by Allen Kitchen Text ©2006 Allen Kitchen; illustration ©2006 Cubist

   “Mommy, my hands hurt,” the little girl wept as she held onto the knees of her mother sitting next to me.
   The golden-furred feline-hybrid woman (puma, by the look of her face and tail) started to pick up her young child. She winced at the pain from her own bandaged hands and stopped short of lifting the little gold and black child into her lap.
   “I’m sorry, cub,” she said sadly as she pulled her hands back into her own lap. “My hands hurt too.” She cast a worried glance at me and smiled weakly down at her little girl.
   I’d been ignoring the other refugees lounging around the airport—there were so many of them. The lucky ones were sitting in the scarce chairs; most were standing though. Some lacked limbs; some wore slings or other types of bandages. Every one of them had bandages on their hands, stained red and brown with dried blood.
   But I couldn’t help but notice the little girl and her mother beside me. It wasn’t just the girl’s painful whimpering or her attempts to get into her mother’s lap. Nor was it the saddened look on her mother’s face as she was unable to give her daughter some comfort. I looked down at my own pair of hands, bandaged in exactly the same way.
   I thought about how much pain there was when the humans tore my claws out—the sheer misery as they were ripped from my body without anesthetic or painkiller, not so much as an aspirin. There had been many terrors this past year, many things that no child should have to witness. But none of the things I could think of came close to imagining that innocent little girl being mutilated like the rest of us.
   I stood up and reached my own, bandaged hands underneath her armpits. She let out a little squeal of protest but was too weak or hurt to offer any real resistance. I turned around and set her down in my seat next to her mother. Mother and child wrapped their arms around one another and stared at me in some surprise.
   “A gentleman always gives his seat to a lady,” I said. Then I gave a tiny nod of the head to the child and a small disarming smile. “Even a little lady,” I added.
   The mother smiled at me and hugged her daughter tighter still. “God bless you, sir,” she said.
   A sadistic chuckle from behind me made me spin about. I was still dizzy from the blood loss and from the pain coursing through my body, but I knew better than to ignore the sound of that kind of voice behind me—a mean-spirited voice. A human voice!
   Coming toward me were three army men dressed in standard urban gray combat fatigues. Two Hispanic corporals carrying Hyperkinetic fletchette rifles were on the left and the right of a black-skinned officer. The captain had an ancient Colt 1945 semiautomatic pistol on his side and some kind of computer tablet on his left arm.
   “A black leopard giving up his seat for a puma,” the captain chuckled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you had feelings toward them. But animals like you aren’t capable of such feelings that I know of.”
   I scowled and looked him up and down, from his bald head to his spit-shined leather boots. “Didn’t anyone tell you that it’s dangerous to tease the animals?” I finally told him. “Especially out of their cages?”
   Captain Jayce (according to the nametag sewn onto his uniform) just snorted. “You think I need to show you some kind of courtesy?” He tapped at the tablet on his arm for a minute. His eyes furrowed as the display showed him something he didn’t like. “You don’t have any ID tags in you,” he said.
   I noticed both corporals tensing up at the captain’s discovery and gripping their weapons tighter. I crossed my arms in front of my chest, partly in protest and partly to make it clear that I wasn’t about to jump them.
   “I was a combat pilot in the Middle East war,” I explained. “We were prohibited from having the standard ID chips all the other human-animal hybrid soldiers got—the radio in it would ruin the stealth of the ground attack strike craft.”
   “Oh really? An A-22 pilot, eh?”
   “A-25, actually. And my name, since that’s what you are concerned about, is Thomas Hamilton. Warrant Officer Hamilton, 235th Air Assault Force.”
   Captain Jayce nodded and scrawled some figures across the display on his arm. “235th,” he echoed lowly. “It’s too bad you and the rest of your squadron killed General Malov and his staff a couple of years ago. You and all the rest of you genetically engineered mistakes wouldn’t be shipped off to your doom if you hadn’t attacked the hand that fed you.”
   I made sure to keep my arms where they were. The last thing I wanted was for the captain’s two goons to get nervous and start pumping clouds of Mach 4 tungsten darts into the waiting room. They made a mess out of any flesh they encountered, combatant or not.
   “It’s too bad that General Malov tried to massacre all the hybrid soldiers at Fort Negra,” I replied. “He drew first blood, not us.”
   Captain Jayce frowned, lowered his arm and then stepped forward, standing nose to nose with me. It was supposed to be intimidating. “None of you were supposed to be able to breed!” he snapped. We both turned automatically and looked at the little gold child on the seat behind me. She clutched at her mother’s arm in alarm at the sudden attention. “You were all supposed to be perfect little soldiers, coming out of the artificial wombs and fighting where it’s too dangerous for regular soldiers to go. This,” he said hooking a thumb at the frightened child, “wasn’t supposed to happen!”
   “But it did,” I grumbled. “So that bastard Malov used nerve gas on his own soldiers. And those of us who survived took measures to make certain he’d never kill another American soldier—human or hybrid—again.”
   I grinned, deliberately showing my teeth. Jayce’s eyes widened and he backed away. Like I said, his standing nose to nose with me was supposed to be intimidating. But it’s really tough to pull that off when the guy you’re going up against has sharp, pointy teeth. And I have lots of sharp, pointy teeth. He wasn’t the first asshole who’d tried to pull that old chestnut on me, but in Jayce’s favor, at least he didn’t wet himself as he backed off. That’s happened to me a couple of times.
   “Meaning you fragged a general officer in a war zone,” Jayce said. “Call it what it is.”
   “And I’d do it again.” I put my arms to my side and growled. Guards be damned, I wasn’t going to let myself be stared down by some little bald academy punk who clearly never saw combat! “But if you want to make something personal out of it, tell your trigger monkeys here to put down their guns and let’s go outside.” I smiled more broadly. “I’ll even take you all on, 3 on 1. But not in here, where innocent folks can get hurt and the decorations can get scratched.”
   Every sound in the airport stopped. I could almost feel several hundred people take a breath and hold it. Jayce stood his ground for a moment. I’ll give him credit for that. But he finally took another step back and looked at the display on his arm again.
   “What’s the point in that?” he calmly said. “All of you are going into exile. You and all the rest of you untrustworthy monsters are going to the Moon. You’re going to be really busy, mining and building and just trying to stay alive up where there won’t be any people to turn on.” He gave me a victorious smirk. “So why should I want to fight you, Thomas Hamilton? I’m going to do much worse than kill you—I am going to send you to a prison where you’ll never escape or threaten another human being. How does all that grab you?”
   I nodded sagely and crossed my arms again. “Coward,” I called him.
   “Now, now, Warrant Officer,” he condescendingly said to me. “It wouldn’t serve any purpose for us to kill you here and now. You have work to do up on the Moon, the lot of you. Sorry that we had to take your claws away,” he sneered as he pointed to the bandages on my hands. “But you are all a lot safer to work with without them. And you’ll be easier for the security folks upstairs to handle as well.”

   I’ve never been one for long plane rides. So you can imagine how happy I was with taking a lunar shuttle trip to the Moon. It was crowded with men and women of both canine and feline hybridization. There was even one Vulpine sitting in the very front, though I didn’t see much of him—he stayed put except while using the zero-gee toilet at the back, which was fine by me. I wasn’t on the shuttle to make friends or start up polite conversation.
   For that matter, neither was anyone else on the trip. Outcasts and exiles, each and every one of us, I thought as I looked the crowd over. 100 former soldiers and special operations experts, all crammed into a sardine can floating in space and heading for an airless, lifeless rock orbiting our home. The sobbing and cries of pain as people changed the bandages  on their hands. made the trip seem less a voyage to the Moon than a trip into Dante’s Inferno.
   I was quite surprised when we landed on the Moon. A one-way trip to lunar orbit took 4 days, from what I’d read—but we hadn’t even been in null gee for 12 hours before setting down in the less than usual gravity there. The main doorway opened with a hiss and my ears popped as the pressure equalized.
   A moment later, I saw a clouded leopard dressed in grungy coveralls step into the aisle. He carried a simple clipboard and pencil, in stark contrast to the high-tech gadgetry I’d seen half a day earlier on Captain Jayce (may he find an itchy spot in Hell.) The only thing the gray-and-black feline had in the way of technology was a battered, obsolete 2-way walkie talkie clipped to his web-belt.
   Alongside the spotty one, in walked a pair of buff lads wearing the latest in German Shepherd attire. That is to say, he was escorted in by two German Shepherd-shaped soldiers. They didn’t have any weapons on them that I could see, but there’s no mistaking the arrogant swagger of an armed soldier standing around a group of unarmed civilians. The only group that looks more predatory are politicians, and all of those were left back out on Earth—I guess there was a silver lining to this whole mess after all. Both doggies wore clean and pressed regular army issue pants, no shirts. And they also had white gloves on, which puzzled me.
   “May I have your attention, please!” the clouded leopard called aloud. “Everyone, please, quiet down? Thank you. My name is Leonid Anatalov, and I’m the assistant facilities manager here on Luna 3.
   “For those of you who don’t know, we’ve all been condemned to exile from the planet Earth.” He shrugged. “The humans made us to fight their damned wars for them because it was too dangerous for them to do it themselves. And once they got scared of us as well, they shipped us out here to work for them.
   “But I digress. Luna 3 is a mining and research center. Luna 2 is to the north of us, and Luna 1 is down at the ice farms in the craters on the southern pole.
   “Now I know this has been a trying time for all of you. I would like to tell you that we’ll make every effort to make you comfortable, but I can’t. Up here, there’s very little in the way of comfort for any of us. We are currently in a construction mode, expanding all our facilities so we can accommodate all 40,000 or so hybrids that are destined to come here. The work is hard, nasty, and sometimes dangerous. But if we all pull together and work as a team like we had to do in the wars, then we will all get through this. We’ve been through worse, right?” The 100 beings in their seats murmured their agreement.
   “Then relax and stay in your seats until your names are called. You will then leave the ship one at a time and report to your work and dorm sections.” He glanced at his clipboard. “Thomas Hamilton?” he called out. “Where are you?”
   I must have looked quite surprised when he called my name first. It didn’t take the guards but a couple of seconds to spot my shocked face and walk down the aisle to fetch me.
   “You will come with us,” the bigger of the two said as he undid my seat restraints. I was going to get up myself, but he pulled me by my shirt and half lifted, half drug me out of the seat and into the aisle. It was about that time I realized that ¹/6 regular gravity would allow for some surprising abilities and feats of strength.
   That’s also when I felt something jab through the cotton gloves into my back. I turned my head to whisper behind me: “I thought everyone had their claws taken out.”
   The German Shepherd gave a wicked chuckle that made the fur on my neck stand up. “Only trusted security forces still have them,” he said. “We make sure nobody gets out of line or causes any trouble, so the humans let us keep our claws.” He jabbed them harder into my back to make me move faster. “But don’t worry, Kitty-cat,” he sneered. “I’m sure we aren’t going to have any trouble with you. You’ll never even know we still have ours or miss your own, you’ll see.”
   I arrived at the end of the aisle with my rather gruff escort. I looked the leopard square in the eyes, my green slits locking onto his. I don’t know what I was expecting to see in that face. Rage, perhaps. There was plenty to be enraged about. Disgust maybe, since his crew had to absorb a fresh load of green troops whether he wanted them or not.
   Instead, what met my eyes was a look of exhaustion with a hint of sadness behind it. “You are Thomas Hamilton?” he asked me politely. “The pilot?”
