One hour later, Sherlock is still on the couch, curled in a tight ball with his back to the rest of the room.
Not a lot to be done about that, really, so John quangles the Kefitzat's AI and writes up a brief statement for Admiral Uriel. He hadn't exactly announced his 'port of a small-time Trebalan narcotics thug yesterday, but he'd been fairly liberal with the zip ties, so he isn't too worried about there being problems. Better than Lestrade or Dimmock bursting in and discovering a very angry seven-foot-tall lizard man with four arms, quite frankly. It was good of the Ambassador to pass along the tip that got John on the dealer's trail. Today's visit had been a thank-you of sorts.
Statement finished and osked, John turns his attention back to Sherlock. He's honestly a bit surprised at the man's silence. He'd fully expected Sherlock to fly into a frenzy of questions, observations, and demands for experiments upon discovering an extraterrestrial in the sitting room. It really isn't every day that this sort of thing happens, after all—John tries to keep work and home separate. Not everyone is as discreet as the Ambassador.
He decides to let Sherlock ruminate for the time being. He's probably trying to recall all the astronomy he deleted now that it's suddenly relevant.
John doesn't quite get around to asking Sherlock what his thoughts on the Ambassador are. Three hours into Sherlock's sulk, Lestrade calls them in on a spectacularly messy killing in the middle of Regents Park. There's a layer of snow on the ground, enough that the prints of whatever it was that killed (shredded) Raymond Hayes are starkly visible in the crimson-splattered white drifts.
Sherlock gets stuck in what looks like an ugly data conflict. He's muttering about cassowaries, things being too heavy to be something else, quadrupeds not bipeds, and highly developed cuspids as he paces; John thinks it a good thing that Lestrade had long since sent the rest of his crew packing. Sherlock is particularly vicious when stymied by weird data.
A text comes in on John's mobile. It reads, 'Smuggling op interrupted. Makelt loose from cryo. Last scan, loc Regent's.'
John curses. Something up in a nearby tree screams.
"Why anyone feels the fucking need to take two hundred kilos of hexapodal, cyclopean, sideways-mouthed nightmare fuel anywhere but Hell is entirely beyond me," John complains good-naturedly as he sits next to Sherlock and Lestrade, one arm around each. Sherlock has curled into a ball. Lestrade is staring wide-eyed at the corpse of the makelt and clinging to John like a child. "Don't worry, though, it's dead. Just got to take out the lower brain; that's the one that manages breathing and the hearts."
Admiral Uriel snorts. "I don't think they're worried about it being alive so much as they're worried about it existing in the first place, Watson," he says wryly. "The only reason I haven't sent them into a panic is because I can pass as human with a little bit of stage makeup and the right clothing."
John supposes that that's a fairly accurate assessment, at least in Lestrade's case. He pats Sherlock's shoulder, meeting the detective's gaze when he lifts his head out of his arms and knees. "Hey. Penny for your thoughts?"
"Explain," Sherlock croaks.
"Explain what?"
"The flat. Not hallucinating?"
John shakes his head. "Nope. That was the Ambassador."
"The thing in the tree."
Lestrade shudders. "Fucking trees," he mutters, glancing nervously into the boughs where the makelt had been hiding. "Fucking things in trees."
John gives Lestrade's shoulders a friendly squeeze. "Makelt. Cold-climate apex predator from a long-period rocky planet around a binary in the Scutum-Centaurus Arm."
Sherlock narrows his eyes. "How long have you been involved with this?"
John has to count. "Oh... thirty-six years now, I think. Got borrowed by walking jellyfish back when I was six."
"Borrowed?" Sherlock asks incredulously. "How do you borrow a six-year-old?"
"You pick him up, walk off with him, use his brain as a temporary storage device for your ship's database while repairs are done, and then let him go once you're finished," John replies glibly. It's really not all that big of a deal, even if he did end up fluent in the six major languages used by spacefarers and a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of about fifty different species of extraterrestrial. "They had to enlist me after that; I remembered a bit too much."
Sherlock stares.
"What? It didn't hurt."
Lestrade shivers. "Fucking space," he mutters, burying his face in John's shoulder.
John sighs. It's going to be a long evening.
No sleep deprivation as an excuse this time! Oh well.
Makelt and the Admiral are mine. The jellyfish that borrowed John are a reference to the Fountainheads, a race of ambulatory jellyfish-like extraterrestrials from Alastair Reynolds' "Pushing Ice". Everyone who likes science fiction should read that book (and the others by Mr Reynolds, too, since he's mad talented and has an astrophysics degree).