This is a book that I've wanted to start writing for years...this is the first chapter so far...please feel free to critique. I don't know if I will share any other chapters, as the book gets very adult-themed, and I need to look further into the site rules before posting or promising anything....

Chains of Persecution

Chapter 1

Excruciating pain shot from my hip into my back, radiating up my spine for far longer than I would have liked. I ripped my hand from the clutches of the young blonde leading me, summoning up my most intimidating scowl as I glowered down at her. Her teeth flashed un-pologetically back at me, meeting my scowl with a bright grin. My dour disposition never seemed to faze her.

"I'm sorry, Connor!" she chirped in a bright tone, obviously not sorry at all, "I'm just sooo excited that I finally managed to talk you into getting yourself a new little family member!"

I tried desperately to maintain my irritation with the girl, but that beaming face never failed to melt me right down to my icy core. Her name is Jennifer. Shes a small little ball of blonde sunlight...or that's the persona she tries to fool you with. Jennifer was my second-in-command during the wars, and there is a lot of power compacted into that tiny frame. Her sky blue eyes glimmer with intelligence, reflecting a brain which never stops turning. Those eyes also hold certain warmth, forcing even the most insensitive prick of a man to relax around her a bit, but I have also seen those eyes go cold and hard as steel. Those are not moments I prefer to remember lil Jennifer by. That woman is scary when things do not go her way, and she is as battle-worn as any soldier, despite her deceptive aura of innocence. I always thought that she could make me a dearly coveted and beloved wife, but unfortunately there is the issue that she only drinks from the waters of Venus...if ya catch my drift.

Jennifer really came through for me after a devastating injury during our last skirmish against the Vishnu. It was the last fleet they had stationed in our system, and my commander had decided that it was time to finish them off for good...or at least for many years. See, the Vishnu originate from a system billions of light years away, and even with the most current and advanced space traveling technology, it would take them over 300 years to send support, and that's assuming they utilize the wormhole nearest to their system.

Anyway, wanting to finally finish the ******s off, my commander decided to go on the offensive, but at the same time he wanted to minimize casualties. Call in Saturn Unit, a Special Forces airborne unit which I was in command of. We were a scant thirteen men tasked with the impossible: take control of and destroy the Vishnu control ship. Take the control ship, and the fleet will fall like flies to Home Fleet. The battle is a very long story, and perhaps I'll tell ya someday, but we're getting off point. Short story is everyone in my unit was killed, and I was nearly killed trying to protect what remained of my unit: Jennifer...and shes been a thorn in my side ever since. I think she feels she owes me or some ****** like that. Whatever it is, I cant shake her off me any more than a dog can shake off fleas.

Back on point, Jennifer had finally cracked my stony exterior and managed to win an enormous jackpot of feel-goodyness from my softer and more pliable innards. We were on our way to the market in search of a new pet. She was always on my case about being more social and finding a good woman to take care of me after the injury, and when she discovered that I had never discovered the joys of having an adorable little lap monkey...she decided that finding me the perfect pet would be a good compromise to my preferred life as sour-tempered recluse.

The section of market reserved for the pet trade was not exactly a pretty place. There were about two acres of land sanctioned solely for the trade of animals, including everything from beasts of burden to little songbirds to brighten up your living room. The animals were kept in some pretty cramped conditions, and there was very little shelter available to them. The ****** and the piss-soaked dirt was usually just raked to one side once a day until the market closed for the week...only then was it scooped up and taken to the burning pit. The resulting smell was pretty rancid, and I always hated seeing those miserable beasts hunkered down, breathing in a mixture of dust churned up from the barren ground and their own fecal matter. I mean, it wasn't like they lived their lives there, but if they weren't sold; those creatures were in the market day and night all week until the market closed for the weekend. Scraps of food were just tossed into the pens where they scuffled amongst each other to obtain their portion. Oftentimes the small and timid died before the week was out...the bodies just piled about a quarter of a mile away, and when the wind was just right the smell of rotting corpses mingled unpleasantly with the smell of piss and ******. It was a pretty depressing place to be.

