Luca stood at the summit of a moss-covered, rocky hill and stared out at his domain with profound satisfaction.

For miles into the distance, all he could see was a lush, naked landscape that ended only because his eyes couldn't follow the delightful curves of his world as it ran off ahead of him, inviting him to follow. The soft rise of deliciously shaped and supple hills, valleys that wound delightfully into lands just out of his sight, and the promise of warm, wet pools at the edge of lush forests. This was a fertile, young, nubile world. And it was all his.

"Mine," Luca growled, so satisfied he idly wondered if he shouldn't be lighting a cigarette and asking the ground beneath his feet if it was good for her, too.

Luca took a deep breath and let himself shift. Inhuman sinews receded, fur vanished, the bone-gnashing canines replaced by rows of well-bleached teeth. Colour returned to his sight, as the keen but colour-blind eyes of the wolf were replaced by eyes better able to appreciate the ascetics of ample, buxomous beauty.

His pants were tattered from the knees down, just like every pair he had ever worn when he had transformed. His right hand, out of habit, tapped his pocket to feel for the small controller for his wormhole generator. And just as he had done every time before now, he let out a brief sigh of relief that it was still there.

He spread his arms out and let himself fall onto the moss. The fall took slightly too long with the weaker pull of his world's gravity, and it felt more like falling onto a bed or a pool when his back finally reached the green beneath him.

There was a lot of fun to be had at 38% of Earth's gravity.

But something pricked at the back of his senses. Something that distressed his peace of mind; like the whine of an oil tycoon's bored trophy wife. But in this case it was a rumble, and a flash of lights high above.

Luca sat up and watched as something plunged into his sky, burning a deep line of white smoke through the air. It was too bright, too distant, and created too much smoke and fire to see with any clarity, even for his more wolfish eyes.

Luca sat and watched the object descend for a few minutes, and gradually realized the object was slowing down, and some of the fire being belched into the air was coming from the fusion rockets of a spaceship.

Mildly irritated, Luca stood up, stretched, and shifted back into the wolf. He then pushed off from the rock and hurled himself into a sprint. His powerful lope carried him across the fields, following the smoke as the long line pointed the way.

The ship slowed quite a lot as its engines pushed against its own velocity, and perhaps a few hundred feet from the ground the vessel slowed to a relative crawl 

For a brief, absurd moment, the ship hung in the air, almost wholly still just above a hill. Even Luca, who would readily admit had no interest in any vehicle that didn't have ready access to a mini-bar, could appreciate the accomplishment of arresting what looked to be a multi-thousand mile an hour free-fall in-atmosphere without overworking the ship's heat-shielding.

Luca's admiration lasted just until the engines cut out, and the ship dropped like anyone would expect six hundred tons of steel to.

The ship struck the gentle slope of the hill, and with a deafening cacophony that sounded eerily like the enthusiastic audience of the last concert Luca had attended, the ship rolled down the hill into the nearby valley.

Luca cursed to himself and pulled out his portal device. He then took the radio he had ripped out of the headpiece of the helmet he had left behind and set it in his ear.

He opened the screen of his device, pressed a few buttons, and gestured at the ground a dozen feet away. Almost immediately, a small black orb popped into existence with a hiss that sounded eerily similar to the sound a cat makes when you try to take what it's eating away.

"Viviana, darling, there's a spaceship on my planet," Luca said, appalled that even to his own ears his voice was substantially less than suave.

"We know. We've been tracking it on your satellites orbiting Mars for twenty-one minutes," Viviana replied in a tone mixing the sing-song patronizing of an elementary school teacher with the indignation of a theoretical network developer doing tech support at that same elementary school.

"And you haven't bothered to tell me any of this?" Luca asked.

"We sent a message to you twenty minutes ago. It should arrive in another thirty seconds. Radio takes twenty-one minutes to traverse the distance between Earth and Mars right now," Viviana explained. "The price you pay for a private world, honey."

Sure enough, just as she finished explaining, Luca's portal device gave a quiet wolf whistle and showed a lengthy text about an unidentified spacecraft with no transponder on a zero-burn approach. Whatever the bloody hell that was.

"I have a security team standing by. You just need to pop a bigger portal to let them through, and they'll clean up whoever this joyrider is," Viviana said.

"Could you tell how many occupants were in the ship? It's pretty small," Luca asked.

