Chapter Twenty-One: Rescue Mission
Warnings for references to previous nonconsensual sexual experimentation, scientists behaving badly, and at least one furious biped.
John walked down the hall, trying to look inconspicuous. This was easier said than done. He was, after all, a small, fierce alien holding a wriggly lava lamp hostage at saltpoint.
At least there was no one else in sight. It was off-hours, and the Keplerians were doing whatever they did when they weren't ordering hapless bipeds to sex each other delirious. Sleeping, perhaps, or playing some kind of multi-polygonous mah-jong. Still. John remained vigilant.
It was a good thing he did too, because somewhere around the third bend in the corridor, the hostage, Plum Duff, made a squidge for it. John looked down to find that the tentacle he'd been grasping – not very gently, either – had turned to liquid in his hand.
"The fuck?"
He didn't know if the liquid was harmful or not, but the experience was like being spat on by a grasshopper for the first time – unexpected and unpleasant. As he tried to shake the goo off his fingers, the scientist began hurrying off without it.
"That's how you want to play it? Fine."
John lobbed a bit of salty homemade napalm over Duff's "crowning protuberance" (Sherlock's term; John cut to the chase and called it a head) and into a nearby wall sconce. The glowing plants within promptly keeled over and died, emitting a plaintive crackle and an acrid stench as they went.
"See that, all black and crispy? If you don't start being more helpful, that's you. All I'm looking for is the lab with my boyfriend in it, and yes, that's almost certainly where he is, because that's how you lot work. For crying out loud. It's not that difficult."
Although otherwise perplexed by John, Duff seemed to know a warning shot when he saw one. He came to a standstill. It was the jiggliest standstill John had ever seen, but then, that was life when you were made of jelly. Even straightforward things like skidding to a halt involved a great deal of inadvertent motion afterwards.
John caught up and wrapped his left arm around Duff's back.
"Right," he said. "Go ahead and turn your whole torso into goo and see how far that gets you. I'll pour you into a bucket if I have to."
Duff accepted the comment with silent hostility. He clearly had no idea what John was saying. John didn't let the creature's bafflement stop him. He had a role model for this. Sherlock said intelligible things only fifty percent of the time, but he kept right on going. If anything, the fact that nobody understood him made him talk more.
"Let's review the mission plans. Plum Cross. My mate. You're taking me to him. If you don't get me there as fast as your ruffle can carry you, so help me God, I'll salt you dead. Now move it."
In case Duff needed a reminder of where they were going, John drew Sherlock's Keplerian name in what was essentially the creature's haunch. He would have preferred to draw the cross over his captive's communicative plate, as this was where words usually went, but his arm was too short to wrap that far.
"He'd get a kick out of that, wouldn't he?" muttered John. "Beanpole. Obsessed with the height difference. I think he gets off on it. What? No, not you. Keep going, Rowntree. Forward march." John's last meal had worn off, and Duff was looking more and more like a giant fruit pastille.
Duff shuddered and lurched his way down several corridors. John hoped to hell that they were going in the right direction. He'd never been to this part of the ship before. Duff could have been taking him anywhere, from Sherlock's side to the trash compactor. Nevertheless, John needed him. He couldn't just barge through doors at will. Duff, like all Pentagons, had a level-five security clearance. John would need that to get where he was going.
He would have preferred to hold the salt weapon in his left hand, the one touching Duff's membrane, but he couldn't risk it. All it would take would be for Duff to take a Clouseau-esque tumble over something in the hall, and John would be left clutching hundreds of pounds' worth of black goo, or worse. There was a vapor phase to Keplerian death, but having seen what had happened to the plants, John doubted that the transition would be instantaneous.
Awkwardly, like the world's least compatible conjoined twins, John and Duff made their way around a corner. There they ran smack into a Keplerian lying on the floor. He seemed to be polishing it with his belly.
