It was just 2000 when he awoke from a dream that had ended in a particularly nasty crash with a smoking crater.

Clammy with cold sweat, he made himself some instant soup and tea and slowly relaxed. He needed something to take his mind off the simulator. He looked again at the lock on the cargo hatch. It was certainly beyond his abilities to hack it, so the only option was to bypass it mechanically.

"Blackbeard, how are the contract workers being sedated?"

"12% oxygen, 5% carbon dioxide, lethal to unmodified humans."

"Blackbeard, do we have a SCAB for such an environment?"

"Yes, three, as the atmosphere on the planet is not suitable for unmodified humans either. Locker II, drawer 4b."

He opened the drawer. There were indeed three emergency breathers, each good for half a day according to their labels. The drawers below contained a small collection of tools. There was a powerdriver that might work on the hinges. And it did. Soon they were all loose, except for one that held the whole hatch to its frame.

"Blackbeard, cut the engines for the next 0500." Immediately he floated.

He put on the mask and moments later the last screw was out. He wedged the tip of the powerdriver under the hinge until he heard the telltale hiss of pressure equalisation. Slowly, he pulled the screw out of the frame by moving the whole hatch to the left. Very slowly and very carefully, because it weighed five times as much as he did. He secured it with a rope, just in case.

The hibernation of the slaves was not just the atmosphere, it was cold in the hold, the exhaust from the breather trailing clouds.

"Blackbeard, cargo hold lights on."

There were not many lights. They illuminated a skeletal steel rack that filled the entire hold. There were three rows of eleven compartments, separated only by thin steel supports. In each was a hibernating slave, 33 in all, strapped to their matrasses. They looked human, as far as he could tell with the helmet each wore. He was shivering, not just from the low temperatures; he had never been responsible for so many lives on a ship before. He floated around the rack to the other side. In the bottom right corner was a small display showing the status of all the slaves.

From this side it was clear that these were not human slaves, not fully human: they had the upper body of a human, but their lower body was that of an animal, with thick fur and a tail. He wished for his pad to identify their shape and origin. Anyway, his curiosity was satisfied. Then he saw a tail flicking and heard a faint groaning in the lowest box near the centre. Should he check it out? An alarm sounded on the display of the rack and a light turned yellow: one of the slaves had woken up. Probably from the higher oxygen levels coming from his part of the ship.

He hurried around the rack. The slave was a female. Her eyes were open and she was trying to move. But the 4D restraints held her down.

"Wait!" He sailed over to her, removed the helmet and unbuckled her harness with the clearly marked yellow and black striped release lever. She lifted her torso and banged her head on the rack above, cursing in some unknown slang.

"Come quickly!" He held out his hand. She took it and he pulled her out of her compartment. She was long, much longer than he had expected. He grabbed her hind legs to stop her before she hit the wall at the far end of the crew's small living area. She was probably still in shock, because he would have panicked too if a stranger in a mask had floated him out into an unknown environment at 0 g.

As soon as she was outside, he floated the heavy hatch back into its frame before any more slaves woke up. After tightening the first two screws, the lower pressure in the hold sucked it into place. He turned and removed his mask.

The slave ignored him, preoccupied with weakly punching her lower body, crying and whimpering as she tumbled through the crew compartment.

"Hello."

She looked at him, her eyes wide. Fear had clearly taken over as she tried to walk on air with her four uncoordinated legs. Taking up half the volume of the small crew space, one of her legs hit the edge of the table and sent her flying. She slammed her shoulder into a wall and screamed again, at her body and at him in a very strange, almost incomprehensible Standard.

He was out of his wits, so he quickly climbed into the cockpit. "Blackbeard," he shouted, "make a patch for a person three times my weight, half a day."

"It could kill a person." Still, the dispenser clicked.

He took the patch and timed his jump from the hatch to fly past her neck when her back was to him. The patch hit its mark on the side of her neck before she even realised he was back.

He knew the almost instantaneous effect of the 4D patches, but it was still strange to see how quickly she slipped into unconsciousness. Her wild, erratic movements slowed, her wailing reduced to a whimper and her breathing became shallower and slower. The last thing to twitch was her tail.

He pulled her gently to the floor. "Blackbeard, decelerate again with 0.13g, please."

