FSE

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The first thing that registered in Eric's mind when he woke up was a terrible, mind-numbing pain that pounded deafeningly at his temples and knocked about behind his eyes. The jackal let out a low moan, the pained groan familiar to those suffering from a massive hangover. One tall ear of his twitched before both folded back over his skull. He squeezed his eyes shut to try and conquer the pain, drawing his arms and legs in closer to his body. It didn't seem to want to work and Eric growled his frustration into the soft pillow beneath his head as he clenched his teeth tight together.

After a little while, the pain seemed to ebb enough for the canine to attempt to open his eyes. His head ached, but he managed all the same, opening his eyes and blinking wearily in an attempt to focus on his surroundings. Eventually his effort paid off and he was rewarded with both an idea of where he was and more than a little confusion.

He was in a room, a room in the hotel suite if the decor was anything to go by, and laying in a large bed. There was a large window to his left and an immense vidscreen taking up the wall directly past his feet. Eric stared at the crystal chandelier hanging above him as a feeling of unfamiliarity settled upon him like a blanket of snow might settle to the ground in the middle of winter. Wait... there was no chandelier in the room he had been given.

_This isn't my room..._thought the jackal as he slowly blinked some more, beleaguered by both his pounding headache and a spell of disorientation. He looked down as something brushed against the fur of his bare chest and a bit of weight was applied there soon after.

Oh shit!

Stacy's arm lay across his chest, her white-furred paw lying just below his neck. The jackal's gaze followed the arm up to the body that it was attached to and saw that the vixen was on her side facing him with her body just barely covered by the blanket and her fur a tussled mess. Her eyes were closed. Unfortunately, that was not to last.

Her eyelids pried themselves open like rusted shutters; slowly and not quite easily. Then the movement became a bit quicker and they blinked a few times. It's about then that Eric guessed what would happen next, using all of his experience with nights like the one previous (not the part about being basically abducted; the part about drinking more than he should have and meeting a girl that had done the same)... and he was soon to be proved correct.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" she screamed, flailing backwards away from him and grabbing up the blanket to cover her nude form. Eric's head felt close to bursting and his ears shivered with the vibrations, rotating away from the enraged fox in an effort to make the horrendous sound just a bit less shrill. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING IN MY BED!?!" she demanded, "Wait!! No!! No! No! NO! OH MY GOD! WE HAD SEX!"

To make matters worse for the stricken Jackal, it was then that Rhajir and Trax came barging into the room, the wolf with his phaser drawn and aiming, and the tiger with a knife pulled. It was the latter that talked first. "Captain! Are you- HOLY SHIT!" Despite their obvious amount of discipline, both shirked away from the sight of their commanding officer with the covers pulled up to hide herself and the jackal holding his hands up while buck-naked but a foot or two from her. Rhajir looked like he had been struck in the face with a sledgehammer and was holding up an arm as if to shield himself from what he was seeing. Trax's eyes went wide and his ears were focused intently on them, his gaze, and head, turning to first Eric, then Stacy, then back again.

"GET OUT! BOTH OF YOU!" Stacy howled as she pointed impatiently at the door through which they had sprang. Even the sheer shock that the two bodyguards had to have been feeling wasn't enough to make them skip out on an order. Both retreated quickly, blurting apologies and profanities in equal measure. The door shut solidly behind them and the noise of footsteps could be heard as the duo quickly sought out better things to do. Stacy turned to Eric with a look that could shatter stone. Thankfully, Eric was composed entirely of weaker stuff, and the effect was just barely under the lethal level. His ears folded back and he flashed a grin, hoping to disarm her just a little bit.

Nope. Instead of getting her to calm down, all it did was piss her off still further. And give Eric a bleeding nose.

Stacy shook out her hand, growling and spitting like a mad badger. Her eyes were aflame with anger. "What did you do!?! Drug me?!" she demanded with the full, unrestrained accusatory nature of her gender.

Eric, who was by this time gripping a nose from which blood was dripping in what could almost be called a steady stream, scowled right back. It couldn't match her stare, but it was the best he could manage with both his pride and his body as battered as they were. "What? NO! I didn't drug you! I would never do that to anyone!"

"Then how do you explain THIS?" she hollered in his face, throwing her arms up in an all-encompassing gesture that was directed, for the most part, at the bed.

Eric, his nose now halting its red output, couldn't help himself. "You must've liked what you saw." he retorted, realizing but a moment after he said it exactly what he had said. He braced for impact.

The reply came by way of pillow express, with an urgent delivery to the top of his head. It wasn't long before she was raining pillow-smacks all over his sorry hide. It was an improvement from being punched in the nose, but it wasn't exactly a massage either.

