by Blaze Ward
“Pull gently, and it will come the rest of the way out.”
And just like that, Wybert had mastered a laser pistol. He nodded sharply and smiled up at Lazarus. It looked like a smile. The four mandibles, like fingers with sharp claws at the end, opened up like a flower briefly and then clacked shut again. Considering how stern he had looked earlier, Lazarus took this as a good sign.
“To disarm the bolter rifle, just depress the red switch on the front of the piece that sticks out perpendicular at the base,” Lazarus smiled back at the man. “This is a bullpup configuration rifle. It fires ammunition contained within the magazine in the rear stock, and I did not charge it with a round previously.”
Pop, and the Ilount was holding the laser pistol, the powercell, the bolter, and the magazine in his four hands, with the spear leaned against the wall.
“Here,” Aileen leaned in and tapped him on the shoulder. “Wybert will be some time playing, now that the weapons are safe. Let us put your armor away, and we can clean the floor.”
Lazarus followed her back to the chamber next to the airlock and found a shelf to put his parts. His unconscious had been expecting spacesuits, but for humans. Nothing else here would fit a human, but he could identify the crew member, just from the shape.
The two he hadn’t seen must be utterly frightening. One suit was made for a pencil nearly seven feet tall and skinny enough he could wear his own suit and then put Lazarus’s armored lifesuit on around that.
The other suit was a drum, split open sideways and waiting for someone to climb in. Two spindly arms emerged from the hubs and reminded him of cat tails with six finger claws at the ends, all facing inward.
Momma, I’m a long ways from home.
The others had disappeared for now. He had heard them moving away in a strange symphony of footsteps on the floor.
Aileen found a towel for herself and dried her fur after she handed him an old fashioned mop with a squeegee bucket.
Lazarus shrugged and set to work, earning his supper.
Chapter Eight
Addison
Addison had headed across the main cargo deck to the engine room. Thadrakho was nowhere to be seen, but that just meant the leak was inside a wall somewhere, or in the overhead plumbing again.
Ereshkiki Nisab rolled back from the console and blinked several of his eyes.
Qooph. The Wheelmen.
One of the oldest races to have achieved starflight, even before the Innruld came and forged their empire on the backs of the non-bipeds.
Addison wondered how one of the overlords would react to a human in their midst. Probably badly. Lazarus had none of the characteristics of beauty that the Innruld demanded of themselves.
Ereshkiki Nisab rolled to a stop and deflated one of his ring pockets enough to rest. Addison had never understood the evolutionary pressures that forged the Qooph. His Systems Mechanic had once said that they evolved up from simple ground slugs, in the way that the Churquen had once been snakes.
But the Qooph had added a bone and cartilage endoskeleton. Formed into a pair of hexagons attached at the hub, with six bladders around the outside that they could inflate and deflate to roll forward or backwards as needed.
Four feet tall. More than two feet wide at the hubs. Solid and stable, everything a Churquen might want in a Systems Mechanic.
Two thin arms stuck out of the axle, ending in hands with six opposed thumbs and no wrist. They could not lift much, but were among the most delicate artisans in the galaxy.
Between the twin outer rims, six eyes and six mouths were equally spaced around the inner rim. Ereshkiki Nisab studied him now with two eyes and a grinning mouth.
“The human passed inspection?” he asked with at least four mouths from the harmonics.
“He does, for now.” Addison finally allowed himself a sigh. “You would have needed to see him without the armor to understand how dangerous his kind must be.”
“Oh?”
“He might outweigh you, old friend,” Addison said. “Certainly any two of the rest of us, excepting only Wybert. He is at least six feet tall, and weighs nearly two hundred pounds, most of it being muscle. And he walked like the gravity in here was almost too weak for him.”
“Warrior?” Ereshkiki Nisab asked, blinking and focusing. Both hands came together in front of himself like an old lawyer clenching his hands across his belly. It was not a Qooph mannerism, but one he had picked up in his years with non-rollers.
