Torpedo Run Chapter 7
#7 of Torpedo Run
Chapter 7
Jenny Greenway groaned softly, each pulse of pounding pain in her skull tinged with growing nausea and an ever-encroaching horrid sense of being conscious again. The cat turned her head to the side, and heaved once, dryly, before a cool hand touched her forehead. The pounding hadn't stopped yet, but as she managed to finally open her eyes to look on the blurry and surprisingly flat grey landscape, a shock of adrenaline went through her.
"Sh-shit...Asylum!"
The response was quiet, but hurt her head all the same, a calm cool voice that nonetheless battered her like a percussion band inside her skull.
"Yeah, I get it, miss. Sorry, but we're kind of in deep shit at the moment, so can the diplomatic requests for now okay?"
Jenny winced and forced her eyes open again, refusing to let the siren's song of gentle unconsciousness re-claim her. When she tried to sit up, though, the cat felt restraints tighten around her chest, arms and legs.
Finally able to see, she looked around, the running lights nearly blinding with brightness. All around, the metal walls of an armored vehicle shielded a dozen or so badly injured furs that were strapped into seats or in neat aisles on the vehicle's floor. Standing over her, perched precariously on a slender strip of floor between two injured cats, stood an armadillo with a tiny, hard-to-distinguish red cross on his helmet.
"Why'm I tied down?"
The corpsman blinked at her, and she grunted and glowered at realizing it was the 'are you stupid' look she was so used to getting from the pure-bred students at the university.
"We don't know you from Eve, miss. For all I know, you could be hostile."
"Do I LOOK like Atrian Army to you?" Her voice had a bit more growl than she'd meant to, and the Armadillo's face hardened into a responding glare. He'd opened his mouth to retort, when someone leaned back from the driver's compartment. He was older, maybe in his fifties, and had that steely look that made shivers of panic run up her spine. The sort of look she'd seen in the eyes of the furs who'd chased her for days after the first student uprising.
"Miss," his voice was strong, rumbly, matching steely eyes with a commanding presence that shut her up faster than any paw over her mouth would have, "we're under heavy attack by the local militia troops. Unless you've got a good route to get us out of here, I'm going to ask you to please keep your head down and your mouth shut so we can concentrate on keeping everyone here alive."
Outside, a thunderous 'whump' sounded out and the Corpsman twitched, glaring that direction as if the sound of an exploding vehicle was personally offensive to him. Jenny felt cowed, smaller than even her diminutive physical form. The lion's words and momentary stare of authority made her want to curl up in a ball and simply hide. But that explosion had been all too close, and the cat girl's jangled nerves gave her the courage to speak up.
Besides, even physically helpless, she could at least try words...For all the good they'd done her lately.
"S...Sergeant?"
The big lion looked back, as their vehicle made another quick motion, and more explosions sounded outside.
"Yes, young lady?"
"Where..." trepidation burned hot in her gut. She'd drawn his attention, while strapped down and helpless in the back of a jostling vehicle, none of her friends in sight to protect her if things went wrong.
"Where are we now?"
The lion grunted and leaned forward, consulting a map as their transport juked to the side, causing the corpsman to brace himself against the wall to not fall on her. Everything swam sickeningly for a moment, the motion making her want to vomit and scream for them to stop wiggling around all at the same time.
"About half a click south of the spaceport. Trying to find a good hold-out that isn't completely exposed. You know anyplace that fits?"
The cat winced, spitting in hopes it would help quell her nausea. The slimy, chilled stuff slid down her cheek, and she blushed at how unappealing she must have looked at that moment, streaked in blood and mud and spit rolling down her face.
Three months ago, it would have made her cry with uncontrollable embarrassment. Now it just made her mad and a little sad at all she'd lost.
Fuck it, Tosker's going to kill me...But if we don't go there, we'll be dead anyway.
_ _
"Take S-71 for another quarter kilometer, then make a hard right. There's a rushway overpass that'll hide you from their satellites. Take some tricky driving, but they'll have a hard time hitting us there. If you take that east another couple of miles, we might be able to get into the old subway tunnels. After that...Th...There's a bunch of passageways we can use."
