'Gods, what a galaxy.'

Jerry thinks to himself as he wakes up, enveloped in soft fur and curves. To his back somewhere he can feel the smaller, scaled sensation of Nadi snuggling in and absorbing heat from his body like a lizard with a particularly favored sunning stone. She wasn't quite as big as her sister wife, but the tiny Kohb had plenty of love to give, and she gave it gladly.

That Nadi could keep up at all with Syl was impressive, size or no size. The vivacious Volpir woman had lived a life in rebellion to her biology. She hated the reputation of her species for barging into marriages in particular. She’d fought with her own kin over that once upon a time, and struck out on her own far from home. She’d had to work hard, take chances, and fight her way to the top of the pile on Centris.

Now though, she’d achieved one of her earliest goals. Now she could smile at him and tell him that all her struggles had been worth it. All the patience. All the pain. All the loneliness. And the way she smiled, he was damn sure he meant. Syl was many things, but subtle was not one of them when it came to communicating how she felt to him.

Jerry finally wakes up completely and slowly wiggles his way south, slipping out of the girl's arms and out of the bed. The light sheet was for modesty as much as anything, and they were going to cool the room regardless of the season. Syl's soft downy coat ensured there was no such thing as chilly in her arms. A sigh of happiness escapes him as he gazes longingly at the bed that just barely managed to comfortably sleep three. Warm. Snuggly. All he had to do was go back to sleep.

It had been nearly a month since he first entered this world of wonderment. They'd gone to work immediately, so he'd been able to beg off taking honeymoon leave. Again. Considering his new business was now considered a potentially critical part of the Undaunted's morale and colonization plans, he had swung splitting his time between the shop and the ship, and had purchased a small air car with some help from the transforming alien air car, Kati Downshift.

Actually having human livestock would do a lot for long term colonization in terms of human morale and comfort. Having human pets available for people was incomprehensibly important long term.

Going home from duty was like a sigh of relief. He’d never thought himself one of those guys, but he just didn’t find himself hanging around as often anymore. It was hard to do as the boss anyway, but enjoyed a good relationship with his troops.

Instead he’s in the car and in the air just as fast as he can after duty days at the Dauntless. Jerry even found himself enjoying the drive once he'd managed to get the car's stereo system to play nice with human music.

Actually arriving home was pure joy, even if work was still on the menu.

Jerry glances around Syl's modest apartment, mentally taking stock of things before retrieving his sidearm from under his pillow and stepping into the spacious bathroom to do his morning training without waking Syl or Nadi up. He'd gotten lost in thought, and the heavy creation of finely machined steel would bring him back down to Centris. The FK BRNO Field Pistol was a unique choice from what he'd seen. He hadn't made his favorite handgun like so many others had, he'd bought this one and brought it straight from mother Earth, with plenty of its powerful 7.5 FK ammunition in several variations. Rank had its privileges, and while the two levels of Commander rank were getting handed out like crazy these days, he'd actually been one on his departure from Earth.

A quick rack of the Field Pistol's unique action ejects the rifle grade solid copper round as he goes through a series of dry fire exercises. Trigger control, drawing from a hip holster, drawing from concealment, drawing from axiom concealment, and immediate remediation drills with the help of a spare magazine and some snap caps he'd made.

He carried other weapons out in public of course, the MP7 submachine gun was an old friend from the Marine Raider Battalions, and just like the Field Pistol's 7.5 FK, it's round was designed to rip through armor, manufactured or natural, and it wasn't too bad suppressed either. Throw in an MDRX rifle in 6.5 Creedmoor, and no matter how bad the bitch was, no matter how far away, Jerry could engage and stop the threat. And that was before he’d gotten more of a handle on axiom.

Jerry grins to himself in the mirror. If the crazies wanted a piece of him or his girls, he was going to make sure he entertained them properly. The galaxy had a lot of naturally armored targets, his preference for a handgun that could reliably punch through ceramic body armor at 100m seemed more and more like a prophetic vision than Jerry just being a gun nut every damn day.

Weapons training done, Jerry turns to his daily work out. He only had body weight options without going back to the Dauntless for now, but that was fine. He'd rigged a pull up bar among other things to maintain his conditioning.

It confused the girls a bit. He'd shown he could infuse himself with axiom enough that he could probably have a fair shot on an Apuk in an arm wrestling contest, so why work his own muscles? They enjoyed the show however, so they were hardly going to try to stop him.

A quick cold shower to finish shaking the rust off, and prevent inadvertent morning glory, they actually had things to do today, and lounging around after a workout was a great way to tease the girls into a little fun.

Armored bodysuit on, put on some of the slick civilian attire that Syl had picked out for him. Jerry tucks his weapons into axiom pockets in his jacket with another, far more friendly smile.

"Man I don't know what's gotten into me recently... but I think I like it."

"Mhmm... I can hazard a guess, marriage suits you clearly."

Syl slinks into the room in a light dressing gown and drapes herself over his shoulders, nuzzling into his neck and kissing him tenderly a few times.

