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jeriendhalThis isn't quite in sequence with the rest of the story. I'm going to have to write a brief bridging scene to separate Ali and Salli before this one.
She did not, Ali told herself as the air skimmer crossed into the Hivebreed District, have any reason to be nervous. She'd spent nearly a week aboard Lady Melanie's freighter with Aunt Razi and the family horde already. She was just going to be meeting a few more of them.
“It's a pity that Lady Darktail couldn't come with you,” Aunt Razi said. “The cubs would have been just thrilled to meet her. I mean they've all met our own liege lady when she came round for school visits and such, but that's not the same as having a viscountess in your living room.”
“I wish she was here too,” Ali agreed, worrying her lip between her fangs. Hivebreed District was was on the opposite side of the ocean from Darktail District, on the edge of the Gerwart Republic. This would make the furthest she'd been separated from Lady Salli since being Lady Melanie had maneuvered her into being Salli's bodyguard just over a year ago.
“Anyway, you'll just be meeting my daughter, Neka, and her spouse Fin, and their children. It'll be fun,” Razi said cheerily. The skimmer's console beeped and Razi turned over the flight to the local traffic control network. In a minute they were overflying a series of close set turret homes, in the circular style favored a half a century ago. The skimmer plopped down in front of a modest two story tower, with a slate roof and red and yellow flowers planted along the house's perimeter.
The door opened and a vixen a couple of centimeters taller than Aunt Razi, with a white pelt marked with black ear tips, like Ali's brother Lu, waved to them as they exited the skimmer.
“Hullo, Mum!” Neka called. She came out of the doorway to meet them as they came up the walk, opening her arms to gather Ali up in a hug. “It's so wonderful to finally meet you!” she said.
Ali returned the hug more cautiously. “Same here,” she said quietly. “I, um, guess it was a big thing when Lady Melanie was able to give you the news.”
“Oh, yes!” Neka agreed. “I was only seven myself when we heard about your family's ship being attacked. It was such a great tragedy. Though Cousin Lu never gave up hope that you'd be found someday, and he turned out to be right in the end.”
“Yes, he did,” Ali agreed. Though it had certainly ended up being a mixed up mess, with her being tried for piracy, and being sentenced to hard labor for her crimes. Said labor, fortunately, was being Lady Salli's bodyguard.
“Where's Fin and the boys?” Aunt Razi asked.
“Out at the park,” Neka told her. “I thought it might be a good idea to give Ali a chance to sit down and get some tea, rather than have her be immediately bowled over by the twins.”
“Thank you,” Ali said gratefully. Though she was getting better at the whole “meet your long lost relatives” thing, after practice with Lu, Aunt Razi, and the family horde. Children were going to be a first though, and not one that she was looking forward to.
Neka led them inside to a neatly kept house, and to a living room with shelves of old fashioned print books topped with carefully dusted bric-a-brac, primarily ceramic grass chaser sculptures. Then she disappeared briefly into the kitchen to brew up tea for them all, leaving Ali alone for a moment with Aunt Razi.
“Are you all right, dear?” Razi asked gently.
Ali held her paws together in her lap, tail curling around her knees. “I'm fine, I think. It's just they're... y'know... cubs.” Given that her previous interactions with young children, back when she had been Bloody Margo's slave, had been shooting ones who resisted her, this was going to be a new experience.
Aunt Razi reached over to pat her shoulder briefly. “You'll do fine. Ned and Nav are good boys.”
“Yes, Aunt Razi.” Ali carefully put a smile back on her face as Neka reentered the room, carrying a tray with tea and biscuits. She listened quietly as Razi and Neka talked, with Aunt Razi recounting the family horde's arrival on Greenholme just after Bloody Margo's raid on the small colony and Ali and Lu's dramatic rescue of Lady Salli.
“And now you're onworld while Lady Sallivera gets her eye repaired?” Neka asked. “How long do you think you'll be staying?”
“Depends,” Ali answered. “Could be just a month, if Lady Salli chooses to just get her cyber eye replaced. But she was talking recently about getting a full cell rejuvenation. If she goes through with that, we could be here for a year or more while she recovers.”
“Well, I hope you're here for a bit more than a month,” Neka said. “This is going to be my only chance to see you, really.”