The lion gave her a hard, harsh look, flinty-eyed and no-nonsense. It took all her effort, strapped down and helpless, trying not to let her small bust heave with gasps of fear-thickened breath, to meet them steadily. Finally, he nodded, and slapped the shoulder of a driver she couldn't see.
"You heard the girl, private."
A few seconds passed, as she blew out a breath of relief. She could worry about the resistance leader's annoyance at revealing his hideout later. For now, survival was more important. Plus, if she was lucky, she might convince him this would help their cause.
"Corpsman, get her out of those restraints and bring her up front. She'll need to give directions from here."
No no no, please don't make me move...Please...
_ _
Rough fingers wrapped around the back of her head, taking a firm grip that made her wince and sent a shot of energy through her body. She'd always liked forceful males, and the drugs she'd discovered, the ones the government had been pumping into the slum water systems all her life to encourage breeding, weren't helping.
Then he helped her up, bracing her neck to make certain nothing worsened. A moment later, and she was being carried by the powerfully-muscled medic as he stepped carefully over the injured warriors. A quick, confusing hand-off had her in the arms of that burly, powerful sergeant. In order not to risk jostling any more injured warriors, he didn't get up, simply strapping her into his lap with the belt system.
She felt hot, dizzy, her face and stomach both overwarm in ways both pleasant and unpleasant, head swimming with dizziness and the urge to spit up all over the windshield. Ahead of them, she saw through the pitted, damaged armor glass.
Directly in front of them, maybe two car-lengths up, that same murderously powerful military vehicle that had saved her before was maneuvering, shoving abandoned vehicles out of the way as its turret twisted to and fro, firing off bursts of rounds that blew anything they touched to shreds. Clinging to handles on her hull and crouched in a hover-trailer attached to her back, other Marines had strange-looking metallic rifles pointed out every which way, spraying little fairy-sprites of light in what her concussed eyes saw as random patterns like a damaged spiderweb covered in drips of water lit by the rising sun.
Atop that turret, an angry-faced wolf with a silvery, whipping robotic tail was twisting the weapon about and firing off bursts of divine wrath as they whizzed past a cross-street. Barely visible in the moment she had to see, the alleyway had been turned into a charnel house of dead Atrian soldiery and a burning vehicle, torn to bits by the might of the USF Marines.
Little Jenny Greenway hunched her shoulders and curled in on herself. For all her willingness to charge a military barricade, to challenge the government without so much as a knife to protect her, she was scared and knew it. If the lion wanted her dead, all he'd have to do is close his python-like arms around her and squeeze. With how badly her head hurt, and how hot her crotch felt, she might just let him to escape the embarrassment.
"Th-there, turn there!" she said in a hoarse stage whisper, pointing at the overpass that loomed in front of them. Along its top, even at the angle they were approaching, she could see the long bores of army artillery cannons being lined up to fire.
Without waiting for confirmation, the driver next to them twisted his control stick, and the whole vehicle rose up to clear sandbags left behind by road crews before the crackdown had started. Ahead of them, the flying death-machine continued spitting rounds at some enemy invisible to her eyes in the smog, even as it spun around to backtrack and follow them.
"Miss, what's your name?"
"J-jenny...Greenway."
"Miss Greenway, then. I'm Staff Sar'nt Herrin. It's good to meet you."
His politeness startled her, and Jenny craned her aching neck to look up at him. Older, she knew, by the grey in his fur, but no sign of the tired burnt-out eyes she was so used to seeing. They were just as piercing up-close as far away, and no less light green either. He wasn't looking down at her.
"Thank you for...Saving me, sir."
"No 'sir' for me, miss. I'm non-commissioned. You can call me 'Marine' or 'Herrin,' since you're civilian."
Jenny felt the red in her face, and wanted to curl up until she vanished. Here she was, in this giant's lap, terrified and thanks to government biological testing wet as hell, being shot at and on the run, and still all she could think about was putting her paw down his pants and surrendering to the larger feline.
You're not a slave to their bio experiments, goddamnit...
_ _
Even in her head, Jenny's words to herself rang hollow. Though she looked like a pure-breed and had worked her way out of the heavily-contaminated slums, her own parents had been subject to the tests that had necessitated her revolt. Dosed up on water tainted with low-level aphrodisiacs over the course of their entire life, they had played right into the government's desire to force cross-breed mating, as so many others had over the last few generations.