"You asshole!" cried the vixen in between 'cushioned' blows, "How could you!?"

"Ow! Hey! Calm down! Ah! Stop it!" came Eric's muffled cries. He grabbed the pillow, yanking it from her hands. When she started to beat on him with closed fists instead, he grabbed her firmly by the wrists and reared back his head, struggling to keep her claws from coming into close contact with his flesh. "Hey, you came onto me!"

Stacy let out an infuriated growl of frustration and seemed to calm down a little bit, her muzzle dropping to her breasts as she hung her head. Her limbs suddenly lost their malevolent will and they fell from the jackal's grasp to cross the vixen's chest. Stacy let out a sigh. "I believe you..." she admitted, the way she said it not doing much to heal the male canine's bruised ego.

Eric nodded and took a step back, plopping down onto the end of the bed. "So.. wait.. what?" he asked, a little confused as he tried to remember exactly what had happened the night before. What he could recall wasn't all too clear and more than half of it was a blur of noise, colour, and warmth. He must have had way too much to drink indeed.

Stacy reached a hand up to her face and pinched the bridge of her muzzle. She shook her head. "It must have been the drink. And I imagine being cooped up in a ship for almost a year didn't help it at all."

Eric smirked a little bit, one corner of his mouth pulling up into a half-smile. "No, I suppose not." The jackal slumped forward onto his knees. His tail patted the bed behind and to his side as if betraying his small bit of pride at having gotten 'down and dirty' with one of the most wanted people in the sector. It wasn't really something to brag about, especially to the wrong people, but to possibly have something over his 'kidnapper' could potentially prove useful in the future.

A sudden calm descended upon the room before the silence was broken by a sigh from the piratical vixen. Almost as if a switch were toggled, she let go of the blanket that she had been clutching about her to hide herself from the jackal's gaze. The white-furred fem stepped from the crumpled blanket at her feet and pulled the duffel bag at the foot of her bed up onto the cushioned surface. Eric was unsure what was in the bag, so he looked over her shoulder as she unzipped it. To his mild mix of disappointment and relief, all he saw was clothing. She drew out a pair of khakis and bra before turning back to the jackal. "Well?" she asked, "You gonna stand there watching, or are you going to get dressed?"

Being slow on the uptake, he thought for a moment that the clothes in her hands were intended to be worn by none other than himself. Eric's mind ground to a standstill for a second (in truth, he had done far weirder things over the course of his lifetime, but it usually took more than one 'outing' for them to be brought up) before the vixen nodded towards where his boxers, discarded from the night previous, lay crumpled on the floor.

"Oh." he managed as he walked over to them and scooped them up. "Uh, sorry." despite himself, he found that he was posturing and trying to be sexually appealing. Though he would never be described as 'buff' in a million years, he had a wiry strength to his body and a sure stride that many found appealing. He was more a fencer than a brawler in terms of build and it was not out of the ordinary to have some fems giving him second glances. Curious, he spared a glance back over his shoulder as he got back upright from bending down to grab his underwear. He thought he saw the vixen's eyes dart quickly to focus on her own progress, but he wasn't too certain that she had been watching him for sure. He shrugged mentally. Obviously, she had seen something that she had liked last night and that was enough for Eric. He picked up his pants up as he passed them on the way back with a smile that he hoped she didn't quite see. At that, he left the pirate captain to her devices and exited the suite.

**

Stacy sighed as the jackal morph left her room and flopped heavily onto the bed.

Now how had she managed to end up in such a compromising position? She could usually keep her personal needs tightly under wraps. Her violet eyes fixed on the ceiling, unfocused as she thought.

She had drank last night, but that wasn't usually enough to shake her iron-bound hold on her emotions and wants. Heck, she had once drank a foxtaur under the table. And that was hardly something to take lightly.

She doubted that it had been any form of drug. Trax and Rhajir had both sorted through Eric's clothes and vehicle for just such items when he had been knocked out by the vixen's own. Needless to say, they had come up empty with the only things of note being a hastily-hidden porn slate and a rather ornate lighter sans tobacco sticks. Neither his apparent like of herms nor any possible family heirlooms had really spoken up as important or hiding anything dangerous, so she had allowed him to keep both.

She wasn't in heat. Stacy's last heat cycle had ended a little over a week ago. She frowned as she came up without something solid to pin her recent sexual actions with Eric on. Oh well, she thought, at least I only have to deal with him for several days at the most. We'll drop him off at his house and be done with him.

