Escape

by Blaze Ward

  If that was even an option, as wound up as he was.

  At least his stomach had settled. He had taken enough of everything to probably stop a moose, but it had been necessary. With food packs, Khyaa’sha could figure out what he ate and hopefully had enough that he wouldn’t have to dose himself silly every meal until he ran out.

  Lenox the MedCrawler had studied some of the chemicals, but pronounced himself unable to replicate them with the supplies on hand. Perhaps at the next docking?

  Lazarus snorted at the thought of visiting a medical doctor on a station and becoming a whole series of medical journal articles on a new First Contact.

  That would raise too many flags. Someone would want to investigate. That would lead to questions about where the human was found.

  Which would lead to them asking Director Wolcott why, exactly, this alien was there in the first place.

  That might be the single dumbest idea Lazarus had heard in years, but he could not fault the robot for the linear thinking that got it there. Lenox was trying to treat a new organic, and doing the best it could.

  Lazarus laid down and shook his head. The lights were just bright enough that he could see the room, but in his chest, that heart was banging a bass drum as fast as it could.

  Maybe if he could meditate a little and relax, he would be able to sleep.

  Then his eyes closed and exhaustion pulled him into the depths.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lazarus

  Morning.

  Lazarus came back to the universe from someplace far away. Dark and foreboding. His personal clock was messed up and there wasn’t an electronic one in here on the dresser, so he was just floating in darkness. At least it was warm.

  The smells of yesterday seemed to have fully faded. It was always like that when you boarded a new ship. He had been expecting it to last longer because he was dealing with more than just human scents in the air, but maybe his nose was as tired as he felt.

  Except he wasn’t tired. He felt rejuvenated almost.

  Lazarus lifted a hand from the bunk and his brain finally engaged. Light gravity. Only about eighty percent of Brasilia or Ajax. He had been sleeping on a cloud, even as his mind had descended into hell and dueled with Cerberus for passage.

  He laughed and sat up.

  “Lazarus, are you awake?” the voice of an angel descended on him.

  Intercom. Light. Clock, too, over there under the intercomm when he looked. Early morning, if he was mathing correctly. Not a sure bet.

  “I am,” he replied as the tones became Khyaa’sha.

  A more unlikely angel he had a hard time imagining, but didn’t every angel descend with “Fear not, human,” before they imparted their message, as they were so alien that primitive minds could not understand that the strange creature they beheld was a messenger from God?

  Had the Qooph visited Earth in some magnificently ancient era and spoken to Ezekiel? Certainly the description of that angel was close, although the Systems Mechanic here only rolled on one axis at a time, rather than all.

  Or had a Qooph in a hardshelled environment suit traveled on Bronze Age Earth inside a sphere so that he could turn any direction as necessary?

  He would not ask Ereshkiki Nisab today, but it might be worth researching the species’ astronomical history someday, to see if they had perhaps made it as far as Earth four or five thousand years ago.

  “Are you ready to face your second day?” Khyaa’sha asked with a lilt in her voice that was friendly and concerned, while still being alien.

  But then, they were just people. Lazarus was the alien here, wasn’t he?

  “I am.” Lazarus swung his legs off the bunk and stood, careful not to leap into the air and bash his head. The ceilings on this ship tended to either be seven feet or fourteen, depending. Lower than he was ready for.

  Everything was just enough off to leave him gasping from time to time, and the thin air didn’t help.

  He heard the door unlatch and he stretched to loosen all the kinks from sleeping curled up on his side in a bed too short.

  Goldilocks with freckles.

  “The others should be stirring soon,” Khyaa’sha said. “Does your kind bathe in running water?”

  Bathe in running water? Oh. Shower.

  “Yes,” Lazarus said. “Shower is the term I am familiar with.”

  “Addison showed them to you last night?” she asked. “Red for hot. Green for cold.”

  “Indeed,” Lazarus replied. “Where would I find a towel to dry myself?”