“Oh, you can come to Greenholme any time you like.”
Neka raised her eyebrows. “Come to Greenholme? That's a once in a lifetime trip for someone like me. The only reason Mum and the others were able to go was because Lady Melanie offered them berths of her freighter. I could never afford the expense on my own.”
“Oh, I suppose you're right,” Ali said weakly, realizing her mistake. Working in Salli's employ, and before that in the service of Lady Melanie's Red Vixen persona, she was used to all of her own travel expenses being paid for by her employer/owners. She supposed in comparison to the average vixen, who never expected to leave the world of their birth, she was unusually well traveled.
Further conversation was interrupted by the sound of the front door banging open, and a rush of footpads on carpet and the excited babble of a pair of young cublings. Two boys, genetic twins from the looks of them, about eight years old, came barreling into the room, while behind them an exasperated adult voice called out, “Slow down, for the Mother's sake!”
The twins came to a halt in front of Ali, looking at her with wide eyes. Behind them the adult, Fin, paused at the doorway, their fur the same light orange color as the boys. The twins were males, no doubt, but she couldn't immediately identify Fin's gender. He or she were either slightly below average height for a male, or a bit taller than average for a female, with features that either belonged a very pretty male or a slightly homely vixen. Fin's clothes didn't offer any clues either, consisting of loose pants that fell just below their knees, and a baggy shirt over which they wore an open vest.
“Nedith and Naverth, this is your Aunt Alinadar,” Neka said. “Ali, these are our boys, Ned and Nav, and my spouse, Fin.”
“Hullo,” Ali said, giving the boys and Fin a little wave. She could feel her stomach tensing up, making her wish she'd skipped on the second biscuit she'd eaten.
Ned spoke up, still staring at Ali. “Mum said you were a space pirate.”
“That's right,” Ali agreed.
“You don't look like a space pirate,” Nav said.
Ali blinked. “What's a space pirate supposed to look like?”
“Y'know, like a pirate. With the leathers, and weapons hangin' everywhere.”
“Except if it's a space battle. Then you'd be in a battlesuit,” Ned added. “Do you have a battlesuit?”
“No, I never had one,” Ali told them, feeling herself relax a little at the honest questions. “My captain, the Red Vixen, had a lot of wazagans on board the Scarlet Claw to fight boarding actions. Most of them had battlesuits that they wore when we attacked a ship. She used me as a bodyguard mostly.”
“What did you wear?” Nav asked.
She shrugged. “Pretty much what I wear now.”
“But you don't have any weapons!”
Ali smiled slightly. “I don't have any that you can see. A smart bodyguard doesn't look like a bodyguard. That way any baddies won't be expecting me to be a threat.”
That answer seemed to impress the boys. “I guess that makes sense,” Nav agreed. But the smile dropped form Ali's face when he asked, “Did you ever kill anybody?”
“All right boys, that's enough,” Fin said firmly, before Ali could answer. Her/his voice was a pleasant alto, again not giving any clues about their gender.
“No, it's a fair question,” Ali said, before Fin could shoo them off. She felt a weird sense of relief that it had been asked, actually. If I can convince them I'm a good person, after everything I've done, maybe I really am. “I did kill people, quite a few of them. I was a pirate when I was younger than you are, if you can believe that. Then I was tried by the Stellar Court and convicted, and now I'm be paying for my crimes.”
“You're not in prison,” Ned pointed out.
“Nope. I'm permanently indentured to the Viscountess Darktail. Will be for the rest of my life.”
The boys considered that for a moment, then answered simultaneously, “That stinks.”
“I wish I could be a space pirate!” Nav said.
“No, you don't,” Neka said firmly, to Ali's relief.
“Go upstairs and play you two. I think Aunt Ali would like to talk to the adults some more,” Fin added.
“Yes, Mum. Yes, Fin,” Ned and Nav answered. Then they ran out of the room, footpads pounding up the stairs.
“Thank you,” Ali said gratefully. She let go of her tail, which she had unconsciously begun gripping during her conversation with the twins. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest still, in a familiar flight or fight response. They're your relatives, not your enemy. Not anymore.
“You all right?” Fin asked, sitting on the couch beside Neka, her ears pricked up.
“I... um... don't have much experience with cubs,” Ali admitted. “Good experiences anyway.”