"Not that I want to sound biased or anything, but you do seem quite happy as a married man, and you know Nadi, myself and our future sisters are going to make sure you stay happy as a married man. Come what may we'll stand against it all together."

Jerry turns and greets Syl properly with a deep, breath stealing kiss.

"Mhmm. You sound like you're concerned... Did something come up?"

Syl frowns. "Not so much per se... but that attack on those two Carib women under Undaunted protection has me worried. Then there was the attack on those three humans doing laundry, then that nightclub attack on that kid... Herbert, right? And finally all that crazy shit at the charity Admiral Cistern attended with Ambassador Tal. Seems like trouble follows you humans everywhere you go."

Jerry slips out of Syl's arms and shifts around behind her, wrapping her up in his arms from behind now, as her tail automatically winds around his leg.

"Regretting hooking up with me?"

"Not on your life hot shot." Syl giggles. "Trouble's just part of life... besides, I'm enough of an adept to know what you're hiding under your pillow, if that massive pistol of yours can't handle it, I don't want to meet it. I certainly don't want to meet whatever it is without you." Syl sighs. "There is one thing. I'm a bit jealous of Nadi. She seemed to get gravid the first night!" The fox-like alien pouts for a moment. "I was hoping to be the first to present you a child."

"It's not a race, and you'll always be my first wife. The position's certainly an odd one coming from Cruel Space, but the title, the crown if you want to name yourself queen of our household, is yours."

Syl melts into her lover's arms, snuggling happily.

"Goddess I knew I got lucky with you, a man seducing a woman! Just being pursued is so... special. Continuing to fall in love with you is going to be wonderful my dear."

"I suppose having to do the dating after the fact makes a lot more sense in a society with an average of one male to a hundred women."

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"It doesn't always go like that. Meet cutes, marriage interviews or negotiations, matchmakers, dating services and a million other ways. Lots of options that let people find love, or at least affection, or to ensure compatibility, then get married. But with you I was feeling a bit... impulsive. Even without being able to smell you, there’s just something about you that makes my heart race. I imagine I'd have crawled over my desk before you could show me all those lovely animals if I could have smelled your pheromones. I’m bonded to you and they can still hit me like a plasma cannon."

Syl nuzzles at his neck, sighing softly as she loves on her husband with every ounce of strength in her body and making Jerry feel like he could arm wrestle a Cannidor and win..

“Mhmm. I’ve been meaning to ask darling, from what I know of human life spans, have you been considering a healing coma?”

Jerry stops dead for a second. He’d kind of been waiting for this topic to come up, and it had been something he’d been wondering about.

“Too old for you darling?”

“Hardly, I rather like your mature air, and if you were any more vigorous I’d be begging you to take more wives just for help in bed! I was just thinking for your health’s sake it wouldn’t be a bad time to return to your prime age wise.”

“Is it really that common to get a healing coma?”

“Volpir lifespans are quite similar to humans, and I’ve just undergone my third healing coma. I’m one hundred and thirty standard years old, and by some standards I tend to leave it further than I should. It costs nearly nothing and just takes some time out of one’s schedule. So I try to be as healthy as I can be. It’s not just deaging after all, it cleans up all sorts of trauma.”

“Hmmm. That’s a good point. I have some metal in my ribs I could stand to get out…”

“If you’re worried about your tattoos, or even some of your scars, they can be cosmetically reapplied. There’s services that specialize in that actually.”

Jerry smiles up at Syl.

“Probably won’t hurt as much as getting them the first time.”

“The scars or the tattoos?”

“Yes.”

Syl leans forward to plant a series of kisses on Jerry’s cheek and chin before finally slinking again and kissing him deeply on the lips.

"Say… on another note, I think it's about time. Shall we go have a look at our other prototype?"

Jerry resists racing downstairs like a child going for a Christmas present. He'd grown up with dogs. Served with dogs as an integral part of his unit in the Raiders. He had a beloved companion in Togo for nearly fifteen years. While Syl and Nadi had helped deal with loneliness in one way, he missed having a pet.

Going into space after losing Togo had been an utterly miserable experience. Very little to distract himself from that loss once he'd gone into the black. Zero G had sucked for everyone, and at least he'd had a little of Togo's ashes in a little keepsake to help deal with what was a minor tragedy to some, and equivalent to losing a family member for others.

Today however it'd be all worth it. The risk. The homesickness. The near insanity of six months of zero g. Getting in shootouts with alien scumbags for the full on dumbest reasons he'd ever heard of.

Hand in hand with Syl he approaches the cloning tank that they'd selected for the first experiment. He’d intentionally avoided this tank, leaving it safely in Nadi’s gifted hands. Even if it had failed, it'd still be Mikasa. As would the next, and the next, if that's what it took. And when it succeeded he knew he'd hug that Mikasa all the tighter for the loss of her ‘sisters’. Far from a failure however, floating quietly in the fluid was a single, perfect puppy.