   I nodded.
   “Good. We need pilots.” He handed his clipboard to the smaller guard and turned to him. “See to it that the rest are processed correctly and get them into their dorm areas,” he directed. “I want this ship refueled and loaded with cargo for a return trip within 8 hours. And if the ship commander bitches any about flight regulations and needing 12 hours of rest, bite him!” The guard nodded and the clouded leopard turned to me once again. “This way Mr. Hamilton, if you would please.” Leonid gestured out the door.
   I gave him a nervous glance but went where he directed me. I ended up standing on a gantry that was butted up against the body of the shuttle. The seals must not have been perfect because I could hear the air hissing and sputtering out into vacuum from the interface as I stepped onto the walkway. Leonid stepped out right behind me.
   “We’re really short on pilots right now,” he announced as he fell into step right behind me. We both walked straight ahead into the aluminum cylinder. The only illumination was from 3 dull red lamps along the wall. “You say you flew A-25s in the war?”
   I nodded again.
   “And did you have anything to do with General Malov’s death at the tail end of the war?”
   “If he didn’t want to end up a casualty, he shouldn’t have murdered so many of his own soldiers,” I spat.
   Leonid didn’t look impressed. “You didn’t answer my question,” he noted. “That’s fine; it’s not important. But if you have skill enough to fly one of those fat, ugly pieces of crap…”
   “Careful how you talk about my planes, now,” I cautioned him.
   His ears sagged. “Sorry. If you have skill enough to fly one of those svelte, gorgeous pieces of crap…” He turned to look at me with a weak grin. “Better?” he inquired.
   “Better,” I said with a thumbs up.
   “Good. Since you already know the basics about low-level flight and how to properly gauge distances, we have a job for you. We’ll instruct you on the particular points that you don’t know. And yes, there will be lots of those.”
   I paused as we reached the closed pressure door at the end of the hall. “Why do you need new pilots?” I asked. “I didn’t hear any advertisements for an airshow around Mare Tranquilitis or anything.”
   Leonid tapped a code into the white, glowing 10 key pad in the door. “You’ll see,” he said matter-of-factly. “We also need someone to assist our chief engineer and scientist, Dr. Anatalov, with fixing some problems with the shuttles so we don’t lose any more crewmen or craft.” He frowned at me as the door slid aside with a hiss. “And yes, we are related.” He stepped inside the station.
   Related? I kept asking myself. How can that be? How can any two creatures born in an artificial womb be related? That would be one of the first questions I’d ask the doc when I met him, I promised myself.

   Confined areas? I like ’em just fine. Hell, I’ve been an assault aircraft pilot and had to create temporary quarters in the Middle Eastern deserts out of a piano crate and an old parachute. And while the piano crate was smaller (though I never did learn what they shipped in it—I couldn’t see why anyone would need a piano out where I was), at least it wasn’t also home to hundreds of others.
   The base was built as a set of interlocking cylinders about 150 feet long and 30 feet or so in diameter. They connected together in an economy-sized jigsaw puzzle, with the ends of the cylinders connecting into the wall of the next one, the whole thing laid out at 90-degree angles. I could see the logic of the layout; no single air leak in one cylinder could not completely isolate anyone—there were at least 2 ways out of any place, no matter what.
   The cylinders had false flooring to give a flat surface to walk on. Aluminum sheet over my head made a second floor, for the space overhead. This particular cylinder had several desks and monitors scattered about. Presumably it was the flight ops control room; I’ve seen command posts often enough to recognize one on sight. But this was the first control room of any sort I’ve encountered that looked like its staff lived in it.
   “What’s with the cots and improvised curtains?” I asked Leonid as we walked past the console operators, who were too busy monitoring their duties to pay any attention to me or to the myriad camping supplies and scavenged living quarters scattered about. “You mean to tell me that these folks live and work here at the same time?”
   Leonid nodded. “We are short on space, as you might guess,” he explained. “A small manufacturing colony suddenly gets thousands of refugees thrown on its doorstep—things are crowded.”
   “Is that all?”
   “No. We are also short on oxygen, food, water, medicine, hydroponics space to generate food and air…”
   I groaned. “Hydroponics? Does that mean I have to become a vegetarian?” That would be a real problem, since being part-feline meant I was still pretty set to eat meat.
   “Yes and no,” Leonid said. “We raise rabbits as well. Combined with soy and a bit of seasoning, you’ll never know that it was 84% vegetable matter.”
   “I’ll have to take your word for it.” My stomach growled, almost in protest to the idea of having to eat soyburgers again.
   “Food isn’t the half of it, though. Since an average person consumes 53 liters of oxygen an hour, and I have some 6000 people living in these tight, little quarters, life support is a high priority for us all. Water and oxygen are constantly in short supply.”
   “Ah,” I said. “What about metals and power? You don’t seem to be short on those.”
   Leonid opened the oval hatch at the far end of the chamber. “Power comes from the sun and from our nuclear furnaces,” he explained. “Our oxygen systems take sunlight from mirrors and distribute it evenly across shelves covered with dense plantlife. This keeps the number of windows to a minimum.”
   I thought for a moment. “Because they mess with structural integrity.”
   “Yes,” he said, apparently surprised that I had a brain. “Any hole in a cylinder wall is a potential problem.”
   I stepped through the hatch and looked around; we were in an airlock. Both of us walked to the opposite door. “And the rest of the colony?” I asked. “How does it survive meteor strikes?”
   “One, most of the colony is underground. The lunar soil also keeps radiation to a minimum. And two, the cylinders are surrounded by shred.”
   I blinked, mulling the word over and over in my head. I’m familiar with some terminology of the aerospace world. Heck, you can’t fly without learning at least a couple of things. But that was a word I’d never heard of. “What is…” I began.
   Leonid opened the door impatiently and cut me off. “Shred is a layered set of tiles outside the cylinder walls,” he explained, holding the door open and expecting me to pass through. “The outermost level is silicon carbide, the hardest material we can manufacture. That vaporizes any particle that strikes, and the layers of graphite and aerogel that follow absorb the kinetic energy of the particles that remain while also insulating the colony from the cold of space.” He gestured his head toward the door. “Do you mind?” he urged. “I do have other things to do.”
   I stepped through the door and into another world. This place wasn’t the lunar colonies as I had been led to believe they were; this was a camp full of refugees, people torn from their lives so fast that most of them barely had more than the clothes on their backs. Canines, Felines, Vulpines, all huddled on improvised cots along every free space of the cylinder.
   They were too tired and worn out to even sob anymore. They were covered in a fine, gray dust. I wrinkled my nose. What didn’t stink of unwashed sweat and urine, reeked of mold and some stench I’ve never encountered before. The door clanged shut behind me and Leonid brushed past me to lead the way again.
   Most of these people wasted their time drowsing life away on their cots. A couple of more-clever folks played a game of cards close to one of the light clusters. I could see as I passed that the cards were improvised bits of stamped metal with the card symbols upon them. I finally realized that they’d made a deck of cards out of military dogtags!
   Row after row, I passed person after person. Some were missing arms or hands, some were now blind and wearing rags over their eyes. But none of them, not a soul bothered to look up at me as I passed. It was like walking past the living dead.
   “So sad,” I muttered. “Look at these folks.”
   “I don’t have to,” Leonid replied. “I’ve been up here building this base together with my sister for 6 years now.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Every one of these people is a warrior for the United States Alternative Forces. Every one is a soldier or an airman in some capacity or another. After all, the government needed people to fight, and you can’t expect them to send their own human sons and daughters into harm’s way—it’s too dangerous!
   “So they created us, the newest slave class in the long, bloody book that is human history. The humans created us to be the perfect fighting machines. Smart, clever, fearless, dangerous to the other side. Everything a general could want in a soldier.”
   Leonid stopped and turned around. He angrily stabbed a clawless finger at my chest. “Then some assholes went and blew away a general!” he accused. “Blew away someone that the money men who really run things had groomed to be the next president, fresh from victory in the middle east!”
   I narrowed my eyes at him. “That’s not how I remember it at all, Leonid. As I recall, that butcher, Malov, wasn’t content with killing the fighters and civilians on the other side. He decided that he didn’t like the unexpected fact that we could breed on our own rather than have to be created in a factory like so many jeep parts. So he took it upon himself to kill all the hybrid soldiers himself. Every man, woman, and especially child.
   “He gassed our base! Our own fighters came up from the south and did it. We didn’t even know what was happening at first. If we weren’t always on guard for a chemical attack, things would have been a lot worse. As it was we lost 250 people that day. Good people. Honest and dedicated soldiers, some of whom were personal friends of mine.
   “And what did they get for their dedication to their leaders and loyalty?” I spread my arms wide to everyone in the module. “What did we all get? Either killed on the spot by some lunatic, or sent to our deaths on some airless rock a quarter-million miles from home? That’s what we get for risking our lives for our country—treatment worse than people give their damned pets!”
   Leonid withdrew his hand slowly. But his angry face and blazing eyes made it clear that he didn’t buy the argument.
   “So one monster goes and kills a few hundred of his own soldiers, and you and your buddies think that makes it okay for you to go and do the same thing?” He spat at my feet. “Let me tell you something, Thomas. This was supposed to be a research facility, plain and simple. None of the Moon colonies was set up to be a refugee camp. We were put here to assemble space vehicles, since the metals are abundant and it takes less energy to leave the Moon than it does the Earth.
   “And now, because of you bastards and your need for revenge, I’m having to build shuttlecraft and big cylinders to house all the people being exiled from Earth! Instead of playing Captain Kirk, I’m having to play babysitter, and all because a few dumb sons of bitches figured that they could lick the entire human race with their tails tied to their backs.”
   I didn’t get angry, though deep down I could feel the blood start to boil. He wasn’t there, I reasoned. There’s no way he could understand how it felt, then and there… Then again, there was no way I could understand what he and everyone else who had been building up here for years had gone through either.
   “When someone is trying to kill you,” I calmly explained, “every creature has the God-given right to defend itself. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are. General Malov was the lowest form of life—he betrayed and murdered his own soldiers! If we’d left him alone, he’d face a court martial for his betrayal. Of course you and I wouldn’t be alive to see it, as we’d all be dead if Malov’s notions spread outside of his little sphere of influence. Which they undoubtedly did, considering how all these folks ended up.
   “No, it isn’t fair what happened to you. But it wasn’t fair what happened to us, either. All of this came about because of one asshole, and no, that asshole wasn’t me.” I leaned closer, putting my nose against his. It’s far more intimidating when I do it. “So don’t you stand there and tell me that all this shit is anyone’s fault but Malov’s. You got me? You dare to suggest that anyone deserves to be condemned to this vacuum-sealed sardine-like life, and I’ll have your ears on a necklace. Understand?”
   Leonid stood his ground and crossed his arms, brushing them against my chest as he did so. “I can see that you and I aren’t going to get along at all,” he growled. “Fine by me. I’m an engineer and a scientist, not a soldier. But I will tell you this.” He whispered. “If you threaten me or anyone I know ever again, I’ll tell the police dogs to tear your throat out and toss you into the nearest airlock. If I’m in a good mood that day, I’ll let the air out all at once so you won’t suffer. If I’m feeling sadistic, I’ll do it slowly, so that your blood boils in your veins and you scream in agony for the rest of your miserable life. Do you understand me?”
