4

Lap arrived in the brig some time later, carrying a tray of pre-packed food substitutes and a can of 'Water Plus'. The can had a flash sign emblazoned upon it that read 'Now 50% more watery!'. How water could be 50% more watery, Demi couldn't imagine. Lap turned off the force field, sat beside Demi for a few seconds before crinkling to her. Then they left, leaving the force field switched off.

She switched the force field back on and reentered the cell before it buzzed back into operation. If, when, the authorities caught up with them, she wanted it to be absolutely clear that she was, in fact, a prisoner. Kidnapped and forced aboard this ship under absolute and total duress. That, and she wasn't too sure that Captain Friss had full control of his faculties. He could turn on her at any second.

A few hours later, the food substitutes eaten, the more-watery water drunk, the captain himself entered the brig. He switched off the force field, then used his blaster to make certain she couldn't switch it back on again. That kind of thing. That was the weird kind of thing that made Demi distrust him. He could have simply pulled out the fuse.

In silence, Friss stood before the cell, sat, cross-legged, on the floor and pulled a satchel from behind him. Still saying nothing, he opened the satchel and removed something that Demi would not have expected in a thousand years. A Russian nesting doll, delicately and intricately painted with a smiling, wide-eyed features of a young woman. He began to open up the doll, taking each piece out and standing them in a line.

"You." Friss tapped the top of the largest doll, looking directly at Demi, then tapped the others in turn as he continued. "Lodka, Bognrd BloodRage, MacGuffin, the Big One."

He paused, smirking and nodding his head as though he had explained everything, and then waited. Demi had no idea what he was talking about, so remained silent herself. Friss raised an eyebrow, which helped nothing. When he raised the other eyebrow to join it's twin, he waggled them. That still didn't begin to explain what he meant, so Demi shrugged. Friss sighed, tapping the heads again and drawing in a breath, presumably to repeat what he had already said.

"I don't know what you're trying to say!" Demi wafted her hand in the general direction of the gathered dolls. "I don't know what this is! Words! Use actual, descriptive words!"

"This is the score. This is what I need you for and I can't do it without you." Once again, he began tapping the heads of the dolls and Demi had to stop herself breaking his fingers to stop him from repeating those words. "It's a MacIntosh doll. Been in my family for years. Centuries. It illustrates how each part of the puzzle leads to, reveals, something bigger."

"No, it's a Matryoshka doll, that much I do know." She watched as Friss rolled his eyes at that. She half expected him to make a scoffing suck of his teeth. "And that's not how it works. You've just seen how it works. The more you reveal, the smaller the pieces get."

Friss began to say something, pointing his finger at nothing in particular, then stopped. He scowled, looked at the dolls, mimed opening them up and placing each piece beside each other, and then made an even darker scowl before picking up the dolls, replacing them inside each other and returning them to his satchel. He swung the satchel back behind him and his scowl turned into a grin.

"Look, we could argue all day about who is right and who is wrong, which metaphor is correct, or how utterly ignorant you are of my Russian heritage, or we could get down to the necessary negotiations." He shifted onto his knees and shuffled closer to Demi, causing her to try to move even further away from him. He clasped one of her hands between both of his own. "I need you and that beautiful, wildly illegal implant of yours, Demi. It would be simply regrettable if the authorities found you and were to know that the implant was still working. Wouldn't it?"

He worded it as though the threat were implied, but it could not be more of a very definite threat if he had drawn a finger across his throat and waved his blaster before her eyes. A threat, not so much veiled, as wearing a day-glo t-shirt with the words "I'm threatening you!" in big, three-dimensional letters across the front. Demi didn't like being threatened, but the thought of additional charges adding to her last Virt-prison sentence sent shivers down her back.

"Some negotiation." She pulled her hand from between his, grimacing as he tried to keep hold of it. "Whatever. Just explain what you want. Who is 'Lodka' and 'Bognrd BloodRage' for a start. Are they members of your crew?"

"After a fashion." Friss rose to his feet, placed one hand upon the wall and leaned against it, his other hand on his hip. It was the worst 'sad and reflective' pose Demi had ever seen. "Lodka is my ship. The best ship in the galaxy and, without her, like you, everything falls apart. Bognrd is ... well, yes, he's a crew member. Without him ..."

