The Riddle (Alternate Dimensions Book 2) Page 3

  The mooreerie continued to grumble, but I just laughed then looked to the others. “I’m going to clean up first, if you guys don’t mind. I have a feeling that after tomorrow, we won’t stop moving for a while.”

  “Yeah, because our life has just been the epitome of leisure the past few days.”

  “Exactly.”

  I stood and walked over to the facilities, leaving my few friends to their own devices. I had a lot to think about, but it was nothing that couldn’t be pondered under a hot shower.

  More puzzle pieces were falling into place, but somehow, the picture didn’t seem that much clearer.

  Chapter Three: A Flibflorb a Day Keeps the Kodadt Away

  “Ow!”

  “Remain still, please.”

  “Dude, we’re like a billion years in the future and you guys still haven’t come up with a way to draw blood that doesn’t hurt like a bitch?”

  Bajol gave me a look that was basically the seirr equivalent of a raised eyebrow. “And have you had extensive experience with your blood being drawn?”

  “Bumpy childhood. Less with the subtle explorations of my backstory and more with the getting this over with.”

  “Normally, I would apply a mild anesthetic, but I want our sample to be as pure as possible. There’s no telling if this dimension’s drugs might affect your dimension’s readings.”

  “Yeah, you seemed to not mind using them for that brain surgery you did without my permission when we first met.”

  “You were a prisoner. I did not need your consent to provide a lifesaving surgery.”

  “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

  The doctor stood back, a patient look on their face. “Is there a reason you are being so passive aggressive?”

  I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “Just a general dislike of hospitals or anything that reminds me of them. And this lab definitely reminds me of them.”

  I had been cool with the idea of getting me tested, and excited even when I woke up to the fake captain gently shaking me. It wasn’t until Majoi guided us into the lab Angel was giving us permission to use that my stomach had sank.

  Everything was white, like uncomfortably, immaculately white. There was the sharp scent of antiseptic in the air–which, by the way, was ridiculously dry. So, after a couple of hours of sitting there, being scanned, pricked, and otherwise tested, I was feeling pretty antsy.

  “Ah, apologies. We are almost done.”

  Bajol pulled away and loaded the vial of scarlet-red blood he had withdrawn from my arm into some machine doohickey or another. It would have probably been cool to watch, and super science-y, but I was pretty distracted by the heebie-jeebies that were busy making their home in my psyche.

  “So, do you think I’m contagious?”

  Bajol was quiet for several beats, as if he was calculating in his head. “Considering how your body has so expertly configured a self-curing mechanism, I would hypothesize no. However, there is the question of what might happen if you were wounded in an area with only partially scrubbed DNA in it.”

  “So, in other words, maybe, but you hope not?”

  “I’m a scientist. I do not hope. I theorize.”

  I smirked at that. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

  Sitting still was getting to be too much, so I took to pacing the room. If Bajol minded, he didn’t say anything about it and let me work. My mind was still wrapping itself around the idea that there was a whole race of world savers who were tasked with keeping the dimensions safe, and that I was some super-powered version of said saviors that managed to hop the barrier between realities.

  Granted, I didn’t think I had done the hopping myself. Most of it had been that scientist lady, Jyra.

  I frowned as I thought back to the last time I had seen her. Was she okay? Was she even alive? I could only hope so. The whole point of going back to the lab was to save her. She held the answers of how I got here and how I would get home. Oh, and save the universe while I was at it.

  Several hours passed, with Janix and Viys’k being dropped off by Majoi at a later hour. I was almost jealous of their sleeping in, but that was quickly quelled, when I remembered the only reason either of them were caught was because of the dreams my Stranger friends had sent them.

  It wasn’t until late afternoon until Bajol stood, stretching. “I have set up every test I could think of for what we need. Now we just wait for the results.”

  “How long?” I asked, throat tight.

  “Some just a few hours, some as much as twenty-four. We can call Majoi over the comm if you all want to return to the captain’s quarters while I guard the samples.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Won’t you be lonely?”

  The seirr shook his head. “Although I like to think I have kept up admirably in the rescue you somewhat took over, I am a scholar at heart. Time to myself to record my thoughts and sift through data will be much appreciated.”

  “Ah, gotcha. We’ll leave you be then.”

  “Thank you.”

  We waited for Majoi to come collect us, then returned to the captain’s quarters. I thought I would be bored, but I found the opportunity to sit and do nothing for a bit refreshing. It wasn’t too long before I felt myself slipping off into a nap.

  ***

  “Hey, Fire Skull, time to wake up. The doc has his results.”

  I groaned and sat up, my mouth like sandpaper. “What?” I asked blearily, rubbing my eyes. They, also, were uncomfortably dry.

  “Here,” Janix said, handing me a large tankard of what looked like holographic crystal. I downed the liquid inside greedily and felt a bit more refreshed and slightly less like roadkill. “Come on, the doc is waiting.”

