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They would know where he was now, in addition to him arriving uninvited to their party. But Lazarus was a dead man trying to survive. He didn’t have enough food to endure the time it would take for Ajax to repair herself and sail him home, unless he found help.

  “Who is this?” a rough voice came back over the line, speaking Interlac with an accent Lazarus had never heard before. “What are you doing here?”

  “I escaped when my ship was torn apart in a jump accident,” Lazarus replied, trying not to sound evasive as he lied to the very people who might rescue him. “I’m lost and trying to make it to somewhere where I can find my way home.”

  That part was true. He just needed half a year for Ajax to be ready to carry him. What could she do to a Westphalian patrol force with a little surprise next time?

  One of the two ships over there blinked out of existence as he watched. The other turned this direction and Lazarus felt his breath catch as he looked at the image on the scanner.

  Every starship he had ever seen, even local spaceships, had always been built in a symmetrical manner, usually mirrored on the sides, if you sliced it down the long line of the center.

  This stranger was not. It almost looked like a treble clef from a page of music. Or maybe one of those ancient sea monster ammonites, curled away to the starboard side as it turned a head towards him. The engines were in the middle of the left side as the ship spiraled back, with a goose neck and head coming from the starboard part of a circle.

  He had never seen anything like it.

  Around him, the koch suddenly shuddered and crunched as light flashed from the enemy vessel. The strangers had fired on him.

  It was a trap.

  On his boards, the jumpdrive was dead. The engines were failing. Life support cut out with an eerie silence as he listened.

  “What are you doing?” Lazarus yelled at them as their ship fired a second time.

  Metal tore, and he could see space and stars through a gap where hull had been.

  Red lights signaled an impending failure of the generators.

  Lazarus reached between his legs and triggered the ejection system. It was meant for failures at low altitude in an atmosphere, dating back to aircraft flying skies without ever reaching space. But nobody had ever changed the basic logic.

  A rocket ignited and the roof of the cabin detonated outward on a set of charges that opened the rest of the cockpit to space.

  Lazarus was pressed tight as the rocket carried him to safety, where presumably a parachute or something equally irrelevant in deep space would try to stop him from slamming into a nonexistent planet nowhere below him.

  In space, there is no sound, other than your own harsh breath as your faceplate detects a pressure change and slams shut to save your life. The rockets stopped after a few moments and Lazarus was coasting.

  He twisted around enough to watch his second command die for real this time, a silent flash of light and radiation that left very little in the way of salvageable rubble.

  Or evidence, if you wanted to look at it that way.

  The other ship, the strange alien curve that looked like nothing he had ever imagined, drew closer.

  His seat was slowly turning, so he unbuckled and kicked off against it to kill some of the spin and watch the other ship following him.

  The suit’s onboard systems detected some sort of scanner beam. It must just be a scanner, since it hadn’t chopped him into pieces.

  “What species are you?” that strange, almost-angry voice pursued him across the cosmos. “You aren’t Innruld.”

  “Human,” Lazarus replied. “I have never heard of the Innruld.”

  “You speak their tongue, stranger,” the voice growled.

  “Where I come from, it is called Interlac,” he countered. “I was told it was the common tongue of deep space.”

  Silence.

  “I am an unbelievably long ways from home,” Lazarus said, trying to convey however many hundreds of light-years that might be with just his tone.

  “And we have never heard of your kind here, human,” the voice replied gravely.

  Lazarus decided it was a male voice, for reasons he could not explain. A captain on that ship, possibly up to no good and angry at being discovered.

  If they were evil creatures, they would have already killed him, like they had his ship.

  Unless their goal was to let him float in space until his suit gave out and he died while they watched.

  There was always that.

  Lazarus felt something take hold of his entire body, bringing him to exact rest relative to the ammonite. For a moment, he fancied that he could see faces in the section that stuck out from the front, where lights glowed out of a wide viewscreen.

  Underneath that, he could see what his brain kept calling a ball turret with guns pointed right at him. Waiting like a bird dog sniffing in the morning mist.

  “Are you a cop, human?” the voice asked.

  Cop? A gendarme? Here? Were these folks criminals after all?

  “No,” Lazarus replied firmly. “If anything, I probably qualify as a rebel.”

  “Against whom, human?”

  “Westphalia,” Lazarus replied. “I doubt you’ve heard of them either, but they plan to take over all of known space, given the chance. I was fleeing them when my other ship died.”

  “Well then, human rebel, let us see if you are worth rescuing,” the voice laughed roughly.

  Lazarus felt an invisible tug, drawing him forward. Below, the strange ship rotated on her y-axis, a yaw that brought an opening around to line up with him and light up internally.

  Airlock? Or mouth?

  Shortly, he would find out.

  Chapter Four

  Addison

  Addison sighed internally and tried not to growl his angry thoughts as he uncoiled his lower half and slithered off the command coil where he had been supervising the cargo transfer.

  Wybert had panicked. He did that. All that aggressive adrenaline overloaded the Ilount goofball at times and he attacked where other species might flee. That was what the Ilount did. It was probably why the Queen sent all her males out into space, keeping only the females behind to maintain the nest.