   I stood still for a second, but only for a second. Then I backed away, splaying my ears in defeat. Leonid may have been smaller than me and untrained, but this was his home territory, and he had the command of God knew how many soldiers. Hybrid soldiers, our own kind. This was his world and I was just a new arrival within it. So long as I had a job to do and didn’t make too many waves, he would tolerate me. But the instant I became more trouble than I was worth, his cold logic would have no difficulty at all in ordering my removal from his equations.
   “Yes sir,” I slowly told him in formal tone.
   He snorted. “My name is Leonid,” he snapped. “Call me sir again, and you’ll be cleaning the communal latrines with your tongue for a week. Trust me, you’d prefer the air lock. Now if you are finished playing your macho games with me, let’s get a move on. Tanya is waiting for us.”

   “Ah, the man of the hour!” Tanya excitedly met Leonid and me at the door to her work center. Unlike the rest of the complex which was buried under lunar soil, dimly lit and crammed full of exiles, Tanya’s hanger was spacious, well-lit and had next to nobody within it. The hanger was much larger than the other cylinders, built so that the farthest end could be removed and the spacecraft that was being built within could be taken outside.
   Tanya herself was quite different than the rest of the people in the base. Where they looked like they’d come straight from a war zone, Tanya looked as if she’d just stepped out of a college campus. She had a pad of paper in one hand and a pencil tucked behind her right, fluffy ear. She wore a spotless white lab coat, which stood out in stark contrast against the gray-and-black-spotted fur that was still visible on her arms.
   And she was smiling. In spite of everything happening around her, she was smiling!
   “You’ve met my brother, I see,” she said pleasantly. “I hope you didn’t let him scare the fuzz off of you—it really isn’t as bad as he makes it seem.”
   Leonid gave a frustrated huff and closed the hatch behind him with a metallic clang. “Mr. Hamilton, my sister, Tanya Anatalov,” he said with an equally metallic voice. “She’s in charge of all spaceflight projects on the Moon, and she has the final say on who gets to be a pilot.”
   Tanya waved her hand dismissively and walked over to her brother. “I swear, Leonid, it’s sometimes hard to believe that we are related,” she cooed as she took his clipboard from him. “If your ass was any tighter, we could tighten pressure fittings with it. Go away and find someone else to scare; I need to ask Mr. Hamilton here a few questions and give him the nickel tour.”
   Leonid put a clawless hand on my shoulder. I met his cold eyes and clearly saw the warning implied within. “As you wish, sister dear,” he growled. “But I’m going to check up on you in a short while.” He squeezed my shoulder tighter, enough to make me wince. The leopard might not have claws, but he had the kind of grip that only manual labor can create. Plus, he knew a pressure point or two. I grunted in the sudden flood of pain, which vanished just as quickly. I put my hand on my shoulder and watched in bewilderment as he opened the hatch and left, slamming it noisily behind him.
   “Does he strike you as someone who found half a worm in the apple he was eating?” Tanya said with a little chuckle and walked around me towards her desk. She stroked my free arm with her tail as she passed, beckoning me to follow her. Dutifully I did so. She walked around an old metal cabinet that looked like it had been made in the war—World War One, that is—and sat down behind it. I automatically took the chair on the opposite side of the desk, tucked my tail between the uprights and sat down.
   “How is it possible for you two to be brother and sister?” I asked.
   “A simple little miscalculation at the birthing plant—they created two of us in one artificial womb. And since we were both designed for high IQ and were badly needed for the war effort, they brought us to term just like everyone else. So he and I are brother and sister, even if we probably don’t have anything in common genetically.” She looked at a computer tablet on her desk and drew a figure on its display with a fingertip.
   I nodded. “I was wondering about that,” I said.
   She ignored my words. “I see by your records that you flew air assault,” she said. “I’ve found that air assault pilots make the best shuttle pilots.”
   My jaw hung open for a second. She didn’t just say what I think she just said..! “You… you mean you want me to fly spaceships?” I gasped.
   “What else would we want you to fly? There’s no air out there for a plane, you know.”
   “You want to turn me into a flea-dipping astronaut?” I pulled my jaw closed again, still not quite believing what I was hearing. I was exiled to this rock and the sky, and suddenly I was going to become an astronaut? A space hero?
   “A bus driver is more like it,” she replied, just a hint of disappointment in her voice. She closed the file and looked out a small window behind her, out into the assembly bay. “You see, when the humans created the lunar colonies, they needed a better launch vehicle to reach it. You noticed that the flight was only 12 hours, didn’t you?”
   I nodded. “Yes, I was wondering how that was possible, too.”
   “It’s possible by using a little trick of quantum mechanics,” she said. She turned to face me again. “How much do you know about how metals were created?”
   I shrugged. “Same as everyone else, I guess. The raw ores are melted and heavier metals sink to the bottom…”
   “No,” she interrupted. “That’s how metals are forged. But not how they were created to begin with. You see, when you fuse hydrogen together to form helium, the resulting matter weighs a little bit less than the two hydrogens that made it up. The loss of mass is released as energy. And when you fuse heliums together, you again release energy, although less of it.
   “Once you start fusing anything with atomic number 27 or greater, however, it doesn’t release energy; it absorbs it. When a star reaches this stage it no longer has any thermal energy to keep it together. All its mass implodes and then explodes outwards in a great big nova. And the heavier particles in the universe, from iron up, are created in that cataclysm.
   “So you see, you, me, and everything we can touch is the bloody remains of a dead star, gone some 5 or 6 billion years now. But there is plenty of energy locked away deep inside the core of the nucleus. All we have to do is weaken the strong nuclear force and we split ordinary metals just like we split heavy atoms. But without all that nasty radioactive debris.”
   My jaw opened again. “Fission without radiation?” I said, feeling very stupid at the moment. I had never heard of such a thing before.
   “Kind of. We call it light fission,” she went on. “We take a fine nickel wire and put it into the field surrounded by a stream of liquid nitrogen as our working fluid. The nickel atoms break in two, releasing over a trillion joules of energy for every mole of nickel used. And nickel is quite a dense metal; you get lots of moles in a single spool of it.”
   “Well, yeah, I guess!” Things were happening so fast. One moment I was on the Earth and the next I’m on the Moon. And then I’m told that I flew up here on a nuclear powered engine? “But what about exhausts and byproducts?” I asked. “It has to exhaust something!”
   “Nickel splits evenly in two to create silicon,” she answered me. “With a tiny amount of phosphorus and aluminum as side products. And what little silicon also splits in two becomes nothing but nitrogen. But the nitrogen pumped into the reaction chamber becomes so very hot that it forms a plasma, and a fast moving plasma at that. This jet of silicon and nitrogen superhot gas is what drives our spacecraft around. The exhausts are harmless; in fact, you’ll step on tons of it anytime you go to the beach. Sand is nothing but silicon dioxide—the world is covered in it. But it only takes less than a ton of nitrogen and nickel to fully fuel a spacecraft.”
   “Then… then we have the power to reach the outer planets and more!” I cried out.
   “Eventually, yes.” Tanya looked sad for the first time. I suddenly hated myself, hated that anything I did or said made her sweet face frown like that. “We were originally put here to develop the engine, build the ships and mine for the metals and other materials the base would need. But with all the extra mouths to feed and work to be done…” She looked outside into her hanger once more and sighed heavily. “Now it’s all we can do to build the machines and use them to ferry people and supplies up while sending back rare metals and impossible light-heavy alloys we make in freefall while orbiting the Moon.”
   She turned to look at me. I swear her eyes looked as if they were seeing straight through my body and into my very soul. “But the one thing we can’t manufacture, for all our technology and power, is skilled pilots. We can try to teach and train, but there’s no substitute for experience. And while flying a shuttle is different than a plane, it’s still flying and the skills necessary are mostly the same.”
   I leaned back against a stained metal wall and stared at her in amazement. “You… are planning to make me an astronaut?” I managed to stammer out.
   “You are already an astronaut,” she sighed. “Look around you. Despite the darkness and dirt, this isn’t Detroit, you know. Thousands of hybrid soldiers have been sent here before you in the past year, and thousands more will come after you.” She turned and walked back to her desk. “Compare that to the 13 humans who have come here in the last half century, if you want to.”
   I blinked and stood up straight. “Ms. Anatalov,” I began.
   “Call me Tanya,” she interrupted.
   “Tanya, I may not be a history expert, but I do remember that there were only 12 astronauts sent to the Moon, not 13.”
   “Is this the new pilot you said you wanted for your special project?” another voice said behind me.
   I jumped at the unexpected voice and backed up to the wall reflexively. Coming into the room through the only door at the end of the brown cylinder were two canine soldiers wearing light tactical armor and ear-communicators. German Shepherds, both of them, just like back at the landing pad. The pair looked the room over as they came in, as if expecting trouble. They strutted about like they owned the place.
   Walking between the two guards was a bald headed human. He wore a black eye-patch over his right eye and some scars were still visible on his right cheek. He was so small that he didn’t need to duck as he came through the hatchway. His guards towered over him.
   He wore a gray jumpsuit with a single patch on his left shoulder. A black utility belt carrying radios and portable computer links was the only other adornment.
   “Governor Moriarty,” Tanya formally greeted the newcomer without a smile. “To what do I owe this unexpected visit?”
   Moriarty snorted derisively and turned to stare at me with his one good eye. He came closer, giving me a good look at his scarred face. I had to admit, between the eyepatch and the fact that he looked like he shaved with a cheese grater, he was quite an imposing figure. I instinctively cringed back from him.
   “I always meet with pilots when they come into my facility,” he haughtily replied. “I feel that it’s important that they know their place in our little world away from the world.” He glanced down at my bandaged hands. “They are healing well, I trust?”
   I held my hands up so he could see. “Considering the surgery was hardly consensual, I’m doing all right,” I grumbled.
   “Well, we are in very tight quarters here, as you no doubt have seen. We can’t have everyone walking around with claws; you brutes would kill each other.” He gestured to his guards. Both security canines walked confidently so that they were on both sides of me. Then they grabbed both my arms and pushed me against the wall.
   I snarled and tried to fight them off. I bared my teeth and snapped at one of them. They likewise bared their fangs and growled, leaning forward to trap me against the wall. I couldn’t reach either of them with my teeth and let’s face it, I’m a pilot—I’m light and agile rather than strong. I could hold my own against one of these bulky monsters in a hand to hand fight, but not two of them.
   “I wouldn’t suggest kicking or biting,” Moriarty told me. He slowly walked towards me, taking off his black leather gloves as he eased closer. “As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, only my loyal security forces have claws, which are the only weapons of any sort on this station. Piss any of them off and they’ll gut you like a fish and throw your carcass out the airlock to be flash-desiccated in the vacuum of space.”
   “Governor Moriarty! Stop it!” Tanya cried.
   “Why, I’m just introducing myself to my new pilot, here, Doctor Anatalov,” he chuckled. “You, Mr. Hamilton, may call me sir whenever you meet me. You will fly the translunar shuttles down with rare metals and special machines that you traitors manufacture here. You will return with more exiles, and life support supplies as needed.
   “And in addition to your regular duties, Miss Anatalov is working on a special project and needs a pilot to be at her beck and call.” He grinned wickedly. “It’s a somewhat risky project. The chances are pretty good that you’ll get blown up on one of her little test flights.” I turned to look at Tanya. The fur on the back of her neck was puffed out and her ears were flat against her head. “She’s a genius, but she’s far from perfect,” the man continued.
   “All of which brings me to the reason I came all this way, Mr. Hamilton; to welcome you to my little abode.” He lunged forward faster than I could see, and considering I’m a feline, that’s fast. His fist plunged hard into my solar plexus and I automatically doubled over, coughing. The two dogs dropped my arms and let me fall to the floor. I clutched my stomach and tried not to retch. I slowly looked up at the governor’s face.