"Oi," said John, as Duff burst into a tirade of shapes. "Don't get innocent people involved. Shut up and keep moving. If you screw this up, I will not be happy."
Trying to keep Duff quiet, he gave him a warning poke, but it was no use. Without the human ability to separate thinking from speaking, Duff would inevitably display his every thought across his midriff in glorious Technicolor. Furthermore, the janitor was lower in rank than Duff, which meant that he would take notice of everything Duff said. The janitor was a Watcher. It was as plain as the Olive Triangle in the center of his globby forehead. He would see, and he would get help.
And yet. Much to John's surprise, the Triangle stayed humbly on his belly, motionless. He looked like a courtier's coat tossed into a puddle for a passing queen.
John's face lit up in grim triumph.
"Well, isn't this interesting. He doesn't dare look up at you. What's the matter? You smack the idea of your five-pointed superiority into his head one too many times? That's going to make for a very one-sided conversation, mate. Right, then. Don't think I didn't see how you acted with Ut's replacement. That's what you get for parading about, treating everyone else like dirt."
They soon came across another janitor. This time, John was not so lucky. The new janitor was shining the wall with her back. As soon as they hove into view, her peripheral shapes, which had been gliding back and forth with the polishing motion, froze. There was no doubt in John's mind that she was looking directly at both of them.
How do I rebound from this? "Lovely evening, miss; my friend and I are out for a stroll?"
He should have learned the language from Sherlock when he'd had a chance, but the thought that the Keplerians would separate the two of them had never crossed his mind. Given how attached he felt to Sherlock, it was a surprise to be reminded that they were separable. Well. He would rectify the situation pronto, just as soon as he dealt with …
"Hey. No." The janitor had just created a tentacle, and she was reaching towards a wall sconce with it. "What are you …"
The sconce began flashing rhythmically, much as the ones in John's room had just before Fool and Tart barged in and sedated him. It was almost certainly an alarm.
"Ta," groaned John. "Ta very much."
He pinched off a bit of his napalm blob and tossed it into the sconce, extinguishing the light. The hallway was no longer bathed in a strobe effect, but the damage had probably already been done. On Earth, fire alarms didn't just make a single corridor unbearably noisy; they alerted off-site firefighters to come running. Chances were good that someone had been alerted to the threat posed by an irritable, salt-laden biped with a scientist in tow.
Even if the alarm had, through some miracle, gone unnoticed, word would be getting out shortly. While John was busy dealing with the light, the janitor had undulated off.
"Break's over," said John to his troublesome hostage. "Take me to Sherlock."
The cross he'd poked into Plum Duff's gelatinous flesh with his finger had already smoothed over. He made another one out of sheer frustration.
They stopped outside the transparent door of a large laboratory. It was full of towering columns. Each contained a different alien life form. It seemed at first glance like a cross between an interplanetary zoo and the Temple of Karnak.
One column contained some kind of sixteen-foot worm that crashed against the walls of its cage. John hadn't even known that worms could crash. Another was home to a waterfall of yellowish sludge. It poured out of a slit at the top, landed in a pool at the base, then was sucked back up into the column again. A third column housed what appeared to be several instances of ball lightning, all jostling each other like enormous blue tumbleweeds. They made a tremendous racket. Even with the door closed, John could hear them buzzing and humming like a swarm of giant bees.
Interspersed with the columns were perhaps a dozen wide oval pedestals. These were opaque and olive in color. In a previous life, the life he left in London, John would have called them desks. At one desk, a Keplerian scientist, half hidden by machinery of some kind, used one of his tentacles to jab viciously at something on a slab. It appeared to be a dead jellyfish, or a cadaverous umbrella.
"Go, go, go," hissed John. "Do you want Dr. Jabby here to see us?"
He grabbed one of Duff's tentacles and ducked into a nearby alcove. It seemed to be a custodial closet. The vat of liquid it contained smelled very much like the parts of the ship tidied by the janitors.