The up and down came back. He made sure her limbs were straight and not tangled. But with 0.13 g there was little risk of bruising or cutting the bloodstream anyway.

To calm himself, he made some tea and soup. The patch seemed to be working normally, she was unconscious with a low pulse and shallow breathing.

He returned to the cockpit. But instead of another simulator run, he ran their fuel simulation again, and it looked even worse than the last time. The current estimate was that they would enter the atmosphere at 54 km/s, more than fifteen times the planet's escape velocity. He did not need the simulator to know that they would burn up in the thin atmosphere.

"Blackbeard, why are the numbers off?"

"The star's gravity and the planet's orbital parameters seem to be wrong in the database."

That could not be true, or no one would be able to jump to this system.

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"Blackbeard, I want you to run a diagnostic on all gravity sensors."

"That will take 8047."

Of course, everything would be fine. The AI had somehow miscalculated their trajectory. Despite the fact that the brown dwarf's gravity was so weak that they could even jump into the planet's orbit. This gave him an idea.

"Blackbeard, I want you to jump behind the planet's orbit, but close to it. Look at this course here. Then we make several catch-up jumps, each with a flyby. We have to jump below or above the ecliptic to avoid the energy-harvesting satellites. About 80 repetitions to bleed off 80 km/s delta v. Can you do that?"

"No problem. Want a patch?"

"Blackbeard, no. Can the coils take it?"

"Microjumps are not a big problem, these are more like single pulses at these short distances."

"Blackbeard, jump when ready."

The 0010 jump alarm sounded. The room collapsed a little too early and immediately unfolded into an endless blue wall. A wall in 3D that disappeared again in an instant. It took him a moment to recognise it. "Blackbeard, that was one of the solar arrays of Energy Harvesting Satellite 1. Are you trying to kill us? I said behind the planet, not in front of it."

"Sorry, the next one will be on target."

The still ringing jump warning was back to zero, and the room folded and unfolded in the blink of an eye. The planet filled their view and quickly shrank again, as it should. And their delta v had dropped by 1.2 km/s. "Blackbeard, that was good. Please repeat it."

* * *

In the next 0070 they made another 53 jumps. The last jump was far off again, the AI had kept them in 4D almost 4 micros too long. Only by luck did they miss the downward maser beam of the Energy Harvesting Satellite 3 by less than 10 km. Any stupid timer could do better than this AI. He was sure by now that the AI was running illegal mods, mining crypto, or whatever it was that consumed processing power and screwed up its timing. He had heard similar rumours before. But for now, they had lowered their delta v enough. "Blackbeard, next jump to here, 0.87 out at 35 degrees behind the planet. We'll slow down the rest conventionally, using the engines. Jump when ready."

Almost anywhere in the general vicinity would have been fine. But they came out right on target. Now they could slow down to the planet's escape velocity and still have some fuel left for emergencies.

He sighed and unbuckled the 4D harness. Their deceleration was still at optimal efficiency with only 0.13 g. Too little gravity to move properly. So he climbed down the stairs like an asthmatic snail.

The first thing he did was check the cargo turned guest: She was still knocked out by the patch, but her breathing was steady. One less thing to worry about.

And even though the whole flyby had lasted less than 1000, it still felt like half a day. The 4D had not been that bad. Looking at bad geometry with increasing brightness and noise for a few moments was ok. But the nerve-wracking errors the AI might make at every jump had left him in a cold sweat.

So his next check was the shower. The small reservoir had one advantage: it was already fully recycled. He enjoyed a few moments of lukewarm mist. It did wonders for the mind. And now he changed into fresh clothes because his guest was there. Hard to forget when she took up half the crew's living space.

He brewed a pot of tea and took it to the cockpit. When it was empty, he asked for a weaker patch. From the cockpit hatch, he looked at her again. It still seemed strange, a woman with an animal for a lower body, fur all over, four legs ending in black caps. And very strong, human and animal parts alike. He took a deep breath and, more confidently now, slid down the ladder in slow motion, stopping next to her. Even lying down, her lower body was almost as high as his groin. He touched the fur on her lower body. It was very thick and warm. Feeling guilty, he quickly withdrew his hand. Another deep breath and he removed the plaster from the slave's neck and replaced it with the much weaker one. Then he stepped back as far as the small crew quarters would allow.

