtle reminder that winter was still coming, and although yet a couple months away, he felt they still had a lot of preparations to make before they might be socked in their cavern for weeks or even months at a time by the weather. They still had no real idea how subtle or harsh that Bonestell’s species of Old Man Winter might be in this place and they needed to be prepared for anything the local Mother Nature might throw at them.

He glanced back at the com unit and made a quick decision. He set up its touch keyboard to tap out a brief text message in reply and then quickly composed his response. He was certain they would not like what he had to say back home, but some things were more important.

Congratulations and adulations at our discovery appreciated, but the request for a more thorough investigation of the “First Chance” site will have to wait until spring. Preparations for the unknown conditions of our upcoming winter must take priority, but you can be assured the Ferdinand Magellan will not be forgotten. 

Jonathan Sunset, Captain of the Second Chance colony on Bonestell.

***

One of the duties of the colony captain was to box up the personal belongings of any Fur who might have lost his or her life in the service of their new home. Jon had already done the distasteful task in Gerard and Wendy’s domes, the latter of which still contained the mixed scents of fear, blood and death. Anything of sentimental value that could be stored for some possible day in the future when they might be returned to their families on Earth were sealed in containers sent along specifically for that purpose. Anything that could be reused within the colony would be returned to supply and rest was to be burned. Sadly, there had been little to save from Wendy’s demolished home.

He had purposely left Avon’s quarters for the last, and for this he had humbly asked Kristen to help him. He had never wanted the grizzly bear’s position and had never wished him ill. On the contrary, Jon had liked Avon and had considered him a friend, so it did not feel right to be going through his belongings.

It had taken two hours to sort everything and get things ready for their eventual storage in either the sealed containers or the supply dome and now they were simply cleaning out the constructed building. They were in no short supply of the geodesic segments, and there was no one else who might need to move into the bear’s former home, so Jon supposed they would probably just dismantle it at some point and save back the parts for when they might be needed. The domes that had been damaged in the attack had all been repaired, excepting for Wendy’s place. That too would be disassembled, but some of the panels would have to be set aside as too damaged to be usable.

Jon looked across the empty area inside the living space and began sweeping out the dust and fur that had accumulated on the floor near the curved walls of the structure. He was silent as he worked, but after several moments, Kristen spoke to him from the doorway.

“What now?” she asked quietly.

He looked up. “I guess we put away our cleaning supplies, take the containers to storage, and then go find something to eat. I’m hungry.”

“I’m hungry too,” said the lioness, “but I was talking about your role as Captain. Have you chosen your First Officer yet? You’ll need to appoint someone and inform headquarters.”

The male lion looked back at her and shrugged. “I haven’t really given it any thought,” he confessed. “Do you want the position?”

Kristen chuckled, knowing full well from the twinkle in his eyes that he had only said it in jest, but she shook her head. “Nope, that’s not a responsibility I’ve ever desired. You’ll have to pick someone else, Honeycat.”

Jon smiled. “Honeycat, is it?”

“Honeywoof was already taken.”

“Hmm, well, choose something else, please. I wouldn’t want you to get me and Carl mixed up, y’know?”

Kristen walked up to him and wrapped her arms around his middle, laying her head up against his chest. She listened to his heartbeat with her eyes closed for a moment while he gently stroked her head hair with his claw tips.

“What about Norman or Hank?” she murmured.

“No, I don’t want you to call me Norman or Hank as pet names either.”

Kristen looked up at him with a lopsided smirk. “Stinker,” she said. “I meant them for your second-in-command!”

Jon smiled at her for a moment, but then he shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t think either of them are leadership material. As morbid as it sounds, if something happened to me, whomever is my second would have to step in and lead everyone – someone who would have the best interests of the colony in mind, not their own.”

“I suppose that lets out Dr. Mochizuki?”

“I’m afraid so. I have nothing against him, but I’ve heard some of the things he’s said when he didn’t know I was within earshot. I do think he’s good at what he does so I would like to keep his focus on that alone.”

“Who would you suggest?”

Jon thought about it for a moment. “Ken, Carl or Arne,” he replied at last. “Possibly Jasmine.”

“Jasmine? Isn’t she awfully young to be a leader?”

“I don’t think age has anything to do with it. After what she’s gone through in recent years, she’s had to do a lot of growing up.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t know if she’d be right for the job. Why’d you pick Arne?”

“Have you seen how good he is with the animals?” Jon asked. “They trust him – far more than they trust me, and he and I get along okay now.”

“It was the horses that didn’t like you and they’re all gone. I don’t think the other animals care one way or another about you, except at feeding time.”

“Yeah, thanks… I think.”

“You and Arne may get along better now than you did back on Earth, but I don’t think some would follow him even if he was appointed by committee.”

Jon frowned. His short list was getting shorter by the second. “Do you have a problem with Ken or Carl?” he asked.

“None at all. They’re both well-liked and both are responsible.”

“And they’re both wolves. Is there anyone else you would recommend? Equal time for the ladies? Ellie, perhaps?”

Kristen thought about it for a moment but shook her head. “No, not really. Ellie might if you asked her, and she is self-sufficient, I’ll give you that. I’ve never heard of Carl setting himself above her, but sometimes I think she looks to him for direction too much.” 

“Okay,” Jon said at last. “I think I’ll offer the position to Ken. As a doctor, he’s used to responsibilities.”

“I think he’s a good choice.”

“First, however, I need lunch. Want to join me?”

***

Ken shook his head. “Sorry, Jon, but I must decline,” the red wolf said. “It’s true that I’m used to responsibilities, but I already have my paws full trying to keep everyone healthy in an alien environment. Everything from overgrown hogs down to tiny spiders is trying to kill us and my days are already full examining and testing everything around us to make sure what we eat, smell and touch is safe enough.”

He shrugged and sat down on a roller stool with his hands in the pockets of his medical smock. “Did you know that we’d all come close to getting scurvy?”

Jon’s eyebrows went up. “Scurvy?”

“I didn’t realize that we weren’t getting enough vitamin C until I did a blood test on Ellie after Jenni informed me she was pregnant. Do you remember when you started getting a small tablet with every meal?”

“Yeah, I figured it was just a vitamin supplement. Neither Kim nor Yuki ever explained what it was, only that Avon said that everyone needed it.”

Ken nodded. “We have plenty of vitamin C tablets, but we’ll eventually need to find a natural source if we can. We’ve discovered foods that are nutritious for us, but most of them have been low on ascorbic acid. There’s almost none in the fish and birds we’ve eaten, but I hesitate to tell you where the greatest source I’ve found is.”

“The pigs?”

“The pigs. However, some of the other deer-like animals we’ve tried have a decent amount in their metabolisms too, so as long as we can keep a steady diet, we should be okay. I may need you to exercise your authority and inform everyone that I need to give them all a physical to make sure no one else is lacking in anything. Eating local meat and vegetables, I should have been checking everyone periodically anyway.”

Jon nodded. “Good idea. Speaking of colony authority…”

The red wolf looked apologetic. “I appreciate that you consider me to be leadership material, but as you can see, I think I’m needed more right where I am.”

The cougar nodded. “Yes, of course, you’re right, Ken. Thanks anyway.”

“You’re welcome, Jon.”

***

“Hi, Jon, what can I do for you?”

The mountain lion sat down next to the grey wolf at a table in the Great Dome. Carl had just finished a meal of fish and local vegetables and was now just relaxing with a cup of coffee. Ellie was away somewhere and there was no one else in the dome at the moment.

“Hi, Carl. I was hoping you could help me out with something; it would help the whole colony, actually.”

The wolf stared back at him, his amber eyes steady on the cougar. “Sure, what do we need?”

“It’s been several days since we lost Avon and I’ve already been officially appointed by Stockholm as the new captain. What I need now is a first officer to be my second-in-command.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s necessary. You want me to help you pick someone?”

“No, I already have someone picked,” Jon said with a smile. “I just need you to accept the position.”

Carl blinked. “You want me? Out of everyone here? Is it because I made the discovery of the year?”

Jon shook his head. “It has nothing to do with finding the Magellan,” he said. “I need someone who’s responsible and is experienced enough to handle things if I’m not around. You’re the most qualified of everyone here.”

“More than Dr. Mochizuki or Dr. Wilder?”

“More so than either of them. They both have their paws full with other important responsibilities.”

Carl looked interested. “Anyone else?”

Jon smiled, remembering something Avon used on him months ago. “You really don’t want the job, do you?”

Carl looked amused. “It’s not that – I was just surprised. Sure, if I’m the wolfman you want, you’ve got me for as long as you need me.”

The feline looked relieved. “Thanks, Carl. I’ll announce it tonight when we’re all gathered for second supper. I’ll get with you later and go over your duties, but you don’t need to be concerned. I’ll be taking care of things most of the time, only occasionally delegating things for you to do for me.”

“Do you have something you need to run off to do right now?”

“No, not really,” Jon confessed.

“How about now? With my sprained ankle, I have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and I’m rather bored. You’d have a captive and attentive audience.”

Jon nodded. “Okay, we can do it now, but let’s go back to my quarters. I have some contingency plans you’ll need to know about if anything should happen to me, but I don’t want to discuss those out in the open.”

Carl started to gather up his tray and dishes, but Jon grabbed them. “You go on ahead, Carl. I’ll put these away and then will right behind you.”

“As you wish, boss. See you there.”

Chapter 17

Shade

Dara Turner walked quietly through the huge, main passage of the cavern, just as she had many times in recent months. The light from her helmet lamp illuminated her way, but her movements down on all fours cast shifting shadows all around her. At times she thought she saw something menacing in a side alcove only for it to be the silhouette of stone outcrops, but this was becoming so common during her solo sojourns into the mountain that she rarely jumped at them anymore.

The main passage had not yet taken her all the way through the dry mountain, though its huge dimensions as it meandered always seemed to remain about the same. She had fully expected to find another large cave opening on the other side of the mountain range, but as yet the passage seemed to be endless for her slow gait. It could take years to fully explore all the corridors of the cavern system.

There were numerous side passages that she had explored one by one, marking the entrance to each with a bit of bright yellow surveyor’s ribbon. Sometimes she went as far as she could along one of them only to find a sudden dead end; there were others that went just so far before taking an abrupt upturn where it became too narrow for her ursine bulk to go, or at a pit that dropped to depths unfathomable. Although she was courageous enough to probe the darkness of the mountain on her own, she was not so foolhardy as to attempt exploration of such risky places by herself.

In the wavering shadows of her lamp, she spotted another side tunnel that was not marked. She had been by this way a number of times, but she did not recall having seen that one before. That was the trouble with shifting shadows – an actual opening in the wall could easily be mistaken for just another shadow.

Turning with curiosity, she headed for the passage to see if there was anything worth seeing. More often than not, the stone avenues held no interest for anyone but a geologist such as herself since a dry cavern such as this rarely had any distinctive formations. Despite this, she was always hopeful something else might turn up in addition to rock strata that relayed the histories of the mountain itself.

***

Kevin settled down on a large boulder high up on the side of the mountain. He sniffed the air with his eyes closed, sifted the scents and matched them up with his memories. After six months on Bonestell, the fennec fox could identify only half of what he smelled on the wind, but most were so familiar to him as to be comforting, even if he did not necessarily know what some of them were associated with.

The breezes were picking up as the sun begun to sink below the western horizon, but the large ears of the fennec fox caught more than just sounds and the wind. A butterfly-like insect of black and white patterns slapped into his left ear and Kevin opened one eye to look up at it in amusement. He plucked it out and then let it go to continue on its way over the mountain with the winds. The errant bug fluttered up and around in the air currents for a moment, but then it was taken right out of the air by a bird at point on another flock of migratory avians heading south.

Kevin watched as the previously unknown flock of bird species swooped over his head around the last peak of the mountain range and dipped down toward small lake of the valley to settle in for the night. The water seemed to be a consistent stop for migrating creatures and the myriad of birds that had flown in over the past few days had become a nuisance to the Furs that lived there – to all but Dr. Mochizuki, that is. The biologist was taking photos and all the feather samples he could get his hand paws onto; some of the avian visitors took exception to his proximity, flogging his ears if he got too close, but the red panda was persistent.

The late-season flowers that had bloomed in the forest had also become a source of territorial squabbling amongst the birds as they all fought over the nectar. The din was often deafening and it was an irritation so loud that several of the Furs threatened to set off firecrackers or other homemade noisemakers to frighten them away. Kevin was amazed that none of them had followed through with such threats, but as yet no one had done so.

Still, the overall noise pollution made it difficult to hear anything in the vicinity of the cavern, and it did not seem to make a difference if the sun was up or not. Some species of the migrating birds were diurnal while others were nocturnal. The Furs could only hope that the recent cooler temperatures would shrivel up the flower blooms soon so the birds would leave them in peace.

The unicorn-like kirin deer had departed the small valley a month and a half earlier after staying only days, apparently rested from their travels and ready to continue on to whatever lands to the south where they might spend their winter.

The missing horses had been seen far out on the prairie by hunting parties, but there had been no chance of catching them. They appeared to be healthy and enjoying their freedom, likely becoming this world’s new herd of Arabian Mustangs, but first they would have to survive their first winter just as the Furs would.

The tan fennec fox heaved a sigh and looked down upon the dusk-lit valley. He had climbed up to check on his weather instruments, though after he had recorded their readings into a pocket paper notebook, he had decided to climb higher just to see what he could see.

The peak of Avonaco Mountain was the shortest at the end of the mountain range and although it was not tall enough for a perpetual, year-round snow cap like the others to the north, the recent cold front had left its crown dusted with a fine powder. Watching the weather was not Kevin’s only responsibility, but it was certainly his most important one and his skills at forecasting were slowly improving with experience. If he read the conditions right this time, they could have their first frost down on the valley floor within a week.

Kevin tucked his notebook into a pocket and hopped down off the boulder, startling a squarie dabbit out from beneath its edge. The small creature had a few native shell nuts tucked into its cheeks as it scurried away. There were many animals in the areas that were storing up food for the coming season and the Furs were no exception.

In the two months since Jon Sunset had assumed command of the colony, preparations for the unknown conditions of the winter season had continued daily, and it seemed they might actually be prepared to face whatever nature threw at them.

Every dome they had originally built had been emptied, moved further back into the cavern and then reoccupied. Modular pens for the animals had then been constructed inside the cave where the domes had once stood. The animals did not yet occupy the new paddocks, but in the event of inclement weather, they could be moved inside the protection of the cave where the temperature remained constant year-round and they would be out of the elements. They would still get the benefit of fresh air by the entrance, but this also meant that the smell of the animals would be drawn into the cavern system for all to enjoy.

Cleaning up after the livestock would be a chore for everyone that would have to be maintained throughout the winter, but it would be a necessity to the survival of the animals as well as themselves. The problem still to be worked out is where the waste would be stored through the winter months. No one wanted it inside the cavern, so it would likely have to be taken out by wheelbarrow and deposited near the garden plots for use the following spring.

One key project had taken the majority of the colonists over a month to perform. The small river that flowed from the lake had been dug out deeper and the dirt and rock taken from it had been used to build up the southern perimeter of the lake by nearly six feet. They had experienced relatively dry weather in which to work, but Carl had assured them all that their labors would save the gardens and the rest of the valley from flooding as it had in the past. Excess water would be held back by the new, higher shoreline and channeled down the deeper riverbed through woods and out across the plains along its original natural course.

A new bridge of stone and clay had also been built across the river from the valley to the cavern pathway, and the rock walls erected as protection against the thunderpigs had been strengthened as well. The alpha moon had moved through all its phases twice since the Battle of Second Chance and there had been no further incidents with the giant porcine natives. Some of the Furs had grumbled against their new captain on his stance forbidding retaliation against the pigs, but the various projects around the colony had kept everyone too busy to do much more than grouse at first. In time, even those individuals forgot to complain.

As a result of all the hard work, just about all of the Terran Furs were in much better physical shape now than most of them had ever been before in their lives. They were stronger, had more stamina and were in better health than they had enjoyed even since their transformation into furmankind; good, hard work often benefited new colonies to other worlds, whether human or furman. There would be a lot of inactivity once winter set in earnest, so it would be better to start out in good physical condition.

An alcove back in the coolness of the cavern serving as the pantry of preserved food was packed with meat they had taken from herds in the vicinity that were safe to hunt and eat. The Terran vegetables they had been able to grow in the gardens, plus all the local edible veggies they had found had also added to the packaged food they had brought from Earth. As many containers as they could spare were filled with water from the local mountain spring and stored in the event the source became frozen over during colder months since an underground stream within the cavern had never been discovered.

Numerous ricks of wood had been stacked in out of the weather. Most of the firewood and kindling had been taken from all the dead wood they could find within the small forest that surrounded the valley, though some trees out closer to the prairie had also been felled and chopped up in order to bolster their stash.

The fiberluminum panels of the Furs’ domes were insulated, but would be unlikely to hold off the cold of snow for months at a time. The supply manifest did include efficient space heaters, but in the constant temperature of the cavern, they should be warm enough with their fur and the bedding they had brought along without having to resort to them very often.

As he meandered along an animal trail in the waning light, Kevin looked down the side of the mountain toward the lake that was barely visible through the trees. He could not see the opening from where he was, but in his introspective musing, the small fox knew that finding the cavern had been a Godsend for their survival. He had never known whether the original colony site had been chosen because of the cavern or due to other factors, but he had personally been thankful for its existence.

In previous months, Ivan had petitioned heavily that they should move the colony to the eastern hills that he and Rose had discovered, believing all their survival needs could be provided by the forest. Not only could the woods provide enough lumber to be used in the actual construction of houses, but permanent structures could be laid out in a real town. Why should they simply just survive for the required five years or longer? Starter colonies of Furs often continued to exist on those same worlds even after human settlements later migrated to them, so why should they not have real homes on this one?

There were some who were nostalgic and believed they should stay put right where they had set up especially since they had already put so much recent work into it, but many more were intrigued by the idea of solid homes and their captain was one of them. The topic had come up one night during second supper with the pros and cons bandied back and forth across the meal.

There were many good ideas and it was even brought up that if the winter turned out to be especially harsh, the cavern site could still be retained as a wintering location where they could migrate to for the cold months instead of abandoning it altogether. Before signing up for the program, Carl and Ellie’s home had been in Jackson, Wyoming, but they had also had another house in St. Augustine, Florida where they usually stayed through the winter. Knowing they would never occupy them again, the couple had sold both homes, but it was the memory of the practice they had brought up in example.

There were no rules that stated that a starter colony had to stay in the same place it had begun and some had already begun to visualize new homes, but in the end, Jon had tabled the discussion until such time as they had weathered the coming winter. Once they knew how good or bad conditions might be, the knowledge could help determine their future.

Kevin descended down the side of the mountain and passed the octagonal solar array panels that generated power for the lights, stoves and other devices they used within the cavern. Solar energy collection technology had improved by leaps and bounds over the past century and even the diffused light of an overcast sky could generate the power they stored into efficient cells.

Although none had been set up, the supplies also included a set of four turbine towers for wind-generated power. The solar collector up on the side of the mountain seemed to provide all the energy they had needed so far, but if the colony ever moved to another location, the wind-system might be required.

The fennec fox reached the cavern entrance just as a hunting party was heading down the zigzag path. Carl was leading several Furs out into the woods to see if they could bring down some of the arrowheads. A final reaping from the gardens had brought in a last big bounty and someone had suggested a large meal to celebrate the fall harvest. There were no turkeys on Bonestell, but no one seemed to have any objections at the use of the tasty arrowhead in its place as the main course. There were some who compared it to a Thanksgiving meal, even if the meaning of the event was not exactly the same.

Although the arrowheads were active around the clock, they seemed to be mostly crepuscular in the early evening hours. Kevin wished the hunters well and then went in search of Erin to discuss something that had been on his mind.

***

“I’ve gotten better using a bow than I was when we first got here,” Arne admitted to the others around him, “but I wish I could have stretched my muscles and hunted down on all fours with nothing but my teeth and claws!”

The African lion walked upright with his bow and quiver of arrows over one shoulder while holding the avian legs of an arrowhead over the other. Both small moons of the planet were full and their combined reflected light permeated through the canopy of trees and provided the night-sighted predators a modicum of illumination on their journey back home. Even together, the full light of both satellites reflected only a fraction of what old Luna used to provide to the Earth, but it was still a welcome assistance on the hunts.

The large bird hung to the back of Arne’s knees and was one of four the hunters had killed that evening. Its extremely large, coal black eyes were open but lifeless. Even the blue ring pattern in its face feathers around each eye seemed muted in death. Despite how ugly its appearance might be, they had all grown fond of the flavor of the great birds.

“Unless you had wings, I don’t think hunting the arrowheads would work too well for you down on all fours,” Cheryl responded with a grin.

“Ah, but if they’d added eagle DNA to your lion mix,” Dahlia added with a snicker, “you’d be a gryphon and then you could get them on the ground or in the air!”

Arne frowned at the bantering remarks, but knew there was no malice in them. “True,” he said over his shoulder, “but you know what I mean. We’re predatory animals in humanoid form. The human side of me likes the convenience of the bow, but the animal part of me wants to hunt, stalk and chase!”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Jon replied, repositioning another of the birds over his shoulder. “During my transformation, I had nightmares worrying about my animal instincts taking over completely, but now there are times I’d like to let them do just that.”

“Please don’t,” Dahlia said with a frown. “A mountain lion like you would try to kill and eat a red fox like me and my sister. I’d prefer you didn’t use your hunting skills on me!”

Jon narrowed his eyes and peered at her with a calculating look, his mouth open to show his teeth in a feral grin. The vixen’s expression reflected mock distress for a brief moment, but when he stuck just the tip of his tongue out between his teeth at her, she giggled.

“It’s a good thing we still have our human intellect,” Carl remarked. “We’d have scattered to the four winds as soon as they opened the door of the ship when we got here.”

“Although you and I are both canine types,” Cheryl said to the wolf, “you and your mate would have probably considered me a competitor for food and killed me by now.”

“No doubt,” Carl replied to the Border collie with a nod. “It’s better that we can work together than against one another.” He hefted up the bulk of the arrowhead he carried and added, “Even if we have to use the tools of mankind, we won’t be going hungry anytime soon.”

“Stop!”

Dahlia looked up at Arne. “Don’t be sore,” she said. “We only—”

“No,” the African lion said in clipped tone. “Stop. Everyone stop and be quiet for a minute!”

Although Arne was not the leader of the small hunting party, everyone obeyed instantly, all of their senses straining to hear and smell the scents of the woods around them.

“What is it?” Jon whispered. He studied the lion and followed his gaze where he had been staring up into the trees.

“Nightshade,” Arne barely breathed aloud.

A low growl issued from Carl’s throat as he eased his avian burden to the ground. Without speaking aloud, he dropped silently to all fours and moved forward, his eyes never leaving the darker shadow amongst the trees he had just spotted. The others followed his example, all of them suddenly determined to find out what had been stalking them for months, once and for all.

Although part wolf, Carl could climb trees just about as well as any of them, but the felines of the hunting party were better equipped for such an endeavor. Without preamble, Arne leaped up into the twist-oak in front of him, gaining the lower limbs with one bound, only seconds ahead of Jon.

To the others on the ground, the shapeless dark shadow moved fast over to the next tree, but they were all good trackers and did not intend to let this one get away. They all shouted direction and suggestions to the two large cats scrambling through the branches of the trees above them.

Although some of them had tried to trap and capture the nightshades in the past, the whatsit always seemed to elude them, but this one seemed to be a little more sluggish, possibly due to the recent colder weather.

The nightshade made no sound, but its pursuers were gaining on it. It tried to go to a higher elevation, but the felines matched it move for move, limb for limb. The chase went on for some moments, but when the arboreal path came to an end at the edge of the woods overlooking the prairie beyond, the creature stopped and turned to face the predators. Even in the pale moonlight coming in from overhead, it was still difficult to get a good look at the animal, but Arne chose not to give it time to regroup.

Landing on a limb only a few yards from the nightshade, he stripped off his winter robe top in one movement as he used his momentum and propelled himself forward. With a roar of triumph, the African lion wrapped the robe tightly around the dark creature and then allowed his weight and momentum to carry him over. Flipping onto his back, he landed on a thick clump of the tall prairie grass, stirring up its spearmint aroma in a cloud of dust.

Jon landed next to him a heartbeat later and reached out to help Arne hold down the squirming, thrashing form within the garment. The rest of the hunting party arrived shortly and everyone circled around the felines to keep whatever it was they had at bay.

After several long moments, the commotion within the robe settled down. They could hear faint heaving breaths, and even then it was so quiet it was not easy to hear. Arne had his hands upon its abdomen and Jon clutched two lower limbs that were no longer struggling, both cats amazed that the thing had not yet tried to bite them.

“Careful,” Dahlia breathed when Cheryl reached forward to pull back part of the robe covering the creature’s head. Very gingerly and mindful of the teeth of a cornered animal, she peeled back the garment, revealing a small pointed face that was vaguely foxlike. The fur on its head and face was very fine, matte-black and did not reflect anything from the torch flashlight that Carl shined upon it, but the rest of it seemed to be covered in furry feathers or what more realistically resembled leaves. It was no avian by any stretch of the imagination, nor was it part plant, but the resemblance was uncanny. It was simply fur with its own unique physical properties.

The creature had two wide set eyes that also seemed to defy reflections, displaying no whites around its pupils. At first glance, Jon thought he saw a kind of membrane covering its eyes and as he stared at it, he noticed that it did not even blink.

Its nose consisted of nothing more than a pair of slits over a tiny mouth, and when it opened that small maw to suck in air, he also saw that the skin of its gums and its flat teeth were also completely black. It had no ears to speak of, appearing as nothing more than a pair of ridges on each side of its narrow skull.

It stared back and forth at each of the Furs that surrounded it, but made no more struggling movements and no other sound than its breathing. Its eyes moved back to Arne; both of his large hands together held it about its middle, but it seemed to relax as it gazed at him impassively.

“Wow…” Dahlia whispered. The nightshade’s eyes tracked to her voice, but then it looked back up at Arne. It opened its mouth as if to call out, but nothing came from its throat. None of its black teeth possessed any kind of points, looking flat and rather harmless. It was likely a strict vegetarian, eating leaves, bark, berries and soft-shell nuts.

“I don’t think it has a voice,” Cheryl said quietly. “Let’s see what the rest of you looks like.” Keeping her movements slow and easy, she pulled the robe down a little more and several spider-like limbs emerged from the folds of the cloth, all covered in the leaf-like fur. The sight made the Border collie gulp, but the two closest limbs to its shoulders reached out with tiny hands and grasped her fingers gently. Two other limbs possessed three fingers and an opposable thumb, but the rest were obviously legs and feet.

Arne moved his hands one at a time so that Cheryl could remove the robe but he continued to hold the creature firmly, through without too much pressure. Its leaf-fur against his fingers was satin-smooth and cool to the touch.

Cheryl removed the robe altogether, but the little creature made no move to escape. His genitals were recognizable amongst his totally black fur, but he had no tail at all and his fur-covered buttocks were round and smooth. He was no larger than a Capuchin monkey, though he looked more like a cuddly spider with a mammalian head. He was not necessarily cute, but his small size and gentle manner made Cheryl smile.

“Someone take some pictures before we let him go,” she said.

“We aren’t taking it back after all the trouble we went through to get it?” Arne asked incredulously.

“No,” Jon said with a chuckle. “Now that we know what it is, I don’t think this thing is anything to worry about. We’ve solved the mystery of the nightshades that have been watching us.”

“Are there more or is this the only one living in our woods?” Dahlia wondered aloud, moving closer to take pictures of the spider-fox critter. She snapped a few images, but he did not even jump when the flash went off. He simply looked back at her and licked his lips with a black tongue.

“This thing moves so quickly and silently, there’s no way to know,” Carl said.

Arne held it up gently so the vixen could get photos from all sides, but then held the passive creature out at arm’s length. It simply looked back at him, displaying no sense of curiosity of its own.

“Okay, are we done here?” the lion asked, looking over at Jon.

“Go ahead and let it go.”

Arne walked to the nearest tree and held the nightshade up toward a lower limb. It reached for it with four arms and he released his hold on the thing. Without even looking back at its captors, the creature silently climbed up into the shadows of the woods and had disappeared before anyone could really tell which direction it had gone.

Carl waved for the others to follow him. “C’mon, let’s get back to where we dropped the birds or something else will have a good dinner tonight instead of us.”

As the small group set off once again through the woods, Jon looked back up into the overhead limbs. For once, he was glad a discovery they had made was neither harmful nor anything to cause fear on this new world.

Chapter 18

Revelations

Sleeping on Bonestell had become a problematic situation for the Terran Furs that had immigrated to the new world. Physiologies long-accustomed to twenty-four hour days did not know how to properly cope with the longer thirty-six hour rotation. In the middle of the planet’s summer there was daylight for eighteen hours each day, matched by another eighteen hours of nighttime. Bodies that were used to shorter day and night spans found that standard sleeping patterns simply did not apply. They adjusted as well as they could, but often found themselves with two sleep periods a day and more mealtimes too.

Having the colony homes constructed inside a large mountain cavern helped, though. Even though the sun might be shining throughout the longer daytime, the perpetual gloom inside the cave served to make it easier for any of them to sleep when it might be more difficult with sunlight streaming in through bedroom windows.

It was on such a day when the world outside was lit up from diffused sunlight through an overcast sky, but the darkness of the cavern served to help the sleep patterns of a certain group within the colony.

Although born a human that had been transformed psychologically as well as physically, Jon had eventually become accustomed to his new life. He still retained the mind, will, emotions and intellect he had possessed beforehand, but now that he also had the instincts and physical form of a mountain lion, he was stronger, healthier and even generally happier than he had ever been. He had not thought it possible for someone such as himself to do some of the things he had done since his transformation, and something even as trivial as the current sleeping arrangement would have never appealed to him when he had still been fully human.

A month into the colony’s first winter on Bonestell, two of the other felines had pulled the components from storage and built a larger geodesic dome specifically for the social interaction of the Felis. While the Ursis bears did not need to hibernate through the winter as their Terran cousins did, they still had plenty of body fat insulation to keep them warm. Likewise, the Canis canine types and the Vulps fox breeds all developed insulating fur undercoats that helped them with the seasonal cold. Only the the felines were not as well-equipped to handle the winter. It was true the Felis coats did grow thicker and some like Kim did actually have something of an undercoat, but the felines as a whole preferred the warmth of indoors.

It was because of this that Arne and Sissy had constructed an extra sleeping dome filled wall-to-wall with extra pillows, blankets and comforters taken from the general supplies. Each feline still had his or her personal quarters, but for the social comfort and interaction with one another, they all had an open invitation to make use of this special place.

For Jon, it had been a long night, true in the chronological aspect of the clock as well as hard work he had put in before finally giving in to slumber in the shared space. He had had a troubling argument with Manny over something that should have been trivial and it had been a mental workout.

Snow had been falling in large flakes since mid-morning and their little valley was covered by a white blanket several inches thick. The lake and river were both only frozen along their edges, as the mountain spring continued to flow into them.

Most of the wildlife around the valley had gone, presumably to seek shelter. The thunderpigs were likely holed up in their cave on the other side of the mountain and the lil-deer had all disappeared entirely. There had been no sign of them for a week, not even out in the forest where life beneath the canopy would have given them more shelter. There had been so many of them by the end of the fall that surely they would have required a large area to winter, but once the cold weather had moved in around the mountains, they had quickly departed.

Although still visible beneath the water, the various fish and other water creatures were lethargic and did not seem to move around much. Even the long snizards were curled around themselves among the rocks. Most of the birds they had come to know had left for other lands, but others had migrated in to take their places, giving Doctor Mochizuki even more species to photograph and catalog in his ever-growing library.

One new critter to appear in the woods that surrounded the valley came in abundance. The white-furred creatures were not unlike snowshoe hares but with a head and ears vaguely resembling something like a koala. It was a dopey-looking thing, but it did not seem to be foraging for food as much as coming out merely to play in the snow, jumping, hopping, burrowing and rolling around together. Some of them ventured out into the open clearing of the valley later during the night and it was then that Manny took it upon himself to sneak down from the cave to stalk them.

To those who watched, the arctic fox was just as difficult to see against the whiteness of the snow as the little koala-bunnies, but when he was down on all fours, he was fast. Unfortunately, the thicker furman robes he was wearing interfered with his motions and became a source of irritation. After close to an hour without success, he stormed back up into the cavern and loped straight to the armory.

He had pulled out a rifle, and from the lip opening of the cave, began taking shots at the dopey little creatures. Not everyone had been asleep during the nocturnal hours, but once he started firing, they were all up and in arms – some afraid that the thunderpigs had returned to attack while they were all off their guard.

Jon had snatched the rifle from the fox’s grip, nearly taking off a finger in the process, and gave him a stern dressing down in front of everyone. Not only was he wasting their limited ammo, he was using it against something that presented no threat to anyone in the colony at a time when they were not short on food – and in the middle of the night with no warning at all. He had frightened their livestock, as well as the entire colony.

Once the cougar was finished with him, the arctic fox had gone from embarrassed and repentant to angry and resentful. Manny stormed down the path, trudging off through the falling snow and disappeared into the woods. Jon let him go, hoping the winter cold would help cool down the hothead.

He did not return to the cavern for hours, but when he did, the fox was in a better mood, though looking sheepish. He had taken his frustrations out on the koala-bunnies in the woods using his human intellect and managed to trap several of them using only a few items.

Using a magnesium lighter that he carried everywhere, he had cleared out a spot in the woods, made a small fire, and then roasted one of them while he examined the others he had caught. He reported that the meat of the little critters had a flavor like kerosene and he had thrown it all up within a half hour of finishing his first meal.

Manny brought back the remains of the one he had cooked for anyone who wanted to examine it. He had also planned to bring another one back alive, but the creatures had sharp dentures and the others he caught had chewed through the twine he had used before he could hang onto them. He had also used his knife to cut a strip from his robe to wrap around his left hand where one had bitten him.

Jenni cleaned his injury, but she could not detect any kind of venom or toxin in the bite wound. He had simply been bitten because he had not kept his hands to himself.

Once all the excitement had died down and people started returning to their beds, Jon had stayed up with Manny to talk with him while to make sure they were clear with one another. The fox confessed that he had simply gotten overexcited with the hunt and the cold weather, both of which he liked, but had gotten frustrated with his lack of success actually catching the little dopes.

Before Jon finally decided he had calmed down himself enough to go on to bed, Kevin had sought him out with a report of his own. Looking out into the valley, it appeared the wind was picking up, whipping the continually falling snowflakes around madly. He was afraid that the snowfall could be building up into a storm. With their cave at the extreme southern tip of the mountain range, the winds funneling south usually blew past the entrance, typically creating an outward draft from the cavern. If the winds shifted, however, a blizzard could realistically force the frigid air right up inside.

The young desert fox admitted that he was not sure the weather was building up into a storm, but he wanted to let Jon know his fears just in case it did come about. The cougar assured him that it was the right thing to do, and then shooed him off to bed so he could go crawl into the shared feline dome himself.

When Jon slowly awoke sometime later, he could feel other cat-bodies all around him. Without opening his eyes, he could hear the regular sleeping rhythms of five others. The pocket of warmth surrounding him was pleasant and he really had no need to get up just yet.

He had his arms wrapped around Kristen, so he snuggled up closer and gently brushed her scalp hair with the claws of one hand. She let out a contented sigh, rubbing the top of her head beneath his chin, and Jon suddenly realized her scent was wrong.

He opened his eyes and studied the black tufted fur on the end of the ears resting upon the pillow they shared. Swallowing with personal embarrassment, he tried to find a way to extricate himself from around the lynx. If Kim woke up and found his arms curled around her this way, he was afraid she might scratch him with her claws in disoriented fright.

He swallowed with difficulty and tried to will his heartbeat to calm down as he removed his top arm from around her and then rolled over onto his back in slow, fluid movement. Kim rolled over with him in her sleep atop his lower arm and then buried her nose in his bare chest fur with a low-throated purr.

He looked down at the top of her head with a frown and his fingers flexed as he tried to think of a way to extricate himself without waking her.

There was an amused chuckle on Jon’s other side, just barely audible. Kristen stuck her muzzle up inside one of his ears and whispered, “That is so cute, watching you trying to get free.”

Jon’s eyes tracked to her face in the dim light. “Help?” he requested in a quiet voice.

“Not a chance, Jon-boy,” she replied with another whisper, her canines bared in a mischievous smile. “I know how it is – just like a male. I get tossed aside for the one who feeds you, you alley-cat!”

Jon swallowed again, but then froze when the small form snuggled up to him giggled quietly. The mountain lion looked back down at the lynx and then she turned her head to peer up at him.

“Sorry, Jon,” Kim said with a smile that belied her words. “I thought it was Raine beside me.” She tossed a glance toward Kristen and then threaded an arm across Jon’s middle. “I might have done this earlier if I’d known he was this cuddly.”

Kristen snickered. “Now you know why I was after him for so long,” she whispered, lightly batting at his whiskers, each contact making his eyes blink.

“Would you stop that?” he pleaded quietly, trying to keep from waking anyone else in the cat pile.

There were times when Kristen was totally serious with her chosen mate, but there were others when she was playful in their relationship. Completely unconcerned that another female was cuddling her male, Kristen mirrored her position on his other side and threaded an arm across Jon’s middle adjacent to Kim’s. She draped a leg across the one of his closest to her and immediately Kim did the same.

The mountain lion was now effectively pinned down and with growing alarm, he was almost afraid that Kristen was going to initiate what they liked to call playtime along with the lynx – and in the middle of a pile of other felines. He needn’t have worried, though. Neither Kristen nor Kim had any plans for such an incident. What they did now was simply for the fun of the moment.

Kim looked across the cougar’s chest at Kristen. “Is he ticklish?” she whispered mischievously.

The lioness gave her a look of disappointment. “No, but I am,” she whispered back. “Don’t give him any incentive or we’ll both be in trouble!”

“I heard that,” Jon murmured, inching his fingertips toward each female’s ribs. Kim giggled again and squirmed, but Kristen pinned his hand between her elbow and her side, holding it tight.

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed, arching an eyebrow at him. He only smiled back in response, staying his hand. “You’ll wake the others.”

“Actually, it would be your screams that’ll wake the others,” Jon replied with mischief in his eyes. Before anything could escalate, however, they all heard what sounded like a grunting bear.

“Was that Hank?” Kim whispered, breaking the mood. “He sounds like he has a cold.”

“No, it sounded more like Aaron,” Kristen answered quietly.

The sound was repeated, but this time the three cats all looked from one to another. “I don’t think that was any of our bears,” Jon remarked in a whisper.

The lynx suddenly looked afraid. “Maybe one of the pigs has come back from inside the cavern!”

There was a quiet tapping at the doorway to the dome. Jon looked toward the curtain and then someone stuck his head inside. “Jon?” whispered the silhouette.

“I’m here, Michael. What’s going on?”

“Sorry to wake you,” said the swift fox, “but we have some new visitors outside.”

“Visitors?”

“Come see.”

The mountain lion untangled himself from the females and somehow managed to twist around so that he could get up onto all fours. It was the easiest way to walk through the curled bodies without stepping on any of them. A few of them opened sleepy eyes to see what was going on, but went back to sleep almost as quickly.

Now fully awake, Kristen and Kim got up together and followed him out into the cavern. The three of them trailed Michael to the cavern entrance, past the animal pens where Cheryl was trying to quieten the sheep that had started to panic with the arrival of the new visitors.

Standing in a snow bank at the foot of the zigzag path were four animals none of them had ever seen before. They could be vaguely compared to bears, but the resemblance was only basic. It appeared to be two adults and two adolescents with plump bodies, huge paws and claws, long fuzzy tails and wing-like ears, a fat blocky head with coal black eyes and a wooly fur as white as the snow itself, but with black socks around each foot. Their heads and faces did not resemble Terran bears, but just as the native deer remind the colonists of the deer from home, these could also be thought of as the native variety of bear. They weren’t all that big, the largest was about the same size as Hank or Alicia. Completing the picture, they all acted lethargic as if in great need of sleep.

“Now dat’s whut I would call a ‘shno barr’,” Cheryl said with an exaggerated country accent, mimicking one of her cousins back on Earth. She fished the PBJ from a pocket and snapped a few pictures of the creatures for their scientist.

“A snow barr, huh?” Michael repeated with amusement. “Kinda fitting, really. Not exactly a bear, but could be a barr.”

All four of the thusly-named snow barrs were peering up into the cavern. Other colonists were gathering at the top of the path to look down at them and the largest of the newcomers kept gazing over the pathway from the valley up to the shelter of the cavern. It moaned as if in disapproval that the place was already occupied.

“Maybe this was their wintering den,” Kim suggested. “There may be more coming.”

“If there were more, I’d think they would have already been here ahead of the weather,” Carl said from the side. He and Ellie had already been awake due to the nocturnal side of their lupine ancestry and had been standing watch. Manny showed up with a rifle, but only kept it ready.

The adult male barr took a step onto the pathway with a look that was almost determined. He needed sleep, and really wanted in, but there were strange creatures blocking the way ahead. As soon as he took a second step, all of the Furs at the top lined up side by side across the path. Manny took aim, but kept the safety on for the moment.

“What do you suggest?” Jon asked Carl beside him quietly. “They haven’t really harmed or threatened anyone.”

“If we let them in and all they do is find an alcove to hibernate in, that might be okay,” Carl mused. “This cavern might have been theirs at one time.”

Jon looked down at the poor animals standing out in the heavily falling snow and considered the wolf’s words.

“As much as I hate to turn away one of my kin,” Alicia said from the side, “What happens when they wake up hungry? Will they try to eat one of us or our livestock? Do we really want to take that chance?”

Jon frowned and turned to Manny. “Fire off a single warning shot,” he told the arctic fox. “They haven’t done anything, so don’t shoot one. Just try to frighten it away.”

“What about everyone else who’s still asleep?” Manny asked with pursed lips, recalling his earlier dressing down.

“I think most everyone’s awake this time,” Jon said, looking at the crowd around them. “Cheryl, you and Arne may need to quieten the livestock again.”

“Ayup,” the Border collie replied.

“Another wasted bullet coming right up,” muttered the arctic fox. Manny took aim with his rifle, thumbed off the safety, and gently squeezed the trigger.

The bullet struck the rock face of the mountain a foot above the barr’s head. A few flecks of stone broke off and peppered the animal, and it jumped backward from the echoed noise and the rocks.

Inside the animal pens, the cattle and sheep reacted to the gunshot with distress, but their keepers immediately began working to calm them.

The male barr bawled out in fright and raced back its family a little further behind, and then turned around to face the Furs again. For all the expressions that animals could make, this creature actually looked as if it might start crying. There was moisture in its eyes, probably from the sudden unexpected stress, but then it seemed to realize the futility of trying to gain shelter in the cavern.

The barr moaned mournfully at his companions and then the four of them turned toward the woods. Perhaps they could find sufficient shelter against the storm elsewhere.

Jon watched them go until they had disappeared into the shadows of the forest. He had mixed feelings about driving them away during a snowstorm, but he had to keep the colony’s safety in mind. It was possible they might have just settled down into hibernation without causing any problems, maybe even leaving on their own later, but he could not really take that chance.

***

Carl muttered beneath his breath as he pulled hard on the top rotor of the gyrocopter. He was sure the primary shaft was undamaged by the crash, but the thick bushing holding the rotor to the shaft was sticking. He stood back with hands on his hips and studied the errant damage. The rotor blade itself was bent slightly in two places along its length and he had intended to pull it off in order to make an attempt to straighten it out, but first he would have to remove it. He had taken out the primary long bolt and that should have released it from the shaft, but something was still holding it in place.

The cheek plate looked as if it might also have a hairline fracture, but he did not know if he had anything he could replace it with; maybe some the scrap metal left over when Norman put together a Faraday cage for their electronics.

It had been two weeks since he and a few others had hiked out to where he had left the gyrocopter behind, and they had all had to push and pull it all the way back to the cavern when he had been unable to get it started again. It had been an afternoon endeavor, but the craft rolled well enough across the grass plains with the efforts of him, Michael, Hank and Alicia providing the muscle power to keep it moving.

The hardest part had been lifting it over the stone partitions to get it up the path into the cavern where work could be done on it, but once it was inside, the wolf had abandoned it to attend his wife. This was her first pregnancy, and since she was over fifty years of age, every little thing was cause for concern to the expectant father.

Now that things had settled down somewhat and the snowy weather had him trapped inside, he had returned to his pet project in an attempt to repair the damage. He knew he might be wasting his effort and may not even have the tools or parts necessary to fix it, but with nothing else to occupy his mind at the moment, it was better than just sitting around.

He looked over the bushing again and then his eyes lit up. In addition to a long bolt that had attached the rotor to the shaft, there was a small roll pin he had missed. He felt foolish at forgetting it, as it had been he and Ellie who had assembled the kit in the first place.

He grabbed a small hammer and an appropriate punch tool from the toolbox at his feet and quickly tapped out the flush pin. When he tugged on the rotor this time, it slid off the shaft and came away in his hands. He gave the item a look of triumph and went right to work.

***

A solitary beam of light cut through the Stygian darkness far back in the cavern system. The lone ursine explorer had often been scolded for making her sojourns alone without a partner in the event of trouble, but now that the colony had been socked in for the winter and there was little enough to do for everyone, Dara Turner had frequently taken off on her own.

Originally, she had compared this cavern system to Mammoth Cave in Bowling Green, Kentucky, but over time she had discovered this was not exactly a true comparison. Also primarily a large dry cave, there were plenty of areas within the Kentucky karst topography that contained formations formed by wind or water erosion and mineral deposits, but this cave was completely devoid of any such wonderments. It was dry, completely dry, and although the primary passage was huge in itself and the floor was relatively flat, she knew that wind alone could not have formed such a cavern system. As a geologist, she had formed several hypotheses for its origins, but with the limited resources at her disposal, it was nothing more than conjecture.

Although Dara had not informed anyone of her departure, this time she had packed food, water, a bed roll and a few provisions to press even deeper into the cavern system than she had been able to go before. She was sure there was another exit somewhere on the other side of the mountain, but the passageways meandered and were never quite in a straight line, so she had no real clue just where under the mountain she might wind up. The overhead passages were not as immense farther back inside, but there were numerous branches that could go anywhere.

At the moment, the polar bear was camped out in a small alcove with her bed rolled out and a can of Sterno heating up a small pan of beans. She also had a plastic container of cubes made from various fish, deer and thunderpig meat. One by one, she skewed a cube on the end of a hunting knife, and then she would cook it over the pink flames before eating it with the beans. She wished for a few spices and perhaps some other vegetables, but she had wanted to travel light so had kept her pack at a minimum. She had even worn a set of furman overalls so she could utilize all the little pockets to carry her smaller items.

She ate her food in silence, enjoying the complete quiet around her. She also enjoyed the solitude away from the other bears. Ever since Aaron and Alicia had announced themselves an exclusive couple, Dara had become the focus of the other males’ aspirations by default. She enjoyed the attention and was not against their advances, but sometimes a woman just needed time alone.

When she finished eating, she could feel her eyelids bowing to gravity, so she put out the small cook fire, cleaned up her campsite and put everything away except the Sterno can to allow it to cool. Using only her LED head lamp on a low setting, she pulled off her clothes and folded them up beside her. She set the light beside her garments and then turned it off.

The white-furred female stretched out on the sleeping bag with a thin pillow beneath her head and lay still. She closed her eyes and lay on her back for a long while, but despite that she was tired and ready to rest, she did not go to sleep right away. Her ears strained to hear any sound within the cavern passage, but there was nothing at all. The absence of sound was just as complete as the unfathomable darkness.

There was no dripping of water, no footsteps of little critters and the near-constant breeze through the passageways was even still. She had expected to hear the little squeaks and subtle flapping of bat wings, but so far she had seen nothing like them within the cavern of this world. Perhaps Bonestell did not have bats or their equivalent, or maybe it was just this particular cave that did not harbor any. The silence was complete but for her own breathing and heartbeat. In time, she drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

***

When Dara resurfaced from slumber some hours later, it was a peaceful awakening. She had a moment of disorientation when she opened her eyes and saw nothing at all in the complete darkness, but then she remembered where she was. She yawned, curling her pink tongue over itself and stretched languidly. Even though she was an anthropomorphized polar bear and had more fat and muscle than she had ever possessed as a human, she still had a beauty of her own.

Prior to her transformation, she had been a big woman anyway. She had never been obese, but she had actually been tall, large-framed and broad-shouldered, the type that some men called Amazon. A larger animal like a bear seemed the right choice when she had made her decision after volunteering for the program. Although larger than most in the colony, she could be stealthy and quiet in her movements, and although she was quite alone so far back in the cavern system, she began to stir and sit up in the darkness.

She was just reaching beside her bed for her clothing when she saw it. At first she thought it was a trick of the light-gathering nerves in her eyes, possibly misfiring in the total absence of light, but when she blinked again and again, she realized there was something out there.

She swallowed and began pulling cloth over her bare furry form, dressing quickly but trying to stay as quiet as possible. Without taking her eyes from what she had seen, Dara rolled up the thin pillow within the sleeping bag and then quickly tied it to the bottom of her day-pack. Her eyes watered, as she refrained even from blinking, but after only a few quick moments, she was dressed and everything back in place upon her back.

Moving forward on all fours but without turning on her head lamp, Dara crossed the black passageway toward what looked to be nothing more than an obscure, pale blue glow several yards away. As she stepped closer, she could pick out the details of the entrance to a small grotto in the opposite wall. By the time she reached it, her eyes had adjusted and there was enough light coming from the opening that she felt as drawn to it as a bug was to a candle flame.

The opening was just large enough that she could squeeze her bulk into it, but she felt no fear as she followed a brief tunnel that quickly opened up into a larger chamber. The room was no more than around a dozen square feet with a low seven-foot ceiling, but it was what the place contained that held her sense of awe.

Running through veins in the layers of rock that she could see clearly without the use of a headlamp was a mineral that glowed with its own internal light. There was such a concentration of emitted illumination in the room that she could have almost been able to sit and read a printed book without much effort.

She knelt next to a wall and looked closely, having to squint in the light. Just from initial appearances, the mineral was marbled with blue-white clay. She sniffed at it and detected a subtle aroma, but it was nothing she was familiar with. There was no heat coming off of the substance either.

She figured that it could also be some kind of chemical or biological action taking place within the clay, but since the cavern was in perpetual darkness this far back into the system, it must either be self-replenishing or constant without need for renewal. She was also concerned that the material might be radioactive and she was unwilling to touch it; if it was, however, she might have been exposed already just by crawling into the room.

She frowned, having never considered such a find. She only had a few small sample containers in her pack, but nothing was lead-lined for such a contingency. If she got sick from exposure, she might expose others by bringing it back, but there was no way she was returning to Second Chance without returning with some of it back for testing.

She pulled off her pack and dug into its contents. She bypassed the plastic containers and found a vial made from industrial glassteel an inch in diameter. She did not even know why she had it today in her pack, but she had found it on the ground back at the Furmankind Institute in Upstate New York and had kept it.

Using the trowel end of a small rock-pick she carried in the pack, she scraped off enough of the clay to fill the small bottle. She put the rubber stopper in the end and then wiped the end of the trowel on the rock of the wall.

With such an unexpected find, she determined that she needed to return to camp right away. She squeezed back out to the main corridor and then flagged the entrance with several strands of bright yellow surveyor tape. It would take her a while to get back, so she would need to spend all her time traveling without stopping to investigate anything else along the way.

***

Dara rolled the wheeled stool back away from the work bench and looked up at Dr. Mochizuki. She set the colony Geiger counter on the bench and then gestured to the glass vial full of the clay she had found that was quietly glowing even in the light of the dome.

“I can’t detect even a trace of radioactivity in that stuff,” she told the red panda. “Maybe you can find some biological reason why the stuff glows in the dark without exposure to visible or UV light.”

“I will give the mineral a thorough examination,” the scientist assured her with a nod. “While I make a visual inspection, I will also run it through the gas chromatograph to break down the components.”

The polar bear looked thoughtful. “If we can determine that it’s safe to be around, we might be able to use it as an alternate light source in our domes if the electronics fail again.”

“I do not think the solar-collection system suffered any damage from the solar flares,” Masanori reminded her, “but an alternative would be a good contingency to have in reserve. What would you do with it, simply bottle the clay and put one in each dome?”

Dara smiled. She did not had many opportunities to work with the red panda, but she found that she had enjoyed the discussions she had with him over the past half hour.

“Actually,” she answered, “I thought I could dissolve the material in water, soak it into a blanket, and then let it dry. If that worked, I could just hang it up on a curtain rod to light up my dome and save on the power cells. Of course, I’d have to stuff it under my bed or in a duffel bag when I wanted to sleep – that stuff is bright when there’s a lot of it all together.”

“I will let you know what I find out,” Dr. Mochizuki informed her. “Even if you cannot use it for the purpose you have in mind, it is still a significant find.”

***

Erin was crouched upon the southern bank of the valley lake, peering into the water at the fish swimming through the reed-like plants.  The clouds and the weather had broken three days ago and a warm front had washed over the region in a brief respite. There was still snow everywhere, but there were places in the direct sunlight that had thawed somewhat, including the surface of the water.

The temperatures had risen into the low fifties, and though not exactly warm, the Furs had ventured out of their cave and were taking advantage of the sunshine. Kevin warned that the oasis in the weather would not hold and that he suspected another frigid blast was on its way. Erin was proud of him at just how seriously the young fennec fox had taken his responsibilities. He had been diligent in his studies, and while he did not have a network of weather stations, having only the solitary communication satellite still in orbit to aid him, he was becoming adept at reading the meteorological signs in the sky, the scents on the wind, and even subtle signs by the birds, animals and plant life reacting to upcoming changes.

As a counselor, Erin had bent her rather large ears to the needs of others and the diminutive desert fox seemed to have no lack of clients seeking her out. The group was relatively stable as a whole, but it seemed a natural thing that some needed someone to listen to their anxieties and fears concerning their new home. As Dr. Mochizuki kept reminding everyone, this world may be Earth-like in many ways, but it was still an alien ecosystem that did not quite match their home planet, and it was at odd times when this alien-ness made itself known to each person.

There were only a few who had not come to her, but she was available to any who sought her out. Some had concerns they just needed someone to listen to, while others had issues with the ongoing separation from all they had known throughout their former lives. It was a good thing she had taken an oath of confidentiality as a counselor, for she knew a few secrets that some had divulged to her that they would have never wanted made public here in the colony or back on Earth. She was good at keeping things to herself, however, and their confidence in her was well-grounded.

According to the Bonestellan calendar that Sissy had worked up, they had been residents here for just a little over seven local months – but the days and months here were greater than they were on Earth, so by the Terran calendars, they had been away even longer. Erin had done everything she could to encourage them all, but there were some who wondered how they could last for five years.

She had to remind them that although an hour here was the same as an hour on Earth, the length of days and the length of years were different. A little over two and a half years on Earth would pass by the time they marked their first full year on Bonestell. This made many of them wonder if the duration of their five-year contract would be measured by the Earth calendar or the Bonestellan calendar. Jon had been entreated to check with Headquarters the next time he filed a report. Even if they did not use currency on this colony outpost, the thought of the prize money going into their personal bank accounts stayed in back of numerous minds.

Life here was not so bad, although every long day was still a learning experience. The populations to immigrate from Earth would later benefit from the knowledge gained from this small colony, which made everything they did here invaluable.

Movement at the edge of her vision drew her attention. There were several Furs taking advantage of the outdoor weather to get out and run, and they were all upright on two feet as they jogged around the perimeter of the little valley. Jon was at the head of the troupe, with Kevin keeping pace right beside him. Others followed behind, all nearly in perfect step as if they were all marking cadence. Erin smiled, knowing that she should be out there getting the exercise with them, but she was feeling lazy in the day’s warm sunshine. At least Kevin was out there with them. He might have the shortest legs of the group, but he kept up with them all.

***

Jon was enjoying himself. Like the others under his authority, he had felt cooped up within the confines of the cave and needed the time to get out and stretch his legs. Granted, the cavern system was so immense that a triathlon could have been held within its passages, but running through dark corridors without knowing where the boundary walls might be could be hazardous to one’s self. The mountain lion had tried to maintain a personal exercise program in some fashion or another since they had arrived, but daily duties and the odd length of days had sometimes altered his routines to where they weren’t quite so routine anymore. Sometimes those activities even took the place of scheduled exercises altogether.

As he jogged around the outskirts of the little valley with others beside him or following behind in step, he was aware of eyes watching them from the shadows of the woods. The lil-deer had long gone to wherever it was they went for the winter, but other, larger ruminants had taken up temporary residence within the small forest. It seemed this region of their continent was host to many different shapes, sizes and types of animals that could be related to the deer family. It was really surprising that more predators weren’t native to the area with such an abundance of food.

Movement along his side caught Jon’s eye as a red fox vixen jogged past him and took the lead. The cougar did not mind, however, since Jasmine’s shapely form gave him new scenery to admire. The fur of her fox tail had grown back completely and was even fluffier than before with the addition of her winter undercoat. Now that she had her magnificent brush again, Jasmine enjoyed showing it off any chance she could. Considering that she was the only female currently jogging with the pack, she was aware she now had all eyes upon her backside and made an extra effort to add a little jiggle to her jog.

When they had made three laps around the perimeter of the five-acre valley, Jon called a halt beside the small river flowing from the lake. Several of them dropped to all fours in order to lap up cool water.

In the moments while they rested, Manny looked over at the mountain lion and caught his attention. “Hey, Jon,” he said. “I have a question for you.”

The cougar looked over at the arctic fox. “What’s on your mind?”

“Now that we have good weather again, how about we start that salvage effort on the Magellan to see if there’s anything left in the ship we can use?”

Raine looked up from the water with interest and said, “Yeah, I’ve been itchin’ to get out to the wreckage ever since Carl found it.”

Before the colony captain could respond, Jasmine asked, “Doesn’t the AHCP want the black box from it?”

“They do,” Jon answered, “but I don’t think we have time to get out there and do anything before the next cold front moves in.” He looked aside at Kevin, who sat on his haunches nearby. The small desert fox nodded, waving his large ears with the action.

“From what I can tell,” Kevin said with confidence, “the next front should come in from the northwest late tomorrow with gusty winds, rapidly falling temperatures and a sharp rise in air pressure. I’m limited by the equipment I have to work with,” he added, “but part of it is intuition – or a gut feeling.”

“A gut feeling?” Raine replied in jest.

Kevin frowned. “I may not be entirely accurate without a host of geosynchronous weather satellites in orbit or weather stations sending data from across the continent, but my gut feelings about our local weather are getting better.”

The cheetah waved a hand dismissively. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he replied. “I doubt I could do any better than you.”

“I trust his research,” Jon interjected, “and with the weather taking another downturn, I don’t think it would be advisable to be up on the mountain during inclement weather anyway. I’d like to get up there just as much as any of you, but I think it would be best if we wait for springtime to go back to the Magellan. Then we can take our time investigating the wreckage. Carl said the nose of the ship was relatively pulverized, so I doubt we’d be able to get anywhere near the bridge, but the black box is located farther back in the fuselage, giving us a better chance to find it.”

“What about salvaging other things from the ship?” Manny asked. “Like that coffee cup Carl brought back for you.”

Jon nodded. “That’s become my favorite cup,” he admitted, “but Carl said it looked as if a terrific fire blazed through the ship when it crashed. He found the cup outside, probably thrown out through a split in the fuselage. There may not be much of anything else left to salvage, but it wouldn’t hurt to look.”

“Yeah, but we have to wait until spring to look,” Raine grumbled.

Jon looked at Raine and shook his head. “The Magellan is stretched out over a deep chasm and lying partially on its side,” he reminded the cheetah. “If bad weather hits while you’re in there, you may not be able to get out. Carl said the hatch he entered was in the middle of the ship that he’d had to get to by walking across the upper surface of the fuselage. I doubt that was easy with the warm and windy conditions he faced that day, and I don’t think trying it in a snowstorm would be that wise.”

He nodded to their shortest member, indicating that he accepted the tan fox’s contribution to the safety of the colony. “Kevin will let us know when spring is on its way, and then we’ll start making our plans to see what we can find within the Magellan.”

***

Winter weather returned with a vengeance the next evening. Temperatures plunged, heavy snow developed rapidly and dumped enough on the land to make it look as if it had been locked in eternal winter instead of ever having experienced a short period of warmth. The overcast skies looked as thick as the drifts upon the ground and wind began to howl around the end of the mountain range as gusts to the south threatened to whip up conditions into a blizzard. The surface of the lake and river refroze with the new onslaught, although the natural spring on the side of the mountain continued to trickle, creating an icy waterfall beneath it.

There was a mad scramble to erect wind barriers to protect the livestock, and although they did not have enough material to block the entire entrance to the cavern, what they did manage to put up was expected to suffice. Fortunately for them all, the winds typically drew air out of the system instead of blowing it inside with such ferocity.

The Furs were greatly thankful for the natural fur coats that genetic tinkering had given them, in addition to the thicker garments they had brought along, especially since the winters were longer seasons here. Facing the winter in their former human bodies would have been downright miserable, and although men and women had often faced worst conditions in Antarctic stations on Earth, this colony was not as well-equipped with the technologies available to those groups.

With the arrival of winter, the Ursis members of Second Chance often became the subject of good-natured ribbing, everyone wondering when the bears would finally go into hibernation. It was an attribute of their hybrid genetic makeup that they did not have to sleep through the winter and survive on stored fat reserves; the bears found other ways of staying warm together, and as a result, Dara and Alicia would both be having cubs in the spring.

The colony had plenty of food and water stockpiled within the cavern for the Furs and all their livestock. Not only did they have the stores that had been shipped to the planet with them, they had also had great success preserving the local food they had found they could safely eat that also provided them with nourishment. Dry timber had been cut and stored as cordwood, so there would be no lack of heat, even if the smoke would darken the high ceiling of the cavern above several fire rings. Additionally, the geodesic homes were all insulated, and with the space heaters from supply, they should all be warm enough.

Due to the length of days, meals among the varied Furs of the group were often sporadic, scattered around the clock and keeping their two cooks constantly busy. With the advent of winter, however, mealtimes had become social gatherings where all twenty-seven colonists often ate together.

During one such evening when everyone had assembled together in the Great Dome for a hot soup of seasoned Bonestellan vegetables with cubed chunks of roasted mooshelk steak, conversations had grown quiet with the howling wind of the blizzard conditions outside.

More through chance than design, Kristen and Chieko had taken a table together and soon fell into a discussion about their individual furman transformations. Both of their mates joined them at the table halfway through their meal and soon Jon and Masanori were drawn into the conversation.

The red pandas often kept to themselves during mealtimes, but neither of them seemed inclined to be detached this time. Even the scientist seemed grateful for the company.

“Most volunteers to the program go in with an orientation into what they’ll be expecting,” Chieko said with a shake of her head, “but neither of us was prepared for the changes.” The red and black sow was wearing a warm sweater that Dahlia had knitted from the wool of the colony sheep. She and her sister had spun the thread on a simple spinning wheel that had been included in the stores and Chieko had been the first to request a garment made from it. She had a matching cap and mittens, and although the designs in the fabric were only hand painted, it was a cute look for her and she often expressed her gratitude by telling others of Jasmine and Dahlia’s skill.

Jon looked at her and then at her husband. “You were the director of your Institute,” he stated. “I thought you were well familiar with the processes.”

“I was, to a degree,” the older red panda agreed, “but only from an administrative standpoint. Although I have been involved in genetic engineering for many years, I was never actually witness to much of the personal transformations that went on in each of our wings. As you know from your own experiences, the physicians who attended you did more than just supervise; they were involved in the day-to-day alterations you endured, helping out with medication or advice as needed. For Chieko and myself, we had no such help because there was no one with experience holding hands with ailurine subjects. The physiology of red pandas is different from the other four Fur types, and even the diets are very specialized. It took a great effort to learn to eat foods other than the bamboo that we were naturally craving.”

He paused and let out an uncharacteristic sigh. “I knew some of what to expect, but I was woefully unprepared for the sheer amount of pain involved.” He looked straight into Jon’s eyes and said, “I had overseen the Toyohashi Furmankind Institute for many years with the transformations of Furs occurring right under my nose, but until I experienced my own alterations, I’d had no real idea what my volunteers had been facing. Knowing what I do now, I am simply amazed at the number of people agreeing to undergo such an ordeal willingly.” He looked over at his wife and gently took her hand.

“When Chieko asked to atone for her mistake by undertaking the same transformation, I was horrified. She had never been a volunteer and was just as uneducated on the physical toil as I had been. I forbade her following me through such an experience, and I tried to tell her just what I had endured, but acts of love sometimes blind us to truths that are laid out before us.”

Chieko dipped her head submissively, but Dr. Mochizuki raised the hand that still held hers and lifted her chin with it. He gave her a compassionate smile when she looked up at him with soulful brown eyes. “I am thankful for my Chieko,” he said softly, “but I never wanted you to have to experience the terrors that I did.”

Jon nodded silently, watching the two genetic mistakes on the other side of the table from him. He had once remarked that Marcelo Delgado could never fully understand those under his direction at the North American Furmankind Institute unless he had experienced the process himself, but Dr. Mochizuki now knew what none of the other Institute directors had ever known. It was unfortunate that such a person would have been banished from the Earth because of the mistake. Jon felt that the red panda would now have been the perfect director who could relate to those who came under his care in the program. Away on Bonestell, none of it would matter to those who could have benefited from his guidance the most.

The four of them became silent, their meals finished and each lost in thought. Then after several long moments, Kristen reached over and took her own mate by the hand without looking at him.

“Dr. Mochizuki,” she asked quietly, “may I ask you a question about the furmankind process?”

The scientist nodded. “Of course. What is it you wish to know?”

“I’m sure you’re more familiar than any of us with all the experimentation done before the process was ever approved to offer for volunteers,” she began. “Do you know if the process was ever conducted in reverse?”

Jon looked at her in puzzlement. “What do you mean, in reverse?”

Dr. Mochizuki tapped the table with a finger. “I believe she is asking if human DNA was ever applied to animals, instead of animal DNA applied to humans such as us.”

Kristen’s face brightened. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”

The red panda nodded. “There were such experiments done in the early days after Professor McEwen’s formula was made public for cancer eradication,” he admitted, “but that was long before I was ever involved with the program. At that time, geneticists attempted to uplift several species of animals in order to make them sapient. Whether or not that was accomplished was never really determined, however.”

“What happened?”

“Most of the subjects did not survive the process. Unable to understand what was happening to them, some killed one another out of sheer madness but others died from the physical agony that warped and twisted their bodies. The animals that were successfully uplifted by the process became smarter and more cunning, and almost always had to be put down after killing their keepers, the ones who tried to help them through it. It was a dark time and it set the experiments for creating successful Furs back by nearly two decades. All studies were abandoned and further research forbidden.”

Kristen tilted her head. “If it was all abandoned, how did we come about?”

The red panda gave her a look of amusement. “It was the allure of forbidden fruit, Ms. Eisenberg. Such research is never truly abandoned completely, even under direct orders. Some geneticists were too attracted by the benefits of furmankind if it ever became successful, that research continued in secrecy. Those involved were not allowed to experiment using conventional means, so they had to resort to other methods. There was a time when the news reported of prisoners condemned to die as having been killed attempting to escape, but in reality genetic scientists working covertly for the Terran Colonization Coalition were taking them straight from Death Row. If the subjects died in the process, it was considered an acceptable loss since they were already doomed to die.”

“That’s horrible!” Kristen exclaimed.

The doctor nodded. “Yes, it was. There was a terrible backlash once the forbidden experimentation became public, and even though their efforts were ultimately successful, the ones responsible were convicted of heinous crimes against humanity. The public was incensed and out for blood, and the perpetrators were imprisoned for life without parole. Some wanted them executed while others clamored to make them go through the very experiments they had engineered, but even though operations were halted, there was still the matter of what to do with the people already successfully transformed into Furs.

“There was no reversing the process, but compassion spread for the once-condemned and instead of executing them after the agony they had already endured against their will, it was decided to perform delicate brain surgery on them to wipe out past memories of their criminal lives, to then be reeducated with useful skills. Although these acts were done under forbidden conditions, the original purpose for creating Furs still existed. Humans sent to settle other worlds that had been determined habitable still needed an edge up to survive, so the first successful Furs were trained with survival skills and sent on a new colony ship to a world that became known as Noah’s Ark for obvious reasons.”

“Noah’s Ark?” Jon sat back in his seat. “I don’t remember a colony world with that name.”