“We heard a lot of it during her trial,” Aunt Razi put in, for Neka and Fin's benefit. “It made for pretty ugly listening. After her family was killed by the pirates who took her in, she was made Bloody Margo's slave, before she escaped that and was taken in by the Red Vixen. Margo forced Ali do a lot of terrible things.”
“Oh, I'm sorry,” Neka said, though Fin was looked less sympathetic.
“Well, that's in the past now,” Ali said. “Now I'm working as Lady Sallivera's bodyguard, as part of my indenture. I'm doing a lot better.” She cleared her throat. “So what do you two do?”
Neka looked grateful at the obvious change in subject. “Well I'm a librarian, and Fin is a sergeant in the town's Civil Protection unit.”
In other words, a uniformed law enforcer, Ali realized. Great. She was starting to dearly wish Aunt Razi had given her a briefing before bringing her here. Then another thought occurred to her. “Wait,” she said. “I know Aunt Razi is an EMT, you're a librarian, and Fin is a CP. That means you're all Military Caste, right?” We're a service oriented bunch, we Blacksailors, Aunt Razi had said, when she'd arrived on Greenholme. Or more accurate, a capital “S” Service oriented bunch. The foxen Military caste wasn't all soldiers after all. It encompassed a general definition of any organized group under government leadership that served the general public.
“Yes,” Neka said. “I thought you would have realized that when Lu found you. He is a Stellar Patrol officer, after all.”
“No, I didn't,” Ali replied. “That's.... er, I wasn't expecting that.”
Aunt Razi nodded. “Your side of the family went Commoner though, when they bought that independent freighter and moved aboard it.”
“I think this is my day to be confused,” Ali admitted. “Speaking of which, I've got one dumb question to ask.”
“There's no such thing as a dumb question,” Neka said, in a tone of voice that was pure Librarian.
“All right. Good.” Ali waved at Fin in desperation. “Because I've got no idea what gender you are!”
Fin smiled at her. “Well, the answer to that is Yes.”
“What do you mean, 'Yes?'”
“I'm all three genders,” Fin explained.
“Well, that doesn't make any sense, because the last thing I knew foxen only had two, and you can only be one of those at a time,” Ali said, somewhat grumpily. She had the bad feeling Fin was playing a joke at her expense.
“Sorry,” Fin said. “My ancestors were part of a genetic experiment about a hundred years after the start of the Interstellar Era. The idea was to even out a perceived gender bias towards vixens. So they came up with us Blended as a solution.”
“So you're... both?” Ali asked carefully.
“Not exactly,” Fin explained. “I can switch from male to female, or stay in a gender neutral state like I am now. Which to be honest I prefer, because switching back and forth takes a week, while I run a terrible fever and eat like a starving grass chaser.”
“Oh. Then which of you... er...?”
“Fin switched to Male state to sire the twins, and then back to female so we could have one of the eggs transferred from my uterus to Fin's,” Neka explained.
“Which turned out to be a mistake, because about five months into their pregnancies, Neka had to ask me to come over and move in for a while, since they were both too tired to do any housework,” Razi said, grinning.
“We thought it would be romantic,” Fin said defensively. The look on Fin's face was so put out, that Ali had to cover her muzzle with a paw to hide her grin. She felt herself relax. Perhaps she wasn't going to be the most unusual part of this extended family after all.
The thumping that had been going on upstairs since the twins had been exiled to their room to play, increased in volume as they bounded down the stairs again, shouting at each other.
“No, you're the space pirate!” Nav, or maybe it was Ned, shouted from the hallway. Ali was jolted out of her brief relaxed state, as she heard the distinct sound of a plasma pistol firing. The twins burst into the room, sliding to a halt suddenly, their eyes suddenly wide with fear.
Ali looked at them from over the sights of her palm stunner, which she'd popped from its arm holster in automatic response to the perceived threat. She froze, her own eyes wide with fear and horror with the realization of what she'd almost done, as the two boys dropped the bright orange toy weapons from their paws, raising their arms in surrender.
“What in the Cold and Dark are you doing? Are you mad?” Fin shouted at her, as Razi and Neka looked her in shock.
Ali swallowed, flipping her stunner back up her sleeve. “Excuse me,” she said hollowly. “I have to go.”