It took a few moments for the drugs to wear off. Finally, she blinked.

"Hello, I am Marik," he said, intoning each word carefully.

She looked up at him from the floor with a rather vacant expression, then straightened her torso. Now her head was level with his stomach. And she was really strong, her shoulders much broader than his. In fact, everything except her head was about 1.5 times bigger. She had long, muscular arms and huge hands. With slow movements, she stood up on all four legs, bouncing a little in the low gravity. Because of the patch, her face showed only slight confusion. Standing, she was more than a head taller.

"I hml Lalleli", she mumbled. "whell is Hellni? Hwhy his no heavy?"

"Hello Lalleli. I gave you a patch to calm you down. I will remove it now." He slowly crossed the two steps between them, palms up, then reached around her neck to pull the patch off.

She grabbed him as he got closer, he barely managed to pull the patch off before she held him with inhuman force. "hhelni, hwo is hwo?" she asked, unintelligible with her heavy accent and slurred speech from the drugs, holding him tight. Slowly, her breathing accelerated.

"Are you feeling better?"

"I had a dream," she said, now finally in some Standard, heavy with dialect. "I was being mutilated."

"You are on a spaceship. But you look healthy. As far as I can tell, I don't know your species."

"What? I am human."

He didn't know what to say. Human was a broad category, of course. But he doubted any society would consider her human enough.

She turned her head and looked behind her. And then she hugged him, almost crushing him. Tears fell on his head, his chin trapped between her breasts. Her breath ruffled his hair, even her breathing was so strong. Her crying shook his whole body, she held him so tight he could barely breathe. He hoped she would calm down soon. Until he almost fainted from lack of oxygen. "Please let go a little," he huffed.

Just then she realised she was almost crushing him and released him abruptly.

He was afraid she would go into shock again. "Please, I have no idea what happened. I just found you in the cargo hold. I am Marik, the pilot of this spaceship. What is your name?"

"Spaceship?" She spoke it without an accent, almost as if it were a foreign word to her. "I am on a spaceship?"

"Yes, you are. That is why everything is so light. Please tell me what you expected?"

But she was silent for a long time. "I, I am not sure," she said at last. "I had to undress and went into their pod. I think it was on a spaceship too. But we were on the ground, near Cleventrough."

"Where is Cleventrough?"

"Oh, that's the name of the spaceport."

"Sorry, I mean, what star system is Cleventrough in?"

"Star system? Oh, I don't know." She started to cry again.

"Sorry, I think I can find out which system it is. The name sounds special enough. And if all else fails, we can visit all possible systems. Please, I want to help you. Are you all right?" It was a stupid question, of course.

She pointed behind her. "And what is that?"

"What do you mean?"

"I entered the pod on two legs. A woman, not this!"

"Oh!" He leaned against the wall despite the low gravity.

"You mean you were human?"

"Until I woke up here," she looked miserable again and began to cry, "and now I am this strange, hideous beast! Ouch!" She had slapped her lower body again.

"I do not think you are hideous. Your fur is very soft."

She looked at him like he was crazy.

"I'm sorry."

"You like the fur?"

"Have you felt it yourself?"

She hesitantly stroked the fur on her front legs. "Hmm."

"May I too?"

She nodded. He ran his hand through her back fur. Fallerian had no furry animals, only spiky hairs on giant caterpillars and a few others. And those hairs were most often dangerous. Her fur was different, soft and warm. He could even feel her breathing.

"Can you move your legs?"

She lifted her left hind leg. "Yes. Somehow, I knew how to use them. Even if it feels wrong. I still feel human."

"You are human. Just in a different form."

Her long arms caught him easily. Another hug, gentler this time. "Thank you."

"You know there are 32 more like you still hibernating in the cargo bay. To be sold as slaves, apparently."

She cursed something unknown to him.

"Sorry, I didn't understand."

"Never mind. I sold myself as a contract worker for five years to support my parents. The company even promised me a new plot of land after that. But I never agreed to it." Her tears flowed again. "Shrumptic, I'd rather work the streets."

So they were indeed contract workers. Uncertain, he patted her back. "I see. You have been turned against your will. But what are we to do now? I think you will get your piece of land on the planet."