   Moriarty was smiling, putting his gloves back on. “Welcome to the Moon,” he sourly said as he turned towards the hatchway with both guards flanking him once more.
   I coughed and lay down on the textured aluminum floor. Its cold pierced my thin black fur. I coughed again and watched as the blood-splattered spittle flew much further than I would have expected. The lower gravity, I reminded myself. One of a number of differences I’ll have to get used to.
   Tanya knelt next to me and pulled me up to a sitting position. She looked worriedly at me, taking my pulse at the neck. “That bastard,” she complained as she reached into a left chest pocket and pulled out a scrap of cloth. “Only one slot up here to fly the flag of humanity, and they had to send him.”
   I coughed again, catching the flotsam in the cloth that was held to my muzzle. “I guess that guy’s the 13th human on the Moon, as you were saying,” I said in a ragged voice.
   Tanya nodded while still watching my face intently. “Yes. He’s the governor of all the lunar bases and represents all of humankind out here.”
   “Oh, he’s a perfect representative of the species all right; cowardly and more than willing to let others take the risks for him while he himself enjoys the profits of the effort.”
   Tanya looked a little surprised as she dabbed at my muzzle. “Don’t think that all human beings are like him,” she pointed out in a quiet voice.
   I winced. “Couldn’t prove it by me,” I coughed. Tanya shrugged and helped me up. I let out a groan and forced myself to my feet.
   “Do you need to go to medical?” she asked me. She sounded more than a little worried.
   I shook my head. “Not for a mere punch in the stomach, no,” I told her. I gave her a weak smile.
   She returned it with a smile of her own. The pain in my gut almost melted away in the brightness and joy of her smile. “Are you sure?” she said softly. “I can’t have the pilot for my special project dying his first day here, you know.”
   “Trust me, lady. I’ve had a lot worse than a sock in the belly.” I walked uncertainly back into middle of the cylinder. “But would this be a bad time to ask you about this special project?”
   She let out a small chuckle. “Sorry, Buck Rogers. But you’re going to have to master the shuttles first before you get to move on to other things. Crawl before you run, Thomas.”
   “I’ll settle for walking after the crawling today, if that’s all right with you. But your point is taken—one step at a time.”
   She nodded. “Yes,” she said softly. “Let’s take things one step at a time.”

   “What do you mean, my entry was too steep!?” I roared over the intercom. I was uncomfortably ensconced in a modified red pressure suit with an oversized acrylic helmet over my head. The half-sphere of plastic was to accommodate my oversized muzzle; I’d asked why such a large sphere was necessary when a simple oval would do. After trying on the oval prototype and seeing for myself how distorted my vision became, I didn’t complain about it again. Flying a spacecraft turned out to require considerable reliance on instruments and the ability to see them.
   The simulator in which I was sitting was an exact replica of a lunar shuttle cockpit. All the instruments were the same as the ones on a real vehicle, including the one I currently pointed to. “Do you see the velocity curve on monitor 4? I burned extra fuel to decelerate to the correct speed.”
   “But check your entry angle chart,” the feminine voice over the speakers clipped to my ears replied. Dutifully I tapped at the icon on the top of the plasma display to bring up the requested data. It showed a set of green, yellow and red lines marking the maximum allowable velocity versus height. And racing across them was the white line that showed the position and speed of my vehicle. It went across the red line because it started at the yellow one.
   “Crap. Traveling faster en route meant that I arrived early and came in steeper,” I sighed.
   “Right. And coming in at a steeper angle not only caused you to generate too much heat, but it also placed too great a stress load on the vehicle’s wings—they snapped off at around 200k feet or so.”
   “I’m never going to get the hang of this,” I complained as I flipped my visor up and away from my face. “So far, I’ve lost 15 ships in various reentry mishaps and fuel consumption errors.”
   Tanya laughed out loud at me through the intercom. For some reason, it didn’t bother me at all. “There’s only so much fuel on any vehicle, Thomas. We can generate tremendous energies with the light fission reactors. But heat doesn’t move things; expanding gasses do that. And there’s only so much liquid nitrogen on board. Use that all up by accelerating and decelerating harder in order to make your trip quicker, and you’ll become a spectacular, if short-lived, shooting star when you hit the atmosphere.”
   “Yeah, I know.” I was really starting to dislike this whole spaceflight thing. I didn’t know why they bothered giving the job to a pilot like me—so far, everything I’ve learned was completely different than flying. It was totally alien. Space piloting was to air piloting what running a nuclear power plant was to running a neighborhood bar.
   “Let’s try it again, Thomas,” Tanya’s voice chimed through the intercom. “And this time, remember that if you exceed your preplanned speed, you’ll arrive early and that means a sharper entry angle. Okay? Can you at least try to master the preplanned flight before learning how to hot dog it?”
   “Right. And I’ll try not to make any wise cracks about the term ‘entry angle’ while I’m at it.”
   There was an uncomfortable moment of silence on the intercom. I was just beginning to wonder if I’d offended her when I heard her stifle a laugh. “You’ll have to buy me dinner before you get to make jokes like that, fly boy,” she teased.
   I felt my ears perk up alertly. “Oh really?” I said quickly. “How about we grab some grub after I get out of this simulator?”
   “I’m not fond of grubs,” she pointed out. “And we can talk about dinner after you get back from your first shuttle trip to the Earth. It’s coming up in just 2 weeks, so you’d better get your mind back on the job or you aren’t going to make it back here to talk about anything.”
   “All these damned preplanned directions, accelerations and decelerations,” I growled as I reset all the switches to the proper configuration for launch from the lunar surface near Luna3. The velocity curve display and orientation guide jumped back to the way they would look while sitting and waiting for the lunar ascent. “This isn’t piloting; it’s Calculus class without the benefit of a textbook!”
   “Poor baby,” Tanya crooned. “Okay, I need to get some work done on the big super-secret project while you practice. So I’m going to leave my brother in charge of the simulator for a while. You take care and try not to incinerate yourself too often, okay?”
   “Huh? What?” I called for her through the intercom. “Tanya, are you there?”
   “She has more important things to do than to wipe your chin, Thomas,” Leonid replied instead. Even through the static of the intercom, the dislike in his voice came through like a wave of cold air. “Besides, you’re delusional.”
   I straightened my earpiece. “What makes you say that?” I asked.
   “Asking her out to dinner? You must be nuts.”
   I took a breath. “I’ll admit that there’s not much room or decent food to offer up here on the Moon,” I said.
   “Or intelligent conversation, if she’s with you,” came the gruff response.
   I frowned “Hey now, you can call me a lot of things. Forward, perhaps, maybe even aggressive. It comes with the pilot wings, you know. But one thing you can’t call me is stupid.”
   I heard Leonid let out a wicked chortle. “How smart can you be, when you’re hitting on the sister of the guy who’s currently in control of your flight simulator?” he asked.
   Oh, shit. I swallowed nervously as I realized my predicament, and flipped the visor on my helmet down again.
   “Okay, let’s get to work,” Leonid announced. “In this simulation, you’ll be dealing with a runaway reactor combined with the loss of your liquid nitrogen tanks in the upper aft section. This will create very strong inertial forces on you and the ship.” He chuckled again; I suddenly realized that it was far less pleasant than when Tanya did it. “I hope you took your motion sickness pills earlier, because pilots are required to clean up their own suits.”
   I was about to mention that the dispensary was all out of motion sickness pills, but the simulator began vibrating around me and I had to concentrate on the displays and controls in front of me.

   By the time I landed my shuttle on the runway in Florida, the entire flight was almost routine. Countless practice sessions and fiery deaths had beaten the barnstorming urge out of me. I had learned to give up trying to fly the shuttle by instinct and instead trusted the charts and displays surrounding me. It was less like flying and more like autocross driving, trying to keep the vehicle moving at the right speed and in the right place at the right time. Once I figured that out, things worked out much better.
   My stepping through the thick, circular hatchway and outside for the first time in months was proof of my new competence.
   I took a deep breath. The morning air was heavy with moisture and scents of every sort. Clean scents, not like the ever-present stink of thousands of folks crammed into tin cans on the Moon where water is a precious commodity and everyone gets a bath once a month whether they need it or not. I breathed deeply and closed my eyes, holding onto the rails in the strangely strong gravity—odd, how once-familiar things become distant and alien when they aren’t around all the time. Coming back from the Moon, I now felt like I weighed a ton.
   “Don’t get too comfortable, pussy cat.” I opened my eyes again and saw three army security guards stepping up the gantry toward me, shouldering their way past the white-suited ground crews that were offloading boxes and bags of material brought down from the Moon. I recognized the one in the lead and I grinned at him.
   “Well, well, if it isn’t Captain Jayce,” I said over the hum of the trucks surrounding my ship. “Bet you never expected to see me again, did you?”
   Jayce stopped in his tracks and looked up at me in surprise. “Jesus Christ, it’s you again!” he announced. “Can’t say as I’m glad to see you here, even if you did bring a load of osmium and raw beryllium-tungsten alloy down. I was just telling the brothers here how much we were saving on Tender Vittles now that the biggest pussy in town was gone.”
   The guards flanking him were carrying the same Hyperkinetic fletchette rifles as before, although they weren’t the same enlisted men as before. This time Jayce’s fellow soldiers were both black and wore the rank of Sergeant on their collars. They smirked at their leader’s comment and the group resumed its climb. I kept my grin up and sang a little to them as they continued up the ramp.
   “Yeah, but look how big the rats are getting nowdays. Why, I’ve heard stories that one of them got promoted all the way to captain!”
   The guards chuckled aloud, though Jayce didn’t.
   “Still got that smart mouth, I see,” he snorted. “One of these days someone’s gonna shut it for you.”
   “Maybe.” I leaned nonchalantly against the railing and studied the clouds beyond the tail of my ship. “But it won’t be now, and it sure as hell won’t be you doing the honors.” I turned and stuck my tongue out at him, making him turn crimson on top of his black skin. “So don’t waste my time with your mindless chit-chat. You guys are here to take me to the temporary quarters while the shuttle gets refueled and reloaded. Right?”
   Jayce nodded, too angry to talk.
   I nodded back and walked past them, heading down the stairs. “Good. Just don’t bore me while we’re at it. Mindless prattle from cannon-fodder isn’t my idea of a good time.”
   Jayce fell in step behind me. “Yeah?” he snapped back.
   “Oh, that’s a quick and clever response. Thought that one up all by yourself, did you?”
   “At least I don’t have to go back to the Moon,” he shot back.
   I stopped, turned and locked eyes with the little man. Instantly the other two had their weapons trained on me.
   The captain didn’t back up an inch. He also didn’t give any clue that he was the slightest bit scared of me.
   “Go ahead,” he said lowly, “Touch me once, you freak, and my men will reduce you to the consistency of jello. They’ll have to bury you in a paper towel.”
   I didn’t flinch. I kept my eyes locked on his.
   “Kill me, Jayce, and your superiors will see to it you end up in the Russian rental-prison complex in Siberia,” I replied in a soft, threatening growl. “You’ll have to explain why you blew away one of the few people in the universe who can fly the spacecraft that bring you humans your space-made trinkets and take the other hybrids out of your line of sight.
   “You’re not going to do shit, Jayce. And neither am I. So stop trying to puff yourself up into something you aren’t and do your job escorting me to my temporary quarters. Or do I have to wander around and find it for myself?”