The red panda shook his head. “That’s because it doesn’t exist anymore – or rather, I should say the planet is still there, but it’s no longer habitable. The place was virtually Earth-like when the Furs were sent there, and these settlers successfully put down roots as a mixed colony not unlike this one, but six years after their arrival, a massive asteroid collided with its small moon. The impact broke up both the moon and the asteroid, and the gravity-drawn debris rained down upon the planet. The entire surface of the world was literally bombarded and its atmosphere rendered unbreathable. Before a rescue ship could be dispatched, all oxygen-breathing life on the planet had perished. There was no one left to rescue.”

Dr. Mochizuki picked up his soup spoon and licked off a bit of sauce still clinging to it before he continued. “It was a terrible tragedy, a waste of life, but the disaster was not caused by the Furs themselves. They had successfully colonized an Earth-type exoplanet and were propagating, proving that even Furs of matched genetic material could reproduce and populate their world. The research data that had been sent back to Earth during their stay had given mankind such hope that even humanity could move in later and establish a successful foothold there.

“By this time, the AHCP was formed to oversee careful transformation of volunteers. There were volunteers for the colonization program, but there were not many of those who were agreeable to be turned into animal hybrids. However, once laws were enacted to protect their rights, the organization received proper funding and the incentive prize money was publicly offered, the number of volunteers picked up.

“Other habitable worlds where humans might have trouble getting started were then targeted for furman advance colonies with the intent of learning as much as possible about a particular world so later humans could properly prepare for the conditions they would find. The rest you know.”

Jon took a drink from his cup and swallowed in silence. Some of this he had heard before, but other parts was a revelation. Yes, he had endured great pain and agony through the transformation, and for him it had been against his will, but he was now strong and healthy, living well on another world where anything could be dangerous.

It was now their mission to establish a foothold on this planet in the name of the humanity of Earth, and everything they learned, large or small, could be potentially important to the survival of mankind in need of expanding away from an overcrowded world.

Chapter 19

Life Refreshed

Sissy stood in the middle of the small valley field and looked around in wonder. The lil-deer had returned with the coming of spring, but there had been a population explosion. There were just as many dog-sized adults as before, but hordes of tiny fawns were now everywhere. They were all grazing on the lush, pale green grass with a few of the smaller ones running and kicking up their hooves in play; they were all through the local woods too.

The little deer were not the only critters in the valley either. A few mooshelk were at the edge of the lake eating reeds and kirin deer were in the lake feeding off the plants beneath the water. There were numerous birds in the trees of the forest too, some of which none of the colonists had ever seen before, even with the earlier winter migrations. Dr. Mochizuki had his wife out collecting photos of everything new she saw; even if he could not have a physical sample, the scientist wanted a record of what came into the valley for future reference.

The arrowheads were back in abundance as well, and although they were once considered an annoyance due to their eerie cries, they were now looked upon as a tasty addition to the menu.

The red pandas were not the only ones busy with all the new changes that a spring after a long and cold winter brought to the land. Kristen was having a delightful time cataloging all the new plant-life that had emerged too. Strange new fruit, vegetables, herbs, shrubs and flowers were being discovered in the valley, the woods and even out on the plains, and a great number of them were safely edible and nutritious – though others were discovered to be poisonous to the furman physiologies, whether ingested or merely touched. Even the oak sapling from the acorn that Avon had planted upon their arrival had grown taller, adding more limbs to its spindly profile.

Probably the lioness’ greatest discovery was that what they had supposed to be a kind of tall wheat-like grass that covered the plains was not merely a grass at all, but was a form of oat or wheat that ripened quickly in the spring. Upon confirmation of this, Kim and Yuki immediately harvested some and went right to work hand-milling it into a kind of flour. For simplicity’s sake, what had been called wheat-grass was now just wheat and the entire eastern prairie was covered by it. The resulting smell of baking bread was only a little different from what they were used to and meals were soon accompanied by their creations. The sisters had already been successful making cooking oil from local seeds the previous fall and they were anxious to try a batter made from the new flour for frying.

Cheryl and Arne had their hands full as well. There were new calves, sheep, piglets and chicks to care for and the longer days worked to their advantage, giving them more time to handle all the associated responsibilities. It seemed everyone was involved in some way or another with the livestock and gardens, and after months of winter inactivity, they all seemed to enjoy having things to do out in the sun again.

The flora and fauna were not the only things refreshed with the new life of springtime. Several couples had formed during the winter months and as a result, numbers in the colony were about to increase as well.

Alicia and Dara were heavy in pregnancy, and if the medical exams were correct, they were both carrying two babies each; Aaron was the confirmed father of Alicia’s cubs, but it was unknown who Dara’s was since she had not accepted monogamy in the face of uneven numbers of females to males. She was unconcerned, however, since all of the males who had been with her were more than willing to claim fatherhood as if it was a badge of pride, with promised help by all in raising them.

Sisters Jasmine and Dahlia were also each expecting a fox kit of their own, and the respective fathers Michael and Ivan were just as proud of their accomplishments. These would be born later in the long spring, but one mother was just about ready to give birth.

Ellie had endured all the trials and tribulations associated with a first-time pregnancy through the long winter, and although Carl had been properly attentive, she was more than ready to get this over with. She and her husband were the eldest members of the colony and as humans they had not been able to have children, but now as Furs they were excited at the prospect of parenthood. Of course for all, there was the uncertainty of having offspring now that their bodies were a hybrid blend of human and animal, but the children would be the first natural furman births among this group.

***

Springtime for Second Chance was a time of great rejoicing. They had made it through the winter with relatively few issues thanks to months of prior preparation, and although boredom had set in and more than a few personality conflicts flared up, they were all comparatively minor to the problems that could have arisen. Those who had been lost in the opening months of occupation were still missed, but time was beginning to ease the feeling of loss.

The Bonestellan calendar that Sissy had worked up was still difficult to relate with the passage of time back on Earth. A day was longer here and so were the months, so it seemed as if time on their birth world moved faster. For those who celebrated Christmas, that date on Earth had come and gone long before anyone in the colony had realized it. New Year’s Day no longer had meaning here, since First Day took its place to commemorate the date of their arrival on this world. Old holidays no longer had significance, and although they could try and count seven days to a week, the time did not correspond with a week on Earth. In truth, they had already been there long over a year by the reckoning of those at headquarters in Stockholm, but there were still another three longer months of local time before they could count the first revolution around their new sun.

For some, however, the passage of time seemed to slow exponentially in anticipation of more localized and personal events.

***

The anthrocanis lupus figure was pacing ceaselessly in a steady rhythm around the dusty floor of the cavern, down on all fours with his head dipped low and his eyes barely focused on anything around him. His tongue was hanging loose, but his ears were fully erect to catch any sound to indicate the arrival of his long-awaited children. Others that watched him pace could not help but to make the comparison of a real wolf pacing the confines of a cell in a zoo, though there were no bars to keep him contained here.

Once it had been announced that Ellie had gone into labor within the dome she and her husband called a den, a small crowd had gathered outside the structure as Jenni and Chieko attended the she-wolf inside. As with many births, however, the waiting became long and the crowd thinned out to only a few bodies while everyone else went off to busy themselves with other activities and responsibilities.

Then a sound issued from the den unlike anything they had heard before. It was not quite the cry of a baby and it was not the whimpering yips of a canine, but it was somewhere in between and issued in chorus. Carl’s ears swiveled toward the dome and the rest of his body followed swiftly.

“Wow,” Kevin remarked with excitement when the wolf disappeared into the den. “I never knew anything with one throat could make a dual pitch like that!”

“That was two little voices, luv,” Erin explained with a grin. “One must have come out right on the tail of the other one, only seconds apart.”

Jon sat forward on his chair, a cup of coffee in his hands as he looked toward the dome in anticipation. Kristen leaned up against him and spoke quietly. “Do you think we should round up the others? Carl’s going to want to show off his new cubs soon.”

“Good idea,” he answered. He did not really want to leave, but responsibility called. The mountain lion set his Magellan cup on the ground beneath his chair and then padded off on all fours to spread the word.

***

Inside the wolves’ home, Carl approached the bed cautiously. Chieko gave him a warm smile and reached out to touch his shoulder when he drew near. Jenni was on the far side of the bed with a pan of warm water, patiently cleaning tiny bodies squirming on a blanket in a plastic tub upon a table. Ellie looked up at her husband from the bed, a tired but loving expression radiating from her lupine face.

The new father swallowed and stood up on two feet beside the bed. He leaned over and took Ellie’s hand gently. “Are… are you okay?” he asked in a quiet voice. The concern in his eyes made his wife chuckle.

“I’m fine,” she answered. “We’re all fine.” Carl leaned forward to kiss her and she stroked the side of his muzzle with a finger.

She looked over at the leopard and said in a weary voice. “Jenni, dear, would you introduce the children to their father, please?”

The nurse and midwife looked up with a grin. “Of course.” She crooked a finger at the male wolf and he stepped around the bed to join her. Carl and Ellie were now long-accustomed to the lupine forms of their transformation, but the father’s mind and thought processes were still primarily human. When he saw the first of his children, he was startled at the form of the tiny body, but Jenni’s wide smile eased that sudden hesitation right away.

***

When Carl emerged from the birthing den, he was met with applause from the entire gathered colony. He ducked his head from the noise and waved his hands frantically for quiet. When the din had fallen enough to speak, he grinned out at the crowd and said in a low voice, “Thanks, but let’s keep the noise down. The little ones are sleeping.”

Dr. Mochizuki chuckled. “I should imagine their ears have not yet opened,” the red panda said with amusement. The wolf looked at him for a brief moment before he nodded.

“Yes, of course, I forgot,” he murmured with a smirk. “I’m still thinking like a human.”

“When do we get to see them?” Dahlia asked from the front of the gathered Furs.

Without answering, Carl turned toward the dome behind him and made a brief gesture. A moment later, Jenni appeared from the depths of the dome with a small blanket in her arms; within its folds was a tiny figure. The new father gently picked up the naked infant and then held him up for all to see. At this stage, the male child resembled little more than a regular puppy, though with an oversized head to house his human brain. More humanoid characteristics would continue to grow into well-defined limbs and features in the coming weeks.

The small male made no sound as Carl showed him off to Second Chance to the oohs and aahs of all the women. He was predominantly lupine in appearance with brown, grey and white fur, and the small triangular ears were flopped over next to his large head. The tiny eyes would also remain closed for about a week, so it would be a few days before the color of his eyes could be determined. Carl held the small bundle close to his chest fur and the tiny nose began to sniff, taking in his scent.

“This is my son, Jude,” Carl told them, “the firstborn by less than a minute. Jude Amaranth.”

“No middle name?” Norman asked with a smile.

“Not needed,” Carl replied without taking his eyes from the newborn.

Before the new father could say more, Chieko came out with another bundle wrapped in light blanket. The boy’s twin sister was noticeably larger than he was, but although fraternal, her fur patterns were similar to his, right down to the dark mask around her eyes.

Carl reluctantly handed the boy back to Jenni, who wrapped little Jude up in the folds of his blanket. The wolf turned toward the red panda and gently picked up the naked little female. As he had done before, he let her take in his scent as he held her close, and then he held her up for all to see.

“This is my daughter, Jodie,” Carl announced quietly. “Jodie Amaranth.” The little girl did not like being held up away from the warmth of her father’s chest and began to whimper. Several of the ladies in the crowd aww’d at the tiny cries, but her tiny protests stopped when daddy held her close again.

Carl looked out at the faces smiling back at him and his expression was beaming. “Our population has increased by two precious little lives,” he said with emotion in his voice. “Ellie came through the ordeal just fine and is now resting, but we’ll both have our hands full for a while. We would appreciate all the help any of you can provide. Not only are they the children of their parents, they are also the children of our colony.

“Since they can’t hear us yet,” Sissy asked with a hopeful expression, “can we celebrate now?”

The wolf grinned back at her. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.” Thunderous applause, whistles and shouts of well-wishes echoed across the cavern. Although tiny ears might not be open yet, the puppies could feel the vibrations of the commotion and both started whimpering in unison.

Chieko raised her hands, smiling from ear to ear, but soon had the crowd quiet again. “Ellie has instructed me to let everyone know that all of you will be welcome to come in to see them after they have had some time to themselves,” she told them patiently. “However, the mother and her children need to rest now. Please and thank you.”

***

“What in the world are you doing?” Jon asked in amusement.

Norman and Hank had dug a shallow pit in the ground not far from the bridge across the river and one of the bears was now stacking grapefruit-sized rocks in a pyramid beside it while the other brought in an armload of huge leaves from the forest. The boughs were nearly three feet long and a third of that wide. Jon recognized them from the woods, but did not know if anyone besides Dr. Mochizuki might have given them a name.

Hank looked up from his rocks with a smile. “It’s a celebration for Jude and Jodie,” the black bear answered. “We’re going to have a Pachamanca feast!”

“I’m not even going to try to pronounce that. What kind of feast is that?”

“It’s a Peruvian pit barbecue,” Norman said, putting down his armload a short distance away. “I went to one of these on vacation in Hawaii once and it was really good.”

“I never made it to Hawaii,” Hank added, “but I attended one in San Antonio a few years back.”

Jon sat on his haunches beside the pit. “Okay, I understood the barbecue and feast bits of your explanation, but I don’t know the reference for the rest.”

“First, we’ll build a fire over these rocks and get them real hot,” Hank explained. “Once the fire has burned down to coals, we’ll use tongs and place the rocks inside the pit.”

Norman held up one of the large leaves he had collected. “Then we’ll wet these down and lay them over the rocks. On top of those, we’ll lay out cuts of meat and vegetables, and then put down more of the leaves.”

“Cover those with damp cloth and then pile some dirt on top of those. Let it all sit for about an hour and a half, and then we’ll dig it all up again. The meat and veggies will have cooked nicely and will provide enough food for everybody!”

Jon looked from one to another and nodded approvingly. “Do Kim and Yuki know what you’re planning, in case they might be setting up a celebratory meal of their own?”

“Yes, we do!” said a voice from behind him. Yuki gave him a pleasant smile and dropped a number of burlap sacks beside him with a gently wagging tail. “We’re getting the meat and vegetables ready, but they won’t have the rocks fired for a while yet, so we’re helping with the rest of the preparations too.”

“Yeah,” said Hank with appreciation, “I was gonna dig the pit myself, but Kim grabbed another shovel and helped me.”

“Where’d these come from?” the mountain lion asked, patting the burlap bags.

“That’s what some of our vegetables were packed in for the trip from Earth,” said Yuki. “Potatoes, onions, carrots and the like. We’ll wet these down in the river and lay them on top of everything else before we cover them with a layer of dirt.”

“Ah… It sounds like you all have everything under control,” he said, getting back up on two feet. “I will leave you all to it.”

“If all goes according to plan,” Norman informed him, “we’ll be ready to eat this by second supper tonight.”

Jon made an embellished show of licking his lips. “I’m looking forward to it already.”

***

A week later, the mountain lion enjoyed the sunlight streaming in just under the lip of the cavern ceiling. He was sitting in a chair at a small folding table, poring over hand-drawn maps on notebook paper and matching them up with the aerial photographs that Carl had transferred to his PBJ months ago.

Throughout the long winter, the colony captain had been preparing a plan to investigate the outlying areas using survey kits included in the manifest. Now that the colony site was established and they seemed to be relatively safe even from thunderpig attacks, he wanted to begin expanding their knowledge of the surrounding territories.

Carl’s aerial photos would help, giving them a baseline to begin with, but without a working gyrocopter, they would have to do everything from ground level. The wolf had tried his best to get his flyer working again, but without the proper tools and parts, he had only been partially successful. When pressed about its safety, Carl would only shake his head and admit that he was unwilling to take it up into the air without further repairs that he was currently unable to make.

They were also handicapped with the loss of the horses. Those had been seen out across the grand prairie with two new foals in their herd, proving that they had found someplace to winter and that they had survived any other predators that might be out there. One of the original reasons for bringing the horses was for travel, but without them all the surveying would have to be done on foot. Fortunately for them all, they could travel on all fours with a backpack designed for this form of travel, and they all had more endurance than they would have had as humans as well.

Using a claw tip as a stylus, Jon drew a few boundaries on the PBJ screen overlaying an aerial shot that he had marked for the first area to survey. He saved the file and was about to gather up the sketch papers when he noticed a group approach from inside the cavern.

Aaron, Aldo, Ken, Kevin and Raine stopped beside his table, each wearing a hopeful expression. “Hey guys,” the cougar said with a raised eyebrow. “What can I do for you?”

Ken took a step forward as their spokesman. “Hi Jon,” the red wolf said. “We’ve been talking and we want to know if we can have your approval to strike out for the Magellan. We want to see if there’s anything we can salvage from the ship that might be useful here.”

Jon looked up at the physician in wonder. The wolf had barely left camp in the months they had been there, choosing instead to stay close to home to treat anyone from the dangers of the new world, but now it looked as if the wanderlust had finally claimed him too.

“You told us headquarters wanted the black box flight recorder if we could find it,” Raine reminded him with an optimistic tone. “This would be a good time to look for it.”

“I do not think we have any bad weather coming soon,” Kevin interjected. “As far as I can tell, the winds should be light all this week and the temperatures even at night should be comfortable.

“We also need to stretch our legs,” Aaron added with a smile, “and a hike out to the ship would be good for us.”

Jon looked from one to another in amusement, but kept his expression neutral. The only one who had not spoken was the bloodhound, but he also bore a look of interest in the request.

“What about you, Aldo?” he asked.

“Ditto to all of that,” the canine answered. “I could use a change of scenery too.”

The cougar was hesitant. He had been about to start asking for volunteers to begin the survey, but Stockholm had recently restated their desire to have more information from the wrecked colony ship. They had sent him the schematics for the vessel back in the fall, so he really had no excuse.

Sighing inwardly that the surveys would be delayed just a little longer, he acquiesced. “Okay,” he said at last, picking up one of the wolf’s hand-drawn maps that included the location of the vessel. “It will take you two days of travel on foot to reach the crash site, so I’ll give you guys a week to get out there, salvage what you can, and then return. I want to start surveying the surrounding areas soon, so I can’t spare you any longer than that.”

“A week?” Raine complained. “If it takes us two days to get there and two more to get back, we’ll only be at the ship for a day!”

Jon chuckled and the others around them snickered in amusement. “We don’t have five-day work weeks anymore, Raine. You’ll have seven of our thirty-six hour days.”

“With seven days total,” Ken explained to him, “we can take up to three long days looking over the ship. If it’s as bad as Carl described, however, there may not be much of anything to see, but at least we’ll have enough time to know for sure.”

“Oh, okay,” the cheetah muttered in understanding.

“It might take us that long to get to the black box, though,” Aaron reminded them. “If it was smashed up with the bridge, we may not have any kind of tools to get at it.”

“I thought it wasn’t on the bridge,” Kevin remarked.

“It isn’t,” Jon confirmed. He tapped through several screens on his PBJ, thankful that it was currently working properly, and pulled up the file that Stockholm had provided to him. He opened the schematics to a specific plan and then raised the small screen up to show the others.

“The black box recorder was not located in the bridge area or anywhere near the nose of the ship,” he informed them. “It was in a package array sandwiched between two reinforced bulkheads near the life support generators at the center of the ship. It’s possible that it could have been protected from damage and you might be able to retrieve it.”

“That’s good for us,” Kevin replied. “What does it look like?”

“Obviously - a black box,” Aldo replied.

Jon shook his head. “Actually, it’s not a black box, despite that’s what flight recorders have been nicknamed since they were first included on aircraft during World War II. The type used on all interstellar Slipships are enclosed inside a bright orange sphere that’s made to withstand temperatures of up to two thousand degrees Fahrenheit and an impact of four hundred miles per hour. It is because of these specifications that Stockholm is optimistic that it can be retrieved. If you do find it, bring it back whether or not you think it’s any good. Even if I can’t retrieve any data from it using the equipment sent along with us for that purpose, we’ll keep it until such time as they might send out a ship to retrieve it.”

“That might not be until we’ve reached our five-year expiration date,” Aaron remarked.

“Possibly,” Ken agreed, “but if that’s the case, we can just tuck it back inside the cavern out of the way along with that old rusted site marker beacon pyramid.”

“Go ahead and pack up enough food and water for seven days and make a list of the tools you think you’ll take along,” Jon said. “Have Carl look it over and he can determine if there’s anything the six of you might have missed.”

“There are only five of us, Jon,” Aldo pointed out.

“You’ll need Carl to lead you back to the right spot or you might waste valuable time hunting around to find it,” Jon replied. “He did say that the fuselage was weathered and blended in with the surrounding terrain. He might have missed seeing it himself if he hadn’t landed nearly on top of the thing.”

“Do you think Carl’s going to want to leave his babies?” Ken asked, swishing his tail behind him. “I think the only time he’s even seen the sun since they were born has been to run for the latrine.”

“I’ll make sure he goes with you,” Jon said with a smirk. “Ellie’s complaining that he’s too attentive and won’t let them rest. He keeps disturbing the twins to check to make sure they’re developing right. There’s nothing he can do for any of them for the first few weeks anyway.”

He looked around at the smiling males. “Don’t be gone longer than seven days,” he reminded. “That should be plenty of time for all of you, but I’ll need you back after that. We need to begin sending out survey groups, and the hunting parties will also need to start building up our food stock again. As you can guess, there will be no thunderpigs on the menu. We’ve all learned that lesson and we’ve lots of other, more passive food sources anyway.”

***

Carl muttered beneath his breath as he fastened the strap on the last of the packs he had put together for everyone. He did not know how they were going to carry everything they needed, which included several heavy tool kits. Without the horses, they would become their own pack animals and the weight of these packs would slow them down.

He was still unhappy about Jon pulling rank on him to make him leave his newborns behind to go with the Magellan party, but the cougar had convinced him that he was badly needed on the trip. There were plenty of willing helpers if Ellie felt she needed anything she could not do herself.

He was still muttering about it all when Cheryl stopped beside him on her way out to the barn. “What’s the matter, Papa Wolf?” she asked.

He looked up at her with a frown and sighed audibly. “We have too much stuff to carry comfortably, but we’re going to need everything I’ve packed. We need the tools to extract the flight recorder and disassemble anything else we find that might be useful, plus we have to have enough food and water for six people for seven days.”

“Is that all?” the Border collie laughed. “Why don’t you take one or two of the wagons? You can use them to take your supplies out with you, plus you’ll need something to bring back anything you find.”

“I know the horses are gone for good,” the wolf grumbled, “but I don’t think any of us really want to be harnessed to a wagon.”

Cheryl peered at him from beneath the brim of her cowgirl hat. She reached out and gave his forehead a light tap. “Now you’re just being silly,” she told him. “We still have cattle and they can pull a wagon just as easily as a horse.

Carl looked up at her and blinked. “Yes, of course,” he admitted. “Now I do feel silly.”

The canine laughed and stood up. She wore a set of overalls with her hat, but nothing underneath, so her profile caught the wolf’s attention for a moment. He shook his head and then rubbed his eyes. He needed to get away from the colony for a while, having put himself under a lot of stress since the birth of the twins.

“I’d go with you to tend the cattle,” Cheryl added, “but I’m needed here for the rest of our critters.”

Carl smiled. “I think we can handle a couple of cows,” he said.

“Just like a horse you would have taken, make sure they get the rest, food and water they need,” she told him. “They’re strong, but they have the same basic needs that we do and they also have limitations. We’ve already been using them to plow the gardens. All you have to do is make sure they’re cared for and they’ll do the job you need them to do.”

“Thanks, Cheryl. I was getting too worried about how we were going to get everything out there and back and didn’t even consider the obvious.”

“You’re welcome, Papa Wolf. Do you think you’ll need one or two carts?”

He looked at all the packs on the ground and made a brief mental calculation on what they might bring back. If he was lucky, he might also be able to salvage parts he could use for the gyrocopter. He also remembered the unseen predators out on the plains that had taken down and stripped the large flightless bird. If they were to run into them, he did not want a whole wagon train to slow them down if they needed to run.

“I think one is all we need,” he answered. “Do we have a bull that could defend itself if needed? We’ll be up on the side of the mountain at the crash site, but we’ll have to leave him and the wagon down on the prairie.”

The cowgirl smiled at him. “You don’t usually help out with the livestock, but have you ever even looked at the cattle we have?”

The wolf frowned. “Of course I have, but what does that have—?”

“Tsk. All our cattle are Texas Longhorns, Carl. They might be gentle in nature, but the males and females alike are all armed with an impressive set of horns.”

“We have Longhorn cattle?” he asked with a deflated expression. “I guess I’ve never really noticed in the nine and a half months we’ve been here.”

“Well, for what you have in mind, I’ve got just the big guy for you,” she told him with a grin. “He’s a strong, hearty bull and he’s shown that he can use those things if needed, but if you’ll pardon the pun, he’s a little bull-headed and you might have to prod him along in places. Just remember that he could use his horns on you too, so don’t get him too riled up.”

“He sounds perfect for our needs. Thank you.”

Cheryl smiled and tipped her hat. “You’re welcome. I’ll get him harnessed to the wagon for you and then you can leave at any time. Just make sure you get him back to me safely. We still need him to make more cattle!”

Chapter 20

Dragon Harvest

Thock! Thock! Thock! The sounds of a lone axe echoed across the valley, but Ellie did not know whose it might be. Trees were being felled in the woods for use constructing new fences around the gardens with local lumber, but it only sounded as if one person was chopping right now.

The new mother sat just outside her den with a cup of locally-grown tea and a barely-touched, misshapen slice of toasted bread made from new flour, having finished breastfeeding her infant twins. Both were developing naturally with humanoid characteristics becoming more distinct each passing day. No longer looking like little more than wolf cubs, their arms and legs, fingers and toes were extending and shaping up, with also a little color showing up in their scalp hair. Both Carl and Ellie had been naturally blonde-headed in their youth and Jodie looked to have taken on this color atop her head. Jude’s hair was darker, almost a chocolate brown, and was more reminiscent of the grandfather he had been named after.

The little female was gaining weight, but her smaller brother did not seem to be getting any bigger, something that concerned both of his parents. Jude seemed healthy enough, but he was only a little larger than he had been on the day of his birth. He had been the smaller of the two from the start, but with his sister’s growth, the difference in size between them was now more apparent.

As much as she hated the term, the word runt kept creeping into Ellie’s mind and she felt ashamed for thinking it. She had tried to get Jude to take in more nourishment than Jodie, but he never seemed to want much and what he did consume did not seem to make a difference. From all signs, however, there did not seem to be any other problems other than his smaller size.

Two weeks after the birth, the ears and eyes of both pups had only just opened, and both seemed to be alert to their surroundings. Carl was concerned about how long it had been taking, but several had assured him that it would likely take about two weeks if they followed the natural progress of normal wolf cub development. Ten days after their birthday, Jude and Jodie were both looking back at their parents with murky blue eyes and responding to their voices.

It had also taken some getting used to hearing the sound of the twins’ little cries. Not quite the sound a human baby would make, but neither was it like a puppy either. There were times in the middle of a sleep period when one or the other would cry out for attention that either Carl or Ellie would wake up in a panic at the unfamiliar sound, but they were both slowly starting to grow accustomed to it.

The chopping sounds from the forest continued and were even a little comforting to the mother wolf. It was rhythmic and soothing in the quiet of the valley. Although experienced in hiking and camping trips away from civilization, without the continual noises of a city or even a small town, Second Chance could often be too silent for her tastes. She kept expecting to hear wheels on pavement or the sound of aircraft in the sky, but here the only sounds came from birds, the wind and occasional voices of her fellow colonists. The chopping of wood told her that activity was indeed in motion, and although it was not very loud, she welcomed it for her peace of mind.

Another sound interrupted her solitude, however. She recognized Jodie’s cries immediately and set her tea and toast aside to attend the needs of her child.

***

“Giddy up, ya horny animal!” Aaron called out. The longhorn bull had stopped to graze at yet another patch of succulent grasses and did not want to continue pulling his load. The brown bear sitting in the seat atop the fiberluminum wagon whipped the reins up and down vigorously, but the hearty bovine ignored him while the tasty patch was consumed.

Hoon!

“What was that?” Ken asked, standing up on two feet to look above the ripe heads of wheat.

Hoon! Hoon!

“I don’t know,” Raine said, hopping up into the back of the four-wheeled wagon for a higher vantage point. He looked out across the prairie with a frown. “Manny, Aldo and I heard that sound when we were exploring to the south,” he added.

“That’s right, I remember that,” Aldo remarked. “Never did see what made it, though.”

“Gerard and I heard one also,” Aaron muttered, “but it was at a distance. Maybe it’s just a bird or lizard of some kind.”

“I think that’s what attacked the horned bird I injured,” Carl said distractedly. He was standing near Horny’s head, deftly avoiding the animal’s long horns as the bull moved his head to and fro looking for the source of the call, the tasty grass now forgotten. “It’s a predator of some kind.”

“That’s not good,” Kevin murmured, looking around nervously.

“Everybody up into the wagon,” Carl directed. He, Ken, Aldo and Kevin scrambled up and joined Aaron and Raine, standing amongst the various items they had successfully salvaged from the Magellan wreckage. The operation had gone well and according to plan, and although they did not find as much to scavenge as they had hoped, they were able to extract the ship’s flight recorder. From the vessel’s machine shop, Carl had also found a few engineering tools and parts he was hopeful would help him get the gyrocopter back in the air. The wagon was only partially filled with salvage, the rest making up their tools and remaining supplies.

“What about Horny?” Kevin asked, looking down at the large Texas Longhorn bull that Cheryl had nicknamed due to his impressive set of horns, as well as his enthusiastic demeanor toward the cows he serviced.

Ken crept forward past the brown bear in the driver seat and stretched out a hand toward the primary harness buckle attaching the bull to the wagon. “He’s armed, but maybe he can defend himself better without this load.”

“Don’t release him yet,” Aaron warned. “If he runs off now, we may never catch him and Cheryl would skin us all alive for losing her calf-maker.”

“Why didn’t she loan us a cow instead?” Ken muttered. “The females have the same long horns that he has.”

“Maybe he’s the only one aggressive enough to use them,” Aldo suggested.

“There!” Kevin whispered. “I see it!”

“Where?” Raine nocked an arrow to his bow. The fennec fox pointed out across the prairie and then the cheetah could see movement in the grasses even if he could not see what it was.

Hoon! Hoon! Hoon! The sound emanated from the disturbance in the grass directly behind the wagon.

What emerged from the grass made Carl’s hackles rise. Its long face was relatively triangular in shape with a single horizontal nostril across its sharply pointed nose and a large auricle spread across the top of its head from earhole to earhole. Its short velvety fur was vertically striped in the same colors as the prairie wheat, giving it the perfect camouflage for its environment and its solid black eyes were intensely confident and alert to everything around it; in just seconds, the hoon’s eyes had tracked to the bull and each of the Furs, marking all their positions. Its mouth was open, revealing an impressive set of cutlery, though its short tongue did not extend beyond them. Roughly the size of a Great Pyrenees mountain dog, it stood on four long, thick legs and it possessed a magnificent brush of tail fanned up over its back. It had the look of an experienced predator that was used to taking down prey bigger than itself.

Carl swallowed hard, immediately remembering how terrified the large injured hornbird had been when one of these creatures had attacked it on his previous trek back from the Magellan wreckage.

Horny bucked and rocked against the harness, trying to turn to face the predator, so Ken reached out and hit the quick release before the wagon tipped them all over. The bull took advantage of the freedom to face off at the new creature.

The hoon extended its neck and a new cry issued from its throat, sounding somewhere between a cross of wildcat and feral dog that set the teeth and nerves of the Furs on edge. Horny lowered his head canted to one side so that a point was lined up with the other animal and he stamped the ground with a warning snort. The hoon narrowed its eyes at the display, but did not back down. It advanced with confidence and flexed its jaws.

Thunk!

The feathered shaft of an arrow entered the back of the hoon’s neck and extended through its throat, pinning it to the ground, but that barely slowed it down. The animal thrashed around making an ear-splitting shriek of pain and rage, jerking the shaft and its head up from the ground to look at Raine, who was scrambling to load another arrow in his bow.

Horny was momentarily ignored as the hoon had a new target and its muscles bunched up to leap into the wagon. Before anyone could do anything, it launched itself up toward Raine but misjudged the cart’s railing. It scrambled for purchase to pull itself up and the cheetah whacked it hard across the face with the frame of his compound bow. The hoon jerked back, but did not lose its grip on the wagon, so Raine changed tactics and stabbed at its eyes with the end of the arrow still in his other hand. He missed hitting those fierce orbs, but the snarling animal dropped back to the ground to gather itself for another attack.

Distracted and in pain, the creature was not ready for the sudden charge of the bull. The end of one of the long horns caught the hoon’s flank and went deep; the animal was carried away several yards before the bull stopped to shake its massive array. The predator was flung off to the ground, but determination got it back up onto its feet. Horny snorted and readied for another charge.

Unwilling to allow the new predator to do even a little damage to the bull with teeth or claws, Aldo fired off an arrow of his own. This one penetrated the animal’s rib cage; it yelped and staggered, but then leapt up toward the wagon again – only to be knocked backward by a powerful blow from an ursine paw.

Enraged, it glared up at the brown bear that peered over the side of the wagon at it, but Raine loosed another arrow and this time it went through the predator’s eye. The hoon jerked sideways from the force of the impact and flopped over in the grass, one paw twitching for only a moment before it fell still and stopped breathing.

“Holy cow!” Aaron exclaimed. “It took Horny and three arrows to stop that thing!”

Ken jumped out of the wagon and landed beside the still beast, but then he turned back toward the spooked bull. The Longhorn was still standing ready to fight in case the hoon got up again, but the red wolf approached him with quiet movements with both hands stretched out toward him. Horny allowed the familiar figure to get near him when the hoon predator stayed down, and only relaxed when his hand stroked the Longhorn’s forehead. The bull regarded Ken with a proud bovine expression, unmistakably looking triumphant and full of himself.

With a nod, Ken took a handkerchief from a pocket and calmly wiped away thick blood from the end of the horn. He then took Horny’s harness and helped maneuver him back into place while Carl, Raine, Aaron and Aldo all crawled out of the wagon to take a closer look at the hoon. Only Kevin stayed up high and off the ground, adrenaline coursing and heartbeat still rapid as he panted away his terror.

Raine put a tentative hand on the hoon’s chest, feeling for a heartbeat, but the critter was lifeless. “We’ve got to take this thing back with us,” he said, looking at Carl. “Jon and Dr. Mochizuki will both want to see it.”

“What if it wakes up in the wagon with us?” Kevin inquired with a frown.

Aaron reached out and grabbed one of the arrow shafts protruding from the beast’s body. He gave it a good shake, but there was no response. “I don’t think you have to worry about that, kid,” he said. “It’s dead now.”

“It’s dead,” the small fox repeated, but he did not sound convinced.

Aaron picked up the hoon with a grunt and carried the body over to the back of the wagon. “Wow, this thing’s heavy – all muscle.”

He flipped it over up against the Magellan’s flight recorder and Kevin retreated to the front seat of the wagon. The bear crawled back up and smiled at the fox when he took the seat beside him. Ken handed the bull’s reins up to him with a nod.

“Okay, let’s get moving back to base before one of that thing’s relatives comes looking for him,” Carl directed. Aldo jumped up into the wagon to keep an eye on the hoon and Raine handed him his bow. He and the rest followed alongside, down on all fours again.

***

Jon watched quietly as Aaron carried the heavy corpse of the hoon over his shoulder up to Dr. Mochizuki for examination, but then he turned back to the Magellan party.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said to them. “Aside of the omnivorous pigs, this is the first real predator we’ve seen since we got here, and I’m thankful none of you were hurt.” He clasped his hands and then rubbed them together with a smile. “Now, let’s see what you brought back from the ship.”

Kevin hopped back up into the wagon with a grin. He pulled a box across to the side where Jon looked on curiously. “I found the kitchen,” the young fox said. “There was a lot of damage, but I did find some utensils I thought Kim and Yuki could use.” He held up a scorched metal spatula with a melted handle that might have been plastic at one time. “They’ll need some cleaning first, though, and maybe someone can carve them a new wooden handle for this one.”

“I found a stand-alone, claw-foot bathtub made of fiberluminum that was still in decent shape in the captain’s quarters within the forward gravity drum,” Raine said, leaning against one of the wagon wheels. “I wanted to get it, but no one else would help me unbolt it from the deck and take it back out to the wagon.” The cougar grinned at the cheetah’s sour expression. “Just imagine, Jon — relaxing in a tub of fire-heated water up to your shoulders to wash the dirt and grit from your fur! Bathing in the river is fine if you like cold spring water, but I miss a hot bath!”

“I agree that sounds great,” Jon admitted, “but I’m sure it would have been a hassle to bring it back.”

“Can I go back to get it later?” Raine pleaded. “If you let me do this, I’ll let you have the first bath!”

The mountain lion laughed. “We’ll see.” Raine smiled with a triumphant nod. His captain’s response had not necessarily been negative, so perhaps there was still a chance. He and the others pointed out other items that could have value to someone in the camp, but it was not until Kevin rolled what looked like a blackened orange pumpkin over to the side of the wagon to him that the cougar’s eyes lit up. Like most everything else they had brought back, there were signs of damage, age and weathering on the object, but according to the original specifications, the Magellan’s flight recorder should have survived it all.

Jon reached into the wagon and picked up the basketball-sized sphere as a crowd began to gather around the wagon. “I’m going to take this and see if the data on it is still accessible by the equipment we brought,” he said. “I’ll need copies of all the notes and photos you took, but for now, you all have fun with your scraps!”

The others started fielding questions about their experiences with the gathering Furs, but Kristen fell into step beside her mate.

“Maybe now we can find out what really happened,” she said hopefully.

“It’s definitely a mystery that a lot of people back home would like cleared up,” Jon agreed.

“Did the guys find any bodies?”

The lion shook his head. “They found the remains of some of the livestock still in cryo tubes, all long dead, but none of the people. Remember that we were revived in orbit before the Meriwether Lewis started its landing, so the Ferdinand Magellan probably followed similar policy. Even though Carl had help with him this time, it was the same as when he reported his earlier investigation. They found none of the crew or passengers. Scavengers probably disposed of the bodies a decade ago. The fuselage was split open and so were the cargo bay doors, all above that deep crevasse.

“If we were to rappel down into its depths, we would probably find a lot of detritus from the crash piled up below, but from what they could see, it looked practically bottomless. Raine said he dropped a rock into it but never heard it hit anything below. That just means it could have soft-landed in sand or on vegetation, but they didn’t have any lights strong enough to penetrate that darkness to its bottom. Maybe someday the AHCP will send a ship to investigate with the proper equipment, but for now it’s best left alone.”

He and Kristen walked up the path to the cavern and then to the home they shared. He set the sphere on the floor beside their table and left the room to get the equipment he would need from supply. While he was away, Kristen peeled off her coveralls and shook them outside in the cavern. She had spent the greater part of the day in the gardens and had soil all in them. When she moved back inside, she opened a chest of drawers and pulled out a set of furman shorts. She put them on and was adjusting the strap across the back of the waistband over her tail when Jon returned.

He saw her topless state, and although she was well covered up by her fur, he could hardly help but admire her figure. He remembered back to the time when they had first met and how touchy she had been about her weight. She had been a little plump then, but nothing he would consider fat, though her self-image had been different than how everyone else had seen her. Now as an anthrofelis mountain lion, her weight was more evenly distributed and she was rather cute.

She winked at him and then slipped on one of his oversized tee shirts, eliciting a verbal sigh of disappointment from her mate. Kristen laughed and then pulled up a chair when he set a small metal box upon the table. He opened its top and pulled out four cables from the lid. Matching color coding, he plugged the cables into corresponding jacks in the box unit and then knelt down on the floor to plug the others ends into the flight recorder. The receptacles were corroded, but Jon scratched off enough residue with a nail file that he finally got a good connection.

He thumbed on the power of the tabletop unit and the flight recorder resonated with a low hum. There were no lights or other sounds from the sphere, but a small screen on the metal box went through a series of startup commands synchronizing a signal between the two devices.

The sphere suddenly made a high-pitched whine that made both cougars wince. It was at a frequency that humans probably could not hear, but as Furs it was painfully noticeable. The small screen on the box suddenly filled up with seemingly random code, but whatever it was receiving from the flight recorder was being stored within its own memory crystals. It was meaningless to Jon and even a little disappointing, but once it was finished, he would hook the box up to the com unit and transmit everything in a concentrated data burst back to Earth. Perhaps someone within the AHCP would be able to make sense of the information.

***

When Carl returned to his dome, he found Ellie kneeling beside the baby crib they had fabricated from spare materials. It was simple in design without any frills but it served its purpose.

“Hello, sweetie,” he said in a near whisper to keep from waking the children. Ellie jumped and looked over at him with startled eyes. She had been so preoccupied with her thoughts that her sensitive hearing and olfactory senses had not even informed her of his return. She blinked and looked over at him and it was then he saw that her eyes were moist.

“Hello,” she whispered back, wiping at her cheek fur with her fingers. “How was your trip?”

“Just a little eventful,” he said distractedly. He reached out and brushed bangs from her forehead. “What’s the matter?”

She dipped her head and then looked back at their children. “It’s Jude,” she said quietly. “He’s stopped eating and he’s too small as it is.”

Carl frowned and moved over to the crib. Just looking in over at the cubs, it was easy to tell them apart. Jodie had a greater size than her brother, who was too thin even for his smaller frame. They both slept, each curled around the other, but they were a mismatched pair.

The male wolf reached out and lightly stroked the fur behind his son’s ear. “When was the last time he’s had any milk?” he asked quietly.

“Yesterday morning. He’s refused all offerings since then.”

Carl studied his children for a moment, but then he pulled off his furman shirt and set it aside. He gently scooped up the smaller child in his hands and then held him close to his chest fur. The little boy sniffed at his scent for a moment and then let out a small sigh, but otherwise did not make a sound as he snuggled up to his father’s warmth.

Carl rocked back and forth and lightly stroked the fur along Jude’s back with a finger. The small cub opened his mouth and curled his little pink tongue in a wide yawn and then buried his nose against his father’s fur.

After long patient moments, the papa wolf looked over at his wife and mate. “Make another offering,” he whispered. Ellie raised an eyebrow, but opened her furman top without comment. Carl handed the little one over to her and she laid him across the crook of an arm with his head at her breast. Almost immediately, Jude began to suckle.

Ellie watched in wonder and then glanced over at her husband; he looked incredibly pleased with himself. “Daddy’s little boy,” she remarked with a twinkle in her eye. “He must have missed you while you were away and lost his appetite.”

“See? I told you I should have stayed.” Carl smiled and then leaned in close. “I missed all of you,” he said. He gave her a quick, affectionate lick on the cheek and then slipped an arm around her waist. There was a small whimper from the crib, so he turned toward his daughter and picked her up with a relaxed smile.

***

Aldo was having a contented nap on a bed of moss beneath a tree in the woods the next afternoon. It had been a long, full day of work with a team setting fence posts around the garden and he had taken his first sleep period out in the forest instead of going back to the cavern. The spring weather was comfortable, and even in the heat of the day the shadows of the woods were pleasant.

He had been having good dreams lately, most about Cheryl. With both of them having been raised in country settings, they were kindred spirits and he was quite fond of her easy smile, sense of humor and her work ethic. They had not hooked up in the time they had known one another, but he was generally shy by nature and had not initiated anything beyond a friendship. That did not stop his dreams, however, and he had often wished he could bottle them up to experience again later.

One such dream involved nothing more than a camping trip with just the two of them, but just as things were about to get interesting, a dark malicious entity permeated the dream and attacked with such violence that he came awake with a start.

The nightmare did not necessarily end there. A strong, fear-filled scent assaulted the bloodhound’s sensitive olfactory senses and he involuntarily shivered all over. This was not the first time he had smelled that scent and he was suddenly afraid.

He scrambled up onto all fours and looked around. He, Manny and Michael had experienced such a scent out on the prairie far to the south that led to a desolate region of sandstone caves and gullies. They had never seen what had set their fears on edge and had beaten a hasty retreat before they found out. Aldo had often wanted to go back with an armed party to see if they could flush out what it might be, but duties and responsibilities around the colony had never really presented an opportunity.

He was suddenly aware that he was alone in the woods with something whose scent alone frightened him. Straining his ears, he realized that it had also grown completely quiet around him. There were no bird calls, no rustle of tiny furball feet amongst the leaves on the forest floor and even the buzz and clicks of insects were absent. The air itself was even still and he was unable to determine which direction the scent originated.

The bloodhound swallowed with difficulty and made his way back toward the little horseshoe valley, the hackles along his back seemingly standing up in permanence. He had no way of knowing if he was being stalked, so he stretched out his senses and tried to detect anything malevolent that might be nearby. He tried to keep his steps through the woods as quiet as he could while simultaneously making haste.

As he got closer to the colony site, he finally began seeing movement through the trees. The wildlife they had in abundance in the valley was rushing away as if making an exodus, and that thought alone filled him with dread. The fear scent had permeated the air and it was making everything afraid.

What kind of critter could instill such a reaction in every living thing? Aldo thought to himself. He had once called the unseen creatures ‘dragons’, and although it had been said in jest, terrible visions of giant fire-breathing lizards kept coming to mind.

When he reached the edge of the clearing, the bloodhound saw several things at once. Cheryl and Arne were in the corral frantically trying to gather up livestock that were frightened and trying to get past them to escape up into the barn. Other Furs were running and loping as fast as they could for the cavern and there were several lined up at the top of the path already armed with bows and rifles. In spite of the panic that was rampant across the little valley clearing, there was one thing that seemed especially out of place.

All the lil-deer that had recently tripled in population were calmly milling around the clearing. They weren’t eating the grass or flowers and none were frolicking around as usual, but they all seemed to be waiting for something with their ears and little tails up and facing the woods where he crouched; there was none of the fear or panic in their little faces. All of the rest of the wildlife had vacated the area, leaving the little deer to themselves to wait… but wait for what?

Aldo began to physically shake and shiver from fright. He felt an overwhelming need to rush up to the presumed safety of the cavern, but he could not make his legs work. The fear scent was stronger now and he felt rooted to the spot right between the close trunks of two large twist-oaks.

It was then he saw them walking purposely through the underbrush of the woods to his left; it was the originators of the scent that made just about every living creature mad with fear just from the smell alone.

Twice the size of the largest thunderpig, these dragons looked like a crossbred creature with a leonine and crocodile-like body with rough shaggy fur. Each one, and there were two of the things, had a head that was vastly oversized, impossibly making up nearly a third of its massive overall length. That great head was upon a thick neck with seemingly exaggerated shoulder muscles that had to be necessary to support such weight. One was larger than the other, and the smaller of the two creatures was nearly twelve feet high at the shoulder with an overall body length two and a half times its height.

Aldo could see long, curved talons on its fore-paws that flexed in and out with each step of sturdy legs. There was a short, but thickly bulbous tail behind powerful back legs that did not cover much but seemed to act like a counterweight for that massively huge head. Both creatures walked boldly to the edge of the clearing and then stopped, looking out at the population of lil-deer with intense, profound black eyes.

Each opened its mouth and within a moment, Aldo felt overwhelmed by another strong wash of the fetid scent. He felt petrified, his claws digging deep into the rough bark of the tree he was pressing his face against and he could feel his muscles quivering. The teeth within those mouths were long, hooked and inward curving, perfect for holding onto prey. It was the most frightening thing he had ever seen, whether awake or in the midst of a terrible nightmare.

Despite the top-heavy heads and ungainly looking bodies, the dragons suddenly surged forward with speeds that would have rivaled Raine in a flat-out run. They charged forward with their maws open, issuing such a roar that made the ears hurt and it only took an instant for the two of them to charge right into the midst of the lil-deer.

The resulting slaughter was violent and messy. The dragons slashed at the their prey with their talons and chomped down, sharp teeth and powerful jaws severing them nearly in two with the first bite; chewing was fast, open mouthed and bloody as they ripped and shredded the oily meat and crunched bones with little effort. When one deer was consumed, a dragon moved swiftly to another, sometimes gutting two or more deer at the same time.

Through the carnage of the attack, however, the deer never ran or tried to escape. It was as if the fear scent kept them as rooted to the ground as it did to Aldo. It was a one-sided affair and the Furs up in the cavern could do nothing but stare in horror at the scene played out below that seemed to go on and on. Even those who were armed never pulled their weapons up to bear.

In its feeding, one of the dragons made its way near the corral, and for a moment it looked as if it might go for the cattle – or for the fear-stricken Cheryl and Arne – but the great creature did not seem interested in any of them. It was as if its appetite would be satiated only by the small, foul-tasting deer. It simply looked over the fence at the cowering Furs and livestock for a moment, its large nostrils taking in their scent, but then it turned its hideous countenance back toward the lil-deer to gorge again.

The feeding went on, but after a time, both dragons slowed, their immense bellies eventually filled to capacity. The larger one moved across the field to its mate, and in an odd, affectionate way, they nuzzled one another for a moment. Then as if by signal, they turned in unison and ambled slowly through the remaining deer out to the forest, walking Meriwether Lane on a path that would take them out to the prairie.

Several moments after they had gone, sound and movement slowly returned to the little horseshoe valley. Birds of all kinds began screeching and chattering amongst themselves in such a din. The remaining little deer seemed to come out of a daze and began moving away from the bloody carnage left spread out all across the clearing, and as they congregated on the far side, Aldo noticed that there only seemed to be about a third of the little darlings left, most of them the young ones.

Perhaps this was the natural course of things here. The lil-deer must have a population explosion every spring and the dragons thinned them out again. There was no way of knowing if it only happened in this little valley, but more likely the dragons moved from oasis to oasis to harvest them as an annual staple to their diet. Perhaps the oily substance in the meat was necessary to the health and rearing of young dragons. It was all supposition, but these thoughts whirled through Aldo’s mind as he, too, came back to his senses.

There was shouting from the cavern and he could see Jon giving orders to a small crowd. Within a moment, Hank, Norman, Aaron, Raine and Manny set off toward Meriwether Lane at a run armed with rifles and bows slung across their backs. He doubted they were charged with killing the massive beasts, but more likely it was to make sure they had indeed gone away and would not return anytime soon.

It was fortunate that the dragons had been uninterested in anything but the deer. Remembering how difficult the fight had been against the thunderpigs, Aldo was certain they had nothing that could have stopped these things from destroying everyone if they had set themselves upon the flesh of furmankind.

This line of thought made Aldo wonder if the fear scent would also stop a thunderpig in its tracks as it had everything else. If the colony survived another year in this place, it was unlikely that anyone would want to be near the lil-deer herd the next spring. What would happen if the furman children were out playing amongst them the next time the dragons returned? Would the kill-frenzy blind the hideous beasts so that they ate anything else that might be in the mix? That could explain the mass exodus just before the harvest. The dragons ate only the deer, but nothing else wanted to be caught up by mistake.

***

It took the rest of the day and most of the long night to clean up the mess. Blood, bones, hair, bits and scraps were strewn all over the clearing and no one wanted the smell to attract scavengers and other predators to their camp. A large pit had been dug and the remains were piled up inside, but then a fire was set to it all when the winds were favorable to blow the smoke away from the mountain cave. Once it had all burned to ash, the pit was filled in again. They could do nothing about the blood splattered all across the grass, but myriads of birds and furball mice braved the smoky valley to consume what they could.

Three days following the lil-deer harvest, things began to settle into routine once again. The dragons had been followed out a short distance across the prairie and it appeared that they were well on their way toward the north without even looking back. With luck, they would not be seen again until the next spring.

Jon and Carl were sitting on the bank of the lake late into the night, quietly discussing a change of plan the cougar originally had concerning the survey of surrounding lands. He had thought long and hard about the discussions others had been having about the hills to the east and was in favor of focusing a survey in that area. The conversation was well into plans when a heart-rending wail echoed from the cavern.

The wolf jumped up with instant dread and began running toward the zigzag path with Jon fast on his heels. They passed others who had reacted to the cries and did not stop until they reached the wolves’ geodesic den.

Jon hesitated at the door, but Carl rushed inside. Ellie was on her knees beside the crib, wailing with great wracking sobs as she clutched something to her bosom.

Carl knelt beside her with a lump in his throat, and when he saw what she held, his own dam of emotions let loose. The little form of Jude lay still in her arms, tiny blue eyes unseeing and jaws partially open without a breath within them.

The little boy had been weak from the start, but despite his parents’ best efforts to nurture and care for his health, it was not enough. Carl and Ellie both sobbed as other Furs gathered outside their door, but the noise and anguish woke up the remaining twin.

Jodie cried out in the darkness for attention. Ellie was unwilling to release her son, so Carl made himself get to his feet to pick up their daughter. He gathered her up in his arms and then sank again beside his wife. He did not even bother to quieten the little girl so that the three wolves could cry out in distress together.

After several long moments of suffering, two of the cries merged into mournful howls, and then in her own high-pitched little voice, two-week old Jodie learned to howl that night.

Chapter 21

Change of Scenery

Jon looked up at the buzz that passed overhead, shielding his eyes against the afternoon sun. Carl had been successful repairing the gyrocopter with the tools and parts he had salvaged from the Magellan and had spent the past three weeks making numerous flights in an aerial survey of the Ivanrose Forest to the east. The wolf drove himself relentlessly in work, presumably to get his mind off the death of his infant son, but when he was home, he spent every waking moment with his wife and daughter.

At merely a month old, Jodie had more in common with a wolf pup than a human baby. She could not yet walk upright on two feet, but she had already started maneuvering around on all fours, investigating the scents of the immediate region of the den. She had not yet gathered up the courage to venture out of the den on her own, but her mother had started taking her out to the valley clearing to experience the sights, sounds and scents of the great outdoors on days of good weather. Jodie had also started eating meat in small bits pre-chewed by her mother, supplementing the milk she still nursed.

Ellie was not alone, however, even when Carl was away on self-appointed duties. She had plenty of volunteers to help as needed, not only from the females of the colony, but some of the males too. She got the most attention from the other mothers-to-be, all of them now having a common bond; Alicia, Dara, Jasmine and Dahlia all wanted to help and discuss issues on first-time motherhood, and they all shared their fears of losing a child of their own just as she had. They helped care for Jodie if Ellie needed to visit the latrine or just get away for a little alone time with her husband and they were all learning things with each experience that would be helpful when their time came.

Neither Dara nor Jasmine were due for another few weeks and the vulpine sisters only a short time after that, so all four of them had been excused from most colonial duties. Jon had forbidden Dara from making unescorted excursions back into the recesses of the cavern during her pregnancy, but the polar bear had already lost all interest in such explorations. She had spent most of the winter months trying to learn as much about the internal ecosystem of the mountain as she could and had gotten it all out of her system by the time she had started feeling the life growing within her.

Neither Jasmine nor her sister was as far along, but both of them seemed to be enjoying motherhood even if they had not actually given birth just yet. The maternal congregation kept Ellie from getting too lonely while Carl was away on days like this one.

Using maps on a PBJ made from aerial photographs and leaving at first light, Jon had led a group of ten from Second Chance across the prairie. Like others in the colony, he had yearned for a change of scenery and he was itching to get out away from the horseshoe valley for a while, so he had decided to make a day trip of it with all-comers welcome to go along. They had all packed food and general supplies, as well as several weapons, but so far they had encountered nothing out amongst the tall double-stalks of wheat to cause alarm.

They had seen the ever-present lil-deer in places, as well as a few of the other herbivores they were already familiar with; they had even spotted a couple of thunderpigs with a young shoat that watched them in idle curiosity, but none showed any hostility toward Furs that kept their distance. Just before they had reached the start of the hills that overlooked the plains, they had also come across a small flock of large, flightless birds that could be compared to either ostriches or emus from Earth in appearance. The hard, bony ridge crowning their heads matched up with what Carl had described before and had casually named hornbirds. They were docile and relatively harmless, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they could use the horns if provoked. They did not seem to be alarmed by the presence of the mismatched group of predators, but other sources of food were abundant and no one had any additional reasons to stir them up.

Carl’s gyrocopter circled overhead again and then buzzed off in a specific direction to indicate where he wanted them to go. Jon acknowledged the aerial instruction by radio and then led his group where directed. The grey wolf had a spot picked out in a broad forested dale between two ridges as a possible homestead site for the colony that matched the criteria he and Jon had worked out together. There was a nearby river that fed into a lake at the southern end of the wide valley, with tall trees all around with straight trunks that should provide good logs for homes.

The undulating hills that went on for miles weren’t as high as the rocky peaks of the Hiamovi Mountain Range, but were more reminiscent of the Smokey Mountains of the eastern United States in the Tennessee vicinity, though with differences of its own.

There was nothing wrong with the cavern where they had lived for the greater part of a year, but many were tired of living in a cave and preferred to have real homes around them; recent memories of the horrific lil-deer slaughter was also still fresh on their minds and the need to get away before the next harvest was shared.

The cavern had been a good site to start out, but if they were going to put down roots, establish themselves and grow for years to come, there was no harm in beginning now. Scouting out possible sites for a real town was the primary purpose for this trip.

Although Jon was the de facto leader of the group, he had set up Carl and Ivan as their guides. The red fox tod was the only one among them who had previously been to the Ivanrose region that was almost due east from Avonaco Mountain.

In the months since Rose died, Ken had become obsessed with finding an antidote to the denim spider venom, but had only had a tiny amount from the original spider from which to work. At Ken’s behest, Carl had taken precautions during his explorations so that he could hunt down and capture more of the little devils for the red wolf’s research. The hunt had almost been fruitless, as the tiny spiders seemed to be especially good at hiding, but once Carl located some of the Mandelbrot flowers growing near the apex of a hill, he had been successful bringing back several in specimen tubes without getting bitten.

Using furball mice he had kept as lab animals, Ken felt he had successfully developed a counter-agent to the tiny spider’s fast-acting venom, but it would have to be administered immediately after getting bit in order to have a chance to work. Several people in the colony had objected to him using the furballs for experimentation, but he had to remind them that he did not have a modern lab in which to work. If he had to sacrifice several mice to save another Fur’s life, he was willing to make that call, but he would do so as humanely as possible.

Although successful on the mice, no one would volunteer for testing of the final formula, not even the doctor himself, so it was still only theoretical that it might actually work on the physiology of a Fur. Each member of the scouting party had been equipped with a personal needle syringe to carry on his or her person should anyone get bitten by this particular creature. They were all to take extra care when handling anything and everyone had brought along the species-specific leather gloves they had all been issued.

So far, the denim spiders had been found inhabiting only Mandelbrot flowers and nowhere else. Although the plants themselves were harmless, they were easily identifiable and branded as hazardous due to their little hosts. Despite this, however, everyone kept a close eye out for the spiders elsewhere, remembering how poor Rose had suffered.

After spending several hours walking on all fours across the wheat prairie, the shade of the trees felt good upon the pelts of the ten Furs that entered the forest and started up the first rise. They would have to cross two of them to reach the dale that Carl had found to match their specifications, but the terrain was smooth and easy to traverse.

Of everyone on this day trip, Kristen seemed to be the most excited, running here and there examining new plants that did not grow near their current colony site. Jon tried to rein in her enthusiasm with the logic that she would have plenty of time to study and catalog the new flora, but it did not seem to matter to the mountain lioness. This was her playground and the botanist was wasting no time.

Ivan reached the top of the rise first and stood up, spreading his arms out wide. “Welcome to the Ivanrose Forest!” he said with a smile. Sissy stopped to take his picture and then gave him a little applause.

Hank got up on two feet, put his hands on his chest and then inhaled deeply. “Mmm,” the black bear murmured with a smile, “I do like the aromas of this place!”

“It smells homey,” Erin agreed.

“It smells homely?” Michael asked with a frown. Erin and several others laughed at him.

“Clean the fuzz out of your ears – I said it was homey,” the tan-furred pixie corrected him with a grin. “It smells like home.”

The swift fox felt his ears heat up. “Yes,” he said, feeling embarrassed, “the scents are very comforting.”

“Imagine what it would smell like after a rain,” Kristen mused. “I could get used to this.”

“If the place Carl’s picked out for us is this nice,” Jon said, “we could be getting used to it soon and you will not have to use your imagination.” He stretched, but he was not quite ready to relax just yet. He put his handheld radio into the pocket of the furman vest he wore and then dropped to all fours. “C’mon, let’s keep going. Carl said it’s only another mile and a half from here, down the vale and then over the next rise.” There were no stragglers, as everyone was eager to see what could potentially be their new home, so they followed the mountain lion in the direction that the gyrocopter had indicated.

The underbrush of the forest was light and most of the lower branches of the trees were high enough that all but the taller bears would have little difficulty walking beneath them when up on two feet. Birdsong filled the trees, chattering and singing, and smaller critters scurried away from the new and unusual predators that had entered their wood. Insects chirred, clicked and buzzed, and they could even hear the warbling call of a mooshelk somewhere off in the distance. The Furs had fallen silent as they walked, their footsteps just as quiet, but the denizens of the forest knew they were there and alerted others to their presence.

They crossed a series of weathered washout gullies at the bottom of the shallow vale, but then started up the final hill. At the top, they had to skirt around a thicket of thorny bushes, but then they found a wide animal trail that lead right to their destination.

The dale between the low mountains was approximately two miles wide and was several miles in length, but within the northern half was a large glade they could look down into. Sitting near the center of the clearing was Carl’s gyrocopter.

A river meandered along the eastern side of the shallow valley and fed into a moderately-sized lake at the southern end where it dammed up naturally against another low mountain. There was more than enough area in the dale for a small town with room to grow and the serene vista put smiles upon the faces of all the Furs.

“Now this is where we should have put down in the first place!” Raine said in a low voice.

“Amen to that,” Sissy replied absently. She took a few pictures of the region and then turned back to Jon, lightly bouncing on the toes of her feet. “Are we heading back this evening?” she asked, putting the camera into her day pack. There was a wistful look in her eyes.

Jon shook his head. “I thought we might camp out overnight – do a little hunting, test the waters and get a feel for the place before we go home.”

“Where are we going to sleep?” Kevin asked. “We brought a few supplies, but I don’t think anyone brought bed rolls or tents.”

“What’s the weather supposed to be like tonight?” Jon asked him.

The young desert fox twitched one of his large ears. “It should be relatively mild and pleasant,” he answered.

The cougar looked back at him with a smile and then glanced around at the others. “We slept on the ground during our survival march back in the Adirondacks and we did okay. We can do the same here.”

A shudder ran up Erin’s spine. “I just hope there are no coyotes out to eat me this time.”

Kevin sniffed the air and then looked at her with a smirk. “You aren’t bleeding this time,” he reminded her quietly. Then with a serious expression, he looked up ahead at Jon. “We are going to rotate watches during the night, right?”

“That’s right,” the mountain lion confirmed. “Someone will be watching over the rest of us in two hour shifts when we settle in for the night.” Jon still felt guilty at having fallen asleep the night that Erin had been attacked, and he had privately sworn that he would never do that again anytime he was on watch.

***

Later that evening, nine Furs casually relaxed around the crackling flames of a campfire pit they had dug into the soil of the valley floor. Hunting had brought in one of the kirin deer and they had served it up on a spit over the fire made from branches of the nearby forest. Kristen had successfully located a few indigenous vegetables she already knew to be safe eaten raw and the clear flowing water from the river had tested clean.

After supper and just before the sun set beyond the mountains, Carl had bid them all goodbye and returned to the colony in his gyrocopter, anxious to get back to his family now that his primary duty for the day had been accomplished.

The area was all they could have hoped for. There was plenty of game for food, more than enough room to build their town and all the lumber they would need in the surrounding forest. There was a clean running river, a lake to the south and fertile soil for the gardens. There was grass for the livestock and they were still within a couple of miles from the wheat prairie. Remembering the signs when they had first taken up residence in the little horseshoe valley below the cavern, they had searched the region for evidence of past flooding, but all they found was near the river where the water might have overflowed its banks by only a few yards. They had a wide margin to build their town with plenty of room to spare.

Jon knew that Carl would gather everyone together back at the cavern to show them pictures and tell them all of what they had found. There were sure to be a few who would be nostalgic for the place they had lived for almost a Bonestellan year, but he was sure in the end that they would all agree to move to the new location so they could have real homes out in the fresh open air. The cavern had been a great asset when they had needed it, but now they wanted to do more than simply survive. It was time to live.

The conversations around the fire had grown quiet. It had been a good day, they all had full bellies, and the growing darkness of the night was peaceful.

“So, what do we call our new town?” Raine quietly asked after a long lull.

Hank spoke up almost lazily. “We could give it a name from the Cheyenne language, since that’s what Avon was.”

“Why should we name something else after Avon?” Ivan grumbled. “He was a great guy and all, but we’ve already named a mountain after him, as well as the whole mountain range it belongs to!”

“Okay, okay – it was just a thought.”

“What about Jon?” Sissy suggested. “Since he’s our leader now, and we never really call him by his last name anyway, why don’t we call it Sunset or Sunset Town?”

“That’s just dumb,” Hank retorted. Sissy looked offended, but playfully stuck her tongue out at the black bear. Hank stuck his out at her in return, but there was amusement in his expression.

Jon shook his head immediately. “Hey, if you want to name something after me, you can wait until after I’m dead – but I don’t plan on going anytime soon!”

“What about this Ivanrose Forest?” Sissy countered. “It was named for Ivan and Rose before Rose died.”

“Yes, but we named it for ourselves under first discovery rights,” Ivan replied defensively.

“A town is something we’ll build, not something we’ve discovered,” Jon added.

“Okay, so what do we call the place?” Michael asked. “The Town sounds too generic.”

“Sometime generations from now, they’ll make this a landmark since it’ll be the first town built on Bonestell. We can call it First Town,” Kevin suggested.

“That, too, sounds generic,” the swift fox muttered.

Kristen took a drink from her canteen and then looked around. “What’s wrong with continuing to use Second Chance?” she asked. “It’s the name of our colony, not necessarily the name of the site where we first lived.”

“Better. I’d prefer that to something generic,” Michael replied with interest.

Ivan agreed. “Second Chance Cavern and Second Chance Town. There’s nothing wrong with both sites using Second Chance in the title,” he said.

Michael took up the mantle, sweeping an outstretched arm out over the area around them. “I think Second Chance for the name of the town is a good idea. The old site could be Colony Cave, or the Colony Valley.”

Erin yawned, stretched, and then leaned up against her younger mate. “How about Horseshoe Valley as the name of the first site?” she asked, staring into the flames of the campfire. “It’s descriptive and more fitting.”

“Actually, I like that,” Kristen said with a nod.

“I do too,” Jon said at last. A few others mumbled agreement; it was the best suggestion they’d had so far.

“Why don’t we just simplify things and call the town Second Chance since that’s where the colony will be living?” Jon asked. “Instead of just being a nickname for the group, we could make the name official for the town we build.”

“That’s better,” Ivan remarked.

“This is probably the best idea yet unless we come up with something better,” Sissy remarked. “After we get back and tell everyone what we’ve found, we can put it to a vote. If it passes, that’s what we’ll go with.”

“And if it doesn’t pass?” Hank asked.

Sissy smiled. “Then we’ll get to debate some more.”

The conversation grew quiet and Jon looked sadly into the empty depths of his Magellan coffee cup. After several long moments with the crackling campfire making the only sound, Jon pulled out his PBJ and glanced at a message before clearing his throat for attention.

“I’ve not had a chance to tell anyone yet,” the mountain lion said to all the faces looking back him, “but there is secondary reason why we’re out here looking at town sites today, and it’s every bit as important as our primary purpose.”

All eyes were upon him, some trying to anticipate his next words.

“What’s going on?” Kristen asked quietly. Her mate frequently kept her informed of things that affected the colony as a whole, but he had said nothing about another reason for their outing. She studied his face, but he did not seem upset or looked as if he had any bad news.

Jon looked back down at the dual screens of his PBJ. “We’d already been planning to look out this way as a possible new site for the colony ever since Ivan and Rose told us about it,” he explained calmly, “but I received a message yesterday morning from Ásmundr Gustavsson.”

“Gustavsson!” Ivan exclaimed. “Isn’t he the president of the whole Anthro Human Colonization Program?”

Jon nodded toward the fox. “That’s him. As you all know, Second Chance was an experiment. Typically, Fur starter colonies are all of one species, but due to the disaster on Bastien, this one went out with a mixed group. Perhaps as an oversight, Second Chance has the usual population that is sent to a new world, but with us split up between four different Fur types, each group has only a quarter of the numbers usually needed for diversity.”

“We know all this, Jon,” Hank grumbled. “Can you get to the point?”

The cougar raised an eyebrow at him. “The point is that our numbers have been too low from the start, but Headquarters is about to correct this a little.”

Sissy pulled out a paper pad to take notes. “Does this mean what I think it does?” she asked, swishing her tail behind her.

Jon nodded. “Second Chance is about to double its population of mixed Furs. Numbers of each type will still be low compared to typical starter colony populations, but we’ll have an increase of thirty-two Furs — eight more of each species.”

