“Rocket.”
Rocket stirred in the little round bed, curling up into a tighter ball to escape the sound.
“Rocket, wake up.”
“Go 'way. It's my sleep shift.”
A webbed hand no bigger than his own stroked his tail. There was only one person in the galaxy he'd permit that familiarity. “I wouldn't wake you if it weren't important, honey.”
Rocket's whiteless feral eyes popped open, and he gave himself a moment to wake. He didn't snap to alertness as fast as he once had, and it took him a minute to gather his senses.
He was curled up in his favorite bed. He had many beds these days, as many as he wanted, but this was the old, patched bed, the one Pete gave him many years ago. The one Star-Lord bought on Earth, had monogrammed with his name and a Ravager symbol. It was a round, padded bed, meant for some Earth animal, but Pete hadn't told him that. He got Rocket the bed because he thought Rocket would like it, and though Rocket knew at once it was meant for a pet, Pete never said a word. He'd thought Rocket was too proud to sleep in a bed made for an animal. If only he'd known the awful places Rocket slept in the beginning. In a cage, under a bush in the rain, on a pile of garbage in an alley. Rocket wouldn't turn his nose up at a comfy bed,especially when it was offered by someone he had begun to genuinely considered a friend.
Rocket crawled out of the bed, and Lylla was there to meet him. She wasn't as young as she'd been either, but anti-aging tech meant for bald bodies had been adaptable to their small, furry forms. It hadn't been cheap to get it, but there was no shortage of money now. They'd been married for over fifty years, now.
“Mornin', love,” Rocket growled, and she put her head under his chin the way she always did when he hugged her.
“It's not morning, silly,” she said, and her long ottery whiskers twitched with a smile. “I know you're tired. We've been so busy lately. I didn't want to wake you, but a ship's coming in and they want to talk to you personally.”
“Gamora?” Most of the old Guardian crew were retired now, as rich as he was or living in quiet seclusion. Their galaxy-saving days were over. The one-time Destroyer ran an orphanage on Xandar now, of all things. Except Gamora, who just kept going on adventures, with or without Pete. “Is it the Sister Act?”
Weird name for a ship, but when they'd been to Terra one time Pete made them watch a bunch of movies. One of them had that name and when Gamora and Nebula teamed up as freelance troubleshooting agents it'd seemed appropriate. They still stopped by once a year or so, or when they needed repairs.
“No dear, it's the Vengeance.”
Rocket came all the way awake. “The Vengeance? They can't possibly expect repairs.”
Lylla giggled. Ah, that sound. Absolutely, positively worth waking up for. “All the work crews are tied up anyway. Blackjack's division is working on the Bitterblossom, Wal's on the Sovereign Citizen and Pyko's teams are all working on those Xandarian covettes that got damaged in that ion storm. And that supercarrier freighter is due in tomorrow.”
“Not to mention we aren't even capable of docking the das't thing!” But he had to respond. You didn't ignore the Star of Vengeance. He reluctantly squirmed loose from Lylla's hug and pulled on his best tunic, armorweave (old habits die hard) with the fewest chemical stains of anything he habitually wore. He had a dress jacket somewhere but he hadn't dug that out since he attended Stakar and Aleta's son's wedding what, three years ago? It was easy to lose track of time when you ran something as busy as Sanctuary II, better known as the Sanctuary Independent Shipyard.
“Gotta go honey.”
“I know dear.” She held up a datapad. “I'll be in the computer core if you need me.”
Diplomat. That's what they'd made Lylla to be, those assholes who made the second generation of Uplifts. Her built-in linguistics and negotiation skills had somehow translated to her becoming an ace programmer and manager. It was just as well, since she was not interested in using the other skills they'd given her. Assassination was not in his wife's nature.
Rocket was the only survivor of the original Sanctuary complex. All the other test subjects had died and he'd killed most of the researchers when he escaped. But records had survived, a new illegal research group sprang up, and that's how he'd met Lylla, Blackjack, Wal and the other second-gens. And when that one was shut down still others had sprung up. He'd been very busy for a while fighting the ever-regenerating hydra heads of illegal research teams and the result was an awful lot of freed and now unemployed Uplifts.
“Your fault, Rocket ol' pal,” he muttered as he paced down the corridor. He would make better time on all fours but the Vengeance could wait that long. He had become so well known as a successful Uplift that animal researchers on a dozen worlds had begun trying to duplicate the effort. He'd been one of the first. There were thousands now, and about two-thirds of them worked here. He and Lylla had in fact set up Sanctuary II mostly to train and employ them. Almost all of them were cybernetically augmented and programmed with useful skills, and Sanctuary II had become of such use to neighboring empires that whole treaties had been hammered out to keep it free of interference. They were strictly neutral and some of the best mechanics in known space, with Rocket at the head of the tech pyramid. None of the other research complexes had quite managed to capture lightning in a bottle as the Halfworld lab had with him, horrific as their methods had been.