   Jayce glared fiercely at me. I just stared right back. I could see him clutching for his pistol, just to let it go again. We both knew the score: Exile or not, I was worth a lot to the humans. I was able to do what they were afraid to do and to go where they didn’t have the guts to go. That made me valuable in some twisted sort of way. And the Powers That Be wouldn’t appreciate one of their over-rated cops making my replacement necessary.
   “The day I let one of you monsters just walk around the place like you own it…” he finally said in a gravelly voice. “We’ll escort you to your dorm where you’ll spend the night, resting up for tomorrow’s flight out of here. You take off at dawn, freak.”
   Then in a move that was so quick I barely registered it (which is really fast, considering I’m a leopard and all) he reached up and grabbed my right ear in his fist. I jumped at the surprise, and curled my lips back angrily. Captain Jayce then pulled my head lower, closer to his mouth so he could whisper to me.
   “But if you screw up or do something that’ll give me an excuse to vaporize your ass, I’ll welcome it,” he hissed. “Go on, do something stupid like try to escape or hurt someone. Please.” He smiled unpleasantly at me. “If life on the Moon is too tough for you, I’ll be more than happy to put you out of your misery.”
   It was then and there that I felt my heart harden against these people. Not just Jayce, but all of them. I suddenly felt the weight of the world lift away and a sudden burst of something I hadn’t felt in quite a long time.
   I felt proud!
   “Like I’d ever let a little coward like you decide something as important as my life,” I said back. My voice was as flat and cold as aluminum sheeting. “You know the real reason you want to kill me, don’t you? It’s not that you don’t like hybrids or what we represent. It’s not that you care who’s breathing your air.
   “No, your hangup is that you’re scared that my cohorts and I are tougher than you are. You and the rest of your kind can’t hack it out in space any more than you can hack it on the battlefield. That’s why you don’t like me: Because I can do what you can’t or won’t even try to do!”
   His face reddened even further. He gritted his teeth so hard I could hear the enamel crack. His grip on my ear tightened, which was a good thing really, seeing as he couldn’t go for his gun and hold my ear at the same time.
   I leaned closer, letting my teeth and my hot breath play against his throat “That’s what really gets at you, isn’t it?” I whispered evilly. “That I and the rest of us ‘mistakes’ are now astronauts, dancing on the Moon while you squat here, doing the same lame stuff your granddaddy did! That’s what really pisses you off the most, isn’t it?”
   Jayce stood there for several moments, trembling. Just trembling. I could feel his heart racing, the pulse a steady machine gun through the veins in his throat. For several seconds I thought he would drop my ear and grab for his gun to shoot me, even though he knew I’d tear his throat out before his palm reached his holster. For a split-second there it looked like he was so intent on killing me that dying himself didn’t bother him.
   It’s strange what goes through your mind at the moment of truth. Ask anyone who has gone through it sometime, and they’ll all tell you the same thing. Oh sure, the stories all tell about men thinking of their lady friends or families. Or about doing as much damage as possible before getting taken out. You’ve probably heard dozens of such tales.
   But what the people who have actually stared down old painless will reluctantly admit, after you give them enough liquor, is that such things aren’t what they thought of in that split-second when all hope fled and the end looked certain. Propaganda aside, what people think about at that last instant can be completely random. I know, I’ve talked with plenty of pilots in my outfit and others who thought they were goners for one reason or another. One pilot said his dying thought was wondering if he’d be responsible for late charges on any library books he couldn’t return on account of being dead. As I said, what goes through the conscious mind in that final split second when you think you are about to die can be quite random.
   I wondered if Heaven had a ‘No Pets’ rule in effect that would keep me out. Funny, that.
   But Captain Jayce seemed to calm down again and slowly, very slowly so as not to panic me, pulled his right hand off my ear and backed away. I tried to lock eyes with him once again. He wouldn’t look at me. He turned to the side, looking toward the buildings in the distance.
   “At least I don’t have to drink my own recycled piss,” he said, quieter this time. The anger was still there in his voice. But the sharpness had gone out of him. He turned to his escorts. “Walk this cat to his dorm room rather than getting a vehicle for him. We’ll see how tough the kitty is after a nice, long hike through Florida’s lovely summer conditions while decked nose to tail in black fur.”
   His two armed cohorts looked unhappy. “But captain, it’s more than a mile back to the base,” one of them complained.
   “Are you saying that this cat-thing is tougher than you are?!” he roared, grateful for someone to vent his rage on who wouldn’t fight back. “Are you telling me that this pussy here is stronger than the pride of humanity? Are you standing there in your uniform and saying that you are lower than an animal?”
   Both enlisted men shook their heads and stood at attention. “No, captain!” they barked out in unison.
   “Good!” Captain Jayce snapped back. “This is a cushy assignment you two have. I’d hate to have to loan you both Civil Engineering where you’d get to dump latrines all day!”

   “Hello everyone! I’m home!” My voice rang through the metal walls of the module, barely touched by the sound-dampening foam laid all over the ceiling. I closed the hatch to the R&D section where Tanya worked and called again. “Anybody here?”
   “Welcome back, Thomas,” Tanya called from behind some equipment panels on the far end of the cylinder. “Congratulations on making your first flight. What is it that you pilots say about someone when they make their first solo trip?”
   I felt my cheeks get hotter and was suddenly glad she was where she couldn’t see me. I tugged at the collar of my dirty coveralls. “I’m not sure that’s a nice thing to talk about with a nice lady like you,” I managed to struggle out.
   Tanya walked around the panels and put both hands on the table in the middle of the room. She winked knowingly at me.
   “You know, I’ve been hanging around pilots since I was 10,” she said in a pleasant tone. “I know the lingo quite well, thank you, and I’ve long since gotten past the point where some of the talk embarrasses me. But thank you for thinking of my feelings, anyway.”
   “Uh, sure. No problem.”
   “So how was the flight? Any malfunctions I need to know about?”
   “None but the heat in my lap.”
   She looked suddenly concerned. “Is hot air blowing onto your lap?” She thought for a second. “There are no environment systems anywhere near there. So I can’t think what…”
   I held up my hand to stop her from winding herself up too tightly. “Relax, Tanya. There’s nothing wrong with the shuttle. But while I was downstairs I remembered what you said earlier.”
   Now she looked confused. “What I said?” she echoed. “And what was that?”
   “You said that when I made the flight and survived, that you’d have dinner with me. Remember that? So…” I pulled my other arm and the bags they held from behind my back and held them up where she could see. “Dinner is served!”
   Tanya stared at the bags for a moment. Then she turned to me again. “You brought dinner up with you from the planet’s surface?” she said incredulously. “But where did you put it? How… how in the world did you get it?”
   “I borrowed a cell phone off one of the ground crew just 2 hours before liftoff and ordered a couple of pizzas delivered to me. You know, my bank account down there is still active? Anyways, after I got a couple of pizzas I flew up with them in my lap. That’s why I was complaining about the heat there. Now, the food has probably gotten cold by now, but…”
   Tanya burst out laughing and made several spaces clean on the burnished stainless steel table. “Oh my goodness!” she laughed. “Do you know how long it has been since I had some pizza? What kind did you get?”
   I walked to the table and put the bag and the two boxes it contained on the table. “Meat lover’s pizza, of course,” I told her. “The works! Only the best for you!”
   Tanya turned back to the panels she’d been working behind. “Leonid!” she called. “The very clever and resourceful Thomas brought us pizza for dinner!”
   Leonid came from around the panels, wiping the grease from his hands onto a scrap of cloth. It was difficult to tell whether he was getting his hands clean or dirty, as filthy as the cloth was. His blue jumpsuit wasn’t much cleaner than the cloth. Apparently he and his sister had been repairing some equipment in the back of the module.
   “Made it back in one piece, I see,” he grumbled. “You’d better not have scratched the paint—it’ll be awhile before I can whip up a fresh can of titanium white.”
   I sighed softly. “Nothing but the best for you, and your brother,” I amended.
   “Now, now,” Tanya gently admonished both of us. “You two be on your best behavior. After all, how often do we get fresh, honest to gosh pizza up here? We are a little out of the usual delivery area.”
   Leonid blinked, then his eyes softened. “I guess you’re right,” he finally said. He turned to face me. “Sorry about that, Thomas. It has been a long day.”
   I blew a puff of air. “Don’t sweat it,” I told him. “And sharing dinner with you will be fine. I brought lots.” With a flourish I reached forward and flipped open the lid to the first of the two boxes.
   Inside was a misshapen mass of bread, red, various kinds of meat, all swimming in a slick of oil and crushed to the back half of the box.
   Leonid leaned forward and took an experimental sniff. “Yeah,” he said, amused. “But lots of what?”
   I looked closer at the twisted wreckage of dinner, and my heart sank. “It… was pizza,” I said. “I don’t know what could have happened to it. I was careful to keep it flat on my lap the whole way. I even used bungee cords to hold it in place.”
   Tanya put one hand on her left hip and regarded me thoughtfully. “Was it still flat in your lap when you reached zero gee and then accelerated to lunar rendezvous?” she asked, also amused.
   “Yes, of course. Where else could I have put it?”
   “Then the pizza floated around in the box, and when you headed for the Moon, the entire thing was smashed against the side, just like if you’d put it on its end here or on the Earth.”
   I shook my head sadly. “So much for dinner,” I moped. “I’ve ruined it.”
   “Nonsense!” Tanya brightly said as she reached for a blob of pizza. “Are you kidding? This was very clever, and very sweet of you. Thank you!” She scooped a mass of bread and goop with her fingers and stuck it into her muzzle. She smacked at it noisily and drops of tomato sauce stained her whiskers.
   “Mmm! Delicious!” she announced. “A bit cold, though.”
   “No tip for the delivery boy, then,” Leonid said with a good natured snort, then dug in himself.
   I let myself grin weakly and reached for a bite myself. “The company is compensation enough,” I said as I scraped my fingertips on the cardboard box and pulled up a doughy, red wad of what was once a large pizza from a major chain. “No real way to tell where the slices are, is there?”
   “Next time, buy calzones,” Leonid said, licking his muzzle. “They’ll travel better.”
   “Good idea,” Tanya said, already reaching for another bite. “We’ll think up a few things that we can have delivered to the KSC strip that won’t get ruined inflight.”
   “How about fried chicken? Does that chicken place deliver?” I asked them.
   Both Leonid and Tanya looked at me. “What chicken place?” Tanya finally asked aloud, glancing at her brother.
   “You know…” I grinned. “The KFC by the KSC?”
   There was a moment of complete silence. It was followed a couple of seconds later by the roaring laughter of three feline voices.

   I’d love to be able to say that that night was the beginning of a fun and happy life for me. I would really like to say that, but it just isn’t true. Have you ever lived in a small house, and more and more people come to stay with you? That was what life was like on Luna3 shortly after that.
   We had more and more people coming up on each flight, which meant less and less oxygen being shipped. And all the new people had nowhere to go, so everyone was crammed tighter and tighter into the existing modules. Leonid was making more facilities as fast as he could, but the inflow was still almost 50% greater than he was able to build for.
   I don’t think I need to point out that since we were on the Moon, and recycling almost everything, the life support systems were strained. Very strained. Water and oxygen from the hydroponics was barely keeping everyone alive. Carbon-dioxide poisoning was beginning to become a problem in places. The soy and algae systems that converted the sewage back into air and food were becoming overwhelmed with waste. We began cutting back on food rations, to reduce the amount of sewage and to also increase the number of soy plants that created oxygen for us.