  “In the bottom drawer under the mirror,” Khyaa’sha said. “I shall look for you in a bit. There is something I wanted to prepare for you this morning that I think will serve your immediate nutritional needs.”

  Because sure, a giant pinwheel spider woman fixing you breakfast was the most normal thing in the galaxy, wasn’t it?

  Lazarus found the towel. A bottle of general detergent had been recovered from the koch, so he could get himself clean, if a little raw, at least until he found something less harsh. Or shaved his head and kept everything so short that he didn’t need to wash it.

  He ran a hand over his chin and felt the first hint of bristles. It was another thing that marked him separate from the others back home, how slow his ginger-colored beard grew. Some of his friends in college had needed to shave twice a day, while he needed to skip several days before his beard even started to be visible.

  But he would need to find or fashion a razor soon. Maybe Thadrakho could build him something? The man had a knack for that sort of work, what Papa Michael called rednecking.

  Towel over his shoulder like he was back at the Merchant Marine Academy, Lazarus opened the hatch and turned left. Past two cabins he stopped first at the head and then entered the thing his mind kept wanting to refer to as the “Shower Event.”

  The room was twenty feet long and ten wide, with high ceilings that Lazarus could only touch if he jumped in the low gravity to the extreme of his muscles. It wasn’t tiled like it would be back home, but there were shower heads at all heights and directions, each with perhaps a dozen options one could dial in to adjust flow, pressure, and pattern as you needed.

  Lazarus picked the highest head, the one he presumed was normally used by Thadrakho, as the only person here taller than Lazarus, not counting Wybert’s overall horizontal length. He stripped and stashed his clothes well away so they would remain dry and entered the combat arena.

  Hot was really hot, he discovered fast enough, nearly scalding his hand. Ajax had never had enough time in the tanks to heat the water, so hot always came out mostly a little better than warm, unless he timed his showers to the dead of night or the middle of a watch. Someone here liked really hot showers.

  Once the temperature was low enough to be comfortable, Lazarus just stood under the water and let it wash yesterday off of him. All of yesterdays.

  Everyone before Lazarus.

  He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, unconsciously expecting the timer to kick in and cut the water flow, like back at the Academy when you didn’t want students spending their days in there.

  A voice intruded and Lazarus opened his eyes like a shot.

  “What kind of claws do you have?” the voice broke his concentration.

  Lazarus looked over in a near panic and realized that Aileen was naked and showering next to him, looking up at him expectantly with those deep, dark eyes.

  He had never showered with a female. Barracks and warships always had male and female showers port and starboard, along with cabins separated by gender down the centerline.

  You didn’t necessarily do that on a civilian ship. Or an alien one where females outnumbered males, if he had done the math right yesterday.

  Four foot six. Covered with a thick fur of short bristles. Expressive eyes. Wide mouth. Ambulatory whiskers and ears.

  And breasts. Covered over with fur except for reddish-gray nipples that were visible.

  Lazarus’s mind simply desce
nded into white noise.

  “You awake?” she snapped at him.

  “Maybe,” he opened his eyes again, but there was still a naked Yithadreph woman soaping herself, all of four feet away.

  “What kind of claws do you have?” she repeated herself with a little exasperation.

  Lazarus held out a hand, unable to even parse her syntax into something that made sense. She took it in both of hers, hands with four fingers and an opposable thumb, all rather stubby and webbed compared to his. And covered over with finer fur.

  She ran a thumb over the ends of his fingers and inspected them by pulling him closer. Lazarus didn’t have anything left with which to resist her, even as strong as he normally was.

  Her shower was not running much hotter than his, from where she pulled his arm into it.

  “I need a scratch,” she said, looking up at him with serious eyes. “Remahle’s kind don’t have good claws to dig in, but you might. And I’m not limber enough to reach my spine with any good leverage.”

  Yup. White noise.

  Lazarus finally found coherence. He was showering with a woman, alien though she might be, and she wanted him to soap and scratch the fur along her spine, all the way down to the cute stub of a tail sticking out.

