A History of Interspecies Relations

			Prologue

	Muli heard her alarm clock going off, and tapped the touch-sensitive screen with her foot to turn it off.  She wanted to kick it like she usually did, not being a morning person, but knew full well she would smash it with her hooves if she ever did.  The temptation was there though.  Still, you didn't want to go breaking things when you were in Deep space.  You couldn't repair unless you had a spare and the nearest distributor was at least a few years travel away.  Even worse if you accidentally injured yourself, you had better hope your med center was well stocked and your self-care skills were up to the task.  The medbed could save your life, but you really didn't want a machine operating on you unless it really was life or death.
	As various old aches and pains made themselves known, she remembered her last experience with the medbed.  A support strut holding rare metals had collapsed near her, and a falling chunk of platinum had hit her.  Her left arm got flattened right at the elbow, and the pain was enough to make her vomit.  She had passed out halfway to the med center on her ship and nearly died from blood loss.  Such was the risks you took when you chose to be a miner in Deep space.  High risk, high reward, it wasn't a job for everyone.
	The high chance of insanity or death actually wasn't considered the biggest downside of the job.  She scratched at the matted fur on her rebuilt left arm as she remembered her mother's final argument against it.  Damn fur never set right after the accident, mostly likely the fault of the medbed.  Muli's mother had always disapproved of her less than feminine tendencies, since that stuff "won't attract bucks."  On hearing of Muli's choice to become a miner, she practically had an aneurysm.  After trotting out the most horrific incidents that had happened to miners, she played her ace card.  "You'll NEVER have the opportunity to mate!"  But Muli's mind had already been made up, she wanted to be a miner.
	The way she figured it, she was never going to have the opportunity to mate anyways.  She was out running around getting into trouble when all the other girls were practicing their form and movements.  When everyone else was spending years treating their fur to get the soft fluff that made males not want to let go, she was sneaking into construction sites to watch the heavy machinery work.  She was never as pretty as the other girls, and didn't put in the effort to try and improve, no matter how much her mother begged her to.  She didn't realize how much a male meant until she had her first heat, and by then it felt like it was already too late.
	She made her way to the washroom in her quarters, scratching, coughing, and snorting all the way.  Looking into the mirror, she saw her matted and overly dry fur looking particularly dull and scruffy.  She gave herself an affirmative hand gesture, and said "Lookin classy as always."  So she was a virgin, who cared?  When your species has a birth rate of 19 females for every male, and 75 percent of males didn't survive to adulthood, actually having sex with a male was something of an accomplishment.  One acknowledged by society even.  Her own mother had managed to be selected for mating three times, and received a discount on her taxes for it.  Only got pregnant twice, but it doesn't always end in a litter.
	She washed up while thinking about her family.  She understood full well why her mother was so overbearing.  Her first litter male had died at the age of 6.  Every litter carried the chance of a male, her mother had gotten one in her first litter.  Muli had been in the second litter, after he died, so she never got the chance to meet him.  All she had heard were the stories from her older sisters, of how they used to carry weapons when they went out to play in an unspoken agreement to prevent any harm to him.  He died in his sleep one day, and her older sisters always had haunted looks on their faces when they spoke about her mother was nearly comatose for weeks afterwards.  There was no male in her second litter.
	It's why she never could be too angry at her mother, she couldn't even imagine how terrible it must have been to lose her only male child.  It was common, only 75% of males did survive to adulthood, but it still cut deep.  Her older sisters always told her that her mother used to be pretty relaxed before Tion died.  It seemed hard to picture, she had always known her mother to be overprotective and controlling.  She felt it was unneeded, females weren't as fragile as males, with a 98% survival rate to prove it.  To her mothers credit, if she was disappointed in not having a male in her second litter, she never showed it.  Despite being overbearing most of the time, Muli's mother always did take good care of her and her sisters.
	After getting dried off in her blower closet, she put underwear on and headed for the control deck.  One of the many benefits of being all alone, you didn't have to worry about a dress code.  At first it was something she did because she could, after a while she just found she was more comfortable that way.  She had tried working naked, but accidentally brushing her nipples against sharp metal convinced her to wear a bra, and the occasional draft of cold air going between her legs convinced her to put panties on.  She arrived at the control deck, as she laughingly called it.  In reality, it was a small room located above her quarters with six monitors that could be used for any function, and a pilot's chair.  A flashing yellow light on the console brought her running.  She relaxed after a quick look told her it was the navigation system spitting up a location error.
	It wasn't the first time it had happened.  She bought the ship used, and it had a number of problems the bitch who sold it to her neglected to mention, including a really nasty issue with the wiring in the cargo doors that could have killed her.  Instead she was eating when the ship's computer let her know that half her ship had just vented itself into space without any input.  The navigation controller had a memory issue where it would fill it's memory with gibberish and then reset itself.  Thus the navigation controller thought it had gotten lost on a regular basis.  She left to the kitchen and came back with some fruit juice, reprogramming the controller was going to take time.  Naturally, flying without your navigation controller in full working order was a bad idea.