"Everything falls apart. I get it." She rolled her hand in a circle, urging him to continue explaining and then stopped. "Wait. I thought this was your ship?"

"It is. After a fashion. I found it. Salvage rights and all that." He cringed, thought about it for a second and cringed again. "Alright. I found it in the Gal-Navy shipyards under refit. If they didn't want someone taking it, their security should have been better! Anyway! Lodka is different. She really was salvage. An ancient warship left behind by an extinct race far beyond our current technological levels. A ship born to travel the galaxy faster than anything. Oh, she is a beauty!"

"Born?" This had all become needlessly sexual for Demi's tastes. Whoever and whatever Friss had feelings for were none of her business, but her curiosity, as always, got the better of her. "You say that as if it's a living thing. And, if this Lodka is so important to you, why aren't you flying her now?"

"She is a living thing! She's an organic ship. As far as I know, the only organic ship in the galaxy." Friss turned and leaned his back against the wall, staring into nothing as he recalled his ship. "She's fast and tough. Armed to the teeth, literally. I just, sort of, kind of, parked her in the wrong place and they towed her away."

He glanced towards Demi and went back to staring into space. A second later, he glanced again. It seemed clear to Demi that he had expected a reaction of some kind. Possibly an 'Ooh! Wow!' at the idea of an organic ship. Or maybe a sympathetic commiseration at his loss. She had no idea and she still hadn't heard anything about Bognrd BloodRage and whatever terrifying part he played in all of this. She didn't even want to ask.

"Ooh. Wow. Organic, eh?" Maybe it was the lack of passion in her words, but that didn't seem to be what Friss wanted from her. She tried a different tack. "Towed away. How sad. Poor you."

"Don't you want to know where I parked her?" He was like a child, Demi realised now. He toyed with the power cell of his blaster, pouting.

"Okay." Demi shrugged, wishing she could have talked to Lap instead, even though she could understand a rustle they said. "Where did you park her?"

"Only on the Grand Palace Nest of the Governor General of Imblibdor 5!" He broke out into a wide-mouthed grin, all teeth and curled back lips, and wide, wild eyes. He slapped his thigh as though he had told the ultimate after-dinner drinks joke. "You should have seen it! Pincers snapping from under the rubble. Antennae struggling to find a way out. Pheromones screaming for help. Or ice-cream. My Imblibdorian pheromone reading skills need brushing up. But, yeah, they didn't like that, and their impound yards have, for some reason, the best security this side of the mega-banks. That's one of the places you come in."

He began to laugh, even though none of what he had said could ever be considered close to being almost funny. He laughed hard, tears appearing in his eyes, his hand falling to his ribs, presumably because they ached and not because he was so narcissistic that he needed to hug himself, and Demi realised that Captain Frisson Packlightly was not altogether the most sane man she had ever met. Or sane at all. Not even remotely close to sane.

The full weight of her situation had begun to press upon her. Not only from the slaughter that had occurred at the bar, or finding herself locked in a cell, sometimes through her own doing, in the brig of a stolen Gal-Navy corvette. Or even that she had probably, unintentionally, violated her parole in several, compellingly definite ways. All that would be enough for anyone to feel more than a little disappointed with their life choices.

It was worse, however. The man that had kidnapped her, and refused to allow her to remain captive in her force fielded cell, was mad. Not angry, though she wouldn't put that emotion past him, but absolutely stark-raving bonkers. A child's mind in the body of a man and someone had taken his toy away. The screaming tantrum, she decided, had only just started.

The screaming tantrum and the screaming alarm that now started blasting from speakers hidden within the walls of the brig. It didn't sound good. The kind of alarm that promised explosions, blood, smoke and aliens demanding apologies for some obscure slight made against them. Another sound came over the hidden tannoy, softening the alarm for a second. It sounded like white noise in a blender.

"Oh, balls!" Friss gave Demi an apologetic, teeth-grimace and the grimace turned to an accusatory scowl. "We've been found. We shouldn't be able to be found. Are you bugged?"

She was a little miffed, that was for certain, but Demi couldn't say whether she was bugged or not.