  Hoping that his day had already reached its weirdest point, and that everything else was downhill from here, Lazarus took the bar of what he assumed was soap from her paw and lathered up his hands. He considered it, found the idea acceptable, and dropped down to his knees next to Aileen, where they were almost of a height.

  “Turn around,” he managed when she looked back at him in surprise.

  She did. He soaped up her back with the bar before resting it on the wet floor and proceeded to sink his nails into the fur and work the soap in.

  In his mind, it didn’t feel that much different from the German Shepherd his family had had when he was much younger. Bristly fur. Oils that came off. A body that backed into his fingers as he found the right pressure and rhythm.

  If she’d been a cat, he might have expected her to purr after a bit.

  “Okay, that was good,” she stepped away from him. “Stand up and I’ll do you now.”

  Lazarus let that comment go at face value and levered himself back to his feet. Aileen had similar claws to a human, once she got to work on his back, even if she had to stand on her toes to get higher than his shoulder blades.

  The soap had a nice smell. Clean, instead of the industrial chemical taint of the stuff he had brought from the ship. But that was for plates, not humans.

  And a good back scratch really made all the difference in the world, facing his day.

  She finished and stepped back.

  “Thank you,” he said, turning to finish rinsing and then shutting his water off.

  It was just the most natural thing in the world, right? Showering with an alien woman who needed you to soap and scratch her back.

  Perfectly sane.

  He dried himself off and got dressed, unable to keep from stealing glances at her. Short legs and arms, compared to a human. Long torso. A ridge of fur about three fingers wide right down the center of her spine, which was why having help grooming was so important.

  As xenobiology went, Lazarus had seen weirder. From a safe distance. In a nature documentary vid.

  He finished dressing as Aileen shut off her shower so he decided to retreat rather than ogle the Yithadreph woman as she did the same.

  Outside, the smell of something drew him past the food storage compartment and into the kitchen area. The tables out here were empty as yet, so perhaps the others had not risen. It was early in the ship’s day, and Lazarus had gotten the impression that Director Wolcott had intended to stay up later doing something after he put the human to bed.

  Khyaa’sha looked up from her pot and smiled at him. He hoped it was a smile. The two big mandibles opened and clacked, and her eyes got big for a second.

  “Ah, right on time,” she said, pivoting from where she was resting back on her abdomen and six legs to take a ladle and pour something into a bowl. There was no steam, so it wasn’t oatmeal. Hot oatmeal, anyway. “Try this.”

  He took it and she turned back to her kitchen, purring or perhaps humming to herself as she worked.

  Lazarus took the low bowl and made his way back to the tables overlooking the main cargo hold. Pure water came from a nozzle next to the glasses, so he took two trips getting everything to where his shipping container still waited.

  Aileen joined him about the time Lazarus finally got organized enough to study the bowl. Thicker than soup. Smoother than oatmeal.

  Pudding? It had the color of butterscotch.

  Aileen was eating something that looked like a cooked salad and largely ignoring him, so he took up a spoon and took a dab.

  Sniffed it.

  Considered.

  Sweet, but rather earthy. Cardamom and brown sugar kind of smell.

  He took the briefest taste. Yes. Sweetness. Brownness. Milkiness. Maybe start with coconut cream and flatten the taste out with nutmeg and brown sugar and allspice.

  After a moment, his brain finally engaged. This was Wybert’s gruel, but modified. Cut, maybe, with a different set of spices and fluids from what the Ilount had been eating last night.

  Lazarus really felt inspired to locate coffee. Director Wolcott’s crew had something similar in taste, but the plant from which it was derived didn’t have any caffeine in it.

  And he really needed something to bring him alive this morning.

  Clacking on the deck indicated Wybert’s arrival. Nothing else made as much noise as a decapeed. Lazarus considered suggesting booties with a soft, rubber sole, so he could still grip, but didn’t necessarily tell everyone in the neighborhood who was arriving.