Luckily for my sensitive nose, it was the first day of the market, and the sands had been scraped and washed and the smell was simply a pleasant earthy smell mixed with the musk of beasts. Jennifer led me past the first pens of very young animals, bred to be domestic house pets, explaining that they were much too young and would need more care than Id be willing to give. I glanced at the little ones as we passed, smiling and wiggling my fingers at those who were brave enough to lace their fingers between the chain link and stare up at me with interest. Most; however, sat hunkered in the dirt staring at nothing, tracks of dried tears cutting tracks over dirty cheeks. Every now and then one would let out a small mewling cry, probably calling for an absent mother. I felt a surge of pity for the young beasts, but they would be happier once they were adopted out.

Jennifer stopped me at a slightly larger enclosure, between the toddler lot and the teenager lot. Across the street was a lot reserved for adults who were awaiting sale by a previous owner, freshly captured adults from the wilds, and beasts that had proven to be vicious and were awaiting their final stop in life: the incinerator...where all unwanted creatures eventually ended up. That was a practice which I had always disagreed with; not really the fact that they burned the creatures' bodies, but the fact that they just dumped them in there alive. I suppose the screams didn't bother the lot workers, but they sure as hell gave me nightmares.

As Jennifer prattled on about her stock (she bred Neko as a hobby), I wandered over to the pen reserved for those sorry creatures that would face the incinerator at the end of the week. Known to be vicious and highly unmanageable, those who were placed in the "WARNING: DANGEROUS ANIMALS" pen were rarely sold...their only release being handed over to the searing hot flames of death by their own fed up owners. Okay, so technically they are signed over by the owners to the market with the note "If not sold, destroy", but they may as well be dumping the struggling bodies into the incinerator themselves.

Today, there was only one poor creature lying crumpled in the pen. She lie on her side, one arm stretched straight out, her head of dark matted hair resting in the nook of her elbow. Her back was to me, so I could not see the face, but I could definitely see each and every bulge of the vertebrae in her back, jutting out from either tanned or dirty skin that was laced with fresh whip welts. Her tail lay limply in the dirt, the fur just as matted as the hair on her head. This was a poor creature who had obviously not been well cared for.

An ear twitched as my boot scuffed the earth, alerting her to my presence. She gracefully rose, though it was evident that every muscle in her body was taut, as if waiting to be attacked at any moment. She slowly straightened and turned her head my way. As her golden eyes met mine, something within me connected with the ****** immediately. Those eyes...they seemed so intelligent and so.sad. I could almost feel her pain and suffering reaching out from that stare and enveloping me. The breath caught in my chest and I took an involuntary step forward, reaching out and resting my hand atop the chain link. I couldn't explain it, but I wanted her. I could not leave here without her, though she didn't seem to feel the same way. After regarding me coldly for a few seconds, she dropped back to the earth, resting her head against her arm once more. She was still facing me; however, and continued to regard me with those golden eyes from where she lie on the ground.

"What are you doing over here?" Jennifer questioned, having noticed my absence and appearing beside me, "You wouldn't want anything from here. Too much trouble."

She must have caught the look on my face as I turned my head to acknowledge her because she suddenly frowned and squared off against me, crossing her arms over her chest, eyes flashing that cold steel which meant she was preparing for a fight.

"I..MAY have entertained the thought," I began to say, but she cut me off with a harsh scoff.

"LOOK at her!" she practically yelled, indicating the prone form with a careless wave of her hand, "It's obviously from the wilds! Full grown! Wolf by the look of it!"

Hmm.perhaps I should back up for you Earthlings who may not have heard of the planet Neko or the strange creatures which inhabit it. I hear that the Vishnu Wars is actually being left out of the history books in many schools on the outer rims of the Earth United Federation systems, so I'll start from the beginning.