   Things finally got so bad that several newcomers ended up in my tiny corner of the dorms. Thus, I ended up sleeping in the R&D cylinder, tossing a sleeping cot in an isolated corner of the lab to make room for more refugees. Tanya and Leonid ended up moving into the lab themselves soon after. As Leonid sourly put it, either they could move into the lab or the swarms of newcomers could do it instead. Better them than who-knows-who so we ended up an odd threesome in the lab/quarters. A sheet isolated each of our own tiny territories from the rest of the lab, giving each of us a small bit of privacy. Not that it was a lot of privacy since the lab was rarely quiet. And Tanya had taken to working many more hours than she normally did.
   Leonid had noticed that himself. “She’s going to drive herself into an early grave,” he said as he handed me a weak cup of coffee. I was sitting at a side table, studying the manifests of the last 6 months of flights on my scratched-up computer tablet.
   “She works like a woman possessed,” I said, breathing somewhat heavier in the thinner atmosphere. With lower oxygen levels, even little efforts got tiring. “I don’t know why she’s going at it so hard.”
   “She thinks she can save us all with her new drive,” Leonid said.
   “It’ll take more than a new propulsion system to fix things here,” I replied. “Look at these manifests. We’re bringing in more and more people without any new support for them. Where are they supposed to live? What are they supposed to breathe? What are the people down on Earth thinking?”
   Leonid shrugged sadly and sipped at his own weak brew. “They are thinking that the sooner they get us off their planet, the better,” he said resignedly. “They probably believe that if we all die up here, building their stepping stones to space, then it’s no big loss and that’s just so much blood that humankind won’t need to spill to reach for the stars.”
   “Pretty chicken-shit way of heading to space if you ask me,” I grumbled. “Sending your refuseniks out to colonize for you—what ever happened to new frontiers being forged by people with gumption and guts?”
   “They found a group to do their dirty work for them. Or created them, one.”
   “Well, there won’t be any forging of the brave frontier if we all suffocate. We need more oxygen, more water—hell, more everything. And we need to stop flying more folks up here for a bit. Life support can’t handle the people we have, much less more of them.”
   Leonid snorted. “You can tell that to the governor. But you’ll have more of a response if you tell it to the walls. He’ll never go along with a pause in moving people up here.”
   I scratched my head in frustration. “That’s true,” I admitted. “He’ll never go along with a voluntary stop in operations.” I sighed and looked at the manifests of our 14 shuttles again.
   Then I got an idea! My ears shot up and I turned excitedly to Leonid. “What if it’s not voluntary?” I exclaimed.
   Leonid looked confused and sipped his coffee again. “What are you talking about now?” he asked.
   “All the ships are way past due for safety inspections of the main reactor, right? We just stop flying to the Earth until we’ve done them all and made sure all the ships are certified flight-worthy. Simple.”
   “Too simple,” Leonid said with a shake of his head. “Do you really think the Governor is just going to let us stop flying for a couple of months?”
   “Sure he will—if no pilots are willing to fly the shuttles in that time.”
   “Ah. Now it’s starting to sound like a mutiny.”
   “Only long enough for you and your crews to build a few more modules and more life-support systems.” I put my cup down and stared at Leonid’s glaring face. “Come on Leo , you just need a little time to get caught up again. This little trick can buy us that time.”
   “He’s right, you know.” Tanya came from around a group of overfilled bookshelves to lean wearily on the table. “No matter how you look at it, we need more supplies and if not fewer consumers, at least no more than we have now. We need to stop flying back down to Earth for a little bit and quit bringing more people up with us.”
   “We’ll lose our shipments of oxygen!”
   “Which we aren’t getting any more because the ships are crammed full of people instead of supplies,” Tanya softly replied.
   “You’ll never get the governor to go along with it.”
   “The governor will have no choice,” I added. “Unless he’s got a secret squadron of trained shuttle pilots complete with shuttles who’ll fly for him when the rest of us won’t. And besides, when we all choke to death from lack of oxygen, so will he.”
   “Which is exactly what I’m going to tell the pharaoh,” Tanya said with a sigh. “Don’t worry about him, Leonid. Even the most twisted creature understands self-preservation. He’ll be happy to have more air to breathe, and he’ll make our cover story work with the bosses downstairs.”
   I watched the two lock eyes for a moment. I watched his angry glare latch with her soft, green eyes. The two couldn’t be more different—where he was a pessimist, she was an optimist. He saw himself trying to keep from getting buried under his responsibilities; she simply did her job, no worries, as if it was her reason for waking in the morning.
   I’ll never know what the two communicated between themselves as they stared at each other. But after a moment, Leonid looked away and walked away from the table toward the hatchway.
   “Well, if I’m going to have a short break to build more cylinders, I guess I’d better grab a few hundred bodies around me and get to work.” He keyed the hatch open and half stepped through before turning back to look at his gray and black sister. “You’d better be right about this,” he said. “We aren’t going to get a second chance.” With that he turned and closed the hatch behind him with a metallic clank!
   I stared at Tanya for a moment. “Maybe we need to build a still instead of more oxygen generators,” I said, hoping a bit of humor would help her mood. “There’s only one other person on the Moon who needs a shot of whiskey worse than your brother.”
   Tanya smirked faintly. “Me?” she guessed.
   “Hell no! If anyone else is getting a shot of genuine Moon-made moonshine around here, it’s me!”
   She smiled wider, and I grinned back. It made me feel warmer than any booze ever could. Or did.
   “We don’t have the resources right now,” she said. “But in a week or two, we just may.”
   I laughed out loud. “Oh?” I said unconcernedly. “You know where to get us a few metric tons of water?”
   “Exactly.”
   My smile froze onto my face and my breath caught in my throat. There was something in her voice that disturbed me. It was the same tone in my commander’s voice when he told me and the rest of the squadron that we were attacking the one who had just attempted to murder us. It was a calm voice. It was a certain voice.
   And something told me that the voice I just heard was going to throw me into certain danger, just like the previous one did.

   “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, save it for a rainy day.” I couldn’t help singing; it kept my nerves stable. It was that or cry out in terror. I’d gotten used to flying my routine missions to the planet and back. But this—this took the cake.
   I was sitting on a comet that was streaking past relatively close to the Earth and Moon. My mission: Land on the ice-ball, capture as much water from it as my tanks could handle, then fly back to the Moon again. It was definitely a different sort of trip.
   For one thing, I used up almost all of my nitrogen just getting to the comet and synchronizing orbits with it. When I pointed that problem out to Tanya, she just shrugged and pointed out that I’d be using some of the comet-water as reaction fluid for the trip back. I had to admit, it was a pretty slick plan.
   It would be slicker if I wasn’t squatting on an orbiting snowball several million miles from home, however. Landing wasn’t all that difficult, though I had to use the dorsal thrusters more than I expected to counter the outflow of water vapor from the comet’s surface. I was on a rough, black and white world that was covered in a gauzy haze as the surface evaporated off into space.
   “What is your status, Molniya?” the radio chirped. It was Tanya, back on the Moon some 7 million miles away. I reached forward, careful not to move too quickly in the zero gravity, and keyed the talk-switch for the open cockpit mike.
   “The ship is still on the surface of the comet. I’ve got the choppers collecting ice for the lunar stations as we speak. I expect I’ll be bringing back the full load of 8 tons of partially processed water as planned.” I double-checked my hastily-assembled mission computer beside me; meaning I looked at the laptop that was velcroed down in the copilot seat.
   “Analysis shows the comet to be about 41% rocky stone, a bit more than we expected. That means it’ll take a little more time to fill the tanks. But I’m ahead of schedule otherwise. Molniya, out.” I keyed off the mike and hoped that the soft whir of the cockpit’s life-support and avionics systems hadn’t ruined the connection. Out here, with 35 light-seconds of distance between me and the Moon, it’d take more than a minute of round-trip signal time for me to hear Tanya asking me to put my helmet on and switch to the suit’s comm system.
   I leaned back in the captain’s chair and nervously sighed. I hoped I didn’t have to put on the helmet again; it was uncomfortable enough wearing the red, rubber spacesuit for days on end. This trip to a comet that swung by relatively close was as high-risk as missions came—anything could go wrong at any time and for any reason. Nobody had ever even set a spacecraft down on a comet before, much less mined it for ice.
   Normally I wouldn’t have touched a mission like this with a ten-foot pole. But we desperately needed the water, and this snowball in space just happened to pass by close enough that a hastily assembled and modified shuttle could go out and get it. 10 tons of water came to about 8 tons of oxygen, and that was enough to last us a long time. I told myself that I’d either come back as a hero or I wouldn’t come back at all. Either way, I’d come out ahead of the game.
   I glanced at the load meters. The tanks were just about full—2,400 gallons of not-quite-potable water in the internal and external tanks—which would bring the ship to its maximum weight. I smirked when I thought about how funny the machine had to look from the outside, with both wings removed and long cylindrical tanks welded on in their place.
   Most likely, the humans would be furious when they found out about the hack job we’d done to one of their shuttles. Frankly, I didn’t see how the humans could claim ownership of any of the spaceships; we forged the metals on the Moon, constructed them on the Moon, and flew them from the Moon. Nitrogen and computers were the only thing needed from the Earth nowadays. At least, that was the only thing they’d give us. Not more food or air or anything like that.
   “Acknowledged, Molniya,” Tanya’s reply finally came back. “Understand you are almost out of nitrogen. Go ahead and exhaust that before switching and using the water as your reaction fluid. By my calculations, a week-long trip back to Luna will consume about 2 tons of water. That leaves 8 tons you are bringing in. Good job. Note your new acceleration and speed versus distance curves on display 2. Luna, out.”
   I double-checked the load and the tanks: They were full. I pressed the sequence of keys that jettisoned the choppers and scoopers from the bottom of the vehicle. I grinned as I visualized Leonid’s furious face. He’d asked me to try to come back with the rig if at all possible because it had taken some work to build it, but I’d never intended to do that—my ship was heavy enough as it was. Any additional mass (like useless wings and now useless ice-cutters) was dead weight as far as I was concerned, and needed to be tossed at the first opportunity.
   The ship jolted and shuddered as the explosive bolts separated the cutters. I stopped applying dorsal thrust and sat back in my seat. The breeze of the evaporating water leaping into space pushed me away from the comet, quickly at first, but more and more gently as I got further and further from its surface.
   After a moment I used the automatic guidance system to orient the ship toward where the Moon would be in 7 days. 7 long days in this space suit… I squirmed in my seat. Like the past week-plus-change wasn’t bad enough, now I had another week of it to go through. Swell, just swell. I watched the stars swirl around slowly outside the window as the heavy vehicle dutifully changed direction.
   The ground crew better have thought far enough ahead to install the extra large baggies in the poop catcher, or this suit’s going to be right nasty when I get back… Once the ship’s course and velocity were set up and pointed someplace other than oblivion, I powered up the main reactor from stationkeeping mode and back to flight mode again. I could feel the rumble in every fiber in my body as the unbelievable energies of the cosmos were unleashed behind me. The ship vibrated and shuddered, and then the reaction fuel began pumping into the chamber.
   The ship groaned. I was pressed back into my seat by the almost quarter of a G of thrust. I watched the lines on my display; acceleration was right on the money, as were velocity and position. The orientation display showed me to be right on course as well.