“Possibly,” Addison nodded. “At least well-armed for a scientist or explorer. I have not yet probed his past. Aileen is putting him to work and the others are quietly watching to see how he reacts.”
“Will we keep him?”
“I am currently obligated, Ereshkiki Nisab,” Addison felt his eyes slit in a low-grade anger. “Wybert killed his ship and Kuei has not been able to identify salvageable bits. Even the Innruld would take him aboard, if only to put him to work, much as I have done. At least here he has a chance of freedom later.”
“And the place he rebels against?” the mechanic asked. “Westphalia?”
“Kuei could find no records, but we’ve never looked,” Addison shrugged. “I will quietly ask questions, but not until the current cargo is delivered. No use tempting the authorities.”
“But you do not feel it is a trap?” the wheelman asked.
“Everything is a trap,” Addison sighed again. “This one feels like less of one than the others. For now, we need to flee from this place in case our other friends panicked after delivering the package. I had told them that we would deal with the situation when Lazarus appeared. I can honestly say that we destroyed the intruder before he could escape to warn anyone of what he saw here. Hopefully, they will take that at face value.”
“And if they do not?”
“We are all rebels, old friend, same as Lazarus claims to be,” Addison finally laughed. “Who would they tell? The Innruld?”
Chapter Nine
Lazarus
He hadn’t been a midshipman swabbing decks in nearly two decades, but Lazarus had not forgotten how it was done. And he only had to get them dry now, rather than soaping, cleaning, waxing, and sealing them over the course of an entire day.
The Yithadreph woman, Aileen Enjehn, watched from a safe distance as he worked his way slowly through the space outside the airlock, past the storage and armory and other closed hatches, and into a hallway that ran at an odd angle to the rest. But then, nothing in this ship appeared square, except a few internal bulkheads.
This must be where the crew quarters were. He looked up from his work and saw a trail of water emerge from one of the cabins, presumably hers and she had been asleep when the alarm went up that they had a new passenger.
She had remained nearly silent as he worked, just leaned backwards against a handy wall with her arms crossed across her chest in something not quite disapproval but not all that friendly either.
The water was heavier here, so he worked with slower care to get it all up. Finally, he was working against the door to her personal quarters.
Lazarus put the mop into the squeegee and turned to face her as he wrung it dry through the ancient design of two wheels and a lever.
“I presume that there is more water through this hatch?” he said carefully.
“I will deal with it later,” Aileen replied in a tone that managed to split the gap between defensive and angry.
But then, what woman wants a stranger to see her personal quarters, especially if they are messy? And he was a completely alien species on top of that, although they might both be mammals, at least from his estimation of her.
Still, Lazarus nodded and tried to smile at the tiny woman.
“What’s the next task, then?” he asked, assuming they had more chores for him.
“Kitchen,” she said, flexing her entire body to propel herself off the wall and back down the long corridor towards the cargo bay.
Lazarus left the mop here for now and followed her
up a ramp where the black widow spider had gone earlier.
The space up here was an open balcony, curved around the upper deck of the cargo bay behind a rail with tables for a variety of species to all sit together and eat.
“Khyaa'sha,” Aileen called. “He’s yours next.”
Aileen eyed him warily and slid around him to retreat down the ramp as the Tarni emerged.
Lazarus had no idea why a cartwheel spider might earn that name. She was the size of a really big dog as she emerged on eight silent feet and stared at him.
“Let us sit and talk like civilized beings,” she said in a voice that sounded like a woman he had once known on Brasilia, when he was seventeen and stupid. As opposed to thirty-five and marooned.
Lazarus found a bench-enough place at one of the tables and sat. Khyaa'sha walked close and leaned her weight back enough to rest on the rear of her abdomen and bring her front two feet in the air.
He had a hard time not reacting defensively when she did, as her head went up and those mandibles looked huge as if they were poised to strike at him.
