“This isn’t going to work,” the Singer grumbled under her breath.

“Shut up and act sick,” Brettn hissed.

“But diseases don’t cross species barriers,” she grumbled.

“No, but bacterial infections and fungus can,” Old Bess interjected eagerly. “What?” she demanded when Brettn and the Human both turned incredulous expressions toward her. “I read!”

“Shut up and cough!” Brettn growled. “They’re coming!”

Old Bess and the Human who called herself the Singer began to heave and cough. Brettn had carefully painted rust into spots all across all three of them, and much to their distaste had blown a bit of salt into their eyes to make them water and go red. Most importantly, they’d all wrapped themselves in as much clothing as they could get. Along with their acting and a bit of excessive drooling, Brettn hoped it would be a convincing act.

The dirty oil he’d dripped onto them also made a rather convincing puss.

“Guards!” he howled. “Please! Help!” he coughed.

It was true that diseases from one species never infected another, Brettn had undoubtedly never heard of such an outbreak. But Humans were wild cards; no one knew anything about them. Even the ever-growing fame of the Thief-Taker only meant that most people on the station knew what one looked like but at the same time likely couldn’t name it.

So a strange alien and two Ventusi showing all the same – rather ugly looking – symptoms should be unusual enough to cause alarm. And when the Vyrăis guard rounded the corner and immediately began to shout into his radio in panic, he was confident the gambit had been convincing.

“Keep it up,” Brettn hissed between coughs. “And follow me.” Brettn began to stumble in the direction of the guard. He moaned and coughed and shouted for help as he went, and the guard stumbled and began to run.

Other inmates scattered from the scene for the same reasons: An outbreak on a ship was bad enough. A cross-species outbreak was an unheard-of plague. No one wanted to get sick, but the guards especially didn’t want disease in their prison.

It wasn’t that they cared about the wellbeing of the inmates so much as they cared about the work involved and the drop in their income. They couldn’t fleece bedridden inmates for money. And if the inmates got too sick to clean after themselves, the entire ship would soon stink worse than it already did with no one to clean it up.

Brettn was surprised, however, by how quickly the guards responded. It was only a few minutes of groaning and coughing before a team of five guards shoved their way down the cramped corridor toward them. They had wet rags tied around their faces and thick gloves on their arms. And they tacked the three of them with total disregard for the damage they did.

When the Human resisted, one kicked her in the midsection, which turned out to be a mistake as the Human immediately spat something foul-smelling from her mouth. The guards flinched away, and their shouting grew more frantic. Still, they swept up the three of them and dragged them to the shuttle bay while more guards sprayed a strong-smelling foam over the entire hallway.

It was only moments before the guards shoved them into the shuttle’s cargo bay. The shuttle was little more than a box with cold gas thrusters, but the control room was locked, and the bay doors sealed with excessive finality.

“Holy crap, it worked!” Old Bess breathed.

“Yeah,” Brettn sighed in relief. He hadn’t told them that if he’d gotten the timing wrong and the shuttle had already been away, then the guards might have pushed them into the airlock anyway. Then they’d all be sucking vacuum instead. “I didn’t know Humans could spit venom,” Brettn said as he turned to the Human, whose groaning was starting to sound very convincing.

“Not venom, and not on purpose,” the Human groaned, curling around her midsection protectively. “That was my breakfast,” she moaned.

“Gross,” Old Bess chirped. “Are you okay?” Old Bess rested a comforting hoof on the Human’s back.

“I’ve had worse,” the Singer grumbled. “Now what?”

“Now,” Brettn said, holding down his disgust, “I guess we wait to see where they take us. It’ll be a nearby clinic or something. Much easier to escape from, I promise.”

“You guess?”

“I wasn’t sure we’d get this far,” Brettn admitted. He tactfully left out that “But hey! It’ll be much easier to escape from a place that’s actually on the station.”

“You have got to be the worst escape artist I’ve ever heard of,” the Human grumbled.

“Ah, but you have-“ Brettn choked off his sentence as a subtle shift in the gravity suddenly ran through the shuttle. “We stopped!” he hissed.

The Human stood and pressed her back to the shuttle’s door. When she stretched to her full height, she carefully peeked through a tiny window. Brettn and Old Bess began coughing and moaning in earnest, but the Human only narrowed her eyes.

“There’s no one on the other side,” she hissed.

“What?” Brettn coughed and cleared his throat. “No, no, there should be guards by this airlock,” he said. “A whole checkpoint’s worth of ‘em.”

“Well, there isn’t,” she said dismissively. “Which means it’s time to get the fuck out of this elevator,” she growled. She dropped to the floor and began running her fingers along the floor near it.

“What are you doing? You can’t open this thing from inside! What if the airlock hasn’t cycled?!” Brettn stammered.

“It’ll be fine!” the Human grinned. “My ears popped after we started moving so I know this thing is overpressured,” she explained. “Even if that room isn’t full of air, we’ve got enough in here.” Her fingers gently brushed across the floor on the left side of the door. With an exclamation of delight, the Human began to scratch at the where the floor met the wall.

“Oh no, she’s just as crazy as the other Human, isn’t she!?” Brettn turned on Old Bess. “Why did you have to bring along a crazy Human!”

“Don’t you yell at me!” Old Bess stomped her hoof and a horrible screech of metal filled the room.

For a brief moment, Brettn and Old Bess stared at her hoof in disbelief. It was only when the screech once more reverberated through the metal room that they realized the sound had come from where the Human was crouched.

They whipped their heads around and found that the Human had managed to pry up a corner of the floor. The panel in her hands warped, and the wiry muscle of her arms stood out against her bare skin. But the floor slowly bent under her stubborn tugging, revealing a previously hidden lever.