“They’re sending out more people?” Raine asked.

“That’s right.”

“That’s great news!” Erin said with a smile.

Jon continued, some of his audience looking interested while others appeared to be in mild shock. “Preparations are already being made now, so in about four Earth-standard months, a brand new AHCP colony ship called the Christa McAuliffe will be departing Earth with two mixed classes of all four Fur species, arriving here approximately eight weeks later. Converting to Sissy’s Bonestellan calendar, they will arrive sometime in late summer, approximately around the same time we got here last year.”

Ivan leaned forward, resting his elbows across his knees. “Did you say they were sending two classes?”

“That’s right,” Jon replied. “According to my information, they’re coming from the Buenos Aires and Toyohashi Institutes. We almost didn’t get any Vulps, though. They’re gathering up just about all of them they can process to re-colonize Bastien with a fox-only group, but they managed to reassign enough to come here.”

“That was thoughtful of them!” Michael said with a grin.

“Well, we may have to soothe their feelings when they get here,” Jon cautioned the swift fox. “They were expecting to be included with the others going to Bastien, so some of them may have separation anxiety. In spite of a few bumps when we first got to this world, however, we have it pretty good here and I think they’ll like it once they settle in. As with what happened with us, they were accelerated through their studies during and after the volunteer transformations, though none of them will have had the opportunity for a colony practice simulation. These new folk will be totally green to colony life having only textbook knowledge, so we’re all going to need to be patient and understanding when they arrive. Not only is the Christa McAuliffe bringing out new colonists, she’s also bringing associated supplies to support them.”

He gestured to the large clearing around them that they had chosen as their new town site with a smile. “If we’re going to move here, I’d like to get started on the site right away so that when the ship lands, we won’t have to haul all the new supplies from Horseshoe Valley to this location. We can direct the ship to land on this side of the prairie where we can haul everything straight from there to our new town. We still have planning to do, but we’ll need to load up one of the wagons with spare parts from supply to start building domes here for temporary purposes.

“We already have plans to cut down trees to build log homes, but this is going to take time. The domes can be used as temporary shelter and supplies to support those who will be here as we move back and forth between sites. With luck and a good tail wind, we can have a few permanent buildings set up for the new mothers and their children first, with the rest of us in the domes until others can be constructed. If we aren’t finished by the time the new arrivals get here, they can help us build more.”

Sissy sat back on her haunches beside the fire, the flames reflected in her eyes. “We will have sixty-six Furs when the others get here,” she said with a smile. “By the time we have enough log homes to house everyone, Second Chance will be a town!”

Michael cleared his throat. “There are twenty-eight of us now, and we’ll have thirty-two more joining us. That’s only sixty, Sissy.”

The orange striped feline laughed. “You’re forgetting the children! Dara and Alicia are having two cubs each, and then Jasmine and Dahlia are having one kit each, all due before the ship arrives. That makes sixty-six!”

Jon sat down next to Kristen. “Now you know why I wanted an area larger than what we would have needed just for those of us here now. We’ll need space enough for everyone, and despite that our cavern is huge, it would have started feeling cramped with sixty-six Furs occupying it.”

Chapter 22

First Day

Kristen climbed the side of the hill slowly, pacing herself and making sure her footsteps were sure. The trail from the valley below was becoming worn from constant traffic, so she really was not concerned that she would have a misstep, but she carried delicate cargo and did not want to take any chances.

Her objective looked down at her, and when the mountain lion realized what she was doing, he was up onto his feet like a flash and was then at her side. She gave him a smile and realized the endeavor had winded her more than it should have. She had enjoyed the robust physical endurance she had acquired with the hybrid transformation her body had gone through, but it seemed that even a pregnancy could slow down a Fur.

Jon helped her to a spot beneath a small shade tree where he had been working with the com unit in coordination with the overhead geosynchronous satellite. She sat down gratefully and then he relaxed beside her.

“Why didn’t you stay down there?” he asked with a frown. “You should be resting.”

The botanist reached up and lightly batted his whiskers, making his eyes blink. “I didn’t stay down there because you were up here,” she answered as if that was all she needed to say. Jon raised an eyebrow at her as she leaned back against the slender tree trunk. “What’cha doing?” she asked.

The lion tapped the metallic case of the com unit, but didn’t pick it back up. “I just sent off a progress report back to Earth,” he replied. “Most of it was trivial, but with the festivities, I didn’t think I’d have time to do it later. First Day may not mean anything to the yahoos back home, but having survived our first full year on Bonestell is cause for celebration.”

“Our first year wasn’t as bumpy as what some of the other colonies experienced, but we still had our share of ups and downs,” Kristen agreed. She leaned against her mate and he automatically put an arm around her. She rested a hand on her middle. “It’s hard to believe it has already been a year, although it also seems like it’s been longer since we got here.”

“Mmm hmm,” he agreed. “In spite of all that’s happened, I like it here. It’s odd how the twists and turns of my life have led me to this place, but although I sometimes wish I could change what I did, I don’t think Brian Barrett would have ever come here.” He reached over and lightly stroked Kristen’s belly. “As for Jon Sunset, he’s right where he wants to be.”

The lioness smiled and let out a contented sigh. The couple fell silent and simply relaxed, enjoying the day and one another.

The afternoon sky above was populated by lazy white clouds floating across a blue-green background with gentle breezes moving over the forest. The dale below them presented a different vista than what he had become accustomed to from his perch up on the side of the mountain back in Horseshoe Valley, but Jon felt he could get used to it. The growing town of Second Chance was spread out below and they could hear the sounds of activity.

Nearly fifteen log structures sealed with clay from the river had been built in recent months through the spring and summer, and every time one was completed, several of the surrounding geodesic domes were dismantled and placed into storage. Despite the number of two and three-room structures that just about everyone had had a hand in building, there were not yet enough for everyone to have their own place, so several of the Furs had doubled up to room together.

The Great Lodge was the first log building the colonists had erected once they had voted to move in and put down roots in the Ivanrose Forest. It had been a surprise to the colony captain, but the decision to leave the cavern in the Horseshoe Valley was unanimous and a new purpose had been driving everyone since. Having gotten used to the Great Dome as a shelter and public gathering place for the better part of a long year, the corresponding Great Lodge, which some were also calling Town Hall, would serve the same purpose. Instead of a separate structure for a kitchen, however, one had been built inside with connecting pantries to the supplies.

The Furs had discovered that the tall and straight trees of the forest possessed a medium-grade wood that could be cut and split lengthwise into boards as needed with the tools that had been provided to them. Hand tools, saws, augers and hammers were in abundance, but they had also been supplied with electric powered tools that had seen little use while they occupied Horseshoe Valley.

Among the supplies they had brought to the planet, were four turbine vertical axis wind generators that had been unused at the cavern. Each had been erected at the four corners of the new town. With the solar energy station in operation in addition to the wind generators and the earlier problems with their electronics subsided, things were going well. The town capacitors were full and there was energy to spare for their equipment.

Chopping down trees, stripping them of limbs and then cutting them to needed lengths took time, as did preparing the ground with a foundation for the structure and then the assembly itself. Those not otherwise occupied with responsibilities in the new gardens or animal pens were all engaged with the town raising. These were not the skills they had been taught at the Institute, but there were a few with experience in construction that it was all straight forward enough. Those without prior knowledge were learning by necessity, and even those who never would have taken part in such activities in the past were becoming old hands with it all.

It had taken over a week of long Bonestellan days to move everything from the cavern to the new valley using only three wagons drawn by teams of cattle, but they took only what they needed. Well-traveled ruts across the Grand Prairie over the hills and through the dales to the new site had roughly established the planet’s first road with the move.

Spare dome sections and fasteners would be stored back in the cavern, as well as what little firewood left that had not been used up during the winter. Although it was the equivalent of an Earth-day’s travel on foot between Horseshoe Valley and the Second Chance town, the coolness of the cavern could still be used to store some preserved meat for leaner times, and for this purpose an alcove in the rock had been walled off to keep other critters from partaking of what they left behind. Until they could find another method of food preservation at the new town, they would hunt only when needed. Ivanrose was plentiful in game and the soil was fertile for growing both Terran and indigenous vegetables in abundance. There were plans for a subterranean basement near the Great Lodge where meat could be kept cool underground, but with everything else in progress, that project had not yet begun.

No one wanted to abandon the cavern altogether. There was always the offhand possibility that they might need to winter there in the cavern again if the next snowy season proved to be too harsh in the forest, so some supplies that could be spared were also left behind as a contingency. For the most part, however, everyone seemed to have a resolve to make the new town work.

Even the pandas had suspended their scientific research and cataloging to help build the town. There would be plenty of time for research later with a whole new forest to examine, but for now they assisted the others as needed and Chieko discovered that she had been given more freedom to mix with the populace than she previously had since their arrival.

In time, Second Chance would be a real town spread out across the dale, and in anticipation of expansion they had already built upon a small grid pattern that would become streets. In reality, the place harkened back to an old western town, but it was functional and it was all theirs. They did not have the proper material to fully wire up more than a couple of the buildings with electricity from the power generators, but with the light-emitting clay from the cavern that Dara had discovered and some of the glow-in-the-dark plants that grew naturally in the forest, they did not have to spend their nights inside the buildings in total darkness.

One of the smaller buildings had been erected at Raine’s insistence and he had performed much of the work on it himself. He had lobbied throughout the colony population and gained more support than he had thought he might get, so the cheetah had been ultimately successful having a dream fulfilled. The town now had a public bath house that contained the large claw-foot tub salvaged from the wreckage of the Magellan. He and several others had taken a wagon and time out from colony activities to retrieve the luxury item from the ship. They may not have indoor plumbing in any of the log buildings, but heated water in buckets could be used to fill the tub whenever anyone might have a desire for a hot bath. It was an indulgence in the midst of relatively backwoods conditions, but anyone was welcome to use it. Unfortunately, the dimensions of the tub were a little small for most of the bears.

Despite the new structures, however, the large barn dome was still in use for the animals and would likely continue to serve its purpose for some time. The valley dale had plenty of room for the livestock to roam inside a widely fenced area and they had taken to the local grass just as readily as they had back at Horseshoe. Likewise, a large garden area was being tilled and planted with seasonal foods, some of which they could not grow the previous fall, and as such they would have a greater variety to keep them all well-fed throughout the year.

The nearby river was just far enough away from the town proper to keep the danger of flooding in rainy weather at a minimum, but still close enough to provide all the fresh water and fish the townsfolk needed. The unnamed lake to the south was several times larger than the tiny one they had lived over in the cavern, and there would be days when all work was set aside so that everyone could spend a day at its sandy beach just relaxing.

Although their typical days were filled with work on the town, Norman spent much of his personal time off carving out a large hardwood log he had found in the forest into a dugout canoe. It had to be wide enough to carry his bulk and it had taken him and several of the other bears to wrestle the former tree trunk to a spot where he could work on it close to the water. It looked pretty rough and he had a long way to go with it before it could be usable, but he had already formed other ideas for a raft if this one did not work out.

It had once been said that necessity was the mother of invention, and it turned out that many in this group had enough experience and ingenuity to make the things they needed if they were able to find the proper materials. They had survived their first year on Bonestell primarily using the items they had brought from Earth, but now that they were true residents of this planet, very few of them were content to remain idle. They had an entire world in which to use to their whims and the intelligence to make it work.

Settling Bonestell had been a smoother experience than some colonies had endured on other worlds, and the lower planetary tilt had made their seasons less severe so far. They had no illusions of a Garden of Eden, however. It had been an educational experience and they had lost several of their friends and family due to misfortune, but they all learned from their mistakes and were stronger from it all. In this new region, there were likely dangers to discover that were not in evidence where they had lived before. Predators, poisonous bugs, toxic plants and natural disaster were all possibilities, but they had the capacity to deal with each as they came up.

Although there would continue to be new discoveries made through their entire existence on the planet, they now knew how to survive and live with the new lands. Lifelong friendships had formed among the group and others had paired off, whether exclusively or to satisfy the needs of the moment, but this group was becoming tighter with everything they went through. There were also children now with associated responsibilities, and that was all part of life.

If that life continued to flourish, they will have paved the way for eventual human colonization to help ease the burdens of the Earth, and the colonists had made good use of their furman instincts and capabilities doing it. There had been numerous occasions, especially in the early days, where some of them might not have initially survived had they still been fully human. The hybrid physiologies with strength, endurance and heightened senses had served them well and proved that the Anthro Human Colonization Program was right on track with their purposes and plans.

Jon and Kristen sat quiet musing on such things for a good long while, but eventually the sounds of activity from the town drew them back to the present. Jon yawned and stretched, and then wrapped both arms around his mate. Kristen smiled and closed her eyes within his embrace, but their moment was short lived. The com unit beside the cougar pinged to life with an incoming dispatch that was relay-echoed on his PBJ.

“You got a response already?” Kristen asked.

“They can’t have replied,” Jon grumbled. “It takes forty hours for a tachyon burst message to go one way and I had just relayed mine to Earth when you got up here. This is something new.”

He tapped through the commands on the unit expecting a text-only message from headquarters, but he was surprised to discover it was a real-time video transmission. Kristen looked over his shoulder at the small screen and smiled at the form that appeared there.

“This is Captain Katherine Adrienne of the colony ship Christa McAuliffe, contacting the captain of the Second Chance colony on Bonestell. Are you there?”

Jon tapped a control to respond. “This is Jonathan Sunset, captain of Second Chance,” he answered. “You caught me at a good time; I was standing here by the com just now. I’m surprised to see you, Captain Adrienne. I thought you were commander of the Meriwether Lewis.”

The red-haired woman smiled and unconsciously straightened the straps of her royal blue coverall uniform. “The Lewis was decommissioned due to its age and the McAuliffe took its place in the fleet. They didn’t want me to retire at such a young age, so they put me and my crew on board the new vessel.”

“Congratulations are in order, then,” Jon said to the thirty-something woman with a smile. “I knew a ship was on its way, but I wasn’t aware you were so near to arrival. This is a surprise.”

“Well, the McAuliffe’s slip-engines are more efficient and we can get more speed out of them, so it only took seven weeks to make the journey out this way.”

“It’s good to hear you got a good ship, Captain. We’ve been looking forward to your arrival, but didn’t expect you so soon. When will you be landing?”

“We’re currently in orbit over Bonestell, but we won’t be landing just yet. They’ve barely started processing your people out of cryo and my chief surgeon wants to get them all revived and examined before he releases them into the wild.” She said the last with a cheesy smile and Kristen laughed aloud over Jon’s shoulder.

“I don’t know if you got the message,” the cougar said, “but we’ve moved our colony into the mountains to the east of where you originally dropped us off. We found a better place and are in the process of building a real town here.”

Adrienne nodded. “Yes, I was informed of the move and the site marker beacon has given us your new coordinates.”

“The replacement marker beacon pyramid you left with us last time has been set up out in the grand prairie about a mile and a half from our new location. That’s the closest you can land due to the forest and the mountains. Let me know when you intend to come down and we can meet you out there with wagons and cattle to assist in transferring personnel and supplies out to the town site. We only have three cattle-drawn wagons and we’ve lost the horses we brought, so it will take a while to get everything moved.”

“What happened to your horses? Did something eat them?”

“It’s a long story how they got away, Captain, but they’re all currently running free as a mustang herd. We see them from a distance on occasion, but we’ve never been able to catch them again.”

“You’ll be glad to know that we have ten more horses for you to be revived upon landing. You’re also getting five more wagons, as well as a few hydrogen-powered, all-terrain trucks, so that should help get things moved to your new site.”

“That’s great! I can have my first officer fly his gyrocopter out to meet you upon landing.”

“Gyrocopter? Isn’t that’s old tech? You should be pleased to know that we’re also carrying a hover fancraft to aid in your exploration.”

“Excellent! We asked for one originally, but a gyrocopter is all they could send us then. How many can fly in the one you brought us?

“Two or three, I believe.”

“That’s good. For your return flight, we have the personal effects of those who’ve died for you to take back to their families. We also have the flight recorder from the Ferdinand Magellan for headquarters. With luck, the AHCP can discover what happened.”

“You didn’t hear? The coded data you transmitted back to Earth was analyzed and the cause of the crash was determined.”

“What happened?” Kristen asked.

“An EMP burst from the local star reached Bonestell just as they were in descent, damaging their navigation circuits and they overshot the landing coordinates. As they were making maneuvers to throw off orbital speed near a mountain range to bank around and return, they flew into what they could only determine to be a flock of huge winged creatures. The event was documented on the flight recorder and the resulting avian collision smashed through the command center, probably killing most or all the bridge crew before the ship went down into the mountain where you found it.”

“Wow…” Jon mused. “We never found any sign of the crew of passengers, only some of the livestock still in cryo tubes, but a terrific fire blazed through the ship, probably incinerating everyone.”

“No doubt,” agreed the captain. “It’s made all the news frequencies on Earth and that’s the general conjecture. Thankfully, all the McAuliffe’s systems are protected with military-grade shielding, so we should be relatively safe from such EMP bursts coming in this time.”

“That’s good. How soon can we expect you?”

“Doctor Dee says that it will take another four hours to revive everyone; I’m sure you remember the process.”

Jon grimaced. “That I do.”

“In four hours, it should be getting near dark by the time everyone’s ready, but we may wait until local morning to land.”

Kristen laughed aloud. “Nightfall’s not for another twelve hours, Captain Adrienne. Our days are longer here,” she said.

The woman blinked with a frown. “I’ve made numerous colony flights over the years, ma’am, but I seem to forget the time differential every occasion we get to another world. You would think I’d be used to it by now.”

Jon chuckled. “There’s something else you may not be aware of, Captain, but you picked the perfect date to show up with our new personnel. This is First Day, the one-year anniversary of our original landing here on Bonestell.”

“One year?” the captain repeated in puzzlement. “That’s not right. It’s been a little over two and a half years since we were here last to drop you off.”

“Two and a half Terran years, you mean,” Kristen corrected. “Each day here is thirty-six hours long and a year for us is six hundred thirty of those longer days.”

“Oh really? That is amazing!”

“Yes, it is. We are currently preparing a feast to celebrate this milestone and you’re all invited – you, your crew and our new people.”

Adrienne laughed. “I don’t think this could have worked out any better than if we’d planned it to happen this way. Congratulations, Captain Sunset. You’ve survived your first local year and from what I’ve heard, good things are in store for you all. Once your folks have been revived, we’ll contact you again prior to landing. Deorbit will then take approximately fifty-three minutes, so we should be on the ground in about five hours.”

“That will still leave us with seven hours of daylight,” Kristen remarked.

Jon nodded. “What is your departure window?”

“Depending upon atmospheric conditions, the standard window is three local days to give the colony enough time to offload and transport everyone and everything we aren’t taking back with us.”

“That should be plenty of time. Our weather guy says we should have several more weeks of mild weather before the seasonal rains begin. I’ll be waiting for your call.”

“That sounds good. I will talk to you then, sir. Captain Adrienne, out.”

Jon switched off the unit and then looked at Kristen. “We’d better get back down to let everyone know we’re having company for supper tonight. We’ll need to prepare a lot more food than we’d intended.”

Kristen started to stand, but gulped when she had trouble getting to her feet. Jon helped her up with a smile. “Careful now,” he said quietly. “We don’t want to disturb the kids.”

The lioness gave him a smirk, but then looked at him for a moment. “I know that we’ve all pretty much abandoned the traditions of marriage due to a previous mismatch of numbers,” she said, “but perhaps Captain Adrienne can perform a brief wedding while she’s here.”

“Who’s wedding?”

“Ours, silly. The captain’s bringing us eight more of each of our species, so there will be more choices around for everyone else to pair up with as they please. You’ve already said that you don’t want multiple mates, so that makes you exclusive to me.”

Jon smiled down at her, amused at her train of thought. “You’re claiming me as your own?”

“Yes, you’re mine!” she exclaimed with a giggle.

The mountain lion considered her words for a moment and then set the com unit on the ground at his feet. “In that case,” he said in a low voice, “I still have something I need to do.”

“What’s that?”

Jon Sunset leaned forward, gave her a brief lick on the cheek, and then got down on one knee in front of her. “Kristen Eisenberg,” he said, “will you marry me?”

With a rumbling purr and moisture in her eyes, the lioness slid into his arms and snuggled up close.

“Yes!”

The book you are about to read is not part of the three-book story you have just finished, but it is included here as a bonus since it is most definitely a part of the Furmankind universe, taking place in a different time period with another cast of characters and events. 

Sit back, relax and enjoy the adventure.

Bonus

A WILDER WEST

©2014 by Ted R. Blasingame

Chapter 1

Rider in the Sun

The range of low granite mountains baked in the prairie’s summer sun, heat waves shimmering into water mirages wherever there were flat places. A ghostly dust devil stirred up dirt in a dancing pirouette while heat-loving cicadas chirred across the plain, filling the air with their rolling song of mating.

The lone rider sitting atop a paint mare was oblivious to it all.

A dusty Stetson pulled down low on his brow shielded his eyes from the afternoon sun, but he was not seeing much anyway. Allowing the mare to pick her own way through the foothills, his thoughts turned inward to the day’s events and to the memories of the son he had buried that morning.

Although the youthful cattle hand had been a full twenty-one years of age, the father could see only the face of a young boy, unwilling to remember the estranged son who had stopped talking to him two years earlier following the death of the wife of one and the mother of the other. Being thrown from a horse spooked by a diamond-backed rattlesnake was a senseless way to die, but few men get to choose the way they depart this world.

The mare snorted nervously and the rider looked up. The narrow pass she had taken them into was bordered on both sides by lichen-covered granite boulders festooned with scrub oak, prickly pear cactus and the small red and yellow petals of summer flowers.

Indian blanket, the rider remembered idly. His late wife had always loved the small wildflowers and he had often brought her a handful whenever his travels led him back to their home. He reached out and plucked one from the canyon wall just as the horse snorted again.

Mindful of snakes like the one that had spooked his son’s stallion, the rider watched the boulders for signs of the deadly reptiles basking on the sun-warmed rocks; his ears were tuned to the warning sound of their tail castanets. The snakes were well camouflaged and could easily strike out at man or animal, but the only sound the rider heard was the buzzing of insects and the occasional cry of a hawk.

The mare whinnied nervously and the man patted her reassuringly on the neck. “Easy girl,” he said in a soothing tone. “I don’t hear any—”

A loud shriek sent chills down his spine despite the summer heat and he whipped his chin up, eyes suddenly wide. He had been so wrapped up in his memories and looking low for snakes that he had completely forgotten the terrain above.

He peered up into the angry face of a mountain lion that was so close that he could have easily tapped her on the nose with a well-aimed stone. At her feet were three kittens, cowering low against the rocks, and the rider knew he had unwittingly wandered too close to her den.

Man and feline locked eyes for a moment, but the shriek had panicked the horse and she tried to bolt away through the boulders before the rider could draw his pistol. Unwilling to let the intruder escape, the maddened cat leapt for them and landed heavy upon the man’s back, knocking him from the horse.

He landed hard in the dust as the horse ran away, but the cougar did not give him time to catch his breath. She clawed him, bit him hard, and probably would have mauled him to death, but another form jumped into the fray in a blur of claws, tawny fur and black spots. The mountain lion was bowled over in surprise but rolled away only to jump back up to her feet.

Standing over the injured man and facing her was a feline unlike any she had ever seen in her short life. It was covered in spots and was just as large as she was herself. The cougar screamed at the intruder in fury and prepared to launch herself at the newcomer, but the strange cat jumped first, clawing the air at her in a belligerent but decided un-catlike manner.

If she had been alone, the mountain lion would not have backed down from this new threat, but with the safety of her kittens at stake she quickly decided she was outnumbered and ran away to circumvent the rider and the spotted cat to get to her crying kits.

The intruder watched the mother cougar rush off with each of her kittens in turn, but the newcomer made no move to pursue her or to grab what could have been an easy meal each time the mother was away with a kit.

Once gone to some distance, the cougar screamed out her fury, the shriek echoing off the granite canyon walls.

The injured man on the ground groaned in pain and forced his eyes open, vaguely wondering why he was still alive. He had been taken by surprise and he had had no chance to draw knife or gun to defend himself. He coughed into the dirt and put a bitten hand up to the back of his neck, feeling blood soaking into his shirt. He was lucky to be alive, but feared he would not be for long. He was miles from Tin City, the small town where he had buried his son, and his horse had run off; his outlook was not promising.

He managed to roll over onto his back, and it was then he saw a large spotted cat with round golden eyes peering down at him. His movements froze, and although he did not recognize what kind of feline it was that stood over him, he knew he would be unable to defend himself against another large predator. Whether it was fear or an act of preservation against the knowledge that he was about to be eaten he might never know, but for the first time in his life the man fainted dead away.

Chapter 2

The Kindness of a Stranger

The pain across his back, shoulders, head, hand and neck brought the man back to consciousness, though he kept his eyes tightly shut. He was on his stomach in the sand, but the light on his eyelids was dim, so he surmised that he had been out for some time if the sun was going down. He immediately remembered the cougar attack and again wondered why he was still alive.

He recalled seeing kittens at the cougar’s feet, so once she had eliminated him as a threat, the mountain lion must have abandoned him to die so she could move them to some other den location. He knew his horse had run off and was surprised even more that the buzzards or coyotes had not found him.

Providence must have been smiling down on him, he absently mused, although there was nothing in his life he could think of that would have redeemed him so. He believed himself not to be a bad person, but he knew he had not exactly been a saint either.

Tired and hurting, he briefly considered resting a little more, but he had no guarantee that the scavengers would continue to leave him alone. He cracked open one eye and prepared to force himself up onto his hands and knees, but what he saw made him pause. Instead of lying in the narrow canyon where he had been attacked, he was on the soft sandy floor of a simple cave made of the spaces between huge granite boulders stacked upon one another against the side of a mountain.

The sun was still shining bright outside, but here in the cool shade of the boulders it would have seemed almost comfortable if he had not been injured.

Where am I? he wondered, feeling disoriented. He had no memory of crawling into the shade, and the more he looked at his surroundings, he was sure this was not even in the vicinity of where the cat had jumped him.

The cat.

He remembered another large cat. It had driven off the mountain lion, he recalled vaguely, and then it had come back for him. But… what happened after that? He could not remember. He had heard of some folk forgetting things after a traumatic event and he wondered if that is what had happened to him, but it still did not give him an answer. Had something driven the second cat away? Perhaps some cowpoke in the vicinity had saved him from certain death after he had passed out. That had to be it.

He heard movement behind him and he closed his eyes momentarily. It had to be his savior. He was so very tired and his injuries were talking to him, but he felt the necessity to thank the man who had rescued him. He gathered up what strength he had in him and tried to push himself up onto his hands and knees, but the damage to his shoulder made him too weak. All he managed to do was raise his head up a little and then drop it back down hard in the dirt. He sputtered and coughed, and suddenly there was someone at his side.

“Careful, friend,” a strange voice whispered into his ear. “You have been injured and may need to rest some more before you try to get up.”

“Thank you,” the man replied through a raspy throat, closing his eyes again. “M’thirsty.”

“I have your canteen. I will help you drink.” The words were enunciated without contraction in an odd accent he did not recognize, but he could understand every syllable clearly.

He felt a strong, strangely-scented arm slide beneath him and then lift him off the ground a few inches. The metal lip of the canteen touched his mouth and then there was cool water on his tongue. He managed to slurp down enough to satisfy his immediate need and he partially raised a hand to show he had had enough. There were droplets in his mustache and he licked them dry before he let his head drop back down.

The stranger set him gently onto the ground and capped the canteen. “You rest for now,” the odd-sounding voice whispered. “I have managed to stop the bleeding from your wounds, but you may open them up again if you move around too much.”

“Thank you, sir, I’m much obliged.” The injured man relaxed as much as the pain would allow and kept his eyes closed. “My name is Jake – Jacob Harrison. Who am I beholden to?”

His benefactor hesitated before answering. “You may call me Citra.”

“Sitra – is that an Indian name? Sioux, perhaps?”

“No, I am not Indian,” replied his companion. “Neither am I a sir.”

Jake opened his eyes, but Citra was not in his field of view. She had an accent and a timbre in her voice he did not recognize, but he would not have guessed she was a woman.

“If you are Indian,” he said, “you have no cause to fear me. I have several in my employ and they are all treated well.”

“That is good to know,” Citra replied, “but I am not Indian. I am… not from around here.”

“I’m okay with foreigners, too,” Jake told her, closing his eyes again. He had become so curious about his savior over the past few minutes that he wanted to see what she looked like, but the pain across the back of his neck was renewed just by simply talking.

“You are bleeding again,” Citra told him, pressing something against the back of his head. “Please, rest. You are probably hungry, but you should remain still for a while longer. I will prepare something to eat later.”

Jake hissed at torn flesh that ached, but knew she was right. He sighed and tried to relax, keeping the rest of his questions for later. After resting for several moments, he felt himself begin to drift and he did not fight it.

***

When next he awoke, Jake could smell the smoke of a small campfire accented with the aroma of roasting meat. His stomach growled in response and he swallowed in anticipation. He was still on his stomach facing the same way as before, and when he opened his eyes and looked out from the cave, the sky was dark.

He started to get up, but his companion was instantly at his side with a firm but gentle hand upon the small of his back to keep him down.

“You have slept a good while,” Citra’s voice told him, “but your wounds will be too tender to sit up just yet.”

“Lying on my face with my mustache in the dirt’s none too comfortable,” Jake grumbled. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had claws across my back. I think I should be able to sit up a little for now.”

“Suit yourself. I saw the scars on your back and they looked old. How did you get them?”

Citra put one of those strangely-scented, strong arms beneath his chest and eased him up from the ground. Jake used his arms to support his weight somewhat, but one hand was wrapped up in strips of cloth that he recognized as formerly being part of the undershirt he had worn.

“Black bear,” he answered without further explanation.

As she helped get him up into somewhat of a sitting position, he could feel the injuries in sharp pangs. He clenched his eyes closed and hissed through gritted teeth, but he was determined to sit upright.

The arm across his chest felt odd, but when he opened his eyes to look down at it, she pulled it back out of sight and then retreated several feet away. He started to turn toward the campfire behind him, but her voice stopped him.

“Please, do not turn around,” she said. Then after a brief hesitation, she added, “I am not decent.”

Jake swallowed with difficulty. It was dark in a late summer evening and he was with a woman in a cave who was not decent. He briefly wondered if she had been bathing with a pail of water heated over the fire when he had awakened.

“Pardon, ma’am,” he said, feeling awkward. He could hear her shuffling around behind him, so he took stock of himself while he waited. His undershirt had apparently been cut into strips and used to bind his wounds, but the remains of his outer shirt had been put back on over him.

He marveled at the woman who had come to his rescue against a large cat, having been able to get both his shirts off of him and one back on after tending to him. An Indian woman would have been capable enough, but she denied that heritage, so he was more than a little curious about the foreigner who had helped him.

“What’s cooking?” he asked, licking his lips. “It smells delicious.”

“Wild turkey hen with a side of cattails.”

“Really? Wow. Where’d you get the turkey, a local farm?”

Citra chuckled. “No, I caught her myself.”

“Hmm, you must be good with a rifle,” he mused. “If you’re in need of a job, I could probably use someone of your skill.”

“Please do not turn around,” Citra said from a spot much closer behind him. “I will set your food and canteen down next to you.”

Jake blinked as a new thought occurred to him. “Pardon me, ma’am, but did you…. Uh, were your clothes also damaged by the mountain lion when you fought her off?”

He heard her set something onto the ground just behind him. “No, I did not bring any clothing with me,” she whispered into his ear, “and I am not wearing anything.”

Jake cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Now listen,” he started, “I’m thankful and all for your help, but I’m a decent man. I got nothing against you, madam, but I don’t think this is the time or place for a lady of the evening to be practicing her skills!”

Citra gasped in surprise, but then she began laughing aloud in genuine amusement. There was something strange with her voice, but the laughter sounded pleasant coming from her.

“You can relax, Mr. Harrison. I am not a prostitute and I am not trying to lure you with my womanly wiles. There is a reason why I am not wearing any clothing, but I do not think you are strong enough to handle the truth at the moment. Please, eat, but do not turn in this direction. I will explain later, if I decide you can understand.”

Jake frowned, clearly puzzled, but he finally nodded quietly.

“Thank you,” she said.

Without turning his head, the injured man reached out with his good hand and felt the edge of a plate. He pulled it to his lap and recognized the eating tin and utensils he carried with him in his pack. This puzzled him further, as he had thought the items were in the saddlebags strapped to his painted mare. Next to the plate was his canteen, and it seemed to be full.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but where did you get my things?”

“I found your horse when I was out hunting. I had a difficult time getting her to trust me enough to get near her, but she is tethered outside; I took the liberty of giving her water and the feed sack from your saddlebag. She is fine.”

“Much obliged,” Jake mumbled, looking down at the bit of roasted turkey meat and the ripe head of a cattail plant on his plate. The aroma was almost making him drool, so he picked up his fork with his uninjured hand and skewed the meat. It was still hot, but he managed to pull enough off without burning his mouth. The turkey was well cooked, but still moist, and the flavor of the juices nearly made him sigh aloud. Once he had swallowed several bites, he picked up the cattail and bit into it. The flavor of the plant was sweet and it had been a while since he had last eaten one. There must be water nearby if she had found the cattails, probably when she had refilled his canteen.

Later, after he had had enough food to fill his belly, Jake felt drowsy again. His injuries did not hurt as much as he thought they should, but Citra was still adamant about him keeping still as much as he could so he would not reopen his wounds. He was thankful that nothing major had been ripped by the cougar’s teeth and claws. Primary blood vessels and tendons had escaped injury by sheer luck, and the woman had gotten to him quickly soon after the attack that he had not bled out in the dirt. He was weakened by the incident, but with Citra’s care Jake felt he would survive.

He ran the fingers of his good hand through his sandy blond hair and knew he must look a sight. The hair was sticking up in the back and matted on one side where he had been laying on it. There were a few superficial scratches on his scalp and a bit of dried blood, but thankfully this wound was minor. He smoothed down the hair and then scratched an itch beneath his sideburns. He had trimmed them earlier for the funeral, but he had been out of shaving tonic. He should have picked up a bottle while he was in Tin City, but he had not been thinking clearly at the time.

Despite his predicament, Jake’s thoughts returned to his son. The guilt of two years of estrangement weighed heavily upon him and he eventually stretched out and drifted off to sleep thinking of his boy.

***

He seemed to be sleeping a lot, but considering the injuries he had sustained Jake knew he should not be concerned. He lay with one arm cradled beneath his head as a makeshift pillow, the other with the injured hand stretched out away from him. Although now awake, his eyes remained closed for a long while as he simply lay there unmoving. When he did open his eyes, it was at a sound just outside the cave entrance.

It was still nighttime and the campfire behind him had practically burned itself out, giving off only a shallow flickering glow, but there was enough moonlight outside that he could just see the silhouette of someone tending his horse. There was something odd about the shape; if Citra was indeed unclothed, her profile should have been more defined, more feminine. He was no stranger to a woman’s body, but he was a gentleman at heart and felt briefly ashamed for looking. He closed his eyes quickly when she patted the mare gently on the nose and then turned back toward the cave.

Curiosity coaxed him, however, and he opened his eyes to slits, mentally telling himself it was just so he could see her face. His heart rate quickened when she appeared to get down on her hands and knees and began crawling toward the cave — only it did not even look right as a crawl; it almost appeared as she were on four feet.

He swallowed involuntarily. As she got closer to his position, he could feel her eyes upon him, and as he looked back through slotted eyelids, it almost appeared as if her eyes were shining in the dark. He had seen green eyes in the darkness like that before – on a cat.

Citra drew nearer and then the soft glow of the waning crescent moon behind her made his heart skip a beat. If he did not know better, he would have thought the mountain lion had come back for him. The silhouette certainly seemed to convey this image, though the head seemed oddly misshapen. She stopped a few paces away and simply stared back at him.

“Curiosity got the better of you, did it?” Citra’s voice came from the feline-shaped shadow. She stepped closer and it was then that the meager flicker of the campfire gave some illumination to her face.

Jake’s mouth opened and suddenly went dry. Staring back at him impassively was a cat the size of a mountain lion, but with strange cream-colored fur adorned with a multitude of black spots and with dark tear streaks beneath her eyes. It was the creature that had driven away the mountain lion after it had attacked him!

She moved closer on all fours, but he knew he had seen her up on two legs near his horse. He was at a complete loss, as his mind was unable to connect what he saw with what he knew. His jaw worked of its own accord, giving him the appearance a fish gasping out of water.

The cat stopped just a few inches from him and then settled down on all four feet with her belly upon the ground, her tail swishing quietly behind her. He could see her face clearly and it further unnerved him. He had never been this close to a cat larger than a barn mouser that was not trying to kill him.

She looked at him in what appeared to be a compassionate expression. Although definitely feline, there was also something vaguely human about her appearance too – almost as if she were a blend of the two, and accenting the illusion was brown, human-like wavy scalp hair on top of her head that hung to her shoulders.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” she said quietly. It was odd hearing words spoken in English coming from a feline throat that should not have been able to form such vocabulary. Jake swallowed again, but despite her words, he was afraid of her. He tried to get up onto his hands and feet to get away from her, but the pain across his back suddenly lashed back at him. He dropped back into the dirt, but tried to scoot away from her without getting up.

“Jake,” she said in a more commanding tone, but keeping her place in front of him. “Please settle down. I have been taking care of you – I am not going to hurt you.”

He stopped and stared back at her with wide eyes and then she held up a paw in a very human-like gesture. Her limb was unlike any he was familiar with; the palm was padded, but she possessed a thumb and even short fingers!

“I promise you,” she said in a quiet voice, “that I am here to help you, if you will let me. It is me, Citra. I was not quick enough to save you from the mountain lion mother’s attack, but I chased her off and then brought you here to my cave to tend to your wounds.”

Jake swallowed with difficulty. His mouth was so very dry. “What… what are you?” he croaked.

“I am called a Fur,” his companion replied. “I am part human and part cat – a cheetah, specifically. As you can guess, I am not from around here.”

“Are… you going to eat me?”

Citra’s eyes narrowed in amusement and she chuckled. “Heavens, no, Jake – I am not a cannibal.” She sat upright and demurely crossed her legs to one side like a human female. “My primary concern is to give you First Aid, so if you will allow me to help you get better, perhaps you can help me in return.”

Jake blinked. “What is a fur-staid?” he asked.

“First Aid is giving you temporary medical treatment until you can get to a doctor. I have been trying to treat your wounds, but you keep opening them back up. If you do not lie still, it will take more time before I can get you to a proper physician.”

The man nodded, closed his eyes and put his forehead down on the ground. His head, back and neck were all stinging, but he tried to calm himself. He must be delirious, he surmised. A fever probably had him and was making him see things that could not be. It was the only explanation he could accept.

He had been attacked by a cougar protecting her kittens, and someone must have saved him and treated his wounds. That much was true. Everything else was a fever dream. If he kept his eyes closed, he would not see the nightmare.

Relax, he told himself. Behave as his savior had instructed and perhaps he would get better in time. Time, that was what he needed. Once the fever passed, he would see a very different caretaker than the one his sickened mind had conjured up for him. Whoever she really was, Jake hoped she was pretty.

Chapter 3

The Other Cat

The soft light of dawn gave color to the world outside and Jake stared out through crusty eyelids at an orange and black butterfly that flitted among the wildflowers growing between the granite boulders. He lay still for a time, but there was a growing need to empty his bladder despite the possibility of reopening his wounds yet again. Swallowing back a deep sigh, he steeled himself against the pain and gingerly got up onto his hands and knees as quietly as he could.

The skin across his neck, shoulders and back stretched taut and stung a little, but as he pulled one foot up beneath him, he did not feel anything rip open. Good so far, he mused.

He extended his arms out for balance and slowly pushed up with his legs. Wavering, he almost fell over, but then he managed to keep an uncertain balance long enough to gather up his other leg and then stand up in a crouching position. He stood thus for a long moment to make sure he would not fall forward onto his face, but then slowly took a tentative step.

There was a twinge in his ankle when he put his weight on it and he cursed beneath his breath, but he quickly surmised that it was probably just a sprain caused by falling from his horse. Despite this, however, his ability to walk had been relatively undamaged by the cougar’s attack and he could still get around. He rubbed his ankle a moment, straightened up, and then nodded quietly to himself.

Getting to his feet had taken longer than he had thought, but now that he had gravity working against him, he remembered the reason why he was now on his feet. He looked around the shadows of the cave, but he was alone. The campfire was nothing more than a pile of ash with a single curl of smoke floating up toward an unseen crack between the boulders overhead, but there were two dead rabbits laid out together beside the ring of stones, evident his caretaker was still providing for him.

He limped toward the entrance of the cave and then glanced at the terrain. He did not recognize the small canyon, but there were plenty of places for him to do his business away from the delicate eyes of the woman who had cared for him. He hobbled along the animal trail for just a couple minutes and then stepped between two large boulders against the mountainside to relieve himself.

Before he was finished, however, he had the uneasy feeling of being watched. He buttoned up his trousers and turned around slowly. He did not see anyone at first, but he remembered the cougar attack from higher ground so he glanced up. The small hairs on the back of his neck stiffened and he felt a sudden rush of adrenaline.

His nightmare was there, silently looking down on him from a short distance up the side of the granite mountain. She sat on her haunches beside a scrub of oak, the limp body of a dead jackrabbit in her jaws and those large golden eyes staring over it at him.

The strange spotted cat was no dream unless he was actually asleep and still hallucinating. Without taking his eyes from the creature, he pinched his arm hard using a thumbnail. His arm twitched and he knew he was indeed awake, but he was not sure that he could accept what he was seeing as real.

He sighed and leaned back against a boulder. Without his Stetson, he shielded his eyes against the morning sun with a hand as he took a good look at her. She had called herself a Fur, but that was an odd thing to call herself. Was she not covered in fur? She had also said that she was part cat, a cheetah.

Jake had heard stories and descriptions of an exotic cat from Africa called a cheetah, but he had never even seen a pictograph of one. Despite this, he doubted that there had ever been any like this one before. He was sure he would have heard of that.

He studied her for a long moment and she seemed in no hurry to spoil the moment. Aside of the color and pattern of her fur, in this position she looked very similar to the mountain lions he was accustomed to seeing in these parts. She sat on her haunches with her front legs before her and her tail wrapped lightly around her feet, but the shape of her back legs looked odd.

Without knowing it was the truth, he surmised that the larger hip and leg muscles is what had allowed her to stand up on her back feet, giving her the appearance of having just two legs and two arms, but then he remembered her strange hand-like paws. Although shorter than a human’s, she had four fingers and a thumb on each hand-paw. He found it highly unlikely that she could have unbuttoned his shirt and pulled off his undershirt to bind the wounds upon his neck and back without fingers.

The cheetah dropped the rabbit at her feet and then stretched out her arms in the air just as a human would, and it was then he could see her chest. Although not large or well defined, she definitely had a pair of small female breasts beneath her fur, and it surprised him that a cat would have only two. At the realization of what he was seeing, he blinked and averted his eyes, even though he could see nothing protruding through the thick chest fur.

He shifted his eyes to her face and her look of amusement puzzled him until he realized that she had seen his gaze focused upon her chest for a moment. She did not seem offended by his inspection and made no effort to hide herself away from his gaze; she knew she was well covered. A long lock of the wavy brown scalp hair upon her head fell into her eyes and it was then he made another realization. That was hair on her head, not just the fur that covered the rest of her. Animals with fur did not have hair on their heads!

This was no mere animal. In spite of everything he knew from his life’s experiences, there was something about her that was also human. Had one of her parents been a cat and the other been a human? He cringed at the thought, averting his mind from the logistics of such a union. It was not possible in nature, but how else could it be?

Almost as if drawn to them against his will, Jake looked back into her eyes, those large golden orbs that had depth and personality. She looked back at him steadily, and although she did blink, it was not as often as a human might, and it was then he remembered something. She had been watching him when he had turned around, and that meant she had seen him relieving himself on the rocks. He felt his face heat up and he cleared his throat, once again turning his gaze away from her.

“You’re real,” he muttered at last. “I’m awake and you’re really real.”

“Yes, Mr. Harrison, I am,” she replied in that strangely accented voice.

“I don’t understand,” he said after a hard swallow. “How can you be real?”

The feline creature looked down at him with something of a sad air, the dark cry lines beneath her eyes aiding in the expression. “I do not know how to explain what I am in a way you could understand,” she said to him, “but I need your help just as much as you have needed mine.”

“Why would you need my help?” he asked, feeling the renewed sting of taut, injured flesh across his neck from looking up the mountain at her. “You can defend yourself against other mad cats and can apparently hunt well without so much as a gun or knife. You’ve taken better care of me that I could myself yet you could still kill me in an instant.”

His hand strayed to spot where his holster normally resided upon his hip, all too aware of its absence. She had wisely removed it from him, for he would probably have shot her in an instant upon first seeing what she was, without ever knowing she could talk.

“I am far from my home,” she replied, “and I am in constant danger from others like you who would not hesitate to kill me for my pelt. Until I can find a way to return to where I belong, I will need your protection.”

“How can I protect you?” he asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.

“Take me in as a curiosity for your show. It would allow me to hide in plain sight.”

Jacob Harrison stared up at her and let his jaw drop slightly. “How… how did you know about my show?”

The cheetah woman’s eyes narrowed in amusement. “I found a rolled-up copy of your poster with the pack on your horse. I did not know what to make of it at first, but the more I looked at it, the more I realized how you could help me.”

“Poster?” he asked.

“The one promoting your show.”

Harrison thought about it for a moment and then his eyes lit up in realization. “The lithograph!” he exclaimed. “I always carry at least one or two with me everywhere I go in the event I see a good place to hang one.” He frowned and hooked the thumb of his injured hand upon the belt of his trousers. “I don’t know why I had one with me this time, however,” he said in a quiet voice. “It wouldn’t have been appropriate to post a bill at the funeral.”

Citra tilted her head to the side. “Funeral?”

He nodded without looking up. “My son, Douglas,” was all he said, looking morose. He fell silent for a long moment lost in thought, but then he looked back up at his companion under the shade of his hand. “Can we go back into the cave where it’s cooler?” he asked. “I think I need to sit down.”

Nodding, the cheetah woman picked up the dead jackrabbit and then stood up on her hind legs. Taking her steps carefully, she walked down the side of the mountain and Jake thought she looked as natural walking on two legs as she had on four. He stared at her mutely until she reached his side and then held out an elbow to him.

“Take my arm,” she said. “I will help you back to the cave.”

He looked at her elbow for a moment, but could not bring himself to touch it. “I can walk okay,” he said. “I just might be slow sitting back down.”

“As you wish, Mr. Harrison.”

She allowed him to walk in front of her, to make sure he did not really need her assistance, but when they got back to the cave entrance, they both stopped and stared. A thin coyote was sniffing at the dead rabbits by the fire stones, but when it saw them approach, it grabbed one and then bolted out into the canyon.

“Hey!” Citra exclaimed indignantly, shaking a fist at the departing critter. “Go get your own bunny!”

Something about her reaction broke the ice and Jake found himself chuckling. The cheetah turned and looked at him, and upon seeing his amusement broke into a feline grin of her own.

“Well, at least I still have this one,” she said, holding up the rabbit she had just caught up on the side of the mountain.

Still smiling, Jake limped back to his pallet and eased himself down into a sitting position. The action stretched the skin across his back but he managed to hold in a gasp of pain. He made himself as comfortable as he could while his companion set the jackrabbit beside the smaller cottontail rabbit the coyote had left behind. She sat down beside the fire pit and crossed her legs demurely to the side, looking over him.

“How are you feeling?” she asked in a quieter voice in genuine compassion. There was a little blood on the strips of cloth she had bound him in, but fortunately it was only a few spots. She had not had anything to stitch up the furrows in his skin, hoping the bandages would help until she could get him to a real doctor.

“About as well as a man can after having his neck and back torn open by a wild mountain cat,” he replied with a grimace. “In case I did not say so properly, I would like to thank you now for giving me help and your fur-staid. I still do not understand how you can be what you are, but I’m grateful that you stepped in to save me from certain death. A momma cougar would not have been content to just let me lie there after she had injured me. To keep her kittens safe, she’d have killed me for sure.”

“You are welcome, Mr. Harrison. I was nearby when I heard her scream, and although I had no plans to reveal myself to anyone, I could not just stand aside and let her have you. I am sorry I did not get there quick enough to keep you from injury. If I could have gotten there sooner, I could have spooked your horse so that she would have carried you away from harm without ever having seen me.”

“Thank you just the same. I appreciate what all you’ve done for me.”

“Are you now convinced that I will not harm you?”

Jake nodded and looked around the cave, anywhere but at her. Having such a discussion still had him thinking in the back of his mind that he must be hallucinating, but at least he no longer felt any danger from this creature.

The feline woman spied something and a smile crossed her face. She moved to a small pile of his belongings further back in the cave and then picked up a roll of thick parchment. She brought it back out to him and then knelt in the dirt so that she could spread it out between them. The man held down two of the corners while she held the others.

Unrolled between them was a poster declaring “Jake Harrison’s Wild West” with “Fun for the Whole Family” in large, elaborate type inside of a twisted rope border around the edges. Citra smiled at him and Jake let a crooked grin cross his lips.

“My name is Jacob,” he told her, feeling just a little more comfortable around her at the moment. Perhaps it was the familiarity of the lithograph, but he felt more talkative. “Although everyone but my Ma an’ Pa have always called me Jake. As you can see, I own a Wild West show that we take from town to town across the west. A lot has changed over the years and most folk have forgotten what it was like to explore and settle the western lands where they now live. They’ve forgotten the hardships, the battles with the Indians and times of starvation from drought or the cold of winter. My show is helping to keep the spirit of the west alive so that these things are never forgotten. I have talented horse riders, ropers, crack shots and even several real Indians to give authenticity to reenactments of those days behind us all. I even have buffalo, long horn cattle, a bobcat, a coyote and a black bear all in cages for display.”

Citra nodded with excitement. “I remember reading about shows like this,” she said. “People like Buffalo Bill Cody who wanted to keep the west alive.”

Jake’s expression darkened. “William Frederick Cody writes a lot of books about himself that people read and they think his is the only show out there,” he said with a snort. “He might have once been a Pony Express rider and a buffalo hunter, making himself out to be the real frontier hero, but he’s just a showman – an entertainer who thinks he is better’n me!”

Citra stared at him for a moment, instantly regretting that she had mentioned a specific name of the time. He was probably the most well-known, but as Jake pointed out, he was not the only one who had had a western show that traveled the land enticing customers to release a few of their hard-earned coins. She had not considered his competitors and mentally kicked herself for bringing it up.

Jake leaned over forward and pointed a finger at the poster, releasing one corner. “He might have been the first to do one of these shows, but mine is just as good as his and has real heart as well as entertainment. It is a good thing he is out of the country right now to leave the Wild West to those of us who remember what this was all about!”

Citra nodded and began rolling up the poster again. “If you would be willing,” she said quietly, “you could help me out by letting me join your show.”

Jake sat back and it was a businessman who now looked at her. “The purpose of my show is to keep the old Wild West alive,” he reminded her. “As much as I’m beholden to you for helping me, there aren’t any big cats like you anywhere in America. None look like you, and certainly none of them can walk and talk like you do. How do you suppose I can pass you off as one of the natural wonders of the west?”

The spotted cat shook her head and set the poster aside. “Horses were not native to this country,” she reminded him. “They were brought to North America by the Spanish Conquistadors and propagated over the years so much that they are now a part of this land. You can pass me off as an exotic cat brought in on a ship from Africa that was likely bound for the zoological exhibit that opened in Philadelphia a few years ago. You can say that I probably got loose upon arrival and was roaming the land when you caught me somewhere out in the west.”

Jake pursed his lips and considered her story. He was unconvinced, but then a new thought occurred to him. “Is that what really happened?” he asked. “Did you get loose from that exhibit? I’ve heard stories of all the critters they have on display in Philadelphia in what they are calling a zoo, with animals from around the world.”

Citra chuckled. “No, that is not where I came from. It is just a story I made up on the spot for our scenario here.”

“You said your home was a long way from here. Africa’s a long way away.”

“My home is even farther,” the cheetah told him with a straight face, “but I do not want to talk about that now. I want to talk about how you can help me with your show.”

“I don’t know,” Jake muttered. “Sounds kinda fetched to me.”

Citra leaned closer to him and caught his eye with her own. “Just think, Mr. Harrison – you will have something in your show that Cody does not have. Think of the crowds you will draw, telling everyone you have a Wilder West Show!”

A glint suddenly appeared in Jake’s expression and he smiled widely. “You would do that?” he asked in a quieter tone, as if afraid a competitor might overhear the conversation, “You would allow yourself to be put up on display like another animal?”

“Yes and no,” she replied. “We can work out the details of a performance later, but for now that could be the foundation of a partnership.”

Jake sat back and thought it over for a few minutes, but then he looked back over at her. “Why all this?” he asked. “You’re free to live how you want now. Why would you want to start living in a cage?”

Citra got up to her feet and stood up – all the way up. She spread out her arms wide, putting herself on full display for him. “Look at me, Mr. Harrison,” she said. He did as directed and had to force himself not to stare. She was covered in natural fur, but this female wore not a stitch of clothing; although her chest and crotch fur was thick enough to hide everything beneath, he considered her enough of a woman to feel embarrassed. He swallowed and forced his eyes up to her face.

“You have never seen anyone like me before, and never will again. If I had not helped you, but you saw me out hunting rabbits around the mountains, you would have been tempted to shoot me for my strange pelt, yes? Do you think that I would look good spread out on the floor of your home? You might never have known that I am more than just an exotic cat, and by shooting me, no one else would ever know either.”

“Yes,” he replied slowly, “I suppose that could have been the case.”

“That is my point. I can still end up as a spotted rug on the floor of some cabin, and I would really prefer that not be my fate. Even if I have to live in a cage and let others stare at me through the bars, I will be safe and alive! If I had not been nearby when that mother cat attacked you, you would probably be dead right now. Are you not glad to be safe and alive, Mr. Harrison? You may be injured, but you are alive.”

Jacob Harrison stared at her for a good long while, barely even blinking himself. When she settled back down on the dirt floor of the cave, he shook himself as if he had been in a trance and gave her a nod.

“I can see your point,” he said at last, “and even though I think you’re the strangest lady-cat I’ve ever seen, I am indebted to you for saving my life.” He flexed the stiff fingers of his injured hand and grimaced. It had only been a day since the attack, so he knew it would still take time before his injuries healed.

“The first thing we’ll need to figure out is how to get you back to my camp that’s outside of the town of Ioland. You can’t ride on my horse with me – too many folks would see you – and I don’t have a caged wagon with me to pull you there as I would any other wild critter I’d caught for my show.”

“You could put a rope around my neck and I could walk alongside your mare as if you had simply caught me and were taking me back that way,” Citra suggested. “You could claim that I gave you those injuries, but that you had beaten me into submission and I am now docile.”

“Hmm, perhaps.” Jake sat back and studied her for a moment. “Would you mind, uh, getting down on all fours for a minute? I want to look at you.”

The cheetah did as requested and presented her side profile to him, lightly swishing the black tip of her spotted tail.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a strange, wild animal,” Jake told her, “but I’m not sure how I’m going to explain what’s on top of your head. Saying I put a hair piece on you might be amusing, but wouldn’t make sense.”

Citra smiled. “We can talk about that on our way back to your show,” she replied. “There is no need to work out all the details at this moment. It may be a day or two more before you are well enough to ride anyway.” She looked over at the rabbits and licked her lips. “I do not know about you, but I am hungry for breakfast.”

Jake nodded. “Yep, me too. Is that going to be enough for both of us?” he asked.

“That is my breakfast,” the cheetah informed him. “There is more roasted turkey for you if you want it, but I was in the mood for rabbit this morning. I can go hunt down more if you want some.”

He shook his head. “No, turkey sounds fine. I just wish I had some bread to go with it.”

***

An hour later, they were both satisfied with the bounty in their bellies, although Jake had been a little unnerved watching her eat the rabbits raw using only her teeth and claws. He was no stranger to seeing bloody meals in the cages of the wild animals he kept on display, but this strange cat woman was calmly cleaning her hands and muzzle with a wet strip of cloth aided by a sandpaper tongue.

With a full stomach and having found a comfortable position that was the least painful for his injuries, Jake was feeling relaxed and was musing over their earlier discussion.

“If we are going to be partners,” he said in a quiet voice, “perhaps you should tell me a little about yourself.” She looked over at him for a moment, the tip of her pink tongue still protruding from her lips. He chuckled at the sight; despite her human-like qualities, she could still be so cat-like at times.

“I do not really know how much I can tell you where you would understand,” she reminded him again.

Jake waved his good hand in the air. “If you can’t tell me how you came to be what you are, how about you just tell me a little about yourself. You’re obviously intelligent – you can think, speak, and even read the letters on my lithograph; you know about my competitor, Cody and places like the Philadelphia Zoo. Even my horse has a personality, but she can’t tell me about herself the way you can.”

“I do not know what to tell you…”

Jake smiled. “Let’s start with your name,” he said. “Tell me what it means. You said you weren’t Indian, and now that is obvious to me, but that sounds like an Indian name.”

The feline woman tilted her head and thought about it before she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Let me get more comfortable.” She stretched out in front of him, settling in comfortably with all four feet beneath her and her head down upon her hand-paws.

“I told you my name was Citra Kayah. That is really just a nickname, given to me by a friend. Citrakāyah is not Indian, but it is a word in Sanskrit that simply means the same as ‘cheetah’. Seeing what I am, it seemed fitting.”

Jake raised an eyebrow at her. “I don’t know what ‘sand script’ is,” he said, “but that sounds silly.”

“Sanskrit is a language spoken in parts of India,” Citra explained patiently. “What is so silly about that?”

“Calling you ‘cheetah’ in another language is the same thing as calling you ‘cheetah’ in English. That’s not a name, it’s just a description, no matter what language it’s in.”

Citra frowned. “Well, when you put it like that way, I suppose you are right.”

A smirk suddenly crossed Jake’s face. “If this Sanskrit is a language from India,” he said, “wouldn’t that still make your name an Indian name?”

The feline woman stopped and stared at him a moment, and then chuckled. “Touché,” she said with a shake of her head.

“Huh? What is that mean?”

“Touché is a French word used in the art of fencing, a type of sword fighting,” she replied. “Basically, it means you struck the heart of the matter - or in this case that I see your point.”

The man frowned. “For a cat, you sure know a lot of fancy foreigner words,” he muttered.

“I like to think that I am well-educated,” she replied with a proud expression.

Jake looked at her for a long moment and then returned to the original topic of their conversation. “You said that Citra is your nick-name. Is that something like a stage name?”

The cheetah looked amused at the showman. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“What is your real name? Can I pronounce it, or is it something only known in a cat language?”

Citra laughed aloud. “My real name is Susan Foreman,” she confessed, “but that is not very exotic sounding, is it?”

Jake blinked. “Susan Foreman?” he repeated. “That is a… a human name.”

“I did tell you that I am half human.”

“Yes, I suppose you did,” he admitted slowly. “I still do not understand how you can be half human and half cat.”

“Well,” she said quietly, “I was not always this way, half and half as I am now. I was born a normal little brown-haired girl my parents named Susan Carole Ann Foreman, but it was not until later as an adult that I went through a procedure that made me into what I am now.”

“Pro… procedure?” Jake asked with wide eyes. “Does that mean that something turned you into a lady-cat?”

“Yes, that is exactly what that means.”

“That’s impossible!” he exclaimed.

Citra got up and moved closer to him, much closer. She settled down right in front of him and reached out for his good hand. Before he could pull it out of her reach, she gently took his wrist and then guided it up to the top of her head, setting his fingers across one of her soft, furry ears.

“It is not impossible, Mr. Harrison. I am real.”

He stroked the ear for a moment and then ran his fingers across her brown scalp hair in soft strokes. “It… it feels real, but I don’t understand how it is possible.”

She looked up at him, moving only her eyes. “I told you that you would be unable to understand. I may never be able to explain it in a way that you could comprehend, just as you would not believe how I came to be here either. Are you a believer in faith, Mr. Harrison?”

Jake blinked at the non-sequitur. “Uh, yes, of course, I am a God-fearin’ man.”

“As with God, Mr. Harrison, some things you have to accept on faith alone. You may not understand how I got here or how I am what I am, but you will have to accept it on faith that I am here and that I am real. If you cannot do that, you may never believe that the person who saved you from being killed by a mountain lion is another cat that can talk and is just as intelligent as you are.”

“I’m still not sure I believe it even now,” he muttered, surprised to find that he was still petting her as he would a common housecat.

Chapter 4

Country Doctor

Jake’s impossible companion gingerly pulled at the edges of the dry, bloodstained wrap that covered the injuries on his back. The man hissed, the tender wounds stinging as she lifted it up, but there seemed to be no new seepage. It had only been two days since the cougar attack, but Jake was getting restless from inactivity and his caretaker knew he needed real medical attention. The wounds on his neck, hands and across his back looked ugly, and although they were no longer bleeding, they would probably get infected if left untreated. The skin around the wounds was already fiery red and she feared he might become feverish soon.

The female Fur set the wrap aside on one of the fire pit rocks to keep it out of the dirt covering the cave floor. After she had had a chance to clean his wounds a little, she would wash the remnants of the man’s undershirt she had used as a makeshift bandage. She would have liked to have boiled the shirt in water over the fire, but they had nothing large enough for such a luxury.

She had heated up water in the coffee pot from Jake’s pack and then let it cool a little, so she was at least able to have something to clean him with. She poured warm water over another scrap of cloth, wrung it out slightly, and then gently began to daub at the dirt and sweat on his wounds. Jake gritted his teeth and said nothing, knowing from past experience that it needed to be done.

The mismatched companions had talked only a little during their time together, both of them mostly lost in their own thoughts. Although they had tried to further discuss the possibility of her joining his Wild West show, Jake’s injuries had kept him distracted too much to make plans.

“Citra,” he gasped, “we need to leave. Today. I can’t take much more of this.”

“Yes, you need a doctor,” the cheetah agreed. “I can only do so much for you with what we have here. Do you feel strong enough to ride?”

“That doesn’t matter,” he grumbled. “You may have to tie me to my saddle if I’m not.”

“How far is it to your camp?”

“A day’s ride. Longer if we have to go slow.”

“Once your bandages are cleaned and I have redressed your wounds, we will go.”

“Citra…”

“Yes, Jake?”

He closed his eyes and whispered as she worked on him, “In case I don’t make it, thanks again for your help.”

“Jake…”

“I... I hope you make it back to your home,” he husked, “wherever it may be. I’m sure your people are looking for you.”

The Fur frowned and shook her head slightly, even though he could not see the action. She knew her people would look for her, but it was unlikely they would ever find her. She was forever out of their reach; the most she could hope for was to avoid becoming an exotic rug for as long as she could.

***

The painted horse stood patiently on the canyon floor while Citra assisted Jake up the embankment above her. In danger of ripping his wounds open again, he had been unable to get up into the saddle the traditional way, and although the Fur’s hybrid condition granted her more strength than what she had possessed as a human, she had not been able to lift him over her shoulders to get him up in the saddle. The footing was not sound on wind-blown grit covering the rocks, but she managed to keep him upright as he reached out for the western saddle horn.

Jake felt undignified having to mount a horse in this manner, but he supposed it was better than being draped across Honey’s saddlebags like a dead man.

As Citra crouched down on the lip of the embankment, she hoped the mare would stay put long enough to get her rider in place. It had not been an easy task to approach the horse in the first place; the animal’s natural fear of a large predator panicked her when Citra had first approached, but the cheetah woman’s gentle manner was aided by the perfume she wore.

The scent was imported and very expensive, and apparently the horse enjoyed it just as much as she did herself as it must have masked her natural ‘big cat’ aroma. Once she had initially calmed the animal that first day and proven that she presented no threat to the mare, the two of them had gotten along well. Citra had been feeding and watering her, as well as given her a nightly grooming with a brush Jake kept in the saddlebags. Even after only a couple of days, Honey stood calmly as the predator cat crouched over her on the embankment with her rider.

Jake eased a leg out across the narrow distance while Citra supported his weight with hands beneath his arms. It was not the most dignified way of mounting a horse, but with patience, he finally slid into the saddle with only minimal pain. Citra studied the cloth shirt across his back, but to her relief there were no new blood stains.

The man patted Honey affectionately and spoke several soothing words before he sat up straight with his boots firmly in the stirrups. He looked over at the cheetah and gave her a pained smile as he clucked his tongue. The mare moved away from the embankment and then Citra hopped down upon the canyon floor beside them.

Fresh water was in the canteen, a day’s ration of food was in the pack and the fire pit in the cave had been covered over with dirt; they were almost ready to go.

The cheetah stood up beside the saddlebag and pulled off a coil of rope attached to its strap and buckle. Although her fingers and thumbs were shorter than Jake’s, she manipulated the rope as if she had handled delicate things all her life; the rider felt amazed, watching her fashion a slip knot at one end. When she finished, she opened up the loop, slipped it over her head, and then drew it up short of being snug around her neck. She looked up at Jake and handed him the rest of the rope.

“Try to remember that although I look like a wild animal, I am more than one,” she told him, getting down upon all fours, “Please do not try to choke me as we travel.”

Jake gazed down at her and for just a moment, a wild animal was all he saw. He gathered up most of the slack in the rope, leaving her enough to walk beside the horse, and then wrapped a section of it around the horn of his western saddle.

Had this really happened to him? he thought to himself. The two of them had worked up a story about this exotic escaped feline from Africa attacking him, giving him wounds that still needed to be treated, but now that he was atop his horse looking down at the cat at the end of a rope, he momentarily wondered if the story was real and that the rest of what had happened was actually a fever dream.

“Shall we go?” she asked quietly, breaking him from his thoughts. Without a word, he nodded and then lightly tapped Honey’s sides with the stirrups. The mare started off in the direction he indicated with the reins and Citra padded softly beside them.

***

The pair of them was quiet as they traveled, as had been their plan. Should anyone else out on the prairie see them, Jake did not want to have to explain why he was talking to a captive animal, with the animal responding to a conversation.

After a couple of hours, the rider’s mind wandered to the business of his show and he actually forgot about his strange acquaintance for a while. He had had numerous occasions to talk with her, but aside of that first night, neither had offered up much more information about themselves. They were riding companions for the moment, but still nothing more than strangers.

He glanced down at the cat and saw her sniffing at the air as she walked. She noticed his gaze and then said quietly, “There is water nearby. I am thirsty and I am sure Honey is too.”

Jake leaned forward and rubbed his mare’s neck and replied, making it look as if he might be talking to his horse – something that would be more common than talking to a wild cat.

“Which direction?” he asked without looking at her.

Citra sniffed again. “To the left, not far.”

Jake straightened up in his saddle, the skin of his shoulders stiff beneath his shirt, and guided Honey from her path a little to the left. It was only a few minutes before they stepped down an embankment and came upon a narrow creek flowing in a recessed channel across the prairie. Citra went right to the water and began lapping up the sun-warmed liquid. Jake allowed Honey to approach the water on her own volition and she bent to drink as well.

The rider remained up in the saddle, gazing out across the landscape beneath the shadowed brim of his hat. The granite mountain range was to their south and there seemed to be nothing but gently rolling prairie ahead. The land was somewhat familiar to him and he knew there were a few ranches in the area, but he had not yet seen one on the horizon.

He took a sip from his canteen without taking his eyes off the scenery, but just as he capped the container and was about to say something to the cat, a voice startled him from his reverie.

“Hello there!”

Jake turned to look behind him, but he immediately grimaced when he pulled his neck muscles taut in the action. “He... hello,” he gasped.

Several yards behind him in front of the embankment on a brown-spotted Appaloosa stallion was a man in dusty garments just as weather worn as his summer-baked skin. He had the look of a rancher and the brim of his hat was pulled down to shade his eyes from the sun, but his friendly expression seemed genuine. He urged his mount closer to the stranger, but then pulled up short when he saw the roped cheetah looking up at him from the edge of the creek.

“What have we here?” he asked in surprise.

Jake turned his horse to present his injured neck and shoulder to the newcomer. “Cat attacked me back in the mountains,” he explained. “Do you know where I can find a nearby doctor?”

The rancher continued to stare at the large spotted cat. “Yeah, there’s a doc not far from here,” he said distractedly. “Is that a mountain lion? What’s wrong with it? Its fur looks diseased!”

“It is called a cheetah and the spots are natural,” Jake explained. “I’m taking it back to exhibit in my Wild West show.”

“Wild West show? I heard someone talking about a show that was in Ioland,” the man replied, “but I’ve not had time to leave the ranch to have a look-see.”