  An Ilount Queen wanted mighty heroes to mate with. The survivors usually qualified.

  Addison didn’t know if Wybert’s tremendous luck made him eligible, as the fool was a barely-contained berserker at the best of times, a goofball at the worst, and with a tendency to shoot first and forget to ask questions later.

  Still, he usually made a good gunner for Shiva Zephyr Glaive, but Addison realized that he needed to maintain a shorter leash today to keep Wybert from killing people before they needed it. Should have locked the guns from the bridge.

  Addison flexed his narrow shoulders backwards until they touched, to relieve some of the stress as he undulated his lower half once around the command coil, working out kinks in his tail.

  “Kuei, keep us still relative to the alien while the energy web pulls him into the airlock,” Addison ordered his Helmsman, a female Vaadwig with a better sense of three dimensional maneuvering than anyone he had ever met. “You’re in charge up here for now.”

  She turned and smiled at him. He thought it was a smile. Her narrow, long skull was covered with tan fur instead of proper green and blue scales, and had external ears larger than his hands, sticking out and up from the sides of her head. Those ears moved like flags in a breeze, but he had known her long enough to read the woman’s mood and nonverbal communication.

  “We’re stable, Director,” she nodded.

  “Cormac, plot an escape course back out of the nebula by a different path than we normally enter,” Addison turned to the small box forward to port, the dock where his ancient NavCrawler plugged itself in to plan pathways through the stars.

  “We have six programmed presently, Director,” the little bot replied, always referring to itself in the plural for reasons Addison had never gotten it to explain. “Do you exhibit a pref
erence?”

  “Furthest away from normal by physical space,” Addison replied after a moment. “The colloquial long-ways-around.”

  “As you command, Director.”

  Addison started to depart, and changed his mind briefly. He slithered back to the command coil and opened the intercom to cover the entire ship.

  “Wybert, disarm your guns and meet me at the airlock with your spear,” he ordered. “Everyone else without duty get weapons out of the locker and do the same.”

  He closed the channel and slithered over to the bridge arms locker. Churquen like him didn’t have hips like some of the upright species, especially the Innruld, but his kind had long-since mastered a leather harness that put everything within reach. He draped the bandoleers in place over his sleeveless tunic and locked them, and then added a compact pistol where a biped might have a hipbone.

  The creature they were bringing aboard was a biped, but of a type that didn’t show up in any records. Much shorter than an Innruld, although of the same basic mechanics. But almost as heavy as the overlords of the galaxy, from the readout.

  Addison wouldn’t bother with melee combat if the creature was unruly. He would shoot it, or let Wybert and his stupid powerspear loose on the human. Addison could always coil his lower half around the creature and squeeze it to death if it got to that.

  Out the bridge hatch, he heard his crew moving around. There weren’t any more Churquen besides him, and thank the fates themselves that he only had one Ilount crew member. Addison could only imagine two of them on one deck, each constantly trying to one-up the other.

  He’d probably end up having to space the pair of them at some point, just so he could sleep.

  Khyaa'sha emerged from her kitchen on the deck above and descended over the rail on a line of web as he approached. She was a Tarni, what others occasionally called a cartwheel spider, and could always bite someone with those smiling mandibles. Plus, while she walked on all eight legs, at least until she arrived somewhere, she could still rear up on the back six to free her front pedipads for delicate work, like folding strudel pastries.

  Today, she had a beam rifle slung along her abdomen along with her own pack harness. Organic webbing coiled from a hook on her harness if she needed to tie the human up. She could always make more on the fly.

  Addison would have liked to have Ereshkiki Nisab, his Qooph Systems Mechanic, at hand, but the wheelman would be busy keeping those poor engines from overheating and breaking down.

  The last thing Addison needed right now was to be stranded in the middle of a nebula with a cargo of illegal narcotics destined for an Innruld world.

  Aileen and Remahle met him at the airlock, the former still dripping water from her fur as she pulled a vest around herself and then drew a pistol. Aileen was a biped, of sorts, like the stranger. Fur-covered, like Kuei, but the Yithadreph were marine mammals for the most part, with short legs and arms emerging from a long torso. She must have been asleep in her bunk, floating peacefully, when he woke her.

  And if she was dripping on his deck now, it was his fault for ordering her to move, so Addison might just mop it up himself later as an apology.

  Remahle was also a furred mammal, but a much lighter brown color than the nearly umber of Aileen’s. Also a biped, but nearly a head shorter, coming up only to Addison’s shoulders. Also about as nimble as Aileen. Innruld generally referred to the Kr’mari derisively as glider squirrels. Where Aileen wore pants with several big pockets on the thighs to go with pockets in her jacket, Remahle had a harness similar to Addison’s, except it went around his neck, down his chest, and around both legs, so as to not interfere with his glider membranes.

  The clacking of Wybert’s ten feet on the deck signaled the approach of the lunatic gunner. Addison checked that the man was holding his damned powerspear with both of his upper arms, which would hopefully keep him from drawing the pistol on his hip and randomly shooting the human. At least before Addison ordered him to.