"Sensors confirmed only one occupant. The ship is registered as a small cargo freighter under the name Isabella Bonny."

"Bonny? Like Anne Bonny, the pirate?" Luca asked.

"What?" Viviana asked, her shock too enthusiastic to be fake. "They've never made a movie about her, so why do you know that?"

"I have an under-appreciated breadth of personality. You just can't see past my money," Luca said.

"That hurts, darling. I also see you for those abs. And that bikini you promised me," Viviana retorted.

"How about pure platinum?" Luca asked. "A gold bikini might get confused with Star Wars cosplay. Which I'd be into, but it doesn't really suit the celebrations."

"Won't it chafe?"

"You'll wear it for half an hour, and then it'll end up on my bedroom floor. So, this Isabella Bonny, does she have a rap sheet? Or anything to suggest she's something other than a freighter hauler who should have hired a decent mechanic?"

"Let's see..." Vivian said, and Luca could see her squinting at the computer screen in his mind's eye. "I have two arrests for stealing lobsters from restaurants and throwing them in the sea, a restraining order from the boy band 'Boo Ya Thang', ninety-four unpaid parking tickets, and... oh, this is good, she might be the only woman in history actually arrested for flashing the lead singer at a rock concert."

Luca sputtered and nearly fell over laughing. "Are you serious?"

"I am. Older rock band, one of those groups that came up while Rock & Roll was still kinda retro. Nearly gave the frontman a heart attack, but that might have just been because she was twenty years younger than anyone else at the concert," Viviana explained. "Luca, baby, should I be getting jealous?"

"Just imagine wearing history's most expensive bikini. I'll pop another portal and call you soon," Luca replied before he hit a button on his controller and the portal winked out of existence.

"Okay, it does sound a little like a fart," Luca admitted before he shifted back into the wolf and looked down the hill towards the fallen ship. He reached it in just a few short minutes, only shifting back as he neared one of the ship's entrance hatches.

As he approached, he found the door and glanced around for a security console. He found a fairly archaic-looking numbered keypad and took a careful look at it.

The '0' button was faded to the ghost of a number, while the other keys looked untouched. Seeing it reminded Luca of having to sue a security firm a few years ago, when their passcodes hadn't been changed from the factory default ones.

Luca extended his finger and typed 0-0-0-0-0-0.

The door came off with the same enthusiasm he usually saw from a socialite's dress at a pool party.

Luca stepped directly into what appeared to be the ship's bridge. There were several cracked screens, two large windows that had, impressively, managed to survive the trip, and a young woman was lying in the ship's padded flight chair.

The young woman's hair and most of her flight suit was matted in sweat. Her face was flushed, and she had a small grin on her face like she had just won something. For some reason Luca couldn't explain, she was wearing an eyepatch on a string as a necklace.

Luca approved of her cyberpunk-ish pixie cut. Smart choice for spaceflight. You never knew where long hair could get caught in zero gravity. Luca recalled this one occasion a woman's hair got caught in a zipper at an extremely inopportune moment while-

An irritated sounding cough distracted Luca's thoughts, and he looked up to find the source of the noise. Above him, a bird met his gaze with a quizzical but oddly morose expression, as if it weren't sure of the flavour of the existential horror it was witnessing.

Ignoring the bird, Luca checked on the status of the ship. "Computer," Luca said.

"Intruder detected," the ship's onboard computer announced. Immediately an alarm attempted to sound, but the noise was muffled by broken circuitry and what might just be a lack of enthusiasm on the ship's part. "Engaging boarding defence protocols. Preparing to vent ship's atmosphere."

Luca smirked. "That doesn't work so well on a planet."

"Well, crap," the computer replied.

"Status of the crew and ship," Luca ordered.

"The ship requires extensive repairs to, well, it would be shorter to list the parts that don't need to be fixed. The captain is fine, just a little dazed."

Luca stepped up to the woman in the flight chair. When she saw him, her face turned pink, and she stared at him wide-eyed, her mouth opening slightly and her breath slow and laboured.

"You're probably still recovering from that crash," Luca told her as he looked at the small computer on her flight chair, impressed to see it displayed her medical status in reasonably thorough detail. "Let's get you outside."

The woman looked up at him with wide but slightly glazed-over eyes. She was clearly tired since her eyes seemed to droop before she looked back up at him again.

"Please be gentle," she whispered.

Considering her recent ordeal, Luca felt it was a reasonable request.