“That’s the one.” Jake gasped from a sudden surge of pain and the rancher saw fresh blood on the bandage across the side of his neck.

“I’m sorry, you need the doctor,” the other man mused aloud, taking his eyes off the cat. He gestured toward the northwest. “You see that grove of trees out yonder?” Jake nodded. “That’s Doc Padden’s farm. He can fix you up.”

Jake tipped his hat. “Thank you, much obliged,” he said. “My show will be in Ioland for two days. If you and your missus come, tell a man named Desmond that Jake said you could get in for half price.”

The man nodded. “Thank you, we may try to see what you have to see.” He glanced back at the spotted cat that lay on her belly beside the creek, quietly watching the men. “What’s wrong with its head?” he asked, indicating the brown wavy growth. “Is that normal on a… a cheeter?”

“I’ll have my veterinarian look her over,” Jake told him. “If it’s a disease or deformity, I may have to put her down.”

The rancher pulled a rifle from a saddle holster and pulled it up, putting the bead right between the cat’s eyes. “I can do it now if you’d like and save you the trouble,” he said somberly. “There’s been a rash of killings from my livestock and the tracks I’ve found point to a large cat. If it attacked you¸ this might be the one what done it, especially if it’s sick and diseased.”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t think it was her that got your livestock. I don’t think she’s been eating much, as you can see her ribs.” The rancher lowered his rifle to take a closer look at the cat. “Thanks for the offer, but I want her for my show.”

“Suit yourself,” the man said with a frown, “but don’t let it loose. I’m not the only one who’s lost sheep lately and someone else might not withhold a bullet for that thing.” He looked again at Jake and noticed the grimace upon his face. “I’d better not keep you any longer. You’d best be getting over to Doc Padden’s place to get you fixed up. I’d go with you, but I still have a lost sheep to find.”

“Thank you,” Jake said politely. The rancher took one more look at the spotted cat and then put away his rifle before he rode off.

The cheetah took another drink of water and then stood up after making sure the rider was out of earshot. “You can see my ribs sticking out?” Citra asked, glancing back at her side.

“Not so much,” Jake replied, “but you are skinnier than a cougar and he didn’t know the difference.” He looked at her a moment more and then asked, “Are you the one who got his sheep?”

“No, I have only eaten rabbits, squirrels, quail and a turkey since I got here, all free range. That momma mountain lion is probably the one that has been hunting the area.”

“You get enough to drink? I think I’ve opened up my back again and need to find that doctor.”

“I am ready to go,” Citra replied. “If you need to push Honey up to a run, I can keep up.”

“I don’t think I could handle a run, but I don’t think you could keep up with Honey if we did.”

“A cheetah is the fastest land mammal there is, so I would not worry about that. However, do you need me to look at your bandages first?”

“No, if that rancher comes back, I don’t want him to see you standing up on your hind legs to get at me. I wouldn’t even want him to see you and me talking right now.”

“Good point. We should go find your doctor.”

They continued on, heading for the farm near the grove of trees they had been directed to, but after looking around to make sure they weren’t followed, Jake spoke in a low voice. “We need to do something about the hair on your head,” he said. “There’s going to be questions about it everywhere we go. You said you had an idea?”

“All I need is a simple haircut, if we can find some shears. You can cut it all off for me, but it will only be a temporary solution since it will just grow back like any other person’s hair.”

“Why do you have hair anyway?”

“That is part of what I cannot explain to you, Jake.”

“I’ve only known you two days and already I’m getting tired of hearing that. Someday you’re going to tell me your story, whether you think I’ll understand or not!”

***

“Is that the cat that attacked you?”

Jake glanced out the window of the farmer’s simple house. His mare was tethered in the shade at a hitching post, but the spotted feline was tied to a tree near a cattle trough. She was relaxing on her belly beside the tree, calmly cleaning her paws with a large sandpaper tongue, looking all the world like a huge housecat. The farmer’s two dogs were standing out of harm’s way, barking, growling and making an overly loud fuss, but the cheetah ignored them.

“Yeah, but I don’t think she’s all that harmful,” Jake replied as the doctor cleaned his injuries. “I startled her in a narrow canyon and frightened away the meal she was stalking. If you look at her, she doesn’t look as if she’s been eating much and I think she attacked me out of fright. That she didn’t finish me off once I was down says a lot.”

“Well, Mr. Harrison, you’ve been dealing with wild animals more than I have, so I suppose you know what you’re talking about,” the country doctor told him. “I think most everyone else would have shot the thing if it had attacked them.”

“You’ve seen my show?”

“We were in Ioland last night at the feed store and my daughter begged us to go. We had a good time.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to entertain you myself,” Jake mused, “but I was away at Tin City to attend my son’s funeral.”

“My condolences on your loss.”

“Thank you.”

Doctor Padden finished cleaning the wounds and then stepped back to look at his patient. He was a middle-aged man with brown hair that was just starting to frost with grey, but the farm work had kept him in good shape and his hands were steady.

“I’m ready to stitch you up,” he said in a calm voice. “I would ask how you wanted to do this, but you’re in so much pain now from only just a cleaning that you’d probably pass out from the stitching.”

Jake looked at him over his shoulder and spotted the man’s younger wife standing in the doorway. “Better knock me out, Doc. I don’t want to scare your family with my screaming.” He had said it with a smile, but the look in his eyes showed that he was already tired of hurting. He had been stitched up before and knew it would still hurt afterward, but then it would be given a chance to heal properly. He knew he was man enough to handle the pain, but after days of handling it, he only wanted relief.

“Okay, you’d better lie face down on the bed, Mr. Harrison.”

The doctor turned to a cabinet, pulled out a bottle of amber liquid and picked up a large wad of gauze from the shelf beside it. His wife disappeared from the doorway as he approached the showman. He poured a little of the liquid onto the gauze and then held it out to Jake’s prone face.

“Breathe this. It will put you under for a little over an hour. By the time you awaken, you’ll be all patched up.”

“Thanks, Doc. I appreciate it.”

***

Citra knew it would take some time for Jake to receive proper care, so she was prepared to wait. One of the benefits she had come to enjoy being part cat was the patience she had gained in the process. When she had not done anything in response to the ruckus the dogs had made, they had eventually stopped barking, but both of the mutts remained close to keep an eye on the large spotted animal.

The afternoon was hot, but the cool shade and the water trough had made the time bearable. Even despite the rope, there was nothing else she needed to do and nowhere she needed to go, so she was content to enjoy the outdoors. With the deal she had made with the show owner, she would be doing a lot of lying around in a cage, so her future seemed devoid of further duties for some time, if not for the rest of her life.

The cheetah woman looked up when she heard a door close at the nearby house. A young girl of five or six had come outside, brown curls loose around her shoulders as she swished her tan dress walking across the yard toward her. Both dogs looked back at her with wagging tails, but her attention was not upon them. The strange, spotted kitty held her mesmerized, especially those large golden eyes.

Citra watched her curiously, but made no move to approach her. Jake had already been telling the few people they had met that she had been the one to attack him, so she did not want to provoke anyone that had access to a gun, which seemed to be a great many people in this place.

The little girl moved closer and suddenly the feline Fur felt uncomfortable. If Citra been a real wild cat like the mountain lioness, the girl would have already been within reach of deadly teeth and claws.

“Christine!”

The girl stopped and looked back toward the house at her mother’s shriek. There was genuine fear on the woman’s face as she raced toward her daughter. She had seen Jake’s injuries and heard how the spotted cat had attacked him. Both dogs, anxious by the mother’s panic, renewed their growling and incessant barking.

Citra admired the bravery of the mother rushing in to protect her child with nothing but a straw broom. The woman put herself between the girl and the large cat, but Citra remained where she was on the ground, fearful that if she got to her feet even to put distance between them, the broom would come at her. The broomstick would not have done much to harm her, but Citra would prefer not to have a lump on her noggin from the encounter.

The mother grabbed her daughter’s hand and slowly backed away from the cat with her, holding the broom in front of them. The dogs grew bolder from the woman’s anxiety and got closer to the cheetah. Citra remained in her spot, but could feel her ears flattening against her head and her semi-retractable claws fully extending in the event the canines got too close.

Thankfully, the woman called the dogs back, and although reluctantly, they obeyed and retreated to a safer distance, though they did not stop their barking. Citra stayed on her guard as the mother pulled her daughter back inside the house. As long as the dogs continued to harass her, she would not be able to relax. In time, however, there would be quiet again across the farm.

***

Some hours later, Citra opened an eyelid to see two men exiting the house, one handing the other a few coins from a leather pocket purse. Jake was again in his shirt, but it had been washed by the doctor’s wife and she could see fresh bandages on his hand and neck. He looked drowsy, as if he had just woken from a long nap, but despite the doctor’s insistence that he rest up before leaving, Jake was determined to make his way back to Ioland to rejoin his company before nightfall.

The doctor carried a medical bag as he walked with him toward the cheetah. “Listen, if you want to leave your cat here,” Padden was telling him, “I can have someone dispose of it for you and deliver its pelt to you later. There’s no reason to put yourself at further risk by doing this. I don’t think you would survive another attack.”

Jake shook his head. “Thanks, but I want her for my show,” he insisted. “She is worth more to me alive than dead. I just have to take care of that growth on her head and she’ll be fine.”

“Very well, Mr. Harrison, here you go.”

The farmer doctor handed him a pair of shears and then stepped back to a safer distance, his rifle ready for trouble. Jake gave him a confident smile and then turned to face the spotted cat. In a pre-arranged show, he held out both hands with the shears in one and crouched down in a display meant to convey to the cat that he meant her no real harm.

The cheetah got up on her haunches, laid her ears back and hissed at him in warning, but he continued closer talking in a soothing voice.

“I’m not going to hurt you, little Citrakāyah. I only want to help you,” he intoned serenely. “You are in no danger from me, so please let me near.”

Whether or not the animal could understand his words, the doctor marveled at the calming effect it seemed to have on her. Within a moment, Jake stretched out a hand to the cat’s head and gently put his fingers into her wavy brown hair. The cheetah’s ears came forward and she panted lightly at his touch, visibly relaxing.

Moving slowly so that he might not do anything to alarm the cat, Jake brought the shears closer to her head. Her large eyes followed the movement, but displayed nothing more than simple curiosity. He opened the blades and then quietly cut off a long lock of hair.

Purely for the doctor’s benefit, Citra reacted to the haircut with wide eyes, appearing as if for a moment she might panic, but Jake spoke in the soothing voice again to calm her. The feline seemed transfixed upon his eyes as he cut more from her head, and soon there lay a pile of wavy brown hair at the cat’s feet. The haircut was not perfect, but he had trimmed it down to her scalp, where there seemed to be a fine fuzz of fur underneath. Despite that he had never seen a spotted cheetah before her, Jake thought she now looked more like a mountain lion than she had since he had met her.

He stepped back slowly, pulling the shears down to his side, and then he retreated calmly back to the doctor. He handed the shears to him with a smile as the cat bent down to sniff idly at the cut hair at her feet.

“See, nothing to it,” he boasted.

“Well, I’ll be,” the doctor responded. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone calm a wild cat like that before. You’re talented, Mr. Harrison. You may want to put something like that in your show if she survives.”

“If she survives?”

The farmer indicated the brown hair. “I’d almost say that looks like regular hair, but it has to be a growth of some kind. Be careful, please. That may be a disease that infects your wounds, or even your other animals.”

“My veterinarian will examine her when I get back,” Jake told him. He suddenly looked weary and the doctor put a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you sure you won’t stay overnight to rest before you leave?” he asked in concern. “My wife will be frying up a plump chicken tonight with corn, potatoes, okra and gravy with her special cat-head biscuits and fresh butter.”

“Cat… cat-head biscuits?” Jake repeated hesitantly.

The doctor laughed, his grin spreading across his whole face and up into his eyes. “That’s what I call them,” he said, pantomiming holding one with both hands, “since she makes them about the size of a housecat’s head – not like your cat’s head, though!”

Jake chuckled and shook his head. “The offer’s tempting, Doctor Padden, but I really do not want to wait any longer. I can be in Ioland in a couple hours and then I can rest for real.”

“If that’s what you want, I can’t keep a stubborn man back,” said the farmer with a smile. “Please promise me you’ll have a doctor in Ioland take a look at you tomorrow, to make sure your stitches are holding tight.”

Jake smiled and held out a hand to the man who had helped him. “I promise that is just what I’ll do,” he said over a firm handshake. “Thanks for your help, Doc.”

He turned back toward the cheetah and boldly walked to the tree. He untied the rope and then led the cheetah past the doctor to Honey, who had been watered, fed and was waiting with her rider’s saddle and pack.

The farmer tried to keep his distance from the great cat, but gave Jake a hand up onto his mare. Once the rope was tied off onto the saddle horn, the showman tipped his hat to the wife and child standing just inside the door of the house and then pulled on the reins to lead Honey away for the final leg of their journey.

As they rode away, Citra looked back over her shoulder and watched the farmer gather together with his family as they all retreated back into the house. These were good people, she thought to herself.

Chapter 5

New Home

The ride during the rest of the day was uneventful. They passed a couple of wagons heading along the dusty road in the opposite direction and Jake took a few moments to hawk his show and tout the cheetah with him as the next attraction for his production, inviting them back to see this new wild animal he had caught out on the plains. Most saw her as nothing more than a strange kind of mountain lion with spots, though there seemed to be an extraordinary lack of enthusiasm to those they met along the way. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour and folks were too focused on getting back to their own homes, but the showman was a little disappointed that the handful of people he had shown her to seemed to have little curiosity about her.

“I don’t know if having you in my show is going to be of much interest,” he muttered when they were alone again on the trail.

“Are you worried I will not earn my keep?” the Fur asked quietly. “You have not shown me to more than a handful of people, which does not represent a percent of everyone who might visit your show.”

Jake looked askance at his companion, still not used to having business conversations regarding earnings and percentages with what should be nothing more than a talking animal, an impossibility in itself.

“Do you charge someone a price to come in and see everything you have to offer,” she asked, “or do you charge for each exhibit, each individual performance your people put on?”

“One price for everything,” he confirmed. “Twenty-five cents per adult, ten cents for children.”

“If that is the case,” Citra continued, “then having me in one cage and some mountain lion in another is not going to bring in more money than having just a mountain lion.”

“That is true, but I had hoped having the extra draw of an exotic cheetah would entice more people to pay to see the show than usual. That is what would bring in more money.”

Citra stepped around a mesquite bush, dragging the rope across the top of it. “Instead of worrying about what a handful of people we have met today think, just give it a couple of weeks. If I do not draw a crowd for you by then, I have an idea that may help out if you are willing to give it a try. It would be risky for me, but could be good for the show in the long run.” Jake looked simultaneously interested and dubious, which almost made the cheetah laugh aloud at his mixed expression.

“What… did you have in mind?” he asked. Citra wondered how he would take her idea; it was something that would be more likely found in a circus and may not fit in with theme and purpose of a Wild West show, but if he was that concerned with her presence drawing in more coins, he might consider it.

Keeping an eye on their darkening surroundings in case anyone else might overhear their conversation, Citra begin to explain what she had in mind. He seemed surprised at first, but then was nodding his head as he listened.

***

Jake Harrison’s Wild West was currently set up on the outskirts of Ioland, a young town on the northwest bank of the Canadian River in the Oklahoma Territories. The town itself was unremarkable, but as the territorial county seat of Day County, it was a decent spot for the show to draw in visitors of the region. Typically, they only stayed and performed for two nights at any one place, but just as they had reached Ioland, word had reached Jake about his son’s death in Tin City just a day’s ride to the south. Unfortunately, the cougar attack had delayed his return by three days, so the businessman was not sure his troupe still awaited him.

He had left Emmett Desmond in charge so he could attend the funeral on what should have only been a round trip of two days. Taking a day to set up for the show, two nights of performances and then another day to pack everything up for the next move, they would surely be on their way to the next town by now. He did not think they would leave him behind, as he was the sole owner of the venture, but they did not normally wait for any other stragglers working for the show.

They could see a great distance across the relatively flat prairie grasslands and as nightfall was darkening the skies, Jake could see a soft glow of light ahead marking the location of the town. Before they could get to it, however, they had to cross the river.

Jake pulled Honey to a halt and Citra stopped beside them atop an embankment overlooking the Canadian River, or the Goo-al-pah as the Comanche called it. The water was no more than six or seven feet at its deepest, but even in the darkness, he could pick out sand bars and shallow areas where crossing would be easier.

He glanced over at his exotic companion and asked in a low voice, “Can you swim?”

“Yes, of course I can,” she replied. “I take it we need to cross this.”

“That’s Ioland up ahead on the other side. I only asked because I know cats don’t usually like water.”

Citra smiled up at him. “Thank you for your concern, but I do not mind the water. My fur is all dusty and could use a good cleaning anyway.”

“We probably will not be able to talk again for some time,” he said, idly scratching at one of his stitches, “So if there’s anything you need to say to me before we go on, you’d better say your piece now.”

“I know you are a busy man with many people who look to you for guidance,” the feline said, “but you are also injured and will need to rest up a while before you can return to the center of things. All I ask is that you have someone set me up with a place to stay and food to eat. I can play the part of a dumb cat until such time as we may be able to talk again, or if we need to put my idea into play.”

“I’ll make sure my lady-cat is taken care of properly,” Jake said with a small tip of his hat. “For now, we’ll need to hush up so no one discovers that you’re more than you seem.”

“Thank you, Jacob,” she said, using his given name with a private smile.

“You’re welcome, Susan,” he returned in kind. Without another word, he prompted his mare down the embankment toward the water. He untied the rope from his saddle horn and played out more slack to give the spotted cat room to maneuver across the river.

He kept an eye on Citra while they crossed, letting Honey pick her own route through the water, but the feline managed to make it on her own without incident. Jake was high enough on the horse’s back that he barely got his boots wet, but the cheetah stopped when they reached the bank and shook loose as much of the water as she could.

She gave him a triumphant smile and he nodded back to her, but now that they were getting near, they would have to stop with the expressions of familiarity.

They reached the edge of town presently, but would not have to go through it. They had arrived on the same side where his show had been camped, but he could now see that the entire caravan had been packed up and ready to go. Travel wagons, tents and sleeping pallets had been set up with campfires and Jake was pleased they had not left without him.

He rode toward the silhouette of a familiar wagon, but before he reached it, the broad figure of a man stood up from his seat before a small fire where he had been tending a pot of coffee.

“Jake!” the man said with enthusiasm. “We’d just about given up on you! Where’ve you—?” He stopped short when he saw the damp spotted cat on the end of a rope walking quietly beside the rider and his horse. “What the thunder is that?” he croaked with wide eyes.

“Emmett,” Jake said quietly. “I need this critter put in an exhibit cage, if we have any extras. It’s a citrakāyah from Africa, but it is more commonly called a cheetah.”

Honey approached the man’s silhouette with familiarity, but in the glow of firelight, Jake had recognized him as the associate he had left in charge of his business during his absence. Emmett Desmond was a short, broad-shouldered man with a thick mustache, equally thick sideburns and only a ring of hair around the perimeter of his round head. He had small eyes, but they were sharp and light glinted from them in the dim light.

“Is it safe?” he asked warily, examining the exotic cat from a distance. He looked up at his boss and only then noticed the bandages and the pained expression on his face. “What happened?”

“I made a greenhorn mistake and got between this girl and her dinner,” Jake explained, using the made-up story. “She roughed me up, but once she calmed down and finished her supper, it was easy enough to rope her. I thought we could use her as an extra attraction.”

Emmett chuckled and shook his head. “You’re the only man I know who always seems to bring back anything that attacks you, Jake. What did you call her, a cheater? Did she hurt you bad?”

“Chee-tah,” Jake corrected. “She tore me open, but I made it to a local doctor who stitched me up. I’m going to be stiff and sore while I’m healin’, so I’m going to be leaning on you to help keep the show going.”

“You got it, boss. Everything’s packed up and ready to ride. If I’d not heard anything from you by morning, I was going to get everyone moving toward our next stop in Alva. You knew our schedule so I figured you would either catch up to us there or in Wichita.”

“We can leave for Alva at first light,” Jake instructed as he slowly dismounted his mare. “I need to see Lane about my injuries, and then I’m going to find my bunk and collapse for the night. Would you see to Honey for me and find a place to put the cat too? I think our cages are all full up, but maybe you can put her in with the mountain lion if you put the two of them on short ropes – just so they do not tear one another to pieces before we can get another cage to separate them.”

Emmett nodded, taking the mare’s reins in one hand and the rope to the strange cat in the other. “I’ll see that Honey is fed and watered before she is put away for the night,” he said, “but we won’t have to double up the cats in one cage, boss.”

“Why’s that?”

“I didn’t know how to tell you, but the coyote died two nights ago. We had to bury him out by the river.”

“My coyote died?” Jake repeated. He looked stricken. He had trapped the mangy little thing out on the prairie the previous season without knowing if the undernourished animal would survive, but he had treated it back to health and exhibited it as a natural native to the land. He hated to lose the timid canine, and although he would never admit it to anyone, he had grown fond of the coyote. He would have to trap another for the show, and for a brief moment he wished he had known about this earlier. Perhaps he could have brought in the coyote that had stolen Citra’s rabbit the other day.

“Sorry, boss. I know the customers liked seeing it caged.” This was true; the local farmers and ranchers who’d come to his show got to see the animal up close and alive, a change from seeing one that was not dead from buckshot or running away with one of their chickens.

“Okay, put this girl in his place. Have Tony make sure she has clean straw, food and water. She’s not eaten much today, so she is probably hungry.”

“Will she attack me?”

Jake shook his head. “No, she’s been calm enough. Maybe it’s the breed, but I’ve not had as much trouble with her as we usually do with Old Max. So long as she has enough to eat, she shouldn’t give us much grief.”

Emmett nodded. “You can find Lane over near Chetan’s tent. That Indian got his moccasins tangled in a sage bush during our last performance and twisted an ankle. The last I saw, Lane was wrapping it up for him. What name do you want on the cat’s cage?”

“Cheetah, with citrakāyah in quotes,” Jake replied. “No, I don’t know how to spell it, but you can get with Lane tomorrow. If anyone knows, it’ll be him. We won’t need it until we set up in Alva anyway.”

“Okay, I’ll ask him on the ride tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Emmett. Good night.”

“See you in the morning, boss.”

Jake moved off into the darkness without a look back, leaving his friend with the tasks he had given him. Emmett rubbed Honey’s neck affectionately for a moment, but then he turned his attention to the spotted cat. He had never heard of a cheetah before and wondered how something like this one had gotten a hold on his boss.

Despite Jake’s assurances that he was probably safe with the cat, he remembered that the feline had attacked while hungry. If she was hungry now, he was concerned she might come after him as well.

To put distance between him and the cat, the man got up into Honey’s saddle to ride her to the temporary corral where they stabled the horses for the night. He tied the cat’s rope to the horn and then looked down at her. She peered back up at him passively, her large golden eyes shining from nearby fire light. An involuntary shudder passed through him and then he directed Honey toward her place for the night.

Surprisingly, Emmett had no trouble coaxing the strange cat into the coyote’s empty cage. It was large enough that she would have room to pace around, having been built upon the frame of an old prairie schooner. A grown man could have stood up inside the cage, though the iron bars were close enough together that even a skinny coyote could not have squeezed through them.

The cage had already been cleaned out after the death of its previous occupant, so he would have to get Tony to provide fresh straw, water and food for the cat. The latch on the cage was nothing more than a sliding bolt, so once the feline was inside and away from the gate, Emmett shut her in and sauntered off to find the animal keeper.

***

Tony Holland was the caretaker of the animals on exhibit, a young man who had recently begged Jake to let him join the troupe when they had stopped in Brownsville. His job was far from glamorous, but the man hoped he would one day be allowed to perform in the show itself as a trick rider. As with any mundane chore, Tony took care of the animals, but spent as little time with them as possible so he could focus on his real talents. As long as he did what he was paid to do, his foreman did not seem to mind him practicing out away from camp to stay out of the way of others.

Once the sandy-haired man had gawked at the spotted cat for a spell, he wrestled an armload of straw in through the door, all the while keeping a sharp eye on the creature when he had his arms inside. Curiously, the exotic feline stayed in a corner on the opposite end of the cage from him, simply sitting up on her haunches and watching him quietly as she groomed her damp fur.

He managed to get the water and a slab of beef inside without being molested, but she was definitely watching him with intensity when he had brought the food. It was not until he had backed away and closed the cage door that she finally approached the fare and ate with relish.

Tony watched her for a moment and then glanced over at movement from next cage nearby. A large male cougar was stretching his paw out toward him as if to beg food for himself. The animal had been caged with the show for so long that he was long accustomed to the routine, and although he had already been fed for the night, the smell of fresh meat was enticing.

“Sorry, Old Max,” Tony said with a smile toward the cougar. “This is for your new neighbor.” Then his voice dropped conspiratorially, “I did save an extra piece for you, though.” From a pocket he pulled out something wrapped in paper and then he pulled apart the edges. Inside was a thick morsel of dried jerky that he could have eaten himself on the trail ride, but the young man tossed it through the bars of the lion’s cage. The tawny cat snared it with a paw and it was gone within three bites.

The mountain lion looked back at him with what could have been an expression of gratitude, but Tony was already walking away, quietly folding the paper before shoving it back into a pocket. His chore with the new animal finished for the night, he wanted nothing more than a cup of hot coffee and a chance to relax before the long ride tomorrow.

***

With all the hustle and bustle of the camp making last minute preparations before bedding down for the night, Citra had curled up on her straw and had soundlessly drifted off to sleep with the end of her tail draped across her nose. Before long, however, a slight sound picked up by her sensitive hearing penetrated her sleep and she cracked open one eye.

Looking through the hairs of her tail fur, she saw a silhouette standing a short distance from her cage. Although most of the campfires had been allowed to die down to coals for the night, she could focus on the individual in the starlight.

It was a young man with prominent cheekbones and broad shoulders, with a head of black hair that was adorned with what she recognized as several feathers of a hawk. He wore a simple long-sleeved shirt of dark cloth, buckskin breeches with moccasins and there was a white cloth wrapped around one ankle. There were also two beaded strands hanging loosely around his neck. Citra recognized him as a Native American, or what she knew used to be called an Indian. Jake had said that he had employed several for reenactments of the wild, untamed west, so this must be one in his charge.

Although the thin sliver of the moon had already set, the cheetah could see the man’s dark eyes shining from some other reflected light, staring at her, studying her. Although she figured that he might not be as educated as a white man, Citra got the impression just from his eyes that this was no ignorant fellow. There was intelligence in him.

She raised her head to look at him fully, the tip of her tail lightly tapping the straw. The man continued to study her, for that was exactly what she felt he was doing, his eyes transfixed upon her own.

When she did nothing more than flick an ear, he showed remarkable courage and approached her cage. He put his fingertips upon the platform beside the iron bars, well within reach of the strange spotted feline, but he showed no fear, only curiosity.

The Indian picked up a length of straw and then held it out toward her nearest paw. Inwardly amused at his gesture, Citra extended her paw and lightly tapped the end of the straw a couple of times before pulling it from his fingers with her semi-retractable claws. She pulled it up to her face and rubbed the stalk across the glands of one cheek after sniffing it with care.

The man seemed relaxed but still cautious, but then his eyes widened as he stared at her paw for a long moment. Citra wondered what could have piqued his attention and then remembered something she possessed that no natural cheetah or other cat had. Thumbs. Although they were short and stubby in order to allow her to run on all fours, she could use them just as dexterously as any human and one was currently wrapped around the piece of straw.

Slowly as so not to startle the young man, she let the straw drop beside her and she curled the paw beneath the fur at her chest, laying her head down again. Her eyes were still open and fixed upon his, but she took on the attitude of a drowsy animal ready for sleep.

Her watcher continued to study her, but then he said something in a quiet but deep voice. “Wohsheesheekeeyea…”

She did not recognize the word, assuming it was something from his own language; she could not begin to guess what it might mean, but sincerely hoped he was not marking her for a spotted rug. A man of any nationality might still hope to do that with her, but unless he spoke English, she could only guess at the intention.

Playing the part of a dumb animal, she relaxed and closed her eyes. It was several moments before she heard him walk away and it was only then that she peered back after him through slotted eyelids. He did not look back as he headed toward the cluster of tents and show wagons, and soon was lost in the darkness.

Citra raised her head again and looked around. No one else was in sight, and even the other nearby animal pens were quiet. Her eyes fell upon the rusted bars of the cage and wondered if she had done the right thing. Jake knew what she was and had agreed to take her in for her own safety, but if she had misjudged him and he was a dishonest man, she might never get out of a cage for the rest of her life — however long or short that might be.

Chapter 6

Feathered Friend

A hard jolt caused Citra’s head to bounce upward and then come down hard on her chin. She almost bit her tongue, but the hurt to her jaw was bad enough. It was near impossible to sleep with the wheels of her cage dropping into small washouts in the prairie or jumping up over stones. From the conversations she had overheard on the trail ride it would take some time to reach the next town, but as a self-imposed prisoner in an animal cage the cheetah woman knew there was little she could do. She could not even pace back and forth in front of the bars since the movement of the wagon made standing a precarious endeavor.

The entire troupe and entourage of Jake Harrison’s Wild West was on the move, and while Citra had heard of such traveling shows before, she had never been aware of just how many people were involved. Jake had nearly a hundred-and-fifty people in his employ and nearly two-thirds that many wagons to carry everyone and everything from place to place. Not only were there the few “wild animals” in cages like her own, there were numerous longhorn cattle, sheep and buffalo to be driven along, and whole herds of horses for every use from trick riding to pulling the carts.

The air was dusty with the dirt everyone was kicking up into the air, and even though that many horses, cattle, sheep, buffalo, wagons and people were moving along the trail, the terrain was far from packed down by all those feet and wheels. Citra’s cage jumped and bounced, proving to the jostled Fur that there were no springs beneath her to absorb the shock of travel.

The cheetah’s cage wagon was hooked in tandem with other exhibit animals and drawn by a team of horses driven by Tony Holland. The black bear in the cage in front of her was clinging to the iron bars on one side in a desperate attempt for stability, while the mountain lion trailing her was crouched in the middle of the floor with his claws embedded through the straw into the wooden planks beneath him. Although the other animals might be used to this kind of traveling, it was clear to Citra that none of them were inclined to enjoy the ride. Somehow, she doubted that she would ever get used to it either.

Thinking the bear had the right idea, the cheetah made her way to one side of the cage and clung to the iron bars, hoping desperately that the company might stop to rest soon. The bouncing around was not being kind to her bladder, and although as an animal she was limited to doing her business in a corner of her wagon, doing so in a moving vehicle was nearly impossible.

Grasping the iron bars with her eyes closed, Citra entertained thoughts of escaping sometime under the cover of darkness and leaving Jake to his show. It might be more difficult to survive alone out on the prairie, but at least there she would have freedom and a stable surface beneath her feet.

However, she knew staying with a sympathetic man like Jake could increase her chances of survival in this place, even if she had to endure the indignities of a life of dusty, bumpy travel in a cage. She may never be rescued by her people, but she was determined to live as long as this kind of life would allow. Alone with no more protection than any other animal, she could not count on ever reaching the normal lifespan of her kind. Escape to freedom sounded like a godsend, but unlike a wild animal, she could look ahead and see that captivity was her best method of survival.

The wheel of the cage bumped up over another rock and Citra mashed her lips up against the iron bars she clung to. The sudden pain made her blink rapidly and she almost cursed aloud. She was not typically given to profanity, but any person will have a moment in time when something slips out in surprise. Thankfully, she managed to do little more than yip from the hurt, thus preserving her charade.

She heaved a big sigh, spat out trail dust and held onto her cage as well as she could for the continual bumpy ride.

***

Citra woke up muttering beneath her breath, but her situation had not changed. The troupe continued to move across the prairie in a loose single file, up over gentle hills and down through shallow valleys avoiding washout gullies in the terrain. The sun was almost directly overhead, but there seemed to be no sign of stopping for lunch. Surely the horses, cattle and other animals were getting as thirsty as she was by now.

Despite the dusty, bumpy ride, she had managed to nap part of the way, though she could not figure out how she had accomplished that. Perhaps it was an attribute of her feline nature, being able to sleep just about anywhere. She yawned widely, mindful of the iron bars still moving around beneath her clutching hand paws.

Someone cleared his throat and Citra glanced behind her cage. Riding on a palomino mare parallel to the mountain lion’s wagon behind hers was a man with a lightweight woven blanket with a colorful southwest design draped across his shoulders. His long black hair flowed from beneath a hat with a round top and a wide brim, but she could see a couple of hawk feathers woven into several strands of hair and fluttering in the breeze behind him. Another was attached to a round conch on his hat band.

The Indian’s dark eyes were shadowed beneath the brim of his hat, but she could see them focused upon her. It was the same man from the previous night who had looked in on her, and although he was in a different set of clothes, she recognized him.

Remembering that brief meeting, she realized that she was gripping the bars of the cage with her hands, her thumbs once again in full view of the man’s gaze. Feeling self-conscious about them, she retracted her thumbs from sight and put her whole hands outside the bars to hold onto them with her wrists that were more in keeping with the great cat she was supposed to be.

The motion was slight, given that she still bounced around from the trail ride, but it was enough to put the Indian into motion. He gave his reins a small flick and the palomino kicked up into a quick trot that brought him parallel to the spotted feline.

Looking directly into her large golden eyes, he nodded toward her and said “Hinhanni.”

Citra was surprised and it showed upon her face. She was about to tell him that she did not understand his speech, but caught herself before she could respond out of habit. She was just a dumb animal, she silently reminded herself.

The man stared at her for a long moment, quietly mulling over the reaction she had just displayed at his spoken word. Most animals would have done nothing more than stare back at him in curiosity, but she had actually seemed surprised. Was it possible she understood him?

“Okahnige hwo?” he asked.

This time, the cheetah looked back at him dully. Citra had no intention of revealing herself to more people than necessary and would have to watch her reactions around those who stared in at her through the bars of her cage.

The Indian tried again, enunciating the syllables of his word more slowly. “Oh-kah-ghnee-gay hwo?”

Citra remained impassive, this time looking away and across the countryside in what would have been perceived as the animal’s boredom. She accepted that he was attempting some kind of communication with her, but was it a real conversation he was trying or was he merely speaking aloud for his own benefit, as he might speak to his horse or a pet dog? Whatever his intention, the Fur would have to guard her reactions and play her part.

Disappointment crossed the man’s features. He seemed genuinely intrigued by this strange spotted cat, but he apparently thought he had seen more than what he had. Lightly pressing his lips together, he rode silently for several more moments before he finally clicked his tongue with a flick of the reins. His palomino trotted further up the line of carts, wagons and riders and was soon lost to Citra’s view.

What was that all about? she wondered.

***

The day seemed to go on and on. Citra was tired, thirsty and even a little bit grumpy from the incessant bumpy ride. She needed water, but what had been in her bowl had long since sloshed out onto the wooden deck of her wheeled cage. Despite the lack of water, her bladder was also reacting to the continual jostling and she groaned aloud at the frustration of it all, though she kept her eyes closed for no other reason than to keep the dust out of them.

Then she had that feeling again, of being watched. When she cracked open an eyelid, she fully expected to see the Indian, but this time there was a different set of eyes peering back at her – two sets, actually.

A short-bearded man in a dusty shirt with suspenders casually rode atop a black and tan horse beside her cage. His rough hands held the reins around the shoulders of a golden-haired girl of five or six years in a pale-yellow dress who sat on the saddle in front of him. Both were looking over at the cheetah in open curiosity.

Citra still clutched at the bars of her cage, but had somehow managed to roll with the motion of the wagon; she likened it to the rolling seas of a small ship she had once ridden across the ocean, the primary difference being hard jolts as the wheels hit rocks and uneven ground.

She opened her large golden eyes and peered back lazily at the father and daughter. The girl said something quietly to the man while pointing a small finger toward her. This was something she knew she would have to get used to seeing. By her own choice, she would always be on display for curious onlookers.

The pair watched her for a time, the father pointing out things like her spots and the dark cry-lines beneath her eyes, but when she did nothing more interesting than yawn at them, they eventually moved on and left her to her bouncing travel.

Before Citra could even attempt to fall back into a state of lethargy, another horse rode up on the other side of her cage. Her ears swiveled back and forth at its approach, and then she turned and looked over her shoulder at it.

When she saw that it was the same Indian as before, she hesitated for a moment and then unfurled herself from the bars to make her way on unsteady paws to his side of the cage to get a better look at him. He seemed intrigued that she approached his side of the wagon to peer out at him, but a wheel beneath her jumped over a hand-sized stone that caused her to lurch forward. Instinctively and without thinking, she grasped the bars to steady herself, wrapping her thumbs and fingers around them in a hard grip.

The man narrowed his eyes at her, seemingly unblinking, and then he nudged his horse so that it moved over closer to the cage. The palomino rolled one eye to the side, unsure whether she wanted to be so close to such a large predator, so the mare kept her distance from the wagon even as she drew nearer at her rider’s silent instruction.

The Indian studied the spotted cat again, his gaze seemingly glued to her eyes and the dark cry-lines beneath them. Although the body and head shape was similar to what he knew of big cats, primarily like the cougar in the next wagon back, there were differences too. He had never seen such an animal before the previous night, so she must be a new exhibit.

He wiped dust from his mouth and then licked his lips momentarily, all the while leaning just a little closer toward the jostling cage. The feline returned his gaze, but made no threatening move toward him or his mount. It was all she could do to hang onto the bars.

The Indian swallowed and then spoke again, this time in accented English. “Beautiful spotted cat who cries, can you understand me?”

In spite of her resolve to remain impassive, her eyes widened in astonishment and she blinked rapidly several times with a lump in her throat. She knew he had noticed her thumbs, something a cat should not have, but why would he even expect her to understand by asking such a question? She had once known a few people of Native American descent, one of them a close friend, but none who had an almost spiritual connection with nature as she suspected this man to have.

The two of them locked eyes and she felt drawn into the depths of his gaze, almost as if he was a snake hypnotizing a potential rodent meal. He knows, she thought, or he suspects I am not what I appear to be. She resisted giving him any other response, but then it came – unbidden – almost against her will.

She nodded.

Despite there was no mistaking her action, the man did not seem to be surprised, and that in itself surprised her.

“I am pleased,” he said almost casually. “Does anyone else know you can understand this tongue?”

Again, she felt compelled to nod.

“Harrison?”

She nodded.

“Desmond?”

She shook her head in the negative.

“Your keeper, Mr. Holland?”

No.

“Anyone else?”

She shook her head twice.

He fell silent and looked around, gently bobbing with the motion of the horse’s movements. His eyes dropped to the reins in his hands and he stared at them for several long moments. She could understand him. Had it been a single nod, he could have attributed that to the bounce of the wagon, but she had responded in both the affirmative and the negative to his questions. She could understand him, but only in English.

However, she had not spoken, so even if she understood his words, there would be no actual conversation between them. He was curious about this strange spotted creature that could not even be described in any legend he had ever heard, but yet it understood him in at least one language. He did not want to be too hasty in his musing, since even his horse seemed to understand spoken commands, but the palomino had never responded back to him in very human-seeming nods and head shakes in direct response to questions.

He looked over at her and put a hand up to his chest. “I wish I knew the name of the spirit that dwells within you,” he said quietly. “I am Chetan,” he said, enunciating his name Chay-tahn. “Harrison holds your secret. I will hold it too.”

Citra’s expression softened, and despite the jostling wagon beneath her, she gave him a gentle smile and a nod. Chetan swallowed and nodded in return. “You hear, but I would wish that you could also talk,” he said wistfully. He spoke a few more words in his native language, but they were meaningless to her.

“I can always use a friend,” Citra replied in a quiet voice.

This time, the Indian was surprised and he nearly fell off his horse in astonishment. When he finally righted himself in his saddle, he stared back at her with wide eyes. Before he could say anything, however, a voice called out from behind.

“Hey, are you okay up there, Hawk-hawk?”

The Indian turned and raised a hand toward the man driving the team of horses several wagons back who had evidently saw him almost topple from his saddle. “I am okay,” he called. “Horse stumble.”

The Indian’s mount glanced back at him, almost as if she could understand her rider’s words as well and resented the lie. The black-haired man smiled and patted the animal’s neck affectionately, muttering a few low words into her ear. When Chetan sat upright in his saddle again, he purposely did not look over at the spotted cat.

Citra chuckled and felt sorry for the Indian. Surely he must think himself crazy, but the fact remained that she did need a friend especially now the cat was out of the bag, as the saying goes. Jake knew what she was, but he would be out of action for a little while longer due to his injuries, and then he would likely get distracted by all the duties and responsibilities he had toward his show. With everyone coming to him for one reason or another, she could not count on him having the opportunity to visit her very often, if at all. In time, he might even come to forget what she was and begin to think of her as just another exhibit animal.

“I am Citrakāyah,” she told him. With all the sounds and noises from the moving caravan of wheels, feet and hooves, she did not expect anyone would be able to overhear their conversation unless they were riding beside them; no one else was near.

“Si-tra-ka-yah?” the man tried to repeat slowly, moving only his eyes to look back to her. As she spoke, he seemed especially focused on her lips as they formed the words she said.

“That is close,” she replied, “but you only need call me Citra.”

“Citra,” he repeated. “What are you?” His words were direct, but the Fur suspected he was this way with everyone.

“I am a cheetah,” she began, having flashbacks to her initial discussion with Jake. “I am part cat and part human, a mix of both, and I come from far, far away.”

“Chee-tah. Why are you here?”

“I am lost, separated from my people.”

“Who are your people?”

“We are called Furs.”

“Because you all have fur?”

“That is right,” she answered with a smile. “Not all of us are cats like myself. Some are foxes, some are wolves and some are even bears.”

“Spiritwalkers…” Chetan breathed in a hushed voice.

Citra shook her head. “No, sorry. We are just people and we have no special abilities. We are not spirits.” The Indian mulled on that for a moment, but before he could say anything more, she sighed and looked around. “Will we be stopping soon?”

Chetan looked ahead and nodded. “We will cross river ahead. Stop there to let horses and other animals drink.”

“That is good. I need to drink too, and I also need to pee.”

The man looked at her. “Pee?”

“Relieve myself,” she explained, putting one hand down to her crotch.

The Indian nodded. “Me too.”

“So, why are you with Mr. Harrison’s show?” Citra asked to keep the conversation going. Playing the part of a quiet, dumb animal made for long, lonely hours and she was suddenly glad for his company. She had to watch herself, though; she was gripping the iron bars and showing off her thumbs again without thinking about it.

“I am showman in part of the show that remembers the conflicts between the coming of the white man and of The People. I ride in to show what it was like when The People tried to drive away settlers who wanted to take land and kill all the buffalo.”

“That is showing you off to be bad people!”

“Yes, but is truth. Did happen.” He shrugged. “Now white men are everywhere, but Harrison gives me a job, food and clothes with pay. Life is not bad.” He turned, smiled at her and rubbed his belly. He was in good shape, but there was a little roundness to his tummy. “It is good to eat.”

She laughed aloud at this and there was almost the thrum of a purr beneath the sound of it. Chetan decided instantly that he liked the sound of her laughter.

“Why did that man call you hawk-hawk? Do you train hunting hawks?”

He brushed at the feathers attached to his dark hair with the backs of his fingers. “My name, Chetan, is hawk to the Lakota. Some call me Chetan Hawk, but that is same as calling me hawk twice; Hawk-hawk.”

“Ah, I see.” She gave him a pleasant smile as her eyes roved over his feathers.

“Will you be in the show,” he asked, “or does Harrison plan to sell you?”

Citra’s eyebrows went up. Selling her to someone else was something she had not considered. If Jake could not bring in extra coins with her as an exhibit, he might be willing to sell her to someone else for the money. He was a businessman, after all.

“He will display me as another animal exhibit,” she admitted, “but we have also talked of including me in his show. There has been no talk of selling me.”

Chetan nodded. “This is good,” he said. “I would wish to talk with you again.”

“I would like this also,” the feline replied, “but there should only be a few people who know I can understand and speak English. Please do not tell anyone for now.”

“I will hold your secret,” he said, echoing what he had said earlier. “Can all your people hear and speak this tongue?”

“Yes, among others. I know others too, but not yours.”

They fell silent for several long moments when the wagons began to slow. They were nearing a river and the caravan line was spreading out across its banks to allow all the animals to have access to the water.

Before their section split up, however, Chetan leaned in closer to the cat’s wagon. “I have dreamed of you,” he said quietly.

“Of me?” Citra responded with a tilt of her head.

“I dreamed of igmutaka with painted spots that had been crying so hard that its tears had turned black,” the man explained, drawing an imaginary line with his finger from the corner of his eye down to the corner of his mouth to mimic the ones in the cheetah’s face fur.

“Ee-gmue-tahn-kah?” Citra repeated, trying to pronounce it correctly.

Chetan smiled and gestured toward the lethargic cougar in the wagon cage behind them. “Mountain cat,” he explained.

“That description fits me well enough,” said the cheetah. “What did this spotted igmutaka do in your dream?”

“Igmutaka stood up on hind feet and sang to me.”

Citra gave him a human-style grin and nodded. “That must have been me,” she told him. “If we ever get the opportunity, I can do both for you.”

Chapter 7

Reliving the Wild West

Citra looked across the small circle of wagons that the animal exhibits had been arranged in and felt pity for the thin coyote whining and pacing her new cell. Jake’s men had captured a young female just ahead of the caravan on the trail ride to Alva; having stirred her up from a midday nap, one of the rodeo ropers had captured her while she was still sluggish. There had been no new cages to put her in so they had had to just keep her on a rope, but Jake had sent an order ahead to Alva with a rider to a wagon-maker so that one might be waiting for them by the time they had reached town. The one he later found waiting for him had been hastily constructed using a covered wagon base already partially built, but it would serve its purpose for the coyote.

The other exhibit animals were quietly awaiting attention from Tony, long resigned to their fates. The young trick rider had set the brakes on the cage wagons after arranging in them in a large circle, leaving an opening between the coyote and the bobcat for visitors to come in to see the wild critters. With that accomplished, he had just returned from the nearby Salt Fork Arkansas River with a handcart containing a half-barrel of water. He set it down near the center of his circle and then rubbed his lower back for a moment before he got to work.

The rest of the production was currently being set up in an allocated field just outside of town and the place was a flurry of activity. Tony dipped a large ladle into the water barrel, picked up an empty wooden bowl and then approached the coyote. The frightened female retreated with tail between her legs to the opposite side of the cage from the man, who set her bowl up on the floor between the bars and then proceeded to fill it from the ladle. He would do the same with the bobcat, the bear, the cougar and the cheetah all in his charge. Once they had been watered, he would repeat the process with fresh straw for their beds, followed up with a bit of food for each to tide them over through the day.

Something else waiting for Jake in Alva was a stack of new lithographs and hand bills he had had made up by the town’s printing office. They were similar to those he had used previously, but this time the title had been edited to read “Jake Harrison’s Wilder West”. The handbills were similar, but in a lower corner of the sheet an artist had included a hand-drawn picture of a cheetah’s head. Having never actually seen a cheetah before, the artist had merely drawn the head of a mountain lion with dark vertical stripes below its eyes and rough splotches across its face and head. Jake recognized right off that the shape of the head and muzzle were wrong, but since no one else would likely know the difference, he decided to leave it as it was.

Including some of Alva’s townsfolk in his endeavor, he hired a handful of boys loitering near his camp to take the majority of the lithographs and handbills to post them all over town to promote the show, and once they had gone on this mission, he made his way to the mayor’s office to introduce himself, something he did everywhere they went.

After meeting with the mayor, he visited several local markets to arrange the purchase of large quantities of food and supplies to keep his business operational as they traveled from town to town.

***

An hour into the four-hour performance of life in the Old West, the young town of Alva had already provided good crowds for the first evening of the show’s two-day presentation. People were hungry for something to break up the monotony of their daily lives and were willing to give up a few coins to see memories of the Wild West reenacted right before their eyes. Most had never known the mix of wonders and hardships involved settling the lands of North America as pioneers braved an untamed world.

In addition to the few wild animals that were on display, an outdoor set of grandstand bleacher boards was set up for visitors to sit upon while performances were put on for them out in a wide-open field. The show began with a parade on horseback that put all the performers on open display. Trick riders showed off their skills to the delight of the crowd, a large group of Indians rode by on their ponies in full colorful regalia, and a band of Mexicans filed by and rallied the crowd with enthusiastic shouts and cheers punctuated with guns firing blanks overhead. Covered wagons with homesteading families smiled and waved, followed by riders herding longhorn cattle and bison raising a cloud of dust.

Once the grand parade ended, Emmett Desmond stepped out with a wide brimmed hat and in full leathers meant to promote a western theme, addressing the crowd through a conical bullhorn of thick cardboard. This was normally Jake’s job as the master of his show, but until he was fully healed enough to take the center stage again, Desmond would take his place.

His announcements brought in costumed men and women to perform feats of skill in shooting exhibitions with the use of rifles, shotguns, revolvers, and even the deadly accuracy of the bow and arrow. The visitors responded well to the boisterous displays and applause issued from the grandstands.

Next began the reenactments of life in the west depicting hunts involving buffalo, longhorn steers, wild mustangs and even a black bear. None of the animals were actually killed or duly harmed in the performances, since the same critters would be needed again for other shows, but the reenactments impressed the crowd as Desmond reminded them that life on the frontier was much harsher than modern life in the towns and cities that were now populating the west. Times were tough in years past that helped create the niceties that people now enjoyed.

While other reenactments were getting ready to perform for the audience, Desmond brought in rough riders to showcase the skills of horse racing, cattle roping, bronco busting, and the Indians also got to show off their prowess by fierce wrestling, racing one another on foot, and even racing on foot against an Indian pony. Ritualistic dances were a favorite and many of the visitors caught themselves tapping their feet in time with native drums.

All through the ceremony, Desmond reminded them all that although the Red Man was considered primitive by society, not to look down upon them badly. The Indians were a noble race with strong family and social ties, were highly skilled and had great respect for one another – some attributes that society in itself was sometimes lacking. The conflicts and wars between civilized white men and the native red men were simply clashes between cultures so different that neither was able to comprehend the other upon first meeting. The frontiersmen who moved across the land had dreams of owning their own land and homesteads, while the Indians lived with the land without thought of ownership until the intrusion of the east came upon them.

The next great presentation was a bison hunt, first shown from the point of view of the Indians, who used all parts of the animals throughout their societies, and then by the great white buffalo hunters who treasured the thick hides and traded them for supplies needed to support their homesteads. The thundering hooves of stampeding bison that were driven across the field enthralled the visitors. Most people living in the real west had never seen bison before and felt the grand, rumbling rush of feeling in their bones as if they were in the middle of a great hunt. It was an experience few would soon forget.

As the evening progressed, a “war” was staged between the US Calvary and the Indians that showed just how savage and brutal such an event could be, with villains and heroes on both sides of the conflict in the aftermath. The “wounded and dying” were tended by both races and even the “savage” Indians were shown to have genuine emotions toward their fallen friends and loved ones.

The grand finale of the performance showcased a cabin rolled out on hidden wheels representing a homestead family under attack by Indian forces that were repelled by a mix of cowboys and Mexicans. At the end of the show, all of the performers lined up in front of the crowd, many of them hand in hand, to take a bow to raucous applause.

After the entertainers filed away and the crowd began to disperse, everyone was invited to wander through the camp to witness skills performed firsthand, glass-blowing over hot fires, blacksmiths tamping out iron into horseshoes, plows and hand tools, women quilting and others showcasing life on a farm that most town-dwelling visitors had never had to experience before.

The tourists could see a longhorn steer or a buffalo up close, pet wooly sheep and feed chickens to get a few minutes of on-hand familiarity. The “wild animals” were on display so they could all see critters that some had never seen with their own eyes before, but had always heard about. Tent stands were set up for the men to drink, for families to eat jerky and pemmican and there were numerous hand-made trinkets for sale by cowboys, Mexicans and Indians alike.

All in all, the traveling Wild West show was a great success wherever it went, letting people briefly escape from their daily routines to experience life as it used to be.

***

At first, Citra watched the faces outside her cage with interest. Farmers, ranchers, store owners and the like came in pairs, groups and family gatherings, and there were folks of all kinds who came to stare back at the “wild” animals that had been caught and put on display. Some were unwashed, still dusty from working in the fields or tending their livestock, while others had come to the show dressed up in their Sunday meeting clothes.

Most were astonished and amazed at the strange spotted cat, and with Citra arranged in a cage next to an actual mountain lion they could all see that she was not just a cougar that had been made up to look like something else.

Unfortunately, not all the visitors were kind to the animals. There were those who did nothing more than make fun of the critters, the funny-looking cat especially, sometimes accompanied by spitting tobacco or tossing rocks, sticks and drink bottles into the cages at them.

One man got too close to the black bear thinking it looked harmless behind a curtain of iron bars and almost lost several fingers in the process. His friends had to rush him off to a nearby doctor, but instead of respecting the potential danger of these animals, it only seemed to fuel the distain some had for them.

One brave soul even had the audacity to bring a pistol with him and was aiming it through the bars at the cheetah when Tony stepped into the area to check in on his animals. It was unknown if the man would have actually fired a shot, but after he had been escorted off the premises without a refund of his two bits, a shaken Citra sat in the back corner of her cage and refused to face any other visitors the rest of that evening.

***

Jake soaked in a claw-foot tub of cooling water in a room down the hall from the hotel suite where he was staying while his show was parked outside of Alva. His injuries were healing well enough, but it was at times like these that he would spend a little of his own money to sleep in a bed more comfortable than the one in his show wagon.

The water had been provided by an employee of the hotel, heated up and brought in by buckets to fill the tub, but he had been in it long enough that it had grown tepid. Resting his elbows up on the high sides of the tub, the businessman was going over the reports that Emmett Desmond had brought him after the close of the first night’s performance. Numbers were up from previous stops, and although Alva was no larger than some of the other towns they had seen, the monetary take was a good indication of more visitors.

Was the increased income due to the new exotic cat he had on display, or was it merely due to greater numbers of people who were interested in the reenacted scenes from the Wild West his productions portrayed?

He mused on that for several moments with a frown. There had been no time to see Citra since they had arrived, especially as there were no opportunities to talk where no one else would overhear. He was healing and getting around better now, but he had left the bulk of his usual duties as center showman to Desmond for the time being.

An hour later, he sought out Emmett and found him rubbing down one of the trick ponies with a wide brush. The bald man nodded toward him when the show owner arrived.

“You look like you’re getting around a little better,” he said in greeting. “You don’t seem to be having any trouble walking now.”

Jake peered darkly at him from the shadow of his hat brim. “There was nothing wrong with my legs,” he reminded the man, “but everything still feels tight across my neck and shoulders. The stitches sting and itch, but it’s tolerable.”

“Glad to hear it, since you’ve been slacking in your responsibilities.”

Jake grinned and rubbed the pony’s nose affectionately. “This isn’t the first time a critter’s had a hold on me,” he retorted good-naturedly, “so you know I’ll be back in the center of things soon enough.”

“So, what’s on your mind?” Desmond said with a sideways glance. “Pulling your stitches out getting around won’t help anyone and you could always send a boy out me to with your message.”

Jake shook his head. “I’ve been going over the numbers from last night’s show and I think our little lady-cat is bringing in more folks to see us.” Desmond frowned, but kept his attention on the pony as his boss continued. “I want to increase the mystery surrounding our exotic cat, so I’ve been thinking that we should separate her from the other critters, set up her cage wagon by itself and then surround it with the large curtain panels – maybe put up a couple of the new handbills at the entrance so people would know what’s inside.”

“How’s that going to increase the mystery?”

“Folks might wonder why she’s been separated from the rest - may make them think she’s more dangerous and make them curious to see her.”

Desmond cleared his throat and turned to face his boss. “Jake, I’m glad that we have a few extra coins this time around,” he said, “but that thing doesn’t belong with us and you should get rid of it.”

“What?”

“You should contact the Philadelphia Zoo and sell it to them. That’s where it belongs.”

“Sell my cheetah?” Jake asked incredulously.

“You keep telling everyone that’s where it’s probably from, escaped a train somewhere and made its way out here to the Territories. Maybe if you just offered it to Philadelphia, they’ll give you a good reward for returning it to them.”

“Now why would I want to do that?” Harrison rebuffed with a dark look in his eyes.

“Jake, that spotted cat is not native to these parts – not even to this country at all! We have a Wild West show to remind people of the things that happened so none of them forget, and a cheetah isn’t part of that history! It doesn’t fit our show, no matter how much extra she brings into the coffer.”

Jake narrowed his eyes at the other man, his jaw set in irritation. He had to remind himself that no one else knew his secret of the cheetah, and that Desmond was reacting solely on the knowledge of a wild animal that had been caught out on the plains and shoved into a display cage. Remembering something Citra had told him on the night they made their plans to include her in his show, he made a quick decision and nodded toward the man.

“Come with me,” he said. “I have something to show you about that cat that will change your mind.”

Desmond pulled a fob watch from the pocket of his pants and popped open the cover. “Listen, I have a lot to do before I turn in tonight. I don’t really need to see the cat again.”

Jake put a hand on his arm. “Come with me,” he said. “I insist.”

The man snorted his displeasure, but followed his boss anyway. The pony’s reins were tied to an old metal milk jug filled with dirt, so he did not have to worry about her wandering away until he got back. He left the brush on the jug and followed as instructed.

Tony was refilling the exhibit animals’ water bowls when they arrived in the circle of wagons and he looked up in surprise to see the show’s two top men. Jake gave him a nod and said, “Take a break. Give yourself about twenty minutes.”

Tony’s eyebrows raised. “Uh sure, thanks,” he replied. He set his water ladle on the edge of the bobcat’s cage and then wandered away wondering what secrets the bosses needed to discuss. After he had gone, Jake led Desmond straight to the spotted cat’s wagon. The exotic feline was reclining lazily, but lifted her head up when the men approached the cage.

Without preamble, Jake looked in at her, tipped his hat courteously and said, “Citra, this is Emmett Desmond, the one always in charge for me when I’m away. I need you to tell him what you are and what we discussed about your stay with us.”

The expression on Desmond’s face clearly showed that he thought his employer had either gotten into the whisky or he was suffering a fever from his injuries. The expression on the cheetah’s face was impassive and bored. She blinked once slowly and then lay her head back down in the straw.

Jake put his hands up and gripped the bars, ignoring the strain on his stitches and stared in at her. “Citra, I really need you to talk to Emmett.”

The tip of the cheetah’s tail thumped the straw a couple of times, but otherwise she did not give any indication that she understood a word he had said. Jake glanced over at Desmond and saw the look of pity on the other man’s face.

“Jake… you need to rest,” the balding man said quietly. “Your hurts are making you do things Diego would say is loco, and you know he never uses that word lightly.”

Through tight lips, the businessman said, “I am not loco.” He turned back toward the spotted cat and stared in at her. “C’mon, Citra. I need you to talk to Desmond.”

“I don’t think that cat’s going to meow at me, Jake. It’s just a dumb animal.” He pulled out a handkerchief from a pocket and swabbed the top of his head in the warm night air. “Listen, I need to get back to the ponies. There’s been a lot of dust in the wind today and we need them looking good for the show tomorrow.”

Without a word, Jake nodded and let Desmond depart. He stared in through the bars at the cheetah and sighed loudly. “If you’re mad at me for not coming by to see you, I already said that I would be busy when we got back,” he said hotly. “Besides me, that man was your best chance of survival and you just turned him against me. I told you before, you don’t fit in with the theme of my show, and that’s all he can see!”

Citra raised her head and narrowed her large golden eyes at him. “One of your customers pointed a cocked revolver in my face today, Jake. That is not something I will soon forget. I am strange enough for most folks, but you and I had already agreed not to expose what I am to many other people yet,” she said calmly. “Two are enough for now.”

Jake glared at her. “Two? Who else knows?”

“Chetan and I have had private conversations when no one else has been around.”

The man sputtered indignantly. “Why didn’t you tell me that you and that Indian had been talking?” he spat out in anger.

“Why should it matter to you?” Citra asked, again in a calm voice. “How could I tell you, anyway? You never come by to talk to me and I needed a friend. I am not a dumb animal and I need companionship just as much as anyone. Chetan respects my nature, even if he understands my existence no more than you do.”

“I’ll tell you why it matters!” He pointed in the direction the other man had gone out through the opening in the wagon circle. “Emmett wants me to sell you to the Philadelphia Zoo for a reward! You’re not a native and you don’t fit in with our show, but I needed to convince him that we should keep you. That’s why I need you to talk for him. If he understands, he won’t press me to get rid of you. It’s well and fine you talk to Chetan, but he’s just a performer in my show. Emmett is used to me listening to his suggestions and more times than not, he’s had good ideas. Do you think you’d be better off in Philadelphia than with me?”

Citra got up and sat on her haunches, looking out at the man. She was silent for a moment and then nodded. “Okay, Jake,” she said quietly, “I will do as you ask, but I need to ask something of you too.”

“What is it?”

“I would also like you to choose a woman I can talk to.”

“Why?”

She stepped closer to the bars and lowered her strangely accented voice to a whisper. “I have mentioned that I am half-human. Unfortunately, this also means that I have a monthly dilemma that requires some personal needs.”

“I don’t understand. What dilemma? What needs?”

Citra gave him a little smile. “A lady does not usually discuss such things with a gentleman,” she whispered, “but I am referring to a woman’s natural time of the month.”

Jake swallowed and averted his eyes away from her. The skin of his neck began to redden and he coughed briefly into a fist. “I-ah… s-see…” he stammered. “I didn’t realize an, uh, an animal…”

“Half-human,” she reminded him again. “It has not started yet, but I am getting close.”

Jake took off his hat, fanned himself with it for a moment, and then put it back in place.

“Yes… yes, of course. I’ll get Sonya Brandy. She’s a performer who plays the parts for schoolmarm, showgirl, homesteader wife or whatever else is needed.” He looked back up at the feline and licked his lips. “I don’t know how well she might take to your… nature, but I think she’d be the best to help you with your… womanly issues.”

Citra sighed and relaxed, thankful that she was about to expand her little growing circle of friends. “Thank you, Jake. Now, if you will drag Desmond back here again, I will talk to him for you.”

Chapter 8

Growing Circle

Emmett Desmond thought the notion of a talking cat was insane and likely the result of a fever brought on by Jake’s injuries. There was no other reason why someone as level-headed as his boss would entertain such loco ideas, unless he was merely trying to play some elaborate joke. Harrison knew as well as anyone else just how much work was involved after the end of a night’s performances before they could all relax, so Desmond returned to the trick pony to resume brushing her dusty coat, pushing the cheetah to the back of his mind.

He worked quietly and his equine companion endured the routine with complete calm; she knew that a feed sack would be awaiting her and the other ponies he had to do after the balding man finished. The silence did not last however, when Desmond looked up at the sound of approaching feet. Chetan Hawk, as the Lakota Sioux Indian was known to all associated with the show, was dressed in fresh leathers and a clean tan shirt. He wore no hat in the evening air, letting his long black hair flow around his shoulders and kept out of his face by a simple cloth headband.

“Mr. Hawk?” Desmond asked, dropping the brush to his side. The Indian rarely interacted with him, which was not uncommon given the amount of people employed by Jake for the show, but it seemed this time he needed to speak to him directly.

“Mr. Desmond,” the Lakota performer said with a nod of his head, “Mr. Harrison would like to see you in his wagon now.”

“He’s probably sore about what I said about his cursed cat,” Desmond muttered. Chetan said nothing, merely staring back at him, but the balding man shrugged. “Okay, I’ll go see what’s on his mind. Would you finish brushing the pony and see to her feed sack for me?”

“No, sorry,” Chetan replied. “Mr. Harrison asks me to find Miss Brandy also.”

“Sonya? What does he want her for?” Desmond asked puzzled. “I thought her performance tonight was just as good as it always is.”

“I go to find Miss Brandy,” the Indian announced without explanation. He had delivered his message and now had to go seek out the other person he had been sent to find. He walked away without another word and Desmond let out a sigh. He patted the pony’s mane and put down his brush.

“Too many interruptions, ol’ girl. I’ll be back to get your feed for you as soon as I can.”

He decided to make a detour to his own wagon first. It was not far, so he went inside and stepped across a shabby woven floor rug to a box nailed to the wall near his bed without lighting a lamp in the dark room. Inside was a bottle of amber liquid with only a little bit in the bottom and he pulled a cork from the top before downing the remaining mouthful. Finally ready to face Jake when the man was in a foul mood, he put the empty bottle back in its place and then departed the wagon.

By the time he reached Harrison’s wheeled home, Chetan stood beside the wooden steps by the door with a woman wearing a casual beige dress. She was running an old brush through her shoulder-length red hair in an effort to make it more presentable. She looked first at Desmond and then at Chetan, clearly wondering if she was about to get a reprimand for something and her mind was racing to remember anything it might have been.

“Good evening, Sonya,” Emmett said with a gesture of his chin.

“Good evening, Mr. Desmond,” she replied.

Now that both were present, Chetan mounted the steps to the wagon’s door and tapped on it lightly. “They are here,” he called quietly.

“Please come in,” said Jake’s voice. “All of you together.”

Chetan opened the door and went up into the wagon without waiting for the woman to enter first. Thinking himself more of a gentleman than he really was, Desmond gestured for Sonya to go next and she nodded to him thankfully.

The interior of the wagon was close quarters with all of them inside, but once Desmond passed through the entrance, Jake said, “Please close the door, Emmett.”

Inside the room were a number of lithographs tacked to the walls showcasing past performances. There were a couple of large wooden trunks protruding from beneath the bed that took up most of the room and the master of ceremonies himself was seated in the only chair.

However, Jake was not the one who held the attention of his visitors. Sitting up in the middle of his bed was the cheetah. There was no rope or leash upon her with no bars of a cage between them either.

“Jake! What have you done?” Desmond gasped, backing up to the door. Sonya had not seen the new exotic cat, her responsibilities having kept her from the animal exhibits, but her eyes were wide as silver dollars and she was backing up against Emmett while making the sign of the cross over her chest.

“Calm down, you’re safe,” Jake assured them. He turned toward the feline and then gestured toward the other three. “Citra, I know you’ve met Chetan, but our other two visitors here are Sonya Brandy and Emmett Desmond.”

“I am pleased to meet you,” the cheetah said in a strangely accented voice. There was a collective gasp from both humans.

“A ventriloquist’s trick!” Desmond croaked. “Are we adding vaudeville acts to our show now?”

“I am no ventriloquist’s dummy,” said the spotted cat. “I can speak for myself.” She moved to the edge of the bed and then swept her hind legs around so that she could sit on the edge of the thin mattress with her feet hanging toward the floor. She sat up straight, put her hands into her lap and then demurely crossed her legs. Throwing voices or not, none of them had ever seen an animal do that before!

She held up a hand and splayed out her fingers and thumb. Chetan stepped forward and matched her gesture with his own hand up against hers, but she kept her large golden eyes upon the two newcomers.

Sonya looked at Jake in a mixture of interest and fear. “Did… did that cat just talk?” she whispered.

Jake nodded. “Yes, and she appears to have better manners than either you or Emmett. Please say ‘hello’ to Miss Citra.”

Sonya swallowed and looked back at the strange feline. “H-hello,” she said in a shaky voice.

“Hello, Miss Brandy,” said the cat. “Please do not be afraid of me. I am in need of friends and would like to be yours.”

“How?” Desmond gasped, staring at the feline lips that had just pronounced words of English. “How is this possible?”

“I am a lost traveler from a faraway land,” the animal explained. “My name is Citrakāyah, but for ease you may call me Citra. As you may guess, I am half animal and half human, something my people call a Fur for obvious reasons. Specifically, I am part cheetah.”

Desmond’s throat felt tight, and although this thing had told them they were safe, he kept his hand on the door latch behind him in case they all needed a quick escape. Sonya, on the other hand, took a tentative step forward.

“How can you be both human and animal?” she asked after a brief hesitation. She felt mesmerized by those large golden eyes, and although they were like nothing she had ever seen before, she could see the intelligence behind them.

“As I have told Jake and my friend Chetan,” the cat replied, “I am unable to explain to you in ways you would be able to understand, but I was once as human as you are before I was changed into what I am now.”

“It’s magic!” Emmett exclaimed. “I never believed in it before, but I think I do now!”

“Not magic, Mr. Desmond, it is science; beyond that, I do not have a way to explain it to you.”

“Are… are you a demon?” Sonya whispered. “Were you cursed?”

Citra smiled sadly, but shook her head. “I am neither magical nor spiritual and this is not a curse. I am just as much a part of this world as you are, only I am a blend of two beings instead of one. However, because of what I am, what I look like and how people like you react to me, I am vulnerable and my life is in danger every day.”

