Brettn was having a terrible evening. The stump of his foreleg ached where it sat in its spring steel prosthetic, and the dexterous tentacles down his flanks were cold and stiff. And, worst of all, his wallet was as empty as his stomach.

Thankfully, Brettn was a natural pickpocket. A bump here, a trip and stumble there – and suddenly, two more wallets found their way into his cloak. Unfortunately, a blind search through both of them with his tentacles revealed both were empty.

Brettn shivered and felt the stump of his leg twinge in pain. There were few windows on the Terminal, but clearly, the station was in the shadow of its parent Gas Giant: Momia. Without what little light and heat reached the station from the star, the radiators of the station worked just a bit too well – and they didn’t quite work well enough without the shadow. Such was the “weather” on Torus Terminal.

Thankfully the cold could only last for a few hours a day for a few months, and the orbits only matched up twice along its twenty-year rotation.

He dumped the wallets into a waste chute and stumbled on. Things had not been going well since he’d let his ambition tempt him. Thankfully, the prisons on Torus Terminal were just as easy to escape as he remembered; he hadn’t even had to wait until he was inside. He’d slipped away as soon as he could once that damn doctor had taken his leg.

Shattered knee or no, where was the Empire’s incredible medicine when he needed it? So what if he could never have paid for it? He wouldn’t have, even if he could.

He’d slipped away only hours after the “Thief-Taker” General had had him turned in, and now weeks later, there was no sign that the dreaded Human had continued looking for him. However, all his usual haunts were still full of thugs and thieves loyal to the hypocritical monster, so he’d been hiding out as far from them as possible.

Brettn had had no place to sleep and little food to eat ever since. He’d long ago run out of money for the dirty small pod hotel he’d stayed in at first. His luck had been terrible with his pickpocketing, and he didn’t dare take more than wallets for fear of running into one of the Human’s fences.

All of which led him to follow his nose down one of the many corridors between Blocks, his stomachs grinding at nothing. The delightful scent of wheatgrass broth and ferngrain bread – oh, he hadn’t had fresh bread in so very long.

Soon enough, he found himself outside a crowded unit, with billowing clouds of steam and delicious scents wafting out to overpower the smell of unwashed bodies.

“What’s going on?” Brettn asked another Ventusi in spacer garb – fresh off a ship delivering Hydrogen from Momia. The filed down horns were a sign he worked in the cramped confines of the engine rooms.

“It’s a free kitchen! They’re just handing out food to anyone who asks!” he said with a happy smile.

Brettn snorted in disbelief. “Go on, pull the other one,” he said and brandished his prosthetic leg to add emphasis.

The spacer laughed and shook his head. “No. Really!”

“Who in their right mind is giving away food?” Brettn asked incredulously.

“Why, the e’er-gen’russ Thief-Taker Gen’ral, o’ course,” a deep and rumbling voice interjected.

Brettn whipped his head around and balked at the sight of a familiar T’nann’s single eye. Though he couldn’t remember the name at the moment as the T’nann’s tail was in the process of cutting off the oxygen from Brettn’s brain.

“An’ lookey lookey wha’ I ‘ave found,” the T’nann growled. “A dir’y li’l thief, tryin’ ‘o prey on the poor folk o’ Torus Terminal.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Brettn didn’t get to hear how the crowd reacted as his vision slowly faded to black. The last thing he saw as his vision faded and the T’nann lifted him well off his feet, was the spacer’s wallet as it fell out of Brettn’s grasp. He barely noticed the soft-bodied arachnid at the top of the stairs at the back of the so-called “free kitchen.”

==//====&===+===&====//==

Brettn had to admit: this prison was slightly less stupid than most. For one, built into a decommissioned ship whose only real mode of travel was the photon sail. It had arrived in the system very early in the station’s development, riding laser light to cross the vast distances. And while photon sails were still required to get to and from Torus Terminal, this particular ship had had to cross much larger distances and had suffered for it.

The sails were removed, cut at their hinged joints, and the ship permanently moored to the station. There were no engines, only the overburdened hydrogen-oxygen system that managed their air and water. And a hydroponics system that could not support the prison population. The only way in or out was through a shuttle that came to the ship in the morning and left in the evening.

With such scarcity on board from the air, to the water, to the food, the guards made more from the prisoners than they did in most prisons. If the guards had salaries at all didn’t seem to matter, if you wanted food, water, or a blanket: you paid a guard with whatever you had.

And to top it all off, everyone was mixed in together. Murderers and debtors, children and elders, bucks and does – or whatever it was that any given species had. If you were a criminal of any caliber, you could end up in a place like this.

When Brettn had still been on the Thief-Taker’s good side, the Human had regaled Brettn with how he had survived prison in a faraway star system. Somehow the Human had made friends with the guards by running errands for them and eventually earned enough to pay off the debt that had landed him in there. At one point, the Human claimed he’d been allowed to come and go as he pleased from the prison.

Brettn doubted he had the raw charisma to pull that off. But he had other ways of getting out of prison.

However, the next meal hour presented a new opportunity: across the dining hall, he spotted Old Bess within a noisy crowd.

Old Bess was not old, despite her name and her generous frame. She was a beautiful Ventusi doe and a prostitute who Brettn had known for many years – though he was rarely a client as much as a partner in crime.

It was a blessing that they’d ended up in the same prison. Usually, one of them would show up and pose as the other’s life partner. Prisons and judges got a bit funny when life partners were involved. The councils thought that life partners had the right to be imprisoned together. That worked out fine for Brettn and Old Bess, together the two of them could saw through shackles in less than a night and use their combined blankets and overalls as ropes to lower them down from barred windows.

That particular strategy wouldn’t work here, but they might be able to convince the guards they needed to be moved to a prison that would let a life pair be housed together. This prison only had tiny cells fit for a single occupant, converted from the sleeping berths the crew had once used, which would present several much better opportunities to escape.

Brettn’s shackles joined the cacophony of the crowd as he made his way toward the clump of bodies where he’d seen Old Bess. He pressed through the crowd in search of the doe but soon froze in horror as he discovered why the crowd had gathered here.

His hearts beat in his ears, and the stump of his leg suddenly flared with the memory of the missing joint as a foot shattered it. Standing with a toothy smile at the epicenter of the crowd was a Human.

Thankfully, after a moment of blind panic, it reached his attention that the voice was different: a much higher pitch, and even the accent differed. And slowly, more differences presented themselves. For one, this Human’s mane was long, incredibly long – and mercifully un-oiled. The prisoner’s overalls also helped distinguish them, as they were incredibly different from the Thief-Taker’s well pressed and neatly creased clothes.

Old Bess noticed him first. “Brettn! Come and meet my new friend!” she shouted over the crowd. She stumbled to stand and untangle her shackles from the circle around the Human’s table. Within moments she’d taken one of his antlers in her mouth and tugged him through the crowd to the Human’s side.

“This is the Singer; she’s a Human!” Old Bess crowed in her familiar boisterous way. The sound of her voice did much to calm Brettn’s nerves.

“Nice to meet you,” Brettn greeted carefully. It took all his effort not to flinch as the Human’s forward-facing eyes locked onto him with the same predatory focus he’d seen in the only other Human he’d known.

“So this is the “escape artist” you’ve been telling me about?” she grinned. “So tell me, Mr. Escape Artist,” the Singer leaned in until she’d trapped Brettn between herself and Old Bess. “How are you getting the three of us out of this place?”

Brettn felt hope flare and die within him with those words. His usual strategy would need some reworking.