She was snapped out of her thoughts by a chiming that emanated from the holocomm station. The arctic fox's ears perked and her head rose from the bed to regard the communications suite. A red telltale blinked to the right of the screen marking it as urgent and she jumped to her feet. She almost forgot that she was wearing only a bra and grabbed up a shirt from her bag and slipped it on over her head before stepping onto the pedestal and hitting the 'answer' key.

"What?" she asked in a tone that was probably a little more annoyed than it really needed to be. A headache and only the vaguest memories of the night before seemed to do that to her.

"Captain." started Ashley with her usual polite address, "I thought you would like to know that the sloop backed off and the freighter has departed from orbit."

Annoyance made one of her ears flick but Stacy nodded. "Good. No need to mimic a system failure?"

"No ma'am." came the courteous reply.

Hmmph. She must really be after my job, thought Stacy. Being awfully polite today.

"Anything else out of the ordinary I should know about?" Stacy quickly slipped back into the sense of informal formality that she was known for on the Breath, and if anything Ashley seemed to take to it.

"Nothing of any real note, Captain. Just the normal 'Fleet daily scan."

"Good. Good. Carry on." said Stacy, reaching for the off button on the console and wanting nothing more than to just have some time alone. But she was cut short by a sudden flash of care from her subordinate.

"Uhm.. Are you okay, Captain?" came her voice with every trace of sincerity. "You look... distracted."

Stacy simply stared at the flickering representation of her second for a few seconds with a mask of barely-managed curiosity scrawled across her muzzle. She nodded slowly. "Yes, I'm fine. Dismissed."

"Very well, Cap-" Stacy hung up and sighed for the second time in several minutes. Stacy felt a mild regret for having been so abrupt with the other vixen. She really hadn't done anything to deserve it. Bah, served her right for being nosey.

The alabaster vixen turned to retreat back to her bed, but she paused mid-rotation. Thinking for a moment with her head cocked at a mild angle, she nodded and hit a few runes on the interface, keying in the correct number for another of her ship's command crew. She waited, and, to her genuine lack of surprise, was answered midway through the second ring.

"Captain."

"Reese." replied Stacy, then added as an afterthought, "I take it you are well."

The shepherd looked a little taken aback by her sudden outburst of care. It was far from a secret that Stacy went through bridge crew as quickly as a ravenous horde of dieters goes through an all-you-can-eat buffet. He raised a brow inquisitively and Stacy saw the hazy representation of his tail give a curious and halfhearted wag. She smiled inwardly. Oh, how she wished that she had hit 'capture picture' on the comms interface. The expression was priceless. "Uhm... yes, Captain. Everything is going well."

She noted the way that he had avoided the fact that she had been after how he was doing personally and instead treated it like he would a request for a status update. "Ah, good. I need you to send me some things..."

**

Eric released the breath that he did not recall holding, letting it out through his nose with an altogether bewildered look on his face. He blinked a few times with his eyes not focusing on anything in particular.

Well. That went better than expected.

The jackal rolled his shoulders and set off down the small hallway towards the stairs up to his loft. He nearly bumped into a solid bulwark of pure fur-coated muscle. Surprised, Eric looked up into the face of the large wolf morph. Though never called short in his lifetime, he only came up to Trax's chest. Frankly, he found the prospect of having to look up up to match the larger canine's gaze rather intimidating alone. Add in the fact that Trax could probably tear him limb from limb in less time than it took to blink, and Eric was safely within the 'oh crap...' zone. To his dark amusement, he momentarily wondered if he had been stomping and romping about on what was considered 'hallow ground' to the wolf.

They stood like that for a good few seconds, neither of them moving or letting their gaze falter. To Eric, it felt like his very soul was being invasively and very crudely strip-searched and manhandled. He was almost being violated on a spiritual and very personal level.

But then, just as quickly as it had started, it stopped. The wolf gave a half-grunt and turned away dismissively. Elated, and not to mention glad to still be in one piece, the jackal relaxed a little and released yet another breath.

Well. That went better than expected. Again.

Eric smiled to himself. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad after all. I mean, if he can survive a dangerous pirate captain and her duo of near-psychotic bodyguards, what else can life throw at him that could possibly be worse?

Had he known the answer to that question, he most likely would have walked out the front door of the hotel and never looked back.

**

_ Aboard the SFS _ Cortien's Honour _ , Frescoe Nebula, several thousand light-years away... _

The orange-tinted red hue of the nebula stood out starkly from the depthless void of the open space surrounding it. The star cradle seemed to glow with its own radiance, but it was actually borrowed from the small, hyper-dense cores at its heart and reflected by the vast blotches of gases and raw material. It hove in the dark like a bloodstain on a tablecloth, the unimaginably large sprays and patterns of raw, star-making material dwarfing the military cruiser that skirted about the edges of the gigantic space phenomenon. It was truly awe-inspiring, and to many it was a staunch reminder that no matter how important one may think themselves, how incredible their achievements, the galaxy paid them no heed.