That didn't mean the other techs weren't brilliant. They were, and Rocket was the first one to admit it. But it was a source of pride that no one could take a box of scraps and turn it into a planet-cracking bomb like ol' Rocket.
A feline Uplift came around the corridor and nodded respectfully. “I was coming to get you, sir. There's a Kree superdreadnought....”
“I know, Hanya. Lylla told me. I'll handle it.” The feline didn't quite salute (Rocket didn't go for that, but a lot of the Uplifts were built to be military slaves and it was a hard habit for them to break), fell to all fours and trotted off.
Rocket left the living quarters and entered one of the common areas, a stadium-sized park with artificial lighting that'd easily pass for real sunlight and trees, grass, fountains. Rocket smiled, remembering tinkering with the lighting to get it just so when they welded together the first few segments of what would become the Sanctuary Independent Shipyard.
“G'day sir,” said a squirrel uplift curled up in a tree with a datapad. Furry children were playing on the grass, splashing in the fountains. Rocket punted an errant soccer ball back to one of the older ones, fighting the urge to stop for a few minutes and enjoy the park.
“Good day, Skik. That better be homework.”
“It is, sir.” The squirrel had the good grace to look embarrassed. “No more cutting classes, I promise.”
That did make Rocket pause. He lowered his voice so only the squirrel could hear. “I know you're sweet on Dalla. Cutting class occasionally to see her is okay, all right? Long as your grades stay up.”
The squirrel smiled and waved. The squirrel's girlfriend was a crewwoman Uplift on a freighter, and only stopped by every few weeks. Rocket couldn't blame him for wanting to see her. He hadn't had...anyone to see, really, until he'd met Lylla. The galaxy wasn't as lonely for Uplifts as it had once been.
“Just watch out for her teeth,” he said, and Skik laughed. Dalla was something Pete called a marten, and on Terra martens ate squirrels. Not here, though.
He'd made the Vengeance wait as long as he dared. Making them wait showed they weren't the most important thing in the galaxy, though they probably thought they were. Best not to push it, though. Another minute's walk and his office's doors recognized his DNA and whooshed open.
His secretary looked up from a screen. “Vengeance on line one, sir.”
“Thank you, Alex.” Alex was one of only a dozen humanoids on the station. Another was waiting in Rocket's office.
“Paul! They didn't tell me you were in.” A broad smile curved Rocket's expressive raccoon face as he shook the doctor's hand. “Anything you need to talk to me about?”
Paul Foster had risen politely when his boss entered, but flopped back into a formless beanbag chair as suited to humans as quadrupeds. “No no, I just had an afternoon without checkups and thought I'd stop by. Something going on?” Paul Foster was Rocket's oldest humanoid friend, and the only survivor of the original project that made Rocket. The only researcher there Rocket hadn't personally killed, because unlike most of those two-legged monsters Paul was a good man. Only the moments of human kindness he'd gotten from Paul had kept him alive and sane in the little cage and through the series of horrific operations.
There were things Rocket had done during his escape that he still regretted, fifty-plus years later. That one security guard hadn't deserved to die, for one thing. But he didn't regret sparing Paul, and all these years later the doctor was the station's chief medical officer.
“See for yourself, Paul.” Rocket waved a screen wider until it snapped out to cover the whole ten-meter-wide office wall. “External view.”
“Oh good lord.” Paul gaped. He knew the ship he was looking at had to be on the far side of the minefield and orbital forts that protected Sanctuary II from the occasional ill-advised pirate raid. It still loomed huge, dwarfing a dozen escort vessels that themselves were at least battlecruiser-class. “Kree?”
“Paul, meet the Star of Vengeance, Kree Home Fleet Flagship. Vengeance, meet Paul.” He motioned the doctor to silence and touched a blinking light on his desk. A life-sized holo of a Kree in a beribboned uniform appeared between them and the wall screen. “Ah, Admiral Dek. I apologize for the wait, you arrived during my sleep shift.”
The blue-skinned alien's eyes narrowed as he considered whether he was being disrespected. “Director Rocket, I expect a person of your...stature is very busy. The delay is understandable.”
Veiled insult aside, it was as polite a greeting as he could expect from a Kree. Respect, that's what it was. Respect, all he'd ever wanted (in hindsight) and which he, and the other Uplifts, now received. It helped that they were useful. “Admiral, you know that the Kree-Skrull Accords prevent Sanctuary Independent Shipyards from performing maintenance on your vessels. Even if we could dock something the size of the Vengeance. Which we can't.” He smiled.