   I watched the nitrogen level indicator drop down almost to zero. I smiled and decided that the mission was going to be a long cakewalk after all. I closed the valve to the nitrogen system and opened the flow valves to the water tanks to run on water for the rest of the voyage.
   That was when all hell broke loose.
   It started gently. Must people probably wouldn’t have noticed the change in pitch from the engines. But I did. If my helmet had been on I probably wouldn’t have detected it so early. My smile vanished and my ears were instantly alert, listening to the changing noise from the three engines as they ran out of their regular fuel and switched to something new.
   The quiet, almost imperceptible random changing in pitch from one engine grew louder. Then the sound was joined by a similar warbling from the other two engines as well. It grew louder. So did the pulse suddenly pounding in my throat.
   Then the course changes started. The course cursor on my display was going crazy, jumping all around the monitor as the ship yawed first one way, then the other. I grabbed my helmet reflexively and snapped it on. Whatever was going on, I couldn’t fix it if I died from a sudden loss of cabin pressure.
   I could feel the ship jerking left and then right again, over and over. The motions were random. But what was the cause? Were the computers malfunctioning? Did a gimbal assembly on one of the motors fail? I tapped up a data screen and tried not to think about the sweat on my forehead. The gimbals were all dancing like drunken fruit flies, bouncing to and fro. But why? Could’ve been computer failure—but if that was the case, the ship would have been unstable from the start of the return flight back to the Moon.
   That was when it hit me. A cold icicle of terror stabbed through my back as I realized that the problem hadn’t come up until I turned off the nitrogen and started using the water as reaction fuel. I quickly reached up and turned off the flow of water and throttled the reactor back to station-keeping once more.
   The wild, bouncing ride came to a stop.
   I looked at my displays again. The acceleration curve was already falling away, as was the position/velocity line. I was drifting when I was supposed to be accelerating fairly hard. I swallowed, knowing full well what would happen if I fell too far out of those calculated lines; I’d died often enough on the simulators, after all. But this was no simulation. This, I reminded myself, was as real as real could get.
   I took a couple of quick, deep breaths and forced my wildly flailing mind back under control again. Plenty of time to panic after the emergency is over, I told myself. But panic now, and I’m dead. Can’t panic now, space will eat me… A short time later I had my anxiety attack reasonably damped down and I considered what was happening.
   That wasn’t just water I had in my tanks, I decided. Sure, the rocks and stones from the comet were filtered out with screens. But what else was in that ice besides water and very small bits of stone? Frozen methane? Molecular iron? Bits of frozen fish sticks? Who knew?
   But one thing I did know was that the fuel was contaminated, and that the thrust it produced would be random. That was a big problem because as the two side engines lost and then regained power again, the ship would be turned back and forth, back and forth. I’d never be pointed in the correct direction. The ship would fly like it was drunk; which it was, in a matter of speaking.
   “Molniya, this is Luna,” Tanya’s voice broke my concentration. It was a welcome distraction. “Your thrust has stopped, and we saw a lot of shaking just before engine cutoff. What’s wrong?” I could have sworn her voice sounded worried. Good, I thought, that makes two of us!
   “This is Molniya!” I realized I was breathing fast. Hell, if they couldn’t understand that under the circumstances, screw them! “It’s the fuel—the water is contaminated or something. It’s causing random lateral thrust, burning differently in the side engines. Is there any way I can make it back on only the center engine where the variable thrust problem won’t throw me in random directions? Over.”
   I looked from display to display, praying that something would somehow show me a way to get out of this. Not that I was really expecting anything to appear. I was 7 million miles from the lifeless rock I called home, which was orbiting another rock that itself orbited the sun at 93 million miles. I was so far out that even at the speed of light, just talking with someone took over a minute. Getting home would take time and precision navigation, not to mention engines that thrusted properly when they were told to.
   “Molniya, Luna,” Tanya’s worried voice finally came back. “No, you can’t get home on a single engine. There isn’t enough thrust in it and your ship is very heavy right now. You need all three motors at nearly full power to get home.”
   I took a deep breath and pressed the TALK button.
   “Luna, Molniya. Understand last statement. Do you have any ideas that can get me home? And the water as well? Over.” I turned off the mike and waited for the signal to weave its way around Albert Einstein to get to Tanya and back. I rested my head on the back of the seat and tried not to think about what she might say.
   The radio came alive. There was a pregnant pause where her mike was active, but there was no sound. Nothing but the sound of her breathing. I could almost imagine her clutching the microphone, desperate for something to say. Desperate for anything that could save me.
   She didn’t have an answer for me. She didn’t know how to get me home anymore than I did myself. I held my breath and listened to the almost silent radio and the volumes it spoke to me.
   I realized that the nearly empty carrier wave from the Moon, my home, meant that I was on my own again. It was like it was back in the assault planes. I leaned back in my grav seat and finally exhaled. There was no one in the universe who could help me right now; not Tanya, not Leonid, not the entirety of humanity and all its computing and engineering prowess. Nobody.
   I looked at my hands, my red rubber encapsulated hands, snug in their pressurized gloves. Then I looked outside the windows again. The carrier wave from the Moon finally cut off as Tanya let go of the transmit button. I could have sworn I heard a small sob just before the radio went dead. But the fact of the matter was the only hands that could get me home… were mine.
   The big question was, how?
   I thought about the problem for several minutes, pointedly avoiding the displays. Reading them only made me more nervous without giving me any ideas, so why bother. I ran the problem through my head, over and over again, all to no avail. There was just no way for me to get the acceleration I needed to get home without using all three engines, and with the damned impurities in the fuel, there was no way to use them all without pointing everywhere in the sky except where I wanted to go.
   Jettison the side water tanks? Not possible. There hadn’t been time to install such a system before the mission. Besides, that still left the internal tanks to deal with. And without any water, there was no fuel to return on, so it was back to square one…
   In spite of what I wanted, I thought a second about what it would be like to be stranded out here. Eventually I’d use up all my oxygen, and there was no electrolysis system on board to make any from the water. Maybe I could improvise something from Molniya’s electrical systems—no, scratch that. I’d only starve after I ran out of food. And the Earth and her Moon would zoom on in their 93-million-mile orbit around the sun, not to pass this way again for another year. And by then, I’d be a frozen asphyxiated corpse in a ceramic and magnesium casket. Frankly, the thought scared the hell out of me!
   Several minutes passed. I closed my eyes and thought about just putting a bullet in my head instead rather than dying slowly in the depths of space. I shuddered as I imagined the bullet leaving the barrel and shattering my helmet before taking me to glory. Not that there was any way of making it a reality—there were no weapons on the ship that I knew of.
   Then my eyes widened. As I imagined the bullet spinning, coming out of the barrel, I imagined the ship spinning the same way, heading back to the Moon! It would work—gyroscopic stabilization, by God, just the same as what keeps a bullet flying straight and true!
   I set my jaw and gripped the orientation controls. I positioned the machine so that that the moving target reticle would be lined up in about 5 minutes. Gritting my teeth and saying a small prayer, I threw the roll thrusters to full on and put Molniya into a spin.
   The hull passed the sound from the small orientation motors to the flight deck. The attenuated hissing sound merged with the drone of the life support systems and my rapid breathing. It seemed to take forever, although I knew logically it only took a couple of moments for the constant thrusting to get a decent roll started. A couple of degrees per second at first, but finally a full quarter of a rotation per second.
   I powered up the reactor once more and watched the orientation display again, staring fiercely at the image. The spinning cursor got closer to the center of the display. I put my thumb on the THRUST button and my palm on the thrust control. Second after second went by, with the reticle circling the screen’s origin, closer and closer and closer.
   The circles and lines crossed each other perfectly on the screen. I turned the fuel on and slammed the throttle to full!
   The ship shuddered and bounced. I was pressed flat against the cushions of my flight seat. The jerking from side to side was much less pronounced this time since the ship’s spinning mass stabilized it from momentary side thrusts. It was working!
   I forced air into my lungs and concentrated on getting the vibrating ship back onto the velocity/position curve again. My stomach growled from being twisted about. Plus I felt like I was about to throw up, a consequence of the head and stomach moving at different speeds. I swallowed hard and keyed my suit’s mike.
   “Luna… this is Molniya,” I said, feeling queasy. “Have the motion sickness pills ready for when I get back. It’s going to be a rough trip home… but I’ll be back as scheduled. Molniya out.”

   If anyone asks you how long a person can survive without food, I can tell you from experience that the answer is somewhat greater than 7 days. That’s how long it was that I flew the spinning and vomit-inducing Molniya back. I tried to eat more than a dozen times on the flight home, but very little of it stayed down.
   There’s little worse than bodily fluids floating around loose in zero gravity. Fortunately for me the spinning ship made the puke fly up and pool on the control panel above me. That was good; it meant the stuff wouldn’t get into the air system and clog up the works, leaving me gagging for breath in the last tortured minutes of my life.
   The bad part was that I had to operate those buttons and circuit breakers. The spacesuit’s gloves made that a bit more tolerable. Of course, I still had to smell everything, and it didn’t take but a couple of days to make the puke really ripe. I could have worn my helmet the whole time, but then, one barf and I’d be swimming in it rather than having it centripetally held to the ceiling. So I left it off and suffered the odor.
   And to make things nastier, I had to decelerate the ship and stop the spin to land on the Moon. And coming down on the Moon, a vile rain showered down upon my head. If I had been thinking more clearly I’d have put my helmet back on first. But a solid week of spin-induced vertigo made me feel more than halfway dead, so I guess such a small oversight is understandable.
   I managed to land on the Moon in one piece within reasonable distance of the landing pad. It only took the ground crew an hour to position the ship so that it was within range of the extensible concourse. And in that hour, I ate every bit of food still on board the ship.
   The hatch opened and I was suddenly a hero. Several dozen voices of every imaginable species let out a Hooray!!! as I stepped onto the passageway and promptly fell flat on my nose. I’d brought in much needed supplies to the lunar bases, though it would need quite a bit of processing to make it potable or breathable. I’d brought a fighting chance for life to the exiles from the Earth, even if I couldn’t bring them their liberty.
   That’s what I was thinking about as they carried me out on a gurney. Like I’ve said before, it’s strange what passes through your mind at times. I mean, with Tanya rushing up to me and kissing me on the side of the muzzle, you’d think that I could have imagined a hundred other things right then. But I didn’t.
   “We gave you up for dead!” Tanya sobbed. Her gray and black cheeks were streaked with moisture. She clutched at my right hand and pulled the filth-encrusted glove off. Then she gestured for others to help undo the spacesuit and unclicked the retaining clips that held the bottom half and the top half of the suit together. “I’m certain you’re anxious to get out of that suit as fast as possible,” she told.
   I smiled weakly and blew her a little kiss, wishing I were stronger. Okay, so not every thought going through my mind right then was all that strange…

   A few days later found me back at my usual bunk in the research area again. Medical had used what precious vitamins and salines were available to get me back on my feet again. We hadn’t resumed flights back to the Earth yet, so there weren’t any more exiles coming in. But we still had way too many people up here. Resources were limited and would only become more so once the next batch of expatriates arrived. Nobody knew when that would be, but it would be soon.
   I pulled aside the blankets I’d rigged up around my bed for privacy. You’d think I would have noticed the cot put next to mine; I didn’t. I wasn’t really all that sick or malnourished any more so I don’t have that excuse. And my nightvision is superior, one of the traits the genetic engineers designed into me. I really don’t know why I didn’t see the cot pulled together with mine and the cover pulled over both of them. To my eyes, it just looked like one cot, I guess. One large cot with a new sheet tossed over it.
