SURVIVOR

It was the worst-case scenario, and the one Vree was dreading.

Human-Amir had been kidnapped nearly a full galactic week ago, and they had only just found the ship that had him.

It was putting out a distress beacon across every known frequency, which was very odd for such a heavily-armed ship.

Usually fridd went down fighting. It was a matter of honor for the lethal warrior race. If they died in battle, they went to their god’s right hand.

Dangerous creatures. Vree’s own people tangled with them occasionally, but the fridd only rarely got their collective heads together enough to be a significant problem.

“Take them,” Vree said shortly at the doors to the airlock. “Find Human-Amir if possible, if not, find out what they did with him.”

“Sir,” the soldiers replied with crisp head-bobs. Their heads and large ears were shaved in the patterns of their troop, and they carried their heavy, polished body-armor like it was nothing.

They were ready for action. Vree was proud of them. They were some of the best Ha’reet had to offer, and they looked to him to lead them.

The doors slid open.

Nothing could have prepared Vree for the carnage on the other side.

Bodies littered the floor, some burned beyond recognition, others soaked in blood and other fluids. No few were killed with what was clearly improvised weaponry. Everything from a sharp-ended screwdriver, to something that looked like it might have started off as a metal chair.

It did not resemble a chair anymore, blacked and twisted by impossible heat.

Bodies were everywhere. The full crew detail spread out in groups of two and three blue-skinned bodies, their huge, corded muscles limp in death. Their terrible mandibles, a weapon in themselves and devastating, hung loose below ranks of unseeing bulbus eyes

The ship was utterly silent other than the faint hum of life support.

Vree had a deep, sick feeling in his stomach. There were always stories about humans and what they could do when their lives were truly at risk, but he had discounted most of those as exaggeration. Certainly humans could be dangerous when they wanted, but wanton massacres?

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Certainly not.

He should have listened to those stories more closely.

The bodies continued as they stalked through the halls. Here and there the walls showed signs of intense heat damage. Wires were melted together, and no few of the Fridd were nothing but bone and greasy ash.

It was a nightmare. The worst of all the rumors and stories, and wild imagination. Vree remembered the Thraxxis War, and the death it brought, but even that wasn’t as bad as this.

When they came to the bridge, they found Human-Amir.

He sat on the stairs up the captain’s chair with a long, barbed knife in one hand, and a blaster in the other. Fire danced over his skin, red and menacing, and reality seemed to bend inward around him just a little. Just enough for an aura of wrongness to radiate off him.

Blood spattered his clothes, the red of his own, and the clear blue of the Fridd pirates who lay dead around him.

“Human-Amir?”

Vree trusted his human and knew that, generally speaking, Human-Amir would rather cut off his own hand than harm Vree.

There was nothing general about this situation, and he approached his human with the utmost caution.

Human-Amir looked up at him, and Vree forced himself not to step back when unholy red eyes, deep pits of flame and nothing else, fixed on him. He resisted the urge to bolt as all that wrongness circled him even though Human-Amir did not move.

In fact, he wasn’t even breathing, although he was clearly alive. Vree tried not to wonder what that meant for his human friend.

“We came to find you,” Vree said carefully, and didn’t move. He knew when a predator was watching him, waiting for weakness. If he spooked Human-Amir now, the human would kill them all. “Your family will be glad to hear you are safe.”

Human-Amir blinked once, slowly, and Vree blinked back, the slow, lazy blink of one who was in safe company. He let his ears fall backwards, relaxed and comfortable, even as his tail flicked back and forth, white-furred and a frequent source of amusement for his human friend in months past.

The flames faded into nothing, and when Human-Amir blinked again, his eyes were back to his normal human-brown. He took a long, trembling breath, and then another.

“I made kind of a mess,” he said as Vree let himself relax, and pretended his heart wasn’t beating like a propeller-blade. “They- they were going to- they wanted to find out how much a human could survive. They had my arm, and this big saw-blade- I fought, and they just kept coming. I think- I think I killed them all.”

He trailed off and his eyes flickered from brown to flames again. His hands shook and he dropped the knife to the metal floor with a shudder. Moments later, the blaster followed, and he ran his bloodstained hands over his pants reflexively.

Vree stepped forward against all good sense and wrapped his arm around Human-Amir’s shoulders. The human tensed like a wire, and then went limp against his side, exhausted beyond measure, injured, and shaking.

“Come, my friend,” he said gently, and did his best to ignore the bodies all around them as he guided his human back towards the air lock. “You survived, today. Let us get you home.”