Zack had never felt worse. For all the time he had been working as a husky, Harry had been his best friend, his Rock of Gibraltar in good times and bad, through years of dealing with Park issues and Management issues and Naomi issues, and now Harry was gone. Oh, there were enough little continuities--memories, speech patterns, and so on--so that Zack knew that the body of Irene had once been the body of Harry, and the mind of Irene had once been the mind of Harry, but Harry was gone. All of Irene's talk about finally being at home in her body made Zack sick. He knew Harry, and that wasn't Harry--the experimenters at the offsite facility had found a way of implanting a gender and species identity that was far beyond anything the Park did. And there was no reason to think the technology would stop there.
There was nothing to do but to throw himself into the work of the pack, of which he now found himself leader.
"Katie? There's been a change of leadership over at the Warren. I know you're a Tim Corwall fan, so if you actually want to meet him here's your chance-he's the new Lord of the Warren. Go over there, introduce yourself, and make sure he understands about the importance of making sure all the rabbits have contraceptive berries available and that they take them. With this nonsense going on with the does, the last thing we need is pregnant rabbit-girls."
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Husky relationships tended to progress quickly--the joke was that husky couples generally waited for sex until the first date--so no one was shocked or surprised to see Sam and Goldie curled up together in Sam's bed.
Except maybe Goldie, who found herself awakened by a friendly lick on the nose and Sam murmuring that last night had been wonderful.
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"Agent Sherman! We're happy to say that we have cleared time in the transformation chamber for you to be made female again!"
"Uh, I, uh, can't do it today, uh, too much paperwork. In fact, pretty busy for the whole week. Maybe later?"
Agent Sherman put down the phone and looked at Steve snoring peacefully beside him after another very active night, and wondered how much trouble he was really in.
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"So" Tasha began, popping her claws "Since you had a whole night to think about it, what else do you have for me?"
"Uh" Vinny began "I never learned his name, but there was this German guy--at least he had a heavy German accent--who explained to me about how the things would work with the new does. He said he had designed them himself. I could pick him out of a lineup."
"No need, I know who you're talking about. Designed the new does himself, did he?"
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That was the trouble with these self-taught, "mad scientist" types like Mark. They had no idea how scientific protocols worked, Gunther thought. Not keeping a record of the original forms was just throwing away data, and was going to make it more difficult to figure out what Mark was doing and how to replicate it.
And now the stupid panther-woman wanted to question him again!
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"In the first place" Katie began, seething with rage "You may regard yourself as an ex-Lord of the Warren. If you can't carry out the prime responsibility of the job, you don't get the job. I don't know what the hell Katerina was thinking when she chose you, but it was clearly a mistake."
Tim was shrinking away from Katie. Although the huskies usually didn't set off the fear reaction in rabbits that other predators did, he definitely wanted to be far away from this angry carnivore.
"Now, as your last official act, tell the rabbits that we are all, collectively, going to gather berries."
Fortunately, Katie thought, the berries usually worked for about three days, so they had dodged a bullet here. A husky was going to have to visit daily and supervise collection and consumption until new, responsible leadership emerged from the rabbit-folk themselves. And once she was human again, she had to burn all of her Corwall first editions.