Finding himself alone in the alcove, John peered back out. Plum Duff was still standing in front of the door to the laboratory. He was extremely thin. The tentacle John had grabbed had simply unfurled like a fire hose, taking half of Duff's soup with it.
A plum cross twirled around in the center of Duff's body. Sherlock, John read.
Fuck me, thought John. For once, the idea was purely idiomatic.
"He's in there?"
Plum Duff stared back in incomprehension.
John signed a cross, then pointed at the lab door.
Duff signed an umber square. Yes.
Intent on keeping a low profile, John dropped the tentacle, bent at the waist and ran back to the laboratory door. Duff hastily drew his tentacle back in, regaining his natural girth as he did. It was like watching a party horn, its tooting complete, snap back into a less festive shape.
"Open the door," said John, pointing at the architectural feature in question. He crouched, keeping his salt weapon visible and at the ready.
Duff made no movement.
"Door. Open." This time, John punched it. The door, not Duff.
John looked up at his hostage. The scientist was quivering. All of his peripheral shapes had migrated to the side furthest from John.
Shapes rushing towards you mean love. Shapes rushing away mean what? Hate? Fear?
John wondered what Keplerians looked like when they were both afraid and in love. For a fraction of a second, he pictured a giant novelty lamp with its shapes rushing back and forth from one side to another. He recognized that emotion. It was how any sane individual would feel about Sherlock.
Duff opened the door. Sure enough, there against the back wall was John's beloved. He'd previously been obscured by Dr. Jabby, but that scientist had wandered away from his station.
Sherlock's curly head lolled forward. He was being harangued by a large Keplerian with a wine-colored streak, and he appeared to be half-embedded in the transparent wall. His face was pale as starlight, and all of space loomed vertiginously behind him. He was just this side of conscious, but he was alive, and Jesus, why was his torso covered in bloody great welts?
John's heart leapt at the sight of him. Meanwhile his brain got to work on the question of who was going to pay for the welts. And how.
John had to get to Sherlock. But first, he had to figure out what to do with Duff. If he brought him into the lab, Duff would almost certainly tip off Sherlock's interlocutor. This might result in Sherlock's death. If he let Duff go, Duff could spread word of their exact whereabouts.
John tossed his napalm ball from one hand to the other.
Slap, went the weapon as it hit his palm. Slap.
He let the ball talk for him.
This is your fault, motherfucker. You started this. You stuck my partner in a machine. You experimented on him. Did you enjoy that? All right, he wasn't my partner then, but Christ. He had no idea what was going on. He's not a toy, he's a human being. One of the better ones, actually. He's not something for you to play with. You have no fucking idea how much I resent everything you did to him. To us.
Duff's communicative screen was awash in a flood of shapes. John had a feeling that this meant, "Please, Infinitely Multisided Polygon, let me live."
Slap, went the ball. It landed first on one palm, then the other. Slap, slap.
Duff made himself smaller, denser, as though anticipating the killing blow. John held his ball steady and stared directly at him.
"Right," he said. "Piss off."
Duff flashed three olive-colored diamonds in the middle of his soup. It was the same comment Ut made whenever he was particularly confused by Sherlock.
John waved the arm without the salt to demonstrate a path towards freedom.
"'Piss off,' I said. Go share your fear with everyone else. That's what you Keplerians do, right? You tell everyone what's on your mind. Good. Go and spread your terror like a virus. Tell everyone that there are two crazy bipeds in the lab, and they'll destroy anyone who tries to separate them. Go on. Make yourself useful."
Duff was off as fast as his ruffled base could carry him. While most of his peripheral shapes shivered and shook in the front, one lone pentagon tossed and turned in the back, as though trying to determine what to make of John.
John headed into the lab, staying low, hiding behind equipment and furniture. He got past two desks before running into Dr. Jabby. Based on what John had seen so far, he was either a xenobiologist specializing in pathology or a necrophiliac. John hoped it was the former.