It reminded Captain Richard Tycho that he was nought but an insignificant amoeba to the universe. He shook off his sudden thoughts of futility as his second addressed him.

"Captain, we're being hailed." called his second in command, a generally jovial foxtaur by the name of Jakar. The captain raised a brow, a habit that many of his crew made fun of behind his back when they were sure that he was out of earshot. "Callsign identifies it as belonging to the Prophet of Fortune."

"Patch him through to my chair." said Tycho with a small nod as he walked toward his command station at the front of the bridge in front of the primary viewer screen. He sat down in his chair, keeping a straight back as he did so. Another of his habits. He waited a few seconds until a green telltale was flashing on the chair's arm alerting him of an incoming call.

Most commanders of Star Fleet believed that incoming transmissions should be put up on the main viewer for the crew to see. Captain Richard Tycho thought the idea was hardly a good one. Not only were some communications meant for his ears only, but he found that the bridge crew of any large military vessel had a bad habit of being less... in control than their captain and prone to actions unwise in some circumstances. Such as replying in an angry manner to the rather forceful and direct mannerisms of a Serath Fleet Commander, for instance. Needless to say, that encounter was far from favourable and something that the loud-mouthed ensign was lucky to walk away from.

"Is this the Captain?" Came a husky and scratchy voice through the speakers mounted in the arms of the chair. It had the telltale drawl of a Renzar translator that managed to somehow slur every second or third word into something nearly comprehensible. There was no visual message, but then the captain never expected it from the mercantile Renzar. Vid calls meant expending more power. Expendin more power meant less power was sent to the engines. Less engine power means a slower realspace burn which led to less efficient trading runs. Which meant a smaller profit, wealth being the key component to any Renzar's mindset.

"It is," said Tycho in a measured response, "I am Captain Richard Tycho of the SFS Cortien's Honour. Who is this?"

There came a raspy burbling from the other end of the call, a laugh of sorts, before an answer was heard. "You strakah and your_isrit_ titles... This one is called Ar'dem, of the Prophet of Fortune. We have something that belongs to you, this one thinks."

Tycho scowled a little. Leave it to the Renzar to find something important. They have always had a knack for happening across Federation tech and selling it back for a highly-inflated 'recovery fee'. If the Federation refuses to pay, the Renzarian black market swallows up the item a few seconds after the deal is turned down.

If they have something like a junked fighter or a deep-scanner probe, Tycho would be obligated under Star Fleet edict 328f to oblige the Renzar and pay off the cost using a ship-accessible account linked directly into the bureaucracy of the Federation. But if it is just some desolate hauler, he'd have diverted his patrol route for nothing and could potentially have set the stage for a disaster. In either way, Tycho would lose. He'd either be carrying some cargo in his bay that would obstruct safe handling protocols, towing some hulk that reduces his ship's effectiveness, or could even be discharged as a deserter if something were to happen due to his meeting providing a window of opportunity for any ner-do-wells.

Fucking regulations.

"What is it, and how much do you want?" he asks in a less-than-happy tone. It is followed by more of that bubbling laughter.

"Ah, you must have dealt with us before, this one thinks. You know that credits make the universe spin, huh? Well, that's good... good. But this time is different. This cargo is a bunch of mouths, feeding off of our resources. We think they had best be handed off to you strakah_before they crunch-munch their way through our food stores and pollute our air with their frequent _barahlks."

"So you have refugees that you want us to take off your hands? Who are they, and how did you come to possess them." Tycho was in no mood for humouring the Renzar. Let them talk long enough and they could convince you to sell them your mother at half her worth. But then something ticks over in the Fleet captain's brain; Renzar never do things for free. Not when they have a good bargaining chip like a few refugees. "And what's the catch?"

There is a pause on the other end of the line. It goes on for several seconds before the Renzar comes back on, "This one thinks that his life is worth waiving the finder's fee..."

"Your life?"

The other end of the conversation cuts in and out, as if the mic is changing hands on the other ship's bridge before another voice comes on. It is a man's voice, rough, but distinctly human, "Captain Tycho, this is Captain Yarrick, previously of the Sanctioned Deliverance and the SFS Courage before that. I am requesting an extraction from this scrap heap before these Renzar hounds decide that they can sell a man's boots and atmosuit more easily when he's dead."