  An antenna appeared over his right shoulder right next to his ear, along with a blueish skull. The outer left eye stared at Lazarus and blinked, and the four mandibles clacked once.

  “That smells good,” Wybert said, leaning a little weight on the back of Lazarus’s shoulder.

  He hoped that Ilount didn’t drool. Or if they that did it wasn’t caustic.

  “Khyaa’sha’s trying something for me this morning,” Lazarus replied without screaming or leaping into the air once. “I think she made you some.”

  “Goodie,” and he was gone.

  Lazarus remembered to breathe. Aileen snickered so quietly that nobody but him would hear it. He studied her and saw the wry grin pulling her whiskers and lips to the right. Today, the Capri pants she was wearing were gray, and the vest a soft maroon not that different from the pants he was stuck with back in his cabin until he found or made something else.

  “He can be a dork,” she announced. Like that might be a trade secret.

  Lazarus shrugged and took a larger taste from the bowl. Almost butterscotch pudding, if he added something. Might need to break out all the spices Aileen had rescued and see what worked. It went down smooth and seemed to have the same jolt of energy he got from honey.

  Hopefully, some of the antibiotic qualities that the Ilount found would work here as well. There had to be all manner of alien germs and bugs floating around.

  Director Wolcott appeared about the time Lazarus was finished scraping the bowl clean and lamenting that he didn’t have a prehensile tongue with which to get the last bits.

  That was good. He almost felt like he wanted to survive this morning, but for the lack of coffee.

  “Good, you have eaten,” Wolcott announced. “How is your medical condition?”

  My what? Ah, bad translation into a second language.

  “I’m good this morning,” Lazarus replied. “What can I do to start earning my keep?”

  “Muscles when we dock, but I would like you to join me on the bridge, if you would.”

  Lazarus rose and bussed everything into the appropriate bin before following the Director down the ramp and forward.

  Kuei was on the bridge, along with Cormac the NavCrawler, when t
hey arrived. Out the big window everything was a pearlescent gray shot through with the strangest blues.

  Lazarus was entranced.

  “So we are currently in trans-space,” the Director stated. “Making our way out of this system and back to safe space. What path did you use to get into this pocket?”

  “In trans-space?” Lazarus felt his jaw drop open. “In?”

  “Yes,” Wolcott turned his entire being on a coil and stared at Lazarus. “Is this not how you travel FTL?”

  Lazarus felt the bottom of the universe fall out from under him. Actually traveling through FTL space slow enough that you could measure it? Ajax used star drives. Hell, everyone used them.

  Aim yourself at a destination by calculating right ascension, declination, and distance. Punch an instant hole between the two and arrive as close as your sensors, calculations, and gravity deflections would allow.

  But to actually travel through some sort of alternate universe at trans-light speeds?

  “Lazarus?” Wolcott asked.

  Lazarus opened his mouth and nothing came out. On top of the immense firepower of Ajax, what would a star drive be worth to a culture that had to travel slowly through FTL space?

  “I don’t know,” Lazarus finally stammered, trying to keep the panic in his voice to just being lost and shot down and rescued by aliens. Nothing about apparently descending from a more-advanced technological culture than the one he had found himself in.

  Even the light gravity overcame him and Lazarus found himself sitting on his butt on the cold deck, hoping the room would stop spinning.

  “Lenox to the bridge immediately!” Lazarus heard a voice yell. “Emergency.”

  His own heart was suddenly pounding a triphammer beat so fast he thought his head might explode.

  Wolcott appeared in his field of vision.

  “Can you hear me?” the naga-man appeared to be yelling.

  “Yes,” Lazarus managed. “Sorry.”

  The words seemed to cause the tides of madness to suddenly recede. Lazarus looked at his hands, and they were fluttering, but he could clench them. Move them.

  Standing right now sounded a little stupid, but the deck was doing a capital job of holding him up, so he stayed still and let it.