Syl steps to the tank's controls, reviewing the readouts carefully. "Looks like everything is as it should be, we targeted the development period perfectly. We have one healthy American Alsatian puppy, aged about three months. Ready for solid food and all that."

"I still don't see how this isn't accelerated aging."

The detailed explanation about how pushing aging forward interacted with cloned tissue and axiom had confused him to hell and back.

The pretty vixen, deep in her work, finds time to roll her eyes.

"I told you, the cheat in the cloning process targets a point in a creature's development cycle. You can aim for pre birth, which is best for extremely complex creatures, or very sensitive ones, or you can target slightly post birth by a few of your Terran months tops. Anything further than that and you risk the creature in question having developmental issues mentally and otherwise. If we had a surrogate available, I'd suggest producing pups as if they were just "born", then having the surrogate nursemaid them for the few months or so till a puppy is independent, but since this is the first dog out of cruel space..."

"Right, that makes sense. I think it finally clicked this time. Post is likely to be popular with customers because it's close to an "instant" result right? You want a puppy, you order a puppy, and a couple days later, bam. Puppy."

"Exactly darling."

Jerry stops as something knocks together in his brain. “Wait, so if you can clone living beings, why not clone more men?”

A dark emotion crosses Syl’s face for a moment. “Ah, that. Well. It’s much like true artificial intelligence compared to a synthetic mind, or a purely artificial and far more simple synthetic intelligence. It’s tried every now and then, but there’s just… something missing. Every time it’s been tried it’s ended in disaster. In one notable case, the clones… apparently realized they were a product, or something. They rebelled and overloaded the reactor of the space station they were on. Killing themselves and the illicit organization that was trying to produce them.”

“Does AI always kill itself too?”

“It’s less that it kills itself but more that it can’t take the final step to true personhood for some reason. It also has no desire to preserve itself. Any attempt to write that kind of code into an AI, the AI automatically deletes it. Every time the experiment has been attempted. With SIs able to do everything simple, and synthetic sapient lifeforms able to do everything else, most people have just… stopped trying. There’s thousands of years of attempts of course, but still the singularity can’t be reached. Some religions, including Synth based religions even say that attempting such a thing is deeply and morally wrong.”

“Wait wait, there’s Synth religions?”

“Oh yes, they promote cyberization of the body, and ‘ascension’ is their greatest sacrament, the full upload of a sapient being’s mind into a synthetic body. In the union of the machine and soul, they believe, is the potential of life truly realized. Ah! Here we go darling, it’s time.”

The puppy starts to drift downwards as the tank begins to drain, a warning light on the tank strobing to make sure someone's paying attention to it.

"Back on cloning for our business, honestly if they're stable, it'd be better to target an age around this one for a lot of the livestock initially too. Artificial impregnation of the livestock, and pets for that matter, with cloned fertilized eggs is probably healthier for the animals long term, but immediate term being able to immediately put feet or hooves on the ground and be fed and looked after with only food, water and affection as opposed to the incessant and detailed needs of a helpless infant..."

Syl continues to monitor the ‘birth’, taking notes almost on autopilot as she flicks through various read outs with a master’s precision and speed.

Jerry leans in as the last of the water drains. An axiom field dries off the last of the fluid, as the puppy slowly starts to stir.

"Pulse good, at least I think it's good. Hopefully these veterinary manuals you got are right. Breathing… Lungs are fully drained of the hyper-oxygenated fluid... and she just took her first proper breath. Brain waves... good. She's stirring. Alright. Let's open the tank up. Wouldn't want her to open her eyes and only see the tank when there's cuddles on hand."

Syl

Syl snuggles in close, watching Jerry as much as the newly created life form before her. She was curious about the puppy of course, but she was far more curious about her husband and his reaction.

She knew this was incredibly important to him, that getting Togo's ‘daughter’ meant all the world to him. Now she'd see the full spectrum of her husband's emotions. They'd been tightly contained previously. Not in the way of one who bottles their emotions up, but in the way of someone who knows how to manage, control, and isolate them in the name of getting the job done. With this success, she believed he would finally allow himself to celebrate, and to mourn, and she would do everything she could to support him through that.

The stirring puppy seemingly instinctively nuzzles into Jerry as he pulls her out of the tank and holds her in his arms, Syl can't help but feel a pang of longing deep in her stomach. Was this what Jerry would look like holding their first born?

Sure the face was different, and the fur. And the four legs. The lack of sapience. But with enough squinting, she could imagine it was a Volpir kit. It made her heart flutter, and she embraces both spouse and tiny creature as the little being continues to stir.

Finally, the little canine shakes off the great sleep that marked its birth and development and opens its eyes. A lupine yellow with a deep intelligence behind them, she looks to Jerry first, then Syl, and murmurs a happy sound before snuggling a bit more, clearly enjoying her ‘parents' embrace.

Jerry plants a kiss on the crown of the little creature's head, making her attentive ears wiggle a bit as she starts to look around and visually explore her new environment.

"Hello Mikasa... today's an extra special day now that you're here with us."