Sonya swallowed her fear, seeing how unruffled both Jake and Chetan seemed to be around this creature, and tried to calm her own rapidly beating heart. She took another half-step forward in the tiny room and was standing directly in front of her. Citra held out a hand to her, palm upward in a non-threatening manner.

Sonya looked at the strange hand, then at those golden eyes, and then back down at the hand again. She was familiar with mountain lions and other common cats, but had never seen one with a thumb before. Citra did nothing more than hold out her hand and Sonya suddenly felt compelled to act.

Slowly at first, she reached up and covered the feline hand with her own, turning it to the side and then giving it a gentle handshake. The feline smiled at her and nodded.

“I am… pleased to meet you, Miss Citra.” She released the soft, padded hand and then looked at Jake. “If I may ask,” she said, “why me? Surely her nature must be kept secret to keep her safe, but why show her to me?”

Jake gestured toward the cheetah with his chin, an action that brought out a grimace from the stitches in his neck. “Citra requested a woman who might help her with certain… monthly requirements. You were the first one I thought of.”

Sonya looked back at the strange spotted cat. “Certain monthly requirements?” she repeated. Before anyone could answer, however, she arched an eyebrow and nodded. “I think I know what you mean,” she said in a quieter voice.

“I think you do,” Citra responded with a smile.

“I do not think I do,” Desmond grumbled. “I’m the one around here that Jake goes to when there are requirements to be met!”

Sonya turned and looked at him with a wry smile. Absently wrapping a couple of fingers in her long red hair, she stepped over to him and then whispered into his ear. The man cleared his throat and licked his lips as his neck suddenly turned red.

“Oh, uh, I see,” he muttered. “Forgive me, ladies.” Sonya and Citra both giggled in unison, which caused them both to look back at one another as if they had always been friends.

Jake snorted in amusement, thankful the ice had been broken. “Due to my injuries and responsibilities to the show,” he said in the sudden quiet, “I’ve not been able to check on and visit with Citra since rejoining the troupe. She and Chetan became friends on their own and I would like the two of you to do the same.” He looked at Desmond. “I had a hard time believing what she is as well, my friend, but the more time you spend with her, you’ll realize she is intelligent and can hold her own in a conversation. She’s not a dumb animal.”

“What… do you need me to do?” Emmett asked, almost afraid to look at the feline everyone seemed to be claiming was half-woman. He still was not sure that this was not some trick that Jake was playing on him, but for now he would play along.

“I know she’s not part of the Wild West and doesn’t really fit the theme of the show, but we have to keep her safe until her people come for her.”

“You mean there will be more things like her coming?” Emmett asked hoarsely. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped down his baldness.

Everyone looked to Citra, where she had been sitting quietly. “If they come for me, I do not think it will be another Fur like myself,” she said quietly. “Most of those I worked with are fully human like yourselves and it is likely they would send one of them to look for me.” She looked sad for a moment and looked down at her hands in her lap. “I do not know if I can expect them, however. I may be too lost for them to find, and if that is the case, I will be here for the rest of my life.”

Jake put out a hand and took one of hers in his own. “You saved my life, Citra. For as long as you are here, I promise to do my best to keep you safe.”

“Thank you, Jake,” she replied with emotion in her voice.

“She saved your life?” Desmond repeated. “I thought she was the one that attacked you!”

Jake grinned. “That’s just what I’ve been telling people. I got too close to a momma cougar and her kittens in a canyon and that’s the cat that ripped me up. Citra jumped in and chased her off before she could finish me, and then she tended to my injuries until I could get to a doctor. I am alive because of her.”

Sonya looked at Citra with growing respect in her eyes and Chetan smiled, nodding in understanding. Desmond heaved a loud sigh and looked at the cheetah in a new light.

“Well then, cat-lady,” he said, nodding his head, “If Jake’s beholden to you for saving his life, you can count on me to help keep you safe.”

“Thank you, Mr. Desmond. I appreciate that.”

Chetan looked at Jake and then gestured toward his feline friend. “She stay in cage? It is dirty, dusty.”

“For now, Chetan. Until others know that she can talk and get up on her hind legs, it’s better for her to play the part of a wild animal.”

“Until others know?” Sonya asked. “Should we really want more than us to know about Citra? The more who know, the harder it will be to keep her safe.”

The cheetah smiled. “Jake and I have discussed a way that I can be worked into the show where it is not necessary to keep me hidden. Until we do this, however, I will continue to play the part of an exotic cat that attacked Jake out on the prairie. Perhaps you can help us refine our intentions, so here is what we want to do...”

***

A little while later, Chetan and Sonya took Citra back to her cage. She walked with them under the guise of a rope looped around her neck and both had promised to visit with her when they could at times when no one else might be around. Sonya even offered to have her wagon parked near the animal exhibit cages the next time they moved so that she could slip the cheetah out of her cage so they could talk in the privacy of the woman’s home on wheels.

After they had gone and the two remaining men were left alone together, Desmond took a seat on the edge of the bed and put his elbows down on his knees to look at his boss. He did not know who might be listening from the outside, especially if the cheetah had greater hearing, so he kept his voice low, just barely above a whisper.

“Jake, I know I wanted to get rid of her before,” he said, “but now I realize we’ve got to keep that animal!” He punctuated the statement with a fist closing upon an imaginary object.

“That’s the plan, Emmett. I want to keep her safe and that’s why I brought her with me.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Even if that thing can talk and sit upright, just think of what people would pay to see a rare human-cheetah woman! That plan of yours you just told us about is nice, but that gives her too much freedom – we’ve got to keep her locked up and never let her out!”

Jake looked at him. “I’m not convinced we need to be that drastic, Emmett. As you’ve reminded me before, she doesn’t fit in the theme of a Wild West show. Our little plan is a borderline away from a sideshow circus, but what you want to do is elevate it to a freak-show.”

He could almost see the dollar signs in Desmond’s eyes when the other man replied, “Maybe it’s time we expanded. This is the chance of a lifetime!”

Jake sat back and rubbed his eyes. Emmett’s newfound enthusiasm concerned him.

Chapter 9

Unexpected Freedom

The town of Wichita was larger than other places where Jake Harrison’s Wild West had recently performed, and it was expected to draw in superior crowds. It would take longer than usual for the local boys Jake had hired to place lithographs and handbills around town, but he had had the foresight to wire ahead to the newspaper office to post an advertisement in The Wichita Daily Eagle to promote the show two days in advance.

Fortunately, to run his own typical errands, he had been able to make use of the town’s electric trolleys to get around, something he had heard about but had never experienced before. He was not sure it was likely to catch on in many places, but he had to admit it made things easier for his usage.

It had been nearly ten days since the cougar had attacked him, and although he had been healing well enough, it would likely be another week before the stitches could come out. At least the wretched things did not hurt much anymore, but the ones in his neck still annoyed him if he needed to turn his head to the right.

He spied the town hall before the trolley reached the end of the block and he prepared to step off onto the unfamiliar paved roadway to introduce himself to the town mayor. Still unused to riding the electric conveyance, he would have to watch himself when he got out. At the last stop, he had stumbled and nearly fell onto his mustache in front of everyone, but his outstretched hand had snagged a handle on the side of the trolley car just in time to keep him upright.

While Jake Harrison was making his rounds, the rest of his company was busy getting things set up and arranged on the edge of town where they had been directed to go. As had been discussed in earlier meetings, Citra’s wagon was set apart a short distance from the other animal exhibits that were still arranged in a circle, albeit a little smaller. Materials had been procured from Alva before they had left town and now several workmen were erecting an enclosure around her wagon with a ten-foot canvas curtain.

The cheetah watched the workers quietly with interest, but none of them paid much attention to her at all. She and her wagon were merely obstacles they had to walk around to get their tasks done, so she was left to her thoughts. Despite that she looked like an animal, this critter had an active mind of her own, and as she studied their handiwork, she was working out how their construction methods could have been improved.

Although she was content with how things had worked out since she had met Jake, everything around her seemed so primitive, but she had already known this would be the case when she had come here. It had been an accident, all of it, and even if she did not know the exact cause of the mishap, there were worse places and situations she could have encountered.

When she closed her eyes, she could still see her friends and associates, wishing her well on her journey, none of them knowing that something was about to happen only moments later. It was during such recollections that she tried to remember every little detail, as if she might figure out what went wrong at the moment of her departure, but there was nothing she could recall that would clear up the mystery.

Would they come looking for her? Would they even be able to? How could they even know where to look? Yes, she was sure that some effort would be made to retrieve her, but the biggest question of all would be when?

“Okay, boys, that’s it!” called one of the workers, breaking her from her thoughts. She looked out through the bars of her cage and saw only a horizon of white in all directions. A series of large canvas panels set up on wooden frames surrounded her cage wagon, the ends stitched together with a single vertical opening between two of them being the only break she could see. At seven feet high, she guessed that was supposed to serve as the doorway where visitors would pass through to see the exotic spotted cat. The west may have been wild, but there were other things in the world that could be wilder.

She could hear the voices of the men as they departed the area, one job completed so they could begin another to prepare for the next day’s first performance. The air outside that curtain barrier was filled with the sounds of work and voices of over a hundred people. Most would consider it a cacophony of noise, a barrage against the ears, but Citra could pick out an actual beauty to it all and she smiled.

With the workers gone and the curtain surrounding her cage, it was the first bit of privacy she had had since bringing Jake to her cave in the granite mountains. She was sorely tempted to open the latch and let herself out of the cage. Although the circle around her wagon was about fifty feet in diameter to allow a crowd of visitors to surround the cage, she could use that space to get out and stretch her legs, even if running at top cheetah speed in such a tight circle was nearly impossible.

The urge to get out even for a few minutes was so strong that she caught herself reaching for the latch, but then she stopped herself with a smile. If she was to do such a thing, it would be better to wait until the dead of night when there would be less of a chance of someone walking in on her.

She sighed and yawned in the morning sun shining through the bars and decided to let the cat in her take over long enough to nap in a sunbeam. She stretched out with her back near the bars and began to relax, but then her ears perked up on their own and swiveled toward a sound. She rolled over and looked back toward the slit in the curtain, knowing that if she had given into her earlier temptation, the person coming through the doorway would have seen her outside of the cage.

She smiled when a curvy woman with shoulder-length red hair emerged, one arm threaded through the handle of a woven basket. The cheetah rolled over, got to her feet and watched the woman doing something with the doorway before turning to approach the cage.

“Hello, Sonya,” the feline said in her strangely accented voice.

“Good morning, Citra,” the red-haired woman said courteously. She swept an arm around at the surrounding canvas and said, “What do you think of your new curtains?” she said with a thin, arched eyebrow.

“You can tell that men put it up,” Citra replied with a chuckle. “It is plain and straightforward, no style at all.”

“A nice floral print would have been better,” Sonya agreed with a critical eye. “The visitors would never notice, but it’s what you will have to look at from day to day in whatever town we go to.” She set her basket on the ground and then reached up to unlatch the cage door. “If things go well with our plans, though, you won’t have to worry about the white curtains for long anyway.”

Citra looked alarmed when the red-haired woman opened the door. “What if someone sees?” she whispered.

“I put up a hand-written sign outside telling everyone to Keep Out and then used clothes pins to clip it shut for now. We should be safe enough for a little while.”

“You are the clever one,” the cheetah quipped with a smile, jumping down to the ground. She stood up on two feet and then arched her back to a satisfying crackle. Sonya picked up the basket, set it up on the edge of the cage and rummaged around inside while Citra looked over her shoulder.

“What do you have in there?” she asked.

“I have the supplies you requested for your cycle, also a pair of shears and a few things to eat that you may not be getting from Tony. We’ll have to hide your supplies somewhere you can get to them when no one is around. Tony would toss them out as trash if he found them.”

“Thank you.” Citra took the womanly supplies that were wrapped up in a floral towel and studied them. They were not as sophisticated as what she was used to using, but considering her circumstances, they would do. She ducked beneath the wagon and found a box mounted to the underside of the floor boards that could typically be used for tools, but was empty save for dust, grass and a couple of long-dried leaves. She picked out the debris and carefully placed her bundle in it. She figured that Tony was unlikely to use the tool box if he had not been already.

When she moved back out into the sunlight, Sonya was facing her with the shears. “What are those for?” Citra asked.

“Your hair needs to be clipped again. Honestly, I don’t know why you even have human hair on your head, but I wish I could see what it looks like when you let it grow out.”

“Maybe you will see it soon enough,” the feline said, sitting down on her haunches with her back to the woman. “I do miss my hair, but something else I miss is wearing clothing.”

“Clothing? You wear clothes where you come from?” Sonya asked in amazement. She could not picture an animal wearing garments, especially one with such a wonderful permanent fur coat.

“They are made of lighter material than yours,” Citra explained, “and we do not wear them in layers, but I do have a wardrobe full of them back home. There are some rather nice outfits, too.”

Sonya shook her head in wonder as she clipped the short brown hair down to the tawny fur on top of the cheetah’s head. “You have a wardrobe full of clothing,” she muttered. “You must be rich.”

Citra heard the tone of her voice. “The economy is different, but yes, I am well-paid for my work.”

Sonya continued clipping in relative silence. When she put away the shears, she moved around so that she could face her furry friend. “I hope you don’t think ill of me,” she said quietly, brushing a finger through her hair to push it out of her face, “but even though we’ve been friends now for several days, I still have a hard time thinking of you having clothes, money and a job. What do you do anyway?”

Citra stood up on two legs again so the other woman would not have to keep looking down at her. She studied her new friend for a moment with a slow blink to her eyes as she considered what to tell her. After a moment, she could feel the tip of her tail flipping side to side, directed by her emotions. “The best I can tell you,” she said, “is that I am an engineer with plans to become a settler.”

Sonya looked at her. “You… drive a train?” she said incredulously.

The cheetah stared back at her in surprise, but then she chuckled, shaking her head in a very humanlike movement. “Sorry, no. I used the wrong word. Do you know what a scientist is?”

“That is someone who plays with science stuff, like electricity and chem… chemicals.”

Citra put a casual hand on the woman’s arm. “That is close enough,” she answered. “My real job will be to settle new lands and make a way for others to follow – at least that is what it was before I came here by accident.”

“Much of this country is already settled now,” Sonya muttered after a moment. “No offense, but where would people like you go to settle?”

“Lands far away where there are no people, countries or borders — just trees, grass, mountains, seas, animals, birds and open air.” She had said the last with a wistful expression and Sonya could tell she longed for that personal dream.

“That must be a great distance away. How did you come to be here?” Sonya asked, something she had been curious about since she had met the Fur.

Citra shook her head. “I am sorry, my new friend, but that is something I cannot explain where you would understand it. Please be content to know that I am here by accident and I will be in danger without your help and friendship.”

Sonya nodded her acceptance and then smiled. She clasped hands with this strange being and shook them gently. “I don’t always understand you, but I’m glad to know you, Miss Citrakāyah. Thank you for letting me know you.” Citra’s eyes narrowed with her smile. “Now, you’ve had a haircut and got out of your cage for a little bit. Is there anything else you’d like to do before we put you back inside? I’ll need to tend my other responsibilities soon.”

The cheetah gave her a silly grin and got down on all fours. “Just one thing,” she said. “I need to let the animal in me stretch her legs for a moment.”

Without waiting for a response, she trotted out to the perimeter of the enclosure and then picked up speed as she circled the inside wall of the curtain, moving faster and faster with every circuit. Although a cheetah was the fastest land mammal on the earth, such speeds could only be maintained in short bursts, but it was still a sight that clearly impressed the human woman who witnessed it.

***

The next night was a success. The mystery surrounding the curtained exotic cat drew in large crowds of visitors. Because everyone else was busy taking part in the rest of the shows being performed in front of the grand stands, Jake himself stood at the entrance of the canvas enclosure, hawking the wonders of a wilder animal that had been captured on the plains that was not a native to these lands.

Before the show had begun taking the coins of its visitors for the evening, Citra had schooled her benefactor with general facts about cheetahs so he could impart them to the crowds, and although she would not be able to show them her great speed, she paced her cage gracefully so that those seeing her for the first time could look at her from all sides.

There were no repeats of the earlier incident with the man and his gun, as Jake had stationed a few stage hands inside to make sure the crowds that came in to see her behaved. The visitors were suitably impressed and it was with great pleasure that Jake could overhear their comments and conversations about his prize find, with some remarks of going to tell others who might not have otherwise visited the Wild West show.

***

It was during the second night’s performance that she noticed him. While Citra was leisurely pacing her cage to the delight of the crowd surrounding her, she recognized a distinctive hat. It was an old, round-topped hat that she remembered was called a bowler, but what drew her eye to it was the pheasant feather sticking out of the hat band. The single feather stuck up and out too far, as if its wearer had no concept of decorum, but standing on the raised platform of the wagon, it drew her eye directly to it.

She had seen the same hat and feather on the previous night, but this time she looked at the individual beneath them. The man was average in height, as he seemed no taller or shorter than others in the crowd around him, but the brown suit he wore with a bright red bow tie and polished, round-rimmed spectacles gave him the look of someone just out of Sunday worship service, even though it was only a Thursday. His chocolate-brown sideburns merged with the mustache over his upper lip, but his chin was clean-shaven, much as Emmett Desmond kept his facial hair tended. She felt no danger, but he seemed to take an extraordinary interest in peering into the cage at her.

He walked around inside the curtained arena to look at her from all sides and his gaze never left her. At one point, they even locked eyes and he seemed almost startled that she was looking back at him just as intently, as if she had noticed his scrutiny. There were times when he used a stubby pencil to scrawl notes onto a small pad he kept in a pocket, so she began to wonder if he might be from the local newspaper office writing up an article about the strange spotted cat.

After a while, the crowds began to disperse as the evening wore on, but the ‘pheasant man’ was one of the last to stay around. Her chaperones finally made him leave, and then they blew out the lanterns lighting the area to leave her alone in growing darkness.

She sighed and dropped down upon her bed of straw, glad that she was no longer on display and had to be up on her feet. She was bored and longed to be out in an open field running off excess energy, but she had to keep reminding herself that this was for the best for now and it had been her idea. Show business might be better if she had actually had something to do other than walk around a small wagon cage.

She could still hear the diminishing sounds of people on the other side of the curtain, but eventually she managed to relax enough to drift off into slumber.

***

Citra awoke to the sound of footsteps, her sensitive hearing alerting her to someone’s presence. She opened one sleepy eye, expecting to see one of the four people who knew what she really was, but the silhouette in the dim moonlight of a waxing crescent moon made the ridge of fur along her spine to rise unbidden. It was the pheasant man and she could see his feather towering above the bowler hat as he moved across the darkened enclosure toward her cage.

She got up to her feet, wondering if she was going to be facing down another gun barrel, and she silently resolved to let herself out of the cage to get at him first if it came down to it. Doing so would blow her cover, but she valued her living hide more than the secrecy. Playing the part of the dumb animal, she watched him intently, her nocturnal sight gathering more light and giving her greater details that he could have seen himself.

The man drew no gun, however, but he stepped right up to the door to her cage. He watched her for only a moment, but then he looked behind him as if making sure they were still alone together. Satisfied that they were, he turned back to the cage and reached for the latch.

Citra watched him slide the bolt up and then to the side slowly to keep it from making a sound, and then he quietly pulled the door open, keeping himself as far from the opening as he could. Once the way out of the cage was clear, he quickly walked around to the back side of the wagon.

The cheetah turned and kept her eyes on him, but made no move to exit her cage. It was clear the man had intended for her to escape, especially at the look of consternation upon his face when she did not.

“Shoo!” he whispered at her, waving his arms as if to frighten her. This was clearly a case of sabotage, the Fur thought to herself. Either the man was hoping she would escape so he or other associates might shoot her as a wild animal out on the plains beyond Wichita, or he was some kind of early animal rights activist wanting to grant her freedom. Whatever the intent behind his actions, it ran contrary to Citra’s personal plans and she decided to act.

She sat down.

Pheasant man tried several more times to shoo her out of the cage, so she got down on her belly and simply relaxed in the straw, staring out at him. Giving insult to injury, she yawned as if bored with him.

The man swore beneath his breath, but it seemed that nothing he did would prompt this dumb animal to leave her cage. She was free and too ignorant to know it!

Frustrated, he threw up his hands, grumbling to himself and headed back toward the doorway through the curtain. Perhaps she would just leave through the opening on her own. She allowed him to get halfway across the distance and then she jumped out of the cage onto the ground.

Turning to look at an unexpected sound behind him, the pheasant man saw the lean cheetah slowly stalking him. His eyes bugged out of their sockets, he let out a yelp and nearly stumbled over his feet trying to get to the curtain before she got to him, clearly forgetting that she was touted as the fastest animal on dry land. There was no guarantee that she would stop at the curtain either, but now he was scared and ran for his life.

Citra surged forward quickly and took a playful swat at his boots, knocking one out from beneath him just as he reached the door slit. He tumbled to the ground and rolled out through the opening, but the cheetah had had her fun and did not bother to follow him outside.

She could hear him running for his life and it was all she could do to keep from laughing aloud as she made her way back to her bed.

***

Tony Holland twisted his neck from side to side, trying to get the kinks out of it from a restless night of sleep on a pillow that was too old and too thin. The sun was barely up over the eastern horizon, but there was already activity all around the camp.

Simply because the cheetah had been separated from the other exhibit animals, he walked past her enclosure to attend the others first. Although still wild animals, they had each come to recognize that Tony was the one who provided food, water and fresh bedding. He occasionally slipped them extra morsels, though he was fully aware that any of them could turn on him at a second’s notice and that none would ever be pets.

Once they had been fed, watered and cleaned up after, he turned his attention to the cheetah. It did not matter to him one way or another if the show owner thought she was something special. Granted, she was different than anything else he had ever seen, but since Tony had aspirations of being a trick rider, the responsibilities with the animals was only a short-term step toward that greater goal.

However, when he slipped through the slit in the curtain, his jaw dropped and a sudden fear shot up his spine. The door to the wagon was wide open and the cheetah was gone!

He turned and ran as fast as he could toward his boss’ wagon. He hated to disturb Mr. Harrison this early, but he could think of nothing else to do. He rapped his knuckles on the wooden door in a set of three knocks at a time.

Knock knock knock

“Mr. Harrison!”

Knock knock knock

“Mr. Harrison!”

Before he could repeat a third set, the latch rattled, the door opened and Jake peered out at him with an arched eyebrow. He was bare-chested with a towel draped around his neck and shaving soap spread across the bottom half of his face. In his hand was a shaving razor.

“What is it, Mr. Holland?”

“The cheetah! She… she is…”

“Spit it out, man. What’s happened to my cheetah?”

“She’s gone, sir!”

“Gone?” Jake exclaimed. “What do you mean, gone?”

Tony swallowed hard at the other man’s glare. “I was making my rounds with the animals and just went to her enclosure. The gate to her cage is standing wide open and I didn’t see her anywhere!”

Jake swore beneath his breath, but not for the reason that Tony thought. Jake was sure that Citra has snuck out of her cage for an early morning run or a visit with her other friends and had not yet returned in time. It was going to be difficult explaining that to Tony, and he had not wanted to reveal her to him just yet.

He wiped the shaving soap from his face with the towel and grabbed last night’s shirt from the chair. He slipped it on, following the other man back to the cheetah exhibit, all the while casting dark thoughts toward the feline.

When they got to the enclosure, Jake went in first. Sure as he had been told, the cage door was standing open and he could not see the exotic spotted cat. Tony came through the curtain after him and gestured toward the empty cage.

“That’s how I found it, Mr. Harrison. It was closed and latched after everyone left last night. I swear I didn’t leave it open!”

Jake turned to look at the other man and put a hand upon his shoulder. “Let’s take a closer look,” he said calmly. He did not feel calm inside, afraid that Citra would return anytime, standing up on two legs while her caretaker was there to catch her in the act of being something more than an animal.

However, when they approached the cage, they both saw her at the same time. The large cat was still there, mostly covered over with the straw she normally lay upon. Her tawny fur blended in well with the straw and her spots looked like nothing more than bits of shadow beneath the cover of the wagon.

Citra’s ears twitched and she lifted her head up to look at the men, bits of straw still clinging to her ears and in her whiskers. She looked sleepy and did not bother to get up from her bed.

“There, Mr. Holland,” Jake said, quietly closing the cage door. “You see, she’s still here.”

“But… the door was open! Why didn’t she escape?”

Jake shrugged his shoulders, the skin still tight from the stitches. “Maybe she was asleep all night and just didn’t notice,” he conjectured, “or it hasn’t been open very long. Whatever happened, I won’t hold you responsible, Mr. Holland, since we still have her.”

Tony deflated, hardly believing his luck. “Thank you, Mr. Harrison. I’ll make sure it never happens again!”

“I’m sure you will. Listen, go get yourself a cup of coffee from the grub tent and settle your nerves. I’ll look over the latch to make sure it just doesn’t need to be replaced and then go back to my shaving. You can tend to her after you’re calmer.”

Tony swallowed with difficulty and nodded. “Thank you, sir. I could use a fresh cup.”

Jake watched the other man leave and did not turn back to the cage until after he had disappeared through the curtain. When he did, Citra had gotten up to sit back on her haunches, her tail wrapped around her feet in the straw.

“Good morning, Jake,” she said quietly.

He looked up at her and narrowed his eyes. “Where did you go early this morning?” he asked. “You almost gave Tony the fits when he came in to check on you and didn’t find you in your cage. Leaving the door open was careless.”

Citra flattened her ears against her head and snorted at his rebuke. “I have been here all night,” she told him. “The door was not opened by me, but I never left my enclosure.”

“Who opened it then?”

Quietly and patiently, she told him about the pheasant man who had stolen in through the canvas during the night. “He has been here to see me both nights we have been here, and wrote down some notes on pad he kept in a pocket. I assumed he was here to write an article about your great find, but now I think he might have come to sabotage the success of your show.”

“Why would he do that?” Jake asked in a huff.

“Perhaps he was jealous that you had something he did not, or was upset that more people were coming to see me than he felt was right. I do not know, Jake. He never told me his reasons. I left the gate open so that someone would bring you here so I could tell you.”

She went on to give him a good physical account of the man. He had been there long enough that she had gotten a good look at him, but Jake admitted that he did not recognize the description.

“I never thought I would have to do this,” he told the Fur, “but I may have to put a padlock on your cage door to prevent this from happening again.”

“Do not lock me up,” Citra said in a quiet voice. It was almost a plea.

“There’s never been need for it until now,” he told her, “but I think it’s necessary after this. You have proven to be a popular draw for the show and with this coming to light, I will need to safeguard you more than ever.”

What he did not tell her is that this was exactly what Emmett had wanted to do in the first place, and because of that, Jake was concerned that Desmond might have arranged last night’s incident to that end.

Chapter 10

Out in the Open

It was a week later in Salina when Citra was given the news. Her first unveiling would be at the end of the night’s performance after everyone else had taken their bows. This was to be more than just standing around in a cage for others to look at – this would be part of the regular performances of Jake Harrison’s Wilder West show. Citra, Sonya and Chetan had been planning and practicing since they had worked up a routine with Jake’s permission in Wichita. They had no idea how well or not the act might be received, so tonight would be the test.

True to her feline nature, Citra paced back and forth in her wagon that had been cleaned out of everything but herself. The large cat would have bothered most horses, but the Appaloosa stallion hooked up to the wagon was calm and impassive, long used to the wild animal exhibits it normally hauled from town to town in a team with others.

Chetan spoke quiet words to the horse, lightly rubbing the animal’s neck. The Indian had just finished the last of his scenes for the evening portraying an attacking warrior, and had changed his outfit to his everyday casual garments. His role in the final act would be little more than a stagehand, but he was the only who could do this due to his friendship with the exotic cat.

Standing beside the cage wagon, Sonya kept herself busy by checking and rechecking her props. She was a stickler for authenticity in their western reenactments, and although showcasing a cheetah in the Wild West was hardly authentic, she wanted to make sure everything would be in place as they had rehearsed.

“You know,” the red-headed woman remarked, “when you pace like that, it’s hard to remember you are more than just an animal.”

“I know,” Citra grumbled quietly, coming to a stop beside her friend, “but I am nervous. What if something goes wrong? I know this was my idea, but now that it is time to do it, I cannot calm my nerves.”

Sonya nodded. “First time stage fright can give anyone the jitters,” she agreed. “Don’t worry whether or not anything goes wrong. Just do everything like we practiced and everything will be fine. You are going to shock some folk, so be prepared for that, but go on with the performance. You know what to do.”

Citra extended a hand-paw out through the bars and Sonya took it in her own, lightly petting the fur on the back of the hand with her other fingers. The action felt calming to the feline and she smiled. “Thank you, Sonya. I am glad you are my friend.”

Chetan approached them and gave the cheetah a reassuring smile. “It is almost time,” he said. “You will do fine.”

Citra retrieved her hand and then used it to caress one of the Indian’s hair feathers before lightly brushing his check with her fingers. “Thank you, Chetan. I appreciate all you have done for me.”

Chetan put a hand up to his chest and returned the smile. “It has been an honor,” he told her.

The sound of gunfire and the cheering of the crowds finally quieted, signaling the end of the act that normally finished the night’s show. Unknown to the audience, however, there was to be a final presentation.

Jake’s voice could be heard after applause died down following the final bow. “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you would keep your seats, I have one further exhibit to bring to your attention. No doubt you have heard about a certain new critter I have in my possession and you might be anxious to see what we’ve caught. For this presentation, I will now hand you over to Sonya Brandy, a talented actress with my company.”

Desmond stepped around the corner of a covered wagon that had hidden them from view and gave the sign they had been waiting for. Chetan moved to the horse’s bridle and clucked his tongue lightly. The stallion moved forward and the wagon wheels began to roll.

“Here we go,” Citra whispered, returning to her pacing in the moving cage. Sonya followed quietly behind, her hand steady upon another small cart pulled along behind the wagon.

There was a hush across the crowd as the horse and wagon moved out into the field before the grandstands. The ground was broken up from the numerous horses, cattle and buffalo that had run across it earlier and the smoking cabin prop farther out was being drawn away out of sight. All eyes, however, were on the new wagon being pulled out to the center.

There was a collective gasp as the great strange cat stopped its pacing and stared out across the audience. Its large golden eyes roved over them all, seeming to stop at each person, or at least that is the way it felt to those in the crowd.

When the cheetah began pacing its cage again, Sonya stepped out front and center. She was wearing a tan fringed blouse and skirt, boots and a cowgirl’s hat, and she carried a bullwhip rolled up in her hands.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she called out in a voice loud enough to carry to everyone. She was long used to facing crowds and reciting the lines of scene reenactments and she was comfortable facing the audience.

“As the grand finale for tonight’s show, Jake Harrison would like to present his latest find to you all. What we have here is what is known as a citrakāyah, or a cheetah. This great feline is normally a resident of the African savannah and parts of other eastern countries. She is not native to North America and would otherwise be out of place in a production such as ours showcasing the authentic Wild West days of the past, but Mr. Harrison himself discovered this wonderful creature roaming free upon the plains of the Oklahoma Territories. How she got here and why she was in the granite mountains is anyone’s guess, but now she is with us for a very special presentation!”

Chetan walked toward the door of the cage and the cheetah reached through the bars to take a few swipes at the Indian. None of them connected, of course, but the crowd reacted as expected with great gasps or shouts of warning directed at the man with feathers in his hair.

Chetan called out something loud in Lakota to the animal and she backed away from the bars with an angry hiss. He inserted a key into a large iron padlock and opened it to more warnings shouted from the crowd.

“No!”

“What are you doing?”

“Don’t let it out!”

The Indian hung the padlock on one of the cage bars, then lifted the latch and pulled it aside. He looked over his shoulder once at the crowd, giving them an embellished look of faked uncertainty, and then pulled the gate open wide. A woman screamed and several people stood up from their bleacher seats, ready to run.

The strange spotted cat bolted for the open door and jumped down upon the ground to the accompaniment of more shouts and screams. Sonya rushed forward and held up both hands to the audience as Chetan disappeared around the back side of the wagon.

“There is no need to be afraid!” she shouted above the din. “Everything is well under control!” Then she unfurled her bullwhip and swung it in a circle several times over her head before she brought it down to a sharp crack!

The loud sound stopped most in the audience from bolting, and most stared in open anticipation. The cheetah halted in her tracks, raising one paw to the air, her ears flattened against her head, her fanged jaws wide open. Sonya cracked the whip twice more and the cheetah cowed, yet obviously showed no fear of the woman. The whip cracked again and the animal made a subtle transformation, her demeanor calming as she settled own upon her belly on the ground with her tail stretched out behind her.

“There, that’s better!” Sonya called out with a smile. “Ladies and gentlemen, the citrakāyah is the smallest of the great cats of Africa. Though not as large as a lion, leopard or even a mountain lion, the cheetah is the fastest animal in the world.”

When she said this, the feline sat up on her haunches as if looking proud of this particular accomplishment. There were a few chuckles from the audience at this, and the cat then took on a “smiling kitty” expression to complete the picture. There was a collective sense of easement in the crowd, with the earlier tension relaxing a bit.

Using information that Citra had imparted to her earlier, Sonya continued. “The speed of a cheetah is such that given the chance, she could easily outrun anyone here, as well as most of the horses.” She tipped her hat at the feline and added, “I’ve even heard it said that a cheetah might even be able to outrun a locomotive, though I admit that I’ve never seen such a sight!” Murmurs of awe in the audience made others look at the now-docile animal with dubious looks at such a claim.

“However, despite any unsubstantiated rumors that may be associated with this remarkable creature, the one we have right here can even do things that any other cheetah cannot. You see, folks, this one is extra special!”

Chetan walked out from behind the wagon carrying what appeared to be a brown curtain four feet high that was attached to a thin wooden frame six feet across. He set it on wooden feet between Sonya and the cat, and then backed away quickly as if afraid of getting too close to the animal. The cheetah stood up on all fours and stared hard at the Indian, licking her lips and looking as if she might be contemplating the man as her next meal. Chetan looked at the crowd and made an exaggerated show of swallowing hard before he ran high-stepping around behind the wagon again, eliciting a few giggles and chuckles from the crowd.

Although they had done this in practice, Citra had to steel herself to keep from laughing and to stay in character as a wild animal. She had known from talking with him that Chetan had a sense of humor, but it was really amusing to see him acting comical; to most of his working associates, he always seemed so stoic and emotionless when not acting out a scene required of him during reenactments.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Sonya called out, bringing the attention back to her, “I would like to show you why this cheetah is so special, but first I must warn you that what you are about to see may surprise and even shock you, but it is entirely real. You see, this citrakāyah - or Citra, as we call her - is more than an animal. She is like nothing you have ever seen before, so I ask you to remain calm.”

There was a total hush over the crowd, including a great number of Jake’s people who were around to see this unexpected act tacked onto to the end of their usual show. Sonya cracked her whip once more. The cheetah took a few steps toward the framed curtain, but her large golden eyes were upon the red-haired woman.

“I really wish you would not wave that whip around so much,” the cheetah said with a strange accent in a loud, carrying voice. “You could hurt someone with it, and it might be me!”

There was a collective gasp of surprise throughout the audience. Something strange had just happened, but some were not sure of what it was. Surely there was someone behind that curtain supplying a voice to rattle their nerves, but some of them had actually seen the animal’s lips form the words they heard.

The cheetah bumped into the curtain and knocked it over, allowing the audience to see that there was no one hiding there. Sonya picked it up, set it back into place, and then the cheetah moved behind the curtain. Keeping her head in full view, she then rose up, putting her forepaws up on the top rail of the frame and looked out over it to the audience. She raised one paw up in the air and spread out her hand in greeting. “Good evening,” she said in a clear voice.

Several people fainted; not all were women and not all of them were even a part of the paying audience. There were several shouts and sudden conversations erupted all around.

“Excuse me!” the cheetah called out loudly, but she was practically drowned out by the din. Then, in a bolder voice, she shouted, “Excuse me!”

Chetan raised a pistol loaded with blanks and fired a shot into the air to get everyone’s attention. People looked back and the discussions began to falter as everyone seemed to realize that the spotted animal was still addressing them while waving both front legs at them as if they were arms. How was she doing that? She would have to be standing up on her rear legs!

When she had their attention again, Citra gave them all a human-like smile, leaning forward with her elbows up on the curtain frame. “Although you have all seen me in my luxurious spotted fur coat, I do not wish to embarrass or upset anyone here, so if you will excuse me for a moment, I will get dressed.” Conversations were still muttered and murmured throughout the crowd, but they were all now predominantly focused upon her.

Sonya walked to the end of the curtain with a box that she set down at her feet. One by one, she took items from the container and held it out behind the curtain where it was taken from her. The only thing anyone could see of the cheetah seemed to be her head and shoulders. After a moment, even her shoulders seemed to be covered over in something dark, but then her head disappeared for a moment as she bent down for something. When she stood up again, she looked out at the audience and smiled.

“Almost done,” she said. People in the crowd were still trying to figure out whose voice it was they were hearing. Was it the Indian, speaking at them from behind the wagon? No, he was standing in plain sight at the cart at the back of the wagon and was pulling out a small table and two straight-backed chairs, but he had not spoken a word.

Sonya took a western hat from the box and handed it to the cheetah. As the crowd watched, she kept the hat in full view as she took it and placed it upon her head. She had to adjust it to fit between her ears, but then she tilted it at a saucy angle with a smile at the crowd.

When she stepped out from behind the curtain, it was to complete silence for a moment before her appearance really registered. Standing upright as a human would, this so-called cheetah walked out wearing a blue fringed blouse with the long sleeves pushed up over her elbows, a black and brown cowhide skirt held up by a black belt with a silver colored buckle depicting the head of a longhorn steer. Her tail whipped back and forth lightly beneath the skirt.

The top of the blouse was open to reveal a white fluff of fur that took the place of a bandana and the spotted fur of her arms and legs were unhidden. The brown hat was adorned with a simple concho that matched the longhorn steer on the belt buckle.

She was barefoot, as there were no boots that would ever fit her digitigrade feet, but despite that she was a four-legged creature standing up on just two of them, she looked almost natural in that upright position. Letting the crowd take a good look at her, she put one hand on a hip and with the other tipped her hat toward her onlookers.

“How about this, folks?” she asked. “Am I more presentable now?”

Quite unexpected, there were a few claps from the crowd, and although it was sporadic at first, others joined in, but not the whole crowd; there were many who were either still stunned at what they were seeing or were simply silent in their disbelief.

Citra smiled and then took a bow just as Chetan walked up beside her. The crowd hushed suddenly when the Indian offered her an elbow, which she took graciously. He led her to the side to the small table and two chairs he had set up. Sonya was already sitting in one and Chetan led her to the other.

She gave him a quick ‘cat lick’ on the cheek, which elicited a few nervous chuckles from the audience, and then she sat down in a prim and proper manner, pausing only a moment to tuck her tail in through the back slats of the chair. She crossed her legs demurely and then looked across the table at the red-haired woman beside her.

“Hello, Miss Brandy,” she said loudly, “what brings you here to these parts?”

Chetan stepped behind them, unfolded a gingham tablecloth of red and white squares and draped it across the table between the two women.

“Hello, Miss Citra,” Sonya returned. “I heard you were in town and wanted to know if you would join me in a cup of tea!”

Chetan set a tray on the table between them that contained a small tea kettle with two sets of cup and saucer.

“Why, yes, I would like that,” said the feline all dressed in her western wear.

Chetan quietly poured tea from the kettle into both cups, and then handed one first to the cheetah, and then one to the other woman. Citra held up her cup and saucer with one hand, and then sticking out her pinky with the other, picked up the cup and put it to her lips. Due to her bifurcated upper lip, she was unable to drink from a cup like a normal human, but the audience did not know this and she pretended to drink her tea, not showing that she really would need to lap it up.

For several moments, the audience was stunned into silence that this animal was acting so… human, but then a little more sporadic applause issued through the grandstands. Acting as if she finished off her cup, she set it on the saucer and then put them back on the tray. She stood up from her chair, retrieved her tail, and then took a bow.

Although there was a lot of noise at the moment, Citra’s hearing was sensitive enough that she had heard a few comments from others who worked for the show, remarking that Jake must have hired someone to dress up like an animal in a skirt.

Once the applause died down, Sonya got up from her seat, taking a bow of her own, and then Chetan took the props away while Citra stepped back to the center place in front of the wagon.

She held up her arms, but turned them so the crowd could see the patterns. “As you can see, I have spots in my fur much like those of a leopard. The tan and white of my fur helps cats like myself blend into a field of tall grasses and the spots resemble the shadows within the grasses. Having the spots and coloration to hide in the grassy savannahs of Africa would help me sneak up on my prey. Like the mountain lions you are familiar with here, cheetahs are carnivores, which means we are meat eaters, chasing down things like antelope and gazelles, which are similar to deer.”

She took off her hat and handed it to Sonya, briefly rubbing her ears it had been up against, and she then reached up and trailed her fingers over her ears. “On the back of my ears, there are black and white areas that to another animal sneaking up on me might mistake for eyes looking back at them. Just thinking that I am watching them might make them go away instead of trying to creep up on me. Although you will probably never see another like me that can do the things I can do,” she said, wrapping up her short performance, “you may be able to glimpse another of my animal cousins in a zoo exhibit like the one in Philadelphia. I hope you enjoyed my little presentation and have learned a few facts about cheetahs in general. Good evening, folks.”

The crowd had been riveted to her words while she was speaking, but almost as soon as she stopped, a man from the audience stood up from the grandstands and pointed at the cage. “She’s a fake!” he shouted. “It’s a vaudeville deception! A cheap magician’s trick meant to deceive us!” Citra looked up at the man, instantly recognizing the pheasant feather in his hat band, sticking up high above his bowler hat. Others in the crowd were beginning to side with him, shouting in anger at what had to be nothing more than a trick meant to get their coins!

Citra and Sonya both waved their hands in the air to get everyone’s attention back upon them, and although complete silence did not return to the arena, they were able to get most of them to listen again.

“I am not a fake!” Citra called out across the crowd, her agitated tail swishing side to side. “I am no magician and there has been no trickery! I can prove that what I am is real!”

“How?” someone shouted back.

Citra pointed a stubby finger at the pheasant-feather man. “You, sir. Come down here, please.” She looked out at others in the crowd and called out, “Three more men, please – preferably unmarried.”

The last statement caused more than one head to turn. “What? Why?” called out a plump woman near the front row.

Citra stepped back behind the curtain, but remained up on two legs. “You saw me as a four-legged cheetah before I put on these clothes. Behind this curtain, I will remove them so these four men can see that I am not an actress switching places with a different animal.”

The man in the bowler hat was hesitant, but when three other men came down from the grandstands toward her, he moved forward as well.

“Do any of you know these men?” Citra called out as they gathered up in front of the curtain.

“That’s my brother!” called a young woman, pointing to the youngest of the four.

“That one owns the general store,” called out an older man. “I’ve done business with him for over a year!”

“That gentleman runs a trolley!” said someone else. No one else identified the pheasant-feather man, but no one seemed to care. Visitors to Salina were common.

“Very good,” Citra called back. “I wanted you to see that these men were not planted in the audience for this, and that you will take their word as to what they see!” There were murmurs of ascent in the crowd, but before anyone could change their minds and start up another ruckus, she turned toward the four men looking over the curtain at her.

“I am not just an animal and I am not an actress made up to look like one,” she told them. “Although I am part animal, I am also a woman, so I apologize to you gentlemen in advance if what I am about to do embarrasses you.”

Before she began, however, she looked around until she saw Chetan. She motioned him to her and then whispered something in his ear. He nodded and then departed.

Although hidden behind the curtain from the crowd, there was nothing Citra could do to hide from the eyes of these four men. The people here were far more sensitive than where she was from when it came to nudity, and even though she was completely covered in fur, she knew that just the act of undressing would offend the sensibilities of the majority of the audience. It was for this reason she had asked for unmarried men.

Without taking her eyes off her watchers, she began unbuttoning her blouse and watched their eyebrows go up when they realized she wore neither brassiere nor corset beneath. Facing them, she pulled open the blouse and then slipped it off her shoulders. Now uncovered before the men, her breasts were not large and her chest fur completely covered them over so nothing showed through, though the male minds had enough imagination to fill in the details on their own. The store owner swallowed hard, looked back over at his shoulder toward the audience, and then returned his gaze to the strip show he had been invited to witness.

Citra handed the blouse to Sonya, who put it back in the box in full view of the crowd. There were murmurs and whispered discussions, mostly from oh-so-prim and ‘proper’ women fidgeting in their seats.

Still keeping her eyes upon the four men, she unfastened her belt, handed it to Sonya, and then fingered a few side buttons open so that she could push the cowhide skirt down over her slightly curvaceous hips. As with the blouse, she wore no undergarments beneath the skirt and the man with the bowler hat licked his lips nervously when it dropped to her feet.

Up close as they were, they could all see that she had the unmistakable curves of a woman, and although the white and cream-colored fur was thick over her crotch, all four of them felt their faces heating up at what they perceived. She knelt down to pick up the skirt and then handed it to Sonya.

Standing up again, Citra held out her arms. “Touch my fur,” she told them. “Assure yourselves that I am not wearing fur-covered sleeves and I am wearing no other garments.”

There was some hesitation at first, but all four of her witnesses reached out to brush her arms, her shoulders, and even the young man who was the one woman’s brother boldly ventured to run his hand over the swells of her chest. She looked at him pointedly, but otherwise said nothing, allowing him and the others to pet and tug carefully at her fur. After a few moments of this, the four of them looked back and forth between themselves and it was easy to see in their eyes that they were at least convinced she was not someone in a costume.

“Keep your eyes on me, boys,” she said. As they watched, she put her hands up over her head and then she turned around slowly so they could all see her from behind. The bold young man reached down and took hold of her tail. “Gently,” she told him over her bare, fur-covered shoulder, making the end of that extremity wiggle in his hand. He dropped it as if it was a separate live thing and cleared his throat, causing the other three men to chuckle.

“Okay, we are near the end of our show,” she told them, “but I do not want you to take your eyes off me just yet. I am going to walk out from behind this curtain down on all fours and then you can testify to everyone else that the animal that emerges is the same one you just saw disrobe before your eyes.”

As they watched, she leaned forward and then got down on all four feet. They could see that the slightly larger hips and shoulders were configured in such a way that she could function just as well down on all fours as she could up on two feet. Now more than ever, she looked like a regular cat as she looked over her shoulder at them. She swished her tail, gave them a wink and then said, “As you can see, it is still me down here. Thank you for your time, gentlemen.”

With them still watching, she stepped out from behind the curtain as the cheetah and faced the audience. Chetan reappeared nearby and handed something to Sonya. The red-haired woman took it with a nod, and although this was not part of the planned act, she instantly surmised what it was for.

She approached the four men and in a theatrical voice said, “Raise your right hands, gentlemen.” The four looked at one another for a moment and then did as they were told. Sonya held out a large book with a tooled leather cover. “Place your left hands on this Bible, please.” They all gathered together and each of them put their palms down beside one another.

“Gentlemen, answer truthfully in front of God and these fine people,” she said loudly, indicating the crowd, “Did you witness anyone switching places, a woman for an animal behind that curtain?”

Two of them said “No” in unison, but the other two looked back out at the audience before adding their own negative responses.

“Gentlemen, answer truthfully,” Sonya said again, “Did you witness the cat-woman disrobe completely, proving that she was not wearing a costume?”

All of them hesitated, feeling their faces growing red. “Yes,” they all finally replied. There were unhappy murmurs from several women in the audience and more than a few chuckles from other men.

“Gentlemen, answer truthfully. Is this cheetah standing beside us on four feet the same one that was but a moment ago, talking to us and standing up on two legs in front of you?”

“Yes,” they answered.

“Gentlemen, one final question. Answer truthfully. Are you convinced that Citra is what she says she is, without trickery or deceit?”

Each man took longer, but all of them replied with a nod and a “Yes”.

Sonya smiled, pulled the Bible away from them and held it up to her chest. “Thank you, gentlemen,” she said. “You may return to your seats.”

“Yes, thank you,” Citra added, sitting down upon her haunches. The witnesses looked at her just a moment more and then retreated. The man with the pheasant feather in his hat stared at her the longest before he also walked away. Although he could not be sure that she had gotten a good look at him that night in Wichita, he got the impression that she had recognized him and he suddenly wanted to be far away from her.

Sonya turned toward the audience and stood beside the cheetah. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “We were not lying and this was not just an act. Citra is —”

“A demon!” shouted out the plump, frumpy woman from near the front. “That thing is no woman! It’s a demon from Hades in the shape of an animal woman!”

Enticed by her enraged words, several others who had not been enamored by the Fur took up her accusations. Men and women alike got up to their feet and began to shout out their indignations.

“That thing is of the devil!”

“We do not want that demon in our midst!”

“Send that blasphemer back to Hades!”

A cold chill ran up Citra’s spine and a ridge of fur along it stood up of its own accord. At least they were now convinced she was real, but was she about to be burned at the stake? She and Sonya exchanged quick looks of panic, neither of them knowing how to diffuse this unexpected turn of events. However, before things escalated beyond control, a middle-aged man in a brown suit stood up from the audience; he waved his hands in the air to get the attention of those who were grumbling, shouting and joining the woman’s righteous cause.

“Quiet!” he shouted. “Calm down and listen to me!”

People began to notice him and some fell silent right away when they recognized the man, though it took others a little longer to see him. After a moment, it seemed all eyes were upon him and he put his hands upon his hips as he addressed the crowd.

“Many of you know me,” he said in a loud tone of authority, “but for those who don’t, I’m Preacher Will Montag.” He looked pointedly at several who had raised their voices in anger toward the cheetah, but his gaze settled upon the plump woman who had started the ruckus.

“Matilda Brown,” he said when he had her attention, “you should hush up this nonsense! You heard those men swear on the Good Book that everything they saw and experienced was true! There’s no stink of brimstone or the Devil’s sin in the air here, and Mr. Harrison is an honorable man who has brought us a fine evening’s wholesome entertainment. Miss Citra may not be a… a woman like what we are used to seeing, but God works in mysterious ways and I believe she has a purpose in Creation just as you or I do. There’s lots of unexplored places upon our Earth, so who’s to say there’s not more of her kind out there that haven’t been discovered yet.

“Now, if our fine, responsible men claim she is no fake, all with their hands upon the Holy Bible, then who are we to question God’s intention on placing her here?” He looked around the crowd, his hands still upon his hips. When he looked again at Matilda, the woman was turning all kinds of purple, but she refused to meet anyone’s eyes. “Now, let’s not hear any further talk of demons and blasphemy!” the preacher said. “Miss Citra is real and the only sin committed here is a prejudice against her for being different than the rest of us!”

“Amen, preacher!” someone called out.

“Hear-hear!” said another.

“Now,” Montag concluded, “unless ya’ll want me to give more of a sermon than that right now – and some of you know how long-winded I can be – I suggest you give this special lady the applause she deserves for entertaining us as an end to tonight’s show!”

Someone whistled, others laughed at the preacher’s candor, but applause erupted from the crowd with a few cheers directed toward the lovely cheetah.

There was moisture in Citra’s eyes and she nodded gratefully to the man who had single-handedly talked sense into a crowd that could have become a vicious mob; she would have to meet with him after the show and thank him personally. She stepped forward with a smile, motioning Sonya and Chetan to her sides, and all three bowed in unison toward their audience.

Chapter 11

A Fanciful Tale

Citra looked out through the bars of her cage wagon with a deep frown, her short fingers wrapped around the iron and her feline nose pressed up between them.

“Is this really necessary?” she asked in a plaintive voice. “Everyone already knows what I am now.”

Jake looked up at her apologetically as he clicked a padlock closed through the latch of her cage. “After that near-disaster, I don’t want to press our luck by repeating your performance and causing another riot. For your safety, it’s best if we keep in you in an exhibit cage for now. You can talk to the hands and visitors as you like, but I don’t want anyone able to get to you.”

“What is to keep someone from shooting me through the bars?” she asked, crouching down to look him in the eye. “Someone tried that before. If you lock the gate, I cannot get out to chase them away! I will be no more than a target sitting in here! I will not have the local minister to talk them down everywhere we go.”

“We’ll keep someone posted guard over you while we are in town,” he said. “When we are traveling, you can ride with me.”

“So why are you locking me up now?” she asked. “We are done here in Salina and you are breaking down the show for our move to Topeka. The townsfolk are not here now.”

Jake scratched at an itch beneath his mustache. “There’ll be too many distractions and it’ll be too easy for some local idiot to get at you,” he told her. “I don’t want anyone to try stealing you away in the night, so I will have Chetan watch over you until it is time to go.

Citra snorted, crossed her arms and turned her back on him. “I would rather ride with Chetan on his horse than with someone who would lock me up. Unlike you, he is nice.”

Jake sighed audibly, but then shook his head to clear his thoughts when he realized he was staring at her curvy backside. He cleared his throat and forced himself to look away.

“I’ll have Sonya bring you some clothing,” he said after a moment of uncomfortable silence.

Citra looked over her shoulder at him in amusement. “Why?” she asked with a smirk, “Now that you have seen me in clothing, does that mean that you now see me as naked?”

Jake cleared his throat again. “You already told me in the cave that you were naked,” he reminded her. “I just got used to seeing you like that.”

“You mean you got used to seeing me as an animal,” she retorted, getting down on all fours and turning to face him. Although she was comfortable in nothing but her fur, she did feel conspicuous without clothing whenever she was surrounded by others, particularly when standing upright. As she had told Sonya earlier, she did not have to wear clothes, but it was a lifelong habit that felt natural to her. The fabrics in this place did not breathe as well as her own garments did, but she did not have a choice in that matter.

Jake looked up at her looking embarrassed. “I suppose I did,” he admitted.

She lay on her belly so that her face was even with his. She reached out and tapped the brim of his hat with a finger. “I do not blame you, Jake. I am used to people here thinking of me as an animal too. It is a natural reaction when I am seen for the first time, even if it is known that I used to be fully human.”

“How long have you been a… a furry?”

Citra chuckled. “I have been a Fur,” she corrected, “for four years. It took the greater part of a year for the transformation, and then a little over three years afterwards to attend training for the job I was to do in this form.”

“What job was that?”

She smiled and shook her head. “That is what I cannot tell you, Jake. You would not understand.”

“Susan, I am tired of you treating me like a total idiot,” the man grumbled. “I’ve had some education and I’m a successful businessman. I am not stupid!”

“I never said you were stupid, Jacob – only that I do not know how to give you the answers you want so that you would understand them.”

Jake stared at her and then made a show of pocketing the key to her cage. “That is the same as calling me stupid,” he groused. “I will send your friends to attend you as I promised, but I need to get to work.” They could already hear Desmond’s bellowing voice outside the cheetah’s enclosure as he directed hands to start breaking down the grandstand bleacher boards.

“Jake!” Citra called as he turned his back to her and began walking toward the split in the curtains. “Do not leave me locked up!”

The man disappeared without another word and the feline captive slumped down on the straw of her cage with a pout.

***

The next morning, everything was packed up and ready to go. Everyone belonging to the show had rested up for the night and Jake’s wagon home led the troupe out across the Kansas countryside.

Despite their argument the night before, Citra sat beside the showman as he drove his team of horses. Being at the front of the line, this was the first time since she had come to the show that she was not breathing dust stirred up by other wagons, horses, bison and cattle. Although the seat beneath her was only thinly padded, it was still more comfortable than clinging to the sides of a cage over rough terrain.

When all was being prepared for the next move on the previous evening, Citra had had a steady line of visitors, mostly hands who had either seen her surprising coming-out performance, or had heard about it from other hands. Most came to gawk and stare, while others actually tried to engage her in conversation. It was hard to say if she had actually made any new friends that night, but it was certain everyone knew about her now.

The distance to Topeka would take the entire slow-moving caravan a week and a half to traverse the countryside, primarily due to the cattle, oxen and buffalo, so there would be plenty of time for her to mingle with those who might be interested in conversing. There might even be time to grow some of her scalp hair back before they get there, now that they were no longer cutting it for her.

Citra enjoyed the first day of travel, sitting quietly beside Jake and lazily looking out over the landscape. Her companion had barely said a few words to her since they had started out, and even though she had tried to engage him in chitchat, his responses were short, clipped and somewhat irritable. She knew he was still chafing from their exchange the night before.

She reached out and touched his arm. He glanced sideways at her, but otherwise remained tight-lipped.

“Jake,” she said, “I am sorry for what I said last night. Please forgive me.”

He looked at her again and grunted. “I do not like being called stupid,” he reminded her, “even if you did not say it in so many words.”

“Jake, you are not stupid and I did not mean to infer that you were. Again, I am sorry.”

For the first time that day, the man turned in his seat and looked at her directly. “Susan, you have told me time and again that I will not understand what you could tell me. Maybe I won’t and maybe I will, but why don’t you act like I have some smarts and do me the courtesy of giving me some kind of explanation.”

The feline studied him for a long moment, considering just what to say, and he took her silence to be another refusal. He snorted in frustration and turned back to his reins.

“Jacob,” she said at last, “I… will try to tell you what you wish to know.” He glanced over at her without turning his head, clearly disbelieving her words. He did not say anything in response and she knew without a doubt what he was thinking without having even a smidgeon of telepathy.

“As I have mentioned before, my name is Susan Carole Ann Foreman,” she began. “I am the daughter of Scotty and Amanda Foreman of Raton, New Mexico.”

“I’ve been through Raton,” Jake remarked, his gaze still out on the trail across the prairie grasses, “but it was called Willow Springs then, before the post office changed its name a few years back. I think they also called it Otero for a couple years.”

Citra nodded with a smile, remembering that bit of personal history from her home town. “Yes, that is where I was born,” she said.

“What year? Guessing the age of a cheetah is not one of my specialties as a showman.”

The cheetah swallowed hard before answering. “I was born at ten minutes after two o’clock on the afternoon of December 18, 2161, and I am now thirty-four years old.”

Jake turned his head slowly and then looked right into her large golden eyes. “Twenty-one sixty-one, huh?” he repeated in a tone that suggested he considered her answer nothing more than sarcasm at his curiosity. “Are you making fun of me now?”

Citra shook her head and put a hand over her heart. “It is the truth, Jake. I swear it.” He snorted again, but this time she took offense. “You asked to hear my story, but if you will not listen to me, I will simply shut up now and you will never hear it again.”

He swatted at a fly that was buzzing around his head and then looked back at her with narrowed eyes. “How am I supposed to believe anything you say if you claim you were born in 2161?” he asked in exasperation. “That is a long time away from now!”

“Yes, Jake, I am from a future time,” she replied calmly.

“That ain’t possible!”

“Neither is an anthrofelis acinonyx jubatus or what is more commonly called a Cheetah Fur in my time, yet here I sit beside you in 1892 having an impossible discussion.”

Jake turned back to the trail, consternation showing clearly across his face. He did not say anything for moments, but when he did, his voice was more controlled. “Continue.”

“I have already told you that I used to be fully human,” she reminded him. “On my thirtieth birthday, I volunteered for a transformation that would combine my physical make-up with that of a cheetah. By this time, that process had been in use for many years.”

“Rubbish. A pile of rot.”

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Okay, for the sake of the argument that I believe this… story… is possible, why would you do such a thing?”

Citra’s expression softened and she gestured out across the prairie with an outstretched arm. “You have plenty of wide open spaces now, Jake, but populations all across the Earth will increase over the years. At this moment, there are little more than fifty million people in the whole world, but in my time, there are over twelve billion people on the Earth!”

“Twelve billion! I do not even know how many zeroes are on that number.”

“That is a twelve with nine zeroes, Jake. Because there are so many people, we are running out of room and resources to keep everyone sheltered and fed. This is where I come in.”

“You? Is turning people into animals giving more food back to people? Do you eat less?”

Citra relaxed a little. At least he was now asking proper questions instead of simply giving her grief. “No, we have a different purpose, one that takes a lot of planning.” He did not respond, but merely waited for her to continue her fantastic tale. “Because there are so many people in this world, we now look toward other worlds for people to move to.”

“What do you mean, other worlds? There’s only one world!”

Citra smiled. “There is only one Earth, but Earth is just one world of many. We call them planets.”

The expression on Jake’s face almost looked as if she had just spoken heresy, and his mouth hung open in his disbelief. Before he could retort, however, she continued. “When you look up at the stars at night, Jake, what do you see? What are they?”

He snapped his jaw shut and turned back to the trail in time to guide his horses around a washed-out gully in the prairie. When they were again on even ground, he cleared his throat.

“The stars are just points of light for direction to guide us at night. Nothing more.”

“Each of those points of light is another sun like ours, Jake, only very, very far away.”

“Prepost—” He clamped his lips together and bit off his reply. “Go on.”

“By my time, we have devoted a lot of scientific research on the study of those stars, Jake, and we have discovered that some of them have their own worlds around them. Some of the stars are much larger and much hotter, though some are smaller and weaker than our own; those do not always have their own worlds or the ones they do have would not support life. However, there are some suns like ours that have worlds very much like our own Earth. It is to those places we have explored and discovered to be habitable with their own plants and animals. It is to those places that some of our people have settled, much like the western United States was settled at one time.”

Jake swept a hand in front of him, indicating the land around them. “They used to call this a New World,” he remarked.

“Exactly,” said the cheetah. “We have found many other new worlds, farther away than just on another continent, and although some of them are very Earth-like, there are many with harsh conditions and there have been difficulties staking a claim for a homestead.”

The showman nodded. “There were many hardships when these lands were settled. We overcame them in time, but it took tough men and women to endure and things were not easy at first. It is these things we try to remind folks with our show.”

“That is exactly right, and what we do on other worlds is similar.”

“How so?”

“Every time we discover a new world where we might settle, we first send in someone to explore the immediate area, and if things look good, then we will send in a small group of people to see if they can live with the land; they build homes, raise their cattle, try to grow crops to feed them all, and if they are there long enough, some even have children. Sometimes things look good at first, but conditions turn out to be harsher later with the change of seasons. Sometimes the settlers survive, sometimes they do not.”

Jake nodded again. “That is the way of things. Sometimes it takes hardy men to tame a land first before the weaker, more common folk can move in later.”

Citra smiled. “That is right. Sometimes, however, it takes people hardier than the toughest folk you could find. That is what Furs are for.”

“You’re a settler?” he asked with interest.

“Of a sort,” she answered. “One of my jobs is to go in alone and take a first look at the lay of the land before others join me. If what I report back is favorable, others follow along with tools, livestock and enough food to start out, but then it is up to us to learn what natural plants and animals can be safely eaten to sustain us. Furs like me were created so that we have the intelligence of humans with the hardy stamina and instincts of predatory animals. With that kind of combination, we are more likely to survive a harsh, new environment and we can learn as much as we can about the new place before the regular people can try to move in.”

Jake leaned back, keeping an eye on the terrain up ahead with the reins in one strong hand while he stretched the other out across the back of the seat. “I still do not know that I believe your story, especially about going to other… star-worlds,” he said with the crook of a smile, “but I think I’ve understood most of what you’ve told me. Was that so hard for you to tell me?”

“I have not answered all your questions, Jake. If you do not believe me so far, how are you going to believe what I have not yet told you?”

“How long does it take to get to these other plan… uh, worlds? I have never taken an ocean voyage, but I know those take weeks and sometimes months, depending upon which direction they are going and what kind of winds they face.”

Encouraged, Citra sat back in the seat and was suddenly conscious of the man’s arm behind her. She was about to lean forward again, but his fingers idly began petting at the fur of her shoulder nearest his hand; he did not look as if he knew he was doing it, so she relaxed and stared off across the prairie.

“Long before I was born, mankind made discoveries that allowed him to fly high above the Earth, even to the moon.”

“The moon? I remember hearing someone on a train talking about some far-fetched book written by a Frenchman about flying away to the moon. I never read it though. It sounded like someone’s fairy tale.”

“Was the author Jules Verne?”

Jake nodded. “That name sounds familiar. It might have been him.”

“Verne was only one of many writers who imagined flights to the moon, but it eventually became a reality. Man first had to learn to fly through the sky before he could learn to fly to the moon – or to the stars.”

“I seen me a balloon fly through the air once. Two fellows rode in a basket underneath it while they cooked the air inside with a fire. That sure was a big thing. I can’t imagine how big it must be to reach all the way up to the moon!”

Citra smiled again. “Mankind learned to make ships that flew higher and faster, and yes they were very big, but even the first journey to the moon took days to reach it.” Jake looked up into the partly cloudy sky, but did not see even the faint outline of the moon. Sometimes he could see it peeking out of the sky during the day, but the sun always dominated it, making the moon’s light dim and barely seen at times.

“A flying ship, eh? That must have been some sight.” Without a frame of reference, Jake could only visualize a large sailing vessel with full sails floating up to the moon among the clouds and stars, with giant hot-air balloons attached to its masts.

“The voyages of the first ships to other worlds just in our own neighborhood took years to reach them and many more to reach other stars,” Citra said in a quiet voice, “but then they went even faster, cutting the journey down to the most distant known world to mere weeks. Even that was not fast enough when we found other worlds that were ever farther away and other technologies had to be invented in order to make the trip.”

“That all sounds far-fet… uh, fascinating,” Jake murmured in a distracted tone, “but it still doesn’t explain how you got here. Did your sailing ship fly backward?”

The furry woman actually laughed aloud at that, making Jake frown. “Actually, I do not know how I wound up here, three hundred and three years before I left. It should not have been possible.”

Her statement made him blink. “What do you mean?”

“We learned how to create small wormholes through space, not through time. Instead of sending people on ships, we have something like a bridge between the Earth and whatever other world we were going to.”

“A worm… worm hole? Like in an apple?”

“I suppose that is where it originally got its name, since a wormhole is rather like a tunnel that a worm has eaten through an apple, only this is through space.”

“I don’t see how any critter could eat a hole in the air,” Jake muttered.

“That is one of those complicated things I do not know how to explain to you.” The man looked irritated at that, but dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “Instead of going around a mountain or a whole mountain range, you can save time by going right through a mountain using a tunnel, right? Let us just say that mankind learned how to drill holes into the sky so we could travel great distances in a shorter period of time.”

“Okay, that I understood. I rode on a train that went through a mountain once, but they’ve been blasting tunnels through mountains for a long time.”

“It is a similar principle, but instead of using picks, hammers and explosives, we create our tunnels using physics.”

“Fizziks?”

“That is right,” she replied casually, as if he knew what the word meant. “Although the method was discovered by mistake, it is a practice we have been using for about a decade now; although it uses a tremendous amount of power, it is economically cheaper than sending a ship. Sometimes there are forces in the universe that are unexpected and can cause problems to the system. Perhaps that is what happened to me.”

“So, you went through one of these worm tunnels, but instead of coming out on the other side of the mountain, some fizzik put you here instead?”

Citra raised her eyebrows and looked at the showman in surprise. Had he really understood what she had tried to tell him?

“Yes, Jake. Something like that must have happened to me.”

The cheetah fell silent for a while, lost in thought. What had happened to her? With all the advances of mankind over the ages, time-travel was not one of them. Even in her time period, it was nothing more than a facet of the imagination, often romanticized in popular fiction; the day she had come to this place and time had begun without any warning on what was to come.

***

Susan Foreman’s day started much like any other. She crawled out of bed, padded her way across the carpeted floor of the hotel suite and began her morning routine with a trip to the bathroom. The feline engineer rarely slept in anything since she had grown her own fur coat, so she did not have to strip out of anything like a nightgown when she stepped into the shower.

On a normal day, she preferred a floral shampoo and conditioner designed with the cheetah’s spotted fur in mind, but for today’s venture she would forgo anything that added a scent beyond her own; all of her personal possessions had already been boxed up and put into storage, so it was unlikely she had anything matching her own toiletries anyway. Unscented soap and unflavored mouthwash had been provided to her with the room, and although neither was much to her liking, they were necessary measures today.

After she stepped out of the full-body dryer and groomed her fur, she walked to the closet and found the single outfit that had been cleaned and left for her, a tan pair of furman shorts that fit loose over her fur with a hole below the back waistband for her tail, and a short white lab coat with a split up the back, also for her tail.

Before she left the suite, the cheetah female took a last look around. It would be some time before she would sleep in comfort again, but at least they had given her a plush suite of rooms for her last night on Earth.

When Susan reported for work an hour later, she was clean, dressed and well fed with a sumptuous breakfast. It would not do to begin her day on an empty stomach, and with a full belly she was feeling chipper and anxious to get started. She smiled and gave a brief finger wave to several technicians in the large warehouse, skirting around crates of equipment they were lining up in front of a large square frame with thick metal sides at the far end of the room from the hangar doors.

There was nothing but a wall behind an empty space of darkness on the other side of that frame, but a low frequency pulsing emanated from those shadows. She gave it only a brief glance as she headed to a nearby control booth, stepping over thick cables running between them on the floor. Inside were two men and a female bobcat Fur, all dressed in white lab coats matching the one she wore.

