Tags for This Story: Furry, Anal, Rimming
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Just as Arnold had predicted, the 'few months' needed to upgrade the portal's power sources was compressed down into a few weeks thanks to a truly unbelievable amount of resources that the entire world threw at the problem. Somehow the notion of humans trapped in another dimension made old political differences much less important. The entire Earth was united under the idea of 'our people are in trouble, and we're going to get them back'.
It still made no difference. Grace sat and clutched her hands together as the assembled staff and VIPs sat through another interminable charging sequence in Main Operations. There was another horribly long moment while they charged everything up and...still saw nothing. She didn't see so much as the tiniest spark from the center of the great machine.
After John and Arnold had gone through their various mutterings and pointing at graphs, General Gossett stepped up onto the dais next to the controls. As bad as Grace felt, General Gossett looked even worse. The soldier was still impeccably groomed, but the bags under his eyes betrayed the pressure he was under. After another whispered consultation with the two scientists, he turned and surveyed them all.
"We're still collating our data. There's an all-hands meeting in six hours."
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Private Jack Rockatansky took the rifle from the rabbit-dude and eyed it with something close to lust while the furry guy talked.
"Now, what we've done is take some of your remaining 'fifty-cal' ammunition and reproduced it. We don't have that many ammunition factories, so we're having to re-tool one before we can really produce large quantities. But in the meantime we wanted a test weapon to fire our version of your ammo before we test them out in your machine guns."
"Makes sense," said Rockatansky distantly. He was used to getting handed weapons that were well-made but also clearly mass-produced. But this...the gun in his hands could only be described as
art
, with flowing clean lines and a meticulously crafted stock. It looked like a bespoke large hunting rifle. "You sized this for us?"
The cheerful rabbit-guy's name was Gunthar Smallburrow, and he was a gunsmith and machinist. He was the first lagomorph that Rockatansky had seen with actual muscles in his arms. Gunthar nodded at the private's question. "I figured it would be easier for you monkey-boys to test. I tried out an earlier test-article and, well..." He rubbed his furry shoulder as if in memory of a painful injury. "Now for this one I used our standard rifle template and made it larger to fit both you and the larger round. It's a bolt-action only, like our rifles. But I figured it would be better to just change one thing at a time."
Rockatansky looked up at the distant target. The two of them were at the firing range that had been set up near the defenses around Hadley's Farm, and they had set up their test at the longest range. At this distance, the man-sized card looked like a small white fleck.
And
this rifle only had iron sights and no scope, so even hitting the damn thing would take some doing.
The Ranger smiled. He was well-acknowledged to be the best shot in the platoon, so if he could get this to work he'd have bragging rights for months. He looked down and levered open the bolt. "There's no magazine, right?"
The gunsmith shook his head, his big eyes apologetic. "Like I said, I only wanted to test one thing at a time."
Rockatansky nodded and held out a hand. Gunthar put what looked like a perfectly cromulent fifty-caliber round into his hand. The private held the cartridge up and gave it a quick once-over. Apart from the lack of markings on its back, he'd be hard-pressed to tell that it came from somewhere other than a factory back home. He nodded his approval and loaded the round. He closed the bolt; its lever was just the right size, and the movement was smooth as silk. He got down into a prone shooter's position and placed the rifle barrel on the rest they'd set up. The rifle's metal was cool against his cheek as he set up the shot; he could just see the target's center. It was a small black dot that seemed to dance in the heat waves thrown up by the ground. Today was more-or-less windless, so at least he had that going for him.
The Ranger let out a breath and squeezed. The trigger action was as lovely as the rest of the weapon, with the 'glass rod breaking' feel that was so desired. He loaded and shot three more times, then they safed the rifle and trouped downrange to see how they'd done.
Rockatansky began chortling as they got close to the target. He could see four neat holes punched right around the center, grouped tight enough to lay a playing card over them. As Gunthar made notes the private looked down at the weapon.
"Oh, baby, where have you
been
all my life?" With a good scope on it this thing would give any sniper rifle back home a run for its money. "How much for it?"
Gunthar looked up from his note-taking. "Eh? Oh, you can keep using that if you like. I'll let them know the prototype rounds work well, and we can also see about making some mounted weapons in that caliber that our people can use."
Rockatansky was stunned at the gift. "No, wait, I gotta pay you for this. When our portal gets re-opened, I got a good chunk of change saved up."
The gunsmith laughed. "You're money's no good here, literally."
As the pair headed back to the other side of the range, Rockatansky saw a few of the new militia walk down from one of the berms. These guys were dressed in green/black and blue/black outfits, which meant they were from the cities of Hingbrook and Ecklam, respectively.
"Mornin', folks," he said to them pleasantly.
Most of them returned his friendly wave with an equally pleasant greeting, although there were a few in both militia that just gave curt nods in reply. It was the first really standoffish response that the Ranger had encountered, but he just shrugged it off. After all, they were still probably getting used to dealing with giant monkey-boys.
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The weeks passed in a whirl for Ned. He'd been tasked with continuing to manufacture explosives 'just in case' the terror-birds tried something again. That took most of his time during the day, and at night he returned to the barracks and Holly's enthusiastic greeting. She'd been given her old job back, although a lot of her own time was getting eaten up in interviews with various reporters from all over the planet.
Eventually they decided that the barracks were not quite 'homey' enough. After her disappearance, Holly was declared 'missing, presumed dead', which meant her apartment had been let out to someone else. Fortunately Emma had moved her things into storage. It took some searching, but finally Holly and Ned found an apartment with ceilings tall enough to keep Ned from hitting his head everywhere. Unfortunately that apartment was on the
top
floor of its building, which in turn meant that they had to haul all of her stuff up four flights of stairs.
'They' turned out to be mostly 'Ned'. He couldn't resist it when Holly batted her big blue eyes and asked him to carry the heavy items. He was
so
strong, after all. Ned knew he was being manipulated but went through with it anyway. She didn't have