Where once humans had been the only way to cross breed genetic strains, the Atrian government had found a way to directly create hybrids, mostly through forcing thousands of cases of trial and error. Hundreds of thousands of non-viable fetuses for thirty years, just to create a hodgepodge species of cross-breeds they treated like trash and disposed of when they got too rowdy.
Even she, one of the intellectual leaders of the revolt, had until the last few hours no idea why. Just vague thoughts that they wanted to walk away from the core of galactic government. Without the need for humans to restrain genetic drift every few decades, they could afford to piss off the USF, even break the Accord if they wanted. Now, with a military coup going on all around, she was having the gut-wrenching realization that their paranoid fantasies were true.
After the long, rushing silence, in which what she suddenly realized was an Atrian Army transport occupied by USF Marines, the lion called Herrin spoke again.
"Where are we going?"
Jenny flinched, the mental image of Tosker having a screaming hissy-fit coming all too easily. 'Why'd you bring government dogs here?!' and 'You traitor!' seemed the most likely exclamations.
"Down the subway tunnel for two miles, th-then left through a broken wall. We're looking for a...um...Subway workers' union hall. The weasel that runs the place knows how t-to get us to the base."
"Base? What sort of base?"
Jenny closed her eyes, willing herself not to whimper. It felt like a betrayal, telling military where to find the Movement and all of its supplies. Most of the protestors and volunteers they'd brought along to get past the barricade hadn't even known about the place.
"I...It's...There's a lot going on here, sir...Uh...Mr. Herrin. They've been experimenting on the poor here for decades, trying to...I think they're trying to render humans obsolete, and Atria is the testing ground..."
The graying lion blinked down at her, and beetled his brows together like a pair of giant caterpillars.
"Run that by me again? You'll understand I can't take you at your word."
She wriggled, withering under the look and unable to meet his eyes more than a second or two. Instead, she focused on that angry-looking black wolf in the turret who was now ahead of them again as they approached a gaping sink-hole in the concrete not a hundred meters from the overpass's towering pylons.
"Um...Down through there. You know how hybridization of human sub-species is supposedly impossible right?"
"Yeah. Something about chromosomal aberration. The GRP designed the first 'furs' to be sure they couldn't turn on humanity, back when they were worried us engineered types wouldn't consider ourselves human. We need a living human population to breed with every five or six generations or we all start going sterile, right?"
"Close enough. You need about one human for every six family lines, every fifth generation."
Jenny nodded while speaking and put her paw against the window. It was partially steamed-up now, from all the overheated furs inside and the rapidly-dropping temperature outside. Quick, deft moves of her diminutive, delicate, scraped fingers began drawing three circles and labeling them.
"Atria Prime, which we're on, is where we think the first tests were started...About 30 years ago. Local media didn't even comment much on the rise in infant death rates. Lots of stillbirths. The government started running all these ads encouraging the swinging lifestyle."
She tapped on the one she'd labeled 'Atria Prime' with a finger, and drew the bio-hazard symbol under it.
"When subtle methods didn't work to force a break in monogamy, they started putting low-level aphrodisiacs into the water supply. I guess they figured if they forced enough breeding and picked up the kids who were half-breeds for DNA testing, they'd eventually find some strains that weren't degenerating genetically."
The middle-aged veteran was frowning now. She saw that look and knew it meant he believed her. She also saw he was thinking, though not on ramifications - More likely he was considering how and whether to report this, based on whether or not he'd be believed.
"Thing is, the degeneration slowed pretty quickly after the first ten years. In some vintage water samples, I found evidence of a retro-virus they'd put into the city's tap water. More dead kids, but it helped refine their breeding process."
The corpsman chimed in, sounding incredulous.
"What the fuck? Kid, you better not be lying to me. Are you some kind of doctor or something?"
She shook her head, turning just far enough to get dizzy again, then laid her cheek against the big lion's chest with a wince.
"Ow...No. I'm a bio-chemistry grad student at the planetary uni. Or I was, before I started discovering things and getting blocked all over the place. First they cut my grant, then started trying to intimidate me out of pursuing my research. I started out just trying to figure out why we'd had that big crop of infant deaths three decades ago. Kind of a historical science thing."