“Good morning, Susan,” Robin said with bright green eyes. “Did you sleep well?”

Susan returned the feline woman’s smile and stretched out her arms with exaggerated movement. “I did indeed,” she answered. “Good dreams, too!”

Dr. Benjamin Quarters looked up from a computer tablet in his hands and gave her a friendly nod. “Are you ready to see a new world?” the dark-headed man asked.

“I am! Have you established the connection already?” the cheetah asked, peering back toward the door frame outside through the glassteel windows of the booth.

“Briefly, just for calibration,” said Samuel Hawke, the other man who sat over a bank of control panels. The broad-shouldered Amerindian looked up at her with a wide smile, even though she was not looking at him. “The signal from the other end fluctuated a little, but it stabilized and we have a solid lock.”

Dr. Quarters set his tablet on a small folding table to the side and put his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “Since this is your first assignment with us,” he said to the cheetah. “State the situation and your mission for the record.”

Susan looked at him and folded her hands in front of her. She gave the project director her full attention with a nod. He knew everything she was about to recite, but this was for her benefit as a refresher.

“The two-year automated study of planetary body BR5.49, code name Hisashi, was completed six months ago and all partners of the Terran Colonization Coalition have approved immediate installation. A small automated ship consisting of nothing more than an interstellar engine boosting a cargo package was then sent out to the target world and weeks later, its cargo was deployed from orbit. Upon landing, a small TranDim Gate began transmitting a tachyon signal back to Earth to establish a wormhole bridge synchronized with the main TranDim Gate here, adjusted for planetary and stellar movement.” She glanced at the large frame outside for only a moment.

“Once Samuel reestablishes the bridge between our Gate here and the one on Hisashi, I am to go through alone, reconnoiter the area to make sure the other end does not spill out over a canyon, the side of a mountain or body of water, and to determine whether or not there are hostiles in the vicinity before I anchor the signal. Once anchored, I will transmit the go-ahead code back through the Gate so that Robin and the other technicians can come through with the tools and material we will need to build a larger TranDim Gate to receive furman colonists, supplies and equipment.”

She exchanged smiles with Robin Dayne, the Fur who would lead the furman technical team after her to construct the larger Gate. This was a first assignment for all the Furs involved in establishing a starter colony on Hisashi, an Earthlike world seventy-three light years away that had been named for its discoverer.

“Very good,” Dr. Quarters said with satisfaction. He had been involved in launching furman colonies to their worlds for the past two decades, but the first half of that time had been via huge colony ships instead of the trans-dimensional tachyon gatefold system that later made them obsolete. Rather than a faster-than-light interstellar vessel taking weeks or months to traverse the vast distances between star systems, the TranDim Gate involved no more time and physical action than simply passing through the portal from the transmitter to the receiver as one would walking through a door.

“Did I get it right?” she asked with an all-too-feral grin. She was an engineer with all the ready knowledge for her task and had no doubts of her own capabilities, but she could not keep the smile from her countenance at her excitement.

“Yes,” Dr. Quarters said with a chuckle. “You’ve passed with the proverbial flying colors.”

Susan wrung her hands together and looked down at Samuel. He was the primary engineer for the entire system and was also responsible for maintaining the connection between worlds, so her life was really in his hands. They had gone out a few times in the recent weeks leading up to this moment, but they had never really become more than just friends. It was likely due to their dissimilar species, but perhaps it was for the best. Once she stepped through the Gate, she would become a permanent resident of the feline colony she was helping to get started and would likely never see him again. She had met most of the other forty-nine Furs who would later follow her through the Gate to Hisashi and she felt there were a number of potential males that could warrant her attention.

Samuel stood up and opened his arms. “Let me have one last hug from my Citra,” he said, using the descriptive nickname shortened from citrakāyah that he had pinned on her at their first meeting. Despite the species she had become through anthro transformation, she had not known what the Sanskrit word meant at first, but had later come to understand its origin. She had never had a nickname before and enjoyed it when he used it when addressing her.

The slender cheetah slid into his arms and practically disappeared in the warm embrace of his strong arms. “I will miss you,” she said solemnly, a faint rumbling purr accenting it.

A small chime sounded from the console and the low pulse of the system increased in volume, signaling an established connection of the Gate. Samuel kissed her cheek without another word and then she stepped back with an embarrassed smile.

“This is it!” Robin whispered, almost as excited as she was herself. She gave Susan a brief hug and then retreated to a corner of the small control booth.

“I will see you soon, Robbie!”

“Good luck and Godspeed,” Dr. Quarters said with an outstretched hand. Susan took it gratefully.

“Thank you for everything, Ben,” she said with warmth. Then the time came for her departure. She left the booth and then walked straight to the Gate, the large square frame that dominated the back wall of the warehouse hangar.

Looking into the active Gate from the side, it looked little different that it had while powered down, but only when she stood directly in front of it, there was another world looking back at her through a smaller, rectangular window at its center.

The wormhole was only as large as both ends of the tunnel, and although the Gate transmitting on this end was large enough to drive a charter bus through, the receiving end on Hisashi was only big enough for one person to cross over, little larger than a standard doorway.

The small window in the center was framed with a faint, hazy rainbow around its edges, but through the middle was an unblemished countryside of gently rolling hills of lush and green, chlorophyll-based vegetation under a milky blue sky. Oases of tree-like flora dotted the hills and high cirrus clouds occupied the sky. There was a warm breeze flowing into the warehouse from unequal air pressure, and with it came a clean, fresh aroma mixed with the smell of a nearby unseen sea.

Susan grinned and began to step forward, but then checked herself. Without looking back at the control booth or at any of the other warehouse technicians watching her, she stripped off the lab coat, dropped it to her feet on the concrete floor at and then did the same with her furman shorts. Clad now only in her natural spotted fur, the cheetah dropped to all fours and peered back through the Gate. It would only take a few steps to reach that landscape, but to her it felt as if she was about to begin a long journey.

There did not seem to be any birds or wildlife that she could see, but that did not mean there would not be something in the vicinity when she stepped through. Disrobing was standard procedure and a Fur never really felt naked anyway, but when she emerged on the other side down on all fours without clothing or jewelry, this left little for a potential attacker with anything to hold onto. Her fur patterns would help her to blend in better while she is looking around and the absence of artificial scents from soaps or perfumes would help keep her from giving away her position if she had to go into hiding. Once the all-clear was given, Robin would bring her a bag with more clothing when she came through behind her.

She readied herself to run if necessary and then approached the Gate, stopping only a few inches from the threshold to let the wind blow through her wavy brown scalp hair. She took a last look toward her associates in the booth. Samuel and Robin waved and Dr. Quarters gave her a nod of approval. Then without further delay, she turned back to the Gate and walked through. The low pulse of the Gate silenced immediately.

She felt a brief ripple of energy through her fur and across her skin, and her eyes squinted in the sudden unfamiliar sunlight of a new place, but otherwise there did not seem to be any other physical manifestation of her journey. She stepped forward on dry yellow grass that crunched beneath her feet and felt the dry heat of a summer sun upon her back.

She blinked, standing still, and looked out across the flat and dusty landscape. This was not right. What she had seen through the Gate before stepping through had been different.

Susan turned toward the wormhole portal, but instead of looking back through into the warehouse, there was nothing behind her but miles of open prairie with a range of low mountains in the distance that wavered in the heat. She sniffed at the air and frowned at the dryness. There were no fresh aromas and not even the salty sea air she had scented through the Gate.

She swallowed and looked around again. She was completely alone in the middle of nowhere, and there should at least be the lander with the small Gate receiver; where she stood, it did not look as if such a device had ever been here.

She turned around, and around again, looking everywhere. The sun was directly overhead and she was starting to pant in the heat. It was as if she had stepped through onto a savannah where her kind had once lived back on Earth.

Earth... Was this Hisashi? That world was Earth-like in many ways, including different environments and terrains all across its surface. Had the Gate system hiccupped and dropped her onto another continent by mistake? She had never heard of such a thing happening before, and did not know if that was even possible. The end of the Gate came out at the receiver. There was no receiver here, so how had she gone anywhere at all?

She started panting heavily and not all of it was due to the heat. She felt light-headed and wavered on her feet, so she put her head down silently willing herself not to faint. She was alone. Utterly alone.

Naked without a single tool upon her, she had been dependent upon the supplies and devices that would have been included on the lander. She had no way to contact Earth; no way to transmit a recall signal.

She crouched down close to the ground, wondering what she should do. She had been trained to make a living on a strange, unfamiliar world, but most of that training had included some tools and equipment to start off with. She looked at the yellow grass in front of her nose, sprouting up from dry, reddish dirt. It looked like grass, but she could not be sure of anything. They had been taught that no matter where they went in the universe, an Earthlike world would have trees, grass and flowers of its own, whether they resembled Terran vegetation or not.

One thing was certain. She needed water. She had had a full breakfast not an hour before and could go days without food anyway, but she had to have water – especially in such a dry heat that was beating down on her.

There was movement in the corner of her eye. She raised her head and looked out across the land. A slow-moving dust devil stirred up dirt and grass less than a half mile distant. It presented no danger, but it was another reminder of the desolation around her.

She got up on two feet, shaded her eyes and began looking off in the distance in every direction around her. She saw nothing that might have been a river or lake, but a shimmering mirage of water in the direction of the mountains enticed her. Would she find what she needed there? Natural springs often issued from mountainous regions, so that would be her best chance at finding shelter and life-giving water.

***

Citra looked over at Jake and let her eyes refocus upon his face. He stared back at her with the expressions she had expected - incomprehension and disbelief. No matter, he had wanted to hear her story, so she continued.

“For a long time,” she said, “I really thought I was on Hisashi, the other world where I was supposed to have gone, but everything around me was too Earth-like and it all confused me. I found water to drink and food I could chase down and eat when I reached the mountains. There have been life forms on the other worlds we had settled that were similar to our own, but there were always differences due to the environments and ecosystems. Here, I found rabbits, squirrels, foxes, possum and deer that were not just similar, but identical to what I knew from Earth.

“Despite the conflicting knowledge in my head, I had been trained for survival in an alien environment, so I set out to make a life for myself, though wondering where the other colonists might be and why they did not come after me. I was reluctant to leave the place where I had arrived, in case a connection was reestablished, but the day was hot and long.

“I eventually decided water was more critical so I moved off. Wildlife was abundant and I am a good hunter, so I knew I would not starve, but it would have to be done entirely with tooth and claw, since I stepped through without any other weapons.

“The days began to run together as I roamed the countryside, hunting for food and seeking shelter against the inclement weather in caves like the one I took you to when we first met. In time, I was drawn to a pillar of smoke on the other side of the mountains and I came across a homestead; it was then that I knew I was somehow still on Earth.

“I could not get too close to the house due to a pair of dogs, but I was near enough to recognize a rancher, his family and the things around their house and barn. One of the things I found was a relatively recent newspaper written in English that had survived a burn pile and it was from that I learned that instead of 2195, I was now in 1892, somewhere out in the middle of the North American Great Plains.

“This date was more than a century and a half before Furs like me were ever genetically created for interstellar exploration, and I knew to reveal myself could get me shot and skinned or stuffed as an exotic animal. I had to stay hidden and I also began to suspect there would be no more of my own people arriving to join me or rescue me.  Life looked bleak and lonely until I met you, Jake.” She leaned against his arm across the back of the wagon seat and sighed aloud. “I took a chance when I saved you. If I had chosen wrong, you could have killed me as just another animal.”

Jake was quiet for a long time, giving his attention to guiding the horses across the prairie, but just when the feline began to feel impatient for a response, he looked over at her.

“Citra,” he said slowly, “you are unlike anyone I have ever known, and while I think that was quite a yarn you just spun up for me, I can see that you believe it all to be true. Perhaps it is, but there was very little of what you said that I understood.”

The cheetah opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a hand. “Yes, I know you’d already said you didn’t know how to explain it where I could understand, but I’m wondering if you didn’t just make up a lot of that for my benefit.”

Citra snorted and crossed her arms. “If I was going to make up something just for your benefit, mister, I would have given you something I knew you could swallow! Everything I told you was the truth, whether you understood it or not. Next time we stop, get a Bible and I will swear on it, just as I made those men do in my performance!”

“Citra…”

“If you do not believe me after that, I can always leave you to your show and go back out on my own. There are people who know about me now, so maybe I can survive a little while longer on my own without you! I could even try to make my way to Philadelphia to that zoo! At least there they would probably take care of me the rest of my life if my people never show up to take me home, and maybe I will not have to tell them a thing about where I am from or why I am here!”

“Citra, please sit down.”

In her indignation, the cheetah had not realized that she had gotten up onto two feet and the rocking of the wagon was threatening to topple her off. One of the wheels hit a rut in the dirt and she stumbled. Citra sat back down hard on the seat, her lips pressed tightly together, her arms crossed and the tip of her tail flicking with her agitation. She pointedly did not look at him, sitting on the forward edge of the seat so that she would not be leaning back against his arm.

“Citra,” Jake said again. His voice was calm and quiet, but he kept his eyes focused out across the terrain. She did not respond, so he removed his arm from the seat back and put a gentle hand on her arm. “Since you are willing to swear upon the Holy Bible that what you’ve said is true, I suppose I must believe you, no matter how fetched it must sound.” He sighed and then put both hands back upon the reins.

The feline’s posture relaxed, but she kept her arms across her bosom. “You believe me now?” she asked incredulously.

He nodded without looking at her. “I can’t deny what you are,” he said quietly, “even if I don’t know what you are. You saved my life when you could have just stood by and let that momma puma kill me. For that alone, I am indebted to you in that I can do no less for you.”

Citra let out a soft sigh and then scooted closer to him on the thinly padded wagon seat, putting a hand upon his shoulder. “Thank you,” she said with a quiet purr. “You have more knowledge and experience of the world around you than someone who lived three hundred years before you, and this is the same with me. I know it must be difficult for you to accept, but I swear I have never lied to you, Jake. This is why I did not want to tell you my story.”

The showman nodded and then looked aside at her. “My life must seem so simple to you,” he said. “Please forgive me for being stupid.”

“Jake, just because someone does not know everything that someone else does, that does not mean they – or you – are stupid. You just have not experienced the same things I have.”

“Okay then, will you forgive me for being stubborn and set in my ways?” he asked with a crooked smile. “I suppose I just didn’t want to believe there was any other world or time but the here and now.”

Citra returned his smile. “Yes,” she said, “I forgive you. You are my friend, and although you do not understand everything I have told you, I am thankful you are willing to listen.”

“Thank you, Susan.”

“You are welcome, Jacob.”

He suddenly felt amused, realizing that anytime he called her by her given name, she always responded with his given name. “I want to know everything about you,” he added after a moment. “I may not be able to comprehend what you might tell me, but you are the most interesting woman I’ve ever known and I want to know you better.”

The cheetah narrowed her large golden eyes over a smile. “Oh, you do, do you?” she said playfully. “Does this mean you now see me as a woman instead of just a talking cat?”

“I suppose I do, ma’am,” Jake replied with a tip of his hat. “Although you don’t have much of a chest.”

Citra looked up at him in surprise at his frank remark, but then gave him a mischievous smirk. “That is natural with a Fur,” she informed him with a snicker. “Down on four feet, can you imagine me trying to run with a large chest between my forelegs?”

Jake coughed and sputtered suddenly at the boldness of her words, his neck and face instantly turning red. The feline woman laughed aloud at his embarrassment and clapped her hands together in delight. “Yes, I suppose you can imagine that!”

The showman muttered something beneath his breath that she did not catch, but then the riding companions shared a lighthearted chuckle, lapsing into comfortable silence as the horses pulled the wagon over the rolling terrain.

The pair of them had been so focused on their discussion and argument that neither of them had realized that someone had been riding on his horse parallel to the wagon and had heard everything they had said. Chetan had smiled inwardly at their playful banter, but Citra’s story filled his head full of endless thoughts.

Chapter 12

A Generous Offer

When the first of the wagons arrived just outside of Topeka there was already a large crowd awaiting them. Jake was used to seeing a few curious onlookers anytime they pulled into another town, but never a large gathering such as this; there were almost enough folks there that they could have filled up the bleacher boards had they been set up. He called for a halt in the large procession and pulled his horses to a stop. A small group broke off and approached the nearest wagon, which happened to be his.

“Hello,” Jake said in a friendly tone, keeping his seat with the reins in his hands. “Is there something the matter?”

A well-dressed man in his fifties shielded his eyes beneath the brim of a short top hat and smiled up at him. “By chance, are you with Jake Harrison’s Wilder West?” he asked with the voice of an orator.

“That’s correct. I’m Jake Harrison.”

The man put his hands together. “I am Ross Cofranco, the mayor of Topeka, and I wish to welcome you to the Kansas state capital!”

Jake tied off his reins and then climbed down off the wagon. He wiped dusty hands off on his trousers, approached the man and held out a hand with a smile. “Thank you, sir. It’s my practice to visit the mayor every time we visit a new town, but I didn’t expect you to take time out of your busy schedule to greet us out here personally.”

Mayor Cofranco nodded and hooked a thumb behind the lapel of his suit coat. “I received a wire from Mayor Caverns of Salina about your recent visit there. It seems there was an interesting event that happened he deemed necessary to inform me about.”

Jake frowned, wondering if they might be refused into Topeka due to the ‘demon’ in their midst. It was fortuitous that he had had Citra retire to the inside of his wagon home an hour earlier; he wanted people to pay to see her and did not want anyone to get a free peek when they pulled into town. If there was going to be a riot due to her presence, it was good she was not currently in sight.

He looked around at the rather large crowd and felt uneasy. “Sir,” he said with as much of a smile as he could muster, hoping to diffuse the situation, “I assure you that everything was under control and that we don’t wish to cause any troub—”

The mayor laughed and held up a hand in a disarming manner. “As you can see, word has gotten around and a great number of our fine folk would wish to see this new… attraction to your show. I am eager to see this special cat of yours, myself – if indeed it is real.”

Jake presented the mayor with a genuine smile beneath his mustache. “Sir, I assure you there is nothing fake portrayed in any part my show. If you would like a moment to talk with Citra Kayah in private, I can arrange a meeting just as soon as I can start my folks setting up in your gatherin’ field.”

Cofranco cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind,” he countered, “we would like to see this cat now, before you get set up.” He did not say anything more, but Jake got the sudden impression that if he did not like what he saw, the mayor might turn them away before they so much as dusted off their boots.

“Yes, sir,” he said, still smiling and with a nod. “If you will follow me, she’s right this way.”

“Is it safe?” the mayor asked warily.

Jake nodded again. “Quite safe, sir. My Citra is far more intelligent and better behaved than many women you might know. You have nothing to fear from her.”

“Thank you,” the politician replied, casting a quick glance back at a well-dressed woman at the front of the crowd. Jake gestured for him to follow, but suddenly realized the entire crowd was surging forward. He stopped and raised both hands toward them. “I’m sorry, folks, but this meeting is just for his Honor, the Mayor. If we are allowed to set up the show here in your good town, you all will have plenty of opportunities to see my special lady-cat then.”

There were groans and grumbles at this, but the mayor faced his people with a wide, campaign-like smile. “Patience, friends. As Mr. Harrison has explained, this first meeting is just so I may satisfy my curiosity as to his claims. I should be back momentarily.” He turned back to Jake. “Shall we continue?”

“Follow me.” The mayor was prepared to walk to the end of the caravan if need be, but Jake stopped just at the other end of the boxed wagon he had just been driving. He reached beneath the bottom edge, untied a rope and then swung down a hinged set of steps beneath the door into his traveling home. He locked them in place with a small wedge of wood and then stepped up to the door.

He knocked on it twice and then opened the door just a crack. “Citra,” he called inside, “the esteemed Mayor of the great town of Topeka, Kansas, would like to meet you. May we come in?”

There was a brief hesitation and then Cofranco heard a quiet voice answer, “I am decent. You may come in.”

***

Ten minutes later, Mayor Cofranco stepped down out of the wagon and closed the door behind him. He swallowed hard, pulling a handkerchief from pocket and daubed his forehead with it. He walked around the wagon to the waiting crowd and put a smile on his face for their benefit.

He looked out across the expectant expressions and tucked both hands into his pockets. “My friends,” he said in a carrying voice, “I have seen this Citra Kayah with my own eyes, and I have spoken with her.” There were murmurs throughout, but the dignitary continued. “I admit that it was a little disconcerting to have a large spotted cat akin to a cougar sitting up, wearing women’s clothing and talking to me, but she was, indeed, quite able to hold an intelligent conversation with me. I was allowed to touch her and I have determined for myself that she was not someone made up in some sort of costume.”

He reached out to the well-dressed woman who had stood by his side when the caravan arrived and she took his hand. “She — Miss Citra Kayah — expressed a desire to speak to you as well, my dear,” he said to her.

“With me?” she repeated uncertainly, putting her other hand up to her throat. “I’m not sure I am up to this, Ross.”

The mayor nodded. “You have nothing to fear, my dear,” he said. “Come with me.”

After a hesitation, the woman acquiesced and allowed herself to be led to the back of the wagon. Jake was standing beside the steps and lightly tipped his hat in courtesy.

“Ma’am,” he said quietly, holding out a hand to her. “If you will step up into the wagon, my friend Citra would like to meet you.”

She gave him a false smile, but presented her hand to him to help her up the steps. The door was ajar slightly, but she knocked lightly on the frame.

“Hello?” she said tentatively. “I am Carolyn Cofranco. You wished to see me?”

“Please come in,” answered an odd voice.

Carolyn opened the door and stepped up into the dark single room. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom, and by then her husband had joined her, his hat in his hands. Knowing the interior was small, Jake remained outside to give them space, but listened in through the open doorway with his elbows resting on the top step.

Seated on the edge of the small bed mattress was a creature nothing like the mayor’s wife had ever seen before. Citra wore a pale-yellow blouse and a tan skirt with her legs hanging to the floor. She was unshod, as there was nothing available that could ever fit such digitigrade feet, and her hands were folded together in her lap. She wore no hat, but there was a Stetson on a folded blanket beside her on the bed. Upon her head was short growth of dark brown scalp hair that had a bit of natural wave to it. Although the cry lines upon her face should have made her look somber, she was smiling pleasantly and her large golden eyes were shining bright.

“Hello,” said the cheetah. “My name is Citra Kayah.”

Carolyn felt herself growing suddenly faint, despite the fact that she had been told what to expect. The mayor grabbed a small chair from the corner at his side and set it behind his wife.

“Here,” he said, “have a seat.” The woman sat down gratefully and removed the bonnet she wore, not taking her eyes off the feline.

“You… you’re real…” she said, almost trying to convince herself of her own words.

“Yes, ma’am.” The cheetah stood up and took a step toward the woman, holding out a short-fingered hand. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance.” Carolyn took the proffered hand automatically, but then marveled at the feel of the cat’s padded palms. She examined the hand-paw a moment more before she shook it gently once. Citra returned to the bed and sat down, looking back at her expectantly.

“May… I ask you a question?” queried the woman.

Citra nodded. “What is it you wish to know?” she replied.

“Were you sent here by the devil?”

“Carolyn!” the mayor scolded instantly. His wife flinched, but seemed afraid to look away from the cat.

The cheetah was taken aback by the question, but she cleared her throat, willing herself to stay calm. “No, ma’am,” she answered in an unruffled voice. “I am just another of God’s creations, given a little help from mankind.”

“Does this mean you believe in God?”

Citra smiled warmly. “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

Carolyn felt a little calmer, seeing what she believed to be truth in this creature’s eyes. “You don’t seem evil,” she remarked.

Citra chuckled. “I have never felt evil in my life,” she said, “except, perhaps when I used to tease my favorite cousin unmercifully for being shy around girls.”

“That appears to be something we shared,” the woman said with a laugh. “You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I was my younger brother’s personal terror growing up for that very reason! I’m sure that he thought I was evil back then, but now we are the best of friends.”

Citra laughed. “Likewise, with my cousin. We do not see one another often, but when we do there is great affection between us and we often sit for hours just reminiscing about our days as children. For someone who used to be shy around women, he now has a lovely wife and four daughters.”

Carolyn looked surprised. “Cats have wives and husbands?”

The cheetah laughed again. “Families are important,” she replied without trying to explain genetic engineering. Her vague response did not specifically answer the woman’s question, but it seemed to placate her curiosity.

“I don’t know what you are or how you came to be,” said the mayor’s wife, “but you seem genuine. How did you wind up in Mr. Harrison’s company?”

“She saved my life from a momma cougar in the foothills of the Wichita Mountains, down in the Oklahoma Territories,” Jake said from the steps of the doorway.

“In return,” Citra added, “he is saving my life with protection by letting me join his show.”

“Protection?” asked the mayor. “Protection from what? How?”

“Look at me, sir. Before I met Mr. Harrison, I was in constant danger from hunters who might want to make me their prize fur trade. As long as I am with the show, I have relative safety from such people.” Then she smiled again, fingering the hem of her skirt. “Since he feeds me, I do not have hunt down my food every day and I also get to wear such nice clothes.”

“What did you wear before?” Carolyn asked curiously.

Citra held out her arms to show off her fur. “Just my spots, ma’am.” Ross Cofranco coughed into a fist and his wife averted her eyes for a moment. “There is no need to feel embarrassed, please. I am quite concealed beneath my natural fur, but I prefer the covering of nice clothes.”

“I have never seen a cat like you before,” mused the mayor. “What are you?”

“Specifically, the feline part of me is called a cheetah. If you like, the proper name for me is a citrakāyaḥ, which is where I get my stage name from. However, if you are interested in knowing more about who and what I am, you can come watch the show. A good bit of my presentation is imparting information about what I am to the audience.”

Carolyn turned and looked at her husband. “I don’t know about you, Ross, but I’m convinced that Mr. Harrison was telling the truth about her.”

The dignitary hooked his thumbs behind the lapels of his coat and nodded. “I am too,” he said. He turned behind him to look down at Jake. “Mr. Harrison, I see no reason why you can’t set up your show in the south field just outside of town. I would like to personally welcome you, your special friend and your people to Topeka; my wife and I would very much like to see your show.”

Jake reached up to shake hands with the man. “I thank you kindly, sir.” The mayor stepped back out of the wagon to iron out a few details with him, but Carolyn turned back to the cheetah as she put her bonnet back in place atop her head.

“May I make one little, personal request, please?” she asked.

“Please do.” Citra already knew what she wanted and smiled encouragingly.

“May I touch your fur?”

The feline chuckled and held out an arm. “I am afraid my fur is a little dusty from our trail ride, ma’am, but yes, you may.”

Carolyn hesitated. “Do you… bath with just your tongue like other cats?”

Citra smiled. “Only if there is no water available.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice so it would not carry to the men outside. “Between you and me, ma’am, I prefer a luxurious bath with lots of bubbles and I am hoping to clean up in one as soon as I can.”

***

Moments later, the mayor and his wife stepped outside and approached the expectant crowd. Instead of repeating his earlier announcement, he nudged his wife. She looked out at the townsfolk, many of whom she knew, and gave them a confident smile.

“I am pleased to tell you that Mr. Harrison’s claims concerning the new addition to his show are true.” Murmurs buzzed through the crowd, but she continued undaunted. “My husband and I have met with her and we both believe that she is real and that neither of us believe a word of the rumors from Salina that she is evil and a demon of the devil.”

“Can we see it, this cat?” someone called out.

“We want to see her too!” said someone else. There were other similar remarks, so Jake stepped up beside the mayor and waved his hat in the air to get everyone’s attention. When there was relative quiet again, he placed the hat back on his head and flashed everyone a wide showman’s grin.

“I am pleased to hear that you fine folk are so eager to see my Citra Kayah,” he said in a carrying voice, “but you will need to attend Jake Harrison’s Wilder West tomorrow to meet her.”

There were several cries of outrage and demands to see her now, but the mayor held up a hand for quiet.

“My friends,” he said in a necessarily loud voice, “the one you wish to see is a part of Mr. Harrison’s show, and as such, you will all have to pay to see her as is proper for any other part of the production!” There were more grumbles, but he added, “Although Carolyn and I have already met with her, we both plan to attend the show and we’ll be paying our due as well. For now, these folks have been on the trail for days and I’m sure they would like to rest up before they set up their show.”

There were a few more muttered remarks of disappointment, but at the mayor’s behest, the crowd began to disperse. Cofranco turned to Jake and gave him a few words of thanks, and then he and his wife left with the others.

***

At the end of the next night, Citra, Sonya and Chetan repeated their rehearsed performance. However, before the Fur revealed herself with spoken lines, they had added a race between Chetan on his palomino mare and the cheetah to show off her great speed, a feat that impressed a great number of folks in the audience as well as many of the show hands when she outran the horse across the field. The palomino could have outdistanced her in a longer run since the cheetah could only maintain top speed in short bursts, but they had no time or desire to stage such a race.

Although undressing in front of others to prove her validity had not originally been part of the planned routine, there was no denying the impact it had given during the performance in Salina. They now made it a part of the sequence for greater believability and again took locally-known members from the audience. The participants could later be interrogated by their own friends and family to attest to what they had experienced, further spreading the word.

Citra, Sonya and Chetan took a bow to thunderous applause at the end of the show, and this time there had been no heckling, threats of riot or the need of a local minister to talk them down. Apparently word of the mayor’s endorsement had spread throughout the capital city and the people of Topeka were a little more accepting of what they had seen; either that or the disbelievers simply kept quiet during the performance.

Afterward, Citra retired to her exhibit cage so that others could stare and gawk at her, but this time there were many who asked questions of her, some merely to hear her strange accented voice. Jake had posted several trusted men within the curtained enclosure to assure her safety, and all had been given a detailed description of the man with the bowler hat and the pheasant feather to make sure he had not followed them again. There was no sign of him this time.

At last, the evening wore down and the crowds dispersed. The night had gone well and attendance had brought in a larger-than-usual amount to the coffers. Part of it was likely due to the state capital having a larger population than the towns they had visited in recent weeks, but Jake was of the mind that his special lady-cat was another part of the reason. They would be there for two evenings of shows, so if the second night here brought in as much as it had this time, they would do well.

“I was against it at first,” Emmett Desmond murmured as he kicked back in the solitary wooden chair in Jake’s wagon, “but I have to admit your little catgirl has been a good draw.” He looked over at his boss, who was relaxing against a headboard sitting cross-legged with the day’s take counted out before him on the mattress.

“I still don’t think a cheetah belongs in a show trying to remind folks what the old west was like when the old west didn’t have cheetahs,” Emmett added, wiping a handkerchief across the balding crown of his head beneath his hat, “but the visitors don’t seem to mind.”

Jake scribbled a figure inside a ledger and then gathered up the money, placing it all inside a wooden cigar box containing the night’s take. He set the box on top of the book and then stretched out his legs. He would add the money to the company money pouch under the bed later.

“I appreciate your understanding, Emmett,” he said. “She might not be something naturally found during the expansion across the west, but it wasn’t uncommon for explorers to see things they’d never seen before.”

Remembering something Citra had mentioned, he added, “Just look at the horses we use. They were not originally native to these lands, but look at us now. Horses are now just as much a part of these United States as anything else. Heck, even most of the people here didn’t start out here, but were immigrants from Europe! Who’s to say that Citra’s people won’t be part of us later, like the Indians or the Mexicans? Maybe she’s just the first.”

“Maybe,” Emmett mused, scratching at his thick mustache.

Jake looked around the small room. “I need to send a wire ahead to Kansas City to get a travel wagon built for her so she’ll have a place to stay instead of her exhibit cage during her off-hours.”

Emmett looked up. “I thought she was staying here with you.”

Jake’s expression darkened. “Why would you think that?” he growled.

“You’ve been spending a lot more time with her than you used to,” the balding man answered, his small eyes reflecting the light of the lantern hanging from a hooked nail overhead. “She sleeps in here when we’re on the trail and also when you’re staying at a hotel in town, so we just assumed she slept in here the rest of the time too.”

“We?”

“There’s been talk,” the man boldly admitted. “What you and your cat do in here together is your business, but it hasn’t escaped notice that you’ve become awfully fond of her.”

Jake’s neck turned red as his blood pressure went up at this revelation. “You… you think that I’ve been sleeping with an animal!” He sputtered for a moment and bolted off the bed to stand in front of his associate, both hands balled into fists. “That’s preposterous!”

Emmett raised one hand in surrender, but did not retract his words. “So, you admit she’s an animal,” he retorted. “You’ve been talking up a lot of folk about her human qualities that everyone’s figured you don’t see her as a talking cat anymore!”

Jake snorted, deflated, and then thumped the brim of Desmond’s hat lightly. He leaned back against his bed, crossing his arms. “Listening to her talk, I think I sometimes do lose sight of that,” he admitted. “She’s definitely intelligent and interesting to talk to, but I’ll tell you straight that I have not slept with her!”

Emmett crossed his own arms. “Well, that relieves me to hear you say so. I think she should just sleep in the exhibit cage, but if you want her to have her own wagon, I’m sure that would stop a few of the wagging tongues. She’ll need a team of horses and someone to drive it for her when we’re on the trail.”

“Chetan can drive it for her,” Jake muttered, picking up a pillow that had fallen to floor when he had gotten to his feet. “She gets along with him as well as anyone else, and we have plenty of horses.”

Several light knocks on the door interrupted their conversation. Emmett reached out from his seat and tripped the latch, pushing the panel open with a finger.

“Yes?” he asked the silhouette standing just outside on the ground. Darkness had already fallen outside, but light from Jake’s lantern illuminated the man’s face. He was large man with a head full of dark brown hair that spilled out from beneath a hat nearly the same color and his clothing was nothing special, but he carried himself well. He looked up into the wagon with large hazel eyes.

“I was told I could find Jake Harrison here,” he replied.

“You’ve found him,” Jake answered, surreptitiously laying the pillow he had picked up across the ledger and money box on the bed. “What can I do for you?” He went to the door and then stepped down to the ground. Emmett got to his feet but remained inside, keeping an upper vigil over the stranger who stuck out a hand toward Jake.

“My name is Will Thornton,” he said with a pleasant expression when Jake took his hand warmly. “I represent Longhorn Tom’s Wild West Extravaganza and I come on behalf of Thomas K. Johnson. We are currently in Baldwin City and Mr. Johnson sent me to meet you.”

Jake nodded. “I have heard of Johnson’s show,” he remarked in a neutral tone. “Have you come to compare ours to his?”

Thornton shook his head. “No, but I do admit that I’ve looked over everything you’ve had to offer tonight and agree that you have done well reminding your visitors how things used to be taming the Wild Western lands.”

“Thank you. If not to compare our shows, what’s your business?”

Thornton removed his hat and held it in his hands. “Mr. Johnson has heard about the newest… addition to your show and has seen the potential draw of such a creature; after seeing your show and exhibits tonight, I have to agree. He has authorized me to extend a generous offer to purchase the animal from you, the funds drawn locally from a bank here in Topeka.” He named a figure and Emmett whistled in surprise.

Jake pursed his lips, but shook his head. “I appreciate such a gracious offer,” he said after a moment, “but my cheetah is not for sale.”

Thornton nodded, but without hesitation said, “I’m sure we can reach an agreement, Mr. Harrison,” and then he named another price, substantially higher than the first offer. Emmett was making choking noises in the background, but Jake ignored him. The amount he had been offered made him swallow with difficulty, but he stood his ground.

“Thank you,” he said hoarsely, “but my cheetah is not for sale at any price. There is more value in her than money.”

Thornton’s smile faded just a little, but he maintained his composure. He named a third price, noted as his final offer, this time making Jake’s eyes nearly bug out in surprise. The offer had gone up to a quarter of the value of his entire operation, and he silently wondered how Johnson had accumulated so much money that he could use it for a single purchase.

Emmett was suddenly at his side, so excited that if the man had possessed a tail of his own, it would have been wagging so hard as to alter the local weather patterns. He looked at Thornton and then to Jake. “A moment alone, please,” he said. Thornton nodded with a shrewd smile, instantly recognizing the effects such numbers had over men.

Desmond led Jake around the corner of the wagon and then pressed in close to his boss’ ear. “Take it!” he whispered excitedly. “I know you like her and all, but you said it yourself that she’s an animal. It’s not like you’d be selling your sister or someone into slavery.”

“Emmett…” Jake whispered back darkly, “you don’t know what you’re saying!”

“I know exactly what I’m saying! You’ve bought and sold horses, longhorn cattle and buffalo without as much as a second thought. You’re a business man, Jake. Think of what that kind of money could do for the show! We have wagons, animals and even people who need replacing just from all the travelin’ we do, and you could make a better life for those who work for you! She can talk and she’s a curiosity, but she’s – just – an – animal. Sell her to him! She all but fell freely into your lap and you won’t lose a penny of investment by selling her! That amount of money would more than make up for the extra we made tonight with her performance!”

Jake listened to Emmett’s arguments with a deep frown. He had come to value and rely upon this man’s judgment over the years they had worked together, and he actually agreed with a lot of what he was saying, but he felt an inner turmoil that was foreign to him.

At last, he gave Emmett a nod and then both of them walked back to the visitor. Thornton recognized the looks on their faces and smiled smugly, hooking his thumbs behind both lapels of his traveling coat.

Jake cleared his throat, putting both hands into the pockets of his trousers, and then looked at him. “I am honestly surprised that Mr. Johnson would be so liberal with such an offer for something he’s never seen with his own eyes and have only heard from hearsay. Be that as it may, I cannot fault a man who has the means to get what he desires where all parties would benefit. However, I’m afraid I must decline your offer, Mr. Thornton.”

It was hard to tell who was the more surprised, Desmond or Thornton, but Jake’s right-hand man was making noises that could be compared to a faulty steam engine as he coughed and sputtered. The other man’s jaw had dropped and it took a moment before he snapped it shut with an audible clack of teeth. Emmett clamped a hand on his associate’s arm, but Jake ignored him.

“Please tell Longhorn Tom that I genuinely appreciate his fine offer,” he said, “but the little lady-cat once saved my very life and I am beholden to keep her safe with me. The money would have helped us greatly, but by keeping her, I’m no worse off than I was before your arrival; I’m happy with the way things are going with my show.”

Thornton’s lips pressed together tightly, but only for a moment. He tipped his hat to Jake and took a step backward. “I will convey your message to Mr. Johnson,” he said calmly, “but if you reconsider and decide you would prefer the money, I assure you that the amount of this offer will not be so generous next time.”

“I will remember that,” Jake said in a neutral tone. Thornton turned without another word and strode off into the darkness.

“I thought you’d decided to sell!” Emmett hissed. “That was a lot of money!”

Jake looked at him calmly. “I never said I would,” he reminded him. “I appreciate your recommendations, but as I told this yahoo, Citra is not for sale.”

Emmett Desmond growled deep in his throat and then spat on the ground between them. “You used to listen to me, but I can see how much you value my recommendations now!” he responded angrily. He did not wait for Jake to reply, so he stormed off into the darkness, leaving the owner of the show standing alone in his decision.

Chapter 13

Tooth and Claw

“I have something for you.”

Jake approached Citra’s exhibit cage that was still surrounded by the tall canvas curtain while the sounds of the show grounds being dismantled could be heard all around. The second night had gone as well as the first and now that everyone had had a good night’s sleep, things were being packed away for their next ride to Kansas City. As before, Citra had been locked up in her cage for protection and Chetan had been excused from other duties to watch over her. Anyone else who had been assigned to guard duty would have balked and grumbled, but Chetan genuinely enjoyed his time with the Fur.

The Indian was leaning casually upon the baseboard the cage rested upon, quietly talking with the cheetah when the owner of the show passed through the split in the curtain.

Emmett Desmond had not spoken a word to him since their argument the night before, but Jake had said nothing to Citra about the incident that had concerned her future with the show. In hindsight, he wished he had ordered Emmett to say nothing of the offer to anyone else, but it might be too late now. He had purposely not given much attention to the rest of his employees that morning, personally suspicious of angry stares he might get back for passing up so much money if the word got out.

Citra now had fans among his people, but to some the newness of the curiosity surrounding her would wear off and then she would be just another exhibit in the show, even if she could dress up and talk. When that happened, there would be a lot of what-ifs concerning the money, and people often got disgruntled when the subject of money came up.

“Good morning, Citra,” he said, “and Chetan.” The Indian merely gave him a courteous nod, but the feline crouched near the gate of her cage with a smile.

“Good morning, Jake,” she said. “What is this gift you have for me – the key to my cage?”

Jake chuckled. “No key, but something just as good.” He held up what looked to be an ordinary padlock that looked identical to the one which kept her gate locked.

“I do not understand,” she remarked. “Is this a joke or are you really going to put two locks on my door?”

The man laughed and gave her a big smile. He held up the lock so she and Chetan could see it better. It appeared to be locked together, but when he applied pressure to pull it apart, the tumblers released and it snapped opened.

“It looks like a regular padlock to anyone who might come in by your cage,” he explained, “but I had my smith file down the tumblers so that you could open it yourself if something happened.” He snapped it back together and it looked sufficiently locked.

Citra smiled when he pulled the key to the real padlock from a pocket and switched them out. “Thank you,” she said. “This will come in handy if I need to get out to relieve myself.”

The man turned red and then cleared his throat. “Ah, yes,” he murmured. “You can let yourself out for that, just keep an eye out for strangers. I have reason to believe there may be others who might want you themselves.”

“Others? Who?”

“Uhm, just others who might be envious that we have you to draw in more visitors. You know, you said this would happen, even when you and I were back in the cave.”

“What would happen?”

“When you first asked me to let you join my show,” he said with a smile, “you said that you could help bring in more customers, and in doing so would bring in more money.”

Citra smiled, looking over at Chetan. “See?” she said. “I do have some value here.”

Jake swallowed when she was not looking. She had no idea what her value was to him, but Emmett surely did. He remembered something and then fingered the bars of her cage. “I’ll have something else for you once we reach Kansas City,” he said. “How about a travel wagon of your own like the ones that me and my main performers live in?”

Citra’s eyes lit up. “My own place?” she asked with emotion in her voice at first, but then she narrowed her eyes at him. “What is the matter? You do not want me curled up at the end of your bed anymore?”

Chetan blinked. “You sleep in his bed with him?” he asked boldly.

“No, she does not!” Jake said quickly with an exasperated look at the cheetah. After the conversation he had had with Desmond, he did not want such rumors circulated further, so he turned to the Indian in earnest. “She rides with me on the trail and only sleeps in my wagon while I’m driving! When we stop on the way each night, she’s been sleeping here!”

He tapped the side of the exhibit cage and then spat on the ground at his feet. He looked at the feline, who was quietly laughing at him, and added, “I was trying to be courteous by offering her a comfortable wagon of her own, but if she’s going to act like this, maybe she’s better off here!”

An impish twinkle appeared in Chetan’s eyes. “Cold nights better with warm fur blanket,” he said.

“I have a warm blanket to sleep with,” Jake grumbled, “but it’s not made of her fur — nor is she in it!”

Both Citra and Chetan laughed openly at his discomfiture and finally Jake heaved a heavy sigh. “Listen,” he said to her after a moment. “Do you want the wagon or not?”

The cheetah wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. “Yes, Jake. That would be nice, but you will have to teach me to drive the horses, or will it be hooked up to the back of your wagon?”

“Chetan can drive it for you, if he is willing.”

The Indian tilted his head. He did not have a wagon of his own to call home, typically sleeping out under the stars on a bedroll or beneath a small tent when the weather was inclement. Fortunately, the show did not travel during the colder months, and for those who did not have family or homes to go to, Jake owned a ranch in Texas where any of them could stay through the winter as needed. Although Chetan’s life was not as prosperous as some were in the company, it was not in his nature to begrudge Citra her good fortune.

“I would be honored,” he told the feline. Citra reached out through the bars of her cage and lightly caressed his face.

“Thank you,” she said. “You are a good friend.”

There were sudden shouts from the other side of the cheetah’s curtain and Jake listened for a moment as his workers argued about how something dismantled for the move. He frowned at his companions and then scratched at his sideburns.

“I sent ahead a wire to Kansas City for your wagon,” he said to the feline. “With luck, it should be ready by the time we arrive.”

“Thank you, Jake. It is appreciated.”

“You’re welcome, my lady-cat. Well, I best be getting back to business.” He tipped his hat to Citra and then nodded to Chetan before he left the circle. The canvas curtain would be coming down soon, but for now the two friends still had a few moments of privacy.

The Indian looked up at the cheetah. “Are you sleeping in the bed with him?” he asked in a quiet, covert tone now that they were no longer needling Jake.

Citra smiled at his bold question, but shook her head. “No, I just like to tease him when I can,” she answered truthfully. “Jake is too proper to sleep with a lady.”

Chetan frowned. “He is no stranger to a woman in his bed,” he informed her.

“What do you mean?”

“After wife died, Mr. Harrison very grieved. Looked for comfort in others, usually every town we visit.”

“I see. Does he sleep with anyone in the company? Sonya, perhaps?”

“No, only those he does not know. I think he is afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Forming attachments to anyone.”

The female cat fell silent for a moment, lost in thought. Then she looked at her friend. “Has he done this since he brought me here?”

Chetan shrugged. “Maybe, but I do not think so. He always stays in hotel in towns we visit. Sometimes I take message from Mr. Desmond to his hotel and always there is smell of perfume in his room; I have noticed none lately.”

One of the large panel curtains was suddenly pulled down off of its frame and a man on a ladder on the other side dropped it to the ground. Two others began gathering it up to spread out and fold for storage. Chetan excused himself and went to see if they needed help.

Citra settled onto the straw and put her head down on her hand-paws. There were more than a few interesting thoughts floating about inside her head and she let a small smile cross her face.

***

On the second day on the trail toward Kansas City, the company halted for the night just a few miles outside the small town of De Soto, where they settled down beside the Kansas River that paralleled their route. They were more than halfway to their destination and they were fortunate in that the weather had been mild along their journey, but there was a small line of thunderheads looming up far to the southwest that occasionally lit up with internal lightning which could be seen even against the evening sun. The low-pressure system pulled the air in a steady breeze and at times it got downright windy across the plains.

It was anyone’s guess if they would have rain during the night as the storm system was small and could bypass them altogether, but it was a possibility it could move in right over the top of them. One of the canvas curtain panels normally used around the cheetah’s exhibit area was draped completely over the cage wagon for protection against the wind and any rain that fell.

The cheetah was not especially frightened of thunderstorms, but they were out in the open and she felt practically exposed to the elements without the solid walls of a building around her. Citra was huddled on her straw bed in the middle of her cage in an attempt to relax a little, but the wind made the edges of the draped canvas flutter and flap in the wind. She understood that similar coverings had been erected over the other caged animals, but the horses, cattle and bison would have to weather the conditions on their own; there were few trees in the place where they had stopped for the night for any of them to stand under.

The sun had not yet set, but due to the activity readying everything for a potentially bumpy night, she had been left alone to herself. She hoped that Tony Holland would come soon with her supper. Although she was a performer in the show and was now known to all that she could walk upright, dress herself and talk, she was still Tony’s charge when it came to mealtimes.

She had tried talking to him on occasion, but it unnerved him that the spotted cat he fed and watered might actually be as intelligent as he was. He did not see it like that, but while he did answer questions put to him, he had never felt comfortable having an actual discussion with the feline.

Citra was not sleepy, but boredom crept in as she waited. Her large golden eyes closed while her ears twitched listening to the sounds around her. She was grateful for the canvas covering her cage, but since it had not yet started raining, she had wished at least one side of it had been left open so she could see out. Although the evening winds were cool, there was no airflow beneath the curtain and it had become stuffy, so she had stripped off her western garments and left them in a pile beside her; reclining in her natural fur was cooler by degrees.

While she waited, the cheetah felt a growing need to relieve herself. She had no plans to soil her cage now that she had a way out, so she quietly reached through the bars of the cage and unsnapped the trick padlock on the gate. She eased it open and then slipped out onto the ground. The only place beneath the curtain she could go was underneath the wagon itself. There was not much room down there, but it would suffice for what she needed.

The storm clouds began to obscure the evening sun as they drew nearer to the region and the winds picked up. There was still enough light to cast faint shadows, however, and as Citra scratched at the earth to bury her business beneath the wagon, she saw a dim silhouette appear on the canvas. She recognized only that it was a man’s figure wearing a typical western hat that he had to hold onto in the wind with one hand, but before she could say anything in greeting, she saw the other hand pull free of his coat tails and lift in front of him.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

Four pistol shots fired out in rapid succession into the center of the cage above her and Citra instantly knew they had been meant for her. Instead of sitting there in stupefaction, she reacted immediately with anger and burst out from beneath the canvas, her jaws apart baring her fangs.

The would-be assassin had already turned to run from the area, knowing the gunfire would draw others from their evening meals, but he was not expecting the spotted cat’s sudden appearance. Cheetahs did not possess the ability to scream or roar when angered, but the human parts of Citra’s hybrid vocal cords did a fair approximation in a shriek of rage.

Propelled forward in a sudden burst of speed, the cheetah was upon the man before he was able to run more than a few steps. She struck out with a lightning-fast claw intending to hamstring him, but the leather boots he wore took the brunt of the damage. She did succeed in tripping him up and he fell flat on his face into the dirt of the prairie broken up by the earlier hooves. He lost his revolver, but he had too much earth and grass in his mouth and eyes to look for it.

The large cat landed hard in the middle of his back, forcing the air from his lungs, and she raked her claws across his shoulders. The man screamed and she clawed him again across his neck and one ear, rending it in bloody tatters.

Reacting in sheer terror at the mad animal he was supposed to have killed, the man rolled over hard, upsetting her balance, and she tumbled into a heap to the ground beside him. There were shouts of others nearby, but before she could pin him down again, the assailant scrambled to his feet and ran for his life, one hand pressed hard over his bloody ear.

Citra jumped up again and bolted after him. She caught him just as he reached the nearby river and the both of them rolled down an embankment. They fell into the water at a shallow spot and the maddened cat pounced upon him. He raised an arm instinctively and the jaws that had been intended for his throat clamped down upon his forearm. The large golden eyes that peered over the arm at him as he screamed were wide and blazing in fury.

Several men scrambled down the embankment and surrounded them, shouting words that Citra was not focused upon. Hands grabbed at her to pull her off her assailant. Lost within the instincts of her feline half, she screamed incoherently at them and tried to bite one or two, but then suddenly there was a rope around her that was drawn up tight, pinning her arms against her sides.

She was pulled from the man beneath her and unceremoniously hog-tied up on the bank. She squalled and screamed, but then Jake’s face appeared above her.

“Citra!” he exclaimed at her. “Calm down!” She continued to struggle, but then Jake tried again. “Susan!” he shouted, using her real name. Only then did some clarity come to her eyes. She recognized him and then her struggling ceased; she panted heavily, looking up at the faces of those who were holding her down; many were puzzled, some looked angry and others seemed afraid of her.

When it looked like she had finally come to her senses, Jake glanced back to the crowd of men who were hoisting the man she had chased down up out of the dirty river. He was hanging limp and there was blood mixed with mud on him in multiple places.

The showman turned his attention back to her. “What in blazes happened?” he demanded.

“He…” she replied with a gulp of air, “He sh-shot at me in my cage!” she managed to get out.

“What did you do to him?”

“I fought back!”

Jake shook his head. “No, I mean what did you do to make him try to kill you?”

“I do not know!” she cried in frustration. “He was shooting into my cage without provocation.”

Emmett stood up from where the others were gathered around the unknown man. Jake looked up. “Is he dead?” he asked.

Desmond shook his head. “No, but he’s fainted, probably from shock. She tore him up pretty bad.”

“Do you know him?”

Again, Emmett shook his head. “I don’t recognize him. He’s not part of the company.”

“Get him to Lane. See if he can patch him up enough so we can talk to him, find out why he tried to kill her.”

“Right, boss.”

Jake waved his hands in the air around him. “Okay, guys, give her some air.” Seeing that the mad cat was no longer trying to get at anyone, the small crowd backed away. He saw Tony nearby and waved him over while he started to untie the ropes around the feline’s hands, feet and middle.

“Yes, sir?” Tony asked, his eyes still a little wide from the incident.

“Go back to her cage and take a look. She said this guy shot at her.”

“Right away!”

“You did not hear the shots? You do not believe me?” Citra asked in disbelief.

“Just getting the facts straight,” he answered grimly. “You just attacked a man and the only thing the local authorities might see is that a wild cat became violent and tried to kill someone. We’ll be lucky if they won’t demand to have you put down!”

“I was defending myself!” Citra exclaimed. She took several minutes to press the dirty water from her fur, her back turned to him in miffed silence.

Tony came running back and made his way down the embankment. “Mr. Harrison,” he said, out of breath, “the canvas panel I draped across her cage for the night has eight bullet holes in it!”

“Eight?”

“Yeah, four on one side and four on the other, probably where the bullets passed through. They were down low, about right where she would have been sitting on the straw. Two of the bullets went through the clothes she had pulled off and there are gouges in the wood flooring where they must have ricocheted off through the back of the canvas. It’s a wonder they didn’t hit anyone else on the other side!” He held up Citra’s favorite blue blouse and there were fresh holes in the fabric. Had she been in them, she would have surely died.

“I also found this.” Tony handed a revolver to his boss. Jake pulled out the cylinder and peered inside; four shots had been fired from its chambers. He looked at the cheetah with a deep frown.

“How did you escape getting shot?” he asked.

Citra dipped her head. “I was under the wagon, relieving myself,” she answered quietly.

“Lucky for you,” Tony muttered. “How’d you get out, anyway?”

She exchanged glances with Jake, unsure she should reveal the tricked padlock in case she needed to use it again. She did not think Tony would have had an issue knowing she could get out anytime she wanted to, but the others around them might be afraid of the knowledge, considering she had nearly killed a man.

She looked at Tony and lied through her carnivorous teeth. “Jake left it unlocked for me,” she said. “I had planned to take a bath in the river after it got dark so no one could watch me.”

Tony gave her a crooked smile, a little color on his cheeks, and several of the men around them chuckled at his embarrassment.

In spite of the levity of the moment, Jake helped her up to her feet and then waved an arm through the air. “Okay, folks,” he grumbled as a few flashes of light from the approaching storm got his attention. “The show’s over for now. Go on back to what you were doing and get ready for the rain. It looks like it’s going to roll right over us.”

The men departed back up the embankment, leaving the showman and his lady-cat standing in the growing darkness beside the river. Wind tousled the bangs across Jake’s forehead, but he did not seem to notice. Citra saw his expression getting darker even as the evening light faded.

“May I stay in your wagon tonight?” she asked demurely. “I can sleep on the floor rug, but I do not want to be alone in my cage right now.”

Jake seemed not to notice her words as the two of them made their own way back up to the camp. She walked upright beside him, clinging to his arm, but he seemed lost in thought.

“Jake?” she asked.

He looked over at her. “Hmm?” he responded. She repeated her question and then he nodded. “Sure, go ahead,” he said. “I’m going to find out what happened.”

“How?”

“I suspect I know why he tried to kill you, and someone’s going to pay if I’m right!”

“Why do you think he wanted to kill me?” she asked.

Instead of answering her question, he shook his head. “You get yourself cleaned up and then go on to my wagon and try to relax,” he told her. “I’m going to talk to that guy, and if he doesn’t give me satisfactory answers, I may turn him over to you again.”

***

When Jake approached the wagon of his company doctor, there was a small crowd milling around outside. Emmett saw him and turned his way.

“Has he said anything?” Jake asked.

“Just his name, Wyatt. The guy was squalling in so much pain that Lane gave him ether. He’s in there now, stitching him up.”

Jake swore beneath his breath. “How long will he be out?”

“Oh, he’s still awake,” Emmett said with a smirk, “but he’s incoherent and apparently doesn’t know what’s happening with him. You know how that stuff is – he won’t be able to give you a straight answer for hours.”

“You said his name was Wyatt – first or surname?”

“Dunno which.” Emmett leaned in closer. “You should have sold her to Johnson, then you wouldn’t have someone trying to kill her.”

“Johnson!” Jake exclaimed. “I’d wager he had a hand it this!” He thought a moment and then looked up at Desmond. “That guy Thornton said they were in Baldwin City. That’s not too far from here. I’m going to ride out there and have a chat with Tom Johnson,” he growled, gritting his teeth.

“Tonight? That’s twenty miles if it was one!”

“I’m leaving right now!” He turned, stopped, and then looked back at Emmett. “Get everyone up and on the trail in the morning. Get Chetan to drive my wagon. You’ll probably get to Kansas City before I get back, so have a meet with the mayor and get things set up. I’ll catch up with you there.”

“If you say so, boss.”

He turned to go again, but stopped long enough to look back at his second-in-command. “Don’t try to sell off my cheetah while I’m gone!” he snarled. Before Emmett could respond, he ran off to get his horse.

***

It had been a long time since Jake had last run his horse so hard. He hated to do it to Honey, but he had no time to spare. If he waited any length of time, Longhorn Tom might move his show on to another town just as he had done himself. Typically, Jake’s company performed only two nights in a row in any specific place, three if the town was large enough, so there was no guarantee Johnson would still be in Baldwin City by the time he arrived.

As luck would have it, though, the storm he had expected to ride through moved off to the northeast, so he and Honey only had to endure a windy night as they rushed across the countryside. Jake used the stars that peeked out through the overcast sky to guide him and he silently prayed they did not run across any deep gullies or prairie dog holes in the darkness. He urged his painted mare as fast as prudence allowed.

Stopping only for water and to give his mount a few moments to rest now and then, Jake rode all night, and the sun was just beginning to color the morning clouds when he saw Baldwin City on the horizon.

***

When Jake rode into town, one of the first things he saw was a lithograph for Longhorn Tom’s Wild West Extravaganza posted in the window of a general store. It was still early enough that there were few people out on the streets, but the store was already open for customers.

He tied off Honey’s reins at a water trough in front of the establishment, dusted himself off and then stepped up onto the boardwalk. A rotund, middle-aged man with hair slicked back with oil was just putting on a work apron behind the counter when Jake walked in.

“Good mornin’,” said the man pleasantly. “What kin I hep you find?”

Jake indicated the colorful post in the window. “Is that Wild West show still in town?” he asked.

The man looked to see where he was pointing, adjusting the thick round lenses of his spectacles over his nose. “I’m ‘fraid I should take dat down. The missus an’ I saw the final show last night,” he said. “They’s prolly packin’ up rat now.”

Jake nodded in relief. They were still here, which meant that Johnson would be there too. He dug into a pocket and pulled out a coin. He set this on the counter and then tipped his hat.

“Thank you, sir,” he said in a raspy voice.

“You soun’ like you could use a drank of lemonade,” the store owner said. Without waiting for a reply, he moved to a cabinet at the end of the counter.

“Lemonade?” Jake repeated when a small mason jar with pale yellow liquid was set in front of him. A few seeds swirled around in the drink, but it looked awfully delicious. He was mighty thirsty.

“Yep, freshly squeezed by the missus just a bit o’go.”

Jake drank up the tart juice in several hefty swallows before he set the empty glass on the counter. He smacked his lips a few times and then gave the man a smile of gratitude. “That sure hit the spot!” he said in appreciation. “How much do I owe you?”

The man held up the coin Jake had put on the counter and then turned to an old cash register. “Paid in full, m’frien’,” he said with a smile. The register made a ding and he dropped the coin into the drawer that opened.

“Much obliged,” Jake told him with a nod. “Can you tell me where the Wild West show was set up? I need to see the owner before they leave town.”

The man gave him directions that led to a field on the other end of town. Jake thanked him and then walked out to Honey. The poor mare looked as tired as he felt and her large brown eyes gazed at him imploringly.

“Sorry, ol’ girl,” he said, rubbing her neck with affection. “Just one more ride to the other side of town and then you can rest.” She snorted softly and then he got back up into the saddle.

When they reached the field, Jake was glad to see that only a small portion of the show’s booths, bleacher boards and tents had been dismantled.

He approached a young woman in a fringed outfit with a cowgirl’s hat that covered over a mass of auburn hair. She was brushing down a roan colt and her curves from the backside presented a nice sight to the weary traveler.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said politely, climbing out of the saddle.

The woman turned. “Yes?” she responded with a smile. “Are you here to sign up for the show?”

Jake shook his head. “No, ma’am. I was hoping you could direct me to Thomas Johnson. I need to speak with him about a private matter, please.”

“Sure, you can find Longhorn Tom over there under the grub tent,” she said, pointing across the way.

“Thank you,” he said, tipping his hat courteously. He walked Honey across the field to the tent he had been directed to and then tethered her at a portable trough where another horse stood by quietly. The tent was open on the sides and a few tables and chairs were set up beneath the shadows. There was only one person inside and he sat at one of the tables quietly eating his breakfast.

“Mr. Johnson?” Jake asked quietly.

The man looked up. He was a handsome man in his early thirties with light brown hair, a thin mustache and well-tended sideburns. He wore casual clothes but they were well-pressed. He wiped his lips with a cloth handkerchief and nodded.

“Yes?” he replied. “I am Thomas Johnson. Who might you be?”

“Jake Harrison.” The man’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly, but Jake caught the motion. “I see you’ve heard of me.”

Johnson gestured toward a chair opposite him. “It’s always good to know of your competitors. Please have a seat, Mr. Harrison.” Jake sat down quietly and then put his elbows upon the table. “Have you had second thoughts on my offer?” Johnson asked.

“No, I am quite firm on that account. Citra is not for sale.”

“Pity,” said the man. “You see, I have a successful Wild West show, but lately I have been making additions that could draw in more visitors. Exhibits like your spotted cat – a cheetah, I believe it is called – would fit well with my plans.” He took a sip of coffee from a tin cup. “I have already acquired a lion and a rhinoceros from Africa from the Philadelphia Zoo. I would like to add a cheetah to my show, but one that can walk upright and talk… well, that would be sure to draw in a crowd!”

Johnson paused to let his guest make a comment, but Jake said nothing, staring hard into the gray eyes of the other man. “Will Thornton gave me a favorable review of your special animal,” Johnson continued, “but I don’t know why you’re so determined to keep her.”

“You don’t?” Jake muttered with a tilt of his chin. “I believe I explained it well enough to your man. She saved my life and I am returning the favor by keeping her safe. She’s expressed the desire to remain with my company and I am bound to honor that.”

Johnson nodded. “I have heard that you take great pride in the accuracy of your show,” he said.

“I do.”

“There were no cheetahs in the wild lands of the west, and although she can perform for you, she doesn’t fit your claims of accuracy. My show, however, is changing. We still do reenactments of the western settlements, but I am giving my visitors more to see. I have exhibits from around the world, not just from the western United States.”

“That sounds like a circus!”

“Right you are, Mr. Harrison. I do not yet have the necessary exhibits and performers to claim to be a travelling circus, but that is my eventual goal. Your cheetah would have a good home here and I would go to great lengths in order to have her here as a one of a kind.”

“Yeah, I know to what lengths you would go to,” Jake growled. Johnson’s eyebrows rose on his brow.

“I don’t claim to understand what you’re referring to.”

Jake snorted. “I wouldn’t claim your actions either, but I know it was you.”

Thomas Johnson pushed his finished breakfast tin aside and then sat back in his chair, eyeing Jake with narrowed eyes.

“What are you accusing me of?” he demanded in an even voice.

“Your man Thornton gave me three rather high offers for Citra, but since I refused your generosity, I’m supposing you decided that if you couldn’t have her, no one would!”

“You aren’t making sense,” Johnson remarked. “What’s happened, did someone shoot her?”

Jake’s eyes became fierce. “How did you know that?” he growled.

“Just a guess from your attitude. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I didn’t say she was killed,” Jake said, watching his opponent closely, “but the guy who tried it is currently in critical condition.” There was a twitch in Johnson’s left eyelid, but it was so imperceptible that it could have been easily missed.

“What happened?” Johnson asked quietly.

“He blindly shot up her cage, but didn’t hit her,” Jake said, leaving out the fact that she had not been in the cage at the time. “She took offense, however, and mauled him for his efforts. He’ll be lucky if he gets to keep that ear – he looks quite a fright.”

“Has… he said anything?”

Jake raised his chin. “Only his name. If he’s still breathing by the time I get back to my company, I can be sure that my friends will have already gotten more out of him.”

Johnson was silent for a moment, but then he stood up from his chair slowly. “Mr. Harrison,” he said quietly. “I am glad your cheetah escaped harm, but I can assure you that I had no part in this affair. I can see how you might think I would do this, but if I was willing to pay such a sizable amount, it is unlikely I would want harm to come to this creature.”

“Are you saying that Wyatt is not your man?”

“I know of no such person, and neither would anyone else in my employment do such a thing.”

Jake got to his feet, feeling weary from the long night’s ride. He did not believe a word of Johnson’s denial, but for the moment he had nothing else to confront him with. Wyatt was his only proof and he would now be on his way to Kansas City with his company, injured as he was. He did not know what he was going to do with him, but what he told Johnson was true. He knew Emmett Desmond’s history and was confident that if anyone could make Wyatt talk, it would be him.

Jake had nothing more to say to Johnson, so he merely locked eyes with him for a moment and then turned to walk away without another word.

“I wish you luck with your endeavors, Mr. Harrison,” Longhorn Tom said to his back. “Keep that magnificent creature safe, and when you eventually tire of her, remember my offer!”

Jake swore softly beneath his breath and climbed up into Honey’s saddle. They both needed food and rest before making the journey to Kansas City to rejoin the company, but once they had recuperated a little, he had a small detour to make.

Before he had passed beyond the boundaries of Johnson’s show camp, Jake saw a man watching him from the darkness of the evening shadows beside a tent. He might not have noticed him except his round-rimmed spectacles reflected light from a lantern that hung from a pole between exhibits and caught his eye.

Jake tipped his hat courteously at him and it was then he noticed the bowler hat with a pheasant feather sticking out of its band. He looked closer and saw the brown mustache that merged with sideburns over a clean-shaven chin that Citra had described to him. The bright red bow tie and the Sunday meeting suit he wore completed the picture and Jake turned his horse toward him.

There was a sudden look of panic in the fellow’s eyes at having been recognized, so he turned and darted away between two of the craft tents. He was gone before Harrison could get to him, but now Jake was sure it was the same man who had tried to sabotage Citra’s success with his show, and it appeared he worked for Johnson.

***

Jake led Honey down a wooden ramp from a boxcar and tipped his hat at the others who had accompanied him from Wellsville, a railroad town to the east of where he had confronted Johnson. Instead of riding the trail across the countryside to meet up with his company, he and his mare had caught a train on the Santa Fe line from Wellsville to Kansas City, which had saved on travel time. Now that he had arrived in the Wyandotte County seat, he would need to find out where the company was setting up.

He rode through town looking to see if any of his lithographs had been posted yet and they’d had to dodge several street cars that were becoming common; they connected the regions that until only recently had been several smaller towns that had combined into one large city which was spread out across the state line in both directions.

On the back end of one of the street cars was one of his lithographs and he recognized it with a smile. Hand-written at the bottom was the location where the public could find the show. Having been in Kansas City before, he had a fairly good idea how to get there, so he climbed up in his saddle and steered his mare toward another part of town.

When he spied the familiar wagons, carts and livestock of his company, he knew that Emmett would be hip-deep in getting things set up for the next day’s performances. The routine was so unchanging from town to town that everyone knew what to do and when to do it, but Desmond was meticulous in making sure that visitors would have a good time and that meant keeping an eye on the setup before the paying customers got there.

He found the short balding man with the big fuzzy mustache trying to settle an argument between two of the women in the company and Jake suddenly changed his route and went looking for his wagon instead. He had no intention of getting dragging into whatever situation the women had with Emmett; he could handle that one on his own.

He nearly walked right into Randall Lane rounding the corner of a supply wagon. The company’s doctor sidestepped him with an armload of lidded glass jars, each containing a portion of amber liquid.

“Hi, Doc,” Jake said after making sure the other man was not going to spill anything. “What do you have there?”

“Diethyl ether,” the dark-headed man replied. He was a middle-aged man in good health and dressed in simple clothing. He was a compassionate man, but also no-nonsense when it came to the affairs of others. “After the incident outside De Soto, I used up the last I had on that Wyatt fellow. I just got more from a local apothecary.”

Jake scowled at the name and saw Desmond walking in their direction. “Emmett,” he said with a nod, “I confronted Thomas Johnson about Mr. Wyatt in Baldwin City, but he denies any knowledge of the affair.”

Emmett spat on the ground. “He’s lying through his teeth!” he retorted with a growl, glancing over at the doctor. “Wyatt spilled his guts after Lane patched him up.”

“Yeah, I got the impression I was talking to a snake,” Jake muttered with a nod. “His words were not matching up with the look in his eyes.”