Centuries ago (approximately five centuries ago that is) the greater Earth powers like China, USA, and the United Kingdom, were a booming metropolis. Skyscrapers miles high, airships, self-driving cars...things we can only imagine now. The price for all this great stuff was, of course, natural resources. Gas, coal, oil...anything that could be dug up from the ground was dug up. Forests were cleared to make way for agriculture and cattle. Dams were built to store what little fresh water we had left, and even the oceans water was being utilized after a way to purify mass amounts of salt water was invented. As we used up more and more of these resources, species of animal began to die out. It began with creatures like the Thylacine and Black Rhino, but I think it was when the Plains Zebra...or perhaps it was the Honey Bees? Anyway, after an important species got wiped out, Earth caught the attention of the Vishnu.

Now, nobody has ever really discovered whether the Vishnu is the name that the species calls themselves, or if it is a name they gave us out of symbolism. See, Vishnu is a Hindu goddess who protects the Earth from chaos and other such stuff. Apparently this species of aliens has some sort of network that observes different worlds that house sentient life, and they will come swooping in on a holy crusade to take out any creature which upsets the natural balance. They're the most extreme type of environmentalist. Anyway, when the Vishnu arrived, they proclaimed the human species as a parasite on the Earth, and that they would cleanse our world of this chaotic force and bring back the natural balance. Some say that they first warned us to change our ways so that we may live, but human beings have never exactly been known for giving up their own desires for the greater good. For the first time in history, all the leaders and military forces of the world banded together to fight this menace. They called this new alliance Earth United Federation.

We obviously lost, or we wouldn't be spread across hundreds of star systems across the galaxy. Basically scientists managed to reverse engineer a captured Vishnu spacecraft, and they figured out how to travel through wormholes. It was do or die. The Earth United Federation started evacuating as many people as they could, shooting them off to numerous different star systems with habitable planets. Many of the first spaceships never made it. A few fell to the Vishnu, but you can never build something perfectly the first time around, and many ships fell due to technical failures...lost forever within a wormhole or exploded across a distant star system. How did they know where these wormholes went, and where the hospitable planets were? One can only guess. I never saw the answer during any of my research. Chances are they managed to lift some star maps from the Vishnu...or perhaps they just blindly fired people off into space, hoping for the best. We were pretty desperate.

The people of this planet were some of the lucky ones who made it to a perfect planet fit to sustain human lives. There were many creatures similar to our own, including a fascinating species which were coined The Neko, based on a fantasy creature dreamed up in Japan at some point, and the namesake for our planet. Their anatomy was extraordinarily similar to that of human beings, only there were animalistic features mixed in there as well. There were different breeds of wild Neko and each breed was named after an Earth animal which most closely represented them. Despite their human appearance, the Neko were not gifted with human intelligence. Once the arduous task of domesticating them was complete, they could be trained to do simple tasks like cooking and cleaning and became beloved pets and extremely useful laborers for us human beings. It was found out that their DNA was even close enough to our own to produce human/Neko hybrids, but any pregnancy resulting from intercourse must be quickly aborted. The idea of a living being with the body of a Neko and the brain of a human frightened many, so it was declared a federal offense to allow a possible hybrid fetus to come to term. Because of the heavy fines and possible prison time, most owners are very careful not to accidentally impregnate their Neko pet.

Now that you have all had a lesson in history, lets get on with the story: I flinched a bit at Jennifer's outburst, and glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, trying to judge her temperament. Yup, she was pissed all right.

"I may have been considering it," I replied a bit sheepishly, giving her a slow and silly smile...something which usually softened her a bit, but not this time.

"We came here," Jennifer said in tight, controlled voice, "to find you a pet that was old enough to care for itself and be trained to help you out...and now you want to leave with a wild and vicious wolf that is likely un-tamable and would require more attention than even an infant?"

I shrugged in a gesture which I hoped would not be misconstrued as dismissive. I mean, the lady did have a point.

"You did say that I need to find some sort of project to keep myself busy..." I ventured.

"I didn't mean!" Jennifer began to snap back, but was suddenly interrupted by a jovial voice from behind us.