“Wha- but how?” Brettn stammered.

“You aliens are weird, but usually not stupid,” the Singer grinned as she let go of the metal panel, it rang as it tried to retake its shape and failed. She wiped at the moisture that had suddenly appeared on her face. “No one locks airlock doors, that would be dumb. So, if you don’t want people to use the door you hide the latch,” she explained.

“How did you even find that?” Brettn asked. The floor had appeared seamless only moments ago.

“Just felt around for it,” the Singer said. “Once you find the seam, it’s just a matter of getting it open.”

“But what if someone tried to let out all the air?” Old Bess asked.

“The door is shaped like a plug; if there were a vacuum on the other side, you’d never get it open,” the Singer made a strange motion with her shoulders that seemed dismissive.

“How do you know all this stuff? You told me your passion was music,” Old Bess said as she slowly backed away from the door.

The Human opened her mouth to answer but hesitated. “I’m ... not sure, actually,” the Singer mumbled. She grunted as she braced herself and pulled the lever. A heavy thud shook the entire shuttle, and the shuttle door shifted with the hiss of leaking air.

“Oh, gods protect me!” Old Bess wailed. The fear of depressurization was practically written into the genes of space-faring folk, and not just in popular medias featuring characters flung into the black. Torus Terminal had evacuated Blocks before because of containment issues.

Brettn might have screamed too, except he froze with the sudden fear of being sucked out through a hole into a vacuum. But the Human just stood up and pushed her fingers into the space between the door and the wall.

“What are you doing?” Old Bess gasped as she began to hyperventilate.

The hissing of air suddenly became a whoosh, and then stopped. “See, as I said,” the Singer said. “If there were no air, it wouldn’t have opened.” She made a strange shoulder motion and pulled the door fully open. “Do you hear that?”

As Old Bess calmed herself, Brettn turned his attention to the airlock beyond the door. It was faint, but Brettn thought he could hear ... shouting?

“What in the world?” he muttered. He followed the Human into the airlock as she stretched to look through another small window into the security checkpoint on the other side.

“It’s abandoned,” she said, confused. On the other side of the door, barred gates and metal countertops were unmanned. In the distance, she could now make out the sounds of an alien riot and the distinctive zap-thump of Imperial stun-nets. The sound made her blood run cold, and she felt her face growing hot with anger.

“Then now’s our chance,” Brettn said excitedly. He turned to gather Old Bess, who had managed to catch her breath but was still staring through the wall. “Can you open that door, too?”

“Yes, and while we’re at it, you can tell me about this other Human you met,” the Singer said, her voice reflecting her mood.

Brettn froze and felt his heart sink. “Oh, you heard that?” he said hesitantly. A phantom pain shot through his leg, and the spring steel prosthetic shivered against the floor as he twitched. The Singer’s silence and her unwavering stare were answering enough.

==//====&===+===&====//==

“Things appear to be getting out of hand, sir,” Arnarxx stuttered. The reports they were scraping from the station’s Security Frequency were becoming exceedingly violent, even for what they’d seen of the way the Thief-Taker General operated.

“Everything is going according to plan, Arnarxx,” the Thief-Taker said, bowed over his desk at the back of the little restaurant. A small metal box sat in one corner, and a wire snaked across the smooth surface to a tiny speaker balanced within the Human’s ear canal. Occasionally the Human’s stylus moved over the cellular sheet before him.

Wood and paper were expensive products on a station and using them for stationery was a ridiculous expense. Instead, most record-keeping was done on plastic sheets riddled with microscopic ink cells when it wasn’t done digitally. The stylus induced a flip in the electrical charge of the cells embedded in the sheet, and the ink within changed to a darker color in response, leaving a mark not unlike a pen on paper.

Only the Human knew what was written in his records. He used a language and alphabet that no one else on the station knew. And claimed to have encrypted his writing, so even if someone could translate the words, it would not appear to say anything coherent.

Arnarxx was less confident than the Human, but that was normal. The Human rarely deigned to explain his plans to them, mostly he just told Arnarxx what he wanted Arnarxx to do. And so far, Arnarxx had been diligent in doing just that. They enjoyed the work, too.

Arnarxx had their new servers up and running in record time. They even had underlings – for lack of a better word – monitoring the servers and maintaining them. Arnarxx assumed the Human had them in his employ, and that they were being compensated in some fashion. But Arnarxx also didn’t ask.

Arnarxx hadn’t realized how much they enjoyed the engineering aspect of constructing the server, but the Human had because that was what he had Arnarxx doing now.

It was apparent now that the Human aimed to break or claim as many aspects of the station’s economy as he could for himself. Arnarxx had never considered etching data into quartz before, but he was very close to designing a machine that could read and write in the patterns the Human had described. They were thankful they didn’t need to develop an entire encoding system for a four-dimensional storage medium.

More than that, though, they were surprised the Human had been able to imagine such a system. Arnarxx didn’t believe the Human to be very educated in such matters, but it also wasn’t their place to ask.

There was substantial activity in blocks eight through twelve on Torus Terminal, and Arnarxx could hear the panic and fatigue in the Imperial peacekeeping corps members over their frequency scraper. But another signal lit up their program, and their server highlighted it as an Imperial frequency but could not identify the encryption.

Although, from the other side of the room, in the stillness of the comfortable office space, Arnarxx heard a voice from the tiny speaker perched inside the Human’s ear: “Package is secure.”

The Human tapped his finger against his desk and the sound echoed through the room. Arnarxx whipped their head around to look toward the Human and was disturbed at the sight of his smile.

“All.”

Tap.

“According.”

Tap.

“To plan.”