“Wyatt works for Johnson, all right, and was acting under orders to kill your cheetah if you wouldn’t sell her to Thornton’s offers.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Mr. Desmond had me administer sodium thiopental,” Lane informed him.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Jake asked, thinking it was a pain killer of some form for the guy’s wounds.”

“It dulls the mind so that he can’t think up lies to questions put to him,” Emmett explained. “His name was Nate Wyatt and he is worked for Thomas Johnson off and on for three years, usually doing dirty work such as this one. Wyatt was not in the know about what the cheetah was beyond she was just an animal to be put down, but yes – he was on Johnson’s payroll.”

“Was?” Jake looked shocked. He knew that Desmond had some rough history in his past, but he never thought the man was a killer.

“Don’t worry about Wyatt,” Emmett said in a low voice. “We’ve already taken care of the matter. It’s unlikely that anyone from Johnson’s show will ever bother us again.”

“What did you do, bury him in an unmarked grave?”

Emmett simply raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “Nah, he’s still breathing back in De Soto, but don’t you worry about it, boss.”

“Should I expect the law to look us up to put down my cheetah?”

Emmett shook his head. “I wouldn’t worry about that. She’s safe.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m going to go put these away,” Lane said. “They’re heavy.”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Jake said absently. “I’ll get the bill of sale from you later.”

“I didn’t expect you back until later this evening,” Emmett said after the doctor departed. “You look like you’ve ridden to Texas and back in one night. Your catgirl’s worried about you, so go see her and then get some rest. I’ll keep things going to set up for tomorrow and check on the wagon you ordered for her in a little while.”

“Right, then,” Jake muttered. Anytime Desmond blatantly sidestepped a question, Jake knew he was better off without the knowledge of anything he had done. Taking the man at his word that they would not have to fret over anything Johnson had tried to engineer, he finally nodded wearily.

“Thanks, Emmett. I’ll check in with you later.”

Chapter 14

End of the Trail

“Welcome to Texarkana, Mr. Harrison! I am Mayor Lery and these are my councilmen,” said the politician. The man was all smiles when Jake climbed down from the seat of his wagon. He returned the smile and took the mayor’s gloved hand.

“Thank you,” Jake replied in a friendly tone. “To what do I owe this honor?”

The mayor was accompanied by a small group of men, all dressed in official clothing and all were smiling. Jake distrusted smiling politicians, but he had met many such local dignitaries in his travels and had survived.

“We received news that you might be passing this way and we had hoped this was the case.”

Emmett Desmond rode up on his horse, but stopped a respectable distance away, though close enough he could hear whatever these men had to say. The company was now on its way south into Texas to a ranch that Jake owned near Tanglewood. The performing season had come to an end and the Harrison ranch would play host to his employees who did not have family or homes to go to during their downtime through the winter months. Their final presentation had been in Springfield, Missouri and they had been on the trail for over two weeks since.

The sun was getting low on the horizon and they had left the Red River behind them hours ago. Jake might have called a halt for the night there, but he had wanted to press on just a few miles further to Texarkana.

“How can I help you?” he asked of the mayor. “We’re getting low on supplies and figured we could help your local economy with a visit to your stores, in addition to a stop for the night for the whole company just outside of town.”

Lery rubbed his hands together with a smile. “Sir,” he said with a hopeful smile, “I know that we were not on your performance route this year, but if we could impose on you, we sure would like to see your show while you’re here!”

Jake’s expression drooped. It had been a long, hard day on the trail and everyone was weary, hungry and ready to settle in for the night. All thoughts of performing reenactments had been laid to rest after Springfield. He glanced over at Emmett and sighed inwardly.

“Sir,” he said after a long moment of thought, “it pleases me to no end that you would like to see our show, but we are currently on our way to sit out the winter and give my folks a rest. Fully a third of my personnel has already left the company to spend the season with their families and will not be rejoining us until the spring when we begin traveling again. If you like, I will make sure that Texarkana is one of the first locations of our new year’s schedule.”

Mayor Lery’s smile wilted, but he merely looked back at his councilmen before turning back to Jake. “Please reconsider,” he implored. “We understand that you may not be fully staffed, but my town could use a cheerful distraction right now.”

“What happened?” Jake found himself asking.

“The Amberson and Edmond families had a longstanding feud and it came out to a showdown out near Sand Flat. One was killed with the other seriously injured and, it’s had a lot of folks down in the mouth over it all.”

Jake shook his head. “I would love to oblige you,” he said, “but we do more than just reenactments, and a large number of those who are away were those who support the foundations of everything we do.”

Lery frowned and held up a finger. “One moment, please.” He turned back to his council members and the small group of men huddled together in a tight circle. They conferred for several moments and Jake was starting to fidget when the mayor finally turned back to face him. His smile returned and once again he rubbed his hands together.

“Mr. Harrison,” he said, “we would like to suggest a compromise.”

“I’m listening,” Jake mumbled, not really wanting to agree to anything for the truthful reasons he had already stated.

“If you will give us the best show you can – with what you have – we would like to give you a substantial discount on any and all supplies you had intended to purchase.”

Jake raised his eyebrows. He glanced over at Emmett, who prompted him with a subtle nod. “How substantial?” he queried.

“Half off,” the politician announced with a knowing smile.

“If I can get that in writing,” Jake said with a resigned nod, “I think we can put something together for you.”

“Agreed!” Lery said with enthusiasm. He turned back to one of his associates, who produced a sheaf of paper from a document pouch he carried. The councilman held the pouch sideways to provide a writing surface as another produced a fountain pen. Mayor Lery scribbled on the page for a moment, signed it and then passed it around to each of his colleagues. Once they had all affixed their signatures, Lery blew lightly across it to help dry the ink. When he was sure it would not run, he turned and handed the paper to Jake.

He read over what was written and then walked over to hand it up to Emmett, who still sat atop his horse. Desmond looked it over and then handed it back to him with a nod.

“It looks satisfactory,” Jake said to the mayor. “It will take most of tomorrow to set up everything, so we can be open for paying customers the morning after, but Mr. Desmond here and a few others will need to go shopping in your town before we can do so.”

Mayor Lery turned and gestured toward a man behind him in a brown suit and a straw hat. “This is Mr. Perkins. He will meet with your Mr. Desmond tomorrow morning and accompany him so that you may have the agreed upon discount for the things you need. In the meantime, we will spread the word of your show, Mr. Harrison.” He took Jake’s hand and pumped it in a firm handshake. “We really appreciate this.”

Jake nodded wearily. “Thank you, sir. With your permission, we would like to get settled in to have our supper and rest for the night before we begin tomorrow.”

“Yes, yes, of course! We will leave you for now, Mr. Harrison. Good night.” The mayor turned to leave with his councilmen, but then stopped and looked back.

“By the way,” he said hesitantly, “do you still have your cat-lady with you, or is she away with the others?”

“She is a cheetah and her name is Citra Kayah, your Honor,” Jake answered. “Yes, she is still with us. We will make sure the people of your town have every opportunity to see her and hear what she has to say.”

“Splendid! Well, then, good night.”

“Good night, and thank you.”

After the politicians were out of earshot, Desmond dismounted and moved close to Jake, looking over the paper again. “Well, that certainly was unexpected,” he mumbled. “What are we going to do?”

“This’ll put us behind schedule to Tanglewood, but we’ll give them what they want with what we have. We can do no more, but I want everyone rested up tonight so we can get a good start tomorrow morning, and then we’ll perform with the effort and enthusiasm we’re known for.”

“Yes, boss, I’ll spread the word.”

“You still have the shopping list of the supplies we need?”

“It’s in my wagon.”

Jake scratched at his trail-dusty blonde hair beneath his Stetson. “We’ll need to add a few items to cover what the customers will need, plus a few extras simply because of the discount his Honor agreed to give us. Due to the size of this town, we’ll give them the typical two days, so I’ll send Diego on ahead to Tanglewood to let them know we’ll be four days delayed. I don’t want Mrs. Norris agitated that she had the place ready and then we don’t show up for days.”

“I saw her once when she was agitated, as you say it,” Emmett shuddered. “I don’t ever want to see that again!”

Jake gave him a crooked smile and patted him on the shoulder. “Well, that really wasn’t your fault, but she never saw it that way. She may be a tiny old woman, but she packs a lot of personality! Let’s just stay on her good side and all will be well.”

***

The next evening after a long day of preparations, Sonya stood behind Citra and pulled a brush through the curly brown scalp hair upon the cheetah’s head. The feline had her eyes closed and a quiet purr issued from her throat. Sonya chuckled and shook her head quietly.

“Even after all this time you’ve been with us,” she said with amusement, “it still amazes me to see a cat with a head of hair. Yes – I know you said you were half human, but now that we don’t have to cut it and can let it grow, I think it gives you character.”

Citra opened one eye. “Are you saying that I have character or that I am a character?”

Sonya grinned. “Yes.” The cheetah turned and looked up at her friend, sticking out a feline tongue at her. “Sit still and let me finish or we’ll never have you looking good for him.”

“I still do not think he has that kind of interest in me,” Citra remarked. “To him, I am still an animal, no matter that he pays more attention to me now than he used to and acts like a gentleman.”

“What else can it be? Jake hasn’t invited anyone else to supper in a long time.”

“I am just another bit of property to him, a part of his show business. He has only hinted, but I suspect we will be dining with the town’s mayor, perhaps to show off his mysterious performer.”

Sonya was silent while she brushed the cheetah’s scalp hair into some kind of order. Then, almost hesitantly, she asked, “Do you have a beau back home where you’re from?”

“A… beau?”

“You know, someone you care for a great deal.”

Citra was quiet for a moment, but then she shook her head beneath the brush. “No, not really,” she answered. “There was a man I worked with that I was fond of, but we never had much of a relationship other than our work. I had hoped that perhaps I would meet up with a handsome Fur when we established our colony, but I will probably never… uhm, never see any of them… ever again.”

She got quiet again and then Sonya could feel her friend shaking. She put down the brush and then knelt beside the cheetah. Citra looked over at her with a deep frown and wet tears that followed the dark lines in the fur beneath her eyes. “I am never going home…” she whispered.

Sonya put her arms around her friend’s shoulders. She rarely touched the feline more than necessary, but this was the first time she had ever embraced her. Although covered in fur, her narrow shoulders felt just as if they belonged to just another female friend that she had consoled over some issue or another.

“There, there,” she cooed quietly as Citra buried her face in the soft folds of her blouse at the shoulder. “Even if you don’t have a home to return to, you will always be welcome here.”

The cheetah sat back and wiped the moisture from her face fur with the backs of her hands. “I know,” she said with a nod. “You, Chetan and even Jake have tried to make me feel at home, and I know that must have been difficult at first, me looking like I do. Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, dear.”

“When I was changed, it was never meant for me to spend much time around anyone other than more of my kind,” Citra told her with a sniffle. “Others here have accepted me as just another show animal with more talents than most, but I still see and hear how they react around me. I am no person to them, just a curiosity.”

“Perhaps, but those folks don’t matter. Now, dry your eyes and let’s get you into a clean outfit. You will want to look your best for your dinner date with Mr. Harrison.”

Citra wiped her feline nose on a handkerchief and stood up from the stool she had been sitting on. “I have told you before, this is not a date. It can never be a date as long as Jake sees me as an animal. I am surprised that he does not keep me on a leash.”

Sonya walked across the small room of the wagon and plucked a fresh skirt and starched blouse from wall pegs. She turned back to the cheetah who had been lounging around in her natural fur coat.

“Whether or not he has any romantic intentions, it is still a dinner date, so get dressed and get ready. If nothing else, perhaps you’ll get to eat better food than what we’ve had on the trail.”

“There is that,” Citra agreed, “but if we dine with the mayor, his wife may not want an animal at the table; I may have to eat from a bowl on the floor…”

Sonya laughed. “That’s going to look mighty silly with you in a skirt!”

***

When Jake knocked upon the door of her wagon home, Citra was ready and alone. She opened the door and looked down at her friend with a pleasant smile. Jake peered up at her and his mouth dropped open. Sonya had done a good job.

Citra wore a long-sleeved beige blouse that complimented the colors of her fur, though the top button was open and showed not a woman’s cleavage, but a puff of white fur that could have been mistaken as a scarf. The thin material of the skirt that hung nearly to the tarsal bone of her digitigrade feet was dark brown, but it was clingy enough to show off a bit of her curves. She did not have many of those to show off, but the garment that Sonya had chosen for her looked good on her. They had only had to make a minor alteration to add an opening for the cheetah’s tail with a strap and a single button above it to keep her modesty in place. The ends of her curly scalp hair just brushed the top of her shoulders and she had her head tilted just slightly as she gazed down at him.

“Good evening, Mr. Harrison,” she said.

“Good evening, Miss Foreman! You look elegant, my lady,” Jake said in a quiet voice when he found it.

“Thank you, milord,” she responded in amusement.

He offered her a hand and she took it with a smile to descend the steps to his side. The man himself was dressed in dark brown jacket, waistcoat and slacks over a white shirt with a thin black tie. His Stetson had been dusted off and was tilted up slightly and his mustache and sideburns were neatly trimmed; he even smelled of cologne, something he had never worn in the months she had known him.

“I hope you don’t mind walking,” he said, proffering an arm to her. “The place where we’ll dine is right over there.” He pointed to a two-story building at the edge of town where all the windows were lit up.

“Walking is fine,” she said.

They strolled in companionable silence in the darkness while the rest of their company went about their nightly routines behind them. There was only a sliver of the moon tonight and it was barely above the western horizon, giving out very little illumination. They got halfway across the field before Citra spoke up.

“I appreciate your invitation to dinner,” she said, “but I do not know the occasion.”

They walked several more steps until Jake stopped and turned to look at her. “I was thinking the other night that I had never properly thanked you for saving my life and saving my show,” he said. “I may not get many opportunities to speak to you alone much these days, but I want you to know that I am forever in your debt and will never forget it.”

Citra gave him a warm smile that spread across her entire furry face. “I have never regretted our meeting,” she replied, “and I am also in your debt for saving me from a potentially-short life of living in fear and hiding.”

“I hope you don’t mind, but we’ll be dining with Mayor Lery and his wife tonight. I wanted to sit with you alone, but we would be unable to visit any establishment in town where we wouldn’t attract a lot of attention.”

Citra nodded. “I understand, and I actually expected that is where we were going. I just hope his Honor’s wife does not make me eat from the floor.”

“If she does, I’ll be down there with you,” he replied with look of amusement.

He looked at her for a quiet moment but then reached out and took both of her hands in his own, an act that surprised her. “This isn’t easy for me to say, but I have to admit that I’ve grown rather fond of you – not only as a friend, but also as a woman.”

Citra swallowed with difficulty. Had she heard him right? Before she could respond, he released her hands and then reached into an inner pocket of his suit coat. He pulled out a small cloth bag and then pulled the draw string apart. He upended it over a hand and something that glittered fell out.

The cheetah’s eyes were better equipped to see in the dark than a human’s were, so she saw what he held before he could hold it up. It was a gemstone the size of a penny mounted into a golden frame that was attached to a matching chain.

“You may not be able to see this well in the darkness, but this is an opal,” he explained, holding it up so that the stone hung at the end of the chain. “In some cultures, it’s believed to bring the bearer good luck, and it’s also associated as a birth stone for those who were born in October, which you once told me is when you were born. It belonged to my wife, who was also born in October, but I would like you to have it.”

She reached out and touched it very gently with a claw tip. “It is pretty,” she whispered, “but I should not take what belonged to your wife. That is a precious memory you should have of the time you had with her.”

Jake smiled. “I loved my wife,” he said, “but she and I will no longer be together. Please, accept this gift as a token of my appreciation and affection.”

“A…affection?”

Jake moved around behind her so that he could put the chain over her head. “My dear, we both know what you are and there is no reason to discuss that any further, but if you were fully human, I would be restless until I could make you mine.”

She suddenly felt lightheaded at his words, but could do nothing more than put a hand up to the gem that rested upon her blouse. “I don’t really know what kind of relationship we can have,” he added, “but all I know is that I can’t stop thinking about you.”

He stepped back around to face her, “Be that as it may, we may be nothing more than close friends, but I enjoy your company and your intelligence continues to amaze me. I hope that we can be friends for as long as life allows.”

Citra smiled at him and the lights from the house ahead reflected from the moisture in her eyes. “Thank you, dear Jake,” she said with emotion. “I accept your gift and I accept your friendship in whatever form we are allowed.” She put a hand out, placed it gently over his heart, and then leaned in to give him a light kiss on the cheek. Then with a sparkle of mischief in her eyes, she also gave him a brief lick on the end of his nose.

The action surprised him and he blinked rapidly. “What… what was that for?” he asked with a hard swallow. He had somehow anticipated the kiss when she had leaned forward, but the lick?

Citra giggled and then took his arm again. “That… was just me!” she replied playfully. “It is who I am, so you should be prepared to accept me for who – and what – I am.”

The man raised an eyebrow at her and wiped off his nose. “Well, what I am is hungry. Shall we go meet with the mayor and his wife?”

At the mention of food, Citra’s stomach growled – loudly. She looked embarrassed, but then both of them burst out laughing. The tension was broken and she tugged on his arm toward the house with a grin.

***

The performance of Jake Harrison’s Wilder West the next day went off without a hitch, despite that they were short-handed by a third of their company. Although it had been over a fortnight since they had last performed, everyone fell back into the swing of things with little effort.

Jake put his usual enthusiasm into his narrations on the trials, tribulations and triumphs of settling the west and the townsfolk seemed to be having a good time with all that they experienced. The day was a little cool under overcast skies and there was moisture in the air with the promise of rain for the dry, crunchy grass of the prairie. Fortunately for everyone, however, the late afternoon passed with plenty of sights, scents, food, crafts and entertainment for all.

One man slipped in without paying the two-bit entrance feet, however, having snuck in while the show hands were distracted corralling the longhorn cattle. He was a large man, tall with broad shoulders, black hair, brown eyes and a dark complexion hinting that he might have Indian blood in his ancestry, but he wore nothing that would bring any special notice to him. He was dressed in common jeans, boots, a simple tan shirt and a straw cowboy hat, and he seemed interested in everything as he milled through the crowds of people.

When he discovered a barrier of tall canvas curtains arranged in a wide circle, he moved around its perimeter until he located the opening that was framed by two lithographs portraying what looked to be a cougar’s head with cheetah cry lines and spots. He raised an eyebrow at the depiction and then eased the split in the curtain aside to peer inside.

There was nothing more than an animal cage inside with a bit of straw in the middle and a water bowl to one side, but it was empty of the citrakāyah the sign had proclaimed. He walked to the cage and absently rubbed a hand across one of the iron bars as he considered what he saw. There was no one else about, so he left the vicinity and browsed through the festive visitors again, his eyes never still, though he looked up at the overhead clouds periodically as if keeping an eye on the weather.

He could hear the sounds of a gathered throng somewhere out on the grounds, but then it got quiet for a brief moment. During that pause in the overall sounds around him, the man heard a strangely accented singing voice. He blinked as he realized what he must be hearing and he started weaving his way through the crowd toward it.

After moments, he reached a set of raised wooden bleacher boards and the stands seemed to be packed with even more people. The melody of the song was one that was currently popular among some of the larger cities and the crowd seemed to be mesmerized by the singer.

Unable to get a seat in the bleachers, he walked around to the front near some of the show hands where he could see. When he did, he stopped and stared at the form standing atop a small raised platform.

Despite the fact that Citra presented the display of an animal standing upright in western clothing on its hind legs, she had a surprisingly good singing voice. She enunciated her words without contraction in an odd accent, but the crowd could hear every syllable clearly.

The man scratched the hair beneath his hat and then crossed his arms, leaning up against one of two wooden posts holding up a banner over the crowd with the name of the company across it in bold red letters. He watched the rest of her presentation with interest and was greatly amused when she had several unmarried men from the audience come forward to watch her disrobe behind a low curtain.

When it came to the final act and the cheetah woman took a bow with her two associates, he clapped along with the rest of the crowd and even gave out a sharp whistle.

With the four-hour set of presentations over for the night, the throng began to disperse, but the man hung back and kept an eye on the strange woman. She stayed mostly out of sight with her friends behind one of the wagons, but he watched her for several moments before he turned and disappeared into the crowd.

He stopped a few of the show hands here and there, making queries that resulted in them giving him directions across the field, and he eventually stopped before one of the enclosed wagons that some of the performers used as homes along the trail.

He stood before the door quietly for a moment, composing himself, and then he knocked on the door. There was only a brief pause before the latch opened and the door panel swung outward.

“Yes, what can I do for you?” said a voice from inside.

“I am looking for Jacob Harrison,” the man asked.

“I’m Harrison,” Jake said, putting on his hat before stepping down to greet him. “Is there a problem?”

The man shook his head. “No problem, sir. I enjoyed your company’s show tonight, but there is a matter I must discuss with you.”

“Are you one of Mayor Lery’s councilmen?”

“No, Mr. Harrison. I am Citra Kayah’s owner.”

Jake blinked and then narrowed his eyes. “Her owner?” he repeated warily. “I have known her for months and she’s never spoken of ever having an owner.”

“I am not surprised. If you will take me to her where the three of us can have a private conversation away from other ears, I assure you we can straighten this out right away.”

“You think she’s going to corroborate your story?”

“Without question.”

“Nothing doing. If you think you’re going to take her from me at gunpoint, you can un-think that thought, mister. She has a lot of friends amongst my company and no one’s going to let you get away with her.”

That seemed to surprise the man. He spread his arms wide and then made a slow turn. “I am unarmed,” he said.

“Let me see under your hat.” The man lifted his hat and Jake saw there was nothing but a head of thick, black hair beneath. “Okay, you’re unarmed,” Jake conceded, “but I’ve already told Mr. Johnson on two occasions that she isn’t for sale!”

“Mr. Johnson didn’t send me and I’m not here to buy her from you, Mr. Harrison. Please, just take me to her,” the stranger said. “I assure you that all I want to do is talk to her.”

“Talk.”

“That’s right. I just want to talk to her.”

Jake studied the man for a long moment. He seemed honest enough, but where it came to Citra, he was doubly cautious.

“All right,” he said at last. “I will take you to her, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on you.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Harrison.”

“This way.”

Jake led the man on a maze route through the tents, carts and wagons until he came to one in particular. It was nondescript and did not stand out from any of the others, but Jake stopped before the door and knocked three times.

“Citra, it’s Jake!” he called. “I have someone here who claims to be your owner.”

“My owner?” said a voice from behind them. Both men turned around quickly and saw the feline staring at them with a frown. “I do not have an owner,” she said.

“That’s what I thought!” Jake growled angrily. Before he could do or say anything more, the man tipped his hat up high on his head with a wide grin across his face.

“Hello, Susan,” he said, holding his hands out to his sides, palms outward.

The cheetah’s large golden eyes widened and she dropped the hat she held. “Sam!” she exclaimed. She rushed forward and jumped into his waiting arms. The man held her tight and it was then Jake realized that Citra was crying against the taller man’s chest.

Jake watched with an open mouth for several moments until Samuel noticed him. He stroked the hair on her head for a moment and spoke quietly into her ear until she calmed down. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief she pulled from within her blouse and then turned to look at her benefactor.

“Jake…” she said hesitantly after a moment. “This is Samuel Hawke. He is not really my owner, but he comes from the same place that I do. He is my good friend.”

“The same place…” Jake repeated carefully. “You mean that faraway place from another year?”

“Yes, that is right.” She looked up at Samuel. “He has come to take me home – you have, right?”

Samuel nodded. “That’s correct.” Then he raised an eyebrow. “You told him where you were from?”

“It was necessary,” Citra assured him. “I saved his life once, and in turn he has given me safety traveling with his company. I have trusted him with my life.” She looked at Jake again. “He did not believe me in the beginning, and I am not sure he has ever completely accepted my story, but I have only told him the truth.”

“That story’s too fanciful to have been true,” Jake admitted, “but I stopped arguing with her about it.”

“I had no hope anyone would come for me, so I have had to make the best life I could. It was only right I told him.”

Samuel looked at Jake. “What did she tell you?”

“That she’s half-human, half-cheetah by choice, that she was an engineer but did not drive a train, that she was supposed to be a homesteader on some other world, and that she will not actually be born for some three hundred years from now. How true can that be, I ask you?”

Samuel nodded with a thin smile. “It’s true, every word of it.”

“I tried to explain everything in terms he could understand, but I guess I was never really successful,” Citra said sadly. She stepped away from Samuel’s side and then put an arm around Jake. “It did not matter,” she added. “He cared for me and kept me safe.”

Jake felt his head swimming, but did not move away from her. The opal on her bosom glittered in the evening light and he remembered his words to her the previous night. He swallowed with difficulty and then rested his forehead against hers, pushing his hat up out of the way.

“I guess this means it was all true. Does this mean you’re going to leave me?” he asked in a quiet voice.

The look on Citra’s face wilted and the cry-lines beneath her eyes enhanced the expression. “You know I must,” she whispered. “I do not belong here. Where I came from, I have a purpose. Here, I am nothing more than a freak of nature.”

He reached up and fingered the opal necklace. “I don’t care. I don’t want you to go.”

“I am sorry, Jake.”

Samuel watched them touch and nuzzle one another and he began to fidget. He cleared his throat after a bit and Citra looked back at him.

“How did you find me – here?” she asked, amazement creeping back across her face. She had never expected to see this man again.

Samuel looked around at the activity that still went on across the field. “Is there somewhere we can discuss this in private?” he asked.

The cheetah indicated the wagon they stood beside. “In here,” she said, turning to the door. Ever the gentleman where Citra was concerned, Jake opened the door for her and then offered her a hand when she moved up to the steps. He followed her in, leaving Samuel to come in behind them.

Jake took the small room’s only wooden chair beside a small open window letting in fresh air as Citra climbed up onto a hand-quilted blanket covering the thin mattress of her bed. Samuel leaned against the wall after closing the door and then slipped his hands into the pockets of his trousers.

“It took a lot of investigation, but we knew you’d gone back, although we didn’t know how far or where,” he started to explain, “so we did a worldwide search of historical newspaper archives looking for someone matching your description. We found something of that nature in an old article about Longhorn Tom’s Wild West Extravaganza where Thomas K. Johnson mentioned a former competitor named Harrison who had a real-looking cat woman in his show that he had tried to buy for his own. We knew it was you when it said the cat’s stage name was Citra Kayah.”

Citra frowned. “That was a stroke of luck, Sam, but I could have easily been killed by a cattle rancher mistaking me for a strange looking mountain lion.”

“Well, we were also on the lookout for any articles about an odd, skinned pelt reported by cattlemen.”

The feline woman smirked. “Oh… thanks.  I think.”

“We also had to include strange creature sightings like the New Jersey Devil, the Chupacabra, Bigfoot and the like in our search… you wouldn’t believe just how many sightings of that last one we had to filter through!”

“That had to have been amusing. I am glad you found me, but… what happened to me? How did I get here, and how did you get back here too?”

“Do you remember the fluctuations in the connection we had in the system just before you left?”

“That was months ago, but I seem to recall you mentioning it that morning.”

“There was another right when you stepped through the Gate to Hisashi. We lost the connection at the instant you went in, but we assumed it closed behind you so we reset the system and reestablished the wormhole. You weren’t at the receiving end, so we thought you’d gone on to do your reconnaissance, but when you didn’t report in after several hours, Robin went through to make sure some indigenous life form there hadn’t injured you. She couldn’t find you and saw no signs that you’d even left the area, so we had to assume something big had carried you off as soon as you stepped through and were beyond help. We had no choice but to proceed with Robin assuming your duties – armed, of course.”

“I do not understand. If you had marked me as a casualty, why are you here now?”

Samuel smiled. “After the larger Gate was constructed and the colony fully moved over to Hisashi, I started going back over the system event logs to see if I could explain the fluctuations in case they happened again; we never experienced any others, so it was not a concern through the rest of the colony operation.”

“I assume you discovered something if you are here now. What did you find?”

“The geosynchronous satellite over Hisashi recorded massive local solar flares from its parent star that washed over the planet at the time we established the bridged connection. The wave front coalesced with the planet’s magnetosphere and we are assuming it disrupted the wormhole signal. The duration was short, but the disturbance was just long enough that the corridor phased backward across itself due to the sheer amount of power it takes to generate and push it toward the receiver. I feared that you might have been disintegrated immediately, but the signal from the tracker chip embedded beneath your skin was traceable all the way back to a different spatial area in Earth’s orbit.

“It took me a lot of research and a few arguments with Ben to stay on your trail. He was under pressure to begin operations to resupply another colony, but I didn’t want to abandon you to your fate until I knew for sure what it was. It came down to the middle of one night that I had run into a brick wall and was stumped with some odd readings buried in the signal. I was sure it had something to do with your emergence point, but was at a loss how to proceed.”

Jake listened quietly to the discussion, but the confusing plethora of unintelligible babble was making him impatient and he began to fidget, much as he had the first time Citra had spoken of such things.

“I’d had my head down on my desk and needed rest,” Samuel continued, “but instead of going to sleep, my mind began to wander. After spying a data wafer on the desk, I started thinking about my family history, something I’d been researching right before you left, and a random old memory resurfaced that gave me a clue about what might have happened to you.”

“Really? How did you get a clue about me from your family genealogy?” she asked, intrigued.

Jake looked interested, but interrupted. “That is fine and you found her, but if you’re going to take her away, what can you tell me about my life?” he asked. “What did your history books say about me? Do I become a rich and famous showman?”

Samuel hedged for a moment, looking uncomfortable. “I’m not sure I should say anything,” he murmured. “No one should know too much about his own future.”

“I disagree,” Jake countered. “I’ll take my chances -- tell me!” Sam and Citra exchanged looks, and the cheetah silently nodded.

“So be it. Our history records say you died in a large fire that destroyed most of your company.” Jake looked stricken by this, but Sam continued. “Lightning from a late-season thunderstorm sparked a prairie fire that overtook your company during the night that was too fast for many to escape. I’m sorry, but a number of your people died in the fire and some of the bodies were burned too badly for real identification. It was reported that you were one of those. The show never recovered afterward, with the last performance just outside of Texarkana, Texas.”

“Which is where we are now,” Citra observed in quiet horror. She recalled the ground outside beneath her bare feet and noted just how dry the prairie grasses had been beneath them.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Harrison.”

“Died?” Jake repeated with a disgusted look. “Burned to a crisp? How horrible! When does it happen – tonight or tomorrow?”

“Tonight,” Samuel confessed, looking out at the cloudy sky through the window. “This is why I’m here right now. I need to take Citra out of here before it happens.”

“I’ve got to move the company!” Jake exclaimed. “We can cancel tomorrow’s show and move somewhere else before it happens!”

“Yes, but in doing that, you might move to the very place where it happens, Mr. Harrison. We don’t know the exact location of the fire, but it seems there may be no way for you and your people to escape what is coming. In the time where Citra and I are from, the event has already happened. It is a part of history.”

Citra put a desperate hand on her old friend’s arm. “Sam! We can take Jake back with us!” she exclaimed hopefully. “I saved his life, he saved my life – and now I can save his… again!”

“I don’t know… That might be changing history.”

“My coming back here might have already done that!”

“You have added nothing more than a footnote, my citrakāyah. Any descendants Mr. Harrison might have would never be born if we took him.”

Jake took off his hat and held it in his lap. “I can go with you? That would be better than dying in a fire!”

“If he dies tonight, he will not have any descendants, Sam! Nothing would change if he came with us, other than he would go on living!”

“If it’s all the same to you,” Jake said soberly, “I don’t want a death that kind of horrible!”

“You already said his body was not identified, that it was only thought his was one of those burned too badly to recognize! Maybe that is because he came back with us!”

Samuel turned his eyes upon the other man and studied him for a long moment, thinking things over. “Maybe,” he mused quietly. “However, there is something else to consider.”

“What is that?” Jake asked, rubbing his temples. This strange talk was giving him a headache.

“You may not like living in our year, Mr. Harrison. It is like nothing you could possibly even dream of, and will likely even be a nightmare for you.”

Jake snorted. “I’ve seen some wild things in my day, son. I’ve never been to a foreign country, but I’ve heard tell that some have customs considered really strange. I have seen how different things were between our homesteaders and the Indian nations right here and I’ve been able to live with them even if I think some of those are really odd.”

He looked over at the cheetah. “If Citra’s there with me, I’d like to take that chance in your world. Nightmare or not, it has to be better than dying.”

“Taking you with us would be a one-way journey, Mr. Harrison.”

“So’s dying!”

“You can’t come back if you don’t like what you see. I cannot stress this enough. You might go on living, but you will leave this kind of life behind forever, so before you make your decision, keep that in mind.”

“If she came here and you came here, why do you say that I can’t come back?” Jake asked. “It sounds like that gate of yours can go anywhere in any year.”

The Amerindian looked frustrated. “The Gate was not designed for this, and although I pushed hard for the attempt to come back to get her, my director was adamant that this would be the last time. There are too many variables and potential dangers, so the technology to do it again will be dismantled and the data erased as soon as we get back.”

“That sounds like Ben,” Citra muttered unhappily from her spot on the bed. She was an engineer and a scientist and did not like the notion of ignoring such a discovery, but from the months of her stay here, she also realized that it was probably the right thing to do. Fictional time travel stories were abundant in her era and all were wrought with the kind of dangers that could result.

Samuel looked over at her. “I was given three days to find you before the recall Gate appears for us, and it took me nearly all of that time to find you. You would not believe the sheer amount of power we’ve had to employ to recreate the conditions that brought you – and me – to this place and time without a receiver. If my information is correct, everyone in Mr. Harrison’s production will be bedded down for the night when it happens.”

“Every man has to die sometime,” Jake muttered. “For some of my folks, I guess it’s tonight, but for me I would choose not to meet the Death Angel just yet. I’ve already avoided him once, thanks to this lady-cat here.” He glanced out the window at the people moving about and then looked back at Citra. “What about her? People around here will notice her absence too. There’s too many folks who know about her now.”

The cheetah shook her head. “Very few of them really know how I got here, and with so many perished in the fire, those who are left may not even care if one of the animals got away in the confusion.”

“I suppose that’s so.”

Samuel looked at Jake for a long, quiet moment. “If you’ve made your final decision, we’ll all need to leave this evening just after dark so no one sees us depart. This will keep with the history records of your disappearance, but our recall will not be until tomorrow morning. The coordinates for the place we’ll need to be is approximately five miles due south of here, so we can plan to spend the night there. Citra can accompany you back to your wagon, Mr. Harrison, so you can take a few personal items if you wish.”

“She doesn’t have to come with me,” Jake said stiffly. “It won’t take long to grab a few things from my wagon.”

Samuel shook his head. “You’ve expressed the notion of warning your people, having them move out of the danger. We can’t allow you to do that, Mr. Harrison; history must run its course.” He turned to the cheetah. “If you run into anyone, make sure he tells no one that you’re both leaving or about what’s to come. I’ll wait for you in here.”

Jake snorted at the other man’s distrust, but he raised a hand as if giving an oath. “I promise not to spill the beans,” he said.

Citra looked over at him with smirk, but Samuel pulled on the sleeve of his shirt. Glowing faintly upon his wrist in the dim light of the room was an electronic timepiece of a type Jake had never seen before. Samuel tapped its illuminated face several times and then studied something there.

“The Gate will appear at seven thirty-eight tomorrow morning, so we’ll need to be in the right place by then.”

“Is there any danger of the fire spreading in that direction?” Citra asked.

“No, and that’s why we chose those coordinates for the recall Gate. I have a tent and a couple of bedrolls stashed in that area, so we won’t have to camp out in the rain.”

Jake narrowed his eyes. “If you know where the fire is not going to be for that, I could warn Desmond to move the company there. That would save a lot of people from dying!”

Samuel Hawke was a larger man than Jake Harrison by inches. He stood up and towered over Jake, looking down at him with a dangerous expression. “That would be spilling the beans,” he said with a rumble in his voice, “something you just promised not to do. I was under the impression that a man’s word meant something here. Was I mistaken?”

Jake swallowed, but then shook his head. “No,” he said after a moment. “I have always prided myself at keeping my word.”

“That’s a good attribute,” Samuel told him. He held out his hand and Jake stood up to take it. They shook hands and the expression on Jake’s face showed that he had accepted what he must – and must not – do over the course of the next few hours.

The showman looked over at the cheetah and let out a small sigh. “I’ll miss these people and this kind of life,” he told her, “but if that is what it takes to go on living, I’m glad you’ll be with me at least.”

Citra and Samuel exchanged a quick glance, but then she climbed off the bed to embrace him. “Yes, I will be with you… as long as I can, Jake,” she promised.

“Okay, now that this is all settled,” Jake said, “let me get a few things from my wagon and then I can saddle up my horse.”

“You will need to leave your horse here, Mr. Harrison,” Samuel said.

“What? She might die in the fire!” Jake retorted incredulously. “She’s been a good mare.”

“If your horse is discovered missing, someone might think you escaped death instead of dying with the others. It’s possible she might get away on her own, but we can’t take her with us. It’s best we go on foot.”

Jake frowned deeply, but nodded. “It appears you know best in all things,” he grumbled, “but we don’t have to walk five miles to this gate of yours. We can take three of the show ponies from the corral and then let them go when we get to where we are going to camp.” He swallowed hard and then added, “If the company is going to be broken after the fire, I doubt anyone will miss them.”

Samuel nodded. “That’s a good plan. You’ll need to leave your pistol behind, too.”

“What? Why?”

Citra held up a pair of fingers. “Two reasons,” she explained. “The first is that you will not need it where we are going. People do not need to carry guns for protection anymore.”

“The second reason,” Samuel added, “is that if it is found and recognized among the burned ruins, it will complete the picture that you perished.”

Jake glanced at Citra with a look of annoyed acceptance. “Let’s go get my things before I change my mind.”

“It’s too late to change your mind anyway,” Samuel said.

“What do you mean?” Citra asked.

“Now that we’ve told him about what is to come, if we leave him behind, you know he will warn his people and save himself. We have to take him with us now.”

Sam and Citra looked back at Jake together. The showman looked indignant for a moment that they still felt he could not be trusted, but then he realized that Samuel was right. Knowing of his own impending death, he would not have thought twice about warning the others in spite of giving his word if he was left to face the fire as he was supposed to.

“No turning back,” Jake said to his companions. “We have to go through with this.” Citra put a reassuring hand on his arm and Samuel nodded. “Let’s get this over with,” Jake said firmly.

In unison, all three turned to the door, but Samuel suddenly stopped and held up a hand. “One more thing, please.”

“What is it, Sam?” Citra asked, peering out the window. “You said we had to leave after sundown and it’s getting close to that now.”

“This won’t take long.”

Jake and Citra sat down on the mattress side by side and both looked up at him. Sam smiled sheepishly and leaned back against the wall, sliding his hands into the pockets of his trousers.

“In the months you’ve been here, have you met an Indian by the name of Chetan?”

“Yes, he is a good friend of mine,” Citra answered.

Jake nodded and said, “He’s one of my performers in reenactments of the times when the white man encountered the red man.”

“How do you know of Chetan?” the cheetah asked.

Samuel grinned. “Chetan Hawk was my ancestor. I would very much like to meet him just for a few minutes before we go. He’s the reason why I’m even in the Program.”

“He is? How?”

“He knew how to read and write in English and kept a diary that’s been in the family for generations. In it, he spoke of his time with a Wild West show and his fondness for a special cat-like woman he knew only for a short time, though he never named her. He never wrote much about her and did not explain, but we’ve always wondered what he was talking about; some thought he had just smoked too much peyote, but I never forgot it; that is the extra clue I said I’d had.”

Citra grinned at this, now fonder of her Indian friend.

“He was also a bit of a visionary in the family,” Samuel continued. “Although uneducated for the most part, he seemed to have some foreknowledge of future events, from the settling of other worlds to the furmankind program itself!”

“He must have heard us talking,” Jake surmised aloud, looking at the cheetah. “That day on the trail to Topeka, when you gave me your fanciful story, remember?”

She nodded. “That must have been it,” she agreed. Looking at Samuel, she asked, “Since he obviously escapes the fire, do you think he might have changed history, knowing what he did?”

Samuel shook his head. “He never made any significant contributions to the world,” he said. “He never talked about it to anyone else as far as my knowledge extends, just kept it in his diary.”

“Perhaps that is for the best.” She looked at him with a gentle smile. “He is a good man, Sam. You should be proud to be part of his family.”

Her associate drew himself up with pride. “I am,” he said, “and thank you for telling me that. I will not tell him who I am, but I would like to meet him.”

“We do not have much time, but we can go see him after Jake gets his things.”

“Are you going to warn him of the fire?” Jake asked suspiciously.

“Not at all,” Samuel assured him. “I already know that he survives the fire, so I’m not tempted to give him any information about his fate. I won’t even tell him that we’re related. I give you my word that I only want to meet the man.”

Jake nodded. “That’s good enough for me. Let’s go.”

Chapter 15

Unfamiliar Territory

Jake looked out through the opening of the tent and peered out across the prairie in the direction of Texarkana. He could not see much through the rain of a late-season thunderstorm and he wondered how a rain-soaked land could catch fire from a lightning strike. He already knew the answer, though. He had seen such things happen before, where a land so dry continued to be flammable tinder even under a little bit of water. The downfall was not hard and it had not been raining long, and even he knew that water would not cover the whole of the land. It could and often did rain only in spots, and with growing anxiety he knew that the company was camped out in such a place where it could not escape a quickly spreading grass fire.

Samuel’s history records did not give a specific time when the lightning would spark the deadly fire, but there had already been a spectacular light-show in the heavens before even a single drop had fallen – a common sight out on the grand prairie, and the rumble of thunder came often. They only knew that it would happen sometime during the night when everyone would be asleep.

The showman was no stranger to sleeping in a tent, as he had spent many nights in them over the years, but he had never seen a large dome tent before; Samuel and Citra had quickly assembled it from the contents of a small bag that the Amerindian had previously stashed with bedrolls beneath a cluster of sage brush. On a regular night, he would have been fascinated by its water-resistant material, fiberglass rods and camouflage pattern, but he had watched them put it together with detached interest in the blue-white glow of a strange lantern that possessed neither flame nor heat. He had set out his old bedroll inside with two others made from fabric he had been told could keep a person warm even in the cold of the arctic.

Samuel was fast asleep, snoring softly atop his sleeping bag and Citra was cocooned inside another between the two men. Jake had been surprised that the woman would sleep within the same tent as the men, but the others had assured him that neither of them were offended and it would be acceptable. They were only sleeping side by side, and although even this went against Jake’s upbringing, he doubted he would be getting any sleep that night anyway.

A cool breeze from the rain flowed into the tent through the opening he sat cross-legged just inside, but he could not bring himself to close it. They had shown him how to operate the zipper to close it when he was ready.

He stared out into the storm, flinching every time he saw a flash of lightning, but he was unable to take his gaze away from the night. He could feel the fatigue of the long day, but he was too restless to attempt sleep.

Who would survive? he thought to himself. Samuel had said that most – but not all – would perish in the disaster. What of Emmett, Lane or Sonya? He considered Mrs. Norris, the scrappy old woman he trusted implicitly to run his ranch in Tanglewood. What would become of her… or the ranch? He had not updated his Last Will and Testament in years, and if memory served correctly, it still reflected that all his possessions and holdings were to go to his only son – the son he had buried just before meeting the half-cheetah and half-human woman who had changed his life – and now his continued existence – forever.

He spat out into the rain. Even if he could not tell anyone, he wished he had had the time to update his will before running off in the night. He could have set up Desmond or even Mrs. Norris as the Executor of his estate and make some kind of provision for the survivors of those who’d worked for him. Jake Harrison was a rare employer who always tried to make sure his folks were taken care of and it irked him that he had not been able to do so in this case.

Whether or not he had ever gotten foreknowledge of events did not change the fact that he had not updated his will with the death of his son. He had planned to do that when they had returned to Tanglewood, but it was too late now. Once he was declared dead and gone, they would probably try to find some distant relative to hand over his estate. To his recollection, he had no living relatives, but some cockroach would likely crawl out of the shadows to lay claim to what was left.

Jake was not a crying man, but that did not stop him from having emotions. His throat was tight and he heaved several thick sighs in the darkness of the tent, but he never removed his eyes from the rain.

He sat thus for several hours into the early hours of the morning, eventually dozing off from sheer fatigue, but then he awoke with a start when he felt two padded hands upon his shoulders. Without thinking, he leaned back until he felt her form up against him, and then her arms slid around him in a light embrace.

In the months they had known one another, there had been little physical contact between them, no more than necessary, but in the emotion of the moment, he knew that she shared his fears for those they had called friends. Instead of pulling away, he settled back against her and allowed the embrace. He reached up to one of her hands and took it in his own, lightly petting the fur of her arms with the other.

It was only then that he looked back out into the darkness. The storms had moved on and the rains had stopped, and there was now a reddish orange glow off in the distance. He swallowed hard, realizing that these two who claimed to be from a later year had not lied to him concerning the night’s fatal events. The fires on the horizon had either killed or were killing his friends and employees at that very moment.

He started to get up, the urge to run five miles back to his company strong, but Citra’s arms tightened and kept him seated. He struggled for a moment until he heard the sobs at his back. She also mourned those she had known that were now dead or dying.

“Why didn’t you let me save them?” Jake whispered. “We could have saved all their lives!”

“Jake…” Citra whispered back through a tight throat, “we cannot change what was to be. Sam and I could not have even let you come with us if your own future had not already been determined to end on this night. Had you and I never met, that cougar might have killed you that day as you were probably supposed to, but even if you had survived that, you would be there in the fire now – with them – dying.”

“I know,” he croaked, “but we could have saved them too! We could have all gone forward to your year with you!”

Citra continued to hold him tight, her face buried in the hair on the back of his head. “Jake, someone died tonight and when the townsfolk of Texarkana sift through the remains, they will find a body they will mistake as you. This also means that person has died and will never be identified and claimed by his family. Was it Mr. Desmond, was it Tony, or was it some poor hand in your employment that you did not even know his name? There will not have been enough extra, unidentified bodies to take the place of everyone else you wanted to save. It would have been as if your entire company disappeared off the face of the earth, but our books do not record any such event. History can only be bent – such as my insignificant presence here – but it cannot be changed.”

Jake stretched out his aching legs, having sat in one position too long, but the cheetah would not allow him to leave the tent. He settled for getting up onto his knees so he could turn to face her. She kept her hands upon his shoulders as they looked into one another’s eyes. Sorrow and loss reflected back to each.

The shared emotions got to be too much for the showman and he suddenly pulled her into a fierce embrace as he finally let a few tears moisten her fur. She held him just as tight with no teasing or accusations that shedding tears meant he might be no real man.

Further back in the tent, Samuel watched them quietly from his bed and was surprised to feel a small pang of envy. Although he and Susan had gone out together a few times, their relationship had developed into nothing more than friendship. She was supposed to have gone off to another world out of his reach anyway, but seeing her in the arms of another man, he discovered that he still had some feelings for her.

With some small consolation, he knew that Susan and Jake would not be able to stay together even when they did get back home. As a genetically altered Fur, Susan was contracted for life with the Anthro Human Colonization Program and would likely be placed in another new starter colony since she had missed out on Hisashi. Jake would then be on his own in a land that would be just as foreign and unfamiliar in customs and traditions as if he had gone to some other country. The showman and former-owner of a large company would likely be out of place for the rest of a life that had now been extended.

Under the cover of his sleeping bag, he checked the time on his techwatch and noted there was still a few hours before they needed to get up to break down the camp. Nothing would come of disturbing the closeness his two companions shared for the moment, so Samuel closed his eyes and willed himself to relax again.

A moment later, Jake and Citra broke their embrace and then sat down side by side. Jake glanced back out the door, but Citra reached up and gently turned his face back to her.

“We can do nothing for them,” she reminded him. “Perhaps you should try to get some sleep.”

He dropped his head, touching his chin to his chest. “If I close my eyes, I fear I may see their faces screaming in the midst of flames,” he murmured. “Perhaps I can rest when we get to your home. Does it take long to get there?”

The cheetah shook her head. “Only a moment; once the Gate appears, we only need to walk through it like a doorway. When you step through, you will already be at our destination.”

“That is amazing. What does it feel like?”

She gave him a little smile, proud of him for changing the subject away from more dreadful thoughts. “You will feel a small tingling all over when you step through the Gate, but it will only last as long as taking that step.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Not at all.”

“What will I see?”

“Well, the first thing you will see is the dull interior of a very large building,” she told him with a bemused expression. “The equipment for the Gate is set up inside of a warehouse so that when we start a new colony or resupply one that is already established, we can move everything they need in one line of effort. They are usually already set up on platforms or carts to make the transportation easier.”

“Sounds like a single file of covered wagons or a freight train.”

Citra nodded. “That is a good analogy.”

“There’s another one of your fancy words. What is a nalo-gee?”

“I should have just said that you had made a good comparison. That is what an analogy is.”

“Yeah, you could’ve just said that,” he remarked with the hint of a smile in his eyes. “Do you still have trains and horses?”

“Yes, but the horses are not ridden for daily transportation like you do now, and the trains are much, much different – even if they are still used for the same function.”

“If you do not ride horses, what do you ride?”

Citra tried to think of anything she could use as a frame of reference. “Have you ever heard of a horseless carriage?”

Jake scratched his head. “I’m not sure I know what that is, but just thinking about it, I suppose that could describe a train or a trolley car.”

“Okay, think of a trolley car that can drive around without an electric cable or tracks, going any direction you need it to go along the roads.”

“That takes a might bit of imagination,” he murmured.

“Some of our vehicles move on their own from an internal engine. All you have to do is steer it and tell it how fast you wish to go.”

“An engine. Is that why you said you were an engineer?”

She smiled. “Not exactly, but do you remember the sky ships I once tried to describe to you?”

“The ones that ride through the air to the moon and other places?”

“That is right. Some of our vehicles fly through the air too, but they do not go as far as the moon. They stay lower in the sky to take their passengers from one place to another.”

“I would like to see that.”

“You will see them, Jake – in just a few hours.”

He fell quiet for moments, but then looked over at her to peer into her large golden eyes. “What will happen to me?” he asked quietly. “Since it was going to burn up, I grabbed the company money pouch when I went back to my wagon. I don’t know how long it will last, but I should have enough money to buy a homestead somewhere.”

Citra frowned. She did not know how to tell him that the few thousand dollars he had in the large leather pouch would not amount to much in an economy three hundred years removed from what he was familiar with. Until now, none of them had thought beyond saving his life, but once he was safe and sound in 2195, how would he live? What would he do? She was lost in thought for a moment, but then Jake spoke again in a quiet voice so as not to disturb their sleeping friend.

“Tell me about your world,” he requested, looking around at the tent and the few items that surrounded them. “Just seeing what you have here tells me that I will probably be a little lost when we get there.”

“Over the next century from right now, electricity will play a large role in many aspects of life,” she began. “You are familiar with telegraphs, electric lights and electric trolley cars, but that is only the beginning of what we call technology. Energy will be discovered in many forms beyond electricity and will make the things you see in my world seem miraculous, possibly even as incomprehensible magic! I will try to describe some of them you may see right away so they will not surprise you too much…”

***

Jake did sleep, but contrary to his fears, he did not have nightmarish dreams of his friends or of deadly flames. Instead, he was so fatigued that he was as dead to the world as he should have been due to the fire. Despite this, however, he awoke with a start before the sun was up.

The silhouette of Citra was curled up in a feline ball beside him, her chin resting across one of his knees, but he could feel the tip of her tail twitching against his bare foot, alerting him that she was already awake. He reached out quietly and then stroked one of her ears. Without opening her eyes, she smiled and the tip of her tail became a little more animated.

Jake glanced toward the doorway of the tent but found it had been zipped up closed, so he looked over to one of the mesh windows to the side. The sky outside looked only partly cloudy and there was the hint of morning sunlight just beginning to color the east.

“What time is it?” Citra murmured quietly.

Jake fished out his pocket watch, popped the cover and then turned its face in several directions trying to find enough light to read it. “Six fifty-three,” he replied after a moment. He returned the timepiece to his pocket and then reached for his boots. Citra raised her head and yawned, her ears pressed flat against her head and pink tongue curling up over itself.

Once he had his boots on, Jake snared his Stetson from the side and positioned it on his head after first brushing down his hair with a palm. He got up onto his knees and moved toward the door.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said quietly. Citra started to get up, but he waved her back down. “Stay here.”

“You do not want me to come with you?” she muttered with a frown.

“I need to relieve myself,” he said matter-of-factly. “You stay put.” Citra gave him a contrite look, but kept her place as he fumbled with the door zipper, trying to remember how it worked. He managed it after a moment and then stepped out onto the damp prairie amongst the field of sage brush where they had camped; despite the rains, the grasses still crunched underfoot.

The feline turned toward her other companion and then playfully batted at one of his ears. He sucked in a sharp breath, gulped and sputtered for a moment before he reached out and grabbed her wrist without opening his eyes. He held her wriggling fingers away from his assaulted ear and sighed aloud.

“It seems like someone’s in a better mood this morning,” he mumbled.

“Sleep will do wonders for a tired mind and body,” she returned.

“What time is it?”

Citra opened her mouth to reply, but the man’s techwatch chose that moment to start beeping in a three-tone pattern.

“What’s that sound?” asked the voice from outside the tent.

“It’s the sound of seven o’clock,” Samuel said, slowly sitting up, his eyes still closed. “Time to get up.” He silenced the watch without looking at it and then rubbed at his eyelids. When he finally opened them, the large golden orbs of the cheetah were staring back at him only inches away. He started and leaned backward. “Don’t do that!” he complained. The feline giggled and then sat back on her haunches as he silenced the watch.

“One of the things I’ve missed being back here looking for you,” Samuel said groggily, “is my Kaffetrakter.”

Citra smiled and smoothed down some of the errant black hair on top of his head. “Poor Sam, having to do without his imported coffee machine,” she purred. “Do not worry. We will be home soon and you can have all you want then.”

At her words, Samuel looked at his watch as if realizing what time it actually was. He looked around for his boots and then struggled into them. “We only have a half hour before the Gate arrives! We need to get everything broken down and put away.”

“Yes, boss,” Citra said, already rolling up her sleeping bag. She had to do Jake’s next, as he had not come back inside. With her and Samuel bustling around, he would have just been in their way.

Ten minutes later, the two of them crawled from the tent and began pulling out their bedrolls and other items, laying them across the sage brush to keep them off the muddy ground. The tent came down quickly afterward and they soon had everything stored away within bundles that could be easily carried.

Jake had not lifted a finger to help with anything, but when they finished and stood up to look at him, they found him staring off to the north with his hands in his pockets. There was smoke on the horizon and it had again taken all of his strength not to go running across the prairie back to Texarkana. The show ponies they had ridden had been freed after they had made camp and all three had disappeared during the night’s storms; even if he followed through with his temptation, he would be on foot.

Instead, he walked out from the camp a short distance and found something stuck into the damp ground. It looked like an oversized railroad spike twelve inches tall, but it had a faint yellow blinking light the color of a firefly’s butt perched on top. He knelt down to look at it and frowned.

“Is this one of your future things?” he called back. Citra and Samuel both walked out to him and he indicated the spike.

“Yes, that’s part of a perimeter sensor I set up last night.” Sam gestured a few yards in both directions and it was then Jake saw there were more of them. “I set them up in a circle around the camp in case something decided to visit us in the night.”

“What’s it do?”

Samuel stretched out his hand and waved it to the side of the spike. A sharp snap issued from the device and the Amerindian’s hand suddenly jerked away as if slapped. He held up his hand. There was a slight red mark across both sides of his hand.

“It sends out a mild electric current between the posts,” Samuel explained, “so that if something tries to cross it, a little jolt will convince it to go away. It’s not harmful and doesn’t really hurt, but most animals won’t try to cross it after the first snap.”

“I don’t see anything between the posts,” Jake muttered to Citra as Samuel wandered away.

“The energy field is not visible to the human eye,” she remarked, “but I can see faint lines when it is dark. I am sure other animals can see it too, which is another deterrent.”

“Look here,” Samuel said, kneeling down a few yards away. Jake and Citra saw him switch off the field with a tap to his techwatch and then put a hand down upon the ground. Beside his spread fingers was a fresh track in the wet soil. “Mountain lion, a large one,” he explained. “Sometime this morning.” There were more prints circled around the perimeter of the invisible fence, a stark indication that a cougar had been interested in their camp during the night.

Jake frowned. “Your sen… sensor spikes stopped it?”

“Looks like it,” Citra confirmed. “Without it, we could have had a visitor inside the tent last night.”

“This one,” Jake said, pointing to the well-defined paw print, “seems to be missing a toe.” He scrunched his lips, frowning. “Old Max, the male cougar we captured three years ago and kept in a cage wagon, was shy a toe on his right front paw.” Jake spat on the print, and then added, “He was a mean critter, too. Far too mean to risk having outside a cage. Eat you in a heartbeat if’n you gave him a chance.”

Citra nodded, adding, “I kept well away from his cage, since when I got near he became more restless.” She dropped down to sniff the footprint. “Smells like him, so I guess he got free during the fire.”

Samuel looked again at his techwatch. “It’s almost time,” he announced firmly. “The field is off now; help me gather up the posts and we’ll put them in the tent bag.”

It only took a couple minutes to pull up the spikes from the large circle around the camp site. Sam scraped as much mud off each one as he could before placing them in the bag with the disassembled tent.

Jake took another solemn look toward the north before Citra put a hand on his arm. Ready now to put this tragedy behind him, he nodded and turned his back on the smoke.

The trio only had to wait just a few more minutes, but then the air shimmered a few yards away. To Jake, it looked as if a rainbow had bunched up together into the space the size of one of his supply wagons. They were not directly in front of it, but Samuel turned to their bundles and picked up as much as he could carry, leaving the rest for his companions.

Citra handed Jake his bedroll and a pillowcase that he had stuffed the few belongings into that he had grabbed from his wagon. They followed Samuel a few paces to the east and suddenly the shimmering Gate looked different.

From the sides, it was nothing more than a rainbow haze, but when standing directly in front of it, Jake saw another scene. At this angle, it appeared to be a doorway at ground level about the size of a barn door, only all four edges were marked by a faint, hazy fog that made no sound whatsoever. There was a strong breeze flowing past them into this hole in the air from unequal pressure and Jake gulped at what he saw.

Just as Citra had described, there seemed to be nothing before them other than wooden crates strapped down onto a row of strange-looking wagons. That in itself was not what held the showman’s attention. It was the fact that several men and a woman were looking back at them, all of them wearing some kind of matching white robes. One of them was beckoning them to come through the amorphous gateway and Samuel surged forward without hesitation.

Jake watched him step through and for just a brief moment it looked as if the man had gone out of focus. Citra reached out and took his hand gently.

“Come, Jake,” she coaxed. “We must hurry. The Gate will not stay open long.”

All of a sudden, Jake’s feet would not move. He stood rooted to the spot and resisted her pulling on his arm.

“I’m not going!” he gasped, digging his heels into the muddy ground right in front of the shimmering opening. “I’ve changed my mind!”

“You must come with us!” Citra exclaimed, tugging on his arm with glances back behind her. “This is your only way now!”

“Your history books can be wrong!” he said in a tight voice, forcefully hurling his bedroll to the ground. “You saved me from the fire, but now I can go on living right here where I belong!”

Samuel came back to the Gate, his burdens having been dropped to the concrete floor of the warehouse beyond. “Mr. Harrison,” he said in a strong voice, “you can’t stay. To your world, you’re now dead!”

“I’m not dead until they plug me into the ground!” Jake shouted.

Knowing there must be tremendous power being pumped into the system to maintain the Gate for every second of its existence, Citra made a quick decision. She tossed her bundles through the Gate and then grabbed Jake around the middle. She grasped him tightly with three limbs, purposely let herself fall a little to the ground to off-balance him, and then propelled herself toward the Gate with the fourth.

“No!” Jake shouted, struggling to free himself from the painful clutches of her claws. He felt a slight ripple across his body as they passed through the opening through time and space and hit the ground hard. Another pair of strong hands latched onto both he and the cheetah and dragged them back away from the portal frame just as the rainbow gateway disappeared.

Jake, Citra and their bundles lay in a heap on the floor of the warehouse and Samuel stood large over them. The Amerindian took on a fighter’s stance in case the man from yesteryear got violent, but all the bluster seemed to go out of the showman. Jake gasped when Citra extracted her claws and he curled up in a ball where he lay.

There were several voices all talking excitedly around him, but there was also a low pulse that could be felt more than heard in the stuffy air that almost drowned out what was being said. Jake ignored their words, gasping for breath with his eyes tightly closed.

Citra knelt beside him and put a hesitant hand upon his shoulder. He brushed it off as if her touch burned and refused to look at her.

“Jake?” she said in a soft voice. “I am sorry. I had to do that. I am sorry if I hurt you.”

“Leave me alone,” he growled into his chest.

The cheetah got up on two feet and backed away, giving him time to recover. When she looked around, Samuel was talking to a man in his late forties whose dark hair showed no signs of his age. The project director in a white lab coat like the others was arguing with Sam about the third member of their party, but the Amerindian was doing his best to explain Jake’s presence in a respectful tone.

When she looked back at the man in question, Citra saw that Jake was now sitting up on the cold floor, his hands absently rubbing the places where she had dug in her claws. He had retrieved the pillowcase that contained his personal belongings and had it sitting in his lap as if afraid someone else might take them.

She wanted to go to him, but knew he would talk to her only when he was ready. She had forcefully taken him away from everything he had ever known and something like this could damage even a close friendship.

Jake did not look at her, but was glancing around at the inside of the large building. It was cold, musty and he did not like the look of the place even though Citra had already told him what to expect upon arriving. Several men and a woman were all wearing those annoying white robes and he silently wondered if he would be forced to dress as they did in this place.

Nearby was a large box with another person inside standing in front of an array of instrumentation that was all alien to the showman. The box was about the size of his travel home if it had sat on the ground without the wagon wheels. There were thick black ropes on the ground from that booth to what looked to be a door frame near him with a blank wall behind it. He saw Samuel nod in deference to the man who spoke with him and then the Amerindian headed toward that box, his western boots clomping on the concrete floor.

The other man looked to be someone of authority and Jake found himself getting to his feet when he approached. He dusted off his trousers and then picked up his Stetson from the ground where it had fallen in the scuffle. A gentleman always removed his hat indoors, but he straightened it upon his head despite that he was within a building. He squared his shoulders and faced the man who stopped a few feet from him.

“Mr. Harrison,” the man said with a carefully controlled voice, “I am Dr. Benjamin Quarters, the Project Director of this facility. Welcome to New Mexico.”

Jake transferred his pillowcase to his left hand and stuck out his right. “I’m Jacob Harrison, of Jake Harrison’s Wilder West show.”

“Yes, that is what I have just been told,” Dr. Quarters said, taking the man’s proffered hand. They both maintained a firm grip as they shook and then Jake gave the inside of the building another brief glance.

“I’m in New Mexico?” Jake asked. “It’s been some time since I was last here.”

“Las Cruces, to be precise. Yes, it’s been a really long time since you were here last,” Quarters reminded him. “How do you feel?”

Jake rubbed the spots where Citra’s claws had dug in as he studied the other man. “I will live, thanks again to my lady-cat, even if she was a bit rough on me this time. If you’re the one in charge here, am I in trouble?”

“No, that would be Susan and Samuel.”

“Because of me?”

“Because of you.” Quarters turned toward the Fur standing quietly nearby. “However, I understand that if it were not for you, our furry friend here might not have survived, and for that I thank you.”

“She’s saved my life, sir - twice, now,” Jake said. “I would appreciate it if you would be lenient with the lady-cat on my behalf.”

Quarters smiled, looking at the cheetah. “Susan, would you join us, please?”

The feline approached them demurely, her arms together in front of her, fingers griping the cowhide pattern of her western skirt merely for having something to do with her hands.

“Hello, Ben. I am glad to see you again.” Citra said to the director.

“I’m glad to see you as well, Susan,” said the doctor. “It took a lot of effort to discover the means to bring you back to us, most of it due to many sleepless nights for Samuel.”

Citra looked around and saw new faces among those in white lab coats standing near the now-empty frame of the Gate. “I am glad to be back, sir, but how long have I been away? I was with Jake almost five months, but it looks like more time has passed here.”

Quarters looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Five months, really? You’ve been missing for nearly two years. Today is Friday, April 21.”

“Two years?”

“Ah, yes… the offset time differential. It is 2197.”

Citra looked down at her western garments. “I think our clothing is a little out of date,” she murmured. “We should change as soon as possible, but all my things are in storage.” She looked up at Quarters with a frown. “I am sorry I missed out. How are things on Hisashi?”

The project director fell silent as he led them away from the silent Gate. Jake followed along quietly with his pillowcase slung over his shoulder, looking around at everything from the overhead lights to equipment panels on the walls. The other technicians were still huddled together in quiet conversation, and while he could not hear what they said, he was sure it was all about the strange man who had come back with their associates.

Quarters was still talking. “We lost everyone on Hisashi three months ago, Susan. They established their town near the ocean in a gulf region, but they were too close to the shore when a magnitude-nine offshore quake sent a tsunami over them. Their equipment transmitted audio and video feeds right up until the end and satellite surveillance corroborated the event. They’re all gone.”

Citra put her claws up to her chin. “That… that is terrible!”

“It’s one of the dangers of moving to a new place, Susan. If the flora or fauna don’t get you, the weather still can. The colony site had shown no previous indication there had ever been any earthquakes or flooding in the region. It was thought to be safe.”

“Robin, Chet, Malcom and all the others?”

“As far as we know, all dead. The Gate receiver on their end stopped working so we haven’t been able to send anyone in to look for survivors. However, since Hisashi seemed to be otherwise human-friendly, the Terran Colonial Coalition has decided to send another starter colony to try again. They will launch a new Gate receiver next month, and as soon as it arrives and deploys from orbit, another colony group will be going through. For obvious reasons, they are choosing another site farther inland.”

“Will I be going with them?” the cheetah asked.

“You only just got back, so that will have to be the topic of a future discussion with the committee.”

Quarters led them to a door leading outside and stopped just inside after he opened it. It was raining outside; not a storm, but a grey day with steady rainfall. Jake could not tell if was morning or afternoon from the available light, but he was still on morning time. The director reached for an umbrella from a container beside the door and Citra took another. She handed it to Jake and then grabbed another for herself.

Jake struggled trying to open it, so the cheetah reached over and showed him how to thumb the quick release catch. Its spring action deployed quicker than he expected and he jumped back, nearly losing his hat and his pillowcase of belongings.

“If you will follow me,” Quarters said, “we can retire to the conference room where we can discuss your little adventure.” Jake and Citra stepped out into the rain behind him and it was the showman’s first glimpse of the new outside world.

They walked along a concrete sidewalk that led across manicured grounds toward another building. Jake looked around and thought he was in the middle of a city, having never seen so many structures so close together that was not a town, but the architecture was like nothing else he had ever seen. Tall buildings of glass and steel surrounded them and he could see the distant mountains between some of them. This looked nothing like the Las Cruces he had seen before.

Halfway across the grounds, they passed a large ornamental water garden occupied by numerous fountains with flower beds containing more colors than the showman had probably ever seen together in one place.

There was movement from the corner of his eye and one of the smaller buildings on the right suddenly jumped up from the ground into the rainy sky. He sank to a sudden crouch on the sidewalk as it roared away and he tilted up the edge of the umbrella to watch the flying vehicle with wide eyes.

It disappeared through the maze of tall buildings and then he noticed that his companions were staring back at him. He cleared his throat and stood up again feeling foolish, but to their credit, neither Citra nor Quarters said anything to him about it. He nodded without a word and they headed off again across the grounds.

Another movement caught his attention when a tiny device with grappling arms beneath it floated by in the air with a quiet buzzing. There was a plastic box clutched in its limbs that protected its cargo from the rain. Jake blinked several times and started to follow the delivery drone as if mesmerized, but Citra took him by the arm with a smile and coaxed him to follow.

They gathered beneath a colorful awning at the doorway of another building and folded the umbrellas. A section of the wall made of glass slid sideways without anyone touching it. Jake stumbled and walked through the opening backward, keeping his eyes on the door as if it was a snake. It closed again of its own volition when it was sure there was no one in the doorway and the showman was suddenly fascinated.

He walked back to the door and it opened again without him touching it. He stepped back out under the awning and waited for it to close again. When it started to do so, he leaned forward to touch it, but then it retreated again from his fingers.

“Come on, Jake,” Citra said with amusement. “We can play with the technology later. Put your umbrella in the canister.”

The showman looked up with a grin and nodded, walking back into the building. He waited for the door to close again before depositing his umbrella and turning to follow his companions.