She fled out of Neka and Fin's safe, comfortable home, out into the street...
She did not, Ali told herself as the air skimmer crossed into the Hivebreed District, have any reason to be nervous. She'd spent nearly a week aboard Lady Melanie's freighter with Aunt Razi and the family horde already. She was just going to be meeting a few more of them.
“It's a pity that Lady Darktail couldn't come with you,” Aunt Razi said. “The cubs would have been just thrilled to meet her. I mean they've all met our own liege lady when she came round for school visits and such, but that's not the same as having a viscountess in your living room.”
“I wish she was here too,” Ali agreed, worrying her lip between her fangs. Hivebreed District was was on the opposite side of the ocean from Darktail District, on the edge of the Gerwart Republic. This would make the furthest she'd been separated from Lady Salli since being Lady Melanie had maneuvered her into being Salli's bodyguard just over a year ago.
“Anyway, you'll just be meeting my daughter, Neka, and her spouse Fin, and their children. It'll be fun,” Razi said cheerily. The skimmer's console beeped and Razi turned over the flight to the local traffic control network. In a minute they were overflying a series of close set turret homes, in the circular style favored a half a century ago. The skimmer plopped down in front of a modest two story tower, with a slate roof and red and yellow flowers planted along the house's perimeter.
The door opened and a vixen a couple of centimeters taller than Aunt Razi, with a white pelt marked with black ear tips, like Ali's brother Lu, waved to them as they exited the skimmer.
“Hullo, Mum!” Neka called. She came out of the doorway to meet them as they came up the walk, opening her arms to gather Ali up in a hug. “It's so wonderful to finally meet you!” she said.
Ali returned the hug more cautiously. “Same here,” she said quietly. “I, um, guess it was a big thing when Lady Melanie was able to give you the news.”
“Oh, yes!” Neka agreed. “I was only seven myself when we heard about your family's ship being attacked. It was such a great tragedy. Though Cousin Lu never gave up hope that you'd be found someday, and he turned out to be right in the end.”
“Yes, he did,” Ali agreed. Though it had certainly ended up being a mixed up mess, with her being tried for piracy, and being sentenced to hard labor for her crimes. Said labor, fortunately, was being Lady Salli's bodyguard.
“Where's Fin and the boys?” Aunt Razi asked.
“Out at the park,” Neka told her. “I thought it might be a good idea to give Ali a chance to sit down and get some tea, rather than have her be immediately bowled over by the twins.”
“Thank you,” Ali said gratefully. Though she was getting better at the whole “meet your long lost relatives” thing, after practice with Lu, Aunt Razi, and the family horde. Children were going to be a first though, and not one that she was looking forward to.
Neka led them inside to a neatly kept house, and to a living room with shelves of old fashioned print books topped with carefully dusted bric-a-brac, primarily ceramic grass chaser sculptures. Then she disappeared briefly into the kitchen to brew up tea for them all, leaving Ali alone for a moment with Aunt Razi.
“Are you all right, dear?” Razi asked gently.
Ali held her paws together in her lap, tail curling around her knees. “I'm fine, I think. It's just they're... y'know... cubs.” Given that her previous interactions with young children, back when she had been Bloody Margo's slave, had been shooting ones who resisted her, this was going to be a new experience.
Aunt Razi reached over to pat her shoulder briefly. “You'll do fine. Ned and Nav are good boys.”
“Yes, Aunt Razi.” Ali carefully put a smile back on her face as Neka reentered the room, carrying a tray with tea and biscuits. She listened quietly as Razi and Neka talked, with Aunt Razi recounting the family horde's arrival on Greenholme just after Bloody Margo's raid on the small colony and Ali and Lu's dramatic rescue of Lady Salli.
“And now you're onworld while Lady Sallivera gets her eye repaired?” Neka asked. “How long do you think you'll be staying?”
“Depends,” Ali answered. “Could be just a month, if Lady Salli chooses to just get her cyber eye replaced. But she was talking recently about getting a full cell rejuvenation. If she goes through with that, we could be here for a year or more while she recovers.”
“Well, I hope you're here for a bit more than a month,” Neka said. “This is going to be my only chance to see you, really.”
“Oh, you can come to Greenholme any time you like.”