"You have the research notes from your study still?"
She nodded, then winced, and put a paw to her temple where it throbbed as the world spun for a few seconds. Jenny really didn't want to vomit all over the nice Sergeant who was so kind as to lend her a comfortable lap to sit in.
"Yeah, back at the base. We're a group of intellectuals and...Other people...Who were trying to find ways to make this stop. Only it's been impossible for us to get word off-planet. Government's been monitoring all communications for a long time, and in the last week cut all civilian outside contact."
The Sergeant was shaking his head, as he reached for a little black box attached by wire to the dashboard. A quick click and shush of static told her it was a communicator, probably a short-wave radio.
"Mobile Two, this is Mobile One. Take position behind us, we have a destination, over."
A grainy voice, sounding female and in pain, responded.
"We copy, Mobile One, moving to position. Out."
The big, vicious-looking monster of a vehicle in front of them shifted sideways and floated behind them, turret swiveling this way and that looking for enemies to destroy. Then the Sergeant made a signal with his paw, and they were descending the sink-hole into the darkened subway.
"This line operational?"
"No, Mr. Herrin. It's been down for almost a year now. Planetary Guard brought down sections of tunnel to make it unusable and left sensors behind to keep an eye out. They didn't think we were smart enough to hack the signals and re-route the things."
The Sergeant and his driver met eyes briefly, meaningfully.
Oh good...Glad to see they're making plans...
_ _
Captain Leith walked through the ship's hospital compartments, escorted by a pair of Naval security staff who looked as exhausted as she felt. All around her, the reason she was still awake lay mostly in silence, strong painkillers and anesthetics keeping her injured crewmen and Marines from doing the moaning, groaning, and crying out she'd half-expected. At least half had electronic systems attached to their heads, virtual reality systems designed to give the conscious things to do while they lay in bed, too doped up to be allowed mobility.
One of the Fist's doctors hovered nearby, checking on patients as she went, though to her annoyance he seemed more interested in her than in the injured.
As she rounded a corner in the bulkhead and passed through a curtain, the sick-sweet smell of burnt flesh assaulted her nose. The temptation to ask for a face mask that would help with the stink was strong, but the Captain nonetheless retained her poise, and ignored the wrenching sensation in her gut that told her she'd dream of that smell later.
Adriana paused at one of the beds, and put her hands against the metal foot-rail as the mustelid doctor puttered up.
"This is Petty Officer 2nd Class Sati Anwar, Captain."
Adriana couldn't identify the young woman's species through all the bandages that wrapped entirely around what flesh would have been exposed by the sheets. Gently breathing in time with the softly whirring oxygen machine next to her, the otter girl's eyes were obscured by a mask of gauze stained a blotchy pink, her ears likewise covered and wrapped.
Captain Leith took the chart off her bed table and lifted it to look blurry-eyed at the notes there.
"Doctor Cass, is Ms. Anwar going to survive?"
The skunk shuffled his feet and prodded the tips of his fingers together, a nervous tick Adriana knew would drive her mad eventually with the desire to grab his paws and tell him to stop fidgeting.
"I give her a 50-50 chance, Captain. The burns weren't as severe as you might think, but they cover almost her entire body. It's frankly a miracle that she survived what I suspect happened. Nano-surgeons don't deal well with burns, but cutting all the burns off of her at once would almost certainly kill her from shock."
Adriana set the clipboard of unidentifiable medic-speak down on the metal table with a soft click, and took a careful seat on an edge of the bed not occupied by an unconscious engineer.
"Can you wake Ms. Anwar without hurting her?"
"I...Yes, that should be possible. Um. I was told you wanted to see Commander Galen and the senator...They're this way if you w-"
"Please wake her, doctor. Galen can wait a few minutes, he's a big boy."
She didn't make mention of the senator, and how much she wasn't looking forward to demanding an explanation of what was going on. A quick bit of research before she'd left the bridge told her things about that old tiger, mostly that she wasn't cleared to know much about him before the start of his political career.