  Both antenna were at attention today, almost like horns, and all four mandibles were clenched shut, like combat was imminent. Five eyes glared out at the world in challenge. At least the lower arms were resting on his belt, below the chest armor Wybert wore over his chitin to anchor the saddlebags he had slung across his lower thorax.

  “I want the human alive, unless he attacks us physically, Wybert,” Addison growled at the Ilount warrior. “You’ve already cost us the value of whatever that ship was.”

  “I said I was sorry,” Wybert squeaked back defensively.

  The species might be more impressive if their voices weren’t like birds chirping. Even an Ilount who stood five and a half feet tall and another seven feet from keelbone to pooptube, plus the foot of gripper spinnerets beyond that.

  Addison could rear back and look down on Wybert when he needed to impress the creature. Hopefully, it would not be necessary.

  “Where’s Thadrakho?” Addison asked, looking around for his last crew member.

  “I have him back here helping with a fluid leak,” the calm, stone tones of Ereshkiki Nisab came over the intercom.

  “Acceptable,” Addison replied.

  A working ship was more important than an additional creature to impress the human, even if a Necherle like Thadrakho might be the most scary, according to some of the stories Addison had heard. Necherle were a cold-adapted, insectile species taller than anyone else on the crew, covered over with a chitinous hide that insulated them. Thadrakho was a pretty good junior systems mechanic. Better than anyone else, anyway.

  The outer airlock hatch had sealed and the room finished pressurizing as Addison looked at the giant in the chamber beyond on the screen display. Now they would find out what manner of fish they had caught.

  Chapter Five

  Lazarus

  Lazarus knew the day was going to be even stranger as soon as the whatever-it-was deposited him inside the steel-and-light maw on the side of the ship.

  Airlock. More or less. Weirder than any version he had ever seen, even in the kind of low-budget vids that the fleet shipped out to all ships for entertainment on a regular basis. Even to secret bases developing cutting edge warships.

  This was the first one he’d ever seen that was round instead of squared off. And it opened in an iris, rather than a big, heavy plate that would seal up in an emergency.

  The lights in here were also dimmer than he would have set them, but that was a personal thing, rather than a mechanical issue.

  But it was the gravity that warned him. Maybe eighty, eighty-five percent what he was used to on a daily basis. He would have to be careful not to accidentally fly if he jumped too hard, at least until he got used to it.

  His feet found the deck and he heard the exterior hiss as the airlock did its thing and inflated reality around him. Lazarus watched his sensors register the change. Oxygen content a little higher than he was used to. A couple of weird trace gases he wasn’t, but nothing that would poison him.

  So far.

  His laser pistol was attached to the exterior of his armored lifesuit, with the flap down and the magnets that had held it through an ejection-into-space cycle. He left the bolter rifle slung across his back as well. The locals might be hostile, but they might not, and looking like he was threatening them with an act of piracy was no way to get their help.

  At least not yet.

  Finally, a series of lights and sirens burped at him, probably warning anyone in the area that the airlock was about to open. He turned towards the inner hatch and flipped up his faceplate, but left his suit running. Bottled air, just in case.

  The inner hatch irised open.

  Lazarus was struck by a nightmare vision he couldn’t have steeled himself for, even in his worst dreams.

  They were monsters.

  Bizarre, alien creatures.

  The closest one had four arms, ten legs, antenna, and blue skin. But he was also carrying a long spear in his top two hands, and had it pointed into the airlock.

&
nbsp; Next to him was a naga from ancient, Hindu mythology on Earth. Scale-covered in green with long, blue stripes, the lower half of the body was a snake tail longer than Lazarus was tall. Vertical, it had two, spindly arms from narrow shoulders, a head with large eyes and mouth, and maybe those slits were nostrils. It had no ears, but it was wearing a crossed bandoleer with pockets and a pistol of its own.

  A giant spider with black hair and red stripes stared malevolently at him from beyond those two, its head and front arms up with what he assumed was a rifle of some sort in its hands.

  Next to it, a dire sea otter in pearl-colored Capri pants and a banana-colored vest held a pistol on him. She also dripped water onto the deck. At least there were shoes on her feet, unlike the rest.

  And she was most definitely a she, even for a fur covered otter. She had breasts like a human woman. Or at least bumps in the right location and shape.

  That just made it weirder.

  Next to her, almost at the back, was a ring-tailed lemur with bat wings.

  What the hell are those trace gases? Did they flood me with hallucinogenic drugs?

  “What is your name, human?” the naga asked in a deep, rich voice that Lazarus remembered from the radio.

  The captain of the ship, maybe. Or the Communications Tech.

  And it spoke in Interlac, albeit with a strange accent unlike any Lazarus had ever heard in the Rio Alliance.

  But he was also a thousand light-years from home.

  “Lazarus,” he answered, standing perfectly still so the legged slug with the spear didn’t suddenly rush him.

  Lazarus was pretty sure his armored lifesuit could stop a simple spear, if the creature hit him in the chest plate, but it might go after the softer joints and open something.

  God Above only knew what kinds of alien diseases he might pick up in an open wound.

  It didn’t do his sense of well-being any good when everyone over there jumped just a little as he spoke. Them being nervous might be worse than them piratical, truth be told.