Neka raised her eyebrows. “Come to Greenholme? That's a once in a lifetime trip for someone like me. The only reason Mum and the others were able to go was because Lady Melanie offered them berths of her freighter. I could never afford the expense on my own.”
“Oh, I suppose you're right,” Ali said weakly, realizing her mistake. Working in Salli's employ, and before that in the service of Lady Melanie's Red Vixen persona, she was used to all of her own travel expenses being paid for by her employer/owners. She supposed in comparison to the average vixen, who never expected to leave the world of their birth, she was unusually well traveled.
Further conversation was interrupted by the sound of the front door banging open, and a rush of footpads on carpet and the excited babble of a pair of young cublings. Two boys, genetic twins from the looks of them, about eight years old, came barreling into the room, while behind them an exasperated adult voice called out, “Slow down, for the Mother's sake!”
The twins came to a halt in front of Ali, looking at her with wide eyes. Behind them the adult, Fin, paused at the doorway, their fur the same light orange color as the boys. The twins were males, no doubt, but she couldn't immediately identify Fin's gender. He or she were either slightly below average height for a male, or a bit taller than average for a female, with features that either belonged a very pretty male or a slightly homely vixen. Fin's clothes didn't offer any clues either, consisting of loose pants that fell just below their knees, and a baggy shirt over which they wore an open vest.
“Nedith and Naverth, this is your Aunt Alinadar,” Neka said. “Ali, these are our boys, Ned and Nav, and my spouse, Fin.”
“Hullo,” Ali said, giving the boys and Fin a little wave. She could feel her stomach tensing up, making her wish she'd skipped on the second biscuit she'd eaten.
Ned spoke up, still staring at Ali. “Mum said you were a space pirate.”
“That's right,” Ali agreed.
“You don't look like a space pirate,” Nav said.
Ali blinked. “What's a space pirate supposed to look like?”
“Y'know, like a pirate. With the leathers, and weapons hangin' everywhere.”
“Except if it's a space battle. Then you'd be in a battlesuit,” Ned added. “Do you have a battlesuit?”
“No, I never had one,” Ali told them, feeling herself relax a little at the honest questions. “My captain, the Red Vixen, had a lot of wazagans on board the Scarlet Claw to fight boarding actions. Most of them had battlesuits that they wore when we attacked a ship. She used me as a bodyguard mostly.”
“What did you wear?” Nav asked.
She shrugged. “Pretty much what I wear now.”
“But you don't have any weapons!”
Ali smiled slightly. “I don't have any that you can see. A smart bodyguard doesn't look like a bodyguard. That way any baddies won't be expecting me to be a threat.”
That answer seemed to impress the boys. “I guess that makes sense,” Nav agreed. But the smile dropped form Ali's face when he asked, “Did you ever kill anybody?”
“All right boys, that's enough,” Fin said firmly, before Ali could answer. Her/his voice was a pleasant alto, again not giving any clues about their gender.
“No, it's a fair question,” Ali said, before Fin could shoo them off. She felt a weird sense of relief that it had been asked, actually. If I can convince them I'm a good person, after everything I've done, maybe I really am. “I did kill people, quite a few of them. I was a pirate when I was younger than you are, if you can believe that. Then I was tried by the Stellar Court and convicted, and now I'm be paying for my crimes.”
“You're not in prison,” Ned pointed out.
“Nope. I'm permanently indentured to the Viscountess Darktail. Will be for the rest of my life.”
The boys considered that for a moment, then answered simultaneously, “That stinks.”
“I wish I could be a space pirate!” Nav said.
“No, you don't,” Neka said firmly, to Ali's relief.
“Go upstairs and play you two. I think Aunt Ali would like to talk to the adults some more,” Fin added.
“Yes, Mum. Yes, Fin,” Ned and Nav answered. Then they ran out of the room, footpads pounding up the stairs.
“Thank you,” Ali said gratefully. She let go of her tail, which she had unconsciously begun gripping during her conversation with the twins. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest still, in a familiar flight or fight response. They're your relatives, not your enemy. Not anymore.
“You all right?” Fin asked, sitting on the couch beside Neka, her ears pricked up.
“I... um... don't have much experience with cubs,” Ali admitted. “Good experiences anyway.”