The doctor disappeared for a minute, and Adriana leaned over to get a closer look at the wounded mariner. She smelled of ointments and lotions, burn cream, and had a small river system of plastic tubes running into and out of various points in the bundle of bandaging. Based on Anwar's chart, and the reports she'd received after disengaging battle with the enemy fleet, she knew that Sati Anwar's quick thinking and tenacity had been responsible for her ship's survival, and her wounds were a direct result of those acts.
Without those torpedo tubes, the enemy capital ship would have torn them apart when they swooped in to render fire support to embattled Marines. Marines who still survived, she hoped, somewhere planet-side. The enemy fleet, as predicted, had swooped in on them when the Fist became stationary to fire towards the planet. The fast launch of a blistering torrent of torpedoes had blown eleven small enemy ships to so much space dust, and scored two hits strong enough to ward the enemy cap-ship off, though they had in trade given the Fist a beating with rail guns and plasma streams she wouldn't soon forget. Nor forgive.
A stray hair had landed on the otter's bandaged face, and Adriana, Captain of the Fist of the Nascent Dawn, brushed it away with all the gentleness of a caring sibling. Here, among the wounded, the necessary poise and emotional detachment of a commanding flag officer felt like the weight of a thousand stars on her back. She wouldn't let the slight thought of impropriety towards such an action stop her from doing one small thing to help a crewman that had given her all.
A rustle and a few clinks told her the doctor was back, and she watched with tired eyes as he inserted a needle into Anwar's IV drip. The bio-monitor attached to the otter began to slowly speed its soft beeping sounds, signifying an increase in pulse rate.
"Captain, she's heavily drugged, so please understand if she speaks nonsensically..."
"That's all right. I need to talk to her for a minute concerning what she saw on our hull. Chief Karnen asked me as a personal favor. Also, I wanted to talk to the officer who may very well have saved all of our lives."
The doctor simply nodded and sighed, but gave her no further objection. Softly squeaking wheels, though, did draw Adriana's eyes off her wounded engineer and up towards a white-furred ancient escorted by a pair of very quiet young Marines of the 12th's elite boarding action specialists. Her own guards exchanged nods with the Marines. Enmity would likely always exist between Navy and Marines, but at least security staff could respect one another well enough to coordinate.
His voice came out scratchy, rough and low, from a wrinkled muzzle that curved at one edge with a slight, sad smile. The old fur's eyes were watery blue, surrounded by circles of thinning fur. He, however, showed no sign of his injuries other than a few bandages on his face. The walker looked more banged up than he did, with chipped paint and newly-replaced wheels.
"Captain, might I have a moment of your time?"
She stared at him for a few seconds, suspicion warring with gratitude, before gesturing with a sweep of her hand. The elderly fur activated a handlock on his walker, and with the assistance of his escorts managed to limp around it and sit, facing her, paws folded in his lap and eyes meeting the Captain's with a remarkable steadiness.
"Commander Forza is healing well. Nano-surgeon technology has gotten much better since I was in the Corps."
Adriana eyed him up and down again, noting the medical gown was a few sizes too large, and had been belted in. The old tiger looked like a mummy, fragile and dried-up, but she'd read the action report, and knew not to underestimate him. For a few seconds, the Captain, normally unflappable, had trouble deciding what to say. As the ancient senator sat patiently, she finally spoke.
"What in the hell is going on, Senator Bull?"
The old tiger kept their gaze linked together, like taut chain, and in the depths of his watery blues she saw nothing but a shielded icy stare. He was unreadable. As he began to answer, though, the elderly creature broke their stare and closed his eyes to rub stick-thin fingers at the bridge of his snout.
"Where do you want me to start? I understand why you don't trust me, and it's well-warranted. I'm not proud to admit I had a part in this...Though not for many years, and I thought they'd ended the project."
Adriana sat up, and was about to answer when a bandage-wrapped paw shifted and brushed against her hand, then weakly wrapped fingertips around it. Blinking, distracted, the Captain looked down.
Petty Officer Anwar didn't look any different - With her face almost completely covered, the otter's eyes couldn't be seen to open. Still, the movements had changed from death-like unconsciousness to the slight shifting of a disoriented, scared person. A whisper uttered, mumbled, around the tubes that no doubt ran into her mouth and snout. Adriana brushed a hand over her forehead gently, and squeezed the grasping paw.