Deep breath. Alien cook on an even more alien starship.
I’m the weird one here, as far as they are concerned.
“What do humans eat?” she asked simply,
As he caught his breath, Lazarus realized that their eyes were actually on a level this way. She was normally three feet tall and maybe six feet across all her feet. He was six feet tall, but a lot of that was torso, like most men.
Peers, seated. Huh.
“Humans are nominally omnivores,” Lazarus said after a moment. “A variety of grains and vegetables. Meat and seafood that has been cooked at least somewhat to kill off certain germs. Fish can be eaten raw, depending on preparation.”
“Do you really drink the poisons of a fermented grain?” she asked.
Looking closely, she had six small eyes around her skull, probably for defense, and two big ones centered above the mandibles. Hunter’s eyes, like a human.
“The right grains, yes,” he admitted. “Wheat, corn, rice, barley, hops, oats. I had a few emergency ration bars in my backpack, but nothing that will last me more than a few days.”
“If allowed, I would taste one.” She leaned forward just enough to make him flinch, but that seemed to be attention, rather than threat. “It would let me find something similar to see if you can metabolize.”
Lazarus nodded after his heart started beating again. He reached into a pocket where he had stashed them earlier and withdrew one. That left three. Maybe he needed to diet right now, anyway.
He held it out carefully with two fingers. Her pedipalp came up delicately and pulled it from his hand.
Exoskeleton, he presumed, although that big it might be dermal armor over an endoskeletal structure. She might weight eighty pounds, which would be light for a dog that size, to say nothing of a deer, but far too heavy for exoskeletal joints.
Khyaa'sha’s chitin was covered over with fine, bristly, black hairs. The foot itself was a pad like a cat’s, with webbed toes that moved like fingers and ended in claws smaller than his fingernails.
Delicately, this nightmare from his worst dreams tore open the ration bar and broke off a piece about the size of his first joint on his thumb. Up close, the two big mandibles covered four smaller ones, like Wybert’s on the corners of an X. They moved more dexterously than fingers to grasp the sample from her hand and chew it.
“Sweet,” she observed.
“We use honey from bees, an insect species back home,” he tried to explain. “They digest pollen and water and produce a sweet fluid to feed larvae and such. Humans have slightly domesticated them to the point that they produce far in excess of what they need, and we can harvest it. It has a variety of antibiotic qualities, as well as being a significant energy source. And sweet.”
“Very good,” she nodded as those powerful jaws ground it up quickly. “Tree and ground nuts. Grains. A number of secondary chemicals added whose purpose I cannot identify.”
“Mostly vitamins and trace minerals added to sustain a human who had access to only bars and water,” he replied. “One bar and enough water will keep me alive for several days.”
“Very well,” she nodded again. “I will prepare a dinner of…”
Lazarus didn’t know the word she used, but it had connotations of dim sum—Chinese finger foods—in Interlac. Lazarus repeated the word back to her with a question.
“Yes. Samples of a variety of things you can taste,” she agreed. “Do you have sufficient medical supplies if I accidentally poison you for dinner?”
Oh, yes. Very much yes. That was the biggest part of the backpack, by volume. Things he should take now. Things he should have at the table with him. Things to take before going to sleep.
“I do,” he said simply, planning a trip down to the storage room to get the rest of the backpack, once he knew where he might sleep.
“Good,” she fell forward onto all eight feet and backed away from the table as gracefully as a cat. “We need to introduce you to Lenox next. He’s our medic, and will need to work up records on you. Did anything survive from your ship?”
“I do not believe so,” Lazarus replied. “Hopefully the Director will be able to find something of my previous life.”
“My heartfelt apologies, Lazarus,” she suddenly spun around to watch him with her hunter’s eyes. “We are all refugees that way, so perhaps you will find a place here with us.”