   And a lovely spaceship designer dressed in nothing but her gray and black fur under the covers, waiting for me.
   I dropped the small vial of vitamins and stood there motionless, staring at her. It took longer for them to hit the floor than I expected and I jumped at the noise when they finally hit the ground.
   “Has medical cleared you for action, hero?” she whispered. “I wouldn’t want to do anything that might injure you.” She sat up slowly, letting the cover fall from her chest. She turned her head and looked at the space beside her, then turned back to me and smiled seductively.
   I think I stood there in stunned silence for too long. Her smile faded and she gave me a confused look. “Are you all right, Thomas?” she asked.
   I nodded and bent down to pick up the vitamins. “Yeah, I’m okay,” I managed to get out. “Just a little surprised, is all.” I walked over to my cot and stood beside it, looking down on Tanya’s beautiful body. “But aren’t there lots of ears here in the same room as us?”
   She smiled again and lay back with her hands behind her head. She draped her thick, warm tail out from under the bed and laid it on the other side of the bed. The tail twitched once. Twice. I stared at the tail while Tanya stared up affectionately at me.
   “So let them hear,” she whispered. She ended her sentence in a tiny trill that sent shivers of excitement up and down my spine.
   I swallowed. Then I began to unzip my blue overalls down the front. Slowly, of course. “And your brother?” I asked quietly.
   “Leonid? He is working on the Grom for the rest of the night.”
   “The Grom?”
   “It’s Russian for ‘thunder’, just like Molniya is Russian for ‘lightning’. After the lightning, molniya, comes thunder, grom, yes?”
   “Oh. I just thought you’d give it a sexier name, is all.”
   She sat up again and came toward me on all fours. The sheets flowed off her furry body like water off of silk. “Right now, I can’t think of anything sexier than you, Thomas,” she purred.
   Every curve and line on her body was exposed. She was luscious, even in the dim light of the research module. Her human-shaped breasts hung beneath her as she came seductively toward me. I noticed that each areola had a perfectly circular black rose around it.
   Have you ever seen a cat stalking prey through the grass? I swear that image was what first went through my mind. I saw that hungry green gleam in her eyes and suddenly knew what a mouse felt like. And strangely enough, I didn’t seem to mind!
   She sat up and took my hands into hers. She let out a low, churring sound, then she pushed my hands away from the zipper. Tanya then began pulling it down herself, cutting the silence with the scissoring links as she eased it past my chest. Then past my abdomen. Finally, she got to my groin area, where she stopped upon bumping an obstruction.
   Tanya chuckled faintly, like water on glass. “Maybe you’d better do the rest,” she whispered, leaning back again. “I’d hate to hurt you, especially after everything you’ve been through to get this far.”
   I swallowed again and took her hands in mine. They were shivering, and not from cold. I think she noticed. I pulled the fabric and her gentle hands and took the zipper to its end. Then I released her hands and reached up to my shoulders, pulling the garment off. I stepped back a foot from Tanya and wriggled my way out of the uniform, kicking it underneath the cot.
   I looked her over from top to bottom. Her eyes sparkled eagerly in the dark, shining starkly on her gray fur. Every detail of her body was visible as she sat there in the nude—save one. Her tail was now draped over her lap, hiding her private parts from view. She flicked her tailtip again and leaned forward, putting her hands on my hips and my briefs.
   “Do you like what you see?” she teased.
   Hell, yes! I nodded quickly.
   “Aren’t you the least bit curious to see if my pubic hair is as black as my roses?” she asked.
   I nodded again.
   “Then Thomas, you’re going to have to lose the underwear.”
   “Did our roles get swapped while I was gone?” I sighed. “I thought I was supposed to be chasing you.”
   Tanya let her hand slowly glide down my thigh. “We are all barely staying alive up here,” she said softly. “And I almost lost you once already; you very nearly didn’t make it back alive. When you were out there and I thought you weren’t coming back, a part of me felt as cold as space itself. I thought about all the things I wouldn’t get to do with you.
   “Life is fragile and we don’t know how long we have left to us. So Thomas, I’m through playing games and being the tease—we don’t have the time for it. We could die in 50 seconds or in 50 years. Who knows? But if I’m going to feel pain when you are gone, then I should be allowed to feel joy when you are here.”
   She looked up eagerly at me. “I know I seem forward all of a sudden, and if that bothers you then I’m sorry. But tomorrow may never come so I’m not waiting any longer. Now, are you going to take those shorts off or am I going to have to do it for you?”
   She didn’t have to ask me twice. Hell, after seeing her in my bed stark naked and waiting for me, I was more than ready already. I bent over and pushed my underwear down to my ankles. Doing so, I was nose to nose with Tanya.
   Tanya reached a hand around my head, and caressed the back of my head for a second, sniffing me. I sniffed her as well, taking in the scents of her and the rest of the lab. Her strong feminine scents mingled with the astringent odors of cutting oil and ozone. The very faint aroma of delicate perfume hidden somewhere on her body mixed in a tantalizing bouquet with pheromones coming presumably from some other currently hidden part of her body.
   She gingerly brought my lips to hers. I stepped out of my underwear and then let myself fall the rest of the way into her embrace. She gripped me more tightly and pulled me onto her, breathing faster. I let out a small growl of delight as her legs and tail wrapped around my waist, clutching me tighter still.
   I learned three very important things that night. One, I learned how to fuck in a roomful of people without making enough of a racket to disturb everyone else around me. Two, I learned that her pubic hair wasn’t black at all, but just a darker shade of gray. And three, I learned that danger is a big turn on, for me as well as for her. There’s nothing like a little narrowly escaped death to get the old libido going at a fevered pitch.
   The vitamins came in handy.

   “It looks like we’ll be resuming flights to the Earth in 13 days,” Leonid announced, putting down the notebook he’d been reading from. “During the pause, we’ve managed to build the largest chamber yet for more newcomers. We also got some new hydroponics running in the western corridor. But we lost 8 people in the construction and now we have 8 vacuum suits out of commission. Together with earlier losses, material usage and consumables, we need to use half of the next 16 flights for cargo and material rather than passengers.”
   I yawned and leaned forward over the table. “Oh, I just bet the humans are going to love that,” I muttered. I took another bite of my soy/rabbit nutrient patty and tried not to wince. Over the past few months I’d gotten somewhat tolerant of the taste. Which is not to say I liked it, only that I could eat it without spitting it out in disgust. I almost looked forward to flying back again, just so I could get a bit of real food.
   Leonid stared at the notebook. “Well, if they want to have a concentration camp on the Moon to banish us, then they are going to have to deal with a few realities.”
   “They haven’t been dealing with reality thus far. Hell, the instant we became inconvenient, they shuffled us all to the Moon rather than deal with the reality of what they created.”
   “You tell me nothing I don’t already know,” he grumbled. “Personally, I’d love to make a few dedicated flights for materials and nothing but, but there’s no chance in hell of my getting that. A few 50/50 flights though, I have some chance of getting.”
   Tanya yawned herself and leaned back, stretching. I glanced aside and noticed that her jumpsuit wasn’t zipped up fully. I got a good look at her cleavage. I grinned at her and she smiled back before winking at me.
   “I’ll have to write up a schedule for all the pilots, then,” she said while straightening up again. She turned to face me. “Excluding you, of course.”
   My ears perked up in surprise. “I’m off the roster?” I exclaimed. I was puzzled. The only real reason I could think of for that would be an exemption by the flight surgeon for my bit of malnourishment earlier. But he would have told me something if that was the case. Or at least have documented it in my record.
   Leonid scowled. “Well! Isn’t that just great!” he fumed, throwing his pen forcefully onto the table. It bounced at least four feet into the air and soared across the room—the wonders of ¹/6 gravity. “You find yourself a bunk buddy, and suddenly we are down one pilot? That’s wonderful, just fucking wonderful.”
   I blinked in astonishment at his sudden temper flare-up.
   Tanya’s ears flattened back straight on her head and she stood up, leaning far over the table. She angrily stared Leonid right in the eye.
   “You have something to say, brother dearest?” she snarled. “Flight and research are my domain, not yours. So what’s your fucking problem?”
   Leonid stabbed an index finger toward me and bared his teeth. “Your fucking is my problem,” he snapped. “In every sense possible! He’s got to pull his weight around here just like everybody else. He doesn’t get a free pass from work just because he’s keeping you warm at night.”
   Tanya and I both narrowed our eyes. But I didn’t get to say anything—she beat me to it.
   “If anyone else had said that to me,” she hissed, “they’d be watching me tear their guts out a foot at a time to feed it to them! How dare you!”
   Leonid leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I just call them like I see them,” he stated flatly. “He’s got regular duties to perform in addition to helping you get your rocks off, you know.”
   “You goddamned bastard!” I yelled, finally standing up. “If this was a different place and time, I’d challenge you to a duel! You take that back before I cram it sideways up your ass!”
   “I’m not taking it back because I’m right.”
   “You’re wrong, Leonid!” Tanya spat in his eye. “The reason he’s not flying the regular milkrun to Earth is because he’s going to be flying the Molniya for me when we take the Grom out for test flights, you arrogant piece of shit! I need the best we’ve got for the development missions and you know it!”
   Leonid wiped his eyes but looked unconvinced. “And how do you know he’s the best?” he said sourly. “Been sleeping with the entire flight staff without my knowing?”
   I gasped in shock. Tanya’s tail frizzed. I could tell that the fur on the back of her neck was standing straight up. Hell, I could feel my own hackles rising, I was so mad. Tanya was trembling with fury and I thought she might jump across the table and throttle him. I gripped her tail and held her back, watching her bare her fangs at him and loudly growling.
   Finally, she backed away from the table. I let go of her tail and looked at her. She took a quick breath and ran a hand over her hair and neck, smoothing it and trying to regain her composure.
   “As long as we are baring our souls here, you could stand a good roll in the hay yourself,” Tanya huffed. “It would do wonders for your temperament. I’d love to be able to tell you to go get fucked. But since you don’t have anyone and probably couldn’t catch a woman with a trap, I guess I’ll just have to tell you to go fuck yourself instead!” With that she spun on her heel and stormed out of the research module. The eyes of the miscellaneous people huddling in their blankets along the wall by the hatch watched in idle curiosity as she walked by and slammed the door closed behind her.
   “Whew,” Leonid said after a quiet moment. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, they say.” He shook his head and looked like none of it mattered to him.
   I was still pissed. I clutched the edge of the table and glared savagely at him. “It’s too bad we don’t have our claws anymore, Leonid, or I’d take your tail off and throttle you with it.”
   Leonid looked bemused. “Oh, the big bad pussycat is going to stop screwing my sister long enough to kick my ass? My, my. I’d better start shaking in fear then, hadn’t I?” He leaned forward. “Big words, Thomas. Really big words, since we both know you don’t have to back them up.”
   At this point, I had an insane brainstorm. “Bets on that?” I grabbed the pen and paper and made a quick sketch. I then stuck the drawing in front of his face. He regarded the paper for a moment, then looked astonished.
   “You’re kidding,” he gasped.
   “Oh, no,” I growled. “I’m very serious. Do you know what this is? Can you make two of them? One for you and one for me?”
   Leonid bit his lip thoughtfully. “Not without getting into a lot of trouble,” he said. “If security found out…”
   “Oh, so now who is afraid to put their actions where their words are? Can you make a pair of these things or not? Answer me, yes or no!”
   Leonid locked eyes with me. We both stood th