  “But I thought he said he would need a whole day for some of those tests.”

  “He did,” the mooreerie answered, ruffling my wild curls. “You’ve been out for over twenty-four hours.”

  “What? No. I don’t believe you.”

  He shrugged. “Bajol said it was best to let you sleep. You do realize you’ve been through a hell of a lot of trauma in a short time. Maybe a little mini-coma was in order.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I groaned and sat up, wiggling to the edge of the bed. Despite my rest, my limbs all felt heavy, and the muscled alien had to help me to my feet.

  “You okay there?” he asked, voice thick with concern.

  “I have to pee. Urgently.”

  “All right, that makes sense. Come on, bathroom first, then doctor talk.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Surprisingly, I wasn’t embarrassed as he helped me over to the bathroom. He waited until I was upright in front of the toilet before letting me go. “Can you handle it from here, or do you still need me?”

  “I should be fine,” I murmured, “but keep the door cracked.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right outside.”

  I waited until he was gone and the door was mostly closed before very carefully shimmying out of my pants and lowering myself onto the porcelain throne. Except, in this universe, it was more like a light-up, chrome throne, but the point still stood.

  I stayed planted there until I was done, and boy, did it take a while. I was starting to buy this whole sleeping for twenty-four-hour business. My legs were asleep by the time I wrapped up my business and slid my hands under the sanitizer.

  “You all right?” Janix asked as I opened the door. “I was worried you might have gotten sucked into some other dimension via the sewage system.”

  “Nope, still here,” I said, laying an arm across his shoulders for support. “But significantly less full of it.”

  “Are you guys done with your awkward bonding over bowel movements yet?”

  That, of course, was none other than Viys’k. Laughing awkwardly, I let Janix help me over to the couch where I flopped across several cushions. I felt like my body was slowly rebooting itself after being shut off for far too long, and sitting up was way too much of a hassle.


  “So, Doc, what’s the word?”

  “You are not contagious.”

  Angel threw her hands up in the air. “Hey! Well, isn’t that some good news! All right, so now we can–”

  “But–”

  “Oh no, I hate buts. Nothing good comes after a ‘but.’”

  “Should someone nefarious gain access to large amounts of live samples of you, there is a chance they could use the immunity your body has to create a sort of mutated mutant virus. Basically, a supercharged plague that would make our current one look like child’s play.”

  “Well…,” I murmured slowly. “That’s decidedly not good.”

  “No,” Angel agreed. “Not at all. So basically, we can’t let you–or any part of you–ever fall into enemy hands.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it, but good to know.”

  “Not to be fatalistic, but maybe we should make some sort of a fail-safe. Ya know, something to make sure if you get captured you have a sort of a…way out.”

  “What, are you talking like some sort of modern equivalent of a cyanide capsule?”

  Janix looked a bit sheepish as he shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe all of us should have one. We’re messing with a force that eats entire dimensions. I think having a back-up plan is prudent more than anything.”

  “Interesting idea, but too easy to hack. For now, how about we focus on getting you back to that lab?”

  I nodded, fairly relieved that I wasn’t going to have some form of better-safe-than-sorry suicide in my body. “What’ve you found?”

  “Apparently, Jyra, the scientist that brought you here, had an assistant. Followed her from their mutual internship right on to co-heading their project. Although almost all info on her has been redacted, I managed to find where they squirreled her off to. We find her, we have our key to get into that lab.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. So where is this assistant?”

  “Well, here’s the fun part. It’s a labor camp on one of the outer moons of the Krelach home planet.”

  “So, a prison.” I said with a long sigh. “After all this running, you want us to break into a prison.”

  “You’ve already busted out of the most secure one in all of the system. How hard could a standard security labor camp be?”

  “I don’t know. Last time I teleported through a cell wall without meaning to.”

  “Whoa, really? Think you can do that again?”

  “I have no idea. Mostly the things I do seem kinda like a one-and-done sort of deal.”

  “Huh, interesting. But don’t worry, I have a plan that doesn’t rely on your fluctuating powers.”

  “That’s a relief.” Viys’k said dryly from where she was perched on the back of the couch. “What does it involve, then?”

  Angel clapped her hand, and for a moment, it was easy to forget she was a centuries-old revolutionary with the ability to converse with people from other dimensions. “That’s the best part! We’re all getting disguises! I haven’t had the chance to play dress up in ages.

  “We’ll all be given new identities, papers, DNA readings, the works. This is gonna be the best roleplay I’ve had since my birthday.”

  I sensed there was a touch of TMI in there, but I let it slide. “So, how exactly do these disguises work?”

  “Now that, my friend, is better shown than told.”

  ***

  Angel was right. Unequivocally, completely, and totally right.

  If she had told me, off the bat, just how advanced their espionage disguise game was, I never would have believed her. But, after two days of flying toward our destination and being fitted for about every possibility under the sun, I was beyond amazed.