"Ms. Anwar, you're in the ship's hospital. You were badly burned in the process of saving our ship. If you understand what I'm saying, give me two squeezes?"
Nothing happened for a few seconds, as the old tiger watched them both. His eyes had softened ever so slightly, his focus more on the injured sailor than the Captain now. Sati's paw squeezed, weakly, twice, and Adriana gave it a careful squeeze back. Before she could say more, the elder spoke up.
"Thirty years ago, I championed a bill aimed at funding genetics research, designed to help deal with issues outlying colonies were having receiving the necessary human DNA. It was all well-intentioned, and so far as I knew was being used properly. Rates of genetic drift declined, and I mostly stayed out of the deeper science side of the project."
He reached into a pocket of his hospital gown, and drew out a tiny silver chip, then leaned out precariously to set it atop the bed-side table.
"Everything I know about it is in there...In addition to what my people were able to find, learn, or steal. Largely it hasn't been analyzed yet. Unfortunately, it seems while I was busy championing the public interest, other senators had made certain I knew next to nothing about what was actually going on. This coup...It doesn't fit. My only guess is that the military somehow took control of the genetic experiments, and felt it doesn't need us senators around any more."
Sati tilted her head, clearly listening, though Adriana had no idea whether she understood what was being said, bewildering as it was.
"When I realized the experiments hadn't stopped...When I started reading all manner of stories and supposedly-unrelated facts and putting them together, I sent a request to my old friend, Admiral Karrick, for a military escort to get this information off-planet for analysis."
Captain Leith's face felt like stone, a heavy weight on her head that wanted her to lean towards the old tiger, to yell at him for drawing her crew into this trap. His eyes, downcast towards the wounded otter, were still unreadable. Something about him, though, spoke of old pain, exhaustion that went soul-deep, and of an iron spine beneath the age and rust.
"You did your duty, sir. We'll get that information to Admiral Karrick if it kills us."
Anwar must have understood, because she nodded, once, before laying her head back into the cushion. Her paw squeezed into the Captain's hand, and though the otter was too hurt to have any strength, Adriana could feel her determination in the shaking, intense touch.
"That bomb," the old tiger continued, "must have been meant for me as much as your ship. They knew I wouldn't entrust the chip to anyone, and that I'd have to wait until after the tour to hand it off in secret. I...Never predicted they would assassinate the entire Senate just to get me. Never knew they were on to me, either."
Captain Adriana Leith gave Sati one more squeeze of the paw, then set it down before speaking to her.
"Ms. Anwar, I need you back on your feet as soon as possible. I need my best engineers, and you're one of them. As of the moment you're back in uniform, you'll be receiving brevet promotion. Your actions were heroic, but if you'd had another crewman with you, you probably could have avoided injury. So we're remedying that for next time. Understood?"
The bandages shifted, and she heard a soft, vaguely choked noise. After a moment of hot worry finished flashing through her, the Captain realized it was a pleased laugh. Mostly because Ms. Anwar's weak paw managed a feeble thumbs-up gesture.
"As for you, Senator Bull."
She turned to the old tiger, who had both paws up in a supplicating position. His eyes were on her again, steel-hard and spine as straight as ancient vertebrae would allow.
"You are now our guest, for the duration of the Fist's journey back to fleet headquarters. However, you'll understand that I'm not going to abandon this system until we have our Marines back on board, I hope?"
It wasn't a question. Just politely worded, and the old Senator knew it. He laughed, rough and low in his throat.
"If you tried to leave Marines down there to save my moldy old ass and a bit of mystery data on a little plastic disc, I'd kick you out an airlock myself."
Adriana offered him a hand, and was immediately met with the ancient tiger's spidery paw clasping into her palm. It was small, withered with over a century of rough times, and she could feel calloused skin beneath the thinned fur. Nonetheless, his grip, and his eyes, were strong.
"Glad to have you aboard, sir."
Derry debarked the Rattler, his ass so sore he was pretty sure it was going to fall off when he undid his belt to piss later. For the moment, though, they were surrounded by dirty, grim-faced onlookers, and he had to shoo them away from the Rattler's doors so they could be opened to offload injured Marines and civilians.