The Kree liked their ships big. Late unlamented Ronan the Accuser had commanded the Dark Aster, a vessel nearly five kilometers wide. The Vengeance as long as the Aster was wide, far bulkier, and unlike Ronan's carrier the superdreadnought was massively armed. Strongly defended as Sanctuary II was Rocket wouldn't want to be the one trying to stop the Vengeance if it came at them through the minefield. Or it could just stand off and test their point defense. There were enough antimatter warheads on that boat to glass a planet.
There were only six Vengeance-class ships. One had come after the Milano once, which Pete had compared to sending an elephant to swat a mosquito. Rocket even knew what those animals were, now. There was an elephant Uplift working down in parts receiving and he'd swatted mosquitoes on a visit to Terra.
“Well then Admiral, why the visit? Our permits are up to date and there are no outlaw ships currently in dock.” Various treaties allowed even Ravagers to use the shipyard, but you didn't quibble about that with a massive Kree dreadnought fifty kilometers out.
“Someone wishes to speak to you,” the admiral said. He smirked. “I think you know him.”
The holo disappeared as the vast viewscreen was suddenly filled by something other than a starfield and distant vessels. A great green head, bereft of body, with a mass of tentacle-like protrusions in place of hair. “Supremor,” Rocket breathed.
“Director Rocket,” boomed the head, and Rocket winced as the automatic volume controls kicked on to mute it somewhat. It was a show of power, just as remotely taking over the screen, right through Rocket and Lylla's elaborate hand-engineered hacking defenses had been. He was speaking to the “head” of the entire Kree Empire, one of the two or three most powerful individuals in the known universe. The Shi'ar Empress commanded more military might, but not by much, and in a distant third place was the battered remnants of the Skrull, whoever was in charge after their homeworld was destroyed by the Devourer of Worlds.
Once Thanos would be in the mix somewhere, but the Mad Titan was either dead or in hiding. No one had proof of seeing him in thirty years, but there were always rumors.
“Supremor,” Rocket replied, and in a show of power of his own he sat down behind his desk rather than stay bolt upright like a junior officer confronted by a flag admiral. “What may Sanctuary Independent Shipyards do you today?”
“I would speak to you and your wife together,” the Supreme Intelligence boomed.
“All right,” Rocket said, though he tilted his head to the side. He didn't need to gesture to the monitor panel by the door, he could see Alex on it already making the call. A good secretary was attentive but not intrusive.
“So, how go things in the Empire,” Rocket said to pass the time. “I hear you patched things up with Nova Corps after that messy little incident at Centauri.”
“You were offered a unique honor,” the Supreme Intelligence boomed, as though he hadn't spoken at all. There was an echo of sorts, as though many voices spoke at once. In a sense they did. The Supremor was a collective intelligence, the result of centuries of adding notable Kree minds to its matrix. Admirals, politicians, geniuses, poets, engineers. The Supremor was justifiable proud of itself. “No non-Kree had ever been offered inclusion into myself before. Your technical skills could live forever in me.”
“And I refused,” Rocket said. “I still do. I am content to remain myself.”
The doors whooshed open and Lylla trotted in on all fours. For a short-legged critter like herself that was simply a faster mode of transit. Even Rocket did it when he was in a hurry, though he was better suited to bipedal locomotion than his wife.
“Supremor,” she said, her whiskers bristling in a friendly manner. Always the consummate diplomat, Lylla. “What can our humble little station do for the mighty Kree Empire?”
“It is in regard to your son,” the Supremor boomed.
“Rolla?” It had taken a great deal of money and work from some of the galaxy's greatest doctors to make it possible for she and Rocket to have children at all. Though ultimately they were from the same biological root (for even Rocket had eventually had to admit that just about all known Uplifts could be traced back to Terran species) they could never have had a child without a lot of effort. And not the pleasurable sort of effort that usually resulted in children. Nothing stopped them from trying, of course, and the two lonely Uplifts tried with great enthusiasm, but it wouldn't have resulted in children without the aforementioned medical work.
Eventually they had three children, the girls, Lyta and Gem, both working on the station, and Rolla, who had a rebellious streak wider than he was tall. Last they'd heard he was on Rigel scandalizing the locals by demonstrating that a four foot tall Rigellian woman and a foot-shorter Ottcoon (Rotter?) were in fact the same height lying down. It would have been unthinkable in Rocket's early days but Uplifts were common enough now that these things happened, little as the stodgy Rigellians approved.
“Oh dear,” Lylla said to the frowning Supremor, and she and Rocket spoke the next words together. It was neither the first nor would it be the last time they said them.
“What has he done now?”