Unwilling to drop his napalm for the purposes of signing, John drew a quick cross in the carpet with his elbow. Sherlock. The scientist seemed to be considering this, so John drew a circle around the cross, signifying the two of them together. It was a long shot, but perhaps the alien would get out of the way if he knew that John only wanted his partner back.
Unfortunately, Dr. Jabby had little interest in inter-biped romance. He threw a tentacle around John's neck and pinned him to the floor with it. John looked up to see him readying another tentacle. This one was tipped with the same kind of syringe attachment that had knocked John out earlier.
Fighting for air, John grabbed the syringe and stuck it into the scientist's jelly. He hoped that this would result in an Umber Triangle-style faint that would turn the aggressor to liquid. No such luck. Instead, Jabby fell heavily to the floor, paralyzed but solid. John rolled out of the way. He was about to congratulate himself on this James Bond maneuver when he realized that he'd just wrapped the asphyxiating tentacle further around his neck.
To make matters worse, he'd attracted the attention of another scientist – not the one holding Sherlock captive, but a saffron-colored one, slender and devious. It was now towering over John with some kind of cutting implement. The thin blade shone wickedly in the light of the electric tumbleweed creatures.
Choking, John picked up Dr. Jabby's syringe-tipped tentacle and jabbed his colleague in the base with it. The colleague dropped his cutting implement and toppled over backwards. John wondered if, despite the loud humming and buzzing in the air, Sherlock had heard the creature fall.
John felt lightheaded. Black spots were appearing before his eyes, like the dark patches in a soap bubble just before it pops. With the last of his air, he grabbed the fallen Keplerian scalpel and pressed it to the tentacle around his neck. It sliced through the tentacle like a knife through butter.
Oxygen streamed into John's arteries, and with it, euphoria. He stumbled to his knees just in time to see a new scientist peering at him from behind the worm cage.
Right, he thought. I nearly got strangled by Jabby, then vivisected by Pointy. Who the hell are you?
The new scientist looked at John, who was flanked on both sides by prostrate Keplerians, and decided he had other things to do. He hurried to the exit, his internal shapes flapping like a cloud of frightened moths.
Against his better judgment, John let him go.
Trying to hold back a wave of revulsion, John wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He'd just realized what he was hiding behind.
The apparatus consisted of an elevated trough, open at both ends, perhaps six feet in length. Cords of something thick and gelatinous hung from the edges. John couldn't tell if these were ropey tentacles or tentacular ropes. In the middle of the trough was a drain, like the one in the floor of a bathtub. A clear tube ran from it to a small reservoir below.
One of the tentacles stirred. Operating on adrenaline, John scrambled backwards. The tentacle began palpating the portion of the carpet where he'd just been.
Oh. Bollocking. Shit.
It was the milking machine Duff had hooked Sherlock up to, weeks before. It had to be. The tentacle things were what, restraints? Or possibly something more multipurpose. John tried not to think about it too much.
His mind was still reeling at what he'd just seen when he heard a familiar baritone coming from the other side of the trough.
"I admit I have formed a … rudimentary attachment to him," it said.
Sherlock.
"Based on pleasure."
Hang on. What?
John listened to the speech. All of it. And when he was done, he rose to his feet, got behind the scientist with the purple scar, and held the remainder of his homemade napalm to the back of her head.
"Get the fuck away from my boyfriend," he said.
A/N: Ancientreader leaves everything she touches better than she found it, and this chapter is no exception. I'm indebted to her for her expert wielding of the editorial scalpel. And for inventing the word "saltpoint." And for rampaging awesomeness.
Some readers have asked whether there are other stories featuring John and Sherlock in space. I'm happy to report that there are. Berlynn_wohl's sexy, whimsical ROT-13, available on Live Journal and Archive of Our Own, is a personal favorite. If you haven't read it yet, you're in for a treat.