Parked behind it, the armored transport they'd commandeered from a dead unit of Atrian Army soldiers was already open, their three Corpsmen offloading dozens of injured. Not a single corpse, though, he noted sourly.
We'll be going back for the dead. Leave no warrior behind...
_ _
The bitter taste in his mouth wasn't just from hours of tension and blistering combat. Being pushed out of that airport stung at his pride, and he was itching to go back there and kick some ass. Which was ironic, he realized, considering how pants-crapping terrified he'd been during the first minutes they'd been under fire.
Holy shit...I'm a combat veteran now...
_ _
It was a strange, dawning realization, and he looked down towards his paws. Encased in fingerless gloves, he could see the pads of his paws were blistered and rubbed raw by the constant vibration of his machine gun's controls. Once he saw them, they started to hurt like hell, too. Nanites would ignore minor injuries like that, he'd read, to conserve their energy - For every bit of him they healed, he had to eat, and they were programmed to take emergency situations into account.
Fuck it, a little discomfort's no big deal. I'm a fucking Marine.
_ _
'A little discomfort' was starting to make itself known though, in the pads of his fingers, and all across his swollen face. All those impacts against the gun turret a few hours back hadn't hurt much then, but he was feeling it now, his face feeling like it was three sizes too large for his skin.
In any case, he had no time to worry about it, as the side hatch finally opened and Nivea stumbled out straight into Derry's waiting arms.
For those delicious, softness-in-armor moments, she just lay up against his muscular chest, breathing deep and soft to let her head stop spinning. They'd finally managed to stop the bleeding, Derry noted with satisfaction, looking down at the sweaty and bloodied olive drab tee that covered most of her upper body.
The wolfess tilted her head back to look up at him, and they met eyes for a few overhot moments. Hers were dilated, a little blank from the bleariness of serious blood loss and too much adrenaline, and she managed an anemic smile.
"Hey Derry," she muttered.
Her lips were so close, he knew he could lean in and catch them with his own. Up here, against the Rattler, he doubted anyone would see. Even if they did, he wasn't entirely sure he cared, after all that fighting and killing outside. What's more, he had an aching after-action erection that was making itself known by jamming itself uncomfortably against the stiffened insides of his armored pants.
"Yeah, Niece?"
Her cheek rested against his chest, soft under sweaty fur, as his arms went around her.
"We lived...Heh...We're alive."
She sounded incredulous, disbelieving.
Blood loss...She's a little delirious. Damnit, now's not the time, wolfy...
_ _
The urge to kiss her, to grab the wolf who'd saved his life and fuck her silly against the side of their ride was powerful. Powerful enough that his paws were digging into her hips, pressing her against him. The wolfess never reacted, either too far gone at the moment to notice, or actually wanting him.
Either way, he realized, to do this to her now would be wrong. She was in no position to say no, and he knew she was a lesbian. She was his friend, the closest one he had, and to risk that by taking things too far...
He had an arm around her shoulders and was helping her limp across the ragged subway station base towards a bulwark of sandbags when his aural implant picked up a vociferous argument somewhere on the other side of the service doors.
"You brought the FUCKING MARINES to MY BASE?! You little FUCKING CUNT! I SHOULD FUCKING KILL YOU for breaching security like this!"
"They were getting shot to bits! They're not the enemy, Tosker! Fuck!"
That's the girl from the barricade...The one who helped us...
"Too fucking bad...They can stay, but YOU...YOU have to pay for BREAKING THE RULES!"
There was a sound, a ratcheting noise, like handcuffs. Then the unmistakable sound of a struggle, grunting and yelping other furs couldn't hear over the background noise of hundreds talking, and through the muffling doors.
Derry was surprised by how fast the urge to kill rose up. Just like his instructors had trained him, just like old man Tenh had said, the instinct was a powerful, quick tool. While other Marines and wounded civilians were being led through the right-hand doors, towards the old subway station's shops and passenger waiting section-turned resistance base, he strode up to the left-hand doors.
He leaned bleary, half-conscious Nivea down until she was laying on a silvering old wooden bench, then straightened up and thrust his boot at that offending door. He kicked at the metal thing like it had wronged him, raped his mother and shot his father, then come back to rape again and give him a half-sister. He kicked like he was booting down a phantom door somewhere behind the one that was in his way.