“We heard a lot of it during her trial,” Aunt Razi put in, for Neka and Fin's benefit. “It made for pretty ugly listening. After her family was killed by the pirates who took her in, she was made Bloody Margo's slave, before she escaped that and was taken in by the Red Vixen. Margo forced Ali do a lot of terrible things.”
“Oh, I'm sorry,” Neka said, though Fin was looked less sympathetic.
“Well, that's in the past now,” Ali said. “Now I'm working as Lady Sallivera's bodyguard, as part of my indenture. I'm doing a lot better.” She cleared her throat. “So what do you two do?”
Neka looked grateful at the obvious change in subject. “Well I'm a librarian, and Fin is a sergeant in the town's Civil Protection unit.”
In other words, a uniformed law enforcer, Ali realized. Great. She was starting to dearly wish Aunt Razi had given her a briefing before bringing her here. Then another thought occurred to her. “Wait,” she said. “I know Aunt Razi is an EMT, you're a librarian, and Fin is a CP. That means you're all Military Caste, right?” We're a service oriented bunch, we Blacksailors, Aunt Razi had said, when she'd arrived on Greenholme. Or more accurate, a capital “S” Service oriented bunch. The foxen Military caste wasn't all soldiers after all. It encompassed a general definition of any organized group under government leadership that served the general public.
“Yes,” Neka said. “I thought you would have realized that when Lu found you. He is a Stellar Patrol officer, after all.”
“No, I didn't,” Ali replied. “That's.... er, I wasn't expecting that.”
Aunt Razi nodded. “Your side of the family went Commoner though, when they bought that independent freighter and moved aboard it.”
“I think this is my day to be confused,” Ali admitted. “Speaking of which, I've got one dumb question to ask.”
“There's no such thing as a dumb question,” Neka said, in a tone of voice that was pure Librarian.
“All right. Good.” Ali waved at Fin in desperation. “Because I've got no idea what gender you are!”
Fin smiled at her. “Well, the answer to that is Yes.”
“What do you mean, 'Yes?'”
“I'm all three genders,” Fin explained.
“Well, that doesn't make any sense, because the last thing I knew foxen only had two, and you can only be one of those at a time,” Ali said, somewhat grumpily. She had the bad feeling Fin was playing a joke at her expense.
“Sorry,” Fin said. “My ancestors were part of a genetic experiment about a hundred years after the start of the Interstellar Era. The idea was to even out a perceived gender bias towards vixens. So they came up with us Blended as a solution.”
“So you're... both?” Ali asked carefully.
“Not exactly,” Fin explained. “I can switch from male to female, or stay in a gender neutral state like I am now. Which to be honest I prefer, because switching back and forth takes a week, while I run a terrible fever and eat like a starving grass chaser.”
“Oh. Then which of you... er...?”
“Fin switched to Male state to sire the twins, and then back to female so we could have one of the eggs transferred from my uterus to Fin's,” Neka explained.
“Which turned out to be a mistake, because about five months into their pregnancies, Neka had to ask me to come over and move in for a while, since they were both too tired to do any housework,” Razi said, grinning.
“We thought it would be romantic,” Fin said defensively. The look on Fin's face was so put out, that Ali had to cover her muzzle with a paw to hide her grin. She felt herself relax. Perhaps she wasn't going to be the most unusual part of this extended family after all.
The thumping that had been going on upstairs since the twins had been exiled to their room to play, increased in volume as they bounded down the stairs again, shouting at each other.
“No, you're the space pirate!” Nav, or maybe it was Ned, shouted from the hallway. Ali was jolted out of her brief relaxed state, as she heard the distinct sound of a plasma pistol firing. The twins burst into the room, sliding to a halt suddenly, their eyes suddenly wide with fear.
Ali looked at them from over the sights of her palm stunner, which she'd popped from its arm holster in automatic response to the perceived threat. She froze, her own eyes wide with fear and horror with the realization of what she'd almost done, as the two boys dropped the bright orange toy weapons from their paws, raising their arms in surrender.
“What in the Cold and Dark are you doing? Are you mad?” Fin shouted at her, as Razi and Neka looked her in shock.
Ali swallowed, flipping her stunner back up her sleeve. “Excuse me,” she said hollowly. “I have to go.”
She fled out of Neka and Fin's safe, comfortable home, out into the street...