  Apparently, in the future, they didn’t use wigs. No, instead, my head’s measurements were taken by some sort of laser scanner, which was connected to a machine that printed out a membrane-thin cap of what looked like real, honest-to-goodness skin. Angel herself helped me to test fit it, slicking my hair down flat to my skull, then covering the edges in some sort of goop. It felt just like a bald cap I wore back in drama club for a one-off show, but it quickly started to grow heavier. When I reached up to touch it, I already felt a finger nail’s worth of hair growing.

  “Not bad, right?” Angel had asked. “Now if anyone tries to take some sort of DNA sample, it’ll match to the profile we set up.

  “This is insane.” I had remembered laughing at that and thinking it couldn’t get any more high-concept than that.

  As it turns out, I was wrong. Unequivocally, completely, and totally wrong.

  Bajol placed tiny implants just behind our ears. Apparently, these put out readings to confuse other types of scanners and could be controlled wirelessly via the array in Angel’s captain quarters. So, the heartrate monitors, retinal scanners, and fingerprint readers around the prison would get whatever data we fed them.

  Of course, there was the standard IDs, paperwork, and learning about our new identities, but those were less exciting. I would rather watch the hair on my fake head grow as it sat in the med-lab, waiting for us to suit up for our mission.

  But it was actually Janix, who got the most interesting upgrade of all. It turned out a three-armed mooreerie was a bit too conspicuous, when one of the three most wanted people in the galaxy was exactly that, so Angel’s captain-double began fitting him for some sort of prosthetic. I had thought it was going to be your stereotypical dummy arm, maybe with some sort of grasping mechanism, but no. What the decoy unveiled looked like an exact model of a real, living arm. When I expressed wonder about it, the seirr explained that bio-mechanical limbs had become quite advanced compared to my time. As I watched them test it out, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how right she was.

  By then, it was time for us to load up into some sort of fake prisoner ship and jettison from the mothership. Our cover story was fairly straight forward. Angel, Viys’k, and I were government-licensed bounty hunters delivering Janix, an illegal fighter that had been running his own underground battle scene without the appropriate permits. I had originally thought we were going to go for a more serious crime, but it seemed in this universe, damage to the government’s pocketbooks were considered more heinous than rape or murder.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?” Janix murmured to me as we shuttled through space toward the orange and brown moon above the krelach home world.

  I grunted affirmatively, going over different scenarios and how I was supposed to answer. I was playing the part of the silent, dumb muscle, lest I accidentally screw something up by saying something exceptionally primitive of me. Angel was our leader and the tactician of our group, while Viys’k was the infiltrator.

  “I just mean, you’ve spent pretty much every waking moment in this galaxy trying to get out and then stay out of prison, and now we’re marching right into one. That’s gotta make you nervous, right?”

  I gave him an odd look. “What are you trying to do?”

  He shrugged, an interesting articulation with four shoulders. “I dunno. Commiserate maybe.”

  “Commiserate? Are you trying to subtly tell me you’re nervous?”

  He looked uncomfortable as he shifted in his dummy-restraints. “Well, yeah. Listen, I’ve been captured exactly two times in my life. One of them, I lost my arm, the other, I met you. I’m not really anxious to gamble at how a third time turns out.”

  Oh. I had never thought to stop and think of how this plan might have been effecting everyone else. I had just assumed I was the weakest link and everyone would coddle me to make sure the dumb human was all right. Wow, I was a terrible friend.

  “Is that how you, uh….” I gestured to his now-prosthetic limb, which was busy crumpling a small piece of metal sheeting over and over again.

  “Yeah. You don’t know this because you’re not from here, but mooreerie society doesn’t have the best views on the handicapable. We’re meant to protect the lodee in our circles, and the thought is that you need all four arms to do so. Anyone lacking is a target. Weak. W
e’ve advanced a lot, but there are certain things that are harder to shake.”

  I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it wasn’t my place to speak at all, just to listen, but I couldn’t help the empathy that rolled through me. Janix was normally so flippant, so easy going and hard-shelled. He had to be particularly upset to be confessing to me now, on a ship headed straight for a labor camp.

  “But I’m not weak. You know that, right? Even after that asshole stole my arm, I still managed to escape with half his goods.”

  “Yeah, of course, Janix. I never thought any less of you for a moment. I hope that’s been obvious.”

  “Well, yeah, but you don’t know anything, so it doesn’t count.”

  “Wow, rude.” I countered, pinching his leg.

  He jerked away but laughed, and his serious mood was broken at least for now. I joined in his mirth, letting myself get carried away in our cackling.

  Although I had high hopes for our mission, I had the feeling it was the last bit of levity we would have for a while.

  Chapter Four: Ramshackle Rat Rescue

  “Heralding ship, you are entering restricted space. Your vessel is reading as unregistered. What is your purpose?”