They were inside of an office building staffed with other people at desks with some kind of book with shiny covers in front of them. Carpeted floors muffled Jake’s footsteps. Almost immediately, a service bot emerged from a wall receptacle and began vacuuming up the bits of mud, dirt and grass left behind from his muddy boots and Jake tried to jump up onto a desk away from the strange critter. He stumbled, twisted around and then fell across the desk, hitting his head hard on the oak surface.

“Goodness!” exclaimed a young woman seated at the desk. Citra and Dr. Quarters rushed back and found the showman out cold.

Citra hovered over him and patted his cheek. “Jake!” she exclaimed. “Snap out of it!” He mumbled something about a woman named Mabel, but did not regain consciousness.

“Let’s get him into the conference room,” Quarters remarked. The cheetah’s hybrid physiology gave her enhanced strength and she gathered up the cowboy in her arms without needing anyone else’s aid. She had carried him like this once before when she had first found him in the canyon following the cougar attack and had taken him to the cave where she had been living.

She followed Quarters along a wide corridor while others poked their heads out of their offices to see what was going on. Many stared and gawked at the clothing that both Citra and the man in her arms wore and discussions began clucking in the background.

Quarters opened the door to a room with dark paneled walls. Inside, Citra set him in a wide padded chair at the head of a large V-shaped conference table in front of a wall-sized screen. There was a pitcher of water and several crystal glasses on a small table next to one wall and the director quickly poured out a portion. Ice tinkled in the glass as he handed it to the cheetah.

Citra held the glass for a moment and then put her cool and damp hand up against Jake’s forehead. His eyes fluttered after a moment and then he looked up into her large golden eyes.

“Here,” she directed, holding the glass out to him, “take a sip and get your breath back.”

“What happened?” he asked sheepishly.

“I think you fainted when a cleaning bot startled you.”

Jake looked alarmed, glancing from Citra to Dr. Quarters. “Please don’t tell anyone I fainted,” he begged them, taking the glass of water. It was the second time he had fainted in Citra’s presence and his ego was severely humbled. There was also a new lump on his noggin where he hit the desk.

“Some shock is to be expected,” Quarters assured him. “You’ll be fine in a moment.”

The showman lifted the water to his mouth and stopped when it touched his lips. He was not expecting it to be as cold as water from a winter rain barrel. It was cleaner than he was used to seeing too, but he suddenly found himself gulping it down.

“Easy,” Citra cautioned. “Slowly.”

After several moments, Dr. Quarters took a seat at the table and Citra sat down beside Jake. “Take a moment to compose yourself, Mr. Harrison,” the director said sympathetically. “You’ve had a long day and it’s not over yet. Samuel will be with us shortly after he’s completed his task and then we’ll have a long conversation.”

“The day’s only begun,” Jake muttered, “but I agree it’s already been eventful.” He looked at the crystal glass in his hands and felt the smooth surface beneath his touch. “If it’s not too much to ask, could I beg some coffee? We only woke up an hour ago and this snow water is the only thing I’ve had in my stomach.”

Quarters frowned, again having forgotten the time differential. “Of course, I will order up something for the three of you, but it is late afternoon so I may not be able to get breakfast foods.”

“Anything at all would be appreciated.”

Quarters pulled a techphone from a shirt pocket and tapped at its face for several moments. Jake watched him curiously and then the director looked up again. “Something will be brought up from the cafeteria in a moment.”

The showman was about to ask him what he had just done, but then he rubbed his temple instead. Citra looked at him in concern.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“No, I don’t think I am,” he admitted. “I don’t know that I will be.”

“Jake…”

He looked up at her with a look of hopelessness. “Take me back,” he said quietly. “Please. You tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen. I can be bull-headed like that.”

Citra shook her head with a sad expression. “That is no longer possible, Jake. Remember what Samuel told you – this was a one-way trip.”

“I don’t care if your history books say I died!” he said. “I can go away somewhere else, maybe to San Francisco and start a new life, take on a different name. Others have done that before.”

“Mr. Harrison, you can never go back,” Quarters said in an even tone. “The Gate to your place in time has closed forever.”

“Even if we could send you back,” Citra added, “there is no guarantee that you would survive. Paradoxes cannot exist in time, so it is more likely that you would go back only to die. Remember Old Max’s tracks by our camp? Your body was never found and positively identified, so he might have gotten you even as the momma cougar was supposed to have in the beginning when I showed up to save you. History would have corrected itself had you stayed behind.”

“You planned to come forward with Susan and now you are here,” Quarters remarked. “Second thoughts will not help you now and what-ifs have no bearing. You are here, Mr. Harrison, and this is one of the things we will discuss when Samuel joins us.”

“What is Sam doing?” Citra asked curiously.

“Samuel is purging the system of all records, settings and related data associated with our attempt to retrieve you through the glitch in your Gate passage – so that it can never happen again by choice.”

“I thought you might, but I had hoped you would not do that,” Citra remarked. “I know it was a mistake I went back there, but that is how discoveries are made. Time travel could be a—”

“Time travel presents too many temptations to meddle with history. We were never meant to possess such authority. I have elected to erase all knowledge of the means to repeat such a journey before further experimentation can be done. There will be no record of what we’ve done for others to exploit.”

The feline looked at him aghast. “You alone decided that? That kind of a decision cannot be made by one man!” she exclaimed. “Surely we could benefit from further research into —”

Samuel entered the room. “Dr. Quarters,” he interrupted, “it’s done. All material related to Operation Cheetah Retrieve has been purged from the system along with all redundancies. It’s all gone.”

The project director narrowed his eyes and held out a hand. “Your private backup, please,” he said firmly. Samuel looked as if he had been caught with his hand in the till and reached into the pocket of his trousers. He pulled out a small data wafer and handed it to his superior.

“Thank you, Sam.” Without taking his eyes off the Amerindian and without checking the contents, Quarters snapped the wafer in half between his thumb and forefinger.

Samuel nodded with resignation and handed a dirty pillowcase to Jake. “You left this out in the hallway,” he said. “One of the bots was trying to clean it.”

Jake took it and peered inside. The meager belongings he had grabbed and stuffed into the pillowcase before leaving his old life behind were all jumbled together, but he would not know if anything was amiss until he had a chance to inventory everything.

One thing was missing, and that was the pistol he had snuck back with him. He looked at Samuel and saw the gun tucked into the waistband of his trousers. The large man briefly showed him the rounds that he had removed and held in his hand, and the former showman nodded in acceptance.

Citra was oblivious to this wordless exchange between men, but stared at Samuel with disappointment as he took another seat at the table. All the knowledge associated with the ability to travel to other years had been erased, just like that.

Quarters regarded Jake quietly until the man set his things aside and looked up. “Now,” he said at last, “before any kind of a decision is made concerning Mr. Harrison’s future here, I want to know what happened.” He looked at Citra and nodded toward her. “Start at the beginning, from the point where you stepped through the Gate that was supposed to have transported you to Hisashi.”

The cheetah opened her mouth to begin, but there was a knock upon the door. The director sighed at the interruption, but Samuel got up to open the door with a thumb to a pad set in the wall. A man with a floating anti-grav cart stepped into the room and looked apologetic.

“I was instructed to deliver an early dinner here, sir,” he said.

Quarter nodded. “Yes, that is for my associates here. Please come in.”

The man stared at the western garments that Samuel, Citra and Jake all wore, but said nothing. He pushed his cart to the table and began setting out covered plates, cups and utensils for them. No one said anything, but Jake studied the floating cart until a steaming cup of hot coffee was set before him. He preferred to drink his black and for a moment he thought of nothing more than the aromatic java that trickled down his throat.

“How much do I owe for this?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Quarters. “Our budget covers it.”

Jake nodded with hesitation. “Much obliged, thank you.”

Samuel and Citra began eating hungrily, but only after Quarters nodded that they could do so before they continued with the debriefing. He enjoyed a cup of coffee with them, but otherwise sat quietly observing them all.

Jake lifted the cover from his plate and found beefsteak, a baked potato, corn and green beans with a hot roll wrapped up in a paper napkin beside it. He was secretly pleased that they had food he could eat, as he had wondered if he would have been forced to eat some strange critter and vegetables from one of those foreign worlds he kept hearing about.

He picked up a knife and fork and cut into the meat. It was cooked medium well, just as he liked it, and he was surprised to find it had a good smoky flavor.

A half hour later, the same cafeteria attendant had come in and cleared away everything but the coffee pot and their cups. Having food in his belly with a warm cup of coffee had calmed Jake’s nerves and he listened quietly when Citra began telling her tale. He interrupted only now and again to clarify something that had to do with himself and his company, but for the most part allowed her to talk at length.

When she had brought her circumstances up to the present, Samuel told his part of it, beginning when he had hesitantly stepped through the modified Gate signal to go search for her while dressed in unfamiliar garments made to resemble those depicted in photographs from the 1890s.

They took a break after two hours and Samuel led Jake to a restroom, giving him basic instructions for its use. Jake found he was able to take care of things without an issue and did not even jump when the automatic flusher activated. He washed his hands at Samuel’s insistence and seemed fascinated by the water pulsing from the faucet without him having to turn any knobs.

He had only been in this strange world a few hours and he vowed quietly to himself that he would never again faint from anything he saw here. It might take time to get used to some of it and he would have to learn their rules, but his stubborn will began to assert itself once more.

When they returned to the conference room, everyone was present except the project director. The three of them sat in relative silence for several minutes, but then Samuel began tugging at the collar of his shirt.

“I hope we can stop for the day soon,” he said. “My internal body clock is still set for the Texas morning we got up on back in 1892, but it is almost five o’clock in the evening here. I’m ready to get out of these clothes and into a hot shower.”

“I know what you mean,” Citra remarked. “I may donate the clothing I have on to a museum, claiming I found them in a locker somewhere, but I am anxious to get into something more comfortable.”

Jake looked down at his own garments and frowned. He was comfortable in what he had on, but since no one from this year seemed to be wearing them, he suspected the style had long since gone out of fashion. He just hoped he would not have to wear one of those white robes. He did not know why, but they really annoyed him.

Citra put her elbows up onto the table and then rested her chin in one hand. She looked at Samuel with a lazy smile. “Ben said it has been almost two years since I left,” she said. “It has only been a few months for me, so tell me what has happened in my absence.”

Samuel shook his head. “You know how it is,” he replied. “Things change but they stay the same. It’s not much different from when you were here, though we’ve had the usual transient personnel in the office staff. I’m here every workday and even I keep seeing new faces every week.”

“Maybe it is because Ben is such a driving taskmaster,” she remarked with a smile.

Samuel snickered, but shook his head. “Aw, he’s not so bad – except when something doesn’t go according to his plans. Then he can be a real tyrant!”

“That is what I am afraid of,” the Fur muttered. “We brought him a new dilemma today. So tell me, have you found yourself a nice wife yet?”

Jake listened to their conversation quietly. He was starting to get a little impatient, tired of seeing the walls of the conference room and little else.

Samuel looked uncomfortable. “No, I haven’t,” he murmured, “although I have gone out with Yuri Morisato a time or two.”

“The cute little Japanese woman from accounting?” Citra asked with bright eyes. “You have to be nearly two feet taller than she is!”

“A foot and a half,” Samuel retorted stiffly, “but that doesn’t mat—”

The door slid open and Dr. Quarters reentered the room. He said something to someone just outside and out of sight, but then turned his back on the closing door to approach the chair he had occupied earlier.

He regarded Jake for a moment but then he rubbed the underside of his chin with a finger.

“Mr. Harrison,” he said, “you cannot go back, ever. However, I have been thinking over your situation and there is an alternative, if you’re willing to listen.”

Jake looked at him warily. “I appear to have no choice. Say your piece.”

“Do you like Susan?”

Jake was taken aback by the direct question. He looked at her and she gave him a warm smile.

“Yes sir, I suppose I’ve become right fond of the little lady-cat,” he replied, his eyes locked on a particular piece of opal jewelry resting on her bosom.

“Does it bother you that she is part cat?”

“Not anymore,” the showman admitted. “Although I don’t understand all she tried to tell me about how she got like that, I do feel a great affection for her. I’m sure I would miss her even if I could go back. To be frank with you, sir, I think she’s been the only thing keeping me sane since we got here.”

“What if I told you that you could be with her the rest of your life?”

Jake raised an eyebrow and stared at him. Samuel did too. “If I’m to be stuck here in this strange place, she’s probably the only one who could keep me at ease. I would like to stay with her as long as I’m able.”

Quarters looked at him with a serious expression and leaned toward him. “Do you love her?”

Jake suddenly looked embarrassed. Men just did not discuss such things with one another in public, and with Citra sitting in the room, he felt awfully uncomfortable. After a few moments of fidgeting, he looked down at his boots.

“I suppose I do in some way,” he admitted with a nod. “As much as a man can without crossing a line.”

“And what line is that, Mr. Harrison?”

Jake looked at Citra and swallowed with difficulty. “She used to be a woman, but now she is not,” he mumbled. “She is a lady-cat.”

“Did she tell you why she was turned into a half human, half feline woman?”

“She said there was another Earth far away up in the sky that she was going to homestead with other animal folk. She said the animal bits in her would help her to survive harsh country and weather.”

“That is essentially correct. Tell me, would you be more comfortable having a life with her if you were just like her?”

“Just like her? You mean to turn me into a… a… man-cat?”

“Only if you want to,” the director told him. “You could then go with her and help her settle new lands, not unlike settling the west where you’re from. I understand you are quite knowledgeable with that kind of life.”

Jake looked at Citra, but she remained meekly quiet. This must be his decision, not influenced by any words she might say.

“Does… it hurt?” he asked. “Becoming an animal? Will I lose my soul?”

“I won’t lie to you, Mr. Harrison; yes, there are times when it will hurt and the process takes months to complete, but if Susan can go through it, I’m sure you can survive through it too. We can arrange for her to be right with you throughout the whole process, and once the changes are finished, you will feel stronger, run faster, see and hear much better and will be healthier than you have ever been in your life. You would be taught new skills, and I’m sure you can even teach us a few things from your own experiences. What you do after you are transformed and go to another world will benefit all mankind, not just yourself.”

Quarters sat back in his chair again. “As for your soul, those like Susan who have done this believe their souls are intact. They might have gained instincts from their animals, but they have retained all they were as humans. Of course, the decision is yours alone. We cannot send you back to your old life, so even if you decide to remain human, I’ll see to it that you are provided with a place to live, a job to perform and money to live on, all in thanks for looking after Susan for us while she was in your care. She won’t be able to stay with you, because she still has the obligation to settle another world, but we will be in contact with her on occasion if you wish to get a message to her.”

Jake studied her face for a moment, but did not say anything for a long while. When he did speak, it was in a low voice. “This would change everything I’ve ever known,” he mused aloud. “But just coming here with you has done that already. May I have some time to think it over? I am a man of business with my own company. I don’t make important decisions without weighing the balances first.”

“Take all the time you need, Mr. Harrison,” Quarters told him. “You and Susan may stay together for now, but I will make sure you have the necessary food and necessities you require until you decide your future. It could be a year or two before she can be reassigned since another had to take her place for the original mission and I don’t believe there is sufficient time to get her in on the replacement crew. Once she has gone, she may never have the opportunity to return.”

Just then, the door slid open and a young woman came into the room. “Dr. Quarters, Albert Desler from the North American Furmankind Institute is on the holocom for you in your office.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll be right there.” He looked at Samuel and said, “You may go home now and take the weekend to rest up from your trip. I’ll see you at the usual time on Monday.”

“Yes sir,” Samuel replied. “What about them? Susan’s apartment was all boxed up when she left the first time.”

Quarters nodded. “I will have my management assistant arrange an apartment for them before we close up shop today.” He turned to the cheetah. “Susan, I will leave him now in your care,” and then to Jake he said, “Good day, Mr. Harrison.”

Chapter 16

Into the Sunset

“I knew it!” Jake complained, holding out one of the white robes at arm’s length. “Is this all you people wear here?”

The tall Amerindian laughed aloud. “Mr. Harrison, these lab coats are only worn by the technicians who work here at this facility. We handle a lot of people and material supplying the colonies and these coats keep the clothes we wear under them clean.”

“Oh, just an overcoat,” Jake muttered, pursing his lips. “I knew I would need a job here, so are you putting me to work already? I thought Dr. Quarters was going to give me some time to think about it first.”

Samuel chuckled, but shook his head. “Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Harrison. You and Susan will be going across town to a new apartment and we figured you wouldn’t attract too much attention if you wore one of these over your western clothing. This is just until we can get you some proper clothes to wear here.”

“I see.” Jake took the lab coat and put it on begrudgingly. It fit loosely over his garments, but was not uncomfortable. He looked at himself in a floor-length mirror mounted to the wall in the men’s restroom and frowned. “I look like a circus clown,” he muttered.

“Believe me, Mr. Harrison, that’s what people would say if they saw you in your regular clothes,” Samuel remarked. “They won’t even bat an eyelash seeing you in the lab coat since this city is used to all the people who work here.”

The showman turned to his companion. “Are they going to make you my foreman?” he asked with a tone of resignation.

“I doubt it. Why?”

“In that case, I would prefer if you would not call me Mr. Harrison all the time. I would like it better if you simply called me Jake.”

The Amerindian held out a hand with a smile. “Pleased to meet you, Jake. I’m Sam.”

Jake took his hand and smiled for the first time. “Thank you, Sam. If I am to be stuck here, I would like to be friends.”

Samuel nodded. “Likewise, Jake. If I may make a suggestion, you might want to start addressing our Citra by her real name, Susan. I know how you’ve been addressing her in your show, and why, but around here I was the only one who called her by a nickname. I don’t mind you using it, but others around here might not know who you’re talking about.”

“Sure, I can do that,” Jake replied. “She told me her real name, but she originally introduced herself to me as Citra Kayah. I’ve been calling her that for the past five months and it may be a habit hard to break by now.”

There was a knock on the door. “Hey, are you guys finished in there yet?” the cheetah’s voice said through the panel. “You take more time dressing than most women I know, and I know that all you are putting on is a lab coat!”

Jake glanced at Samuel with a look of long suffering. “She talks differently now that she’s home,” he remarked.

“How so?”

“She’s gotten more pushy!” he said intentionally loud enough for feline ears to hear him.

Samuel grinned, thumbed the door control, and the panel slid aside. Citra was standing just on the other side with her hands on her hips. Like the two males, she still wore her western clothing, but they were covered over by a lab coat. There was a smirk upon her face and the tip of her tail was swishing back and forth under the hem of the coat.

“Seriously, what took you so long?” she asked, stepping aside to let them out into the corridor.

Jake looked straight into her eyes and said with a straight face, “I’ve enjoyed all this fine coffee I’ve had, but I had to get rid of it sometime.”

“I see,” she said with amusement. Looking up at Samuel, she asked, “What about you, big guy? Did you have to go too?”

“Hey, all I did was walk in and hand him his lab coat!” he complained innocently.

In sheer spite of the white garment he claimed to detest, Jake put his Stetson on top of his head, then ran a finger across his mustache as if daring one of them to make him take it back off inside the building.

Citra laughed and then tapped his nose lightly with a claw tip. “Come on, hombre, we need to see Ben’s assistant. She is supposed to be setting us up with a place to live.”

Samuel put a hand on her shoulder and she turned to embrace him. “I’m glad you’re back,” he rumbled into one of her ears. Jake felt uncomfortable witnessing their closeness, especially after the confession he had made earlier in front of everyone concerning his feelings for her. He walked down the corridor to give the two friends a moment of privacy, and made a show of examining the brightly colored fish in an elaborate aquarium. Citra appreciated Jake’s thoughtfulness and gave her full attention to her tall companion.

“Thank you for coming back for me, Sam. I know you must have gone head to head with Ben just to try.”

“That I did,” Samuel admitted, “but you’re worth it. I reminded him just how much of an investment the AHCP had in you, and all he saw were the Credits. As for me, I missed my special friend.”

The cheetah pulled back and looked up into his dark eyes. She searched them imploringly and saw something in them she had never seen before; genuine affection. Completely ignoring Jake, she got up onto the tips of her toes and gave him a brief, fuzzy kiss on the lips.

“I am sorry we never got together,” she whispered only loud enough for him to hear.

“Me too, but we had our chance and neither of us did anything about it,” Samuel murmured, running his tongue across his lips; kissing bifurcated lips was a new experience. “Maybe that was because you were due to leave for Hisashi and we knew we’d never see one another again.” He leaned down and kissed her forehead this time before pushing her out to arm’s length. “However, you need to give him a chance now. If he chooses furmankind, he is going to need you more than ever.”

“What if he chooses not to do it?” she asked, a trace of fear in her voice. “Who will take care of him then?”

Samuel grinned mischievously. “There are western-themed bars all over Las Cruces,” he replied. “I’ll just have to take him to them one at a time until I can hook him up with a two-steppin’ cowgirl and sign him up for the rodeo circuit!”

They both burst out laughing and Jake looked back at them with sudden irritation, somehow knowing he had just been the butt of a joke.

***

Jake gripped a side bar on the wall of the aerial taxi with a death grip when the automated vehicle shot up into the evening sky. The mustard-yellow, egg-shaped pod had two facing bench seats and a large space between them for riders with luggage. Citra sat opposite the man, unconcerned by the driverless flying vehicle, so he willed himself to calm down.

After several moments, however, Jake strained against the safety harness, pressing his nose and hands against the glassteel window to peer at the sprawling City of Crosses below. The sun was getting close to the horizon in the west and lights were already illuminating houses, buildings and lines along the streets. Even something as simple as city lights fascinated him, as it was a sight he had never witnessed before, especially not from the air. They were high, but had not risen above the mountains to the east.

Jake did not like the sensations he felt in the pit of his stomach as the air pod zoomed along predetermined aerial lanes around the taller structures of the city, most of the buildings in the center part of the metropolis higher than he thought possible. He peered upward through the curving side windows, but did not see any balloons holding the taxi egg aloft.

He was at a loss how something as heavy as the oval sphere could fly without some means of support, but then he swallowed hard when their flying carriage careened around the corner of an unusually tall building, then dropped toward the ground at an alarming rate. With his stomach in his throat, Jake was certain his trip to this future year was about to end abruptly, but then the egg slowed when it approached the ground. There was a series of white circles alongside the street at the front of the building, and other taxi pods occupied several of them.

Their taxi settled gently to the ground in an empty circle on four thin extended pylons, and then a small, flat panel flipped out from a section of the wall opposite the door. Citra leaned over the panel, tapped in a code and then pressed her thumb against a small glass square.

“What are you doing?” Jake asked curiously, waiting for his stomach to catch up to him.

“Paying for our ride.”

“Where’s your money?”

Citra smiled. “My money is in a bank, but I can access it through the network and pay for things with just my thumbprint.”

He thought about that for a moment, watching her tap the scanner screen again. “I didn’t know animals had fingerprints,” he muttered.

“Most do not even have fingers,” she reminded him, “but fingerprints came with the human part of my hybrid physiology – thankfully, otherwise I could not get to my funds very easily!”

“This is a strange world you live in.”

“No, just more convenient,” she countered. “Once mankind got hold of technology, we learned to do all kinds of things with it to make our lives better.”

“Tech… technology is not part of my world,” Jake replied sullenly. “To someone like me, this is a strange world.”

Ride fee paid, the curved side of the pod facing the tall building popped out and slid to the side, allowing them to exit. The only luggage they carried was their western hats and Jake’s pillowcase of meager belongings. Citra led him across a concrete sidewalk toward the glass front of the building, and just as they did at the Gate facility the front doors slid aside at their approach. After several hours of going through such doors, Jake was already getting used to them and did not even flinch when it slid back into place behind him when they entered the lobby.

“Sam said I should call you Susan,” he murmured.

The cheetah stopped and looked at him with a warm smile. “That is probably best in public,” she said, “but I do not mind the nickname.”

“What do you prefer?”

She thought about it a moment and shrugged. “I know you are used to calling me Citra, but Sam was the only one who called me that here.”

“Yes, that’s what he said. Okay, I will call you Susan.”

“That is fine, Jacob.” She used his birth name with a teasing smile and they started walking across the lobby. He enjoyed seeing her smile, so he grinned back at her.

There were several people milling around in the foyer and Jake had to fight to keep from staring once he began to notice them. They were ordinary folk, but two of the women wore so little that he could feel his neck and face heating up from embarrassment.

The two women saw his wide-eyed gaze and grinned openly, apparently amused by his archaic hat mismatched with a white coat. They were both wearing fashionable bikinis that barely covered their attributes, having just emerged from the building’s ground floor swimming pool, and were waiting beside another set of glass doors.

Jake swallowed, having never seen so much exposed flesh out in public, and he felt it best to avert his eyes. He chanced another look when the door slid aside and they stepped into a transparent tube. The door closed and then he watched open-mouthed as, standing on a small platform, they began to rise up inside the tube. They quickly moved out of view and he rubbed his eyes.

Susan was talking quietly with a brown-headed man behind a podium who seemed to be dressed in dark green clothing that covered him from the neck down to his black-shod feet. His clothes seemed to be a solid piece of fabric, and Jake was hard pressed to see even a seam in the material.

Jake moved to stand beside the cheetah and watched her affix her thumbprint to another box that the other man held out to her. At the insistence of a sharp chirp, she spread out her hand, palm downward, across the box. A thin red line seemed to come out of nowhere and move over her fingers, then it disappeared just as suddenly and the box began chirping again.

A moment later, the man behind the podium turned to the wall behind him and picked up something that dropped out of a small hole. When he picked up and handed the object to the Fur, Jake saw that it was a golden ring, simple in design without even a gemstone accent.

Susan turned to Jake and gestured to the box. “Your turn,” she said cryptically. When he did nothing but look confused, she gently took his hand and positioned his thumb over the box. He felt nothing from the contact with the glass scanner, but when it chirped, she helped him splay out his hand just as she had done.

“Do not move,” she instructed him. Before he could wonder if it would hurt, the red string appeared over his fingers, but he could not feel a thing. The string looked no more substantial than if it had been made of light. A moment later, the man at the podium held out another ring identical to Susan’s, albeit a little larger, and he took it mutely.

“This is the key to our apartment,” she explained, slipping hers onto the ring finger of her left hand. Jake raised an eyebrow and then removed his old wedding band; he did not know why he still wore it, but there was no need for it now. He pocketed it and then slipped on the larger ring that had been given to him. To his surprise, it fit him perfectly and was not altogether uncomfortable.

Susan smiled and then turned back to the apartment manager. “Thank you, Mr. Caxton. When can we expect to move in?”

“Your place is ready and waiting,” Caxton replied in a smooth voice. “Dr. Quarters’ office was specific in your needs and we had one already furnished. The kitchen has been freshly stocked and several parcels arrived a half hour ago by drone for the other items we were told you required. All have been charged to your account, Ms. Foreman.”

“Very good; we would like to go up right away,” she replied. “It is good to see you again, Mr. Caxton, although I never expected to be back in this neighborhood.”

“We are glad to have you with us again,” the man replied with a genuine-seeming smile, leading her and her companion across the lobby to the same glass doors Jake had seen the swimmers go through earlier. “I have also been informed you should expect the rest of your belongings that were placed in storage to arrive sometime tomorrow morning.”

Susan smiled and nodded, but did not reply. Jake stood beside her as they were apparently waiting for something by the doors. After a moment, he heard a light humming and then saw an empty platform descend inside the tube. The doors slid aside and he followed his companions into the small compartment.

“Is this another tack-see?” he asked when the doors closed. He expected to go flying up through the air again, but he was only partially correct.

“No, Jake, this is an elevator. It will take us up to the floor where our new apartment is located.”

“I’ve been in elevators before, but they didn’t look anything like this. If the place is upstairs, why don’t we just use the stairs?” The platform began to rise straight up inside the transparent tube and it was only then that Jake realized the tube was mounted to the outside of the building.

The manager smiled in amusement. “We have emergency stairs, Mr. Harrison,” he said, addressing Jake for the first time since the documents had been signed and the keys issued, “but I don’t think you would want to walk up twenty-one flights to get to your new home.”

“Twenty-one!” Jake gasped, looking out through the glassteel wall of the elevator at the shrinking ground below; the tallest building he had ever been in had only had four floors. There was a ring of indirect lights inside the ceiling of the lift, though the sun outside had already begun to disappear below the horizon, casting the city in darkness that tried in vain to overtake its myriad of lights. It moved slower than the air taxi, but he was not sure he liked the feeling in his stomach any better now than he had then.

“I understand you may be with us another two years,” Caxton remarked in courteous conversation, his hands together before him. “Did something happen to your assignment?”

Susan nodded. “Yes, I had to return ahead of schedule, but I am not at liberty to discuss details. I may need to undergo further training before I can go out again and Mr. Harrison here may accompany me next time.”

“Indeed!” Caxton replied. He looked again at Jake and seemed to study him for a moment. The elevator car slowed to a stop and the door behind the manager opened to let them exit. “In that case, I wish the two of you the best of luck!”

“Thank you.”

Jake nodded and cleared his throat. “Thank you, sir,” he said politely.

Caxton led them along a long, carpeted hallway adorned with fake-looking plants and oil paintings in expensive frames set in intervals between doors that Jake assumed were to other apartments. They walked about halfway down the corridor and the manager stopped in front of a wooden door that was simply marked 2199 in metallic numerals, then clasped his hands together behind his back.

Susan looked at Jake to get his attention and then held up her left hand paw with the new ring on her stubby finger. She put the ring near the door number and there was a faint click right before the panel slid aside to let them in.

“Huh,” Jake murmured when Susan walked inside. Caxton indicated that he should follow her and then the manager came in last.

The room immediately inside was not large, but ample to contain the furnishings within. The walls were light tan and the carpet was in earth tones to match the furniture. Most everything looked recognizable to the former showman, although in styles he would have never been able to come up with in his imagination.

The manager simply stood in the entranceway quietly while Susan walked from room to room. There was a modest kitchen with a stocked pantry and lots of cabinets, a dining area and a laundry room. A full-sized bathroom contained twin sinks, a glassed-in shower, a huge deep tub and a full-body dryer in the corner in addition to a pedestal toilet. Jake looked at this item curiously and wondered about its design until he realized that someone like Susan with a tail would be more comfortable perched upon a pedestal than a chair-like toilet; at least it was not a cat’s large scratch box.

The single bedroom was also modest, but contained a large walk-in closet with built-in dresser drawers, and the queen-sized bed faced a large wall-mounted screen. The bedroom had a window to the outside, but the drapes were closed, and the front room also had a wall of drapes. Susan pulled these to the side and opened a manual sliding glass door. She stepped out onto a small covered balcony and inhaled the rain-soaked air with a smile. Knowing how high up they were, Jake chose not to join her on the balcony, despite all the city lights beckoning to him.

“This apartment is better than the one I had before,” Susan said approvingly when she came back inside.

“So, there are no complaints?” asked the manager.

“None.”

“Good night, then.” He gave them both a brief smile and then departed quickly.

As soon as he was gone, Jake removed the lab coat and tossed it over the back of a dining chair with a curious horizontal slot down low in the back. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the door and asked, “Are Furs so commonplace that normal folk don’t even bat an eye seeing one of you?”

The cheetah shrugged. “We still get some stares,” she explained, “but this complex is the one used to house all the Furs who come to Las Cruces for the colonization program or other associated personnel. I used to live here, but on a different floor.”

Jake walked to the balcony door and reopened it to let in some fresh outside air. “Is there a reason why you have to live so far up off the ground? Is it so you can catch the flying cars from up here?”

Susan laughed. “No, we are up high because all the apartments lower down are probably already occupied.”

It was getting darker outside, but rain was falling again and the winds at this elevation were starting to blow some of it inside, so Jake shut the door and then turned to face her. Although evening here, it had only been a few hours since the two of them had woken up. He was not sleepy, though he did feel tired from the recent stresses of the new time and place, not to mention the loss of their friends.

“I have not had a proper cleaning since I first went through the Gate,” Susan said. “I could use a nice hot shower or a soaking bath.”

Jake looked interested, suddenly aware of his own personal aroma. There were not many baths to be had while on the trail between towns, and although he usually bathed when he stayed in a hotel in whatever town the show stopped in, his last had been two weeks prior in Springfield. He had done nothing more than sponge bathe prior to the dinner he and Susan had taken with the Texarkana mayor and his wife. A little bit of cologne had helped mask the odor, but now that he was standing in a clean room, he had no trouble smelling his fragrance.

“I saw your bathtub,” he remarked, “but I didn’t see a bucket or where to heat the water.”

The cheetah’s eyes glimmered with her smile. “Come, let me introduce you to indoor plumbing, Jake. I will let you bathe first.”

He followed her through the bedroom into the bathroom and she gave him quick instructions on how everything worked. She started it for him and showed him how to adjust the temperature of the water to satisfaction, and then told him what to do to turn it off when the tub was filled to the desired height.

“I will leave you to bathe,” she told him. “Take your time and soak as long as you want. Clean clothes for both of us have been provided, so I will lay out something for you on the bed. Leave your dirty clothes on the floor and I will gather them up to have them cleaned and packed away tomorrow.”

“What are you going to do while I am in here?” he asked, waiting for her to leave before he so much as took off his boots. He sat down on the edge of the tub, idly keeping an eye on the quickly rising level of the water.

“I am going to send a few messages and reestablish a few contacts.”

Jake did not know by what method she would send out messages, but he assumed it was some otherworldly version of a wire telegraph. He decided not to ask and merely grunted. She shut the door behind her and he shut off the water, surprised at how quickly it had filled up. He disrobed quickly and then sank deep into the hot water. Tired muscles began to ease within moments and he closed his eyes while his body soaked.

***

Jake peered out of the bathroom wearing nothing more than a thick green towel wrapped around his waist and noted with relief that the cheetah was not in the bedroom. The door to the hallway was standing open and he could hear several low voices. He frowned and tiptoed to the door to close it. If Susan had invited over a few guests, he did not want any of them peeking in at him before he had dressed.

Secluded in privacy, he then walked to the bed and looked down at the garments she had laid out for him. It appeared to be a pair of dark grey trousers, a white long-sleeved shirt, undershirt, socks and an odd-looking pair of underpants. There was also the strangest pair of shoes that looked like nothing else he had ever seen before. He looked them over for a moment with a frown, but decided to try out the clothes before he gave himself a headache trying to figure out the footwear.

He slid on the underwear first and gulped at how formfitting they were. They were not necessarily uncomfortable, but they fit more snugly than anything he was used to. He did not want to think about the fact that a woman – even one in cheetah form – had handled such things prior to him wearing them, so he quickly put it out of his mind.

The trousers fit well, and although they were of a style and material different than those he had worn here, they were not bad. He was surprised to find that there were no familiar buttons to close up the fly. There were some kind of fasteners imbedded within the material, and when he put them close to one another, they seemed to adhere to one another and practically disappear from sight once they closed together.

The undershirt felt similar to the underpants in that it were so formfitting as to feel like a second skin. He put it on backwards the first time, but then realized just by looking at it that the neck opening was deeper on one side than the other, indicating a front to the garment. The outer shirt closed together in the manner as the trousers, so he tucked the tail of the shirt into his pants and found a simple belt on the bed.

He picked up this last item with a smile. It might be three hundred years removed from where he had been that morning, but belts had not changed much in all that time – or so he thought. He threaded it through belt loops in the trousers just as he had done for years, but when he looped it through the buckle, it seemed to latch together on its own without a tongue through a hole in the material. It was all strange, but he had managed to figure it out on his own.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and was surprised at the feel of the mattress. It was softer than anything he had ever sat on before, including chairs and cushions at some of the fancier hotels he had been in.

He looked around and remembered with a frown that he had seen only the one bed inside the apartment. This was obviously Susan’s bed, but where was he to sleep? On the couch, or would they have him in a different apartment that they had forgotten to show him?

He did not want to impose, but he wanted a better feel of the bed first. He climbed up into the middle of the mattress and then stretched out on top of the smooth comforter on his back. He laid his damp hair upon one of the two pillows and he sank into it far enough that he thought he might disappear altogether. He grinned foolishly and then closed his eyes, enjoying the luxurious comfort.

He opened his eyes again at a gentle shaking. He blinked several times, and had a brief moment of confusion when he looked up into the amused expression on the cheetah’s face.

“Welcome back,” she said with a cheerful smirk. Jake surmised he must have drifted off to sleep and gave her a relaxed smile.

“Sorry,” he murmured. “I wanted to try out your comfy bed and must’ve dozed off.”

“That is okay,” she replied. “We are both tired from the events of the day and I do not blame you for taking a quick nap.”

“Uhm, how long was I asleep?”

“I left you to take a bath an hour ago,” she said. “I was concerned when you did not come out, so I came in to check on you.”

Jake sat up and scooted to the edge of the mattress. “I’m glad I dressed first,” he mused, feeling his cheeks warm up. Susan smiled and used her claw tips to smooth down his hair. He had lain down with it still damp and now his hair wanted to stand up in the back. It was little different than some hairstyles she had seen, but she knew it would not suit him.

“I heard voices earlier. Who was here?”

She tilted her head for a moment and then her eyes lit up. “No one was here,” she answered. “I was watching the news on the screen. I have some catching up to do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That is okay. I can show you later. You do not have to get up now if you would prefer to sleep longer,” she told him.

“Where would I sleep?” he asked quietly.

“Here, of course.”

“Of course? I thought this was your bed.”

“Jake, this is our bed, just as this is our apartment.”

“Now wait a minute,” he said, standing up quickly. “That’s not proper!”

Susan smiled, remembering the time period where he was from. The sensibilities of folk in the late 1800s were not the same as they were now, as they had been for centuries, and personal beliefs were much more structured.

“I am sorry, Jake,” she told him. “Dr. Quarters did tell you that we would be staying together until we figured out what to do with you, so he had his assistant set up this apartment for both of us. It could be up to two years before I might be reassigned to another world.”

“I can understand that,” he replied, “but I didn’t presume that he would expect us to sleep together in the same bed!”

Susan looked up at him, the expression on her face appeared solemn due to the dark cry lines in the fur beneath her eyes. “Jake,” she said calmly, “is sleeping beside me such a bad thing? I thought you liked me.”

“Ma’am,” he said frostily, “no man likes to admit this to a woman he likes, but I am no stranger to a brothel. Despite this unsavory fact, I have never lived in one!”

The Fur sighed aloud. “I understand your upbringing and our cultural differences, but if all we do is sleep, what harm can it be?”

“No, apparently you don’t understand my upbringing!” he snarled. Jake crossed his arms and began pacing the floor. “As I told your Dr. Quarters, I am not about to cross that line!”

Susan got up off the bed, all her earlier amusement evaporated. “Jake,” she said haughtily, “this is not a cat house and I am not offering my body to you. If you cannot simply sleep beside me, I will ask Mr. Caxton tomorrow if he will put us into a two-bedroom apartment instead – unless even that is too taboo for your delicate sensibilities and you need a place of your own altogether!”

She stormed across the room toward the bathroom and stopped at the doorway. “You can have the bed tonight – by yourself – and I will sleep on the couch, but right now I need a hot shower. I’m dusty and dirty, and by your notions not all of that is from sleeping in an animal cage!”

She punched the door panel button and disappeared into the bathroom. Jake stared at the closing panel, for once glad the sliding doors could not be slammed in anger. He sighed in frustration and picked up the shoes that had been left for him. Without another look at the comfortable bed, he left the room and closed the door behind him.

He approached the couch and sat down on it. The cushions were almost as comfortable as the bed had been, which was good for him. He had already determined that despite how rough he might be around the edges, he was still too much of a gentleman to take the bed and make a woman sleep on the couch.

He was far too keyed up to sleep, and the nap had given him some rest anyway, but he did not really want to face her wrath again when she came out of the shower. Perhaps it was time to take a walk and cool his heels.

He looked at the odd shoes for a moment and thought he knew how to put them on. He slid a foot into one, finding it not uncomfortable, and the opening adhered itself together just as the shirt and trousers had done. His foot was snug inside the sneaker and he put on the other one. He stood up and then walked around the room in them, feeling almost bouncy on the cushioned soles.

“I don’t like these, not one bit,” he muttered to himself. The soft sides gave in too much and he did not feel confident walking in them, so he sat down and pulled at one; the opening parted and his foot slipped out. He looked around and spied a plastic tub near the laundry room containing their old garments; a moment later, he had the legs of his new trousers tucked into the top of his old boots, feeling much more at home in them.

He picked up his pillow case from the dining table and peered down inside of it. His meager belongings were mixed all about, but he spied what he wanted. He picked out an Indian-made hair comb carved from fish bone and ran it over his hair, using his reflection in the glass of the patio door to give it some semblance of order. He walked toward the front door and automatically reached for his Stetson, but stopped himself.

These folks do not wear hats anymore, he mused to himself. He had not seen many people after leaving the facility warehouse, but there had been no hats on any of them. He heaved a sigh and left it where it sat upside down on a small decorator table. That was one of the things he would miss wearing in this new time and place.

Remembering the ring key on his hand, he waved it in front of the door and heard it click. The panel slid aside and he walked out, letting it close on its own behind him.

***

When Susan emerged from the bathroom, having been through the shower and full-body fur dryer, she was groomed and ready to apologize to Jake. She wore a simple pair of furman shorts and a Japanese yukata that had been modified with an opening for her tail. The cotton outer garment was decorated with a pattern of cherry blossoms on a pale pink background. She stepped out into the front room, but saw no one.

“Jake?” she queried tentatively. She received no response as she looked from room to room. The apartment was not large enough for many places to hide and she began to feel uneasy with his absence. She went to the patio door and slid it aside, but there was nothing out there except a small table with two chairs, all of which were damp from the day’s rain.

She closed the door quietly and gazed around the room. Where could he have gone? She glanced toward the front door, but his Stetson was still on the decorative table. His pillowcase of belongings rested upon the dining table, too. Her eyes fell upon the blue and white sneakers she had put out for him to wear, but they sat beside the couch. It was then she noticed his boots were missing from their old clothes she had dropped into a hamper with the intention of having them cleaned.

She frowned with a new sudden thought and rushed back to the patio. It was no longer raining, but the damp surface of the balcony did not show his boot prints leading to the wrought iron rail; for a moment, she had been afraid he had thrown himself off in anguish.

Even if he had not done so, where was he?

Susan sighed and figured he must have gone out. There was no telling where he might have gone, and that alone could be potentially dangerous with his unfamiliarity of the place. She swallowed and quickly left the apartment.

Padding cat-silent down the hallway, she approached the elevator doors. The platform was rising within the transparent tube and there were several figures inside. It stopped at her level, and when the door opened Jake looked out at her with a wide-eyed expression. He was accompanied by two other Furs, both female and both looking extremely amused. The females were vixens, one red with black accents and the other pure arctic white, and they were wearing only their natural fur coats and minimalist shorts.

“Hej, är du Susan?” asked the white fox with a tilt of her vulpine head, one hand hanging possessively off Jake’s shoulder.

Relieved to find Jake safe, Susan gave the vixen a smile and nodded. “Yes, I am Susan. Where you did you pick up my wayward friend?”

“He was wandering around down on Twelve looking like a little lost child,” answered the red vixen. Jake’s face and neck were flushed deep red. “Try as we might, we could not get much out of him other than your name, floor and a few mumbled sentences.”

Susan stepped forward and took his hand. “Thank you for returning my pet human,” she said with an easy laugh. “I may have to put him on a leash to keep him from running away!”

“Jag kan hålla honom om vi hittar honom springa lös igen,” said the arctic fox with a yip and a feral grin.

Jake blinked. “What did she say?” he asked ruefully.

“I believe she said she may keep you if she finds you running loose again,” Susan answered with a smirk.

The red vixen laughed aloud. “Yes, that is what she said.” Both foxes snuggled up on each of Jake’s sides, making a furry vulpine sandwich out of them all, and then each gave him a brief lick on the cheek. His eyes went open really wide and all three women giggled at his traumatized expression.

He looked at Susan with eyes that begged and he rasped, “Take me home, please!”

“Thank you for bringing him back,” the cheetah said to the vixens, still smirking.

“You are welcome!” said the red one. “Feel free to visit again, handsome. You too, Susan. We are in 1261.”

“Han är kul att retas!” said the other with a snicker.

Jake’s rescuers stepped back into the still-open elevator and both gave him a wave of waggling fingers, punctuated by provocative hip-wiggles and bushy tail-wags.  The platform dropped out of sight and Jake looked back at Susan, a thoroughly mortified look on his weathered face.

“W-wha... what did the... the white one say before she left?”

Susan grinned. “She said you were fun to tease.”

“Nice…” he muttered in defeat. They turned and walked back up the corridor to the apartment. Susan opened the door and Jake meekly followed her inside.

When the door closed, Jake went right to the couch and sat down as if he was completely deflated and his bones had turned to jelly.

“What happened?” Susan asked, sitting beside him, though not touching.

“After our... argument I needed a few minutes to cool my head, so I decided to go walking. The hallway outside isn’t very long, so I tried the elevator hoping I could go back downstairs, but it only took me down a few floors before I could try more of the buttons. I ran into a crowd of werewolf Furs and got turned around when they were grouped around the door to get in the elevator. The hall on that floor went ‘round in circles and I lost track of where I was.”

He shrugged his shoulders and dropped his gaze. “I felt lost and then I only wanted to get back in here, so I knocked at an apartment at random and those two came to the door. Neither was wearing anything at all!”

“Looked like they had on their shorts to me,” Susan countered.

“They... uh... they put them on only because... I, uh, I asked them to,” he stammered.

The cheetah gave him a little smile, even though he was not looking up at her. “Jake, you have seen me without clothes many times. It was not until I started performing my act at the end of your show that you started seeing me in clothes.”

“That – was different,” he muttered.

“How is that different?”

“I only saw you as an intelligent talking cat at first,” he confessed, pain in his voice. “It was only later I started seeing you as... as a woman. You’ve told me there were other types of Furs, but this was the first time I’ve seen the foxes. Seeing them as fox women made the difference. I… I got embarrassed.”

“Jake – you are a man of the world and I have seen you afraid of very little, but sometimes you seem as innocent as a teenager with your old-world upbringing. I really am sorry, and I apologize for my outburst earlier. I should not have tried to push my ideals – my modern morals – upon you. You cannot help how you think any more than I can.”

He looked up and gave her a little smile. “Thank you,” he said. “As I told you months ago, I’m not used to feeling stupid, and I seem to feel that way a lot when I’m around you.”

She leaned forward and rested her chin upon his shoulder, looking down at her hands. “Jake, you are not stupid. You are just not used to the same things I am – and that is a big difference; bigger, at times, than either of us realize. Please forgive me for forgetting that.”

“I forgive you, Susan. I also keep forgetting that you didn’t have the same raising that I’ve had. Here, you have different notions of what is or isn’t proper. An unmarried man and a woman sleeping in the same bed together may not be a bad thing to you, but in my time, it was a sin. I… I have sinned in that manner, but never with anyone that I’ve had feelings for. There’s a difference, but I don’t know how to say how.”

Susan leaned back and looked at him. She put a hesitant hand upon his arm and was encouraged when he did not flinch or pull away. “Jake…” she started, choosing her words carefully, “I do not care what you may have done before we met, and you cannot help anything I did with my life. None of that matters. But – if we are to stay together until I get a new assignment, we will need to keep one another’s feelings in mind.”

“That sounds sensible.”

“While we Furs are first and foremost people, we are also social animals of a type, and sleeping beside someone else is most comforting to us. I will not say that...adult activities do not happen, but sleeping together does not automatically mean we will do anything more than just sleep.” Jake opened his mouth to remark, but she put a silencing finger up to his lips. “This is not a belief you share with me, but I will respect that. Simply because you will live with me and we share feelings for one another does not mean we are required to sleep together. We will sleep apart tonight, and then tomorrow I will see Mr. Caxton about moving us a place where we each have our own bedroom.”

“That will probably be best. Thank you.”

She patted his hand and then stood up. “Now that we have reached an understanding, come with me to the dining table. There is something I think we need to do.”

“What is that?”

“Come – to the table.”

He stood up and followed her as directed. She sat down in one the chairs with the odd slot in the back and he saw her slide her tail into it. His eyebrows went up in understanding. It made sense to him now to have tail-friendly chairs in a place where Furs lived. She indicated that he should sit in another chair beside her and then she reached for something on the table he had not noticed before.

It looked like a large book and then she opened it up like one. She tapped its edge and the book’s shiny surface lit up with words and pictures. She tapped in a few commands using her claw tips on part of the surface and the pictures changed. Jake leaned in closely and suddenly recognized a face.

“It’s Sonya Brandy!” he exclaimed. “Only… she looks old.”

Moisture welled up in Susan’s eyes. “Yes, she was one of the survivors of the fire and lived to be eighty-three. She married a man named Michaleen Flynn in Illinois and had four sons.”

Jake’s throat tightened. “Sounds like she found a good Irishman to suit her. We already know that Chetan lived on. Any others?”

“Let me check.”

Another photo came up on the screen a moment later and Jake’s heart skipped a beat. It was not another person, but it was a sepia tone photograph showing the charred remains of a field where blackened husks of wagons, carts and numerous bodies littered the ground. Several people stood around in the background, smudged with soot and all looking glum at the catastrophe around them. Jake closed his eyes.

“What about Emmett?” he asked quietly, “or Doc Lane?”

Susan continued tapping instructions and the page filled up with text. Susan’s eyes roved over the material for a moment before she sat back in her chair. “Both perished in the fire,” she said, her voice husky with emotion. “Emmett Desmond got out in time, but he was seen going back in to help someone else. He and the other person did not make it back out. The fire caught Randall Lane in his sleep, as it did many others.”

She read off more names of those who died and Jake seemed to wilt with each one he heard. He was thankful for the names she did not read, but there were so many who did not make it. Too many… After a little more research, they discovered that Mrs. Norris, hardy and stubborn old woman that she was, collapsed at the Tanglewood Ranch when she heard the news and never recovered. Harrison’s estate was in probate for months before lawyers found a distant young niece related to him in New Jersey and everything went to her. Unfortunately, she was inexperienced with money or property and made several bad decisions based upon the relationships she had at the time, winding up losing everything.

Jake put his arms on the table and his head upon them. “The same thing would have happened if I had stayed there and died,” he murmured. “Everything I built is gone, leaving no legacy.”

Susan slid an arm across his shoulders and gave him a gentle hug. “The difference is that you are still alive. The company and everyone you knew may be gone, but you still have a chance to make something of your life, Jake.”

He looked up and a firm resolve came across his face. “You’re right,” he said, sitting up again. “People of this time probably don’t remember that much about how the west was settled. Maybe I can start up a new traveling Wild West reenactment company to teach your folk what happened back then!”

Susan frowned and returned to her computer tablet. She tapped on the screen for a moment and then shook her head. “From what I can find, such shows disappeared about two hundred years ago,” she told him. “People lost interest and there was no money in them anymore.”

Jake seemed to wilt and rubbed his eyes. He reached across the table to his pillowcase and started pulling out items and spreading them out. Susan closed up the tablet and set it aside, watching him work in mute silence. Most of what he had brought with him was personal curios that meant something to the man; sadly, the company currency he had brought was long out of date and unredeemable. He also had a couple of books, two photographs and a few things for personal hygiene like his shaving kit, comb and scissors for his mustache.

Susan picked up one of the sepia tone photographs in a hand-carved wooden frame. “Who was she?” the Fur asked curiously.

“Mabel Harrison, my late wife,” he muttered without looking at it. “The other is of my son, Douglas.”

“Did Douglas ever marry?”

“No, there wasn’t anyone who could tie him down long enough. There was a gal in Tin City who was sweet on him, but he never seemed interested in her affections.”

He looked at his meager possessions on the table for a moment and then shoved everything but the thick leather money pouch back into the pillowcase. He slid the entirety of his company funds toward Susan.

“This is all the money I have,” he said solemnly. “Would you put this into your bank for me? It may be all I have to live on after you go away.”

She nodded, unwilling to tell him that the amount she had seen him count out would not have lasted but a few days with the current economy even if the currency was valid. They might be able to sell his bills and coins to a collector and get more for them, but it would still be paltry.

Jake rubbed his eyes again and then pulled his watch from the pocket of his trousers. He popped the cover open and then stared at it for a long moment. “It’s not that time anymore,” he muttered. “I need to reset it to your clock.” He did not bother changing it, however, and put it back in his pocket.

“It’s a little cool in here tonight,” he remarked with a tired yawn. “I think I’ll need a blanket and a pillow for the couch.”

“I will get them for you,” Susan replied, getting to her feet. “If you would prefer to take the bed, I can sleep out here tonight.”

Jake shook his head and gave her a pleasant smile. “Now what kind of gentleman would I be if I made a beautiful woman sleep on the couch?” he asked, standing up beside her. She sighed with a smile and brushed a finger through the bangs across his forehead.

“Thank you, kind sir.”

Once he had a pallet made for his bed, Susan bid him good-night and then retreated to the bedroom to let him undress. She was unbelievably tired, and looking back at him before shutting off the lights and closing her door, it looked like he was dragging as well. It had only been six hours since they had gotten up that morning in 1892 and it should feel like it was only early afternoon to both of them, but neither of them had had anything but restless sleep the previous night.

She stripped off her shorts and yukata and laid them across a corner chair before she stretched out on the bed. She had had a mattress in the wagon cart she had been given, but it had been thin and provided little actual comfort. This was a real bed!

***

When Susan emerged from the bedroom the next morning she found Jake standing out on the patio balcony. His hands were resting on the rail and he was gazing out across the top of a layer of thin fog at the mountains that stuck up through it like a chain of islands in a sea.

She put her hands on the rail beside his and he looked over at her. He noticed right off that she wore nothing but her fur and he started to say something, but then realized that anything he said would spark another argument. Despite the lack of clothing, she was sufficiently covered up and he knew he was going to have to get used to such things. He did not like it, but he held his tongue.

“Good morning,” she said pleasantly. “How did you sleep?”

“As the saying goes, I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I was tired, worn out and I don’t think I even dreamed, but I was up before the sun rose over the mountains.”

“How is your head?”

It took a moment before he realized what she meant, but he gave her a crooked smile and tapped his forehead with a finger. “It’s still jumbled and confused, but it will settle down soon enough. Once my noggin realizes that it can’t change what’s happened and just accept every new thing that comes along, I’ll be okay.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

He turned around and put his back to the rail. “I couldn’t find a coffee pot or grounds, though,” he said, directing a mock glare toward the kitchen. “How do you start a day without coffee?”

Susan laughed. “I am in complete agreement with that. We should have coffee and a coffee maker in there. Let me see if I can find it.”

She dropped to all fours, the first time since they had arrived, and padded toward the kitchen. Jake admired her sleek figure and mentally scolded himself for thinking that way only a moment later.

“Here it is,” she announced holding up a black carafe. It looked nothing like a coffee pot and did not look as if it would hold up well over a flame, but she did not even have a fire going from the odd-looking stove. She filled up the container with water from the sink, but then poured it all back into something on the counter that defied Jake’s comprehension. She put the empty carafe down into the bottom of the device and then opened a cabinet door. From a paper box inside, she pulled out a round white ball the size of an egg and studied a label affixed to its side. The cheetah nodded to herself and then put the ball into the top of the device.

It only took a moment before the room was filled with the rich aroma of coffee. It had a scent that enticed Jake’s nose and he found himself in full anticipation of trying it. A minute later he heard an energetic gurgle from the coffee maker and then Susan snared a couple of coffee cups from wall pegs over counter. She filled one with steaming black coffee from the carafe and then handed it to him.

Jake held it up to his nose and gave it a long, shallow sniff to take in the aroma. He lifted the cup to his lips, took a tentative sip, and then smiled with half-lidded eyes.

“Mmm, this is good,” he mused contentedly, “but I don’t recognize the little extra flavor that is in it.”

“That is hazelnut,” Susan informed him. “You like it?”

“Very much. I could get used to this.” He enjoyed the drink for several moments before he bent over and examined the coffee maker. “This is amazing. It’s probably the best thing I’ve seen here so far.”

Susan took her cup to the dining table and sat down with it. “I will make breakfast shortly,” she said when he joined her. “With luck, they stocked the refrigerator with good food.”

They sat in companionable silence enjoying their coffee for a little while, but after a bit Jake seemed to fidget. Susan frowned and set her cup down.

“I am sorry if I have upset you again,” she apologized in a quiet voice. “I will put on some clothes.”

He looked over at her and shook his head. “No, it’s not that,” he assured her. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this morning and I think I’ve made a decision.”

“What have you decided?” she asked cautiously. With the way their discussions and emotions had roller-coasted the past day, she did not know what to expect from his thinking processes. She picked up her cup again and held it up to her lips without drinking.

“Right now, right here,” he began, “you are the only stable thing in my life. If you are planning to leave me in a couple years to go to one of those new worlds you told me about, I... I think I want to go with you.”

“You know what that means, right?”

He nodded, staring morosely down into his cup. He took a deep breath and stated, “It means that by accepting Dr. Quarters’ recommendation, I’ll be turned into a… a man-cat... a cheetah creature like you. But – I’ll do it only upon one strict condition.”

“And what is your condition?”

“That you never leave me.” He looked up into her large golden eyes and she peered back into his brown ones.

Susan could only guess what a shock to his upbringing and cost to his pride that making such a life-altering decision must be, yet she also could not help teasing him – but just a little.

“Why, Mr. Harrison,” she purred primly, “is that a proposal I hear?”

He was suddenly taken aback by the question, but then he saw the twinkle in her eyes. “Well, ma’am – if that’s what it takes to keep you by my side for the rest of my life – yes, it is.” He saw a smile spread across her whole countenance and her initial reaction sent a warm feeling through him. “We can be married as soon as I am a cat like you are, but not before.”

Still in a teasing mood, Susan set her cup onto the table and then leaned toward him. “I am sure you know there is no such thing as marriage among mere animals. They simply take a mate whenever nature says it is time.”

Jake cleared his throat. “Be that as it may, lady-cat, I’m not an animal yet... but, well, I thought you Furs were half-human. Wouldn’t your kind still marry because of that?”

She giggled. “Yes, some do, but out in the colonies some do not bother with anything as useless as a marriage certificate or even a ceremony. The rules do not necessarily apply out there.”

“Does...” and his face fell as he struggled to say it, “...does this mean you are refusing your hand to me?”

Susan shook her head and then her face lit up with a smile. “I am not,” she said with sudden emotion in her voice, extending her right hand to him. “I accept your proposal, my dear Jacob.”

***

One month later, Susan and Jacob stepped out of an airbus that had landed in the parking lot of a facility located deep in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. With the exception of Susan and the bus driver, the rest of the passengers were there for the same reason as Jake Harrison. They were volunteers for the Anthro Human Colonization Program, there to undergo the nine-month process that would combine their DNA with that of the animal of their choice from a list, making them one of furmankind. They would be contracted to the AHCP for the rest of their lives, their sole purpose to establish starter colonies on new worlds deemed habitable for the sons and daughters of Earth.

Susan Foreman had already endured the painful transformation, but the AHCP had made special arrangements to allow her to return with Jake and serve as his personal counselor and teacher. The former showman’s real background – and his protection of Susan during her time-displacement crisis – was known only to a select few, and it was due to this that a great many rules and regulations had been bent, with more than a few simply tossed out the window.

Susan’s presence on the airbus trip from New York City had been of great interest to the other passengers, and she had spent the entire journey fielding questions on what to expect through the process and of life beyond. Jake had heard much of this from her already, but had also learned a few more things listening to the conversation. He felt confident that as long as she was there to help him through the transformation, he could make it.

Possibly the greatest inspiration for doing all this was the guaranteed chance to take part in homesteading new lands. Instead of reenacting the hazards and discoveries for audiences, this time he would be doing such things for real – and it would all be done to benefit both mankind and furmankind alike.

Standing outside the airbus with the others, Jake took Susan’s hand and faced a pair of tall iron gates. The horizon was obscured by the deciduous and evergreen trees of the surrounding forest, but the evening sun peeked through the branches as the gates swung open to receive them. Passing over the threshold and heading into the warm sunset, Jake felt a sudden thrill as his new life began.

About the Author

Ted R. Blasingame is an amateur author who has been writing science fiction since the mid-1970s. Those first few years rarely saw completion to any of his various writing projects until his discovery of ElfQuest in 1979. Under the pseudonym of “Mooncrest” and inspired by the fantasy world of Wendy and Richard Pini, he wrote a short story titled “Brothers In All But Blood” that was accepted and printed in the first issue of fan-related material called “Yearnings”; in the following two issues, poems “Shenla” and “Thoughts from the Heart” were also published. Involvement in ElfQuest fandom was heavy throughout the eighties, including the creation of the Timber Valley Holt, a newsletter-producing chapter of the ElfQuest National Fan Club that operated 1984-1990 with over sixty members. Belonging to twelve different group chapters and producing written stories for most of them, severe burnout from a full decade of active involvement slowly set in and he eventually left the fandom.

While later working part time as a paste-up & layout artist and typesetter in the same print shop he had earlier produced his newsletters through, he was contacted by cartoon writer and artist Mark Barnard to assist in the typesetting of a new anthropomorphic ‘zine called “Midnight Sonata”. Ted and Mark had known one another in ElfQuest fandom, and although he was relatively unfamiliar with anthropomorphic fandom, Ted found the concept intriguing and agreed to help put together the issues in addition to writing several short stories for the series.  Two issues were produced in 1992 and 1993, but a third in 1994 was discontinued partway into production when Mark moved on to work in the commercial comics industry.

Ted was suddenly without an outlet for writing anthro-inspired stories, so in late 1995, he began putting together a rough idea of characters and backgrounds for a new series which would eventually become known as “Blue Horizon”. Originally intended to be written solely for himself with no thought toward public presentation, the first story “Drug Running” was written and he showed it to friends Eileen Fryer and Steve Carter in 1996. With their favorable reception to the story, both volunteered to help with ideas and other stories, with Ted having final authority over the stories produced.

Ted and Eileen were married in the spring of 1998 and later that year both Eileen and Steve prompted Ted to put the Blue Horizon project online for others to read.  Initially hesitant to release the series to the public, he eventually gave in to the idea and put together a simple website through free website community Geocities. This worked out well enough for a while until imposed advertisements on the site convinced Ted that it was time to look into registering a domain of his own so that the series could be available to the public without the annoyance of advertisements while on the site.  Registration to the FurRing helped bring visitors to the site and word of mouth spread for some exposure that a new anthropomorphic series was available to read for free online.

Thinking the domain could be used for multiple anthro projects, furstuff.com was registered with a webhost for the project, but later interest in additionally posting his other non-anthro material prompted Ted to register a different domain, dennier.com, as his primary site. (“Dennier” was the name of the primary character’s homeworld in the Blue Horizon series.)  Operations moved from furstuff.com to dennier.com and the former domain was allowed to expire.

Stories, character information, artwork and background material dominated the Blue Horizon site and stories were written several times a year and presented as “episodes” and “seasons” much like a television serial. It attracted a modest readership over time, but again faced with project burnout by 2002, Ted decided to let Blue Horizon rest for a while so he could write another story that had been in mind for some time. He tied up loose story threads in the series and wrapped up the tales, thanking his readers for their interest and support.

For the next two years, he worked on the novel-length story called “Hoenix” that took place within the same ‘universe’ as the Blue Horizon series, although focusing upon a completely different cast of characters that only marginally overlapped with the parent series.  In 2004, Fred Patten gave the book a relatively favorable review and it was included in the Ursa Major Awards’ “List of Recommended Reading”, later being nominated as one of four finalists as “Best Anthropomorphic Novel of 2004”.

During this time, Ted discovered Lulu Press, a print-on-demand printer for self-publishing authors and began releasing the Blue Horizon series in a set of collected volumes for those who had earlier requested the stories in traditional printed form.  Sales were moderate as fans of the series ordered the books for their personal libraries, but during the two year period that Ted had taken away from the Blue Horizon series, the majority of his readership had gone on to other things and did not return even after the series was resumed with another “season” of stories.

By this time, Eileen and Steve had both moved on to writing and artistic projects of their own, so Ted was left as the sole creative participant in Blue Horizon (with the exception of one more story later written by Eileen concerning the marriage of two main characters).  Another ten stories were written, but readership had fallen to a veritable trickle, so once again production faltered on this series. There was no official announcement made concerning an end to the series, but with so few readers it was deemed unnecessary.

A prequel story taking place six years prior to the events of “Drug Running” then began to take shape, if not for the original readers but for himself. “Blue Horizon 1261” was produced as a stand-alone, novel-length story that was presented on the website a chapter at a time. By this time, Ted and fellow anthro-author James R. Lane had begun a partnership to beta-read and assist editing one another’s works.  Following the completion of “1261” in 2009, Ted began work on the production notes of another anthropomorphic story that he had long wanted to write. Involvement in Blue Horizon had always gotten in the way, but with that series now on hiatus, the time was right to move on to something else altogether.

When the annual registration for dennier.com approached in 2010, Ted wrestled with the idea of finally letting that domain expire and dropping his longtime webhosting account, but he found it difficult to let it go. He would debate the need for his site for most of the year and eventually decided to let it all go in 2011. Any further projects would be strictly for himself without any public presentation. Ted still had an interest in the anthropomorphic corner of the science fiction genre, but would withdraw from the public’s eye of the fandom.  However, when word of this was presented on his website, the few loyal readers still with him entreated him not to remove his material so completely from the Internet. Touched by this display of loyalty, Ted sought out a new free website community where he could create an archive of his material without the burden of maintaining a domain and webhosting account.

Practically stumbling across Weebly.Com, the free (and ad-less) site presented the perfect place to set up an archive, so by the time the registration for dennier.com was up for renewal again, a new site was in place. All previous character data, background information and the project artwork galleries were not included; the new site would contain an archive of just the stories related to his projects. With dennier.com expired after thirteen years of production, Ted could now focus on other things.

Unlike “Hoenix” or “1261”, his new personal project would be unrelated to Blue Horizon, though would continue to use anthropomorphic themes.  The new tale would follow one man’s journey through psychological demons, pain and revelation through an unwanted transformation into the life of a beast destined to explore other worlds. The plot would combine elements of an unwritten space colonization story Ted had considered years earlier with anthropomorphic transformation for his newest project.  Unwilling to completely abandon the readers still with him, Ted elected to post the story chapter by chapter to his new story archive, and in the fall of 2011, “Sunset of Furmankind” was completed, making it the longest single story he had ever written (topping out at approximately 331,000 words).

In late 2011 and early 2012, Ted began reformatting his self-published books of “Blue Horizon”, “Blue Horizon 1261”, “Hoenix” and “Sunset of Furmankind” into epub and Kindle formats for sale and electronic download through Lulu Press, Barnes & Noble and Amazon for the eBook readers that were recently popular.  Although sales of the printed books had been moderate over the years, sales of the ebooks took off at a rate that astonished the author.  Ted still prefers the feel of a printed book in his hands, but now realizes the public demand for electronic books.

In early 2012, Ted’s planned final project was the 20th Anniversary Revision of his first novel-length tale, “Treasure Hunt”.  Originally written in 1992 before his introduction to anthropomorphic storytelling, Ted had never been completely satisfied with the opening chapters to the story that focused on the maiden voyage of an interstellar science vessel, so between other projects he would occasionally render small changes to the manuscript. With his continual editing, the story became affectionately known as the “Neverending Edit”.

After the finishing “Sunset” and making his books available for eBook readers, Ted decided it was time to focus his creative energies on that longtime project.  It was his intention to completely drop the opening chapters altogether and write them from scratch. He would now be introducing the protagonists through a different series of events that led up to the original plot and even changing the characteristics of some personalities that would ripple through the rest of the manuscript. Although some elements had changed, the general plot and resolution remained the same.

Following the completion of Treasure Hunt, a renewed painful onset of carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, and a new ailment of tendinitis in the right thumb region, Ted Blasingame has seriously considered retirement from writing. There are still many story ideas orbiting the cranium, but the hand pain is making it difficult to do much typing these days.  Only time will tell if he will ever actually retire from writing.

For other works by the author, visit

http://trblasingame.com 

Books by Ted R. Blasingame

Sunset of Furmankind (Furmankind #1)

Lost in the Wilderness (Furmankind #2)

Second Chance (Furmankind #3)

A Wilder West

Blue Horizon Book 1 (with Eileen Blasingame & Steve Carter)

Blue Horizon Book 2 (with Eileen Blasingame & Steve Carter)

Blue Horizon Book 3 (with Eileen Blasingame)

Blue Horizon Book 4 (with Eileen Blasingame)

Blue Horizon 1261

Hoenix

Treasure Hunt (with Steve Carter)

Arion

Changelog

November 2020

Edits, additions and corrections to Books 1 and 2.

June 2022

Edits, additions and corrections to Book 3.

Table of Contents

FURMANKIND

Copyright

Dedication

Sunset of Furmankind

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Lost in the Wilderness

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Second Chance

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

A Wilder West

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

About the Author

Books by Ted R. Blasingame

Changelog