Lazarus nodded but remained silent. These folks might be refugees, but they were also shoot-first-ask-questions-later. And the other ship had run like hell as soon as he announced himself, so Lazarus wondered if his new friends were criminals.
But then, what was he, in the eyes of Westphalia? And possibly the Innruld?
Chapter Ten
Lazarus
It got weirder, which surprised Lazarus.
Lenox turned out to be a robot. Khyaa'sha called it a MedCrawler, and it was programmed with a cheerful Hippocratic Oath and the ability to shift its pronunciation down into an Interlac Lazarus could follow better than any of the others.
Khyaa'sha walked up a wall and hung herself in a corner of the space clear across the cargo hold from the airlock he had first boarded. Not far from engineering, if Lazarus understood the various cryptic references.
It would be interesting to see how the aliens moved. Maybe he could do things to upgrade Ajax from what he might learn here. Weirder, if he stayed long enough and ended up liking these people, maybe he could upgrade their ship before he left.
He was leaving. Lazarus hadn’t worked out the when or the how, but he had the why nailed to a board. Westphalia.
The Earthers were probably aware that they had fought a new kind of vessel. That much they could get out of his old crew, especially the regenerative capabilities of this new warship. Those vessels would be looking over their shoulders for Ajax to return.
Patrols might even start looking for him, but all they had to go on was the original vector he had taken when he jumped, not the distance. And nobody else would be crazy enough, desperate enough to fly into a nebula like that without a charted path.
But that was tomorrow’s task. Today, he had to worry about himself.
The MedCrawler before him was a red box, about a foot tall and two feet on the square. It really did have treads on both sides, when Lazarus would have expected wheels to be more efficient. But then, that was only on decks. Lenox might need to travel off the ship with Director Wolcott and his crew onto unknown terrain.
Each side and the top had folding arms and appendages: arms, tools, scanners, maybe even eyes, although it had enough of those around the rim of the square casing.
“So, Human Lazarus,” Lenox extended a telescoping arm with several unknown devices on the end. “How would you classify your current medical condition?”
The voice was male. It reminded him of a nurse he had tried to recruit for Ajax, but the man had too good of a gig at the base hospital and wasn
’t bored enough for adventure.
Probably for the best, all endings considered.
“Stressed,” Lazarus replied, looking down, even from the bench he sat on. “In addition to all the adrenaline of the last several days, I have now been exposed to alien bacteria and viruses that may or may not be able to cross species. My health was good at home, but I have also brought my own biome with me here and exposed your crew.”
“Already noted,” Lenox managed to smile with his voice alone as the one arm traced obscure Egyptian hieroglyphics in the air between them. “For baseline, describe your age and health levels.”
“Human male,” he replied. “We are a two-gender, mammalian species of erect biped. Age: thirty-five standard years, so just about at the peak of human development and potential, before age begins to slow me down both mentally and physically over the next six to eight decades. Oxygen breather. Blood based on iron hemoglobin. The gravity on this ship is about fifteen to twenty percent lower than what I am accustomed to, so I will need to find your workout equipment and see if it has a high enough top limit for me to remain in prime shape.”
“Schooling?” Lenox asked.
“Rio Alliance Merchant Marine,” Lazarus laughed. “That is a very thin disguise for a military university that I’m sure does not fool Westphalia. Advanced training in military sciences and experimental, mechanical biomorphics.”
“I am not sure that latter term translates into Interlac cleanly,” Lenox said. “Could you repeat it?”
“I probably should not, Lenox,” Lazarus smiled down at the robot. “I doubt you actually have a high enough security clearance to know those things, and I would be surprised if my knowledge in the field would be applicable aboard this vessel. Or any others. Ajax was a bleeding edge experiment.”
“Ajax?”
“My former command, Lenox,” Lazarus sobered. “We were ambushed by a full Westphalian GunWall and nearly destroyed. My crew abandoned ship, but I set the vessel on a self-destruct course and escaped into the lifepod that you found, just before destroying it.”