	She brought up the memory, only to see the star charts were still resident.  "Oh come on, now what's wrong with you?" she grumbled at the console.  If it wasn't the memory, than this was a new issue.  The navigation controller was still reporting that her current location didn't match squat.  Was it a logic error?  She had no idea how to deal with something like that.  She connected three monitors to the ship's external sensors to take a look for herself.  A PLANET!  Fucking huge one, roughly four hours from her position.  She threw a pulse scan at it, and disappointingly read it was just a gas ball.  Solid core, but you couldn't realistically mine that.  But there were other planets, since she seemed to be inside of a star's system.
	This was wrong.  She knew full well her engines were off when she went to sleep.  You only get drunk and pass out with the engines still on once.  Waking up a day away from where you were supposed to be always teaches a strong lesson.  Yet here she was, in a solar system somewhere.  How far was the nearest star when she went to sleep, 8 years away?  There was no possible way she had been out for that long, or traveled fast enough while asleep.  There were physics issues when you got close to the speed of light, and her ship could go nowhere near that speed.  So how in the three hells had she gotten here?
	She checked her navigation log.  She had seen some odd things before, like one log that swore the ship was in three places at the same time.  But what she saw was more the equivalent of seeing two different pictures taped together.  Three hours after she had gone to sleep, her ship was suddenly here.  No travel recorded, the stars just changed.  She was there, then here.  No disturbance was detected, nothing was out of place, she was just elsewhere.  The scent of potential money in the planets she had stumbled across had been replaced with fear.  She was lost.  Not just confused about her directions, actually completely lost.
	Before panic could completely set in, a green light flashed on the console.  Relief flooded over her, and she felt her heart rate drop back to a more reasonable level.  She might be lost, but a transmission meant someone else was out here.  And that meant they could direct her back to where she was mining.  Wondering how she was going to explain how she got so far off course, she opened comms to hear the transmission.
	"13, Houston. We see you getting close to gimbal lock there. We'd like you to bring up all quad Cs on MAIN A, quad C-l, C-2, C-3, C-4 on MAIN A, and also bring B-3 and B-4 up on MAIN A."
	The voice sounded tense, as well as oddly deep.  A short while later, there was more.
	"13, Houston, do you read?"
	Another voice, sounding almost panicked responded.
	"Yes, we got it!"
	Another voice joined in.
	"Affirm."
	Then the original voice spoke again.
	"Okay. Can you tell us anything about the venting, where it is coming from, what window you see it at."
	Venting?  It was a distress call!  She had the computer figure the location the transmission was coming from.  It was a radio wave, so it didn't have location data attached to it.  After listening to five more panicked minutes from the poor bastards losing air, her computer spat up the location.  Less than two hours away if she didn't care about her batteries getting drained hard.  Given some fellow miners were in trouble, she didn't care about the batteries.  She set course for their location, and set the engines to run at full.
	Judging by what she was hearing on the transmission, she didn't have a moment to waste.  Their electronics must have gotten messed up, since they had to rush to lower their power draw before they lost it all.  The thrusters on their ship were going haywire, and it sounded as if their navigation controller was having a very hard time dealing with the constant sudden course corrections.  At least, that's what she thought they were talking about, they seemed to be using a lot of codes.  What did "barber pole" mean?  She had managed to gather the names of the crew on the ship from the communication between it and some other party named Houston.  Jim, Jack, and Fred.  Strange names, but her mother had named her after an alcoholic beverage, so who was she to judge?
	The crew seemed to be performing procedures trying to get their ship back under control, and the despair in their voices was obvious.  Oddly deep voices too.  If she didn't know for a fact males were forbidden from anything involving Deep space, she would be forced to assume they were male.  She had a brief fantasy of rescuing a wayward crew of males who had snuck into space, and them rewarding her for rescuing them.  She quickly shook it off and started thinking about what these people were doing out here so far from civilization.  Probably miners like herself, but Houston had the feel of authority, giving instructions to the crew on how to deal with their current crisis.
	Which meant a corporation.  Corps didn't mess around in Deep space unless they had something to hide.  Which meant it was a risk even getting close to the distressed ship.  They could decide they can't have her tell anyone what she saw, and sic a few attack craft on her.  Her mining lasers were great at punching through rock, but not so great at punching through titanium alloy armor.  Still, this was her only lifeline back to civilization, so she had to take the chance.  The other half of it was the rule of helping another miner in need.  The Deeps could be incredibly dangerous, so no miner ever abandoned another miner if it could be helped.  Corps, independents, even pirate miners wouldn't fail to assist another miner in need.  The news groups were full of records of pirates coming to the aid of various parties who they had pillaged or been at war with in prior encounters.  Besides, given how stressed out all parties in the transmissions sounded, she doubted they had ANY other ships in the area period.
	So she sat listening to the transmissions.  Roughly half an hour away, she heard them mention a lifeboat.  Shortly after that, they said there was less than 15 minutes of power remaining.  And not long after, much talk about shutting heaters off.  No power, no heat, she was very glad she was finally within range.  Sounded like she wasn't a moment to soon.
	"Apollo 13, this is the Ditas, rescue has arrived."